The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute 135004203X, 9781350042032

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The Ethics of Resistance

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Being and Event, Alain Badiou On Resistance, Howard Caygill Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics, Anthony Faramelli Hegel and Resistance, edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort Errant Affirmations, David J. Kangas Apocalyptic Political Theology, Thomas Lynch After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Quentin Meillassoux

The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute DREW M. DALTON

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Drew M. Dalton, 2018 Drew M. Dalton has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: The transit of Venus in front of the Sun, 2012. © Roger C. Hill, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, U.S.A. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4203-2  ePDF: 978-1-3500-4202-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-4205-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For Rudi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  The failure of ethics in the West 1 A history of collaboration 1 Ethics reenvisioned 3

PART ONE  The tyranny of the absolute 9 1 The trouble with post-Kantian ethics: Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux on the vicissitudes of ethical absolutes 11 The ironic antinomies of post-Kantian ethical and political thought 11 The limits of liberalism 13 The dogmatic structure of nationalism 14 Alain Badiou and the “smug nihilism” of post-Kantian ethics 16 The ethics of fidelity 18 Quentin Meillassoux on the rise of post-critical fanaticism 19 Factial speculation and radical contingency 20 The fragility of Meillassoux’s hope 22 The trouble with speculative ethics 23

2 Phenomenology, ethics, and the Other: Rediscovering the possibility of ethical absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas 26 Phenomenology’s problem 26 Edmund Husserl’s reduction 29 The radical foundations of the phenomenological revolution 30

viii CONTENTS

Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of phenomenological ethics 33 Martin Heidegger and primal ontology 34 Levinas and the ethical primacy of the Other 36 Shame and the Other 38 Responsibility and ethical subjectivity 39 Phenomenology and the absolute 40

3 The problem of the Other: Levinas and Schelling on the reversibility of ethical demand 42 The face of the Other as absolute phenomena 42 The absolute and the infinite 43 Levinas’s God? 45 The ethical value of Levinas’s absolute 46 The ambiguity of the infinite 48 Schelling and the absolute reality of good and evil 51 The reversibility of good and evil in the absolute 53 The Other as absolute ground for good and evil 56

Interlude  Sympathy for the devil: The tyranny of heaven 58 The evil of acquiescence 58 Kierkegaard’s apologetics for murder 60 A report on the banality of evil revisited 65 The tyranny of heaven 68

PART TWO  The ethics of resistance 71 4 Don’t give up, don’t give in! Jacques Lacan and the ethics of psychoanalysis 73 The radical power of Lacan’s thought 73 Unconsciousness unsettled 74 The alterity of the Other 76 Desire for the Other 78 The subversion of the subject 80 The Other/Thing 82 The ethics of psychoanalysis 84

CONTENTS

5 Carving a space of freedom: Michel Foucault and the ethics of resistance 89 Michel Foucault and the exigency of ethical resistance 89 The uses of genealogy 90 The modern subject—Governmentality, normalization, and bio-power 92 The trouble with modern subjectivity and the ethics of resistance 95 Ethics as care for the self 98 Technologies of care 100 Care for the self in relation to the absolute Other 104

Conclusion  The ethics of resistance: A backward-turning relation 106 Ethics and the absolute 106 A backward-turning relation 112 Politics as first philosophy 114 The political ends of anarchy 116 The ethics of ab-archy 119 Notes 121 Bibliography 143 Index 150

ix

If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.” And, as far as everything else is concerned, I say, no. I say no with all my strength. ALBERT CAMUS, NOTEBOOKS: 1935–42

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For All the Devils: I would like to begin by taking a moment to thank a number of people in my life without whom the present volume would not have been possible. First, I would like to thank my friends, colleagues, and students at Dominican University who have supported me emotionally, intellectually, and finan­ cially as I have prepared the various drafts of this book. Specifically I’d like to thank the members of the Philosophy Department, Tama Weisman, Nkuzi Nnam, and Kelly Burns; the administration of RCAS; and the university as a whole, especially then dean of RCAS and now provost of the university, Jeffrey Carlson. The constant support and encouragement of the Dominican University community was invaluable as I balanced my teaching responsibilities with my writing duties. I’d also like to thank the students and faculty of the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at Brock University, my second intellectual home, who have generously allowed me to try out the various arguments and theses articulated here over the past few years through a series of invited seminars and lectures on my research. Special thanks are due to Athena Colman, Michael Berman, Rohit Dalvi, Leah Bradshaw, and my dear friend and constant ally Rajiv Kaushik. I’m deeply indebted as well to everyone at Bloomsbury for their guidance, thoughtful suggestions, and hard work, particularly Frankie Mace, who was the ideal editor for this project and whose constant good humor made bringing this work to publication a complete delight. Special thanks are also due to Tom Sparrow and Dylan Trigg, both of whom read early drafts of this manuscript and made vitally important recommendations, most significant of which was suggesting I contact Bloomsbury to begin with. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to my dear friend Elizabeth Fansher who took time while on vacation to read through and edit the first complete draft of this text. To my family and friends, Robin, Thea, Pop, Paul Simpson, Andrew Osborne, and Luke Jenner, I owe more than I could ever do justice with words. I am especially grateful to the stubborn persistence of David Banach, with whom and against whom the first seeds of this work were sown. Finally, I want to acknowledge Rudi Visker, whose influence permeates both this

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

work and my intellectual life as a whole. Visker not only taught me what philosophical resistance looks like in a million little ways, he still inspires me to think more broadly and deeply and to never give up on or give in to my temptations to be complicit with and complacent to my own desires, the expectations of others, or the laws of the universe.

INTRODUCTION

The failure of ethics in the West

A history of collaboration The history of ethics in the West is a history of collaboration—a history of assent and affirmation. It is the history of the varied attempt to identify some idea of an absolute good and to define the various means by which one may live perfectly in accordance with it. Virtue belongs, according to this story, to the one who both knows the absolute and has the courage and constancy to act appropriately: to submit themselves to it willingly, fully, and constantly. Whether conceived of as an eternal god, universal maxim, or maximization of happiness or defined as the product of divine revelation, rational deduction, or moral calculation, the origin and apogee of ethical thinking in the West has always figured as a kind of moral yeasaying to some absolute good—an intellectual and practical acquiescence to some conceived supreme value. So it is that the history of ethical philosophy in this tradition takes on the image of an angelic chorus: the voices of its authors filling the annals of religious dogma and rational intellection alike with the echo of a million “amens.” “Let the absolute reign, forever and ever,” they sing. “Let it be in our minds and in our actions, on earth as it is in the heavenly realms of thought.” Evil within this narrative has received the lesser part. Cast as a form of moral failure by the philosophers of the West, evil has rarely been granted its own ethical power. Instead, it has been placed in the subordinate position: defined not as a moral force in its own right, but as the perversion, rejection, or negation of the moral force of the absolute. As such, evil has been traditionally portrayed in the West as the consequence of an inability or unwillingness within a moral subject to submit to the natural

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right or sovereign power of the good, either due to blind ignorance, gross incompetence, or idiotic refusal. In this tradition, evil has taken on the guise of a purely negative force: nothing more than a kind of petty and ultimately futile resistance to, rebellion against, or dissent from the absolute power of the good. In contrast to the “yea-saying” moralists then, the agents of evil have been caricatured in the West as a set of puerile “nay-sayers,” epitomized in the portrayal of the devil in various Christian mythologies and depicted in the book of Jeremiah in the Latin Vulgate crying out “Non serviam”—“No, I refuse. I will not serve nor obey the edicts of the absolute.”1 But what has this history of ethical thought wrought? What practical benefit has been accomplished by the yea-saying attendants of the idea of the absolute? The kingdom of heaven on earth? Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace? Jeremy Bentham’s happiness? No, none of these. Instead, a variety of totalitarianisms set up in the name of some form of absolute justice, purity, power, or security, at least two global wars waged to end all wars and secure perpetual peace, the North Atlantic Slave Trade, the Armenian Genocide, the Shoah, Srebrenica, and countless other massacres. Was all this demonstrative evil little more than the product of some “lesser part” within us? Was all this suffering nothing more than the result of a moral reluctance within our nature, some unwillingness within us to submit fully or bow appropriately to the absolute good? Can it be that the abject horror of human history is simply the result of something missing from our hearts or minds—some flawed conscience, or perhaps some collective idiocy, weakness, or innate wickedness which has prevented us from affirming wholly the absolute good and joining the morally upright yea-saying philosophers of history? Can it be that the profound suffering of the other which cries out to us from the pages of human history is really nothing more than the effect of something negative within us—some ethical deprivation which operates at the core of our being? Perhaps. Perhaps the moralists of the West are right. Maybe we are all “conceived in wickedness” and “born into sin,” as the Psalmists wrote and the Evangelists snarl. Perhaps we are in fact structurally limited by the frailty of our finitude, destined to always fall short of the absolute: capable only of knowing it dimly and acting halfheartedly in its name. Or perhaps, more hopefully, we simply have not applied ourselves fully to the task yet. Maybe if only we were to redouble our efforts to be good, to know the absolute fully and realize its order completely, we could finally make a heaven for ourselves here on earth, as individuals, as a polis, and eventually as a planet. But, then again, perhaps the moralists of the West are wrong. Perhaps all the evil we have known is not the result of some “lesser part,” some moral failure to attain the absolute, but something else entirely. What if it is the inverse that is true? What if the evils of human history are not the result of something negative within us, something which refuses or resists the absolute? What if, in fact, they are the result of that within us which is most positive: our very pursuit of the absolute good? What if the

INTRODUCTION  3

root of human suffering does not lie in something missing from us, but in something present within us? What if evil emerges from our very conception and pursuit of the good as an absolute? Could it be that the history of ethical philosophy in the West has not only been wrong, it has been an accomplice to, and perhaps even the cause of, evil? The aim of this book is to explore this possibility and to suggest an alternative to the dominant narrative maintained by the moral “yea-sayers” of Western philosophy.

Ethics reenvisioned My goal is to prove two things. First, I want to show that determinate evil action is not ultimately the result of a privation of or derivation from some absolute good within us; but, more often than not, it is the result of precisely the opposite: namely, the attempt to realize the good as an absolute, a status which, as I will show, allows for the justification of virtually any action in its name, no matter how manifestly terrible. In pursuit of this goal, I will show that many of the most horrifying atrocities in the political history of the West are not ultimately the result of some dissent from the good, however perverse, but much more often the effect of a casual, well-intended, and even at times well-reasoned assent to some idea of an absolute good. In this way I hope to prove the old maxim which marks the perfect as “the enemy of the good” to be more true than ever before imagined. In fact, as I will show, the concept of perfection found in the idea of the absolute good is, more often than not, the ultimate ground of and condition for evil. The second goal of this book is to redefine ethical reasoning in light of this claim as a form of resistance to any idea of an absolute good. It is my aim to reclaim the defiant resistance announced in the demonic non serviam decried by the moralists of the West as the only means by which any actual good can be preserved and pursued in the real world. Such a persistent resistance, I will argue, is the only ethical maxim we should strive to emulate in our thought and action alike. Note that it is not the aim of this book to deny the existence of absolutes in toto. Nor is it to argue that we should rid ourselves of the absolute in order to pursue the good. My aim here is not to kill the gods of the morally upright philosophers, deny their power, nor call for their excision from ethical reasoning. To the contrary, I hope to affirm the power of the absolutes they tout. Indeed, as I will argue, the idea of the absolute is not only inescapable, it is in fact necessary in order to found and justify any practical ethics. But, as I will show, the value such absolutes hold, acting as the foundation for moral judgment, must be reevaluated. It is the aim of this book to alter the register in which we speak of the absolute in ethical philosophy. It is my aim to transmute the value traditionally attributed to the absolute, from good to evil; and, on the basis of that revaluation, I aim

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to establish a new model of ethical reasoning which defines the good as emergent from determinate resistance to the lure of the absolute. To achieve these goals, I must first address and dispel a common misconception within contemporary philosophical circles: namely, that the question of the absolute is passé—that, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “God is dead.” This has been the tacit assumption of contemporary philosophers for the last two centuries: that the idea of the absolute is no longer of concern for serious philosophers. Since Immanuel Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics, such questions have been assumed to be the exclusive domain of the ideological or the uneducated. Indeed, the aim of ethical philosophers since Kant has been to identify and detail various modes of moral reasoning which do not invoke the absolute as an actual and universal power. Hence, the birth of ethics as deontological reasoning, moral calculation, and more recently deconstructive openness. In order for my aims to be achieved then, I must first show, in contrast to this assumption, that the idea of the absolute, as the ground and aim of ethical reasoning, is still very much alive in the West after Kant. I must show, in other words, that Nietzsche was wrong: that God, as the idea of the absolute, is in fact not dead, but is rather still very much alive in contemporary Western ethical thinking. Moreover, I must show that this “God” lies hidden precisely where we would least expect to find him, even in those political and ethical philosophies which have grown from the Kantian critique and the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God as a universal and actual absolute. Only by first revealing the absolutes hidden within such projects can we understand how very present “God” still is with us today, and how this idea in turn functions to ground very real social and political evils. This is the task of the first chapter of this book. There we will examine two contemporary attempts to reframe ethical thought in the wake of the so-called “death of God.” The aim of this examination is to show that even among those most committed to the project of thinking of the good outside the bounds of the absolute, the absolute still manifests as an end to be affirmed; and, inasmuch as it does, it gives way to any number of concrete and practical ethical and political problems. To make this case, Chapter 1 will examine the ethical works of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, respectively, both of whom forthrightly attempt to diagnose the problem of the absolute in ethical thinking after Kant and propose a solution to it. Unfortunately, as we will see in detail there, the solutions proposed by both thinkers are not without their own catastrophic problems. The nature of these problems will allow us to conclude that a new approach to the nature and role of the absolute within ethical deliberation must be developed if we are to overcome the horrors of the past. Such a project requires, however, first acknowledging the necessary function of the absolute as a ground for ethical deliberation. Moreover, it requires discovering a universal and actual absolute which does not reassert the kind of dogmatism thankfully laid to rest by Kant’s critique. Only once

INTRODUCTION  5

this task is accomplished can our larger goal to reevaluate the value of the absolute begin. Chapter 2 responds to this challenge by detailing how a new nondogmatic account of a simultaneously universal and actual absolute can be discovered within the phenomenological tradition, specifically within the account of the Other presented in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. To examine the nature of this absolute, we will begin there by tracing the genealogy of the idea of the Other qua absolute within the history of phenomenology, beginning with the work of Edmund Husserl, proceeding through the thought of Martin Heidegger, and arriving finally at the ethical analyses of Emmanuel Levinas. Then, through a detailed analysis of Levinas’s work, we will discover how the idea of the Other can serve as a simultaneously universal and actual absolute ground for ethical thought without falling into the vicissitudes which arise from the Kantian critique. This chapter concludes by suggesting that the demands levied by the Other as detailed by Levinas can function as a new absolute ground upon which to establish ethical deliberation anew. But, as will become clear in Chapter 3, this solution to the problem of contemporary ethics comes at the cost of the long-held belief in the inherent goodness of the absolute. Indeed, as we will see there, this solution can only be taken, as I have already suggested, if the value of the Other qua absolute is radically reevaluated. To see how this must be the case, Chapter 3 reveals how Levinas’s account of the Other qua absolute is not a force to be casually acquiesced to, as is assumed by his most committed readers; but is in fact a force which should be scrupulously interrogated and diligently resisted. Chapter 3 argues that despite Levinas’s earnest attempts to found in the Other an absolute ground for ethical responsibility to be heeded and obeyed, what he inadvertently, albeit serendipitously, accomplishes is precisely the opposite: namely, to define an absolute which functions as the actual ground for determinate evil. In other words, what Chapter 3 shows is that while we can use Levinas’s account of the Other as a universal and actual absolute upon which to establish ethical deliberation anew after Kant, it is not an absolute which we should deem wholly good nor strive to obey completely. In order to make this point all the more clear, Chapter 3 will conclude with a brief survey of the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who identifies in his analysis of the power of the absolute what he termed the “reversibility” of good and evil. So it is in Chapter 3 that the first aim of this book is finally accomplished: that is, the identification of a present and active absolute moral force upon which to ground ethical deliberation after Kant, only no longer as a telos to be attained, but as lure to be resisted. As we will see there, the absolute ground for ethical deliberation present in the demands of the Other give rise to the possibility of the good only inasmuch as they are resisted. If they are obsequiously obeyed, the demands of the Other function as the absolute ground and condition for the possibility of evil. This realization allows us to turn from the first of our goals, to the second:

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the articulation of a new conception of ethical deliberation qua resistance to the demands of the absolute. The urgency and exigency of the need to develop an ethics of resistance against the demands of the absolute Other will be expounded upon in an interlude separating the first three chapters and the remaining three. The aim of this interlude is to demonstrate all the more clearly the necessity of cultivating a new mode of ethical thinking in relation to the absolute. There the concrete dangers of this ethical reversibility within the Other qua absolute will be detailed by reevaluating two particularly poignant moments within the history of Western philosophy where the idea of the absolute good faltered rather tellingly. The first of these moments will be excavated from the work of Søren Kierkegaard, the second from the thought of Hannah Arendt. In this interlude we will discover how, contrary to the expressed aims of these thinkers, the reversibility of the demands of the Other, qua absolute good, is all the more apparent—how, in other words, the good of the Other, when absolutized, reverts immediately to evil. To make this danger all the more clear, this interlude will show how actual manifestations of evil in human history, from suicide bombings to the Shoah, have all been grounded upon and justified in the name of some concept of an absolutized good. In this way, the aim of this interlude is to show all the more clearly what is at stake in the second half of the book: the necessity of defining ethical action as a form of resistance against the absolute demands of the Other. It is to this latter task that the remaining chapters of the book will be dedicated. We will begin this task in earnest in Chapter 4 by examining the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan. There, through an analysis of Lacan’s account of the genesis of the subject, we will see how various forms of pathology, and what Lacan unambiguously called evil, can result from an inappropriate relation to any Other which bears the status of an absolute. In light of this danger we will explore what Lacan termed “the ethics of psychoanalysis,” an ethics which, he argued, can only be pursued by learning to say “no” to the lure of the absolute Other and by subsequently cultivating a set of practices which can embolden the subject to hold its own against the inherent threats posed by the Other. Chapter 5 will develop Lacan’s idea of the ethical necessity of “nosaying” by way of the late work of Michel Foucault. There we will not only find a further articulation of the inescapable dangers inherent to the perception of the Other as an absolute ethical force; we will also discover a number of strategies aimed at cultivating an ethics of resistance within contemporary subjectivity. In this way, we will discover in Chapter 5 a means of pursuing practically an ethics of resistance via what Foucault termed the “technologies” associated with appropriate “care for the self.” The book will conclude with a final chapter which draws from a number of classical and contemporary sources in order to help the reader reimagine how ethical deliberation could be pursued as a form of ethical

INTRODUCTION  7

resistance to the absolute Other. There, through an analysis of the role of political philosophy in ethical thinking, we will gain an even more precise understanding of how to accomplish practically an ethics of resistance and how such an ethics might be used to counter the imminent threat of evil present in the contemporary social and political scene. It is my profound conviction that for any ethics to be truly worthy of its name, a project earnestly devoted to the pursuit of the good and the defiance of evil, it must begin with the recognition that any number of absolutes announce themselves in the world around us today. Each of these absolutes are presented with the weight and power of a demand issued in the name of some Other. Ethical deliberation must begin by evaluating the demands of these absolute Others. This requires the counterintuitive recognition that each of these demands, by virtue of their status as absolute, has the potential of inadvertently leading to evil when obeyed too faithfully. For ethical philosophy to proceed it must acknowledge this possibility and its resulting conclusion: that ethical action may require active resistance to the demands of every absolute. Unfortunately, this has not yet been the case within ethical philosophy in the West. For ethical philosophy to continue to have any relevance in the contemporary world it must renounce its traditional allegiance to the absolute without denying the role such absolutes play as the ground and condition for universal and actualizable ethical judgments. It is the task of ethical philosophers today to recognize that in order for the good to be defined, the absolute must be acknowledged as a force to be resisted. To accomplish this task we must begin by accepting that every absolute demand glowers with the fearsome potential of justifying virtually any act, even murder and genocide, in its name. Only by acknowledging this fact can those committed to ethical action attempt to articulate the concrete and practical means necessary to resist such potentially evil injunctions and secure the good. The task of the first half of this book is to identify and reevaluate the absolute ground of ethical deliberation as a force which does not call for affirmation, for saying “yes, thy will be done,” but which requires resistance, which requires defiantly shouting “No, non serviam! I will not be complicit in your agenda.” Having shown how the demands of the Other arise and operate within lived experience as an absolute, and how such demands ground and condition the possibility of evil, the second half of this book aims to detail a set of practices which may be useful for establishing such an ethics of resistance. One need not restrict oneself to the set of practices detailed here, however. To the contrary, it is my hope that this book will inspire the expression of any number of concrete, particular, and specific acts of political and ethical resistance, all equally suspicious of whatever Other invokes its power in the readers’ life to solicit his or her absolute allegiance. In the words of Chairman Mao “may a thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools of thought contend”; and may each of them grow from the recognition that the demands of every absolute must be resisted.

PART ONE

The tyranny of the absolute

CHAPTER ONE

The trouble with postKantian ethics: Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux on the vicissitudes of ethical absolutes

The ironic antinomies of post-Kantian ethical and political thought One of the fundamental problems confronting contemporary philosophy, or so the story goes, is the apparent lack of any obvious universal and simultaneously actual absolute good upon which to ground ethical and political assent. There is no longer any universally shared God to whom we can turn for guidance, nor is there any obviously actualizable noumenal realm of ideas or forms from which we can deduce determinate action. “God is,” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, most definitely “dead.” Such pretensions, it is believed, were unequivocally laid to rest by Immanuel Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics. As a result, post-Kantian social and political philosophers have faced a difficult choice: either give up on ethical absolutes entirely by embracing some form of ethical relativism or nihilism which rejects both the universality and the actuality of the good; or, alternatively, attempt to establish some new non-absolute ground for ethical acquiescence and judgment. It is in pursuit of the latter that the history of modern ethical theory emerges.

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Such attempts to theorize the good after Kant have, however, faced their own dilemma. Without access to any obvious universal and actual absolute, they were forced to ground ethical judgment in relatively non-absolute positions, either by 1) identifying a universally assertable but non-actual (i.e., virtual) good upon which ethical judgment could be founded, one deducible within the structures of reason alone, for example (like the universal rational duties touted by deontologists); or alternatively, 2) asserting the power of some actual but nonuniversal (i.e., local) good which could function as a ground for ethical judgment, one emergent from the singularity of one’s own being, for example (like many of the post-Nietzschean conceptions of virtue ethics). Ethical consequentialists like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for their part, seem to have alternated between these two poles—at times, they have insisted on the actuality of ethical absolutes by sacrificing their possible universality (as is the case in classical utilitarianism which considers the actual experience of a singular [read: local] individual’s pain and pleasure, human or otherwise, but acknowledges that this experience bears no universal absolute value); at other times, conversely, they have asserted the possibility of universal values by sacrificing their actuality (as is the case in eudemonic and aesthetic consequentialisms which make room in their calculus for the virtual goods of cultural and political values, but by doing so lose the possibility of that calculus functioning on any universal level to adjudicate between competing local values). To make the nature of this post-Kantian ethical disjunction clearer, think of the options available as falling along a set of Cartesian coordinates where the vertical axis divides those values which are asserted as actual from those values asserted as merely virtual, while the horizontal axis divides those values which are asserted as universal from those which are asserted as merely local such that the resulting options available appear thusly:

Universal and Actual Absolute The Domain of Dogmatic Metaphysics (e.g., God, the Idea of “the Good,” etc.)

Universal and Virtual Relative Non-Absolute The Domain of Deontology (e.g., Categorical Imperative, Liberty, etc.)

Local and Actual Relative Non-Absolute The Domain of Virtue Ethics (e.g., Eudaimonia, Pleasure, etc.)

Local and Virtual No Absolute The Domain of Nihilism and Relativism (e.g., My opinion, etc.)



THE TROUBLE WITH POST-KANTIAN ETHICS

13

What was forsworn by the death of dogmatic metaphysics accomplished by the Kantian critique was the inaccessibility of any real sense of the absolute as a universal and actual power. All that remained for those who wanted to maintain the possibility of a robust sense of ethical reasoning, therefore, were the relatively non-absolute disjunctive options of potentially universal, but virtual goods (top right quadrant) or locally accessible but potentially actual goods (bottom left quadrant). So it was that “God” as the idea of the universally actual absolute withered away within the history of ethical philosophy after Kant, or so we have been told. But, as we will see shortly, the rumors of God’s death within ethical philosophy have been greatly exaggerated; for the absolute, qua universal actuality, still lies ever in the depths of these various ethical approaches, biding its time, waiting to emerge, and in the most horrible of ways. Indeed, as will become immediately clear, each of the approaches sketched above inevitably reestablishes some new and twisted form of ethical dogmatism in its attempt to be effective. This new form of dogmatism results from its unadmitted assertion of some form of universal and actual absolute without which it risks collapsing unintentionally into precisely the kind of nihilism or relativism it seeks to avoid. The inevitability of this reversion/collapse dichotomy is testified to by even the most cursory survey of the political projects emergent from these various post-Kantian ethical approaches.

The limits of liberalism Take, for example, the case of Western liberalism, a political project famously established on a conception of liberty grounded in a virtual (nonactual) idea of a universally shared human nature exemplified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, informed in large part by Kant’s deontology. The problem with this project, as became increasingly clear after the end of the Second World War, is that as soon as it asserts the universality of this virtual ideal, it immediately confronts the actual reality of cultural differences and identity politics. What do the postcolonial rebellions of the late twentieth century testify to if not the hegemony of the idea of universality asserted by Western liberalism? What becomes clear through such conflicts is the apparent impotence of Western liberalism to act in the name of its universal ideal without running the risk of trammeling the very real (read: actual) differences which exist between cultures and peoples. The inevitability of this problem, of course, should signal to the liberal that his or her pretensions to universality are a sham—nothing more, ultimately, than an inflation of certain local (in this case, liberal European) ideals. Indeed, isn’t this precisely why so many nations, particularly former colonial nations, have refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? They know all too well that the alleged “universality” of these rights

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is little more than a veil to hide what is really a set of imposed European values. Hence the backlash against the alleged universality of Western liberalism so apparent in global politics today. In the face of this realization, Western liberalism faces a choice: 1) either maintain the universality of its claims by rendering itself actually impotent in the face of concrete global ethical dilemmas, effectively, I would argue, retreating into a form of ethical nihilism (think, for example, of Neville Chamberlain’s tragic discovery that any peace brokered on an appeal to universal interests quickly dissolves beneath the weight of the local interests of another nation); or 2) in light of the threats posed by such a retreat, sacrifice the virtuality of its ideals by asserting them as actually effective; but, in doing so, establishing a new form of cultural imperialism—a process which, as will become clear, inadvertently establishes anew a form of precisely the kind of dogmatism Kant’s critique allegedly abolished. Examples of the rise of such liberal imperialisms are myriad: one only has to look at the numerous times the ideal of Western political liberty has been used to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation in order to ensure the “freedom” of that nation’s people. Take, as only one example, the rhetoric invoked by Tony Blair and George W. Bush prior to the launch of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which universalized a particular set of local values (Western liberal democracy) as universal ideals and in doing so trammeled the local cultural values of the Iraqi people. This choice between ethical impotence, on the one hand, and cultural imperialism, on the other, awaits any ethical or political project grounded in the appeal to some universalized virtual ideal. In the face of actual cultural difference they must either sacrifice their pretensions of universality, effecting a new form of cultural imperialism which rests ultimately on the dogmatic assertion of the absolute value of one set of local values; or, alternatively, they can attempt to maintain the pretense of their universality, but only by relinquishing their ability to act effectively in the face of ethical crises, ultimately, it would seem, resigning those values to the realm of the purely virtual.

The dogmatic structure of nationalism Of course, a similar ironic inversion awaits those on the other side of the post-critical ethical disjunction sketched above—those who would forward a political project established in the assertion of some local value actualized within one’s family, community, sect, or country. Consider the case of the various forms of conservative nationalism rampant in politics after Kant (from Mussolini and Hitler to the British National Party, Le Front National, and Donald Trump), all of which, as will become clear, are really nothing more than the logical subaltern of Western liberalism.



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For such nationalisms to uphold the effectiveness of their local practices or beliefs as actual powers capable of standing in and among other potential local values, the superiority of those values must inevitably be asserted. “Your local gods or values may be good for you,” one may say, “but they’re not my gods and values, and so are not as good as my own.” The line of thinking is this: in order to maintain itself in the face of competing claims, this approach necessarily requires the development of an apologetics for one’s local systems; only in this way can its use and value be established in the global marketplace of ideas. All too quickly, however, this apologetics reverts into a polemic against other competing claims, a polemic which inevitably becomes an assertion of the superiority of one’s own set of local values over every other competing claim. So it is that what begins as nothing more than the assertion of the actuality of a local value becomes the assertion of the universal validity of that local value. In this way a new universally actual absolute is asserted and a new form of ethical and political dogmatism emerges. To make this clear, think of the rise of German National Socialism in the 1920s: a movement which ostensibly began as nothing more than the assertion of the value of certain localizable social and political actualities (e.g., the history of the German nation and people), but which quickly universalized those realities as virtual ideals for all (e.g., the formation of an epic historiography, the assertion of a new universal Drittes Reich, and the mythologization of racial origins and purity via the Thule Society). What inevitably followed, of course, was the attempt to actualize those universal virtual projections through determinate action (e.g., the Anschluss with Austria, the annexation of Poland, and the initiation of the “final solution”). What is testified to in the tendency toward exceptionalism and ethnocentrism in every conservative nationalism is a discovery, not unlike that of Western liberalism, of the apparent impotence of the actual power of local values to operate in the face of competing claims. Without some attempt to universalize one’s singular local value, that position all too easily collapses under the weight of cultural/ethical relativism, a relativism which ultimately undermines even its limited authority over the local. In other words, what drives the dogmatic hagiography of nationalistic politics is the threat posed by other nations and localities to the effectiveness of one’s own values to operate even locally. The sheer existence of other competing claims and localities seems to call into question the effectiveness of local values as an actual force. When confronted with other claims, one’s own local customs appear hollow and quaint, not the stable realities one once took them to be. So it is that one must either abandon the actual power of those customs and values to guide one’s life or assert their universal validity against every competing claim. What we discover from these brief surveys is the apparent impossibility of maintaining a post-critical ethical or political project on the basis of either an absolute universality without actuality (i.e., liberalism) or an

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absolute actuality without universality (i.e., nationalism). Both attempts appear inevitably either to collapse into some form of nihilism or erect some new form of ethico-political dogmatism grounded in the assertion of a new universally actual absolute. To show the insidiousness of this dilemma within post-Kantian philosophical ethics itself, let us examine two particularly powerful attempts to ground ethical reasoning anew after the so-called death of God. The first of these approaches can be found in Alain Badiou’s 2001 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, the second in Quentin Meillassoux’s 2008 After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. The divergent approaches proposed by these two thinkers are particularly instructive for exposing the inescapability of the problem of the absolute in Western ethical thinking, as both thinkers, despite being keenly aware of the risk sketched above, nevertheless fail in precisely the ways identified.

Alain Badiou and the “smug nihilism” of post-Kantian ethics The goal of Alain Badiou’s Ethics, as he openly confesses in the preface to the English edition of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, is to mount “a political attack against the ideology of human rights,” an ideology which, as we have seen, grows out of the post-critical attempt to theorize a universal good as the virtual projection of some idealized conception of the human.1 It is clear, however, that the real target of Badiou’s attack is not only Kant, but all those who would attempt to theorize the possibility of a universally grounded ethical judgment in the wake of Kant’s critique (whether deontological and liberal or nationalistic). The vehemence of Badiou’s attack is driven by his conviction that any attempt to ground ethical action in the idea of universal values inevitably results in what he diagnoses as “the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of ‘ethnic’ conflicts, and the universality of unbridled competition,”2 or what he terms elsewhere “smug nihilism.”3 In accordance with our brief analysis of ethical and political projects after Kant, Badiou thinks that it is the fate of any post-critical ethical project to “oscillate between two complimentary desires: 1) a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western’ position,” which we have characterized in the political project of Western liberalism, or 2) what Badiou identifies as “a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life—or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death,” which is the ultimate end of any ethico-political project grounded in the assertion of a locally actual ethical value, like Nazism.4 Despite their



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apparently divergent starting points and aims, Badiou thinks, both of these political projects grow out of an attempt to theorize a universal good after Kant. Nevertheless, what ultimately results from both is what he calls, in a word, evil. Indeed, according to Badiou, “every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good,” whether it be the universal virtual idea of the good maintained by the Western liberal or the local actual concept of the good touted by the Nazi, inevitably becomes, he claims, “the real source of evil itself.”5 So it is, he suggests, that the social and political horrors testified to in the centuries since Kant are the direct result of the attempt to think and act ethically in the wake of the critique. Evil, for Badiou, is not the product of some failure within a subject to think ethically, as it has traditionally been figured in the West. It is not, he thinks, the result of some moral frailty, incompetence, or ignorance. Instead, he argues, the pervasiveness of evil political activity in the centuries since Kant is the direct result of the attempt to think and act ethically in the wake of the “death of God” and the collapse of any simultaneously universal and actual ethical ground. Evil is, in other words for Badiou, the result of an improper pursuit and implementation of all post-Kantian ideas of the good. Indeed, Badiou writes, “[evil] arises as the (possible) effect of the Good itself.”6 In order to resist the potentiality of evil latent in all such postKantian approaches to the good, he therefore concludes, we must “reject the ideological framework of [these sorts of] ‘ethics’” and consider anew the possibility of a universal ground for ethical judgment.7 This requires, he thinks, reconsidering the very nature of ground itself, which is to say: the very nature of being. To accomplish this task Badiou famously asserts a new set of ontological axioms—axioms which he has articulated throughout his career, most famously in his 1988 Being and Event.8 First, Badiou argues, one must acknowledge with Nietzsche the effect of the Kantian critique: namely, that “there is no [longer any] God. Which also means: the One is not.”9 What this implies, he claims next, is that “every situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple, composed of an infinity of elements, each of which is itself a multiple.”10 According to Badiou, it is from this multiplicity that our existence, such as it is, emerges. Thirdly, he concludes, “Considered in their simple belonging to a situation (to an infinite multiple), the animals of the species Homo Sapiens [must be considered] ordinary multiplicities.”11 For Badiou, since after Kant there is no longer any “One” singular being upon which to base our ideas of the human, neither can there be any shared human nature—no one truth or way of existing which unites all thinking beings into a shared “humanity.” Instead, he asserts, every instance of the human, as its own complex assemblage of the multiple, must be thought of as its own event—as its own truth.12 So it is that Badiou discredits from the start any liberal ethics which would appeal to a universally shared idea of human nature, reason, agency, or freedom.

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The ethics of fidelity Following this line of argumentation Badiou concludes, “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity produces in the situation.”13 To be truthful or faithful to the ground of existence—to be ethical, in other words—is for Badiou to be faithful to the singular situation of a particular event, a particular assemblage or way of being. To be ethical is to represent appropriately a particular truth. It is from this claim that Badiou derives his account of ethical judgment. Ethics consists for him in the attempt to be faithful to the singular reality of one such event or truth: namely, the actuality of my event, my being, my truth. As such, Badiou concludes, there can be no one ethics for all, but only a singular ethics forged in fidelity to a singular truth or event. “The only genuine ethics,” he writes, “is [therefore] of truths in the plural.”14 Any true ethics, he concludes, must be faithful to the particular singularities which arise from the multiplicity. Ethics must be considered anew then, claims Badiou, not in the realm of the generic virtuality of the universal, but, in the concrete particularity of the actually singular. Ethics must be, in other words, he writes, only and always an “ethics-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art)”—an ethics of the particular becoming subject, the particular event or truth which arises from the multiple realities manifest in that moment.15 Ethical judgment is about being true to the singularity of one local event, qua ground of actual existence.16 Hence, ethical action is defined as “a principle of consistency, of a fidelity . . ., or [in] the maxim ‘Keep going!’” Only such a fidelity to the singular, he thinks, can potentially “ward off the Evil that every singular truth makes possible.”17 So it is, he argues, only by reconceiving of ethics in this way, as a fidelity to the singularity of a local actuality, qua event which arises on the ground of the multiple, can one resist the “smug nihilism” inherent in the universal virtuality of the “idea of the human” and ward off the possibility of the evil which all too obviously results from it. There are, unfortunately, a number of problems with this approach, as becomes clear through a reading of Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s most canny student and critic. For, according to Meillassoux, it is precisely the demand of such a fidelity to some actualized local existence (my existence, for example, or my people’s existence), which, as we have already seen, inevitably gives rise to a new absolute and subsequent dogmatism—or, in Meillassoux’s language: a fanaticism. Far from warding off evil, Meillassoux asserts, it is precisely such fanaticisms, grounded as they are in a covert reemergence of a local absolute, which precisely found, justify, and even demand evil actions.18 With this conviction, Meillassoux attempts to dismantle Badiou’s ethical system and establish what he thinks is a more viable alternative.



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Quentin Meillassoux on the rise of post-critical fanaticism According to Meillassoux, a certain paradox results from the Kantian critique of dogmatism. For, “the more thought arms itself against dogmatism,” he writes, “the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism.”19 This occurs, he reasons, because, while the Kantian critique of metaphysical absolutes “culminates in the disappearance of the pretention to think any absolutes,” it does not, as we have noted, culminate “in the disappearance of absolutes” in toto.20 To the contrary, it ultimately allows for the assertion of any absolute, “the only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justification of their validity.”21 In other words, since Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics is effective by limiting the power of reason to a purely virtual power (albeit universal in scope), it does not necessarily prevent the assertion of some local, nonuniversal (i.e., non-rational) claim with pretentions of operating as an absolute, like Badiou’s multiplicity, or the “German Spirit,” for that matter, so long as these new “absolutes” do not feign a universal rational validity. The unintentional result of this “forbidding reason any claim to the absolute,” Meillassoux writes, “has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious,” qua fanaticism.22 In this way, thinks Meillassoux, “fanaticism . . . is the effect of critical rationality, and this precisely in so far as . . . this rationality was effectively emancipatory; was effectively, and thankfully, successful in destroying dogmatism.”23 Such is the tragic irony of the Kantian critique according to Meillassoux: that by de-absolutizing the universal actuality of the divine, it gave way for the assertion of any number of local, nonuniversal/non-rational absolutes and gods. It gave way, in other words, for the appearance of any number of fanatical fundamentalisms and nationalisms—all of which amount to new forms of dogmatic metaphysics, each asserted in faith or, to use Badiou’s language, fidelity.24 The problem with such fanatical dogmatisms, as is obvious in the case of the Nazi but is equally true, albeit less obviously, of Badiou, is that each allows for the justification of any number of demonstratively evil acts; what’s more, these acts are not subject to scrutiny nor critique by way of an appeal to universal reason. So it is, Meillassoux argues, that evil necessarily results from such fanaticisms: for, any and all ethical and/or political actions can be justified on the basis of a fidelity to some localized absolute. Think of Kierkegaard’s Abraham for example: Abraham’s “teleological suspension of the ethical,” of that which is universally justifiable via reason, is grounded in his fidelity to an event and truth which was revealed only locally to him exclusively.25 Ethical systems of this sort, grounded as they are in a fidelity to some local position, are ultimately for Meillassoux nothing more than the resurgence of a new form of dogmatism grounded in the assertion of a new universally actual absolute.

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As Meillassoux puts it, “To be dogmatic is invariably to maintain that this or that—i.e. some determinate entity—must absolutely be, and be the way it is, whether it is Idea, pure Act, atom, indivisible soul, harmonious world, perfect God, infinite substance, World-Soul, global history, etc.”26 It follows from the existence of this one necessary entity that “every entity is absolutely necessary ([through] the principle of sufficient reason).”27 Since “this God,” exists, the logic goes: so too “this world, this history, and ultimately this actually existing political regime necessarily exists, and must be the way it is.”28 As a result, he reasons, fanatical ethical, religious, and political projects are not only able to justify the necessity of certain activities (e.g., ethnic cleansing, mass suicide, military expansion, the weaponization of children), but can even claim that such activities are in fact inevitable and good!29 It is for this reason that Meillassoux concludes that “to say that God exists,” or for that matter (B)eing, the One, and so on, “is to make [of it] the worst of masters.”30 For Meillassoux, the return to dogmatic metaphysics effected in such fanatical assertions of local truth, events, and values as the ground for ethical or political thought “obliges [its] believer to submit to a being that is essentially amoral, capable in its phenomenal manifestation of allowing or even ordaining the most extreme evil.”31 Thus, Meillassoux concludes, it becomes essential that ethical philosophers discover a new “non-metaphysical absolute” upon which to ground ethical and political judgment if they are to resist such evils.32 Indeed, according to Meillassoux, it is the task of every contemporary philosopher to give up the pretense that ethical judgments can appeal to any relative non-absolute position and in turn “uncover an absolute necessity”; but, and this is essential, one “that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary entity,” and which cannot be used therefore to erect some new form of dogmatism nor fanaticism capable of justifying the kinds of social and political horrors so obvious in the political history of the West.33 It is to this task that the bulk of his monograph After Finitude is committed. There Meillassoux strives to expose “how thought is able to access an absolute, i.e. a being whose severance (the original meaning of absolutus) and whose separateness from thought is such that it presents itself to us as non-relative to us, and hence [is] capable of existing whether we exist or not,” and to use that absolute to ground ethical judgment anew.34 Such a nondogmatic absolute is available, he claims, through what he terms factial speculation: “the type of speculation which seeks and identifies the conditions of factuality.”35

Factial speculation and radical contingency This factial speculation is grounded in what Meillassoux terms the ancestral or the arche-fossil. The ancestral for Meillassoux designates “any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species—or even anterior to every



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recognized form of life on earth,” a reality testified to by what he calls the arche-fossil: “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event . . . that is anterior to terrestrial life.”36 Examples of such arche-fossils are radiocarbon decay, which bears testimony to the accretion of the earth roughly 4.6 billion years ago, or the cosmic microwave background of the universe, which bears asubjective witness to the rapid expansion of the universe roughly 13.7 billion years ago from an intensely dense and hot photon plasma. What inquiry into such arche-fossils opens up for Meillassoux is the possibility of “think[ing] a world without thought—a world without the givenness of a world.”37 What factial speculation makes possible according to Meillassoux is, in other words, the possibility of identifying a new absolute which is both actual and universal but which, nevertheless, does not lend itself to the formation of a new dogmatism or fanaticism. What the ancestral object presents, he thinks, is thus a way of not only escaping what he calls the correlationism inherent to the Kantian critique and its followers, but, much more importantly, a means of establishing a new ground for ethical and political judgments.38 Through the ancestral, Meillassoux concludes, contemporary philosophy is able “to achieve what [Kant] has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not,” and to act ethically in accordance with this knowledge.39 More specifically, Meillassoux thinks that what is deducible through factial speculation grounded upon the ancestral object is “a time in which the passage from the non-being of givenness to its being has effectively occurred—hence a time which, by definition, cannot be reduced to any givenness which preceded it and whose emergence it allows.”40 By opening the way to a conception of an absolute time which precedes the current existing conditions of existence, Meillassoux argues that factial speculation allows for the rediscovery of the radical contingency of existence: the fact that though things are the way they are now, they could have been otherwise, or not been at all. And, it is this discovery, he thinks, which we can use to ground a robust critique of evil and found anew ethical judgment. Meillassoux defines the radical contingency of existence revealed in the ancestral object as the horrifying discovery that “everything could . . . collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this [radical contingency is] not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what.”41 The absolute which is revealed through factial speculation is thus, Meillassoux claims, “the absolute necessity of everything’s non-necessity . . . the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything,”42 or what he calls elsewhere the novelty and freedom granted by the “inexistence of God.”43 Because of the radical contingency that this possibility reveals, Meillassoux concludes, “the factial [opens] the very arena for a speculation that excludes all [dogmatic] metaphysics,”44 allowing for the assertion of “an absolute without [recourse

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to] an absolute entity.”45 It is upon this new absolute, what he terms “the necessity of contingency,” that a new non-fanatical, nondogmatic ethics and politics can be erected.46 According to Meillassoux, “Against dogmatism, it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important that we rediscover . . . a modicum of absoluteness—enough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some [local] revelation.”47 So it is, he thinks, that through the absolute necessity of contingency, revealed through factial speculation, one recovers what he identifies as “the minimal condition for every critique of [fanatical] ideology . . . whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily.”48 By showing concretely and undeniably the fact things could always have been and might still be otherwise, factial speculation establishes for Meillassoux an absolute ground upon which to mount a critique of the evil acts justified as inevitable within the logic of fanatical dogmatism. This ground also allows him to develop a new method of ethical deliberation.

The fragility of Meillassoux’s hope According to Meillassoux, it is the task of “any [contemporary] philosopher worthy of the name” to attempt to ground anew ethical judgment upon such absolutes.49 Indeed, according to Meillassoux, “the goal of every philosophy must be the immanent inscription of values in being,” grounded, as he sees it, in the necessity of radical contingency.50 For, as Meillassoux claims, only through such factial speculations on the necessity of contingency can one discover the possibility of an absolute value always already present in actuality “without the intervention of a transcendent revelation.”51 Such a value, he thinks, “not founded by the soil that sustains [existence] . . ., but by the void that outstrips [it],” allows for the assertion of an absolutely universal good that cannot be the object of dogmatic fanaticism.52 Meillassoux names such a value “hope,” hope in the possibility—nay, the necessity—of change, of other possible futures, any possible future, even the possibility of a future wherein justice would finally be actualized.53 There is thus a fragility to Meillassoux’s conception of the good. Indeed, he confesses, it only offers a “troubled certainty”—a “troubled certainty” that things could be otherwise than they are—that we could eventually live in a world where the good reigns, forever and ever, on earth as it is in our hopes and dreams.54 And yet, Meillassoux thinks, such a “troubled certainty” is enough—enough, at least, to “protect us from the dogmatism of necessity”55—enough, in other words, to condemn absolutely any action which demands the kinds of social and political evils justified by the fanatics all too active in world politics.



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The trouble with speculative ethics Through Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s respective diagnoses of the possible consequences of post-critical ethical projects, and the horrors which can result from their political application, we begin to see what is ultimately at stake in the debate: the very real possibility of evil in the world. Moreover, it becomes all the more clear that what underlies these possible consequences is the ethical disjunction effected by Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics. Without recourse to any universal and actual absolute upon which to ground ethical judgment, post-critical thinkers can only rely either on the strength of a universalized virtual subjectivity which, as we saw with Badiou, either leads to Western liberal nihilism or to a new form of cultural dogmatic imperialism; or, alternatively, they may invoke the local actuality of personal or cultural events, values, and truths which, as we saw with Meillassoux, leads directly to the fanaticism of religious and nationalistic fundamentalisms. In order to stand against these possibilities, Badiou and Meillassoux alike have attempted to speculate anew the possibility of an absolute ground for ethical judgment: for Badiou, the singularity of a local event; and, for Meillassoux, the universality of speculative contingency. Unfortunately, each of their attempts contains a fundamental weakness, leaving both open to the possibility of precisely the kinds of nihilism and dogmatism they denounce. For Badiou, as we have seen, ethical judgment must be grounded in the absolute singularity of the site of a subject’s evental becoming (site événementiel au devenir). As such, absolutized ethical judgment is opened up, he claims, in the subject’s fidelity to its own (local) truth. What we discover in Badiou’s work, then, is a conception of good and evil which is entirely bound to the subject’s experience of its own (again, read: local) becoming. The problem, however, as Meillassoux subtly shows, is that Badiou’s position poses the risk of establishing a new kind of fanatical religiosity. What else are we to make of Badiou’s call for “fidelity” to the singularity of one’s own becoming than the grounds of a new kind of religious fanaticism? And indeed, isn’t this precisely what we see in the suicide bomber, for example? Who is to say that he or she is not, each in his or her own way, enacting precisely an ethics of fidelity: staying true to his or her own evental experience of a local, personal good or revelation? It seems then that even though Badiou may successfully reconceive the nature of subjectivity after Kant, the ethical project he grounds in this subjectivity nevertheless suffers the same shortcomings as other post-critical ethical projects—giving in, in its own way, to the possibility of fanaticism. Without a simultaneously universal and actual absolute upon which to establish ethical critique, Badiou’s thought seems just as trapped in the dangers posed by the post-Kantian ethical disjunction as his “smug nihilists,” whether liberal or Nazi.

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While Meillassoux, for his part, escapes such threats, grounding, as he does, ethical judgment in the universality of factial speculation, his project nevertheless contains its own critical weakness. For, as we have already seen, ethical action consists for him in nothing more than a hope for what he calls “a world to come,” a world which he terms in his yet unpublished L’Inexistence Divine the “fourth World,” or “the World of justice.”56 It is only by hoping effectively for this world, he argues, that we are able to ground ethical speculation, “for it is only the World of [future possible] rebirth of humans,” a possibility grounded in the absolute contingency of all things, “that makes universal justice possible, by erasing even the injustice of shattered lives.”57 According to Meillassoux, “The factial is an ontology that allows us to think immortality directly as one possibility among others, but as a real possibility.”58 Justice, for him, is realizable only in thinking this possibility. What this means practically is that justice for Meillassoux remains an impossibility in the present—something which never exists now, but which exclusively presents a virtual possibility (inexistent) for the future. The good derived from this possibility, while universal, is thus never actualizable, remaining only ever purely virtual. Indeed, such a good is, he confesses, only ever “an imaginary Good, aimed at by an illusion for which only thinking beings are equipped. It is a Good at which one aims, perfectly inexistent in the world that precedes the rise of humanity. And it manifestly exceeds the capacities of matter, in whose midst it has none the less emerged in the form of an obstinate hope.”59 We see from this that there is a certain amount of messianism to Meillassoux’s project—one grounded in materiality and not some transcendent or existent God, to be sure, but a messianism nonetheless, one which sees the good only in a future which can never arrive. Meillassoux even admits as much, claiming that “the core of factial ethics . . . consists in the immanent binding of philosophical astonishment [in an inexistent god] and messianic hope, understood as the hope for justice for the dead and the living.”60 This means concretely that the good for Meillassoux is always still yet to come, never something actual in the world. The problem with Meillassoux’s solution is that we face very real and pressing ethical dilemmas here and now, in this world. How are we to derive ethical action in the present from the possibility of a good that only manifests in the hope for the future? How are we to respond today to the evils justified by whatever fanaticism is au courant? This is an acute and fatal weakness in Meillassoux’s ethics: specifically, that the absolute upon which he establishes factial speculation, though initially actual, qua ancestrality, is only effective as a virtual ground for ethical and political judgment. As a result, as Badiou has correctly pointed out, “there is a detachment from the present in [Meillassoux], a kind of stoicism of the present. There is no clear vision of the present.”61 “This is,” he concludes rightly, “a political weakness.”62 As Badiou has noted, “For Meillassoux the future decides, the future and perhaps the dead will make the final judgment.”63 Unfortunately, we do not



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have the luxury of waiting for some virtual future or the resurrection of the dead to respond to the actual humanitarian and environmental crises which we face today. What is more, as we have seen, Badiou’s own solution to this weakness does not provide a sufficient ground to condemn universally the actions of those who initiate and perpetuate these crises, men and women who very well may act in accordance with the truth of their own becoming. It is clear from this that it is incumbent upon contemporary ethicists to find a better way to ground absolute ethical judgments in the wake of Kant’s critique. Where Badiou and Meillassoux are right is in their recognition that this project hinges on discovering the possibility of a new absolute upon which we can ground ethical judgment, one which neither 1) relies upon the kinds of transcendental structures upheld within the dogmatic metaphysics of the pre-Kantian world nor 2) gives in to the kind of “smug nihilism” inevitable from the assertion of a purely virtual value. What we must discover is, in other words, a form of the absolute which is actually present in our local lived experience but which nevertheless has a universal power and validity—an absolute upon which we can ground a critique of any evil justified in its name. Make no mistake, what is at stake in such a project cannot be overestimated: it is the ability to resist the kinds of social and political evils which have stained the history of the West since Kant. Fortunately, we are not alone in this pursuit. As we will see in the following chapter, precisely such a universally accessible and actual ethical absolute can be identified in Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological analysis of the face of the Other. But, as we will discover soon thereafter, the effectiveness of such an absolute to ground a critique of evil lies not in its function as the source of positive ethical demands, but in its function to define a limit case which should never be approached. In the hopes of overcoming the deadlock of the post-critical ethical disjunction effected by Kant and detailed above, we must turn to the phenomenological tradition.

CHAPTER TWO

Phenomenology, ethics, and the Other: Rediscovering the possibility of ethical absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas

Phenomenology’s problem It may be surprising to some to see the phenomenological tradition proposed as a solution to the problems addressed by and inadvertently repeated in the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. After all, both thinkers, particularly the latter, situate their work as a critique of the phenomenological tradition. According to Meillassoux, for one, the phenomenological tradition remains too trapped within the structures of the Kantian critique to address reality as it actually is or to pose any viable solution to the immanent ethical and political problems that plague us as a result of it. Thus, while the aim of the phenomenological tradition may have been to go “back to things themselves,” as Husserl declared, and to bring philosophy down from the theoretical heights of idealism and reintroduce it to the concrete lived experience of those of us here below, it nevertheless remains, Meillassoux claims, entirely circumscribed by what he infamously calls Kantian correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”1 Indeed, according to Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, some of Meillassoux’s greatest



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supporters in the English-speaking world, the phenomenological method fundamentally requires “the renunciation of any knowledge beyond how things appear to us. Reality-in-itself is cordoned off at least in its cognitive aspects.”2 It is therefore incapable, they argue, of asserting anything more than the merely virtual reality of perception and appearance—not being, but seeming. As a result, they conclude, it is incapable of grounding any material judgment, ethical or otherwise. It was in fact precisely with the aim of addressing and overcoming this apparent “correlationism” at the heart of the phenomenological tradition that Meillassoux, Badiou, and their followers called for philosophy to “speculat[e] once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally.”3 According to them, it is only by “recuperat[ing] the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of [Kant’s] critique,” that philosophy will be able to both address the nature of reality revealed in the material sciences and establish thereby a new ground upon which to mount a critique of the excesses of ethical and political life.4 Hence Meillassoux’s emphasis on factial speculation on the basis of the ancestral object as a means of uncovering the radical contingency of existence and reinscribing absolute value into being, which we examined in the last chapter.5 According to Meillassoux and his colleagues, without some ground in an actual reality which exists outside of and beyond the limits of perception, phenomenology is destined to revert, despite its intentions, to some form of idealism at best or collapse into outright solipsism at worst. Thus, they conclude, in order to “construct a transcendental naturalism capable of providing an ontological foundation for science” and ethical judgment anew, the project of correlationism in general and phenomenology in particular must be jettisoned.6 It was in large part this conclusion which led Tom Sparrow to call for “the end of phenomenology” and the initiation of a “new realism” capable of taking up these challenges in earnest.7 This critique of phenomenology is however not as“new”as Sparrow would have it. To the contrary, it is a critique which has haunted phenomenology since its very beginning. Indeed, as early as 1894 Gottlob Frege argued that the phenomenological insistence on approaching phenomena in and through the structures of perception guaranteed its eventual reversion into a form of idealism.8 By beginning with the first-person perspective, he argued, Husserl’s phenomenology was fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the radical asubjective ground of thought; specifically, he argued, phenomenology was incapable of affirming what he took to be the absolute validity of arithmetic principles. In many ways, what is at stake in Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s speculative critiques of phenomenology is a resurrection of Frege’s critique: namely, phenomenology’s apparent difficulty discovering in thought that which transcends it—its absolute ground, reality in and of itself. For Frege, the transcendent,

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absolute ground for thought was, by contrast, discoverable, at least in part, through mathematics. For Frege and his followers, the laws of mathematics which ground logic must be conceived of as existing entirely independently from human perception lest it lose its validity. Even if there were no thinker to do the calculation, Frege insists, two and two must still make four. Such transcendental harmonies exceed human meaning making, he insists. Instead, Frege thinks, such arithmetic principles must be thought of as the language of the stars and the music of the spheres, and therein lies their status as the absolute ground for thought. Since the principles of mathematics must be valid independently of human thought, he reasoned, their foundations must lie in that which is separate from and outside of human thought, in some absolute. Given this conviction, it was with good reason that Frege was suspicious of Husserl, who in 1887 defined mathematics and numbers as nothing more than a category of human understanding, one formulated by consciousness according to the structures of social life.9 What this amounted to, for Frege, was an attack on the absolute power of mathematics. In Husserl’s account, Frege feared, mathematics becomes nothing more than a singular and unusual form of human language, no different in status really than Mandarin or French, and not, as he insisted, the absolute language of material reality itself. The essence of the problem with the phenomenological project according to Frege was this way in which it appeared to reduce reality to the structures of subjective life, thereby denying from the outset the possibility of any full access to absolute reality in itself. In effect, thinks Frege, what Husserl’s phenomenology accomplishes is the final disavowal of the possibility of any certifiable knowledge of reality in itself: reality as it exists independent from our perception of it. As a result, he reasons, the only thing a rigorous phenomenology could actually accomplish would be a detailed accounting of the psychological structures of subjective experience. Far from establishing a transcendental basis for a science then, which is precisely what Husserl proposed his phenomenological project would complete, Frege argued that Husserl’s assumptions effectively eradicated the possibility of a full and robust concept of science by limiting human access to any absolute, asubjective, and preexistent structures and patterns present in the universe itself. From this it is clear that the speculative critique of phenomenology which decries it as a kind of correlationism is most definitely not new. It is instead simply the newest version of the Fregian critique of phenomenology as a form of psychologism. The link between these two critiques even extends into the commitment by the authors of both to the absolute nature of arithmetic principles. Alain Badiou, for example, has expressly called for an effort to reframe philosophical ontology in the language of mathematics.10 According to Badiou, “Pure presentation as such, abstracting all reference to [the] ‘that which’—which is to say, then, being-as-being, being as pure



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multiplicity—can be thought only through mathematics.”11 This is a suggestion which Meillassoux has seconded in his praise of “mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors, to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”12 Through mathematics, Badiou and Meillassoux think with Frege, philosophy has access to an absolute reality, one which exists outside of and beyond the structures and limitations of human consciousness. In this regard, all three conclude, mathematics is more equipped to ground ethical and political projects than anything discoverable within the phenomenological tradition.

Edmund Husserl’s reduction For Husserl, famously, such pre-critical conceptions of an absolute reality accessible outside of and beyond human perception are naïve—necessarily resorting to a kind of naturalism that he thinks simply cannot bear any serious scrutiny. It was in fact precisely against such naturalisms that Husserl initiated his project, identifying within them the seeds of a “crisis” which threatened, according to him, the very foundations of science.13 Thus the whole phenomenological project was conceived by him as a critique of and argument against something not unlike the sort of “speculation” called for by his contemporary critics. And yet, Husserl was not unchallenged by the charge of psychologism brought against him by Frege and others. To the contrary, he was very nearly obsessed with this critique and returned to it consistently throughout his work. Indeed, even a quick survey of his oeuvre reveals him dedicating almost as much time defending his project against the charge of psychologism as articulating the aims and methods of that project. From Volume 1 of the Logical Investigations, his first major work published in 1900, where we find the most extended defense of the phenomenological method against the critique of psychologism,14 to section B of Part II of the Crisis, written near the end of Husserl’s life, where the transcendental status of phenomenological philosophy is asserted almost dogmatically,15 Husserl appears incapable of launching even a cursory account of the phenomenological method without taking at least some time to shore it up against the possible critique of psychologism. In all of these passages, what Husserl suggests is that what ultimately saves phenomenology from falling into psychologism is the method of inquiry he proposed it must take: the phenomenological method. In particular, he cited what he called the power of the phenomenological reduction to buoy phenomenology up from the depths of mere psychologism. According to Husserl, since phenomenological inquiry occupies a liminal space between the empirical sciences and psychologistic idealisms, it necessarily runs the risk of collapsing into either errancy: psychologism on the one hand, and naïve naturalism on the other. What protects it from doing so, Husserl assured his readers, are the methodological

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constraints demanded by proper phenomenological research. The phenomenological reduction, first intimated in the Logical Investigations but most fully articulated in Ideas I, was for Husserl what guaranteed that the phenomenological project not fall into either errancy and instead fulfilled its aim to ground and secure the foundations of scientific inquiry.16 Through the reduction, he insists, “nothing at all stands in the way of accomplishing a transcendental . . . science of the lived in experiences.”17 By ensuring a properly phenomenological attitude, free from the vicissitudes of naturalistic assumptions and commonplace judgments, according to Husserl, the reduction grants philosophy immediate access to precisely the kind of “immanent,” “absolute,” and “empirical” “givenness” of phenomena sought by the empirical sciences and the contemporary speculative realists.18 Indeed, according to Husserl, it is in fact only by way of this reduction that some absolutely pure and immediately given “this” can be encountered at all without falling into the problems of naturalism. In recognition of this fact, contemporary phenomenologist Dan Zahavi has concluded that Husserl, in particular, and phenomenology, in general, are ultimately immune to Frege’s critique and its contemporary speculative revival.19 The problem with both, he thinks, is that they miss what is not only ultimately at stake in phenomenological research—namely, precisely the kind of absolute reality they seek; more importantly, they miss what is truly radical, in the most original sense of the word, in the phenomenological approach to the absolute. To understand the basis of his claim, let us examine what are perhaps the two most radical elements of Husserl’s thought. Thusly we will begin to understand how and why phenomenology can be of use to us in our present attempt to discover a simultaneously universal and actual absolute capable of grounding a new approach to ethical judgment. The first of these two claims lies hidden within the rallying cry of the Husserlian project itself: zu den sachen selbst, back to things themselves.

The radical foundations of the phenomenological revolution When first reading Husserl, one is likely to note the superficial resemblance between his call to return to “things themselves” and Kant’s renunciation of “things-in-themselves” in the first critique. This is of course a homophonic connection which only exists in translation. In the original German, Husserl’s sachen selbst bears no immediate connection to Kant’s Ding-an-sich. This is nevertheless an instructive confusion. For however exterior to the language this connection is in the original, it is a connection which reveals all the same something interior and essential to Husserl’s project: namely, the way in which it revolutionizes the Kantian critique, turning it, as it were, on its head.



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The hard core of the Kantian system is the claim that it is impossible to rationally conceive of things existing “in themselves.” Such noumenal objects, as Kant calls them, exceed the scope of human perception. As such, he argues, while such noumena may exist and may function as a ground for human experience, they cannot be known or addressed as such. Indeed, according to Kant, one cannot even talk about them in any meaningful way as actual. At best, one can think of them as possible objects—one can act “as if” they are out there. But such a move is ultimately a kind of leap of faith for him, albeit a rationally grounded one. According to Kant, therefore, these possible objects should not be treated as the actual ground of human experience. Instead, he argues, one must acknowledge that the real and actual ground of phenomenal experience lies in the transcendental structures of subjectivity itself: the a priori concepts of space and time, for example. It is these a priori concepts which, argues Kant, while functionally empty without the content of a posteriori experience, are the real ground of phenomenal experience.20 This is the hard core of Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics: that no absolute reality independent of the structures of consciousness is accessible to consciousness. Hence his, and the subsequent history of philosophy’s, attempt to ground ethical judgment in something other than the absolute in-itself. In calling for a return to the sache of “things themselves,” it was Husserl’s aim to question the grounding assumptions of the Kantian schema and to reconcile this split between phenomenal and noumenal realities. For Husserl, phenomenal life must be grounded anew in a more primal encounter with some external reality. In this regard, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology can be read as a direct response to Kant’s transcendental idealism—not a rejection of it, but a revolution of its assumptions. For Husserl, prior to the subjective experience of objective reality, there must be a more immediate engagement with things. Husserl famously names the raw material of this primal engagement the pure plena of noetic data.21 For him, this pure plena, this unstructured noetic material, is the ultimate ground and condition for subjective experience, even the abstract concepts of time and space. Of course, he concedes with Kant, in order for this noetic data to take on any real meaning or value for the subject as this or that concrete object, it must be apprehended and organized according to certain noematic ideas, as he calls them, which motivate a subject’s judgments or actions.22 Nevertheless, Husserl insists throughout his work, such noematic ideas are not primary, but secondary to the nonsubjective consciousness of pure noetic data. That is, they do not precede the reception of noetic data, but come afterward, as an adopted structure which gives meaning to and makes sense of that data. The call to return to “things themselves” is in part for Husserl a call to push beyond the noematic structures of subjectivity and to discover beneath them the pre-subjective ground of the thinghood absolutely present in the noetic data itself. It is, in other words, a call to discover beneath the Kantian

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structures of transcendental idealism a more primal ontological immanence. To put it another way, using the language of phenomenologist Ed Casey, what Husserl wants to do is to show that in order to derive the abstract ideas of space and time, for example, we must have the lived experience of place and history first.23 It is from more primal experiences of this sort, Husserl thinks, that the structures of egoic life arise and subsequently shape phenomenal life qua subjectivity and objectivity. This argument is made especially clear in Husserl’s later works, particularly the Krisis (1934–37), but is equally present throughout his career.24 Take, for example, the first section of Ideas II (particularly alinea §8 through §11), which Husserl began writing in 1912 and later amended and added to in 1928 (after the rigorous reworking of Edith Stein in 1916 and Ludwig Landgrebe from 1923 to 1925).25 There Husserl expounds upon the primacy of what he refers to as the sensuous (e.g., sense-objects, sense-data) as the pre-given ground for egoic life, a pre-given which, he argues later, is present for the ego through the aesthesis of the body.26 Such allusions to a presubjective aesthesis localized in a lived body can be found even in Husserl’s earliest works. Take, as another example, alinea §3 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1910–11), where Husserl localizes lived experience in a pre-subjective bodily engagement.27 This same basic intuition can even be discovered in Husserl’s first explorations of consciousness (Bewusstsein) in the Logical Investigations (1900–1), which, he argues there, underlies and supports all egoic experience,28 and which, as early as 1907, he situates in what he calls the “kinaesthetic sensations of the Body.”29 The assertion that beneath the phenomenal life of the subject there lies a more primal pre-subjective ground is absolutely essential to understanding the power of Husserl’s critique of Kant. And, it leads directly to the second of what I take to be Husserl’s most radical claims: the recognition that this presubjective ground is a shared lifeworld (lebenswelt), one which is constituted intersubjectively with and through our interaction with others.30 Others are not for Husserl, as they are for Kant, merely an object of consciousness: something we confront on the basis of our subjective structures or conceive of according to our noematic ideas. This is a point Husserl makes clear in alinea §62 of his 1929 Cartesian Meditations.31 There he argues that other consciousness resides in the pre-given sensuous lifeworld of pure noetic data. As such, the experience of any other, he insists, precedes subjective life and, as he makes especially clear in Ideas I and II, even conditions it. Our pre-subjective contact with others is mediated, thinks Husserl, by the primal affect of empathy (einfühlung).32 It is through empathy, he argues, that one connects with others pre-subjectively; and, it is therefore in empathy, he claims, that the conditions for subjective life are established. For Husserl, empathy operates as the channel through which the ego receives the noematic structures around which subjectivity and objectivity are organized. As the source of these structures, the influence of others exists immanently within every phenomenal apperception for Husserl. It was for



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this reason that he writes in the Krisis: “We, each ‘I-the-man’ and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this ‘living together.’”33 The objective world and my subjective experience of it are inexorably shared intersubjective constructs for Husserl. They are products of this pre-subjective “living together.” All reality is, in other words, socially structured for Husserl. And, since phenomenal life is fundamentally and inexorably structured by social interactions, Husserl concludes, any rigorous inquiry into the nature of the world must involve an inquiry into the nature of the others with whom we share it. It is here, in this absolutely pre-subjective relation with others which is guaranteed by Husserl’s phenomenology, that we begin to catch a glimpse of the possibility of discovering a new absolute ground for ethical and political action missed by the speculative thinkers. Indeed, it was precisely this possibility opened up by phenomenology which attracted a young Emmanuel Levinas, unquestionably one of the most influential ethical thinkers of the twentieth century, to travel to Freiburg in 1928 to study for a year with Husserl.

Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of phenomenological ethics According to Levinas, the history of Western philosophy prior to Husserl had been little more than a history of various idealisms, a history he defined as the perpetuation of “the myth of a legislative consciousness of things, where difference and identity are reconciled.”34 These prevailing idealisms, argued Levinas, all rest on a fundamental error in Western philosophy which has privileged one’s self over others in the formation of conscious life—making one’s connection to their own being more primary than their connection to anything outside of or beyond their being. Levinas defined this privileging in the history of philosophy as the persistent “totalitarianism or imperialism of the Same.”35 For Levinas, the consequences of such imperialisms have been multitude: from rampant solipsism in the history of philosophy to outright violence and murder in the history of politics. It was therefore in the hopes of discovering a philosophical system which moved beyond such idealisms and violence that Levinas turned to phenomenology. In Husserl’s insistence on the intersubjective nature of the lifeworld, which he established as the foundation of conscious life, Levinas saw a possible path to discovering a nonsubjective ground for absolute ethical judgments which could overcome the violence of philosophical and political history. In his pursuit of a new absolute ground for ethical judgment which could escape the vicissitudes of the Kantian critique, we find in Levinas a project parallel to our own. But, in order to understand how Levinas forged this path, we must first understand his engagement with Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s most gifted student; for,

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while it is Husserl who set Levinas on his journey, it was Heidegger who pointed the direction his work would eventually take.

Martin Heidegger and primal ontology In 1929 Levinas wrote that though he went to Freiburg “because of Husserl,” while there he “found Heidegger,” who had just taken over Husserl’s chair in philosophy.36 Heidegger was at that time just coming into his own as copies of his lecture notes and his recently published Being and Time circulated Germany, prompting what Hannah Arendt described as “rumor of the hidden [philosopher] king,” returned to save us all from our naïveté.37 In Heidegger, Levinas found an even clearer articulation of the primacy of a pre-subjective engagement with the world than was announced in Husserl’s method. According to him, “While Husserl still proposed—or seemed to propose to me—a transcendental program for philosophy, Heidegger clearly defined philosophy in relation to other forms of knowledge as ‘fundamental ontology.’”38 It was in Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” that Levinas would finally discover the means of carrying his ethical concerns beyond the limitations of Kantian idealism. Indeed, it was this conviction that inspired him to write at that time that “[Heidegger’s] teaching and his works are the best proof of the fecundity of the phenomenological method”—the ultimate means of overcoming the errors of the past, both those which plague us intellectually and which haunt us practically.39 By developing a phenomenological analysis of the pre-subjective givenness of the world, Heidegger illuminated for Levinas what he, and even some today, saw as obscured in Husserl. For Levinas, the great achievement of Heidegger’s work lay in how it was able to abandon entirely the structures of subjectivity through an ontological analysis of a pre-subjective beingin-the-world. In Heidegger’s ontology, then, Levinas found what he had gone to Germany looking for: a way out of the “myth of the legislative consciousness.”40 The great revelation of what Heidegger called “Dasein analysis” was for Levinas this regrounding of existence in a pre-given sensuous lifeworld, a move which irrevocably cut the legs out from under philosophical idealism.41 In this way, Heidegger’s thought represented for Levinas, as he wrote in 1934, the final death knell of subjectivism in philosophy.42 What Levinas failed to realize then, and only really became aware of after the Second World War, was that what Heidegger’s work gave to him with one hand, it simultaneously took away from him with the other, what we discovered in the other side of Husserl’s radical project: the insistence on the primacy of the Other in the formation of consciousness. For Heidegger, as for Husserl, the inexorability of being-in-the-world entails a being-with others (Mit-sein).43 Inasmuch as Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, handling and absorbed in the tool-being of the world, it finds itself thrown alongside others. Yet, despite the inexorable sociality



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of Dasein’s everyday being-in-the-world, Heidegger insists, in contrast to Husserl, that the fundamental ontological nature of Dasein’s being-in-theworld is not its being-with others, but what he calls its ownness, or Mineness (Jemeinigkeit).44 This is a reality which is testified to, thinks Heidegger, in the facticity of death. One’s death, he writes, is exclusively one’s own.45 No one can rescue us from its inevitability, alleviate us from the weight it places upon our lives, nor venture into that darkness with us. As the ultimate possibility of one’s life, death is for Heidegger the expression of one’s ownmost reality, that which most de-fines or circumscribes the nature of one’s being.46 It is only through being authentically toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode), he therefore concludes, that one can discover that, despite the inexorability of beingwith others, one is ultimately and always truly alone in-the-world—bound more primordially to oneself than to others. The inevitability of death, he concludes, reveals that the sociality of Dasein’s being-with others must inevitably give way to its being-its-Self (Selbstein) in recognition that others are not really a structural part of one’s own being, merely an addition to it—an addition, moreover, he argues, that presents a kind of threat to one’s being-in-the-world.47 As such, argues Heidegger, being-with others is not ultimately a modality of being-in-the-world to be embraced, but one which must be resisted. For, he thinks, when one too closely identifies with others, one risks losing sight of the singularity of his or her own being, forgetting the essential aloneness or mineness testified to by the inevitability of death. Heidegger names this risk inauthenticity (uneigentlichkeit), which is the possibility of not-being-one’s-own or, to romanticize it, becoming inappropriate.48 Fortunately, thinks Heidegger, no matter how suffused or entwined with others one becomes, no matter how inauthentically one lives one’s life, he or she will always hear what he calls the call of conscience (die Anrufung der gewissen): the call of one’s own being to return to what is authentic and appropriate to one’s self.49 For Heidegger, the true power of phenomenology lies in its ability to amplify this call. For him, Husserl’s summons to “return to things themselves” is nothing more than a way of hearing properly the call of conscience articulated by our being, summoning us back to what is truly ourselves. What Heidegger saw in the phenomenological method, then, was a means of resisting the temptation which he saw present in the beingof others—a way of harkening to the solicitation of being and becoming truly authentic (eigntlich). It is for this reason that so many scholars have sensed in Heidegger’s phenomenology a kind of prescriptive “ethics of authenticity.”50 Heidegger, of course, always denied this claim, insisting instead that his account of authenticity was purely descriptive. Still, there is sufficient reason to suspect that in Husserl’s epoche, Heidegger found a path through phenomenology to the kind of ethical ontology he credits with first appearing in the Hellenistic ethical systems skepticism and stoicism, two schools of thought which seem to have obsessed him as a young man.51

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Levinas and the ethical primacy of the Other This possibility of grounding an ethical project in Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” was immediately apparent to Levinas. Indeed, part of what Levinas seems to have found so invigorating in Heidegger’s project was the way in which it refigured Husserl’s call to “return to things themselves” as an ethical mandate, one which revealed the primacy of ethical phenomena. Indeed, his earliest works praise Heidegger precisely for the way he united phenomenological analysis with an ethos of life. But, what began to trouble Levinas increasingly, particularly in his work from 1946 onward, was the way in which Heidegger’s particular account of the ethical power of the call to “return to things themselves” sacrificed the primal sociality of the shared lifeworld which he found so alluring in Husserl’s work. What Levinas sought to do in his mature work was to reinfuse Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with Husserl’s insistence on this primordial sociality within the shared lifeworld. To do this, however, required radically refiguring Husserl’s account of the relationship between the self and others. Specifically, Levinas aimed to recast the appearance of the other to the self as a power which appeared outside of and beyond the structures of subjective thought and perception: not as an intersubjective phenomenon, but as an extra- or suprasubjective phenomenon—indeed, as an absolute power capable of radically reconfiguring our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of ethical responsibility. To indicate the superiority and power of the position which he thought others occupied in the life of the subject, Levinas took to capitalizing the first letter of the word: the Other. According to Levinas, in order to account for contact with this Other as a truly primal structure within one’s being-in-the-world which nevertheless comes somehow from outside of or “otherwise than” one’s own being, we must situate the appearance of the Other “on its own [ground]”—“outside of” and “beyond” the structures of subjectivity.52 Only in this way, he reasons, can contact with the Other remain truly prior to subjectivity and therefore not only free from it, but capable of effecting it radically and absolutely. Only thusly, he argues, can we frame our interaction with the Other outside the confines of idealism, subjectivism, and ultimately violence. What Levinas’s phenomenology attempts to accomplish, in other words, is to identify in the Other something which, while apparent to the subject, signals the subject’s access to some absolute reality which lies outside of and beyond itself and operates as its ground and condition. In this regard, we find in Levinas’s account of the Other precisely the kind of radical asubjective absolute which Frege and the speculative realists claim is renounced by phenomenology, one which could be used to ground not only science anew, but also, ultimately, absolute ethical judgment. It is for this reason that his work is of such vital importance to the investigation at hand. According to Levinas, precisely such an absolute ground is made available through a phenomenological analysis of the way in which the Other appears



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in and through the human face (le visage) in social interactions. According to Levinas, the human face, though apparent in the world alongside other phenomenal objects of the world, nevertheless appears impossibly otherwise than such objects, as if it came from outside of the world. This is the case, he argues, due to the way that the human face is capable of standing out from the world and demanding our attention. Unlike other phenomena which remain perfectly in their place in the world, the face of the Other, claims Levinas, somehow exceeds its context, appearing, as it were, on its own horizon, or in its own light. Its meaning is not, like the pen upon the desk, or the cup upon the table, defined by its surrounding or use. Its meaning is defined by itself, on its own. In this regard, he argues, the face of the Other does not play by the rules of the world—it appears otherwise than other objects. For these reasons, he thinks, though the human face is in fact a discrete phenomenon in the world, it somehow appears to us as if it came from “outside of” and “beyond” our world. Or, put another way, though the face of the Other is perceived by the self, its meaning does not seem to come from the self—one cannot define the meaning of the face of the Other for him or herself. Rupturing as it does with the way in which other phenomena appear, Levinas nominates the face of the Other as a kind of anarchic phenomenon: one which “disturbs” or unsettles the grounding order or arche of phenomenality—one which ruptures with what we take to be the horizons, limits, and rules of perception.53 It is for this reason, he claims, that the face of the Other appears as an “enigma” to the perceiving subject, one which appears from the “hither side of consciousness” and which cannot be accounted for by the subject nor ever fully encompassed within his or her understanding.54 Indeed, according to Levinas, the nature of Other apparent in the human face exceeds any set of finite qualities which the subject may use to describe or circumscribe its nature. As such, he concludes, though the face of the Other appears in a finite and definite form, it nevertheless appears within the consciousness of the perceiving subject as a kind of infinitude.55 It is for these reasons, according to Levinas, that the face of the Other is so valuable for reframing an understanding of the nature of the self; for while it appears to the self in a concrete and actual form, it cannot be reduced to the morphe of that which is seen by the self. To the contrary, he claims, the face of the Other somehow exceeds its form, “overflowing the plastic image it leaves me,” testifying to the fact that the self is in contact through it to something which exceeds it.56 This is what defines the unique nature of the human face according to Levinas: the fact that it “is present in its refusal to be contained”—that “it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed” by any set of finite attributes or descriptions—and thus signals the death of any idealistic account of selfhood.57 The enigmatic and anarchic nature of the face signals for Levinas a breach within the totality of subjective life presumed by various idealisms and opens up, thereby, a lane to the land of that which lies beyond phenomenality and subjectivity—a lane to the land of the absolute.

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Evidence of this anarchic power present in the face lies, according to Levinas, in any number of concrete lived social experiences, most notably shame (la honte), conscience (la conscience), and what he calls metaphysical desire (désir métaphysique), experiences he spends considerable time unpacking in his work.58 Such experiences are for him radicalized versions of Husserl’s empathy or Heidegger’s call of conscience: that within us which testifies to our primal responsibility to that which exceeds us. The difference of his analysis is that where Husserl’s empathy and Heidegger’s call function to reinforce a subject’s connection to itself, shame, conscience, and metaphysical desire operate inversely for Levinas: they function, he thinks, to destabilize the centrality of the subject’s relation to itself. What we experience in shame, conscience, and metaphysical desire is an absolute reconnoitering of a subject’s attention—a pulling away from the self which opens up the possibility of relating to something radically and absolutely other than the self. It is on the basis of this new relation, Levinas argues, that not only the self but ethics can be understood anew outside the limitation of the Kantian critique. Understanding how such a relation is possible, however, requires a detailed phenomenological accounting of the experience of one, or all, of these sorts of experiences. Let us turn for now to just one: shame.

Shame and the Other According to Levinas, there is a qualitative difference between shame, guilt, and remorse.59 Whereas guilt and remorse arise from subject’s reflection upon itself, a reflection in which it finds itself lacking in relation to some abstract or virtual ideal, shame occurs, thinks Levinas, spontaneously, as if for no reason. It is, he argues, the instantaneous affect one feels before the presence of an Other who, simply by being there, “calls into question the naïve right of my power, my glorious spontaneity as a living being” and forces me to give an account of myself.60 Shame is thus for Levinas the uncomfortable and unaccountable experience of finding one’s self all of a sudden no longer comfortable nor at home in one’s own being. It is, in other words, the experience of having been abruptly displaced from the center of one’s own being by something or someone outside of, beyond, and other to oneself. According to Levinas, shame is this experience of being forced to examine oneself in a new light, one which does not originate from one’s self, but which originates with something outside of one’s self: the Other. What one discovers through an analysis of this experience, he contends, is not only the fact that “my freedom does not have the last word; [that] I am not alone in the world”; one also discovers that the Other is capable of requisitioning my experience of myself and reorienting that experience such that I see myself from an alien perspective.61 What one discovers, in other words, is that, as Levinas puts it, the Other is “situated on a height” above us and bears a more primordial connection to our being than we do ourselves!62



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As Levinas puts it, in shame we discover that “the Other measures me with a gaze incomparable to the gaze by which I discover him. Th[is] dimension of height in which the Other is placed is, as it were, the primary curvature of being from which the privilege of the Other results, the gradient [denivellement] of transcendence” which allows the Other to call us into question.63 Thus, Levinas concludes, though the Other appears in the mode of a face which I may recognize, a face which appears to me as an equal to whom I can speak, what we experience in shame is the fact that this “interlocutor is not a Thou, he is a You; he reveals himself in his lordship. Thus exteriority coincides with a mastery. My freedom is thus challenged by a Master.”64 “The Other—the absolutely other,” Levinas writes, “paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face. He can contest my possession only because he approaches me not [merely] from outside but from above.”65 So it is that by attending to the experience of shame, Levinas argues, one can discover through phenomenology a subjective experience which testifies to that which lies beyond the structures of the subject: namely, the absolute. “Shame,” he writes, “does not have the structure of consciousness and clarity. It is oriented in the inverse direction; its subject is exterior to me,” its subject is the Other, the absolute.66 What a proper understanding of shame reveals, according to Levinas, is the fact that subjectivity is not in fact closed off to some absolute reality, as the Kantian tradition would have it, but is in fact inexorably related to the absolute. What a phenomenological analysis of shame and other similar experiences reveals, he argues, is that in and through the face of the Other the subject is not only always already in contact with that which is absolutely beyond it, its very experience of itself is grounded and conditioned through this relation. According to Levinas, “The relation with the Other” opened in the presentation of the face “does not immediately have the structure of intentionality. It is not opening onto . . ., aiming at . . ., which is already an opening onto being and an aiming at being. The absolutely Other [of the face] is not reflected in a consciousness; it resists the indiscretion of intentionality.”67 As such, he thinks, a proper phenomenology of the power of the face not only calls for a reconception of the nature of the self, it calls for a reconception of the nature of ethical judgment. This power of the face of the Other to “put . . . into question” the nature of the self and bring it into relation to that which lies absolutely outside of it is what creates for Levinas the possibility of reframing ethical consideration anew, outside the limitations of the Kantian critique, in what he calls absolute responsibility.68

Responsibility and ethical subjectivity To be a subject, according to Levinas, is to be fundamentally and inescapably responsible to the Other—always capable of being summoned to respond to the Other, “put into question,” and required to give an account of

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oneself. This responsibility is, he thinks, the primary condition of subjective existence.69 “To utter ‘I’,” Levinas writes, is “to affirm the irreducible singularity in which the apology is pursued,” it “means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this is the I.”70 The relation we have to the Other is not therefore, he concludes, a mode of intersubjectivity, as Husserl would have it—for it is not according to him established horizontally between equals. To the contrary, according to Levinas, we relate to the Other as a “superior,” a “master.”71 Our relation to the Other is thus what he calls a “transascendence,” a relation to that which exceeds our being.72 Given the supra-ontological nature of this relationship through which the subjectivity of the subject is founded, Levinas argues that the subject should not be thought of as “a modality of essence,” or Being as a whole, but as dependent upon an absolute which falls “outside” of and “otherwise than” being.73 According to Levinas, “Our inquiry concerned with the otherwise than being catches sight, in the very hypostasis of a subject, its subjectification, of an ex-ception; a null-site on the hither side of the negativity which is always speculatively recuperable, an outside of the absolute which can no longer be stated in terms of being.”74 From this he concludes that the subject must be considered not primarily as a kind of being-in-the-world, but as the site of a kind of rupture within being: that place wherein being loses its hold and something absolutely beyond Being manifests.75 As such, he claims, “properly speaking [the subject] does not exist.”76 The experience of being a self is not therefore of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger would have it, or of being conscious, as Husserl put it. Instead, it is for Levinas the experience of the “locus and null-site of [the] break-up,” of identity and being affected by the responsibility one feels for that which is absolutely beyond it, for the Other.77 This is a radical redefinition by Levinas of the traditional understanding of selfhood. For Levinas, the self is not primarily an experience of its own being. It is instead the experience of that which is Other than it—of that which lies on the hither side of its own being—of that which is absolutely outside of it. As such, Levinas defines the self as a form of “exteriority,”78 a “concave without a convex.”79 “Subjectivity,” he writes, “is vulnerability, is sensibility,” it is to always already be in contact with that which exceeds and precedes it.80 Subjectivity is for Levinas, in other words, to always already be in contact with the absolute.

Phenomenology and the absolute This, thinks Levinas, is the crowning achievement of phenomenology: its ability to reveal the priority and superiority of that which is situated outside of and beyond the structures of subjectivity in the formation of subjective experience. Its lasting legacy, he thinks, is to overcome the limitations of the



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Kantian critique by detailing through a rigorous accounting of everyday experiences like shame and desire how the subject is always already related to that which lies absolutely beyond it. But, even more importantly for Levinas, it is capable, thereby, of redefining and reestablishing the nature of ethical deliberation upon this absolute. Indeed, according to Levinas, since the Other to whom the subject is related primordially is situated “beyond” or “otherwise than [the subject’s] being,”81 the relation the self has to it “is not therefore ontology,” he concludes, but “ethics.”82 Hence Levinas’s claim that ethics, and not metaphysics, must properly be thought of as “first philosophy.”83 According to Levinas, only ethics is capable of understanding properly the relation we bear to ourselves through the Other manifest as an absolute power. The Other, he writes, “enters into our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an absolute, which in fact is the very name for ultimate strangeness.”84 And, it is for this reason that it holds such a power over us. But, manifest as it is in the social relation we have with a specific human face, the power of the absolute appears to us as a form of ethical responsibility. So it is that we discover in Levinas’s work not only a way of responding to the concerns of Frege and the speculative realists; much more importantly, we discover a way of overcoming the limitations of the Kantian critique explored in the last chapter. What we discover is, in other words, a way of regrounding ethical judgment anew upon a potentially simultaneously universal and actual absolute. Through an ethics grounded in a proper phenomenological understanding of the Other, we may finally find the means of accomplishing Meillassoux’s call to reinscribe “value into being,” thereby overcoming the vicissitudes of the ethical disjunction initiated by the Kantian critique. Perhaps in Levinas’s Other we have discovered precisely the kind of “great outdoors” sought by Meillassoux in mathematics—one which while remaining faithful to “the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of [Kant’s] critique” nevertheless provides for us a ground for critiquing the kind of evil given way to by every ethical project emergent from that critique. In this regard, we may find through his work a way beyond the ethical deadlock which has haunted post-Kantian philosophy, and perhaps even a ground for a robust ethical critique of the kind of evil such philosophies have justified. As we will discover more in the next chapter, however, what Levinas’s analysis gives us with one hand, it takes away with the other, requiring us to turn our understanding of an absolutely grounded ethics on its head—away from the ethics of acquiesence and toward an ethics of resistance.

CHAPTER THREE

The problem of the Other: Levinas and Schelling on the reversibility of ethical demand

The face of the Other as absolute phenomena The potential use of Levinas’s account of the Other as a new simultaneously universal and actual absolute ground for ethical judgment hinges on the special status it bears within the realm of phenomena. As we saw in the last chapter, according to Levinas, though the Other appears as a face to an apperceiving subject within one’s daily lived experience, there is something about it which refuses to be reduced to that lived experience. To the contrary, as we saw, for Levinas the power of the face lies in the way it breaks with the apparent rules of phenomenality and presents more than it could possibly present— presents, in fact, that which is absolutely Other than and beyond the self. By his read, the face of the Other “[refuses] to be contained” by its world—it presents something which “cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed” by reason.1 In this regard, as we further saw, the face of the Other manifests for Levinas as a sort of “enigma” for subjectivity2—something which, though apparent to the self, points to that which lies radically outside of and beyond the self, on the “hither side of consciousness.”3 Indeed, it was this enigmatic status of the Other which, according to Levinas, justified a complete revision of the traditional idealistic account of subjectivity as a closed totality, one which is only ever in contact with itself, and demanded in turn a new conception of subjectivity which placed the subject radically and inexorably in contact with that which is always already exterior to it.4 In this way, as we saw, Levinas’s phenomenological analysis of the Other opened up the possibility of discovering within lived experience something



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which lies absolutely beyond it—an absolute, moreover, which bears an undeniably ethical value. It was for this reason that we concluded in the last chapter that through Levinas’s phenomenology we may discover a new conception of the absolute which could be used to ground ethical judgment beyond the constraints of the post-Kantian disjunction. Indeed, as Levinas writes, in the “absolutely Other,” we not only discover “[an] absolute,” we discover that “correlation is broken,” and the possibility of a new conception of ethical responsibility is born.5 Presenting as it does that which lies outside of and beyond the limitations of not only the being of the subject, but beyond being itself, Levinas claimed that the face of the Other was “ab-solute in his manifestation.”6 Indeed, he argued, “the enigma [of the face] is the way of the Ab-solute.”7 It was for this reason that Levinas concluded that the power of the Other could not be understood nor comprehended by the powers of intellect or reason— it could in fact only be conceived of via ethics. The Other as that which is absolute is, Levinas concluded, “foreign to cognition.”8 “The unwanted intrigue which solicits the I and comes to a head beyond cognition and disclosure in Enigma is ethics.”9 It is thus only through ethics, he argues, that one can truly reconcile oneself to the absolute. This requires, he thinks, understanding properly the way in which the Other manifests to the self as a sort of infinite phenomena.

The absolute and the infinite Indeed, for Levinas, the ethical status of the Other qua absolute hinges on its status as an infinite phenomena; for, he writes, it is infinity which “opens . . . the order of the Good.”10 Remember that for Levinas, the power of the face to summon the subject beyond itself and invite it into relation to that which lies absolutely beyond it lies in the unique way in which it appears in the world as something which breaks with the rules and order of the world. It was for this reason, as we saw, that he identified the face of the Other as a sort of anarchic phenomena. It is this anarchic status of the face as “both . . . non and . . . within” the world which Levinas thinks is perfectly represented in the concept of “the in of the Infinite.”11 This way in which the face of the Other appears within the realm of finite beings for Levinas as that which refuses to be contained by them signifies for him “the presence of a being not entering into, but overflowing, the sphere of the same,” and this is what, according to him, “determines its ‘status’ as infinite.”12 To further detail the strange doubleness the Other bears for Levinas as an infinite phenomena, let us turn momentarily to another place in the history of philosophy where the concept of the idea of the infinite manifests: Descartes’s third meditation.13 After all, it is from Descartes, and in constant reference to Descartes, that Levinas attempts to outline his account of the Other as absolute.

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In the third meditation, Descartes aims to discover within himself the presence of some idea that he could not attribute to his own genius, proving thereby that he is not only not alone in the universe, but that he could not be the author of everything: that there must be at least one other being or thing outside of himself. What he discovers, of course, is what he calls the idea of perfection, or the idea of the infinite. Such an idea is represented for him in the concept of a number so great that he could not possibly comprehend it, though he is capable of imagining it. The presence of such an idea within him, one that we conceive precisely as that which is too great to be understood, serves as definitive proof for Descartes that there must be within him the presence of or trace of another being which preceded, exceeded, and perhaps even conditioned his consciousness—a being which was capable of understanding that idea. Such a being he calls for convenience sake God. So it is that Descartes discovers through the idea of the infinite his God, the idea of the infinite functioning for him as a modern version of Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence.14 But what interested Descartes in this move was not, as it was for Anselm, the assurance that there is some higher power in the world. Instead, what interested him was the surety that this idea gave to his attempt to ground an absolutely guaranteed understanding of himself and the world. Through the idea of the infinite, Descartes discovered the foundation for his absolute assurance that the world was not of his own making, that he was not solipsistically trapped within in a web of his own weaving, nor was he trapped within a labyrinth of lies crafted by some evil genius. What the idea of the infinite gave to Descartes was the confidence that his understanding of the world and himself was grounded on something which stood absolutely outside of and beyond his own thoughts. For Levinas, the idea of the infinite in Descartes is “exceptional” because of the way it identifies within subjective life an “ideatum [which] surpasses its idea.”15 “In thinking infinity,” Levinas writes, “the I from the first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinite, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept.”16 In his articulation of an idea which cannot be encompassed by thought, Descartes’s third meditation charts the way for Levinas to perceive in the human face more than can possibly be present: access to something which lies absolutely beyond the perceiving subject. The idea of the infinite thus operates as the perfect metaphor for Levinas of his own account of the exceptional nature of the Other— something which for him, though manifest through one’s being-in-theworld, nevertheless exceeds that being, remaining “radically, absolutely, other than” the world, something like Descartes’s God.17 In fact, Levinas makes this latter comparison explicit in his work.18 Since the face of the Other presents a phenomena that cannot be accounted for within the logic of ontology, he argues, and opens thereby a channel within being to that which lies otherwise than and beyond being, which he terms the Good, Levinas suggests we can think of the absolute made available in the face of the Other as a sort of God.19 Hence his description of the face



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of the Other as an “epiphany” and a “visitation.”20 The relation one has to the face of the Other, Levinas concludes, “is not therefore ontology” but a kind of “religion,” though, it must be said, a religion which is, as he puts it, “for adults”—a religion free of the mystical entities and magical happenings which populate immature religious imaginations.21

Levinas’s God? This comparison Levinas draws between the ethical relation we have to the absolutely Other and religious epiphany has led many scholars, like Dominique Janicaud, to somewhat hastily place Levinas’s work in the socalled theological turn of late-twentieth-century French philosophy.22 Of course, what Levinas means by religion is hardly contiguous with traditional faith practices. In point of fact, Levinas’s religion has much more in common with atheism than anything else.23 Indeed, I would argue that a close reading of Levinas’s oeuvre reveals that even those texts seemingly explicitly dealing with the divine all ultimately aim at what he calls in his Nine Talmudic Readings a “desacralization of the sacred”—not the attempt to discover within the finite realm of phenomena some window or pathway to the divine, but instead the attempt to strip the divine of its power, of what sets it apart, and to scatter that power among finite phenomenon, sowing it among the human, establishing it in the face.24 In this regard, Levinas’s phenomenology is a kind of promethean project—a reestablishment of the divine in determinate local phenomena. Thus, though Levinas’s phenomenology of the face works to reopen the realms of transcendence, its movement toward the beyond is not like classical theology’s Scala Paradisi. Its aim is instead to rob the divine of its fire, carrying it downward into the realm of the determinate Other. It is for this reason that Levinas insists throughout his work that transcendence, while a “trans-ascendence,” nevertheless proceeds horizontally toward the determinate Other, who, while “situated on a height,” is nevertheless in the world, and not of the heavenly realms. This explains further Levinas’s claim that ethics, the way we navigate our relations to those others, is the only “spiritual optics,” the only way of conceiving of the divine, as well as his argument that the ethical subject must exist on its own ground, “separated” from any possible divine origin, as an “atheist.”25 Such statements point to Levinas’s attempt to rid the world of the mystery of religious faith and to ground transcendence anew—not in the invisible but in the visible—in the concrete ethical solicitation of the Other. If there is any religion in Levinas at all, therefore, it is not a traditional one. It is not one which can be easily synchronized with other more traditional expressions of religious faith, Western or Eastern. Instead, it must be conceived of as an entirely new kind of religion, a kind of “religion without religion,” as some have put it.26 According to Levinas, as a desacralized absolute, the face of the Other does not demand of us some dogmatic fidelity, nor blind fanaticism, the

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source, according to Meillassoux, of so much contemporary evil. What the “absolutely Other” demands of us instead is what Levinas calls responsibility; and it is on this basis that it establishes an absolute ethical order which we can use to mount an attack against what Badiou called the “smug nihilism” of post-Kantian philosophy.27

The ethical value of Levinas’s absolute For Levinas the infinite present in the face of the Other, operating as it does to rupture the totality of the subject’s possession of the world, introduces what he calls the possibility of the Good—the possibility of acting “otherwise than” in one’s own interest, “otherwise than” in accord with one’s own being. It presents, in other words, the possibility of perceiving beyond the mere “thingness” of objects in the world an inherent and absolute value to those things, grounded outside of and beyond their being and yet immanently and inexorably a part of them. Interrupting, as it does, the otherwise valueless survey of the world made by a subject’s gaze, the face of the Other presents for Levinas the possibility of organizing the world in a new way: one centered not around the self-interests of the ego, but around the demands of the Other. In this way, Levinas insists, the face of the Other rescues the subject from a potential nihilism, but only by traumatizing it with ethical responsibility.28 According to Levinas, the appearance of the absolute in the Other interrupts the subject’s nascent and assumed place at the center of its own being and world. As such, it invites the subject into another way of being: an ethical “relation without relation” to the world.29 For these reasons, Levinas sees in the face of the Other a presentation of a qualitatively different order, an order which breaks fundamentally with the way a subject would organize the world according to its finite categories of understanding. The new infinite order the Other introduces invites the subject beyond finitude into the realm of an infinite ethical responsibility.30 Hence Levinas’s identification of the face of the Other as a kind of “good in-finite.”31 Levinas’s identification of the infinitude introduced by the face of the Other as good is grounded in his claim that while the Other calls the subject into question, it nevertheless “is not opposed to me as a freedom other than, but similar to my own, and consequently [is not] hostile to my own.”32 Instead, he argues, the Other manifests “in a mastery that does not conquer but teaches.”33 It is for this reason, he concludes, that the new order introduced by the Other should be identified as a kind of liberation, one which carries the subject beyond a nihilistic ethos of pure utility by introducing the possibility of absolute goodness.34 Indeed, according to Levinas, the ethical solicitation of the face of the Other should be seen as an “investiture of freedom.”35 For him, the appearance of the Other signals the subject’s freedom from a world in which the only possible value is one’s



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own self-interest and the coming of a new world order in which all value is guaranteed absolutely by the Other. By Levinas’s read, the Other frees us from a life of slavish self-interest by calling into question the naïve spontaneous freedom of subjectivity to survey its world; and, in doing so, he argues, the Other elevates subjectivity into a higher domain of freedom, one wherein it can choose between its selfinterests and the interests of another. This is part of the pedagogical power of the Other as master and teacher for Levinas: the realization that one need not be trapped within the economy of self-interest and self-satisfaction, guided exclusively by need and hunger, but that one may give oneself over the Other and enter into a relation guided by desire and responsibility.36 Thus while the appearance of the Other may appear to limit the spontaneous freedom of the self to do as it pleases, Levinas insists that the appearance of the Other actually functions to “found and justify” the freedom of the subject.37 It is this “investiture of freedom” by the Other which Levinas thinks assures its value as an absolute good. According to Levinas, “The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it” absolutely with the possibility of goodness.38 What the Other introduces to subjectivity, Levinas thinks, is this possibility to be just.39 Thus, he concludes, that the appearance of the Other “instead of offending my freedom . . . calls it to responsibility and founds it.”40 Hence his claims that such a relation is, ultimately, an invitation to “peace,” an exclusively communal possibility.41 By inviting the subject to go beyond itself and enter into relation with an Other wherein peace and justice can be realized, Levinas thinks that what the Other ultimately introduces is the possibility of discovering the “final reality” of subjectivity: the possibility of goodness.42 Hence his claim that “it is only in approaching the Other that I attend to myself.”43 As an absolute manifest within subjective life which opens up the possibility of goodness, Levinas’s Other serves as the ideal location to ground anew ethical deliberation. Indeed, in Levinas’s Other we not only discover a new way of conceiving of the absolute ground for the possibility of ethical deliberation, we discover an absolute which is both actual, manifesting as it does in the concrete face of the Other, and universally present in all faces and to all subjects. And yet, as we have seen, this universally actual absolute does not limit our freedom through its demand of our fidelity, according to Levinas, but instead invests our freedom by compelling us with the power of the good. In this way we discover in Levinas a means of surmounting the limitations of the post-critical ethical disjunction which has haunted us since Kant. Yet, there is something intriguing about the ethical value of this new simultaneously universal and actual absolute which should give us pause; there is something about it which, despite all of Levinas’s claims, should arouse our suspicion and make us cautious to give ourselves over to it too quickly. This curious ambiguity lies in the way in which Levinas accounts for the power this Other has over us—a power which, as we will see shortly, is not necessarily always as good as Levinas would have us believe.

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The ambiguity of the infinite As we have seen, it is the impossibility of evading the absolute power of the Other and its ethical solicitation which, for Levinas, founded anew the nature of the I and assured its access to an absolute value situated outside of and beyond itself. Indeed, as we have seen, for Levinas “the uniqueness of the I is the fact that no one can answer for me.”44 The singularity of the subject is therefore founded, he argues, on its ethical responsibility to the Other. The Other is both the basis of a subject’s existence for him and the opening of its possible relation to goodness. It was for this reason, as we just saw, that he insisted that the Other not be seen as an impediment to subjectivity, but rather as a path by which the subject may come fully into its own. And, it was because the Other manifested in this way, Levinas argued, that its appearance does not really alienate the subject from itself, but instead, teaches it and invites it into justice. For these reasons Levinas names the relation we have with the absolute through the Other gentleness.45 The absolute responsibility we discover within ourselves for the Other, Levinas writes, “imposes itself without violence” in a non-offensive mode.46 Thus, he concludes, though the Other may appear to be a threat to the freedom and development of the self, the “‘resistance’ of the other” to my freedom, he assures us, “does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; [but] has a positive structure.”47 As such, the appearance of the Other does not come to enslave the subject, but to elevate and promote its freedom.48 For these reasons, Levinas argues, the absolute value introduced by the Other should be welcomed by the subject.49 In contrast to this “good infinite,” which founds and justifies the subject’s existence and freedom, Levinas does indeed identify a “bad infinitude,”50 one he sees manifest in the presentation of a quantitative excess of something “like the brute sensible datum of the empiricists.”51 This excessive “bad infinite” he examines under the guise of what he terms the il y a (there is): a mode of existence he describes as being “without limits, and thus in the form of an origin, a commencement, that is, again, as an existent.”52 “The absolute indetermination of the there is, an existing without existents,” Levinas writes, “is an incessant negation, to an infinite degree, consequently an infinite limitation.”53 As an infinitude established in and maintained through the perpetuation of a continuity within being which holds the possibility of “always still more,” the il y a expresses for Levinas not a force for good, but rather a force for what he calls “evil in its very quiddity.”54 This quantitative infinite is bad, he argues, because it can only manifest through a plena of being which, by its very nature, cannot allow any differentiation or otherness. It therefore introduces the possibility of an excess which would require a totality so complete that all difference or otherness be abolished as a challenge to its infinitude. Thus while the infinite presented in the face of the Other challenges the subject and, in his words, elevates



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it to its “final essence” and its “true freedom” in ethical responsibility, the possibility of the infinite presented in the il y a, he reasons, threatens to overwhelm the subject and collapse it entirely into an indeterminate morass of being.55 For these reasons Levinas argues that while the proper response to the solicitation of the infinite presented in the face is to say, “moi voici” (“here I am”), the only rational response to the all-consuming temptation of the possible quantitative infinite of being is to resist, to flee—to escape.56 Unfortunately, this distinction is not as easily made as Levinas would have it, and it is on the basis of this possible equivocation of the two orders of infinity that our suspicion of the value of the absolute present in Levinas’s Other rests. Indeed, as a number of Levinasian scholars have noted, most famously Levinas’s close friend and earliest reader and champion Maurice Blanchot, despite his best attempts to purge the concept of a totalizing “bad infinite” from his account of the “good infinite,” a strange ambiguity nevertheless appears between the two categories.57 Indeed, Levinas himself admits that the transcendence manifest in the face of the Other is “transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is.”58 And this “possible confusion” is not uncommon in his work. To the contrary, it is not hard to find Levinas describing the infinite demand of ethical solicitation presented in the face of the Other as, for example, carrying on in “perpetuity,” a word he typically reserves for the quantitatively “bad infinite” of the il y a.59 At other times he describes the absolute power manifest in the face of the Other as monstrous,60 a term more fitting it would seem to the bad infinitude of the there is.61 And this “possible confusion” is far from benign. Indeed, it was in large part what motivated Jacques Derrida to distance himself from Levinas, identifying in his “Violence and Metaphysics” how the ethical responsibility to which the subject is absolutely summoned by the Other is nothing more than an inversion of the kind of totalizing violence threatened by the undifferentiated being of the il y a.62 To grasp fully the consequence of this “possible confusion,” remember that for Levinas the face of the Other, as an infinite phenomenon, bears what he describes as an overwhelming power—a power which, he claims, cannot be shirked nor evaded.63 This power, as we have seen, operates by usurping the position of the subject and reorienting it infinitely around another pole: the demands of the Other. So it is, thinks Levinas, that the face of the Other calls the subject eternally into question and “empties [it] of [itself], empties [it] without end, showing [the subject] ever new resources” which can be reconnoitered on behalf of the Other.64 What the face as an infinite phenomenon does, in other words, is, he writes, to “obsess” the subject, “captivate” it, and take it “hostage,” demanding from it ever more attention, devotion, and service.65 Thus, Levinas argues, what we discover through a diligent phenomenological rendering of the face of the Other is an absolute which “reveals [itself] in [its] lordship. [Its] exteriority coincides

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with a mastery.”66 The Other appears according to Levinas, in other words, as a kind of sovereign. Of course, as we have already seen, Levinas assures us that the sovereignty of the Other “imposes itself without violence.”67 It is therefore, he soothingly declares, “a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches.”68 Indeed, it is in this regard, he soothes, that we can think of the Other as one who comes in “peace,”69 not to “limit the freedom” of its subjects, as we just saw, but to “found and justify it.”70 But is this not a common refrain among all sovereign colonizing powers in their conquest? The problem with such assurances is that they are rarely, if ever, true, and all too quickly collapse under the weight of the harsh realities of occupation. Indeed, Levinas’s own descriptions of the manifestation of the Other betray these evaluative claims. According to him, “The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself [before the Other] comes from the hither side of my freedom.”71 It therefore “provokes my responsibility against my will,” taking me “hostage.”72 For these reasons, Levinas thinks, the ethical subjectivity imposed by the sovereignty of the Other is experienced as a “trauma.”73 The absolute Other, he claims, hunts us down “to the point of persecution” and “strip[s us] of all protection.”74 By the Other, he claims, we are made to “suffer,” a suffering which he compared throughout his career to a kind of “obsession” and “insomnia.”75 Moreover, according to Levinas, the sovereignty of the Other, established absolutely as it is in the primal ground of the subject’s being, is “without any escape possible.”76 The demands levied by the Other are therefore, he concludes, “absolute,” “infinite,” and “can never be satisfied.”77 There is thus a real problem with the absolute ground for ethical deliberation which we gain from Levinas’s phenomenological account of the Other. While it may function to found and justify the existence and freedom of the subject anew, beyond the limitations of the Kantian critique, the power possessed by this absolute appears capable of captivating the subject completely, becoming a tyrant who threatens to destroy the very existence and freedom which it founds and justifies. In this regard we cannot help but be suspicious of the real value of this absolute. Can it be that it is truly as good and pure as Levinas would have it? Or, is it possible that this new absolute, in its perfection, is capable of inverting into its opposite: not the ground for goodness, but in fact the ground for excess and evil? The possibility of such an inversion of the ethical value of the absolute was detailed by F. W. J. Schelling in the 1809 draft of his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.78 There, as we will see shortly, Schelling defines evil precisely as the result of an all too complacent relationship with the absolute—an absolute which, by virtue of its superiority, is capable of reversing at any time from good to evil.79 Indeed, as will become clear shortly, according to Schelling, evil is the ultimate result of any attempt to relate oneself to any absolute good perfectly. Through an analysis of Schelling’s account of the reversibility of



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good and evil in the absolute we will therefore discover the true value of Levinas’s Other and uncover, thereby, the necessity of thinking ethics in relation to the absolute anew.

Schelling and the absolute reality of good and evil Though ostensibly an investigation on the nature of human freedom, the bulk of Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitsschrift is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the nature and origin of evil, a reality which motivated Martin Heidegger to note that the word evil should in fact be seen as “the key word for the main treatise.”80 The reason for its centrality in Schelling’s investigation was his conviction that “either real evil is admitted” or “the real concept of freedom vanishes.”81 According to Schelling, if the idea of freedom is to be maintained with any real vigor, then human freedom must be understood as equally disposed toward the “possibility of [both] good and evil,” and not primarily oriented toward one or the other.82 Without the actual possibility of both, argues Schelling, human beings become something like a rat stuck in a labyrinth with only one real choice: to go forward toward its end (the good) or resist and retreat backward (toward evil). This is what was implied, he thought, in the traditional privative or negative account of evil: the idea that evil is nothing more than the failure to adequately give proper deference to the power and sovereignty of the good. Figured thusly, argued Schelling, what appeared to be the bivalence of choice between good and evil in the classical conception of human freedom turns out to be nothing more than a kind of moral slavery. Within such a system, he thinks, human beings ultimately have only one choice: to be good. Evil within this system is nothing more than the inverse modality of goodness—the same track run backward, as it were. For a robust conception of human freedom to emerge, Schelling therefore concluded, the privative definition of evil must be overcome. By his reasoning, human freedom can only be assured if it has at least two radically distinct options, each emergent independently from its opposite. In other words, thinks Schelling, for the human to be truly free it must encounter the possibility of evil as a unique, separate, and distinct possibility from the possibility of the good. And, for this to be the case, Schelling concluded, a new conception of evil must be formed, one which grants it its own positive ontological power.83 According to Schelling, “The ground of evil must lie, not only in something generally positive, but rather in that which is most positive in what nature contains.”84 With this goal in mind, Schelling dedicated the bulk of his essay on human freedom to the articulation of a new absolute ground for the possibility of evil. And, it was precisely such a ground which he discovered in what he called rather oddly the Ungrund (the non-ground) of existence.85

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Schelling’s identification of the absolute ground for the possibility of evil in this unimaginable non-ground, though admittedly bizarre at first glance, is in fact, he thinks, the only logical conclusion one can draw. According to Schelling, it follows that before the actual emergence of existence, the logical possibility of that existence must exist as a virtual possibility. This logical possibility, he thinks, must contain within it the potentiality of everything which eventually will exist in actuality. It is this virtual existence which precedes every actual being which Schelling names the Ungrund. It is not a being itself, and bears no concrete actuality, nor ever did. It is instead, he thinks, a sheer virtuality, one which contains within it the infinite possibilities of existence in a purely potential state, all held together in “complete indifference and indistinguishability.”86 In this regard, Schelling’s Ungrund figures in his work in much the same way that the Hebraic Tohu va Vohu (ּ‫ )תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הו‬evoked by the writers of the book of Genesis functions as the logical ground for creation.87 Like that formless void, the Ungrund represents for Schelling the unruly chaos of the not-yet existent possibility from which all existent beings actually emerge.88 As the pure potentiality which must have logically preceded being, the Ungrund expresses for him the possibility of all beings, qua virtualities. The Ungrund can only be thought of therefore as a kind of “Being, as not having being”89—the logical necessity of the virtual possibility of all beings prior to their actual becoming. For Schelling, actual determinate existence emerges at the cost of this infinite potentiality or virtuality. Being thus emerges, he thinks, through a cision from the Ungrund—a cutting free which occurs when at least one being is actually asserted over and against the potentiality of an infinite number of virtual beings. So it is, Schelling maintains, that where there is at least one actual being, the infinite virtual possibilities held out in the Ungrund are abolished. It is thus from the resolution of the pure potentiality of the Ungrund into the determinate actualities of existence that the possibilities of good and evil emerge, thinks Schelling. According to Schelling, “Each being having emerged in nature according to the manner indicated has a dual principle in itself which, however, is basically one and the same considered from both possible sides.”90 Thus, he continues, “it is entirely correct to say dialectically: good and evil are the same thing only seen from different sides, or evil is in itself, that is, considered in the root of its identity, the good, just as the good, to the contrary, considered in its turning from itself [Entzweiung] or non-identity is evil.”91 As emergent from the same ultimate ground (the Ungrund) and actualized in the same determinate existent (human beings), evil appears, according to Schelling, as the perverse virtual double of the good, both emergent from the same absolute ground of existence. In actuality, however, he insists, they exist as radically independent and distinct from one another. Nevertheless, as we will soon see, they bear the trace of their virtual heritage within one another, allowing each to revert suddenly into the opposite. So it is, he thinks, that the value of actions, whether good or evil, becomes



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reversible when posited as the absolute ground for existence. Indeed, it is for this reason that Schelling insists that the absolute ground of existence not be seen as either good or evil, but the radical possibility of both.

The reversibility of good and evil in the absolute While, according to Schelling, the Ungrund is abolished in the emergence of actual existence, he maintains that an “indivisible remainder” of its virtuality remains forever within the structure of existence.92 This “indivisible remainder” manifests as the possible confusion between good and evil in being—the possibility that any attempt to achieve the good might actually result in evil.93 As Schelling writes, “Everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again.”94 According to Schelling, the “indivisible remainder” of this virtual possibility forever haunts actual existence, casting a dark pallor upon it and inspiring what Schelling calls the “dread of life.”95 This “dread” is experienced, in part, he argues, as the realization that all one is, all one has wrought, indeed, all that has ever been, could eventually amount to and return to nothing—that life, and all its accompanying joys, may ultimately be meaningless. This radical contingency becomes even more poignant, he thinks, when one realizes that, due to the effects of the “indivisible remainder” of the chaos which precedes and clings to existence, what one perceives to be good may in fact result in evil. The dread this possibility (qua virtuality) inspires within us, Schelling claims, has the power to “drive [us] out of the centrum” of our being; and it is this possible excentricity, he thinks, that grounds the ambiguity of the choice between good and evil.96 According to Schelling, in light of the overwhelming power of the absolute, one is faced with two options. One can, on the one hand, not give in to this dread and live in dynamic tension with the threat posed by the absolute, neither being overwhelmed by it nor inordinately threatened by it. One can, in other words, reject the lure and temptation posed by the irreducible remainder of the absolute power of the Ungrund and forge a kind of perpetual dynamic relation to it and to all other actualized existent beings emergent from it. Such a dynamic tension is, according to Schelling, the definition of goodness, or what Schelling calls the relation of love.97 Alternatively, Schelling argues, one can give in to what he calls the “temptation” and “lure” of the absolute intuited in the dread of life inspired by the “indivisible remainder” of the Ungrund. One can, in other words, acquiesce to the temptation of the absolute. This, thinks Schelling, can happen in one of two ways: either by giving oneself over to the idea of the absolute entirely, in attempt to lose oneself within it, a process which

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of course ultimately ends in the annihilation of self; or, alternatively, one may attempt to instantiate the power of the absolute within their own being, asserting their own being as its equivalent, a process which, he argues, ultimately requires the annihilation of all other beings. Both of these approaches are what Schelling defines as the source and origin of evil.98 In this regard, Schelling concludes that “evil is only evil to the extent that it exceeds potentiality,” that it exceeds the dynamic tension one being can have with all other beings and with the absolute.99 From this it becomes clear that the real source of evil for Schelling is not some failure to acknowledge or affirm the absolute. But, precisely the opposite, evil arises for him as the result of an improper relation to the power and value of the absolute. Any action established in affirmation of the absolute, argues Schelling, runs the risk of reverting into evil, however well-intentioned it may be. For, according to Schelling, the line which distinguishes good from evil necessarily collapses when considered in light of the virtual totality of the absolute, allowing for a fundamental reversibility between good and evil. Indeed, it was for these reasons that Schelling argues that any conceivable absolute good or God, as an infinite potentiality, must necessarily be implicated in any evil act. The absolute ground of existence can thus no longer be conceived of simply as an actus purissimus,100 he argues, nor as the perfect foundation of a moral order. Instead, he argues, the absolute which grounds existence and conditions ethical choice must be acknowledged “undeniably to share responsibility for evil.”101 Ultimately, thinks Schelling, goodness can only be assured through the cultivation of right relation to both the infinite demand of the universal and the particular demand of the self. Any exceedance in either direction necessarily results in evil, he thinks. Too much good, too much evil. Too much Other, too much self. This is what he means by the reversibility of good and evil as absolute terms. Heidegger summarizes this reversibility in Schelling’s thought well. “The greater the form of good and evil,” he writes, “the closer and more oppressive the counter form of evil and good.”102 For Schelling, the attempt to diligently attend to the demands of the absolute, regardless of the intentions of the agent, is just as likely to result in evil as the attempt to ignore or reject the absolute entirely. For Schelling, any attempt to realize the absolute, even if perceived of as a good, necessarily reverts into evil. This reversibility of good and evil in the absolute is the heart of Schelling’s examination of the essence of human freedom. As such, the only way to preserve the good, argues Schelling, is to maintain an appropriate distance from the absolute. Only by maintaining oneself apart from the infinite lure of that absolute, Schelling thinks, can the continued existence of actual beings be preserved. This is, for him, the essence of goodness. To illustrate Schelling’s conception of the potential reversibility of good and evil in the absolute, think of the relation between the sun and the earth. As the source of warmth, the sun enables in large part the very possibility of life on earth. As such, the sun has traditionally been deemed a kind of



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good—something we rejoice in the return of every morning and celebrate the proximity of every spring and summer. But glowing within the beneficence and seemingly inexhaustible abundance of the sun there lurks a horrible inhuman threat, a threat which Lyotard, for one, has suggested presents the ultimate challenge to philosophy.103 This threat lies in the fact that the sun is already halfway through its lifecycle, the end of which will culminate in a sudden expansion which will result in the complete annihilation of all traces of life from our planetary system. The brutal fact we confront in this reality is that the goodness of the sun lies exclusively in the fact that it is not bigger or smaller, hotter or cooler, closer to or farther away from us than it is. Either extreme, either relation to the absolute condition of human life metaphorically present in the sun, signals the extinction of life. In this regard, our evaluation of the goodness of the sun hinges on our being a proper distance from it. Its goodness for us is assured only inasmuch as the earth remains properly within the centrum of its natural orbit, neither drawing too close to it nor straying too far from it in our yearly voyage. Were the earth to wobble a little more extremely than it does, or were its orbit elongated only slightly, that same radiant orb worshiped by the ancients for its generosity would alternatively scorch and freeze us—and would appear as a malevolent force to human life. Likewise, thinks Schelling, the absolute ground of existence. The goodness of the absolute is only assured inasmuch as we relate to it properly, neither growing too close to it in our attempts to do good nor pulling too far away from it in our attempt to maintain our independence and freedom. According to Schelling, were the infinite power of the absolute to manifest fully within our lives, it would most certainly consume us, wiping away all trace of our singular subjectivity. Alternatively, were we to attempt to reject the absolute entirely in the vain attempt to rid ourselves of its potential pernicious influence, we would find ourselves freezing in the nihilistic void of a valueless world. The absolute ground for goodness, for Schelling, thus lies in cultivating the ability to maintain one’s self in appropriate relation to the absolute ground of life, existence, good, and evil. It is for this reason that Schelling insists that while the absolute be identified as a good, we must forever recognize that the possibility of evil lies ever in its depths. Such is the potential reversibility of good and evil in any absolute, thinks Schelling. It must be the goal of any philosophical ethics worthy of the name, he therefore concludes, to define some means by which the power of the absolute can be resisted and a healthy relationship to it may be cultivated— one which is neither too compliant to it nor too rebellious from it. The main goal of ethics for Schelling is to discover through reason the concrete steps necessary to maintain the subject at the centrum of its being, in right relationship to itself, to every other being, and to the absolute. The task of ethics must never be, he thinks, an attempt to affirm wholly or submit completely to the whim of the absolute. This is, for him, the very foundation of evil. For the good to be pursued and preserved, Schelling argues, ethical

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decision making must begin by recognizing the danger of the absolute and subsequently determining a way of tempering its influence in life in a way which neither removes its sway entirely nor gives in to the temptation to cave in to its demands fully.

The Other as absolute ground for good and evil Considered in light of Schelling’s account of the reversibility of good and evil in the absolute, mustn’t we reevaluate the value of the absolute we discovered in Levinas’s account of the Other? Indeed, mustn’t we conclude that the Other, manifest in the life of the subject as the absolute ground for the possibility of ethical reasoning, functions equally to mobilize the possibility of good and evil alike? Mustn’t we conclude that, in fact, this Other functions as a ground for goodness only inasmuch as one is capable of resisting its capacity to obsess him or her infinitely; and that, on the other hand, the Other operates as the foundation of evil action when its demands are obeyed too fully, too unquestioningly, or too willingly? How else are we to make sense of the horrible violence we have seen throughout the history of the West: the various forms of fanaticism, political totalitarianism, and cultish excess which have caused so much horror? What each of these instances of evil has in common is the same attempt to realize on earth the complete order of an absolute idea of infinite perfection (e.g., the ideal society, the perfect race, a totally secure homeland)—some idea of an absolutely perfect good which, by virtue of its status, is capable of demanding the complete sacrifice of not only the life of the obedient subject, but the life of others as well. What else drives the fanatical demand for “ethnic cleansing” manifest in the Shoah, Srebrenica, or the Albanian genocide if not some conception of a perfect and absolute good which, as such, inspires the infinite fascination and obsession of its adherents? Indeed, isn’t it a similar kind of obsession with the infinite, only in the form of a potentially quantitatively material good (e.g., wealth, land), which drives the kind of reckless consumerism and profit-motivated colonialisms that has crippled the developing world for the past two centuries? Isn’t it all too painfully obvious that any absolute position, when imbued with the powers of infinitude, no matter how innocuous, seemingly innocent, perfect, or good, is capable of demanding from its subject an excessive allegiance which leads almost inevitably to evil? Might we conclude then, following Schelling’s line of reasoning, that evil is the only likely result from a diligent pursuit of any perceived absolute good, even the good of the Other? What we discover through a rigorous phenomenological accounting of the Other as a possible absolute ground for ethical judgment is not, we must conclude, some perfect good to be obeyed. What we discover instead is the absolute ground for the possibility



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of good and evil alike. Indeed, in many ways what we discover in Levinas’s account of the absolute power of the Other is the ontological condition for what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil”—a possibility which, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, arises out of the assent of one’s will to the imperatives of another who presents himself or herself as an absolute master and authority.104 What we gain from an analysis of Levinas’s phenomenological account of the Other is a new simultaneously universal and actual absolute ground upon which we can establish and define ethical decision making outside the limitations and vicissitudes of the post-Kantain disjunction. What Schelling’s work reveals, however, is that this new absolute cannot be accepted blithely as a good to be willingly obeyed. To the contrary, what we discover in this absolute, and indeed any absolute, is a profoundly ambiguous phenomena, one which appears to ground the possibility of good and evil alike. What we discover in the Other is therefore an absolute which we must be wary of—one which we must learn to be suspicious of and contend against. The absolute ground for ethical value and action provided by the Other is one which we must learn to take an appropriate distance from—neither growing too infatuated with its power nor too complacent with its demands; neither growing too welcoming of its dominion nor too rebellious against its sovereignty; neither drawing too close to its majesty nor pulling too far away from its brilliance. What such a conception of the absolute requires is, in other words, a radical rethinking of the nature of ethical deliberation and duty—one which breaks with the traditional acquiescence demanded by the moral yea-sayers of the West. The watchword for any ethics grounded upon this concept of the absolute must be resistance. It is the aim of the remainder of this volume to detail the importance of the cultivation of such an ethics of resistance and to show precisely how it could be envisioned and developed practically within the life of a subject.

INTERLUDE

Sympathy for the devil: The tyranny of heaven

The evil of acquiescence It should be clear at this point that if ethical philosophy is going to continue to have any real relevance in the twenty-first century, the status and value of the absolute as the foundation for moral judgment and action alike must be critically reevaluated. We can no longer accept the vision of the absolute maintained within the history of philosophy of a pure moral force: the supreme good and ultimate telos of life—something to be affirmed and realized both within the personal and the political sphere alike. To the contrary, as we have seen, any appearance of the absolute within the ethical order is necessarily tinged with the possibility of evil. The recognition of this fact should not, however, motivate some attempt to craft an ethics without reference to any absolute. Such post-Kantian pretentions, as we have seen, are doomed to fail, either by falling into precisely the kind of nihilism they seek to avoid or by unintentionally establishing a new form of dogmatism capable of justifying a fanatical devotion. If we are to craft a contemporary ethics that has real personal and political purchase without falling into either of these extremes, we must ground it upon an absolute which is both actual and universally available; at the same time, we must equally recognize that such an absolute is not to be obeyed, but to be resisted. Precisely such an absolute is what we gain in Levinas’s phenomenological account of the Other cast through the lens of Schelling’s analysis of the reversibility of good and evil. In Levinas’s Other we discover an absolute which appears in the form of an actual determinate entity (the face) and which is simultaneously universally manifest to all human subjects. In this regard Levinas’s conception of the



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Other allows us to overcome the limitations of the post-critical ethical disjunction detailed in Chapter 1. But, as we saw in Chapter 3, despite his best efforts to maintain the moral perfection of this power, Levinas’s conception of the Other all too easily converts into a potentially totalizing force, one which threatens to overwhelm us entirely, demanding from us absolute fealty and sacrifice—a demand which Levinas himself identified as evil. Following this discovery we concluded with Schelling that this Other, qua ethical absolute, should not be seen as unequivocally good, but should instead be viewed as the ground for the possibility of good and evil alike. Moreover, we discovered that evil emerges from this absolute ground precisely inasmuch as it is affirmed as entirely good and pursued practically in the personal and political areas. So it was, we concluded there, that the new absolute ground for ethical deliberation which we gain in Levinas’s account of the Other is not a force to which one should bend the knee idly nor acquiesce too complacently. Instead, we argued, we must learn to vigilantly resist the regime of the Other. Only in this way, we concluded, could we begin to pursue some semblance of the good. What we must learn to do, to use Levinas’s own analogy against him, is to recognize that while the Other may shine with an ethically illuminative fire, one which is capable of kindling anew absolute ethical judgment, it is nevertheless a power which we must be cautious of, guarding against the dangers inherent to it, lest it spread beyond its appropriate limits and engulf us entirely. Such is the real task of ethics, it would seem: to learn how to manage the infinite power of the absolute. Like the heat of a flame, the power of the absolute must be properly contained and regulated. We should not see the needs of the Other as the singular path of goodness, but as a path to possible excess which can only lead to evil. By approaching the absolute in ethical thought in this way, as a limit case to be guarded against and regulated, we can begin to rethink the nature of ethical deliberation for the twenty-first century. We began this volume with the claim that the history of ethics from Plato to Kant has been a history of collaboration: a history which has almost unilaterally defined ethical action as the acquiescence of the individual to some absolute ethical maxim, mode of evaluation, or mandate—that the principal aim of ethical philosophy has been to identify this absolute and define the best and most appropriate means of affirming it continually and actualizing it effectively. Evil, according to this tradition, as we saw, was the result of some failure in this process—the consequence of some inability, ignorance, or unwillingness to submit to the order of the absolute good. It is time that this history come to an end. It is time that we reject the fallacious assertion that ethical action is defined in acquiescence to and in accord with the absolute. Indeed, it is time that we assert precisely the opposite. It is time to acknowledge that evil action does not arise from some moral deficit within the subject, some lack or refusal to submit to the absolute; to the contrary, evil results from

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the misguided attempt to affirm, achieve, and/or instantiate the absolute. The classical assumptions must be inverted. We must understand finally that it is not evil which should be defined privatively, but goodness—for goodness only appears where the absolute is not fully realized, where the absolute is resisted and its potentially infinite demands are held in check. To make the necessity for this inversion all the more clear, consider the case of Kierkegaard’s account of the Akedah (Abraham’s attempt to, in faith, obey God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac found in Genesis 22) in his 1843 Fear and Trembling.1

Kierkegaard’s apologetics for murder The goal of his analysis of the Akedah there, Kierkegaard has his pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio write, is to liberate the reader’s understanding of Abraham’s dilemma from the everyday interpretation of it which has been used repetitively in moral sermons and casual banter.2 In these settings, he thinks, the meaning of the narrative has been reduced to the point of signifying nothing more than a model of sacrificial piety— something which all people of faith should aspire to emulate in their lives. However, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio argues, such interpretations level out and erase what is truly at stake in the narrative. Indeed, they result, he thinks, in a casual “indifference” to the narrative—one which allows the story to be read while “smoking [one’s] pipe,” or “stretching out [one’s] legs comfortably.”3 This indifference, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio thinks, leads to an interpretation of the story which gives rise to the banal call to “sacrifice one’s best,” a call which is all too casually bleated across pews on Sunday mornings between hollow smiling congregants as they encourage one another saccharinely to sacrifice their own best: their best effort at the charity bake sale, their dollar as the hat is passed round, or their time at Sunday school teaching catechism. “What is left out of Abraham’s story,” in this interpretation, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio thinks, “is the anxiety, for to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and most sacred duty.”4 In order to confront, confound, and upend these sorts of indifferent interpretation, de Silentio attempts to reintroduce the anxiety he sees at the heart of the story into the heart of his readers. This he does by forcing them to contemplate with Abraham what he thinks is the real meaning of the Akedah: the fact that what Abraham is really called to do by his faith is to commit murder. According to Kierkegaard’s de Silentio, the key to reading the Abrahamic narrative correctly is to confront this terrible truth: that Abraham, the father of faith, is “either a murderer or a believer.”5 Make no mistake about it, he entreats his readers to understand, “the ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he intended to murder Isaac.”6 So it is, de Silentio concludes, that



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Abraham’s actions should not be praised from the pulpit by lazy pastors as a form of model citizenship. Nor should his actions and intentions be held up as some abstract ideal to which fatuous parishioners should strive. To the contrary, when understood properly, de Silentio argues, Abraham’s actions and intentions model precisely the opposite: exactly what a good citizen should never do. This, he thinks, is the horrible truth which the reader must confront if he or she is to understand the real message of the Akedah, and through it the logic of the absolute to which we are called in faith: namely, that obedience to God requires an absolute rupture with ethical deliberation and action. To make this point all the more clear, de Silentio reminds his readers of the classical definition of ethical judgment in the West. Ethical judgment since Kant, he details rightly there, functions by referencing a set of universal ideals—ideals to which we can all, at least in principle, assent and which we should all, therefore, categorically obey. “The ethical as such,” he writes, “is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which may be expressed from another angle by saying that it is a force at every moment. It rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos.”7 The good is only achieved, it follows from this logic, when one submits one’s actions to the logic of the universal at all times. Indeed, what we may call evil occurs, de Silentio reasons, in further accord with Kant, when someone rejects, refuses, or inverts this universal order—when, in other words, an individual asserts himself or herself over and against the power of the universal. According to de Silentio, “As soon as the single individual wants to assert himself in his particularity over against the universal, he [breaks with the ethical] and only by acknowledging this can be reconciled again with the universal.”8 From the ethical standpoint then, de Silentio concludes, Abraham “ought to [be] remanded and exposed as a murderer,” for the binding of Isaac— indeed, he should be seen as an evildoer par excellence.9 And yet, and this is the exceptional moment in his thinking, according to Kierkegaard’s de Silentio, Abraham is precisely not a murderer. He is instead, as he styles it, a “knight of faith.”10 This is a fact, he goes on to argue, which not only exculpates Abraham from the possible charge of murder and evil, but which, in fact, elevates him to the status of saint.11 It is on this impossible reconciliation of the paradoxical conflation of these two figures, murderer and saint, that de Silentio thinks a proper understanding of the Akedah hangs; and, it is only by way of such a reconciliation, he concludes, that one can truly understand the duties one is called to by faith in the absolute. This is, of course, the whole point of Kierkegaard’s excursion: to work out through de Silentio a definition of faith as the embrace of precisely such a “paradox” whereby, he writes, “a single individual as the particular is [elevated] higher than the universal,” and is moreover “justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it.”12 For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s act, by virtue of faith, not only falls outside the realm of the

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ethical order; it falls outside the realm of rational judgment in toto. It is, in the words of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “a foolishness to the world.”13 As such, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio argues, Abraham’s actions cannot properly be understood within the limited borders of finite human understanding, ethical or otherwise, and cannot be subject, therefore, either to rational judgment or to ethical condemnation. To the contrary, faith, he suggests, requires commitment to a logical order which breaks with the finite realm of such judgments and transcends into what he calls the order of “infinity.”14 As such, he concludes, faith “does not belong to the distinctions that lie within the proper compass of the understanding.”15 Instead, it can only be understood when one exceeds the limitations of human logic, understanding, and judgment—when one commits oneself wholly to the realm of what he calls “the absurd.”16 It is precisely this appeal to the absurd, according to de Silentio, which is the true excellence of faith—for it is through this transcendence of finite rational judgment, he argues, that the absolute, the infinite, is made manifest in the finite “here below” of existence. So it is, de Silentio further affirms with the Pauline epistle, that the foolishness of faith must be praised as “wiser than the wisest human wisdom,” for it is only through it, he argues, that we can know and see that which lies absolutely beyond human wisdom: the absolute itself—God.17 It is of course for this reason that Kierkegaard has de Silentio infamously conclude that the excellence of Abraham’s faith was precisely the way he transcended through it the universal logic of ethical judgment—the way he managed through faith to “teleologically suspend the ethical.”18 In his act, de Silentio writes, Abraham manages to “transcend the whole of the ethical [by virtue of a] higher telos outside” of and beyond human understanding.19 Indeed, it is on this basis that de Silentio distinguishes the actions of Abraham, which he praises, from those of a tragic hero, who at times must also sacrifice what is best to him or herself in order to achieve an ethical aim. But, “[where] the tragic hero is [only apparently] great by his ethical virtue,” de Silentio reasons, “Abraham is [actually] great by a purely personal virtue”—a virtue which operates in exceedance of ethical judgment and which elevates him, as an individual, over and above the realm of the finite values of every other mortal creature and brings him in relation with an infinite and eternal absolute.20 This is the critical difference between the two according to de Silentio: the “tragic hero still remains within the ethical,” his or her actions defined entirely within the limits of “the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a sentiment that has its dialect in its relation to the idea of the ethical life.”21 By contrast, he argues, in faith “the single individual . . . determine[s] his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.”22 It is on this basis, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio concludes, that faithfulness to the demands of the absolute, however apparently absurd to the finite logic of human reason, is actually a superior mode of action than that which is merely ethical. Since the ethical person can only ever act



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on the basis of a rational judgment measured in relation to the universal value of all existent mortal and finite things, he argues, the actions of the ethical person have no ultimate, eternal, nor absolute value. As a result, he concludes, the meaning of those actions can only ever be fleeting and transitory, measured exclusively within the framework of the terrestrial and the human, bearing no eternal weight. By contrast, he argues, the person of faith, acting on the basis of a “duty to [an absolute] God” who transcends the value of all other things, manages to supersede his or her own finitude in infinite power and glory.23 As such, he reasons, the actions of the knight of faith register within the realm of the eternal and the infinite and bear a lasting significance. Indeed, for de Silentio what we witness in the absurdity of an act of faith is a sort of apotheosis of the divine—an appearance within the finite realm of human action of the power and glory of the absolute and infinite. It was for this reason that de Silentio concluded that “there is an absolute duty to God” which could justify even the murder of a child, “for in this relationship of duty, the single individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute.”24 Abraham’s virtue, de Silentio thinks, rests in the fact that he “does not resist [his absolute duty to God],” but instead accepts it wholly, abandons the ethical, and works diligently to manifest the demands of the absolute fully within the finite realm of human action.25 By virtue of Abraham’s “teleological suspension of the ethical,” he argues, the power and might of the divine appears within the human. In this regard, de Silentio suggests, in Abraham’s act of faith one catches a glimmer of the incarnation of the divine which will ultimately come in the form of the messiah. Note that the key factor in Abraham’s excellence, for de Silentio, is that he does not stop to measure God’s command to “make a burnt offering” of his son Isaac by virtue of ethical or rational thought. He does not stop to measure nor judge the commands of the divine. Instead, he gives himself over fully to the infinite logic of the absolute and works immediately to actualize the demands of his God “on earth as it is in heaven.” Abraham’s virtue, Kierkegaard concludes, lies in his willingness to submit to the transcendental logic of absolute goodness and not count the ethical costs. His virtue grows from his willingness to acquiesce and to say “yes, thy will be done” to the absurdity of the infinite’s demand. Kierkegaard’s argument is so essential to the study at hand because it illustrates precisely what is wrong with the ethical systems of the West— namely, that they define virtuous action as obedience to an idea of the absolute which is identified as wholly good but which, precisely by virtue of being absolute, is actually capable of justifying terrifying actions within the here and now, like the murder of a child. In a sense Kierkegaard is right: the concept of the absolute introduces an absurd logic which not only justifies, but even demands that one break with his or her ethical duty to others. Where Kierkegaard is wrong is his insistence that such a break

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constitutes the excellence of faith. Let’s call it what it really is: madness and evil—something which must be resisted vehemently in order to pursue true excellence. The value of Kierkegaard’s analysis lies precisely in showing us how and where ethical judgment fails: namely, inasmuch as it gives way to the commands of the absolute. What Kierkegaard’s account of the logic of the absolute grants us is a better understanding of how obedience to the absolute functions to ground and justify evil. What motivates and justifies the actions of the suicide bomber if not the absurd logic demanded by faith in the absolute—a faith by which he or she can teleologically suspend his or her duty to not kill? What is at work in those who would train children to martyr themselves in the name of their religion or nation if not the concept of an absolute value which transcends the value of all finite existence? Do we not also witness such an “elevation of the individual” over and above the rational principles which govern our ethical relation to others in the logic of the one-percent as they exonerate and even extoll their exploitation of the world? And wasn’t it by virtue of a similar call to infinite obeisance to the absolute will of the master that the inhabitants of Jonestown drank their infamous “Kool-Aid,” the members of the “Solar Temple” killed children and ultimately themselves, and the devotees of Aum Shinrikyo poisoned commuters on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas? Isn’t there even something of this logic at work in the rhetoric of the white supremacist or the plantation owner in the southern United States and Caribbean as they demanded the fealty of their chattel and sanctified the subjugation of black bodes in the name of an absolute racial order? Is this not the “great white burden” as they see it: to suppress the many in the name of some transcendent and absolute order and truth? Are these all examples of excellence, manifestations of the divine, and inheritors of Abraham’s saintliness? Or, are these not acts of evil, acts which we must ardently denounce? Unfortunately, if we follow Kierkegaard and his logic of the absolute, we cannot denounce them. Instead, we must count such actions as transcendentally good. Indeed, we must sanctify them as manifestations of the divine and count them as premonitions of the messianic age. What we discover from an analysis of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is ironically precisely the opposite of what he intended: namely, a powerful argument in favor of the ethical necessity of resisting the absolute. Indeed, what we get from his work is an even better understanding of the sad reality that where the absolute is affirmed as a good, concrete ethical duties between humans necessarily collapse and evil flourishes. What we discover, in other words, is the repugnance of any ethics which seeks to affirm the absolute and the exigency of the cultivation of an ethics which would resist it. This conclusion is true whether the order of the absolute is assigned to a divine person or to a terrestrial reality. The actions and logic of Adolf Eichmann during the Second World War are especially instructive here.



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A report on the banality of evil revisited In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt notes that she went to Jerusalem in 1961 to attend the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects and executioners of the Shoah, expecting to see the very face of evil—a grimacing macabre visage twisted in rancor and hate. What she found instead, she details, was an individual she described as mild mannered, even meek—a pencil pusher of a man who maintained his innocence before the law on the basis that he was just obeying “superior orders.”26 It was in fact on this basis, as she reports, that Eichmann maintained not only his innocence, but in fact his excellence. Indeed, as she details, Eichmann felt that he should be praised for his dutiful obedience to his masters. As Arendt writes, Eichmann maintained throughout his trial that “he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler’s orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed ‘the force of law’ in the Third Reich.”27 As a result, she details, Eichmann appeared incapable of understanding why what he had done was wrong. To the contrary, Eichmann seems to have thought of himself as the ideal Kantian citizen, one who submitted his individual interests to the rule of law and the universal logic of the state in pursuit of a perpetual stability and peace, which he argued was the ultimate aim of the Third Reich: to establish a new world order. In any case, he famously contended, in further defense of his innocence, that he had not given the order to kill. Nor, he maintained, had he ever “killed any human being.”28 As he testifies, “I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it.”29 Nevertheless, as Arendt notes: Nobody believed him. The prosecutor did not believe him, because that was not his job. Counsel for the defense paid no attention because he, unlike Eichmann, was, to all appearances, not interested in questions of conscience. And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feebleminded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.”30 According to Arendt, the great cloud of disbelief surrounding Eichmann’s protestations of innocence did not spring from some misapprehension of his character. To the contrary, she famously argued, it grew from a fundamental

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misunderstanding of the nature and origin of evil, a misunderstanding which she sought to correct in the conclusion to her report on the Eichmann trial. The root of the problem lay, she argued there, in the false assumption that evil action always results from some malicious or wicked will, neither of which, she surmised from the testimony, prompted Eichmann’s actions. To the contrary, she argued, Eichmann’s actions were borne of what she termed “a sheer thoughtlessness.”31 On this basis of this conclusion, she argued, the evil of the Shoah should not be attributed to some malevolence within Eichmann or the German nation, but to what she famously termed a certain “banality.”32 For Arendt, this banality is the ultimate ground of the rise of totalitarianism, the horrors of the death camp, and every other manifestation of real evil in the world. It was thus in attempt to devise a means of protecting individuals against such “thoughtlessness” and the horrors which result from it that Arendt dedicated the bulk of her subsequent works: arguing, for example, that in the cultivation of an active “life of the mind,” one finds a solution to the banality of Eichmann’s evil.33 Since, she reasoned, evil is conditioned by the kind of mindless obedience Eichmann exhibited toward his “superior orders,” the aim of ethical action must be to cultivate the strength to resist the lure of such orders, whether they originate with the state, the employer, the neighbor, or even God. Only thusly, Arendt thinks, can evil be prevented and the good preserved. Indeed, it was for this reason that she argued in her later works so passionately for the value of the cultivation of an active interior life. Only through the cultivation of such an active “life of the mind,” she suggests, can one develop the strength to authentically engage with others in the public sphere without giving way to “thoughtlessness” and the “banality of evil.”34 In this regard we find in Arendt’s account of the banality of evil an analog to our claim that evil arises, in contrast to the established history of ethical philosophy, from an all too complacent acquiescence to the “superiority” of some presumed absolute order—in Eichmann’s case, the ideal state. With Arendt, we must assert that the evils of the Shoah, like the evil of Abraham’s attempted murder and the evil of suicide bombings, mass suicide, and unchecked capitalism, are the result of the affirmation of and attempt to actualize completely some absolute demand, whether it be of the state (i.e., Deutschland, in Eichmann’s case), the divine (in Abraham’s), or the dollar (in capitalism’s). But, where we must differ with Arendt is in her assertion that such an assent is always the result of “sheer thoughtlessness.” To the contrary, as we will see in more detail shortly, such actions may result from precisely the opposite: a well-intended and even thoughtful attempt to affirm and actualize some good. As will become clear, the real problem with Eichmann was not his “thoughtlessness,” but his presumption that the good he sought carried the weight of an absolute order—one which demanded that he cast off the idea of a universalizable ethical duty to all in order to realize it completely. Thus, while Arendt asserts that evil action results from an assent of the will, by simply going along with the flow, we must differ



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with her in thinking that such assent arises from some rational deficiency, some idiotic “thoughtlessness.” In contrast, as we will see, Eichmann’s assent to the will of his masters was borne from his conviction that their commands carried the weight of the absolute. His actions, far from growing from some “sheer thoughtlessness,” in fact emerged from a profound consideration of his duties—only a consideration worked out in the order of the absolute. The realization that the Shoah did not result from sheer thoughtless passion, but instead originated in a cool, disinterested, and quite abstract rationalization and thorough planning, is part of its horror. The mechanism that drove the efficiency of the Nazi extermination of the Jews was nothing if not thoughtful, calculative, and, to some extent, even rational. As will become clearer, the logic which justified the Shoah grew from an attempt to actualize rationally a perceived absolute value: the purity of race and an unthreatened homeland—a value which called for and even justified the extermination of all perceived Untermenchen and the active pursuit of lebensraum. The trouble with Eichmann and the rest of the German nation at the time was not the fact that they acted thoughtlessly—it was the fact that they employed a logic of absolute and infinite duty to determine their action. The trouble with the Nazi regime was, not unlike Abraham, that it sought to actualize a presumed absolute position perfectly in the finite realm of human action. Isn’t this, after all, what drove Eichmann to obey the order of his masters so diligently: the sincere belief that he was acting in accordance with the logic of some absolute good, an absolute good that absolved him of his concern for those whom he so casually assigned to death camps with the flick of his pen? Wasn’t Eichmann ultimately compelled by some inner zeal for the Nazi order as the dawning of an absolute good through the rise of the German people and nation—an order which instantiated in its emergence its own rationale and logic? How else do we explain the accounts Arendt gave of how selflessly and tirelessly Eichmann worked to achieve those ends, often staying in the office long past the hour when his colleagues had retired to bed—at times even coming in at weekends to cover the shift of his sick employees? Was such dedication borne out of nothing more than “pure thoughtlessness”? Or, is it more likely that Eichmann acted, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, in accordance with a rationale and logic which transcended the finite realm of human ethical reasoning and called for a new transcendental logic which, in his own words, superseded the demands of a “humanitarian view”?35 Wasn’t it such a logic that convinced him that the orders he received were “superior,” as he put it, in the first place and not, therefore, subject to the limited, pedestrian, and quotidian logic of human value? This is precisely what Bettina Stangneth argued in her 2014 reexamination of Eichmann’s actions in Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.36 There Stangneth makes the convincing case that Eichmann was in fact anything but a mild mannered pencil pusher thoughtlessly caught up in a regime he could scarcely comprehend nor resist even if he wanted to or were to try. To the contrary, Stangneth argues that

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Eichmann saw himself as a true hero for his actions. In his own words, which Stangneth documents faithfully throughout her book, Eichmann defined himself as “a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood,”37 a man faithful to what he took to be an absolute value “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate.’”38 Indeed, as Stangneth quotes, Eichmann identified this value with what he called “a sacred order and a sacred law,”39 one which works for the “benefit [of] my people”40 and was, in its transcendental form, “stronger than any so-called moral requirement.”41 It was in fact from this absolute, this “sacred order and .  .  . sacred law,” as Eichmann stated over and over again in the Argentina Papers, that he deduced his “true duty.”42 What Stangneth makes clear in her research is that Eichmann’s affirmation and assent to the “superior orders” of the Nazi regime were not borne out of some idiocy or “sheer thoughtlessness”; to the contrary, they came from a thoughtful consideration of what he believed to be his duties to the absolute “sacred law” of blood and nation, a law which, for him, transcended the “moral requirements” of “humanitarian views” and called for obedience to superior logic and rationality, one forged in the fires of the absolute. What is this if not a terrestrial and political analog to the logic of faith which we just examined via Kierkegaard’s account of the Akedah? Is Eichmann’s fanaticism for purity not also a version of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in virtue of some absolute duty, only in this case an absolute political duty? If so, I think we must declare the old truism that identifies the path to hell to be paved with good intentions as not only more horrifyingly true than is commonly admitted; we must also admit that that path can be designed, laid out, and graded with a profound thoughtfulness and attentiveness to rational principles, only rational principles which rest upon the bedrock of the logic required by an affirmation of some absolute. From these excurses it should be all the more clear that the real ground and condition for evil is not some absence or deficit within the subject. Evil is not the result of incompetence, idiocy, or wickedness. To the contrary, concrete manifestations of evil in social and political history are more often than not borne from a profound desire to affirm and instantiate some idea of the absolute. Given this reality it is time that moral philosophers break with any account of ethical deliberation which demands fealty to the idea of the absolute. It is time that we denounce any logical system which is deduced from the affirmation of transcendental values. It is time that we develop a model of ethical reasoning which does not see the absolute as a force to be obeyed, but instead recognizes it as a force to be vigilantly resisted.

The tyranny of heaven In Paradise Lost, John Milton, perhaps inadvertently, casts the rebellion of the devil against God in the Christian tradition in what could be seen as an



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almost sympathetic light.43 Indeed, it was this fact which famously drew William Blake to lovingly rhapsodize the virtues of Milton’s devil in his pamphlet on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.44 For Milton, the devil’s virtues grow from his “dauntless courage and considerable pride,”45 his commitment “never to submit or yield,”46 never “to bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee”47 to what he saw as “the tyranny of Heaven,”48 but instead to tirelessly “resist”49 and to perpetually fight to be “free, and to none accountable, preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp.”50 Indeed, it was in praise of the devil’s resistance to the absolute command of God that Milton crafted what is perhaps his most famous edict: that the glory of the devil lies in his commitment “to reign in Hell, [rather] than serve in Heaven.”51 It was for this reason that Milton suggested throughout his work that “the undaunted fiend” should be “admired; admired, not feared.”52 Indeed, as Milton goes to great lengths to show throughout the remainder of Paradise Lost, it is only God, as the ultimate absolute, who should properly be feared.53 With this conclusion we must agree. The absolute must indeed be feared. And, inasmuch as we fear the sovereignty of the absolute, we must redouble our admiration for any devil who would resist it. We cannot let this fear command our allegiance and obedience nor call for our respect and worship as it has in the philosophical and religious traditions of the West. To the contrary, with Milton’s devil we must endeavor to transform this fear into the earnest desire to resist. In other words, albeit against Milton’s intended aim, we must recognize that it is not the divine which we should emulate and seek to instantiate in our thought, speech, and action “on earth as it is in heaven”—but the devil. What we must do to move ethical deliberation forward in the twenty-first century and beyond is to summon the courage of Milton’s devil in our reasoning and, with him, commit ourselves to resisting the tyranny of the heaven of philosophers, the tyranny imposed upon us by a history of a moral yea-saying which has conflated the concept of the absolute with the concept of the good. Against this tyranny, we must open ourselves to the possibility that the good appears only when we refuse to bend our knee to the absolute—where we, like Milton’s devil, summon the courage to commit ourselves to perpetual resistance against the possible tyranny of the absolute.54 Note that in calling for an ethics of resistance, I am not denying the reality nor the power of the absolute. I am not saying with Nietzsche that the god of the philosophers is dead. To the contrary, an ethics of resistance must begin with the recognition that the absolute is still very much alive and with us, manifest in the Other and permeating, therefore, our social, ethical, and political institutions and intuitions. The power of God is indeed omnipresent. Our starting point must be an affirmation of the unassailable logic, power, and might of the absolute. But it must be an affirmation which induces fear and prompts resistance—not an affirmation which inspires admiration and prompts acquiescence.

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It turns out that the moral “yea-sayers” of the West have been right in part all along: the absolute is indeed a force to be feared and reckoned with. As the proverb goes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”55 Let no one count himself or herself wise who does not fear the power of the absolute present in the demands of every Other. What we should fear from this absolute is not its judgment nor displeasure however, but the possibility of evil its existence grounds and can justify. Given this fact, the wisdom which should properly arise from a fear of this absolute is not one which should result in our obedience, but one which solicits our resistance. It is my goal to pursue the wisdom of this fear and to craft from it an ethics which is sympathetic to any devil who would say “no, non serviam” to the absolute power of the Other. It is with this goal in mind that we will turn in the remaining chapters to the work of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. It has been said that the greatest deception the devil ever spun was to convince the world that he did not exist. To this we must respond that if this were the case, and the devil did not exist, to amend Voltaire’s quip, “it would be necessary for us to invent him”—not in order to have a scapegoat upon which to pin the blame for evil, but in order to have a hero to teach us how to avoid it and to resist its ultimate ground: the absolute manifest in the demands of the Other.56

PART TWO

The ethics of resistance

CHAPTER FOUR

Don’t give up, don’t give in! Jacques Lacan and the ethics of psychoanalysis

The radical power of Lacan’s thought Readers of Jacques Lacan have long been attentive to his radical reaccounting of the genesis and nature of subjectivity, a reaccounting which, as we will see in more detail shortly, positions the subject not as the product of its own activity, as the history of philosophy has traditionally rendered it, but figures it instead as the product of the activity of an Other.1 In this regard, as more and more are beginning to recognize, Lacan’s project can be seen in many ways as a sort of psychoanalytic parallel to Levinas’s phenomenology.2 Lacan’s work, like Levinas’s, presents a subject who is radically exterior to itself, a subject emergent from, and thereby with access to, that which is absolutely beyond it. As such, Lacan’s work, like Levinas’s, is useful for those who seek, as we do, to overcome the post-critical disjunction which we identified with Meillassoux and Badiou in Chapter 1.3 What has been less recognized up to this point is Lacan’s conviction, in further concert with Levinas, that this radical reaccounting of the nature of subjectivity demands an equally radical reenvisioning of the nature of ethical deliberation and action. What is interesting for us now, however, is not where Levinas’s and Lacan’s thoughts appear to harmonize, but where they are discordant. For where Levinas saw in the absolute Other a benison to be welcomed and obeyed, Lacan identified, with Schelling, a potentially overwhelming and inhuman absolute which not only threatens to destroy subjective life, but also could in fact drive it into madness, psychosis, and even the destruction of others—what we could call, in a word, evil.

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In contrast to Levinas’s ethics of assent, Lacan therefore proposes, as we shall see, an ethics of resistance. What we gain through an understanding of Lacan’s work is thus not only a means of further understanding how the kind of inverted subjectivity established in relation to the Other qua absolute can be used to overcome the limits of the Kantian critique, thereby making available a potentially universal and actual absolute ground for ethical decision making; we further discover a strategy for reconceiving the nature of the ethical decisions grounded thereupon not as assent, but as resistance.

Unconsciousness unsettled Lacan begins his account of the nature of subjectivity similar to Levinas: defining the subject as something emergent from an Other who is situated beyond the powers of conscious representation. Taking Freud’s now infamous statement that “Wo es war soll ich werden,”4 which Lacan translates as “Where it was, the Ich . . . the subject, must come into existence,”5 as his guiding principle, Lacan defines the subject as that which appears in a space opened up by the withdrawal of something situated radically outside of and beyond it. “There where it was just now,” he writes, “there where it was for a while, between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, ‘I’ can come into being and disappear from what I say.”6 “The subject” for Lacan is nothing more than “this emergence,” this trajectory from out of a field of that which is absolutely beyond it into being. As such, he maintains, the nature of the subject is entirely determined by this absolute outside, this “it,” as he calls it, which both precedes and grounds subjectivity, all the while remaining absolutely beyond it and unconscious to it. In order to understand the nature of the subject properly, Lacan therefore concludes, we must first attempt to understand the nature of this absolute unconscious “it.” For Freud, famously, this “it,” identified as the ID, was nothing other than the drives or instincts (Treib) located in the biological impulses of a material body. These material drives, Freud argued, were the ultimate ground of conscious life. The ego or subject, as emergent from this ground, is, he thought, little more than the “surface of the mental apparatus .  .  . what may be called reason and common sense,” he famously analogized, are nothing more than the “tip of the iceberg” of subjective life.7 The hidden depths which buoyed and supported mental life, he thought, are ultimately the material demands of the ID. So it was according to Freud that the ultimate ground for subjective life, though lying properly outside the powers of “reason and common sense,” is nevertheless identified as originating within the body of a singular being. As such, he reasoned, the unconscious ground of subjectivity, while outside the scope of egoic life,



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is not truly absolute, for it does not lie absolutely outside of and beyond the being of the subject. The position of the unconscious is for Freud merely relatively outside the subject’s grasp. But, Lacan asks, if this is the case, how are we to account for the apparent surprise and radical disruption of the return of the repressed, for example? How do we account for the apparent radical asymmetry between the demands of the unconscious and the interests of the subject? It was questions of this sort which motivated in large part Lacan’s break with the Freudian schema and his conviction that the “notion that the unconscious as merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.”8 It was to a critical rethinking of the unconscious as radically and absolutely outside the subject that Lacan initiated his work. And, it was in the service of this critical rethinking that Lacan restructured the nature of the subject, opening it up to that which lies absolutely beyond itself and its own interiority—grounding it in what he called the Other. There appear to be at least three different ways in which Lacan sought to rethink the concept of the unconscious “it” as the ground and structure of subjective life. He describes it, alternatively, as: 1) a kind of gap or rupture, “impediment, failure, split” within the signifying field inhabited by the subject;9 2) the “discourse of the Other,” which establishes the symbolic network within which a subject emerges;10 and thereby, perhaps most famously and often quoted, 3) “structured like language.”11 The plurivocity of these accounts of the nature of the unconscious, though at first confusing and unsettling, should not be taken as a sign of some contradiction or irresoluteness in Lacan’s thought; nor should it be taken to express three different formulations, each perhaps representative of a different period in Lacan’s oeuvre, as they sometimes are by Lacanian scholars.12 After all, these three iterations appear concurrently in Lacan’s most detailed examination of the nature of the unconscious, the 1964 seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. It would seem then that these three statements, though perhaps at first seemingly divergent, all internally cohere with one another. Lacan’s three declarative statements concerning the nature of the unconscious thus seem to express not three different claims concerning the nature of the unconscious ground of subjective life, but three different visions of it: the absolute unconscious approached from three different vantage points, as it were. According to Lacan, the unconscious can either be addressed: 1) genetically, with regard to its origins in “the discourse of the Other”; 2) phenomenologically, as it appears in the subject’s imperfect appropriation of that discourse (i.e., “impediment, failure, split,” and slips of the tongue); or 3) structurally, as ordered according to the structures of the language of that discourse, its laws, grammar, and rules, for example. However it is approached, what is important to note is the consistency Lacan has across all three of these accounts in identifying the unconscious ground of subjectivity with what he terms the Other, an Other who is situated, as we will see, absolutely beyond the life of the subject.13 Indeed, this is the hard

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core of his difference with Freud: Lacan identifies the ultimate seat of the subjective instincts as that which is not merely unconscious to the subject, as Freud did, but as that which is positioned other than, outside of, and absolutely beyond the subject. The subject for Lacan is “situated in the very locus of the Other,” in that which is entirely outside the scope of not only its “reason and common sense,” but its very materiality.14 Indeed, according to Lacan, “it is only in the Other,” conceived of as this absolute “outside,” “that the subject is constituted.”15 As such, the subject emerges on the scene, according to Lacan, as always already decentered from its own existence—always already in contact with that which is absolutely outside of and beyond itself.16 This is what Lacan famous refers to as “the subversion of the subject.”17 The subject for Lacan arises on a ground which is not just relatively “not-its-own,” like the relative foreignness of the drives and instincts demanded by the material needs of the body, as it is for Freud, but on a ground which is absolutely not-itsown. To understand this better it is useful to examine further the nature of the Other which Lacan sees as constituting the subject’s emergence—to ask with Lacan, “Who then is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who agitates me?”18

The alterity of the Other According to Hans-Dieter Gondek, the Other in Lacan must be understood not as some person, this or that other, but as “first of all faceless.”19 “The Other,” he argues, “is a site. The Other only obtains a face when someone actually inhabits this place, for instance the mother, or an ‘exemplar’ of the opposite sex.”20 The Other for Lacan is thus not someone, though someone may at times inhabit the symbolic space occupied by the Other. Nevertheless, the Other in itself represents something larger than any single person: a superstructure or network in which every singular person participates, and even creates, without ever fully controlling or mastering individually. To understand this distinction between the singular others which make up the Other and the Other properly, Sean Homer suggests distinguishing between the lowercase “o” other of individual identities and the uppercase “O” Other which grounds and structures subjective life as the unconscious. According to Homer, while the lowercase “o” other refers to specific others, other subjects with “faces,” for example my mother, neighbor, or colleague, “the big Other, on the other hand, is that absolute otherness that we cannot assimilate to our subjectivity.”21 This distinction, suggests Homer, serves to underscore Lacan’s point that the unconscious force which structures subjective life is not only outside of and beyond the subject itself; it furthermore cannot be located within any particular person, place, or thing. It is absolutely outside the scope of perception.



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Lacan of course suggests as much himself, arguing that “we must distinguish two others, at least two—an other with a capital O, and an other with a small o, which is the ego.”22 It is the latter, capital O Other, according to Lacan, which “is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious.”23 Thus, thinks Lacan, “it is only in th[is] Other that the subject is constituted as ideal.”24 That is, it is only in an Other so other that it cannot even be isolated, identified with, or located in any specific other that the subject is grounded. Thus, claims Lacan, “the unconscious, which I represent to you as that which is inside the subject [as that which is the subject’s own-most] . . . can be realized only outside, that is to say, in the locus of the Other in which alone it may assume its status.”25 What “we are dealing with” in Lacan is, in other words, as Lorenzo Chiesa puts it, a “transindividual unconscious that differs from both intrasubjectivity, the unconscious as the ‘Other who is within me,’ and intersubjectivity, the unconscious of the Other subject.”26 What we discover in Lacan’s account of the Other qua “transindividual unconsciousness” is a ground of subjective life which is totally nonrelational—which is, in other words, located absolutely and radically beyond itself. Nevertheless, argues Lacan, it is this absolutely non-relational power which structures the nature and life of the subject. “The Other is,” Lacan writes, “the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks to him who hears, that which is said by the one being already the reply, the other deciding to hear it whether the one has or has not spoken.”27 It is thus this absolutely Other, he reasons, which holds “the master position” in the nature and structure of subjective life.28 Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that the subject is ultimately for Lacan nothing more than an imperfect reflection of this absolute Other. “It is from the Other that the subject receives even the message that he emits,” declares Lacan. When the I speaks, when it declares itself, it does so in a language and voice given to it by some Other. The very selfhood, identity and singularity, of the I is given to it by and structured around the Other, according to Lacan.29 Thus, Lacan declares, “the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other.”30 So it is that we discover in Lacan a subject inexorably in contact with that which is absolutely Other, an account which, like Levinas’s, “reverses the topology of the traditional imagery,” to use Lacan’s words.31 What we gain from this understanding of the absolute alterity of the unconscious Other which structures subjective life is a subject which is always already, from the very moment of its naissance to its eventual extinction, radically outside of itself, scattered across the field of the Other, irrevocably ex-centric to itself.32 Lacan’s subject thus lacks any coherence with itself, as the idealist traditions of Western thinking would have it. This subject even lacks the integrity of a singular entity. Instead, according to Lacan, the subject is irrevocably fragmented. It is a cobbled together assemblage of signs and signifiers which it takes up from an Other it can

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never fully know or relate directly to, but can neither extract itself entirely nor distance itself sufficiently from. For, as Lacan puts it, it is only in the Other that “the subject authentically reintegrates his disjointed limbs, and recognizes, reaggregates his experience.”33 This explains Lacan’s repetition in his 1954–1955 seminar on The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis of Rimbaud’s famous line that “I is an other.” For Lacan, “the subject is decentred in relation to the individual. That is what I is an other means.”34 As something assembled in the absent space that is the Other, the “I” for Lacan is not primarily its own, but primordially a possession of the Other. The seat of the subject’s existence thus lies not only beyond the grasp of its conscious powers, situated in a zone that it cannot comprehend or even address; it is located in something that it cannot even identify in any singular object, person, place, or thing. To be an I, for Lacan, is thus not only to be alienated from oneself, it is to be composed of a multitude of influences, each of which it is equally alienated from. This bivalent alienation comes from the fact that, according to Lacan, the subject occupies a liminal space between the one and many, between a singular self and the plural Other.35 To be a subject in relation to this multitudinous absolute is thus for Lacan to be always out of joint. It is to be always already othered. This is the ultimate significance of Lacan’s repetition of Rimbaud’s claim. To be a subject for Lacan is to never fully be any one thing. It is instead to be “an Other,” to be in contact with an absolute reality which can never be reduced to nor resolved into a static concrete ontological object.

Desire for the Other In line with Levinas’s analysis, Lacan recognized that his “formulation [of the relationship between the subject and the Other as unconscious] totally changes the function of the subject as existing.”36 As an assemblage of an absolutely unconscious Other which cannot be localized in any singular thing, the subject for Lacan can likewise never be accounted for as a fully formed being. Instead, it must be conceived of as somehow less than, or in want-of-being.37 To explain how this could be the case, Lacan turned to an analysis of the nature of desire, which he took to be, in many ways, an expression of the essence of subjective life.38 Lacan begins his account of desire (désir) by distinguishing it from need (besoin) and demand (deamande).39 According to Philippe Von Haute, need for Lacan “is grounded in a physiological lack, and in principle, there is an adequate object by which it can be satisfied.”40 As such, need grows from the concrete material nature of the body and thus, while at times disconcerting and surprising to the subject, can nevertheless be reconciled to something inside of or inherent to the subject, if only that part of the subject that is disparate from the subject’s understanding of itself, the reality of the subject’s materiality—the ineluctable “thinghood” of its existence. Demand,



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for Lacan, as Von Haute puts it, is emergent from need and “pertains fundamentally to linguistically articulated need” in the “intersubjective relationship.”41 Demand is thus for Lacan nothing more than the attempt to formulate need within the symbolic field of the Other—to express to the Other the reality of one’s material needs. Desire, for Lacan, is radically distinct from both need and demand, for it is not tied to the material body and its survival. To the contrary, “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need.”42 Desire thus articulates for Lacan a relation to the Other which is less determinate than need, a relation which cannot be reduced to the materiality of the body nor tied to any concrete ontological object. It is thus a relation, he thinks, which is entirely subsumed within the relationship of the absolutely Other. Desire, he claims, is inexorably “bound up with the desire of the Other.”43 It is, he claims, “the desire of/for the Other,” qua absolute structure.44 This can have at least three different meanings. First, desire is for Lacan the desire for the Other’s desire (i.e., the desire to be desired by the Other). It is the desire to capture the Other’s attention and gaze, gain its approval, and summon its interest. While the nature of this element of desire can be mediated through our relationship to particular, singular others, one’s mother, neighbor, or colleague, the capture of these concrete desires will never be enough, Lacan assures us. For the Other aimed at in desire is not the other of singular personas. It is instead the big O Other of the collective unconscious field which constitutes the subject’s nature— the absolute Other. What the subject desires when it desires the desire of the Other is, in other words, the desire to capture the ground of its own nature, to be able to radically affirm itself. What the subject desires is to find itself worthy of desire. The second meaning of Lacan’s account of desire as “desire of/for the Other” is the desire of the Other. When we desire, thinks Lacan, it is not properly our desire that is articulated—it does not originate from within us nor belong wholly to us. Originating as it does with an Other who is situated absolutely outside of and beyond us, the subject’s desires are nothing more than a pale reflection of the Other’s desire. Thus, what a subject may take to be the authentic experience of some desire, the desire for some accomplishment or recognition for example, is really nothing other according to Lacan than an expression in the subject of the Other’s desire, what the Other has determined to be of value. The subject’s desires, he argues, are the result of its internalization of the desires of the Other as represented to it through one’s engagement and interaction with the concrete singular others of its community. What the subject desires, Lacan cautions us, is nothing other than what those around us deem desirable. To make this clear, take the value of gold as an example, the value of which is not emergent from any intrinsic property it possess. Its value does not rest upon the judgment of any singular subject. The value of gold comes from the fact that it is desired by others. Hence the fluctuation of its value which adjusts

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to the perceived desire of others. Likewise, Lacan thinks, the desire which fuels subjective life is produced by and in relation to the desire of the Other. The third and final meaning of Lacan’s analysis of desire as “desire of/ for the Other” is his conviction that what is desired from the Other is its very otherness, that which makes the Other stand outside of and beyond us, what Lacan identified as the object petite a of the Other. What we desire in our desire for the Other is to capture what is elusive therein. We desire the otherness of the Other: we want to be able to pin it down, appropriate its power, and make it our own. What we desire, thinks Lacan, to use words borrowed from Levinas, is to be able to reduce the otherness of the Other to the structure of the self. What he thinks we desire in this mode is to evict the Other from the “master position” and assume lordship over one’s own being—it is to appropriate the source of one’s own being within oneself, aggregating one’s disparate being into a singular solid whole. It is, to put a point on it, the desire to be able to satisfy oneself. It is these three modes of desire, all bound up together, working interdependently with one another, which Lacan thinks determine the nature of the subject’s desire and thereby the essence of its conscious life. Hence his claim that the aim of analysis must be “that the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire,” thereby fulfilling the Delphic command to know oneself.45 The problem is however, as Lacan details, that the ultimate aim of desire, regardless of how it appears, lies in the field of the big O Other. So it is, he concludes, that one’s desires are doomed to remain forever unsatisfied; for no matter how successful one may be in capturing the attention, affection, and desire of any number of singular others or achieving what it is that they find desirable, one can never achieve through these means direct access to or complete relation to that which is absolutely beyond it. So it is that the nature of desire for Lacan is to remain forever unstable, vulnerable, and distressing to the subject. It is this inescapable truth which opens up for Lacan a fundamental ethical problem for the subject.

The subversion of the subject As the product of its desires, Lacan positions the subject as inhabiting a curious ontological between: somehow less than being, but not yet nothing—a kind of becoming, or what he calls a manqué-a-etre, a “want-to-be.”46 Lorenzo Chiesa expresses the curious ontological status of the Lacanian subject well: “The Lacanian subject is a subjectivized lack, not a lacking subject or subject of impossibility, even though he presupposes the assumption and overcoming of a purely negative moment.”47 As a “subjectivized lack,” the subject for Lacan expresses itself as a kind of absence or privation, but not, curiously, of being.48 Though the subject may fall short of being, it expresses a privation within the unconscious, within the Other. Remember, that where



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“it,” the unconscious, was, according to Lacan, the I becomes/emerges. The subject thus expresses a kind of disruption and subjectivized lack not of being, thinks Lacan, but of the Other. And, this Other, he claims, as we have seen, cannot be accounted for as a simple entity—after all, “there is no Other of the Other.”49 The Other itself thus expresses for Lacan a kind of lack of being. Indeed, according to Lacan, “the gap of the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological.”50 The unconscious for him is thus “neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.”51 If the subject is to be accounted for as a privation or disruption within the field of the unconscious Other, it must be understood therefore as a disruption within that which is not-yet-being. Indeed, claims Lacan, “‘I’ am in the place from which a voice is heard clamoring ‘the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.’”52 The I is an interruption in the field of the unrealized unconscious—a kind of bubble arising out of the not-yetsomething of the Other. As a result, the ontological status of the Lacanian subject is questionable at best. Lacan puts it this way: “Being of nonbeing, that is how I as subject comes on the scene,” as the expression or manifestation of that which cannot be expressed as such.53 The Lacanian subject, far from being a consistent being, is thus, as he puts it, a “subjectwith-holes,” something porous and insubstantial. It is not-yet-something, but at the same time not-quite-nothing.54 Understood thusly, the subject is less some determinate entity for Lacan, less some present actuality, than a kind of possibility or anticipation. It is not something which appears then in the present now of existence, but something which is held out for the future as a kind of trajectory. For Lacan the subject is, in a sense, purely anticipatory and only fully realized in the “future perfect sense.”55 As Von Haute puts it, “The subject ‘is’ not of this (phenomenal) world, and in contrast with the [traditional] subject of consciousness, it must be thought of as ‘eccentric’ (ex-centric).”56 Only conceived thusly, as an eccentric/decentered “not-yet,” can we talk about the “existence” of the Lacanian subject. What’s more, the naissance of the subject from the Other through desire is not for Lacan a perfect exchange. It is forever imperfect—leaving in its wake what Slavoj Zizek has called, borrowing from Schelling, an “indivisible remainder.”57 Because the subject emerges in and through its relation with an elusive Other, to be a subject, for Lacan, is to be fractured, which Lacan represents with the symbol of the barred subject ($). To be a subject in Lacan’s world is to be what Bruce Fink has called split. “The subject is split,” he writes, “between ego and unconscious, between conscious and unconscious, between an ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language (the signifying chain) in the unconscious.”58 To be a subject, Fink concludes, is to be “nothing but this very split.”59 The emergence of the subject is effected for Lacan through this splitting. To be a subject, Lacan suggests, is thus to find oneself in this incomplete state of transition, barred equally from fully becoming itself (fully manifesting

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as a determinate entity replete in its own existence) as well as from falling back into the oblivion of non-being (collapsing back and losing itself entirely into the field of forces occupied by the Other). It is instead always to be in lack—to be in want, either of being or, alternatively, of oblivion. To be a subject is for Lacan, in a word, to desire: to desire to be, to be stable, satisfied, and at rest, or to not be, to be reabsorbed back into the totality of the Other. Nevertheless, as Philippe Von Haute argues well, though “the subject is constituted in and through the encounter with an Other,” this encounter does not fully define it, for “there is always one signifier too few to definitively determine the signified” subject.60 So it is, Lacan concludes, that desire, and through it the nature of subjectivity, is problematic. One’s relation to the Other, he maintains, is far from easy or uncomplicated. To the contrary, for Lacan the ontological status of the subject makes the Other a problem for and to it, one which has the potential of overwhelming subjectivity and leading to all sorts of pathologies and evils. The power of the Other is thus, he concludes, something which the subject must learn to regulate in his or her life—it is something which the subject must protect itself against. Such is the task of ethics according to Lacan.

The Other/Thing Since according to Lacan the Other is “first of all faceless,” as Gondek put it, less a determinate entity than a field of forces, it is not an appearance to which the subject can address itself directly, nor is it something which can ever be attained nor possessed entirely by the subject. Thus, though it operates as the ground of the being qua desire for the subject, its absolute separation from the subject ensures that the subject will never be satisfied nor complete. This is the foundation of a problem which haunts the nature of subjectivity for Lacan. Where Levinas wants to maintain that the Other, as a singular person, comes as a benison, and is someone who, as we have seen, comes in “peace” to “found and justify” the subject’s freedom, Lacan readily admits that the subject’s relation to the Other qua absolute ground poses a profound and inescapable temptation, threat, and irritation. The Other is for Lacan a thorn in the flesh of subjectivity, one which, if not dealt with properly, can lead to pathology, destruction, and what he somewhat surprisingly terms evil.61 As a result, the Other according to Lacan must never be seen as a benevolent master. Instead, it must be acknowledged as something analogous to Schelling’s numinous absolute: a force which is terrifying in its potential power to disrupt and collapse the entirety of subjective existence.62 It is for this reason that Lacan’s analysis is so useful to the project at hand. Not only does he, like Levinas, recognize that the Other manifests to the subject as an absolute force, one which functions as the foundation for ethical life, he moreover recognizes that such a force poses a inexorable danger to the life of the subject. Indeed, it was in recognition of



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this fact that, as we will see more clearly momentarily, that Lacan sought to develop a model of ethical life which could resist and regulate the influence of the Other in the life of the subject. Only through such a regulation, he suggested, could some semblance of a good life be lived To expound upon the potential danger inherent to the nature of the “absolute Other of the subject” Lacan drew upon a term which he borrowed from the Heideggerian oeuvre: das Ding, the Thing.63 The Thing, for Lacan, represents “whatever is [perceived as] open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.”64 It thus expresses for him whatever a subject aims to attain in its desire—the object a of the Other. As such, he thinks the Thing can “present itself paradoxically as the rule of a certain Gut or good,” as the promise of the fulfillment and satisfaction of the subject.65 In truth, however, he assures us, the subject “cannot stand the extreme good that das Ding may bring him.”66 In fact, he claims, the more a subject pursues das Ding as a good, the more that subject will come into contact with some evil.67 As a result, Lacan concludes, “everything about it that is articulated as good or bad divides the subject in connection with it, and it does so irrepressibly, irremediably, and no doubt with relation to the same Thing. [Thus] there is not a good and bad object, there is good and bad, and then there is the Thing,” which operates as the absolute ground of both.68 The Thing, according to Lacan, as the absolute ground of subjective existence, gives rise equally to the possibilities of good and evil alike. In an attempt to explain the terrible ambiguity of the Thing as the aim of desire, Lacan summons a familiar image: that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity?69 The Thing, like the face of Harpo Marx, Lacan thinks, can never be resolved on one side or the other of ethical evaluation: never wholly good nor fully corrupt. As the absolute ground and aim of desire, Lacan thinks, it has the power of motivating within us both “extreme perversity” and profound good. Therefore, he concludes, despite our tendencies to perceive in it some absolute good, the Other, qua Thing or object of desire, should never be mistaken to be a “sovereign good,” before which a subject should bow and scrape.70 To the contrary, he insists, it is incumbent upon the subject to see in the Other a “disruptive” and “nauseating” force which one must learn to protect oneself against.71 Such a task, he argues, is the aim of ethics. It was for this reason that Lacan declares “the status of the unconscious” qua absolute Other or Thing to be “ethical.”72

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The ethics of psychoanalysis Lacan began his reformulation of ethics in light of the perverse power of the Other by first redefining the nature of guilt and transgression. According to Lacan, “From an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one’s desire [for the Other].”73 For Lacan, in the absence of any immediately given absolute good, the only universal and actual absolute upon which one can ground ethical judgment legitimately is one’s desire for the absolutely Other/Thing which stands “beyond-of-the-signified.”74 The Other, as the ground of the subject’s existence, is for Lacan the only accessible ground for ethical decision making.75 As such, ethical judgment can only be mediated in regard to one’s desire for and relation to the Other/Thing, according to Lacan. Hence his claim that the only ethical question one can ask is whether or not one has been faithful to the elusive nature of one’s desire. The fundamental question of ethics is for him this: whether or not you have “acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?”76 When answering this question, it is essential to remember that for Lacan the Other from which these desires flow is not good. To “act in conformity” with one’s desire does not mean for him then to pursue the Other wholly, nor attempt to satisfy oneself in acquisition of the Thing. To “act in conformity” is not for Lacan to affirm the value of the Other as the object and aim of desires, nor is it to cede to its authority, comply with its demands, or confess its supremacy. To the contrary, to “act in conformity” with one’s desires is for Lacan to acknowledge, in both intention and action, the ambiguous power of the Other as the absolute ground of existence. It is to recognize that while the Other conditions the possibility of one’s existence, it also threatens to disrupt or overturn that existence, casting it into oblivion. As such, the ethical status of the Other as absolute must be acknowledged, thinks Lacan, in line with Schelling, as the potentiality for both good and evil. Good and evil are not absolute terms in their own right, he therefore concludes. Instead, they appear to be relative terms, each defined in relation to the Other as the sole absolute.77 They are modalities, he thinks, of one’s comportment in relation to the Other/Thing as the object and aim of desire. The goal of ethical deliberation is thus for Lacan not to ask “How can I faithfully attain the Other as the object/aim of my desires?” It is instead to ask “How can I relate appropriately to the aim of my desires, to the Other/Thing?” It is to ask, in other words, “How can I maintain a proper distance and proximity to the Other, neither giving in to it too fully, nor giving up on it entirely?” This is what it means for Lacan to desire rightly: to relate correctly to the Other/Thing; or, to renew the metaphor evoked by Schelling of the sun as the absolute source of life, it is neither to pull oneself too far from the Other nor to draw too close to it.



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In recognition of the need to define a proper distance from and relation to the Other/Thing, Lacan posited his one ethical maxim, which he repeats throughout his Ethics of Psychoanalysis: ne pas céder sur son désir—don’t give up on nor give in to your desire.78 For Lacan, only when one has acted in accordance with this maxim, when one has maintained an appropriate relation to the Other as the object/aim of one’s desire, neither giving in to its demands nor giving up on its allure, can one say that the good has been preserved and one has acted well. On the other hand, Lacan reasons, when one fails to relate to the Other appropriately, either giving in to the temptation it presents or giving up on its elusiveness, evil must necessarily result. Lacan explored the effects of such evils in the form of the various destructive pathologies which could result from a subject’s improper relation to the Other: neurosis on the one hand, which he thinks occurs when a subject has given up on its desires, and psychosis on the other hand, which he thinks results from a subject’s having given in too fully to its desires.79 It is worth addressing each of these pathologies briefly in order to understand further the exigency of Lacan’s formulation of ethics as a mode of resistance to the Other. On the one hand, appearing as the order, structure, and regulatory conditions for existence, the Other/Thing can manifest to the subject as what Lacan terms “the Law” governing desire—those prohibitions which set the limit case of desire, saying to desire “thus far shall you come and no further.”80 As moral law, the Other/Thing operates, he thinks, to set the regulatory conditions and operational boundaries of desire, circumscribing its nature and defining the limits which constitute it. As such, they are essential, he argues, to the formulation and maintenance of desire, and with it subjectivity. Unfortunately, at the same time, as we have seen, the absolute nature of the Other/Thing lends it a certain numinous power. As such, the moral law, though originally nothing more than the borders which define the limits of desire and subjectivity, all too quickly, according to Lacan becomes like a noose restraining the subject, cinching ever tighter the boundaries defining permissible action for the subject.81 So it is, Lacan argues, that the moral law can invert into its opposite: Show[ing] itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueler and crueler even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of our impulses or desires. In short, the insatiable character of this moral conscience, its paradoxical cruelty, transforms it within the individual into a parasite that is fed by the satisfactions accorded it.82 What ultimately results, argues Lacan, is a pathological “self-hate,” accompanied by the temptation to give up entirely on one’s desires, and subsequently given in to the infinitely cruel demands of the Other as a

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moral absolute.83 The result is what Lacan terms neurosis.84 So it is that we discover, Lacan claims, that “from the beginning,” neurosis operates in the “ethical dimension where it is, in effect, situated.”85 And, “what happens once the limit is exceeded,” once the moral law expands to the point of neurotic obsession within the subject, Lacan asks? “The [subject] is not as such capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal. Instead it is scattered and diffused.”86 In this way, Lacan warns, the very Thing which functions as the object and cause of subjective existence as desire becomes part of a “neurotic apparatus” which threatens to destroy the subject.87 It has to be said that something of this attempt seems to be at the heart of Levinas’s analysis of the ethical demands of the Other presented in Chapters 2 and 3. Only in Lacan do we begin to see in this acquiescence to the absolute Other something dangerous and perverse. The potentiality of the Other qua moral absolute to invert into that which gives rise to the neurotic evil must therefore be resisted and countered, thinks Lacan. The question is this: Will it [the I] or will it not submit itself to the duty that it feels within like a stranger, beyond, at another level? Should it or should it not submit itself to the half-unconscious, paradoxical, and morbid command of the superego, whose jurisdiction is moreover revealed increasingly as the analytical exploration goes forward and the patent sees that he is committed to its path?88 Lacan’s answer to this question is a vehement “No!” Indeed, he insists, that for the sake of its survival and well-being a subject’s “true duty [is] to oppose that command.”89 So it is that the first meaning of Lacan’s ethical maxim ne pas céder sur son désir becomes apparent. One must not give up on one’s desire! One must not yield to the temptation to give in entirely to the restrictions and demands of the Other as a moral absolute. Instead, one must cultivate an active resistance to the temptation it presents. One must develop the strength to say, “No, I will not yield my desires nor my existence to you!” But, this response must also be tempered, according to Lacan, for the other side of his ethical maxim is to not give in too fully to the temptation presented in the Other to actualize the object of desire either. According to Lacan, while “whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel”; at the same time, “whoever enters the path of uninhibited pleasure (jouissance), in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or other, encounters [other] obstacles,” obstacles which, Lacan assures us, “may be traced back to a single root,” namely, the absolutely Other.90 These obstacles are, for Lacan, the loss of subjectivity, only here threatened from a different direction, from within. When one gives in too fully to his or her own desires, Lacan thinks, the evil of psychosis necessarily results.91 According to Lacan, psychosis is



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the result of an attempt to transgress completely the moral law established by the Other, which limits and structures existence. It is, in other words, the attempt to live without limits—to become the absolute master of one’s own being through the absolute satisfaction of one’s desires.92 What such an attempt ultimately aims at, Lacan thinks, is an attempt to envelop the Other/Thing within oneself—to absorb the Other into one’s own being and thereby “fill up” the lack (manqué) which constitutes subjectivity. The result of such a transgression of the natural limits which constitute subjectivity is, for Lacan, another form of evil.93 Such an attempt is exemplified by Lacan throughout his work in the actions and writings of the Marquis de Sade. According to Lacan, “Sade lays out a vision of Nature as a vast system of attraction and repulsion of evil by evil,” which he in turn attempts to “assimilate[e]” into himself through the “integration into a fundamentally wicked nature.”94 What Lacan sees in Sade is someone who has given in too fully to his desires—someone who has attempted to shed himself of the inherent frustrations and limitations of the subjective life of desire and, in turn, to absorb and integrate into himself all that he perceives himself to lack.95 In his attempts to cast off any and every limit put on his desires, Sade represents for Lacan the psychotic subject par excellence—the ultimate expression of one form of evil. The result, of course, was Sade’s collapse into absolute meaninglessness, violence, and chaos. Such are the fruits of failing to relate properly to the Other as the absolute ground of existence. So it is, Lacan insists, that just as much as one must not give up on one’s desires, falling into a neurotic self-abnegating totalitarian vigilance, neither should one give in too fully to one’s desires, resulting in a psychotic collapse of sanity. Both excesses are for Lacan the root of determinate evil in the life of the subject and the world as a whole. As such, Lacan insists, the task of ethics must be to learn to relate appropriately to the absolutely Other by cultivating an ethics of resistance which “keeps us a long way from” the uninhibited pleasure promised to us by our desires without giving up on them entirely.96 Only in this way can the good be pursued, according to Lacan: by neither giving in to nor giving up on desire. By acknowledging and maintaining healthy limits in one’s relation to the Other and the self. For Lacan, ethics consists in learning how to desire just the right amount. It consists in learning both how to protect and to pursue that desire appropriately, by neither giving up nor giving in to the overwhelming power possessed by the absolutely Other. It was on this basis that Lacan defined psychoanalytic treatment as the first step in the development of a kind of ethical discipline. To be ethical, Lacan thought, requires learning to embrace and maintain the precarious and vulnerable position one finds oneself in in relation to the absolutely Other. Indeed, this is for him the goal of psychoanalysis: to cultivate a good life through the development of a proper relationship to the Other in one’s desires. In order to achieve a good life, Lacan thinks, one must cultivate the strength necessary to resist the temptation the Other will always pose. This is the aim of psychoanalysis,

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for Lacan: to learn to say “no” to the Other, to resist the temptation to neurotically obey its commands entirely without giving in to the temptation to psychotically reject its limitations wholesale. Only by learning to resist the threat posed by the Other through such a no-saying, Lacan argues, can the subject hope to establish some good, both for itself and for others. In this way, Lacan’s work provides a modality in which we may envision the possibility of an absolutely grounded ethics as resistance to the Other—one which pursues the good by way of a diligent “nay-saying” of the commands of the Other. What we have in Lacan’s ethics is, in other words, a model of demonic resistance which, while acknowledging the power of the absolute in the Other, refuses to affirm it as a good. But how might such a naysaying ethics of resistance be practically cultivated within the life of a subject? To answer this question we will turn in the next and final chapter to the work of Michel Foucault.

CHAPTER FIVE

Carving a space for freedom: Michel Foucault and the ethics of resistance

Michel Foucault and the exigency of ethical resistance Through our analysis, in the previous chapter, of Lacan’s account of the birth of subjectivity in relation to the Other, we discovered finally a means by which we may reconceive the possibility of an absolutely grounded ethics as a mode of resistance. As such, the task which we first endeavored to complete at the start of this volume nears its completion. It should be clear at this point how, through an ethics of resistance grounded in the absolute sovereignty of the Other over the subject, operating as the condition for its existence and ethical concern, we were able to escape both the limitations of post-Kantian ethical philosophy as well as the vicissitudes of the Western philosophical tradition which has treated the absolute as a morally unambiguous force, one to be worshiped and obeyed. As we have made clear, only an ethics which is absolutely grounded upon the demands of the Other but which nevertheless establishes the good in dynamic resistance to those demands is capable of addressing adequately the very pressing social and political problems which confront us today. Only an ethics which says, “No, I will not go along easily with the logic of the absolute, nor serve complicity in its projects. I will resist,” is capable of responding to the ethical exigencies of the world without giving in to extremes or giving up entirely. Without such an absolutely grounded model of ethical resistance, ethical deliberation all too easily collapses into either nihilism on the one hand

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or, even more terribly, gives way to the logic of the absolute on the other hand—a logic which, as we have seen, is capable of justifying and even demanding the extermination of self and others, in a word, evil. This much, I hope, is clear by now. What is not yet clear, however, is how such an ethics of resistance could be cultivated within the life of the subject—how, in other words, one could cultivate within oneself the strength to say no to the Other, to resist the lure of the absolute without giving up on it entirely. To answer this question, we will now turn to the late work of Michel Foucault. Toward the end of his life Foucault focused increasingly on what he considered the myriad sociopolitical dangers which beset modern subjectivity—dangers which, he suggests, threaten to crush its freedom and give rise to tyranny. Note that in exploring the root of these dangers it is not Foucault’s conviction that there is something particularly precarious about the structures of modern life. That is to say, he does not think that what threatens the subject in the modern condition is any more treacherous than what it faced in any other historical epoch or cultural framework. To the contrary, according to Foucault, “everything is dangerous. . . . I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger”—to determine what uniquely threatens the subject today, where it finds itself.1 It is Foucault’s goal in his last works to identify what he sees as these “main dangers” which are unique to the modern subject, to diagnose their origins, and to articulate a set of ethical practices capable of helping the modern subject to evade, resist, and sustain itself against those dangers. This is the chief aim of his last major works. According to Foucault, in these works “the most certain of all philosophical problems, is the problem of the present time, and of who we are in this very moment.”2 But in order to understand this problem, he insists, one must first endeavor to understand the origins of the present time, the ancestry of “who we are in this very moment.” Only thusly, Foucault argues, will we be able to understand fully and thereby address appropriately the singular ethical dangers which beset contemporary life in the West. This sort of investigation into “the different forms by which the individual has been lead to constitute him or herself as a subject” Foucault famously names genealogy.3

The uses of genealogy For Foucault genealogical inquiry must be distinguished from historical inquiry. Unlike history, Foucault argues, the goal of genealogy is not “a quest for [the] ‘origins.’”4 It “does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity,” he argues, nor does it attempt to trace “the evolution of a species.”5 What a meticulous genealogy aims to do instead, he writes, is “to identify the accidents, . . . the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.”6 As such, Foucault claims, what is revealed in a genealogical



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analysis of the modern condition is distinct from what is maintained by the synchronic story stitched together from a thorough accounting of world history. Where history presents the modern condition as the full flowering of a series of causally connected occurrences, Foucault argues, genealogy reveals the modern condition to be nothing more than the product of a series of “accidents,” or, what he calls elsewhere, “a particular stage of forces.”7 What a genealogical analysis of the present moment accomplishes over and above historical survey is, he thinks, to force a break with the illusory narrative that contemporary life is somehow a natural thing: the expression of some global destiny or world spirit. By contrast, Foucault thinks that what a rigorous genealogy reveals is precisely the opposite. It reveals the fact that contemporary existence is not the blossom of history. It is not natural. Its happenings and events cannot be credited to some inner spiritual trajectory or biological root. To the contrary, Foucault thinks, what a detailed genealogy of the modern condition reveals is his conviction that everything about the modern subject is unnatural: little more than the unintended consequence of a series of apparently arbitrary transformations within the sociopolitical sphere. In other words, the modern condition is for him nothing more than a by-product of sociopolitical forces which happen outside of and beyond its reach—on the hither side of its own history and experience. In this regard, the picture of modern subjectivity that Foucault’s genealogy grants us is not unlike the one presented in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. For both the modern subject is the cultural product of forces which lie radically outside of it, and which are diffused within a network of cultural and political exchanges.8 In this regard, in many ways what Foucault’s genealogy accomplishes, to borrow language from Lacan, is to reveal how the subject is structured by, though, and in the Other. Indeed, Foucault himself confesses as much, declaring that for him the principal aim of genealogical research is to reveal “the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” and to “await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.”9 Where Lacan uses psychoanalysis to “unmask” this Other within the heart of modern subjectivity, Foucault employs genealogy. But despite their methodological difference, both equally aim at revealing what they consider to be the absolute ground of modern subjectivity, namely the Other. Moreover, both seek to expose this ground in order to diagnosis and address properly the ethical dilemmas and problems which beset contemporary subjectivity.10 Indeed, according to Foucault “the goal of my work during the last twenty years has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.”11 It is perhaps due to this accounting of the birth of the modern subject in and through the Other of social and political history that Foucault’s work has been so often misunderstood outside of philosophy. As an inquiry into the grounding conditions of modern subjectivity, Foucault’s

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genealogies tarry essentially in the sociopolitical. This does not mean however that the aim of his work, as it is all too often portrayed, is to reveal the structures of sociopolitical power. To the contrary, according to Foucault, “it is not power, but the subject which is the general theme of my research.”12 Analyses of sociopolitical expressions of power are for him merely a means of unmasking the “face of the other” which structures and gives birth to the modern expression of subjectivity and thereby to expose what he saw as the root of its problems and ethical concerns. According to Foucault, “My problem has always been . . . the problem of the relationship between subject and truth. .  .  . The problem of power/knowledge, is not [therefore] for me the fundamental problem but an instrument allowing the analysis . . . of the problem of relationships between subject and games of truth.”13 “What I [really] wanted to know,” Foucault concludes, “was how the subject constituted [it]self, in such a such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc.”14 And the ultimate aim of this inquiry is for him to reveal the origins of the problems which threaten the nature of the modern subject. Foucault’s principal aim then is not political but, as will become increasingly clear, ethical.

The modern subject—Governmentality, normalization, and bio-power As his research progressed, Foucault increasingly identified the origins of the specific “games of truth” and “applications of power” which gave birth to modern subjectivity with a number of revolutionary changes which occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of Europe and the Americas. What changed at this time, as Foucault meticulously documents in Volume 1 of his History of Sexuality as well as his 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collége de France, was the way in which political power, which up until that point had been attached to a single sovereign ruler, a king, queen, or prince, for example, who maintained absolute mastery over his or her subjects by right, specifically “the right to take life or let live,” became democratized, displaced, and diffused, among the polis.15 What such democratic revolutions wrought, argues Foucault, was not the eradication of the power of the sovereign, but its displacement and distribution among the collective body politic.16 This dispersion of power, Foucault claims, had a number of unintentional consequences for how political subjects related to themselves, to power, and to others. For example, as Foucault details, as a result of this dispersion of power, the subject no longer related to the idea of sovereignty vertically, as if it came from a singular person situated above and beyond it, but horizontally, in and through its relations to other, apparently equal, subjects: the neighbor,



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colleague, family member, etc. This transformation in the location, direction, and locus of sovereign power gave rise to what Foucault eventually calls modern governmentality, a neologism expressing for him the guiding “governmental rationalities” effected by the democratic revolutions of the modern age.17 For Foucault, it was the birth of these new forms of governmentality which conditioned and shaped the nature of modern subjectivity and the ethical dangers which beset it. It is therefore essential, Foucault thinks, that one understands the structures of modern governmentality in order to diagnose the modern condition and address the problems which arise from it. Such an understanding begins for him with the recognition that, contrary to its expressed aims, the effect of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not the collapse of sovereign power but its explosion. Indeed, Foucault famously argues, while the kings of Europe may have been dethroned by these revolutions, “the king’s head still hasn’t been cut off.”18 Instead, what was accomplished, he thinks, was merely the transference of the king’s crown: from the head of the king to the psyches of individual members of the polis. This transformation in the nature of sovereign power was for Foucault the real ground of modern governmentality and the birth of the modern condition and its vicissitudes. For, far from ending the tyranny of the kings and queens of Europe, what these revolutions unintentionally effected, according to Foucault, was to make the power of the sovereign all the more pervasive, indeed inescapable, and therefore all the more insidious. Foucault spends the bulk of his later works detailing the way in which the modern subject, acting as the partial inheritor of sovereign power, took over the responsibilities of the sovereign with devastating severity. By Foucault’s read, where the subject of classical governance once looked to one sovereign in order to evaluate, regulate, or determine the course of his or her actions, the modern subject, as the inheritor of that power, is forced to rely upon itself to evaluate, adjudicate, and determine the course, meaning, and value of its own life and to turn to others to examine itself in light of the power it now holds. This task results, thinks Foucault, in a supererogation of the scope and rule of reason within the life of the subject and with it the power which others hold over it. It was for this reason that Foucault defines the true “spirit of modernity” as “a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.”19 According to Foucault, as the inheritor of sovereign power, the modern subject must rely on its use of reason and the judgment of the polis in order to govern itself. As a result, far from freeing its self from the absolute power of the sovereign, what the birth of modern governmentality effected, according to Foucault, was an amplification of the power of the other over the subject, only now the other beside me, not above me. Foucault calls this new expression of power at the heart of modern governmentality normalization.20 “Normalization,” Foucault writes, is “one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age.”21

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According to Foucault, normalization works through the erection of certain commonly held “truths” concerning the nature of the world, human nature, the good, and so on—“truths” which operate as normative guidelines structuring the subject’s relation to itself and others, moderating and directing what constitutes appropriate behavior, or a good life. One of the principal ways such “truths” were erected in the modern age, as Foucault details, was through the birth of the so-called social sciences. These sciences operated by producing a form of certified knowledge defining what is good, true, or right—knowledges which the modern subject could use to measure itself. So it was that the modern subject no longer turned to the church or the state to determine how it ought to live, but turned instead to the academy for instruction, an academy which alleged to do nothing more than accurately observe and reflect back the habits and customs of the polis. Operating as the locus of information on the nature of the polis, Foucault details how the social sciences became, perhaps unintentionally, the gatekeepers of normativity within modern governmentality. To make this process clearer, think of how logic today, as a subdiscipline of philosophical inquiry, works normatively to define what is or is not considered a rational chain of inferences or an appropriate mode of deduction. By defining what constitutes a good or rational argument, logicians effectively define not only the nature of rational thought itself; they further define what constitutes a valid argument and thereby what can be considered true. And yet, despite the obvious prescriptivity of this project, logicians will defend their work tirelessly as purely descriptive, nothing more than an accurate accounting of the underlying laws of language and thought itself. In this way, what they take to be a purely descriptive reflection of the inner workings of language functions effectively to prescribe and circumscribe the boundaries defining a good thought from a bad one, rational argumentation from irrational rhetoric, and ultimately truth from falsity. Likewise, thinks Foucault, the modern social sciences, by attempting to merely describe the everyday conditions of modern life, nevertheless functioned to prescribe what constituted the limits and constraints of a healthy person. In this way, argues Foucault, the social sciences emerged as the new source of normative power in modern governmentality, defining through their apparent descriptions the boundaries which circumscribe rational and appropriate behavior. In this way, Foucault concludes, the power of the sovereign inherited by the subject in modern governmentality became localized within what he calls the power/knowledge dialectic established by the modern social sciences.22 According to Foucault, power/knowledge discourses of this nature are the true inheritor of the absolute power of the sovereign. As a result, he argues, it is the modern social sciences which ultimately institute the standards of conduct and appropriate parameters of behavior to which the modern subject turned in order to determine how to govern itself and its relationship with others. This is for Foucault one of the



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two main sources of the modern condition and the subsequent problems which beset it. Alongside this transformation in the location of the regulatory power of the sovereign effected by modern governmentality, Foucault identifies a simultaneous transformation in the aim of power. According to Foucault, where the classical sovereign exercised his or her power by dint of the sword, under threat of death, the power/knowledge relations established in and maintained through normalization functioned in the name of life— in the alleged attempt to “exert a positive influence on life.”23 Indeed, according to Foucault, one of the principal differences which distinguished modern governmentality from classical sovereignty was the emergence of an “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life”24—a management “whose highest function was .  .  . to invest life through and through.”25 Foucault calls this transformation in the aim of sovereign power in modern governmentality bio-power or bio-politics.26 Foucault defines the apparent aim of this new bio-politics as “on behalf of the existence of everyone.”27 What it signified was a transformation in the aim of political rule: from absolute obedience to absolute enjoyment, productivity, and increase. What resulted from this transformation in the aim of government, Foucault shows, was the birth of a new regulatory principle in the life of the modern subject. According to Foucault, in bio-politics the subject no longer regulates itself out of fear that failure to do so could result in some punishment. Instead, he argues, the subject regulates itself in order to “live better,” “stay healthier,” “be more productive,” and so on. According to Foucault, this transformation in the aim and regulatory principle of modern governmentality infuses every social and political system of the West today.28 As a result, he thinks, the experience of subjectivity in the modern Western world has become ordered according to some obscurely defined ideal of what constitutes a good and productive life, an ideal established by the particular bio-political regime within which one lives.29 This biopolitical ordering of the subject’s life is, according to Foucault, the second of the two main sources of the modern condition. Between normalization and bio-power, each working with its other, the modern condition is born and with it the particular dangers of the contemporary time.

The trouble with modern subjectivity and the ethics of resistance To illustrate how normalization and bio-power work together to create the modern subject and expose how they together pose a terrible danger to that subject, Foucault famously analogizes modern governmentality to the operation of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison. As Foucault details in Discipline and Punish, Bentham proposes that his Panopticon would work

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by creating the illusion for its prisoners of constant surveillance.30 In this way, Bentham hypothesizes, the design of the Panopticon would displace the regulatory power usually exercised by a guard in a prison onto the prisoner him or herself. Not knowing whether he or she is being observed, Bentham’s suggests that his prisoners would begin to regulate their own behavior on the off chance that they indeed were. In this way, he argues, the prisoner would slowly assume responsibility for his or her own actions and conduct him or herself according to what he or she presumed to be the right course of action, regardless of whether or not some external guard was present to enforce it. In this way, Bentham suggests, the prisoner would become his or her own guard (normalization). What’s interesting, Bentham suggests, is that this assumption of responsibility by the prisoner for his or her own conduct would not come from a fear of punishment. After all, who is to say whether there is a guard there or not? Instead, he argues, the prisoner’s regulation of his or her behavior would be driven by what he or she came to believe was in his or her own interest, as a way of ensuring a happy and incident-free interment (bio-power). In this way, Bentham concludes, the panoptic prison would not only cost less, guards being an optional and only occasionally necessary expenditure; but, by forcing its detainees to assume responsibility for their own behavior, Bentham believed that his panoptic prison would also ultimately lead to a more complete rehabilitation of the moral conscience of its subjects. Similarly, Foucault thinks that the subject of modern governmentality, while apparently free from the tyrannical surveillance of a sovereign power, assumes responsibility for itself, conducting itself according to what it believes to be its own interests (bio-power). This it accomplishes, he argues, by measuring itself against its peers, as documented by the social sciences, internalizing from their conclusions codes of conduct which can be internalized in order to self-regulate (normalization). But, as with Bentham’s prisoners, Foucault thinks that the apparent freedom of modern governmentality is really nothing more than a new form of internment and domination—one effected through the transformation of sovereign power, from without to within.31 What is actually accomplished in the changeover of administration of power effected by modern governmentality, Foucault therefore concludes, is nothing more than a new form of political incarceration—a situation in which the modern subject operates as its own jailor. It is for this reason that Foucault famously defines “the soul,” understood as the rational conscience of modern subjectivity, as “the effect and instrument of a political anatomy” and the ultimate “prison of the body.”32 Herein lies the core of the danger which confronts modern subjectivity according to Foucault—the problem which prompted him to pursue so diligently toward the end of his life a new kind of ethics. The problem, he thinks, is this: while this internalization of the power of the sovereign is what establishes and defines the nature of modern subjectivity, and should thereby be deemed productive and inescapable, it also leaves that subject



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with no privacy, with no space outside of the evaluating gaze of the other. As a result, Foucault thinks, the modern subject finds itself given over to a kind of hypervigilance, forever examining itself and putting itself under ever-increasing scrutiny and inquiry, fearful that somehow its actions, or indeed even its thoughts, may be inaccurate, inappropriate, abnormal, or bad. Caught within a gaze from which it can never escape, the modern subject finds itself with increasingly less room to maneuver—increasingly less freedom to simply be itself. What is ultimately at risk in the structures of modern governmentality, Foucault concludes like Lacan, is a total collapse of the freedom of the subject, and with it the very structures of subjectivity itself. This is the threat of what Foucault calls “a state of total domination.”33 In order to oppose this threat Foucault proposes a reexamination of the nature, powers, and aim of ethics. What is needed to confront the unique problems posed by the structures of modern governmentality, thinks Foucault, is what Johanna Oksala has rightly called an ethics of resistance.34 The aim of Foucault’s later work is to articulate precisely such an ethics: one capable of empowering the subject to kick against the threat of total domination inherent within the structures of its existence. Such an ethics, he argues there, “consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.”35 According to Foucault, the primary task of philosophical inquiry today should be the cultivation of precisely such an ethics of resistance: the aim of which is “not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are,” to refuse the latent threat of domination inherent in the structures of modern governmentality.36 Indeed, he argues, “philosophy [must be] precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they present themselves. ”37 And, philosophers can only accomplish this task, he suggests, by “keep[ing] watch over the excessive power of political rationality.”38 As such, Foucault thinks, the new goal of philosophical ethics should be “to attack not so much ‘such or such’ an intuition of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power.”39 Instead, its aim must be to create a means by which the modern subject can resist the techniques and forms of power which both define it and threaten to overwhelm it. This, he thinks, is the principal task of contemporary ethics. As Foucault writes in his introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, “the major enemy, the strategic adversary” of philosophical ethics “is fascism .  .  . And, not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”40 The goal of Foucault’s later work is to articulate an ethics capable of resisting this “fascism” which is “in our heads” as the result of normalization and biopower—an ethics capable of defining what he calls a “space of freedom.”41

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Note that according to Foucault this “space of freedom” can never be complete. The aim of his ethics is not a total mastery of the self or perfect autonomy. According to Foucault, there is not, after all, some pure or true nature of subjectivity outside the bounds of sociopolitical power to which one could aspire to be liberated.42 Nor, he argues, should we “think of freedom as a universal that is gradually realized over time”—some “universal which is particularized in time and geography. Freedom is not a white surface with more or less numerous black spaces here and there and from time to time.”43 Instead, the freedom sought by Foucault’s ethics of resistance is “[nothing] other—and this is already a great deal—than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is given by the ‘even more’ freedom demanded.”44 The aim of his ethics of resistance is not therefore to escape the power/ knowledge discourses which absolutely ground the nature of the modern subject. Instead, he argues, the aim of an ethics of resistance is to cultivate a relationship to power which is capable of warding off domination. His goal is to articulate a means whereby the “relationship of self to self” would not imprison the modern subject, but empower it.45 In other words, the principal aim of Foucault’s ethics is to define a means whereby the modern subject could use the very conditions which condition it to resist the potential threat those conditions pose and thereby to taste, in small but significant ways, some modicum of freedom from the overwhelming and totalizing gaze of the Other present in normalization and bio-power. In order to effect such an inversion of the trajectory of modern governmentality, Foucault aims to creatively reimagine the use of precisely the kind of power/knowledge practices essential to its formation. The aim of this creative reimagining is to transmute the function of power/knowledge practices within a subject’s life, transforming them from a tool of domination to a source of sustenance. By recasting power/knowledge discourses in this way, Foucault suggests, the modern subject could employ the techniques essential to modern governmentality in order “to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of [the] kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”46 In order to help his readers imagine such “new form[s] of subjectivity,” Foucault draws upon to a number of philosophical and literary sources, most notably classical Greek philosophy, where, he suggests, the conception of ethics as a form of epimeleia heautou or “care for the self” serves as a valuable resource for reconsidering the aim of ethical practice in the modern world.47

Ethics as care for the self Foucault’s interest in classical Greek philosophy is not borne from some ill-founded conviction that they had somehow “gotten it right” or that somewhere within their work lay the final solution to the problems of



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modern governmentality. To the contrary, Foucault insists that “you cannot find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by another people.”48 “There is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period,” he thinks.49 We should not therefore see in classical Greek philosophy “anything to get back to” or resurrect wholesale.50 Instead, what Foucault thinks we can find in the Greeks is “a useful idea”—an idea which he thinks could be employed in the modern world to resist the threat of total domination.51 The core of this “useful idea” for Foucault is the insight “that it is not at all necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific reasoning,”—that it is not at all necessary, in other words, to make ethical judgments about what is right and wrong in reference to power/knowledge discourse.52 What the modern subject can borrow from the Greeks, Foucault thinks, is the possibility of reimagining ethical evaluation outside the strictures of normalization and bio-politics. In this way, Foucault argues, the subject could reenvisions ethical practice as “a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with[out] an authoritarian system, [without] a disciplinary structure.”53 What is useful in the Greek conception of ethics qua care for the self is for Foucault, in other words, the presentation of the radical possibility of reconceiving of ethical judgment “as a problem of personal choice,” a problem which invites a subject into a deeper relationship to itself, rather than dividing it from itself and subjugating it to an alien accounting system.54 Through a reevaluation of the aims and methods of classical Greek ethical philosophy, Foucault presents a number of means by which the modern subject might resist the conditions of its very existence in such a way that it is no longer threatened by its very ground (the power/knowledge discourses of the Other), but empowered and sustained by it. Such a use of ethics, Foucault argues, could radically reframe the nature of modern subjectivity. And this, according to Johanna Oksala, is the ultimate aim of Foucault’s ethics. “Care for the self as a practice of freedom,” she writes, “means challenging, contesting, and changing the constitutive conditions of subjectivity as well as its actual forms. It means exploring possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new fields of experiences, pleasures, and relationships, and modes of living and thinking.”55 Such a conception of ethics as a means of sustaining the self against the threat of its absolute ground is for Foucault what has been missing from the other liberatory projects in the Western condition.56 “They need an ethics,” he contends, “but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics based on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on.”57 What the Greek idea of ethics provides by contrast, he suggests, is a means of reconceiving ethical judgment freed from the stringent requisites established by normalization and bio-power. In the Greek conception of ethics as a mode of care for the self Foucault discovers “an example of an ethical experience which implies a very strong connection between pleasure and desire,” an example, he argues, which is essential to the modern subject

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in its attempt to resist the threat of total domination posed by the conditions of its existence.58 Defined as “a relation of self to self” aimed at managing desire and pleasure, Foucault invites his readers to reimagine the project of ethics as the development of an “aesthetics of existence.”59 Imagine, he entreats us, the aim of ethics as the amelioration of the experience of subjectivity—a practice which made existence more beautiful and pleasurable. Reconceived in this way, the goal of ethics would become “to create ourselves as a work of art”—its function not critique, but creation.60 What one discovers by remaining with the Greeks ethics as an “aesthetics of existence,” Foucault writes, is the discovery that “one does not have to take up a position or role towards oneself as that of a judge pronouncing a verdict.”61 Instead, he thinks, “one can comport oneself toward oneself in the role of a technician, of a craftsman, of an artist, who from time to time stops working, examines what he [or she] is doing, reminds himself [or herself] of the rules of his [or her] art, and compares these rules with what he [or she] has achieved thus far.”62 It is this “idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art,” which Foucault claims is inherent to the classical Greek conception of ethics, that he thinks could be useful to the modern subject in its attempt to resist the threat of total domination. Through an appropriation of this idea, he argues, the modern subject can use ethical judgment and practice not to restrict its freedom but to increase its pleasure.63

Technologies of care Reconceived of as an aesthetics, Foucault sees the goal of modern ethics to be the cultivation of a set of disciplines, practices, or techniques/technologies appropriated from the history of philosophy which a modern subject could use in order to craft anew its relation to itself. Articulated as a set of practices, not merely postulates, Foucault thinks it is imperative that the modern subject think of ethics as “a real activity and not just an attitude.”64 To populate a potential set of practices (techne tou biou) capable of helping the modern subject resist and live beautifully, Foucault draws widely from the history of Western philosophy and literature.65 One of Foucault’s main sources of inspiration for this project is the classical Greek tradition of parrhésia, which he defines as the “ethics of truth-telling as an action which is risky and free.”66 Indeed, the idea of parrhésia dominates Foucault’s last lecture courses at the Collége de France. This was due in large part to Foucault’s conviction that in the classical Greek practice of parrhésia one observes an “exercise, [indeed] the highest exercise, of freedom.”67 It is Foucault’s hope that such a practice could be mobilized by the modern subject to resist its ground. Parrhésia occurs, argues Foucault, when a speaker maintains a more primary relation to some perceived truth



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than he or she does to the threat posed by any power who would oppose that truth. According to Foucault, the “exemplary scene of parrhésia [occurs when] a man stands up to a tyrant and tells him the truth.”68 Such a bold truth-telling, Foucault thinks, operates to reorient and reinforce a speaker’s relation to itself, over and above its relation to the Other. In the act of parrhésia, he thinks, a subject recreates itself outside the threats posed by the power of the Other, reestablishing itself in relation to its own truth. For this reason Foucault does not identify parrhésia as “the language of command; it is not speech which places others under its yoke.”69 To the contrary, he claims, “the function of parrhésia is precisely to be able to limit the power of the masters.”70 Indeed, Foucault identifies parrhésia with “a virtue, a personal quality, a courage (courage in freely telling the truth).”71 Its primary aim is not to govern how a subject relates to an other, he suggests, but how a subject relates to itself. Such a conception of truth-telling is useful to the modern subject, argues Foucault, as it provides a model for rethinking the nature of the self in relation to the concept of “truth,” not as an object obscurely defined within the power/knowledge discourses of the other, but as a living reality present within the life of the subject itself. As such, the concept of parrhésia models for Foucault a mode of thinking of the truth as a resource to draw upon in order to resist those “truths” forced upon the subject by others through normalization and bio-power. In this way, he thinks parrhésia functions as an essential tool in the attempt to push back against the threat of total domination posed by others. One of the ways Foucault thinks the concept of parrhésia could be mobilized to this end is through his conception of rigorous genealogical analysis.72 Indeed, according to Foucault one of the primary functions of genealogy is to critique the dominant truths and normative claims asserted by the modern social sciences.73 By exposing the gaps, ruptures, and breaks in the narratives maintained by the social sciences, genealogical research functions, he thinks, as a kind of parrhésia. It offers, thereby, he suggests, an alternative account of the nature of subjectivity and forms of life it may take from the “normal” one certified by self-appointed authorities. In this way, a rigorous genealogical analysis serves to push back against the dominant narrative of modern governmentality. As such, Foucault concludes, genealogy opens up a space wherein a subject can reimagine the nature and possibilities of its own existence outside the survey of the panoptic scrutiny of the other. Genealogy, he thinks, thereby frees the modern subject to recreate itself in a new and potentially more pleasurable way. Another one of the technologies of the self Foucault explores is the stoic tradition of askesis, or discipline.74 After all, argues Foucault, every “techne tou biou, this art of living, demands practice and training: askesis.”75 Without discipline, practice, and training, thinks Foucault, any ethics aimed at resisting the threat of total domination is rendered impotent, a useless exercise. To innervate an ethics of resistance, Foucault therefore concludes, a definite set of askesis must be developed. “The role and function of

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askesis,” according to Foucault, is “to establish the strongest possible link between the subject and truth,” thereby empowering the possibility of not only parrhésia, but every other technique essential to the development of an ethics of resistance as well.76 The foundation of such ascetic disciplines, Foucault argues, is “solitary self-examination,”77 “self-diagnosis,”78 and “self-testing.”79 Through such practices, Foucault claims, askesis can be used in the contemporary world to bring the subject into a relation to itself which falls outside the bounds of modern governmentality.80 By forcing the subject to assume a responsibility for itself which is not aimed at bringing it into greater obedience to the edicts and precepts of the other, but which empowers it to resist that other, Foucault sees the cultivation of askesis as essential to the development of a new ethics of pleasure. Through a critical appropriation of classical askesis, Foucault argues, the modern subject could think of self-discipline as a means of securing and achieving pleasure, not restricting and controlling it to bio-political ends.81 “[Askesis] involves arriving at the formation of a full, perfect, complete and self-sufficient relationship with oneself, capable of producing the self-transfiguration that is the happiness one takes in oneself,” explains Foucault.82 As such, it can be used to reorient the subject’s relation to its own life as a source of joy, and not as a resource simply for more life. One example Foucault gives of such a modern appropriation of askesis is the life and work of the Marquis de Sade. In Sade Foucault finds a dutiful commitment to sexuality which resisted the disciplinary structures of bio-politics (sexuality as a means to reproduction) by appropriating its regulatory power to the end of art and pleasure (sexuality as an aesthesis).83 A third technique Foucault identifies within the history of philosophy which he thinks is useful to the cultivation of a modern ethics of resistance is the medieval tradition of self-writing, or autobiography, which he analyzed in part by way of Augustine’s Confessions.84 According to Foucault, the practice of self-writing, whether in the form of a personal journal or regular correspondence with another person, created a narrative space for the medieval subject wherein he or she could define him or herself according to the conventions of beauty, as opposed to what was considered appropriate, good, or right. In a similar way, Foucault thinks that the modern subject could use self-writing to define itself outside of the dominant discursive practices of normalization and bio-power.85 As such, self-writing can operate, according to Foucault, as a means of resisting the domination the subject faces in the power/knowledge discourses of the other. Self-writing, he thinks, opens up a space wherein the subject is free to craft an account of its own life in such a way that it derives pleasure from scrutiny, and not neurotic control and hypervigilance. For these reasons Foucault identifies self-writing as an essential element of askesis, one which is indispensable to the formation a new mode of subjectivity qua aesthetics.86 For Foucault “writing constitutes an essential stage in the process to which the whole askesis leads: namely, the fashioning of accepted discourses, recognized as



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true, into rational principles of action.”87 The function of self-writing, he summarizes, is “to constitute, along with all that reading had constituted, a ‘body,’” for the subject—a habitation, as it were, for the subject.88 One way such self-writing could be appropriated by the modern subject as an ethics of resistance is modeled for Foucault in the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French intersexed writer. As Foucault writes, Barbin’s writing was a “manner of living,” which worked to “baffle every possible attempt to make an identification” of him or her as this or that sex, this or that kind of person.89 Through self-writing, Foucault argues, Barbin was able to escape the scrutinizing gaze of the normalized expectations of nineteenth-century life and establish a relationship to himself/herself that evaded the threat of total domination inherent in those expectations. Likewise, he thinks, the modern subject may employ self-writing to craft an account of itself which does not conform to and is not accountable to the bio-political standards of productivity, rationality, and goodness. Instead, he thinks, in the body of text composed by the self-writing subject, one may craft a vision of oneself which is free, pleasurable, and beautiful. In this way, Foucault thinks, self-writing is instrumental in resisting the normalizing lure posed by modern governmentality. Another possible site of resistance Foucault identifies in his detailing of the various possible technologies of the self is surrealism.90 According to Foucault, surrealism operates by perverting the expected norms of society, allowing a subject to reframe itself in the realm of the imaginary, a realm not as easily dominated by the panoptic eye gaze of modern governmentality. What Foucault finds in surrealism is, in other words, the power to use language or images to define a realm of existence outside of the strictures of the power/knowledge framework of the modern sciences.91 The use of such surrealist methods to carve a space of freedom is expressed perfectly for Foucault in Jean Genet’s Les Nègres, where Archibald states that “by stretching language, we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide, whereas the masters contract it.”92 Foucault himself explores the possibility of using language surrealistically in this way as an act of freedom and resistance in his analysis of the work of Raymond Roussel. As Johanna Oksala puts it, “Foucault read Roussel’s work as an effort to capture what lies outside the discursive order of things by means of language” and “to show [thereby] the instability of the order of things that we take for granted.”93 For Foucault, what we gain by imaginatively crafting surrealist depictions of the world is the possibility of imagining ourselves, and our world, otherwise than it is—indeed otherwise than we are led to believe it must be. As such, the cultivation of a surrealistic imagination is essential to resisting the normative expectations which restrict the subject’s existence. One final technique which Foucault gleans from the history of philosophy to erect his ethics of resistance lies, somewhat ironically, within the Enlightenment project of Kant himself.94 Foucault saw in the Enlightenment

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figures and texts an essential site of excavation for his archaeological survey of the foundations of modern governmentality. After all, he reasons, it is from the Enlightenment that the revolutionary call for the abolishment of sovereign power and the rise of the democratizing social sciences was first issued. As such, he argues, it is from these figures and texts that the structures and vicissitudes of contemporary subjectivity grow. Nevertheless, Foucault thinks, the emancipatory aims of the Enlightenment could be used to resist precisely the imprisoning system it erected. As Joana Oksala rightly notes, “The Enlightenment provided him with the historical—not transcendental—values on which to base his implicit critiques” of modern governmentality.95 What Foucault finds in the Kantian challenge to “dare to know,” for example, is nothing less than a model for the cultivation of a form of subjectivity which defines itself and its duty to others through a more primordial duty to itself and the cultivation of its own reason. As such, what Foucault discovers in the Kantian project is a means of recognizing one’s duty to the normative expectations of others which nevertheless refuses to be oppressed or dominated by them. This is the hard core of the Enlightenment project for Foucault: the articulation of “the undefined work of freedom” which could still be mobilized to resist domination.96 This possibility of appropriating and mobilizing the “undefined work of freedom” inherent to the Kantian critique as a means of resistance is exemplified, according to Foucault, in the life and writings of Charles Baudelaire. According to Foucault, the life of Baudelaire, perhaps even more than the writings of Kant, models “an [ethical] exercise in which [an] extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.”97 The function of the kind of lived critique modeled by Baudelaire is, for Foucault, a demonstration of the “patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.”98 According to Foucault, the modern subject must learn, like Baudelaire, to appropriate the very kind of critical inquiry in modern governmentality which threatens to overwhelm in order to resist, enjoy, and become beautiful. Only in this way, thinks Foucault, can the modern subject finally give birth to the freedom promised to it by the Enlightenment thinkers.

Care for the self in relation to the absolute Other In parrhésia, askesis, self-writing, surrealism, and critique, Foucault articulates a set of practices which he thinks are essential to the survival of the modern subject. Only through the cultivation of and disciplined exercise of these practices, he suggests, is the modern subject capable of sustaining itself against the totalizing scrutiny of the other essential to modern governmentality, qua normalization and bio-power. Through parrhésia,



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askesis, self-writing, surrealism, and critique, Foucault defines the concrete means a modern subject must employ if it is to resist the threat of total domination inherent to its very existence and carve for itself a space of freedom wherein it can maintain its self, its coherence, and its integrity. In Foucault’s ethics, I think we discover a way of envisioning our own project: the articulation of a model of ethical judgment capable of resisting the latent threat posed by the Other as the absolute ground of moral conscience. Through an understanding of the nature and aim of Foucault’s technologies of the self we gain a detailed model for how ethical responsibility qua resistance could be practiced—how, in other words, we could cultivate a relation to the demands of the Other which ground and define our ethical judgments without giving fully in to their requisites, thereby loosing ourselves in ethical neurosis, or rejecting entirely their sway over us, thereby collapsing into ethical psychoses. What Foucault’s ethics provide for us is thus a set of concrete practices whereby we may resist the potentiality of evil inherent within the demands of the Other as the absolute ground and condition of our ethical concerns, and remain instead within the thin band which circumscribes the nature of the good. Through the disciplined practice of parrhésia, askesis, self-writing, surrealism, and critique I think we have a means of holding ourselves back from the lure inherent to the nature of the absolute Other—that is, we have a means of carving a space of freedom away from the tyranny of its influence without giving into the illusionary promise of an impossible autonomy cut entirely free from its influence and import to us. Through the practice of something like Foucault’s ethics of resistance we discover a determinate method whereby we can say no, non serviam to the Other and thereby hold ourselves back from the devastating dangers of dogmatism, fanaticism, and ethical neurosis without giving ourselves over to the equally threatening horrors of nihilism and ethical psychosis. What we discover then, finally, is a concrete method by which we may resist evil and actively pursue an absolutely grounded ethics of pleasure, peace, justice, and the good.

CONCLUSION

The ethics of resistance: A backward-turning relation

Ethics and the absolute The question of the absolute has haunted philosophy since its beginning. The ancients sought to prove that the absolute existed, something outside of and beyond the transitory sphere of perception. The medievals aspired to define the nature of the absolute and to deduce from it rules for life which could reconnect it (re-ligio) to human terrestrial life. The moderns in turn aimed to naturalize the absolute—to locate it within the materiality of the physical world itself, the structures of human reason alone, or the movement of history.1 It has only been in contemporary philosophy that the question of the absolute has been largely abandoned. Indeed, in many ways the ethos of philosophical inquiry for the last hundred years has been the varied attempt to question, critique, or otherwise scrutinize the idea of the absolute as “dead”—as no longer relevant, useful, and germane to philosophical thought. As a result, one of the major aims of contemporary philosophy has been to delineate how to think and live well in an age without absolutes and to define how a meaningful life could be lived without reference to any fixed absolute position. It is time we admit that this project has failed: not because the solutions it has offered are not viable nor ingenious, but because its assumptions about the absence of the absolute are simply wrong. The underlying problem of the contemporary age is not the loss of absolutes, it is their multiplication and amplification within the sociopolitical sphere. The fundamental problem of the contemporary age is our failure to recognize that the question and problem of the absolute is still very much alive— present in every instance of the Other with whom, in whom, and through whom we live. It is time then to re-inaugurate philosophical inquiry into

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the nature of the absolute, only not as an end to be attained, defined, or naturalized, but instead as a terrifying force to be resisted at every turn: as the very ground and condition for the possibility of evil. Even the most cursory survey of the social and political history of the West over the last two centuries testifies to the continued operation of the idea of the absolute in human affairs. From the Tsarist pogroms of the nineteenth century to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians which began the twentieth, the quest for absolute security, absolute purity, and absolute power prompted by the idea of absolute right, absolute justice, or the absolute good has dominated the politics of the Western world since Kant. From the first two World Wars, the Shoah, the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the events which dominated the political scene of the twentieth century, to the seemingly unending liberalizing “low-intensity conflicts” and concomitant nationalistic and fundamentalist religious responses to them which marked its end and the start of the twenty-first, the idea of the absolute has never abandoned us. Its appearance has morphed, but the influence of the logic of the absolute is just as manifest in the contemporary age as it was in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. What is it that grounds the rise of the so-called alt-right in the United States today if not a professed belief in the absolute right to “free speech” and the absolute difference between cultures and races (not to mention the absolute superiority of certain of those cultures and races)? And, isn’t a similar logic at work in the so-called men’s rights movement which grounds its claims on the conviction that there is an absolute difference between sexes (not to mention the belief that one of those sexes bears an absolute right and authority to rule over the other)? And how are we to make sense of the recent election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, or the increasing popularity of the balkanization of the European Union by various nationalistic parties if not by recourse to some idea of absolute sovereignty or the absolute freedom of individual nation states (e.g., UKIP, Le Front National, Vlaams Belanng, Partij voor de Vrijheid, Lega Nord, Golden Dawn, Svoboda, and Jobbik)? And this of course is only representative of one side of the post-critical disjunction—one set of absolutes invoked within contemporary political thinking. There are alternatively those absolutes esteemed by the other side of the post-critical disjunction as well—those who continue to pursue global liberalism in the name of the idea of absolute peace, absolute prosperity, and absolute efficiency: the Silicon Valley utopians, for example, who see in technology the promise of a future absolute perfection: a world without suffering, conflict, and perhaps even death (e.g., Bill and Melida Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Michio Kaku). Consider as well the global market one-percenters who see in an absolutely open economy the possibility of absolute opportunity and perfect equality and prosperity for all, regardless of nation, creed, or color (The Clinton Foundation, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and David Rockefeller).

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Given the pervasiveness of the logic of the absolute in contemporary political discourse, the real question for contemporary philosophers should not be “How are we to live without the absolute?” Instead we should ask “How are we to deal with the proliferation of absolutes in the contemporary world?” In other words, if contemporary philosophers are going to continue to be relevant, they must learn to ask the question of the absolute anew. The question now is not “Where can we find the absolute?” but “How can we evade the pervasiveness of absolutes?”—“How can I contend with and protect myself from the totalizing grasp of the absolute?” The question which should preoccupy contemporary ethical and political philosophers should be this: “How are we to deal with the panoply of competing absolutes present in contemporary discourse when each of them summons us with a demand calling for our complete and total allegiance?” In order to answer this question, this volume has aimed to accomplish four things: 1) to reveal the continued relevance of the idea of the absolute in contemporary ethics by showing how the question of the absolute has morphed as a result of the Kantian critique, and how that metamorphosis continues to shape the social and political history of the twentieth century; thereby, 2) to show the necessity of rethinking the nature of the absolute as simultaneously actual and universal such that it may function to ground ethical and political reasoning anew without collapsing into dogmatism, on the one hand, nor giving way to an anemic relativism, on the other; 3) to argue that precisely such an actual and universal ethical absolute can be discovered within the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, only not as it is figured by him, as an absolute good, but as an ethical excess which grounds the possibility of social and political evil, one which therefore must be resisted; and finally, 4) to show how such an ethics of resistance can be conceived by way of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethics and Michel Foucault’s ethics as technologies of care for the self, respectively. To accomplish these goals, we began this volume by exploring the relative strengths and weaknesses of Quentin Meillassoux’s and Alain Badiou’s ethical projects. As we saw in Chapter 1, both Badiou and Meillassoux explicitly attempt to establish, each in his own way, some new speculative ground for ethical deliberation, one which, while acknowledging the efficacy of the Kantian critique of the absolute, nevertheless overcomes the limitations it established for ethics. In this regard, their work provided a perfect lens through which to examine and understand the problem of the absolute in ethical reasoning after Kant. Unfortunately, as we saw there, both of their respective attempts to ground ethical judgments without recourse to any absolute failed, each ultimately, albeit unknowingly, resorting to some new form of either dogmatism or relativism, and with potentially disastrous consequences. In the hopes of overcoming the limitations which hampered their efforts and escaping the ethical disjunction initiated by Kant’s critique, we turned in Chapter 2 to the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas in whose work we sought to reinvigorate the idea of a simultaneously actual and

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universal ethical absolute. There we discovered in his account of the Other a power which, while actually present to the subject, nevertheless transcends the structures of subjectivity, thereby making available a universal absolute power capable of grounding ethical deliberation anew. As we saw there, according to Levinas, the face of the Other manifests as an actual entity which cannot be reduced to the structures of any singular subjective thought or being, remaining therefore absolute in its appearance. At the same time, the Other appears, he contends, universally to all perceiving subjects as the ground and condition for their being and ethical responsibility. In this way, as we saw, Levinas’s phenomenology provided a way for us to escape the limitations of the ethical disjunction erected by Kant’s critique and ground anew the possibility of absolute ethical judgment. Unfortunately, however, as we saw in Chapter 3, the ethical valence of this absolute is far from good. Indeed, through a closer analysis of Levinas’s argument through the lens of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and later Hannah Arendt and Søren Kierkegaard, we discovered what we called the inherent reversibility of good and evil in the idea of the absolute Other. As a result, we concluded toward the end of the first half of this book that the ethical power manifest in the Other as the absolute ground and condition of ethical judgment was not one which we should attempt to instantiate, emulate, nor acquiesce to. Instead, it expressed a limit case—something to be avoided at all costs and vigilantly resisted. So it was that we were forced to confront and renounce the traditional philosophical assumption that the absolute is incontrovertibly good—a benison to be welcomed, complied with, and obeyed wholly. To the contrary, we discovered that, in sympathy with Milton’s devil, the absolute ethical power possessed by the Other is one which should arouse our suspicions and our fears. As a result, we concluded that the absolute ground established in this Other must not be used to erect a positive definition of ethical action, but rather a dialectically negative one. The ground that the absolute qua Other provides for ethical judgment is precisely the limit case of ethics. The position of the Other marks the domain of excess and absurdity, that realm to which a subject must never stray if he or she is to remain within the realm of the good. What the absolute accessible through the Other establishes is a boundary marker which circumscribes the limits of ethical reasoning, that border beyond which one must not trespass if he or she is to reside with justice. As we saw, the potentially infinite demands levied by the Other define the absolute ground and condition of evil. The kind of ethical judgment which we seek to ground absolutely upon the Other should not yield positive injunctions to be obeyed therefore, but instead, a negative capability: constant resistance. The nature of the kind of ethical judgment which we hope to ground in the absolute power of the Other is expressed fully in saying “No, non serviam!”—I will not make myself an accomplice to the excess and evil which arise from complicity in an infinite and absolute logic. Only by thinking of ethical deliberation in this way, as the absolute

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necessity of constant resistance, can we pursue an effective politics of peace and justice in the twenty-first century and beyond. In order to understand how we might think of ethical deliberation in this way, we turned in the last two chapters of this volume to the work of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, respectively—examining how each in his own way defined ethical action as a dialectical resistance established in response to the latent threat posed by the subject’s Other as its absolute ground. In Lacan, we found that the idea of a universal and actual absolute Other, far from grounding a positive understanding of the good, in fact threatens to overwhelm and debilitate the subject it creates, giving rise to the possibility of any number of psychic disorders and maladies, which Lacan called evil. To protect the subject from this threat, Lacan defined ethics as no-saying, a mode of resisting the Other. In order to see how we may heed this call to say “no” to the Other, we turned to the work of Michel Foucault, who toward the end of his life defined various means by which the subject may actively resist the overwhelming power of its own genesis: the other, which he defined as threatening the subject with the possibility of its total domination. As we saw there, Foucault employed the ancient Greek conception of care for the self in order to redefine ethical action as a means of resisting this threat and sustaining the self. Through his analysis of parrhésia, askesis, self-writing, surrealism, and critique, Foucault articulated a number of strategies we can use to rethink the nature of ethical action as resistance, not compliance. It is important to note that the concept of ethics as an act of resistance which we gleaned from Lacan and Foucault is not grounded on a denial of the power of the absolute. To the contrary, as we saw, Lacan and Foucault were both all too keenly aware of the power and presence of the absolute in the Other as the ground and condition of subjective life. Indeed, both argued that it was only by first acknowledging and understanding the nature and genesis of this power that the exigency of an ethics of resistance could be understood. It was not the aim of Lacan nor Foucault then to reject or rebel against the idea or the role of the Other qua absolute in ethics, nor to put it to death. To the contrary, it was their aim to acknowledge the dangers that the Other as an absolute power posed to existence and to articulate in response some means by which a subject could sustain itself without collapsing into neurosis, psychosis, or total domination—in a word, evil. What they pursued in their ethical projects then was the means necessary to empower the subject to relate to the Other as its absolute ground without falling into the possibility of collapse, domination, and evil. According to both, the concept of the good can only be thought of as a possibility emergent from a relation with the Other that does not give way to the power of its influence. In other words, for both the concept of the good can only be thought of as the product of a diligent resistance to the Other as the absolute ground of subjectivity.

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My attempt to define ethical judgment and action as a constant and thoughtful resistance to the power of the absolute is thus not an attempt to reject the idea of the absolute nor deny its reality. It is not to pursue with Nietzsche and much of contemporary philosophy an ethics grounded in “the death of God.” To the contrary, my approach is the opposite. It begins by acknowledging the impossibility of an ethics without such a “God,” an ethics without an absolute ground. It was thus essential that we started by showing how the idea of “God” had not truly passed from the domain of contemporary ethics—that the Kantian critique had simply morphed the way in which that “God” appeared therein. It has never been my aim to deny then the phenomenological reality identified by Levinas as the absolute ethical exigency of the Other. To the contrary, as I have shown, a robust ethics of resistance must be grounded in an affirmation of the power of the absolute uncovered within Levinas’s phenomenology: a recognition of the primal, undeniable, and absolute ethical power of the Other in our lives as its ground and condition. The goal of this volume is not then to deny, occult, nor erase the absolute position and power of the Other. It is instead to show the vicissitudes of that power—to show that the “God” of philosophy is not good. That in fact, to the contrary, the absolute power of the Other appears to be the ground and condition of the possibility of evil. It has been my aim, in other words, to show that the power of the Other as the absolute ground of human life, manifest through a rigorous phenomenological accounting of existence, is not a force to mildly be accepted, but a force to be diligently resisted. The ethics of resistance we have defined through Lacan’s concept of ethical no-saying and Foucault’s understanding of ethics as care for the self should not be understood then as alternatives to the ethical duties and responsibilities which Levinas identified as demanded from us by the Other. To the contrary, ethical nosaying and care for the self should be understood as the very way one should take up those duties and responsibilities. The ground for our call to an ethics of resistance is precisely the urgency, power, and inescapability of the kinds of absolute demands articulated by each and every Other— demands which can loom so large within our lives that they can crush our hopes and send us reeling into nihilism or alternatively excite our devotion and prompt our fanatical worship. It has been my goal to show that precisely because of the kind of absolute power which the Other holds over us, as the ground and condition of subjective life, that we must learn to resist lest our rational judgment is overwhelmed and we give way to the logic of the absurd and practical evil. Our aim in the last two chapters of this volume has been to discover the practical means by we can begin to respond to the ethical demands of the Other without giving way to its power and becoming an agent of the infinite in the world—the origin of determinate evil. The aim of an ethics of resistance is this: to identify and to defy the origins of evil.

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A backward-turning relation In order to picture the relation to the absolute sought by such an ethics, I have already given a number of analogical metaphors, from the rebellion of Milton’s devil against the absolute power of the “tyranny of heaven” to Schelling’s reference to our planet’s orbital relation to the sun—its centrifugal force working to resist the gravitational pull of its center. In order to further illustrate the kind of relation sought within an ethics of resistance, it is useful to examine one final metaphorical image: Heraclitus’s bow or lyre. For Heraclitus, famously, goodness or justice (dike) is only achievable as the harmonious balance of opposing forces. Such a goodness is not something, however, which he identifies with peace or stability. To the contrary, it is for him only accessible through war and strife. Indeed, according to fragment 80: “War is comprehensive, . . . justice is strife, [and . . .] all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must be.”2 Hence Heraclitus’s claim in fragment 8 that “what opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions.”3 This is what explains ultimately his metaphoric equation between life (bios) and the dynamic tension which powers a bow (bious), a weapon of war.4 For Heraclitus, the harmonic balance of goodness in life is only achievable through the cultivation of a perpetual state of strife and war between opposing forces. What this means for Heraclitus is that justice can only be accomplished through a kind of dynamic opposition. “Through differing,” he writes, justice emerges as “a backward-turning connection, like that of a bow.”5 All of this is relatively well known about Heraclitus the obscure, but what is less well known is that for Heraclitus justice is not something which emerges between a set of equally opposed forces—that is, the strife that Heraclitus envisions as the foundation of justice and goodness is not one which appears between two powers matched in strength and potentiality. Indeed, such an idea of equality runs fundamentally counter to the overall logic of his work. After all, were the weight of the pull between the opposing forces of a bow equally balanced, then its power would be nullified— each side cancelling out its other. Indeed, stasis would eventually emerge between such equally opposed forces, like the rest which eventually comes to justice’s scales in the classical Western figuring. For Heraclitus, of course, such static equilibrium is the very definition of death: the end of existence and the possibility of goodness. The kind of stasis which would result from the opposition of equally balanced forces would not therefore result in justice for Heraclitus, but its inverse: annihilation. According to Heraclitus, existence is fundamentally dynamic, perpetually flowing and moving like a river. As such, the nature of goodness and justice within existence cannot come from peace, balance, and static equilibrium, but imbalance, unrest, and strife. And, in order to maintain such a dynamism within his conception

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of existence, it follows that justice, understood as dynamic opposition, could only ever be achieved through a relation between two unequal forces. Indeed, for Heraclitus justice seems to be defined as the dynamic opposition of one force against the imposing power of another supreme force. Heraclitus figures this relation, like Schelling, as the kind of relation which can emerge between one force which occupies a central position, forever drawing all to it with centripetal allure, and another force which opposes that lure with a centrifugal force of its own, forever striving to pull away. In this way, Heraclitus thinks, two opposing forces work together through strife to create one dynamic system which flows perpetually in a vortex rotation. This image of a vortex relation between two unequal oppositional forces is in fact invoked by Heraclitus in fragment 125 where he compares the dynamic flow of existence to the stirring of a “barley drink”—the barley holding together in relation to the center of the rotation of the stir.6 Likewise, Heraclitus suggests, justice emerges from the dynamic resistance of a singular existent against the entropic pull of the center of existence itself which, by its position, strives to draw everything into sedentary oneness and stasis with itself. Justice for Heraclitus only emerges when this unity is resisted, when the many of existence wage war against the absolute position of the one center—when, in other words, singular beings define themselves against the pull of absolute Being as a whole.7 Such an opposition between the one and the many is the origin of goodness and the possibility of justice for Heraclitus. So it is that ethics emerges for him as the cultivation of a “backward-turning” relation to the allure of absolute stasis and oneness: a mode of resistance by existent subjects against the absolute ground of their dynamic existence. In Heraclitus’s imagery we discover a particularly powerful way of reenvisioning ethical deliberation as resistance. Following his thought we could think of the good we seek in our ethics of resistance as the product of a war we must continually wage against the influence of the absolute. Note that this is not a war which we should wage in the hopes of achieving a successful revolution which would overturn the order of the absolute. The aim of this war is not the capture, trial, dethronement, execution, and replacement of the Other. These are the aims of revolution: the overturning of the current order and establishment of a new order. By contrast, resistance aims to establish a counter order within an established order, one which neither overturns it nor destroys it, but which fights within it to stifle its aims and hobble its influence. The war we seek to wage against the absolute in the ethics of resistance should aim to establish a sort of détente with the order of the Other: a mode of relation which allows the Other to retain its grounding power over the subject without requiring the subject to submit willingly, nor obey fully its edicts. Such a “backward-turning” embrace of the power of the absolute Other is what is sought in an ethics of resistance. Figured in this way, we can imagine ethical deliberation proceeding thusly: first one would discover what absolutes lurks within his or her mind,

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demanding from him or her absolute allegiance. Then one would trace the origins and grounds of those absolute injunctions to the Other, his or her engagement with others as mediated by culture and tradition. Next, one would work to acknowledge that such injunctions, if taken seriously and pursued to their logical conclusions, would lead necessarily to excess and evil. Thusly, one would begin to realize that the influence of the Other, though inescapable and fundamental, is in fact pernicious—something to be resisted. Such a recognition should prompt the subject to cultivate within him or herself the strength to resist the demands of the absolute Other and to say, against his or her every instinct: “No, non serviam! I will not give in to the influence of the Other in me.” Only through such a resistance—only through such a “backward-turning relation” to the absolute Other which grounds and conditions one’s existence, beliefs, and very way of being—can any hope of practical justice be grounded.

Politics as first philosophy There is a long-standing hierarchy within the history of philosophy which can be traced back to Aristotle’s delineation of different possible modes of inquiry pursued by thinkers. At the top there has always been metaphysics, identified as first philosophy, followed in turn by physics and the other modes of natural philosophy. Toward the very end of that list we find ethics, and finally politics, as the collective application of ethical principles. This presumed hierarchy of thought was grounded on the assumption that before one can determine how things should be, either at the individual ethical level or at the corporate sociopolitical level, one must first understand what things are (their nature), both at the metaphysical and at the physical level. And, it was believed that to pursue such first-order metaphysical questions properly, one must free oneself from one’s innate ethical or social and political judgments. Only in this way, it was thought, could one discover the absolute nature of existence free from and outside of one’s limited and finite social and political experience. One of the major trends of twentiethcentury European philosophy has been to call this traditional hierarchy into question, and to suggest, by contrast, that not only what something appears to be is determined in large part by how one lives one’s life; but that, moreover, the ethical, social, and political realities of how one lives one’s life are essential to inquiring properly into the nature of what reality ultimately is. The argument is that it is only in the immediate lived reality of the personal and the social that an appropriate lens can be found through which any presumed metaphysical realities can be viewed. This is of course what is implied in that oft-quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre which states that “existence precedes essence.” Indeed, it was this conviction which prompted Emmanuel Levinas to reject this hierarchy pervasive within the Western philosophical tradition

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and to proclaim that ethics should be seen as “the primary and the source of first philosophy.”8 For Levinas, the ethical dilemma posed by the Other reveals the metaphysical structure of phenomenal reality itself. “Ethics,” Levinas writes, “is the [only] spiritual optics”—it is, he thinks, the only means by which one can see clearly and understand fully the metaphysical conditions of lived experience.9 For these reasons, Levinas argued that it is only through an analysis of the ethical demands imposed by the presence of the Other that one can understand the metaphysical ground of existence itself. Hence his assertion that ethics should take its proper place within the hierarchy of the West as first philosophy. From what we have seen in this volume, it would seem that Levinas’s suspicions of the traditional hierarchy are justified. It was only by way of a thorough analysis of the ethical power of the Other that we discovered a new absolute ground for existence and ethical judgment alike, one which allowed us to escape the limitations of the Kantian critique. But, we also discovered by way of this analysis something that Levinas could not see through his ethical optics: the danger inherent to the power of the Other qua absolute. It is possible that Levinas’s failure on this point resulted from not having taken his inversion of the traditional hierarchy of philosophical inquiry far enough. In order to overcome these limitations within his system, it may be necessary to take his critique one step further and declare that as much as ethics may function as the only “spiritual optics,” perhaps only by way of politics can we gain a sort of ethical optics. Only through political analysis is it possible, after all, to catch a glimpse of what is ultimately at stake in ethical judgment. It may only be by way of the political lens then that one can discover the dangers inherent to the idea of the absolute and discover thereby the exigency of the ethics of resistance. Perhaps it is not so much ethics, then, but politics which we should finally deem “first philosophy.” By examining the political ramifications of the ethical exigencies of any and every apparent ethical absolute, we discover the pernicious power and value of the metaphysically absolute and the necessity therefore of cultivating a practical ethics of resistance to such metaphysical absolutes. Interestingly, political philosophy has long acknowledged the vicissitudes of the absolute in practical matters, and has more often than not defined the possibility of liberty and goodness as an operation of resistance. John Stuart Mill, for example, wrote in his 1859 essay On Liberty that “the struggle between Liberty and Authority” has dominated the political thinking of the West since ancient Greece.10 This is due, he argued, to dangers inherent to the nature of political authority which, by its very nature, he thinks, tends necessarily toward tyranny. It was in fact this tendency toward absolute tyranny inherent to every mode of political authority which for him set and defined the very conditions of political liberty. Liberty, according to Mill, can only ever be understood negatively as a “protection against the tyranny of the political rules.”11 Given this fact, Mill concluded, the goal of a political philosophy aimed at preserving liberty, and with it the possibility

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of a good life, must be to determine the best means by which the power of political authority could be limited, whether that authority expresses itself in a single sovereign monarch, an elected official “regularly accountable to the community,” or even “the prevailing opinion and feelings” of society, which Mill saw as in many ways even “more formidable than many kinds of political oppressions.”12 For Mill, the chief aim of every political philosophy from Plato onward has been to determine precisely where and how within every mode of political order the threat of tyranny arises, and to devise the diverse means by which that threat may be mitigated and resisted.13 According to Mill, it has always been the responsibility “of patriots .  .  . to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation [is] what [is] meant by liberty.”14 The only way to achieve this end, he claims, is for political philosophers to cultivate a constant vigilance and active resistance against the possibility of tyranny inherent to every social and political situation. Only in this way, he concludes, can political philosophy ever hope to secure the good. “All that makes existence valuable to anyone,” Mill wrote, “depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.”15 This is for him the path of the good. What Mill saw as the guiding assumption of every political philosophy from Plato onward is what seems to have escaped every ethical philosophy until now: the fact that absolute authority necessarily poses an immediate threat to the possibility of the good. What we have attempted to do in this volume is to think in parallel lines with the great political philosophers of the West without invoking their names explicitly, and to discover through their preoccupation with the possibility of tyranny latent within every iteration of authority the metaphysical conditions which ground the possibility of evil. In other words, what we have attempted to do is to peer through the optics provided by the political history of the West to see how the metaphysical idea of the absolute, manifest phenomenally in the Other, operates within the ethical order to establish a tyranny which grounds and conditions the possibility of evil. In light of this discovery, we have defined the possibility of good within the ethical order negatively, alongside Mill and the other great political philosophers of the West, casting it as a form of protection against the possibility of ethical despotism. By allowing politics, as first philosophy, to guide ethical and metaphysical thinking in this way, we have discovered the importance of saying no to the Other and arming ourselves against its absolute order through an ethics of resistance.

The political ends of anarchy In recognition of the innate tendency toward tyranny within absolute authority, there has long been a strain of anarchy buried within the political philosophy of the West, a voice which cried for the absolute overturning

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of the concept of authority in toto. From its birth amid the Cynics of ancient Greece and Rome to its full flowering in the political anarchism of nineteenth-century Europe, the ideal of a world free from the possibility of political tyranny and evil has haunted the Western philosophical tradition.16 This anarchist idea is summed up well by Emma Goldman, who reasoned that “all government in essence, .  .  . is tyranny” and that it was in fact this tyranny which “holds [humans] captive,” preventing them from living a good and fulfilling life.17 As such, she concluded it must be the aim of any individual who seeks a life of goodness and justice to rid themselves and their neighbors of the influence of authority. Only thusly, Goldman suggested, could evil be abolished and lasting peace be established. It was for this reason that she and her comrades declared every form of government, indeed every social and political arche which structured human life, to be a pernicious influence which should be eradicated immediately and eternally.18 For the anarchists, this tendency within every arche to establish tyranny and evil is the result of its appeal to some idea of a natural and absolute order within human existence, whether it be the absolute right of a monarch to rule, the absolute freedom of a voting body to speak, or the absolute authority of some God to judge human action.19 It was such ideas, they thought, which grounded and structured every arche which limited and repressed human liberty and goodness. In order to achieve true freedom and justice, they thus reasoned, such absolutes must be rooted out, unsettled, and ultimately abolished.20 By hunting them down and eradicating them in this way, they argued, the foundations of the various social and political systems which govern human life would crumble and the possibility of liberty and justice for all could finally be pursued.21 This was the ultimate aim of the nineteenth-century political anarchists: the elimination of the ground of evil and the establishment of the possibility of lasting peace and goodness. It was for these reasons that Alexander Berkman concluded that political “anarchism is the finest and biggest thing man has ever thought of; the only thing that can give you liberty and well-being, and bring peace and joy to the world.”22 A similar position, albeit free from the social and political messianism implied by the idea of a final and lasting peace, has been renewed of late within twentieth-century European political philosophy by such thinkers as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière.23 The goal of these thinkers has been to pursue a mode of inquiry which, as Rancière has put it, defines the possibility of a political relationship outside “the exercise of power,”24 one which is achievable only through “a specific break with the logic of the arkhê.”25 To achieve this aim, Rancière for one argues that the contemporary political subject must “rupture with the logic of commencement/commandment” which flows from every conception of the absolute.26 Such concepts, he contends, only operate to “police” human thought and interactions by defining a standard by which to judge, regulate, govern, and control the limits of human activity.27 For Rancière, the true

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essence of “politics stands in distinct opposition to the [idea of a] police” established on such concepts of the absolute.28 Only by actively resisting the commandments of the police which are grounded upon an appeal to such absolute standards, he therefore concludes, can the true essence of politics, qua liberty, be preserved both within philosophical inquiry and practical life. Such a determined pursuit of liberty against the order of the absolute Rancière calls dissensus. “The essence of politics,” he writes, “is dissensus.”29 The true essence of politics can only be maintained, he argues, where such a dissensus is initiated by resisting the temptation to police human behavior and thought. In order to realize this essence, he argues, political subjects must abandon the idea that there is a “single foundation” upon which the right to rule or govern is grounded.30 “The distinguishing feature of [a true] politics,” he argues “is the existence of a subject who ‘rules’ by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule”—no claim to absolute authority or judgment.31 In order to pursue political freedom, Rancière therefore concludes, every claim to the absolute much be systematically uprooted. Only thusly, he argues, can political subjects “suspend . . . all logics of legitimate domination,” thereby delegitimizing the authority of the police and empowering the possibility of political liberty and goodness.32 Only once the domination of such absolutes has been destabilized through a vigilant pursuit of “democratic ‘anarchy,’” Rancière thinks, can the threat of political evil be abated and the possibility of a good life be pursued.33 A similar line of thinking motivates Deleuze and Guattari’s call for what they identify as “micropolitics”—a political regime which attempts to preserve a mode of social interaction “that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus and the overcoding machine,” inherent to any rigid political order grounded upon a concept of absolute order.34 Deleuze and Guattari identify the kinds of political systems which emerge from such concepts with fascism, repression, and ultimately evil.35 The pursuit of a viable political liberty, Deleuze and Guattari therefore argue, proceeds by resisting any abstract conception of an “absolute” which would justify the control, segmentation, or sedimentation of human nature.36 What their concept of “micropolitics” aims to accomplish is, like Heraclitus’s concept of justice and the good, to embrace and empower the mutation, transformation, and becoming inherent to human relations outside the bounds of the kinds of arche which arise from concepts of the absolute.37 According to Deleuze, only by embracing such anarchical micropolitical relations which resist the logic of any grounding absolute order can fascism, and ultimately evil, be eradicated from social relations. “Man’s only hope,” Deleuze writes, “lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable,” lies in pursuing an anarchic revolution against the order which arises from every idea of the absolute.38 A similar attempt to articulate a new form of anarchistic political thinking can be found in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s conception of what he calls the

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political differend which, he argues, manages to escape the “hegemony of genres” grounded upon and emergent from the idea of absolute order.39 Lyotard’s goal is to define a mode of politics which can open up a space for “differends that are not regulated and cannot be regulated” by such concepts of absolute type or nature.40 Such a task, he argues, involves calling into question the mode through which authority deduces and legitimates itself and its norms from absolute positions.41 In this way Lyotard’s political philosophy also manifests as a kind of political anarchism aimed at unsettling any authority grounded upon some idea of absolute duty, obligation, right, or nature.42 However it has been articulated, whether in the classical revolutionary language of the nineteenth century or the postmodern wordplay of the twentieth, the goal of the kind of anarchism which has forever haunted the political philosophy of the West has always been to overcome the threat of tyranny and evil which they see as inherent to every social and political arche by abolishing the grounds upon which that arche is established and justified: namely, some idea of the absolute. Whatever their form, such anarchisms are destined to fail. The seed of this inevitable failure does not lie in their identification of the absolute as the ground of every arche and evil, but rather in their naïve belief that such absolutes, and the subsequent orders they justify and maintain, could ever be abolished completely. If we are to follow our intention to make politics first philosophy and derive our ethics of resistance from the insights of political thinkers who have recognized with us the inherent threat posed by such absolutes, we must amend the aim of classical anarchism in recognition of the necessity and inescapability of the absolute. The aim of the ethics of resistance must not be an-archy, the attempt to do away with, deny, and refuse (ana) the arche of the absolute. The aim of the ethics of resistance must be instead to empower the subject to establish its own ab-archistic order—a order which pulls away from (ab) and holds its own against the lure of the absolute.

The ethics of ab-archy As we have seen, our pursuit of an ethics of resistance is not a call for revolution against the order of the absolute. Its aim is not to break the chains that bind us to the absolute nor cast off the injunctions of the absolute in pursuit of the illusion of a complete and total liberty. The ethics of resistance aims instead to carve a space of freedom away from (ab) the ethical bondage with which the absolute holds us. Its goal is to pursue liberty negatively in this way: to adjudicate the nature of the good within the limits established by the authority of the absolute. Our ethics of resistance attempts to achieve this aim not by rejecting the authority of the absolute, but by pulling away (ab) from it enough to establish its own counter order. Such a negative space within the absolute authority of the Other is achieved by learning to say

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“no” to the Other and learning to protect and care for the self such that we are not led by the neck of our subjectivity, jerked around via our shame and desire, and carried into the excess of nihilism or fanaticism from which springs practical political evil. By cultivating a self who can hold out against the commandments and adjurations of the Other, the ethics of resistance attempts to pursue the good negatively, as a space which is carved within, though not wholly separate from, the order of the absolute. In this way, the ethics of resistance forestalls the possibility of the kinds of evil which can be justified in the name of any absolute order. By establishing a “backwardturning” relation to the Other as absolute, the ethics of resistance emerges as the possibility of a new counter (ab) order to the arche of the Other. In this regard, what an ethics of resistance seeks is not anarchy, but ab-archy. It seeks to establish a space within the tyrannical rule of the Other for a counter system of existence, one which is carved through the refusal to bend the knee to the logic of the absolute. Only on the basis of this new order, this counter system, can the limitations of the Kantian critique and the ensuing political horrors borne from it be overcome and a new mode of absolutely grounded ethical judgments and political actions be established. What, finally, can be hoped for from the kind of backward-turning relation to the absolute sought within such an ab-archistic ethics of resistance? Lasting peace? Prosperity for all? The good life? No, none of these. No one knows better than the devil that his resistance against the absolute is futile, doomed to fail from its very inception. The ethics of resistance is an absurd task, not unlike Sisyphus’s—one destined to eventually collapse back into the very darkness it strives to move beyond. But as Albert Camus concluded from his meditations on the travails of Sisyphus, “I cannot see what my revolt loses by being useless, and I can feel what it gains.”43 Perhaps we can imagine that, like his Sisyphus, those who have learned to pursue such an ethics of resistance, those who have learned to say “no” to the infinite demands of the Other and to cultivate an appropriate level of self-care against the logic of the absolute, are at the very least happy. For, though they know that there will be no end to their resistance, nor will some final peace or liberty ever be achieved, at the very least they will have understood the root cause of any darkness they may eventually fall into, and know what must be done if they are to take up the burden of peace, justice, and pleasure again. Perhaps finally, this is enough. Perhaps finally, this is all the goodness we can ever know.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Jer. 2:20 (LVB).

Chapter 1 1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), liv. 2 Badiou, Ethics, 10. 3 Ibid., 30 and 38. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 13. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 9 Badiou, Ethics, 25. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 44. 13 Ibid., 42. 14 Ibid., 25. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 47. 17 Ibid., 67. 18 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 48. 19 Ibid., 47. 20 Ibid., 44. 21 Ibid., 44–5. 22 Ibid., 45.

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23 Ibid., 49. 24 Cf. Ibid., 46. The problem of pursuing the absolute via faith or fidelity will become all the more clear in the interlude via a detailed investigation of the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. 25 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 26 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 32 (italics mine). 27 Ibid., 33 (italics mine). 28 Ibid., 34. 29 What Meillassoux has in mind here is something like Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit in his lectures on the history of world philosophy, the development of which, in and through historical events, not only demands, but justifies and redeems any number of concrete human horrors. It is this underlying logic to Hegel’s conception of the absolute in history which led Theodor Adorno to ask whether it was possible to take Hegel seriously after Auschwitz. It is this question which seems to motivate at least in part Meillassoux’s critique of dogmatic conceptions of the absolute here. For more on the problem of Hegel’s concept of the absolute in history, see: Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Martin Shuster, Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Nemli Osman, “Adorno, History ‘After Auschwitz,’” in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, ed. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 49–60. 30 Quentin Meillassoux, “Appendix: Excerpts from L’Inexistence divine,” in Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, trans. Graham Harman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 235. 31 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 227. 32 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 51. 33 Ibid., 34. 34 Ibid., 28. 35 Ibid., 79; cf. 128. 36 Ibid., 10. 37 Ibid., 28. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 Ibid., 27. 40 Ibid., 21. 41 Ibid., 53. 42 Ibid., 62. 43 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 177. 44 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 128. 45 Ibid., 34.

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46 Ibid., 76. 47 Ibid., 49. 48 Ibid., 33 and 34. 49 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 196. 50 Ibid., 195. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 210. 53 Ibid., 189; cf. 190. 54 Ibid., 193. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 189. 57 Ibid., 190. 58 Ibid., 188. 59 Ibid., 205. 60 Ibid., 192. 61 Alain Badiou, “Interview (with Ben Woodward),” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 20. 62 Badiou, “Interview,” 20. 63 Ibid.

Chapter 2 1 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. 2 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 4. 3 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 3. 4 Ibid. 5 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 195. 6 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 7. 7 Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 8 Gottlob Frege, “Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic,” trans. E. W. Kluge, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology 81, no. 323 (1972): 321–37. 9 Edmund Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003).

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10 Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 110–12. 11 Badiou, Ethics, 127. 12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 126. 13 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of The European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 43–57. 14 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume I, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970). 15 Husserl, Crisis of The European Sciences, 202. 16 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 131 and ff. 17 Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 62. 18 Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 53 and ff. 19 Dan Zahavi, “The End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24, no. 3 (2016): 289–309. 20 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–4. 21 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: I, 214–15. 22 Ibid. 23 See, for example, Chapters 10 and 11 of: Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 24 Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences. 25 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1990). 26 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: II, §18. 27 Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, §3. 28 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume II, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), 82–4. 29 Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, ed. and trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), §47. 30 Husserl, Logical Investigations: Vol. II, 48–50, 129–32, and 184–6. 31 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), §62. 32 Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/4), Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 435. 33 Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, 108.

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34 Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 14. 35 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height.” 36 Emmanuel Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, ed. and trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 38. 37 Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, October 21 (1971): 50–4. 38 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 38. 39 Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” 38. 40 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 14. 41 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 33–5. 42 Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” 39. 43 Heidegger, Being and Time, 149. 44 Ibid., 67–8 and 151. 45 Ibid., 284. 46 Ibid., 307. 47 Ibid., 308. 48 Ibid., 220. 49 Ibid., 312–19. 50 See, for example: Richard Capobianco, “Lacan and Heidegger: The Ethics of Desire and the Ethics of Authenticity,” in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer, 1995): 391–6. 51 For more on this connection, see: Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, eds. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretative Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 52 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 71 and 173. 53 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 133. 54 Emmanuel Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 70. 55 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195–6. 56 Ibid., 50. 57 Ibid., 194. 58 Ibid., 101. For more on these phenomena, see Chapter 3 of: Drew Dalton, Longing for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009).

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59 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 54–5. See also, Levinas, “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 94. 60 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84 and 86. 61 Ibid., 101. 62 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 12 and 18. See also: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34–5, 200, and 297. 63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. 64 Ibid., 101. 65 Ibid., 171. 66 Ibid., 84. 67 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 16 (italics mine). 68 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 88. 69 Ibid., 245. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 100. 72 Ibid., 35. 73 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 17. 74 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 17–18. 75 It should be noted that there is a subtle difference in Levinas’s early accounts of the nature of subjectivity from his later ones. Whereas in his earlier work Levinas seemed much more comfortable in identifying the I of subjectivity with a mode of being, in his later work he strives to avoid any nomination of the subject as a form of being. Nevertheless, in both his early work and later work, Levinas consistently identifies the subject as the site wherein a relation with that which is beyond being is established. It is for this reason that we can present a relatively synoptic vision of his account of the nature of the subject here. 76 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 53. 77 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 14. 78 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 290. 79 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 49. 80 Ibid., 54–5. 81 Ibid., 3–5. 82 Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 7. 83 Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 76. 84 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 53 (italics mine).

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Chapter 3 1 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. 2 Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 73. 3 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 57. 4 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 290. 5 Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 76–7. 6 Ibid., 72. 7 Ibid., 75. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 76. 10 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 103–4. 11 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 160. 12 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195 (italics mine). 13 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 78 and ff. 14 See, for example: Kevin J. Harrelson, The Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2009). 15 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49 (italics mine). 16 Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 54. 17 Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” 18 See, for example: Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 19 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 167. 20 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 53. 21 Emmanuel Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 11–23. See also: Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 7–8; and Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80. 22 Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 16–103. 23 Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 8. See also: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 58. 24 Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 147. 25 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 89. 26 See, for example: John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

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27 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 17. 28 Levinas, “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 151. See also: Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 148. 29 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 143. 30 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 18. 31 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 59–76. 32 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid., 34–5. For more on the contrast between Levinas’s account of need and desire, see: Dalton, Longing for the Other. 37 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. 38 Ibid., 88. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 203. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 178–9. 43 Ibid., 178. 44 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 55. 45 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 150. 46 Ibid., 219. 47 Ibid., 197. 48 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 11. 49 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. While this emphasis of the nonallergic intervention of the Other is perhaps more representative of Levinas’s earlier works and is challenged and complicated by his later works, as will be shown shortly there is nevertheless ground to argue that it represents a synoptic account of Levinas’s take of the ethical dilemma throughout his career. Indeed, these themes are repeated throughout Otherwise than Being and his groundbreaking essay “Substitution” (in Basic Philosophical Writings). The only difference is that there, and in other later works, they are accompanied by other, more troubling accounts of the ethical solicitation of the Other, accounts which, as has been mentioned, will be explored in greater detail shortly. 50 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 59–76. 51 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 59. For more on this distinction, see: Drew Dalton, “Phenomenology and the Infinite: Levinas, Husserl, and the Fragility of the Finite,” in Levinas Studies 9 (2014): 23–51. 52 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 18.

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53 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 281. 54 Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 180. 55 Levinas, Time and the Other, 49. 56 Levinas, On Escape, 54. 57 Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 49: “The there is is one of Levinas’s most fascinating propositions. It is his temptation too, since as the reverse of transcendence it is thus not distinct from it either. Indeed, it is describable in terms of being, but as the impossibility of not being, as the incessant insistence of the neutral, the nocturnal murmur of the anonymous, as what never begins (thus, an an-archic, since it eternally eludes the determination of a beginning); it is the absolute, but as absolute indetermination.” 58 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 138. 59 Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 136. 60 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 138. 61 For more on this ambiguity see, for example: John D. Caputo, “To the Point of a Possible Confusion: God and il y a,” in Levinas: The Face of the Other (Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Center, 1998): 1–36. See also: Rudi Visker, “No Privacy?” in Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 235–73. 62 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (London: Routledge Press, 2001), 97–192. 63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 245. 64 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 52. 65 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 111–12. 66 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 101. 67 Ibid., 219. 68 Ibid., 171. 69 Ibid., 203. 70 Ibid., 197. 71 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 10. 72 Ibid., 11. 73 Ibid., 15 and 111. 74 Ibid., 15 and 156, respectively. 75 Ibid., 54, 84, and 87, respectively. 76 Ibid., 13. 77 Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 121. 78 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

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79 Schelling, Human Freedom, 47–8. 80 Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Oxford: Ohio University Press, 1985), 97. 81 Schelling, Human Freedom, 23. 82 Ibid. 83 It is this element of Schelling’s argument which distinguishes his work so decisively from that of his contemporaries, most notably Hegel. For Hegel, what we consider to be evil is ultimately nothing more than a necessary moment in the development of the absolute good/God. Thus while his account of evil is not necessarily privative, nevertheless evil does not appear in his work as a real, independent potency. In this regard, Hegel’s account of evil does not differ significantly from that of the medieval scholastics. Evil remains for him, as it does for Augustine and Aquinas, only ever a relative value. For Hegel, the only absolute value is the good, hence his ability, as Meillassoux shows, to justify the evils of human history as not only necessary, but as an essential element in the emergence of the good. Schelling’s genius lies in his assertion of the ontological originality and independence of evil as its own moral force, one which is radically distinct from the good. By asserting the radical positive independence of evil from the good in this way Schelling’s work mobilizes a completely novel understanding of both the concept of evil and, more pertinently, the concept of the absolute. What Schelling’s concept of evil allows is a rereading of the absolute as a morally ambiguous force, a possibility which Hegel and the rest of the history of philosophy could never have accepted. 84 Schelling, Human Freedom, 37. 85 Ibid. 86 F. W. J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 203. 87 Gen. 1:2 (ESV). 88 Schelling, Human Freedom, 29. 89 F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 22. 90 Schelling, Human Freedom, 31. 91 Ibid., 63–4. 92 Ibid., 29. 93 This conviction has to have been informed in no small part by the death of Schelling’s wife Caroline in 1809 as well as her daughter in 1803, both of whom Schelling endeavored to treat medically, perhaps unintentionally poisoning in the process—a reality which caused public scandal at the time and nearly cost Schelling his professional appointments and personal freedom. 94 Schelling, Human Freedom, 29. 95 Ibid., 29 and 34, respectively.

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96 Ibid., 47 and 41, respectively. 97 Ibid., 63–4. 98 Ibid., 47. 99 Ibid., 67. 100 Ibid., 30. 101 Ibid., 23. 102 Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 157. 103 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 104 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), 252.

Interlude 1 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. 2 Ibid., 22. 3 Ibid., 22–3. 4 Ibid., 23. 5 Ibid., 49. 6 Ibid., 24. 7 Ibid., 46. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Ibid., 32 ff. 11 Ibid., 34. 12 Ibid., 48 (italics mine). 13 Kierkegaard is clearly making reference here to 1 Cor. 1:25 (ESV): “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.” 14 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 34. 15 Ibid., 39. 16 Ibid., 31 and 61. 17 1 Cor. 1:25 (ESV). 18 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 49 and 58. 19 Ibid., 51. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 50–1. 22 Ibid., 61. 23 Ibid.

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24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 293–4. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 26. 31 Ibid., 287. 32 Ibid., 252. 33 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (Orlando: Harcourt, 1978). 34 See, for example: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 476–9. 35 Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 218. 36 Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem. 37 Ibid., 303. 38 Ibid., 218. 39 Ibid., 303. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 218. 42 Ibid., 304. 43 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: The Modern Library, 2008). 44 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Mienola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994). 45 Milton, Paradise Lost, 38. 46 Ibid., 17. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 18. 49 Ibid., 20, italics mine for emphasis. 50 Ibid., 59. 51 Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 76. 53 Ibid. 54 The spirit of this call to resist the absolute is poeticized forcefully in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1865 poem Atlanta in Calydon which reads: “Because thou art over all who are over us;/Because thy name is life and our name death;/Because thou art cruel and men are piteous,/And our hands labour and thine hand scattereth;/Lo, with hearts rent and knees made tremulous, / Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breath, / At least we witness of thee ere we

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die/That these things are not otherwise, but thus;/That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith,/That all men even as I,/All we are against thee, against thee, O God most high.” See: Charles Algernon Swinburne, “Atlanta in Calydon,” in Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 35. 55 Prov. 9:10 (ESV). 56 Voltaire, “Epistle to the Authors of the Book, The Three Impostors,” in The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901): vol. XV, 21–4.

Chapter 4 1 See, for example: Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); or, Philippe Van Haute’s close reading of Lacan’s famous essay from the Ecrits “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002). 2 See, for example: Sarah Harasym, ed. Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Simon Critchley, “Das Ding: Lacan and Levinas,” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 72–90; Steven Gans, “Lacan and Levinas: Towards an Ethical Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 28, no. 1 (1997): 30–48; and Drew Dalton, “The Intrigue of the Other and the Subversion of the Subject: Levinas and Lacan on the Status of Subjectivity after Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 34, no. 2 (2013): 415–38. 3 See, for example: Drew Dalton, “Phenomenology and the Problem of Absolute Materiality: Psychologism, Correlationism, and the Possibility of an Ethics of the Inhuman,” in Unconscious: Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Dylan Trigg and Dorthée Legrand (Dordrecht: Kluewer, 2017): 141–59. 4 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures (The Standard Edition), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 100. 5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 144. 6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1996), 332. 7 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and Id, ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 8–9. 8 Lacan, Ecrits, 163. 9 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 25 and 29. 10 Ibid., 131.

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11 Ibid., 20. 12 Cf., Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 66: “Lacan developed a number of different definitions of the unconscious and the emphasis that he placed on each conceptualization changed throughout his career.” 13 See, for example: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 84, 188, and 199. 14 Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, trans. Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 263. 15 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 14. 16 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 9. 17 Lacan, Ecrits, 292. 18 Ibid., 155. 19 Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Cogito and Separation: Lacan/Levinas,” in Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, 31. 20 Gondek, “Cogito and Separation: Lacan/Levinas,” 31. 21 Homer, Jacques Lacan, 70 (italics mine). 22 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 236. 23 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 130. 24 Ibid., 14. 25 Ibid., 147. 26 Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 43. 27 Lacan, Ecrits, 155. 28 Ibid., 337. 29 Ibid. 30 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 199. 31 Ibid., 144. 32 Lacan, Ecrits, 189. 33 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 247. 34 Ibid., 9. 35 See, for example: Lacan, Ecrits, 350: “This is what the subject lacks in order to think himself exhausted by his cogito, namely that which is unthinkable for him.” 36 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 21–2. 37 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29. 38 Ibid., 275. 39 Lacan, Ecrits, 333, 344, and 354.

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40 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 104. 41 Ibid. 42 Lacan, Ecrits, 344. 43 Ibid., 333. 44 Ibid., 345. See also: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 235. 45 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 228. 46 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29. 47 Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 6. 48 For an excellent reading of the status of the Lacanian subject as a lack, see: Paul Verhaeghe, “Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), 164–89. 49 Lacan, Ecrits, 349. 50 Lacan, Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29. 51 Ibid., 30. 52 Lacan, Ecrits, 317. 53 Ibid., 332. 54 For an excellent explication of the curious ontological status of the subject, see: Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 11–40. 55 Lacan, Ecrits, 339. 56 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 160. 57 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007). 58 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 45. 59 Ibid. 60 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 71. 61 See, for example: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 184. 62 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 172. 63 Ibid., 52. 64 Ibid., 84. See also: Ibid., 71. 65 Ibid., 55. 66 Ibid., 73. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 63. 69 Ibid., 55. 70 Ibid., 70 and 95. 71 Ibid., 319. 72 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 33.

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73 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 319. 74 Ibid., 54. 75 See, for example: Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 11: “The question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real,” as expressed in the absolute otherness of the Thing. 76 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314. 77 Ibid., 63. 78 Ibid., 319. It is important to note here the doubleness of the phrase “céder pas” in French, which signifies both “to give up on,” and “to give in to.” Recognizing the doubleness is essential to understanding properly Lacan’s formulation of ethical resistance. 79 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 222. See also: Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 242–50, 316, and 319. 80 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 73, 76, and 83. 81 Ibid., 176–7. 82 Ibid., 89. 83 Ibid. 84 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: Psychoses, 1955– 1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 250–1. 85 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 35. 86 Ibid., 58–9. 87 Ibid., 46–7, 57–8, and 319. 88 Ibid., 7. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 176–7. 91 Lacan, The Psychoses, 221. For more on the difference between psychosis and neurosis in Lacan see: Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 231–2, 248, and 265. 92 Lacan, The Psychoses, 194. 93 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 184. 94 Ibid., 197. 95 Lacan, The Psychoses, 202. 96 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 185.

Chapter 5 1 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231.

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2 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 216. 3 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and ther: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Buchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 5. 4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 144. 5 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 146 and 148–9, respectively. 8 For more on the relationship between Foucault and Lacan on the nature of subjectivity in relation to the Other, see: Louis Sass, “Lacan, Foucault, and the ‘Crisis of the Subject’: Revisionist Reflections on Phenomenology and PostStructuralism,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21, no. 4 (2014): 325–41. 9 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 144 (italics mine). 10 Cf. ibid., 154. 11 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 208. 12 Ibid., 209. 13 Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984. Conducted by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Muller,” trans. J. D. Gauthier, S. J. in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 9–10. 14 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 10. 15 Michel Foucault, An Introduction. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 136. 16 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 139. 17 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 107–8. 18 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knoweldge: Selected Interviews and Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121. 19 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 305. 20 See, for example: Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1974–1975, ed. Arnold L. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 25. 21 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1995), 184. 22 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 109. 23 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 137.

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24 Ibid., 140 25 Ibid., 139. 26 Ibid., 140. 27 Ibid., 137. 28 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 107–8. 29 See, for example: Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 41; and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Chapters 5 ff. 30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200 ff. 31 Ibid., 176–7. 32 Ibid., 30. 33 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 19. 34 For more on Foucault’s ethics as a form of resistance, see: Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164–5. 35 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 211. 36 Ibid., 216. 37 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 20. 38 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 210. 39 Ibid., 212. 40 Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robery Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii. 41 Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 36. 42 See, for example: Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 2–3. 43 Foucault, The Birth of BioPolitics, 63. 44 Ibid. 45 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 20. 46 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 216. 47 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 5. 48 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 231. 49 Ibid., 234. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 235. 52 Ibid., 236. 53 Ibid., 235. 54 Ibid.

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55 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 12. 56 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 231 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 234–5. 59 Ibid., 235. 60 Ibid., 237. 61 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Smeiotext(e), 2001), 166. 62 Foucault, Fearless Speech. 63 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 235. 64 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 230. 65 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 232. 66 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 66. 67 Ibid., 67. 68 Ibid., 54. 69 Ibid., 104. 70 Ibid., 161. 71 Ibid., 71. 72 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 126. 73 For more on how Foucault’s concept of genealogy functions as an exercise of parrhésia and critique see: Rudi Visker, Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1999). 74 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: Volume 3, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986/1988), 58–64. 75 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 143. 76 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2001/2005), 371. 77 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 145–50. 78 Ibid., 150–60. 79 Ibid., 160–4. 80 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 64–5. 81 Ibid., 66. For more on Foucault’s concept of ethics as askesis, see: Edward McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 82 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 319–20. 83 Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29–52. Foucault’s heroization of Sade seems to be derived in some part from

140 NOTES

Camus’s portrait of Sade in The Rebel. See, for example: Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 36 ff. 84 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 213. 85 For more on this see, for example: Eduardo Mendieta, “The Practice of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, ed. Dianna Taylor (New York: Acumen, 2011), 116–19. 86 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 359–62. 87 Foucault, “Self-Writing,” 208. 88 Ibid., 213. 89 Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a 19th Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Vintage, 1980), xii. 90 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 311. 91 Again, Foucault seems to have drawn extensively from Camus’s The Rebel here. See: Camus, The Rebel, 295–6. 92 Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 27. 93 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 84. 94 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 306. 95 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 187. 96 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 316. 97 Ibid., 311. 98 Ibid., 319.

Conclusion 1 In this regard, despite the revolutionary spirit of the modern project, much of modern philosophy remains firmly within the tradition it tried so desperately to free itself from. Nowhere is the irony of modernity’s fealty to the history of philosophy more obvious than in the so-called revolutionary philosophy of Hegel whose concept of the absolute is really nothing other than a kind of “immanentization” of the idea of the absolute good maintained from Plato onward. Indeed, in many ways Hegel’s project on this count is really not all that distinct from Aquinas’s: the attempt to forge a kind of summa theologica, only one in keeping with his Protestantism and idealism whereby God becomes not only the ground and condition for all understanding, but the living immanent essence of all reality. 2 Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 71. 3 Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, 72. 4 Ibid.

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5 Ibid., 50 (translation amended). 6 Ibid., 70–1. 7 Indeed, it was for this reason that so many of the ancients saw Heraclitus’s work as a counterpart to the logic of Parmenides’s concept of the One, one which, while at first glance its opposite, could actually operate within it. For more on this connection, see: Christian H. Sötemann, Heraclitus and Parmenides—An Ontic Perspective (Munich: GRIN Publishing, 2009). 8 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 20; Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a Humanism, ed. John Kulka, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 20. 9 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. 10 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5. 11 Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays. 12 Ibid., 8–9. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid., 9. 16 Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1972), 190–1. 17 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 4–5. 18 See, for example: Mikhail Bakunin, “The Immorality of the State,” in The Selected Works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, ed. Carlo Cafiero and Èlisée Reclus (Online: Library of Alexandria Press, 2009). 19 See, for example: Michael Bakunin, God and the State, ed. Paul Avrich (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). 20 Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism, 22–9. 21 See, for example: Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 3. 22 Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism, xxv. 23 The link between these thinkers and nineteenth-century political anarchism has been traced in: Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 24 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 27. 25 Rancière, Dissensus, 30. 26 Ibid., 33. 27 Ibid., 36–7. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 38. 30 Ibid., 41. 31 Ibid., 40.

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32 Ibid., 33. 33 Ibid., 41. 34 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brain Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 216. For more on Deleuze’s conception of politics qua anarchy, see: Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2009). 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 214–31. 36 Ibid., 508–9. 37 Ibid., 238. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 171. 39 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 141–2. 40 Lyotard, The Differend. 41 Ibid., 142–3. 42 Ibid., 143. 43 Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: The Modern Library, 1963), 54.

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INDEX ab-archy  119, 120 Abraham  19, 60–4, 66, 67 absolute  1–7, 106–8 ambiguity of  48–50, 53, 83 good  1–3, 46, 47, 56, 58–9, 63–4, 67, 83–4, 107, 109, 111 ground of evil  3–4, 50–5, 63–4, 68–9, 107, 111 local actuality  14–16, 18–19, 23–5 (see also ideal) necessity of  3–4, 6, 14, 25, 51, 106–7, 111 Other  36, 37, 39–41, 42, 44, 73–8, 82–5, 87, 89, 91 universal actuality  11–13, 19, 23, 39 41, 42, 47, 57, 58, 84, 108 universal virtuality  13–14, 23–5, 27, 53 acquiescence  1, 3, 5, 11, 41, 53, 57, 58–60, 63, 66, 69, 86, 109 actuality  4–5, 11–16, 23–5, 41, 42, 47, 51–3 aesthetics  100, 102 alt-right  107 anarchy  37, 38, 43, 53, 116–19, 120 arche-fossil  20–1 Arendt, Hannah  6, 34, 57, 65–7, 109 askesis  101–2, 104, 105, 110 atheism  45, 132–3 n.54 Badiou, Alain  4, 16–19, 23–5, 28–9, 46, 73, 108 balance  53–5, 112–13 banality  57, 66 Baudelaire, Charles  104 Berkman, Alexander  117 biopolitics, biopower  92, 95–7, 99, 101, 102, 104 Blanchot, Maurice  49, 129 n.57

call of conscience  35, 38 Camus, Albert  x, 120, 140 n.83, 140 n.91 capitalism  64, 66, 107 care for the self  6, 98–9, 104, 108, 110–1, 120 chaos  52–3, 64, 87 collaboration  1, 59 colonialism  13, 50, 56 command, demand of the Other  5–7, 18, 25, 46, 49–50, 56, 60, 63–4, 69–70, 86, 88, 101, 117–18, 120 conscience  35, 38, 85, 96, 105 consciousness  28–29, 31–3, 44 contingency  16, 20–2, 24, 27, 53 correlation, correlationism  21, 26–8, 43 critique (Kantian)  4–5, 11, 13, 14–16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25–7, 30–3, 38, 39, 41, 50, 74, 104, 105, 108–9, 111, 115, 120 death of God  4, 16, 17, 111 decentered subject  38, 46, 53–5, 76, 78, 81, 112–13 Deleuze, Gilles  97, 117, 118 democracy  14, 92–3, 104, 118 demonic  3, 88 Descartes, Rene  43–4 desire  38, 41, 47, 68, 78–81, 83–7, 97, 99, 100 devil  2, 3, 68–70, 88, 109, 112, 120 dogmatism  4, 11–13, 14–16, 18–23, 25, 29, 31, 45, 58, 105, 108, 122 n.29 domination  96–105, 107, 110, 115, 118

INDEX

eccentric subject  36, 46, 53–5, 81, 112–13 ego  32, 46, 74, 77, 81 Eichmann, Adolf  64–8 ethics  1–7, 11–13, 31, 58–60, 66 consequentialism  12 deontology  4, 12, 13, 16 of fidelity  18–19, 23, 45, 47, 122 n.24 history of  1–3, 11–13, 58–60, 114–15 of hope  22, 24 judgement  7, 11–12, 16–17, 18, 20–5, 27, 30–1, 33, 36, 39, 41–3, 56, 58–9, 61–3, 64, 84, 93, 99, 100, 105, 108–9, 111, 114, 115, 117–18, 119–20 of psychoanalysis  84–8 relativism  11–13, 15, 108 of resistance  3–4, 6–7, 41, 57, 69–70, 74, 85–8, 89–90, 97–8, 101–5, 108–11, 112–16, 119–20 speculative ethics  16–19, 20, 22, 23–5 virtue  1, 12, 101 event  17–18, 19, 20, 21, 23 evil  1–7, 17–22, 24, 25, 41, 46, 48, 50–1, 56–7, 59, 61, 64, 68, 70, 73, 82–7, 90, 105, 107, 108–11, 114, 116–19, 120 banality of  57, 65–7 as privation  1–3, 51, 60, 130 n.83 reversibility of good and evil  5–6, 50, 52–7, 58, 109 face of the other  25, 37–9, 42–6, 49, 76, 82, 91–2, 109 factial speculation  20–2, 24, 27 fanaticism  18–22, 23, 24, 45, 56, 58, 68, 105, 111, 120 fascism  16, 17, 19, 23, 56, 65, 67, 97, 107, 118 fidelity  18–19, 23, 45–7, 122 n.4 finitude  2, 16, 35, 37, 43, 45, 46, 62–4, 67 first philosophy  41, 114–16, 119, 126 n.83 Foucault, Michel  6, 70, 88, 89–105, 108, 110–11, 137 n.8, 139 n.73

151

freedom  14, 17, 21, 38, 39, 46–50, 51, 55, 69, 82, 90, 96, 97–9, 100, 103, 104, 105, 107, 117, 118, 119 Frege, Gottlob  27–9, 30, 36, 41 Freud, Sigmund  74–6 fundamentalism  19, 23, 107 fundamental ontology  34–6 genealogy  90–2, 101, 139 n.73 Genet, Jean  103 genocide  2, 6, 7, 20, 56, 107, 122 n.29 God  1, 3, 4, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 44, 45, 54, 60–3, 66, 68–9, 111, 117, 130 n.83, 132–3 n.54, 140 n.1 Goldman, Emma  117 good  1–7, 11–14, 17, 22–4, 43–4, 46–7, 53–5, 59–60, 61, 66, 68, 83, 85, 87, 94, 95, 102, 103, 105, 107–9, 119–20 absolute  1–3, 46, 47, 56, 58–9, 63–4, 67, 83–4, 107, 109, 111 of resistance  85, 87–8, 89, 105, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 119–20 reversibility of good and evil  5–6, 50, 52–7, 58, 109 governmentality  92–8, 99, 101–4 heaven  1, 2, 45, 63, 68–9 tyranny of  68–9, 112 Hegel, G.W.F.  122 n.29, 130 n.83, 140 n.1 Heidegger, Martin  5, 33–5, 35, 38, 40, 51, 54, 83 hell  68, 69 Heraclitus  112–13, 118, 141 n.7 history  1–3, 6, 15, 20, 25, 32, 90–1, 122 n.29 of philosophy  1–3, 6, 31, 43, 58–9, 66, 73, 100, 102, 103, 106–7, 114, 130 n.83, 140 n.1 of Western ethics  1–3, 11, 13, 31, 33, 58–60, 66, 68–9 of Western politics  20, 25, 33, 56, 107, 108, 116 hostage  49–50 human  17–8, 37 Husserl, Edmund  5, 26–36, 38, 40

152 INDEX

ideal  13–15, 38, 56, 61, 66, 95. See also absolute, universal virtuality and virtual, non-actual idealism  26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 77, 140 n.1 identity  40, 76–7 identity politics  13 inauthenticity  35 infinite, infinity  17, 20, 37, 43–4, 46, 48–50, 52, 54–6, 59, 60, 62–4, 66, 85, 109, 111, 120, 128 n.51 inhuman  55, 73 judgement  7, 11–12, 16–17, 18, 20–5, 27, 30–1, 33, 36, 39, 41–3, 56, 58–9, 61–3, 64, 84, 93, 99, 100, 105, 108–9, 111, 114, 115, 117–18, 119–20 justice  2, 22, 24, 47, 48, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112–14, 117, 118, 120 Kant, Immanuel  2, 4–5, 11–13, 14, 16–18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30–1, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 47, 50, 57–9, 61, 65, 74, 89, 103–4, 107, 108, 109, 111, 115, 120 Kierkegaard, Sø ren  6, 19, 60–4, 67, 68, 109, 122 n.124 Lacan, Jacques  6, 70, 73–88, 89, 91, 97, 108, 110, 111 law  21, 28, 65, 68, 75, 85–7 Levinas, Emmanuel  5, 25, 33–4, 36–41, 42–51, 56–7, 59, 73–4, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86, 108–9, 111, 114–5, 126 n.75, 128 n.49, 129 n.57 liberalism  13–14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 107 local, non-universal  12–16, 17, 18–19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 45. See also absolute, local actuality logic  21, 28, 29, 30, 32, 52, 61–2, 63–4, 65, 67, 68–9, 89–90, 94 love  x, 18, 53 Lyotard, Francois  55, 117, 118–19 madness  64, 73, 92 massacre  2, 6, 20, 56, 66, 68, 107

mathematics  28–9, 41 Meillassoux, Quentin  4, 16, 18–25, 26–7, 29, 41, 46, 73, 108, 122 n.29, 130 n.83 messianism, messiah  24, 63–4, 117 metaphysics  4, 11–13, 19–22, 31, 38, 41, 49, 114–15, 116 Mills, John Stuart  12, 115–16 Milton, John  68–70, 109, 112 modernity  11–13, 44, 106–7, 140 n.1 modern subjectivity, condition  90–7 money  60, 64, 66, 107 morality  x, 1–4, 11–13, 51, 57, 58–60, 65, 68–70, 85–7, 96, 105, 130 murder  7, 16, 33, 60–4, 66, 67 nationalism  14–16, 19, 23, 107 National Socialism (Nazism)  16, 17, 19, 23, 65–8 necessity  3, 4, 6, 15–16, 19–22, 52, 54, 60, 64, 85, 86, 114, 115, 119, 130 n.83 neurosis  85–6, 87, 88, 102, 105, 110 Nietzsche, Friedrich  4, 11, 12, 17, 69, 111 nihilism  11–13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 25, 46, 55, 58, 89, 105, 111, 120 normalization  92–8, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104 noumena  4, 11–13, 30–1 obedience  2, 5, 7, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 88, 89, 95, 102, 109, 113 obsession  49–50, 56, 86 ontology  17, 24, 27–9, 32, 34–6, 40, 41, 44–5, 51, 57, 78, 79, 80–2, 114–15, 135 n.54 Other  5–7, 25, 56–7, 58–9, 69–70, 73–4, 89–90, 105, 106–8, 109–10, 111, 113–14, 116, 119–20 in Foucault  90, 91–3, 98, 99, 101–5, 110 in Heidegger  34–5 in Husserl  32–3

INDEX

in Lacan  73, 74, 75–8, 78–88, 89, 97, 110 in Levinas  36–41, 42–51, 57, 58–9, 73–4, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86, 109, 115 parrhé sia  100–1, 102, 104, 105, 110, 139 n.73 peace  2, 14, 47, 50, 65, 82, 105, 107, 110, 112, 117, 120 phenomenology  5, 25, 26–41, 42–3, 45, 49–50, 56–7, 58, 73, 75, 108, 109, 111 politics  3–4, 7, 11–16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 33, 56, 58, 59, 68, 69, 89, 90–2, 95, 97, 106–8, 114–19, 120 potentiality  7, 13, 15, 17, 41, 52, 54, 59–60, 73, 74, 82, 84, 86, 105, 109, 112 power/knowledge  92, 94–5, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103 psychoanalysis  6, 73, 75, 84–5, 87–8, 91 psychoses  73, 85, 86–7, 105, 110 Ranciè re, Jacques  117–18 Real, the  136 n.75 reduction, phenomenological  29–30 relativism  11–13, 15, 108 religion, faith  1, 18–20, 23, 31, 45, 60–4, 68, 69, 107, 122 n.24 resistance, ethics of  3–4, 6–7, 41, 57, 69–70, 74, 85–8, 89–90, 97–8, 101–5, 108–11, 112–16, 119–20 responsibility  5, 36, 38, 39–41, 43, 46–50, 93, 96, 102, 105, 109, 111, 116 reversibility  5–6, 50, 53–6, 58, 109, 129 n.57 revolution  92–3, 104, 113, 118, 119 Roussel, Raymond  103 sacred  45, 60, 68 Sade, Marquis de  87, 102, 139–140 n.83 Sartre, Jean-Paul  114

153

Schelling, F.W.J.  5, 50–6, 57, 58, 59, 73, 81, 82, 84, 109, 112, 113, 130 n.83, 130 n.93 selfhood. See also subjectivity in Foucault  90–5, 98–100 in Heidegger  35 in Husserl  30–5 in Lacan  74–8, 80–2 in Levinas  39–40, 42, 43 self-writing  102–3, 104, 105, 110 shame  38–9, 41, 118, 120 Shoah  2, 6, 56, 65, 66, 67, 107 sovereignty  2, 14, 50, 51, 57, 69, 83, 89, 92–6, 104, 107, 116 space of freedom  97–8, 103, 105, 119 speculative materialism, realism  23, 27, 28, 30, 33, 36, 40, 41, 108. See also ethics, speculative subjectivity. See also selfhood in Foucault  90–5, 98–100 in Heidegger  35 in Husserl  30–5 in Lacan  74–8, 80–2 in Levinas  39–40, 42, 43 suicide  6, 20, 23, 64, 66 surrealism  103, 104, 105, 110 surveillance  46, 47, 96, 101 techne, technique, technology  6, 97, 98, 100–4, 105, 107, 108 terrorism  6, 20, 23, 64, 66 Thing, Ding  82–3, 84, 85, 86, 87, 136 n.75 thing-in-itself  4, 11–13, 30–1 total domination  97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110 totalitarianism  2, 33, 48–9, 54, 56, 59, 66, 82, 87, 98, 104, 108 transcendence  22, 24, 25, 27–8, 29–30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 45, 49, 62–4, 67–8, 109 trauma  46, 50, 73–4, 85–7 truth  17–8, 19, 20, 23, 25, 64, 92, 94, 100–3 tyranny  50, 68–70, 90, 93, 96, 101, 105, 112, 115–19, 120

154 INDEX

unconscious  37, 42, 50, 74–8, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 99, 134 n.12 Ungrund  51–3 universal  3–5, 7, 11–18, 19, 21, 22, 23–5, 30, 41, 42, 47, 54, 57, 58, 61–3, 65, 66, 74, 84, 98, 108–9, 110 utopianism  14, 107

value  1, 3, 5, 11–15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 31, 41, 43, 46–7, 48–50, 51, 54, 56–7, 58, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 79, 93, 115, 130 n.83 vigilance  87, 97, 102, 116 violence  22, 33, 36, 48, 49, 50, 56, 87 virtual, non-actual  11–19, 23–5, 27, 38, 52–4. See also absolute, universal virtuality and ideal