(December, 2016)
“When philosophy and life are intermingled, we no longer know if we incline toward philosophy because it is life or hold to life because it is philosophy.”
– Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” 1951
Are we entitled to prescribe an order for the world? To dictate the terms of our own ontologies, the mechanics of our realities? Are these the correct questions? These inquiries certainly feel urgent, and they gesture toward a rich, vital, and intractable hermeneutical and philosophical problem within the Western tradition. Judith Butler charts the dimensions of this problem in many of her essays, and through her engagement with the works of Emmanuel Levinas and G.W.F. Hegel, a clearer sense of what these thinkers found to be some of the most compelling aspects of this interpretive issue emerges. For Levinas, “a break in the universality of theoretical reason,” visible through the contradiction of a Europe that portends to peace through reason but whose history has been anything but peaceful, occasions an ethics that is prior to knowledge, prior to any “order of objectivity” imposed upon the world (Levinas, 163, 168). For Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, this hermeneutic issue arises in the temporality of his account’s subject, in the logical instability that the various ontological postures of his subject enacts. Butler suggests that “the figure [in Hegel’s Phenomenology] marks the instability of logical relations,” and that “the temporality of the concept is not finally separable from the temporality of reading,” from the journey of Hegel’s subject in which the reader also becomes an integral participant (Butler, “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel” 44-45).
So how are we to know this world — seemingly so resistant to interpretive effort —and be at peace with one another within it? Levinas suggests that any “order of objectivity” must arise from ethics (“objectivity reposing on justice”), that knowledge remains secondary to the call of peace (Levinas 168-169). This essay will certainly not succeed in concretizing the kind of objectivity that would “repos[e] on justice.” In fact, consistent with Hegel’s enacted meaning (as Butler sees it), this essay will argue that there is no stable objectivity which proceeds from ethics, but only one subject to a dialectics, to the movement of time, to the ambiguity of the subject’s metaphysical location. In order to make this argument, I will first chart a Levinasian ethics of nonviolence in which consists the unmediated right of the Other over the subject, even to the point of “dying for the Other” (Levinas 167). From here, I will parse Butler’s reading of Hegel for clues as to what form this order of knowledge might take, before mapping the one onto the other, attempting to retain the Levinasian primacy of ethics before knowledge. Finally, this conjoining of Levinas and Hegel will attempt to deploy Hegelian desire as an ameliorative to Butler’s concern that a Levinasian ethics of nonviolence “threatens to become a pure culture of the death drive,” a duty to avoid inflicting violence upon the Other so burdensome that death appears as a favorable alternative to an unethical life (Butler, Precarious Life 140). Can we cultivate a desire for life that remains compatible with the absolute right of the Other over the subject? We shall hope to find out.
A LEVINASIAN ETHICS OF NONVIOLENCE
In his essay “Peace and Proximity,” Levinas identifies the contradiction between an idea of Europe that would achieve “peace on the basis of the Truth” and a Europe “wear[y]” from “millennia of fratricidal, political, and bloody struggles, of imperialism, of human hatred and exploitation” (Levinas 162-163). He suggests that we have been “seduced by peace,” by a peace which “commands…without forcing,” which “convince[s] rather than vanquish[es]” (Levinas 162). The power of Greek wisdom, of the Truth that has emerged from this philosophical tradition, consists in its ability to coerce peaceful cohabitation by eliminating the possibility of difference, by “reconcil[ing the other] with the identity of the identical in everyone” (ibid.). This peace achieved through universalism — through a Hellenic rationality — would assimilate everyone under one Truth, providing each person “their repose, their place, their seat” within a “gathering of humans participating in the same ideal truths” (Levinas 162-163). This language of “repose” that Levinas introduces here suggests a kind of staticness, an unchanging eternality that would undergird European society. Peace would be, then, the stoppage of time; it would mean the overcoming of the annihilating force of entropy, the victory of human reason over chaos.
This model for peace which relies on the assimilation and elimination of difference becomes unsavory for Levinas in multiple ways. He identifies its ongoing inability to prevent devastating violence, seemingly arising out of a rupture, a “break in the universality of theoretical reason,” which emerges and constitutes itself in the branching, and often opposing ideologies that have generated these millennia of violence. For Levinas, this contradiction, this “guilty conscience” which “rends Europe at the very hour of its modernity” does not necessarily arise from a failure of Hegel’s “speculative or dialectical project,” but merely from that project’s “indifferen[ce] to wars, murders, and suffering, insofar as these are necessary for the unfolding of rational thought, which is also a politics” (Levinas 163-164). Instead, Levinas wants to install ethics as something anterior to rationality, something which could exist outside of reason, informing reason and the politics which follow on its heels. He writes, “One can ask oneself if one should not understand the very ideal of truth – which no European could refuse – already in terms of an ideal of peace which, more ancient than that of knowledge, only comes to open itself to the call of truth” (Levinas 165). In Levinasian parlance: peace preceding truth, as the ground for truth.
Rather than establish a universal order in which “the ego would be reduced to a part of a Whole,” Levinas remains wary of a universalism which too readily obliterates otherness as a “part[] belonging to a divided whole,” upholding instead a philosophy of radical alterity (ibid.). He emphasizes the etymological meaning of “absolute,” signifying “detached” or “apart,” when he writes, “It is necessary to ask oneself … if the alterity of the other (autrui) has not — straightaway — an absolute character,” suggesting that the Other cannot be “merely other in a logical sense, other of an alterity logically surmountable in a common genus” (ibid.). The Levinasian Other then, resists negation and “absorption” into a unifying logical schema, signifying instead “the surplus of sociality over every solitude” (ibid.). Rather than interpret Husserl’s appresentation as signifying a negativity, or as that which is hidden in what appears, Levinas finds instead this “surplus,” this profound excess of appearance which signifies love. Love emerges as that which establishes the irreducibility of the Other to same, and as the ultimate condition of peace. It is also not reducible to some “subjective illusion,” but instead takes on a kind of atemporality; the subjective in this sense becomes the “breakthrough — across the impassive essence of being, and across the rigor of its logical forms and genera, and across the violence of its perseverance in being — toward the unique, toward the absolutely other, through love” (Levinas 166). Rather than succumb to the momentariness of ontological postures that Hegel identifies in his Phenomenology, and to which Levinas seems to address himself, love cuts through, across these orientations, to signify in what is absolutely unique about the Other. Love undergirds the conditions then, not only for peace, but for proximity — for a human closeness in irreducible difference that Levinas describes as an “impossible assumption of difference, impossible definition, impossible integration” (ibid.). These are powerful words, and we shall hope to see their more complete meaning revealed later in this inquiry.
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To this point in the essay, Levinas has been engaged in a phenomenology of sorts, and now turns to locate, in concrete terms, the inviolability of the Other which characterizes his ethics. For Levinas, the ethical relation consists in the human face’s entreatment to neighborliness, in its singularity, in its “extreme exposure to death, to mortality itself” (Levinas 167). The face presents a vulnerability that is “at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace,” and Butler draws out Levinas’ language on this subject, highlighting the duality and tension within this vulnerability (Levinas 167). She writes, “If the Other, the Other’s face, which after all carries the meaning of this precariousness, at once tempts me with murder and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to produce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics” (Butler, Precarious Life 135). We are simultaneously enticed to kill the Other whose vulnerability reminds us so painfully of our own exposure, and enticed to watch over this Other, enticed with the “impossibility of letting the other alone faced with the mystery of death” (Levinas 167). It is here that proximity and love surface, in this watching over the Other in their profound uniqueness. For Levinas, the Other must always take precedence over the self — no logic of self-preservation provides adequate justification for violence, or even for passivity or indifference in the face of the Other’s suffering. We know this to be the case because of Levinas’ identification of “the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world” (Butler, Precarious Life 132). And it is here that the extent of Levinas’ “absolute pacifism” becomes a struggle for us (ibid. 136). Levinas explicitly states that his ethics “put [one’s] ontological right to existence into question,” and also “always plac[e] in question [one’s] very identity, its limitless freedom and power” (ibid., Levinas 167). It is here that Levinasian ethics “threatens to become a pure culture of the death drive,” wherein we must always make ourselves available to pain and death rather than subject the Other to those same forces (Butler, Precarious Life 135).
So again, what are we to do when confronted with this struggle? Butler rightly identifies the ways in which violence inheres even in the scene of address, in which we are “held hostage” and “h[old the Other] hostage” simply by speaking and being spoken to (Butler, Precarious Life 139). Yet how can we avoid this scene, this violence constitutive to existence itself insofar as without this vital encounter with the Other, one “cannot find meaning within [one’s] own being-in-the-world”? Especially in the age of global capitalism, it seems we are implicated in violence done to the Other through even the most banal and fundamental of everyday activities: the rubber in my shoes made from oil over which wars have been and continue to be fought, the clothing on my back made by what might be justly called slave labor in some remote Southeast Asian country. At what cost to the Other can I desire to persist in my own being? Can we locate, in Hegel, a desire to continue living which also, as Butler calls for, “evinc[es] a moral intentionality” (Butler, Subjects of Desire 4)? Will this be adequate to recuperate the purely nonviolent ethical life as a viable possibility?
HEGELIAN FORCE, DESIRE, AND RECOGNITION
Butler begins her analysis of Hegel by establishing desire as the driving engine behind his Phenomenology, identifying its central role in the attempt to discover identity and a metaphysical place for the subject. Though Hegel’s first invocation of desire does not arrive until “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” Butler suggests that this “moment of [desire’s] appearance is not necessarily the initial moment of its efficacy” (Butler, Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel 54). Rather the subject (which is not yet necessarily a full subject in the proper sense) “is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject,” as desire drives the subject towards the world, towards a fuller sense of its own identity (ibid. 48). Indeed, desire is at play from the earliest moments of the Phenomenology, but always operates under different guises, in different forms, always “thematiz[ing] the conditions of its own existence” (ibid. 54). This persistent thematization of desire parallels the over-arching structure of Hegel’s dialectic, in which meaning and the account’s subject never stand still, but instead always move, adopting and enacting different ontological postures as desire sets to work.
In the early moments of the Phenomenology, before consciousness has become self-consciousness (“desire in general”), desire can be seen in the operations of Force. Butler elucidates Hegel’s conception of Force as “posit[ing] the externality of the world of sensuous and perceptual reality as one that is essentially related to consciousness itself; in effect, Force posits externalization as a necessary moment of thought” (ibid. 55-56). It is Force which seems to provide an answer to the earliest question posed by this paper: yes, we must prescribe an order for the world, but this order is not necessarily one that will stick, so to speak. Consciousness seeks to relate itself to the world, and so is compelled, by desire, to “find a determinate manifestation for itself.” So it is Force which both compels consciousness to externalize, and Force “which frustrates the absorption of that inner reality into determinate form”; it is that which “sustains a tension between that which appears and that which does not appear” (ibid. 56). It is through this tension, this movement between internal and external realities, between conception and rejection, that consciousness, in a sense, learns to become self-consciousness. Self-consciousness emerges in order to think this movement, to “think inner difference, the mutual implication of opposites, as constitutive of the object itself” (ibid. 57). Through Force, consciousness is not only impacted, but impacts the world through its conception of it. Butler establishes “the role of our own consciousness in constituting this reality inasmuch as the text must be read to have its meaning enacted” (ibid. 50) Once self-consciousness has grasped Force, it can “think change,” which is to say, it becomes aware of the process of constant change to which it, and consequently the world, are both subject (ibid.). The negativity that inheres in this realization of the Hegelian subject, the realization that each internal conviction will be undermined in its externalization, gives rise to the structure of determinate negation, to change, which is “constitutive of desire itself” (ibid. 63).
So we begin to see that this structure of negation, as integral to desire, seems to undermine the possibility of desire’s satisfaction at every turn. And yet, in order for the subject to know itself and its world, it must continue negating this world, for this is how the subject accumulates knowledge — as an interrelated web of previously superseded misconceptions. Butler writes, “desire, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent features of the subject itself” (Butler, Subjects of Desire 6). We can begin to see, however, that this project fails at completion because of its open-ended nature, because of the “insurpassibility” of otherness (Butler, “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel” 67). Insofar as the subject fails to make immanent all features of the external world because of their sheer proliferation, the subject has not found an identity, not found a metaphysical place for itself. The final stasis this subject searches for does not seem to be available in the sensuous and perceptual world, and so self-consciousness relocates the site of its search once more, continuing to widen “the circumference of reality”: it searches for another self-consciousness, or concretely, the human Other (ibid. 69).
It is unclear at this point, if this desire, which now inaugurates the search for metaphysical place through interaction with the human Other, can be said to be moral at all. It seems to presuppose a kind of stasis as its telos, a satisfaction which would place the subject into a stable relation with otherness, and insofar as the subject may desire to be moral, can desire then, through the workings of Force, move the subject towards this ethical relation? For Hegel, the confrontation with the Other inevitably moves the subject into a relation of inequality, which he elucidates in “Lordship and Bondage,” — a relation one would be hard pressed to describe as ethical.
In “Lordship and Bondage,” the subject encounters the Other, expecting to find recognition, or the reflection of its reflexive structure by the Other as the satisfaction of its desire. But it discovers that this is not the case. It is, in Butler’s language, “wholly absorbed” by the Other, and becomes both ecstatic and angry (ausser sich). Butler writes,
self-consciousness initially expects the Other to be a passive medium of reflection for itself; the Other will mirror itself since the Other is like itself. … Apparently this self-consciousness did not take seriously the extent to which the Other is, indeed, like itself, i.e., a principle of active negation, and so is scandalized by the independent freedom of the Other (ibid. 74-75).
This initial encounter paves the way for the “life and death struggle,” in which self-consciousness becomes anxious that he will only ever be certain of his “own determinate life, but never can get beyond his life to be certain of the life of the Other” (ibid. 77). This anxiety becomes a desire to annihilate the Other, such that self-consciousness can be certain of its world once more. This desire to annihilate is, simultaneously, the desire to “merge with the Other,” to eliminate the reliance of self-consciousness on determinate existence, to become an abstraction. It is here, in this next moment of thought, that the unequal relation emerges and where the possibility of ethics seems lost: when annihilation is replaced by domination. Because annihilation would defeat the purpose of self-consciousness’ project — to know the world and itself — by destroying life, domination emerges instead as a compromise which Butler suggests “must be understood as the effort to annihilate within the context of life” (ibid. 78-79). The lord-bondsman relation becomes a “configuration of death in life,” a “project[] of [the] despair … of not being able to die” (ibid. 80). Both the lord and the bondsman are tethered to life, seemingly by desire, by the project of self-consciousness, and yet this project has led both lord and bondsman into despair, into an unethical relation of domination and enslavement in which both quite “explict[ly] desire[] to die.”
HEGEL AND LEVINAS: A RESISTANT COMMENSURABILITY
So it seems, in a way, Butler has located within Hegel a concern surrounding a death drive which arises, not from the difficulty of living an ethical life, but from the impossibility of finally knowing the world and the Others within it. Hegel’s Phenomenology has enshrined inequality, assimilation and domination at the root of all interactions with the Other (if we are to take seriously the implications of the lord-bondsman relation) while Levinas has enshrined nonviolence, radical alterity, and peace at the root of his philosophy of Otherness. What sense can we make of these two thinkers by placing them into dialogue with each other? Levinas gives us some clues as to how he would like to respond to Hegel. In the moment when Hegelian self-consciousness encounters the Other, it, as Butler reminds us, “naively expects that the Other will be passive like objects, and differ only insofar as it can reflect self-consciousness’ structure” (ibid. 75). Indeed, this posture towards the Other demonstrates a naivety which points toward the degree to which the subject of the Phenomenology, and perhaps even Hegel, has underestimated the character of the Other’s alterity. Levinas reminds us that we must ask ourselves “if the alterity of the other (autrui) has not – straightaway – an absolute character, in the etymological sense of the term,” which, again, signifies a “detached” quality or “apart”-ness which resists negation. The Hegelian subject has misread the situation entirely, and must reorient himself, accounting for the absolute alterity, the singularity of the Other in which love signifies.
Though the Hegelian subject still desires to know itself and the world, and still expects to find this knowledge in the reflexive structure of the Other, Levinas would have this subject reconsider its narcissistic ontological presumptions. He writes, “Consciousness is born as the presence of the third party in the proximity of the one for the other … . The foundation of consciousness is justice and not the reverse” (Levinas 169). Consciousness, for Levinas, emerges after the encounter with the Other, and on this front, Levinas and Hegel seem profoundly incompatible — Hegel’s narrative establishes the genesis of consciousness well before the encounter with the Other, while Levinas suggests that it only emerges through this encounter, through the inception of justice. Levinas gestures towards his incompatibility with the Hegelian tradition to which he addresses himself through the language of “impossib[ility]” which I identified earlier: “Proximity as the impossible assumption of difference, impossible definition, impossible integration. Proximity as impossible appearing” (Levinas 166). It is through a rejection of the Hegelian primacy of knowledge that Levinas establishes proximity, a human closeness-in-difference that makes no Hegelian effort at definition or integration, as prior to consciousness and as a condition of peace.
What, though, of Butler’s concern about the Levinasian death drive? Has Hegel’s notion of desire offered us any solutions? Perhaps not concretely, but Butler’s appropriative reading of Hegel may suggest a way around the desire to die that she identifies as integral to the lord-bondsman relation. Despite the seemingly grim implications of the inequality Hegel places at the root of our interactions with Others, Butler suggests that we should seek “the dissolution of [the lord and bondsman’s] antagonism,” paving “the way to an embodied pursuit of freedom, a desire to live in the fullest sense” (Butler, “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel” 80). We can seek this dissolution through a return to Hegel’s conceptualization of Force, which as we have seen, allows us to prescribe a new framing for the world as the old one proves inadequate, insofar as our desire to live an ethical life finds the old one not to be good. Because “desire is coextensive with life,” it is, for Butler “thus always an implicit struggle against the easier routes of death in life, the presence of contradictions, that keep one from wanting life enough” (ibid. 80-81). Insofar as we can see these “contradictions” as speaking to a Levinasian aporia between the fear of death and the anxiety about perpetrating violence against the Other, and also as contradictions between our desire to live ethical lives and the necessity of inflicting violence, Hegelian desire seems to suggest that we work towards the elimination of this latter contradiction. The Levinasian aporia, on the other hand, should not be eliminated; it sustains the possibility of ethics precisely because of its irresolvability. Even in the case of the latter contradiction (between the desire for ethical life and the necessity of violence), Butler suggests that there can be no closure, no satisfaction, except in death, whenever that may come. It is because desire is coextensive with life that it requires us to persist in our being, to continue the process of renewal, renegotiation, and movement towards the world. In a particularly strange sense, albeit perhaps consistent with Hegelian parlance, desire becomes the desire to desire life.
So, to return to one of this essay’s primary inquiries, it seems we have failed in the enterprise of discovering the possibility of a purely nonviolent ethical existence. Hegelian desire is not the magic bullet I had hoped it would be, but Hegel has nevertheless provided the conceptual tools needed to see desire as always already engaged in the potentially ethical process of world-making. Butler writes, “we are recognized not merely for the form we inhabit in the world (our various embodiments) but for the forms we create of the world (our works); our bodies are but transient expressions of our freedom, while our works shield our freedom in their very structure” (ibid. 83). We are free to make of the world what we will, to harness the generative capacity of Force and desire to reorient, to give the world an ethical form. Butler emphasizes the “fictional” nature of Hegel’s subject, and of his account, and suggests that our role as his readers is, in a sense, to “become makers of fiction who cannot sustain belief in our creations, who wake to their unreality, only to dream more shrewdly the next time” (ibid. 54). So this is our task: to shrewdly dream up new ethical realities, to set to work and give them determinate form, to recognize the fleetingness of stasis (which is truly a “philosophical death wish”), and instead embrace flux as constitutive of life, knowing that we will not always be good, but that we can always be better (Butler, Subjects of Desire 14).
WORKS CITED:
Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel.” The Judith Butler Reader. Ed. Sara Salih. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 39-89. Print.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 