Austin - The Desire Of The Other (null And Void)

1 The Desire of the Other (Null and Void) Michael Austin

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.” – Barrack Obama’s inaugural address

“There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly, like the pneumococci in dogs which gain entrance through the nose. . . .This creature is Your Neighbor.” − Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

For much of his career, Emmanuel Levinas was concerned primarily with a philosophy of “transcendence.” That is, Levinas was focused on phenomenological experiences which broke with our experiences of the every-day, what he called the “Same.” That which breaks the Same is that which cannot be systematized as a part of the cohesive system of the ordinary (the Self-Same), and as such is always outside (transcending) the system of the Same. That which breaks with the Same (or perhaps it would be better to say “that which breaks the Same”) is, for Levinas, the Other. The Other is a “trauma,” an event which “break[s] up [. . .] consciousness” and forces the problem of responsibility on the Self, the issue being, “what is one to do with this Other?” The Other is a wound that never heals and never goes away. Under the Levinasian paradigm, the Self is always already under the sway of the Other, which “remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence.”1 That is, one's existence is grounded not in an inalienable ontology of self-certainty (“I think, therefore I am”), but a lopsided ontology of response 1 Emanual Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press), 168.

2 to difference (“You [who are not me] call, therefore I am [so as to answer]”). What I wish to do in this essay is to interrogate this Other who desires of me, to find out who this Other is, and to find out what the Other is asking of me, that is, to understand rather than satisfy the Other. Of course, an interrogation is not suitable to a Levinasian philosophy dominated by my unyielding response to the Other (either in the form of hospitality or murder. . . and all points in between), and this is precisely the point. We will see that when taken to its extreme, when confronted in this way, the Other does not exist, but only the “Desire of the Other” exists properly. Finally, we will confront Jack Caputo's statement that Levinasian ethics are entirely impossible.

Is The Other A Faceless Monster? (Well Why Not?)

I wish to first suggest that there is more than a little humanism in Levinas' ethics. Rather, the celebration of otherness as seen in Levinas is quite modest when compared to the work of someone like Gilles Deleuze who constructs a “Geology of Morals” and is concerned with “becoming-animal.” That is, the Other is not actually tout autre, but stands simply as a symbolic representation of human dignity; the Other is always already a human being. Levinas speaks of the Other in decidedly human terms, e.g.: I can recognize the gaze of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan only in giving and refusing; I am free to give or to refuse, but my recognition passes necessarily through the interposition of things. Things are not, as in Heidegger, the foundation of the site, the quintessence of all the relations that constitute our presence on the earth. . . The relation between the same and the other, the welcoming of the other, is the ultimate fact, and in it the things figure not as what one builds but as what one gives.2 Would not the Other, the Absolutely Other (tout autre) be Otherwise-Than-Human? Is not the true test of an ethic of otherness not in “the face of the other man” but in the face of the monster? An ethic of otherness should not be conjured up from a certain Jewish humanism (the human being is made in the

2 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49.

3 image of God and is therefore holy / sacred) but rather in the monstrosities as dreamed up by a Kafka or a Lovecraft, though these true Others (the uncomfortable others) would likely make one go mad.3 There is also the issue here of how the tout autre could even appear to us phenomenologically if it supposedly surpasses all possible horizons of experience. Is not the truly Other that which precisely cannot appear in the Face-to-Face encounter? That which has no face to begin with?4 The Levinasian Other is a domesticated otherness, an otherness made prim-and-proper for television commercials of starving African children, tsunami survivors, and inner-city youth (the liberal-humanist non-threatening otherness). It is precisely those who have “lost-face” that are calling us the most, and it is those who do not call to us where we see the greatest alterity (the animal, the pseudo-organic, and the evil). Levinas will tell us that “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness,”5 but should not that which is tout autre shake me up? Should I not be shocked by the Other? The Other does not reveal him- or herself solely as the stranger, the widow, or the orphan, but even more so in the terrorist trying to kill me, the fundamentalist trying to convert me, or the beast trying to eat me. In short, Levinasian otherness is not other enough, but remains part of a historically contingent form of Jewish humanism, emphasizing the dream of a world with no oppression, war, or poverty. His central notion is not a Subject (not an agent grounded on its own rationality), or even an organism, but rather the more abstract (and historically constructed) unit of liberal human dignity. The Other (in the Levinasian sense) is never experienced as Other.

3 As Lovecraft himself acknowledges in “The Call of Cthulhu:” “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position within, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (New York: Library of America, 2005), 167. 4 Or, as Slavoj Zizek points out, the human being stripped of their humanity, as seen in the expressionless Muselmann. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 113. 5 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 150.

4 Violence and Existence (The Unbearable Burden of Being)

Existence for Levinas is violent, nothing exists without harming other existents. The goal then, the task of the human being is to be without being a murderer, as evidenced in Levinas' account of Jewish ethics: If Judaism is attached to the here below, it is not because it does not have the imagination to conceive of a supernatural order, or because matter represents some sort of absolute for it; but because the first light of conscience is lit for it on the path that leads from man to his neighbor. What is an individual, a solitary individual, if not a tree that grows without regard for everything it suppresses and breaks, grabbing all the nourishment, air and sun, a being that is fully justified in its nature and its being? What is an individual, if not a usurper? What is signified by the advent of conscience, and even the first spark of spirit, if not the discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing by assassination? Attention to others and, consequently, the possibility of counting myself among them, of judging myself - conscience is justice.6 According to Levinas then, I am infinitely responsible to and for the Other, who is hindered in some way by my very existence. But is this the case? There are many claims being made here: First, that existence is inherently violent, that is, that there is somehow a finite space set aside for existents and we must all make room for the Other.7 Second, that the Other is lacking in some way, that the Other is never Whole, but seeks Wholeness through me. Third, that I am somehow responsible for (ful)filling the void that is the Other. I exist as a perpetual threat to the Other, or rather, and more specifically still, my very existence (my being-in-the-world) is violent to that of the Other. Could we not then say from this standpoint that existence itself is violence, that it is the original and perhaps only violence? Or, as Zizek says in his essay on Levinas, is it that my existing as null and void (an infinite lack) is rather a threat to Being?

6 Emanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 100. 7 I'm reminded of the episode of The Simpsons titled “Bart of Darkness” (Season 6, Episode 1) where a heat wave is striking Springfield. At the end of the episode, all of the children of the town are in Martin Prince's pool and he commands everyone to move slightly to allow room for another person. The pool immediately collapses.

5 This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which Levinas' answer is not sufficient: I am a threat to the entire order of being not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being – as such, as nothing, I 'am' a striving to reach out and appropriate all. 8 If this is correct, then Levinas is not to be viewed as the great guardian of the Other, but instead as he who, like Heidegger before him, sees a threat looming large over Being, and builds his philosophy on such grounds. The questions of the constitution of the Self and his or her threat to the Other (or Being) are perhaps too much to take on in this essay. As such, I wish to focus on the latter two points, the Other as lack, and the Self as responsible for compensating for this ontological “missing piece,” which will fall under what we will call the “Desire of the Other.” The Other presents itself totally naked and exposed, its ontological lack readily apparent as it says not only “Do not kill me,” but also (and perhaps more strongly), “I'm empty, please fill me.” For how could the Other desire if it did not in some sense lack? Levinas tells us that the Other presents him- or herself precisely in this lack (the stranger lacks familiarity, the widow their spouse, and the orphan their parents). If the Other confronts me in such a way, that is, in need of help, then it is in some sense missing or lacking. . . perhaps even castrated. Do we accept that we exist as lacks or voids? Perhaps this is the secret of the Self and the Other, that only the Other can see my void, my secret, and I his or hers.9 Perhaps we all, in some sense, lack, that both the Self and the Other exist as voids in Being, that our existence itself hinges on “an impossible / traumatic kernel, around a central lack,” because

8 Slavoj Zizek, “Smashing the Neighbor's Face” (available online at http://www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm). 9 “How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself and without my being able to see him in me? And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is 'my' secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some ‘one,’ or to some other who remains someone? It is perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy, namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no-one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. . . . The question of the self: ‘who am I?’ not in the sense of ‘who am I’ but who is this 'I' that can say 'who'? What is the 'I,' and what becomes of the responsibility once the identity of the 'I' trembles in secret?” Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92.

6 Without this lack in the Other, the Other would be a closed structure and the only possibility open to the subject would be his radical alienation in the Other. So it is precisely this lack in the Other which enables the subject to achieve a kind of 'dealienation' called by Lacan separation: not in the sense that the subject experiences that now he is separated forever from the object by the barrier of language, but that the object is separated from the Other itself, that the Other itself ‘hasn't got it,’ hasn't got the final answer – that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring; that there is also a desire of the Other.10 That is to say, that it is not only I who desire, but that the Other, in all the talk of the face-to-face as a violent confrontation that wounds my being-in-the-world (and never heals), is also in some sense wounded. As Zizek continues, it is precisely through this mutual lack that I am able to empathize with the Other, that it is only in their lack of totality (and infinity), in their very pain and suffering that I am called to heal, that a relation between my Self and this other is possible. “This lack in the Other gives the subject – so to speak – breathing space, it enables him to avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack but by allowing him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack in the Other.”11 Rather, is this not the very Desire of the Other, both in the sense that I, as a lack, desire this Other to fill me, just as the Other desires to be filled by me? For I must be the Other to someone, something. In my otherness, do I not desire (please fill me)? That is, if I am indeed infinitely responsible to the Other, if I must somehow give myself wholly to the Other in order to fill their gaps, is this not a futile task? For are they not infinitely responsible in some sense to me, as the Other of the Other? Would this not simply lead to a hungry Other, who, not unlike a stray animal, would continually return to be filled? And would I be able to satisfy the Other? It is possible that if I am also constituted by a void, built on a lack, that I would be entirely inadequate for the task of fulfillment, that I would be a wasted meal on the Other.12 It is at this point that the Other breathes me into being (expires me) in order to breathe me in 10 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 122. 11 Ibid. 12 Perhaps for these reasons, Levinas has found such a following in Christian theology, for is not the Christ that very being whom we eat and are thereby mysteriously filled? Is the Messiah the only true way to adequately satisfy the Other? These are questions that will have to wait for future inquiries.

7 (inspire me). To put it another way, I am because of the Other (in some sense) and therefore am for the Other in the sense that it is my duty (before duty even exists) to not only withhold from murdering the Other (otherness remains even after the murder; the crime is never perfect) but to keep the Other alive. It is never then the Other who creates me that I experience, but the Desire of the Other; in the initial creation of my self it is the Desire of this Other, the desire for wholeness that creates me in the first place (I am constituted by the very void that the Other longs to fill), while after this, it is my own desire for wholeness (my own Desire of the Other) that sustains my existence as I live a life haunted by otherness and incompleteness. A sad image emerges here when the Other is taken to its extreme, of empty beings creating further empty beings in an attempt to satisfy a perpetual hunger. In a bizarre reversal of Hegel's Aufhebung, the Other creates me (the Self), so as to incorporate me (the Other of the Other) into him- or herself. Of course, unlike in Hegel, this is not possible for the same reason that my murdering the Other does not eliminate otherness. That is, the Other cannot destroy their Other to fill their lack just as I cannot destroy him or her to fill mine (our wounds will never heal).13

An Impossible Ethic (The Pitfalls of Being a Good Host)

Yet, on a more practical, dare I say ethical, level, Levinasian ethics as first philosophy seems to flounder even still. If we reject the previous problematizations (that the Other is not truly Other and that on a basic metaphysical level it may in fact be impossible for the Other to be satisfied, let alone by me) and continue along the Levinasian line of thought, we run into still more problems when it comes to my responsibility to and for the Other. This can be seen most clearly in an essay by Richard Kearney titled “Desire of God,” critiquing the very Levinasian-Derridean concepts of the Other and hospitality. I wish 13 There is a wonderful scene in David Cronenberg's The Fly that describes this very concept. In the final scene of the film, Brundlefly (Jeff Goldblum) realizes that if he incorporates Veronica's (Geena Davis) DNA as well as that of their unborn child then there would be more human DNA than fly DNA in this new being (thus existing as less of a monster than he does now with half human and half fly DNA) and they would all then become “the perfect family.” Of course, he too fails to see that he would remain a monster after this “eating of the Other.”

8 here to raise this final criticism against Levinas, the charge of impossibility. Levinas' ethics as first philosophy could be described as “Jewish theology done phenomenologically,” in that, the ultimate goal is not simply to love one another, but to be creators of justice for the coming Messiah. For this reason, the Levinasian-Derridean ethics are ethics of pure hospitality, of a welcoming of the Other and loving the Other. Of course, what this means is that there is no difference between the demonic and the divine Other, that all must be welcomed. As Derrida himself points out:

For pure hospitality or pure gift to occur there must be absolute surprise. . . an opening without horizon of expectation. . . to the newcomer whoever that may be. The newcomer may be good or evil, but if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy your house, if you want to control this and exclude this terrible possibility in advance, there is no hospitality. . . The other, like the Messiah, must arrive whenever he or she wants.14 What Levinas calls for is a new way of being, of replacing human time with “messianic time.”15 This new way of being is being-in-excess, of loving all, turning no one away, and starving so as to feed the Other (all others). Levinas makes a demand on us in his prophetic command to love one another, that is, the demand to move from eros as erotic (particular) love to agape as political (universal) love. “What Levinas asks is not possible.”16 But it is impossible for many reasons, the first reason being that this is an ethics of blindness, not of indifference, but of unconditional affirmation (Oui oui, viens viens!) As Kearney says,

Blindness is all very well for luminary painters and writers, for Homer and Rembrandt, but don't most of the rest of us need just a little moral insight, just a few ethical handrails as we grope through the dark night of postmodern spectrality and 14 Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility” in Questioning Ethics, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1998). 15 Richard Kearney, “Desire of God” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 121. 16 John D. Caputo, “Hyperbolic Justice” in Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 200-2001. Quoted in Kearney, “Desire of God,” 121.

9 simulacritude toward the “absolute other,” before we say “yes,” “come,” “thy will be done?” Is there really no difference, in short, between a living God and a dead one, between Elijah and his “phantom,” between messiahs and monsters?17 The problem then fully emerges. On the one hand, Levinas is not extreme enough, seemingly claiming that the Other is tout autre when really meaning that the Other is always another human being. Yet still on the other hand, his call to an ethic of the absolute other is entirely impossible, as it has no criteria whatsoever (and indeed as Derrida says, could not have any criteria). In short, we are infinitely responsible to all Others (as Others) and yet are doomed to fail unless we are willing to outright sacrifice ourselves in the name of the Other. On the other (more abstract) hand, Levinasian ethical love fails on account of love itself. Levinas presents the call to hospitality, the welcoming of the Other in an embrace of love as a rational choice. Love is entirely involuntary (I fall in love). How the world would be different if one could simply choose who to love, but even more, to love all! Love is a violent act for all those involved, from my being thrown into the love-relationship without warning, without choice, to the supreme act of violent particularity (“of all people, I love you”). Also, in this radical particularity, I can perhaps not be satisfied with loving simply the particular person, but am driven to find just what it is in them that I love. The particularity of the love-relationship increases, and in this way I accomplish the Lacanian act of destroying the Other, as I say “I love something inside of you more than you and so I destroy you.” Of course, the crime is never perfect.

Concluding Remarks (Waiting for that Deus Ex Machina)

Ultimately, these three critiques leveled at Levinas can be summed up in the following: Levinas does not give us an ethics, but a formal presentation of Jewish Messianism. The Other does not appear 17 Kearney, “Desire of God,” 127, my own bold.

10 as the monstrous Other, but is always already a human being. The Wholly Other is God however, whose image is man (imago dei) as written in Genesis. This explains perfectly why the Other presents themselves in lack, for is not the Jewish God nothing less than the Holy (Wholly) Void? The God of Abraham and Moses is the God who is not there, who hides His face (and shows his backside), who cannot be seen but for a mysterious cloud (of unknowing), and who promises to (someday) show Himself in the face of the Messiah. The Void of the Other is precisely the imago dei, that part which lies in feverish desire, tense with perpetual anticipation as it longs to be filled, to be made whole. This leads directly to the impossibility of Levinasian ethics. On the one hand, and with respect to the Other as human being, he or she can never be filled, but will always have a piece missing from themselves as they are ultimately alienated from their world by virtue of their constitutive lack. The Desire of the Other is never complete, never satisfied. This is reflected on the macrocosm as well, as the Jewish God is perhaps the supreme articulation of impossibility. God can never show Himself without making Himself into less than what he is (infinity). Particularity and finitude (as in revealing oneself totally, that is, having nothing hidden) are entirely alien to God. We are left wanting by such a system, I mean that quite literally, we end up reading Levinas with nothing but desire for the impossible, a desire which can never, by definition, be satisfied. Levinas leaves us waiting for God (Deus Ex Machina). The question is, how long do we wait?18

18 Estragon: Let's go. Vladimir: We can't. Estragon: Why not? Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot. Estragon: (despairingly). Ah!