From Word To Word

I have had several conversations in the past few weeks about my understanding of encountering the other, an idea that I have written about several times, most recently in a post on the idea of Social Holocaust. There are two sorts of objections that people are making to this idea: first, that it privileges a sort of extroversion and gregariousness and fails to value solitude; and second, that it sets up an ideal of the encounter that real encounter always fails to achieve, an argument that resembles very closely the concern of TC’s comments on Being at Home. Both of these objections are valid to a degree, and I would like to nuance my argument in order to account for them.

To the first objection, that my privilege of encounter fails to recognize the value of solitude, I would suggest a distinction between the word ’solitude’ and the word ‘isolation’, arguing that encounter requires the first but is absolutely opposed to the second. In order that I encounter the other truly and properly, in order that I be able to respond to this encounter truly and properly, I must be prepared to listen and watch for the other, must be prepared to open myself to encounter with the other, and this preparedness requires of me not less solitude but more. Solitude, in this sense, is a deliberate and practised aloneness in which I encounter myself as other so that I may be prepared to encounter the other as other also. This solitude is a practice of aloneness that consists precisely in turning me outward toward openness.

Solitude is therefore absolutely distinct from isolation, which turns not to openness but to closedness, both to the self and the other. Whereas solitude is practised in a disciplined aloneness, isolation can be and often is practised in the crowd, where the sheer amount of superficial contact with everyone functions to shield me from really encountering anyone, where the crowd permits me to be so shallowly acquainted as to be virtually anonymous. This kind of isolation prevents both real encounter and real solitude. It is the practise of distraction from encounter and from solitude, through mere social stimulus, through the use of technological apparatus, through the acceptance of certain social institutions and infrastructures, and through acquiescence to certain cultural pressures. It is the kind of isolation that occurs when spouses read in bed to avoid speaking to one another, when friends spend their time together talking to others on their cellphones to avoid having to look each other in the eye, when people refuse to allow others into their homes for fear that their real lives will be exposed. It is a practise that says, “We will talk later when others are around, so that we will have an excuse not to mention what we are really feeling and thinking,” that says, “We can talk later on the phone when I am with someone else, so that I will not have to look into your eyes or anyone else’s,” and that says, “We will have you over later, when the house is clean, and when we are having a party, so you will see us at our best and we will not really have to share with one another.” It is what Derrida describes as “lethal isolation.”

It is just as difficult, therefore, for the extrovert as for the introvert to be open to the other, for the extrovert’s socialization can isolate as easily as the introvert’s separation. Encountering the other is not a matter of having more acquaintances, or going to more clubs, or holding more dinner parties, it is a matter of holding oneself open to the possibility that, at any moment and in any manner, I may be encountered by the other. I will not know who this other is. No activity of mine will discover this other to me. I can only make myself open, before I know who this other will be, and wait to be encountered. The practise of this discipline is not simple, either for the introvert or the extrovert.

All of this brings me to the second objection, that this ideal of encounter with the other will not always or ever be discovered in a real encounter with the other. TC expresses something like this in the observation that not everyone’s home matches the ideal home for which I am constantly advocating. In both cases, however, in the encounter and the home, which are inextricably linked for me, I would argue that this inadequacy is the essential and constitutive risk. There is no openness to encounter and no hospitality of the home that is not an openness and a hospitality to the possibility of hostility, violence, and death. To a certain degree, every openness will always be an openness to this violence, because there can never be pure encounter, can never be encounter with the other that is not immediately reduced to a relationship with another. In other words, all encounter, all hospitality, is inadequate to what it desires to be, which introduces an unavoidable violence into the act of encounter. As Emmanuel Levinas says, playing on a double meaning in the French, the host is always also the hostage to the one who is invited. The host always invites the one who will make him a hostage. There is no avoiding this violence.

In this sense TC is absolutely right. Every home fails to be a home in some respects, and some fail in almost every respect. Yet, the failure of the home, even at its worst, should by no means render the ideal of the home less desirable. What it should do, what it does do, is ask of us at least two things. First, it asks that we never confuse what is of the home and of the encounter and what is not, that we always distinguish clearly between what belongs to these ideals. Second, it asks that we always strive to approach the ideal of the home and the encounter, even and especially because we recognize that this ideal is not some concrete object that can ever be realised.

Those who are concerned with the home need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were beaten or neglected or abused, but that was not of the home; that was a violence done to you in the place where a home should have been. Come, let me invite you into my home. It also falls short of the ideal. It also admits that it does not wholly know what this ideal might be. Even so, it strives to be a home as best it can. Come strive with us, and when you go from us, to wherever it is that you will go, strive to make it a home also, as best you can, because there are many who looked for a home and found none, because there are many who need your home to be their home as well.”

In the same way, those who are concerned with encounter need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were hurt, and abandoned, and rejected, but that was not of the encounter; that was a violence done to you in the place where the encounter should have been. Come, now that we have encountered one another, let us strive to bear the responsibility of one another as best we can, though we admit that we will never be adequate to our ideal, and though we admit that we do not wholly know what this ideal might be. Though we must always be parting, let us go from one another, striving to be open to the other also, because there are many who have been hurt and many who have been abandoned, and they need those who will bear with them as well.”

We who are concerned with home and with encounter need to be willing to say and to do these things, even though they are a terrible risk, because we ask others and ourselves to be open to being neglected and abused again, hurt and abandoned again, because we can never guarantee that we will be adequate to the ideals of the home and of the responsibility of the encounter, because we will certainly and in every case fall short of these ideals. What we say and do always bears this risk, and those we ask to join us will always bear this risk as well. There is nothing more terrible than this, which is why it is always easier for me to isolate myself, even if I know that it will be lethal. It is always easier to allow myself to be distracted from the other, to guard the thresholds of the home. I cannot mitigate this risk and this terror, and I would not do so if I could.