From Word To Word

I want to begin replying to TC’s comments on Social Holocaust by expressing how significant these kinds of responses are to me, whether they are received through this present medium, or through conversation, or through my classes. In each case I feel myself honoured beyond what I deserve, indebted in ways that I do not know how to repay. The responses of others continually recall me to humility, and I am always grateful for them.

TC suggests that eliminating the encounter with the other is also an elimination of the self, and that the decision to refuse the encounter with the other is perhaps the result of a decision, even if only a subconscious one, to refuse the self. Now, I think that TC is speaking psychologically here, and I am not at all qualified to respond in those terms, but I would agree that in ethical and philosophical terms this is precisely the case. The refusal of the other is always a refusal of the other in me. The more radically I refuse to encounter the other, the more completely I refuse to encounter myself. The refusal to encounter the other, therefore, is often an expression of my unwillingness to encounter myself.

I am aware that I have introduced some terminological confusion here, and in previous posts also, when I refer to encountering the self as other, and I think an explanation of my terminology in this respect might be useful to clarifying exactly why I think TC’s observation is both accurate and significant. In making reference to the self as other, I am following Emmanuel Levinas in his idea of “the third”, though I am using different terminology. Levinas argues that a pure ethics is never possible because, among other reasons, it requires my self and the other to be the only ones concerned. The introduction of a third person makes ethics impossible, because there are now two others, and my responsibility to each of them is infinite. Any fulfillment of my responsibility to the one will necessarily come at the expense of my responsibility to the other. The third, therefore, is a recognition of the practical limits of an ideal ethics.

Levinas goes on to argue that it is never possible to find a pure ethics by escaping the third, because if I were alone with the other I would not have escaped myself. The self who appears to me as myself always plays the role of the third for me, always introduces impossibility into the ethical responsibility that a bear to the other.  In this sense, I bear for myself an ethical responsibility also, just as much as I bear responsibility for the other, and even as a condition for the responsibility I bear for the other. I can love the other only as I love myself. I can bear responsibility for the other only as I bear responsibility for myself. This is to say that I necessarily love and bear responsibility for the other and for myself as an impossibility, because I must love and bear responsibility infinitely and must do so more than once.

Returning to TC’s comments, the implication for me here is that the rejection of the other cannot be separated from a rejection from the self, even on the most fundamental philosophical level. The desire or the need to refuse the self, whether or not it is subconscious, will always be also a desire and a need to refuse the other. Because I fear to encounter myself, I refuse to encounter the other. The logic of holocaust, then, proceeds from myself, from a fear of myself as other, and from a fear of encountering my self as other. I eliminate the other because I must eliminate my self as other.

Jean-Luc Marion, in an essay entitled “Evil in Person” (see Prolegomena to Charity), traces a similar logic in his description of evil. He argues that the logical end of all evil is suicide. Though suicide is not necessarily the worst of all evils, it is the end where all evil logically terminates, and for some of the reasons that I have been discussing. All evil, he argues, is evil because it separates us from the other, because it places the logic of revenge between us. This logic appears to affirm the self, insofar as it eliminates what is not the self, but in fact it is also a negation of the self, since it also eliminates the other in the self, to the point where self is nothing. The evil that I perpetrate on others, even and especially when this evil is revenge for the evil done to me, is thus always also an evil that I perpetrate on myself, and its result is always separation and isolation. The final end of this logic, of course, is suicide, the ultimate act of separation and isolation, the act in which is shown most essentially that the separation of the self from others is always accompanied and perhaps motivated by a desire to separate the self from the self.

It is for this reason, Marion argues, that “Hell is the moment when the soul finds itself alone.” Discovering itself apart from everything, even its self, the soul discovers itself absolutely alone, definitively imprisoned in its isolation, solely responsible for its isolation. The movement that I have been describing, therefore, and that TC has refined for me, the movement of holocaust, always ends up including the self in its destruction and perhaps even secretly originates in the desire for this self destruction. Social holocaust, in this sense, becomes the outworking of social suicide, the ultimate and essential act of separation.