From Word To Word

I am always confronted with the limit of my being, of my language, and of my responsibility that is posed by my death. I am confronted as if by a door and a threshold, and my passing of this door always remains a necessary impossibility. It will always remain necessary for me to pass this threshold that is my death, and it will never be possible for me to survive the passage of this limit, and yet this threshold and this limit remain determinative. To attend to the limit, therefore, to attend to what lies beyond the limit, is to to die constantly, is to constantly accept my own extinction, even as I recognize that this death and this extinction always remain to come.

This preoccupation is experienced as a kind of agony, because it always falls short of its intention until the moment when it can no longer be preoccupied at all. It will never succeed in crossing the threshold, never succeed in broaching the limit, for when the moment of death arrives, it is always too short, too prolonged, too sudden, too delayed, too sharp, too dull to be recognized for what it is, and so my preoccupation will always fail to know the moment of my death, no matter how attentive it is, no matter how watchful. The only death which my preoccupation will discover is a death that I have survived, and therefore not my death at all. Any limit that it can surpass will have left my limit intact.

If I persist, then, in a preoccupation with the limit and with the beyond of the limit, it will always be the case that I will need to occupy the moment of death repeatedly, not to cross it, which will always remain impossible until the moment when it becomes unrepresentable, but to survive it in the expectation that there will come a death which I will not survive. I cross the limit of the threshold, not expecting to find its beyond, which will forever remain inaccessible to me, but in order to inhabit the threshold as a kind of waiting for the threshold that remains to be crossed. Thus, a concern for the limit and its beyond is experienced as the agony of a death that does not kill, the agony of threshold that opens only onto another threshold. Any attempt to avoid this pain and this agony, this repetition, would necessarily abandon the limit and its beyond.

Dave Humphrey recently responded to my post on defining a philosophy of the table, a subject that we have since discussed in person also, and he raises some points on which I would like to expand.

First, he rightly notes that I fail to recognize how a philosophy of the table always remains opened to a possible future because it always remains unfinished.  Perhaps there is something about the nature of my own habitual concerns that I too often neglect this future moment, even as I attend insistently to the occasion of the present moment and to the memorial of the past moment.  I do agree with Dave, however, despite my negligence, that it is essential to a philosophy of the table that it be turned toward the future, in the expectation that the conversation will not ever have been completed, in the anticipation that there will always remain more that will need saying.  If it is necessary to honour a present and to memorialise a past, it is also necessary, as an essential correlate of these activities, to anticipate a future.

This anticipation is not for the next instalment or for the next issue of a discrete philosophical event, but for the continuation, always desired and always uncertain, that I will speak with you again.  It is an anticipation that says, even before our present conversation has ended, even before we have parted, “I miss you and what you have to say to me and what we are together.”  It says, “Let us come together again soon, though I know it is always possible that we may never be able to come together again.”  It has something of Levinas’ “adieu” to it.  It says, “Go with God, and may God return you to me.”  Just as in a memorial of the past or in an honouring of the present, it refuses to understand itself as a philosophy that is distinguishable from those who share in it.

Dave is also right, therefore, to see this mode of philosophy as a gift, with all of the implications and the questions and the problems that this word bears and has borne as a subject of theory and philosophy over the centuries.  There is too much that could be said about this gift and this giving, and I would say it more poorly than others have done before, so I will only avow that we know, you and I, what this giving is, not to theory, not to philosophy, not to ethics, not to theology, but to us.  As I find myself saying continually, it cannot be separated from us.

This is why I do not believe, as some of my acquaintances have argued, that my definition of a table philosophy functions to privilege orality over textuality, or presence over deference.  Quite the opposite, a philosophy of the table sees no difference between the spoken and the written, so long as the are exchanged as gifts according to the bond that is between us.  It takes no interest in how the other is as such, only how the other is for me, as a gift, according to that bond.  It privileges not the spoken or the present, but the shared.  It insists only that our speaking and our being be between us, that this sharing be what defines it, that this giving be both what closes it as a protection around those who are gathered in it and opens it continually to the approach of others who wish to gather also.  It says both, “Let us remember and celebrate and anticipate what we share here,” and also, “Come, join in our sharing.  There is room for you here also.”

I have been reflecting on whether there is anything definitively different in the kind of philosophy that I have been advocating in this space and in others, the kind of philosophy that finds its place at the table and over the stove and in the garden and on the front porch, the kind of philosophy that does not artificially separate itself from the rest of everyday living. While it is obvious that this kind of thinking occurs differently, I wonder whether it proceeds differently, whether the difference in its practice results in a difference in its conclusions. In other words, does the rhythm of the household and the neighbourhood produce a philosophy that is different in substance from the philosophy that is produced by the rhythm of the academic institution and the professional thinker?

The following are some ideas that might contribute to a discussion of this question.

1. The questions posed by a philosophy of the table are always undertaken in the context of relationship if not of friendship. While neither relationship nor friendship is foreign between professional philosophers, of course, institutional philosophy rarely appears in these contexts. Except for the kinds of exchanges that sometimes occur in an interview or in a discussion session, the relationships that might exist between professional thinkers are most often obscured in what these thinkers produce. A table philosophy, however, simply cannot exist apart from the relationship that defines it. Apart from this relationship. it ceases to be what it is. It proceeds solely from the space created by crossing of our gazes.

This does not mean that the product of professional philosophy does have among its sources the conversations of friendship. It merely means that these conversations are most often covered over when professional philosophy produces itself as such. Where a table philosophy need have no product beyond what is produced in the relationship between the thinkers themselves, a professional philosophy appears only in a product that always distances itself from the relationship and usually marks this distance deliberately.

2. A philosophy of the table, as the preceding distinction indicates, also differs from a professional philosophy in what it produces. Where the aim of professional philosophy is almost always contribution to a body of knowledge that is supposed to be held in common, a table philosophy has as its aim only to produce change in those who are gathered around the question. Its product is a different thinking and a different acting in its participants, and the body of knowledge to which it contributes is only the shared memory of the conversation, always ongoing, among them.

The product of an institutional philosophy almost always appears in a form that is defined and reproducible: a book, an article, a paper, and interview. It almost always has the appearance of a finality. It appears as definitive. The product of a relational philosophy, however, never appears in this kind of form. It appears only in its multiple and provisional and undefinable influences on those who share in it. Accept that it causes people to think and be differently, it has no product of any kind. It can never be reproduced. It can never be published. To try and reproduce it in these ways would only be to remove it from its context and submit it to the structures and conventions of the institution.

3. An institutional philosophy also gestures differently from a philosophy of the table. The characteristic gesture of a professional philosophy is the citation: a reference to the established body of reproducible knowledge, appearing always in a present tense. “Kant writes,” or “Heidegger argues,” or “Derrida demonstrates.” A philosophy of the table, however, has as its characteristic gesture the shared memorial: a reference to the undefinable and unreproducible history that lies between the participants, appearing always in a past tense. It says, “Do you remember when we were talking on your porch last fall?”, or “This topic has always preoccupied you ever since that first discussion group, hasn’t it?”, or “We’ve always agreed on that point.” This gesture to a shared past is not just a remembering. It is a memorial. It does not merely recall the ideas that were shared. It also celebrates the relationships and the times and the places and the activities that defined these ideas. It refuses to make the ideas separate from the relational contexts that produced them.

These kinds of memorial do appear in a professional philosophy at times, of course, and I count some of them among my favourite philosophical writings. However, even in these cases, institutional philosophy does not produce the effect of a memorial, at least not to me, who did not experience the people and the occasions being memorialised. Jacques Derrida’s memorial in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas moves me very much, both intellectually and emotionally, and it may even function as a memorial for those who knew them both and shared with them, but it can never be for me a memorial in the sense that I am describing. A philosophy of the table, however, cannot help but be such a memorial. It proceeds solely by means of these gestures to its own shared past, recalling and celebrating and mourning what has passed before, becoming ever more complex as the conversation winds through the years.

4. An institutional philosophy also differs from a table philosophy in that it is to a much greater degree produced for the occasion rather than by it. In almost every case, a professional philosophy is produced in advance to be delivered as a polished discourse for a particular occasion. Even in those instances that have the appearance of being improvised, like an interview or a question period, it is always the case that what is produced on these occasions is produced largely for rather than by the purposes of these very occasions. In contrast, a philosophy of the garden and the kitchen is produced largely by the occasion and by the season and by the task being accomplished and by the people present and by the weather and by the topic that circumstances have suggested and by what is being eaten and by everything else that makes that moment irreplaceable. This kind of philosophy takes the moment into account in order to honour the moment, not in advance of it, but in the midst of it. It does not permit itself to be abstracted from the occasion on which it finds itself.

I could perhaps say more, and I am tempted to do so, but I wonder how others might respond to what I have said so far. I am aware that the distinctions I have made cannot be maintained absolutely in every case, that institutional philosophies do include and have the apperance of including elements of a table philosophy, and that table philosophies are constantly situated within contexts that are at least partially produced by institutional and professional philosophies. Though I think there is a useful distinction here, I am interested to see whether others think so as well.

A few months ago, during my failed attempt to use this space to manage online media, I posted very briefly a link to the manifesto of an organization called Ars Industrialis, which was formed several years ago by Bernard Steigler, George Collins, Marc Crepon, Catherine Perret, Carloine Steigler, and some others. The manifesto essentially argues that technologies of knowledge, communication, and information, which it describes as technologies of spirit, are becoming centralized and subjected to market forces in ways that threaten the life of the mind. It maintains, however, that these technologies also have the potential to inaugurate a new era of the life of the mind.

I concur with the manifesto in several respects:

1. That the life of the mind is substantially threatened by the subjection of technologies of spirit to the requirements of the market;

2. That practices of technologies of spirit need to be developed that will actively resist the subjection of these technologies to the market; and

3. That these practices, to the extent that they are successful, hold the potential to invigorate and vitalize the life of the mind.

However, I am suspicious of the manifesto in several respects also:

1. That it idealizes a past epoch and a possible future epoch of the mind in simple opposition to a current less ideal epoch;

2. That it represents resistant practices of technologies of spirit simplistically as capable of neutralizing chaos and creating the conditions for a peaceful future; and

3. That it understands the intervention of new practises of technologies of spirit primarily in terms of stimulating desire, formulating these terms according to a Freudian terminology that is, in my opinion, both limited and limiting.

Beyond these concerns, the most central problem of the Ars Industrialis project is, however, that it remains content to write about new technologies rather than through them. Its proposed activities include traditional academic media almost exclusively: discussions, symposiums, work-groups, press, journals, books, studies, and experiments. Only once does the manifesto mention the actual use of new technologies, when it discusses publication on the internet, but it limits the scope of this kind of publication to the organization’s own website. At no other point does the possibility of conducting academic work through new technologies of spirit even arise, not in the entire manifesto. At all other times, new technologies of spirit remain objects for study only, this despite the assertion that these technologies hold the potential to usher in a new epoch of the mind.

This refusal of a particular academic community to conduct its work through the new technologies of spirit is symptomatic, I think, of the broader academic community’s general failure to make use of the technologies available to it in any real way, particularly in the kind of resistant and critical ways that are required if these technologies are not to become completely dominated by the influence of the market. It is necessary that there be a concerted and sustained effort from those who are concerned with the life of the mind to write and think and work in critical ways through the new technologies of spirit themselves. This is necessary, not only because it is the only way that the voice of the academy will regain a role of relevance to society more broadly, but also because this kind of critical intervention should be the primary role of the academic in every society in every era, no less now than ever.

My friend James Shelley recently posted a quotation from R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art, a work on aesthetics that was first published in 1938. This is one of the things that I love about James: I can never predict what he will be reading. It might be theology. It might be politics. It might be a more or less obscure work of aesthetics by an idealist thinker better known for his work on the philosophy of history. James reads with an admirable promiscuity.

I have never read anything by Collingwood myself. I ran across some of his work (The Idea of History and Essays in the Philosophy of History) when I was doing research for a course on the language of history, but I had neither the time nor the interest to read them at that time. What James has quoted from Collingwood, however, interests me very much in connection with the kinds of arguments that I have been reading in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and other texts. I am very curious about this idea of amusement.

The word ‘amuse’ comes to English from Latin through French. The English word initially referred to the act of cheating or deceiving people by distracting their attention to something else, even to the act of physically throwing dust into the eyes of shopkeepers so that their goods could be stolen. Its application to the function of entertainment, therefore, was at first intended to be derogatory. To call an entertainment an amusement was to suggest more or less explicitly that it was distracting people in order to cheat them. To have been amused was equivalent to having been beguiled or deluded.

At some point, however, the negative associations of amusement began to fall away, becoming applied cynically by the leisured classes to their own entertainments, and then passing into common usage as virtually synonymous with entertainment and recreation. Interestingly, a similar transition can also be marked with words like ‘diversion’ and ‘distraction’, which were once but are no longer necessarily derogatory when used to describe entertainment.

These changes in usage, I think, reflect how fully our society has become a society of amusement, has subordinated what Collingwood calls “practical life” to the consumption of entertainment. We have inverted the relationship between entertainment and practical life. Rather than understanding practical life to be of primary value and entertainment to be a necessary distraction from the routines of this life, we understand entertainment to be of primary value and practical life to be an unfortunate distraction from entertainment. Anything that is not amusing, anything that is not created explicitly to be consumed as entertainment, has become something to be endured until the next opportunity for diversion. In this way, entertainment actually devalues and cheats society of its practical life. It becomes amusement because it distracts us in order to steal our lived lives.

Our society is, in this sense, clearly a society of amusement. We value the sports hero over the parent, the movie star over the cook, the supermodel over the teacher, the pop singer over the farmer. We value the practical life only insofar as it produces the financial resources that allow us to consume our amusements. Our primary goal is to consume amusement as entirely as possible, with every dollar and every moment.

What is most alarming, as our changing use of the word ‘amusement’ indicates, is that we increasingly accept this society of amusement and natural and desirable. Whereas we once used the word ‘amusement’ critically to describe how entertainment was blinding us, we now use it affirmatively to describe the value of entertainment to us. We no longer recognize how we are blinded and robbed of our lives by entertainment as amusement. We have become blind to our blindness.

This is why, as Collingwood suggests, the majority of society’s members now have the conviction that “amusement is the only thing that makes life worth living.” They have accepted wholly, to the point of belief, that amusement is more valuable than practical life, that it is desirable to have their practical lives cheated from them in exchange for a more and more complete saturation with amusement. It is not merely that they consume celebrity gossip rather than develop real relationships. It is that they believe this situation to be normal and good.

It is for these reasons that I decline to be amused, to be distracted, to be diverted. I will celebrate the festival and honour the holiday, but I decline to let these things cheat me of my lived life. I will live in a way that values the family and the community and the garden and the kitchen and the workshop. I will live in a way that values the rhythms of practical life, with its own celebrations and entertainments, but I choose not be amused.

I have just finished my first reading of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and have just begun my second, so I will probably be posting on it frequently over the next few weeks. Debord published the text, one of the seminal works in the study of media, in 1967, and it came to prominence during the now almost mythical events of 1968, when student protests in Paris instigated a general strike and eventually toppled the governing party of Charles de Gaulle.

The text is organized into numbered sections, some very short, almost aphorisms, and some considerably longer. The sections are grouped together into chapters that circulate around larger themes or arguments, and the sections are arranged such that a chain of argumentation can usually be reconstructed, though this chain is not always explicit. The first few chapters deal almost exclusively with the function of spectacle in society. The later ones are more concerned with analyzing certain trends in Marxist theory and with defining an alternative perspective that has become associated with a movement called Situationism.

There is little in the later chapters that interests me. In my limited experience, any discussion that begins to analyze the relative merits of the various Marxisms leads nowhere, or, more accurately, leads almost everywhere but to nowhere useful, to an endless list of parties, theories, figureheads, congresses, manifestos, and splinter groups. While the analysis of this mess seems to be the favourite occupation of every imaginable brand of Marxist intellectual, it only bores everyone else.

The first few chapters of the text, however, explore the questions of social visuality, mediation, and specularity in ways that are interesting and provocative. There is something blunt, almost aggressive about Debord’s thinking. Though I have reservations about some of his conclusions, many of his observations strike me as true and worth reexamining in the context of our contemporary culture. It seems to me that his ideas about how the spectacle mediates social relationships have perhaps never been more relevant, and I intend to discuss some of these ideas as I have the opportunity.

As I was preparing to write this final instalment in the history of my engagement with the problem of ethical response, I reread my previous post on the subject, and I was disappointed to see how narrow and inadequate it now seems to me just a few weeks later. I still agree essentially with what I wrote at that time, but I am displeased with how it represents my interaction with Illich’s writing as if the idea of the movement in the belly was the only thing I took from Rivers North of the Future, as if I was reading his work primarily in search of solutions to the problem of ethical responsibility. The reality is that I rarely have a predetermined purpose when I begin reading a book of any sort. I was not thinking about ethical responsibility when I took the book from my shelf, at least, not any more than I was thinking about several other subjects that preoccupy me, and I found far more in it than just the sections that were related to ethical responsibility, as significant as these sections were to me. My reading and thinking practises are far more promiscuous, intuitive, and fortuitous than my writing sometimes makes them appear. This misrepresentation does Illich, and myself, and the subject as well, I think, a gross injustice.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that I will write in similarly misrepresentative ways is even greater when I begin discussing Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity. Not only does this particular collection of essays have much more of value to say on the subject of ethical responsibility than I will be able to discuss in this single post, but Marion’s broader work means much more to me than I will ever be able to communicate in any way, no matter how much space I am given. Whatever approach I might take to describing how his thought has influenced my understanding of responsibility for the other will be hopelessly reductive of his true influence on me. I can do nothing more than signal this inadequacy in advance.

While Marion is certainly a significant philosopher for many reasons, it was none of these reasons that drew me to him. I discovered him first when I was working on my MA thesis. I had found a book entitled God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. I was interested in it because it contained a discussion on the nature of the gift between Jacques Derrida and some guy named Jean-Luc Marion. Because the discussion followed Marion’s presentation on the name of God and negative theology, I read this paper also, and I was intrigued enough by Marion’s approach that I immediately bought his most famous book, God Without Being, which, without any hyperbole, shattered my theology irrevocably. I have since read Being Given, The Crossing of the Visible, and Prolegomena to Charity, all of which have been very influential on me, though they exceed my understanding in many respects.

Marion’s contribution to the problem of ethical responsibility, at least in the formulation of this problem that I have been tracing in my own history, begins where Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future ends. If, as Illich argues, I can only know my responsibility as a neighbour to the other, not by a law, but by a spiritual movement in the belly, it resolves the question of how I can know what I owe the other, but it does so only at a cost. While the movement in the belly justifies the Samaritan of our example, and while it calls us to act in similar ways, to be open and responsive to the movement of the belly, it will always be possible that there will be no such movement, that everyone will pass the beaten man by the side of the road and feel nothing. This possibility is not just that nobody will pass the victim, not just that someone will pass and turn away from the victim, not even that someone will turn toward the victim and find that he is not the victim he believes himself to be. This possibility is that someone might pass the victim and neither turn toward him or away from him, but walk on in perfect conscience because there was no movement in the belly.

To put this problem differently, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my concern might be diverted from the other to myself. This diversion, when functioning correctly, is not wrong, because it is a diversion, not to myself as myself, but to a spiritual movement provoked by the other in myself, a movement that should culminate in a return of my concern to the other, even if this concern is one that is not necessarily able to give what the other requests. In this way, the Samaritan acts rightly. Though he responds to the spiritual movement in his belly rather than to the other directly, this movement returns him to the other and impels him to relieve the other’s suffering. The priest and the Levite, however, feel no such movement. Making the entirely unjustified assumption that they were actually looking for such a movement, they could in good conscience continue on their way, because they had not been moved. Their ethical movement, to look into their own bellies, had diverted them from the other to themselves. In this way, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my ethical response to the other may fail even to encounter the other at all. Though I may be open to the movement in my belly, I am open to this movement apart from any real encounter with the other. I may be responding ethically, but I am not responding ethically to the encounter with the other, only to a movement in myself.

Marion does not speak directly to this problem in Prolegomena to Charity, at least not in relation to the function of the neighbour, but he does describe a similar structure in his own terminology that opens up a possible resolution to the problem in Illich’s approach. Marion refers to the responsibility that I owe to the other as the injunction of the other, and he argues that this injunction does not come to me from the other, but that “it actually arises in me, like one of my lived experiences.” In this sense, he affirms Illich, because this injunction functions similarly to the movement in the belly, coming neither from myself nor from the other, but from beyond us both, as a movement that can only be understood in spiritual or theological terms. Marion is clear on this point. “The obligation toward the other,” he says, “is born in me, though it is not born of me; it is born for the other, though it is not born through the other.”

Marion too, however, confronts the problem that we find in Illich, that is, if the injunction does not arise from the other, then a response to the injunction is not a response to the other at all. This sort of response leads only to the injunction as law, he argues, but can never have a relation to the other in particular. “If we want to secure responsibility all the way to the point of love,” he says, “then the injunction must designate not only the other as such, but just such an other as the invisible gaze that crosses my own.” In other words, though the ethical response must not arise from the other, it must designate the other in particular, or it fails to be a response in any meaningful way.

The only thing that can accomplish this designation of the other, according to Marion, is love or charity. “In order for the other to appear to me,” he argues, “I must first love him,” because “only love opens up knowledge of the other as such.” Yet, love only “becomes a means of knowledge when my concern is with the other,” when I accept the face of the other precisely as other. Put differently, the ethical obligation that comes neither from me nor from the other is given particularity by the knowledge that I have of the other, that is opened by the love I have for the other, that is enabled by the concern that I have for the other.

This seemingly complex relation has a very simple implication: the ethical movement begins precisely in my willing to be concerned for the other. I must will to be concerned for the other, so that I can love the other, so that I can know the other, so that I become fully open to the obligation, the injunction, the movement in the belly as it bears upon me and the particularity of the other. In Marion’s own words, “To accept the other’s face, or better, to accept that I am dealing with an other, a face, a counter-gaze, depends uniquely on my willing it so.” As he says later, “The other appears only if I gratuitously give him the space in which to appear.” For this reason, ethical responsibility in its particularity depends on my will, despite the fact that it does not come from either me or from the other, but merely arises in me. My will does not produce ethical responsibility in particularity, but only opens me to concern, and love, and knowledge of the other, which opens me to the possibility of ethical responsibility.

All of this implies that the movement in the belly arises, not randomly, but whenever I will myself to be concerned with the other, whenever I will myself to accept the face of the other. If I accept that I am dealing with an other, if I will this to be so, I will necessarily feel the movement in the belly, in every case, without exception. This does not at all imply that I will be moved to respond to the other in the way that the other desires or expects, or in the way that I desire or expect. It does not even imply that I will be moved to respond in any way at all. It implies only that, if I am willing to accept the face of the other, I will find myself moved in some way. There will be a movement in me, a spiritual movement, a movement that it will be in every case wrong to ignore, even if this movement is to do precisely nothing.

The neighbour, therefore, is the one who wills to accept the other, the one who does not pass by a victim on the side of the road without willing to accept this victim as the other, without willing to experience responsibility for the other, whatever it might be, without willing to experience a movement in the belly, whatever it might be. The neighbour may not always be moved to help as the Samaritan was, but the neighbour will always will to be moved in whatever way the injunction appears in relation to the particularity of the other. The neighbour will always be prepared to be concerned for the other, to love the other, to know the other, to be moved by the injunction toward the other. No act, therefore, and no law, can ever guarantee what is proper to the neighbour, only a continual will, a continual willing, a continual willingness.

There is still the logical possibility, certainly, that I might will myself to accept the face of the other, that I might be open to the movement that this acceptance will permit in me, but that I will nevertheless find myself unmoved to help the victim by the side of the road. It is still possible, certainly, that everyone might will, that everyone might be open, and that everyone might nevertheless be unmoved. Yet, this possibility is permissible only according to the perversity of logic, not according to the movement of charity. If the priest and the Levite had willed to accept the beaten man as an other, if they had been open to the responsibility that they bore for him as neighbours, is it conceivable that they would not be moved to pity? If, in other words, they willed themselves to be open to the other and the spiritual movement that the other founded in them, is it conceivable that this spiritual movement would not be a movement to pity? The logical possibility exists, but the spirit of charity knows better, knows that the kind of movement that moves the belly will not leave the bleeding man beside the road unaided.

The fault of the priest and the Levite, therefore, is not that they passed the victim without turning to him, because they had no legal responsibility for him. It is not that they refused the movement to pity in their bellies, because they felt no such movement. It is that they refused to will an acceptance of the other, refused thereby the movement of the belly that they could not foreknow but that they knew even still must almost certainly be to pity. Their fault was that they refused to be concerned for the other, refused to love the other, refused to know the other, and therefore refused to be open to the particularity of their ethical responsibility to the other.

None of this, I want to emphasize, means that I must do everything for all people. None of this even means that I need to do anything for anyone. All it means is that I must will myself to accept the face of the other and to accept the movement that will arise in me, and to act according to this movement, even if the act is to do nothing at all. The act itself will always be nothing. The will to accept the face of the other will always be everything, because all of ethical responsibility flows from it.

I have just been browsing through a book I picked up a few weeks ago at a local used book store. I am not actually supposed to be buying more books until I find the shelf space to put them, and this particular book does fill rather a lot of shelf space, but I had nothing else to do downtown while my wife was shopping, and it looked like such an interesting book, so I bought it anyway. The book is Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.

Let me be clear. I am most certainly not recommending that you go out and buy this book, not unless you are the sort of person who likes spending too much money on books that you will probably never read but that you keep around because they are interesting in a useless sort of way. The Arcades Project is not a book that you will likely read. I have no intention of reading it through myself. There are two versions of an essay that Benjamin based on the project, and these do make interesting reading, but The Arcades Project itself is less a coherent text than it is an experiment in research method. It has more in common with something like Roland Barthe’s S/Z, despite being entirely dissimilar in structure, than it does with a standard work of theory. It is the method behind a certain approach to theory, and this is what makes it both so interesting and so unreadable.

Structurally, The Arcades Project is essentially a huge notebook, or, perhaps more accurately, a huge series of files on various subjects, mostly related in some way or another to the development of a certain culture that Benjamin associates with the rise of the arcade as an architectural form in 19th Century europe. Each of these loosely organized files contains quotations from a range of authors, many of whom are very obscure, along with Benjamin’s own commentary, which ranges from brief notes, to longer reflections, to the beginnings of more polished works. The sum of these collections and reflections is massive, running to something like 850 large pages in my edition: a truly staggering piece of scholarship.

The effect of the volume, even on a mere browser like myself, is to portray the subject of research, even something as seemingly insignificant as the arcade, as inexhaustible. No matter how minute and rigorous, it seems to say, research will never attain mastery over its subject. Its proper mode is not to be definitive, but to wallow in the infinity of its task, to revel in its minutia. Its proper product is not the authoritative text but the collage or the notebook. There is something both beautiful and impossible about this.  Perhaps this is why I cannot stop browsing the book but I cannot start reading it either.

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.

I was very disappointed in Miseducation, a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays supposedly on education. The book is edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo, and represents itself to be an analysis of schooling and education, which is why I bought and read it. I am very interested in how education, learning, schooling, teaching, curriculum, and pedagogy function in political and cultural terms. I was hoping that Chomsky would be able to contribute something significant to my thinking of these questions.

Instead, by far the greater part of the volume addresses issues of media misinformation, one of Chomsky’s most common, if perhaps also most necessary, themes. It is only the first two essays that speak to the question of schooling and education directly, and only the first that does so in any sustained way. What there is about education specifically is what you would expect of Chomsky, that is, schools play a central role in maintaining a system of control by socializing students to believe that supporting the interests of those in power is necessary to survival. So far so predictable, and perhaps so true, but I could have written as much myself. I had hoped that I would find a deeper and more systematic analysis of the educational system, in the same mode as Chomsky has critiqued the media, but I found instead some tangential remarks that were never developed into a coherent and consistent argument.

Of course, the fault here is not Chomsky’s. He was not the one who gathered these particular papers and chose to publish them under the title of Miseducation. It was not his intention in any of the collected papers to provide the systematic analysis that I wanted and that I was led to expect. The fault here is Macedo’s, whose Miseducation, unfortunately, is mostly a misrepresentation.