Christopher asked me to summarize Levinas's thought today, and I said this was impossible in a sentence. But I think the important point for us is that he doesn't see trauma as something to be 'cured' and moved beyond - rather, it is the precondition of ethics. In other words, it is only by remaining *within* trauma that we can be ethical subjects. Why? Because we are split open by the other. This is an anti-positivist and ultimately anti-humanist stance. As he writes:
‘I am not merely the origin of myself, but I am disturbed by the Other. Not judged by the Other, but condemned without being able to speak, persecuted. But we have shown that it is necessary to go further: to be substitutable for the persecutor; whence the idea of responsibility preceding freedom.’
and:
‘Modern antihumanism, which denies the primacy that the human person, a free end in itself, has for the signification of being, is true over and above the reasons it gives itself. It makes a place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, and in substitution. Its great intuition is to have abandoned the idea of person as an end in itself. The Other (Autrui) is the end, and me, I am a hostage.’
re this 'hostage' idea:
‘It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world’
and yet, at the same time:
‘the past of the Other must never have been present.’
Thinking of 'Hiroshima mon Amour' again: it is precisely because of all the substitutions and ruptures and eruptions (of one subject into another, one unnamed past into the present and so on) that a set of ethical relations are established. I think it's a beautiful film for this reason - and many others...
2 comments:
ps 'responsibility' doesn't mean being sensible or 'doing the right thing'. It means being in a perpetual state of responsiveness to a call from an other which can never be properly answered...
I would agree with tom on his interpretation of Levinas' definition. Responsibility in the sense of 'doing the right thing' denotes a type of rational calculation between means and ends. Levinas would reject this. It is precisely the 'perpetual state of responsiveness to a call from the other.' Levinas is quite explicit about this call. He says elsewhere that this call would best be exemplified by "help!" It invokes a response. We are called by the other to be responsibility by and for the other.
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