Act All this means, however, is that there is in effect a kind of Hegelian speculative identity between Derrida and Habermas, in the precise sense of mutual supplementing: each of the two philosophers, in a way, articulates what the other has simultaneously to presuppose and disavow in order to sustain his position: Habermasian critics of Derrida are right to point out how, without a set of implicit rules that regulate my relating to the Other, respect for Otherness unavoidably deteriorates into the assertion of excessive idiosyncrasy; Derridean critics of Habermas -- also rightly -- point out that the Fixation of the subjects relating to its Other in the set of universal rules of communication already reduces the Others alterity. This mutual implication is the truth of the conflict between Derrida and Habermas, so it is all the more crucial to emphasize how Lacan rejects the very presupposition that both Derrida and Habermas share: from the Lacanian perspective, this respect for Otherness is in both cases the form of resistance against the act, against the crazy short-circuit between the unconditional and the conditioned, the ethical and the political (in Kantian terms: between the noumenal and the phenomenal) that is the act. It is not so much that, in the act, I sublate/integrate’ the Other; it is rather that, in the act, I directly am the impossible Other-Thing. The Other: Imaginary, symbolic, and real The problem here is: is not Lacans ethics of the Real -- the ethics that focuses neither on some imaginary Good nor on the pure symbolic form of a universal Duty -- another version of this deconstructive-Levinasian ethic of the traumatic encounter of a radical Otherness to which the subject is infinitely indebted? Does not Lacan state that the ethical Thing ultimately refers to the neighbour, der Nebenmensch? The Thing is the neighbour in his or her abyssal dimension of irreducible Otherness; for this reason, our relationship to the neighbour can never be reduced to the symmetry of the mutual recognition of the Subject and his Other, in which the Hegelian-Christian dialectic of intersubjective struggle finds its resolution: that is, in which the two poles are successfully mediated. Although the temptation to concede this point is great, it is here that one should insist on the way Lacan accomplishes the passage from the Law to Love: in short, from Judaism to Christianity -- for Lacan, the ultimate horizon of ethics is not the infinite debt towards an abyssal Otherness. For him, the act is strictly correlative to the suspension of the big Other -- not only in the sense of the symbolic network that forms the substance of the subjects existence, but also in the sense of the absent originator of the ethical Call, of the one who addresses us and to whom we are irreducibly indebted and/or responsible, since (to put it in Levinasian terms) our very existence is responsive -- that is to say, we emerge as subjects in response to the Others Call. The (ethical) act proper is precisely neither a response to the compassionate plea of my neighbourly semblant (the stuff of sentimental humanism), nor a response to the unfathomable Others call. Here, perhaps, one should take the risk of reading Derrida against Derrida himself. In Adieu a Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida tries to dissociate the decision from its usual metaphysical predicates (autonomy, consciousness, activity, sovereignty...) and think it as the others decision in me: The passive decision, condition of the event, is always, structurally, an other decision in me, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolutely other in me, of the other as the absolute who decides of me in me.’ (Derrida) When Simon Critchley tries to explicate this Derridean notion of the other’s decision in me’ in terms of its political consequences, his formulation displays a radical ambiguity: “the political decision is made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off from a pre-given conception of justice or the moral law, as in Habermas, say, and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the demand provoked by the others decision in me that calls forth political invention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision.” (Critchley) If we read these lines closely, we notice that we suddenly have two levels of decision: the gap is not only between the abyssal ethical Call of the Other and my (ultimately always inadequate, pragmatic, calculated, contingent, unfounded) decision how to translate this Call into a concrete intervention -- the very decision is split into the others decision in me and my decision to accomplish some pragmatic political intervention as my answer to this others decision in me. In short, the first decision is identified with/as the injunction of the Thing in me to decide, it is a decision to decide, and it still remains my (the subjects) responsibility to translate this decision to decide into a concrete actual intervention, to invent a new rule out of a singular situation, where this intervention has to obey pragmatic/strategic considerations and is never on the level of the decision. However, returning again to Antigone: does this distinction of the two levels apply to her act? Is it not, rather, that her decision (to insist unconditionally on a proper funeral for her brother) is precisely an absolute decision in which the two dimensions of decision overlap? This is the Lacanian act in which the abyss of absolute freedom, autonomy and responsibility coincides with an unconditional necessity: I feel obliged to perform the act as an automaton, without reflection (I simply have to do it, its not a matter of strategic deliberation). To put it in more Lacanian terms: the others decision in me does not refer to the old structuralist jargonized phrases about how it is not I, the subject, who is speaking, it is the big Other, the symbolic order itself, which speaks through me, so that I am spoken by it, and other similar babble, but to something much more radical and unprecedented: what gives Antigone such unshakable, uncompromising fortitude to persist in her decision is precisely the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Others (Things) injunction/call. Therein lies Antigones monstrosity, therein lies the Kierkegaardian madness of decision evoked by Derrida: Antigone does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she -- for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision -- directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations. Zizek, DID SOMEBODY SAY TOTALITARIANISM? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, 2001, pp.159-63
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 22:20:05 +0000
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