From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Levinas and Psychoanalysis Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 03:02:01 -0600 Diane, You raise excellent points regarding the deficiency of Badiou's critique of Levinas. This is an issue upon which you and I continue to be in agreement. I also share with you the view that even though Levinas himself may have been pious and full of "god talk", it is certainly possible to read him in a way that avoids the necessity of theology. Lyotard, to merely give one example, was a great reader of Levinas who remained far from being religious. I will even concede you the point that, for similar reasons, Levinas need not be considered as necessarily conservative or reactionary in the political sense. I have no wish to be unduly reductive in my interpretation of Levinas. What I want to explore further with you instead, however, is this very relationship of Lacan with Levinas. This is because I believe Badiou's ethics also bear a deep relationship in many ways with Lacan's own ethical concerns. I thought you made an excellent point when you said that "God is the name for that which infinitely exceeds the tropological structure; and though Levinas would hate this, it looks and acts an awfully lot like (but is not simply reducible to) what Lacan calls the Real." I agree and would go on to say that this formulation is also close to what Levinas calls the 'il y a' or 'there is' in "Existence & Existents." Levinas writes: "In horror a subject is stripped of its subjectivity, of his power to have private existence...It is a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has "no exits." It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation." To me this sounds suspiciously like Lacan's notion of a traumatized subject. Certainly, some of the other elements you name such as masochism, being held hostage to the other, substitution, and the principle of alterity itself as a kind of shattering of the mirror stage all lend themselves to a psychoanalytical interpretation. I am not saying this as an attempt to do an easy refutation of Levinas that subjects it to Freudian analysis or one that merely interprets his ethics as a masking of the superego under the guise of the other. What I find so impressive about Lacan, in spite of his jargon, is that he presents psychoanalysis as a way that leads us into the ethical, not beyond it. Despite the horror Levinas would have with my interpretation, there clearly seems to be psychoanalytical elements in the way Levinas presents his ethics, if only because he presents them in a phenomenological, existential fashion. He does not argue logically like Kant, but rather puts us at the primal scene, as it were, of the birth of ethics, in the destitute face of the other that creates an obligation. By showing us how ethics is situated in the Event of the Other, doesn't Levinas reveal a basic affinity with Badiou and Lacan? And doesn't this allow us to minimize the significance of the "god talk" and interpret his ethics in a much more radical fashion? As Lyotard puts it in the Differend (171): "Levinas' "marvel" comes close to the "alienness" of the Gnostics, particularly in Marcion's case. Obligation alienates the ego: it becomes the you of an absolutely unknowable other. Jonas also uses the word Unheimlichkeit, which gathers within itself the contradictory relation between ego and other. In acceding to this request, I go out far away from my home, as a hostage, without ever taking up habitation with you, nor ever being your guest, since you have no residence, but I also thereby fulfill my calling, which is to be at home no longer. Freud, putting the id in the place of you, goes the wrong way when he assigns to the ego the call of evicting the id. He would be succumbing to the temptation of empty knowledge. But the analysis, supposing that it consists in this substitution, it is still interminable." Keep in mind Marcion was also a very close reader of St. Paul as well as Badiou. eric
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