From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Just a slob like one of us
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 07:59:26 -0600


Geof,

I just finished reading "The Puppet and the Dwarf" by Zizek this weekend
and he makes a insightful number of points about Pascal's Wager, Levinas
and Derrida I thought I'd share with you. He also makes the case, in
slightly different terms, I argued for in my previous posting to you;
namely, both their ethical projects fail, not merely on account of
religiosity (as Badiou has charged), but also because of internal
problems with their positions.

Levinas and Derrida tend to piously veil the very Thing they attempt to
elucidate in their philosophies. They remain phenomenologists even as
they argue for alterity or deconstruction. Perhaps it is not so much a
question of encountering the Face (even one that is 'to come') as it is
of being willing to lose face in order to encounter the Real. 

In fidelity to the event of truth it is necessary engender a subject out
of the void or gap of one's inherent self-difference; one that
constitutes a New Creation, both a binding up of wounds as well as a
suture, one the confronts the multitudinous world and linear time with
the demand of a universal principle; a reiteration in place of plurality
and mere difference.     

"It was God Himself who made a Pascalian wager by dying on the Cross. He
made a risky gesture with no guaranteed final outcome, that is.  He
provided us-humanity-with the empty S, aster Signifier, and it is up to
humanity to supplement it with the chain of S.  Far from providing the
conclusive dot on the i, the divine act stands, rather, for the openness
of a New Beginning and it is up to humanity to live up to it, decide its
meaning, to make something of it."

"This compels us to detach the Christian "love for one's neighbor"
radically from the Levinasian topic of the other as the impenetrable
neighbor. Insofar as the ultimate Other is God himself, I should risk
the claim that it is the epochal achievement of Christianity to reduce
its Otherness to Sameness: God himself is Man, 'one of us.'"

"The ultimate idolatry is not the idolizing of the mash, of the image
itself, but the belief that there is some hidden positive content beyond
the mask.  And no amount of deconstruction helps here: the ultimate form
of idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of the Other, so that all
that remains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as
the Messianic Promise.  It is here that we encounter the limits of
deconstruction, as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades,
the more radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its
inherent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianic
promise of justice. This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,
and Derrida's ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,
'undeconstructible.'"

"in a kind of inverted phenomenological epoche, Derrida reduces
Otherness to the 'to-come' of a pure potentiality, thoroughly
deontologizing it, bracketing its positive content, so that all that
remains is the specter of a promise, and what if the next step is to
drop this minimal specter of Otherness itself, so that all that remains
is the rupture, the gap as such, which prevents entities from attaining
their self-identity?"

"Here I am tempted to suggest a return to the earlier Derrida of
differance what if (as Ernesto Laclau, among others, has already argued)
Derrida's turn to 'postsecular' messianism is not a necessary outcome of
his initial 'deconstructivist' impetus? What if the idea of infinite
messianic Justice which operates in an indefinite suspension, always to
come, as the undeconstructible horizon of deconstruction, already
obfuscates 'pure' difference, the pure gap which separates an entity
from itself?  Is it not possible to think this pure in-between prior to
any notion of messianic justice?  Derrida acts as if the choice is
between positive onto-ethics, the gesture of transcending the existing
order toward another positive Order, and the pure promise of spectral
Otherness - what, however, if we drop the reference to Otherness
altogether?  What then remains is either Spinoza - the pure positivity
of Being - or Lacan - the minimal condition of drive, the minimal
'empty' (self)-difference which is operative when a thing start to
function as a substitute for itself."

eric

     

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