"Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida"

[kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 04:42:02 -0700 Peter Kosenko <kosenko at netwood.net> wrote:

> But I have no clue what Derrida's lingo gets us or how the writer of the 
essay thinks that he has got some priviledged insight into ethics from it.

JD is setting up an "ethics of responsibility" ... the idea of 'infinite' 
responsibility based on Levinas's idea of the inherent vulnerability (death) of 
the other, a kind of political 'handle with care, life is deadly.' However much 
one gets out of JD depends on what one is willing to invest. Most people aren't 
willing to invest much, which is probably a shame to some degree. As much as 
Habermas is a posterboy for modernity, Derrida is a posterboy for all that's 
bad in academia today. I supsect we are in need of better targets. The real 
problem with Derrida is that he's not Hegelian enough. Derrida tends to argue 
that excessive attachments  take place within a closed economy, wherein 
everything that is outside is absorbed through a violent incorporation. From 
the sounds of it, JD on death is no different. The problem is, JD isn't 
Derridian enough, because it isn't only with our excessive attachments that we 
absorb the other, it is *every* attachment that absorbs the other. Every 
clearing already entails a synthesis (in the Kantian sense). But... back to 
ethics... and let's take Derrida seriously for a moment. Let's look at Fight 
Club for example (spoilers ahead). Near the end Jack (Ed Norton) is talking with
Tyler Durden who accuses him of not taking responsibility. Jack replies, "I 
accept that. I take responsibility for everything." The logic, of course, is 
that when one accepts responsibility for everything, even those things which we 
never had a part in... we end up in the suicidal position of Jack at the end of 
the film; who puts a gun to his head an pulls the trigger. Of course, Jack 
survives... which betrays the truth about ethics. The successful completion of 
an ethical act - taking responsibility for everything - brings one to the point 
of death. The weight of infinity crushes us - literally. An ethics of infinity 
brings us to the point of madness (the irrationality of reason?). What is 
comical - and Fight Club is a romantic comedy - is that Jack survives. This is 
precisely what is problematic about the film - its anti-Derridian point. In 
surviving, the film portrays ethics as possible - we can eat lead salad, eat 
the other, and survive - and get the girl to boot. The properly Derridian point 
here is that this is precisely what is impossible. One cannot commit oneself to 
an ethical act and get away with it. In ethics, success (in the Kantian 
sense) is lethal. Ethics is only 'possible' at a distance from ethics. Of 
course, I prefer looking at this through a Lacanian/Zizekian lens... JD turns 
this into an ontology which is a logical error more than anything else. The 
other isn't always vulnerable... Lacan is more consistent on this point. The 
other is always that which does not ex/ist (in the sense of existing for us - 
not in the 'existential' sense). To say that this gap in our horizon is 
vulnerable - which entails that we already know what the other is - is 
inconsistent with a deconstructive approach. The other 'already in us' is 
precisely the remainder of our conceptual / perception synthesis, what cannot 
be accounted for. This cannot be called vulnerable in a rigorous sense. In 
Lacanian terms, this is none other than the object petit a, the sliver in our 
eye. The idea of responsibility for the other, then, is not necessarily a 
responsibility to the vulnerable other, but to the other in the gap, the other 
that is lacking within our own viewpoint. The appropriate attitude is not 
submissive, subjecting oneself to the other ('an opening to otherness') but a 
fidelity to this very gap, which says nothing about the other. It is the 
inherent 'emptiness' within our political field that is our ontology, the 
absence of the other. Depicting the other as weak or vulnerable is part and 
parcel of a project to 'save' the other. The other doesn't need to be saved. On 
the contrary, the other is the ground of any possible politics, the inherent 
lack that makes (unsuccessful) relations possible to begin with.

ken