Witnessing, Recognition and
Response Ethics
Kelly Oliver
For at least the last twenty years, philosophers have attempted various strategies for reviving the Hegelian notion of recognition and redeploying it in discourses around social justice, including multiculturalism, feminism, race theory and queer theory. Hegel’s master–slave dialectic may seem like an obvious place to start to analyse the oppression of one group by another. Given that Hegel is not literally talking about slaves, however, but a stage of consciousness, indeed the onset of self-consciousness, we might wonder why his notion of recognition has become so important to these contemporary discourses on oppression. One reason is that the Hegelian model of recognition proposes that self-consciousness, or in more contemporary discourse, subjectivity, is not autonomous and self-contained within an individual, but rather develops through relationships with others. Subjectivity is inherently inter-subjective.
Twenty years ago, theorists such as Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser used notions of recognition against liberal ideas and ideals of the autonomous individual as a starting place for social and political theory. If our subjectivity is dependent upon relations with others, then autonomy is an illusion at worst, and a construct at best. For example, Axel Honneth believes that we see ourselves as autonomous only by virtue of relations of positive recognition with others, whereas Judith Butler argues that we must give up the illusion of autonomy for survival (Butler 1997: 196). Regardless of their stand on autonomy, they both insist that subjectivity is dialogic because the subject is a response to an address from an other (Honneth 1996: 92; Butler 1993: 225). Here, I want to focus on subjectivity as a form of address and response, with and beyond recognition.
If subjectivity is fundamentally inter-subjective because it is formed through mutual recognition, then many of the assumptions of liberalism, based as they are on the notion of individual autonomy, are unfounded. Indeed, in light of mutual recognition as the basis for subjectivity, we must reconceive of what it means to decide, to act, to be free. Reinventing the very concept of freedom has been the project of some post-Hegelian theorists of recognition, especially most recently Axel Honneth (Honneth 2015).
In spite of its promise, I begin this chapter by sketching some of the possible limitations of recognition for grounding both politics and ethics. While the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, my central argument is that in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. Next, I take up more recent attempts to link recognition to vulnerability rather than to self-consciousness. I both challenge the concept of vulnerability as exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticise the concept for levelling differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. I argue that rather than constitute uniquely human subjectivity or humanity as some theorists suggest, vulnerability is shared with nonhuman animals – and this may be its advantage over recognition based on self-consciousness. Furthermore, like recognition, vulnerability is distributed according to political and social power. Some are more vulnerable than others. Making vulnerability, or recognition of vulnerability, constitutive of human subjectivity risks levelling differential vulnerability that is the result of political or social oppression (Sheth 2009). In this regard, vulnerability could be seen as the flip side of political recognition. Some people or animals are given political recognition while others are made vulnerable. And while starting with the vulnerable may be better than starting with the beneficiaries of political power, it too has its risks.
In the second part of this chapter, I propose witnessing, grounded in response ethics, as a supplement to recognition models of political and ethical subjectivity. Witnessing takes us beyond recognition to the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience, which must be added to the politics of recognition. Perhaps this is why Butler talks about recognition in terms of ‘seeing as’. Seeing as requires not only re-cognition but also imagination. Avowing the suffering of others caused by my own privilege, however, requires more than cognition or even imagination. It requires pathos beyond recognition. It requires a commitment to what Jacques Derrida calls hyperbolic ethics, an ethics of impossible responsibilities for what we do not and cannot recognise.
Intellectual, epistemological or even political recognition is not enough to move from politics to ethics. If politics is about general principles and universal laws for the good of the whole, ethics is about the singularity of each. The question for politics today is how to bring the ethical concern for the singularity of each living being into politics. This tension between ethics and politics is at the heart of justice. The tension at the heart of this radical notion of ethics is echoed in the tension between the concrete social, historical context of situated subjects, on the one hand, and the witnessing structure of subjectivity constituted through address and response, on the other. The tension in witnessing between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness to what cannot be seen – or even seen as – is productive for thinking about the relationship between ethics and politics.
In the third part of this chapter, I argue that witnessing is a process of address and response that radicalises Hegel’s insight that subjectivity is constituted inter-subjectively. Discussing the double meaning of witnessing as both eyewitness testimony and bearing witness to what cannot be seen, I develop a tension at the heart of subjectivity that opens up the possibility of considering both the social-political context, on the one hand, and the inter-subjective constitution of subjectivity, on the other. In conclusion, I relate witnessing and response ethics to an ethics of earth grounded on our shared bond to our singular home, planet earth. Rather than start with our recognition of ourselves as self-conscious human beings, or recognition of our shared vulnerability as human beings, I ask what happens when we see ourselves as earthlings who exist by virtue of our ability to respond to the call of others, including our environments. Moving beyond the humanism of most theories of mutual recognition of either self-consciousness or vulnerability, I argue for a response ethics grounded on our singular shared bond to the earth. Witnessing as ongoing address and response between earthlings and their environments cannot be reduced to recognition, mutual or otherwise.
SOME LIMITATIONS OF RECOGNITION
While I appreciate the critique of liberalism involved in contemporary theories of recognition, and while I endorse the inter-subjective nature of subjectivity, I find the notion of recognition problematic on several levels. First, it is imperative to consider the political and social context of recognition, something that Hegel himself did not do in the Phenomenology of Spirit when he developed the notion of mutual recognition. And while his followers have attempted to consider social context, especially thinkers like Honneth, Butler and Fraser, adherence to the concept of recognition can limit the flexibility of a theory to accommodate the complexities of inter-subjectivity, especially the interrelationships between subjects and their environments. For example, Alessandro Ferrara criticises Honneth for focusing on only the family and political institutions rather than on educational institutions or churches, which he contends are as important in the formation of values (Ferrara 2015). Second, in practice, recognition rarely, if ever, attains the ideal of mutual recognition. Rather, it is conferred by one individual, group or institution on another individual or group. And, as such, it can become a symptom of oppression rather than its cure. This means that marginalised individuals or groups must seek recognition from the very people or institutions responsible for their oppression. Even if political recognition is won, the power structure that made it necessary to fight for recognition is still in place.
Some, such as Charles Taylor (1994), have attempted to use recognition to describe multiculturalism, and in so doing endorse the idea of one culture recognising another such that one culture confers recognition as a judge and jury in relation to the other (Oliver 2001). Axel Honneth also suggests that social struggles for recognition are struggles to be recognised within the dominant norms of a society. The problem with these theories is that recognition by the dominant group not only reinforces the power structure of dominance insofar as those in power control who is recognised and who is not, but also, recognition so conferred is part and parcel of a pathology of recognition inherent in colonisation and oppression (Oliver 2001, 2004). In other words, marginalised groups struggle for recognition from dominant groups or institutions wherein both the criteria for that recognition and its conferral are controlled by the dominant groups or institutions. This notion of recognition makes oppressed peoples beholden to their oppressors for recognition, even if that recognition is the beginning of their political rights and improved social standing. While political recognition benefits marginalised peoples, within theories of recognition, there is still a lingering sense that recognition is bestowed by some people upon others. And, the risk is that this power dynamic continues even in the struggle for recognition.
Third, the concept of recognition suggests a moment rather than a process. The culminating moment, or telos, of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic is mutual recognition, and his followers embrace mutual recognition as an ideal, if never completely possible in practice. Recognition seems to be something one has or one doesn’t, without anything in between. And, even the ideal of mutual recognition becomes suspect unless we acknowledge the impossibility of ever achieving it. In other words, we must be vigilant in our efforts to reach beyond recognition towards those whom we may not recognise, and even those who do not actively engage in a struggle for recognition. We cannot rest assuming that recognition has been won. Rather, ethics requires that we go beyond recognition and take responsibility for the possibility of witnessing, the possibility of address and response, whether in words, moans, cries, whispers, grunts, whinnies or birdsong. Recognition is but a stage in an ongoing process, one that continually requires re-evaluating. Or, more accurately, recognition itself is an ongoing process in which mutual recognition is never actualised.
In spite of the various productive ways in which contemporary theorists attempt to revive and expand Hegel’s notion of recognition, it is difficult to get beyond the connection between recognition and cognition. Because of this, the notion of recognition lends itself to the sense of an aha moment wherein re-cognition happens. This is to say, recognition seems to be an either–or proposition. Either you have it or you don’t. In this regard, recognition seems too much like flipping a switch. This may be apt when describing political recognition, which requires policy changes or new laws. Even so, it risks covering over the process that makes those changes possible. The risk is twofold. First, if we consider just epistemological or political recognition, the affective and imaginative dimensions of political life are missing. Second, and more problematic, if we consider recognition as a moment or a goal that can be reached, then we risk resting easy that justice has been served. If we think that recognition is something that can be attained, or given, the risk is that once we feel it has been, then we can be confident that we have satisfied the conditions of justice. Following Emmanuel Levinas and Derrida, I will argue that justice requires holding open the possibility of something beyond recognition.
Feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ann Murphy and Julia Kristeva have suggested that recognition involves not merely recognising self-conscious, but also recognising vulnerability. In various ways, these theorists argue that ethical norms result from our shared vulnerability and not our shared rationality or self-consciousness. Contrary to traditional liberal theory, they argue that it is not our autonomy and rational will that ground politics, but rather their opposites, dependence and vulnerability. Modifying the Hegelian notion of recognition, they suggest that what is acknowledged in the struggle for mutual recognition is mutual vulnerability – namely, that we can both wound and be wounded by the other. They ask us to rethink politics starting from mutual vulnerability rather than from liberal contract theory. One issue is that insofar as vulnerability and dependence are just the flip sides of the autonomous individual, then the binary logic of liberal theory has not been changed by endorsing the underside rather than the traditional one. Furthermore, vulnerability is not only something that we share with all life forms, but also variously experienced depending on one’s position in social and political hierarchies.
Take, for example, Judith Butler’s argument in Precarious Life that there is a primary vulnerability that comes with being human, and more specifically, it comes with being born as a human infant completely beholden to others for survival. She argues that this primary vulnerability, associated with infants, is constitutive of humanity (Butler 2004: especially xiv, 31). She concludes her reflections on violence by insisting:
the task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism, or fully obliterated, where both alternatives turn out to be the same. (Butler 2004: 147; my emphasis)
What does it mean that the human cry has become either inflated or obliterated? In cases of oppression, torture and domination, oppressors literally do see and hear ‘the cry of the human’, but, presumably, the argument is that at the same time they do not recognise it as human. On this view, the recognition of vulnerability is the recognition of humanity and vice versa.
As important as it is to add vulnerability and dependence to our political thinking, especially as a counterbalance to autonomy and independence that have dominated political thinking for so long, however, it is also necessary to consider some possible limitations or risks of starting from shared vulnerability, or the recognition of shared vulnerability, which are not the same thing. Certainly, in situations of oppression, torture and domination, the vulnerability of others is exploited. But, it is also the case that in these violent situations, it can be the recognition of vulnerability, and even the recognition of humanity, that enables the most brutal violence. Indeed, when we treat people ‘like animals’ it is not because we do not recognise their humanity, but rather precisely because we do. We call people animals and use the rhetoric of animality and the subhuman precisely because of the need to justify treating people in violent torturous ways. In an important sense, the rhetoric of animality, or of inanimate objects, when referring to other human beings assumes recognition of their humanity in the very gesture of denying it. In other words, the fact that any justification is necessary, any categorisation or naming, suggests an underlying, if disavowed, recognition of humanity. Furthermore, recognising the humanity of others does not stop us from torturing and killing them. Recognition of the cry of the human is consistent with torture, oppression and violence. And, while recognition of vulnerability does not necessarily lead to violence, in an important sense, it is a prerequisite for it. We see that a body or spirit is vulnerable to being oppressed or tortured, otherwise we would not bother subjecting those bodies to our violence.
It is noteworthy that the word ‘vulnerable’ comes from the Latin word vulnerabilis, which means wounding. The first definition of vulnerable in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘Having power to wound; wounding’; the second is ‘That may be wounded; susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury’ (OED 1979). Vulnerable means both the power to wound, or wounding, and the capacity to receive wounds, or wounded. So what exactly are we recognising when we recognise our own vulnerability and that of others? Perhaps, we are acknowledging that we can both wound and be wounded, and that others can both wound and be wounded. And further, some wounds are mortal wounds that lead to death, death of individuals, or even of entire races or species. In some sense, recognition of vulnerability is the recognition that all living beings die, that all of us are mortal. How, then, does the recognition that we are all subject to death constitute our humanity? If vulnerability is constitutive of humanity, it is so only if it is linked to self-consciousness. We might argue that the self-consciousness or recognition of our own vulnerability is uniquely human because surely vulnerability, particularly bodily vulnerability, is not. And perhaps for theorists such as Butler it is this recognition that grounds the moral community and moral obligations, a recognition that we may not share with nonhuman animals who are certainly vulnerable but may not experience their own vulnerability as such.1
If vulnerability is constitutive of humanity, then, is it not uniquely constitutive. Although infancy lasts longer in humans than in other animals, the vulnerability of newborns is not unique to humans. The fact that we can be wounded by, or wound, others is also not unique to humans. We share this vulnerability with all living creatures. Indeed, whether or not other animals have a sense of themselves as selves, whether or not they are self-conscious, they do seem to have a sense of their own vulnerability. In fact, even more than humans, nonhuman animals may be aware of their bodily vulnerability and much of their energy is spent protecting themselves and their young from harm. If vulnerability or recognising vulnerability as something we share with other humans enables ethical relationships with them, then recognising vulnerability as something we share with all creatures should enable ethical relations with nonhuman animals as well. Traditionally, at least, between humans and other animals, recognition is seen as a one-way street: we can recognise them, but they can’t recognise us. In this regard, recognition of bodily vulnerability seems more promising than the mutual recognition of self-consciousness as a way to bring nonhuman animals into the moral community (given that we share vulnerability with all creatures), but this means vulnerability is not uniquely constitutive of humanity. Whatever we think of animals’ ability for recognition or self-consciousness, and here it may depend upon which animals, it is hard to deny both that they are vulnerable and that many are also aware of their own vulnerability and that of others.2
Again, when discussing either recognition or vulnerability it is important to consider the ways in which recognition is conferred on some and withheld from others, human or nonhuman, and the ways in which some are made more vulnerable than others (Sheth 2009). This is true for humans as well as nonhuman animals. Indeed, many more nonhuman animals are vulnerable to human killing and violence than other human beings. Like recognition, vulnerability operates within a social political context wherein some have more power than others. Just as, in practice, recognition is withheld or conferred by those in power on those marginalised, so too vulnerability is differentially distributed. Some bodies are more vulnerable than others. Some bodies are made vulnerable for the sake of the prosperity of others. In relation to human bodies and human institutions, nonhuman animal bodies are prime examples of vulnerable bodies, particularly those raised on factory farms for human consumption. Thus, it is crucial to consider the politics of vulnerability, which can be covered over or disavowed by the notion that vulnerability is constitutive of human subjectivity (Sheth 2009). The notion that vulnerability is constitutive of subjectivity is reminiscent of older claims that violence is constitutive of subjectivity (Oliver 2001, 2004). While this may be true, it is imperative to consider different levels of violence and the ways in which violence is distributed amongst bodies. Not all people are subjected to the same levels of violence. And, arguing that violence and vulnerability are constitutive of human subjectivity risks levelling violence and vulnerability and disavowing the ways in which both are politically distributed.
Recognition of vulnerability as the foundation of ethics cannot be merely a form of knowing suggested by the etymology of the word re-cognition. Nor can it be merely a form of seeing as, for example, seeing someone as human. For, knowing something, or seeing, whether literally or with the mind’s eye, doesn’t necessarily motivate ethical relations or compassionate action. Thus, recognition alone is not enough. Along with knowing or seeing as, we need pathos or empathy to act on what we recognise. In other words, recognition, whether epistemological or political, must be accompanied by affect to become ethical.
Arguably, pathos beyond recognition is lurking behind Butler’s notion of the politics of grief and mourning. In Precarious Life and Frames of War, she powerfully argues that only certain lives are grievable. She imagines a world in which we can grieve even for our enemies. She circumscribes grievability and mournability into a politics of recognition such that once again it is an epistemological problem of seeing as that leads to the political problem of exclusion. As we’ve seen, however, epistemological recognition is not enough given that human beings can torture and oppress even those they recognise as self-conscious and vulnerable, even those they recognise as human, and perhaps even those they recognise as grievable. On the other hand, just because some lives are not socially or politically grievable doesn’t mean they aren’t mourned. Americans may not grieve for the Iraqis killed during their invasion, but Iraqis do. And, for the most part, our society doesn’t acknowledge the grief over losing animal companions, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t mourned. Finally, while getting social and political recognition for the lives of those we grieve who are, or have been, deemed ungrievable is crucial, we might ask whether this happens as a matter of recognition or rather through pathos beyond recognition.
Intellectual recognition of suffering, vulnerability and mortality, while perhaps necessary are not sufficient. There has to be something that pulls us outside of ourselves and towards another. What is it that makes us not only recognise but also act on the suffering of others? What transforms recognition into compassion? Is affect the missing link between the politics of recognition and ethical regard? Ethical seeing, or what we might call ethical passion – to underscore both our passivity in bringing it on and the suffering that is its companion – is an affair of the heart and not just of the mind. What would it mean, then, to see as from the heart in addition to seeing with the mind or with the eyes? Would this change how we conceive of recognition and of seeing as?
What if, as Derrida suggests in Memoirs of the Blind, the function of the eye is not to see, but to cry? He says:
The eye would be destined not to see but to weep . . . . The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. (Derrida 1993: 126–7)
It is only if we ‘see’ vision as the proper – and perhaps only – function of the eye, that we see blindness as a defect. What if, instead, we take the function of the eye to be crying, crying for those in need or in pain? These would be tears of compassion for all other living beings. These would be tears that take us beyond epistemological or political recognition and towards our ethical obligations to them, whatever species they may be. This is a seeing as necessarily veiled in tears, beyond recognition.
WITNESSING PATHOS BEYOND RECOGNITION
In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Oliver 2001), I suggest that the structure of subjectivity is one of witnessing, beyond recognition. Invoking the double meaning of witnessing, I develop a theory of subjectivity that connects the historically localisable subject position of particular subjects with the infinite response-ability that makes subjectivity possible. By bringing together subject position and the structure of subjectivity as witnessing, I navigate between the extremes of conceiving of the subject as either foundation or simple effect. The notion of witnessing brings together the historical context and finite situation of particular subjects on the one hand, with the witnessing structure that makes subjectivity an infinite open system of response, on the other. By so doing, it both politicises the subject as in ‘subject position’ and insists on a fundamental ethical obligation at the heart of subjectivity itself.
Witnessing is defined as the action of bearing witness or giving testimony, the fact of being present and observing something; witnessing is from witness, which is defined as to bear witness, to testify, to give evidence, to be a spectator or auditor of something, to be present as an observer, to see with one’s own eyes (OED 1979). It is important to note that witnessing has both the juridical connotations of seeing with one’s own eyes and the religious connotations of testifying to that which cannot be seen, or bearing witness. It is this double meaning that makes witnessing such a powerful alternative to recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and thereby ethical relations. The double meaning of witnessing – eyewitness testimony based on first-hand knowledge, on the one hand, and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can’t be seen, on the other – is the heart of subjectivity. The tension between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness both positions the subject in finite history and necessitates the infinite response-ability of subjectivity. The tension between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness, between subject position and subjectivity, is the dynamic operator that moves us beyond the melancholic choice between either dead historical facts or traumatic repetition of violence. It is the tension between our social-political contexts and our ethical responsibility to imagine life otherwise.
Our experience of ourselves as subjects is maintained in the tension between our subject positions and our subjectivity. Subject positions, although mobile, are constituted in our social interactions and our positions within our culture and context. They are determined by history and circumstance. Subject positions are our relations to the finite world of human history and relations – what we might call politics. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is experienced as the sense of agency and response-ability that are constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness, which is fundamentally ethical. And, although subjectivity is logically prior to any possible subject position, in our experience, they are always profoundly interconnected. This is why our experience of our own subjectivity is the result of the productive tension between finite subject position and infinite response-ability of witnessing.
An example recounted in Dori Laub’s Testimony illustrates the productive tension between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness to something beyond recognition. Laub, a psychoanalyst interviewing survivors as part of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, remarks on a tension between historians and psychoanalysts involved in the project (Felman and Laub 1992). He describes a lively debate that began after the group watched the taped testimony of a woman who was an eyewitness to the Auschwitz uprising in which prisoners set fire to the camp. The woman reported four chimneys going up in flames and exploding, but historians insisted that since there was only one chimney blown up, her testimony was incorrect and should be discredited in its entirety because she proved herself an unreliable witness. One historian suggested that her testimony should be discounted because she ‘ascribe[d] importance to an attempt that, historically, made no difference’ (1992: 61). The psychoanalysts responded that the woman was not testifying to the number of chimneys blown up but to something more ‘radical‘ and more ‘crucial’, namely, the seemingly unimaginable occurrence of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz, that is to say, the historical truth of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz. Laub concludes that what the historians could not hear, listening for empirical facts, was the ‘very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination’ (1992: 62). The Auschwitz survivor saw something unfamiliar, Jewish resistance, which gave her the courage to resist. She saw something that in one sense did not happen – four chimneys blowing up – but in another made all the difference to what happened. Seeing the impossible – what did not happen – gave her the strength to make what seemed impossible possible, surviving the Holocaust.
The double meaning of witness can help to theorise the Holocaust survivor testifying as both an eyewitness to the Jewish uprising at Auschwitz and as bearing witness. As an eyewitness, she testifies (incorrectly) to the events of that particular day when prisoners blew up a chimney. In addition, however, she bears witness to something that in itself cannot be seen, the conditions of possibility of Jewish resistance and survival. As an eyewitness, she occupies a particular historical position in a concrete context that constitutes her actuality as well as her possibilities. She was a Jew in the midst of deadly anti-Semitism. She was a prisoner in a concentration camp. She was a woman in the mid-twentieth century. Her position as a subject is related to the particularities of her historical and social circumstance. In order to evaluate her testimony as an eyewitness, it is crucial to consider her socio-historical subject position and not just the ‘accuracy’ of her testimony. Indeed, the ‘accuracy’ of her testimony has everything to do with her subject position. It is, in fact, her subject position that makes historians particularly interested in her testimony as a Holocaust survivor. Her testimony is unique because she was an eyewitness; she was there. But, it is not just because she was there, but why and how she was there that makes her testimony unique. The testimony of another eyewitness to the same event – a Nazi guard at the camp, or someone outside the camp who noticed flames in the air – would have a very different meaning, even if he also claimed to see four chimneys blowing up. Perhaps within the context of the Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, surrounded by mostly male professors, the fact that this witness was a woman makes a difference to how she speaks and how she is heard. Only by considering her subject position can we learn something about the ‘truth’ of history even from the ‘inaccuracies’ of her testimony.
It is also important to note that experience is constituted as such for the witness through testimony. In addition, insofar as it is the performance of testimony to which the addressee of the witness, or the witness of the testimony, responds, and through which the unseen of history is shown, our sights are directed beyond the visible world of the eyewitness. What the process of witnessing testifies to is not a state of facts but a commitment to the truth of subjectivity as addressability and response-ability. Witnessing is addressed to another and to a community; and witnessing – in both senses as addressing and responding, testifying and listening – is a commitment to embrace the responsibility of constituting communities, the responsibility inherent in subjectivity itself. In this sense, witnessing is always bearing witness to the necessity of the process of witnessing itself, the process of address and response.
From his work with Holocaust survivors, and being a survivor himself, Dori Laub concludes that psychic survival depends on an addressable other, what he calls an ‘inner witness’. It is the possibility of address that sustains psychic life and the subject’s sense of its subjective agency. If the possibility of address and response – whether verbal or nonverbal, grunts or whispers – is annihilated, then subjectivity is damaged. To conceive of oneself as a subject is to have the ability to address oneself to another, real or imaginary, actual or potential. Subjectivity is the result of, and depends upon, the process of witnessing – address-ability and response-ability. By attacking the very structure of address and response, oppression, domination, enslavement and torture work to undermine and destroy the ability to respond and thereby undermine and destroy subjectivity. Part of the psychoanalyst’s task in treating survivors is reconstructing the addressability that makes witnessing subjectivity possible. Addressability and response-ability are the conditions for subjectivity. The subject is the result of a response to an address from another and the possibility of addressing itself to another.
If subjectivity is the process of witnessing sustained through response-ability, then we have a responsibility to response-ability, that is to say, we have a responsibility to promote the ability to respond. We have an obligation not only to respond, but also to respond in a way that opens up rather than closes off the possibility of response by others. We must be vigilant in our attempts to continually open and reopen the possibility of response. We have a responsibility to open ourselves to the responses that constitute us as subjects. Response-ability, then, is the founding possibility of subjectivity and its most fundamental obligation. We are constituted as subjects through our interactive inter-subjective address and response with others, other people, other animals and our environment. We are responsive creatures, as are all living beings. We cannot live without address and response from others. But this process of address and response is not just a matter of recognition. Our bodies are doing it without our knowledge or permission, so to speak. Moreover, our ethical obligation is not just founded on the recognition of self-consciousness, mutual or otherwise, or vulnerability, but also on witnessing to something beyond recognition.
Certainly, Butler and other recognition theorists insist on vigilance in opening up justice to those who have been disenfranchised. This is possible only by attending to the ways in which we don’t recognise others. More radically, it is necessary to attend to the ways in which the ideal of mutual recognition is impossible, which doesn’t mean that we should not continue to endorse it. Moreover, because we do not recognise the other does not make us any less responsible for him or her. To the contrary, ethics begins in the space of the impossible and unknown. It does not begin in the space of what is known or can be recognised. ‘So long as there is recognizability and fellow, ethics is dormant. It is sleeping a dogmatic slumber . . . . The “unrecognizable” is the awakening’ (Derrida 2009: 106).
While recognition may be necessary for politics and changing public policies, the ethical foundation of this politics must always take us beyond recognition to a realm beyond seeing as where our confidence as seers or knowers is shaken to its foundations. We must dwell with what Levinas calls insomnia. Our inability to know, to see, to recognise, must keep us awake at night. As Levinas insists, I am responsible. I cannot shirk my responsibility onto others. But, I am responsible not only for my own response, but also for that of the other. I always have one more response to give. ‘The more I answer,’ says Levinas, ‘the more I am responsible’ (1981: 93). Furthermore, I am responsible for the other’s ability to respond, whether or not I recognise him or her. Indeed, for Levinas, ethics is always a movement beyond recognition. For, recognition risks turning ethics into moral rule following. While categorising and calculating may be necessary for politics, ethics requires us to dwell in the space of the incalculable, a space without moral rules or laws, a space beyond recognition.
This is what Derrida’s hyperbolic ethics demands: namely, radical responsibility for my response to the other, beyond recognition. Derrida proposes a radical ethics of responsibility for justice, hospitality and forgiveness beyond recognition. Moving beyond Kant’s calculable hospitality based on the limited surface of the earth, which is always a limited hospitality, Derrida argues for an unlimited, infinite hospitality. He discusses the tense, but necessary, relationship between unconditional and conditioned hospitality (Derrida 2005: 67). Perhaps in order to ‘avoid the worst’, as Derrida sometimes says, we need to embrace what remains a secret, what cannot be calculated or even anticipated, and thereby prevents us from ever thinking, or understanding, or knowing once and for all, the meanings of hospitality, justice or ethics. To think the secret is to think the impossibility of knowing, the impossibility of articulating, and perhaps even the impossibility of ethics itself. And yet, this attempt to think the impossible, to articulate the impossible, may be the very condition of possibility for ethics.
Pure or unconditional hospitality, that is to say, the impossibility of a law or habit of hospitality entering into an economy of exchange, is central to Derrida’s discussions of the gift and continues through his discussions of forgiveness, and beyond. The ‘pure gift’ cannot be dictated by law or part of an economy of exchange. For, if you give a gift in exchange for something else, is it really a gift or more like a payment? So too with hospitality. To be pure and absolute hospitality, it cannot be given as payment for a debt or done merely out of duty to the law. It cannot become a matter of either habit or moral duty. The purity of the gift is associated with the infinite responsibility of giving, which is beyond morality insofar as morality is a matter of calculation and rules. Calculation, rules and laws turn what should be an ethical response to the singularity of the other or the event into a mere reaction or reflex determined by convention.
Like hospitality, if forgiveness is given only to get something in return, then it is not absolute. If forgiveness is given only upon certain conditions – for example, the perpetrator repent or feel remorse – then it is not true forgiveness. Once forgiveness is circumscribed within social conventions or laws, it is no longer pure (Derrida 2001a: 45). The concepts or ideals of giving, hospitality and forgiveness, in their absolute and hyperbolic forms, have an essentially limitless and infinite quality that Derrida constantly compares with what passes for giving, hospitality and forgiveness in our everyday lives. He maintains that what we do recognise as gifts have meaning only in relation to this ideal of giving that is essentially unrecognisable (Derrida 2001b: 53). Even the ideal of mutual recognition sounds too much like an exchange.
Like hospitality and forgiveness, there is a contradiction at the heart of recognition that necessarily takes us beyond positing mutual recognition as something like a Kantian ideal, a goal that we can never reach and yet must strive for nonetheless. Derridean hospitality, forgiveness and gift are more than Kantian regulative ideals precisely because there is an internal contradiction inherent within the very notions themselves (Derrida 2000: 149, 2004: 133–6). Derrida points to this contradiction when he asks: ‘In giving a right, if I can put it like that, to unconditional hospitality, how can one give place to a determined, limitable, and delimitable – in a word, to a calculable – right or law?’ (2000: 147–9). In other words, the principle grounding all conditional hospitality, namely, unconditional hospitality, is at odds with its practice. For, what makes hospitality unconditional not only makes hostility possible, but also inevitable insofar as ultimately there is no calculus with which we determine how to distinguish one from the other. The threat to unconditional hospitality does not come from outside, but rather from inside. Hospitality operates according to the autoimmune logic distinctive of all appeals to the self or sovereignty. In other words, if, or insofar as, hospitality is granted by one to an other, its unconditionality is already comprised. Indeed, the very terms self and other are problematic if our goal is unconditional hospitality; but these terms are required by our notion of hospitality insofar as we imagine that someone has the power to extend hospitality to another. And yet, this very power acts as a condition that prevents hospitality from being unconditional.
We could make the same argument with recognition. Mutual recognition necessarily undermines itself insofar as it assumes an exchange between two subjects, whether or not they are beholden to each other. In addition, political recognition required by our daily lives as political beings necessarily effaces the singularity of each living being. How could an ideal of recognition, mutual or otherwise, encounter the singularity of each? How could recognition be based on this encounter? In the name of what or who, then, could we claim the right to recognition? In the name of what or who would we struggle for it?
Rather than lead to inaction and indifference, Derrida suggests that this impasse between unconditional and conditional, pure and impure, is necessary for justice, if always a justice to come. Indeed, the internal tension between them is the necessary tension between ethics and politics as between singular and universal. Another way of articulating the contradiction internal to the notion of hospitality, then, is in terms of the conflict between ethics and politics. Ethics of hospitality demands that we welcome every singular being in its singularity – already the words ‘we’ and ‘its’ belie the impossibility of such a demand – and politics, even a politics of hospitality, demands that we develop a universal principle of hospitality that applies to all, effacing the singularity required by ethics. In other words, ethics demands consideration of the singularity of each unique being, while politics requires universal rules and principles that apply equally to all.
Ethics, traditionally also a realm of universals, within Derrida’s thought becomes the realm of the singular, the event, what is unique to each life and each moment of that life. The demands of the ethical are impossible and unconditional and yet necessarily guide our actions. Indeed, the tension between the unconditional and the conditioned produces an urgency that takes us back to Levinasian insomnia – our decisions about what is right and what we ought to do keep us awake at night because there is no easy answer; there is no handy principle to which to appeal. Rather, we must respond to each individual and each situation anew according to its singularity. We must question the values, principles and laws with which we were raised. When ethics becomes a matter of moral rule following, then it has been reduced to mere calculation at worst and epistemology at best. In either case, ethics disappears. Ethics requires not only dwelling in the undecidable space of that Levinasian insomnia, but also reopening that space over and over again in the name of a justice ‘worthy of its name’. Witnessing to what is beyond recognition is central to this impossible justice.
THE ETHICS OF SHARING A PLANET
In Animal Lessons (Oliver 2015), I expand the notion of witnessing to include nonhuman animals. The basis for ethical relations has moved beyond reason or recognition and towards witnessing to response-ability itself, that is to say, witnessing to the ability to respond, which is not just the domain of humankind, but all of animal-kind. In this way, witnessing ethics as response ethics can take us beyond human centrism and towards consideration of the ways in which all of the creatures of the earth, and the earth itself, respond. Within response ethics, political and moral subjects are constituted not by their sovereignty and mastery but rather by address and response. Extending my analysis of witnessing, address and response (broadly conceived) are the basis of earth ethics grounded on cohabitation and interdependence. And, the responsibility to engender response, or facilitate the ability to respond, in others and the environment, is the primary obligation of earth ethics. This earthly ethos is the result of pathos beyond rationality or recognition because it is based in our embodied relationality, which is bound to other living beings, not only through shared places and histories, but also through the larger biosphere and ecosystems that sustain us, and ultimately through our singular bond to the earth.
An ethics of earth is grounded on the affirmation of bio and social diversity that make the earth a living planet. Earth ethics emerges from the tension between the absolutely unique place of each one and the collectively shared bond to the earth, both of which necessarily constitute the life of the planet. Earth’s biosphere, which cannot be separated from the earth itself, is a dynamic of individuals and communities, species and interspecies symbioses. And all life is also dependent upon nonorganic elements that also are terraforming. The earth is this complex of relationships.
To say that we are earthbound creatures is to say that we have a special bond to the earth. We belong to the earth, just as it belongs to us. Rather than ownership, this sense of belonging harkens back to a more archaic sense of the word that conjures Eros as longing and companionship. Our life on earth is a longing for home, for a home that we can love, a home that we love enough to take responsibility for. Ethos as habitat or home brings with it a sense of belonging to an ecosystem or community. This sense of belonging is not a familiarity that can be taken for granted, especially when we consider earth as home. For, as every creature ‘knows’, the earth is populated with strange others and foreign landscapes that can be welcoming or threatening, and everything in between. For human beings, the earth as home is fore-given and must be interpreted and reinterpreted, even as it is also a prerequisite for meaning.
Meaning both requires social bonds and emerges through social bonds, which are tied to particular spaces or places and times or histories. The relationality of social bonds, including bonds to places and histories, makes meaning possible, even while meaning emerges through relationships. The dynamic of meaning as both constituted by, and constituting, our relationships is akin to the witnessing structure of response-ability, the structure of address and response. Living creatures are responsive and an earth ethics promotes our responsibility to open up, rather than close off, the response-ability of others, their ability to respond.
Witnessing or response ethics maintains that even in the face of our lack of understanding, the impossibility of mastery and inherent unpredictability, we have a responsibility to act in ways that open up the possibility of response from our fellow earthlings and from the earth itself. Obviously this abstract ‘principleless principle’ or ‘groundless ground’ also opens onto the tension between ethics and politics (Willett 2014). Ethics requires that we open up response and response-ability in the face of our ignorance – for if we knew with certainty, it would no longer be ethics but rather social or even natural science – while politics requires that we negotiate relationships within our living space in order to survive and thrive, which always necessarily means killing or excluding some others (e.g. deadly bacteria, fungi and viruses). We might say that an ethical politics is one in which ethics juts through political policy and forces us to continually and vigilantly reassess and reinterpret our responsibility towards others, even if – perhaps especially if – those others are threatening.
Whether or not we share properties or capacities, whether or not we share recognition or vulnerability, we share the planet. Whether or not we share a world, we share the earth. Perhaps it is time to rethink democracy not in terms of contracts but rather in terms of proximity, not in terms of nations but in terms of the planet. Considering animals when thinking about political rights and moral responsibilities challenges traditional notions of rights and equality based in rational autonomy and forces us to go beyond rational consent or contractarian democracies, to our proximity with all of the inhabitants of the earth.
Basing democracy on proximity rather than on contracts, however, would also require us to rethink our relationship to animals, especially to companion animals with whom we live. A politics based on proximity may be more inclusive than one based on contracts implicitly signed by autonomous individuals, or even recognition given to or conferred by those in power on the marginalised or excluded. A politics of proximity does not require merely an ideal of mutual recognition. It does not require merely the recognition of vulnerability. Indeed, it may require us to go beyond recognition to consider our proximity to those whom we do not recognise.
NOTES
1.Following Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger, I challenge this notion of recognition as a dividing line between humans and animals (Derrida 2008). See Oliver 2009, 2015.
2.For example, see Chloë Taylor’s extension of Butler’s notion of vulnerability to nonhuman animals (Taylor 2008). Taylor argues that although, as she articulates it, Butler’s Levinasian ethics necessitates the exclusion of nonhuman animals, it can be extended and adapted to include animals. James Stanescu argues that fragments of concern for nonhuman animals already exist within Butler’s writing. Gathering these bits together, Stanescu (2012) argues that Butler’s ethics not only includes nonhuman animals, but does so necessarily. As intriguing and helpful as Stanescu’s reconstitution is, nonhuman animals have not been a priority for Butler.
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