Why Responsibility Matters
“Responsibility” is usually defined in terms of the juridical concept of self-responsibility where, as Bernhard Waldenfels puts it, the “dialogical idea of giving account, inherited from the Greeks, meets the juridical idea of imputation (imputatio) invented by the Romans.”1 In his genealogy of responsibility, Robert Bernasconi helpfully outlines the individualism and the notion of temporality assumed in the usual definition.2 This legal idea of backward-looking accountability (and blame), he suggests, becomes linked, in the late eighteenth century, with the moral idea of accountability that focuses on the agent’s forward-looking conscious intention. While providing a means of making the individual accountable to others at a time when the radical individualism of emerging capitalism and democratic politics forced the dissolution of existing social bonds, this juridico-moral idea of personal responsibility leaves us with two problems: it fosters determinism (in demanding continuity between past and future) and undermines rather than fosters social bonds that would support justice and democratic pluralism. These are the problems that Levinas’s revisions to the meaning of responsibility address. However, uncovering the dialogue (largely implicit) between Levinas’s and Nietzsche’s critiques of juridico-moral responsibility allows a fuller appreciation of why such revisions matter.3 Such an analysis also provides a means of diagnosing how, in contemporary social relations, a failure of political responsibility may precipitate a crisis of personal responsibility.
Before Levinas, it was Nietzsche who challenged the notions of subjectivity and temporality underlying the juridico-moral model of responsibility by questioning the “bad conscience” that attends it (GM 62, 84). Insofar as it is assumed that the self of juridico-moral responsibility is given, philosophical debates about responsibility have tended to center on whether “conscience,” understood as conscious awareness of the difference between right and wrong, is driven and determined by the laws and moral norms one inherits or by an original capacity of freedom to oppose or affirm that order. Nietzsche, on the other hand, severs “conscience” from juridico-moral accountability in terms of any juridico-moral code and reinvents the self and the normative basis of conscience accordingly. This is a radical move that explains, I suggest, Levinas’s rare and late explicit acknowledgement of his debt to Nietzsche: the “Nietzschean man above all was such a moment” when the “history of philosophy . . . has known this subjectivity that [by ‘reversing irreversible time’] . . . breaks with essence” (OB 8). In breaking with essence, Nietzsche breaks with the determinism of conventional materialism which, for Levinas, is a determinism of “war and matter” (OB 8). But Nietzsche also, by critiquing the notion of “free will,” avoids a second kind of determinism: ideological or sociopolitical determinism that Levinas describes as a reassembling of beings “in a present that is extended, by memory and history, to a totality determined like matter” (OB 5, 8). For Nietzsche, “genuine” responsibility requires that “conscience” not be determined either by material forces or by a tradition enforced by either moral universalism or totalitarian government (GM 60).
The question remains though: Whence comes the criteria of conscience if not the laws and moral norms that we inherit and that, at least in part, condition us? Answering this question not only motivates Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s revisions to the meaning of responsibility; it also points to the relevance of this task for contemporary ethics and politics. The juridical concept of self-responsibility cannot explain, and indeed may exacerbate, an apparent crisis of conscience in some contemporary liberal democracies, where democratically elected governments initiate programs that endorse the treatment of persons in ways that are felt to be in direct conflict with the normative basis of the moral sensibilities of the citizenry. Under such conditions of a failure of political responsibility there is a tendency either to fall into step with this revised code of conduct such that personal responsibility (in the juridical sense of accountability or duty) seems to vanish, or public life descends into a blame game and responsibility (duty and blame) falls disproportionately toward women, particular racial and ethnic groups, the socially disadvantaged, and the dispossessed. What Nietzsche and Levinas together help to explain is what happens to the capacity for personal responsibility, and the normative basis of conscience, judgment, and conduct, when the laws and moral norms we supposedly embody seem to be undermined by a government that we assume is responsible for keeping them in place.
The value of Levinas’s revision of responsibility is often put in different terms. There is consensus that his radical move consists in changing the referent of “for” in “that for which I am responsible” and thereby challenging the individualism that necessitates the juridical concept. For him, in being-responsible I am not first of all responsible for my self or for upholding the juridico-moral code. Rather, I am, most fundamentally, responsibility for the other. This contribution is made possible by an idea of corporeal subjectivity that first emerges from both Nietzsche’s idea of subjectivity and his critiques of the juridical concept of responsibility
What is particularly radical about Nietzsche’s approach to responsibility, and what accounts for the “reversing of irreversible time” and the “break with essence” that Levinas admires, is that Nietzsche locates the conditions of subjectivity, normativity and self-responsibility, not in free will or in the maintenance of the same self through memory but in responsiveness based on what I will call somatic reflexivity: a corporeal and affective self-relation that manifests as “conscience”—a futural ability to respond to circumstances in excess of existing law and custom. This is an important intervention into the meaning of being-responsible, for several reasons. First, it moves responsibility beyond the freedom-determinism debate by proposing that the relation between the self and the juridico-moral code, while constitutive, must also be excessive, self-critical, and transformative of norms. Second, in placing the highest value on the uniqueness and opacity of this somatic reflexivity, rather than on, say, “life itself” or human “dignity” based on autonomous practical reason, Nietzsche and then Levinas, more radically still, revise the very basis of normativity in ethics and politics: this corporeal reflexivity, and the uniqueness it signifies, is that through and for which we are, most fundamentally, responsible, whatever other characteristics (sex, race, religion, age) that corporeality may signify.
Where Levinas departs from Nietzsche is on the question of how this corporeal reflexivity arises and, hence, whose responsiveness takes priority: for Nietzsche it is the self’s somatic reflexivity through and for which I am “genuinely” self-responsible; for Levinas, it is the other’s. Examining the bases of this difference exposes the third contribution that juxtaposing their accounts might offer to a revision in the meaning of responsibility. In grounding responsibility for the other and its suffering in the opacity of the other’s somatic reflexivity, Levinas challenges what Nietzsche’s account of self-responsibility diagnoses but does not limit: the tendency to assume the privilege of self-responsibility that breaks with history, determinism, and the prevailing social order without assuming responsibility for the effects of that privilege on others.
Fourth, both Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s emphasis on the temporality of somatic reflexivity reveals what is most at risk in a crisis precipitated by a failure of political responsibility: the body open to an undetermined future that is a condition of conscience and hence responsibility. Drawing out the implicit “conversation” between Nietzsche and Levinas on responsibility diagnoses the impact on personal responsibility of a failure of political responsibility in some liberal democracies in the present. What I will argue is that a failure of political responsibility consists not so much in an undermining of a juridico-moral code, but more so in the futural inclination of bodies and, with this, the normative basis of democratic sociality that political and ethical responsibility would ordinarily share.
Nietzsche and the Making and Overcoming of Juridical Self-Responsibility
It is in the first three sections of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche outlines his thesis of how self-responsibility, in the juridical sense, is made.4 Rather than being given, this subjectivity arises through the process of “breeding an animal with the right to make promises” (GM 58–59). The promise is of interest to Nietzsche not only as the basis of a sociality governed by contract of which he is critical but also for exemplifying, in its structure, the temporality of the self central to self-responsibility in general: a body, not only open to the past but also to the future. Contrary to the model of self upon which the juridical concept is based, Nietzsche’s genealogy suggests that what I have called somatic reflexivity, rather than the faculty of reflection, is the primary condition of agency, conscience, and self-responsibility. And he shows how both somatic reflexivity and memory arise through the imposition of a juridico-moral code through what I will call the force of law.
He proposes that we are by nature creatures governed not by self-consciousness and memory but by forgetting. This forgetting is not passive—in us forgetting “represents a force” (GM 57–58). While forgetting does constitute the present (by “having done” with an impression), this is not enough for juridical self-responsibility, which requires that experience assume a significance sufficient to register in present consciousness as one’s own and sufficient to be recalled in the future and attributed to the same self retrospectively. As Levinas will later confirm, for subjectivity, “time is needed”; there must be a “getting out of phase with the instant”; a “divergence of the identical from itself,” a divergence of the present from the past and the future (OB 28). For Nietzsche, it is the codification of experience via a juridico-moral code that temporalizes the self in a way that counters forgetting. But to counter the force of forgetting, the juridico-moral code has to be attached to some intensity and it must act on the same material of forgetting. The intensity, the force, is provided by affect, pain, and also pleasure, so that, to be a force, this law must join forces with those of the body. As Nietzsche puts it in Twilight of the Idols: culture is inaugurated, “not in the ‘soul’” or through a disciplining of thoughts; “one must first persuade the body” (TL 101). So, self-responsibility originates with the creation of a “real memory of the will”: a “morality of mores” in concert with the “mnemotechnics” of pain orders events and their meaning, opens a gap between the decision (“I will”) and the future discharge of the will (the act), and opens the ability to anticipate a future and, through a selective memory, to recoup in the future a past that is now present (GM 58). The body is disciplined in line with prevailing norms, and some events and their meaning become both conscious and “unforgettable” (GM 61).
This social disciplining of the body is not itself a problem for Nietzsche—it is how we come not only to embody a juridico-moral code, but also to have an affective, self-reflexive, and self-critical relation to it (see also BG 30). This is not the reflex action of conventional materialism: in its reflexivity, the body attempts to enhance pleasure and move beyond pain, but, as pleasure and pain, along with “everything of which we become conscious” are already codified, “interpreted through and through” (WP 263–64), somatic reflexivity involves contestation and transformation in the meaning of experience, of effects and their relations. Somatic reflexivity then is the basis of “will to power” (GM 77). The self, for Nietzsche, is the body divided and doubled by the force of law: accompanying habitual evaluative action, normalized according to convention, are both affect and the force of reevaluation and futurity beyond mere affect. This responsive self is the self that Nietzsche considers of supreme value.
Levinas, from his earliest work in 1934, sees merit in the “importance attributed to this feeling for the body . . . [as] the basis of a new conception of man” (RH 69), although there he seems reluctant to attribute its positive conception to Nietzsche. He locates the appearance of this new materialism (as opposed to “popular materialism”) in nineteenth-century Marxism, associating Nietzsche’s philosophy with its corruption by National Socialism. Shortly after, in his 1935 paper On Escape, Levinas clarifies what he meant by “this feeling for the body”: the feeling of being “riveted” to a body and the feeling of escape (OE 52–53)—not escape from the body, nor from “social convention,” but “escape” as the futural experience of “going somewhere” (OE 53). The value Levinas finds in this “new conception of man” is that it avoids the “ideological expansion” implied in idealism’s and liberalism’s conceptions of the subject as “absolutely free” and above the historicity of concrete embodied existence; and it avoids, at least in the first instance, the determinism of biologism and conventional materialism (RH 64–65, 69). While Levinas drops the terminology of “feeling for a body” and “escape” in his later formulations of subjectivity in terms of the ethical relation to alterity, he arguably never abandons this self, conceived in terms of corporeal reflexivity, even if he moves beyond it with his notion of sensibility. It is, therefore, Nietzsche’s idea of the self as affect and a futural responsive movement beyond mere affect and traditional meaning that attracts Levinas’s later praise in Otherwise Than Being: this is the subjectivity that “breaks with essence” (OB 8). It is also this conception of “the Nietzschean man” that reverses “irreversible time”: he stands at the “gateway” called “the moment” in Nietzsche’s most considered account of eternal recurrence (TZ 267–72). Here, Zarathustra, in a critique of both cyclic time and linear, historical time, describes the present moment as a kind of existential knot of becoming from which a path extends eternally to the past and a contradictory path extends eternally toward the future: in this “moment” of recurrence the self is stretched between a past and an undeterminable future.
Somatic reflexivity, therefore, is also the primary condition of critical “revaluation of value,” and it is a condition of, but not reducible to, thought and reflection: “the whole somber thing called reflection” is no more than further “mastery over the affects” (GM 62) and to “think” is to envisage how pain might be avoided and pleasure repeated in the future (TZ 147). And it is this responsiveness, given by somatic reflexivity, that is the condition of one kind, of conscience—“bad conscience” informed by discipline according to prevailing norms. But with this comes a second “conscience” that renews the world through reflexivity—“conscience” as a responsive relation to oneself and to the norms that the self embodies and that guide its action, and as a temporality open to a past that is “owned” in the present but under the compulsion of an undetermined future opened in advance.
This idea of conscience helps to explain a crisis of conscience precipitated by what I referred to in the beginning as a failure of political responsibility. The “real problem regarding man,” for Nietzsche (GM 57), and, I suggest, for us in the present, is that this body in its responsiveness and futurity is at risk, most notably from the ideal of juridical responsibility that governs it. A condition of somatic reflexivity is that a relation to both the juridico-moral code and the future be maintained, not that the self is entirely engulfed by either. In assuming responsibility for itself, the self risks itself for an unknown future; the self “goes under” as Nietzsche puts it (e.g., TZ 126–28). But the ideal of juridical self-responsibility would remove this risk: it assumes the endurance of a preordained image of the self as the faithful embodiment of the prevailing juridico-moral code. That is, the temporal structure of the promise and of accountability assumes the ability to commit the self to a particular future and, through a selective memory, to recoup in that future a past self, word, or deed that is now present. According to Levinas, such a responsible “will” would require the impossible: a memory or “temporality of time [that] makes possible . . . a recuperation in which nothing is lost” (OB 28–29). Moreover, for Nietzsche, to the extent that a particular future is ordained in advance by the juridico-moral idea of responsibility in concert with totalitarian, nationalistic, or utilitarian government, this is at the expense of futurity per se and therefore at the expense of somatic reflexivity and hence responsibility.
With regard to this overarching concern for the body’s reflexivity and futurity, Nietzsche has three related criticisms of juridical self-responsibility. First, insofar as the constitution of the responsive self is normalizing, any responsibility the individual assumes for such action is not genuine (GM 59; HA 74). This is the paradox that arguably still ails us: responsibility cannot rest on blind obedience to the law and norms one inherits rather than chooses. Second, and conversely, Nietzsche is critical of the “fable” of responsibility insofar as it rests on the illusion of free will (HA 43). Two aspects of his critique of free will are relevant here. One is that the illusion of free will carries with it the illusion that we can choose and predict the future in advance (HA 73). The other is Nietzsche’s claim that the individual is not responsible for anything arising from his “nature” because his “nature” is not freely chosen; it is to some extent inherited—“an outgrowth of the elements and influences of past and present things” (HA 43; see also GM 44–45). While, for Nietzsche, we cannot choose the future or our inheritance, we can, through somatic reflexivity, transform our inheritance and so keep the future open.
Nietzsche’s third criticism of juridical self-responsibility is the one I wish to emphasize: in preempting a particular future, juridical self-responsibility closes down “the reversal of irreversible time,” responsiveness and futurity. Insofar as the “last man,” for example, is the embodiment of a socially prescribed good, in him the future, ordained in advance, is actualized (EH 328–30; TZ 128–30). But such individuals would be “unable to create” (EH 330). They would be unable to respond to “elements and influences” of historical existence (HA 43) in a way that, without escaping the body and therefore the norms one has inherited, keeps the body open to the undetermined future and affects open to the transformation of meaning. Those who embody the juridico-moral code they have inherited so extensively that they merely repeat it with resignation, in sacrificing “the future to themselves—they sacrifice all man’s future” (EH 330). The “last man” is the end of history, the end of spatio-temporalization and so would be as “dyspeptic” as the self for whom the force of forgetting is dysfunctional—“he cannot ‘have done’ with anything” (GM 58). He would have the “conscience” of a machine.
“Genuine” Responsibility and Levinas’s Provisional Critique
Nietzsche has a solution of sorts to these paradoxes of juridical responsibility and to the closure of responsiveness and futurity it fosters. But with this solution, he and Levinas part company. In section 2 of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche welcomes the possibility that a genuinely responsible “sovereign,” “noble” individual may emerge from this regime of accountability, punishment, and blame. Without explaining how this might happen, Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual as unique (“like only to himself”), having his own measure of value, and thus “liberated again from the morality of custom,” and in whom a consciousness of this power and freedom has “become flesh” (GM 59). This “proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom . . . this sovereign man calls . . . his conscience” (GM 60).
Conscience? Nietzsche cannot mean the conscience of the liberal individual whose free will, as Levinas puts it, arises from “outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence” (RH 66) and, while appearing to break with determinism, actually, “by memory and history,” reassembles the present into a totality “without fissures or surprises” (OB 5). There are two other ways to interpret Nietzsche’s picture of genuine conscience and responsibility. First, he could be suggesting that the sovereign individual ordains his future in advance insofar as his or her self-legislated meanings and values have become flesh. But such a self would be little different from the “last man” or a thing in one crucial respect: such an individual would be a body reduced to and coincident with a fixed form and meaning with no excess, no affect, no somatic reflexivity, no ability to respond creatively. As with those who embody the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche discusses in the third essay (GM 103–8, 162), “a few ideas are to be rendered indistinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, ‘fixed,’ with the aim of hypnotising the entire nervous and intellectual system” (GM 61). Any set of ideas or “legal order thought of as sovereign and universal . . . would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man” (GM 76).
Nevertheless, this seems to be how Levinas interprets Nietzsche’s materialism in his early discussion of the philosophy of “Hitlerism.”5 Conceptions of the self as adhering to a body become a problem, for Levinas, if the reflexive futural aspect of the body is denied. The body is then governed by the law of its inheritance: “The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self” (RH 69). With this, says Levinas, “if race does not exist, one has to invent it” (RH 69). The danger of this materialism is that it harbors a philosophy of expansion for which everyone denies responsibility. This is not the “ideological expansion” of idealism but a material expansion of one’s own biological or inherited truth through “war and conquest” (RH 70–71). While Levinas attributes this principle to the rediscovery and glorification of “Nietzsche’s will to power” (RH 71; EN 97), this, as the analysis above suggests, is not Nietzsche’s materialism. It is true that he says, in Beyond Good and Evil, that no education or critical revaluation of affects can completely eradicate from the body the cultural “qualities and preferences” of one’s “forefathers” (BG 184). This “constitutes the problem of race” (by which Nietzsche means cultural rather than biological race). But there is a difference between living through the “qualities” one has inherited and being determined by those “qualities.” Hence, Nietzsche objects to the kind of transnational politics that, while transnational, evokes the “storm and stress of ‘national feeling’” involving the adaptation of everyone toward one ideal identity (BG 153–54). By cutting the individual off from the material and cultural traditions that condition her and from the undetermined future that her reflexivity would open, such totalizing politics thereby turns everyone into a slave of the State. This is “slavery in the subtlest sense,” and “is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants” (BG 154).
The second and most likely interpretation of Nietzsche’s picture of genuine self-responsibility, more consistent with Levinas’s admiration in Otherwise Than Being, is of an individual for whom a future is open because the revaluation of value, one’s own force of law, has become flesh. Genuine self-responsibility makes the most of the force of forgetfulness, of contradictory forces of somatic reflexivity, thereby interrupting and transforming the work of law and morality and its imposition of a few “demands of social existence as present realities upon these slaves of momentary affect” (GM 61). Put in the best possible light, the conscience of “genuine” self-responsibility is given by an aesthetics of self and a critical politics. This sovereign individual is irresponsible in the sense that she is not accountable in terms of—and will not necessarily uphold—the juridico-moral code that would shape her. But she is responsible in the sense that, in responding to and either affirming or contesting those norms, she sacrifices an enduring image of herself to keep the future open. This is the prereflective moment of “conscience” that “reverses irreversible time.” In this contradictory recurring knot of existence, the past, including the juridico-moral code one has inherited, is neither forgotten nor entirely recuperated through memory: it is revised and either affirmed or contested through transforming the “it was” into thus “I willed it” (TZ 251–3). Thereby the self “goes under” while taking responsibility for her “destiny.”
While the idea of somatic reflexivity, as the condition of conscience, is helpful for understanding the material impact of too much juridico-moral government, there is a problem with Nietzsche’s solution—the only criterion of conscience, of critical revaluation, and “judging” the right thing to do, seems to be the maintenance of the self’s responsiveness and hence uniqueness. There is no internal limit to the creative forces that accompany this expression of freedom. While I accept the reading of “will to power” as enhancement of a “feeling of power” from the discharge of creative forces of reevaluation of value, rather than a will to domination, there is nevertheless an imperialism that haunts Nietzsche’s picture of genuine self-responsibility.6 This is not because “will to power” is driven blindly by meanings it has inherited in the way Levinas suggests in his analysis of Hitlerism: as I have argued, “will to power,” as a manifestation of corporeal reflexivity, consists in a break with such determinism. Rather, the problem is that the “will to power” of genuine responsibility and “great politics” operates as a force, the expression of which is both inevitable and usually aggressive (e.g., BG 174–75; GM 77; EH 327). This is partly because Nietzsche formulates the forgetting that governs the presocial self in terms of force such that memory techniques and other means of enculturation are understood in terms of counterforces that “will to power” then opposes. But also, more fundamentally, the imperialism apparent in his descriptions of “will to power” arises from the individualism he espouses.
This individualism appears when Nietzsche forgets his own genealogy of genuine self-responsibility, where somatic reflexivity, conscience, and responsibility are born of relation with others (and not just with those who enforce prevailing laws through a punitive disciplinary system). If the relations that constitute and maintain the individual are denied, relation will break through from within in the form of a combative discharge of force. Even when Nietzsche admits the interdependence of self-responsibility, there is this confrontational element. He suggests in Twilight of the Idols that freedom, as the “will to assume responsibility for oneself,” is not autonomous in the sense of being separated from its effects but is measured “by the resistance which has to be overcome . . . to remain on top” (TL 542). Hence, others are perceived as competing for sovereignty or as a potential threat to one’s territorial integrity maintained through one’s own force of law. In discharging its creative forces of reevaluation, the self-responsible self transgresses the unique value of the other’s somatic reflexivity and extraterritoriality and is absolved of responsibility for the effects of its freedom on the suffering of others.
If prolonging or enhancing the other’s suffering is an inevitable consequence of genuine self-responsibility, that model of responsibility would be subject to the same charge that Nietzsche levels at juridical self-responsibility: genuine self-responsibility would foreclose the responsiveness that reverses irreversible time and hence it would foreclose futurity, perhaps not in oneself, at least not initially, but certainly in others. Insofar as the State or individual relinquishes this responsibility for keeping the future open, by preempting the future, by imposing an image of the future self on everyone, these bodies can be undone, rendered senseless, and barred from a future. This is one meaning of suffering and terror: the pain of passive suffering, arising from the dissolution of the self into the absolute present (the “last man”), into the timeless flux of affect, or into the linear progressive or cyclic time of biological destiny or automatism. Nietzsche puts the highest value on the active suffering of the self-responsible self who suffers from an excess of creative force, and therefore from the problem of meaning (e.g., GM 162; BG 136). But, by not conceiving of a limit to the discharge of critical evaluative forces accompanying “genuine” self-responsibility, Nietzsche would preserve this kind of active suffering for the self by the proliferation of passive suffering in others, albeit in a blundering, nondeliberate way. While Nietzsche does allow that a genuinely sovereign individual or State will respond to others who are different (or who in some other way challenge its force of law) with generosity, mercy, and compassion (GM 72–73), this external limit to the imperialistic effects of will to power is too dependent on the arbitrary whim of sovereignty to be more than a fortuitous virtue.7 On the basis of this “multiplicity in pure indifference” that Levinas finds in phenomenology (CPP 89) but that also accompanies Nietzsche’s sovereign self-responsibility, Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human: “we feel toward [the neighbor] as free and irresponsible as toward plants and stones. That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely” (HA 70).
Levinas, Responsibility for the Other, and Beyond
Levinas would agree with Nietzsche that the suffering of others, whether passive (the result of external force) or active (responsiveness as the expression of uniqueness), is learned. But the other’s suffering is learned as it is felt in the very process by which the responsiveness of somatic reflexivity and self-responsibility arises. Hence, in contrast to Nietzsche and by going further into the preconditions of responsiveness and responsibility, Levinas argues that “the condition for, or the unconditionality of, the self does not begin in the auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event, ‘compassionate’ for another” or resentful of another or just indifferent (OB 123). “Quite the contrary”: the self begins in “compassion” or responsibility for the other, in response to the other’s alterity that breaks through the other’s (cultural) form (CPP 96). So, while Levinas agrees with Nietzsche that the break with determinism is prior to the distinction between “free” and “un-free” will (BG 32–33) and that the criteria of conscience (the “norms of morality”) are “not embarked in history and culture” (CPP 101), the “finite” freedom of self-responsibility that Nietzsche describes is neither original nor unlimited (OB 122–23). Levinas’s claim that uniqueness and autonomy arise through interdependence points to four departures from Nietzsche’s account of the prehistory of somatic reflexivity, responsiveness and therefore responsibility.
First, for Levinas, responsiveness, as a condition of responsibility, does not arise by way of force, whether an “original” force of forgetting, a counterforce of law, or a force of revaluation that arises in the reflexivity resulting from the relation between the other two. Rather, the intensity or “inspiration” necessary to move the self beyond itself comes from the other, “over and beyond the logos of response” and as a condition of sociality, normativity, the juridico-moral code, and the affective powers of one’s creative relation to that code (OB 102). And this provocation of the other is pacific rather than hostile (OB 139). This is to take the condition of responsibility beyond essence caught in an ontology of war and “rational peace” to a “forgetting” and “ignorance of what is not noble” (OB 177). Levinas’s forgetting shares synergies with Nietzsche’s but is not a force in opposition to memory. Rather, forgetting lies beyond “the bipolarity of essence, between being and nothingness” and is “absolutely opposed to oppression” (OB 177).
Hence, and second, it is the other’s alterity that introduces “a lapse of time” inaugurating the “getting out of phase of the instant,” the temporalization of time that would constitute a self who would be self-responsible (OB 51; CPP 105). This being affected by alterity affects me beyond and as a condition of the “moment” of recurrence that Nietzsche describes. For Levinas, in this knot of recurrence the self does not return to itself the same, not because it remakes the world all by itself (by reversing time in transforming “it was” into “thus I willed it”) but because this “is a recurrence to oneself out of an irrecusable exigency of the other” that puts into question all “self-affirmation” and all “egoism born again in this recurrence” (OB 109, 111). Still, following Nietzsche, the place of this temporalization is the body: “recurrence is incarnation” (OB 109). But it is the felt strangeness of others, the extraterritoriality of a (no)place unconstituted by me, that constitutes the uniqueness of the self signified as corporeal reflexivity or the “non-coincidence with oneself” (OB 56). Respons-ability is sensibility that exceeds but also is a condition of somatic reflexivity, a responsive body with meaningful projects open to a future, and to a critical relation with the juridico-moral code.
Third, while building on the value Nietzsche attributes to the futurity of the body’s reflexivity, Levinas rejects any implication that maintaining the self’s responsiveness (through an aesthetics of self-overcoming or a critical politics) is the primary normative basis of “conscience.” He follows Nietzsche’s conviction that conscience is not about accountability with reference to cultural convention. But Levinas locates “responsibility for the other” beyond the condition of “good” or “bad conscience” such that this responsibility is dedicated to the other “before being dedicated to myself” (EN 169–70). This inclination toward the corporeal expression of the other’s alterity disrupts moral norms while providing the basis of all normativity: it says “thou shalt not kill,” and this unique sense puts existence on a human and moral plane and introduces value and “meaning into being” (Levinas OB 128; CPP 88–89, 92, 95–96). As a nonvolitional, affective “response” to the other, I am therefore responsible for the other’s responsiveness: “I have to answer for [the other’s] very responsibility” (OB 84) and “defend the rights of the other man” (OS 125). As it is through and for the futurity of the other’s body that I am responsible, it is this, rather than preservation of my own reflexivity, that is the normative basis of “conscience”—that felt conviction about what is right and wrong “beyond convention” (OB 88).
Finally, contrary to Nietzsche, that I am responsibility for the other implies an internal limit to the creative forces of self-responsibility: responsibility for the other puts into question the freedom of the ego and “its pride and the dominating imperialism characteristic of it” by limiting my freedom to possess, kill, or in any way negate the other’s uniqueness (OB 110). More positively, this responsibility is “responsibility for the freedom of the others” (OB 109), and, as responsibility for the other, the subject “frees itself from its ‘return to self” (OS 125), from “enchainment to itself” (OB 124).
The value of these interventions into the meaning of responsibility does not lie most fundamentally in promoting tolerance and multiculturalism. They support such a cause, but one could equally rely on the pluralism inherent in Nietzsche’s ontology for that. More valuable I think is that Levinas’s idea of responsibility for others, juxtaposed with Nietzsche’s “genuine” self-responsibility, pinpoints what would precipitate a crisis of responsibility in a liberal democracy of the kind with which I began. Political attempts to secure a particular future for the nation or for oneself, through reasserting the borders of one’s sovereign territory, by imposing one’s will upon the world, or through racism and other exercises in political determinism, consist in evasion of responsibility for others. Evasion of political responsibility (for the preservation of the responsiveness of all others) would not just affect the others who are targeted by enhancing their suffering in Nietzsche’s “passive” sense—that undergone as a dissolution of the spatio-temporality of subjectivity. Evading responsibility for the futurity of others would also enhance the suffering of those within the political community that practices such imperialism by destroying the “source” of the break with determinism (the other) that is a condition of responsiveness, self-responsibility and openness to an undetermined future.
This conclusion about the impact of the evasion of political responsibility on the corporeal reflexivity of both self-responsibility and responsibility for others cannot be easily derived from either Nietzsche or Levinas alone—partly because they both neglect politics—but also because they both view “useless” suffering (meaningless, unwitnessed, for no purpose) as both what we deem “evil” and that which is to some extent “congenital” (GM 67–69; EN 92–93). What is not clear is how much they thereby condone the passivity and dissolution of subjectivity (and hence loss of responsiveness) that is characteristic of such suffering. Nietzsche seems to build passive suffering inflicted on others into “great politics” itself as a by-product of the “deification of cruelty” in the figure of the sovereign individual (GM 65–67). Levinas, however, insists that suffering inflicted by such sovereign forces is neither congenital nor inevitable: this is “suffering and evil inflicted deliberately . . . in a manner . . . of a reason become political and detached from all ethics” (EN 97). This “degrades human beings by affecting their freedom” and reducing them to “the identity of a mere thing” (EN 92). Even if the other’s suffering is not my own doing, the non-indifference of responsibility for others demands that we not “abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to the political fatality—or drifting—of blind forces” (EN 99–100).
On the other hand, for Levinas, the suffering that is “congenital” is that of responsibility for the other: “the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other” (EN 94). While this does not promote politics detached from ethics that would abandon the other, it could imply an abandonment of the self—a dissolution of self, the undoing of the lived place and time of the body into affectivity and sensation without sense, a utopia of no-place, no-time, and no-meaning. It is Nietzsche who reminds us of the consequences, for responsiveness and futurity, of such pure passivity and receptivity. Added to this is a second possible problem in accounting for the impact of the evasion of political responsibility on responsiveness: not only does Levinas’s account of responsibility for others not suggest anything concrete for politics; he holds that any actual response to others (including politics), by imposing conditions, evaluations, and judgments, consists in a withdrawal from responsibility for others (e.g., TI 64).8
However, through occasional qualification, by way of the notion of the “Third Party,” Levinas, particularly in his later work, points to an internal limit to this apparently unlimited, unconditional responsibility for the other. And this is where ethics meets political responsibility. The limit comes not from specific moral or juridical laws that would give one reciprocal rights against the other but from the concern for all others, including one’s self, that underlies the egalitarian principles of justice in liberal democracies. This “concern for justice” arises from and is justified by sensibility as responsibility for the other (OB 128). It also limits the unconditional and asymmetrical dimensions of responsibility for the other in that, “from the first” the other for whom I am responsible is always also a Third Party with respect to another and, while no one can substitute for my responsibility, “I am another for the others” (OB 158). As responsibility for the other, I do not get reduced to pure passivity or to a thing because the uniqueness expressed in my corporeal reflexivity emerges through and is supported by the welcome of other others who are responsible for me. This idea of the Third Party also suggests that the “concern for justice” arising from but “spreading around” responsibility for the other is what Levinas would understand by the normative basis of political responsibility in liberal democracies. Indeed, he suggests in an interview in 1988 that the “very excellence of democracy” lies in the attempt, through “legislation, always unfinished,” to be open to the better expression of “justice . . . in the name of responsibility for the other” (EN 229–30).
If Levinas is right that this concern for justice based on responsibility for the other is what underscores the “conscience” of political responsibility, and if Nietzsche is right that we embody some of those norms of the juridico-moral code that emerges from this concern for justice, as well as a reflexive relation to that code, then an evasion of political responsibility would manifest in a dissolution of the limits that keep operative sociality as giving to and inclination toward the uniqueness and alterity of all others. Keeping a check on the dissolution of the self implied in the passive suffering of both responsibility for others and that inflicted by the sovereign forces of self-responsibility would require a chiasmic, rather than asymmetrical, relation between ethics and a critical politics, between responsibility for others and self-responsibility. Nietzsche and Levinas’s idea of the body in its futurity as the expression of the highest value provides the ground for a link between the two. This is the body understood in terms of somatic reflexivity or sensibility, the body that breaks with determinism but that is thus enabled because it is affected by the other and is compassion for the other. These bodies are at risk under present conditions not from the suffering for others of somatic reflexivity or from the insecurity of an unknown future, but from either an ethics detached from politics or from a politics detached from ethics. Nietzsche and Levinas are at their best when they see the two, ethics and politics, as interdependent. What would reattach ethics and politics is a critical politics that mobilizes the revaluation of value of “genuine” self-responsibility—but in a way that preserves the independence of the self’s reflexive and therefore critical powers by assuming responsibility for the preservation of the independence and unique value of the other’s responsiveness and responsibility. This is a concept of responsibility that Nietzsche and Levinas together may have envisaged for our time.
NOTES
1. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Response and Responsibility in Levinas,” in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 46.
2. Robert Bernasconi, “Before Whom and For What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility,” in Difficulties of Ethical Life, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Denis Schmidt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)
3. For an alternative analysis of the relation between Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s approaches to responsibility see Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics 31, no.4 (Winter 2001): 22–40, revised in Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), chapter 1.
4. I have borrowed some of my analysis of Nietzsche from another paper: Rosalyn Diprose, “Arendt and Nietzsche on Responsibility and Futurity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 6 (2008): 617–42. The research for both papers was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.
5. For a more detailed discussion of Levinas’s essay “Reflections on The Philosophy of Hitlerism” in relation to Heidegger’s philosophy, see Tina Chanter, “Neither Materialism nor Idealism: Levinas’ Third Way,” in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, ed. Alan Milchman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 137–54.
6. For a comprehensive analysis of various meanings of “will to power,” see Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), chapter 4; for a comparison of Nietzsche’s idea that will to power is about increased “feeling of power” with that of Hobbes, see Paul Patton, “Nietzsche and Hobbes,” International Studies in Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2001): 99–116.
7. For an account of why this volitional generosity is an insufficient guarantee against the imperialism of sovereign “will to power,” see Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), chapter 1.
8. His most explicit statement to the effect that politics closes down the ethical relation to the other can be found in an interview, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 29.