I
In a well-known series of reflections in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in the Christian teaching, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” Freud proposes, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” Freud condenses this surprise and bewilderment in a series of questions and objections that cannot but seem reasonable and commonsensical:
Why would we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. . . . He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him.
Things become even more complex when this neighbor is a perfect stranger:
But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own of any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share.
But things get even worse. “Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love,” Freud writes;
I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.
Freud brings his reflections on neighbor-love to a provisional conclusion by appealing to the persistence, in human beings, of a fundamental inclination toward aggression, a primary mutual hostility. As “creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness, . . . their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.”1
Against the background of such remarks, it might well seem to be a fool’s undertaking to attempt to make psychoanalysis a key resource in the project of reanimating the ethical urgency and significance of neighbor-love in contemporary society and culture. But that is just what the essays in this volume propose to do. This book’s underlying premise—axiom even—is that the Freudian revolution is stricto sensu internal to the topic of neighbor and, indeed, provides a crucial point of reference for the project of rethinking the notion of neighbor in light of the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.
After the slaughters of World War II, the Shoah, the gulag, multiple ethnic and religious slaughters, the explosive rise of slums in the last decades, and so on, the notion of neighbor has lost its innocence. To take the extreme case: in what precise sense is the Muselmann, the “living dead” of the Nazi concentration camps, still our neighbor? Is “human rights militarism,” as the predominant ideological justification of today’s military interventions, really sustained by the love for a neighbor? And, in our own societies, is not the multiculturalist notion of tolerance, whose fundamental value is the right not to be harassed, precisely a strategy to keep the intrusive neighbor at a proper distance? In the magnificent chapter 2.C (“You Shall Love Your Neighbor”) of his Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard develops the claim that the ideal neighbor that we should love is a dead one—the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. His line of reasoning is surprisingly simple and straightforward: in contrast to poets and lovers, whose object of love is distinguished by its particular outstanding qualities, “to love one’s neighbor means equality”: “Forsake all distinctions so that you can love your neighbor.”2 However, it is only in death that all distinctions disappear: “Death erases all distinctions, but preference is always related to distinctions.”3
Is this love for the dead neighbor really just Kierkegaard’s theological idiosyncrasy? In some “radical” circles in the United States, there came recently a proposal to “rethink” the rights of necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies). So the idea was formulated that, in the same way people give permission for their organs to be used for medical purposes in the case of their sudden death, people should also be allowed to grant permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs to play with. Is this proposal not the perfect exemplification of how a particular politically correct stance realizes Kierkegaard’s insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor? A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner of a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid either harassing or being harassed: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the same time, a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing threat of the partner’s excessive enjoyment is also eliminated.
To put it in the simplest way possible, the essays collected here share the basic premise that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious gives us the resources to understand, with a new and heretofore unimagined complexity, what is happening when we enter into the proximity of another’s desire, a desire that touches on the border regions of life and death and that can therefore assume an inhuman, even monstrous aspect. What if, for example, Kafka’s “inhuman” figure Odradek proves to be the exemplary case of the neighbor? The premise of this volume is that only through understanding the eventfulness of such an encounter will it be possible to truly grasp what is at stake now in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
II
As Jacques Lacan points out, the biblical commandment to love the neighbor represents a complete break from classical ethics: “Nothing is farther from the message of Socrates than you shall love your neighbor as yourself, a formula that is remarkably absent from all that he says.”4 With the injunction in the Torah to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) and the New Testament’s question “who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29), the relationship to another person indicated as “the neighbor” (re’a in Hebrew, plesion in the Greek) comes to define monotheistic ethics in its difference from the Greco-Roman or “pagan” ethics of moderation and temperance as the keys to happiness. Lacan’s ultimate point, one already adumbrated in Freud’s various warnings about the possibility of neighbor-love, is that the encounter with the neighbor—this new point of orientation in ethical life—points to a beyond of the pleasure principle that still guides the classical ethics of happiness. Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor; the neighbor remains an impenetrable, enigmatic presence that, far from serving my project of self-disciplining moderation and prudence, hystericizes me.
Jewish literature presents numerous examples of the radical ethics of the neighbor, from the Talmud and Midrash, Maimonides and Nachmanides, to Rosenzweig and Levinas; and in Christianity neighbor-love is a central problem to thinkers as diverse as Augustine, William of Ockham, Catherine of Siena, Luther, and Kierkegaard. At the same time, the neighbor has acted as a doctrinal shibboleth for the separation and even opposition of Jewish and Christian ethics and for the emergence of the so-called secular world from the Christian line of interpretation. The New Testament defines itself against what it sees as the narrow legalism of Pharisaic Judaism and initiates the dialectics of new versus old, universal versus particular, and love versus law that will inform ethical theory in modernity. For Immanuel Kant, the commandment to love the neighbor embodies the rigors of ethics as pure practical reason, in which the Good is clearly distinguished from both Jewish law and pagan wellbeing. Kant’s frequent citation of Leviticus 19:18 as an instance of the categorical imperative continues the logic of universalization that began in the New Testament and provides the proof text for the reconciliation between religion and reason.
In both Judaism and Christianity, the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to “love your neighbor as yourself” functions most canonically as the central law or moral principle par excellence, the ethical essence of true religion, in tandem with the commandment to “love God.” But the meaning of neither of these injunctions can be taken as self-evident: just as love of God can be interpreted in terms of many divergent practices, from private meditation to public martyrdom, so the intent and extent of the commandment to love the neighbor are obscure and have frequently been points of radical disagreement and sectarian division, even in mainstream interpretation. For skeptical readers, both religious and secular, the commandment to love the neighbor has seemed far from rational and has, in fact, appeared deeply enigmatic—indeed, as an enigma that calls us to rethink the very nature of subjectivity, responsibility, and community. We might even say that neighbor-love is not a law that can be obeyed literally, nor a theory that can be definitively exemplified, but a rule that can be proved only by its exception. That is, neighbor-love functions more as an obstacle to its own theorization than as a roadmap for ethical life: whereas all ethical imperatives involve some ambiguity and hence require some degree of interpretation (e.g., What constitutes honoring one’s parents? Is there a difference between “killing” and “murdering”?), the injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” involves interpretive and practical aporias in all its individual terms, and even more so as an utterance. One cannot attempt to fulfill it without taking the risk of transgressing it. Despite its seemingly universal dissemination, despite its appropriation in the name of various moral and political agendas, something in the call to neighbor-love remains opaque and does not give itself up willingly to univocal interpretation. Yet it remains always in the imperative and presses on us with an urgency that seems to go beyond both its religious origins and its modern appropriations as universal Reason.
To begin, who is my neighbor? In Judaism this question often takes the form of asking whether the neighbor to be loved includes non-Jews along with Jews. Before modernity, however, few Jewish readers understood the injunction to extend beyond the limit of the covenant; and while some medieval exegetes include fellow monotheists among the neighbors, others restrict the commandment’s object even more, limiting the neighbor to strictly observant fellow Jews. But even the most exclusive account must face the inevitable question of the choice of one particular neighbor over another, for to love any one neighbor is surely to fail to love another. A defining moment in the emergence of Christian universalism comes when the neighbor is asserted to include everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, in the parable of the Good Samaritan: while the Levite and the Cohen pass by the injured man in the road, presumably not recognizing him as a fellow Jew, or perhaps fearful of violating laws of purity through contact with a corpse, the Good Samaritan comes to his aid and proves himself the true neighbor of his neighbor—whether dead or alive.
Secondly, what acts or affects are imposed in the seemingly excessive and even inappropriate injunction to “love” my neighbor (ahavah, in Hebrew, which includes romantic and sexual love)? The medieval Rabbi Nachmanides insists that love is a figure of speech, an “overstatement.” Pointing to the peculiar grammar of the Hebrew phrase, which could be translated awkwardly but literally as “love to the neighbor as yourself,” he argues that the commandment enjoins love of the neighbor’s welfare, not person. Christianity has similarly tried to distance the commandment from any sense of inappropriate affect, usually by emphasizing its close connection with the love of God. Some commentators (notably Kierkegaard), pointing out that love cannot be commanded, cannot be produced by imperative or necessity, argue that the commandment is meant to be confronted as enigma, to be broken through to love of God.
Furthermore, what does the commandment’s apparent reflexivity, the call to love the neighbor as yourself, imply about the nature of self-love and, by extension, about subjectivity? What is the force of the comparative kamokah (again, an unusual formation in this grammatical context)? Neighbor-love has come to serve as a test of the meaning of affiliation, membership, and community insofar as the commandment seems to require a relationship or affective bond of some sort between the other and the self. Is the neighbor understood as an extension of the category of the self, the familial, and the friend, that is, as someone like me whom I am obligated to give preferential treatment to; or does it imply the inclusion of the other into my circle of responsibility, extending to the stranger, even the enemy?
Finally, and for the concerns of the present volume most importantly, does the commandment call us to expand the range of our identifications or does it urge us to come closer, become answerable to, an alterity that remains radically inassimilable? In this spirit, one might paraphrase Max Horkheimer’s old motto from the late 1930s “If you do not want to talk about Fascism, then shut up about capitalism”: if you do not want to talk about Odradek, Gregor Samsa, and the Muselmann, then shut up about your love for a neighbor.
In raising these questions, neighbor-love not only opens up a set of fundamental issues that continue to define ethical inquiry in modernity, but also implies a new theological configuration of political theory. The essays in this volume make a preliminary step into this opening.
III
In the first essay, Kenneth Reinhard argues that Freud and Lacan provide the resources for a radical rethinking of the two fundamental categories of Carl Schmitt’s political theology, that of the sovereign (as the one who decides on the state of exception) and that of the friend-enemy distinction (as providing the very framework of the field of political life). Rather than simply abandoning the concept of political theology—a common reflex in contemporary liberal thought—Reinhard argues that it ought to be pushed further toward an alternative political theology of the neighbor. In doing so, Reinhard suggests, we might avoid the two alternative ways of not encountering the neighbor, which he correlates with the psychic structures of psychosis and neurosis: “Neurosis and psychosis represent two asymmetrical modes of the failure to love the neighbor: whereas the neurotic becomes an autonomous subject of desire in turning away from the impossibility of the command to love the neighbor, the psychotic fails to achieve subjectivity while succeeding in experiencing the other as radically other, loving the neighbor not wisely, but too well.” Reinhard proposes that the way out of this bind is to be found in Lacan’s elaboration of sexual difference and his notion of the “impossibility” of the sexual relation. Reinhard argues that Lacan’s “formula” of masculine sexuation—the pattern according to which a “masculine” subjective structure comes to be stabilized—closely parallel’s Schmitt’s understanding of the organization of the political field (friend-foe distinction) around the figure of the sovereign and his paradoxical “right” to declare a state of exception. Masculine subjectivity is constituted, in this view, in relation to the fantasy of the primal father: “The sovereign is like the primal father in being stationed at the margins of the state he regulates: it is only insofar as there can be a radical exception to the law that the law can exist and be effective. The primal father and the sovereign occupy the position of extreme dictators whose word both violates the rule of the total state and promises it totality, closure, drawing a line between the inside and the outside, the native and the stranger. The subjective decision that results in masculine sexuation is the choice not to choose, the decision to remain in a liminal position by both accepting subjection to the law of castration and maintaining the belief in the existence of at least one man who has escaped that law, while enforcing it on all others.” For Reinhard, Lacan’s proposal of an alternative logic for feminine sexuation, one that includes the dimension that Lacan called the pas-tout, the not-all, offers the resources for allowing us to pass from the political theology of the friend-enemy to that of the neighbor, a figure located no longer in a field totalized by a sovereign exception, but rather within an infinite series of possible encounters, one without limit and without totalization, a field without the stability of margins.
In the second essay of the volume, Eric Santner takes as his point of departure Walter Benjamin’s famous allegory of the chess player in which an automaton, representing historical materialism, is guided in his moves by a wizened dwarf representing, in turn, the resources of theology. Santner raises the question, as simple as it is perplexing, as to the nature of the materiality at stake in such materialism. That is, what sort of materiality must this be if theology is to play a role in its analysis and recomposition? And how should one understand the theology that, in Benjamin’s view, would be up to such a task? Santner pursues these questions by way of an engagement with the work of Franz Rosenzweig, the German-Jewish philosopher whose magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, was a crucial point of reference for Benjamin’s thought in general and for the critique of historicism he proposes in his Theses, in particular. Through a reading of Rosenzweig’s discussion of the concept of miracles, Santner argues that the materiality at issue in historical materialism needs to be understood as a kind of semiotic density, a signifying stress, constituting the subject’s creatureliness. For Santner, “becoming creature,” the acquisition of the materiality at issue in historical materialism, is linked to the state of exception already elaborated in Reinhard’s essay, that is, to exposure to a boundary zone of the Law where the force of law exceeds any normative content, where the meaningfulness of law is traversed by a movement of designification. Creaturely life is what gets “(dis)organized” by way of what Benjamin calls the erregende Schrift, the exciting script, that gathers around the edges of states of emergency/exception. Against this background, Santner proposes that a miracle implies a capacity to intervene into this dimension of creaturely life, the possibility of releasing the energies contained there, opening them to genuinely new destinies. It is, Santner argues, through such interventions that one remains faithful to the commandment of neighbor-love.
In the final essay of the volume, Slavoj Žižek argues for an understanding of the injunction to love one’s neighbor precisely as a challenge to the so-called ethical turn in contemporary thought, a turn often linked to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Žižek’s main target in this essay is what he characterizes as an ethics of the “last man”—Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man” is the point of reference here—the paradigmatic citizen of contemporary Western civilizations who fears an excessive intensity of life as something that might disturb his search for happiness without stress and who, for this reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance. For Žižek, a whole series of contemporary commodities and phenomena embodies this anxiety and vulnerability apropos of excess: coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, up to the desire to prosecute wars without casualties (nonexistent on our side, invisible on the other side). Žižek proposes a revaluation of the notion of excess, of exposure to excess, one that follows the logic of the Hegelian revision of the Kantian position: Is the status of the subject always limited, dispossessed, and exposed, or is the subject itself a name for this dispossession? From the subject’s limitation, we have to move to limit itself as the name for the subject.
For Žižek, this Hegelian sublation of the Kantian position disseminates into the field of political life a crucial dimension of life introduced by the Kantian transcendental turn, that of “inhuman” understood as the very “extimate” feature which makes the human human. Whereas the judgment “he is not human” means simply that this person is external to humanity, animal or divine, the judgment “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely, that this person is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human. In the pre-Kantian universe, Žižek suggests, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness. With Kant and German Idealism, however, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over. With Kant, on the other hand, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. Žižek argues that this dimension is missed in the ethical turn in contemporary thought in general, and in the work of Levinas, in particular. Žižek’s further argument is that it is only by insisting on this dimension that it becomes possible to reinvigorate the properly political potential of the injunction of neighbor-love.
The essays in this volume were written over the course of several years of intensive conversations between the three contributors. These conversations have never yielded complete agreement or harmony (or even comprehension!). Nonetheless, we have all taken as our fundamental point of departure—as the very matter of thought, die Sache des Denkens—the axiom that it is only with the emergence of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious—with the emergence of the subject of psychoanalysis—that we can truly grasp the ethical and political complexity introduced into the world by the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself.