Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

Whereas the persistent structure of Levinas’s ethics defies succinct summary, and a thorough reconstruction of its origins and transmutations is beyond the scope of the present discussion, some basic historical and conceptual elucidations are necessary. This is important not only as a way to situate his contemporary heirs within an intellectual matrix, but to offer a more discerning account of the historicity of his thought, a historicity that is fundamentally misrecognized by uncritical reliance on his autobiographical pronouncements.⁴ On the basis of these retrospective pronouncements, Levinas is piously characterized as a Lithuanian Jew, or Holocaust philosopher, outside the dominant logic of Western modernity and its logos, or as a sage from the age of catastrophe whose thought bears the forms and contents of ethical possibility in its aftermath. By following Levinas’s own self-descriptions, critics tend to overstate the centrality of Nazi horror in the architecture of Levinas’s philosophy, most of which was conceived prior to any awareness of these horrors, even if developed as a response to the French postwar predicament. Sylvie Courtine-Denamy’s one-liner succinctly conveys this view: “A la démesure des crimes de la Shoah, correspond chez Levinas une responsabilité démesure.”⁵ But, as Samuel Moyn has convincingly shown, such démesure is hardly commensurate with the experience of the Shoah, but has a different ideological matrix: “Levinas always remained a pre-Holocaust philosopher insofar as his thought continued to be governed by interwar premises” and the ethical tenor of his writing was forged in the context of a broader turn to ethics in French letters as part of how the postwar political field was structured with the onset of the cold war.⁶ Likewise, it is important to offer a more searching account of the conceptual architecture of his thought and the sediments it bears from the intellectual traditions he has inherited and the political situations to which it responded. Understanding the intellectual traditions he drew from is of particular importance in apprehending the ethical and political significance of certain formulations that nowadays have acquired axiomatic status: say, the timelessness of Levinas’s quasi-solipsistic, preontological account of responsibility.

Philosophically, this temporalization symbolized a momentous episode that significantly obfuscated the spatial presuppositions constitutive of political responsibility. This spatial disorientation is readily grasped in the temporalizing of abstract space in the leading schools of early twentieth-century European philosophy. Both neo-Kantianism and phenomenology shared a drive to further despatialize philosophical reflection. In the case of neo-Kantianism, centrality was accorded to a philosophy of introspection concerned with “a priori objective validity,” something that would be recast and radicalized in Husserl’s “phenomenological reductions” and the temporalization of space that became the signature of his phenomenology, which would then become further radicalized in the internalization (and ontologization) of history as historicity in Heidegger.⁹ Even Heidegger’s invocation of facticity purportedly went beyond historical processes and their enabling constraints. It rather conveyed “the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein” duly cast in overwhelmingly temporal terms.¹⁰ Theorizing places in ways that temporalize space, as sites for the concealment and deconcealment of Being, or the “Being of beings,” ultimately displaced the conceptualization of spaces of actual historical eventuation.

It is in the philosophical problematic inaugurated by these thinkers that one first glimpses the lineages of the conceptualization of responsibility that found fuller expression in the writings of Levinas and are reproduced in the thought forms of his transatlantic heirs.¹¹ These temporalizations, despatializations, and reductions thus constitute the historical sediments that crystallized in the thought forms that eventually became constitutive of the unhistorical and despatialized idea bearing Levinas’s signature: “responsibility to the Other.” The architecture of Levinas’s philosophical reflections was thus forged as part of intellectual debates within European thought during the interwar period. More specifically, these reflections constitute the harvest of long-standing engagements with the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, the philosophy of Heidegger, Judaism and Jewish philosophers, especially Franz Rosenzweig, along with the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth.¹² These engagements largely predate his turn to ethics—which is best exemplified in his notorious claim about ethics as first philosophy—and which only crystallized in the context of the broader turn to ethics characterizing French letters with the onset of the cold war.

Levinas’s phenomenology of the other was formulated way before it became the signature of his ethics. Barth is of particular importance in this genealogy. The theological motifs suffusing many of Levinas’s philosophical formulations of the Other—say, the asymmetrical, unmediated, and nonreciprocal relation to the Other—have him as a main source. But the philosophical problematic to which Levinas’s ethics, and its turning away from history to the realm of the preontological, corresponds is already at work in Husserl’s phenomenology, especially in the ways in which Husserl’s idea of the “phenomenological reduction” posits the disavowal of historical mediations, and political and economic imperatives, as part of his quasi-transcendental philosophy.¹³ Whereas Husserl’s idea of the “phenomenological reduction” is deployed throughout his corpus at different levels, undergoing several reformulations, there is a persistent structure to it: it brackets out not only the historical self—the “I” as a concrete historical reality, as an upshot of different institutional, natural-historical and social mediations—but history, as such, in its attempt to grasp the historicity of consciousness, understood as the consciousness of historical experience.¹⁴ Husserl’s bracketing of history as part of his reductions still invokes an abstract historicity from an “egological” perspective. Heidegger, in contrast, went on to sidestep the problematic of the subject by recourse to an idea of Dasein that continued to bracket out history, while abstractly recasting it as historicity and remaining committed to phenomenology as a method of wresting the historically concrete out of actual history for the sake of a more originary historicity prior to history or, most of all, a fundamental ontology.¹⁵ In Being and Time history is ontologized in the pseudoconcreteness of a historicity without history.¹⁶ Levinas went on to further radicalize Heidegger’s displacement of egology, while retaining the formal contours of phenomenological argumentation by positing a reduction to the realm of preontology on the basis of which he eventually made the notorious claim on behalf of ethics as first philosophy.¹⁷ And traces of both phenomenology and “his foray into theology” ultimately became sedimentations that mediated the political and critical import of the theological philosophy he forged in the interwar period and the ethics he formulated on the basis of it.¹⁸

How exactly does Levinas undergo the recasting of the philosophy of the Other into an ethics? While the Holocaust left an indelible mark in Levinas’s thought, it is not as a response to it that his philosophy forces the ethical englobant of politics that is his signature.¹⁹ Rather, Levinas’s own the turn to ethics unfolded in the context of the cold war, through his response to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and the Jew, Sartre’s quarrel with Camus, along with Levinas’s own version of the moralist rejection of utopia, and his radicalization of Judaism and the dedifferentiations ensuing from it.²⁰ Levinas’s ethical turn was largely a politically infused philosophical response to the political crucibles of a specific historical situation.

Accordingly, the early cold war is the relevant context to probe the historical determinants mediating the development of Levinas’s mature philosophy. This is a context in which antiutopian sensibilities were radically articulated as part of an overall suspicion of collective agencies and the intensification of political life that defined the interwar period, thus leading to the hypostatization of individual existence. In the wider European context, bifurcation of individual existence and collective life took shape as a sharp diremption of morality from politics and history, part of an eminently political attempt to discredit the forms of collective agency and action that could harbinger revolutionary prospects in postwar Europe. That containment of such revolutionary prospects—communists and other radicals were central in the antifascist Resistance in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece—was central to American strategic vision for Europe and world capitalism is well documented.²¹ In French intellectual circles, however, these concerns found expression cloaked in the language of antiutopia, or antipolitical existentialism, a rehearsal of Kierkegaard’s polemic against Hegel and Hegelianism—Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, along with Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel, were central figures. Herein, ethics first emerged as an alternative to politics qua collective agency and historical endeavor. Fleeing history and debarring collective agencies and action as a situated modality of shared praxis, with its own autonomous internal imperatives and principles, thus became a historical determinant that further sedimented the theological and phenomenological tenets informing Levinas’s ethical thought. Kierkegaardian and Barthian motifs, along with the illusion of immediacy running in tandem with sediments of the argumentative structure of the phenomenological idea of “reduction,” coalesce around an eminently political form of ethical partisanship that sought to discredit any revolutionary challenge to the emerging political order: America’s Europe. In these efforts the ethical became inoculated from history, the individual from the collective, ethics from politics. Better yet, in the context of the anti-Marxism of a cohort of French intellectuals—who in the name of an antiutopian, antipolitical, and existentialist ethics decried forms of collective agency associated with the Hegelian-Marxist legacy—modalities of ethical politics conforming to the parameters of the defensive politics of militant North Atlanticism crystallized. And Levinas’s turn to ethics responded to this situation. His response found primary expression in terms of his recasting of Judaism as a universal ethics. In Moyn’s formulation, “Levinas’s presentation of Judaism as a safeguard against the wistful and treacherous desire for a revolutionary alternative to the burden of responsibility not only followed his creative interpretation of the Jewish tradition but also form a transconfessional imperative during the Cold War of thinking ‘after utopia.’”²² A recasting that entails not only the internalization of the Other and its reconstitution as ethically binding and thus present in the very constitution of the self—an internalization that amounted to the dedifferentiation of the divine encounter and human ethics, something that Rosenzweig has carefully conceived as distinct—human ethics is derivative of the divine encounter, “neither identical nor analogous to it”—but also posited the need to demarcate ethics from politics as part of a moralizing stance that ultimately amounted to a defensive ethical politics.²³ Just as it would be the case with the ethical politics defining the ethical turn of the late seventies, Levinas’s flight from history and political life was thoroughly historical and political.

In this vein, Levinas writes about how politics “is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naiveté.”²⁴ And responsibility squarely belongs to ethics, not to politics. It is embedded in ethics as first philosophy, thus prior to political life. Indeed, all the formulations Levinas offers of the idea of ethical responsibility are to be understood as strictly moral, therefore dirempted from the realm of political life. Responsibility, which in this account is spatially indeterminate, is conceived as at once illimitable and stark. This seems to be as far from what Simone de Beauvoir once called “the ethics of ambiguity” as one can go; yet it is equally distant from any historical concreteness, or awareness, of the obduracy of humanity’s natural history, sedimentations and ossifications, let alone the spatial determinations, constituting predicaments of power.²⁵ On the contrary, the obduracy and starkness of the imperative of responsibility that Levinas conjures up is derived precisely from its abstract nature, and how it is bereft of particular, historically constituted, determinations. The upshot: a strategy of compensation in the form of a commandment whose emphases on starkness, illimitability, and compulsory bindingness seek to compensate for powerlessness. Or, to invoke Peter Dews’s observation: “by detaching the ethical command so completely from any empirical human interest, or from any development discernable within history, he surely risks producing the opposite effect from the one he intends.”²⁶ It risks futility qua ethics, even if, by effectively debarring forms of political agency, it is politically productive in a negative way. Even if such sternness is justified in the name of a historical experience, or axial event—say, Nazism for Levinas—its severe formalism bears sediments and traces of the modalities of history it seeks to extinguish, both political and philosophical histories, not least in the compulsions of its formal imperatives and the hypostatization of chastened subjectivity.²⁷

Ironically, Levinasian heteronomy is more removed from actuality than Kant’s vaunted autonomy. While autonomy is scrupulously separated from empirical inclination in the Kantian system, Kant’s philosophy of history at least offers the supplement for its historical actualization, its collective eventuation in history. On this score, the Kantian Sollen is actually more palatable than Levinas’s. Undoubtedly, his account of the subject is hardly the ethereal, disembodied entity of Kantian noumena, nor is it akin to that conception of subjectivity that he famously reproached Heidegger with conjuring. Critics have pointed out how, in contrast to these disembodiments, Levinas deploys many a powerful adjective to thematize the constitution of subjectivity, its corporeality and creatureliness—fatigue, malaise, nausea, pain, passivity, sensibility, suffering—and his account of the Other is equally peppered by allusions to thirst, hunger, clothing, and shelter.²⁸ But there is something dampened, vacuous, and abstract about these invocations. Their deadness brings to mind one of Brecht’s quips from his Dialogues of Refugees: “Germans have a weak aptitude for materialism. When they stumble upon it, they immediately make it into an idea, and a materialist becomes someone who believes ideas come from material conditions, not the other way around, and here is where the matter ends.”²⁹ This is, mutatis mutandi, the case with Levinas’s invocation of these adjectives, an adjectivization that merely amounts to abstract invocations of embodiment. The irony is that this critic of cold Enlightenment rationalism conjures an unencumbered image of a naked self, a self barely partaking in what one associates with humanity (say, culture) that few if any rationalist defenders of the Enlightenment ever dreamed of.³⁰

Yet Levinas’s invocation of embodiment is too often uncritically accepted. Terry Eagleton has explained its intuitive appeal, even while acknowledging its severity: “The harshness of the Kantian moral law remains firmly in place; but its brutal lack of realism is tempered by a phenomenological vocabulary (openness, otherness, bodiliness and so on) more hospitable to a late modern sensibility or postmodern age. Sensibility becomes the medium of obligation.”³¹ This holds. Still: if sensibility constitutes an unmediated mediation in ethics, and that is a big if—as sensibility is thoroughly mediated by humanity’s natural history—does it not become hypostatized and thus depleted of any critical import in these formulations? More to the point: how binding is this hypostatized obligation when the abnegated subject actually encounters others and such sensibility is treated as culturally mediated? Indeed, such sensibility is prereflective and precritical, and in this precise sense Levinas remained a precritical philosopher, which raises the question of the possibility of brigading him within the context of critical theory, a philosophical tradition for which critical reason is the sine qua non. For if there is something that emerges from the twenty-five years of critical philosophy, and that remains an obligatory point of departure for genuinely critical theory, it is Hegel’s insight about process and mediation as intrinsic to the experience of consciousness.³² These are, at any rate, some of the hard-earned lessons of critical philosophy.³³ Sidestepping without tarrying with them by way of neologisms is a regression, a relapse into a precritical disposition and its antinomies. All the same, Levinas’s wager is that such a self is constituted in reference to an originary otherness, which recasts the dyad self-other; a relational constitution that debunks hypostatized ideas of the “I” and its conceits about autonomy, but which is ultimately an asymmetrical nonrelation of abnegation. Again, what emerges in lieu of the “I” is a thoroughly heteronomous idea of responsibility pivoting on a formalism in which the Other compulsively upbraids it. This is a chastising that is no less obliging than the sometimes despotic sense of necessity found in Kant. In a way, it is even more despotic. Because it consists of an obligation without economy or regulation, there is no sense of limits to it, nor any reckoning with the primacy of the situation in which it is actualized, let alone its mediations or the forms of responsibility such economy demands. It is cast as immediate in at least two senses: it is preconceptual, and thus tacitly assumed as immediate, and it is outside any social and cultural, much less institutional, mediation.

Contemporary accounts of philosophical ethics indebted to Levinas brook none of the spatial determinations characteristic of more robustly political ideas of responsibility.³⁴ The different connotations of political space and limits that figure as enabling conditions of the practices of responsibility are largely decried in theoretical and philosophical articulations of ethical responsibility. Among the casualties of these dismissals are not only conceptualizations of responsibility in terms of conceptual activity, as in Kant, but also robustly political ideas of answerability to predicaments of power or accountability for them. In this way, these posit the primacy of ethics over politics, or at least ethics supervening over political life, and, by extension, moral conceptions of responsibility over political ones. The modes of reflection that nowadays prevail in continental and theoretical approaches to the question of responsibility can be accurately described as late modern, or postmodern, versions of prima philosophia advocating for modalities of ethical politics at odds with hegemonic ones. But, like every other version of ethical politics, these attempt to anchor ethical responsibility in advance of the scenes of power in which encounters with others occur. While these philosophies often profess fidelity to the Other, the texture of collective life mediating and structuring the spaces for these encounters is mostly abstractly posited, or partially thematized, but never conceptualized with their particular historical, economic, and political determinations. Rather than political responsibility, what emerges is a hypostatized positing of ethical responsibility to the Other that then, it is argued, is supposed to supervene on political life.

How exactly this is so can be grasped by considering Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980). Symptomatically, this book was published at a time in which the late twentieth-century turn to ethics in the French scene was reaching a peak. In Blanchot’s extravagant account of responsibility one encounters an inheritance of Levinas and an anticipation of most of the themes that would reverberate in North Atlantic appropriations:

All of this amounts to a rejection of robust forms of collective and political agency, as well as of the cognitive mappings that political literacy in navigating predicaments of power demands; equally absent is a sense of enabling boundaries or limits. Instead, Blanchot’s formulation pivots on the simplification and reduction of responsibility, as an ethical and political category, to a caricature of bourgeois morality. That these displacements and disavowals are reductions, displacements, and transformations of what the concept of responsibility has historically connoted is clear enough. Less readily accepted, however, is how politically disabling these formulations of responsibility are, and how symptomatic of a turn away from politics largely triggered by antipathy to radical leftist politics. For the idea of infinite responsibility to the Other, a responsibility frequently cast as a limitless and “preontological” imperative, or an ethical injunction and commandment anteceding the scenes of actions that could render it concrete, is at best a labile stance of left-liberals and at worst a neutralization of forms of collective agency threatening the mainstay of depoliticized politics. It is out of this particular constellation that the elective affinity between Theory, one of the legacies of the structuralist moment in French philosophy, and Levinasian ethics can be discerned. If Levinas’s ethics is one response to a philosophical and historical problematic, his emergence as a signpost in the works of otherwise very different figures like Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida is the final result of a set of intellectual and political historical processes and concatenations. The main historical and political determinants have been addressed; what follows is a more immanent critique of two influential heirs.³⁸

In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Derrida exemplarily casts the intersection between ethics and politics in Levinasian terms.³⁹ Yet, however much an influence, his discussion of responsibility is irreducible to it. In Derrida’s work the problem of responsibility is part of an attempt to elucidate the intersection between ethics and politics that is also enmeshed with Nietzschean concerns about the fate of responsibility once conceived beyond calculability and recast as a radical response. In Politics of Friendship, for instance, Derrida expands on his formulation of responsibility and the intersubjective moment built into the grammar of this concept. Intersubjectivity is thus cast from the perspective of what he calls the “question of response” along Nietzschean lines: “a brief grammar of the response—or rather, of ‘responding’—will afford a preliminary insight” into the question of the intersection between “responding” and “responsibility”; he thus juxtaposes and unpacks the interdependence of a series of connotations associated with answerability: “‘to answering for,’ ‘to respond to,’ ‘to answer before.’”⁴⁰ Throughout these reflections on responsibility one finds a set of recurrent themes: the primacy of ethics over politics, the (im)possibility of the decision, and the unconditional responsibility to the “Other,” which is proclaimed in terms of well-nigh infinite generosity and hospitality. That last, especially once cast in terms of a radical openness to the Other, sometimes takes the form of a commandment or imperative as an unmediated and thus abstract Sollen. Derrida, on the one hand, rehearses the Kantian themes of antinomies and imperatives, along with a quasi-transcendental mode of argumentation that by way of the legacy of phenomenology and its method resets the quintessential Kantian question of “conditions of possibility” into “conditions of impossibility”; on the other hand, it poses the question of responsibility in terms of the need to have an unconditioned acceptance and openness to the “Other.”⁴¹

But to fully grasp the significance of these themes, a brief look at one of Derrida’s more compelling enactments of his thought is necessary. In his remarkable essay, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” he offers a succinct yet powerful formulation of the intersection between deconstruction, invention, and the Other, which bears on his theorization of responsibility. Derrida prefaces his essay with a provocative assertion: “deconstruction loses nothing by admitting that it is impossible”—and his elucidation of this admission runs like this: “For a deconstructive operation, possibility is rather the danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is, as I shall insist in my conclusion, of the other—the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention.”⁴² Possibility is thus deconstructed as impossibility, and the impossible is thus formulated as that which is presently impossible within the given parameters of thought, but whose possibility would implode these parameters. Derrida’s figurations of possibility and impossibility are folded in a modernist conceit that praises singularity and innovation as ends in themselves: these posit the new and that anxiety about the persistence of the old, thus effecting a call for unmediated, virtually ex nihilo, invention.⁴³ Invention, accordingly, evokes what Fredric Jameson in another context refers to as a “break,” a break from what precedes the invention in question in order to aver the connotations of singularity found in this concept and the futurist disposition that is a central animating impulse, which it, in turn, seeks to enable.⁴⁴ While not unblemished by modernist conceits, Derrida’s recasting of the impossible leads to brilliant local insights about the aporetic status of the concept “invention.” Aporias that, accordingly, conjure the futurity of “to come,” “the other,” “the new,” “production,” and the “public.” “Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all,” Derrida writes, but not just any invention counts.⁴⁵

Derrida’s essay is, among other things, a sustained reflection on the same problem that the dialectical legacy since Hegel has tarried with, and often refers to as the dialectic of the actual and the possible, and how its complexity can be rendered speculatively, thus rendering the space, the middle, between identity and lack of identity, and so on. But Derrida’s concern is not with the landmarks of dialectical thinking: “determinate negation,” “mediation,” or the triad of the universal, the particular, and the singular. Rather, the emphasis is on the last element of the triad, but isolated from the rest: invention of the singular. Deconstruction mines the transgressive moment that lies at the intersection between invention and production. It is not regimented by the “statutory limits” imposed on it by those that license it, or commissioned it, Derrida asserts. Rather, it challenges them. Hence its transgressive quality: “An invention that refused to be dictated, ordered, programmed by these conventions would be out of place, out of order, impertinent, transgressive” (10, 21). The challenge is to avoid subsuming the singularity of the new in terms of the old or the different in terms of the same. A daunting task given the situated nature of any invention in a milieu, in a scene, if you wish, that mediates its constitution or serves as a precondition for it. As such, an invention is “susceptible to repetition, exploitation, reinscription,” and so Derrida’s deconstructive move is to offer “a reinvention of invention”: “So it would be necessary to say that the only possible invention is the invention of the impossible” (6, 42, 44).

But the last formulation is too quickly reached, as other formulations avow a dimension of invention whose implications Derrida’s essay sidesteps: the role of mediation, which is another way of saying that the singular cannot not be thought without the universal and the particular—especially once cast politically, from the perspective of responsibility. One formulation that betrays the role of these mediations is when Derrida deducts the public dimension entangled in the concept invention: “The status of invention in general, like that of a particular invention, presupposes the public recognition of an origin, more precisely of an originality. The latter has to be assignable to a human subject, individual or collective, who is responsible for the discovery or the production of something new that is henceforth available to everyone” (28). Stated differently, there is a recognizer who fulfills this public role of re-cognizing the invention as such and thus attributing it to someone. A recognizer who has the power to do so is authorized by someone and operates in a concrete scene in which the invention occurs and is acknowledged as such. Yet Derrida hardly pursues this aspect of invention, which from a different perspective could be interpreted as raising the quintessential political question. Aside from a rather glib comment about the “modern politics of invention”—“The modern politics of invention tends to integrate the aleatory into its programmatic calculations”—Derrida consistently disavows the theoretical significance of this admission, even if at other points of the essay he abstractly invokes a “we” in relation to the invention of the other (37). How does Derrida manage to sidestep these eminently political questions? Why does he stop at the point in which it becomes crucial to historicize and politicize the question of invention? Two potential determinants can be presented: a modernist conceit with the new, which has political import, but is entirely unsuited to think about political transitions and change, and a phenomenological conceit that seeks to transcendentally address questions prior to the actual, historically constituted scenes in which these eventuate.

The foregoing questions figure prominently in Derrida’s more political texts, texts in which he explicitly casts the intersection of ethics and politics as a fundamental question for deconstruction: Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, and Rouges. These works exhibit Derrida’s usual shrewd and coruscating readings of canonical figures, while broaching political questions of democracy, justice, inheritance, mourning, and responsibility. In dealing with these questions, Derrida undoes the different binaries that pervade these questions and linguistically reframes the terms of the discussions, but the political import of these interpretative moves appears largely indeterminate and elusive. Such elusiveness is part of a philosophical temperament in which performing an ethos of critique takes center stage and eludes the mainstay of political theory, the concerns with power, authority, collective life, its identity and forms, and the state, just to mention a few. Some of Derrida’s formulations mine the rhetorical figures of language to exert a critical effect, to unsettle sedimented modes of discourse and patterns of thought. What is missing, however, is an account of the central category of the dialectic, from Hegel to Adorno: mediation, a category that some of his formulations presuppose, but that he disavows.⁴⁶ This absence bears on the political import of his account of responsibility.

In The Gift of Death Derrida offers a formulation of responsibility that illustrates the handicap of recanting mediation. Derrida presents an argument against responsibility being “motivated, conditioned, made possible by a history.” In contrast, he alternatively formulates the relationship between responsibility and history in the following way: “History can be neither a decidable object nor a totality capable of being mastered, precisely because it is tied to responsibility, to faith, and to the gift. To responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms, made therefore through the very ordeal of the undecidable.”⁴⁷ Derrida thus wants to challenge conceptions of history as informing responsibility, as offering a set of guidelines and calculations to what responsible action is; say, what Nietzsche called “the memory of the will.” There is, of course, a moment of truth in Derrida’s account, as decisions sometimes take place outside the bounds of received knowledge, and sometimes acting out of a decision entails transgressing such parameters. Even so, no ethically meaningful action, however murky the moment of decision is, and uncertain its outcome ultimately may be, is outside history.

In his celebrated essay “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida once again tarries with history and responsibility, but this time in relation to his idea of a “messianicity without messianism,” the coming of the other, “the advent of justice.” In terms that echo Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the concept of history, Derrida juxtaposes “the ordinary course of history” (Benjamin’s “historicism”) with interrupting, or “tearing history itself apart” (Benjamin’s messiah), and responsibility figures largely in relation to the latter as an act of volition, “doing it by deciding,” that correlates the decision of the other in me, which for him “does not exonerate me of responsibility.”⁴⁸ This responsibility, he has claimed elsewhere, is infinite, and without which there could be no “moral and political problems.”⁴⁹ Even so, one may wonder: how can the infinite enter the finitude of historical time? But the question may be misguided. The answer is simple: it is outside of it, transcendentally primal, preontological, as it is for Levinas. In a passage from Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence that Derrida cites approvingly, Levinas states: “Responsibility for the Other is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom in which a commitment to the Other would have been made.”⁵⁰ Responsibility is thereby conceived as preontologically binding and thus insulated from any reckoning with the social and political world.

While Derrida’s recasting of responsibility as a response contains a moment of truth, as it were, it becomes less compelling when it is conceived as an effective turning away from politics in order to ground the ethical obligation in advance of any concrete encounter with others. But the ahistorical tenor of his reflections is not entirely reducible to a distilled Barthian motif—even if the Levinasian disavowal of institutions he inherits is shot through with Barthian and Kierkegaardian conceits—or to Levinasian sediments that remain in his thought forms. Rather, it is a philosophical tenet that deconstruction has inherited from Derrida’s own long-standing encounter with Edmund Husserl.⁵¹ Something exacerbated by Derrida’s engagement with the structuralist moment in French philosophy after his return to the École Normale Supérieure in 1964.⁵² Early on, Derrida’s critique of structuralism and of Western binaries—speech/writing, presence/absence, mind/body, subject/object—took its primary cue from Husserl’s distinction between the empirical and the transcendental. In the context of his critique of the historicism of his day, Husserl identified a relativist tendency of historicism. Such relativism, according to Husserl, could be curbed by transcendentally establishing the basis of apodictic knowledge, by establishing the priority of phenomenological to empirical inquiry. Traces of this antihistoricism plague Derrida’s framing of the question of responsibility, its infinite obligation, and its “impossibility.”

From Husserl’s phenomenology Derrida inherited and productively reclaimed a transcendental “scheme” that rehearses the transcendental turn of Kant’s critical philosophy—Derrida has claimed to be at heart a Kantian, “an ultra-Kantian” that is, nevertheless, “more than a Kantian,” which is consistent with the role of the quasi-transcendental in deconstruction—but rather than asking about the conditions of possibility for knowledge, it asks about conditions of impossibility.⁵³ The transcendental thus gives way to the quasi-transcendental. But even if Husserl’s pseudoconcrete “phenomenological reduction” is thoroughly deconstructed, its theoretical structure of argumentation continues to frame the way Derrida approached theoretical questions. In so doing, Derrida distanced himself from the post-Heideggerian hermeneutic claim that interpretation takes place within a historical horizon of meaning, however open such a horizon remained, a position famously formulated in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.

Out of his engagement with Husserl’s phenomenology, Derrida establishes the transcendental status of difference, but also its instability, which he would thematize as différance: “neither a word, nor a concept,” but one of deconstruction’s terms of art that at once involves “spacing” and “temporalizing,” both of which conjure “the possible that is presently impossible”; it precedes and thematizes “the opposition between passivity and activity” and constitutes a constitutive “primordial nonpresence.”⁵⁴ Derrida writes: “Thus we no longer know whether what was always presented as a derived and modified re-presentation of simple presentation, as ‘supplement,’ ‘sign,’ ‘writing,’ or ‘trace,’ ‘is’ not, in a necessarily but newly, ahistorical sense, “older” than presence and the system of truth, older than ‘history.’”⁵⁵ Even so, Derrida would claim a (quasi-)transcendental primacy, if not priority, to these notions as a “primordial” “scene, a theater stage” that is deconstruction’s version of the “transcendental reduction.”⁵⁶ Or as Peter Dews has felicitously put it, after deconstructing Husserl’s transcendental reduction, Derrida travels upstream to the shifting grounds of différance in transcendental consciousness, while other critics of Husserl, say, Adorno, traveled downstream to “an account of subjectivity as emerging from but entwined with the natural and historical world.”⁵⁷ And therein lies the crucial difference between deconstruction and critical theory.

Returning to the question of responsibility in a way that correlates with Derrida’s disavowal of history, one could then ask: what does it mean, politically, to theorize responsibility in ways that render this ethical commitment political when such theorization is anchored on a decision that dispenses with the elements by which one can discern the ordering of cultural, social and institutional arrangements that mediate one’s subjectivity? In The Politics of Friendship Derrida’s notion of responsibility is once again elaborated in relation to a (ultimately disavowed) dialectic of avowal and disavowal of knowledge in the decision that sheds light on this question,

To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge—that is, what brings responsibility unto itself, if there ever is such a thing. For, yet again, one must certainly know, one must know it: knowledge is necessary if one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of responsibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instance to follow the consequence of what is—that is, of that which can be determined by science and consciousness—and thereby frees itself (this is what is called freedom), by the act of its act, of what is therefore heterogeneous to it, that is knowledge. In sum, a decision is unconscious—insane as that may seem, it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible.⁵⁸

In this formulation Derrida displays commendable sensibility to what Arendt notoriously called the “natality” of action, those moments of creation that are not determined by what already exists that break with the continuum of history.⁵⁹ The radical gesture of this passage captures something that Gayatri Spivak has insisted defines deconstruction as a critical ethos: the experience of impossibility, of the incalculable—here signaled in the disavowal of knowledge—with an awareness that “legal and political decisions must be made, empirically scrupulous but philosophically errant.”⁶⁰ But the critical and political import of these gestures remains elusive, if not foreshortend, when the imperatives of power that mediate these decisions are not conceptualized.

Still: why is the “philosophically errant” moment of impossibility so crucial? Why does it matter so much? And why hypostatize lack of certainty and the possibility of equivocation? The latter runs the risk of reifying in thought the limiting historical conditions of the present. Here the distance between deconstruction and dialectical critical theory is clearly seen. In contrast to deconstruction, critical thinking is foremost an immanent task that needs to avoid these reifications, and not just to acknowledge the complexities of action, but critically re-cognize the predicaments of power where these political decisions intervene. But to carry on such re-cognition requires a concept of mediation that is not a part of deconstruction. Although sometimes presupposed, dialectical thinking is disavowed in Derrida’s inheritance from Marx, as are the collective forms of agency that historically characterized Marxist legacies. Derrida, however, claims a radical politics for these “philosophically errant” gestures: “Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”⁶¹ And it is in terms of this inheritance from Marxism that Derrida further thematizes deconstruction’s idea of responsibility. “The responsibility, once again, would be that of an heir,” he writes. Even so, this inheritance is as ineluctable as it is universal: “Whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism.”⁶² This is, to say the least, a strange claim from the philosopher of différance. It is particularly intriguing when one considers the coupling of this universal heritage with a strong sense of responsibility, since it comes in the form of a stern imperative that one is unable to disown and that brooks no geographical limits or exceptions. “And whether we like it or not,” Derrida’s severe tone reminds the reader, “whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be heirs. There is not inheritance without a call for responsibility. An inheritance is always the reaffirmation of a debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation, which is why we distinguished several spirits.”⁶³ And therein lies the centrality of responsibility in this process of inheritance: one needs to responsibly distinguish, out of the universally received spirits, which ones are to be inherited.⁶⁴

This inheritance entails annihilating those ugly spirits (Stalinism?) of Marxism and retrieving what is critical for a “democracy to come,” deconstruction’s ultimate political gesture. But here the process of selection ultimately empties out the critical import of Marxism. The universalization of this legacy takes away what made it specific, rendering it critically diminished. Other than a list of plagues afflicting the then newly proclaimed world order, which are never politically theorized, one is hard-pressed to find any genuinely critical reckoning with this order. Derrida’s “antidecalogue,” as even a sympathetic critic as José María Ripalda has noted, lacks the specific mediations that are constitutive of any concrete civility that could actualize its tenets politically.⁶⁵ In this radicalized Marxism, there is no analysis of power, capital, and the mediations between the cultural, the economic, the aesthetic, and the political that in turn mediate the scenes where encounters with others take place, where responsibility is enacted.

In contrast, in Derrida’s formulations, responsible action consists of absolute decisions, which more often than not come in the form of imperatives outside any political, economic, or cultural mediation. Ultimately, these are solipsistic decisions whose impossibility never seems to hinder their imperative necessity, regardless of the scene of power where they act. These are rather decided entirely outside it.⁶⁶ Responsibility thus disavows knowledge, even basic knowledge of subject positions, or the place of the addresser and the addressee in the social formation where the responsible act eventuates and unfolds. No wonder Derrida sees an intimate relationship between responsibility and faith: “Responsibility and faith go together, however paradoxical that might seem to some, and both should, in the same movement, exceed mastery and knowledge.”⁶⁷ Responsibility is despatialized and thus abstractly universalized and severed of any politically meaningful context that betrays an elective affinity with the variations of ethical politics defining the present.

That many a judgment goes amiss, or pseudoproblem hypostatized, in Derrida’s ethical politics of responsibility is precisely seen in what is probably the single most dismal sentence found in his published writings: “How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant?”⁶⁸ This passage probably betrays thinking that never got a second thought. Still, this utterly abstract universalization of limitless responsibility is perfectly consistent with the overall tenor of Derrida’s account of ethical responsibility. For both ethical and political responsibility entail limits and a dose of realism. Pace Derrida, one’s ethical and political responsibilities are necessarily limited to the locus of action available in the scenes of power that shape the political and ethical situation one inhabits. Or, as Eagleton has lucidly put it, “Universality means being responsible for anyone, not per impossible, for everyone at the same time. To assume that it does, even while insisting on its impossibility, betrays a certain hubris of the infinite, however apologetic and self-castigating in tone.”⁶⁹ Politically, this hubris lends itself to sanctioning neoimperial ethical doctrines, like current invocations of “responsibility to protect,” that brook no sense of equality, accountability, or community of fate between those in need of protection and those perfunctorily responsible for providing it and thus, at best, revert to a tutelary relationship or, at worst, become the ethical supplement to the current world order.⁷⁰ Overall, anonymous relations with others within a political collectivity in which one is recognized as participant are necessarily political and mediated by institutions.⁷¹ For these anonymous relations to be minimally democratic, a community of fate between rulers and ruled has to be in place. Such community is expandable in ethical relations—which are necessarily proximate in ways that political ones are not—but concrete limits are constitutive of both. Though Derrida’s ruminations on responsibility could be allusive, they hardly amount to a sense of political responsibility, or purpose, much less transcend what seems to be a radical Nietzschean-cum-Levinasian solipsism that is only abstractly concerned with others. These gestures, moreover, do not threaten the liberal-capitalist order, let alone respond to present-day predicaments of power where capital is increasingly unfettered and when centralized forms of state power are increasingly unaccountable.

Yet, for all its eloquence, important questions pertaining to the constitution of the encounter, which are the mainstay of political theory, remain unaddressed. What is left out of this account are the foremost epistemological-political aspects, such as the constitution of the scene of the encounter itself, or how such a scene mediates the constitution of the “I,” and the ensuing responses to it. The “I” is neither prior to these encounters nor just a product of them. An “I” is arguably a bundle of mediations: some are explicitly dialogic and intersubjective and others are not, but the constitution of the “I” is unthinkable without them. Moreover, strictly speaking, the intersubjective moment of any “I” requires communication with others, which is always in place within historically constituted situation, and is equally constituted by the mediation of historical relations that are not necessarily intersubjective but always social.⁷³ A critical conception of responsibility needs to attend to these mediations, to cognize them and the imperatives that they inaugurate, more than it needs to try to elucidate an indefinable ontological moment that is always thoroughly mediated. But Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself is mostly silent about this epistemological task. And this silence renders the political import of its reflections rather elusive.⁷⁴ For instance, while insisting on casting the act of narration that forms the subject, however opaquely and incompletely, the giving of an account, as an “act,” Butler truncates the political import of such an “act” by the terms in which she casts it. Such narrative acts—as Butler rightly suggests, these narratives do not merely relay information but are constitutive acts of subjectivity—carry transformative possibilities at the level of the constitution of the self, which she connects with Socratic parrhesia.⁷⁵ However, Butler does not relate these to the mainstay of the political life of the city but, rather, reverts to the Platonic project of soul-craft. She quotes Foucault’s one-sided interpretation of The Apology approvingly: “the target of this new parrhesia is not to persuade the Assembly, but to convince someone that he must take care of himself and of others; and this means that he must change his life.”⁷⁶ Notice how in one stroke this rendering brushes aside much of what Socrates does say about the city, as well as his fealty to its democratic political form and its attendant practices. But what is even more revealing about this formulation is the extent to which it betrays a preference for Socrates as a moral thinker rather than as a political theorist, as one who foreshadows a subordination of political life to ethical imperatives conceived independent of it, if not a retreat from the political tout court. Practices of the self tacitly but effectively oust any consideration of political rule by the selves, by the many.

A more concrete attempt to render this type of preontological commitment to the Other political is found in Butler’s Precarious Life. There she offers a shrewd effort to theorize ethical responsibility on the basis of “grief” and “mourning,” to theorize the possibility of “community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” in order to be responsive to claims of justice and solidarity with others, especially in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. In this text she gives an alternative response to an experience of loss that quickly became a legitimizing event for a new phase of U.S. imperial ventures. In Butler’s account, grief is a valuable conduit to theorize “fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”⁷⁷ At a general level, her intent is commendable: to avoid facile exonerations, stigmatizations, and self-righteousness so as to counter a hegemonic response that is based on aggressive militarism and imperialist zeal. In such a predicament, to think “what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war” is an imperative question.⁷⁸ Yet, somewhat anticlimactically, Butler seeks to address this question ontologically; namely, her preferred strategy of counteracting contemporary versions of raison d’état is calling for an insurrection “at the level of ontology.”⁷⁹ This ontological insurrection carries at its core the recognition of one’s vulnerability, “a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself,” as constitutive of the human condition.⁸⁰ Vulnerability is thus elevated to the plane of ontology: it is recognized, acknowledged, but not re-cognized. Stated differently, what emerges from this acknowledgment of human vulnerability is a rather foreshortened ontology whose critical and political import remains vague.⁸¹ It is a strictly ontological perspective, which ultimately leaves unattended the role of power, and its structural imperatives, in the human experience of vulnerability.⁸² Accordingly, this is a formulation that comes perilously close to reifying powerlessness, since it ultimately disavows any sociopolitical analysis of vulnerability, or of the configurations of power that are complicit with it and mediate the various degrees of vulnerability political subjects experience in scenes of power constituted by structural inequalities of class, gender, and status. Some are more vulnerable than others, even if we all share the frailty of embodied existence. But discerning degrees of vulnerability cannot not be a historically grounded and politically infused cognitive mapping—a mapping that, while reacting to the somatic dimension of subjectivity, apprehends it epistemologically in its sociopolitical mediations.

In Giving an Account of Oneself Butler once again voices this reifying tendency in her plea for a chastened conception of subjectivity that would make room for “an ethics of the unwilled”; that, in turn, stems from a Levinasian “primary exposure to the Other,” an exposure that serves as a reminder “of a common vulnerability, a common physicality and risk.” That physicality of the self, which is presubjective, one “from which we cannot slip away,” enables an experience of vulnerability that grounds a sense of responsibility prior to any choice, but serves as a condition of possibility for it.⁸³ Although Butler quickly adds that “common” in Levinas does not mean “symmetrical,” an exploration of this distinction dictates re-cognizing and reconceptualizing the materialist bent of her argument and bringing it to bear on the overall theoretical forms that frame her reflections. Yet that demands a more historically grounded critical theory, along with a consideration of the spatial dimension of responsibility, one that in Butler’s formulations is consistently subjugated to temporal considerations.

“One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.”⁸⁴ The experience of loss may very well instill such feelings, but these do not occur in a vacuum, especially when the losses under consideration are political. Besides, if there is one point that Theory has driven home, it is that the “one” in this construction is likely to be located in different “subject positions” in any given scene of power. Namely, asymmetrical relations of race, class, and status oftentimes mediate the ways an individual experiences loss, and these are historically entrenched in political and cultural contexts. This is especially so in the United States, an antidemocratic society that presumes to be democratic, but is characterized by entrenched inequalities of power and status. Yet, while writing in this context, Butler does not meet it head-on. She rather insists on “fundamental vulnerability” by means of her endorsement of Levinas’s contention, as distinctively elucidated in his Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, about the absence of a “self prior to its persecution by the Other,” a “persecution that establishes the Other at the heart of the self, and establishes that ‘heart’ as an ethical relation of responsibility.”⁸⁵ Who, then, is the audience here? Again, for “persecution” to possess any critical import, it needs to be thoroughly mediated, recast from the perspective of the scenes of power in which the encounter with others, and with any third involved, takes place, along with one’s position in it. Persecution and loss are no different from death, when it comes to thinking politically about their meaning and elucidations. And here the mediations of the “we” that Butler invokes come to haunt her account, for the invocation of a sense of responsibility, say, a republic of mourning—no less than the “republic of suffering” that was conjured in the aftermath of the American Civil War—relies on a series of institutional and collective mediations for it to have any political import.⁸⁶

But none of this can be discerned from a rebellious act at the level of ontology. Actually, examining critically the historical and structural variables that hinder one’s capacity to act politically in the face of loss is primarily an epistemological task. In lieu of the current fate of democracy in the United States, the immediate context of many of these theorizations, more productive questions would consist in interrogating, say, What are the political and ethical implications of compromising one’s political identity by actions carried on in one’s name? What are the demands that ensue from this compromise, in light of the forms of power a collectivity generates, and what are its uses and abuses? How is a democratic identity, and one’s fidelity to it and the political forms and processes that actualize it, transmogrified by actions that betray it rather than promote it? What is lost in such compromises? Paradoxically, interrogation along these lines requires a culture of commonality that both contemporary forms of power have rendered either politically anachronistic or suspect. Invocations of a “we” like Butler’s always presuppose a binding political identity—a collectivity that is responsive to the language of solidarity, common purpose, and shared power.⁸⁷ Stated differently, Butler’s account consistently fails to acknowledge what it presupposes throughout: an account of the political identity and forms binding the collectivity, a democratic “we,” which she constantly invokes.⁸⁸ It also fails to conceptualize how the forms of power crystallized in the late modern state sabotage it. This failure, however, is not merely a simple omission. Rather, it is built in the conception of theory that tries to negotiate political tensions in ontological terms. Levinasian formulations like these run the risk of mistaking historical limitations for ontological ones.

In subsequent writings, Butler has at once complicated, modified, and expanded some of the arguments advanced in these two texts, even if her arguments betray a persistent structure that remains unchanged. In Frames of War, for example, she has sought to register historical and political differentiations as part of her elevation of a shared condition of vulnerability and precariousness to the level of ontology. By means of a distinction between “precariousness” and “precarity,” Butler seeks to bring to the fore something that was only perfunctorily adduced in earlier formulations, and which had little ascendance in the overall architecture of her theory and ethical vision: historically and politically constituted forms of vulnerability and precariousness and the different modalities of framing that could either reveal or occlude particular variations of precariousness.⁸⁹ Herein, precarity appears as mediated precariousness, even if it is never formulated as such, as the concept “mediation” is foreign to Butler’s philosophical orientation and the theoretical armature of her writings. Conversely, as the title of her book explicitly portends, Butler has gone on to offer sustained reflection on how frames and framing operate, something that raises important critical, epistemological questions. Unquestionably, these are important developments, and are hardly perfunctory. Even so, these epistemological inquiries continue to be one-sidedly anchored in a set of ontological commitments stemming from her original formulation of ethics first and ultimately subordinated to it.

That this is so is nowhere clearer than in Parting Ways, her courageous reckoning with Jewish legacies as part of her eloquent critique of Zionism, which constitutes her most politically bold theoretical statement to date. There she summarizes her efforts as an attempt to formulate “an ethics of dispersion” from the perspective “of a certain ethical relation, decidedly non-egological,” which makes good on the ethical and political import of Levinas’s ethics.⁹⁰ Consider the following passages, “The responsibility that I assume, or, rather, that claims me in this instant, is the result of the precariousness I see, the violence that I may cause, the fear of that violence. As a result, the fear must check the violence, but this does not happen all at once. In fact, the unlimited responsibility that I bear toward the other is precisely the result of an ongoing struggle between the fear induced in me by the commandment and the violence my existence does to the Other. If I fear for the Other, it is because I know the Other can be destroyed by beings like myself.”⁹¹ These passages constitute a brilliant unpacking of Levinasian ideas of unlimited responsibility, and betray an anxiety about the self and the need to consistently upbraid it. Yet for these injunctions to carry any concrete political or ethical import, they need to be historicized. The universal abjection these formulations convey is so abstract that, at best, it becomes indeterminate and meaningless, or, at worst, elevates a logic of equivalence that reinscribes identity in the name of difference, the Other, to the preontological scene. Such elevation would bracket out much of what makes responsibility meaningful—limits, differentiations, the constitution of social and political space, perpetrators, victims, bystanders, or structural beneficiaries—especially in a colonial situation inaugurated by a settler-colonial state, Israel, with its structuring imperatives.

Once historicized, however, it becomes clear that for these injunctions to gain any traction, and avoid the righteous frivolity of “neither/norism,” they need to bear on those in structural positions of power or structural beneficiaries of a politically sanctioned condition. In light of Butler’s ethical sense and political commitments, one immediately surmises that this “I” could hardly be a Palestinian living in Gaza, let alone any colonized, dominated, or actually persecuted subject. Rather, the “I” is most likely a citizen of the Jewish state, or an American or European Zionist, or any fellow non-Zionist Jew or fellow North Atlantic denizen that identifies with the Shoah as a form of civil religion. This is not to say that a colonized subject has no responsibilities in the colonial predicaments she inhabits. But to introduce a differentiated sense of responsibility, the necessary distinctions and determinations that constitute a situation structured to achieve and clinch her dispossession have to be mapped. And such mapping is irredeemably impaired by the hypostatization of an upbraided “I” and its Other.

Even if Butler’s appeal to a particular tradition of Jewish ethics can be explained by identifying her audience, one question lingers: why this particular ethic, and why the need to think of ethics first? What exactly is at stake in the attempt to ontologically ground an ethical obligation? Why posit such an abstract obligation as an anchor for ethical politics? Why cast it in terms of ethical reductions, which also constitute the reduction of politics to ethics, and why the insistence on ethical politics antecedent to predicaments of power that muddle it and render pseudo-ontological commitments mute? Do these reductions amount to much else besides a philosophical conceit, one that is thoroughly mediated by liberal anxieties and the promise of anchoring politics on something beyond itself? Or is it an upshot of the depoliticized politics of contemporary liberal-capitalism and the forms of ethical politics sustaining it? Simply put, in the case of Butler, this may well be a philosophical conceit. Butler inherited from Levinas a conceit about ethics as first philosophy that despite its vaunted concern with the Other and the nonidentical, consists of its own version of prima philosophia. Butler is, to be sure, hardly concerned with traditional questions of epistemology and is thus not positing an epistemological absolute first, nor is she concerned with the plausibility of the Husserlian phenomenological reduction. Yet, out of the asymmetrical primacy of the Other, Butler posits precariousness as a shared condition that occupies the place of the “originary” insofar as it is cast preontologically, which is another way of asserting immediacy and thus disavowing mediations. Following the architecture of Levinas’s ethical reduction, Butler offers a quasi-transcendental version of the “absolute first,” or a primordial scene, which ostensibly challenges the illusion of immediacy, as her concern with “normative violence” could be construed as lending a voice to the Other, the nonidentical. But this quasi-transcendental structure of phenomenological argumentation still posits a foundational moment. The illusion of the absolute first thus persists: in place of constitutive subjectivity, difference and a relational dyad—self-other—is formulated, as an ethical reduction dislodges the phenomenological reduction without altering its structure of argumentation.

If there is one lesson to be derived from critical reason, it is that consciousness is no less a condition of possibility of the relation between self and other, subject and object, than of subjectivity, or even otherness, which can only be critically grasped not as a primal moment but as situated in our concrete webs of relations with others, which are both actualized and undone in history, and constituted through the texture of cultural and social relations and their political sanctioning, rejection, or codification, as the socially and culturally embedded creatures humans are. Otherness is, in a nutshell, painstakingly mediated. Even conceiving the relation to the Other, its primacy in the constitution of the self as preontological is already an operation mediated by a consciousness. The relation self-other cannot be comprehended without the consciousness from which it is abstracted as part of the process of autonomization inherent to critical reflection. In lieu of a unity of consciousness, in these accounts one finds a no less mediated relation, and yet a relation that while emerging from consciousness is nevertheless hypostatized as severed from it. Better still, the unity of consciousness that abstracts the dyad self-other as constitutive of the self, as preontological, is itself fractured and never at one with itself, as it is already thoroughly mediated by concrete historical processes. Just as there is no empirical self without the concept, and no concept without an empirical self, there is no relation to the Other outside encounters with real others. Accordingly, there is neither constituens nor constitutum, neither purely ontological nor preontological, neither pure subjectivity nor pure objectivity; rather, these are all dialectically constituted and thus thoroughly mediated.

Yet “mediation is mediated,” as Adorno once observed.⁹² And so are the two moments that constitute the initial dyad—self-other, subject-object—and, as such, mediation cannot be hypostatized.⁹³ This is a fundamental insight that Adorno’s immanent critique of Hegel’s philosophy yields. Whereas the very essence of the concept is to be immediately mediated, the idea of mediation is also mediated by the immediate. And the mediation of the immediate is a reflective determination (Reflexionsbestimmung), meaningful only in relation to the immediate, even if this objective immediacy is blocked from consciousness: reflection has no access to the immediate—that is the block—but it re-cognizes this limit and refuses to subsume it under mediation.⁹⁴ Nonidentity extricates not only the hypostatization of immediacy; it equally refuses any hypostatization of mediation, even if such refusal is thought through immediately mediated concepts.⁹⁵ Accordingly, at the level of the subject there is the mediation of the concept, itself mediated, and the mediation of the nonconceptually immediate, but at the level of the totality one can speak of another sense of mediation: that of the objective social processes mediating the cognitive process itself in both its subjective and objective mediations. More to the point, once these relations are re-cognized as entirely mediated, the necessary next step is to consider and interpret the historical processes structuring the situation from which the “self-other scene” has been autonomized. Once the binary is thus speculatively re-cognized, as mediating and mediated by a historical condition, one can critically discern the “experiential content” and historical sediments in rather abstract formulations and concretely pose the question of its political and critical import.⁹⁶

As the foregoing intimates, the inherent problems of the kind of substitution Butler tacitly introduces were already foreshadowed in Adorno’s critical engagements with Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Here is one formulation of Adorno’s critique: “The qualification of the absolutely first in subjective immanence founders because immanence can never completely disentangle the moment of non-identity within itself, and because subjectivity, the organ of reflection, clashes with [widerstreitet] the idea of an absolutely first as pure immediacy.”⁹⁷ Here the key word is reflection, and how any account of I, or Other, is always already mediated by that “clash,” so to speak. It is by tarrying with that clash and thus conceiving subjectivity at once as constituens and constitutum—as thus subject and object in both social and epistemological terms—that Adorno goes beyond even the most radical antifoundationalism in dialectically conceiving knowledge and accounting for the enabling limits of mediation. Succinctly put: even post-Kantian antifoundationalism—from Heidegger to Habermas—continues to posit a “unity of consciousness,” even if constitutive subjectivity is supposedly debunked. Thus, the critical task has been largely conceived in terms of overcoming metaphysics. In sharp contrast, Adorno’s critique reopens the question of metaphysics through his materialist negative dialectics. This yields a more discerning account of the historically constituted and socially sanctioned doing and undoing of subjects beyond distended ontological or psychoanalytic conceits. Rather than unities of consciousness dirempted from history, what this dialectical perspective invites is to think of the mediations involved to avoid both hypostatizing categories of reflection or historical symptoms, as phenomenological abstractions or reductions tend to do.

Outside epistemological considerations, there is, politically speaking, something deeply abstract about positing ethical obligation prior to the scenes of action in which it becomes actualized. Insofar as it is quasi-transcendental, and thus “prior to” engagement in the actual historically constituted world, the foregoing ethical obligations are utterly dirempted from the texture of political and ethical life and have little bearing on how one actually relates with others. By extension, meaningful mediations, distinctions, and differentiations, central for making good on any idea of ethical and political responsibility, are entirely bracketed out. But the question of spatial and political differentiations, or degrees of vulnerability, is one thing; how to conceptualize degrees of responsibility is another. Properly conceptualizing the nature of the imperatives shaping predicaments of power, both historically and politically, is something that the antinomian spirit underlying these inheritances of Levinas is not able to do. Instead, antinomianism is in and of itself a symptom or a particular response that flees political life in the hope of a more effective intervention. But leaving obdurate structures unattended, or tacitly taking these for granted, does not make them go away. Rather, it leads to a tacit acquiescence to them.

For absolution from these criticisms, a more sympathetic reader may ask: so what? Even if, say, Butler’s theoretical commitments do not move on a par with her political commitments, these have not preempted Butler from engaging in activism or articulating a compelling ethical-political stance in the present. Indeed, to the left of Derrida, Butler is a more politically minded activist whose politics go beyond the platitudes of Derrida’s interventions. That holds, as far as it goes. But theoretical limits find a corollary in her political stance. This is readily seen vis-à-vis the questions of nonviolence and Palestine.⁹⁸ In this essay she offers moving reflections on Edward Said and his political legacy by way of a beautiful poem by Mahmoud Darwich. This essay not only exemplifies Butler at her critical best, it also offers an astute account of the logic of dispossession built into Zionism as a settler-colonial project. Even so, despite the momentary avowal of a political ethic and the historical, political, and social mediations structuring Zionism’s relationship with its others, which also include non-Zionist Jews, Butler’s otherwise compelling political commentary is abruptly shortened by a feeble plea for a futurist exilic politics. Similarly, she neglects to consider the important question of how this concrete political scene she reconstructs demands something beyond her ethical politics, as the ethical obligation is severed from the political situation mediating and constituting any action within it. It is a political scene demanding political responses irreducible to the ethical scene of obligation the book abstractly invokes and ultimately hypostatizes.⁹⁹ If only an immanent appeal to democratic principles—their nonidentity in Palestine, so to speak—allows us to unveil the logic of the exclusion, dispossession, and domination of Palestinians in Palestine, why the appeal to Levinasian ethical politics in the first place?

The answer to the last question probably lies in her philosophical vocation and identification with Judaism. One can readily surmise that in Parting Ways Butler’s audience is fellow Jews, whom she hopes to interpellate by recourse to Jewish ethical resources, which were most forcefully expressed during the heyday of “Jewish modernity.”¹⁰⁰ Butler movingly writes as someone who “wishes to affirm a Judaism that is not identified with state violence, and that is identified with a broad-based struggle for social justice” and thereby reclaim “Jewish traditions that oppose state violence, that affirm multi-cultural co-habitation, and defend principles of equality,” which she rightly casts as a “vital” yet mostly “forgotten or sidelined” ethical tradition.¹⁰¹ “I am trying,” Butler further writes, “to delineate a political ethics that belongs to the diaspora, where Jews are scattered among non-Jews, and to derive a set of principles from that geographic condition and transpose them into the geopolitical reality of Israel/Palestine.”¹⁰² In the midst of the Zionism pervading American Jewry, Butler’s aim is gutsy and commands respect. Still, one cannot take it uncritically, and the passage invites several questions. One: can one speak here of a political ethic when the aim in question is indifferent to the specificity of each political situation it invokes? Second: even if one grants that “cohabitation” or convivencia are indifferent to political forms (and in this case they are not), can one freely extrapolate historically specific principles and practices that were mediated by political forms and import these into a colonial situation largely defined by the conflict between two ethnic nationalisms? This, in a historical moment in which the sociological springs of diasporic traditions are virtually extinguished. And this without dwelling on one of the peculiarities of this settler-colonial situation: while this is colonialism without a metropolis, Israel has benefited by the imperial powers lording over the region ever since the early twentieth century—first Britain, then the U.S.¹⁰³ Last: how political is a political ethic that brackets out consideration of the spatial presuppositions of any meaningful cohabitation that can only be politically implemented and sanctioned, and immanently discerned, by considering the political logic of the situation itself beyond the conceits of ethical politics.

Be that as it may, out of this inheritance of Jewish ethical traditions, she formulates an ethical politics of nonviolence, which rejects both state violence and violent resistance to it. Politically, she pits Jewish ethical politics against Israel’s raison d’état and the ethical politics of the American imperium and its avatars. As part of her retrieval of alternative Jewish traditions, Butler works overtime on Arendt and Benjamin. But Butler’s expansive readings notwithstanding, there is little by way of Jewish ethics in Arendt or Benjamin. In the case of Arendt, to read her through an ethical prism is to abjure or distort much of what makes her a genuinely political thinker: among other things, her compelling account of degrees and levels of political responsibility. Indeed, once ethics is cast as antecedent to politics, as an ethical scene prior to it, the kinds of questions that Arendt posed are cast aside. Unlike Arendt’s political conception of responsibility, Butler frames her reading of Arendt, along with the even less assimilable Said, in a perspective of ethical responsibility resulting from preontological precariousness, something that distorts the inner logic of these bodies of work. Something similar is at work in her reading of Benjamin. Butler offers an expansive interpretation of the role of responsibility in his thinking by juxtaposing the “Theologico-Political Fragment” to his notoriously inscrutable “Critique of Violence.” The upshot: a quasi-Levinasian Benjamin enlisted for a tamed messianism that holds out “for a way of thinking and acting politically that does not presume that self-defense or self-destruction are the only two alternatives.”¹⁰⁴ This reading is accomplished through careful but selective slicing of Benjamin’s text. She focuses on Benjamin’s discussion of the commandment “Thou shall not kill” and in the responsibility of either wrestling with it “in solitude,” or ignoring the commandment’s “nondespotic powers” (83). She then clinches the emerging reading: “As a form of ethical address, the commandment is that which each individual must wrestle without the model of any other. One ethical response to the commandment is to refuse…it, but even then one must take responsibility for refusing it. Responsibility is something one takes in relation to the commandment, but it is not dictated by the commandment. Indeed, it is clearly distinguished from duty and, indeed, obedience. If there is wrestling, then there is some semblance of freedom” (84). But a closer look at Benjamin’s rather cursory glossing on this question suggests that far from having “resonance with Levinas’s position” it actually subverts it (87).

One need not go any further than the passage itself to see how different this account is from Levinas’s. The wrestling or tarrying with the commandment happens in history and the commandment could be refused and the ethical actor needs to take responsibility for such refusal, which also has implications for the consequences of this refusal. And that is part of any politically robust sense of responsibility, a thematization of responsibility that offers a more promising path to think about the political valences of responsibility beyond the reductions and conceits of Levinas’s ethics. Even so, Butler implausibly claims some resemblance to Levinas and rounds up Benjamin’s formulations by conscripting his critique of violence to an “anarchistic” disposition: “Benjamin’s point is to show at least three interrelated points: (1) that responsibility has to be understood as a solitary, if anarchistic, form of wrestling with an ethical demand, (2) that coerced or forced obedience murders the soul and undermines the capacity of the person to come to terms with the ethical demand placed upon her, and (3) that the framework of legal accountability can neither address nor rectify the full conditions of human suffering” (87). These “points” can certainly be found in Benjamin’s text, but they carry different connotations and are never hypostatized. But what about what this enumeration leaves out? Benjamin’s formulations occur in the context of his account of “divine violence” and his articulation of “revolutionary violence” and the political ethic required to articulate its economy:

Several things are worth noting. First, as Butler acknowledges, the commandment is noncompulsive, which creates a vast gulf between this formulation of responsibility and the hyperventilated bindingness of Levinas’s responsibility to the Other. Here the encounter with the commandment is not only nondespotic but is also historically situated and need not be reduced to the individual, but could be collective. Second, both individual and communities are avowed, so solitude is best interpreted as suggesting a condition devoid of any transcendental anchorage or guarantee and not a solipsistic encounter with the commandment. The commandment is, in sum, thoroughly mediated. And these mediations are intimately related to the situation, its imperatives and conditions, which is what can render judgment on the specific action or deed in question, a judgment irreducible to the commandment.

Benjamin’s formulation offers the possibility of a different reckoning with the commandment in the context of violence beyond the reductive terms that Butler rightly wants to challenge, but cuts in a different direction than the one she envisions: it opens the possibility to contextualize the absoluteness of the command and to grasp its historical determinants and determinations. This last point was something lucidly pursued by the late León Rozitchner, an Argentine Jewish philosopher also critical of Israel, who offered an interpretation of the commandment that distinguished between an absolute-absolute and an absolute-relative: absolute, insofar as the principle is constitutive of an irreducible self qua unity of consciousness; relative, insofar as it recognizes the relative nature of this self in a world beyond itself, a world in which the self relates to others, but one that also sustains it, mediates and constitutes it, and in which any “I” is relative to her own historical situation.¹⁰⁶ This dialectic of the relative and the absolute is conceived as constitutive of any historically situated relationship between self and other. At once irreducible and relative, the self, as an absolute singularity, turns into absolute what is relative to his situation and tarries with it in historically constituted and politically sanctioned ethical and political predicaments. Accordingly, in contrast to the absolute-absolute that Levinas formulates, which is severed from any historical determination and yet cast as supervening on political life, the absolute-relative is historically determinate and differentiated.¹⁰⁷

Out of this phenomenological differentiation emerges the difference between violencia and contra-violencia: a distinction easily translated into English as violence and counterviolence provided that the latter is disassociated from any logic of preemption.¹⁰⁸ To deny this crucial distinction is to homogenize violence and indulge in an absolute-absolute interpretation of the commandment “Thou shall not kill” that is thoroughly unhistorical and conflates the violence of those who rebel against an oppressive order—their “counterviolence”—with that of those who preside over that order, rule them, or subject whole classes and groups to a routinized violent predicament in which the dominant group is either a major structural beneficiary or represents the interests of those who are. As Rozitchner perceptively observes, there is no violence in general or killing in the abstract; violence and death are always concrete and situated in space and time, admitting both qualitative and quantitative distinctions.¹⁰⁹ Violence is, accordingly, always specific: objective or subjective, structural or individual, revolutionary or restorative. Counterviolence is thus asymmetrical to the constitutive violence structuring the predicament in question. It is downright false, if not frivolous, to conflate violence and counterviolence in asymmetrically constituted situations, situations of extreme violence in which the violence seeking to subjugate another with the aim of exploiting and/or dominating that other and ultimately placing her at the service of a dominating or ruling group, class, or entity, sometimes killing and torturing her, cannot be equated with the counterviolence of those defending themselves in such predicament, those who fight not to be dominated and debased, tortured or annihilated.¹¹⁰

Yet this distinction, and the conversion it presupposes, can never be hypostatized; instead, what it demands is a sober reckoning with the historical realities and forces at work in any given predicament of power. But doing so requires abandoning the philosophical conceit of the preontological and descending downstream to history, the inevitable constitutive mediation of consciousness. Once thus conceived, one can formulate a political ethic whose economy of violence frames “counterviolence” in terms of the absolute-relative bound by the commandment of preserving life and the possibility of a political order enabling conditions of equality, freedom, and shared power, while fully re-cognizing the tragedy of the predicament in question and assuming responsibility for the lives lost. Preserving life is thus a binding imperative that is the precondition of any effective emancipatory political ethic, even if it is an absolute-relative insofar as death may arrive, but not because it is sought as end or means. Rather, the point of departure of a political ethic is the preservation of life and its dignity, while acknowledging how a predicament might impose death and the need to take responsibility for it. A political ethic is, accordingly, about limits, especially in light of the tragedy of confronting extreme violence and the dangers involved. Only by recourse to limits articulated by an economy of counterviolence can these be curbed, especially as one confronts forms of extreme violence.¹¹¹ This is, at any rate, more consonant with the spirit of reckoning with the commandment in solitude as a member of a political collectivity, something demanding distinctions and mediations that the architecture of Levinas’s own politically infused ethics militantly preempts by fleeing history and not tarrying with the thorny dilemmas of authority, law, and ethics, along with the structures constituting differentiated patterns of domination and exploitation. Only then can the dialectic of fidelity to a commandment or principle assuming concrete ethical and political responsibilities be construed.

What about Derrida’s version of ethical politics? What are the political upshots of Derrida’s ethical politics and its heretical deconstruction of responsibility? It is clear that despite perfunctory gestures to the political, the ethical has the upper hand in Derrida’s ethical politics of responsibility. Moreover, unlike Butler, there is something fundamentally labile about his variation of defensive ethical politics, especially once contrasted with the theoretical radicalism of deconstruction. Eagleton has once again offered a pithy formulation that captures the contrast between the radical tenor of deconstruction and the liberalism of its master thinker: “There is a bathetic contrast in the writings of both Levinas and Derrida between the arresting avant-garde pitch of their theory and the tediously familiar brand of multiculturalism which it seems to involve in practice.”¹¹² Even if, apropos of Levinas, Eagleton’s judgment goes astray—as there is a sodden, even distended, quality to his theological upending of the self and the ensuing inflation of the Other—regarding Derrida it holds. If anything, it is understated. Bluntly put, there is something noticeably platitudinous about Derrida’s ethical politics: an unruly, often iconoclastic, philosophical radicalism consistently yielded a defensive bien pensant politics. From his early evasive liberalism on the Algerian question, which became something of an axial and thus politically defining moment, to the 2003 rapprochement with Habermas as part of the North Atlantic version of “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”—with panegyrics to Mandela, interventions in academic politics, and his Free Mumia moment somewhere in between—these political interventions oscillated through the coordinates of the liberal center, albeit mostly located to the left of the centrist bandwidth without threatening it.¹¹³ Anticlimactically, virtuoso theoretical performances conjuring the possibility of something genuinely singular and new, and thus unfettered by the old, yield a version of the defensive politics characteristic of North Atlantic left-liberalism. For all the rhetorical boldness of his theoretical moves, puns, and feints, there is a strong inflection of what Barthes famously called the neither/nor criticism when it comes to politics. For, if nothing else, the neither/nor strategy is a “mechanism of double exclusion,” which under the ruse of resisting one dichotomy, and the rhetorical blackmail it purportedly stages, tacitly adheres to its own pristine position above the fray of the structuring the terms of the binary enact.¹¹⁴ A position Barthes acerbically, but correctly, characterizes as “the fine morality of the Middle Party” that rewrites the initial binary into its own new dichotomization.¹¹⁵ Or stated in more Hegelian terms: the initial pair conforming the dichotomy is cast as located in the way of the world and thus to be resisted, but resisting the terms staged in the initial dyad, and the derision to which their consignment to the way of the world entails, especially once compared to the rather pristine standpoint of the critic, introduces a new dichotomy: that of a deconstructive version of the virtue of one’s fine morality and the way of the world. In other words, for all the dedifferentiations that deconstruction authorized—not least the entwining of the philosophical, literary, and rhetorical—and the binaries it undid, tacitly it introduces a new binary between conventional politics and itself, with Derrida cast in the role of the ethical “beautiful soul” who for a long time could not find a place within the rich leftist bandwidth of the post-1968 French political spectrum.¹¹⁶

Clearly, at his most forceful, Derrida’s overwhelmingly defensive politics have the effect of denouncing selected localized injustices. But to connect the preemption of injustice, or the condemnation of this or that injustice, to an allegation that the injustices in question are profoundly structured and embedded in institutionalized and patterned social arrangements, sanctioned by relations of rule and domination, that should be abolished is simply never in the cards. Just consider how for all the pathos of Derrida’s eventual invocations of Algeria—invocations oftentimes lionized by critics—politically Derrida’s actual position vis-à-vis French Algeria amounted to little more than a chastened version of Camus’s “good colonialist.”¹¹⁷ Likewise, his denunciation of the ten plagues in Specters of Marx fails to critically relate them to a broader critique of the structural injustice of the liberal-capitalist mainstay defining the North Atlantic orders, which Derrida as an indefatigable traveler so often traversed, and that, incidentally, constituted the transatlantic space for deconstruction’s ascendance. Theoretical hesitation under deconstructive wraps often reverted to political vacillation when the political stance in question demanded something more than a defensive politics quietly acquiescing to the neutralizations constitutive of the often fierce depoliticized politics of the transatlantic north. For all the talk about a democracy to come, one searches in vain for any sustained reflection on citizenship as a politically meaningful category. This is arguably a function of Derrida’s unhinged deconstruction of fraternity amidst his dislodging of the other two moments of the revolutionary triad—freedom and equality.¹¹⁸ The overwhelmingly defensive cast of his politics thus sits comfortably with his futurist disposition, a disposition that is conveniently unencumbered by “the difficulty of sharing power and governing ourselves in common.”¹¹⁹ Derrida’s ethical politics consists of a modality of liberalism, a defensive politics that preemptively neutralizes forms of agency that can mount a threat to the mainstay of the present while portending an unmediated future. This politics “to come” is so radically underdetermined from the present, and aloof from any commitment to the collective agencies that can break from what is, that it simultaneously remains miraculous and still recognizably liberal.