And, does Badiou, the anti-Levinas, with this topic of the respect for the unnameable, not come dangerously close precisely to the Levinasian notion of the respect for Otherness—the notion that is, against all appearances, totally inoperative at the political level? Recall the well-known fiasco of Levinas when, a week after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, he participated in a radio broadcast with Schlomo Malka and Alain Finkelkraut. Malka asked him the obvious “Levinasian” question: “Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?” To this, Levinas answered:
My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.
— The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 294.
The problem with these lines is not their potential Zionist anti-Palestinian attitude but, on the contrary, the unexpected shift from high theory to vulgar commonsense reflections. What Levinas is basically saying is that, as a principle, respect for alterity is unconditional (the highest sort of respect), but, when faced with a concrete other, one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or an enemy. In short, in practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing. No wonder then, that Levinas also perceived alterity as a radical strangeness posing as a threat, a point at which hospitality is suspended. This is clear from the following passage about the “yellow peril” from what is arguably his weirdest text, “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic” (1960), a comment on the Soviet-Chinese conflict:
The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.
— Les imprèvus de l’histoire (Saint Clément: Fata Morgana, 1994), p. 172
Does this not recall Heidegger’s insistence, throughout the 1930’s, that the main task of Western thought today is to defend the Greek breakthrough, the founding gesture of the “West,” the overcoming of the pre-philosophical, mythical, “Asiatic” threat—the greatest opposite of the West is “the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular”?
— Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 106-107.
Posted by sphaleotas at February 15, 2005 07:46 PM