February 28, 2005
Human, All Too Human
BBC Two, Monday August 9, 1999.
A verbatim transcript.
[A man in monk’s garb is re-enacting Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in a present-day marketplace.]
KAP: The madman is clearly offerin’ some kind of warnin’ that
there’s a tremendous cataclysm on its way. I think what’s important for
Nietzsche is that there’s a number of events – let’s call them
intellectual events of the Nineteenth Century – which put together all
work towards underminin’ the very foundations of Christian moral
civilization.
[Slow zoom into a late photograph of Charles Darwin.]
If you take, er, Darwin as an example, Darwin was brought up in a very,
er, theological, religious context, and Nietzsche points out that
before releasing or publishing ’is whole Theory of Natural Selection he
had it for twenty years and he kept it in a cupboard stacked away.
[Cut to an office. Caption:
PROFESSOR KEITH ANSELL PEARSON
Philosopher
The red venetian blinds are drawn. To KAP’s right, a bronze bust of Nietzsche.]
I think on Darwin’s part he himself realised that it would have
precisely the tremendous consequences – potentially nihilistic ones
that Nietzsche was detectin’ in... within the theory – that it would
undermine the whole basis of Western morality and metaphysics.
[Panning shot of Basel University.]
That it would show that the world functions and operates quite well, or
quite consistently, without the need for any divine intervention.
[...]
[Mock-up of Nietzsche’s Sils Maria cabin. In the foreground, medicine bottles in various colours.]
’Ee says somewhere that, “you yourselves are this will-to-power.” And I
think that Nietzsche thought that, er, ultimately the task was one of
self-mastery – that is, of acquirin’ a certain kind of self-knowledge
that would not be merely intellectual or abstract, because for
Nietzsche all knowledge is ultimately rooted in the body – so for him,
self-mastery involves acquirin’ as much knowledge as is possible about
the human body, about your body, about its physiology, about its psychology.
[...]
[Still of Nietzsche, paralytically insane.]
He says: “if you cannot live [nervous cough, suggestive of the Sublime] beyond or above the law”, [pause]
[Return to office.]
which he sees as the obligation of the philosopher – to question all
values – which means you’ve got to live outside or beyond all laws – he
says, “if you cannot do that, if you find that task too great as a
philosopher then”, he says, “either you must construct another law, or
find refuge in madness.”
And it’s interestin’ how we would interpret the meaning or significance of Nietzsche’s descent into that black hole of madness.
[Slow zoom into another still of Nietzsche, paralytically insane, cross-eyed.]
Did he ultimately find that burden, that responsibility, too great, and
therefore collapsed under the very weight of the questions he was
posin’ for himself?
[Dissolve into circling aerial shot of man in period costume, atop an alpine mountain.]
I mean maybe those questions are too great for any single individual to entertain or to think through.
February 24, 2005
February 18, 2005
Philosophie IV unveiled before dumbfounded audience of graduate students
February 15, 2005
A bit of the other
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.
