In his essay “Robespierre, Or, the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror”, Zizek writes,
In today’s ‘post-deconstructionist’ thought…, the term ‘inhuman’ has gained new weight, especially in the work of Agamben and Badiou. The best way to apporach it is via Freud’s reluctance to endorse the injunction ‘Love thy neighbor!’– the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas thereby obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, a monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbour the term Thing [das Ding], used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability… In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radically ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the ‘living dead’ in the concentration campus. (xiii-xiv)
While I’m not great enthusiast of Levinas, passages such as this, scattered throughout his work, irritate the hell out of me. Am I alone in suspecting that he’s never read a single word of Levinas? Certainly the above remarks suggest that this is the case.
Larval Subjects . 
March 30, 2007 at 1:11 am
This really seems to have only tangential relevance to Levinas.
One possibility is that Zizek is suggesting, contra Levinas, the possibility of a ‘faceless’ human being that does not ’emanate’ a ‘call of ethical responsibility’.
However, this seems to have little to nothing to do with the figure of the concentration camp ‘Musselman’.
If anything, I think Zizek could read Levinas sympathetically.. they seem to share certain concerns.
March 30, 2007 at 2:39 am
Well, it’s very cool to bash Levinas nowadays. I think you’re right to suspect that Zizek has little more than a passing familiarity with Levinas. Theorists seem to think they are challenging Levinas’s project when they attack the dialogical tradition of Rosenzweig and Buber or the notion of “responsibility.” For instance, Agamben (and this is one of only two major problems I have with Agamben) in Remnants of Auschwitz assigns the category of responsibility to the realm of the juridical and thereby denounces it as irrelevant, impotent, etc. And it would seem (given other allusions in the same work) that this is directed toward Levinasian responsibility-for-the-other; however, the latter concept is anything but juridical – it is a theory of individuation (Levinas makes this blindingly explicit in the lecture series God, Death, and Time, in case it wasn’t already obvious in Otherwise than Being). So Agamben (in this case) and Zizek (just about everywhere) are merely constructing and defeating a straw-Levinas. Zizek’s statement, that Levinas “fails to take into account… the radically ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself,” is patently ludicrous, and I’m not sure that even one of the many Zizekian zombies could fail to wince at that statement.
March 30, 2007 at 6:14 am
Kyle, I am very privy to your characterization ”Zizekian zombies”, can you provide some more detail?
March 30, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I was thinking of the Slavoj Zizek Fan Club in particular. I remember about a dozen people wearing SZFC t-shirts at a conference I went to a while ago. Yeah. Ideology is dead.
March 30, 2007 at 1:33 pm
So Agamben (in this case) and Zizek (just about everywhere) are merely constructing and defeating a straw-Levinas. Zizek’s statement, that Levinas “fails to take into account… the radically ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself,” is patently ludicrous, and I’m not sure that even one of the many Zizekian zombies could fail to wince at that statement.
Exactly right. I’ve always been struck by how closely Levinas’ descriptions of the traumatic nature of the encounter with the Other so closely parallel Lacan’s descriptions in seminars 4-8. Like Lacan, Levinas emphasizes the unfathomably nature of the Other, how it evades the logic of the same and identity, and how any response to the call of the Other is filled with doubt as to whether or not one is responding in the right way. Like the Lacanian Other during this period, the Levinasian Other has the status of unfathomable enigma that erupts into our world and disturbs the pleasant ipseity of the solipsistic ego.
March 30, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I’m vote in favor of “Zizek has barely read a word of Levinas” or, if it’s an option, “Zizek has read just enough Levinas to selectively quote in order to support a pre-established critique.” I’ve said as much previously, with some vitriol, which I am sorry to admit, but there it is.
As both an admirer and a critic of Levinas’ work, I can say that with all charity, I find the bit from Zizek you quote in the post to be so fundamentally incoherent an interpretation of Levinas that I am not even sure how to respond to it.
Tangentially, Kyle, I actually disagree with you somewhat. I agree that responsibility is not a juridical concept, but I’m not sure I see Agamben doing that sort of dismissal of Levinas. I think he’s just interfacing with an earlier Levinas, the Levinas of On Escape, and the role that shame plays in individuation. In addition, at least to me, the notion of witnessing Agamben draws out at the end of Remnants seems concordant enough with Levinas’ notion of the call, and of the caress. I could be being generous to the point of artifice, but I hope not.
March 31, 2007 at 12:41 am
It occurs to me I think it is possible that Zizek is also misreading Agamben here: that the Musselman is humanity reduced to bare life, and only bare life, and thus transformed or produces as the living dead, is not the same thing as being configured as an inhuman such that no call or love is possible, which seems to be the implicit claim (I say “seems to” because I honestly don’t know, but if he’s saying Levinas doesn’t understand how bad it can get, then I assume he’s saying “it’s so bad that the other no longer calls for a response, can no longer be loved, or something like that). Anyway, Agamben’s point is that even the Jews who were in the thick of it were embarrassed by the Musselmanner, which is precisely what makes possible the act of witnessing: their embarrassment is the only truly reliable evidence of the biopolitical horror of Auschwitz. Which means inhumanity is never so inhuman so as to cancel the possibility of an encounter with the Other, or put another way, that even bare life or the inhuman elicits a call.
Not that any of this matters. I’ve long since lost hope that Zizek’s arguments are going to be coherent, or if coherent, that they will work coherently in relation to any other arguments he makes. So seriously, who knows what in the hell he’s trying to say in the above quote.
March 31, 2007 at 1:38 am
Hey Kenneth – thanks for the comment to my comment. I think you’re absolutely right that Agamben engages with the earlier Levinas, the one still looking for an otherwise. The essay On Escape is expressly identified in Remnants, if I recall correctly (if not, somewhere else in Agamben’s corpus). But, responsibility being what it is for Levinas, and given the character of the Remnants book (a work searching explicitly for a new ethics), and all the motifs we see unpacked (shame, the witness, testimony, for instance), I think, at the very least, that an oblique criticism of the later Levinas is there. And while I disagree with it, there is a school of thought that would say that Agamben’s disavowal of “relation” in, e.g., Homo Sacer is a mobilization against any encounter-based phenomenology such as that of Buber or Levinas. The kicker being that, for Levinas, the other is always unaccountable and overflowing, and so no “dialogue” or, a fortiori, relation, is really possible, in the strict sense. (I don’t think this is Agamben’s point in casting aside the metaphysical category of relation, but there it is.)
Can I run a tangent of my own?
Kenneth, perhaps you can help me out with something that’s troubled me with Agamben since the beginning (this is item #2 on my list of grievances with Agamben). In The Coming Community, obviously a purposely elliptical work which, as such, was bound to raise this type of issue, in the very first chapter (“Whatever”), Agamben suggests that quodlibet ens is being-such that it always matters. Now, the “community of the question of the possibility of community” with which this text necessarily engages – Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, and so forth – is concerned to work out the nature of singularity in solidarity or alterity in conviviality, through a “communism without community,” “a community of those who have no community,” “a negative community,” and other slogans. But the way Agamben brushes over the very “substance,” if I may, of the other in community raises my eyebrows. Being-such that it always matters – yes, but what is the meaning of this “matters”? Can we take seriously such a cursory treatment of alterity? If it is more than that, if this is not a connect-the-dots or fill-Agamben’s-gaps puzzle for the reader, maybe you can shed some light on the topic. I address this to you because you seem ready to defend Agamben, and I cannot treat Agamben with the seriousness he otherwise deserves (based on every other text) until I get a satisfactory account of this problem from someone, somewhere (I am now too biased to generously fill the gaps myself).
March 31, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Zizek is a prolific writer. I can’t say the same thing about his reading.
April 1, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Actually, Kyle, I am in agreement with you. I found Coming Community to be rather stillborn in its composition, and the notion of whatever community bothered me immensely, precisely because, as you identify, it seems a stratagem by which the ethical encounter is voided in favor of an antecedent that is neither substantive nor knowable, but that exists for Agamben nevertheless as a displacement for the ethical encounter. I think the Agamben of Remnants is much closer to being compatible with Levinas’ call – hence my defense of it. I do think, though, that your interest in Agamben might be more enabled by a look at his Language and Death, with its emphasis on the constitutive force of negativity and absence, which I consider to be a better effort at thinking a community without communion than the “whatever” of Coming Community. At the end of the day, I remain much closer to Levinas and Nancy on this question of community, but I also think those two are lacking analytical insight into precisely the terrain on which Agamben shines: the intersection with and juridicality of the law and (legal/juridical) sovereignty. So I take Agamben perhaps more seriously than you do, though I do so more in some areas than in others.
And Ryan/Aless: that’s the best two sentence summary of the Zizek problem I’ve yet seen.
April 1, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Kenneth, thanks for your insights. Language & Death is my favorite work by Agamben. It sets the stage for everything that follows, for better or for worse, and what you say – “with its emphasis on the constitutive force of negativity and absence…[it’s] a better effort at thinking a community without communion than the ‘whatever’ of Coming Community” – is accurate, I think. Which is one of the reasons Coming Community is such a disappointment for me. I think the experimentum linguae, the pure event of language as such, could have been worked into a robust theory of community, I think a flat yet differentiated/distributed ontologico-political community is possible with that notion as (negative) ground. But Agamben is highly allusive on this point, as we see in “Whatever,” and his attention quickly turns to criticism rather than completing the vision of community still latent in Language & Death. His criticism is likely just as necessary as completing that vision, in the grand scheme of things; maybe I’m just impatient. You are probably spot-on regarding taking Agamben seriously – I find his thinking on law, as we find it in State of Exception (the notion that the law will be “used” as an old child’s toy, pure gesturality or Gelassenheit, in the to-come) somewhat naive, and cannot but take it with a grain of salt. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s without merit – I think it’s possible to make a constructive use out of his legal theory, but I don’t think public law is where I’d locate that possibility. I’d like to see some scholarship on Agamben and contract (or tort) law, the conventionally “private” law fields. This is where all the action happens. The “capillaries” of the legal system.
One other thing – while Levinas does lack interest in the juridical order just about wholesale (there are scattered thoughts on this in his Talmudic work, though), I don’t think the same is true for Nancy at all. In fact, I think Nancy has a mature and meritorious theory of law, even if he develops it obliquely. The texts of The Birth to Presence are important here. I’d err on the side of Nancy on the question of law in the context of the community problem. But maybe that’s just me.
April 1, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Can you be a bit more specific about where in Birth of Presence I should look? It’s been a few years since I cracked that particular book – unlike Finite Thinking and Singular Plural, which I tend to visit often – and I read it in a different frame of mind and a different context to the one we’re discussing now, so any roadmap you’d care to provide would be mighty helpful to me.
As for the Agamben question, I do agree that some work on tort law might be rather interesting. Maybe a combination of Agamben and the little known Lon Fuller – could be fascinating. But Agamben is trying to extend Foucault’s thinking about governmentality and biopolitics, so he’s obviously going to focus on a different order of the law, and I think it’s a good focus, all things considered, if only because offers a more robust way of thinking juridicality than does Foucault, at least in my opinion.
I am curious, assuming Sinthome doesn’t mind the progressing tangent, what you think about Agamben’s essay on Plato in Potentialities, which also gets back to this issue of the something of language that makes possible a community, though it does so somewhat obliquely…
April 1, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Regarding Nancy, I was thinking specifically of the “Abandoned Being” essay, which is pretty famous. But I like to link that one to the “Heart of Things” one and read it in light of the former.
You know, Foucault was really influential for the American strand of critical legal studies (now largely defunct), especially Duncan Kennedy (see his “Stakes of Law” essay – everything he wrote, basically, is available on duncankennedy.com). But his commitment is to a neo-Marxist school, so Foucault is always sort of marginalized in his thinking. Agamben is a resource that has not been tapped in this realm, though he is beginning to catch on (as is Badiou – he’s speaking at Cardozo Law later this year). Much more so than Lon Fuller, however, are Kennedy and the other crits relevant for thinking American jurisprudential problems with Agamben. Come to think of it, I’m not sure how I’d envision a Fuller/Agamben interface. (And Fuller is not little known, at least within legal circles. I’m not sure of your background, so perhaps you meant to indicate a different discursive arena than the legal.)
Oh, I’m in total agreement with you regarding this statement: …I think it’s a good focus, all things considered, if only because [it] offers a more robust way of thinking juridicality than does Foucault…. Foucault’s thinking on governance requires some serious unpacking. There’s a rather mediocre book, though praiseworthy in its attempt, that tries to do this. Foucault & Law: Toward a Sociology of Law as Governance, is the title if I recall correctly. I don’t particularly endorse this, though.
Presumably you’re referring, in the last paragraph of your post, to the essay “The Idea of Language”? Plato and the experimentum linguae are pervasive themes in Potentialities, especially the first section, but this is most direct. In any event, everything in that book is fantastic. This is Agamben at his finest, in my opinion – this is the thinker we met in “On the Destruction of Experience” and Language & Death. Agamben is at pains in the “Idea” essay to demonstrate the presuppositionlessness of the bare “fact” of language and its elemental consistency, its envelopment of the actual. In that sense it’s not unrelated to Deleuze’s thinking of an immanent ontology – only here, Agamben wants to make language (qua experimentum linguae) the plane itself. The human occupies the space of, or rather is, the folding-machine of linguistic infolding (in more Deleuzo-Guattarian terms). And, interestingly, Agamben’s retrieval of the theme of Idea in this essay sort of automatically puts him into contact with Deleuze. Sinthome might want to chime in here, because my Deleuzean competence quickly extinguishes itself around this point.
I’d be happy to develop this dialogue further if you had a specific issue on that essay that you’d like to approach – it doesn’t seem like we’re very far apart on our readings of Agamben after all. Also, if you’ve a suggestion regarding Agamben/Fuller, I’d be interested to hear it.
April 1, 2007 at 10:47 pm
My background is in rhetorical theory, from the communication perspective, not the composition one, and believe me when I say I would be terribly surprised if more than a handful of folks in my field have ever heard of Fuller, much less be able to talk about what he wrote. I ended up reading a bunch of him recently for entirely random reasons, and found his focus on contract law rather fascinating, and so mentioned his name both as a result of my recent excursion into your more familiar waters and because I like the idea that contract law is inherently interactional. It seems to me that there’s a way to link up Agamben’s discussion of the profane and the open into this interactional realm and in to the binding force of contract (or tort) law that would move away from claims based on property, appropriation, damage, etc. This is a guess on my part, of course: the rest of my family (parents and sister), and my best friend since like 2nd grade, are all attorneys or magistrates now, and perhaps for that reason, my interest in the law has been what I can only call “incidental.” *grin*
And indeed, “The Idea of Language” was what I had in mind. I think the bare fact of language, it’s communication of its own being, as language, offers at least one model of thinking the whatever of community, in the sense that community always communicates its own potential, even if that potential remains insubstantial. Of course, this is also where I find Levinas most valuable, in that the call of the other, the interruptive force of the face of the other, is what makes known this potential relationship as an ethical question rather than an ontological one, which is precisely the danger I see in Agamben’s rather awkward coming community.
To me the perfect blend can be found, in all places, in V for Vendetta, during the scenes of torture and imprisonment, when Evey receives the letters that V himself had once received, and they read something like: I do not know you, I have never met you, and yet there is something about you that make me know that I love you. It’s far more elegant in the film, but there is in that moment a synthesis of Agamben’s form of life with Levinas’ preontological caress.
Can you elaborate some on the Kennedy writings your referencing? I might enjoy adding them to my list of casual reading :)
April 1, 2007 at 11:45 pm
To begin with the end:
Surely. “Stakes of Law” is Kennedy’s most accessible (for those of us with humanities backgrounds, rather than social science backgrounds) piece on the function and place of private law in a post-industrial capitalist society. But Kennedy has something of the eclectic in him too, so he hits on many issues as he moves along (so I don’t want to make it sound as if that essay was limited to that focus). His most famous essay, the one that made him famous in legal scholarship, is the 1976 essay, “Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication.” It’s great, but it’s rather difficult to follow unless you’ve got a strong background in the history of law. This essay is cited by even those hostile to Kennedy and the crits (and the hostiles are legion!). I recently gave a sort of talk on the themes of the “Paternalistic and Distributive Motives” essay, which encapsulates Kennedy’s thought in the early 80s – that’s a good one. Things begin to change around this point as the “first wave” of CLS was dying off, and the second was beginning (new scholars, new themes, more radicalism) – the dialogue “Roll Over Beethoven,” between Kennedy and legal theorist Peter Gabel, discloses several fundamental changes in the CLS mode of thought. So that’s a good one. And then there’s the book Sexy Dressing, Etc, which is not so much “legal theory” but a sort of blend of law, sociology/economics, and cultural theory. Not terribly important, but a good read.
If you want to become familiar with the CLS “movement” as it was in the 80s, pick up The Politics of Law, which is a panoply of critical essays. It’s also decent.
Ah, and your background in communications theory makes perfect sense now. Yes, I would imagine that Agamben’s thesis on language-as-such would be terribly interesting for your field. But can I comment on your remarks on Fuller/Agamben?
If we take the idea of contract as inherently interactional, which is a perfectly reasonable way to approach it, do we not presuppose freedom of contract? And perhaps this was valid once – in a socio-political milieu that would predate our own, that is, a milieu in which agriculture and even industry are the principal structures of society or the market, a milieu that does not know the intensity of the commodification of service and the network of exertions of power known as “(popular, media, product) culture” today? I mean, Fuller operates on this presupposition, which is a problem. And I always try to take these thinkers in their contexts, but I don’t think the idea of freedom of contract – most basically, that you freely enter into the transactions and agreements that you in fact enter into, from simple purchases to insurance contracts to whatever else – ever had validity, it only seemed to. But anyway, I think Agamben’s understanding of law (albeit in the public law context) pushes him away from this type of thinking, insofar as he borrows Nancy’s important insight that the authority of the law is no longer based on application (law-to-fact) but on abandonment (fact already abandoned to law – in short, law works its normativity before any “application” of law to fact – law is already life). And in a sense this was realized long ago in the legal realm, though without the radicality of a Nancy or Agamben. It happened, in American legal history, with the demise of Langdellian formalism and the birth of legal realism, around the New Deal era. Contract law (and tort law) shed their rigid rules to an extent (e.g., the doctrine of consideration or the parol evidence rule in contracts) and become saturated with these tropes that allow seamless ingress and egress into and out of the structure of the “total legal obligation” (to quote the UCC) – some examples might be unconscionability, the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and the ever elusive “due care.” This is a fundamental paradigm shift in the development of the law. And that we, as consumers, as contracting parties, as atoms of society, are already abandoned to these legalisms (rather, that they are no longer “legalisms,” but facts of life) means that Agamben’s Benjaminian thesis on the state of exception become rule has tremendous relevance for private law. (Noting well that Agamben and every other non-classical-liberalist disavows the public/private distinction – private and public are here signifiers of different, though impossibly intertwined, fields of law, taken in an academic sense).
Hey, I’m sorry that was drawn out. And I know this is not a legal theory blog. Sinthome, please let me know if this is something you’d rather not see played out on your turf.
Kenneth, you’ve got some interesting thoughts on V for Vendetta. Thanks for sharing them.
April 2, 2007 at 9:02 pm
There’s no need to worry about whether or not you’re departing from the theme of the original post. Both of you are discussing issues that are quite far from my own areas of expertise, so I’m happy to sit back, take notes, learn and follow up your references when time permits. I’m pleased to see a discussion of this caliber occuring on this blog. I think of these blog spaces primarily as public squares, where discussion is free-form and allowed to follow its own development, opening the possibility of encounters that would not otherwise take place. Thanks to both of you for deciding to play on my corner.