Rei Terada

Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
terada@uci.edu

 

Ethics and Politics of Proximity reflects on the contemporary state of thought about proximate others, whether they be like or unlike oneself, neighbors, friends, rivals, or enemies. Coming from disparate disciplines (politics, literary studies, and architecture) and using heterogeneous principles, these essays by Robert Meister, Laura O’Connor, and Dana Cuff show that proximity is a testing ground for struggles between politics and ethics and for models of border cultures and shared space.¹ Proximity, the afterlife of approach, also retains the trace of time in spatial relations; no consciousness of proximity exists without at least a hypothesis of how one came to be near, whether one arrived before or after the other. Various discourses of proximity, however, may stress or repress temporal questions. In his essay for this issue, Robert Meister calls the “ethics of the neighbor” “a spatializing discourse within ethics, as distinct from a ‘temporalizing’ discourse that subordinates ethics to political rhetorics associated with memory and identity.”²Microinvestigations in the ethological field of “proxemics”–the study of such things as how close to one another we like to stand and speak–also reflect the always changing power relations between parties without necessarily offering a historical account of how these came to be, as Dana Cuff points out in her study of suburban architecture. In the uneasy territory of proximity, interactions that are not explicitly political must still be recognized or repressed as ambiguously so because of their place in a sequence of other exchanges.

 

Contemporary theory has been nervous about proximity. In the 1980s and early 1990s, critical theory and cultural studies often repeated that one should not identify too closely with the other. Too easy identification, by this logic, is said to fantasize harmony and mistranslate or appropriate the other’s communication.³ This seemingly self-critical suspicion of identification, however, may also flatter the self by attributing too much power to it. Arguably, it wishfully aggrandizes the self’s capacities in the mode of restraint. Shielding the autonomy of the other can turn into the comedy of cultural critics’ protecting their objects of study from a totalizing force that these same critics could never actually muster. In a redundant act of magical thinking, cultural theory was sometimes called on to safeguard differences even as those differences were posited as inevitable. Fifteen years later contemporary formulations of the ethics of proximity as opposed to its politics tend to take an even more radically self-subjugating form. Even as the stricture on identification remains largely in place, current schematizations of proximity often underestimate the difficulty of bearing with others, or masochistically embrace it. Contemporary ethics in the lineage of Lévinas figures the other as an overpowering given that makes assymetrical, ultimate demands; the subject endorses the pain of invasion as the very condition of subjectivity. Lévinas’s extreme version of responsibility at least has the merit of stressing the subject’s suffering. In Lacanian formulations, the suffering of self and other can be relegated to the realms of the imaginary. Eric Santner’s Psychotheology of Everyday Life mobilizes Franz Rosenzweig’s accounts of the banal heroism of life among one’s neighbors in order to suggest that each subject must bear the burden of the other’s unconscious. For Alain Badiou, the philosophy of Paul represents the possibility of overcoming the sectarian strife that Badiou attributes to over-attention to differences.⁴ Badiou and Slavoj Zizek give the Pauline equivalence of self and other a Lacanian twist, arguing that the relation of neighbor to self reflects the strangeness and externality of the self to itself. Nonetheless, Zizek insists, the “common void” in us and between us provides a basis for a reorganization of psycho-social life.⁵

 

These forms of proximity–upon me, too close to me, in me more than me–suggest a persistent lack of vocabulary for untraumatic relation.⁶ Santner’s position in particular is worth examining at greater length, since Santner understands the necessity of working through resistance to proximity. He shows how in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig comes to view the repeated friction of small acts of communal involvement as the texture of love, and eventually compares the attitude Rosenzweig recommends with the analyst’s toward the analysand:

 

What Freud and Rosenzweig have done, then, is to elaborate the ethical relation introduced into the world by Judeo-Christian monotheism–love of God as love of neighbor–as the basis of a distinctly modern ethical conception: my ability to endure the proximity of the Other in their “moment of jouissance,” the demonic and undying singularity of their metaethical selfhood (in Freud’s view, it is perhaps only psychoanalysts who–at least ideally–embody this ethical attitude). To put it most simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of animation that belongs to no form of life. To cite Freud’s characterization of the Ratman, the face of the Other to whom I am answerable is one that in some form or another manifests a “horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself [is] unaware.” (82)

 

The phrase in parenthesis is crucial, since for Freud analysis is possible only because it is not simply a part of everyday life, and everyday life in the mode of the analyst’s hypothetically infinite patience would be cruel. Further, enduring another’s sexual horror as the type of neighbor relation in the love of God is frighteningly close to internalizing parental seduction. Jean Laplanche asks whether one might compare the sexualized messages of parents to children to the demands of God: “That God is enigmatic, that He compels one to translate, seems obvious in the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition of exegesis. Whether this enigma presupposes that the message is opaque to Himself is plainly a different question. Does God have an unconscious?” (191). Santner adduces Laplanche in order to argue that “every symbolic investiture” of personhood–beginning with the primal scene as unconscious display–produces a “kernel of ‘indignity'” about which we incline to be defensive, but toward which Rosenzweigian love may be open (84-85). Here as in Lévinas, the difficulties of proximity are fully acknowledged only to advocate even greater proximity. The subject is to be “release[d]” from its “labors to translate superegoic pressure into a meaningful communication/legislation” by the logic that working to escape the pressure only mires the subject more deeply (104). Although Freud and Laplanche might agree that escape fantasies can perpetuate the wrong kind of excitement, they do not, like Lacan and Zizek, lose their sense of outrage at psychic invasion and the rightfulness of one’s desire to escape it. The project of analyzing and undoing interpellated messages may be interminable, but still, according to Laplanche, “the development of the human individual is to be understood as an attempt to master, to translate, these enigmatic, traumatizing messages. . . . Analysis is first and foremost a method of deconstruction (ana-lysis), with the aim of clearing the way for a new construction, which is the task of the analysand” (165). This series of associations–from banal contact to parental seduction by God–suggests that the memory of psychic intrusion may lie behind our objection to the frictive presence of proximate others. “Being able to bear the institutions and the people we depend upon is called masochism,” Adam Phillips suggests (49).

 

It may be the case that relation is unsustainable, as Freud suspects in Civilization and Its Discontents, even as we survive it. If so, it is not clear what our attitude toward this state of affairs should be. I’d suggest simply that this question should be approached as much as possible without presuppositions and a priori moral obligations. We feel so guilty about having difficulty with fundamental sociality that we do not even know what we think before we impale ourselves on imagined inexorabilities that bear their own social and political consequences. Analysts are familiar with patients who rush to submit to imaginary laws just to end the discomfort of mixed feelings toward others and the pressures of choice. Ethics and politics could take a page from prosaic clinical literature and simply hold ambiguities in mind longer to see what they may be composed of.

 

The particular combinations of attraction and repulsion in proximate relations and the histories of conflict that create them should bear in some way on one’s responsibility to someone else. Even the best proximate relations contain particular knots of love-hate. The difference between working through with Freud and “going through the fantasy” with Lacan may be remaining alive to the contingent forces that produce these knots and coming up with the empiricist empathy to undo them at length.⁷ Although I don’t speak for the authors of these essays, as their reader I admire their taking the time to dwell in the details of proximate entanglements–the logics of victims’ and victors’ justice (Meister), the poetic forms of intimate ethnic rivalry (O’Connor), the disparate imaginary neighbors projected by architectural conventions and innovations (Cuff). Their unblinking descriptions of historical dilemmas help us understand the political and power relations that have made the ethics of proximity difficult to bear.

 

Notes

 

1. The essays by Meister and Cuff, as well as this preface, are products of “The Ethics of the Neighbor,” a seminar sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The authors would like to thank Kenneth Reinhard, convener of the seminar, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the Institute, for the opportunity to do this research.

 

2. See also Derrida’s comment on the figure of the neighbor in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason: “Perhaps in the discussion to follow I might be able to elaborate on a series of values most often associated with that of the brother: the values of the neighbor [prochain] (in the Christian sense), the fellow, the compeer or the like [semblable] (the enormous question of the like: I tried to argue in my seminar this year that pure ethics, if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the other as the absolute unlike, recognized and nonrecognizable, indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition and all recognition: far from being the beginning of pure ethics, the neighbor as like or as resembling, as looking like, spells the end or the ruin of such an ethics, if there is any….)” (60).

 

3. A deconstructive version of the argument against losing the other through overcloseness occurs in Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man. This is the form in which I’ve found the argument most convincing.

 

4. Badiou’s Paul prescribes the redoubling of a local imperative into a universal one: “it is incumbent upon love to become law so that truth’s postevental universality can continuously inscribe itself in the world, rallying subjects to the path of life.” For Badiou, Paul’s ontology is empty because his Christianity is based on its most fabulous element, the Resurrection; Paul “knows that by holding fast to this point as real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that surrounds it” (4-5). Badiou’s logic is a version of traditional metaphysics’ historical contempt for “merely empirical” experience figured as a burden.

 

5. See, for example, his gloss on Badiou in The Ticklish Subject, which phrases the foundational nature of the void in even more general terms: “There is no Order of Being as a positive ontologically consistent Whole: the false semblance of such an Order relies on the self-obliteration of the Act. In other words, the gap of the Act is not introduced into the Order of Being afterwards: it is there all the time as the condition that actually sustains every Order of Being” (238).

 

6. Perhaps untraumatic relation that respects the rights of the self is unpopular because it has too often been the domain of socially conservative theories of market force. Yet there is nothing necessary, and a great deal that is tense, about the connection of self-respect to capitalism.

 

7. For a defense of Freudian mourning pitched against Lacan, see Ricciardi.

Works Cited

 

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. 1997. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
• — . Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
• Laplanche, Jean. “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem.” Essays on Otherness. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 138-165.
• —. “Seduction, Persecution, Revelation.” Essays on Otherness. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 166-96.
• Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. New York: Vintage, 1998.
• Ricciardi, Alessia. The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• Santner, Eric. On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.