Kelly Pender

Rhetoric and Composition Program
English Department
Purdue University
penderk@purdue.edu

 

Review of: Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso, 1999.

 

In his latest collection of essays, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, Simon Critchley extends and modifies the discussion of deconstruction and ethics that he put forward in his earlier book, The Ethics of Deconstruction. Like that earlier work, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity examines the nature–or rather, the possibility–of ethics and politics after (or during) deconstruction in relation primarily to the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. In contrast to his position in the earlier book, however, Critchley’s reading or assessment of Levinasian ethics in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity is, as he puts it, “a critical reconstruction” (ix). Specifically, he extends, deepens, and modifies his arguments about the “persuasive force” of Levinasian ethics in regard to deconstruction. One way of reading Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (a way that Critchley seems to encourage in the preface) is to see the culmination of this consideration of the subject in his affirmation of the political possibilities of deconstruction (chapter 12).

 

However, because Critchley investigates subjectivity outside the issues of deconstruction and politics, it would be unfortunate to read his essays strictly in terms of such a culmination. For instance, his discussions of subjectivity, ethics, sublimation, and art in “The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis” (chapter 8) and in “Das Ding: Lacan and Levinas” (chapter 9) provide a reconstruction (or an additional reading) of Levinasian ethics outside of the question of politics. In addition, and more importantly in regard to the aims of this review, Critchley’s careful treatment of subjectivity distinguishes Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity from a number of “postmodern” treatises on the subject. It is, I think, this carefulness (which is enacted as much as it is expressed) that makes the strongest case for the political possibilities of deconstruction.

 

When I say “postmodern” treatises on the subject, I am referring to the work in a number of fields (e.g., literary theory, rhetoric and composition, and cultural studies) that takes for granted the dissolution of the humanist subject, declares its epiphenomenal status, and then celebrates postmodernism’s victory over the Enlightenment, or homo rhetoricus‘s victory over homo seriosus, often taking for granted the ascendancy of ethics over politics. Often these arguments contend that politics are based on the assumption that humans are free to deliberate on issues, to express opinions, and take collective action. However, since the means of reaching consensus are always already predetermined by hegemonic, capitalistic forces, the political endeavor–as traditionally understood, for example, in terms of various ideologies of the Enlightenment–is a doomed endeavor. It is on this basis that some scholars attempt to distinguish the ethical from the political, and in doing so advocate new modes of subjectivity or post-subjectivity–for instance, following Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic or rhizomatic modes; following Baudrillard, the seductive mode; and following Gorgias, the sophistic mode. In fact, it is the question of subjectivity that seems to drive these arguments; that is, the exigency for their discussion of ethics and politics is the dissolution of the humanist subject. While I do not want to imply that such arguments are simplistic or unwarranted (since Quintilian’s “good man speaking well” is indeed alive and thriving), I do want to suggest that this exigency potentially leads to totalizing conceptions of the subject, or, conversely, of the dissolution of the subject, as well as problematic conceptions of the relationship between ethics and politics.

 

It is precisely this exigency that Critchley problematizes in his third chapter, “Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity.” By turning Heidegger’s critique of Husserl (and Descartes) back onto Heidegger, Critchley explores the possibility of a conception of the subject outside of metaphysics. Specifically, he argues that the very grounds that distinguish Dasein from a contemplative subject (the openness to the call to Being) can be read metaphysically, which is to say that they can be read as modes of authentic selfhood. “It is Dasein,” he claims, “who calls itself in the phenomenon of conscience, . . . and the voice of the friend that calls Dasein to its most authentic ability to be . . . is a voice that Dasein carries within it” (58). Based on this Heideggerian argument, then, there is no subject outside of metaphysics. From this position, Critchley questions the history and the presuppositions entailed in the idea of a post-metaphysical subject. Among these presuppositions, he contends, is the idea that we have achieved an “epochal break in the continuum of history.” “For reasons that one might call ‘classically’ Derridian,” he continues, “all ideas of exceeding the metaphysical closure should make us highly suspicious, and the seductive illusions of ‘overcoming’, ‘exceeding’, ‘transgressing’, ‘breaking through’, and ‘stepping beyond’ are a series of tropes that demand careful and persistent deconstruction” (59).

 

Indeed, Critchley finds problematic the very argument that there was a metaphysical res cogitans, a subject of representation, in Descartes’s work–a paradigmatic case and a key starting point in the history of the idea of the unified subject. It is because this unified self has been retrospectively projected onto all conceptions of the subject since Descartes that Critchley sees the history of modern philosophy as (in part) “a series of caricatures or cartoon versions of the history of metaphysics, a series of narratives based upon a greater or lesser misreading of the philosophical tradition” (60). “Has there ever existed a unified conscious subject, a watertight Cartesian ego?” he asks (59).

 

Although Critchley’s response to the question is “no,” he does not advocate a pre-Heideggerian conception of the subject, the subject that is outside metaphysics. In other words, Critchley argues, following John Llewelyn, that we must seek a conception of the subject that tries to avoid the metaphysics of subjectivity without falling into the metaphysical denial of metaphysics (73). Critchley finds this attempt in Levinasian ethics–in its nuanced account of metaphysics, subjectivity, and the relation between subjective experience and the other. For Critchley, what’s most important in Levinasian ethics is the shift from intentionality to sensing, which is to say the shift from representation to enjoyment. As Critchley puts it, “Levinas’s work offers a material phenomenology of subjective life. . . . The self-conscious, autonomous subject of intentionality is reduced to a living subject that is subject to the conditions of its existence” (63). It is because of this sentience that the I is capable of being called into question by the other. The I, in fact, is more accurately a me in Levinasian ethics and subjectivity in that the subject is subject precisely because it (its freedom) undergoes the call of the other. According to Critchley, then, the (post-) Levinasian conception of the subject does not react conservatively to the poststructuralist or antihumanist critique of subjectivity by trying to rehabilitate the free, autarchic ego (70). Rather, it needs these discourses in order to conceive of the subject as non-identical, overflowed, and dependent on that which is it incapable of knowing. “Levinasian ethics,” Critchley contends, “is a humanism, but it is a humanism of the other human being” (67).

 

In the final section of the essay, Critchley argues that the Levinasian conception of the sentient, ethical subject is very close to the kind of postdeconstructive subjectivity sought by Derrida. According to Critchley, Derrida has called for a “new determination of the ‘subject’ in terms of responsibility, of an affirmative openness to the other prior to questioning” (71). While Critchley does not suggest that Derrida is referring only or directly to Levinas’s conception of the subject, he does stress the consonance between the subject that is formed by non-comprehensible experience of the other and the postdeconstructive subject alluded to by Derrida. He claims, for instance, that the determination of the Levinasian subject “takes place precisely in the space cleared by the anti-humanist and post-structuralist deconstruction of subjectivity” (73). What’s more, according to Critchley, is that Levinas offers a metaphysical account of ethics and the subject while simultaneously displacing and transforming metaphysical language. For example, in Levinas’s work, “ethics” is transformed to mean “a sensible responsibility to the singular other”; “metaphysics” becomes “the movement of positive desire tending towards infinite alterity,” and “subjectivity” is “pre-conscious, non-identical sentient subjection to the other” (75). As a result of these conceptual shifts, he argues, the Levinasian subject avoids predeconstructive metaphysics, or intentionality, without attempting a Heideggerian denial of metaphysics.

 

In “Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?” (chapter 4), Critchley moves away from a direct discussion of subjectivity in order to consider the political/public potentialities of deconstruction. Specifically, by taking issue with Richard Rorty’s classification of Derrida as a private ironist, he articulates a connection between Rorty’s conceptions of the public and the liberal ironist and Derrida’s conception of justice and thereby argues for the public value of deconstruction. Critchley begins this argument by problematizing the grounds upon which Rorty’s classification of Derrida depends. For Rorty, Critchley explains, Derrida is a private ironist because his projects have become individualized projects of self-creation or self-overcoming–they have become non-argumentative, oracular discourses that do not address the problems of social justice (95). In Critchley’s view, Rorty’s claim (his developmental thesis) depends upon a reductive periodization of Derrida’s work, as well as a foundational conception of argument or public discourse. Moreover, Critchley argues that what Rorty has observed is not a change in the public significance of Derrida’s work, but rather a shift “from a constative form of theorizing to a performative mode of writing, or, in other terms, from meta-language to language” (96).

 

What ultimately problematizes Rorty’s classification, however, is the connection that Critchley sees between Rorty’s definition of public liberal and Derrida’s conception of justice. For Rorty, the public is defined as that which is concerned with “‘the suffering of other human beings’, with the attempt to minimize cruelty and work for social justice” (85). According to Critchley, this definition of the public (of liberalism) attempts to ground the criterion for moral obligation in a “sentient disposition that provokes compassion in the face of the other’s suffering” (90). This criterion, he continues to argue, is found in Levinasian ethics–it is the ethical relation to the other that takes place at the level of sensibility. In addition, this criterion is found in Derrida’s conception of justice. As Critchley explains it, “Derrida paradoxically defines justice as an experience of that which we are not able to experience, which is qualified as ‘the mystical’, ‘the impossible’, or ‘aporia’ . . . an ‘experience’ of the undecidable” (99). And for Derrida, it is the experience of justice–of the unknowable–that propels one forward into politics. Critchley is careful not to suggest that Derrida locates justice in politics. To the contrary, Derrida believes that no political decision can embody justice; however, no political should be made without passing through the aporia–the face to face–of justice. Critchley concludes, then, that “what motivates the practice of deconstruction is an ethical conception of justice, that is, by Rorty’s criteria, public and liberal” (102).

 

While he certainly does not collapse the distinction between ethics and politics in this chapter, Critchley, through his interpretation of Derrida’s conception of justice, does cast doubt upon any kind of ethics/politics polemic. Put another way, I think that by destabilizing Rorty’s private/public distinction, Critchley opens up a space in which notions such as the “post-political” can be examined and possibly understood in light of more nuanced accounts of deconstruction. Moreover, Critchley’s argument for a Levinasian conception of subjectivity as the ethical basis of deconstruction (even if it is a more cautious or reconstructed argument) calls into question the kinds of subjectivity (schizophrenic, sophistic, etc.) that some scholars see as part and parcel of the poststructuralist deconstruction of the subject. Like Critchley, many of these scholars theorize a new kind of politics that comes after the ethical experience, after the deconstructive aporia. Requisite to experiencing this aporia, however, is a kind of Dionysian or Deleuzian subjectivity–an unhinging of desires or an experience of the multiple within the individual. The problem here, and it is a problem well illuminated in chapter 3, is that in the space left by the exiled humanist, metaphysical subject, these kinds of arguments insert yet another metaphysical subject. In other words, this subject, as well as the ethics derived from it, is something we can know and control–something that we can enact or release at the level of language by obfuscating meaning, identity, and representation. As a result, the aporia is playfully characterized as a utopian dimension of discourse–or worse, as an intellectual enterprise in which one can participate through self-reflexive, parodic, paradoxical, and digressive ways of writing. And it is by virtue of this characterization that the subject, it seems, is once again reduced to representation.

 

Critchley takes up this issue of representation, or thematization, in his discussion of Levinasian ethics and psychoanalysis in chapter 8, “The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis.” Here Critchley argues that Levinas attempts to articulate the relation to the other in a series of “termes éthiques“: accusation, persecution, obsession, substitution, hostage, and trauma (184). Like Levinas, Critchley points out that this attempt is an attempt to thematize the unthematizable; it is a phenomenology of the unphenomenologizable (184). Quite contrary to Levinas, however, Critchley sees this language as indicative of a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. Of particular interest to Critchley is Levinas’s use of the term “trauma.” He writes, “Levinas tries to thematize the subject that is, according to me, the condition of possibility for the ethical relation with the notion of trauma. He thinks the subject as trauma–ethics is a traumatology” (185).

 

Critchley’s question to Levinas (a question which he admits is in opposition to Levinas’s intentions) is: “What does it mean to think the subject–the subject of the unconscious–as trauma?” (188). To begin with, according to Critchley, thinking the Levinasian subject as trauma means that the ethical relation “takes place at the level of pre-reflective sensibility and not at the level of reflective consciousness” (188). More specifically, and based on the “Substitution” chapter of Otherwise than Being, Critchley writes that the subject as trauma is a subject utterly responsible for the suffering that it undergoes–it is a subject of persecution, outrage, and suffering. He later describes this original traumatism as a deafening traumatism, as “that towards which I relate in passivity that exceeds representation, i.e. that exceeds the intentional act of consciousness, that cannot be experienced as an object” (190). “In other terms,” he continues, “the subject is constituted–without its knowledge, prior to cognition and recognition–in a relation that exceeds representation, intentionality, symmetry, correspondence, coincidence, equality and reciprocity, that is to say, to any form of ontology, whether phenomenological or dialectical” (190).

 

Despite Levinas’ resistance to psychoanalytic theory, Critchley believes that his conceptions of the subject and the ethical relation depend on, to put it in Lacanian terms, “a relation to the real, through the non-intentional affect of jouissance, where the original traumatism of the other is the Thing, das Ding” (190). Without this notion or mechanism of trauma, Critchley claims, there would be no ethics in the Levinasian sense of the word (195). Taking this connection further, he writes that “without a relation to trauma, or at least without a relation to that which claims, calls, commands, summons, interrupts or troubles the subject . . . there would no ethics, neither an ethics of phenomenology, nor an ethics of psychoanalysis” (195). Finally, foreshadowing his argument in chapter 12, Critchley contends that without this ethical relation, one could not conceive a politics that would refuse the category of totality. It is the absence of this ethical relation–this passivity towards the other–that seems to limit, if not debilitate, so many other recent discussions of ethics, politics, and subjectivity.

 

In chapter 12, “The Other’s Decision in Me (What are the Politics of Friendship?),” Critchley focuses primarily on the question of a non-totalizing politics, positioning his previous discussions of subjectivity as a context for his argument. As he explains early in the essay, through a reading of Blanchot’s Friendship, as well as a reading of Derrida’s reading of Blanchot in The Politics of Friendship, Critchley examines this question in regard to Derrida’s recent Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. By way of this discussion of friendship, and its relation to the public and the private and to politics, Critchley argues that despite the connections between Derrida’s conception of “sur-vivance” (his attempt to think a nontraditional conception of the passive decision of friendship that is linked to mortality) and Levinas’s ethical relation to the other, there is an important distance between Derrida’s work and that of Levinas. Critchley sees this distance as the result of five problems in Levinas: (1) the idea of fraternity, (2) the question of God, (3) his androcentric conception of friendship, (4) the relation of friendship to the “family schema,” and (5) the political fate of Levinasian ethics in regards to the question of Israel (273-74).

 

With these problems in mind, Critchley goes on to provide a positive reading of Derrida’s position on politics in Adieu. According to Critchley, although Derrida recognizes the gap in Levinas’s work in regard to the path from the ethical to the political, he does not read it as paralysis or resignation. On the contrary, this hiatus, says Critchley, “allows Derrida both to affirm the primacy of an ethics of hospitality, whilst leaving open the sphere of the political as a realm of risk and danger” (275). It is this danger that allows for what Derrida refers to as “political invention”–an invention or creation that arises from “a response to the utter singularity of a particular and inexhaustible context” (276). Critchley then describes this response as both non-foundational and non-arbitrary–which is to say that it is a response that is both unknowable and passive. It is in this respect that Critchley relates political invention to Derrida’s nontraditional conception of friendship, his notion of “the other’s decision is made in me” (277). In summary Critchley writes that “what we seem to have here is a relation between friendship and democracy, or ethics and politics . . . which leaves the decision open for invention whilst acknowledging that the decision comes from the other” (277).

 

As I have argued throughout this review, it is the acknowledgment of the other that distinguishes Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity from so many other works on subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Without this acknowledgment, that is, without being affected by a consideration of the incomprehensible or unthematizable, these works risk a kind of totality–they risk saying what the subject is (a fragmented stream of desires) and what it isn’t (a unified, coherent self). That they can know undermines their discussions of the other, reducing it at times to a trope. This is not to say that all discussions of subjectivity, ethics, and politics must be Levinasian. However, since they tend to use this term, “other,” in addition to many Derridian terms, in order to wage war on metaphysics, the Enlightenment, and humanism, it seems that closer readings of deconstruction, subjectivity, ethics, and politics are called for. Critchley has begun to answer that call.

 

Work Cited

 

• Llewelyn, John. The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger, and Others. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1991.