The Inhuman Condition

by Visker, Rudi

• ISBN13: 9781402028267
• ISBN10: 1402028261
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-30
• Publisher: Kluwer Academic Pub

Summary

At the origin of this volume, a simple question: what to make of that surprisingly monotonous series of statements produced by our societies and our philosophers that all converge in one theme - the importance of difference?To clarify the meaning of the difference at stake here, we have tried to rephrase it in terms of the two major and mutually competing paradigms provided by the history of phenomenology only to find both of them equally unable to accommodate this difference without violence. Neither the ethical nor the ontological approach can account for a subject that insists on playing a part of its own rather than following the script provided for it by either Being or the Good. What appears to be, from a Heideggerian or Levinasian perspective, an unwillingness to open up to what offers to deliver us from the condition of subjectivity is analysed in these pages as a structure in its own right. Far from being the wilful, indifferent and irresponsive being its critics have portrayed it to be, the so-called 'postmodern' subject is essentially finite, not even able to assume the transcendence to which it owes its singularity. This inability is not a lack - it points instead to a certain unthought shared by both Heidegger and Levinas which sets the terms for a discussion no longer our own. Instead of blaming Heidegger for underdeveloping 'being-with', we should rather stress that his account of mineness may be, in the light of contemporary philosophy, what stands most in need of revision. And, instead of hailing Levinas as the critic whose stress on the alterity of the Other corrects Heidegger's existential solipsism, the problems into which Levinas runs in defining that alterity call for a different diagnosis and a corresponding change in the course that phenomenology has taken since. Instead of preoccupying itself with the invisible, we should focus on the structures of visibility that protect us from its terror.The result? An account of difference that is neither ontological nor ethical, but 'mè-ontological', and that can help us understand some of the problems our societies have come to face (racism, sexism, multiculturalism, pluralism). And, in the wake of this, an unexpected defence of what is at stake in postmodernism and in the question it has refused to take lightly: who are we? Finally, an homage to Arendt and Lyotard who, if read through each other's lenses, give an exact articulation to the question with which our age struggles: how to think the 'human condition' once one realizes that there is an 'inhuman' side to it which, instead of being its mere negation, turns out to be that without which it would come to lose its humanity?

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	x
Introduction — Talking 'bout My Generation	1	(22)
Part I LOOKING FOR DIFFERENCE
Chapter 1 Levinas, Multiculturalism and Us	23	(17)
1. The Political Approach and Its Implicit Metaphysics	24	(5)
2. The Ethical Approach and Its Explicit Metaphysics	29	(5)
3. A Question of Attachments	34	(6)
Chapter 2 In Respectful Contempt. Heidegger, Appropriation, Facticity	40	(19)
1. In the Margins of Thought	42	(2)
2. Relativism, Scepticism, Historicism	44	(2)
3. Appropriating Heidegger After Foucault	46	(3)
4. Being Held (Up)	49	(3)
5. Just How Naked Is Dasein's 'That'?	52	(7)
Chapter 3 Whistling in the Dark. Two Approaches to Anxiety	59	(20)
1. Anxiety and Fear	59	(5)
2. Heidegger's Approach to Anxiety	64	(5)
3. The 'Security Paradox'	69	(4)
4. Anxiety in a Pluralistic Society	73	(6)
Part II AFTER LEVINAS
Chapter 4 The Price of Being Dispossessed. Levinas' God and Freud's Trauma	79	(33)
1. A Discomfort That Liberates?	82	(4)
2. The Proximity of the Other	86	(3)
3. Responsibility Is Misplaced	89	(4)
4. Affects Without Context	93	(6)
5. A Shock Without Affect	99	(7)
6. Ex Nihilo, an Other Scene	106	(6)
Chapter 5 The Mortality of the Transcendent. Levinas and Evil	112	(30)
1. Transcendence and Exteriority	115	(3)
2. Two Paths in Metaphysics: From God to the Face and From the Face to God	118	(8)
3. An Invitation or a Command?	126	(6)
4. A Passio in Distans	132	(10)
Chapter 6 Is Ethics Fundamental? Questioning Levinas on Irresponsibility	142	(47)
1. Some Technicalities: The Privative Negation	143	(2)
2. Levinas' Ambivalence Toward Privation	145	(4)
3. Responsibility, in a Very Small Nutshell	149	(2)
4. The Face — Not an Obstacle, but the Secret Aim of My Desire	151	(6)
5. A Naturalization of the Other?	157	(7)
6. A Confusion of Tongues?	164	(4)
7. Not Leaving Oneself	168	(5)
8. Beyond "Help" — The Logic of Appreciation	173	(7)
9. "Not Without" Qualities — Racism Reconsidered	180	(9)
Part III AFTER HEIDEGGER
Chapter 7 Intransitive facticity? A Question to Heidegger	189	(46)
1. Untranslatably My Own	194	(4)
2. Undoing Dasein's Self-Defence	198	(4)
3. Talking Oneself Out of It'	202	(4)
4. The World – A First Liberation	206	(4)
5. The Message of Boredom	210	(5)
6. Does Boredom Truly Have a Message?	215	(7)
7. Between the Tines of a Fork	222	(6)
8. Intransitive Facticity, the Pre-History of The Primacy of Ethics'	228	(7)
Chapter 8 Demons and the Demonic. Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Anxiety and Sexual Difference	235	(20)
1. Being Unable to Die	237	(2)
2. Silence, Fear and Trembling	239	(4)
3. Not Nothing – Anxiety and Pudency	243	(7)
4. Adam's 'Passing Into the Act'	250	(2)
5. A Mute Transcendence	252	(3)
Chapter 9 Dissensus Communis. How to Keep Silent "After" Lyotard	255	(29)
1. The Fissure	260	(7)
2. A Conceptual Shift	267	(3)
3. Sorrow or Care – "After" the "Death" of "God"	270	(14)
Conclusion In Search of Visibility	284	(17)
Acknowledgements	301