Romanticism is defined by its "opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values." Tis well known isn't it. iIt is my understanding of Romanticism. Or that Romanticism can be identified as a kind of change (a reaction to a broadly-defined sense of the Enlightenment values, or the historical emergence of "Romantic ideology"), which is in turn constituted as a stable identity; or as an endless, nonteleological process of becoming (Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze).
I'm not sure about the "Romantic ideology". What does that refer to? Self-reflexive autonomy? That art , or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture'? I'm reminded of a remark made by Adorno in Minima Moralia. In considering the viability of cultural criticism, he writes:
Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most long-established and central is that of the lie: that culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of man which does not exist; that it conceals the material conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence. This is the notion of culture as ideology, which appears at first sight common to both the bourgeois doctrine of violence and its adversary, both to Nietzsche and Marx. But precisely this notion, like all expostulation about lies, has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology. (p.5)
Kant's theory of genius - for all its vagueness and lack of philosophical rigor - has been enormously influential. In particular, the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of mind; the link of fine art to a 'metaphysical' content; the requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head of all arts - all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century after Kant. Indeed, when modernists protested (often paradoxically) against the concept of the artist by using 'automatic writing' or 'found objects' it is, for the most part, this concept of the artist-genius that they are reacting against.
As we learn in Philosophy 101 Kant's critical philosophy is fundamental to the development of both knowledge, Romanticism and modernity. In the three Critiques, he distinguishes between the object spheres of knowledge, justice and taste, splitting philosophical enquiry into the three branches of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. It is the aesthetics that drop away in Philosophy 101, rarely to reappear.
What we learn in Philosophy 101 is that between the first two spheres (epistemology and ethics), Kant draws a division that cannot be crossed: he argues that knowledge is bound by the "limits of experience" which cannot be transcended without falling into error, and so makes room for an ethical realm in which human freedom rests upon a "categorical imperative" whose basis lies in an idea of reason that allows no sensible presentation. This separation of knowledge and justice provides the basis of modernity for many.
What then of aesthetics? Whewre does it lie in the architonic of modernity? In Philosophy 202 we are taught that The third Critique, the Critique of Judgement, in which Kant discusses aesthetics and natural teleology, sets out explicitly to form a bridge between the two spheres of epistemology and ethics. The third Critique aims to bring together the realms of epistemology and ethics, reconciling them in a system that will make possible a coherent account of the subject's place in the world.
Now, one of the key questions at stake in many of the debates surrounding modern aesthetics is the success or failure of Kant's bridging enterprise and the status of aesthetic judgement in philosophical thought. I'm more interested in the latter than the former.
What kant bequeaths to us are some central concepts ---- aesthetic reflective judgement, genius, sensus communis, the sublime .
As is well known Kant's conception of the subjective universality of taste lies at the heart of his account of in the way the Critique of Judgement constructs the relationships between taste and cognition, aesthetics and subjectivity. What underpins this is the relationship between aesthetic experience and the objective universality of cognition:
Without being guided by any purpose or principle whatever, this pleasure [of taste] accompanies our ordinary apprehension of an object by means of the imagination, our power of intuition, in relation to the understanding, our power of concepts. This apprehension occurs by means of a procedure that judgement has to carry out to give rise to even the most ordinary experience .... pleasure must of necessity rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions for the possibility of cognition as such, and because the proportion between these cognitive powers that is required for taste is also required for the sound and common understanding that we may presuppose in everyone. (CJ, §39, p. 158-59)
This means that the deduction of aesthetic judgement's universality is achieved only at the cost of a negative definition that posits taste as incomplete knowledge, as a lack in and of knowledge. The conclusion of Kant's deduction in a negative definition of the conditions of aesthetic judgement with respect to cognitive knowledge constructs taste in such a way that it will be irreducible to the systematic knowledge-based thought of modernity, irreducible to questions of truth and falsity.
What we have is a lack-in-knowledge: on the way to knowledge there is a nonknowledge which opens the possibility for knowledge without being reducible to it. The aesthetic provides the subjective conditions of possibility for cognitive knowledge; it shows the way to knowledge, without being knowledge itself.
Puzzling isn't it. Well, I've always been puzzled by it. It is 'sensus communis' - what Kant posits as the common sense ---which grounds the universality of an aesthetic judgement .
In his article on Deleuze and biophilosophy Mark Hanson links Deleuze's work to the concerns of the biological sciences and evolution:
Though they stop short of jettisoning natural selection wholesale, D+G do significantly restrict its function, arguing (with Bergson) that selection forms a purely external principle of difference capable of operating only on constituted forms, that is, at the molar level. That such a principle cannot by itself account for the proliferation of life is well accepted by the majority of contemporary biologists and furnishes one common ground linking biological theory to D+G (and Bergson): in all these cases, some internal or vital principle of differentiation is required. D+G, however, distinguish themselves by their desire to furnish a rigorously molecular account of "evolution" (creative involution). As Ansell-Pearson has noted, the crux of Deleuze's (and later D+G's) transformative appropriation of Darwinism is the insistence (following Gilbert Simondon) that "differentiation presupposes individuation as a field of intensity" and that processes of individuation precede the constitution of individuals and thus "enjoy an independent evolution" (Germinal Life, p. 92). While individuals (organisms) might be the carriers of individual differences, they do not comprise the locus of evolutionary mechanisms: "evolution" (and later, involution) operates directly through processes of individuation.
In his article on Deleuze and biophilosophy Mark Hanson links Deleuze's work to the cognitive and biological sciences. Hanson says:
Why then, the reader may be wondering, my interest--indeed investment--in D+G's biophilosophy? The short answer concerns the sustained and often surprising resonances between their enterprise and the ground-breaking work that has been transforming the cognitive and biological sciences in the last few decades. No other cultural theorist pays anywhere near as much heed to work in science (the relation between philosophy and science is one of the central topics of D+G's final collaboration, What is Philosophy?), which, concretely speaking, means that no other theorist is able to follow and to capitalize upon the sustained break with representationalism that forms a core principle of recent work in cognitive science and neurobiology. D+G's interest in ethology--and indeed in what Keith Ansell-Pearson aptly calls an "ethology of assemblages"--anticipates the recent consensus in cognitive science (including AI) that behavior can only be understood when viewed systemically, i.e., as a component in a larger system or assemblage.
Hanson says that developments in the cognitive and biological sciences have revolutionized our view of the brain, behavior, and evolution, and when hitherto unimagined convergences between humans and machines are transforming the very meaning of life, it is imperative that cultural theory follow suit. He adds:
In the light of these developments, notions of subjectivity, agency, and selfhood can no longer remain anchored in an obsolete representationalism, but must be rethought from the ground up. What D+G's work accomplishes, despite whatever criticisms we may launch against their more radical tendencies, is precisely such a rethinking: eschewing all representationalist models of agency (including theories of performativity which, despite their promises, comprise nothing less than the last bastion of a moribund representationalism), D+G model agency as an emergent process rooted in biology and inseparable from a larger ecological context.
An article by Mark Hanson on Deleuze and biophilosophy, that recognizes and explores the way that biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Hanson says:
Essentially, after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology--Bergson's notion of the elan vital--Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between the biological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. As I shall argue, what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporary science, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual.
The principal difference between lying and denial is that in the case of the former, the self is not epistemically divided against itself; the liar is fully conscious of the contradiction between what is and what is said. In denial, the self is divided such that what is unconsciously known to be true is precisely unavailable to the conscious subject who avers something untrue.
Freud understood the phenomenon of denial as a matter of self-deception. His theory of repression is pivotal in explaining this self-deception with the therapy consisting in bringing of repressed content to consciousness. It is a reworking of the Socratic conception of self-knowledge; one of a self divided against itself that progressively frees itself from its distorted self-conceptions in a journey of self-actualization.
In his Biophilosophy for the 21st Century Eugene Thacker asks a good question; one that bears on some of our postings on Gilles Deleuze. As we come to understand biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy---from his early major work starting from his engagement with Bergson and culminating in Difference and Repetition of 1968, through his collaboration with Felix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially, A Thousand Plateaus of 1980), to his final work on Leibniz and geophilosophy (The Fold, and with Guattari again in What is Philosophy?). This indicates that Deleuze has framed his account of individuation and agency through an evolving critical engagement with evolutionary thinking.
Thacker asks: 'Is biophilosophy simply the opposite of the philosophy of biology? He answers thus:
Whereas the philosophy of biology is concerned with articulating a concept of 'life' that would describe the essence of life, biophilosophy is concerned with articulating those things that ceaselessly transform life. For biophilosophy, life = multiplicity. Whereas the philosophy of biology proceeds by the derivation of universal characteristics for all life, biophilosophy proceeds by drawing out the network of relations that always take the living outside itself. An extrinsic diagram as opposed to intrinsic characteristics. Whereas the philosophy of biology (especially in the 20th century) is increasingly concerned with reducing life to number (from mechanism to genetics), biophilosophy sees a different kind of number, one that runs through life (a combinatoric, proliferating number, the number of graphs, groups, and sets). Whereas the philosophy of biology renews mechanism in order to purge itself of all vitalism ('vitalism' is one of the curse words of biology...), biophilosophy renews vitalism in order to purge it of all theology (and in this sense number is vitalistic).
Biophilosophy is an approach to nonhuman life, nonorganic life, anonymous life, indefinite life -- what Deleuze calls 'a life.' But the trick is to undo conventional biological thinking from within. Biophilosophy focuses on those modes of biological life that simultaneously escape their being exclusively biological life: microbes, epidemics, endosymbiosis, parasitism, swarms, packs, flocks, a-life, genetic algorithms, biopathways, smart dust, smartmobs, netwars -- there is a whole bestiary that asks us to think the life-multiplicity relation.
In his review of Stuart Elden's Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History mentioned here, Ali Muhammad Rizvi says that one should bear in in mind that, for Foucault, there is no single unique present, as there is no single unique past or single unique future. Therefore, there are potentially innumerable histories of the present, as there are innumerable (possible) pasts and futures.
Rizvi says that Foucault sees the present moment, the finitude that encircles us, as "not an end, but the curve and knot of time in which the end is beginning". But there are as many (possible) ends as there are (possible) beginnings. Thus the question of 'our' present arises here. Which present out of the innumerable (potential and actual) presents is 'our' present? The above questioning brings us to the strategic intent of Foucault’s work.
Rizvi adds that:
Foucault’s history of the present is a history of thought... But this history of thought is strategically situated in the context of its 'own history', its 'own present' thatis the history which it owns and to which it belongs. Thus in strategic terms Foucault’s history of thought situates itself in the context of the history of Western thought ... Foucault delimits his pursuits by situating himself in the context of a particular and specific past, present and (particular possible) future(s) Through this situation this history can only be dubbed as the mapping of the present, as Elden rightly points out. But the history of the present is mapping of the present not only because it is a situated history, it is mapping of the present basically and primarily because it is a strategic history, a history aiming at and situated in the context of the modern and Postmodern projects of freedom, what Foucault terms as "seeking to give a new impetus, as far and wide as possible to the undefined work of freedom".. Thus the project of mapping of the present is a project aiming to assess the strategic possibilities inherent in the present. Elden has missed out this strategic side of the Foucauldian project, in my opinion, or a tleast it has not been sufficiently emphasised.
A good book review by Ali Muhammad Rizvi of Stuart Elden's Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History.
Elden's text explores the relationship between Heidegger and Foucault in terms of the way they reconceptualise space and time in wholly non-Cartesian terms. Rizvi says that it has been argued since the eruption of the so-called modernity/postmodernity debate that:
...while modernity consisted in giving priority to time over space, postmodernism reverses this by giving priority to space over time. Elden convincingly dismisses such naive binary oppositions. It is not simply the question of giving priority to space over time. What defines the new way of thinking inaugurated by Heidegger, and carried to new peaks by Foucault, is the question of conceptualising space and time anew and to think of them not exclusively but in relational terms. The new way of thinking inaugurated by Heidegger is relational through and through .... This leads us, according to Elden, to a new conception of history, which is no longer to be seen as an assemblage of events in linear sequence but as spatialised history, a history which uses space not merely as an object of analysis but rather as a tool of historical analysis. While Heidegger confined himself to the reconceptualisation of space and time and their new relation through engaging with thinkers from past and present, Foucault actually wrote spatial histories.
The notion of Augenblick (and the related Einblick) is important for Elden’s strategy for finding a fundamental (primordial?) link that relates Heidegger to Foucault. Through this crucial Heideggerian notion Elden points towards the notion of time as the moment "where future and past collide in the present, as the temporality of the moment" ... According to Elden the Heideggerian notion of time as Augenblick can be linked to Foucault’s history of the present. In two ways at least. The notion of Augenblick portrays time in terms of the moment, now and here (the present) and not in terms of past or future. Of course the 'now' here is a richer 'now' than the ordinary 'now' in the sense that it 'contains' in it both the past and the future in the same fashion in which the notion of 'present' is now reconceptualised to incorporate both past and future...The second reason is that the notion of 'moment' also points towards the spatial side of the present, what Elden calls "the double meaning of present, the temporal and spatial signifier". Thus, according to Elden, because Heidegger reconceptualises the notion of time as 'the moment', i.e. as the present in both a temporal and spatial sense, he paves the way for the Foucauldian notion of the history of the present as the history of the 'now and here'.
Another difficult passage from Rudolph Gasche's paper entitled, “The Eclipse of Difference”. Gasche is talking about Heidegger's distinction between Being and beings. He has already observed that 'if it is true that Being is nothing but the Being of beings, it is also true that, as such, it must be radically different from beings themselves, even from the universe of beings, from being in totality. Above all, Being cannot possess ontic qualifications, and chiefly among them, being in the sense of existence, presence, presence-at-hand.'
He then says:
From the foregoing it ought to be clear that the philosophical concept of difference does not account for the "between" in which one finds that things and species in their difference are already present. Consequently, the question arises: "Where does the 'between'’ come from, into which the difference is, so to speak, to be inserted?"... The difference that this "between" makes isnecessarily more fundamental than all philosophical (logical) or commonplace distinction. Since this difference is presupposed by all difference as distinctionand relation, it must be "older" than distinction and relation. To circle back,then, to the difference between Being and beings, let me note that if this difference were a distinction, it would also apply to a region in which one "finds that Being and beings in their difference are already there." Yet Being is not there in the same way as beings are. If beings are what is, Being refers to the being (in a verbal sense) of beings, to what gives being. The difference between Being and beings is the difference between Being as the horizon whose opening makes it possible for beings to appear within it, and beings as those things which appear and come to stand within that horizon itself (including the manifold relations and differences that go with them). It is a difference between dissimilars, in other words.
In the conclusion to his Viewing Power in Heidegger and LevinasMitchell Verter argues that Levinas’ project in Totality and Infinity is quite similar to Heidegger’s project of constructing a ontological phenomenology in Being and Time. He says that although the terminology often seems cryptic and the sentences often become dizzying, Levinas intends to describe the exact structures of our everyday empirical existence. Verter adds:
Levinas' philosophy attempts to radically reorient my conception of my life. Rather than letting me think of myself as an independent, autonomous entity, Levinas wrenches the center of my life outside of myself. Levinas teaches me just how radically I, at every moment of my life, am radically exposed to the wills of other people. The Other always maintains the capacity to shock me in both delightful and horrifying ways. My openness to the Other explains why I can not shut out another person’s suffering, even if I choose to ignore it. Conversely, this exposure also enables another person to invade my privacy in order to harm me.
Rather, he demonstrates how my interactions with others --- and even my relationship with myself as one who transubstantiates into an Other over time--- will always disrupt my self-assertive will. The Other confronts me as a person whose actions I can't fully predict and whose statements I can’t completely control, yet whose commitments and words directly affect me. Furthermore, the Other seizes my destiny away from myself because he always takes over my projects and my works at the very moment that I project and produce them. Therefore, Levinas demonstrates that, in this post modern age of The Rapture, control will always slip out of our grasp and our will will always be violated by others.
In his The Eclipse of Difference, which I have referred to previously, Rudolph Gasche says that the:
... history of philosophical thought shows that such emancipation [of difference from identity] was always only partial. What takes place from Parmenides to Hegel, and beyond, is a relative liberation in which difference, rather than being effaced in the face of identity, is shown to have its only meaningful place within identity, and to play a constitutive role in the becoming effective of identity, whose priority nonetheless remains unrivaled. But apart from the factual history of philosophy, there are essential reasons that prevent the severing of difference from identity. By abolishing the difference between difference and identity, philosophy would slip back into the nonphilosophical, in short, into a kind of empiricism, in which the power of the manifold and spurious infinity prevail, and where the difference that thinking makes --- the thought of identity ---has not yet emerged. That the bond between identity and difference is an essential bond, and is constitutive of what difference means in philosophy, becomes evident in any careful analysis of the various articulations of difference to be found in the history of philosophical thinking.
Gasche goes on to say that Heidegger conducts an investigation into the very presuppositions of the philosophical concept of difference. Heidegger's elaboration of difference he says:
...is fundamental and radical. It amounts to a foregrounding of the classical concept of difference in a difference more originary, in that it conceptualizes that from which differents come into a relation of standing against one another. It is a thinking of difference on this side of the possible modes that difference as relation can assume, the relation of inversion or reversal included. This is a concept of difference that not only is philosophically more fundamental than the ones evoked hereto, but that truly makes a difference. It is a radical difference, indeed, radical in all the senses of the word: it is marked by considerable departure from the usual or traditional meaning of the term; it is basic and fundamental, growing from, or proceeding from, a root which it constitutes itself.
Update: 10 June
Gasche then asks: What then is the difference that Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings, the ontico-ontological difference, ontological difference, or, in his later works, simply "Dif-ference"? Well I 'm glad that he does because I've always struggled to grasp this myself. I find the distinction elusive. I reckon that I get it, then I lose it. Gasche says that:
Yet, from the beginning, Western thought has also conceived of Being only from the perspective of beings, and with respect to them alone, understanding Being, consequently, as only another, however excellent or superior, being or existent.Well we do think of 'beings' as stand alone individual things or objects (subjects, atoms, sensations) and Being is usually coded as some religious entity, is it not?
Mitchell Verter's succinct account of the relationship between Heidegger and Levinas on vision that I stumbled into here is pretty informative.
Levinas commends fundamental ontology for uprooting the detached viewpoint of classical theoretical philosophy. Heidegger challenges both the Platonic model of a soul that co-exists with eternal ideas and the Cartesian notion of a mental substance detached from empirical facts. For him, each individual exists as a Dasein which is always and already involved in a temporal world. Therefore, Dasein does not merely sit back as a spectator who observes objects. Instead, Dasein's visual modalities commit it towards its world, defining its affectivity and its involvement.
By questioning the classical visual paradigm, Heidegger limits the power of spectatorship. Not only does Heidegger’s analysis of engaged existence demonstrates the limits of theoretical mastery over the world, it also shows that Dasein does not even exert complete control over its own being. Dasein does not inhabit a detached position hovering over phenomena. Therefore, it can never manipulate existence enough to guarantee its absolute mastery. At best, Dasein, as a Being-in-the-World, must authentically accept that temporality, as the forces of heritage and fate, render it unable either to be-a-basis of itself or to control the consequences of the possibilities it projects.
Despite all of his philosophical innovations, Heidegger follows a traditional optical model that subordinates the particular to the universal. Even though Dasein does not internalize an object within its consciousness as a classical subject would, it still views beings by going beyond their specificity in order to envision them in the luminous horizon of Being. So argues Levinas.
Levnas argues that though Heidegger's ontological model goes beyond the individual being to the Being of the being Levinas asserts that this viewpoint ignores the exceptional position of the Other. The general horizon of Being only illuminates certain ways of knowing the Other. The Other’s alterity, his existence as a separate being, remains entirely refractory to vision and possession. Levinas opposes the philosophical motif of visuality and the correlated notion of comprehensive reason by asserting that language conditions the possibility of sight.
Levinas explains that vision finds its limit during the encounter with the visage of the Other. I can not appropriate or exercise power over the Other as if he were either an object internalized by a subject or a revelation of Being. Levinas explains that I cannot grasp the particular Other against a background of universality because of the manner in which the Other manifests himself: I view the Other in his "depth" as an independent being who can see me looking at him. The vision of the Other coincides with an invocation of the Other; I can not know him without already acknowledging him. In this face-to-face confrontation, my visual orientation towards the Other doubles as a linguistic relationship between us. Because I must speak to the individual Other whom I encounter, I can not detach him from his particularity by locating him in a universal horizon. Therefore, the interlocutory Other always remains outside of my comprehension and beyond my power.
Verter helps us to understand why Levinas thinks that it is inappropriate, if not impossible, to try to relate to the Other through the mediation of the light.:
By viewing the Other in the context of Being rather than directly confronting his visage, I violate his alterity. I do not encounter an individual human Other, but rather a being that offers itself for my possession. However, this attempt to dominate the Other through vision ultimately fails. Although one can acquire categorical knowledge pertaining to the Other through sight and consciousness, the Other’s living presence remains refractory to this power. Whereas T&O described the termination of the solitary existent’s power as death, IOF contends that the possession of the Other is only possible as complete negation, as murder. However, even murder can not provide me with an absolute power over the Other. Although a man does possess the actual power to kill another man, this does not make the other man his possession. I can only grasp the Other in the horizon of Being as a set of dead qualities, but can never appropriate his living being. Because even this ultimate attempt of negation never exercises any complete domination over the Other, Levinas states that the Other presents himself as an infinite resistance to my power and my murderous will.
I've just come across the Dif-ferance resource site courtesy of Phillweb. Both are good resources, with the purpose of the former to 'promote scholarship, teaching, and research pertaining to the notion of difference and to publish jointly or independently the Journal "Dif-ferance" among other publications'. Well this can sure help me struggle with difference as otherness as I've come to this material late, with few resources.
My understanding of the issue is that the traditional view of otherness is that it is relative to the same. That is to say, the other is that which is other than the self. This relative view of otherness is remains the standard position the development of Western philosophy from Plato through Heidegger. In the latter half of the 20th century, postmodern philosophy began to challenge this view of otherness. The argument was that the traditional understanding could never encounter the other qua other---and was therefore oppressive, unethical, and violent--and thsi meant that otherness must be met on its own terms, so to speak, rather than defining it in terms of the self. Okay, if the former unduly favors the self does the latter unduly valorizes the other? That is what I'm currently struggling with.
Digging further into the Dif-ferance site I find Rudolph Gasche's The Eclipse of Difference which is a chapter from his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. He reinforces the above history of difference.
Were one to write a general philosophical history of the concept of difference, one might be tempted to view it as the history of the progressive emancipation of difference from identity. Beginning with the Parmenidean conception of pure identity, of Being free of all difference, such a history would document the movement of difference from its position, in Plato, as one pole of a dialectical structure to its acquisition of the dominant role in the constitution of identity, or the Absolute, in German Idealism ..... If at the dawn of philosophical thinking difference scarcely left the shadow of identity, identity now barely shows its face, and, with its departure from the scene, this brand of criticism would seem perhaps to have liberated itself not only from the exigency in Western thought to think of difference and identity in relation to each other, but also from the thought that difference exists only within identity, the One, the whole ---whether or not the concept of difference has been taken up in the concept of the unity of all that is.Well that's how the history of difference presents itself to me or how I've come to understand it. Gasche usefully suggests that Giorgio Vattimo in his Les Aventures de la difference works with this interpretation of what he terms "the thought of difference" in contemporary French philosophy. He says that:
Although Vattimo's target is the doctrine of difference in Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, he approaches this doctrine primarily through the works of the latter's disciples, in particular Bernard Pautrat, Jean-Michel Rey, and Sarah Kofman. As a result, Deleuze and Derrida are portrayed as having developed a theory of difference according to which difference is repressed and forgotten by Western thought. As a follow-up to Heidegger's meditation on the ontological difference, and as a return to Nietzsche's rememoration of an originary difference under the figure of Dionysos, this theory, aimed at bringing difference back, rendering it present again, would demonstrate a way of stepping out of and beyond metaphysics.This account of the hierarchies between concepts or categories of identity and difference troubles me because it just reverses the traditional relationships or duality: instead of identity being dominant it is now difference.
A quote that offers one account of the intertwining of bodies:
The other is my mirror in the sense that it is through the other's bodiy that I am aware of my differences through the tilt of the other's head, the touch of the other's hand, the look in the others eye. But the same mirror confuses my body and the other's: by mimesis and transitivism I tilt my head, touch my hand, and look at myself and cannot easily telll the difference between what I live and what the other lives.That is Rosalyn Diprose paraphrasing Merleau Ponty's The Primacy of Perception in her Corporeal Generosity (p.89) .
I'm not sure. It sounds more like a mother child encounter than one between two adults.
Rosa Braidotti says that:
The nomadic view of ethics takes place within a monistic ontology that sees subjects as modes of individuation within a common flow of Zoe. Consequently there is no self-other distinction in the traditional mode, but variations of intensities, assemblages set by affinities and complex synchronizations. Bio-centred egalitarianism breaks the expectation of mutual reciprocity that is central to liberal individualism. Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual co dependence is what is at stake in nomadic ethics of sustainability. This is against both moral philosophy of rights and the humanistic tradition of making the anthropocentric other into the privileged site and inescapable horizon of otherness.
Braidotti asks:
If the point of ethics is to explore how much a body can do, in the pursuit of active modes of empowerment through experimentation, how do we know when we have gone too far? How does the negotiation of boundaries actually take place? This is where the non-individualistic vision of the subject as embodied and hence affective and inter-relational, but also fundamentally social is of major consequence. Your body will thus tell you if and when you have reached a threshold or a limit. The warning can take the form of opposing resistance; falling ill, feeling nauseous or it can take other somatic manifestations, like fear, anxiety or a sense of insecurity. Whereas the semiotic-linguistic frame of psychoanalysis reduces these to symptoms awaiting interpretation, I see them as corporeal warning signals or boundary markers that express a clear message: “too much!”
This use of kinesis as movement or disturbance that unsettles by Michael Loriaux helps us to makes sense of Levinas' conception of the encounter with, and responsibility to, others. Responsibility is inherent in the initial encounter between persons ---before language or philosophy or law. The obligation to respond depends upon an openness to discourse, in which some modicum of trust must precede any dialogue whatsoever, and an awareness that something within us and critical to our existence is not ours and not reducible to our interests.
There is a disturbing movement here. Loriaux says:
Levinas traces the source of that kinesis to the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, that encounter is lived as an indictment and a threat to the Self’s ontological construction of the world, a construction in which the Self is deeply invested because it renders its world familiar and compliant. The encounter with the Other challenges the Self either to impose some “totalizing” ontology on the Other in defense of his own ontological construction of the world, or to surrender that world to the intrigue of the encounter through the exploration of the Other’s rival construction. Levinas characterizes the openness to exploration as an openness to the “infinite,” which by its ever-receding horizon contrasts with the closing, or narrowing of the horizon of “totality,” or ontological control.
Loriaux continues:
The movement initiated by the encounter with the Other, whether oriented toward totality or infinity, is always violent. In the first instance, it produces a movement to secure the Self’s ontological world, to achieve “domination” as a “work of ontology,” to apprehend the Other not in its individuality but in its generality. In the second instance, it ends in “eschatological vision,” the apperception of new horizons of possibility. That apperception is no less violent because of its power to wrench the Self from its ontological assurance by calling the Self to an attitude of responsibility toward the Other.
There is a strange relationship between poststructuralist ethics in Continental philosophy and the dominant Anglo-American traditions of moral philosophy. For some reason moral philosophy, as a discipline does not score highly in poststructuralist philosophy or in French philosophy as a whole, whilst a lot of Anglo-American moral philosophy is hostile to poststructuralism---the standard charges are relativism and nihilism---and denies its ethical concerns.
Yet ethical concerns abound in poststructuralism: recall Deleuze's ethics of immanence, Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference, Foucault's ethical relationship of care-for-self, and Derrida's and Levinas' emphasis on alterity. These ethical concerns in poststructuralist philosophy indicate that a liberal individualist definition of the subject is seen to hinder the development of new modes of ethical behaviour. Ethics becomes a discourse about forces, desires and values that act as empowering modes of being, whereas morality is the established sets of rules. What we have is a critique of liberal individualism and its replacement by a different, non individual conception of subjectivity.
For instance, the neo-vitalism of Deleuze, with its reference to Bergson Nietzsche and Spinoza, works with a conception of the subject as a radically immanent intensive body, that is an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an 'individual' self. This intensive and dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and to undergo constant, though, non-destructive, fluxes of transformation. It is the body's degrees and levels of affectivity that determined the modes of differentiation. Joyful or positive passions and the transcendence of reactive affects are the desirable mode. The emphasis on 'existence' implies a commitment to duration and conversely a rejection of self-destruction.
It is the deconstruction of the liberal humanist individual that marks a central fault line between Anglo-American moral philosophy and poststructuralist ethics. As one's identity is produced between self and other then the identity of the self becomes dispersed into the other. Hence the shift towards the openess of others.
Levinas ethics are part of an approach that is suspicious of totalizing accounts of a world that are too complex to be reduced to a single point of view--- an example would be an ontology that reduces the other to the same. One does not establish an ethical relation with the Other human individual if the Other is not radically alter (i.e. other-than) to my ego.
The first use of the word ethics in the main text of Totality and Infinity is connected to critique:
A calling into question of the same - which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the same - is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge. And as critique precedes dogmatism metaphysics precedes ontology (TI, p.43)
Being for the other exceeds being for oneself in responding to the other.
Catchy phrase huh? Ethics tied to visual issues is an interesting approach. Doesn't ethics is an optics entails a disturbance of the very language of ethical inquiry?
The phrase 'ethics is an optics' is that of Levinas. It is to be found in the 'Preface' to his Totality and Infinity, and it comes up whilst he is talking about eschatology of peace in relation to war. He is arguing that eschatology:
...institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non -encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality.
Levinas then says that this eschatological 'beyond ' the totality and objective experience is within the totality and history, within experience. It:
...does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but instiyutes a relation within the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. Ther "first" vision of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology that is the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context.The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision ---it consumates this vision; ethics is an optics.
Levians doesn't say much. He simply says that it is vision without image, berefit of the synoptic and totalizing virtues of vision. If the preference for infinity is one that eluded a God's-eye view of the whole what does 'vision without image' mean for the ethical (caring) response to the other in terms of a face -to-face encounter? Keeping one's eyes shut?
Does not Heidegger hold that poetic modes of disclosure posses the capacity to to liberate us from the nihilism of a technological mode of being? Poetic revealing (poesis?) in the latter Heidegger is a way of facing the world ---understood as releasement or letting be--- that stands in opposition to the grasping technological way (Gestell ) of facing the world. Poetic revealing as Gelassenheit points to a mode of conduct or way of being-in-the-world in which action is no legislated by an instrumental reason based on mastery, and points to the possible return to poetic dwelling .
Some argue that this construction of poiesis confronting Gestell, and the rehabilitation of poiesis as a way out of Gestell, or the technological mode of being, effaces praxis understood as phronesis. So Heidegger privileges poiesis over praxis.
Maybe Heidegger reads praxis back into poiesis? Acting as making? Do we need to reject the dominance of poiesis over praxis and refuse to insist on upon praxis in contradistinction to poiesis? Instead of returning to Aristotle we engage in an overcoming of the tradition as undertaken by Nietzsche and Heidegger's critique of metaphysics.