PHI 408 Existentialism

Final written assignment: Due the day and time of the final exam

“The Impossible in Levinas and Derrida”

Reflect on the status of the impossible in the work of Levinas and of Derrida that we have addressed in our class.

First, in the case of Levinas, consider an analogy between the ecstasis that links Heidegger and Sartre (the treatment of ecstasis that concluded your last paper), and Levinas’s notion of a selfhood that is an ethical relation to an Other; an other whose face is always what leads is beyond in infinite transcendence: “It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond” (L 86-87, my emphasis). We are, as Levinas states, “hostage” to the other through this structure of subjectivity as responsibility.  Our responsibility for the other is nonreciprocal. (L 98) Then, make a transition to the “impossible” nature, for Levinas, of that very responsibility. Such a responsibility is “impossible” in the sense that it can never be complete.  As Levinas writes in the essay “Substitution,” “To be a “self” is always to have one degree of responsibility more.” (91) In addition to the responsibility that the future holds for us, there is a responsibility that precedes us: “Without ever having done anything, I have always been under accusation: I am persecuted.” (89) I am, he writes, “Obsessed with responsibilities which do not result from a ‘freely contemplating’ subject…” (88) Levinas rejects the traditional conception of the ego as a discrete deliberative agency. “The ego,” he writes, “ is a not a being which is capable of expiating for others; it is this original expiation which is involuntary.” (91) The assumption of such a responsibility does not come, for Levinas, from a deliberative, calculating subject, but takes place in a displacing passivity that is the impossibility anterior to possibility. (95)

In the case of Derrida’s text, “On Forgiveness, ” Derrida writes that when forgiveness “aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological), by work of mourning…then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure.” Forgiveness, he continues,  “is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible, as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.” (31-32) What does Derrida mean by the impossible? Perhaps it is indicated in the following formulation: “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.” (32-33) Derrida writes: “Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition?... Even if this radical purity can seem excessive, hyperbolic, mad!  Because if I say, as I think, that forgiveness is mad, that it must remain a madness of the impossible, this is certainly not to exclude or disqualify it.” (39) In this context Derrida rejects forgiveness as a matter of  “negotiations… with calculated transactions…” (39) In the case of crimes against humanity, Derrida asks, “who would have the right to forgive in the name of the disappeared victims?” (45)

 In your conclusion reflect on how the impossible, or even the unthinkable, becomes the topos if not the condition of the possibility of an “ethics”?  What other texts and themes from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, would lead us to such a topos? What finally would be the “meaning” of such a ethics?  Derrida insists that a “pure and unconditional meaning, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.” (45) Forgiveness, he writes, “must plunge, but lucidly, into the night of the unintelligible.” (49) Derrida asserts that such an “hyperbolic ethical vision” is the “condition of responsibility.” (51)

You are required to discuss an early version (first draft) of the essay with me. Students will present their essays (oral presentations) at the final class for discussion. The final paper should be approximately 5-6 pages in length, typed and double spaced.

Additional passages for consideration from Levinas and Derrida:

LEVINAS (from "Substitution")

“Of course, the notion of the subject to which the analysis of proximity leads us does not coincide with the notion of Mind, but the notion of soul does not correspond either.” (94)

“The word “I” means to be answerable for everthing and everyone.
In this substitution whereby identity is inverted, a passivity more passive still than all passivity, beyond the passivity of the identical, the self is freed from itself.” (90)

“Responsibility for the other does not wait for the freedom of commitment to the other.” (89)

“…prior to every will, the obsessional accusation is a persecution. It strips the Ego of its self-conceit and its dominating imperialism.” (88)

DERRIDA (from "On Forgiveness")

“A ‘finalised’ forgiveness is not forgiveness; it is only a political strategy or psycho-therapeutic economy” (50)

“…in order to change the law…it is necessary to refer to a ‘”hyperbolic” ethical vision of forgiveness’. Even ig I were not sure of the words ‘vision’ or ‘ethics’ in this case, let us say that only this inflexible exigence can orient a history of laws, and evolution of the law. It alone can inspire here, now, in the urgency, without waiting, response and responsibilities.” (51)

“We can imagine, and accept, that someone would never forgive, even after a process of acquittal or amnesty. The secret of this experience remains. It must remain intact, inaccessible to law, to politics, even to morals: absolute.  …it is necessary… to respect the secret…which exceeds the political or that which is no longer in the juridical domain.” (55)