Ghost in the Wire

This is exactly the sort of shit that bugs me to hell and back about Zizek; he's misreading Levinas horribly, perhaps on purpose, perhaps not (does it matter?), a habit far too common with him over the last decade. Levinas explicitly deals with the problem of the third party, what Zizek calls the third, or what Derrida calls the other Other. It's the difference between ethics and justice in Levinas' thinking, and there is no programmatic opposition between the two; indeed, the very fact that one cannot fulfill one's obligation to the face (which is a phenomenological interruption that marks the preeminence of ethics over ontology, and not the "kernel" or core of some Levinasian ethics, much less a conceit by which the other other or third becomes "secondary" for Levinas; it is not necessarily a Real face but rather the Phenomenon of the face, it's innate announcement of alterity, that matters) or to those others others of which one is unaware is precisely the condition of ethicality itself - one must always be(have) ethically and yet one can never be ethical, at least not in any ontological sense.

The only way one can read Levinas as Zizek does is if one stops after Totality and Infinity and never continues on to read Otherwise than Being (or Beyond Essence), which repudiates explicitly some of the remnants of ontological thinking found in the previous work. Hence the distinction between the saying and the said in OTB, a difference that Levinas maps onto his previous use of the face in order to ensure that no one understands the face as simply a physical co-presence or ontological given. For Levinas, once one goes "otherwise than being," and understands that the other simply cannot be understood by the dint of the corporeal other, one turns - oh the shock of it - to language. And in language one finds that the very possibility of saying the other necessarily implies the equal problematic of all the other others that language addresses (the saying) outside of the context and manifesation of a particular address (the said). And so, by the time we get to the end of OTB (pp. 158-162), with his discussion of justice in full swing, Levinas will make clear that:

The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, indivudations of the human race, or chips off the old block... The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.

Now of course, this doesn't respond on point to Zizek since Zizek is enacting a simple bait and switch strategy, maligning Levinas in effect for why it is his conception of ethics cannot ground an ethical politics. Well not surprisingly, Levinas wasn't entirely stupid on this point, and actually addresses it in a number of contexts. Here's an easy and succinct statement of how his thinking would relate to politics (from Entre Nous):

There is a certain measure of violence necessary in terms of justice; but if one speaks of justice, it is necessary to allow judges, it is necessary to allow institutions and the state; to live in a world of citizens, and not only in the order of the Face to Face. But, on the other hand, it is in terms of the relation to the Face or of me before the other that we can speak of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state. A state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible, in which it is directed in advance by the determinism proper to the state, is a totalitarian state. So there is a limit to the state... The other concerns you even when a third does him harm, and consequently you are there before the necessity of justice and a certain violence. The third party isn't there by accident. In a certain sense, all the others are present in the face of the other.

And that's not all. Levinas writes about the Rights of Man and the Right of the Other, discusses the proper, political conception of "peace", and attempts a series of other discussions about justice as the domain of community and the role of the third party. And we don't have to agree with him (and certainly I don't, especially when it comes to his writing on Israel, or his belief that media images of so-called "disaster porn" actually help to expose the face of the other), but we do have to at least interact with these writings if we are to properly assess whether or not Levinas either ignores the Third or relegates him/her to secondary status.

I don't want to be without charity here, because I think Zizek is a smart fellow. And I haven't read the entirety of new Zizek neighbor essay, but I did read Puppet and the Dwarf, which makes very similar unsupportable claims about the problems and impenetrability of the Levinasian Other (all without citing Levinas), but I trust Jodi's rendering of Zizek's argument. So, while I'm open to a more robust defense/articulation by or on behalf of Z, reading the Zizek excerpt above just pisses me off.

And what is really so damn annoying about Zizek's argument here (the one about the secondary third) is that Zizek doesn't need to do it. If one wants to argue that Levinas gives up the ghost on universality, well then by Gods, it's easy enough to do. Levinas might note that universality is made possible by the ethical relation, since there would be no ability to extract and produce a universal without the constitution of the subject via its relation to the other(s) and the debt that it entails, and that the abstraction of Zizek's universal voids the potential for the face-as-interruption and that, as such, the universal isn't a liberation from the other but rather the relegation of the other's (and the other others') specific conditions, and their subsequent sublimation to reason/metaphysics. In other words, Zizek's universal simply reasserts the primacy of the ontological by wishing away any of Levinas' arguments about why ethics precedes and determines ontological possibility. Now one can disagree with Levinas here, and obviously Zizek does, but to pretend as if Levinas hasn't addressed the importance of the third, or has relegated it to secondary status and to present the above as if "and therefore, we must focus on the universal as the only hope of ethics" is, to my mind, evidence of either sloppy critique (in that he can't or won't read) or malicious/predatory critique (in that he relies on his readers to not read the texts he engages).