We're all in this together. But how?

One thing we know for sure: when you've got psychoanalytically-inclined folk talking about neighbor love, they are going to insist that jouissance has something to do with it. This is worth noting because both Judaism and Christianity might suggest that neighbor love has more to do with emotions we might link to obligation or non-passionate versions of love associated in Christianity with caritas or agape. Whatever else we think of Reinhard and Zizek, it's fair to say that they talk a lot about the fierce pleasure-pain of neighbor love. So Reinhard talks about how destabilizing neighbor love is, and whether we should talk about the neighbor as a woman, and Zizek insists on the violence of neighbor love. Santner seems tame by contrast, and not especially interested in the nature of neighbor love, or how or why it is we might feel love for the neighbor. He is, as Scott suggests, focused instead on the role of God or divine love. What follows is my attempt to clarify what Santner leaves out by leaving out jouissance.

If I understand Santner correctly, neighbor love is a love that is no longer tied to "'mere' object cathexis" and "a representation" (133). What enables this love? It is not, I think, the same as agape or the oblatory love we associate with "giving one's individuality over to a higher unity, cause, ideal or totality (124)." Santner doesn't endorse this version of Christian love associated with agape (and advocated, as Anders Nygren famously argued, most strongly by Martin Luther). With Rosenzweig, Santner argues instead that divine love enables a love that moves from one particularity to another, from one particular neighbor to another. We need (a postsecular version of) God and theological thinking because otherwise we just try to worm our way out of psychic trauma and the hold of convention by celebrating an undifferentiated love or thinking of ourselves as exceptional, trying to forge our own path. So Santner doesn't want (and doesn't think we can have) Luther's god, who dismisses the importance of our love and instead transforms us into vessels of divine love. And he doesn't want (and doesn't think we can have) the god who punished Moses and Aaron and the Israelites (84). Instead he seems to suggest that we have the God of some sort of communal commitment to suspending the fantasy of self-sufficiency and social stability or of obedience and its alternative.

But Santner has much less to say than either Reinhard or Zizek about what the neighbor looks like, how we perceive the neighbor, or even how we might encounter the neighbor. We should be "exposed to the proximity of the neighbor" "without restraint" (131). But why and how would "suspending the obscene libidinal investment in the Law" compel us to be more open to the neighbor? If we were going to play this out, it would be really tempting to think that premodern societies or alternative societies (think of something like our fantasies of the Amish in the U.S. today) are more neighborly than mainstream u.s. society can be. There are some obvious problems with romanticizing premodern or religious societies in this way. But otherwise, we have to do the work that Santner doesn't seem to do here, of figuring out how others (whether as the "other" or "the neighbor", the 2 or the 3) are implicated in our libidinal investments. Or, to put it a bit differently, can Santner help us understand the following question: what is it about our psychic make-up that makes the neighbor matter, anyway?