Dear All,
Technology is vexing! Emily E is having trouble posting to the blog, so I'm doing this for her. Once you log on to Blogger, you should be able to post a new topic by clicking on the "new post" button in the top right hand corner of the screen.
Without further ado, here's Emily's post:
I think, to point to the place in the text where Zizek gets most disturbingly explicit, the Muselmann as a "neighbor" "at its most traumatic" could help explain the way "privileging a One as the neighbor" is so extreme or violent.
Zizek first states, "When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, a lack of depth" (161). Thus, the Muselmann is a "neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible" (161).
Zizek then quickly expands this as it opens up for him the "key dilemma" (which I read, although which is probably incorrect or only partial, as the tragedy inherent in the Muselmann being a, orthe neighbor, "with whom no empathetic relationship is possible"): "What if it is precisely in the guise of the "faceless" face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other's call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing the Muselmann, one hits upon one's responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?" (161). I think, to return to your question, Constance, that Zizek is here pointing to the "ethical violence" inherent in "choosing against the face, for the third." The violence, I think, has to do with his idea of what justice means in light of this -- he later writes, "And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it "embedded" in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper" (184). So, my conjecture from this is that the person who tries to focus on the face, which is always faceless, of the Muselmann, is in no position to enact justice, here figured as "an empathetic relationship" that is always already impossible because of the "zero-level" of the Muselmann. The very lack of "depth" in his faceless face negates (our) ability to form a relationship with (this), the other, who "should" make our management of the Other's call to responsibility less traumatic, or achievable via the "contingent umbilical link that renders it "embedded" in a particular situation."
So, would there be "violence" in looking away from the (faceless) face of the Muselmann to the faceless Third (a One as the neighbor)? Yes, but it seems that Zizek is highlighting that the alternative, the explicit lack of justice that created the Muselmann in the first place is a violence that we somehow overlook as violence, because it's not our fault that the Muselmann is faceless, that he "shamelessly...exposes" this lack of depth (171).
And now, I am commenting as myself--heh!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Zizek's comments on the bottom of 175-t 176 might be helpful here. He writes, "When, in Seminar 20, Lacan proposes the formula "Y'a de L'Un" (. . . "There is something of One"), this One is not the One of a harmonious Whole, or the One of some unifying principle, or of the Master-Signifier, but, on the contrary, the One that persists as the obstacle destabilizing every unity." This One is the exception, the excluded one that Reinhard links to the "feminine position" (or "female sexuation) in the Name of the Father. There are, it seems, a number of ways of thinking here about One. Zizek has just given us at least two.
Can this help us parse the knot we were working on when class ended?
This makes sense: these two different ways of thinking about the One are analogous to two ways Zizek defines justice: one is, as Emily says, that based on an "empathetic relationship"--the very thing Santner dismisses as "a kind of charitable, humanitarian assistance program" p109--rooted in particularity and an implacable alterity (a la Levinas); the other is, instead, the faceless Third (Zizek) or feminine sexuation (Reinhard) or an exposure to the proximity of the neighbor enabled by an "uncanny" version of interpellation (Santner). I'm very intrigued by Emily's suggestion that Zizek may well be more invested in exposing the violence we overlook than calling for violent love in itself. That may be key to understanding Zizek's seemingly perverse insistence on glorifying revolutionary violence.
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