In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A p T E R 2 B A T A I l l E ’ S S U N A N D T H E E T H I C A l A B y S S Late-Night thoughts on the Problem of an Affirmative Biopolitics Nazism treated the German people as an organic body that needed a radical cure, which consisted in the violent removal of a part that was already considered spiritually dead. from this perspective and in contrast to communism (which is still joined in posthumous homage to the category of totalitarianism), Nazism is no longer inscribable in the self-preserving dynamic of both the early and later modernities; and certainly not because it is extraneous to immunitary logic. On the contrary, Nazism works within that logic in such a paroxysmal manner as to turn the protective apparatus against its own body, which is precisely what happens in autoimmune diseases. —Roberto Esposito, Bíos TODAy IS THE FIRST DAy of the rest of your strife. In thinking about ethics we come up against some of the most difficult problems. One person ’s righteous indignation is another’s reactionary oppression. The citizen ’s free speech can be the government’s hate speech. The model’s sexy furs are PETA’s incontrovertible evidence of animal slaughter. Your nice iPhone may entail child labor, environmental degradation, and a Chinese worker’s exploitation. Even the seemingly innocent sweep of a linoleum countertop may represent,from another level,microbial genocide .When this example was brought up before a roomful of students in Danville, Kentucky, in the context of a discussion of life’s extent in the context of, among other things, abortion, many in the class raised their 34 f R O M “ p R O T O z O A N ” T O p O S T H u M A N hands when asked if they believed microorganisms were not alive. For a sperm and an egg cell, fertilized or not, do not look that different from many microbes. Do they have feelings? Is the male masturbator guilty of wanton destruction of human life? The vegetarian (and Adolf Hitler was one) may think eating meat is murder, but thinks nothing of flying to an environmental conference,thereby adding to global warming that may trigger a wholesale climate collapse. Still others would argue that wiping humankind off the face of the Earth in the long run may be just what the biosphere needs to keep going. Somewhere Jacques Derrida writes that all of his work amounts to nothing but graffiti on the base of the monument that is the work of the rabbinical religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas. A friend of Maurice Blanchot and who at first admired Martin Heidegger, Levinas last century recognized that there is no possibility for a prescriptive ethics, a Mosaic tablet of writs set in stone that will guide us as to conduct, what is right to do, as we make our way through the ethical darkness. We need instead a descriptive ethics; we must engage with the other as other, falling without parachute through an abyss without bottom. The pointing finger has three fingers pointing back at the accuser. We have moral dyslexia. Who can guide us? For Levinas, it may be God, or what is left of him after Friedrich Nietzsche. We must be there with the face of the other, accountable, responsible to it. I read large sections of Levinas ’s Totality and Infinity, and I thought this idea of grounding ethics in the face, before the face of the other, was a fascinating idea. I was in a rush to apply, to appropriate it. I did so, naively no doubt,1 to the face of Earth so that we might have ethical accountability toward the planet, our mother, the biogeochemical matrix from which the flesh of our body comes but also the environment we co-opt and infect in our nonstop proliferation.There is a cool painting that shows a lunar-landed astronaut, the blue Earth reflecting off his visor, obscuring and replacing his face. The Levinasian ethics of the face also seemed to touch on the lack of accountability in technowarfare, dropping bombs on those we don’t see, death at a distance. Recently, however, I learned (during a lecture by Cary Wolfe, the editor of the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series) that Levinas didn’t even consider animals to have a face. That was strange. Animals don...

Share