Ethics at a Standstill: History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School

Six. The Sense of Hope

305 SIX The Sense of Hope From the Surplus of the Social to Surplus Morality Negative Dialectics, as we have seen, conveys the impression that a changed philosophy calls for a new categorical imperative , that receptivity to the preponderance of the object implies not only the failure of the power of identification, but my guilt of what I am thinking. But we have also seen that it would be more accurate to think the possibility of negative dialectics as arising from the presumption that the extreme development of natural history (issuing in, for example, Auschwitz) gives the experience of Schuld, making that guilt/responsibility/debt radical enough to allow for the possibility that the dialectic of enlightenment might come to consciousness. How else could identity come to a determinate negation not of this or that scheme of identification, this or that rationality, but of itself? Does identity not need an object lesson in extremis to recognize itself for what it is? Yet negative dialectics remains ambiguous with respect to the question of whether the subject is to be removed from its throne by its continuous failure, according to its own criteria, to constitute through identification, or by the appeal of the absolutely external in the surplus of the social relation. Negative dialectics all but knows yet cannot say that it must look beyond the preponderance of the object, to the relation with the Other, if identity is not to recover itself, if the Same is not 306 Ethics at a Standstill to reinstitute its freedom through identification. Thus, negative dialectics remains ambiguous in aiming at a knowledge of the absolute which is not an absolute knowledge. On the other side, that of the surplus of the social, the selftranscendence of the separate being in substitution, is not only the necessary condition, as Levinas says, for the difference between truth and ideology (OTB, 177–78), but realizes itself in the matter of justice — and thus necessarily demands the operations of the Same, identification, reason, calculation, comparison, and so on. But the question of justice ought not and need not issue in an amphibology of ethics and eschatology versus the State and Universal History. In that amphibology the state and history are radically disturbed, but even this radical disturbance continuously reinstates the state it disturbs. The use of ontology for the sake of the other seems to imply both an acceptance and rejection of whatever justice there is, both a confirmation and a denial of its own instantiations, without respite, without escape and without transcendence. The identification, totalization and thus injustice required by justice, by the third party, are not differentiated from the identification, totalization, and injustice required by the natural history of domination and the domination of natural history.1 As Adorno puts it in one formulation, “what is done to all by the few always occurs as subjection of individuals by the many” (DE, 21–22). The injustice of justice appears to be unquestionably a social necessity and, in appearing so, both justice and injustice succumb to the principle of immanence. The question whose answer is supposed to realize justice becomes a piece of natural history, repeating itself ad infinitum, and in the same form. In the Levinasian amphibology the dialectics of justice is at a standstill. The question of justice need not, however, issue in this amphibology if that very question includes, or can and should include, the possibility of differentiating between the requirements of the third per se and the past historical forms The Sense of Hope 307 through which these requirements have been concretely mediated . Has there been a surplus justice, calculation, comparison, or identification over and beyond what the third party ethically requires, a surplus not of the social, but a surplus subtracted from the social in domination? Would the critique of natural history, resting as it does on such a differentiation, also imply that the justice required by the third party might signify a social relation in which the relation of each and every Other-to-the-Same would take a form other than the forms mediated by identification ? The question according to Levinas — the ethical demand that institutes and regulates the development of ontology: what do I have to do with justice? — this very question ought to include the question of natural history, the construal and denial of universal history. If...