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

Three. The Dialectic of Natural History

107 THREE The Dialectic of Natural History Ethics and the Crowd: Experience at a Standstill, or Baudelaire Levinas’s thinking, as a philosophy out of the concrete, is certainly not insensitive to what Adorno calls the micrological. Time and again Levinas refers to typical yet concrete, small but significant instances of the ethical relation out of which his phenomenological investigation will yield structures that break up and reverse the totalizing operations of the Same, shattering the rigid complacency of the idealist subject. The following frequently noted passage could be taken as a prime example: “It is through the condition of being hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity — even the little there is, even the simple ‘after you, sir.’ The unconditionality of being hostage is not the limit case of solidarity, but the condition for all solidarity” (OTB, 117). Even this minimal act of politesse in which I defer to a stranger on a crowded sidewalk, perhaps the smallest possible unit of Desire, bears witness to that radical passivity in which the Infinite passes by, and which, as the very condition of possibility of a totalizing subjectivity, is not mightier than, but still so far beyond the reach of the Same that it carries with it a judgment encompassing universal history. 108 Ethics at a Standstill Levinas will go on to say that all “the transfers of feeling with which the theorists of original war and egoism explain the birth of generosity...would not succeed in being fixed in the ego if it were not with its whole being, or rather with its whole dis-interestedness, subjected not, like matter, to a category, but to the unlimited accusative of persecution” (118). Yet of pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity in the world Levinas will have said, simply, there is little. This is too simple. The paucity of Desire that “there is” demands an aetiology of the forms of damaged life which take root in natural history. It calls for something like a phenomenological history of the modern subject, one that can diagnose the reification of consciousness reaching its height in modernity, unearthing the conditions of possibility of ethical indifference and anaesthesia. Once more it is Benjamin who offers the Frankfurt School a direction into this critical inquiry. Their inquiries, however, will once again go farther than Benjamin into the socio-historical mediations of Desire and make them more explicit. As Adorno complained often enough, Benjamin’s Marxism was lacking precisely in the dialectical mediation of subjectivity and objectivity. But to get to a sense of what makes Levinas’s statement too simple, and of how natural-history will approach the problem of solidarity in the world, we can begin with an examination of the use Benjamin makes of Baudelaire’s encounter with the crowd in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In this essay, the subject of which was to be an important part of the Arcades Project, Benjamin rubs Baudelaire’s work and life against the grain, among other things in order not only to illuminate and condemn a certain “increasing atrophy of experience” (SMB, 159), but also, in the figure of Baudelaire’s relation to the crowd, communicate both the difficulty and the imperative of communicating the experience of that atrophy of experience. As the first real poet of modernity, Baudelaire’s relation to the The Dialectic of Natural History 109 crowd already prefigures a “crisis of art” which is part of a crisis in perception itself (187), and therefore by extension a social and ethical crisis. Levinas’s “after you, sir,” however small it might be, is a face to face relation. Benjamin will begin from other perceptions of such an encounter. One side of Baudelaire’s relation and reaction to the crowd is similar to those of Engels, and of Poe in his story “The Man of the Crowd.” Engels’ “old-fashioned” reaction to the crowds of London is both aesthetic and moral, revealing, according to Benjamin, not only an “unshakeable moral integrity” but a certain premodern German provincialism: these faces reflect nothing to each other but “‘brutal indifference , the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private business’” (Engels, quoted in SMB, 167). Poe’s story similarly relays about the crowd “something menacing in the spectacle they presented” (172). According to Benjamin, “Poe’s text makes us understand the true connection between wildness...