The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity

II. Sexlove and Ethics

c h apte r t w o ................................... sexlove and ethics 1. Sexlove is grounded in the transfer of corporeal schema that, through reversibility , allows me to recognize you as a fellow human being: it grants me the ability to see myself through your eyes and feel myself through your touch. This displaced experience of myself from the outside alienates me from myself , induces reflection, and establishes my self as a being-in-question. There is a hybrid collision and commingling of myself for myself and myself for you: the decentering induced by the impact of your look on me challenges my taken-for-granted familiar self in some ways and tacitly reinforces it in others . You confirm my existence, your recognition corroborates my identity, but do you see me as I want you to? Do you value me as I value myself? Recognition of self and other is not abstract and value-neutral; it is permeated with the figures of desire: what self and other want, what self and other need—what we value, what we seek, what we fear and avoid. This is the ground phenomenon of ethics. In the collision and commingling of separate desires we confront the need to choose among the options available to us. In prereflective stages, we are vectored by the force of the desire whose power supervenes. In reflective stages, initiated and reinforced through the desire or demand of the other, we make more deliberate choices, complicated by the fact that my desire is mediated through my aboriginal need for your affirmation and my equally original fear of reprisal. Here is the root of the sociality to which we awaken through the development of the cogito. The awakening of ethical consciousness subtends the nature-nurture binary . We could not see, much less recognize, each other were we not bodies. That is as much a natural fact as it is a contra-factual hypothetical. And the same might be said of the grounding of desire in bodily functions and needs. But as all consciousness already finds itself embodied, so is it the case that it finds itself already in a social milieu. Are these two aspects, separable only 112 the ethics of particularity in language, then equi-primordial? Not if one subscribes to some theory of the evolution of the human from earlier forms of life. Not if one holds that hormonal processes prefigure the range of human desire, that diseases of the pituitary gland affect the development of sexuality during puberty and adolescence . To assert, however, that biological structures constitute necessary conditions for the development of human desire is not to render socialization epiphenomenal. It is, rather, to say that biology founds sociality as it founds consciousness, but also to say that the founded terms return to influence and contextualize their biological foundations through the structure MerleauPonty calls reversibility. To seek the ground of ethical consciousness in the structures of the lived body, in the structures of reversibility that constitute the intertwining of nature and nurture, self and other, is to challenge the theories of normativity that seek foundations in a domain above the flesh, be it the heaven of ideas or the one in which deities reside. It is also to challenge the theories prevailing in some corners of the intellectual world wherein culture and its sign systems are taken to be autonomous and self-generating engines responsible for creating the normative conventions in whose names we praise and condemn, reward and punish each other. 2. We awaken to the tug of sexlove at the same phase in life that we begin to concern ourselves with the needs and demands of others in a reflective and deliberate way. When sexlove is not conditioned by the normative concerns that accompany desire, we invoke the categories of pathology and regard the act or agent as lacking in humanity. To fail to recognize another human as such is subhuman, abnormal, bad. Anger is transient, shot through with value, and presupposes recognition. We may assign negative predicates to those who commit violent acts in a moment of madness, hold them responsible , and even punish them, but there are different predicates and different treatments reserved for those who violate others in modes of indifference rather than in the passion of high emotion. There is an essential lability to sexlove: the same structure generates cohesion and disruption. The course of sexlove is intrinsically bumpy: my affection makes me vulnerable and that vulnerability constitutes my beloved as [18.116...