An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker, 314. 2. Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” 56. 3. Here and throughout An Ethics of Betrayal, I use the terms “subject” and “subjectivity ,” on the one hand, and “self” and “selfhood,” on the other hand, in counterdistinction to one another. I do so to distinguish the modalities of minority and liberal discourses from those of contemporary cultural criticism and critical theory. While liberal and critical discourses never exist separately from one another, the notion of a minority subject aspiring to or authorized with selfhood suggests the specific political investments of each. In very general terms, liberalism posits the self as an a priori condition of social formation, a discrete and bounded agent that acts upon the world and effects changes through its will. Cultural criticism and critical theory take the subject as the more unstable “subject of enunciation,” which is both enabled through the structural and discursive operations of power, and which also acts, although with limited agency, upon the structural and discursive formations in which it finds itself. The subject supplements and is excessive to the self, an excess that will be crucial to understanding the ethical possibilities of betrayal. In a similar vein, I distinguish between “the Other” and “others” to indicate the relationship between the existential conditions of ethics and the sociopolitical grounds of critical theory. “The Other” stands as a figure of the impersonal “Otherness” of existence that cannot (as I explain in this chapter) be thought or known. My reference to “others” and “other others” addresses those bodies, groups, and subjects to whom Otherness has been attributed. 4. Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 84. 5. Ibid. 6. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 60. 7. Ibid., 63. Levinas utilizes in particular Husserl’s formulation of a “non- 174 / notes theoretical intentionality” in consciousness and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the primacy of perceptual experience as a situated and embodied one in his own conception of a non-reflective passivity that grounds first philosophy. Merleau-Ponty insists that consciousness itself is situated in the material body, is incarnate, such that reflection is always outpaced by unreflected life or existence. Thus, in Levinas’s words, self-consciousness is always situated as an “intimate carnation” that “no longer purely and simply displays the exteriority of an object” (“Ethics as First Philosophy,” 79). If this self-consciousness is a reduced one, in that the limits of what it might grasp become more readily visible in the body’s materiality, it also affirms a “self-consciousness and absolute being” through a surplus of the non-intentional consciousness, the “consciousness of consciousness” and unknowing knowledge that is indirect, implicit, and aimless. 8. Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 78. 9. Levinas, Time and the Other, 70, 77. 10. Ibid., 74, 71. 11. Ibid., 81. 12. Judith Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” 25. 13. Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 82. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Ibid. 17. Derrida’s description of ethics as “hospitality” provides a significant thread for conjoining the ethical to the juridico-political, a theme that will be troped in a number of the works that I examine in this book. For Derrida, if the subject experiences its own being as, in the Heideggerian sense, being “thrown” into existence, the ethical project amounts to an attempt to make oneself at home, a project of “hospitality”: “Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigner, ethics is hospitality” (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 16–17). Hospitality thus signifies a reckoning with the dislocation of being, one that, as a first philosophy, is “ethicity itself” (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 50). In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida also addresses Levinas’s deployment of sexual difference and “feminine alterity” to figure the ethical hospitality of the Other (36– 45). However, as I will discuss below, the political implications of this figuration are not unproblematic, nor even as salutary as Derrida suggests, given how this homogenized and abstracted generalization of difference always conceals the racial and gender privilege that is put under erasure in a reading of politics as “the political.” 18. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 29. 19. Ibid., 29–30. 20. Ibid., 33. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 59, 61. For extended discussions of the theoretical...