Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 15: Incursions of Alterity

15 Incursions of Alterity The Double Bind of Obligation What, we might ask, could Gregory Bateson’s description of the double bind have to do with the question of evil? I hope to show that the double bind, the claim that no matter what one does one cannot win, not only plays a role in determining the development of schizophrenia , as Bateson maintains, but is intrinsic to the emergence of the moral life.1 I view the double bind as a prior condition for deciding that a contemplated act is evil and for the sense of obligation that enters into the avoidance or pursuit of ends that are deemed to be evil. I argue further that double binds arise not only in individual but also in sociohistorical contexts in which otherness is in conflict with collective rules. The route taken in support of these claims will, of necessity, be circuitous. I shall begin with Levinas’s premise that ethics originates in alterity , in the otherness of the other person, whose very existence, as it impinges upon the self, is experienced as a proscription against exerting violence against that other. But I maintain that the understanding of evil that can be inferred from this account requires expansion. There are not only harms one does to another but harms that one inflicts upon oneself, the evils of physically injurious and psychologically debilitating acts committed against oneself. I examine such acts in light of George Ainslie’s discussion of how temporal distance affects the ways in which we make choices, preferring present satisfactions over remote gains. Next, I consider evils that are inherent in 236 the very modes of rationality that govern contemporary collective life and form the context for evils that can be termed radical war and widespread poverty. To this end, I shall continue to appeal to Janicaud ’s analysis of techno-discourse, a mode of rationality underlying radical evils. These disparate modes of evil are linked by virtue of the double binds that come into play in the self’s relation to itself and within a sociocultural whole. Levinas’s Philosophy and the Double Bind of Alterity Levinas maintains that moral awareness begins when the other person is disclosed, in her immediacy, not as another myself but as absolutely other. Perceived in this way, the other is grasped not as a composite of sense data but as an ethical imperative that is not prescriptive but proscriptive: the other acts upon the self as a directive to refrain from harming or doing violence to that other. That another individual may be given as an object of perception or cognition is not in question in contexts of everyday existence. But when disclosed as an object in the world, otherness disintegrates, and the other enters consciousness as one of its possessions or as part of a totalizing nexus of sociohistorical relations. In thus reducing the other to a content of one’s own consciousness, one is always already guilty before the other. In Levinas’s radical view of otherness, the face of the other is revealed primordially not as a phenomenon but as a command to refrain from doing violence to the other.2 It is not hard to see in this account features of the double bind, a situation that, according to Bateson, involves two or more persons one of whom repeatedly experiences negative injunctions from the other. Such injunctions can enjoin one either to act or to refrain from acting in a given way and may entail punishment if disobeyed. A secondary injunction to undertake or fail to undertake an action may be in direct conflict with a primary prohibition according to which the other (the putatively benevolent parent) is not to be seen as punitive. The pattern of conflicting demands that comes into play in the double bind may enter into all of one’s interpersonal situations and, for the recipient, remains inescapable. It should be noted that the double bind does not go unnoticed in the work of Derrida. It functions most effectively in the context of the problem of translation, a problem that he finds instantiated in the biblical account of the tower of Babel. God’s resentment at the ‘‘pretensions of men to make a name for themselves’’ or, as Derrida Incursions of Alterity 237 would have it, the preemption of the power to name, results in God’s dispersion of...