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12 Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears Reading John D. Caputo’s Ethics Edith Wyschogrod How can one write an ethics without appearing to command the Other? Is not an ethics always already written from the standpoint of God, as it were? ‘‘Do Thou examine the motives upon which thy actions shall be based and act upon a maxim that thou would’st will to become a universal law.’’ Or, ‘‘Assess the outcomes of thy actions and comport thyself accordingly.’’ More modestly stated, in writing an ethics, one creates a macro, it would seem, a system of keystrokes that is entered into the memory of one’s computer, and then orders, ‘‘Execute.’’ Baudrillard might say playfully that ‘‘the ethicist is the software engineer of the moral life.’’ Whatever the idiom in which ethics is currently inscribed, an ethical work seems to sway perilously within a command structure, a metalevel dialectic that cannot be transcended: ‘‘Be thou deontologist or consequentialist,’’ even when the idiom is that of situation or narrative ethics unless transcended in a way to which Caputo’s work Against Ethics points.1 Is not the act of writing itself the demand to read? Not if one writes a-scriptically, writes without writing. Must an ethics then avoid natural language, be written in code, if it is to be a-scriptic and, if it is to be effective, must it then be decoded, so that it may penetrate the fabric of human existence? A code may be a system of equivalences, for example, information can be transcribed as 1s and 0s to become portable and the condensed bits then decoded in accordance with a system of commensurable items. Like dried food, infor212 mation enters in a ‘‘natural’’ state, is dehydrated, and emerges again in its ‘‘original’’ form. A code may also be a system of laws, of general rules, decrees, or principles to be applied to particular cases. Such general rules function as distillates that must be expanded upon and enlarged. The very advantage of both types of code—accessibility of the message when the code is mastered in the first case; applicability of the message to particular cases in the second—disqualifies code as the a-scripting we are looking for in ethics. Codes enter into a universal structure of communication, a system of undeconstructed signi- fiers. Caputo’s ethic does not evade the command structure of ethics, yet does not fall into the various traps inherent in coding or in the dyadic structure of ethical reflection. How must an ethics be written if it is to address one ethically, he asks? Such an ethic must resist ethics. Who commands and who is commanded is hidden, a concealedness that cannot be a concealing/revealing in Heidegger’s sense. Instead, this counterethics is written with the hand of Johannes de Silentio ‘‘in implacable and ironic opposition to Heidegger’s originary ethics.’’2 It is thus shrouded in secrecy and, if a secret is to be a secret, it is not the truth of phenomena that is sought, but that which is other than truth and being, in this case, the Other who is, qua Other, concealed from me. The challenge is how to divulge the secret without divulging it. Thus, in a much cited passage, Derrida writes: ‘‘There is a secret of denial and a denial of the secret. The secret as such denies itself as secret separates and already institutes a negativity; it is a negation that denies itself . . . de-negates itself.’’3 This de-negation is ‘‘essential and originary,’’ both obscuring itself and appearing to the one with whom it is shared, partitioning itself within itself, denying itself. In an ethics that is secret, ‘‘the name of God can only be said in the modality of this denial.’’4 Perhaps Caputo (like Derrida) does not want to endorse just this particular denial. Can an ethics that legislates without legislating, one that remains secret, be dialectical? John Caputo mentions riding back and forth on a monorail between Levinasian Ethics and Deleuzian Nietzscheanism . In fact, his work might be viewed as a secret diary of this journey: learned, jagged, witty, one in which kindness restrains the wills to power that might otherwise run amok in it. Yet what is frightening about a monorail is not the monotonous alternation between destinations, its dialectical quality in mechanical guise, but rather the carriage’s screeching to a halt somewhere along the way, swaying over the chasm that monorails are designed...

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