spikenard

I came across this quotation this morning:

“Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in the first place, as annihilation.”

- Derrida, Aporias, pp. 13-14

Now I don’t know the technical details of the disagreement between Levinas and Heidegger to which Derrida here refers but it got me thinking about what is not annihilated in death. The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to the person who is dead that continues after the event of the death. It is this odd relationship that structures grief.

The relationship to the dead is a strange relationship because in order for it to be a relationship there must be something that is being related to, there must be something to which the griever relates that is not annihilated in death. The history of the dead is not annihilated in death and neither is the habitus of our relationship to them. The relationship to what is not annihilated in death is also in some sense the object of the relationship itself – the intentional projection of our relatedness beyond ourselves makes it possible for grievers to relate to the externality of the relation itself. The misery of this self relation is part of what makes grief terrible but this is not to suggest that grief is only something terrible that we are trapped within. Grief is also beautiful in its solemn profundity, it is also an ode that we willingly gift to the dead. Our very willingness as givers constitutes the receiver that has not been annihilated in death.

The image comes to me of making a phone call to the person who has died. Their phone rings and the phone is picked up but they never speak.

When my mother died I often had dreams of her still being alive and happy, joking and chatting, but she would never hear me and would never speak to me. It was as if I were the ghost, not her.

I mean, tossing all these satellites and shuttles out into the cosmos. What do they think they’re gonna find up there that they can’t find down here? They think if they piss high enough, they’re gonna come across the monkey with the beard and the crap ideas? And it’s, like, “Oh! There you are, captain! Are you busy? Because I’ve got a few fundamental questions for you.

- Johnny (the bitterly intellectual and misogynisticaly carnal antagonist of Mike Leigh’s 1993 movie Naked)

This is an attempt to think ethics in relation to Derrida without falling foul of the conflation with Levinas that Hagglund warns of.

The Neary case was exposed by a temporary nurse that came in to the hospital from the outside, a person who was not part of the normalised work practices of womb removal that Neary had created in the operating theatre. I’m interested in this role played by the outsider that seems to make the scandalisation of violence that has been normalised possible.

There has arguably always been a role for the outsider in ethical judgements – even if it is an outsiders perspective achieved by a former insider – if judgements rely on some critical distance that makes their operation possible. Now if one refuses to think about this distance that makes ethical judgement possible as being fixed – for example, an institutionally constituted juridical role or some apriori capacity for rational reflexion – then one begins to think the contingency of ethical distance.

The distance we are attempting to think is the phenomenon of this ethical distance, without an over determination of what exactly that distance is or how it is actually achieved in a given situation. All one admits is that an ethical perspective effectively exceeds the normalised structure being judged. This brings us into a proximity with Derrida’s différance: the structural relationship that exists between an uneconomic expenditure and the economy it exceeds. It is possible to state that the excess of Différance is involved in the ability to think differently that ethical judgement involves.

The excess is not fundamentally ethical – the excessive judgement is not necessarily better than the system it exceeds. We expect too much of ethics if we expect moral judgement to be “correct” by channelling some ideal conception of the good. It is not up to philosophers to tell people what to think and how to feel. to be moral in the sense I describe can be to be wrong – the catholic condemnation of contraception being a typical example. The type of excess involved in conservative ethics is especially interesting as it involves the experience of an excess of tradition that overpowers the present which is then rendered inconsequential. This is an interesting example of the general phenomenon of differantial excess. The differantial excess is also involved in the more straightforward overpowering of the normalised past structure in events such as the scandalisation of the Neary case.

There is an unethical aspect to ethics, a small aspect of infidelity, of deliberate refusal to understand something on its own terms that makes ethics possible.