Thursday, March 11, 2004
(6:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Oedipus and the Other: A Derrida Post
I'm having trouble getting a word in edgewise lately in class. It's part of the same retiring nature that makes me such an already-taken-chick magnet (or so I'm told). Anyway, in Derrida class, the last two books we've read are Of Hospitality and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. I'm well aware that Levinas isn't cool anymore, or if he's still cool, it's just because people don't realize that he's already obsolete. I know all of that, and I accept it. The very existence of this post is a betrayal of Slavoj Zizek, and perhaps of Jesus Christ himself (certainly Paul, if nothing else).
Still, I found myself deeply enjoying Adieu and, in particular, wondering what he's doing with Levinas and psychoanalysis. This only shows up explicitly in two spots, as far as I can tell, and here's the first:
An apparent paradox: anarchy, true anarchy, must be paternal--as the only effective protestation against the "tyrrany of the State." Pre-originary hospitality, anarchic goodness, infinite fecundity, and paternity might still give way to allergy [Levinas's word for a hostile reaction to the Other]. This happens almost all the time and it entails forgetting, denying, or repressing what comes before the origin, according to the common experience of history. This negativity of repression would always remain, according to Levinas, secondary--even if it were an originary repression, as is said in the psychoanalytical code of which Levinas is wary. In its originary secondariness, it would still attest, as if in spite of itself, to the very thing it forgets, denies, or represses, so that inhospitality, allergy, war, etc. would still come to bear witness to the fact that everything begins with their contrary, that is, with hospitality. (95)
I'm sure I've alienated at least a few readers. I press on: in this passage, Derrida is contrasting Levinas's position with that of Kant in "Perpetual Peace." For Kant, war is the natural state, so that peace can only be "instituted" through treaties among sovereign states (just as the perpetual war of all against all is turned into "peace" by handing over all violence to the state). Derrida points out that an instituted peace would always carry with it the threat of enforcement and would thus never become a "pure" peace. For Levinas, however, war is never "pure" war, because it attests to the primordial hospitality of the face-to-face. The state of nature is peace. Where did war come from, then?
And what exactly is the father doing in this paragraph? In the psychoanalytic code of which Levinas was so suspicious, the primordial father represents sheer violence, absolute threat. The peace of the household is like Kant's perpetual peace, with a simmering undercurrent of war or the desire of war -- the son kept in control by the threat of castration, the father the object of his son's hateful gaze. It's known as the Oedipus complex. And strangely enough, in Of Hospitality (published in the same year as Adieu), the guest, the refugee, par excellence is none other than Oedipus himself. Certainly it's a displaced Oedipus, not the canonical Oedipus of Oedipus Rex, but the oft-overlooked one of Oedipus at Colonus -- but Oedipus nonetheless, the criminal par excellence, who can hardly keep up with the questions of those who are fascinated by his crimes.
Coming back to Adieu, we find a discussion of the biblical cities of refuge, which are to welcome those who have murdered inadvertantly. It's only a temporary refuge; the muder is not simply forgiven:
For the objective or involuntary murder does not have to be totally excused. Levinas insists on this double finality. Indeed, it is there to remind us that there is no real discontinuity between voluntary and involuntary murder. Sometimes invisible, always to be deciphered, this continuity forces us to infinitize our responsibility: we are also responsible for our lack of attention and for our carelessness, for what we do neither intentionally nor freely, indeed, for what we do unconsciously--since this is never without significance. (108)
Now all I need to do is re-read Totality and Infinity, then "Violence and Metaphysics," tracing both of them for psychoanalytic stuff -- then see what exactly Derrida is trying to do by hinting at psychoanalytic concepts at the most crucial, but also the most difficult to understand, areas of Levinas's thought. Perhaps a rapproachment between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is on the horizon -- if only the Lacanians could figure out a way to stop being so damn particularistic. (Oh, wait -- it's the Derrideans who are so idolatrous of their Master. It's so hard to keep track of this stuff.)
