In the fifth chapter of her book, Precarious Life, Judith Butler, in response to a story she heard claiming that the humanities had lost their moral authority, argues for a more intimate analysis of the relationship between the modes of address and the moral demand or expectations prompted by those addresses. She uses a Jewish ethic of non-violence and an interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face” to explain how it is that the address by others results in binding and unwanted or unprecedented moral demands. Through this analysis, she is ultimately making an argument in support of an existing value of the humanities.
According to Butler, the face, which Levinas makes clear, “is not exclusively a human face”—as it can be represented by an expressive human back that seems to demonstrate, in a personified manner, human agony—is the humanizing notion that produces an ethical struggle (133). The face is a mode of address and responding to the face signifies an understanding of its precariousness, an understanding of the relation between your own precariousness and that of the Other. Understanding and legitimizing the existence of the face is to legitimize an ethical relationship between yourself and the moral authority of the Other. This ethical relationship, however, is a dichotomized one, with both sides fighting each other. According to Butler, although the face clearly says “Thou shalt not kill,” it simultaneously produces, among those it addresses, a temptation to kill. As Butler describes, “There is fear for one’s own survival, and there is anxiety about hurting the Other, and these two impulses are at war with each other…But they are at war with each other to not be at war…the nonviolence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but…from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence” (137). And although this “war” could be theoretically ended by justifying the killing of someone who could possibly make you undergo violence, Levinas argues that self-preservation is not justification for murder.
Furthermore in her argument, Butler is trying to explain the relationship between discourse and moral authority. The face is tied to discourse because it speaks—because it “says” “Thou shalt not kill.” The relationship between language and the Other is another part of the ethical relationship between the face and moral authority. Butler argues that we don’t and can’t speak and legitimate language without first being addressed by the Other. Therefore, she says, once the Other no longer exists, neither can language. This can be tied back to the quote she previously uses by Levinas: “My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world…” –the Other, who is legitimized by the notion of the “face,” is a crucial facet of society, of the human need for sociality and ethical boundaries (132). “Language,” she says, “communicates the precariousness of life that establishes the ongoing tension of a non-violent ethics” (139). The Other legitimizes language, thus establishing a relationship between discourse and moral authority because language allows for this tension between the two divided reactions to the “face.” But although language allows for this non-violence, it is also innately embedded with a certain violence. This is because, according to Levinas, the situation of discourse is one in which we are held hostage. We do not ask to be addressed, but must conform to the framework of the address we receive.
Addittionally, Butler argues for an ethic of Jewish non-violence, by explaining Levina’s account of the relationship between violence and ethics. Butler further explains Levina’s notion of the “face” by tackling the issue of humanization and dehumanization. She addresses Levina’s paradox that although the “face” is not exclusively a human face, it is the source of humanization. She argues that there is a difference between the “inhumane but humanizing face”—that is to say, a face that through personification is humanized (i.e. the back that “screams”)—and the “dehumanization that can also take place through the face”—meaning, to use this notion of the face to reduce the Other to less than human (141). For example, Saddam Hussein’s face is dehumanized in American media to represent tyranny. Butler also uses the example of the women on the front page of the New York Times with their burkas taken off. Butler describes how this has dehumanized their real and figurative faces to a symbolic nature—the “symbol of successfully exported American cultural progress” (142). Here, the face acts as a rationale to the violence imposed on others by the War on Terror. Here, the violence imposed on the other is justified by the threat of violence upon us. The war between the two previously mentioned dichotomies ends (for now at least), with one side taking control. The face is not humanized in this situation, as Levina argued. Rather, the characteristics that would humanize it (the pain and agony of wartime) is hidden. Butler explains that this situation is confounding. Although the image of those women or Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden gives a face to the war, it is dehumanizing in some instances.
Through this essay, Butler is addressing both critics and supporters of humanities. She argues that the critical approach possible through the field of humanities is essential to the issue of dehumanization in American media. This dehumanization prohibits us from mourning the horrors of war because it prohibits us from giving those horrors a legitimizing face, as was done during the Vietnam War. Rather, the media uses the face both to give purpose to war and to demonstrate its successes. The figurative and literal face is not allowed to serve its ironic yet essential purpose of inciting us into an ethical fight that prohibits the killing of the Other. This, she says, is an “ethical outrage” (150). Therefore, she calls upon her audience to reignite their intellectual critiques and constant questioning that is characteristic of humanities, as it is necessary to create oppositional and ethical voices. To lessen the fear of voicing opposing views and thus bring into question questionable ethics is, according to Butler, the existing value of humanities.
Katia Barron
Katia,
ReplyDeleteI love the idea that you bring up when you say if the thing we hear when we see a face actually is “thou shalt not kill,” the thing that we are always presumably hearing first is “I could kill you.” Why in the world would it be, though, that when we confront the vulnerability of a peer the thing we recognize is that we can kill and therefore we must not?
I think you address it most explicitly when you bring up the idea that “this “war” could be theoretically ended by justifying the killing of someone who could possibly make you undergo violence.” To that, you say (and I disagree): “Levinas argues that self-preservation is not justification for murder.”
The argument Levinas is making breaks down, here. It is literally impossible to murder in the name of self-preservation because the self you are presumably preserving is being deranged in the moment that violence is being meted out on the Other. When pain is registered in the face of the Other it is a pain which reminds you that you are vulnerable, too. To be a murderer isn’t just to have to live with one. It is to be a mourner, it is to endure the loss of a life that must be grieved and which must in that grieving, as in “Undoing Gender,” be our undoing. The killing of the other is a figurative awareness of violence in which you necessarily are killing yourself.