The next World Cup games being tomorrow (Argentina-Germany and Italy-Ukraine), hence a small break from football blogging (which goes one at Goal Post @ the New Republic and elsewhere).

Listening to my Greek waiter explaining to his boss the advantages of the American labor and education systems. He also mentions how there are no opportunity in Greece or Cyprus. I am sitting at Café Agora, a Greek café in the Montrose area. It's funny to see amid the imitation artwork from the Classical and Hellenistic periods one Roman bas-relief from Septimus Severus reign.

When discussing Edward Said's "Orientalism," a friend of mine argued that the Ancient Greeks were a lot Oriental (Other) than we as Westerners tend to think of them. Sure, the Greeks established colonies in Phocea (modern-day Marseilles), Sicily and southern Italy, but not much came out of it. Most of the cultural exchanges must have occured then with Persia and Phoenicia. Little wonder then, when given the chance, the Greeks expanded eastward.

Speaking of alterity, a discussion on psychotherapy down at looktouch turned into a discussion on Emmanuel Levinas's ethics.

We know the story of Levinas being confronted with the question of what one ought to do when facing a Nazi Other and how he was unable to answer it. A Kantian, a consequentialist or a deontologist (all in the American analytic sense. The analytic tradition "always" seems to have answers) could possibly articulate what is permissible to do in such and such situation. But does the question really fit within the frame of Levinas’s work? Levinas is not so much interested in an ethics of imperative and permission. Rather, he seeks to de-sediment the meaning of ethics. Simply put, what does it mean to be ethical?

Levinas asks in the preface of Totality and Infinity whether we are deluded by morality or not. “The state of war,” he writes “suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.” The shadow of war, and by extension of Auschwitz, weighs heavily on Levinas’s. War has made us lose sight of what it means to be ethical by revealing to us our vulnerability. In a state of war, our sense of self, or what Levinas calls the “ontological event,” is exacerbated at the expense of the Other. “War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.” In a logic of war (a figurative war), the relation of the Self to the Other can be only one of domination since the “ontological event” takes precedence over everything else (or what Levinas calls “selfishness”). As such, in order to overcome what Foucault would later call “our fascist impulse” in his preface to Deleuze and Gattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Levinas sees the ethical event not simply in the encounter of the Other, but the encounter with an open hand.

Consequently, we are already outside of the Levinasian frame of work when we ask about what we should do when facing the Other who brings violence. As we formulate the question, we are already entering a logic of war as we sediment an identity to the Other we are facing. We attribute him a role, we objectify him. Most commentators of Levinas remark that ethics are not something theorized, but something experienced. The formulation of the question presupposes an imperative, the imposition of a normative goodness. We are not escaping from selfishness, where the Self takes precedence over the Other. Only by welcoming the Other with an open hand, without presumptions about his intentions, without fear can I start an ethical relationship with him.

I think the state of war pretty much renders the ethical event impossible. This is where I stray mostly from Levinas (or perhaps not). But that should not excuse us from not trying. The question is, how far are we willing to go along with the reverence of the Other? Possibly, this is what is really asked when we wonder about how to act when facing a Nazi. It would seem that Levinas is asking us to be saints and heroes (well, this is what he writes after Totality and Infinity), but this is pretty much what any ethical formulation is asking of us. Like Simone Weil, is Levinas pointing us at an ethics of martyrdom? (I don’t think so) And how far can we push the reverence of the Other before it becomes a fetishization of the Other?

I am babbling now. And those are just notes on the preface to Totality and Infinity. I am always babbling anyway.

Listening to The Shins – “Caring is creepy” from Oh, Inverted World.