I /Thou

Enough of i am.
What of alterity with which we began... pray tell? Alain Badiou presents a few intriguing arguments around the questions of difference and alterity. In the first two chapters of his book on Ethics he articulates a response to Levinas’ position on the other, upon which his own provocative position on ethics is based. Levinas argues that it is impossible to arrive at an ethics in relation to the other because of the "despotism of the same, which is an incapability of recognizing this other." Same and other conceived ontologically under the dominance of self-identity ensures the absence of the other in effective thought which he (Levinas) argues suppresses all genuine encounters with the other….thus barring an ethical opening to alterity itself! This conundrum, argues Levinas, is the problem of western metaphysics, and an undesirable remnant of its Greek origins. According to Badiou’s reading of Levinas, the antidote to this problem is to shift the implicit same/other dialectic to a different foundation or origin point, one not tainted by metaphysical thinking, specifically the subject/object, reality/appearance oppositions; and in so doing Levinas "proposes a radical, primary opening to the other conceived as ontologically anterior to the construction of identity." For Levinas everything is grounded in the immediacy of an opening to the other which disarms the reflexive subject. The "thou" [tu] therefore as a result, prevails over the "I". This, Badiou asserts, has the status of Law in Jewish thought. For Badiou, the ineffable authority of the altogether Other- that is God - implicit in Levinas’ enterprise makes his ethics "essentially a category of pious discourse" with its own rules and regulations, hence upholding and reproducing the omnipotence of religious dogma. Moreover, with this parasitical or symbiotic attachment between religion and ethics, if we remove one from the Other, if would result, according to Badiou, "in a dog’s breakfast!" He writes, that "our suspicions are aroused when the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the right to difference are clearly horrified by a vigorously sustained difference… For them African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian." In fact, he argues, "these others are only acceptable if they become good others, which is to say they should be the same as us which serves to evacuate the use value of difference and otherness as a political and/or ethical category.