Levinas’s non-metaphysical system of ethics stresses the primacy of the Other — a capitalized Other that appears in the world through any “face” I happen to see and address. Isn’t this congruent with the first ambiguity I had pointed out in Seminar XX, between the Other and the other, in the name of what the other’s body can symbolize of the big Other? If Lacan is indeed collapsing the distinction between the other (as my neighbor) and the big Other (as Levinas does all the time), what repercussions will this have about the issue of the body on the one hand and about Ethics on the other?
Sade could allow us to criticize a certain type of ethical innocence in Levinas; after all, even a face can still be dissociated into teeth and a tongue that can be pulled out, a nose or ears that can be cut away, eyes that can be pierced, and so on! The Levinassian Face cannot blissfully ignore an always recurrent threat of dismemberment and disfiguring. On the other hand, Levinas could help us retrieve Adorno’s point and expose in Sadism the perverted epistemophilia it hides. The Sadian libertine pretends to have reached a degree of impassability beyond horror because the subject believes he or she knows the truth about jouissance. However, as Levinas would suggest, the issue is not to know but to desire, or any knowledge of jouissance merely reproduces the illusions of the “non-dupes” who nevertheless err: Les non-dupes errent … In spite of a vaunted knowledge of jouissance , we can now see the Libertine as just another Hostage of the Other. The perverse subject has to give himself or herself up completely in the name of the Other’s jouissance, and is thus all the more the slave of this absolute jouissance — ironically, just as the moment he or she thinks he is the Absolute Master. Desire seems to provide the only way out by preferring the darker (or more obscure, rather) path of ethical un-knowing as Levinas’s Totality and Infinity shows through its “Phenomenology of Eros” and its detailed and compelling analyses of “jouissance and representation.” These finally lead to the formula: “No knowledge, no power either” (”Ni savoir, ni pouvoir”). Is absolute passivity the best access to a truth of desire?
As this is a real question, it will have to remain without an answer. The pre-condition for a provisional answer might indeed be found in Kant’s articulation of his three Critiques. Or a last caveat might be useful at this point, provided by a rare moment of humor in Kant, quoted by Freud. Freud reminds us in his discussion of the Schreber case that Kant remains a good model for any theoretical elaboration. He asserts that only a “genetic” approach capable of understanding Schreber’s “feminine attitude towards God” will make sense of Schreber’s belief that he has to become a woman who will then be sexually abused by God and become the slave of God’s jouissance. Before beginning his “Attempts at Interpretation” Freud concludes his first chapter by quoting Kant’s famous Irish bull (a Viennese goat, in fact): “Or else our attempts at elucidating Schreber’s delusions will leave us in the absurd position described in Kant’s famous simile in the Critique of Pure Reason: — we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat (Bock) while some one else milks it.”
Freud refers to Kant’s “On the Division of General Logic into analytic and dialectic” — a section that opens with the momentous question: “What is truth?” As Kant shows, such a question is absurd, since it presupposes the universality of criteria of knowledge by which one could answer it. He adds:
“For if the question is in itself absurd and demands answers that are unnecessary, then it not only embarrasses the person raising it, but sometimes has the further disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener: it may prompt him to give absurd answers and to provide us with the ridiculous spectacle where (as the ancients said) one person milks the ram while the other holds a sieve underneath.”
If indeed Freud has “succeed(ed) where the paranoiac had failed” by rewriting Schreber’s system in a more coherent way, he may have failed where Kant’s and Sade’s systems have partly succeeded — in their absurd and irrational praise of rationality. While it might be tempting to over-value Sade’s testimony as that of a scape-goat of jouissance, the ancient simile used by Kant could also suggest that we too, post-Freudians that we are, grown all too wise to the universal function of phallic symbols, have milked the same ram or he-goat, while someone else, God, or maybe just our next-door neighbor, has been copulating with him — but through a different sieve!
1. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX On Feminine Sexuality. The limits of love
>and Knowledge 1972-1973, tr. Bruce Fink, (New York: Norton, 1998) p. 4.
>Henceforth S.XX followed by the page number.
>2. Nestor Braunstein, La Jouissance: Un Concept lacanien, (Paris: Point
>Hors Ligne, 1992) p. 7-51..
>3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dailectid of Enlightenment, tr.
>J. Cumming, (New York: Continuum, 1987).
>4. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade”, tr. James Swenson, October n.51, p. 55.
>5. S. Freud “The Economic problem in Masochism” (1924) in General
>Psychological Theory, (New York: Colliers, 1963) p. 197-198.
>6. ibid, p. 200-201.
>7. G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity”, in Early Theological
>Writings, tr. Knox, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971)
>p. 188.
>8. ibid., p. 195.
>9. ibid., p. 213.
>10. Jacques Lacan, “L’Etourdit”, in Scilicet (Paris, 1973) n.4, p. 36.
>11. ibid., p. 37.
>12. See Jean Hyppolite, Gen se et Structure de la Ph nom nologie de
>l’Esprit (Paris: Aubier, 1945) p. 156-162 about the issue of” Alterity in
>Desire”.
>13. Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor tr. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston/
>Northwestern U.P., 1991).
>14. “Kant with Sade”, October n.51, p. 74.
>15. Monique David-M nard, La Folie dans la Raison Pure (Paris: Vrin,
>1990), p. 179-245, and Monique David-M nard,Les Constructions de
>l’Universel (Paris: PUF, 1997).
>16. Emmanual Levinas, “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes”, in Outside the
>Subject tr. Michael B. Smith, (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1993), p. 43-44.
>17. Paris: Vrin, 2nd, 1988, p. 194-97.
>18. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit et Infini (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff,
>1965) p.254.
>19. Freud “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a
>case of Paranoia” (Schreber)” in Three Case Histories, (New York:
>Colliers, 1963) p.132. For a good philosophical reading of the question
>of madness in Kant’s Reason, see Monique David-M nard, La Folie dans la
>Raison Pure (Paris: Vrin, 1990). See also Slavoj Zizek, “Kant and Sade:
>The Ideal Couple, ” in Lacanina Ink n. 13, 1998, p. 12-25.
>20. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason tr. W. S. Pluhar
>(Indiannapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1996) p. 112. The usual reference to
>Kant’s original editions is A 58- B 83.