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Vulnerability: A Beginning.

The Ethical and Political Potential of The Blush and Embarrassment.

Michael Kelvin Hearn Bachelor of (Honours Class 1)

0000-0001-7295-2404

A thesis submitted for the degree of at The University of Queensland in Year 2020 School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry 2

Abstract This thesis is motivated by my resistance to the view that vulnerability lacks the normative force to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal. My intuition is that vulnerability is a necessary pre-condition for those conditions that produce moral consciousness; a consciousness that expresses itself by way of the blush and embarrassment. As such, I am arguing that if it is a moral world we are interested in, then we are compelled to promote the ethico-political conditions that best support these expressions of our vulnerability, defined now by our moral exposure to the . With and as my principal guides, and to a lesser but no less important extent, Judith Butler, I hope to address this view by appealing to a projection account of vulnerability, as opposed to a protection account. This language comes from a Derridean reading of the Greek problēma; insofar as it might be said of vulnerability that it presents us with a problem, then this ‘denotes as much the task of projection as the edge of protection’ (Derrida, Aporias, 1993, 11-12, 40). Regarding the former, I am interested in exploring vulnerability as an attitude, a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state, itself indicative of an idea or emotion. As such, vulnerability, I am arguing, calls on us, by expression of our ideas and emotions, to project at the very edge of that which cries out for protection. By this I mean (mindful still of Derrida), that while my instinct is to hide from that which may impinge upon me; I may even go so far as to hide my vulnerability altogether by disavowing it; in the face of such, the projection account of vulnerability compels me nonetheless towards an attitude, a posture, informed by the vulnerable body. Such an account requires that vulnerability’s voice be heard, which is to say that the body be allowed to Speak. In order to gain a clearer understanding of what the body is Saying, I will utilise social/psychology research, including the work of Raymond Crozier and , to support my argument that the blush communicates our genius as morally ambivalent animals. This genius further expresses itself by way of embarrassment; as both the aporia of a knowledge emotion, such as confusion, and a self-conscious emotion, like shame for example. To the extent that philosophy has anything to say about the blush, it is invariably witnessed as the pink blush (of shame). To this end, I will explore Jean Paul Sartre’s, as well as Levinas’ accounts of shame, alongside Aristotelean aidos and Norbert Elias’s of embarrassment, if only to demonstrate that perhaps there is more to be gained from blurring the distinction, in order that we might hear what the body is Saying. Regarding embarrassment, as something like the aporia of confusion, I will turn to the story of the student from Bologna, as told by Robert Antelme, in order to rehabilitate the blush and embarrassment such that they might reveal their ethical and political potential. I trust that by listening to what the body is Saying, I might go some way towards reconciling the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness, and in so doing reveal something of the normative potential for an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name, vulnerability.

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Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, financial support and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my higher degree by research candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis and have sought permission from co- authors for any jointly authored works included in the thesis.

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Publications included in this thesis

No publications included.

Submitted manuscripts included in this thesis

No manuscripts submitted for publication.

Other publications during candidature

No other publications.

Contributions by others to the thesis

No contributions by others.

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree

No contributions by others.

Research involving human or animal subjects

No animal or human subjects were involved in this research.

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Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the assistance of Associate Professor Marguerite La Caze (Principal Supervisor) and Associate Professor Matthew Sharpe (Associate Supervisor). I also acknowledge the assistance from various members of administrative staff in School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry.

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Financial support

This research was supported by an Australian Research Training Program Scholarship.

This research was supported by travel funding from School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Keywords vulnerability, the blush, embarrassment, emotions, , politics.

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 220319, , 50% ANZSRC code: 220311, Philosophy Psychology, 30% ANZSRC code: 220310, Phenomenology, 20%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification

FoR code: 2203, Philosophy, 70% FoR code: 1608, Sociology, 20% FoR code: 1701, Psychology, 10% 7

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE 8 CHAPTER 1 - VULNERABILITY: THE BODY THAT KNOWS OPENNESS 20 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 20 1.2 – THE ‘PROBLEM’ WITH VULNERABILITY 24 1.3 – NIETZSCHE: THE BODY 26 1.4 – LEVINAS: THE SAYING; THE BODY 30 1.5 – BUTLER: THE EMBODIED SUBJECT; RESISTANCE 35 1.6 – CONCLUSION 39 CHAPTER II - VULNERABILITY: SHAME (AND EMBARRASSMENT) 42 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 42 1.2 – SHAME (AND EMBARRASSMENT); A BRIEF ‘HISTORY’ 44 1.3 – LEVINAS ON SHAME: ONTOLOGY TO ETHICS; BEING TO OTHERWISE THAN BEING 50 1.4 – SARTREAN SHAME: ALL ‘PRAISE’ THE OTHER 56 1.5 – SHAME (EMBARRASSMENT, SOMETHING LIKE CONFUSION); A SENSE OF BELONGING 62 1.6 – CONCLUSION 65 CHAPTER III - VULNERABILITY: PATHOS; EMBARRASSMENT; (THINKING) OPENNESS 67 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 67 1.2 – THE PATHOS OF OPENNESS 70 1.3 – EMBARRASSMENT (AS APORIA) 78 1.4 – LEVINAS: THE BEGINNING; OPENNESS 84 1.5 – CONCLUSION 88 CHAPTER IV - VULNERABILITY: THE BLUSH (AND EMBARRASSMENT) 92 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 92 1.2 – THE BLUSH 94 1.3 – EMBARRASSMENT (OTHER THAN APORIA) 103 1.4 – THUS SPOKE THE STUDENT FROM BOLOGNA 107 1.5 - CONCLUSION 115 CHAPTER V - VULNERABILITY: POSTMODERN ETHICS; A BEGINNING 118 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 118 1.2 – BAUMAN’S POSTMODERN ETHICS 123 1.3 – CONCLUSION 143 CHAPTER VI - VULNERABILITY: A POLITICS OF LOSS 146 1.1 – INTRODUCTION 146 1.2 – LEVINAS – THE THIRD; ; TIME 149 1.3 – MAKING A HABIT OF THE DECISION, OF JUSTICE, AND AIDOS 159 1.4 – CONCLUSION 173 EPILOGUE 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY 182

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Prologue If by the conclusion of this thesis it is the reader’s view that its claims are relatively modest, mundane even, I will judge it to have been a success. It would be folly to think that in the space allowed I might fully account for an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name, vulnerability. This is not to say that I think the task impossible; rather, it is to suggest the direction of future research into a politics of loss; one that retreats from the scene of ethics in order that it might reclaim it by expression of its work ethic; an ethics defined by making a habit (hexis) out of the pursuit of justice. In short, it is the pursuit of justice, rather than justice itself, by which politics can now claim itself to be virtuous. I mention politics, the subject of the final chapter, at the outset because I am aware of the context, the world, into which this document is delivered, a world riven by climate and culture wars (for the first time perhaps, when it comes to the former); a world in the grip of a global pandemic; a world that desires above all else to retreat behind borders (if certain populist leaders are to be believed), from behind which we admit only those whom we judge to be acceptable, which is to say sufficiently like us so as not to disturb the status quo. And yet, the state (of affairs) is itself riven by social and political unrest, such that the one waiting patiently on the other side of the border might well reflect on why it was they sought entry in the first place?

Borders speak to protection from all that might impinge upon us by way of the unwanted, the uninvited, Other. As such, borders are somewhat antithetical to vulnerability, which is to say to our willingness to be (morally) exposed to others; to the world at large. More than that, borders suggest that should it come to it, I will by my ability to refuse or repel, be the last left standing. This ideal has about it an insidious logic; whether by force of arms or force of argument (the latter seemingly ultimately defers to the former when it comes to the state), I will win the day – I will be the last left standing. Hence, such a logic is itself antithetical to what it means to say – After you; the expression of the ethico-political that is of interest herein.1 Why insidious? Because for those unable or unwilling to engage with politics, it speaks first and foremost to an instinct for survival. As such, this logic, unlike that which grounds complex language games, requires only limited computational resources in order to parse, appealing as it now does to traumatised bodies in a fight for survival (real, or invoked by those who would seek political advantage); bodies now suffering to the extent that they feel they are

1 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 117; hereafter cited as Otherwise than Being; I have Levinas to thank for this formulation, and his proposal that even ‘the simple ‘“After you, sir”’ can speak for ‘substitution, the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other’. 9 no longer able to grasp the world and are therefore susceptible to being grasped by the world. Importantly, I am not suggesting that this logic of the last left standing, or these traumatised bodies, can be dismissed as being irrational; indeed, such logic appeals directly to the altogether rational belief that there are times when it appears best not to cooperate, even if our moral intuition tells us that in so doing, we are likely, collectively, to arrive at a less than desirable outcome. Of course, this assumes that being the last left standing is one such outcome, for to be so renders human subjectivity derived by our moral exposure to the other as unobtainable. In short, the last left standing is no longer recognisable as a moral animal.

I arrive at a key question of this thesis: what is it that identifies this moral animal; more importantly, how is it that this relational moral animal identifies itself by virtue of what the body is Saying?2 I should firstly, briefly, clarify what I mean by moral, and the distinction between morality and ethics. To be moral is to be orientated towards the other such that I am now (morally) conscious of the other. Ethics, I take to be as our attempt at codifying this orientation. Mindful of this, I am suggesting it is the blush that first and foremost betrays us as moral animals; a betrayal that is impossible without vulnerability, if such can be defined as my (moral) exposure to, my orientation towards, the other. To betray not only speaks to the blush unintentionally revealing my true character in this moment further defined by aporia (the confusion of not knowing where to go or how to begin); the etymology of betrayal is rooted in the Latin tradere, which speaks to my body’s willingness to nonetheless cross over this aporia, in order that it might give, surely the primordial communication of myself as a moral animal.3 In sum: the blush is my body Saying that despite the seeming impossibility, I am nonetheless giving myself over to this moment, and hence to the Other before me. This formulation will become even more important when I realise that to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. It also suggests that the logic of the last left standing, as defined above, makes a none too subtle and negative appeal to inhuman (and frankly, impossible) ideals of invulnerability, and therefore to a world without morality; a world in which I am no longer (morally) exposed to the other and hence return to myself as the same.

2 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143; once more, I have Levinas to thank for this term; the Saying, for Levinas, like vulnerability itself, holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’. 3 Douglas Harper, “Online Etymology Dictionary,” (2001-2020); the etymology of the verb betray is rooted in the Latin tradere, meaning to ‘hand over’, from trans (across) and dare (to give); Harper suggests that the Proto- Indo-European root of betray is found in *do-, meaning ‘to give’. Note that any references or allusion to the etymology or origin of words hereafter, unless otherwise cited, has been sourced from Douglas Harper, “Online Etymology Dictionary,” (2001-2020); this includes instances where I clarify in a footnote that I am referring to a word’s etymology; as such, “Online Etymology Dictionary,” will not be footnoted further. 10

On the notion of sameness: an obvious point to make at this juncture is that our shared corporeal vulnerability ensures that we all relate to what it is to bruise and bleed, and if sufficient force be applied, to break. One of the provocations of vulnerability is that our shared propensity to both being wounded but also to inflict harm, ought in and of itself be sufficient to ground a normative claim. One such claim might take the form: knowing how easily I bruise, bleed and break, I am compelled therefore not to inflict such upon the other. While there is something inherently egalitarian about our shared corporeal vulnerability, and by implication a further appeal to egalitarianism more broadly, there is little about vulnerability so construed that compels us to treat others as fundamentally equal. My qualified statement ought to make it clear that I do not consider such a task an impossibility. But even if it were the case that our shared corporeal vulnerability was to become the basis for treating others equally, which is to say morally, I would still harbour concerns that this would be confining such an ethics to what I am calling a protection account of vulnerability. Under this account, vulnerability would be construed as a problem qua problem, requiring redress. Worse still, it may be disavowed, thereby alluding to an ethics of negation, whereby we are obliged to treat each other morally because we wish it were not so, a victory of every ‘it was’, over ‘I wanted it to be’. Such an ethics would be opposed to life, and while one may be opposed to life (suicide is an expression of this opposition), one cannot, in the first instance, be protected from life.

As such, life, it might be said, is a sufficient condition for vulnerability, which is to say that by virtue of being alive we are guaranteed at some point to be wounded in one way or another. To claim otherwise is to suggest that it is Death who speaks. Staying for a moment with the language of claims as they relate to conditions: my intuition is that vulnerability is a necessary pre-condition for the conditions that produce moral consciousness. Assuming that vulnerability obtains (and therefore not invulnerability, which alludes to amorality), when human bodies collide the ensuing moment is bound to have a moral hue; otherwise they are merely bodies colliding in a universe bursting with colliding bodies. I say moral hue to emphasise that the moment can be perceived as having the overall character or appearance of being moral and therefore human. Why human? I am proposing that the blush uniquely betrays us as moral animals. While I am allowing that certain non-human animals may well blush, it is not, as far as I can tell, for moral reasons.

To this end, I am proceeding on the intuition that when morally conscious bodies began colliding, they blushed in the face of the Other in the knowledge, the aporia, that to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. Hence, to know what it is to be me in the world 11 demands that at some point I say – After you. A further intuition is that the blush speaks to the knowledge we have of ourselves as morally ambivalent; someone who, in the moment, is just as likely to err as I am to forgive. Importantly, the blush also signals my confusion at this state of affairs; and while I think the blush ultimately betrays our will to be good (expressed in the first instance by our willingness to give), I will not be pursuing this intuition throughout. Accordingly, my focus remains on exploring our potential as morally ambivalent animals. Having said that, it would seem this view of humankind as intrinsically good is suddenly back in the zeitgeist. If I may paraphrase the opening of a recently published monograph:

This is a book about a radical idea […] [one] known to make rulers nervous […] [an idea] erased from the annals of human history […] [and yet an idea] legitimised by virtually every branch of science […] and corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked […] [The idea being] that most people, deep down, are pretty decent.4

However comforting it might be to see this view in print from the pen of a historian, I proceed in the belief that it will ultimately be the job of an ethico-political ideal of vulnerability to create and sustain the conditions that support the morally ambivalent animal, the contradiction, at the centre of my concerns. As for decency, by the time I get to the final chapter, it will be my argument that, at least for politics, decency requires much work; indeed, it requires of politics that it make of such a work ethic.

For this political ideal to find purchase, whereby politics demonstrates its virtue by its willingness to habituate treating the other with decency, vulnerability will have to be shown to possess the necessary normative force. If I may, in the first instance, outline the argument in two steps: first, I am defining vulnerability by my exposure to the other, such that I am now morally aware of the other. Hence, to conceive of the moral animal who blushes is to grant that such an animal is expressing vulnerability. Here, exposure is being thought of in the active sense, insofar as I am called upon to project my vulnerability (something Emmanuel Levinas might not abide with his insistence on absolute passivity, but I will return to this point). Of course, I am exposed to others all the time without necessarily being aware of them, much less morally aware. I am interested in what occurs when two bodies collide… This motif, including the ellipsis, will feature throughout. For the moment, I do not mean collision in the violent

4 Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans., Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishers, 2020), 2; interestingly, Bregman also mentions the blush in support of his argument, but only in passing. 12 sense, as in to bump or crash into another. That said, I can be so lost in my thoughts that I collide with the other and move on without necessarily recognising them in any way (although, I am just as likely to be annoyed and ready to accuse the other of not watching where they are going.) In contrast, consider that which occurs when we approach the other walking towards us; both parties move simultaneously to the left and then to the right and back again before, finally, one of us gestures to the other – After you. In this case, we are just as likely to blush, if the ‘dance’ goes on for too long.

The uncontroversial assumption guiding the above is that we are social animals. Having said that, one concern I harbour is whether, without vulnerability, in a world where we have forgotten how to blush, it might be possible to envisage such a world as one in which our sociality is largely instrumental such that it could be said that we are morally neutral; or worse than that, knowable, which is to say, no longer a contradiction. This may well already be the case where extreme suffering occurs (obsessed as one is now, predictably, with one’s own survival), but such cases are outside my scope. Committed as I am to the morally ambivalent animal, I will set aside this scenario of moral neutrality (or knowability), as one that haunts me as a possibility.

I said I would make the argument in two steps: if, in the first instance, vulnerability can be defined by my moral exposure to the other; to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you; without an ideal of vulnerability such a formulation is all but impossible to conceptualise. This formulation is moral in nature, insofar as to know what it is to be me in the world, demands that at some point I say – After you. This not only alludes to Levinas’ notion of substitution (of putting myself in your place), as noted above; recall that I am suggesting that the blush betrays my body’s willingness, in this moment, to cross over; to give. To this end, to give, as betrayed by expression of the blush, is morally equivalent to Saying – After you, insofar as I can be said to be surrendering to the aforementioned ideal, that to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. If such expressions of the moral animal lie at the heart of ethics, which is itself at the heart of politics, then surely, I am obliged by vulnerability if it is a moral world I am interested in, and not one that embraces the logic of the last left standing? I will leave the conclusion, for the moment at least, as a rhetorical question. I will now outline how, in six chapters, I intend to support the argument.

The purpose of Chapter One, ‘Vulnerability: The Body that Know Openness’, is not to make an argument as such. Rather I wish to establish the importance of the body to this project, which is aimed ultimately at an ethico-political ideal concerned primarily with listening to what 13 the body is Saying, which for Levinas, we will see, bears witness to that which is prior to knowing and doing. I proceed by first looking at the ‘problem’ of vulnerability, after which I begin to form an idea of what it is to be an embodied subject by focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s wholehearted embrace of the body as well as, I want to suggest, vulnerability. Next, I explore Levinas’ concept of the Saying, which derives its argumentative force from the vulnerable body. I then consider Judith Butler’s ideal of the vulnerable body, both as that for which we cannot fully account, and that which asserts itself via various modes of resistance. Perhaps mindful of Butler’s work, it is important I again stress that I am concerned neither with the subject suffering to the extent that they are unable to grasp the world and are therefore instead grasped by the world, nor the violence that is the cause of such. It is precisely because suffering so defined cuts this subject off from ‘every living spring’, that I would not presume to foist upon them the ‘philosophising’ herein. Such suffering no doubt requires protection and such violence, addressing. Notwithstanding, I could not reasonably call upon the subject unable to grasp the world to take on a project (particularly one of vulnerability), distracted as they are by surviving from one moment to the next. In short, the projection account of vulnerability is directed at those of us who are able in the first instance to choose to respond; we ‘princes’, who for no other reason than the good fortune of our birthplace, are spoilt for choice, indeed we are embarrassed by our relative richness of choices.

In Chapter Two, ‘Vulnerability: Shame (and Embarrassment), I refer to Genesis and the biblical story of shame between a man and a woman. My reason for doing this, besides accounting for a (largely western, Judeo-Christian) history of shame, is to suggest that it was not shame they were feeling, but rather something like confusion; an emotion, I argue, that does not rely on culturally specific antecedent conditions. This lays the groundwork for a discussion in Chapter Three relating to confusion as a knowledge emotion. But before that, as I am arguing for the greater significance of embarrassment, it is important that I discuss shame. To this end, Chapter Two begins with a short history of shame (and embarrassment), with reference to Genesis and , as well as the German sociologist, Norbert Elias. The latter’s thesis rests on the observation that from the Middle Ages onwards, as the result of directives in the form of etiquette guides produced by the elite, the rest of us gradually became more attuned to the shame and embarrassment caused by certain actions and expressions (mainly of our unruly bodies), that had up until now caused no such offence. Regardless of what one thinks about his broader thesis in relation to our fear of embarrassment acting as a civilising process, Elias is important when it comes to embarrassment, in particular because he 14 provides us with a date when the term enters the lexicon as it is currently understood in terms of breaches of etiquette, and the subsequent expression of a negative self-conscious emotion.

From Elias and embarrassment, I then move onto two canonical accounts of shame. The first is from Levinas, who in his earlier work looks at shame from an ontological point of view, whereby we experience shame as being ‘riveted’ to and unable to escape the self in shame. There is an undeniable stickiness in this earlier account, of being-stuck-to-itself within a totality (of existence) which at this point largely ignores the Other. This changes in his later account of shame, where Levinas is now more concerned with how the Other provokes a sense of shame in me such that I am called upon to justify myself, my freedom, in the face of the impoverished other. There is a sense that in both his earlier and later accounts of shame, freedom is what is at stake for Levinas; while the former glues me to myself, the latter, under the demand of the Other, frees me from an egoistic concern with myself, promising an ideal of the self that is constituted in my concern for the Other.

Of course, the Other, in particular my concern with how I am perceived in their value- laden look, is at the centre of Sartre’s phenomenological account of shame. While there can be little doubting the impact of Sartre’s thought on the literature dealing with shame, I am more concerned, as is his translator, Hazel Barnes, in earlier editions of Being and Nothingness, with Sartre’s reliance on ‘a missing God’, and his willingness to utilise religious iconography in what is otherwise a distinctly secular account of shame. To this end, it is Levinas who says we live in hypocrisy, which is to say in the between the Jew and the Greek. I am suspicious that perhaps Sartre can be accused of hypocrisy, insofar as he wants to have it both ways when it comes to shame; as a concept attached to philosophy, as well as prophecy. The latter term comes from the Greek propheteia, meaning ‘gift of interpreting the will of the gods’. Could it be that Sartre considers himself possessed of such a gift? Whatever the case, my point is that I think it reasonable to suggest that the term finds it difficult to escape its religious origins; accordingly, there appears, to this reader at least, to be a sense of certainty when it comes to the normative power of shame. As such, I am somewhat dubious about the potential for explorations of shame to open up new philosophical spaces.

Space (the Rilkean Open) is a key concept in Chapter Three, ‘Vulnerability: Pathos; Embarrassment; (Thinking) Openness’. It is not for nothing that in the first chapter I note that what reconciles Nietzsche with Rainer Rilke is their resolve to remain open to experience in order that they might question ‘all that has hardened into stereotypes’ and in so doing further question ‘our customary interpretations’. To this end, I am motivated in this chapter to further 15 reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that aspires towards (thinking) openness. Here, I take the former to be our animal body that, just like Rilke’s animals, and prior to our acquiring moral consciousness, was secure in the Open; the latter refers to our attempts since to make sense of the memory we have of this expression of vulnerability as complete and utter exposure – a oneness with (the) World. As such, I take vulnerability to be the appropriate attitude, a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state. I proceed as follows: in the first section I look more closely at openness as well as pathos – the pathos of openness, but from a Heideggerian perspective informed by Thomas Sheehan’s interpretation of Heidegger’s work. Sheehan, I believe, shows us how pathos might be considered the appropriate mood in our approach towards (thinking) openness. Why Heidegger? Having mentioned Rilke, the poet of the pure and unutterable of the Open, I wish to delve a little deeper into Rilke’s exploration of openness through a reading by Heidegger, in an attempt to further ground my approach to (thinking) openness.

In the following section I explore the potential that (thinking) openness presents precisely at the moment Openness threatens to thwart it, a moment of embarrassment (as aporia). Accordingly, I go some way further in defining both aporia and embarrassment. In the final section, given that I am moving towards an ethics of vulnerability (a politics too), and given that Levinas could be said to be obsessed by ethics (an aporetic ethics no less), as well as the openness that defines such, I return to his work in order to more fully explore his conception of communication that relies on such openness and defines itself as antithetical to certainty – as confusion no less. Other than my responsibility for the other to which Levinas attributes it, this sense of communication, of confusion, I want to suggest, speaks to the subject concerned by its emergence from the preconscious safety of the Open into an openness defined by borders and boundaries, limits, and end. If we consider that this subject is one that is ‘incapable of shutting itself up’, not only does this speak to the dangers and risks inherent in such expressions of subjectivity, it speaks also to the sense of pathos that, I argue, defines the openness of the moral animal.

To this end, I am proposing that the blush betrays us as moral animals. In Chapter Four, ‘Vulnerability: The Blush (and Embarrassment)’, I am eager to have the blush speak for itself, which is to say I wish to free it momentarily from culturally sensitive antecedent conditions, as well as the negative self-conscious emotions it is said to herald. I believe the blush can be further conceived of as a primordial signal of simultaneity, the heralding of the relationship between consciousness and morality, within a frame of reference provided by the presence (or 16 perceived presence) of the Other. This (admittedly positivist sounding) formulation harks back to Levinas’ assertion that only the welcoming of the Other ensures ‘the commencement of moral consciousness, [that] which calls in question my freedom’, that which interrupts the ego’s obsession with itself. Within this context, I want to propose that the blush, this most human of responses, is so, precisely because it signals the emergence of the moral animal at the centre of my concerns.

In order to understand what it is the body is Saying, I focus firstly on the blush from a scientific (social/psychology) point of view. To this end, I look at early research into blushing by Thomas Burgess and Charles Darwin, as well as current research by Ray Crozier. I continue with this approach in the next section on embarrassment, where I focus, once more, on more recent social/psychology research into the prosocial benefits of embarrassment. Finally, I return to philosophy, in particular to a scene from Robert Antelme’s account of a student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I discuss an essay by Lisa Guenther in which she refers to her own as well ’s reading of Antelme, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but rather that which may have been overlooked as a result. Accordingly, my focus remains very much on the blush and embarrassment, in particular the latter’s absence from these analyses. To this end, I also discuss an essay by Phil Hutchinson questioning Agamben’s excision of embarrassment from Antelme’s account, something Guenther also notes. By reviewing the literature dealing with Antelme’s account of the student from Bologna, I am suggesting, in line with my concerns regarding shame raised in Chapter Two, that due to our apparent obsession with shame, far from making us reliable witnesses, we risk silencing what the body is Saying. More than that, we risk speaking for only a privileged few, if such can be defined as those for whom the pink blush is visible. I am hopeful that by concentrating on what the student from Bologna’s body is Saying, I not only build upon the themes explored in the previous chapters, specifically the notion of the blush and embarrassment as aporia (something like confusion), I also provide a bridge to the following chapters on ethics and politics.

I arrive at ethics, in Chapter Five, ‘Vulnerability: Postmodern Ethics; A Beginning’. This chapter and the next are partly defined by what they are not, which is to say it would be folly to think that an ethics and a politics that take for their name vulnerability might be fully accounted for in two chapters. Instead, what follows serves as an introduction to the potential promised by vulnerability, and by extension the blush and embarrassment, to be at the heart of 17 an ethico-political ideal. My hope is that the following two chapters establish the groundwork for further research. There can be little doubt that when it comes to embarrassment, philosophy has had little to say, preferring, as I argue, the grand narratives of shame. To the extent that it has anything to say about the blush, it is, I also point out, invariably witnessed as the pink blush, thereby inadvertently echoing a historical bias against those who cannot be seen to blush and therefore cannot be morally trusted.

This chapter is devoted to a reading of the Polish sociologist and , Zygmunt Bauman. I remain mindful, of course, just like Bauman is, of Levinas’ work on ethics. By focusing on Bauman’s postmodern ethics, I am arguing that it is the ideal condition under which the moral animal at the centre of my concerns might flourish; supportive as Bauman is, of ourselves as morally ambivalent – a contradiction, if you will. Without an appropriate ethics to support it, a contradiction is likely to call out for protection. In so doing, it invites us to speak against it – to negate. But that would speak to an ethics of negation, of resentment, one that would deny the contradiction its moral genius, expressed in terms of its moral ambivalence. Instead, I am gesturing toward an ethics of vulnerability that calls for the contradiction to project itself; that expresses, by way of the blush, that I am embarrassed by my knowledge that I wanted it to be so.

The reader might well be thinking, now that we are finally arrived at ethics, why not focus on the philosopher who elevates ethics as first philosophy? My response is that I return to Levinas at some length in the following chapter on politics. I have already suggested, by my use of the term ethico-political, that I consider ethics and politics to be deeply intertwined. I revisit this point in the following chapter; suffice to say that I think it more useful to see Levinas’ ethics through the prism of the very real concern he harbours for it under the threat of a politics that might not live up to the ethical ideal at its heart.

Politics is my focus in the final chapter, ‘Vulnerability: A Politics of Loss’. Once more, this chapter is partly defined by what it is not. I am concerned neither with political history and political theory, nor what one might call the science of politics. Informed by Levinas, I will argue justice demands that politics decides from amongst all the others in the face of the one already and always before it. Confronted by such, politics must risk all and retreat from the scene of ethics, which is to say from the perfection of that which occurs prior to the conatus. In so doing, I will argue that politics can now reclaim something like ethics: first by its efforts at making a habit of the decision and therefore, justice; second, having decided, politics now 18 expresses aidos and in so doing allows for the possibility of the other, finally, speaking for themselves.

I devote the first section of this chapter on politics to Levinas, the thinker of ethics, for he, perhaps like no other, knows that his ‘self-conscious’ ethical utopia, his ‘“moral party of two”’, is forever and always haunted by the third party, the others already in the face of the one before me, and the requirement, therefore, for justice. This notion of forever and always speaks, we will see, to a Levinasian concept of time. Importantly, it speaks further to the ideal that is of importance herein, while there is a politics concerned with the others, there is always time. To this end, I briefly consider Levinas’ concept of time as it relates to the Other, and by definition, all others.

The second section is devoted to a reading of aidos that distances it from shame as a self-conscious emotion. This is not to suggest that feeling is no longer accounted for, as that would further suggest I have turned my back on the body. Recall that my overarching task is to reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness. Accordingly, in this chapter, I am drawn to a reading of aidos that gestures towards the ambiguous nature of its ‘role as a bridge between pathos [feeling] and hexis [knowledge]’. Given that I have already spent some time on pathos, I devote the beginning of this section to a closer look at hexis. From there my focus turns, finally, towards aidos, and the implications for a politics of vulnerability that must somehow incorporate the power of emotions which are at the core of the moral animal at the centre of my concerns.

My continual reference to the moral animal is in no way meant to denigrate what it is to be human (beyond our animality). But I am concerned that we never lose sight of the body; a body that once knew Openness as an animal’s body, prior to attaining consciousness of itself as no longer part of the Open. Having said that, I acknowledge the view of a future proposing that our bodies as organic matter may no longer exist, replaced in large part by technology; bodies may not exist at all if we are destined to become consciousness only. Behind such views is the language of transcendence, insofar as there is the promise of transcending the limitations of our natural state by avoiding disease and even death.

Finally, let me end this brief introduction where Nietzsche ends his intellectual life: in the closing three sections of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche starts each section with the question – ‘Have I been understood?’ What concerns him (besides being remembered as uncovering 19

Christian (im)morality) is – ‘The concept of “God” invented as a counterconcept of life’; in order that we transcend ‘the only world there is’. Nietzsche despairs:

[I]t is the lack of nature, it is the utterly gruesome fact that antinature itself received the highest honours as morality and was fixed over humanity as law and categorical imperative. – To blunder to such an extent, not as individuals, not as a people, but as humanity!5

Technology, its founders and their acolytes, share many similarities with gods and religion. That is a discussion for another day. For the moment, flesh and blood bodies exist and must be accounted for; more than that, they must be listened to. This project, from beginning to end, is marked by an obsession to heed what the body is Saying, in the hope that which singularly defines our bodies might acquire the normative force to ground an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name – vulnerability. With the body now, once more, at the forefront of our mind, let us turn to Chapter One, concerned as it is with establishing, from the very beginning, the importance of the body when it comes to considering vulnerability.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans., Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 332-335; hereafter cited as On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo.

20

Chapter 1 - Vulnerability: The Body that Knows Openness I have asked myself, whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body – Nietzsche6

Has not the philosophy that aims primarily for certainty already passed over all fundamental truths, and opened out into the inconsequentiality of a “wholly secure” knowledge? To put the question still more radically: is not regress to secure and apodictically certain truths an avoidance of the real problem, a flight from the insecurity and eeriness of unsettled human existence? – Eugen Fink 7

Vulnerability, the body’s lingua franca, and yet it narrates neither its beginning nor its end – birth, death; unknowable first and last acts. The embodied subject endeavours to make the middle act, a vastitude still, its defining characteristic, suffering in the knowledge that its origin and extinction, expressions of extreme vulnerability, are unknowable. And yet… we are compelled to begin.

1.1 – Introduction This entire project, in spirit at least, identifies its primary task as that of a ‘philosophical physician’, subscribing as I do to the Nietzschean ideal that philosophising cannot be separated from the body.8 Put another way: the ‘philosophy’ I am proposing is not merely an academic discipline, it is a ‘commitment to thinking that embraces the existence of the thinking person’ and in so being speaks to the reality of being-embodied, of being a body.9 Informed by the body, the mood of philosophy herein is one of doubt. I will return to the importance of embodied thought, of our endeavours towards (thinking) openness in Chapter Three. For now, when I refer to the body, I mean not only the mute and meaty human body, it is the body of the text, of knowledge, the body politic. , in his seminal work on Nietzsche, argues that it is the relation between ‘dominant and dominated forces’ that defines a body, ‘whether it is chemical, biological, social or political’.10 Obviously I am not exceptional in my regard for the critical importance of the body, especially when it comes to thinking about vulnerability.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans., Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 34-35. 7 Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans., Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 46. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 35. 9 Goetz Richter, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Eugen Fink, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, trans., Goetz Richer (London: Continuum, 2003), vii. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans., Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Continuum, 2002), 40. 21

The editors of a recent collection of essays on vulnerability argue that there are ‘two broad kinds of response’ when it comes to the question of vulnerability: one is concerned primarily with ‘our common embodied humanity and equal susceptibility to suffering’; the other is concerned with those rendered ‘vulnerable to harm or exploitation by others’ due to power inequalities, dependency and capacity.11 Let me be clear from the outset: I am not concerned with the latter response, those who are susceptible ‘to specific kinds of harm or threat by others’; nor am I concerned with the sort of suffering that renders the subject ‘unable to receive what is being thrust on it’, destroying language and making meaning impossible in the process.12

Accordingly, I am concerned neither with the subject suffering to the extent that it is unable to grasp the world, nor the violence that is its cause. It is precisely because suffering so defined cuts the subject off from ‘every living spring’, that I would not presume to foist upon said subject the philosophising herein.13 I am however interested in suffering in the Nietzschean sense, which is to say our willingness to ‘go under’, to ground ourselves in our body, its painful affects, in order that we might enhance our prospect of overcoming. ‘I love those who do not know how to live’, says Nietzsche, ‘except by going under, for they are those who cross over’.14 Implied within Nietzsche’s appeal to go under is the capacity to answer such: my interest therefore is in those able to do so, those not suffering to the extent they are unable to grasp the world, those who are therefore willing to own their vulnerability. For the moment, to own our vulnerability begins quite literally with the simple acknowledgement of our intrinsic vulnerability; to admit as factual that which is, and has been, generally viewed as a disadvantage – a problem.

If only it were that simple. suggests that the Greek problēma, speaks to both ‘projection or protection’; the former alludes to ‘the projection of a project […] a task to accomplish’; the latter alludes to ‘the protection created by a substitute, a prothesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide

11 Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, “Introduction: What is Vulnerability, and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and , eds., Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6; hereafter cited as Introduction. 12 Jennifer L. Geddes, “Violence and Suffering: Kafka and Levinas on Human Suffering,” Literature and Theology 29 (2015), 402-403; the author is referring to Levinas’ view on suffering from the perspective of what it is to suffer; she makes it clear that Levinas thinks it crucial we attend to the suffering of the other. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 238; hereafter cited as Totality and Infinity. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans., Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books,1976), 127; hereafter cited as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 22 something unavowable’; in short ‘problēma […] denotes as much the task of projection as the edge of protection’.15 Derrida also wishes to place the word problem ‘in tension with another Greek word, aporia’ about which, initially at least, all he knows is ‘“not knowing where to go”’.16 Not knowing where to go implies not knowing where to begin; to begin, I will argue in Chapter Three (in which aporia will be approached), speaks to vulnerability as both openness and beginning, as motion; a space in which things can happen. Vulnerability, or more precisely, what I will call the projection account of vulnerability, speaks to the problem of vulnerability; and the tension inherent in the call to project at the very edge of protection. Accordingly, my working definition of vulnerability (the projection account) is captured by this call. Within this context, when it comes to the projection account of vulnerability, I am interested in vulnerability as an attitude, which is to say a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state.

For the moment, there remains a concern with our common embodied humanity, of which our corporeal vulnerability is perhaps its most universal, and at the same time, equivocal expression. Ann Murphy, a contemporary theorist of vulnerability, may well concur with this view given her own that ‘the ethical provocation of corporeal vulnerability lies above all in its ambiguity’; within this context the vulnerable body, according to Murphy, ‘neither sanctions nor forbids violence’.17 Staying with Murphy, I remain mindful of her caution around arguments suggesting ‘there is some definitive sense of responsibility that should follow upon recognition of one’s own vulnerability’.18 Even if vulnerability speaks to ‘the ties that bind’, Murphy argues there is ‘no particular ethics that is suggested’ by such; she claims that even Judith Butler would admit it is a leap in bad faith to argue ‘that the recognition of one’s own vulnerability would motivate a sense of responsibility for the similarly vulnerable other’.19 To this end, Murphy suggests that ‘in the absence of normative claims there is no clear extrapolation from the reality of embodied vulnerability to a just politics’.20 I consider this project to be a response, of sorts, to Murphy’s understandable concerns when it comes to proposing, as I am, that vulnerability possesses the normative and proscriptive force necessary to be at the heart of both an ethics and a politics bearing its name.

15 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans., Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 11, 40. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 66. 18 Ibid., 72. 19 Ibid., 72-73. 20 Ibid., 73. 23

Having said that, the purpose of this chapter is not to make an argument as such, that burden will fall upon the following chapters. For the moment I am content to explore what I consider to be the uncontroversial link between the body and vulnerability. Before addressing the ways in which the body in general and vulnerability in particular are accounted for by various thinkers, I will look at how vulnerability is situated within what I am calling a of the problematic; an account of vulnerability that primarily calls for protection from that which would impinge upon us. To this end the overall project might well be described as an attempt to rehabilitate vulnerability from its current protection account to one in which we are called upon to project our vulnerability, mindful that such calls on us to project at the very edge of protection.

I will proceed by first looking at the ‘problem’ of vulnerability, after which we will begin to form an idea of what it is to be an embodied subject by focusing on Nietzsche’s wholehearted embrace of the body as well as, I want to suggest, vulnerability. I will explore Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of the Saying which derives its argumentative force from the vulnerable body. I will then consider Judith Butler’s ideal of the vulnerable body; both as that for which we cannot fully account, and that which asserts itself via various modes of resistance. Overall, I admit that I am appealing to what Butler might fairly describe as a foundationalist or essentialist ideal of vulnerability, whereby we establish that we are first and foremost a vulnerable body. Butler worries (as do I) that such appeals will founder, primarily because of vulnerability’s fixedness within a discourse that discounts all but its negative qualities (the aforementioned discourse of the problematic).21 She further considers whether any questions asked of vulnerability that might define it detrimentally will provide the basis for ‘a foundational premise for politics (which it is not)… an essential identity (which it is not)… [and, for example] an identification of women with injurability (which is not necessary)?’22

In sum, vulnerability, it might be said, has a twofold problem: it can be reduced to the status of problem if one focuses, for example, on defining vulnerability solely in terms of our own (and the other’s) capacity to be impinged upon; it can also present as a problem when it comes to the attitude taken by those who would claim to speak on behalf of vulnerability – on behalf of the body. In Chapter Three, it will be my contention that in order to hear vulnerability’s voice we are required first and foremost to listen to what the body is telling us,

21 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds., Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (London: , 2016), 22. 22 Ibid., 22. 24 for such informs our endeavour towards (thinking) openness. Remaining deaf to the body places us at risk of revealing all but the very life of its non-verbal communication (like the blush for example); I am suggesting that if such communication is heard, it bleeds and breathes life into those that declare themselves to speak on behalf of the body.

1.2 – The ‘Problem’ with Vulnerability G.E.R. Lloyd argues that for the ancient Greeks philosophy secures for its practitioners true happiness, thereby offering immunity against the anxiety that otherwise exemplifies human vulnerability in the face of a life filled with uncertainty; in other words, ‘the insecurity and eeriness of unsettled human existence’.23 Even Aristotle, confident as he no doubt was of his own philosophical prowess, was prepared to concede Solon’s dictum that it is premature to judge one’s happiness prior to knowing one’s end.24 In short, according to the ancient Greeks only death (and the knowledge it will not come like a thief in the night), or philosophy, provides one with sufficient reason to be happy as both inoculate one against one’s own intrinsic vulnerability to life’s vastitude, which is to say the feeling one has when confronted by that which is seemingly without limits and therefore beyond one’s control.

Martha Nussbaum uses the term ‘animal vulnerability’ to describe ‘our dependence on and attachment to things outside ourselves that we do not fully control’.25 Likewise, Butler refers to vulnerability as ‘a function of openness […] of being open to a world that is not fully known or predictable’.26 To this end, and in line with my own aspirations, Simone Drichel calls for a reframing of vulnerability ‘in a way that embraces rather than defends against its constitutional openness’.27 Drichel puts it thus: ‘What is at stake is something at once simple and fundamental: the challenge to reframe a negative state as a negative capability.’28 This, she argues, will allow us to, albeit at some risk to ourselves, reopen ourselves to ‘the actual vastness and complexity of experience’, and in so doing, ‘we might find that our capability lies, just as it did for Keats, in dwelling in uncertainty: the uncertainty of not knowing in advance who or

23 G.E.R. Lloyd, The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2005), 93-94; and Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, 46. 24 Ibid., 93-94. 25 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 24. 26 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 149. 27 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 9; and Simone Drichel, “Introduction: Reframing Vulnerability: “so obviously the problem…”?” Substance 42 (2013), 24. 28 Ibid., 24. 25 what may come to impinge upon us’.29 Just as I am not alone in considering the importance of the body when it comes to thinking about philosophy in general and vulnerability in particular, so too when it comes to thinking about vulnerability in ways that allude to the projection of our ‘animal vulnerability’ at the very edge of that which cries out for protection (our awareness of such). The alternative, wishing to be protected from our ‘animal vulnerability’, alludes to a desire for something like invulnerability.

Butler warns against conceptions of invulnerability, arguing that in seeking to preserve ourselves we become inhuman; ‘self-preservation’ under these conditions becomes the human condition and as such we claim that to be ‘inhuman is constitutive of the human’.30 Butler also draws our attention to ‘the masculine position’ within vulnerability discourses that effectively denies or disavows ‘its own constitutive vulnerability’ thereby rendering the coherence of such as ‘especially brittle’; in short, as Butler argues, ‘although the denial of vulnerability is impossible, it happens all the time’.31 She suggests that ‘there are many reasons not to like vulnerability’; vulnerability describes the conditions under which we are impinged upon in ‘ways we do not choose’, making ‘most of us wish we were less vulnerable’.32 Nevertheless, argues Butler, this should not mean vulnerability is rejected as grounds for theoretical consideration.33 While welcome, Butler’s concern with avoiding problematising vulnerability does not yet ease this reader’s own concern that Butler derives much of her argumentative persuasion from her reliance on defining vulnerability primarily in ways that focus on our susceptibility to, amongst other things, impingement and injurability. , a legal theorist and political philosopher, defines Butler’s work on vulnerability as being ‘preoccupied with the human capacity for loss, death, and tragedy’.34 More recently, Estelle Ferrarese echoes Fineman when she refers to the ‘centrality that [Butler] confers on the possibility of bodily destruction’.35 Danielle Petherbridge identifies a transition in Butler’s views on vulnerability: from associating vulnerability with ‘structural relations of domination or injurious forms of identity-formation’, Petherbridge argues Butler’s more recent work now gestures ‘towards an ethics of non-violence within the condition of heightened violence in the

29 Ibid., 24. 30 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 102-103, 136. 31 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 145-146. 32 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 22. 33 Ibid., 22. 34 Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and 20 (2008), 12; see author’s footnotes. 35 Estelle Ferrarese, “Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is?” Critical Horizons 17:2 (2016), 149. 26 face of war or terrorism’.36 Perhaps Petherbridge’s assessment is fairest as it recognises at least a tonal shift; whether that indicates a substantive shift sufficient to give a normative account of vulnerability remains to be seen.

Tiffany Tsantsoulas neatly summarises the above tensions when she points to the difficulty Butler faces in transitioning ‘from the ambiguous provocations of vulnerability to the ethico-political sphere’; further arguing that a ‘descriptive social ontology alone’ does not provide ‘normative ethical prescriptions’.37 In short, to be identified as vulnerable within a discourse that tends to focus on vulnerability’s negative aspects (the aforementioned problem of vulnerability), such as our susceptibility to impingement, is unsatisfactory insofar as it defines both the condition (of vulnerability) and the subject for whom the condition applies as problematic. To say there is something regressive about such a characterisation of vulnerability is an understatement of sorts, for it speaks to notions of going backwards, or retreat; antithetical to my belief, which I will address in later chapters, that to be vulnerable is to express what it means to begin, which is nothing less than an expression of power – something of an obsession for our next thinker, Nietzsche, for whom power might be said to be restored by vulnerability, if such can be defined primarily by its projection, and hence by our capacity to remain open to the world.

1.3 – Nietzsche: The Body What of the body, prior to assigning it any agency, prior to consciousness even – what of the mute and meaty “I” of the body? ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings,’ proclaims Nietzsche, ‘there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is self.’38 According to Nietzsche, this ‘self’ dwells in the body, it is the body.39 Consider also what Nietzsche has to say about the ‘I’ – ‘“I,” you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith – your body and its great reason: that does not say “I,” but does “I.”’40 In doing, there is a sense of the ‘I’ as a state of the body, an affect prior to the logos that eventually claims the ‘I’ for itself.

36 Danielle Petherbridge, “What’s Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power,” 31 (2016), 590. 37 Tiffany N. Tsantsoulas, “Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial Rejoinder to Judith Butler’s Ethics of Vulnerability,” Symposium 22 (2018),159. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 146. 39 Ibid., 146; my emphasis. 40 Ibid., 146; my emphasis. 27

Nietzsche argues that ‘consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication’.41 Paul Katsafanas emphasises that Nietzsche has ‘linguistic communication’ in mind, meaning that Nietzsche is making a distinction between how the human animal and all other animals communicate insofar as ‘conscious thinking, and only conscious thinking, occurs in words’.42 Nietzsche is emphatic – ‘All perfect acts are unconscious and no longer subject to the will.’43 We see here the importance Nietzsche is placing on the body’s unconscious expressions of ‘I’, revealing the potential, one could argue, for the body to betray the conscious ‘I’. Consider what occurs when we blush for example, when we least want to be exposed, the blush reveals that which we would otherwise like to conceal. Such is the fear of blushing for some (erythrophobia), which only intensifies the more they worry about it, that they turn to surgery in an endeavour to ‘kill’ the blush. Within this context, one can see how we might begin to despise the body.

Nietzsche warns those who would despise the body that in so doing the body ‘wants to die and turns away from life’, no longer able to perform that which it most wants to, ‘to create beyond itself’.44 Importantly for Nietzsche, the body begins to assert itself firstly as health, or lack thereof; somewhat paradoxically, sickness of the body equates to a philosophical robustness in Nietzsche’s view. The sick need their philosophy, ‘whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation’; those in rude health, their philosophy is ‘merely a beautiful luxury’, which at best can be viewed as ‘the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude’.45 Heidegger points out that ‘“Sucht” (sick) is a variant of “seek” and is mistakenly associated with “search”. The ancient word “Sucht” means sickness, suffering, pain’.46 Heidegger continues – ‘This proximity in recollection to what is distant is called “Sehnsucht” (longing) in German.’47 This reading allows Heidegger to formulate the following, oft quoted – ‘Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.’48 In the same essay Heidegger draws our attention to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as ‘the convalescent’; as he who aches for home; he who is ‘on the road to himself’.49 To this end, Nietzsche provides us with an intriguing

41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 297-299. 42 Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 24-25. 43 Friedrich Nietzsche, The , trans., Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 163. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 147. 45 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 33-34. 46 , “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” trans., Bernd Magnus, The Review of Metaphysics 20 (1967), 417. 47 Ibid., 417. 48 Ibid., 417. 49 Ibid., 412. 28 analogy of the traveller and the sick philosopher: just as the tired traveller surrenders to sleep, so too the philosopher eventually surrenders ‘body and soul’ to their sickness and in so doing shuts their eyes to themselves; and just as ‘the traveller knows that something is not asleep, that something counts the hours and will wake him up’; so too the sick philosopher knows they will eventually wake, that ‘something will leap forward then and catch the spirit in the act’.50 ‘I am very conscious’, says Nietzsche, ‘of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares’.51

Similarly, Nietzsche describes the pain of giving birth to ideas, to endowing those same ideas with all the ‘blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe’, as being analogous to the process of birth itself.52 Nietzsche implores – ‘We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed.’53 According to Nietzsche – ‘Life – that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame – also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other.’54 We begin to see that our vulnerability to such ‘wounding’ is vital, literally, to a Nietzschean ideal of what it means to truly live. Without this vulnerability we would not enact profound lives but merely wallow, ‘robust squares’ to be sure, but wallower, nonetheless.

Nietzsche appears to put this view beyond doubt with his self-prescribed motto – ‘Increscunt animi, virescit vulnere virtus.’55 Walter Kaufmann translates this as – ‘The spirits increase, vigour grows through a wound.’56 Woundedness is the etymological grounding of vulnerability. Is Nietzsche suggesting that we ought to self-harm in order that we might grow? He does, after all, espouse war in the preceding lines. Kaufmann reminds us that context is important when considering what Nietzsche means, in this case, by war; the example Kaufmann provides is from Zarathustra, arguing that here Nietzsche is referring to ‘strife and exertion […] rather than armed conflict between nations’.57 Elsewhere, Nietzsche refers to war in terms of ‘waging war against oneself’, otherwise expressed as ‘self-control [and] self- outwitting’; characteristics Nietzsche attributes to figures he admires such as Caesar.58 Contrast

50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 34. 51 Ibid., 35. 52 Ibid., 35-56. 53 Ibid., 35. 54 Ibid., 36. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans., Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books,1976), 465; hereafter cited as Twilight of the Idols. 56 Ibid., 465; see Kaufmann’s footnote. 57 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 413; specifically, Zarathustra (Z 11 18). 58 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans., Walter Kaufmann (New York: Radom House, 1989), 112. 29 this with those ‘weaker human beings’ whose ‘most profound desire’, according to Nietzsche, is that ‘the war they are should come to an end’.59 Returning to the above motto, Nietzsche prescribes it for those ‘spirits who have become too inward’.60 Consequently, I want to propose that the expression of woundedness qua vulnerability Nietzsche is advocating for finds its expression as outwardness – openness. Put another way: for the spirit that has become too inward, Nietzsche prescribes turning one’s , one’s attitude, outward.

With the above in mind, it is implausible, I want to further propose, to conceive of Nietzsche’s ideal of the Self-of-the-body, without conceding that for such an ideal to find any purchase, vulnerability is first and foremost, front and centre. Without the capacity to suffer, expressed by our willingness to ‘go under’; to ground ourselves in the body and its affects, we greatly diminish our prospect of overcoming. More importantly, without the capacity to remain open to such suffering, life is no longer grounded in the body and therefore life no longer finds its fullest expression. It might well be argued that Nietzsche’s entire appeal is grounded in the call to remain open to ‘wounding’, however unintuitive it may feel. Lou Salomé argues that the ‘seeking of pain courses through the entire history of Nietzsche’s development and is its essential intellectual and spiritual source’.61 The sense of pathos is palpable when we consider that it may well have been vulnerability that finally claimed Nietzsche; remaining open as he did, always looking out, like his creatures, like all creatures, into the ‘pure space’ of the Rilkean Open; never to ‘find that nowhere’.62

It is worth dwelling a moment, now that we have Nietzsche and Rilke reconciled: a reconciliation that, according to Walter Kaufmann, is captured in part by both men’s ‘resolve to be open’ and in so being rejecting ‘all that has hardened into stereotypes’ – in short, Nietzsche and Rilke demand of themselves ‘an openness for experience which explode[s] our customary interpretations’.63 This ‘resolve to be open’ alludes to a projection account of vulnerability, to a philosophy of vulnerability; a philosophy of the Saying over the said, in which the latter is always at risk of hardening into stereotypes. As well as that, the will to openness in order that new experiences might explode customary interpretations, speaks to potentiality, the importance of which cannot be overstated when it comes to our next thinker.

59 Ibid., 111. 60 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 465; my emphasis. 61 Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, trans., Siegfried Mandel (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 3. 62 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” in Duino Elegies, trans., Stephen Cohn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 65. 63 Walter Kaufmann, “Nietzsche and Rilke,” The Kenyon Review XVII (1955), 9. 30

1.4 – Levinas: The Saying; The Body I turn my attention now to Levinas, and his conception of the Saying; that which is prior to ‘the said’. Importantly, the Saying finds its principal expression in the body’s corporeal vulnerability. Recall that when I am referring to the body, I mean not only the mute and meaty human body, it is the body of the text, of knowledge. Within this context, as suggested by the chapter’s title, I am interested in firstly reconciling the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness; the corporeal pre-condition, if you will, for an expression of vulnerability prior to the face-to-face encounter for which Levinas is best known. This encounter, and its further implications for expressions of vulnerability will come into its own as we progress; for the moment, I am just as interested in how philosophy, a body of knowledge, begins to communicate on behalf of a body that knows. To this end, Levinas suggests that the Nietzschean subject is an example of a philosophy of the Saying.64 If the Saying relates to vulnerability, and Nietzsche’s is a philosophy of the Saying, it is surely, therefore, a philosophy of vulnerability?

‘The saying prior to anything said bears witness to glory.’65 So proclaims Levinas in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Edith Wyschogrod argues that glory in the Levinasian sense does not refer to a divine presence, ‘but rather the suspension of the conatus to know or do, the pure receptivity or passivity of a subject… open [in the service of the Other] to the point of total defencelessness’; while the Saying represents ‘the signification-of-one-to- another prior to words, and the said, the language of speech and writing… through which the Saying must manifest itself’.66 Levinas expresses the difficulty one faces when trying to put the Saying into words – ‘But the philosopher must return to language to convey, even if in betraying them, the pure and unutterable.’67 The Saying, Levinas argues, suspends the subject from activity, allowing for subjectivity to signify itself unreservedly as ‘here I am’, thereby identifying itself ‘with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself, the voice that signifies’.68 Here, momentarily suspended from activity, we see the beginning of a conception of power, not expressed in the act, but rather as the potential of that which precedes the act – a

64 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being 8; see also Richard A. Cohen, “Two Types of Philosophy in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Discipline Filosofiche, ed., S. Galanti Grollo (Rome: Quodlibet, 2014), 22; Cohen says of Levinas’ admiration for Nietzsche that the latter’s writing ‘bursts through the said’ providing ‘an illustration of Levinas’ distinction between two types of philosophy’, that of the Saying and the said. 65 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 145. 66 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), x-xvi; hereafter cited as Emmanuel Levinas. 67 Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 148. 68 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 31 beginning prior to what it means to begin. I will return to beginning (as it relates to vulnerability) in Chapter Three, but for now the reader should reconcile beginning with potential.

To this end, Wyschogrod points out that Levinasian power is not so concerned with being, expressed for example by Heidegger as being as the power of being; being in the Levinasian sense can never be expressed in the act; ‘once potentiality passes into act, its existence is its realisation; it loses in existence the very power that made it a possibility’; power, therefore, ‘belongs to potentiality and not to act’.69 Within this context, the Saying, like vulnerability itself, is a ‘passivity of passivity’, a ‘dedication to the other’ characterised by sincerity; ‘not the communication of a said’, which would ‘immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the said’; the Saying holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’.70 Bearing in mind that Levinas considers Nietzsche’s a philosophy of the Saying, one can see why I have pursed a similar bent: surely of Nietzsche it can be said that when it comes to his thinking he offers no excuses, evades nothing, and he could hardly be accused of offering an alibi, other than ‘I have come too early’, when God is pronounced dead.71

Levinas makes it clear that while the Saying is communication, it is better thought of as the conditions under which communication might occur – it is exposure:

It is the unblocking of communication, irreducible to the circulation of information which presupposed it… it is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to trauma, vulnerability.72

For Levinas, exposure expressed as such is ‘an inversion of the conatus of esse’; the suspension of the human conatus to know and do. In being offered to the other without holding back, Levinas argues ‘it is though the sensibility were precisely what all protection and all absence of protection already presuppose: vulnerability itself’.73 In this exposure, this vulnerability, ‘passivity more passive than all patience’, there is ‘a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity’; this responsibility for the other, the exposure to ‘the frankness, sincerity, veracity for saying’; not saying that protects itself in the said, ‘just giving out words in the face of the other’; this is ‘uncovering itself’, a ‘denuding itself of its skin… at the edge of the nerves’.74 Levinas argues

69 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, xxx. 70 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 71 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 182. 72 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 48. 73 Ibid., 75. 74 Ibid., 15. 32 that vulnerability is responsible for the breaking up of identity; our vulnerability, according to Levinas, exposes us to the ‘outrage’ and ‘wounding’ of the other, to the extent that we substitute ourselves for the other. It is in this move, beyond concerns with our own identity, our essence, towards a responsibility for the other, that our subjectivity is formed. In short, for Levinas, our subjectivity is derived from our ethical relationship with the other, accordingly, ‘the breakup of essence is ethics’.75 Finally, by invoking the body’s vulnerability, Levinas argues that this exposure to the other is passive insofar as it is not premediated.76

‘Life is a body’, proclaims Levinas in Totality and Infinity, and not just the experience of the living body, but lived experience also; to be a body, according to Levinas, is not only to have mastery over oneself but to also stand on the earth amongst others and in so doing ‘be encumbered by one’s body’.77 Levinas stresses that to be so encumbered does not manifest itself as dependence, but rather it should form the basis of the enjoyment of existence.78 Levinas further stresses that no duality exists between that of the ‘lived body and physical body’, the physical body not only supports a life acquired from the world, the body is the world. Levinas evokes the very real security provided by a built dwelling against the natural elements when describing our body’s capacity to overcome the insecurities of life, namely our own death; in the enjoyment gained from living life as a body we postpone the inevitability of its negation.79 Edith Wyschogrod argues that for Levinas, while dwelling alludes to both protection and concealment, its primary purpose is the provision of ‘a place for meditation or contemplation’.80 It is worth mentioning this, if only to tease out the idea that for Levinas the body represents both an actual dwelling and an interiority from which we might safely dwell upon the objective world. In short, the body lives the life of the world, the body is world (here I am invoking Rilke, to whom I will return), and in so being the body is just as indifferent to ‘the proud leaping ego’ as the world itself is.81

While our subjectivity, according to Levinas, is defined by our vulnerability, our exposure to the other; he points out that we are not defined by our bodies, and yet we are bound by the ‘the Gordian knot of the body’.82 Levinas is drawing our attention to a notion of subjectivity that is ‘independent of the adventure of cognition’, a subject corporeally

75 Ibid., 14. 76 Ibid., 15. 77 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 164. 78 Ibid., 164. 79 Ibid., 164-165. 80 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 73. 81 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 147; the self of the body ‘laughs at [the] ego and at its bold leaps’. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 77. 33 inseparable from its subjectivity; ‘subjectivity of flesh and blood in matter’ is important for Levinas, especially because of its ethical implications.83 In this plot’ we are bound to others’ prior to our undeniable ties to our own bodies, but that is because the body expresses a ‘preoriginal signifyingness that makes sense because it gives’; not preoriginal qua origin, but rather pre-ontological, for our bodies do something ‘which cannot be subordinated to the vicissitudes of representation and knowledge’; bodies give birth; according to Levinas, maternity ‘is an abandon without return […] a body suffering for another, the body as passivity and renouncement, a pure undergoing’.84 Of course, not all bodies give birth: but there is, I want to suggest, another ‘preoriginal signifyingness’ that not only gives but communicates that we are open to receiving as well; it too is insubordinate to the will of the conatus; and importantly, it accounts for all bodies. The blush is the body communicating that we are first and foremost moral animals; indeed, I will later argue that it betrays our genius as such. My hope is that an exploration of the blush can avoid some of the criticisms Levinas faces when he invokes tropes like birth and eroticism in an effort to account for the absolute of the other.85

Both Nietzsche and Levinas acknowledge the body’s vulnerability to suffering, not, as I have already stressed to the extent that we can no longer grasp the world; nevertheless, courage is required. Nietzsche extracts an account of the suffering subject living to its fullest potential; in Levinas, it is by giving, an attunement to the suffering of the other, that the subject lives to its fullest potential. The plea from both is that we endeavour to remain open to the potential promised by embodied accounts of subjectivity and in so doing our values might reflect that which the body represents with its intrinsic, animalistic, vulnerability. To this end, Vanessa Lemm argues that Nietzsche equates truth, not with language but with the silence of animals, freeing them from the vagaries of conceptual language that can tie us up in knots.86 Here I think it helpful to think of truth in terms of perfection, insofar as animals possess a sort of unachievable perfection we should nonetheless strive for; a perfection that Rilke suggests when he writes – ‘To animals / their being is infinite, unknowable; / and they look out from it,

83 Ibid., 78. 84 Ibid., 78-79. 85 Benjamin Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide For the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2006), 146-149; Hutchens directs the reader to both ’s and ’s denouncement of Levinas’ ‘notion of eroticism as strictly sexist’; the feminist literature problematising Levinas’ approach is extensive; further analysis of this literature is beyond my scope. 86 Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009),115. 34 not at themselves / […] they see the whole; / themselves within it; held and healed forever.’ 87 This ideal of perfection, I want to suggest, is imaginable, and only for a brief and unbearable moment, if we are prepared to let our bodies do the talking.

Before moving onto Butler’s ideal of the embodied subject, I wish to look at a question posed by Levinas, as it relates to the sense of openness that defines vulnerability herein – ‘Doesn’t subjectivity signify precisely by its incapacity to shut itself up from the inside?’88 Levinas identifies several ways in which opening can be understood: first, he refers to a conception in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which Levinas identifies as ‘the opening of all objects to all others, in the unity of the universe governed by the third analogy of experience’.89 Here I take Levinas to be referring to Kant’s assertion in ‘The Third Analogy’ that any two objects of experience exist in time simultaneously due to a causal relationship, standing ‘in thoroughgoing community of interaction with one another’.90 Second, Levinas makes reference to Heidegger’s ‘ecstasy of ex-sistence’; consciousness animated ‘by the original opening of the essence of being (Sein), is called to play a role in this drama of opening’, thereby, according to Levinas, founding this ‘ecstasy of intentionality… in the truth of being’.91 We begin to get an inkling of the issue Levinas has with Heidegger’s ‘essence of being, insofar as the ‘ecstasy of intentionality’ is then ‘founded in the truth of being’.92 Essence, intentionality, truth, all manifestations of philosophy as egology: Levinas argues that ‘opening can have a third sense’ that is not the essence of being, ‘not consciousness that opens to the presence of the essence open and confided in’.93 Levinas is making the distinction between a philosophy of the said (read Heidegger), and a philosophy of Saying (read Nietzsche).94 Under this analysis, ‘opening is the vulnerability of a skin offered exposed in wound and outrage beyond all that can show itself, beyond all that of essence of being can expose itself to understanding and celebration’; therefore, argues Levinas, vulnerability is at the heart of our relation to the other, a relation that does not have causality at its core, that is ‘prior to all affectation by the stimulus’.95 Levinas

87 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” 67. 88 Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” 62. 89 Ibid., 62-63. 90 , Critique of Pure Reason, trans., Marcus Weigelt (Victoria, Australia: Penguin Classics, 2007), 228-229. 91 Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” 62-63. 92 Ibid., 62-63. 93 Ibid., 63; Levinas refers to ‘egology’ as Husserl’s ‘neologism’. 94 Richard A. Cohen, “Two Types of Philosophy in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” 22; Cohen makes it clear that in invoking Nietzschean laughter as a humane break from the ‘seriousness’ of ‘the synthesising subterfuges of language’, Levinas is not wholly endorsing Nietzsche’s doctrines, some of which Levinas describes as ‘resignation and illusion’. 95 Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” 63. 35 further argues that by revealing vulnerability as such, it reveals itself as a ‘condition (or incondition) by which being shows itself creature’.96 I will return to this ‘sense’ of openness in Chapter Three, but for now, it is with this creature in mind that I turn to Butler’s embodied subject; one that not only risks misspeaking on behalf of its body insofar as it is a body that cannot be entirely spoken for; but also one that is called upon at great risk to itself to place its body in public spaces as a form of resistance against that which would potentially cause it harm.

1.5 – Butler: The Embodied Subject; Resistance Butler draws our attention to the subject that cannot fully narrate its own story by asking what are we to make ‘of a subject who is not self-grounding […] whose conditions of emergence can never be fully accounted for?’97 The subject’s subsequent ‘opacity’ prevents it from being a rule unto itself insofar as ‘it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself’.98 Butler suggests that within the context of our relations to others ‘moments of unknowingness about oneself tend to emerge’, thereby defining relationality as ‘not always available to explicit and reflective thematisation’.99 Butler’s conception of the opaque subject is expressed otherwise as ‘a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self- knowledge’; how such an embodied subject can form the basis of ethical relations with others is the problem she sets for herself in Giving an Account of Oneself.100

When it comes to the embodied subject, Butler argues that the body has a history of its own, a history we cannot fully recollect. To be a body is in some ways to be deprived of having a history that is fully narratable – not a secret history, for that would imply the possibility of revelation, but rather a history that is defined by its unknowability.101 The embodied subject, Butler argues, stands outside temporality insofar as its self-narration cannot account for a beginning in which much has already happened, requiring of the subject that it narrate for itself a fictionalised and fabulated beginning.102 Butler states – ‘My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story.’103 The language is evocative, it speaks to the embodied subject unable to narrate its beginning nor its end. Birth and Death:

96 Ibid., 63. 97 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 19. 98 Ibid., 19-20. 99 Ibid., 19-20. 100 Ibid., 19-20. 101 Ibid., 38. 102 Ibid., 39. 103 Ibid., 40. 36 unknowable first and last acts; the embodied subject endeavours to make the middle act, a vastitude still, its defining characteristic, haunted by the knowledge that its origin and extinction, expressions par excellence of extreme vulnerability are known only to the Self-of- the-body. Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist and philosopher, uses similar language when he alludes to our endeavours at finding meaning ‘in the sea of meaninglessness; as ‘being locked in the brief/narrow time/space between the entry [birth] and the exit [death]’; which Bauman describes as the ‘two gaping holes in the pretence of order which no effort did or ever will plug’.104 And yet, as embodied beings, we are bound it would seem, always to begin.

This Self (of the Body) is prior to language and yet it is not immune to our endeavours at narrating its story, and in so doing we are always in danger of speaking falsely insofar as we are inclined to attribute something to where there is manifestly nothing to be revealed. To this end, I might (mis)appropriate Samuel Beckett and suggest that in our endeavours to speak for the Body we ‘drill one hole after another into […] [the Body] until that which lurks behind it, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through’.105 This Beckettian metaphor alludes to the risks involved for the body should we continue to get it wrong – there are only so many holes one can drill. This notion of a body that resists our efforts to fully narrate its story (a risky venture to say the least), speaks to the very real risk involved for the same body when it is utilised as a form of resistance. It would seem that we run into danger either way.106

In Butler’s later work, she argues that forms of resistance find their meaning, in part, in the risks incurred when vulnerable bodies inhabit and perform in public spaces.107 At the beginning of this chapter I drew attention to Butler’s concerns that foundationalist or essentialist appeals to vulnerability are in danger of foundering in vulnerability’s fixedness within a discourse that discounts all but its negative aspects – those aspects requiring protection. Butler, wary of her own concerns, subsequently valourises vulnerability as non- violent resistance expressed by bodies being quite literally ‘put on the line’, deliberately exposed to the blows from the forces mobilised by the state to quell the resistance.108 Butler asserts that ‘such a claim is controversial’ as it implies these forms of resistance ‘can seem allied with self-destruction’.109 Recall my clarificatory remarks earlier in this chapter regarding

104 Zygmunt Bauman, “Morality without Ethics,” Theory, Culture & 11 (1994), 4. 105 Samuel Beckett to Axel Kaun in The Letters of Samuel Becket: Volume 2. 1941-1956, eds., Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1:518; my emphasis. 106 See etymology of risk; can be traced to the Italian riscare, which means ‘run into danger’. 107 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 26. 108 Ibid., 26. 109 Ibid., 26. 37

Nietzsche’s motto – ‘The spirits increase, vigour grows through a wound.’ Once more, I am inclined to believe that Nietzsche is not advocating self-harm in the physical sense. Butler, on the contrary, is clearly quite concerned about this possibility. It would seem that even in her later work on a conception of non-violent resistance, Butler is unwilling to let the reader forget about the body’s very real vulnerability to physical violence.

I am more inclined to focus on Butler’s aforementioned reference to vulnerability as ‘a function of openness […] of being open to a world that is not fully known or predictable’.110 Interestingly, this expression of exposure, something Butler elsewhere refers to as a ‘bodily experience’; it, along with the body, ‘constitutes one among several vexations in the effort to give a narrative account of oneself’.111 Within this context, when it comes to the projection account of vulnerability, I am interested in vulnerability as an attitude, which is to say a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state. In later chapters I will look more closely at various mental states (emotions), but for now my focus is on vulnerability as openness qua outwardness; a mental state (an antidote, I have suggested, for Nietzsche’s ‘spirits who have become too inward’). Returning to Butler: by invoking the potential for self-harm and thereby controversialising the practice of deliberately putting oneself in harm’s way at great risk to oneself, she is making a controversy of risk itself, which, I have noted, quite literally means to run into danger. All this seems, to this reader at least, like little more than a description of the status quo. Butler appears to underscore this view, when she claims that ‘under certain conditions, continuing to exist, to move, and to breathe are forms of resistance’.112 Life then, for some, it seems, is risky by its very nature. Surely this has always been the case? I would prefer to align myself with Nietzsche when it comes to risk: he is no doubt aware of its etymological roots when he declares that ‘the devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death’.113 I think it reasonable to suggest that Nietzsche valourises risk; indeed, I am in agreement with those who argue that this risk of death is, for ‘our genealogist of morals’, central to any consideration of ‘that [which] would [later] go by the name of “ethics”’.114

110 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 149. 111 Ibid., 149; and Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 39. 112 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 26. 113 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 138. 114 Daniel Ahern, The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the of Virtue (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 21. 38

Butler argues that the ‘bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other […] in ways that sustain us but also ways that can destroy us’.115 This exposure points to the body’s precarity; Levinas, she argues, would have a ‘precarious and corporeal being […] responsible for the life of the other’.116 Butler draws our attention to the difficulty many have with Levinas’ ethical formulation that we are responsible even for those who persecute us when she exclaims – ‘If only the Israeli army felt this way!’117 Notwithstanding Butler’s assertion that she is using Levinas ‘against himself’, for this reader at least, this reference to the state of diminishes her argument somewhat.118

Recall that Levinas accuses much of philosophy of being an egology, a philosophy of power that finds its expression in the tyranny of the universalising and impersonal tendencies of the state; something Butler is in accord with.119 It seems unlikely therefore that the state would admit to anything approaching Levinasian responsibility. This is despite Levinas’ assertion that ‘in no way is justice [at the level of the state] a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the for-the-other, a diminution, a limitation of […] responsibility, a neutralisation of the glory of the Infinite’.120 I will pursue this point further in the chapter on politics, but for now there seems more to be gained by grounding my exploration in the relationship between individuals, or as Butler puts it, ‘the intertwinement between that other life, all other lives, and my own – one that is irreducible to national belonging of communitarian affiliation’.121 This tension, this entwinement, between my life and the lives of others speaks to Butler’s arguments for vulnerability’s expression as resistance via public assembly. They also echo early feminist calls for women to make the personal political, to bring those issues traditionally seen as women’s issues out of the private and into the political domain. Interestingly, Butler argues that the undoing of the current binary opposition between vulnerability and agency is a ‘feminist task’.122

Butler’s recent work on vulnerability as resistance is, in one sense, a call to action; it might be further characterised as a survival manual for those living in precarity, with its focus on resistance and recognition. Butler appears to foreground identity, and therefore hers is, to this reader at least, broadly speaking a philosophy of egology, concerned as it is with power

115 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 108-109. 116 Ibid., 109. 117 Ibid., 109. 118 Ibid., 107. 119 Ibid., 108. 120 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 159. 121 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 108. 122 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 25. 39 that finds its expression in the tyranny of the universalising and impersonal tendencies of the state. Egology, I want to argue, has about it a logic of the last left standing; antithetical to what it means to begin; beginning, I will argue in later chapters, is analogous with vulnerability as an expression of power. Once more I turn to Bauman, this time to his none too subtle critique of modernity, which he accuse of being ‘an illicit attempt to impose order on the world which leads logically to genocide, to eliminate anything that is different […] [and in so doing modernity] create[s] a homogenous order and system of societal domination’.123 Accordingly, between conventional sites of power and Butler’s precarious subjects there appears little in the way of a contest. In some ways I am reading Butler against herself in order to be reminded of the central issue facing vulnerability within a discourse of the problematic – that it lacks the normative and prescriptive force to be at the heart of both an ethics and a politics; a criticism we have seen, of Butler’s own work if such can be characterised as a descriptive social ontology.

1.6 – Conclusion I began this chapter by alluding to the issues confronting vulnerability before it can be seriously considered as a foundation for ethical and political ideals; the principal issue being my concern that vulnerability is in danger of becoming ensnared within a discourse of the problematic (otherwise expressed as the problem of vulnerability) and thereby offering little, other than a protection account of vulnerability. I am particularly concerned that such accounts will lead eventually to an ethics of negation (as opposed to an ethics of life); a victory of every ‘it was’, over ‘I wanted it to be’.124 I will return to ethics in Chapter Five, but for now I want to propose that if one needs an appeal that captures the spirit of the antithesis, which is to say a projection account, then one need only bear in mind that when it comes to vulnerability – I wanted it to be.

To this end, the tension that exists when regarding vulnerability as a problem is demonstrated, I suggested, in Derrida’s reading of the Greek problēma, which, according to Derrida, speaks to both ‘projection’ as well as ‘protection’; in short, ‘as much the task of projection as the edge of protection’.125 Accordingly, if I might take a small liberty with Derrida’s reading, and propose that the projection account of vulnerability calls on us to project

123 Douglas Kellner, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Turn,” Theory, Culture & Society 15 (1998), 78. 124 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans., Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 99-100; this is how Agamben differentiates between Nietzsche’s resentment and amor fati; I will return to Agamben’s analysis in Chapter Five. 125 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 11. 40 at the very edge of that which cries out for protection. As well as capturing the tension inherent in a reading of vulnerability as a problem, this call captures something of the spirit of the ethico- political ideal towards which I am working. As well as that, it speaks to my overarching ambition to reconcile the body that know Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness.

For Nietzsche, we saw that life ‘means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame – also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other’.126 This finds its ultimate expression, I suggested, in his motto – ‘The spirits increase, vigour grows through a wound.’127 Our vulnerability, expressed in terms of ‘wounding’, I argued, is vital, literally, to a Nietzschean ideal of what it means to truly live. As such, I proposed that the expression of woundedness qua vulnerability Nietzsche is advocating for, finds its expression as outwardness – openness. In other words, for the spirit that has become too inward, Nietzsche prescribes turning one’s gaze, one’s attitude, outward – to project that which otherwise cries out for protection.

This sense of projection is further captured by Levinas’ Saying, which, according to Levinas, finds its principal expression in the body’s corporeal vulnerability. The Saying, we have seen, suspends the subject from activity, allowing for subjectivity to signify itself unreservedly as ‘here I am’, thereby identifying itself ‘with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself, the voice that signifies’ our vulnerability, our exposure.128 We saw that for Levinas, our subjectivity is defined by our vulnerability, our exposure to the other; he points out that we are not defined by our bodies, and yet we are bound by the ‘the Gordian knot of the body’.129 Levinas is drawing our attention to a notion of subjectivity that is ‘independent of the adventure of cognition’, a subject corporeally inseparable from its subjectivity; ‘subjectivity of flesh and blood in matter’ is important for Levinas, especially because of its ethical implications.130

The expression of ‘here I am’ that interests me going forward is the blush; as such, the blush, I will be proposing, is the body Saying – Here I am; not only that, but also – After you.131 The blush, I am proposing, is the body communicating that we are first and foremost moral

126 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 36. 127 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 465. 128 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 129 Ibid., 77. 130 Ibid., 78. 131 Ibid., 143; this expression of ‘after you’ is also from Levinas. 41 animals; indeed, it betrays our genius as such. I have expressed my hope that by embracing the blush I might avoid some of the criticisms Levinas faces when he invokes tropes like birth and eroticism in an effort to account for the absolute alterity of the other.

Finally, it was Butler who cautioned us when it comes to speaking for the body. Having now invoked the blush, as (initially) both an expression of Here I am, as well as – After you; I am compelled to defend such against charges of misspeaking. To the extent that philosophy has anything to say about the blush, it is invariably witnessed as the pink blush (of shame). Hence, it is shame that I must now, with some reservations, address.

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Chapter II - Vulnerability: Shame (and Embarrassment) By the just retribution of the sovereign God whom we refused to be subject to and serve, our flesh, which was subjected to us, now torments us by insubordination – Aurelius Augustine132

I harbour reservations when it comes to shame, the original fall in the story of our origin. Is it that shame knows itself too well? Announcing itself as both a virtue and the beginning, shame threatens the openness that is prerequisite if we are to stumble upon new philosophical spaces – open spaces, defined by their lack of apprehension; spaces in which all our terms, ‘slippery fish’ that they are, eventually escape our grasp in order that they might speak for themselves.

1.1 – Introduction My closing comments in the previous chapter committed me to looking closely at the blush. This commits me, firstly, to consider shame (and embarrassment). There can be little doubting the importance of shame in the philosophical literature and the literature more broadly. To ignore it, or worse, dismiss it out of hand, would hamper my later engagement with embarrassment. Regarding embarrassment, I bracket it for two reasons: first, to indicate I take the view that there is little consensus regarding the effective and affective differences between shame and embarrassment; second, I am eager at some point to have the blush speak for itself, which is to say I believe it can be momentarily freed from culturally sensitive affects like shame (and embarrassment).133 To be sure, I believe the blush is the primordial signal that communicates to the other (who is just as likely to blush in response) that moral consciousness (confusion) has obtained; but I am getting ahead of myself. The focus herein is on shame (and embarrassment).

Notwithstanding, I am with those who distinguish the blush as ‘a communicative signal’, that when combined with an affect like shame or embarrassment (or indeed, confusion), ‘bears witness to the individual’s sincerity’.134 Recall in the previous chapter, that for Levinas sincerity speaks to the ‘approach to others […] that comes from human vulnerability’.135

132 Aurelius Augustine, The City of God: Volumes I & II, ed., Anthony Uyl (Woodstock, Ontario: Devoted Publishing, 2017), 249. 133 W. Ray Crozier, “Differentiating Shame from Embarrassment,” Emotion Review 6 (2014), 274; Crozier argues that ‘no consensus has been reached on how shame and embarrassment differ’; see also Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse: Was Darwin Wrong?” in Shyness and Embarrassment: Perspectives from Social Psychology, ed., W. Ray Crozier (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 230; although it is not their view, the authors point to there being ‘no consensus in the literature’ when it comes the differences between shame and embarrassment. 134 Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse,” 246. 135 Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” 69. 43

Etymologically, sincerity also alludes to growth, and to the whole, ‘of one growth’, a growth that cannot occur, in this case, without the presence of the Other, which is to say a self that cannot be meaningfully constituted without considering its exposure to, and its responsibility for, the Other. Within this context (the context provided by the Other), the normative potential of vulnerability begins to reveal itself in terms of there being one way to grow and therefore ‘to begin’.

It is for this reason that I harbour reservations when it comes to shame, especially when it posits itself as the original fall in the story of our origin; as the beginning. To this end, I am reticent to release shame from its religious origin; I remain wary of ‘a missing God’ wielding normative influence over considerations of shame. I should clarify, I am not proposing that shame starts with the rise of Judeo-Christian religion. Shame features strongly in Aristotle’s thoughts regarding emotions, as aidos, (already mentioned in the previous chapter); shame and embarrassment also play a central role in Norbert Elias’s thinking of them as civilising affects that begin to emerge soon after the Middle Ages, frightening us into taming our unruly bodies in order that we might be accepted into civil society, that we might, belong.136 Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will be devoted to a short history of shame (and embarrassment) in order to provide context for this chapter and those to follow.

Following on from a brief historical account of shame (and embarrassment), I will turn to an examination of the modern era and Emmanuel Levinas’ treatment of shame, supported by readings of Giorgio Agamben and Lisa Guenther. Levinas’ account of shame, we will see, evolves from that which rivets us to ourselves to that which is present only in the face-to-face encounter between myself and the Other. The importance of the presence of the Other (perceived or otherwise) cannot be overstated when it comes to our next theorist; Jean-Paul Sartre’s is considered the canonical account of shame; as such, time does not permit a detailed reading of Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness; instead I will guided by the views of his translator Hazel Barnes as they align with the hesitancy I feel regarding shame; as well as an essay by Luna Dolezal. Regarding the latter, I will devote a short section of this chapter to a closer reading of her own account of shame, as I believe it provides the ‘scaffolding’ for the following chapter, concerned as it is with emotions. It is to a history of emotions, specifically a history of shame (and embarrassment), I now turn.

136 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: The History of Manners, trans., Edmund Jephott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); I will return to Elias’s text via the secondary literature. 44

1.2 – Shame (and embarrassment); a brief ‘history’ Firstly, a distinction needs to be made, not between shame and embarrassment; rather, I am proposing a distinction be made between self-conscious emotions and knowledge emotions. I will focus on the latter in the following chapter; for the purposes of this chapter, I will consider shame and embarrassment as one in the same, which is to say when I refer to shame I am referring to it alongside embarrassment as, uncontroversially, a negative, or unpleasant, self- conscious emotion. To assist in that understanding we can say that self-conscious emotions are ‘characterised by a shift in perspective where the individual views his or her own behaviour as if through the eyes of another’.137 A further distinction: David Konstan, in his concise essay on the subject of shame in Greek antiquity, points out there are ‘two Greek words that are typically rendered as “shame” in English [and they are] aidos and aiskhune (or aischyne)’.138 Mindful of his view that the ‘terms are by no means entirely synonymous’, and given the constraints herein, as I am only referring to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I will restrict my reading of shame to aidos.139 To this end, Nir Eisikovits points out that in his ‘classical philosophical account of shame’, Aristotle’ utilises aidos in the Ethics and aischyne in the Rhetoric.140

Aristotle refers to shame (aidos) firstly in negative terms, which is to say it ‘cannot properly be described as a virtue’(I note that Eisikovits defines it as ‘a quasi-virtue’, for reasons that will become clearer); rather, for Aristotle aidos is more akin to ‘a feeling rather than a disposition’.141 And yet it is difficult, under Aristotle’s analysis, to ignore the notion of character altogether, especially when he defines shame as ‘a kind of fear of dishonour’.142 Konstan reminds the reader that here we are not talking about ‘honour in the abstract’; rather, it is ‘specific acts or events’ that Aristotle has in mind when, for example, he describes the shame arising from the disgraceful actions of the coward who throws away their shield and flees the field of battle.143 This example demonstrates that under Aristotle’s definition, ‘there are thus three elements that together prompt the emotion of shame’: these are, the act itself, the character flaw ‘revealed by the act’, and finally ‘the disgrace or loss of esteem before the

137 W. Ray Crozier, “Self-consciousness in Shame: The Role of the ‘Other’,” Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour 28 (1998), 277. 138 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” Social Research 70 (2003), 1034. 139 Ibid., 1034. 140 Nir Eisikovits, “Embarrassment and Political Repair,” in Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, eds., Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 263. 141 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 249; see also Nir Eisikovits, “Embarrassment and Political Repair,” 263. 142 Ibid., 70. 143 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” 1042-1043. 45 community at large’.144 It will be interesting, when we get to the relevant section, to see if these three elements align with Sartre’s account of shame when it comes to the one caught peeping through the keyhole? Importantly, according to Konstan, because of shame’s inextricable link with honour, there is an allowance ‘for gradations in the phenomenological effects of shame’.145 Character flaws are just that; like honour they can be addressed, and as such shame does not necessarily need to be ‘experienced as an assault on one’s essential being’.146 It would seem there is something in shame promising, somewhat paradoxically, that in the process of losing one’s reputation there lies the prospect of reviving one’s reputation.

Konstan argues that, ‘for Aristotle, shame has to do above all with loss of reputation’; importantly this loss must occur ‘before those people whom we take seriously’.147 Notwithstanding, reputation, just like character, can be salvaged; it is perhaps for this reason Konstan argues that ‘writers in classical Greece saw […] [shame] as fundamental to ethical behaviour’148 This speaks to current social/psychology research, where embarrassment (and shame) signal ‘underlying prosociality and commitment to social relationships, where prosociality is defined as caring about others’ welfare and avoiding behaviours that may damage another’s welfare’.149 To this end, Konstan’s might be viewed as an argument for the rehabilitation of shame as conceived of by the ancient Greeks; or if not rehabilitation, then at the very least a relearning of shame by virtue of our sensitivity towards recognising the positive implications for our modern understanding of shame as an ethical affect. This is in contrast to those who view shame as ‘the experience of the utter worthlessness of the self […] [and therefore] something we would be better off without’.150 Rather than focus on the merits (or otherwise), or the prevalence (or otherwise) of such views, I think it more fruitful to remain focused on the rehabilitative overtones suggested in Konstan’s essay, for they are aligned with my own desire, mentioned in the previous chapter, to rehabilitate vulnerability.

144 Ibid., 1043. 145 Ibid., 1044. 146 Ibid., 1044. 147 Ibid., 1046. 148 Ibid., 1049. 149 Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer and Dacher Keltner, “Flustered and Faithful: Embarrassment as a Signal of Prosociality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102 (2012), 81; see also Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse,” 245; although they do not use the term ‘prosocial’, the authors make a similar case for shame, as well as the blush, as an appeasement gesture that has a similar effect to that of an apology. 150 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” 1032, 1049; Konstan is referring to Helen Block Lewis’ ‘highly influential study (1971)’. 46

I think it can be implied from Aristotle’s understanding of shame that (as a ‘quasi- virtue’) it promises to rehabilitate the ‘virtuous man’; insofar as shame is ‘virtuous conditionally […] the virtuous man […] if he were to do so and so’ will feel ashamed.151 Aristotle makes it clear that ‘to be ashamed when one does a shameful act’ does not in and of itself prove that one is virtuous; the clue comes from the emphasis on the conjunction if, which is to say that in the event one should find themselves doing ‘so and so’, then there is something virtuous in the recognition of such as shameful.152 According to Aristotle, the shame that arise from the ‘fear of disrepute […] is akin to the fear of danger’; Aristotle observes that ‘people who are ashamed blush’(from fear), leading him to conclude that aidos appears to be a ‘bodily affectation […] indicat[ing] a feeling rather than a disposition’.153 Fear, it would seem, has been understood from the very beginning, as a necessary condition for blushing. And yet fear, I would argue, is strangely absent from the religious account of shame, at least in the story of how it all began.

Space does not permit an in-depth analysis of how various religions treat shame, or indeed if Aristotle was aware of the Pentateuch when he was thinking about shame. The assumption being made is that the Aristotelean concept of shame was developed independently of earlier Jewish scholars. What is interesting (perhaps ironic is a better choice of word) is that as far as the biblical story goes, shame obtains at precisely the same time that a man and a woman in a garden desire knowledge and wisdom (a literal translation of philosophy as loving knowledge and wisdom); the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, were relatively relaxed about nudity. To this end, Konstan doubts ‘that nakedness and sexuality in general played so central a role in Greek shame as modern critics sometimes suppose’; Konstan reminds us that while sexual misconduct causes shame, Aristotle is concerned ‘with the character flaw to which such behaviour testifies, not with sex as such’.154 It puts a new spin on Derrida’s question – ‘Are we Greeks? Are we ? […] Are we […] first Jews or first Greeks?’155 Does shame come from the (Jewish) body or the (Greek) mind? Or is more accurate to suggest that when it comes to shame – ‘“Jewgreek is greekjew”.’156 Whatever the case, I am not here raising the spectre of

151 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 251. 152 Ibid., 251. 153 Ibid., 249. 154 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” 1045. 155 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Writing and Difference, trans., Allan Bass (London: , 2001), 191. 156 Ibid., 192; Derrida is referring here to James Joyce’s Ulysses. 47 dualism, rather I am acknowledging that shame finds its locus in the body and the mind; where one chooses to focus their attention depends on which story one is telling.

As for the Jewish story of shame and its apparent lack of fear as a motivating force, J. David Velleman points out that Genesis Chapter Two ends with the rather matter-of-fact statement – ‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.’157 After eating from the tree of knowledge – ‘The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…’158 The structure is a simple one: naked and unashamed; enters the story and with it a new name for the naked body; as such knowledge, rather than fear, of shame motivates the couple to suddenly grab for fig leaves to hide their exposed genitals. Importantly, that knowledge is now born in the way they look at each other. Velleman argues that Genesis ‘suggests […] that the necessity of clothing was not a cultural invention but a natural fact’, that became self-evident once the couple eyes were opened.159 Interestingly, for Aristotle, shame is felt ‘more intensely’ when we act disgracefully in the eyes of others – ‘“whence the proverb that aidos is in the eyes”.’160 Konstan notes that ‘there is some debate about the original meaning of the proverb’, drawing our attention to two readings, one of which argues that ‘Aristotle evidently takes it [to allude] to the disapproving look of others’.161 Shame, therefore, ‘is in the eyes’ of the other; not the omnipotent Other, for in Genesis God is simply the source of knowing that the unruly and unregulatable body is evil. It requires this newly acquired knowledge to be born in the value-laden look of the other if shame is to obtain.

In some respects, Genesis neatly captures the theme that is of most concern herein – how to reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness. The etymology of shame speaks to the ‘confusion caused by shame’; the latter will be a focus in the following chapter, in which I will explore the notion of confusion as a knowledge emotion, concerned as it is with thinking and comprehending. For now, I want to propose that such provides us with a secular reading of Genesis that is fair to both the author and their protagonists. Accordingly, the former is right to think that at some point a male and female gradually became conscious of their nakedness in the eyes of each other; it is not unreasonable, therefore, for the author to surmise that they now knew themselves to be naked, which is to say they were now body-conscious. Additionally, it is not unreasonable

157 Genesis, Chapter Two; in J. David Velleman, “The Genesis of Shame,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (2001), 27. 158 Genesis Chapter Three; see David Velleman, “The Genesis of Shame,”, 27. 159 Ibid., 27-28. 160 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” 1045. 161 Ibid., 1055; see author’s notes. 48 to assume that such knowledge brought with it a great deal of confusion. At this point in the story, the author has his protagonists deciding to cover their genitals; quite reasonable, one would think, as a character-driven plot point. However, to avoid thinking about how it was that consciousness of such things suddenly obtained in these bodies, the author simply invites God from the machine (deus ex machina). They may well have been the first to ‘sin’ in this way, but the author can take great comfort, albeit posthumously, in the knowledge that many since have similarly ‘sinned’.

Speaking as it does to offence, sin is as good a segue as any to our next thinker: Nobert Elias’s thesis rests on his observation that from the Middle Ages onwards as the result, once more of directives from above, but this time in the form of etiquette guides produced by the elite, the rest of us gradually became more attuned to the shame and embarrassment caused by certain actions, that had up until now caused no such offence. Originating in the castles of the elite, these ‘civility manuals of early modernity’ proposing new modes of public deportment gradually spread throughout the rest of society; manners become a way of expressing social hierarchy. One is now not only aware of having one’s conduct observed, one is also aware that such externalities are perceived by the observer as ‘an expression of the inner, whole person’.162 Such is our fear of the ensuing shame and embarrassment should we breech these newly emerging social rules and regulations, we begin to internalise this ‘fear of the self’ which, according to Elias, partially supplants the fear we previously had of others causing us harm.163 Key to Elias’s thesis is his observation that in the Middle Ages our thresholds of shame and embarrassment were relatively low; we were quite comfortable urinating and defecating in public; as such, we were not at all shy about being naked. Elias further observes ‘this openness towards the body begins to be lost after the 16th century’.164 From the 18th century, according to Elias, ‘it gradually becomes embarrassing even to speak of certain activities’.165 Our once unruly and unregulatable bodies are now spoken for by those who write the rules and regulations, and so being they are (if they want to belong, that is) silenced.

A transformation occurs: from ‘the unrestrained drives and desires of the Middle Ages’ mediated only by ‘external constraints’, a form of self-control emerges that is gradually freed from the passions of old to be replaced by a fear stemming ‘from […] [our] dependencies …]

162 Andreas Wehowsky and Carol Poore, “Making Ourselves More Flexible than We Are: Reflections on Norbert Elias,” New German Critique 15. (1978), 65-66; see also Valérie de Courville Nicol, Social Economies of Fear and Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 87. 163 Valérie de Courville Nicol, Social Economies of Fear and Desire, 87. 164 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 107, 137. 165 Ibid., 107. 49

[upon newly defined] social relationships’; and our desire to aspire to the concomitant social ideals.166 There is acknowledgement that such civility comes at a cost: repression of old passions in favour of self-mastery means that ‘ and restlessness loom large’.167 This mirrors the concerns some have when it comes to Erving Goffman’s analysis of embarrassment, which carries some of the civilising themes present in Elias’s thesis. I will have more to say on this in Chapter Four.

There are also undeniable echoes of Nietzsche, and his concern for the subject ‘who from lack of external enemies and resistances and forcibly confined to the oppressive narrowness and punctilious of custom’(surely another name for manners); this ‘tamed’ subject’s once wild instincts now turn inward and ‘bad conscience’ is born […]; this instinct for freedom […] pushed back and repressed […]’ can now only ‘discharge’ itself on itself.168 I cannot dwell on Nietzsche at this point, but it is interesting to also note that he begins Genealogy of Morals with the observation that the ‘psychologists’ appear obsessed with ‘dragging the partie honteus [shame] of our inner world into the foreground’, and in so doing that which is ‘purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular’ becomes the origin of our shame.169 If one replaces the ‘psychologists’ with the authors of both Genesis and the aforementioned etiquette guides, one could argue that little appears to have changed in shame’s methodology, which is to say that at a given moment in history it is decided that certain expressions of the unruly and unregulatable body are deigned shameful; accordingly, if one wishes to belong to civilised society then one ought to endeavour at once to suppress that which, up until now, was considered ‘passive, automatic, reflexive [and] molecular’. Nietzsche suspects that there resides in these ‘psychologists’ an unconscious ‘hostility and rancour toward Christianity (and )’; we are back at the Jewish (body) and the Greek (mind); and our apparent difficulty at reconciling these accounts of shame.170

Returning to Elias: a criticism is that he does not properly account for ‘moral autonomy’ in earlier pre-modern or warrior , where, for example, ideals of dishonour/honour may have prompted its members ‘to act in concert with morally normative social expectations’.171 The assumption I am making is that something like aidos has operated in various forms since

166 Andreas Wehowsky and Carol Poore, “Making Ourselves More Flexible than We Are: Reflections on Norbert Elias,” 67-68; see also Valérie de Courville Nicol, Social Economies of Fear and Desire, 88. 167 Valérie de Courville Nicol, Social Economies of Fear and Desire, 88. 168 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 85-87. 169 Ibid., 24. 170 Ibid., 24. 171 Valérie de Courville Nicol, Social Economies of Fear and Desire, 110. 50 human beings began coalescing in social groups; whether or not such was reinforced by external or internal pressure is beyond my scope. My objective is not to critique Elias’s ‘civilising’ theory, but rather to give the reader a historical context for the (re)emergence of embarrassment, in particular, in the 16th century, in a form that will be largely familiar to our current understanding of it as a negative self-conscious emotion that obtains when we commit a breach of etiquette in the presence of the Other. Assuming the normal range of social behaviours are in play, none of us actively seek out disapproval. A sense of belonging is important; culturally dependent social norms might be said to be the glue that holds us together.

Under Elias’s analysis, the fear of shame and embarrassment we will undoubtedly experience should we deviate from such norms is how we self-regulate. Fear, it would seem, runs a streak from Aristotle to Elias. And yet it is strangely absent in Genesis, for our protagonists simply (and suddenly) know something; as if consciousness has not yet had time to formulate this new feeling, beyond knowing confusion. And if they blushed, which they surely did, then it was from something like confusion rather than shame; as this frisson of consciousness passed between them, they suddenly looked at the other’s unruly and unregulatable body with a sense of knowing. Confused by the complexity of this newfound knowledge they encircled and held fast to each other; understandable surely, but already vulnerability is threatened by our sudden willingness to speak for the body. The body that knows Openness is silence by the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness.

With this ‘history’ in mind, I turn now to our (post)modern thinkers. My hope is that the above account will provide some context for the remainder of this chapter as well as those to come.

1.3 – Levinas on Shame: Ontology to Ethics; Being to Otherwise than Being Lisa Guenther points out that there is a transition in Levinas’ thinking regarding shame, from the ontological account provided in his earlier work, On Escape, first published in 1935, to what Guenther describes as ‘an ethical account’ in his later major work, Totality and Infinity, published some thirty years later in 1961.172 It is the former account that Agamben refers to in Remnants of Auschwitz, describing it as no less than ‘an exemplary analysis of shame’.173 What distinguishes Levinas’ treatment of shame, according to Agamben, is that for Levinas ‘shame does not derive, as the moral maintain, from the consciousness of an imperfection

172 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” Review 44 (2011), 24-25. 173 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 104. 51 or a lack in our being from which we take distance’; rather, in shame we are incapable of moving away or breaking from ourselves.174

Agamben argues that if we are ashamed (by our nudity, for example) ‘it is because we cannot hide from what we like to remove from the field of vision’; we are confronted by the simultaneous ‘impulse to flee’ from ourselves, alongside the ‘equally certain impossibility of evasion’.175 Guenther refers to this ‘mood’ as ‘ontological self-encumbrance’, something Levinas calls ‘enchainment’, which Guenther describes as ‘the feeling of having to be oneself, unable to escape one’s own relation to being’.176 Agamben, in his effort ‘to deepen Levinas’ analysis’, paints a compelling image of a ‘consciousness collapsed’; in this moment of desperation it seeks ‘to flee in all directions […] [while] simultaneously [being] summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own defacement’.177 This formulation allows Agamben to promote his view that ‘the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject’.178 It is precisely this ‘double movement’ (at once the subjectification and desubjectification that is shame) that Agamben wishes to apply to his analysis of Robert Antelme’s account of the roadside execution of an Italian student from Bologna; something I will take issue with in Chapter Four.179 Notwithstanding, one gets a compelling picture of the subject in shame, stripped of the relative luxury of being able to stand apart from itself, already in judgement of itself, forced to remain glued to the self, which by virtue of its shame already alienates itself from an understanding it would prefer to have of itself.

Levinas argues that while at first blush ‘shame appears to be reserved for phenomena of moral order’ in which we feel ashamed for having transgressed or ‘deviated from the norm’; in so being we are at pains to identify ourselves as such.180 But there is something of a lack of passivity in the suggestion that we might wish to identify ourselves as ashamed; according to Levinas, what gives shame its ‘whole intensity, everything it contains that stings us, consists precisely in our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend’.181 There are echoes here of Levinas in Mary

174 Ibid., 105. 175 Ibid., 104-105. 176 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 29. 177 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 106. 178 Ibid., 106. 179 Ibid., 106; for the story of the student from Bologna see, Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans., Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Illinois: The Marlboro Press, 1992), 231. 180 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans., Bergo (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 63. 181 Ibid., 63. 52

Babcock’s much later work on embarrassment; Babcock describes ‘the “personal account” of embarrassment’ in which we find ourselves acting in ways that are inconsistent with the conception we have of ourselves.182 What distinguishes this account, according to Babcock, is that embarrassment is treated less as ‘a response to the feared reaction of an audience’, rather it is preferable to view embarrassment as ‘a reaction to a perceived discrepancy between one’s action and one’s own personal standards’.183 Interestingly, according to Babcock, what distinguishes embarrassment from shame is that the latter ‘results when the individual believes […] [that they have] violated a shared, [perceived] objective standard of what it is to be a worthy person’.184 In contrast, embarrassment obtains when we unwittingly call into question a ‘persona’ we have developed for ourselves, in part to limit our sense of vulnerability, which is to say, to limit our responses in what is otherwise a space defined by ‘openness and flexibility’.185 This harks back to Chapter One and the persona of ‘the philosopher’ which for the ancient Greeks secures true happiness by offering immunity against the anxiety that otherwise exemplifies human vulnerability in the face of a life filled with uncertainty.

It is precisely the personal nature of shame that Levinas accentuates when he reminds the reader that we ‘forget that […] [shame’s] deepest manifestations are an imminently personal matter’; in shame ‘we cannot hide what we would like to hide’.186 It is worth quoting Levinas at length:

The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself. What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself.187

There is an undeniable stickiness in this account, of being-stuck-to-itself within a totality (of existence) which at this point excludes the Other, a state of affairs that Guenther describes in terms of a triangular structure, ‘a suffocating relation between me, myself and being’.188 To this end, following the section on shame, Levinas sketches out a compelling phenomenological account of nausea which distinguishes itself, according to Levinas, precisely because it ‘sticks

182 Mary K. Babcock, “Embarrassment: A Window on the Self,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 18 (1988), 459. 183 Ibid., 460. 184 Ibid., 460-461. 185 Ibid., 461. 186 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, 64. 187 Ibid., 64. 188 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 30. 53 to us’.189 Like shame, nausea rivets me to myself, smothers me ‘in a tight circle’ (me, myself and my nausea); in nausea I am ‘scandalised’ by my body, by its need to vomit (in this case), such that I would welcome ‘the presence of another’ if only to downgrade this scandal of nausea to ‘the level of “illness”’; that which, according to Levinas, might offer me some relief because it ‘is socially normal and can be treated’.190 This mention of the desire for ‘the presence of another’ provides us with a segue to Levinas’ later thoughts on shame in Totality and Infinity, where, according to Guenther, ‘shame no longer features as a sign of ontological self- encumbrance but rather of ethical provocation by the Other’.191 This later move also aligns Levinas with Aristotle and Elias, both of whom we have seen rely on the presence of the Other in order for their accounts of shame (and embarrassment) to obtain. Having said that, one can easily imagine shame’s hangover persisting in the way we have just seen Levinas describe, long after the Other is no longer there to witness our behaviour.

In newly addressing shame Levinas (without referring to it directly) makes much of embarrassment (as obstacle). Before my exposure to the Other, I am free to consider the facts, or rather, I am free to consider the potential embarrassment to my freedom (my spontaneity) as presented by the facts under consideration.192 Guenther describes our freedom under these conditions as ‘the violence of my own arbitrary, unjustified, and naively self-absorbed freedom’; my consciousness of my ‘unworthiness’ of this freedom, according to Levinas, does not come about by a further consideration of the facts – ‘The first consciousness of my immorality is not my subordination to the facts, but to the Other, to the Infinite.’193 In other words, what calls my freedom into question is not ‘the totality’ as defined by what is ‘theoretical’ (the facts), but rather the moral dimensions of ‘the Infinite’ as revealed by my exposure to the Other.194 According to Levinas, ‘the freedom that can be ashamed of itself founds truth (and thus truth is not deduced from truth [the facts])’.195 As such, unlike the way in which facts embarrass me, according to Levinas, ‘the Other is not initially a fact, is not an obstacle […] [rather, they are) desired in my shame’.196 To this end, while once I might have been free to consider the facts, ‘the Other opens up a future beyond the projects and possibilities

189 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, 66. 190 Ibid., 66-67. 191 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 31. 192 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 82-83. 193 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 31; and Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 83. 194 Ibid., 83. 195 Ibid., 83-84. 196 Ibid., 84. 54 of a single subject’.197 Within this context, it is enticing to consider Levinas’ reference to the Other as being ‘not initially’ a fact (or obstacle), as alluding to the potential inherent in the Other, should I now consider the fact of the Other over my responsibility for the Other, once more being relegated to the realm of fact qua obstacle, and therefore an embarrassment; an obstacle that, far from wanting to overcome, I now wish to take distance from.

To be sure, Levinas argues that we must not consider ‘the Other as an object’; instead we are required to measure ourselves against the idea of infinity as represented by my responsibilities in the face of the Other.198 Our idea of what constitutes infinity is measured by our ‘consciousness of that which exceeds it’; that which ‘could not have been created by consciousness alone, but which is nevertheless found within consciousness as a of that which produced it’.199 This Cartesian ideal of infinity as perfection, Levinas argues, allows us to know our own imperfection; we do not hold onto to it as an idea, rather we welcome perfection into our lives by welcoming the Other, which for Levinas is ‘the commencement of moral consciousness, [that] which calls in question my freedom’.200 Once more, it is worth quoting Levinas as length:

Thus this way of measuring oneself against the perfection of infinity is not a theoretical consideration [of the facts]; it is accomplished as shame, where freedom discovers itself murderous in its very exercise. It is accomplished in shame where freedom at the same time is discovered in the consciousness of shame and is concealed in the shame itself. Shame does not have the structure of consciousness and clarity.201

Guenther refers to this as our ‘ethical conscience’, that which ‘is awakened in shame before the Other’; this awakening is achieved by the Other and ‘not by activating capacities which already lie dormant in me, but rather by putting my freedom in question and challenging me to justify this freedom, investing it as responsibility and political solidarity’.202 To this end, Levinas declares – ‘To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom.’203 This welcoming of the Other, according to Levinas, reveals to me an awareness of my own injustice if such can be defined by ‘the shame that freedom [to consider the facts] feels for itself’.204 There is a sense

197 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 31. 198 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. 199 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 31. 200 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. 201 Ibid., 84. 202 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 31. 203 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 85. 204 Ibid., 86. 55 here that in both his earlier and later accounts of shame, freedom is what is at stake; while the former glues me to myself, the latter, under the demand of the Other, frees me from an egoistic concern with myself, promising an ideal of the self that is constituted solely in my concern for the Other.

Guenther neatly encapsulates the move from Levinas’ initial account of shame to this later account:

In this sense, the ethical shame which the Other provokes in me does not make me feel stuck to myself; rather, it opens a way of getting un-stuck from my own suffocating relation to being […] We question ourselves […] because we have been put in question by the Other […] we have been called to justify ourselves to one whose vulnerability is exposed to the potential violence of our arbitrary freedom.205

Recall from the previous chapter, our exposure to the Other, this vulnerability, is ‘passivity more passive than all patience’, wherein there is ‘a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity’; this responsibility for the other, this exposure is ‘uncovering itself’, a ‘denuding itself of its skin… at the edge of the nerves’.206 Under this analysis, vulnerability, my unwilled exposure to the Other, is a necessary condition for shame, which is to say, without shame I am free to appeal to the inhumanity inherent in conceptions of ‘invulnerability’ and in so doing I appeal to ‘self-preservation’, nothing less than a cry from the ego to be left alone to consider the facts. Recall, also from the previous chapter, I suggested that egology has about it a logic of the last left standing. One can see the potential for current global crises that require ethical as well as political responses to becoming subsumed in a consideration of the facts at the expense of our exposure and responsibility to the Other. Here one need only think of the prospect of millions having to flee their homes, their homelands, because they have become uninhabitable due to rising water and temperature levels: while various nation states consider the ‘fact’ that there is only so much they can do given the finite nature of their resources; resources that ought, in the first place, be held in reserve for their own citizens. This dilemma is somewhat analogous with fiddling while Rome burns. To this end, one does not have to cast the net too widely to bring to mind situations where our justification for keeping the impoverished Other embarrassed by our impenetrable borders is so that we might have the luxury of considering the facts; or as

205 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 32. 206 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 15. 56

Levinas might put it, we privilege ‘the Truth’, that which the self freely chooses to seek, over ‘the Good’, which is defined by my responsibility always for the other person.207

Finally, unlike Sartrean shame, which, I will argue, is seemingly too sure of the knowledge of its own beginning, Levinas’ later account of shame speaks to a beginning prior to what it means to begin. Our ‘ethical conscience’, provoked by our shame of our arbitrary freedom in the presence of the Other precedes consciousness, allowing Levinas to elevate ethics as first, as pre-conscious, philosophy. To this end, Guenther argues that philosophy ‘the vocation of perpetual questioning, does not antecede […] [my] experience of being put into question by another’; this formulation allows her to observe that while ‘philosophy may be born in wonder […] wonder is born in shame’.208 Within this context, shame speaks to my concern with beginning insofar as I think that ‘the beginning’ haunts Sartre’s account of shame, thereby threatening to close down the potential for new philosophical spaces to reveal themselves.

1.4 – Sartrean Shame: All ‘Praise’ The Other Before turning to Sartre, it is instructive to turn firstly to his translator, Hazel Barnes; in part because her views align with my own, but also because they do not appear to survive into later editions of Being and Nothingness. In her introduction she expresses her surprise at finding in Sartre’s ‘non-theistic philosophy’ what she refers to as ‘a species of Original Sin’.209 Within this context Barnes points out that for Sartre, ‘I experience my alienation and my nakedness as a fall from grace’; according to Barnes, ‘this is the meaning of the famous line from Scripture: “They knew that they were naked”’.210 We find ourselves returning to the couple in the garden; Velleman argues that Genesis ‘makes little sense under the standard [Sartrean] philosophical analysis of shame as an emotion of reflected self-assessment’.211 He ponders how, during a time when nakedness would not have violated any social norms, is it that Adam and Eve suddenly make ‘a negative assessment of themselves?’212 To this end, I have already proposed that confusion rather than shame might be the more appropriate mood for the story of Genesis; and here I am not only referring to our protagonists; as readers we would do well to reflect their

207 Benjamin Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide For the Perplexed, 8. 208 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 32. 209 Hazel E. Barnes, “Translator’s Introduction,” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), xxxix; this introduction is not included in the Routledge Classics, 2003. 210 Ibid., xxxix. 211 J. David Velleman, “The Genesis of Shame,” 28. 212 Ibid., 28-29. 57 confusion in our endeavours at understanding, in the absence of an all-knowing God, how is it they suddenly know they are naked.

With Genesis still in mind we turn to Sartre, who in an attempt to clarify what he means by ‘original’ or ‘pure shame’, argues that it does not necessarily relate to ‘having committed this or that particular fault […] [or] of being this or that guilty object’; rather, I have simply ‘“fallen” into the world in the midst of things and […] I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am’.213 Sartre recognises the terms ‘original’ and ‘fallen’ carry with them all the Biblical symbolism ‘of the fall after the original sin […] [and] the fact that Adam and Eve “know they are naked”’.214 Once more, I have already suggested that suddenly knowing they are naked speaks to the couple’s confusion. I think Sartre is somewhat cavalier with his use of ‘fact’ (which etymologically speaks to ‘evil deed’, prior to its meaning ‘truth’ – both meanings are problematic). Under this analysis, by virtue of its , shame manifests itself as the moral virtue by which we mediate our nakedness in the presence of the Other.

Barnes stresses that throughout Being and Nothingness, while ‘there is no explicit religious association Sartre seems by his choice of words to indicate such connection’.215 Beyond his signalling to religion, Barnes argues that Sartre rehabilitates ‘old terms’ with an eye to their theologicality, which is to say, with an eye to their power to elicit what Barnes refers to as ‘a new theological argument’.216 She makes it clear that while she thinks Sartre rejects (on logical grounds) ‘the notion that God actually exists’, she wonders why he does not allow for such rather than appealing to the pursuit of ‘a missing God’.217 Here Barnes is referring to Sartre’s assertion that ‘everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the- world succeeded in realising only a missing God’; according to Sartre himself, everything is ‘presented in a state of disintegration in relation to an ideal synthesis’; the ideal of integration haunts us ‘because it is always indicated and always impossible’.218 This invocation of ‘a missing God’ hints at hypocrisy insofar as God in absentia is called upon to play a part in what is otherwise a ‘non-theistic philosophy’. There are echoes here of Nietzsche’s concern with how we might define morality in the absence of God. Mindful of such, one might well ask – between the evil of two lesser choices, is hypocrisy more favourable than nihilism?

213 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 384. 214 Ibid., 384; my emphasis. 215 Hazel E. Barnes, “Translator’s Introduction,” xl. 216 Ibid., xli. 217 Ibid., xli. 218 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 792. 58

Derrida cites Levinas thus: ‘hypocrisy […] is not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both philosophers and the prophets’; according to Derrida, under this Levinasian analysis we live ‘in hypocrisy’, which is to say ‘we live in and of difference’; in this case ‘the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history’.219 By this definition, alongside Barnes’ observations, I think it reasonable to suggest that Sartre stands accused of hypocrisy (not necessarily nihilism – a discussion for another time). And yet, despite calling on ‘a missing God’ to play His part, Sartre is positively endeavouring to think anew insofar as he wants to wrestle shame from the grasp of religion (from its historical context) and locate it at the secular centre of what Guenther refers to as a ‘triangular structure’ shaped from the relationship ‘between me, myself and the Other’.220 She is referring to Sartre’s assertion that ‘shame is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions – ‘I am ashamed of myself before the Other.’221 It is surely not accidental that Sartre situates the ‘myself’ in the middle, between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ – the ‘myself’ (me-as-object for the Other) is, for Sartre, defined by the shame with which I ‘live’ in the look of the Other.222 I am proposing that, under the conditions just outlined, according to Sartre, shame is our middle name and therefore our defining characteristic.223 If so, is this really Sartre’s own diagnosis, or is he endeavouring to interpret the will of ‘a missing God’?

This brings me back to my accusation of hypocrisy: if restricted to its negative connotation one might ask, is Sartre wanting to have it both ways when it comes to shame – as a concept attached to philosophy as well as prophecy (the latter term comes from the Greek propheteia, meaning ‘gift of interpreting the will of the gods’)? To this end, Barnes’ view (derived from her endeavour to interpret the ‘will’ of Sartre) neatly encapsulates my reservations, in particular, that shame gains much of its power, its moral force, from its reliance on a religious story of origin. It is worth reminding ourselves that Sartre is grounding his thinking in the western philosophical tradition, in which the Judeo-Christian story of Genesis is also prominent. One wonders how far afield from Western civilisation one would have to travel, before the moral force of Sartrean shame is lost, falling as his analysis now does, on

219 Emanuel Levinas, in Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” 192. 220 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 26. 221 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 385; without any of these ‘dimensions’, according to Sartre, shame does not obtain. 222 Ibid., 350. 223 See etymology of ‘middle name’, for sense of speaking to ‘one’s defining characteristic’. 59 deaf ears? Notwithstanding, if one is to accept Sartre’s analysis of shame as that by which I ‘live’ in the look of the Other, we are it would seem the species of original sin. My concern is that under such conditions shame can neither create new values nor begin to, for it already defines itself as both a ‘virtue’ and the ‘fact’ of the beginning. With one eye always on ‘a missing God’, shame is deeply ingrained in our sense of morality; more worryingly, it is the body, its nakedness, already spoken for (by religion), already acted upon (by religious practice), thereby extinguishing all potential the body possesses to speak for itself.

Sartre points out that ‘no matter what results one can obtain in solitude by the religious practice of shame, it is in its primary structure shame before somebody’.224 In what are effectively his opening remarks on shame, Sartre puts religion and shame shoulder-to-shoulder; perhaps it is more accurate to say face-to-face; and even though Sartre is not suggesting the somebody in this case is God, once more, there is no escaping the ‘missing God’. Some caution is required however: one must assume that what Sartre means when he emphasises practice is that I am in effect rehearsing the ‘vulgar gesture’ (it can only be vulgar enough to cause shame if judged so by the Other), prior to enacting it; better still, I am imagining such (it may never occur), in order to give an account of my shame before God so that I may ask Him for forgiveness. For the reader raised in the tradition of The Confession, most will recall a time when they confessed to a sin not committed; in effect one practiced shame in order to set the ledger straight.

Sartre is emphasising that we cannot truly experience shame (we can almost certainly confect it) for a ‘vulgar gesture’ not committed, and more importantly, not witnessed. This points to what Rom Harré argues are the ‘two structural conditions for shame’ under Sartre’s analysis: first, according to Sartre ‘… shame is shame of oneself before the other. These structures are inseparable’.225 Harré describes these ‘inseparable structures […] [as] the reflexive and the intrapersonal’.226 The second structural condition for shame, according to Harré, is that ‘the former is modelled on the sufferer’s beliefs about the latter’; to illustrate this point, he refers to Sartre’s assertion that ‘the experience of my gesture as vulgar is to borrow the other’s judgement of it’.227 Sartre emphasises this when he declares – ‘Nobody can be vulgar

224 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 302. 225 Jean-Paul Sartre, in Rom Harré, “Embarrassment: A conceptual analysis,” in Shyness and Embarrassment: Perspectives from Social Psychology, ed., W. Ray Crozier (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 184. 226 Ibid., 184. 227 Ibid., 184. 60 all alone!’228 Not just the ‘vulgar gesture’ then, but also that it is witnessed and judged accordingly, so that I internalise this transaction (the Sartrean Look), finally, as shame.

Luna Dolezal, in an essay that will further inform my analysis, argues that for Sartre, in expressing shame we regard ourselves ‘as the object of another person’s perception and understanding, even if the “other” is imaginary or absent’; importantly, the other’s perception is not ‘a neutral seeing, but rather, it is a value-laden looking which has the power to objectify and causes the subject to turn attention on […] [themselves] in a self-reflective manner’.229 This capacity for self-reflection captures an important aspect of Sartrean shame; its ontological significance is derived, according to Sartre, from its ‘capacity to reveal myself to myself through “the look” of the other, awakening self-reflective awareness’.230 Sartre leaves little room for doubt in this regard – ‘It is shame […] which reveals to me the Other’s look and myself at the end of that look. It is the shame […] which makes me live, not know the situation of being looked at.’231 There is a tension here between knowing and living; for now there is a sense that Sartre is shifting the locus of living from the Self to the Other, when he argues that ‘beyond any knowledge which I can have, I am this self which another knows’.232 As such, according to Sartre, ‘I am my Ego for the Other in the midst of a world which flows towards the Other’.233

Sartre refers elsewhere to this flowing towards the Other as an ‘internal haemorrhage’; but such is shame’s affectivity that suddenly this flow is externalised, ‘the world flows out of the world and I flow outside myself […] I am this being. I do not for an instant think of denying it; my shame is a confession’.234 Here he is not referring to the aforementioned practiced confession, but the visceral lived confession of my insubordinate body-for-the-Other. This phenomenological account of shame (as haemorrhaging) speaks to the blood-rush-and-roar of the blush which escapes me such that my body now becomes my body-for-the-Other. In blushing ‘my body-for-the-Other’ is more than just an obstacle, ‘it remains inapprehensible’ to the point of being ‘constraining’.235 This speaks to embarrassment (as aporia); the sense that there is no way forwards and the ensuing desperate mental state in which one finds oneself,

228 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 302. 229 Luna Dolezal, “Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s account of Shame,” Human Studies 40. (2017), 425-426. 230 Ibid., 421-423. 231 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 350. 232 Ibid., 350; my emphasis. 233 Ibid., 350. 234 Ibid., 350. 235 Ibid., 377. 61 suddenly feeling like there is nowhere to turn. As already stated, aporia will be dealt with at some length in the following chapter.

Sartre now draws our attention to a person bent over the keyhole (his canonical account of the shame suddenly experienced by someone overwhelmed by ‘jealousy, curiosity, or vice’, caught by the Other, real or imagined, peeking through a keyhole); suddenly revealed by the Other, I must confront the possibility that ‘it is even possible that my shame may not disappear; it is my red face as I bend over the keyhole’.236 Recall that for Aristotle, ‘there are […] three elements that together prompt the emotion of shame’; the act itself, the character flaw ‘revealed by the act’, and finally ‘the disgrace or loss of esteem before the community at large’.237 Sartre’s account has the act (peeking through a keyhole); the character flaw (jealousy, curiosity, or vice; the assumption is that curiosity in this case is of the sort that killed the cat); and finally my disgrace before the Other. In this instant, ‘I am this being. I do not think for an instant of denying it; my shame is a confession’.238 I wonder whether without the blush it is possible for Sartre to argue that shame is in and of itself my confession? Perhaps it is more accurate to ask, without the blush, am I confined to simply knowing rather than living my shame?

With his reference to ‘my red face’, I believe that Sartre is stressing that this is no longer the practiced confession of a confected shame but the visceral living of it via the body’s manifestation of the undeniability of the blush. One could argue that under such conditions the time for confessing is well past; the blush has already betrayed me, fixed me in this moment of ‘being-for-others’, rendering me as a brute object in this world of objects, this world of walls and doors and keyholes.239 Even if in this moment my body is lost to me, inapprehensible, is all else lost, or do I allow this moment, this aporia, this sense of there being no way forwards, this collapse of all progress, to reveal to me the potential for a new way forward – a new beginning prior to the shame that asserts itself as the beginning? In short, could it be that prior to the expression of shame our relationship to the Other is momentarily defined, not by shame, but by its inapprehensibility and therefore by something like confusion? I will further address this question in the following chapter.

Returning to Dolezal: she argues that when it comes to shame more broadly, it is not only that shame reveals ‘a painful awareness of one’s flaws or transgressions with reference to

236 Ibid., 370; my emphasis. 237 David Konstan, “Shame in Ancient Greece,” 1043. 238 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 350. 239 Ibid., 350. 62 norms and others’; shame is also ‘about a deeper layer of relationality through our bodily vulnerability’.240 Regarding the former statement, Dolezal could just as well be describing embarrassment. But Dolezal, it would seem, is content to regard embarrassment from the point of view of the literature that refers to it as merely ‘a “milder” form of shame’; for Dolezal, shame can be ‘used as an umbrella term’ for a whole range of emotions; as such, embarrassment can be considered a variant of shame.241 While I am keen to blur the distinctions between shame and embarrassment, in the following chapters I hope to show how this collapsing of embarrassment into shame might diminish the potential of the former to speak for the body in ways other than a self-conscious emotion.

1.5 – Shame (embarrassment, something like confusion); a sense of belonging Dolezal appears to support the Sartrean view that when it comes to human affairs, shame has much to offer; indeed, for Dolezal, ‘the fundamental driving force behind shame […] is our human need for belonging’; as such, shame ‘reveals our necessary vulnerability with respect to others and our deep human concern to maintain social bonds and feelings of belonging’; there are echoes here of Elias, especially through the lens of our deep concern (read fear) when it comes to maintaining social bonds.242 It should be noted that Dolezal says she is keen to move beyond what she refers to as Sartre’s negative account of ‘original shame’, where human relationships are ‘characterised by ceaseless objectifying and alienating responses between the self and the other’.243 Our need for belonging is central to Dolezal’s argument, and while she recognises that ‘belonging is a multifaceted concept’ that speaks to our connection ‘to place, to communities, [and] to political structures’ (its etymology speaks to being the property of, or a member of – both are problematic); no doubt mindful of such, Dolezal wishes to limit belonging to a biological conception that recognises above all else our embodied nature and our need to alleviate our anxiety around our physical vulnerability.244

Dolezal, it might be said, is appealing to our (animal) instinct for connection prior to the imposition of consciousness; a primitive or primordial shame that ‘does not require any particular mental content, or particular set of thoughts or understandings, but rather registers

240 Luna Dolezal, “Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s account of Shame,” 421. 241 Ibid., 424; see also Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 16; Probyn points to shame qua shame as being a ‘white hot’ experience; not so embarrassment which is a variation along the continuum of shame-humiliation’. 242 Ibid., 423. 243 Ibid., 425. 244 Ibid., 422. 63 as a felt experience, or affect, through the physical body’.245 Within this context, shame operates ‘as both a signal of distress and of appeasement, [it] is a response that arises in order to repair social bonds and ensure survival’.246 Dolezal refers the reader to ’s account of ‘primitive shame’ beginning ‘in preverbal infantile development’; a prolonged period in our lives as infants where we ‘are thoroughly dependent on others for survival and nourishment’; within this context ‘primitive shame’ manifests itself ‘as a means to manage this helplessness and embodied vulnerability’.247 As a helpless infant in ‘a world of objects’ shame is not defined in terms of ‘negative self-evaluation but instead as “a painful emotion responding to a sense of failure to attain some ideal state”’.248 Dolezal argues that ‘primitive shame’ thus defined expresses itself in ‘the bodily recognition of one’s physical dependency, vulnerability and lack of omnipotence’.249 Dolezal is essentially claiming that ‘primitive shame’ is a childish emotion, which is to say an ‘early emotion’, expressed as it is by the preverbal infant. But is it? To make such a claim, Dolezal is seemingly suggesting that ‘primitive shame’ can be considered as something like a primary emotion, in the same category as fear or anger, for example. Or is it that she is suggesting that ‘primitive shame’ bridges the distinction between primary (or ‘early’) and secondary (or ‘adult’) emotions?

It is instructive at this juncture to turn to Antonio Damasio who proposes that we call ‘“early” emotions primary, and “adult” emotions secondary’.250 In the move from primary emotions (what Damasio otherwise refers to as ‘innate, preorganised [or] Jamesian’) to secondary emotions, Damasio argues that ‘we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other’.251 Within this context, given that Dolezal is arguing that ‘primitive shame’ does not rely on ‘any particular mental content […] [or] thoughts or understanding’, it is difficult to see how ‘primitive shame’ would meet Damasio’s criteria for secondary or ‘adult’ emotions. But Dolezal is also arguing that ‘primitive shame’ is essentially ‘a felt experience, or affect, through the physical body […] aris[ing] in infants when they feel their social bonds are threatened’.252 Under this analysis she appears able to make the move, the connection at least, between primary, or ‘early’ emotions as experienced by the body, and

245 Ibid., 434. 246 Ibid., 434. 247 Ibid., 432. 248 Ibid., 432. 249 Ibid., 432. 250 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (London: Vintage Books, 2006), 131. 251 Ibid., 134. 252 Luna Dolezal, “Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s account of Shame,” 434. 64 secondary, or ‘adult’ emotions that rely on what Damasio refers to as the ‘scaffolding’ built upon the foundation provided by primary emotions.253 This notion of ‘scaffolding’ is important as it accentuates that ‘adult’ emotions are built upon the body’s expression of ‘early’ emotions, or as Damasio puts it, ‘secondary emotions utilize the machinery of primary emotions’.254 Dolezal speaks to this notion of ‘scaffolding’ when she proposes that ‘shame as an affective response […] [may well be] present in very young infants and forms the foundations for the experiences of shame as a self-conscious evaluative emotion […] later in life’.255 By this account, shame, under the guise of being ‘primitive’ (or primordial), is our beginning prior to beginning (life as an adult at least). In the following chapter I will pursue an ideal of ‘primordial emotions’ that endeavours to distance itself from shame, and in so doing rehabilitate the moral animal that is at the centre of my concerns.

In the context of the above discussion, it is worth noting that Vanessa Lemm reminds the reader that ‘for Nietzsche, affirming homo natura means embracing the condition of embodiment as pertaining to life rather than hiding the body behind illusions of a higher, moral origin’.256 Lemm argues that for Nietzsche, probity (a commitment to self-experimentation reflecting the unity of life and thought in the thinker) implies that ‘one unlearn shame and refrain from denying the naturalness of one’s instincts’.257 This harks back to my earlier reference to Nietzsche’s opening comments in Genealogy of Morals, and our apparent obsession with ‘dragging the partie honteus [shame] of our inner world to the foreground’, and in so doing that which is ‘purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular’ (our instincts) becomes the origin of our shame.258 Lemm’s definition of Nietzschean probity as the unity of life and thought in the thinker, ‘an embodied truth’, mirrors my own concern with reconciling the body that knows Openness with the body of knowledge that endeavours towards (thinking) openness.259 Lemm refers the reader to Nietzsche’s motto (concerning probity) – ‘Let’s be naturalistic and let’s not paint our inclinations and disinclinations in moral colours’.260 The suggestion here is not so much that morality cannot be grounded in naturalism (the body); rather, we ought to look to the body as first and foremost ‘pertaining to life rather than hiding

253 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 131. 254 Ibid., 137. 255 Luna Dolezal, “Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s account of Shame,” 433. 256 Vanessa Lemm, “Who is Nietzsche’s Homo Natura? Self-Knowledge, Probity and the Metamorphoses of the Human Being in Beyond Good and Evil 230,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Philosophische Anthropologie 7 (2018), 44. 257 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 43-44. 258 Ibid., 24. 259 Vanessa Lemm, “Who is Nietzsche’s Homo Natura? 44. 260 Ibid., 44. 65 the body behind illusions of a higher, moral origin’.261 It might be asked of Dolezal, finally, why paint our natural inclination for belonging, the very fabric of life, in the moral hue of shame (primitive or otherwise) in the first place? In so doing, surely there lies a risk of relationality being conflated with a relationship, firstly, to a higher moral power? To this end, we are commanded to love each other as Jesus loved us. Of course, I am, to an extent, strawmanning Dolezal; but, as I have suggested throughout this chapter, while shame has a seat at the table, I am concerned that there lies the risk that its normative force comes from a still deeply embedded understanding we have of shame originating from a divine moral authority.

1.6 – Conclusion There can be little doubting the importance of shame in the philosophical literature and the literature more broadly, and yet I harbour reservations when it comes to shame. I am not convinced that it can be properly thought of outside its religious context. Perhaps it is more accurate to say (from a western, Judeo-Christian perspective) that when it comes to whether we are Jews or Greeks in relation to shame, I am inclined to think we favour the Jewish story, especially when we are looking at shame from a strictly moral perspective. We saw that the Greek version (aidos) is inclined towards honour, which is to say that in shame one is afraid of losing of one’s reputation, especially when judged by those whom one respects. On a positive note, the character flaw revealed by the disgraceful act does not necessarily mean that all is lost; indeed, it would seem, somewhat paradoxically, that in the process of losing one’s reputation there lies the prospect of reviving one’s reputation. This appears to be a more generous attitude than simply knowing (understanding as fact or truth) shame; it seems unlikely that once known we can ever properly unknow shame. Hence my issue with Sartre’s somewhat cavalier use of fact (speaking as it does to ‘evil deed’, prior to its meaning ‘truth’), in relation to Adam and Eve knowing they are naked and therefore in shame.

Interestingly, we saw that when it comes to the Jewish version of shame as presented in Genesis, unlike the Greek version, fear does not appear to be a motivating force. Rather, like Rilke’s animals that know Openness, Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed; that is until knowledge enters the story, and in so doing gives us shame as the new name for the naked body. Knowing we are naked, knowledge then, and not fear, becomes the motivating force for shame. Knowledge or fear: which is shame’s motivating force? By way of an answer, let us not forget Levinas’ lament that we live ‘in hypocrisy’, which, according to Derrida, means we

261 Ibid., 44. 66 live in and of the difference between the Jew and the Greek; Derrida, we saw, refers to this difference as ‘the unity of what is called history’.

Is that the problem I have with shame – its history. If so, can Levinas’ two accounts, or Sartre’s canonical account, or Dolezal’s account in response to Sartre, where shame now provides a sense of belonging (as opposed to the ‘ceaseless objectifying and alienating responses between the self and the other’ in Sartre); can any of these compelling accounts live outside history? Of course not. Does this mean they have nothing to offer? Of course not. Does this mean I can do better? For the last time, of course not. Accordingly, my approach has been to introduce embarrassment, alongside its close cousin. We have seen that embarrassment comes to us relatively unencumbered by a lengthy history, entering the lexicon around the middle ages to describe a way of civilising the unruly body via the imposition of etiquette standards handed down from the upper classes.

When one considers, as I have, that the literature supports the view that it is difficult to draw any worthwhile distinctions between shame and embarrassment; my approach going forward is simply that I wish to escape the hypocrisy of shame by focusing on its poor cousin. In so doing, I hope to be able to demonstrate that prior to considering self-conscious emotions, like shame for example, embarrassment has much to offer us as a knowledge emotion, like confusion for example. As I have suggested herein, let us, for the moment at least, leave shame out of the story, and begin with the assumption that upon suddenly knowing they were naked, Adam and Eve were confused. This ought to please the reader no less than knowing.

67

Chapter III - Vulnerability: Pathos; Embarrassment; (Thinking) Openness For doubting pleases me no less than knowing - Dante262 Two bodies collide… this brief and unbearable moment signed into language by an ellipsis speaks to falling short, to confusion, to disorder, to entropy. The blush, that which first announced to the world (defined now as the Other) that (moral) consciousness had obtained, reveals itself at once as the herald of confusion and also our desire to address such.

1.1 – Introduction It was not for nothing in the first chapter I noted that what reconciles Nietzsche with Rainer Rilke is their resolve to remain open to experience in order that they might question ‘all that has hardened into stereotypes’ and in so doing further question ‘our customary interpretations’.263 This might well be our guiding ethos going forward given that it appears to promote the benefits of vulnerability, indeed one’s ‘resolve to be open’ speaks to what I am calling the projection account of vulnerability (in contrast to the protection account). Recall, from the previous chapter, Derrida argues that the Greek problēma ‘denotes as much the task of projection as the edge of protection’.264 I proposed the projection account of vulnerability speaks to the problem (aporia) of vulnerability in terms of the tension inherent in the call to project at the very edge of that which cries out for protection. To this end, I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that vulnerability speaks to a subjectivity ‘incapable of shutting itself up’, a subjectivity compelled towards (thinking) openness and in so being it speaks to the body that knows Openness, expressing the doubt and confusion it feels now that it exists within an openness defined by boundaries and borders, limits, and end – aporia; the moment one body collides with another, a moment in which it is nonetheless determined that no matter which way it goes this moment is moral, and therefore, a ‘fine risk to be run’.265

I am motivated in this chapter to further reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that aspires towards (thinking) openness. I take vulnerability to be the appropriate attitude, a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state. A mental state, I suggested in the previous chapter, speaks to the expression of emotion, surely a mental state also speaks to what it means to feel confused and also, importantly, to think? I will return to

262 Dante’s Inferno (XI. 93). 263 Walter Kaufmann, “Nietzsche and Rilke,” 9; regarding my suggestion of a reconciliation between Nietzsche and Rilke, see also Roger Berkowitz, “Liberating the Animal: The False Promise of Nietzsche’s Ant-Human Philosophy,” Theory & Event 13 (2010), 7; in his review of Vanessa Lemm’s monograph, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, Berkowitz stresses that ‘Rilke is not Nietzsche’. 264 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 40. 265 Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity,” 151; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 120. 68 this question. Concerned as it is with openness such thinking endeavours always to exceed its own limits and yet it is precisely these limits, these boundaries, that not only define our sense of openness; they are also the provocation necessary for embarrassment (as aporia) to obtain, which is itself the provocation required if new philosophical spaces are to be discovered.

Embarrassment (as aporia), I will argue, belongs more broadly to the category of what are referred to as ‘“aporetic emotions”’, which can themselves be categorised as ‘“primordial feelings”’.266 As such, embarrassment might be said to precede its twin which is commonly defined as a self-conscious emotion in the same category as shame. I suggested in the previous chapter that shame is too confident of its own beginning, thereby limiting its potential to open up new philosophical spaces. Doubt and confusion, on the other hand, make up the defining mood of embarrassment (as aporia). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, primordiality speaks to the blush that communicates such embarrassment – such confusion. The blush and embarrassment (as a self-conscious emotion) will be dealt with in the following chapter.

The motivations for this chapter are as follows: as well as reconciling bodies I am also interested in what occurs when bodies collide, more specifically, when bodies first begin colliding and the moment that immediately ensues. To this end, it could be said that I am appealing to evolutionary psychology/biology insofar as I am interested in exploring the possibility that prior to culturally contingent antecedents (or what Emmanuel Levinas might refer to as ‘pre-original antecedence’), when bodies collided… they universally blushed from something like embarrassment (as aporia).267 The use of an ellipsis is deliberate, it not only provides a space in which we might explore our key terms, or more importantly, where we might allow our key terms to reveal themselves; speaking as it does (etymologically at least) to a sense of falling short, an ellipsis is suggestive of the doubt and confusion that characterise the mood of embarrassment (as aporia). It should be noted that while I may be appealing to the evolutionary sciences it is only in the broadest sense, time does not permit a discussion regarding the merits or otherwise of this approach. In sum: in line with my approach towards (thinking) openness, I am proposing that prior to complex language, when (moral) consciousness is emerging, when human bodies begin colliding with each other, aware for the first time of themselves not only as ‘the locus of the as-factor’, but also that they are no longer secure in the Open that has up until now protected them as preconscious animals (somewhat

266 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, (New York: Guilford Press, 2018), 11; Jurist is citing Antonio Damasio (2010) in relation to “primordial feelings”. 267 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 132. 69 paradoxically) in a world without boundaries or borders or end; we blushed from embarrassment (as aporia) at the knowledge that all this was as yet beyond our knowing, but which nonetheless promised our potential as moral animals.268

It should be noted that my parenthesising of morality is meant to convey consciousness that obtains primarily in the presence of a similarly conscious Other. To this end, I am following Levinas’ formulation, alluded to in the first chapter; our welcoming of the Other ensures ‘the commencement of moral consciousness, [that] which calls in question my freedom’, that which interrupts the ego’s obsession with itself.269 In short, I cannot account for consciousness that emerged prior to the emergence of the Other; when surely there existed something obsessed with itself, now that it was no longer secure in the Open; and yet I must remain mindful of this something; that which Levinas endeavours to capture with his use of il y a (there is); ‘this existing without existents’.270 Space does not permit a proper analysis of Levinas’ use of there is; suffice to say he is wanting to account for there always being something, which is to say, we can no longer find refuge in unconsciousness (the Rilkean Open); ‘the il y a is a presence in the absence of things […] the sheer fact of being when there is nothing at all’.271 We might say that were it not for the emergence of the Other, something would still have existed, destined to be obsessed with itself.

I will proceed as follows: in the first section I will look more closely at openness as well as pathos – the pathos of openness, but from a Heideggerian perspective informed by Thomas Sheehan. Sheehan, I believe, shows us how pathos might be considered the appropriate mood in our approach towards (thinking) openness. Why Heidegger? Two reasons: I could hardly leave the last word on Heidegger to Levinas’ lamentation in the previous chapter; and second, having mentioned Rilke, also in the previous chapter, the poet (of the pure and unutterable of the Open), I wish to delve a little deeper into Rilke’s exploration of openness through a reading by Heidegger, in an attempt to further ground my approach to (thinking) openness. In the following section I will explore the potential that (thinking) openness presents precisely at the moment Openness threatens to thwart it, a moment of embarrassment (as aporia). To this end, I will go some way further in defining both aporia and embarrassment. In the final section, given that I am moving towards an ethics of vulnerability (a politics too);

268 My continual bracketing of thinking is to emphasise that it is our approach towards openness that interests me, rather than any definition of openness that may well emerge as the result of such thinking. 269 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. 270 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans., Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 46. 271 Ibid., 49; see also Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 8. 70 and given that he could be accused of being obsessed by ethics (an aporetic ethics no less), as well as the openness that defines such, I will return to Levinas in order to more fully explore his conception of communication that relies on such openness and defines itself as antithetical to certainty – as confusion no less. Other than my responsibility for the other to which Levinas attributes it, this sense of communication, of confusion, I want to suggest, speaks to the subject concerned by its emergence from the preconscious safety of the Open into an openness defined by borders and boundaries, limits, and end. If we consider that this subject is one that is ‘incapable of shutting itself up’, not only does this speak to the dangers and risks inherent in such expressions of subjectivity, it speaks also to the sense of pathos that, I will argue, defines the passivity of the openness of this intrinsically moral animal.272

1.2 – The Pathos of Openness First, there is an ancient Greek word (yet another), apeiron, which captures something of the pathos I am endeavouring to portray herein; time does not permit a close analysis of its broader doxographical usage, but a brief ‘linguistic analysis’ is in order: it speaks to an absence of borders and boundaries, limits, and end; as well as that ‘“[…] [which] cannot be traversed from one end to the other”’; that which is ‘“enormous, immense”’; that which ‘must at least be considered as temporally [and spatially] infinite’; that which, according to Aristotle ‘must thus be an indeterminate substance from which the elements come into existence’.273 It is important to note there is a distinction between the abovementioned Levinasian there is and ‘the pure apeiron […], for we are asked to suppose a world’.274 Notwithstanding, apeiron captures something of the dilemma for the body that endeavours towards (thinking) openness; in order to account for the body that knows Openness, it is already undone by its knowledge of borders and boundaries, limits, and end; in so being the best it can do is declare the absence of such; a lamentation of sorts, now that it is deprived (deprivare); quite literally, entirely released, from the Open. To this end, apeiron will serve to capture something of our muscle memory of the ‘primordial chaos’ of the Rilkean Open.275

In this section I will rely on two essays by Thomas Sheehan, and his reading of Heideggerian openness, as well as that of pathos. I will then turn to Heidegger himself for a further discussion of openness, specifically as it relates to his reading of Rilke. Rilke’s poetry

272 Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity,” 151. 273 Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 67-68. 274 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 8. 275 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 8; Wyschogrod points out that apeiron refers to ‘primordial chaos’ or ‘unlimited’; she contrasts this with Levinas’ account of ‘there is (il y a)’. 71 has thus far been the thread reconciling our various thinkers, our thoughts in general. Heidegger’s analysis of Rilke will not only further assist us in having a fuller understanding of the openness that defines vulnerability as I am concerned with it herein; once again, in the spirit of reconciliation, I could hardly leave the last word on Heidegger to Levinas. Recall from the previous chapter that Levinas laments the ‘“verbality"… [re]awakened in the word being’ by Heidegger; reminding us once and for all that being is a ‘happening’; not humankind's nature, but rather its experiences and how it thinks about existence.276 We saw, also in the previous chapter, that for Levinas openness is not so much ‘awakened’, rather it is expressed in the Saying prior to the said, a ‘passivity of passivity’, a ‘dedication to the other’ characterised by sincerity; the Saying holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’.277 By utilising Sheehan’s essays, I am not suggesting that he (or me, for that matter) is endeavouring to reconcile Heidegger with Levinas; rather I am interested in an alternative reading of openness that tends, I think, more towards the pathos that I am proposing is its defining mood. Put another way, such a reading could be said to locate a sense of suffering within the subject (somewhat akin to Nietzsche) when confronted by such openness, in contrast with Levinas who locates suffering (openness too) in the locus of my relationship with the Other. Once again, recall in the preceding chapter that I suggested Nietzsche extracts an account of the suffering subject living to its fullest potential, whereas with Levinas it is by giving, an attunement to the suffering of the other, that the subject lives to its fullest potential.

Sheehan argues that Heidegger’s entire project is based on a translation of as meaning ‘always-being-open’ or ‘already-having-been-opened’, or ‘apriori openedness’, terms Sheehan recognises as being ‘immensely awkward’, content therefore to suggest that Dasein is simply ‘openness’.278 According to Sheehan, Heidegger is consistently of the view that ‘“being- open” is the ineluctable condition of our essence, not an occasional accomplishment of our will’; in short, ‘it is our “fate”’.279 Sheehan reminds us that ‘the open or Da functions only as long as there is human being’; indeed, ‘a human being’s raison d’être is to-be-the-open’.280 According to Sheehan, the new paradigm for interpreting Dasein is as ‘apriori openedness’ rather than as ‘being-there’; Heidegger does not understand the Da as the ‘there’ but rather as

276 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans., Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 38. 277 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 278 Thomas Sheehan, “A paradigm shift in Heidegger research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), 183, 194. 279 Ibid., 194. 280 Ibid., 194-195. 72 the ‘“open” […] the dynamic openness […] that makes possible all acts as taking-as’.281 To this end, Sheehan argues that:

The most extraordinary thing about all Heidegger’s thought, both early and late, is his unwaivering insistence that human being is that “open” and thus is “the thing itself.” From the beginning to the end of his career, he never got beyond that point.282

It is not like we have a choice, ‘we cannot not be the open’; according to Sheehan, ‘the facticity of our “cannot-not-be-the-open” is what Heidegger calls our “belonging” to the open’ (an echo here of Rilke’s animals belonging to the Open).283 Importantly, Sheehan suggests that ‘human openness is always co-openness’, which forms the basis ‘for all forms of interpersonal togetherness, whether [it be] the shoulder-to-shoulder of solidarity, the eyeball-to-eyeball of political struggle, or the face-to-face of moral obligation’.284 In this last formulation of ‘interpersonal togetherness’ one cannot help but think of Levinas and his emphasis on the face- to-face and my absolute responsibility for the other within the ethical framework of the one- for-the-other.

It is difficult in the context of the above reading of Heidegger to avoid the suggestion that openness defines us within the context of our relationship with the other. Accordingly, the argument might be made that it is because of the pathos of our intrinsic openness, more precisely the suffering of such, that all verbality (to utilise Levinas’ word) has been employed in precisely the opposite direction in order that we might deny (at the very least distance ourselves from) our vulnerability, concerned as we understandably are by being impinged upon. This alludes to what I referred to in the previous chapter as the protection account of vulnerability. To this end, recall, also from the previous chapter, Judith Butler’s reference to ‘the masculine position’ within vulnerability discourses that effectively denies or disavows ‘its own constitutive vulnerability’.285 There is a sense of pathos to be sure, that in so doing we seek to preserve ourselves by aspiring towards invulnerability; we have seen Butler caution that ‘self-preservation’ becomes the human condition and as such we claim that to be ‘inhuman is constitutive of the human’.286 Not only a sense of pathos but a paradox too, if we assume that we generally skew towards a tendency to want to decrease suffering. If openness is that which

281 Ibid., 193. 282 Ibid., 193. 283 Ibid, 194-195. 284 Ibid., 200. 285 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 145-146. 286 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 102-103, 136. 73 we are bound to suffer then we only accentuate our suffering by denying our humanity. We also risk the loss of our most basic form of communication (hermeneia), thereby confining ourselves to discourses in which all but the very life of the body is communicated.287

Sheehan suggests that Heidegger constantly returns to Aristotle’s On Hermeneia in order to ‘retrieve from this phenomenon a hidden meaning’.288 I am interested in hermeneia only as it relates to ‘the power of semainein’; what it is ‘to make manifest and therefore understandable […] to communicate’ either by gesture or sound ‘in the basic sense of indicating something to another with the overtones of both intelligibility and sociality’.289 Sheehan describes this notion of hermeneia thus:

The condition for the possibility of hermeneia [as semainein] in this most basic sense of communication is only that an entity be empsychon [alive] at least at the animal level and therefore have the possibility of revelatory openness to other entities in pathos and phantasia, that is, that it have, to some extent, world […] The nature of pathos is such openness, such having-of-world, and if there is a difference between the ways animals and human beings have world, that difference is interior to pathos itself.290

This difference, Sheehan suggests, is highlighted by the unique way in which we humans live openness. According to Sheehan:

“[The] human psyche, for all its asymptotic self-presence, is even more exteriorised, more pathetike, than is the animal’s, for the human being, in knowing the other as this or that, knows it as other and, even more, knows itself as the locus of the as-factor that registers such otherness.291

It would seem that even at our most basic level of hermeneia, the human subject is immediately overwhelmed by its sense of itself in the world, which is to say, overwhelmed by its consciousness of not being World; of standing apart from the Rilkean Open that is World. To further explore this idea, I turn now to Heidegger and his critique of Rilke’s conception of the Open.

287 Thomas Sheehan, “Hermeneia and Apophansis: The early Heidegger on Aristotle,” in Franco Volpi Heidegger et l’idée de la phénoménologie, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 71; see Sheehan for the three structures of hermeneia; I am concerned with ‘hermeneia-1 [semainein]: self-expression or communication in any form’; -2 [legein] refers to ‘self-expression or communication in discourse’; -3 [apophainesthai] refers to ‘self-expression or communication in declarative sentences’. 288 Thomas Sheehan, “Hermeneia and Apophansis: The early Heidegger on Aristotle,” 67. 289 Ibid., 71. 290 Ibid., 71. 291 Ibid., 71. 74

Heidegger draws our attention to a letter written by Rilke to a Russian reader in an effort to further explain what he means by the Open, and the difference in the relationship to the Open between human and non-human animals. In essence it is an earlier rhyme of Sheehan’s abovementioned view of the human psyche as ‘more pathetike’ in its exteriority. According to Rilke, non-human animals, by virtue of their comparative lack of consciousness are ‘in the world’ to the extent that they cannot set themselves against or apart from the world; in other words, they have no sense of themselves as being exterior to the world – the are World. Importantly, the world (the Open) is not defined by ‘sky, air, and space’; for Rilke ‘they, too, are “object” and thus “opaque” and closed to the man who observes and judges’.292 This means that the non-human animal ‘is all that […] and therefore has before itself and above itself […] indescribably open freedom’.293 Interestingly, for Rilke, the closest we get to such (animal) openness is ‘those first moments of love when one human sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation toward God’.294 There are echoes here of Rilke in Levinas’ conception both of infinity and the height from which the other approaches me: according to Alphonso Lingis, the Infinite (the non-thematisable God suggestive of that which is beyond language) reveals itself in my saying ‘“Here I am”’, and in so saying I ‘expose my exposedness’ as well as by obedience to ‘the order that orders me to my neighbour’.295 To this end, according to Levinas, as for ‘my position before the other as a face’, the other ‘approaches me from a dimension of height’, which has about it a divine or heavenly measure; the face is infinite insofar as it ‘is present in its refusal to be contained’; not the object of the face so much as its transcendence.296 The face is therefore ‘an invitation to the fine risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to the other’.297 We will see in the section on Levinas that he repeats this use of ‘fine risk’ to indicate the inherent uncertainty, the fragility also I would argue, of this moment. But for now, we might consider the following (with Levinas in mind): when it comes to the human animal (the moral animal), it is not in nature that we experience the Open (the Infinite) but in the face of the other; having been excluded from (entirely released from) nature by virtue of our having included consciousness (which is to say, having embraced that which is both a constituent part as well as that which now confines us in the Open), as social animals we are bound to having to continually rediscover our (moral) nature defined by our openness

292 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 105. 293 Ibid., 105. 294 Ibid., 105-106. 295 Alphonso Lingis, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, xl. 296 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35, 49, 194, 214. 297 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 94. 75 qua communication with the other.298 Another way of putting this point might be to say that, having been expelled from the Open by virtue of our consciousness, it behoves us therefore to make a virtue of consciousness insofar as it ushers us towards openness by saying, ‘Here I am’.

To this end, I noted in the introduction that I am endeavouring to reconcile Nietzsche with Rilke. Roger Berkowitz, in his review of Vanessa Lemm’s monograph, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, stresses that ‘Rilke is not Nietzsche’; by way of reinforcing this point he points to Heidegger’s admission ‘that Nietzsche’s teaching of the Will to Power stands outside of Rilke’s poetic world’.299 Berkowitz recognises that Lemm is right to argue ‘that Nietzsche’s own metaphysics […] [can be] understood to replace the priority of reason and logos with the priority of the animal’.300 Berkowitz argues that to the extent that one can equate Nietzsche’s concept of will to power with life itself, then for Nietzsche ‘the rational and representational will appears as an obstacle to the unlimited and unfolding of will to power and a retardation of life’.301 To put it in terms I am pursuing herein, we might say that the body that knows Openness is embarrassed by the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness. Perhaps the reverse formulation is more accurate: the pathos of human openness is expressed when the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness is embarrassed by the body that knows Openness – a constraint that is all the more pathetike because the latter is ultimately unavailable to us. I will revisit this notion of constraint, of absence as well, when I get to Jean Paul Sartre’s account of embarrassment in Chapter Four.

Ultimately, Berkowitz takes issue with Lemm’s thoroughgoing embrace of the ‘infinite freedom of the animal’, arguing that in so doing she could be said to be abandoning humanity in favour of its animality, the ideal of (animal) freedom is suggestive of the ‘yawning freedom of infinite possibility’; in Heidegger’s words ‘the “absence of boundaries and limits”’ (the Rilkean Open; the apeiron).302 Berkowitz concludes that ‘what such a freedom forgets is that humans live in a world’, and while there is nothing wrong with questioning ‘the rational foundations of [this] world’, Berkowitz argues that is another thing ‘to question the world itself’.303 Time does not permit me to pursue whether or not Berkowitz’s critique of Lemm is fair or otherwise, suffice to say that the point I want to make from all this, once again, is that

298 See etymology of ‘include’, suggesting ‘to have (something) as a constituent part’; as well as ‘enclose, imprison, confine’. 299 Roger Berkowitz, “Liberating the Animal: The False Promise of Nietzsche’s Ant-Human Philosophy,” 7. 300 Ibid., 7; as previously noted, Berkowitz is reviewing Lemm’s monograph, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy. 301 Ibid., 7. 302 Ibid., 8; Berkowitz is citing Heidegger, Parmenides, Gesamtausgabe vol. 54 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 234. 303 Ibid., 8. 76 in our endeavour towards (thinking) openness we are constantly embarrassed by the body that knows Openness. To this end, I am particularly interested in the potential that (thinking) openness presents precisely at the aporetic moment Openness threatens to thwart it. To this end I agree with Berkowitz, insofar as it is precisely the recognition of our limitations, our boundaries and borders, our limits, and end, as they exist in openness (as distinct from the Open) that interests me, for it is only by coming up against these limitations that aporia reveals its potential to open up new philosophical spaces.

This brings us back to Heidegger: he succinctly encapsulates the importance, something of the pathos too, of consciousness and its impact on our capacity to be (or not to be) in the world – ‘The higher its consciousness, the more the conscious being is excluded from the world.’304 According to Heidegger, those beings whose consciousness is dimmed, muted or ‘benumbed’ are relatively ‘untroubled by the restless relating back and forth in which conscious representation stumbles along’.305 By this analysis, according to Heidegger, encumbered by a consciousness that now sets us apart from the Open, we are therefore ‘more venturous than plant or beast […] [and as such we are] also in danger differently from them’.306 While no living thing is afforded ‘special protection’, those beings lacking consciousness are ‘admitted into the Open and secured in it’.307 As such, according to Heidegger, these beings ‘in the venture of their dim delight’ exist as ‘carefree in the Open’, unbothered by ‘their bodily character […] [or] their drives’; they face danger of course, but importantly, ‘not in their nature’. To this end, they exist in balance with the Open ‘in such a way that the balance always settles into the repose of a secureness’.308 We, on the other hand, enjoy no such protection, asserting ourselves as we do means ‘the balance of danger is in essence unstilled’.309 Heidegger has more to say in his response to Rilke, once again time does not permit me a fuller exploration. Importantly, for our purposes, I have established that by openness I am not referring to the physical world per se but rather to that which is impinged upon by consciousness.

It appears that pathos might well be the appropriate mood of an openness defined by boundaries – an openness that, paradoxically, confines us. There is a sense here that openness as we experience it (or perhaps as we remember it; our muscle memory of apeiron; the

304 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 106. 305 Ibid., 106-107. 306 Ibid., 113. 307 Ibid., 113. 308 Ibid., 132. 309 Ibid., 132. 77

‘primordial chaos’ of the Rilkean Open) restricts us within certain limits. Before it referred to restrictions within limits, or borders, or boundaries, confine spoke to bordering alongside, to having a common boundary. Within this context it might be said that the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness operates within the confines of a consciousness that is itself conscious of the body that once existed in balance with the Open, carefree and unbothered by its own character, settled and secure. We might consider that if this were the case we would in our endeavours towards (thinking) openness, acknowledge the body that knows Openness with a degree of tenderness, a sense of loss too? This question doubtless hints at a longing for a return to nature. This is not my intention; I remain mindful of Nietzsche’s view that humankind does not ‘return’ to nature, rather it ‘reaches nature only after a long struggle’.310 At this stage, I am interested in providing yet another sense of the pathos I am arguing defines the mood of openness as we experience it, a sense that is only further enhanced by the suggestion now of ‘a long struggle’.

Thomas Gould argues that the modern sense of pathos describes what we feel when certain events invoke within us ‘a mysteriously agreeable sadness’, a combination of tenderness and sympathy we might feel when we experience loss; or the power of art to ‘ennoble us or deepen our understanding’.311 Pathos in this mode produces only ‘a minor pleasure’ that does not cause us much consternation, unlike the early Greeks who in their stories attributed pathos to ‘catastrophic suffering, undergone by some […] man or god, far in excess of the sufferer’s deserts’.312 Within this latter context, the interpretation of pathos that interests us amongst those in Gould’s monograph is that of the dancers in Oedipus the King. Upon being revealed, ‘pathos makes one want to shudder and want to turn away, even as it makes one yearn to look, to feast one’s eyes, and try to understand’.313 Gould argues that the dancers’ own ‘aversion and abhorrence at the sight of the blinded Oedipus is almost as strong as their intense fascination’; therefore, so too is the audience’s own pleasure at what horrifies it.314

Far from any ‘minor pleasure’, is this latter sense of pathos closer to what we experience when, as a body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness we get a glimpse of the body that knows Openness, that which promises in equal measures to embarrass and

310 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 73. 311 Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), ix. 312 Ibid., xi; Gould refers to this meaning of pathos as ‘almost technical’. 313 Ibid., x. 314 Ibid., x. 78 confuse us? In an attempt to further flesh out this question (there is no possibility of an answer), I turn now to aporia and to embarrassment (as aporia).

1.3 – Embarrassment (as aporia) I should reiterate that what concerns me in this chapter is a reading of embarrassment that stands alongside our more common understanding of it as a complex self-conscious emotion in the same category as shame, for example. Read as such, I am endeavouring to give an account of embarrassment that is universal, which is to say, one that is not so reliant on culturally specific antecedents. To this end, I am also motivated by the blush and my intuition that prior to it being spoken for by complex emotions which are, once again, often culturally dependent, it is the signifier of something like embarrassment (as aporia) if such can be defined by my sudden realisation, my confusion too, now that I am confronted by an obstacle about which it appears there is little I can do to avoid. This inability to avoid the obstacle in question speaks further to it being necessary and therefore insubordinate to the will, the very thing that gives the blush (of embarrassment) its particular sting. As already stated, I will return to the blush at some length in the following chapter, but for now my focus is on that which may reveal itself to be its primordial universal antecedent condition, expressed in terms of embarrassment (as aporia). I am endeavouring, essentially, to account for the moment in which embarrassment-as-constraint returns to the body as something felt; whether that constraint comes from the limits imposed upon me by my (moral) consciousness, as already discussed, or from my body which is suddenly for-the-Other.315 In short, it is fair to say that what marks this moment above all else is that I am unsure exactly what I am feeling.

Elliot Jurist, a current researcher specialising in emotions, argues that we should focus on these ‘states of not being sure of what […] [we] are feeling’ if we are to more accurately account for ‘how emotions are lived’.316 This state of being unsure speaks to the sense of falling short I have suggested marks the (elliptical) moment immediately after two bodies collide. Jurist argues that these feelings eluding easy definition can be defined as ‘“aporetic emotions”’, meaning they ‘are vague and lack sharp specificity [and] manifest themselves when we feel something but we are not sure what it is’; Jurist goes on to argue that our ‘effort to fathom those feelings seems directionless or blocked’.317 Within this context we might say that we are embarrassed by the aporetic nature of these feelings; in Sartre’s language, we ‘act “blindly,”

315 I will turn to Sartre in a later chapter for his discussion on my-body-for-the-Other. 316 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 9. 317 Ibid., 10. 79 shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of […] [our] shooting’.318 Jurist likens ‘aporetic emotions’ to what Antonio Damasio refers to as ‘“primordial feelings”’; those emotions that ‘occur through the brain monitoring the state of the body […] [importantly] they precede other more specific emotions and tend to have a valence of pleasure or pain’.319 For reasons that will become more obvious as we progress, it is the latter valence that concerns us herein, insofar as embarrassment might be thought of as my suffering of the suffering to come; at once a premonition and the realisation of something painful – a presentiment of my imminent undoing.

Consistent with ‘aporetic emotions’ being primordial, Jurist speculates that ‘it seems appealing to understand aporetic emotions as linked to the evolution of the brain’.320 Elsewhere, Jurist refers to ‘aporetic feelings’ as being ‘characterised by the sense that a person does not know what he or she feels’.321 He argues that such feelings can take two forms: ‘unformulated feelings, experienced as vague, and conflicted or contradictory feelings, experienced as confusing’.322 Whether or not confusion can be classified as a ‘proper emotion’ carries with it some controversy.323 Paul Silvia suggests that ‘confusion is the ugly duckling of the knowledge emotions’, as such, confusion has not attracted much attention from researchers; indeed, according to Silvia, ‘the notion of confusion as an emotion seems to make some psychologists strangely mad’.324 I will return to Silvia on this, but for now the point to be made is that confusion, if it is to be viewed as an emotion at all, belongs to a category that is distinct from other categories like positive, hostile and self-conscious emotions.

According to Jurist, aporetic feelings speak to this sense of confusion insofar as the subject reports that ‘they feel something but do not know what they feel’.325 Doubt, then, could be said to be the defining mood of embarrassment (as aporia); and doubt, as we are about to see, is, somewhat paradoxically, what makes progress possible however difficult it may appear. Regarding aporia, Jurist points out that the term comes from the ancient Greek, meaning

318 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., Hazel E. Barnes (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2003), 377; from this point on, I will be citing this later edition. 319 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 11. 320 Ibid., 11. 321 Elliot Jurist, “Mentalized Activity,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 22 (2005), 427. 322 Ibid., 427. 323 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure: Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Pride, Surprise, and Other Unusual Aesthetic Emotions,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3 (2009), 49; I will return to this point in a later chapter. 324 Paul J. Silvia. “Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience: An Overview of Empirical Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, eds., Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 266. 325 Elliot Jurist, “Mentalized Activity,” 433. 80

“difficulty in crossing”; literally ‘“a = not” and “poria” = crossable”’.326 This is interesting when now considered alongside a-peiron (from peraõ); that ‘“[…] [which] cannot be traversed from one end to the other”’. There is the further suggestion here of the pathos of openness as we experience it – that which cannot be traversed nonetheless calls upon us to set out; a reformulation (perhaps) of Heidegger’s ‘longing’ expressed in terms of ‘the agony of the nearness of the distant’; we set out knowing that each step forward takes us a step further away. Another way of approaching this is to note how when it comes defining aporia, difficulty in crossing abuts the literal meaning, not crossable; difficulty is rooted in the Latin facere, meaning ‘to do’; hence, we arrive at an ideal of aporia that calls on us, despite the impossibility, to begin.

To this end, Derrida refers to aporia as ‘the old, worn-out Greek term […] this tired word of philosophy and of logic’; a word he puts into ‘tension’ with another, namely, ‘problem’; a word about which all he knows before he begins is ‘“not knowing where to go”’.327 Not knowing where to go implies not knowing where to begin; indeed, we need only recall Derrida lamenting elsewhere – ‘I do not know where to begin to mark out this assemblage, this graph, of differance.’328 Derrida emphasises begin, no doubt to highlight its etymological grounding in aporia, suggestive of ‘a doubting or being at a loss where to begin, or what to say, on account of the variety of the matter’.329 In Aporias, Derrida asks – ‘Can one speak – and if so, in what sense – of an experience of the aporia?’330 Even though it is not clear that Derrida would allow for it, I want to propose that as we approach aporia, the experience we should keep in mind is one of beginning. The Latin finis, which greatly concerns Derrida in Aporias, means ‘that which divides, a boundary (line), limit, border, end’. I emphasise end in order to accentuate the negative connotation already suggested by aporia, as that which is not crossable – the end of the line. Derrida does not use this phrase as far as I am aware; he may think it more appropriate to use, as he does, ‘the limit of the ending, the place where, in a way, the ending ends’.331 To be sure, he seems more interested in ‘the crossing of the line’; notwithstanding, if the experience of aporia can be defined as ‘the affirmation that announc[es] itself through a negative form’, then the experience of beginning might be said to only become possible with

326 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 10. 327 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 12. 328 Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in : An Anthology, eds., Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 135. 329 John Oswald, A Dictionary of Etymology of The English Language (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861), 419; see footnote for aporia. 330 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 15. 331 Ibid., 30. 81 our knowledge of end.332 Still with Derrida: ‘not knowing where to go’ implies also that I am seeking – to go; to set into motion that which is threatened not only by the obstacle before me but the doubt also about how best to proceed. And yet the doubt we feel can be overcome, I want to suggest, by beginning; this is despite (or perhaps because of) the overriding feeling we have of there being no way forwards.

Surely one can think of any number of seemingly intractable issues about which there appears to be no way forwards; against which, I would argue, the only antidote is beginning. This may seem like an obvious point, but of these same issues we might ask how many are dealt with by not beginning, by kicking the proverbial can down the road? By not beginning we have already failed; we have fallen at the first obstacle and in so doing we deceive ourselves into thinking there is no way forwards – no beginning.333 To reiterate: the experience of aporia, of the doubt and confusion about there being no way forward is – to begin, and in so doing we demonstrate our vulnerability, if such can be expressed by our willingness to open ourselves up to beginning. I will return to this point in a moment.

André Laks argues that, broadly translated, aporia speaks to a sense of ‘there being no way forwards […] [the] desperate mental state in which one finds oneself, having nowhere to turn one’s mind to reach a definite opinion on some subject’.334 Laks argues that ‘what Aristotle [with his use of aporia] wants to show – not without some sense of paradox – is that being stuck in an aporia […] is precisely what make progress possible in the most fruitful way’.335 This harks back to Jurist’s point that aporia speaks to difficulty rather than impossibility. To this end, the intellectual impasse suggested by Aristotle’s use of aporia is not to be seen ‘as the collapse of all intellectual progress, but as the condition of fruitful inquiry’.336 Importantly for our concerns, Laks notes that as well as this sense of aporia as a puzzle, ‘we find in English “difficulty” [and] “embarrassment”’.337 Embarrassment, we know, speaks to what it means ‘to doubt’ and ‘to block’. This sense of doubt, I have proposed, is the appropriate mood for aporia, which can be further understood as ‘the doubting (dubitatio) of one pretending not to know

332 Ibid., 19. 333 To fail is etymologically suggestive of falling (fallere); but also, to deceive. 334 André Laks, “Aporia Zero (Metaphysics ´ 1, 995a24–995b4)*,” in Aristotle: Metaphysics Beta, eds., Michel Crubellier and André Laks (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2009), 26; I am only glossing over Laks’ extremely detailed research to capture the sense of embarrassment implied by aporia. 335 Ibid., 26. 336 Ibid., 26. 337 Ibid., 25; see footnotes. 82 what [one] knows, or how [one] should say it’.338 This sense of doubt speaks also to Jurist’s earlier suggestion that ‘aporetic feelings’ can appear to be ‘conflicted or contradictory’ leaving one feeling confused.

Regarding confusion: I have already pointed out that there is some controversy surrounding whether or not confusion can be classified as a ‘proper emotion’. Notwithstanding, Silvia argues that confusion, alongside interest and surprise, are categorised as knowledge emotions, meaning they are ‘associated with thinking and comprehending’.339 Elsewhere, Silvia argues that knowledge emotions are viewed as such because ‘the appraisals that cause them are metacognitive: people are appraising what they know, expect, and understand’.340 According to Silvia, ‘confusion is a metacognitive signal: it informs people that they do not comprehend what is happening and that some shift in action is thus needed, such as a new learning strategy, more effort, or withdrawal and avoidance’.341 Within this context, Silvia goes on to argue that for those ‘novices who are faced with [art] works that they cannot understand’, they might foster expertise by ‘both reducing and harnessing the experience of confusion’.342 Confusion, it would seem, is a pathway to knowing; confusion is also the defining mood of aporia; therefore, we might say that to know anything requires that we willingly embrace not only confusion, we also continually embrace aporia, the obstacle that is itself defined by confusion. And further: if Silvia is right and confusion is associated with thinking, then for the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness, it does so in a state of confusion, confronted as it is by (the obstacle of) the body that knows Openness.

There is, I would suggest, something Nietzschean in this ideal, this appeal to confusion and to aporia. Indeed, it is Nietzsche who declares that ‘certainty [not doubt] is what drives one insane’.343 Nietzsche, it would seem, aspires towards confusion as well as aporia; he certainly aspires towards mountain tops, a metaphor, surely, for that which is difficult but not impossible, if one is to remain sane, which is to say – sound and healthy. In short, certainty is not good for one’s health; confusion, on the other hand, if we have the courage to embrace it (again and again), speaks to good health.344 To this end, Keith Ansell-Pearson directs our attention to Howard Caygill’s essay ‘Affirmation and eternal return in the Free-Spirit Trilogy’;

338 Stephen A. Barney et al., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 77. 339 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 48. 340 Paul J. Silvia, “Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience,” 265. 341 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 49. 342 Ibid., 49. 343 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 246. 344 Sane comes from the Latin sanus, meaning ‘sound, healthy’. 83 according to Caygill, Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ can be construed ‘as an aporia or puzzle which opens up new philosophical spaces’.345 An aporia or puzzle which opens up new philosophical spaces speaks not only to beginning but opening too – to vulnerability, no less.

The compound begin consists of ‘be’ (about), as well as ginnan (a Teutonic verb meaning ‘to open, open up’, or alternatively, to cut open (surely an expression of what it means to project one’s vulnerability); ginnan itself is cognate with gina and ginnan, meaning ‘to gape’ (as in, mouth or abyss). Importantly, inherent in ginnan ‘is the concept of motion […] [as well as] the shift in meaning from “open up” to “begin” (as in, to open a speech)’.346 From the Anglo- Saxon, be-ginnan, it is conceivable to suggest that we get a sense of opening ‘a space in which things can happen’.347 What begins? What happens? Vulnerability begins, which is to say it is (always) beginning. What happens? Consciousness happens; not just consciousness; ours is the good fortune of being moral consciousness, which is say, for the moment at least, confusion. Recall, I am following Levinas’ argument that our welcoming of the Other ensures ‘the commencement of moral consciousness’, which interrupts the ego’s obsession with itself; hence I cannot account for consciousness that emerged prior to the emergence of the Other, when surely there existed something obsessed with itself.348 To obsess, etymologically speaks to staying put, to remaining where one it; quite literally, to sit. Needless to say, this antithetical to the notion of beginning (as vulnerability) I have just outlined. To this end, recall from Chapter One, that I believe the blush is the primordial signal that communicates to the other (who is just as likely to blush in response) that moral consciousness (confusion) has obtained. I will be discussing the blush at some length in the following chapter, but for now I want to suggest it communicates something like aporia, ‘a doubting or being at a loss where to begin, or what to say, on account of the variety of the matter’; something like confusion; something like beginning.

I proposed in my introductory remarks that prior to complex language, when human bodies begin colliding with each other, aware for the first time of themselves not only as ‘the locus of the as-factor’, but also that they are no longer secure in the Open that has up until now

345 Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Introduction,” Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed., Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 2002), 7; my emphasis. 346 Lynn D. Sims, “Aspectual Loss and Renewal: onginnan, beginnan, start,” in Periphrasis, Replacement and Renewal: Studies in English Historical Linguistics, eds., Irén Hegedūs and Dóra Pödör (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 60; for mention of “to cut open”, see preface Catherine Keller, Face of The Deep: A Theology of Becoming, (New York: Routledge, 2003). 347 Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 112. 348 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. 84 cossetted them as preconscious animals in a world without boundaries or borders, limits, or end; (moral) consciousness now obtains, and with it the doubt and confusion that presides over aporia. Haunted now by the memory of a world without delineation, consciousness demands that the first task of the moral animal is to delineate, to make its mark, and in so doing it begins.349 I turn now to Levinas, on beginning first, and then to revisit his conceptualisation of a subjectivity that signifies itself ‘precisely by its incapacity to shut itself up from the inside’; by its vulnerability.350 Importantly, whether I am discussing beginning or vulnerability; from this point onwards the reader is to assume that (moral) consciousness is in attendance.

1.4 – Levinas: The Beginning; Openness Levinas has this to say about beginning:

But the problem is that one can ask if a beginning is at the beginning, if the beginning as an act of consciousness is not already preceded by what could not be synchronised, that is, by what could not be present, the unrepresentable, if an anarchy is not more ancient than the beginning and freedom.351

In other words, consciousness, which proudly asserts itself as the beginning is always haunted by that which precedes it. Consciousness then, according to Levinas is beginning, which is to say, always beginning (inchoative, according to Levinas) – ‘Consciousness is a mode of being such that beginning is what is essential to it.’352 Recall from the previous chapter, we discussed Levinas’ conception of power as ‘belong[ing] to potentiality and not to act’.353 Levinas wants to expand our idea of power beyond ‘a simple repercussion of energy along a causal chain’ to that which embraces power as ‘the feat of commencing, that is, of existing as an origin and from an origin towards the future’.354 By emphasising both commencing and existing, I would argue that Levinas is trying to capture a sense of beginning that speaks to motion, as discussed above.

We have only just discussed the suggestion that inherent in beginning is the concept of motion, captured by the shift in meaning from opening up to beginning. Within this context, I would argue, we get a sense of vulnerability as being both a necessary and sufficient condition for beginning. Regarding the latter, assuming vulnerability obtains, even the immediate re-

349 See etymology of the verb delineate; ‘to mark out in lines’; as well as ‘describe’ and to ‘portray in words’. 350 Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” 62. 351 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 165. 352 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 131. 353 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, xxx. 354 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 131. 85 action of ‘invulnerability’ is the beginning of something, in this case, our attempt at closing down the possibilities implied by the potential of the projection account of vulnerability. I will return to this point throughout, as it speaks to the imperative implied by vulnerability (the projection account at least), and in so doing speaks further to an ethics in which we are bound, always, to begin.

Levinas argues that ‘consciousness is the very impossibility of a past that would never have been present, that would be closed to memory and to history’.355 Given the very personal and profound losses Levinas suffered as a result of the Holocaust, it is difficult in this formulation of consciousness not to hear his thinly veiled warning with regard to the potential for the present to be revisited by events we thought we had left behind; a potential made even more potent should we suffer the hubris of endowing ourselves with a sense of a (new) beginning that forgets its own beginning – that forgets it is always beginning.

By emphasising always, I am endeavouring to speak to what Levinas refers to as passivity, which like action (as potential), is not the ‘effect in a causal series’. According to Levinas passivity exists on ‘the hither side of consciousness and knowing […] [on] the reverse side of being, prior to the ontological plane in which being is posited as nature’; in short, such passivity is ‘the meta-physical [or ‘pre-original’] antecedence’.356 In a typically poetic turn of phrase, Levinas asks the reader to imagine:

It would be as though beyond the ambit of a melody a more acute or more grave register resounded and mingled with the chords heard, but with a sonority that no voice can sing and no instrument produce.357

Passivity as Levinas sees it is both before and beyond consciousness, effectively placing it out of the reach of philosophy (totality); indeed, Levinas says we could call such ‘pre-original antecedence’ religious if it ‘did not make us run the risk of evoking a theology impatient to recuperate “spiritualism”’.358 Levinas wants to equate this sense of passivity with the aforementioned subjectivity that is incapable of shutting itself up from the inside. This ideal of subjectivity is defined by an inwardness, not ‘in any spatial terms’, but by ‘the fact that in being the beginning is proceeded […] by a responsibility, prior to freedom’; in short – ‘The

355 Ibid., 131. 356 Ibid., 132. 357 Ibid., 132; my emphasis; Levinas asks in the footnote to this analogy – ‘Is not Nietzsche the exceptional breath to make this “beyond” resound?’ 358 Ibid., 132. 86 subject is a responsibility before being an intentionality.’359 What defines this responsibility? Like vulnerability itself, it is a ‘passivity of passivity’, a ‘dedication to the other’ characterised by sincerity; ‘not the communication of a said’, which would ‘immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the said’; the Saying holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’.360 Levinas argues that the Saying of this ‘responsibility that is undeclinable, yet never assumed in full freedom, is good’.361 Indeed, if we were to utter yes (the said) in response to the other, then according to Levinas, at his point ethics ‘makes its entry into philosophical discourse’.362 We therefore do not ‘choose the Good’, instead we are in effect elected by the Good; importantly, this ‘election by the Good is not an action, but non-violence itself’; residing as the Good does in the very passivity already outlined.363

Levinas makes the point that the ‘passivity of [my] possession by the Good’ and by extension my relationship with (and responsibility for) the other ‘in not convertible into nature […] the anarchical bond between the subject and the Good is a bond that cannot be made on an assumption of a principle which would be in any way present to the subject in a choice’.364 Levinas goes further when he states that such a bond is not ‘a “divine instinct”’ or the indication of ‘an “altruistic or generous natures,” or a “natural goodness”’.365 Recall that by anarchy Levinas is referring to that which ‘troubles being’, as that which might be said to haunt consciousness by virtue of its ability to disrupt ‘the ontological play’ of consciousness. This sense of ‘ontological play’ speaks to the decision, the said, the yes or no I might be tempted to utter with regard to my relationship qua responsibility to the other. To this end, Levinas makes it clear that ‘in the midst of the submission to the Good […] [there remains] the seduction of irresponsibility, that is, the very birth of the ego in the obeying will’.366 Here birth speaks to the beginning of consciousness, which we have seen is already preceded by beginning; by an anarchy ‘more ancient than the beginning and freedom’. This means the subject, the ego, the ‘I’, in its fulsome expression of its responsibility supports ‘the universe “full of things”, placing such responsibility beyond ‘ontological categories’; leading Levinas to conclude that ‘anti-

359 Ibid., 133-134. 360 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 361 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 135. 362 Ibid., 135. 363 Ibid., 135. 364 Ibid., 137. 365 Ibid., 137. 366 Ibid., 137. 87 humanism’ has failed us by not finding in us, ‘lost in history and in order, the trace of this pre- historical and an-archical saying’.367

We find our way back to the Saying – and to the said; to communication, and to the doubt that, according to Levinas, defines such. But if doubt is the defining mood of communication, its possibility cannot occur without openness, without our being vulnerable. According to Levinas:

To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for […] [the other].368

Levinas goes on to argue that such is the nature of openness-as-responsibility, it reveals itself in my substitution for the other; this is not to suggest that ‘the openness of communication’ should be viewed in terms of ‘a simple change of place, so as to situate a truth outside instead of keeping it in oneself’.369 According to Levinas, there is ‘folly’ in the notion that communication exists on the outside, as an add-on; what gives communication (and the openness that defines such) its sting, is that the ego is firstly in comfortable communication qua solidarity with itself.370 Our subjectivity obtains when ‘the ego does not appear, but immolates itself’; only in this way can my relationship with the other ‘be communication and transcendence, and not […] [just] another way of seeking certainty, or the coinciding with oneself’.371 The Saying, like the vulnerability that defines it, is why we cannot remain inside ourselves; as we saw in the previous chapter, the Saying is the condition under which communication might occur, ‘the unblocking of communication […] the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to trauma, vulnerability.372 As such, our humanity, our subjectivity, according to Levinas, ‘is a responsibility for the others, an extreme vulnerability’.373 Concomitant with my own appeal to primordiality, Levinas posits that:

367 Ibid., 139. 368 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 119. 369 Ibid., 119. 370 Ibid., 119. 371 Ibid., 118. 372 Ibid., 48. 373 Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity,” 149. 88

Prior to consciousness and choice, before creation is assembled into the present and into a representation and becomes an essence, man approaches man [two bodies collide]. He is made of responsibilities. With them he rends the essence.374

Morality might be initially (or perhaps definitively) defined by my absolute responsibility (my substitution) for the other; in other words, by the Good. The Good, its Saying, is suggestive of a time when human bodies begin colliding; when consciousness is emerging; when we become aware for the first time of ourselves not only as ‘the locus of the as-factor’ (the ego), but also that we are no longer secure in the Open that has up until now protected us as preconscious animals (somewhat paradoxically) in a world without boundaries or borders, limits, or end. Is it any wonder that doubt and confusion define our attempts at communicating all this? Levinas argues that when it comes to ‘communication […] one can indeed only speak of […] uncertainty’.375 To this end Levinas posits that:

Communication is an adventure of a subjectivity, different from that which is dominated by the concern to recover itself, different from that of coinciding in consciousness; it will involve uncertainty. […] Communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.376

Levinas proposes that ‘the word “fine” has not been thought about enough’; he argues that it is ‘antithetical to certainty, and indeed to consciousness’.377 Interestingly, fine can be traced back to the Latin finis, which we know means ‘that which divides, a boundary, limit, border, end’; we can see why doubt and confusion is the defining mood of a subjectivity newly emerged from The Open; a subjectivity that now risks communication in an openness defined by boundaries and borders, limits, and end. I have continually emphasised end, not in order to point to death (although it doubtless does), but rather to remind us that it is antithetical to the sense of beginning that I have suggested defines vulnerability.

1.5 – Conclusion I began by saying that I am motivated in this chapter to further reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that aspires towards (thinking) openness. As such, I take vulnerability to be the appropriate attitude, a posture informed by the body that implies a mental

374 Ibid., 149. 375 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 120. 376 Ibid., 120. 377 Ibid., 120. 89 state. Concerned as it is with openness, such thinking endeavours always to exceed its own limits, and yet it is precisely these limits, these boundaries, that define our sense of openness.

In order to explore this sense of openness, I turned first to the pathos that I believe pervades such. I suggested that even at our most basic level of hermeneia (self-expression or communication in any form), the moral animal is immediately overwhelmed by its sense of itself in the world, which is to say, overwhelmed by its consciousness of not being (the) World; of standing apart from the Rilkean Open that is (the) World. It is this sense of being overwhelmed that is informing my intuition, mentioned in my opening remarks, that prior even to the presence of the other, there was One who now realised they stood apart from (the) World; from the Open.378 In their endeavour to reconcile the body, that had until a moment ago known Openness, with the body of nascent knowing now suddenly having to think openness, this One blushed in the face of the Open (most likely from something like confusion). Morality obtained in this moment of reconciling what it was like to be me in the world, which is to say in the attempt to restore the union between this One and the Open. Of course, my appeal to morality (to the moral animal) is enhanced once morally conscious bodies begin colliding; for then to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. I will return to this point in the chapters on ethics and politics.

This primordial confusion, I suggested, is captured by the phrase ‘aporetic emotions’, which are themselves defined as being ‘vague and lack[ing] sharp specificity [and] manifest[ing] themselves when we feel something but we are not sure what it is’; as well as that, our ‘effort to fathom those feelings seems directionless or blocked’.379 In the language of Sartre, I suggested that our embarrassment at this state of affairs means that we ‘act “blindly,” shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of […] [our] shooting’.380 And yet, just like the One who first stood apart from (the) World, we are compelled by this aporia to begin. To this end, I asked, what begins, what happens? Vulnerability begins, which is to say it is (always) beginning. What happens? Consciousness happens; not just consciousness, ours, I suggested, is the good fortune of being moral consciousness, which is say, for the moment at least, expressed by our confusion at this state of affairs.

This notion of consciousness as beginning (beginning as vulnerability), is informed by Levinas’ views on beginning and openness, which, according to Levinas are passivity insofar

378 See Prologue. 379 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 10. 380 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 377. 90 as such exists on ‘the hither side of consciousness and knowing […] [on] the reverse side of being, prior to the ontological plane in which being is posited as nature’; in short, such passivity is ‘the meta-physical [or ‘pre-original’] antecedence’.381 Levinas, we saw, is making a move, one which he is at pains to point out is not religious, whereby our responsibility, like vulnerability itself, it is a ‘passivity of passivity’, a ‘dedication to the other’ characterised by sincerity; ‘not the communication of a said’, which would ‘immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the said’; the Saying holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’.382 Levinas wants to resist the notion of ‘divine instinct’ or ‘natural goodness’; and yet, when it comes to our responsibility for the other Levinas proposes that ‘I am obliged without this obligation having begun in me, as though an order slipped into my consciousness like a thief, smuggled itself in’.383 The passivity of such an order (insofar as I am not awaiting or welcoming such) is expressed by Levinas in terms of my ‘obeying this order before it is formulated’.384 Much like my resistance to Sartre’s reliance on a ‘missing God’ when it comes to shame, I am reticent to take up Levinas’ language of obligation, order and obeyance, for there can be no denying the religious overtones. And even if one takes Levinas at his word when he says this formulation is not related to ‘divine instinct’ or ‘natural goodness’; the language or obligation, order and obeyance (just like shame) comes to us as normatively preordained.

I should stress that I am not suggesting we are naturally good. I did mention, in my opening remarks, that I think the blush ultimately betrays our will to be good; that betrayal itself speaks to our willingness to give.385 Importantly, this is set against the aporia of ourselves as moral contradictions, which is to say we are just as like to err as we are to forgive. But I am getting ahead of myself. For now, it is enough to suggest that when this moral animal emerged from the Open, the blush betrayed its embarrassment. This was not yet an expression of a negative self-conscious emotion, like shame for example, but rather a knowledge emotion; something like confusion; something like the student from Bologna felt just before he died in a ditch by the side of the road. His story, as told by Robert Antelme, will be explored in the final section of the following chapter; it will mark a return to philosophy. But first, given that

381 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 132. 382 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 383 Ibid., 13. 384 Ibid., 13. 385 Once more, see Prologue. 91 philosophy has largely ignored the blush and embarrassment, I will rely on science for an explanation in support of my intuitions to this point. 92

Chapter IV - Vulnerability: The Blush (and Embarrassment) When we see the cheek of an individual suffused with a blush […] immediately our sympathy is excited […] as if we were ourselves concerned, and yet we know not why. The condition […] appeal[s] to our better nature, and secure[s] [our] sympathy, which we ourselves may have claimed from others on similar occasions – Thomas Henry Burgess M.D.386

Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions […] but we cannot cause a blush, as Dr. Burgess remarks, by any physical means [...] it is the mind which must be affected – Charles Darwin387

But that you passed me by, silent; that you blushed, I saw it well: that is how I recognised you as Zarathustra […] Your shame, Zarathustra, honoured me – Friedrich Nietzsche388

The blush, both an obstacle and that which must be overcome; the moment of aporia, and of morality; all too often defined by the negative self-conscious emotions it is said to herald, the blush, finally, speaks for itself.

1.1 – Introduction I have said that I am eager to have the blush speak for itself, which is to say I wish to free it momentarily from culturally sensitive antecedent conditions, as well as the negative self- conscious emotions it is said to herald. Following on from the previous chapter, I believe the blush can be further conceived of as a primordial signal of simultaneity, the heralding of the relationship between consciousness and morality, within a frame of reference provided by the presence (or perceived presence) of the Other. This (admittedly positivist sounding) formulation harks back to Levinas’ assertion that only the welcoming of the Other ensures ‘the commencement of moral consciousness, [that] which calls in question my freedom’, that which interrupts the ego’s obsession with itself.389 Within this context, I want to propose that the blush, this most human of responses, is so, precisely because it signals the emergence of the moral animal at the centre of my concerns.

386 Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (London: John Churchill, 2017), 1. 387 Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, eds., Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 286. 388 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 377. 389 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. 93

I will return this last claim in the following chapter; for now, I am compelled to question philosophy’s (mis)treatment of the blush (and by extension, embarrassment). By not allowing ‘the ugly’ to speak for itself, the blush has been ensnared in the gaze of philosophy which sees only the privilege afforded the rose-coloured cheek and not the heat that speaks for all. Why ‘ugly’? I am being guided by Nietzsche’s ‘emphasis on the negative’, that which recognises and affirms ‘the value of the apparently negative’; I therefore take seriously Nietzsche’s caution that ‘one should guard against thinking lightly of [such] [...] phenomenon merely on account of its initial painfulness and ugliness’.390 It is precisely because of its painfulness that Charles Darwin thinks there to be little evolutionary value in blushing, declaring that it ‘makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them’.391 Consider also Sartre’s observation that ‘to “feel oneself blushing” […] can determine psychoses such as erythrophobia […] [the blush is] nothing but the horrified metaphysical apprehension of the existence of my body for the Others’.392 And yet, it is the blush that reveals Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to The Ugliest Man – ‘That you blushed, I saw it well: that is how I recognised you as Zarathustra.’393 All this leads me to think that there is still much to learn from the blush – if we would only let the body Speak.

In order to understand what it is the body is Saying, I will focus firstly on the blush from a scientific (social/psychology) point of view, that will capture something of the history of the research into blushing as well as current research. I will continue with this approach in the next section on embarrassment, where I will focus, once more, on social/psychology research into the prosocial benefits of embarrassment. Finally, I will return to philosophy, in particular to a scene from Robert Antelme’s account of a student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution.394 I will refer to an essay by Lisa Guenther for her discussion of her own and Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Antelme, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but rather that which may have been overlooked as a result.395 Accordingly, my focus remains very much on the blush and

390 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 253; Kaufmann describes Nietzsche’s dialectic as the “recognition and affirmation of the value of the apparently negative”; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 87. 391 Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 309. 392 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 376. 393 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 377. 394 Robert Antelme, The Human Race. 395 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben: The biopolitics of shame and humiliation,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 38 (2012); see also, Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. 94 embarrassment, in particular the latter’s absence from these analyses. To this end, I will refer to an essay by Phil Hutchinson questioning Agamben’s excision of embarrassment from Antelme’s account, something Guenther also notes.396 In sum, I am hopeful that by concentrating on what the student from Bologna’s body is Saying, I will not only build upon the themes explored in the previous chapter, specifically the notion of the blush and embarrassment as aporia, I will also provide a bridge to the following chapters on ethics and politics.

1.2 – The Blush From the outset, an uncomfortable truth needs to be addressed; philosophy (the Western canon at least), as far as I am aware, does not account for the blush in those with dark skin, or those who dress in ways that conceal the face. As such, to the extent that it deals with the blush it is from the point of view of those for whom the blush appears as pink, or rose, or red; in short, those who are fair-skinned and therefore, most importantly, those for whom we can bear witness. I stress this because it alludes to a deeper problem for accounts of shame in particular, and for the moral animal more generally. Recall from Chapter Two, Sartre’s account of shame (which is consistent with Aristotle’s observation that ‘aidos is in the eyes’); according to Sartre, I am revealed as such in the eyes of the Other (real or imagined); therefore, I must confront the possibility that ‘it is even possible that my shame may not disappear; it is my red face as I bend over the keyhole’; in this instant, ‘I am this being. I do not think for an instant of denying it; my shame is a confession’.397 One can see the issue: if my red face is how my shame announces itself; if the blush (as witnessed by the Other) is my confession, how, therefore, does Sartre account for those ‘in whom a change of colour in the skin is scarcely or not all visible’?

There is, I concede, an element of strawmanning in this question. Recall that for Sartre, shame obtains when I gain from the value-laden look of the Other their judgement of my action as vulgar. This happens prior to the blush; indeed, it might be said to be the cause of my red face; therefore, while Sartre’s account allows for those with dark skin or others who choose to dress in ways that conceal the face to feel shame, does it allow for my red face to be my confession and hence, for the Other who judges my shameful act, to bear witness? Further, are we to assume that those for whom the blush is not visible, are able to deny their shame and therefore cannot be morally trusted? This question has a long history, going all the way back

396 Phil Hutchinson, Shame and Philosophy: An Investigation in the Philosophy of Emotions and Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 397 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 301, 285. 95 to the Prussian polymath and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt. Both Charles Darwin and London physician Thomas Burgess before him, refer disparagingly to Humboldt’s assertion that those who cannot be seen to blush ‘know not how to blush’ and therefore cannot be morally trusted; the ‘dark races’ (and those presumably who choose to dress in ways that conceal the face) are therefore incapable of giving ‘external evidence by blushing, of their deep internal feelings’.398 Under this analysis, it would seem that those who are dark-skinned, and those who dress in ways that conceal the face; collectively, the majority of the world’s population, have no way, within the context of the Western canon, of having their shame, their embarrassment, their morality, witnessed by way of the blush; the primordial signal, I am suggesting, of ourselves as moral animals. By the end of this chapter, we will see that there is potential for the blush to be ‘witnessed’ in other ways; ways that are yet to be properly researched; ways that mean if we just listen to what the body is Saying, we do not necessarily need to rely on seeing my red face. The further implication for restricting the blush to such a privileged ‘white’ witness, is that the voice of vulnerability is similarly restricted, which is to say there is no accounting for how the rest of humanity might project their vulnerability, if such can be further defined as their moral sensitivity.

Burgess, whose seminal treatise on blushing precedes Darwin’s by some thirty years, devotes an entire section to sensitivity entitled ‘On Sensibility’. Of particular note is Burgess’s attempt to speak for all living things (including plants and non-human animals) when it comes to sensibility and the blush. This is to be commended, especially when philosophy can sometimes appear to overlook all but the human animal in its considerations (of all things).399 Burgess, on the other hand, wants to allow for the possibility that even plants demonstrate ‘sensibility’; indeed, when it comes to plants and animals ‘there is something analogous to sensation […] [expressed by the degree to which] plants as well as animals are […] sensible of external expressions’.400 Burgess’s thesis is that as consciousness develops so does our experience (our understanding too) of sensibility (of vulnerability), until we arrive at the human animal in which ‘sensibility may be defined to be that peculiar action of the brain by which we receive impressions, either internal or external’.401 Our capacity to be excited by these sensations is, according to Burgess, more ‘vivid’ when we are young; as we mature, while ‘we

398 Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 293; see also Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 33. 399 See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am; not only Levinas, but Descartes, Kant, Heidegger and Lacan too, all are accused by Derrida of failing to adequately account for animals other than the human animal. 400 Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 13. 401 Ibid., 19. 96 find them still buoyant’, importantly (and perhaps to our detriment as far as I am concerned herein) Burgess argues that these sensations are now ‘more under the control of the will’; that is until we reach old age, where ‘they become finally confused or extinct’.402 As we progress towards old age and death, we see the potential for the prior ‘death’ of the blush; at the very least the diminishment of our capacity to blush, if such is reliant on our capacity for openness (sensibility).

To this end, there are Burgessian echoes in William Young’s essay on vulnerability in Levinas’ ethics, in particular how youth ‘as an an-archic vulnerability, contests the limits of being’.403 Young argues that:

A necessary risk of such vulnerability is its ossifying loss of receptivity. Such ossification, and the reversion to activity [at the expense of potential], are requisite for the emergence of consciousness. Consciousness appears as a betrayal and capture of the youthful vulnerability from which it emerged.404

Consciousness, it would seem, represents a threat to vulnerability, and therefore to the blush. Recall, from the previous chapter, Heidegger’s observation that, ‘the higher its consciousness, the more the conscious being is excluded from the world’; encumbered by a consciousness that now sets us apart from the Open, we are therefore ‘more venturous than plant or beast […] [and as such we are] also in danger differently from them’.405 The danger, I want to suggest, is particularly felt by the moral animal at the centre of my concerns, which is to say for intuitive expressions of our morality, in favour of external conceptions of morality, whether they be gifted us by religion or the state. Regarding the latter, this danger is particularly acute when it comes to those who have ‘forgotten’ how to blush; and how these ‘unblushing males’ might present a potential obstacle (an embarrassment, no less) for an ethics and a politics that take for their name – vulnerability.406 I will return to this point in the following chapters.

Interestingly, for Burgess, as consciousness develops, we are able to demonstrate ‘true sensibility’, which finds its expression by way of the ‘True Blush’.407 Burgess makes a

402 Ibid., 20. 403 William W. Young III, “Betrayals of Vulnerability: Beyond Sovereign Responsibility,” Philosophy Today 53 (2009), 224. 404 Ibid., 224. 405 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 106-107. 406 Martha Nussbaum, “The Philosopher of Feelings,” Interview with Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker Online (2016); it is from Erving Goffman that Nussbaum gets this idea of the ‘unblushing male’; a subject Goffman describes as ‘young, married, white, urban […] [and] heterosexual’, amongst other things. 407 Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 21, 48. 97 distinction between the ‘False Blush’ and the ‘True Blush’: the former occurs due a ‘morbid sensibility’ (one that is over-excitable due to the subject’s comparative lack of intellectual and moral training); the latter speaks to ‘all those changes or variations in colour which take place on the cheek, having some good and substantial moral cause for their production’.408 While recognising the blush as a signal, first and foremost, of ourselves as moral animals; true to his time (and before the death of God), Burgess attributes our capacity to blush from moral failure to Providence.409 It goes without saying that Darwin does not accept Burgess’s reliance on the divine; I am obliged, nonetheless, to cite Burgess at some length to demonstrate just how much he seemingly gets right:

The soul might have sovereign power of displaying in the cheek […] the various internal emotions of the moral feelings whenever they are infringed upon either by accident or design […] Moreover […] being conscious of this involuntary power […] serve[s] as a moral check upon the inclination […] prevent[ing] us from deviating from the prescribed rules of morality.410

This harks back to Elias’s work on embarrassment, especially our fear of it, operating to keep us within social etiquette guidelines. To this end, Burgess argues that ‘we must certainly admit the utility, and even the necessity of blushing in society’, for when we infringe ‘upon the prescribed laws of society’ we deserve ‘to make at least a moral atonement’ for such.411 Under Burgess’s analysis, it seems that the more refined our intellectual and moral consciousness, the more conscious we are of our body’s ability to unconsciously betray us should we stray from the path of moral righteousness or social etiquette. We get a sense here, from a thinker steeped in science and religiosity, writing just prior to the emergence of Nietzsche, of an analysis, the sort which Nietzsche would devote his life to debunking; indeed one gets the impression that Nietzsche might have been more interested in Burgess’s notion of ‘morbid sensibility’ given its prerequisite lack of moral training.

Darwin concurs with Burgess when it comes to the blush being insubordinate to the will, remarking that ‘we cannot cause the blush […] by any physical means’, it is the mind and not the body ‘which must be affected’.412 Importantly, both men also agree that the blush is first

408 Ibid., 21, 48. 409 Ibid., 49. 410 Ibid., 49. 411 Ibid., 49. 412 Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 286. 98 and foremost heat. To this end, and in contrast to philosophy’s obsession with witnessing my red face, Darwin refers the reader to David Forbes’ observations regarding the Aymara Indians:

That from the colour of their skins it is impossible that their blushes should be as clearly visible as in the white races; still under such circumstances as would raise a blush in us, ‘there can always be seen the same expression of modesty or confusion; and even in the dark, a rise in temperature of the skin of the face can be felt, exactly as occurs in the Europeans’.413

I have already had much to say regarding confusion, I will have more to say later in this chapter; notwithstanding, within Forbes’ account, as well as heat, there is now another way to recognise the moral animal at the centre of my concerns, without referring to the blush. Forbes is still relying on being able to observe confusion on the face, which cannot account for those who choose to dress in ways that conceal such. Again, I will return to this apparent shortcoming, but for now I want to suggest that from the very beginning, as well as signalling something like confusion, the body has been telling us that the blush is, first and foremost, heat. For the reader already concerned by my references to primordial times, when the moral animal was almost certainly not fair-skinned; when the cheeks may not have even been visible due to the preponderance of hair; this reference to temperature and touch as a way of recognising the blush should allay any doubts they may have had about the blush as a moral signal. Time does not allow me to pursue a phenomenological (or evolutionary) account of touch; suffice to say I think it reasonable to imagine that when morally conscious bodies began colliding, they touched the others’ face; the sudden warmth of which was a sign that no matter which way it went, this moment was moral.

This focus on heat is consistent with the view of a current leading researcher on the blush, Ray Crozier, who argues that for too long now we have been distracted in our inquiries by the appearance of the blush, and that perhaps it is time to focus instead on temperature.414 Crozier further acknowledges that when it comes to researching signalling properties of the blush ‘a continuing problem […] is the relatively poor visibility of the blush among people with dark skin pigmentation’.415 But even this can be challenged by a certain ‘irritating finding’ that appears to indicate those with higher pre-blush temperatures are ‘more likely to show a

413 Ibid., 293; my emphasis. 414 W. Ray Crozier, Blushing and the Social Emotions: The Self Unmasked (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 57. 415 W. Ray Crozier, “Blushing and the private self,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 236; my emphasis. 99 decrease in facial temperature’ after the onset of, for example, embarrassment.416 This lack of visibility due to skin colour, as well as the suggestion of an inconsistency when it comes to temperature responses, can still be mitigated somewhat by Forbes’ observation regarding facial expressions, like confusion for example. Having said that, given we can assume that the primordial moral animal lived in a world, as yet unlit and unwarmed by fires; if we further assume that such a world made even temperature an unreliable indicator; surely the body had other ways of Saying – ‘I’ do not know how this moment will go. This issue is one that I am hoping the student from Bologna, his body at least, can help address. I will return to the blushing body with its busy hands by the side of the road.

Notwithstanding the fact that ‘the blush presents many challenges to researchers, I am encouraged by the recent research that argues the blush ‘is a significant element of social life’ about which ‘a greater understanding will contribute to many areas of the human sciences’.417 Within this context, the apparent lack of philosophical interest in the blush is difficult to understand when we consider that according to the editors of The Psychological Significance of the Blush, ‘the blush is ubiquitous yet scarcely understood’.418 Surely philosophy ought stand alongside science in this regard. The editors further claim that what is all the more surprising when it comes to the blush is that much scientific research has been dedicated to studying facial expressions that convey emotions as well as the emotions themselves and yet the blush, that which heats and colours the face, which heralds the emotion itself, has suffered from ‘scientific neglect’.419 This would be understandable, they argue, ‘if the blush was straightforward to understand or was of little psychological or social consequence’; on the contrary, the blush ‘presents many puzzles’ (an aporia no less), as well as being culturally and psychologically significant.420 The blush is uniquely human, and yet blushing has been identified as the largest gap in Darwin’s theory; ‘the blush represents a lacuna in our understanding of emotion’.421

416 Ruth Cooper and Alexander L. Gerlach, “Measurement of the blush,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 47. 417 W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong, “Conclusions,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 343; my emphasis. 418 W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong, “The study of the blush: Darwin and after,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 419 Ibid., 1. 420 Ibid., 1; my emphasis. 421 Ibid., 1-2; see also W. Ray Crozier, “A Catalogue of Blushes,” Working Paper Series Paper 35 (2003), 7; Crozier points out that even when it comes to affect theorist like Silvan Tomkins, he ‘has surprisingly little to say about the blush and he shares with other theorists’ uncertainty about its role’. 100

Referring to studies on the signalling properties of blushing, Crozier argues that ‘exposure’ (a singular definition of vulnerability) encourages ‘speculation on […] the evolutionary origin of the blush’.422 To this end, Crozier presents two evolutionary accounts of the blush: the first is that exposure, or conspicuousness, poses a threat to many species due to the ever-present danger of predation; Crozier posits that ‘there may be something innately arousing about being exposed and unable to hide’, leading him to propose that ‘the evolutionary origins of the blush may lie in arousal that is triggered by being conspicuous and hence exposed and vulnerable’.423 This leads Crozier to further posit that over time this conspicuousness within the natural world might now be associated ‘with being socially conspicuous and at risk of social rejection’ (recall that Aristotle observed that fear, of disrepute in this case, caused people to blush.)424 Crozier’s second account of the evolution of the blush is one that ‘represents a sudden shift in the arousal that takes place when action is inhibited’, thereby suggesting that the blush ‘is associated with a state of ambivalence: “an action tendency that is stopped, blocked, or suppressed”’; under such conditions, Crozier points out, the blush ‘“could result from sudden inhibition of some tendency to act”’.425 Two points are worth making: first, Crozier’s account of the blush appears consistent with Silvia’s account of confusion in the previous chapter; recall that according to Silvia, ‘confusion is a metacognitive signal […] inform[ing] people that they do not comprehend what is happening and that some shift in action is thus needed’.426 Second, in relation to Crozier’s latter account of the blush being ‘associated with a state of ambivalence’; this will become the focus in the following chapter, dealing with an ethics that creates the conditions under which the morally ambivalent animal, the contradiction, may thrive. My intuition is that the blush, as a moral signal, is one that first and foremost communicates my ambivalence, which is to say my confusion in the knowledge that I am just as likely err as I am to forgive.

A further lead may come from research (albeit limited and tentative) suggesting that prior to it acquiring ‘communicative and symbolic significance’, the blush (like laugher) operated as an entropic-minimisation mechanism.427 The authors argue that ‘in social situations that cause blushing the mobilised energy has no outlet’ leading them to hypothesise that

422 W. Ray Crozier, “Blushing and the private self,” 236; my emphasis. 423 Ibid., 236. 424 Ibid., 236. 425 Ibid., 236; Crozier is citing Frijda (1986, p. 186). 426 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 49. 427 Pedro C. Marijuan and Jorge Navarro, “The Bonds of Laughter,” Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) (2010), 11. 101 blushing developed primarily to relieve cerebral blood flow.428 The attraction of this hypothesis, not lost on the authors, is that prior to it becoming an expression of a complex emotion, the definition and antecedent conditions of which are often culturally dependant, the blush was first and foremost the ‘constant and universal’ relief of cerebral blood-flow that occurred when prelinguistic bodies began colliding; as such it was bound to become adopted, alongside ‘laughter, crying, facial expressions […] enhanced gaze discrimination, unison sense, rhythm, music [and] dance’ as a ‘group communicational’ adaption.429 It is not difficult to imagine that prior to complex language, the blush communicated my understandable desire to lessen my confusion; perhaps it is more accurate to say, my body’s confusion, burdened as it now was with an emerging consciousness that initially signalled little else other than my moral ambivalence in the presence of the Other.

This pre-linguistic account of the blush (the Saying prior to the said), points to further research suggesting that blushing is a non-verbal ‘communicative signal’.430 While the authors (like so many) wish to attribute shame as the principle mental state which excites the blush, their analysis is helpful as we approach the section dealing with embarrassment, insofar as I believe it helps to further reconcile both affects. While the authors wish to make a largely linguistic distinction between shame (defence of one’s image) and embarrassment (the avoidance of intrusion into the private sphere of others), they acknowledge that ‘there is no consensus in the literature that they are different’.431 Notwithstanding, the authors argue that the blush communicates not only the subject’s ‘sensitiveness to others’ judgements’ but also that the subject shares the others’ values.432 Furthermore, the authors argue that by blushing, the subject is demonstrating that it shares values with others; feeling ashamed for violating these values the blushing subject is communicating its sorrow and ‘thus performing an acknowledgement, and an apology aimed at inhibiting others’ aggression or avoiding social ostracism’.433 In short, the blush serves as ‘signal of appeasement […] an acknowledgment of a value and, possibly, an apology for its violation’; the hope is ‘that the group is less likely to be aggressive towards or isolate the individual’.434 The authors argue that Darwin might object to endowing the blush with such strong communicative powers, given his view that ‘the blush

428 Ibid., 11. 429 Ibid., 11. 430 Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse,” 240. 431 Ibid., 230. 432 Ibid., 240. 433 Ibid., 240. 434 Ibid., 242. 102 has no function at all’.435 While this suggestion is understandable, especially when we consider it in the context of Darwin’s aforementioned views relating to the suffering the blush induces in bother the blusher and the beholder; Darwin also has this to say:

Blushing – whether due to shyness – to shame for a real crime – to shame from a breach of the laws of etiquette – to modesty from humility – to modesty from indelicacy – depends in all cases on the same principle; this principle being a sensitive regard for the opinion, more particularly for the depreciation of others [….] in relation to the opinion of others on our conduct.436

Here we see, as evidenced by our discussion in earlier chapters, not only that the blush accounts for moral shame (for a real crime) and embarrassment (from a breach of the laws of etiquette); but also an account of Nietzschean shame (modesty from humility, and from the error of indelicacy); most importantly, we see that the blush, just like Sartrean shame, relies principally on ‘a sensitive regard […] to the opinion of others on our conduct’.437 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we see vulnerability accounted for, insofar as neither the blush nor the emotion it heralds obtains without our sensitivity towards others – our relationality; the sense that ‘I’ belong.

Given that the blush seems to be Saying, ‘I’ (want to) belong, and given that it also appears to be non-verbally communicating various modes of moral behaviour, perhaps, finally, what is of most importance is that we can trust what the body is Saying by way of the blush; for not only is it ‘a reliable social signal […] impossible to fake or to suppress’; as ‘a communicative signal’, when combined with affects like shame or embarrassment (or indeed, confusion), it ‘bears witness to the individual’s sincerity’.438 Recall, yet again, that for Levinas, the Saying, like vulnerability itself, is a ‘passivity of passivity’, a ‘dedication to the other’ characterised by sincerity; ‘not the communication of a said’, which would ‘immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the said’; the Saying holds itself open, is openness, ‘without excuses, evasions or alibis’.439 We begin to see the blush as an expression of such, for it not

435 Ibid., 242. 436 Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 308-309. 437 Carl D. Schneider, “The Reddened Cheek,” Nietzsche on Shame,” Philosophy Today 21 (1977); Schneider gives a compelling account of shame from Nietzsche’s perspective. 438 Peter J. de Jong and Corine Dijk, “Social Effects of Facial Blushing: Influence of Context and Actor Versus Observer Perspective,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7 (2013), 13; see also, Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse,” 246. 439 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 143. 103 only Speaks to a sincerity that is impossible to fake, it Speaks to us as moral animals that not only want to belong, but by blushing also Say something like, here ‘I’ am.

Recall, once more with reference to Levinas, that the Saying suspends the subject from activity, allowing for subjectivity to signify itself unreservedly as ‘here I am’; the blush, I am proposing, is the body Saying – ‘Here I am’.440 This sense of the body making such a sincere declaration is akin in some ways to that of the ‘I’ of Derrida’s ‘auto-deixis’ (this is ‘I’ who is showing myself), which he so wishes to afford the non-human animal other (the animot).441 A body suddenly ‘grasped’ by the Other; the blush, (just like the ink of the octopus to which Derrida refers), speaks to the truth of ‘the ipseity of being able to be or able to do “I”, even before any autoreferential utterance in language’.442 This further appeal, prior to language, to the blush betraying something like the truth about me; of me being able to be or do ‘I’; occurring as it does in the silence I have signed into language with an ellipsis, speaks therefore to a sense of falling short of language. And yet the blush communicates something that feels like the ‘truth’ about me in the moment. We arrive at an expression of the positive valence of the blush, which is all too often defined by the negative emotion it is said to herald. One such emotion is embarrassment (as a negative self-conscious emotion). As we are about to see, beyond a conception of it a knowledge emotion, like confusion, while embarrassment can undoubtedly speak to a sense of failure, it also, just like the blush, communicates our intrinsic morality, which is to say, our prosociality.

1.3 – Embarrassment (other than aporia) Failure, it might be said, is a hallmark of embarrassment, particularly if one subscribes to Erving Goffman’s view that the embarrassed subject ‘fails’ when it projects an incompatible definition of itself before the other, something Goffman argues the subject naturally desires to conceal.443 For some, like Michael Schudson, this confines Goffman’s subject to one that avoids rather than attains, ‘not a maximiser of gain but a minimiser of risk’.444 Schudson argues that Goffman ultimately excludes the capacity for the subject to be a hero and a fanatic; to be deeply involved in an activity but also insensitive; to bravely flaunt propriety while thumbing its nose

440 Ibid., 143. 441 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed., Marie-Louise Mallet, trans., David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 95. 442 Ibid., 92-95. 443 Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organisation,” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1956), 264, 266. 444 Michael Schudson, “Embarrassment and Erving Goffman’s Idea of Human Nature,” Theory and Society 13 (1984), 633. 104 at vulgarity; to retain ‘the untrained and admirable emotionality of the child’ as well as ‘the child’s stubborn and wilful selfishness’.445 These qualities, it might be argued, neatly capture Nietzsche’s ideal subject.

This is not to suggest that embarrassment is in and of itself a failure, on the contrary, Schudson makes it clear that he thinks Goffman ahead of his time when it comes to ‘embarrassment [as] a profoundly important feature of human motivation and social structure’.446 Goffman puts it in the following terms: when the subject is embarrassed ‘social structure gains elasticity; the [subject] merely loses composure’.447 Mirroring Goffman’s earlier sociology research, more recent psychology research argues that embarrassment probably evolved as a way of preventing social exclusion, allowing those who displayed ‘inclusive fitness’ to adapt more successfully to group living than those individuals who might be described as loners.448 This view harks back to Elias’s thesis suggesting that our fear of embarrassment ensures that we adhere to social etiquette guidelines, especially if we want to be thought of as belonging to a society that now wants to distance itself from the ‘problem’ of the unruly body.

To this end, current research suggests that in order to avoid ‘social ostracism’, surely the ‘death’ of the human subject construed within alterity, ‘embarrassment likely developed’ for the following reasons:

1) As an appeasement gesture. 2) To deter social transgressions. 3) To motivate amends and reparations for the social wrong.449

Alongside the above criteria, when we consider that the subject blushing from embarrassment is signalling ‘submission and apology’, while at the same time scanning ‘their emotional surroundings, particularly by monitoring the eyes of others, as they attempt to repair their social transgressions’, one gets a further compelling picture of the moral animal at the centre of my concerns.450

445 Ibid., 647. 446 Ibid., 646. 447 Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organisation,” 271. 448 Ryan S. Darby and Christine R. Harris, “A biosocial perspective on embarrassment,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122. 449 Ibid., 122; the authors are referencing (Harris, 2006; Keltner and Buswell, 1997). 450 Ibid., 123. 105

Behaviour associated with displays of embarrassment is otherwise described in the scientific literature as prosociality: embarrassment within this context signals the subject’s ‘underlying prosociality and commitment to social relationships, where prosociality is defined as caring about others’ welfare and avoiding behaviours that may damage another’s welfare’.451 Referring to Goffman’s earlier research demonstrating embarrassment’s capacity to ensure ‘smooth-flowing social interactions’ (echoes here of Burgess’s abovementioned suggestion regarding the social utility of the blush), the authors argue that there is yet more potential for embarrassment beyond the ‘appeasement analysis’ inspired by Goffman’s research.452 Beyond the functional account of embarrassment’s capacity ‘to ameliorate the social effects of mistakes and mishaps’, the embarrassed subject is also, the authors further argue, signalling its ‘underlying prosociality and commitment to social relations […]; [its] other-orientated, prosocial disposition’.453 The authors argue their ‘hypothesis that embarrassment signals an individual’s prosociality fits well with evolutionary claims regarding the roots of prosocial behaviour’.454 An evolutionary account of prosociality points to it being ‘a by-product of a more general tendency of individuals to internalise social norms’; we signal our ‘trustworthiness and attractiveness as a group member’ by reliably signalling our ‘sensitivity to norm violations’ via reliable ‘involuntary signals’ like the blush .455 There is much to like in this evolutionary account of prosocial behaviour; primarily that it alludes to the blush as a prelinguistic, non- verbal communication of myself as morally trustworthy.

The authors also make a distinction between embarrassment and shame from this prosocial point of view: their intuitions lead them to believe that ‘shame does not signal prosociality’, leading the authors to hypothesise that while the observer of a subject displaying shame may ‘attribute some positive traits […] (e.g., they are capable of feeling sorry)’ the observer is unlikely ‘to trust them or be prosocially inclined in their actions’ towards the shamed subject.456 In short, unlike shame, embarrassment as prosociality (an expression of our being ‘other orientated’), allows prosocial subjects to ‘selectively interact, thereby enjoying the benefits of mutual cooperation and reciprocal altruism while avoiding the costs of exploitation by more egoistic individuals’.457 This view contrasts with that of the

451 Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer and Dacher Keltner, “Flustered and Faithful,” 81. 452 Ibid., 82. 453 Ibid., 82. 454 Ibid., 82. 455 Ibid., 82. 456 Ibid., 93. 457 Ibid., 82. 106 aforementioned researchers who attribute this prosocial behaviour to shame; notwithstanding, it further demonstrates why I am less inclined to distinguish shame from embarrassment. It also demonstrates why I think the blush is so important; shame or embarrassment, it seems not to matter; the blush non-verbally communicates self-consciousness (at having failed in some way in the presence of the Other); importantly it is also signals that I am sincerely asking for forgiveness; something that is likely to be given by the Other (assuming that vulnerability obtains, and there are no bad actors). Of course, this is all within the context of embarrassment as a self-conscious emotion; I am more interested in its potential as a knowledge emotion; indeed, as I have already made clear, I think the latter precedes the former, speaking as it does to something like confusion. I will return to this analysis in the following section.

Roland Miller describes the ‘prototypical case of embarrassment’ as the ‘hapless person’ who suddenly becomes aware they have ‘misbehaved with others present’; suggestive of a subject that has strayed from the path of its usual sense of its behaving self, now gazing back at itself in embarrassment; an emotion, a reaction, that relies on there being at the very least, a belief that the Other has also witnessed this ‘misbehaviour’.458 Under such conditions, according to Miller, our subject becomes ‘flustered and discombobulated’, an expression, I would argue, of becoming undone, - of nothing less than confusion.459 The persona the subject thought it was presenting, this carefully thought out composition, is momentarily discomposed. Recall that Babcock argues that ‘persona’ is to be thought of as a conception of the self against which one standardises and thereby constrains one’s actions; embarrassment, under these conditions, ‘ensues when the individual deviates’ from one’s persona, in effect it is a violation of one’s ‘own idiosyncratic standards for action’.460 The constraint she speaks of is a measure of what is required to operate in an otherwise open and flexible environment.461 Constraint (or lack thereof) also echoes Elias’s thesis on embarrassment’s utility, when it comes to ‘the civilising process’; expressed by our embarrassment at those whom we judge to be less restrained than good manners dictate they ought to be.462

Yet another hallmark of embarrassment is that it is only rarely accompanied by aggression. Embarrassment appeases the other, thereby greatly diminishing any possibility of

458 Roland S. Miller, “The interactive origins and outcomes of embarrassment,” in The Psychological Significance of the Blush, eds., W. Ray Crozier and Peter J. de Jong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 185. 459 Ibid., 185. 460 Mary K. Babcock, “Embarrassment: A Window on the Self,” 461. 461 Ibid., 461. 462 Richard Kilminster, Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2007), 75. 107 violence.463. To this end, the blush (of embarrassment) is not only ‘the mechanism that allows the individual to correct the mistake, to repair the momentarily disturbed relationship’, the blush also elicits from the other ‘emotions and behaviours’ that serve to ‘remedy social transgressions’.464 In short, the blushing subject is more likely to be forgiven than a subject who displays no such appeasement signal; under such conditions the social/psychology research suggests that embarrassment helps solve problems of social interaction.465 Miller, in his conclusion, agrees with this sentiment when he argues that the evolutionary origins of embarrassment ‘jibe nicely’ with those of the blush, leading him to think it ‘reasonable to conclude that, along with the singular physiological response of blushing that might be its hallmark, embarrassment has desirable functions in social life’.466

Finally, it should be noted that I am promoting what are referred to in the literature as ‘“nice guy” theory[s] of empathetic embarrassment’, whereby I am depicting ‘human nature at its helpful sympathetic best’.467 I am doing so because I am also promoting the projection account of vulnerability; hence I am assuming that vulnerability obtains. There will always be the counter example of the bad actor who is capable of mocking the blush, or otherwise using it against us. In this case, our first line of defence is obviously to make ourselves less vulnerable to such attacks. This speaks to the protection account of vulnerability, which I stated from the outset is beyond the terms of this inquiry. This is not to suggest that I place no value at that which cries out for protection; indeed, it is for this reason that I now turn to the blushing body with its busy hands by the side of road.

1.4 – Thus Spoke the Student from Bologna My focus in this section is on a scene from Robert Antelme’s account of a student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I will start with a reading of Jean Paul Sartre’s brief account of the blush (of embarrassment) in order to build upon the previous chapter, and to consolidate our understanding of embarrassment as aporia. I will then turn to an essay by Guenther for her discussion of her own and Agamben’s reading of Antelme, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but

463 Roland S. Miller, “The interactive origins and outcomes of embarrassment,” 197. 464 Dacher Keltner and Cameron Anderson, “Saving Face for Darwin: The Functions and Uses of Embarrassment,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9 (2000), 187-190. 465 Ibid., 190. 466 Roland S. Miller, “The interactive origins and outcomes of embarrassment,” 199. 467 Michael Billig, “Humour and Embarrassment: Limits of ‘Nice-Guy’ Theories of Social Life,” Theory, Culture & Society 18 (2001), 27. 108 rather that which may have been overlooked as a result.468 Accordingly, my focus remains very much on the blush and embarrassment, in particular the latter’s absence from these analyses. I will also refer to an essay by Phil Hutchinson questioning Agamben’s excision of embarrassment from Antelme’s account, something Guenther also notes.

Recall that Sartre argues that ‘[the blush is] nothing but the horrified metaphysical apprehension of the existence of my body for the Others’.469 He further argues that my blushing body-for-the-Other is an embarrassment:

It is my body as it is for the Other which may embarrass me. Yet there too the expression is not a happy one, for I can be embarrassed only by a concrete thing which is present inside my universe […]. Here the embarrassment is more subtle, for what constrains me is absent. I never encounter my body-for-the-Other as an obstacle; on the contrary, it is because my body is never there, because it remains inapprehensible that it can be constraining.470

Two things are worth noting: first, by Sartre’s account, the blush is affectively the apprehension of the inapprehensible. Second, Sartre appears not to be (initially at least) referring to embarrassment as an emotion, rather embarras speaks to that which is an obstacle, namely my body-for-the-Other, and yet it is clear that this meaning does not entirely satisfy Sartre. In her translation of this passage, Hazel Barnes takes gêne and gênant to be speaking to hinderance as well as constraint. I am not sure this adequately captures the sense of unease or awkwardness I believe Sartre is endeavouring to convey. While gêne and gênant refer, amongst other things, to embarrassment, gêne can also be translated as malaise (a general feeling of discomfort or unease whose exact cause is difficult to identify); gênant, which Sartre stresses, also alludes to that which is disturbing, as well as, feeling uncomfortable.471 This leads me to think that, regardless, in the moment I affectively apprehend the inapprehensible, I may very well be confused.

Whether or not Sartre would allow for my expanding embarrassment’s meaning from a state of being hindered to include a state of feeling confused is debatable, for confusion enters the realm of emotion and it is unclear whether Sartre is explicitly referring to embarrassment in this way. Notwithstanding, recall that Jurist argues that feelings which might be said to elude

468 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben,”; see also, Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. 469 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 376. 470 Ibid., 377. 471 Note that gêne refers to discomfort, as well as embarrassment and inconvenience; gênant refers to annoying, awkward, troublesome, distracting, as well as embarrassing. 109 easy definition be referred to as ‘“aporetic emotions”’, meaning they ‘are vague and lack sharp specificity [and] manifest themselves when we feel something but we are not sure what it is’ (a working definition of subtlety, one would think); recall also that Jurist further argues that our ‘effort to fathom those feelings seems directionless or blocked’.472 I have said confusion: I am happy to proceed on the understanding that it may well be something like confusion.

It should be noted that to refer to confusion as an emotion at all is not without some scandal.473 It is worth recounting Silvia once more; confusion, he argues, can be categorised as a knowledge emotion, meaning it is ‘associated with thinking and comprehending’; knowledge emotions are viewed as such because ‘the appraisals that cause them are metacognitive: people are appraising what they know, expect, and understand’; within this context, ‘confusion is a metacognitive signal […] inform[ing] people that they do not comprehend what is happening and that some shift in action is thus needed, such as a new learning strategy, more effort, or withdrawal and avoidance’.474 Importantly, if confusion is to be considered an emotion, it belongs in a category of emotions that is distinct from other categories, namely self-conscious emotions like shame, for example. Following on from this, I want to suggest that the blush not only betrays my realisation that my body is suddenly for-the-Other, the blush is the herald also of my confusion – I do not comprehend what is happening, a shift in action is required, even if all this means is that I wish to avoid this state of affairs. Here, we need to consider this state of affairs as alluding to both my body being suddenly for-the-Other, as well as the Other, given that the actual or perceived presence of the latter is prerequisite if the blush is to obtain.

This state of affairs means that I am not only embarrassed by my body-for-the-Other; in my confusion (my expectation of what is about to occur), I am embarrassed by a moment that exists in the future and is apprehensible only insofar as it is beyond my apprehension (my grasp as well as my understanding). This is what gives the blush its sting: prior to the expression of complex self-conscious emotions, I am proposing that the blush signals the apprehension of the inapprehensible; the presentiment of my imminent undoing; my confusion in the face of my inability to both comprehend what is happening and the action (if any) required in response to such. In short, I do not know ‘where to go’ or how ‘to begin’.

Returning to Derrida on aporia; he refers to a note he made on Heidegger’s Being and Time that alludes to a sense of aporia ‘as being, and above all of nonbeing, more precisely of

472 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 10. 473 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 49. 474 Ibid., 48-49; see also, Paul J. Silvia, “Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience,” 265. 110 a certain impossibility as nonviability, as nontrack or barred path […] the impossible or the impracticable’.475 Recall, Jurist notes that aporia ‘literally means “difficulty in crossing” […] [as well as] a sense of being confused […] [it also] captures the state of not knowing what one feels’.476 Derrida also draws our attention to Aristotle’s use of diaporeõ, which Derrida translates as ‘“I’m stuck (dans l’embarras) [I’m embarrassed], I cannot get out, I’m helpless”’.477 I want to reiterate, that from these ‘multiple figures’ of aporia, I am arguing (perhaps not unlike Derrida) that the experience of aporia is, paradoxically, one of beginning, insofar as ‘to begin’ cannot find its expression without having also experienced its ‘negative form’. In short, beginning obtains when I have an expectation of end (the limit or termination, as well my arrival at such); a strange concept to consider in the presence of one who is about to die.

Antelme recalls the following in particular about the student’s response to being randomly chosen for execution:

His face has turned pink. I look at him closely. I still have that pink before my eyes. He stands there at the side of the road. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands either. He seems embarrassed.478

So horrified is Antelme at the retelling of a past event that he seeks momentary refuge in the present – ‘I still have that pink before my eyes.’ But then something draws him back; the student seems at a loss to know what to do with his hands. I will return to these busy hands, but for the moment it should be noted that Antelme is reticent to speak for the student when he writes – ‘He seems embarrassed.’479 By filtering his witness through the lens of his impressions rather than forcing his view, Antelme is not only speaking to my sense of aporia, in particular ‘doubting or being at a loss where to begin, or what to say’; he is effectively honouring the student by allowing the student’s affectivity, his body, to speak for itself.480

I turn now to an essay by Guenther dealing with her own as well as Agamben’s reading of the same scene, mindful that I am not evaluating their respective analyses of shame. Firstly, Agamben asks:

475 Ibid., 13. 476 Elliot Jurist, “Mentalized Affectvity,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 22 (2005), 427. 477 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 13; diaporeõ otherwise speaks to being entirely at a loss or perplexed, nonplussed, or in doubt. 478 Robert Antelme, The Human Race, 231. 479 Ibid., 231; my emphasis. 480 Note that ‘seem’ comes from the Old Norse soema, meaning ‘to honour’. 111

Why does the student from Bologna blush? It is as if the flush on his cheeks momentarily betrayed a limit that was reached, as if something like a new ethical material were touched upon in the living being.481

This ‘material’, Agamben suggests, lies beyond the consideration of facts and words.482 Here Agamben not only neatly captures the blush as aporia; which previously I have referred to as a limit; as knowledge of end; Agamben also alludes to Levinasian ethics, insofar as it is that ‘material’ which is prior to the human conatus. For this reader, I would have preferred Agamben pursue this line of thought further, which is to say that he continue to listen to what the student’s body is Saying, rather than imposing a reading of shame onto a scene that seems, as he rightly puts it, beyond the consideration of facts and words.

Guenther asks the very same question of the student – ‘Why does he blush, and what does this blush signify?’483 She wants to resist Agamben’s subjective interrogation of the blushing student; instead she wishes to focus on the power of a witness to withstand the humiliation of the desubjectification of being singled out. According to Guenther, a witness alludes to the Other, without which, she argues, the blush would be consigned to oblivion.484 The witness allows the blush to move beyond the moment of desubjectification, to signify nothing less than the blush that binds us in ‘the irreducible relationality of all [blushing] subjects’.485 Guenther argues that the student’s blush ‘point[s] to an excess of relationality which cannot be contained or reduced […] [the blush] survives [the student’s] death […] as a sign of interhuman relations’.486 In short, under Guenther’s analysis the blush signifies that ‘I belong’.

Undoubtedly wishing to remain faithful to Antelme’s account, Guenther focuses on ‘the pink flush […] [that] becomes a sign […] not only of the student’s affective response […] but also of the relation between himself and everyone else who can see, everyone else who has both the capacity and the responsibility to bear witness’.487 Guenther notes Ruth Leys’ reading of the same scene in which Leys suggests that ‘pink […] emerges as the most vivid figure that Antelme can propose for the absolute similarity or likeness of human beings’.488 Interestingly,

481 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 104; my emphasis. 482 Ibid., 104. 483 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben,” 65. 484 Ibid., 67; my emphasis. 485 Ibid., 71. 486 Ibid., 69. 487 Ibid., 71-72. 488 Ibid., 76; see Guenther’s notes. 112

Leys also suggests that the blush ‘cannot be tied to any specific emotion. [According to Leys] all we are entitled to say is that […] pink appears to be an expression of a threatened aliveness or vitality’.489 Notwithstanding, by alluding to the colour pink as the signifier of our similarity, our likeness as human beings, our relationality, Guenther is inadvertently excluding much of humanity, those for whom the blush is invisible due to the colour of their skin or because they choose to dress in ways that conceal the face. Recall that Crozier argues that for too long now we have been distracted in our inquiries by the appearance of the blush, and that perhaps it is time to focus instead on temperature.490

Retuning to Leys: I agree with her insofar as the blush ought not (initially at least) be associated with a specific emotion. More importantly, as I am proposing that the blush first and foremost speaks to the presence of an obstacle, one can think of few greater obstacles than one’s ‘threatened aliveness or vitality’; or in Derrida’s words, one’s ‘nonbeing’ or ‘nonviability’, if such can be defined in the student’s case as his imminent death. Antelme alludes to this when he writes, ‘we saw the effect death had upon the Italian. He turned pink…’491 Antelme is not referring to death itself but the student’s certain knowledge that he is about to die, indeed it is only after all doubt has vanished, now that he has knowledge of end, that the student blushes.492

In this moment, this presentiment of his imminent undoing, this suffering of the suffering to come, the student’s body betrays its embarrassment, as aporia. In Jurist’s terms, embarrassment as such might be said to be ‘vague and lack sharp specificity’, nevertheless manifesting itself as something felt; and now that the student has an expectation of end, his ‘effort to fathom […] [his] feelings [regarding this state of affairs] seems directionless or blocked’.493 Something like confusion reigns. The student’s body betrays its ambivalence towards being blocked by a future that is beyond his comprehension, by suddenly becoming busy. This busyness betrays not only the body’s anxiety, its distress, but also its determination to remain engaged.494 To engage, etymologically speaks to making a pledge, a promise, in this case to beginning, despite knowledge of end. In order to further explain what I mean I return

489 Ibid., 76; see Guenther’s notes. 490 W. Ray Crozier, Blushing and the Social Emotions, 57. 491 Robert Antelme, The Human Race, 231-232. 492 Ibid., 232. 493 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 10. 494 The etymology of ‘busy’ is rooted in what it is to be anxious, as well as anxiousness. 113 to embarrassment, or more precisely, something like confusion, and its exclusion from the student’s story.

Hutchinson notes that Agamben’s citation of Antelme stops precisely at his mention of the student’s embarrassment.495 Immediately following the line – ‘He doesn’t know what to do with his hands either’ – Agamben wields an ellipsis, effectively silencing the student’s embarrassment. I would add that it also silences Antelme’s welcome hesitation in speaking for the student, as discussed already. There is a sense of pathos in Agamben’s assertive use of an ellipsis when we consider that it speaks to ‘falling short’, an expression, no less, of confusion and doubt, both of which ought to haunt any endeavour to speak decisively for the body.

Guenther too recognises the ellipsis that silences the student’s embarrassment, pointing out that, ‘“He seems embarrassed”’, is the English translation of the French – ‘“Il a l’air confus” (“He seems confused”)’.496 Interestingly, Hutchinson, in his own analysis translates ‘embarrassed’ not as confusion but as embarassé; in so doing, it might be argued that he allows a slippage of sorts, from what I am calling a knowledge emotion to its more common expression as a self-conscious emotion, like shame for example.497 Hutchinson argues that due to his ‘theoretical predilections’ (in this case, an analysis of shame), Agamben omits that which is ‘problematic’, namely embarrassment. Hutchinson is questioning Agamben’s apparent assumption that embarrassment and shame are interchangeable when it comes to the expression of complex self-conscious emotions. As stated, more than once, I am happy with the interchangeability of embarrassment and shame (as self-conscious emotions); but is not at all clear, to this reader at least, that this is Antelme’s intention when he writes – ‘Il a l’air confus’. If the student is expressing an emotion, then I am more inclined towards the category of knowledge emotions over self-conscious emotions.

Antelme notes something else about the student, his body – ‘He doesn’t know what to do with his hands either.’498 To this end, Rom Harré points out that ‘disorderly gestures’, otherwise expressed by Goffman as ‘busy hands […] are semantically equivalent’ with blushing.499 Suddenly our attention shifts, along with Antelme’s, from the student’s blushing face to his busy hands: and while we are focusing on those busy hands, we return to Hutchinson’s criticism of Agamben’s use of an ellipsis to excise ‘the predication of

495 Phil Hutchinson, Shame and Philosophy, 59-60, 73. 496 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben,” 67. 497 Phil Hutchinson, Shame and Philosophy, 73. 498 Robert Antelme, The Human Race, 231. 499 Rom Harré, “Embarrassment: A conceptual analysis,” 188; and Goffman cited by Harré, 194. 114 embarrassment’ from Antelme’s account, so that Agamben might ‘give the impression that Antelme’s writing supports his thesis’.500 At the end of the same paragraph in which he makes this point, Hutchinson wields an ellipsis of his own and in so doing excises the student’s busy hands from Antelme’s account. He records that ‘Antelme wrote: “he does not know what to do…”’; Hutchinson wants to argue, contra Agamben, that if the student ‘were ashamed surely he would be concerned with being, not doing’.501 By using an ellipsis to silence the student’s busy hands, Hutchinson comes close to doing that which he accuses Agamben of; indeed, the student’s busy hands are our best indication yet that we can claim, alongside Antelme, that the student seems embarrassed.

Allow me, with the greatest respect, to make the student dark-skinned; better still, let me have him in a hood. Can I still suggest that the student’s body seems to be Saying embarrassment; something like confusion? In a word – yes.

This brings us back to Sartre (as already mentioned in the previous chapter); immediately following his account of embarrassment, he has this to say:

I seek to reach […] [my body], to master it […] in order to give it the form and the attitude which are appropriate. But it is on principle out of reach […] fixed at a distance from me as my body-for-the-Other. Thus I forever act “blindly,” shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of my shooting.502

Not only do we get a further sense of Jurist’s argument that our efforts to fathom these feelings seem directionless or blocked; by capturing “blindly” within quotation marks, it is enticing to consider that here Sartre is excluding consciousness. The time for projects is over, instead Sartre is alluding to the unconscious actions of, in this case, the blushing body by the side of the road with its busy hands; and yet, it seems that it still has something to Say. I arrive, essentially, at the same conclusion as Guenther: the blush, those busy hands, survive the student’s death as a sign of interhuman relations – of an ethics beyond (or prior to) the consideration of facts and words.

Levinas points out that we are not defined by our bodies, and yet we are bound by ‘the Gordian knot of the body’.503 He is drawing our attention to a notion of subjectivity that is ‘independent of the adventure of cognition’, a subject corporeally inseparable from its

500 Phil Hutchinson, Shame and Philosophy, 73; see also, Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 104. 501 Ibid., 74. 502 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 377. 503 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 77. 115 subjectivity; we have already seen that ‘subjectivity of flesh and blood’ is important for Levinas, especially because of its ethical implications.504 It has long been noted, since Burgess at least, that ‘when we see the cheek of an individual suffused with a blush […] immediately our sympathy is excited […] as if we were ourselves concerned, and yet we know not why’.505 This suggests that our response to the blushing body with its busy hands by the side of the road, speaks to an ethics that is ‘independent of the adventure of cognition’, which is to say beyond the consideration of facts and words.

1.5 - Conclusion Can an ethico-political ideal (my focus in the following two chapters) remain beyond facts and words? It would seem unlikely. This, we will see, is what troubles Levinas when it comes to politics in particular; that by virtue of its obsession with facts and words, politics will always be in danger of diminishing the purity of the ethics that ought to remain at its heart.

As for this chapter: I have been motivated to listen to what the body is Saying by way of the blush and embarrassment. Regarding the latter, we saw that it is much more than a negative self-conscious emotion; indeed, it could well be the social glue that holds us together, acting as it does to appease the other and thereby deter social transgressions. In so doing, embarrassment motivates us to make amends as well as reparation for the social wrong. In short, it serves as an expression of our prosocial inclinations, a commitment to social relations; we care about others’ welfare; consequently, we do our best to avoid behaviours that may damage another’s welfare. I have already admitted that I am promoting a ‘nice guy’ theory of embarrassment, and by extension, of the blush. My motivation, beyond assuming that vulnerability obtains, has already been alluded to by my references to shame’s inability to open up new philosophical spaces. This is not to diminish shame in any way; indeed, in the final chapter on politics, I am committed to revisiting aidos as a way for politics to reclaim ethics.

My reliance on a ‘nice guy’ reading is also motivated by my concern that to the extent it deals with the blush, philosophy confines it mostly to the pink blush of shame, thereby inadvertently excluding most of humanity from this moral expression of vulnerability. It is for this reason that I turned to science, in order that the blush might, in the first instance, be allowed to speak for itself. What does it Say? That I am a moral animal; by virtue of my vulnerability, my moral exposure to the other, the blush betrays that I care about what the other thinks; betrayal demands that I give myself to the other, which is to say I concede a view of myself in

504 Ibid., 78. 505 Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 1. 116 respect of the other. Importantly, the blush signals my sincerity, impossible as it is to fake or suppress. Given the richness of the blush as a communicative moral signal, I find it surprising that philosophy does not have much to add to the extensive work carried out by early researchers like Burgess and Darwin (or indeed, current researchers like Crozier). Regarding Darwin, it is almost as if philosophy has been dissuaded by his view that due to the suffering caused by the blush (to both the blusher and beholder), there is little of apparent evolutionary value; subsequently there must be little of philosophical value.

This is not to suggest that philosophy ignores the blush altogether; once again, to the extent that it deals with it, philosophy seems obsessed with confining it to an expression of the pink blush of shame. So obsessed, that any allusion to it as a knowledge emotion, like confusion for example, is silenced by an ellipsis. This, we saw, is even the case when somatically equivalent signals, such as ‘busy hands’, are expressed, in this case, by the body by the side of the road. To this end, I turned my attention to the story of the student from Bologna. A psychological account of the student’s story might suggest that he is expressing a metacognitive signal informing us, as his witnesses, that he does not comprehend what is happening and that some shift in action is therefore required. But that would be to merely describe the scene. Like those mentioned herein, I have endeavoured to read more into the student’s story. I have suggested that the student from Bologna, or rather, his blushing body and those busy hands speak to embarrassment as aporia. Confronted with the presentiment of his imminent undoing, and already suffering the suffering still to come, the student’s body seems to be Saying – I do not know where to go or how to begin. And yet, all is not lost. The blush, just like those busy hands, speak to all who have at one time or another acted “blindly” in the hope that something might come of it, thereby demonstrating the positive valence of the blush which is otherwise all too often defined by the negative self-conscious emotions it is said to herald.

Finally, recall that Burgess proposes that ‘when we see the cheek of an individual suffused with a blush […] immediately our sympathy is excited […] as if we were ourselves concerned, and yet we know not why’.506 This expression of moral ambivalence from the witness’s point of view captures the ambivalence of the blush itself. The intuition guiding me from this point onwards, is that the blush, as a moral signal, is one that first and foremost communicates my ambivalence, which is to say my confusion in the knowledge that I am just

506 Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 1; my emphasis. 117 as likely to err as I am to forgive. Not only that: a projection account of vulnerability suggests that I always wanted it to be so.

118

Chapter V - Vulnerability: Postmodern Ethics; a Beginning To err is human; to forgive, divine.507

After all, what would be “beautiful” if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: “I am ugly”?’508

Without an appropriate ethics to support it, a contradiction is likely to call out for protection. In so doing, it invites us to speak against it – to negate; so that now we might find comfort in the contradiction confined to the dustbin of history. But that would speak to an ethics of negation, of resentment, one that would deny the contradiction its moral genius. Instead, I am gesturing toward an ethics of vulnerability that calls for the contradiction to project itself; that expresses, by way of the blush, that I am embarrassed by my knowledge that I wanted it to be so.

1.1 – Introduction First, let me say that this chapter and the next are defined by what they are not, which is to say it would be folly to think that an ethics and a politics that take for their name vulnerability, might be fully accounted for in two chapters. Instead, what follows serves both to draw out the implications of the previous four chapters, a justification if you will, as well as an introduction to the potential promised by vulnerability, and by extension the blush and embarrassment, to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal that creates the conditions under which the moral animal at the centre of my concerns might flourish. What are these conditions? Any that support the central argument herein, that when it comes to the expression of our morality, we are ambivalent; we are a contradiction that must embrace the aporia of such if we are to properly express our moral genius.

A word on genius: speaking as it does to a ‘“moral spirit” who guides and governs’ us; as well as ‘talent’ and ‘“inborn nature”’; when I refer to our moral genius, I am not suggesting that such is expressed naturally. Like any talent, it must be nurtured; the danger we face as a (moral) contradiction is that we are inclined, at our worst moments, to not want to take responsibility for this problem child. Hence ethics must create the conditions under which the moral animal might reconcile itself with the aporia of this contradiction; more than that, an ethics of vulnerability must encourage the moral animal to wish it were no other way. As conceived herein, genius also alludes to the idea (an expression of our moral behaviour and

507 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (London: W. Lewis, 1711), 26. 508 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 88. 119 hence our ethics) that transcends time and place. An idea otherwise defined, while it may have merit, it remains constrained to a time and place and therefore confined to the dustbin of history. In this way, an expression of our moral genius is an expression of our moral spirit that transcends time and place; as such we are guided by it, even when it reveals our ugliness. Thus exposed, a contradiction is just as likely to cry out for protection, by way of a reply, an objection, even worse, a counterargument. In so doing, it invites us to speak against it – to negate; so that now we might find comfort in the contradiction confined to the dustbin of history. But that, I will argue, would speak to an ethics of negation, of resentment, one that would deny the contradiction its moral genius.

I said at the beginning of Chapter One that I consider this project to be a response, of sorts, to Ann Murphy’s concerns when it comes to proposing that vulnerability possesses the normative and proscriptive force necessary to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal bearing its name. If vulnerability is a necessary condition for the blush, and if, as I have argued, the latter expression is both moral and impossible to fake, then surely one can also argue that vulnerability ought to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal that takes morality seriously and in so doing endeavours to create the conditions that allow for such expressions; otherwise, to be vulnerable remains as merely a way of describing ourselves in the world. Recall, from Chapter One, Tiffany Tsantsoulas neatly summarises the difficulty Judith Butler faces in transitioning ‘from the ambiguous provocations of vulnerability to the ethico-political sphere’; Tsantsoulas argues that a ‘descriptive social ontology alone’ does not provide ‘normative ethical prescriptions’.509 Mindful that my own response is likely to face a similar critique, I have been eager from the start to give vulnerability a voice, informed by what the body is Saying by way of the blush. This is based on my intuition that vulnerability is a necessary pre- condition for the conditions that produce moral consciousness.

Assuming that vulnerability, defined now as moral rather than physical exposure, obtains, and therefore not invulnerability, which alludes to amorality; when human bodies collide, the ensuing moment will have a moral hue, otherwise they are merely bodies colliding in a universe bursting with colliding bodies. I say moral hue to emphasise that the moment can be perceived as having the overall character or appearance of being moral and therefore human; and if I might momentarily constrain the blush to a conception of colour, then, as I have previously argued, the blush is the primordial communication, the hue, that betrays us as moral

509 Tiffany N. Tsantsoulas, “Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial Rejoinder to Judith Butler’s Ethics of Vulnerability,” 159. 120 animals; betrayal demands that I give myself to the other, which is to say I concede a view of myself in respect of the other. Of course, this animal is marked by its moral ambivalence, and yet, my intuition is that the blush betrays our will to be good, which is to say our instinct for goodness. Notwithstanding, my primary interest lies is in exploring the ethical conditions that support, first and foremost, our moral ambivalence; the moral animal that is just as likely to err as it is to forgive.

Now seems as good a time as any to point out that I am not about to enter the Hobbes/Rousseau debate; suffice to say, a detailed engagement will be required in any future research. For the moment, it is enough to suggest that while I may be accused of making an appeal to our nature (our genius), it is one defined by our moral ambivalence. Accordingly, broadly speaking, it fits neither the Hobbesian view that we are, by nature, prone to violence (at the very least to the lesser angels of our nature); nor does it accord itself with Rousseau’s thesis that nature provides us with a model (‘a normative standard’) for the good (a ‘principle of natural goodness’), inspired by a state of nature in which there exits the possibility of ‘a life of harmony, free from contradiction’.510 The claim herein is that since bodies began colliding, the blush betrays that we are a contradiction, if such is defined by our moral ambivalence. Accordingly, we are sure only that this moment will be moral, which is to say we are just as likely to err as we are to forgive.

To this end (psychopathologies notwithstanding), a further assumption being made is that we cannot be amoral if vulnerability obtains. Under such conditions of vulnerability, we are unlikely to be indifferent towards or disregard the other. Indeed, this is why the blush is so painful, it betrays our moral consciousness and in so doing it reveals our responsibility for the other. In the language of social/psychology science, we have seen responsibility referred to as prosociality, defined as caring about others’ welfare and avoiding behaviours that may damage another’s welfare’.511 This is not to suggest that we cannot be immoral, far from it; yet another reason the blush causes us to suffer, communicating as it does the aporia of our moral ambivalence. In sum, the blush, while I think it betrays our will to be good (to give), it Says that we are first and foremost a contradiction, a mutual opposition precariously balanced between the capacity to err and the willingness to forgive. It is precisely because of the presence of the former that the blush is an aporia, speaking as it does to the presentiment of our imminent

510 Robin Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64. 511 Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer and Dacher Keltner, “Flustered and Faithful,” 81. 121 undoing, an obstacle that can be overcome by our instinct for goodness. Having said that, once more, a postmodern ethics of vulnerability is one that first and foremost recognises the contradiction that is the moral animal at the centre of my concerns, and in so doing it becomes the condition under which this moral animal might thrive.

What do I mean by postmodern, beyond the ‘the extreme’ simplification of ‘postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’?512 I share the Polish sociologist and philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman’s incredulity that modernity ‘legitimates itself with reference to a [philosophical] metadiscourse […] that mak[es] an explicit appeal to some grand narrative’; that modernity (its ethical aspirations in this case) represents a world that ‘is one of an essentially orderly totality’; arrived at after a long struggle for ‘universality, homogeneity, monotony and clarity’.513 Jean-François Lyotard himself calls on the reader to ‘wage war on totality’ if we are to avoid the ‘fantasy’ of once more believing that we can ‘seize reality’, if such can be defined by its appeal to universality; to totality.514 Lyotard’s ‘war’ speaks to Emmanuel Levinas’ own; the latter refers to war in the context of reason (politics) standing in opposition to morality; ‘the entire tradition of Western metaphysics […] [having] arisen in the context of a totalising ontology’ now threatens ethics as first philosophy.515 Levinas argues that we need ‘to distinguish between the idea of totality [myself in the world in which the other is always the same], and the idea of infinity [a subjectivity now defined by its welcome of the absolute other]’.516 Levinas makes it clear that ‘the same is essentially […] [the totality of the] system’; consequently, ‘it is not I who resist the system […]; it is the other’.517 Within this context, one can see how important ethics becomes to politics, insofar as it remains at the heart of politics, ethics (the other) resists the reflexive tendency politics displays towards systemisation, which is to say, totality.

Therefore, when it comes to the postmodern in ethics, there is less emphasis on the condition of , which is suggestive of on order of rank above that which preceded it; rather I am inclined toward thinking of postmodern as primarily a form of resistance against that which would seek to universalise the morally ambivalent animal at the centre of my concerns. Without such, what hope is there for the political animal and hence for a politics that

512 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans., Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 513 Ibid., xxiii; see also Douglas Kellner, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Turn,” 74; and Zygmunt Bauman, “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity,” Thesis Eleven 29 (1999), 33. 514 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. 515 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21; see also Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 1-2. 516 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 26-27. 517 Ibid., 40. 122 wishes to reclaim the ethical in the ethico-political; something it must do if it is be a politics of vulnerability. I will focus on such a politics, one that goes by the name of loss, in the following chapter.

The remainder of this chapter will be primarily devoted to a reading of Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics. This will not be to the exclusion of all else. I will revisit Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the blush, as well as a thought experiment in which he challenges the Nietzschean notion that we would necessarily want history to repeat our worst moral missteps. This harks back to my opening remarks, and the concerns I have in those instances where we are revealed as ‘ugly’; the temptation is now to consign such to the dustbin of history, thereby robbing those moments of their genius. I will remain mindful, of course, just like Bauman is, of Levinas. The reader may well be thinking, now that we are finally arrived at ethics, why not focus on the philosopher who elevates ethics as first philosophy? My response is that I will return to Levinas at some length in the following chapter on politics. I have already suggested, by my use of ethico-political, that I consider it difficult to separate the latter from the former. I will revisit this point in the following chapter; suffice to say, based on my own concerns expressed above, I think it more useful to see Levinas’ ethics through the prism of the very real concern that he harbours for it under the threat of a politics that might not live up to the ethical ideal at its heart. I might otherwise express this in terms of the ever-present danger for politics, retreating from the scene of ethics with no intention of returning; rather it commits to attempting to rewrite ethics to suit its own totalising tendencies.

Finally, by embracing postmodern, it is important to emphasise that I do not intend to rebuke or slander modernity; rather, consistent with the importance I have placed so far on embarrassment as confusion and doubt (as aporia), I am inclined towards gently reproaching modernity for attempting to cast a spell, promising to draw our faith in (un)certainty into the brilliant light of human reason so that it might excommunicate the prefix of negation, thereby elevating the quest for certainty above all else. A hopeless task, I will argue, in the face of the morally ambivalent animal at the centre of my concerns. Postmodern, on the other hand, must not only reconcile itself with aporia and ambivalence, but diplopia too, for it willingly accepts that every vision splendid is haunted by its ghost; that God, or his proxy, will always be in the machinery. 123

1.2 – Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics The first thing to clarify is that Bauman says his is ‘a study of postmodern ethics, not of the postmodern morality’.518 The observation has been made that Bauman’s ‘use of ethics and morality can appear contradictory at times’; but generally speaking, ‘ethics is an attempt to codify morality […] [while] morality is an orientation to the “other”’.519 Bauman refers to ‘moral problems’ as those faced by men and women in a postmodern world that earlier generations could not have accounted for in their consideration of ethics, as they ‘were not articulated then as part of human experience’.520 Here, for example, one can think of norms, and the family; the idea that gender might be seriously contested, neutralised even; that families might no longer resemble the age-old ideal codified in religious and other writings; earlier ethicists could not have imagined these postmodern ‘moral problems’ when it came to writing the rules. My own feeling is that for Bauman morality is (human) life, and life is prior to ethics, it is the condition for ethics. When ethics appears, just like religion or reason which are its traditional architects, it does so post hoc; it arrives on the scene after two bodies have collided, endeavouring to codify the collision. The appeal of postmodern ethics, for Bauman, is that these bodies, with the support of the state, be left alone to make sense of it for themselves.

In his monograph, Postmodern Ethics, Bauman argues that the principal opportunity that postmodernity presents is to explore ‘a radically novel understanding of moral phenomena’, now that modernity’s ‘ethical theories’ appear to have ended up looking ‘more like a blind alley’.521 Importantly, Bauman notes that this does not necessarily mean that such theories should be ‘denigrated or derided as one of the typically modern constraints now broken and destined for the dustbin of history’.522 Bauman suggests that modernity’s theories provide an opportunity to better understand why our ‘moral power’ appears to have been rendered invisible by modernity’s ‘capacity for thwarting self-examination’, cosseted as we were in modernity’s swaddling of universal principles.523 The doubts that might be expressed by those who are still very much proponents of universal principles are neatly captured by Bauman:

After the world kept within bounds by God’s commandment, and another administered by Reason, here comes a world of men and women left to their own shrewdness and

518 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 1. 519 Mark Smith, “Reading Bauman for Social Work,” Ethics and Social Welfare 5 (2011), 14. 520 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1. 521 Ibid., 2. 522 Ibid., 2. 523 Ibid., 2. 124

cunning. Men and women let loose… loose men, loose women? Life [morality], once more, nasty, brutish and short?524

As such, Bauman proposes that we might be asked by those same proponents (of modernity) to consider the following:

A jungle deprived even of the jungle law, morality without ethics – this is not the prospect of replacing one morality with another […] This is the unthinkable prospect of society without morality.525

Bauman points out that the above views are based on the assumption that a ‘a world without ethics seems to be necessarily – by the same token – a world without morality’.526 The challenge therefore, for postmodern ethics, is to shake off the fug of modernity’s certainty regarding universal ethical principles for long enough to consider ‘that with the demise of effective ethical legislation morality does not vanish, but on the contrary – comes into its own’.527 Hence, the approach to a postmodern ethics, according to Bauman, is not to abandon modernity’s moral concerns, but to reject modernity’s methodology, if such can be defined by its reliance on both ‘coercive normative regulation in political practice’, as well as philosophy’s ‘search for absolutes, universals’ and theoretical foundations’.528 According to Bauman, the agents of modernity in their ‘moral thought and practice […] [are] animated by the belief in the possibility of a non-ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code’.529 In response to this belief, he does not assert that his proposal is necessarily the answer, but nonetheless he wants to believe that one exists, if not now, then in the future; and if that future be postmodern then it will be defined precisely by its ‘disbelief’ in the aforementioned possibility. Hence, we will look back at modernity, not in judgement, but simply armed with what we know now (and could not have known then):

A non-aporetic, non-ambivalent morality, an ethics that is universal and “objectively founded”, is a practical impossibility; perhaps also an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.530

524 Zygmunt Bauman, “Morality without Ethics,” 24. 525 Ibid., 25. 526 Ibid., 25. 527 Ibid., 25. 528 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 3-4. 529 Ibid., 9. 530 Ibid., 10. 125

It is in support of the opposite, an aporetic and ambivalent morality, that I turn now to what Bauman refers to as the seven ‘marks of moral condition, as they appear once contemplated from the postmodern perspective’.531 I will, in the first instance, make a list of these ‘marks’ along with a brief description, after which I will provide a more detailed critique, within the context of the preceding chapters. As well as that they will provide a further context for the discussion I wish to have, in particular regarding ourselves as a contradiction; at which point I am inclined to depart from Bauman, if not completely, then from his earlier work.

Bauman’s seven marks are as follows:

1) Humans are morally ambivalent: ambivalence resides at the heart of the of the ‘primary scene’ of the human face-to-face. 2) Moral phenomena are inherently non-rational; insofar as they must precede the consideration of purpose and the calculation of gains and losses, they do not fit the ‘means-end’ scheme. 3) Morality is incurably aporetic; few choices are unambiguously good, and the majority of moral choices are made between contradictory impulses. 4) Morality is not universalisable, which is not an appeal to relativism; rather, it opposes a concrete moral vision or moral universalism. 5) Morality is bound to remain irrational. For every totality bent on uniformity and the soliciting of the disciplined, co-ordinated action, the stubborn and resilient autonomy of the moral self is a scandal. 6) The assumption is that moral responsibility, being for the Other, must obtain before considerations of being with the Other. There is no self before the moral self, morality being the ultimate, non-determined presence; the act of creation ex-nihilo, if ever there was one. 7) The postmodern perspective does not reveal the relativism of morality. The human- wide moral unity is thinkable as the remote (and so be it, utopian) prospect of the emancipation of the autonomous moral self and vindication of its moral responsibility; facing up to, without being tempted to escape, the inherent and incurable ambivalence in which that responsibility is cast.532

Douglas Kellner neatly summarises the above when he argues that:

531 Ibid., 10. 532 Ibid., 10-14. 126

For the postmodern, one must learn to live with ambivalence, uncertainty and contingency: one cannot be certain of anything, cannot predict the consequences of actions and choices in theory, science or life, and must accept ambivalence and difference.533

It is interesting to note that Kellner repeats himself with the use of ambivalence; we have to live with it; importantly, we also ‘must accept’ it. The distinction is subtle but central to an understanding of postmodern ethics: the move from merely living with the notion of ourselves as morally ambivalent to acceptance of such, suggests that upon achievement of the latter we open up a new space in which things can happen. The repetition also serves to accentuate the first of Bauman’s ‘marks’, and that is that ‘at the primary scene’ of the human face-to-face we are morally ambivalent; in short we are a living, breathing contradiction. In my view, nothing else happens unless one accepts this first premise; and it is not assured, for it flies in the face of the aforementioned age-old metanarratives of ourselves as either intrinsically ‘evil’ or good (Hobbes verses Rousseau). To this end, Bauman argues that the idea humans are essentially good or bad and that we ought to be assisted when it comes to the former and prevented with regards to the latter is wrong. According to Bauman, what lies at the heart of the face-to-face encounter is ambivalence, which is to say, humans are morally ambivalent.534

Given that we are prosocial animals (we care about the other and what they think about us), this appeal to ourselves as moral contradictions seems counterintuitive; if not that, then at the very least counterproductive, for such a view threatens to derail ethical projects that appeal to the ideal we have of ourselves as intrinsically good. I want to suggest that this is precisely what makes morality, and hence ethics, so challenging. It might help to look to Nietzsche, who asks – ‘After all, what would be “beautiful” if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: “I am ugly”?’535 According to Nietzsche, this question helps us understand ‘the enigma of how contradictory concepts […] can suggest an ideal, a kind of beauty’.536 It is worth noting that Nietzsche, with his use of ‘would’, seems to be pointing to a possible future from the point of view of the past. To this end, the etymology of ‘would’ speaks to the past tense of what it is ‘to will’; and beauty from the ancient Greek (κάλλος, kalós), etymologically refers to what is good and right and noble; that which is moral. Within this context, we might say that a will to beauty can be otherwise expressed as a will to

533 Douglas Kellner, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Turn,” 76. 534 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 10. 535 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 88. 536 Ibid., 88. 127 morality; a moral future that cannot obtain without first recognising our (past) ‘ugliness’. To be ‘ugly’, etymologically speaks to our moral offensiveness; it is also suggestive of a sense of fear and dread; of self-loathing. Within this context, one can see why religion, for example, had such success when it came to drawing our attention to this latter sense of ourselves. This is why I am arguing that postmodern must not only reconcile itself with our moral ambivalence, but diplopia too, for postmodern willingly accepts that every vision splendid is haunted by its ghost, which is to say that the sense we have of ourselves as good must inevitably reconcile itself with the fear and dread we have of ourselves as being otherwise than good. Many examples of the latter litter our history; I am suggesting that a will to beauty, to goodness, to morality, demands that we must not only embrace this ‘ugliness’, we must also embrace the aporia of knowing that I always wanted it to be so. I will return to this last point shortly.

Is it any wonder that, when it comes to morality, confusion reigns? I have made much of confusion in the preceding chapters. Recall, from Chapter Three, Paul Silvia argues that a knowledge emotion like confusion ‘is a metacognitive signal: it informs people that they do not comprehend what is happening and that some shift in action is thus needed’.537 Recall also, Ray Crozier’s second account of the evolution of the blush, in which he argues it ‘represents a sudden shift in the arousal that takes place when action is inhibited’, suggesting that the blush ‘is associated with a state of ambivalence: “an action tendency that is stopped, blocked, or suppressed”’; leading Crozier to further argue that the blush ‘“could result from sudden inhibition of some tendency to act”’.538 If we are to listen to what the body is Saying, it would seem that from the very beginning, the blush speaks to this moral ambivalence. As such, the blush betrays my animal knowing; I am a contradiction that is just as likely to err as it is to forgive. As such, regardless of the outcome, I am momentarily confronted by the presentiment of my imminent undoing; a suffering of the suffering to come. It is precisely because I am a contradiction that the aporia of this moment demands that I experience the ‘negative form’ if I am to have any chance of expressing the affirmative ideal of this encounter. Another way of putting this might be to say that forgiveness means little without an understanding, a knowing, of that which is calling for forgiveness. I am not suggesting that one must actually experience what it means, for example, to be cruel; rather, the blush betrays our knowledge (as confusion) at the potential for ourselves to be cruel. Let us dwell a moment, on the worst excesses of cruelty.

537 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 49. 538 W. Ray Crozier, “Blushing and the private self,” 236; Crozier is citing Frijda (1986, p. 186). 128

First, recall from the previous chapter, Lisa Guenther’s analysis of Agamben’s take on shame in the story of the student from Bologna. Guenther proposes that when Agamben refers to the blush as betraying ‘something like a new ethical material’, he is referring to ‘the ethos of human subjectivity […] a trace of the inhuman in the human […] [as such] ethics for Agamben means bearing witness to this inhuman in the human […] to the “strangers” in ourselves’.539 Agamben, in a rather poetic turn, suggests that the blush ‘is like a mute apostrophe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him [the student]’.540 This reading of the blush by Agamben, as betraying the ethos of our subjectivity, the strangers in ourselves, speaks to our moral ambivalence; that we are just as likely to err as we are to forgive. One could say that by describing the blush as ‘a mute apostrophe’, Agamben, by referring to this mark of omission is suggesting that we know something is missing, which is to say moral certainty; or perhaps, we are lamenting the certainty of our capacity for immorality. Either way, Guenther, we already know, wants to resist Agamben’s analysis of the blush bearing witness to ‘the inhuman in the human’, instead she wants to argue that it speaks to our ‘responsibility for the other human.’541 Of course, postmodern suggests that both analyses are valid; indeed both are vital if we are to properly capture humanity’s genius for morality, which is to say its genius for immorality.

To this end, Agamben challenges us with a thought experiment: mindful of Auschwitz, what can we say regarding Nietzsche’s endeavour to overcome resentment; would we still will that Auschwitz eternally return? In response, Agamben suggests that Auschwitz serves to refute Nietzsche’s eternal return, insofar as one could not realistically support an ethics that would require Auschwitz be repeated for eternity.542 But, as Agamben points out, it is not as simple as that; in Nietzsche’s ‘experiment’, Auschwitz would appear at the very beginning, thereby causing one, in the first instance, to ‘“gnash one’s teeth and curse the demon who has spoken in such a way”’; prior to the wish for eternal return, there is the wish that one had not been presented with this dilemma in the first instance.543 This does not mean that we simply say that Zarathustra’s ‘lesson’ has failed and we go about restoring ‘the morality of resentment – even if for the victims, the temptation is great’.544 But, equally, this is not to suggest that we ought to aspire towards an ethics of denial either; one that would simply refuse to accept ‘that

539 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben,” 66; see also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 104. 540 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 104. 541 Lisa Guenther, “Resisting Agamben,” 66. 542 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 99-100. 543 Ibid., 100. 544 Ibid., 100. 129

“what happened, happened”’.545 As an alternative, Agamben directs our attention to Primo Levi’s response to Auschwitz, which Agamben argues ‘implies a new, unprecedented ontological consistency of what has taken place’.546 Agamben stresses that through the prism of Levi’s response – ‘One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself.’547 This ontology, I want to propose, not only speaks to vulnerability, to the aporia of always beginning; it speaks also to our genius for immorality; and hence, to the moral spirit that transcends time and place. Importantly, it speaks to lived experience, which is to say it always and already resides in traumatised bodies; vulnerable bodies, that have been impinged upon in ghastly ways. Is it any wonder Nietzsche gnashed his teeth and cursed the demon who proposed the problem (the aporia) of eternal return? Insofar as eternal return haunts us, it is not only because of amor fati (‘I wanted it to be’), it is also because the idea (of eternal return), defined by its genius, exceeds time and place. Despite wishing it otherwise, we are therefore, as it were, already on the (moral) hook.

I have been arguing that the projection account of vulnerability speaks to the problem (aporia) of vulnerability. Such an account alludes to the tension inherent in the call to project at the very edge of that which always already resides in traumatised bodies and cries out for protection. And yet, even though in the face of such cries it is tempting, any denial of our moral genius is a denial of our humanity; a call to aspire, ironically, to an ideal of inhumanity, if such is now defined by that which is morally unambivalent. Just like our trepidation around uncertainty, there is a reflexive desire, only this time we wish to cling to the prefix of negation. In so doing, we are in danger of finding our way back to an ethics of negation, of resentment.

Auschwitz is rightly accused of being a moral travesty that we understandably want to stand in opposition to; more than that, we want to display hostility toward those who were its architects, its acolytes. But, consistent with the argument I am attempting to prosecute herein, this would be to deny the moment its moral genius; a genius that was no doubt nurtured by those in power at the time. The danger we face as morally ambivalent animals is that we are inclined, when confronted by these moments, to not want to recognise ourselves as such. We seek moral certainty as an antidote to the confusion we feel; the aporia that suggests, to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. Against the backdrop of an event like

545 Ibid., 100; here Agamben is referring to Jean Améry, and what he calls Améry’s ‘anti-Nietzschean ethics of resentment that simply refuses to accept ‘that “what happened, happened”’. 546 Ibid., 101. 547 Ibid., 101. 130

Auschwitz, my use of aporia in this context, I trust, becomes clearer. Is it any wonder that we wish to rid ourselves of the incredulity we feel in the face of such an impossibility? Can it really be the case? in the context, even of Auschwitz, far from putting distance between myself and its horrors, I must embrace the notion that to be in the world is, in some important way, to be (you), those aforementioned architects and acolytes.

Once again, I am arguing that the danger we face when confronted by these moments, is that in not wanting to recognise ourselves in the other, we seek certainty as an antidote to the confusion we feel in the face of ourselves qua the other, as morally ambivalent animals. Within this context we recall Nietzsche’s warning that ‘certainty is what drives one insane’.548 Does this make those agents of modernity, ‘animated by the belief in the possibility of a non- ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code’, insane?549 I will answer this by pointing out, yet again, the danger for the moral animal that seeks certainty in a world otherwise defined by the pathos of vulnerability; by seeking protection from that which is bound to cause us discomfort we are denying our moral genius, which is to say our genius for immorality. As such, we seek to confine the latter expression to the dustbin of history. Thus consigned, its value as a moral spirit that might guide us is greatly diminished. More than that, there is the ever-present danger of denying that which never ceased to take place; that which is always repeating itself in the lived experience of traumatised bodies. I have used the example of Auschwitz as it is raised by Agamben; but consider any colonised indigenous peoples in its place, and the same analysis holds.

Returning to Bauman: he directs the reader to Levinas’ ‘“moral party of two”’; what Bauman otherwise refers to as ‘the primal scene of morality’ in which I encounter ‘the Other as a Face’.550 What distinguishes this encounter is the ambivalence of its morality, which is to say, there exists the ‘awesome potential for love and hatred, for self-sacrifice and domination, care and cruelty’.551 The primality of this scene speaks to that which comes before ‘codes or rules, reason or knowledge, argument or conviction’; in short it comes before the language that communicates such; in Levinasian language it is the Saying prior to the said.552 The importance of communication will become a greater focus in the following chapter on politics. For now, it is worth repeating Levinas in relation to that which precedes communication; perhaps it more

548 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 246. 549 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 9. 550 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” Philosophy Tody 43 (1999), 151. 551 Ibid., 151. 552 Ibid., 151. 131 accurate to say, that which grounds communication, in the form of Saying. Levinas proposes that while Saying is communication, it is better thought of as the conditions under which communication might occur – it is exposure:

It is the unblocking of communication, irreducible to the circulation of information which presupposed it… it is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to trauma, vulnerability.553

I have previously suggested that the blush might well be seen as the bodily manifestation of Levinasian Saying, the non-verbal ‘communicative signal’, the communication of an emotion that already relies on the said in order to make any sense.554 If ambivalence is our defining moral characteristic; if our capacity for mixed feelings speaks to the experience we have of harbouring an attitude towards the Other that is simultaneously positive and negative (‘good’ and ‘bad’); the blush is the Saying of this aporia.

Recall, the research suggesting that prior to it even acquiring ‘communicative and symbolic significance’, the blush may have operated as an entropic-minimisation mechanism. Entropy, disorder, speaks not only to the confusion we feel, but also to the turning or transformation of one thing into or towards another. Within this context we can reconsider the abovementioned ‘awesome potential’ for love to become hatred, or indeed, for hatred to turn towards love. The blush, I am proposing, not only reveals us to be moral animals, it suggests that prior to complex language, when bodies begin colliding, we possessed primal knowledge (an animal knowing) of ourselves as morally ambivalent. This ‘knowing’ has an emotional component, insofar as not knowing which way things will go could well be the cause of something like confusion; the blush, the herald of such confusion, indicates our knowing that some shift in action may be required depending, once again, on how things go. It bears repeating, ambivalence is our defining moral characteristic: far from being concerned, I am proposing that we should embrace our capacity for mixed feelings; the experience we have when standing before the other, of harbouring an attitude towards them that is simultaneously positive and negative (‘good’ and ‘bad’), calls on us to embrace a sort of cognitive dissonance. Importantly, under Bauman’s analysis of postmodern, we are also called upon to resolve this for ourselves, which is to say we should endeavour to seek something like our own moral equilibrium rather than having it decided for us by external forces like religion or the state.

553 Ibid., 48. 554 Christiano Castelfranchi and Isabella Poggi, “Blushing as a discourse,” 240. 132

In response to our moral ambivalence, Bauman cautions that any endeavours directed towards non-ambivalent morals are sure to fail; ‘no logically coherent ethical code can ‘“fit”’ the essentially ambivalent condition of morality’.555 Rationality cannot ‘“override” moral impulse’, indeed the best it can hope for is to silence or paralyse such impulses.556 In short, we should not look for guarantees when it comes to moral conduct; there is no such thing as perfection when it comes to either the human subject or the society they belong to. This is not to suggest that we ought not retain our will to beauty, to goodness, to morality (as intimated in Nietzsche’s abovementioned question); as long as in so willing, we never lose sight of our ‘ugliness’. It is worth noting that here Bauman appears to be making a normative claim, albeit in the negative sense; that we ought not seek out guarantees when it comes to morality might be said to speak to the positive normative aspirations I have for embarrassment, or something like confusion. In short, a postmodern ethics of vulnerability compels me to embrace the confusion I inevitably experience when I stand before the Other.

Bauman argues that ‘moral phenomena are inherently non-rational’, which is to say, they can only be defined as moral ‘if they precede the consideration of purpose and the calculation of gains and losses’.557 As such, they escape being considered under notions of ‘utility or service’ they might be said to offer the individual, group or cause. Moral phenomena are also irregular, nonrepetitive; they are not monotonous nor are they predictable in ways that might suggest they are ‘rule-guided’; as such they are unable to be ‘exhausted by any “ethical code”’558. Any attempt to submit moral phenomena to such a code misses the point of ‘what is properly moral in morality’.559 This would be analogous to insisting that the instrumental logic of the language that builds aircraft can be applied to the moral animal at the centre of my concerns; that the application of a system or set of principles can ensure that such an animal reliably performs a specified task; impossible one would think, when one takes into account Bauman’s assertion that ‘morality is incurably aporetic’.560 Once again, morality, and hence, ethics, it would seem, is hard work. This is consistent with Jacques Derrida’s view, firstly, that ethics, “‘if it exists’” must be experienced as an ‘undergoing, or enduring of an aporia, of a certain impossible’.561 As François Raffoul points out, ‘for Derrida, the relation to aporia is one

555 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 10. 556 Ibid., 10. 557 Ibid., 11. 558 Ibid., 11. 559 Ibid., 11. 560 Ibid., 11. 561 François Raffoul, “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008), 270. 133 of endurance’, which is to say that while one is neither blocked nor stopped, one does not, on the other hand, overcome.562 By enduring, one demonstrates above all else something affirmative; insofar as one gets a glimpse of what is possible, one is not overcome by impossibility as something final, as a limit, but rather as the expression of what is possible.563 In this way, for Derrida, ‘“the impossibility of finding one’s way is the condition of ethics’”; an ethics that is itself defined, as Raffoul notes, by its unconditionality, which is to say ‘beyond ontology but also beyond ethics’.564 Recall, from Chapter Three, that Levinas wants to resist the notion of ‘divine instinct’ or ‘natural goodness’; and yet, when it comes to our responsibility for the other (ethics), Levinas proposes that ‘I am obliged without this obligation having begun in me, as though an order slipped into my consciousness like a thief, smuggled itself in’.565 The passivity of such an order, I suggested, is expressed by Levinas in terms of my ‘obeying this order before it is formulated’.566 To this end, Raffoul notes that in Adieu, Derrida recalls Levinas confiding to him that ‘“what interests me in the end is not ethics, but the holy, the holiness of the holy”’.567 Recall also, Bauman’s sixth ‘mark’ of the moral condition, in which he states that moral responsibility (ethics), being for the Other is an expression of the moral self, prior to being with the Other; indeed there is no self before the moral self; according to Bauman, this moral self is the act of creation ex-nihilo, if ever there was one.568 One gets the feeling that the hyperbole employed in endeavouring to establish our moral nature requires just as much effort to bring to the page as the practice of ethics itself.

Of course, one can easily get lost in the language games of any and all such claims. This is why I remain committed to allowing the body to speak, by way of the blush and embarrassment; in the moment immediately after two bodies collide… In this moment I have signed into language with an ellipsis, there is nothing to say, there is only a sense of falling short; and yet, we must speak. But before we do, let us look at what the body is Saying – I am a moral animal; by virtue of the pathos of my vulnerability, my moral exposure to the other, the blush betrays that I care about what the other thinks; moreover, it signals my sincerity, impossible as it is to fake or suppress. In short, assuming that vulnerability obtains, I am irrepressibly and unmistakably a moral animal.

562 Ibid., 272. 563 Ibid., 273. 564 Ibid., 271; see footnote, 290. 565 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 13. 566 Ibid., 13. 567 François Raffoul, “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” 271; see footnote. 568 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 10. 134

This is why, in the previous chapter, I suggested that the student from Bologna (an undergoing or enduring of a certain impossible, if ever there was one), or rather his blushing body and those busy hands, speak to aporia. Confronted with the impossibility of the presentiment of his imminent undoing, and already suffering the suffering still to come, the student’s body seems to be Saying – I do not know where to go or how to begin. And yet, all is not lost. The blush, just like those busy hands, speak to all who have at one time or another acted “blindly” in the hope that something might come of it, thereby demonstrating the positive ethical valence of the blush which is otherwise all too often defined by the negative self- conscious emotions it is said to herald. In sum, the blush says much of what there is to Say about myself as moral animal. The challenge for an ethico-political ideal that takes vulnerability seriously, comes in the form of its obligation to create and maintain the conditions under which this moral animal might thrive.

Returning to Bauman: he draws our attention to our choice to care for the Other; if taken to the extreme the Other’s autonomy is threatened. And yet this should not prevent us as moral actors from striving to stretch our effort to the limit – ‘The moral self moves, feels and acts in the context of ambivalence and is shot through with uncertainty.’569 Accordingly, we can recognise ourselves as moral by our uncertainty in the face of our trying to know ‘whether all that should have been done, has been’.570 Recall, once more, Levinas argues that communication is a fine risk to run insofar as he suggests the term fine speaks to that which is ‘antithetical to certainty, and indeed to consciousness’.571 I proposed that this reading allows us see why doubt and confusion might be the defining mood of a subjectivity newly emerged from the Open; a subjectivity that now risks communication in an openness defined by boundaries and borders, limits, and end.

If we accept that ‘moral phenomena are inherently non-rational’ then it should be fairly obvious that ‘morality is not universalisable.’572 But Bauman wishes, with this emphasis, to stress that he is not necessarily endorsing moral relativism. Bauman argues that the ‘overall effect [of modernity’s aspirations] is not so much the “universalization of morality”, as the silencing of the moral impulse and channelling of moral capacities to socially designed targets’ which may or may not always in and of themselves be moral.573 Within this context, one can

569 Ibid., 11. 570 Ibid., 11-12. 571 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being., 120. 572 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics., 12. 573 Ibid., 12. 135 think of many cases in which our individual moral concerns, our best intentions, are assuaged by the succour provided by the notion of the greater good as promised by ‘socially designed targets’. If we consider, for example, those deemed not to be refugees by the state and therefore persona non grata; as a result, they are perennially imprisoned some distance from our shores. There is something of a paradox in the state’s utilisation of the unacceptable or unwelcome other, the (effectively non-existent) existent; the propaganda that would pretend to protect us from the imaginary other, speaks to the spectre of the others already in the face of the one before me; something Levinas refers to as ‘the third’, about which I will more to say in the following chapter on politics.

Continuing for a moment in this vein: we are told that the greater good is served by many thousands more (imaginary others) not drowning at sea; the body’s intrinsic vulnerability (to drowning in this case) is affectively and effectively utilised by the state in order to establish a moral maxim – it is self-evidently true that the fewer people that drown the better. While it controls the borders and boundaries, the limits, the end, the state controls the moral narrative; and further, while a degree of certainty underpins the state’s belief in its capacity to deny those who would come by boat, the same certainty permeates its narrative around what constitutes the greater moral good. In response we can find comfort in such stories, but in so doing we must suppress our moral ambivalence, as well as our confusion.

The appeal from postmodern ethics might take the form that rather than suppress, we ought to revel in our conflicted feelings, our confusion, our doubt; we need only consider a future in which, for instance, the state is less able control its borders, when bodies begin colliding en masse. The suggestion herein is that those able to embrace their moral ambivalence, the harbinger of which is the blush, will not only be better placed to adapt; their blushing means they are more likely to be forgiven by the impoverished other. This might be one reason why for the state, or any other ‘social totality’, an appeal to ‘the stubborn and resilient autonomy of the moral self is a scandal’, insofar as scandal speaks to the morally ambivalent subject being an embarrassment, a stumbling block, to the smooth running of the state.574 Bauman argues that from ‘the control desk of society […] [such scandal] is viewed as the germ of chaos and anarchy inside order’.575 It is worth recalling that for Levinas, anarchy refers in part to that which ‘troubles being’, as that which might be said to haunt consciousness

574 Ibid., 13. 575 Ibid., 13. 136 by virtue of its ability to disrupt ‘the ontological play’ of consciousness.576 It is not a stretch, surely, to imagine the moral animal similarly disrupting the state.

This is not to suggest that Bauman is appealing to anarchy in the political sense; rather his appeal is to those who administer society to recognise the intractable ambivalence of the moral subject in their charge in order that they might positively exploit such, rather than give in to their compulsive reflex to suppress or outlaw.577 Under such conditions of positive exploitation, the moral self may be ‘cultivated without being given a free rein […] shap[ed] without its growth being stifled and its vitality desiccated’.578 Bauman declares that ‘the social management of morality is a complex and delicate operation which cannot but precipitate more ambivalence than it manages to eliminate’.579 Bauman proposes that due to the problems of ethically legislating for the morally ambivalent subject at its heart, ‘one must assume that moral responsibility – being for the Other before one can be with the Other – is the first reality of the self’.580 In this sense, Bauman is challenging the view that society (broadly speaking) is how we gain an initial sense of ourselves as moral animals. Within this context, one might say that when bodies begin colliding, it is the moral genius of these blushing bodies, rather than any ‘divine’ interference, that enhances their prospect of surviving this encounter for long enough to allow society (its ethics) to form. When bodies begin colliding, when the potential for ethics arises, the blush communicates my being for the Other, insofar as ‘for’ speaks (etymologically) to being ‘before’, in the sight of, in the presence of, in place of the Other. Could it be that, rather than ‘divine’ interference being required to mediate a moral encounter between myself and the Other, I am myself, in this moment, divine?

Let us pause for a moment, and properly consider Alexander Pope’s proverb from our newly emerging postmodern perspective. But before that it is worth situating my consideration, which is to say that like Rousseau (Levinas too) I am assuming that ‘reason [prior to the emergence of the other] was dormant in natural man’; as such, I am resistant to any endeavour ‘to ground natural law on reason and profound metaphysics’; for it to be considered ‘natural law’ it must be ‘discoverable prior to the development of man’s reason’; prior, in other words, to the human conatus.581 Within this context, my consideration of Pope’s proverb is informed by Rousseau’s attempt ‘to establish the principles of natural right through an examination or

576 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being., 104. 577 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics., 13. 578 Ibid., 13. 579 Ibid., 13. 580 Ibid., 13. 581 Robin Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions, 67. 137 the nature of man’.582 Accordingly, there can be no hint of a distinction between what it is to be human and the divine, therefore it is assumed that to err, and to forgive are both are equally naturally human. This certainly captures the moral ambivalence at the heart of postmodern ethics, which is to say while we can all too readily transgress, we also equally possess the capacity to forgive such transgressions. To for-give, speaks etymologically to completely giving – to giving completely. Within this context we might now consider Bauman’s suggestion that being for the Other ‘precedes all engagement with the Other, be it through knowledge, evaluation, suffering or doing’.583 His emphasis on for not only indicates that without the Other we are incomplete. Importantly, it also alludes to the notion that our moral responsibility is intrinsic to who we are as moral animals; accordingly, the absence of such would, like the absence of the Other, render us unrecognisable.

I might go a step further and rehabilitate Pope’s observation that to forgive is divine. Recall Edith Wyschogrod’s argument, that for Levinas glory does not necessarily refer to a divine presence ‘but rather the suspension of the conatus to know or do, the pure receptivity or passivity of a subject… open [in the service of the Other] to the point of total defencelessness’.584 As well as speaking to the abovementioned sense of giving completely, I want to propose that within this reading of Levinasian glory, we get a further sense, alongside Bauman (recall that morality, being for the Other is, according to Bauman, the act of creation ex-nihilo) that our capacity for forgiveness is prior to the human conatus of knowing and doing. Consistent with Bauman’s claim of moral ambivalence, our capacity to err must also exist prior to the human conatus, therefore it can now be said that to err and to forgive – both are equally divine, which is say human, all too human. In short, our moral ambivalence, its incurably aporetic nature, is our nature. It is due to our intrinsic capacity to both err and forgive (or to use Murphy’s language, our ‘capacity for both injury and care’) that the projection account of vulnerability owes its potential to ground an ethics.585 To this end, our moral ambivalence is inseparable from considerations of the ambiguity that Murphy proposes is what make appeals to the vulnerable body so provocative.586

The moral animal, I am suggesting, emerged from The Open, already possessing a genius for morality, without which moral conscious could not have obtained in the presence of

582 Ibid., 68. 583 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 13. 584 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, x-xvi. 585 Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 6. 586 Ibid., 6. 138 the other. Before even the arrival of a morally conscious other, I want to suggest the possibility of the moral animal who first blushed with confusion in the face of the Open; the body that had only just known Openness was already reconciling itself with the body of knowing that endeavoured towards (thinking) Openness. The first idea that could be defined by its genius, and therefore by its ability to transcend this time and place, was one of reconciliation; an attempt at restoring a union defined by vulnerability. A question raises itself (free from the concerns of, but also aware of the broader discussion regarding the problem of consciousness): might it be that this is what makes consciousness so difficult to pin down? Recall that I cannot account for consciousness prior to moral consciousness (vulnerability as defined by our moral exposure to the other); also, subjectivity as I am concerned with it herein is construed via its relationality to and its responsibility for, others. Therefore to ask what it is like to be me in the world, what it is like to experience a sunrise, or the colour red, or to feel pain are moral questions, for to be me in the world is, in some important way, to reconcile what it is to be you in the world. To reconcile speaks ‘to restor[ing] to union and friendship after estrangement or variance’; from the Latin reconcilare, meaning ‘to bring together again’. This is the language of coherence; not coherence concerned with a logic that demands a rational explanation, a logic that, by virtue of its appeal to reason, harks back to that of the last left standing; a logic that, by virtue of epistemological solipsism, declares that to be me in the world is to be, me.

The language of coherence that is of interest herein is consistent with moral consciousness; it is the language of unification, precisely because it recognises the other. It is the language of ethics. This is exemplified when I say that to know what it is to be me in world, means that at some point I am compelled to Say – After you. As previously noted, I have Levinas to thank for this formulation, and his proposal that even ‘the simple ‘“After you, sir”’ can speak for ‘substitution, the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other’.587 This ‘responsibility for the other’, Levinas points out, ‘cannot be fitted into grammatical categories’; it is for precisely this reason that I am insisting on the blush being the standard bearer, not only of the trepidation that haunts this primal scene; my blush in response to yours expresses my concern that you ought to go first.588 Indeed, the blush might well be seen as the original expression of (prosocial) suffering insofar as both the blusher and beholder, unsure of which way this could go, are both committed to Saying ‘after you’. It is not dissimilar (indeed, this situation may cause one to blush) to that which occurs when we approach the other walking

587 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 117; my emphasis. 588 Ibid., 117. 139 towards us; both parties move simultaneously to the left and then to the right and back again before, finally, one of us gestures to the other – after you.

Knowing this about ourselves and therefore about the Other speaks to this gesture of after you, as being something like the primordial act of forgiveness; insofar as I can know what it is to be me in the world, I am called upon to reconcile what it is to be you in the world. Within such a formulation there is the notion that at some point I must be willing to give up some aspect of myself (a way of looking at myself), and in so doing give in to some aspect of you (a way of looking at you). This aligns me somewhat with Butler’s aspiration for ethics, expressed by our willingness ‘to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness […] our willingness [also] to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human’.589 In my endeavours ‘to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession’, I may stumble when giving an account of myself to the other but ‘surely will be forgiven’.590 I depart, somewhat, from Butler when it comes to fear; she argues that if one is to remain faithful to Nietzsche, for instance, then I can only give an account of myself (whereby ‘account’ refers to a narrative around myself as a morally accountable agent) following ‘an accusation or, minimally, an allegation […] made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established’.591 I am proposing that fear haunts the primordial scene as the ‘negative form’ of vulnerability; without such, the projection account of vulnerability cannot obtain. The danger here, of course, is that my fear causes me to flee this moment of Butleresque ‘opacity’ into the embrace of the conatus, whereby in the race now to know and to do, to act morally, something other than social fitness becomes the order of the day. Indeed, something like physical fitness now haunts this primordial moment. In other words, we are back to a conception of power getting, always, to speak first.

Returning to Bauman: he argues that this being for the Other is without ‘“foundation”’; one cannot therefore ask ‘“How possible?”’ as this would call upon morality ‘to justify itself’.592 It is worth quoting Bauman at length on this point:

That question demands that morality show the certificate of its origin – yet there is no self before the moral self, morality being the ultimate, non-determined presence; indeed, an act of creation ex nihilo, if ever there was one.593

589 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 136. 590 Ibid., 137. 591 Ibid., 11-12. 592 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 13. 593 Ibid., 13. 140

I prefer this formulation over Levinas’, of my responsibility for the other coming by way of ‘an order’, which, I think, sounds perilously close to a religious order. Bauman argues that if one assumes ‘that moral responsibility is a mystery contrary to reason’ then one also assumes that we are not ‘“normally”’ moral, at least not without ‘some special and powerful cause’. 594 Bauman’s view is one reason why I am allowing for a reading of the moral animal prior even to the appearance of the other; the me that must reconcile itself with the world; that endeavours to give a coherent account of itself in the world – the (Nietzschean?) moral party of one.

Finally, Bauman stresses, once more, that ‘the postmodern perspective does not reveal the relativism of morality’.595 On the contrary, according to Bauman, it is the parochialism of politically motivated societies that reveal ethical codes to be relativist, plagued as they are by the ‘sediment of tribal parochialism of institutional powers’ that seek to overcome ‘variety through the extension’ of their powers.596 In a strikingly prescient passage, given the current debate regarding the potential pitfalls of in particular, and tribalism more generally; a debate more often than not propagated by those public (renaissance) intellectuals who reveal themselves all too often by their appeals to the bastions of reason and science; Bauman argues that ‘humankind-wide moral unity is thinkable’:

Not as the end-product of globalizing the domain of political powers with ethical pretensions, but as the utopian horizon of deconstructing the “without us deluge” claims of nation-states, nations-in-search-of-the-state, traditional communities and communities-in-search-of-a-tradition, tribes and neo-tribes, as well as their appointed and self-appointed spokesmen and prophets.597

Bauman goes on to argue that this human-wide moral unity is possible only via the (admittedly utopian) ideal of the emancipated and autonomous moral self, its moral responsibility now vindicated, now facing up:

Without being tempted to escape, to the inherent and incurable ambivalence in which that responsibility casts it and which is already its fate, still waiting to recast into its destiny.598

594 Ibid., 13-14. 595 Ibid., 14. 596 Ibid., 14. 597 Ibid., 14-15; my emphasis. 598 Ibid., 15. 141

It is at this point, a utopia in which an emancipated and autonomous moral agent resides, that I am inclined to depart from Bauman’s postmodern condition, for such harks to a modernist ideal. In fairness to Bauman, he would likely willingly concede this point; he too abandoned the postmodern condition for what he termed ‘liquid’ modernity, a thesis that postulated ‘we remain in a broadly modern epoch but one that is distinguished from […] “solid” modernity’ by its admission of ‘an increased pace of change and fluidity’; in short it is ‘solid modernity coming to terms with its impossibility’.599 This mirrors Kellner’s criticism of Bauman’s views on modernity (note that Kellner is writing his article before the release of Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, which makes his criticism somehow more poignant, as one can now imagine Bauman is responding); Kellner argues that Bauman ‘fails to theorise stages of modernity, or of modern thought, with competing Western mindsets, which would render modernity itself a contested terrain’.600 In short, without giving modernity the opportunity to put itself in the dock to defend itself, Bauman denies it the chance of being ‘up for grabs, constantly contesting older positions and creating new ones’.601 This means, according to Kellner, that Bauman’s analysis of modernity can come across as overly negative and reductionist; he fails to properly account for the positive gains made by modernity in the form of ‘democratic participation, , associations and socio-political contestation’.602 Perhaps of most interest is Kellner’s proposal that Bauman’s take on modernity is ‘too intellectualistic, too focused on the condition of knowledge and the role of the intellectual as definitive to modernity [thereby] neglecting its socioeconomic, institutional, structural, and material determinants’.603

In the first instance, Bauman is simply remaining faithful to Lyotard’s opening line in The Postmodern Condition which states that, ‘the object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies.’604 There is no suggestion that Bauman is endeavouring to rewrite the postmodern book; indeed, even when he turns his back on the postmodern for liquid modernity, he ‘hang[s] on to a core tenet of postmodernity in his incredulity in relation to grand narratives’.605 What is of more interest, is the implication in Kellner’s criticism that Bauman has neglected the body for the body of knowing (knowledge). This brings to mind Butler’s warning that ‘we cannot even fight for infrastructural goods

599 Mark Smith, “Reading Bauman for Social Work,” 5; see also, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 600 Douglas Kellner, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Turn,” 76; Kellner gives various examples. 601 Ibid., 76. 602 Ibid., 77. 603 Ibid., 77. 604 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii; my emphasis. 605 Mark Smith, “Reading Bauman for Social Work,” 5. 142 without being able to assume them to one degree or another’, which is to say that bodies need streets in order to fight for their right to freely assemble, to be seen, on the streets.606 The point I am making, with my reference to Butler, and in line with Kellner, is that one must remain mindful of modernity’s largess, the institutional, the structural, the material requirements, of a body that would venture to turn its back on modernity. Having said that, I am not (neither, I think, is Kellner) accusing Bauman of ignoring the body. How could I, when I started out by proposing that for Bauman morality is life.

Bauman’s opening epigraph in Postmodern Ethics cites none other than Rainer Rilke – ‘Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces.’607 Here one is given an image of trauma, a vulnerable embodied being requiring anything but a grand narrative to speak for it; a story, instead, of bits and pieces that endeavours to reconcile itself with this shattered being. And like me, I trust Bauman turns to Rilke precisely because of the latter’s resolve to remain open to life, and by extension, to the moral animal at the centre of our concerns. Indeed, I am quite sure of it, for only recently Bauman had this to say about ‘the concept of “moral [in]sensitivity”’:

[It] denote[s] a callous, compassionless, and heartless kind of behaviour, or just an equanimous and indifferent posture taken and manifested towards other people’s trial and tribulations […] “insensitivity” […] lies in the sphere of the anatomical and physiological phenomena from which it is drawn – its primary meaning being the malfunction of some sense organs.608

If one has been rendered physiologically insensitive (Bauman uses the example of painkilling drugs), the danger, according to Bauman, is that we also become morally insensitive, which is to say our responses to the other no longer take into ‘account the welfare of an-other’; in short, we lose our capacity to be prosocial, which we know is defined as caring about others’ welfare and avoiding behaviours that may damage another’s welfare.

Broadly speaking, Bauman’s thesis in this later work is that under liquid modern conditions that would render us morally insensitive, ‘the Levinasian “party of two” stops being a seedbed of morality’.609 A condition that concerns him is what he refers to as ‘adiaphorization’, whereby ‘the pattern of the consumer-commodity relation […] [is

606 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 126. 607 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1. 608 Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013),13. 609 Ibid., 15. 143 transplanted onto] interhuman relations’; leading Bauman to conclude that while it may ‘lubricate the wheels of the economy […] a consumerist attitude […] sprinkles sand on the bearing of morality’.610 The reader may have already made the connection: Bauman’s formulation of ‘moral sensitivity’ and his concern for its loss, speaks directly to Thomas Burgess’s seminal treatise on blushing, as discussed previously, but worth repeating at this late juncture, for it brings us back to the body and to the blush. Recall that Burgess devotes an entire section to sensitivity entitled ‘On Sensibility’, in which he endeavours to account for human sensibility, (if it is based on our moral concerns and not a ‘morbid sensibility’ due to a lack of intellectual and moral training), as ‘true sensibility’ (in other words, moral sensitivity); which finds it expression by way of the ‘True Blush’.

Recall also, my alluding to the danger presented by those who have ‘forgotten’ how to blush (who might, in Bauman’s words, be suffering a malfunction of sense organs); those who might now be defined as having lost their moral sensitivity, their vulnerability; and how these ‘unblushing males’ might present a potential obstacle (an embarrassment, no less) for an ethics and a politics that take for their name – vulnerability. It is time, finally, to address the latter, what I am calling a politics of loss. Here loss is not only indicative of the epistemological mood of the body of knowing that endeavours to account for the moral animal at the centre of its concern, it also speaks to a very real sense of grief, now that I am bound to consider all others at the ‘expense’ of the one that is always before me. And yet all is not lost; Bauman supports the view that politics is the ‘art of the possible’.611 The phrase would normally be indicative of compromise, in the sense that concessions must be made if things are to get done; and while I am not about to disavow the sentiment, the doing, I am inclined to look at what compromise promises. Within this context, a politics of loss is, paradoxically, one of promise, which like the ethics herein, gestures towards the future.

1.3 – Conclusion There is a general view that ‘any plausible normative ethical theory will have something to say’ about deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics.612 Once more, it would be folly to think that in a single chapter I could make the case that an ethics of vulnerability gestures to all three. Otherwise I would have convinced the reader that in order to be moral, we are duty- bound to embrace vulnerability (as a virtue); having done so it behoves us to project our

610 Ibid., 15. 611 Ibid., 13. 612 Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia, ed., Edward N. Zalta (2018). 144 vulnerability in order that we might account for as many others as possible in the best possible way. Putting that to one side, I want to reflect for a moment on what it means to gesture: it speaks to a ‘manner of carrying the body’; to ‘a movement of the body […] intended to express a thought or feeling’; to an ‘action undertaken in good will’. On these counts, I trust that I have gestured to an ethics, insofar as it is concerned with the projection account of vulnerability; an ideal that takes seriously what the body is Saying.

What is the body Saying, by way of the blush (and embarrassment)? That from the very beginning, the moral animal at the centre of our concerns possessed a moral genius; one that reconciles the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness; that harks back to the moral animal that first blushed in the face of the Open, in the knowledge (where knowledge speaks to confusion) that it wished to reconcile a union defined by vulnerability. I have also gestured to our genius for immorality: I have argued that unless we accept our moral ambivalence, then this account of ethics as aporia and ambivalence, inspired by Bauman, falls short; indeed, it falls flat on its face. I must have knowledge (where, once again knowledge speaks to confusion) of the ‘negative form’, expressed by my capacity to err, even if I am embarrassed by it, which is to say confused by the aporia of the presentiment of my imminent undoing. Without this experience of embarrassment as aporia, there is no possibility of vulnerability, and therefore no possibility for beginning. Under such conditions, I forfeit any chance I have of expressing an affirmative moral ideal, expressed herein as my willingness to forgive – my will to be good.

I am a contradiction, I admit. Any appeal to my being otherwise was never going to carry the day. But you knew that already – ‘That you blushed, I saw it well: that is how I recognised you’.613 I am the contradiction that first became conscious of myself as such; that knew from the beginning that my ugliness would return, insofar as it never ceased to take place. This is my moral genius, the idea that transcends time and place; that I should endeavour to reconcile this contradiction of myself in the world; of myself reconciling with what it is to be you in the world.

A contradiction cries out for protection, by way of a reply, an objection, even worse, a counterargument. In so doing, it invites us to speak against it – to negate – so that we might find comfort in the contradiction now confined to the dustbin of history. But that would speak to an ethics of negation, of resentment, one that would deny the contradiction its moral genius.

613 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 377. 145

Instead, I am gesturing towards an ethics of vulnerability that calls for the contradiction to project itself; that expresses by way of the blush that I am embarrassed by my knowledge, my confusion, at wanting an aporia, such as I am, to be so.

146

Chapter VI - Vulnerability: A Politics of Loss Beyond the other there is the third party […] also an other, also a neighbour […]. Who then is the first one to whom I must respond, the first to be loved? There must be knowledge of such things! It is the hour of justice, inquiry, and knowledge. It is the moment of objectivity motivated by justice. Thus we need laws and, yes, courts of law, institutions and the State, to render […] the “violence” […] [and] rigours of the universal and justice.614

A politics of vulnerability is one of loss. It is unlikely, try as it might, that politics can retain the perfection of that which is expressed prior to the conatus, which is to say, ethics. And yet ethics must remain at the heart of politics. A politics of vulnerability is one then, that is haunted by what it cannot be. In the face of such loss politics seeks to retreat from the scene of ethics. Or does it? In so doing it reclaims something like ethics: first by its efforts at making a habit of the decision and therefore of justice; second, having decided, politics now expresses aidos and in so doing allows for the possibility of the other, finally, speaking for themselves.

1.1 – Introduction Once more: this chapter is partly defined by what it is not. I am concerned neither with political history and political theory, nor what one might call the science of politics. To this end, I am sympathetic with the view (mirroring Zygmunt Bauman’s in the previous chapter regarding ethics) that ‘an exact science of politics would be an impossibility, and baneful in its implications, given the passionate and fluctuating nature of […] [humankind], which defies all efforts to create a perfectly organised society’.615 Notwithstanding, if for the purpose of this chapter politics must be defined (named, is perhaps a better word), then it is not by its mechanics, nor the machinery; both, it could be argued, inevitably end up serving its own interests prior to serving those of its constituents; indeed, this is an ever-present danger for a politics of egology.616 If politics is to be named herein, it is by a single word – loss. The ethical perfection of ‘the moral party of two’ is lost to politics, concerned as it is now with the others already in the face of the one before it.

614 Emmanuel Levinas, Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed., Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 246. 615 W. Wesley McDonald, and the Age of (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 37; McDonald is characterising Fisher Ames’ view that due to our capricious nature politics cannot have fixed principles. 616 Recall that Levinas uses egology (what he calls, Husserl’s ‘neologism’) in terms of a philosophy of power that finds its expression in the tyranny of the universalising and impersonal tendencies of the state. 147

Informed by Emmanuel Levinas, I will argue justice demands that politics decides from amongst all the others in the face of the one already and always before it. Confronted by such a demand politics must risk all and retreat from the scene of ethics, which is to say from the perfection of that which occurs prior to the conatus. In so doing, I will argue that politics can now reclaim something like ethics: first by its efforts at making a habit of the decision and therefore, justice; second, having decided, politics now expresses aidos and in so doing allows for the possibility of the other, finally, speaking for themselves. With my focus very much on making a habit of deciding, rather than the decision itself, I will not be exploring Jacques Derrida’s ideal the decision. Having said that, it would be remiss not to make a further reference to the importance Derrida places on what it means to decide, especially when it comes to ethics. Accordingly, I will briefly revisit Derrida later in this chapter.

I will devote the first section of this chapter on politics to Levinas (the thinker of ethics), for he (perhaps like no other) knows that his ‘self-conscious’ ethical utopia, his ‘“moral party of two”’, is forever and always haunted by the third party, the others already in the face of the one before me, and the requirement, therefore, for justice.617 This notion of forever and always speaks, we will see, to a Levinasian concept of time. Importantly, it speaks further to the ideal that is of importance herein; while there is a politics concerned with the others, there is always time. To this end, I will briefly consider Levinas’ concept of time as it relates to the Other, and by definition, all others.

The second section will deal firstly with how politics might work towards reclaiming something like ethics; not as an expression of the perfection which occurs prior to the conatus, but by virtue of making a habit of the decision and therefore of justice. In sum, it is the way that justice conducts itself that might be said to be virtuous. Insofar as it demonstrates ‘dissatisfaction with itself’, it not only displays something like a postmodern ilk (a dissatisfaction with that which preceded it), it alludes to hexis, and hence, to the ethical in the ethico-political. Finally, I will revisit an expression of aidos that gestures towards the ambiguous nature of its ‘role as a bridge between pathos and hexis’.618 To this end, I am interested in the link between aidos and ‘decency in thought or theory’, for it hints at ascribing to knowledge a sense of morality, insofar as aidos serves as a guide towards how such knowledge might be applied to future decisions, especially those concerning the moral animal

617 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 151. 618 Nicholas Higgins, “Shame on You: The Virtuous Use of Shame in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” Expositions 9 (2015), 3. 148 at the centre now of politics’ concerns. To be sure, while I am not proposing a politics of the blush, or indeed, of embarrassment, a politics of vulnerability is not only committed to providing the conditions under which these moral expressions might thrive, it is haunted by the mood to which they Speak.

Regarding the political potential of emotions more generally, I note Martha Nussbaum’s recent monograph, Political Emotions. Her appeal to love as being at the heart of those emotions ‘that sustain a decent society’, as being the cause of our ‘intense attachments to things outside the control of our will’, speaks broadly to the aspirations I have for vulnerability in general, and for the blush and embarrassment in particular.619 Her suggestion also that ‘the conception of the human being that lies at the heart of the political conception involves both striving and vulnerability’ speaks, I think, to what I have been referring to as the projection account of vulnerability; insofar as Nussbaum wishes to conceive of human beings (indeed all animals) as ‘not just passive recipients of fortune’s blows’; we are also at the same time ‘active beings who pursue aims and who seek lives rich in activity’.620 Elsewhere, Nussbaum argues that ‘recognising one’s vulnerability [is] a precondition […] for an ethical life’ (and therefore, one would think, a political life); indeed, for Nussbaum, what defines a ‘good human being’ is their capacity for ‘openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond [one’s] own control that can lead [one] to be shattered’.621 As such, we are all of us entitled to be supported in our agency and striving. I emphasise this to further highlight the problem of politics for Levinas, as revealed by considerations of the third: exactly how am I to decide which of you is entitled to my support? One might easily feel at a loss in the face of such overwhelming numbers, and in so being one might reframe Levinas’ question – ‘How is it that there can be justice?’622 My intuition is that the answer to this question lies in a politics of vulnerability; one that is prepared to retreat from the perfection of Levinasian ethics so that it might reclaim something like it, by virtue of its commitment to the habit of the mundane task of making the decision.

619 Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 15. 620 Ibid., 120-121. 621 Martha Nussbaum, “The Philosopher of Feelings.” 622 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 89; my emphasis; Levinas puts it terms of, ‘How is it that there is justice?’ 149

1.2 – Levinas – the Third; Justice; Time Before proceeding, it is worth briefly revisiting the lengthy epigraph leading this chapter, in which Levinas exclaims – ‘There must be knowledge of such things!’623 He declares that the transition from ethics to politics is the hour of knowledge, ‘the moment of objectivity’; it is as if Levinas is highlighting a tension, alluded to in my introductory remarks, between the pathos of subjectivity defined by the ‘Gordian knot’ of the unruly and unregulatable (the feeling body); and the knowledge (hexis) that politics must bring to bear upon such. Reading Levinas, one gets the sense of a lamentation, at the very least the exasperation he feels at having to address politics. It is almost as if Levinas himself is at a loss. It is for precisely this reason that I am turning to Levinas (the thinker of ethics) now that we are arrived at politics; hesitancy and uncertainty are the appropriate attitudes when considering a politics endeavouring to take to heart the contradiction that is the moral animal at the centre of our concerns.

It should be noted that even though justice can be read in Levinasian terms as the highest political ideal towards which we ought to strive, I do not intend to conceptualise it (at least not explicitly) in this way. Such a reading places justice in tension with other ideals, like mercy for example, and then there is the assumption that I am now considering justice and mercy at the expense of say, liberty and equality. The whole argument collapses into a tiresome competition between competing ideals of the good life. Justice, as I am primarily concerned with it, obtains in the making of the decision; more precisely, in the habit politics dedicates itself to forming, when it comes to making the decision.

To this end, justice might be further conceptualised as the making of one’s mind; it is the form and the character of the communication to follow. Justice demands that I speak. It is worth revisiting Levinas, regarding communication:

Communication is an adventure of a subjectivity, different from that which is dominated by the concern to recover itself, different from that of coinciding in consciousness; it will involve uncertainty. […] Communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.624

This ideal of communication alludes, we have seen, to an ethics that troubles the self-satisfied ego. Likewise, communication of my decision, of justice, troubles politics, insofar as always having to decide disrupts politics’ obsession with itself. Levinas argues that ‘consciousness is

623 Emmanuel Levinas, Is it righteous to be? 246. 624 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 120. 150 born in the presence of a third party […]. The foundation of consciousness is justice’.625 Recall that Nietzsche argues that ‘consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication’; here Nietzsche is making a distinction between how the human animal and all other animals communicate insofar as ‘conscious thinking, and only conscious thinking, occurs in words’.626 Consciousness is the foundation of justice: this is broadly consistent with Aristotle, who opens his account of politics by declaring that we are by nature ‘political animal[s]’; and further, as we know that ‘nature does nothing in vain’, we have been endowed with a faculty for speech beyond that which other animals possess, which is to say we can express more than merely pleasure or pain; according to Aristotle, we use speech ‘to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence the just and the unjust’.627 The moral animal, that which expresses its moral genius by way of the blush (and embarrassment) becomes the political animal; the Saying becomes the said. In this way the moral animal is the antecedent of, and a necessary condition for, the political animal.

Regarding the blush, a politics cannot in all seriousness be expected to communicate by way of blushing. Having said that, I have previously referred to those who have ‘forgotten’ how to blush; and how these ‘unblushing males’ might present a potential obstacle (an embarrassment, no less) for a politics that takes for its name – vulnerability. To this end, Nussbaum states that she is ‘drawn to those who blush’, for they are in touch, unlike the ‘unblushing males or “normals”’, with their ‘animal nature’.628 Mindful of such, the political animal would do well to embrace the communicative power and authenticity of the blush if it is to have any chance of speaking to the moral animal at the centre of its concerns. I can go further and propose that the blush is that which haunts a politics of loss, insofar as it speaks to the presentiment of my imminent undoing, something, I will argue, that politics must contend with if it is to properly communicate justice.

It is clear that Levinas acknowledges communication is necessary if justice is to obtain, for how else is the third to know my decision between themselves and all the others. Levinas also wishes to imbue such communication with something of the ‘perfection’ of his ethics (a perfection, I have suggested, that is captured by the blush). To this end, the ‘main business’ of ethics, we are reminded, exists elsewhere, other than consciousness; as passivity in the form of

625 Ibid., 160. 626 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 297-299; see also, Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious, 24-25. 627 Aristotle, Politics, trans., Carnes Lord (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4. 628 Martha Nussbaum, “The Philosopher of Feelings.” 151 subjectivity that is incapable of shutting itself up from the inside which, we have seen, Levinas places both before and beyond consciousness, effectively putting it out of the reach of politics. Notwithstanding, politics ‘is called upon to conceive [of this] ambivalence’; in effect to ensure that the Saying of ethics is awakened always in the said.629 This is one reason why I am interested in looking, later, at hexis, for it speaks to ‘not just ethical behaviour, but also knowledge and technical skill’.630

Consciousness, the communication of the said that will betray the uniqueness of the other, is born in the presence of a third party: all the others who demand justice. Herein, justice lies waiting on the hither side of the ellipsis, that which marks the moment of silence, of falling short, and of doubt. Accordingly, justice does not (it cannot) suddenly speak with a newfound and surprising clarity. That would not be consistent with what precedes it, that would be a leap to faith in the logic of the instrumental language that builds aircraft, the belief that now politics is under consideration we can finally insist upon a system or set of principles that endeavours to ensure the moral animal at the centre of our concerns reliably performs a specified task. This is not to suggest that politics cannot concern itself with endeavouring towards reliably performing a specified task, in this case making the decision. Indeed, as I will argue in the following section, this is precisely how politics might reclaim something like ethics. In this way, I am hoping that I can alleviate something of Levinas’ ‘loss’.

When we read Levinas on politics, we cannot help but hear a hint of resignation in his voice:

We leave what I call the order of ethics, or the order of saintliness or the order of mercy, or the order of love, or the order of charity – where the other human being concerns me regardless of the place he occupies in the multitude, and even regardless of our shared quality as individuals of the human species. He concerns me as one close to me, as the first to come. He is unique.631

Where do we leave for? In short, we leave for politics, or as Bauman puts it, we leave for ‘the realm of choice, proportion, judgement and comparison’.632 Importantly, it is comparison that ‘already entails the first act of violence […] [for] it is defiance of uniqueness’.633 Perhaps this

629 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 162; see also Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, xxi. 630 Pierre Rodrigo, “The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (2011), 7. 631 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,”155; Bauman is citing Levinas from an interview with Francois Poirié. 632 Ibid., 155. 633 Ibid., 155. 152 is why Nietzsche, unashamedly and determinedly unique, a moral party of one (to employ the parlance herein), is so reticent to actively engage with politics?

Into this ‘intimacy of the face to face’ of ethics enters the third; what Levinas describes as ‘a permanent entry’; there is no escaping justice then; my concern for it comes ‘from the bottom of the saying without the said, the saying as contact […] the spirit in society’.634 Accordingly, a society becomes just as long as it does not abandon its starting point – the relation between myself and the Other; and all the others. Levinas asks: Do I know the relationship between the Other and this third? What are the implications of this relationship on my understanding of the Other? Who is the Other?635 There is now a necessity ‘to weigh, to think, to judge, in comparing the incomparable’.636 Levinas arrives at an ideal of justice as a result of having to establish with others, ‘the interpersonal relation’ already established with the Other.637 Importantly, according to Levinas, the justice that is ‘exercised through institutions […] must always be held in check by [this] initial interpersonal relationship’.638 Levinas frames his concerns with institutions, and by extension politics:

Does the social, with its institutions, universal forms and laws, result from limiting the consequence of war […], or from limiting the infinity which opens in the ethical relationship of [one to another]?639

Philippe Nemo enquires of Levinas whether this ‘conception of the political’ represents ‘an internal regulation of society as in a society of bees or ants’, or ‘a higher regulation, of another nature, ethical, standing above politics?’640 To which Levinas replies that ‘politics must be able in fact always to be checked and criticised starting from the ethical’.641 Levinas argues elsewhere that ‘in no way is justice a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the for-the- other, a diminution, a limitation of […] responsibility, a neutralisation of the glory of the Infinite’.642 Not only must politics decide amongst all the others in the face of the other already before it, according to Levinas it must not become a poor facsimile of ethics. I ask again – ‘How is it that there can be justice?’

634 Ibid., 160. 635 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 90. 636 Ibid., 90. 637 Ibid., 90. 638 Ibid., 90. 639 Ibid., 80. 640 Ibid., 80. 641 Ibid., 80. 642 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 159. 153

Levinas asks: ‘How is it that there is justice?’ He answers himself by asserting ‘that it is the fact of the multiplicity of […] [humankind] and the presence of someone next to the Other, which condition the laws and establish justice’.643 Levinas draws the distinction out in the following way – ‘If I am alone with the Other, I owe […] [them] everything; but there is someone else.’644 The division of this sentence into elements gives one pause: the former speaks to ‘the moral party of two’, what we have seen Bauman refer to (for Levinas) as ‘self- consciously a utopia […] the primal scene of morality […] the only stage on which such selves could play themselves, i.e., as moral beings’.645 There is something of the story of Genesis in this mise en scène (prior, that is, to our protagonists eating from the tree of knowledge); this is made more explicit when we consider Bauman’s proposal that what makes this ‘moral party of two’ so idyllic is that we get to be our natural selves if such can be defined as our being moral, ‘instead of playing scripted roles and reciting someone else’s lines’.646 According to Bauman, ‘“inside” the moral party there is just me, with my responsibility, with my care, with the command that commands me and me alone, and there is the Face […] but all this changes with the appearance of the Third’.647 Caution is required here: the appearance of the third suggests that it suddenly manifests from somewhere else, or that the third (for Levinas) is what separates ethics and politics. Bauman appears unperturbed by this apparent distinction, for he later talks about the third ‘gate-crash[ing]’ this party of two making ‘the moral self […] feel uncomfortable’.648 Interestingly, Bauman argues that Levinas too feels uncomfortable, as is evidenced, according to Bauman, by Levinas’ ‘obsessive urgency, in later writings and interviews to return to “the problem of the Third” and the possibility of salvaging his description of the ethical relationship in the “presence of the Third party”’.649 While there is a sense of pathos when we consider Levinas in this light, of Levinas being at a loss in the face of his formulation, I am intent on not stripping the pathos from the moment itself – the moment we become aware of the presence of the ever-present third.

In order to further explore this notion of there always being the third, let us consider the latter element in Levinas’ sentence – ‘but there is someone else’; there is might normally precede a singular noun, and yet surely Levinas is not suggesting that the third is but one other

643 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 89. 644 Ibid., 89-90; my emphasis. 645 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 151. 646 Ibid., 151; my emphasis. 647 Ibid., 151. 648 Ibid., 153. 649 Ibid., 153. 154 that intervenes in this ‘moral party of two’? If we assume this to be the case, that the third is indeed all others, then something of the enormity and complexity, the impossibility of the task, is revealed. But the third, for Levinas, is more than just all others: Robert Bernasconi points out that Levinas gives us three accounts of the third: the third party (le tiers) which Bernasconi argues ‘is the site of the passage to the political’ for Levinasian thought; ‘justice begins with “the third man” in the sense of the third party’; the second account refers to ‘the notion of the third person (la troisième personne)’; Bernasconi argues that this refers to ‘the neutral observer whose standpoint corresponds to that of universal reason’; the third account, and according to Bernasconi, most difficult, refers to Levinas’ use of ‘“illeity” (illéité) which derives from the third person singular personal pronoun “il”’; not to be confused in ‘the grammatical sense […] with the third person perspective of reason’.650 To this end, the third person exists outside reason insofar as ‘the third person is the beyond’; it is the face which is ‘irreducible to rational discourse’; the trace, which is not that so much of a presence, more like that of a memory (of alterity) which is beyond recalling insofar as it exists in a primordial past; suggesting that ‘I’ was always otherwise than being.651

Another way of understanding the above is to consider that ‘meaning beyond meaning [the third person or the face] […] slip[s] into the meaning structure of the phenomenal’, thereby causing the ‘disarray or disorder into which the phenomenal is thrown by the entrance of the transcendent’.652 This ‘disarray or disorder’, this entropy, I have proposed, is that which the blush signals, prior to communicating complex emotions that are dependent upon cultural considerations; more precisely, the blush, I have suggested, signals our understandable desire to minimise this entropy. This ‘disarray or disorder’ precipitated by the third qua ‘entrance of the transcendent’ spells trouble for being, especially that which desires to be left alone in its solitary freedom. The third, in all its manifestations is also a problem for the purity of ethics, insofar as it announces politics.

Bernasconi suggests that his is ‘not […] an attempt [at] an exhaustive clarification of these three kinds of tertialité’; they are, he further argues, ‘at times barely distinguishable’.653 On this point Timothy Rothhaar agrees, arguing that the ‘“third party” is a complicated term, the specifics of which change over the course of Levinas’ work’.654 For my purposes I will be

650 Robert Bernasconi, “The Third Party. Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999), 76. 651 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 160-162. 652 Ibid., 163-164. 653 Robert Bernasconi, “The Third Party. Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,” 76. 654 Timothy W. Rothhaar, “Levinas and the “Matter” of Poverty,” Religion 9 (2018), 6. 155 guided by Rothhaar’s reading of what he proposes is the third’s ‘core meaning’, which is to say it ‘is not the singular Other of the face-to-face encounter, but all others outside of it […] [as in] society […] “the whole of humankind”’; the primary purpose of which ‘is the carrying out of justice’.655 Justice, it would seem, just like the third that is its motivation, is always there; the decision raised by the requirement for justice suggests that while I am prepared to decide, which is to say that while there is a politics concerned with the others there is always time. I will return to time in a moment, but for the moment let us further consider the notion that justice, like the third, is always haunting the scene of the face-to-face encounter, which is to say, ethics.

Madeline Fagan argues that ‘the Third is present in the face-to-face relationship from the very beginning, in fact as an integral part of the face itself’; there can be no separating the other and the third, ethics from politics; indeed, for Fagan, ‘the ethical realm relied upon is always already also political within itself […] [they] are not separate realms that corrupt one another but are necessarily inseparable and contained within one another’.656 This reading of Levinas goes some way, one would think, to answering concerns broadly characterised by those expressed by Gavin Rae:

Levinas has run into the major problem of normative ethics; that is, for all its pretensions to universality, Levinas’ privileging of the ethical state depends on a political decision about the fundamental value [justice] to be enacted.657

Rae argues that for Levinas this means that even though Levinas ‘recommends that the ethical state be enacted […] [he] cannot demonstrate why this needs to be the case’.658 I would ask: can there be any notion of why within the context of that which already and always is, which is to say can one recommend putting into practice that which is beyond custom? Here I am not endeavouring to raise the spectre of the is-ought dilemma, rather I am alluding to time as being that which already and always is. Rae does not appear to be explicitly accounting for time in this context; insofar as it could be said to be concerned with it, the ethico-political cannot stand outside time, and is therefore always being enacted. If one subscribes to Fagan’s reading of Levinas, which is to say there can be no separating the other and the third, ethics from politics;

655 Ibid., 6. 656 Madeleine Fagan, “The inseparability of ethics and politics: Rethinking the third in Emmanuel Levinas,” Contemporary Political Theory 8 (2009), 7. 657 Gavin Rae, The Problem of Political Foundations in and Emmanuel Levinas, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 232. 658 Ibid., 232. 156 it turns out that there is always someone else, which is to suggest (etymologically), that ‘all the time’ and ‘all the way’, quite literally, across all time there is always someone else.

To this end, Richard Cohen points out that for Levinas, ‘the future is the future of he who is always yet to come, he who will never and can never fully present himself’.659 Time, therefore, is not thought of in terms of ‘a degradation of eternity’; it is infinite insofar as it does not ‘allow itself to be com-prehended’.660 According to Levinas, time is not temporally linear; ‘it makes a detour’ from our understanding of it as ‘straightforwardness […] into the ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person’.661 Levinas argues that ‘time is not the achievement of an isolated and lone subject […] it is the very relationship of the subject with the Other’.662 In sum, for Levinas:

The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. It seems to me impossible to speak of time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration.663

Without the Other, time collapses into solitude, into an eternal present that Levinas describes as ‘an enchainment in relation to itself’; the present tears ‘the fabric of infinite existing (as expressed by my relationship to the Other).664 I think it is worth, once more, quoting Levinas at some length, in order to further demonstrate the implication for our understanding of time in the context of a world without the Other, and by definition, all others:

Solitude is not tragic because it is the privation of the other, but because it is shut up within the captivity of its identity, because it is matter. To shatter the enchainment of matter is to shatter the finality of hypostasis. It is to be in time. Solitude is an absence of time […] the time the subject travels by carrying its identity, is a time incapable of loosening the tie of hypostasis.665

I have a relationship with time for as long as I have a relationship with the other; importantly, just like the other, time also exceeds my grasp. I can always grasp the present (I can more easily

659 Richard A. Cohen, “Introduction,” Time and the Other, 18. 660 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, 32. 661 Ibid., 33. 662 Ibid., 39. 663 Ibid., 77. 664 Ibid., 56. 665 Ibid., 57; my emphasis; see also, 43-44, 51-52; Cohen notes Levinas’ ‘distinctive use’ of hypostasis ‘to refer to the origin of an entity that is neither substantial nor insubstantial’; otherwise expressed as ‘the individuation of existence’; Levinas himself refers to hypostasis as ‘a situation where the existent is put in touch with its existing’; in other words hypostasis is ‘the present […] the departure from self’ which, without the Other, can only return to the self; as such, for Levinas, ‘positing hypostasis as a present is still not to introduce time into being’. 157 conceptualise it at least, as distinct from infinity); indeed, I am wedded to the present without the other. Recall that ethics for Levinas is passivity, not that which I would (if I could) grasp. Accordingly, the ego, ‘the self as power’ in which ‘the self always returns to itself’ (at the expense of self-constitution via my responsibility for others) is what threatens ‘being for infinity’ – time, in other words.666 Once more, without the Other, time collapses into solitude; I am the last left standing. Stripped of my moral exposure to the other, I am no longer recognisable as a moral animal, which is to say human.

If we can begin to conceive of the third as all others all the time, and the third is the essence of politics, then for political leaders it lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘time is of the essence’. The third, it would seem, is essential for a politics if it is not to become mired in an obsession with itself; insofar as it embraces the notion that while there are others there is always time; politics staves off the danger of becoming one of egology. A politics of egology stands outside time (as conceived herein) and is therefore tenuous, insofar as there is now no possibility of a future other than that which appeals to the logic of the last left standing. Recall that Levinas argues egology is a philosophy of power that finds its expression in the tyranny of the universalising and impersonal tendencies of the state. Within this context, politics as egology is obsessed with itself at the expense of its responsibility for all others all the time, and like the self-obsessed ego it becomes enchained to itself in the present moment, one defined by its obsession with itself at the expense of those for whom it is responsible.

This harks back to my suggestion in an earlier chapter, that for current global crises requiring political responses, we can see now see a danger for politics as egology subsumed in a consideration of itself, at the expense of its exposure to, and responsibility for, all the others. Politics becomes mired in the triviality of the contest with itself. Here, one needs only to recall any number of leadership challenges within political parties, or the obsession populist leaders have with curating their own image; and, importantly, the subsequent obsession of some sections of the Fourth Estate with the very same, at the expense of their charter to frame political issues in a balanced way. Obsession, the ‘idea or image that intrudes on the mind’ against our will, means that the Fourth Estate, and those claiming to have a platform to speak to power; incredulous that such an idea or image has intruded against their will (and not necessarily the will of the people), are capable of little else other than projecting their incredulity at this state of affairs.

666 Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 136-137. 158

One can see the danger inherent for politics, in particular; now that it is obsessed by the war within; now that it is no longer concerned by its responsibility to the others; such a politics is diminished in its capacity to care for the others. Now that its attention and resources are deployed in the struggle for its own survival, politics pleads the case that its resources are limited. Accordingly, when confronted by its responsibility to the others and the demand on its resources implied by such, instead of turning to justice, politics looks to the law and to irresponsibility, which is to say politics justifies its refusal by declaring itself not legally responsible for the others. To this end, consider a future in which the state obsesses over the fact that there is only so much it can do for those forced to flee large swathes of the planet; while they consider such facts, the third is already arrived; more than that, the third was never absent, existing as it does in the face of the other already inside the border. The moral animal, as conceived herein, is grounded in its responsibility to the others, to the third, and therefore to the ideal that while there are others there is always time. Hence a politics that embraces the concerns of its constituents, surely finds little time to become obsessed with itself, a vagary of modern politics of all persuasions.

I would like, finally, to propose that this is, for politics, the third’s raison d’être – while there are others there is always time, which is to say there is always time for improvement. Bauman argues that ‘the indelible trait of all justice is its dissatisfaction with itself: “justice means constant revision of justice, expectation of better justice” […] [it] must exist perpetually in a condition of noch nicht geworden [not yet become, and therefore, one would think, always beginning], setting itself standards higher than those already practiced’.667 This sense of ‘dissatisfaction with itself’; the need for ‘constant revision’ speaks to a politics of loss; insofar as it retreats from the scene of ethics, politics goes some way to reclaiming it by making a habit of ‘constant revision’, if such can be defined by revisiting what it is to make the decision. This implies also that politics’ constantly revisits justice, as discussed in this section. As such, justice is not promoted as a virtue in and of itself, as a political ideal to be measured against others, like mercy or liberty or equality; rather, it is in the way that justice conducts itself that might be said to be virtuous, insofar as it demonstrates ‘dissatisfaction with itself’, it not only displays something like postmodern ilk (a dissatisfaction with that which preceded it), it alludes to hexis, and hence the ethical in the ethico-political.

667 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 155; Bauman is citing Levinas. 159

1.3 – Making a habit of the decision, of justice, and aidos First: recall that justice, as I am primarily concerned with it, obtains in the making of the decision; more precisely, in the habit politics dedicates itself to forming when it comes to making the decision. In line with Levinas, for me, the decision, like all the others, resides in the face of the one already before me; it is the ever-present intrusion of politics in the face of ethics. This is not dissimilar to Derrida’s formulation of the decision, insofar as he follows Levinas’ attempt at reversing ‘the deciding I into a decision “of the other in me”’.668 As such, for Derrida, ‘my decision can never be mine, it is always the decision of the other in me […] “an other greater and older than I am”’.669 This harks back to Levinas, and his proposal that when it comes to my responsibility for the Other, ‘I am obliged without this obligation having begun in me, as though an order slipped into my consciousness like a thief, smuggled itself in’.670 The passivity of such an order (insofar as I am not awaiting or welcoming such) is expressed, we have seen, by Levinas in terms of my ‘obeying this order before it is formulated’.671 To this end, Derrida suggests that, ‘“One says too easily ‘I decide’ […] [as if] I am capable of and master of my decision”’.672 There is in this suggestion of mastery, or lack thereof, a sense of justice and of pathos; insofar as the decision (like all the others) resides in the face of the one already before me, surely ethics demands that I have no authority over the Other (they are, after all, their own author); and yet, politics wishes to speak qua act with something like authority when it comes to making the decision.

According to Derrida, ‘an act and an answer to the question, ‘“What should I do?”’ are what ethics and politics share in common.673 Moreover, whatever it is that ‘I’ decide, the decision is above all else marked by urgency, ‘the impossibility of waiting for the end of reflection, of the inquiry, whether it be cognitive, philosophical, metaphysical, or meta- metaphysical’.674 This urgency not only speaks to the decision residing, like all the others, in the face of the one already before me; implied in the question, ‘What should I do?’ is a call to action; indeed, by responding that I should (I shall) do x, I am placing myself under an obligation to act.675 Here there is the suggestion that an act is the singular answer to the

668 François Raffoul, “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” 283. 669 Ibid., 286. 670 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 13. 671 Ibid., 13. 672 François Raffoul, “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” 285. 673 Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed., trans., Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 296. 674 Ibid., 296. 675 See etymology of ‘should’, which ‘preserves the original notion of “obligation” that has all but dropped from shall 160 question, ‘What should I do?’. One can also detect in I should, an echo of the direction thou shalt, expressed by my obligation (my responsibility) to act, which ought to come as no surprise; for here too, Derrida tells the story of Levinas revealing that ‘the “holy [le saint]”’ and not ethics is what interests him.676

I am not suggesting that Derrida is explicitly calling upon religion, which is to say the order from religion by way of the commandment suggested in should; rather, he relies on urgency as the motivating force behind the decision. As such, ‘I’ am compelled by the others in the face of the one already before me; indeed, I am bound, not only by the decision, but to all the others, such that my responsibility now weighs upon me.677 Is it any wonder then, that in making the decision ‘I’ am relieved qua released from the pressure of my obsession with myself. To this end, François Raffoul argues that:

[Derrida] ‘seeks to imagine an alterity of decision, a decision that would be of the other, for a decision worthy of this name should mark the splitting open of the self in its identity or self-sameness […] “A decision should split open or tear – this is what the term decision means – [and] therefore should interrupt the thread of the possible.678

Within Derrida’s formulation of the decision there is an allusion to vulnerability, insofar as the self that was obsessed with itself is now split open, torn apart, by the presence of the Other. A disassembling and subsequent reassembling seems to occur in the act of deciding; the latter ‘assembly’ is now unrecognisable as the self-obsessed ego which preceded it; its subjectivity defined by its responsibility in deciding for the other.

Recall, from the previous chapter, that ethics, my responsibility for the Other, finds its expression in being for the Other. I suggested that this is an expression of the language of coherence, the language of unification, that is consistent with moral consciousness, precisely because it recognises the other. It is the language of ethics, insofar as I acknowledge that to know what it is to be me in world, means that at some point I am compelled to Say – After you. At this point, the point at which the Other finds their voice, I not only give of myself in respect of the Other (betrayed as I am by the blush), I am further compelled to listen – to hear (from the Latin cluere), and in so doing I not only hear myself called upon, I hear myself spoken of.679 To be so, brings me, somewhat uneasily (for I am no longer speaking for myself), face-to-face

676 Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” 297. 677 See etymology of ‘urge’; it speaks to my being compelled as well as bound; as being weighed down. 678 François Raffoul, “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” 286. 679 See etymology of ‘listen’, from Latin cluere, meaning ‘to hear oneself called, be spoken of’. 161 with a vision of myself as expressed by the Other. Within this ethical context, how is it that I get to decide from amongst all the others in the face of the one already before me? How is that I and not all the others have the luxury of contemplating what it means to decide. Finally, spoilt for choice, is it even possible to decide? I will return to these questions.

Perhaps this is why, for Derrida, in order for a decision to be possible, it must be impossible, which is to say we ‘cannot know in advance what to decide’.680 To this end, William Sokoloff points out that for many critics, Derrida turns ‘politics into nothing, immobilising political action and judgement, and rendering the traditional vocabulary of politics unusable’.681 Perhaps Sokoloff’s conclusion is the fairest basis upon which to proceed; and that is for Derrida the decision, while it alludes to the difficulty always for politics in deciding, politics should not abandon ‘the call for more responsible modes of action’.682 According to Sokoloff, this means that within the political context, Derrida ‘prevents us from deciding too quickly but also rules out as irresponsible the deferral of decision’.683Somewhat presciently (or is it that this state of affairs has always been the case), Sokoloff observes that ‘ of the exhaustion of politics are the signs of our time’; alongside ‘the disappearance of substantive dialogue, [and] the gag order on dissent’; in the face of such, there is the ever-present danger of apathy.684 Set against this, Sokoloff argues that one can interpret the decision from a Derridean perspective, as being a strategy of political renewal, whereby an ethical space is created ‘from which one can launch a permanent critique of the legal order […] appear[ing] as a spontaneous politics that cannot be represented by a party or a leader’.685 In this way, the citizenry are called upon ‘to leave the safety of the private realm and enter the space between justice and legality’. 686 Two aspects of this carry me forward; the expression of ethics is never far from that of politics; but the political expression of ethics itself (the political in the ethico-political) is, in the first instance, mundane, calling as it does for politics to do little else other than make a habit out of making the decision. My instinct is that in calling for anything greater, there lies the danger that politics will only hear itself described in terms of greatness, and so doing be distracted from the task at hand – to make a virtue, not out of justice or the like, but out of habit.

680 William W. Sokoloff, “Between Justice and Legality: Derrida on Decision,” Political Research Quarterly 58 (2005), 342. 681 Ibid., 341. 682 Ibid., 350. 683 Ibid., 350. 684 Ibid., 350. 685 Ibid., 350. 686 Ibid., 350-351. 162

Pierre Rodrigo observes that when Aristotle inherits certain terms or concepts, he does so in a way that could be described as selective or inventive.687 I am likewise inclined when it comes to my use of hexis, which Rodrigo points out is variously translated as ‘“state”, “stable disposition”, “”, “way of being”, or even “possession”’.688 I have already cited Rodrigo in relation to my interest in hexis speaking to ‘not just ethical behaviour, but also knowledge and technical skill’.689 I proceed on the basis of a key point that Rodrigo makes:

Hexis not only allows an act to be repeated, and hence to be exercised anew thanks […] [to the] virtues of habit; but in actively focusing it, it leads it to be exercised better […] [and] to realis[ing] the fulfilment of its object according to a typical determination.690

I will not be focusing on this last reference to ‘a typical determination’, for it alludes to the ‘“right mean”’, which is to say a ‘determination as excellence between two opposing faults’691 Having said that, there is scope in future research to see if such an approach can be applied to ethical determinations more broadly, whereby the morally ambivalent animal at the centre of our concerns might become more knowable, as distinct from universalisable. The same might be said of justice in terms of ‘a typical determination’; for the moment, I am confining justice the act of the decision; not just a single act, but the repeated qua habitual act of deciding.

Mindful of Rodrigo’s abovementioned account, I am proposing that what makes justice, the decision, virtuous, is not that a single account can be judged to be good or bad; surely it is always the case that any single decision will have advocates for and against. Rather, it is by politics making a habit of the decision, and therefore of justice, that its virtuous character can be said to express itself. With justice as the end-goal, there is the assumption that something like goodness and righteousness will eventually prevail as something like ‘a typical determination’, although there can be no guarantees. Justice aside, while hexis is related to habit (ethos) and speaks to ‘a state of character’, I am primarily conceptualising it as the character of the state.692 As such, the state identifies itself by its work ethic, which is to say by its willingness to make a habit of the decision and therefore of justice.

687 Pierre Rodrigo, “The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” 6. 688 Ibid., 6. 689 Ibid., 7. 690 Ibid., 14. 691 Ibid., 14. 692 Joseph Malikail, “Moral Character: Hexis, Habitus and ‘Habit’,” Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy 7 (2003), 5. 163

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares that when it comes to moral or ethical virtue (as distinct from intellectual virtue), it ‘is the product of habit (ethos)’.693 Arthur Miller argues that for Aristotle:

Habits and character relate to conduct within society, that is, within the political community. If there is a key premise in Aristotle’s thinking about ethics it is that man functions in society – the political community – as the political animal.694

Society is otherwise referred to as ‘the polis’, which Miller defines as the social/political environment […] in which a person’s character (ethos) is formed’.695 To this end, Miller cites John Herman Randall:

Social organisation, the polis, provides the means of training in these individual excellences, and it also furnishes the field in which it can operate […] Ethics and politics are hence two aspects of the same “architectonic” science.696

We are back at Fagan’s abovementioned view, that there can be no separating the other and the third, and hence ethics from politics. We are also back at Levinas, when it comes to justice as enacted by politics – ‘There must be knowledge of such things. It is the hour of […] knowledge.’697 This recognition by Levinas of the architectonic structure of the ethico-political, of the ‘systematisation of knowledge’ that is the reflexive motivation of politics, shows why he is cautious when it comes to the political in the ethico-political. Politics’ embrace of systems and knowledge (the systemisation of knowledge) threatens the uniqueness of the individual.

I have said that I am interested in looking at hexis because it ‘denotes not just ethical behaviour, but also knowledge and technical skill’.698 Given I am proposing that, for politics, virtue lies in hexis, the habit of making the decision (a technical skill, surely); and given that habit implies an endeavour towards continuity (in this case, a series of decisions sharing a link to justice, suggestive of continuity). Now we can consider the implications for politics’ role in providing something like stability (perhaps another way of expressing the aforementioned ‘typical determination’). This addresses a concern of Nussbaum’s, when she argues that ‘part

693 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 71. 694 Arthur B. Miller, “Aristotle on habit (εθō) and character (ηθō): Implications for the rhetoric,” Communications Monograph 41 (1974), 310. 695 Ibid., 310-311; the author argues that ‘ethos means “character” [and] is understood within the context of ethos, or “habit”’. 696 Ibid., 310-311. 697 Emmanuel Levinas, Is it righteous to be? 246. 698 Pierre Rodrigo, “The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” 6. 164 of justifying a normative political project is showing that it can be reasonably stable’.699 To this end, Rodrigo emphasises that Aristotle’s appeal to hexis is an appeal to ‘a stable qualitative disposition’.700 Rodrigo further argues, that when it comes to Aristotle, hexis is above all else to be considered in ‘the active sense’:

In short, if virtue can be defined as a hexis […] it is not so much because moral virtue is a stable state [rather it is] an active bearing of desire […] [alternatively] when one takes it as an act, [it is] a certain direction of decision: it is the constancy of desire, or the firm preservation of that which has been decided.701

Of course, in this case, justice is the ‘certain direction of [the] decision’, as well as the ‘constancy of desire’, in short, the stability provided by politics. As such, politics has its work before it.

This ideal of hexis; this character of the state expressed in terms of its work ethic; this genius of a people (the polis), expressed in the desire to be constantly better when it comes to making the decision, brings us back to Bauman’s argument that ‘the indelible trait of all justice is its dissatisfaction with itself: “justice means constant revision of justice, expectation of better justice” […] [it] must exist perpetually in a condition of […] setting itself standards higher than those already practiced’.702 Having come the full circle, having suggested that justice expresses its potential by virtue of its work ethic, now I turn by attention to aidos, and what role it might play in a politics that measures its gains by virtue of its willingness to embrace loss, which is to say by its willingness to retreat from the scene of ethics in order that it might reclaim it by expression of its work ethic.

Recall, from Chapter Two, how Aristotle declares that aidos ‘cannot properly be considered a virtue’, and yet implied within Aristotle’s analysis is the hint of it being a quasi- virtue. To this end, Nicholas Higgins argues that while ‘Aristotle presents shame as a non- virtue’ there is a reading of aidos that allows for ‘an appropriate type of shame’, one that is ‘prospective as opposed to retrospective’.703 Regarding the latter, Higgins defines it as being ‘purely derived from external constraints; it is imposed upon the individual by other members of the polis’ and it occurs post-hoc.704 I will not be pursuing this line of thought any further. As

699 Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 16. 700 Pierre Rodrigo, “The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” 7. 701 Ibid., 12. 702 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 155. 703 Nicholas Higgins, “Shame on You,” 1. 704 Ibid., 4. 165 for the prospective account of shame, it is marked by being experienced ‘before the action rather than after’; to this end, ‘it is rooted in knowledge of what is honourable and dishonourable, as well as the saliency of that knowledge to an as yet undone act’.705 Let us pause, to further consider this prospective expression of aidos within the context of all that has preceded us to this point: first, I am assuming that it is implausible (although certainly not impossible) to impose an account of shame as a self-conscious emotion upon politics, attached as such accounts are, in the first instance, to embodiment and shared ideals as expressed in the value-laden look of the other. To this end, I am not sure exactly how I might submit politics to something like Sartre’s ‘triangular structure’ of shame, shaped as it is by the relationship ‘between me, myself and the Other’.706 I am unable to envisage the ‘me’ and ‘myself’ when it comes to politics.

Having said that, I have made much of embarrassment (prior to it being considered as a self-conscious emotion), as being both the presentiment of my imminent undoing, and a knowledge emotion (like confusion, for example), meaning it is ‘associated with thinking and comprehending’, as well as an appraisal of what one knows, expects and understands.707 Regarding presentiment, the experience of foreboding, a suffering of the suffering to come, while the blush (of embarrassment) has previously captured this state, it cannot be asked of politics that it blush from embarrassment (there should always be allowances for individual politicians to blush from embarrassment.) Having said that, it would be not be unreasonable to suggest that politics can experience a sense of foreboding ‘before the action rather than after’, particularly when politics knows that such an action, the decision in this case, may result in something like dishonour. Confronted by such politics (the political project) may be embarrassed, insofar as this future action becomes an obstacle, an impediment to politics going about its normal business, distracted as it is now by the threat of looming dishonour. In this instance, politics may also experience embarrassment as something like confusion, which has been conceived herein as a knowledge emotion; hence, politics realises a shift in action is required, such as a new learning strategy, more effort, or withdrawal and avoidance. A knowledge emotion, like confusion, also provides politics the opportunity to foster expertise by ‘both reducing and harnessing the experience of confusion’.708 Under this analysis,

705 Ibid., 4. 706 Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the temporality of social life,” 26. 707 Paul J. Silvia, “Looking Past Pleasure,” 48; see also, Paul J. Silvia, “Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience,” 265. 708 Ibid., 49. 166 embarrassment, I am proposing, takes on the attributes of a ‘prospective’ account of aidos. In short, politics, armed with the knowledge it possesses of what is honourable, is able, by an expression of aidos, to apply such knowledge to the decision that, as of this moment, exists in the future as ‘an as yet undone act’. I will return to the notion of honour, as it relates to aidos, shortly.

For now, while aidos is not a virtue in and of itself (and therefore a quasi-virtue), it can act as a guide for politics, thereby ensuring virtue finds its expression, in this case by politics’ pursuit of the habit of making the decision, which is to say, by its pursuit of justice.709 This means that for politics, it can only declare itself virtuous post hoc; in order to gain our trust it must be able, in the first instance, to direct our attention to its habit of making honourable decisions. This is not dissimilar to politics asking to be judged on its record. All too often the focus of this appeal is on its economic record; the government will argue this is essential (that its economic record be good) if it is to otherwise exercise its power for ‘good’. This argument implies that a rich state is a moral state. But could it be the case that excessive wealth has the opposite effect? Could it be, with all the focus herein on the decision, and how making a habit of such is the expression of justice as a virtue; could it be that excessive wealth means that politics can no longer decide, spoilt as it is by the number and variety, the wealth of choices it has at its disposal? Worse still, could it be that the wealthy state believes it is under no such obligation, especially when it comes to the others, and making the decision.

One way a state demonstrates its wealth is by fortifying its borders. Recall, I have suggested that while it controls its borders, the state, if it does not control the moral narrative, it certainly provides itself with a substantial platform from which to exert its influence. Such narratives surely also influence what we consider to be virtuous, the most obvious example being military might. Hence, while a degree of certainty underpins the state’s belief in its capacity to control its border, the same certainty permeates its narrative surrounding what it considers to be both moral and virtuous. We can and do find comfort in such stories, for there is no doubt that we are all possessed of that which cries out for protection, especially if we are convinced it is a dangerous and desperate other that waits on the other side of the border. I would argue that under such conditions, the moral animal at the centre of our concerns is in more immediate danger of suppressing its ambivalence, the first step on the road to moral certainty, and hence an appeal to invulnerability, and to the logic of the last left standing.

709 Nicholas Higgins, “Shame on You,” 8; Higgins points out that, for Aristotle, shame guides ‘individual act’ ensuring that each action is done as a […] man of virtue, would’. 167

From this position of relative security, we turn our attention to the words of Mark Twain:

A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of luck. And then – supremest value of all – his is the only high fortune on the earth which is secure.710

Here, in Twain’s lament, we see an expression of the antithesis of vulnerability (the logic of the last left standing), an ethico-political ideal of egology. Importantly, we also catch sight of the position from which the ethico-political (philosophy, if you will), is dispensed. Recall from Chapter One, Nietzsche says of those in rude health that their philosophy is ‘merely a beautiful luxury’, which at best can be viewed as ‘the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude’.711 And so we princes, secure in our knowledge (and with knowledge of our relative security), with nothing at stake and therefore nothing to risk, proceed to ‘philosophise’. Of course, there is always the danger of damaging our reputation, but only in the eyes of our fellow princes; this sense of aidos, this loss of face, we saw, greatly concerns Aristotle. Is it any wonder? the ethico- political, as prescribed by a philosophy that ‘picks up [its] grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by […] [the] pure accident’ of its birth’; a politics of loss was hardly going to come from such quarters.

But let us now consider a future in which the state has been less successful in securing its borders, where the notion of the decision seems redundant given that the others are now actually here, and not merely gestures towards justice in the face of one already before me. Two bodies collide… we are now face-to-face with the impoverished other. Surely, now that our luck has run out, surely now seems like as good a time as any to express our embarrassment at this state of affairs; when ours was the ‘only high fortune on earth’ that was secure; when we indulged ourselves in the logic of the last left standing.

In her monograph, Mythology: Timeless Tales of God and Heroes, Edith Hamilton suggests that aidos is ‘a difficult word to translate; while it ‘means reverence and the shame that holds men back from wrongdoing’, it also speaks to ‘the feeling a prosperous man should have in the presence of the unfortunate – not compassion, but a sense that the difference

710 Mark Twain, What is Man? (Bremen, Germany: Dogma, 2013), 159; my emphasis. 711 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 33-34. 168 between him and those poor wretches is not deserved’.712 Interestingly, according to Hamilton, aidos, as well as nemesis (righteous anger), are ‘two personified emotions esteemed highest of all feelings in Homer and Hesiod’.713 Accordingly, neither have ‘their homes with the gods’; it is only ‘when men have finally become completely wicked will Nemesis and Aidos […] leave the […] earth […] [for] the company of the immortals’.714 There is much to glean from Hamilton’s reading of aidos: first, if the blush is that which communicates aidos, then one might say that when our wickedness has become such that we have forgotten how to blush, then aidos, this ‘highest of all feelings’, for all intents and purposes, deserts us; now merely a memory, a ghost of the feeling we ought to have in the presence of the impoverished other. More than once, I have alluded to those who have forgotten how to blush, and how these ‘unblushing males’ may present an obstacle (an embarrassment, no less) for an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name – vulnerability.

The second point I would make is that in her reading of aidos, Hamilton is alluding to embarrassment, as in, embarras de richesses (an embarrassment of riches; as well as a confusing abundance of choices). Recall, from Chapter Four, I noted that in his brief account of embarrassment, Sartre appears not to be (initially at least) referring to embarrassment as an emotion, rather embarras speaks to that which is an obstacle, and yet it is clear, I suggested, that this meaning does not entirely satisfy Sartre. I pointed out that in her translation of this passage, Hazel Barnes takes gêne and gênant to be speaking to hindrance as well as constraint. I expressed some trepidation as to whether or not this adequately captures the sense of unease or awkwardness that I believe Sartre is endeavouring to convey. I pointed out that while gêne and gênant refer, amongst other things, to embarrassment, gêne can also be translated as malaise, a general feeling of discomfort or unease whose exact cause is difficult to identify (recall that ‘aporetic feelings’ are ‘characterised by the sense that a person does not know what he or she feels’); and gênant, which Sartre stresses, alludes to that which is disturbing, as well as feeling uncomfortable. Read in conjunction with Hamilton’s normative appeal to aidos (which cannot obtain without vulnerability – defined now by our moral exposure to the other); now that we are face-to-face, we see that not only should we blush from embarrassment in the presence of the impoverished other, we ought to be confused, we ought to be uneasy, we ought to be disturbed by our abundance (of riches, and of choices). The blush betrays my unease;

712 Edith Hamilton, Mythology, illus., Steele Savage (K.P. Basu Printing Works: Calcutta, 1953), 37-38; my emphasis. 713 Ibid., 37. 714 Ibid., 38. 169 betrayal demands that I give myself to the other, which is to say I concede a view of myself in respect of the other. In sum, the blush Says to the impoverished other – How is it that I can know what it is to be you in the world? The impoverished other, embarrassed by my unease, is just as likely to blush in response – How is it that I can know what it is to be you in the world? As conceived herein, vulnerability compels me to answer by Saying – After you.

I said that I would further clarify what is meant by honour, specifically as it relates to aidos. Higgins argues that aidos is linked to ‘decency in thought or theory’, and its impact (as a feeling) on one’s ‘future understanding of action’, in the event such should bring about dishonour.715 Once more, the action that concerns me herein is the making of the decision (future research will be required to explore the implications for both praxis and poiēsis within this formulation.) That said, I am interested in Higgins’ link between aidos and ‘decency in thought or theory’, for it hints at ascribing to knowledge a sense of morality, insofar as aidos serves as a guide towards how such knowledge might be applied to future actions. This is consistent with the prospective account of aidos as something that is experienced ‘before the action rather than after it’. Therefore, can politics, in the knowledge that it must decide, be guided by aidos as to how it ought to act prior to making the decision? Could it be that aidos prompts politics with the knowledge that the decent course of action is to accept the other.

For the purposes herein, I am aligning honour with what it means to be decent. Accordingly, to be decent is not only rooted in dignity and honour, it also speaks to the ancient Greek δοκεῖν (dokein); as well as gesturing towards what it means ‘to accept’, dokein also gestures towards what it means ‘to think’. Does this move us closer to reconciling the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness? Surely knowledge grounded in ‘decency in thought and theory’, which is say aidos, demands of a politics of vulnerability that it once and for all reconcile itself with the body, rather than seeing it as a ‘Gordian Knot’, as something to be solved.

It is worth noting that when it comes to finding a place for the body in politics, Judith Butler has this to say regarding Levinas:

715 Nicholas Higgins, “Shame on You,” 6. 170

Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in this ethical philosophy.716

I am of the view that without a body, the idea of justice enacted by the decision, means little if anything at all. It is the very facticity of bodies at sea, of bodies in the air, of bodies traipsing across contested ground, and finally of all these bodies milling at the border, that makes deciding from amongst all the others in the face of the one already and always before it, so compelling for politics. Without bodies, there is no requirement for ‘decency in thought or theory’; ideas without bodies in mind, while they may have merit (even genius), they are not born with ‘blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe’.717 I am of the view that the same can be said of the decision, which is to say that without bodies politics can find refuge in the knowledge that any such decision is free from aidos and therefore from considerations of decency. Bodies, and only bodies, demand of knowledge that it be decent; a willingness to embrace aidos ensures that politics never becomes an ‘objectifying and registering mechanism with […] [its] innards removed’; in other words, a politics of egology.718

It should be noted that dokein, as well as speaking to what it means to accept and to think, and to have such characterised by decency, is also related to δόξα (doxa), which is to say to glory (as well as honour). Recall Levinas’ proclamation – ‘The saying prior to anything said bears witness to glory.’719 Recall also, that Levinas accuses much of philosophy of being an egology, a philosophy of power that finds its expression in the tyranny of the universalising and impersonal tendencies of the state. And yet, according to Levinas, ‘in no way is justice a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the for-the-other, a diminution, a limitation of […] responsibility, a neutralisation of the glory of the Infinite’.720 Now, politics cannot be expected to express glory by way of suspending the conatus (of knowing and doing, of thoughts and theory); indeed, one could argue that the conatus is the very remit of politics. Instead, a politics of vulnerability bears witness to glory by its willingness to embrace bodies and in so doing, it effects (and affects) decency. By reconciling itself with bodies, a politics of vulnerability is one of loss (as close to a feeling as politics is likely to have, and one that it feels sorely). By

716 Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2012), 147. 717 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 35. 718 Ibid., 35. 719 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 145. 720 Ibid., 159. 171 turning its back on egology to embrace aidos, politics now retreats from concerns with itself, to focus instead on ‘the claim of others to judge and act starting with their own horizons’; the political expression of Saying – After you. 721 In so doing, politics recognises the claim to honour of others.

The above is not so far removed from Aristotle’s view of decency, expressed in terms of what is equitable: in situations ‘where law is defective because of its generality’, which is to say, in ‘cases for which it is impossible to lay down a law’ (in the absolute sense), Aristotle states that it becomes necessary to make an exception to the rule of law.722 As such, according to Aristotle, ‘the equitable man’ (the otherwise decent man), ‘is one who by choice and habit does what is equitable, and who does not stand on his right unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side’. Importantly, for Aristotle, this ‘disposition described as Equity […] is a special kind of Justice, not a different quality altogether’.723 This concept of decency, concerned with Equity, is also reminiscent of Avishai Margalit’s decent society, one whose ‘institutions do not humiliate people who depend upon them’; more specifically, ‘a society in which there is no humiliating institutional inequality or humiliating constraints on freedom.724 As such, Margalit argues that ‘a decent society requires the elimination of the sort of inequality that leads to humiliation’.725 One can see how Aristotelean decency, concerned as it is with Equity, might address the sort of institutional inequalities that lead to humiliation. Indeed, the need of others to not feel humiliated appears to be allowing for an Aristotelean expression of justice that takes into account this need, such that it may impact upon my own needs otherwise variously expressed. Within this context, there is an allusion to a politics concerned with justice being one that is also willing to embrace loss, in those circumstances where it is clear that an exception should apply in favour of the one who, in this case, demands to not be humiliated. This speaks further to a reading of aidos that recognises, above all else, the claims of others.

In his review of Douglas Cairns’ monograph, Aidos (which Higgins also refers to) N.R.E. Fisher points out that for Cairns ‘“the concept of honour is never far away from the

721 Klaus Held, “The Ethos of from a Phenomenological Point of View,” in Self-Awareness, Temporality and Alterity, ed., Dan Zahavi (Berlin: Springer, 1998), 199; the author argue that it is ‘in the political world’ that aidos takes on this meaning. 722 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 317. 723 Ibid., 317. 724 Avishai Margalit, “Decent Equality and Freedom: A Postscript,” Social Research 64 (1997), 147-149; see also Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, trans., Naomi Goldblum (London: Harvard University Press, 1996). 725 Ibid., 160. 172 evaluation that is constitutive of aidos”’.726 As such, according to Fisher, there is the sense ‘both of a concern with one’s own honour or status, and of a recognition of the claims to honour of others’.727 Key to this formulation is ‘that aidos […] [is] essentially an externalised, other- directed emotion’; it captures the shame one feels ‘at falling short of […] [one’s] own internalised ideals or self-image, which have been affected, but are not totally determined, by what others may say’.728 This reading of aidos is reminiscent of Mary Babcock’s aforementioned ‘“personal account” of embarrassment’ in which we find ourselves acting in ways that are inconsistent with the conception we have of ourselves.729 Recall that what distinguishes this account, according to Babcock, is that embarrassment is treated less as ‘a response to the feared reaction of an audience’, rather it is preferable to view embarrassment as ‘a reaction to a perceived discrepancy between one’s action and one’s own personal standards’.730 This sense of falling short (signed into language by way the ellipsis, in the moment after two bodies collide…) speaks to Hamilton’s account of aidos, whereby we sense our confusion, our unease, our being-disturbed in the presence of the impoverished other. And yet all is not lost: unlike certain conceptions of shame, which I alluded to in Chapter Two, as being akin to ‘the experience of the utter worthlessness of the self […] [and therefore] something we would be better off without’, there is the sense with aidos that while there is undoubtedly the experience of loss – all is not lost. This speaks to Cairns’ reply to Fischer, in which he argues ‘that aidos is an emotion which […] focuses on one’s own honour and on that of others; Cairns goes further:

This remarkable fact encapsulates the truth that honour, at least in ancient Greek society, is a reciprocal system of mutual claims and obligations, to which the “zero- sum” model […] does not apply.731

This reference to a zero-sum outcome, more specifically its avoidance by way of ‘a reciprocal system of mutual claims and obligations’, speaks to what I have been referring to throughout as the logic of the last left standing. A politics of egology is one that, as well as being tyrannical (as Levinas would have it), is obsessed with itself at the expense of its responsibility to the

726 N.R.E. Fisher, Review of “Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 33 (1997), 191; see also, Douglas Cairns, Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 727 Ibid., 191; my emphasis. 728 Ibid., 192. 729 Mary K. Babcock, “Embarrassment: A Window on the Self,” 459. 730 Ibid., 460. 731 Douglas Cairns; reply to N.R.E. Fisher, review of Aidos, 193. 173 others. As such it stands outside time (as conceived herein) and is therefore tenuous. A politics of vulnerability, I am proposing, knows that while there are others there is always time; indeed, it relies on this being the case. Habits, like making the decision from amongst all the others in the face of the one already and always before it, take time to inculcate. As such, politics reveals its character by its work ethic, demonstrated over time, and for as long as there are others. In so doing, politics expresses its will to justice. It is the very expression of this will, by way of habituating the decision, rather than justice itself, by which politics expresses itself as virtuous.

1.4 – Conclusion The claim herein has been modest: of course, it had to be given the constraints of a single chapter. Hence, my appeal to politics to make a habit out of decency might seem at first blush to be stating the obvious. I trust that, by now, the reader can see it is not quite as simple as that. Informed by Levinas, I have argued that justice should be at the heart of a politics of vulnerability, not as its highest ideal (or a universal claim), but as its modus operandi, which is to say its habit – its work ethic; which can only be established while there are others, and therefore time; the promise of a future.

This reading of time, as instructed by Levinas, has led me to think that for politics, this is the third’s raison d’être – while there are others there is always time, which is to say there is always time for improvement. This was further instructed by Bauman’s view that ‘the indelible trait of all justice is its dissatisfaction with itself’, hence justice demands that it revise itself with the expectation that it will better itself.732 It is this constant revision, expressed in terms of hexis (ethos), making a habit of the decision, that provide politics with a sense of stability, thereby addressing a concern of Nussbaum’s that politics demonstrates it can be reasonably stable.733 As such, this is not a reading of justice as an ideal that puts it into competition with other ideals, like mercy or liberty or equality. Even though justice can be read in Levinasian terms as the highest political ideal towards which we ought to strive, I have endeavoured not to conceptualise it (at least not explicitly) in this way. Such a reading, I have suggested, places justice in tension with other ideals, like mercy for example, and then there is the assumption that I am now considering justice and mercy at the expense of say, liberty and equality. The whole argument, I further suggested, collapses into a tiresome competition between competing ideals of the good life. Justice, as I have been primarily concerned with it,

732 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 155. 733 Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 16. 174 obtains in the making of the decision; more precisely, in the habit politics dedicates itself to forming, when it comes to making the decision.

As such, mine could be construed as a mundane reading of justice and therefore of politics; as might my appeal to decency, lacking as it does the excitement of a loftier ambition. To this end, I am reticent to be quite as excited as Rutger Bregman, when it comes to the idea that we are basically decent.734 Morally ambivalent – yes. As for being decent, I have argued that it requires we work hard at making a habit of it, and in so doing politics, in this case, claims it as a work-ethic. In this way, I have also argued, politics reclaims something like the expression of ethics in the ethico-political.

Let me assure you that to be so judged, as mundane, would be the highest praise I could hope for. To be described as mundane (from Old French mondain) would make a politics of vulnerability one that belongs to the life of the world (as opposed to the life of the gods). We learned that this is what defines aidos; it is a personified emotion, esteemed as the highest of all feelings; a worldly emotion that will only desert us should we become wicked enough such that we have now forgotten was it is to blush. To be mundane speaks to that which loves the world; that which is haunted by a memory of itself as noble and generous.735 Surely such language (of world, and of nobility) brings to mind ‘the last anti-political German’? he who accused us of depriving the real world of its real value, ‘to precisely the extent to which […][we have] mendaciously invented an ideal world’; who declared that ‘all the problems of politics, of social organisation [universal ethics] […] [was] because […] [we] learned to despise “little” things, which means the basic concerns of life’.736 To the extent that they might be referred to as ‘little’, certainly they have been largely ignored by philosophy, I have concerned myself with the blush and embarrassment; not as political expressions per se, for they are strictly moral and therefore ethical. It is because they are so, and because ethics is at the heart of politics, that they haunt the expression of politics herein; one that embraces loss and in so doing demonstrates its willingness to retreat.

I have suggested that by retreat, one might get the sense that politics is leaving the scene of ethics. But there is a double movement, I have suggested, implied by politics in retreat; insofar as it leaves the scene of ethics, by its willingness to work hard at making the decision,

734 See Prologue, 6. 735 See etymology of mundane as speaking to ‘of this world’; from Old French mondain, mean ‘of this world, worldly, earthy, secular […] [as well as] noble, generous’. 736 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 218, 225, 256. 175 it reclaims something like the expression of ethics. A politics of vulnerability bears witness to glory by its willingness to embrace bodies, without which ethics could not obtain. In this way, politics simultaneously affects and effects decency, which is to say it imbues the decision with aidos; and with all the ‘blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe’ of the moral animal at the centre of its concerns.

176

Epilogue My motivation herein has been my resistance to the view that vulnerability lacks the normative force to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal. The italicisation of the term, that tired old gesture, when (in this case) one desires vulnerability, but not quite: that I bruise and bleed and if enough force be applied, I break; that I have the capacity to inflict such harm upon others; despite what our intuition tells us a reliance on the physical manifestations of vulnerability was never going to be enough. To this end, I have focused throughout on a reading of vulnerability that speaks to our moral exposure to the other, which is to say I have not been interested in bodies that collide without moral consequence. Devoid of such, human bodies are not sufficiently differentiated in a universe of colliding bodies.

My intuition has been that vulnerability is a necessary pre-condition for the conditions that produce moral consciousness – the moral animal. If the reader now allows that vulnerability can be defined by my moral exposure to the other; and that to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you; and that without an ideal of vulnerability such a formulation is impossible to conceptualise; then this formulation is moral in nature, insofar as to know what it is to be me in the world demands that at some point I say – After you. If the moral animal is at the heart of ethics which is itself at the heart of politics then surely, I am compelled by vulnerability, especially if it is a moral world I am interested in and not one that embraces the zero-sum logic of the last left standing.

In Chapter One, after establishing the importance of the body to vulnerability, it was then apparent that it prevents us from giving a definitive account of ourselves. As such when we endeavour to speak for the body, we risk getting it wrong; indeed, we are bound to. I knew then that my project, compelled as it is to speak on behalf of the body, would likely be thus condemned. But, from the beginning, I found solace in a question posed by Nietzsche – ‘What would be “beautiful” if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: “I am ugly”?’737 The vulnerable and unknowable, the unruly and unregulatable body is all too often accused of being the source of those impulses and instincts judged to be ‘ugly’, and hence, all too often approached as that which should be spoken for.

Shame is one way we speak for the body’s impulses, and so it was in Chapter Two that I expressed my suspicions surrounding an ideal of shame that appeals to a ‘missing God’, a reading of shame ensnared by its origins as a biblical story of a man and a women that suddenly

737 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 88. 177 know they are naked. This emphasis on knowledge suggested there might be another reading of this story: Genesis, I argued, neatly captures the theme that is of most concern herein – how to reconcile the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness. To this end, I suggested that confusion (a knowledge-emotion) was a more appropriate response to afford this man and woman who gradually become aware of their naked bodies and its impulses. Without recourse to psychology, the author of Genesis deals with this ‘ugliness’ by inviting God from the machine to declare such knowledge as shameful. When it comes to shame, I believe that God is still all too often called from the machine as a surrogate for whatever normative claim is being made.

It was partly in response to the pathos of the story of Genesis, that in Chapter Three I turned my attention to the pathos of vulnerability. Pathos, I suggested, expresses itself even at our most basic level of hermeneia (self-expression or communication in any form); the moral animal is immediately overwhelmed by its sense of itself in the world, which is to say, overwhelmed by its consciousness of not being World; of standing apart from the Rilkean Open that is (the) World. It is this sense of being overwhelmed, I suggested, informing my intuition that prior even to the presence of the other, there was One who now realised they stood apart from (the) World, from the Open. In their endeavour to reconcile the body, that had until a moment ago known Openness, with the body of nascent knowing now suddenly having to think openness, this One blushed in the face of the Open, most likely from something like confusion.

This primordial confusion, I suggested, is captured by the phrase ‘aporetic emotions’; my intuition is that the blush, prior to it being spoken for by complex emotions which are often culturally dependent, is the signifier of something like embarrassment (as aporia), if such can be defined by my sudden realisation, my confusion too, now that I am confronted by an obstacle about which it appears there is little I can do to avoid. This reading was in part motivated by my resistance to Emmanuel Levinas’ assertion of our ‘pre-original’ obligation, when it comes to our responsibility for the Other, speaking as it does to a ‘missing God’, or at the very least to something like a golden rule. I am more interested in an earthly account – mundane even: as such, the blush, I argued, prior to it being spoken for by complex emotions which are often culturally dependent, operated as something like an entropic-minimisation mechanism. Prior to complex language, the blush communicated my understandable desire to lessen my sense of disorder, my confusion; specifically, my body’s confusion, burdened as it now was with an emerging consciousness of my moral ambivalence in the presence of the Other. I already had an uncomfortable sense that I was just as likely to err as I was to forgive. 178

I was concerned with a reading of embarrassment that confines it to our more common understanding of it as a complex self-conscious emotion in the same category as shame. In response, I endeavoured to give an account of embarrassment that is universal. This led to my exploring ‘aporetic emotions’, as those ‘linked to the evolution of the brain’; such feelings, we saw, can be ‘characterised by the sense that a person does not know what he or she feels’.738 This experience, we saw, can be further broken down into ‘unformulated feelings, experienced as vague, and conflicted or contradictory feelings, experienced as confusing’.739 This exploration of ‘aporetic emotions’ demanded that I also address aporia itself; this dual sense of ‘doubting or being at a loss where to begin, or what to say, on account of the variety of the matter’; as well as ‘there being no way forwards […] [the] desperate mental state in which one finds oneself, having nowhere to turn one’s mind to reach a definite opinion on some subject’.740 Hence, embarrassment emerges as that which speaks to both confusion as well as aporia. It was this reading of embarrassment that had previously motivated me to suggest that, for the moment at least, we leave shame out of the story, and begin with the assumption that upon suddenly knowing they were naked Adam and Eve were most likely, confused.

It was another story, that of the student from Bologna recounted by Robert Antelme, that I turned to in Chapter Four, not to challenge the accounts of shame derived from this story, but rather to suggest that the blushing student from Bologna, with his busy hands, was expressing embarrassment as something like confusion. More than that, the blush, I suggested, was the apprehension of the inapprehensible. In this case what could be more so, than one’s imminent death in a ditch by the side of road? The scientific explanation for such a reaction, I proposed, might be expressed in terms of a metacognitive signal, a sign that the student from Bologna did not comprehend what was happening and that some shift in action was therefore required. The student from Bologna, by virtue of the blush and his busy hands, speaks to embarrassment as aporia. The blush, just like those busy hands, speaks further to all who have at one time or another acted ‘blindly’ in the hope that something might come of it, thereby demonstrating the positive valence of the blush which is otherwise all too often defined by the negative self-conscious emotions it is said to herald. By utilising the story of the student from Bologna, I hoped to pivot to an ethics that embraced the blush and embarrassment, not an ethics of embarrassment per se. Rather I wanted to demonstrate why embarrassment might be defined

738 Elliot Jurist, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy, 11. 739 Elliot Jurist, “Mentalized Activity,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 22 (2005), 427. 740 André Laks, “Aporia Zero (Metaphysics ´ 1, 995a24–995b4)*,” 26. 179 as the mood, the condition, under which a postmodern ethics of vulnerability might be considered.

So it was, that in Chapter Five I turned my attention to postmodern ethics. Relying primarily on a reading of Zygmunt Bauman, this chapter proposed, above all else, that when it comes to morality, we are a contradiction, which is to say that we are just as likely to err as we are to forgive. This, I argued, is our moral genius, that which transcends time and place; that I should endeavour to reconcile this contradiction of myself in the world, of myself reconciling what it is to be you in the world. This is why courage is required: a contradiction cries out for protection, by way of a reply, an objection, or even worse, a counterargument. In so doing, it invites us to speak against it – to negate it – so we might find comfort in the contradiction now confined to the dustbin of history. But this approach, I argued, speaks to an ethics of negation, of resentment, one that would deny the contradiction its moral genius. Instead, I am proposing an ideal of an ethics of vulnerability that calls for the contradiction to project itself; that expresses by way of the blush that I am embarrassed by my knowledge that when it comes to myself as a moral contradiction, I wanted it to be so.

That I would not have it any other way; this could be said to be the highest aspiration for politics as I outlined it in Chapter Six, especially a politics for which time is of the essence. Insofar as there is always the decision to be made, between all the others in the face of the one already before it, then for a politics of loss, I argued, there is always time. As conceived of herein, with reference to Levinas, time ‘is not the achievement of an isolated and lone subject […] [rather] it is the very relationship of the subject with the Other’. In short, ‘the other is future’.741 Surely, if it was asked of politics what it desired most (other than power perhaps), it would say a future. A note of caution: not a future defined as yet more time to obsess with itself; for politics, the future is time to develop the habit of pursuing justice by way of making the decision.

That a politics of loss, in some sense, can never get it right when it comes to the decision, this sense of ‘dissatisfaction with itself’, I argued, as well as the need for ‘constant revision’, speaks to justice as conceived herein.742 Expressed in terms of retreating from the scene of ethics in order that it might reclaim something like ethics, I proposed that, as such, justice is not promoted as a virtue in and of itself (as a political ideal to be measured against others like mercy or liberty or equality); rather, it is the way in which justice conducts itself

741 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, 39, 77. 742 742 Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 155. 180 that might be said to be virtuous, insofar as it demonstrates ‘dissatisfaction with itself’, it not only displays something of a postmodern ilk (a dissatisfaction with that which preceded it), it alludes to hexis and to aidos, to ethics, and hence an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name – vulnerability. To this end, I proposed that a politics of vulnerability bears witness to glory by its willingness to embrace bodies and in so doing, it affects as well as effects decency. Bodies, and only bodies, I argued, demand of knowledge that it be decent; a willingness to embrace aidos ensures that politics never becomes an ‘objectifying and registering mechanism with […] [its] innards removed’, in other words, a politics of egology.743 As such, politics imbues the decision with all the ‘blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe’ of the moral animal at the centre of its concerns.744

The moral animal: what happens by way of the blush when two such animals collide? These motifs have been at the heart of my endeavour to establish why it is I believe that vulnerability possesses the normative force to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal. If I am correct, and the blush betrays our genius as moral animals by way of our expression of embarrassment, then the blush is also betraying something deeper, an aporia of sorts; for it Says that to be me in the world is, in some important way, to be you. An ethics of vulnerability implies that to know what it is to be me in the world requires that at some point I Say – After you. I do not propose to know what can be said in the face of this Saying; to suggest otherwise would be, after all, to establish an ethics, and that was always beyond the scope of this project.

I said at the very beginning, it bears repeating; I am aware of the context, the world into which this document is delivered, a world riven by climate and culture wars, as well as a global pandemic. This is a world that desires above all else to retreat behind borders; borders, I suggested, speak to protection from all that might impinge upon us by way of the unwanted, the uninvited, Other. As such, borders are somewhat antithetical to vulnerability, which is to say to our willingness to be morally exposed to others; to the world at large. Borders, I further suggested, offer a guarantee that should it come to it, I possess the ability to refuse or repel. Consequently, by force of arms or force of argument, I will win the day – I will be the last left standing. This zero-sum logic (of the last left standing) is antithetical to vulnerability, to what it means to say – After you.

743 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 35. 744 Ibid., 35. 181

Is this where we are heading, this ‘pinched and flattened, cowardly world’?745 In such a world, Nietzsche warns, our ‘instinct […] [is] to cast up a barrier to push back everything that would assail [us]’; we are compelled, in Nietzsche’s words, to become hedgehogs.746 But then he has this to say – ‘Having quills is a waste, even a double luxury when one can choose not to have quills but open hands.’747 I have intimated throughout, that I consider Nietzsche’s a ‘philosophy’ of vulnerability. In the closing lines of ‘Why Am I So Clever’, from which the above reference to ‘open hands’ comes, Nietzsche proclaims:

My formula for greatness […] is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it […] but love it.748

There is, in what I have called a protection account, the implication that vulnerability is a problem and therefore something we must bear out of necessity; we may even be tempted to conceal it; worse still, disavow it. I have argued that an ethico-political ideal that embraces such an account risks being one of negation, whereby we are obliged to treat each other morally because we wish it were not so, a victory of every ‘it was’, over ‘I wanted it to be’. Such an ethics would be opposed to life, and while one may be opposed to life one cannot, in the first instance, be protected from life, which is no less than a sufficient condition for vulnerability. The reverse is true also, which is to say that vulnerability guarantees the presence of life – otherwise it is Death who speaks. Surely life provides us with the necessary universal appeal required of normative claims; accordingly, we are compelled in the first instance to live, and then not just any life but one that is moral and therefore human?

My intuition herein has been that if it is a moral life we are interested in, which is to say human life, then we are compelled by moral expressions of vulnerability like the blush and embarrassment. Both can be conceived of as ‘ugly’ insofar as they cause suffering. Doubtless this is why Charles Darwin considered the blush to be of little evolutionary value. However, mindful of such suffering perhaps the best way, finally, to formulate a projection account of vulnerability is, as always, to give the last word to Nietzsche and say, just like the body is Saying by way of the blush, that despite the potential for suffering, when it comes to vulnerability – I always wanted it to be so!

745 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 253. 746 Ibid., 253. 747 Ibid., 253. 748 Ibid., 258. 182

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