(who were not themselves caught up in it).
The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering? What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? Who would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting an industrial farm in which pigs are half blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, the torture and suffering of millions about which we know but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect on one of us if we were forced to watch one single snuff movie of what goes on thousands of times a day around the earth—brutal torture (plucking out of eyes, crushing of testicles, for example)? Would we continue to go on living as usual? Yes—if we were able to somehow forget (suspend the symbolic efficiency) of what we had witnessed.
So, again, does not every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal?7 Yes, every ethics—with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis which is a kind of anti-ethics: it focuses precisely on what the standard ethical enthusiasm excludes, on the traumatic Thing that our Judeo-Christian tradition calls the “Neighbor.” Freud had good reasons for his reluctance to endorse the injunction “Love thy neighbor!”—the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the Neighbor. This is what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the Neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates: he thereby obfuscated the monstrosity of the Neighbor, the monstrosity on account of which Lacan applied to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the Neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face, like the hero of Stephen King’s The Shining, a gentle failed writer, who gradually turns into a killing beast and, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family.
When Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor,” they are thus not just making the standard critico-ideological point about how every notion of universality is colored by our particular values and thus implies secret exclusions. They are making a much stronger point about the incompatibility of the Neighbor with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbor. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbor. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor.
Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbor as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.
We should celebrate the genius of Walter Benjamin which shines through in the very title of his early work: On Language in General and Human Language in Particular. The point here is not that human language is a species of some universal language “as such” which comprises also other species (the language of gods and angels? Animal language? The language of some other intelligent beings out there in space? Computer language? The language of DNA?): there is no actually-existing language other than human language—but, in order to comprehend this “particular” language, one has to introduce a minimal difference, conceiving it with regard to the gap which separates it from language “as such” (the pure structure of language deprived of the insignia of the human finitude, of erotic passions and mortality, of the struggles for domination and the obscenity of power).8 This minimal difference between inhuman language and human language is clearly a Platonic one. What if, then, we have to turn the standard relationship around: the obverse of the fact that, in Christ, God is fully human, is that we, humans, are not. G.K. Chesterton began The Napoleon of Notting Hill with: “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong . . .”—which, of course, does not mean that some of us are not human, but that there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human.”
The screen of civility
The predominant way of maintaining a distance towards the “inhuman” Neighbor’s intrusive proximity is politeness—but what is politeness? There is a gentle vulgar story that plays on the innuendos of seduction: A boy and a girl are saying goodbye late in the evening, in front of her house; hesitantly, he says: “Would you mind if I come in with you for a coffee?”, to which she replies: “Sorry, not tonight, I have my period . . .” A polite version would be the one in which the girl says: “Good news, my period is over—come up to my place!”, to which the boy replies: “Sorry, I am not in a mood for a cup of coffee right now . . .” This, however, immediately confronts us with the ambiguity of politeness: there is an unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality in the boy’s polite answer—as John Lennon put it in his “Working Class Hero”: “you must learn how to smile as you kill.”
The ambiguity of politeness is best rendered in Henry James’s masterpieces: in this universe where tact reigns supreme, where the open explosion of one’s emotions is considered as the utmost vulgarity, everything is said, the most painful decisions are made, the most delicate messages are passed over—however, it all takes place in the guise of a formal conversation. Even when I blackmail my partner, I do it with a polite smile, offering her tea and cakes . . . Is it, then, that, while the brutal direct approach misses the Other’s kernel, a tactful dance can reach it? In his Minima Moralia, Adorno pointed out the utter ambiguity of tact clearly discernible already in Henry James: the respectful consideration for the other’s sensitivity, the concern not to violate her intimacy, can easily pass over into the brutal insensitivity for the other’s pain.9 The same spirit, elevated to the level of absurdity, was displayed by Field Marshall von Kluge, the commander of the Army Group Centre on the Russian front. In January 1943, a group of German officers in Smolensk, where the headquarters of the army group was based, was planning to kill Hitler during the latter’s visit; the idea was that, during a meal in the mess, some two dozen officers would simultaneously draw their pistols and shoot him, thus rendering the responsibility collective, and also making sure that Hitler’s bodyguards would not be able to prevent at least some of the bullets hitting their target. Unfortunately, von Kluge vetoed the plan, although he was anti-Nazi and wanted Hitler dead. His argument was that, by the tenets of the German Officer Corps, “it is not seemly to shoot a man at lunch.”10
As such, politeness comes close to civility. In a scene from Break Up, the nervous Vince Vaughn angrily reproaches Jennifer Anniston: “You wanted me to wash the dishes, and I’ll wash the dishes—what’s the problem?” She replies: “I don’t want you to wash the dishes—I want you to want to wash the dishes!” This is the minimal reflexivity of desire, its “terrorist” demand: I want you not only to do what I want, but to do it as if you really want to do it—I want to regulate not only what you do, but also your desires. The worst thing you can do, even worse than not doing what I want you to do, is to do what I want you to do without wanting to do it . . . And this brings us to civility: an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the other asks me to do, so
