Towards a Relational Ethics

Towards a Relational Ethics Stephen Frosh

Psychoanalytic vocabularies • Intersubjectivity and recognition as shared vocabularies across psychoanalysis and social theory. • Concern with psychoanalytic thinking on what it means to ‘recognise’ an other; and beyond that with some ways in which psychoanalysis is being deployed as a critical tool in developing an ‘ethics’ of otherness, or more broadly a stance towards knowing, singling out, or being in relationship with an other who in her or his impact on the subject can be a disturbing yet longed-for neighbour.

Relational thinking • Move from dominance of drive theory to (object) relational thinking in psychoanalysis. • Stolorow (2006): Recognition of intersubjectivity does not entail adherence to or rejection of any specific psychodynamic theory. In fact, acceptance of the foundational significance of intersubjectivity enables therapists to employ the various psychodynamic concepts with greater discrimination and effectiveness.

Subject-subject psychology • In the intersubjective conception of recognition, two active subjects may exchange, may alternate in expressing and receiving, cocreating a mutuality that allows for and presumes separateness. (Benjamin, 1998)

Recognition versus omnipotence • The tension between recognizing the other and wanting the self to be absolute (omnipotence) is, to my mind, an internal conflict inherent in the psyche; it exists independent of any given interaction –even in the most favourable conditions. It is not interpersonally generated but is, rather, a psychic structure that conditions the interpersonal. The problem of whether or not we are able to recognize the other person as outside, not the sum of, our projections or the mere object of need, and still feel recognized by her or him, is defining for intersubjectivity. (Benjamin, 2000)

Use of an object • Benjamin draws on Winnicott’s idea of an object’s resilience being what creates it as real. • ‘In Benjamin’s view there is an ongoing and endless cycle of the establishment of mutual recognition followed by its negation, constituting a never-ending tension between complementarity and mutuality, between relating to the other as object or like subject.’ (Baraitser, 2008)

Constitution of the subject • ‘In Benjamin’s work, we are not fundamentally constituted through loss, but through processes of separation that are tempered by the pleasures of mutual recognition and the possibilities of shared understanding made possible through surviving destruction. And if we follow this through, difference can then be experienced as something that can be identified with, not just repudiated, negated or controlled. The infant can enjoy the fact that the mother has a life of her own to get on with, as it means that she is like me, with desires of her own’ (Baraitser, 2006)

The Third • ‘Third in one’ and ‘One in Third’ reflecting capacity to hold otherness in mind and creation of a new space for encounter. • ‘Moral third’: ‘those values, rules, and principles of interaction that we rely upon in our efforts to create and restore the space for each partner in the dyad to engage in thinking, feeling, acting or responding rather than merely reacting’ (Benjamin, 2009) • ‘The analyst says, in effect, “I’ll go first.” (Benjamin, 2004)

Political responsibility • ‘you acknowledge that you have, you know, bumped into the person’s bruise, and you acknowledge that there is hurt and pain and that you may have responsibility for that, and in doing this, you alleviate a whole level of tension that makes it possible, then, to talk about, to explore’ (Benjamin, 2006)

Acknowledging errors • ‘it should serve to reveal how the analyst takes on the responsibility for forgiving herself and thus being able to transcend the shame of her difficulties enough to talk about and analyze them (without excessive or impulsive self-disclosure)’ so patient can contribute reciprocally to the analytic relationship becoming ‘an interpreter of the analyst and a co-creator of dialogue, and so develop her own sense of agency and responsibility’. (Benjamin 2009)

Primacy of the Other • In my analysis, … the relation to the Face is the relation to the absolutely weak … and there is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the other -and at the same time (and this is the paradoxical thing) the Face is also the ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’. A Thou-Shalt-not-Kill that can also be explicated much further: it is the fact that I cannot let the other die alone, it is like a calling out to me… at the outset I hardly care what the other is with respect to me, that is his own business; for me, he is above all the one I am responsible for. (Levinas, 1991)

Responsibility • I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face. (Levinas, 1985)

Recognition is not responsibility • Levinas’ argument is in a different register from that of sameness and difference, recognition and reciprocity. Recognition… is not identical with responsibility Self-recognition that relies on recognition by another subject will perhaps always run into difficulties with how to prevent an infolding of alterity due to the colonizing impulse that is inherent, not only in ‘knowing’ another but in recognizing too. In contrast, describing the relationship with the Other as an ethical relationship prior to self, a relationship that establishes the subject as a responsible subject prior to ‘being’ a subject at all, Levinas redefines both the notion of the subject and the Other, as well as the nature of their relationship and that of recognition itself. (Baraitser, 2008)

Being spoken • It’s only through my meanders and slow detours, perhaps across many decades, towards recognizing language’s powerful impersonality -which is always operating despite and within its air of a communicative ‘intersubjectivity’- that I can ‘become myself.’ Yet I become myself only by way of fully accepting my own impersonality, too –as someone who is herself accidentally spoken, not only by violent language, but by any language whatsoever –and who, by means of her own relieved recognition of this very contingency, is in significant part released from the powers of the secretive and unspeakable workings of linguistic harm. (Riley, 2005)

Sharing in the elemental • We do not relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sensibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light our eyes know, the ground that sustains our postures, and the air and the warmth with which we speak. We face one another as condensations of earth, light, air, and warmth, and orient one another in the elemental in a primary communication. We appeal to the others to help us be at home in the alien elements into which we stray: in the drifting and nameless light and warmth of infancy, in the nocturnal depths of the erotic, and in the domain of dying where rational discourse has no longer anything to say. (Lingis, 1994)

Communication is not speech • The one who understands is not extracting the abstract form out of the tone, the rhythm, and the cadences –the noise internal to the utterance, the cacophony internal to the emission of the message. He or she is also listening to that internal noise –the rasping or smouldering breath, the hyperventilating or somnolent lungs, the rumblings and internal echoes –in which the message is particularized and materialized and in which the empirical reality of something indefinitely discernible, encountered in the path of one’s own life, is referred to and communicated. With this internal noise it is the other, in his or her materiality, that stands forth and stands apart making appeals and demands. The other is not simply the recurrent function of appealing to and contesting me; he or she is an empirically discernible vulnerability and intrusion. (Lingis, 1994)

Human Excess • ‘The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things.’ Žižek’s (2006)

On not knowing the other • ‘If I were to “really know” the mind of my interlocutor, intersubjectivity proper would disappear; he would lose his subjective status and turn –for me- into a transparent machine. In other words, not-being-knowable to others is a crucial feature of subjectivity, of what we mean when we impute to our interlocutors a “mind”: you “truly have a mind” only insofar as it is opaque to me.’ (Žižek, 2006)

Musselmann • In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans, but the radically ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the ‘living dead’ in the concentration camps. (Žižek, 2006)

Muselmann and Neighbour • What if, facing a Muselmann, we are made aware of our responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic? In short, what about bringing together Levinas’ face and the topic of the ‘neighbour’ in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch, the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me? (Žižek, 2006)

Bearing witness • ‘the one who truly bears witness in the human is the inhuman; it means that the human is nothing other than the agent of the inhuman, the one who lends the inhuman a voice’ • ‘What testimony says is something completely different, which can be formulated in the following theses: “human beings are human insofar as they are not human” or, more precisely, “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman”.’ Agamben (2002)

Opacity • ‘we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves.’ (Butler, 2005)

Against ethical violence • Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same… one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centring and ‘fails’ to achieve self-identity. (Butler, 2005)

Ethics of recognition • By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it. If letting the other live is part of any ethical definition of recognition, then this version of recognition will be based less on knowledge than on an apprehension of epistemic limits. (Butler, 2005)

Interruption • ‘If the other is always there, from the start, in the place of where the ego will be, then a life is constituted through a fundamental interruption, is even interrupted prior to the possibility of any continuity. Accordingly, if narrative reconstruction is to constitute the life it means to convey, it must also be subject to interruption.’ (Butler, 2005)

Extrinsic sources of the drives • In Laplanche’s theory of the drives, the drive does not emerge naturally or spontaneously from the body as the transparent expression of its needs; rather, it is the byproduct of the desiring and signifying relations between the subject and the other. In particular, the drive is the byproduct of the psychical work of the infant, both opening up to and defending against the seductive ministrations of the adult. (Fletcher, 2007)

Enigma of the other • To understand the unconscious, however, is to understand what cannot belong, properly speaking, to me, precisely because it defies the rhetoric of belonging, is a way of being dispossessed through the address of the other from the start. For Laplanche, I am animated by this call or demand, and I am at first overwhelmed by it. The other is, from the start, too much for me, enigmatic, inscrutable. The ‘too-much-ness’ must be handled and contained for something called an ‘I’ to emerge in its separateness. (Butler, 2005)

Accountability versus the unconscious • ‘To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality… To say, as some do, that the self must be narrated, that only the narrated self can be intelligible and survive, is to say that we cannot survive with an unconscious’ (Butler, 2005)

Ethical relationships • ‘I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others’ (Butler, 2005)

The ethics of transference • The other represents the prospect that the story might be given back in new form, that fragments might be linked in some way, that some part of opacity might be brought to light. The other witnesses and registers what cannot be narrated, functioning as one who might discern a narrative thread, though mainly as one whose practice of listening enacts a receptive relation to the self that the self, in its dire straits of self-beratement, cannot offer itself. And it seems crucial to recognize, not only that the anguish and opacity of the ‘I’ is witnessed by the other, but that the other can become the name of one’s anguish and opacity: ‘You are my anguish, surely. You are opaque: who are you? Who is this you that resides in me, from whom I cannot extricate myself?’ (Butler, 2005)

The Thing • Lacan defines das Ding as the encounter with something in the other that is completely alien –an intrusive foreignness that goes beyond the compositions of self and other, and their politicizations as ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. The Thing materializes the constitutive ambiguity of the primal object, the trauma of its uncertain disposition between excessive presence and radical absence…the Thing is that part of the other that is ‘mute’, but the neighbour speaks and thus forms a template for the subject’s emergence. (Reinhard, 2005)

The Thing and the Neighbour • ‘if there is no neighbour to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me’; on the other hand, without the Thing, ‘we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat”, aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication.’ Žižek (2005)

Negativity and responsibility • This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy. Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, ‘cleanse the plate,’ draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a ‘suicidal’ gesture of a radical act –what Freud called ‘death drive’ and what German Idealism called ‘radical negativity’. (Žižek , 2006)

The Third and Ethical Violence • In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the ‘gentrification’ of the Other-Thing into a ‘normal human fellow’ cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves –there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order. (Žižek , 2006)

Justice • This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary… Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. (Žižek , 2006)

Psychoanalysis as love or justice? • We can clearly see, now, how far psychoanalysis is from any defence of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: no face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no ‘intersubjectivity’ here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third. (Žižek , 2006)

Towards a Relational Ethics