Abstract
Philosophical complexity and post-structuralism both offer a challenge to the Cartesian humanist subject and the predicates of subjecthood that this view presupposes (including a strong view of agency, intentionality, rationality, and causality). In substantive terms, this challenge results in a so-called liquidated subject, wherein the notion of the subject no longer corresponds with any fixed or signified content but is instead characterised as a decentred and complex construction.
In this chapter, the deconstruction of the humanist subject and the traditional predicates of subjecthood is undertaken at the hand of Levinas’s understanding of the Other; Derrida’s work on the subject, animals, and eating; and, Nancy’s reading of Heidegger’s Dasein from the perspective of Mitsein. The insights that these analyses yield are critically compared to Cilliers’ complex view of identity, in which the self becomes over time in a network of relations with others. In so doing, a tentative portrait of the liquidated subject emerges, and attention is drawn to the urgent need to revise our traditional understanding of ethics and responsibility.
The consequences that this complex view of identity holds for understanding and relating to the self and to the other are also explored at the hand of the example of encountering the stranger (Levinas, Derrida) or the intruder (Nancy).
How then can the pour-soi (for-self) be transformed into the pour-tous (for-all), while remaining frenetically pour-soi? We can begin to understand that from the moment one living being becomes an existential exigency for another; this exigency immediately creates, in fact, a solidarity and a complementarity of the one in relation to the other.
-Edgar Morin ( 1980 ), La Méthode, v. 2: La Vie de la vie
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Notes
- 1.
See Sect. 3.3.
- 2.
See Sect. 4.2.1.
- 3.
See Sect. 5.3.1.
- 4.
Interestingly, Descrates also endorses the view that the self is not centred on one basic instance of ‘the Same’. In ‘The third meditation’, Descartes argues that human consciousness does not only contain an idea of itself, but all the irreducible ideas of the infinite. Consciousness thus relates the self with a reality that remains irreducible to the self. Although Descartes identifies the infinite with God , Levinas nevertheless uses the basic structure of Descrates’s argument to put forward a characterisation of the Other as that which manifests beyond consciousness (and that cannot therefore be understood from the perspective of consciousness) (Peperzak 1993: 21).
- 5.
Cilliers (2010b: 59) writes that boundary formation is the process by which possibility is ‘actualised in the presence of constraints’ . Cilliers also notes that the ‘[t]he fewer [the] constraints, the more possibility, but possibility left empty’ (59). For example, a breadth of possibility is open to a small child who has an entire lifetime ahead of her and who is still relatively unconstrained by life choices . Conversely, ‘[t]he more constraints, the better we can get at meaning, but the more bountiful it is’ (59). For example, as one gets older—and exercises more choices in terms of career, spouses, offspring etc.—the many possibilities of childhood begin to close down, but there is a richness and depth to one’s life experiences (exercised within very definite constraints) that is missing from the life of a child.
- 6.
See Sect. 3.4.1.
- 7.
This concession not only necessitates that we take into account discriminatory attitudes towards animal societies, but also, as Derrida (1987b: 183) argues, partitions and separations ‘other than Auschwitz—apartheid, racial segregation—other segregations within our Western democratic society. All these differences have to be taken into account in a new fashion.’ This is because repressing these differences denies an engagement with the problematic of the subject.
- 8.
Indeed, Calarco (2004: 181) notes that ‘[b]esides the short essay in Difficult Freedom entitled “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Levinas appears wholly uninterested concerning the relation of animals to the ethical or justice-as-politics .’
- 9.
To illustrate this point, Derrida (1995: 281) uses the example of the chef d’Etat (head of State) as embodying the pinnacle of this fraternal structure, in that the chef d’Etat ‘must be an eater of flesh’. In a footnote, Derrida points to one exception to the rule , namely Hitler, who was in fact a vegetarian, but states that ‘[e]ven he did not propose his vegetarianism as an example’ (475). Moreover, Derrida views this exception as illustrative of the ‘hypostudy’ which he is trying to evoke, namely: ‘A certain reactive and compulsive vegetarianism is always inscribed, in the name of denegation, inversion, or repression, in the history of cannibalism’ (475).
- 10.
To recall, Levinas questions Heidegger’s ontico-ontological distinction , arguing that Being is nothing other than a collection of beings.
- 11.
Although the moment of coming into presence is not as highly valued in the complexity discourse, identity is nevertheless viewed as an emergent property to the extent that ‘it develops and transforms as a result of the play of differences which constitute it’ (Cilliers 2010a: 7). Due to dynamic feedback loops and non-linear interactions, emergence should also not be viewed as a progressive or incremental process. Nancy’s definition of the we ‘as ‘each one’ (chaque un) and ‘each time ’ (chaque fois)’ (Watkin 2007: 55), as well as Derrida’s concepts of différance and iterability (where the latter implies a view of identity that ties repetition or sameness to difference or alterity) also guard against this teleological view. Becoming in time thus renders the subject as fundamentally irreducible to itself. That the subject ’s sense of identity is contingent on context also reaffirms the view that identity cannot be a pre-given or complete construct. Rather, we are the product of our histories , our relationships, and our current contexts . As such, we are forced to always renegotiate our identities in practice , and with one another.
- 12.
As previously stated, unconditional hospitality also raises questions regarding the anthropological dimension of hospitality , specifically as regards the problem of who is accorded the right to hospitality . In this regard, Derrida (2010: 4) asks:
what can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality towards the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable; does one owe hospitality , and is that the right word when it is a question of welcoming—or being made welcome by—the other or the stranger [l’étranger] as god, animal or plant, to use those conventional categories?
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Woermann, M. (2016). Complex Identity and Ethical-Political Responsibilities. In: Bridging Complexity and Post-Structuralism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39047-5_5
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