Social Distancing, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Other
By Brendan Johnston
The endless barrage of events occurring this past year seem like the very embodiment of Dorothy Parker’s sardonic question, “What fresh hell can this be?” And while some of these hells have arisen only recently, like COVID-19, this current pandemic has also served to accentuate and even exacerbate cultural and global issues that have long been emerging at a greater distance. Still, this ongoing threat of the coronavirus is perhaps the most constant reminder that our own lives, those of our loved ones, and so many others, are each in various states of precarity.
In better times, these “precarious lives,” as Judith Butler calls them, more often appear to us at a further remove. But the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Reno’s own, Miciah Lee, and the senseless shooting of Jacob Blake are vivid reminders that many of these lives are often very close to us. There are also so many displaced people waiting in semi-permanent camps throughout the world and even on our own border. But drive down Center Street in the evening, and you will see homeless and displaced Renoites gathering in a long line outside the Reno Events Center to take “socially distanced” shelter. These conditions of precarity are in fact quite proximate to us. It’s also a reminder that the responsibility to maintain a social distance is also very much a privilege that far too many are not currently afforded.
As a PhD student in literature, at times I often get consumed in the texts and the theory that I am studying. It becomes very easy—and at times almost necessary—to become a bit detached or disengaged from the local, immediate world in order to keep a sustained focus on the textual world. These worlds certainly intersect. They are meant to. Sometimes they even look a great deal like one another. But they never quite feel the same. And while I always try to keep in mind the relevance of my research to what’s going on in the world today, it’s often easy to remain a bit removed and philosophical about how these complex systems directly engage with our own lives. Sometimes it feels like you are finding this critical insight into everything, while at the same time, you aren’t actually doing much of anything.
One particular thinker whose work I have been engaged with the past four years, who challenges this type of detachment and over-rationalized thinking, is the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1985). Originally a Jewish Lithuanian who survived the Holocaust in Vichy France, Levinas has much to say on the question of ethics, politics, and engagement. Levinas argues for the individual and infinite responsibility we have to the other. In fact, rather than locating the ethical imperative in the self or in the divine or in some sort of community utility, he locates the foundation of all of his thinking—if it can be said to maintain a traditional foundation—in the concept of radical otherness. For Levinas, this ethical moment arises specifically in our apprehension of the stranger’s face. And in this moment of direct visualization, our responsibility (whether we like it or not) becomes immediate, pre-rational, and, most importantly, unconditional. It is a moment of radical substitution where their vulnerability and precarity become completely our responsibility. However, this position of infinite responsibility at the expense of our own self-care has proven a difficult ethics to sustain in practice. And this ethics of close contact, the face-to-face, seems especially difficult in a time that necessitates social-distancing and facial coverings. How can we be responsible to the other when we cannot even see the other’s face? Even before this current period of responsible distancing, Levinas’s ethics has been both challenged and extended by a number of contemporary thinkers. In an age of mass global migration caused equally by globalized capitalism and climate change, how do we continue to reconcile this conception of Levinas’s integral yet always slightly unknowable other?
Jacques Derrida, a later French philosopher, famously extends Levinas’s ethics of unconditional individual responsibility to that of unconditional cultural hospitality, questioning the status of the refugee and the very idea of national sovereignty. Originally an Algerian-born Jew, a minority member in an already colonized country, Derrida later emigrated to France and eventually became a looming figure of the European poststructuralist movement. As much as he is now more remembered for his early focus on linguistic deconstruction, all of his work is deeply inflected with issues of cultural difference, displacement, and colonial otherness; and in his later work, he explicitly drew attention to his debt to Levinas. For Derrida, this sense of hospitality or hosting does not end or even begin with the close relations of our neighbors and our families. That would be too easy—since our individual relations are already extensions of our own sense of internal unity and comfort. True hospitality extends to the radical other, to those we don’t fully know, to the stranger, even to those strangers who might do us harm. This caveat is often what makes Levinasian ethics and Derridian hospitality difficult to fully practice.
In the current migrant crisis, both on our own border and in the world at large, these calls for responsibility and hospitality gain renewed importance. And while often distance and national boundaries are used to justify the occlusion or even disavowal of vast swaths of human others, we see more and more that these others that are “illegal,” “detained,” or deemed “outsiders” to our own cultures and governments are often living, and have been living, among us for quite some time. These systems of racialization, marginalization and oppression are not just the stuff of distant totalitarian states and dictatorships, but, in fact, clandestinely embedded and even a self-preserving function of the most Westernized, liberal democracies. Take a look around - this soft authoritarianism and dissembled racism is now revealing itself in the open.
But the question still remains, how do we give voice to these marginalized others, those who are disavowed even as their labor and bodies are often exploited at the hands of state power? Perhaps when hash-tag movements like #occupywallstreet, #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, and #defundthepolice find such a public opportunity to name and speak back to these deeply-rooted power structures, it is important that we find ways not only to listen but to sustain and act upon this important introspection—to ensure that hashtag activism doesn’t simply end with Facebook slacktivism. I am by no means suggesting that these movements are flawless; or that they are the only means by which to express your solidarity with these precarious lives. But where they do certainly succeed is in concentrating and magnifying our focus. They make those whose lives seem very distant become very proximate—so proximate in fact that they require, even demand, our response. In a Levinasian sense, perhaps these are some immediate lenses we have for looking more closely and clearly into the face of the other—the other that has always been close to us but has been obfuscated or diminished by the bewildering myths of exceptionalism and past greatness, or, even worse, the subtle ideologies that serves to mask and legitimize the day-to-day operations of the status quo.
So, in this current pandemic, of course the most immediate and tangible ethical steps we can take are to wear a mask and to keep a safe distance between ourselves and our neighbor. But, we should also remember that, while the virus has now become the most adjacent connection we have to a universal human precarity, so many other issues like world hunger, systemic racism, and housing insecurity are not only still ongoing, but they will most certainly be profoundly exacerbated by this same pandemic. So, let’s continue to keep our physical distance from our neighbors in order to maintain an ethical proximity. But let us also continue to find ways to look into the face of the other, to take off the cultural and ideological masks that obscure and distance these unacknowledged neighbors. Once again, this is not just a matter of apprehending the face of the other, but also a matter of recognizing and acting upon the infinite responsibility that this entails.
Photo/Brendan Johnston.
Brendan Johnston is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno. He has recently published an edited collection along with his colleagues, Drs. Ann Keniston and Lee Olsen. The collection, entitled Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader, contains reflections by contemporary thinkers on Levinasian ethics in light of 21st century issues in feminism, biopolitics, decoloniality, and ecology.
Preview image/scholarpedia.org.
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