Toward the Dignity and Justice of Being

The way of thinking proposed here does not fail to recognize being or treat it, ridiculously and pretentiously, with disdain, as the fall from a higher order or disorder. On the contrary, it is on the basis of proximity that being takes on its just meaning. In the indirect ways of illeity, in the anarchical provocation which ordains me to the other, is imposed the way which leads to thematization, and to an act of consciousness.


---Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence (trans. A Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Pr., 1981)








The entry into being does not entail a fall into absolute moral indifference, or even corruption. While Levinas could criticize Heidegger for the paucity of morality in Being and Time, no phenomenology of ontological difference necessarily leads, by its very method, to a disregard of the other as completely other. In the passage above, Levinas sets up his case against a philosophy that 'reduces, by an abuse of language, saying to the said and all sense to interest' (Otherwise Than Being, OTB,16). Already in Existents and Existence, Levinas poses the metaphysical problem of just what takes place prior to an existent's insertion into being, the reluctance if not refusal to enter into a cont[r]act with being under the conditions of insomnia, fatigue, indolence. Speculatively, Levinas posits these structures of pre-phenomenality, of pre-consciousness, where passivity holds sway. Taking a stand before being, what Levinas has named hypostasis, provides the liminality encountering an existent, which is always just out of phase with existence (being).


For Levinas, an existent and existence do not coincide precisely; a lag presents itself. A diachrony characterizes the interface of an existent with existence, where the encounter with the other in proximity occurs and seizes what, for the existent, has not yet become a self realized into being. So in this metaphysical frame (which potentially gives being its dignity and justice) the other who holds me hostage and for whom the 'I' takes full responsibility---and the responsibility even of the other's own responsibility---in substitution, provides the locus of ethics. As Levinas summarizes, he has interpreted 'the subject as a hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence' (OTB, 184).


Levinas, whose allegiance to Husserl is palpable, finds limitations in classical phenomenology, and in order to locate transcendence in its proper frame, opens upon a metaphysics, a first philosophy, of ethics. By placing the ethical moment prior even to ontology,  Levinas introduces a 'morality clause' into the contract with being. Because the other and the approach to the other, the encounter with alterity and illeity, is prior to the self of the subject-in-the- making, ethics shapes the posture of the hypostasis, or what I have dubbed the 'hypostatic union' of the existent with existence. Being is therefore extricated from the problematics of Heideggerian phenomenology, ontology and its existentialist demeanor, in which Dasein's being in the world flirts with the Volk, permitting, in the darker corners of Dasein's moods, all kinds of savagery.


Ultimately, though, Levinas never really parts ways with phenomenology, or at least the spirit of phenomenology. He will eventually come to say that what he was doing through OTB, was phenomenology all along. His approach to the problem of ethics could not fit within the scope of the phenomenology of his day, or at least the orthodoxy of its method. His metaphysics of ethics speculates upon the very nature of phenomenality and therefore of givenness. Because such a metaphysics is embedded within consciousness itself, I am comfortable describing it more along the lines of a radical phenomenology, one that is still thinking the given and therefore within the purview of phenomenology itself. A phenomenology of givenness provides the logical step from Levinassian ethics as first philosophy, yet retains the phenomenological posture. I attribute Jean-Luc Marion's debt to Levinas, at least in part, to this tacit acknowledgment.


Marion's argument with Heidegger is not primarily ethical, though its commitment to the given certainly has ethical if not moral implications; and the inadequacy of the reduction to being or ontology compels Marion to explore just how far down the reduction can go, hence his 'third reduction' to givenness. That a radical phenomenology quests for the end of metaphysics by no means spells the end of speculative thinking; the quest simply critiques the limits of any metaphysics bent on determining the validity of all kinds of phenomena. To privilege givenness does not hold being with disdain or in contempt. Rather, the privilege rescues phenomena from the hegemony of metaphysics, of ontology and ontological difference, of any positivism, and in particular from their tendencies to determine what any kind of knowledge can and cannot be.


Nihilism, too often the final face of existentialism and the positivistic stamp on rationality, impugns all of reality and makes something very small of being. Nihilism opposes any dignity and justice of being. The antidote to nihilism is thinking the thing from itself as it gives itself, as the antidote to mere being is life. As Agamben has convincingly shown, bare life, zoe, is already stripped of dignity and justice, and thematized life, bios, is at least poised for them. For Levinas and Marion, there is no state of exception, no state of being (or givenness) unworthy of dignity and justice. It remains part of my project to locate the origins and locations of dignity and justice in this thing called being, and in part, it attempts this move by asking just what is this thing called love.

Stealing Bodies

Medicine continues to come under fire for its dehumanizing gaze. The fire comes from everywhere: who has not indicted the medical gaze for its objectification of the human person? In the pages of this blog, the discussion notes that both Foucault and Marion have articulated the methods of medical surveillance that situate the person so that only the body comes into view, thereby suppressing the flesh and the wholeness of the person, and institutionalizing the gaze. In this sense, medicine still enacts the caricature of robbing graves, stealing bodies in order to focus the gaze. Indeed, the medical gaze no longer need wait until dark to enter misty graveyard: the gaze has achieved the uncanny ability to steal the body from the person, the body from the 'flesh' right in its own back yard: the clinic, the hospital, even the house-call.

Medicine can see nothing but the body in its biometric presentation. This mythos runs deep beneath troubled waters. Is medicine really that blind to suffering, seeing instead only dysfunction of 'normal' systems defined by 'normal' mathematical ranges? Is that caricature the straw man set up to fall, or at least receive the righteous arrows of indignation from journalism and medical 'philosophers?' Certainly medicine has undergone several transformations in the last 100 years, but the transformation that disfigures bios (a life lived) into zoe (bare-life) by removing the person from her home, her living environment, to the clinic, where the medical gaze sharpens its focus, is not even the most recent transformation, one Giorgio Agamben might call an act of medical 'sovereignty.'

If medicine has undergone a more recent transformation, one that has modified its gaze even further, it would be that political transformation that injured its eyes, disfigured its vision so that what it sees is only the person reduced to the body in the name of population-based healthcare. Governmental sovereignty has recreated medicine in its own image: a utilitarianism (I think here too generous a term) that views the demos as a homogeneous entity that can be managed only as a collective. Here, sovereignty exercises its prerogatives in the name of the collective in order to reduce lives lived to bare lives; it conscripts medicine to its own ends, medicalizing not only the people, but the law, ethics, and ways of living and being.

Jeffrey Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse, for example, should be read as an indictment of medicine's complicity in the politics of the human body. Though subtitled Medicine, Power and the Care of the Dying, Bishop's study begins in Foucault and ends in the usurpation of the medical gaze itself by the machinations of amoral sovereignty. Wildly off base in his assassination of Palliative Medicine, Bishop visits his recurrent thesis that nonetheless gives us pause: sovereignty seeks legitimation through (medical) science, as it seeks to define and then politicize life and death.

Politically, who can fault the government for enlisting the experts at Harvard or the Institutes of Medicine, whose ethics are ostensibly irreproachable? Medical 'society' at its highest and most prestigious levels has dictated how medicine will be practiced in the 21st century. In collusion with big business interests, the best and brightest (credentialed as such) in medicine have wreaked havoc within the very site of medicine: the relationship between a physician and her patient. As corporate boards and company stockholders extract obscene wealth from the delivery of healthcare, hospitals and legitimate medical practices have attempted to provide care with ever-decreasing revenues, which have been diverted seemingly anywhere but where they are needed most.

Human beings suffer in the flesh, yet the 'business of medicine' has plucked out an eye of medicine so that it can see only the body---the business end of medicine has determined that it's just too expensive to see some things. The flesh, the locus of suffering, has become invisible, and only the body reduced to measurements comes into view. The gospel of the boardroom has made this the truth that sets wealth free. The complicity of medicine with the corporate-political juggernaut has stripped the relationship between providers of care and the receivers of care from the delivery of healthcare.

If elections are true reflections of the will of the demos, then is it unreasonable to conclude that the current healthcare situation is precisely the one the people themselves have permitted and shaped? Is the stripping of doctor-patient relationship more of a divestiture of a relationship that is more a remnant of a bygone era? If so, why all the complaints and self-righteous prose?

Hollywood's Dr. Frankenstein visits graves under cover of darkness to exhume bodies to be imbued with living flesh, a flesh envisioned by human ingenuity and enterprise. Stealing bodies is the good doctor's only recourse, as his design could not be countenanced by a brand of medicine bound by prohibitive ethics. This stealing of bodies steals bodies already bereft of the flesh. The contemporary Frankenstein, the melding of politics and medicine, steals bodies from the flesh of human beings whose integrity of personhood does not fit into the politico-medical model.

We know this monster, this 20th century beast and the very flower of 'modernism'. It is the monster that sterilized societies' 'idiots,' euthanized lives not worth living (or medically determined to be something less than living), and murdered the bios reduced to zoe that was determined to be an invading pathogen---a disease within the body politic---in the convenient genocides that are the 20th century's legacy to the 21st. The 21st century, our century, remains poised to resurrect the monster to do its bidding. Indeed the monster is not dead, only sleeping: talitha cumi.

The inconvenient truth of medicine's complicity with politics is as easy to ignore as other inconvenient truths. Great suspicion must meet the intersections of politics and science, medical or otherwise. The monster writes its metanarrative in small print, but shouts out its story from the gaudy billboards of consciousness.

The Mark of Cain and the Biopolitics of the Flesh In Negative Certainties

¹³ Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. ¹⁴ Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
¹⁵ But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. ¹⁶ So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden. [Gen. 4:13-16, NIV]

Cain was mistaken: he thought he was fated to be the first homo sacer, but the Lord said 'not so.'  If we take as points of departure Agamben's paradox of sovereignty in his Homo Sacer, and Marion's coalescence of 'proscription' and 'prescription' as the event of such sovereignty in Negative Certainties, we might conclude that there can be no univocity of sovereignty between God and the agency of the 'state of exception.' Indeed, to predicate sovereignty of God is to commit the idolatry of the concept. God does not place Cain under the ban, but instead, in a subversion of sovereignty, marks Cain as not only unsacrificeable, but un-killable a well. Even as the soil cries out the blood of Abel, God does not deem Cain unworthy of life; his life is given to posterity in a generosity inconsistent with sovereignty.

While Marion nods to Foucault and Antelme (The Human Race), there is no trace of a nod to Agamben, even in Marion's most political statement yet:



...even the philosopher, and perhaps he above all, has the means to confirm and thus also to put into question the humanity of other men: it is enough to establish that man defines himself as Greek, European, Aryan and so on...thus defining in the end which are not human. Every political proscription, every racial extermination, every ethnic cleansing, every determination of that which does not deserve to live: they all rest on the claim to define (scientifically or ideologically, because in the end the difference is canceled out) the humanity of man...(NC, 36).

Certainly Agamben's work resonates in these lines: when prescription melts into proscription, and biopolitics (Marion's science and ideology) determines the humanity (the bare life) of man,  determines the very status of man as included and/or excluded and therefore as the exception, determines even the status of man as undeserving of life, Marion describes the historical event of sovereignty. Forms of life (bios) collapse into 'bare life' (zoe) in proximity to sovereignty; these terms as appropriated by Agamben play out in the phenomenon of the flesh and its diminishment to the body in Marion's analysis of the medical gaze, the un sans papiers, and the 'economic agent,' all of which are versions of the biopolitical commodification of the human being. The flesh/body distinction under the medical gaze points to a certain hylomorphism: the ego is the form of the flesh, as (in classical sacramental theology) the soul is the form of the body. As the human creature is always a saturated phenomenon to itself, even the sovereign (himself a human creature) of the polis cannot legitimately declare the homo sacer, though as the agent outside the law that bans the sacred man to both inside and outside the law, he, as the Zizekian pervert par excellence, overturns the non-intersecting registers of the real and symbolic orders, and writes the real into the symbolic without translation. The flesh as saturated phenomenon finds its excess not in distance, but in closeness---relationality approaches not infinity but zero, as the flesh cannot see itself as self or ego. By rendering both 'forms of life' and 'bare life' as objectness, the perverted sovereign stages a bizarre hylomorphism and sacramentality: the sacrament of sovereignty is the man who is unsacrificeable and killable.

Agamben notes:

One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty – non political life – is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zoē is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis – and this much has, by now, already happened – these thresholds pass, as we will see, beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man.  (Homo Sacer, 77).

Marion, in apparent sympathy with this delineation of 'threshold,' can observe, that under the medical gaze, 'the suffering of my flesh will be transmuted into a disease of my body' (CN, 28). Because the flesh is immense, only the parameters of the body fall under the physician's eye, which can only see that body as a machine defined by numbers (e.g., laboratory values), and whose gaze "opens the fearsome region where man as doctor must decide if, and when, that which the machine maintains as functioning in this particular sick man still deserves consideration  as a life. And if this life can still claim to be human" (CN, 28). The very threshold that delineates sovereignty's distinction of 'inside from...outside' is a clinical threshold. The very anthropometrics Agamben identifies in the politicization of bare life, for Marion become the biometrics that determine identity in the event of sovereignty--- the proscription and prescription of the unpapered being, whose identity requires an ever escalating 'constant verification' (CN, 34). For Agamben's "new living dead man," that verification is always sought but never comes, even as the sovereign becomes for the sacred other, the object of desire, ever so bitterly, in the jouissance of sovereignty itself.

Marion's analysis of King Lear sympathizes with Agamben's axiom that "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order" (Homo Sacer, 96). While there is no actual 'camp' in the tragedy, the conceptual space drives the action: the reduction of Lear from bios to zoë, from sovereign to persona non grata, from a state of ousia to a state of non-being. The permanence in Lear is not all that permanent, of course, and the reintegration of what it means to be human with the politics of the tragedy requires the reestablishment of love at great personal cost.  The stakes are always high when the very definition of the human creature must rest in its indefinition in order to maintain humanity itself.