“Orientalism”/”Negritude”

Despite the use of different strategies (partially derived from different legacies of thought, apparently), it seems that there is a (structural) parallelism between the modes in which both “Orientalism” and “Negritude” come into “being”: in/through discourse. The similarity of the mechanism(s) is striking.

Given the (I’d call it) “performative” dimension of discourse (discourse produces “truth”), isn’t there a danger in outlining / throwing into discourse the (potentially “true”) mechanism of the coming into “being” of “Orientalism” and “Negritude”? Isn’t there the danger that this throwing into discourse (through theorizing) might actually have a conservative effect?

The Ethical and the Linguistic

“That situation is one in which we are addressed, in which the other directs language towards us.” (Butler, 139)
As the ethical arises – in Levinas’s model (undertaken by Butler, as well) – as a function of the (linguistic) situation (“language arrives at an address we do not will” – Butler, 139; we cannot control the flow and directionality of the language we temporarily appropriate), apparently independently of the content of what is being said – which I see as being a function of the speaker (the human being), Levinasian ethics appears to me to paradoxically bracket the self in order to capture the mechanism of the “purely” ethical (indebted as it appears to be in structuralism, though transcending it). For, “to be addressed is to be, from the start, deprived of will” (Butler, 139).

The ethical gesture is a negative one, I would suggest: an act of censorship. Levinas’ is a negative ethics.


In light of : A different light

In Sensibility and the Face, Levinas operates an incredibly fascinating mutation within the binary light-obscurity (ultimately reducible to the binary presence-absence): obscurity as presence filling the space and emptied by the light – “The light makes the thing appear by driving out the shadows: it empties space. It makes space arise specifically as void.” (Levinas ,189) (contrast with Plotin, for example: obscurity is nothing but the absence of light). This shift entails – in my view – a reconfiguration of presence as potentiality of the absence – presence in a new light (or a new concept of presence?), corresponding perhaps – again, in my view – to a new ideology of liveness emerging/dominating on the contemporary stage.

The Impossibility of the Same

Even though I find Levinas philosophy qua ethics superb, I believe that it is “idealistic” (in the “common”/everyday use of the word; for Levinas, “idealism is refused” – 216) in that it grows (beautifully) out of the assumption that the Same is actuality. I would argue, however, that, as there can be no identity without difference (as Butler also notes), there can neither be the Same. The self as the other is the actuality (thus existence is performance) that – it seems – neither Levinas nor Butler takes into account.

“Speech proceeds from absolute difference.” (Levinas, 194)
“The formal structure of language thereby announces the ethical inviolability of the Other and, without any odor of the "numinous", his "holiness”. (Levinas, 195)

Is language the “cause”/source/origin/condition of/for the absolute in-acccessibility of the other?