Alterity, Difference, Indifference

The ethics of radical responsibility articulated by Levinas insists upon the alterity of the Other who faces me. The Other is not comparable to me in any way; s/he is neither the same as me in the sense that we share a common essence, nor different from me with respect to this or that definite criteria. Rather, the Other is absolutely Other, in a way that refuses to yield to consciousness but nevertheless commands me to responsibility. In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas distinguishes between access to the face in terms of its (ethical) alterity and in terms of its (ethically irrelevant) empirical differences: “You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them. The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes!” (Levinas 1985, 85). While many feminists have found in Levinas’ ethics a fruitful starting-point for conceptualizing sexual difference in terms of alterity (Irigaray, Chanter), others have found his relative neglect of cultural, racial and other differences a stumbling-block for feminism (Sikka, Sandford). My aim is to explore and develop a third approach that avoids the apparent impasse between Levinas’ ethics of alterity and a feminist ethics which focuses on difference.

I have tentatively called this third approach an ethics of indifference; it draws on the philosophical work of Cavarero, Agamben, Blanchot and Schelling, as well as the literary work of Jean Genet and Clarice Lispector, in order to articulate a dimension of ethical life distinct from both alterity and difference. Here, indifference does not indicate an ethical neutrality or failure to “care” about moral issues; rather, it refers to the impersonality or neutrality of the fact that one lives, and that one is not in charge of this fact from the ground up, and that one is not the first or the last living being. Even after my death, my involvement in life as such, in the degeneration and regeneration of organic matter, does not cease; in this sense, I cannot negate or escape my status as a living being connected to other living beings in a way that is very concrete and material, but for this very reason remains difficult to theorize.

The significance of indifference becomes clearer when compared to alterity and difference. In addition to my singularity as a uniquely responsible self (from the perspective of a Levinasian ethics of alterity), and in addition to my identity as a social being, which is constituted in relation to complex differences (from the perspective of a feminist ethics of difference), I am also quite simply a living being. And considered as a living being, I am neither different from nor identical to any other living being, but rather in a state of indifference with respect to all other living beings, or in what Genet calls an “exact equivalence” to other living beings insofar as they live and die (Genet, “L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5). Clarice Lispector explores the terrain of indifference in her novel, The Passion According to G.H. In this novel, a woman’s encounter with a cockroach suddenly discloses her own status as a living being – as a creature which is no more, and no less living than any other living being. This realization has ethical as well as ontological implications; throughout the novel, Lispector develops what I would call an ethics of indifference based on the contact between living beings which is distinct from both the ethics of alterity (based on the proximity between self and Other) and the ethics of difference (based on the interaction and mutual negotiation of historically-situated subjects).

My project could be explained in a slightly different way as an exploration of the relation between the Who and the What in ethical life. Cavarero, following Arendt, develops a political ontology based on the irreducible uniqueness of every human being insofar as they are born to a mother as this “one,” this singular “Who.” Cavarero contrasts her approach with a politics that overlooks who someone is in order to classify and manage what they are. Women in particular (and arguably other marginalized groups) are reduced to the status of a What (a fertile womb, a source of comfort, a housekeeper) by patriarchal political structures that fail to recognize women’s singularity. But I wish to argue that there is another dimension of the “What” (or perhaps one could call it the “That,” the sheer that-ness of a living being) which Cavarero touches upon but does not fully develop, and which poses a challenge to her own account of the Who as an embodied but singular being. To what extent does the embodied self, as a living being, instantiate the anonymous, neutral, indifferent What (or That), rather than, or in addition to, the Who? Must we not understand the Who and the What as simultaneous layers of the ethical-animal self rather than as a mutual opposition?

This research has implications for the way we understand the relation between humans and other living beings such as animals and plants (not to mention cockroaches). But in particular, it has implications for the way we understand the animal in the human, the neutral living being in the singular, responsible self or the historically-differentiated subject. In this sense, I see this project as a continuation of the feminist critique of mind-body dualism, as well as the ecofeminist critique of a hierarchy between human beings and all other living beings. But my interest is not simply to confirm that the mind is always already in a body, nor that human beings are always already animals; rather, I wish to develop a language for more precisely articulating the one in the other: the what in the who, the body in the mind, the animal in the human. I think that Agamben’s work on the interval between man and animal will help with this project; but that this account must also be opened up to a feminist account of the rather different interval between man, woman and animal.

This research also has implications for Levinas scholarship, and in particular for the feminist response to Levinas’ figure of the feminine Other. The feminine Other hovers ambiguously between the absolute alterity of the stranger and the familiar intimacy of the same; the dwelling which the feminine Other opens for me is an exception to the faceless neutrality of the il y a, the latter of which threatens to swallow up the distinctions between the Other and the same. In this sense, the tropes of feminine Otherness and the il y a provide a starting point for developing the possible intersection between an ethics of alterity which responds to the proximity of the (human, and implicitly masculine) stranger, and an ethics of indifference which is in an immediate but impersonal contact with other living beings.