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Ascolo Parodites
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The Other is not, in coming upon me, described by consciousness. The Other is not, in this coming, consciously ordered. The proximal but unpresent touch of the Other obsesses and persecutes consciousness in refusing the interrogation that the Other incites and in escaping the reach for which the Other calls. An act of consciousness is delayed in its self-enactment before the Other who, being without a consciousness, is timelessly before the act of consciousness that unavoidably bestows time and presence of the Other. The Other renders us speechless in giving us speech. It denies consciousness the identity of its self-enactment in giving its identity. In the patience of passivity, I am he who anyone at all can replace, but one for whom nonetheless there is no dispensation: the subject, I, must ultimately answer to and for what I am not.
This the basis for all authority: the necessity to justify the arbitrary in me before the Other, endlessly persecutes me, endlessly eclipses me; as if the basis of the Law were its mere enunciation, so that the Law is itself an obstacle to my obtaining to criminality, so that is is the Law which prevents my trespass in the Face of the Other, which is a quite literal sense to those words of Levinas, that the 'Face to Face' is characterized by the subject's inability to murder the Other. It is in the very act of breaking the Law that the Law is rendered meaningless; and my criminality, being precluded by logos, is only a pathetic innocence. It is as if the world in which I live is circumscribed by the Law, by logos, and criminality is itself thrust upon me as something from which I am compelled to abscond in the Face of the Other; I am accused, again, in my effort to justify what is arbitrary in myself, I am persecuted by the necessity to justify what is arbitrary in myself before the Other.
To trespass upon the Other is impossible, as a mere inclination. This is why Medea speaks of 'tearful thoughts' before murdering her children and, to go through with the very act, must accomplish a reverse akrasia. Yet trespassing upon the Other may be comprehended in the Medean resolution, for it is in the act of crime that I am aborted from the Law, - my injustice is annihilated and my crime is not obtained, but only a pathetic innocence. My injustice exists only in the shadow of what is arbitrary in me, and not in the light of ethical awareness. This is the central aporia of the Medea. Moreover, the necessity of justifying the arbitrary is due only to the failure suffered by an arbitrary power. In this sense, the failure of the arbitrary power may be conceived of as a pathos excluded from logos. This pathos is, as it were, the matrix of any philosophy that makes the failure of the arbitrary the ontic characteristic of man; that makes criminality, not sin, the original defect from which the whole order of philosophical anthropology is to be determined.
Yet it is necessary to take this pathos at its highest point of perfection. Even though it is prephilosophical, this pathetique is precomprehension, and it is that insofar as it is perfect speech, perfect in its order and on its level. In order to gain a methodological priority for the pathetique, we must reduce it just as Ricoeur reduces his pathetique of misery to the transcendental method. This will be done by a means of a reflection on the style of negative dialectics to substitute the transcendental method by which Ricoeur's pathetique was informed. Let me now state what it is I expect from this decision to look within the power of the epistemic subject for the most profound modality by which the fundamental failure of the arbitrary in man may be grasped. From it I seek a clue to the exploration of all the other modalities of man as intermediate with respect to the Other, intermediate in the sense of functional mediation by the necessity to justify the arbitrary which the Other invites upon man. I seek a clue as to the modality of the Law itself. With this twofold beginning, prephilosophical and philosophical, pathetique and negative dialectic, we are provided with the elements for going on. Upon the stage of negative dialectics the fundamental catastrophe of the arbitrary in man will be furnished, and the whole content of the pathetique of responsibility will be revealed, revealed as the modality of Law. In effect, I want to reduce the Levinasian 'infinite accusative' to Ricoeur's typus for the pathetique, (informed by a negative dialectical approach, rather than a transcendental one) so that I may bracket the subject and the Other and finally emphasize Levinas's notion of the failure of the subject as an arbitrary power over the infinite responsibility to the Other and, on the basis of Adorno's notion of the strength of the epistemic subject, expand this former notion of the failure of the subject as an arbitrary power to the extent to which the responsibility to the Other can be contained in it, - expand this former into Law as its absolute presentation and, following Adorno's essential method in the negative dialectics, use the strength of the epistemic subject to break through the pathetique of constitutive subjectivity. This will extend the original Levinasian philosophy is a new direction: we will not have developed an ethics of the subject's infinite responsibility to the other, but a Law to which the Other can pay submission, a Law informed by a shattering of the pathetique of constitutive subjectivity, a Logos that is not constrained by ethnos. In effect, I want to develop a theory of Law as philosophical ethics.
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