7 - The Withdrawal of the Body

Summary

Ethical experience, if it is an experience, is from the outset an excessive obsession with the other since, in Emmanuel Levinas's thought, ‘the subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation’. Of course, a meaning-making process, one that demands and thus calls for a proper context, might be carried out later; but only later and only through a negation that aims at obscuring the meaning of ‘affectivity qua affectivity’. This already belated obscuration, already caught up in an economy of retroactivity that corrupts the pre-reflective affect, cannot deny the fundamental fact that the other imposes itself on the self immediately.

For Levinas, proximity to the other arrives ‘first’ as it takes place before the subject having the privilege to reflect and thematise. The self, in a certain sense, offers itself to the other whereas this offering is not the outcome of a subjective act. The exposure to the other reveals that the subject's existence is first and foremost a passivity before the body of the other. This radical notion of proximity conceives of the subject as that which is always already responding to a welcoming that has happened before the self has a chance to choose. It is an originary welcome – the other is already affecting the self. Hospitality is thus based on an originary sociality that is implicated in the structure not of enclosure but of exposure: not a relation between already formed subjects but the condition for the possibility of being a subject. Hospitality is being exposed to affects that cannot be and should not be considered as cognitive: affects as those experiences that make the subject be, not experiences that the subject simply has. The subject does not have sovereignty over its home and self, for hospitality, in its originary sense, frustrates all sovereignty.

Indeed, the self as the host/hostage can react to the arrival of the other, to its visitation, either by welcoming or rejecting. Yet both Levinas and Jacques Derrida maintain that there nevertheless exists the necessity of responding to ‘an incalculable alterity of the other’ as the basis of the ethical condition.