Refusals of Responsibility: A Response to Donna Orange and Robert Bernasconi

Abstract

This article responds to Donna Orange’s and Robert Bernasconi’s suggestion that I present a developmental view of ethical subject formation in “Emmanuel Levinas and the 'specter of masochism.’” Arguing that the particular kind of development that underpins Levinas’s account is one of traumatic interruption, I ask what role the ego’s traumatic “prehistory” might play not just in constituting ethical subjectivity but also in closing it down: why is it that ethical hospitality, enabled by what Levinas calls “substitution,” so often finds lived expression in hostile refusals of responsibility? I propose that, to answer these questions, we need to consider Levinas’s “anarchic traumatism” not just from a philosophical but also from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Keywords:

• development
• hospitality
• Levinas
• responsibility
• trauma
• vulnerability
• fear
• violence

Notes

¹ I owe this distinction to Campbell Jones, who offered the term “crisis of refuge” as an alternative to “refugee crisis” during a symposium on “Relationality” held at the University of Otago in November 2015.

² Derrida will do a much better job at that in “A Word of Welcome” (Derrida, 1999) and “Hostipitality” (Derrida, 2000).

³ I suspect Bernasconi and I may be talking at cross-purposes here: the other I have in mind when I make this statement is the other(ed) that the racist or sexist society fears, a fear that finds expression in racially or sexually motivated hate.

⁴ The anthropocentrism of this view of course needs to be—and has been—challenged. See, for example, Calarco (2010).

⁵ That is to say, “traumatized” in the way we might understand traumatization in a psychoanalytic context, where it is likely to trigger highly defensive post-traumatic responses.

⁶ I develop this idea in greater depth in Drichel (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simone Drichel

Simone Drichel, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in the English & Linguistics Programme at the University of Otago.