15 2Terada

Preface: Approaching Proximity
Rei Terada
University of California, Irvine
terada@uci.edu

(c) 2005 Rei Terada.
All rights reserved.

1. Ethics and Politics of Proximity reflects on the
contemporary state of thought about proximate others, whether
they be like or unlike oneself, neighbors, friends, rivals, or
enemies. Coming from disparate disciplines (politics, literary
studies, and architecture) and using heterogeneous principles,
these essays by Robert Meister, Laura O'Connor, and Dana Cuff
show that proximity is a testing ground for struggles between
politics and ethics and for models of border cultures and shared
space. Proximity, the afterlife of approach, also retains the
trace of time in spatial relations; no consciousness of
proximity exists without at least a hypothesis of how one came
to be near, whether one arrived before or after the other.
Various discourses of proximity, however, may stress or repress
temporal questions. In his essay for this issue, Robert Meister
calls the "ethics of the neighbor a spatializing discourse
within ethics, as distinct from a 'temporalizing' discourse that
subordinates ethics to political rhetorics associated with
memory and identity." Microinvestigations in the ethological
field of "proxemics"--the study of such things as how close to
one another we like to stand and speak--also reflect the always
changing power relations between parties without necessarily
offering a historical account of how these came to be, as Dana
Cuff points out in her study of suburban architecture. In the
uneasy territory of proximity, interactions that are not
explicitly political must still be recognized or repressed as
ambiguously so because of their place in a sequence of other
exchanges.

2. Contemporary theory has been nervous about proximity. In
the 1980s and early 1990s, critical theory and cultural studies
often repeated that one should not identify too closely with the
other. Too easy identification, by this logic, is said to
fantasize harmony and mistranslate or appropriate the other's
communication. This seemingly self-critical suspicion of
identification, however, may also flatter the self by
attributing too much power to it. Arguably, it wishfully
aggrandizes the self's capacities in the mode of restraint.
Shielding the autonomy of the other can turn into the comedy of
cultural critics' protecting their objects of study from a
totalizing force that these same critics could never actually
muster. In a redundant act of magical thinking, cultural theory
was sometimes called on to safeguard differences even as those
differences were posited as inevitable. Fifteen years later
contemporary formulations of the ethics of proximity as opposed
to its politics tend to take an even more radically self-
subjugating form. Even as the stricture on identification
remains largely in place, current schematizations of proximity
often underestimate the difficulty of bearing with others, or
masochistically embrace it. Contemporary ethics in the lineage
of Levinas figures the other as an overpowering given that makes
assymetrical, ultimate demands; the subject endorses the pain of
invasion as the very condition of subjectivity. Levinas's
extreme version of responsibility at least has the merit of
stressing the subject's suffering. In Lacanian formulations, the
suffering of self and other can be relegated to the realms of
the imaginary. Eric Santner's Psychotheology of Everyday Life
mobilizes Franz Rosenzweig's accounts of the banal heroism of
life among one's neighbors in order to suggest that each subject
must bear the burden of the other's unconscious. For Alain
Badiou, the philosophy of Paul represents the possibility of
overcoming the sectarian strife that Badiou attributes to over-
attention to differences. Badiou and Slavoj Zizek give the
Pauline equivalence of self and other a Lacanian twist, arguing
that the relation of neighbor to self reflects the strangeness
and externality of the self to itself. Nonetheless, Zizek
insists, the "common void" in us and between us provides a basis
for a reorganization of psycho-social life.

3. These forms of proximity--upon me, too close to me, in me
more than me--suggest a persistent lack of vocabulary for
untraumatic relation. Santner's position in particular is
worth examining at greater length, since Santner understands the
necessity of working through resistance to proximity. He shows
how in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig comes to view the
repeated friction of small acts of communal involvement as the
texture of love, and eventually compares the attitude Rosenzweig
recommends with the analyst's toward the analysand:

What Freud and Rosenzweig have done, then, is to elaborate the
ethical relation introduced into the world by Judeo-Christian
monotheism--love of God as love of neighbor--as the basis of a
distinctly modern ethical conception: my ability to endure the
proximity of the Other in their "moment of jouissance," the
demonic and undying singularity of their metaethical selfhood
(in Freud's view, it is perhaps only psychoanalysts who--at
least ideally--embody this ethical attitude). To put it most
simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is
the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of
animation that belongs to no form of life. To cite Freud's
characterization of the Ratman, the face of the Other to whom I
am answerable is one that in some form or another manifests a
"horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself [is]
unaware." (82)

4. The phrase in parenthesis is crucial, since for Freud
analysis is possible only because it is not simply a part of
everyday life, and everyday life in the mode of the analyst's
hypothetically infinite patience would be cruel. Further,
enduring another's sexual horror as the type of neighbor
relation in the love of God is frighteningly close to
internalizing parental seduction. Jean Laplanche asks whether
one might compare the sexualized messages of parents to children
to the demands of God: "That God is enigmatic, that He compels
one to translate, seems obvious in the entire Judaeo-Christian
tradition of exegesis. Whether this enigma presupposes that the
message is opaque to Himself is plainly a different question.
Does God have an unconscious?" (191). Santner adduces Laplanche
in order to argue that "every symbolic investiture" of
personhood--beginning with the primal scene as unconscious
display--produces a "kernel of 'indignity'" about which we
incline to be defensive, but toward which Rosenzweigian love may
be open (84-85). Here as in Levinas, the difficulties of
proximity are fully acknowledged only to advocate even greater
proximity. The subject is to be "release[d]" from its "labors to
translate superegoic pressure into a meaningful
communication/legislation" by the logic that working to escape
the pressure only mires the subject more deeply (104). Although
Freud and Laplanche might agree that escape fantasies can
perpetuate the wrong kind of excitement, they do not, like Lacan
and Zizek, lose their sense of outrage at psychic invasion and
the rightfulness of one's desire to escape it. The project of
analyzing and undoing interpellated messages may be
interminable, but still, according to Laplanche, "the
development of the human individual is to be understood as an
attempt to master, to translate, these enigmatic, traumatizing
messages.... Analysis is first and foremost a method of
deconstruction (ana-lysis), with the aim of clearing the way for
a new construction, which is the task of the analysand" (165).
This series of associations--from banal contact to parental
seduction by God--suggests that the memory of psychic intrusion
may lie behind our objection to the frictive presence of
proximate others. "Being able to bear the institutions and the
people we depend upon is called masochism," Adam Phillips
suggests (49).

5. It may be the case that relation is unsustainable, as Freud
suspects in Civilization and Its Discontents, even as we survive
it. If so, it is not clear what our attitude toward this state
of affairs should be. I'd suggest simply that this question
should be approached as much as possible without presuppositions
and a priori moral obligations. We feel so guilty about having
difficulty with fundamental sociality that we do not even know
what we think before we impale ourselves on imagined
inexorabilities that bear their own social and political
consequences. Analysts are familiar with patients who rush to
submit to imaginary laws just to end the discomfort of mixed
feelings toward others and the pressures of choice. Ethics and
politics could take a page from prosaic clinical literature and
simply hold ambiguities in mind longer to see what they may be
composed of.

6. The particular combinations of attraction and repulsion in
proximate relations and the histories of conflict that create
them should bear in some way on one's responsibility to someone
else. Even the best proximate relations contain particular knots
of love-hate. The difference between working through with Freud
and "going through the fantasy" with Lacan may be remaining
alive to the contingent forces that produce these knots and
coming up with the empiricist empathy to undo them at length.
Although I don't speak for the authors of these essays, as their
reader I admire their taking the time to dwell in the details of
proximate entanglements--the logics of victims' and victors'
justice (Meister), the poetic forms of intimate ethnic rivalry
(O'Connor), the disparate imaginary neighbors projected by
architectural conventions and innovations (Cuff). Their
unblinking descriptions of historical dilemmas help us
understand the political and power relations that have made the
ethics of proximity difficult to bear.

Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
terada@uci.edu

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Notes

1. The essays by Meister and Cuff, as well as this preface, are
products of "The Ethics of the Neighbor," a seminar sponsored by
the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The
authors would like to thank Kenneth Reinhard, convener of the
seminar, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the Institute, for
the opportunity to do this research.

2. See also Derrida's comment on the figure of the neighbor in
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason: "Perhaps in the discussion to
follow I might be able to elaborate on a series of values most
often associated with that of the brother: the values of the
neighbor [prochain] (in the Christian sense), the fellow, the
compeer or the like [semblable] (the enormous question of the
like: I tried to argue in my seminar this year that pure ethics,
if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the
other as the absolute unlike, recognized and nonrecognizable,
indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition
and all recognition: far from being the beginning of pure
ethics, the neighbor as like or as resembling, as looking like,
spells the end or the ruin of such an ethics, if there is
any....)" (60).

3. A deconstructive version of the argument against losing the
other through overcloseness occurs in Derrida's Memoires for
Paul de Man. This is the form in which I've found the argument
most convincing.

4. Badiou's Paul prescribes the redoubling of a local imperative
into a universal one: "it is incumbent upon love to become law
so that truth's postevental universality can continuously
inscribe itself in the world, rallying subjects to the path of
life." For Badiou, Paul's ontology is empty because his
Christianity is based on its most fabulous element, the
Resurrection; Paul "knows that by holding fast to this point as
real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that surrounds it"
(4-5). Badiou's logic is a version of traditional metaphysics'
historical contempt for "merely empirical" experience figured as
a burden.

5. See, for example, his gloss on Badiou in The Ticklish
Subject, which phrases the foundational nature of the void in
even more general terms: "There is no Order of Being as a
positive ontologically consistent Whole: the false semblance of
such an Order relies on the self-obliteration of the Act. In
other words, the gap of the Act is not introduced into the Order
of Being afterwards: it is there all the time as the condition
that actually sustains every Order of Being" (238).

6. Perhaps untraumatic relation that respects the rights of the
self is unpopular because it has too often been the domain of
socially conservative theories of market force. Yet there is
nothing necessary, and a great deal that is tense, about the
connection of self-respect to capitalism.

7. For a defense of Freudian mourning pitched against Lacan, see
Ricciardi.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. 1997.
Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile
Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia
UP, 1986.

. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.

Laplanche, Jean. "Interpretation between Determinism and
Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem." Essays on
Otherness. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 138-
65.

. "Seduction, Persecution, Revelation." Essays on Otherness.
Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 166-96.

Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other
Appetites. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Ricciardi, Alessia. The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis,
Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Santner, Eric. On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life:
Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2001.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of
Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.