simone weil

The essay on genocide has much in common with the philosopher Simone Weil. There will be a conference on her work at BC on April 23-24, in case any of you are interested.

Fanny

Force of Face

Dear Professor Kearney (and classmates),

Quick question: I've been trying to think about Levinas' face/ethics in relation to Derrida's "Force of Law," and I am wondering where/when the face 'does its work.' I'm in Los Angeles, and don't have the text with me, but from what I remember, in "Force of law" Derrida sets up three movements toward justice (1) Suspention (epoché) of the Law (2) Ghost of undecidability (3) Urgency to act. If that's a fair reading/remembering, when does Levinasian ethics do its work? Is it present in all three steps of these? Does it cause me to suspend the law because ethics happens without a 'third'? Does it cause the haunting of undecidability because I have no way of relating to the Other? Does it demand that I act, as it puts me in the accusative asking me where I am and demanding that I "do not kill" or whatever else it might say? Does it do its work before all of this? Or is comparing these two just a category mistake?

thank you,

Mike

Levinas & Genocide

Yesterday we didn't get to the second article which dealt with Levinasian ethics in view of genocide, particularly the Rwanda Genocide. But I was so confused by this article that I would regret very much missing the chance to ask about the point of this article. Particularly, I'm not sure how genocide fits into Smith's presentation of Levinas. Maybe someone with keener eyes than mine can correct my error, but I didn't see Smith ever discuss genocide in his paper. He discussed homicide quite a lot (despite using the word genocide for it), but genocide doesn't seem to appear except in a brief synthesis of Heidegger's Das Man with Levinas' ethic (a synthesis which he later casts aside as outside the realm of the essay).

So I'm left without exposition and without clue as to how genocide could fit into Levinasian ethics which seem to be very concentrated on the person, the I. Since the I, the single person, can't commit genocide (unless she's very efficient with her time!) but can only participate or command a genocide, I don't understand how any personalist ethic can really be fit neatly to the issue - i.e. it seems that it would require quite a bit of molding to fit Levinas into a discussion of genocide.

And in the end, I'm confused as to the very choice of genocide as a test-case. Assuming that the word still means anything at all aside from being a caricature of everything we don't like in human behaviour (a very generous assumption, in my opinion), I don't understand why Smith chose to address genocide rather than the more applicable-to-Levinas homicide. He seems to insinuate that genocide is an obvious site of radical evil, but aren't there any number of other examples of radical evil in the world? So what makes genocide so special? Is it just the fact that to discuss genocide increases the level of spectacle in a way that discussing infidelity, child abuse, rudeness, &c. wouldn't?

-Gabriel