Levinas Unhinged by Tom Sparrow

Author:Tom Sparrow [Sparrow, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2013-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

When we actually attempt to think the system of radical interdependence we find ourselves caught up in, we are forced to think what Morton calls “the ecological thought.” The ecological thought requires us to try to imagine all the beings that make up our ecosystems as well as the links between every one of these ecosystems, or the totality of strange strangers. A strange stranger is a being—human, animal, other—that is simultaneously intimate with and foreign to me. The more you look at and learn about this intimacy, the more foreign the strange stranger seems. This is the nature of its strangeness and the effect it has on our thinking.16 The strange stranger is not just some exotic species of insect or weed that lives on the far side of the planet, vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change: it is your closest neighbor or housecat or long-term partner. “The more we know them, the stranger they become.” Their strangeness derives precisely from the fact that we can never anticipate or know them, from the way their familiarity becomes so familiar it becomes quite unfamiliar, like a word you say over and over and over and over again until you are convinced that you are not pronouncing it properly. It sounds so weird all of a sudden! This is the strangeness of infinity, which demonstrates just how intimacy serves to intensify foreignness.17 It is particularly disarming to acknowledge that it is precisely this strangeness that commands us ethically, that calls for our humility and caution. The strange stranger is the face(lessness) of infinity, the specter of a responsibility that exceeds us.

Facelessness

To think the ecological thought it is not enough to encounter the strange stranger face-to-face and be struck with the weirdness of its intimacy. And it is not enough to imagine the immense network of things that make up ecological life. The ecological thought requires us to recognize that there is no adequate perspective on the environment that would enable us to look it in the face. The environment faces us from every angle; it is everywhere we look and everywhere we don’t. It both surrounds us and inhabits us and in the final analysis this means that we have no inside or outside, and thus we ourselves are nothing other than one of the strange strangers that haunt us. And if it is true that climate change, for example, or any of the other “hyperob-jects” identified by Morton, presents us with an environmental crisis that requires ethical and political responses, then we have good reason to be terrified at how the ecological thought resists our capacity to think it at the same time as it commands us to think it.

When we try to imagine the threat to ecological life posed by the climate crisis, we are met with the kind of horror that Levinas attributes to the il y a, bare existence, or the night in its purest darkness. This is because, while science shows that humanity does in fact play

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