Against Ethics or Just Confused?

Comments Spurred by Reading Against Ethics, by John D. Caputo

I like John D. Caputo, I really do.  I like him the way he claims to "love" Levinas or Heidegger: he cites them, uses their work and then nimbly criticizes their excesses.  All to the good, with respect and gentleness.

I like John D. Caputo because he gets so much of what Deconstruction is about, and he wrote a really important book on Derrida (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida) and also other really important and good books about being on the front (?) lines of philosophy as it attempts to cut a new regime of thinking into our discourse.  What could be a more difficult mission than that?

And so these comments, that claim my differences with John (he writes in a way that serves to minimize the propriety of a name, even his own name), are offered in the spirit of a fellow traveler who is out groping into the ....  well, that's the issue.

At issue in the contemporary scene, as I understand it, is what does a post-metaphysical engagement  entail, and what are the parameters (a what?  a how? a call or promise?) with, in and by means of which that engagement transpires?  And then, what does that engagement demand of us in terms of a disposition, a commitment, a construction of a world, and then, an ethic, and even a faculty or method?

John proclaims that our engagements occur in and with the abyssal.  In this vacuum, as I picture it, currents cross and mix and generate ephemeral events on which our sensibility can alight.  Those events, of themselves yield the flesh, which as a surging forth of this eventuation, obligates us to its dimensions, but prescribes nothing to us as to how to enact such an obligation.  "Love and do what you will," he proclaims. "Dilge  [from which the word "diligent" comes] and let events happen," he says. (p. 121)  "We are... all disasters, lost stars, lost in space," he says (p. 233).  And the flesh that obligates us is the eye that doesn't see, the tortured and diseased flesh of the ones who do not even rise to the law.  And then, "Beware of philosophers: they are too much occupied withy strong or healthy people, with autonomous agents and aggressive freedoms.  They miss the disasters." (p. 233-4).

To my ears this sounds like the atheist who clings to the powers of ego to get him through -- even if that ego offers the most ardent sympathy for and empathy with the weak and ill and despised among us.  We alone supply the love, we alone supply the notions and images that elucidate the obligations that rise up through the abyssal muck. It is a picture of the lone human in the dark and forbidding universe, the pre-established and spontaneously arisen creature of mind that conceives and constructs a habitat for himself.  And, yes, it is a very masculine image in my reading.  "Flesh clings to flesh in the anonymity of the night." (p. 247).  Say it ain't so, John.

So I, hardly a philosopher, but loving of the endeavor, offer this notion: The Breakout Creatives: what notion enshrines a greater strength than that?  They present experiments and venture new constellations into which we can follow.  What could be less dis-astrous than that?  So if I am a philosopher -- to beware of -- so be it.  I do not see that the human endeavor rises like a blister on the surface of a fleshed-over abyss.

I see it as a gathering, a singularization out of great and alive cosmic potencies (a la Schelling) that teem with energies that have been left in the wake of the great onwarding that expands the universe and opens new spaces, time/spaces that invites the singular, the events -- of all kinds, and everywhere -- to surge forth.  Some of them stick and organize;  some of these continue their own onwarding and insist on individuating, opening singularization to more expansive and more encompassing modes of engagement with that surging forth of occurrences into the expanses opened by pure cosmic onwarding.

Some of what occurs, as individuated moments -- reaching and groping in order to become more expansive and more encompassing -- are indeed of the flesh.  And this flesh is sometimes glorious and beautiful, and sensate and able to generate organization on scales never before imagined.  Yes, it is obligated flesh to flesh, but it is also response-able to response-able and so, thereby it promises to any occurrence that it will give way to what must needs occur for the event to unfold, for the happening to release and generate in an individuation of its own... and so forth.

Maybe John was in a mood inspired by a quantum vacuum or a Schrodingerian phase shift of superposition -- that was all the rage in the 90's when he wrote this book.  I suspect he has moved on, since he can write so clearly about a Derridian promise, which is anything but abyssally devastated flesh festered on a disaster.

But let me be clear:  the Breakout Creative Project envisions a universe teeming with self-organizing potencies and longings to individuate the spurts of singularities that bode forth in that great spatiation.  Our notion is an ethic, to be sure:  one of generativity, one that promises giving way for a "there" to arise, take and give affect, to rise as flesh and respond as the living boding forth.  Of this stuff, this great star dust, this great astral pleroma we are born and give way to what comes.  Yes, yes.

John, you must hear that by now.