Gérard Bensussan Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #314.1

Since this preface, intended for my Japanese readers—who have sometimes understood me better than my French readers!—gives me the opportunity, I would like to begin by recalling these hypotheses. On the one hand, I will summarize the content that underpins this book, and on the other hand, I will recall some complementary observations about nihilism or conatus, as I have presented them in several texts published over the past two or three years.

Two massive questions, by no means original in themselves, guided the writing of this book.

The first concerns what one could call the condition of possibility of morality insofar as it is subject to a prior relation to the otherness of others. In general, when one speaks of morality, one speaks of modes of relations with others, rules, prescriptions, norms, customs, of course, according to the Latin etymology of the word. These mores, from which morality derives its very name, only make sense in the interpersonal or intersubjective relationship, in being-with-the-Other, or in being-together, through which there opens the relation between morality and politics, and the question of the passage, or not, from one to the other. If there were no other, if I were alone in the world as on a deserted island, would morality still be required, conceivable, consistent? In other words: are there “duties to oneself”? Can there be an ethical concern for oneself, independent of any relation to others? How can one think of an ethics of the self without others, before others, outside of others?

Countless authors have attempted to define the difference between ethics and morality. Ricoeur, for example, tried to establish a clear distinction between morality as a binding system of rules, and ethics as the pursuit of the good life.

It should already be noted, as I recall in the book, that the two words, morality and ethics, mean the same thing if one considers their history and etymology: Cicero indeed translated the Greek ta ethica into Latin as philosophia moralis. But then how and why did the same thing historically branch into two increasingly leafy domains? The criterion of relation to otherness seems to have determined this distinction. This intersects another central question in the book, closely associated with it: that of sensibility, what Kant calls the “sensible motive.”

Can morality be founded on reason alone, or must it rather proceed from a feeling, an affective resource, a lived ordeal? Everyone knows very well, Schopenhauer ironically noted, that the moral act and the rational act are two absolutely different domains, and only Kant thinks—or pretends to think—that they are homologous or convergent.

One can therefore hold that morality, in the broad sense, is determined from the concrete, relational, and subjective experience of the otherness of others. These two aspects of the questioning—otherness and sensibility—are constantly intertwined. To acknowledge the heterogeneity of morality and reason, it is enough to observe that an act commanded by reason is not necessarily moral. Reason can ally with evil—this is its Faustian vocation, realized in its disastrous instrumentalization in the service of unacknowledged passions. Conversely, an act can be moral and at the same time unreasonable. Excessive charity, self-sacrifice, can be so oblative, so excessive, that it carries its author into distress, misery, disaster.

Rousseau, invoked by Schopenhauer, established that morality always proceeds from what he calls, at the beginning of Emile, “the feeling of existence,” the feeling of life or power. The “innate repugnance to see one’s fellow suffer,” from which “all social virtues, generosity, clemency, humanity, flow,” constitutes, he explains, a “principle prior to reason.” As it precedes reflection, pity naturally has the vocation to determine morality from this indivisible core that is the feeling of existence, “feeling life.” Reason, if it has its part—to mediate between customs and laws, between morality and politics—comes afterward. It has no existential virtue; it is foreign to this feeling of existing in which morality is rooted. Rousseau here is strangely close to Nietzsche’s Machtgefühl (feeling of power), but also to Levinas’s anarchic pre-origin.

Placing pity at the foundation of morality implies that morality itself is determined by otherness, since compassion is, in any case, compassion toward another. This is the deduction Schopenhauer draws: what carries the moral value of an act is that it affects another, for the better, so that any “ethics of the self,” in the sense that Foucault, reading the Ancients, tried to define its contours, is called into doubt—not in its existential possibility but in its properly moral value. The very idea of a moral law founded a priori, in necessity and universality, then seems to lose all meaning. One could, at best, deduce this moral law, but certainly not posit it as a foundation. If it were a priori, that is, necessary, it would be ipso facto effective. It could not not exist—whereas it must exist, according to Kant himself, who added moreover that it is possible and conceivable that to this day no moral act has ever been performed.

The Two Morals proceeds from these interrelated questions about otherness, sensibility, and the place of rationality in moral action. In a second step, the work strives to describe a topography—this is for me the absolutely central stake of all our moral questions and perplexities, and since the publication of the book, I have continued this work of topological determination in several texts.

What does this topography mean, what is it?

Nietzsche already observed the existence of a “separation of morality” (Scheidung der Moral), a division between a morality “that looks straight in the eyes” and is enacted face to face, on one hand; and on the other a morality of “functional ends” and “human needs,” as he said—a “separation” between “functional needs” on the one hand, and “face-to-face” on the other.

This topography, where two territories adjoin and distinguish themselves, was truly explored by Levinas, who showed the fundamental heterogeneity of ethical proximity—either the face-to-face, the Two, on one side; and justice for all, the political or societal sphere where the multiplicity of subject-citizens unfolds, on the other side.

The face-to-face (which corresponds to what Levinas calls “ethics”) is governed by asymmetry, non-interchangeability, by the shock of singularities each time irreplaceable. Whereas the socio-political field (“justice”), what is exchanged among many, based on norms and prescriptions valid for all, where equality, anonymity, and interchangeability of places reign and must reign, cannot admit the uniqueness of the other, of their “face.”

Two spheres, then, without any apparent passage between them in Levinas.

I have tried in this book to extend the Levinasian topological distinction (proximity/justice, face-to-face/society) to analyses that exceed it: love, violence, hospitality, justice, forgiveness—through which one can observe the heuristic relevance and thematic fertility of the Levinasian distinction.

It should perhaps be recalled here that the fundamental originality of Levinas’s project consists to trace subjectivity back to its pre-anthropological archi-origin. Levinasian ethics conceives the relation to the other man as encounter, the unexpected, the event, an irruptive breach, and, more radically, consequently, as a relation to the infinite. The face, place of the irruptive breach, is, in its absolute exposure, the trace, the no-place. The face is a central metaconcept of Levinas’s thought, as is known, but its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. It is undefinable, while authorizing, from it but outside of it, all definitions. To define it would be to forget the infinite it signifies and to reproduce a monstrous ontology of the face. Indeed, if the other is what they are, that is, if they are defined and whatever the contents of their definition, if they are confined in an essence, they are no longer the other; they are what they are, they are their being. These are therefore never being-properties, properties that are and make the other, in their otherness as a singular subject, but their face as without determinate qualities, not being identifiable.