ABSTRACT
The question of who “the other” is, or who is designated in the commandment “love thy neighbour as thy self”, is the starting point for Calum Neill’s contribution, The excluded in identification. In reference to Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir (2008), the author emphasises the absence in the protagonist’s memory which marks his lost memory of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. According to Levinas’ (1982) interpretation of these events, the Palestinians have become, not the neighbours, but, seemingly because unjust or wrong, the enemy. Freud interprets the same commandment quite differently in Civilisation and its Discontents, where it is the very fact that the neighbour is not kin, is not closest, that becomes problematic. His emphasis is on the impossibility of extending the love of the dyadic relationship to the wider world. He furthermore objects that my love is a sign of my preference for my family and friends; “to put a stranger on a par with them would be to do them an injustice” (Freud, 1930a ). This interpretatory discrepancy leads to the question of whether the ethical consists in a mode of identification, or whether, in order to be ethical, it must exceed the bounds of identification. Where identification is key, the author argues, there is necessarily that which is excluded in identification which demands response-a demand which marks the beginnings
of the possibility of the ethical. Kierkegaard (1847) advocates love of one’s neighbour as a non-preferential love, one that renounces distinctions. Since it does not depend on any extraneous perfection in the object, he argues that such love is the perfection of love. Žižek’s response is to argue that as death is what removes all distinctions, the only good neighbour, according to Kierkegaard’s argument, would be a dead neighbour. Thus Kierkegaard’s love for the neighbour, devoid of any particularity, misses out on, to Žižek, what is difficult in love. As against this, he suggests we “love the other because of his or her very imperfection” (2002, p. 214). Neill argues that we can understand Freud’s and Kierkegaard’s descriptions of passionate preferential love as another form of self-love on the basis of Lacan’s account of misrecognition in the mirror stage, where the child’s idea(l) of itself is created on the basis of a desire to resemble, or become, the external other. While relations with the other, he argues, are bound in a logic of identification, the danger lies in allowing such identification to be mistaken as true recognition of the other’s particular characteristics. The otherness of the other would be experienced beyond identification and recuperation, but such a beyond can only figure in subjective experience as the limitations of the symbolic and imaginary frameworks. It is beyond identification and recuperation that we would experience the other, but such a beyond cannot be experienced in itself, that is, it can only insist at the limits of the symbolic and imaginary frameworks. While the other, to Husserl (1931), is logically subordinated to the perceiving self, a Lacanian conception insists on the persistence of that which cannot be recuperated to such an identification, that which was never reducible to the ego. The Lacanian subject, in coming to be, can be seen as the very split between the imaginary self-present ego and the indeterminable otherness within. Lacan (1949), argues the author, lets us appreciate the illusion inherent to the identification we tend to start with. The possibility of ethics, he suggests, might lie in this realisation of the false and fragile premise of our self-and other-identification, suggesting the possibility of a prising open of the constricts of the same to make room for the possibility of the utterly other.
