Skip to main content

The ingratitude of the other in the Maussian circle

In "The trace of the Other", Levinas describes the movement without return towards the other as requiring "a radical generosity of the same who [...] goes unto the other" and also " but also "requires an ingratitude of the other". He adds that "[g]ratitude would be in fact the return of the movement to its origin". The return of the movement to its origin is pŕecisely the Maussian circle - the circle of perpetual gratitude, described by Mauss, that makes everyone tied to a social structure by a state of contunuous debt. The Maussian circle is hard to escape because it involves every social act in a scheme of debts and gratitude - it is a total social fact that reaches beyond any supposedly defined economic realm. A gift of any kind brings in itself the poison of a possible hostility because it produces a burden upon whoever receives it. The gift is tied to an often vague but enforced norm of retribution that is always in the brink of paving the way for hostility. Ingratitude would be a way out - and in fact could be understood as a different cybernetic movement, a cybernetically positive movement of ceasing to feed back the social circle and rather stop nourishing it and taking its forces away.

Ingratitude is a cyberpositive way out of the circle. It can take two routes: the one of the self-serving greed, which is the ingratitude of one's own - embrace ingratitude myself - and the one of making sure the other is not compelled or fully unable to reciprocate - forcing ingratitude on the other. These two ways involve some kind of immunity, or some kind of anonymity; say, I can escape unnoticed with the money or I can place the money unnoticed in someone else's pocket. I can force my immunity from the Maussian circle of gratitude - and become anonymous and no longer part of a social identity - or I can force a circumscribed immunity on the other. To be sure, the latter is not to tell the other to escape her responsibility to reciprocate because this would amount to an ingratitude of one's own. Rather, to promote the ingratitude of the other is to make sure reciprocation is not even considered - typically because the gift itself was anonymous. In both cases, anonymity brings about a cyberpositive circuit - either as unbound accumulation or as infinite responsibility.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more