Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. By Simon Critchley. New York: Verso Press, 2007; pp.168. $26.95 Cloth. To be blunt, Critchley is on it. His recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an outstanding series of threads involving ethics, the Other, and subjectivity all woven into a wonderful tapestry of critical theory and guidelines for a new politics. The tapestry shares some of the tattered edges of similar attempts to negotiate ethics and universalism (Bandrillard's "ironic subjectivity," Hardt and Negri's "multitude," Derrida's "new international," and Cixious' "feminine gift economy" to name a few). These tattered edges, meaningful but not enough to diminish the value of the tapestry involve slight internal contradictions, excessive optimism in face of excessively pessimistic descriptions of the status quo, and a tendency toward the abstract over the specific; but Critchley's contributions remain complementary and unique. Critchley's advocacy of ethical subjectivity is a political project, as he would admit, both bridging the gap between active and passive nihilism as well as moving beyond an ideological ethics that would contain our daily demands to the realm of possibility and state agency. This ambitious task borrows extensively from Levinas, Badiou, and Lacan as well as Knud Ejler Logstrup's defense of "the unfulfillable demand." This demand is for infinite justice, infinite compassion, and infinite progress. Critchley's political sensibility is essentially an individual anarchy attempting to hold on to an ethics based on responsibility for the Other, even if that responsibility manifests as a traumatic condition on the self or a demand that is perpetually impossible. That is the argument in a nutshell--not a nut far from Badiou's push for a militant and unyielding drive for ethical truths in St. Paul--but a slightly different presentation of the nut that is more afraid of Nietzsche's criticism of group moralizing than of Badiou's fear of "ethical ideology" or Levinas' concern that judgments about or on the Other will dehumanize and devalue the Other. What does this mean? It means that Critchley starts and finishes with political disappointment--a disappointment that stems from an internalization of apathy and nihilism (and may even preclude consideration of politics in the first place) as well as an over-reliance on a meta-narrative using ethics to promote a particular worldview. When he borrows from Logstrup, for example, Critchley goes further than to simply establish a responsibility or obligation to the Other. He contends that "one's existence is completely at stake in relation to the other person and to fail the other is to fail that existence irreparably." (51) This demand on the self is continual and never satisfied or resolved, but it is the process of pursuit that generates the ethical imperative, borrowing from the subtitle, an "Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance." When the argument gets more intricate later in the debate, the concrete examples stem from more theoretical constructions of major authors rather than a streaming contextualization for what this means in distinct instances. …