Strange ethics, stranger politics: Levinas and Vice on escaping the passivity of shame

Abstract

In this article, I put Emmanuel Levinas and Samantha Vice into conversation on the topics of shame and politics to demonstrate how each’s understanding on these can help attenuate shortcomings in the other’s position. Vice’s ethical inquiry into how white South Africans can be and live well, is I argue, problematically conceptualised. This tracks a problematic distinction between shame and guilt respectively, and consequently, undermines Vice’s suggested remedy of political silence. Levinas’s account of ethical subjectivity, in which the self is hostage to the other person, requiring a total apology for its shameful being, however, renders the subject so fundamentally passive that it becomes unclear how the passage to politics can be negotiated. In the first movement of my argument, I deploy Levinas to recast Vice’s project, to be and live well (in South Africa) as an ethical project always already a political project. In the second (but diachronous) movement of my argument, I argue that Vice’s prescription that those implicated in, and continuing to benefit from, systems of oppression should remain politically silent, offers a practical way to cash out Levinas’s zig-zag movement between ethics and politics. A secondary contribution of the article adds to the project of putting analytic moral philosophy (broadly Vice’s position) into dialogue with continental philosophy as exemplified in Levinasian ethics.