Reviewed by: Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance Sam B. Girgus Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. Simon Critchley. London and New York: Verso 2007. Pp. 168. $26.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Simon Critchley begins his argument for a new paradigm for ethics and politics with a description of the “disappointment” (2) that he believes now grips our individual and collective lives. He says a “moral deficit” and a “motivational deficit” make meaningful political life and action impossible (7, 8). He calls this crisis of belief and action a bad case of Nietzschean nihilism. To begin changing this situation, Critchley insists that the ethical experience remains the best means for achieving selfhood and subjectivity. Even after decades of political failure, he argues that ethics and politics each constitute the condition of possibility for the other. Accordingly, Critchley writes a modern manifesto for ethics and politics. He does not simply offer another abstract argument to supersede theories in analytic philosophy that discuss ethics in terms of duty, character, and virtue or consequences. Instead, he argues that the ethical challenge proves inescapable in human experience and indispensable to meaningful political action. Critchley designs a theory of ethics, subjectivity, and politics to restore the motivation to act politically in a revised context of democratic thought and action. The trajectory of Critchley’s thought covers the great body of the modern philosophical tradition from Kant to contemporary continental writings. He writes with a clarity that makes his work accessible to the general reader while also challenging the ethical imagination and critical thinking of his peers in philosophy. In under 150 pages of text, Infinitely Demanding reverberates with the passion and conviction of earlier works of western thought that sought to change how people think and live in tumultuous times. From the outset, he wishes to replace the Kantian theory of autonomy with a paradigm of intersubjective human relationships that characterizes the work of contemporary thinkers such as Levinas and Lacan, among others. This would counter a “post-Kantian” philosophical tradition which “from left to right, from Marx to Heidegger, is dominated by what we might call the autonomy orthodoxy” (36). Seeking to find an “alternative inheritance” that breaks from this orthodoxy, Critchley focuses on the transcendental “moment” when ethical demand challenges autonomy with absolute responsibility for the other. This radical responsibility for the other takes Critchley from another tradition that for many equates knowledge with being in the work of the three H’s—Hegel, Husserl, and Heideggger. Instead of following in footsteps of this line of thinkers toward an ethical theory that centers on such basic concepts as autonomy, the ultimate power of knowledge, and the primacy of being, Critchley concentrates on “the ethical subject in terms of a split between itself and an exorbitant demand that it can never meet, the demand to be infinitely responsible” (40). In choosing this direction, Critchley links Levinas’s philosophy of radical ethical responsibility to Lacan’s controversial work on trauma. Still relatively unknown outside of philosophical and theoretical circles, Levinas has become crucial in contemporary philosophical discussion. From his first important work that was written during five years as a French soldier in a Nazi stalag for Jewish prisoners of war, Levinas extolled an extreme philosophy of absolute responsibility for others as even more important than individual freedom and being. To balance this Levinasian bent, [End Page 647] Critchley proposes a Lacanian “model of sublimation” that cultivates humor, difference, and distance as a vital mechanism for enabling “the subject” to satisfy Levinas’s “ethical demand” without being crushed by it (85). Critchley argues that Levinas and Lacan, who are so different, come together in maintaining that “there is something about the other person, a dimension of separateness” that remains beyond comprehension (66). For Levinas, this distance or otherness, which he terms “alterity,” requires a response of ultimate moral responsibility. Critchley also believes the human condition requires such responsibility even with its concomitant “trauma and lacerating guilt” (67) but that Lacanian theory helps to turn the trauma of separation into “reparation” (69). For “moderns” in “symbolically” and “ethically impoverished” cultures (70–71), Lacanian psychoanalysis manages trauma by putting “the subject in...