The Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures
UCLA 2003-2004

The Ethics of the Neighbor

The UCLA Mellon Sawyer Seminar on The Ethics of the Neighbor will investigate the cultural, religious, and political problematics that circulate around the figure of the neighbor, from the biblical texts and post-biblical commentaries that are its origin to its proliferations and mutations in modernity and the contemporary world. Our perspective will be comparative on several levels, beginning with the examination and juxtaposition of the concept of the neighbor as it unfolds in the three major monotheistic religions and the many cultures constellated by them. Moreover, our work will involve texts and events from various historical moments and parts of the world, including Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, as well as lending itself to a global perspective. Our methodology will be interdisciplinary, including the expertise and approaches of scholars from the fields of religious studies, history, literature and literary theory, law, philosophy, political theory, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and government.

Our work over the year of the seminar will be divided into three units roughly defined by three eras of the discourse of the neighbor: Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary.

Our first quarter, “Neighbors of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” will begin by examining the vexed relationship of those three closest monotheistic neighbors around the figure of the neighbor, as a central source of rhetorical and social conflicts that persist into modernity. Our methodology this quarter will be first of all historical and exegetical. It is only through close attention to the primary texts and their histories of interpretation that we can make sense of the complex, often paradoxical, political and social effects that arise from them, in which a single figure or text may be mobilized for several contradictory purposes. In Judaism, the Levitical injunction to neighbor-love is often cited as the highest religio-ethical principle: in one famous Midrash, when a proselyte asks Rabbi Hillel to teach him all of Judaism while he stands on one foot, Hillel offers this distillation of Jewish wisdom: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereof; go and learn it" (Talmud Shabbat 31a). The ethical principle may sound simple, but the commentary is endless, and the Rabbinic tradition reads the midrash as meaning that the kernel of the law is located not in its general formulation, but in the infinite specifics of its interpretation and enactment. The New Testament assertion of the primacy of the commandments to love God and to love the neighbor (cf. Mark 12: 28-33) is an attempt to summarize and replace all of Jewish law with two universal principles. Saint Paul and later Christian thinkers will argue that the neighbor in Judaism refers exclusively to the fellow-Jew, whereas in the New Dispensation, the category of Neighbor will expand to include everyone.

However, in both Judaism and Christianity, another rhetoric of the neighbor is articulated around the figure of Ishmael – the son of Abraham from whom Islam traces its descent – where the difficulties underlying the relationship to the neighbor most clearly emerge. Ever since Abraham's firstborn son and his mother Hagar fled into the wilderness to establish another great nation, parallel to that of Isaac and Jacob, Ishmael has been cast as the threatening neighbor whose very presence is unbearable, as a challenge to any claim of unique divine sanction or right of possession. For Saint Paul, Ishmael is the type of the modern Jew, the “slave,” whereas Christians are seen as deriving from Isaac, the “freeborn” (Gal. 4:22-25). And in later Christian typology, the Muslim was bound to the Jew through the figure of Ishmael. But Islam has its own well-developed account of the neighbor in its ethics and theology: according to key sayings attributed to Mohammed, “He is not a believer who eats his fill when his neighbor beside him is hungry” and “He does not believe whose neighbors are not safe from his injurious conduct”; and “None of you [truly] believes until he likes for his brother what he likes for himself” (Al-Hakim, at-Tabarani and al-Bayhaqi). Indeed, the relationship to the neighbor in Islam is understood not merely as an ethical principle, but as a central determining factor of faithfulness to God – as a litmus test for membership in the universal Nation. Hence in the Qu’ran as well as in Haddith and other commentary and legends, the meaning of neighbor-love continues to be a sight of contention and self-definition, a place in which the ethics of the neighbor is both formulated and enacted.

In the second part of the Sawyer Seminar, “ Modernity and the Neighbor: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis,” we will examine the role of the ethics of the neighbor in the philosophical and ideological transformations that produced modernity. Despite the fact that modernity often represents itself as “enlightened,” as the annulment of particular religious beliefs in the name of universal reason, an account of neighbor love derived from the interaction of the three major monotheisms plays a key role in the conceptual, social, and ethical constitution of modernity. We will begin by considering the ways in which key Kantian concepts depend upon a separation of faith and reason articulated explicitly around the figure of the neighbor. Kant views the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” as it appears in the New Testament as a partial purification of the pathological legalism inherent in its Jewish origins, and as a prototype for the categorical imperative by which he defines ethical reason. Aspects of the social dynamics of “neighborhood” that we earlier examined in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts converge with Kant’s rationalization of the ethics of neighbor-love in Hegel’s theory of society in The Philosophy of Right (1821). There, the neighbor and the neighborhood are transitional concepts located between the “abstract right” accorded the family and the concrete “morality” that only emerges in civil society. In these ethical, philosophical, and social paradigms, which are central to the development of modern theories of the public sphere, the contention in and between Jewish and Christian thought for the meaning of the ethics of the neighbor is repeated on the secular plane.

But beginning already with Kierkegaard’s radical rethinking of the ethics of the neighbor in Works of Love (1847), the neighbor comes to stand for a singularity not so easily generalized. Indeed, Kierkegaard points to the disturbing fact that were the universalized concept of the neighbor to be pushed to its limit, the ideal neighbor would be the dead one – a corpse that passively receives our infinitized love, without the interference of any annoying actual and particular characteristics. Kierkegaard’s critique of idealist ethics in the name of an irrecusable call to neighbor-love establishes the conditions for its modern reappraisal, beyond the opposition of religion and reason. In the remaining meetings of this quarter, we will examine recent accounts of the ethics of the neighbor in philosophy and psychoanalysis that respond to Kierkegaard’s insight, and that have been crucial for the contemporary re-encounter with the neighbor in political and social theory (the topic of the second quarter of the seminar). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud locates the malaise that inevitably accompanies civilization in what he sees as the impossible and even immoral injunction to neighbor-love. Freud argues that every social structure needs to exclude some element it deems pathological, and this is precisely the function the Jews have served in much of the world for centuries. Lacan, however, points out that we can also find hidden in Freud’s repudiation of neighbor-love the seeds of a renewed ethics of the neighbor, one that does not avoid the often repugnant specificity of other people through grand idealizations. And a similar rethinking of the neighbor and neighbor-love occurs in the thought of the Jewish philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, whose work deepens this radical ethical possibility while retracing its tragic conditions in the limits of civilization itself. For Rosenzweig, the ethics of the neighbor must be approached in terms of the “neighboring” relationship of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: each religion has a specific role to play in the work of social and ethical salvation that is their joint task. And for Levinas, the essential imperative of this work is that we support the neighbor’s values and beliefs as different, not merely a reflection of our own. For all these late modern thinkers, although religion has often been the vehicle for the most outrageous of social aggressions, it also offers possibilities for their analysis and even transformation.

Our work in the Mellon Sawyer seminar this quarter will establish the paths by which the ethics of the neighbor passed from religious discourse into modern secular culture and thought, only, towards the end of the twentieth century, and, as if from some only obscurely sensed necessity, to return to these scriptural origins in order to replumb their dark and often troubling depths. And by having followed this trajectory over these first two quarters of the seminar, we will have established an historical logic of the neighbor that will provide us with the tools we will need in the final quarter of our work, and indeed, in the world we find ourselves in today.

The third quarter of the seminar, “Contemporary Situations and the Future of the Neighbor,” will center on case histories which have become emblematic of the failed ethics of the neighbor, such as the Holocaust, the Middle East, Rwanda and Somalia, and the Balkans, as well as try to look forward to a concept of the neighbor yet to come. In the years following the Holocaust, one version of the attempt to come to terms with the immensity of its horror has sought to contextualize it within the history of ethical reason, as the horrific culmination of a certain strand of Enlightenment thought. Adorno and Horkheimer describe German anti-semitism as a triumph of "instrumental reason" in which evil itself became rationalized and institutionalized; in Hannah Arendt's analysis, the Holocaust represents modernity's reinvention of evil in the guise of the banality and impersonality of the bureaucratic state apparatchik. More recent attempts to encounter the Holocaust, however, have probed the more intimate and personal realm of the neighbor, producing on the one hand, accounts of the radical failure of the responsibility of one neighbor for another (those, for example, detailed by Lanzmann, Hilberg, Goldhagen and most recently in Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland), and, on the other, narratives of the good neighbor, "righteous gentiles" and rescuers such as Wallenberg, Schindler, and the villagers of Le Chambon. This new moment can lead both to the fantasmatic pathos of mass identification (as in the Schindler phenomenon) or to a more genuine ethical encounter with the traumatic singularity of moral choices. Many of these problems have recurred in the discourse that has accompanied and diagnosed the violence and hatred raging in the Balkans and the Middle East, once again in the guise of the neighbor and the biblical injunction to neighbor-love. In both situations, it is once again in the relations among the "People of the Book" that we find the deadliest animus and the most callow and sanctimonious evocations of autochthonous origins and divine right of possession.

Today we live in a world dominated by the resurgence of racism, tribalism, and nationalism, a time in which the permeability of national borders in the West and the dissolution of Communism in the East has laid the foundations for the construction of even more intransigent ethnic and class barriers. The realities of economic division and racial hatred haunt the European Community, despite its self-presentation as a model of post-nationalist social organization. In a time when the bankruptcy of the universal ethics of the Enlightenment, the republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the revolutionary goals of communitarianism are taken as a commonplace, it is precisely in the negative space of such common ground that advocates of the possibility of community after Community come to meet. For the ancient and modern thought and culture to be examined in this seminar, the best possibility for escaping the cycles of reciprocal tribal violence, often sustained in the name of the Family, lies in the proximity of the neighbor, and the contingent, transitory, and non-identitarian relationship that the neighbor requires. In these traditions, the neighbor is never seen merely as the object of our sympathy or empathy, through which the subject can come to know and love itself, but as the locus of our desires, the source of our persecutions, and the focus of our cruelty. The task of our Sawyer Seminar will be to examine the ways in which the encounter with the ethics of the neighbor can open the field of community to the meeting of singularities, within and beyond the fields mapped by culture.

It is commonly assumed in this country that American culture is secular or at the very least “non-denominational.” But this is to forget that the U.S. Constitution separates church and state not only to prevent the infiltration of religious ideology into government, but also in order to protect religion from governmental interference. The world we live in is both deeply religious (consciously or not), and increasingly ravaged by religious strife. Nevertheless, it is this very inextricability of religion and the social that perhaps offers the last chance of finding some rapprochement to the struggles that threaten to tear our world apart, from within and without. For, for better or worse, it is religion that provides our fundamental conceptions and vocabularies of authority, freedom, responsibility, the individual, the nation, and universalism – ideas whose value we indeed hold to be self-evident for democracy. It is our hope that a UCLA Mellon Sawyer Seminar in “The Ethics of the Neighbor” will approach this set of difficult issues and imbrications with equanimity, modesty, and optimism.