sexta-feira, 8 de dezembro de 2017

















"Simon Dawes: 
In her article in the special section of this Journal, 
Julia Hell identifies a frequent emphasis on acts of looking in your writing. 

What is the link, for you, between looking and ‘the other’, 
or how significant for you is the gaze of/at ‘the other’?

Zigmunt Bauman:
 

I guess Julia Hell is right, the visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and “seeing” supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception. 
No different seems to be the constitution of Levinas’s, my ethics teacher’s, perception/imagination: it is the sight of l’Autre that triggers the moral impulse and recasts me as a moral subject through exposing me and surrendering/subordinating to the object of my responsibility (this happens already before l’Autre has a chance to open her/his mouth, and so before any demands or requests could be heard by me…) – even if the tactile, the caress, is a better metaphor for Levinas’s model of what follows the awakening of the moral self.
What is in my view unmentioned and missing however in Julia’s awesomely insightful vivisection of the “gaze”, is another variety of gaze – tremendously important in the unpacking of the complex eyes-and-ethics relation. The gaze which she so perceptively and inspiringly focuses on, the Orphic gaze, is so to speak a “killing-through-love” or “murder by love” gaze (though also, potentially, saving/liberating). There is also however a “Panwitz gaze” as experienced, spotted and vividly reconstructed by Primo Levi: a “killing-through-unconcern” or, more adequately, “murder-by-indifference” gaze, a gaze immune to the bacillus of morality, inoculated against the responsibility-awakening impact of meeting-an-Other. I believe that tracing the societal ways and means of replacing Orpheus’ gaze with Panwitz’s, of stripping the gaze of its inborn ethical power (the process I dub “adiaphorization”), is quite crucial to any serious attempt to map the convoluted and contorted itinerary of moral self inside the liquid-modern world…"



Zigmunt Bauman in conversation with Simon Dawes:
https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-with-zygmunt-bauman/




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