Epilogue
The Practice of Recommencing: Toward a Cosmopolitanism of the Dispossessed Belonging

We are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory. Yet this does not suggest that “theory” is over and that we can relievedly return to the age of pretheoretical innocence (Eagleton 2003: 2). After all, this is not the first time that theory has been reported dead and nothing stimulates it more than the proclamation of its death (McQuillan et al. 1999: 9). This déjà vu effect of theory’s burial introduces a disturbing equivocation with the “post-“ in post-theory. How can something be after and therefore new with regard to the past if it already happened before and is therefore old, i.e. a constituent of the same past? The unexpected revival of the surmounted mode of thinking – an operation associated by Freud (1947: 232) with “the uncanny” – redoubles the present in the past by suddenly making strange that which hitherto was familiar (Royle 1999: 13). Something that seemed to have been overcome surprisingly turns out to have determined the overcomer from the outset by forcing him or her to affirm the supposedly discarded beliefs against his or her will.

Whichever post-theorist misapprehends this fundamental equivocation of the relationship between theory and post-theory, taking post-theory to simply mean the irrevocable passing of theory, makes him or herself responsible for the regression into the pre-theoretical condition of common sense. In taking such a common sense attitude, however, s/he polices the others, which in Rancière’s terms means: imposes on them a “consensus.”6 What characterizes such a post-theory qua pretheory, which unfortunately dominates today’s theoretical scene, is the establishment of a transcendental platform such as History, Politics, Culture, the Aesthetic or Life as a matter of course. Such a platform is proclaimed to invisibly determine all the visible empirical data in the same way God determines all earthly beings (Bennington 1999: 104–107). In the various forms of today’s post-theory qua pretheory we are witnessing such quasi-universal conditions of possibility raised to the consensual basis of all differentiation, or an a priori agreement on what the difference is. Difference thus becomes an object of observation allowing the observer to safely exempt himself/herself from its disturbing operation. The final objective of that self-exemption is the commanding institutional position of the “Police.” Yet the problem such a policing has to confront is that, even though the observer, by disengaging his or her empirical restrictions, envisions sensus communis in the emancipating meaning of public sense, him or her nonetheless, in the final account, materializes sensus communis in the restrictive meaning of common sense. In Kantian vocabulary, s/he substitutes the sensus communis logicus for the sensus communis aestheticus (2007: 124–125). Since common sense is by definition restricted, his or her truth cannot but miss universal validity.

Feverishly and systematically counteracting such undesired failures, theory, seen in retroactive perspective, proved to be passionately attached to its own sovereignty. It hardly strived to maintain the superiority of its subject or, to put it with Rancière, the “pedagogic relationship” between the master and the pupil, the knower and the one who lives in illusion (Rancière 2011a: 144). The pedagogical truth can come into being only against the background of delusions or, more accurately, through the dismantling of previous truths as delusions. The truth of the master who “knows better” can be affirmed only through the derogation of the truth of the pupil who knows less. The development of literary theory in the twentieth century testifies to the perseverance of such “pedagogic relationship” in exemplary ways.

As long as post-theory insists on its definite break with “deluded” theory as it predominantly does today, it appears that it follows this unfortunate tradition of policing the others. Confronted with the rising violence, destruction and extinction of our “age of extremes,” post-theorists, in a kind of compensatory maneuver, create for themselves a well-protected, allegedly all-encompassing and all-commanding “observatory.” Yet in order to achieve such a remedial quasisovereignty, they subject to epistemic violence – in a typically policing manner – not merely their object, but also the putative transcendental condition they claim to be affirming by their activity. For example History, after being unilaterally reduced to the perspective of the victors, becomes a divine authority entitled to pass judgments on all human lives equally, their unequal chances within its frame notwithstanding. But although historical propulsion raised to the transcendental condition implies expulsion as the condition of its possibility, it obliterates this discrimination inherent to it. Conceived in progressive teleological terms History conceals its innumerous collateral victims.

Not only History suppresses its internal equivocation, but at the other side of the power spectrum also the Subaltern. Turned into the blankness of the Radical Other – for its part an unquestioned transcendental platform -, it enables the establishment of the sovereign agency of the postcolonial theorist. As Gayatri Spivak (1999b: 358) has cautioned, while speaking in the name of the putative muteness of the subaltern, in the final analysis the émigré intelligentsia detaches itself from that “racial underclass.” Ironically enough, it thereby spontaneously reintroduces the founding operation of the Enlightenment against which it otherwise persistently argues. That is to say, it makes the subaltern legible only within the field of the political in which the theorist conceives his or her inquiry (Spivak 2008: 24), applying to it the finite responsibility of law instead of the infinite responsibility of justice, which accepts no rules in advance. If the subaltern wants to be recognized, it has to comply with the politically given norms by suppressing its inassimilable difference and heterogeneous axiomatic (Cherniavsky 2011: 157). Hence what might be called the an-archic and ec-static relationship between the observer and the observed – as they are both discontinuous and dislocated with regard to one another – is erased in favor of the observer’s spatial-temporal sovereignty.

Claire Colebrook (2011: 70) interprets such a self-exemption of the posttheoretical observer followed by the exposure of the observed object as a kind of “reaction formation” or remedial operation of a theorist befallen and disconcerted by its putative “object.” The only alternative way she sees for a theory determined not to pervert its “after” into “before,” i.e., not to let its judgments relapse into common sense prejudices, is to subvert such a self-deluding compensatory imaginary or the wish-fulfilling fantasy of the transcendental platform by establishing the obligation of post-theory to protect its antecedent in lieu of triumphantly overcoming it. Theory should be attentively taken care of by post-theory instead of being revolutionarily disposed with or left behind forever. Whenever post-theory introduces such a decisive political interval by simply “burying” theory, it inadvertently falls into pre-theory. Its après coup degenerates into a déjà vu. Only if it searches for the ethical interaction with and remains loyal to its predecessor can it paradoxically interrupt him/her in favor of something new.

For this reason the prefix “post-“ in post-theory, like that in postmodernism or postmemory for that matter, does not merely indicate the temporal sequel or break, but also stresses the ongoing influence of the former on the latter and the profound relationship between the two (Hirsch 2012: 5–6). This political (or dissensual) sense of the “after” in “after theory” or the “post-“ in “post-theory” that engenders a much more complex relationship than is the policing “pedagogical” one, meets an instructive further elaboration in the booklet Life.after.theory (Payne and Schad 2003). The significant www-punctuation of the title strategically introduces discontinuity both into its logical and temporal continuity, which obviously contradict each other. If we follow the logical continuity, then life appears to be always-already theoretical; if we follow the temporal continuity, then the age of theory is replaced by the age of life. In short, punctuation introduces discontinuity in both of these continuous inferential trajectories. It follows that neither does life fully replace theory nor is it thoroughly theoretical from the outset. Instead of such an easy substitution of the one sovereignty for another, an inassimilable “spectral surplus” interrupts the asymmetric “pedagogical” relationship between theory and life, as does the one between post-theory and theory or the observer and the observed for that matter. Due to the intervention of that surplus, between the agencies (placed at the commanding position of the delineated “oppositions”) and enablers (located at the commanded position) arises a paradoxical conjunctive disjunction that breaks the clear-cut policing terms of their relationship, multiplies and disperses both “agencies” and “enablers.” In such a way, a complex political relationship between them saturated with a number of ethical stakes comes into being. This peculiar political-ethical relationship has been attentively examined in the alternative tradition of thought that we are going to engage in the following.

As one of the prominent philosophers of the so called ethical encounter, Jacques Derrida, in a round-table discussion from 2001 titled “Following theory” pointed out the strange alliance between the theorist’s fidelity to the text (the latter figuring as a kind of the Doppelgänger of the theorist’s constitutively absent interlocutor) and the betrayal of it. As I am trying to indicate by introducing into Derrida’s discussion the concept of the Doppelgänger,7 in the final account he claims that the “object” of theoretical observation, due to its “spectrality,” is unavailable in terms of the theorist’s spatial-temporal belonging. Assuming the profile of an unprecedented case, this “object” requires that the observer reconfigure his or her habitual rule of judgment. If the appropriate rule of its following were available in advance, if it were still an unquestioned part of the observer’s “place on the earth” and history, there would be no such contradiction and thus no responsibility, no ethics of reading would be necessary; there would only be law inhabited from this place and history and waiting to be applied. But because this is now an uncanny encounter with the Doppelgänger relegated to outside the time and space of the observer’s belonging, the latter has to invent the rule in order to address the new situation of the former. As he or she who is observed has escaped into an irrevocable exile, this observer’s invention of the new rule of cohabitation cannot but be a betrayal of the old rule. “You have to betray in order to be truthful” (Derrida 2003: 11). As political obedience to established law would be irresponsible, Derrida obviously advocates a pre-legal, ethical responsibility which, however, must take its chances:

After the not-self-inflicted rupture of continuity bore upon the observer and the observed, the former is confronted with an uncannily resonant experience of the past. His or her judgment, addressed from the dispossessed “elsewhere,” loses its footing, becomes populated by discordant views and divided up into the antagonistic many. What makes this encounter with the exploded past so uneasy, and this experience so incommensurable, is that the observed, by being now out of joint, resists consistency and semantic identity, drawing the observer into infinite responsibility toward its vibrant plurality and heterogeneity. Even if “no finite being can […]be infinitelyresponsible,” Derridabelieves “that […]in ethics responsibility is infinite or it is not. That’s why I always feel guilty” (Derrida 2003: 48–49).

That significant sense of inexhaustible guilt, it appears, results from the new cohabitation with the non-belonging and precarious many after the departure of the belonging and situated companion (in the position of the observed). Considering Derrida’s reiterative coming-to-terms with Levinas, here one is unavoidably reminded of the Levinasian destitute “face” that haunts the self by its unremitting ethical demand to preserve its life from erasure. Out of an extreme precariousness this “face” breaks in, befalls and persecutes the self (Levinas 1986b: 51). This interruption from “elsewhere” blasts open the continuum of the self’s history, replacing its smooth transmission with the series of displacing encounters. It liberates the unlimited possibility of the discontinuous and plural “living time” from the linear and homogeneous “fate” of historical temporality (Levinas 1989: 139–45). The insistent claim of the face delivers the self to the same irritating targeting – the French word visage, etymologically read, means precisely “targeting” – that the self for its part has previously applied, via its monitoring, to this “face.” “Regarder ce qui […] vous vise: c'est regarder le visage (Levinas 1976: 6). Levinas speaks of the “preontological interhuman relationship with the other” (Levinas and Kearney 1986: 22). The targeting position of the face, the uprightness of the interpellation of its “defenseless eyes” (Levinas 1996: 12) escape all attempts of the self to cognize them. Concomitantly, instead of communicating with the familiar companion, theory is confronted with the echoes of a dispossessed exile; instead of enjoying a selfish belonging, it is displaced by their iterative urges. “[I]ts equality with the object it understands intentionally” is broken up (Levinas 1987c: 120). If it wants to protect from erasure these scattered remnants that obsessively beset it, call it into question, empty it of itself, (Levinas 1986b: 350) theory for its part must enter the process of self-disempowerment. Since how could it possibly have turned its attention to the dispossessed if it did not undergo dispossession on its own? Without mobilizing the “alterities within,” it could not have corresponded with the “alterities without.”

This “unchosen cohabitation,” (Butler 2012: 24) an everything but self-elected interdependence and co-articulation with the defaced enabler in which the theoretical agency appears to be involved in Derrida’s and Levinas’s rendering of the ethical encounter, obliges the latter to the care addressed above. Paradoxically, the observer is expected to safeguard the same displaced observed that is unremittingly disquieting him or her. After all, theory appears to be, almost by definition, the activity of survivors induced by the traumatic departure of their life companions. To underpin such thesis, John Schad mentions that even Leavis’s famous equation of theory with life implied the activities of those accidentally left alive after the devastating battles of the First World War (Schad 2003: 175–177). Theory also remained firmly associated with the posttraumatic condition thereafter. So when Derrida states that he always “feels guilty” (2003: 48) and that “in a certain way the only thing which interests me is the uncanny” (33–34), he obviously links theory with the uncanny experience of living on with the exilic residues of the past. Theory cannot but arrive too late for the rendezvous with its intimate companion; as the latter is now confronted as the spectral “face” alone, it is by definition a post-theory. It has no other choice but re-beginning; a smooth continuation with the gone is equally impossible as is the definite break with its persecuting memory. Sentenced to the “anacoluthic discontinuity” of “standing alone without companion,” theory is called upon to investigate the modes of cohabitation with its disseminated leftovers.

This disquieting companionship that haunts theory’s observation comes from the resolute refusal of the departed to remain forgotten (Schad 2003: 188–189) or mortified into a historical object for that matter. Because history, written by those who belong, obliterates the suffering of those who do not belong to its official stream, the exile aims at different kind of remembrance requesting the renouncement of theory’s belonging. In order for theory to reinvent the cohabitation by maintaining receptivity for such “diasporic injunctions,” Derrida finds Nietzsche’s active forgetting to be a more appropriate solution than mournful despair a la Lyotard or Agamben. Unlike despair passionately attached to the continuity with the lost, active forgetting breaks the obedience to the existing law in the name of recommencing. Instead of compulsively adhering to the memory of the gone companion it matches together experimental, tentative, and fictional companionships out of the former’s “bits and pieces.” In that manner it interrupts the homogeneous stream of common history, rearranges its temporalities to crack its amnesia and prevent it in silencing the alarm sounded from “elsewhere.”

“Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae, as the superficial believe; it is rather an active – in the strictest sense, positive – inhibiting capacity,” states Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals (1996: 39). In The Use and Abuse of History for Life (1957: 12), to which “active forgetting” refers, Nietzsche introduces the creatively pluralizing commemoration precisely to counteract history’s unilateral effacement. Rather than taming the past by the allegedly superior wisdom of the present, memory acts in reverse, i.e., releases the liberating potential of the past to transform that which the present has regrettably come to be. Not for the sake of homogeneous dead eternity, it engages the past for the ongoing, plural and heterogeneous needs of life. If the science of history privileges the unifying après coup insight, then the art of memory opens itself to the multitude of déjà vu experiences, collecting their dissipated shards like a magnet. By delving into the polyphony of the past and rescuing numerous local and personal histories from erasure, it forges unexpected convergences between its suppressed voices and thus offers a counterweight to the triumphant voice of history. Focused on the transformation of the oppressive present, memory rejects the chronological accuracy of the past’s reconstruction. Devoted to those deprived of history, it picks up, combines and fits together their ruins in order to establish a remedial alliance with them.

Nietzsche’s subversive rewriting of history, especially with regard to this interlocking inclination of the disregarded, surprisingly accords with the one Benjamin worked out in his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”8 Therein he states that “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1969: 255). In developing a dispossessed cosmopolitanism of scattered enablers against the generous one of the superior agency, both Nietzsche and Benjamin engage the “tactical” operation of memory, generated out of the endangered, disfigured and disowned present, in order to subvert the tranquil “strategic” use of history. By “flashing up” Benjamin seems to be indicating that memory instantaneously, as it were, takes possession of the historian, explodes into his or her present, distracting his or her attention and rearticulating the latter’s habitual priorities. Grabbing hold of the historian, it acts pretty much like Levinas’s “face.” In such a way, the historian is catapulted out of its privileged abode in the present and forced into what Benjamin calls the now-time (Jetztzeit). He defines this now-time as an enormous abridgment of the entire history of humankind, an uncanny fusion of divergent temporalities whose far removed “chips” suddenly reverberate with one another, entering a kind of curious “elective affinities.” By compounding distinct temporal sequences and letting them resonate in one another, the memory’s amalgamating of the dispossessed breaks apart the amnesia of the linear historic affiliations. Pressed by this divine spark of similarity into an unwilled proximity of the complete strangers to one another, one non-belonging suddenly comes to be shedding light on another.

Transforming the disturbing address of the departed companion into an imagined illuminative cohabitation with the unknown enablers deprived of belonging – this might be the new political task of theoretical observation, as opposed to its former policing task. Attuning itself to the “elsewhere” of its exiled other, it cannot unite with him or her on any common basis, as it belongs to him or her only through non-belonging. As no community with the excluded is possible, what instead remains is a dispossessing relationship that disables the communal type of belonging on both sides. In the way I interpret that which Derrida renders as fidelity-by-betrayal, it amounts to the agency’s pre-legal, ethical commitment to its disabled enablers. Such a commitment maintains audibility for the multiple voices silenced by the existing law and keeps the observer open for their rival recruitments.

As I have tried to demonstrate, the ethical involvement with the obliterated past was, next to Derrida, proposed and examined also by Nietzsche, Benjamin and Levinas. But there is another important thinker that might be engaged in this new political-ethical connection to widen, articulate and enrich it. By associating the theoretical activity with the recommencing search for the missing rule of cohabitation with its exiled enabler, Derrida, probably inadvertently, brings it close to the concept of political judgment as elaborated in the late work of Hannah Arendt. In her recent Parting Ways (2012) Judith Butler has made a strong case for the “diasporic” profile of Arendt’s political thought against the “communitarian” readings of her work.9

Following her ongoing political concern with statelessness and rightlessness, argues Butler (2012: 126), Arendt consistently defends pluralization against universalization and denies anybody’s right to set the universal rule of human commonality. What makes the idea of world history monstrous, says Arendt, is that it compresses the irreducible multitude of people into one human individual (2010: 12). However, one can become human only in relation of equality with the manifold others and not alone. As for Arendt being human means being free, no man can become free alone but merely “together with his equals and only with his equals” (1979: 301). “Indeed,” this is how Butler (2012: 148) reads Arendt, “if there is no equality, no one is human” and equality disappears as soon as a self-nominated “agency of humanity,” suspending the constitutive cohabitation with its remote and unknown enablers, unilaterally defines its terms. Being an arbitrary and violent act, such a definition of the human cannot but bereave another part of the irreducible human many of the right to bear human rights. And Arendt insists that “the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself” (1979: 298).

In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she interprets political judgment as Kantian reflective judgment exerted in the plural public space in which, following infinite responsibility toward the destitute that it unavoidably produces by its deliberations, it is obliged to engage ever new perspectives. As the public space is shaped exclusively by the practice of judgment, each and every commonality instituted in its frame is based on discriminatory values and therefore, instead of being sovereign and all-embracing as it used to present itself, exposed to dismantling by other judgments. As Linda Zerilli (2011: 124) puts it, “[j]udging may well call into question my sense of political community with some persons and reveal a new sense of community with others.” So what we are dealing here with is not a smoothly progressing assimilation of the excluded performed by political judgment, but a series of the latter’s transformative encounters caused by their consecutive appeals. As political judgment, in order to make up for one such appeal, induces another, all those that have been excluded by its reconfigured operations can be impossibly traced back to one and the same common denominator. Being discontinuous and displaced with regard to one another, their nonbelonging resists a smooth translation into a new belonging, or indeed community for that matter.

Even if I cannot judge without visiting many scattered standpoints, which are beyond my own in order to overcome my own thinking – and this is the gist of Arendt’s idea of human natality and recommencing – it is impossible for me to exhaust them all, and I ultimately must admit that my resulting judgment is not beyond question. It cannot but rely on “betrayal.” Even if it revealed something new, it would preclude something else. “This sense of community is contestable because I can never compel anyone to agree with my judgment. […]To judge is not only to assume that others share my view of the world, but also to risk discovering that someone does not” (Zerilli 2011: 130). Since the public space thus appears to be not only plural, but also contradictory in its internal constitution – a multitude of conflicting public spaces rather than the one homogeneous public space – theoretical judgment, invited to a permanent rebirth of its imaginary cohabitations, receives calls of the excluded enablers forever anew. The commemoration undoubtedly breaks history’s amnesia in an illuminating manner, but by forcefully merging, abbreviating and mistranslating its residues, it is in itself never uncontested either. On the contrary, its rearticulation of the legal norm, undertaken to safeguard the precarious many, is necessarily conjectural, counterfactual and experimental.

This somewhat unexpected point of concordance between Derrida’s and Hannah Arendt’s otherwise divergent philosophical perspectives is obviously far removed from the normative discourse of the so-called Critical Theory that dominated the Age of Theory characterized by the policing practice. Having been conceived in the Marxian spirit as ideology critique, Critical Theory championed its own judgments at the expense of others’ prejudices. Arendt’s and Derrida’s envisioning of post-theory as an infinitely responsible thought that, necessarily detaching itself from its “object,” does not stop searching for an appropriate cohabitation with the latter’s precariousness in ever new terms, aims at the abandonment of such perilous sovereignty of theoretical judgment. It clearly resists today’s intensified pressure on the humanities to produce “palpable, visible, measurable, and more or less immediately applicable knowledge after the model of the natural sciences” (Smith 2006: 122). Post-theory in the delineated Arendtian and Derridaean sense is not merely uninterested in that kind of “real knowledge,” but also denounces the latter as a completely mistaken idea in the global world of antagonistically co-implicated perspectives. Whatever values are championed, they are in competition with other values, whatever choices we make, we face unintended consequences (Rasch 2011: 57). Instead of being directed toward universal consensus as the putative goal of any responsible intellectual activity, post-theory as it is interpreted here finds itself mired in non-deliberate interdependencies. Doomed to common rather than envisioned public sense, its judgments are anything but sovereign and all-encompassing.

The fundamental fallacy of Critical Theory was the systematic downplaying, if not utter rejection of that unavoidable common-sense short-circuiting of its enlightening long circuits. While on the one hand awakening and eye-opening, theoretical reason on the other hand entails devastation of those who disobey its ultima linea common sense judgments. This is the price of its enlightening activity. Its seemingly sovereign judgments always turn out to have been relying on prejudices. While this does not utterly disqualify its observations, it does restrict them. If we simply rejected them as “misplaced prejudices,” we would set up a truth putatively superior to their blinded assertions and thus merely redouble the contested argument. Theory certainly must consistently replace prejudices with judgments, but, as Hannah Arendt has put it, “in the course of that replacement it is necessary to trace back these prejudices to the judgments inherent to them and to affiliate these judgments for their part to the underlying experiences which once gave rise to them” (2010: 79, transl. mine). As nobody can survive without prejudices and as our present judgment, somewhere and someday, becomes such a prejudice too, the analytical objective is not to dispose with prejudices altogether because of their failure to realize the universal truth. Nobody is in the possession of such truth.

Arendt therefore finds the necessary – limited and provisional – authority neither “in an untenable absolute, nor in a law of laws, but in the power of reconstitution itself” (Honig 1991: 102). This peculiar authority acquires the form of the persistent “practice of deauthorization” (111), i.e., the self-rewriting from ever-new perspectives. Such a self-constituting practice clearly resists the pregiven and enclosed notion of belonging. However, it entails not so much a self-congratulating progressive authorization of the theoretical agency but rather its responsive readapting to always-new cohabitations with the enablers. This is how Arendt conceives the constitutive freedom of thinking: an operation of the subversion of the reigning law, but permanently addressed and populated by the many, i.e., performed in their disconcerting company.10 The slippery and heterogeneous character of this many makes such thinking vulnerable and precarious, but, as Judith Butler has convincingly argued (2012: 173–174), thinking cannot protect the precarious condition of its enablers without simultaneously exposing its agency to it. What drives the theorist’s agency to cohabitate, converge with and bear upon the dispossession of its enablers is precisely material interdependency, shared precarity and, ultimately, adjacency of agencies and enablers.

Forever in need of reiteration, the aim of such post-theory is to lay bare the claim of prejudices to the status of universal truths as a pretension unsuitable for the incommensurably heterogeneous circumstances of human life and by doing so to open the space for traumatic experiences disregarded or even inflicted by such truths. Instead of being a practice aiming at the final reconciliation of humankind, theory thus becomes a recommencing practice of the human many unaccounted for. It takes the form of political judgment that systematically inspects “the line separating one life from the other” (Rancière 2004b: 303), which in the first place means the borderline between the political agencies and the non-political enablers. Keeping in mind that the political gesture par excellence is the gesture of excluding the enablers from the political, the discriminating effects of theoretical practice have to be constantly scrutinized by this practice itself. Rather than a final unification of incalculable human plurality, post-theory’s permanent task is to raise awareness of the violence inherent in such undertakings as well as to renounce the unitary political identity imposed by them.

It is only through its concern for the permanent rebirth with which “something unique comes into the world” (Arendt 1958: 174), that today’s post-theory can display its commitment to a profoundly endangered life. Because life is transient, perishable and extinguishable, today’s post-theory is urged to shelter and treasure it; because life warrants freedom by its leap outside the determination of temporal continuity (Arendt 1993: 152) and thus interrupts the enclosure by the historical law, it deserves our full devotion and continuous care. It cannot happen by itself but only by our assuming responsibility for it, our coming-to-terms with it via the “betrayal” of the reigning law. In terms in which Levinas rendered this responsibility, nobody can replace us in this disposition. As “all persons are the Messiah,” “the fact of not evading the burden imposed by the suffering of others defines the self” (Levinas 1990a: 89). Arendt for her part interprets responsibility along similar lines. “I am the legislator,” writes she (2003: 69), and my sin can be defined “as the refusal to act my part as legislator of the world.” Or to render the same idea finally in Benjamin’s terms, we never know whether it is not we ourselves who have been invited to rescue the deprived from the tyranny of law. This profound concern for the (legally) dispossessed is how he translates the guideline (Richtschnur) “Thou shalt not kill” (Benjamin 1996: 250). The trauma must not be repeated. As guidelines are neither coercive nor enforceable but variously applicable, it is up to us to interpret, adopt and enact them in given circumstances. Such an enactment, constrained by the animosity that haunts our non-deliberate cohabitation with the irritating dispossessed, is undoubtedly a probing, vexed and ambivalent operation. Nonetheless, the political-ethical encounter that takes the interdiction against destroying precarious life seriously remains the key responsibility of theory in the post-theoretical age, the very task of its survival.