From 'Giving Guilt: The Aneconomy of Law and Justice' by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in 12(1)
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory (2011) 79-93 -
The concept of guilt is seen here as debt beyond repayment. Following Derrida, the gesture of giving is placed in the economy of gift, an aneconomical gift that is not part of the exchange cycle. At the same time, guilt is linked to desire, the desire to give and to be free from guilt. Desire is described as the urge to cross over, to apprehend the non-identical and to give oneself away. In this reinforced crossing, where the improbability of giving conditions the improbability of reaching out, guilt and its impetus are found locked up in claustrophobic self-reference. For this reason, the author consults Kierkegaard and Luhmann whose contributions show that the gesture of giving acquires its relevance not so much on account of its recipient, but precisely because of the absence of such a recipient. The combination of an absent recipient and an absented giver fills the gift with an emptiness that can only be channeled back upon itself, in the autopoietics of guilt. This is exactly the fate of the law, which can deal with the guilty but never with guilt (in the above sense). In its attempt to give away guilt, the law attempts to become other than itself: justice. The improbability of crossing over becomes more obvious than ever.
He comments that -
Giving performs a certain crossing. This occurs not just because giving traditionally entails a movement from the one who gives over to the one who receives. Not even because one usually wants to receive back or to bask in the recipient’s pleasure. Rather, the act of giving itself, the gesture per se, is a crossing. It is irrelevant what is given or to whom. The point of relevance is the crossing from self to other, from one side of a boundary to the other, from here to there: indeed, the gesture of giving as an intentional bridge between giver and receiver, namely, a bridge that connects while keeping apart. Just as Husserlian intentionality constitutes a disrupted connection between subject and object (Husserl 1973), in the same way guilt intentionally links while tears apart. Thus, on the one hand one finds the emptying of givenness, the absence of the given left behind. And on the other, the desire that is left unfulfilled, the unquenchable wish to cross onto the other side: these are the loci of the present text. ...
Although my reading of autopoiesis and Luhmann more specifically is idiosyncratic and purposefully distant from given interpretations (see, however, Clam 2007), I insist on the non-metaphorical conception of autopoietics of guilt. This means that guilt, just as communication, cannot be conceived outside its autopoiesis, namely, the self-generating and thus infinite stock of guilt that relentlessly moves (or attempts to move) across a boundary. This boundary (be it between individuals, organizations or systems) separates the location of guilt from its projected dislocation, namely, its eventual self-eradication. The paradox here is that guilt wants to exhaust itself, to disappear, and in so trying, it always produces itself in excess. Guilt is inexhaustible and so is the desire to cross.
In that sense, the present article contributes to what I have elsewhere called 'Critical Autopoiesis' (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2009), namely, the emerging understanding of autopoiesis that applies itself onto itself in critique and indeed in crisis. The crisis of autopoiesis is not just a theoretical crisis. Rather, it is a crisis of excess, of waste and putrefaction. In its normal operation, autopoiesis generates its own autopoietic excrement. This is both an expected state of the theory (any theory) as well as a much anticipated link between on the one hand, the theory, and on the other, a society that is consumed by guilt over its own overconsumption and overproduction. In that sense, guilt is a space of critique within society, a mnemonic mirror that cannot be alleviated by recourse to the traditional means of absolution, namely, god or law. Indeed, it is on the latter that this article partly focuses. The particular choice is justified on two fronts: first, law is considered to be dealing with guilt in an expiatory way for both the perpetrator and the victim. Indeed, this is what in some respects is called justice. And however rare an occurrence justice might be, it remains a more convincing manifestation of a working mechanism than divine justice. The second reason for the choice of focus is less valiant, but in some ways more imperative: god is much harder to focus on, herself a particularly intensely moving target whose absence might require an entirely different methodological avenue. Still, there is a lot of god in what follows, not least because the difference between law and justice on the one hand and god on the other might merely be a question of the material on which the text is written on – stone tablets, turtles, bodies, paper, screens.
And on and on.
