A commentary on Donna Orange’s “What kind of ethics? Loewald on responsibility and atonement”.

Abstract

In my response to Donna Orange (2014), I interpret the several components of ethical life in Loewald's thought, which Orange identifies and explains. I attend to Orange's insight that Loewald's ethics is situated in his conceptions of responsibility and atonement. Although Orange suggests that there is a connection between Loewald's idea of "self-responsibility" and Levinas's elaboration of "for-the-other-responsibility," she does not draw out the relationship between the two. In my response I ask: How do self-responsibility and for-the-other responsibility require and work against each other? What is the significance of this relationship for ethics? I set out to deepen the connection between Loewald's and Levinas's conceptions of responsibility in order to propose that in a psychoanalytic ethics self-responsibility always already looks toward the for-the-other-responsibility.

Introduction.

“…In her commentary on Orange’s article (Orange, 2014), Daniella Polyak hones in on this possible affinity between Levinas and Loewald, offering several suggestions about how such a comparison might provide resources for developing a psychoanalytic ethics (Polyak, 2014). In particular, Polyak explicitly thematizes the connection intimated by Orange between Levinas’s conception of responsibility as “for-the-other” and Loewald’s account of self-responsibility, attempting to think through Orange’s claim that these two kinds of responsibility require one another.…”