Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric

TLDR: In this article, Lavin presents a political challenge: how do we get ourselves out of the business of blame-laying in a liberal democratic public sphere without giving up on the idea of responsibility?

Abstract: other that postliberal interdependence requires. Such an act most certainly puts the one taking responsibility in jeopardy: in the example provided by Friedlander, breaking curfew was punishable by death, and even giving up one’s meager ration of food could lead to starvation. Lavin is clear on this point: ‘‘[V]ulnerability is not episodic but an unavoidable component of human experience’’ (130). Vulnerability and risk is what there is, and responsibility (of a postliberal sort) is how we constitute ourselves as subjects. Chad Lavin presents us with a political challenge: how do we get ourselves out of the business of blame-laying in a liberal democratic public sphere without giving up on the idea of responsibility? His answer is that we don’t*that, in fact, we have to give up on the strictly liberal conception of publicity and of agency in order to do so. The alternative, a conception of distributed agency that sees subjects as interdependent and in the process of constant engagement (substitution), is far better*he claims*given the current circumstances, although it also comes with attendant risks, which are unavoidable. What remains is for us to take up Lavin’s challenge not only in the political sphere but in the ethical one, to develop notions of social and intersubjective engagement, along the lines of Butler’s (and, for my money, Levinas’s, Alain Badiou’s, or Jean-Luc Nancy’s), and to take seriously the idea that substitution*figural, performative, and bodily*is the principal condition of everyday life.