In the terms of Levinas, the face of the Other calls out for goodness and for justice, demanding that “You shall not commit murder,” especially against what he calls the Stranger.46 In his quasi-religious language — the Other exists on high, in God’s realm, in infinity47—Levinas is on the side of the angels, feeling sympathy for the Stranger rather than the Devil, looking down on an earthbound totality where warfare and imperialism are the law of the land. He wills himself to believe in his ethics, in the idea that “to be for the Other is to be good.”48 But he concedes that “the Other … is situated in the region from which death, possibly murder, comes.”49 When the Khmer Rouge arrived triumphantly in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they were strangers and others to the city’s population. If everyone on all sides treated their others as if they themselves wore the face of the Other, then perhaps the ethical and moral goodness called for by Levinas would be achieved. But the others who were the Khmer Rouge brought death, and who is to say that the face of the Other worn by them was not just as real as the one Levinas longs for? What if the face of the Other heralded not justice but terror? In our contemporary wars waged for and against radical Islam, could the masked face of the terrorist be the face of the Other to the West? What if justice and terror were one and the same? The Khmer Rouge and the radical Islamists certainly believe that they are on the side of justice, as do the Western states with their beliefs in tolerance, free speech, freedom of religion, and airpower.
No wonder that some philosophers, like many other people, turn away from the possibility of hell and resort to faith in heaven, the future that is yet to come. The philosophical equivalent of faith is the secular belief that the Other compels us to justice (which, in poststructuralist thinking, need never be defined). If we wish to live as a species, we need to hold on to that faith, but we also need to confront our doubt. It is possible that the Other is a killer, and that we ourselves may be killers or complicit in killing. If so — and if Duch is simply another case of the “banality of evil,” the term Hannah Arendt coined to speak of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann — the lesson to be learned from Duch’s example is that the banality of evil has generally been reserved by the West for itself, as a sign of subjectivity, of agency, of centrality, even for the most unimportant of Westerners who functioned as nothing more than cogs in the war machine. Excluding others from the banality of evil denies them that same right to subjectivity found in villianous behavior. In contrast, to make others the subject of the banality of evil is to renounce the patronizing pity of the West, which is tempting for others to themselves assume. Pitying oneself, for others, is always detrimental, for those who believe that they cannot do evil will in the end do evil, which is what happened in Cambodia and in many nations that threw off Western domination.
To put this ethical conundrum of the Other in the most schematic way possible, here is how the various modes of ethical memory work. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, the simplest and most explicitly conservative mode, we remember our humanity and the inhumanity of others, while we forget our inhumanity and the humanity of others. This is the ethical mode most conducive to war, patriotism, and jingoism, as it reduces our others to the flattest of enemies. The more complex ethics of remembering others operates in two registers, the liberal one where we remember our humanity and the radical one where we remember our inhumanity. In both registers, we remember the humanity of others and forget their inhumanity. The liberal register where we remember our humanity is also conducive to war, although war usually carried out in humanitarian guises, as rescue operations for the good other (which may require us killing, with great regret, the bad other). The more radical version, where we remember our inhumanity, is the driving force behind antiwar feeling, as we worry about the terrible things we can do. And yet there is a level of deception in this radical register, too, for if we also see only the humanity of others, and not their inhumanity, we are not seeing them in the same way we see ourselves. So it is that in the name of the other’s humanity, we consign the other to subordinate, simplified, and secondary status in contrast to our more complex selves. While we are capable of dying and killing, of tragedy and guilt, of the whole panoply of human and inhuman action and feeling, the other is only capable of being killed, perpetually pegged as an object of our seemingly well-intended pity. To avoid simplifying the other, the ethics of recognition demands that we remember our humanity and inhumanity, and that we remember the humanity and inhumanity of others as well. As for what this ethics of recognition asks us to forget — it is the idea that anyone or any nation or any people has a unique claim to humanity, to suffering, to pain, to being the exceptional victim, a claim that almost certainly will lead us down a road to further vengeance enacted in the name of that victim. The fact of the matter is that however many millions may have died during our particular tragedy, millions more have died in other tragedies no less tragic.
Rithy Panh’s memoir and films foreground this ethics of recognition and make a daring claim: Cambodia belongs in the center of world history because of the humanity and the inhumanity of the Khmer. This is an important claim for two reasons. The first and most obvious reason is simply that the claim moves Cambodia and the Khmer people from margin to center. This is also the less interesting reason, given that making the marginalized more visible leaves the periphery intact for new others to inhabit. The more important reason is the assertion of inhumanity, for the other’s move from margin to center in Western discourse is most often premised on asserting the other’s humanity. By rejecting this sentimental, heartwarming reasoning, Panh’s work affirms the importance, and the difficulty, of grappling with inhumanity, both the inhumanity of the West and the inhumanity of its others (which is to say, from the perspectives of those others, us). The face of the Other is thus, even in its name, a misnomer. It tempts us to pity others, to see only the singular face of their suffering. In reality, the Other always has at least two faces, human and inhuman.
These two faces are both evident in one picture on the walls of S-21, on a second-floor exhibition room, where Duch is shown at trial. There is his face, but it has been defaced. Visitors have scrawled insults and obscenities over it. He is only a man, perhaps one of exceptional ability but not an alien, and they do not like what they see, precisely because he looks no different than us. His resemblance to us and our resemblance to him causes fear, which is why some visitors deface him. An ethics of recognition would prevent us from defacing him, from misrecognizing him as the devil incarnate, for the resemblance to the human is what we must remember if we hope not to repeat atrocities. Ethics is optics, and it demands that we see how Duch is man, human and inhuman. We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs.