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‘Relational ethics’ is a big-boned term Frosh uses to signify a number of ideas generating from psychoanalytic theory, social science and philosophy, that can augment our ways of ‘thinking about and promoting efforts to link with otherness across fractures of hurt, oppression and suffering’ (pp. 225-26). In particular, Frosh wonders to what degree relational ethics can open up the defended identities and closed interfaces between the Israeli and Palestinian communities. He relies on the recent work of the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin and cultural theorist Judith Butler whose Jewishness profoundly affects their identities and the complexities of their sometimes critical stance towards Israel. He also relies on the perspectives of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as crucial in fleshing out the ethical foundations of his thesis.
Frosh is a formidable researcher and his breadth reminds me of a quote from Jung in the Collected Works in which he acknowledges his own tendency to ‘poach the reserves’ of philosophy as a way of illuminating his own views. A century ago, there was a deep reticence about any cross-pollination of ideas, particularly between philosophy and psychoanalysis. In that era, Jung and Freud were attempting to make psychoanalysis into a ‘legitimate’ scientific enterprise just as philosophy was attempting to rehabilitate itself in a scientific age. Phenomenology, as a sub-discipline of philosophy, emerged out of this effort in the thought of Husserl and later Heidegger. They sought a new foundation or rehabilitation of the theories and methods of philosophy. Both of these thinkers profoundly influenced Levinas and emphasized the hiatus prior to and between human thought and action while Frosh's primary interest is in understanding and promoting ‘efforts to link with otherness across fractures of hurt’. In other words, Levinas views the irreducibility of the gap prior to and between thought and action in human relatedness as foundational to the ethical rel