Introduction

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

(Wittgenstein, 1981 , p. 7)

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

(Derrida, 1987 , p. 194)

My idea for this book began with an incident in South Korea, which has haunted me ever since. In April 2014, on the southwest coast of South Korea, the passenger ferry Sewol sank. It was carrying 476 people, 304 of whom died, including 250 high school students who were on a field trip. This single incident revealed, on the one hand, the corrupt state of the government and industry, laying the way for the impeachment of the president and the advent of a new government. On the other, it revealed a societal inability in terms of comprehending the suffering of others. There is no doubt that the government tried to silence the victims' families to cover up its own faults; the mainstream media were antagonistic to the families, for example by describing them as seeking excessive amounts of compensation, as politically motivated by far-left agitators, as misguided and misinformed. It is also true that the media soon simply ignored the subject, even perhaps going so far as to engineer apathy towards it through the encouragement of 'Sewol fatigue'. This happened at the very time when the families were still struggling to establish the truth: some were on hunger strike and were asking the government for a fairer judgement and response. And what they had to confront was not only the government itself but also the people who ignored them or even mocked them - in what was an extreme case, one group organised an 'excessive eating protest', gleefully eating takeaway pizzas right next to the hunger-striking families. It was the political conservatism of the government and the media that created the conditions for such hateful forms of behaviour to grow. The families and survivors were very soon told they should 'move on from the past', even while the government blocked and delayed the raising of the ferry from the shallow waters where it had sunk: it took in fact almost three years for that to happen, and it was possible only after the presidential impeachment and the advent of a newly elected government. Questions about the lack of sympathy or empathy were certainly raised. But were these questions enough?

I was working as a teacher in a primary school at the time. I was probably teaching a class when the ferry started to sink. My recollection is vague, partly because I did not initially pay close attention to the news since I had heard that all the passengers were safely rescued - the government announcement that turned out to be terrifyingly false. Along with the rest of the nation, I had to watch the ship gradually sinking with almost three hundred people on board and then, for several days after it had sunk, to cling on to the real possibility that there might be survivors alive in air pockets, even though no rescue attempt was taking place. This tragedy, brought about not so much by natural as by human causes, certainly created a disturbance in me. It was something I could not expect to be resolved but rather something I needed to live with. Speaking of the incident was difficult, but so too was being silent. But, then, how do we even begin to address this tragedy? The sinking was seemingly the result of various intertwined problems - the overloading of unsecured cargo, the illegal redesign of the ship, and the acquiescence of responsible bodies in the relaxing or ignoring of regulations, the explanation of which all comes down to economic and political interests. Yet, even more striking is a series of irresponsible judgements made at different levels that denied the possibility of rescue. The instruction to passengers to 'Stay put' inside their cabins issued while the captain and some crew were abandoning ship was not simply faulty, it was criminally negligent. The regularly repeated instructions to 'Stay put, put on a life-vest, and don't come out' were followed by most students and teachers, resulting in a high number of casualties.

Although the disaster remains under investigation, all evidence points to the negligence of the government and the National Coast Guard. What we hear from the records is merely the language of bureaucracy, shored up against responsibility. What was absent in this was any real sense of those who had died or those who were in mourning as real flesh-and-blood people, each with their unique individual lives, the individual stories, cares, anxieties, hopes and fears. There was only impersonal neutralised language and sterile thought. In the autumn that year, I left Korea to study in London, for a year, on a Masters in Philosophy of Education. The incident was something that kept pressing on me as if demanding my response, though I did not have the courage directly to face up to it. I wrote an essay on it that I never used. Martin Heidegger, on whom I was focusing then, provided me with some resources to think about it, but not sufficient.

In April 2017 I returned to London to do a PhD. This time I wanted to explore more directly the question I had: what is it that blocks our response to the other? Soon after, on 14 June that year, Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey residential block in West London, burned down as a result of inappropriate renovation, which used flammable exterior cladding that did not comply with building regulations. Seventy-two people died. A report in October 2019 said that more could have been saved if the instruction to evacuate had been provided earlier. The instruction given by the fire brigade was to 'Stay put'. The Leader of the House of Commons publicly stated to a radio phone-in host, 'I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building. It just seems the common-sense thing to do.'1 While this is a different context to the Sewol incident, what is the same is that such insensitive words are blind to those they are addressing. And I am compelled again to ask myself: what would I do if I were there? Would I not trust the instruction? I think I would. Then is it ultimately good management or 'good control' - the phrase that was used repeatedly - that we need here? Since the Sewol disaster, in South Korea, there have been discussions about good control or management; the need for safety education and about putting swimming on the curriculum; as well as the cultivation of the capacity to doubt and to question authority developed through such activities as debating, all of which, although important, do not seem to be the fundamental issue. What we are facing is not something that can be solved by adding some extra component to the curriculum. We need rather to question ways of thinking to which we become accustomed through education and through the culture we live in, and to think about what we have learned to deny. Moreover, I do not think that such measures as systems of good control can be established just once and last forever; they will require constant review and revision; and ultimately the time for decision-making comes at any moment unexpectedly. Any rule or system soon begins to seem irresponsible when it is fixed, closed and unchallengeable: it ceases to be answerable to human others.2 And, if we need to learn to question what is given, it will not suffice to learn a set of debating skills or arguments with which, in our confidence, we may easily fall into the trap of abstract thinking. It is precisely such abstract thought, as shall be seen, that gives rise to irresponsibility.

What is at stake is rather 'control' itself, which at best seems to give an illusion of order or to encourage an inappropriate craving for order. Societies that encourage the desire to be secure and settled (or, in its bourgeois equivalent in the life, that encourage the emergence of the Last Man, as described by Nietzsche) should be called into question. This is not restricted to South Korea or the UK. The commitment to control is seemingly justified in an achievement-driven society particularly under the influence of bureaucracy inflamed by performativity and capitalism. What the culture of control reveals is the prevalent way that we think, where thinking itself is understood as control. Thinking serves to clarify and classify things in the name of efficiency - that is, as a means to master things. Yet, to think of what is radically other to myself, it is important that the other must remain as other, as non-reducible to classification. It requires an escape from what Emmanuel Levinas calls a totalising of thought. Such thinking, he claims, has arisen with a 'philosophy of the neuter', which he finds to be the characteristic of traditional Western philosophy with its primary concern with ontology - a philosophical orientation that reaches its most explicit expression in Heidegger's thought (Levinas, 1969 , p. 298).3 This is related to his critical view of totalising ways of thinking, and hence of totalitarianism - surely not unrelated to Heidegger's commitment to Nazism. For Levinas, thinking as totalising fails to recognise the irreducible alterity of the other (l'autrui).4 It cannot acknowledge the other who cannot be contained in my idea of the other and always exceeds it, in a relation to what Levinas terms 'face' (Levinas, 1969 , p. 50). Thinking that only incorporates the other when it confronts this...