Ethics Without Manifestation: Structural Obligation Beyond Visibility and Recognition

Ethics Without Manifestation: Structural Obligation Beyond Visibility and Recognition Author: Chris Sawyer ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2651-9398 Email: [email protected] Version: v1.0 (Preprint) Date: July 2025 License: © 2025 Chris Sawyer. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17535758 ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 1 Ethics Without Manifestation: Structural Obligation Beyond Visibility and Recognition Abstract This paper develops an account of ethical obligation that endures beyond the field of appearance. It argues that visibility, recognition, and addressability—long treated as the preconditions of ethical relation in phenomenological and post-phenomenological traditions—are contingent rather than necessary structures. Through a process of subtraction, the paper removes manifestation itself as a condition for relation, formulating a model of minimal ethical relationality defined by five features: non-visibility, nonrecognition, non-addressability, non-horizonality, and non-mediated endurance. Drawing on and diverging from Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Butler, and Arendt, it constructs a non-phenomenological ethics responsive to those who remain excluded, erased, or invisible. The argument concludes that ethical life does not depend on appearing, being recognized, or being addressed, but on the structural endurance of relation itself. This reconfiguration replaces the traditional ethics of encounter with an ethics of endurance, grounding responsibility in persistence rather than manifestation. Keywords minimal relationality; structural ethics; phenomenology; visibility; recognition; manifestation; Levinas; ethical obligation 1. Introduction: Ethics Beyond Appearance Consider the migrant who drowns unseen at a closed border. The disappeared person whose name is erased from public record. The incarcerated individual rendered voiceless and invisible by state confinement. The algorithmically profiled subject, whose very personhood is filtered through a nonappearing statistical identity. In each of these cases, ethical obligation remains intact—yet the conditions of visibility, recognition, and addressability are absent. What kind of ethics can account for this persistence? What kind of relation survives when manifestation is denied? Ethical relation has, in both philosophical tradition and contemporary theory, been closely tied to structures of manifestation. From the classical formulation of the face-to-face encounter in Levinas (1969) to the politics of recognition in contemporary moral theory (Butler 2005; Arendt 1958), the condition for ethical obligation has been rooted in some form of visibility, recognition, or addressability. The Other ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 2 appears; the Other is recognized; the Other demands a response. Ethical obligation has been thought to arise within and through a horizon of manifestation. Yet this assumption deserves critical reconsideration. What if the condition of appearing is not only unnecessary for ethical obligation but, in fact, a contingent and dispensable structure? What if relation, and specifically ethical relation, can endure beyond visibility, recognition, and addressability? Such a possibility requires a conceptual move that I will call subtraction: the removal of manifestation not as negation or reversal, but as erasure of the condition itself. The aim of this paper is to construct an account of ethical relationality that persists after the subtraction of phenomenality. It proposes that obligation does not require the appearance of the Other, that ethical relation can endure without visibility, recognition, or addressability. In doing so, it severs the traditional link between ethics and phenomenality, offering a minimal ontology of ethical relation. If relational ontology can be constructed without recourse to appearing, then so too can ethical obligation be conceived without dependence on the structures of manifestation. In what follows, I will first reconstruct the phenomenological and post-phenomenological grounding of ethical relation, tracing how visibility, recognition, and addressability have been assumed as necessary (Husserl 1982; Heidegger 1962; Levinas 1969; Derrida 1999). I will then articulate the logic of subtraction, distinguishing it from negation, concealment, or latency. With this in place, I will construct a positive account of minimal ethical relationality: obligation without face, without recognition, without address. This minimal ethics will then be contrasted with key figures in contemporary ethical theory— Levinas, Butler, and Arendt—each of whom, in different ways, retains the horizon of manifestation. Finally, I will discuss the methodological and practical consequences of an ethics without manifestation, pointing toward a reconfiguration of ethical life no longer dependent on the visible, the recognized, or the addressable. The stakes of this inquiry are both theoretical and practical. In a world increasingly saturated with the demand for visibility and recognition—from social movements to digital life—rethinking ethics beyond manifestation is not merely an academic exercise. It is a necessary step toward conceptualizing obligation and solidarity that can endure even in conditions of invisibility, erasure, or systemic non-recognition. Ethical life, I will argue, need not be bound to the demand to be seen. While recent work in critical phenomenology has expanded the ethical implications of visibility, recognition, and address—often to include questions of race, incarceration, gender, and ecological ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 3 vulnerability—this paper proposes a different move. Rather than deepening the conditions of appearing, I argue for their subtraction as a basis for ethical relationality. In contrast to thinkers such as Lisa Guenther, Mariana Ortega, and Leonard Lawlor—who problematize the exclusions within structures of appearance—I propose that ethical obligation can endure even in the absence of those structures altogether. This approach reframes responsibility not as a function of intelligibility, legibility, or call, but as a condition of co-existence irreducible to manifestation. 2. The Phenomenological Ground of Ethical Relation The tradition of phenomenology, from its origins in Husserl’s method of intentional analysis to its radicalizations in Heidegger, Levinas, and beyond, has consistently tethered relation to the structures of appearing. The encounter with the Other, the call to responsibility, the constitution of ethical obligation— all have been understood as dependent upon manifestation in some form. Ethical relation, in this tradition, presupposes not only the being of the Other but the appearance of the Other. Husserl’s phenomenology, though primarily concerned with epistemological structures, lays the groundwork for this presupposition. In Ideas I, Husserl articulates the noetic-noematic correlation: every act of consciousness is directed toward an object, and objectivity itself is constituted through acts of intentional meaning-bestowal (Husserl 1982). Although Husserl’s project is not explicitly ethical, his method enshrines appearing as the condition of relational intelligibility. What is not given in appearing is bracketed from the field of inquiry. To relate, in the phenomenological sense, is to apprehend, to intend, to constitute—processes that presume a horizon of manifestation. Heidegger, while moving beyond Husserl’s intentional structures toward an ontological analysis of Dasein, retains and deepens the phenomenological commitment to appearing. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes Dasein’s being-in-the-world as structured by the clearing (Lichtung), the open space in which beings are disclosed (Heidegger 1962). The ontological difference between beings and Being becomes accessible only through the event of disclosure. Relation, for Heidegger, is not merely cognitive but ontological: it is a being-toward, a comportment structured by the possibility of encountering other beings within the clearing. This clearing is not merely a passive background; it is the condition under which beings become manifest. Ethical relation, though not explicitly thematized in Being and Time, is later developed in Heidegger’s meditations on dwelling and solicitude, where being-with-others (Mitsein) is constituted within the openness of the world. To be-with is to exist within a horizon of shared disclosure. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 4 Levinas radicalizes phenomenology by shifting the focus from ontology to ethics. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas critiques the totalizing grasp of the Same over the Other, proposing that ethical relation arises from the irreducibility of the Other (Levinas 1969). The face-to-face encounter is the site of this ethical interruption: the face exposes vulnerability, commands responsibility, resists comprehension. Yet the face, despite its resistance to totalization, is still a phenomenon. It appears; it is encountered. Levinas insists that the face is not reducible to empirical features, but it is not divorced from phenomenality. The face is an ethical phenomenon—it is the appearing of the Other in a way that exceeds comprehension but nonetheless addresses and commands. The structure of addressability is crucial here. The face speaks; it commands. Ethical obligation arises not in spite of manifestation but through it. The Other is not hidden or inaccessible; the Other is manifest in the face, even if that manifestation resists totalization. The scene of ethical relation is a scene of appearing, albeit an asymmetrical and infinite one. Derrida, in his engagements with Levinas and his broader critique of phenomenology, complicates but does not abandon the horizon of manifestation. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida emphasizes the impossibility of fully responding to the ethical demand, the infinite deferral of the promise of hospitality (Derrida 1999). Yet this deferral is meaningful only against the backdrop of a horizon in which appearing remains a condition. The trace, the supplement, the différance—all are structures that destabilize presence but presuppose its field. Responsibility, for Derrida, is haunted by the impossibility of closure, but it is haunted within a structure that remains phenomenological. Contemporary ethical and political theories inherit and adapt these phenomenological commitments. Judith Butler’s theory of recognition and performativity, for instance, builds on Levinasian and Hegelian legacies. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler argues that ethical obligation arises within a scene of address and recognition (Butler 2005). The self is constituted in relation to the Other, and this relation presupposes being-called, being-addressed, being-recognized. The ethical demand is not an abstraction; it is a demand that emerges within a social field of intelligibility and visibility. Similarly, political theorists like Hannah Arendt tie ethical and political existence to the condition of visibility. In The Human Condition, Arendt asserts that political life is constituted by the space of appearance, where individuals reveal themselves through speech and action (Arendt 1958). Without visibility, without the public space where appearing occurs, political existence collapses into mere biological life. Ethical and political life are modes of being-in-the-world that presuppose manifestation. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 5 Across these diverse accounts—phenomenological, deconstructive, performative, political—a common thread persists: ethical relation is grounded in appearing. Whether through the intentional structures of consciousness, the clearing of Being, the face of the Other, the trace of responsibility, or the performative constitution of the subject, the ethical demand arises within a field of manifestation. To relate ethically is to encounter, to be addressed, to recognize or be recognized, to appear and to respond. This historical attachment to phenomenality has profound consequences. It ties ethical obligation to conditions that are contingent and fragile: visibility, recognition, addressability. When these conditions are absent—when the Other is invisible, unrecognized, unaddressable—traditional accounts of ethical relation falter. Ethical obligation becomes precarious, dependent on the persistence of structures that can be disrupted or denied. Moreover, the emphasis on manifestation carries with it a political and epistemological burden. Visibility and recognition are not neutral structures; they are historically and socially mediated. Who appears, who is recognized, who can address and be addressed—these are functions of power, ideology, and institutional structures. An ethics grounded in manifestation risks reinforcing these structures, reproducing exclusions and marginalizations that are precisely the conditions under which ethical obligation is most urgently needed. The phenomenological tradition, despite its radical critiques and destabilizations, has not escaped the gravitational pull of manifestation. It has modified, complicated, deferred, or saturated the structures of appearing, but it has not subtracted them. Ethical relation remains, in these accounts, a function of the encounter, the address, the disclosure. If ethical obligation is to endure beyond the contingencies of visibility and recognition, a more radical move is necessary. It is not enough to complicate or destabilize appearing; it must be subtracted. Ethical relation must be conceived without reliance on manifestation. Such a subtraction requires a conceptual reorientation. It demands that we rethink obligation not as a response to the appearance of the Other but as an endurance of relation that persists irrespective of visibility, recognition, or addressability. It requires that we construct an account of ethical relationality that does not presuppose a scene of encounter, a field of manifestation, or a horizon of intelligibility. In what follows, I will articulate the logic of subtraction as it pertains to ethical relation. I will show how appearing can be removed as a necessary condition without collapsing relation into abstraction or ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 6 nihilism. Subtraction is not negation; it is the erasure of the condition itself. With this clarified, I will construct a positive account of minimal ethical relationality—an obligation without manifestation. 3. Subtraction and the Removal of Manifestation Subtraction, as I propose it here, is not to be confused with negation, concealment, or deferral. Each of these retains the structure of phenomenality, even if in a fractured or destabilized form. Negation opposes appearance with non-appearance, concealment hides what is otherwise manifest, and deferral postpones appearing while maintaining its horizon. Subtraction, by contrast, removes the condition of manifestation itself. It does not negate appearing; it erases it as a necessary condition for ethical relation. In traditional phenomenology, non-appearance has often been treated as a derivative or secondary condition. Husserl acknowledges the absence of intuitive fulfillment as a moment within the horizon of intention: what is absent is that which can, in principle, be made present (Husserl 1982). Heidegger thematizes concealment as the withdrawal that co-constitutes disclosure: being withdraws but does so in relation to the clearing (Heidegger 1962). Derrida radicalizes this withdrawal into a structural deferral— différance—but deferral is meaningful only within a horizon in which presence is indefinitely delayed (Derrida 1982). Even Levinas’s ethical interruption, while transcending ontological totality, presupposes a scene of encounter. The face appears, even if it resists comprehension. Ethical obligation, for Levinas, is the response to the manifest vulnerability of the Other—a vulnerability that, though irreducible, is phenomenologically encountered (Levinas 1969). Subtraction breaks with this entire tradition. It proposes that ethical relation does not arise within a horizon of appearing, nor does it depend on structures of visibility, recognition, or addressability. Subtraction removes appearing not by opposing it but by refusing its necessity. It posits that relation, and specifically ethical relation, endures without manifestation—without disclosure, recognition, or the possibility of intuitive fulfillment. This move is not nihilistic. It does not deny the possibility of relation; it denies that relation requires appearing. It is not an annihilation of relationality but a purification. Subtraction clarifies what remains when the contingent structures of phenomenality are removed: a minimal relationality that persists irrespective of manifestation. To understand subtraction, we must distinguish it carefully from other modes of non-appearance: ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 7 • Negation establishes a dialectical opposition: presence versus absence. In negation, the absence of appearing is defined by its opposition to appearing; it remains within the same conceptual field. • Concealment posits a hiddenness that is meaningful only in relation to potential disclosure. Heidegger’s aletheia—truth as unconcealment—presupposes that what is hidden can, in principle, be revealed (Heidegger 1962). • Deferral displaces appearing indefinitely but retains the horizon within which presence is anticipated, however deferred (Derrida 1982). • Subtraction, by contrast, removes the entire horizon of appearing. It does not oppose or defer manifestation; it refuses it as a condition. Subtraction is not a moment within phenomenality; it is the erasure of phenomenality as such. It does not posit hidden beings awaiting disclosure, nor does it defer manifestation into an endless future. It asserts that relation, including ethical relation, persists without the necessity of appearing. Such a move requires rethinking the structures that have been assumed necessary for ethical relation: • Visibility: Subtracted. Ethical obligation does not require that the Other be seen. • Recognition: Subtracted. Ethical obligation does not depend on acknowledgment or identification. • Addressability: Subtracted. Ethical obligation does not arise from being-called or from the ability to respond to a call. • Horizonality: Subtracted. Ethical obligation is not framed within a field of potential manifestation. In place of these structures, what remains is endurance. Relation endures without visibility, recognition, addressability, or horizonality. Ethical obligation is the endurance of relation without the medium of manifestation. This endurance is not a hiddenness; it is a non-manifest persistence. It is not defined by its absence of visibility but by its irrelevance to visibility. The Other need not appear to command obligation. Obligation is not a response to a call or a face; it is a structural feature of being-with that persists irrespective of manifest conditions. Subtraction thus frees ethical relation from the contingencies of phenomenality. It liberates obligation from the structures that have historically mediated and, by extension, constrained it. In a world where visibility and recognition are unevenly distributed—where power structures determine who appears, who ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 8 is recognized, who can address and be addressed—an ethics grounded in manifestation is precarious and exclusionary. Subtraction offers an alternative: an ethics that remains operative even when visibility is denied, recognition withheld, addressability foreclosed. This move has significant consequences for ethical theory. It challenges the centrality of encounter, of face-to-face relation, of dialogical reciprocity. It demands that we think obligation not as a response to an appearing Other but as a structural endurance that persists without manifestation. One might object that such an account risks abstraction, that it detaches ethics from the concrete realities of lived experience. But subtraction is not an abstraction; it is a clarification. It reveals that the structures of appearing are contingent mediations, not necessary grounds. Ethical relation is not a construct of visibility and recognition; it is a minimal endurance that persists irrespective of them. Moreover, subtraction does not preclude the importance of manifestation in specific contexts. It acknowledges that visibility, recognition, and addressability play crucial roles in social and political life. But it refuses to ground ethical obligation in these structures. It asserts that ethical relation is not dependent on their presence. It endures even—and especially—when they are absent. The logic of subtraction thus clears the ground for a minimal ethical relationality, one that is neither predicated on nor disrupted by the structures of manifestation. It opens the possibility of obligation without face, without recognition, without call—an obligation that persists in the silence and invisibility that characterize much of ethical life. In the next section, I will construct this minimal ethical relationality in positive terms, articulating its features and distinguishing it from traditional accounts. By doing so, I aim to show that subtraction does not lead to a void but to a purified ethical field—one in which obligation is no longer dependent on the scaffolding of appearing. 4. Minimal Ethical Relationality Having subtracted the structures of manifestation—visibility, recognition, addressability, and horizonality—we are now tasked with constructing a positive account of what remains. Ethical relation, I argue, endures beyond these structures in the form of minimal relationality: a being-with that persists without appearing, a structure of obligation that is neither grounded in nor disrupted by the conditions of manifestation. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 15 structures of public appearance collapse, even when individuals are rendered invisible by systemic conditions. This subtraction opens the possibility of ethical life for those excluded from the public realm, for those who cannot appear, who are silenced or erased. It ensures that obligation is not a function of public disclosure but a structural endurance that persists without manifestation. Arendt’s theory, for all its insights, remains tied to the structures of appearing. Minimal relationality offers an alternative—an ethics that endures even in the absence of the space of appearance. 5.4 Departures and Divergences Levinas, Butler, and Arendt each offer profound critiques of traditional ethical and political assumptions. They complicate and radicalize the structures of manifestation, but they do not subtract them. Ethical relation remains, in their accounts, tied to appearing, recognition, addressability, or public disclosure. Minimal ethical relationality departs decisively from this tradition. It removes the structures of manifestation as necessary conditions for ethical life. It proposes that obligation endures without visibility, without recognition, without address, without appearance. It is a purified endurance, a minimal being-with that persists irrespective of social, political, or phenomenological contingencies. This departure is not a rejection of the insights of Levinas, Butler, and Arendt. It builds on their critiques but pushes further. It reveals the limits of their commitments to phenomenality and proposes an ethics capable of enduring where the structures of manifestation fail. In the next section, I will discuss the methodological and practical consequences of minimal ethical relationality. How must ethical theory and practice be reconfigured once the necessity of manifestation is subtracted? What new forms of ethical life become possible? 5.5 A Note on Recognition-Based Ethics While Levinas, Butler, and Arendt each retain the structures of manifestation in distinctive ways, a broader tradition in contemporary moral and political theory explicitly centers recognition as the normative foundation of ethical life. Nowhere is this more fully developed than in the work of Axel Honneth, whose theory of recognition has been widely influential in both critical theory and normative ethics. In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth argues that “the experience of being recognized by ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 16 another person is the condition for a person's practical relation to self,” and that this mutual recognition forms the “moral grammar of social conflicts” (Honneth 1995, 92). Recognition, for Honneth, is not merely a psychological or sociological phenomenon; it is the structural basis of ethical life, the precondition for selfhood, dignity, and intersubjective justice. The force of Honneth’s position lies in its effort to ground normative claims in the lived experiences of misrecognition and social struggle. By treating recognition as constitutive of ethical agency, he provides a compelling account of why social exclusions—racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of marginalization—are not merely political failures but moral injuries. Yet this same dependence on recognition renders his framework vulnerable in contexts where recognition is structurally withheld. If ethical standing requires visibility and intelligibility within an existing normative order, what becomes of those subjects who fall outside the scope of recognition entirely? Minimal ethical relationality addresses this blind spot by decoupling obligation from recognition. In the subtraction of manifestation, recognition is not denied but rendered unnecessary: obligation endures even when recognition is impossible, even when the Other is unintelligible within prevailing discursive frames. From the standpoint of minimal ethics, the injustice of misrecognition is not that it prevents ethical relation from arising, but that it obscures or denies a relation that already structurally persists. Recognition may facilitate political empowerment or social inclusion, but it is not the ontological ground of ethical life. 2 This marks a crucial divergence from Honneth’s framework. Where recognition-based ethics conditions moral standing on reciprocal intelligibility, minimal ethical relationality asserts that obligation does not depend on reciprocity. It offers an ethics that remains responsive not only to the misrecognized, but also to the unrecognized, the invisible, and the erased. In doing so, it addresses the ethical demand precisely where it is most precarious—where manifestation has failed or never occurred. 6. Methodological and Practical Consequences The subtraction of manifestation not only reconfigures ethical relationality at the conceptual level; it also demands a rethinking of ethical methodology and practice. If ethical obligation remains valid independent 2 See also Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition (2005) and Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992), both of which offer influential accounts of recognition as foundational to ethical and political life. While differing in scope and emphasis, their frameworks similarly affirm recognition as a condition for moral standing. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 17 of visibility, recognition, or addressability, then the traditional practices and frameworks that presuppose these structures must be reexamined. What modes of ethical life become possible once phenomenality is no longer the condition of relation? What are the consequences for theory, advocacy, and lived experience? 6.1 Methodological Reorientation: Beyond Descriptive Phenomenology Traditional phenomenological ethics, following the lineage of Husserl and Heidegger, proceeds by describing the structures of appearing (Husserl 1983; Heidegger 1962). Even radical critiques, such as Levinas’s ethics of alterity or Derrida’s ethics of hospitality, rely on the destabilization of appearance rather than its removal (Levinas 1969; Derrida 2000). They complicate the scene of manifestation but do not erase it. Subtraction demands a different methodology. Rather than describing phenomena or the structures of their givenness, ethical thought must turn to the minimal conditions under which relation persists absent appearing. It must infer structural endurance without the aid of visibility, recognition, or address. This requires a methodological austerity. Ethical inquiry must resist the impulse to return to scenes of encounter, to moments of address, to fields of intelligibility. It must map the persistence of obligation without recourse to manifestation. This is not an abstraction; it is a discipline of thought, a refusal to anchor ethics in contingent structures. Such a methodology aligns more closely with structural inference than with descriptive phenomenology. It seeks to articulate what minimally endures rather than what richly appears. It shifts the focus from the empirical to the structural, from the seen to the enduring. In practical terms, this methodological shift alters how ethical inquiry is conducted. It moves from thick descriptions of lived experience to thin mappings of relational endurance. It moves from phenomenological accounts of the face-to-face encounter (Levinas 1969) to structural accounts of beingwith that persist even in the absence of encounter. 6.2 Ethical Practice: Obligation Without Visibility In traditional frameworks, ethical action is often predicated on seeing the Other, recognizing their vulnerability, responding to their call. Humanitarian practices, for instance, rely heavily on the visual: ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 18 images of suffering, testimonials, public appeals. Political advocacy similarly depends on making marginalized groups visible, on demanding recognition (Butler 2004; Arendt 1958). Subtraction challenges these practices at their core. If ethical obligation does not depend on visibility, then ethical action must be rethought. It must not be contingent on seeing the Other’s suffering, on recognizing their humanity, on hearing their voice. It must persist even when these are absent. This does not mean that practices aimed at visibility and recognition are without value. They remain politically and socially important. But subtraction insists that ethical obligation is not limited to those who can be seen, recognized, or addressed. It extends obligation to those who remain invisible, unrecognized, unheard. Consider, for instance, the stateless person who exists outside any legal or political order. Denied recognition, visibility, and public address, they are excluded from the very frameworks that traditionally ground ethical obligation. The Rohingya in Myanmar, or long-term undocumented migrants in the United States, may lack not only legal status but also the discursive and institutional means of appearing as claimants of rights. Yet their ethical claim persists. Minimal ethical relationality provides a way to sustain obligation in precisely these conditions: not through visibility or recognition, but through the structural endurance of being-with. This same logic applies in more technologically mediated contexts, where the failure of recognition is no longer only political but algorithmic. Facial recognition systems have repeatedly been shown to misidentify or entirely fail to register dark-skinned faces, disabled bodies, and gender-nonconforming individuals. Predictive policing algorithms render certain lives statistically legible only as risks or anomalies, rather than as subjects of obligation. In such systems, appearance itself becomes computationally filtered and selectively permitted. Here again, a phenomenology-dependent ethics is silent: when the Other does not appear within the parameters of machine legibility, the ethical demand is eclipsed. Minimal ethical relationality counters this collapse. It sustains obligation even when the Other is digitally erased, procedurally misrecognized, or computationally excluded. It grounds responsibility not in what systems of appearance can perceive, but in what structurally persists. In a world where legibility is increasingly policed by code, where intelligibility is determined by data regimes, subtraction opens the space for an ethics that is resistant to the violent neutrality of technological mediation. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 19 Practically, this demands a reconfiguration of ethical action. It calls for forms of solidarity that do not depend on identification or empathy, forms of advocacy that do not rely on visibility campaigns, forms of care that do not require personal recognition. It also demands a reconsideration of ethical silence. In a culture saturated with demands for speech, for testimony, for disclosure, subtraction valorizes the endurance of obligation in silence. Ethical relation does not require articulation; it persists without it. Such a reconfiguration has implications for movements engaged with populations rendered invisible by systemic structures: undocumented migrants, stateless persons, incarcerated individuals, the disappeared (Butler 2009; Arendt 1968). Subtraction provides a framework for ethical relation with those who cannot appear, who cannot be recognized within the dominant orders of visibility. 6.3 Rethinking Solidarity and Responsibility Solidarity is often conceived as arising from shared recognition, from mutual acknowledgment, from collective appearing. Political solidarities are forged in public spaces, through visible alliances, through acts of recognition (Butler 2009). Minimal ethical relationality proposes a different foundation. Solidarity can be rethought as a structural endurance—a being-with that does not require shared visibility or mutual recognition. It is not contingent on appearing together but on enduring together. Responsibility, too, is reconfigured. Traditional accounts tie responsibility to the encounter with the Other, to being addressed, to being recognized as a responsible agent (Levinas 1969; Butler 2005). 3 Subtraction detaches responsibility from these structures. One is responsible not because one is called, but because one endures in relation. Responsibility is not triggered by the Other’s call but persists irrespective of addressability. 4 Unlike personhood-based or reactive-attitude-based models, which rely on the 3 For contemporary extensions of this address-based ethical model, see Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 56–74. While these approaches deepen the ethical implications of recognition and dispossession, the present account subtracts the conditions of manifestation altogether. 4 There are points of tangency between this account and certain concerns in analytic moral theory—for instance, debates over moral standing in cases involving non-reciprocal subjects such as infants, animals, or cognitively impaired persons (McMahan 2002), or discussions of moral reasons that do not rely on mutual intelligibility (Scanlon 1998), or emotional responsiveness (Strawson 1974). While such frameworks attempt to accommodate asymmetrical obligation, they typically retain a horizon of personhood, communicative capacity, or shared ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 20 intelligibility or emotional responsiveness of the moral subject, this structural account grounds obligation in the bare persistence of co-existence itself—independent of recognition, reciprocity, or normative address. It does not require that the Other be capable of addressing a claim, nor even that the Other appear at all. What remains is not the appeal of the face or the intelligibility of the claim, but the condition of being-with as such. This has profound implications for how responsibility is conceptualized in social and political life. It challenges the idea that one must be aware of the Other’s suffering, must see it or hear it, in order to be responsible. It asserts that one’s responsibility endures even in ignorance, even in absence. Such a conception aligns with certain traditions of radical responsibility (Levinas 1969; Derrida 2000), but it pushes further by removing the necessity of phenomenality altogether. It proposes that ethical life is constituted not by appearing but by enduring. 6.4 Toward a Non-Phenomenological Ethics Subtraction thus opens the possibility of a non-phenomenological ethics—an ethics that does not ground obligation in appearance, recognition, address, or disclosure. It is an ethics of endurance rather than of encounter, of structural relation rather than phenomenological presence. This ethics is more resilient because it is not contingent on the fragile structures of visibility and recognition. It is more inclusive because it extends obligation to those excluded from public appearance. It is more austere because it refuses the comforts of mutual recognition and acknowledgment. Yet it is not cold or indifferent. It is precisely because it does not rely on appearing that it can sustain obligation where traditional ethics fail. It can persist in the face of systemic invisibility, in the face of exclusion and erasure. Such an ethics is urgently needed in a world where structures of visibility and recognition are increasingly weaponized, where appearances can be manufactured, where recognition can be strategically withheld. Subtraction offers a framework for ethical life that is resistant to these manipulations. normative space. The account offered here seeks to extend ethical persistence even further—grounding obligation not in relational recognition or response, but in the structural endurance of being-with, irrespective of legibility or status. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 21 It calls for a reorientation of ethical thought and practice, a shift from the seen to the enduring, from the recognized to the persistent, from the addressed to the structurally related. In the concluding section, I will summarize the argument and reflect on the broader implications of minimal ethical relationality for the future of ethical and political life. 7. Conclusion: Ethics Without Manifestation This paper has argued for the subtraction of manifestation as a necessary condition for ethical relation. Beginning with a reconstruction of the phenomenological tradition’s attachment to appearing—from Husserl’s intentional structures (Husserl 1983) to Heidegger’s clearing (Heidegger 1962), from Levinas’s ethical face (Levinas 1969) to Butler’s politics of recognition (Butler 2005) and Arendt’s public space (Arendt 1958)—I have shown how ethical obligation has been historically tethered to visibility, recognition, and addressability. Subtraction, as proposed here, is not a negation or a concealment of appearing but its removal as a condition. It does not oppose visibility with invisibility, recognition with non-recognition, address with silence. It erases the necessity of these structures for ethical relation. 5 What remains after subtraction is a minimal ethical relationality: an endurance that persists without visibility, recognition, addressability, or horizonality. This endurance is not abstract; it is the austere structure of being-with that survives the collapse of phenomenality. Ethical obligation, in this account, is not a response to the appearance of the Other, nor is it dependent on being seen, recognized, or addressed. It is a structural persistence—a minimal beingtoward that endures irrespective of the contingent structures that have historically mediated ethical life. Minimal ethical relationality departs decisively from the critiques of Levinas, Butler, and Arendt. While each destabilizes traditional ethical and political categories, each retains, in different ways, the gravitational pull of manifestation. Ethical relation, for them, remains tied to encounter, to recognition, to appearance. Subtraction steps beyond this horizon, offering a purified account of ethical endurance. 5 For critical phenomenology that seeks to radicalize rather than remove the conditions of manifestation, see Emmanuel Alloa, The Shadow of Things: On the Figuration of the Invisible, trans. Nils Schott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). This paper instead proposes their subtraction as a structural intervention. ETHICS WITHOUT MANIFESTATION Chris Sawyer — Preprint, July 2025 22 The methodological and practical consequences of this move are significant. Ethical inquiry must shift from descriptive phenomenology to structural inference; ethical practice must reconfigure itself around obligation without visibility. Solidarity and responsibility can no longer be grounded in shared recognition or mutual appearing; they must be rooted in the structural endurance of being-with. Such a reconfiguration opens new possibilities for ethical and political life. It offers a framework for obligation toward those who are rendered invisible, unrecognized, or unheard. It sustains ethical relation even where the structures of manifestation fail, even where public spaces collapse, even where the social orders of recognition are violently withheld. In a world where visibility is commodified, where recognition is stratified, where appearance is manipulated, an ethics that depends on manifestation is precarious and vulnerable. Minimal ethical relationality offers a more resilient foundation. It grounds obligation in what persists rather than what appears. This is not to deny the political and social importance of visibility, recognition, and addressability. These remain crucial sites of struggle and contestation. But ethical life, if it is to be just and inclusive, must not be bound by their contingencies. It must endure beyond them. Future work will be needed to elaborate the applications of minimal ethical relationality to specific domains: refugee ethics, carceral justice, digital invisibility, and more. But the conceptual framework offered here provides a starting point: a move from the ethics of appearing to the ethics of endurance, from phenomenological mediation to minimal persistence. Ethics without manifestation is not an ethics without Others, without obligation, or without relation. It is an ethics purified of the scaffolding that has historically constrained it. It is an ethics appropriate to a world where appearance can no longer be trusted to guarantee ethical life. In place of the fragile promise of being-seen, it offers the enduring structure of being-with. In place of the demand to be recognized, it offers the quiet persistence of obligation. In place of the horizon of manifestation, it offers the austere endurance of ethical relation. Ethical life does not end with the collapse of appearing. 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