Levinas and Education~ At the Intersection of Faith and Reason

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Levinas and Education

Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education

1. Education and Work in Great Britain, Germany and Italy Edited by A. Jobert, C. Marry, L. Tanguy and H. Rainbird 2. Education, Autonomy and Democratic Citizenship Philosophy in a Changing World Edited by David Bridges 3. The Philosophy of Human Learning Christopher Winch 4. Education, Knowledge and Truth Beyond the Postmodern Impasse Edited by David Carr

11. Education, Work and Social Capital Towards a New Conception of Vocational Education Christopher Winch 12. Philosophical Discussion in Moral Education The Community of Ethical Inquiry Tim Sprod 13. Methods in the Philosophy of Education Frieda Heyting, Dieter Lenzen and John White

5. Virtue Ethics and Moral Education Edited by David Carr and Jan Steutel

14. Life, Work and Learning Practice in Postmoderniity David Beckett and Paul Hager

6. Durkheim and Modern Education Edited by Geoffrey Walford and W. S. F. Pickering

15. Education, Autonomy and Critical Thinking Christopher Winch

7. The Aims of Education Edited by Roger Marples

16. Anarchism and Education A Philosophical Perspective Judith Suissa

8. Education in Morality J. Mark Halstead and Terence H. McLaughlin 9. Lyotard: Just Education Edited by Pradeep A Dhillon and Paul Standish 10. Derrida & Education Edited by Gert J. J. Biesta and Denise Egéa-Kuehne

17. Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism and Schools Isaiah Berlin and Education Neil Burtonwood 18. Levinas and Education At the Intersection of Faith and Reason Edited by Denise Egéa-Kuehne

Levinas and Education At the Intersection of Faith and Reason

Edited by

Denise Egéa-Kuehne

New York London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Denise Egéa-Kuehne All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levinas and education : at the intersection of faith and reason / edited by Denise Egéa-Kuehne. p. cm. — (Routledge international studies in the philosophy of education) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-415-76385-1 1. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2. Education—Philosophy. 3. Philosophy. I. Egéa-Kuehne, Denise, 1942– LB880.L472L48 2008 370.1—dc22 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-89538-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-76385-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89538-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-76385-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89538-2 (ebk)

2007051464

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xi 1

DENISE EGÉA-KUEHNE

1

Emmanuel Levinas: School Master and Pedagogue

13

CATHERINE CHALIER AND AMI BOUGANIM

2

Levinas’s Quest for Justice: Of Faith and the “possibility of education”

26

DENISE EGÉA-KUEHNE

PART I

Questioning Education 3

The Importance of Enjoyment and Inspiration for Learning from a Teacher

41

43

CLARENCE W. JOLDERSMA

4

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum

56

PAUL STANDISH

5

Emmanuel Levinas, Literary Engagement, and Literature Education

67

CLAUDIA EPPERT

6

Other than the Other: Levinas and the Educational Questioning of Inﬁnity IAN MCPHERSON

85

vi

Contents

7

Teaching Our Way Out When Nobody Knows the Way: A Levinasian Response to Modern Hope

100

JULIAN MILES EDGOOSE

8

Thinking the Other—The Other Thinking: Remarks on the Relevance of the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas for the Philosophy of Education

115

MICHAEL WIMMER

PART II

First Philosophy 9

The Priority of Ethics Over Ontology, the Issue of Forgiveness and Education: Levinas’s Face-to-Face Ethics

137

139

MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU

10 Thinking Educational Ethics with Levinas and Jonas

155

EIRICK PRAIRAT

11 Welcoming and Difﬁcult Learning: Reading Levinas with Education

170

SHARON TODD

12 Autonomy and Heteronomy: Kant and Levinas

186

ZDENKO KODELJA

13 Pedagogy with Empty Hands: Levinas, Education, and the Question of Being Human

198

GERT J. J. BIESTA

PART III

Between Ethics and Politics

211

14 How Hospitable Can Dwelling Be? The Folds of Spatiality in Levinas

213

ZELIA GREGORIOU

15 Justice in the Name of the Other: Levinas on Rights and Responsibility ANN CHINNERY AND HEESOON BAI

228

Contents vii 16 Peace as Being Taught: The Philosophical Foundations of a Culture of Peace

242

JEFFREY DUDIAK

17 Dehiscence: A Dispersal of Levinas in the South Paciﬁc, for Education

253

BETSAN MARTIN

18 Ethical Obligation in Caring for the Other: Reﬂections on Levinas

272

JIM GARRISON

Contributors Index

287 293

Preface

As English translations of Levinas’s texts became more readily available to English-speaking scholars, it also became evident that the interest in Levinas’s work was on the rise. As educators grew increasingly concerned about issues of ethics, moral education, and social justice, the idea of a book on Levinas (“the philosopher of ethics”) and education began to take root. I thought it might be very timely to gather voices from different national, cultural, and educational backgrounds, and hear what they diversely found in Levinas’s philosophy, which could inform and articulate our thinking on ethics and social justice in education. The result is this ﬁrst book-length collection speciﬁcally on Levinas and education, intended to give voice to a diversity of understandings and analyses of Levinas’s thought. Out of eighteen chapters, only three have been part of previous publications, only one of them in English. The book offers works from an array of international scholars, and although the ﬁnal text is in English, this project crosses borders of language, nationality, and educational tradition. The production of this book took much longer than anticipated, and I am most appreciative of the contributing authors’ trust, patience, and support. I thank the Routledge team who, through ofﬁce moves, editorial changes, and delays, remained most supportive: James Whiting, Terry Clague, Mike Wendling, Katherine Carpenter, Benjamin Holtzman, and Eleanor Chan. I also thank the publishers, who, in spite of increasingly stringent economical imperatives, not only were willing to take a risk on this publication, but generously allowed an increase in its size to accept all eighteen contributions. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of the proposal for their perceptive comments and challenging questions. Very special thanks to Dilek Suslu and Marina Basu for their judicious editorial support and for Marina’s meticulous review of citations and references.1 Her contribution to the translation of Eirick Prairat’s essay was perceptive and thoughtful. Much appreciation to Ina Pitzner for her superb translation of Michael Wimmer’s challenging text, and to Alan Block and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev for their very helpful comments on Chapter One regarding Judaic terms and references.2

x

Preface

Most of all, I am especially grateful to the nineteen contributing authors whose individual voices can be heard in each chapter. Without them, this book simply would not be. Baton Rouge May 2007

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. Dilek Suslu is a graduate student, and Marina Basu a doctoral candidate in education at Louisiana State University. Marina has a Master’s degree in philosophy with a thesis titled “Biopolitics or the legislation of life: A Foucauldian analysis.” Her research interests lie in exploring issues of social justice from philosophical, feminist, and critical theory perspectives. dsuslu1@lsu. edu; [email protected] 2. Ina Pﬁtzner obtained a diplom in English/French translation/interpretation from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a PhD in French from Louisiana State University. She is currently an independent scholar and translator in Berlin. Recent publications include “Boris Vian,” for the Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature; “‘Happy Babel?’ Translation in Europe,” in Bucknell Review (2004); as well as reviews and translations of poetry. Her essay “L’Exil—un lieu précaire” is forthcoming in a collective volume, Lieux Précaires: L’énonciation des lieux et le lieu de l’énonciation dans les contextes francophones interculturels (Russo, Harel and Therrien, eds). ina.pﬁ[email protected]

Acknowledgments

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to use excerpts or reprints from the following: Ami Bouganim’s texts, included in the ﬁrst chapter “Emmanuel Levinas school master and pedagogue,” were originally published in French in Emmanuel Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue (1998), and include “Postface” (71–75) and “Lévinas pédagogue” (55–64). Translated and published in English for the ﬁrst time. By permission of Jean-Jacques Wahl, Les Éditions du Nadir, Paris, France, and Ami Bouganim. Catherine Chalier’s text “Lévinas maître” is also included in the ﬁrst chapter “Emmanuel Levinas school master and pedagogue.” It was also originally published in French in Emmanuel Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue (1998, 65–70). Translated and published in English for the ﬁrst time. By permission of Jean-Jacques Wahl, Les Éditions du Nadir, Paris, France, and Catherine Chalier. Parts of Denise Egéa-Kuehne’s “Levinas’s quest for justice: Of faith and the ‘possibility of education’” were included in a chapter titled “Levinas’s ethico-political order of human proximity: ‘The quest for justice,’” published in M. A. Peters, C. Lankshear, and M. Olssen, eds. 2003. Futures of critical theory: Dreams of difference. Lanham, Boulder, NY, Oxford: Rowman & Littleﬁeld. By permission of C. Gatliffe, Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc., and Michael Peters. The substance of the chapter “Thinking the Other—The other thinking: Remarks on the relevance of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas for the philosophy of education,” by Michael Wimmer, originally appeared in German in different sections of his book Dekonstruktion und Erziehung. Studien zum Paradoxieproblem in der Pädagogik (transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2006: 299–305, 354–55, 356–65, and 375–81). Translated and published in English for the ﬁrst time. By permission of Verlag, Bielefeld, and Michael Wimmer.

xii

Acknowledgments

The book project was introduced and discussed at three conferences by different panels of contributing authors: “Levinas and education.” Chair: C. Joldersma. Panel: J. Dudiak and D. Egéa-Kuehne. First Annual North American Levinas Society Conference, Purdue University, May 13–15, 2006. “Levinas and education.” Chair: D. Egéa-Kuehne. Panel: M. Papastephanou, Z. Kodeljia, Z. Gregoriou, P. Standish, S. Todd, and G. Biesta. The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, University of Oxford, England, April 1–3, 2005. “At the intersection of faith and reason with Levinas.” Chair: D. Egéa-Kuehne. Panel: H. Bai, G. Biesta, A. Chinnery, J. Edgoose, C. Eppert, J. Garrison, Z. Gregoriou, C. Joldersma, and S. Todd. The Philosophy of Education Society Annual Conference, San Francisco, March 18–21, 2005.

Introduction Denise Egéa-Kuehne

A Jewish scholar born in Lithuania in 1906 and naturalized French in 1930, Emmanuel Levinas has signiﬁcantly marked contemporary thought. According to Sean Hand (1989, v), he is “one of the most profound, exacting and original philosophers of twentieth-century Europe.” Although his texts are deemed difﬁcult, and resist “any quick or facile understanding” (Peperzak 1993, ix), requiring careful and thoughtful reading and a knowledge of the authors whose writings he analyzes and refers to, Levinas’s works have been the object of increasing attention among Anglophone intellectuals as more of his texts are translated. His concepts of ethics, justice, consciousness, and moral conscience are deeply relevant to education, as they were developed through the face-toface encounter with the other, through intersubjective relation, and through the responsibility and respect one must develop for the other as Other— notions which rest at the very heart of education.1 However, when reading Levinas, one must be cautious not to look for easy solutions or precepts to be “applied.” In his response to Philippe Nemo, Levinas explains: “My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to ﬁnd its meaning” (Levinas 1985, 90). Levinas does not believe that philosophy should necessarily develop an easily implemented program. Although he is aware that one might be able to construct such a program on the basis of his theories, he insists that it is not his speciﬁc goal. In the discussion that followed his presentation on “Ideology and Idealism,” he was questioned on his lack of concern with “concrete reality” and his ability “to solve actual ethical problems” (1989, 247). He insisted again that it was not his “purpose to moralize or to improve the conduct of our generation” (247). In his view, the interpersonal relation he discusses in his works “stands behind practical morality” as a relation of responsibility, no matter how poorly or weakly this responsibility is perceived or acted upon, “even when it takes the form of politics or warfare” (247). In The intrigue of ethics, Dudiak (2001) addresses this issue. He stresses that in his own reading of Levinas’s work, he understands Levinas’s “descriptions of the ethical . . . not at all of an ideal, of something that might be realized,” but “of the conditions of possibility, the ‘inspiration,’ of every realized situation” (259n45).

2 Denise Egéa-Kuehne He explains that Levinas’s discourse “is justiﬁed only to the extent that it . . . be taken as ‘prophetic’” rather than prescriptive or legislative (163).2 Bouganim recalls that “philosophy does not hold education in much esteem; it is willing to consider it as one of its applications, but in no case as one of its determinations” (15). Yet for many years, Levinas spent the greatest part of his days as an educator, a “school teacher,” and a director of the École normale israélite orientale, “melding a real interest in pedagogy to his research in philosophy” (Bouganim, 15)—not unlike most of the “great thinkers” such as Aristotle, Kant, Montaigne, Pascal, Plato, Rousseau, and many others through the ages, for whom, by tradition, their reﬂection on education was nothing but an evident continuation of their work on epistemology, ethics, politics, and the nature of humanity.3 In this book, and it is a major point, the goal is precisely to not prescribe ways in which Levinas’s concepts are applied to education, a position reiterated and stressed by most of the contributing authors. Others, mostly outside education, may claim that there is “a strong movement in education toward exploring areas outside of education with the hope that something can be learned that will be pertinent for education” (Anon. 2004). However, this is deﬁnitely not the purpose of this book. I believe that what educators may look for in Levinas’s texts (as in other philosophers’ works) is not a set of guidelines, rules, or precepts to be applied to education. In chapter 11, Sharon Todd writes: “Indeed, as soon as one thinks of transposing his concepts into the sphere of pedagogical exigency, they not only slip their mark, but they no longer stick to the fabric of his own thoughts” (170). Not only any attempt to derive speciﬁc applications to education would not do justice to Levinas’s work, but it would go against his repeated assertion not to provide “a program.” Todd adds: “it is only through a gross distortion of, or inﬁdelity to, the concepts themselves that a direct application of his philosophy can even be considered” (170). Reading Levinas in the context of education needs what Derrida suggests when referring to his own texts, i.e., an attentive and respectful reading “through work that actually requires time, discipline, and patience, work that requires several readings, new types of reading, too, in a variety of different ﬁelds” (Derrida 1995, 401). A thoughtful reading of Levinas can engage in some powerful rethinking of education and in an analysis of “all the hidden assumptions which are implied in the philosophical, or the ethical, or the juridical, or the political” (Derrida 2001, 178). Such a reading of Levinas can lead to a greater awareness of the issues at stake in education and a better understanding of what they are; it can help articulate more clearly these problems, and move toward a more responsive and responsible approach to knowledge and education. This volume, the ﬁrst book-length collection on Levinas and education, gathers new texts written especially for this book (except three) by an international group of scholars from ten different countries (Canada, Cyprus, England, France, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Scotland, Slovenia, and the United States). They are well known for their work on Levinas and in philosophy and educational theory. This book is not a comprehensive overview of the work done on Levinas and education, and it lays no claim

Introduction

3

but to offer a limited sample of some of the reﬂection Levinas’s work has inspired on educational issues. Although the authors in this volume engage with Levinas’s thought in different ways, they share questions and concerns about education. We hope these questions will in turn engage the readers in a dialogue, and foster in them quests of their own, as they uncover with these authors the necessity and the possibility of thinking education anew in terms of ethics, justice, responsibility, hope, and faith. The ﬁrst two chapters serve as an “Introduction” to Levinas and his work as a pedagogue and a philosopher. Under the title “Emmanuel Levinas school master and pedagogue,” the ﬁrst chapter gathers texts from two French scholars, Catherine Chalier and Ami Bouganim, who knew Levinas well and worked with him in the context of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the École normale israélite orientale. Three texts are taken from a small monograph published in a limited edition by the Editions du Nadir in honor of Levinas. Chalier and Bouganim share their reminiscences of Levinas the philosopher, Talmudist, and schoolmaster. They discuss his work as a teacher, a pedagogue, and a school director, and the importance he placed on these areas of responsibility. We ﬁnd a Levinas simultaneously enriched by Jewish as well as secular thought, his exegesis of the Talmud deepened by his philosophical grounding. His engagement with the Rabbis and especially with Rashi—his favorite Judaic scholar—and with the Bible was matched by his equally deep involvement with Plato, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, or Rosenzweig. In Levinas’s teaching, an interaction between reason and faith addresses intelligence rather than cultivates piety. For him, as Chalier points out, the transmission of the Jewish texts meant a deployment of their richness which would provide guidance to young Jews from the Diaspora, themselves destined to become teachers. Bouganim highlights how Levinas conducted his Shabbat lessons with a certain kind of freedom, where students where allowed to play “truant” or turn away from the Yeshiva, but also how he strived to equip his pupils “for a great excursion through life and through modernity, from which [they] were supposed to return . . . richer and more conﬁdent in [their] doubts” (22). Study was akin to prayer for Levinas, for whom studying was one of the fundamental exigencies. He comes across as a concerned, thoughtful, and serious pedagogue who also had a sense of humor in his relations with students. Chalier’s and Bouganim’s tributes to Levinas bring to the fore his extreme intellectual richness, as a philosopher, a Talmudist, a pedagogue, and a master. In chapter two, titled “Levinas’s quest for justice: Of faith and the possibility of education,” Denise Egéa-Kuehne introduces Levinas’s fundamental concepts of ethics and justice and stresses their profound relevance to education. She recalls how the loss of axiological markers and the collapse of ideologies prompted a search for new models of thinking, and renewed interest in ethics and morality. For Levinas, this search took the form of a response to the call of transcendence and inﬁnity, guided by the “grace of God” or the “phenomenology of the face.” Egéa-Kuehne discusses the connection

4

Denise Egéa-Kuehne

Levinas makes between ethics and the “face-to-face” encounter with the Other, an encounter fundamental to education. She analyzes how this entails a movement towards justice and brings into question the violence inherent in the struggle to afﬁrm oneself and the “right-to-be,” a concept also found at the core of American education. She further explores Levinas’s quest for justice and its tight link to responsibility, leading to a discussion of his “‘idea of a possibility’ and the promise of an ideal of education” (26). Chapters three through eight address ways in which reading Levinas leads to, or supports, “Questioning Education,” albeit on different levels. In “The importance of enjoyment and inspiration for learning from a teacher,” Clarence Joldersma wonders how it is possible for one person to learn from another. From early learning experiences with parents, school peers and teachers, he sees many situations in which we learn from others, although the content may vary, from acquiring factual knowledge to gaining new perspectives. Joldersma explores the relation between “learner” and “teacher,” “the-one-who-learns” and “the-other-from-whom-one-learns,” in or out of a schooling context. While addressing how it is possible to learn from a teacher, he develops “anew the notion of subjectivity” (43). Although not supplanting it, his model takes the reader “beyond the idea of ‘the conscious subject’” (43). In his attempt to answer the question of “how it is possible to learn from a teacher,” he rests his argument on Levinas’s philosophy and his method of transcendental argument, in particular on his two concepts of “enjoyment” and “inspiration.” In his quest for an answer, Joldersma questions “the founding role of consciousness” (45), and shows that it is necessary to situate consciousness. Paul Standish takes what he calls a “somewhat deﬁant” approach in “Levinas’s language and the language of the curriculum.” He challenges “the familiar reception of Levinas in education and the social sciences” (56) on two main levels: he wants to resist some of the current assumptions he takes to be “potential dangers,” and his goal is “to be relatively direct in assessing the implications of these difﬁcult ideas for educational practice” (56–57). He proposes to accomplish this task by focusing on questions of language and curriculum. He wishes to extend the relation to the Other—central to Levinas’s thought—to objects of study (that is to the curriculum), and to ask what this might imply for teaching and learning, emphasizing the invocational rather than the representational aspect of language. First, he shows that, for Levinas, the relation to the Other is not realized in a kind of abstract contemplation, but rather in language itself; secondly, that the curriculum itself is essentially a matter of language; and hence, that the curriculum—the triangle of teaching, learning, and content—is one way in which the relation to the Other can be realized. Standish addresses the problems of totalized ways of thinking where quality control and performativity dominate educational policy and practice. Drawing upon Levinas’s concept of the relationship to the Other as an opening towards inﬁnity, he explores the ways we might escape totalization in education. The implications relate to the selection of intrinsically rich subject

Introduction

5

matter rather than teaching to the test, and this in turn relates to the role of the teacher, where the teacher acts as a conduit for the learner’s connection to the inﬁnity of the subject and the questions it raises. In the ﬁeld of literary studies, Claudia Eppert notes that “a deep rethinking of the assumption and methods” (67) underlying literary criticism are based on Levinas’s works. In “Emmanuel Levinas, literary engagement, and literature education,” she shows how a “dialogue of literary engagement and interpretation between contemporary scholars and Western traditions” (67) has developed around Levinas’s thought. She addresses her chapter to “readers who are new to literary and educational theory” (67) seeking to show the importance of Levinas’s philosophy and the impact of his own sometimes conﬂicting views concerning the roles of art, literature and criticism on the longstanding debate about the inter-relations among literature, ethics and education. After outlining the history and nature of this debate, she discusses how contemporary literary and educational theorists committed to the arts have responded in various ways to Levinas’s writings. She concludes by brieﬂy considering the implications for literature education in North America. In “Other than the Other: Levinas and the educational questioning of inﬁnity,” Ian McPherson explores how Levinas articulates a triangulation of ethics, education, and spirituality. He approaches education and spirituality, and questions about phenomenology and Levinas via Rosenzweig and via the theme of the children’s questions which belong to the Passover (Pesach) liturgy (seder). He draws attention to the educational dimension of the co-inherence of ethics and spirituality in Levinas and in family traditions. These children’s Passover questions and their analogy with some hermeneutic questions can be understood as ways of sharing in ongoing exodus—educational, as well as ethical and religious, from totality or rival totalities, in the direction given by the inﬁnite. Inﬁnity puts totality in question, in ways which are liturgical and educational, political and personal, and thus, McPherson stresses, ethical. Conversely, inﬁnity is put in question as children ask about the meaning and value of rituals and traditions. He also puts inﬁnity in question in our versions of totality “in which we dream our travesties of inﬁnity” (87). Inﬁnity, at work in opening us up through, and for, the other can be glimpsed as other than the other, as intimate as well as transcendent, as doubly inﬁnite. This leads him to considering how Levinas and Pascal, both eloquent witnesses for the inﬁnite, can be understood together as mutually enhancing. He sees them as urging “an educational exodus” beyond the merely quantitative and qualitative abstractions in which totality traps learners and “threatens to close down our learning”; thus “the inﬁnite delivers us” (96). Julian Edgoose argues that Levinas gives educators new ways to understand how they may ﬁnd hope in their work, in the chapter titled “Teaching our way out when nobody knows the way: A Levinasian response to modern hope.” Although hope is seldom discussed directly in educational writing, most references assume that teachers’ hopefulness depends on their ability to work towards their social or pedagogical goals. He explains that this

6

Denise Egéa-Kuehne

practical yet utopian stance rooted in Christianity is the dominant modern understanding of hope, and is explored in Halpin’s book Hope and Education (2003). He argues that Levinas’s work suggests an alternative (following Judaic themes previously explored by Benjamin and others) which gives insight into a non-utopian stance towards the future. While the ﬁrst stance tends to be “monological” and depends upon the teacher’s vision alone to guide the class, the second is more “dialogical” and opens to the creative and unpredictable aspects of classroom interactions. Edgoose contrasts these two stances with respect to four “pillars” of hopeful teaching: curriculum, agency, reward and social change. In closing, Edgoose uses Václav Havel’s writings to explore the implications of a Levinasian hope for social change and the secular potential of Levinas’s stance. Michael Wimmer’s essay, “Thinking the Other—The other thinking: Remarks on the relevance of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas for the philosophy of education,” is neither an interpretation of the philosophy of Levinas nor an attempt to outline the consequences of his philosophy of the other for rethinking pedagogical concepts, problems, or theories. Rather, for Wimmer, it is a reﬂection about the paradoxical or aporetical situation which arises when thinking is confronted with the other, or the experience of the other—a heteronomous experience. He discusses the relation between the experience of the other and the experience of deconstruction, or deconstruction as an experience of the other, the “encounter” as an “event” of the “impossible.” He understands the link to philosophy of education as the fundamental paradox of the concept of education since Rousseau and Kant. Wimmer argues that the purpose and the problem of pedagogy consist in the relation to the other, which in the logical language of philosophy, and especially of science, leads to paradoxes and aporetic descriptions. He recognizes that the history of educational theories could be interpreted as a record of different ways of trying to solve the problem. But solving the problem would imply the end of pedagogy as a relation to the other in favor of a mere technical and calculating understanding of education. It is necessary to seek another way of thinking the task of pedagogy as a paradox, because the (ethical) sense of the unsolved problem and the aporia of education consist in staying open for the encounter of the (unforeseeable, coming) other—in theory as well as in experience and praxis. The next ﬁve chapters critically engage with Levinas’s philosophical writings—in particular his unique approach to ethics which he calls “First Philosophy”—to gain a deeper understanding of some major educational issues. Marianna Papastephanou considers the inﬂuence of Levinas’s ethics of responsibility on philosophical-pedagogical discourse and the signiﬁcance of his conceptions of guilt and forgiveness for moral education and the human relations in schools. In “The priority of ethics over ontology, the issue of forgiveness and education: Levinas’s face-to-face ethics,” she argues that an examination of the notion of subjectivity presupposed by Levinas’s accounts of guilt and forgiveness is crucial for appreciating the educational signiﬁcance of those conceptions. Such an examination is not always carried out

Introduction

7

in the appropriate depth by educational theory, and that often results in the latter’s uncritical endorsement of some fashionable yet problematic aspects of Levinas’s insights. Through a “sympathetic but critical reading” (140) of Levinas’s notions of guilt and forgiveness, she suggests a qualiﬁed welcome of Levinasian ethics in education and argues for a reworking of existing accounts of teaching responsibility. In “Thinking educational ethics with Levinas and Jonas,” Eirick Prairat ﬁrst shows how Levinas’s thought enables us to renew the concept of responsibility. While in the juridical ﬁeld responsibility (be it civic or criminal) consists in being responsible for one’s actions and their consequences before the Other, for Levinas, the relation to the Other is not a relation of vis-à-vis, but a relation of solicitude. It is no longer a matter of being responsible for oneself before the Other, but, more radically, to be responsible for the Other. Here, the concept of “face” is central. Neither a plastic reality, nor an empirical given, the face is wholly language, pure experience without concept. It speaks and calls for a response. It is both a solicitation and an order which assigns and compels. Levinas offers the possibility of thinking an educational ethics which escapes the ontological dilemma between deontologism and consequentialism. Moreover, Prairat adds, if the face is the trace of Inﬁnity, which means that one cannot conceptualize or understand it, it is not to be known, but to be recognized [il n’est pas à connaître mais à reconnaître] in its “nakedness.” Hence the Other draws its dignity from the sole signiﬁcance of his or her face which requires no context (social, cultural, etc.), no belonging (ethnic, etc.), and no emblem. It follows that Levinas’s thought invites us to posit the original idea of “educational hospitality.” How can one think the relation between education and the oeuvre of Levinas? Or, rather, how does one who writes on education welcome Levinas’s words? Sharon Todd asks these questions in “Welcoming and difﬁcult learning: Reading Levinas with education”—questions she sees as unavoidable particularly since the very essence of Levinas’s work resists the kind of application which so often plagues efforts in educational theory. The insistence that theory should have a directly applicable, practical function is at cross purposes with the very tenor of Levinas’s writings. What can be made from Levinas’s texts is nothing less than a search for how they teach us new ways of reading the ethical stakes of our educational encounters. Characterized by a notion of implication, this orientation seeks to read the ethical force of education itself—to open up, in other words, the practices of education to ethical inquiry. And yet, Todd argues, an ethics of implication does not directly answer the question of how one might welcome Levinas’s texts, and what signiﬁcance such a welcoming has for education. Welcoming, that gesture of receptivity we give to an other, seems to demand something more of us than any intellectual appeal to implication might suggest. Not only does implication risk becoming yet another methodological fashion, but it risks blanketing the very real difﬁculties involved in our gestures of welcome. Following Levinas’s own writing on welcoming, and its relation to hospitality, Todd exposes the difﬁcult learning

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required in order to respond with welcome to another, and details the ethicopedagogical structure of welcoming. She then reads how this ethico-pedagogical aspect of welcoming needs to be fully considered in light of how education might itself begin to welcome the work of Levinas. Thus she seeks to elucidate the double meaning of reading Levinas with education—the ethical aspect of learning involved in his notion of welcoming, and the consequent ethical aspect of learning involved in education’s welcoming of Levinas’s words. In “Autonomy and heteronomy: Kant and Levinas,” Zdenko Kodelja posits that, according to Kant, autonomy is the ultimate aim of moral education. Heteronomy has a value only as a necessary condition for achieving autonomy. At the beginning of the educational process a child is, due to the discipline and constraint, subjected to absolute obedience. But step by step he or she desists from obeying someone who is not himself or herself and starts to obey himself or herself or, if we prefer, reason. At this point, obedience becomes voluntary, that is to say, an obedience which is no longer founded on the authority of the other, but an obedience which is obedience to oneself. In this way a child passes on from heteronomy to autonomy. Kodelja argues that, unlike Kant, who asserts that every form of heteronomy leads to the alienation of the subject and to the destruction of ethics, Levinas defends the idea of moral heteronomy. But he does not defend the moral heteronomy as a submission to the tyrannical will of the other. On the contrary, he shows the heteronomy of the face which in its weakness awakens a person to life as a subject. The subject, as Chalier stresses, “emerges...as a response to the appeal of the face that elects the subject” (190). “For Levinas...the subject is moral and free because of this election and not, as Kant thinks, because of the subject’s autonomy” (190). What does it mean to be a subject? What does it mean to be a human being? In “Pedagogy with empty hands: Levinas, education and the question of being human,” Gert Biesta questions modern Western philosophy’s answer to these questions which, since the Enlightenment, has been given in terms of rationality. He recalls that, for this tradition, to be human means to be rational; to be a subject is to act rationally. Biesta argues that, apart from questions about the deﬁnition of rationality, there is the deeper question as to whether it is indeed the case that, as Aristotle would already have it, “man” is a rational animal—that is, whether our humanity depends on a particular “characteristic” or “quality” shared by all human beings. Biesta asks whether our humanity can be deﬁned. He sets out to show that one of the major contributions Levinas made to this discussion is that not only did he make it possible to give a different answer, but he also showed us a different way to pose these questions in the ﬁrst place. Moreover, he made it possible to move the question of the humanity of human beings away from the cognitive realm to the ethical domain, through what might best be described as an ethics of subjectivity. Biesta explores Levinas’s work around these issues, both as a body of ideas and as an intervention or disruption of the modern, Western discourse. He argues that to follow Levinas does not so much mean to apply his ideas to education or understand what he has to say about human subjectivity, as to require ﬁrst

Introduction

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and foremost—and again and again—a unique, singular response from us, educators. Biesta shows that it is the connection between human subjectivity and the idea and practice of responding which allow us to ask questions about education in a new and unprecedented way. The last ﬁve chapters contribute a thoughtful analysis of Levinas’s texts at the intersection “Between Ethics and Politics.” Questioning the formal juxtaposition of ipseity to the ethical response to the Other in many readings of Levinas, Zelia Gregoriou continues the philosophical conversation on hospitality. In “How hospitable can dwelling be? The folds of spatiality in Levinas,” she elaborates on how modalities of ipseity and the spatial relationships they implicate, sustain the trace of the other. She introduces the problematic of transcending spatiality in speaking of, or encountering, the Other. In her investigation, she re-reads Levinas’s notion of ipseity in Totality and Inﬁnity and in Otherwise than Being, showing that Levinas’s passage from dwelling to ethics does not rely on presuppositions of mastery, sameness and absorption of otherness. For him, the sameness of home is not a condition for hospitality. Instead, dwelling and opening the door to the Other are both enabled by another primary, but also discreet, sense of passive hospitality—that of ﬁnding one’s self in a hosting retreat. We are already guests, in our solitude, inscribed by the trace of another hospitality. Gregoriou’s reading of Levinas theorizes home and hospitality and opens up new directions for rethinking multiculturalism, conﬂict resolution, and peace studies. In “Justice in the name of the Other: Levinas on rights and responsibility,” Ann Chinnery and Heesoon Bai note that “in an age saturated with rights talk, Levinas’s conception of unconditional responsibility for the other is often criticized as being too utopian and impossible to realize” (228). However, they contend that “what is questioned [here] is the intelligibility of the very notion of unconditional responsibility” (228). How could it be that we can deny that there are limits and constraints to our responsibility? In trying to make sense of Levinas’s seemingly unintelligible view of responsibility, Chinnery and Bai are compelled to re-examine the very foundations of the rights and responsibility discourse, namely social contracts which offer a particular conception of ethics which necessarily privileges self-interest. They begin by contrasting the social contract view of rights and responsibilities with Levinas’s view. They draw implications for the “lived experience” of Levinasian ethics and explore “what it might mean to take up a Levinasian conception of rights and responsibilities in education” (229)—speciﬁcally in educating for participatory democratic citizenship. In “Peace as being taught: The philosophical foundations of a culture of peace,” Jeffrey Dudiak follows Levinas in identifying the passive and paciﬁc moment of “being taught” by the other—over against the Socratic and philosophically dominant idea that maieutic learning is the active ﬁlling in of the circle of the same (which Levinas reads as essentially violent)—as the foundational moment in education, and as the very pedagogy of peace. Dudiak

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concludes by reﬂecting upon the relation of this emphasis to the Quaker idea of education as illumination by “the light within.” Betsan Martin writes from Aotearoa-New Zealand, an Island nation in the South Paciﬁc where, for the indigenous peoples, relationality and generosity are ethics at the heart of their traditions. In “Dehiscence: A dispersal of Levinas in the South Paciﬁc,” she takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the philosophy of science and on a discourse of cultural difference. Levinasian themes provide the basis for linking themes in Natural Science (akin to Ecology) to an ethics of cultural difference. She ﬁnds one of the “enchantments” of Levinas in the precision with which he puts exacting logic and rationality to the service of ethics, to transpose the ontology of the knowing subject from objectiﬁcation of the other to responsibility for the Other, an ethical quality heralding a realm of “otherwise than being.” Martin takes Levinas’s ethics seriously as a foundation for research and practice, going beyond the conﬁnes of philosophical argument to the world of engagement. Ethical responsibility may extend to the need to withdraw, separate, or create distance. Martin ﬁnds an exploration of ethical boundaries and mutuality in responsibility in Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of the feminine, and an ethics of sexual difference where inﬁnite responsibility is conceived in terms of two sexes as the terms of alterity. Martin’s main purpose is not to highlight the limits of inﬁnite responsibility, if that contradiction can be overlooked for now, but to work with alterity, or radical difference, as an opening of a passageway for education to overcome hostility with hospitality, and ﬁnd an ethics of respect in Western thought, for what is beyond the familiar and the known. Levinas constructs the inﬁnite Other as absolute alterity incommensurable with the self-same (ipseity), Jim Garrison argues in the chapter titled “Ethical obligation in caring for the Other: Reﬂections on Levinas.” He shows that this construction places an ethics of care at the core of a neo-Kantian ethical model. Feminists such as Carol Gilligan have shown that the tensions between the ethics of care, with its emphasis on personal relationship, caring, and connection, and the ethics of justice, with its emphasis on rules, detached rationality, and moral judgment, are irresolvable. Among other things, Levinas rejects reciprocity in our relationship to the Other while he explicitly calls for abstract, decontextualized duty, self-sacriﬁce, and a curiously exclusive either/or logic. Garrison combines feminist criticism of the ethics of justice with feminist concerns about self-sacriﬁce and with Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas’s either/or dichotomies. He agrees with Irigaray’s claim that Levinas reinscribes a metaphysics of patriarchy and male subjectivity, and he seeks to generalize this claim by arguing that Levinas is subtly elitist and oppressive. He begins by discussing the pattern Levinas weaves in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and how he makes our relation with the Other a condition of the very possibility of acquiring the “ontic” trappings of Being (language, logic, a mind, ego, and so on). He then shows that while Levinas is right about needing the Other to acquire language or mind, he is mistaken to think that the Other absolutely precedes the self. The fact is that the self, the

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Other, and some third entity they share all merge simultaneously in reciprocally transformative relations. Arguments relying on conditions of possibility are frequently transcendental, which leads Garrison to examine Levinas’s transcendental argument for a “preontic” ethical obligation to the Other. In this section, he follows up on hints from Irigaray to reveal the patriarchy hidden in Levinas’s ethics. Levinas’s blindness to the feminine disables his construction of caring for anyone seeking to build caring relations. Garrison concludes by connecting teaching to spirituality as creative connection and response to students who are different from us. Certainly, the essays collected in this volume do not encompass the work done by scholars on Levinas in the context of education, nor do they represent the extent to which Levinas has inspired and informed reﬂection on many major educational issues. Although it is not possible to acknowledge all the scholars worldwide who have contributed and continue to contribute to a better understanding of Levinas’s oeuvre in terms of education, my hope is that these essays will introduce new readers to the wealth and profundity of Levinas’s thought, and encourage scholars of Levinas (in any disciplinary ﬁeld) to explore his texts anew and take a deeper look at education beyond mere practical school performance. I also hope that these texts will open more widely the possibilities offered to education by Levinas’s powerful thinking, and stimulate a desire among educators at all levels to do further research and explore his writings. NOTES 1. I have tried to follow accepted conventions in my use of “Other” and “other”; see Cohen in Levinas, Time and the Other: “I have always translated autrui as the ‘Other,’ with an uppercase ‘O,’ and autre as ‘other,’ with a lower case ‘o’” (1987: 30n3 and viii), thus distinguishing autrui/autre as the personal other, from autre the otherness in general, alterity. However, I respected the spelling of each author in capitalizing or not the “other” in the contributed chapters. 2. See also Dudiak (chap. 16). 3. It is interesting to note that, in 1941, when the Philosophy of Education Society (PES) was created in the U.S., it clearly stated that the philosophical method would be its fundamental discipline in the context of education, distinct from an application of philosophical “tenets” to education (Egéa-Kuehne 1997).

REFERENCES Bouganim, A. 1998. Levinas, school master and pedagogue. In Levinas and education: At the intersection of faith and reason, ed. D. Egéa-Kuehne, 13–25. London: Routlege. Cohen, R. A. 1987. Translator’s introduction to Time and the Other and additional essays, by E. Levinas. Trans. R. A. Cohen, 1–27. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Derrida, J. 1995. Points . . . : Interviews 1974–1994. Trans. P. Kamuf et al. and ed. E. Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. Talking liberties: Interview with A. Monteﬁore. In Derrida & education, ed. G. J. J. Biesta and D. Egéa-Kuehne, 176–85. London and New York: Routledge.

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Dudiak, J. 2001. The intrigue of ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Egéa-Kuehne, D. 1997. Philosophie de l‘éducation dans le monde anglophone. Revue Française de Pédagogie 121:141–55. Halpin, D. 2003. Hope and education: The role of the utopian imagination. London: Routledge. Hand, S., ed. 1989. The Levinas reader. Oxford, England and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other and additional essays. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1989. Ideology and idealism. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 235–48. Oxford, England: Blackwell. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Peperzak, A. T. 1993. To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.

1

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue1 Catherine Chalier and Ami Bouganim2

LEVINAS SCHOOL MASTER3 A few years ago in this Oratory4 during one morning Shabbat lesson, Emmanuel Levinas cited this verse from the Songs of songs (7–9)—“causing the lips of those who are asleep to speak”5—thus commented upon by R. Yohanan, in the name of R. Chimon, son of Yehotsadak, in the Talmud: “each time a religious rule is quoted and the name of its author is cited in this world, his lips stir in his tomb” (Sanh. 90b). Levinas was all the more moved by this text since he thought such a quivering of the lips is renewed with each utterance, even the most humble, pronounced in the name of a person who has passed away, an utterance now without any defense and entrusted to those who, for some time yet, can watch over it and pass on its gift. It seems to me that it is the task of those who, under various titles, have shared in the grace of receiving the teaching of Emmanuel Levinas. So . . . I would like to recall some of the words I heard here during his Shabbat lessons. However, I would do it with some trepidation because, as Emmanuel Levinas himself used to say while citing the Talmud (Avoda Zara 5b), the forty-year desert crossing is a metaphor for the forty-year studying necessary before one can arrive at the truth of a master’s thought. In these Shabbat lessons, for Emmanuel Levinas it was not a matter of “taking” the ﬂoor in a magisterial fashion, but rather, as he liked to put it by citing his master Chouchant, a matter of remaining faithful to one of the signiﬁcations of the famous lemor which, in the Torah, so often concludes the divine address to Moses. He wondered: What does lemor mean? It must be understood as a call to transmit what is heard, because an utterance does not lose its inﬁnite richness when it is transmitted.6 On the contrary, it is this richness men deploy—of course on the condition that they not try to use it to defend their own cause or make a career in the world, but that they be only concerned with making it live, within and by them. Therefore, Levinas continued, we must serve the Torah lishmah, in a disinterested manner, because it needs us. Without us, in the libraries, it is nothing. Even the angels cannot save it, because only a being of ﬂesh and blood, through his or her unrelenting questioning, has this capacity to expand the light which

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lives in a word. The Torah is an ancient text, but the wonder of this Book is that it grows younger through the ages as the men receive it, as the women receive it, I dare add, thinking about a somewhat enigmatic formula he employed one day—women “weave” the text. But what does receiving the Torah mean? It means, Emmanuel Levinas used to say, welcoming it within ourselves. One day, Levinas pointed out that had Abraham not responded hineni— here I am [me voici]—the Torah would have been but eloquence. Only the hineni eliminates what is left of pride in us, and furthermore, only the hineni enables us to receive the heritage, without taking it for ourselves or jealously keeping it, each time as if it were the ﬁrst time. Only the hineni troubles our slumber in being—we are not sufﬁciently awake, Levinas often said. But, for these words me voici to ﬁnally rise unchecked to our lips, like Abraham, we must always be aware that a Word precedes us and calls us, and that it does so tenderly. It is this tenderness which awakens our consciousness, our conscience, Levinas said; it is this tenderness which sobers it. Why then do we forget it so often? No doubt because this sobering goes through some exigencies which go counter to the spontaneous tendency to give ourselves priority in each and every thing.7 First of all, the exigency of study—a fundamental exigency for Emmanuel Levinas who, one day and with great satisfaction it seems to me, cited a comment by Rashi, according to whom if the Hebrew had not built the golden calf, there would have been no cult, but only studying.8 Study as prayer would have been sufﬁcient. It does not mean that he was not cognizant of the meaning of prayer; one day, he even remarked, with humor, that he or she who does not acknowledge9 the Creator before eating, but does it afterwards, rejects God because not only does he or she give himself or herself priority, but afterward, in addition, he or she wants to make sure of the world to come, Olam haba. Praying, he said, is standing up, fragile and vulnerable, before the Creator, but the highest form of praying is to give grace, to know how to give grace, even when life becomes suffering. As if the proximity of the Eternal could not be experienced on the mode of success or triumph, but only in the humble memory of His Name which, alone, grants the spiritual strength necessary to not lower our gaze in the face of the injustice which benumbs this world, and to know that we are summoned by it, up to the ultimate moment. Humble memory which, in the man or woman steeped in his or her own private distress, or assaulted by the darkness of the spirit, eventually maintains alive, if it were only for a moment, the quivering of hope. The exigency of study is not sufﬁcient in a world scarred by suffering, personal or collective; of course, Emmanuel Levinas knew that. He said that God did not need any cathedrals but, on the other hand, He required that money be exacted from the rich to give to the poor, even on erev Shabbat, the eve/evening of Shabbat. As long as the tears of those offended burn the ground, how can we resign ourselves? How can we not question ourselves

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 15 about our own responsibility in the face of those tears? He then recalled that the precept “Thou shalt not kill” (Tu ne tueras pas) was a requirement for each and every one of us and that we must question ourselves, without any complacency, about everything our own being kills, through thought, through words, and through deeds, before we think about God, or, more precisely, for the idea of Him to gain meaning within ourselves. There lies, it seems to me, the highest exigency of his teaching, an exigency from which no one is ever released, an uneasiness which lasts as long as the span of life which is imparted to us, to the ones and the others. Emmanuel Levinas has most particularly taught those who, throughout the years, have listened to his words at the morning Shabbat, that it was not proper to enter a house of prayer or study with a cold heart, but that it was not sufﬁcient either to become enthusiastic to believe one was in proximity with the Creator. For Levinas, there was no such a thing as an expert in spirituality, but, on the contrary, he wished—after the Shoah which left so many Jews totally forsaken—for each Jew to get back in touch with his or her inner life. However, he asserted, inner life implies reading the Book. But to read, a master is needed who guides the attention, who makes the letter a teaching experience, and who, in the image of Aaron’s rod which began to bloom (Numbers 17, 23), enables words too long believed dead to begin living again. Words, Hebraic words, the only ones which can turn our reﬂection toward the true level of the texts from our tradition, have, for the most part, come to life or found it again thanks to Emmanuel Levinas’s presence. Their embers were revived by him. Our responsibility is, in turn, to keep them alive. Catherine Chalier ENIO Oratory, 4 Shevat 5756

LEVINAS PEDAGOGUE AND PHILOSOPHER10 For more than thirty years, Levinas was a man of the Alliance.11 Director of its École normale israélite orientale [ENIO, in Paris, France], at a time when it still trained schoolteachers who left to go and teach in schools in Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco. It was also a time when, every Saturday, it attracted the ﬁrst disciples who came to listen to him draw prowesses of wisdom and premonition out of Rashi. In France, philosophy does not hold education in much esteem; it is willing to consider it as one of its applications, but in no case as one of its determinations. However, Levinas spent the greatest part of his days on administrative tasks as a school director, melding a real interest in pedagogy with his research in philosophy.

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At that time, the École normale israélite orientale—I believe I may risk such a statement—was one of the rare places where one reﬂected on Jewish education. Israel was relying on the Hebrew language, its biblical texts, its prophetic decors, and its young literature to insinuate into minds and attitudes a civility more Israeli than Jewish.12 In the United States, the ﬁrst Sunday schools were opened and the ﬁrst Ramah camps were organized. Nowhere in the Diaspora did anyone yet consider the perpetuation of the Jewish people in terms of Jewish education, so dissuasive was the action of the Zionist emissaries from the Jewish Agency, authorizing nothing other than the return to Israel for those who wanted to fully assume their Judaism. Levinas was one of the rare individuals to think the Jewish destiny otherwise than in political terms, wagering on “an education which does not separate human beings,” recognizing in ethics the ﬁrst and the last word of Judaism. It is true that he was faced with students who came from oriental countries where Judaism was preserved willy-nilly against the discredit colonialism cast on local cultures, and who approached the West with questions which, inasmuch as they remained unanswered, threatened to turn against them. Assimilation did not gain ground in the rate of mixed marriages only, but it also laid behind the door of the school, and Levinas, as he put it, did not want to have to pick up his students’ prayer shawls after they left him. Hence, ﬁrst and foremost, his interest in Judaism was that of a pedagogue charged by the Alliance to form its best students, if not its teachers. He did not debate with the Pharisaic scholars just because he was in search of personal gloriﬁcation through his inscription in the Great Talmudic Conversation or the inscription of his commentaries in the margin of the Jewish condition working project. Indeed, he challenged them to retain under its shawls a generation which threatened to go and graze wisdom in foreign ﬁelds and to swap its ancestral cult for some foreign cults. Levinas did not want to cultivate piety, thus distancing himself from any “pedagogy of exaltation” where enthusiasm would try to make up for the deﬁciencies in studying and the failures in intelligence; he did not even want to invoke tradition; he wanted to address intelligence. An ordinary scholar of Judaism, even a thinker presuming the genius of his research would have, had he failed, found fault with the level of the pupils, or with the students who would have shown some reluctance to follow him. However, a true pedagogue does not incriminate his or her students, but incriminates his or her own knowledge. At that time, Levinas thought that if Judaism did not speak to the young generations who cried out for Marx or declaimed Heidegger, falling prey to false messianic promises or to puerile pagan charms, it was because nobody any longer went to the trouble of addressing them on their condition with a somewhat coherent discourse. Only to harness it to education did Levinas wrench the Science of Judaism from the pure and hard philology which, since the beginning of the [twentieth] century, gave off—to repeat Scholem—whiffs of death: “To erect Judaism as a science, to think Judaism, is to render the texts didactic again” (Levinas 1953, 9). While Buber had shown some interest

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 17 in the Hassidic tales, and Rosenzweig in the ritual of prayers, Levinas was interested in the Talmud, and more especially in the Aggada, diving once again into the raging sea of its controversies, sweeping along behind him disciples from all nations who could but be ﬁlled with wonder at his obstinacy—wholly Judaic—in persisting in humanism, simply humanism. In this country [France] with so many grandes écoles, Levinas also wanted a grande école which, brandishing the banner of “Jewish classicism,” would pull Hebraism out of its torpor, showing a particular attachment to Hebrew, as if its characteristics were the ﬁrst and the last credentials of Judaism.13 He wanted to release a civilization from the girders of Halakha, from the thickets of the Aggada, and from all the illuminations the masters drew around the ones and the others. He spoke Greek only to better reach listeners and readers who had lost their Hebrew, not to mention their Aramaean, and only because he understood a discourse on Judaism which was articulated according to the snares of philosophical reason. Perhaps Levinas was not so much from Maimonides’s school which installed the Greek science under “the tents of the Torah”14 as from Philo’s school—less deceived and more experienced than the historical Philo—who carried the Judaic diversion to the very heart of Greek wisdom. In fact, he was mostly “Lithuanian,”15 irremediably so, locating Judaism “at the intersection of faith and reason,” pushing it in its secular entrenchments only to better tap into a Jewish laïcity which could vie with a laïcity readily masking its Christian motives. That being said, Levinas was one of those rare people for whom any question about meaning takes a philosophical turn and emerges only if it goes through the great minds of the past. On the one hand, then, he presented himself as the protagonist of Abaye and Rabba, and on the other hand, as a protagonist of Plato and Heidegger, readily displaying some of that pertinent Socratic clumsiness, readily betraying that subtle mosaic stutter, at the intersection of two great conversations where, to repeat Harry Wolfson—the great American Medieval scholar—resides the “workshop par excellence” of the mind. By directing the education of his pupils, opening new perspectives to the questions these young men posed to themselves, young men who still knew the music if not the words of their Talmudic masters, Levinas knew that he was conveying his comments to the Oriental masses whom these future schoolteachers were destined to teach. He also knew that it was the best way for his teaching to reach all those who, one day, would take the narrow passage between day and night where they would no longer know where they came from nor where they were going, and where they would look for scraps to continue to hold on to the Unknown which haunts our lives.14 But if Levinas acted as a mediator between the Alliance and its schoolteachers, facilitating an acculturation which did not so much dispossess you of your Jewish culture as convert you into the rich compost in which to acclimate and transmute the Western culture, he also acted as a mediator between the Alliance, as the history of Israel had consigned it in its texts, and its representatives among the Jews, as

18 Catherine Chalier and Ami Bouganim well as its interlocutors within other religions, especially the Christians. As an admirer of Franz Rosenzweig, Levinas could not ignore that one cannot revive the live embers of Judaism without also communicating their heat to the beams of Christianity. With the passing years, an entourage had gathered around this great Lithuanian, a court of faithful [followers] who respected and admired him. The École normale israélite orientale had even come to constitute a kind of ecumenical stible for the enthusiastic disciples of Abaye, the austere disciples of Rabba, and even the discontent disciples of Ben Perahia, who argued about the legitimacy of the Master’s hermeneutic procedures, for Zionists and Diasporists who agreed on the vulnerability of Israel, and for Sephardim and Ashkenazim who prayed together according to the rites of the Alliance. Come the Shabbat, they all waited for the synagogue to open for study to take their seats around Levinas who, the Bible on his lap and his commentary books at hand, was setting out to share with his audience the Shabbatical delights which he managed to wrench from Rashi, in the best of the Pharisaic traditions, his commentary on the sidra (weekly section of the Torah) and, as if in passing, on the small domestic incidents of Israel and the major events of the world. [Homage and gratitude are rendered] to the Oqer Harim Levinas was as a philosopher, a Talmudist, a pedagogue, and a master17 for his extreme intellectual richness. Ami Bouganim

LEVINAS PEDAGOGUE18 At the end of the 1960s, for a young adolescent, going to the École normale israélite orientale still represented the crowning of an education through the Alliance Israélite Universelle. First we arrived in Paris which harbored all the decors found in our textbooks, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Elysées, and the seat of the Alliance. We were more or less convinced that we would meet the Père Goriot just around the corner, and the Princess of Clèves in some salon.19 At that time, the École normale israélite orientale was not really normal, or Israelite, or quite oriental. It was, ﬁrst and foremost, the school where Monsieur Lévinas welcomed us, it seems to me, with the sense of a sacred mission. [The name Lévinas] intrigued some young Moroccans used to the shorter name of Lévi only, and his ﬁrst name ﬁlled them with wonder. Upon awakening, Monsieur Lévinas was waiting for us for the shaharit and parted with us at bedtime with maariv (the morning and evening prayer services, respectively). In the morning, we found him in the synagogue, wrapped in his tallit, his teﬁllin strapped on, swaying back and forth.20 He simultaneously was praying and studying; he openly prayed in his Talmud, suggesting to us that studying was a form of prayer. In any case, he did not

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 19 watch us, leaving some of us to pursue our dreams, and others our meditations. We took turns leading the prayer service, in alphabetical order, and since he was rather in favor of swift prayers, we led it at a fast pace, competing among ourselves in the mastery of Hebrew. Monsieur Lévinas was happy about this state of affairs—proud of the level of our Hebrew which was barely mumbled in Paris—and consequently, God in heaven could but be pleased. On the day of the Shabbat, he put away his Talmud to intone our songs of Shabbat and nostalgic tunes with us. He even overlooked the (oriental) ardor with which we endeavored to reconstitute the atmosphere of our synagogues; especially when we set out to bellow our Song of songs and, from behind some sincere mystical intentions, some irrecusably erotic harmonies came through. Once the prayer service was over, we walked before the teva (pulpit) to shake hands with him, [a hand] sometimes soft, sometimes warm. At the table, he surrounded himself with two or three students whom he went to fetch from their seats; he showed interest in the areas where they were born, described his own, and avoided questions about their studies and their schools. The following day, we attended the course on Rashi, open to the general public, which was not yet very large at the time. One of the pupils sat before him and read the text, and this great admirer of Rashi found a wicked pleasure in not covering more than two or three verses in one hour in order to display the richness of the Torah and savor to the fullest the genius of its commentator. He found a real delight in commenting on this text, surprised to discover again, along with us, what in a certain way he put into it—a magician of the meaning, for the glory of Rashi and for our joy. The most privileged moment was the period of instruction—as a resident of the boarding school at the time—which followed minha. No more guests, no more intruders, we were among ourselves—a manner of Tisch, perhaps, with no pushing and shoving and no confusion, in the evening twilight, a time which was neither of the day nor of the night, neither of the sacred nor of the profane. It was the moment to read to us, in lieu of an exhortation, a letter from a former student, to comment on an article from Le Monde, to present us with excerpts from Thus spoke Zarathustra or from Dostoyevsky, from whom he liked Crime and punishment and The brothers Karamazov.21 With Russian authors, he evoked this reason of the heart which would seduce so many of his disciples precisely against the imperturbability of intellectualism, even against its indifference, without so much as challenging the rule of reason. In those moments, Monsieur Lévinas revealed himself as a poet of the “extraordinary possibilities of the human psyche.”

Levinas’s Lehrhaus22 Pedagogical paths are indeed impenetrable—thirty years later, the authors listed on the curriculum and whose works we ceaselessly had to rehash have

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fallen into oblivion, whereas those to whom Monsieur Levinas introduced us never ceased to solicit us. These encounters seemed to say that even when doubts have beleaguered everything, when an eclipse passes over God, when we ﬁnd ourselves without a sky over our heads, we could still inhabit those texts—since human existence consists in restoring the forever recurring adventure of culture and its promises. Thus, in the spirit of Maimonides, Monsieur Levinas incited us to set ourselves to philosophy to better accommodate ourselves of our Jewish perplexity, perhaps even better assume it as a human distinction. Presuming, under all circumstances, of the—philosophical—pertinence of the Scriptures and their commentaries, was for him the ﬁrst and last ﬁdelity, perhaps also the religious duty of every Jewish philosopher. Philosophy did not represent an error, but on the contrary, it was required to remove all incertitude and enrich Judaism. We were doomed, as human beings as well as Jews, to the vibrant and delicious companionship of Moses the Stutterer and Socrates the Skeptic, “at the intersection of faith and reason.” Monsieur Levinas, in his own way, introduced us to a marvelous version of Rosenzweig’s “Lehrhaus” where “nothing Jewish was foreign” and where to be Jewish, to repeat after Rosenzweig, was “something which circulates from the root of our hair to the tips of our ﬁngers.”23 Monsieur Levinas’s school was totally Jewish, from getting up in the morning until bedtime, Jewish on the Shabbat and Jewish during the week. It welcomed Plato and Tolstoy without parting with its Judaism. The school was under no other supervisor but Michelangelo’s Moses who occupied a place of honor in the courtyard—no less vigilant than all the Moseses we may have internalized—and who followed our debates, our reviews, and our ﬁrst sentimental liaisons. A secular school, notwithstanding the daily religious services, notwithstanding all the religious celebrations, and notwithstanding all the practices which enabled us—to repeat Levinas’s considerations on this theme—to commune intimately with God and to inscribe ourselves in His will. A school open to all trends of thought, to all Orientals—from Lebanon, Iran, or Turkey—and to a few rare Westerners—and even to the Messiah. I believe that they were preparing us to better resist the mermaids’ [songs] of assimilation by teaching us how to traverse the absence of God which might be awaiting us outside, to endure it without deserting, to overcome it through a heroic disillusionment, in the name of heavens which it was up to us to people. Later on, I was to discover this sentence in Levinas’s writings: “A grown-up God manifests itself precisely through the void of a child’s heavens.” It was also a free school. Relations with the teachers were free, relations with the administration were free, relations with the texts were free, and more especially, relations with God were free. Anyway, we readily played truant, deserting our classes for the Paris neighborhoods and their characters. Playing Jewish truant, with or without our kippa, with or without our tallit, but always with Rashi. Without punishing us, even without making us suffer any remarks, Monsieur Levinas showed—between prayer services—a great pedagogical mansuetude; with a cunning sense of humor

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 21 which is supposed to be the hallmark of great scholars, he declared before the Central Committee of the Alliance: “Those Mediterranean people are unredeemable individualists; personal work during formal study sessions, under the supervision of a master of study, is intolerable to them.” Monsieur Levinas never failed to scold us. He declared to the Central Committee of the Alliance: “To mold character and taste, one must know how to condemn.” But his way of going about it often covered a compliment, and sometimes an exhortation. The day after he had scolded us for one reason or another, he almost always had a kind word. That is the hallmark of the true pedagogues who, unceasingly, go over their measures and their decisions in their concern for constantly correcting themselves in order to better deserve the—moral—right to correct others. Thus one day, during the week, we had decided to attend a manifestation in support of Israel. Only Monsieur Levinas could grant us such an authorization of a political character. He called us into his ofﬁce, inquired about our motivations, and cautioned us against the excesses which might be part of any manifestations. He was worried and annoyed; we were determined. He left the choice to us. The following morning, at the synagogue, he was overwhelmed, probably reassured also: “How was it? How was it?” That day, God had to wait until we ﬁnished our narration of this great première which a manifestation in support of Israel could constitute for us adolescents. At that time, Monsieur Levinas was surrounded by Madame Levinas, sensitive to our tastes and nostalgias, with a discrete maternal attitude toward us, and by Dr. Nerson, with whom his thought journeyed. We were most curious about the content of their conversations. Perhaps they discussed the disappointments of Israel, perhaps the dangerous progression of communism. Wise men’s disciples of this caliber could only but cultivate the presence of God on Earth, they could only but debate of the Story of Creation and the Celestial Chariot—we kept a respectable distance. Perhaps they also discussed the pedagogical troubles we were causing the administration of the school. The pedagogical ethos of the school which existed under Monsieur Levinas’s direction remains to be restored, were it only to contribute to the extraction of the current Jewish school from the ghetto upon which it folds over because of religious timidity as much as pedagogical deﬁciency—in any case, at the cost of a terrible rupture with other agents of acculturation and socialization, including the parents [of the students]. In France, as everywhere else in the Diaspora, I am afraid that most of the Jewish schools today do not devote themselves so much to this pedagogical poetics of the creation and the resistance as to some pedagogical turbid exorcism: “a pedagogy of exaltation” which privileged piety to the detriment of intelligence, and from which Levinas clearly distanced himself. Rather than open up—within the school—the debate intimately lived by each adolescent, “who reﬂects and compares,” mobilizing Nietzsche and Rabbi Akiba, one would dissuade such an adolescent, castigating Nietzsche and disarming Rabbi Akiba.

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Monsieur Levinas was particularly sensitive to the problematic of Jewish education in the Diaspora, countered by an environment of cathedral architecture and subject to a calendar which unfolds the story of the Christian passion. His pedagogical wager was on intelligence, clarity, and generosity: I cannot but, in turn, cite this key sentence: “So that the abiding values of Judaism contained in the great texts of the Bible, the Talmud and their commentators may nourish our souls, they must again nourish our minds.” Monsieur Levinas did not even think about blaming us for turning away from Yeshiva to which our religious instruction and our fathers destined us. He outﬁtted us for a great excursion through life and through modernity, from which we were supposed to return—once our journey “by way” of Proust and Hegel was completed24—richer and more conﬁdent in our doubts, recovered from our illusions, immunized against the temptations of “open seas.” Of course he despaired at seeing us leave behind our shawls and our phylacteries, but he was certain that we would come back for them some day, at least those among us who would push our research far enough to know the nostalgia of the in-folio, of the Shabbat candles, and of this delicious and vertiginous Jewish absence/presence to the world. Thoughts reveal themselves in all their reaches and breadth only when the school debates have decanted around them, when they break free of the circles—after all limited—of faithful, to arrive at the workshops of creation and production of thought. Once we recover from the presence of this great Pharisee among us, and especially after we recover from mourning his absence, we shall wrest his thought from the devotion—well deserved and well deserving—of his disciples to submit it to the critique which is the philosophical manner of consecration. In any case, one can no longer always already imagine that it is possible to deal with Judaism, with the Jewish condition or un-condition, or with Talmudic thought without invoking Levinas, without going through his writings, and without discharging our debt to him. Without any doubt, he is the greatest thinker of Judaism at the end of the [twentieth] century, an incarnation of the Judaic rejoinder, unceasingly reshaped against the always resurging paganism. In France, of course, in the United States, and in Israel, Modern Hebrew will have to, willy-nilly, bring some humility into its pretensions in order to welcome this philosophical thought set out from Hebrew for a philosophical journey from which it will have brought back a rich bounty. Levinas has accomplished a double prowess. He has explicated Judaism to the non-Jewish and—a more delicate task—restored the coat of arms of Judaism in the eyes of the Jews, among the most intelligent who, for one reason or another, had strayed away from it. One had not seen such a thing in a long time, perhaps since Philo. However, the philosophical explanation of Judaism by Levinas brings back to Judaism Jews and non-Jews who would bow before the texts to establish a dialogue with them and expect lessons and directions from them. It may even mark the beginning of a communion by the monotheist humanity in a same invocation of the Name. The translation of Levinas in seventy

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 23 languages makes him the Jew of the Nations. He will have known the merit of being contemporary to his oeuvre, contributing, I believe, to the eschatological maturation of humanity. Although Monsieur Levinas is dead for the pupils, Levinas is still among his disciples who will continue to meet him in his books. As for me, citing a midrash, I feel his lips permanently quivering in the tomb as we so often quote him, invoke him, and discuss him. Ami Bouganim

NOTES 1. The small volume titled Lévinas Philosophe et Pédagogue (Alliance Israélite Universelle 1998) was published in a limited edition by Les Éditions du Nadir in Paris “as a mark of gratitude for his teaching and in homage to Professor Emmanuel Levinas thanks to the support of his faithful friends from the Synagogue of the École Normale Israélite.” In addition to Catherine Chalier and Ami Bouganim’s texts translated for this book, it included contributions from David Banon (Lévinas talmudiste, 31–54) and Ady Steg (Apologue, 7), and a conversation between Levinas and Paul Ricoeur (Entretien, 11–28). (trans.) 2. Translated by D. Egéa-Kuehne, by permission of Les Éditions du Nadir. A word of appreciation to Catherine Chalier and Ami Bouganim for generously providing some pertinent comments and amendments to their texts. Notes added for the translation are identiﬁed by (trans.). Authors’ notes are identiﬁed by (CC) or (AM). Square brackets indicate insertions made by the translator. 3. Chalier 1998. 4. The Oratory is located at the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) in Paris, France. (trans.) 5. There exist as many versions of this phrase as there are Bible translations. The King James Version (KJV) is the source for Chalier’s French version “il fait s’agiter doucement les lèvres endormies.” Other similar wording: “Flowing gently through the lips of those who fall asleep” (New American Standard Bible, 1995, Lockman Foundation); and “moving gently the lips of sleepers” (New KJV, 1982, Thomas Nelson). (trans.) 6. Lemor is frequently used in the Bible, meaning “saying.” Examples: Exodus 20.1 (KJV): “And God spake all these words, saying”; Leviticus 27.1 (KJV): “And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying”; Number 2.1 (KJV): “And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying.” (I am grateful to Catherine Chalier for providing these comments and references.) The Talmud rules of conﬁdentiality further explain the use of the word lemor and its major role: “[T]his principle of conﬁdentiality is also implied in Scripture discussing the communication between Moses and the Almighty. In many of the communications between G-d and Moses, the Torah adds the speciﬁc designation lemor, or ‘to say’; that is, G-d’s words were meant to be delivered by Moses to the Jewish people, implying that, without speciﬁc permission, G-d’s words would be considered conﬁdential and therefore, not to be divulged” (Boylan 2002, 8). I am grateful to Marina Basu for bringing this quote to my attention. (trans.) 7. Further discussion of Levinas’s notion of “disinterestedness” and the violence of being can be found in Egéa-Kuehne (2006), for example, and in Chapter two of this volume. (trans.)

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8. Salomon ben Isaac (Rabbi Chlomo ben Yts’hak), better known under his pseudonym Rashi (Troyes c. 1040 c. 1105), is a commentator of the Jewish sacred texts of the written tradition (the Bible, i.e., Pentateuch, Prophets, Hagiographers) as well as the oral tradition (the Talmud). (trans.) 9. French text bénit: “Many English-speaking people ﬁnd the idea of berakhot very confusing. To them, the word ‘blessing’ seems to imply that the person saying the blessing is conferring some beneﬁt on the person he is speaking to. For example, in Catholic tradition, a person making a confession begins by asking the priest to bless him. Yet in a berakhah, the person saying the blessing is speaking to God. How can the creation confer a beneﬁt upon the Creator? This confusion stems largely from difﬁculties in the translation. The Hebrew word barukh is not a verb describing what we do to G-d; it is an adjective describing G-d as the source of all blessings. When we recite a berakhah, we are not blessing G-d; we are expressing wonder at how blessed G-d is” (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise 2007). (My thanks to Marina Basu for providing this information.) (trans.) 10. Bouganim 1998b. 11. Founded in 1860, the Alliance Israélite Universelle is today one of the main international organizations in Jewish education and culture. Its objective is the diffusion of a type of Judaism which is simultaneously faithful to tradition, tolerant, and open to the modern world. Furthermore, the Alliance strives to promote French language and culture abroad and acts as a major partner in defending human rights and dialogue between religions. Its work consists in its network of schools in France and abroad, its schools of continuing studies (Section Normale des Études Juives and the Collège des Études Juives), and its extensive library and publications including Les Cahiers de l’Alliance. (trans.) 12. In those years, the only Israelite attempt to face the problem of de-judaization of the young generations was conducted under the inﬂuence of Benzion Dinor, French Minister of Education. It consisted of a cultivation of “a Jewish consciousness” and did not meet with much success. (AB) 13. In France, the grandes écoles are higher education establishments outside the mainstream framework of the public universities. Generally focused on a single subject area (e.g., engineering, research, business, or administration), they are of moderate size and highly selective in their admission criteria. (trans.) 14. It is a Talmudic expression. 15. “Lithuanian” is a well known designation for rationalist rabbi’s (Mitnagdim) who oppose the pietistic rabbis (Hasidim). The ﬁrst ones were mainly located in Lithuania, the birth country of Levinas. 16. When the ENIO reopened in 1946, Levinas wanted nothing short of “creating . . . a Western center of Jewish spirituality which, once more, will bring something new to Eastern Judaism” (Alliance Israélite Universelle 1946– 1947). (AB) 17. Oqer Harim is a Talmudic expression which, quoting an expression from Rashi, designates a master particularly “adept in Talmudic argumentation [pilpoul].” See Rashi (Berakhot 64a). (AB) 18. Bouganim 1998a. 19. Le Père Goriot is one of the most widely read novels, written in 1835 by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel by Madame de Lafayette, ﬁrst published anonymously in March 1678. (trans.) 20. The tallit (also sometimes spelled tallith) is a prayer shawl worn by Jewish men and women (Orthodox women do not wear the tallit) after they have reached their Bar Mitzvah (13th Jewish birthday) for boys or Bat Mitzvah (12th Jewish birthday) for girls. The tallit is used during the morning prayers on all weekdays (including Sabbath and other holydays). It is not worn for

Emmanuel Levinas School Master and Pedagogue 25

21. 22. 23. 24.

afternoon and evening prayers. The Teﬁllin (Hebrew: ʺʴʩʬʩʯ), also called phylacteries, are the two boxes with black leather straps attached to them containing Biblical verses; they are used in traditional Jewish prayer. (trans.) Text slightly modiﬁed from original by Ami Bouganim. (trans.) House of learning. (trans.) Text slightly modiﬁed from original by Ami Bouganim. (trans.) These words echo Proust’s famous 1913 text Swann’s Way (Du Côté de chez Swann). (trans.)

REFERENCES Alliance Israélite Universelle. 1946–1947. La Réouverture de l‘ENIO. Les Cahiers de l‘Alliance 11. ———. 1998. Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue. Paris, France: Editions du Nadir. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. 2007. Who Blesses whom? In Prayers and blessings. Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ Judaism/prayer.html#Who Bouganim, A. 1998a. Lévinas pédagogue. In Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue, 55– 64. Paris, France: Editions du Nadir. ———. 1998b. Postface to Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue, 71–75. Paris, France: Editions du Nadir. Boylan, S. 2002. Symposium: A Rabbi’s obligation of conﬁdentiality vs. the religious duty of disclosure. In Jewish law report, ed. C. Powarsky. Institute of Jewish Law. http://tourolaw.edu/academic_programs/institutes/jewish_law_pubs.asp. Chalier, C. 1998. Lévinas maître. In Lévinas philosophe et pédagogue, 65–70. Paris, France: Editions du Nadir. Egéa-Kuehne, D. 2006. The violence of being and Levinas’s quest for justice: Levinas’s “idea of a possibility.” Paper presented at the ﬁrst annual North American Levinas Society Conference, Purdue University, IN. Levinas, E. 1953. Réﬂexions sur l‘éducation juive. In Les Cahiers de l‘Alliance 74. Songs of songs. 1995. 21st century King James version. Deuel Enterprises, Inc.

2

Levinas’s Quest for Justice Of Faith and the “possibility of education”1 Denise Egéa-Kuehne

The focus of this chapter is on Emmanuel Levinas’s concepts of ethics and justice and their profound relevancy to education, yet not in a prescriptive way, as we saw in the introduction that Levinas himself resisted the concept of philosophy being “applied” to education. First, I brieﬂy recall how Levinas’s reﬂection on ethics and justice developed in the context of an ethical vacuum due to a loss of axiological markers which prompted a renewed interest in religious thought. Then I brieﬂy outline his understanding of ethics, and its connection to the “face-to-face” encounter with the Other, an encounter at the basis of education.2 This ﬁrst movement towards justice raises the question of the violence inherent in the struggle to afﬁrm oneself and the “right-to-be,” a concept found at the heart of American education. I then explore Levinas’s quest for justice and the tight link he establishes with responsibility. I conclude with a discussion of his “idea of a possibility” and the promise of an ideal of education.

LOSS OF AXIOLOGICAL MARKERS AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL As diagnosed by Nietzsche, a historical fracture occurred with the phenomenon of nihilism marked by the “death” of the Christian God and of supra-sensible ideals, and by a progressive shift to a “relativist” perspective. Following up on Nietzsche’s analyses, historians and researchers described a regression, even an eclipse, of the religious and the sacred in Western industrial countries as well as under the Communist regime (Gauchet 1999; Weber 1958). However, after 1975, Kepel (1991) noted that a reafﬁrmation of religion ties “God’s return” to the collapse of diverse ideologies. The Christian, Jewish, or Islamic movements we have observed are inscribed in this dual perspective: ﬁrst, they endeavor to name the confusion and disorder of the world as perceived by their adepts through the revitalization of a vocabulary and categories of religious thought, applied to the contemporary world. Next they elaborate projects to

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transform the social order and make it conform to the injunctions and values of the Bible, the Koran, or the Evangels, for they only, according to their interpretation, can guarantee the coming of a world of Justice and Truth. (259–60) All three religious traditions have much in common. They all reject a secularization which goes back to the Enlightenment, and hold that the arrogant emancipation of reason from religious faith is primarily responsible for the subsequent ills of the twentieth century which directly led to Nazi or Stalinist totalitarianisms. The new generations see no contradiction between the knowledge of science and technology they seek and their submission to a religious faith which eludes logic and reason. They see their lives as representations of the fact that a “God-fearing Jew,” for example, may also be a “great scientist.” Although they all agree that a fundamental transformation of the organization of society is needed in order for the sacred texts to be an inspiration once more for the “city of the future,” Christians, Jews, and Muslims disagree as to its format and content. Each of these religious cultures has elaborated speciﬁc “Truths” which, by reafﬁrming their respective identities, make them mutually exclusive. Kepel (1991) points out: “Ecumenism ends with the disqualiﬁcation of secularism; beyond that, projects for a society diverge, then become deeply antagonistic, with a potential for merciless conﬂicts in which no doctrine of Truth can allow any compromise” (1991, 259–60). The rebirth of a vital hermeneutics which interrogates Christian spirituality but also the Islamic domain and the Hebraic ﬁeld marks our time and its mutations in philosophical thinking. Even though atheists may choose to ignore this shift, the religious and its inﬂuence nevertheless cannot be dismissed. This reversal to religious thought in Western culture feeds into modern needs for ethics, and marks our contemporary societies where the Old and the New Testaments become ethical sources. The Bible, the Talmud, and such works by Rosenzweig and Buber appear to be the roots of this contemporary Jewish thought renewed by Levinas. Often identiﬁed as the “philosopher of ethics,” Levinas developed a phenomenology of the face, not as a plastic form, but as a presence signifying an interdict of violence, through the inﬁnity of which it is a trace and a sign—the face signiﬁes Inﬁnity.3 For Levinas, this ethical plenitude is linked to the Hebraic tradition and to the wisdom of the Eternal. In Totality and inﬁnity and Ethics and inﬁnity, Levinas exposes some theses with obvious Biblical and Talmudic references. It is recognized that Levinas’s thinking is essentially philosophical and phenomenological, yet the Biblical message is also paramount. Many a time, Levinas has conﬁrmed the importance his reading of the Bible has played in his “manner of thinking philosophically, that is to say thinking while, and by, addressing all human beings” (1985, 24).4 He acknowledges that it lays the foundations of his reﬂection about the Other. In his dialogue with Philippe Nemo, Levinas stresses the importance of this ethical source:

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Denise Egéa-Kuehne The sentiment that the Bible is the Book of books wherein the ﬁrst things are said, those which should be said so that human life has a meaning, and are said in a form which opens to commentators the very dimensions of profundity, was not some simple substitution of a literary judgment for the consciousness of the “sacred.” It is that extraordinary presence of its characters, that ethical plenitude and those mysterious possibilities of exegesis which originally signiﬁed transcendence for me. (1985, 23; italics in the original)5

The Talmudic source is also paramount in Levinas’s thought, since the Talmud offers an ethics articulated around the Other. For Levinas, the Bible and the Talmud are the (dual) foundations of ethics and the law. The movement of his reﬂection is particularly striking in Difﬁcult freedom, a long meditation on Judaism and its essence. In that text, Levinas elucidates what he sees as the true meaning of the Jewish monotheism, devoid of all idolatry and rejecting the idea of a sacred power fettering human freedom. Moreover, Levinas discusses how Judaism carries the risk of atheism—“a beautiful risk” according to him, yet to be “overcome,” where humans can ﬁnd God, even while they deny it. The rigorous afﬁrmation of human independence, of its intelligent presence to an intelligible reality, the destruction of the numinous concept of the Sacred, entail the risk of atheism. . . . The difﬁcult path of monotheism rejoins the path of the West. One wonders, in fact, whether the Western spirit, philosophy, is not in the last analysis the position of a humanity that accepts the risk of atheism, if it must be held to ransom by its majority, but overcome it. (1990, 15–16) Some scholars have looked at Levinas’s body of work as a “diptych,” distinguishing between the two panels of his “philosophical/Greek” and “religious/Jewish” writings (Banon 1984). Although Levinas declares himself “in favor of the Greek heritage,” he believes that “both moments,” religious and philosophical discourses, “are necessary” albeit “not on the same level” (1999, 177). However, while he acknowledges the deep inﬂuence of his Biblical and Talmudic sources, he often stresses the importance he places on being a philosopher, not a theologian: “My point of departure is absolutely non-theological. This is very important to me; it is not theology which I do, but philosophy” (1962, 110).6 In his eyes, at no point in time did the Western philosophical tradition lose its “right to the last word.” Yet if, on the one hand, he recognizes its “right to the last word,” on the other hand, he questions whether it is “the place of the ﬁrst meaning of beings, the place where meaning begins” (1985, 25). Levinas is one of the major contemporary thinkers, considered to have rejuvenated philosophy by going back to the word of the Bible and the texts of the Talmud.

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LEVINAS’S ETHICS AND HIS QUEST FOR JUSTICE For Levinas, “the face of the other” means the ﬁrst relation to ethics.7 In the face-to-face encounter, he sees, beyond all knowledge, an “elevation” of the ethical order, an indirect encounter with a transcendental God, a relation to Inﬁnity: “To my mind the Inﬁnite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signiﬁes the Inﬁnite. It never appears as a theme, but in this ethical signifyingness itself” (1985, 105; italics in the original). Levinas often reiterates this statement in so many words throughout his writings and interviews, stressing that, in his model, “the relation to the face is straightaway ethical,” that is, the relation to the other immediately outlines ethics, in “the humanity of man” (1985, 87). Ethics is born in the encounter with, in the relation of proximity to, the Other: “The term ethics always signiﬁes for me the fact of the encounter, of the relation of an I to the Other. . . . Transcendence and proximity” (Levinas 1974, 28). It is before the Other and the face of the Other that one can have the pure experience of the other, which Levinas sees as one and the same with ethics, inasmuch as one is aware that one is responsible for the other, that the existence of the other is more important than one’s own. He sums it up in these words: “To perceive that we come after an other whoever he may be—that is ethics” (1999, 167). On that point, Levinas shows to be no more receptive to Heidegger’s ontology than he is accepting of Hegel’s unifying notion of Totality. He notes that “the ﬁrst statements of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology . . . then promised new philosophical possibilities” (1987, 34). While Heidegger talks about Sein (Being) and Seiendes (being), Levinas prefers to use the terms existence (existing) and existant (existent) rather than the usual être and étant, making it clear that one must not see any “speciﬁcally existentialist meaning” in those words (1987, 44).8 Heidegger makes a distinction between subjects and objects: those who are—Seiendes, l’étant, l’existant, or beings; and their actions, “their very work of being,” what they accomplish—Sein, l’essence, l’existence, or Being. Levinas recognizes that this Heideggerian distinction is for him “the most profound thing about Being and time” (1987, 44). However, it does not satisfy Levinas, who does not favor the ontological relation (what he sees as an “abstract” relation to Being), and places ethics and religion before speculative ontology. For him, it is not a simple matter of going from Being (Sein, de l’existence), to being (Seiendes, à l’existant).9 Being is the human being (what he calls “man”), says Levinas, and it is as “a face” that a human being is accessible. It is the ethical signiﬁcance of the other which is primordial. In Levinas’s view, “[t]here is sainthood in someone’s face, but most of all, there is sainthood or ethics toward oneself in a stance which encounters a face as face” (in Poirié 1987, 95). What Levinas does not accept is that in Heidegger, “there is a distinction, not a separation” (1987, 45). This is important, as Cohen (in Levinas 1987, 45n9) notes, because “the notion of separation is of the utmost epistemological and ontological importance in

30 Denise Egéa-Kuehne Levinas’s philosophy (italics in the original),” and points to the inﬂuence of Rosenzweig on Levinas. The term Jemeinigkeit (“mineness”), used by Heidegger (1962, e.g., 68 and 284), underscores “the fact that existing is always possessed by someone” (Levinas 1987, 45). However, in his notion of Geworfenheit, usually translated as “dereliction” or “desertion,” there appears the possibility of an existing which might occur independently of a subject, without existents who, when “thrown” into existence, could never master it.10 Then how is it possible, wonders Levinas, to encounter “an existing without existents“? What happens if everything disappears? What is left, he says, is il y a, “the fact that there is,” what he calls “the murmur of silence” (1987, 46).11 And it is by “a vigilance without possible recourse to sleep” (1987, 49) that Levinas characterizes this il y a, “the way that existing is afﬁrmed in its own annihilation” (1987, 48). Levinas describes this “vigilance” as what makes it impossible to retreat in slumber, to fall asleep, to take refuge in the “unconsciousness/inconscience,” the non-conscious/non-conscience. He notes that it may be a paradox also to “characterize the there is by vigilance, as if the pure event of existing were endowed with a consciousness” (1987, 51; italics in the original). Yet he also wonders whether vigilance deﬁnes consciousness, or if consciousness is not indeed rather the possibility of tearing itself away from vigilance, if the proper meaning of consciousness does not consist in being a vigilance backed against a possibility of sleep. . . . In fact, consciousness already participates in vigilance. But what characterizes it particularly is its always retaining the possibility of withdrawing “behind” to sleep. Consciousness is the power to sleep. (1987, 51)12 Levinas sees this escape as “the very paradox of consciousness” (1987, 51). The two meanings of “conscience,” in French and in English—moral conscience and consciousness in the sense of awareness—merge in this notion.13 In order to develop a moral conscience and a moral awareness, one must remain vigilant, aware, not succumb to slumber or take refuge in sleep. In Levinas’s understanding of ethics, it is connected to this notion of vigilance in the experience of the Other, of the relation with/to the Other, the “conscience,” the awareness, the evidence that one is unavoidably responsible for this other. With Levinas, the relationship to the Other enters a new dimension: “The relationship with alterity is neither spatial nor conceptual” (1987, 84). Within this relation with the Other, “alterity appears as a nonreciprocal relationship” (1987, 83). In other terms, unlike the reciprocity Buber ﬁnds in the I-Thou relation, what Levinas calls the space of intersubjectivity is not symmetrical.14 The Other is experienced as other not only as alter ego, but because “the Other is what I myself am not” (1987, 83).15 This intersubjective relation cannot be synthesized; no totality can integrate it. Through this interaction and the sense, the “conscience” and the awareness of this interaction, Levinas sees the compelling and inescapable emergence

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of implication, of interconnection, of the responsibility to/for the Other. It is in this “phenomenology of the face” that the idea of Inﬁnity signiﬁes itself, in the proximity of the Other. There is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance—the ethical resistance. . . . Inﬁnity presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyzes my powers and from the depths of defenseless eyes rises ﬁrm and absolute in its nudity and destitution. The comprehension of this destitution and this hunger establishes the very proximity of the other. (Levinas 2004, 199–200; italics in the original) Levinas shows how consciousness and moral conscience are developed through the face-to-face encounter with the other, through an interpersonal relationship, through the responsibility and the respect one must develop for the Other as other.

VIOLENCE OF BEING AND RESPONSIBILITY One of Levinas’s declared “fundamental themes,” developed in Totality and Inﬁnity, is precisely this interpersonal, non-symmetrical “intersubjective relation.” Levinas considers it “essential” (1985, 79). He insists: “I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it” (1985, 98).16 In support, Levinas often cites Dostoyevsky’s words (through Alyosha Karamazov): “We are all responsible for everything and for everyone before everyone, but I more than any other” (1952, 310).17 It is also in keeping with the ancient Talmudic expression: “All in Israel are responsible for one another,” where Israel is understood as “humanity,” also used as such in “The pact” (1989a, 224–26). Levinas argues that this responsibility is “total” inasmuch as it includes the responsibility “for,” “which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility” (1985, 99). This theme is crucial to understand Levinas, as evidenced by the numerous occasions where he develops it. In that sense, since the “I” is always responsible even for the responsibility of the Other, “[t]he I always has one more responsibility than all the others” (Levinas 1985, 99; italics in the original). This is where the individual’s right-to-be becomes problematic.18 Levinas argues that just being (être), existing, already raises questions: Am I taking someone else’s place in the world? Is my life usurping someone else’s life? What right do I have to be (être)? In Alterity and transcendence, Levinas directly addresses the importance of this line of questioning: “I have written a lot on this theme,” he says, but “it’s my main theme now” (1999, 179). He explains that he means être in its verbal form, following up on Heidegger for whom the “verbality” of the word être “was awakened,” containing

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the event, what “occurs” in être (Levinas 1985, 38). Levinas underscores its dynamic meaning as “a process of being or event of being or adventure of being” (1991, 9).19 Thus absorbed in its intent to be, its “insistence to be,” the individual, sustained by its “instinct of preservation,” perseveres in its “adventure to be” as if it were what it is meant to be, as if it were “its meaning” (Levinas 1991, 9–10). In this argument, Levinas is led to challenge Spinoza’s Hellenic endorsement of the conatus essendi.20 It refers to this perseverance to be “in spite and against everything and everyone,” this “obstinacy to be-there” (the Da- in Dasein; “the there of my beingthere,” [Levinas 1999, 179]), the intéressement of the being, “its primordial essence” (Levinas 1991, 10–11).21 But “being-there” may also mean occupying, “usurping” someone else’s place in the world. This is where “[t]he Da of Da-sein is already an ethical problem” for Levinas (1993, 48).22 In this insistence, in this “concern” to be, he sees a violence, even a “savagery” in this struggle to afﬁrm oneself “without regard, without care” for the Other (1991, 10). He cites Pascal as often as he cites Dostoyevsky, and places this sentence in exergue of Otherwise than Being: “‘That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.” 23 Earlier we saw that it is before the Other and the face of the Other that the individual can have the pure experience of the other. Levinas sees it as one and the same with ethics, inasmuch as one is aware that one is responsible for the other, that the existence of the other is more important than one’s own. According to Levinas, this approach to ethics, this concern for the other-than-I, the non-indifference to the Other, constitutes the trigger which could release the obstinacy of the individual in his/her perseverance, his/her insistence to be. This obligation to, and responsibility for, the Other is unlimited: “In ethics, the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own” (Levinas, 1986, 24). This call to responsibility through the encounter with the Other would be “the release of this ontological contraction said by the verb être, the dés-intér-essement opening the order of the human, the grace, and the sacriﬁce” (Levinas 1991, 238). Levinas developed this notion of désintér-essement, then presented his concept of il y a as a trace of the “necessary,” “the very test of dis-inter-estedness” (1985, 52). To emerge from il y a, the individual must depose the “sovereignty” of his or her “I.” Furthermore, “[t]his deposition of the sovereignty by the ‘I’ is the social relationship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation” (Levinas 1985, 52). Levinas split this term in three segments to underscore “the uprooting from being” which, according to him, it signiﬁes (1993, 36). He distinguished this coming out of being through the encounter with the face of the other from that made possible through knowledge, and called it “sociality“: “Sociality will be a way of escaping being otherwise than through knowledge” (1985, 61). Dés-intér-essement characterizes the human being parting with, discarding, his or her condition of being. Levinas discusses it at length in Otherwise than Being, arguing that it does not merely mean “to be otherwise,” since to be otherwise is still to be.

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With this concept of dis-inter-estedness, “the responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-Other,” which appear to him as what could “stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being” (1985, 52), Levinas explores the ﬁrst level of disruption of being in his move towards justice. It is this “ethical event” discussed above, in which the “encounter” (distinct from “experience”) with the “face of the other” constitutes a call out of oneself into conscience and awareness of the Other, into an ethical relation to the Other, a relation to which Levinas refers as “discourse,” or in later texts, as “proximity.” In his response to Kearney, in Face to face, Levinas declares: “I become a responsible or ethical ‘I’ to the extent that I agree to depose or dethrone myself—to abdicate my position of centrality—in favor of the vulnerable other. . . . The ethical I is a being who asks if he has a right to be!—who excuses himself to the other for his own existence (1986, 27). The second disruption is brought about by a third party, le tiers. The above discussion is based on an encounter face-to-face with one Other, through an interpersonal relation eliciting the responsibility and the respect called for by the Other for the other as other. However, going back to some arguments developed in Totality and Inﬁnity, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas establishes that humanity cannot be reduced to two individuals, because there is always un tiers, a third party—the reality of society—who disrupts, upsets the simplicity of this one-on-one encounter with the emergence of this “third party next to the Other” (Levinas 1985, 89).24 “Indeed,” Levinas responded during the discussion which followed a 1972 presentation on “Ideology and idealism,” “if there were only two of us in the world, I and one other, there would be no problem. The other would be completely my responsibility. But in the real world, there are many others” (1989b, 247). With him or her, the third party brings “the proximity of a human plurality” (Levinas 1999b, 101). This third party is also a neighbor, and a neighbor of the neighbor, other than this neighbor, each being unique— and with each tiers entering the scene, problems arise. For Levinas, this situation raises several questions: In this plurality, which one comes before the other in my responsibility? What are they, then, the other and the third party, in relation to each other? and so on. Ultimately, he sees “[t]he ﬁrst question in the inter-human” as the inevitable question of justice, when it is necessary to weigh, think, and judge within a relation of proximity, where everything is owed to each and every other, demanding the impossible—“a comparison of incomparables” (Levinas 1999, 142). Thus the movement from ethics to justice is triggered by the entrance of the third on the scene of the intersubjective relation. Levinas writes: “it is the fact of the multiplicity of human beings, and the presence of a third party next to the Other, which condition the laws and establish justice” (1985, 89).25 This is where Levinas sees that “the quest for justice” is going back to the face of the other, “the source of my obligation toward other men” (1999, 170), the source of responsibility and ethics. For him, it is “[t]hat initial obligation, before the multiplicity of human beings, [which] becomes justice” (1999, 175–76). The individual’s choice to acknowledge the Other as other is an ethical decision,

34 Denise Egéa-Kuehne and it is this acknowledgement which Levinas calls justice. Thus his concept of justice appears to be conceived in a Biblical sense, as a synthesis of moral behaviors. This is also where Levinas sees—were one to forget the uniqueness and primacy of the other—the possible risk of “transforming the sublime and difﬁcult work of justice into a purely political calculation” (1999, 170). However, it is important to note that this move from ethics to justice may not be linear if one reads the role of responsibility differently. Dudiak (2001) stresses that, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas claims repeatedly that the arrival of the third party on the scene of the intersubjective relation between I and the Other “is not an empirical fact,” but an essential structure of the other (Levinas 1981, 158–60). In Levinas’s words, “[i]t is not that the entry of the third party would be an empirical fact, and that my responsibility for the other ﬁnds itself constrained to a calculus by the ‘force of things’” (1981, 158). The sharing of responsibility is not afﬁxed to the arrival of the third, but is already part and parcel of one’s responsibility to the Other. In Levinas’s thought, “[i]n the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice, demands measure and knowing, is consciousness” (1981, 158). Moreover, in Totality and Inﬁnity, “The Other and the Others,” Levinas argues that the other already carries a “third,” that is to say, another Other: “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other” (2004, 213). In the face-to-face encounter, the other Other (le tiers) is already there, or manifests itself simultaneously. In this sense, Levinas can write: “The others concern me from the ﬁrst,” in a “fraternity” which is not based, however, on genus, but on responsibility (1981, 159). This concept of “fraternity” renders justice accessible to all, which is the essence of justice, in the fact that “I am another for the others . . . the reciprocal relationship binds me to the other man in the trace of transcendence, in illeity” (Levinas 1981, 158). A few pages down, Levinas conﬁrms that “justice can be established only if I, always evaded from the concept of the ego, always desituated and divested of being, always in non-reciprocatable relationship with the other, always for the other, can become an other like the others” (1981, 160–61). The importance of this “fraternity” for justice cannot be overlooked since it is thanks to this fraternity that there can be justice also for “I.” Later, in an interview with Mortley (1991, 18), Levinas acknowledges that “there is a sense in which another is in conﬂict with my relationship with a third party,” which precludes “liv[ing] in society on the basis of this one-to-one responsibility alone.” Levinas there sees a relationship of “pity” through which “we enter into knowledge, judgment and justice.”

LEVINAS AND THE “POSSIBILITY” OF EDUCATION Levinas’s concepts of ethics and justice have raised many questions.26 The most salient and frequently voiced of these concern his writings about an ideal deemed impossible to achieve in “an age of dis-aster—an age without

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a guiding star” (Cohen in Levinas 1987, 26), in a world which has lost its markers and has gone awry, in which “[t]here [is] no longer any measure to contain monstrosities” (Levinas 1996, 120). Although Levinas often claimed that his work “escapes the reproach of utopianism” (1981, 184), how realistic is his call for a responsibility to the Other in a world where the persistent focus on self-interest appears to be at the antipodes of what he advocates in his notions of dis-inter-estedness and primacy of the Other, a focus at the heart of American culture and education? Levinas was convinced of the paramount importance of justice, and situated it at the core of “ﬁrst philosophy,” which for him was ethics. He also saw that demanding justice for the Other was a return to a profound morality which deﬁes ideology. Posing the problem of fundamental justice through the arrival of a third party in the intersubjective relation led him to raise the question of rights, which in this context is necessarily “always that of the other” (Levinas 1999, 102). We saw that, in his model of ethics and justice, he argues that responsibility to the Other implies responsibility to all others, which for him leads to responsibility for social justice. It may be that, in Levinas’s understanding of ethics, its connection to the encounter “face-to-face” with the Other, and its movement toward justice, all found at the root of education, there is a promise: that of the possibility of a “just” education—the possibility of integrating this understanding of ethics and justice in an education which appears increasingly bureaucratic and selfserving. It may be that Levinas can help educators understand this question of the violence inherent in the struggle to afﬁrm oneself and the “right-to-be,” a concept also found at the heart of American education. The tight link Levinas establishes between justice and responsibility is also helpful. With Levinas, we can bring to education this “idea of a possibility” and the promise of an ideal of education. Recalling the episode of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince asking for the drawing of a sheep—a Little Prince who is satisﬁed only with the sketch of a box where he is told a sheep he cannot see is asleep—Levinas confesses: “I do not know how to draw the solution to insoluble problems. . . . I have no idea other than the idea of the idea that one should have. . . . I have the idea of a possibility in which the impossible may be sleeping” (1999, 89). Derrida has discussed at great length this notion of “to-come” (à venir) in a way which helps us better understand the profound meaning of justice and its “promise,” and the “possibility” about which Levinas writes.27 For Derrida, the notion of “to-come” entails “some openness to the future, and . . . openness to the other” (2001, 180); that is why speaking of somethingto-come is referring to something experienced as always possible. In this case, it does not mean that justice in education, or our ideal of justice in education, will realize itself only in a future time, nor does it refer to a “regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or . . . a utopia” (Derrida 1994, 65). Extending Derrida’s concept of “to-come” to justice and education, it can be understood “as the concept of a promise” (64), which can manifest itself only where there is disruption and upheaval, when there exists a gap between the present state

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of education, in this case, and the possibility of an ideal of education, a just education. In fact, it is in this very gap that education would be shaped between an inﬁnite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the inﬁnite respect of the singularity and inﬁnite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. (Derrida 1994, 65; italics in the original) It is in this gap that the “inﬁnite . . . singularity and inﬁnite alterity of the other” must be preserved, “as the only chance of an afﬁrmed or rather reafﬁrmed future” (Derrida 1994, 37). Without this gap, without this disjunction, education may simply believe, in all good conscience, that it has succeeded, that its duty is accomplished, and therefore it may lose “the chance of the future, of the promise or the appeal . . . (that is its ‘own’ possibility)” (Derrida 1994, 28). Levinas sees there a possibility in which “the impossible may be sleeping” (1999, 89), but, writes Derrida, “there is no responsibility that is not the experience and experiment of the impossible” (1992, 44–45). He links this concept—this condition of responsibility dependent on the simultaneous necessity of a condition of impossibility—to a notion of “messianism,” to the experience of the promise. It is by opening a space for the afﬁrmation of this promise, of the messianic and emancipatory promise, of the impossible event as a promise, that it will preserve its capital of possibilities, of a dynamic ideal of justice in-the-making, to-come. This concept of à venir, to come—this condition of possibility simultaneous with the necessity of a condition of impossibility—is closely linked to the promise, to a notion of messianism, to faith. Like the promise whose very existence depends on its not being kept, which, the moment it is kept is no longer a promise, the possibility of its coming is what makes a messiah a possibility which can only be sustained by its being forever deferred. Derrida sees that this “messianic structure,” what he calls messianicity, has everything to do with faith. For him, the concepts of to-come and the promise are closely tied to the pledge, to commitment, and his texts on the university without condition in particular repeatedly utilize these terms, along with engagement, responsibility, profession, profession of faith, act of faith, declaration of faith, and act of sworn faith. This thinking is not limited to theoretical thinking or to knowledge in its general sense. As Levinas has shown it throughout his life, as teacher and director at the École normale israélite orientale (ENIO, Paris, France), if met with responsibility, it is a “thinking,” a “faith,” which calls for action, which strives toward a possible future which, because it is always in the making, à venir, remains a dynamic hope and promise of something to come. This tension between the state of education today and the hope for, the faith in a more just

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and responsible education, an education-to-come, constitute the force behind a thinking which “calls for the coming of an event, i.e., calls precisely for that which ‘changes’” (Derrida 1999, 257): that which helps shape an education which would better respond to our hopes for a more just and equitable education, an education based on the respect of the Other, where violence would have no place, and responsibility would be a foundation for learning and living. NOTES 1. Parts of this essay were included in a 2003 chapter titled “Levinas’s ethicopolitical order of human proximity: ‘The quest for justice,’” in Futures of critical theory: Dreams of difference, ed. M. A. Peters, C. Lankshear, and M. Olssen, 103–25. Lanham, Boulder, NY, Oxford: Rowman & Littleﬁeld. 2. See Introduction (11n1). 3. Much has been written on Levinas’s use of “the face” to articulate his notion of ethics. However, Biblical connotations to “the face” must be kept in mind when reading Levinas, as well as references to Franz Rosenzweig’s writings, especially in the 1972 The star of redemption (Der stern der erlosung). Levinas was very familiar with Rosenzweig’s work (e.g., Levinas 1993, xxii–xxiii and 49–66) and The star in particular. He wrote a foreword for Stéphane Mosès (1992), in which Mosès discusses Rosenzweig’s use of “the human face” as “the way the transcendence of the other is revealed to me,” harking back to “the face of God” and “Truth” (284–86). In his introduction to The Levinas reader, Hand (1989, 5) recalls that, in Totality and Inﬁnity already, “[t]he term ‘face’ . . . denotes the way in which the presentation of the other to me exceeds all idea of the other in me.” In his introduction to his translation of Alterity and transcendence, Michael B. Smith (1999, xiv) writes: “The face of the other is the locus of transcendence in that it calls into question the I in its existence as a being for itself.” See also Adriaan T. Peperzak (1993, 20) and Max Picard’s works, and Levinas’s “Max Picard and the Face” (1996, 94–98). 4. Translation modiﬁed. Cohen’s translation left out a few signiﬁcant words. Original French text: “Elle [the Bible] a donc joué un rôle essentiel—et en grande partie sans que je le sache—dans ma manière de penser philosophiquement, c’est-à-dire de penser en s’adressant à tous les hommes” (1982, 19). 5. Translation modiﬁed: “les choses . . . qui devaient être dites” (this is not the verb “devenir” but “devoir,” indicating a necessity, an obligation); “les dimensions mêmes de la profondeur” (mêmes here does not mean “same” but “very”); “cette plénitude éthique et ces mystérieuses possibilités” (“ces” is not a possessive to be translated by “its” sending back “mysterious possibilities” to “plenitude,” but a demonstrative pronoun to be translated by “those”) (1982, 17–18). 6. See also Levinas’s response to a panel of Dutch philosophers on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Leyden, The Netherlands (in May 1975): “I have never even thought that I was doing theology. Whatever my experiences and pre-philosophic sources may have been, I have always had this idea (a bit mad perhaps) that I was doing or endeavoring to do philosophy, even in commenting on the biblical text which called this forth.” (in Peperzak, 1993, 210n2). See also Levinas (1985, 22–25). 7. See Introduction, note 2. 8. See also Derrida (1978, 79–153). 9. See Levinas (2001) and Peperzak (1993, 5). Note the shift between the French and the English titles, from a movement between, to a juxtaposition of, the two terms: existence and exista(e)nt.

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10. English translators of Heidegger’s Being and time used the term “thrownness” (174, 233, 330–3). 11. See also Levinas (2001, 51–3 and 1989), where it is also termed “the elemental.” 12. See also Levinas (2001, 61–70 and 1989). 13. Fairly consistently, most English texts translate the French word conscience with “consciousness.” The reader must keep in mind that the term “consciousness” is generally perceived to mean “awareness” more readily than “moral conscience,” and that, in the English translation, the “moral” semantic connotations might be left out of Levinas’s text or overlooked. 14. See also “The asymmetry of the interpersonal” in Levinas (1989, 215–16, 251 and passim). 15. See also “Transcendence is not negativity” in Levinas (1989, 40–2). 16. French text: “dût-il m‘en coûter la vie” (1982, 105): “should it cost me my own life.” 17. See Chinnery, 240n4. 18. See in particular “The meaning of meanings” in Levinas (1993), a text which challenges Heidegger’s position that meaning is derived from Being, and in which Levinas asks: “Is it just to be?” (90–5). 19. See also Time and the Other (1987, 48): “The existing that I am trying to approach is the very work of being, which cannot be expressed by a substantive but is verbal.” 20. However, it must be noted that in his preface to Éthique comme philosophie première (1998), Rolland believes that Levinas takes some liberty in his use of Spinoza and Heidegger’s texts. He acknowledges that, for Levinas, the essence of the “I” is not in “a formidable centripetal force which would be speciﬁc to it,” but it would refer to Spinoza’s conatus essendi—conatus in suum esse perseverandi— (la persévérance de l’ëtre), as it would refer to the Heideggerian doctrine of “the existence which exists in such a way that the very existence of this existence is at stake,” again loosely translated. Rolland writes: “Levinas confuses—and no doubt deliberately—Spinoza’s text as well as that of Heidegger with the famous Spanish inn where, as everyone knows, one never ﬁnds but what one brings—in this case, his own research, his own questioning” (55–56). 21. See also Levinas (1991, 258; 1993, 47–8). 22. Also in Éthique comme philosophie première (105). 23. See Pascal (295, 451). Levinas uses the quotation often; see for example Face to face (24); Ethics and Inﬁnity (120–22); Entre nous (261); and Alterity and transcendence (32). 24. Translation slightly modiﬁed. French text: “la présence du tiers à côté d’autrui” (1982, 94). 25. Translation slightly modiﬁed. French text: “c’est le fait de la multiplicité des hommes, la présence du tiers à côté d’autrui” (1982, 94). 26. These are questions which would take us further than the limits of this essay. See for example Dudiak, The intrigue of ethics, and Peperzak (1993), especially 167–84. Questions on the Other as thief or murderer and practical applications of Levinas’s concepts are also among questions which have been raised. See for example Fox, Modern Jewish ethics, especially 147–50. 27. Derrida especially develops the concept of à venir around the theme of “democracy-to-come,” a concept clearly linked to justice.

REFERENCES Banon, D. 1984. Une Herméneutique de la sollicitation. Emmanuel Levinas, Les Cahiers de la Nuit Surveillée 3:99–115.

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Cohen, R. A., ed. 1986. Face to face with Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press. Derrida, J. 1978. Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Writing and difference, trans. A. Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Call it a day for democracy. In The Other heading. Reﬂections on today’s Europe, trans. P. A. Brault and M. B. Naas, 84–109. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, & the New International. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Marx & sons. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2001. Talking liberties. In Derrida & education, ed. G. J. J. Biesta and D. Egéa-Kuehne, 176–85. London and New York: Routledge. Dostoyevsky, F. M. 1952. Les frères Karamazov. Paris: La Pléïade. Dudiak, J. 2001. The intrigue of ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Fukuyama, F. 2006. The end of history and the last man. New York: Simon & Schuster. Gauchet, M. 1999. The disenchantment of the world. Trans. O. Bruge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hand, S., ed. 1989. The Levinas reader. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and time. Trans. J. Marquarie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Jonas, H. 1984. The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age. Trans. D. Herr. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Kepel, G. 1991. La revanche de Dieu. Paris: Points Actuels-Seuil. Levinas, E. 1962. Transcendance et hauteur. In Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 56:3. ———. 1974. Autrement que savoir. Paris: Editions Osiris. ———. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1996. God and Philosophy. Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Perperzak, S. Critchley, and B. Bernasconi. 129–48. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other and additional essays. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1989a. The Pact. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 211–26. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1989b. Ideology and idealism. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 235–48. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1990. Difﬁcult freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1991. Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l‘autre. Paris: Grasset. ———. 1993. Outside the subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. London: Athlone. ———. 1996. Proper names. Trans. M. B. Smith. London: Athlone / Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Questions and answers. In Of God who comes to mind, trans. B. Bergo, 79–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. Alterity and transcendence. Trans. M. B. Smith. London: Athlone / New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 2001. Existence and existents. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Mortley, R. 1991. Conversation. London: Routledge. Mosès, S. 1992. System and revelation: The philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Trans. C. Tihanyi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Peperzak, A. 1993. To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Poirié, F. 1987. Emmanuel Levinas, qui êtes-vous? Lyon: La Manufacture. Roland, J. 1998. Préface to Éthique comme philosophie première, by E. Levinas, 11–65. Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages. Rosenzweig, F. 2005. The star of redemption: Modern Jewish philosophy and religion. Trans. B. E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Weber, M. 1958. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Trans. T. Parsons. New York: Scribner’s.

Part I

Questioning Education

3

The Importance of Enjoyment and Inspiration for Learning from a Teacher 1

Clarence W. Joldersma

How is it possible for one person to learn from another? There are many situations in which we learn from other people, ranging from early experiences with parents to conversations with friends to school settings with instructors. The content of what is learned ranges from mere factual knowledge to markedly new perspectives. This essay explores the possibility of learning something new from another person. In it, I use the common terms “learner” and “teacher” in a functional fashion, to stand for the-one-who-learns and the-other-from-whom-one-learns, respectively, either in school or out. To answer how it is possible to learn from a teacher I will develop anew the notion of subjectivity. Although it does not supplant it, my model will take us beyond the idea of the “conscious subject.” I believe that, to answer more adequately the question of how it is possible to learn from a teacher, we need to situate consciousness by uncovering two crucial conditions which make this possible: “enjoyment” and “inspiration.” In developing these ideas, I rely on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his method of transcendental argument (Dudiak 2001; de Boer 1997). However, before turning to those conditions, I wish to answer why the subject-as-consciousness is not adequate. Although consciousness is important for learning, I will argue that it cannot totally explain how it is possible to learn from a teacher. One might argue it is adequate to say that a conscious subject learns from a teacher. In this case, developing a model of consciousness by itself ought to explain this adequately. Levinas suggests, following Husserl, that the central feature of consciousness is intentionality, the idea of “consciousness of.” In this model, Levinas states: “Consciousness is always correlative with a theme, a present represented” (1981, 25). Consciousness always involves an object of consciousness. Perhaps subjects learn about something when they direct their attention to it, making it an object of consciousness. So, how might learning work? Learning can be thought of as coming to know this or that. Or, perhaps more accurately, coming to know this as that; to know is to correlate this (thing) in terms of that (idea). Learning might mean ﬁnding connections between thing and idea, being and concept. A depiction of learning in this

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way centrally involves consciousness, for intentionality can be understood as the correlation between thought and object—disclosing being to thought (Levinas 2004, 27). Learning, then, would be the process by which a person as learner would have, for the ﬁrst time, brought that concept to bear on this thing, using that idea to disclose this being. In this model, learning is the process of adequation between the learner and what is learned, “a comprehension that encompasses” (Levinas 2004, 34). Learning as disclosure means having an adequate grasp on something, comprehending it, encircling it with a concept. Learning is coming to possess something through conceptualization. Successful learning about the world requires that it be domesticated, reduced to something familiar. To learn is to dispel mystery, to bring home what is foreign. This is accomplished by a neutral intermediary, a representation. Representation gives the learner cognitive mastery by giving the power to grasp—comprehend—the world. Learning involves introducing intermediaries which link what is already known to what still needs to be learned, making the unknown part of the known. Adequation occurs through intermediaries. In doing so, the object is determined by the subject. The way Levinas explains it, “the object of consciousness, while distinct from consciousness, is as it were a product of consciousness, being a ‘meaning’ endowed by consciousness” (2004, 123). The object is a product of consciousness through endowing it with meaning. Intentionality’s arrow involves meaning-giving by capturing the multiplicity of what is given to consciousness through thematizing it as realities stable enough to be identiﬁed. As an act of synthesis, thematization picks out the important, enduring, clear constants in the sensibility that is given. Learning thus involves freedom through overcoming the world’s resistance. By ever widening the ego’s circle, the conscious subject encompasses exteriority to reveal the known world. Making the strange familiar simultaneously secures the subject from alienation. Precisely through mastery does the world’s resistance as something exterior disappear: “the object’s resistance as an exterior being vanishes” (Levinas 2004, 124). Intentionality’s arrow, secured at one end, is deployed in acts of centering by the conscious subject; learning constitutes acts of freedom. Learning does not only represent the world but, more strongly, constitutes it through representation, ﬁnding exteriority back in consciousness. The learner as conscious subject brings the world to presence, in the present, working from the inside out. The conscious subject does not adequately explain how it is possible to learn from another. Precisely, its strength of depicting learning as adequation—comprehending the world by constituting it—is its weakness for explaining how one might be open to inﬂuences from a teacher. The model depicts learning as self-learning, initiated from within. The conscious subject is a centered ego, an “I,” into whom knowledge of the world is actively gathered. Although on this model a conscious subject seems able to learn

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about the world by itself, its very independence makes it difﬁcult to explain how it might learn this from a teacher. Yet learning from others is a ubiquitous phenomenon. More strongly, we learn from a teacher when we are in no position to learn by ourselves. Learning then happens before we have an adequate conceptual matrix; it requires relinquishing inadequate conceptualizations or erroneous assumptions precisely on account of the teacher. That is, becoming critical of oneself requires a teacher from whom one learns to be self-critical. Perhaps there are better models of consciousness which could account for how it is possible to learn from a teacher. But I wish to retain the notion of “consciousness of” and uncover its conditions. I will suggest that the possibility for learning from a teacher arises in a relationship which is prior to consciousness, involving a kind of vulnerability. That is, the conditions which make possible learning from another are not found in consciousness itself, but before or beyond it. What I am questioning is the founding role of consciousness for learning from another. Instead, I will give a more primary role to corporeality, drawing on two of Levinas’s concepts. First I will explain Levinas’s idea of “enjoyment” and then his notion of “inspiration.” Together, these give an understanding of subjectivity which models more adequately the possibility of learning from another. This model does not supplant the subject-as-consciousness, but situates it. Levinas argues: “Consciousness does not fall into a body—is not incarnated; it is a disincarnation—or, more exactly, [it is] a postponing of the corporeity of the body” (2004, 165–66). Only by theoretically abstracting away from the concrete situation can we arrive at a privileged conception of consciousness. But if we—employing a fallacy of misplaced concreteness— attempt to start by giving primacy to consciousness, then our theorizing short-shrifts the fact that consciousness always is embodied. Attempting to hold that consciousness is substantive in itself gives rise to modeling the learner exclusively in terms of consciousness. Yet, Levinas suggests, this will not work; it really merely postpones a discussion of what grounds consciousness, namely, corporeality. Levinas states: “The event by which the existent contracts its existing I call hypostasis” (1987b, 43). Hypostasis is characterized as a withdrawal by (a) being away from (the rest of) being. In breaking away, the (human) existent comes into contact with its own existing. It is as if a part of reality folds back onto itself to such an extent that the result is at once a rupture from the rest of reality and an awareness of itself as a separate being. According to van Riessen (1991, 104), for Levinas the notion of hypostasis means “the arising, out of anonymous being, of an independent being that is nameable, one that can be isolated in time and place in the face of general being.”2 The (human) subject arises precisely in “a rupture of the anonymous vigilance of the there is [il y a]” (Levinas 1987b, 51). Levinas suggests that subjectivity is not its own originating principle, but has its genesis in a rupture with

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the more originary being, the anonymous il y a (van Riessen 1991, 107), constituting a closing off from being in general, binding the subject to itself. This movement creates an interior space into which awareness can draw back and from out of which it can consider outside events (106). If a subject were totally “outside” it would not be a subject, according to Levinas, for subjectivity requires a sheltering interiority. Although the term “hypostasis” is the Greek version of the word for substance, Levinas is after something which is not substantive in the general sense. Instead, hypostasis can best be characterized by evanescence, a continual fading away which always requires renewal or refreshment. Even if “hypostatic existents” were standing still, doing absolutely nothing (so to speak), this would still be an accomplishment, for the continuation of standing still involves renewal, a fresh start interrupting the murmur of the impersonal il y a (Llewelyn 1995, 27). Levinas points to phenomena such as fatigue and effort as evidence for the continual exertion to start anew each moment (2001, 18). Traces of this anonymous origin might be found in our personal experience of disgust, weariness, and fear, for especially in these phenomena we might experience the hesitation to renew (de Boer 1997, 121). And especially in that hesitation we might recognize the inevitable evanescence of every present moment, which means that “being [human; hypostasis] is never inherited but always won in the heat of the struggle” (Levinas 2001, 77). Hypostasis has no lasting endurance; it is always truly renewal. As an accomplishment, it is a form of freedom: “hypostasis is freedom” (Levinas 1987b, 54). This is not yet a “free-will” freedom of conscious choice or deliberation, but the more primal freedom of continual beginnings. The very existence of the subject, continually renewed in accomplishment, is the freedom of the subject’s grip on existing in the face of evanescence (Levinas 1987b). Existing is a verb, the perpetual mastering of existence. But for Levinas, such freedom implies existing as bodiliness, a material being: “The freedom of the Ego and its materiality thus go together” (57). The subject that arises in hypostasis is not the triumph of a bodiless spirit arising out of anonymous materiality. Instead, the freedom constituted out of the subject’s folding back on itself is material existence: “Materiality accompanies—necessarily—the upsurge of the subject in its existent freedom” (56). Evidence for the materiality of this primordial freedom might be seen in, say, our bodily agility in the evasion of an anticipated blow (de Boer 1997, 138). Levinas explains the relation between freedom and bodiliness with what he calls “position” (2001, 68–69). In hypostasis, the gathering of anonymous being into subjectivity collects it here, in this place, sheltering it from being just any old where. Position is the locality in which the subject is gathered and renewed, grounding consciousness by giving it a (local) place. Position “is the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself” (69). Bodiliness “is position itself, that in it is effected the very transformation of an event into a being” (70). Conversely, positionality ﬁrst of all occurs

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materially, as bodiliness. The evanescence of hypostasis—the continuing accomplishment of existing materially—can happen only in a particular locale, here, in this place. The idea of hypostasis is deepened by the notion of enjoyment. For Levinas, subjectivity is not most primordially a set of bodily potentials or a concern for self, but something he calls enjoyment. The accomplishment of hypostasis takes the character of “living from” the elements that form the subject’s immediate environment. But the things the subject “lives from” are not (ﬁrst of all) tools, implements, but “nourishment.” The renewal constituting the evanescent condition of hypostasis is a kind of nutrition, “a means of invigoration . . . the transmutation of the other into the same, which is in the essence of enjoyment” (Levinas 2004, 111). What is external is transformed into the subject, sustaining its very subjectivity. Such nourishment is essentially enjoyable or, more strongly, enjoyment. Nourishment is not part of a concern for staying alive, but is more immediately the “love of life” (Levinas 2004, 112; italics in the original). Evidence for this is concretely manifested in, say, the joy of eating food, or more strongly, in the joy of the enjoyment of eating. As such, enjoyment is not a psychological state, but more fundamentally, “the very pulsation of the I” (113), close to the core of subjectivity. As Peperzak puts it, Levinas suggests that “[t]o live is to feel that one lives and that life strives at intensifying itself by enjoying its own vitality” (1993, 151). To live is to enjoy my enjoyment. To live from food, light, soil, water, work, and sleep is a spontaneous pleasure, the very upsurge of personal life that constitutes the accomplishment of hypostasis. What makes me a subject, before any intentionality, is my enjoyment of what I live from. The happiness of enjoyment is necessarily personal, localized in the knot of being which is accomplished in hypostasis. In a sense, we could say that the I, realized in enjoyment, is interiority. As Levinas states, “The I is thus the mode in which the break-up of totality . . . is concretely accomplished” (2004, 118). As such, enjoyment is the very withdrawal into self of hypostasis, the rupture of anonymous being, the accomplishment of solitude, independence. This is a spontaneous egoism, a self-centered affection for life, for happiness (Peperzak 1997, 9). The subjectivity of the subject arises in the happiness of enjoyment, its interiorization: “To be I is to exist . . . in happiness” (Levinas 2004, 120). But such enjoyment is only possible corporeally. Enjoyment is not some disembodied feeling felt by a conscious subject ﬂoating above the anonymous materiality of being. Instead, the enjoyment of accomplishment involves an earthiness, a materiality. Because of its bodiliness, accomplishment has two sides: on the one hand, enjoyment is bodily freedom, while on the other, it is dependence on the elements which give nourishment. In Levinas’s words, “[t]o be a body is on the one hand to stand [se tenir], to be master of oneself, and, on the other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the other, and thus to be encumbered by one’s body” (2004, 164;

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italics in the original). As corporeality, subjectivity constitutes at once the overcoming of the anonymity of being as well as dependence on that being in nourishment. This doubleness means that enjoyment has another side. Levinas states: “Enjoyment and the singularization of sensibility in an ego take from the supreme passivity of sensibility, from its vulnerability, its exposedness to the other, the anonymousness of the meaningless passivity of the inert” (1981, 74). The other side is a certain kind of passivity with respect to what is exterior to the subject. The human subject is not only active but also passive with respect to its exterior, to the anonymous being out of which it arose and back to which it continually seems to fall. However, that passivity is not the passivity of an object, say, of driftwood stranded on a lakeshore. The personal character of enjoyment takes away the possibility that the relation to the anonymous being is inert, causal, meaningless. Instead, precisely because enjoyment is intrinsic to subjectivity, this passive relationship to the exterior must be characterized as vulnerability, exposedness. Despite its independence, enjoyment can be disturbed at any time (de Boer 1997, 138). The enjoying being is, precisely in its enjoyment, vulnerable. Being exposed is only possible for an enjoying being, for exposure and vulnerability “invite” unwelcome interruptions in the complacency of enjoyment, disturbing its egoistic solitude. An exposedness to the other “is an attack made immediately on the plenitude of the complacency in oneself . . . on the identity in enjoyment . . . on life living or enjoying life” (Levinas 1981, 74). The egoism of enjoyment is necessary to make its passivity something more than the inert passivity of a non-human object. This is closely tied to bodiliness. The body “is the very susceptibility of the Self, a susceptibility to wounding and to sacriﬁce” (Levinas 1996, 182). A non-bodily being cannot be exposed; purely conscious beings are not vulnerable. For example, they would not be susceptible to wounding or illness. Conversely, the susceptibility involved in being exposed and vulnerable can only be envisioned in terms of corporeality (de Boer 1997, 97). For example, only because I am bodiliness can a malady occur; only in enjoyment can I be susceptible to something we might call a disability, illness, or maltreatment (de Boer 1997, 138; Chanter 2001, 90). Or, precisely because the bodily subject exists as enjoyment, it is also subject to enduring evil (van Riessen 1991, 217). It is precisely in enjoyment that my vulnerability is a constant potential for an exposure to something outside the subject. The corporeality of bodiliness is the vulnerability of a standing susceptibility to the exterior. Levinas suggests a more primordial character of subjectivity, constituted in the susceptibility associated explicitly with bodiliness. “The ego is an irritability, a susceptibility, or an exposure to wounding and outrage, delineating a passivity more passive still than any passivity relating to an effect” (1996, 86). Subjectivity is the passivity of the rupture of enjoyment created by vulnerability and exposure. This notion of subjectivity goes beyond the traditional notion of passivity as receptivity, the passive dimension of consciousness (de

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Boer 1997, 62), to a pre-consciousness that is not welcomed: “Unable to take distance from itself, it is hunted down in itself, on the hither side of resting in itself and of self-coincidence” (Levinas 1996, 86). There is nowhere to hide, no interior in which to take shelter, for it is precisely the interiority of hypostasis that is the site of the hunt, the wounding, the outrage, with no defense possible. It is precisely the occurrence of such passive vulnerability in the enjoying subject that Levinas identiﬁes with subjectivity (Peperzak 1997, 158). Explaining subjectivity in terms of enjoyment sets the stage for a discussion of the relation of the self to the other, something important in an account of the possibility of learning from a teacher. Thus we turn to Levinas’s concept of inspiration. If subjectivity is primordial susceptibility, one could rightly ask, susceptible to what? The short answer: the other. Levinas states: The psyche signiﬁes the claiming of the same by the other, or inspiration . . . [Inspiration] is an undoing of the substantial nucleus of the ego that is formed in the same, a ﬁssion of the mysterious nucleus of inwardness of the subject by this assignation to respond, which does not leave any place of refuge, any chance to slip away, and is thus despite the ego, or, more exactly, despite me. (1981, 141) In enjoyment, the subject is self-satisﬁed. But susceptibility means that the ego’s identity can be divided. The exposed interiority shows that it is not a hiding place from exteriority. The other can and does enter this interior space as an unwelcomed, foreign irritant to the self’s unity. This does not destroy subjectivity, however. Although the shock experienced in this disturbance by the other profoundly undermines the subject’s self-sufﬁciency, in fact, it deepens its interiority (de Boer 1997, 49). Inspiration is not an ethereal, mysterious process of non-bodily interaction, but a corporeal one. Inspiration is located in bodily susceptibility, something more primary than the enjoying self’s egoistic unity. Whereas enjoyment as freedom is tied to self-possession, inspiration is susceptible to the other, making self-possession ultimately impossible (van Riessen 1991, 218). Concretely, evidence of the corporeality of inspiration includes responses such as working with one’s hands for an other person, feeding the hungry with food drives, and building shelters for the other; to be inspired is to respond to other people’s concrete needs (Gibbs 2000). Inspired bodiliness means non-indifference to the other. More strongly, what animates human corporeality is the relation of concrete responsibility to the other (Peperzak 1993, 223). Inspiration is not just any old disturbance, but takes the form of a command from the other; inspiration is “subjection to an order before understanding the order” (Levinas 1987a, 171). The command from the other, as a command, comes before one understands what it concretely requires. As an order, it shows up deep in the subject’s interior, as an ambiguous “mine”

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and “not mine,” at once the disturbance of the ego and yet also its very subjectivity. This means that “[i]nwardness is not a secret place somewhere in me; it is that reverting in which the eminently exterior . . . concerns me and circumscribes me and orders me by my own voice. . . . The inﬁnitely exterior becomes an ‘inward’ voice” (Levinas 1981, 147). Interiority, through the command coming in from the outside, becomes a disturbing voice, my own, from within, interrupting the self’s shelter. And it is this command which reaches the core of my subjectivity: “There is a claim laid on the same by the other in the core of myself” (141). The command which disrupts causes a change in my voice’s grammar, from the nominative “I” to the accusative “me.” “To this command continually put forth only a ‘here I am’ (me voici) can answer, where the pronoun ‘I’ is in the accusative. . . . Here I am—is saying with inspiration” (Levinas 1981, 142). The command which orders me causes a change within, away from the sheltered, enjoying nominative subject, to the disturbed, accusative subject. And this is not ﬁrst of all a verbal command: “The order that orders me to the other does not show itself to me, save through the trace of its reclusion, as a face of a neighbor” (140). The concrete presence of the other changes my subjectivity to the accusative. The response to the disturbance created by the other is so strong that Levinas calls it substitution. The inspired self—the accusative case—is one which responds to the point of substituting for the other. “Subjectivity is from the ﬁrst substitution offered in place of another” (Levinas 1981, 145); the subjectivity of substitution is “the null-place in which inspiration by the other is also expiation for the other, the psyche by which consciousness itself would come to signify” (145). The command I receive, in the accusative case, is the order to do the other no harm or, more positively, to do the other good. The obligation to the other is so deep that it seems to become the payment of a never-ending debt. The command of the other calls for a personal, unique response, a singular restlessness which will not rest before the debt is paid in full, although it never can be. This maintains a continuing difference which creates the possibility of inspiration, involving an openness to, rather than a fusion with, the other (van Riessen 1991, 242). The substitution of inspiration involves carrying the other, as other, right in my very interiority, without becoming one with the other (Peperzak 1997, 109). Substitution links inspiration to the ethical: “In the responsibility for the other we are at the heart of the ambiguity of inspiration” (Levinas 1981, 149). Being ethical is being animated by responsibility in the core of one’s subjectivity; “the ethical” could be another word for “inspiration.” The subject does not inspire itself—inspiration comes from the other. Concretely, responses ranging anywhere from a casual greeting to lifelong service can be thought of as evidence for inspiration (Peperzak 1997, 109). The “here I am” in the accusative case is the ethical subject, heteronomous rather than autonomous. Substitution is the rupture of the enjoying ego, transforming it into a call to serve the other (de Boer 1997, 49). This allows Levinas to

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say, “the word ‘I’ means to be answerable for everything and for everyone” (1996: 90)—a non-indifference to the other. The ethical is responsibility before freedom, “a responsibility not resting on any free commitment, that is, a responsibility without freedom . . . [responsibility] for the other (autrui) amounts to the fact of human fellowship, prior to freedom” (Levinas 1996, 91), a responsibility which interrupts the hypostatic subject. Substitution intensiﬁes the I into something unique, non-interchangeable: an ethical subject. Levinas states: “Obligation calls for a unique response not inscribed in universal thought” (1981, 145). Again, this is a function of corporeality, positionality. Traces of the other—obligation—shows subjectivity primordially as a passive relation of being responsible for the other. So, what model of the subject is adequate to describe how one can learn from a teacher? The above discussion suggests an enjoying subject not only vulnerable to disruption but actually disturbed by the other, inspired to responsibility. This model, I will suggest, makes explicit the possibility of learning from a teacher. Although consciousness is undoubtedly involved in the actual process of learning, the conditions which make learning possible at all must be situated at a deeper level. I would contend that the possibility of learning is conditioned by the hypostatic self. Hypostasis involves evanescence, the continual fading away of being into the anonymity of il y a. Thus hypostasis is the constant renewal and accomplishment which maintains the subjectivity of the subject. As such, hypostasis seems the right way to ground the possibility of the continual achievement which is, at least in part, necessary for learning. Hypostasis is the constant formation of the very sort of interiority which might be the location of the assimilation of that which is learned. Achievement is a “living from” the exterior. Because of its evanescent character, the subject must be constantly taking in, from the outside, not only physical material but also cognitive materials such as information, concepts, and perspectives. That is, the assimilatory aspect of learning ﬁts well within the model of the hypostatic subject. Learning is founded in the accomplishment which constitutes hypostasis. Furthermore, the character of such assimilation is enjoyment. Concrete accomplishment is ﬁrst of all a love of life. But if the “elements” which are assimilated, or from which the subject lives, are more than merely physical or biological, then cognitive elements are also “lived from.” And if “living from” constitutes the love of life, then enjoyment also includes living from cognitive elements, not merely physical ones; cognition, too, is rooted in enjoyment. Perhaps before even understanding the usefulness or relevance of the incoming material, the learner is an enjoying subject; assimilating cognitive elements rides on the general character of the enjoying subject who “lives from” the elements generally, before worry about tomorrow, before any concern about how to use the incoming elements masterfully. In this interpretation, the new, which comes from the outside, is assimilated by

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the subject ﬁrst of all precisely because subjectivity is enjoyment. The spontaneous enjoyment involved in learning is rooted ﬁrst of all in the freedom of enjoyment. But enjoyment is also vulnerability, exposure to outside disturbances. This gives learning an interpretation deeper than assimilation, opening to another condition for learning, namely, that learning requires exposure to disturbance, the possibility of rupture. If learning from a teacher requires being inﬂuenced by that teacher, then the possibility of being inﬂuenced at all requires vulnerability to that inﬂuence; that is, we can now situate learning simultaneously in both a love of life and the continuing possibility of interrupting that complacency. Although hypostasis centers and separates the subject, the fact that enjoyment is cofounded in continual vulnerability makes the permanence of any centeredness impossible. The possibility of learning is located in the possibility of disturbing the subject’s assimilating complacency. Disturbance becomes a condition for learning from a teacher, since that requires the possibility of being inﬂuenced by the teacher. Learning from a teacher grounded in the vulnerability of the enjoying subject gives such learning a natural place in the interiority of the subject. Furthermore, we also now have a way to explain the possibility of being critical of oneself. Learning from another does not merely involve purely naïve wonderment, but also a critical posture about one’s own existing knowledge, conceptualizations, or perspectives, that brings to the surface unquestioned assumptions. The condition for a critical stance toward oneself is inspiration, the pre-conscious being undone by a claim of the other. Inspiration changes the nominative “I” into the vulnerable “here I am.” A critical stance toward oneself rides on the possibility of being disturbed by a teacher as other, even before one has the conscious awareness to judge its propriety. It means being disturbed by a claim by the other which forms a disquieting voice from within, animated by the other. The capacity for risking personal change by a learner is grounded in openness to the other, a teacher. Learning from a teacher requires what could broadly be called listening. Whether the teacher gives some new information, a novel concept, or a different perspective, listening is required, a kind of passive receptivity founded in a level prior to consciousness. The listening which occurs in learning from a teacher requires the possibility of risk by the learner: the risk of being open to the teacher, the exposure to being inﬂuenced by something before one can recognize (and judge) the content of that inﬂuence, and the vulnerability of uncertainty. Listening is an asymmetrical relationship. The “here I am” quality of subjectivity is the asymmetry which creates the possibility of listening to the other, grounded on inspiration (Gibbs 2000, 29). The gesture of listening, opened up by the vulnerability of the enjoying subject, exposes the learner to the incoming disturbance from the teacher, in its very interiority. The interiority of the subject, the place of shelter from il y a, is not

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protected from the teacher, from the disturbance coming from the other. The possibility of listening is rooted in the learner’s responsibility and nonindifference to the teacher. As such, it is not only possible but necessary for the subject to listen, as an expression of the learner’s very subjectivity. The listening aspect of learning from a teacher is not only a good strategy, but points to the very subjectivity of being human, to evidence of the “I” in terms of “here I am.” Another part of learning from another, from the perspective of the learner, is responding to the teacher. Learning is not completed merely in listening, but includes also a response we could call speaking. The gesture which grounds such speaking Levinas calls “saying.” “Saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure” (1981, 48). In speaking, the subject shows itself not to occupy a shelter of self-sufﬁciency—instead, it is ﬁrst of all exposure to the other. With “saying,” Levinas puts a linguistic marker on the relationship to the other, being a sign for the other. When a learner speaks to a teacher, say, in answering a question or presenting an idea, the speech is possible because it is grounded in the sign called “saying.” Speaking to the teacher is rooted in the inspired subject’s vulnerability to the other, in a sign that structurally asks the other to acknowledge that sign. Underneath the content of the learner’s response is the sign which asks, “please say I’m right!” That sign is a primordial responsibility to the teacher as other; in speaking, the learner who speaks indicates that he or she is subordinate to the teacher (de Boer 1997, 40). As such, the learner’s speaking is rooted in a primordial relationship which signiﬁes responsibility to the other. Speaking, although clearly a means to give information to the other, at a deeper level is grounded in the learner’s responsibility to the teacher. Both listening and speaking are thus rooted in the continuing distinction between the two interlocutors. Levinas says, “[c]onversation . . . maintains the distance between me and the Other” (2004, 40). The learner requires the interaction of listening and speaking not primarily for strategic reasons but, more deeply, precisely because they are expressions of the very constitution of his or her subjectivity, the core of what it means to be human. Communication occurs across the difference between the one and the other, a difference which communication itself does not erase. The relation across the difference between me and the other is a non-indifference rather than a fusion. Thus, learning from a teacher in speaking and listening is grounded in the very subjectivity of the learner. We can now better situate the phenomenon of consciousness, which certainly is part of any learning from a teacher. If subjectivity has, as its core, relation to another, then consciousness is situated by the listening and speaking subject. Speaking to someone indicates a relation different from, and prior to, treating someone as an object of consciousness, an object at the end of my arrow of intentionality. The other to whom I speak is there not as someone to know and represent, “but as someone to whom I offer

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something” (Peperzak 1997, 62). In speaking, the thematization which constitutes content takes place in the context of speaking to someone. Learning through thematizing is situated in the listening and speaking to the one from whom I learn. It is precisely “saying” which makes learning grounded in an ethical relation. Although learning as a conscious act involves a centering activity (i.e., thematization), “saying” provides its context, with the claim of the other, with the other’s judgment. What makes thematizing possible is the possibility of being wrong. Learning thus ultimately makes sense “in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness, and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability” (Levinas 1981, 48). This “ﬁne risk” is not merely a contingent aspect of the learning process, but its very condition; to thematize is to release from personal possession. The representing act is an offering for the other’s afﬁrmation (Levinas 2004, 172). Successful learning requires the learner to get beyond the arbitrariness of his or her self-centering by offering the representation to the teacher. This is precisely non-indifference, welcoming the other’s judgment, decentering the learner as subject. The process of learning is the disturbance of the enjoying subject through offering representations to the other, or “saying.” Although representation dispels mystery about the world, it does so as the content of a gesture of saying to the other. Representing is a positive deployment of the passive relation to the other. Learning, in this interpretation, actually requires the teacher. Knowing, the core of learning, is possible when it is grounded in saying, as evidenced in the relations of listening and speaking. The learning process is adequately modeled when placed in the context of responsibility for the other. NOTES 1. Shorter versions of this chapter have been presented as part of two panels on this book: “Levinas and Education,” at the North American Levinas Society, Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), May 2006, and at the Philosophy of Education Society’s annual meeting (San Francisco, CA), March 2005. Versions of this chapter were also presented as papers at two conferences: the annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (Oxford, UK), April 2003, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference (Chicago, IL), October 2002. 2. Joldersma’s translation.

REFERENCES Chanter, T. 2001. Feminist interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. De Boer, T. 1997. The rationality of transcendence: Studies in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Dudiak, J. 2001. The intrigue of ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Gibbs, R. 2000. Why ethics? Signs of responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987a. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987b. Time and the Other and additional essays. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1996. Basic philosophical writings. Ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2001. Existence and existents. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Llewelyn, J. 1995. Emmanuel Levinas: The genealogy of ethics. New York and London: Routledge. Peperzak, A. T. 1993. To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. ———. 1997. Beyond: The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Van Riessen, R. 1991. Erotiek en Dood: Met het oog op transcendentie in de ﬁlosoﬁe van Levinas. Kampen: Kok Agora.

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Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 1

Paul Standish

This chapter runs against the grain of a familiar reception of Levinas in education and the social sciences. While the increased interest in his work is in many ways very much to be welcomed, my sense is that this has been skewed by its assimilation to existing positions, preoccupations, and agendas. Much of this problem relates to Levinas’s central concern with alterity. Let me identify what I take to be the potential dangers here. In the ﬁrst place, one ﬁnds that Levinas’s work is understood and used within a discourse of multiculturalism. There are indeed rich resources in Levinas that can contribute to enquiry of this kind, but things go wrong, for example, where his understanding of the Other is assimilated to a politics of recognition. Second, there is the tendency to enlist his work in something like a psychology of dialogical relations, perhaps of student-teacher relations, where the aim is better communication. This may seem close to Levinas’s concerns, but the problem is that such communication is understood as a matter of personal relations and, it should be added, with a relative indifference to the content of what is communicated. Sometimes, a third point, Levinas’s work has been interpreted in a way that relies excessively on a vocabulary of transcendence, causing it to be rareﬁed and detached from the quotidian circumstances of human lives. That vocabulary easily becomes incantatory, and its reiteration stands in the way of a more exact realization of the practical signiﬁcance of ideas in question. Finally, the reception of Levinas’s thought suffers from a more general problem, regarding the understanding of poststructuralism. Postmodern educational research, so-called, is sometimes identiﬁed with skepticism and relativism, and it is commonly imagined to be averse to the pursuit of truth (both by its authors and by its critics). Yet such an aversion is not supported by the poststructuralist thinkers upon whom that work draws (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.), and the adoption within such research of a vocabulary drawn from poststructuralism has typically stood in the way of clarity in these matters (see, for example, Blake et al. 1998; Dhillon and Standish 2000; Standish 2004, 2005, 2007). My approach in this chapter will be somewhat deﬁant, in two respects. In the ﬁrst place, as must be plain, I propose to resist the above distortions. In the second, I intend to be relatively direct in assessing the implications

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 57 of these difﬁcult ideas for educational practice (see also Standish 2005). In part, this will be a means of opposing any assumption that the profound philosophical ideas in question are somehow deﬁled if they are related to practice; it will resist undue piety towards those ideas. To do this, I propose to concentrate on questions of language and the curriculum. In her introduction to Levinas and education: The question of implication, Sharon Todd elicits something of what is at stake here. She writes: Depicting a relation to alterity as an ethical structure of being that is preoriginary, or older than being itself, means of course to be caught within language’s own limits. If the emergence of responsibility grows not out of a rational exercise of being, or out of understanding that the other is like me, but out of a relation to an alterity that is not recuperable through language, then how might we think about ethical exigency in relation to actual persons? To put it another way, the real problem or challenge is how to think about the non-representable conditions of ethical subjectivity in ways that might inform our practical orientation to the world. Where does a meaning of ethics, as opposed to an ethics, leave us if we wish to attend to the ethical aspects of education, for example, given that education is ostensibly very much about language and intentionality? (Todd 2003a, 2–3) An equivocation lingers in these words, however, especially in the reference to “an alterity that is not recuperable through language.” Is the stress here on the fact that this alterity is not to be recuperated, however language might suppose itself representationally capable of that, or on the fact that it is not to be recuperated through language, though perhaps it might be by other means? Education is indeed very much about language, and what is meant by the curriculum might be taken to be the most overt, intentional formulation of this. Yet language should neither be equated with representation nor be presumed to entail the recuperation of experience. Alterity of this kind is not to be recuperated. Todd is an eloquent exponent of Levinas, though I partly take issue with her in relation to these matters (see Standish 2001c; Todd 2003b). The discussion that follows considers questions concerning the curriculum in the light of the signiﬁcance of language in Levinas’s work, something that too often tends to be eclipsed. I begin by retracing what are perhaps familiar steps in order to establish something of the general orientation of his thought.

AUTONOMY AND HETERONOMY In his 1957 essay “Philosophy and the idea of Inﬁnity,” Levinas (1987) identiﬁes two directions the philosophical spirit can take. In the ﬁrst, the thinker maintains a relation distinct from him, other than him. It involves

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a movement that must lead us beyond the nature that surrounds us and towards a beyond: it goes towards the stranger, and extends in a kind of perfectionism towards the divine. This is heteronomy itself. Levinas identiﬁes this thinking in terms of a relation to inﬁnity. In the second, the thinker freely assents to propositions that are then incorporated in such a way that his nature is preserved: it thereby brings into the same what was other. It moves towards a kind of autonomy in which nothing irreducible would limit thought. Disparate and diverse events are incorporated into a history; this might be seen as “the conquest of being by man over the course of history” (48). This is a thinking in terms of totality. It should be clear that it is the former direction of thought that Levinas favors. But it also needs to be recognized, of course, that Levinas is not thereby defending heteronomous practices, such as indoctrination or slavery, which amount to blatant and thoroughgoing denials of autonomy. The point is rather to contest the kind of freedom that is realized where, within the totalized conceptions of thinking he envisages, too singular a faith in autonomy and mastery develops. Freedom arises, in his view, only on the strength of the realization of one’s responsibility, out of prior obligation. Blindness to this—in other words, the presupposition of an initial neutrality as the basis of obligations freely entered into—results in an illusory freedom, for all the apparent choices it may confer. It is helpful to see the contrast here in terms of a distinction between economy and aneconomy—that is to say, between an economy that is totalizable in a circle of exchange, and one that forever breaks with or exceeds that circle. The distinction has been elaborated by Jacques Derrida and others in terms of the notion of the gift; the point at issue is the extent to which a gift made within a circle of exchange ceases to be a gift precisely because of that exchange, because of its conversion into a kind of commerce. This brings out a contrast between the totalized economy of exchange and the inﬁnite (im)possibility, the aneconomy, of the pure gift—a gift where the giver receives neither a gift in return, nor gratifying thanks, nor the pleasure of having given. What, the question seems to arise, could such a gift be like? Hence, there is the suspicion of its impossibility in practice, but also the realization of an idea that might orient thought and reveal the danger of a degeneration that we may otherwise not see. What does it do to us if we deny the implications of this perhaps impossible demand? What does it do to us if we rest content within the circle of exchange? It is perhaps helpful here to assemble a gallery of grotesques. But let me concede at the outset: these are the nicest possible grotesques, and they will surely seem harmless enough, even virtuous, at ﬁrst glance. Imagine, ﬁrst, the Dutiful Citizen. She has always paid her taxes, voted in elections, ensured that she has made appropriate pension plans, participated a little perhaps in local politics and attended meetings, even contributed to charity: she has done her bit, and she is not ashamed of saying so. Imagine next the Professional Teacher. She is always there on time, her lesson

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 59 plans in order, just as she keeps order in the class, and her record-keeping is meticulous. She is committed to her students, knows her subject, knows how to teach it, and reliably gets good results; hence, she is satisﬁed that she is doing everything that can be expected of her. What could anyone expect beyond this? Consider also the Responsible Parent: he has spent quality time with his children, has set money aside for their education, has, like any good parent, sorted out their problems; he has surely played his role well enough, and his children, he thinks, have nothing to complain about. Having brought them up well, he owes them nothing; he is satisﬁed he has done his duty. Imagine last the Successful Student, who has attended classes regularly, identiﬁed the learning requirements, understood the targets she must hit and the criteria for success, and who, having completed the required tasks, can shut the book and move on to the next module. I used to teach with someone who had recently completed his PhD in sociology, and on one occasion I asked him how he was getting on with a particular group of students. “Well, I know all sociology now really,” he said. “It’s just a matter of giving students the bits that they need.” I do not deny that it might, on the face of it, seem to be quite an achievement if we could only get citizens and parents and teachers and learners to behave in the ways described above. But the more elusive point here has to do with how each of these practices is affected if they are seen within these totalizable terms. I shall not elaborate here the ways in which each of these roles would look different if understood in terms of inﬁnite obligation rather than calculable exchange, but it is this concern that is very much at the heart of what follows.

Alterity In order to approach these matters further, it is worth recalling something of Levinas’s understanding of alterity. In a previous paper I put this along the following lines: Levinas wants to overturn the primacy of ontology, and he wants to do this by showing that fundamental to our being, indeed prior to our being, is our responsibility to the Other (Standish 2001a).2 Levinas characterizes this responsibility in terms of the contrast between our awareness of things through sensible experience and the non-phenomenological epiphany of a face. When confronted with the face, I see something that necessarily goes beyond anything my senses can determine. For what I see to be a face something must be revealed of the interiority of the Other—perhaps no more than that interiority is there. And that interiority always exceeds any possibility of knowing I may have. Moreover, for the face to be a face, it must reveal a being whose ultimate vulnerability and need always put me in a position of obligation, and this, it is Levinas’s claim, is a responsibility that will deepen the more that I answer to it. Hence I am originally cast in responsibility; I am singled out in my responsibility. Indeed, this is the manner of my exit from my infancy, my becoming

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human. The face qua face reveals to me an unfathomable interiority and vulnerability that both teaches me and is in need of me, and a distance from me that is immeasurable, imposing on me an absolute responsibility. And extraordinary, even scandalous to modern thought though these ideas are, what would it be like not to think this: to think that I could somehow understand someone without remainder? Or again, that I had discharged my duties and could rest easy? What would that poverty of thought imply for our ethics, our thinking as a whole? As a corrective to possible misunderstanding here, it should be remembered that the relation to the face is not one of cognition (and hence not of recognition). Neither is the relation to the Other one of reciprocity: it is a relation in which the ﬁrst-person perspective is of paramount importance. Moreover, the relation to the Other is not a comfortable relation, but rather a matter of the “itch of the other under my skin.” It is appropriately thought of, notwithstanding Levinas’s own, very different use of this metaphor, as an allergic reaction, a reaction for which the taking of antihistamines would be tantamount to a denial.

My Project and Some Objections My interest here is in seeing how far the relation to the Other that is Levinas’s concern might be extended beyond the relation to the other human being. John Llewelyn, as I have shown in earlier papers, explores the possibility of an ecological reading of Levinas that extends the relation to the Other to animals and other living things, and to the world as a whole (see, for example, Llewelyn 2000; Standish 2001a, 2001b, 2001c). My own concern is to see whether such an extension can be made to objects of study— that is, to the curriculum—and to ask what this might imply for teaching and learning. On the face of it, both these projects ﬂy in the face of Levinas’s insistence that the Other is to be understood in terms of the human being. Moreover, they are at odds with what has been the main thrust of readings of Levinas’s signiﬁcance for education, especially in North America. In that context especially, the tendency has been to read the work in terms of prevailing concerns with multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, or otherwise to situate Levinas’s work within research on moral education. My view, as I have begun to elaborate in previous papers, is that both these tendencies are apt to stand in the way of understanding the range of the educational relevance of Levinas’s thought—and, it might be added, the range of the ethical. While I ﬁnd Llewelyn’s line of argument extraordinarily rich, and signiﬁcant for education, it is, I think, more ambitious in stretching Levinas than my own project. The reason that my own is simpler and more easily argued through is that it turns on the nature of language. What I need to show, ﬁrst, is that, on Levinas’s own terms, the relation to the Other is not realized in

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 61 a kind of abstract contemplation but rather in language itself; second, that the curriculum itself is essentially a matter of language; and hence, that the curriculum—say, the triangle of teaching, learning, and content—is one way in which the relation to the Other can be realized. By the same token, but accenting the negative correlate of this, the curriculum is a site in which the underlying relation to the Other—this obligation and responsibility—is commonly, casually, systematically denied.

Levinas and Language Levinas sees that the relation to the Other is realized through language, which is made explicit in his remark in Totality and Inﬁnity that “The presence of the Other, or expression, source of all signiﬁcation, is not contemplated as an intelligible essence, but is heard as language, and thereby is effectuated exteriorly” (2004, 297). The relation to the Face is not to be understood in phenomenological terms, but neither should it be imagined to involve some kind of pure intuition or intelligence. Indeed, realizing this is valuable in resisting the excessively reverential tendency towards which these ideas are otherwise prone. What is witnessed in the Other is an interiority that cannot be known, but the manner of this witnessing is not separable from language; the relation is realized in the exterior (or public) form of language. It is important to start from the acknowledgement that language is nonnatural and has no ordinary being. Linguistic signs, for all their necessarily physical reality, do not function in the manner of physical objects. They depend on systems of difference, to be sure, but also on something altogether more elusive, which Levinas explains, as does Derrida after him, in terms of their iterability and their trace structure. Hence, they depend also on something that goes beyond physical presence, and hence beyond immediacy. Otherwise put, they go beyond being. Language functions as both representation and invocation, and Levinas is at pains to show the importance of the latter. At an earlier point in Totality and Inﬁnity he speaks of language’s offering of the world: Language effectuates the entry of things into a new ether in which they receive a name and become concepts. It is a ﬁrst action over and above labor, an action without action, even though speech involves the effort of labor, even though, as incarnate thought, it inserts us into the world, with the risks and hazards of all action. At each instant it exceeds this labor by the generosity of the offer it forthwith makes of this very labor. The analyses of language that tend to present it as one meaningful action among others fail to recognize this offering of the world, this offering of contents which answers to the face of the Other or which questions him, and ﬁrst opens the perspective of the meaningful.

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Paul Standish The “vision” of the face is inseparable from this offering [that] language is. To see the face is to speak of the world. Transcendence is not an optics, but the ﬁrst ethical gesture. (2004, 174; italics in the original)

The exceeding of the economies of labor and of “one meaningful action among others” by the (an)economy of language’s offering, as depicted here, is explicitly connected with teaching, which in turn becomes a prime exemplar of the contrast between totality and inﬁnity: [The] voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself. Teaching signiﬁes the whole inﬁnity of exteriority. . . . [The Other’s] alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches. Teaching is not a species of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the presence of inﬁnity breaking the closed circle of totality. (Levinas 2004, 171) Indeed, the very idea of the Other is to be understood in terms of teaching and learning. Levinas’s elaboration of this, resisting the idea that learning has its source within the learner, draws out the limitations, indeed the error, at the heart of inﬂuential conceptions of learning, conceptions that have both ancient and contemporary prominence. The Other is the ﬁrst teaching. A being receiving the idea of Inﬁnity, receiving since it cannot derive it from itself, is a being taught in a non-maieutic fashion, a being whose very existing consists in this incessant reception of teaching, in this incessant overﬂowing of self (which is time). To think is to have the idea of inﬁnity, or to be taught. Rational thought refers to this teaching. Even if we conﬁne ourselves to the formal structure of logical thought, which starts from a deﬁnition, inﬁnity, relative to which concepts are delimited, can not be deﬁned in its turn. It accordingly refers to a “knowledge” of a new structure. We seek to ﬁx it as a relation with the face and to show the ethical essence of this relation. The face is the evidence that makes evidence possible—like the divine veracity that sustains Cartesian rationalism. (Levinas 2004, 204; italics in the original) The insistence on the non-maieutic nature of learning is plainly a rejection of Socrates’s playing the part of midwife to the birth of knowledge in the learner. But the implications, as I shall show below, also have a more contemporary relevance. In Otherwise than Being (1981) Levinas develops the contrast between representation and invocation in a number of ways. One way is through a distinction between the “saying” and the “said” (le dire and le dit). Utterances have their meaning in virtue of their being made within an instituted linguistic system, where that meaning is stabilized. But the vitality of the language in which they are made depends also on there being new forms

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 63 of expression, upon their being uttered with a new sense, where “sense” implies dynamism and direction, something that moves beyond the system (in a sens unique). In its moving beyond and giving direction in this way, language’s invocational function is seen. Levinas expresses something like this also in terms of a contrast between verbs and substantives. The dynamism of the verb, its indication not of being but of becoming, is suggestive of this invocational aspect of language. In a paper titled “Disciplining the profession,” I show how this invocational aspect of language needs to be seen as central to teaching, especially in the university (Standish 2001b). What is sometimes called the prophetic aspect of language implies something about what it is to profess, to be a professor. In the light of this responsibility, let us turn next to the nature of language in the curriculum.

Language and the Curriculum Rousseau made the plea that Emile should not be given more words than ideas, that his ﬁrst study should be an experimental physics relative to his own body. Progressive educators since then have tended to emphasize the value of direct experience—of learning through doing, of learning from the things themselves. So too, a naïve view of science imagines that it is the direct observation of things, and the recording of information on the evidence of the senses, that constitute scientiﬁc study. There are numerous objections to those various claims, and these scarcely need spelling out in the present context. What the examples do is remind us of the way any kind of study takes place through—at the very least against the background of—language. Subjects are language to the extent that they are ways of thinking and reasoning about the world that have been passed down through the generations, where this thinking and reasoning essentially is language. They are, as Michael Oakeshott says, the “conversation of mankind” (1962). Of course, educators are quick to assert the salience of language in various aspects of the curriculum. The progressive educator arguing for the value of direct experience may also emphasize the importance of the arts in the development of imagination and creativity, and it may be that literature and creative writing are valued highly in this. But here the danger is that language is rareﬁed: it is, when it is cherished in this way, the province of the literary, while the ordinary language that serves its purpose in other aspects of learning is construed as dully instrumental and unproblematic— in other words, as incidental to the study. This is to misconstrue language on both fronts and disastrously to underestimate its centrality in our lives. It is also, as we shall come to see, to open the door to misunderstandings of teaching and learning. If it is the case, then, that the curriculum itself is essentially a matter of language, and if, as was shown previously, the relation to the Other is

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effected in language itself, it seems to follow that the curriculum is one way in which the relation to the Other can be realized—and, by the same token, one way in which our failures in this obligation can be continually degenerative. Levinas sometimes says that the realization of the relation to the Other is very rare; but it is pervasive as an obligation. It is time to recall why this matters and then to explore some possible implications for educational practice in more speciﬁc terms.

The Relation to the Other in Teaching and Learning The reason why this matters can be seen if we recall the consequences of closing our lives and thoughts to the dimension of inﬁnity. The examples of the grotesques—the citizen, the teacher, the parent, the learner—need to be seen as subjects trapped within totalized conceptions of their relationships with others. While outlooks such as theirs might retain a place for ideals of autonomy, mastery, freedom itself, these values would, if Levinas is right, be fatally compromised by their assumption of independence. They would be like Cartesian rationalism without the relation to divine veracity (or to the inﬁnite), the relation that Descartes recognized as vital to its very sustenance. The dominance of totalized ways of thinking in education can readily be demonstrated in the economy of quality control and performativity that prevails in so much policy and practice today. If, in contrast to these totalizing practices, the thinking that is needed is characterized by a movement that must lead us beyond the nature that surrounds us, goes towards the stranger, and extends into a kind of perfectionism, there are implications for what is taught within a subject and for how it is assessed. In contrast to teaching to the test, or to the assumption that there must be a tidy matching of learning outcomes and learning activities, or to the exhaustive speciﬁcation of criteria, it follows that teaching and learning should open ways beyond what is directly planned. This would imply the selection of subject matter that is intrinsically rich—that is to say, content that deﬁes easy assimilation and mastery but always invites further thought. It would also suggest the need for methods of assessment that retain an openness until the end of the course, as opposed to providing means for students to pick off the items required and ignore the rest. It would imply also methods of examining that are not exhaustive but leave open the possibility that other things will be learned on the course. And implicit in each of these measures, part of the lesson learned is an understanding of the subject in question as itself limitless (as opposed, say, to a thing of which anyone could know all). Of course, this implies something about the way the teacher must see her subject, and the relation to that subject that she will model for her students. It is appropriate to see her pointing to a beyond—that is, acting as a kind of conduit for the learner’s connection to the inﬁnity of the subject and the questions it raises. It is absurd, if not blasphemous, to think of

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 65 the teacher as someone who professionally takes the role of inﬁnite Other to the learner. But it is not absurd to see the reﬁned and heightened development of language in the subject—which is to say, the subject itself—as an intensiﬁcation of the relation to the Other, an exteriorization of the pursuit of thought that properly honors the mystery in the Other. To cast the teacher as the conduit to the Other in this way, through the language to which she gives the learner access, is to see her as herself oriented by her own relation to the Other. The exteriority to which Levinas refers then—the attention this exacts—amounts also to a kind of objectivity. The insistence that this relation cannot be a matter of maieutics has its contemporary relevance when one thinks of the various ways in which it is thought that the teacher should become the “facilitator of learning.” This is found avant la lettre in the progressivist idea of growth from within and then again, in more debilitated, consumerist forms, in the “student-centered” education increasingly promoted in the community college and the university. To the extent that such forms of student-centeredness imply a kind of self-sufﬁciency—whether one speaks of authenticity or of ownership—they militate against responsibility to the Other. If Levinas is right, this is likely fatally to distort the autonomy or empowerment or freedom that are their aims. Effacing the teacher by reducing her role to that of facilitator may amount to depriving students of the face through which their relation to the Other might otherwise be called forth. This implies also that the learner should come to see herself less as the owner of her learning than as one possessed by it, less as mastering the subject matter than as being in its service. It is in this sense that her thinking is oriented by a kind of heteronomy, yet it is through this that her meaningful freedom is possible. If Levinas has the relevance to meaningful freedom that I am claiming here, this is something that those who argue for a liberal education cannot afford to ignore. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter was developed and presented, in 2004, in the context of the Research Community for the Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, which meets at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The Fund for Scientiﬁc Research, Vlaanderen, is thanked for their support of this work. A later version was presented at the Institute of Education, London University, in 2006. I thank those who participated on these occasions for their responses. 2. The capitalization of “Other” denotes a relationship of a different order from the kind of otherness that deﬁnes items in a categorization. This Other is not different from me in virtue of any perceivable characteristic or quality but because of its invisible interiority, its irrevocable exteriority to me.

REFERENCES Blake, N., P. Smeyers, R. Smith, and P. Standish. 1998. Thinking again: Education after postmodernism. Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

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Dhillon, P., and P. Standish, eds. 2000. Lyotard: Just education. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Llewelyn, J. 2000. The HypoCritical imagination: Between Kant and Levinas. New York and London: Routledge. Oakeshott, M. (1962) in T. Fuller (ed.) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen. Standish, P. 2001a. Ethics before equality: Moral education after Levinas. Journal of Moral Education 30 (4):339–48. ———. 2001b. Disciplining the profession: Subjects subject to procedure. Educational Philosophy and Theory 34 (1):5–23. ———. 2001c. Learning from Levinas: the provocation of Sharon Todd. In Philosophy of Education 2001, 75–77. Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society. ———. 2004. Europe, continental philosophy and the philosophy of education. Comparative Education 40 (4):485–503. ———. 2005. Towards an economy of higher education. Critical Quarterly 47 (1– 2):53–71. ———. 2007. The education of grownups, a religion for adults: Skepticism and alterity in Cavell and Levinas. Ethics and Education 2 (1):73–91. Todd, S. 2003a. Levinas and education: The question of implication. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22 (1):1–4. ———. 2003b. Learning from the Other: Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. Albany: State University of New York Press.

5

Emmanuel Levinas, Literary Engagement, and Literature Education Claudia Eppert

There are important moral presuppositions . . . which belong to a changing “climate of ideas.” . . . Literature is soaked in the moral, language is soaked in the moral. (Murdoch 1997, quoted in Conradi, 21 and 254)

INTRODUCTION Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy has had a signiﬁcant impact on the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, challenging us with a new understanding of the ethical nature of self-other relationships and placing into serious question the theoretical and practical foundations and dimensions of our academic disciplines. In the domain of literary studies, Levinas’s writings have supported a deep rethinking of the assumptions and methods which underlie critical engagements with literature. They have invited a compelling dialogue concerning literary engagement and interpretation between contemporary scholars and Western traditions. As such, they have also opened the door to a reconceptualization of the moral and ethical underpinnings of literature curricula and pedagogy at the school, college, and university levels. Yet, in the measure that we consider Levinas’s philosophy within the context of North American literature education, we must also take into account the difﬁculties of this task. Levinas’s own disparagement of literature, art, and criticism shadows new considerations of the educational possibilities for these ﬁelds of engagement. Some literary critics, in signiﬁcant ways, have begun to challenge Levinas’s suspicions and critiques. My intent in contributing to this timely edition is to offer readers who are new to literary and educational theory insight into how Levinas’s philosophy has energized a longstanding debate concerning the interrelations among literature, ethics, and education. In what follows, I outline this debate, introduce the tenets of Levinas’s philosophy and his problematic views on art, literature, and literary engagement, and discuss how literary theorists have variously taken up his views. Finally, I consider certain implications of his views and those of his literary followers for North American literature education.

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LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM Although recent theorizing has emphasized an ethical turn in contemporary thought (Booth 1998; Garber, Hanssen, and Walkowitz 2000), it would be a misconception to perceive that ethics, and morality speciﬁcally, have emerged as an issue in literary theory only within the last few years.1 Literature and morality have had an enduring and intimate relationship in Western thought and society, intertwined throughout history sometimes as lovers, sometimes as foes. Plato, who conceived his Republic at a time when knowledge had shifted from being derived exclusively through oral means to being additionally obtainable through scripted sources, was among the ﬁrst in the West to separate literature from ethics (Goody 1977; Havelock 1963; Ong 1982). Indeed, while literature and the transmission of cultural values had been indissolubly bound in Homeric times, Plato insisted that poetry be exiled from his Republic. He believed that poetry, broadly deﬁned, misleads those who engage in it away from truth and the valued ways of the world, and he challenged his followers to ascertain any good reason why literature and morality should be reunited (1945). Following centuries have witnessed writers, among them Aristotle (350 BCE), Sidney (1595), Shelley (1821), and Arnold (1865), attempting to bring them together again, variously arguing that engagements with literature cultivate and reﬁne the moral and aesthetic spirit of an individual, a community, and a nation (Bogdan 1992). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when literary theory began to acquire an institutional presence in an era of widespread literacy and schooling, increasing nationalism, and a more entrenched separation of church and state, literature and morality were wedded again, particularly in curriculum and pedagogy, with the anticipation that their offspring learners would, by rigorous schooled participation in their union, become more compassionate, civilized, and committed to democratic ideals (Eagleton 1983; Graff 1987; Kaestle 1983). The rise of the novel and accessibility of ﬁction further inspired fervent debates concerning what counts as national and morally inspiring literature, and vitalized a historically extensive spirit of censorship (Manguel 1996). The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (1983) speciﬁcally describes how institutional literary practices of empathetic identiﬁcation and close reading, among others, came to replace religion at the turn of the twentieth century as hegemonic instruments for social control and for the widespread creation of a reﬁned sensibility. Indeed, not only were literature and morality rapturously reunited, but their communion also brought about a transformation in how the latter was conceived. Eagleton observes: “Morality is no longer to be grasped as a formulated code or explicit ethical system: it is rather a sensitive preoccupation with the whole quality of life itself, with the oblique, nuanced particulars of human experience” (27). Increased schooling and the institutionalization of English literature and language study in sites of higher education secured the discipline of literary

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 69 criticism. Until the mid-twentieth century it continued to emphasize a humanist rhetoric of literary engagement for purposes of social formation, and spiritual and aesthetic enlightenment, particularly in the face of rapid industrial, capitalist, and scientiﬁc advances (Eagleton 1983; Graff 1987; Kaestle 1983). Following the First World War, it was held that criticism and close reading could deﬁnitively restore an organic relation to the world at a time when society was experiencing the negative effects of mass media and industrial labor. An attentive reading of literature would make a person “better,” that is, morally and aesthetically aware, conscientious, creative, sensuous, civil, sensitive, and compassionate. Literary engagement offered what before had been obtainable only through religious insight, while at the same time appealing to the sensual dimensions of human experience. Criticism through institutionalized education speciﬁcally transported readers into a higher realm, and so became linked even more than literature to a pedagogical imperative. While the great books inherently embodied the best of humankind, only sophisticated readers would be able to access their offerings. Critical and close reading accomplished the goal of personal and social transformation subtly through powers of text-reader transference, speciﬁcally through an immersion into poetic language. As Eagleton details (1983, 46), the emergence of New Criticism, a movement which arose in the American South during the mid-twentieth century, solidiﬁed what was to become a widespread and essentially irrefutable belief in the all-encompassing force of literary engagement and literature education to offer refuge from, and to indirectly remedy, social ills. What uniquely identiﬁed New Criticism, however, was the way in which its moral agenda became hidden, made secret in institutional efforts to elevate the status of literary criticism such that it would become equal, in its own right, to the perceived objective scientiﬁc disciplines. Moreover, in this process, moral awareness increasingly became a personal, rather than a socio-political, attribute. The claim was that the practice of criticism, that is, a detached and objective analysis of meaning in the poetic object, did not betray or commit one to any ideologies. It produced reﬁned yet largely politically disinterested subjects. While New Criticism dominated the ﬁeld of literary studies throughout much of the twentieth century, it also experienced competition from readerresponse theory, which was introduced by literary theorist and educator Louise Rosenblatt in the 1930s (1938, 1978). Deeply inspired by the work of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of teaching through experience-based encounters in order to build democratic character, Rosenblatt stressed the importance of the reader’s experience in the construction of meaning in any literary encounter, rather than the notion of a right interpretation of a text, which was the purview of New Criticism. However, although reader-response theory stood in manifold opposition to New Criticism in its methodology, it nevertheless also sought to restore the aesthetic, moral, and democratic integrity of literature and literary engagement, particularly in its early years. Rosenblatt held that literature education operated in the

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service of the instantiation and reinforcement of liberal ideals, producing in students a sensitive social imagination attuned to suffering and beauty, and moving them to ponder questions of virtuous action. The promise of a Levinasian ethical criticism enters literary study following a tide of postmodern, poststructural, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and postcolonial critiques of the educational paradigm of liberal humanism. These critical theories have made it clear that knowledge is not neutral, and that ideologies do in fact underscore any textual relations. They have examined the underpinnings of how and what we know, and have argued that our Western epistemologically grounded orientation to the world, while glossed in claims of liberation, in effect betrays violent and discriminatory commitments. They have revealed the humanist reliance on the notion of a foundational, knowing, and sovereign subject to conceal desires for possession, control, and mastery, as has been made all too evident through such events as the Holocaust and the oppression and genocides connected with imperialism. Increasingly apparent has become the realization that approaches to knowledge, to engagements with individuals, and to objects of study, whether inanimate or animate, are steeped in the solidiﬁcation and dissemination of methods and practices which aspire to maintain and exercise power and authority over objects rather than heighten and reﬁne a compassionate sensibility as espoused. These insights demand consideration of new modes of relation and new literary, aesthetic, and ethnographic approaches. The current state of literary theory is in much debate. Critics on the extreme right, like Harold Bloom (1994), have held tight not only to the moral and sociopolitical signiﬁcance of reading but also to the Arnoldian view that a literate, cohesive, and aware society requires an educational ideology directed toward engagements with great Western masterpieces. Neo-Aristotelians such as literary philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (1990, 1995) emphasize variations of a humanist approach to literature, stressing literature’s innately moral character, the liberational and virtue-inducing power of literary engagement, and the educational possibilities inherent in practices not only of analysis of moral dilemmas faced by literary characters but also of empathic and identiﬁcatory practices. Along similar lines, Wayne C. Booth (1998, 48) has argued that reading and criticizing narratives rather than merely explicitly pronouncing codes of character and conduct encourages students to “absorb lessons in how to confront ethical complexity.” By wrestling with moral conﬂicts in narrative, readers develop skills to think through real-life dilemmas. As uncritical reading or dispassionate teaching can circumvent the ethical possibilities of literary engagement, Booth invites literature education to encompass a three-tiered process of being emotionally and imaginatively taken into the narrative world, participating in a critical and more distanced interpretation on the text and, ﬁnally, learning to become fully skeptical readers, questioning not only the form and content of a narrative but also one’s own processes of readerly involvement.

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 71 Finally, there are literary theorists like J. Hillis Miller (1987), of a more deconstructive bent, who locate the ethical dimension of reading in a linguistically focused undoing of the text. While deconstructionists generally contend that deconstructive readings are not practices of literary criticism, and some have maintained they are amoral, Miller conversely argues that deconstruction includes criticism and that, as such, the ethics of “deconstructive literary criticism” requires acknowledgement and examination. Ethics, he perceives, is expressed in narrative form, and reading involves the attempt to comprehend ethics, which entails commitment to rigorous textual attention. Informed by Levinas, Robert Eaglestone, in his work, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (1997, 5), takes both Nussbaum and Miller to task, arguing that neither establishes a “satisfactory relation between literature and the ethical.” In Eaglestone’s view, while Miller neglects literature’s relation to the real world and deﬁnes ethics in ways that center exclusively upon literature’s tropes and ﬁgures, Nussbaum too readily perceives that literature wholly represents life and does not sufﬁciently address its ﬁctional and linguistic qualities. Levinas’s insights into ethics have extensive implications for literary criticism as deﬁned so far. His writings fault much of Western philosophy, from Socrates to Heidegger, for its ontological imperialism, for conceiving that ethics propels from a sovereign self out toward others (Young 1990, 13). In the vein of postmodernists, he explicates how this self is principally invested in the preservation and reproduction of its image, autonomy, and freedom, such that it justiﬁes unjust relations with others. The long-standing view that literature makes us more morally aware, and the view that education can serve to strengthen our moral insight, are consequently problematic if ethics is understood in the way Levinas critiques it. Indeed, his insights expose much of (literature) curricula and pedagogy to reﬂect controlling and egocentric rather than ethical investments. Levinas’s writing is radical within the Western philosophical canon because it locates ethics in intersubjective relations. Speciﬁcally, ethics emanates from the alterity of another rather than from the self, and reveals the self’s absolute and inﬁnite obligation to alterity. The self, whether or not it acknowledges or accepts it, is formed from, and deﬁned by, this obligation. As Levinas thus turns the ethical relation upside down, so too does he profoundly challenge our conventional Western understandings of how we know, learn, and participate in the world. His thought demands that we no longer regard the external world as a possess-able object of inquiry but rather as a subject and, in fact, as the very ground for the self’s existence. Certainly, in this context, any (academic) theory of relations situated in the movement from a sovereign self out toward (objectiﬁed) others demands reconsideration. Yet, even though Levinas’s writings open up for reexamination a number of problematic assumptions that have informed mainstream Western (speciﬁcally Anglo-) literature education to date, to refer to these writings as a

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means of resolving these assumptions proves exceedingly difﬁcult. Attempts to articulate relations between literature and ethics anew are obstructed by Levinas’s own strident critique of any connection between them. Furthermore, Levinas’s ethics direct us to a perspective that shows the impossibility of any methodology or prescriptive practice to bring us closer to ethical truths. How does one begin to consider a Levinasian-informed ethical practice of literary engagement if Levinas himself not only rejected a prescriptive approach but also criticized the inherent powers of the imaginative and interpretative faculties?

LEVINAS ON ART, LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM While Levinas explains his views on art sporadically in several texts, a concentrated discussion appears in his essay “Reality and its Shadow” (1987). In this piece, he responds to the common perception, or “dogma,” which holds that art exceeds the limitations of language in its ability to apprehend and express the ineffable. These dogmatic terms elevate art and the artistic imagination as the prime vehicles for attaining knowledge to absolute truth. Levinas (1987) instead asserts that art does not transcend but resides within the public sphere, and that the artist is not liberated from, but rather subject to, the obligations of humanity. For Levinas, while art does contrast with knowledge, it does not necessarily therefore belong to the order of truth—of revelation or of creation. Art substitutes an image for the object. In the process, it detaches itself from the object. Because an image is a substitution, it neutralizes our capacity to actively grasp its object through conceptual understanding. Images work upon us through magic and seduction. Our consent is translated into a transferential participation in which the image obtains a hold on us. In the incantation of poetry and music particularly, the “I” is stripped of its power and participates in a non-conceptual sphere of sensation, situated outside the (un)conscious. This sphere is not within or beyond the ﬁeld of truth but rather on the “hither side” of it, in the land of shadow or “phantom essence.” As art and artistic engagement participate in this sphere of non-truth, they evade demands of ethical responsibility. Levinas hence disengages poetry and art from ethics. Indeed, echoing Plato, he states: “The poet exiles himself from the city. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (1987, 12). According to Levinas, art, then, is not ethically committed simply by virtue of its being art. It is not the supreme value of civilization, and often is no more than entertainment and spectacle. Levinas continues his disparagement of art in Totality and Inﬁnity (2004) and in Otherwise than Being (1981), though, particularly in Otherwise than Being, his views are not without contradiction. This contradiction becomes apparent even in “Reality and its Shadow” when he discusses the importance of the critic. In

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 73 this essay, Levinas at ﬁrst binds art with the practice of criticism. Like art, criticism dogmatically professes access to the absolute. Criticism parasitically depends upon art, and seeks to either hunt for the absolute through it, or substitute itself for it. Later, however, he asserts that criticism returns art and the artist to the human world and ethical exigencies through inquiry into technique, inquiry into the history and society in which the artwork is situated and, in this regard, criticism is essential. In thereby acknowledging the value of the critic, it would seem that Levinas inadvertently suggests that art does have something to offer, for art is the critic’s vehicle. Moreover, to what extent are art and criticism truly distinct? (Eaglestone 1997, 109). Several contemporary theorists contend that Levinas’s critique of art and literature does not necessarily imply an impossible connection between ethics and aesthetics, and thus continue the defenses begun after Plato. Richard Kearney (1999, 108–17), for example, maintains that while Levinas expresses suspicion over the enchanting power of images, he does not outright censor art’s ethical possibilities. He writes, “Levinas’s suspicion of images is not directed against the poetic power of imagination per se but against the use of such power to incarcerate the self in a blind alley of self-reﬂecting mirrors” (110). In his interpretation, Levinas’s thought leaves room for an ethical imagination which safeguards alterity from ontological investments in self-reproduction and the erasure of difference. Concentrating her discussion largely upon Levinas’s thought on art and literary expression in Totality and Inﬁnity, Jill Robbins (1999) argues that Levinas’s response to the question of the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic betrays a revealing tension. She notes the ambiguity reﬂected in his writings, detailing how his harsh perspective on art seems to stand in opposition to his own literary analysis and praise of the Holocaust poetry of Celan, and the writings of Blanchot and Dostoyevsky, among others. In these works, in fact, he gestures toward the opening function of art—that is, art’s capacity to open the reader to the ethical (Robins 1999, 146). By thus betraying exceptions to his rule, Robbins contends, he puts the rule itself into question. She further illustrates how Levinas also often deploys the resources of the literary in order to illuminate his philosophy, thereby further blurring generic boundaries and hierarchies (xxiii). She concludes that, while Levinas’s thought does not entail a clear change of heart in the possibility of art to transcend the limitations he cites, it does point to a modiﬁcation and softening (154). Her investigation of his unaccented comments on literature not only reﬂects alteration in his views but also suggests the possibility of literary expression and criticism, understood as close reading and textual interruption, to possess ethical content (xxiv). Similarly, Robert Eaglestone (1997) argues that Levinas’s rearticulation of his ethics in ways which are responsive to the Derridean recognition of problems of language creates room for the reassessment of Levinas’s antipathy

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toward art and literature. Otherwise than Being marks a critical shift in his thinking from his earlier work, Totality and Inﬁnity. Rather than elucidate the ethical vis-à-vis the face-to-face relationship, Levinas addresses its place in language. Speciﬁcally, he represents ethics with the vocabulary of “saying” and “said.” He positions the said as the discursive, that which is known or knowable, identiﬁable, nameable, thematizable, containable. In contrast, the saying is alterity—indeﬁnable, non-descriptive, conceptually ungraspable. As the saying enters discourse, it is subject to efforts of representation and is reduced, yet it always appears as a trace within the said. Each therefore subverts the other. Alterity, beyond essence, is what calls us to obligation. Whether alterity is read through the face-to-face encounter or through language, the effect on a person is the same. The encounter traumatizes. It disrupts the presumptions of ego-identity and makes manifest the obligation to be responsible and responsive to alterity. Ethics—alterity, the address of alterity, and the inﬁnite and absolute obligation to respond to the address—is a priori. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas continues to denounce literature and art, though less so. Now, however, because he situates ethics in language, he can no longer readily separate ethics and literature. On the one hand, in ways that echo his thought in “Reality and its Shadow,” he asserts that art is essence, par excellence. Here he acknowledges that modern works of art can recognize, reveal, and exploit the artiﬁce of art. They can illuminate its production, its essences, and the illusions in which it participates, although they cannot ultimately transcend their own limitations. But Levinas inadvertently departs even more signiﬁcantly from his earlier theory of art and artistic engagement by rooting art no longer in the shadow world but rather ﬁrmly within the discursive, within his new vocabulary of said/saying. As he maintains that the said contains a trace of the saying, and insofar as literature and art are said products, by implication, they also carry the trace of alterity and its address. Hence, the ethical is within the said of art. Levinas himself at one point attests that “[t]he caress of love . . . is always different and overﬂows with exorbitance the songs, poems, and admissions in which it is said in so many different ways and through so many themes, in which it apparently is forgotten” (1981, 184). Levinas’s discursive turn, observes Eaglestone (1997, 184), offers not a methodology of literary criticism per se, but an orientation to language which requires “attending to the ethical in the textual, and [to] the responsibility inherent in reading.” It heralds an ethical reading which obliges one to fracture the said and expose the saying within the said. For Eaglestone, literary engagement is centrally about an interminable practice of interruption which permits witnessing the otherwise than being and undoes the reader (139). Such a practice cannot be prescribed, methodologized, because as soon as reading practice is formalized it loses its ability to fracture the said (165). There can only be ceaseless reﬂection and interruption. Even to insist on an ethics of literature is to make a ﬁnite and reductive “said” claim. In

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 75 this sense, Eaglestone deﬁnitively gestures to a practice that would seem to follow Lawrence Buell’s anticipation of an ethics of criticism. In his contribution to The Turn to Ethics, Buell (2000, 7) not only draws attention to the potential value of a Levinasian ethics of criticism but also observes that such a criticism “would presumably need to fuse a revised version of a deconstructionist vision of the impossibility of reading with a revised version of Booth’s book as friend: the other for whom we feel responsibility prior to any awareness of it.” In this Levinasian context, as Buell notes elsewhere, textual encounter becomes interpersonal encounter (1999, 13). In her discussion of Levinas and literary theory, Susan A. Handelman (1991) envisions the literary text as an address of alterity and as a mode of speech which teaches and opens us to what lies beyond philosophical or conceptual understanding, to that which transcends essence. Handelman also describes the necessarily symbiotic said/saying relationship within texts, and equates religious with secular literature. Both genres embody the said through their formal qualities and social dimensions, and both also bear the trace of alterity, encouraging readers to be exposed to and pedagogically engage the “saying” (284–85). Her writing, it seems to me, emphasizes a spiritual understanding of Levinasian alterity, recognizing ethics as a relationship between not only self and an/other but also self and God. Handelman perceives a strong relationship between the text and its interpretation. The text contains within it the teaching other, and exposure and interpretation opens up this educational dimension (285). Richard A. Cohen (2001) illuminates how Levinas, in his other work, distinguishes between criticism and exegesis. Levinas charges that criticism is limited because it focuses upon explanation over insight. Criticism emphasizes investigating and explaining the objective contexts in which a text is situated or to which it refers, whether local, regional, or global. In contrast, exegesis, a practice developed in the context of the study of sacred works, aspires toward insight derived from the text and the subject’s own subjective context. It is oriented toward comprehending external and internal truths, toward a deep self-understanding of humankind. Cohen draws attention to how the central difference between criticism and exegesis is pedagogical. Whereas criticism views the text as an object for investigation and analysis, exegesis perceives it as a teaching (245). Aimed at transformational learning, exegesis encompasses diligent study and articulates learning as the pursuit of a difﬁcult wisdom which combines understanding with virtue (Cohen 2001, 243). Cohen eloquently writes: “The issue of the text’s impact is not a matter of receiving new contents, new information, new data. The learning involved in study is not a matter of possessing a new or revised set of theses, to carry away in one’s mental pocket, as it were. Rather, one is changed by the experience of learning” (2001, 252). Furthermore, exegesis involves multiple interpretations by multiple readers. The uniqueness of each reader’s context, background, and perspective

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contributes to the generation of insight. In this respect, although he does not himself contest Levinas’s aesthetic position, Cohen moves conversation of Levinas’s inﬂuence on literary engagement beyond one of criticism to one of ethical exegesis. For Levinas, ethical exegesis is the task of the philosopher. Others have suggested how it might also be the task of the literary critic. The as yet unanswered question is whether it can also be the task of the educator and the reader of literature. In my own view, there is room to consider a Levinasian ethics of engagement with literature and art. Such a practice does not appear incommensurable with a view that interminably questions the responsibilities of art and aesthetic engagement. For sure, one might disagree, as Levinas does, with the privileging of art as the property of, and means to, the ethical. Undoubtedly, art can readily draw audiences into narrow entertaining relationships or into sociopolitical consolidations of egoistic and violent investments. Levinas contends, as Cohen puts it, that ethics “can and must remind us that the aesthetic life is inferior to the moral life” (2001, 16). The moral possibilities of art do, in fact, appear undermined when we witness art and literature being used in the service of voyeuristic entertainment, or propaganda and suspect politics. And in the case of historical trauma, we can appreciate Theodor Adorno’s own conﬂict about poetic possibility after Auschwitz. Yet I believe art also supports interminable questioning, provides avenues for ethical reﬂection, can expose and destabilize the presumptions of society, subjects, and even art itself. It can accomplish this overtly, through its statements, and covertly, in its uncontainable ambiguities—ambiguities which can exceed authorial intentions. Some theorists maintain that art and the artist need to be irresponsible in order to be able to bring to light what might have been invisible (Mitchell 1994, 421–25). As I have discussed elsewhere (Eppert 2002), some commemorative works deliberately encourage their audience to engage in moments of “imaginary” violence, in hopes that readers or viewers will be challenged to question themselves, to address their own potential antagonisms. In such situations, art, not unproblematically, exercises irresponsibility in order to invite the development of a responsive and responsible heuristics of fantasy and imagination. I suggest that such works show the locus of responsibility to rest principally on the audience. Whether art indulges in irresponsibility and/or carries a trace of ethical address, what seems central is exegesis, what the reader/viewer/listener psychically and socially does with the text. Adam Newton (1995) draws upon Levinas’s philosophy to detail a “narrative ethics.” He describes narrative as a communicative ethics which binds narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text. He distinguishes his critical practice from that of Miller and Booth. While he acknowledges the differences between them—one subscribes to an ethics of unreadability, the other to an ethos of friendship—he maintains that their theories remain implicated within a formalist and Kantian framework. Both theories articulate the view that literary texts require judgment from their interpreters and that this judgment rests upon ethical criteria, such as

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 77 whether ethics is conceived as duty or as freedom. In contrast, he envisions a less universal practice of reading, one which engages the particularity, immediacy, and performative dimension of each narrative. Each narrative uniquely exerts an ethical claim upon its characters and audience. Examining the work of such writers as James, Dickens, Conrad, and Melville, Newton investigates narrative acts themselves, the consequences of representation, and the “ethico-critical accountability” to which acts of reading hold their readers (18). Within this latter context, he asserts, “texts tax readers with ethical duties which increase in proportion to the measure with which they are taken up. The ethics of reading is to think the inﬁnite, the transcendent, the Stranger” (292). As does Derek Attridge (1999, 26) in his study of Levinas and innovation in cultural practice, Newton identiﬁes the literary work, no matter how intimately engaged, as stranger rather than friend, emphasizing the radically and subversive unfamiliar within and over the familiar. A Levinas-informed study of literature and literary response seems to have so far attracted the most attention in Holocaust studies. Indeed, Levinas’s development of his philosophy was signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by the genocide of the European Jewry during the Second World War. While Kearney examines the implications of Levinas’s thought in the context of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a nine and one-half–hour documentary that aspires to represent the unrepresentable through the refusal of presence, Dorota Glowacka (2002) does so through a discussion of Ida Fink’s short stories and the Holocaust artwork of Mordechai Ardon and Robert Morris (Kearney 1999, 112–13). These works repeatedly point to Holocaust art and literature as sites that contest traditional notions of representation, because they are intent upon communicating suffering and realize the impossibility of doing so. Holocaust testimonies which witness without making claims to an appropriative or possessive realism and cognitive and/or empathetic mastery resonate with a Levinasian understanding of ethical responsibility. Moreover, in ways that echo Newton’s writings, theorists such as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) have emphasized the vital role of the listener, viewer, or reader in Holocaust testimonies, and the ethical importance of (impossibly) attending to traces of alterity. Elsewhere (Eppert 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004b), I have examined Levinas’s writings in the context of educational engagements with multicultural and multi-ethnic “witness” literature. I have suggested that we might productively think about how this literature encompasses a teaching of sorts, a teaching of a long past and continued present of violence, oppression, and suffering, and a teaching of the need for alternate engagements with the past and with others. Indeed, several of these Bildungsromane are structured in ways which call upon their readers to enter the protagonist’s worldview. This protagonist embarks upon a journey to learn about his or her past and to heal from its legacy. As with Holocaust art and literature, this literature struggles to witness the unrepresentable. In ways that converge and differ, it is embedded in exegetical challenges of learning responsivity/responsibility to the historical

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event and the suffering that it indexes. Readers participate in the protagonist’s remembrance and are (potentially) confronted not only with the text’s difﬁcult subject matter but also with their own individual and socialized habits of reading and engagement. In a discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (Eppert 1999, 2004b), I illustrate how the protagonist Tayo’s Bildung entails a nuanced critique of different modes of hegemonic Western engagement (touristy, identiﬁcatory, familial, modernly ethnographic), and, ﬁnally, via Tayo’s own insights and healing, beckons readers to a transformational witnessing.2 This witnessing departs signiﬁcantly from the self-other dualistic orientation and worldview which gave rise to this violence in the ﬁrst place. It is variably embedded in unmasterable awareness of intersubjective relations and the obligations of alterity. In this respect, textual engagement can compel readers to not only (un)learn ethics anew but also (un)learn reading and, in effect, identify alternate ways of participating in the world.

LEVINAS AND EDUCATION Handelman (1996) is among the ﬁrst to have written about Levinas’s ethics in relation to education, speciﬁcally literature and religious education. She observes how Levinas’s philosophy demands that ethics, not epistemology, become the dominant preoccupation of educators, and poses the question of the capacities of literature to teach ethics/ethically. Revealing how Levinas makes the self’s encounter with other into a teaching relation, she recognizes the interminability of learning, as alterity remains exterior, incapable of being fully known. In this respect, the teaching-learning relation is no longer deﬁnable within self-sufﬁcient, protective, autonomous or utilitarian terms, or within traditional hierarchical understandings of teacher as knower and student as tabula rasa. Education is inﬁnitely relational, and insights obtained testify to the learner’s inﬁnite and absolute responsibility, with teacher and student both positioned as learners (Handelman 1996, 227). As insight is not containable, neither is it straightforwardly communicable. Drawing upon the Jewish mystical tradition, Handelman (1996, 233) observes how the “deepest knowledge can only be conveyed in [an] indirect way . . . through condensation, story, and parable” (italics in the original), because to transmit the full complexity of something without contraction and concealment is to overwhelm, and so deny, the student access to understanding. In ways that I believe have fascinating connections with Eastern philosophy, she emphasizes teaching then as the staged creation of an empty space and as a concurrent act of self-limitation rather than self-expansion for the purposes of opening up to the other.3 Robert Gibbs (2000) similarly discusses the educational dimension of Levinas’s thought. He equally draws attention to the dialogical nature of learning and to how learning is no longer merely informational but embedded in the ungraspability and authority of alterity (29). In shifting the locus of teaching

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 79 from the self to the authoritative alterity of the other, Gibbs makes it evident how Levinas also unconventionally shows the practice of questioning to be the priority of the other. The encounter with alterity exposes, interrogates, and continuously places the learning self into question, requiring the learner to respond and justify himself or herself. Gibbs emphasizes how listening to alterity consequently is the learner’s foremost task (30). Listening, the self is questioned in unanticipated ways, is challenged to learn the necessity of response to alterity’s address and how to respond to that which it cannot think and make its own (32). In this, the learner comes to identify how the exegetical process is lifelong. Indeed, ethical education is the teaching of inﬁnity—of inﬁnite alterity, of inﬁnite obligation, of inﬁnite interpretation, of inﬁnite humility, and of the inﬁnite present within the self in the call to respond (32). Gibbs illustrates the performative aspect of teaching—it is not that there is an exteriority in reality which then becomes taught; rather, teaching produces the exteriority itself. Levinas also describes the unique disposition ethical listening demands. As I discuss elsewhere (Eppert 1999, 2004a), the attentiveness for which Levinas calls is one in which we aspire to proximity with the teaching other not through imposition, but rather by attempting to remain open and vulnerable. We approach a text, therefore, not by interrogating it, demanding it surrender its meaning to us, drawing conclusions about it based upon our own investments, experiences, and fantasies, but rather by allowing it to ask questions of us that we cannot anticipate, by allowing it to expose us to ourselves. Handelman (1991), for one, observes how a Levinasian model of ethical exegesis would negate the idea of the text as “enclosed container where meaning is fully inside” or as some blank slate upon which the reader arbitrarily projects her or his own willful meanings, or as a cultural artifact which essentially reﬂects the contest of ideologies. Levinas’s idea of interpretation rests on his notion of language as already opened to the other. . . . The “said” or book retains an “other voice” . . . and is the very modality which opens and “exposes itself to exegesis and solicits it, and where meaning, immobilized in the characters, already tears the texture which conceals and encloses it. (1991, 286; italics in the original)

CONCLUSION: LITERATURE EDUCATION TODAY Educational theorists and practitioners have begun to examine vigorously how critical theory might ﬁnd practical expression in high school curriculum and pedagogy (e.g., Appleman 2000; Carey-Webb 2001). At the same time, research reveals the extent to which the American high school English curriculum remains largely deﬁned by the traditional Western canon and humanist in its orientation, immersed in New Criticism and reader

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response (Applebee 1996; Willinsky 1991). Moreover, American schooling today is increasingly subject to an agenda of control and measurement, limiting possibilities of reﬂection, creativity, questioning, and vulnerability. Rather than submit to an agenda of testing and standards, in which any outcome beyond satisfactory scores is ill-deﬁned, Booth (1998, 45) and other educational theorists (e.g. Nakagawa 2000; Noddings 2002; Purpel and McLaurin Jr. 2004; Smith 1999) encourage educators and policy makers to examine what is centrally important in education: not obedient citizenship, not market power, but rather, the problem of living, especially in this age of anxiety and violence. Literature education is ideally well-suited to address the question of how one might learn to live in the world. As we have seen, the teaching relation is conceived in and through speaking, reading, writing, and listening engagements, very much the “stuff” of the English classroom. While sensitive to Levinasian insights about the inherently non-prescriptive character of ethics, literature education can nevertheless be imagined as a site where the doors to continually deconstructing and reconceiving the world in radical and transformational ways can be open. The national standards for the English Language Arts curriculum as deﬁned by the National Council of Teachers of English and by the International Reading Association (1996) recognize literature education as a site for considerations of morality and ethics. They point to how literary engagement provides learners with opportunities to reﬂect ethically and philosophically on the values and beliefs of their own and other cultures, deepen their understanding of life’s complexities, question their own perspectives, and assume different and critical stances toward events, circumstances, and issues. While these perspectives support moral and ethical inquiry, I feel the need to more fully recognize literature education as a site for the foregrounding and critique of the social construction of different philosophical understandings of ethics. As Levinas has made all too clear, ethics is a term which carries a Western history of ontological violence. Literature education can invite philosophy into its curriculum and also, in the process, encourage deconstruction of its own ideological conditionings and practices. In the measure that literature education continues to operate within a paradigm that deﬁnes ethics and reading practice in ways that hold tight to notions of autonomy, to the extent that literature proceeds from the self rather than from the other, posits a dualistic worldview, emphasizes mastery and a ﬁnality to lesson-learning, and cultivates the presumption one can know others by imaginatively stepping into their shoes (a too-common and unnuanced refrain among student teachers of English education in my classes), practices of literary inquiry and interpretation that aspire to create conditions for the education of an (ethical) imagination stand in danger of perpetuating oppressive relations. Certainly, those on the right who advocate a return to values, to character-building, and to the reading of the Western canon speak of literary engagement as

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 81 the exercising of will, power, and control, and, in so doing, risk ethics.4 And, as has been shown, liberal humanists of a more democratic bent also support assumptive practices which, albeit couched within the terms of a quest for moral awareness and sensibility, can betray self-serving interests. While the scope of this paper does not permit a more extended discussion of the implications of Levinas’s writings for literature education, sufﬁce to say in conclusion that, if, in previous decades, educators sought to inculcate status quo-preserving virtues through ﬁxed codes of conduct or through didactic literature, however broadly conceived, contemporary times perhaps hearken more for an inconclusive view of literature education which would foster what Simone Weil (1952, 173), French philosopher and contemporary of Levinas, identiﬁes as a “gymnastics of the attention,” open practices of learning to look ever more deeply and carefully at self and world. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the anonymous reviewer of this chapter for his/her very careful reading and thoughtful suggestions, and to Denise Egéa-Kuehne for her patient and generous spirit. NOTES 1. While ethics points to a sensibility of thought and action, morality more speciﬁcally deﬁnes a particular socially deﬁned set of rules and norms. See Derek Attridge (1999). 2. For additional critiques of empathetic identiﬁcation, see William F. Pinar (2001), Megan Boler (1999), Robert Eaglestone (1997), and Deborah Britzman (1998). 3. See Claudia Eppert and Hongyu Wang (2007). 4. Bloom, for instance, maintains that “[w]hen you read, you confront either yourself, or another, and in either confrontation you seek power. Power over yourself, or another, but power” (1982, quoted in Hobbs, 1994, 301). For critiques of current character initiatives see Yu (2004), and Purpel (1997).

REFERENCES Applebee, A. N. 1996. Curriculum as conversation: Transforming traditions of teaching and learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Appleman, D. 2000. Critical encounters in high school English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents. New York: Teacher’s College Press; National Council of Teachers of English. Aristotle. 1958. Poetics. Trans. and ed. W. D. Ross. New York: Pocket Books. Arnold, M. 1979. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, in The Norton anthology of English literature, 4th ed., vol. 2, ed. M. H. Abrams, 1404–1423. New York: W. W. Norton. Attridge, D. 1999. Innovation, literature, ethics: Relating to the Other. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 114 (1):20–31.

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Bloom, H. 1982. The Breaking of the vessels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. The Western canon. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bogdan, D. 1992. Re-educating the imagination: Toward a poetics, politics, and pedagogy of literary engagement. Porstmouth: Heinemann. Boler, M. 1999. Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York: Routledge. Booth, W. C. 1988. The company we keep: An ethics of ﬁction. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. The ethics of teaching literature. College English 61 (1):41–55. Britzman, D. P. 1998. Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany: State University of New York Press. Buell, L. 1999. In pursuit of ethics. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 114 (1):7–19. ———. 2000. What we talk about when we talk about ethics. In The turn to ethics, ed. M. Garber, B. Hanssen, and R. L. Walkowitz, 1–13. New York: Routledge. Carey-Webb, A. 2001. Literature and lives: A response-based cultural studies approach to teaching English. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. Cohen, R. A. 2001. Ethics, exegesis, and philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conradi, P. ed. 1997. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature. New York: Penguin. Eaglestone, R. 1997. Ethical criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eagleton, T. 1983. Literary theory: An introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eppert, C. 1999. Learning responsivity/responsibility: Reading the literature of historical witness, PhD diss., University of Toronto. ———. 2000. Re-learning questions: Responding to the ethical address of the past and present others. In Between hope and despair: Pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma, ed. R. I. Simon, S. Rosenberg, and C. Eppert, 213–230. Lanham: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. ———. 2002. Entertaining history: (Un)heroic identiﬁcations, apt pupils, and an ethical imagination. New German Critique 86:71–101. ———. 2003. Histories re-imagined, forgotten, and forgiven: Student responses to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Studies in Reading and Culture 10 (2):185–94. ———. 2004a. Altering habits of attention and inattention in education: Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas. In Spirituality and ethics in education: Philosophical, theological, and cultural perspectives, ed. H. Alexander, 42–54. Brighton, Portland: Sussex Academic Press. ———. 2004b. Leslie Silko’s Ceremony: Rhetorics of ethical reading and composition. JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Writing, Multiple Literacies, and Politics 24 (3):727–42. ———, and H. Wang, eds. 2007. Cross-cultural studies in curriculum: Eastern thought, educational insights. New York: LEA, Taylor and Francis. Felman, S., and D. Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge. Garber, M., B. Hanssen, and R. L. Walkowitz, eds. 2000. The turn to ethics. New York: Routledge. Gibbs, R. 2000. Why ethics? Signs of responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glowacka, D. 2002. Disappearing traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Fink’s literary testimony, and Holocaust art. In Between ethics and aesthetics: Crossing the boundaries, ed. D. Glowacka and S. Boo, 97–115. Albany: State University of New York Press. Goody, J. 1977. The domestication of the savage mind. New York: Cambridge Press.

Levinas and the Language of the Curriculum 83 Graff, H. 1987. The legacies of literacy: Continuities and contradictions in Western culture and society. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Handelman, S. A. 1991. Fragments of redemption: Jewish thought and literary theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. The “Torah” of criticism and the criticism of Torah: Recuperating the pedagogical moment. In Interpreting Judaism in a postmodern age, ed. S. Kepnes, 221–239. New York: New York University Press. Havelock, E. A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Hobbs, M. 1994. Living in-between: Tayo as radical reader in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Western American Literature 28 (4):301–12. Kaestle, C. F. 1983. Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang. Kearney, R. 1995. Poetics of modernity: Toward a hermeneutic imagination. New York: Humanity Books. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Reality and its shadow. In Collected philosophical papers, trans. A. Lingis, 1–14. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Manguel, A. 1996. A history of reading. New York: Penguin. Miller, J. H. 1987. The ethics of reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murdoch, I. 1997. In Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature, ed. P. Conradi, 21 and 254. New York: Penguin. Nakagawa, Y. 2000. Education for awakening: An Eastern approach to holistic education. Vol. 2 in Foundations of holistic education. Brandon: Foundation for Educational Renewal. National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association. 1996. Standards for the English language arts. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association. Newton, A. Z. 1995. Narrative ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noddings, N. 2002. Educating moral people: A caring alternative to character education. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 1990. Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. Poetic justice: The literary imagination and public life. Boston: Beacon. Ong, W. J. 1982. Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge. Pinar, W. F. 2001. The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching, prison rape, and the crisis of masculinity. New York: Peter Lang. Plato. 1945. The Republic of Plato. Trans. F. M. Cornford. London: Oxford University Press. Purpel, D. E. 1997. The politics of character education. In The construction of children’s character: Ninety-sixth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II, ed. A. Molnar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, and W. M. McLaurin Jr. 2004. Reﬂections on the moral and spiritual crisis in education. New York: Peter Lang. Robbins, J. 1999. Altered reading: Levinas and literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenblatt, L. M. 1938. Literature as exploration. New York: Noble and Noble. ———. 1978. The reader, the text, the poem: A transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Shelley, P. B. 1979. From A defense of poetry. In The Norton anthology of English literature, 4th ed., vol. 2, ed. M. H. Abrams, 781–794. New York: W. W. Norton. Sidney, P. 1979. From An apology for poetry. In The Norton anthology of English literature, 4th ed., vol. 1, ed. M. H. Abrams, 492–507. New York: W. W. Norton. Simon, R. I., S. Rosenberg, and C. Eppert, eds. 2000. Between hope and despair: Pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma. Lanham: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. Smith, D. G. 1999. Pedagon: Interdisciplinary essays in the human sciences, pedagogy, and culture. New York: Peter Lang. Weil, S. 1952. Gravity and grace. Trans. A. Wills. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Willinsky, J. 1991. The triumph of literature/The fate of literacy: English in the secondary school curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. Young, R. 1990. White mythologies: Writing history and the West. New York: Routledge. Yu, T. 2004. In the name of morality: Character education and political control. New York: Peter Lang.

6

Other than the Other Levinas and the Educational Questioning of Inﬁnity Ian McPherson1

Something holy that wants to turn its back upon everything profane is made profane. . . . By the fabric of language so wrought, the Holy of Holies of this sacerdotal people is both veiled from and indicated to the eyes of the peoples of the world. . . . The difference between its vitality and the vitality of a profane language is that nothing once received into it can ever be lost. The holy language grows richer and richer. (Rosenzweig 1961, 266–67) The Revelation has a particular way of producing meaning, which lies in its calling upon the unique within me. It is . . . as if each person, by virtue of his own uniqueness, were able to guarantee the revelation of one unique aspect of the truth. . . . I am suggesting that the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniqueness of each act of listening carries the secret of the text . . . the multiplicity of meanings is due to the multiplicity of people. (Levinas 1989, 195)

INTRODUCTION: OTHER THAN THE OTHER? There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who do not. Words to that effect come from the American wit Robert Benchley. The opening words set up an expectation, and then surprise us, so that we smile, maybe laugh, and perhaps think again, differently. Should we think of each member of each pair as merely belonging to different kinds, or as nevertheless belonging together in ways which transcend such differences? Such are some of the questions suggested by the phrase “other than the other.” Throughout the most holy texts of Judaism—the ﬁve books of Moses— children are encouraged to ask questions. Is this disrespect for the other, or does respect for the other require listening better to children, encouraging them to become better questioners? Even in the nightmare story of Abraham almost sacriﬁcing Isaac, his ﬁrstborn son—as if saying they have no right to

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differ from, be otherwise than, those who do practice such sacriﬁce—Isaac nevertheless begins to question Abraham. (Genesis ch. 22, Anon. 1963) Perhaps learning from this, Jewish children, at least since the ﬁrst Passover sacriﬁce and exodus from Egypt, have been apparently responsible for questioning their parents about the meaning of ritual acts in which they are, actually or potentially, involved together. Perhaps this living tradition of Passover suggests how later generations can take responsibility for repairing weaknesses of responsibility in earlier generations, as parents and children, but also as teachers and learners. If Benchley had known Rosenzweig’s epigraph, he would have appreciated the implied distinction between a profane and a holy concept of the holy and profane. The profane way of distinguishing merely divides the holy and the profane into two kinds (essences), which are supposedly ﬁxed, ﬁnal, and dead. The holy way of distinguishing cannot accept this. The “ﬁxed” must be unfrozen. The “ﬁnal” must become ﬂuently preliminary and penultimate. The “lost” and “dead” must be revitalized in homecoming. In the above account of Abraham as unentitled, Rosenzweig on the holy is already anticipated. Thus what is most holy is both veiled and promised by language, veiled in its profane or secular forms, and promised in its holy vitality. Worldly differentiations are for the sake of an always richer, always more vital, always more holy, way with words. For Rosenzweig, pseudo-holy language constitutes both itself and what it takes to be merely profane language as totalities, by turning its back on the profane and thus on the vitality of the genuinely holy. Thus “totality” typically expresses itself in mutually exclusive totalities. The “richer and richer” character of genuinely holy vitality is not some incremental wealth hoarded by bankers and misers but, like the scriptural manna from heaven to be used or lost, it is a ﬂowing wealth of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Here sharing enriches all involved, rather than impoverishes, as do oppressive totalities. Totalities, like vampires, suck the vitality out of their victims; the always richer vitality of the language of the Holy Scriptures engages its speakers in mutually enriching, reciprocal circulation of vitality, as in free exchange of gifts. Rosenzweig’s understanding of always richer—because more richly shared— meaning, vitality and holiness illuminates his, but also Levinas’s, understanding of inﬁnity as a name of the Holy One. This illuminates Levinas’s understanding of ethics and religion as inseparable ways of response and responsibility. Derrida, at Levinas’s funeral, recalled how Levinas explained his ethics as a concern with the holiness of the holy, the holiness of the other person and the others (1999, 4). Levinas’s witness to what he called the glory of the inﬁnite—as other than the other2—in the other who calls me beyond myself in responsibility, correlates with Rosenzweig’s witness to the holy awareness of holiness, while Levinas’s polemic against totality and totalities correlates with Rosenzweig’s critique of profane misrepresentation (idolatry) of the holy (compare Gibbs,

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1992). Levinas’s epigraph alludes to the “totality” of truth, not as a sum of said propositions, but as the belonging together of the multiplicity of different insights into a meaning attributable to countless unique individuals. The teaching of inﬁnity puts itself in the place of each learner, calling them to live beyond themselves. This also links with Rosenzweig on the holy and the above reading of Abraham as unentitled. For Levinas, then, inﬁnity is the holiness of the holy, expressed in critique of totalities, both aspects reﬂecting Rosenzweig. Levinas connects the inﬁnite with the endlessness of our becoming responsive to, and responsible for, the other and the others. This is not some abstractly universal version of ethics. For as the holy is already at work in liberation from totality, this is an ethics of exodus and Passover (Hebrew Pesach). The Law or Torah is teaching, guidance, and direction for those already involved in this deliverance. Likewise, Levinas’s ethics of inﬁnite responsibility is for those already involved in deliverance from totality, from the tyranny of the same—the homogenizing, the betraying of the dignity of difference (Sacks 2003)—and from the tyranny of anonymous, neutralized, merely quantitative existence (Levinas’s sinister il y a). Here deliverance is guided by the face of the other, inﬁnitely intimate and inﬁnitely demanding. Levinas in his own way witnesses the ethics of exodus and Passover for all. What makes Levinas excessively demanding, even intolerably hyperbolic for so many readers, is his determination to be honest to the trauma in which the inﬁnite, in its holiness and mercy, intersects with our self-enslaving, self-imprisoning pathologies of totality, in which we dream our travesties of inﬁnity. Whether Levinas is equally audacious and successful in distinguishing between this trauma and traumas of self-punishing and abusive violence is a question belonging to what this essay calls “the educational questioning of inﬁnity.” As we need to ask such questions of inﬁnity, and as inﬁnity may ask such questions of us, through the needs and questioning of others, we may seek guidance in educational aspects of the seder (order, liturgy) of the Pesach (Passover). Here children of the family have signiﬁcant primacy as questioning learners, anticipating and contributing to the remarkable convergence of learning, spirituality, ethics, and questioning which distinguish Judaism. If “questioning is the piety of thought” (Heidegger 1977, 35), then Judaism is the piety of questioning. Questioning skills—their teaching, learning, and development—contribute to sharing responsibility for signiﬁcance, across generations, with liturgical depth and elevation. Here, if the holy is being understood aright, the liturgical and the non-liturgical do not split, nor do the political and the personal. This liturgy is both political and personal. Recognition of inﬁnite personal responsibility, far from being a legalistic nightmare or masochistic incitement of runaway guilt, expresses a sense of, and a taste for, being overwhelmed by an inﬁnite joy only and entirely in such inﬁnite responsibility, repeatedly renewed, graciously and forgivingly, in spite of our guilty and shameful failures. Such is the spirituality of Psalm 119, devoted to the Torah

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of God, but also of Dostoyevsky’s Zosima and his brother in the passage, to which Levinas returns, celebrating the inﬁnity of personal responsibility in the context of a spirituality which pervades this responsibility, resonating with Psalm 119. (compare Levinas 1996a, 102, 144, etc)

THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTIONING OF INFINITY? Some of the links suggested above are not articulated in Levinas’s texts. They are, however, part of the contexture of Levinas’s work. Levinas (1993, 128) is explicit about how the Pesach seder involves participants, across centuries, in the exodus as a continuing deliverance, recalling how the Pesach is vital to “the astonishing reality of today’s Jews.” Levinas reproduces the part of the Pesach seder which explains, at the heart of Jewish education, how—in each generation—each must consider himself or herself as a participant in the exodus deliverance from Egypt, for it is not just the ancestors who were brought out of Egypt, “but ourselves; he delivered us with them”(129). While Levinas does not mention here the children’s questions about what the actions mean, he does recall their context. Even questions of novice learners can mean genuine sharing in the exodus. References to children’s questions about the signiﬁcance of the ﬁrst Pesach are sprinkled across passages of the scriptures (lines 26–27 of Chapter Twelve and lines 8 and 14 of Chapter Thirteen of Exodus; lines 20–25 of Chapter Six of Deuteronomy), within four passages—hence the ancient tradition of the four children of the Pesach and Jonathan Sacks’s (2004) argument for a missing ﬁfth question and a lost, ﬁfth, child (101–4). Evidence that subsequent children were encouraged to ask such questions, as part of their sharing in the Pesach and in continuing exodus, can be found at least 2000 years ago (1). Moreover, this living tradition can be elaborated in some creative, even surprising, ways (Barth 1988). Levinas’s underappreciation of this rich context is symptomatic of a worrying limitation, not just of Levinas, but of the versions of phenomenology he digested. Neither Husserl nor Heidegger nor Levinas include vital phenomena distinctive of infancy and childhood, except for those which may be preserved in adulthood. It is as if, in spite of these phenomenologists’ varied insistence on human temporality, human phenomena were, nevertheless, somehow viewed timelessly, disregarding infancy and childhood. In their defense, much research on such matters happened later. Nevertheless, they were too ready to insist on professional and intellectual disciplinary boundaries, to keep phenomenology pure from mere psychology, and from the merely empirical or positivistic, in the name of their devotion to the differentiating intentionality or directedness of mind. Levinas, with Merleau-Ponty among contemporaries, comes close to appreciating some of the potential for phenomenology in such areas, insisting on the importance of hearing and touch, on questioning and being questioned, and on our

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vulnerability to the claim of the vulnerable other at the heart of asymmetric relationships. All this contributes to what Levinas, in step with much tradition, could only see as the questioning and shattering of our self-centered intentionality by the otherness of the other, with their intentionality—a shattering endlessly necessary for the repeated liberation of ethical awareness. Such mutual incompatibility of intentionalities recalls the double-bind of sensitive hedgehogs (or, if you prefer, porcupines) who would, if only they could, huddle together for warmth. In spite of such promising features, why does Levinas, at times, appear so similar to individualist thinkers for whom to be human is to be alone, as an independent being, as in the social contract tradition from Hobbes onward? Is Levinas’s intended reversal or inversion of the individualism of Descartes, Hobbes et al. (inherited conspicuously by Sartre), capable of undoing this individualism? Alternatively, does Levinas’s intended reversal only offer its all too similar mirror image?3 While Levinas’s reversal of egocentric intentionality, through collision between two such intentionalities, could be a necessary phase on the way to richer appreciation of human interdependence, Levinas routinely blocks the way with his intense suspicion, or his concept of intentionality, or both, suggesting ambivalence toward Hegelian aufgehoben (judging yet reconciling transformation). Levinas is surely right insofar as he intends to remind us how egocentric intentionality can colonize, or be colonized by, relationships, groups and institutions, in deeply unacceptable ways. However, can we avoid concluding he is wrong insofar as he would have us believe there is no alternative? If there were no alternative, how could we ﬁnd morally amiss what he would have us reject? In the phrase “egocentric intentionality,” is “egocentric” redundant, given Levinas’s understanding of intentionality? Merold Westphal (2004) suggests a paradoxicality inhabiting Levinas’s thinking. “Only that which is beyond intentionality by enacting an inverse intentionality in which I am no longer the Sinngeber, the origin of meaning, can call me to responsibility” (201). Two aspects of this summary are striking. Firstly, Westphal recognises that Levinas’s implied account of meaning is centered questionably on the ﬁrst-person singular. Secondly, Westphal’s words are ambiguous. Who enacts inverse intentionality, the other or the self? How is “that” beyond intentionality? Westphal articulates ambiguities inherent in Levinas. For Levinas, the other says from on high: “You must not kill me, or others. You must not let me, or others, die alone. You must not usurp my or others’ place in the sun.” Yet what are the alternatives? Can they be only to die in place of the other/s, to die alone after the other/s, to join the other/s in usurping my place in the sun? Can the phenomenological omni-responsibility of the isolated intentional mind be converted into omni-responsibility of the moral agent? Can the conﬂict of self against other be converted into a war of self against itself? These are aspects of moral tension, conﬂict, transformation, or development. Yet how can both intentional, or moral independence

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and dependence fail to press forward to a free, joyful, non-manipulative inter-dependence? Must every “we” be pre-moral or post-moral, and never genuinely moral? (Gibbs 2000; Kepnes 2003; Putnam 2002, 2004) Levinas appears to be aware of such questions, but his answers suggest a struggle to deal adequately with implications of his more central convictions. In the face of the other, the whole of humanity looks at me, commanding me inasmuch as I am master myself. The command of the other commands me to command. This language of the commanding face is justice for others, for the third persons singular and plural, and for the ﬁrst person plural. The face calls me out from these others, so that I return to them justly in service and suffering, ready for further epiphanies among them (Levinas 1981, 157–62; 2004b, 212–14). Is Levinas entitled to trust that the other is already an ethical other, or will emerge ethical? Can there be a purely private self, like Plato’s Gyges, who is pure voyeur and psychopath, always already hidden in self and not in the other? Why, for Levinas, is the human voice so often overtaken by a gaze seemingly quasi-divine or quasi-demonic? What becomes of Levinas if we seek to let voice shape and guide vision more fully? These worries are expressed as questions, rather than as condemnations or rejections, for the sake of the spirit of learning, the spirit of Judaism, the spirit that appreciates the importance of the gift of turning around, changing one’s mind, repentance. For all I know, Levinas and his most perceptive students have good enough answers to such questions. Perhaps I have simply not yet recognised them. Perhaps Rosenzweig’s holiness theme provides answers. Such questions insist on hope for oneself and for the other. Questioning can enact the politics of hope, the politics of the inﬁnite way beyond our hopeless totalities, the politics of promising fulﬁlments and fulﬁlling promises, where neither promise nor fulﬁlment is understood in reiﬁed abstraction from the other.4 Such patterns can also be found in Augustine of Hippo and in Gregory of Nyssa (Peperzak, 2003, 167–69 and n16).5 Levinas could add the point that the Jewish scriptures, in places, anticipate these Christian thinkers in tracing such patterns or grammar. Yet again, differences between Jews and Christians appear as sibling rivalries. What, then, might Levinas have to learn from “merely empirical” studies of infancy and childhood? Well, such studies are never “merely empirical,” but always involve lesser or greater degrees of conceptual and theoretical expertise. Levinas might receive encouragement either to question or to correct more radically the individualistic model of the self which phenomenology inherited to varying degrees from earlier centuries, with their economic, political, and other currents. Such reconsideration is suggested by experimentally reconstructed phenomena including the following: the human ability, even before birth, to begin to recognise the voice of the mother, contrasted with other voices and sounds; the inherited ability, evident even hours after birth, to begin to recognise and respond to, with smile-like conﬁgurations, the human face

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with its basic pattern and characteristic movements; the further early development of the potential for intentionality or mental directedness through the phenomena of joint attention with the other, guided by shared eye-movements as well as more overt gestures and sounds; the learning of varieties of turn-taking and reciprocity in patterns for feeding and being fed, in various forms of playful interaction, and in the verbal reciprocities of pre-linguistic as well as linguistic development, including the free interplay of good conversation; and the many interpersonal, cultural, and social dimensions, as well as individual psychological dimensions, of language. Given these phenomena, it appears each ﬁrst-person singular comes from, and returns to, dependence on the care and responsibility of many ﬁrst-persons plural.6 If our ontologies are thus dependent on ethics, it is hard to see how these pluralities, with their associated justice and rationality, can be treated as if they were merely secondary, peripheral, or epiphenomenal to ﬁrst-person singular intentionality and phenomenology. On such lines, we can also begin to recognise how vision needs to be contextualised more fully by voice. No “merely psychological” phenomena are likely to be universally recognised as a conclusive argument against individualism. Moreover, there are complications, or perhaps fugal variations, arising from gender differences, regardless of how we should attribute such differences proportionately to nurture or nature, culture or genetics. However, where individualism is taken as an ontological axiom, or epistemological premise, or foundationally self-evident truth, then phenomena of the ﬁrst-person plural are typically underappreciated. Levinas is certainly sensitive to the human signiﬁcance of various phenomena of independence and dependence. Yet how conﬁdent can we be that he is, or could be, equally sensitive to the ways in which our lifelong adaptation or renegotiation of our forms of inter-human dependence and independence can be seen and intended, with good faith and authenticity, as phenomena of a promise?7 How well can Levinas see us aiming at developing versions of interdependence which are at least prospective inheritors of a promise that these versions can be non-manipulative, spontaneous, enjoyable, and intrinsically worthwhile, and so at the heart of the ethical? Can we follow Levinas and still see such phenomena of interdependence, acknowledging and transcending the tensions and conﬂicts of dependence versus independence which Levinas explores with such pathos and anguish? Is Levinas in danger of letting the overwhelming pain of such tensions and conﬂicts in effect constitute a replacement human nature, an ersatz Genesis, a second creation which is not good, let alone very good?8 The speech acts which Levinas associates most with inﬁnite transcendence of totality, with the other’s transcendence of the self, of being and the same, and with self-transcendence, are those of commanding, or ordering, and obeying, as well as of questioning and answering.9 In general, it seems that for Levinas, promising only makes itself heard and effective through

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or beyond these other, more insistent, speech acts or forms of enactive language. Now “effective” teaching and learning need all these speech acts. There is no best sequence, knowable in advance, for using them. We just need to try and see “what works.”10 Such inauthentic heteronomy would be anathema to Levinas, in the name of responsibility for the other and justice for others. Furthermore, the associated regime of instrumental or merely technical rationality, professedly focussing just on effective methods, skills and tools, and professedly abdicating responsibility and justice with regard to the goals which such instrumentalism serves, whether wittingly or unwittingly, promotes a spuriously impartial, self-proclaimed neutrality in the name of a “value-free” realm of “the factual,” “the empirical,” “the quantitative,” or “the given.” Here, also, are links with Levinas: on how totalities mutually colonize one another in mutually parasitic forms of codependent egocentrism, on the homogenizing regime of the same, and on the faceless anonymity of the demonic il y a. Levinas, perhaps even in spite of himself, resonates with a promise of a genuine kind and a degree of autonomy, both for individuals and for institutions, an autonomy which continues to take full account of genuine heteronomy, as opposed to exploitative, enslaving, totalizing heteronomy. The individual aspect of responsibility and the social aspect of justice are, we might say, not other than each other, even though we, in our weakness, need to work lifelong at not confusing them or substituting one for the other. This, of course, is not to imply that responsibility has only an individual aspect, regardless of Levinas’s position on this, or that justice has only a social aspect, whatever Levinas’s position. Given the kinship of justice and reason, we need to say something similar about individual and social aspects of rationality, where rationality is understood primarily as our cluster of learned capacities to ask for, recognise, construct and offer good enough reasons, both in relation to the other and in relation to others. For Levinas, rationality becomes ethical in the service of justice. For justice is the reversal of that soi-disant “rationality” already corrupted by totality or totalities. The justice of the heart has its reasons which neither “Reason” nor “Justice” knows. For Levinas, justice and reason stand or fall together (Levinas 1997a, 157).11 Such considerations indicate some of Levinas’s actual and potential contributions as an educational thinker.12 However, one way of interpreting the preceding paragraphs would be to read them as though they imply that ordering with hearing and obeying, and questioning with answering, need to be evaluated according to how they connect, or fail to connect, with promising. For promising is intimately connected with hope, commitment, loyalty, trust, conﬁdence, and related virtues. These virtues are needed to ensure that ordering and obeying, questioning and answering, stay human or humane, or to restore them to this status when it has become doubtful. However, does the use, in previous sentences, of language associated with virtue ethics mean that this discussion of Levinas has wandered too far away from the language which Levinas considers appropriate for

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his witnessing? Does the language of the virtues rely too far, as Levinas might claim, on the language of the said and the sayable, rather than on the saying, on the ontology contrasted with ethics? These objections fail, if there is a shared interest, between Levinas and at least some version of virtue ethics, in the performative, enactive dimension of language. This interest is shared by both with features of Jewish and Christian scriptures, and so with Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard. Pascal, to follow the evidence of several themes in his Pensées, was concerned with developing what he saw as a genuinely Biblical understanding of language and rhetoric. At least some of Pascal’s concern was inherited, with some originality, by Kierkegaard, which is seen in the way he and his pseudonyms consider or use the dialectics of what Kierkegaard typically calls “the what” and “the how.” Virtues are powers that shape how we act and how we become what we are. Levinas’s admiration for features of Kierkegaard is often obvious. See especially Levinas (2000, 74–75) on “Hermeneutics and the beyond.” Here Levinas hails Kierkegaard as the ﬁrst philosopher to be clear that the good human being’s triumph in afﬂiction shows us how to think of God without confusing God with the world. Given this homage to Kierkegaard, one can recognise how Levinas’s offerings on the said and the saying intended to inherit, and fulﬁl, as part of their richness of meaning, something of the promise of Kierkegaard on the what and the how. Given the prima facie similarities here, Levinas ought to be explicit if he and Kierkegaard differ signiﬁcantly in this area. Levinas’s rare apparent criticism of Kierkegaard seems to have been more of a reaction against the way Sartre mischievously tried to exploit Kierkegaard against Levinas. Levinas and Sartre do, however, share a questionable assumption that Kierkegaard’s individual implies Kierkegaard’s individualism (Levinas 1996b; Rée 1997; Westphal 2004). With regard to Levinas’s reverence for the scriptures, and his—and Rosenzweig’s—appreciation of Pascal and Kierkegaard (Levinas [1993, 63] refers to Rosenzweig as the Jewish version of Pascal and Kierkegaard), it seems highly likely that Levinas’s hospitality embraced these themes in Pascal and Kierkegaard, as well as in their shared Biblical sources (see also Levinas’s memorial address for Jean Wahl [1993, 81–83]). Pascal, for all his (then) fashionable anti-Aristotelian aspects, quietly adapts elements of Aristotle for his epistemology and develops a version of virtue ethics (Hammond 2003; McPherson 2004). Kierkegaard, for all his Kantian afﬁnities, also lends himself to interpretation in terms of virtue ethics (Roberts 1998). The once-fashionable assumption that virtue ethics is so distinctive that it requires strong boundaries to distinguish it from anything claimed to be Kantian, or similar, was never well-grounded, and now needs questioning. If ordering and obeying evoke deontological or Kantian ethics, then promising evokes a trans-deontological ethics (Zagzebski 2004). Moreover, on behalf of Levinas, can we not sustain the two following and related claims? Firstly, in Levinas’s lifetime, with horrendous atrocities suffered and

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witnessed also by him, ordering and obeying, and questioning and answering, were all too often intent on betraying and murdering all signs of promise. Secondly, and nevertheless, there can be, and are, better versions of questioning and answering, of ordering and obeying, versions which can only ﬂourish in the ecology of promise which they imply. For only in a world where people can and do give their word to one another, and keep this word for one another, where their word of promise and fulﬁlment is their bond—their covenant with one another, where children with their questioning are signs of promise not to be betrayed—only in such a world can ordering and obeying, questioning and answering, be trusted to enact exodus from imprisoning totality, to advance liberation for freely shared well-being. Reason would become treason in a world where the questioning and answering, and ordering and obeying, implicit in reason, were estranged from promise. The power and authority, the nobility and dignity in which the destitute and distressed other, even when posing as enemy or stranger, can open me up to attend, to become considerate, is itself the promise of the other, even the promise of the inﬁnite, made by and for the other and others. Children, learners and questioners are heirs of such a promise. Shared and shareable language enables the other to include others. As teachers, we certainly need to develop questioning skills and abilities, so long as those are linked with the understanding and virtues (both intellectual and ethical) needed to use such skills or abilities appropriately and well. Somewhere among such skills, understanding, and virtues is the need for teachers to ensure that learners’ needs are well met. These learners’ needs include the need to be given the time required to develop their answers, and the understanding, virtues, abilities, and skills they need, as learners, for learning to ask questions well. Now teachers who enable learners to ask questions, and to ask better and better questions, need humility as well as authority. Indeed, in so teaching, they show a distinctive and genuine authority in and through this very humility. If this is reminiscent of noblesse oblige, then it is the dignity of a distinctive and genuine service, not of some covertly self-serving, self-excusing power. Noblesse oblige all too often veils not just self-serving power, but also the authority and humility of genuine teaching.13 There are, then, vivifying resonances between the following: genuine teachers’ authority in humility, shown in teaching learners to question well; genuine learners’ humility in authority, shown in learning from their teachers (from their intentional and unintentional teaching) how to question better; the dignity in humility of Levinas’s other, teaching the same old self what this self cannot draw from out of itself, as if it could be its own midwife; and the height or holiness in humility of the voice of the inﬁnite, embodied in the expressive, elusive, yet communicative, face of the other, calling us to hear and respond by taking responsibility for this other, no matter how alien or hostile he or she may be or appear, for us as we are here and now, institutionalized in our totalizing prisons.

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It is within such an inclusive economy, such a welcoming ecology, of teaching and learning, of questioning and answering and questioning again, that we, each of us, can learn together. We learn, as parents and children, as teachers and learners, as older and younger siblings and strangers, what the other and the different means for me, and how, in this way, I can take a share of inﬁnite responsibility for the different and the other, as I turn and walk in the direction of inﬁnite deliverance, ﬁnding provisional fulﬁlment in each promise, and provisional promise in each fulﬁlment along this shared way. In such a context, we can see afresh how the Pesach enables each generation of children to learn to ask questions, both their elders’ questions and their own questions, and to prepare for their own children’s questions. In such a context, we can see afresh how Abraham, Job, and others can be such bold questioners of the inﬁnite, and how they can witness and respond so intensely to the questions with which the inﬁnite pursues them (Ward 2001). In such a context, this chapter’s questions for Levinas and his advocates constitute not persecution or accusation, but, I hope, a contribution to our all too human practice of the politics of hope. This chapter’s suggested answers are not intended as substitutions for Levinas’s work, and the work of his most responsible interpreters, but as attempts to take individual responsibility for enriching and revitalizing the meaning or meanings which I have tried to inherit, as the interpreter I have become and would like to become, as one among countless others. Levinas’s late essay (2004a), ﬁrst published in 2000, conﬁrms his continuing engagement with Pascal. The ﬁrst section turns again to Pascal’s words, on behalf of the Holy One, the inﬁnite: “You would not seek me if you had not already found me” (31). The main theme of that essay is, in effect, how to interpret this voice in the context of more conventional philosophical and ethical voices. Levinas links this way of seeking with desire and questioning, exploring how these can signify “something like a ‘more’ in a ‘less’” (40). Levinas’s essay suggests the present chapter is not too widely off the mark. Prince Hamlet, affecting madness, wise in his folly, like some court jester reversing roles with his lord, confesses, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of inﬁnite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (2.2.247–48, Shakespeare 2007; compare Desmond 2005). Here Shakespeare anticipates Pascal, anticipating Levinas. The inﬁnity of mathematical, geometrical space allows us mastery in numerical and experimental operations, rendering ourselves excessively small or large. However, this inﬁnity is bounded in the nutshell of the skull, brain, and self-closing mind. We thus have our own intentional inﬁnity, able to make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven (Milton’s Satan). Yet this inﬁnity is, in turn, disrupted by bad dreams, as the ghosts by which we haunt ourselves and each other speak of more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy. In the end, we may wake up to the intimate authority of the other and the others. Pascal, in effect, identiﬁes this ultimate, genuine inﬁnity with his “third order” or way of ordering, named caritas, love as freely self-giving care for

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others. The inﬁnity of caritas is beyond and yet within the orderings of body and mind, beyond and yet within the styles of geometry and ﬁnesse, beyond and yet within the merely quantitative and the abstractly qualitative, each with its own dreams of inﬁnity. For the inﬁnity of caritas has already found those who seek it. In Levinas, it is by way of the ﬁnesse of responsibility, reiterated in justice, that the inﬁnite delivers us from our bad dreams, of inﬁnity confused with totality, which threatens to close down our learning. Here, in Levinas’s passion for the other, for the inﬁnite in and beyond others, we can witness, participate in, and begin to celebrate a ﬁnesse of justice and compassion, an educational exodus, a homecoming from exile for teaching and learning, a resurrection which Judaism can share with many other learners. NOTES Many thanks, for different kinds of encouragement, to Denise Egéa-Kuehne, Paul Standish, and Hanan Alexander: all hereby absolved from responsibility for features of my waywardness they may ﬁnd unwelcome. 1. I have had to omit a substantial ﬁnal section of my original essay, on how Levinas and Blaise Pascal, both eloquent witnesses for the inﬁnite, are mutually enhancing. I discuss there Pascal’s implied triadic account of the inﬁnite, corresponding to his triadic ordering of understanding. Seen together, Levinas and Pascal, rather than Descartes, urge an educational exodus, beyond the merely quantitative and qualitative abstractions in which totality traps learners and travesties learning, an exodus liberating us for the life-giving way of the inﬁnite. I have added two ﬁnal paragraphs in place of the missing section. 2. The phrase “other than the other” (autre qu‘autrui) is used by Levinas with reference to God, the glory of the inﬁnite, and ethics, in “God and Philosophy” (1989, 179). The phrase “other than the other” is of special interest in that it aspires to hold together, somehow, a sense of divine transcendence and immanence with a sense of human transcendence and immanence in relation to each other. Perhaps divine transcendence is glimpsed in and through divine immanence in the neighbor, the one who draws near. Perhaps, in the image of this, human self-transcendence is glimpsed in and through human immanence in one another’s lives, in the face-to-face ethics of becoming endlessly, inﬁnitely responsible for the neighbor in each stranger, each enemy, each forsaken one. See, for example, Levinas’s various passages on how the face of the other includes both vulnerability and authority, both destitution and power. “According to a saying of rabbinic wisdom, wherever the exaltation of God is uttered, His humility already proclaims itself” (2000, 220). 3. Compare Alain Badiou (2001, 21 and 29), linking Levinas with Lacan, and so Hegel. 4. Compare Levinas, (2000, 75). On page 74, Levinas draws attention to Kierkegaard’s recognition of similar patterns of thinking. 5. Adriaan Peperzak (2003) perceptively links Levinas with Gregory of Nyssa, the great early Christian theologian of the inﬁnity of God. Peperzak also includes essays on Pascal and Levinas. David Bentley Hart (2002), with some reservations, also links Gregory of Nyssa with Levinas. Gillian Rose (1993), with stronger reservations, links Levinas with the different Platonism of Simone Weil. The present chapter responds to these afﬁnities and reservations.

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6. Compare Hilary Putnam (2004), on the conventionality or linguistic dependence of our ontologies, and Putnam (1999). The latter links Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” with the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which has some similar aspects. 7. On our lifelong renegotiation of dependence and independence, compare the work of Donald Winnicott (2002; see also Adam Phillips 1988), especially on various types and uses of what he calls transitional phenomena or objects. 8. Compare the creation stories or aetiological myths of Genesis, Chapters One and Two. There also, we may be uneasy with apparent, all too human ambivalences, not just toward Eve, but also toward the signiﬁcance of human natality, infancy and childhood. If Levinas has little to say about these two chapters, there are various ways of understanding such reticence. 9. Compare what Levinas calls “saying,” rather than the merely propositional forms of what he calls the “said.” 10. I use “scare” quotation marks, or at least distancing ones, in this sentence to signal a shared concern about the recent hegemony of performativity in education, not the least in the UK. The concomitant insistence on measuring whatever features of learning and teaching seem to lend themselves to being measured with the most docility, or even alacrity, is doubly alarming. For not only does it let research and assessment assume a spurious type of control over learning and teaching, but it also turns the ostensible needs of measurement into techniques for managing teachers and learners through setting targets and objectives in the name of a one-sided, over-rigid, and superﬁcial accountability. Such inauthentic heteronomy would be anathema to Levinas, in the name of responsibility for the other and justice for others. 11. Compare Hutchens (2004, 104–5). 12. Levinas and Pascal also suggest the need for understanding together the abstract realms of the merely quantitative and the merely qualitative. To play one against the other is to remain superﬁcial. To displace and replace them with justice and imagination requires openness to something like Pascal’s “third” realm or, perhaps, Levinas’s “ﬁrst” philosophy. 13. Compare with one another: relatively early Karl Barth (1981) writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s on the ethics of teaching and learning, on the neighbor or other as teacher, and on the authority and humility of the teacher; Levinas on the other as teacher of inﬁnity, and on how one learns from the other meaning which one cannot learn—that is, learn Socratically or Platonically by or from oneself (2004, 51); Kierkegaard (1985) on the difference between a Platonic, maieutic teacher and a saving teacher; and Norman Wirzba (1995 and 1996).

REFERENCES Anon. 1963. The Holy Bible. London: Oxford University Press. Badiou, A. 2001. Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil. London: Verso. Barth, K. 1981. Ethics. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Barth, M. 1988. Rediscovering the Lord’s Supper: Communion with Israel, with Christ and among the guests. Atlanta: John Knox. Derrida, J. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Desmond, W. 2005. Is there a Sabbath for thought? Between religion and philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Gibbs, R. 1992. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Why Ethics? Signs of responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Hammond, N., ed. 2003. The Cambridge companion to Pascal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, D. B. 2002. The beauty of the inﬁnite: The aesthetics of Christian truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Heidegger, M. 1977. The question concerning technology. In Martin Heidegger: Basic writings, trans. W. Lovitt and ed. D. F. Krell, 3–35. New York: Harper & Row. Kepnes, S. 2003. Ethics after Levinas: Robert Gibbs’ Why ethics? Signs of responsibilities. Modern Theology 19 (1):103–15. Kierkegaard, S. 1985. Philosophical fragments, or A fragment of philosophy. Trans. E. Hong and H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1989. The Levinas reader. Ed. S. Hand. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1993. Outside the subject. Trans. M. B. Smith. London: Athlone. ———. 1996a. Basic philosophical writings. Ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996b. Proper names. Trans. M. B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Entre nous: Essays on thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. London: Athlone; New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004a. Philosophy and positivity. In Transcendence: Philosophy, literature, and theology approach the beyond, ed. R. Schwartz, 31–42. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004b. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. McPherson, I. N. 2004. Education after Babel: Pascalian considerations of myth, meaning and reason. Unpublished paper presented at the International Conference on Philosophy of Education, University of Edinburgh. Pascal, B. 1995. Pensées. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin. Peperzak, A. T. 2003. The quest for meaning: Friends of wisdom from Plato to Levinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Phillips, A. 1988. Winnicott. London: Fontana / Harper Collins. Putnam, H. 1999. Introduction to Understanding the sick and the healthy: A view of world, man and God, by F. Rosenzweig, trans. N. Glatzer, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. Levinas and Judaism. In The Cambridge companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi, 33–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. Ethics without ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rée, J. 1997. Selﬂessness, London review of books, May. Roberts, R. C. 1998. Existence, emotion, and virtue: Classical themes in Kierkegaard. In The Cambridge companion to Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino, 177–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, G. 1993. Judaism and modernity: Philosophical essays. Oxford: Blackwell. Rosenzweig, F. 1961. Franz Rosenzweig: His life and thought. Ed. N. N. Glatzner. Indianapolis: Hackett. Sacks, J. 2003. The dignity of difference: How to avoid the clash of civilizations. London: Continuum. Shakespeare, W. 2007. William Shakespeare complete works. Ed. J. Bate and E. Rasmussen. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2004. The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah. London: Harper Collins. Turner, D. 2004. Faith, reason and the existence of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ward, G. 2001. Questioning God. In Questioning God, ed. J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley and M. J. Scanlon, 274–90. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Westphal, M. 2004. Transcendence and self-transcendence: On God and the soul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Winnicott, D. 2002. Playing and reality. London: Bruner-Routledge. Wirzba, N. 1995. From maieutics to metanoia: Levinas’s understanding of the philosophical task. Man and World 28:129–144. ———. 1996. Teaching as propaedeutic to religion: The contribution of Levinas and Kierkegaard. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 39 (2):77–94. Zagzebski, L. T. 2004. Divine motivation theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7

Teaching Our Way Out When Nobody Knows the Way A Levinasian Response to Modern Hope Julian Edgoose

[S]uppose . . . that you have lost the meaning of the political and the consciousness of its grandeur, that the non-sense or non-value of world politics is your ﬁrst certainty. At the moment when the political temptations . . . [are] overcome . . . the real universality . . . can afﬁrm itself. It consists in serving the universe. It is called messianism. (Levinas 1990, 94–95) The pupil-teacher relationship . . . contains all the riches of a meeting with the Messiah. (Levinas 1990, 85) This chapter will argue that Emmanuel Levinas can say something important to teachers about hope—a topic he barely mentions explicitly in his writing. The quotations above describe a messianic stance which is a response to a type of hopelessness recognizable by many teachers today. As educational policies like testing and media inﬂuences are increasingly guided by global concerns, teachers feel powerless to affect students. They have less curricular freedom, yet perhaps also fewer ideas about how their teaching might make a difference. This chapter will ﬁrst explore the surprising neglect of hope as a topic of concern in educational and philosophical discourse. It will then establish a contrast between a modern way of viewing hope, rooted in Christianity but secularized in theories of social change on the political left and right, and a Judaic understanding that draws from Levinas’s work.1 Three “pillars” of hopeful teaching—agency, reward, and social change—will be addressed for each tradition. In the discussion of social change, I will use Václav Havel’s writings to explain how, while Levinas’s ideas are motivated by his religious convictions, his stance can be sustained by non-religious teachers.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HOPE Until very recently, hope was acclaimed everywhere but examined nowhere in educational discourse (Halpin 2003). While Sonia Nieto (2003, 53) called it

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the “essence of teaching,” Larry Cuban (1995, xi) wrote that “[t]o teach is to be full of hope,” and Vito Perrone (1991, 131) declared that “[t]eaching is . . . in every respect a profession of hope,” hope received little detailed analysis. As one exception noted, “It is a scandal that a philosophical theme that is so central to how we should live our lives . . . has gone virtually unnoticed in the philosophical community” (Bovens 1999, 667). Teachers also experience a strongly conﬂicting set of public messages about the hopefulness of their profession. On the one hand, teachers see the public’s “faith in education”: the “common pattern in devising educational prescriptions for speciﬁc social or economic ills” (Tyack and Cuban 1997, 2). As Lyndon Johnson once claimed, “[t]he answer to all our national problems . . . comes down . . . to one single word: education” (1965, 1140). Yet alongside that educational optimism there is also a widely perceived notion of an educational crisis which, despite its critics (e.g., Berliner and Biddle 1995), still motivates both political debate and informal public discourse on education. Teachers, then, get confusing messages about hope: it is revered as something central to teaching while it is ignored as a topic of close study; it is justiﬁed by the widely held ideal of schooling while it is just as plainly unjustiﬁed by the widely believed reality. Meanwhile, teachers ﬁnd themselves facing the challenges of their work and waves of new educational reforms motivated by ever more faith in education, with little support. David Halpin quotes a teacher’s description of the challenges he faces in his everyday work: [T]he twelve-year-old students in decrepit asbestos-ridden schools . . . are sexually active, smoking and drinking, with little hope of future employment. Meanwhile the teacher ﬁnds himself subject to policy mandates from distant bureaucrats. The teacher in question concludes: “If I could leave teaching, I’d go tomorrow. . . . I’m not sure I have much hope or faith left.” (Halpin 2003, 11; italics in the original) The teacher in this quotation does not feel he can make much of a difference anymore. When he did feel the power to bring about change, he felt hope, but he has lost faith in the political system which shapes schools, and has lost hope that his efforts are worthwhile. This attitude risks increasing commonness as the framework of teaching has become globalized in three ways: • It is increasingly controlled by central governments to address needs of global economic competitiveness. • Students’ lives have become increasingly inﬂuenced by today’s globalized MTV youth culture and less by locally fostered values. • The perceived disempowerment of people in far distant places can now, after 9/11, have an impact on the lives of Americans and Europeans whether we like it or not. Environmental concerns only add another layer to this complexity.

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Thus teachers are increasingly teaching on a global stage and can feel very small indeed. Within this context, how can teachers feel their work is worthwhile? How can they feel and believe that they are making a positive difference? Any theory of hope must explain three “pillars” of hopeful teaching: theories of agency, reward, and social change: 1. Agency: What should teachers teach to address the problems they see? 2. Rewards: How will teachers feel their efforts are worthwhile? 3. Social change: How will their individual efforts contribute to larger social transformations? Of course, these three components are deeply intertwined. For most teachers, the answers to these questions are reasonably straightforward: they should teach what students need to understand to address issues of concern; they will feel successful when they see the students have learned what they need to know; and they will be part of a process of change by being among the many educators engaged in the incremental struggle to improve society. These responses, or close variations, are implicit in educational discourse. As such, they reﬂect a set of assumptions about the purposes and processes of schooling which reﬂect the Christian ideals which created schools and still shape secular educational thought. In the three sections below, I will take each of these questions in turn— agency, reward and social change—and compare how they are answered by writers in this Christian/modern tradition, and by social thinkers inﬂuenced by Judaism. Foremost among the latter group will be Levinas. My intention is to show that there is a framework for teachers’ social activism rooted in face-to-face interactions of teaching which offers a path for hope in the face of the increasingly complex challenges of today’s world.

Agency: What and How Should Teachers Teach? We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter. (Benjamin 1969, 264) The quotation above contrasts two views of time: “empty time” and “Messianic time.” Empty time is linear; it assumes that time is comprised of empty blocks to be ﬁlled with activity, just as school timetables are ﬁlled with

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classes. Walter Benjamin contrasts empty time with “Messianic time”—an understanding of time rooted in the Judaic experience of the divine. When a teacher ponders what to teach to address a concern, she or he ponders how to best ﬁll the blocks of time available. What Benjamin does not, perhaps, appreciate is the way in which empty time is itself a form of Messianic time—a form of Messianic time with its roots in Christianity but whose inﬂuence now pervades modern Western societies. The contrast between these two forms of Messianic time is crucial to an understanding of how the two traditions would approach the curricular question of hope—what should we teach to address the problems we see? The “empty time” of schools reﬂects a foundational belief in the ways in which one can bring about change, one rooted in Christian messianism. Benjamin’s alternative, rooted in Judaic messianism, is that which Levinas addresses. David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s aforementioned “faith in education” is very much a faith (1997), and is still distinctively Christian in structure. Just as the Massachusetts Colony created the ﬁrst compulsory education laws to prevent “ye Oulde Deluder Satan” from corrupting the social order of the fragile and volatile settlements (Smiley 1959, 15), modern efforts to build economic competitiveness through standards and testing also see curricular changes as a means of social change. Interestingly, those who oppose the inﬂuence of testing and who seek to raise resistant thinking among students also exhibit the same faith, albeit in a different form. Christianity, Progressivism, and Marxist resistance all assume that schools are the engines for social change. They each inspire curricula with speciﬁc social goals in mind. Teachers are encouraged to see their effectiveness by judging their ability to move toward the goals they envision. Increasingly, teachers are now being assessed by this ability too. Slavoj Žižek has recognized “the Christian and Marxist ‘Messianic’ notion of history as the process of the ﬁnal deliverance of the faithful” (2000a, 2). Christians and Marxists, like all who believe in social reform, believe that history can bring with it a gradual process of social improvement. This is Messianic, in a sense with strictly Christian roots, because it rests upon the assumption that we can deliver ourselves from the ailments of society. Levinas’s position differs from this Christian one in just the way the messianic tradition of Judaism differs from that of Christianity. Žižek is again particularly helpful here in assisting our explanation of this difference. He writes: in contrast to Jewish messianic expectation, the basic Christian stance is that the expected Messiah has already arrived, that is, that we are already redeemed: the time of nervous expectation, of rushing precipitately towards the expected Arrival, is over; we live in the aftermath of the Event: everything—the Big Thing—has already happened . . . we have to bear the almost unbearable burden of living up to it, of drawing the consequences of the Act. (2003, 135–36; italics in the original)

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This is a helpful reading of the contrast, but still a speciﬁcally Christian one. Žižek casts Judaic Messianism as a relation to expectation of an Event, an openness to a future centered upon an anticipated moment, while Messianism in Christianity is markedly different: Christians believe the Messiah is already known and documented; the question is how believers should act to realize the promise of their faith. The crucial difference, though, is that in Christian frames of thought, the truth is believed to have already been revealed. This assumption remains deeply rooted in modern secular education. To use the example given a few paragraphs back, whenever anyone creates a curriculum to address perceived social needs they do so based upon the assumption that we have intellectual tools which can help us solve our problems. To Žižek, who comes with a strong neo-Marxist sense of what should be done, Judaism appears passive while Christianity is attractively activist. Yet Levinas paints a strongly contrasting picture of what Messianism might be—one which seems far distant from the appearance of a Christ-like ﬁgure. When writing of “the familiar character of the messianic experience in Judaism,” he writes of moving “beyond the individual Messiah [to] a form of existence whose individuation is not located in a single being” (1990, 87). Building further on these themes, Levinas gives a Talmudic reading of a passage by Rabbi Nahman and concludes: “Messianism is therefore not the certainty of the coming of a man who stops History. It is my power to bear the suffering of all. It is the moment when I recognize this power and my universal responsibility” (1990, 90). Levinas goes on to explore what this reference to “universality” might mean. He contrasts two notions of the universal that emerge from political life. The ﬁrst is a “dialectical adjustment which men make towards another,” the universalism of the enlightenment that emerges out of politics and war (94). It is the hegemonic notion that we all come to agree on truth through the process of debate. The other stems from a darker scenario. Levinas describes a world in which the process of universal reason is experienced otherwise: [S]uppose for a moment that the moral ends which politics prides itself on achieving, but amends and limits by virtue of achieving them—that these ends appear steeped in the immorality that claims to sustain them; suppose, in other words, that you have lost the meaning of the political and the consciousness of its grandeur, that the non-sense or non-value of world politics is your ﬁrst certainty. (1990, 94) This scenario already seems close to that of the teacher in Halpin’s account (2003), who is without faith in the political system and cynical of the rhetoric it uses to sustain itself. At this moment, Levinas writes, the “real universality . . . can afﬁrm itself. It consists in serving the universe. It is called messianism” (1990, 95). Thus, in the light of that despair, teachers’ assumptions that they have intellectual tools which can help them solve their problems can appear foolish. It

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can appear foolish in the face of increasingly complex challenges thrown up by environmental change, global inequality and exploitation, and other seemingly intractable problems. Can we really pretend we have the faintest idea how we might address these issues in any practical sense? We might be able to imagine a sustainable and just world, but do we have any sense of the path from here to there? Perhaps the only option now is to “learn our way out,” accepting the non-existence of solutions as a starting point for our educational efforts (Finger and Asùn 2001). It is perhaps worth noting the ways in which Levinas’s deﬁnition of the Messiah differs from, and resembles, the Christian one. The idea of “bearing the suffering of all” has clear parallels to the Christian notion that “Christ died for our sins.” Yet in Levinas’s Judaism, there is nothing unique or superhuman about one person to come. In contrast to Žižek’s assumption of passivity, Levinas offers a deeply activist reading of Judaic messianism, yet one that does not contain the sense of the truth which comes from the arrival of the Messiah in Christianity. The universality of this despair that Levinas describes comes from “believ[ing] that History has no meaning” (1990, 95). Nothing sets the orientation of the future. The open future of Judaic messianism depends upon our abdication of the sense that we know how the world works, or that we can discern the tide of history, or that we have adequate tools from the past. It is a focusing on the suffering of the world without the reassurances of narratives of liberation or oppression. This should not be interpreted to mean that Levinas would support a rejection of any curriculum. His stance would be, in contrast, that we should not teach curriculum as if it contained an answer. At the end of Otherwise than Being (1981), Levinas writes of the importance of skepticism and the refutation of skepticism. This account, I believe, explains what he believes might be a teacher’s relationship to curriculum: help students explore the ways in which any text fails to provide adequate answers. Skepticism will be refuted in the need for truths by which to live, but then skepticism must return. This relationship is important, he writes, because in our skeptical interpretations of what is presented as truth, the vulnerable and interactive context within which the teacher and student interact (Levinas’s “saying”) is exposed (Levinas 1981, 167–68). Perhaps this is the context for Levinas’s aforementioned comment: “The pupil-teacher relationship, which seemingly remains rigorously intellectual, contains all the riches of a meeting with the Messiah” (1990, 85). Another way to understand Levinas’s position here is in the ways it breaks with any trace of utopianism. As Horkheimer and Adorno (1944, 23) wrote, Judaism associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the ﬁnite as the inﬁnite, lies as truth. The guarantee of salvation lies in the rejection of any belief that would replace it: it is knowledge obtained in the denunciation of illusion.

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This provides another stark contrast with the Christian tradition. Christian hope has always depended heavily on our ability to work toward envisioned desired outcomes. Acknowledging that this is utopian, and acknowledging the totalitarian and other problematic overtones of utopianism, Halpin (2003, 59) calls for a subtler “utopian realism:” “identifying the forces and resources within the present social order that are capable of transforming it for the better in the future, so as to provide a signiﬁcant dynamic for action in the here and now.” In other words, utopian thought of this kind distills (or, perhaps, simpliﬁes) the present to a manageable analysis that suggests a course of action to an improved future. It is a kind of sense of vision which can appreciate the constraints of the present while also linking to the possible future. Hopes based on utopias, however, entrench desirable futures in terms of that which the educator can imagine. This approach to hope is monological because it suggests that the future is something one can author. Utopian visions, even if shared by educators, still remain the teachers’ own, and thus risk being uncomfortable impositions on students. This also puts the burden of hope on the teachers’ own abilities to bring about imagined ends. This is liberating, in that it provides those teachers with a source of hope which can weather the structural failures of schools. Schools do not themselves need to be institutions of positive social change; teachers can be. In contrast to this Christian-rooted dependency on utopian thought, Levinas offers a critique of utopianism, that good/non-place, by interrogating that notion of place. What place do we imagine when we frame out actions? The Bible, he notes, tells of “wars and slaves, sacriﬁces and priests, material interests and crime—jealousies, hatreds and murders which fraternity itself cannot resolve. The Bible does not begin the building of an ideal city in a void. It places itself inside these situations which it must assume, in order to overcome them” (1990, 101). As such, the Bible does not tell of a bygone age, he writes, but “captures humanity in its savagely real state” (101). In contrast, utopian thought “conceives of a world without slaves” and leaves humans to “[wish] unjustly. Instead of the difﬁcult task of living an equitable life, [the utopian thinker] prefers the joy of solitary salvation” (101). In other words, the use of utopian thought risks a denial of the very real complexities of the world itself. Levinas concludes: “To move towards justice while denying, with a global act, the very conditions within which the ethical drama is played out is to embrace nothingness and, under pretext of saving everything, to save nothing” (101–2). Levinas’s vital point here is that injustice is manifest in the immediate. One need not voyage out to discover it, although many might choose to, so they can avoid their awareness of complicity in closer, more complex aspects of their lives. The difﬁculties one might have in dealing with the suffering of one’s family, students, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances are the basis for the much more visible, and more easily opposable, broader social structures. For Levinas, the response to others’ suffering is a deeply political act—one with signiﬁcant impact, as will be argued later. Levinas

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raises the suspicion that our dependency on utopian stances in our politics and teaching reﬂects a desire for easy political consciences rather than any real engagement with the suffering of the world. The tradition based in Christianity, in its manifestations from Marxism to democratic reform, depends heavily on utopian notions of the future. In all cases, preexisting truths can be used as the basis for reaching their respective ideal goals: Augustine’s City of God, Marx’s communism, even the social democratic utopia of the European Union or the free-market utopia of neoliberalism. In all cases, attention is not focused on the very real and complex world around one, but on an ideal for which one must strive. Hope comes from one’s ability to see how one is working toward that ideal. In contrast, Levinas offers a view of messianism which is concerned with one’s ability to take on the suffering of those around one without a mind to a future ideal, with one pouring one’s attention to the very real relationships and complex human world within which one lives. It might be argued that, while utopian ideals may demonstrate more of a desire to feel one is doing something, rather than a path toward a better world, at least they offer some hope. Teachers who set their goals, and strive to achieve them, at least have the possibility of deluding themselves that, if the students reached that target, they would be effective. These skeptics might ask how a Levinasian engagement in the face-to-face with others would make teachers feel hopeful. How will that make me feel I am making a difference beyond the sea of faces which greets me in my classroom? In the next two sections, I will address these questions in turn.

Rewards: Increments Versus Surprises For monological hope, the rewards of hope come in the incremental steps by which the teacher inches the students toward their goals. Yet this understanding of hope leaves teachers vulnerable to the despair of being unable to achieve their goals, while binding them ever more desperately to their need for visible results, as a defense against despair. Fundamentally, as a monological model of hope, utopias cannot do justice to the complex and dialogical nature of classrooms. If students always did what teachers wanted, then Halpin’s suggestions for strengthening teachers’ hopes might be enough, but this is simply not the way schools are. So what might a non-utopian hope look like in practice? While Levinas does not address hope directly, his redescription of social space opens the way for an understanding of the future which contrasts with the Christian/ modern one. In the following passage, Levinas illustrates three ways one can view the future, each of which implies a view of hope: This future is neither the Aristotelian germ (less than being, a lesser being) nor the Heideggerian possibility which constitutes being itself, but transforms the relation with the future into a power of the subject. Both

108 Julian Edgoose my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other . . . my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. (2004, 267) The ﬁrst depiction of the future that Levinas rejects in this passage is one he attributes to Aristotle as “germ-like.” In this view, the future is a seed of a future being, and thus is now a “less than being [or] a lesser being.” The future which comes, then, in this view, is a growth of the present: an unfolding of that which is in the present into a future. This is the unfolding linear future assumed by a naïve faith in schooling, a belief that the future is an evolution of the present. If one views schools as uncomplicated organs of social improvement, this view of the future can support hope, in which society will grow through its schools. Of course, this view would not satisfy those who question the deeper values in the society. The second view Levinas rejects is a heroic which owes its roots not only to Heidegger, as Levinas claims, but also to the Christian utopianism upon which Heidegger drew. Indeed, this view is that which we have already seen in Halpin’s writing on educational hope. In this view, each person’s future depends on his or her own power to bring it about. For the teacher, the future is the product of one’s teaching. The problem with this orientation to the future, though, is that it depends solely on the teacher’s own view of the world. It is monological as it puts all its emphasis on the teacher’s ability to shape the future. It is a future for which one struggles in opposition to society. The third future of which Levinas writes testiﬁes to a creative potential of interaction which is undervalued by faith in schooling and faith in teaching. The future is not something that grows out of the present, nor is it something that depends upon the ability of a person or group to afﬁrm it in contrast to the dominant culture’s values. Levinas draws our attention to the fact that our future is something which can only be reached through our interactions with others, and that these interactions are unpredictable. That is why other people, such as our students, are other to us. The other, as Levinas constantly reminds us throughout his writing, can always exceed one’s expectations, in small or large ways. Every interaction is thus haunted by this unpredictability of outcomes. For every teacher, for example, the best laid lesson plan is necessarily subject to the unpredictability of classroom dynamics. Emergencies can emerge; students’ understandings diverge: lessons never go as planned. Levinas wants us to see this confounding dimension of teaching not as a frustration of our plans so much as the constant opening up of the new and unexpected. Whether we like it or not, the future is “both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other.” He goes on to write that it “does not enter into the logical essence of the possible” (2004, 267). By this he means that my future would be beyond any sense I might have of what can be achieved, since that sense is at all times mine. The very fact that the future depends upon me and the

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other means that the future can surprise me wholly. In human interaction, we can constantly ﬁnd ourselves in places we could never have predicted just moments before. A Levinasian reading would thus suggest that the unexpected and unpredictable nature of one’s classroom interactions is a signiﬁcant source of the rewards of teaching. Indeed, it can be seen as a source of hope for two reasons. First, it reminds us of the meaninglessness of our naïve sense that we know the direction of the future. As we tend to extrapolate the present to a future, this dialogical view of hope underlines the way that the future will not be that way. Against an expectation of control, against the monological backdrop of utopian teaching, such expectations might be seen as grounds for despair. But if those expectations are dropped, and if we take our students seriously, surprises are hopeful and “hope is fulﬁlled by what comes unbidden” (Schudson 1999, 626). Hope then depends on otherness, on our students being distinct others whose words and actions surprise our expectations. The second way in which Levinas’s dialogical future brings hope is in the ways in which teachers’ and students’ fates are intertwined. In Levinas’s terms, the teacher “substitutes” for the student—substitution grows out of the very nature of interaction; it is a by-product of human interconnectivity and not a question of preexistent moral laws. We come to any interaction already tied by threads from every previous interaction, threads that constitute our conscience—acknowledged or not. Perhaps the clearest illustration of substitution comes from the following questions: Imagine you hear that an ex-student has become a Nobel laureate. Would you feel . . . responsible? Perhaps that’s too conceited. However, would you feel implicated? Would you glow after hearing the news, and walk with a certain spring in your step? Or what if you heard that an ex-student had become a mass murderer? Now would you feel responsible or implicated? If Levinas is right, the answer to both questions should be yes. The salience that I hope to illustrate from these examples highlights the crucial factor about substitution—that in teaching we are made most aware of the threads of responsibility which bind us, and the extent to which our future is entwined with the futures of those with whom we have interacted (principally, in this case, our students). In teaching, these threads are the clearest and perhaps most difﬁcult to ignore. Teaching has that extra visibility of conscience, in part, because teaching exists in the paradox of substitution. To teach is to say “I will prepare you for the future,” even as one acknowledges that one cannot be too sure of what that future will bring. To teach, then, is to substitute oneself for the Other. That is the conscience of teaching. It is more visible, perhaps, than any other occasion of conscience, but it is no different in the nature of its origins. The point is, though, that we should not judge this responsibility negatively. Given the fact that we do not traditionally view our identity as something bound by preexisting responsibility, it would be easy to interpret Levinas’s message

110 Julian Edgoose as a somber one. Indeed, the responsibility is a burden in the sense of Dostoyevsky, whom Levinas likes to quote: “Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others” (Dostoyevsky 2003, 374).2 Yet this is negative only against the background assumption that one is free from such obligation. To deﬁne this otherness in negative terms alone would deny its total otherness. The radical otherness, the uncertainty one experiences in every human interaction must carry with it the possibility of both positive and negative surprises. This again adds further context to Levinas’s quote: “The pupil-teacher relationship, which seemingly remains rigorously intellectual, contains all the riches of a meeting with the Messiah” (1990, 85). Within teaching interactions come the new realizations that what both teacher and student felt was previously beyond possibility. The response to suffering can come in teaching, as can the possibility of a response within the complexities of the world. Thus Levinas gives us a way of understanding how hope can emerge in the face-to-face relationships of the classroom. This hope is fundamentally social, echoing the claim of Elie Wiesel: “Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings” (1990, 249).

Social Change: St. Paul Versus the Butterﬂy We have, then, two models of hope. For Halpin, reﬂecting a long tradition of Christian, Marxist, and other modern thought, hope is utopian. Teachers hope by imagining real, practical utopias upon which they can draw to fuel themselves through tough times. Halpin’s hope is based on a view of the future as something one can imagine and strive for, as a product of human will and effort. For Levinas, in contrast, the future is something which emerges through interactions, and thus is something which is marked by the radical alterity of the others with whom one interacts—students, parents, colleagues. When one looks at these two hopes side by side, however, they do not seem similar in structure. While the Christian-Marxist hope consists of both a goal and a commitment to its attainment, Levinas’s hope might be seen as a response to the immediacies of the interactions and relationships within which we live, and perhaps some therapy for the teacher: Levinas shows how we can be surprised by the others with whom we interact, but does not say whether such a stance has any impact on the wider world. This critique has been raised by Slavoj Žižek, among others. Žižek (2000b, 663 and 665) claims that a Levinasian position, particularly “a certain kind of Derridean appropriation of Levinas,” tends toward merely a “moderate Leftist stance” because, for Levinas and Derrida: the messianic promise that constitutes the spirit of Marxism is betrayed by any particular formulation, by any translation into determinate economic

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and political measures . . . the more radical these determinate economic and political measures are . . . the less they are effectively radical, the more they remain caught in the metaphysical ethico-political horizon. (Žižek 2000b, 664; italics in the original) In other words, Žižek feels that the Levinasian acute sensitivity to the alterity of the other leads to a certain political impotence. By this reading, while Halpin’s hope tries to incorporate a sense of radical action, a Levinasian attention to the other seems allergic to such principled actions. This common view of the impotence of radical alterity, however, perhaps misses the point. Žižek, who likes to see Lenin and St. Paul as models of political activism, can only see agency that is large-scale, traceable, institutional. He clearly wants to keep the possibility of revolutionary action alive. But perhaps in this way, Žižek only recognizes a small range of types of agency. It almost seems as if Žižek puts too much faith in “History,” with its pivotal individuals and traceable causal chains of events. Yet there are other ways in which change can occur. One of the most helpful for our current inquiry, I believe, is that which has been explored by Vaclav Havel in numerous writings. He explains it in terms of chaos theory: You have certainly heard of the “butterﬂy effect.” It is a belief that everything in the world is so mysteriously and completely interconnected that a slight, seemingly insigniﬁcant wave of a butterﬂy’s wings in a single spot on this planet can unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away. I think we must believe in this effect for politics. We cannot assume that our microcosmic yet truly unique everyday actions are of no consequence simply because they apparently cannot resolve the immense problems of today. That would be an a priori nihilistic assertion, and an expression of the arrogant, modern rationality that believes it knows how the world works. (1994, 93) The implication is that, as with Levinas, one’s small-scale actions in the faceto-face can have incalculable effects. One important feature of Havel’s passage is the fact that he allows for the complex and unpredictable unfolding of history, and thus creates an articulation within which he can have faith in the effects of his actions, without having an explicitly religious context for that faith. Havel has acknowledged the ways that his hope depends upon quasi-religious footing: “[T]he deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimensions of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere’” (1994, 181). These references to a source of hope from “elsewhere” might sound religious, but Havel is at pains to note that he is not making a theological point. He is not a believer in any traditional sense, he explains, having moved

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away from the Christianity of his upbringing. Nevertheless, as he writes, he has felt some things since childhood, and here the religious tone of his writing continues: that there is a great mystery above me . . . the focus of all meaning and the highest moral authority; that the event called the “world” has deeper order and meaning, and therefore is more than just a cluster of improbable accidents; that in my own life I am reaching for something that goes far beyond me and the horizon of the world that I know; that in everything I do I touch eternity in a strange way. (1990, 189) I believe the statement above resonates with many educators and explains something important about the ways in which hope supports their teaching. Havel describes a sense of transcendent order and purpose which could be read as a barely disguised religious faith, and indeed the educator who resonates with Havel’s articulation of hope might have an explicitly religious source of hope. Yet it would be a shame if we were to dismiss any broader relevance of Havel’s claim for this reason, as he quite explicitly denies religious belief. His faith is not in God but in the complexity of life. He shows a way in which teachers can understand the impact of their work while acknowledging their inability to see the chains of impact which grow from their actions. If Levinas emphasizes the impact and the rewards of the face-to-face domain of teaching, Havel shows how teachers can know they are making a difference. The challenge for teachers is to afﬁrm the nonexistence of solutions. We must accept that we need to teach our way out, but to do so because nobody knows the way. There has never been a plan which would solve our problems today. One can refuse to have faith in plans, but engage with the face-to-face world in which we live. This is to acknowledge the potential in every moment and in every action of bearing the suffering of the world in a way that might achieve signiﬁcance as never before. The challenge for hope offered by Levinas is that of engaging with one’s students, taking them seriously, and being open to learning from them, thereby trying to address the injustices of the human space of our immediate lives instead of denying those immediacies for the sake of some ideal larger solution.

NOTES 1. I do not mean to suggest by this Christian/Jewish differentiation that all contemporary Christians and Jews are divided along the lines I outline. Levinas is at great pains to differentiate Judaism from its Christian caricature as “a failure. A blindfolded virgin. A residue. A remnant. An anachronism. A fossil. A relic. An exhibit.” (1990, 202). Christian stereotypes of Judaism result from the Christian belief that the Messiah came and that the Jews somehow missed the boat. Levinas wants to retrieve a Judaism that is outside the Christian framework which

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still colors many Christian readings of Judaism, as seen in my reading of Slavoj Žižek. His messianism also draws heavily on the Talmudic tradition and the beliefs that emerged from the position of Jews as marginalized people during the Diaspora. From these sources, Levinas is particularly attentive to the ethical stances of Judaic thought, particularly in comparison with the Greek-inﬂuenced ethical stances of Christianity. These differences have far reaching effects, relating to the different traditions of reading texts as much as to different personal or social ethics. The Christian/Jewish differentiation also has its dangers, though. As a writer who was raised Christian, I need to be clear that my readings of Levinas are my best attempt to understand work which intrigues me but is very much my other. There is a danger in any such situation of romanticizing that which one reads. There is also a danger, as mentioned earlier, of suggesting that the differentiation is stronger than it is. It needs to be said: many Christians and Jews hold beliefs that have developed in the other’s history. Many beliefs also hold hybrids whose complexity exceeds the scope of this chapter. 2. See Chinnery, 240n4.

REFERENCES Benjamin, W. 1969. Illuminations: Essays and reﬂections. New York: Shocken. Berliner, D. C., and B. J. Biddle. 1995. The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. New York: Perseus Books. Bovens, L. 1999. The value of hope. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3):667–81. Cuban, L. 1995. Foreword to The call to teach, by D. Hansen. New York: Teachers College Press. Dostoyevsky, F. M. 2003. The brothers Karamazov. London: Penguin. Finger, M., and M. Asùn. 2001. Adult education at the crossroads: Learning our way out. London: Zed Books. Halpin, D. 2003. Hope and education: The role of the utopian imagination. London: Routledge. Havel, V. 1990. Disturbing the peace: A conversation with Karel Huizdala. New York: Knopf. ———. 1994. The art of the impossible: Politics as morality in practice. New York: Fromm. Horkheimer, M., and T. Adorno. 1944. Dialectic of enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Johnson, L. 1965. Lyndon B. Johnson: 1963–1964: Containing the public messages, statements and speeches of the President. Washington: National Archives and Records Service. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being or beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1990. Difﬁcult freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. Massachusetts School Law of 1647. ExtremeIntellect. http://www.extremeintellect. com/08EDUCATION/masslaw1647.htm. Nieto, S. 2003. What keeps teachers going? New York: Teachers College Press. Perrone, V. 1991. A letter to teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schudson, M. 1999. You’ve got mail: A few observations on hope. Social Research 66 (2):625–28.

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Smiley, M. 1959. Prologue to teaching: Readings and source materials with text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyack, D., and L. Cuban. 1997. Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wiesel, E. 1990. From the kingdom of memory. New York: Summit. Žižek, S. 2000a. The fragile absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth ﬁghting for? London: Verso. ———. 2000b. Melancholy and the act. Critical Inquiry 26:657–81. ———. 2003. The puppet and the dwarf: The perverse core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

8

Thinking the Other— The Other Thinking Remarks on the Relevance of the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas for the Philosophy of Education Michael Wimmer1

APPLICATIONS

But if all justice begins with speech, all speech is not just. Rhetoric may amount to the violence of theory, which reduces the other when it leads the other, whether through psychology, demagogy, or even pedagogy. (Derrida 1978, 106; italics in the original) The question of the pedagogical relevance of Levinas’s philosophy is captious in several ways. First, one might be reminded of the traditional division of labor between pedagogy and philosophy, according to which philosophy is responsible for the determination and rationalization of ethical goals, and where the task of pedagogy is to justify the means used to fulﬁll these goals with recourse to psychology, and thus guide their practical realization with a theory of action (Herbart 1984). Aside from the fact that such a teleological determination from outside pedagogy has long been the subject of criticism, and that it is therefore almost impossible today to formulate a universally valid ethics which could identify goals for pedagogy, such a proceeding would essentially miss the point of Levinas’s philosophy, contradicting its innermost intentions, as he neither suggests a new ethics in the classical sense or even a new morality, nor does he present a new educational ideal which could be achieved through practical pedagogical initiatives. The respect for the autonomous Other and the response to the call of responsibility can by no means be generated or effected through knowledge, will, or skill. Levinas does not give new purpose to action but rather fundamentally calls into question such a model of action based on intentional control. The question of how and where, as a pedagogue, one would have to be mindful of the respect for the Other—how one might even have to practice it, or how one could teach children or students the respect for the Other and for the stranger—viewed against the background of Levinas’s philosophy, is not only unfounded but absurd, and would turn it into its very opposite.

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The question of what exactly Levinas’s reﬂections may mean for pedagogical practice, and how they can give new direction to pedagogical action, implies a fundamentally problematic notion of the purpose of education and of the relations among education, knowledge, and morality, or among pedagogy, science, and ethics. This idea presupposes “a primacy of morality over education and of knowledge over instruction,” and conceives the purpose of education to be that of converting “the ignorant immature into the knowledgeable mature” (Benner 1998, 191). Referring to the historical and cultural relativity of ethical and moral concepts and to what is considered to be correct knowledge, and referring to the equally existing reverse dependency on education of ethics and morality, knowledge and science, Dietrich Benner challenges this view since neither practically nor theoretically there is a legitimate fundamentalism which could be founded on ethics and positive science, which could serve as a basis for clarifying educational and instructional issues with regard to pedagogy or educational studies. Rather, in a non-fundamentalist sense, educational matter—whatever it may be—as a fact and as an object of reﬂection is part of the human condition. It can neither be founded on anything else, nor can anything else be derived from it. (1998, 193–94) As, according to Benner, there is neither absolutely correct knowledge nor absolutely correct morality, no perfect ethics and no complete science, education cannot be viewed as adolescents’ introduction to “a body of knowledge and morality valid in itself.” Rather, it is the purpose of [education] to introduce students to “issues and problems of a critical use of reason” (Benner 1998, 193–94). Whether this deﬁnition of purpose can meet with general approval is another issue altogether. The point I would like to make is that this is not about pedagogy as an application of Levinas’s philosophy, at least not in the sense of a technique, of applying a theory to an object, of translating it to a different ﬁeld, or of deriving concrete instructions. Such an application would rather be a misapplication and would soon turn into an inversion. And yet this is about applications, but in the sense that one may turn to Levinas’s texts for enlightenment about the meaning and purpose of education (Erziehung), culture (Bildung), and pedagogy just as he turns to us with his writings, applying them to us inasmuch as we read them, engage with them, reﬂect upon them, and comprehend and translate them, whereupon an occasional inversion takes place in our own thinking, which must not necessarily be understood as a conversion (Derrida 1996a). As his philosophy is about, and against, a kind of thinking which is also essentially our own, the focus is also on pedagogical reﬂection such as it articulates itself in the consensus phrase of modern pedagogy “that education should make humans human” (Oelkers 1985, 254; italics in the original). It pertains to

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related issues such as those of pedagogical action, pedagogical responsibility, or the position of the subject of pedagogical efforts, which must be reconsidered as Levinas’s thought has massively challenged and called into question traditional notions, ﬁrst of all the premise that everything must proceed from the sovereign subject. If the question about new issues and problems for pedagogy arising from Levinas’s philosophy usually evokes a moral and ethical discourse in the classical sense, this may have to do with our times and with the fact that the concept of the Other invokes ethical and religious connotations, and is most likely to resonate with pedagogical discourse where it reﬂects problems of the subject’s morals and morality. But this is precisely what may incite a revival of traditional moral discourse. If this is to be avoided, one must—rather than proceed from the self-relationship with the subject—ﬁrst interrogate the relationship with the Other, which precisely is not previously shaped by morality. Apart from that, Levinas’s philosophy has far more impact on pedagogical discourses, as it pertains to both reconceptualizing culture and revising the concept of education since pedagogy must think itself as that upon which claims are laid. The Other, to whose claim it must respond, paradoxically, is also the subject of pedagogical efforts. With Levinas, this address to the Other must now be understood as a response. Rather than, for example, imposing oneself as the Other onto a child who has to respond to the educator’s claim, the latter must ﬁrst recognize himself or herself to be the addressee. From this follows no ethical foundation for pedagogical action, but rather its radical unsettlement. If it is to be ethical, it must be regarded as a response, as an action not grounded in knowledge, in goals, or in values only, since those precisely obstruct the claims of the Other. And as a theory of education and culture, pedagogy is required to withstand, rather than resolve, the fundamental paradoxical structure in which it has found itself with the discovery of the Other (Masschelein 1996; Wimmer 1994). In what follows, I would like to pursue this question further, as it has come up time and again in my previous reﬂections. So rather than summarizing my previous attempts at rethinking pedagogical questions with Levinas, I would like to investigate this ever-unresolved issue while also drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work.

RUPTURES, APORIAS, PARADOXES The Other of whom Levinas speaks is, and is not just any other. One may miss or fail the Other, and in a way missing or failing is unavoidable in speech. Speech which cites the Other, points to the Other, or believes to be able to express the Other as such remains within the horizon of the power it may believe to have overcome in turning toward the Other. However, escaping this power is not so easy since even the intention and the resolve

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to acknowledge the Other in his or her otherness may be construed as an attempt to anticipate him or her. At the same time, the decision to turn to the Other might be the most subtle and covert way of eluding the Other and turning away, of encumbering him or her, e.g., by envisioning him or her or by making him or her an issue. Sociology, psychology, and pedagogy are stubbornly refusing to hear this exteriority, as neither knowledge nor logic can grasp the “curvature of the intersubjective space” (Levinas 2004, 291). Failure is inevitable since the Third is always already there, and with the Third the many others—consciousness, theory, the neutral concept, deliberation, and objectivization as reductions and dissimulations of that Other—who are so incomparably different and whose proximity precedes any question. This proximity and this responsibility of the I to the Other, to whom it owes all (Levinas 1985, 89), “is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters” who “introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signiﬁcation before the other until then went in one direction. It is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice?” (Levinas 1998a, 157). The unlimited responsibility of the singular I toward the singular Other is at odds with the demand for justice in view of the plurality of the many others. Is there a solution to this problem, is there a transition from duality to communality, and is it possible to conceive of an ethical social theory that proceeds from an ethical relationship with the Other, a non-desingularizing equality? Or is it that responsibility and justice remain irreconcilable; is the aporetic urge to compare the incomparable, without measure, at once necessary and impossible? (1998a). Torsten Habbel writes: The “comparison of the incomparable” Levinas postulated cannot be thought within the context of his own approach; the axiom of responsibility, the asymmetry cannot be upheld in the encounter with the Third, who is just always there, so that the justiﬁcation of responsibility is entirely unfounded. Hence, a transfer from an interpersonal relationship to a theory of justice leads to an aporia . . . (1994, 130) which he considers to be insurmountable. So is there nothing to be done then but face the aporia? But why face it if the incomparable Other is already lost among the many, if this Other is not even present or perhaps only an illusion? Is it not that anarchic responsibility proceeding from the Third and disciplined to order and totality would disappear, and totality be established as a closed system only if responsibility and justice, the ethical relationship toward the singular Other, and political and social conditions were uniﬁed in a theory? Is it not that only with the resolution of the aporia all would be lost so that it would have to be interpreted not as a deﬁciency but as something positive in itself? For the Third is also always Other, a break or a permanent rupture within social totality, and pushes justice—in the sense of “a legality regulating human masses” (Levinas 1998a, 159)—beyond itself.

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Thus, it is “more ancient than itself and than the equality implied by it” and precisely does not entirely suspend “my responsibility for the other, in my inequality with respect to him for whom I am a hostage” (158). “In no way is justice a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the for-the-other, a diminution, a limitation of anarchic responsibility, a neutralization,” for it is “impossible without the one that renders it ﬁnding himself in proximity.” Such justice is not limited to the “function of judgment” and comprehensive only because “nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other” (159). But it can be comprehensive in this sense only if the rupture is salvaged and the “rupture of the individual with the whole” is not denied (1967, 149), if the aporia between limitation and limitlessness, commensurateness and incommensurability, is not avoided, the difference between responsibility and justice is not buried. Before I address the question of how this might be possible, let me brieﬂy identify the paradoxical ﬁgures into which such a thinking of the Other as irreducible to the same is bound to lead. This kind of thought must break with Parmenides, with the claim to think all-in-one in order to be able to establish ethics as ﬁrst philosophy. But as Derrida counters in his reading of Totality and Inﬁnity: “in welcoming alterity in general into the heart of the logos, the Greek thought of Being forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation” (Derrida 1978, 153; italics in the original). How could it be possible then to think this Other, who had always been understood as Being, now as something other, other than being? To grasp this heteronomous experience of the Other in speech, where the Other appears as a “face,” and to be able to conceive of the effect the advent of the Other has on the mind, Levinas must then make an impossible demand on Western Reason—that for the sake of its own reasonableness it open up to that which it cannot embrace without making it identical to itself: A thought would be required that was no longer constructed as a relationship binding the thinker to what is thought. Or we would need, in this thought, a relation without correlatives, a thought not held to the rigorous correspondence between what Husserl called noesis and noema, a thought not held to the visible’s adequacy to the intention it should respond to in the intuition of truth. A thought would be required in which the very metaphors of vision and aiming would not be legitimate. Impossible requirements! (1998b, 15–16)2 This impossible demand, which is just as much a demand for the impossible—demanding that thinking recognize it as a mode of Dasein (Being-inthe-world)—forces this discourse into formal logical contradictions and into paradoxes which thereby assume the character of a necessity.3 All oppositional conceptual dualisms and the entire dichotomously structured conceptual logic thereby wind up in a paradoxical movement, as they are supposed to express through, and within, them something they conceal

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and which can nevertheless be said only through them. Levinas attempts to break out of the coherence ﬁeld generated by these polar conceptual relations by playing the two sides against each other, while continuously revoking thematizations and categories, so that a tertium quid excluded by them seems thinkable as a possibility—one, however, which, within the logical conceptual relations left to their own devices,can only be ruled out as impossible. Thus, the Other cannot be viewed as a manifestation, for if the Other could simply manifest himself or herself, his or her essence would already be incorporated into the world, which is why the Other can only “manifest” himself or herself as a non-manifestation, and, in terms of the Logic of Essence, would have to be identiﬁed as non-essence. Hence the Other cannot be determined in the light-space of Reason, nor in the darkness of the underground, since this darkness would still be a concession on the part of the light, which would merely withhold itself. Locatable neither in the dark nor in the light, the Other must nonetheless manifest himself or herself to be experienced, and if not in space, then in time. However, if regarded as one belonging to the auditory sphere, the Other would have to be imagined as someone speaking—yet speaking would be unthinkable without something spoken, of which the subject may absorb the sense and thereby reduce the Other to the said. So Levinas must postulate a saying which says the saying itself, without being obscured by the signiﬁcation of that which is being said—an “original language, a language without words or propositions, pure communication” (Levinas 1987, 119)—and, moreover, an understanding which would be an understanding of “nothing,” an understanding of proximity which “is by itself a signiﬁcation” (116; italics in the original), before being an understanding of meaning or of being. At the same time, proximity must not re-move the remoteness but must maintain an essentially inﬁnite distance as an irreducible separation. This outside separated from the inwardness of the subject is not to be viewed as its complement but rather as a non-spatial exteriority since, after all, space owes its spatiality to light, which would transfer everything manifest in it to the presence of the imagining consciousness and would lend the power over that which is seen to Seeing. Levinas contrasts the passivity of the perceiving subject with a passivity which yet further radicalizes it, one in which even the subject’s passive syntheses appear as activities, allowing it to imagine itself, in anticipating the advent of the Other, as the starting point and center of the world, and of everything it encounters in it. In short, knowledge can deal with anything, and thinking may remove all strangeness and alterity, yet the Other can neither be known nor thought within this conceptual and linguistic order (Levinas 1996). But just as knowledge may know of its non-knowledge, thought may very well not think the Other as such, but may think this non-ability as that which surpasses it and whose trace it can ﬁnd within itself, “a presence of that which properly speaking has never been there, of what is always past” (1986, 358). Whether to follow these traces, whether to recognize

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or reject the Other, lies in the decision of the individual, in his response, and in his responsibility: “This way the other has of seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito . . . this way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself, we call enigma—going back to the etymology of this Greek term, and contrasting it with the indiscreet and victorious appearing of a phenomenon (1987, 66). In Levinas’s terminology, this enigma is the “face,” which must not be regarded as the image of a face whose epiphany is therefore wholly language, this manifestation of prelogical language as voice, which—as it does not signify anything speciﬁc—remains an enigma (Levinas 1987). The Other “manifests” himself or herself in the face without manifesting himself or herself since he or she does not materialize as an image but rather as a speaking voice, signifying but without signiﬁcation. It is an experience without concept, “pure” experience, as the conception conveying sensory data within the I “ends, before the other, with the de-ception, the dispossession which characterizes all our attempts to encompass this real” (59). Then this experience would be an attitude in view of what is inconceivable for logical conceptual thinking but no mere petriﬁcation as that before the Gorgon’s head, the metaphor of the paradox, rather an ethical attitude “as such”—should there be an “as such” in this case. Thinking might solidify before the exteriority of the face, which represents a beyond which is not behind the world but rather in the world, but which denotes a beyond and an outside of thinking which transcend the space of intentionality, of meaning, of concept, of consciousness, unspatial spatiality opening the space of consciousness, non-meaning generating meaning which, for Levinas, is not inherent in language itself (1987), which is yet already the “house of being” (Heidegger 1998a, 239). Then the real as that which is impossible for thinking can only be experienced by it as a boundary if this boundary is also in effect in thought and in speech, and not just when it encounters an obstacle. This boundary, which itself cannot manifest itself and materialize, “manifests” itself in the trace of the Other, as the paradox of an inconceivability which is the only “logical” mode of “Dasein” of that which cannot be grasped, comprehended, understood. And this mode of Dasein is that which cannot be logically grasped, which the face not only opens up but to which it obliges us: The personal order to which a face obliges us is beyond being. Beyond being is a third person, which is not deﬁnable by the oneself, by ipseity. It is the possibility of this third direction of radical unrightness which escapes the bipolar play of immanence and transcendence proper to being, where immanence always wins against transcendence. (Levinas 1986, 356; italics in the original) Within Western rationality, this radical “unrightness” can only be articulated paradoxically, as the possibility of the impossible, as the mysterious

122 Michael Wimmer secret of another human that is perceived, and causes a switch from the theoretical to the ethical attitude: Ethical language alone succeeds in being equal to the paradox in which phenomenology is abruptly thrown. . . . The trace in which a face is ordered is not reducible to a sign for the simple reason that a sign and its relationship with the signiﬁed are already thematized. But an approach is not the thematization of any relationship; it is this very relationship. (Levinas 1987, 124; italics added) So the experience of the Other brings the impossible, the unreal, and the undecidable into play. These negative “categories,” “concepts,” or “modalities” are limit concepts, and, as such, are synonymous with the paradoxical.4 While in the context of a conception of the other in Levinas and Derrida’s sense they are still negative terms; they are imbued with a positive meaning in that they point to an outside which under the conditions of philosophical language can only be stated as the Other of thought, as the unspeakable and the unthinkable. In other words, they encode an experience which is to be brought to language in order to break out of the conﬁnement of redundant self-referentiality or at least open the closedness of the space of immanence. This makes it indispensable, though, to assume a position on the irreconcilable, the paradoxical, and the aporetical different from that in previous approaches.

DEALING WITH PARADOXES Currently available theories propose two different ways of dealing with the problem of paradox, marked by fundamental differences which ultimately hark back to a difference in the concept of difference itself—the difference between difference and différance. It is not, however, this difference which is at issue here but rather the ways of dealing with the problem of paradox originating from it. The resulting assessments of the meaning and status of paradoxes are profoundly different, depending on the context. On the one hand, they are regarded as the inevitable outcome of self-referential, autopoietic processes and operations, and vindicated to the systemic logic inherent in it. On the other hand, they are interpreted as formulas for failure, enabling an external reference which cannot be neutralized by internal system processes. Then they are perceived as radically distinct from the external referentiality of self-reference, as itself distinguished from the distinctions with which the meaningconstituting system operates, without becoming accessible to a higher-level distinction of any kind (Esposito 1997; Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997). One approach is proposed by Niklas Luhmann’s constructivist systems theory, the other by Derrida’s deconstructionist philosophy of difference. If the

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former is concerned with the autopoiesis of meaning-constituting systems, which—within the absolute autonomy of self-referential closedness (Luhmann 1987)—may view the difference between I and the world, self and the Other as mere constructs of the psychological system itself so that even the opening up toward the Other or toward the environment must be interpreted as though it were simply inherent in the system (Luhmann 1995), because the boundary between system and environment (i.e., everything else) is the condition for the possibility of the system, and any violation of this boundary would result in its destruction (Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997, especially 165), Derrida is concerned precisely with opening this boundary. This opening, too, though, does not just “happen,” but must rather be sustained by thought itself, but then again cannot be regarded entirely as its own achievement. Even for Derrida, this boundary cannot easily be transgressed because that would either amount to the complete usurpation of the Other, of the exterior, or to the surrender of thought, to the extinction of the I in the Other. But instead of transgressing the inner boundaries, the observer’s operations of distinction generate within the system/environment difference by means of a new, higher-level operation of distinction, and consolidating and stabilizing the system/environment boundary toward the outside precisely through this very dynamic of paradoxiﬁcation and deparadoxiﬁcation, deconstructionism pursues the strategy not of transgression but rather of recovery of the boundary.5 It foils the stabilization of the boundary toward the outside by not transgressing the stability of inner boundary demarcations and distinctions (e.g., through dialectical sublation, Aufhebung) but rather by opening them inward, by representing that which is distinct as differently constituted within itself, as an outside on the inside, which would also affect the system boundary or the system/environment difference. Hence, these two strategies of the paradox differ fundamentally with regard to their functional principle, their relation to the paradox, and their application. From another perspective, Luhmann’s system theory is still an attempt to avoid the perceived undecidability and indeterminacy, and to grasp the possibility of their constructions, their legitimacy and functionality, within the impossibility of the real, of the experience of the environment or of the Other. Because the paradoxical, which is considered the motor and principle of self-referential problem processing, functions in such a way in this “logic” that the decision is always possible, and the next higher level is assumed which allows for receiving new decision criteria. These are strategies for salvaging the closedness of the system, which cannot do away with its paradoxes and blind spots, but which, by way of this escape route, remains in control. Rather than principally misconstruing the relationship with the outside, deconstruction is concerned with interrupting this closure and enclosure, which is perpetuated by the continual transgression of boundaries. It is not the overcoming of impossibility which, in systems theory, functions as a condition of the possibility and as a legitimation of the “reality” of

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constructions, but rather its afﬁrmation, or even better, the acknowledgment of the fact that this impossible represents an insurmountable boundary of thought, of construction, of determining judgment characteristic of the position deconstruction takes on the paradox. It is, if I may say so, regarded as a “positive determination,” as a condition for the possibility not of the constructions and judgments to be merely legitimized internally, but as the condition for the possibility of a relationship with the outside, which is present within immanence as a trace of absence. Undecidability, too, becomes positively determinable as the condition for the possibility of a judgment not guided by prejudices or knowledge whose validity is revoked the moment it is confronted with the paradox, so that its appropriateness or inappropriateness may be judged in the judging process as well. Instead of resolving this situation of undecidability by means of newly acquired criteria allowing for a decision, this situation itself turns into a necessary condition for the judgment which can do justice to the Other (Derrida 1992a). Undecidability is a condition for a judgment that must, and yet cannot, be guided by given rules, norms, bodies of knowledge, or presettings if it is to do justice to the singularity of the Other—just as the impossible, the indeterminable, and the undecidable are not viewed as the legitimation for autopoietic constructions, determinations, and decisions. Furthermore, these terms do not denote a boundary of thought, knowledge, and action in the sense that they would cease to be thought, knowledge, and action, and that judgment would be cast into indeﬁnite suspension and agony altogether, or completely left to arbitrariness. For in the paradox, thought and judgment remain tied to that which they cannot resolve and judge according to previous criteria, and in regard to which they are nonetheless forced to take a position and respond. So this is not a deviation into the irrationality of a random arbitrariness. Judging without knowledge is not the opposite of, and complete distanciation from, knowledge, absolute freedom, or arbitrariness. Rather, the obligation arising from knowledge, from rules or laws persists; it is not denied, for then this paradoxical situation and irresolvability would already be decided. The undecidable forces one to let go, just as the impossible forces one to pause, but not in the sense of surrender or of a seemingly radical solution, a formula for dealing with paradoxes. One must pause without stopping, and let go where the undecidable forces one to release one’s hold, where one can‘t even hold onto it—the undecidable. To make of the undecidable (as some might now be tempted to do) a certain value, an instrument worth more than the particular situation in which it has a necessary place (for example, against binary logic, dialectics, or philosophy) is to double band oneself to the point of paralysis or tetanus—I would say, rather, to the point of cramping. (Derrida 1995, 23–24)

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Moreover, there is “no deciding strategy of indecision. Indecision happens. One grapples with indecision. If it were nothing but a calculation, it would be a sinister tactic” (Derrida 1995, 146). The deconstructionist method could then be described as a skeptical method, in which the making of a judgment, manifest in texts of all kinds— in philosophies, in interpretations congealed into institutions, in all cultural systems of meaning—is placed back in suspension, and the forgetting of the Other caused by decisions, determinations, and judgments is thereby remembered. It is not by countering and contrasting, but rather by seeking out the trace of the excluded, that the paradox made invisible by these texts can be made visible and re-implemented. Deconstruction would then be the procedure where a boundary setting is considered failed, not so much in that it is violated from the outside but rather that this failure is traced as an auto-deconstructionist move within the concepts and systematic connections themselves.6 But a “deconstruction cannot be ‘theoretical,’ beginning with its very principle. It is not limited to concepts, to thought content, or to discourses” (Derrida 1995, 28). If it were limited to philosophy or discourses, “it would reproduce the auto-critical movement of philosophy in its internal tradition” (72). It is therefore also not a critical operation; it takes critique as its object; deconstruction, at one moment or another, always aims at the trust conﬁded in the critical, critico-theoretical agency, that is, the deciding agency, the ultimate possibility of the decidable; deconstruction is a deconstruction of critical dogmatics. (Derrida 1995, 54)7 Neither critique of philosophy nor anti-philosophy, neither method nor analysis, “it goes beyond critical decision itself. That is why it is not negative, even though it has often been interpreted as such despite all sorts of warnings. For me, it always accompanies an afﬁrmative exigency, I would even say that it never proceeds without love” (Derrida 1995, 83). Deconstruction must therefore be considered an experience, an “experience of the impossible and the ‘there is’” (Derrida 1996b), an experience of the paradoxical and of the undecidable as an “ethical experience,” if one may say so. Then only is it is possible to make a decision without bias, a judgment without prejudice: Thus the gravest decision—the Wager, the Sacriﬁce of Isaac—the great decisions that must be taken and must be afﬁrmed are taken and afﬁrmed in this relation to the undecidable itself; at the very moment in which they are no longer possible, they become possible. These are the only decisions possible: impossible ones. . . . It is when it is not possible to know what must be done, when knowledge is not and cannot be determining that a decision is possible as such. Otherwise the decision is an application: one knows what has to be done, it’s clear, there is no

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The decision made while one is indecisive, which is made “in the tensest possible relation with the impossibility of deciding” (Derrida 1995, 148), receives its meaning from the Other who decides what the decision means; the answer lies with the Other. In a way, the decision is left to the Other, for as the I as a free consciousness is paralyzed, it recognizes how that which is to be decided is the Other’s prerogative, which does not mean that the I might simply wait, but rather that it does everything it can, knowing it is going to obey the Other in his or her decision, the Other’s decision then about the meaning of the I’s decision. It is here that responsibility in Levinas’s sense is actualized, namely in having to respond in conditions of nonability (not having the response prescribed by knowledge or calculation). If one is not willing to renounce either oneself or the Other, then this is “the most decided . . . will” to not avoid the boundary: “What is the most decided, the most ﬁrmly decided is the decision to maintain the greatest possible tension between the two poles of the contradiction. This is an afﬁrmation of ﬁdelity” (151). According to traditional categories, this position on the paradox could be called practical, in contrast to the theoretical position of systems theory, if this distinction itself were not also affected by deconstruction, which should therefore by no means be viewed as a purely ethical attitude but as a theoretical one as well. For to be able to respond to the Other, and not have this response conditioned by knowledge and prejudices, that is, if thought is to be responsible so that it can do justice to the Other, then knowledge and the usual judgment criteria must be suspended as obstructions, although they cannot be transgressed. This suspension takes place in the situation of undecidability as an experience of aporia or of paradox, which is and must be the beginning of all morality, politics, and culture, if it is to be responsible and just. When the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program. Perhaps, and this would be the objection, one never escapes the program. In that case, one must acknowledge this and stop talking with authority about moral or political responsibility. The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention. (Derrida 1992b, 41; italics in the original) According to this statement, the “meaning” of paradoxes then lies in a relationship—only made possible by them—with the Other, to whom they are

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owed. This relationship concerns both thinking (which tries to do justice to an insolvable task and a double imperative), and action (which requires a judgment, without knowledge controlling judgment, if one is to do justice to the Other). Therefore, paradoxes are not meaningless positions without content, utterances which say nothing because nothing corresponds to them, pseudo-problems and hidden errors, as that alleged logic which claimed to be a paradox-free calculation and inferred nonexistence from initial logical thinkability, without being able to justify this conclusion. To counter the petrifaction with which logical thought responds to the paradox, as it did to Medusa where beheading her in the mirror was the only solution, the founding fathers of rhetoric already resorted to a shift in levels and to distinctions, just as Kant resolved his antinomies by distinguishing between the kingdom of nature and that of freedom, between the transcendental and the empirical, without, however, being able to resolve the paradoxes of distinction themselves. Luhmann writes: “Then the universal recipe of distinction only universalizes the problem. The success of the formula ‘Distinguish!’ only makes it clear that all cognition ultimately consists in distinguishing and must therefore ultimately be grounded in paradoxes” (1991, 62). As mentioned earlier, Luhmann’s solution consists in a “creative deparadoxiﬁcation,” using paradoxiﬁcation to view from a higher level that which cannot be viewed on a lower level, without him being able to view everything. Luhmann dissociates himself from the logical line of tradition, which supposedly killed Medusa “through the mirror of self-reference” (1991, 71), through self-tautologization, and calls his own solution Euryalistik after Medusa’s sister Euryale. He places systems theory in the context of rhetorical tradition although the proximity to Hegel’s logic is in my view unmistakable, at least regarding paradoxical/antinomic levels of differentiation. According to Luhmann, Stheno, the third of the Gorgons, whose handling of paradoxes ranges from “Nietzsche and Heidegger all the way to Derrida” is part of the “ancestral line of theological treatment of paradoxes,” of the attempt to observe the unobservable, and sthenography is in competition with euryalistics (59). As I see it, this classiﬁcation calls for an overall correction and speciﬁcation since deconstructionism, as a philosophy of language, is rather more in the tradition of rhetoric while also being indebted to skepticism, unlike systems theory. Hence, the characterization Luhmann offers does not apply: “Paradoxes are not avoided or circumvented, but exhibited. They are celebrated with devotion. They are expressed in a language contorted as ever. It is almost as if one could recognize the intention to use the Gorgons like a shield, to carry them in front of oneself to frighten others” (1991, 59). As I hope to have demonstrated, deconstructionism is not about “aesthetic shock” (Bennington 1993, 27); it is rather concerned with a theoretically sustained consistency, with the fact that there is no absolute beginning, and everything has already begun—thinking does not begin with itself and must not be considered an answer. Hence it is a relation to the paradoxical,

128 Michael Wimmer the nonsensical, the aporetical which can be determined neither as a solution nor as a rigorous transcendence, neither as a negation of its meaning nor as an afﬁrmation of its function, but rather as a perception enduring the tension, and an experience of the impossible, as a condition for the possibility of responsive thought and just action. To think “in accordance” with the enigma of the paradoxical then would mean neither an active appropriation in the sense of a logical compulsion to resolve the paradox nor a passive surrender in the sense of petrifaction, but it would rather mean “a sort of non-passive endurance” as Derrida characterizes this admittedly somewhat obscure talk of “thinking in accordance with paradoxy” (1993, 16). Inasmuch as it is an endurance of something which transcends thought, one might also call it an “experience,” which is a thought experience (within and with a contradiction) as well, but which still does not have its locus only within thought because it transcends the force or the power of thought. For thought is incapable of putting this experience into a form corresponding to the rules of logic and of concepts. Therefore, with Derrida, one may ask questions which point in two opposite directions: “Can one speak—and if so, in what sense—of an experience of the aporia? An experience of the aporia as such? Or vice versa: Is an experience possible that would not be an experience of the aporia?” (15; italics in the original). Regarding this last question, experience would only be an experience (and not a mere repetition of the familiar, thus a conﬁrmation of knowledge and of expectations) if it encountered the paradoxical and became aware of the enigma of what experience is dealing with. This is reminiscent of Levinas’s notion that one may speak of an experience only if it involves a relation to something absolutely other, if it is a heteronomous experience: “For experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature” (1987, 47). If the paradox is the signature of the enigma, of an enigma affecting thought itself, calling it into question because it is that which transcends thought itself, which is not thought and not knowledge, then the paradox would be the signature of experiencing the Other as an enigma with which thought is unable to cope, which exceeds its scope and makes it come to its limits but without becoming petriﬁed. The enigma and the contradiction challenge thought to take a position, to respond. This challenge, this claim, or this obligation of a “double duty” (Derrida 1992b, 80), arising from the duality inherent in paradoxes, aporias, and antinomies, can then only be perceived by thought if it conceives of the paradox neither as a fantasy or pseudo-problem, nor as a merely logical or semantic problem to be resolved by logical and linguistic means. Denying the enigma as a chimaera, and rendering it invisibile it by logical laws, close thought—which had been opened by the paradox—back onto itself and cut it off from the Other, from what experience gave it to think. However, a kind of thinking which would be suited to the paradox might be called a perceptive thinking, which may comply with the duty to respond,

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articulated in itself as a paradox. In this case, morality, politics, responsible thought and action, really any decision at all, would only be possible under the condition of the paradox.

SOME CONSEQUENCES FOR PEDAGOGICAL DISCOURSE Is it at all possible to conceive of pedagogical action “without judgment” and “without knowledge?” Does not the emphasis and prominence given to the undecidability and unsolvability of paradox make the case for arbitrary randomness and thereby pave the way for even greater irresponsibility and violence than the one we aimed to avoid? And does not the acknowledgment of a “paradoxical rationality” imply a blatant irrationalism, which would reduce to absurdity any attempt at escaping the blind domination of circumstances and at making peaceful cohabitation at least thinkable? These questions are not unjustiﬁed, even though they do not have justice on their side from the outset as if the answer were redundant. The violence and “irrationality” of circumstances are related to the rationality these questions claim for themselves. Therefore, no answer is possible as long as the antithetical structure, replicated in the questions, is not considered a problem in itself, since this antithetical structure pretends to be merely an alternative to choose from, as if a decision were not only necessary but possible as well. In a way, systems theory, too, still adheres to this antithetical structure as it rejects the possibilities presupposed in traditional pedagogy—insight, action, control, etc.—as unjustiﬁed presumptions but, in the inverse conclusion, it postulates their sheer impossibility, and, presuming this impossibility of understanding, controlling, shaping, etc., proceeds to offer a compensation for this lost opportunity. The deconstructionist approach differs from this in that it does not construct an alternative between possibility and impossibility, but rather views the impossible as something connected to the possible. This means that the deconstructionist approach presupposes the paradoxical interconnection of that which in systems theory is already distributed to two sides. Instead of answering the question of how education can be possible even though it can only be thought paradoxically by attempting to resolve the paradox and assuming that this happens in practice anyway, from a deconstructionist perspective the question is answerable. In its unsolvability, it suggests the possibility of an impossibility on which the possibility of education itself is based, so that the paradox must be endured for education to happen at all. Hence, the fundamental paradox of pedagogy is no longer “merely a phenomenon of consciousness relating to nothing in the general self-conception of the agent” (Schäfer 1989, 36). Alfred Schäfer posits that an “orientation of pedagogical action . . . [seems] hardly possible against the backdrop of the paradoxical fundamental structure of this action” (37), and paradox cannot direct action but only establish a “mindset” “to which

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action as an action could hardly correspond” (38). This position cannot easily be challenged as long as it is assumed that there is another possibility. But operating with effect hypotheses, or “as if” attitudes, is equally problematic, at least as soon as the question of whether this manner of dealing does justice to the Other is asked, the question of the mindset on which this pedagogical action is based. So this is not about the antithesis between rationally justiﬁable pedagogical action on the one hand and a mindset on the other, but rather about the difference between the mindset of a “rational” action-orientation and one which remains conscious of the paradox, with the latter certainly not lacking in rational action-orientation but really presupposing it so that the paradox as such can be “experienced,” or even made conscious at all. This is also not about knowledge or non-knowledge, orientation or self-indulgence, etc., but about the simultaneity of the two sides mutually inherent in each other. If one excludes the respective Other from either of the supposed alternatives, which makes them alternatives in the ﬁrst place, the paradox may well be resolved but, at the same time, any non-normative criterion, which would make choosing one of the alternatives still justiﬁable, is lost. In other words, if normative justiﬁcations are always tied to a claim to power, and if the problem of violence is unresolvable in an action thus justiﬁed, the resolution of the Kantian antinomy consists solely in not resolving it because the resolution in itself would be a form of coercion. The problem, therefore, does not lie in another or better knowledge, nor in elusiveness in non-knowledge, but rather in another relation to knowledge, precisely in the “mindset” which decides whether to remain conscious of its own limitation of undecidability in the very moment when one feels one has to make a decision, or to decide something in accordance with an objective criterion, which is valid regardless of the situation and which actually already relieves one of the decisions long before one decides for oneself. Instead of referring to the situation or to the Other, this would mean referring to some knowledge, subjecting oneself and the Other to that knowledge, and thereby reducing any freedom and any personal judgment to whether this knowledge subsumes this situation. Against this determining power of judgment, though, a judgment must be made possible which refers to the Other in his or her otherness, one which then must be carried out by the agent himself or herself who has to make the decision whether this knowledge is just in this situation and regarding this Other. This point of decision, in which the freedom of the decider alone may be actualized since he or she does not simply carry out prescriptive knowledge but must also judge the validity of this knowledge, is given only in the situation of undecidability, in the experience that no other authority has yet taken on this responsibility (Derrida 1992a). However, this freedom can only occur under the claim of an Other or of a situation which blocks any way out into immunity. It is a freedom into which the subject is coerced because it is impossible for the subject to delegate responsibility. It is also free to do this; it can withdraw to norms, knowledge, and rules, but this

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freedom is that of ﬂeeing into non-freedom and seeking the shelter of a knowledge that is supposed to protect him or her from the autonomy he or she stipulated. In short, autonomy and freedom are themselves dependent on paradox, on the experience of the undecidable and of the impossible. From this viewpoint, the paradox is not an obstacle to pedagogical action but rather constitutive of it, if it is to do justice to its purpose, and thereby to the Other. I will not elaborate on the issues of knowledge and action (see Wimmer 1996b, 1996c) for what is crucial here is the insight for which these problems must be considered from their limits, precisely starting from the paradox. Since deconstruction may be identiﬁed as such a reﬂection of the limits, it may be regarded as a possibility of initiating an appropriate way of dealing with this paradoxical structure. It presents the escape as an escape, and by evoking the paradoxical structure, it eliminates the prejudices of knowledge, reverses the division of the paradoxical, and reassembles its parts. In summary, we can say that deconstruction resolves the resolutions in which the problem, the object, and pedagogy disappear, and reinscribes paradox into the discourse. It calls to mind that the impossible and the undecidable are constitutive of pedagogical thought, and disappear with the resolution of paradoxes. It follows the traces of this disappearance within the solutions, and recalls what is forgotten by revealing the paradoxical structure of the pedagogical problem in the streamlined theories, which, despite the distinctions and delimitations made, is not free of traces of the distinguished. The theoretical distinguishing operations themselves are not devoid of recursive movements, which must reinscribe the differences into that which was distinguished by distinction. Hence, the distinguished is contaminated by that which it distinguishes. The return to something original, a foundation, a basis, an arché, a fundamentum, is therefore no longer possible. The theory of the subject can only conceive of the pedagogical antinomy in terms of identity logic as irrationality, lack, ﬂaw contradicting reason, and that which must be resolved. The antinomy not only persists, but it is radicalized when the relationship with the Other is taken as a starting point, and is furthermore construed as a fundamental ethical rapport. The dead-end thinking of a subject-subject relationship with the indispensable primacy of the pedagogical subject, which implies a contradiction at the level of the formulation of the antinomy, transforms into a heteronomous relationship of subject-Other, with the otherness of the Other—and thence its unencompassability—a given from the outset, instead of simply having to submit the autonomy of the subject counterfactually to give way to heteronomy in the form of inﬂuence, seizure, and determination. In other words, if humans are regarded as autonomous subjects of reason, as has been common since modernity, then there is no way around conceiving of the educatee as deﬁcient, as not yet autonomous, as a mere virtual subject who has yet to come into being. Hierarchical inequality then is the point of

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departure. If, however, humans are viewed above all as Other, with every other being completely different, then the child, too, is above all an Other, a stranger just as any Other and therefore—in his or her otherness—equal to the pedagogue. And yet, this equality of being completely different is an equality presupposing a radical difference, albeit without measure and not to be understood hierarchically. Therefore, action itself must be understood as a deconstructionist experience inasmuch as it is confronted with the singularity of the Other and of the situation, with the problem of undecidability and justice. In this perspective, education is possible as education only because it must pass through this moment of its impossibility and absorb it into itself, in the form of avoidance strategies. Otherwise, it would be dressage, technique, agenda, and calculation. Impossibility then (viewed as a logically non-deducible agenda, or as a rationally indeterminable goal, or as a not generally precalculable action) is the condition of its possibility. At the same time, pedagogy as pedagogy is possible only if it does not drift off into pure randomness and arbitrariness, meaning that this “impossibility” must be regarded as “necessary.” So if pedagogy is impossible as logically contradiction-free theory, it still cannot renounce all theory simply because education, instruction, and teaching are not empirical facts devoid of any interpretation. Rather, what these concepts should and can encompass and denote may only be determined theoretically, by making distinctions. These distinctions must also mark the difference with distinctions that reduce pedagogy to technique. However, the distinction between distinctions connecting pedagogy with technique and distinctions distancing pedagogy from technique may only be introduced by a distinction itself, which must borrow its criteria from a metaphysical premise, thereby losing its difference to the distinction connecting pedagogy and technique. Then the distinction between these two kinds of distinctions can avoid metaphysical positioning, and hence normativity, privileging, and proximity to the technocratic interpretation of pedagogy, only if it does not borrow its distinction criteria from an apparent metaposition, but from that which it itself distinguished: the Other. From a theoretical point of view, deconstruction should not be regarded only as a thinking which radicalizes the logic of distinction and articulates the idea of the antecedence of difference, but also as one which thematizes the locus to which logic owes itself, the boundary with the Other. This boundary—inscribed and presupposed in any critical discourse as a prerequisite for knowledge, without being itself identiﬁable within a particular knowledge—is deconstruction’s point of reference. It therefore follows the logic of the paradox that could be formalized as the logic of a reentry or of a retreat, of a folding or bending of the boundary onto that which it delimits. Since deconstruction can uncover and register paradoxes, making the conﬂict of pedagogical purpose reappear from its dissimulations and divisions, this approach proves particularly fruitful with regard to pedagogical issues. The preceding comments reveal a fundamentally different understanding of what has been called ethics. I have already discussed this shift elsewhere

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(Wimmer 1988, 1996a, 1996b), so I will only brieﬂy consider the status of ethics here. This ethic is to be viewed as the attempt to escape the amorality of modernity, which pervades even ethics. If, as Michel Foucault states, modern thought was never able to propose a morality because “from its inception and in its very density” it was “a certain mode of action” (2004, 357), namely of identifying the other as the same, then, according to Levinas, ethics can no longer be founded in, and conceived of as starting from, the ethics resulting from this thought. If the ethos of advanced modernity is viewed as the result of this “ethics” of empowerment mentioned by Foucault, then—in postmodern conditions of self-referentiality—this ethos might be described as a vicious cycle, in which the self-referential subject would only be a subject exclusively concerned with his or her selfhood. This vicious cycle can only be remedied with the experience of the Other, which cannot be integrated into this movement and will bring this cycle to a halt at least for a moment. The experience of the paradox has been presented as such an experience here, an experience of the impossible and the undecidable which might also be deemed an ethical experience but which, in terms of the traditional discourse of ethics, is more in the form of an “anti-ethics.” In this ethics, the experience in paradox, conﬂict, and aporia is not to be separated by decisions and divided into separate ways of processing. If this experience could be regarded as the experience of a double imperative, this separation would have the advantage of resolving impossibility, but then the resulting possibility of processing would inevitably follow a given inclination, some knowledge, an agenda, or a calculation. From this it follows that the responsible response to this double imperative, to these two instructions or to these two laws, is possible only when it itself confronts this impossibility and views it as a possibility. In Derrida’s words: If the two terms of such an alternative translate at once an unsolvable contradiction and an unequivocal seriousness, the aporia is reﬂected or capitalized in abyss and requires more than ever thinking differently, or thinking at last, what is announced here in the enigmatic form of the “possible” (of the possibility—itself impossible—of the impossible, etc.). (1992b, 46; italics in the original) If responsibility, as Levinas also showed time and again, and therefore justice and freedom (in the understanding developed above), are only possible under these conditions of the experience of the Other, then the experience of paradox, antinomy, undecidability, performative contradiction, conﬂict, or “double duty” would be not only to accept but to claim . . . It would be necessary to recognize both the typical or recurring form and the inexhaustible singularization—without which there will never be any event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics. These conditions can only take a negative form (without X there would not be Y). One can be certain only of this negative form. As soon

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Therefore I want to avoid giving the impression that one could usurp this experience, turn it into a strategy, and incorporate it into a moralization. It was not my intent at all to propose a new model for action but rather to lay out a different possible approach to the paradox problem, starting from which fundamental and collateral issues of pedagogy may be reconsidered. NOTES 1. Translated by Ina Pﬁtzner. Quotations from German sources are Pﬁtzner’s translation, unless otherwise noted. 2. See also “Transcendence and evil” (Levinas 1998b, 122–34). 3. Even though Levinas justiﬁes this necessity, it does not have the same logical status as in Kant’s modal-logical triad of the categories of the real, the possible, and the necessary (Grünewald 1986), insofar as it is precisely not regarded solely as an expression of “the relation [of the object encapsulated in the concept] to the faculty of reason” (Kant 1998, 322; italics in the original). 4. While the “impossible” as a concept does not ﬁgure among Kant’s modal categories, one might well say that his entire thought is fundamentally informed by it, in that the basic difference between appearances and things in themselves to which the Critique of pure reason ascribes its actual critical difference with pre-critical thought would collapse without it since the thing-in-itself, after all, denotes the unknowable, that which is impossible for theoretical reason. 5. On the distinction between “transgression” and “recovery,” see Heidegger’s “On the question of Being” (1998b, e.g., 313.), composed in response to “Across the line” by Ernst Jünger who believed the time of transgression had come. On the ambivalence of the gesture of transgression—in reference to Georges Bataille—see Foucault (2004, 36–38). On the issues and the ambiguity of the expectation of an “absolutely new” related to such a transgression, see Odo Marquardt’s skepticism and reservations about Utopian hopes, e.g., of the student movement (1981, 10; 1986). Derrida is equally skeptical about this option of the new by way of transgression (1992b, 18–19). On the problem of the absolutely new in educational theory see also Jörg Ruhloff and Jan Masschelein’s reﬂections exploring the possibility of the new as an absolute beginning for a critical resumption of reﬂection in educational science (Masschelein 2000). 6. “There is the ’system’ and there is the text, and in the text there are ﬁssures or resources that cannot be dominated by the systematic discourse. At a certain moment, the latter can no longer answer for itself; it initiates its own deconstruction. Whence the necessity of an interminable, active interpretation that is engaged in a micrology of the scalpel, both violent and faithful” (Derrida 1995, 82). 7. See also Derrida (1992b, 77).

REFERENCES Baraldi, C., G. Corsi, and E. Esposito. 1997. GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns theorie sozialer systeme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Benner, D. 1998. Erziehung, bildung and ethik. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 44 (2):191–204. Bennington, G. 1993. Derridabase. In Jacques Derrida, by G. Bennington and J. Derrida, 3–322. Chicago: University of Chicago. Derrida, J. 1978. Writing and difference. Trans. A. Bass. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1992a. Force of law: The “mystical foundation of authority.” In Deconstruction and the possibility of justice, ed. D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D. G. Carlson, 3–67. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1992b. The other heading: Reﬂections on today’s Europe. Trans. P.-A. Brault and M. B. Naas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Aporias: Dying—awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth.” Trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995. Points . . . : Interviews 1974–1994, ed. E. Weber and trans. P. Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1996a. As if I were dead: An interview with Jacques Derrida by P. Kamuf. Trans. P. Kamuf. In Applying: To Derrida, ed. J. Brannigan, R. Robbins, and J. Wolfreys, 212–26. London: Macmillan Press. ———. 1996b. For the love of Lacan. Journal of European Psychoanalysis 2. http:// www.psychomedia.it/jep/number2/deridda.htm. Esposito, E. 1997. Paradoxien als unterscheidungen von unterscheidungen. In Paradoxien, dissonanzen, zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener epistemologie, ed. H. U. Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 35–57. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Foucault, M. 2004. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London and New York: Routledge. Grünewald, B. 1986. Modalität and empirisches denken. Eine kritische auseinandersetzung mit der Kantischen modaltheorie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Habbel, T. 1994. Der dritte stört: Emmanuel Levinas, herausforderung für politische theologie and befreiungsphilosophie. Mainz: Grünewald-Verlag. Heidegger, M. 1998a. Letter on humanism. Trans. F. A. Capuzzi. In Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, 239–76. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998b. On the question of being. In Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, 291–323. New York: Cambridge University Press. Herbart, J. F. 1984. Allgemeine pädagogik aus dem zweck der erziehung abgeleitet 1806. Pädagogische schriften, ed. W. Asmus, Vol. 3. Stuttgart. Kant, I. 1998. Critique of pure reason. Trans. and ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. 1967. Martin Buber and the theory of knowledge. In The philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. P. Schilpp and M. Friedman, 133–50. La Salle: Open Court. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1986. The trace of the Other. Trans. A. Lingis. In Deconstruction in Context, ed. M. Taylor, 345–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1996. Transcendence and intelligibility. In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings, ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, 149–60. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998a. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998b. Of God who comes to mind. Trans. B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An Essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Luhmann, N. 1986. Systeme verstehen systeme. In Zwischen intransparenz and verstehen, 72–117. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1987. Autopoiesis als soziologischer begriff. In Sinn, kommunikation and soziale differenzierung, ed. N. Luhmann and K. E. Schorr, 307–24. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1991. Sthenographie and euryalistik. In Paradoxien, dissonanzen, zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener epistemologie, ed. H. U. Gumbrecht and K. L. Pfeiffer, 58–82. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995. Social systems. Trans. J. Bednarz Jr. with D. Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———, and K. E. Schorr. 1982. Zwischen technologie and selbstreferenz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marquardt, O. 1981. Abschied vom prinzipiellen. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1986. Apologie des zufälligen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Masschelein, J. 1996. Pädagogisches Handeln and verantwortung. Erziehung als antwort. In Alterität pluralität gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der pädagogik, ed. J. Masschelein and M. Wimmer, 163–86. Sankt Augustin: Academia. ———. 2000. Schöpfung and absoluter anfang. Einige bemerkungen über die christlich-theologische erbschaft nach Hannah Arendt. In ” . . . was es bedeutet, verletzbarer mensch zu sein.” Erziehungswissenschaft im gespräch mit theologie, philosophie and gesellschaftstheorie, ed. S. Abeldt and W. Bauer, 410–20. Matthias-Grünewald-Verlad, Mainz. Oelkers, J. 1985. Die Ästhetisierung des subjekts als grundproblem der pädagogik. In Sprache zwischen den generationen, ed. J. Petersen, 249–87. Kiel: Verlag Wissenschaft. Schäfer, A. 1989. Zur kritik pädagogischer wirklichkeitsentwürfe. Möglichkeiten and grenzen pädagogischer rationalitätsansprüche. Weinheim: Deutscher Studeinverlag. Schorr, K. E. 1986. Das verstehensdeﬁzit der erziehung and die pädagogik. In Zwischen intransparenz and verstehen, ed. N. Luhmann and K. E. Schorr, 11–39. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wimmer, M. 1988. Der andere und die sprache. Vernunftkritik und verantwortung. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. ———. 1994. Die frage des anderen. In Einführung in die pädagogische anthropologie, ed. C. Wulf, 114–40. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag. ———. 1996a. Von der identität als norm zur ethik der differenz. In Alterität pluralität gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der pädagogik, ed. J. Masschelein and M. Wimmer, 25–58. Sankt Augustin: Academia. ———. 1996b. Intentionalität and unentscheidbarkeit. In Alterität pluralität gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der pädagogik, ed. J. Masschelein and M. Wimmer, 59–86. Sankt Augustin: Academia. ———. 1996c. Zerfall des allgemeinen-wiederkehr des singulären. In Alterität pluralität gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der pädagogik, ed. J. Masschelein and M. Wimmer, 219–66. Sankt Augustin: Academia.

Part II

First Philosophy

9

The Priority of Ethics Over Ontology, the Issue of Forgiveness and Education Levinas’s Face-to-Face Ethics Marianna Papastephanou

FACE-TO-FACE ETHICS AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY Philosophers of education witness much emphasis on measurability, high standards, the promotion of excellence, and other clichés of modern educational priorities. Many of them respond to that emphasis with diagnoses of the limits and tacit complicities of liberalism and efforts to enlarge educational conceptual horizons through new philosophical encounters.1 Technicist and individualist ideals along with practical and institutional demands for performativity and competitiveness compose a picture of schooling as the preparatory stage for the young to enter a life of contractuality. Students learn to struggle for a place under the sun (and from there on to pursue ever higher distinction and proﬁt) and to ensure that every route they take is the optimal one, judged on grounds of a means-to-ends rationality. They also learn to develop an expedient outlook capable of discerning and anticipating the reward awaiting a good deed, to judge themselves and others according to established and time-honored criteria, and to avoid unwise behavior which attracts the eye and anger of the law. By the end of their studies, the young will be skilled and, according to the level of their knowledge acquisition, allotted to various social and professional spaces, ready to ﬁght for survival, pleasure, and interest, for this is the fate of humanity since time immemorial. But if their education has been successful, they shall ﬁght with tact and grace, because autonomous beings know how to defend their freedom up to its remotest border with the freedom of the other. And their place in society will be the proper one because their fair share is guaranteed by the educational assessment of their abilities, sensitive to, and perceptive of, the point where political equality must bow to ontological dissimilarity. (After all, why should people be equal if they are born different?) Quite often, the true picture of liberalist education is far more complex than the one sketched above, but the caricature helps us see what is usually present or operative and what is detected by its critics as a potential danger. Some of the new philosophical positions provide, for those who feel unease and discontent, the conceptual tools or standpoints for criticizing the direction education has taken and for the promotion of alternative

140 Marianna Papastephanou ideals of self and society. As Levinas’s face-to-face ethics attacks the logic of contractuality and the moral sovereignty of the subject in order to expose the ethical inﬁnite responsibility of the I to the other, it becomes a source of promise and fascination for those who sense exhaustion and bankruptcy in individualist Shibboleths. According to Ann Chinnery (2003, 12), “by calling into question our commonsense notions of subjectivity and ethics, Levinas also calls into question the prevailing construal of education as a project of producing rational autonomous subjects.” The educational encounter with Levinas has so far offered to educational discourse exciting and refreshing springboards for challenging the narcissism of the Occidental subject nourished in schools, for unveiling the narrowness of performativity, and for combating the stagnation caused by obsessive commitments to some trite pedagogical views.2 However, although there is much yet to be drawn out of Levinasian theses, after a while there come authority, repetition, and fashion to block the innovative and critical educational welcome. Worse, the consolidation of Levinasian ethics in the position of the received view is followed by a rigid separation of camps of proponents and opponents which often leads to epidermic readings of the texts and a hasty transference to education. Faceto-face ethics may indeed be one of the best alternatives to ﬂat liberalist dealings with morality but itself suffers from problems which eventually solidify rather than shake the predominance of performativity and contractuality in education. I shall read Levinas’s priority of ethics over ontology as such a problem, and argue that it presupposes an incrimination of ontology that ultimately and unwittingly enforces the liberalist position.3 For, in this way, the whole realm of ontology is left in the sway of the liberalist interpretation, and the dimensions of education which appear irreparably contaminated with ontology are overlooked and considered to fall within the province of liberalist contractuality. Or, in a similar eventuality, the extent to which education needs reformulation in order to attain compatibility with suggestions deriving from Levinasian ideas is often underestimated. Then, the turn to a face-to-face ethics appears as a kind of adjustment of an otherwise well-conceived education toward the accommodation of alterity and the proper separation of spheres of action. When education is about the ethical relation, we enrich our perspective with Levinasian insights; when the issue is about transmitting values, debating practices, and imparting knowledge, we leave educational notions of experience, participation, and critical thinking untouched. I shall discuss the Levinasian incrimination of ontology here with regard to this danger of asserting liberalism instead of prompting a head-on confrontation with its treatment of educational topics. To illustrate my argument, I shall employ the issue of forgiveness and its teaching. The onto-theological basis of the incrimination of ontology in its manifestation in Levinas’s position on forgiveness and the tensions of that position provide an example of the sympathetic but critical reading of Levinas which is necessary if we wish

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to do justice to the multiplicity of educational phenomena and questions. My overall intention is not to undermine the signiﬁcance of the turn to Levinasian ethics for education, but, rather, to question the unqualiﬁed educational acceptance of the phenomenological ground that presents ethics and ontology as binary opposites. Unlike Derrida’s position in “Violence and metaphysics” (1978), however, I do not argue that the binarism is undone by showing the irrevocable contamination of ethics with ontology, but by showing that the interdependence of ethics and ontology emanates precisely from the fact that objectivation is not, by deﬁnition, violent.

THE PRIORITY OF ETHICS OVER ONTOLOGY Levinas’s face-to-face ethics turns to an unconditional openness and asymmetrical ethical responsibility to alterity dictated by nothing other than alterity itself. All moral foundationalisms derived from notions of duty, rationality, convention, and contract are considered external and even inimical to the pure ethical command of the Face. Such foundationalist ethical standpoints enforce a symmetry which is nonethical, for it reﬂects egology and serves economy.4 Face-to-face ethics disrupts economy and exposes the tyranny of symmetry. It purports to disclose the fact that all alterity is brought into correlation with a sovereign subject, a thetic entity that categorizes difference imposing criteria and setting self-serving conditions on its ethical response to the other. Levinas perceives an inexorable and insurmountable interconnectedness between egology and ontology and in this way is forced to seek ethics beyond ontology as a transcendent relational sphere: ethics is epekeina tis ousias (beyond essence). In Ethics and Inﬁnity (1985, 52), Levinas clariﬁes that he writes the “dis-inter-ested relation” in “three words to underline the escape from being it signiﬁes.” An evident implication of this segregation and priority of ethics over ontology, however, is that ontology becomes incriminated and by deﬁnition contaminated with violence. This is clearly manifested in Levinas’s statement that “to be good is a deﬁcit, waste and foolishness in a being; to be good is excellence and elevation beyond being” (1987, 165; emphasis added), and gives us a foretaste of the common cause Levinasian ethics may unwittingly make with liberalism. The above quotation is a phenomenological and not a sociological statement; i.e., it does not aspire to describe what holds in certain social conﬁgurations at a speciﬁc historical period. On the contrary, it refers to a feature that, in his view, characterizes being. Given this, it is obvious that the speciﬁc conception of goodness as deﬁcit, pertaining to certain cultures or Lebensformen, is pronounced by Levinas as a tendency of being as such. To the extent that liberalist theory and society (or versions of them) hold such a (mis)conception of goodness, they appear to be the true mirroring of ontology, the accurate mapping of being. Thereby being becomes their proper territory.

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Objectivation is, for Levinas, by deﬁnition complicit, and thus he continues a long tradition of incrimination of the thetic moment. Such incrimination underlies the non-nuanced reading of economy and its reduction to one single kind (with variations that differ in degree): strategicality. Consequently, whatever is not ethics (e.g., epistemology, representation, and order), due to its belonging to, or depending on, ontology, carries along the burden of an economy always thought through as strategicality. From his initial prioritization of ethics over ontology, Levinas concludes that “it is through the condition of being hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity—even the little there is, even the simple “After you sir” (1981, 117). As Chinnery argues, statements of this kind can make sense “only when responsibility is seen to precede subjectivity” (2003, 12). What kind of subjectivity is preceded, however? And why must ethics be prior to ontology? What does it mean for pardon to be possible only when the thetic constitution of the subject is disrupted by the command of the other? What is presupposed is that responsibility is intrinsically antipodic to subjectivity, since the latter is always already violent to otherness. Ontology, as the realm of subjectivity, is qualitatively different from ethics, and the latter must be granted priority over it. Regarding pardon as an ethical gesture, the above mean that all economy is suspended when the act of forgiving emanates from the unconditional subjection of the I to the other. Asymmetry, economy, and forgiveness are connected by the assumption that any symmetry is complicit in contractuality and serves the economy of exchange. I cannot “insist that the other be equivalently responsible for me or for yet another other without falling back into the violence of imposing the particularity of my interpretative framework upon the other, that which the face precisely prohibits” (Dudiak 2001, 409). My expectation, prior to granting pardon, that the other ask for it or truly repent, or my refusal to forgive an unforgivable act, place me in a position of sovereignty and economic control of the other. Thus, for many readers, forgiveness in a Levinasian context appears as an act of absolute and unconditional goodness, a pure absolution or suspension of judgment passed on the other (we shall see below that this does not account accurately for Levinas’s various discussions of forgiveness). In a school setting, some might think, such a break with ontology would entail a teacher-pupil model relation of lenience and generosity, a reforming rather than a punitive stance toward the young, a cultivation of a culture of forgiveness and Gelassenheit (letting-be). Elsewhere (Papastephanou 2003), I have attempted to unveil the economies which operate even in forgiving the unforgivable presented by Derrida as the case par excellence of an asymmetrical and unconditional act beyond ontology. There I have also examined the surplus of the notion of forgiveness in need of educational accommodation which can neither be canalized in the monological standpoint of the unconditional, nor left to the religious and/or the liberalist educational

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framework. As I see it, a unilateral gesture of forgiveness is indeed a desirable asymmetrical act chieﬂy when it appears as a request coming from the wrongdoer. In this way, it reﬂects an ethical responsibility to the other and not a surreptitious economy of the kind I described in “Forgiving and requesting forgiveness” (2003), and is associated with granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer even if such forgiveness is not asked. Here I shall show that Levinas’s position on forgiveness is far more complex than the fashionable reading of it as an unconditional act, and far more educationally fertile than the views which concentrate on the wronged who grants forgiveness. But, at the same time, I shall examine how the underlying incrimination of ontology causes contradictions and difﬁculties which call for a cautious and critical employment of the Levinasian insights on pardon and the way they could shape educational consciousness and discourse.

LEVINAS AND THE ISSUE OF FORGIVENESS In “Toward the Other,” a Talmudic reading dating from 1963, Levinas (1990) discusses two kinds of forgiveness: one which involves the wrongdoer and God, and another which concerns transgressions against other people. A ﬁrst salient educational beneﬁt is that pardon here is not understood as something one learns simply to grant oneself and others, as many curricula seem to suggest (White 2002), but rather as a profound occurrence of ethical and existential contemplation on the part of a wrongdoer. Let us examine this in more detail. A large part of the Levinasian analysis concerns the following excerpt from the Mishna: “The transgressions of man toward God are forgiven him by the Day of Atonement; the transgressions against other people are not forgiven him by the Day of Atonement if he has not ﬁrst appeased the other person” (Levinas 1990, 12). At ﬁrst sight, this seems to go against the confessional culture which has often surrounded the notion of forgiveness. The intersubjective frame (by this I do not mean “interhuman,” which is the frame Levinas associates with ethics rather than ontology) of forgiveness is redeemed from the monological focus on the sinner and her or his “inner” struggle. But Levinas would take such redemption as a hasty interpretation that Judaism values social morality more than ritual practices. Thus the turn to the intersubjective is momentary and does not aim to undo the hierarchization of the monological as primary. “The fact that forgiveness for ritual offenses depends only on penitence—and consequently only on us—may project a new light on the meaning of ritual practices” (16). Levinas restores the priority of ritual practices over what he considers “social morality” as follows: [P]erhaps the ills that must heal inside the Soul without the help of others are precisely the most profound ills, and that even where our social faults are concerned, once our neighbor has been appeased, the most

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Marianna Papastephanou difﬁcult part remains to be done. In doing wrong toward God, have we not undermined the moral conscience as moral conscience? (1990, 17)

To Levinas, the conclusiveness of the model “wrong, wronged, wrongdoer, requested and granted forgiveness,” this sort of “happy ending” of intersubjectivity blocks the ethical and existential inﬁnite questioning of the self. True, in such a model, pardon often becomes a performed duty which restores the subject and staves off risks, thus serving conﬂict resolution and the good function of social order. Educating the young to forgive and ask for forgiveness may appear as a useful tool of expedience for adaptation and survival in a world that cares more about consequences than about genuine feelings, more about reward and punishment than moral conscience and responsibility to the other. Levinas’s work has a unique power to draw the educator’s attention to the dangers of intersubjectivity and its modes of paciﬁcation. This opens a space for two sets of implications: (a) learning to forgive, or learning to request forgiveness, when deprived of other-oriented contemplation, may lead to strategicality, but (b) does this necessarily entail that the intersubjective is per se always already committed to strategicality whereas the monological is per se an ethical openness to inﬁnite responsibility? Acknowledging (a) and trying to combat it by combining intersubjectivity and monologism in a harmonious and never-ending play is not only different from (b), but also incompatible with it, for it leaves room for the consideration of the good side of intersubjectivity and the bad side of monologism. Instead, Levinas seems to accept (b), explain (a) via (b), and regard (a) as a corollary of (b). For a further analysis of Levinas’s afﬁrmative answer to (b), I leave the Talmudic reading for a while and turn to an earlier Levinasian text, “The ego and the totality.” The fault that can be pardoned, separated from all magical signiﬁcation, is either intentional, or turns out upon analysis to have been intentional. Whence the primary value given to the examination of conscience. But pardon presupposes, above all, that the one wronged received all the evil of the wrong, and consequently disposes completely of the right to pardon. By contrast with mystical fault, committed by the involuntary violation of a taboo, the idea of an intentional fault, open to pardon, represents a deﬁnite spiritual advance. But the conditions for legitimate pardon are only realized in a society of beings that are totally present to each other, in an intimate society. . . . In fact, such a society is dual, a society of me and you. . . . A third man essentially disturbs this intimacy: the wrong I did to you I can recognize to have proceeded entirely from my intentions; but this recognition is then found to be objectively falsiﬁed by reason of your relations with him, which remain hidden from me, since I am in my turn excluded from the unique privilege of your intimacy. If I recognize the wrong I did you, I can, even by my act of repentance, injure the third person. (1987, 30; italics in the original)

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The intimate society of the intersubjective creates a pacifying deliberation regarding the freedom at stake and effects the absolution of the guilty subject, thus annulling her or his responsibility and inﬁnite subjection to the command of the other. The ego, in dialogue, would thus recover, be it only after the fact, through pardon, its solitary sovereignty. The ego, capable of forgetting its past and renewing itself, but which by its action creates the irreparable, would through the pardon be liberated from this last shackle to freedom, since the only victim of its act would or could consent to forget it. Absolved, the ego would become again absolute. (Levinas 1987, 30–31) It is true that receiving forgiveness may come from a relation of love which excludes justice. It may also restore the subject to a position of sovereignty. Both repercussions are undesirable from a Levinasian point of view and both can serve as correctives of educational standpoints which emphasize intersubjectivity, ignoring the depths of a conﬂict and, ultimately, the depths of justice. However, despite Levinas’s general emphasis on the phenomenology of the concrete, his reticence and suspicion of criteriology and categorization affects precisely the justice to the concrete, the recognition of the multiplicity of instances of forgiveness. Is it not possible to have both love and also justice? Why should we hold that the circle closing in granting pardon within an intimate society inevitably leaves inﬁnity out? Can this be safely generalized to apply to all instances of intersubjective reconciliatory pardon? This would be problematic, especially in a discourse such as the educational one, where discerning the individual case and judging it in its irreducible singularity is crucial for the cultivation of a sense of justice in schools. Students must learn that there are cases where one’s perpetual preoccupation with one’s past and forgiven fault ends up in an egocentric self-analysis. The act of genuinely requesting and granting forgiveness is itself often a lesson, and the openness to inﬁnity comes from the capacity of a well-taught experience to be reactivated or modiﬁed—and even discarded—in ever new contexts. But a lesson over which one lingers blocks new learning and a guilt which is perpetually rehearsed in one’s mind becomes the cause of ever new wrongs. To exemplify my argument about how time operates in the order of pardon in a way that reconciles totality and inﬁnity, I shall interpolate here a passage from Shakespeare’s King Lear (1983).5 Upon the King’s asking his daughter, Cordelia, for forgiveness (albeit somehow indirectly), he receives the response “no cause, no cause” which puts the past to rest. Lear. Be your tears wet? Yes, faith! I pray, weep not. If you have poison for me I will drink it. I know you do not love me, for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

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Marianna Papastephanou You have some cause; they have not. Cordelia. No cause, no cause. (4.7.71–77)

From a Levinasian point of view, we may approach this case as an instance of pardon within an intimate society of love where the subject is freed from his guilt and restored as a sovereign self. In Totality and Inﬁnity (2004), while discussing fecundity and pardon (as I see it, in a manner that echoes the onto-theology of the Fall), Levinas examines the relation to time. “Pardon refers to the instant elapsed; it permits the subject who had committed himself in a past instant to be as though that instant had not past on, to be as though he had not committed himself” (283). This may apply to both subjects, the forgiver and the forgiven, but, I argue, the signiﬁcance it has for the forgiver is missing in Levinas’s account and this omission reveals once again the downplaying of intersubjective reconciliatory ethics. Within Levinasian ethics as well as within liberalist educational accounts of forgiveness as a “no problem” attitude, Cordelia’s “no cause” may be interpreted as an act of love which operates within an “intimate society” and creates the conditions for the continuation of a relationship. Or, it may be interpreted as a refusal to judge the other and a decision to give him a chance for an absolute recommencement of the relationship: Active in a stronger sense than forgetting, which does not concern the reality of the event forgotten, pardon acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it. But in addition, forgetting nulliﬁes the relations with the past, whereas pardon conserves the past pardoned in the puriﬁed present. The pardoned being is not the innocent being. (Levinas 2004, 283) But I believe that when we turn to the position of the forgiver who responds to a plea for forgiveness, there is more in the connection with time than recommencement or puriﬁcation of the past. To me, Cordelia’s “no cause” sounds not so much as erasure or puriﬁcation of the past but as a particular dissociation from the causality of the harm done. The harm is no longer operative; it no longer produces effects. This is usually forgotten in educational discourses which, either inﬂuenced by Levinas or operating within liberalism, overlook issues of power (or limit them to politics in yet another binarism) working in ethics. Sincere apologies free the hurt being from the grip of the traumatic indifference of the powerful other and constitute a subjection of the wrongdoer which may bring about her or his freedom from the negative power her or his indifference exerts on the wronged. This isostheneia (Papastephanou 2003), the symmetry achieved momentarily in requesting forgiveness and forgiving, though not always relevant and adaptable to the complexity of the issue of pardon, has often more afﬁnity with inﬁnity (and remoteness from totality) than defenders of the ethics versus ontology binarism would be ready to admit.

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The reason why such an admission could not be easily made by defenders of the incrimination of ontology is that, as we have seen, according to them, the intersubjective is burdened with economy and strategicality: even in its purest forms, it represents an intimate society which excludes justice. In Edith Wyschogrod’s words, we can only be guilty or innocent with respect to another, either a person or a principle that transcends the self. Guilt or innocence presupposes a free being who can suffer the consequences for an injury that he has inﬂicted upon another. The possibility of retributive justice, the fact that we can suffer as the result of a wrong inﬂicted upon another, makes our separation from the totality incomplete. (2000, 106) But divine transcendence brings the overcoming of the incompleteness of our separation from the totality. Then, “we are guilty or innocent not in the eyes of an aggrieved party but in God’s eyes alone; that is, we maintain our character as separated being, for guilt is not then conferred retributively by the Other within the totality” (Wyschogrod 2000, 106). However, apart from the many questions this religious framework of pardon and justice raises regarding the very relation of religious discourse with economy itself, there are also other problems in these Levinasian insights. A usual discomfort with such an account of pardon comes due to what is perceived as an unattainable height in its absolute demands on the subject. My concern is the opposite. In this account I perceive the danger of a quite rigorist and inelastic ethics which, by holding intersubjectivity as always incriminated and suspect, restores the absolute and solitary subject—this time through monologism. The guilty self may afﬁrm the operations of ontology and let them be, overlooking the necessity to appease the other and let oneself be entangled in the intimate society of the two, thinking always of its incomplete break with totality. Finally, the guilty self may seek in introspection the transcendence of the order of pardon. This may lead to an eternal self-questioning of the wrongdoer that borders with the attitude White (2002) describes as self-indulgence and constitutes one of the most blatant absolutizations of the ego. Likewise, it may lead subjects to become more judgmental, always searching for hidden economies in their relations, often adapting facts to the theory, even in cases where the basis for this is not factually clear and could have a different interpretation. Eventually, the emphasis on the impossibility of aneconomy may lead to a kind of emotional parsimony. Levinasian theory needs the economy of criteriology and separation of kinds and cases where pardon might be relevant in order to avoid these implications. In short, it needs ontology and epistemology regardless of their inadequacies and faults, and requires them in a version that is not by deﬁnition indicted, i.e., not as a necessary evil. It needs them in order to discern what falls within the order of pardon or not, in order to distinguish the cases where inﬁnite awareness of guilt rightly transcends the appeasing role of the

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“let bygones be bygones” attitude and the cases where it borders with selfindulgence. Consider the following Levinasian statement, ﬁrst with regard to genocide, and then with regard to a mild quarrel among school peers. The objective meaning of my action overrides its intentional signiﬁcation; I am properly speaking no longer an I, I am the bearer of a fault which is not reﬂected in my intentions. I am objectively guilty, and my piety cannot cleanse me of this. “I did not will that” is the paltry excuse with which the “I,” which holds itself back in the intimate society where it was fully free, continues to exculpate itself of a fault that is unpardonable not because it exceeds pardon, but because it does not belong to the order of pardon. (1987, 31; italics in the original) But the most convincing indirect and unwitting defense of the necessity and possibility of a non-egological ontology can be drawn from the rest of the Talmudic reading itself. In that text, there are instances where the discourse on the inﬁnite responsibility to the other, which often leads commentators to conﬂate Levinas’s position of forgiveness with that of Derrida’s forgiving the unforgivable, recedes to let ontology speak the ﬁnal word. Some of these instances will be examined presently. As I interpret Levinas, the emphasis on monological responsibility of the I to the other does not ﬁnd him unaware of the risks involved in the incrimination of intersubjectivity. But his attempt to acknowledge the role of the intersubjective implicitly unveils the signiﬁcance of conditionality in a way that renders Levinas’s conception of pardon (in the Talmudic readings) almost oppositional to Derrida’s account of forgiveness as unconditional. It is . . . a very serious matter to offend another man. Forgiveness depends on him. One ﬁnds oneself in his hands. There can be no forgiveness that the guilty party has not sought! The guilty party must recognize his fault. The offended party must want to receive the entreaties of the offending party. Further, no person can forgive if forgiveness has not been asked him by the offender, if the guilty party has not tried to appease the offended. (Levinas 1990, 19; emphasis added) Levinas considers a biblical verse which contradicts this (offering itself to a Hegelian interpretation that God will forgive anyway even if people do not, because human offenses and sorrows are nothing in the face of Eternity). Levinas rejects the Hegel-inspired interpretation as follows and gives a coup de grâce on those views, political or educational, which treat conﬂict resolution lightly or apply the logic of Realpolitik on world affairs. [T]he offended individual must always be appeased, approached, and consoled individually. God’s forgiveness—or the forgiveness of history—cannot be given if the individual has not been honored. God is

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perhaps nothing but this permanent refusal of a history which would come to terms with our private tears. Peace does not dwell in a world without consolations. (Levinas 1990, 20) Here, forgiveness is conditional on appeasement, on being asked, on a restoration of a relationship Derrida sees, by contrast, as “an ordinary forgiveness that is anything but forgiveness” (2001, 49), and as an affront to the heterogeneity of forgiveness. Could there be an interpretation of this passage which could dissociate this particular description of the ethical I-thou from intersubjectivity and reciprocity? I believe not, because Levinas, in the effort to do justice to ethicized existentialist concerns about the irreducibility of the uniqueness of the other, reintroduces conditionality in pardon. Evidently, it is not a conditionality and an economy of mutual interest and proﬁt, but it is exactly this difference which proves the need to overcome the incrimination of ontology.6 Ontology, the order of knowing, and reciprocity are not exhausted in the meaning that individualist cultures have consolidated for them. Any phenomenology which overlooks this, if thought through to its depth, appears as sociology mistaking itself for phenomenology and, in this way, turns out to be onto-theology (i.e., an account of being which arrests time and, instead of harkening to being, projects to it its own theoria). Thus, it is the Levinasian ideas themselves which are better served by a different account of ontology, and education can better accommodate them if it starts thinking of itself and its relation to ontology differently.7 Could it be that the above Levinasian accommodation of conditionality is only a matter of perspective? That is to say, when the ethical perspective is that of the wronged, the granting of forgiveness is unconditional, but when the perspective is that of the spectator, or the Third, the judge, or the wrongdoer judging herself or himself, conditionality enters the picture. Pupils must feel the absolute command of the other and absolve her or him; not out of duty but out of their vigilant abstinence from judgments which place the other in the category of the guilty and the obligated, thus obscuring the pupils’ primary and unconditional obligation to the other. At ﬁrst sight, this would reconcile Levinas’s above comment (which accommodates conditionality) with his later position in Beyond essence, as well as Derrida’s absolute view of pardon as an act of madness (i.e., transcending all order). Thought more deeply, however, this move would undermine the priority of ethics over ontology, since it would conﬁne the ethical perspective to the human realm alone and elevate conditionality qua segment of ontology to the divine realm. If God’s forgiveness cannot be given if the individual has not been honored, then the conditionality of God’s “if” is the restoration of ontology par excellence. Hence, even with such an interpretation, we see that the wholesale incrimination of ontology cannot be rescued, and when it operates it causes intractable problems. Nevertheless, the rest of the Talmudic reading undermines the possibility of an interpretation such as the latter, while proving that the priority

150 Marianna Papastephanou of ethics over ontology cannot be consistently defended even in Levinas, since the inﬁnite and unconditional responsibility to the other is ultimately conditional on who the other is. Consider the following: Levinas discusses a narrative about a man, Rab, who, while commenting on a text before an audience, was repeatedly interrupted by eminent people who came in, and he had to begin again. When another man (who was not as prestigious as the previous ones) came in, Rab reacted abruptly and refused to go back to the beginning. The other man never forgave him, although Rab kept requesting forgiveness for thirteen Yom Kippur eves. In interpreting the story, Levinas asks about the sincerity of the request. “Is the offender capable of measuring the extent of his wrongdoing? Do we know the limits of our ill will? And do we therefore truly have the capacity to ask for forgiveness?” (1990, 25). Further, Levinas explains why the other man did not forgive Rab: because he had a dream that revealed to him Rab’s secret ambition to take his place in the academy. “Rab, without knowing it, wished to take his master’s place. Given this, Rab Hanina could not forgive. How is one to forgive if the offender, unaware of his deeper thoughts, cannot ask for forgiveness?” (1990, 25). I ﬁnd this Levinasian interpretation signiﬁcant ﬁrst because the case concerns a teacher-pupil relation. How would a Levinasian teacher react to a request to forgive this kind of fault, if we take the particulars of the case literally? Assuming that true forgiveness is an unconditional act of ethics freed from ontology and epistemology, who the wrongdoer is should not be an issue. By contrast, Levinas presupposes ontology here—in fact, an ontology of the most monological and totalizing form. Pure exteriority is suspended and the inwardness of the other is revealed not in dialogue but apocalyptically, in a dream. What the wronged knows about the other, the wrongdoer, is more than what the wrongdoer knows about himself, and the act of forgiving is withheld precisely on the grounds of that knowledge. The dream revelation of the other’s inwardness constitutes a very violent ontology, for the knowledge of the other lies within the knower’s self. The master simply refuses to forgive without attempting to inﬂuence the pupil, to confront the pupil’s lack of self-knowledge, and to help him combat his vain ambition. Is this a letting-be? In a way it is, because the teacher refrains from the challenge to mould his pupil, to treat him as pliable material. He refuses to see that the pupil may be open to change through education, and the only edifying experience he offers him is the very refusal to forgive him and the possible self-questioning this could cause in the wrongdoer’s inner world. But is this letting-be not, at the same time, equal to treating the other as one who is beyond the pale and inherently bad? The master who does not forgive the pupil, and in this way refuses the entanglement and inﬂuence of dialogue, seems to hold an assumption of intrinsically evil behavior of the wrongdoer which cannot be eradicated through the educational relationship itself. Several questions arise regarding why the possibility of the very act of refusing forgiveness that could have a reforming

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effect on the pupil does not tempt the master to reconsider the pupil’s plea, repeated for thirteen Yom Kippur eves. What does this sort of perennialism mean for education? As we saw above, Levinas argues that “perhaps the ills that must heal inside the Soul without the help of others are precisely the most profound ills,” but can any ills heal without the help of others, i.e., foro interno, if they are to heal at all? Is education (understood not as adaptation or preparation for social roles but as conducive of a perfectionist ideal) not precisely about opening the subject to the reforming help of otherness in all its forms, about undoing closure and denying the essentialism of the inherent and non-circumventible guilt? Unlike what is usually thought of as his position on forgiveness, Levinas sets two conditions for the granting of pardon. “There are two conditions for forgiveness: the good will of the offended party and the full awareness of the offender” (1990, 25). He comments on Rab Hanina’s refusal to forgive: “The aggressiveness of the offender is perhaps his very unconsciousness. Aggression is the lack of attention par excellence. In essence, forgiveness would be impossible” (25). What is the extent to which a pedagogical relationship can intervene and remedy precisely this lack of attention? What does the analysis of the Rab narrative teach us about the educational treatment of “unconsciousness“? Can the educational response to such otherness be unconsciousness itself or a parting of ways? Then again, “one can, if pressed to the limit, forgive the one who has spoken unconsciously. But it is very difﬁcult to forgive Rab, who was fully aware and destined for a great fate, which was prophetically revealed to his master” (25). Levinas’s next association is no surprise. “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difﬁcult to forgive. It is difﬁcult to forgive Heidegger. If Hanina could not forgive the just and humane Rab because he was also the brilliant Rab, it is even less possible to forgive Heidegger” (25). Contra Derrida’s view of forgiveness as forgiving the unforgivable, the Levinas of the Talmudic readings indirectly accommodates ontological and epistemological responses to questions about who the other is as conditions of the subject’s ethical responsibility to the other. Although I believe that the particular responses suffer from essentialism and rigorism, I have argued that, formally, their being situated in Levinasian discourse is, in a negative way, quite revealing of the task that a new phenomenology should face, i.e., going beyond the incrimination of ontology. The following is a ﬁnal case from the Talmudic readings which shows how Levinasian ethics is adulterated by the incrimination of ontology. Levinas refers to the narrative of the Gibeonites and David. The Gibeonites were wronged by King Saul and sought revenge: “probably all the greatness of what is called the Old Testament consists in remaining sensitive to spilled blood, in being incapable of refusing this justice to whoever cries for vengeance, in feeling horror for the pardon granted by proxy when the right to forgive belongs only to the victim” (1990, 26). The Gibeonites demand that Saul’s sons be given to them for execution, and King David succumbs to the

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request and delivers the innocent princes to the wronged people. “The Talmud teaches that one cannot force men who demand retaliatory justice to grant forgiveness. It teaches us that Israel does not deny this imprescriptible right to others. But it teaches us above all that if Israel recognizes this right, it does not ask it for itself and that to be Israel is not to claim it” (28–29). Still, there are many problems with this unconditional sensitivity to spilled blood, given that the victims of the retaliation were innocent. (To grasp some of those problems, one needs only associate this idea of the “imprescriptible right” to demand retaliatory justice with 9/11, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and other historico-political events.) Only onto-theological (i.e., resonating the Fall) and essentialist transference of guilt could possibly justify the concession of revenge taken at the expense of innocent victims. Is nemesis transferable to the next generation? Does ontology involve by deﬁnition the eye-for-an-eye, or is the latter only an “instance” (and I mean this not temporally but qualitatively) which should not be absolutized? In other words, should we not be more ontologically parsimonious regarding evil than Levinasian and other similar insights allow? Toward the end of the Talmudic readings we read that what was offered there was a “somber vision of the human condition and of Justice itself” (emphasis added). What “rises above the cruelty inherent in rational order (and perhaps simply in Order)” is only “individual sacriﬁce, which, amidst the dialectical rebounds of justice and all its contradictory about-faces, without any hesitation, ﬁnds a straight and sure way” (Levinas 1990, 29; emphasis added). Levinas’s vocabulary makes it clear, once again, the incrimination of ontology and how this incrimination accommodates what most of the once-called “bourgeois philosophy” has largely taken for granted: human strategicality and insensitivity. Is it not that vengeance is acknowledged as a right (albeit an imprescriptible one) belonging to earthly justice and ontology? Is this not an onto-theological accommodation of the multiple and contradictory accounts of Abrahamic situations of forgiveness in two separate spheres (ontology and ethics) so as to ﬁnd there their proper space and mirror the condition humaine and its impossible qua ineffable transcendence?

CONCLUSION Levinas’s ethics challenges some dominant liberalist assumptions about subjectivity and its cultivation in schools. Levinasian concrete phenomenological analyses of human lived experience can offer educational discourse an unprecedented depth. However, as I have argued in this essay using the issue of forgiveness, the polemics of ontology and the irenics of ethics establish a rigid binarism which, ultimately, concedes to the liberalist worldview the supposedly accurate depiction of the human condition. Liberalism then appears fairly appropriate to deal with matters which fall in the ontological province, but blind to grasp the excess, precisely because if

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excess were graspable it would cease to be excess. There is always something beyond ontology which pervades, disrupts, and unsettles it, and which can be captured through ethics. Yet this incrimination of ontology and prioritization of ethics turns out to block the possibility for a reworking of ontological accounts, leaving liberalism unshaken in its theoretical and cultural predominance as if it were really the closest approximation of the human condition. I have argued here, by contrast, that precisely because ontology cannot be exhausted in contractuality, egology and strategicality, forgiveness is marked by an irreducible complexity which undermines all attempts to reduce it to one single model, e.g., of unconditional forgiveness versus an economic reconciliatory exchange. Reciprocity, criteriology, and economy are some of the notions which require reformulation and examination from a standpoint which is critical but not totally dismissive of liberalism. Then we can have an ethics as radical as the Levinasian one without the incrimination of ontology, while avoiding some of the sense of absolutism and impossibility which makes some educators consider Levinas’s ethics educationally vague and inoperative. Applied to the issue of forgiveness, this means that we perceive the dangers of the intersubjective frame of thought and the possibility that, in certain instances, it may work against a truly ethical stance. But it also means that, by rejecting its wholesale indictment, we give it a new dynamic and allow its multiplicity to surface in the plurality of voices, relations, and events in schools. We acknowledge the differing signiﬁcance forgiveness acquires if seen from the perspective of the forgiver and the forgiven, the inherent complexity of the notion of pardon, irreducible to one single model such as the unconditional, and the power at play when pardon is the subject of moral and existential choice. Overall, Levinas has shown educators that ethics does not begin in the warm security of a prearranged and airtight liberalist setting of law, order, and predictability of the other’s moves, but in the unilateral subjection of the I to the command of the other. Both positions have risks but, to Levinas, the risk of the latter is beautiful (Levinas 1981). We may totally agree with him and struggle to orient education accordingly. But we may also add that there is a “beautiful risk” not only in the recognition of my unilateral responsibility and subjection to the other, but also in the assumption that ontology and knowledge are not by deﬁnition exhaustively complicit in violence. I believe that this is a beautiful risk that occidental thinking has yet to take. NOTES 1. See for instance John White’s defense of liberalism and the responses from Wilfred Carr, Richard Smith, Paul Standish and Terence H. McLaughlin (2003). 2. See for instance the excellent use of Levinas’s ethics in Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (1998) and Standish (2001). 3. For a more detailed and elaborate exposition of this argument, see Papastephanou (2005).

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4. On the Levinasian term ecology, see Jeffrey Dudiak (2001, 405). 5. For this example I am indebted to Paul Standish. 6. Evidently, this does not mean simply that the language of ontology is indispensable to Levinasian ethics as Derrida argued in “Violence and metaphysics” (1978). It is not that ethics is contaminated with ontology but rather that there is a kind of epistemology and ontology which is compatible with ethics. 7. This is not an attempt simply to exculpate ontology. However, what is required here is a detailed alternative account of how ontology could be conceived, which goes beyond the scope and limits of this essay.

REFERENCES Blake, N., P. Smeyers, R. Smith, and P. Standish. 1998. Thinking again: Education after postmodernism. Westport and London: Bergin & Garvey. Chinnery, A. 2003. Aesthetics of surrender: Levinas and the disruption of agency in moral education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22 (1):5–17. Derrida, J. 1978. Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Writing and difference, trans. A Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. London: Routledge. Dudiak, J. 2001. The intrigue of ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1990. Nine Talmudic readings. Trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Papastephanou, M. 2003. Forgiving and requesting forgiveness. Journal of Philosophy of Education 37 (3):503–24. ———. 2005. Onto-theology and the incrimination of ontology in Levinas and Derrida. Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (4):461–85. Shakespeare, W. 1983. King Lear. Ed. G. K. Hunter. Middlesex: Penguin. Standish, P. 2001. Ethics before equality: Moral education after Levinas. Journal of Moral Education 30 (4):339–47. White, P. 2002. What should we teach children about forgiveness? Journal of Philosophy of Education 36 (1):57–67. Wyschogrod, E. 2000. Emmanuel Levinas: The problem of ethical metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press.

10 Thinking Educational Ethics with Levinas and Jonas Eirick Prairat1

The object of this text is to think an educational ethics at a time when the Law is gaining ground and tends to regulate relationships in educational places increasingly often. In the ﬁrst part of this text, I show that traditional ethics has been thought as an ethics of exemplarity, of responsibility, in the sense that to respond means to be responsible to oneself and for one’s actions before the Other. Here, “to respond” has an eminently juridical meaning because it is essentially a relation of self to self. In the second part, we listen to Emmanuel Levinas and also to Hans Jonas on how responsibility takes an ethical tone and becomes responsibility for the Other. Finally, in the third and last part, largely inspired by Levinas’s thought, I outline an ethics for educators.

AN ETHICS OF EXEMPLARITY

To Respond for Oneself To illustrate traditional educational ethics, there is no better example than the following excerpt borrowed from Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 book titled Stalky & Co. The story unfolds in an English school at the end of the nineteenth century. Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle, three boarders in this institution, have managed to ingratiate themselves to a certain Dabney, a retired colonel and the owner of a vast estate adjacent to the school. To be more precise, they have obtained the authorization to come and go freely on his property. They take advantage of this to construct a hut where they meet on a regular basis to read, talk, and smoke with complete impunity. With complete impunity, because they are also authorized to leave the school since they are members of the Natural History Society. This distinction gives them some privileges which they use cunningly. Very soon the teachers and school supervisors come to suspect that our three delinquents are not really interested in the activities of the Natural History Society, and that they take advantage of their privileges to indulge in petty pleasures, guilty in terms of the rules and regulations of the institution. One day, the teachers decide to follow them to make sure, and even take the

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liberty to trespass on Colonel Dabney’s property. Things go wrong as soon those teachers ﬁnd themselves facing the old colonel and his gardeners and have to justify their illegal presence on the grounds. Let us read Kipling—it is most interesting; let me specify that Prout is one of the teachers: “I stand in loco parentis.” Prout’s deep voice was added to the discussion. They could hear him pant. “F’what?” Colonel Dabney was growing more and more Irish. “I’m responsible for the boys under my charge.” “Ye are, are ye? Then all I can say is that ye set them a very bad example—a dam’ bad example, if I may say so. I do not own your boys. I’ve not seen your boys, an’ I tell you that if there was a boy grinnin’ in every bush on the place still ye’ve no shadow of a right here, comin’ up from the combe that way, an’ frightenin’ everything in it. Don’t attempt to deny it. Ye did. Ye should have come to the Lodge an’ seen me like Christians, instead of chasin’ your dam’ boys through the length and breadth of my covers. In loco parentis ye are? Well, I’ve not forgotten my Latin either, an’ I’ll say to you: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ If the masters trespass, how can we blame the boys?” (1929, 52–53) “‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Word for word, who keeps the keepers? Who can vouch for those who must vouch? Who can vouch for those who have the power to sanction? For a long time, educational ethics considered itself as an ethics of exemplarity. The master was supposed to be exacting with respect to himself, without exception, beyond reproach. He was supposed to take responsibility for his decisions and actions, in sum, to be responsible. If here we prefer to talk about ethics of exemplarity rather than about ethics of responsibility, it is precisely because, according to Levinas and Jonas, the concept of responsibility is going to distance itself from its juridical origins to come to mean an ethical stance which no longer owes anything to the relation of the self to the self. But before we show the relevance and fecundity of the Levinasian and Jonasian analyses, it is necessary to review the ﬁrst meaning of the concept of responsibility and to show its originary roots in law.

The Word and the Concept As early as the Middle Ages, the adjective “responsible” is sometimes understood to mean “resistant” (e.g., a castle “responsible to violent assaults”), sometimes to designate he or she for whom one is responsible (e.g., “justiciable and responsible”). As for the substantive “responsibility,” it appeared much later since the earliest mentions of this word are reported between 1783 and 1788 (Henriot 1990). Henriot (1977) notes that the appearance of this term coincided with the interests of jurists

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regarding the rule of indemnity for losses or damages suffered. The concept of responsibility is ﬁrst and foremost a legal concept. But if the word is recent, the concept is less so. Responsibility comes from the Latin verb spondeo which means “to act as guarantor,” or “to make a solemn promise.” More precisely, respondeo means “to respond to an appeal or a notice.” A person, a standard, or an institution formally notiﬁes us to respond, and we have what it takes to respond, as we say of he or she who is sufﬁciently competent, who has enough relations and resources to face adversity. The concept of responsibility directs us to three distinct ideas: that of status (parents are said to be responsible for their children), that of capabilities (here the idea of responsibility is associated with the idea of discrimination), and lastly, that of obligation (in the sense that each individual must answer for his or her actions to the extent that he or she committed them). This last meaning of the word, its commonly accepted meaning, is not a modern idea. At what point in time did the idea of holding the individual responsible for his or her action reveal itself as plausible and eventually believable? In ancient Greece, at the time of the Epics, explanations of human actions by fate, the Gods, or the daemon were still largely prevalent. It seems that the turn to an interpretation of actions in terms of responsibility was brought about with the tragedy. Cassirer (1972) locates this transition precisely in Eschyle’s Agamemnon, in particular when Clytemnestra attempts to exonerate herself from the assassination of her spouse by invoking the malediction which weighs on her family. There operates the confrontation between two models of interpretation of the action. The Chorus rejects Clytemnestra’s deterministic arguments in favor of the thesis of responsibilization: “No one can exonerate you of your crime.” Following Cassirer, Genard shows how this interpretative inversion is accompanied by language modiﬁcations and institutional transformations. “The transformations in the interpretation of the action—beyond their inscription in linguistic forms—each time accompany, justify, or call for institutional transformations, even though the evolution of the institutions seems to induce new interpretative modes which they set in motion, as it were, without the full usage yet of the reﬂective and cognitive resources which they are nevertheless generating” (Genard 1999, 26). There is no inﬂection in the modes of thinking which do not register in a complex dialectic where the structures of a lived world (i.e., the spontaneous manners of conceiving social relations), the modalities of language, and institutional mutations call to one another and involve themselves in a dynamic way. The permanence of an idea calls for an objectivation in the realms of the symbolic and institutional. Conversely, one can afﬁrm that the conjunction of the linguistic processes and institutional procedures sustains existing modes of thinking or creates new ones. Linguistic structures, interpretive forms and institutional practices must be thought together; language, thought, and practices must be tied together.

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A Juridical Concept The concept of responsibility, in the sense of having to answer for one’s actions, has not been of great interest to philosophers. “We are surprised,” Paul Ricoeur notes (2000, 11), “that a term with such a ﬁrm sense on the juridical plane should be of such recent origin and not really well established within the philosophical tradition.” In the context of law, responsibility points to the fact that a legal subject (physical or moral) is held accountable for certain obligations, as a consequence of certain actions he or she is known to have performed. The nature of this responsibility is either contractual, i.e., resulting from a failure to comply with a legal agreement, or delictual, i.e., determined by a deviant attitude resulting in some damage to another person. In French law, it is the distinction between civil responsibility and criminal responsibility; the former refers to the damage caused, the latter, to a deliberate violation of the law. In civil law, causality prevails; one attempts to establish a link of causation and consequence between the act and the damage done, the intention being of little importance. On the contrary, in criminal law, it is the act itself which is considered, for its motivation more than for its consequences. If in the case of civil law, causality alone is sufﬁcient to establish responsibility, in matters of criminal law, responsibility is measured according to the situation, circumstances, and intentions. That being said, in both cases it is a matter of being responsible before the other for one’s actions and their consequences. In the ethical perspective Levinas opens, the relation to alterity is no longer a face-to-face relation, but a relation of solicitude. The Levinasian responsibility is a responsibility for the other, which means it is not a matter of responding before the other for actions we have committed, but of responding before the other for the other’s errors and sufferings. I am called upon, as if assigned to the responsibility. Nietzche’s will to will, Sartre’s authentic decision, or Heidegger’s authenticity establishes the primacy of the subject. Alterity does not carry in itself a claim concerning me, but it receives its signiﬁcance because it is the object of my choice. Alterity has value only because it is elected. On the contrary, the ethics of responsibility posits the primacy and transcendence of the injunction. Moral responsibility is not immediately derivable from juridical responsibility because it refers us to another sociological and anthropological context. Juridical responsibility makes sense only in a sociology of reciprocity which itself unfolds against a background of dual anthropology. When the other appears to me as an autonomous will endowed with power, in order to protect myself I must reduce the prerogatives of my will. The concern about being responsible for my actions is only a way to make sure of the other, to give him or her guarantees ahead of time to disarm his or her possibly malevolent intentions. It is because the possibility of violence is fundamentally reciprocal (I can attack as much as be attacked) that going beyond it inscribes itself in a

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structure of reciprocal acknowledgement and limitation: what I concede to the other, the other must also forgo, but what I acknowledge as mine, I must also acknowledge as the other’s. The logic of reciprocity is a logic of neutralization which rests on an ambivalent anthropology: “unsocial sociability,” Kant (1991) calls it in his Idea for a universal history.2 One can escape this uncertain situation only through a reciprocal self-limitation of one’s actions and a ﬁrm decision to respond to them. In a moral perspective, the face of the Other is a face whose fragility calls for solicitude. The Other no longer appears as a will before me, as a threat which could potentially interfere with my intentions and my projects, but as a being marked with the stamp of fragility. The social realm of moral responsibility is not the world of parity and reciprocity but that of dissymmetry and fragility.

RESPONSIBILITY ACCORDING TO LEVINAS AND JONAS

A Lesson From Levinas In Levinas, the time of reciprocity is the time of multiplicity and plurality. But before that, there exists an originary time, the time of ethics. As for me, I talk about a stage of humanity which precedes reciprocity and becomes reciprocity precisely because there is a multiplicity of individuals, and because, rather than being dedicated more to the Other than to myself, I am obligated to compare the various others, that is to say, I have to reduce them to my knowledge and to myself. (Levinas 1998a, 16) Prior to the world of pluralities, prior to the world where the Other is one individual among other individuals, one citizen among other citizens, he or she is one singular ﬁgure. Levinas’s ethics is an ethics of encounter where the Other reveals himself or herself as a face. This is a central concept in Levinasian thought because the face reﬂects to us the pure contingency of the Other in his or her weakness and mortality (Levinas 2004). It is only in the later Levinas, when he distances himself from the Husserlian phenomenology, that the concept of the face appears and takes hold. In his earlier texts, Levinas is still under the spell of the concrete descriptions of phenomenology. In On escape (1935/2003), he invokes the nausea related to our impotence to be rid of being.3 Later, in Existence and existents (1947/2001), he continues to describe these psychic states which mark our being ensnared in being and reveal the solitude of existing (insomnia, fatigue, and so on). Levinas notes: “Solitude is not tragic because it is the privation of the other, but because it is shut up within the captivity of its identity” (1946–1947/1987, 57). It is not until Totality and Inﬁnity (1961/2004) that the originality of Levinasian thought unfolds.4 In this seminal work, Levinas opposes the totalizing being who assimilates and anchors us to the order

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of the same, to the Inﬁnite, to the face of the Other, to what precisely goes beyond and transcends all thought. Thus we must denounce the illusion of the scientiﬁc enterprise because the path to knowledge maintains us within the order of immanence and the limits of the being. My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of being in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in the communication of knowledge one is found beside the Other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of him. (Levinas 1985, 57) The relation to the Other and the relation to knowledge are not of the same nature. They do not have the same structure; there is no analogy to be sought, for in knowledge there is no possibility to escape oneself, but rather a movement which always brings us back to ourselves. On that point, Levinas is faithful to Kantian Idealism. Inﬁnity or the face of the Other gives itself as the trial of an overﬂowing. The encounter with the Other manifests this excess immediately. The Other escapes me; I cannot grasp and understand him but only recognize him and welcome him in his singularity. The experience of the face is pure experience with no concept. I cannot reduce him to my categories or even to my representations. The face means that the Other is still there beyond himself; in this sense, the face is neither a plastic reality, nor an empirical given. Levinas writes: I think rather that access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them. The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes one is not in social relationship with the Other. The relation with the face can surely be dominated by perception, but what is speciﬁcally the face is what cannot be reduced to that. (1985: 85–86) The relation to the Other is not a relation of knowledge, precisely because “[t]he face is present in its refusal to be contained” (Levinas 2004, 194). If the face cannot be seen, it can be heard; it speaks; it is “discourse” and “expression.” The encounter with the face of the Other is encounter with a word, a command which obliges me and assigns me to be there and to respond because it gives itself as an expression of the defenseless and of nakedness. “[T]here is an essential poverty in the face” (Levinas 1985, 86), so it is just to say that it is both transcendence and destitution, “elevation” and “poverty.” From there we see that the responsibility in question is concern for the other, solicitude and thoughtful welcoming. We are far from juridical formulations because the Other concerns me before any debt

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I might have contracted regarding him or her; I am responsible for the Other independently of any error committed towards him or her. What connects me to the Other is a primary obligation towards him or her, an assignation to respond to he or she who gives himself or herself as one who is both vulnerable and ungraspable. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas returns to the themes exposed in Totality and Inﬁnity and radicalizes them. Subjectivity is no longer an essence which posits and identiﬁes itself in the jouissance of the world, but is originally for the Other. The mark of the face is that of “illeity” (1981).5 With this word, constructed from the pronoun il (he; he who is absent and of whom we are talking) Levinas means to insist on the “never present” of transcendence. To say that illeity characterizes the face is in fact to underscore that it is an elusive transcendence. Not only is it to say that transcendence is not a phenomenon which can appear in the world, but also that it does not appear at all; it does not inhabit a beyond-the-world according to a modality of presence other than ordinary presence (Calin and Sebbah 2002, 34). To the unveiling of being in general, as support and object of knowledge, there preexists a relationship with a being who speaks to me and calls me, and here is Levinas’s lesson: to declare the primacy of ethics. For him, it is not a matter of prescribing moral codes, to afﬁrm precepts, or again to enunciate a universal law; Levinas’s ambition is not to construct an ethics, but to show the general signiﬁcance of the ethical relation. In one of his last texts, he writes: I call face that which thus in another concerns the I—concerns me—reminding me, from behind the countenance he [sic] puts on in his portrait, of his abandonment, his defenselessness and his mortality, and his appeal to my ancient responsibility, as if he were unique in the world— beloved. (2000, 227; italics in the original)6 Levinasian philosophy is probably the philosophy which comes the closest to the enigma of the presence of the Other; ethics is not a supplement of the soul, a surplus in the relation to the Other—it is this relation itself.

An Ethics for Modern Times Hans Jonas talks about responsibility as well. His project is to found an ethics for modern times, an ethics for the technological age. If the starting point of Jonas’s reﬂection is very distant from that of Levinas, sometimes their meditations follow parallel paths. Hence it is of interest to go back to the main points of Jonas’s analysis to underscore its original aspects, those which precisely resonate with Levinas’s work. Jonas’s The imperative of responsibility opens with an unsettling report. In our societies, the development of technology has modiﬁed human behavior in its very essence. For a long time, technology remained neutral from

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the point of view of ethics; it affected neither nature nor humanity. Jonas writes: “Making free with the denizens of land and sea and air, he [Man] yet leaves the encompassing nature of those elements unchanged, and their generative powers undiminished. He cannot harm them by carving out his little kingdom from theirs” (Jonas 1984, 3). However, today, the deal is radically changed. Nature, the biosphere, and the essence of humanity, which deﬁned the framework and the conditions in and from which technological activity developed, have become, in turn, objects of investigation. Today, the kingdom in its entirety is subject to a technological project with no restraints and no limits. According to Jonas’s beautiful formula, the “ﬁnally unbound Prometheus” puts humanity and its kingdom in peril (1984, 185). Hence one can no longer abstract technology from the domain of ethical deliberation. Today, it is as much a promise as a threat and man takes notice of this murkiness when he perceives the increasing gap between that which he can do and that which he can reasonably foresee in terms of consequences. “The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem” (8), for traditional ethics are the ethics of proximity and immediacy. They regulate the relation of man to man in terms of proximity in time and space. Consequently, they are inoperative for thinking effectively about perspectives of remoteness in space and time. It is not sufﬁcient to be conscious of the possible dangers and threats; one must also feel concerned. Jonas proposes a heuristic of fear whose goal is precisely to mobilize us. He writes: “we need the threat to the image of man—and rather speciﬁc kinds of threat—to assure ourselves of his true image by the very recoil from these threats. . . . We know the thing at stake only when we know that it is at stake” (1984, 26–27; italics in the original). This heuristic of fear has been the object of much debate, and Jonas has probably been misunderstood. Fear is neither a weakness nor an alteration of awareness, but vigilance, a movement toward. There is no ethics without affect; men are not moral beings for the sole reason that they are endowed with reason, but because they possess the capacity to be affected. Emotion must be added to reason so that the objective good or bad which we present to ourselves can set our will in motion. We need strength and not knowledge to bend our will. Then the morality which must command our affects paradoxically needs an affect, illustrated by the long history of ethical doctrines. “Jewish ‘fear of the Lord,’ Platonic ‘eros,’ Aristotelian ‘eudaimonia,’ Christian ‘charity,’ Spinoza’s ‘amor dei intellectualis,’ Hutcheson’s ‘benevolence,’ Kant’s ‘reverence,’ Kierkegaard’s ‘interest,’ Nietzsche’s ‘lust of the will’ (and so on) are modes of deﬁning this affective element in ethics” (Jonas 1984, 87). It must also be pointed out that the fear of which Jonas speaks is a “spiritual sort of fear,” a disinterested fear7—it is a fear for the other, not for oneself. This fear is not a pathological disposition which traps us in a solipsistic attitude, but an emotion which opens us up to a threatened objectivity

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in its current existence or in its existence to come. Jonas writes, “we must educate our soul to a willingness to let itself be affected by the mere thought of possible fortunes and calamities of future generations” (1984, 28; italics in the original). This has a twofold meaning. The ﬁrst consists in rejecting meliorative utopias and ideals of progress; rather “the prophecy of doom is to be given greater heed than the prophecy of bliss” (31). The second is the unveiling, and reveals to us that the “object of responsibility” is “the perishable qua perishable” (87; italics in the original). I am responsible for what is fragile and vulnerable, that which is precarious, because it is threatened in its essence and/or in its existence. The archetype of all responsible action is our attitude toward our own progeny. It is the originary trial through which the progenitor has the experience of this assignation to responsibility; he or she is “taken hostage” as it were by this being to whom he or she has just given life. If technology today threatens future humanity in its essence or even in its existence, then the ﬁrst imperative of the ethics of responsibility can be thus formulated: “humanity must be.” For the Kantian categorical imperative, Jonas substitutes the ontological imperative which enjoins us to guarantee the existence of man “in respect of its being itself.” We cannot deduct this obligation from a right, or, since future generations have no rights to enforce, the non-being cannot demand rights since it does not exist. It is to “the idea of man” that we are accountable, an idea that demands that its existence be incarnated in the world. Hence the idea is not to deduct existence from essence as suggested by the proponents of the ontological argument, but to derive, from the idea of man, a duty which is an obligation imposed on those who are already there. The imperative of responsibility invites us never to wager on the existence or the essence of man. Imperfect palliatives are always preferable over that of a very promising cure for horses but which carries the risk of death for the patient. Hence this maxim of the ethics of prudence: “In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will” (Jonas 1984, 11). Jonas introduces the concern about consequences and distant future; he precisely sets the ignorance about the ultimate effects of our actions as the very reason for responsible restraint. Beyond this dimension of consequence, it is the theme of the “heuristics of fear” (1984) we would like to retain because it helps us understand how the call of the Other can truly mobilize me and in which sense it calls me to responsibility.

RETURN TO EDUCATION

The Call of the Child What must we understand when we say that educational ethics is an ethics of responsibility? What is the implication of this statement? We know

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that human nature is characterized by the fact that it is neither given in an immediate manner, nor closed into a pure identity to itself. Johann Gottlieb Fichte writes: “all animals are complete and ﬁnished; the human being is only intimated and projected” (2000, 74). Man is this being whose nature is precisely characterized by a lack of being; he is what is called to be, a being of culture. A few years before Fichte, Rousseau had already expressed this thesis in an anthropological context. The philosopher from Geneva writes: “there is one further highly speciﬁc, distinctive, and indisputable feature of man [that distinguishes him from animals], and that is his faculty of selfimprovement” (1994, 33). Incompletion and the potential for improvement are the two faces of one and the same anthropological reality, or, more exactly, there is anthropological improvement only on the basis of ontological incompletion. Although it is scarcely noticed, the incompleteness of human nature assigns to the young the duty to incarnate the ideal of humanity inscribed in dotted lines. Hence it is not a matter of placing next to an originary situation of incompleteness a claim, a right to education—it is hard to see how its recipient would enforce it—but to show that the incompleteness of the child contains the existential obligation to accomplish the promise of “projected” humanity. This obligation-to-be of the educated is also a call which awaits a response, an address which solicits support and consideration. This obligation-to-be then obliges the elders, those who are already there, to accompany this will-to-become of which they are the witnesses. Therefore the duty to respond of the young is not the other face of a right, but the obligation which accompanies and makes possible in ﬁne the duty toward every child to encourage in him or her an authentic humanity. The ethical obligation is an obligation in echo, echoing the existential obligation which animates and “pushes” the child toward a horizon of humanity. An ethics of responsibility is ﬁrst and foremost an ethics of commitment. Moral obligation does not derive from a fault, nor from any harm the educator might have caused, but from the free decision he or she makes to guarantee it. One can only be responsible only if one wants to be so. Moral responsibility cannot be imposed from the outside. We should also be clear on this: the ethical exigency does not spring forth from the inner conscience of the educator, from his or her interiority, but rather from the one who calls on him or her, convokes him or her, obligates him or her. But there is effective responsibility, in action, only if he or she decides to commit himself or herself because it is always possible for him or her to minimize the call sent out to him or her, to turn a deaf ear to it. If the call is absolutely irrefutable, it is not totally irresistible. To be more precise, let us say that the call invites the will, but the will remains free to assume responsibility in the sense in which it understands it (Levinas 2004). One can vouch for a student (or a child) only freely, already before the parents or the tutors, that is to say before those who trust us with their children, but also before the institution which invests us with this mission. In the order of multiplicity, there is

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moral responsibility only if it is deﬁned by a task or a mission; one cannot be responsible for every one, at all times, since in the end it would regress to being responsible for no one. One of the crucial questions is precisely to deﬁne the diverse ﬁelds of intervention and the segments of responsibility of the different protagonists engaged in educative action.

From Concern to Hospitality Then it is concern which encourages us to constitute ourselves “respondent” in the strong sense of this word; here is the affect which urges the educator and orients his or her will. This term is not to be understood in a theological but in an existential sense.8 Concern can be deﬁned in opposition to both anxiety and doubt. Firstly, we can say that concern is not anxiety since the latter is an objectless fear. Concern is closer to doubt but is distinct from it by the fact that doubt, an intellectualized affect, touches upon ideas, whereas concern has to do with people. There would be a ﬁeld of research to explore on educative concern, on this silent engine of ethics. Concern does not immediately work on consciousness because our presence to the world, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty recalls, is a corporeal presence anterior to all conscious thematization; concern “traverses bodies, lifts up bodies, even before reﬂection and intellectualization” (Corcuff 1997, 389). Concern becomes solicitude, welcome, hospitality, because the face is signiﬁcation without context.9 It requires no milieu (social, cultural, etc.), no belonging (to an ethnic group, etc.), nor any emblem; it makes sense on its own. The Other holds its dignity from the face alone. Derrida, a reader of Levinas, has devoted several texts to the topic of hospitality, texts in which he introduces the distinction between pure hospitality and conditional hospitality. Pure hospitality refers to the idea of “visitation” which is unconditional welcome. Derrida writes: “There is pure hospitality only where I welcome not the invited guest, but the unexpected visitor, he [sic] who invades, and in a certain manner arrives at my place when I am not prepared” (1999b, 103).10 The other is immediately my guest. He is welcomed, without question, without restriction. “A pure welcome consists not only in not knowing . . . but also in avoiding any questions about the identity of the Other, his [sic] desire, his rules, his language, his capacity for work, for integration, for adaptation” (98). The welcoming words can only be poetical, the ﬁrst words addressed to the one who arrives, to the one who has no other determination but that of being he or she who arrives (arrivant). As for conditional hospitality, it does not address the visitor but the expected guest, the guest welcomed and inscribed in a prepared setting and moment, certainly prepared for him or her, but prepared nevertheless. The invitation is neither an impromptu welcome, nor a surprise visit.11 Yet the student is neither a visitor nor an invited guest, but has to be there; the student is mandated to be there. Scholastic obligation and educational hospitality are not necessarily antinomic. It can even be said that the

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latter “unfolds” the obligation into a happy occasion, and it is not indulging in words to say that. The unfolding, in the sense Ricoeur understands it, is a break, but “a break in life and in discourse that creates the conditions for a second-order continuity” (1992, 180).12 The welcoming transforms the imperative to be educated into an invitation to learn; it turns the necessity into an opportunity. To await, to welcome, to signify to the learner who arrives that he or she is expected—here is the ﬁrst moment of hospitality. A moment of free exchange, dialogue, since the “in-between” is the discursive regime of welcome, a space opened and offered to the other. Here, it would be helpful to return to the history of the great pedagogues and to see how, in their writings and their practices, they inﬂected this “watchful intent.” But let us not reduce hospitality to this inaugural question of welcome because it is, in the strong sense of the word, “the space cleared for the other” (Gotman 2001, 2). It is a spatialized relation to the Other. A hospitable school is a school that knows how to make a place for everyone so that no one may feel alien in its bosom.

Beyond Deontologism and Consequentialism To educate is to face incertitude. But incertitude may result from two very different situations: where decisions are made without any guiding rule or norm, and where decisions are enlightened and debated by several normative authorities. Most frequently, educative work falls into the latter kind— situations where there is a plurality of registers of legitimacy (e.g., moral duty, thoughtful desires, regulated obligations). Properly speaking, there is no moral obligation without this test and this passage through the undecidable. To take an example: let us imagine the head of a school who must take disciplinary action against one of the students following a grave transgression. What can he or she do? What do the regulations state? What must he or she do as a representative of the educational community? Finally, how can he or she be just regarding both the culprit and the victim? One can see how the registers of law, morality, and ethics (in the sense of what one judges best to do) collide, making the decision delicate and difﬁcult because of its eminent singularity—hence uncertainties in relation to decisions to be taken, and uncertainties in relation to the consequences of our decisions and actions. Solicitude is a kind of virtual factor which accompanies our deliberations and which situates us beyond, or rather, before, the debate between deontologism and consequentialism, because it is concerned with the near and the far, the here and now, and the future. Deontological (déon, duty) ethics is understood as an ethics which holds that certain actions are morally mandatory or prohibited, with no regard for their consequences in the world. Kantian ethics is explicitly deontological since it posits that an action is morally good if, and only if, it is “done from duty” or “from respect for the law” (Kant 1998, 13). There are a priori moral actions, that is to say, actions that

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have an intrinsic value. In its contemporary version, deontologism afﬁrms the restrictive character of moral imperatives by underscoring the dialectics of rights and duties. To not respect certain obligations is to run the risk of transgressing the subjective rights of the Other. Inversely, consequentialism evaluates actions by the yardstick of their consequences. Philipp Pettit writes: “Consequentialism is the theory which posits that to determine whether an agent was justiﬁed in operating a particular choice, one must examine the consequences of that decision, its effects on the world” (1996, 313). Consequentialism afﬁrms that in all choices, that option is just which has the best consequences, in impersonal and neutral terms with respect to the agent. In matters of education, good consequences are those which foster autonomy or, if not, keep open the future of the child (or the student). Therefore, an ethics of responsibility is an attitude concerned with consequences; the paradox is that all consequences cannot be foreseen. If one cannot foresee everything, there exists, as I have emphasized above, a sort of negative foresight, that is to say, things which must not be done and risks which must not be taken. In this sense, an ethics of responsibility is close to the negative formulations of deontological ethics. However, in certain situations, one must know how to depart from a priori prescriptions and legal procedures. Under certain circumstances, strict respect for regulatory procedures or a priori principles may end up in real educational dead ends. In this case, the attitude which incorporates the prospective dimension becomes salutary. As we can see, an ethics of responsibility is, strictly speaking, neither a deontological ethics, nor a strictly consequentialist ethics. NOTES 1. Translated by Denise Egéa-Kuehne and Marina Basu. A word of gratitude to Eirick Prairat for providing some very pertinent comments on the translation. Notes added to the translation are identiﬁed by (trans.). Author’s notes are identiﬁed by (EP). 2. “The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order. By antagonism, I mean in this context the unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up. This propensity is obviously rooted in human nature” (Kant 1991, 44; italics in the original). (trans.) 3. “Levinas observes that ‘nausea reveals to us the presence of being in all its impotence.’ Nausea itself confronts the nauseated in all of his or her nakedness, in his or her ‘pure being.’ The nature of nausea, then, ‘is nothing other than its presence, nothing other than our powerlessness to take leave of that presence’ (2003, 68).” (Michau 2005). (trans.) 4. De l’évasion (1935), De l’existence à l’existant (1947) et Le temps et l’autre (1946–1947) are anterior to Totalité et Inﬁni (1961). They come from the “ﬁrst Levinas,” the phenomenologist, if one may say so. The problem with

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Eirick Prairat Levinas’s texts is that some of them were published some 40 years after they were written, and yet appear to be recent. (I am grateful to Eirick Prairat for adding these comments to his original text.) Illeity: “An attempt to express, differently, the unbridgeable distance between myself and the other, ‘he-ness’ or Illeity, signiﬁes the impossibility of initially pronouncing a “thou” in some kind of reciprocity with the other person” (Bergo 2007). (trans.) This deﬁnition of the face is one of the most beautiful Levinas gives us. In Totality and Inﬁnity, for example, he gives a totally Cartesian deﬁnition: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (2004, 50; italics in the original). (EP) On the theme of the heuristic of fear, see Greisch (1994, 72–89). Originally, the concept of concern has a theological tone since it is the torment of the soul in its quest for God. See St. Augustine (1982, 26–28). (EP) The word “hospitality” is Levinas’s. In the preface to Totality and Inﬁnity, he writes: “This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality” (2004, 27). He repeats this term at the end of the book (305). (EP) This distinction is already introduced in Adieu (1999a). (EP) See also Derrida (2001). (trans.) See also Levinas (1998). (trans.)

REFERENCES Bergo, B. 2007. Emmanuel Levinas. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas (accessed May 10, 2007). Calin, R., and F.-D. Sebbah. 2002. Le vocabulaire de Lévinas. Paris: Ellipses. Cassirer, E. 1972. La philosophie des formes symboliques. La pensée mythique. Paris: Edition de Minuit. Corcuff, P. 1997. De l’heuristique de la peur à l’éthique de l’inquiétude. In De quoi sommes-nous responsables?, ed. T. Ferenczi, 383–92. Paris: Le Monde Editions. Derrida, J. 1999a. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Nass. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999b. Une hospitalité à l’inﬁni. In Autour de Jacques Derrida: Manifeste pour l’hospitalité, ed. M. Seffahi, 97–106. Paris: Éditions Paroles d’Aube. Fichte, J. G. 2000. Foundations of natural right. Trans. M. Baur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Genard, J.-L. 1999. La grammaire de la responsabilité. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. Gotman, A. 2001. Le sens de l’hospitalité, essai sur les fondements sociaux de l’accueil de l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Greisch, J. 1994. L’amour du monde et le principe de la responsabilité. Paris: Editions Autrement. Henriot, J. 1977. Notes sur la date et le sens de l‘apparition du mot responsabilité. Archives de philosophie du droit, vol. 22, 59–62. ———. 1990. Responsabilité. In Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, les notions philosophiques, vol. 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2250. Jonas, H. 1984. The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age. Trans. H. Jonas and D. Herr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. 1991. Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose. In Kant: Political writings, ed. H. Reiss, 41–53. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1998. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. Ed. and trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kipling, R. 1929. The Complete Stalky & Co. London: MacMillan. Kipling, R. 2002. Stalky & Co. Project Gutenberg. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1946–1947/1987. Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998. Entretien avec Paul Ricoeur. In Emmanuel Lévinas, philosophe et pédagogue, ed. Alliance Israélite Universelle, 11–28. Paris: Editions du Nadir. ———. 2000. Entre nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. M. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1947/2001. Existence and existents. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1935/2003. On escape—De l‘évasion. Trans. B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Michau, M. R. 2005. Review of Emmanuel Levinas, On escape (De l‘évasion). Other Voices, 2 (3). http://www.othervoices.org/2.3/mmichau/index.html. Pettit, P. 1996. Conséquentialisme. In Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, ed. M. Canto-Sperber, 313–20. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ricoeur, P. 1992. Oneself as another (Soi-même comme un autre). Trans. K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. The just. Trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rousseau, J.-J. 1994. Discourse on inequality. Trans. F. Philip. New York: Oxford University Press.

11 Welcoming and Difﬁcult Learning Reading Levinas with Education Sharon Todd

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overﬂows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of inﬁnity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching [enseignement]. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. (Levinas 2004, 51; italics in the original) To write a chapter in a book about Levinas and education is to position oneself at an impossible threshold whose crossing seems to risk a betrayal of either Levinas’s thought or education’s interests. Indeed, it seems one cannot write about Levinas and education without commenting on the difﬁculty of doing so. It is not that the words of his texts are any more difﬁcult than those of many of his contemporaries, or that his style, to use a quaint phallic phrase, is simply impenetrable, or even that he fails to write directly about education. Rather, it is that his self-described project of “ﬁnding meaning” in ethics, coupled with his resistance to any programmatic effort to describe an ethics (Levinas 1985, 90), do not lend themselves to education’s interests in pursuing an ethic or in delineating direct answers to moral questions on teaching. His starting point for ﬁnding the meaning in ethics does not lie in deﬁnitions of what a subject ought to do, but how a subject becomes an expression of an ethical relation. From the vantage of education, his philosophical writings are impossibly out of joint with any attempt to systemize an ethical approach in education. Indeed, as soon as one thinks of transposing his concepts into the sphere of pedagogical exigency, they not only slip their mark, but they no longer stick to the fabric of his own thought. Thus, it is only through a gross distortion of, or inﬁdelity to, the concepts themselves that a direct application of his philosophy can even be considered. It bears asking, then: how might education make a relation to Levinas’s philosophy beyond a utilitarian or pragmatic end? Or, to put the question more directly in line

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with my present concern of reading Levinas with education, how does the emergence of the ethical subject become of educational interest? One way of opening up the terms of these interests, I think, is to be found in the epigraph above. Here, Levinas proposes that the ethical relation is modulated through the way in which the I welcomes the Other, receives from the Other, and is taught by the Other. What is truly extraordinary about his ethics, and consequently what is highly relevant for readers in the ﬁeld of education, is that this ethical welcoming takes on the characteristics of a pedagogical relation. Levinas describes welcoming the Other as the self’s capacity to learn from the Other as a teacher. At the core of his philosophy, then, lies a theory of learning1—one that is not so much concerned with how the subject learns content, but with how the subject learns through a speciﬁc orientation to the Other. By welcoming, the self learns from what the Other has to give, and it is in this learning that the self assumes a responsible relation. Ethical relationality here occurs in the register of pedagogical implication: teacher and learner are bound through the welcome which is both given and received. I want to propose here that not only does Levinas’s construal of learning as welcome raise possibilities for reinterpreting educational encounters as moments of ethicality, but also that this theory of learning provides us with an approach to reading his texts. My contention here is that welcoming (which, as we shall see, is not the same as agreeing with) offers educational theory a way of considering Levinas’s texts beyond the measure of applicability. My point is that since practical ends cannot be deduced from Levinas’s writings, educational theorists are compelled to consider how Levinas’s rendering of ethics in pedagogical terms signiﬁes something beyond what we can put into practice.

LEVINAS’S TEACHER Unlike his Talmudic texts and his essays on Jewish education (the latter written while he was head of the Alliance Israélite Universelle), Levinas’s philosophical writings neither contain overt educational content nor do they partake of a recognizable educational tradition.2 Performing instead at the limit of language, the body of philosophical work operates in the bafﬂing aporia between representation and the non-representable. Words such as teaching, welcome, receptivity, and hospitality play at the border of the sensible, introduced as bridges in an articulation of “the ethical structures which are constitutive of existence” (Robbins 1999, 13). The pedagogical meaning of these structures, it must be said, lies in no ordinary description of a teacher-student relation in a conventional schooling context, nor in a prescription for educational practice. Rather, the dynamics involved speak to the very emergence of the ethical subject at the point of meeting—and greeting—another who teaches me.

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In his 1961 Totality and Inﬁnity, to which I devote my discussion in the following pages, Levinas peppers his philosophical exposition with references to teaching. Often appearing in opposition to a Socratic model, these references propose that teaching structures an ethical reception to the Other. Attacking the logic of sameness which resounds throughout the Socratic emphasis on the teacher as mid-wife—that is, as the one who merely helps give birth to ideas latent within the interiority of the learner—Levinas serves up teaching as that which, among other things, comes from the Other who is master. He presents in these pages what Derrida calls a “strange and difﬁcult thought of teaching—a magisterial teaching” (1999, 17). This shift away from an idea of teaching as facilitation to teaching as that which comes from the Other—the master and stranger—is, perhaps, at ﬁrst glance a particularly unappetising morsel to swallow. Indeed, as a model for education, it seems downright indigestible. What is a ﬁgure of the master doing in a discourse of ethics? In mastering, do not masters master over someone? Who and what does the master teach? Levinas’s notion of teaching as mastery is formulated primarily in terms of three characteristics: strangeness, separation, and height, each of which I will take up in turn below. These three characteristics introduce the idea that learning is not about the difﬁculties of mastering knowledge, but about the difﬁculties of greeting the Other as master. I want to spend some time on the qualities Levinas imputes to the master in order to situate the complementary obligations consequently faced by the learner. First, the master, according to Levinas, is a stranger to the self, an unknown presence which offers the self the gift of a different, or foreign, discourse: “Teaching is a discourse in which the master can bring to the student what the student does not yet know” (Levinas 2004, 180). The master does not rule over the student in any conventional sense, nor does the master constitute itself through a Hegelian relation of interdependence, but poses as the necessary outside from which any knowledge of the world is made possible for the subject. Emphatically, Levinas states: Discourse is thus the experience of something absolutely foreign . . . a traumatism of astonishment. . . . The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us. And it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me. . . . The strangeness of the Other, his very freedom! Free beings alone can be strangers to one another. (2004: 73; italics in the original) By juxtaposing freedom with the ﬁgure of stranger/master, Levinas suggests that teaching is a trauma experienced by the subject in relation to another’s freedom. We receive instruction not only about that which we do not yet know, but also from another whose existence remains in an exterior relation to my own. The master’s foreignness and freedom is a condition of my learning. Thus, secondly, we can see that Levinas invokes a radical separation between the master who teaches and the subject who is taught. Discourse

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itself, he suggests, incurs both trauma and learning. That is, through language, the “student” is exposed to a master who does not simply represent the world to the student, but represents herself as a stranger to the student.3 Levinas brings to the forefront a teaching that is neither merely a relaying of content, nor a question of rediscovering truth in a community of sameness qua Socrates, but a relation which signiﬁes the presence of the teacher. Levinas writes that “[t]hought can become explicit only among two; explicitation is not limited to ﬁnding what one already possessed. But the ﬁrst teaching of the teacher is his very presence as teacher from which representation comes” (2004, 100). Thus we have here a ﬁgure of the teacher who not only represents something to someone but whose presence signiﬁes a teaching. Representation does not then derive from the content of what she says, but from her presence in the act of saying.4 Language does not only thematize the world (“this is that”), but it announces the one who speaks or authors (“here I am”). Yet this is at once a ﬁgurative and singular announcement—ﬁgurative in that when I speak I do not always literally say “this is me,” and singular because “this is me” is always explicit in my speech in the very moment of enunciation. This announcement, then, for Levinas, signiﬁes that there is an absolute difference between the unique speaker and the one being addressed. Speech reveals a presence which cannot be contained in what is said. “As an attendance of being at its own presence, speech is a teaching. Teaching does not simply transmit an abstract and general content already common to me and the Other. It does not merely assume an after all subsidiary function of being midwife to a mind already pregnant with its fruit” (2004, 98). Teaching, in other words, teaches that which is not in common—it teaches otherness itself. So dispensing both with a representational theory of language and a structuralist impulse to inscribe being with the totality of language, Levinas posits a theory of language which reveals that there is something—il y a—beyond the words spoken: a trace of presence exists in the speaking of speech. It is thus that we encounter the Other (the stranger) through discourse. Yet I think it bears some investigation as to why learning from this radically separate Other—this stranger, or foreigner—becomes an effect of a speciﬁcally magisterial teaching. There are two issues at stake here: ﬁrst, why is the ﬁgure of the stranger also that of master? That is, what is it about otherness which takes priority over the subject who learns? Secondly, what is being asked of the learner—in an encounter with a master no less—which enables her to learn? Levinas articulates that the radical separation spawned through language produces an unbridgeable gap between the one speaking and the one being addressed, and it is here that the third characteristic of the master appears, namely height. This gap is marked not only by its apparent irreducibility but by an inherent non-parity. I cannot be the stranger; I can only encounter the stranger across language. And because it is strangeness and not sameness that I encounter, because the Other lies in an exterior relation to me, the

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Other then poses a challenge to the unity of my interiority, my self-identity. The stranger, as Levinas puts it, “[calls me] in question” (2004, 171) simply by revealing herself to me as she speaks. “To make oneself a subject in discourse is to expose oneself to being contested and discredited” (Lingis 1994, 87). The I is destabilized by its encounter with the stranger, for the Other’s “outsideness,” if you will, is unbounded and unboundable—neither containable by the self nor apprehensible through deﬁnition. For Levinas, this relation is not simply an effect of language, but is language itself, and it entails a relation to the other which he describes rather curiously: The calling in question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language. The height from which language comes we designate with the term teaching. Socratic maieutics prevailed over a pedagogy that introduced ideas into a mind by violating or seducing (which amounts to the same thing) that mind. It does not preclude the openness of the very dimension of inﬁnity, which is height, the face of the Master. This voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself. Teaching signiﬁes the whole inﬁnity of exteriority. And the whole inﬁnity of exteriority is not ﬁrst produced, to then teach: teaching is its very production. The ﬁrst teaching teaches this very height, tantamount to exteriority, the ethical. (2004, 171) What is worthy of remark here is that height, inﬁnity, and transcendence begin to set the terms of encountering the Other not merely as a stranger but as a master who teaches nonviolently. Although Levinas claims in the quotation above that maieutics does not preclude the possibility of nonviolence, he pushes the envelope further: the teacher opens up an unknowable outside to me, an exterior which deﬁes any limits I might impose on it, and thereby introduces the subject to the very otherness through which the self learns. But Levinas is not content with a description of the inﬁnity toward which the Other opens me.5 He insists that because the stranger challenges the security of the self’s identity, the self becomes “subject” to the Other—and speciﬁcally, subject to the Other’s address. Thus the radical separation between me and the stranger engenders a certain obligation on my part; because I have been addressed, it is I who am called to respond (not the reverse). Thus, I and the Other are not equal in conversation. Levinas’s characterisation of height here indicates the degree to which the Other is “not on the same plane as myself” (2004, 101; italics in the original). As Robert Gibbs observes, “teaching in Levinas’s sense teaches the possibility of an otherness that does not stand on the same plane with me, does not contest me, but opens me and in so doing founds me” (2000, 33). It is thus only through a relation to height that the ethical subject is established. Ethical subjectivity for Levinas emerges in an encounter marked by the way otherness takes primacy. That is, if the Other were simply an extension of myself, or a mirror image of myself, then I would not (nor could not) be called upon to respond.

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The responsible subject is then a subject who is for the Other in a relation that assumes the Other gives me something more than I contain. Because I can learn from the Other, I become responsible. Levinas is adamant that teaching lies in radical opposition to the exertion of power and control. So although the master calls me into question, she does not do so by force, but through the gift of inﬁnity which breaks through the cocoon of selfhood: “[The Other’s] alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches. Teaching is not a species of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the presence of inﬁnity breaking the closed circle of totality” (Levinas 2004, 171). Despite these qualiﬁcations, mastery remains—from the point of view of “applying” Levinas’s philosophy to education—an unwieldy idea. In common parlance, masters command and rule because they have acceded to a position of control and proﬁciency over a given body of knowledge. To be in a relation to a master is to assume that one is subordinate to a prodigious presence. Now, to some degree, Levinas’s ﬁgure of the master works both within and against these commonplace renderings. On the one hand, the master occupies a position of “height” to which one is subjected, yet on the other hand, the master is also one who “gives;” she gives the gift of inﬁnity and transcendence. Yet, even within this reworked notion of the master, it is not as if we can transpose Levinas’s “master” onto the classroom “teacher.” For what he is at pains to depict are neither the empirical conditions of teaching, nor even an ideal of “good” teaching; rather, his task here is to inquire into the phenomenon of ethics. As I read his writing on teaching, the master gives in a relation of height to the learner a gift which challenges the subject to think outside of herself and compels a response from her. Thus, what Levinas achieves is a depiction of relationality which uses the ﬁgure of the teacher to reveal the fundamental asymmetry at stake in our communicative relationships and in our capacity for thought. So, it is not a question of how well a classroom teacher can emulate the Levinasian master, but a question of how well our communicative relationships in classrooms allow for a learning from the Other. The master does not conform to the role of a teacher in a school setting; it is, rather, that the master reveals to us the dynamics in our encounters with strangeness. Levinas’s idea of teaching as magisterial places the self in a position to receive and welcome. But how does the subject welcome the otherness which comes from the other shore? Welcoming the Other as master seems to expose certain difﬁculties in learning—it at once requires an openness to the Other’s calling me into question even as that questioning is traumatic. Thus we might say that even as the terms for ethical subjectivity are founded on the nonviolent possibilities of teaching, welcoming takes on the added burden of dealing with the traumatic conditions of that very ethical subjectivity. Welcoming, after all, must contend with a master who both gives and challenges in the same breath.

176 Sharon Todd LEVINAS’S WELCOME Levinas’s welcome would appear to count as quite an extraordinary event, both ethically and pedagogically speaking, for it seems to offer a gesture of openness while at the same time it comes from a position of subjectiﬁcation. It also constitutes me as an ethical subject since it is a response which not only welcomes the Other as other, but the Other as master. Although Levinas does not directly discuss welcoming in terms of learning, I interpret his texts as exhibiting of an idea of learning as a logical extension of his views on teaching. Thus as a complement to a “strange and difﬁcult thought of teaching . . . in the ﬁgure of welcoming” (Derrida 1999, 17; italics in the original), to recall Derrida’s characterization, Levinas indeed proposes a strange and difﬁcult thought of learning. For to posit the welcoming of the Other as a condition of being taught more than implies the conditions under which the subject learns from the Other. The strangeness and difﬁculty of welcoming are not particular, of course, to Levinasian ethics. We know through everyday interaction that welcoming demands something more than thought. Welcoming is not a purely intellectual response to another. When I welcome, I greet the Other in such a way that exceeds polite pronouncement: “I welcome you.” In fact, displays of such politeness without affect are often quite at odds with their own rhetorical intent. Although it might be argued that the statement “I welcome you” carries its own illocutionary force, when said with hostility or irritation, the gesture collapses into a mere parody of welcome. Instead, what is usually meant by welcome is an orientation, an orientation directed toward the Other whom one is welcoming, even when the words “I welcome you” are absent. Derrida, more than any other interpreter of Levinas, is all too aware of the complexities embodied in one of the most “determinative words” to appear in Totality and Inﬁnity (Derrida 1999, 25). But what, of course, complicates the Levinasian welcome is its relation to teaching and its connection to the emergence of a speciﬁcally ethical subject. Similar to commonplace renderings of welcome as an orientation that greets the Other, a Levinasian welcome is further distinguished by its capacity to found responsibility out of the ruins of a traumatic yet open encounter with the stranger. Welcome lies in the indistinguishable time of the traumatic call the Other brings to bear on my ego and the susceptibility I have to be open to the Other. Consequently, welcome implies, as we have seen with Levinas’s discourse on teaching, a certain ambiguity with respect to its own doubleness—it both receives the Other as master as it gives the gift of reception. Derrida writes: “Now, for Levinas, the welcoming of teaching gives and receives something else, more than me and more than some other thing” (1999, 18; emphasis added). This suggests to me that if we call learning the welcome we grant to teaching, then learning itself partakes of both a giving and a being given. Below, I outline the particularities of welcome in order to develop a more fulsome account of what I am calling a Levinasian theory of learning.

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The doubleness of welcome, consisting in the difﬁcult yet promising encounter with the Other, is accentuated through a series of accompanying terms in Levinas’s text (2004). Here we enter that peculiar Levinasian lexicon marked by paradoxical expressions of activity-passivity, generosity-hospitality, giving-receiving. Welcoming (and consequently learning) is a liminal conﬁguration: neither purely active, generous or giving, nor purely passive, hospitable or receptive. As such, welcoming poses substantial questions with respect to how one learns on the border of a “performance” that refuses to be contained by conventional notions of gesture or ritual. As a liminal “performance,” welcoming rejects accepted dichotomies and the splitting of time; it is as if the subject enacts, in greeting the Other, an active passivity, a generous hospitality, a giving reception: The Other does not affect us as what must be surmounted, enveloped, dominated, but as other, independent of us: behind every relation we could sustain with him, an absolute upsurge. It is this way of welcoming an absolute existent that we discover in justice and injustice, and that discourse, essentially teaching, effectuates. The term welcome of the Other expresses a simultaneity of activity and passivity which places the relation with the other outside of the dichotomies valid for things: the a priori and the a posteriori, activity and passivity. (Levinas 2004, 89) Although it overcomes the dualities which characterize our usual relations to things, welcome, however, does not attempt to collapse the separation which divides self from Other. It is precisely this separation which characterizes our relations to other persons.6 Welcome is not a gesture which seeks to reduce the independent nature of the Other’s existence through domination, identiﬁcation, understanding, or even care; it seeks not to “envelop” or to protect. Rather it stands as an afﬁrmation of the Other’s strangeness whose independence is not in question. In this sense, as welcome moves beyond the dichotomy of activity and passivity, it does so not by ignoring their inherent tension, but by embodying them simultaneously. Welcome is an ethical testament to the separation between me and the teacher where the opposition of activity and passivity no longer holds. Thus Derrida asks: But is this welcome even a gesture? It is, rather, the ﬁrst movement, an apparently passive movement, but the right or good movement. The welcome cannot be derived, no more than the face can, and there is no face without welcome. It is as if the welcome, just as much as the face, just as much as the vocabulary that is co-extensive and thus profoundly synonymous with it, were a ﬁrst language, a set made up of quasi-primitive— and quasi-transcendental—words. (1999, 25; italics in the original) What Derrida points to here is how the status of welcome operates in Levinas’s work as the primary signiﬁcation—along with the face—which enables

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discourse between the self and the Other. As part of a “ﬁrst language,” welcome invites as it receives the Other in a communicative relation. It is, in fact, that which enables communication. A welcome provides a discursive space of engagement, dynamically giving and receiving in the same turn. We recall from Levinas’s discourse on teaching that the master is marked by strangeness, separation, and height. Consequently, a welcome afﬁrms these characteristics of the Other in the moment of communication. As afﬁrmation, welcome then openly greets the Other’s freedom as my own is put into question. It is a response to the position of the Other who judges me (Levinas 2004, 101), whose freedom thereby precedes my own. And it afﬁrms the alterity of the Other precisely by maintaining separation. Each one of these “movements,” to use Derrida’s term, reverses the usual agentic subject as the source of responsibility. Instead, what Levinas presents us with is a difﬁcult learning, one which is caught up in the exigent demands to respond that the Other imposes. Levinas renders his position distinct from that of Descartes, who embraces the view that it is “my freedom alone that takes the responsibility for the true. As-sociation, the welcoming of the master, is the opposite course: in it the exercise of freedom is called in question. If we call a situation where my freedom is called in question conscience, association or the welcoming of the Other is conscience” (Levinas 2004, 100). In triangulating the tie between teaching and conscience with the idea of welcome, Levinas suggests something quite profound: that learning from the Other (as master) gives rise to our very sense of responsibility. It is not as though we are ﬁrst responsible with conscience and then welcome (and learn), but welcoming and learning themselves embody an active passivity, a passive activity, which calls into question the very nature and freedom of the subject; conscience and responsibility come via the Other as teacher. Given this, it appears that to receive the Other hospitably is the mark of a truly great gift. Indeed, for Levinas, “[t]o recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ [vous] in a dimension of height” (2004, 75). There is thus a profound impulse of generosity entwined with any hospitable reception we grant to the stranger. Hospitality and generosity, like activity and passivity, are not two separate moments or approaches to the Other. They are simultaneously present in the welcome. The aspect of generosity which characterizes welcome suggests that the gift of hospitality is the only possible response to the Other whose alterity challenges me. That is, by disrupting my “habitual economy” (Robbins 1999, 6), my own totalizing presence, my egoistic disposition, the Other compels a different relation. Since I cannot totalize the Other (for otherness is precisely what lies beyond my grasp), I can only propose, or give to her, a world through language, through welcoming. Communication with the Other, as a welcoming of the Other, signiﬁes a generosity which moves across an asymmetrical divide: I give to the Other hospitality for

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there is no other possible relation without totally disregarding the Other’s presence.7 Importantly, hospitality, for Levinas, is bound to a notion of home. He writes, “I welcome the Other who presents himself in my home by opening my home to him” (2004, 171). The self becomes a host as a condition of its ethical subjectivity. In recognition of the double sense of the French word hôte, meaning both guest and host, Derrida depicts the double movement of the subject who welcomes: the hôte who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hôte (the guest), the welcoming hôte who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hôte received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home—which, in the end, does not belong to him. The hôte as host is a guest. (1999, 41; italics in the original) Extrapolating further, Derrida points to the way in which hospitality returns to the subject via the Other. By offering a hospitable welcome, one is saying “I welcome you as you in my home” and insofar as I welcome the Other as one to whom I am obligated to respond (in a relation of height), I become a guest—even in my own home. Thus it is not from a ﬁxed position of being at home in myself that I offer hospitality, but the very movement of hospitality reminds me that I, too, have been received—one does not have a home without prior reception. Yet, to welcome the Other’s alterity is to put oneself under a reappraisal of the given. The Other who challenges me, and to whom I am hospitable, does not, therefore, merely entail a sharing of my home as though the Other were an extension of it; rather, in recognizing the separation which divides me from the Other, the very contours of my home and my self are altered. I am simultaneously host and guest. “The one who welcomes is ﬁrst welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one whom he invites. The one who receives is received, receiving hospitality in what he takes to be his own home, or indeed his own land” (Derrida 1999, 42). This “ﬁrst welcome” which Derrida mentions is, for Levinas, to be found in the realm of the feminine. The dwelling or home which allows a host to become a host in his own home is made possible through the ﬁgure of femininity. Levinas claims he is not referring here to “woman” or to a gendered conception of subjectivity, but to the abstract, metaphysical aspects of difference that structure human relations. As Perpich writes: It is not a set of characteristics or qualities attributed to a certain class of beings (namely, women); it is not a type, of which individual women would be tokens. Rather, the feminine is a principle of equivocation, introducing into being not only an essential duality or plurality, but a proliferating structure of ambiguity. (2001, 47; italics in the original)

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Nonetheless, there is a troubling androcentrism at play in terms of conﬁning the feminine to the home, or dwelling—no particular surprise, perhaps, for feminist readers of the philosophical canon. Although it does not describe gender empirically, in rendering the home as the locus of the feminine, Levinas’s discourse produces a gendered sensibility which serves to reinforce a structure of complementarities out of which his ethics is built. Thus, while Levinas does grant (albeit ambiguously) the ﬁrst welcome to the feminine voice, both the self and the Other remain, in his work, characteristically masculine. If the feminine represents difference in terms of a “principle of equivocation,” it then would seem to suggest that the movement of welcome entails an essentially ambiguous communication—and gives rise to the idea of a mistress as the counterpart to the idea of master. 8 The idea of welcome, then, whether accompanied by terms such as activity, passivity, giving, receiving, hospitality, or generosity, is primarily concerned with one thing: the asymmetrical separation of self and Other. It is an orientation to the Other which afﬁrms her independence, her height, her foreignness. And whether or not one wishes to name this relation as something that emanates from femininity, the point remains that in Totality and Inﬁnity, welcome is concerned ﬁrst and foremost with afﬁrming such inequality. Welcome, as a greeting of the Other as master, signals most directly that ethical response does not derive from what one has learned, but rather that such response means “to be taught.” The idea of welcome as learning translates into a theory of learning whereby learning means “to learn separation.” Thus the learner does not ape the teacher, she neither incorporates her nor swallows her words whole. I learn not through imitation or parody, but in and through discourse. And thus the gift of response that I present answers the Other’s gift of difference—a gift which underscores the nonreciprocity of exchange. To welcome, then, is an “extravagant response” (Levinas 1996, 76), which cannot duplicate what I have been given. Across the ocean of language from which the Other gives me the idea of inﬁnity, I cannot reciprocate the same passage. As a learner, I cannot give back what has been given to me; as Derrida claims, “nothing is more difﬁcult than accepting a gift” (1991, 14). The difﬁculty of the welcome stretches into making the master’s teaching my own. To respond, then, requires an afﬁrmation of the presence of difference—a difﬁcult learning, to be sure.

LEVINAS AS TEACHER, OR WELCOMING LEVINAS To think learning as a complement to teaching, to think the welcome as a complement to the inﬁnite challenge of the Other, and to think the feminine mistress as a counterpart to the master is indeed to confront the difﬁculty of Levinas’s philosophy. Thus, at this point we have two options. Since we cannot simply transpose the ﬁgure of the master into our educational contexts, we either have to claim that Levinasian ethics has little to say to education,

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or that we, like the subject Levinas discusses, need to think beyond ourselves, beyond our desire for direct application of philosophy to practice, in order to do justice to his work—indeed, in order to respond responsibly. As I have alluded to in my introduction, educational interest in ethics often reveals a desire to assign practical value to philosophical discourse. Important work on deﬁning professional ethics, for example, draws upon a wide range of philosophies to provide a principled approach to questions of what constitutes the duties and responsibilities of teachers—answers to which seem particularly urgent in light of overcrowding, under-funding, and the demand for schools to promote large social agendas of equity and democratic citizenship. Frequently, then, texts designed with teachers in mind provide case studies which symptomatically highlight particular educational problems or dilemmas with respect to these educational goals to which teachers are then to apply the learned body of knowledge. Philosophical ideas are presented as helpful navigational aids to teachers who might otherwise be lost in the dark sea of moral indecision. Of course, certain philosophies are more amenable to these practical ends—philosophies which directly bear on questions of outcome (such as pragmatism or utilitarianism), or those which have moral reasoning at their core—while others are simply . . . well, not so amenable. While I do not think that “amenability” or “use” are in any respect worthy criteria for judging whether a philosophy has anything of value to say, there is admittedly a difﬁculty in coming to grips with how one might read Levinas with education. As we have seen, Levinas’s depiction of welcoming and teaching perform at the limit of language and ask us to respond beyond that limit. His work does not represent concepts which can be ferried across to the shores of educational thought, but they instead speak of a separation between self and Other, learner and teacher, reader and author. It is precisely this separation, this incommensurable difference which resists unity and sameness, which provokes a different kind of reading practice. So the question of how to read Levinas with education is fundamentally a question of how to welcome Levinas’s words or how to read Levinas as teacher. To ask oneself how one welcomes Levinas’s texts is to face head-on the ethical demands of coming into contact with another who has “proposed a world” through language. Thus reading Levinas with education is double: we read to learn about the notion of welcome which appears in his texts, while struggling with our own welcome of his texts. And it is indeed a struggle! If Levinas’s texts “propose a world” to us, as a gift of thought, the reader, as a singular subject, is challenged to respond beyond the letter of his text, to address the presence of difference that the words reveal. This challenge actually challenges me as me—it requires a self-criticism and selftransformation at the moment of response. “Theory, in which truth arises, is the attitude of a being that distrusts itself” (Levinas 2004, 82). Thus to respond is to respond to separation in a way which implicates me in that response. The explicit ethical force of welcoming is very much rendered

182 Sharon Todd as a pedagogical structure, and as a reader who seeks to learn, my own reception is thus put on the line, so to speak. It is a response which cannot take in your words and make them mine, but makes my words responsive to the very difference which makes your words possible. In thinking the relation, then, between education and Levinas’s philosophy, it is not about grafting his concepts onto an already existing discourse or practice, but rather creating a self-critical response to his texts which admits—indeed welcomes—the impossibility of such transposition. There is always something impossible about our reading of Levinas because one cannot ever be, or should not be, entirely faithful or grateful. As Derrida puts it, I must “risk the fault” when I give. As opposed to casting his thought into iron-clad principles which provide answers to preestablished problems of teaching and learning, I think, rather, the point is to welcome his words through giving reception to his teaching. To open one’s educational home to the teaching of Levinas means, however, to disturb it. The Other’s alterity means that I am no longer owner of this domain; I become a guest—a guest in my own ﬁeld—for to open my home to a foreign discourse is to admit an alteration of the very terms by which I deﬁne that home. In the sense of educational theory, this means a shift in the terms of educational interest in ethics to something other than practical application. Since we cannot model an actual teacher on Levinas’s ﬁgure of the master, nor the conventional student in terms of a welcoming mistress, readers of Levinas struggle with the difﬁculties of learning to receive in such a way so as not to suppose that Levinas offers new answers to our same old questions. The very terms of those questions are what are being challenged. How we deﬁne our “objects of study,” what we ﬁnd important to theorize, how we proceed with our questions— these are the consequences of being disturbed. Our response cannot simply be an undying, uncritical gratitude to Levinas. Rather, the nature of what we give back in proposing a world of our own through our educational discourse is not based on agreement with the Levinasian terminology, but is a response to the ethical force of learning. To the degree in which the work of Levinas teaches, we are called upon to respond in ways that break the “circle of acknowledgement and reciprocity” (Derrida 1991, 15). The gift we present as part of our reception of the Other, the gift which is part of our welcoming of Levinas, can only be part of learning if we refuse to apply his ideas in strict terms. Elsewhere I have argued for an implied as opposed to an applied ethics: an implied ethics “means no longer simply thinking about education in relation to ethics, it means thinking about ethics through education” (Todd 2003a, 29; italics in the original). An implied ethics takes seriously the conditions of the self’s implication in responding to the Other within an educational setting, and it means reading education through a structure of alterity, where the emergence of the ethical subject is at stake in teaching-learning encounters. Yet, upon further reﬂection, I want to caution that this project of implication runs

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the risk of becoming merely an academic appeal to method unless it can perform under the sign of welcome, under that difﬁcult sign of learning, where I am ambiguously poised to receive and give in the same movement. The impulses to categorize, exposit, interpret, and explain are somewhat inescapable in educational attempts to theorize. Theory, after all, does have a totalizing function. Thus the real challenge in working through the possibilities of welcome is to be attentive to the moments where discourse can resist its own seductive appeal in telling others who they are and what they should know. Theory can also be explorative, curious, attentive, and self-questioning. It can, in short, reveal a learning of separation, a learning from the presence of difference. Learning to become, perhaps, more mistress than master of our own discourse, to see discourse as both gift and response to the Other—this is the difﬁcult task that readers of Levinas in education face. NOTES 1. The term “theory” is not being used in the technical sense of a well-developed explanatory system. Indeed, learning is not even a term that particularly concerns Levinas—his focus lies more on teaching. However, I am using “theory” here rather loosely to indicate a constellation of ideas which reﬂect a certain consistency with respect to how the subject is taught. 2. For a sample of his writing on education, see “Reﬂections on Jewish education,” “Education and prayer,” and “Antihumanism and education,” in Levinas (1997). 3. I wish to note that throughout this chapter I use the term “student” to emphasize that the subject learns in an encounter with the Other. This is not a term Levinas uses. I also use the feminine pronoun to describe both master and subject. This is a deviation from Levinas’s own usage of the masculine, as the discussion of the feminine below will make clear. 4. For the purposes of my present discussion, I wish simply to draw the reader’s attention to the idea that “saying” is what makes signiﬁcation possible; I am thus not delving into this rather complex Levinasian notion in any detail here. For a full discussion of the distinction between the saying and the said, see Levinas (1998). 5. Levinas writes: “The idea of inﬁnity implies a soul capable of containing more than it can draw from itself. It designates an interior being that is capable of a relation with the exterior, and does not take its own interiority for the totality of being” (2004, 180). Thus, the subject’s interiority is brought to the idea of inﬁnity through the encounter with the Other which lies in an exterior relation. The Other signiﬁes that which the self cannot take into itself, representing a limitlessness beyond the borders of self-containment. 6. One could, of course, state that our relations to things and animals ought not be excluded from the ethical response Levinas depicts here. However, his attention to language, to the discourse which speciﬁcally arises from the human Other, as part of the subject’s confrontation with inﬁnity, fails to deal with communication beyond human relations. From Levinas’s point of view, it would seem that the subject who proposes a world, and thereby thematizes that world, constructs a totality which cannot be disrupted from within (and this would include the world in which one imputes to things, natural

184 Sharon Todd objects, and animals speciﬁc qualities). It nonetheless bears some thinking about how a communicative ethics, such as the one Levinas proposes, could be made responsive to the context of nonhuman forms of relationality. 7. Levinas writes that the self has certain relations to the Other, but he is cautious about how to interpret “relation.” It does not refer, for instance, to that which collapses difference (such as we might perhaps ﬁnd in appeals to empathy or in ﬁnding something in common). Instead, “the relationship between separated beings does not totalize them; it is a [sic] ‘unrelating relation,’ which no one can encompass or thematize” (Levinas 2004, 295). 8. I have not dealt here with the varied ways in which Levinas’s texts might be read for the way they may contribute to a feminist orientation to ethics or as a doleful reminder of the sexism that permeates his conception of responsibility. My own view is that the “problem” of the feminine in Levinasian ethics cannot be unambiguously argued in either/or terms. Linked as it is to conceptions of eros (see Todd 2003b), dwelling, hospitality, and transcendence, the feminine is not a singular concept which carries a ﬁxed meaning. For an excellent account of how the notion of the feminine changes over the course of Levinas’s philosophical oeuvre, see Perpich (2001). Also see the collected essays in Tina Chanter (2001a), and Chanter’s own work on the feminine in relation to both Heidegger and Levinas (2001b).

REFERENCES Chanter, T. 2001a. Feminist interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. ———. 2001b. Time, death and the feminine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 1991. At this very moment in this work here I am. In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 11–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1999. A word of welcome. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, 15–123. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gibbs, R. 2000. Why ethics? Signs of responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, E. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1996. Enigma and phenomenon. In Basic philosophical writings, ed. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, 65–77. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997. Difﬁcult freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press ———. 1998. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lingis, A. 1994. The community of those who have nothing in common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Perpich, D. 2001. From the caress to the word: Transcendence and the feminine in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In Feminist interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. T. Chanter, 28–52. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press.

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Robbins, J. 1999. Altered reading: Levinas and literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Todd, S. 2003a. Learning from the Other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education, Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2003b. A ﬁne risk to be run? The ambiguity of Eros and teacher responsibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22:31–44.

12 Autonomy and Heteronomy Kant and Levinas Zdenko Kodelja

Kant, in his Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, deﬁnes autonomy as a positive freedom of the will (1953, 446).1 Therefore, autonomy of rational beings cannot be understood simply as a negative freedom of their wills, that is, as an ability of rational beings to act independently of determination by external causes (446),2 but rather as a positive freedom, that is, as a capacity of the free will for self-determination (447; O‘Neill 1995, 53). A truly free will, and not only an arbitrary one, is then a will which is under law. Negative freedom as an independence from external causes is not sufﬁcient for autonomy, although rational beings cannot be autonomous if they subordinate themselves to something external (for instance, to someone in authority or to their own passions and sensible inclinations). If they want to be autonomous agents, they need something more: they must act by “adopting a self-imposed law” (O‘Neill 2000, 42), or, in other words, they must act by adopting moral principles (maxims) “that can be universally adopted” (because they have the form of law), and rejecting the “principles that cannot be universally adopted” (because nothing can be a moral principle which cannot be a principle for all) (42–43; italics in the original). Autonomy, understood in this way, is therefore identiﬁed with conformity to the categorical imperative (Kant 1953, 447).3 More precisely, one of its formulations requires us to “act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (421).4 It is well known that Kant’s conception of moral autonomy reﬂects the political origin of this concept, particularly Rousseau’s famous idea that “freedom is obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself” (Rousseau 1978, 56). As a result, Kant conceives a rational agent as a kind of sovereign authority who can set universal laws through his or her will.5 Like Rousseau, Kant strictly rejects all forms of heteronomy because it is the determination of the will by external and nonrational forces and, consequently, transforms the imperatives of morality into hypothetical ones. Since an act is moral only if it is in accordance with the categorical imperative, it is obvious that heteronomy destroys morality. For this reason, Kant held that heteronomy has no moral value, “even if, by virtue of it and the fear it inspires, people respect the precepts of law and avoid inﬂicting injury on one another“(Chalier 2002, 61).

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It is not surprising then that autonomy is, for Kant, also the ultimate aim of moral education. Given that autonomy is what children should be educated for, it is obvious that it is something children can achieve only in the end of the educational process. At the beginning of the educational process, children are heteronomously determined and therefore without autonomy. Since they are heteronomously determined, they lack both negative and positive freedom. On the one hand, they lack freedom from determination by external causes, and on the other hand, they are without ability for selflegislation. Since autonomy is nothing more than positive freedom, and if it is true that it is possible to reach positive freedom only on condition that we attain negative freedom ﬁrst, then the ﬁrst step of the educational process, which aims at autonomy, must be to attain negative freedom, that is, to overcome heteronomy. Negative freedom can be, at least partially, attained through the process of that kind of education which Kant, in his lectures on education, calls “negative education.” Negative education is deﬁned as discipline (Kant 1987, 85), and discipline itself is also something negative, because it either tries to prevent animality in man from being harmful for humanity (70–71), or it strives to divest man of his wildness (71).6 In the ﬁrst case, discipline prevents man from being turned aside from humanity, because of his animal impulses (70–71), and to discipline a man means exactly the same as to tame his wildness (82). It seems, therefore, that wildness is the result of his animality. But on the other hand, Kant paradoxically deﬁnes wildness as “independence of laws” (71), that is, as freedom and not as dependence on animal impulses. Man is by nature, says Kant, so strongly inclined to freedom that he sacriﬁces everything for it, although he has been accustomed to freedom only for a short duration (71). Freedom, which is equated with man’s independence of laws, is therefore wildness as well. Here, independence of laws does not mean man’s independence of natural laws, but rather his independence of laws of mankind. For this reason, Kant states that discipline subjects man to the laws of mankind, and it starts with making him feel the constraint of laws (70–71). Man should therefore accustom himself very early to submit himself to the prescriptions of reason, for, if a man is allowed to follow his own will in his youth, without opposition, he will keep a certain wildness throughout his whole life, and he will be apt to follow every whim (71–72). But children are not capable of submitting themselves to the prescriptions of reason by themselves. They need an educator who will force them to obey the will of the educator.7 Obedience to his or her will is necessary as long as they are still immature, that is, until they are able to set their own moral laws and act in accordance with them, without needing educators to compel them to obey them. During this period of a child’s life, the educator does what the child is not yet able to do because of the child’s lack of reason. Thus, he or she does exactly what the child would have done if he or she had been an autonomous agent. In order to submit a child to the prescription of reason, the discipline (the exact purpose of which is to produce obedience) must be applied very early

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(Kant, 1987, 71). Obedience is either absolute or voluntary. It is absolute when it is obedience to the absolute will of the educator, and it is voluntary when it is obedience to his or her will only if it is recognized as reasonable and good. In the ﬁrst case, obedience is the consequence of constraint, and in the second case, it is the result of conﬁdence (125). Constraint is mechanic in the ﬁrst period of the educational process, when a child “must show submission and some kind of passive obedience,” and it is moral when a child is already allowed to use consideration and his or her freedom, but only within the bounds of laws (85).8 Kant emphasizes that “one of the greatest problems of education” is just “how to unite submission to the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of exercising his free will” (87). But although discipline as a form of negative education is necessary and very important in the beginning of the educational process, it is not sufﬁcient for achieving autonomy, which is for Kant, as we have already seen, the most important aim of moral education. The reason lies in the fact that “moral education must be based upon maxims and not upon discipline“: discipline prevents evil habits, while moral education should cultivate the way of thinking. “The child should learn to act in accordance with maxims, which he is able to see for himself that they are just,” and “not from certain motives” (Kant 1987, 124): either external (fear of punishment and expectation of reward in this or another world) or internal (personal inclinations, passions, desires, interests, impulses). At ﬁrst, he learns to act in accordance with school maxims, and later on with maxims of mankind (125). In the end of the educational process he is supposed to be able to act by adopting only those maxims through which he can at the same time will that they become a universal law. When he acts in this way, he imposes the moral law on himself and acts autonomously. We saw that for Kant, heteronomy has a value only as a means for achieving autonomy. At the beginning of the educational process a child is, due to discipline and constraint, subjected to absolute obedience. But, step by step, he desists from obeying someone who is not himself and starts to obey himself or, if we prefer, reason. At this point, obedience becomes voluntary, that is to say, an obedience which is no longer founded on the authority of the other, but an obedience which is obedience to oneself. In this way a child passes on from heteronomy to autonomy (Philonenko 1987, 58). But the problem is that autonomy cannot be fully achieved in the lives of ﬁnite beings.9 Despite this, we have to strive for achieving it not only during our years of education, but also when we are adults. We ought to do this, although, or just because, as Kant asserts in What is enlightenment?, “it is so convenient to be immature” (1970, 54).10 If we do not strive to act autonomously because of our laziness, we are responsible for our immaturity. For this reason, he blames those who do not try to act autonomously or do not have the courage to escape from “self-incurred immaturity,” that is, from a situation in which they do not think and judge for themselves, but

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rather obey a master or someone in authority, and do what he or she wants them to do. Their immaturity is some kind of a willing slavery or a voluntary servitude of rational agents who are willingly subjected to an authority external to reason. Since their actions are not autonomous, but rather heteronomous, they, according to Kant, do not deserve respect. Only those who act autonomously, that is, who establish moral law for themselves, deserve respect. Respect is, in fact, the product of the will which respects its own rationality (Ricoeur 1967, 127). Consequently, when the moral subject considers the person of the other, the same feeling of respect awakens in it—since the other is also, by virtue of his or her reason, a possible source of moral law. The subject thus respects not the other’s singular and irreplaceable personality but rather that which makes him or her similar to itself: the author of moral law. (Chalier 2002, 65) That is why Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative requires that we ought to treat humanity, in ourselves and in the person of any other, “never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end” (1953, 429).11 For Levinas, this way of looking at respect for the other (which passes through the neutral and formal element of the universal, and through respect for the law [Derrida 2003, 119]) is problematic although he, according to Chalier’s interpretation, admits that it is indispensable both “in the struggle against violence, which refuses to recognize the other as an alter ego, worthy of respect,” and “in the denunciation of fanaticism blind to the universality of the human” (Chalier 2002, 68). It is problematic because it “highlights the violence involved in conceiving of the other under the same category as I conceive myself” (Seeskin 2001, 207); that is, it conceives the other as an alter ego. The other deserves my respect because of his rationality, because of his capacity to be an autonomous person like myself, and not, as Chalier accentuates it, because of the “alterity of the other” (2002, 68). As a result, the other is from this perspective seen as an alter ego and not as other in his or her otherness. That which is missing here is just the alterity of the other. This alterity is missing and cannot be seen from the perspective of an autonomous subject because he or she approaches the other “on the basis of the moral law in him” or her, and through the process of self-reﬂection and deduction, he or she can, at the end of this process, ﬁnd only an alter ego. Alter ego is then the result of this process. On the other hand, the alterity of the other we cannot ﬁnd in this way, for the alterity is not the result of the process of self-reﬂection and logical deduction, but rather results from the “encounter with the face of the other” (68). Here, in his or her relationship with the other, “alterity appears as a nonreciprocal relationship” in which “the other as other is not only an alter ego: the other is what I myself am not. The other is this not because

190 Zdenko Kodelja of the other’s character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the other’s very alterity” (Levinas 1987, 83). It seems, therefore, that “the only possible ethical imperative, the only incarnated non-violence,” is for Levinas, an immediate “respect for the other himself” (Derrida 2001, 119). For “the other as a person is,” for him or her, “what determines categorical imperative” (Levinas 1998, 17).12 But although this interpretation is, according to Derrida, “profoundly faithful for Kant (‘Respect is applied only to persons’—Practical Reason),” it is at once “implicitly anti-Kantian, for without the formal element of universality, without the pure order of the law, respect of the other, respect and the other no longer escape empirical and pathological immediacy” (Derrida 2001, 400–1). Unlike Kant, who asserts that only autonomous beings deserve our respect and that every form of heteronomy leads to the alienation of the subject and to the destruction of ethics, Levinas defends the idea of moral heteronomy (Chalier 2002, 6). But he does not defend heteronomy as a submission to the tyrannical will of the other. On the contrary, heteronomy, understood in this way, destroys freedom, and as such, it is immoral and inadmissible not only for Kant, but also for Levinas (78). He defends an entirely other sort of heteronomy, a heteronomy which does not abolish freedom, but rather makes it moral (78). This kind of heteronomy is the so-called heteronomy of the face. It is the heteronomy of the face of the other, the heteronomy of a being who is in a “face-to-face” encounter with me. In such a relationship, the other is not someone who has power to subject me to his or her will. Just the opposite, the other has no power over me. “The face, asserts Levinas, is not a force” (Bernasconi and Wood 1988, 169).13 Even more, not only the other as a face cannot subject me to his or her will since the face is without power, but the “absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenceless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence” (Levinas 1994, 51–52). If it is so, then it is not the other’s power which deters my power and violence, but it is precisely its weakness that deters them. The weakness of the face is in fact its power, it is its moral power, or in Levinas’s words, it is its authority. This speciﬁc power can be described as a power which “awakens a person to life as a singular subject” (Chalier 2002, 78). The subject, therefore, as Chalier emphasizes, “emerges in its irreplaceable uniqueness as a response to the appeal of the face that elects the subject” (78). An individual becomes elect and, consequently, a free subject exactly when he or she responds to the call of the face with the biblical “here I am” (78–79). So, for Levinas, who unlike Kant distinguishes autonomy and freedom, the subject is moral and free because of this election and not, as Kant thinks, because of the subject’s autonomy (79). The subject is, therefore, free because the face chooses him or her. In addition, the weakness of the face calls the subject to responsibility. For Levinas, responsibility is responsibility for the other. It is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, but it is rather its essential structure. This responsibility for the other is not symmetrical. Quite the opposite: although I am

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responsible for the other, I cannot expect any reciprocity from the other. In other words, “the substitution of the one for the other does not signify the substitution of the other for the one” (Levinas 1981, 158). By confronting the other, I cease to be a being “for itself” and become instead a being “for the other” (158). Since there is no symmetry, the other does not become a being “for me.” On the contrary, “the other is separate from me and stands above me. In Levinasian terms, I am hostage to the other” (Seeskin 2001, 203). Nevertheless, the other, who is inﬁnitely transcendent and totally beyond my control, “becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question” (Levinas 2004, 247). The question which arises here is of how individual responsibility and freedom are related. Levinas sees individual freedom as the product of moral responsibility since “only the response to election or to the appeal—responsibility—gives man a sense of freedom. In discovering that it alone is capable of responding, the subject discovers its uniqueness and only then its freedoms” (Chalier 2002, 7). If so, then it is clear that autonomy cannot exist prior to responsibility for the other. Autonomy depends on responsibility for the other and is also constituted by it. Kant’s understanding of the connection between freedom and responsibility is just the opposite: individual freedom is a precondition of moral action. For this reason, freedom is primary and the subject of responsibility is deduced from it. Since the other has precedence over the self in the face-to-face relation, and since Levinas “sees in autonomy the negation of the other and the denial of transcendence” (Seeskin 2001, 210), it is not surprising at all that he revalued and afﬁrmed moral heteronomy.14 What does this mean for moral education and for philosophy of education as well? It seems that this means at least a great challenge which requires us to rethink two basic concepts—autonomy and heteronomy—not only in Kant’s and Kantian educational theory, but also in a great part of contemporary liberal philosophy of education, which regards autonomy as one of the principal educational aims. But is it enough to rethink them or should something more be done? Should we, perhaps, not only rethink them in the context of Levinas’s philosophy, but also apply his interpretation of autonomy and heteronomy to education? Some authors, who examined the relationship between Levinas and education, are convinced that we cannot simply apply Levinas’s philosophy to education. We cannot do this because it is impossible to apply it.15 If that is true, then we cannot do otherwise, although we would will to do so. There are some reasons which support such a conclusion. First, if Badiou’s critiques of Levinas’s thought— as something that is not philosophy but a particular kind of ethics which is neither a branch of philosophy nor the ﬁrst philosophy (Badiou 1993, chap. 2)—are correct, then Levinas’s “philosophy” cannot be applied to education because it is logically impossible to apply philosophy if his thought is not philosophy at all. Second, if Badiou is not right and Levinas’s ethics is (as Levinas and many of his interpreters repeat) the ﬁrst philosophy, it cannot be

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simply applied to educational practice because it is not an ethics as a normative theory which can be straightforwardly applied to moral education, but it is something very different from ethics, as it is usually understood in philosophy.16 It is therefore some kind of meta-ethics, an ethics of ethics, which provides only an explanation of the condition of ethics.17 However, although we cannot simply apply Levinas’s ideas to education, we can, and as philosophers of education, we also ought to, rethink educational concepts (including autonomy and heteronomy) in the context of his philosophy. But according to Ann Chinnery, this is not enough. She thinks that we must, when we “speak of educating for moral agency after Levinas,” not only radically rethink moral agency, but also “abandon the language of autonomous freedom for a language of heteronomous responsibility” (2003, 15). Does this also mean that after Levinas’s privileging of heteronomy, autonomy can no longer be the aim of moral education and that, therefore, autonomy should be replaced by heteronomy? If it does, then we are at ﬁrst confronted with the question of whether the attempt to shift the aim of moral education from autonomy to heteronomy is justiﬁed. On the one hand, it seems that it is justiﬁed because of the same reasons which justify Levinas’s attempt to replace autonomy with heteronomy in his ethics. But on the other hand, his attempt runs, if Alain Renaut is right, into two difﬁculties. The ﬁrst concerns the justiﬁcation of Levinas’s conviction that the Kantian determination of the practical subject as autonomy of the will is only a simple moment in the development of classical humanism, or in other words, of “philosophy of immanence” (Renaut 1989, 255).18 “This is the reason why Levinas, who sees in modernity an inclination to conceive subjectivity as monadicity, considers the doctrine of the autonomy of the will to be part of the same movement.” According to Renaut, this “simple absorption of the idea of autonomy into the notion . . . of immanence-to-itself” is “a sign of insufﬁciently precise categorization.” In his opinion, Levinas confounds autonomy and independence because he is “failing to see that the idea of autonomy already contains the openness to the other” (255). Renaut emphasizes that Kant, in his critique of the morality of happiness in the name of the principle of autonomy, gives the proof for the fact that autonomy is not independence. Autonomy presupposes, says Renaut, that I am the “source of myself” only by raising myself, as the practical subject, above the immediacy of the empirical subject and integrating the presence of the other into my ipseity: the subject that gives itself its own law must, in order to rise to the level of this auto-nomy, have transcended the self-identity of the desiring subject (individuality) and opened itself up to the otherness of the human species. Transcendencein-immanence is by deﬁnition what autonomy means. (1989, 255–56) Renaut sees the second difﬁculty in Levinas’s phenomenological approach, which leads to the idea of subjectivity as responsibility and then from it to

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the notion of subjectivity as “subjection. For, if subjectivity is pure subjection, how can it be responsibility? Is it really possible to think of responsibility without reference to autonomy?” (Renaut 1989, 256). According to Renaut, an “ethical project, insofar as it involves the emergence of responsibility, must unavoidably make reference to the horizon of autonomy without which we cannot conceive how the moral subject could think of itself as responsible to others” (257). In addition, if the previously mentioned requirement to “abandon the language of autonomous freedom for a language of heteronomous responsibility” means that after Levinas, autonomy can no longer be the aim of moral education, and that it should be replaced by heteronomous responsibility, then such a conclusion presupposes that heteronomous responsibility can be an aim of education. But can it? Is it possible that responsibility for the Other, if it is inﬁnite, that is, “without end and beginning” (Habib 1998, 150), could be—as such—an aim of education? Since an aim of education is something that we intend to achieve through the educational process, this means that at the beginning of the educational process there is no responsibility. If there were, it would be logically absurd to intend to achieve it. So, if responsibility is without a beginning, it is already there and it could not begin at that point in the future, when this aim of education is achieved. We would come to the same conclusion if responsibility were “the impossibility of not being responsible for [the] Other” (Bauman 2004, 53). For, if it is impossible that I am not responsible for the Other, since “to be I signiﬁes not being able to escape responsibility“(Levinas 1994, 80), then I am always responsible. Therefore, I do not need education to become responsible. Responsibility for the Other is not the result of education. It is the result of the mere presence of the Other who calls me to responsibility in the face-to-face relationship. In such a relationship, “I am in a position neither freely to accept nor freely to reject responsibility” because “the commandment to responsibility has arrived in advance of the arrival of my freedom, which latter presupposes ego and consciousness” (Miller 1995, 55). Since I am responsible prior to every free commitment, choice, and consciousness, this responsibility is a heteronomous responsibility. However, this responsibility for the Other is constitutive of subjectivity.19 It is not the result of education unless we understand the constitution of subjectivity as if it were an educational process itself.20 But in this case, responsibility is not an aim, but rather a necessary condition of subjectivity. For responsibility is constitutive of subjectivity and not the opposite. If it is so, then heteronomous responsibility cannot be an aim of moral education. NOTES 1. Here Kant deﬁnes a will as “a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational,” and the concept of freedom is for him “the key that explains the autonomy of the will” (1953, 446). 2. The concept of negative freedom is deﬁned as a property of the previously mentioned causality of rational beings, which “can be efﬁcient, independently

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

Zdenko Kodelja of foreign causes determining it” (Kant 1953, Ch.3, 446–63). Thus, negative freedom means that there is no external constraint on what rational beings do. In the opposite case, when the will is determined by external causes, there is no freedom of the will at all. External causes are external regarding reason and they are not necessarily external regarding the particular person as such. They can be either something external in the narrower sense of the word (other persons, conditions) or something internal (one’s own passions, desires etc.). For Kant, an imperative is categorical if it presents an act as “necessary in a will which of itself conforms to reasons as the principle of this will” (1953, 447). In other words, the categorical imperative is that imperative which presents an act of itself objectively necessary, not considering any other end. According to the ﬁrst of the two most known and inﬂuential of Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative, it demands that the fundamental moral principles (maxims) on which we act should be universalizable. If they are not, we must reject them. We must reject, for example, the utilitarian principle of punishment, whose application in education would permit or even require the punishment of innocent students if the consequences of such a punishment were the best possible, or at least better than it would be if we were to not punish them. For we cannot will that the utilitarian maxim of punishment (Punish the innocent if this will have the best consequences!) should be raised to universality and become a universal law, because nobody wants to be punished if he or she is innocent. According to the second formulation of the categorical imperative, it commands that we respect the humanity of every human being and never treat a human only as a means. One example of its application in education would be the principle of punishment according to which we should never punish a student who committed an offence because we would like to give an example to other students in the class and in this way prevent further breaches of the school law. For to punish students in order to secure school discipline or for other valuable educational purposes would mean to treat such students merely as a means to these ends, and not also as ends in themselves. As such, the categorical imperative is opposed to the hypothetical imperative which presents the practical necessity of a possible action as a means to achieving something else. An example of it in education could be expressed in this way: “If you (a teacher) want to secure school discipline in the circumstances when you do not know who of the students in your class committed an offence, you must punish the whole class (including the innocent students).” Thus, this imperative is unlike the categorical one, not unconditional, but conditional: a teacher must punish students only on condition that he or she wants to secure school discipline in the previously described circumstances. Punishing a whole class is not something good in itself, but it is good only as a means to achieving something else (e.g., school discipline). The categorical imperative is a speciﬁc procedure through which any rational agent can achieve universally valid principles of moral action. It is a totally formal principle and as such it tells us only that someone should adopt, and act on, principles which everyone could adopt, but it does not tell us exactly which principles (among many) we ought to adopt and what exactly we should do. In this context sovereignty is deﬁned as a power to enact laws. Use of the masculine gender is that of Kant throughout. A child is here in a position similar to that of a man living in society, who needs a master, “who will break his will and force him to obey a will that is universally valid” (Kant 1963, 17), in order to prevent man’s abuse of his freedom against other men. The educator must compel the child to obey “a will that is universally valid,” but unlike the master, he should, according to Kant, not break the child’s will. Rather, the will of children must be “merely bent in such a way that it may yield to natural obstacles” (Kant 1987, 122).

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8. Kant asserts that “discipline should not be slavish and that a child ought always to feel his freedom, but always in such a way as not to interfere with the liberty of others” (Kant 1987, 101). 9. The will of ﬁnite and imperfect human beings is not like a holy will (which, as a perfectly rational will, always acts only on moral maxims): free from passions, desires, inclinations. Consequently, we always ought to strive for autonomy. 10. “If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all” (Kant 1970, 54). 11. For this reason, those who do not act autonomously, treat humanity in themselves only as a means and not at the same time also as an end, do not deserve respect. 12. This interpretation is different from Kant’s deﬁnition of the categorical imperative, which asserts that it is the universality of maxims that determines categorical imperative. 13. Levinas says that the face “is an authority” and that “authority is often without force” (Bernasconi and Wood 1988, 169). What does this distinction between the force and the authority mean? According to Bauman, the other has “an authority since I am willing to listen to the command before the command has been spoken, and to follow the command before I know what it commands me to do” (2004, 73). On the other hand, the other does not have any power over me since if he had such power—if he had “already spoken the command which I must obey—it would be no longer a face, but an ontological being” (73). Confronting the other as a face is, as Bauman explains, “already the act of transcendence, since everything that appertains to the other in her capacity of being is absent from the other as face” (73). 14. Levinas is also persuaded that “Western thought very often seemed to exclude the transcendence, encompass every Other in the Same, and proclaim the philosophical birthright of autonomy,” which is nothing more than “the self giving law to itself” (Seeskin 2001, 210). 15. Simon states that “it is impossible to simply ‘broker’ Levinas’s writings through the transﬁguration of his philosophical and Judaic thought into either a moral agenda for education or the programmatic regularities of a pedagogical methodology” (2003, 45–46). This conviction is shared by Biesta, who adds that “to explore the relationship between Levinas and education is not a question of the application of his ideas to education” (2003, 61). Egéa-Kuehne also states that what Levinas’s “texts offer educators is not a program, a set of rules, prescription or principles which could be applied to education” (2003, 180). 16. “Levinas has declared several times over the years that he never wrote an ethics . . . if we understand ‘ethics’ as a doctrine about the moral principles, norms, obligations, and interdictions that rule human behaviour. The word ‘ethics’ in ‘ethics as ﬁrst philosophy’ points to something more radical and originary: it indicates a ‘point’ where the ethical and the theoretical cannot yet be opposed—or even distinguished—a ‘point’ where the opposition between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is neither valid nor even possible. If ‘ethics’ is thoughtful consideration (or theory) of the ethical—and primarily of its root or origin—while ‘ﬁrst philosophy’ is the most ‘originary’ or ‘radical’ dimension of theory—a dimension that, as originary, must precede all other dimensions—then ethics and ﬁrst philosophy coincide” (Peperzak 1995, xi). 17. “Levinas has readily conceded that he does not provide an ethics but only an account of the condition of ethics. It should be added that what he describes as ethics is very different from what has hitherto gone under that name among

196 Zdenko Kodelja philosophers” (Bernasconi 1998, 580; italics in the original). Derrida also emphasises that Levinas’s ethics is “an Ethics without law and without concept” since he “does not seek to propose laws or moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general. But as this determination does not offer itself as a theory of Ethics, in question then, is an Ethics of Ethics” (2001, 138). 18. Levinas shared this conviction with Heidegger, who deﬁnes classical humanism as “metaphysics of subjectivity” (Renaut 1989, 255). 19. I am responsible because “the other constitutes me as responsible” (Ricoeur 1990, 388). 20. In this sense, the educational process is understood as the constitution of subjectivity, that is, as the constitution of “the humanity of man” (Levinas 1987, 109), and not as teaching. Teaching is not deﬁned by Levinas as the constitution of subjectivity, but rather as “a discourse, in which the master can bring to the student what the student does not yet know” (2004, 180). Unlike the maieutics, which can bring out of me only that knowledge which is already in me (43), “teaching comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain” (51). It comes from the Other and just through the openness of the self to the face of the Other, which makes teaching and learning possible, the I can learn and “become something different than, or beyond, what it was” (Todd 2003, 30). However, teaching does not bring me responsibility. Responsibility is not the result of teaching or learning.

REFERENCES Badiou, A. 1993. L‘éthique. Paris: Hatier. Bauman, Z. 2004. Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bernasconi, R. 1998. Levinas. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig, Vol. 5: 579–582. London and New York: Routledge. Biesta, G. 2003. Learning from Levinas: A response. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22 (1):61–68. Chalier, C. 2002. What ought I to do? Morality in Kant and Levinas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chinnery, A. 2003. Aesthetics of surrender: Levinas and the disruption of agency in moral education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22 (1):5–17. Derrida, J. 2001. Writing and difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. Egéa-Kuehne, D. 2003. The violence of being and Levinas’s quest for justice: The idea of possibility for education. In Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference 2003, Conference Papers, ed. C. Higgins, Vol. 1: 173–182. Oxford, England: New College. Habib, S. 1998. La responsabilité chez Sartre et Lévinas. Paris: L’Harmattan. Kant, E. 1953. Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1963. Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view. In On History, 11–26. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. ———. 1970. An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? In Kant’s political writings, 54–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1987. Réﬂexions sur l’éducation. Paris: Vrin. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Time and the Other and additional essays. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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———. 1988. The paradox of morality: An interview with Emanuel Lévinas. By T. Wright, P. Hayes, and A. Ainley. In The provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood, 160–180. London: Routledge. ———. 1994. Liberté et commandement. Paris: Fata Morgana. ———. 2003. Humanism of the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. O‘Neill, O. 1995. Constructions of reason. Explorations of Kant’s practical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Bounds of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peperzak, A. T. 1995. Preface to Ethics as ﬁrst philosophy, by A. T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge. Philonenko, A. 1987. Kant et le problème de l‘éducation. Introduction to Réﬂexions sur l’éducation, by E. Kant. Paris: Vrin. Renaut, A. 1989. L‘ère de l’individu. Paris: Gallimard. Ricoeur, P. 1967. Le volontaire et l‘involontaire. Paris: Aubier. ———. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. Rousseau, J.-J. 1978. On the social contract. New York: St Martin’s. Seeskin, K. 2001. Autonomy in Jewish philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, R. I. 2003. Innocence without naivete, uprightness without stupidity: The pedagogical Kavannah of Emmanuel Levinas. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22 (1):45–59. Todd, S. 2003. Learning from the Other: Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. Albany: State University of New York Press.

13 Pedagogy with Empty Hands Levinas, Education, and the Question of Being Human Gert Biesta

To be human means to live as if one were not a being among beings (Levinas 1985, 100).

MODERN EDUCATION AS A HUMANIST PRACTICE What does it mean to be human? What is the deﬁnition of humanity? What is the measure of humanity? These are age-old questions with which philosophers have occupied themselves ever since they turned their gaze away from the natural world toward the human being itself. To say that these are questions with which philosophers have occupied themselves is not to say that they are merely theoretical questions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one example of the way in which a particular deﬁnition of what it means to be human has had wide-ranging practical ramiﬁcations. The advancement of life sciences and life technologies in the twentieth century, which has made it possible to intervene in the creation and termination of human life in unprecedented ways, is another example which shows that questions about what it means to be human can literally be a matter of life and death. The question of what it means to be human is also—and perhaps even ﬁrst of all—an educational question. Education, be it the education of adults, the education of children or the education of other “newcomers,” is always an intervention into someone’s life; an intervention motivated by the idea that it will make this life somehow better: more complete, more rounded, more perfect, more human. Many educational practices are conﬁgured as practices of socialization. They are concerned with the insertion of newcomers into an existing cultural and sociopolitical order. This is not unimportant since it equips newcomers with the cultural tools needed for participation in a particular form of life, and at the same time secures cultural and social continuity. But we should not be too naive about this, since these processes also contribute to the reproduction of existing inequalities—unwillingly or, in those cases in which education is used to conserve particular practices and traditions, also willingly. Education is, however, not exclusively the servant

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 199 of the existing order. There is an important countercurrent in educational thought and practice in which education is seen as the “servant” of the individual. Here, the task and purpose of education is not understood in terms of discipline, socialization, or moral training—that is in terms of insertion and adaptation—but is focused on the cultivation of the human person or, to be more precise, on the cultivation of the individual’s humanity (Løvlie, Mortensen, and Nordenbro 2003). By far the oldest way of thinking along these lines can be found in the tradition of Bildung.1 Bildung stands for an educational ideal which emerged in Greek society and which, through its adoption in Roman culture, humanism, neo-humanism and the Enlightenment, became one of the central notions of the modern Western educational tradition (Klafki 1986). Central in this tradition is the question of what constitutes an educated or cultivated human being. Initially, the answer to this question was given in terms of the contents of Bildung. An educated person was the one who had acquired a clearly deﬁned set of knowledge and values. An important step was taken when the activity of the acquisition of the contents of Bildung became itself recognized as a constitutive aspect of the process of Bildung (e.g., Herder, Pestalozzi, and Von Humbolt). Since then, Bildung has always been understood as self-Bildung (Gadamer 2001). The foundations of modern educational theory and practice were laid when the tradition of Bildung became intertwined with the Enlightenment. Kant provided the classical deﬁnition of enlightenment as “man’s [sic] release from his self-incurred tutelage,” and deﬁned “tutelage” (or, in other translations, “immaturity”) as “man’s inability to make use of his understanding [verstand] without direction from another” (Kant 1992, 90). This tutelage is self-incurred, he wrote, “when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to exercise your own understanding!‘—that is the motto of enlightenment” (90). The most important thing about Kant’s call for rational autonomy was that he did not conceive of this capacity as a contingent historical possibility, but saw it as something which was inherent in human nature. He saw the “propensity and vocation to free thinking” (95) as man’s “ultimate destination” and the “aim of his existence” (1982, 701). To block progress in enlightenment would therefore be “a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress” (1992, 93). Interestingly enough—and this is particularly signiﬁcant for the destiny of modern education since the Enlightenment—Kant also argued that the propensity for free thinking could only be brought about through education. He not only wrote that man “is the only being who needs education” (Kant 1982, 697), but also argued that “man can only become man [a rational autonomous being] by education” (699). With Kant, the rationale for the educational process became founded “on the humanist idea of a certain kind of subject who has the inherent potential to become self-motivated and self-directing,” while the task of

200 Gert Biesta education became one of bringing out or releasing this potential “so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency” (Usher and Edwards 1994, 24–25). Modern education thus became based on a truth about the nature and ultimate destination of the human being, and the connection between rationality, autonomy, and education became the “Holy Trinity” of modern education. This was not only the case in approaches which more or less directly followed on from the Kantian framework, such as those educational approaches based on the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. The ideal of rational autonomy also became the cornerstone of critical approaches to education which took their inspiration from Hegel, Marx, and neo-Marxism—such as the work of Paulo Freire, and North American and continental versions of critical pedagogy (Biesta 1998). The foregoing shows that the question of the humanity of the human being has been a constant in the history of Western educational thought and practice. It also lays bare the humanist foundations of modern education, i.e., the fact that modern education is based on a particular truth about the human being, a particular idea of that which the humanity of the human being consists of. From the Enlightenment onward, the human being has been understood as a being who, by its very nature, is capable of rational autonomy. Education is seen as the process through which the human being’s inherent rational potential is released, so that the human being can become “truly human.”

THE PROBLEM WITH HUMANISM The fact that modern education is based on a humanism—a truth about the human being—should not come as a surprise. Modern education was not an exception, but rather followed a more general pattern in Western thought in which the human being, as a thinking being, a knowing being, and a rational being, that is, as an ego cogito (Descartes), was placed at the very center of the philosophical, scientiﬁc, moral, and political universe. Levinas deﬁnes humanism as “the recognition of an invariable essence named ‘Man,’ the afﬁrmation of this central place in the economy of the Real and of his value which [engenders] all values,” and observes (in 1973) that “(u)ntil the fairly recent past, Western humanity looked to humanism for its raison d’être.” He acknowledges that up to a point, humanism has deﬁnitely been beneﬁcial. It created, for example, “respect for the person, both in itself and in the Other, which made it necessary to safeguard his freedom” (1990, 277). But the question which underlies all of his writings is whether humanism can still be an appropriate framework or an effective “strategy” for safeguarding the humanity of the human being. Levinas believes that this is no longer the case. Levinas’s work needs to be understood against the background of a “crisis of humanism in our society.” He maintains that, in a sense, this crisis had

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 201 to happen. It was a crisis which was needed in order to expose humanism’s “inability to guarantee the privileges of humanity of which humanism had considered itself the repository”—although he hastens to add that it is “a sad thing to say” that the crisis of humanism was needed. The crisis of humanism began with “the inhuman events of recent history.” For Levinas, they not only include the “inhumanities” of “[t]he 1914 War, the Russian Revolution refuting itself in Stalinism, fascism, Hitlerism, the 1939–45 War, atomic bombings, genocide and uninterrupted war,” but are also concerned with “a science that calculates the real without always thinking it,” a “liberal politics and administration that suppresses neither exploitation nor war,” and “a socialism that gets entangled in bureaucracy” (1990, 281). This is why Levinas writes that “[h]umanism has to be denounced . . . because it is not sufﬁciently human” (1981, 128). This way of putting the problem is reminiscent of Heidegger, who in his work has also explicitly exposed the shortcomings of humanism in Western thought. In his 1947 “Letter on humanism,” Heidegger wrote that humanism has to be opposed “because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough” (1993, 233–34). For Heidegger, the problem with humanism as the attempt to deﬁne “the essence of man” is that it is “metaphysical” (226). It tries to “pin down” what the human being as a being (or, we might even say, a “thing”) is, without asking the question of what Heidegger calls the “Being” of this being. With this he refers to the fact that the human being as a being exists—or in Heidegger’s language, “ek-sists,” stands “in the clearing of Being” (228). According to Heidegger, humanism not only does not ask the question of the Being of the human being: “Because of its metaphysical origin humanism even impedes the question by neither recognizing nor understanding it” (226). Levinas considers Heidegger’s “discovery” of the difference between the essence or nature of man (man as a being) and man’s being or existing (the Being of man) a major breakthrough in Western philosophy (Levinas 1985, 40). This is why he thinks of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) as “one of the ﬁnest books in the history of philosophy” (37), and of the analysis of the Being of the human being in this book as “extremely brilliant” (39). He also notes, however, that in order to express his admiration for Sein und Zeit, he always tries “to relive the ambiance of those readings when 1933 was still unthinkable” (38). But although Levinas agrees with Heidegger’s “diagnosis,” he fundamentally disagrees with his “solution,” that is, with his designation of man as “the shepherd of Being” (Heidegger 1993, 234). As a matter of fact, Levinas lists the “ambitious philosophical enterprise in aid of thought and against pure calculation, but subordinating the human to the anonymous gains of Being and, despite its ‘Letters on Humanism,’ bringing understanding to Hitlerism itself” as one of the other inhumanities of the twentieth century (1990, 281). So what is Levinas’s own response to the crisis of humanism? For Levinas there are two related problems with humanism. We have seen that for

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him, the crisis of Western humanism is ﬁrst and foremost located in its inability to counter the inhumanities of the twentieth century. There is a direct link between humanism and these inhumanities in that many of them were actually based upon, or at least motivated by, a particular deﬁnition of what it means to be human. Those who did not ﬁt in with the deﬁnition were excluded or literally exterminated. The ﬁrst problem with humanism, therefore, lies in the fact that it posits a norm of humanity and in doing so excludes those who do not meet this norm.2 The second problem with humanism is that, in its attempt to deﬁne the humanity of the human being as a common humanity or a common human nature, it is unable to acknowledge the uniqueness of each individual human being other than as a variation of an underlying essence. In this respect, all human beings become interchangeable. Again, the problems are not merely of a philosophical nature but have their counterpart in the practice of education. The problem with humanism in education is that it speciﬁes a norm of what it means to be human in advance of any actual manifestation of instances of humanity. It says what the child or student must be or must become, before giving the child or student the opportunity to show who he or she is or might be or might want to be. Humanism is unable, in other words, to be open to the possibility that “newcomers” might radically alter our understanding of what it means to be human, might radically alter the ways in which a human life is humanly led. In this respect we might say that humanism can only think of education in terms of socialization, that is, in terms of the insertion of newcomers into a preexisting conception of humanity or, in the case of modern education, the insertion into a preexisting rational order—the natural order of modern reason.3 As an immediate result, humanism is also unable to really grasp the uniqueness of each individual human being. It can, after all, only think of each “newcomer” as an instance of an already speciﬁed human nature. Is it possible to understand human subjectivity and the uniqueness of each individual human being differently? In a sense, this is precisely what Levinas attempts to do.4 But rather than giving us a new understanding of what it means to be a unique individual subject, rather than giving us a new conception of human subjectivity, Levinas provides us with a completely new “approach” to the question of human subjectivity itself. He presents us with what I suggest to call an “ethics of subjectivity” (instead of a theory of subjectivity), one which centers on the idea of “responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” (Levinas 1985, 95). How should we understand this ethics of subjectivity, and in what way does it allow Levinas to understand the uniqueness of the human subject differently? These may be easy questions to ask, but they are far more difﬁcult to answer, precisely because Levinas does not want to bring the “phenomenon” of subjectivity under a concept but aims to approach the question of subjectivity from a completely new angle. As I will argue below, this has important implications for the way in which we

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 203 can—or cannot—“apply” Levinas’s ideas to educational questions. But let me ﬁrst try to present some of the key components of Levinas’s ethics of subjectivity.

AN ETHICS OF SUBJECTIVITY Levinas wishes to challenge the “wisdom of the Western tradition” in which it is assumed that human individuals “are human through consciousness” (1998, 190). He wishes to challenge the idea of the subject as a substantial center of meaning and initiative, as a cogito who is ﬁrst of all concerned with itself and only then, perhaps, if he or she decides to do so, with the other. Levinas argues instead that the subject is engaged in a relationship—or, to be more precise, is constituted by a relationship—which is “older than the ego, prior to principles” (1981, 117). This relationship is neither a knowledge relationship nor a willful act of the ego. It is an ethical relationship, a relationship of inﬁnite responsibility for the Other. Levinas stresses that this responsibility for the Other is not a responsibility which we can choose to take upon us, since this would only be possible if we were an ego or a consciousness before we were “inscribed” in this relationship. The responsibility which is the “essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” (1985, 95) is a responsibility “that is justiﬁed by no prior commitment” (1989, 92; italics in the original). It is “an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment,” an “anteriority” that is “‘older’ than the a priori” (90), “older than the time of consciousness that is accessible in memory” (96). It is a “passion” which is absolute, in that it takes hold “without any a priori.” Levinas writes: “The consciousness is affected . . . before forming an image of what is coming to it, affected in spite of itself.” (92). One way in which Levinas characterizes this relationship is as “obsession,” and he summarizes this idea with the simple though disturbing phrase that “a subject is a hostage” obsessed with responsibilities “which did not arise in decisions taken by a subject” (101). Along these lines, Levinas tries to make it clear that subjectivity should not be understood as something issued from one’s own initiative. Subjectivity is not an “abstract point” or the “center of a rotation” but a point “already identiﬁed from the outside” (1989, 96). As Alfonso Lingis puts it, “[s]ubjectivity is opened from the outside, by the contact with alterity” (1981, xxi). This is why responsibility should not be understood as something the subject can take upon itself. Responsibility is not “a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself, before the ethical relationship” (Levinas 1985, 96), since that would only make sense “if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself” (1989, 107). Responsibility is a structure which in no way resembles “the intentional relation which in knowledge attaches us to the object. . . . The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility” (1985, 96–97).

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We can clearly see that by identifying responsibility as the essential, primary, and fundamental structure of subjectivity, Levinas tries to get away from the idea that the human subject has some kind of essence or nature. Levinas acknowledges that he describes subjectivity in ethical terms, but he hastens to add that “[e]thics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base” (1985, 95). This is why I wish to suggest that Levinas does not provide us with a new theory of subjectivity—a theory which would claim that the subject is a being endowed with certain moral qualities—but rather with an ethics of subjectivity. He urges us to “approach” (rather than to understand) the question of subjectivity through responsibility via ethics, bearing in mind that the meaning of ethics itself has changed in the process. Levinas tries to respond to the problems of humanism by not asking what the subject is, but by asking how subjectivity is possible, how subjectivity exists. His approach is, however, not an “exist-entialism,” since that could still be read as an ontological attempt to articulate the being (or Heidegger’s “Being”) of the subject. Levinas emphasizes that subjectivityas-responsibility is not a different, or other, way of being, because “being otherwise is still being” (100). In order to safeguard the uniqueness of the subject, Levinas has to go “beyond essence,” to a “mode” that is “otherwise than being.” (1981). Going beyond essence brings one to a place—or better, a non-place, a “null-site” (Levinas 1981, 8)—where the ﬁrst question is not that of the being of the subject, but that of “my right to be” (1989, 86; emphasis added). Levinas’s point is that it is only in the “very crisis of the being of a being” (85), in the interruption of its being, that the uniqueness of the subject ﬁrst acquires meaning (1981, 13). This interruption constitutes the relationship of responsibility, which is a responsibility of “being-in-question” (111). It is this being-in-question, this “assignation to answer without evasions, which assigns the self to be a self” (1989, 96), and thus constitutes me as this unique individual. This is why he writes that the “oneself,” the unique individual, is precisely the “not-being-able-to-slip-away-from an assignation that does not aim at any generality,” because it is “I and no one else” who is a hostage (116). The oneself, therefore, “does not coincide with the identifying of truth, is not statable in terms of consciousness, discourse and intentionality.” While the oneself can appear in an indirect language, under a proper name, as an entity, it still remains a “no one, clothed with purely borrowed being, which masks its nameless singularity by conferring on it a role” (96). The “oneself is a singularity, prior to the distinction between the particular and the universal,” and therefore both unsayable and unjustiﬁable (97). In this sense, Levinas concludes that the oneself is not a being: it is “beyond the normal play of action and passion in which the identity of a being is maintained, in which it is” (104; italics in the original). What constitutes me as this unique individual, as this singular being, is the point in time (which, according to Levinas, is actually the very beginning of temporality) at which I no longer deny the undeniable responsibility which is

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 205 waiting for me. It is the point in time when I say “yes” to the other, keeping in mind that this “yes” is always already a response to a “question” and not an act of recognition which would only bring the Other into existence. The Other exists before me. The uniqueness of the human subject is thus to be understood as something which goes precisely against what Levinas calls the “ontological condition” of human beings. This is why he writes that to be human means “to live as if one were not a being among beings” (1985, 100). Or, as Lingis puts it, “the self cannot be conceived as an entity. It has dropped out of being” (1981, xxxi). What makes me unique is the fact that my responsibility is not transferable. Levinas summarizes it as follows: Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse. This charge is a supreme dignity of the unique. I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a non-interchangeable I. I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me. (1985, 101; italics in the original) This is also why responsibility is not reciprocal. The Other may well be responsible for me, but Levinas emphasizes that this is totally the affair of the Other. The intersubjective relation is an asymmetrical relationship. “I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it” (Levinas 1985, 98). It is precisely insofar as the relationship between the Other and me is not reciprocal that I am subjected to the Other, and in this way I am a subject. My subjectivity is my subjection to the other, which means, in the shortest formula, that for Levinas “the subject is subject” (Critchley 1999, 63).

LEARNING FROM LEVINAS Rather, therefore, than offering a new conception of human subjectivity, a new truth about the human subject—which would keep Levinas ﬁrmly in the tradition of humanism—we might say that Levinas attempts to account for the “awakening” of the singularity of the subject. The predicament here is, however, that although Levinas wants to speak about what is “otherwise than being”—and he is aware that what “is” otherwise than being “has no verb which would designate the event of its un-rest” (Levinas 1985, 100)—he can only do so in the language of being, in the language of ontology, metaphysics, and even, in a sense, the language of humanism. One way to deal with this predicament is with the help of Levinas’s own distinction between the saying (dire, literally “to say”) and the said (dit) (Levinas 1981, 5–7 and 37–38). Levinas emphasizes that the saying always precedes the said; that the said always comes after the event of saying. Yet the saying can only be thematized and articulated, can only

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become manifest through the said. This is why “the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation demands. In language qua said everything is conveyed before us, be it at the price of a betrayal. Language is ancillary and thus indispensable.” We should not understand language, theory, and thought as “some fall of the saying.” They are motivated—or perhaps we should say, ought to be motivated—“by the pre-original vocation of the saying, by responsibility itself” (Levinas 1981, 6). To theorize or thematize Levinas’s writings—which are themselves obviously part of the order of the said—therefore demands a “language that answers with responsibility” (Levinas 1981, 6). This means that we cannot simply approach Levinas’s writings at the level of the said; we cannot simply approach them as a new theory or new truth about the human subject. We must ﬁnd a different way of relating to his writings, a way which attempts to respond to the saying which is beyond what is said in his writings—and which does so in a responsible manner. This is not only a question about how to read Levinas as a philosopher and about how to read Levinas’s philosophy. It is also, and perhaps even ﬁrst of all, an educational question—a question of pedagogy. The issues surrounding how to relate to Levinas’s oeuvre are expressed in a helpful way in a distinction Sharon Todd (2003) makes between learning about Levinas and learning from Levinas. Learning about Levinas assumes that Levinas has a truth to tell and that it is our task, as readers, as educationalists, and as educators, to apply this truth in the domain of education. Learning from Levinas, on the other hand, suggests the opening of a dialogical space where pedagogy can become and remain an event, something which is open to the future. Learning, in this view, is not about the acquisition of knowledge and truth. It is rather about responding, about formulating a response. Similarly, pedagogy ceases to be about handing down the established truths to the next generation, but is about offering opportunities for children, students, newcomers to ﬁnd their own response, to ﬁnd their own—dare I say, unique—voice (Biesta 2004a, 2006). In our attempts to learn from Levinas, we should not, therefore, approach Levinas as a traditional teacher, as someone who knows what we do not know yet, and where it is our task to come to know what the teacher already knows. Reading Levinas is like being with a teacher who asks questions, and in doing so invites, summons, and perhaps even forces us to respond. But it is important to emphasize that Levinas is not a Socratic teacher. He is not a teacher for whom questioning is simply a pedagogical technique utilized to bring the student to the right response. Socrates was, after all, not really interested in the answers his students gave, as long as they helped him make his point. While for Socrates questioning was, in that sense, a dialectical process, with Levinas, questioning becomes a truly dialogical process, a process where the teacher is interested in the student’s response and expects—or, perhaps we should say, hopes—

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 207 that this response might bring something new into the dialogue, into the conversation, and into the world. This is not to say that the questions which follow from reading Levinas are easy, or even comforting. They are unsettling in many different ways. They are unsettling for the philosophical mind which, trained in the canon of Western philosophy, encounters ideas that simply do not ﬁt into the schemata of that canon, and thus seem to unsettle the rationality of the canon and the rationality of the mind trained by this canon. They are unsettling for the humanist mind that, hoping to ﬁnd a secure foundation from which to rebuild the dignity of the human being after all the atrocities of the twentieth century, ﬁnds nothing more than a responsibility which does not seem to be grounded in anything but itself. And they are even unsettling in a very down-to-earth manner: they make us hesitate and may even make us think. The unsettling character of Levinas’s philosophy may well be one of its most important qualities—at least, that is, if we try to listen to the saying in his writings with an educational ear. In the way in which Levinas unsettles his readers, in the way in which reading Levinas is an unsettling experience, readers may leave feeling empty-handed. They may feel that Levinas is not giving them anything. In a literal sense this is true: Levinas does not aim to give any thing through his writings. If it literally leaves the reader emptyhanded, then it means that the only thing the reader can do in response is respond with empty hands—that is, respond as oneself. In precisely this way the unsettling quality of Levinas’s writings has the potential to call for a unique response.5

PEDAGOGY WITH EMPTY HANDS There is relatively little I wish to say in concluding this chapter, partly because I want to leave it to the reader to formulate his or her own response to the way in which I have tried to explore and present issues about Levinas, education, and the question of being human; partly because I feel that I have already said enough; partly because I feel that when writing about Levinas there is always so much more to say;6 and partly because the very thing which does not follow from reading Levinas is a clear educational program which simply needs to be implemented by well-trained educators. This is why Levinas is unsettling as well. He seems to ask from educators that they give up the idea that education can be based upon secure, certain, or even simply agreed-upon knowledge about the nature of the human being. He seems to ask from educators that they give up the idea that education can be based upon secure, certain, or agreed-upon ideas about the destiny of the human being and of humanity as a whole. He shows educators that if they want to be more than agents of socialization—and the crucial question is, of course, if they want to be more than that, and if the

208 Gert Biesta systematic conditions under which they work make it possible—they literally stand empty-handed. But, as I have tried to suggest, this is precisely one of the key insights we can learn from Levinas. It indicates that a concern for the uniqueness of children, of students, and of other “newcomers” requires that we give up, or at least hold back, all the “tricks of the trade,” all the wisdom of the world, all national curricula and educational strategies, all recipes for “what works,” in order to be able to approach newcomers without an agenda or preconception, but in a way in which we can ask them what they are bringing to the world. It is in this way that educators take a responsibility for something they cannot know. It is a responsibility without knowledge—but as I have argued elsewhere in more detail (Biesta 2005), it is this responsibility which has the potential to bring forth educational relationships. It is important to notice that I conceive of the educational relationship in terms of posing a question: to ask newcomers what they are bringing to the world. As Clarence Joldersma (2002) has argued, it is important to see that the relationship between responsibility and uniqueness is at stake for both the teacher and the student. While the empty-handedness of the teacher leads to a singularization of the teacher, the question of what the newcomer is bringing to the world is a question which potentially singularizes the student. This is particularly the case if we phrase the question in the following way: “What do you think of it?” (see Rancière 1991; Biesta 1998)—although we have to acknowledge that this question can be posed in many different ways which do not necessarily have to be verbal. Instead of thinking of curricular areas as bodies of knowledge and skills which have to be transferred into the minds and bodies of our students, we can approach them as areas, practices, and traditions which set particular challenges for particular students, which ask the question “where do you stand?” in many different ways. Such a question(ing) may well leave the student empty-handed, but this is again an empty-handedness which asks for a response not from someone, but from some one. It is a question(ing) which singularizes. It is an educational questioning. What I am hinting at here is, of course, not a recipe for the production of responsible subjects. Levinas’s ethics of subjectivity leads to anything but a moral education. If it leads to anything at all, it may perhaps lead to an education which is more human and more humane—bearing in mind that the yardstick for its humanity will forever lie in the future and will never be in our hands or in the hands of anybody else, for that matter. NOTES 1. There are all kinds of difﬁculties involved in attempting to translate the concept of Bildung, which is why I will not translate this word in this chapter. For a discussion on the ways in which Bildung can be understood in relation to educational traditions in the English-speaking world, see Biesta (2002); John Cleary and Pádraig Hogan (2001); and Lars Løvlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen, and Sven Erik Nordenbo (2003).

Pedagogy with Empty Hands 209 2. The question which might be asked here is whether it is possible to come up with an all-inclusive deﬁnition of the humanity of the human being. Defenders of the idea of an underlying common humanity (such as, recently, Martha Nussbaum) see this as the only way to overcome diversity and difference. Although this may look like an empirical question—in which case I would be the ﬁrst to protest against any deﬁnition suggested—I am inclined to think, with Levinas, that it is the wrong question to ask and the wrong way to go, since what ultimately counts is not whether all human beings can develop a common understanding of themselves, but whether they are able to live together whilst recognizing one another’s uniqueness. Our relation with the other comes before our ability to deﬁne what binds us; this can never be done the other way around. See also Biesta (2004a). 3. One might even say that the very idea of education is already based upon an exclusion, since it assumes that children lack the qualities of adulthood and therefore need education to make them into adults. The very idea of the child as a natural category is in this respect already a humanist exclusion. See also Carl-Anders Säfström (2003). 4. See, for example, John Llewelyn (1995). 5. See also Biesta (2004a). 6. I am aware of the areas of Levinas’s thought I have not touched upon, such as the idea of proximity, the notion of the third, and the idea of justice—which are all tremendously important for education as well. I refer readers to other publications in which I have explored these ideas in relation/response to Levinas in more detail. See, for example, Biesta (2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006).

REFERENCES Biesta, G. J .J. 1998. “Say You Want a Revolution . . .” Suggestions for the impossible future of critical pedagogy. Educational Theory 48 (4):499–510. ———. 2002. How general can bildung be? Reﬂections on the future of a modern educational ideal. British Journal of Philosophy of Education 36 (3):377–90. ———. 2004a. The community of those who have nothing in common: Education and the language of responsibility. Interchange 35 (3):307–24. ———. 2004b. Education, accountability and the ethical demand: Can the democratic potential of accountability be regained? Educational Theory 54 (3):233–50. ———. 2005. Against learning: Reclaiming a language for education in an age of learning. Nordisk Pedagogik 25:54–66. ———. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder: Paradigm. Cleary, J., and P. Hogan. 2001. The reciprocal character of self-education: Introductory comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s address “Education is Self-Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35 (4):519–28. Critchley, S. 1999. Ethics, politics, subjectivity. New York: Verso. Gadamer, H.-G. 2001. Education is self-education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 35 (4):529–38. Heidegger, M. 1993. Letter on humanism. Trans. F. Capuzzi and J. Gray. In Martin Heidegger: The basic writings, ed. D. F. Krell, 213–66. New York: Harper Collins. Joldersma, C. W. 2002. Pedagogy of the Other: A Levinasian approach to the teacher-student relationship. In Philosophy of education 2001, ed. S. Rice, 181– 88. Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society. Kant, I. 1982. Über Pädagogik. In Schiften zur anthropologie, geschichtsphilosophie, politik und pädagogik, 695–761. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag.

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———. 1992. An answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” In Post-modernism: A reader, ed. P. Waugh, 89–95. London: Edward Arnold. Klafki, W. 1986. Die bedeutung des klassischen bildungstheorien für ein zeitgemässes konzept von allgemeiner bildung. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 32:455–76. Lingis, A. 1981. Translator’s introduction to Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence, by E. Levinas. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1989. Ethics as ﬁrst philosophy. Trans. S. Hand and M. Temple. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 75–87. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1990. Difﬁcult freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1998. Entre nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. M. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Llewelyn, J. 1995. Emmanuel Levinas: The genealogy of ethics. London and New York: Routledge. Løvlie, L., K. P. Mortensen, and S.-E. Nordenbo, eds. 2003. Educating humanity: Bildung in postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Säfström, C.-A. 2003. Teaching otherwise. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22:19–29. Todd, S. 2003. A ﬁne risk to be run? The ambiguity of eros and teacher responsibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education 22:31–44. Usher, R., and R. Edwards. 1994. Postmodernism and education. London and New York: Routledge.

Part III

Between Ethics and Politics

14 How Hospitable Can Dwelling Be? The Folds of Spatiality in Levinas Zelia Gregoriou

INTRODUCTION Levinas’s language of the Other has become almost a common topos in the educational discourse on ethics, multiculturalism, and reconciliation after violence (Diprose 2001; Gregoriou 1991, 1995; Libin 2003; Rosmarin 2001; Standish 2001; Todd 2001). More often cited rather than analyzed, picked up rather than translated, his way of articulating our ethical relation to otherness remains singular and overwhelming but also untranslatable. Much more than an ethics, Levinas has given us a new philosophical idiom: a language which bestows emotional intelligibility to sensibility and erotic passion to transcendence, an idiom which recovers difference in the ancestry of philosophy and opens up intimate spatiality and dwelling as places (and as topoi) for philosophical thinking. In trying to understand but also teach Levinas’s philosophical opening to ethical otherness, the face usually becomes a privileged ﬁgure. In the face-to-face encounter with the other, the face of the Other (le visage d’Autrui) enacts a structure of responsibility more primary than consciousness, more binding than mutuality, more engaging than agency, more stern than the imperative appeal of juridicality, and more immediate than the vulnerability of bare skin. The face inaugurates the proximity of the other not in the nominative (the Other as named by me) but in the vocative. The face addresses me before I name the other. Through the face, the other commands me, personally, uniquely, and inescapably, inaugurating a proximity which is more ancient than consciousness and more foundational than the cultural or existential recognition of the Other. In this overwhelming alterity of the face lies the force of a primary ethics but also the potential violence of proximity. In prioritizing pre-discursive immediacy, the proximity to the other surpasses and subverts the translation and assimilation of the other into language, duty, norms; codes which sustain economies of exchange and the tissue of human sociality; translations which nurture the production and reﬂexivity of culture. Since the relationship to alterity and the response to the face of the Other exceed both recognition and juridical forms of welcoming and hospitality, radicalizing

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multicultural thinking from a Levinasian perspective presents ethical thinking with the possibility of a political impasse. How can I receive and sustain the otherness of the immigrant, the ethnic other, the állos–allóglossos, alloethnís, allófylos, allodapós, allóthriskos1—as absolutely Other without this absolute difference being reiterated as the difference of the allókotos (i.e., as strangeness bordering madness) and allótrios (i.e., the difference of the irrelevant, of the one that invokes nothing but indifference)? The shift from a politics based on humanitarianism and human rights to a politics of difference does not seem to be that radical if it does not also subvert something more fundamental than cultural blindness and good conscience. If the face emerges out of the plastic mask of humanitarianism only as singular and “in the dative” (Levinas 1990, 21), does not the demarcation of the Other by my language, my concepts, my juridical categories, and my national sensitivities in the event of recognition amount to the annihilation of its ethical otherness? What kind of encounter is that which commands responsiveness by suspending the familiar culture and rituals of receptivity? This impasse can be resolved, this essay suggests, by redirecting the focus of our reading, from the speciﬁc ethical otherness which Levinas identiﬁes in the face-to-face event to discreet traces of otherness which can be found in the spatiality of happiness and solitude, in nourishment and dwelling.

DWELLING AS A FIRST ETHICS To be I is to exist in such a way as to be already beyond being, in happiness. For the I to be means neither to oppose nor to represent something to itself, nor to use something, nor to aspire to something, but to enjoy something. (Levinas 2004, 120) [E]njoyment is the singularization of an ego in its coiling back upon itself. Winding of a skein, it is the very movement of egoism. (Levinas 1981, 73) Section II. (“Interiority and economy”) and Section III. (“Exteriority and the face”) of Levinas’s Totality and Inﬁnity are separated by a radical asynchrony that suspends any philosophical dialectic or narrative unity between the two. Yet the tendency to read the title “Totality and Inﬁnity” as the successive unfolding of a philosophical drama limits the effect of this asynchrony and facilitates, against Levinas’s intentions, a dialectic between the ontology of self and the metaphysics of ethics. The narrative need for sequence, progress, and even drama, which unfolds along the temporal spacing of the text, links the two poles “Totality” and “Inﬁnity” into a progressive move while superimposing them onto the “Same” and the “Face” as the two ends of a process of ethical development. Levinas’s ﬁguration of the ethical call as an expulsion from the joyous immersion in the world, and

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the cancellation of the egoistic habitation of home, reinforces this reading of Totality and Inﬁnity. In this reading, the egoistic pulsations of ipseity and the intimate structures of dwelling are fashioned as similar modalities of the Same, their rupture marking the threshold to ethical experience. This essay iterates critically this reading, with particular emphasis on the conditionality of ipseity. The goal of this investigation is twofold. First, against the dominant ﬁguration of ipseity as egoism, as the other of ethics, as totality and closure, this reading illustrates ipseity as the break from totality. In effecting separation, solitude and individuation, this break antecedes and enables the ethical structure of responsibility as inescapable and singular, arresting me without margins of substitution. Second, this reading radicalizes Levinas’s claim that there are multiple layers of ipseity, different modalities of enjoyment. Enjoyment of the elements, to be in the elements, is not the same as to be at home and enjoy home. Nourishment and dwelling are analyzed here as discreet and different comforts of ipseity. One is singled out in being addressed and accused in one’s ethical relationship with alterity, but also in being immersed in the world of the elements, the economies of labor and property, and the habitation of home. Levinas calls ipseity the recurrent waves of unicity and singularization by which the self approximates a state of selfsameness. Ipseity is not a ﬁnal state but only the approximation of the selfsame. It approximates without reaching a ﬁnal state of self-presence. Unlike the ethical utterance against responsibility, ipseity does not consolidate its individuation into a subjective voice, inaugurated in the vocative “me voici.” (“Here I am.”) It is not inaugurated as self-certainty, coincidence, coherence, or, in more existential terms, as self-revelation. Levinas posits the primacy of ipseity in the independence of happiness and enjoyment. The enjoyment of the world is not assumed as a Heideggerian adherence to the world, or as the comprehension of being. The substantiality of the “I” is not apperceived as the subject of the verb “be,” but is rather “implicated in happiness,” as “the exaltation of the existent as such“: “One becomes a subject of being not by assuming being but in enjoying happiness, by the interiorization of enjoyment which is also an exaltation, an ‘above being’” (Levinas 2004, 119; italics in the original). In ipseity, singularization is approximated through a passive movement. Alfonso Lingis points out how the French grammar of ipseity, where the self (se, soi) is an accusative without a nominative form, would reﬂect this situation linguistically. In enjoyment, the subject inhabits intimate space rather than awaiting the Time of the other. It is not secondary or subsequent to the call of the Other, a perspective effected by the height of the Other’s ethical command. Its dimensionality is ﬂat, that of the intimate surface. The enjoyment of food epitomizes this pre-ethical egoism, this pulsation of a subjectivity without reﬂexivity: In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not

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Ipseity is less than desire and more than sensuousness. The immersion in the elements effects an escape from totality but contains identity in the passivity of affectivity: To-be-in-the-element does indeed disengage a being from blind and deaf participation in a whole, but differs from a thought making its way outward. Here on the contrary the movement comes incessantly upon me, as the wave that engulfs and submerges and drowns—an incessant movement of afﬂux without respite, a total contact without ﬁssure nor gap from which the reﬂected movement of a thought could arise . . . the affectivity wherein the egoism of the I pulsates. (Levinas 2004, 135) But the pulsating “I” is not only what is steeped in the elements, but also what dwells, that is, inhabits and possesses. The home “serves to shelter him from the inclemencies of the weather, to hide him from enemies or the importunate.” Within the system of ﬁnalities in which human life maintains itself, the home occupies a privileged role. Yet this role consists neither in the Heideggerian notion of the tool—a tool of sheltering the self—nor that of an ultimate end: if one can seek it as a goal, if one can “enjoy” one’s home, “the home does not manifest its originality in the possibility for its enjoyment.” For Levinas, the privileged role of the home consists in being the condition of human activity and its “commencement.” Levinas’s “man,” unlike Heidegger’s “Dasein,” does not ﬁnd himself brutally cast forth and forsaken in the world. Rather, “[m]an abides in the world as having come to it from a private domain, from being at home with himself, to which at each moment ha can retire . . . he goes forth outside from an inwardness [intimité]” (Levinas 2004, 152). Does not, though, this sense of security in inwardness already presuppose a distance from the world? And how can this distance be achieved and maintained without positing an a priori structure of subjectivity? Levinas is reiterating the old philosophical question: “How, in the midst of a life . . . which enjoys elements, and which is preoccupied with overcoming the insecurity of enjoyment, is a distance to be produced?” (Levinas 2004, 154). Derrida’s (1978, 1993, 2000a, 2000b, 2001) investigation of hospitality and the ethical problematic of home seems to have overcome this quest for distance. Nevertheless, the impasse of aporia often regresses to such a question: how can you host the other when your home is deﬁned, must be deﬁned, against a possible permutation of the other’s (guest’s) visit into an invasion? Derrida’s aporetic hospitality, trapped in the same negative metaphysics of an impossible other which Derrida attributes to Levinas in their early encounter, perpetrates the same blindness as his reading of Totality and Inﬁnity performed twenty

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years ago. He dismisses Levinas’s radical articulation of distance as ipseity’s pulsation in intimacy, bypassing it as the philosopher’s marginal preoccupation with the feminine character of the secret. Derrida fails to appreciate that when Levinas introduces dwelling as part of the structure of separation, he is writing against a philosophical tradition which conﬂates—or at least, does not agonize to discern—the articulation of distance and the tools of mastery. In establishing the structures of individuation and reﬂexivity, the philosophical tradition of the “speculum” invests in the speculation over the other and its mastery of the intervals of distance.2 Levinas, on the other hand, introduces distance as the separation effected by intimacy and familiarity in dwelling: “Familiarity is an accomplishment, an energy, of separation. . . . separation is constituted as dwelling and inhabitation” (Levinas 2004, 155–56; italics in the original). This distance precedes and survives the transcendental height which posits the call of the other as command and prescribes my unmediated ethical response. Distance, as separation and reﬂexivity, is not emerging through a negative de-association, asceticism, or Epicureanism, nor as mastery: “would the distance with regard to enjoyment, rather than signifying the cold void of the interstices of being, be lived positively as a dimension of interiority beginning with the intimate familiarity into which life is immersed?” (154). In dwelling, “familiarity and intimacy are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things” (155). This intimacy, this spatial amitié, does not rely on the assimilation of the other through his or her exclusion, or in the hospitality I offer him or her. Vigilance over the structural hostility between hospitality and distance, Derrida’s tactic, construes home as a threshold but also obscures its inwardness that, as we shall see here, reﬂects a different relationship of hospitality. “It has a ’street front,’” Levinas concedes in regards to home (156), but it also has a secretive side. The intimacy, which unfolds and embraces the world from this side of home, is not unfamiliar with the other. “The intimacy which familiarity (ȠȚțİȚȩĲȘĲĮ in Greek 3) already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human” (155; italics in the original). This intimate sociality of dwelling, along with the ethical inscription of ipseity in general, is elaborated in the second and third parts of this essay. The ambivalence of nourishment (ﬁrst trace of otherness), and the welcoming of the dwelling self by the hospitality which a reserved femininity, primary but also discreet, extends (second trace), are two intervals which rupture, correspondingly, the ipseity of nourishment and dwelling. These intervals are elaborated as marks of ethical signiﬁcation and reminders of ethical otherness.

THE EMPIRICAL PRIMACY OF IPSEITY: “ONLY A SUBJECT THAT EATS CAN BE FOR-THE-OTHER, OR CAN SIGNIFY” When does the call to justice arrest, and in arresting, also inaugurate the subject? When does the imperative height of the Other emerge, and when

218 Zelia Gregoriou does the face, unsettling and disrupting, invert the more or less sophisticated economies of immanence, sensibility, labor, reason? According to Levinas, the moral subject arises in subjection when the carefree contentment of sensing is ruptured, when the egoity of ipseity is called into question, when immanence of being at home is de-phased by the time of the Other—in short, when the season of carefree being is terminated. The structural motivation of Totality and Inﬁnity seems to invoke such a structure of belatedness in the inscription of sensation (and signiﬁcation) by otherness and the awakening of ethics. The idea that the circuits of subjectivity unfold within the enjoyment of elemental sensations seems to be compatible with the idea that the ethical encounter causes a temporal de-phasing to the subject and reconstitutes it as a displaced and vulnerable one, a hostage. This “phase” approach to the rupture of the economy of the Same, and the subsequent emergence of an excessive metaphysical desire through the Face, obscures the trace of otherness in other parts of Totality and Inﬁnity. In his foreword to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, Lingis seems to attribute such a developmental trend to Levinas’s articulation of ipseity, a trend which culminates in the ethical redeployment of ipseity in Levinas’s later notion of proximity. Contrasting Levinas’s “enjoyment of the elements” to Heidegger’s coming to a “clearing,” Lingis argues that Levinas conceives of Heidegger’s “ﬁrst tremor of sensibility” as “immersion” and not “an ecstasy out of being“: as “an enjoyment, an intensity and an involution” (Lingis 1981, xxvii–xxviii). This immersion as a modality of being is of particular interest in that it evades the intentionality bestowed by phenomenology to sensual experience: Levinas in this work [Otherwise than Being] presents the ﬁrst movement of animation as an opening of the subject upon a space ﬁlled with air before being ﬁlled, or emptied, by the light. The openness upon the air is not an intention or an apprehension but inspiration, our substance being open to the core. (Lingis 1981, xxviii) Lingis observes that in the course of Levinas’s writing, the notions of receptivity, response and vulnerability are deepened and vested with ethical signiﬁcance. Enjoyment and complacency before any reﬂection as the pulsation of singularity, in Otherwise than Being, is rendered into a palimpsest where the ethical Saying is scribed. The immediacy of enjoyment constitutes a condition for the contact with the Other; yet, at the same time, this contact alters the nature of enjoyment. And though the ethical height of the Other prohibits any dialectic opposition between self and other, cancels any contractual determination of the gift without return, and overwhelms any conditionality of the ethical event through the face’s surprise, the immersion in the elements is tied to ethics conditionally, as its substratum and its point of departure: It [ego] has to be able to be complacent in itself, as though it exhausted the eidos of sensibility, so that sensibility could, in its passivity, its patience

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and pain, signify for the other by unwinding its coils. Without egoism, complacent in itself, suffering would not have any sense. It would lose the passivity of patience, if it were not at every moment an overﬂowing of sense by non-sense. (Levinas 1981, 73–74) The suitability and necessity of ipseity for ethical subversion lies in its production of singularization without inducing the self-presence of consciousness: “the for-the-other both thwarts the subject and affects it in its inwardness through pain. Enjoyment in its ability to be complacent in itself, exempt from dialectical tensions, is the condition for the for-the-other involved in sensibility, and in its vulnerability as an exposure to the other.” Ipseity inaugurates a being of “ﬂesh and blood” who is both vulnerable to and unsparing in giving, where giving is realized as a tearing from oneself. Complacence in oneself and identity in enjoyment singularizes Being and excites sensibility without unifying its pulsations towards a consistent and self-present subjectivity and a contemporaneity with intentionality. This disinterested complacency of sensibility in passivity is congenital to ethical displacement of the subject before and above consciousness. “Only a subject that eats can be-for-the other,” Levinas notes. The tearing away of the mouthful of bread, a dominant ﬁgure for the overwhelming call of ethics, can signify alterity because it tears “from the mouth that tastes in full enjoyment.” It is the plenitude of complacency in oneself which construes giving as tearing from oneself “despite oneself” and “without me” (original emphasis). The unconditional exposure of the subject to the ethical call, “the ‘hemorrhage’ of the for-the-other” (Levinas 1981, 74), depends on the possibility of an individuation unmediated by consciousness. It is this primary form of passive individuation which renders the subject unique and enables his or her ethical susceptibility, as singular and irreplaceable, to a responsibility without the possibility of substitution. Sensibility in the immediacy of enjoyment precedes and conditions vulnerability in the immediacy of ethical contact. From this perspective, ipseity is primary to ethics, for ethics. In Otherwise than Being, this primacy of ipseity becomes more empirically posited. Interiority and exteriority, immersion in enjoyment and arrest by alterity, are linked through a conditional and foundational bind: the one becomes the basis for the other; responsibility is not possible if one is not immersed in the sensuous enjoyment of the elements. Yet the provisions and provision of this primary nutritionist relation with the world does not annul Levinas’s view that ethics is primary to ontology. Rather, it expands the ethical experience of otherness, from the face-to-face encounter to the intimate and sensuous habitation of the world. The elements are intersubjective before they are good for me; “they are relics or traces of alterity, whose closeness to us derives from the contact with the face of another, whose mineral surfaces materialize privatively as the caress of alterity in the skin subsides into touch of the resistant” (Lingis 1981, xxviii). But whereas Lingis’s reading of ipseity territorializes the rupture enjoyment’s egoism and the vestment of ipseity with ethical signiﬁcation, this

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reading suggests that ipseity is already marked by otherness in Totality and Inﬁnity. In the course of Levinas’s work, there is indeed a deepening of responsibility, achieved by sculpting out contractual being and eradicating totality. Sculpting out egoity and reaching subterranean veins of ethical responsiveness in holiness, however, would not be possible without the insecurity, the sense of being on edge, which marks enjoyment from the beginning. Sensibility as joyous immersion in the elements initiates a breach with totality not only by sustaining “the naiveté of the unreﬂected I, beyond instinct, beneath reason” (Levinas 2004, 138), but also by sustaining its deﬁciency in selfconﬁdence: “Nourishment comes as a happy chance. The ambivalence of nourishment . . . offers itself” (141). Bordering joy with insecurity (not lack), ipseity is already announcing the other. In sensibility itself and independently of all thought, “there is announced an insecurity which throws back in question this quasi-eternal immemoriality of the element, which will disturb it as the other” (italics in the original). Levinas emphasizes that this sensibility is of the order of enjoyment (unreﬂective) and not of the order of experience. This means that ipseity as sensibility and immersion is not able to step back from this insecurity and appropriate it from a critical distance by recollecting it (en se recueillant)—as it happens in the experience of dwelling. Empty of substance and dispersed in its lack of an aim, this insecurity is composed by Levinas in the same language of annunciation which is used to speak of the Face: “Enjoyment seems to be in touch with an ‘other’ inasmuch as a future is announced within the element and menaces it with insecurity” (137). Before its ethical signiﬁcance is recovered in the form of an empirical condition, ipseity already partakes in the signiﬁcation of the other. This partaking is aporetic not in the manner of a mutual exclusion (enjoyment or insecurity) or a performative contradiction (insecurity in enjoyment as the impossible) but in the multiple: enjoyment and insecurity. Embarrassing our pedagogical habit to discern the Same from and against the Other, in his rhetorical preoccupation with the Same Levinas already announces the ethical idiom of the Saying: “The future, as insecurity, is already in the pure quality which lacks the category of substance, of something. . . . It is the apeiron distinct from the inﬁnite” (141).

THE ETHICAL PRIMACY OF IPSEITY: DWELLING IN ANOTHER’S HOSPITALITY The breach of the totality that is accomplished by the enjoyment of solitude—or the solitude of enjoyment—is radical. When the critical presence of the Other will call into question this egoism it will not destroy its solitude. (Levinas 2004, 119) If the solitude of enjoyment is the ﬁrst breach of totality, the solitude of dwelling is the ﬁrst breach of insecurity: “With the dwelling the separated

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being breaks with natural existence, steeped in a medium where its enjoyment, without security, on edge, was being inverted into care.” But even though solitude suspends the uneasy feeling about the morrows of tomorrow, the familiarity produced in dwelling and spread over the face of things like gentleness produces distance and difference. Home is where the I’s solitary existence dwells multiply: “the utopia in which the ‘I’ recollects itself in dwelling at home with itself” (Levinas 2004, 156). Where is this reﬂexivity of dwelling posited? And how does dwelling “in the multiple” signify ethical otherness? Lingis holds the view that the ethical structure of responsiveness subtends the space and inscribes the dwelling of home. The relationship with alterity which precedes and makes possible the sensuous expanse and the practical layout itself—i.e., the elements are intersubjective before they are good for me—also precedes and makes possible the reﬂexivity of the dwelling I. The distance and spacing, constitutive of inwardness and recollection, stem from an ethical relation with alterity. Trying to understand the multiple dimensions of dwelling from this viewpoint, we might say that the ethical conditionality which ruptures enjoyment also expands to the solitude of dwelling. Dwelling is already experienced as susceptible to a preannounced opening of the doors. The ethical event of welcoming, in other words, entails opening the doors of a home which has already been inscribed with the trace of the other’s anticipation. Quoting Isaiah 58, Levinas suggests that in opening “the doors of one’s home” and “welcoming of the wretched into your house” (1981, 74), the proximity to the Other alters the immediacy of habitation to a fundamental uprooting: “The subject in saying approaches a neighbor in expressing itself, in being expelled, in the literal sense of the term, out of any locus, no longer dwelling” (48–49; italics in the original). Does not this reading, however, reduce dwelling to the empirical reality of house, to economic existence, property, and ownership? Does it also forget, in treating dwelling as the I’s contemporaneity with its belongings and as mastery, that immediate enjoyment is adjourned and delayed in the home, and that ipseity in dwelling pulsates not as the fragile certainty of the host but as the amity of a guest? The ethical signiﬁcation of dwelling in Levinas must be traced elsewhere and not in the conditionality of a pact between enjoyment and ethics, solidarity at home and responsiveness to alterity, where the enjoyment of solitude gives meaning to the subsequent inauguration of ethical subjectivity as displacement, but in the temporality of habitation as being a guest, i.e., receiving hospitality from the other. To dwell, Levinas writes, “is a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome” (2004, 156; emphasis added). Solitude is not inaugurated in achieving sovereignty but in receiving refuge. One does not dwell primarily as master of the home and host of the other but as the receiver of refuge. On the other hand, Levinas’s philosophy of dwelling shakes up this presumption by displacing

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the origin of a primary host. The home is not a nest, a rest, a domain, an anchor, and a cradle of identity; dwelling is not the departure point but a belated arrival. Therein we dwell as guests: The home that founds possession is not a possession in the same sense as the movable goods it can collect and keep. It is possessed because it already and henceforth is hospitable for its proprietor. This refers us to its essential interiority, and to the inhabitant that inhabits it before every inhabitant, the welcoming one par excellence, welcome in itself—the feminine being. Need one add that there is no question here of defying ridicule by maintaining the empirical truth or countertruth that every home in fact presupposes a woman? (Levinas 2004, 157–58; italics in the original) The feminine constitutes the cardinal point of inner life and the condition of dwelling. Recollection, as the activity of inner life, cannot be grounded on a structure of distantiation and separation from the other. That would cancel the imperative height and empty the excessive metaphysical desire reserved for the Other. In recollection, the subject experiences withdrawal as a positive experience and not as absence. In withdrawal, the subject learns how to accept distance as a gift: “Recollection refers to a welcome” (Levinas 2004, 155). But how can the separation of solitude, how can intimacy be produced in the face of the Other? Levinas reﬂects, as if in a theatrical aside, on recollecting the gaze of the Other and its denuding force. He wonders whether the presence of the Other is already language and transcendence, questioning the possibilities of the other’s transcendental height for sculpting the folds of hospitality: For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced in the oecumenia of being the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence . . . the very essence of discretion. And the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the ﬁeld of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation.” (2004, 155) Dwelling is in need of another other, Levinas concedes, an-other whose difference inscribes space from the depths of a discreet absence rather than disavowing it from the heights of a transcendental presence. This other gives place rather than constituting time. The relationship with the hospitable other does not seem, at a ﬁrst glance, to compromise Levinas’s position that the relationship with alterity is “neither spatial nor conceptual” (1987, 84). Whereas intersubjective space does not sufﬁce as a kind of ethical encounter,

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receiving space, that is, a place opened up by the hospitality of the feminine, is operatively essential in cultivating the subject’s sociality in dwelling. The spatial quality of the “feminine as other” does not appear to constitute a performative contradiction because the otherness of the feminine does not belong to the ethical order of alterity. Feminine alterity can extend a welcoming without canceling the gift quality of this welcoming, without effecting its (feminine’s) recognition as host and donor, subject and master: In human welcome the language that keeps silence remains an essential possibility. Those silent comings and goings of the feminine being whose footsteps reverberate the secret depths of being are not the turbid mystery of the animal and feline presence whose strange ambiguity Baudelaire likes to evoke. (Levinas 2004, 156) Other than me but also other than the face, the feminine reveals the ethical dimension of dwelling by extending the welcoming gesture into a place of intimacy. The intimacy of the place which opens up depends primarily on the discreteness of her gesture: “The Other who welcomes in intimacy is not the you [vous] of the face that reveals itself in a dimension of height, but precisely the thou [tu] of familiarity: a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret” (italics in the original). Buber’s “I-thou” relationship with the other, rejected as an ethical interface by Levinas for disavowing the imperative height of alterity, is reinstated here in order to produce and preserve the intimate spacing of the dwelling: “the I-Thou in which Buber sees the category of interhuman relationship is the relation not with the interlocutor but with feminine alterity” (Levinas 2004, 155). Hosting without mastering, welcoming without awaiting. Who is the subject of this peculiar hospitality? Existence as ipseity and recollection dwells in the space opened by the feminine. Ipseity is actualized in the I’s being hosted. The feminine, on the other hand, is appointed as the nurse and guardian of this peculiar hospitality only as the non-subject: welcoming without inaugurating a debt, without inserting herself in an economy of exchange. Figuring neither the vocative position of the ethical command “You shall not kill” nor the accusative form “me voici” but the murmurs of the inﬁnite listeners, others who are already gone and others who are yet to arrive, the feminine ﬁgure of discretion seems to represent the hospitality of language itself. Levinas’s ﬁguration of the feminine is not historically neutral. Levinas himself, as in most instances where he anchors his ethical discourse in the tropologies of the feminine, disputes the dependency of discreet hospitality on empirical femininity only in the negative: “the empirical absence of the human being of ‘feminine sex’ in a dwelling nowise affects the dimension of femininity which remains open there, as the very welcome of the dwelling” (2004, 158). Rendering intelligible the otherness of the discreet host, however, Levinas’s philosophical thinking of receptivity remains at

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large dependent on empirical constructs of femininity (e.g., literary tropes). For example, he reappropriates Baudelaire’s animal ﬁguration of the “silent comings and goings of the feminine being” in order to fashion a discreet but also distinct otherness—a welcoming, non-threatening but also inassimilable other (156). In the interval of intimate space surrounding this “other” otherness, ipseity retrieves without fear (her silence disavows any attributions by the host to the guest) or feelings of obligation (the hospitality she offers him is not of the order which obliges a counter-gift). Rather, in the discretion of the host’s presence, the guest as the ethical subject is nursed the milk of a fundamental gentleness which produces proximity before proximity is enacted by the ethical response to Other’s imperative command: the discretion of this presence includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relationship with the Other. It is comprehensible and exercises its function of interiorization only on the ground of the full human personality, which, however, in the woman, can be reserved so as to open up the dimension of interiority. And this is a new and irreducible possibility, a delightful lapse in being, and the source of gentleness in itself. (Levinas 2004, 155) The discreet footsteps of female presence as absence, which Levinas recollects and memorializes for reverberating the secret depths of being and the origins of hospitality, also reverberate the violence against her face: the cult of domesticity, female sacriﬁce, female exploitation, trafﬁcking of female desire for sustaining an economy (and theology) of masculine transcendence, female exclusion from the economy of literary creativity, production, and circulation. If separation as solitude and recollection is produced in the hospitality extended by the intimate and discreet other, why is this selﬂess, an-archic hospitality concretized speciﬁcally through the woman’s silence presence and the reservation of her interiority?

CLOSING REMARKS This essay attempted to redirect the focus of our reading from the speciﬁc ethical otherness identiﬁed by Levinas in the face-to-face event to discreet traces of otherness found in the spatiality of happiness and solitude, in nourishment and dwelling. The ﬁguration of these modulations of subjectivity as “egoistic” has obscured the fact that they are also modulations of the self’s break from totality. They constitute neither an immediate encounter with the evocative call of the other, nor an ontological manifestation of what Levinas calls the economy of the same (even though the dominant reading of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics, in its effort to acknowledge alterity in terms of what surpasses comprehension, often relies on the rhetorical device of such an antithesis). In dwelling, alterity ruptures immanence through the folds of

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intimate sociality and hospitality rather than through a dramatic encounter with the Other. In its displacing force as surprise and in its inescapability as command, mediated by no judgment or other acts of consciousness, the ethical event of the face-to-face encounter disperses these folds of intimacy and annihilates the recollection of otherness that such folds host. The faceto-face encounter cancels not only any mediation between the self and the Other as different but also any meditation on otherness. The immediacy of the face-to-face event annihilates both nominative categories of what is different but also intimate retreats where the other is recollected in distance. The hospitality Levinas ascribes to the fragility of enjoyment and the temporality of dwelling (temporal because the home is open to habitation as retreat and not as domain), inaugurates a discreet economy of intimacy and receptivity. More overwhelming than the Kantian right of hospitality, but also gentler than the Derridean aporia as a structure of indecisiveness, this notion of receptivity localizes hospitality in the ethics of dwelling. Without adjourning the welcoming pending the de-termination of foreigners, but without relapsing from absolute porosity to the policing of borders either, this hospitality implicates and obliges us in acts of dwelling, solitude, and recollection. Before one is thrust into ethical insomnia by the call of the other, one is happy and self-sufﬁcient, enjoying interiority, bathing in the elements, dwelling in one’s home. This “egoism” precedes the encounter with the other but also stipulates the quality of the ethical encounter as a disturbance: only a subject who is already at home and has experienced solitude can be surprised by the other; only one who is master at one’s home can be hospitable; only one who is satisfying one’s self in assimilating the other can experience the appearance of the other as an arrival; only one who knows how to dwell in language can practice translation. Taken to the extreme, however, this dialectic deployment of “egoism” and ethics, enjoyment and proximity to alterity, dwelling and displacement, can serve as a new source of legitimation for totalitarianism, ethnocentric education, theocracy of mother language, cultural orthodoxy, and narratives of autochthony and citizenship. As digital transparency and cultural ﬂows act more and more as corrosives on the threshold between the private and the public, interiority and exteriority, the discourse of intercultural education will have to anticipate a backlash of “home.” Joined by the new, global anti-terrorism doctrine, and fed by the quest for security and its re-territorializations in multiple localities, the defense of home re-inaugurates xenophobia as a regime of thought. This regime is usually covered up in totalizing culturalism(s) and recalcitrant calls for anti-West “resistance” (the “love of country” and defense of “our way of life,” as in the case of American patriotism; “the European heritage” and “cultural identity,” as in the case of European enlargement; the Greek Cypriots’ “vocal” NO against the United Nations Plan (“Annan Plan”) for a settlement of the Cypress Problem, as in the case of state engineering used by supra-national bodies to resolve ethnic conﬂicts and violations of International Law). The response of

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educational theory to such emerging totalitarianisms and absolutisms cannot be limited to a didactics of the other. Any educational program which claims to re-present the other and prepare its students to respond to the call of the other is doomed to slide either into the epistemic violence of the sciences or into theological absolutism and sectarianism. Education cannot teach about the other to the extent that teaching continues to be a technology of representation in the legacy of platonic optics. Yet education also continues to be a unique cultural endeavor in staging learning as a passage to otherness: as a threshold experience, as an experience of aporia between dwelling and displacement. Hospitality and translation constitute exemplary experiences of this intimate habitation with otherness. Postponing the time of the other and holding back from the violent immediacy of the face-to-face encounter reserves of interiority, this essay traced otherness in intimate places wherein the self is discreetly reminded of the other. It suggested that dwelling in Levinas’s philosophy is not the Other of ethics. Home is the primary place where hospitality is experienced, while distance and separation is also concretized. It is the privileged place which can interweave, within the single and singular event of dwelling, hospitality, and interiority, separation and receptivity, distance and intimacy, security and exposure. Reﬂexivity as recollection begins at home, only that home is not a natural place of belongingness, determined by identity and birth. The home is not realized in the search for roots but in the invention of one’s self in sociality. It is not the point of origin and return but the place of arrival. The hospitality of intimate spatiality needs to be dwelled again and recollected by multiple readers, from multiple viewpoints and localities. Levinas already opens up philosophy and politics to this perspective by reminding us that only as guests we dwell in homes, literatures, and languages. This reading of Levinas theorizes home and hospitality and opens up new directions for rethinking multiculturalism, conﬂict resolution, and peace studies. NOTES 1. Állos, the Greek word for other/alter, becomes the primary preﬁx in a series of attributives to otherness, some of them delineating (and delimiting) otherness to the difference of the other language, nation, race, etc.—e.g., allóglossos (of the other language), alloethnís (of the other éthnos, i.e., nation), allófylos (of the other fylí, i.e., race), allodapós (of the one from the other place), allóthriskos (of the other religion)—and others attributing otherness to the strange, queer, a-signiﬁable one—e.g., allókotos (strange, mad), and allótrios (bearing difference of an eroding force for the identity of the same). 2. Irigaray introduces the notion of the speculum in order to expose the epistemic devices of body ﬁgurations as well as the masculine imaginary of penetration used by Plato’s to investigate issues of epistemology and learning. For more, see Irigaray (1985). 3. The term ȠȚțİȚȩĲȘĲĮ [oikiótita], used to convey “familiarity” in the modern Greek translation of Totality and Inﬁnity, carries in its ancient Greek root oíkos (home), this privileged signiﬁcation of familiarity-in-dwelling as the example, par excellence, of intimacy.

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REFERENCES Derrida, J. 1978. Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Writing and difference, trans. A. Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Aporias. Trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000a. Hostipitality. Trans. B. Stocker and F. Morlock. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5 (3):3–18. ———. 2000b. Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Trans. R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. On cosmopolitanism. In On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes, 3–24. London and New York: Routledge. Diprose, R. 2001. Bearing witness to cultural difference, with apology to Levinas. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6 (2):125–34. Gregoriou, Z. 1991. The encounter with the Other in its alterity and corporeality. Master’s thesis, Urbana: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ———. 1995. Derrida’s responsibility: Autobiography, the teaching of the vulnerable, diary fragments. Educational Theory 45 (3):311–35. Irigaray, L. 1985. The speculum of the other woman. Trans. G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other and additional essays. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1990. Difﬁcult freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. London: Athlone. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Libin, M. 2003. Can the subaltern be heard? Response and responsibility. In Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, ed. J. Llewelyn, 119–40. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lingis, A. 1981. Foreword to Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence, by E. Levinas. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Rosmarin, L. 2001. The I-You relationship in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6 (2):7–14. Standish, P. 2001. Ethics before equality: moral education after Levinas. Journal of Moral Education 30 (4):339–47. Todd, S. 2001. “Bringing more than I contain“: Ethics, curriculum and the pedagogical demand for altered egos. Journal of Curriculum Studies 33 (4):431–50.

15 Justice in the Name of the Other Levinas on Rights and Responsibility Ann Chinnery and Heesoon Bai

I. In an age saturated with rights talk, Levinas’s conception of unconditional responsibility for the other is often criticized as too utopian and impossible to realize. Certainly, if we take this impossibility as an assessment about practicability, we can only agree with the conclusion. But the criticism here is about more than a practical difﬁculty. What is questioned is the intelligibility of the very notion of unconditional responsibility. How can we deny that there are conditions which delimit and direct our responsibility? Responsibilities are particular terms of obligations, and obligations are contracts one enters into whereby one is required to fulﬁll speciﬁc demands. Moreover, taking responsibility requires one to be in a ﬁt condition of freedom and power to discharge one’s obligations. At least this seems to be an unassailable understanding behind our ordinary notion of responsibility. However, could there be an extraordinary, alternate notion of responsibility by which we can make Levinas’s seemingly unintelligible view of unconditional responsibility intelligible and even compelling? The quintessential discourse of rights and responsibility belongs to the ideology of individualism which emerged in clear relief in the seventeenth century West, and which marked the inception of modernity. Thus, in asking ourselves whether there could be another account of responsibility to which we can appeal for understanding Levinas, we would do well to examine the foundational ideas behind individualism, which is what we propose to do for the ﬁrst part of this essay. Particular foci of this examination are the origin stories of civil society as advanced by the master architects of individualism: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The origin stories of civil society posit a view of human beings as fundamentally self-interested autonomous individuals who see responsibility to others as a fair cost they have to pay for the good they receive—namely, their right to pursue self-interest. Given this view, society tends rather predictably toward a maximization of rights claims (entitlements) and a minimization of responsibilities (obligations). In other words, this view encourages moral calculus, similar to cost-beneﬁt analysis, wherein one weighs how

Justice in the Name of the Other 229 much responsibility one should assume in proportion to how much beneﬁt one derives from a given person or situation. What we have here, then, is a particular conception of ethics which sees self-interest as the quintessential moral agency and currency, and its reciprocal pursuit through a system of negotiated exchange the standard of ethical responsibility. When ethics begins from, and returns to, the self, one’s primary project is the establishment and pursuit of one’s own individual rights and freedom, and responsibilities simply demarcate the limits to that project. Levinas’s notion of unconditional responsibility for the other is a radical departure from this project of modernist individualism, and will therefore become intelligible only within a conception of ethics which rejects the notion that we are fundamentally self-interested autonomous individuals. But even if we reject the social contract as a sufﬁcient ground for ethical relation, why turn to Levinas? Despite his longstanding inﬂuence on Continental thought, it is only fairly recently that Levinas’s work has been taken up in British and North American philosophical circles, and even more recently in applied ﬁelds such as education. This gap is due in part to the delay in translating his work into English, and in part to the stronghold of the AngloAmerican analytic tradition, which refused to take seriously the postmodern challenge to sovereign subjectivity and the prevailing metanarratives about truth, scientiﬁc progress, and so on. Part of the hesitance in taking up these challenges was a fear that rejecting traditional notions of autonomous selfhood would mean forfeiting moral agency and accountability, and that denying the possibility of objective moral truth would inevitably lead to moral relativism. It has become increasingly clear, however, that the rejection of sovereign subjectivity, by Derrida, Levinas, and others, is actually a turn toward the other—and thus a turn toward, rather than away from, ethics. And since Levinas is the philosopher within that tradition whose work is most explicitly concerned with morality and ethics, it is at least worth considering what he has to say around questions of moral responsibility and, speciﬁc to our purposes here, what it might mean to educate in a way which takes those questions seriously. In the pages to follow, we will begin by unpacking the social contract view of rights and responsibilities. We will then discuss Levinas’s approach to rights and responsibilities, drawing implications for the “lived experience” of his ethics; ﬁnally, we will explore what it might mean to take up a Levinasian conception of rights and responsibilities in education.

II. James Ogilvy (1992), in his work on individualism and collectivism, characterizes these two “isms” as ontological, saying that “[t]hey touch the very root of what it is to be a human being.” For individualism, “the individual is the fundamental ontological unit, the alpha and omega of social philosophy” (218). In other words, individuals are the social atoms—the irreducible building

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blocks of society. What is irreducible is a closed entity: self-bound, separate, hence, independent and autonomous. Individuals as social atoms do not acquire emergent properties which will radically alter their self-identity through transformative interaction with other beings. Any interaction which occurs between social atoms is external to them and does not change their essential properties and identities. Tightly bound to itself, a social atom exists unto itself and for itself. It lives out of self-interest and lives for self-interest. Self-interest, therefore, is the prevailing moral agency in individualism. What brings such autonomous individuals together at all to form a society? What needs do they have of one another? Not surprisingly, the need they have of one another is to better serve their own self-interest. Society serves as a means to the end of individuals fulﬁlling their self-interested projects. As we shall see shortly, the individualist ontology which privileges selfinterest and sees society as a means to this end clearly forms the foundation of the origin stories of civil society as told by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the progenitors of social contract theory. We shall start with Thomas Hobbes’s picture of human nature, which set the decisive stage for the theory of social contract in the West. In his famous (or, we are tempted to say, infamous) chapter in 1651’s Leviathan, Of the natural condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity, and misery, Hobbes pictures human beings as equal in want and natural ability, which, when combined with the fact of a natural scarcity of provisions necessary for life, leads to the war “of every man, against every man.” Violence becomes the chief method for securing, through invasion, proﬁt, safety, and reputation, and human life, thus depicted by Hobbes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (1964, 84). Humans are saved from miserable life in the state of Nature by their fear of death and the faculty of reason, which can calculate what needs to be done to avoid misery and death. Thus are born “Naturall Lawes” and “Contracts”— rules to which individuals agree to submit to secure their safety and pursuit of self-interest. For Hobbes, “lawes” (Lex) means “obligations.” Obligations are imposed on individuals in exchange for their “rights” (Jus), the liberty to pursue self-interest. In his starkest view of individualist ontology, Hobbes believes individuals have sovereign status, and therefore have a right to anything, even to another’s body! In theory, we all have the absolute freedom to pursue what our interest dictates. Such are our entitlements or rights. However, in practice, we cannot have everyone freely and equally pursuing his or her rights claims, for it would lead to conﬂict and war. Therefore, there have to be some ways to limit or even, at times, take away individuals’ rights. Social contracts are the solution. Rational individuals realize that if they are to pursue their self-interest, they have to mutually agree upon some rules of conduct whereby they limit their claims of self-interest, and conditionally support others’ pursuit of their self-interests. However, because Hobbes sees human nature as unreservedly brutal and totally selﬁsh, he considers it necessary to have a strong authoritarian government which strictly enforces social

Justice in the Name of the Other 231 contracts among individuals. Only the fear of death and punishment may sufﬁciently discourage individuals from violating social contracts. John Locke, another seventeenth-century supporter of the social contract theory, presents a slightly more benign picture of human nature than Hobbes’s. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believes that individuals are born with a ready disposition toward society. This sociable disposition rests upon the fundamental notion that “equality of men by nature . . . so evident in itself, and beyond all question . . . [is] the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men” (Locke 1988, 270). But what does equality have to do with the disposition toward society? To explain this, Locke uses Richard Hooker (1554–1600) who basically rephrases the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) as: if you want x, want to pursue it but need others’ support, then you are obliged to support others who are pursuing the same. Note that the thesis of equality plays a crucial role in establishing a social contract of exchange between what one is obliged to do for others and what one claims from others for support. It is by virtue of seeing that others are equal, same, or similar to oneself that one feels obliged to fulﬁll others’ needs and demands similar to one’s own. This idea that the perception of equality or symmetry between the self and the other is a precondition for the exercise of responsibility to others is ethically problematic in a world marked more by difference than by similarity. When similarity becomes the guiding motivation behind ethical responsibility, the purview of ethical responsibility is narrowed because we will exclude from our responsibility those who appear different and foreign. We will fail to recognize that radically different others deserve our ethical responsibility. We will be taking up this critical point later in the section on Levinas. The idea of equality, which Locke invokes as self-evident, also forms the foundation of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s conception of social contract. The famous ﬁrst line of his 1762 The social contract reads: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” (1968, 49). A few lines later, he adds: “[Men] born free and equal . . . surrender their freedom only when they see advantage in doing so” (51). For Rousseau, human beings, born inherently equal and free, become the opposite through contact with society’s corrupting inﬂuences, including, principally, pursuits of property. The unequal spread of talents and skills among human beings inevitably shows up when they compete for possessions, and leads to an inequality of wealth and status. The stage is thus set for interpersonal, interracial, and international conﬂicts and wars. Rousseau does not advocate a complete withdrawal from society, even if such were possible, to protect oneself from its corrupting inﬂuences. Some amount of strategic withdrawal would be recommended, as when dealing with the education of our young before the age of reason and discrimination—the strategy Rousseau deploys in 1762’s Emile (1979). For Rousseau, even though corrupting societies are everywhere and are more of a rule than an exception, human beings improve only when they leave the state of nature and enter civil society. He states:

232 Ann Chinnery and Heesoon Bai The passing from the state of nature to the civil society produces a remarkable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they previously lacked. It is only then, when the voice of duty has taken the place of physical impulse, and right that of desire, that man, who has hitherto thought only of himself, ﬁnds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason rather than study his inclinations. (1968, 64) Now a lot can be said, and has been said, about the comparison of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau for their varied conceptions of social contract.1 But for our purposes here, we are most interested in the fact that these three progenitors of the modern social contract theory start off with this tenet: human beings enter civil society by social contract, that is, by the individuals’ voluntary agreement to give up some of their pre-endowed, “inalienable” rights and take up civic obligations in exchange for better self-advantage. This belief is founded upon the stark distinction they draw between the state of “savage” nature and the state of civic culture, between the instinctual and the moral, and, of course, between self and others. All three philosophers subscribe to the idea that there is a pre-socialization stage for human beings, individually and collectively. In this pre-socialized, pre-moral or amoral stage, an individual is a solitary, disembedded social atom, unmarked by contingencies and connections. But how viable is this notion of disembedded individuals? Are we ever born free and equal? Can we ever be social atoms? Can we ever be divested of contingent differences and encumbering connections? The answer to each of these questions has to be a clear, unhesitating “no.” No human being, not even the “wolf-child,” is born outside the inexhaustible fold of contingencies and interconnections which make and mark us unequal and encumbered, for better or for worse. Even before they are born, human beings are always and already social beings, deeply embedded in the thickest web of contingencies in terms of genetic endowments and circumstantial conditions such as wealth, status, health, education, and social, cultural, political, and religious beliefs and practices. It is those contingencies which land each of us in a uniquely tilted life trajectory in terms of personal constitutions and material circumstances, and render us asymmetric and heteronomous from the earliest moment. We may wish for, and work toward, a greater degree of symmetry and autonomy, but this is an altogether different agendum, with different motivations and purposes, from the one which takes equality and autonomy as an inherent human attribute, and which is a social myth. But how is it that, of all people, the three preeminent philosophers whose ideas of social contract we examined here were taken by the myth of equality and freedom? We cannot answer this question here in a biographically accurate way. Yet, in grappling with this question in a more general way, we may see how the logic of social contract ﬁts in with the individualist ontology.

Justice in the Name of the Other 233 III. The initial postulation that human beings are equal and free social atoms whose conduct is motivated by self-interest delimits their interpersonal relationships to an exchange mode. Exchanges are what equals do out of self-interest. The social logic which prevails is: I give you x for your x-equivalent, and you can do the same, and I will oblige you. To exchange one’s x for another’s y that is not equivalent to x is to negate, and possibly damage, one’s self-interest. One is disadvantaging oneself. And for the individualist, self-interest is what human conduct is all about. It often ﬁgures both as the ultimate motivation and as the purpose of all conduct. Thus the “right” thing to do in any circumstance is to pursue self-interest. In other words, we are “entitled” to pursue terms and objects of our self-interest. They become our “rights,” and we demand their fulﬁllment. Suppose we notice, to our consternation, that we are not equal in endowment and circumstances. We also notice that we are so embedded in our web of connections that we are not free to act as autonomous beings. We ﬁnd ourselves encumbered and compromised, some of us much more so than others. The crucial question we should ask is this: since equality (or symmetry) and freedom (or autonomy) are the membership requirements for participation in the mode of exchange, what about those who are unequally endowed and are restricted in autonomy? The answer seems rather obvious. Those without the requirements for membership are necessarily marginalized. This lack of participation takes the form of being unable to make one’s needs and interests known and demanding requisite attention and support, and also being unable to take up responsibilities that would advantageously position one for the reciprocal exchange of obligations and beneﬁts. Conversely, to take up responsibilities that do not add to one’s self-interest in some way is not the thing to do for a rational individualist. A rational individual carefully calculates the kind and extent of responsibility one should take to yield maximum beneﬁt to oneself. But again we ask: what about all those around us who do not behave like these rational individuals? By birth or by circumstance, they do not have equal resources and abilities to work the exchange system of rights and responsibility. We are indeed everywhere surrounded by people who cannot fully participate in this contractual system of exchange: marginalized, powerless, and defenseless people for reasons of social and economic status, gender, age, race, abilities, health, education, and so on. In our social contract–based system, there is little room for these marginalized others. They cloud our self-interested projects, and appear only as burdens and “the most awesome of stumbling-blocks on the self’s march to fulﬁllment” (Bauman 1993, 84). But a justice worthy of its name is surely not intended only for the powerful. In fact, we would argue that our primary obligation ought to be to the weak and powerless—or, as Levinas would say, the widow, orphan, and stranger. In Levinas’s view, this fundamental obligation to the other is

234 Ann Chinnery and Heesoon Bai aroused neither by adherence to a social contract, nor by appeal to moral principles or the pursuit of virtue, but rather by the somewhat paradoxical command of what he calls the “beggar’s request” (2004, 232–33). In other words, one is called to respond not by the force of a powerful counter-ego, but by the vulnerability and fragility of the other.

IV. In this section we shall look more closely at how thinking about rights and responsibilities shifts when we are speaking from a Levinasian perspective. In a nutshell, Levinas claims that if one redeﬁnes responsibility as a positive response to the appeal of the other, one has a new basis for justice and human rights. To pursue justice on this account is to pursue the rights of the other (Levinas 1981). Much has been written elsewhere about Levinas’s conception of subjectivity as pre-ontological intersubjectivity (that is to say, being for-the-other prior to being for-oneself), so we shall not take up that notion in detail here. What is important for our purposes, however, is his insistence on heteronomy and asymmetry as deﬁning characteristics of the ethical subject and ethical relation—a marked departure, as we mentioned above, from the traditional emphasis on autonomy and reciprocity. Levinas calls into question the claim to a natural drive toward self-interest and individual freedom, arguing instead that our basic condition, or ethical nature, if you will, is a “peaceful commitment to the rights of the other person” (Burggraeve 2002, 42). He therefore denies that his is a prescriptive ethics, preferring to call it a description or recuperation of the “real, but forgotten” conditions of human experience and existence. His construal of subjectivity and the ethical relation revolves around notions of heteronomy, asymmetry, passivity, inescapability, and impossibility, but we shall take up just two of those conditions here: heteronomy and asymmetry. For Levinas, subjectivity is best described in ethical rather than ontological language. The “essence” (if one can use such a word) of the self, in his view, is to be a subject in the accusative: not “I think, or, I will, I want, I can,” but me voici (Levinas 1981).2 From the standpoint of traditional Western metaphysics, however, Levinas’s position cannot hold, for it posits subjectivity as an apparently negative “construct”—as a break with, or deliverance from, Being itself (Ciaramelli 1991). In contrast, for Levinas, humanness cannot be deﬁned by autonomy: selfhood is at the most fundamental level a reply, a response to the appeal of the other; and individual subjectivity is bound inescapably to the ethical priority of the other: The ethical “I” is subjectivity precisely insofar as it kneels before the other, sacriﬁcing its own liberty to the more primordial call of the other. For me, the freedom of the subject is not the highest or primary value. The heteronomy of our response to the human other, or to God as the

Justice in the Name of the Other 235 absolutely other, precedes the autonomy of our subjective freedom. (Levinas 1986, 27) Now it might seem here that Levinas is not really talking about subjectivity at all, but rather that he is arguing for a forfeiture of subjectivity and agency. In his view, one is deﬁned as a subject—a singular person, an “I”— precisely because one is exposed to the other and abdicates one’s position of centrality in favor of the other (Levinas and Kearney 1986). And he uses heteronomy to describe the radical kind of openness to the other which, on a traditional account, is the very antithesis of moral agency. As Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings point out, when individualism is the ontological ground and autonomy the moral ideal, relationships come to be seen “as encroachments. Too many see disciplined study or activity as a straitjacket conﬁning self-expression. Too many regard duties as millstones around their necks” (2003, 252). However, as we shall see below, a rejection of the traditional emphasis on individual freedom and autonomy leads neither to a necessary forfeiture of subjectivity, nor to slave morality.3 Rather, we are opened to the possibility of what Levinas calls “heteronomous freedom”—a view of freedom and rights made possible only by investing one’s own freedom in the freedom and rights of the other. The notion of heteronomous freedom highlights the metaphysical violence and injustice of an ethics which maintains the priority of self over other and insists on reducing the other to the same, whereas Levinas insists that justice is about afﬁrming and promoting the rights of the other as other. By elevating the ethical signiﬁcance of difference over similarity, however, he also calls into question one of the fundamental tenets of rights-based ethics—that is, the shared condition of being human as the moral bedrock, the foundation for universal rights. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on essential similarity, Levinas (1981) rejects the appeal to sameness, declaring instead that the other cannot be known by the usual categories of perception. Rather, he says, we must ﬁnd “another kinship”—one that enables us to conceive of the difference between oneself and the other in a way that preserves the other’s alterity and resists oppression and subsumption of any kind. When human rights are taken to be the bedrock of morality, the emphasis is on a conception of the self as a bearer of rights. Human beings have rights simply by virtue of being human, and are, in a signiﬁcant sense, only able to ﬂourish or become fully human by exercising their rights. For Levinas, on the other hand, it is responsibility, and not rights, which forms the bedrock of what it means to be fully human. “It might astonish some,” he writes, “that—faced with so many unleashed forces, so many violent and voracious acts that ﬁll our history, our societies and our souls—I should turn to the IThou or the responsibility-of-one-person-for-the-other to ﬁnd the categories of the Human” (1993, 42). In rights-based ethics, universal human rights are unalienable—they cannot be taken from us—and they are morally binding regardless of civil law.

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To most of us, this notion of basic human rights sounds like common sense, as does the notion of a common humanity as the starting point for moral theory around rights and responsibilities. Levinas disturbs that notion, however. He insists that it is not our similarity as human beings which needs to be upheld and afﬁrmed, but our difference. Consequently, both our rights and our responsibilities are bound up in respecting and afﬁrming the other as other, not as one who is, in all important respects, essentially “like me.” For Levinas, rights begin with our responsibility to, and for, the other, not with the self, and the signiﬁcance of this shift becomes no clearer than in the case of racism. As Roger Burggraeve puts it: For Levinas, the essence of racism consists in accepting only what is the “same,” and excluding what is different, or “foreign.” The “other” is found threatening and therefore ruled out. The only sort of otherness found acceptable is the otherness within one’s own “genre” or “type”—the otherness within one’s own blood or soil, one’s own family, origin, nation, church, club or society, the same job, place, birthplace or birthdate. One accepts only differences and particularities within a same genre, which means that individuals within that genre differ only relatively (e.g., by character, taste and intellectual level). It also means that their deeper kinships [and] relationships are not touched in any way by their differences. . . . Levinas’s perspective allows us to see that Hitlerism and its genocidal crimes is only a quantitative expansion—that is, a consequent, systematic and inexorable expression—of racism in its pure form, which in turn is only a concretization of the conatus essendi. (2002, 59–60; italics in the original) Levinas challenges much of what has become almost conventional wisdom—that is, that perceiving the other as a fellow human being despite contingent differences is the essential ingredient for moral perception and moral performance: he resists any appeal to sameness, even in its thinnest (hence, its most inclusive) sense. The second, and perhaps more controversial, of the two aspects on which we shall focus here is asymmetry. In contrast both to social contract theory, which assumes an exchange between equals, and to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intersubjectivity, the most fundamental intersubjective relationship for Levinas is not one of similarity or symmetry, but of radical asymmetry: “The equality of all is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights” (Levinas 1981, 159). Now, there is nothing inherently new or radical in a claim to asymmetry as such. In fact, since the prevailing conception of ethics is founded on the modernist notion of subjectivity as sovereign rational autonomy, ethics has been characterized by a self-other asymmetry all along. But Levinas inverts the prevailing model and insists on the ethical priority or superiority of the Other. Asymmetry for

Justice in the Name of the Other 237 Levinas is what marks the “fundamental” or “essential” difference in which the “I” is already subject to the Other. In other words, when responsibility is seen as a precondition for subjectivity, the “I which says I” is a subject position “already deposed of its kingdom of identity and substance, already in debt” to and for the other (Levinas 1996, 144). It is an inversion of the traditional “no other-than-self without a self” to “no self without another who summons it to responsibility”—a shift from subjectivity as an “I” to a “me” (Ricoeur 1992, 187). As Adriaan Peperzak explains, for Levinas: The ethical relationship cannot be limited to a practice that is based on the conviction that all humans are equal in having basic rights, being citizens of democratic institutions, members of one human race. . . . The Other comes from “on high,” is superior to me, not necessarily, of course, in the sense of superior intelligence, skills, talents, virtues or holiness, but as a human existence that, in its poverty and needs, surprises and inevitably obligates me. The relation revealed in any encounter is a relation of inequality and height, a relation of asymmetry. The appearance of another in the world, which is also mine, reveals to me that I am a servant, responsible for this Other’s life and destiny. (1997, 23; italics in the original) Contrast this to the notions of exchange and reciprocity, so central to the social contract framework we discussed above. Lawrence Becker (1986), for example, argues for reciprocity (construed as both the disposition to reciprocate and the acts such a disposition makes obligatory) as a fundamental virtue. Speciﬁcally, he proposes that “we should return good for good, in proportion to what we receive; that we should resist evil, but not do evil in return; that we should make reparation for the harm we do; and that we should be disposed to do those things as a matter of moral obligation” (4). As Becker makes it clear, in traditional ethics, moral obligation rests on, and takes as its referent, the prior actions of another. For Levinas, however, reciprocity cannot be an ethical consideration. When asked in an interview with Philippe Nemo, “[b]ut is not the Other also responsible in my regard?” Levinas replies, “Perhaps, but that is his affair. . . . I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it” (1985, 98; italics in the original). And in Otherwise than Being, he claims: The knot of subjectivity consists in going to the other without concerning [myself] with his movement toward me. Or, more exactly, it consists in approaching in such a way that, over and beyond all the reciprocal relations that do not fail to get set up between me and the neighbor, I have always taken one step more toward him—which is possible only if this step is responsibility. . . . Without asking myself: What then is it to

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In Levinas’s view, then, the fundamental asymmetry of the ethical relation is the kind of asymmetry Dostoyevsky points to in The brothers Karamazov: “We are all responsible for all for all men before all, and I more than all the others” (in Levinas 1985, 101; italics in the original).4 With such exorbitant claims, even those who are sympathetic to Levinas’s ethics in theory ﬁnd it difﬁcult to imagine what it would look like in practice, and his work is therefore often discredited as entirely utopian and unrealistic. However, as Levinas himself makes clear, “its being utopian does not prevent it from investing our everyday actions of generosity or goodwill towards the other: even the smallest and most commonplace gestures, such as saying ‘after you’ as we sit at the dinner table or walk through a door, bear witness to the ethical” (1986, 32). The asymmetry of the ethical relation means that one fulﬁlls one’s own freedom by investing it in the freedom and rights of the other; that one pursues human rights by pursuing the rights of the other; and that one sees one’s very subjectivity as always already constituted by responsibility to and for the other—the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.

V. That said, however, it is not immediately evident why we ought to take up such a notion of rights and responsibilities in education. Many educators today express concern over the current proliferation of individual rights at the expense of social responsibility; however, we do not believe that drawing up a more rigorous social contract—a prevailing trend in moral education—will bring about signiﬁcant change in the desired direction of social justice and compassion. As we suggested above in our discussion of social contracts, the prevailing conception of moral agency is so deeply mired in self-interest that it cannot sufﬁce as either the starting point or the measuring stick for moral education. Once one becomes aware of the extent of suffering in the world today, one can no longer rest content with educating students to pursue self-interest to the extent that they do not interfere with the rights of others to pursue their own interests. We need a far more robust sense of social and global responsibility, and that, in turn, requires a fundamentally other-regarding conception of selfhood and moral agency—a conception not unlike Levinas’s. However, we cannot get very far in contemplating a Levinasian “approach” to moral education before running into another apparent paradox—one that marks one of its most notable differences from traditional conceptions wherein responsibility is just one part of an economy of rights and responsibilities. For Levinas, the ethical debt one owes to the other increases in the measure that it is assumed: “duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished” (2004, 244).

Justice in the Name of the Other 239 Contrast this to the traditional framework wherein “Ought implies can” (Williams 2006, 175; italics in the original). Moral obligation on this latter account means that the agent ought (morally) to do something, but in order for the obligation to hold, what ought to be done must be within the agent’s power. Now, as Williams notes, the question of what is within the agent’s power is a contested and problematic notion, as is the requirement of nonconﬂicting obligations, but the salient point for our purposes here is that traditional conceptions of moral responsibility hold the agent responsible only for that which he or she can (reasonably) do. And, for the purposes of moral education, this is an entirely workable stance. Being for-the-other, on the other hand, means moving away from the comforting security of the known and the possible. It means risking the comfort of being for-oneself for the insecurity of responsibility to and for the other. In contrast to the neat parameters of a rule-based morality, the incessant demand to be for-the-other can seem, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “vague, confused and confusing.” One can never be sure that one’s interpretation of the situation has matched the demand: “I have done this, but could I not do more? There is no convention, no rule to draw the boundary of my duty, to offer peace of mind in exchange for my consent never to trespass.” We can recognize morality, Bauman says, by its “gnawing sense of unfulﬁlledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with itself. The moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough” (1993, 80; italics in the original). But how could fostering a “gnawing sense of unfulﬁlledness” be seen as a desirable aim for moral education? Could it not lead to a rather widespread moral paralysis—with students simply throwing up their hands in despair? Not necessarily. While that response indeed remains a possibility, it is not inevitable; nor should we expect it to be the typical response. It is entirely consistent, in our view, to foster at once a strong sense of moral agency and a deep sense of humility. The measure of a moral life need not be the fulﬁllment of one’s own self-interested desires and ends, nor the fulﬁllment of a predetermined set of duties. Rather, why not aim toward a capacity to welcome the unexpected and unknown; a willingness to suspend one’s own projects in order that another might ﬂourish? In other words, if we reframe the criteria for what constitutes a moral life, desirable ends outside the traditional emphasis on rational autonomy come into view. The inherent impossibility of ethics, as Levinas describes it, need not be seen as a condition to be overcome. For Derrida, talking of fulﬁllable, ﬁnite responsibility is akin to talking of ﬁnite love. If one were to answer the question, “do you love me? by saying, Well, up to a point, within certain limits, within reason” I do, then it is not love (Caputo 2000, 120). Even though I will never be able to fulﬁll the obligation contained in the other’s claim on me, its impossibility does not release me from the obligation. A rule-based morality might tell me where my duty starts and

240 Ann Chinnery and Heesoon Bai where it ends, and thus allow me to say at some point that I have done what needs to be done, but Levinas’s ethics offers no such reassurance. It resists absolutes, and it resists absolution. Inﬁnite responsibility is an uncertainty with no exit, but it is also, for Levinas (as for Bauman, and Derrida) the very foundation of morality. Just as we can never say with regard to love, “it is over; I have loved enough,” we can never, with good conscience, congratulate ourselves for having discharged our responsibilities. To speak of rights and responsibility after Levinas therefore requires a new ethical language and new frameworks for practice. However, it is a challenge worth taking up, we suggest, and an opportunity, as Peperzak (1997) says, to investigate whether we are in fact capable of the dispositions required for such radical other-centeredness, or whether our incapacity to do so is reason enough to declare Levinas’s conception exaggerated and unreal. In this essay, we have done our own investigation and come to the positive conclusion that Levinas’s conception of unconditional responsibility becomes both intelligible and practicable if we move beyond the exchange model of human relationship. But being able to practice Levinasian responsibility does not mean being able to fulﬁll it. Since there are no conditions attached to the terms of responsibility, it is by deﬁnition impossible to fulﬁll. However, in the current global context, we can no longer rest content with grounding moral education in social contracts or other variations of the Golden Rule. Responsible citizenship requires that we suspend not only our own self-interested desires, but also our self-referential frameworks. We are called to a responsibility to and for the other which does not rest on perceived similarity or on the possibility of our undergoing similar suffering. As educators, therefore, we must rise to the challenge to foster in both our students and ourselves the kind of moral agency which recognizes and afﬁrms the other as other, and the attendant capacity to live in, and with, the uncertainty—indeed the impossibility—of ethics. NOTES 1. See, e.g., Maurice Cranston’s comments in his introduction to Rousseau’s Social contract (1968, 25–43). 2. The preferred translation of me voici in Levinas’s ethics is “here I am” (see, e.g., Peperzak 1997), but this translation can be somewhat misleading. While me voici is in the accusative case in French, it does not come through as such in English. The “I” in “here I am” ought, therefore, to be read more like the subjective “me.” 3. We are referring here to Nietzsche’s notion of slave morality, in which virtues would be determined as if by the violated, oppressed, and unfree. Within such a conception, Nietzsche claims, what would be valued would be those qualities of utility which would serve to “ease existence for those who suffer;” and although these qualities (e.g., pity, patience, and compassion) are traditionally seen as other-regarding virtues, they are, for Nietzsche, not virtues at all, but rather signs of a weakened and decadent humanity. For more on this, see especially Beyond good and evil (1886/1966).

Justice in the Name of the Other 241 4. The quote comes from Book VI, IIa of The Brothers Karamazov. Levinas was known to vary his translation of this passage. In the quote I use here (which comes from an interview in Ethics and Inﬁnity) Levinas quotes Dostoyevsky as saying, “We are all responsible for all. . . . ” However, elsewhere (such as in Otherwise than Being), Levinas translates it as, “Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone. . . . ” Both translations of the word vinovatyi (i.e., as “responsible” and as “guilty”) are considered acceptable. See A. Toumayan (2004).

REFERENCES Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Becker, L. C. 1986. Reciprocity. London: Routledge / Kegan Paul. Burggraeve, R. 2002. The wisdom of love in the service of love: Emmanuel Levinas on justice, peace, and human rights. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Caputo, J. 2000. More radical hermeneutics: On not knowing who we are. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ciaramelli, F. 1991. Levinas’s ethical discourse between individuation and universality. In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 83–105. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gaylin, W., and B. Jennings. 2003. The perversion of autonomy: Coercion and constraints in a liberal society. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Hobbes, T. 1651/1964. Leviathan. Ed. F. B. Randall. New York: Washington Square Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1986. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. Interview by Richard Kearney. In Face to face with Levinas, ed. R. A. Cohen, 13–34. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1993. Outside the subject. Trans. M. Smith. London: Athlone. ———. 1996. God and philosophy,. In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings, ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi, 129–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Locke, J. 1988. Two treatises of government. Ed. P. Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. 1886/1966. Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Ogilvy, J. 1992. Beyond individualism and collectivism. In Revisioning philosophy, ed. J. Ogilvy, 217–33. Albany: State University of New York Press. Peperzak, A. T. 1997. Beyond: The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1992. Onself as another. Trans. K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rousseau, J.-J. 1762/1968. The social contract. Trans. M. Cranston. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1762/1979. Emile.Trans. A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Toumayan, A. 2004. I more than the others: Dosto and Levinas. Yale French Studies 104: 55–66. Williams, B. 2006. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge.

16 Peace as Being Taught The Philosophical Foundations of a Culture of Peace1 Jeffrey Dudiak

Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Robert Hess, Teacher and Friend

LEVINAS ON “TEACHING” AND ITS RELATION TO PEACE For the philosophical tradition of the Occident, education is preeminently a matter of knowing, of coming to know, and, consistent with Socrates’s agenda-establishing adoption of the Delphic inscription, it is above all a matter of self-knowledge, of coming to “know thyself.” Thus the prestige of the “Socratic method” in education—a questioning that draws out what, according to this conception, is already there, or, after the characterization of the French, Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing, or to be free” (2004, 43). This being free is not, however, the freedom of a “capricious spontaneity,” but, rather, an aligning oneself with (by appropriating—two sides of the same process) that which is (“being”), illustrated by the way in which Western science makes itself the master of nature by learning her laws.2 This predominance of a maieutic model for education is correlative, therefore, with larger epistemological concerns, with a more general theory of coming to know, with coming to know who I am in terms of the “larger scheme of things” of which I am a part. Philosophy in the West, Levinas argues, “has most often been an ontology”—that is, “a root complicity”3— of being (the ontos) and reason (the logos), reason coming to know being and being surrendering itself to reason, resulting in the priority of the theoretical as the privileged way to know. Levinas refers to it as “the reduction of the other to the same” (2004, 43), the reduction of everything to its place in the knowing-being correlation. Thus, for the intellectual tradition of the West, the predominant images are those of unity, of coherence, of the whole, of the ontos that is one—and Western reason, knowing, is to culminate in a knowledge of this whole, to have as its telos an absolute, total knowledge of the being which it knows and in which it participates. Derrida (1988) refers to it (with speciﬁc reference

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to Hegel but representative of the whole élan of philosophy) as “SA”—i.e., savoir absolu—absolute knowledge. As such, reason, like the being that it knows, is one, is all-encompassing, leaving nothing outside, assimilating all that which would appear, at ﬁrst blush, to resist, all that which is a fall or a temporary detraction from the original and/or ultimate coherence of the whole. Levinas refers to this “way,” the Western way of thought, as “totality” thinking. After this model, peace is the smooth interplay of terms within a coherence, where there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, and is the coherence of a system: peace as pax Romana, or pax Americana. But “peace” in this model, “the peace of empires,” bears, according to Levinas, as something constitutive of its essence, an essential violence, the violence of “essence,” with respect to those—and perhaps this is each of us as individuals—who do not “ﬁt” into the system, into the rational/social machinery where the parts, individually irrelevant, are ground to ﬁt: the singularity of faces de-ﬁgured, de-faced, by means of a systematic vandalism. “The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity” (Levinas 2004, 22): square pegs pounded into round holes. And might not the most terrifying contemporary manifestation of this violence be, not the terrorist response to the pax mundi of empire, which at least retains the belief in the possibility of effective action (however misguided and tragic the chosen actions might be), but the quotidian malaise of the legion of late-night, television talk-show watching 20- and 30- (and 40-) somethings who—in the face of a headless and monstrous economic/ bureaucratic social system that runs on its own momentum beyond anyone’s control—refuse to be duped by the silly optimism and feigned oversight of political tinkerers and wave riders, refuse to be duped into any naive hope, and who thus retreat into a too-wise and wise-cracking cynicism, to have a few laughs to Nero’s tune while any “human” foundations of the city, the polis of our politics, burn? Might not this mood, our social mood (often too prevalent to be noticed, and second nature, if not ﬁrst nature, to my students), our “postmodernity,” be our (intuitive before theoretical) protest against the “fruits” of Western, rationalizing totality? It is not, I would maintain, that the individual, human face, the face of suffering or joy, has lost its evocative power (rather, it remains all too graphically human amidst all the oily, social mechanisms), but that we no longer really believe that anything seriously important can be done. It is against knowledge in this absolute sense, and in its hope for peace as coherence, particularly in its Hegelian form, that the nineteenth-century Danish anti-philosopher Kierkegaard protests. He recognizes that only an absolute alterity is capable of breaking up the closed circle of the System, a System which supports as it assimilates differences as dialectical manifestations of Itself. Kierkegaard (1971), in his Philosophical fragments—a title which already protests the coherence of philosophy—posits such an Other, a “Teacher” (allegorically Christ), who is capable of interrupting the

244 Jeffrey Dudiak maieutic project by bringing to me that which is not already mine—namely, for Kierkegaard, the knowledge of salvation, and arguing therefore, though perhaps implicitly, for the possibility of a non-Socratic view of education. Kierkegaard clearly and explicitly opposes the maieutic model for coming to the knowledge of salvation. What is less clear is whether one could deduce from this a more general, non-Socratic view of education. I would argue that one could. Kierkegaard pseudonymously struggles to show the place, to make a place, for the individual, the outsider, the other. Levinas follows Kierkegaard in the concern to posit an absolute exteriority, even if he ﬁnds Kierkegaard’s protest against the System “in the name of the self” still too violent (although of a violence different from that of the totality), and thus ultimately ineffectual.4 For Levinas, “[i]t is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other” (2004, 40). Speciﬁcally, for Levinas, it is the Autrui, the human other, an other who is not the messiah calling me to save myself, as in Kierkegaard, but the human other who calls me to messianic responsibility. For Levinas, it is precisely the human other, presenting himself/herself to me in his/her face, who resists, ethically, the reduction of the other to the same, the strictly maintained correlation between knowing and being with its assumption of all alterity. The face of the other qua other is not manifested, is not manifest, is not, to borrow Kantian/Husserlian language, surrendered to my “transcendental forestructures,” is not a known to a knower, a noema to noesis, but speaks to me, and speaks to me of its resistance to the assimilation inherent in knowing, pronouncing as face a ﬁrst word: “Thou shalt not commit murder.” The face is a dignity. But more than resistance, more than refusal, the face of the other demands of me responsibility, positive “curative aid,” across a difference which, in a favorite wordplay utilizing the double negative, Levinas refers to as “non-indifference,” that is, as that which, in demanding of me ethical responsibility, rather than epistemological adequation, breaks up the closed system instituted by ontology. This means that “the other” is not an ontological other, not (at least principally) other in his/ her way of being, but other as making ethical demands upon me, as calling the ontological order itself, in whatever form it might take, into question.5 Levinas refers to this relation with an other as a teaching. Here the other does not teach me, as in maieutics, that which I already know. It is not merely the occasion for self-knowledge, for a rounding out of the same, but brings to me—in an interruption, a calling into question, of myself as “the naïveté of the direct impulse . . . exercising itself as a force on the move” (2004, 171),6—that which is genuinely new, different, authentically (of itself) other. The other, in speaking to me, teaches me her/his alterity. This teaching is, in the ﬁrst instance, not a matter of coming to know (or “possess”) a content, but a teaching of this teaching itself, teaching me my responsibility, my irremissible obligation to this other for whom I am responsible, to the point where this being obligated is my identity: responsible, I am. Obligo, ergo sum.

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This voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself. Teaching signiﬁes the whole inﬁnity of exteriority. And the whole inﬁnity of exteriority is not ﬁrst produced, to then teach: teaching is its very production. The ﬁrst teaching teaches this very height, tantamount to its exteriority, the ethical. (Levinas 2004, 171) It is in these terms, in my being taught, that Levinas envisions the possibility of a genuine peace—not the peace of an eventual coherence, a reduction of the other to the same, but peace as just relations among terms in difference, a peace not in a forced unity, but in genuine plurality where terms are permitted their difference, their integrity, outside of any totality. Pluralism is not a numerical multiplicity. In order that a pluralism in itself (which cannot be reﬂected in formal logic) be realized there must be produced in depth the movement from me to the other, an attitude of an I with regard to the Other (an attitude already speciﬁed as love or hatred, obedience or command, learning or teaching, etc. . . . ), that would not be a species of relationship in general; this means that the movement from me to the other could not present itself as a theme to an objective gaze freed from this confrontation with the other, to a reﬂection. Pluralism implies a radical alterity of the other, whom I do not simply conceive by relation to myself, but confront out of my egoism. (Levinas 2004, 121; italics in the original) But peace, insofar as there will be peace, must, according to Levinas, begin in me, in my being taught, in my responsibility for the other as other. Teaching peace means, therefore, ﬁrst of all, being taught, learning, to be peaceful, knowing how to serve. A culture of peace requires, after this thought, that I be educated to respond to the needs of the other without my being capable of demanding a reciprocal degree of responsibility from the other who, as other, remains resistant to the categories I ﬁnd in myself and applicable to myself, who as other remains the one I am called to serve. Ethical responsibility is always, for Levinas, asymmetrical, for to demand of the other that which I am capable of demanding of myself would be to institute again the violence of a totality, to have recourse to a purportedly neutral, overarching category which would embrace both me and the other. Teaching remains fundamentally a matter of learning, and teaching peace fundamentally a matter of a prophetic life, a calling of the other to the peace to which he or she already testiﬁes. According to Richard Cohen, prophecy in Levinas “is all speech that calls forth the interlocutor’s responsibility to respond” (1993, 222), or in this context, perhaps, all speech which appeals to the interlocutor as one capable of “being taught.”7 It is the case, of course, that teaching is, too, a sharing of information, a matter of “knowing,” and “truth.” But for Levinas, truth is never something I can attain by myself. Despite Descartes’s cogito, modern philosophy’s

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classical starting point for self-referential certainty, the possibility of selfknowledge is, for Levinas, always haunted by the specter of the evil genius, by what Levinas refers to as the mystiﬁcation, or the “anarchy of facts” (2004: 70). And further on: “But a world absolutely silent that would not come to us from the word, be it mendacious, would be an-archic, without principle, without a beginning. Thought would strike nothing substantial. On ﬁrst contact the phenomenon would degrade into appearance and in this sense would remain in equivocation, under suspicion of an evil genius” (90; italics in the original). And does not Descartes himself, as Levinas points out (“The being inﬁnitely surpassing its own idea in us—God in the Cartesian terminology—subtends the evidence of the cogito, according to the third Meditation,” [54]) ground (in the third Meditation) the possibility of true knowledge, of certainty (the matter of the ﬁrst Meditation) in the assurances granted by a benign deity, in an Other who is not himself an object of knowledge, who “appears” not as a clear and distinct idea generated from within the immanence of the doubting/certain subject, but as the Inﬁnite, the idea of which, as an idea thinking more than it can think, could not have originated in me, but must have been placed in me by the Inﬁnite itself, by an other? The fact that I have the idea of the Inﬁnite in me, and that this idea could not have originated in me (a ﬁnite being), does not only serve to prove the existence of God (the existence of the perfect being who must have been the source of my idea of perfection), but also serves to guarantee the certainty achieved in the ﬁrst meditation. Speaking of the suspicion that God might be a deceiver (“I am constrained to admit that it is easy for him, if he wishes it, to bring it about that I am wrong even in those matters which I believe I perceive with the mind’s eye with the greatest possible obviousness”), Descartes claims that “in order to remove it altogether I must examine whether there is a God as soon as the opportunity occurs, and if I ﬁnd that there is one I must also investigate whether he can be a deceiver; for as long as this is unknown, I do not see that I can ever be certain of anything” (1960, 93; emphasis added). Truth, and knowledge of the truth, is always already interpersonal, emerges only in relation to the alterity of a “person.” Reason begins when my necessarily prejudicial perceptions and conceptions are called into question by the other. Therefore, “the other is not for reason a scandal which launches it into dialectical movement, but the ﬁrst rational teaching, the condition for all teaching” (Levinas 2004, 203), and thus the condition for a reason that is not born of maieutics, but for a genuine reason in touch with exteriority. In the welcoming of the face the will opens to reason. Language is not limited to the maieutic awakening of thoughts common to beings. It does not accelerate the inward maturation of a reason common to all; it teaches and introduces the new into a thought. The introduction of the new into a thought, the idea of inﬁnity, is the very work of reason. The absolutely new is the Other. The rational is not opposed to the experienced; absolute

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experience, the experience of what is in no way a priori, is reason itself. (Levinas 2004, 219; italics in the original) Claims Levinas: “It is not I, it is the other that can say yes. From him comes afﬁrmation” (2004, 93)—thus, the possibility of breaking with the mystiﬁcation, the anarchy, of facts. I know when the other teaches me. “Thought can become explicit only among two; explication is not limited to ﬁnding what one already possessed” (100). I know when the other afﬁrms, invests the assertion I offer, an offering which is already (in its being voiced) apology, already an appeal to an other. The other’s speech supplies me with the starting point for knowledge, the origin of which knowledge dreams. But as we have argued, following Levinas, there can be no other who is not absolutely other, an other who, while refusing my a priori categorizations, and by means of this refusal, enters into an ethical relationship with me, establishing his or her alterity on the basis of his or her ethical, rather than ontological, difference. Knowing, relation to exteriority, requires being taught, being in ethical contact with a genuine alterity. The true has, therefore, as its condition of possibility, the good. Respect and responsibility, my respect and responsibility for the other, found the possibility of knowledge and truth as they found the possibility of genuine peace. A teaching which already knows cannot teach in truth, cannot cultivate a culture of peace. But peace remains a risk—Levinas calls it a “beautiful risk”—in that I cannot guarantee that the other will respond “peacefully” to me. “Peace then is under my responsibility. I am a hostage, for I am alone to wage it, running a ﬁne risk [un beau risque], dangerously” (1981, 167). “Reciprocity is his [sic] affair,” Levinas asserts. To me comes obligation. And indeed, peace cannot be peace, be real peace, shalom, as peace imposed, as the pax Romana of ontology. Rather, it is, according to Levinas, only “thanks to God” when I am taken as the other of the other. “[I]t is only thanks to God [grâce à Dieu] that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is, ‘for myself.’ ‘Thanks to God’ I am another for the others” (158). Societal peace, a culture of peace, therefore, as beyond my control, requires grace, and trust in God’s grace, without this in any fashion detracting from the responsibility for peace that is mine alone. “The other stands in a relationship with the third party, for whom I cannot entirely answer, even if I alone answer, before any question, for my neighbor” (157).8 A culture of peace would thus, according to Levinas, have as its condition of possibility the ethical relation with the other, my being taught, education. But education of a particular kind: “Society does not proceed from the contemplation of the true; truth is made possible by relation with the Other our master. Truth is thus bound up with the social relation, which is justice. Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master” (2004, 72). For Levinas, as for Derrida (in this sense very Levinasian), societal structures, law, justice, are necessary, not as that which dictate my relations with the

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other in any a priori or “from above” manner (in which case the law would always be an unmitigated violence with respect to a singular individual), but as that which arise out of my responsibility to the other, and which regulate that responsibility in terms of my responsibilities to other others. The law is not only, as Derrida (1992) correctly points out regarding Levinas, a restriction of evil, but of goodness, as a restriction against my spending all of my resources, all of myself, on any particular other, on a preferred other, to the exclusion of all other others. But the law, society, nevertheless bears a universality necessary to the general applicability which gives it its commerce, so even in its ﬁdelity to originary responsibility, it necessarily collaborates in a certain violence. The eschatological, as the “beyond” of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility. . . . Of peace there can be only an eschatology. But this does not mean that when afﬁrmed objectively it is believed by faith instead of being known by knowledge. It means, ﬁrst of all, that peace does not take place in the objective history disclosed by war, as the end of that war or as the end of history. (Levinas 2004, 23–24) In this view, a culture of peace, rather than a teleological goal (that which is obtained at the end of time as this end remains within time), legitimately functions as eschatological vision, as an ethical optics, as an ever-receding horizon which is nevertheless essential to a culture which can, while never being entirely just, while never being entirely paciﬁc (the “origin” of justice falling outside the provenance of “being”), can, notwithstanding, be more or less just, more or less a culture of peace. The necessity of structures, and the necessity of a certain violence within structures qua structures, introduces into this thought a certain structural violence, which needs to be perpetually and vigilantly “softened” without ever being susceptible to eradication. Indeed, behind some of the greatest violence is the dream of its total extirpation. “A being receiving the idea of Inﬁnity, receiving since it cannot derive it from itself, is a being taught in a non-maieutic fashion, a being whose very existing consists in this incessant reception of teaching, in this incessant overﬂowing of self (which is time)” (Levinas 2004, 204; italics in the original). Education, my being-taught, needs, then, to be an ongoing re-education, a constant vigilance, an insomnia.9 It requires an attentiveness to those who fall through the cracks of our cultural architecture: homeless, gays, urban poor, single parents, heretics (of whatever sort), prisoners, and the many others who have not as of yet managed to gather sufﬁcient power to give themselves even the voice of the oppressed, who have not as of yet attained a place in the cultural consciousness which would be their admittance to the conversations regarding justice, oppressed to the point of being anonymous in their oppression. It is precisely on this point that Ronald Kuipers (1997) objects to the efﬁcacy, when it comes to issues of justice, of Richard Rorty’s

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“liberal conversation.” Only when we learn to be taught by these, perpetually and ever again, constantly alert to the new oppression generated by even increasingly just and paciﬁc social structures, will our various cultures have earned the privilege of claiming, tentatively, and only with a humble breathlessness, the epithet: “culture of peace.”

THE “EXTERIORITY” OF THE “INNER LIGHT” Having reviewed in spirit, if too brieﬂy, the connection established in the work of Emmanuel Levinas between education and peace, and the emergence in this schema of a notion of knowledge and truth which runs countercurrent to the philosophical tradition, making these vaunted philosophical categories derivative of a pre-original goodness, I should like to take a few paragraphs to offer some suggestions regarding the amenability of this thought to traditional Quaker concerns. Indeed, Levinas would seem, at least on the surface of things, to afﬁrm a number of the components integral to a Quaker way of knowing: a lack of formal dogmas and creeds; listening versus seeing as the dominant metaphor for knowing; nonviolence as a methodology for truth-seeking; praxis and risk-taking and its relation to speech.10 I shall, for the moment, focus on two others: the revelatory encounter of the “Other,” and the notion of “a measure of the light.” In short, the question I would like to pose is this: can the Quaker doctrine of the “inner” light be reconciled with Levinas’s unrelenting emphasis on “exteriority?” That is to ask: is the Quaker idea of the inner light a maieutic notion, a turning for the truth toward myself and what I ﬁnd in me to the exclusion of truth and knowing as interpersonal, to the exclusion of a dependence for truth upon exteriority? The answer I would like to suggest takes its cue from the fact that the doctrine of the inner light describes a relation which is indeed interpersonal, is already a relation with alterity, with an Other, namely, with the Spirit, and the Spirit conceived of as personal.11 For unlike the French Enlightenment notion of la lumière intérieure, wherein the immediacy of true knowledge is a partaking of an impersonal logos, and best accomplished in a Cartesian or Rousseauian solitude uncontaminated by the society of others, the Quaker idea, at least as it is proposed by Robert Barclay in the foundational Quaker document which is his Apology, is a rejection of any idea of a “natural light” in favor of a “spiritual light”12—is a relation of spirit with spirit. And it should not then surprise us when Barclay refers to this relation as a teaching, as an immediacy that is not an immanence, not a participation in a totality but a relation with an Other: “Therefore the Spirit teacheth the righteous immediately, objectively, and continually” (1908, 55).13 For Barclay as for Levinas, it is a matter of knowing a Truth given in a kind of interpersonal immediacy which precedes and gives direction to any deductive rationalizations, and puts the lie to “rationalizations” in the colloquial sense (possible only if I approach the other already supplied with a priori categories,

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with the canons of rationality or tradition already in my possession, to be used against the other, as a way of knowing [seeing] which keeps me from having to listen). We “know” the truth, the good, after each of these characterizations, before we “know” in any traditional, epistemological sense. Indeed, Barclay concludes his arguments for the immediacy of revelation by asserting that such revelation presents itself to us independently of any arguments, of any proofs, but as a prima veritas, a “living experience.” Wait then for this in the small revelation of that pure light which ﬁrst reveals things more known; and as thou becomest ﬁtted for it, thou shalt receive more and more, and by a living experience easily refute their ignorance, who ask, How dost thou know that thou art actuated by the Spirit of God? Which will appear to thee a question no less ridiculous, than to ask one whose eyes are open, how he knows the sun shines at noon-day? And though this be the surest and most certain way to answer all objections; yet by what is above written it may appear, that the mouths of all such opposers as deny this doctrine may be shut, by unquestionable and unanswerable reasons. (1908, 71) I am intrigued by the peculiar logic of Barclay’s text wherein appear arguments (an “apology”) from authority, from “right reason,” and from the scriptures, for that which, according to this closing paragraph of Proposition II, requires no argument. I need to think more on this, but this procedure (of showing how this doctrine necessarily underwrites the possibility of that which is then employed to deny it) strikes me as remarkably analogous to Levinas’s project of attempting to indicate the trace of that which transcends (and is the condition of possibility for) philosophy within philosophy itself. It is true that Barclay speaks in the Apology of this teaching as a teaching of the knowledge unto salvation, his theme being “the true Christian divinity,” such that one is tempted to “spiritualize” this idea of the inner light away from the concerns which preoccupy Levinas: a description of the ethical as the condition of possibility for a just society. Is, then, on these grounds, Barclay’s Other as the Spirit irreconcilable with Levinas’s other as the human other? It is certainly the case that Levinas refuses to separate our relation with the alterity which is the human other from the alterity which is God, even if he also refuses their conﬂation. And Quakerism can certainly boast of no lack of concern for the human other, despite Barclay’s theological emphasis on the knowledge unto salvation. For my part, I would like to propose that my being taught by the Spirit should not, and even cannot, be separated from my being taught by the alterity of the human other. For in our best hours, regardless of the contingencies of our theological formulations, do we not refuse to divorce the two prongs of Jesus’s summary of the law and the prophets, and ﬁnd that our love of God and our love of neighbor coincide, loving God in and through our love of neighbor? Might this saying be, rather than two commandments, a single commandment,

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two ways of saying the same thing, where the world is already spiritual, and God, Emmanuel, is already with us, and where a love of God which does not coincide with a love of neighbor would not be a truncated or incomplete love, but no love at all? There can be no culture of one. Culture is interpersonal, and a culture of peace is one wherein terms retain their differences in reconciliation, rather than sacriﬁce their differences to integration. As we strive, continually, toward cultures of peace, it is my contention that both the teachings of Emmanuel Levinas and those of Quaker tradition have much to teach us, above all the necessity of being taught as a, and perhaps the, condition of possibility for a culture of peace, a being-taught which begins with me. Or need I be taught other-wise? NOTES 1. This paper is based on a presentation made at the annual conference of the Friends Association for Higher Education on June 24, 1995, at Haverford College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The conference theme that year was “Education and a culture of peace: Teaching, learning, and decision-making.” 2. For an elaboration of these relationships, see Dudiak (2001, 5–20). 3. I borrow this felicitous phrase from Steven G. Smith (1986). Characterizing the Western philosophical tradition, Smith claims: “Its approach may be epistemological, that is, attentive to the necessary structure of knowing, or ontological, that is, attentive to the necessary structure of being; but there is a root complicity between the two emphases. It is the destiny of knowledge to search out and adhere to being, and it is the destiny of being to disclose itself to be known” (54). 4. Levinas’s responses to Kierkegaard are most clearly and concisely contained in two short articles: “Kierkegaard: Existence and ethics” and “A propos of ‘Kierkegaard vivant,’” which can both be found in Levinas, Proper names (1996, 66–79). I address these readings in Dudiak (2004). 5. For a more thorough analysis of the “modality” of otherness in Levinas, see Dudiak (2001, 62–78). 6. Following Levinas, I borrow this expression, “une force qui va,” from Victor Hugo’s Hernani. 7. I have provided a fuller discussion of these relationships in Dudiak (2001, 325–52). 8. In this quotation I depart from, and challenge, for contextual reasons, Alfonso Lingis’s translation, which renders dont as “for which” rather than “for whom.” 9. The idea of “insomnia,” ﬁrst phenomenologically described by Levinas in Existence and existents (2001), remains an important and intriguing notion for Levinas in that he, paradoxically, equates consciousness with sleep. The other awakens me from this sleep which is consciousness, and calls me to attend to that which lies outside of myself. 10. I borrow these “components of a Quaker epistemology” from the paper of Professor William Grassie, with whom I shared the session during which this paper was ﬁrst presented. 11. Is the “personiﬁcation” of the Spirit an anthropomorphizing metaphor, or is the personhood of human beings an analogue grounded in the “persons” of the Godhead? Who can answer this question? 12. A reliance upon the “natural light” (the stuff of Socinian and Pelagian error) is rejected in favor of uniting oneself with the “divine light” at, for instance, Barclay (1908, 15).

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13. This is but one of perhaps a dozen references to the teaching of the Spirit in “Proposition II: Of immediate revelation” (Barclay 1908, 26–71).

REFERENCES Barclay, R. 1908. An apology for the true Christian divinity. Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Store. Cohen, R. A. 1993. Emmanuel Levinas. In Interpreters of Judaism in the late twentieth century, ed. S. T. Katz, 205–28. Washington: B‘nai B‘rith Books. Derrida, J. 1988. Glas. Trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1992. Force of law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the possibility of justice, ed. D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D. G. Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge. Descartes, R. 1960. Discourse on method and meditations. Trans. L. J. Laﬂeur. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Dudiak, J. 2001. The intrigue of ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2004. Religion with an impure heart: Levinas on Kierkegaardian religion. In The hermeneutics of charity, ed. J. K. A. Smith and H. Venema, 185–96. Grand Rapids: Brazos. Kierkegaard, S. 1971. Philosophical fragments, or A fragment of philosophy. Trans. D. Swenson and H. V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuipers, R. 1997. Singular interruptions: Rortian liberalism and the ethics of deconstruction. In Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality, ed. J. H. Olthuis, 105–30. New York: Fordham University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1996. Proper names. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. Existence and existents. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Smith, S. G. 1986. Reason as one for another: Moral and theoretical argument. In Face to face with Levinas, ed. R. A. Cohen, 53–71. Albany: State University of New York Press.

17 Dehiscence A Dispersal of Levinas in the South Paciﬁc, for Education Betsan Martin

The koru of the Silver Fern, a spiral unfolding from the earth towards the light, is an icon for values associated with the landscape here. The koru is all about us in New Zealand in our natural environment and, as the new shoot of a native plant, represents an open, regenerative process of life.

INTRODUCTION Levinas’s ethics throws light on the pathway of relations between indigenous peoples and those who came later to Aotearoa from Britain.1 With the beneﬁt of Levinasian methodology, the possibility of moving ahead in cooperation with indigenous aspirations lies before us. Levinas’s proposals for ethical responsibility are an alternative to mastery and relationships of domination and assimilation. Levinas offers the liberal individual and corresponding social organization a way to counter assimilation with respect, respond with hospitality rather than hostility, apply freedom to justice, and create relational epistemologies.2 Levinasian ethics have considerable resonance with indigenous concepts of obligation to care for people and the land, and the high regard for generous hospitality. Indigenous people are generally referred to as Mãori, but the more accurate term tangata whenua means people of the land, indicating an interwoven identity between people and the land. Following the epistemology of interweaving relationship with the environment with human ethics, here values are extended to suggest a Levinasian approach to environmental values. Levinas’s methodology in relations between later settlers in Aotearoa-New Zealand and indigenous people leads to considerations of care for land and environment, integrated with indigenous concerns. Care for land is an ethics calling out for attention in the contemporary environmental crisis. A philosophical move toward relationality can be seen in philosophy, social sciences, and science, especially in ecology and sustainability. In education, sustainability initiatives are well underway in New Zealand and are widespread in other places, notably Brazil.

254 Betsan Martin Inspiration to bring Levinas’s works on ethics to respect for tangata whenua is to build the capacity of Western systems of thought for a nonassimilative approach to intercultural relations. Taking Levinas’s thought far beyond its original context, and extending its scope to engage with environmental issues, means broadening Levinas’s precise focus on the relation between two in the face-to-face relation to two peoples and two different knowledge traditions. However, the extension of two does not lose sight of the original impetus to re-order relations of mastery. The immediacy of the face-to-face relation can be lost in the scope of the big picture, such as in policy. This problem is not fully explored here, except to say that ethical encounter between people of the land and later settlers is mediated through personal encounter in the teaching relation or in local environmental management. Here, reference to education policy and discussion of assimilation policies governing relations with indigenous people is made in the context of new initiatives in education and values associated with environmental responsibility.

LEVINAS: REFLECTIONS FOR AOTEAROA-NEW ZEALAND Levinasian regard for alterity or difference enables reﬂection on epistemology and invites an account of the shaping inﬂuence of education for human subjectivity and values. Although universal in style, Levinas’s work enables responses to speciﬁc challenges and circumstances because he seeks an ethical practice. The ethical and philosophical tradition he addresses includes liberal thought of interest in places further aﬁeld from Europe where liberal traditions were established. For Levinas, the Holocaust ruptured adherence to the legacy of liberalism and brought a reassessment of human values associated with it, such as the priority of property, freedom, and self-interested individualism. The extremity of human brutality led him to engage with violence in human subject ontology—a violence deriving from Cartesian subjectivity and identity, premised on assimilation of the “Other.”3 He drew on philosophy and theology to present a method for counteracting hostility with hospitality. In this ethics, human identity may be achieved through responsibility for the Other, for a stranger or neighbor. An imperative in interpreting Levinas’s thought for conditions elsewhere is not to return to Levinas to give him homage but to bring new interpretation so that his work is given the quality of dehiscence—a seedling allowed to ﬂourish as ideas take root in different times and new soils; it is to take liberties with his inspirational thought, of which any form of totalizing or enclosure is anathema (Derrida 1991). While Levinas’s philosophy supports ethical concerns for education in a context very different from his, his work speaks to liberal traditions of thought where they have been transplanted. New Zealand is one such place. European philosophy, political and ethical thought have long contributed to New Zealand’s cultural

Dehiscence 255 life and philosophy of education, often at the expense of the wisdom traditions of the Paciﬁc peoples, though there are signs of change (Marshall and Martin 2000). The endeavor to build respect for the epistemologies and knowledge of both Western traditions and tangata whenua wisdom is a signiﬁcant reorientation from the education policies of assimilation historically implemented in New Zealand and other countries in this region with a colonial agenda. According to Levinas, assimilation is a form of violence. He counterposes the assimilative process with an ethics of respect for the alterity of the Other. In this context of Aotearoa-New Zealand, Levinas’s metaphysics inspires a new modality for settlers of European and other traditions. It is about a shift of respect for two worldviews, as a basis of respect for multiple worldviews and respectful encounters among them. In this chapter, Levinas’s method is elaborated and interpreted for knowledge, education, and an ethics of care for the land. The Cartesian expression of human subjectivity, “I think therefore I am,” and the Mãori response, “we belong therefore we are” (Rauwhero 2002), show something of the contrast in worldviews and suggest an epistemology and a philosophy arising from genealogical relationships understood to include the land. While indigenous communities evolved from societies arising organically from earth and sky, those with a legacy of liberal philosophies are now faced with evolving a comparable ethics. The invitation to move from assimilative modes of knowing and relating to the wonder of what may be beyond “my” consciousness is a pathway cleared by Levinas. Levinas offers the ethics of the face-to-face relation as a modality for encounter with those of a different worldview and framework for subjectivity. This relational mode of ethics enables a re-view of the greater focus in liberal tradition on individualized ethics. The relational ethics of Levinas, with respect for difference, brings a depth of respect which overturns assimilation and goes even further, to re-place those who have been in positions of dominance as learners. This way of thinking creates a receptivity to epistemologies which “decenter” the subject, such as those articulated by indigenous authors, “deep” ecologists, and researchers in the energy sciences of quantum physics. Levinas keeps open the spirituality of human life, staying in touch with suffering and death, the enduring joy and challenges of love, the personal meaning of existence, and the hope to stay responsive to one another and the natural world. These qualities are attuned to indigenous philosophies, ecological responsibility, and an ethics of place (Coats 2001; Marsden 2003; Martin 1999, 2000, 2002; Naess 1995; Schauberger 1998). Reference to place raises the question of knowledge: whose knowledge is valued, how it is safeguarded, and what is entrusted to the next generation. New Zealand schools taught the history of England, stories of the monarchy, and nothing of the Paciﬁc peoples’ traditions. Britain’s imperial history was not analyzed for the outcomes for indigenous peoples—a forgetting of memory. Nothing was conveyed of how a land of native ﬂora and fauna was transformed into

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pastoral landscapes to support a foreign economy. Environmental intervention took place to correspond to a transplanted economy and social order. In addressing underlying meaning and shaping it, European philosophy is marked by qualities of universality and abstraction which lend it to interpretation across disciplinary ﬁelds, from medicine to education and earth sciences. Researchers interpret the work of philosophers such as Foucault (1980) and Derrida (1991), and thinkers of relationality and ethics such as Irigaray (1985, 1993) and Levinas (1981, 2004) to regenerate the disciplines. In particular, the dualistic traditions are analyzed for their metaphysics of separation, and interpreted for aspects that are mechanistic and instrumental in their effects (Humphries and Black 2006; Klein 2004). New premises for ethics relational and respectful of the Other are the basis for epistemologies which have regard for the interdependence of peoples and the earth. These new forms of knowledge, often referred to as integrated and ecological, are being pursued in discourses of environmental and social sustainability. Such an ethics has considerable correspondence with indigenous epistemology of respect for all living things. In conditions of respect for the longer indigenous experience of the Paciﬁc region, and knowledge that has been shaped by a metaphysics of integration, of interwoven nature and culture, the opportunity to learn from those who have safeguarded it is before us.

AOTEAROA-NEW ZEALAND—THE CONTEXT OF INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGY As a South Paciﬁc nation, Aotearoa-New Zealand is a context acquainted with European philosophy in some measure, and to a lesser extent with Levinas’s. It is a context of Polynesian indigenous philosophies arisen from the experience of the Paciﬁc Ocean, experience often conveyed through metaphors of navigation (Martin and Humphries 2004) and the habitats of islands, and a cosmology of divine powers experienced in the energies of tides and wind, indigenous trees, birds, ancestors. European philosophy and worldviews, and those of the indigenous traditions of the Paciﬁc, and of Aotearoa-New Zealand speciﬁcally, are as different as the lands and traditions from which they come. Colonial history and the European values which accompany it are now interwoven into the fabric of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Speciﬁc educational and philosophical engagement between the two traditions has been rare and recent (Marshall and Martin 2000), and historically more often undertaken by anthropologists, such as Percy Smith, who interpreted Mãori traditions in subsequently discredited ways. Mãori leaders such as Sir Apirana Ngata and Mãori Marsden have had an enduring inﬂuence on Mãori development and engagement with the systems introduced since the colonial period. Mãori educational philosophers and sociologists, such as Linda Smith, Graham Smith, and Russell Bishop, have

Dehiscence 257 led historical critique and been part of a remarkable revolution in education for Mãori, and with other leading researchers, they inﬂuenced the entire system. Initiatives by these leaders and others have had multiple agenda, including making space for Mãori worldviews and knowledge in education, and addressing the destructive forces of assimilation by introducing culturally based education. The historical imposition of a Western worldview was embarked on in education policy and practice in 1847 when the ﬁrst legislation required all children in schools supported by the state, then mostly mission schools, to be taught in English. The law applied to Mãori and settler children, and expressed the early endeavor to insist on English and suppress the Mãori language. This was the beginning of policies of assimilation in education and of the undermining of Mãori language and knowledge. Analyses by contemporary education researchers have shown that, since that time, education policies of assimilation have contributed to the decimation of Mãori spiritual and material wellbeing (Bishop and Glyn 1999; Smith 1999). The politics of assimilation which accompanied the colonial era, and in particular assimilation as the stated policy of education, were, in philosophical terms, the practices of suppression of the Other. This is the violence Levinas addresses. It is this non-accounting for the “alterity” of the Other, the non-recognition of the “difference” of the Other, which makes LevinasÄs ethics so pertinent. Essentially, assimilation was a strategy by which Mãori knowledge and language were suppressed in favor of English language and European knowledge (Jones et al. 1995). Tribal organization was undermined by a Western social order, instigated in government policy that reﬂected the interests of the newcomers. In New Zealand, relationships with indigenous people were formalized in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which is foundational to British inﬂuence in New Zealand. The treaty set the terms for relations between Mãori and the Crown (even though they have been dishonored historically), and is considered the foundational agreement for further settlement. There is strong advocacy for setting right the agreements of the treaty through measures for shared governance and decision-making as a structure to engage with future policy, such as immigration and education. The treaty agreements are counter to assimilation. It is still hoped that the treaty can become the basis for educational policy, and can be used to ensure hospitality to settlers from other places in support of diversity. The legacy of colonial history continues in the failure of liberal education to achieve successful educational outcomes for Mãori through schooling (Smith 1997). In the colonial project, Mãori were excluded from governance and decision -making in education policy, and the subsequent outcomes of school failure are attributed to the imposition of an alien liberal system and to “epistemological racism” (Bishop and Glynn 1999, 63). Evidence of this failure is revealed in the higher failure rates of Mãori and their leaving school without qualiﬁcations (Jones et al. 1995, 161). Russell Bishop and Ted Glynn’s research is part of the quest for culturally appropriate educational methodologies. It is

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inﬂuential in New Zealand education, where diversity and multiculturalism are now key concepts: they are terms of inclusiveness of immigrant people, and they need to take their place alongside the priorities to establish educational systems to ensure positive outcomes for Mãori.

. . . AND THE NEO-LIBERAL REFORMS OF THE 1980’S Liberal education is harnessed to liberal economics, as observed by commentators during the period of economic redirection in New Zealand (Jones et al. 1995). The 1988 Picot Report was commissioned to align educational administration with the economic reforms. It inaugurated an era of reform in educational administration, in which freedom of choice was the touchstone to reﬂect the neoliberal economic directions implemented from 1984 on. In this regime, the Socio Economic Status (SES) of student families is used to measure and explain educational disparities, embedding the idea that family income, rather than the structures of the education system, are the cause of educational disparity. In this analysis, responsibility for educational outcomes is shifted to families rather than to the education system. An economic status analysis for determining success at school, accompanied by the acceptance of deﬁcit theory, which attributes failure to shortcomings of families and children, is a “dead end” for change in outcomes for Mãori (Bishop and Glynn 1999, 69; Kelsey 1995). In an economic context of increasing disparity where a low income economy persists, and in which educational outcomes are tied to economic status, then income levels would need to be adequate in order for low income people to achieve successful educational outcomes. But a change in the structure of education and the outcomes of the employment market, and a deeper understanding of their complex interrelationship, are not the only requirements for change if Mãori are to guide their own destiny as guaranteed in the Treaty of Waitangi. Our understanding of what it means to generate processes that facilitate the freedom to shape our lives and to generate creativity for the fulﬁllment of human potential is hamstrung by the limited understanding of freedom which comes from neoliberal traditions and the way these have been cast into the educational reforms of the 1980s. The articulation of freedom of choice, ﬂagship of the values that support neoliberal economic direction such as competition, efﬁciency, and individualistic self interest, reverberates through the work of educational leaders, researchers, and teachers of the state system. Contradiction and complexity mark educational reforms. Economic priorities create pressure toward uniformity; they gather greater momentum in a neoliberal environment and inﬂuence education (Jones et al. 1995). In this environment, regard for the “alterity” of indigenous societies is even more imperative, for cultural survival and for ensuring the continuity of indigenous knowledge and values. Freedom and the emphasis on choice and freedom also appeared

Dehiscence 259 as a space for self-determination and were therefore attractive for the Mãori sovereignty movement in the 1980s. However, the rhetoric of freedom from constraint without an ethics of responsibility gives rise to the justiﬁcation of extreme self-interest blind to common good. It is in this paradox that Mãori, more attuned to a sense of collective responsibility than to individual rights, were caught up. Critiques of the reforms note that the discourse of freedom in a neoliberal context is a recipe for increasing disparity (Jones et al. 1995, 162–65; Kelsey 1995), and the outcome for Mãori has been as predicted (Kelsey 2002). At the same time as state-governed education and labor market systems were not serving Mãori well, this context of reform saw a number of Mãori initiatives in education ﬂourish. While these have not changed the system as a whole, nor addressed continuing assimilation in mainstream education which still affects the majority of Mãori children, they are providing an alternative education which may serve as a beacon for more general changes. This Mãori-initiated alternative is part of an educational renaissance effort to turn the tide of educational failure for Mãori which persists in spite of the remarkable impetus for change (UN Rapporteur 2006). In the past twenty years, Mãori initiatives for self-determination in education have been built on a philosophical articulation of a cultural framework for education known as Kaupapa Mãori theory. Initiated by Graham Smith (1997), it has been elaborated by others such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Takirirangi Smith (1998, 2000), and Bishop and Glynn (1999). Mãori philosophers use the concept of culture to elaborate new epistemologies in education (Marsden 2003). In the research of Bishop and Glynn (1999), relationship is primary in pedagogical practice, in research methods, and in philosophy. Mãori cultural frameworks of whakawhanaungatanga (family relationships) and whakapapa (genealogical relationships) refer to “the process of establishing relationships in a Mãori context” (Bishop and Glynn 1999, 173–93). These relational epistemologies are integral with the language and the land, and with caretaking obligations (Smith 1999). Whakapapa was a framework for knowledge, research, relationships, and subjectivity constituted through oral tradition, and it is quite distinct from discourses of subjectivity, truth, and power—three discourses privileged in Western knowledge and research. Although notions of relationality clearly support the cultivation of Mãori knowledge and human identity, they are proposed as a framework for an expanded concept of culturally based schooling for all children, including for immigrant communities, in which cultural knowledge, tradition, and language are the media for education (Bishop and Glynn 1999). The philosophy for education outlined by Mãori writers is one which calls for redesign of educational governance, policy, and management, a design built on the ethical process through which educational outcomes would be coformulated. A collaborative approach could reﬂect the process outlined by Bishop and Glynn, whereby Mãori “aspirations, preferences and practices”

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in education involve Mãori in the design, delivery, management, and monitoring of educational initiatives and developments” (71). With respect to knowledge and what is taught in such a reordering of education, inclusion of different historical experiences and respect for shared memory would give further legitimacy to the epistemological basis for education.

ETHICS OF ENCOUNTER Elaboration of indigenous worldviews and philosophies can be found in the writings of indigenous people such as Charles Royal (1998, 2002), Mãori Marsden (2003), and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999). My interest is to work an encounter among different epistemologies articulated by Mãori authors and the work of Levinas: a consideration of different cultural traditions and modes of thought. In Aotearoa-New Zealand, where indigenous people and people of Western (and other) origins share the land, each inﬂuences the other. There are long indigenous traditions for encounter, increasingly respected as a process for engaging interculturally. However, there has been little attention to an ethics of encounter from European traditions. Through the work of Levinas, we can draw into these deliberations a connection to European thought which is more representative of the complexity of Western civilization than the predominance of neoliberalism would suggest. With insight from a Western cultural heritage of ethics, there is an alignment that paves the way for collaboration between the two traditions for a future which reﬂects shared responsibility for our “place.”

LEVINAS—EPISTEMOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

Face-to-face: The Relation Between Two as a Premise for Ethics The logic of Levinasian ethics takes place in an in-depth reworking of the free, knowing subject to invite a prior, and priority relationship of responsibility, which constitutes identity with relationship. The self-contained individual encrypted in Western conceptual frameworks is problematized by Levinas as conditional on prior, or antecedent, relations—relations that are unacknowledged in the individualized understanding of the self. Levinas argues that relationality is the source from which the knowing self or subject emerges, a submerged source whose moorings are suppressed from view and obscured from memory. Relationship in the face-to-face encounter is a taproot for Levinasian ethics in philosophy. The relationship with the Other, who, in Levinas’s work is the Stranger, is a speciﬁc relationship between two. The stranger is to be read literally and symbolically, for the Other is always strange in that “I” cannot presume to know “her or him” or reduce him or her to an object of my consciousness. The Other, as absolutely other,

Dehiscence 261 exceeds my consciousness or knowledge. Alterity is the Levinasian term for absolute difference. Between the individual and the collective, two of the great trajectories of Western thought and politics, Levinas interpolates an ethics of the face as the encounter between two. The relation between two, face-to-face, is Levinas’s term for personal, embodied encounter, which is neither referenced to the individual, nor to the collective, but to two as the basis for ethics and justice. To re-found ethics as something arising from a relationship between two is to allow respectful relations to supersede the objectiﬁcation of the other—the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. Relationality in the face-to-face encounter is the basis for justice. In the Western liberal tradition, equality has been the clarion call around which movements for justice have been orchestrated. But equality is not the basis for justice in Levinasian thought, as this is a relationship where the Other is assumed to be the same as the self; rather, for Levinas, there is asymmetry between the ethical self and the Other, an asymmetry which animates justice. Here, justice is founded on a new subjectivity and on responsibility in a modality very different from that of an individualized “rights-based” approach to justice. Freedom, the touchstone of liberal tradition, is given a very different treatment by Levinas. Rather than freedom for the pursuit of self-interest, Levinas provides a pathway to freedom to be exercised as responsibility. Responsibility is understood relationally, as responsiveness to the stranger; the Other is “my” neighbor.

Freedom and Ethics The difference between the grasping hand of self-interest and the open hand of hospitality are Levinasian metaphors to contrast freedom with ethics, rights with responsibility. An ethical relation, constituted on respect for the alterity of the Other, departs from subjectivity constituted on freedom, the self-interested subject in the liberal tradition (Hall 1986; Oddie and Perret 1992). In stark terms, freedom requires a certain hostility as a way of minimalizing any claims the other might make to restrict “my” freedom. A free subject resists having the pursuit of ideals constrained by the imposition of another’s demands, whereas ethics is responsiveness. Responding with generosity puts freedom at risk; ethics takes a trajectory of hospitality where it is accepted that it is “I who am responsible” (Levinas 1986, 27). In order to create the conditions for ethical subjectivity, Levinas, in Totality and Inﬁnity, argues the case for an internal separation, or a choice between the pursuit of freedom and ethical responsiveness. The free subject is the knowing subject of philosophy, with its “comprehensive claims to mastery” (Critchley 1992, 8). Relationally, the objectifying self denies the other’s difference by excluding that which is in excess of “my” comprehension. The exercise of self-interested freedom, for Levinas, is an escape from responsibility. It is important to keep in mind the distinction already noted between freedom associated with mastery and freedom from oppression. It is the

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freedom of mastery Levinas claims for ethical relationality. To give full consideration to freedom from oppression would involve a fuller discussion of indigenous struggles which are touched on here in reference to educational initiatives. Such a discussion would involve further reﬂection on the responsibilities of freedom subsequent to oppression—a discussion relevant to the women’s movement, and to the example given of the initiatives in Mãori education and the strategies undertaken by Mãori to bring about a renaissance of Mãori language. These examples constitute freedom from oppression, at the same time as they inaugurate afﬁrmative educational programs. Freedom as an exercise of power is not entirely denigrated by Levinas: rather, ethics supersedes this form of freedom. The opportunity for ethics comes when freedom is interrupted with a response of welcome: “the putting into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other” (Levinas 2004, 43). Separation is the spatial conceptualization for the different pathways, for choice between freedom and the response of welcome of, and care for, the Other, which constitutes the ethical subject. Levinas gives a new inﬂection to the concept of “being,” as one who exercises the agency of a subject. He makes a shift from agency as power and freedom to willing subjection to the needs of the Other. For Levinas, this is what it means to become “otherwise than being.” Ethics entails a kind of death to being. (Again, it seems important to recall that “being” is understood as something constituted on mastery; not all expressions of autonomy and selfhood should be subsumed under the concept of “being.”) Rather than fall into a binary between the rights of needs and freedom and responsibilities of ethics, the fulﬁllment of needs is upheld as something necessary to human life. There is not to be a simple hierarchy between egotistical needs and ethical responsibility: rather, rationality, consciousness, and spirit arise from a new source—from relationship in which nurture is offered to the Other person rather than hostility in its many guises. The subject, in free pursuit (as far as possible) of his or her needs, is both a right and entitlement, and but one course for human action. The securing of rights, in terms of the well-being and dignity of selfhood, even self-determination, must be considered as the necessary base for mutual respect. Another course proposed in the methodology of Levinas comes from a seed which is harbored within every person; the seed of relationality comes not so much as a choice, but as a response to the stranger. The rationale of freedom gives way to a new logic of ethics. The stranger, as “my” neighbor, interrupts, interpolates the subject in his or her freedom, and in doing so, in this moment, presents the opportunity for ethical response. Ethical subjectivity dispenses with the idealizing subjectivity of ontology, which reduces everything to itself. The ethical “I” is subjectivity precisely because it kneels before the “Other,” sacriﬁcing its own liberty to the more primordial call of the other. For me, the freedom of the subject is not the highest or primary value. The heteronomy of our response to the

Dehiscence 263 human other, or to God as the absolutely other, precedes the autonomy of our subjective freedom. As soon as I acknowledge that it is “I” who am responsible, I accept that my freedom is anteceded by an obligation to the other. (Levinas 1986, 27) Then ethics arises not from a new ideal, but from recognition of relations which are antecedent to individual freedom. In the logic of this relational ethics, the independent individual of liberal thought is brought into question, in that even those who are most unfettered in their pursuits still exist in residual dependence on their mother and father for life, on another person for love and the natural world for food. To break with the trajectory of freedom and embark on an ethical pathway of responsibility is to encounter desire, which is the passion of the ethical relation, and related to Levinas’s notion of time as inﬁnity. The Other escapes the categories of my understanding and, in the metaphor of time, is thereby transcendent, non-enclosed in “my” interpretation. There is always an inﬁnite distance between the self and the Stranger that cannot be negated without negating alterity.4 Inﬁnity refers to that which is beyond “my” comprehension, aspects of the Other which elude understanding. The transcendence of the stranger who appears, and whose alterity is upheld, is the manifestation of desire because desire is unfulﬁllable. By extension, “my” obligations are never complete; they are unending. Desire describes that which is always beyond reach. For Levinas, it is the Other who is always beyond reach because of the inability to ever fully comprehend an Other. The Other is always beyond me, beyond the grasp of my comprehension: desire “desires beyond anything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the desired does not fulﬁll it, but deepens it” (Levinas 2004, 34). Therefore, desire characterizes the ethical relation, because full knowing of the Other can never be accomplished—it remains inﬁnitely unfulﬁlled. Desire may be normally identiﬁed with romantic love, but for Levinas love is the dynamic of all ethical relations. Desire is linked with responsibility—as inﬁnite. While there is this aspect of unfulﬁllability, there is a practice of response, an embodied or “sensible” responsiveness of giving water to a stranger and food to the hungry, which is never exhausted. While responsibility is inﬁnite, the face of the Other is incarnate, close, present, inviting a practical response.

Face-to-face: Sensibility and Language In constituting the ethical relation as face-to-face encounter, the face represents all the modalities of the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste; it is the site of language and communication. For Levinas, teaching is the communicative mode of the ethical relation: the other is not to be subjected to “my” frameworks, so cannot be assumed to be knowable. The mode of the relation with the Other in his or her alterity is the teaching relation; alterity can only be mediated by teaching.

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Betsan Martin It is therefore to receive the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of inﬁnity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the other, or conversation, is a nonallergic relation, an ethical relation: but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching relation. (Levinas 2004, 51)

The face is the site of nonverbal communication and language. Touch and gesture are modalities of communication complementary to language. Levinas speaks of dissembling the language of the eyes: “language does not begin with a message or proposition spoken by the Other . . . it is rather the nonverbal manifestation of the ’skin and human face.’ . . . The ethical essence of language, from which the experience of obligation derives, originates in the sensibility of the skin of the Other’s face” (Critchley 1992, 179). In reading Levinas, it is impossible not to be at every moment conscious of language. New words are needed. The usual formulation of sentences is inadequate, realizing that the structure of every sentence with a subject predicated by an object belies a metaphysical structure of objectiﬁcation. The ﬁrst-person style seems to disappear in favor of a passive sentence structure to give way to a mode in which the subject is not the center, but to be beckoned into life by an ethical response. Levinas’s major work, Otherwise than Being, is an elaboration of the language of the ethical relation as the “saying,” the language of ethics, the communication which supports the alterity of the stranger. Saying is the oral mode of communication with its responsiveness, its spontaneous, relational dimensions. In the introduction to Totality and Inﬁnity, John Wild writes: Of course, I may still treat him [the stranger] as a different version of myself, or, if I have the power, place him under my categories and use him for my purposes. But this means reducing him to what he is not. How can I coexist with him and still leave his otherness intact? According to Levinas, there is only one way. By language. . . . The questioning glance of the other is seeking for a meaningful response. Of course, I may give him only a casual word, and go on my way with indifference, passing the other by. But if communication and community is to be achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given. This means I must be ready to put my world into words, and to offer it to the other. There can be no free interchange without something to give. (2004, 13–14) Levinas is among the philosophers, such as Derrida (1991), Irigaray (1993), and Minh-Ha (1989), who work with language as the structure that gives form to subjectivity. Levinas considers how language puts the ethical relation to work: “To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces. Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundation for a possession in common . . . it is what I give, the communicable,

Dehiscence 265 the thought, the communication” (2004, 76). Encounter ﬂows through language, gesture, food offered in hospitality. The problem that Levinas tackles in Otherwise than Being is the determinative quality of language, where the ontological structure of language constitutes ontological subjectivity, and as such is the vehicle for the logocentric linguistic system to which Levinas refers as the “said.” To ﬁnd language which allows for that which is in excess of the conﬁnes of language, such as the expression of the face, the gesture, and the gift is a project which arises out of the ethics of the face. Ethical saying cannot be language which constructs the other as an object, but is a new mode of “giving signiﬁcance” which entails reception of the other through listening, as one willing to be taught. “Signifyingness, the one-for-the-other, exposedness of the self to another, is immediacy in caresses and in the contact of saying. It is the immediacy of skin and a face, a skin which is always a modiﬁcation of a face, a face that is weighed down with a skin” (Levinas 1981, 85). We now have some strands for weaving an ethics of relationality into education and creating the conditions of an intercultural ethics for which our times are crying out. With a willingness to listen and be taught, these terms provide links and open analogies between the ethics of the face-toface relation and ethics of cultural difference. The logic of Levinas’s thought expands modalities of space, time, and language, yet it poses dimensions that seem strangely familiar in the Paciﬁc.

ENCOUNTER—LEVINAS AND A PACIFIC CONTEXT Levinas’s ethics addresses liberal subjectivity and values. This relational approach to subjectivity and ethics has attributes in tune with Mãori epistemology and with philosophers of sexual difference and ecology. It seems remarkable that an ethics of relationship emerging from the logocentric tradition should have a number of terms which correspond with those articulated from indigenous traditions. It should be noted that Levinas was a philosopher and Jewish scholar, and that much of his thought was inspired by the sacred texts of Judaism. His writings retain concepts of God and spirituality which have not been speciﬁcally engaged with here. Values such as the priority of face-to-face encounter, food given in hospitality, and the communicative modes of gesture and touch are the concepts of striking similarity in Levinas’s work and in Mãori philosophy (Royal 1998, 2002). Levinas seeks to balance intellectual consciousness with the sensibility of face-to-face encounter expressed in giving drink to a stranger—an embodied philosophy to inspire hospitality and generosity. The preeminence of welcome resonates with the protocols and obligations of hospitality that are preeminent for the indigenous peoples of the Paciﬁc, a reﬂection which has also been theorized in the context of North America in the work of Young

266 Betsan Martin (1995). The face-to-face relation is constantly invoked in indigenous circles as the ethical mode of communication and preferred context for meeting and relationships. The privilege Mãori society gives to face-to-face relations is part of a worldview, described as a “woven universe” by Charles Royal (in Marsden 2003). In indigenous traditions and current practice, face-to-face relations are mediated by hospitality, welcome, and generosity as a community life-force. Traditional protocols of welcome involve all the senses in ceremonial exchanges between hosts and guests, led by the call of women, with greeting, speaking, and hosting shared by women and men. Particular contributions of women and men ensure a deep spectrum of human experience brought forth, including reverence for those who have passed on. Formal protocols for encounter ensure safety and facilitate the purpose for meeting. In this place, where Paciﬁc indigenous societies are the context into which Europeans have become interpolated, reﬂections on cultural difference, indigeneity and contrasting worldviews engage us with European thought in ways which arise from this location, where the unfolding spiral is a more prevalent symbol for thought than a binary structure, and a cyclic mode of time seems ill at ease with a linear time and history—which Levinas disrupts with the time-space mode of inﬁnite responsibility. Responsibility for the other is no stranger in the Paciﬁc, although the term “obligation” is more often used. Following the explanations Royal gives (in Marsden 2003), a few points of contrast can be made using the different epistemology of oral traditions, and that from literate traditions. Royal proposes that oral knowledge is internal consciousness and energy in the body, arising out of a synthesis of multiple external sensory experiences—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste— which is integrated with thought as internal experience. Such a basis for knowledge entails wide, all-surrounding sources of information. In contrast, when the text and the screen are where knowledge is held, knowledge and information are external, intellectually constituted, and to be acquired principally through reading and listening—a focused, sharpened mode of transmission. Some inferences drawn are as follows: The implications of these ideas to knowledge, memory and experience are vital. Firstly, when the text and screen are seen as repositories of knowledge, this serves to emphasize the external nature of knowledge, that is, outside the body. In an oral culture, with its emphasis on listening and seeing the other person, this fosters the view that knowledge resides within the human person, externalized never-the-less at various points. Memory, in this way of being in the world, is concerned with qualities rather than quantities, for it is based again on the notion that knowledge is within the body. Memory, therefore, is really concerned with awareness as much as with past events. Finally, experience is mediated through the whole body in an oral culture, rather than through the images presented by text and screen. (Royal 2002, 9)

Dehiscence 267 The discussion of culturally different ways of forming and acquiring knowledge leads Royal to comment on knowledge which has become commodiﬁed and tradable. “Knowledge has become a resource available to one and all but most of all to those who can afford it” (2002, 9). He goes on to explain, as noted above, that indigenous knowledge is inseparable from the land (10). Whereas thought may come from the mind in the tradition known to Levinas, here, thought is a “product of the environment”—a “bequeathing” of that environment into the consciousness of the individual. Oral knowledge, transmitted often in highly symbolic metaphors, is not conﬁned to ﬁxed dates or to logical arguments, but might be entrusted to narratives and to ever-evolving processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. An oral culture utilizes ﬁnite receptacles of knowledge and memory which change and transform as a tree renews itself over time (Royal 2002, 10). These insights give a sense of what is meant when indigenous people speak of being “of the land” and of the imperative to care for land and waters: it comes from a direct experience of life-sustaining interdependence. Mãori cultural frameworks are expressed in ways that resonate with Mãori language and cultural metaphors. Generally they can be considered as part of a shared commitment to environmental enhancement and sustainability, although it should not be assumed the approaches are the same as those of environmental science. In a time of an increasing need to respond to climate change and to develop knowledge and ethics of sustainability, indigenous knowledge is a powerful resource to be accorded high respect and priority (Berkes and Folke 1998; Wilson, Syme, and Knight 2000). Natural science, ecology, and quantum physics are in tune with indigenous knowledge (Marsden 2003, 92), and might form the basis for evolving locally based and globally applied ethics of knowledge. Such a framework is suggested in the Charter of Human Responsibilities (2004): • Freedom of scientiﬁc research implies accepting that this freedom is limited by ethical criteria. • The full potential of knowledge and know-how is realized only through sharing them, and through using them in the service of solidarity and the culture of peace. • In reaching decisions about short-term priorities, the precaution must be taken of evaluating long-term consequences with their risks and uncertainties. 5 And the following principles could be added: Cultural and indigenous knowledge, which is integrated with earth and the planetary system and carries cultural obligations, is to be safeguarded and engaged with, along with environmentally sustainable practice. In contexts with histories of dispossession of indigenous peoples, respect for indigenous knowledge is an ethical principle for knowledge systems and governance.

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Such an approach to knowledge seeks to reach beyond the limitations of liberal freedom; it is informed by collaborative process and responsibility suggestive of Levinasian ethics and metaphysics.

CONCLUSION Freedom is a paramount value in liberal education, at odds with relational values and subjectivity as articulated by Levinas and philosophers such as Irigaray and Royal. Respect for absolute difference and the concept of responsibility for the Other would be a profound shift for conventional knowledge and learning. An example of two systems of knowledge working parallel to each other is shown in the Mãori educational initiatives. While there are some signs of general acceptance of “two” epistemologies in the education system, there are also signs of hostility. There are various examples of parallel systems in organizations—a system was investigated through the metaphor of a two-hulled waka, a traditional Paciﬁc seafaring vessel akin to a catamaran (Martin and Humphries 2004). The concept of responsibility for reworking relations between indigenous people and later settlers provides a space for both. Relating in Levinasian mode has far-reaching implications, and is already centuries old in the Paciﬁc. It comes from a worldview where collaboration, sustainability, and cooperative process are prioritized. It comes from a value system where hospitality and generosity are measures of economic wealth, where obligations to care for the land and ensuring the well-being of people are outcomes of education in a tribal context. Face-to-face, between two, might be overrestrictive for guiding situations of cultural encounter, because these often take place collectively. But the relations between two preserve the immediacy of responsibility, where it is “my” freedom that stands in the way of ethics. This is a responsibility which cannot be deferred. Levinas offers a way to respectful sharing of space and resources in face-to-face encounters in which being, as liberalism has articulated it, gives way to becoming otherwise. Face-to-face encounters do not guarantee an ethical outcome, but I propose that they enhance the possibility. Rather than prescribing goals, an ethical process in educational governance and policy, as proposed earlier, opens a way to supporting different epistemologies and practices. Preeminently, Levinas’s ethics is addressed to the knowing subject, who might “sacriﬁce its own liberty to the more primordial call of the Other” (Levinas 1986, 27). His work opens a way to maintain the irreducible difference of the Other and awakens the need for encounter where it is possible to respect and safeguard alterity. In Aotearoa, protocols of hospitality are gifts from indigenous communities to bring people together and provide nourishment. We have teaching nearer at hand than Levinas, but he touches a cord from a Western tradition. Dissemination of the gifts of Levinasian ethics is perhaps in the provenance of rariﬁed philosophical inquiry, yet it

Dehiscence 269 is an engagement in ethical subjectivity and relationality which is a challenge beyond current conceptions of mainstream education. It inaugurates a conception of subjectivity new to the liberal tradition, although part of the long Judeo-Christian tradition, and allows for encounter respectful of a different knowledge. In shifting the locus of the individual from center stage, it leads to receptivity to earth ecologies and respect for energy systems which remain well beyond the human grasp, and in need of inﬁnite respect. NOTES 1. Aotearoa is the indigenous language in New Zealand. 2. One ﬁeld of inquiry into relations between indigenous people/Mãori and later settlers is education. Historical analysis has highlighted policies and practices of assimilation. Contemporary Mãori initiatives in education have been introduced to counter the effects of assimilation on Mãori people and to revitalize Mãori language, which was under severe threat. The provision of specialized schools and faculties for indigenous knowledge throughout the educational system shows the need to ensure space for different epistemologies and cultural practices which support indigenous values. 3. Following Levinas’s notation, “Other” denotes alterity, the “absolutely Other,” whereas “other” denotes the other of the “same,” the other who is assimilated into “my” understanding. 4. Levinas’s concept of inﬁnity draws on the Cartesian argument for inﬁnity. Because the “I” is capable of thinking beyond its own capacity, beyond the limitations of time to which the I is conﬁned as mortal, then this capacity provides evidence for the idea of inﬁnity. 5. The Charter of Human Responsibilities is an international document produced collectively by allies from ﬁve continents. Originally published in French on November 9, 2004, and currently available in ﬁfteen languages, it was created as the “third pillar” to complement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the United Nations. Betsan Martin serves on the International Charter Facilitation Committee as a representative of the Aotearoa-NZ Paciﬁc region. The “Ten principles to guide the exercise of human responsibilities” are available on “The Charter of Human Responsibilities” website, edited by Lydia Nicollet, at http://www.charter-human-responsibilities.net/spip.php?article9.

REFERENCES Berkes, F., and C. Folke, eds. 1998. Linking social and ecological systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bishop, R., and T. Glyn. 1999. Culture counts. Palmerston North: Dunmore. Critchley, S. 1992. The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, J. 1991. At this very moment in this work here I am. Trans. R. Berezdivin. In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 11–48. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge. Ed. C. Gordon. Brighton: Harvester. Hall, S. 1986. Variants of liberalism. In Politics and ideology, ed. J. Donald and S. Hall, 34–69. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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Hand, S. 1989. The Levinas reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Humphries, M., and N. Black. 2006. A relational ethic for beneﬁcial business engagement. Business as an Agent of World Beneﬁt. Management Knowledge Leading Positive Change. October. Third Annual online conference UN Millenium Goals as Business Opportunity. Irigaray, L. 1985. This sex which is not one. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1993. The fecundity of the caress,. Trans. C. Burke and C. G. Gill. In An ethics of sexual difference, 116–33. London: Athlone. Jones, A. M., J. M. Matthews, G. H. Smith, and L. T. Smith. 1995. Myths and realities: Schooling in New Zealand. 2nd ed. Palmerston North: Dunmore. Kelsey, J. 1995. The New Zealand experiment. Auckland: Auckland University Press. ———. 2002. The New Zealand experiments: A world model for structural adjustment. Wellington: Bridget Williams. Klein, J. T. 2004. Interdisciplinarity and complexity: An evolving relationship. ECO 6 (1–4):2–10. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. La Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1986. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. Interview by R. Kearney in Face to face with Levinas, ed. R. A. Cohen, 13–34. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1989a. Ethics as ﬁrst philosophy. Trans. S. Hand and M. Temple. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 75–87. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1989b. Martin Buber and the theory of knowledge. In The Levinas reader, ed. S. Hand, 59–74. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity. Trans. A Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Marsden, M. 2003. The woven universe: Selected writings of Rev. Maori Marsden. Ed. T. A. C. Royal. Otaki: Estate of Rev. Maori Marsden. Marshall, J., and B. Martin. 2000. The boundaries of belief: Territories of encounter between indigenous peoples and Western philosophies. Educational Philosophy and Theory 32 (1):15–24. Martin, B. 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. In The Dictionary of Cultural Theorists, ed. E. Cashmore and C. Rojek, 307–10. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Place: An ethics of cultural difference and location. Educational Philosophy and Theory 32 (1):81–91. ———. 2002. Building relationships with Mãori in education. Unpublished research interviews. Available from author. Martin, B., and M. Humphries. 2004. A two-hulled waka as a metaphor for managing diversity. Proceedings: Managing diversity conference Melbourne, Australia. Minh-ha, T. T. 1989. Woman, native Other. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Naess, A. 1995. Arne Naess on deep ecology and ecosophy. In Deep ecology for the 21st century, ed. G. Sessions, 185–262. Boston: Shambhala. Oddie, G., and R. Perret. 1992. Justice and ethics in New Zealand society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Picot Report. 1988. Administering for excellence. Effective administration in education. Wellington: Government Printer. Rauwhero, H. 2002. Te Whanau Korowai. In Free from abuse: What women say and what can be done, eds. J. Hand, V. Elizabeth, H. Rauwhero, M. Burton, S. Selby, and L. Falantule. 1–182. Auckland: Auckland: District Health Board. Royal, T. A. C. 1998. Te Ao Marama—A research paradigm. Keynote address at Te Oru Rangahau. Mãori Research and Development Conference, Massey University, New Zealand.

Dehiscence 271 ———. 2002. Some notes on oral and indigenous thought and knowledge. Paper presented at the Õtaki Oral History Forum, Te Wãnanga-o-Raukawa, Õtaki. Schauberger, V. 1998. Nature as teacher: How I discovered new principles in the working of nature. Trans. C. Coats. Bath: Gateway. Smith, G. 1997. Kaupapa Mãori as a transformative praxis. PhD diss., University of Auckland. Smith, L. T. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies. London and New York: Zed Books. Smith, T. 1998. Doing research from home: Tangata whenua issues and Mãori research. Paper presented at Te Oru Rangahau. Mãori Research and Development Conference. Massey University, New Zealand. ———. 2000. Nga Tini Ahuatanga o Whakapapa Korero. Educational Philosophy and Theory 32 (1):53–60. Stavenhagen, R. 2006. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people on his mission to New Zealand (16 to 26 November, 2005). UN Commission on Human Rights. 62nd Session. Item 15. http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/sessions/62/listdocs.htm#15. Wild, J. 2004. Introduction to Totality and Inﬁnity, by E. Levinas, trans. A. Lingis, 11–20. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Wilson, D., C. Syme, and S. Knight. 2000. The Treaty of Waitangi: Sustainable development in the New Zealand context. In Sustainable development in New Zealand: Here today, where tomorrow?, ed. Paciﬁc Rim Institute for Sustainable Development and S. Knight, 9–12. Auckland: Sustainable New Zealand. Young, I. M. 1995. Communication and the Other: Beyond deliberative democracy. In Justice and identity: Antipodean practices. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books.

18 Ethical Obligation in Caring for the Other Reﬂections on Levinas1 Jim Garrison

Levinas has identiﬁed the violent tendency of Western ontology, language, and logic to reduce all difference and otherness to the same structures of being (the same identities, essences, foundations, origins, ends, and all the rest). Levinas constructs the inﬁnite other as absolute alterity incommensurable with the self-same. If others were absolutely incommensurable, however, we could not even become aware of them. Violence is the price we pay to have a mind. If there is a site beyond the bounds of Western philosophy (e.g., essence, will, ego, rationality, etc.) where we may have a mind and a self nonviolently, we in the West will not arrive there until we escape the history of being. Every cultural structure is violent simply because any structure is exclusive of what cannot satisfy its demands. The present paper is a “Re-reading” of Levinas in the sense called for by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (1991). They saw such a re-reading as necessary in the context of Derrida’s “Violence and metaphysics” (1978), and the appearance of two new texts: Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence (1981) and Derrida’s “At this very moment in this work here I am” (1991), a response to Otherwise than Being.2 Bernasconi and Critchley stress the complexity of trying to “respond responsibly to the responsibility produced by Levinas’s work” (1991, xi). I face the same challenge here. I comprehend Levinas’s call for an ethical response to radical alterity as a call to care for the Other even before the call of justice (rules, laws, judgment, etc.). Many teachers answer this call every day. Teachers commonly practice the ethics of care rather than the ethics of justice by breaking rules rather than students. In the last twenty-ﬁve years, the work of Nel Noddings (1984, 1992) has helped legitimate such educational practices. While Noddings understands that caring has traditionally taken a feminine gender construction, she realizes that is far too narrow an understanding. For the purposes of my paper, though, I will concentrate on that feminine construction. Carol Gilligan (1982) has shown how moral development in young girls and women unfolds according to the ethics of care instead of the ethics of justice, as prior research assumed. Instead of presuming that the rational assessment of rules dictates morality, the “conﬂict between self and other,” Gilligan indicates, “constitutes the central moral problem for women” (70–71). Whereas

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for Levinas the philosophical problem is avoiding the reduction of the other to the same, if Gilligan is right, the developmental problem for many women is not being reduced to the sameness of the other. The either/or logic of justice deﬁnes rigid categories which do not tolerate contradiction, while the both/and character of caring remains reciprocal, paradoxical, and inclusive. Gilligan put the paradox this way: “We know ourselves as separate only insofar as we live in connection with others, and that we experience relationship only insofar as we differentiate other from self” (1982, 63). The ethics of justice crushes many expansive souls who come to teaching expecting personal growth in reciprocal relation with others. Good teachers often compromise a “rational” standard because they know it will torture the uniqueness of some of their students to conform to it. The ethics of care is important for many teachers who deliberately seek out a caring profession as a way to grow by giving to, and receiving from, others and by helping to ameliorate suffering. Unfortunately, the dominant masculine construction of caring as docile and self-sacriﬁcing destroys reciprocity and disables those who think this way as caregivers. Those in caring professions (teaching, nursing, counseling, and such) must avoid self-sacriﬁce in unrewarding asymmetric relations with others while also avoiding egotistic self-assertion. What we require is “self-eclipse,” wherein we grow by offering cautious hospitability to others. Extending Gilligan’s insight into the paradoxes of reciprocal caring, we may conclude: “Because we are connected, we care best for ourselves only if we care for others, and care for others only if we care for ourselves” (1982, 68). Levinas rejects reciprocity in our relationship to the Other, explicitly calls for self-sacriﬁce, and follows exclusive either/or logic. We must attend carefully to the violence of reducing the other to the same which Levinas identiﬁes, but we must radically reconstruct how he would have us respond to it. We must create caring, self-eclipsing, and reciprocal relationships with the other which allow us to live and grow through the inclusive both/and paradoxes of reciprocal relationship, which reject the logic of either/or, which avoid reducing the other to our sameness, and which refuse to sacriﬁce the self to the other’s sameness.

WARP AND WOOF OF LEVINAS’S OTHERWISE THAN BEING: THE SAID AND SAYING Otherwise than Being is an extraordinarily self-conscious, strange, and sometimes seemingly opaque text. Here is how Derrida describes the textual workings of Levinas’s labor: “this is how he sets his work in the fabric: by interrupting the weaving of our language and then by weaving together the interruptions themselves. . . . Another text, the text of the other, arrives in silence with a more or less regular cadence, without ever appearing in its original language” (1991, 18). The warp of Levinas’s weave is what he

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calls “the Said,” which refers to the ontological and logical components of philosophical discourse or being (e.g., its essence, truth, presentation, demonstration, neutrality, etc.) which strives to dominate everything other and reduce it to its same categories, concepts, structures, identities, and kinds. Levinas acknowledges we can never get fully outside the violence of the logos, though we can disrupt it. Disruptive “Saying” weaves in a woof which disrupts and exposes the soliloquy of sameness in philosophical “dialogue.” In any discourse, the Said always obscures the Saying. We can only hope to catch the trace of a Saying which underlies and haunts anything actually Said. The Said presupposes Saying; it is “pre-original,” to use Levinas’s locution. If we follow the trace, it becomes clear that anything Said in any context exposes the speaker (writer, calligrapher, etc.) to the other as recipient of discourse. According to Levinas, language (the living logos) presupposes social others not merely temporally, but transcendentally, as a condition of its possibility. When philosophers concentrate only on what is Said, utterance meaning, they entirely miss the essential exposure to the other without which nothing can be Said. Stating transcendentally essential conditions for anything, as Levinas does, involves the speaker (writer) in ontological philosophemes (essential, foundational, etc.). Levinas’s recognition of the difﬁculty leads him into excruciatingly complex locutions wherein he ﬁrst extends the statement of the condition of possibility, annuls it, and then restates it. For example: “The otherwise than being is stated in a saying that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which the [otherwise than being] already comes to signify but a being otherwise” (Levinas 1981, 7; italics in the original). Levinas strives boldly in his texts to do that of which he speaks and writes. Incessantly unSaying the Said to expose the Saying is necessary because language, the conveyance of meaning, always tends to conceal its conditions of possibility. When we try to expose the conditions of possibility in discourse, we risk disintegrating into nonsense. It is hard to state the other than being in language, the instrument of being. Levinas uses the term “Enigma” to express an intense reﬂection on the limits, paradoxes, and ambiguities of his own text.3 Levinas uses this pattern of extension, withdrawal, and restatement as a technique for thematizing the unthematizable. If Saying is thematizable in any way, it is merely the theme of “Here I am” (Levinas 1981, 146). Without language, without addressing the other, it is impossible to have a mind. We would never address ourselves in thought if we did not ﬁrst address others. According to Levinas, Saying exposes a pre-original pre-phenomenological state preceding the constitution of the ego and the appearance of intentional consciousness. Exposure to the other comes before choice, commitment, or activity. It assumes an entirely “de-situating” and “de-posing” of the subject in complete passivity before the other, wherein we nonetheless do not surrender the irreplaceable uniqueness which is “the subjectivity of the subject” (Levinas 1981, 47–48). This stance involves “passivity more

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passive than all passivity” (14). This statement is typical of the strategy Levinas uses to thematize the unthematizable. In such preontic passivity, we are seized by the other in that we are dragged out of any essence we or culture may assign us and pulled into the other than being. The ethical character of prelinguistic exposure arises from the connection between the ability to respond and responsibility. Levinas insists that “saying is to be responsible for others” (1981, 47). It is an inﬁnite responsibility before the face of the other. We enter into this entirely asymmetric relation without agreement; it is neither a matter of free election nor active desire. It lies beyond simple need and, supposedly, extracts us from being (i.e., essence). Before we are responsible for ourselves—indeed, before we even have a self—we are responsible for the other completely and without petition. We are ethically obligated to the other without limit. In our exposure to the other, the ethical relation precedes the knowing relation. Ethics in the conventional ontological sense of justice (rules and moral judgment) does not concern Levinas; rather, it is the ethics of responsibility. There is no limit to this responsibility. It even extends to the violence the other might do unto me: “The subjectivity of a subject is responsibility of being-inquestion in the form of the total exposure to offence in the cheek offered to the smiter” (Levinas 1981, 111). This is the version of the ethic of care which supports self-sacriﬁce to the other; feminists correctly assert it is mistaken. Derrida (1991) argues woman is Levinas’s other, while Irigaray (1991) insists Levinas reinscribes metaphysics of patriarchy and male subjectivity.4 Later, I will show that Levinas relies on the very worst version of the ethics of care, the one requiring self-sacriﬁce for the sake of others.

A CRITIQUE OF LEVINAS’S TRANSCENDENTAL CONDITIONS FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF LANGUAGE, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SELF Levinas is right about the violence of Western philosophy. Simply reducing him to my preexisting categories is to refuse the call of an other who enables growth by drawing my thoughts and desires out of my already existing self. Nonetheless, I still have serious concerns. Levinas’s error is in assuming some incommensurable other exists as an entirely antecedent condition of the possibility of personal identity. Consider a newborn infant and its birth mother. In most cases any attachment ﬁgure would do, but not quite in this case. The infant cries. Because the infant is not yet a language user, there is nothing Said. The cry is simply part of an overall neurophysiological state. The infant does not yet have an ego, a mind, or a self, much less self-consciousness; therefore, the cry is in no way a self-expression, nor does it address anyone. If there is any state that is pre-original and pre-phenomenological, this is it. We may assume a complete “de-situating” and “de-posing” of the subject, though not in complete passivity before the other. Anyone who has cared

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for an infant will testify that infants are far from passive. Indeed, empirical research shows that the already well-developed fetus must collaborate with its mother in the process of birthing (Comparetti 1981). Infants are preontic in that they have yet to enter the realm of being; they lack language. I could easily claim that the state of the infant pre-originates the pre-original state described by Levinas, but I am not seeking a yet more ultimate foundation. The infant is entirely dependent on the caring other who must ﬁrst attend to the cry, know how to interpret it, and, ﬁnally, respond appropriately by checking diapers, feeding, or adjusting environmental conditions to provide comfort. Pre-linguistic, hence preontic, infants are obviously not ethically obliged in any way, though most mothers accord them high ethical status as beings to whom they are obliged to respond with compassion. Every culture relies on the ethics of justice to formulate laws for their care. Notice that ethical responsibility, or obligation, begins in this example with the ontically constituted other and is directed toward the preontic, though not passive being, which is exactly the opposite from what Levinas proclaims. His attempt to detect a pre-ontological and pre-logical ethical realm confuses ethical responsibility with response-ability as ordinary embodied acts. Again, any expectant mother knows what science has since “proved,” which is that the fetus is response-able in the womb, but it is madness to assume it is ethically responsible. Infants are born response-able, which is how we may learn to communicate with them even before we may communicate with them linguistically. We may communicate with infants much as we do with other animals (e.g., house pets), though the meaning for the culturally initiated members of the community vastly exceeds anything they may experience with other animals. I bring up this odd fact now because Irigaray and others have remarked that Levinas has problems with animality, human and otherwise, in ways we will take up later. In response to the parents’ discriminating response, infants soon learn to vary their verbal gestures, along with other responses, and to anticipate various responses by the attachment ﬁgures. Such complex signaling, however, is well within the scope of actions available to other animals as well. Here is the crucial difference between linguistic animals (humans, chimpanzees, whales, elephants, and so on) and animals which never surpass signaling. Linguistic animals learn to respond to signals from the attitude of the Other toward some third bundle of phenomena (which may later become a named object; i.e., a piece of ontology). The result is a three-term schema involving two selves (e.g., mother and infant) and something shared. Any social relation is actually a “trans-action” (e.g., teacher and student) and in any such trans-action, all participants undergo reciprocal transformation. Mother, infant, and some common meaning emerge simultaneously in the sociolinguistic process, though the greater transformation usually resides with the infant. This fact is easy for teachers as well as parents to grasp. The act of teaching alters our understanding of the subject matter along with our understanding of the students. If we think in terms

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of emergent, co-creative, transformative trans-actions, there is no need to posit a linear series wherein something provides the antecedent conditions of possibility for something else. Instead, we may think of mother, infant, and meanings as emergent subfunctions of a single act of communication which builds on preontic communion. Infants seek to sever their organic unity to the other. This holds even when the primary attachment ﬁgure is not the birth mother. Not surprisingly, the ﬁrst meaningful objects constituted by a very young child are social; physical objects come later. Donald W. Winnicott’s theory of “transitional objects” is a dramatic example: [A transitional phenomenon or] object is a symbol of the union of the baby and the mother (or part of the mother). . . . It is at the place in space and time where and when the mother is in transition from being (in the baby’s mind) merged in with the infant and alternatively being experienced as an object to be perceived rather than conceived of. The use of an object symbolizes the union of two now separate things, baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness. (1999, 96–97; italics in the original) Eventually, adults learn to separate themselves, more or less, from the other and to constitute physical objects, though the place of animalism in every culture suggests there is always a residual social dimension to physical objects. Once again, the problem for Levinas is that our preontic relations to the other are exactly the opposite from what he describes. There is no need for a transcendental realm to locate a naturalistic developmental trace of our relation to the other including not only our Sayings, but our signalings, to the other, however obscured in the linguistically Said. However hidden, there is a trace of the fact that anything Said is a Saying directed toward the other. Almost none of this, however, works like Levinas claims. Some of the most important differences are these: First, there is no such thing as a completely passive living creature. Second, all relations are transactional and mutually transformative. Third, assuming a completely “de-situating” and “de-posing” pre-original, pre-phenomenological subjectivity involves a pre-linguistic level to which we may never completely return once we become linguistic Beings. While we are response-able to others before birth, there is no ethical responsibility at the preontic level. It is a mistake to attempt to work backward to an Edenic utopia.

LEVINAS’S DECONTEXTUALIZED NEO-KANTIAN TRANSCENDENTALISM Levinas offers a formal, context-independent, nearly content-free obligation, imposed because the Other is supposedly a transcendental condition

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for the possibility for Being as language. John Llewelyn (1991) has noted the analogies between the structure of Levinas’s ideal of obligation and the structure of Kant’s categorical imperative. This section explores these analogies and disanalogies. The major disanalogies: First, Levinas rejects Kantian rationalism, radical freedom, and universality within the bounds of being. Second, he insists that responding to another person is immediate and neither the other nor my response is, at that critical moment, an abstract universal. Third, he bases ethics on relationships of care wherein we do not merely care for others because, sympathetically, they are like ourselves, because that is to narcissistically reduce the other to our sameness. There is a sense in which I endorse all these, though not always as Levinas understands them. If we were exclusively natural beings, claims Kant, ethics would prove impossible. Because of our absolute transcendental freedom, however, we may construct, in accordance to reason, universally binding ethical imperatives which allow us to rise above animalistic desires and self-love. Here is one statement of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (1997, 31). Kant insists this statement of obligation (duty and the moral right) is purely formal and empty. Levinas too wants to transcend the conatus essendi (the “law of being”). Consider how he runs together Darwin’s naturalism and Heidegger’s notion of Being in the following passage: A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin’s idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might. Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. (1988, 172) Like Kant, Levinas thinks human beings can transcend their animalism and, in so doing, transcend being. Again, like Kant, we transcend animalism by recognizing a supremely binding moral obligation. Unlike Kant, Levinas does not ground the ethical imperative on practical reason, radical autonomy, or universality. Instead, it is heteronymous in its ethical responsibility to the other. In so responding, we respond beyond the bounds of being, and, hence, beyond the ethics of justice. It is a caring response to a unique and irreplaceable personal other. Levinas sets a self-overcoming ethics of care inside a neoKantian construction. One of the principle attractions of Levinas’s notion of ethical obligation lies in recourse to the ethics of care, while its principle drawback lies in its transcendental neo-Kantian conﬁguration. I think it is one of the main reasons many feminists are troubled with it. Another concern is that Levinas’s standard of ethical obligation seems contentless. Unlike Kant, though, Levinas claims a content, which he derives

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from the encounter with the inﬁnite other. He has profound piety for what overﬂows the conﬁnes of Being, the unthematizable saying, “the Glory of the Inﬁnite,” or God (Levinas 1981). Here is a particularly pertinent example: The ego stripped by the trauma of persecution of its scornful and imperialist subjectivity, is reduced to the “here I am” . . . as a witness of the Inﬁnite, but a witness that does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation. . . . There is witness, a unique structure, an exception to the rule of being.5 (Levinas 1981, 146) Levinas retraces Descartes’s argument that any idea we may form of God is inadequate to his inﬁnity. He indicates: “The idea of the Inﬁnite, which in Descartes is lodged in a thought that cannot contain it, expresses the disproportion between glory and the present, which is inspiration itself” (1981, 146). Levinas simply substitutes the encounter with the Inﬁnite Other for God in Descartes’s account. There is no empirical content to Levinas’s otherworldly ideal; there is only ethical “content from the dimension of height” (1989, 70). The notion of an ethics without an empirical face, without an animal body which smells and secretes ﬂuids, without the possibility of intimate, even carnal, relation, is an ethics which may supervene to provide transcendental comfort, but does not actually intervene to ameliorate the suffering of ﬂesh and blood human beings. For many, an ethics which derives its content from on high is suggestive of a detached heavenly father to whom we are obligated before we are bound to living human beings, even children, who play, create, suffer, and die. I want to explicate the idea of overﬂowing in terms of Levinas’s thinking about the problem of evil understood as senseless suffering. In his discussion of evil and Levinas’s rejection of theodicy, Richard Bernstein (2002) remarks on the analogies and disanalogies between Kant’s thinking about the sublime and Levinas’s thinking about evil. For Kant, the sublime is beyond the ideas of experience and understanding (Verstand), but not beyond pure abstract reason (Vernunft). The difference is that for Levinas, evil is absolutely beyond being: “It is as though to synthesis, even the purely formal synthesis of the Kantian ‘I think,’ capable of uniting the data however heterogeneous they may be, there would be opposed, in the form of evil, the nonsynthesizable, still more heterogeneous than all heterogeneity” (Levinas 1987, 180). Like inﬁnity, evil ruptures totality and is not exhausted in its excess. Thus, Levinas thinks the question about being, that the reason there is something rather than nothing is not the primordial question. Instead, “[t]he ontological difference is preceded by the difference between good and evil” (182).6 Levinas thinks that if we resist the temptation to ontologize and then rationalize evil, the temptation to theodicy, we will ﬁnd the following imperative: “This is no longer a transcendence absorbed by my knowing. The

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face puts into question the sufﬁciency of my identity as an ego; it binds to an inﬁnite responsibility with regard to the other.” Ultimately, the Good lies beyond Being and this “Good does not please, but commands and prescribes” (Levinas 1987, 185). This Good lies close to God and commands from a height many ﬁnd patriarchal. It is a mistake to think we can ﬁnd a place completely outside of, and incommensurable with, Being. One cannot discuss evil in the West, at least since St. Augustine, without associating it with the role of women in “the fall of man” in the Garden of Eden. In His commandment to Adam, as one version of the story goes, God declares: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2:16). In this ancient telling, “man” lacks knowledge of good and evil in his Edenic state. As the story goes, God gives Eve to Adam, and she is weak and easily tempted by the snake into eating of the tree, after which God observes: “‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever‘—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen. 3:22). I think the Christian Bible gets it right with regard to the role of knowledge in discerning good and evil. Unlike Levinas, knowledge of the suffering of others comes after being, not before. Only sapient beings like Homo sapiens could know the difference between good and evil. Only a creature with language, hence a mind and self, could intentionally inﬂict senseless suffering, i.e., evil, or intentionally ameliorate it. The cat playing with the dying mouse it has captured is in the state of nature just as Levinas describes, hence outside ethical obligation. Only intelligent beings, language users captured by being, form intentions. The Good is beyond Being, but not before it. This does not preclude the possibility of a preontic compassionate response, but such a visceral response arises from the depths of animalistic relationship which is fraught with all the dangers Levinas rightly denounces, but which we cannot evade by seeking refuge on high. When we exclude all regard for consequences and the ends arising from desire, it becomes impossible to locate tangible content within the idea of obligation, which is why Levinas must seek it at the greatest spiritual height. Irigaray confronts Levinas with a host of questions and concerns on the divinity of love which capture my own reservations regarding his construction of the other and our obligations to the other. Irigaray worries about Levinas’s inability to wed lovers to each other “with all their senses, with their whole body” because Levinas cannot approach “the other in its most vital dimension, the touch.” Levinas derives the nonempirical, transcendental content of ethics from an untouchable height; it is not born of earthly desire. Irigaray argues Levinas cannot comprehend the alterity of the other’s sex, without which she does not think we can grasp the other at all. She ﬁnds, “He knows nothing of communion in

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pleasure” (1991, 110). Levinas fails to grasp emotional communion because he generally fails to grasp the concrete transactional nature of any relationship, much less preontic animal pleasure. The preontic approaches the other before any knowledge, especially carnal knowledge. Irigaray sees Levinas as someone heavily invested in detachment, wherein he only draws the other “‘close’ to him in ‘duality’” (1991, 111). Such “solitary love” cannot correspond, to the loss of boundaries which takes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body . . . to meet in a shared space, a shared breath . . . where the perception of being two persons (de la dualité) becomes indistinct, and above all, acceding to another energy, neither that of the one nor that of the other. . . . In this relation, we are at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of the others: you, me, and our work (oeuvre).7 (Irigaray 1991, 111) Beautiful! If Irigaray is right, Levinas cannot comprehend the creative both/ and character of intimacy which always involves a third emerging simultaneously with the ﬁrst two and wherein all are co-creatively trans-formed as a consequence of the creative desire they share. We can never understand others except through the things we create together with them in feeling, thought, and action. Levinas’s transcendental turn toward inﬁnite height leaves the natural world of physical events such as animals behind. This bothers Irigaray, who wonders: How to articulate the question of the cosmic economy with, on the one hand, that of sexual difference, and on the other, that of the gods, or more generally, the divine, the other? The question of the face of the natural universe does not seem to me to ﬁgure much in the work of Levinas . . . who is the other if it is not rooted and situated in the natural universe? . . . We are not only culturally determined, we remain natural, and nature is the basis from which we can continue to create culture. (1991, 113) Levinas’s neo-Kantianism sets up a dualism between the lower forms of natural human animality and the supposedly higher forms of transcendental spirituality which makes the natural universe the other of the divine. Irigaray alleges that although Levinas “takes pleasure in caressing, he abandons the feminine other, leaves her to sink, in particular into the darkness of a pseudoanimality” (1991, 113). Judeo-Christianity is dualistic and hierarchical. The spiritual heights are cut off from the material depths. Levinas reinscribes this dualism. Irigaray charges that Levinas’s dualism expresses itself as misogyny. Irigaray alleges, “When it is not traditional metaphysics, what governs the ethical order in Levinas is fundamentally a law deriving from God” (1991, 116). She wonders: “Without

282 Jim Garrison relationships between both natural and spiritual mothers and daughters, that are relationships between subjects, without cultural recognition of the divinity of this genealogy, how can a woman remain the lover (l’amante) of a man who belongs to the line of a Father God?” (115). When Levinas derives the content of his imperative to respond to the other with ethical responsibility, it is an appeal to “a Father God.” That is what I mean when I say that Levinas gives his ethics of care a surprisingly masculine construction.

ANSWERING THE CHALLENGE TO CARE WHILE AVOIDING SELF-ERADICATION Drawing on Heidegger, Nel Noddings approaches care “as the very Being of human life” (1992, 15). She concentrates on Heidegger’s relational meanings, thereby avoiding the more dubious parts of Heidegger’s analysis of the structure of care. She sums up her attitude toward caring this way: A caring relation is, in its most basic form, a connection or encounter between . . . a carer and a recipient of care. . . . In order for the relation to be properly called caring, both parties must contribute. . . . A failure on the part of either carer or cared-for blocks completion of caring and, although there may still be a relation—that is, an encounter or connection in which each party feels something toward the other—it is not a caring relation. (1992, 15; italics in the original) Contra Levinas, caring is a transactional relation requiring responsiveness on both sides. We must co-create caring relationships. They cannot be obligated from only one side. Indeed, obligating myself but not the other subtly assumes I am morally capable of ethical responsibility while inferior others are not. Even in “the mother-infant relationship” we ﬁnd that when “the infant responds” there is “a genuine form of reciprocity that is essential to the relation” even if they are not yet ethically responsible (Noddings 1992, 17). Noddings’s neo-Heideggerian construction of caring as a basic existential involvement of being places her at odds with Levinas, though in agreement with Irigaray (1991) who ﬁnds the “philosophy of Heidegger is more ethical than . . . his philosophy itself says explicitly” (114). Noddings taps into this tacit ethics. Perhaps reconstructing Heidegger with feminist insights allows her to extract the ethics hidden in his philosophy. Noddings also provides a useful summery of Gilligan’s work on women’s moral development and the ethics of care. She begins by observing that this “approach was identiﬁed in the voices of women, but Gilligan did not claim that the approach is exclusively female, nor did she claim that all women use it.” According to Noddings, Gilligan describes “a morality based on the recognition of needs, relation, and response.” Those with a different moral voice “speak from and to a situation, and their reasoning is contextual (Noddings

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1992, 21). Levinas lacks an everyday context such as we ﬁnd in teaching. The “ethic of care” describes “a needs- and response-based ethic” which challenges . . . traditional ethics and moral education. . . . There is also a rejection of universalizability, the notion that anything that is morally justiﬁable is necessarily something that anyone else in a similar situation is obligated to do . . . an ethic of care puts great emphasis on consequences. . . . It recognizes the part played by the cared-for [because it] is an ethic of [reciprocal] relation. (Noddings 1992, 21) Levinas’s blindness to the “feminine” has serious consequences for his construction of a self-eradicating personality in asymmetric relation to an inﬁnite other from whom it willingly accepts abuse. However ﬁne this may sound to those striving to overcome the brutality, control, and domination of their aggressive self-assertive egos, it sounds terrible to those who have suffered emotional or physical violence. To the latter, relationships with the other, including students, are built carefully through trans-actions which allow each party to get to know each other by creating common understanding and trust in guarded circumstances. Relying in part on object-relations gender theory, Gilligan challenges neoKantian ethics of justice as she found it in Kohlberg’s developmental theory. Far fewer women than men achieve the height of abstract, decontextualized rationality demanded by the obligations imposed by the categorical imperative. At the lowest stage of ethical development, Gilligan places those who are completely self-sacriﬁcing and judge their self-worth by their ability to care for others, though not themselves. Even this most undeveloped stage is already ontic. At the highest level, Gilligan locates those who consider the needs of both self and other while striving “to be” responsible to both. Gilligan’s conclusions hold for anyone who accepts the challenge to care in schools. Responding with ethical responsibility to the other always involves some risk and vulnerability. Those who genuinely seek to ameliorate violence ought to recognize that they are obligated to care for themselves as well as others. Otherwise, they may actually perpetuate more violence than they alleviate. Instead of looking for an ethical utopia antecedent to any transaction with the other, we should strive to build better relationships by attending to the consequences of our everyday trans-actions. Every relationship has unique components. In such instances, moral perception—the ability to recognize the needs, desires, and purposes of others, as well as ourselves, so we may respond appropriately—is at least as important as neo-Kantian obligations. We may say the same for moral imagination, which allows us to “see” future consequences and even respond in terms not just of the person before us, but with regard to his or her, and our, best future possibilities. Relationship-building is a transaction wherein the participants, if they succeed, create meaning in common as a consequence of their relationship. Sadly,

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nothing guarantees success, but, I believe, insisting on asymmetric transcendental obligation prior to any trans-action is dangerous, diverts us from the requirement of moral reciprocity within larger transactions, deﬂects moral perception and imagination, and turns our attention away from the consequences of ethical responsibility to the other. Levinas insists my ethical responsibility to the other is limitless. It extends so far that for Levinas, the “self, hostage, [is] already substituted for others” (1996, 91), the extent he expects the self to substitute for the other to the point that “the outrage inﬂicted by the other” demands “the expiation for his fault by me” (1981, 118). Levinas insists this sacriﬁce precedes the formation of the ego and the self, but in the limited space available here, I have suggested that selves, things, and others emerge simultaneously while anything entirely preontic is also animalism, which I do not condemn as Levinas does. There is a hidden egotism, an aura of moral superiority, even a secondary will to power, hidden in an ascetic self-destructive stance which assumes such a passive, asymmetric relation to the other as to remove all reciprocity. Following Irigaray, we may expose the hidden hubris here by asking Levinas some serious questions. Why should we always assume the other less capable of ethical obligation than ourselves? Why should we not expect the other “to be,” at least potentially, as capable of ethical response and responsibility as ourselves? Why should I not expect to grow in trans-actions with others? Does not such an attitude betray a subtle sense of assumed ethical superiority? How can I respond with ethical responsibility, how can I fully meet my ethical obligation, until I come to know the other? Complete asymmetry easily conceals a conditional kindness which can be as destructive as conditional love. Placing no expectations on others to reciprocate to our overtures portrays an image of self-abrogation that paradoxically expresses a superior, self-assertive, even aggressive attitude toward the other. PAX NOTES 1. I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Elaine J. O‘Quinn. 2. See also Levinas (1991), “Wholly otherwise,” which is a reply to “Violence and metaphysics.” 3. He also uses it to convey the ethical urgency of addressing the Other. 4. See also Irigaray (1991), “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas on the divinity of love.” 5. The phrase “here I am,” borrowed from the Hebrew hineni, appears often in the Bible. 6. Levinas is correct here, but only because ontology, the things we make out of existence (objects, ideas, etc.) are always the product of human inquiry. Existence, however, precedes human existence and will almost certainly continue afterward. Ontological metaphysics, what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, is simply a mistake of Western philosophy.

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7. In Totality and Inﬁnity, Levinas (2004) acknowledges a procreative third in a man’s relationship to a woman, but he characterizes it as “his son.”

REFERENCES Bernasconi, R., and S. Critchley. 1991. Introduction to Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bernstein, R. 2002. Radical evil: A philosophical interrogation. Malden: Blackwell. Comparetti, A. 1981. The neurophysiological and clinical implications of studies on fetal motor behavior. Seminars in Perinatology 5 (2):183–89. Derrida, J. 1978. Violence and metaphysics. In Writing and difference, trans. A. Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991. At this very moment in this work here I am. In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 11–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilligan, C. 1982. In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irigaray, L. 1991. Questions to Emmanuel Levinas on the divinity of love. In Rereading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 109–118. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kant, I. 1997. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. Trans. M. Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Transcendence and evil. In Collected philosophical papers, trans. A. Lingis, 175–86. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1988. The Paradox of Morality. In The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood, 168–80. New York: Routledge. ———. 1989. The Levinas reader. Ed. S. Hand. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1991. Wholly otherwise. In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 3–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. Basic philosophical writings. Ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. Totality and Inﬁnity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Llewelyn, J. 1991. Am I obsessed by Bobby? In Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, 234–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Noddings, N. 1992. The challenge to care in schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Winnicott, D. W. 1999. Playing and reality. New York: Routledge.

Contributors

Heesoon Bai is Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She teaches Philosophy of Education, and her research interests are in ethics, epistemology, ecology, and Asian philosophies. Recent publications include co-authored article, “‘To see a world in a grain of sand’: Complexity and moral education,” in Complicity: An international Journal of Complexity and Education; and co-authored chapter, “Breathing qi, following dao: Transforming this violence-ridden world,” in Cross-cultural studies in curriculum: Eastern thought and educational insights. She is the Editor of Paideusis. [email protected]; http://www.educ.sfu.ca/fri/Bai Gert Biesta is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. Recent book publications include: Derrida & Education (co-edited with Denise Egéa-Kuehne, Routledge, 2001), Pragmatism and Educational Research (co-authored with Nicholas C. Burbules, Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2003), and Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). G.Biesta@ exeter.ac.uk Born in Mogador (Morocco), Ami Bouganim was a student of Emmanuel Levinas, at the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. In 1970, he immigrated to Israel where he was the ﬁrst scholar to dedicate his doctoral thesis to the thought of Levinas. For many years, Ami Bouganim has been an educator, contributing to the establishment of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem. Among his writings, several articles on Levinas as well as a book, La Rime et le Rite (Paris, 1996) dealing with the Judaic Response of Levinas to the new paganism of Heidegger. amib@ jazo.org.il Catherine Chalier is Maître de conférences in philosophy at the University of Paris X—Nanterre, France. Her latest publications include Spinoza, lecteur de Maïmonide (Éditions du Cerf, 2006; Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques Award), Les lettres de la création. L’alphabet hébraïque (Éditions Arfuyen 2006), Des anges et des hommes (Éditions Albin Michel 2007), and

288 Contributors Figures du féminin, lectures d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Éditions des Femmes). [email protected] Ann Chinnery is Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her research interests are in ethics, educating for moral and social responsibility, and preparing teachers for work in increasingly diverse classrooms. Recent publications include “On compassion and community without identity: Implications for moral education,” in D. Vokey, (ed.), Philosophy of Education 2006; and “Cold case: Reopening the ﬁle on tolerance in teaching and learning across difference,” in K. Howe (Ed.), Philosophy of Education 2005. [email protected] Jeffrey Dudiak is a Quaker philosopher, and Associate Professor at The King’s University College, Edmonton, Canada. He is the author of The Intrigue of Ethics: A reading of the idea of discourse in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas (Fordham University Press, 2001), and works primarily in the area of Continental philosophy of religion. He is currently exploring the relationship between spirit and truth. jeffrey.dudiak@ kingsu.ca Julian Edgoose is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. He received his BA from Oxford University and his Ph.D. in philosophy and education from Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of “Where Creeds Meet Incredulity: Educational Research in a Post-Utopian Age,” in Studies in Philosophy and Education 25:4 (2006), and published a number of other chapters and papers which draw on Derrida and Levinas. He is currently completing a book which explores alternative philosophical understandings of hope developed in the absence of perceived political agency. jedgoose@ ups.edu Claudia Eppert is Associate Professor of English Language Arts in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, Canada. In addition to numerous book chapters and journal articles, she is co-editor with Roger I. Simon and Sharon Rosenberg of Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma (Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2000), and co-editor with Hongyu Wang of Cross-Cultural Studies in Curriculum: Eastern Thought, Educational Insights (LEA/Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2007). [email protected] Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He is author of over one hundred and ﬁfty refereed journal articles and dozens of book chapters. He is also the author or editor of seven books, past-president of the Philosophy of Education Society and former editor of Studies in Philosophy of Education. Some recent

Contributors

289

publications include, Teaching, Learning, and Loving (with Dan Liston, Routledge 2004), “Spirituality and Teaching,” in The Educative Experience: Teachers Reﬂect on the Writings of John Dewey (Kappa Delta Pi), “The Aesthetics of Ethical Virtues and the Ethical Virtues of Aesthetics,” Interchange, and “A Manifesto for Instructional Technology: Hyperpedagogy” Teachers College Record (with J. Dwight). [email protected] Zelia Gregoriou holds a PhD in Philosophy of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is Assistant Professor in Theory of Education at the University of Cyprus. The focus of her research and writing has been on poststructuralist philosophers of ethics and subjectivity (Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Irigaray) and their relevance to postcolonial theory and interculturalism. Her latest work focuses on trauma, displacement and educational processes of memorialization. Her recent publications include: “The Europeanization of Ethnocentrism: The performativity of new Borders in Cyprus” (Hagar, International Social Science Review), “Difﬁcult Multiculturalism” (Educational Theory), and “Why the ‘Mussulman’ cannot be part of it: A critique of the Human Rights Discourse” (Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies). [email protected] Clarence Joldersma, from Canada, is Professor of Education at Calvin College, where he teaches philosophy of education. His research interests lie at the intersections of continental philosophy, philosophy of science, sustainability and education. Recent articles have appeared in journals such as Interchange, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Journal of Educational Thought. He has co-edited two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s essays, Educating for Life and Educating for Shalom. [email protected] Denise Egéa-Kuehne is Professor of Education and Director of the French Education Project for Research and Teacher Education in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice at Louisiana State University. EgéaKuehne co-edited Derrida & Education with Gert J. J. Biesta (Routledge 2001). She is currently writing a book titled Derrida: Key Critical Thinker for a New Vision of Education (forthcoming with Sense Publishers). Zdenko Kodelja is Head of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. His previous publications include three books—Objekt vzgoje (The Object of Education, 1995); Laicna sola (The Secular School, 1995); O pravicnosti v izobrazevanju (On Justice in Education, 2006)—and numerous chapters and articles on philosophy of education published in different languages. [email protected] In Aotearoa-New Zealand Betsan Martin is part of a national endeavor to work collaboratively with Mãori/tangata whenua, and to advocate for indigenous systems, knowledge and world views in governance and in NZ

290

Contributors

institutions. She is a member of the International Committee working on the Charter of Human Responsibilities, and has established RESPONSE, a Trust for research, ethics and action for eco-responsibility. Working with “alterity” and “difference” in academic research and in applied projects in intercultural relations, responsibility is a key theme in Martin’s contextual interpretation of philosophers such as Irigaray and Levinas. Her work is published in Women’s Studies Journal, International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, MAI Review, and as chapters in several books. Ian McPherson works at the School of Education, Social Work and Community Education, University of Dundee, Scotland. He has had long-term involvement in professional education and training for, and with, schoolteachers and social workers. His main concerns include philosophy of education, ethics, and psychology of learning. Recent papers include work on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Levinas, Kierkegaard and H. Dreyfus. Recent publications have been in the Journal of Philosophy of Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. [email protected] Marianna Papastephanou is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Education at the University of Cyprus, Department of Education. She has studied and researched in Cardiff, Wales and Berlin, Germany and taught at Cardiff University. She is the editor of K.O. Apel: From A Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View (Manchester University Press, 1998) and author of numerous articles on the Frankfurt school, political philosophy, postmodernism, and education from a continental-philosophical point of view. [email protected] Eirick Prairat, is Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Nancy 2, and collection editor at the Presses Universitaires de Nancy. His scholarship in philosophy and history bears on questions of sanction and norms and on ethical and political issues in education. He published Eduquer et punir. Généalogie du discours psychologique (Presses Universitaires de Nancy 1994); La sanction. Petites méditations à l’usage des éducateurs (L’Harmattan, Preface by P. Meirieu 1997); Penser la sanction, les grands textes (L’Harmattan 1999); Ecole en devenir, école en débat, edited with P.A. Dupuis (L’Harmattan 2000); Sanction et socialisation (Presses Universitaires de France 2002); Questions de discipline à l’école (Editions Erès 2003); Les valeurs, savoir et éducation à l’école, edited with B. Andrieu (Presses Universitaires de Nancy); and La sanction en éducation (Presses Universitaires de France, coll. Que-sais-je? 2007). [email protected] Paul Standish is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His philosophical work has examined

Contributors

291

such topics as higher education, new technology, moral education, and citizenship, and his current research is focused on Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. His recent books include The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education (Blackwell, 2003), co-edited with Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, and Richard Smith, The Therapy of Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), co-authored with Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith, and Philosophy of Nurse Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), co-edited with John Drummond. He is Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. [email protected] Sharon Todd is Professor of Education at the Stockholm Institute of Education. She is author of Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY, 2003) and editor of Learning Desire: Perspectives on Pedagogy, Culture and the Unsaid (Routledge, 1997). She is currently writing a book titled Facing Humanity, Thinking Cosmopolitan: Toward an imperfect education, forthcoming with Paradigm Publishers. [email protected] Michael Wimmer is Professor (Systematische Erziehungswissenschaft) at the University of Hamburg. He received his doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin, with a thesis on “Deconstruction and Responsibility.” He worked at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Technische Universität Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Universitiy of Magdeburg, and received a year’s fellowship at the University of Leuven. He teaches and conducts research in philosophy of education and is particularly interested in the relation between French philosophy and the German Philosophy of Bildung and education. His numerous publications include Der Andere und die Sprache 1988; together with Jan Masschelein Alterität, Pluralität, Gerechtigkeit. Randgänge der Pädagogik, and Dekonstruktion und Erziehung. Studien zum Paradoxieproblem in der Pädagogik 1996. Soon will be published a 2nd Volume about Wahn, Wissen, Institution (together with Marianne Schuller and Karl-Josef Pazzini). [email protected]

Index

A à venir 35–7, 38n26 Abraham 14, 85–87, 95 abstraction 90, 96n1, 256 accusative subject 50 Adorno, Theodore 76, 105 affirmation 35, 247 Agamemnon (Eschyle) 157 agency, and hope 5, 100, 102–7 Aggada, the 17 Akiba, Rabbi 21 Alliance Israélite Universelle 3, 15, 16, 18, 24n11, 171 alterity 57, 59–60, 74, 77, 78–9, 182, 189–90, 213–4, 215, 221, 223, 224–5, 243, 249, 258, 261, 263–4, 272, 289 Alterity and transcendence (Levinas) 31, 37n3 aneconomy 58, 147 antimony 130, 131, 133 aporia, the 118–9, 128, 133, 225 Aristotle 2, 8, 68, 93, 108 art 72–7 Ashkenazim 18 assimilation 213, 217, 225, 254–5, 257 asymmetry 236–8, 284 “At this moment in this work here I am” (Derrida) 272 atheism 27–9 Attridge, D. 77 aufgehoben 89 Augustine of Hippo 90 Augustine, St. 280 autonomy 8, 57–9, 80, 92, 131, 186–93, 199–200, 233, 235 Autrui (autre) 11n1, 96n2, 244 axiological markers, loss of 26–8

B Badiou, A. 96n3, 191–2

Bai, H. 9, 288–241, 287 Banon, D. 23n1, 28 Barclay, R. 249–50 Barth, K. 97n13 Bauman, Z. 195n13, 239 Becker, L. C. 237, 241 Being 10, 29, 201, 219, 234, 262–3, 274, 275, 278, 279, 280 being human 53, 207, 235, ben Isaac, Solomon see Rashi Benchley, R. 85, 86 Benjamin, W. 5, 102–3, Benner, D. 116 berakhot 24n9 Bernasconi, R. 272 Bernstein, R. 279 Beyond Essence (Levinas) 149, 273 Bible, the 3, 18, 23n5–6, 27–8, 106, 280 Biesta, G. 8, 195n15, 198–210, 287 Bildung 78, 116, 199, 208n1 Bildungsromane 77–8 Bishop, R. 256, 257–8, 259–60 Blake, N. 68, 153, 290 Bloom, H. 70, 81n4 bodiliness 46–9 Booth, W. C. 70, 75, 76, 80 Bouganim, A. 2–3, 13–25, 287 brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky) 19, 238 Buber, M. 27, 30, 223 Buell, L. 75 Burggraeve, R. 236

C care: challenge of 282–4; ethics of 272–3, 278, 282–3; reciprocal 273 caritas 95–6 Cartesian rationalism 62, 64 Cartesian solipsism 5 Cassirer, E. 157

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Index

categorical imperative, the 186, 189–90 194n3, 194n4, 278 Ceremony (Silko) 78 Chalier, C. 3, 8, 13–25, 189 Chanter, T. 184n8 chaos theory 111 Charter of Human Responsibilities 267, 289 childhood 88, 90–1 Chinnery, A. 9, 140, 142, 192, 228–241, 288 Christianity 18, 26–7, 102, 103–7, 108, 112n1 citizenship 9, 80, 240 civil society 228–9, 232 Cohen, R. A. 75–6, 245 commands, and inspiration 49–50 commitment 164–5 communication 53, 56, 120, 175, 178, 264–5, 276 complacency 218–9 conatus essendi 32, 28n19, 236, 278 conceptual dualism 119–20 concern 47, 165 conditionality 148–9, 218, 221 conflict resolution 9, 130, 144, 148, 226 conscience 1, 14, 30–1, 36, 38n13, 109, 214 conscious subject, the 43–5; and enjoyment 47 consciousness 30–1, 203; and learning 43–6, 53–4 consequences 161–3 consequentialism 7, 166–7 constraint 188 conversation 17, 21, 43, 53 creation stories 21, 97n8, 280 Critchley, S. 205, 272 critical pedagogy 200, criticism 72–3, 74–5 Critique of pure reason (Kant) 134n4 Cuban, L. 101, 103 cultural difference 10 culture 251, 259 curriculum: definition 79–80; and language 4; language of 56–65; and literary engagement 79–81; teachers relationship to 105

D Darwin, C. 278 Dasein (Being-in-the-world) 32, 119, 121 David, king 151–2 decisions 125–6 deconstructionism 122–6, 127–8, 129, 131–2

deontologism 7, 166–7 dependence 91, 275–7 Derrida, J. 2, 10, 35–7, 58, 61, 86, 110, 122–4, 128, 133–4, 141, 142, 148–9, 151, 165, 172, 176, 177–8, 179, 180, 182, 190, 196n17, 216–7, 229, 239, 242–3, 247–8, 256, 264, 272, 273, 275 dés-intér-essement 32–3 Descartes, R. 64, 89, 178, 245–6, 279 desire 263, 275, 278, 292 Dhillon, P. 56 Diaspora 3, 16, 22, 113n1 difference, politics of 214 Difficult freedom (Levinas) 28 direct observation 63 discipline 187–8, 195n8 “Disciplining the profession” (Standish) 63 discourse 172–3 Dostoyevsky, F. M. 31, 88, 110, 238 Dudiak, J. 1–2, 9, 34, 242–52 duties 235, 238 dwelling 9, 184n8, 214–7, 220–5

E Eaglestone, R. 71, 73–4 Eagleton, T. 68, 69 École normale israélite orientale (ENIO) 15, 16, 18–23, 24n14, 36 economic status analysis 258 economy, burden of 142 economy of exchange 58 Edgoose, J. 5, 100–14, 288 education theories 6, 139–41 educators, and language 63 Egéa-Kuehne, D. 1–12, 23n7, 26–40 “Ego and the totality, The” (Levinas) 144 egocentric intentionality 89 egoism 215, 225, 284 Emile (Rousseau) 63, 231–2 encounter, ethics of 260 English Language Arts curriculum 80 Enigma 274 enjoyment 215–6, 218, 220; and learning 43, 47–9, 51–2 Enlightenment, the 27, 104, 199 environmentalism 253, 256 Eppert, C. 5, 67–84, 288 Eschyle 157 eschatological 248 Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Eaglestone) 71 Ethics and infinity (Levinas) 27, 141

Index ethics: and art 73, 76–7; and asymmetry 236–8; of care 272–3, 278, 282–3; definition 195n16, 195n17; and dwelling 220–4; and education 78–9, 181; and educational theory 139–41; of encounter 260; epekeina tis ousias (beyond essence) 141; of exemplarity 155–9; face-to-face 139–41; foundation of 28; and freedom 261–3, 268; and God 279; of implication 7; implied 182; and justice 3–4; of justice 272–3, 283; Kantian 93–4; and literary theory 68, 71–2; and literature 5, 76–8, 80–1; narrative 76–7; need for 27; and ontology 153; and the Other 3, 29, 32; and paradoxes 132–3; and pedagogy 117; primacy of 161; priority over ontology 140, 141–3; and the quest for justice 29–31; and responsibility 6, 31–4, 77, 87, 163–7, 245, 259, 284; and rights 229, 234–8; of subjectivity 202–5, 208; Talmudic 28; and technology 161–3; time of 159; virtue 92–3 être (being) 31–2 Euryalistiks 127 evil 279–80 exegesis 75–6, 79 exemplarity, ethics of 155–9 Existence and existants (Levinas) 159, 251n9 existent 29–30 existing 29–30 experience 63, 128–9 exteriority 44, 65, 225; of the inner light 249–51

F face, the 37n3, 60, 61, 90, 119, 121–2, 141, 159, 160–1, 190–1, 195n13, 213, 261, 264 face-to-face ethics 141; and educational theory 139–41 Face to face (Levinas) 32 faith, in education 103 fear 162–3 feminine, the 179–80, 184n8, 217, 222–4, 275, 281, 283 Fichte, J. G. 164 first-person plural, the 91

295

first-person singular, the 91, 118 first philosophy 35 Felman, S. 77 forgiveness 6; and apologies 145–6; and appeasement 148–9; complexity of 153; conditionality 149; conditions for 151; God’s 149; and guilt 147–8; interpretation of 142–3; and intimate society 144–5; and justice 152; as madness 149; and ontology 147–8, 149, 150, 151–2, 152–3; and penitence 143–4; receipt of 143–6; teachers and 150–1 Foucault, M. 133, 256 France 15, 17, 22, fraternity 34 freedom 242; absolute 278; and bodiliness 46–7; to decide 130–1; destruction of 190; and education 268; and ethics 261–3, 268; heteronomous 235; and hypostasis 46; and indigenous peoples 258–9; and learning 44; Levinas and 190; and the master 172; of mastery 262; negative 186, 187, 193n2; from oppression 262; positive 186, 187; and responsibility 58, 190–1, 261 French Enlightenment, the 249 Freire, P. 200 future, the, depictions of 107–9

G Garrison, J. 10, 272–285, 288 Gauchet, M. 26 Gaylin, W. 235 Gelassenheit (letting-be) 142 Genard, J.-L. 157 gender 179–80, 272–3, 282–3 generosity 178–9, 261 Geworfenheit 30 Gibbs, R. 78–9, 174 gifts 58 Gilligan, C. 10, 272–3, 282–3 Glowacka, D. 77 Glynn, T. 257–8, 259–60 God 14–5, 96n2; death of 26–7; and ethics 279; forgiveness 149; Levinas on 14–5, 20, 279, 281–2; manifestation of 20; proof of existence 246; transgressions against 143–4 Good, the 280

296

Index

goodness 141 grammar 50, 90–1, 215 grandes écoles 17, 24n13 Gregory of Nyssa 90, 96n5 Gregoriou, Z. 9, 213–27, 289 Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals (Kant) 186 guilt 6, 147–8

H Habbel, T. 118 Halakha 17 Halpin, D. 5, 106, 110, 111 Hand, S. 1, 37n3 Handelman, S. A. 75, 78, 79 happiness 192 Havel, V. 6, 100, 111–2 Hebrew language 16, 19 Hegel, G. 22, 29, 127, 148, 200, 243 Heidegger, M. 16, 29–30, 31, 88, 108, 151, 158, 196n18, 201, 216, 218, 278, 282 heteronomous freedom 235 heteronomy 8, 57–9, 92, 186–93 “Hermeneutics and the beyond” (Levinas) 93 hineni 14, 284n5 Hobbes, T. 89, 228, 230–1, 232 Holocaust, the 70, 77, 254 home 9, 216, 221–2, 225, 226 hope 5–6, 100; agency of 102–7; and Christianity 103–7; importance of 100–2; pillars of 102; rewards of 102, 107–10; social change of 102, 110–2; source of 111–2; and utopianism 105–7, 108 Hope and Education (Halpin) 5 Horkheimer, M. 105 hospitality 9, 93, 165–6, 171, 178–9, 184n8, 213–4, 216–7, 221, 222–3, 225–6, 261, 268 human: defining 198, 202; meaning of being 8; uniqueness 205 humanism 192, 196n18; and education 198– 200; problem with 200–3 humanitarianism 214 Husserl, E. 43, 88, 119 hypostasis 45–7, 49, 51

I Idea for a universal history (Kant) 159 identity 109–10, 174, 254 idolatry 86 il y a 30, 32, 45–6, 51, 52–3, 87, 92

illeity 161, 168n5 immanence 96n2, 192, 224–5 Imperative of responsibility, The (Jonas) 161–3 imperative, the 186 impossibility 132, 134n4 independence 91 indigenous peoples 253–4, 255–9, 267, 268 indigenous worldviews 260 individualism 91, 215, 217, 228, 229–32, 233, 235 individuation 215, 219 Infinite, the 29, 246 infinity 4, 31, 57–8, 214–5, 248, 269n4; and caritas 95–6; educational questioning of 87, 88–96; as holiness of the holy 86–7; and interiority 183n5; personal 95; and responsibility 160 inhumanities 201–2 insomnia 248, 251n9 inspiration: and the ethical 50–1; and learning 43, 49–50 inspired self, the 50 intentionality 44, 89–90 intentions 280 interiority 50, 52–3, 59, 61, 183n5; educational questioning of 88–96 International Reading Association 80 intersubjective relations 31, 205 intersubjectivity 144, 148, 153, 236 intimate society 144–6 Intrigue of Ethics, The (Dudiak) 1–2 invocation 62–3 ipseity 9, 10, 215–6, 217–24, 223–4 Irigaray, L. 10, 256, 264, 275, 280–2, 284 Islam 26–7 Israel 16–17, 21–22 I-Thou relation 30, 223

J jemeinigkeit (mineness) 30 Jennings, B. 235 Jewish Agency 16 Jews and Judaism: assimilation 20; classicism 17; collapse of ideology 26–7; destiny 16; education 16– 8, 22, 88; and hope 105; messianism 103–4; monotheism 28; and philosophy 20; scholarship 3; as a science 16; stereotypes 112n1; tradition of questioning 85–6, 87, 95; values of 22 Johnson, L. 101

Index Joldersma, C. 4, 43–55, 208, 289 Jonas, H.155, 161–3 justice: call of 272; in education 35–7; and ethics 3–4; ethics of 272–3, 283; and forgiveness 152; importance of 35; individual aspect of 92; as moral behaviours 34; and obligations 233–4; and the Other 35; promise of 35–7; quest for 29–31, 33–4; and responsibility 35, 234–8; retaliatory 152; rupture of 118–9

K Kant, I. 6, 8, 93–4, 127, 134n3, 134n4, 159, 186–93, 199–200, 277–82, 283 Kaupapa Maori theory 259 Kearney, R. 73, 77 Kepel, G. 26–7 Kierkegaard, S. 93, 243–4 King Lear (Shakespeare) 145–6 Kipling, R. 155–6 knowing 200, 242, 247 knowledge 116, 120, 149, 160; absolute 242–3; ecological 256; immediacy of 249; indigenous 267; maieutic model 243–4; Maori 259–60; neutrality of 70; oral 266–7; and peace 242–9; as resource 267 Kodelja, Z. 8, 186–197, 289 Kohlberg, L. 200, 283 Koran 27 Kuipers, A. 248–9

L language 173, 181, 204, 206, 213; and the curriculum 4, 56–65; function 61–2; and invocation 62–3; Levinas on 61–3, 264–5, 274; Maori 257, 262; pseudo-holy 86; and the relationship to the Other 61, 63–4; sensibility and 263–5; shared 94; and teaching 64–5; utterances 62–3; of virtues 92–3; without words 120 Lanzmann, C. 77 Laub, D. 77 law: foundation of 28; responsibility and 158; self-imposed 186; universality 248 learning: and consciousness 43–6, 53–4; conscious subject model 43–5; critical stance 52; definition 43–4;

297

and enjoyment 43, 47–9, 51–2; and exegesis 75–6; and freedom 44; and hypostasis 45–7, 51; and inspiration 43, 49–50; and language 64–5; from Levinas 205–7; and listening 52–3, 79; needs 94; and the Other 62; and questioning 95; and speaking 53–4; and speech acts 92; and teachers 4, 45, 51–4; and welcoming 7, 176–80 Lebensformen 141 Lehrhaus 19–23 lemor 13, 23n6 Lenin, V. I. 111 Leviathan (Hobbes) 230–1 Levinas and education: The question of implication (Todd) 57 Levinas, E.: on art 72–4; on the Bible 27–8; career as educator 2; claim of content 278–9; on criticism 72–3, 74–5; definition of ethics 195n16, 195n17; and education 2; and freedom 190; funeral 86; on God 14–5, 20, 279, 281–2; on humanism 200–3; on ipseity 9; and Jewish scholarship 3; and Kant 189–93, 277–82; on language 61–3, 264–5, 274; language use 213; learning from 205–7; on literature 71, 73–5; as mediator 17–8; as pedagogue 15–24; as philosopher 28; purpose 1–2, 170–1; relating to 205–7; relevance 1; on responsibility 159–61; scolding 21; Shabbat lessons 13–5; status 1, 22–3; as teacher 13–5, 180–3, 206–7; on teaching 171–5, 263– 4; and theology 28; unsettling nature of work 207–8; on values of Judaism 22 Lévinas Phiosophe et Pédagogue (AIU) 23n1 liberalism 152–3 liberalist education 139 Lingis, A. 203, 215, 218–9, 221 listening 52–3, 79 literary criticism 67, 68–72, 74–5, 79–80 literary engagement 69, 74–8, 79–81 literary studies 5, 67 literary theory 68–72, 75 literature, Levinas on 71, 73–5 literature education 67, 69–70, 71–2, 78, 79–81

298

Index

Llewelyn, J. 278 Locke, J. 228, 231, 232 Logic of Essence, the 120 love 107, 145–6, 263, 281 love of life 47 Luhmann, N. 122–4, 127

M maariv 18 Maimonides 17, 20 maieutics 62, 65, 196, 244, 246, 249 man, fall of 280 Marsden, M. 256, 260 Martin, B. 9–10, 253–271, 289 Marx, K. 16, 200 Marxism 110–1 Massachusetts School Law of 1647 103 master, the 172, 174–5, 178 McPherson, I. 5, 85–99, 290 memory 260, 266 Merleau-Ponty, M. 88, 165, 236 messianism 36, 103–5, 107 meta-ethics 191–2 midrash 23 minha 19 Miller, J. H. 71, 76 Minh-Ha, T. T. 264 Mishna, the 143 modernity 131, 133, 192, 228 monotheism 28 moral: education 187, 188, 192, 193, 238– 40; heteronomy 190, 191–2; imagination 283; perception 283; responsibility 158, 164–5, 191 morality 166–7; and autonomy 186; and education 116; of happiness 192; and literature 80–1; and rights 235; rule based 239–40; slave 240n3 Moses 13, 20, 23n6 Mosès, S. 37n3 multiculturalism 9, 56, 60, 214 multiplicity 33–4

N Nahman, Rabbi 104 narrative ethics 76–7 National Council of Teachers of English 80 natural law 230–2 negative education 187–8 Nemo, P. 1, 27, 237 neo-Marxism 200 New Criticism 69–70, 79–80

New Zealand 253–4; colonial history 256–8; and the ethics of encounter 260; Levinas’s relevance to 254–6, 265–9; Maori philosophy 255; Maori relationships 259–60; Maori traditions 266; Maori worldview 256–7, 267; neoliberal reforms, 1980’s 258–60; Picot Report, 1988 258; Treaty of Waitangi 257, 258 Newton, A. 76–7 Ngata, Sir A. 256 Nieto, S. 100–1 Nietzsche, F. 21, 26, 158, 240n3 nihilism 26–7 Noddings, N. 272, 282–3 non-indifference 32, 244 Nussbaum, M. C. 70, 71

O Oakeshott, M. 63 obedience 8, 187–8, 194n7 objectivation 142 objectivity 65 obligation 51, 157, 161, 164, 165–7, 203, 228, 230, 233–4, 239, 266, 268, 278 obsession 203 Ogilvy, J. 229 On Escape (Levinas) 159 oneself 204–5 onto-theology 146, 149, 152 ontological imperialism 71 ontology 244, 284n6; and forgiveness 147– 8, 149, 150, 151–2, 152–3; priority of ethics over 140, 141–3 oppression 10, 248, 262 oral traditions 266–7 other than the other 96n2 Other, the 11n1; alterity of 182, 189–90, 213–4, 272; authority of 195n13; and conscience 30–1; and discourse 173; encountering 6, 35, 160–1, 225; and enjoyment 215–6; ethical height of 218; ethical obligation to 10–1; and ethics 3, 29, 32; expectations of 284; experience of 117–22, 128–9, 133–4; face of 29; failure to wed 280–1; and hospitality 179, 222; and infinity 4; interpreting 123; and justice 35; and language 4; manifestation of 120–1; as a master

Index 174–5, 178; otherness of 174; paradoxical nature of 119–22; and pedagogy 117; relationship to 60–1, 63–4, 131–3, 184n7, 224, 260–1, 273, 274–5, 283; relationship to in teaching and learning 64–5; respect for 115, 189–90; and responsibility 7, 31, 35, 59–60, 119, 160–1, 193, 202–5, 213, 275; revelation of 159; separation from 277; strangeness of 177; suppression of 257; as teacher 171, 172; and teaching 62; transaction with 283–4; transcendence of 263; welcoming 176–80 otherness 109, 236 Otherwise than Being (Levinas) 9, 10, 32, 34, 62–3, 72–3, 74, 105, 161, 218–9, 237–8, 264, 265, 272, 273–5 Oqer Harim 18

P pacification 144 paganism 16, 22 Papastephanou, M. 6, 139–54, 290 paradoxical rationality 129 paradoxes: dealing with 122–9; and ethics 132–3; of the Other 119–26; of pedagogy 129–34 paradoxification 127 pardon see forgiveness Parmenides 119 Pascal, B. 32, 93, 95–6, 96n1, 97n12 Passover 86–7 passivity 48–9, 274–5 Paul, St. 111 peace 9; culture of 247–9, 251; definition 243; and the Quaker tradition 249–51; risk of 247; and teaching 242–9 peace studies 9 pedagogical paths 19–20 pedagogy 6; critical 200; and ethics 117; mindset 129–31; paradoxes of 129–34; and philosophy 115–7; responsibility 117; role 115–7, 206 Pensées (Pascal) 93 Peperzak, A. T. 47, 96n5, 237, 240 Perpich, D. 179 Pesach seder 87, 88, 95 Pettit, P. 167

299

phenomology 5, 88–9, 159 phenomology of the face 27, 31 Philosophical fragments (Kierkegaard) 243–4 philosophy: and education 2, 15, 180–3, 242; and Judaism 20; language 213; and pedagogy 115–7; role 115; Western tradition 28 “Philosophy and the idea of Infinity” (Levinas) 57–8 Philosophy of Education Society (PES) 11n3 phylacteries 22, 24n18 Piaget, J. 200 place 106, 238, 242–4, 255–6 Plato 20, 68, 72, 73, 90 pluralism 245 plurality 33–4, 159, 179 poetry 68, 72 political activism 111 politics, of difference 214 poststructuralism 56 psyche 19, 49 Prairat, E. 6, 155–69, 290 prayer 3, 14, 18–19 profane misrepresentation 86 promising 91–2 prophecy 163, 245 Proust, M. 22 proximity 29–33, 118–20, 213, 218 Putnam, H. 97n7

Q Quaker tradition 249–51 questioning, educational 5, 85–8; of infinity 87, 88–96; skills 87–8

R Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac) 3, 14, 15, 19, 24n8 rationality 8, 92, 200, 283 rationalizations 249–50 “Reality and its Shadow” (Levinas) 72 reason 3, 19, 27, 94, 119–20, 246–7 receptivity 171, 218, 223–4 reciprocity 10, 149, 153, 158–9, 205, 237–8, 247, 273 reflexivity 217 relationality 260–1, 262, 265 relationship building 283–4 religion 18, 26–8, 86–7 religious education 78 Renaut, A. 192–3 representation 62–3, 171–3 Republic (Plato) 68

300

Index

respect 189–90, 194n3, 195n11, 268 response 218 responsibility 3–4, 6; actualization of 126; concept of 156–7; costs 233; deepening of 220; definition 203, 228; in education 238–40; and ethics 31–4, 77, 87, 245, 284; ethics of 6, 10, 31–4, 77, 87, 163–7, 245, 259, 284; and the experience of the Other 133–4; and fear 162–3; and freedom 58, 190–1, 261; and indigenous peoples 268; individual aspect of 92; infinite 148, 193, 240, 263, 275; Jonas on 161–3; judicial concept of 158–9; and justice 35, 234–8; and language 206; Levinas on 159–61; limits 10; moral 158, 164–5; and the Other 7, 59–60, 119, 193, 213, 275; pedagogical 117; and subjectivity 142, 192–3, 202–5; unconditional 9, 228–9 revelation, immediacy of 250, 252n13 rewards, and hope 102, 107–10 Ricoeur, P. 23n1, 158, 166 right to be 3, 26, 31, 35 rights 9; and asymmetry 236–8; background 228–9; in education 238–40; and ethics 229, 234–8; and obligations 230; and otherness 236; and the social contract 230–2; unalienable 235–6 Robbins, J. 73 Rolland, J. 38n19 Rosenblatt, L. 69–70 Rosenzweig, F. 17, 18, 20, 27, 37n3, 86–7, 90, 93 Rousseau, J.-J. 6, 63, 164, 186, 228, 231–2 Royal, T. A. C. 260, 266–7 ruptures 117, 224, 279

S Sacks, J. 88 sacrifice 268, 273, 284 Said, the 274, 277 Saint-Exupéry, A. Little Prince 35 Sartre, J.-P. 89, 93, 158 savoir absolu 242–3 saying 205–6, 274–5, 277 Schäfer, A. 129–30 Scholem 16 Science of Judaism 16 Second World War 77

Sein und Zeit (Being and time) (Heidegger) 201 self-criticism 181 self-determination 186, 259, 262 self-eclipse 273 self-improvement 164 self-interest 9, 228–30, 233, 238 self-sacrifice 283 self-tautologization 127 self-transformation 181 sensibility 81n1, 218–20, 263–5 Sephardim 18 separation 29–30, 217, 256, 277 Shakespeare, W. 95, 145–6 Shelley, P. B. 68 Shoah (Lanzmann) 77 Shoah, the 15 Sidney, P. 68 Silko, L. M. 78 singularization 133, 208, 215, 219 skepticism 70, 105, 127, 134n5 Smith, G. 256, 259 Smith, L. 256, 259, 260 Smith, P. 256 Smith, S. G. 251n3 Smith, T. 259 social agendas 181 social change, and hope 6, 102, 106, 110–2 social contract 9, 89, 229, 230–2, 238 Social Contract, The (Rousseau) 231, 240n1 social justice 35, 238 social morality 143–4 sociality 32, 217, 223 socialization 198, 202, 207 Socrates 62, 172, 206, 242 Socratic method 9, 174, 242 solicitude 158, 166–7 solitude 47, 159, 227 Song of songs 13, 19 sovereignty, individual 32, 140, 145 space, sharing 268 speaking 53–4, 173–4 speech acts 91–2 Spinoza, B. de 32, 38n19, 162 spirituality 5, 87–8, 255–6, 265 Stalky & Co. (Kipling) 155–6 Standish, P. 4, 56–66, 290–1 star of redemption, The (Rosenzweig) 37n3 Steg, A. 23n1 student, the 172–3; uniqueness of 208 study: and prayer 3; as prayer 14, 18–9 subjection 49, 153, 193 subjectivity 45–9, 50–1, 52, 53, 142, 152, 161, 174–5, 192–3, 196n20,

Index 218, 224, 229, 234–5, 237, 265, 274–5; ethics of 202–5, 208 sublime, the 34, 279 substitution 50–1, 109–10 suffering 89–90, 106–7, 279, 280 susceptibility 48–9, 219 systems theory 122–4, 126–7, 129

T tallit, the 24n18 Talmud, the 13, 17, 23n6, 27–8, 151–2 teachers: and care 273; challenges facing 101–2; compromise of standards 273; despair 107; emptyhanded 207–8; and forgiveness 150–1; and hope 101–2, 104–5, 106, 110, 112; and learning 4, 45, 51–4; Levinas as 13–5, 180–3, 206–7; the master 172, 175; need to develop questioning skills 94; and the Other 64–5; Other as 171, 172; professional ethics 181; relationship to the curriculum 105; and the student 172–3; substitution for students 109 teaching 171–5, 178; and authorative alterity 78–9; definition 196n20; faith in 108–9; globalization of 101–2; and hope 100–1, 112; hopeful, pillars of 100; and language 64–5; Levinas on 13–5, 180–3, 206–7; and the Other 62; and peace 242–9; and speech acts 92; and substitution 109– 10; and trans-actions 276–7 technological development, and ethics 161–3 Tefillin, the 24n18 tenderness 14 thematizing 44, 54, 274 theology 28, 37n6, 224, 250–1 theory 68, 134–5,139, 181–3 Third, the 118, 121, 149 thought 22, 26–8, 60, 118, 246–7, 267 time 102–3 to-come (à venir) 35–7, 38n26 Todd, S. 57, 170–85, 206, 291 Tolstoy, L. 20 Torah, the 13–4, 17, 19, 87, 87–8 totalitarianism 27, 225–6 totality 29, 47, 58–9, 64, 86–7, 91–2, 94, 118, 214–5 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 9, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37n3, 61–2, 72, 73, 146,

301

159–61, 172–5, 176, 180, 214– 5, 216–7, 218, 220, 261, 264 totalizing culturalisms 225–6 “Toward the Other” (Levinas) 143, 160 trans-actions 276–7, 283–4 transcendence 56, 91–2, 96n2, 174, 184n8, 263, 277–82 transcendental argument 10–11, 43 transcendental conditions, critique of 275–7 truth 72, 246, 247, 249–50 turn to ethics, The (Buell) 75 Tyack, D. 101, 103

U United States of America 16, 35 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 198 universality 116–7, 195n12, 256 unpredictability 17, 108–9 unrightness 121–2 utopianism 35, 105–7, 108, 238

V van Riessen, R. 45–6, 49–50 vigilance 30, 45, violence 3, 31–7, 158–9, 230, 248, 254, 272, 275 “Violence and metaphysics” (Derrida) 141, 154, 272, 284n2 virtue ethics 92–3 vulnerability 48–9, 52–4, 96n2, 218–9

W Wahl, J. 93 Weil, S. 81, 96n5 welcoming 7, 165–6, 171, 176–80, 181, 213–4, 221, 265–6 Westphal, M. 89, 93 What is enlightenment? (Kant) 188–9 White, P. 143, 147 Wiesel, E. 110 Wild, J. 264 Williams, B. 239 Wimmer, M. 6, 115–36, 291 Winnicott, D. 97n7, 277 Wolfson, H. 17 women, moral development 272–3, 282–3 Wyschogrod, E. 147

Y Yeshiva 3, 22

Z Zionism 16, 18 Žižek, S. 103–4, 105, 110–1, 113n1