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ON THE CHURCH LANDS 0-534-57627-3
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ON CONFUCIUS 0-534-58385-7 ON DENNETT 0-534-57632-X ON DERRIDA 0-534-57631 -1 O N DESCARTES 0-534-57593-5 ON DEWEY 0-534-57617-6 O N DOSTOEVSKY 0-534-58372-5 ON FODOR 0-534-58365-2 ON FOUCAULT 0-534-57614-1 ON FREGE 0-534-58367 -9 ON FREUD 0-534-57618-4 ON GADAMER 0-534-57598-6
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Introduction
1
PART 1: TOTALITY AND INFINITY
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1. Critique of Ontology
5
2. Separation
18
3. Face-to-Face
23
4. Eros
41
PART 2: OTHERWISE THAN BEING
51
5. The Saying and the Said
52
6. Responsibility
60
7. Substitution
64
8. Justice and Politics
73
Conclusion: The Future of Levinas Studies 83 Glossary
85
Bibliography
90
Introduction
The aim of this book is to familiarize students and general readers with the major themes of Levinas's philosophical writings. As the volumes in the Wadsworth Philosophers series are intended primarily for classroom use, we have decided to focus on those texts by Levinas that are most likely to be used in standard university courses: Totality and Infinity ( 1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). In so doing, we have been forced to omit from careful consideration Levinas's major pre-war publications, as well as his Talmudic writings and essays on Judaism (see Bibliography). The reader who works carefully through the present volume, however, will be well positioned to work through those texts on his or her own. We should mention that even with our restricted focus on Levinas's two principal philosophical texts, it is impossible to do full justice to the richness and scope of the ideas they contain in a volume as short as this one.
* In his short autobiography called "Signature" (1963), Levinas described his life as "dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror" (DF 291)-a regime that would result in the murder of Levinas's birth family from Lithuania along with at least six million other Jews. Practically everything Levinas wrote after the war was written with the experience of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in mind; hence the moving dedication at the beginning of his second major philosophical work, Otherwise than Being:
To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism.
Introduction
Introduction
For Levinas, an event of such magnitude as the Holocaust cannot simply be dismissed as a historical contingency. It is an event that goes to the very heart of philosophy- not only Levinas's philosophy, but philosophy itself to the extent that after it one can no longer philosophize in the same manner as before. In an interview, Levinas put the point succinctly:
The plain fact of the matter is that the good are all too rarely rewarded and the bad frequently go unpunished. Where was God in Auschwitz? Why were the Nazis allowed to get away with murder? And even if the Nazis were to get their just deserts in hell after they died, to what end? In the words of Dostoyevsky, "what do I want a hell for torturers for?" (BK 287). Levinas observes that Nietzsche's pronouncement "God is dead" became an almost scientific fact in the concentration camps (PL 162). What the Nazi atrocities and excessive cruelty of the twentieth century have shown perhaps more than anything else, according to Levinas, is that God is powerless to intervene in history and keep his promises, so powerless in fact that anyone who acts ethically with the hope of reward is bound to be disappointed. To conclude, however, that morality is impossible after an event such as the Holocaust would be a grave error. Why? Because it would be to renounce the very basis upon which one might wish to criticize what the Nazis did . Indeed, it would be to give up the possibility of opposing injustice everywhere: war, slavery, mass hatred, imperialism, genocide, terrorism, totalitarianism, unemployment, and Third World poverty and hunger. This is true even when it is morality itself that is being criticized. Ethics survives the attack on ethics, according to Levinas, because it is ethics that motivates the attack. Does not Nietzsche criticize the holy saints for their excessive cruelty? Does not Marx criticize bourgeois ideology for oppressing the working class? And does not Freud criticize Victorian morality for turning us into suffering neurotics? Levinas ' s critical task, then, is to rethink the meaning of ethics after the breakdown of moral, religious, and philosophical certainty. It is a task to which he applied himself in earnest upon his return from captivity after WWII, and which culminated in the publication of his first major work on ethics, Totality and Infinity. We now turn to this highly original, rich, and colorful work.
The essential problem is: Can we speak of an absolute commandment after Auschwitz? Can we speak of morality after the failure of morality? (PL 176) By "failure of morality," Levinas clearly means the failure of philosophical ethics· founded on the idea o( .absolute duty or the Categorical Imperative, such as we find in Kant:s ethics. But he is also referring to the failure of traditional religious ethics. Such ethics has always been able to console itself with the prospect of salvation and reward, whereby the sacrifices it entails are seen as a type of investment that comes back with a hefty interest, either in this world or in the next. The Holocaust, according to Levinas, destroys the conception of a "happy end" to our moral endeavors. It reveals the stark truth behind what Kant called "the failure of philosophical attempts at theodicy," by which is meant the various attempts that philosophers have made to reconcile God's omnipotence and goodness with the fact of evil on earth. Such attempts, according to Levinas, are totally misguided. They rest on a "childish" conception of God, who distributes rewards to those who are obedient and who punishes those who are not.
• For the purposes of this volume, we will use the term "morality" and "ethics" interchangeably. It should be noted, however, that Levinas does occasionally distinguish the two, as in an interview conducted in 1981 :
By morality I mean a series of rules relating to social behavior and civic duty . .. ethics cannot itself legislate for society or produce rules of conduct ... it is a form of vigilant passivity to the call of the other. (FF 29) In Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being this distinction is not rigorously maintained. 2
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Totality and Infinity
Critique of Ontology
(1961) According to Levinas, it is not just morality that is put into question by Auschwitz, but the whole of Western philosophy beginning with the Greeks. Levinas does not merely criticize philosophy for its failure to prevent violence, but also for its complicity in violence insofar as it privileges knowledge over ethics. Levinas reserves the word "ontology" (literally, the study [logos] of Being [ontos]) for this general tendency within philosophy to give priority to knowledge at the expense of ethics. Early in Totality and Infinity, he writes:
Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by the interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being. (TI 43) To understand what Levinas means by this statement, we are required to give a brief account of the history of ontology, beginning with Parmenides.
The Greeks Parmenides Parmenides of Elea (c. 515) is considered by many historians to be the "father of philosophy." He was among the very first thinkers to draw a distinction between appearance and reality, i.e., the way things merely appear to our senses and the way they are in themselves. This distinction would prove to be fundamental for subsequent philosophy. 4
5
Critique of Ontology
Critique of Ontology Parmenides presented his ontology in a poem called "On Nature" in which the goddess Justice (Dike) reveals to him the nature of truth (aletheia) in contrast to the opinions (doxai) of mortals. It is she who tells Parmenides that we are accustomed to inquire about the nature of reality in two fundamentally different ways. Either we say of things that they are ("what is") or we say of them that they are not ("what is not"). In order to think at all, we must have something to think about. Accordingly, we can only think about what is. Since "what is not" literally cannot exist (it is literally "no-thing"), we cannot properly think about it. The question now becomes: Is what exists static? Or rather is it-as Heraclitus (c. 540) claimed-continuously changing? The goddess in Parmenides' poem argues that change (or becoming) is merely an appearance, and thus is not real. How can something both be and not be at the same time? If we view reality t,~rough the natural light of "reason" (logos), we will come to understand that Being is eternal, indivisible, and unchanging. Parmenides also says: "Thought and Being are the same" (Fr. 8) by which he means that everywhere Being is "one," and thus forms a unity with everything else-including thought itself. In contrast to this Parmenidean conception of Being as "one" ("monism"), Levinas argues that the differences between things cannot be subsumed under a more basic concept of unity but that existence is multiple ("pluralism"). The plurality of what exists, for Levinas, is not just an appearance, but rather part of the very nature of reality as such. Such pluralism, he will go on to say, is particularly evident in my relation to the other person- whom Levinas simply refers to as the Other- inasmuch as he or she is radically different from me. Levinas's thinking thus marks a decisive break with Parmenides and the ontological tradition, a break that he himself characterizes as a "parricide" (TO 43), adopting the expression of a character in Plato's Sophist, to which we turn next.
Plato The limitations of Parmenides' philosophy were not evident until Plato (428-348) arrived on the philosophical scene. Plato accepted much ofParmenides' ontology, including the claim that true knowledge is discovered by the mind and not by the senses. He also agreed that what we call true knowledge is eternal, indivisible, and unchanging. However, he differed from Parmenides on two major points. First, he 6
attributed to the world of appearances the intermediate status of belief (pistis) rather than that of sheer illusion. Second, in his dialogue the Sophist, he distinguished between various senses of "not-Being," and thus challenged Parmenidean monism in its original form. The dialogue provides Levinas with the vocabulary of the "the same" and "the other" used throughout Totality and Infinity, and is thus worth looking at in more detail. The central question of the Platonic dialogue is: How can a statement that something is not the case (e.g., "A mammal is not a fish") itself be true? Surely something that is non-existent cannot exist! Such would be Parmenides' objection, though it turns out that the objection is only partially valid. In the dialogue, Plato has the character of the "Eleatic Stranger," who is a disciple of Parmenides, examine the objection and in the process risk "becoming a sort of parricide" (Sophist 241d). What the Stranger shows is that though "not-Being" cannot exist in absolute terms, it can indeed have relative existence in the sense that something can be other than something else (e.g., "A mammal is other than a fish") . This may be contrasted with something that is said to be the same as something else (e.g., "A dog is a mammal"). These two ways of speaking correspond to the two "forms" or categories of Being that Plato calls "same" and "other." Despite the logical subtleties that Plato and the Eleatic Stranger bring to the philosophical table, we are still lacking, according to Levinas, a category that would be the opposite of Being (OB 3), and thus designate the absolutely other as such. Inasmuch as otherness (or "alterity") is still defined in purely relative terms in Plato's work, then what is other is understood in terms of what it is not, and thus not positively in terms of itself. To Levinas's mind, this means that we still lack the proper philosophical tools necessary to think the otherness of the Other. We have not yet left the climate of Parmenidean Being. Indeed, over two millennia later, in the midst of the Enlightenment, we would still appear to be living in its shadow.
Modernity Kant The German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the foremost 7
Critique of Ontology
Critique of Ontology thinker of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a new dawn in European intellectual and cultural history, characterized by an optimistic faith in reason and science as opposed to superstition and religious dogma. Like his predecessors, Kant drew an important distinction between appearance and reality. However, unlike Parmenides and Plato, he altogether denied that we could have knowledge of reality as such. Our perception is strictly limited to what we know by way of our senses. All we are aware of is the way things appear to us; we can never step outside ourselves and see things as they exist independently of us. We do not have what Kant called "intellectual intuition"--or what the Greeks called nous- by which we may know "things in themselves." Kant, however, did not think that the hum,(!n mind was merely a passive receptacle of sensory experience. OPI the contrary, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 ), he argued that the mind or "understanding" contributes to the world of knowledge by giving form and objectivity to what would otherwise be a chaotic, buzzing mass of sensory experience. We have no choice but to experience objects as located in space and time. This is because we impose the "forms" of space and time on them. Similarly, we are not simply stimulated by light but perceive objects in the light. This we do with the help of twelve fundamental concepts (substance, causality, etc.) that Kant calls the "categories." These categories are not learned from experience (they are "a priori") but are applied to experience. The categories are a sort of conceptual apparatus that allow us to make sense of the world by ordering and classifying it. Insofar as Kant is only concerned with specifying the conditions that need to be met before we can possibly know anything at all, and since what is known is not completely determined by the objective world, but is also constituted by the application of the categories, his philosophy is called "transcendental idealism." However, like every idealist philosopher, Kant is faced with the problem of distinguishing between what is merely subjective experience (e.g. , a dream) and what is properly objective in the sense of belonging to the real world . Indeed, how do we know that there is an objective world out there at all? Are we not simply aware of our own thinking processes? Kant's answer to this supposed refutation of idealism was to say that "our inner experience is possible only on the assumption of outer experience" (Critique of Pure Reason A 226). He argues that the mere fact that I am se lf-aware proves the existence of 8
objects in space outside of me. This is because in order to be aware of the succession of inner experiences, I must have something permanent to observe them against. This background can only be the permanence of objects outside of me, for there is nothing permanent in thought, which is always changing from one moment to the next. While there may be no permanent thought insofar as we rapidly move from one representation to another, in Kant's view there is a permanent subject that does the thinking. Indeed, Kant considers this a logical (or "transcendental") condition of having any experience whatsoever. He writes, "it must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations" (Critique B 131 ). If not, then experience-which for Kant is by definition orderly and connected (Critique A 111)--would be impossible. This is not to say that in order for experience to be possible we must continually be thinking about ourselves. Rather, the claim is that whatever my thoughts or feelings I must be capable of recognizing (or "apperceiving") them as my thoughts and my feelings. If that were not so, then my world would become fragmented and schizophrenic. For experience to be possible, a self-identical subject- the same- must be presupposed. Kant writes,
the "/" of apperception, and therefore the "]" in every act of thought, is one, and cannot be resolved into a plurality of subjects. (Critique B 407) For Levinas, the notion of the "I think" demonstrates Kant's affinity with Parmenidean monism understood as a reduction of the plurality of perceptions to a unity. The other would not be an object of knowledge at all unless the same (self) were able to synthesize experience by bringing different sensory data under the unity of apperception. This way of integrating what is at first outside (as other) into the thinking, goals, and projects of the same constitutes the very nature of freedom:
Such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy [i.e., absolute rule] of an I. Thematization and conceptualization, which moreover are inseparable, are not peace with the other but suppression or possession of the other. .. . "/think" comes down to "! can"-to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality. (Tl 46) 9
Critique of Ontology
Critique of Ontology Levinas is saying here that the knowledge and comprehension the "I think" makes possible leads to the domination and exploitation of what exists. By being placed under a concept, the Other falls within my powers, and is thus exposed to violence and disrespect. We will return to this important argument later on. The violence associated with the "I think" is not restricted to Kant's philosophy. It pertains to every philosophy that, as ontology, seeks to comprehend the otherness of the Other by subsuming him or her under a concept that is thought within me, and thus is in some sense the same as me. This reaches its most extreme possibility in the idealism of Hegel.
Hegel Like many German philosophers of the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( 1770-1831) was heavily influenced by his predecessor Kant. Hegel agreed with much of what Kant had to say about truth and knowledge being constituted by the mind. However, unlike Kant he rejected the view that things in themselves are unknowable. Hegel took the more extreme view that everything that exists must be mental and thus in principle knowable. In so doing, he injected new life into Parmenidean monism, along with the claim that being and thought are the same. For Hegel, Kant's transcendental idealism is fundamentally flawed insofar as it places the categories solely on the side of the human subject, whereas they can equally be said to be on the side of the object. In his best-known work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel offers a unique reading of the history of philosophy as a progression toward this fundamental truth wherein subject and object finally coincide. Hegel dubs this coincidence or unity of subject and object "Absolute Knowledge ." His argument is basically this. The Kantian dichotomy between appearances and things in themselves is shown to be an illusion once we assume, as did Hegel, that the proper objects of philosophical knowledge all fall within consciousness in general (which Hegel calls "Spirit"). To be sure, Hegel is not saying that material objects are figments of our imagination . He is saying that what appears in the first instance to be independent of consciousness ("being-in-itself') turns out to be part of consciousness ("being-for-itself'), and thus ultimately knowable to the extent that consciousness is capable of coming to know 10
itself. The following illustration makes this clear. According to Kant, I am not aware of the tree as such but only as it appears to my senses. Suppose, however, that I do not make the tree the focus of my attention but my knowledge of the tree. It would then appear possible to know my object completely through self-reflection. Hegel offers a historical narrative of the various stages of this coming to know itself of consciousness, which include sense certainty, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion. Throughout this history, the knowing subject (the "I") repeatedly comes to realize that what at first appeared to be radically other than itself ("not-!") is in fact nothing other than itself. Levinas cites a passage from Hegel's Phenomenology that nicely captures this "truth" arrived at by the"!":
I distinguish myself from myself; and therein I am immediately aware that this factor distinguished from me is not distinguished. I, the selfsame being, thrust myself away from myself; but that which is distinguished, which is set up as unlike me, is immediately in its being distinguished no distinction for me. (Phenomenology of Spirit § 164; cited Tl 36-7) What is important to grasp here is that the unity of the "I" is not arrived at in isolation from the world, but by overcoming the dichotomy between it and the world. The initial exteriority or otherness of the world is integrated into a conceptual framework in which any difference or contradiction between what exists and what is thought is linally overcome and forms a single totality--the famous Hegelian "system"- that is identical to reality or Being itself. Hegel's thought is perhaps the most conspicuous example of the tendency of ontology to privilege identity over difference by reducing the other to the same. This tendency does not stop with Hegel, but is continued by a later generation of German philosophers called phenomenologists. The leader of this group was Husser!.
Phenomenology Husser! From 1928 to I 929 Levinas studied under Edmund Husser! (185911
Critique of Ontology
Critique of Ontology 1938), the father of phenomenology, whose work he translated and subsequently introduced to France. Husserl, who was originally trained in mathematics, and later in formal logic and psychology, aimed to develop a philosophy characterized by the same kind of rigor as that found in the mathematical sciences. In order to accomplish his aim, Husser! went "back to the things themselves," that is, he attempted to describe phenomena (i .e., objects of conscious thought) in their own right, without presuppositions. Husser! called this method of dealing with phenomena in a rigorous, purely descriptive, and presuppositionless manner, "phenomenology." In our everyday dealings with the world, we tend to make various assumptions about the world. We naively assume that the world exists outside us and that the objects it contains exist independently of consciousness. This so-called "natural attitude~') according to Husser!, is the greatest obstacle in the way of achieving genuine scientific results in philosophy. To overcome it, Husser! begins in a manner reminiscent of Rene Descartes' method of radical doubt by suspending belief in the existence of the external world. Such "bracketing" is what Husser! calls the phenomenological or "transcendental reduction" (epoche). For phenomenology to maintain its scientific rigor, it must limit its'elf to reflecting on the way in which objects in the world are given to consciousness. Consciousness has two components: act and object. According to the doctrine of the "intentionality" of consciousness (a term Husser! borrowed from the German philosopher Franz Brentano [1838-1916]), every act of consciousness (e.g., perceiving, believing, desiring, etc.) aims at or "intends" some object of consciousness (e.g., what is perceived, believed, desired, etc.). The question naturally arises : Who (or what) is the intentional subject of consciousness? Husser! calls it the "transcendental ego," a purely idealist (i.e., constituting) subject that is in many respects similar to Kant's "I think." However, at this point an objection may be raised. After suspending belief in the existence of the external world, has not the phenomenologist fallen into the idealist trap of"solipsism" by reducing everything- including other persons- to one's own ideas? Husser! was well aware of this apparently "grave objection" to his thinking:
intending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me but, according to their sense, precisely others? (CM 89) Husserl's response was given in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, an important book that Levinas himself co-translated into f-rench in 1931. In this book, Husser! claimed that the other person is not given to me in the same way that ordinary objects of perception are. I do not have a direct perception or "intuition" of the other person as such; all I am directly aware of is his or her body. Nevertheless, I do not perceive the other person as a mere automaton. Rather, I perceive him or her as another ego that is analogous or similar to me. Husser! ca lls this special act of consciousness "analogical appresentation." It is a matter of debate as to whether Husser! successfully escapes Lhe charge of solipsism as stated. Certainly Levinas is among those cnt1cs for whom Husserl 's Cartesian starting point presents insurmountable problems. Levinas criticizes Husser! for reducing the other person to another transcendental ego like me, thereby robbing the Other of his or her uniqueness. "The Other as Other is not only an alter ego: the Other is what I myself am not" (TO 83). Inasmuch as transcendental phenomenology views the other person as essentially the same as me (i.e., having another ego like mine), it misses the otherness of the Other. This is in essence Levinas's critique of Husser!. In some sense, Husser! placed himself in an impossible position. By beginning with the traditional philosophical distinction between subject (ego) and object (the world), Husser! was faced with the problem of explaining how the solitary transcendental ego manages to get "outside itself' in order to know the world as it really is. For many philosophers, this problem was finally laid to rest by Husserl 's most brilliant student, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), under whom Levinas also studied. It is impossible to exaggerate the enormous influence Heidegger's thinking had on Levinas, especially early on. Levinas perhaps learned more from Heidegger than from any other philosopher prior to WWII . However, Levinas would soon become more critical of Heidegger than of anyone else, a fact that has a lot to do with Heidegger's political involvement with the Nazi s during the war.
When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epoche do I not become solus ipse? . . . What about other egos, who surely are not a mere 12
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Critique of Ontology
Heidegger In his first major philosophical publication, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger took phenomenology in a radically new direction . He argued that the task of phenomenology is not to describe what is immediately accessible, or present, to consciousness, but to grant us access to what remains for the most part hidden from consciousness, which Heidegger called the "Being" of beings (BT 35). As we have seen, Being in its different forms ("the One," "reality," "thing-in-itself," etc.) has served as the primary subject matter of philosophical inquiry. Heidegger's focus on Being thus places him squarely within the philosophical tradition that Levinas calls ontology. Heidegger's "fundamental ontology," however, differs from the traditional approaches inasmuch as it atterr\pts to unearth the very foundations of philosophy as such. To understand the underlying motivation behind Heidegger's project, it is important to recognize that the intellectual climate of the time was thick with questions having to do with the foundations of the sciences. For example, "biology," the science of life, must have recourse to a philosophical distinction between the "living" and "non-living" so as to establish the object of its investigation. Philosophy is thus called upon to provide a certain interpretation of the Being of beings, i.e., philosophy decides how the world is to be "carved up" for subsequent scientific investigation. In this sense, philosophy serves as a foundation and guide for all scientific inquiry. Since it is the task of philosophy to make truthful claims about beings, it follows that philosophy should in turn be guided by an understanding of the Being of those beings. However, according to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being has been forgotten . The goal of Being and Time is thus to "raise anew the question of the meaning of Being" (BT 19). What is revolutionary about Heidegger's inquiry is his insistence that our knowledge of Being is not primarily theoretical. In other words, our understanding of the meaning of the word "Being" is not a purely intellectual enterprise, but stems rather from our everyday, practical dealings with the world. Heidegger maintains that human existence-which he calls "Dasein" (in German, literally meaning "being-there")-is always involved in an understanding of its Being as well as the Being of other entities. Dasein is thus different from everything else (e.g., stones, plants, and animals) because Being is a question for it. Heidegger writes: 14
Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ... distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. . . . Understanding of Being is itself a defining characteristic ofDasein 's Being. (BT 32) According to Heidegger, Dasein 's everyday way of being presupposes what he calls a "pre-ontological" (BT 35) understanding of Being, by which he means a non-scientific, non-theoretical, practical concern with beings. Heidegger's argument amounts to the claim that philosophical knowledge ultimately derives from our pre-philosophical understanding of the world . Hence, if philosophy is to attain its goal of knowledge, it needs to begin with an analysis of our everyday, practical mode of existing, or what Heidegger calls "being-in-the-world." For Levinas, Heidegger's focus on practical existence marks an important break with the dominant "intellectualist" bias
To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent (the ethical relation), to a relation to the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom. (TI 45) According to Heidegger, the encounter with beings, including human beings, implies the comprehension of Being in general. For Levinas, this amounts to the primacy of Being over beings, and thus the subord ination of the particular to the general. Insofar as the Other is understood or grasped in terms of his or her Being, then the Other is comprehended on the basis of what he or she has in common with other beings. The Other is thereby divested of his or her individuality, and becomes conceptually the same as others:
The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in
15
Critique of Ontology
Critique of Ontology neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to same. (TI 45) Heideggerian ontology is thus what Levinas calls a "philosophy of power." To know the Other is tantamount to predicting, manipulating, controlling, even dominating the Other. Fundamental ontology remains "under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny" (TI 46-7). Many commentators have strongly disagreed with this interpretation of Heidegger's thought. They typically cite, for example, Heidegger's discussion of "Being-with" in Being and Time (BT §26) as a rejoinder to Levinas's criticisms. In these pages, Heidegger argues that being with others is an inescapable fact of human e~istence. In stark contrast to Husser!, who began his analysis of intersubjectivity from the position of an isolated ego, and then was faced with the problem of showing how the ego relates to other human beings, Heidegger argues that Dasein is always already in relation with Others. From the outset, others are encountered in the world in which I live. However, not only are other Daseins encountered in the world, according to Heidegger, they are encountered through the world as the arena of meaning, language, customs, and history. Although clearly an improvement over Husser!, Heidegger's account of intersubjectivity, for Levinas, still remains steeped in comprehension and knowledge, even if that knowledge is not one of traditional theory:
fully came to terms with his political error. Thus, while Levinas was heavily indebted to Heidegger' s philosophy, he was also governed by the strong "need to leave the climate of that philosophy, and by the conviction that one cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be prelleideggerian" (EE 4). This separation from pre-Heideggerian and Heideggerian philosophy, indeed the separation not only from the totality of philosophy but the totality in general is considered by Levinas to be the pre-condition for ethics as such, as we will now see.
In Heidegger coexistence is, to be sure, taken as a relationship with the Other irreducible to objective cognition; but in the final analysis it also rests on the relationship with being in general, on comprehension, on ontology. ... For Heidegger intersubjectivity is a coexistence, a we prior to the I and the other, a neutral intersubjectivity. (TI 67-8) Levinas's criticism of Heidegger's ontology gains more force from the fact that Heidegger himself was implicated in the Nazi regime that led to the murder of countless Jewish and non-Jewish lives during WWII. Inasmuch as Heidegger's thinking lacks an ethics in the standard sense- and certainly lacked an ethics in Levinas's sense-it is bereft of the very resources needed tq call such a regime into question. Indeed, it is generally conceded that Heidegger, even in later life, never 16
17
Separation
2 Separation
,.
In the previous chapter, we focused on l..evinas's characterization of the ontological tradition as dominated by the ideal of unity, whether it be understood in terms of Parmenidean monism or Heidegger's notion of Being. In order to escape from this tradition and thereby avoid the reduction of the Other to the categories of the Same, Levinas describes the ethical relation not as unity, but as "separation" (TI 36).
Enjoyment The Same Separation is not to be understood as merely spatial or physical distance. It denotes difference. The difference between my neighbor and me is not due to some specific difference (e.g., ethnicity, nationality, gender, etc.), which presupposes some underlying commonality (e.g., human being). The "absolute difference" (TI 194) between us derives from the fact that no genus, universal concept, or general category serves to unite us. You might say that all the Other and I have in common is that we have nothing in common. Levinas writes:
I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him without genus. (TI 39) How, then, do the Other and the Same enter into relation with one another without destroying their separation? Or, what amounts to the 18
same thing, how is ethics, understood as respect for the absolute otherness of the Other, possible? Is not the Same defined precisely in terms of its tendency to annul the difference between it and what initially strikes it as other? The will to knowledge and comprehension is not exhaustive of Levinas's description of the Same. In section two of Totality and Infinity, Levinas conducts an analysis of selthood from the perspective of enjoyment, which he argues is totally different from the self of knowledge. Without being able to examine in detail Levinas's highly original analysis of enjoyment, some of the essential points may be summarized as follows .
lpseity In contrast to Kant, who argued that the knowing I remains an empty form accompanying my representations, Levinas maintains that in enjoyment "the same determines the other while being determined by it" (Tl 128). What does this mean? It means that the Same does not simply constitute objects in the manner of a transcendental ego. Levinas argues that prior to knowing objects, we first "live from" them to the extent that "every object offers itself to enjoyment" (TI 132). To live from something is to treat it as an object of enjoyment by assimilating it to oneself. Levinas's favorite example is eating:
In satiety, the real that I sank my teeth into is assimilated, the forces that were in the other become my forces, become me. (TI 129) Of course, not everything I enjoy is edible! Here it would be more appropriate to say that the Same directly "lives" (Tl 135) (in the transitive sense) the very qualities of what it enjoys. This is not to say that that the Same is simply identifiable with what it enjoys ("the fine cigarette lighter, the fine car" [TI 140]). The Same is also conditioned by what it enjoys in the sense that enjoyment "constitutes me as the Same and not as dependent on the other" (TI 116). Enjoyment makes me independent and self-sufficient. True, things such as food, shelter, clothing, exercise, are all necessary for my biological existence; I am thus dependent on them . But at the same time, insofar as I am well nourished, protected, warm, and healthy, I also gain my independence, 19
Separation
Separation
whereby I am free to enjoy the world. At least this is so "if things are in their place" (TI 112). The case where one eats out of starvation, and therefore remains dependent, is precisely a sign of a "disorganized society" (TI 116). In the normal course of events, one does not eat to live-one lives to eat. Hence Levinas's paradoxical claim: "Man is happy to have needs" (TI 114). Through this complex, and apparently contradictory, structure of enjoyment- "independence through dependence" (TI 115)--Levinas argues that the Same individuates itself, i.e., becomes a particular I. This is what Levinas calls "ipseity" (from the Latin ipse, meaning "self'):
by mi sfortune itself ("the pain inherent in labor"), then by the worry of misfortune ("the indetermination of the future") . The disquietude is overcome through what Levinas calls "dwelling" (Tl 150). The dwelling or the home protects me from the elements: the wind, the rain, and the cold. It is a place of comfort where I can relax and enjoy the fruits of my labor in relative security. Not only does it provide a refuge from "rough winds," it also, as Karl Marx knew, provides a kind of sanctuary that allows me to recover from the alienation of the workplace. This is made possible by the presence within the home of "the feminine ." The feminine is the silent and discrete presence of my beloved, who welcomes me in the home. She manages to smooth away the roughness of the world . Hers is the face of gentleness and intimacy itself:
The personality of a person, the ipseity of the I, which is more than the particularity of the atom and qf the individual, is the particularity of the happiness ofenjoyment. (TI 115) This separation of the I is "secret" in the sense that I can conceive of myself as unique only "from within" (Tl 147). From the point of view of a third party observer (see Chapters 3 and 8), I want happiness like the rest. Levinas writes, "only in enjoyment does the I crystallize" (Tl 144). The I of enjoyment is totally unique- like a snowflake.
Dwelling The Feminine However, the I is troubled by a fundamental insecurity that threatens to undermine its separation and independence. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes:
disquietude insinuates itself in enjoyment, menaced with the indetermination of the future essential to sensibility, or due to the pain inherent in labor. (Tl 145-6)
Gentleness is not only the conformity of nature with the needs of the separated being, which from the first enjoys them and constitutes itself as separate, as I, in that enjoyment, but is a gentleness coming from an affection for that I. . . . The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation . . . This is a new and irreducible possibility, a delightful lapse in being, the source ofgentleness itself (TI 155) We will return to Levinas's notion of the feminine later (see Chapter 4). Let us note here that many feminists- though by no means all- have objected to Levinas's account, which they argue is sexist in that it confines woman to her traditional role as homemaker. In defense of Levinas, it may be said that he in no way is unthinkingly attributing to women certain stereotypical "feminine" traits. Not only do these traits have a positive connotation for Levinas (which they do not have in the tradition), he also makes it clear that the welcome of the feminine in the home does not imply the actual physical presence of a biological woman. It could just as easily refer to a man or a partner of the same sex. We read :
The empirical absence of the human being of "feminine sex" in a dwelling nowise affects the dimension offemininity which remains open there, as the very welcome of the dwelling. (TI 158)
As Kierkegaard pointed out, an enjoyable ("aesthetic") way of life invariably depends on a condition that "either lies outside the individual or is in the individual in such a way that it is not posited by the individual himself' (EO 184). Happiness remains a stroke of luck (TI 144); it is a chance that can be missed, and is thus menaced, if not
We might say that the feminine is a way of being- and not a particular human being.
20
21
3
Separation
The Recollection In the home, through the discrete welcome of the feminine, I am given the opportunity to relax . The life of dwelling enables me to free myself from the pressure of need in order consciously to "make use of time" (TI 166). As such, it allows for a respite or what Levinas calls "recollection . .. a suspension of the immediate reactions the world solicits in view of a greater attention to oneself and one's possibilities" (TI 154). This is similar to the emergence of self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, where, to be human, man must overcome his animal needs. He must show himself prepared to sacrifice his biological desires, and in the process transcend them (Phenomenology §174). Similarly, in Levinas's Totality and Infinity, the self is said to attain full self-consciousness only by rising above the satisfaction of need .
But in order that I be able to free myselffrom the very possession that the welcome of the Home establishes, in order that I be able to see things in themselves, that is, represent them to myself, refuse both enjoyment and possession, I must know how to give what I possess. Only thus could I situate myself absolutely above my engagement in the non-f. But for this I must encounter the indiscrete face of the Other that calls me into question. (TI 170-71) The encounter with the indiscrete face of the Other is what Levinas calls the "face-to-face." This notion is the crux of Totality and Infinity and is the theme of our next chapter.
Face-to-Face
We have seen how enjoyment is said to make possible the separation between the I and the Other. However, we have yet to see how a genuine ethical relation with the Other can occur amid a life of enjoyment. Consider the following passage:
In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against Others, not "as for me ... "- but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate- without ears. like a hungry stomach. (TI 134) We want to know how the Other manages to interrupt the complacency of enjoyment.
Metaphysical Desire Need and Desire Although enjoyment is "necessary" (TI 148) for ethics, the ethical relation is not itself one of enjoyment. Levinas argues that having satisfied one's material needs, the self finds within itself a type of longing that cannot be satisfied. Such is what Levinas calls "Desire" (TI33):
Having recognized its needs as material needs, as capable of being satisfied, the I can henceforth turn to what it does not lack. It 22
23
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face
distinguishes the material from the spiritual, opens to Desire. (TI 117)
"Third Meditation" when he uses the clarity and distinctness of the cogito as support for the idea of infinity (God), and then proceeds to use the idea of infinity as support for the cogito. What is typically treated as a weakness or flaw in Descartes' argument, however, is regarded by Levinas as its major strength. This is because it bears witness to ethical separation. Levinas argues,
Desire is distinguished from "need" (e.g., the need for food) precisely to the extent that it cannot in principle be satisfied. Essentially insatiable, Levinas likens it to a desire that "nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger" (Tl 34). It is like the love Shakespeare writes about in his Sonnet 73: "Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by." (It is noteworthy that Levinas says, "It sometimes seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare" [TO 72).) But Desire is not love (see Chapter 4). Love is exemplified in the erotic relation, and includes an ineluctable moment of need or enjoyment. Desire, which is perpetually' unfulfilled, is literally "metaphysical" (from Greek, meaning "beyond nature") in that it goes beyond natural and animal inclinations. It is thus a "desire [that] precisely understands the remoteness, the alterity, the exteriority of the other" (TI 34). The "understanding" spoken of here is that of theoretical judgment or knowledge; it is "not an object-cognition" (TI 75). Levinas calls it "an experience that is not commensurate with any a priori frameworka conceptless experience" (TJ I 0 I). Recall that Kant argued that experience is always intelligible experience. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he makes the famous remark: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (Critique ASl/875). This goes some way toward explaining why Levinas describes metaphysical Desire as "Desire for the invisible" (TI 33).
Descartes and the "Idea of Infinity" Levinas does not always claim that there is no concept or idea corresponding to Desire. For the most part he merely argues that there is no "adequate idea." An adequate idea is an idea that coincides with its ideatum, i.e., the object of the idea. Levinas uses the term "idea of infinity" from Descartes' "Third Meditation" to draw attention to a thought that the "I think . .. can in no way contain" (TI 48) or "thinks more than it thinks" (TI 62). In order to appreciate the significance of this idea for Levinas, it is worth taking a closer look at how it originally functions in the work of Descartes. It has long been maintained that Descartes argues in a circle in the
24
that there could be a chronological order distinct from the "logical" order, that there could be several moments in the progression, that there is a progression- here is separation. (TI 54) Although the idea of infinity is explicitly introduced only after the cogito in Descartes' text, it is in fact already presupposed by the procedure of doubt that led to the cogito. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas quotes the following well-known passage from Descartes' "Third Meditation":
my awareness of the infinite must ... be in some way prior to my awareness of the finite, that is to say, my awareness of God must be prior to that of myself For how could I know that I doubt and desire, i.e., know that something is lacking in me and that I am not wholly perfect, save by having in me the idea of a being more perfect than myself by comparison with which I may recognize my deficiencies? (quoted in the original Latin by Levinas [TI211]) The significance of this passage for Levinas is that it shows that in order to have the idea of myself as imperfect (i.e., someone who doubts) I must first have the idea of infinity (God) and the positive idea of perfection. True, Descartes only makes this explicit after having attained the certainty of the cog ito. The analysis has indeed become a "reflection on reflection" (TI 2 I 0), whereby Descartes is engaged in retracing his steps, and uncovering what made the initial certainty of the cogito possible. According to Levinas, this tracing back by philosophy reveals the hidden condition of truth and certainty, presupposing the encounter with the Other.
It is necessary to have the idea of infinity, the idea of the perfect, as Descartes would say, in order to know one's own imperfection. The idea of the perfect is not an idea but desire; it is the welcoming 25
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face of the Other, the commencement of moral consciousness, which calls in question my freedom. Thus this way of measuring oneself against the perfection of infinity is not a theoretical consideration.
The Face Meaning "kath auto"
(TI 84)
It should be noted that Levinas's reading of Descartes in Totality and Infinity is highly atypical and selective. Descartes supplies Levinas with a model of philosophy as "critique" understood "as a tracing back to what precedes freedom" {TI 85), but nothing more. Levinas rejects Cartesian "subject-object" dualism, the project of setting philosophy on mathematical-like foundations, and the ontological argument for the existence of God . All of these pertain to the very ontology that Levinas ' s own philosophy criticizes.
Plato and the "Good beyond Being" Descartes is not the only philo~opher within the Western philosophical tradition in whom Levinas finds affinities with his own thinking. Another philosopher whose work includes parallelisms with his own is Plato. Speaking in Totality and Infinity of Plato's notion of the "Good beyond Being" (Republic 509 b), Levinas writes:
The Place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching, not of theology, but of philosophy. (TI 103) By the phrase "good beyond being," Plato is drawing our attention to the fact that the Form of the Good is epistemologically and ontologically prior to all the other Forms (eide) . This is perhaps easiest to understand when we recognize that the Forms constitute the perfect essences of things in the world of appearances. Every Form is good in the sense of being a good model or perfect blueprint, and thus can be said in some sense to depend on the Form of the Good- the highest Form- for its existence. For Levinas, as for Plato, the Form of the Good has a moral significance. It is in terms of the Good that everything else- including the Being of beings- is to be understood . This signals for Levinas an exception in the history of philosophy, which has tended to give priority to ontology and epistemology over ethics.
26
How then does the Same relate to the Other without destroying the otherness of the Other. How is ethics possible? It is unquestionably the face that provides our everyday and most immediate access to each other. The ethical relation is enacted "face-toface." By the term "face" (visage), Levinas does not simply mean a person ' s countenance. Indeed, for Levinas, the face is not strictly speaking an "object" of vision at all. It cannot be represented in a work of art, a painting or a sculpture, and is not a mask or persona that "I wear." The face rather is personification in that it presents-rather than represents- the Other in person. It is the very presence of that which does not present itself to knowledge and understanding in the manner of things. According to Levinas, the human face is unique in that it expresses the person whose face it is "kath auto" (TI 67 passim) ("of its own uccord" or "by itself'). Levinas borrows this term from Book !':!. of Aristotle's Metaphysics, where it is defined as
whatever factor of a thing 's being cannot be a factor of some other being So, a man can be explained as an animal, a biped, but "by himself' a man is a man. (1022a 30-35) The face has meaning kath auto in the sense that it does not depend on anything else- signs, language, culture- to have the meaning that it does. The way in which the Other always escapes visual representation is depicted in Rene Magritte's intriguing painting Not to be Reproduced.
27
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face It should be noted that according to Levinas discourse does not require the use of actual words (see Chapter 5 below). He tells us that " the whole body- a hand or a curve of the shoulder--can express as lhc face" (Tl 262). "Expression" here is similar to what Plato in the l'haedrus called "living and animate speech" (276 a8) that "knows how 10 defend itself' (276 e9; see Tl 66). Levinas likens it best to the " language of the eyes" (TI 66):
The eyes break through the mask-the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks. (TI 66) In As You Like It, Shakespeare speaks of"eyes, that are the frail'st und softest things I Who shut their coward gates on atomies" (3.5.1213). Levinas too draws attention to the vulnerability of the eyes, which make murder (ethically) impossible. Speaking of "the total nudity of lthej defenseless eyes," he writes, "there is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the res istance of what has no resistance- the ethical resistance" (TI 199).
Nesponsibility
Rene Magritte, Not to be Reproduced ( 193 7)
Discourse The ethical relationship between the Same and the Other-the faceto-face- is primarily enacted as discourse (TI 39). Discourse here is not to be understood as the straightforward passage of information from one person to the next. It is first of all a matter of responding to the Other. According to Levinas, we always speak in response to the Other, whose face presents itself as a kind of order or command to be heard. Levinas tells us that the "first word" of the face consists in the Biblical injunction: "Thou shalt not kill" (Tl I 99). The meaning of the face is straightway ethical . 28
The language of the face does not merely consist in the negative prohibition against murder, but also in the positive command to give with "full hands" (Tl 205). For Levinas the face is the face of destitution and poverty. Indeed it is precisely through the Other's r ondition of being the Biblical "stranger, the widow, the orphan" (Jer. :3; see Tl 77) that he or she has power over me. Levinas writes, in typical lyrical fashion:
This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving . .. this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness ofthe face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. (TI 75) The face-to-face, which ro rnprehension , emerges as " Responsibility" here is to be n·.l'ponsivity (i.e., responding)
cannot be reduced to a relation of responsibility for the other person. understood in two senses of the word : to the Other and responsibility for the 29
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face
Other. To respond with responsibility to the face of the Other means concretely to take care of the Other's needs. Such is what Levinas calls "ethics."
Conscience welcomes the Other. It is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naive right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself feels itself to be arbitrary and violent. (TI 84)
Asymmetry and Height One of the most original aspects of Levinas' s ethics- and for some critics the most disconcerting- is the claim that ethical responsibility cannot be reversed. Ethics is not a kind of double-entry bookkeeping which records each transaction as both a credit and a debit. According to Levinas, I am responsible for the Other without the Other being responsible for me in turn . It may indeed be the case that the Other has obligations toward me, but I cannot know this for certain. The Other's responsibility remains "his affair" (EI 98). 'Levinas thus describes the ethical relation as one of "asymmetry" in which the Other approaches me from a dimension of "height"- "the elementary fact of morality" (Tl 297}--calling me to goodness:
Goodness consists in taking up a position such that the Other counts more than myself (TI 247) There are no arguments at this point. There are no arguments as to why the Other should count more than I do. To give an argument would automatically be to return ethics to the order of ontology, systems, and categories. It would be to consider the Other and me on the same level. To take care of the Other's needs without remuneration or reward is the very meaning of ethical asymmetry. Levinas finds it encapsulated in Dostoyevsky's words from the Brothers Karamazov:
Each of us is responsible before everyone for everyone, and I more than the rest. (BK 339)
Here we meet with one of the central claims of Totality and 11!/fnity, namely that the ethical encounter with the Other begins in the shame I feel when I recognize my freedom to be arbitrary and murderous in its very exercise. 'The welcoming of the Other is ipso litcto the consciousness of my own injustice- the shame that freedom lue ls for itself' (TI 86). It is worth underlining that this shameful "consciousness" does not derive from a decision to seek out and mull over what might be called a lack of scruples.
Freedom is at the same time discovered in the consciousness of shame and concealed in the shame itself Shame does not have the structure ofconsciousness and clarity. (TI 84) Levinas is concerned to show how the Other is capable of " investing" my freedom by instilling it with what it was previously lucking, namely, justification. Justification here does not amount to a lhcoretical demonstration or proof of freedom (Kant himself had l' lllphasized the futility of that endeavor). Rather, it has a specifically moral meaning, which is why we read: 'To justify freedom is not to prove it, but to render it just" (TI 83). Levinas calls this requirement for I he I to justify its freedom in the face of the Other "apology" (TI 40).
luionomy and Heteronomy What, then, are we to make of Levinas ' s claim that the "imperialism same is the whole essence of freedom" (Tl 87)? How can II ccdom, which is naturally violent or unjust, aspire to responsibility 111d become just? It is Kant, of course, who drew the distinction between two types of lrccdom: autonomy (from the Greek word auto-nomos, meaning "selflUling") and heteronomy (from hetero-nomos, meaning "other-ruling"). For Kant, all moral action as such is autonomous insofar as it consists 111 l(lllowing a rational universal law ("the Categorical Imperative") that
or lhe
Conscience and Apology The Other who dominates me from a dimension of height is not only a "master" (TI I 0 I) but also a "judge" (TI 240). To submit to ethical judgment, whereby the natural egoism or spontaneity of the I is called into question, is what is ordinarily called "conscience." Levinas writes: 30
31
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face
I find within myself. I thus give myself the law. Levinas borrows Kant's distinction but reverses its meaning. For him morality is not autonomy but heteronomy (see Tl 88). The latter however is quite different from what Kant called " negative freedom" or "spontaneity." Moral freedom as heteronomy for Levinas is not a license to unrestrained liberty. It is rather the sober obedience to an obligation from which I personally cannot escape and which comes from the Other.
is the f. The personal character of apology is maintained in this election by which the I is accomplished qua f. (TI 245)
The freedom of the I is neither the arbitrariness of an isolated being nor the conformity of an isolated being with a rational and universal law incumbent on all. My arbitrary freedom reads its shame in the eyes that look at me. It /i apologetic, that is, refers already from itself to the judgment of the Other which it solicits, and which does not offend it as a limit. (TI 252) It might be wondered whether an obligation that is not rationally motivated should be called " freedom" at all. Indeed, after reading the following quotation from the Jewish Talmudic Synhedrin Treatise I 04b, one might have severe doubts:
To leave men without food is a fault that no circumstance attenuates; the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary does not apply here. (Rabbi Yochanan quoted by Levinas [TI 20 I]) Although the ethical relation is not freely, rationally, or selfconsciously motivated, it is not thereby to be thought of as coerced. Levinas writes: "The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes ; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself' (TI 218-9). In other words, I can choose to act responsibly though I cannot choose to be responsible . The fact that the will has no choice but to be responsible ("it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself') is what is most crucial here, and is echoed later in Totality and Infinity as follows:
To utter "/, " to affirm the irreducible singularity in which the apology is pursued, means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one else can replace me and from which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this 32
Levinas is here anticipating the major theme of Otherwise than Being, namely, "substitution" and the associated concepts of "hostage," "persecution," and "obsession." We will return to these themes in hapter 7.
The Third Party and Reason The Third Party It was noted above that the ethical relation is asymmetrical in that lhe Other counts more than me. Levinas insists, however, that this :lhical asymmetry is invisible to the third party observer (le tiers) who stands outside the relation. Although I see the Other as higher than me ti·om the first personal point of view within the relation, from an :xternal point of view there is no difference between us. The Other and I are thus seen as interchangeable and the relationship between us revers ible. The third party plays an important role in Levinas's work, 1ilpresenting both the totalizing standpoint of reason as well as the rest of humanity, not physically present at the time of the encounter. Th is might be taken to suggest that the third party has nothing to do with ethics. But that is not true at all. According to Levinas, though the th ird party sees the ethical relationship from the outside, he or she is seen within it. In an important chapter in Totality and Infinity called "The Other and the Others," we read :
The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other- language is justice. The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity . .. the third party, thus present at the encounter. ... The presence of the face is a presence of the third party (that is, of the whole of humanity which looks at us) . (TI 213) In facing one, I face everyone. We will discuss what motivated I .l•vinas to include reference to third party in his discussion of ethics Iuter when examining the role of justice in Otherwise than Being (see ( 'huptcr 8). In Totality and Infinity Levinas is not concerned with the problem of justice to the same degree because he is in the process of 33
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face
working out a conception of ethics that begins with my recognition of the Other's suffering and thus superiority over me. This suffering is not restricted to the person facing me, of course, but it is only in the faceto-face relation that I am able to be moved by it. In "Transcendence and Height," appearing just one year later, in 1962, he wrote:
The State which realizes its essence in works slips toward tyranny and thus attests my absence from my works, which across conomic necessities return to me as alien. From work I am only deduced and am already ill-understood, betrayed rather than expressed. (TI 176)
There are cruelties which are terrible because they proceed from the necessity of the reasonable order. There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the Other. (BP 23)
After their production works have a commercial or economic dcsliny through which they receive a meaning that is wholly Independent of the interpretation that was initially intended for them. ll cnce forth they "take on the anonymity of merchandise, an anonymity tnlo which , as wage earner, the worker himself may disappear" (TI 6). Again against Hegel, and closer to Marx, Levinas argues that work docs not emancipate the worker. Work represents the person whose work it is only in some quite formal capacity as producer, whereby he or she becomes representable by any other, and thus open to l'X ploilation.
The relations that operate at the level of the State- commerce, bureaucracy, and war- are thus defective in that they cannot recognize, let alone accommodate, the particular needs:ofthe face. As we will see, politics misunderstands those needs, which it relegates to the realm of correlative rights and obligations.
The State and Work The judgment of the face prior to the apology is to be sharply distinguished from all judgment having to do with the rational application of a general category, concept, or precept to a particular case. Levinas calls this rational judgment "politics," which he associates with the violence of ontology and the universal order. We read:
Politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other ... for it judges them according to universal rules and thus as in absentia. (TI 300) The relation with the political totality, where the same and the Other are judged in their absence, is called "work," which includes "actions, gestures, manners, objects utilized and fabricated" (TI 175). Essentially politics is concerned not with individual persons but with
personnel. This stands in sharp contrast to the view of Hegel, who argued that work is the medium through which an individual "becomes conscious of what he truly is" (PS § 195), i.e., arrives at objective confirmation of her or his existence. For Levinas, work is ultimately the basis not for recognition but "misrecognition" (TI 227; 297): 34
In political life, left to itself humanity is understood from its works- a humanity of interchangeable men, of reciprocal relations. The substitution of men for one another, primal disrespect, makes possible exploitation itself (TI 298) Not only do "life and labor mask" (TI 178), they enslave. As a wugc earner, I am subject to the will of others, who "can dispossess me ol my work, take it or buy it, and thus direct my very behavior" (TI 7). Work, which should have liberated me, if only from material lll'ccss ities, serves to dominate my freedom, leaving me open to uppropriation and exploitation. Hegel's slave is a slave after all.
1\unl and the Categorical Imperative For the German Enlightenment thinker Kant, the idea that rational judgment "according to universal rules" could constitute a "tyranny" would be unintelligible. It would make no sense because practical judgment on the basis of a priori rules coincides with what Kant calls moral judgment, where what I will is judged according to an a priori 1ulc known as the Categorical Imperative. In Groundwork of the Ml'taphysic of Morals Kant offers a formulation of the Categorical llupcrative as follows: "Act only on that maxim through which you can 35
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face
at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (G 21). The principles upon which actions are undertaken, which when valid for a particular agent in particular circumstances are called "maxims," must, if moral, be chosen according to their suitability to function as universally legislative. Practical judgment as the basis of universal law is situated by Kant at the antipodes of "tyranny." It is freedom (autonomy) itself. Levinas, however, remains unconvinced; his conclusion the same:
of universal laws, the I enters under judgment by the fact of being good. (TI 24 7)
the virile judgment of "pure reason " is cruel. (TI 243) Essentially Levinas's criticism of Kant's ethics is twofold. Firstly, it destroys the conditions for separation,. and secondly, it cannot account for ethical asymmetry. "ldealisrrl," he writes, "reduces all ethics to politics" (TI 216). That Levinas has Kant's so-called kingdom of ends- "a systematic union of different rational beings under common laws" (G 95)-specifically in mind here is made clear a few lines later:
In the kingdom of ends, where persons are indeed defined as wills, but where the will is defined as what permits itself to be affected by the universal-where the will wishes to be reason, be it practical reason- multiplicity rests in fact only on the hope ofhappiness. ... In this world without multiplicity . . . each being is posited apart from all the others, but the will of each, or ipseity, from the start consists in willing the universal or rational, that is, in negating its very particularity. (Tf 217) In Levinas's view, the kingdom of ends is a suppression of "multiplicity," a denial of separation that rests on enjoyment and happiness. Levinas 's second chief objection to Kant's moral theory is that it cannot accommodate ethical " height." In Kant's moral theory, otherscalled "persons"-are given respect only insofar as they have the same capacity as I to follow purely rational laws. What Levinas calls the ethical asymmetry between us is thus hidden or destroyed. In Totality and Infinity we read :
The deepening of my responsibility in the judgment that is borne upon me is not of the order of universalization: beyond the justice 36
War Politics is not opposed to morality through commerce alone. Indeed, it is important to bear in mind that the asymmetrical relation with the other, according to Levinas, "can take on the aspect of the symmetrical relation" (TI 225)-or commerce- to the extent that commerce is necessary for ethics, which is "incapable of approaching the other with empty hands" (TI 50). This opposition is most evident in the situation of modern war as opposed to personal combat. In personal combat, adversaries "refuse to belong to a totality" (TI 222); they "seek out one unother" and thus do "not refuse relationship" (TI 223). In modern military combat, by contrast, the totality is extended, national boundaries become blurred, combatants do not manifest themselves in their exteriority and consequently are encountered only through logistics. Hence,
individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisib le outside of this totality) is derived from the totality. (TI 22) As with commerce, individuals engaged in war play roles in which they are no longer recognized nor are recognizable (TI 21). This is attested by monuments to the "Unknown Soldier," a sorrowful reminder of the anonymity of modern warfare.
Death Shakespeare's "Undiscovered Country" Whether it be in the heat of battle or the dead of night, the death one receives is absolutely unknowable. Shakespeare writes: "But that the dread of something after death I the undiscovered country, from whose bourn I No traveler returns I puzzles the will" (Hamlet 3.1.76-82). Levinas presents the puzzle thus:
One does not know when death will come. What will come? With 37
Face-to-Face
Face-to-Face what does death threaten me? With nothingness or with recommencement? I do not know. In this impossibility of knowing the after my death resides the essence of the last moment. I can absolutely not apprehend the moment of death. . . . My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power. (Tl 234) If this were all Levinas had to say about death then one might wonder why he bothered to discuss it at all. But Levinas goes on to draw several conclusions from the fact that death is absolutely unknowable. The first is that "the unwonted hour of its coming approaches as the hour of fate fixed by someone" (TI 235). Although I know it is purely contingent when I will di~, I tend to think of that day as predetermined by someone. Death is situated in a region ("bourn") from which murder or execution comes. It is as though I am to die at an appointed hour. I do not know in advance when that time is because someone else has determined it for me . Hence Levinas writes:
· ~ It
is Oasein's " ownmost" possibility. By this, Heidegger means to ny th11t death is the possibility of authentic existence. Death is a way of lwtng that each Dasein must adopt for him- or herself, explaining why I >uNuin a lways dies alone (BT 294). Lev inas disagrees with every one of these Heideggerian claims. For I l'Vinus, not only is death always future, not only does it deprive me of poNs ibilities that exist independently of the relation to the Other, it 11111111Lains the relation to th e Other. This last point is clarified by I .l·vinas in the following passage:
'f"!Je solitude of death does not make the Other vanish, but remains i11 a consciousness of hostility, and consequently still renders possible an appeal to the Other, to his friendship and his medication. The doctor is an a priori principle of human mortality. Death approaches in the fear of someone, and hopes in someone . . .. A social conjuncture is maintained in this menace. (TI 234)
Fulurity Death threatens me from beyond. This unknown that frightens, the silence of the infinite spaces that terrify [Pascal, Pensees], comes from the other, and this alterity, precisely as absolute, strikes me in an evil design or in a judgment ofjustice. (TI 234) "Conscience," says the great procrastinator, Hamlet, "doth make cowards of us all" (Hamlet 3 . I .91 ).
The Impossibility of Possibility Indeed, Hamlet' s procrast ination , his inability to act, whether it be killing himself or avenging hi s father's death, attests to the radical passivity that comes from the consciousness of one 's own mortality. Levinas describes thi s as "the impossibility of every possibility" (TI 235). Here Levinas is deliberately contrasting his own thought with that of Heidegger, who in Being and Time describes death as the "possibility of impossibility" (BT 307). For Heidegger, death (after having been redefined as "dying" or "being-towards-death") is a unique possibility of Dasein 's inasmuch as it can never be actualized as long as Dasein lives. Not that Heidegger thereby states that death can never happen . On the contrary, Heidegger asserts that death is not only " possible at any moment" (BT 302), but that it is also unique inasmuch 38
Mortality does not simply include reference to the Other in the role ol murderer or medic . In the time that remains between me and my death, there will be time for me to be for the Other. " This is why death n umot drain all meaning from life" (TI 236). It is not that the Other is there, as Heidegger suggests, to "tranquilize" (BT 298) me about death hy telling me that death will not happen at that moment. Levinas claims that death is always future not in order to console the reader or remove his or her anxiety. His point is a logical one. As Epicurus says, "so long ns we ex ist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist" (Letter to Menoeceus). For Levinas, the time that remains until my death is enough time to do one last thing for the neighbor, who will survive me, and thus do something that does not end with my life. In this postponement of death , my life is given meaning that the inevitab ility of my fast-approaching death cannot destroy.
The will . .. on the way to death but a death ever future, exposed to death but not immediately, has time to be for the Other, and thus The goodness whose meaning recover meaning despite death. death cannot efface, has its center outside itself (TI 236) Lev inas goes on to add : 39
4
Face-to-Face We shall have to show this in the course of bringing to light the other chance that the will seizes upon in the time left it by its being against death: the founding of institutions in which the will ensures a meaningful, but impersonal world beyond death. (TI 236) We will see in the next chapter how the will manages somehow to go "beyond death." To finish this discussion, let us emphasize that for Levinas death entails a social relation that restores meaning to life by making it possible for me to do something/or the other in the time that remains before death- a possibility that is thus not mine in any straightforward sense, and which my death thus cannot annihilate. In his discussion of an inauthentic way of dying, Heidegger in Being and Time cites Tolstoy ' s novella 'Fhe Death of Ivan 1/ych as literary attestation of the "phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having ' someone die"' (BT 495 n. xii). To be sure, the majority of what Tolstoy says in his short story would seem to confirm what Heidegger says about the tendency of Dasein to " flee" in the face of its death . But it also contains a remarkable ending that is less Heideggerian and more Levinasian. The passage in question concerns Ivan ' s final realization that he is indeed going to die, that his life was not as it should have been, but there was still time to put it right:
"Yes, I am making them wretched, " he thought. "They are sorry, but it will be better for them when I die. " He wished to say this but had not the strength to utter it. "Besides, why speak? I must act," he thought. With a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: "Take him away . .. sorry f or him . .. sorry for you too. ... " (KS 62)
Eros
Not a ll peaceful relations with the Other are enacted face-to-face. In
thu final section of Totality and Infinity, entitled "Beyond the Face," I .cv inas examines the relation of love, a relation that is said to bring tho ut an alteration in the very identity or "substance" of the I, giving 1 1sc to a future that is paradoxically both mine and not mine.
lt: ros, Friendship, and Familial Love Jk tween Desire and Need T he Greeks used four terms to designate various types of love as lo llows: I) Eros, the sexual or physical desire that exists between couples (heterosexual and homosexual). 2) Stergos, the affection denoting the mutual love between family members. 3) Philos, the care and concern that friends have for each other. 4) Agape, love of the neighbor, involving a deliberate choice to do good for another independently of self-interest. In his discussion of love , Levinas is concerned with variants 1), 2), md 3). He is chiefly concerned with 1), though at the beginning of the
40
41
Eros
Eros
adopting a "deliberately male point of view" (SS 16 n. l) Also, the very descriptions Levinas gives of the feminine beloved are considered insulting to women. ("The beloved, returned to the stage of infancy without responsibility- this coquettish head, this youth, this pure life, 'a bit silly' -has quit her status as a person" [TI 263).) They appear to belong to a patriarchal tradition that used the same characterizations to deny women the vote, for example. In defense of Levinas, it should be pointed out that he also describes woman in extremely positive terms as "master superiorly intelligent, so often dominating men in the masculine civilization she has entered" (TI 264). Indeed, at times Levinas seems to suggest that what he is calling "femininity" and "masculinity" cannot be reduced to actual differences between the sexes, but emerge rather as :'ways to be" for both the sexes, rather like Heidegger's existentialia:
1111us il to describe the feminine beloved, whose way of being consists in oscaping intelligibility while nevertheless giving herself over to erotic nhu ndon and exhibitionist nudity. Levinas speaks of this ambiguous wn y of being as one of "being not yet," as though the beloved were a p11un ise of something that appears without appearing:
The essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming signification. This unreality at the threshold of the real does not offer itself as a possible to be grasped. . . "Being not yet " is not this or that. . . . It ref ers to the modesty it has profaned without overcoming. The secret appears without appearing. (TI 256-7) The lack of signification or meaning on the part of the beloved here Mallarme once said (in true Symbolist style), "To name an object is to destroy three quarters of the poem 's delight. This after all is u1ude fro m the pleasure of gues sing little by little" (SB 8). A similar daim can be made in regard to the feminine, who is "profaned" in vo luptuousness but not "as a possible to be grasped." The way of the 1\lmi nine in the "night of the erotic" (Tl 258) consists in the fact that in the process of immodestly giving herself, she precisely does not give hurself- a contradiction in formal logic (Tl 260). The opposite of pornography, it is as though there were always something more to see, something more to come, another veil to lift. This is witnessed by the 'lll·ess: IN crucial.
Allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the f eminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being. (EI 68) Of course, this leaves unanswered the question why Levinas should use the name "feminine" to refer to one group of attributes that is supposedly shared by both sexes.
The Phenomenology of Eros Voluptuousness Levinas likens the beloved to the nymphs in Stephane Mallarme's Symbolist poem Afternoon of a Faun ( 1865). The nymphs are seduced (or imagined so) by a faun , half man and half beast, lying in the reedy undergrowth of a lakeside bank on a hot, hazy, shimmering afternoon.
These nymphs I would perpetuate. I So clear I Their light carnation, that it floats in the air I Heavy with tufted slumbers. I Was it a dream I loved? (translation by Roger Fry) The poem has a quality of unreality about it, which is why Levinas
44
The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it fo rages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it. It is hungry for this very expression, in an unremitting increase of hunger. (TI 257-8) Notice that Levinas here places the accent on the future . The caress moves into the future that is not yet. It does not anticipate what is to come (or what it finds) but searches without knowing what it is that it is looking for. This is why it "does not act, does not grasp possibles" (TI 259). On the contrary, its movement consists in going " beyond the possible" (TI 281). Levinas claims that "we are here before a new
45
Eros category" (TI 266). He calls its "fecundity," which is defined as the power to engender a child.
Paternity and Maternity Beyond the face and language, eros aims at a remote and nonanticipatable future. Levinas identifies this future as the time in which my child lives, and characterizes the relation I have with my child as "paternity" (Tl 267). We should mention that terms like "fecundity" and " paternity," etc., are not to be understood in a straightforwardly "empirical" or "biological sense" (TI 277). Levinas insists that while "biology furnishes us the prototypes of all these relations . . . these relations free themselves from their biological limitation" (TI 279). They are tropes or metaphors that Levinas uses to speak of a class of relations that are possible with any human being, not merely with one's kinfolk. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes,
The son is not only my work, like a poem or an object, nor is he my property. . .. I do not have my child; I am my child Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other . . . is me, a relation of the I with a self which is yet not me. (Tl 277) The idea that the father does not merely cause his son but in some sense is his son, is substantially in him without being the same as him, is one that Levinas claims is impossible to think in terms of formal logic: "The structure of the subjectivity' s identity that is produced in eros takes us outside the categories of classical logic" (TI 272). Not that the thought is thus outside of all criticism. Levinas's perhaps unquestioned use of masculine language ("paternity," "father," "son"), along with his failure to mention the daughter certainly do little to allay the suspicion that Levinas ' s account is gender biased. There is, however, one important exception. Speaking of the relation of filiality "with its essential reference to the protective existence of the parents," Levinas adds, "the notion of maternity must be introduced to account for this recourse" (TI 278). Levinas will return to the idea of maternity in Chapter 3 of Otherwise than Being, where it becomes a trope for the ethical relation, which includes bearing the weight of responsibility for the Other in an act of substitution (08 75). His use of the term in Totality and Infinity already shows that what is at stake in filiality is
46
Eros
1111 ethics, albeit ethics under a new aspect- what Levinas calls the "' ulinity of time" (TI 281). We will return to this in a moment. One way to understand Levinas's startling claim that in paternity, lhtl I both is and is not its son (or daughter) is to think of the Other as a 01 t of project in life. Everybody knows that good parents are 1nN ponsible parents. They feed and clothe their children, protect and tlllllurc them, educate and cultivate them. They strive to teach their 1 hildrcn to become the best they can be- whether in math, music, art, 1tcnce, or sport. While there is often a temptation to exert too much 1outro l over the child by not allowing it to make its own choices in life, lht• good parent knows where to draw the line between negligence and ht• tng too controlling. The goal here is to teach the child to become ludl.lpendent so that he or she will be in a position to make his or her own choices in life. You might say that paradoxically the parent makes It poss ible for the child to generate his or her own possibilities. Or, to put it another way, the child depends on the parents to become Ind ependent. To the extent that the parents are successful and manage to teach lhl.l child to become independent, then it can be said that the parents Jl'H iize one of their possibilities. They make possible the possibilities of tl ll.l ir child- possibilities that are both theirs (they made them possible) nnd not theirs (they are possibilities of their child, who is an iudependent being). Levinas expresses this most succinctly in an Interview : The fact of seeing the possibilities of the other as your own possibilities, of being able to escape the closure of your own identity and what is bestowed on you, toward something which is not bestowed and which is nevertheless yours-this is paternity. This future beyond my own being, this dimension constitutive of time, takes on a concrete content in paternity. (EI 70) How are the Other's possibilities my possibilities? How can there be a type of parental relation which the Other outside ofbiology?
The Gift of Giving The gift can sometimes go further than we can ever imagine. We typically think of the gift as stopping with the recipient; we imagine the Other as a sort of terminus . Once the Other has received the gift, the
47
Eros
Eros possibility I embarked on has been actualized, and the act of giving is finished. Levinas suggests, however, that the gift, and the desiring possibility that sends it on its way, go beyond the Other. We read:
The Other is not a term; he does not stop the movement of Desire. The other that Desire desires is again Desire; transcendence transcends toward him who transcends- this is the true adventure of paternity, of the transubstantiation which permits going beyond the simple renewal of the possible in the inevitable senescence of the subject. Transcendence, the for the Other, the goodness correlative of the face, founds a more profound relation: the goodness of goodness. Fecundity engendering fecundity accomplishes goodness: above and beyond the sacrifice that imposes a gift, the gift of the power of giving, the conception of the child. (Tl 269) ' The passage is not as difficult to grasp as it might at first appear. Levinas is making the point that through the gift goodness (or Desire) engenders more goodness (or Desire). How so? Imagine I helped a friend to get back on his or her feet again after a bout of depression. Imagine that during the depression, she was in so much psychological pain that her relationships with Others became virtually impossible or seriously impaired. In helping her find a way out the tunnel of despair, did I not make it possible for her to be there for Others should they require assistance in the future , a time when perhaps I am no longer there? Even though I must die ("the inevitable senescence of the subject"), the good deeds I do live on through Others. Perhaps this is the meaning behind the "miracle" story of the feeding of the five thousand in the Gospels. Perhaps the five loaves and two fish symbolize the fecund power of giving that keeps on multiplying its effects.
IVt''' the possibility of having a meaningful life despite the 1111 vHubility of my death . Earlier, we saw how according to Levinas the illlll' I have life on this earth enables the will to seize the possibility to IH' 11).\Uinst death by "the founding of institutions in which the will rii ~ III CS a meaningful, but impersonal world beyond death." To the n lt•nt that this possibility is mine, then it makes sense to speak of my ll vi11 g on in the lives of Others. II must be emphasized that in no way is Levinas suggesting that self I~ literally reborn or " reincarnated." Ethics is not the mythical l'hilosophers' Stone that guarantees life everlasting. This is because the tllhcr's future is in a very real sense discontinuous with my life. The t IIIIer is newness and rupture. He or she introduces fresh springtides luto ex istence, first by making it possible to have possibilities in r ' "fence beyond death, and second by paradoxically changing the nll'llning or the character of one's past. This latter possibility is what I t•vinas calls "pardon":
The paradox of pardon lies in its retroaction; from the point of view of common time it represents an inversion of the natural order of things, the reversibility of time. ... Pardon . . . permits the subject who had committed himself in a past instant to be as though that instant had not passed on, to be as though he had not committed himself (Tl 283)
The idea that I can somehow survive my death through fecundity and countless future generations leads Levinas to introduce a new structure of time- what he calls "the Infinity of time." The Infinity of time is the time in which the I exists without the finite limits of mortality. It is a time of perpetual youth and recommencement in that it liberates the self from the past and aging. In being-for-the-Other, I am
The Other- in a relationship called fecundity, my child as it wereliberates me from the consequences of my own past actions. It is not that I literally did not do X or Y, but it is as though I did not do them. I he Other permits me to disburden myself of any unfortunate choices or mistakes in the past, turning them into a felix culpa (literally, " fortunate fall"). In the measure that I am responsible for the Other in the future, I am relieved of the weight of responsibility for the past. What is the connection between this new understanding of time and the "dream of a happy eternity" associated with Jewish Messianic thinking? Levinas modestly acknowledges that "the problem exceeds the bounds" (TI 285) of Totality and Infinity. He will never again return to the topic directly- possibly because he felt that talk of a happy outcome to our moral actions risked resuscitating the idea of a theodicy that he definitively rejects, and which after the Holocaust looks more dubious than ever. But Levinas is clear about this much: there is something wearisome about life without the Other. It is as though the
48
49
The Infinity ofTime
Eros sheer fact of being- which early on in his career he called the "there is" ("if y a")-were in the words of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire: "tedium, fruit of the mournful incuriosity that take on proportions of immortality" ("Spleen"; quoted by Levinas [TI 307]). With these words Levinas closes Totality and Infinity. One should perhaps contrast them with the fina l line ofSartre's play No Exit: "Hell is other people." For Levinas, on the contrary, hell is being alone.
50
PART2 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)
51
5 The Saying and the Said
At the time Levinas presented Totality ~nd Infinity for his Doctorat d' Etat in 1961, he was a relatively obscure philosophical figure in French intellectual life. Although he was instrumental in introducing Jean-Paul Sartre to phenomenology, he was known primarily as a Husser( and Heidegger scholar but not as a thinker in his own right. This was to change, however, with the publication of an essay by Jacques Derrida entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" (originally published in 1964, and republished with minor changes in 1967). This dense, seventy-page essay was among the first publications on Levinas and almost singlehandedly secured Levinas ' s reputation as one of the most important thinkers in twentieth-century Continental philosophy. It also enabled Derrida to pay his debts to a thinker whose influence on his own work has been profound. Today, it is almost impossible to write on Levinas without considering the questions raised by Derrida concerning Levinas's language. Nor indeed is it possible to write on Derrida's fundamental concepts of the " trace," "other," and "differance," without acknowledging the influence of Levinas.
Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics"
The Saying and the Said ••~ t l' IIS ibly
lies beyond ontology and the philosophical tradition. Derrida
wtil cs:
We are wondering about the meaning of a necessity: the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it. Why did this necessity . . . impose itself upon Levinas? (WD 112) l.cvinas's apparent failure to acknowledge his dependence on the l1111guage and conceptuality of the philosophical tradition in his ntt l·mpted break with ontology leads Derrida to accuse him of " hl'lmying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse" (WD I ' I). Thus when Levinas writes, for example, in Totality and Infinity lhut " Being is produced as multiple and as split into same and other; tills is its ultimate structure . . .. We thus leave the philosophy of l1u11ncnidean being" (TI 269), it is almost impossible not to get the i111prcss ion that Levinas believes he has succeeded in leaving the oulological tradition behind him. Derrida argues that Levinas has done uothing of the sort. If we inquire after the being of the relation that lll'l' Urs between the same and other, we find, according to Derrida, that 11 l' Unnot be "thought or said" (WD 127) without reference to them hoth , thereby presupposing a certain unity. The argument is a classical IIIIC, first formulated in Plato's Sophist, in which the terms "same" (to 111/to/tauto) and "other" (heteron) were said to be relative to one 111other. Sameness could be said of something only in relation to IIIIIClhing other than it, whereby the same can be said to "participate in It ~ opposite" (Sophist 255a). Similarly, the other is "just what it is tluough compulsion of some other" (255d). Accordingly-and this is a ll'l urrent theme of Derrida's long essay- like the Eleatic Stranger of Pluto 's dialogue, whose attempts to name "any opposite of being" ( !Wa) constantly fell to the "inconceivable, inexpressible, unspeakable, 11111tional " (283c)-Levinas must inevitably fail in his attempts to bring tlwt which is "beyond being" (TI 30) to thought and language without ll' lcrcnce to the thought and language of being itself. Like the Stranger, h1• must inevitably fail in his intention to break with Parmenides.
The Problem of Ontological Language /,c•vinas 's Response Derrida's essay " Violence and Metaphysics" is primarily a reflection on the methodological impasse Levinas encounters when using ontological language and concepts to speak of ethics that
While Derrida was undoubtedly correct to call attention to the tllnost insurmountable difficulties of breaking free from metaphysics,
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53
The Saying and the Said he perhaps failed to appreciate the extent to which Levinas was already well aware of the double bind in which he was caught Indeed, Levinas had already made it clear that although ontological language is unavoidable, no necessary commitment is made thereby to the traditional conceptuality underlying that language. This is because what is said in a philosophical text can always be qualified, retracted, and even contradicted if need be in order to make room for an altogether different conceptuality. As early as the "Preface" to Totality and Infinity Levinas writes:
It belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood ln the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. (TI 30) Perhaps the most far-reaching example of what Levinas is here calling "unsaying the said" is his retraction of certain ontologically loaded terms in Totality and Infinity in favor of the completely new ethical register of his second major work on ethics, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In his autobiography "Signature," Levinas explains that the departure from the language of Totality and Infinity was deliberate:
The ontological language which Totality and Infinity still uses in order to exclude the purely psychological significance of the proposed analyses is hereafter avoided. And the analyses themselves refer not /o the experience in which the subject always thematizes what he equals, but to the transcendence in which he answers for that which his intentions have not encompassed. (OF 295) In Otherwise than Being gone are terms like "presence," "interiority/exteriority," and "experience," and in their place we find such non-philosophical terms as "obsession," "hostage," and "persecution." Perhaps the most important characteristic of Otherwise than Being is the de-emphasis of the face-to-face relation, so central to Totality and Infinity, and the introduction of the distinction between what Levinas calls "the saying" (le dire) and "the said (le dit). 54
The Saying and the Said l~thical
Language
'f'he Saying and the Said In Otherwise than Being, Levinas distinguishes between language in its expressive or ethical function, called "saying," and language in its theoretical or ontological function, the "said." According to Levinas, lnnguage cannot be reduced to a merely instrumental function as a tool lor transmitting information. Language also has an ethical dimension that is irreducible to what is said. He refers to this ethical dimension as 1 pure saying or "sincerity":
No said equals the sincerity of the saying. ... Sincerity would then be saying without the said, apparently a "saying so as to say nothing, " a sign I make to another of this giving of signs, "as simple as 'hello."' (08 143) Must one not at least say something objective, say something about lhc world-ontology- before saying only saying itself, before making 1 sign of welcome to the Other? Obviously, "saying" here is not ll~stricted to verbal or written communication; it also includes the possibility of material giving. Shortly before describing the sincerity of t•lhics as a "saying without a said," Levinas tells us that it is "i nseparable from giving for it opens reserves" (08 143). Shortly after describing sincerity as a simple "hello," he tells us that it "is not tlx hausted in invocation, in the salutation that does not cost anything, understood as a pure vocative" (08 144). The welcome must also be 1rcompanied by the giving of one 's possessions. Using language tlcurly intended to shock us out of our bourgeois complacency, Levinas duscribes ethical saying as a
gift painfully torn up . .. not a gift of the heart, but of the bread from one's mouth, of one's own mouthful of bread. It is the openness, not only of one's own pocketbook, but of the doors of one 's home. a "sharing of your bread with the famished, " a "welcoming of the wretched into your house" (Isaiah 58) (OB 74) It might be thought- and this would be Derrida's objection- that I .t•vinas here has not paid enough attention to the order of ontology. 55
The Saying and the Said
The Saying and the Said
Must not bread first be produced before it can be made into a gift for the Other? Does not ethical saying therefore presuppose the entire order of civilization : from agricultural science to relations of commerce, from farming to transportation, from the manufacture of yeast to packaging? We will return to these questions in Chapter 8 when we address the problem of justice and the third party in Levinas's work. Let us mention here in passing that Levinas will indeed go on to grant ontology an important role in ethics, and thus we should be cautious of presenting the relation between the saying and the said as merely one of opposition.
what never presents itself as such to consciousness making it impossible to say who or what it is a trace of. As the trace of a certain "nonpresence" or "nonphenomenon," it signals the relation of differance within the text of philosophy, thwarting its pretensions of full intelligibility or "logocentrism." Whereas Derrida is interested in developing the trace in very general and abstract terms, Levinas is primarily concerned with developing it in connection with the Other human being. For Levinas, the trace is the way in which the Other appears, not as the appearing of a phenomenon, but as a face. "The trace lights up as the face of a neighbor" (08 12). It does so prior to freedom and understanding on my part, as though "the neighbor strikes me before striking me, as though I had heard before he spoke" (OB 88). Levinas is fully aware here that he is contradicting himself. How can the neighbor affect me before affecting me? How can I hear a person before he or she has said anything? The point is that Levinas does not seek to avoid contradiction; on the contrary, he embraces it for it is only through such contradiction that the Other appears in ontological language through in the "enigmatic" form of a trace in which the Other is as it were present in absence.
The Trace How is ethical saying heard if it is pre-linguistic and preontological? How is it possible for Levinas to talk about saying without reducing it to consciousness and thematization? Levinas is acutely aware of the apparent contradiction involved in making what ostensibly cannot be thematized into the theme of his discussion. Whereas in Totality and Infinity the face presents itself as a phenomenon of sorts, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas is uncompromising in his insistence that the "enigma" of ethics can never show itself as such. This does not mean to say that the Other never appears at all. Levinas says that the Other does indeed appear, albeit in the disguised and disruptive form of a "trace." The concept of the trace is perhaps Levinas's most successful and sophisticated attempt to respond to the type of question posed by Derrida in "Violence and Metaphysics." So successful in fact that Derrida himself would take over the concept in his deconstruction of the metaphysics presence. In his most famous work, OfGrammatology ( 1967), Derrida spoke of
the concept of the trace that is at the center of the latest work by Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology . . . which has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as full continuity ofspeech. (OG 70) The indications are such that Derrida came to see the trace as a way of moderating the dependence on the ontological tradition. The trace is not a sign in the conventional sense in that it does not refer to either a concept or an extra-linguistic entity (e.g., a tree). Rather, it refers to 56
Diachrony Another way in which the trace operates in Levinas's work is in terms of what is called "diachrony" (literally, "across time"). Levinas suggests that I and the Other are not related to each other in the same time. Understood in classical phenomenological terms (Husserl's "internal time consciousness"), time consists of a series of now moments that are represented within consciousness by way of memory (retention) or anticipation (protention). Levinas 's understanding of the time of the Other is radically at odds with this picture. The Other cannot be recalled or anticipated in that he or she is never presented (or represented) to consciousness as such. The Other belongs to an "anarchic" (in the etymological sense) time that Levinas calls a "past that was never present." In saying this, Levinas wishes to draw attention to the fact that I find myself commanded by the Other and responsible for him or her prior to consciousness:
the order in the for-the-other of obedience is an anarchic being affected, which slips into me "like a thief" through the 57
The Saying and the Said
The Saying and the Said
outstretched nets of consciousness. . . . The order has never been represented, for it has never been presented, not even in the past coming in memory, to the point that it is I that only says, and after the event, this unheard-of obligation. ... The unheard-of saying is enigmatically in the anarchic response, in my responsibility for the other. (OB 148-9)
ethical terms as responsibility for the human Other. It is to this notion of responsibility that we now turn.
1/leity Levinas asserts that the trace is also the trace of God. This may sound like a traditional claim to make inasmuch as it seeks to unite ethics and religion, but it is a most unusual variant of Divine Command Theory. This is because for Levinas ethics consists in following God's commands paradoxically prior to my hearing t~e command. "I find the order in my response itself' (OB 150). The command to respond to the Other with responsibility presents itself only after the event ("as in a prayer in which the worshipper asks that his prayer to be heard" [OB I 0]). God thus appears to me in the form of a trace, which is the face of the Other-simultaneously "a trace of itself' and "the trace of the infinite" (OB 91 ). Levin as calls this way of relating to the Infinite by way of the face "illeity" ("illeite," a neologism in French, literally meaning "he-ness" in the sense of the unacquainted third person):
The infinite then cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter. The trace left by the infinite is not the residue of a presence; its very glow is ambiguous . . .. The infinite wipes out its traces not in order to trick him who obeys, but because it transcends the present in which it commands me, and because I cannot deduce it from this command. . . . This detour at a face and this detour from this detour in the enigma of a trace we have called illeity. (OB 12) In Totality and Infinity, Levinas made a similar point, albeit in much simpler fashion, when he wrote:
the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face . .. . our relation with {God] is an ethical behavior and not theology. . . . There can be no "knowledge" of God separated from the relationship with men. (TJ 78) This clearly shows that Levinas is concerned to rethink religion in 58
59
6 Responsibility
Responsibility that I am constantly "exposed" to the Other.
The immediacy of the sensible which is not reducible to the gnoseological [knowing) role assumed by sensation is the exposure to wounding and to enjoyment, an exposure to wounding in enjoyment, which enables the wound to reach the subjectivity of the subject complacent in itself and posting itselffor itself (OB 64) What does "exposure to wounding in enjoyment" mean? In order to understand the relation between sensibility and responsibility, we need to answer this question.
One of the major differences between T(Jtality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being concerns the role of sen'sibility in ethics. In the earlier booK:, sensibility was presented as the condition for ethics inasmuch as it made possible the separated I in enjoyment. In Otherwise than Being, sensibility is the way in which the Other and I connect prior to cognition. Levinas calls this " proximity."
Sensibility
Enjoyment and Suffering In Totality and Infinity Levinas remarked that suffering is the absence of happiness, and not the reverse (TI 115). In other words, suffering presupposes a se lf whose natural tendency is to enjoy the world. ("' but open my eyes and already enjoy the spectacle" [TI 130]). Similarly, it is said in Otherwise than Being that suffering presupposes enjoyment. Suffering is not one unpleasant sensation among others; it is the very way in which the Other affects the I living a life of egoism. Says Levinas:
Proximity In Totality and Infinity, Levin as spoke mostly of the ethical relation as a relationship of separation and distance: "Metaphysics approaches without touching" (TI I 09). However, it seems that Levinas eventually became dissatisfied with such a description, which could be seen to invite the misunderstanding that ethics is constituted by vision and theory (from Greek, theorein, to look at, as in a "theater"). In his later writings Levinas thus tends to speak of the ethical relation not as a relation of separation and distance, but that of proximity and contact. "Contact" here does not mean either the caress or the palpation (the method of"feeling" with the hands used during physical examinations). It signifies an immediate attachment to the Other wherein I am no longer free to move away or sever ties, as though the Other were under my skin. This is not meant to imply ethics consists of a fusion between us. We remain different in our cores. The immediacy of proximity suggests that I remain firmly within the relation, living it in such a way
60
sensibility has meaning only as a taking care of the other's need, of his misfortunes and his faults, that is, as a giving. But giving has meaning only as a tearing from oneself despite oneself and not only without me. And to be torn from oneself despite oneself has meaning only as a being torn from the complacency of enjoyment, snatching the bread from one's mouth. Only a subject that eats can be for the other, or can signify. Signification, !he-one-for-theother, has meaning only among creatures of flesh and blood (OB 74). Against the grain of the majority of the Western moral tradition, Levinas argues that only a se lf who eats and enjoys what he or she eats gives can truly give it to the Other. In giving to the Other ethically, there is an obligation to give something of oneself, which means to give one's enjoyment of what is given. Enjoyment is necessary for ethics not o~ly inasmuch as it makes separation possible; it is the precondition for gift-giving. The widow who sacrifices her last two pennies (Mark 12: 61
Responsibility
Responsibility
41-4) in abject poverty gives more than does the bourgeois who donates ten measly dollars to the Salvation Army every Christmas.
"under," and jacere, "to throw") Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being: "The self is a sub-jectum ; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything" (OB 116). Not that the self is subjected to the Other in the manner of servitude. Hence, "if no one is good voluntarily, no one is a slave of the Good" (OB II). According to Levinas, subjectivity lies between the freedom-autonomy and "the determinism-servitude alternative" (CP 134) to the extent that it is always possible to abandon the responsibility that ultimately defines the subject. In " Humanism and An-archy" ( 1968), he writes that there must be
Freedom Passivity We mentioned earlier when examining Totality and Infinity that the ethical relation is not enacted in full freedom . It is not autonomy as Kant defined it. This becomes clearer the more we recognize that the ethical relation is constituted via sensibility prior to consciousness. According to Kant, sensibility is passive in that it is the faculty of receiving sensory intuitions; understanding, on the other hand, is spontaneous or active, and is the faculty of synthesizing these intuitions by bringing them under concepts. Levinas similarly construes sensibility as passive, albeit radically so inasmuch as the Other who affects me cannot be brought under concepts via the transcendental operation of the understanding. The relation between the Other and me is thus said to be "a passivity more passive than all passivity" (OB 14). This notion of radical passivity is not meant to suggest that the Other fully determines my actions or completely controls me . The ethical relation may not be contracted in full freedom , but it is not thereby to be thought of as coercion . While Levinas indeed denies that the ethical relation is one of altruism constituted by full freedom , he goes to some length to make it clear that it is not thereby part of the determinist order of nature or natural necessity. Levinas tells us that " responsibility for others could never mean altruistic will, instinct of ' natural benevolence"' (OB 111-2). "It is against nature, nonvoluntary" (OB 197 n. 27). The responsible relation with the Other is outside the traditional opposition between free will and determinism . Here then Levinas parts company with Sartre, for whom all relations with the Other are a free project of the I, including love: "To will to love and to love are one since to love is to choose oneself as loving by assuming consciousness of loving" (Being and Nothingness, 462; italics added) . In sharp contrast to Sartre, Levinas states, "the Good is not presented to freedom ; it has chosen me before I have chosen it" (OB Ill). It is this passivity that quickly emerges as the locus for personal identity or subjectivity. Capitalizing on the etymological kinship between "subjection" and "subjectivity" (from Latin, sub, meaning 62
the temptation of a facility to make a break [with ethics}. ... Thus there is in the midst of the submission to the Good, the seduction of irresponsibility. (CP 137) This "facility" that makes it possible to break with ethics is sensibility and enjoyment. "This temptation to separate oneself from the Good is the very incarnation of a subject or his presence in being" (CP 137). Only an embodied subject, a subject of sensibility and enjoyment, can be subjected to responsibility. Only thus is it not "a slave to the Good ." It is indeed because responsibility requires the possibility of its own renege- the possibility of"irresponsibility"- that sensibility and enjoyment is assigned such a central role in the Levinasian ethical drama .
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7 Substitution
In Section 3 of Totality and Infinity, speaking of the infinite responsibility for the Other that denotes "not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in the measure that is assumed" (Tl 244), Levinas went on to say:
Perhaps the possibility of a point of the universe where such an overflow of responsibility is produced ultimately defines the I. (TI 245) Does this not threaten to undo the earlier analysis of separation in which the "personal" character of the I was said to result from "the particularity of the happiness of enjoyment"? To see how Levinas came to revise radically the analysis of egoist separation and personal identity as it was presented in Totality and Infinity, we must turn to Chapter 4 of Otherwise than Being, the work's "centerpiece" (OB xli), entitled "Substitution ."
Subjectivity Principle and An-archy The chapter "Substitution" opens with a quotation from the poem "Praise of Distance" by Paul Celan.
I am you, when I am I. (quoted in the German by Levinas [08 99])
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Substitution This line by Celan seems to suggest that the I attains its identity only in relation to the Other- a "you" ("I am you"). This is not to say that the identity of the I is completely destroyed. It is precisely this paradoxical notion of self-identity- where the I exists only in relation to the Other, but at the same time does not merge with the Other in a relation of fusion- that Levinas wishes to describe and make sense of in these pages. Levinas tells us that the chief aim · underlying his discussion of substitution is to try to think "the Other-in-the-Same without thinking the Other as an other Same" (OGW 80). He seeks to show how the self attains its identity in a pre-reflective or non-cognitive relation with the Other without that self-identity eliminating the radical difference between the I and the Other. Although we saw above a similar thought of relation when we surveyed the notions of sensibility and responsibility, here these notions are presented in a far more severe and challenging manner in order to underscore further the paradoxical nature of subjectivity. Levinas's main target of criticism in his discussion of substitution is the modern epistemological and ontological tradition, stretching from Kant and Hegel through Husser!. This tradition would have us understand subjectivity as a consciousness capable of reducing every encounter with alterity to thought. When a series of singular and unrelated perceptions appear to consciousness, it is able to identify them as its own through the use of language and concepts. Different representations (and this would include both internal and external perceptions) thus become transcendentally ideal phenomena. As such, they can be re-presented to consciousness in such a way that they are stripped of their otherness. In grasping beings across ideal structures (e.g., the Kant ian a priori categories, the Hegelian "Concept"), consciousness is thereby able to maintain itself in its identity and remain fundamentally unaffected by the otherness of the beings it encounters. It is this structure of identity that Levinas has in mind when he refers to consciousness as "se lf-possession, sovereignty, arche"' (OB 99). The fundamental aim of consciousness is to achieve certainty regarding beings. This aim predetermines the approach of consciousness to everything it encounters, and ensures that it can never be caught off guard. The drive toward certainty ensures that
anything unknown that can occur to [consciousness} is in advance disclosed, open, manifest, is cast in the mould of the known, and 65
Substitution cannot be a complete surprise. (OB 99) Levinas proposes an alternative to the account of subjectivity found in the idealist tradition, one that does not reduce everything it encounters to an operation of consciousness. As we have already seen in our analysis of sensibility and proximity, the self is a "subj-ect" precisely to the extent that it is subjected to the neediness of the Other. It is in the radical passivity of proximity, in which the "I" is available to the Other without taking the initiative, that the relationship with the Other is formed outside of consciousness understood as arche (meaning "principle," "beginning," or "origin"). It is, as Levinas likes to say, literally an-archic. "Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality" (OB 100).
Substitution responsibility, which has its ongms outside of consciousness, "take place and have its time in consciousness?" (OB I 02)
Recurrence
At this point, we need to raise a question: If as Levinas suggests the Other is radically foreign to all consciousness and order, how does the Other come to make his or her presence felt in consciousness, save as a temporary disruption? In other words, how can the radical passivity of
To begin to answer these questions, we must take up the issue of what constitutes the "ipseity" (or "self-hood") that lies behind consciousness. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas defines ipseity using the term "recurrence." Recurrence has the sense of a return to self, but one that is very different from the return that characterizes the identity of self-consciousness in the idealist tradition. (See the discussion of Kant's unity of apperception in Chapter I .) In recurrence, the self achieves its identity not by its own devices, as though it were capable of pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. Rather it does so by being responsible for the Other. The self feels itself "ill at ease in one's own skin" (OB I 08). Levinas likens the skin here to the "Ness us tunic" (OB I 09) of Greek mythology. When the centaur Nessus tried to rape Deianira, Hercules killed him with an arrow poisoned with the blood of the Hydra. Before dying, however, the centaur told Deianira to keep some of his blood, which he said was a powerful love charm, and could be used to win back Hercules should he fall in love with another. But the blood was really a poison. Afraid that Hercules had fallen in love with another, Deianira sent him a tunic smeared with the blood. Under the heat of the sun, the poison started to burn him and to stick to his skin until it was impossible to get rid of it. So great was the pain that Hercules killed himself. Deianira too committed suicide when she heard the news of the death of her beloved. From love-or guilt- the self is restless in itself It seeks an exit from itself, from its own skin as it were. For Levinas this illustrates the way the "for-itself' of consciousness is converted into being-for-the-Other. Much like the diachrony of the trace discussed above, the time of recurrence belongs to an immemorial past, irrecuperable by memory. This suggests that who I am- or who I am to become- is nothing I have chosen. Here we see Levinas radically distancing himself from Sartrean existentialism . Unlike Sartre, who claimed that the self is chosen in full freedom , and indeed has no choice but to choose itself, for Levinas "the oneself has not issued from its own initiative" (OB 105). If "I am I" only insofar as I am for the Other, and being for the Other is not chosen, then I do not choose who I am.
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Obsession The proximity that gives rise to responsibility, then, cannot be thematized. It operates at a different level than does vision, and can be inferred only indirectly by way of the responsibility that it makes possible. Proximity is an im-mediate (i.e., non-mediated) relation with a singular Other who does not give me time to reflect on what is going on between us. According to Levinas, it amounts to an "obsession," an unwonted (and "unwanted"- for the Other is not an object of need) preoccupation that disrupts the normal, sovereign functioning of the ego qua consciousness. In obsession , consciousness's machinery is jammed, its projects are derailed, and its quest for certainty is interrupted. Again it is anarchy:
Obsession traverses consciousness countercurrentwise, is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium. It undoes thematization, and escapes any principle, origin, will, or arche, which are put forth in every ray of consciousness. This movement is, in the original sense of the term, an-archical. (OB I 0 I)
Substitution
Substitution
It is for this reason that Levinas described the self as a "creature," a being that is dependent on another for its existence but forever barred from knowing who gave it its origin: 'The oneself is a creature, but an orphan by birth or an atheist no doubt ignorant of its creator" (OB I 05).
being responsible for the Other to the point of sacrificing oneself for the Other. Levinas calls this situation of extreme abnegation and sacrifice, in which the self takes upon itself the hardship its spares the Other, the condition of being a "hostage."
Hostage I owe my identity to the Other insofar as he or she makes me responsible. Only I can answer for the Other, in which I become irreplaceable. Responsibility is thus for Levinas the sole principium individuationis ("a principle that uniquely identifies one individuai"Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy). Not ~hat I can ever escape this responsibility for I can never fully escape myself. The Other persecutes me, hunts me down, calls me back to my responsibilities, which my natural egoism would rather ignore. Whereas the Sartrean self attempts to evade the responsibility of choosing itself by choosing to adopt the cloak of bad faith, responsibility for Levinas is the Nessus tunic I cannot take off despite the pain it causes me.
In the exposure to wounds and outrages, in the feeling proper to responsibility, the oneself is provoked as irreplaceable, as devoted to other, without being able to resign. . .. It is thus one and unique, in passivity from the start, having nothing at its disposal that would enable it to not yield to the provocation. (OB I 05) The self, then, is a subject not in the traditional philosophical sense that it is the support of certain attributes, but rather in the sense that it is subjected to the weight of everything, the compressed point of the gravity of responsibility- the situation of Atlas bearing the weight of the world on one's shoulders. Hence, Levinas writes, "I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a non-interchangeable I" (EI 101). I bear the weight of someone else's being, which thus becomes my charge and my concern. From the start my identity is intertwined with the Other' s demands. The self is thus not returned to itself in order to pursue its own egoistic projects or concerns, but is ultimately returned "to the hither side of its point of departure" (OB 114), which means to say that its identity is ultimately created in recurrence through an unavoidable responsibility for and commitment to the neighbor. All this means to say that I am never more myself, never more me, than when doing something for somebody else, for you. This entails
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Innocence and Guilt Responsibility without Culpability In the role of hostage, the self is not only responsible for the Other but also for the Other's responsibility. Here I am obliged to go all the way to the point of substituting myself for the Other, finding myself responsible not only for tak.ing care of his or her needs, but also for his or her misdeeds:
Obsessed with responsibilities which did not arise in decisions taken by a subject "contemplating freely, " consequently accused in its innocence, subjectivity in itself is being thrown back on oneself This means concretely: accused of what the others do or suffer, or responsible for what they do or suffer. The uniqueness of the self is the very fact of bearing the fault of another. (OB 112) We shall consider in a moment the apparent paradox of being under accusation despite one's innocence (from Latin in-nocere, literally "without harm"). The idea that moral obligations are more fundamental than rights and that I have an obligation to do something for the Other even though he or she has no correlate (legal) right to demand it is not new, of course, and can be found in Kant's idea of imperfect duties and the utilitarian requirement to maximize happiness. But it is not Kant or Mill who furnishes Levinas with the idea of an individual under obligation prior to owing anything, but the Jewish Bible.
"Here I am" At the beginning of Genesis 22:7 God tests Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice his son, Isaac:
And it came to pass after these things that God did test Abraham:
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Substitution
Substitution and he said hineni. ( Gen 22: I) In Hebrew, hineni means "behold me" (in the grammatical case called the "accusative"), which Levinas translates into French as "me void' (in English the standard translation is "here I am"). It is as though Abraham knew himself to be under an obligation (or accusation) without a why or a wherefore. We should here issue a caveat that Levinas only applauds Abraham's willingness to follow the Other's (God's) commands unconditionally. Levinas does not agree with Kierkegaard who in Fear and Trembling presents the story as a " teleological suspension of the ethical." For Levinas the story of Abraham and Isaac does not show that the ethical can be transcended by the religious imperative. On the contrary, he argues that Abraham's failure to kill his son precisely confirms the sanctity of ethics and the prohibition against murder. According to Levinas, it is not God (or the angel) who intercedes on Isaac's behalf, which is how the story is usually understood, but Isaac himself. "Abraham's attentiveness to the voice that led him back to the ethical order, forbidding him to perform a human sacrifice, is the highest point in the drama" (PN 77). Levinas admits that to hold a person accountable for faults he or she did not commit is from philosophical point of view "simply demented" (OB 113). But we should be clear that Levinas is not saying that everybody is responsible without guilt. On the contrary, he makes a point of stipulating that
in me alone innocence can be accused without absurdity. To accuse the innocence of the other, to ask of the other more than he owes, is criminal. (OB 195n 18) This propos1t10n, of course, is a corollary of the view that the ethical relation is asymmetrical to the point where I always owe the Other more than I am entitled to demand from the Other.
philosophers is that the Other only has the right to demand what is his or her legal due, and that anything he or she receives beyond that is purely optional and a matter of private philanthropy on the part of the benefactor. It has to be said time and again that Levinas is entirely opposed to that way of conceiving ethics. For him, the self has no such choice in the matter. Levinas further explains this point in his reply to the classical questions raised in the name of egoism and moral skepticism :
Why does the other concern me ? . . . Am I my brother 's keeper? These questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned with itself, is only a concern for itself In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-ofme, the other, would concern me. But in the "prehistory " of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. (OB 117) Levinas does not attempt to answer the moral skeptic but undercut the inquiry altogether by drawing attention to the presuppositions behind it. Cain ' s reply to the question concerning the whereabouts of Abel: " Am I my brother' s keeper?" (Gen . 4:9) is perfectly consistent within the order of philosophy and human reason . What it lacks is an ethical dimension , and this insofar as it requires a reason to be good. (One might wonder whether it is at that point that Cain metaphorically murders his brother.) In other words, it is a complacent response that already takes for granted precisely what is ethically questionable. This is the assumption that from the beginning the self is concerned only with itself, and thus needs a reason to be moral. It is an assumption that Levinas refuses to make .
Hobbesianism
It should be mentioned that substitution cannot simply be equated with altruism (from the Latin alter, other) (OB Ill), which, like its traditional opposite, egoism, is usually thought to operate at the level of the will and freedom . An unargued assumption of many modem moral
Implicitly criticizing Hobbes's theory of original war, he states: "It is, however, not certain that war was at the beginning, before the altars" (OB 118). For Levinas, the possibility of ethical sacrifice is capable of preceding murder and war. But notice that Levinas cautiously writes, "It is, however not certain." Levinas does not totally refute Hobbes and cannot do so without reinserting ethics within the order of reason and argument. Indeed, there is even a sense in which Levinas would agree
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8
Substitution with Hobbes that the self is naturally indifferent to the Other, whose face is required to interrupt its natural egoism and tendency to put itself first. Levinas does not deny the banality of egoism exists; he simply contests the assumption that egoism is "earlier" than ethics. For Levinas, ethics in the sense of the relationship of responsibility to the Other is just as early as- if not earlier than-egoism. Levinas sums up this and his whole discussion of substitution in the following :
Responsibility for another . .. has not awaited freedom , in which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation- persecuted. The ipseity, in the passivity without arc he ch~acteristic of identity, is a hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone. Responsibility for the others has not been a return to oneself .. . Recurrence becomes identity breaking up the limits of identity, breaking up the principle of being in me. .. . [I]t is the impossibility to come back from all things and concern oneself only with oneself ... [R}esponsibi/ity in obsession is a responsibility of the ego for what the ego has not wished, that is, for the others. . . This passivity undergone in proximity by the force of an alterity in me is the possibility of a recurrence to oneself . . What can it be but a substitution of me for the others? (08 114) " Substitution" is indeed the bottom line ofLevinas ' s ethics. It is his most sophisticated account of the relation between the I and the Other irreducible to ontology. But it is not the last word in ethics for there is a final problem to consider, one that is hinted at in the preceding passage by the word "others"- plural. How do I decide in a relation of substitution for which Others I am to assume responsibility? Clearly I do not have unlimited economic resources at my disposal and must therefore choose where I am to allocate them. How I am to make such a choice? Such is what Levinas calls the problems of "justice" and is treated at length in Chapter 5 of Otherwise than Being.
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Justice and Politics
A significant shift in terminology between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being concerns the word "justice." In the earlier work the word is used to refer to the face-to-face relation with the Other (TI 71 ), and is associated with the ethical asymmetry of the relation: "Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master" (TI 72). In the later work, by contrast, "justice" is used specifically in reference to the third party who stands empirically outside the face-to-face: "It is the proximity of the third party that introduces, with the necessities of justice, measure, thematization, appearing and justice" (08 196 n. 22). Here, then, the word is given its more customary meaning of fairness (see, for example, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice) , and is associated with the judicial notion of equal citizens' rights: "Justice is . . . a copresence on an equal footing as before a court of justice" (OB 157). What motivated this new conception of justice? And how is it connected with ethics?
A Conflict of Duties The Limit of Responsibility In Chapter 5 of Otherwise than Being, in the section entitled "From Saying to the Said, or the Wisdom of Desire," Levinas draws attention to the "contradiction" (08 157) that arises in ethics when due consideration is given to the third party, also present at the encounter: "The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction" (08 73
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157). The contradiction can be understood as a conflict of duties between those that are owed to the Other facing me and those owed to the rest of humanity. Whose needs are the most urgent? In fulfilling my obligations towards one person do I not in turn risk injuring another? In giving money or whatever to the homeless person across the street, am I not depriving the starving multitude in the Third World? What am I to do? Levinas puts the problem in terms that are easily understood:
even when we convince ourselves that g1vmg elsewhere has more utility, to do so would still constitute an injustice to the Other. This is why Levinas makes a point in Otherwise than Being of saying that
If proximity ordered me only to the other alone, there would not have been any problem, in even the most general sense of the term. A question would not have been born, nor consciousness, nor selfconsciousness. The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when the third party enters. ' The third party is other than the neighbor, but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other, and not simply his fellow. What then are the other and the third party for one another ? Which passes before the other in my responsibility? 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. The other and the third party, my neighbors, contemporaries of one another, put distance between me and the other and the third party. . . [The third party} is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What have I to do with justice? (08 157) It might be thought that there is simple answer to the question of justice. I am to choose that action that benefits the most people in society. That is to say, I am to do that which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. The inadequacy of such a utilitarian response, however, becomes apparent when we consider that from a Levinasian point of view each person is unique and cannot rightly be compared with others. Thus it would be wrong not to give to the person facing me on the pretext that that expenditure could be more profitably put to use elsewhere. It would be wrong because then I would have compared his or her situation with someone else ' s, and thus overlooked the specificity of the face . The problem is not only that we are unsure how to measure various amounts of happiness (a perennial problem for utilitarianism), but that
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In no way is justice a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the for-the-other, a diminution, a limitation of anarchic responsibility . . a degeneration that would be produced in the measure that for empirical reasons the initial duo would become a trio . (08 159) Justice cannot be used as a pretext or excuse for ignoring one's responsibility to the Other, which is "antecedent to questions." But nor can such responsibility in turn be considered a justification for shutting one's ears to the rest of humanity. In a certain sense, when it is a question of justice whatever I do I am in the wrong. lf I respect the face, then I disrespect the rights or the third party. And vice versa. Justice would appear inevitably to give rise to a bad conscience, not merely because I cannot fulfill the demands which the Other places on me to the full (which is also true), but because in the measure that I do fulfill them l ignore my responsibility to the third party. All this suggests, paradoxically, that there is something unethical about ethics and something unjust about justice. Ethics risks ignoring the third party, while justice requires me to limit the concern (at least temporarily) l have for the Other.
Just Violence Punishment The problem of justice is exacerbated- enormously so- when we consider the situation in which the Other is the oppressor of the third party. Most of us agree that society could not exist without some sort of criminal justice system that imposes sanctions in the form of punishments on those individuals who disobey the law and violate the rights of others. Such punitive measures are sometimes given a retributive rationale, or else they are justified in terms of restraint, rehabilitation, or deterrence. But how is punishment justified from a Levinasian point or view? How in the concern for justice is it possible to justify punitive and repressive measures- violence of sorts- when
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the face would appear express ly to forbid them . Does not Levinas describe the face in terms of its resistance to violence? Things would be relatively straightforward if the Other had si mpl y forfeited his or her rights as a face through infringing on the rights of the third party. That would be the traditional liberal response, but it is not Levinas's. When asked in an interview whether an SS officer has a face, and thus "a right to a defense and respect," Levinas replied: "a very troubling question that ca lls. to my mind, for an affirmative answer. An affirmative answer that is painful every time!" ("A quoi pensent les philosophes?" Autrement I 02 [ 1988]: 59; personal translation).
not justified in defending myself according to Levinas; I am justified and I must defend myself But self-defense alone is not the ultimate justification for using violence, which derives from the need for justice in the name of fulfilling one ' s obligations to the third party. That is why Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being that "there is also justice for me" (OB 159), whereby I become "'like the others,' for which it is important to concern oneself and to take care" (OB 161 ).
Nazism How then does Levinas justify punishing and repressing the face, for example, that of a Nazi? Does not the sanctity and inviolability of the human face make vio lence impossible to justify? In a short article denouncing the death penalty entitl ed "An Eye for an Eye," Levinas appeared to concede as much: "violence calls up violence, but we must put a stop to this cha in reaction" (OF 147) . But if that is true, how is it possible to serve justice, which sometimes requires us to do violence in defense of the third party? Levinas is not a pacifist. "Unquestionably," he writes, "violent action against Evi l is necessary" (NT I 09). This is perhaps contrary to what one might expect when first reading Levinas and the high ethical premium he puts on the face , but totally understandable when we realize that he lived through th e horrors of WWII, which resulted in the murder of his birth fami ly by the Nazis. For Levinas, there can be no question of refusing violence outright for the si mple reason that the type of pacifism Jesus advanced in the Sermon on the Mount ("not to resist one who is evi l" and "to turn the other cheek" [Matt. 5:39-40]) appears to have done litt le, if anything, to stem the tide of blood of the last two-thousand years. " If I am vio lent," Levinas writes citing a Jewish source. "it is because vio lence is needed to put an end to violence" (NT 114). But note that Levinas seeks to defend the use of violence only insofar as it is abso lutely necessary for justice. It is the third party, and my ob ligations to him or her, that justify using violence against the Other. An important implication of this is that it makes it unethical to defend oneself without reference to the third party. It is not that I am
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Patience It must not be thought that in rejecting the doctrine of non-violence, Levinas is insensitive to the risks involved in using violence to combat violence. According to Levinas, the biggest problem facing justice is not that of seizing the evil-doer, but of making sure that the innocent do not suffer in the process. In Otherwise than Being, we are told:
The true problem for us Westerners is not so much to refuse violence as to question ourselves about a struggle against violence that, without blanching in non-resistance to evil, could avoid the institution of violence out of this very struggle. Does not war against war perpetuate that which it is called to make disappear in order to consecrate war and its virile virtues in good conscience? (OB 177) If we are to put a stop to violence, even as we prepare to use violence, then we must be "patient" (OB 177). "In the just war waged against war," Levinas writes, there is the need "to tremble or shudder at every instant of because of this very justice" (OB 185). The weight of the gun must weigh on our conscience before we use it against the Other, and only then as last resort. To be prepared to kill without considering the possibility that by killing one commits an injustice that is worse than the injustice one is seeking to rectify is to risk becoming indifferent to the pain felt by the Other. Lao-Tzu made the same point two-and-a-half millennia earlier: " Weapons are tools of violence not of the sage. He uses them only when there is no choice, and then calmly and with tact, for he finds no beauty in them" (Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Hex. 31).
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Charity We have seen how when faced with the problem of justice there is a sense in which one is always in the wrong. If I carry out my duty to the Other to the letter, then I am remiss in my duty to the third party. If, on the other hand, I do my duty to the third party, I not only renege on my responsibilities to the Other, but also risk making the innocent suffer. It would theref ore seem that a certain violence is inevitable. The best I can hope for is to attenuate the violence as much as possible. Such is the role assigned to what Levinas calls "charity" following justice. In an interview conducted in 1986, Levinas said :
Justice is awakened by charity, but the charitj; that is before justice is also after [justice}. . . It is necessary that I rediscover the unique, once I have judged the thing; each time anew, and each time as a living individual and as a unique individual who can find, in his very uniqueness, what a general consideration cannot find. (IR 52) Justice is traditionally "blind" in the sense of being impartial. The accused who stands before the judge is not looked at in the face ; he or she is judged according to universal laws and general principles that are, or should be, applied to everyone in an unprejudiced and impartial manner. This refusal to look the Other in the face is what Levinas calls the " first violence" (IR 51). It is this violence that charity is called upon to reduce by finding ways to link up once more with the face of the accused:
in the State where laws function in their generality, where verdicts are pronounced out of a concern f or universality, once justice is said there is still, f or the person as unique and responsible one, the possibility of or appeal to something that will reconsider the rigor of this always rigorous justice. To soften this justice, to listen to the p ersonal appeal, is each person 's role. It is in that sense that one has to speak of a return to charity and mercy. (IR 68-9) Levinas often cites as an example of charity the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981. The example is a good one as the abolition is an obvious instance where the face and the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is respected. Nevertheless, it is the death penalty, 78
Justice and Politics i.e., killing as a punitive measure, according to Levinas, that no longer belongs to justice. For were killing prohibited under any circumstances, even when it is deemed absolutely necessary for the protection of innocent third parties, justice would appear to be negated altogether. That would be unjust. Charity is a supplement to justice that can be justified when the initial violence has been arrested and the third party is no longer under threat. As Levinas stipulates, it follows justice.
Politics and the Just State Closely associated with Levinas 's discussion of justice is his notion of the ideal state. Levinas defines the ideal state as one that "holds justice as the absolutely desirable end and hence as a perfection" (PL 177}. The closest approximation to this morally perfect state is a liberal democracy that is presided over by "the consciousness that the justice on which the State is founded is, at this moment, still an imperfect justice" (IR 68). In other words, the most just of states is the state that is most prepared to acknowledge its own injustices and correct them. This requires a continual reexamination of existing governmental policies, political and judicial procedures, laws, statutes, and institutions, as well as the political will and means to revise and amend them whenever they are shown to fall short of justice. The civil rights movement in the United States during the Fifties and Sixties devoted to securing legislation protecting the rights of minority groups who have historically been deprived equal opportunities in public institutions such as schools, government employment, or public accommodations is perhaps a good example of this capacity of a democracy to call itself into question and correct its mistakes.
The "Wisdom of Love " The task of criticizing the laws of the state and the principles they rest on, including public standards of morality, concepts of personhood, and citizenship, is the task reserved for philosophy. " Philosophy justifies and criticizes the laws of being and of the city" (OB 165). This is not merely one area of philosophical inquiry among others (e.g., epistemology, logic, and aesthetics) . Rather, it changes the very vocation of philosophy from the love of wisdom (i.e., the search for truth) into something else, which Levinas calls the "wisdom of love": 79
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The extraordinary commitment of the other in relation to the third party calls for control, a search for justice. society and the State, comparison and possession, thought and science, commerce and philosophy, and outside of anarchy the search for a principle. Philosophy is this measure brought to the infinity of being for the other ofproximity, and is like the wisdom of love. (OB 161)
developed in Levinas's second major work on ethics. To be sure, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas had similarly claimed that reason and ontology were founded on the ethical relation. However, it was not the third party that was said to make reason possible, but the Other as teacher: "The other is not . . . for reason a scandal which launches it into dialectical movement, but the first teaching, the condition for all teaching" (TI 203). In the Otherwise than Being, by contrast, Levinas seldom mentions the role of the Other as teacher, but puts the accent instead on the problem of having to fulfill one's obligations to the Other and the third party when those obligations conflict. The point to underscore here is that Levinas in the later work especially does mot construe the relationship between ethics and ontology as one of opposition, as some commentators do, but rather as a relationship of mutual dependence. Ethics requires ontology if there is to be justice in the name of the third party; ontology is justified only insofar as it is conducted in the spirit of ethics, without which it becomes violent iru its very exercise. This explains why Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being:
Philosophy serves justice not only by the founding of political and judicial institutions, but also by limiting as much as possible the violence that inevitably congeals around these anonymous institutions. This requires a vigilant critique of various forms of rhetoric, propaganda, and ideology that threaten to undermine the freedom of the individual within the state. Philosophy must also seek explicitly to critic-ize itself to the extent that it is constrained to traffic in universal language and conceptuality. This "endless critique" (OB 44) by philosophy of its own distortional language, which can neither state without contradiction the unique identity of the Other (not without using the logic of genre whereby the Other becomes logically indiscernible from any other), nor rid itself entirely of the ideological interests of the state, emerges as an incessant "unsaying of the said" (OB 181). It is an incessant effort to say that which can only be said otherwise than in terms of the language of philosophy, which to the extent that philosophy is impelled to say it regardless, remains always to be retracted, unsaid in its turn . Ultimately philosophical critique, if truly radical, will include a critical assessment of its own desirability in consideration of more basic human needs. Can we afford academic philosophy at a time when over half the world's population is undernourished? The question is perhaps not very philosophical. But then it seeks to place the very practice of philosophy into question .
Justice, society, the State and its institutions, exchanges and work are comprehensible out of proximity. This means that nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other. It is important to recover all these forms beginning with proximity, in which being, totality, the State, politics, techniques, work are at every moment on the point of having their center of gravity in themselves, and weighing on their own account. (OB 159)
In the measure that the presence of the third party gives rise to the necessities of justice, understood as the weighing and comparison of terms that are unique and incomparable, involving calculation, conceptualization, and knowledge, the third party can be said to justify ontology. "In the comparison of the incomparable there would be the latent birth of representation, logos, consciousness, work, the neutral notion: being" (OB 158). This is perhaps the most radical thesis
Philosophy is called upon to criticize the tendency for the modern state to become a supraindividual entity that is more important than the citizens who comJOose it. That is why philosophy is perhaps needed more now than ever before in a country like the United States, where bureaucratic machiinery and the anonymous forces of the market place, industrial pollutiorn and the increased expenditure on the military are starting to look as though they are getting out of control. Indeed, we have seen what politics can do when left unchecked by ethics. The experiience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, whether Hitlerism on the right or Stalinism on the left, has perhaps shown more than anything else the tremendous toll that politics is capable of taking: on human life when it ignores the face. The integration of the individual into the machinery of the state, into
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Justice and Politics systems of efficient and economic controls, is what philosophy is called upon to criticize while finding ways to exercise its prerogative not to serve Caesar or the dollar, thus aspiring to a universal reason and objectivity. That is why it is so important to philosophize, and why Levinas reminds us in the manner of a wakeup call:
Conclusion: The Future of Levinas Studies
One must not sleep, one must philosophize. (OGW 15)
The reception of Levinas's work in English-speaking countries over the past three decades has gone through two key phases. Initially, scholars were concerned simp ly with elucidating the chief features of Levinas's thought and explaining the meaning of his often complex terminology and prose. In the 1980s and early 1990s, readers of Levinas turned their attention to the complicated relations between Levinas and other thinkers in the phenomenological and postphenomenological tradition, including Husser), Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and lrigaray. Both of these phases of scholarship have been particularly useful for demonstrating the immensely sophisticated and provocative nature of Levinas's ethical philosophy, and have also helped to demonstrate Levinas's ongoing relevance for contemporary theory and practice within philosophy and throughout the humanities more generally. Over the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in some of the previously under-studied areas of Levinas's work, especially his Talmudic scholarship and political writings. The first international conference dedicated to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas took place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, May, 2002. Of the recent directions taken in Levinas studies, perhaps the most exciting is that of the trend toward examining Levinas's thought within the context of concrete social and political issues. Many scholars are interested in applying Levinas's thought to some oftoday's most pressing social and political issues as a means of arriving at novel insights or approaches to longstanding problems. Others have used recent developments in social 82
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Conclusion theory to push Levinas 's philosophy in directions he himself failed to go, or to point out important limitations in his work. To take but a few examples, the recent phenomena of globalization and multiculturalism have provoked some authors to consider the role that Levinas ' s writings on politics and justice might play in the construction of a radical and global democracy. Levinas's uncompromising stance on the ethical duty to help those who are hungry and suffering, coupled with his acute insight into the logics of racism and imperialism, promise to add an important and sometimes much needed ethical dimension to existing debates on these topics. Similarly, recent advances in medicine and technology have raised a whole host of ethical issues for which Levinas 's thought might provide insightful answers. How might Levinas ' s thought ·shed light on debates over human cloning, genetic therapy, and abortion? Is the question concerning technology purely ontological, as Heidegger argued, or does it have an ethical meaning? Can Levinas's notion of the face-toface help explain the efficacy of psychotherapeutic practice and the "talking cure"? Many authors have also begun to explore the implications of Levinas's thinking for current trends in environmental philosophy and politics. Although most critics agree that Levinas did not give animals or the natural environment their due regard, there are nevertheless several aspects of Levinas 's thinking that many critics consider useful for the development of an environmental ethic. Along these lines, some scholars have argued that Levinas ' s analyses of the face of the Other should be extended to include the faces of non-human animals, and others have suggested that his notions of singularity and responsivity might be rethought so as to include a certain responsibility and respect for all life forms. It is the opinion of the authors of this volume that the best work on Levinas is still to come. This is something Levinas would indeed welcome, fond as he was of Nietzsche's dictum from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I ("On Love of the Neighbor"):
Let the future of the farthest be for you the cause ofyour today. (Z, 62; quoted CP 93) Levinas 's star may not have arisen in his own lifetime to the Empyrean heights of some of his French contemporaries, such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida, but it might take longer for it to be extinguished from the philosophical firmament. 84
Glossary
Alterity: "The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ' you ' or ' we' is not the plural of 'I.' 1, you- these are not individuals of a common concept. Neither possession nor number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger, the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my sight. But I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him, without genus. We are the same and the other" (TI 39). Asymmetry: " Moral experience, so commonplace, indicates a metaphysical asymmetry: the radical impossibility of seeing oneself from the outside and of speaking in the same sense of oneself and of the others, and consequently the impossibility of totalization" {TI 53). Atheism : "Atheism conditions a veritable relationship with a true God kath auto [in itself]" {TI 77). Desire: "A desire without satisfaction which, precisely, understands [entend] the remoteness, the alterity, the exteriority of the other" {TI 34). Ethics: "We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics" (Tl 43). Face: "The face has turned to me- and this is its very nudity. It is by itself and not by reference to a system .... The relation with the face is not an object-cognition. The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from the world into which it enters, the exiling of a being, his condition of being a stranger, destitute or proletarian . .. . The gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving- this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face . The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him one approaches as ' You ' [' Vous ' ] in a dimension of height" (Tl 85
Glossary
Glossary
75). Face-to-face: "A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face" (TI 39). Feminine: "Feminine alterity is situated on another plane than language and nowise represents a truncated, stammering, still elementary language. On the contrary, the discretion of this presence includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relationship with the Other. . . . This is a new and irreducible possibility, a delightful lapse in being, and the source of gentleness itself' (TI 155). Good : "Goodness consists in taking up a position such that the Other counts more than myself' (TI 247). ,. Hatred: "The one who hates seeks to be the cause of a suffering to which the despised being must bear witness .. . . Whence the insatiable character of hatred; it is satisfied precisely when it is not satisfied, since the Other satisfies it only by becoming an object, but can never become object enough, since at the same time as his fall, his lucidity and . witness are demanded. In this lies the logical absurdity of hatred" (TI 239). History: "History is worked over by the ruptures in history, in which a judgment is borne upon it. When a man truly approaches the other he is uprooted from history" (TI 52). Hostage: "Strictly speaking, the other is the end; I am a hostage, a responsibility and a substitution supporting the whole world in the passivity of assignation, even in an accusing persecution, which is undeclinable" (08 128). Illeity: "The infinite who orders me is neither a cause acting straight on, nor a theme, already dominated, if only retrospectively, by freedom. This detour at a face and this detour from this detour in the enigma of a trace we have called 'illeity.' llleity lies outside the "thou" and the thematization of objects. A neologism formed with if (he) or ille, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me" (08 12). Language: "Absolute difference, inconceivable in terms of formal logic, is established only as language . .. . Words are said, be it only in the silence kept, whose weight acknowledges the evasion of the Other. The knowledge that absorbs the Other is forthwith situated within the discourse I address to him. Speaking rather than 'letting be,' solicits the Other. Speech cuts across vision" (TI 195). Logic: "The relationship between me and the Other does not have the
structure formal logic finds in all relations" (Tl 180). Ontology: " Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by the interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being" (TI 43). Persecution: "In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for the others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor" (08 75). Philosophy: "Philosophy has in its highest, exceptional, hours stated the beyond or being and the one distinct from being, but mainly remained at home in saying being, that is, inwardness to being, the being at home with oneself, of which European history itself has been the conquest and jealous defense. And we would not here have ventured to recall the beyond essence if this history of the West did not bear in its margins, the trace of events carrying another signification, and if the victims ofthe triumphs which entitle the eras of history could be separate from its meaning" (08 178). Politics: " It is not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just State in which man is fulfilled (and which is to be set up, and especially to be maintained) proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the all" (08 160). Reason : " Reason in the sense of an impersonal legality does not permit us to account from discourse, for it absorbs the plurality of interlocutors. Reason, being one, cannot speak to another reason" (TI 207). Responsibility: " Responsibility for the other, in its antecedence to my freedom , its antecedence to the present and to representation, is a passivity more passive than all passivity, an exposure to the other without thi s exposure being assumed, an exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying. The exposure is the frankness , sincerity, veracity of saying. Not the saying dissimulating itself and protecting itself in the said, just giving out words in the face of the other, but saying uncovering itself, that is, denuding itself of its skin, sensibility on the surface of the skin, at the edge of its nerves, offering itself even in suffering- and thus wholly sign, signifying itself' (08 15). Said : "The word that bears on the Other as a theme seems to contain the Other. But already it is said to the Other who, as interlocutor, has quit the theme that encompassed him, and upsurges inevitably behind
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Glossary
Glossary the said" (TI 195). Saying: "This 'saying to the Other'- this relationship with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent- precedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in being" (TI 48). Self: "Perhaps the possibility of a point of the universe where such an overflow of responsibility is produced ultimately defines the I" (TI 244). Sensibility: "Only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify. Signification, the one-for-the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood . ... The immediacy of the sensible is the immediacy of enjoyment and its frustration . It is the gift painfully tom up, and in the tearing up, immediately a spoiling of this very enjoyment. It is not a gift of the heart, but of the bread from one's mouth, of one 's own mouthful of bread. It is the ppenness, not only of one's pocketbook, but the doors of one's home, a 'sharing of your bread with the famished,' a ' welcoming of the wretched into your house' (Isaiah 58). The immediacy of sensibility is the for-the-other of one's own materiality; it is the immediacy or the proximity of the other. The proximity of the other is the immediate opening up for the other of the immediacy of enjoyment, the immediacy of taste, materialization of matter, altered by the immediacy of contact" (OB 74). Subject: "The self is a sub-jectum ; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything. The unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in its unity of apperception, but what is incumbent on me from all sides, regards me in two senses of the term, is my affair. In this sense, the idea that I am sought out in the interstellar spaces is not a fiction of science-fiction, but expresses my passivity as a self' (OB 116). Substitution : "It is because in the approach there is inscribed or written the trace of infinity, the trace of a departure, but [also] the trace of what is inordinate, [of what] does not enter into the present, and inverts the arche into anarchy, that there is forsakenness of the other, obsession by him, responsibility and a self. The non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others" (OB 117). The Third Party: "If proximity ordered me to the other alone, there would not have been any problem, in even the most general sense of the term. A question would not have been born, nor consciousness, nor self-consciousness. The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters" (OB 157). 88
Trace: "Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without a prior commitment, is human fraternity itself, and it is prior to freedom. The face of the other in proximity, which is more than representation, is an unrepresentable trace, the way ofthe infinite" (OB 116). Violence: "Violence can only aim at the face" (TI 225).
89
Bibliography
Bibliography IR
Emmanuel Levinas. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 200 I.
KS
Leo Tolstoy. The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York: Dover, 1993 .
NT
Emmanuel Levinas. Nine Talmudic Readings . Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1990.
Abbreviations BK
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamzov. Trans. D. Magarshack. London: Penguin Books, 1958.
08
Emmanuel Levinas. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I981.
BT
Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Tran~. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson . Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
OG
Jacques Derrida. OfGrammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, I 976.
BP
Emmanuel Levinas. Basic Philosophical Writings . Eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1996.
OGW
Emmanuel Levinas. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Sergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
OF
Emmanuel Levinas. Difficult Freedom . Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
PL
Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds. The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London: Routledge, 1988.
CM
Edmund Husser!, Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
PN
Emmanuel Levinas. Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1996.
CP
Emmanuel Levinas. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
SB
Francine-Claire Legrand . Symbolism in Belgium . Trans. Alistair Kennedy. Brussel : Laconti, 1972.
EE
Emmanuel Levinas. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.
SS
Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1976.
El
Emmanuel Levinas. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh : Duquesne University Press, 1985.
Tl
Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh : Duquesne University Press, 1969.
EO
Seren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, Vol. II. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Anchor Books, 1972.
TO
Emmanuel Levinas. Tim e and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987.
G
Immanuel Kant. Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. H. J. Paton. London: Hutchinson, 1948.
WD
Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
90
91
Bibliography
Bibliography
z
Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.
Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Selected English Translations of Levinas's Works
New Talmudic Readings. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999.
Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Beyond the Verse. Trans. Gary D. Mole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
On Escape. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
Discovering Existence with Husser/. Trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Eds. Adrian Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Proper Names . Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
.
Entre Nous : On Thinking of The Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 200 I.
The Levinas Reader. Ed. by Sean Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. The Theory of Intuition in Husser/'s Phenomenology. Trans. Andre Orianne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Selected Books and Anthologies
In the Time of Nations. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Bernasconi, Robert and Simon Critchley, eds. Re-reading Levinas.
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93
Bibliography Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Bernasconi, Robert and David Wood, eds. The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London : Routledge, 1988. Chanter, Tina, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 200 I . Cohen, Richard A. Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cohen, Richard A., ed. Face to Face with Levina:s. Albany: SUNY, 1986. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Katz, Claire, ed. Critical Assessments: Emmanuel Levinas, 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2004. Llewelyn, John . Emmanuel Levinas: Th~ Genealogy of Ethics. London: Routledge, 1995. Peperzak, Adriaan T. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993 . Peperzak, Adriaan T., ed. Ethics as FirsJ Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion. New York: Routledge, 1995. Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levims: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. The Hague: Nijhoff, 197-t.
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