Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Radical Passivity LIBRARY OF ETHICS AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Volume 20 Editor in Chief Marcus Düwell, Utrecht Universi...

Author: Benda Hofmeyr

7 downloads 604 Views 1005KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Radical Passivity

LIBRARY OF ETHICS AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Volume 20

Editor in Chief Marcus Düwell, Utrecht University, Utrecht (The Netherlands), [email protected]

Editorial Board Deryck Beyleveld, Durham University, Durham (UK), [email protected] David Copp, University of Florida (USA), [email protected] Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research, New York (USA), [email protected] Martin van Hees, Groningen University (The Netherlands), [email protected] Thomas Hill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA), [email protected] Samuel Kerstein, University of Maryland, College Park (USA), [email protected] Will Kymlicka, Queens University, Ontario (Canada), [email protected] Philip van Parijs, Louvaine-la-Neuve (Belgium) en Harvard (USA), [email protected] Qui Renzong, [email protected] Peter Schaber, Ethikzentrum, University of Zürich (Switzerland), [email protected] Thomas Schmidt, Humboldt University, Berlin (Germany), [email protected]

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/6230

Benda Hofmeyr Editor

Radical Passivity Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas

Editor Benda Hofmeyr Radboud University Nijmegen Department of Philosophical Anthropology Faculty of Philosophy 6500 HD Nijmegen The Netherlands and University of Pretoria Department of Philosophy Pretoria 0002 South Africa

ISBN 978-1-4020-9346-3

e-ISBN 978-1-4020-9347-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008940144 © 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper springer.com

Preface

Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust, like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the ‘never again’ situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world, hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of ‘never again’. It is dedicated to all the victims – living and dead – of what Levinas calls the ‘sober, Cain-like coldness’ at the root of all crime against humanity, as much as every singular crime against another human being. The scholars featured deserve a special word of thanks for their invaluable contribution and commitment to rethinking the conditions of the possibility of ‘never again’: Luc Anckaert, Bettina Bergo, Joachim Duyndam, Seán Hand, Al Lingis, Ad Peperzak, Anya Topolski and Peter Zeillinger. This collection of essays follows from a colloquium organized by myself and hosted by the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands on 24 November 2006. I would like to thank the Academie for its generous organizational and financial support of the event. It would not have been possible without the enthusiastic assistance of the following individuals: Koen Brams and Hanneke Grootenboer (for their unreserved support of the idea and its realization) and Anne Vangronsveld (for the coordination and organization of the colloquium). I would further like to thank Fritz Schmuhl at Springer for his wholehearted support and encouragement, David Levey at the University of South Africa for his expert language redaction, and Nina Botha at the University of Pretoria for her invaluable assistance in compiling the index. v

vi

Preface

This volume includes critical approaches to radical passivity from a variety of perspectives (both critical and favourable) covering the entire scope of Levinas’s oeuvre, including both his philosophical as well his so-called spiritual works or Talmudic Readings. The contributing authors speak with widely diverse voices, which will hopefully appeal to a diversified and interdisciplinary readership. This collection will certainly be of interest to an expert academic audience in a wide variety of disciplines, including Philosophical Ethics (or Practical Philosophy), Philosophical Anthropology, Social and Political Philosophy, Religious Studies, Literary Studies, Applied Ethics, Theology, Judaic Studies, etcetera. It is also likely to appeal to people outside of academia interested in that which makes ethical agency possible. The host of featured authors (from Canada, America, the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria and South Africa) and their varied perspectives accord this work an assured international appeal. All the contributions have been subjected to extensive peer and editorial review. Benda Hofmeyr Pretoria, South Africa July 2008

Contents

Preface ...............................................................................................................

v

Contributors .....................................................................................................

ix

Editor’s Introduction: Passivity as Necessary Condition for Ethical Agency? ..........................................................................................

1

Part I

Introducing Radical Passivity

1

Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution? ...................................... 15 Benda Hofmeyr

2

Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Lectures of 1954) ...................................................................................... Bettina Bergo

Part II

31

Radical Passivity and the Self

3

Sincerely Yours. Towards a Phenomenology of Me ................................ Adriaan Peperzak

55

4

Sincerely Me. Enjoyment and the Truth of Hedonism ........................... Joachim Duyndam

67

Part III

Radical Passivity as Basis for Effective Ethical Action?

5 The Fundamental Ethical Experience ...................................................... Alphonso Lingis 6

Radical Passivity as the (Only) Basis for Effective Ethical Action. Reading the ‘Passage to the Third ’ in Otherwise than Being ............................................................................. Peter Zeillinger

81

95

vii

viii

Contents

Part IV 7

Radical Passivity and Levinas’s Talmudic Readings

Listening to the Language of the Other ................................................... 111 Anya Topolski

8 Ab-Originality: Radical Passivity through Talmudic Reading .............. 133 Seán Hand 9

L’Être Entre les Lettres. Creation and Passivity in ‘And God Created Woman’ .................................................................. 143 Luc Anckaert

Index .................................................................................................................. 155

Contributors

Luc Anckaert Luc Anckaert holds degrees in Moral Theology and Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven. He teaches Jewish Philosophy at the K.U. Leuven and ethics at affiliated institutions. The Teyler’s Godgeleerdheid Genootschap of Haarlem was awarded to him in 1998. His publications are God, wereld en mens: Het ternaire denken van Franz Rosenzweig (Leuven: University Press, 1995); Franz Rosenzweig: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (Leuven: Peeters, 1990, 1995, with B. Caspers); Een kritiek van het oneindige. Rosenzweig en Levinas (Leuven: Peeters, 1999); A Critique of Infinity. Rosenzweig and Levinas (Leuven: Peeters, 2006); De rode huid van Adam. Verhalen over crisis en zin Altiora, 2008, with R. Burggraeve). Bettina Bergo Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal, Bettina Bergo is the author of Levinas between Ethics and Politics (Duquesne, 2001) and co-editor of several collections, notably Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God (forthcoming, Columbia); Trauma: Reflections on Experience and Its Other (forthcoming, SUNY); and Levinas’s Contribution to Contemporary Thought (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal). She has translated three works of Levinas, M. Zarader’s The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage (Stanford); co-translated and edited Judéités: Questions à Jacques Derrida (Fordham), and Jean-Luc Nancy’s La Déclosion (forthcoming, Fordham) and Didier Franck’s Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (forthcoming, Northwestern). She is the author of numerous essays and articles on Levinas, psychoanalysis, and contemporary French thought. Joachim Duyndam Joachim Duyndam is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Humanistics in The Netherlands. Information about his work and fields of interest, including a list of recent publications, is to be found at www. duyndam.net. Duyndam is editor-in-chief of The Levinas Online Bibliography (www.levinas.nl). Seán Hand Seán Hand is Professor of French and Head of the Department of French Studies, University of Warwick.

ix

x

Contributors

Benda Hofmeyr Benda Hofmeyr is a philosopher working both in the Netherlands and in South Africa. After having completed her PhD on the work of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas at the Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), she conducted research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL) into the political dimension of art and cultural production. At present she is affiliated to the Department of Philosophical Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy of the Radboud University Nijmegen as well as the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her current research focuses on a critical revaluation of ethical agency in Levinas from the perspective of Kant’s practical philosophy. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious scholarships and awards (the latest of which is a Veni grant) and has published in a variety of fields including contemporary Continental philosophy, political and moral philosophy, art and cultural production. Apart from this volume, her most recent publication is The Wal-mart Phenomenon. Resisting Neo-liberalism through Art, Design and Theory (Jan van Eyck Publishers, 2008). Alphonso Lingis Alphonso Lingis is Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published: Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984); Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985); Phenomenological Explanations (1986); Deathbound Subjectivity (1989); The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994); Abuses (1994); Foreign Bodies (1994); Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995); The Imperative (1998); Dangerous Emotions (1999); Trust (2003); Body Modifications: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (2005) and The First Person Singular (2007). Adriaan Peperzak Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak is the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor in Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. He is a specialist in the philosophies of Hegel and Levinas and has published extensively on both figures. Recent books include Modern Freedom; Aanspraak en Bezinning and Thinking: From Solitude to Dialogue and Contemplation. He is currently engaged in writing on the relationship(s) between phenomenology and theology. Anya Topolski Anya Topolski is a member of the Centre for Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy (K. U. Leuven, Belgium). Her area of interest is the relationship between ethics and politics and Jewish thought. She has published several articles on Levinas, Arendt, Judaism, ethics and politics. She recently completed her PhD on the relationship between ethics and politics in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, focusing on the question of intersubjectivity in the framework of Jewish thought. Peter Zeillinger Peter Zeillinger is affiliated to the Department of Fundamental Theology, University of Vienna, Austria. For a more detailed account of his life and work see http://www.univie.ac.at/fundamentaltheologie/peter_zeillinger.html

Editor’s Introduction: Passivity as Necessary Condition for Ethical Agency? Benda Hofmeyr

Starting with a radical passivity of the subjectivity, our analysis has come to the notion of “responsibility overflowing freedom” (whereas freedom alone should have been able to justify and limit responsibilities), an obedience prior to the reception of orders. Starting with this anarchical situation of responsibility, our analysis has, no doubt by an abuse of language, named the Good (CCP, 135).

The question concerning the ‘radical passivity’ of the ethical agent undoubtedly constitutes the proverbial 64,000 dollar question in Levinas scholarship and reception. In other words, the question concerning the radically passive ethical agent as opposed to the active autonomous agent, with the freedom to act independently without an inherent imperative or inner directive steering its actions, is the decisive issue separating supporters of Levinas from his critics. Levinas claims that taking responsibility for others in need follows from neither sympathy and compassion nor a free, rational weighing of options. Rather, ethical action is made possible by a primordial, an-archical responsibility that is pre-consciously felt as the ‘Otherwithin-the-Same’. We are passively obligated before we can actively choose to help. Levinas therefore argues that the needy other disturbs and incapacitates our customary egocentric ways, and that this ‘radical passivity’ enables us to recognize our inherent responsibility towards others in need. The present collection of essays seeks to appreciate this central conviction underpinning the entire oeuvre of Levinas and to provide its readers with a sturdy framework for conceptualization, problematization and in-depth analysis. In addition, it offers us a much needed critical revaluation of key issues in Levinas’s thought which are, more often than not, uncritically assimilated or taken as a matter of fact. The Problem of Freedom | While Levinas stresses our overriding responsibility towards the Other, and insists that freedom cannot be the basis for taking ethical decisions because it is self-serving, this volume confronts him with the following unavoidable – but as yet underexposed – critique: how can we continue to care for others if we don’t take care of ourselves? And what is the moral significance of responsible action if it is not freely chosen but passively imposed? The central problem underlying radical passivity is undoubtedly the problem of freedom. Is freedom a necessary condition for the possibility of ethically significant behaviour or is freedom, as an expression of self-concern, a hindrance to ethical action?

B. Hofmeyr (ed.), Radical Passivity, © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

1

2

B. Hofmeyr

Levinas’s own thinking on this subject is not unambiguous: while his early works stress the fact that we cannot care for others if we do not first take care of ourselves (i.e. the ethical necessity of individual freedom), his later works focus exclusively on the other as locus of our ethical responsibility (i.e. the ethical necessity of the sacrifice of individual freedom). Following this line of thinking, a false opposition has emerged between an absolutized egoism and a crushing altruism that threatens to undermine the recent resurgence of ethical concerns. This problem arguably constitutes a significant lacuna in Levinas scholarship – something which this volume attempts to fill. While it presents us with a much needed critical account of Levinas’s thinking, it avoids the pitfall of a biased account that sides with one of these two options. The scholars featured are well aware that his thought cannot be reduced to one pole in a binary opposition, that is, either egoism or altruism. Together, the varied contributions succeed in mediating between two opposing systems of ethical thought (e.g. happiness vs. goodness; egocentrism vs. ethics; self vs. other). Secondary literature on Levinas has, all too often, been content to contribute towards the fostering of an irreconcilable (or partial) opposition, leading to an untenable ethical position. The Turn to Ethics | The last few decades have been characterized by an overwhelming preoccupation with ethical concerns in a diversity of fields (including but not limited to Philosophy). Levinas’s thinking was certainly instrumental in the current resurgence of ethics, which has established concern for the other as the virtually uncontested cornerstone of ethics. This volume facilitates a critical revaluation of the work of Levinas, distinguishing between his later work (with its emphasis on [the impact of] the Other) and his early works (with its emphasis on the self as a necessary condition for assuming our responsibility towards the Other). Rather than encouraging untenable ethical oppositions, such a revaluation seeks to provide a critical framework for fostering the recovery of ethics in and beyond the limited sphere of Continental philosophy. While this so-called ‘ethical turn’ constitutes a reaction against the rampant individualism of our times, it also brought the two-pronged danger of a debilitating moralization (already signalled by Nietzsche more than a century ago) in its wake, on the one hand, and moral relativism, on the other. While the thinking of Levinas provides us with a powerful defence against these dangers, it remains a fragile recovery of an ethical (as opposed to a moral) sensibility, for it undervalues the necessary condition for other-responsiveness: the self and the duties we have regarding ourselves. The critical framework constituted by the various contributions and widely diverse idioms represented in this collection, which covers the whole spectrum from the phenomenological roots of radical passivity to its embedding in Levinas’s Talmudic Readings, will hopefully prove to be instrumental in augmenting and furthering critical Levinas scholarship. Contributions | Benda Hofmeyr’s contribution (Chapter 1) introduces the problematics by way of a contextualization of radical passivity in terms of our present-day ethical quandary and the resultant resurgence of ethical concerns in contemporary Continental philosophy. This is followed by a two-pronged exposition consisting

Editor’s Introduction

3

both in a critique and a defence of radical passivity: Hofmeyr commences with a problematization from the perspective of Kant’s practical philosophy. She asks whether radical passivity in Levinas’s scheme is premised on an understanding of freedom as irreconcilable with necessity; whether any moral significance can be attributed to radical passivity, if it does not coincide with at least a minimum of radical freedom (the freedom of Gyges), instead of merely incapacitating it. Hofmeyr’s contribution concludes by following the suggestion of renowned Levinas scholar Roger Burggraeve that the paradoxical dynamics at work in radical passivity can be best explained by tracing Jean Wahl’s influence on Levinas. These analyses show that transcendence or openness towards the other would be impossible if it originated in a free subject. According to Levinas, the responsible ego is only possible in being obsessed by another, in the trauma suffered prior to ‘the autonomy of subjective freedom’ (Dialogue, 27). Bettina Bergo (Chapter 2) excavates the phenomenological roots of Levinas’s conception and approach to radical passivity by exploring its relationship with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s multiple perspectives on passivity as developed in his 1954 Collège de France lectures. When we start from the primacy of everyday thinking, or the primacy of an objective world, Levinas’s later work never makes sense, Bergo contends. Readers have to beat a retreat into languages of tropes or the uncertainty of a wager about intersubjectivity. Reading Levinas through MerleauPonty allows us to weaken the sceptical reception of this wager. Both draw on Edmund Husserl’s work on passive synthesis, from the consciousness of internal time to association, and attempt to outline the conditions under which passivity can be approached, fully aware that a thematization of passivity will reinsert it into intentional consciousness, thereby re-establishing its dualism with activity. They aim to evince the phenomenological priority of passivity, while both realize that something other than the passivity of flowing time-consciousness is necessary. Also, something other than ‘me’ is inscribed in my development and introduces change in the constructive and iterative course of my intentional acts. For both, then, passivity is rooted in a fundamental intersubjectivity that presupposes bodily existence and flesh, though Levinas interprets the flesh in terms of a more ethical focus. As becomes clear in the course of Bergo’s explorations, for both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty the ground of meaning is not un-conscious but phenomenologically indeterminate. The core difference between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, with regards to the problem of situating passivity and activity, concerns the status of the world. Levinas presupposes that consciousness is in the world but comes into being without a world (out of sleep) and therefore can be interrupted by the other, who is likewise not of this, my private, world. Merleau-Ponty’s supposition is that consciousness in all its passive forms is tied to a world. He insists upon the importance of our exchange with a world perceived as the locus of truth and he therefore requires an all-encompassing theory of perception. According to him, if we are to avoid absolutizing positions in which one term of the intersubjective passivity–activity binarism is not ‘crushed’ into the other, then the either/or that made the duality static must be rendered fluid. While Levinas understood this too, he did not go as far as Merleau-Ponty did. That

4

B. Hofmeyr

is why Merleau-Ponty’s investigations, Bergo argues, open another horizon for us. His enlarged perception shed a different and perhaps more illuminating light on the dynamics at work in Levinas’s later phenomenology. In fact, Bergo concludes, it succeeds in expanding, without contradiction, Levinas’s phenomenology of fissured immanence. It allows us to conceive the split consciousness of substitution as a modality of perception, possibly akin to falling asleep, or to Merleau-Ponty’s sense of dreaming, in which the other becomes all, in which the posited ‘I’, the bodysubject, belongs to a field crossed by other fields or other ‘others’. For their part, Adriaan Peperzak (Chapter 3) and Alphonso Lingis (Chapter 5) respectively incorporate a finely honed critique, moulding Levinas’s thinking into wholly internalized and personalized adaptations. Peperzak turns his attention to Levinas’s analyses of ‘the I’ (le moi or me). He begins with Totality and Infinity in which Levinas focuses on the human individual as an ego that participates in the ‘economy’ of a world in which the fulfilling of his/her needs and wants establishes this ego as the centre of all enjoyable possibilities. According to Peperzak, this paradisiacal phenomenology of jouissance gives rise to a hyperbolic account of the ego-centric structure of the elemental economy of naïve happiness that does not account for the fact that life is rather a mixture of happiness and misery. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas presents us with a new phenomenology of our basic dealing and coping with the world. The basic characteristic of all being is now formulated with the help of Spinoza’s expression ‘conatus essendi’, an effort of all beings to be, to maintain and intensify their own being at all costs. According to this phenomenology of being, a basic kind of selfishness is constitutive of all beings by the simple fact that they are, so that the human dimension of ontology can be characterized as a self-centred, egocentric and egoistic manner of existence. On this – most primitive – level of enjoyment and endurance, then, human life can be characterized in terms of an overall addiction to consumerism and self-centred hedonism. As long as I am passively immersed in an economy of pleasure and pain, I remain addicted. As long as my life coincides with my enjoyment of it, I am not ready to welcome anything other that is essentially and existentially different from me or my world without trying to subject that other to my own egoist economy. Openness to the Other would necessitate a fundamental disruption of my egocentrism. This disruption, in the form of the appeal of the face of the Other, draws me out of my homely complacency in the world and converts me to a more demanding existence. I find myself ‘absolutely passive’, wholly determined by the Other’s command and demands. What moves me is my unchosen Desire for the Absolute (or the Good), which reveals its demands on me through and in the eyes of human Others. This is the essence of my a priori, pre-voluntary, ‘pure’, and ‘absolute passivity’ that enables selfless action. According to Peperzak, to live in a world that is good and bad complicates my responsibility not only for others, but also for myself. Levinas hardly ever focuses on my responsibility for my own world and life; but how could I serve you, asks Peperzak, without taking care of myself? His appreciation for Levinas’s revolutionary – although not unproblematic – account of this turn from hedonism to morality, or from ‘economics’ to ethics, is expressed here in a highly personalized retrieval as


5

a ‘phenomenology of “me” (le moi, l’ego)’. It can be read as a deeply reverential amendment to, if not corrective of, Levinas’s own account of le moi. In Chapter 4, Joachim Duyndam responds to Peperzak’s phenomenology of ‘me’ by focusing on enjoyment, distinguishing it from asceticism on the one hand, and addiction on the other. According to Duyndam, asceticism and addiction should be understood as an imbalance between activity–passivity whereas enjoyment – as deployed by Levinas in Totality and Infinity – refers to the radical passivity of self, prefiguring sensibility in the later Otherwise than Being, which re-orients the self-centred self to the Other. The radical passivity of enjoyment opens the ‘inverted’ self to the transcendent other. Unlike Peperzak, who seems to identify enjoyment with the economy of my egoistic life, with being addicted to my world of consumption, Duyndam stresses enjoyment as providing the subject with a certain measure of independence or separation from being, which is necessary to meet the other as other. Therefore, enjoyment does not so much conflict with the other’s appeal to me, but functions as the very condition of my openness to the appeal. This is, as Duyndam argues, what Levinas calls ‘the permanent truth of hedonism’ (TI, 134) as distinguished from the sublime truth of asceticism, which most religions consider to be the way to God or salvation, on the one hand; and from the humiliating truth of addiction, which is commonsensically regarded as the excess of enjoyment, on the other. In the distinctively more literary idiom that we have come to associate with Alphonso Lingis, Chapter 5 investigates the nature and conditions of the ethical experience in which I find myself obligated to act in a certain way. Levinas locates this experience in the encounter with the appeals and demands addressed to me in the face of the neighbour. According to Lingis, there are certain theoretical and practical difficulties with Levinas’s conceptualization of the ethical experience. His distinction between our economic life in the world, on the one hand, and the ethical life following the encounter with the face, on the other, means that outside of the face to face encounter, our engagement with the things of the world is exclusively conceived in terms of appropriation: we seize them for our own use. What Levinas does not acknowledge is that the things of this world, and the living creatures of other species with which we share this world, also place demands upon us. For him, the infinite demand of the human face is distinctive in that it is identified with God. Lingis argues, however, that in the measure that God is conceived as ‘the wholly Other’, constitutive of the otherness of every other human who faces us, the exigency of the human other loses its situatedness in the midst of the common world and its determinateness. How can Levinas identify the alterity of ‘the wholly Other’ with the needs and wants of another, which derive from the other person’s fundamental positivity, from the fundamental satiability of his/her needs? Lingis concludes that Levinas’s insistence upon our infinite responsibility for all others, our passivity in the face of our responsibility for their very responsibilities and irresponsibilities, cannot be the basis for effective action. What comes to the fore in Lingis’s expressly empirical account of the ethical situation – which, he insists, is not an intemporal transmundane dimension in which we exist as for-another – are the tensions in Levinas between the formal and the

6

B. Hofmeyr

concrete, the transcendental and experiential. When asked how sacrifice or giving – the concrete ethical situation – is possible, Levinas insists that what one will ultimately find, behind consciousness and knowing, is the one-for-the-other of substitution. Critics of Levinas’s conceptualization of ethical agency in terms of substitution often complain that the conditions of ethical action are so far removed from the ethical situation that they also make possible the worst kind of subversions of ethics. It is obviously not possible to ‘deduce’ ethics or politics – in any conventional sense of the terms – from substitution. Although Levinas’s thought remains directed toward and grounded in the concrete ethical situation, the interconnection between the formal and experiential remains open to the kind of problematization exemplified by the contribution of Lingis (cf. Bernasconi 2002: 248–249). Contrary to Lingis’s claim that radical passivity cannot form the basis for effective ethical agency, in Chapter 6 Peter Zeillinger argues that it is precisely the later Levinas’s reconceptualized notion of alterity and consequently of subjectivity that renders ethical action – understood as substitution and sacrifice – possible. The argument proceeds by way of a close reading of the ‘passage to the Third’ inconspicuously located towards the end of Levinas’s second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). In response to critique levelled against his early conceptualization of the self as radically independent and autochonous, the later Levinas introduces the notion of substitution, which entails a self always-already ‘infected’ by the other. The encounter with the other is therefore no longer premised on atheism and autarky, but anarchically located within the self. The an-archy of passivity signals the possibility of ethical agency without the arche of identity. Agency therefore does not follow from the possibility of an activity, a freedom, being posited behind this passivity. Rather, the other concerns me precisely because the other is not absolutely outside-of-me. The other (autrui) is now conceived as the other-within-the same, within me, as the very essence of my humanity. According to Levinas, our capacity to assume the suffering and failings of the other (autrui) in no way goes beyond passivity: it is passion – and it is precisely this passion that moves us. The passion of passivity serves as an effective basis for ethical agency precisely because it is not an empirical accident of the Ego’s freedom, but can nevertheless limit itself. In the name of our unlimited responsibility towards others, we may also be called to be concerned with ourselves. The fact that the other person, my neighbour, is also a third in relation to another is the foundation of justice. In other words, in addition to being responsible for my neighbour, I am also responsible for others who exist beside my neighbour, the third. If I could limit myself to my neighbour – the one facing me here-and-now – there would be no problem. However, the third disturbs the immediate relation of the twosome and its intimacy and divides my responsibility. I am no longer first and foremost responsible for the one other, but also for others simultaneously. I cannot know or calculate who came first. What are my neighbour and the third to one another (Peperzak 1993: 229)? Hence the need for consciousness, judgement and justice. Justice does not do away with ethics, however. Justice and the institutions to which it gives rise are susceptible to perversion and corruption. Ethics precedes justice and must continue to keep justice in check, for as Levinas explains, our fundamental responsibility


7

‘dwells in the depths of myself as a self, as an absolute passivity… This passivity… is… an impossibility of slipping away’ (BPW, 95). The final section of this volume is devoted to a hermeneutical retrieval of radical passivity in Levinas’s Talmudic Readings. Levinas presented most of these readings within the context of the academic seminars of French-speaking Jewish intellectuals. In the wake of the Holocaust, these seminars were intended to instruct university educated Jews, who had mostly gone without traditional Jewish learning, in the wisdom of their heritage. These readings are, more often than not, considered to be of secondary importance by Levinas scholars, who tend to favour his philosophical work above his so-called spiritual works, that is, the books consecrated to Judaism. But, as Catherine Chalier (2002: 100) points out, the rigidity of this demarcation seems highly questionable given Levinas’s definition of Europe in terms of a double loyalty, a loyalty constituted by the tensions and oppositions between the Jews and the Greeks, the prophets and the philosophers, the good and the true (TI, 24). At stake here is the question whether the relation between Jew and Greek is ultimately one of unity or one of tension. Do they constitute the two sides of the same coin – that which we call History (or Being) – or are they ultimately incommensurable? Joyce’s phrase ‘Jewgreek is greekjew’ suggests at least some kind of compatibility between the two, whereas Derrida’s revisiting of the terms, while preserving that nuance, uses it to point to what he considers as a contradiction in Levinas (Derrida 1978: 153).1 It is this apparent contradiction between Greek and Jewish impulses in Levinas’s thought that forms Anya Topolski’s point of departure in Chapter 7. Instead of writing in two separate and contradictory languages – confessional (Jewish/Hebrew) and philosophical (Greek) – she contends that Levinas’s thought is articulated in a ‘language’ that came into being as his thought evolved, a language she dubs ‘Judeosophy’. This is a language that allows for a dialogue between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, a language that challenges the symbolic boundaries between Athens and Jerusalem. It therefore facilitates an interaction and cross-pollination between the two modes of wisdom that form the wellspring of Levinas’s thought. This means that one cannot fully appreciate either the purport or purview of Levinas’s thinking without grasping how and to what extent it is neither a fusion nor a translation of one into the other, but an intertwinement of Jewish thought and Greek philosophy. To further the insight of more philosophically oriented readers, Topolski offers us a brief primer on Levinas’s use of the ‘language’ of Jewish thought. She subsequently focuses on three Jewish ‘concepts’, which Levinas employs in his so-called philosophical writings and discusses at length in his Jewish writings and Talmudic readings: (1) the face; (2) ‘here I am’; and (3) God.

1 Levinas repeatedly points out that it is the experience of rupture that calls us, in the first place, to totalize, which is to say that behind any imposition of Greek totality there is always already a Hebrew rupture. However, he also insists that rupture is always the rupture of a totality, which is to say that behind any Hebrew rupture there is always already a Greek totality. Derrida’s point is that the contradiction as it stands provides us with a truthful account of human experience as long as it is understood to mean that the distinction between Hebrew and Greek does not operate in human experience in a pure form (Eisenstadt 2005: 146).

8

B. Hofmeyr

According to her, a proper understanding of radical passivity only becomes possible once we have gained insight into the Judeosophic roots of these three concepts. In Chapter 8, Seán Hand also argues for the philosophical relevance and significance of Levinas’s readings of the Talmud by pointing out that in Levinas’s detailed historical and generic description of the Talmud – presented in his 1968 introduction to his first collection titled Four Talmudic Readings – he insists that the original sages or Tanaim compiling the Mishnah (or codification of Jewish law) ‘most certainly had contact with Greek thought’ (NTR, 4). Levinas explores a task of reading (the Talmud) that recognizes but also breaks conventions, seeking to translate the meanings of a text into a modern language, and so to extricate its universal dimensions from what he describes as the confining details (où nous enferment les données) (ibid., p. 5). Levinas deliberately effects a translation of the Talmud into a predominant Western chronology of ideas in order to characterize its aims, but also to challenge a number of assumed priorities. Levinas’s translated Talmud is apparently located within a conception of modernity taken from Kant, according to Hand, but also problematizes such an epistemological break through its continued transmission of commentary on commentary (7). Its existence as both sui generis and deferring text complicates any assumed supplementary status, including that in terms of its Greek Other. For Levinas, the Talmud’s essential (as opposed to optional or supplementary) status is unequivocal in light of the discursive linkage between Israel and the West, upon which he insists. In fact, he defines the essential task of the University of the Jewish state in terms of the translation of the Talmud into ‘Greek’ (10). By closely following the arguments put forward by Levinas in ‘A Religion for Adults’ (1957) (DF, 11–23),2 ‘The Temptation of Temptation’ (1964) (NTR, 30–50)3 and ‘Damage Due to Fire’ (1975) (NTR, 178–197),4 Hand discovers that Levinas’s ‘spiritual’ interpretations repeat and sometimes even foreshadow his philosophical insights. Hand uncovers, for example, the point where ‘the freedom taught by the Jewish text starts in a non-freedom which, far from being slavery or childhood, is a beyond-freedom [un au-delà de la liberté]’ (ibid., p. 40). Moreover, Levinas specifies how his extraction of the notion of otherwise than (the being of) freedom or beyond freedom (as essence) from the Talmudic text, is an intellectual power facilitated by the Talmud itself, which contains a ‘permanent dissonance’ generated between that which it draws from the biblical text and that which is literally found in the text (39). This beyond-freedom means that from the beginning freedom is un-done or un-made or de-feated by or beneath suffering (dé-faite sous la souffrance), and that this condition or uncondition (incondition) of being a hostage is

2

A talk given by Levinas in 1957 at the Abbey of Tioumliline in Morocco, during several days’ study on education. 3 This reading was given in the context of a colloquium dedicated to ‘The Temptations of Judaism’, held in December 1964. 4 This reading was given in the context of a colloquium dedicated to the topic of war, held in September 1975.


9

an essential modality of freedom (50). In its primary emphasis on suffering subjectivity rather than the Other, and on the linguistic wrenching that seeks to both say and unsay philosophy, we have a clear demonstration, according to Hand, of how the move from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, which philosophically charted a necessary progression from a critique of totality to the detotalizing of critique itself, that is, from a thematics of the Other to a more radical passivity, is predicted here by, and to a degree predicated on, Talmudic reading. Far from possessing a subordinate or supplementary status, then, Levinas grants the exegetical process of the Talmud what Hand calls an ab-original significance and status in relation to his philosophical work. Neither surpassing philosophy nor yet merely illustrating its complexities in an ‘apparently childish’ way for the purposes of a religious retreat, here the Talmud signifies as the site of a fundamental relationality, in terms of both the ethical relation and the difference between modes and genres of revelation. At the same time, it operates in a performative mode in order to enact a reconciliation of agency and radical passivity. In Chapter 9, Luc Anckaert concludes this volume with a close reading of ‘And God Created Woman’ (1972) (NTR, 161–177)5 in an attempt to deconstruct the concept of creation in order to demonstrate the radical passivity preceding human freedom. In this reading, Levinas points to the orthographic issue of the duplication of the yod in ‘vayyitzer’ (‘made’ as in ‘The Lord God made man’ [GCW, 161]), which registers a duality in the act of creation: a creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) in which human responsibility is at stake; and a creation out of humanity (creatio ex homine), in which the relationship between man and woman is established. In the first creation out of nothing, humanity is at issue. Creation is the condition in which man appears in total exposure to the all-seeing omnipotent God. This passivity, without refuge, makes ethics possible. This is called ‘the mystery of the human psyche’ (GCW, 170). In the second act of creation, the relation between man and woman is established as the concrete shape of the first creation. Here Levinas deepens responsibility to unconditional responsibility. Being created means being made responsible. In the first act of creation – creation out of nothing – two creatures are created in one: being human means being two precisely in being one. The substance is ‘torn apart’ in its intimacy. This existence is at the junction of two possibilities excluding one another: conscience and freedom of choice. Together, they create reason. Passively, man is created with an inner division between rationality and arbitrariness. Being human is understood as universal rationality transcending and belonging to the natural order. The created man is a citizen of two worlds. The creature therefore finds itself in an impossible position through an inner dilemma. As obedient to the creator’s will, the creature is no longer a natural creature. But as obedient to its inclinations, the creature becomes a stranger to the creator and the law. The creature is torn apart between obedience to the law and giving in to its own desires.

5 This reading was given in the context of a colloquium on ‘Ish and Isha or the Other par Excellence’ held in October 1972.

10

B. Hofmeyr

The meaning of woman becomes clear from the meaning of inner division of being human. In distinction from the human creation, another word refers to the creation of woman: ‘built’. The discussion concerning the second creation does not concern the question of whether woman is part of being human. The question is whether she is created simultaneously with man or postulates a second act of creation. In the first case, man and woman are perfectly equivalent and the sexual relationship is part of the essence of being human. In the second case, woman is called to life in a separate act of creation. Man and woman are created in two original acts of creation and are, like the two yods, contiguous. Both creatures are persons. The sexual difference is subordinate in this respect. The difference which, in the first place, is an element of being human, characterizes man and woman as open beings summoned to responsibility. From this position in creation, the feminine is understood as an original category of being. This original fact of being is not based on any sexual difference, but is possible through a division of being in which different people comprise a different category of being. Different people are the full and different manifestation of creation in their responsible actions in the world. Man is the last created being. The world preceded humankind and has not come into being through the projections of man. On the contrary, the world is given to man, which means that man can reply to what he has not made himself, and can be responsible for creation as he received it. Humanity is, therefore, precisely situated in a responsibility for all. As the last aspect of creation, the authentic humanity of man and woman consists in a responsibility for all. The sexual difference is subordinate to this. Anckaert concludes his contribution by turning to the alterity of the son as the incarnation of created responsibility, specifically with reference to Kierkegaard’s and Cathérine Chalier’s commentary on the Abraham story. The son – Isaac – teaches (his father) by asking the question about the reality of the covenant that registers itself in being created. From the reality of the covenant, the question of creation appears in its ultimate passivity. What is at stake here in the final pages of this volume is the burning question concerning the limit of ethical responsibility. How far can the subject extend in replying to the appeal of the other? At which point does ethical responsibility become violence and evil? Does absolute responsibility, founded in the covenant of creation, mean the destruction of the subject? For if the subject becomes the neighbour’s hostage in responsibility, this may well destroy his/her own identity. Anckaert concludes with a Levinasian response to these questions through a reading of the tale of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac – the third promised in the covenant.

References Bernasconi, R. (2002). ‘What Is the Question to Which “Substitution” Is the Answer?’, in Critchley, S. & Bernasconi, R. (Eds.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 234–251.


11

Chalier, C. (2002). ‘Levinas and the Talmud’, in Critchley, S. & Bernasconi, R. (Eds.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100–118. Derrida, J. (1978). ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 79–153. Eisenstadt, O. (2005). ‘Levinas Versus Levinas: Hebrew, Greek, and Linguistic Justice’, in Philosophy and Rhetoric 38(2): 145–158. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis. (1979). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis. (1991). Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. Levinas, E. (1984). ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, ed. & trans. R. Kearney, in Cohen, R. A. (Ed.) (1986). Face to Face with Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 13–34 [cited as Dialogue]. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff [cited as CPP]. Levinas, E. (1990a). Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press [cited as NTR]. Levinas, E. (1990b). Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand. London: Athlone [cited as DF]. Levinas, E. (1996). Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press [cited as BPW]. Peperzak, A. (1993). To the Other. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Chapter 1

Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution?* Benda Hofmeyr

Abstract In our present-day Western society, there has been an increasing tendency towards individualism and indifference and away from altruism and empathy. This has led to a resurgence of ethical concerns in contemporary Continental philosophy. Following the thinking of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, ethics has come to be defined in terms of a disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Levinas claims that taking care of others in need is not a free, rational decision, but a fundamental responsibility that is pre-consciously felt. We are passively obligated before we can actively choose to help. Levinas therefore argues that the needy other incapacitates our normal selfish ways, and that this ‘radical passivity’ enables us to recognize our inherent responsibility towards others in need. Levinas’s own thinking on this subject is not unambiguous, however. While his early works stress the fact that we cannot care for others if we do not first take care of ourselves, his later works focus exclusively on the other as the locus of our ethical responsibility. Following this line of thinking, a false opposition has emerged between an absolutized egoism and a crushing altruism that threatens to undermine the recent resurgence of ethical concerns. For how can we continue to care for others if we fail to recognize the duties we have towards ourselves? Moreover, what is the moral significance of responsible action if it is not freely chosen but passively imposed? The first part of this chapter attempts to introduce and problematize radical passivity with the aid of Kant’s practical philosophy. The second part follows renowned Levinas scholar Roger Burggraeve’s suggestion that the paradoxical dynamics at work in radical passivity can best be explained by tracing Jean Wahl’s influence on Levinas. What is radical passivity? Why is radical passivity potentially an ethical problem, while Levinas presents it as the ethical solution? Those readers familiar with Levinas’s thought might object to this very line of questioning – arguing that radical passivity is neither a solution nor a (philosophical) problem but rather a moral/

* This essay was written for the colloquium, Radical Passivity. Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas organized by myself and hosted by the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL) on 24 November 2006. It was subsequently published in 2007 in the South African Journal of Philosophy 26(2): 150– 162. It is reprinted here in slightly modified form with the permission of the editors.


15

16

B. Hofmeyr

aesthetic and mystical (i.e. highly religiously inflected) notion brought about by the very proximity of the other person. While I would concur with this assessment, radical passivity nevertheless presents itself as either a problem or solution when conceived within a critical framework in which we reflect upon the conditions of possibility of ethical agency. Levinas would say that egotistical freedom – that serves the needs of the self at the expense of the other – is the problem and that radical passivity – as an incapacitation of that freedom – is a solution. Radical passivity, therefore, potentially becomes a problem when we question Levinas’s premise that ethical action cannot be based on the freedom of the individual. In other words, by employing this line of questioning I want to assess the moral significance of the inversion of the traditional conception of agency associated with freedom of choice. In order to be able to introduce and problematize the notion of radical passivity, the first part of this paper will sketch the deployment of ethical subjectivity in Levinas’s works. I shall consider to what extent a Kantian perspective can aid such a problematization. The second part will explore Roger Burggraeve’s suggestion that the dynamics at play in Levinas can be best understood by excavating the influence of Jean Wahl on Levinas’s thought. While the first part consists in an introduction and problematization of radical passivity, the second part attempts to understand the moral worth of and paradoxical forces at work in a radically passive agent – as analysed by Burggraeve.

Introduction and Problematization What Is Radical Passivity? The last few decades have witnessed a decisive ethical turn in literary, cultural and (Continental) philosophical discourses. This ‘recentering of the ethical’ followed rather uneasily from ‘the decentering of the subject’, that is, from the critique of the ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject (cf. Garber et al. 2000: viii–ix). For how is ethics to be recentred without its centre, without moral agency understood as sovereign rational autonomy? Disenchanted with Man, wary of falling into the trap of moralizing liberalism, with no desire to resurrect the unprecedentedly arrogant and self-righteous transcendental Ego – discovered by Rousseau and reaching its apotheosis in Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness – the kind of ethical philosophy that has come to occupy the centre stage in recent times has sworn allegiance to its post-humanist legacy. To do so, it had to find a way to radically disrupt ethical agency – an ethics in which the agent is characterized by a radical passivity and should therefore be written under erasure. This ethical agent has found its most exemplary if not most influential articulation in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

1

Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution?

17

This chapter represents the first tentative steps towards a critical revaluation of ethical agency conceived in terms of radical passivity. I wish to assess the moral significance of the inversion or disruption of the traditional conception of agency associated with freedom of choice. For Levinas, on the other hand, responsibility cannot be a choice, for if there had been a choice, ethics would merely serve the needs of the self and would therefore become utilitarian (AE, 136/173–174).1 What happens in radical passivity might be best explained in terms of George Bataille’s fascination with the photograph of the torture of a Chinese man. The image depicts a man being dismembered and disembowelled while being kept conscious with opium. This is betrayed by the expression on the sufferer’s face – at once ecstatic and intolerable. What is important in this context is not the violence of the image, but Bataille’s reaction to it, that is, its impact – something I cannot explain by using one of Levinas’s examples such as the destitute orphan or beggar. We have long since become desensitized (and discouraged from responding)2 to the hapless appeals for handouts by the beggar on the street. Bataille became obsessed with this image in which ecstasy and horrendous pain collide. The excruciating suffering undergone by the vulnerable other caused him to become extremely upset. It distressed him so much that he became delirious, distressed to the point of immobilization (Bataille 1986: 244). This obsession is the ‘substance’ of Levinas’s ethics: involuntary fascination, arresting paralysis that overcomes conscious thought: [o]ne does not merely observe a scene here. For when the other person is drained of all substance, when his reality is his erosion … then the borders between stage and audience are suspended and we are “involved”, “elected”, “singularized”. The paralysis of the subject is an uncontrollable rapport with the other person that absolves all proper difference between Same and Other. It is an intimacy more profound than sympathy or empathy (Wall 1999: 54).

Levinas is trying to articulate the fragile and indefinable relation with Autrui as that from which I cannot distinguish myself. More intimate (and inaccessible) than any perception, experience or feeling, radical passivity ‘gives’ nonpresence. What brings about this nonpresence in Levinas is the arresting proximity of the Other that obsesses the subject to the point of paralysis – an inability or nonintentionality that seizes us from the outside. Autrui is arresting and paralysing. There is an identification of the Same with the Other that enucleates the Same of sameness, rendering it other to itself (cf. ibid., pp. 52–55). This outside is so far outside that it paradoxically comes from those inaccessible, remote recesses within the self. This is the structure of ethical

1 Where two page references are provided, the English translation is followed by the original French page references. 2 See, for example, the Dutch weekly Elsevier’s article, “Rotterdam: Geef niet aan bedelaars!” [“Rotterdam: Do not give to beggars!”] of 12 December 2006 featuring the Rotterdam municipality’s anti-begging campaign to curb the nuisance caused by beggars in the central shopping district despite the prohibition imposed on begging in 2003. On the Internet: http://www.elsevier.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/asp/artnr/130309/zoeken/ja/index.html

18

B. Hofmeyr

subjectivity in Levinas’s mature writings: a paralysis in which the subject becomes ‘sub-jectum’ (AE, 116/147), that is, subjected to alterity ‘despite itself’, a necessity imposed from an outside that is paradoxically lodged within the depths of the soul, that is the very ensoulment of the self (AE, 69/86, 112/143). Passivity in the radical sense, before it is simply opposed to activity, is passive with regard to itself, and thus it yields to itself as though it were an external force. Hence, radical passivity harbours within itself a potentia (Wall 1999: 1).3 It is a confrontation with an other within the depths of the self. According to this view then, ethical agency follows from a force that incapacitates our egotistical (unethical) inclinations. Put differently, radical passivity runs counter to the received commonplace that, without freedom – the radical freedom to choose amongst various actions without inducement and with full impunity, like Gyges4 – none of our choices would be morally significant. They would be like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of forces beyond our control. And what moral value does a puppet or its movements have?

Why Is Radical Passivity Potentially an Ethical Problem Rather Than a Solution? The Deployment of Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas The first step towards unravelling the enigma of a radically passive agent consists in following the trajectory of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics, which reaches its apotheosis in Levinas’s second magnum opus, Autrement qu’ êtrement au delà de l’essence (1974).5

3

In Latin potentia (power) is derived from potest (can). Relevant in this regard are Levinas’s repeated references to the myth of Gyges, originally conveyed by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic (II, 359b–360c). For Levinas, Gyges’s magic ring that enabled him to become invisible is representative of the independence and interiority of the I. With the aid of the ring, Gyges became invisible and ‘broke with participation’. Participation, according to Levinas, is a way of referring to the other: ‘it is to have and unfold one’s own being without at any point losing contact with the other’ (TI, 61/32). To break with participation is to maintain contact, but no longer derive one’s being from this contact: ‘it is to see without being seen, like Gyges’. It is to draw one’s existence from oneself, to come forth from a dimension of interiority (ibid.). When Gyges became invisible, the assembled shepherds spoke of him as if he was no longer there – he became an absolutely independent interiority, ‘which exists non-recognized’. Gyges saw those who looked at him without seeing him, and he knew that he was not seen, that his crimes would not be seen. His position involved the impunity of a being alone in the world. Such a solitary being alone is capable of uncontested and unpunished freedom. ‘The inner life, the I, separation’, writes Levinas, ‘are uprootedness itself, non-participation, and consequently the ambivalent possibility of error and of truth’. 5 As we shall see, there is a clear paradigm shift in Levinas’s thinking between Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). The thematics that form the focal point of AE are fully developed in Of God Who Comes to Mind (De Dieu qui vient à l’iée) (1982). 4

1


19

Levinas’s turn to ethics and its concomitant invalidation of ‘the autonomy of subjective freedom’ (Dialogue, 27) was supported by a profound wariness of resurrecting the transcendental ego (AE, 57/73). His first major work, Totalité et infini, is precisely devoted to the critique of the unquestioned valorization of freedom. For Levinas, freedom is suspect, because it denotes ‘the determination of the other by the same’ and ‘[t]his imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom’. ‘To welcome the Other’, on the other hand, ‘is to put in question that freedom’ (TI, 85–87/57–59). Ethics, for Levinas, therefore constitutes the moment when the arbitrary freedom of the individual egoistic subject is curbed, and when it learns to recognize its responsibility to others instead of merely using or assimilating alterity to serve its own egoist economy. In his second major work, Autrement qu’être, Levinas proceeds to defend the thesis that the freedom of the existent has nothing to do with ethics: [t]he responsibility for the other cannot have begun in my commitment, in my decision… [It] comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory”, … from the non-present par excellence, … the an-archical, prior to or beyond essence. The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of subjectivity (AE, 10/12).

Responsibility cannot be a rational weighing of options, for if there had been a choice, ethics would merely serve the needs of the self and would therefore become utilitarian (ibid., pp. 136/173–174). A commitment already presupposes a theoretical consciousness, an intentional thought that grasps and therefore violates (136/174). For Levinas, this would go beyond the susceptiveness of passivity and would reinstate the other-reductive imperialisms of the self. For him, the limits imposed on the freedom of subjectivity cannot be equated with privation (122/156–157). On the contrary, he insists that the antecedence of responsibility to freedom signifies the Goodness of the Good: the necessity that the Good chooses me first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome its choice. This is my pre-originary susceptiveness. My radical passivity consists in facing a responsibility that I cannot shoulder, for something that I have not done but which I cannot deny without denying myself. It is lodged in me – subjectivity is the other-in-the-same – and imposes a necessity on the arbitrariness of my freedom and thereby invests my freedom or unburdens me of my freedom that cannot but lead me astray. Paradoxically, however, the works preceding AE consist to a large extent in an insistence upon the necessity of our subjective, pre-ethical freedom. The focal point of Levinas’s earliest three works, De l’existence a l’existant (1947), Le temps et l’autre (1948) and Totalité et infini (1961), is the transcendence or self-transcendence of the self, and Levinas expressly presents his first magnum opus, TI, as a defence of subjectivity (TI, 26/xiv). In these early works, the question of the self-transcendence of the self certainly precedes and is never eclipsed by the question of ethics. The problem of the subject’s escape from itself,6 from the unbearable heaviness of being to which it is

6 The question of the subject’s need for escape from itself is dealt with extensively in an early essay, ‘De l’évasion’ (1935) (for the English translation, see Levinas 1982c).

20

B. Hofmeyr

riveted is resolved in the course of these works in terms of ethics or the encounter with the Other. Levinas therefore maintains that the subject only truly comes into being – in any meaningful sense – as ethical subject, that is, after the Other has ‘converted’ me from myself to face my infinite responsibility towards others. Levinas nevertheless insists that the existent’s economic existence in the world, which he considers to be pre-ethical or egotistical, is ethically necessary. Structurally we can therefore distinguish two moments in Levinas’s thinking regarding the subject: (1) the existent’s pre-ethical ‘economic’ life; and (2) the ethical subject or creature’s ethical life. Up to TI, economic self-sufficiency acts as the necessary condition for ethical generosity. His phenomenological analyses from EE to TI describe the existent’s ‘auto-personification’ (TI, 147/120). During its ‘economic life’ in the world, the existent cares for itself and forms itself as independent entity. Only as auto-posited or self-created, i.e. radically free and self-sufficient, can it be host to the other – receive the other not with empty hands, but with something to give. In AE, Levinas will disavow any preceding existential base, but in TI he still argues in favour of a simultaneity. In the works preceding AE, Levinas approaches subjectivity from two distinctly different but, in his view, complementary angles: on the one hand, he conceptualizes subjectivity in terms of ‘enjoyment’. The egoist existent embodies the ‘arbitrary’ freedom of economic existence. It is portrayed as ‘without ears like a hungry stomach’ (TI, 134/107) – naturally inclined to persist in the blind pursuit of its selfserving drives and desires. On the other hand, this same subject is a self that does not coincide with itself. It occurs, on the contrary, as a ‘diastasis’ (EE, 18/16, TA, 69/163; TI, 238–239/215–216). Even in enjoyment it is haunted by a negativity at the heart of its existence – the effort to evade the gravity of materiality and solitude, the absurdity of being (il y a). In TI, it is this ‘nothingness’ at the centre of being that will open a dimension in interiority ‘through which it will be able to await and welcome the revelation of transcendence’. This ‘frontier’ does not come from ‘the revelation of the Other … but somehow from nothingness’ (TI, 150/124, my emphasis). In TI, the ethical subject is therefore still host to two conditions at the same time – both an independent egoist self (i.e. radically free) and capable of ‘self-critique’, which makes the call of the Other audible to the ‘deaf’ existent.7 In the works that follow, Levinas will disavow the subject’s economic existential base and with it the subject’s capacity for ‘self-critique’. Its susceptiveness to the Other then does not stem from any inner dimension of heteronomy, but from the Other, from the idea of Infinity that the Other puts into the subject. This is not a choice

7 The negativity at the heart of the existent’s being causes it not to coincide with itself. The existent thus appears as a diastasis, as a being standing apart from itself. Since the existent is not in equilibrium, it is driven outside itself and thus becomes susceptible to alterity. For the later Levinas, this relation would be based on need and would therefore not be ethical. As we shall discover, he solves this problem by replacing this ‘nothingness’ at the centre of being with the pre-original anarchic presence of ‘the other in the same’.

1


21

made from a position of radical freedom, like Gyges (TI, 61/32), but the radical passivity of a being chosen.8 There is thus a clear paradigm shift – that is nevertheless not a hard break – discernible between TI and AE from egoism and freedom to ethics and the subjection of freedom, which is commensurate with Levinas’s move to radical passivity.9 Did he manage to find a viable explanation for the possibility of ethicality in this amoral, indifferent world, or did he throw out the baby (radical freedom) with the bathwater in his turn to radical passivity? It is here that a Kantian perspective might be useful: the general consensus is that Levinas’s move from economic life to ethical life coincides with Kant’s supplement of the hypothetical imperative with the categorical imperative. However, this reading does not account for Kant’s insistence that moral virtue derives from an incessant struggle against our inclinations, a struggle that presupposes the freedom of Gyges (cf. Morals, 7:405/66–67). It is this freedom (described as ‘non-freedom’ (AE, 123/158–159) ) that Levinas disposes of in AE. Following Adriaan Peperzak, Levinas’s break with pre-ethical, arbitrary freedom can be challenged if the following is true: [t]he “fact” of the other is the revelation of the infinite, because it breaks the totality of my world and urges another orientation upon me – an orientation that coincides with my desire for the absolute.

If this is an accurate representation of Levinas’s thought, it suggests a certain coincidence of myself-as-desire with myself-as-the-host-of-another (Peperzak, 213). If pre-ethical freedom as the desire for happiness (self-actualization or – transcendence) coincides with ethical freedom as the desire for the absolute, ethics and ‘economics’ are inextricably linked. Levinas explicitly states that we cannot concretely care for others without the necessary resources acquired through the satisfaction of our needs. Kant can also be read as opposing the idea of a universe in which goodness and happiness remain irreconcilable, for it would run counter to the necessary presuppositions and demands of reason.

Assessing Radical Passivity from a Kantian Perspective For Kant, freedom is freedom from an over-determination by our egotistical drives and desires, and the law that imposes a necessity upon this (radical) freedom liberates freedom to be ethical. In Levinas’s terminology, it ‘invests’ freedom with another

8 Subjectivity understood as ‘an identity in diastasis’ (AE, 115/147) therefore returns in AE as if to rectify – after psychoanalysis and structuralism – a supposedly oversimplified account of subjectivity as ‘enjoyment’. This rectification seems to forget that the subject never coincided with itself, not even in enjoyment. 9 In TI, the ethical subject is presented as both an independent egoist self (i.e. radically free) and responsible. Myself-as-desire (egoism) coincides with myself-as-host-of-another (ethics). Although Levinas will continue to insist on both, there is a clear paradigm shift between TI and AE from the freedom of economic life to the subjection of freedom that is characteristic of ethical life.

22

B. Hofmeyr

orientation towards the Other – it frees us to take up the responsibility we bear towards others. For Kant and Levinas, radical freedom can be equated with puppetry, since the existent is strung along by its drives and desires – involuntarily egotistical. Both Kant and Levinas respectively claim, in other words, that necessity is not inconsistent with liberty. According to Kant, we are free when we are not solely determined by our desires and needs. Freedom cannot be equated with the absence of determination. A wholly undetermined will would be random and chaotic – it would not allow for responsibility, nor consequently for praise or blame. Kant argues that the only viable way to think of a free will is to think of it as a will whose choices are determined by a law that is internal to its nature. A perfectly rational or ‘holy’ will is determined only by itself, by its own inner lawfulness, and is therefore free. We finite beings, on the other hand, have to contend with our desires. Hence for us the operation of the law in our rational will is not automatic. We feel its operation within us as a constraint, because it must act against the pull of desire. In finite beings, Kant says, the moral law ‘necessitates’ rather than acting necessarily (Groundwork, 4:413–414/81). For Kant, then, pre-ethical, arbitrary freedom coexists with necessity, and moral virtue is conceived as a struggle against our inclinations (cf. Morals, 7:405/66–67).10 A free will in the Kantian sense is, in other words, a will whose volition or decisions are governed by an internal directive. At first sight, Kant’s insistence upon this autonomous will – not ruled by anything outside itself, whether external authority or internal motive, conscience or inclination – seems to be opposed to the heteronomous responsibility Levinas insists upon. However, in Kant, as in Levinas, I am incapable of establishing the law to which I find myself subject (Peperzak, 212). The general consensus is therefore that Kant’s moral law functions analogously to radical passivity. However, as we have seen, in Kant, freedom and necessity (law) co-exist in the struggle between what we want to do and what we ought to do (Morals, 7:405/66–67), whereas in Levinas, pre-ethical freedom is uneducable or irreconcilable with necessity (EE, 93/158). Kant’s practical philosophy therefore uncovers the ethical necessity of radical freedom (contra Levinas). In his introduction to Otherwise than Being, Alphonso Lingis typifies the relationship between Kant and Levinas as follows: Levinas does not express this situation according to the Kantian typology, as a veritable constitution of autonomy out of this inaugural heteronomy of the law – where I must act as though it is I myself that give myself the law to which I am subject (AE, xxxiv).

In this passage, the emphasis is very much on ‘I must act as though’ for Kant might have given autonomy pride of place, as Peperzak points out, yet he was well aware that before I become aware of it, I am not able to establish the law by which I discover myself to be ruled. Kant’s conception of the moral law might then not be so far removed from

10 In this sense, Kant’s practical philosophy points us towards a critical revaluation of radical passivity in Levinas. A thoroughgoing revaluation of radical passivity could potentially furnish us with a fundamental framework for reflecting on the resurgence of ethics in contemporary Continental philosophy, literary and cultural theory.

1


23

the extreme passivity, the expropriation and enucleation that is paradoxically constitutive of the self in the later Levinas. For Kant’s moral law seems to function as a kind of inaccessible noumenal dimension – ‘transcendent’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘inscrutable’ – within the subject, paradoxically ordering it from the outside, as it were.11 Lingis continues: [y]et he [Levinas] calls the Kantian formula remarkable, and reinterprets it to mean that the Law I recognize is first formulated in my own words of obedience – the “Here I am”. Here I exist as the author of what was put to me despite myself and unbeknownst to myself (AE, xxxiv–xxxv).

Of course, in neither Kant nor Levinas does the I figure ‘as the author’ (of the law). What is at stake in Levinas’s notion of disrupted agency is precisely the ‘despite myself and unbeknownst to myself’. The neighbour assigns me before I designate him. This is a modality not of a knowing, but of an obsession, a shuddering of the human quite different from cognition … I am as it were ordered from the outside, traumatically commanded, without interiorizing by representation and concepts the authority that commands me.

The Other’s hold over me arises on the ground of the antecedent relationship of obsession. Obsession is not consciousness, but overwhelms the consciousness that tends to assume it. ‘It is unassumable like a persecution’ (AE, 87/109). The Other’s hold over me precedes any contract that could have been concluded between free and conscious subjects. This implies that, in the face of another, the I no longer stands in the nominative, but in the accusative, as is literally apparent in the French expression, ‘me voice’.12 The English translation, ‘here I am’, renders the subject in the active nominative, whereas ‘me voice’ relegates the I to the position of passive accusative. My being before the Other is not the outcome of my initiative and conscious action. I am before the Other in spite of myself – passively. Until now, I have offered a rather critical assessment of radical passivity, placing the emphasis on the impoverished notion of freedom on which radical passivity is premised. What, then, would be the advantages of a passive ethical agent? Following Roger Burggraeve, I shall now turn to Jean Wahl’s influence on Levinas – specifically his distinction between trans-ascendence and trans-descendence. This should shed some light on why Levinas argues in favour of radical passivity, and explain the strange enigma13 of an ethical appeal that emanates from within the subject while ordering it from the outside.

11

The subject is ordered from the outside, and yet commanded from within. As will become evident, this is the very strange and paradoxical confluence of the ‘from on high’ and ‘from below’ of transcendence in Levinas. 12 More radically, Levinas maintains that the ‘I is passivity more passive than any passivity, because it is from the outset in the accusative, oneself – which had never been in the nominative – under the accusation of another, although without sin’ (DVI, 68). 13 In ‘Phenomenon and Enigma’ (CPP, 61–74), Levinas calls the Other’s way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself an ‘enigma’, referring back to the etymology of the Greek term (i.e. an obscure or equivocal word, a riddle).

24

B. Hofmeyr

Appreciation of the Dynamics Why Is Radical Passivity Potentially an Ethical Solution Rather Than a Problem? Jean Wahl’s Influence: Transascendence versus Transdescendence in Levinas14 Following his mentor, Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Levinas conceives of the relation between the self and Other in terms of a double movement – a trans-ascendence and a trans-descendence.15 Reacting against all intellectualistic systematism, Wahl sought a direct and thoroughgoing contact with reality through feeling. According to him, ‘immediate contact with the real is accomplished in the very contraction of feeling, “a bare, blind contact with the Other” ’ (PN, 117/173). Feeling therefore involves a movement outward towards the other outside oneself, that is, trans-ascendence. It is an ascending move in which a being departs out of its being, surpassing itself in the process. In other words, in feeling the subject is propelled beyond itself towards the other than itself. According to Wahl, without something outside or beyond itself, the human condition would be wretched. What gives human life meaning is transcendence: ‘[d]esire, the source of happiness, of existence above existence, is not a simple lack, a simple emptiness. The appetite for life increases and confirms man’s existence’ (ibid., p. 112/167). This movement of desire is not, however, a going towards and an assimilation of the desired object. It is a dynamic ‘without closure, without conclusion’ (OS, 74/109), so that feeling becomes a bottomless, infinite desire (PN, 113–115/168–169).16 In this transascendent movement, then, the person is elevated above itself, ‘goingbeyond’ itself without falling back upon itself (OS, 74/109). This infinite desire for the Other that bears the subject beyond itself is described by Levinas as ‘the primordial feeling’. Precisely by virtue of being a feeling, this encounter with the Other is not only an outward dynamic, but also has an inward impact on the subject itself.

14 I am indebted to Roger Burggraeve, who brought the significance of Jean Wahl’s influence on Levinas’s thinking to my attention. I am thinking of two conference presentations in particular, which he gave in Rome (‘A Century with Levinas: Visage et Infini’ held on 24–27 May 2006) and Nijmegen (‘A Century with Levinas: First Philosophy, Phenomenology and Ethics’ held on 21–23 September 2006) respectively (and discussions with him that followed these lectures) on the Levinasian movement from exteriority to the interiority of the Infinite. The following part draws heavily upon Burggraeve’s research. See, for example, Burgraeve 2007: 260–280 (in Dutch). 15 Levinas explicitly acknowledges Jean Wahl’s influence in Totalité et infini (see footnote 5, 35/5). He has also dedicated two studies to Wahl’s thought: ‘Jean Wahl et le sentiment’ (1955) and ‘Jean Wahl. Sans avoir ni être’ (1976). These two essays are respectively translated as ‘Jean Wahl and Feeling’ (in PN, 110–118) and ‘Jean Wahl. Neither Having nor Being’ (in OS, 67–83). 16 Wahl’s influence is clearly evident in Levinas’s distinction between need and desire (see, for example, TI, 116–117/89–90).

1


25

‘[T]his desire for infinity … consequently leaves the subject in immanence. Is not this the immanence which Jean Wahl … called “the greatest transcendence”’, asks Levinas, ‘… that which consists in transcending transcendence, that is relapsing immanence?’ (Existence humaine et transcendence (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière 1944), 38) (CPP, 62–63, footnote 4).17 Thus another movement is discernible here. Apart from a trans-ascendent or upward dynamic, there is also the mention of a ‘relapsing immanence’. The latter, instead of going up and away, is suggestive of a downward or backward movement – a trans-descendence. For Levinas, this movement of descent into the underground of the I spells the ethical redefinition of the self. In other words, the ascending intentionality of feeling, the direct and intense contact with the Other, is linked with a descending movement into the subject itself. To the extent that the ‘blind, bare contact’ with the Other is a primordial feeling – a ‘jolt, a shiver, a spasm’ (PN, 114/169) – this contact likewise brings about a fundamental change in the subject itself. Before exploring this descendent movement further, let us take a closer look at trans-ascendence.

Trans-ascendence, the Face and the Idea of Infinity The trans-ascendant movement, then, sets the subject on the upward path to God,18 starting from the face of the other person that addresses me and imposes the responsibility I bear towards others. How does the other person succeed in affecting me in this way? According to Levinas, the encounter with the other person coincides with the ‘epiphany of the face’, that is, the face consists in a manifestation of God. In order to ‘embody’ an expression of this nature and magnitude, the face clearly cannot be reduced to a person’s facial expression. Instead, the face is ‘invisible’ – irreducible to a person’s appearance or representation (TI, 194/168). Precisely because the other defies all fixating representations, it can show itself – ‘express’ itself beyond that which is seen or understood. This expression is a confrontation, because it interrupts our reductive perception and representation of the other (cf. CPP, 20–21). The other is capable of affecting me in such a fundamental way, because his/her expression consists in putting the idea of infinity in me, a finite being (cf. E&I, 91–92/96–97). The idea of infinity, writes Levinas, ‘designates a height and a nobility, a transascendence’… it ‘designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality’ (TI, 41/11–12). In other words, this move upward towards good-

17 In TA and TI, Levinas solves the problem of ‘the preservation of the ego in transcendence’ in terms of fecundity. Fecundity introduces a multiplicity and a transcendence in existence. The I is not swept away in transcendence, since the son is not me; and yet I am my son. If the I were swept away, it would fail to transcend itself. The fecundity of the I is its very transcendence. By a total transcendence, the transcendence of trans-substantiation, the I is in the child, an other. Paternity remains a self-identification, but also a distinction within identification – a structure unforeseeable in formal logic (TI, 277/254). 18 Cf. Burggraeve 2007: 261–263.

26

B. Hofmeyr

ness (ultimately God) does not emanate from within the separated being. This trans-ascendent move is driven by exteriority (TI, 61/33). The other’s appeal therefore arouses in me the idea of God, or the divine. It concerns an idea that has ‘penetrated’ or been put into me by means of the epiphany of the face, which means that it radically precedes me as origin or initiative. The epiphany ‘inflicts’ a radical passivity that paralyses my egotistical preoccupations, and paradoxically enables me to take on my altruistic duty (DVI, 64/106). The ‘taking on’ of my altruistic duty is not to be equated with taking initiative. Radical passivity effectively means paralysis that enables ethical action. This action is not the subject’s ‘doing’ but the result of the Other’s enabling intervention. The subject of freedom, power and agency no longer exists. This is the subject of egocentric self-absorption and irresponsibility. Face-to-face with the Other, the existent and its immanent preoccupations are made meaningful by virtue of a judgement that arrests its egotistical orientations, pardons it and turns it to goodness, that is, towards its infinite responsibility. Something happens to the subject in face of the Other – an ethical re-definition to be understood as a downward or backward movement, a descent to the underground of the ‘I’ itself. This brings us to trans-descendence.

Transdescendence and the Dissolution of the Self 19 Apart from the upward movement of desire for the Other, the subject is also driven inward towards its interiority. It thus triggers ‘contraction and interiorization’. Two contradictory dynamics are united in their tension in feeling. This primordial feeling, then, is a dynamism of immanence par excellence, thanks to transcendence or the contact with the Other. Paradoxically, this means ‘to transcend transcendence towards immanence’ (PN, 115–116/171–172). It is only to the extent that subjectivity transcends itself towards the other than itself, that it actually is subjectivity (OS, 76/112). In order to overcome oneself, one’s very underground has to be redefined. This feeling is not that of ‘affective warmth’, but ‘something savage, dense, opaque, dark, blind, bare contact … with the Other’ (PN, 114/170, 116/172). ‘To revert to oneself’, writes Levinas in AE, is not to establish oneself at home … It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’s very poverty … It is always to empty oneself anew of oneself … like a hemophiliac’s hemorrhage. It is to be on the hither side of one’s own nuclear unity (AE, 92/117).20

Levinas also refers to an ‘expulsion’ – the subject is expelled, ‘without fatherland, already sent back to myself, but without being able to stay there’. This is to be understood as ‘an upsurge in me of a responsibility prior to commitment’ (AE, 103/130).

19

Cf. Burggraeve 2007: 267–270. In AE, 114/145, Levinas also refers to ‘recurrence’ as ‘the contracting of the ego’, which ‘retreats to the hither side of its point of departure’, ‘gnawing away at this very identity – identity gnawing away at itself – in remorse’. 20

1


27

This commitment is not a conscious pledge, but a passivity of ‘an attachment that has already been made, as something irreversibly past, prior to all memory and recall’ (AE, 104/131, my emphasis). This is ‘the passivity of a trauma … a deafening trauma … the passivity of being persecuted’. Subjectivity comes to itself, traumatically suffers itself because subjectivity is precisely ‘the other in the same’ (AE, 111/141, DVI, 83/122). This foreign kernel nestled in the deepest depths of myself – that has always already been there – puts in question all affirmation for oneself (cf. AE, 104/132). The immanence of the self is characterized by a transcendence that lies deeper than that immanence; or in Kantian terms, the autonomy of the subject is characterized by an irreducible heteronomy that goes deeper than the subject and that is always already present and active therein. The idea of Infinity – as something inserted into the subject that was not there before – therefore leads us to discover in the deepest recesses of ourselves something that has always already been there – the other in the same (DVI, 65/106). How can something that is introduced from the outside by the epiphany of the face also, and at the same time, always already be in the deepest interior depths of the self? Following Wahl, Levinas insists upon the ambiguity of transcendence: transdescendence opens up the perspective of transascendence, and vice versa. The ‘au-delà’ (beyond) is at the same time an ‘en deça’ (hither side), in the sense that it simultaneously displays a double dynamism of ascending and descending: an unthinkable interchange of high and low, indifferent to hierarchy (OS, 81/119). It is precisely this ambiguity that guarantees the utter incomprehensibility of transcendence as that which is both ‘supra-human’ and ‘infra-human’. Although never explicitly stated, AE provides ample evidence of the influence of Wahl’s idea of transdescendence on Levinas’s thinking. It is here that Levinas fully develops ‘this awakening of the Same by the Other’ as a deafening trauma. It is also here that he explains in repetitive waves of enigmatic verse the ‘non-synchronizable diachrony’ (AE, 93/118).21 I cannot evade this encounter, because it is anachronistic – the debt precedes the loan, the responsibility precedes the guilt (AE, 112/143). Something is placed in us that was not there before, while forcing us to discover in the depths of the self something that has precisely always already been there. It is an-archical. Anarchy does not mean disorder as opposed to order. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives. Anarchy is persecution. Obsession as persecution designates an inverted consciousness. This inversion of consciousness is ‘a passivity beneath all passivity’ (AE, 101/127). Herewith we are brought back to our initial description of radical passivity, as the subject being passive with regard to itself, submitting to itself as though it were an external force. In this sense, ethical agency in Levinas does not follow from a free rational decision, but from an inner force that incapacitates freedom, understood as involuntarily egotistical. In Levinas, then, subjectivity becomes the

21 Also cf. AE, 122/157: ‘There is diachrony: an unabridgeable difference between the Good and me, without simultaneity, odd terms’.

28

B. Hofmeyr

‘temple or the theatre of transcendence’ (DVI, 76/120) but only at the expense of the very arbitrary freedom that constitutes the ambivalent possibility of truth and error – the freedom that makes us human.

Conclusion: Ethics as a Liberation from Freedom? At first sight, then, Levinas’s conception of ethical subjectivity as ‘the other in the same’ (AE, 25/32, 111/142) seems to resemble Kant’s understanding of free will. However, as we have seen, Levinas caricatures pre-ethical freedom as uneducable or irreconcilable with necessity. Moral virtue, for Levinas, suggests not a struggle with, but an incapacitation of, pre-ethical freedom. For him, ‘the autonomy of our subjective freedom’ is ethically irrelevant (Dialogue, 27). Freedom does not precede but derives from heteronomous responsibility.22 ‘Real’ freedom, for Levinas, is a liberation from that pre-ethical egoist freedom that cannot but lead me astray. Certain critical suspicions remain, however. To what extent, for example, does disrupted agency suggest something other than an ability that follows from the inability to follow a different course of action? Does radical passivity not derive its potentia or moral force from Levinas’s insistence upon an initial non-free freedom, or unfreedom, understood as the existent’s involuntary egocentrism? We shall have to assess whether radical passivity in Levinas’s scheme is premised on an understanding of freedom as irreconcilable with necessity, whether any moral significance can be attributed to radical passivity, if it does not coincide with at least a minimum of radical freedom, instead of merely incapacitating it. So far, Levinas’s thinking has left us with two equally undesirable alternatives: either one chooses for the self and freedom, which necessarily amounts to an absolutized egoism in Levinas’s scheme of things, or one chooses for the other – a crushing altruism in which all duties towards the self must necessarily be forsaken. On the other hand, one might ask oneself whether Levinas has not perhaps discovered the only viable manner of thinking ethical agency in a largely indifferent Western world. In today’s narcissistic and anomic world, even brothers desert each other. ‘The sober, Cain-like coldness consists in reflecting on responsibility from the standpoint of freedom or according to a contract’ (DVI, 71/115). Why does the other concern me? asks Levinas. For him, this question is only relevant and meaningful if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself … In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-of-me, the other, would concern me. But in the “pre-history” of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self (AE, 117/149).

22 In this regard, Levinas enigmatically writes: ‘if no one is good voluntarily, no one is enslaved to the Good’ (AE, 11/13).

1


29

Levinas is convinced that communication or openness towards the other would be impossible ‘if it should have begun in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information’ (AE, 119/151). For him, ‘the condition for, or the unconditionality of, the self does not begin in the auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event “compassionate” for another’. On the contrary, the responsible ego is only possible in being obsessed by another, in the trauma suffered prior to any auto-identification, in an unrepresentable before. For Levinas, ‘the violence of non-freedom’ is redeemed by the Good (123/158–159) – a sacrifice of freedom for the sake of responsibility, for the little goodness there is in the world, ‘even the simple “After you, sir” ’ (117/149).

References Bataille, G. (1986). De Ttranen van Eros. Nijmegen: SUN. Burggraeve, R. (2007). ‘De Immanentie van Gods Transcendentie. De Uitdaging van Levinas’ Ethisch Denken naar-God-toe’, in Tijdschrift voor Theologie 47: 260–280. Garber, M., Hanssen, B. & Walkowitz, R. L. (Eds.) (2000). The Turn to Ethics. New York/London: Routledge. Kant, I. (1785). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, reference to the Academie edition, volume and page followed by the page number of the translation by Paton, H. J. (1948). The Moral Law. London: Hutchinson [cited as Groundwork]. Kant, I. (1797). Die Metaphysik der Sitten/Metaphysics of Morals (published separately as Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue), references followed by the page number of the translation by Gregor, M. (1964). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press [cited as Morals]. Levinas, E. (1955). ‘Jean Wahl et le Sentiment’, in Cahiers du Sud 42(331): 453–459/‘Jean Wahl and Feeling’, in PN, 110–117. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (1979). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (1991). Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer [cited as AE]. Levinas, E. (1976). ‘Jean Wahl. Sans avoir ni être’, in Hersch, J. (Ed.) (1976). Jean Wahl et Gabriël Marcel. Paris: Beauchesne, pp. 13–31/‘Jean Wahl. Neither Having nor Being’, in OS, 67–83. Levinas, E. (1978) [1947]. De l’existence a l’existant. Paris: Vrin/Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (1978). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [cited as EE]. Levinas, E. (1982a). De Dieu qui vient a l’idee. Paris: Vrin/Of God that Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo. (1998). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [cited as DVI]. Levinas, E. (1982b). Éthique et infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Librairie Arthème Fayard et Radio-France, L’espace intérieur 26/Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen. (1985). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press [cited as E&I]. Levinas, E. (1982c) [1935]. De l’évasion. Montpellier: Fata Morgana/On escape, trans. Bettina Bergo. (2003). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (1984). ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, ed. & trans. Richard Kearney, in Cohen, R. A. (Ed.) (1986). Face to Face with Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 13–34 [cited as Dialogue]. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers [cited as CPP].

30

B. Hofmeyr

Levinas, E. (1993). Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [cited as OS]. Levinas, E. (1996). Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [cited as PN]. Peperzak, A. (1982). ‘Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant, and Levinas’, in Cohen, R. A. (Ed.) (1986). Face to Face with Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 205–218 [cited as Peperzak]. Wall, T. C. (1999). Radical Passivity. Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. New York: State University of New York Press.

Chapter 2

Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Lectures of 1954) Bettina Bergo

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between Levinas’s approach to radical passivity – which grounds intersubjective connections before questions of kinship or the biological metaphors of common blood – and Merleau-Ponty’s multiple perspectives on passivity, from that of being caught up in history, to that of somnolence and dreaming, and finally to the delirium staged in Jensen’s novel, Gradiva, as analysed by Freud. For Levinas, as for Merleau-Ponty, passivity consists of layers and facets; it is not directly thematizable without incurring paradoxes. Yet passivity is a kind of whole, an abyss from which meaning arises. In each case drawing on Husserl’s work on passive synthesis, from the consciousness on internal time to association, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty investigate the conditions under which passivity can be approached. They are quite aware that a thematization of passivity reinserts it into intentional consciousness, which reestablishes it in its dualism with activity. Their goal is to evince the phenomenological priority of passivity, before it is set into dualisms of interiority-exteriority, ‘man and things’ (Merleau-Ponty), individuation-indeterminacy. The other-in-the-same is undergone passively before it is represented; as an ethical and in some cases aesthetic phenomenon, it proves unheimlich and retro-active; yet the quality of this radical passivity must be approached philosophically, in the light of regional ontologies (Merleau-Ponty) and the intersubjective and value sources of what unfolds as ethical life, and thus as an an-archic principle of hope (Levinas). This contribution develops these two approaches to passivity, in their common roots and their ultimate divergence.

I propose to begin with two marginal remarks from Levinas’s late work: The body is neither an obstacle opposed to the soul, nor a tomb that imprisons it, but that by which the self is susceptibility itself. Incarnation is an extreme passivity; to be exposed to sickness, suffering, death, is to be exposed to compassion, and, as a self, to the gift that costs. The oneself is on this side [the inside] of the zero of inertia and nothingness, in deficit of being-in-itself and not in being… The passivity of the self [thus] precedes the voluntary act that ventures toward a project, and even the certainty which in truth is a coinciding with itself. The oneself is on the inside of a coincidence with self (OB, 195 fns 12 and 17, translation modified).


31

32

B. Bergo If obsession is suffering and contrariety, it is that the altruism of subjectivity-hostage is not a tendency, is not a natural benevolence … It is against nature, non-voluntary, inseparable from the possible persecution to which no consent is thinkable—anarchic. The persecution brings the ego back to itself (in the previous note “persecution” was “the non-conscious” in its “trace”), to the absolute accusative in which there is imputed to the ego a fault it has not committed or willed, and which confounds it in its freedom. Egoism and altruism are posterior to responsibility … Persecution [extreme responsibility] is a trauma, violence par excellence … [it] leads back to a resignation not consented to, and consequently crosses a night of unconsciousness. That is the sense of the unconscious, night in which the reverting of the ego into itself under the trauma of persecution occurs, a passivity more passive still than every passivity on this side of identity, responsibility, substitution (ibid., p. 197 fn. 27, my emphasis).1

In his 1970s work, Levinas gives an ultimate expression to his hermeneutics of the body, grounded in studies which he began in the 1930s. The phenomenology of the body allows Levinas to explore the passage of felt sensibility – anguish, discomfiture, trembling – into an affective ‘understanding’, which are those moment-concentrates in which sense begins to make sense. In so doing, he prolongs Husserl’s investigations into the phenomenology of drives. Moreover, he poses a question that Husserl explored less fully: if lived sensibility, or feeling, is a dynamic upwelling that changes, is discharged, or diminishes, then it must be experienced by something that can only be approached metaphorically. The metaphor of choice is the vessel apt to contain various degrees of pressure. This container, which is nothing per se, refers to the passivity that accompanies the activity of sensibility and affect. Levinas will argue that this is a non-relative passivity. It is more absolutely passive than both Husserl’s passive synthesis of time and his constitution of the other via apperception. Nevertheless, Husserl insisted that the passive synthesis of time was the zero degree of consciousness behind which one could not pass and remain in phenomenology. If there were other passivities, then these belonged to those events in the body that never reach consciousness, events such as the supposed homeostatic processes governing the autonomic nervous system. How then would one pass from

1 But then Levinas remarks, ‘… what took place humanly has never been able to remain closed up in its site. There is no need to refer to an event in which the non-site, becoming a site, would have exceptionally entered into the spaces of history’ (OB, 184). But if some event-becoming-a-site were to be mentioned – recognizing, with Levinas, that ‘the [whole] modern world is above all … a disorder’ (ibid.) – what would we mention? Events like the Shoah and other twentieth century catastrophes, in which the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the actual and the nightmarish, came together? The de facto site might well be that kind of event, although here, Levinas is speaking of the site that is an embodied subjectivity, that develops a conscience. To explain this without recourse to psychology, he speaks of the pre-experience of ‘per-secution’, not actual social persecution, but being-per-secuted, being, as it were followed by an affect or an indeterminate memory that pertains to a connection I have with other human beings and is ‘experienced’ spontaneously in the wake of their suffering. That said, ‘natural’ tendencies are not overturned; Levinas is not a utopian. There is, nonetheless, a fact of intersubjective connection in his philosophy – and it has nothing to do with instincts for self-preservation or drives to mastery.

2

Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Lectures of 1954)

33

‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ the passive synthesis of time, in which ‘now moments’ arise spontaneously as sensations, and are retained as pure self-affectation throughout all of their metamorphoses in immediate memory? Certainly there were difficulties in Husserl’s paradoxical flowing-static time synthesis, such as establishing the difference between the status of something as being retained, and thus past, yet still ‘perceived’, and something recollected from the more distant past. We know that productive imagination played a significant role in recollection for Husserl, despite his scepticism about Brentano’s concept of the same. The nature of that role thus remained enigmatic. Stranger still, however, was the necessity that primal impressions continually arise spontaneously in the flux of time, furnishing that flux with its ‘material’ and enabling temporal positions within the river metaphor. If this matter is sensuous, then its activity or upsurge risks undermining the passive synthesis Husserl compared to a river. Indeed, he had to admit that: What distinguishes primal impression from primal impression is the individualizing moment of the impression of the original temporal position [a hypothetical first moment of sensation], which is something fundamentally different from the quality and the other material moments of the content of sensation. The moment of the original temporal position is naturally nothing by itself; the individuation is nothing in addition to what has individuation (Husserl 1991: 70, §31).

‘More passive than Husserl’s passivity’ would thus be that X in which ‘primal impressions’ arise. Now, primal impressions arise thanks to what we call events or changes in the body. What interests Levinas, however, is that not only do some of these changes reach intentional consciousness, but the approach of the other person also effects a modification in the same X, which is lived as an immanent modification, but in some way depends on the exteriority of that other. In brief, ‘sensuous vulnerability’ is at least as passive as temporal synthesis. Yet the conundrum Levinas faces concerns the status of sensibility in its movement into consciousness. Something, some alteration, affected a ‘self ’ before the intentional ego became aware of it. Yet that ‘before’ of affectation – which might be called a preconscious or ‘the sense of the unconscious’ – may well be betrayed when it is reproduced for contemplation. We simply cannot know. What we do know is that Husserl’s passive synthesis requires at least two ‘primal sensations’ as data and as qualitative change. Because there is change, he is rightly entitled to speak of a flowing ‘pre-objectivated time’. However, is this flux constituted by the upwelling of sensation, or does the upwelling of sensation prove meaningful in its novelty only because a prior sensation has flowed on into a near or a distant past? If ‘the pre-objectivated time belonging to sensation necessarily founds the unique possibility of an objectivation of temporal positions’, then it is also true that temporal positions would lose their quality as positions if they could not find a metaphoric ‘place’ within the broad Heraclitean river that is the immanent flow of time, passively experienced. The conundrum thus opposes two passivities: (1) a passivity that flows and synthesizes automatically; and (2) a passivity ‘in’ or ‘for’ which new sensuous now-moments well up. In Husserl, passivity and synthesis are qualities of consciousness, one might say of ‘immanence’. Other approaches to the unity of lived temporality explain this cohesion

34

B. Bergo

in the light of the world (Bachelard 1932: 46),2 or again, as a kind of intermediacy between world and immanence (Bergson). Of the intermediary positions between a pure mundanity and a pure immanence, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty represent two of the most innovative. For Levinas, if sensibility or sensuous life (Levinas’s example is the caress (OB, 191 fn.10) ) ‘is’ before becoming an object of intentional consciousness,3 this is because no primacy of origin was determined by Husserl – nor could it be. The duration and indeterminacy of sensibility is ‘more passive’ than the passivity of temporal synthesis only when one realizes that the now-moments of immanence, closed monadic immanence, cannot be assimilated to the now-moment introduced with the arrival of another human body-consciousness. In short, Levinas’s present derives its radical novelty from the fact that his intersubjectivity is not rooted firstly in the intentional constitution of a world made up of other ‘me’s’ or monads. Herein lies his innovation with regard to Husserl’s phenomenology: before I constitute the other as alter ego, I am affected sensuously and emotionally by his/her nearness, his/her recollection. That also means that while the other is distinguished from a world where things are ready to my grasp, and are as if on display, that other does not simply belong to my immanence, or not exclusively. In this respect, Levinas joins Merleau-Ponty in privileging both exteriority and interiority, world and other, as possibilities for approaching radical passivity. The question of degree remains. What does it mean to recognize a plurality of passivities? More important, what does it mean to rank them (if only for provisional, rhetorical purposes)? Despite his use of hyperbole – Levinas’s way of communicating the signification of precognitive sensuous life – he is seeking the most absolute (nonrelative) passivity possible. The stakes of this strategy are none other than the debate regarding the status of the self. Should philosophy (notably, moral philosophy) begin with something like a monadic, self-contained ego? Or must practical philosophy acknowledge that subjective origins – if they are human, are non-linear and intersubjective – reach all the way down to that inside-outside structure we call our skin? This question was also a concern of Merleau-Ponty. In response to Husserl’s investigations into passive synthesis, he outlined a remarkable plurality of passivities in his 1954 Collège de France lectures. These included sleep, symbolism,

2 I am grateful to Gabriel Malenfant (University of Iceland) for pointing out the worldly solution of Gaston Bachelard. 3 Perhaps this is also Kant’s point when he argues, in the ‘Second Analogy of Experience [Erfahrung]’, that sensation must be brought under the intuition of temporality and an a priori concept of unity or cause, so that ‘now’ there is a degree change of heat in, say, a radiator from zero to a – if sensibility or sensuous life ‘is’. ‘Wir anticipieren nur unsere eigene Apprehension, deren formale Bedingung, da sie uns vor aller gegebenen Erscheinung selbst beiwohnt, allerdings a priori muss erkannt werden können’ And therefore, ‘So ist demnach eben so, wie die Zeit die sinnliche Bedingung a priori von der Möglichkeit eines continuirlichen Fortganges des Existirenden zu dem Foldgenden enthält, der Verstand vermittelst der Einheit der Apperception die Bedingung a priori einer continuirlichen Bestimmung aller Stellen’ (Kant 1968: 140 (Ak, 210, emphasis added).

2


35

dreams, and delirium as recorded by literary works. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Levinas, what had to be reconceived was Being itself. If Levinas argued that Being is encountered through more corporeal ‘states’ than Heidegger’s Angst and boredom – through nausea, lassitude and insomnia, for example – Merleau-Ponty would carry the exploration of these states all the way into the passivity of dreaming. Being is revealed in each case, in each of these passive states. ‘Therefore,’ he argued elliptically, not psychology, but philosophy. A passage through these phenomena in order to redefine Being, rather than presupposing the ontology of the In-itself and the For-itself. My attempt at a solution: to go back behind reflective consciousness to find a passageway outside its antinomies; perceptual consciousness [is] introduced by body of the world which is not world for me alone, but also for other bodies and thereby common history. No exogenous causality and no pure endogenous causality or Sinngebung [bestowal of meaning] (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 168).4

A comparable dissolution of boundaries between self and other, self and world, is ventured by Levinas, and like Merleau-Ponty, he can do so because sensation is both endogenous and exogenous, because our skin or our flesh is simultaneously an internal and an external structure. Merleau-Ponty’s passivity lectures were finally published in 2003 (cf. MerleauPonty 2003: 157–158). They are more elaborate than the previously published Resumé de Cours. These lectures further elaborate on work he had already begun in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945). While we find an extensive discussion of sensibility there, the 1954 radicalization blurs distinct boundaries between wakeful thematizing states and somnolence, even dreams. Merleau-Ponty ventures all the way to delirium. I do not know whether Levinas attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on passivity. The latter had been scheduled to serve on Levinas’s Doctorat d’état jury before his death in 1961. Nevertheless Levinas’s thrice repeated reference to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘fundamental historicity’ (OB, 45, 160, 167)5 argues for his influence (cf. ibid., p. 189 fn. 25).

Institution and the Body In his ‘Preface’ to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Institution and Passivity, Claude Lefort writes: The problem of passivity is posed by Merleau-Ponty with the examination of phenomena that do not lend themselves to a shaping [mise en forme] on the model of institution [‘institution’

4 The lacunary style is due to Merleau-Ponty’s notes. The lecture course on passivity covers pages 157–258 (Merleau-Ponty 2003). His reading notes on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams can be found in the Appendix. 5 In OB, Levinas mentions fundamental historicity twice in his section on the ‘Wisdom of Desire’, where his concept of ‘Saying’, or originary signification is woven together with sensuous vulnerability and the passage of a pre-intentional otherness.

36

B. Bergo corresponds to Husserl’s Stiftung, or intentional foundation]. Though this notion [of passivity] is indissociable from that of history or historicity, though it confronts us with a relationship between an instituting activity and a state [of being], instituted in such a way that institution—i.e., foundation and innovation—always supposes something that is pregiven [pré-donné], and the instituted state contains an opening … to the future, the study of passivity apparently excludes the dimension of time … passivity [thus] sees itself assigned the function of revealing [révélateur]; a function that is all the more precious in that this phenomenon has been neglected by the majority of philosophers—the body [usually] being assigned the task of providing the reason for the dependence of the soul in regard to the world (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 16–17).

In Merleau-Ponty, our fundamental historicity is tied to the institution or bestowal of meaning and is connected to the sedimentations of perception in our bodies. This is the case even though bodily passivity stands outside of time, in a sense. What justifies the adjective ‘fundamental’ is something Levinas must grant, especially when he feels he might be interpreted to be moving away from philosophy toward psychology. Merleau-Ponty (2003: 158) explains our fundamental historicity in this way: If I say that I am fully conscious of this [my] past, rather than enveloped by it, I refuse it what is essential: its efficacy in regard to my present. [In so doing] I do not see that this attitude of full awareness or full judgment in regard to the past … rests on the past, disarms it. But in so doing, it is a reaction formation: it is repression or resistance [to that past].

Given fundamental historicity, consciousness must be selective, and what is conscious supposes a great deal that remains unconscious – something Levinas understood clearly in regard to lived immediacy. ‘If there is to be consciousness of something’, writes Merleau-Ponty, ‘there must not be consciousness of everything’ (ibid.). And, following a few words of praise for psychoanalytic therapy that turns upon a knowing, disinterested other,6 he adds, ‘that true dialectic [of patient and analyst] only just comes to light: we are forever carried by “impregnations” of others’ (159). This is what Levinas will call the other-in-the-same. Reading this, the student of Levinas cannot help but ask whether, in addition to valorizing fundamental historicity as sedimented perceptions, the impregnations Merleau-Ponty mentions do not anticipate what will become Levinas’s figures of maternity, obsession, and substitution in 1974. More important is the insistence upon a non-psychoanalytic un-conscious, which is rooted in the complexity of embodied perception. Though he never espouses Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for the primacy of perception itself, Levinas’s 1970s work also relies on a non-psychoanalytic unconscious learned from Maurice Pradines, his professor in Strasbourg. The conundrum of the original sensuous nowmoments in Husserl’s passive synthesis of time is supplemented by both thinkers who turn to sensibility, and thereby open phenomenology to selected concepts from empirical psychology and psychoanalysis. Husserl’s argument, that ‘there is nothing in me that is not consciousness-of’ X, proceeds on his initial assumption, dating from 1901, that the inner voice is pure immediate self-affectation, thanks to which

6 Merleau-Ponty (2003: 160) writes: ‘In analysis, the other is necessary an other who knows without saying … who marks the place of truth which is not in struggle, but in co-presence. An other is necessary toward whom I am not vitally situated, which would transform analysis into narcissism’.

2


37

the simplest affective states are always intentional or on the verge of becoming so. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, insists that the inner monologue is at least partly opaque; one does learn new things through this monologue, which suggests that there is more to it than the mere, redundant ‘sameness’ that serves as foundation. Thus, ‘it must be that [my] becoming aware [prise de conscience] has already happened avant la lettre (which clearly implies an unconscious), or that there should be nothing at all to know about me prior to the [intentional act of] Sinngebung [bestowals of meaning], that is, no personal history, no adversity, no ambiguity, just chaos that says neither yes nor no’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 158). Speaking much the way Levinas will about the heterogenic emergence of the subject, he adds, ‘in the first case, the thesis destroys itself and leaves us thinking passivity; [while] in the second case, the omnipotence of doing as Sinngebung will not [have] succeeded in integrating the personal past: we deny [this past] because it has no probable sense in itself…’ (ibid.). In either case, something other than the passivity of flowing time-consciousness is necessary. In either case, too, something other than ‘me’ is inscribed in my development and introduces change in the constructive and iterative course of my intentional acts. The first intersection of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas is thus the supplement they develop for Husserl’s conception of Sinngebung and intentionality (no matter which version of Husserl’s transcendental egos we accept). This supplement implies an un-conscious that can only be sketched by an interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology. But hermeneutics cannot ignore the discipline that first investigated passivity systematically. What it must do is determine the interpenetration of body and personal past differently from the way psychoanalysis had done. This is why, in Levinas’s case, he will have limited recourse to terms borrowed from psychology – like obsession and psychosis – but he will use them to characterize affectivity without making judgments about mental health or illness. In Merleau-Ponty’s case, the elaboration of a supplement of passivity implies a phenomenological rethinking of those experiences that psychoanalysis would call delirium and hysteria. He considers Freud’s reading of Jensen’s Gradiva and Freud’s famous hysteric, ‘Dora’.7

7 In Merleau-Ponty’s case, the examination of hysteria and of Hanold’s delirium (in Gradiva) seems to pull us away from Levinas’s ethical concerns. Nevertheless, by 1974, Levinas’s notion of responsibility is approached as an unassemblable ‘experience’ of immanent break up or fission. This return to the affective dimension of the experience of alterity, by some ‘I’ which has not yet pulled itself together, amounts to a resolute abandonment of the ontological language Levinas used in 1961 precisely to avoid charges of psychologism. By 1974, that concern had been supplanted, probably by criticisms aimed at his curious, plural ontology in Totality and Infinity; that is, how can something be outside of Being and yet cross through it; and how can this be indicated simply by ‘conversation’. Otherwise than Being accomplishes a major rethinking of the figures by which to express responsibility, and these figures appear metaphoric precisely because they seek to translate sensibility into predication and parataxis. The figures used are more like catachresis, where a term is borrowed from one domain and applied to another domain, which never had a proper term for the object it now denotes. The ‘leg’ of a table is one such example; affective ‘kenosis’ would be a Levinasian instance of catachresis. As Merleau-Ponty understands well, figural language does not express what is ‘unreal’; it expresses what we are used to consider non-objective or private, like a reflection, the memory of a dream, or monocular vision. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s concern

38

B. Bergo

For Merleau-Ponty, fundamental historicity rests upon four modes of passivity: memory, sleep, dreaming, and desire as obsession and delirium. These form the fabric of what he calls ‘a knowing (savoir) of self that is not knowledge (connaissance) and also not self-consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 160). It is something like the last mode that Levinas also explores in Otherwise than Being, calling it obsession, persecution, and substitution. It is true that Levinas also analysed sleep, and his analyses were presented in Paris before Merleau-Ponty gave his 1954 course. Be that as it may, Levinas’s interpretation of sleep is more Husserlian. It sought to show how consciousness emerged from itself to become intentional, and how it could thus exist without an elaborate constant world. Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of sleep are of a quite different order. Before turning to these analyses, let me review Merleau-Ponty’s modalities of passivity, keeping in mind Levinas’s most original dialectic: that of the relationship between sincerity as affectivity and speaking as intentional act; between what he calls ‘Saying’ and the words ‘said’. Like Merleau-Ponty, his passivity is rooted in a fundamental intersubjectivity that presupposes bodily existence and flesh, though it interprets the flesh with a more ethical focus.

Memory and History: The In-Itself and the For-Itself The relationship between the Saying and the Said concerns memory and a certain un-conscious. Levinas points out that ‘how the words, the signs, penetrate into the Said of the identifying Saying still remains to be understood. But this bears witness to an extreme passivity of Saying that becomes a simple correlative of the Said – the passivity of exposure to suffering and trauma, which the present work aims to thematize’ (OB, 189 fn. 25). Though this movement from saying into words said is pivotal in Levinas’s 1974 work, it above all serves his arguments for a recurrent receptive passivity. What Levinas calls the Third Party [Tiers] goes some way to explain how sensibility and affect are crystallized into words. If the beginnings of language are generosity and gesturality, the words offered to another continually drift toward an autonomous conceptual status where they belong to no one. Thus the Third Party could be compared to the un-consciousness of sensibility coming into intentionality, under grammatical structures and behavioural norms. How is this passage recurrent? We would have to somehow remember the crystallization of a thought or idea. Yet the role of memory in Levinas is unclear, as he deliberately avoided ‘psychological’ discussions of memory, its dynamics, or its ‘location’. Moreover desire, which figured prominently in 1961 in Totality and Infinity, is replaced in 1974 by tropes of suffering. with the private meaning of a dream leads him back, repeatedly, to our relations with other persons. There is an oblique ethical interrogation running through the 1954 lectures on passivity. If an ethical vision were his primary concern (and it, along with political critique, may well have been so), then the work on passivity should be understood as a preparatory study.

2


39

Did Levinas want to avoid psychoanalytic interpretations of desire? Did he fear some concept of a Lacanian symbolic order with its law of the signifier that truncates desire and restricts (‘bars’) the emergent subject to normalized, verbal expression? By interpreting desire as anticipation of enjoyment, he certainly preserved its fullness without grounding it in drives or Eros. Merleau-Ponty, for his part, approaches the relationship between meaning and memory as a phenomenological object. ‘Perceptual life [la vie perceptive] … teaches us that if we ascribe meaning to all that befalls us, this is thanks to having experienced, from our birth, something irreducibly prior [faisant l’épreuve d’une antériorité], exterior, or irreducibly other, alter’, so writes Claude Lefort (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 17). For Levinas, it is a similar priority – of exteriority and alterity – which represents the unrepresentable X that permits the passage of sincerity, or desire, into words addressed to the other. In both cases, then, the ground of meaning is not un-conscious but phenomenologically indeterminate. However, given his debate with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty phrases his questions of memory and passivity in terms of the ‘in-itself ’, the ‘for-itself ’, and the ‘for-the-other’. Much, indeed, of ‘La Passivité’ is a struggle with Sartre and Hegel concerning the ethical and political question of how to turn the for-itself into something intersubjective, into something for-the-other (Pour soi en Pour autrui). It was clear to Merleau-Ponty that, at the level of perception and everyday existence, ‘tout pour autrui’ – to cede everything to the Pour Autrui position – was either bad faith or narcissism. It was a way of remaining passive while appearing to be integrally engaged. ‘This concession [of me to the other], precisely because it is global, is nothing … it does not subordinate me to a truth other than me: it is me again who gives this right to the other … it does not have me accompany the other’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 162).8 At this level of analysis, the condemnation of the ‘Pour autrui’ does not so much offer us a critique of Levinas as it furnishes us a struggle with Sartre’s politics. Merleau-Ponty continues: Our solution to the problem of passivity-activity at the level of public history cannot be the crushing of the one into the other (Sartre), cannot be the Hegelian or Marxist “synthesis” (which, inasmuch as it is possessed, is no longer a synthesis but itself also a crushing [écrasement] of one of the terms into the other), but rather the fact that all this is offered to 8 Early on, Merleau-Ponty grasped what Levinas tried to show in 1974. We can be, or behave, otherwise; we can be ‘pour autrui’. But we cannot make a norm out of ‘otherwise than being’, because at this level of passivity, affectivity is not normalized. A minimal consciousness is necessary for its insertion into predictable or mouldable behaviours – unless it is to be a sort of reflex. The citation above argues that radical passivity, as the self ’s vulnerability, is betrayed if it is ‘not subordinated to a truth other than me’ – i.e., to reflection or to a third party. We might ask whether the third party is far enough from the ‘me’ to balance the ‘delirium’ or bad faith that MerleauPonty noted in Sartre’s Pour Soi – Pour Autrui dialectic. That said, lacking the discussion of the for-the-other that we find in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas’s reflection on passivity never argues as strenuously as they do for a politics. Perhaps this is because Sartre’s position on the For-itself, ceding all to the other in the For-the-other, proved self-defeating to Merleau-Ponty, and dangerous as a political end (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 163). Holding fast to a for-the-other at an almost transcendental level, Levinas did not carry the concept into political normativity and thereby eluded the critique Merleau-Ponty levelled against Sartre.

40

B. Bergo a truth both emergent and possessed by no one. The delicate point is: this truth must not be realized the way it has been by the tala [those who go to daily mass], nor the way it has for Marxists, as condition of possibility [of the world], dans l’en deçà [as a kind of a priori] (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 163–164).

Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of passivity and memory led him deeply into questions of passivity in politics, largely because the proving ground of Sartre’s Marxist ontology was praxis, and his for-the-other was an engagement upon which we could decide, an activity. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty adopted a stance emphasizing the possibility of permanent reformation, which nonetheless did not ‘take itself for absolute, and must be liberal – ultra liberalism’ (ibid., p. 163). While this political consideration points toward hospitality in Totality and Infinity, as well as to Levinas’s ‘extreme vigilance of messianic consciousness’ (TI, 306–307), it is more engaged than Levinas’s philosophy, because while Merleau-Ponty questions the boundaries between self and world as well as self and other, he does not qualify Being as violence and conflict. Situating the possibility of pluralism in eschatology and transcendence, Levinas works from the face-to-face encounter, taking transcendence out of the world – though not in the way that Merleau-Ponty’s hypocritical ‘tala’ did. Thus the core divergence between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, when it comes to the problem of situating passivity and activity, concerns the status of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, if we are to avoid absolutizing positions in which one term of the intersubjective passivity-activity binarism is not ‘crushed’ into the other – where a for-itself is not thrust into a for-the-other – then the either/or that made the duality static must be rendered fluid. The fixity of the in-itself, the for-itself, and the forthe-other must be dissolved. While Levinas understood this too, he did not go as far as Merleau-Ponty. In order to approach memory and politics together, Merleau-Ponty delved into a pre-subjective non-conscious in which reality criteria differentiating between somnolence, dreaming and fantasy were put out of play. When Levinas moves in this direction in 1974, we have the impression that he is working with tropes (such as ‘substitution’), but he is in fact expressing a micro-temporality whose duration is close to nil, even if it repeats itself in some way. That is why Merleau-Ponty’s investigations open a different horizon for us.

Merleau-Ponty on Sleep: The De-Differentiated Body ‘The meaning of the analyses of sleep, the dream, the unconscious, the past: not then to seek some inductive and dispersed solution to these problems, one by one; there are no separate solutions, the solution is philosophical (not psychological)’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 164). In order for the solution to be philosophical, ontology – and we ourselves, understood as Being and as beings in Being – must be enlarged. This means that Merleau-Ponty must bring to light ‘the dimension in which the solution may appear, and the opening to truth established. For example, the case of sleep (or dreams, or the past, or the unconscious): [he inquires,] what is its scene [théâtre], what modality of Being does it realize?’ (ibid.). The dimension opened by the solution

2


41

he proposes is perception enlarged; not mere sensibility, but perception in its imaginary, ideological, mythical, and oneiric modalities. This ventures a step beyond Levinas’s phenomenology, whose analyses of waking out of sleep produced, in 1947, the ground level consciousness called ‘hypostasis’. On the other hand, it effects a veritable revolution in the sometimes predatory, sometimes suffocating characterization of Being that Levinas maintained in contrast to transcendence. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘perception’ is a radicalized Husserlianism with a concern about ontology, part of which he shares with Levinas, who experimented with adverbial inflections of Being, his ‘otherwise than’ (autrement qu’être), where Être was Being, or Heidegger’s gerundive Being that ‘beings’. Merleau-Ponty also shares with Levinas his critical eye for ontologies as full: on the objective side, the world, conceived as full being (the same sort of being Levinas found filling in all gaps and breaks, so that, in order to conceive of transcendence, he had to have it cut across or into the being-time continuum, or weave through this verbal continuum in the modes of sensation and adverbs). On the subjective side, Merleau-Ponty refracted ontology into the multiplicity he called ‘perception’. For him, to say Being is to state a fiction. It results from ‘an isolating analysis’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 167)9: ‘[t]he sensible world is filled with lacunae, ellipses, allusions …“behaviours”…’ (ibid.). Even things are not plenitudes; for him, ‘das Ding is an absolute plenitude only in the wake of an isolating analysis that brings it down to a collection of sensory components. Yet even then, it is a hollow plenitude; presence, but absence: its content is infinite … thus … always beyond’ (174). We see here the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s perspectival ontology. If the content of an object is ‘always beyond’, does that mean that the object is other with an alterity as radical as the human other? I do not think he would go that far. Finding themselves implicated in the hermeneutics flowing from a non-foundational, non-positivistic phenomenology, both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas will move past the body as ‘natural’ or ‘physiological’ to consider ‘all that has built up as sedimented over it [sédimenté au-dessus], and describe the subject … not as consciousness … or pure negativity, but as the X to which fields are open (in practice no less than at the sensory level)’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 167). This requires revisiting the modalities of passivity that enlarge the sense of being-perceived, or perceived Being. For Merleau-Ponty, each of these states has its particular relationship to Being, as it also has to other people.10 However, Levinas will focus on a sensuous 9 This invites us to revisit Levinas’s concept of the il y a as ontic plenum. Though at a mere sensory level, Merleau-Ponty might acknowledge a sort of il y a. 10 Merleau-Ponty (2003: 172) writes: ‘Ontological priority of the perceived: it is not a matter of reducing all of being to a “sector” of that being – the “psychic” – continuing to comprehend this as a modality of “objective being”. That would be anthropomorphism … The perceived [is] first, not as a content of my consciousness, not as a content of human consciousnesses, not as a content of Bewusstsein überhaupt, not as “human”. There is something else than all that: the still mute perceived … [which] defines itself only by relations … [it is] not accessible not only through a perceiving body, but again throughout human history: the historicity of science [is] not the reception of natural being, but an historic elaboration … [Thus] the [natural] world without man or before man: Laplace’s nebulous … Thus truth [is not] before us, and no more so than through us alone’.

42

B. Bergo

event that precedes perception and is therefore differently sensuous, even though it is sometimes close to Merleau-Ponty’s somnolence and delirium.

Merleau-Ponty and Levinas: The Hermeneutic Extension of Phenomenology Before turning to Merleau-Ponty’s passivities, let me sum up the impact of his enlarged perception on Levinas’s later phenomenology. Three divergences merit our attention. 1. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Perception’ is the result of efficacious phenomenological bracketing. The world perceived is in itself, though every aspect is also for itself without requiring a transcendental observer. This suggests that a kind of intelligence outstrips the Cartesian notion of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s example: the selective and spontaneous adaptation of embryonic cells grafted onto a tissue whose structure they then imitate. How do they know how to do this, he asks? They do not know anything. If we bracket causality, substance (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 169), even intentional consciousness, then we confront the phenomenon of ‘perception’ in the cells as in a host of non-subjective processes. The operation of this intelligence, while somewhat different from Levinas’s other-in-the-same, argues that a ‘same’ can well be impacted by alterity without it having to ‘know’ anything about that alterity. 2. Things are thus not entities and they are never integrally ‘present’ – all presence is lacunary, partially absent. For that reason, the form and content of things are ‘infinite’. In Levinas’s ‘logic’ of the face-of-the-other, this infinity is expanded because the face speaks to me rather than appearing as a profile or Abschattung. This, however, concerns only alterity as exteriority. 3. This provides us with a chance to rethink the sensory primacy of the caress, following Merleau-Ponty’s radicalization of the sedimented body. His enlarged perception entails all sensory perception, but posits neither a ‘natural body’ nor even a simple ‘sensuous body’. In 1961, Levinas seemed to oppose the body of jouissance to a passive flesh affected by the other. In 1974, sensibility, perception, and diachrony are chiasmatically bound: ‘the passivity of the “for-another” … is the living corporeality … a sensibility which of itself is the susceptibility to being hurt … stuck in its skin … the against oneself that is in the self ’ (OB, 51). Merleau-Ponty too resorts to a chiasm, an ‘X, to which fields are open (in practice no less than at the sensory level)’ (2003: 167). But how does MerleauPonty’s perception, understood as embedded history, imaginings, fantasies, and dreams, accord with Levinas’s caress, recurrence, obsession, substitution, and signification? After all, both men have moved beyond the neutralizing effect of Husserl’s brackets, which transformed those modes into epistemic contents ‘for us’ who have become abstract observers. These three themes expand, without contradiction, Levinas’s phenomenology of fissured immanence. Heidegger’s influence on Merleau-Ponty, evinced in the

2


43

emphasis on perception of a ‘world’, is undercut when Levinas asks what makes perception possible, much less thematization with understanding. His response is the ‘face’ or the repeating event of intersubjective investiture, which constitutes the subject as able to respond. With the other firmly established as a pole of his primary correlation (prior metaphysically to any world), Levinas would accept the importance Merleau-Ponty accords to the world perceived: ‘Thus truth is not before us – no more than through us, alone – but it is the exchange of a world ready to be seen and a perception that rests on it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 172). While MerleauPonty’s interpretation gives us a world less chaotic than Levinas’s il y a, and certainly less violent than Levinas’s Being, as conatus essendi, Levinas understood clearly the multiple modes through which the world presents itself. In later writings, he foregoes further analysis of that world. So it is enough to wonder whether we can read Merleau-Ponty without making the world as transcendent as the other is; or as other, as allos as the other human is to us. After all, Merleau-Ponty wrote numerous sentences like this one: ‘it is to our experience that we address ourselves – because every question is addressed to someone or to something, and because we can choose no interlocutor less compromising than the whole of what is for us’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 159). On the other hand, can we read Levinas as open to a world whose multiple intelligences bespeak an essential, if polyphonic, value? Such a challenge would introduce an unwelcome dualism into both philosophies – although dualism already threatens Levinas precisely because he follows Rosenzweig’s insistence on the non-totalization of Being, transcendence, and the human. Against this (or perhaps congruent with it), Merleau-Ponty is looking for a way toward a complex monism. Because Merleau-Ponty’s thought reduces the antipodal quality of binaries like world and other, everything becomes differently transcendent for him; everything escapes me, is present and absent … to infinity. In the exploration of passive modes, there is no third position to compare incomparables or explain, post facto, the experience of the other. But there remains the ‘hinge me-other [la charnière moi-autrui]’: ‘We live in intersubjectivity’, argues Merleau-Ponty (2003: 175). Levinas said as much when he wrote of the transcendence of conversation in 1961. Yet his 1974 move toward a sensuous non-consciousness, which strenuously disavowed the psychoanalytic unconscious, seems to stiffen the binaries of world versus other, self versus other – while performing the inscription of the other-in-the-same.

Sleep as Private Reality, Private World To illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s break with Husserl’s passivity, one should note the way in which he frames sleep, which contrasts with Levinas’s 1947 descriptions of sleeping and waking respectively as an escape from existence and an emergence ex nihilo. Thus Merleau-Ponty (2003: 168) writes: ‘The revelation of sleep [is] not that it shows me where conscious life comes from (Levinas’s discussion focused on just that), but [rather] sleep shows me: (1) where conscious life had to arise [world]

44

B. Bergo

and all that the perceived world and perception have to do with consciousness. (2) [As passivity, sleep] is a revelation, moreover, of a layer of fantastic relations with the world that is also constituted of these relations; [sleep, as our private reality] is an anguish not of freedom (against Sartre) but of engagement’. Commenting on an enticing description of the process of falling asleep from Sartre’s Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (1940), Merleau-Ponty quotes his erstwhile friend: I feel myself paralyzed by a sort of auto-suggestion: I can no longer follow my thoughts: they let themselves be absorbed by a crowd of impressions that turns them away and fascinate them, or again [my thoughts] stagnate and repeat indefinitely … [this is] captive consciousness. The ground is prepared for hypnagogic images: I am in a special state, comparable to that of certain psycho-asthenics … I can still reflect, that is, produce consciousness of consciousness. But to preserve the integrity of my primary consciousness [consciences primaires], it is necessary that the reflective conscious [intentions] let themselves be fascinated in their turn, that they do not set before them the primary consciousness [intentionality] to observe and describe them (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 186).

This paralysis of auto-suggestion, Sartre’s special state in which we can still reflect somewhat and still shake ourselves awake, recalls Levinas’s experience of insomnia and the il y a. But Levinas’s il y a is a sleepy wakefulness filled with horror before its moiling indeterminacy, which has no worldly parameters. In Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the experience is pleasing or captivating. Perhaps the core of the distinction il y a versus drowsing wakefulness lies in the question of whether passivity has a world at all; whether it supposes a world rather than evincing the experience of sheer world-loss. In Sartre as in Merleau-Ponty, there is little talk of ‘sobering up’ or ‘falling asleep’ to escape la veille, insomnia, as Levinas puts it. That does not exclude the possibility Levinas identifies; however, the contrast in tonalities turns on the way in which consciousness is ‘fascinated’ or ‘captive’. In Levinas, the arrival of the other person is the true sobering up of consciousness, whether captive and drowsing or immersed in its world. This makes his dégrisement resemble a hyper-consciousness. Like captive consciousness, sobering up is neither free nor determined. If wakefulness as vigil is horror, and wakefulness as drowsing is fascination and a certain consciousness – consciousness retiring from the world – then the realm of being disclosed by semi-consciousness must be both pleasurable and painful. There ought to be a pleasurable il y a. Nevertheless, the hyperconsciousness to which the other gives rise does not inspire horror – at least not in Totality and Infinity, where it is called ‘metaphysical desire’. Sobering up and being singularized by that other is certainly a captivity – a singling out that means not being able to escape the other. How then can it not itself be dual in quality? Such a dualism, to which Merleau-Ponty was more sensitive, will not come into view in Levinas until Otherwise than Being, with the other-in-the-same expressed as persecution and obsession. With that move, Levinas also blurs the conceptual boundaries between other and world, self and other, veille and interruption,11

11

Both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas term the consciousness they are describing la veille: respectively the one that Merleau-Ponty finds described by Sartre as captive consciousness, and the consciousness that recoils before the il y a.

2


45

both of which are modalities of captive consciousness. Otherwise than Being approaches Being through different modalizations, called adverbial modes, that inflect our experience of time. In a sense, then, Merleau-Ponty anticipated the analytic complexities that Levinas brought to Otherwise than Being, though he never separated the world and the human other in the deployment of his chiasmatic perception. On the other hand, in pursuing intersubjectivity, Levinas limited himself to the description of sensuous passivity becoming intentional, while Merleau-Ponty carried the exploration of passivity into oneiric and delusional perception. The drift into dreaming involves an increasing loss of the ability of consciousness to ‘determine itself to reflect, [as] it is carried off by its own fall’, Merleau-Ponty (2003: 187) writes, ‘and continues indefinitely to grasp images, [though not] in the form of reality’. This is the ‘ “underside” [l’envers] of freedom’, he argues (ibid.). Was Levinas right to make the approach of the other more determinate than this drifting? The other likewise undermines consciousness’s ability to determine itself. What, then, is the nature of the continuum of consciousness? The other has the effect of shaking consciousness into the alert state from which it can account for itself. But the conscious ‘I’ does not submit freely to a foreign force when the other approaches. Instead, like the drift into sleep there is no decision to submit, no voluntary renunciation of freedom. What is more, in his discussion, Merleau-Ponty ventures that as we fall into sleep, the process of world-loss becomes a ‘ “project”… not in the vulgar sense of an anticipated future … but rather [as] being raising itself toward…’ (ibid., p. 189). In drifting into the world of sleep, into a world lacking reality versus fiction distinctions, it is as though there were an ascent-toward … through an upward curvature of space. But here the ascent is toward a dream world, rather than toward the other person, as in Levinas’s intersubjective space, which also curves upward. ‘Raising itself toward’ is uncannily redolent of Levinas’s 1961 descriptions of the encounter with the other. Here too is passivity, ‘in the sense that there is no distance of self to things and to self, and therefore impressions take on meaning without possible observation’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 192). Is that not like Levinas’s ‘trace’, said to be a meaning outside of de facto history but crossing through it on occasion? What is the continuum of passivity like, if we can speak of a continuum of passive fallings upward or raisings toward? The approach of the other and the divided consciousness of Levinas’s ‘substitution’ are equally, if not more, passive than MerleauPonty’s ‘Being raising itself toward’. In both cases there is no distance from self to self, or self to other. If substitution is more passive than any passivity, as Levinas argues, it is also more meaningful – because intersubjective – than those ascents toward dreaming, which reveal consciousness as simply captivated. The difficulty of a passivity of many modalities is that there is no ‘meta’-position from which to determine their order of significance. If we bracket abstractions such as punctuality and substance, a monadic same, a discrete other, then there is also no absolute passivity, and all passivities may well be transitionally hyperbolic, whether they entail pain, dreams, or substitution. As Levinas ventured at a moment when his own language had reached its limits, the third party is always in the other. So passivity is either transitional or relative. Now Levinas’s third party denotes acts of comparison and intentionality, conscious activity extending out of the ‘moment’ of sobering up before the other. But the third party also seems to be a field overlapping the field

46

B. Bergo

of the other, to speak like Merleau-Ponty. Accompanying sensibility – whose sense is always reconstructed and expressed in a Said – are modalities of the vast tissue that is puckered, lacunary, and folded over itself: this is Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘perception’.12

The Oneirism of Wakefulness and the Perceptual Quality of Dreams Moving past Sartre toward Levinas, Merleau-Ponty (2003: 194) argues that ‘wakefulness [veille] and sleep are less heterogeneous than Sartre says’. Indeed, while ‘the distinction between perceptual and image-forming consciousness [conscience perceptive et imageante] is clear for what concerns a sense object … neither the dream nor the world of waking are made up of that [kind of consciousness]. These are made up of behaviours, events, anecdotes … for even in wakefulness we do not observe an interlocutor before understanding what he says and, in responding, we do not await this signification or [its] Erfüllung to believe in it’. Whereupon he adds a psychological consideration: ‘Our real life, so far as it is addressed to beings, is already imaginary. There is neither verification nor Erfüllung for the impression that we give someone in an encounter’ (ibid.).13 Levinas would agree that ‘we do not observe an interlocutor before understanding and responding’ (2003: 194). Did he conclude too quickly, from there, that this was the core of the ethical ‘moment’? If Merleau-Ponty is right and wakefulness and sleep are less heterogeneous than many have insisted, and that our ‘real life’ is already imaginary, then for him the other’s approach would participate in this imaginary dimension. If ‘there is thus an oneirism of wakefulness and inversely a quasi-perceptive character to the dream’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 194), is there consequently a passivity that points toward the origin of ethical concern? This question 12

Speaking of perception, this time using the term ‘vision’, Merleau-Ponty ventures: ‘All intention to see is immediately vision’ (2003: 247). Could we push this claim and ask whether it explains Levinas’s assertion that the vision of the face is no object? Should Levinas not have said, as Merleau-Ponty argues, that the face is not an object: it cannot be seen qua object in the ordinary sense of the term, because perception is not first the formation of a discrete ob-ject, it is immediacy? In fact, Levinas would not accord this, because his notion of the face is restricted to the human in a way that Merleau-Ponty’s tends not to be (cf. 2003: 195, 215–217). Also see his “L’espace” in Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 325: ‘We perceive almost no objects, just as we do not see the eyes of a familiar face, but its gaze and its expression’ (my trans.). But things, too, have faces for him, and a specific sort of flesh – an inner-outer structure of perception not limited to the visual. 13 And he adds further on that ‘Sartre draws a difference of nature between sleep-wakefulness, imaging consciousness [conscience imageante] and perceptive consciousness. But at the same time this difference of nature leaves them fundamentally homogenous: sleeping like waking is to have a consciousness of something, with the simple difference in the hyletic structuring: adequation in one case, inadequation in the other. They are less homogenous than Sartre says. Sleep is an activity of distancing from the world’ – rather like Levinas’s discussion of aging, which is, itself, a taking of distance from the world, and equally unchosen or willed.

2


47

gains little purchase on Merleau-Ponty’s epistemological deformalization. But more interestingly, it seems to argue that no passivity should be declared superlative. In all passivity there is some sort of activity. In all activity, there is a measure of passivity and phantasy. The same is true for the distinction dreaming-wakefulness because in each case, it is reductive to define them as structural opposites. A philosophy of perception cannot be built upon abstractive polarities. Even ‘the idea of adequation and of the “real” has no sense the moment one wants to apply it to the human world’, writes Merleau-Ponty (ibid., p. 195). The question of hyperbolic aspects of passivity thus turns on the possibility of pre-conscious sensation or sensibility that is not simply visible in Merleau-Ponty’s sense.

The Dream and the Phenomenological Unconscious Life is a dream, but the dream is a life.14

Those difficulties we have with the other who interrupts, singularizes, chooses us, and yet is not a face; the difficulties we have with the other in-the-same who is inside and outside, who is near, whom I suffer yet whom I also approach, arise from three operative assumptions with which we work in Levinas. First, that there is a consciousness which is clear, self-positing, noetically adequate and continuous; while beyond it, there is nonsense, a horrifying il y a or, at best, sensibility on the verge of becoming intentionality, virtual sensibility. Second, that we can still work with the binary opposition: real versus imaginary; that reality is the contrary of the imaginary, and that waking life is verifiable while dreaming is illusory. The third is that passivity and activity might be placed at the antipodes of some sort of continuum on which the acts of a body-consciousness are situated. We may admit that all these assumptions have their ambiguous cases, but we proceed with them regularly, living in the effect of their conceptual topography. What if Merleau-Ponty’s reading of sleep and dreams, and his reflection on ‘symbolism’, refocused our conception of responsibility – thanks to his philosophy of perception? The outcome promises either an enlarged responsibility toward all that we perceive, or the scepticism that Levinas sees continually returning to cast doubts on his heterogenic, intersubjective sensibility.

Consciousness and Relationships with the World Working from phenomenologies of consciousness-entangled, of drowsing, and of consciousness-as-field, all of these in perception itself; working, too, with the body as active and the body as ‘de-differentiating’ (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 2003: 196) as it falls 14 Merleau-Ponty (2003: 208) quotes Eugenio d’Ors, El sueño es vida (Prologue of 1940), in Jardin Botanico 2 (Barcelona: Maginales Tuquets Editores, 1982).

48

B. Bergo

asleep, Merleau-Ponty finds in all these dynamic passages a relationship with the world. We have seen how this differs from Levinas’s passivity. For Merleau-Ponty, dozing off is a leave-taking of the world of consciousness (as it was for Levinas in 1945). But even in full sleep something keeps watch, in such a manner that this process called ‘I’ awakens under a host of circumstances, from anxiety to the sound ‘I thought I just heard’ without hearing it wakefully. ‘Sleeping is neither immediate presence to the world, nor pure absence: it is to be off to the side of it [à l’écart]. As perceptual gathering [mise au point] in general, and as a relation to dramatic situations, the body is the subject of the dream, not the imagining consciousness’, he writes (ibid.). Yet the body cannot be called intentional. What is this strange intelligence? In sleep, the body-subject ‘returns to a de-differentiated body’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 196). In dreaming, however, the subject moves between the active body and the de-differentiated body. Its movement combines activity and passivity uniquely, as a sort of thinking according to analogies and symbols. ‘It is not a matter of [Husserl’s] hyletic distinction, of empty consciousness versus full consciousness … it is a structural distinction’ (ibid.). If waking consciousness is not ‘observation’ but a ‘spectacle that presents itself as going toward an optimum, and calling for a certain position of the sensory apparatus in its regard – then dream consciousness is not empty [either]; it maintains that reference to fields in the world, while distancing from the world’ (ibid.). The dream spectacle presents a world, and this world is neither fiction nor the effect of an unconscious censor, it is my private world. It is private because it mobilizes symbols and associates them idiosyncratically. Freud argued something similar about dream symbolism. In lieu of logical negation, I have a dream in which I am unable to do something, etcetera. For Sartre, symbolism was the failure of adequation. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘the interrupted dream liberates a mode of thinking [that is] not hollow, as Sartre thought, nor mendacious as Freud thought, but impressional. The notion of oneiric symbolism is the touchstone of a theory of passivity’ (ibid.). What makes dream symbolism the touchstone of passivity? Have we dissolved sensuous passivity or sublated it in symbolism? Is this simply a matter of two opposed presuppositions: that of Levinas, that consciousness is in the world but comes into being without a world (out of sleep) and therefore can be interrupted by the other, who is likewise not of this, my private world? On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s supposition is that consciousness in all its passive forms is tied to a world and requires an all-encompassing theory of perception. The possibility of ethics, or religio as an inter-human bond, does not depend exclusively on one supposition or the other. Yet the irreducibility of the human other appears to depend on a consciousness that can wholly lose its ‘world’: a pure transcendence. For Merleau-Ponty, symbolism certainly expresses a hyperbolic passivity in which something, perhaps another human being, is at work. For him, symbolism is situated at two levels: waking symbolism and dream symbolism. His debt to Freud is considerable here, but he is indebted to Freud’s critic, Georges Politzer, for his phenomenological unconscious. This version of the unconscious rejects Freud’s topographic and economic one. For Merleau-Ponty, dream symbolism has something primitive to it; it functions on the basis of associations made by analogies. It seems to be a ‘return to a pre-objective organization of the world, in which the

2


49

subject is the body in the general meaning of: an apparatus for living [and] for possessing imagines’15 – imagined behaviours and situations. Dream symbolism comes to the fore upon ‘the lowering of the barrier of the official personality and the predominance of immediate desire, by virtue of distance from the world’ (MerleauPonty 2003: 197–198). Distance from the world is always a half-lowering or halfrepression, since a residue of the official personality remains in dreams, and the immediate desire – ‘if it showed itself openly – would provoke anguish and awakening’ (ibid., p. 198). The dream is thus active and passive (it constructs itself and it happens to us, even though no integral ‘us’ is there to observe the constructive process). The dream has its own field, like sense data [Sinnendaten]. This is the field of significations produced by the subject as body, working with analoga. It is here that Merleau-Ponty ventures a surprising, almost Levinasian, observation about the work of symbols or signification: ‘The passage to the dream is not a passage to an absolute nihilation of pure signification. It is the partial functioning of the signifying machine, the living apparatus, reduced above all to interpersonal relationships’ (199). The preponderance of dream symbols concerns intersubjectivity. The other, and with her the third party, haunts my dreams. Levinas might find this a fitting repercussion of the repetitive quality of substitution. Yet how can we avoid calling dream significations fictions, or mere imaginings? To say that they are a mode of perception with a field means we characterize them in relation to waking consciousness. We do something similar with pre-spatial sensory fields. Again, this is by analogy with intentional consciousness and wakeful thematization. ‘Where is the dream for the dreamer? [Or again,] what is the “locality” of pre-spatial sensory fields?’ asks Merleau-Ponty. ‘The dream dissolves in awakened life like the monocular image (the “phantom”) in binocular perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 198). This does not make it less authentically perceptual. It simply subtracts the dream and certain sensory fields from [our] perceptual belief, which posits objectivity. Thus the dream and sensory fields are not fictions in the sense of nothingness. ‘The relationship imaginary-real is not [between] the empty and the full, the unobservable and the observable, two incomparable universes … [it is] entirely a species with a different structure. [I]s the “visual” thing (the reflection) “real”? The “phantom” that exists only for one sense – is it “real”?’ he asks. And then, as if anticipating Levinas, he inquires: ‘the “pre-spatial field” of touching as touching, is it “real”?’ (ibid., p. 201). At this level of deformalization, MerleauPonty can only assert: ‘It is not unreal … [The] fantastic symbolism [of dreams] disappears in the waking consciousness of this symbolism, but … its prestige was not simple irreflection; its capacity to represent something else with itself [autre chose avec soi] was not simple impotence’ (ibid.). This insight is very close to the radicality Levinas intended with his description of ‘substitution’ in 1974; even more so since Merleau-Ponty himself characterized dream significations as precipitates of ‘interpersonal relationships’ (199).

15 The editors feature this quotation to explain the concept: ‘Imagines = types de situations et types de conduites, mise en forme favorite des situations et des conduites’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 198).

50

B. Bergo

Two modes of symbolism, two modes of perceptual belief, and two modes of perceiving: dream and waking consciousness are worlds, one largely private, one largely public. They cut across each other. In their relation to each other, they require that we reopen the question: ‘Is it real or just fiction?’ This question makes sense only on two conditions: (1) maintaining an objective-subjective distinction; and (2) approaching thinking from ‘the postulate of the priority of conventional thought … by identity’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 202–203). The dream and its symbolism ‘consist in corporeity and the relation with the other person [avec autrui]’ (ibid., p. 205). Faithful to Freud, Merleau-Ponty argues that even if there is repression [refoulement] operative in dreams, that repression concerns representations – dream sentiments do not themselves undergo repression or disguising (204). This is why some dreams evoke passions overflowing their apparent content or motivation. As to the distinction of the latent versus the manifest content of a dream, clearly the latent content cannot be so hidden that some perceptual activity did not grasp it. If the latent content had completely escaped perceptual sensitivity, then there would be nothing to mask. The symbolic field of the dream, on the contrary, escapes notions like ‘overt’ and ‘exactitude’: ‘not just because one is in the imaginary (the formal reason), but because the unity of the symbols is undivided [in the dream]. That sexual organ is not a sex because it is all, tout – [it goes unremarked] as a sex because [in the dream] it is everything, tout … what prevents [us] from stating openly the latent sense [of the dream] is that the very idea of openly and of exactitude is meaningless here, because the unity [of the dream thought] is undivided’ (ibid.). Understanding dream symbolism requires a different phenomenological reconstruction. It requires a ‘hermeneutic reverie’ (ibid.). This peculiar hermeneutic more than concerns other persons; it grows out of our encounters. But it is this system of echoes, he adds, ‘that constitutes the oneirism of waking as well’ (ibid.) – at least, as a significant dimension of that life. Everything conspires at this moment to shift the significance of the world in Merleau-Ponty toward relations with other persons. Let us look at this in another way. What if Levinas’s distinction between the Saying and the Said, his logic of the trace, his insistence upon the adverbial level that inflects being, is understood as verbality – what if the work Levinas invests in unveiling a sensuous ‘otherwise than being’ were, itself, a kind of hermeneutic reverie? If we answer, ‘No, Levinas’s work is about something real; or real but otherwise inflected, otherwise discerned’, then Merleau-Ponty can show that – with his concept of expanded perception, and given the overlapping of waking and oneiric symbolism – life is at times a dream, and the dream is certainly a life. Moreover, Levinas himself set the real, or Being, existence, and the Good, or value apart from each other. A hermeneutic reverie ultimately does not depend on deliberations about real versus imaginary, actual versus fictional. ‘It cannot be a question of distinguishing them absolutely: our “real” life is oneiric for all that touches the other person; all investment is at the same time counter-investment and over-investment, that is, ambiguous’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 204). The events of election or encroachment by the other, of feeling mal dans sa peau; obsession, persecution, substitution are phenomenological reconstructions

2


51

of pre-intentional sensibility. And Levinas is quick to unsay them in order to protect them from the scepticism that ‘is taken from the order of the “real” or the “eventlike” [événementiel]’ (ibid., p. 205). His concern is legitimate. Can these be undone otherwise than by unsaying? Merleau-Ponty observes: ‘It is not a question of subordinating awakened life to oneiric life. Simply, we must understand what they [these modalities of life] communicate; the fundamental function: desire and the fecundity of desire’ (ibid.). This is precisely what Levinas characterized by ‘metaphysical desire’ in 1961. That which these modalities communicate concerns Levinas’s ‘signification’. Merleau-Ponty’s approach to passivity through a hermeneutic reverie encompasses the plurality he termed perception; that plurality parallels Levinas’s pluralist ontology (existence, value and justice) in Totality and Infinity. Should we take Levinas’s other, and his (non)perception of the other as dreams? We may certainly do that if we understand that dreams do not belong to simplistic binarisms like the true versus the untrue. Yet Levinas’s 1961 distinction between the good and the true underscores an overlooked dimension of intersubjectivity: it is ‘good’ in a way that exceeds the reality principle and the pleasures of consumption and utilization. Merleau-Ponty would hardly reject such a claim. Moreover, ‘the idea of symbolism’ – and perhaps the appearing of the face itself – belongs to the overlap between the two symbolisms of dream and waking states. As he says (2003: 205), the idea of symbolism ‘is not to be attached to a causal order. Instead, it consists in corporeity and the relation with the other person’. ‘Projection and introjection are not the operations of a “consciousness”… the relationship with the world and with the other [autrui] are rapports not with ob-jects, but with that which I have to be, with “instances”. The rule here is indistinction and the exception’ (ibid.). Is the most intensive, most shattering exception not the other- (human) in-thesame? Is it not an introjection that is more than is classified according to the stages of developmental psychologies? If we bring Merleau-Ponty’s 1954 explorations of passivity into Levinas’s phenomenology of immanence in Otherwise than Being, we find a sensuous vulnerability enriched with modalities impossible to dismiss as mere fictions. We find that the Saying and the Said allow for the proliferation of metaphoric levels of signification. They open to a mixing of waking consciousness with the oneirics of the proximity of the other – even if and when the dream feels more sober than do our everyday activities. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s analyses support our saying that Levinas was not just projecting affects onto the other, or that he was simply fantasizing. We might instead consider the split consciousness of substitution as a modality of perception, possibly akin to falling asleep, or to Merleau-Ponty’s sense of dreaming, in which the other becomes all, in which the posited ‘I’, the body-subject, belongs to a field crossed by other fields or other ‘others’. This is a provocative approach to Levinas largely because it does not set out from concepts of the world and the other. It has taken us far from a naïve, perceptual faith and its oppositions. That is a boon, not an obstacle to reading Levinas. When we start from the primacy of everyday thinking, or the primacy of an objective world, Levinas’s later work never makes sense. Readers have to beat a retreat into languages of tropes or the uncertainty of a wager about intersubjectivity. Reading Levinas through

52

B. Bergo

Merleau-Ponty allows us to weaken the sceptical reception of this wager. The question of the world, its primacy and its multiform status, remains. But the world does not so much contain the other person, as it is crossed through by others, or better, shaped by them. That, at least, is the lesson of our dreams. Consider one of the centres of Otherwise than Being: the uncanny time called ‘diachrony’. When viewed from the temporality that is a unified flux, wherein events experienced hold determinate positions, the transcendence called diachrony seems a weak wager, hardly one mode of temporality among many. But now recall Merleau-Ponty’s question, what is the time of the dream? The dream is not an act circumscribed temporally. Hence, the ubiquity of the dream, thanks to [its] symbolic matrices. But it is also trans-temporal. Awakened consciousness entails the time of consciousness and the time of its object. Oneiric consciousness … does not contain this cleavage. Concerning a dream, the question arises whether it is meaningful to say: it began at such a moment and finished at such a moment (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 208, my emphasis).

But this question proves as misguided as it is to ask: when did the other first affect me ethically? Or again: how do I know the other affects me? Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis shows us the futility of conceiving diachrony on the model of Husserl’s flux or that of Aristotle’s units of time. We cannot ask: how long does a diachronic episode last? – lest we suppose all interruptions quantifiable within a homogeneous universal time. The other affects us like the dream. ‘The dream is begun by that which, in us, receives events and classifies them relative to our acquired intersubjective dimensions – [there is thus] a thin thread of oneirism in all awakened life – “this shadow”, this germinative production … of my psychic life, … this automatism that moves in me, this is “the unconscious” ’ (ibid., p. 208). And this conception of the unconscious – which Merleau-Ponty culls from Freud, Politzer, and Proust – is from the outset intersubjective, embodied, even pluri-subjective – not unlike Levinas’s master ‘trope’ of the other in the same.

References Bachelard, G. (1932). L’intuition de l’instant. Paris: Éditions Gonthier. Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kant, I. (1968) [1781]. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Akademie edition. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press [cited as OB]. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003). L’institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique – Le Problème de la passivité: le Sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire. Notes de Cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé, eds., Preface by Claude Lefort. Paris: Éditions Belin.

Chapter 3

Sincerely Yours. Towards a Phenomenology of Me Adriaan Peperzak

Abstract Here I am – for you. How does Levinas describe and analyse this amazing discovery? What does it imply about my ipseity and why should mutual respect be founded in a double (chiastic) asymmetry? This contribution takes up these questions by sketching Levinas’s accounts of the economic and ethical subject, clarifying the meaning of asymmetric height in relation to the evocation of the height of the ‘Most High’, and then delineating the sense of the term ‘passivity’. The author argues that radical passivity must be understood as ‘patience’, not as an ‘ontological’ passivity whose meaning is drawn from impersonal phenomena. In this way, the central Levinasian insight, that responsibility does not derive from a self-sufficient subject in relation to objects or even from a subject dependent on a medium or being in which it is immersed, is able to be preserved without a complacent or merely passive acceptance of evil or suffering. From the analysis of the patient self, consideration then turns to the question of whether and how a phenomenology of ‘me’ is possible. The notion of ‘election’ comes to the fore as the moment in which ‘I’ in relation to you am given a more direct access to experience and expression of myself and my own concern for myself, without yet eclipsing or debasing the height of the Other.

In this contribution, I would like to combine two tasks: (1) explain how Emmanuel Levinas analyses ‘the I’ (le moi, me, or – in a generalizing way – le soi); and (2) indicate how I receive and respond to his analysis. In doing this, I shall describe several dimensions of ‘me’ – in the sense of ‘the I’ or ‘the me’ that every human individual experiences as his/her own – in order to show how these dimensions together constitute a unique person who can designate him-/herself by pronouncing the personal pronoun ‘I’ or ‘me’. As levels or layers of ‘me’, these dimensions must be integrated in a philosophical anthropology that shows their coherence within the corporeal existence of human spirituality. Although Levinas himself does not extensively dwell on the mutual influence of each dimension on all others, their integration remains a task for further elaboration. In Totalité et Infini, Levinas dedicates seventy pages to the constitution of the human individual as an ego that participates in the ‘economy’ of a world in which the fulfilling of his/her needs and wants establishes this ego as the centre of all enjoyable possibilities (TI, 79–149/107–174). Use and exploitation, hunting, fishB. Hofmeyr (ed.), Radical Passivity, © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

55

56

A. Peperzak

ing and farming, dwelling, labour and consumption, but also thinking, reading, and aesthetic pleasures compose a world of enjoyment (jouissance), of which I am the living sovereign for whom the universe exists. To live is to live on… (vivre de…) and this allows me to enjoy my immersion in the elements of water, light, earth and air, flesh, and ideas, while being animated by a desire for happiness and harmony. Levinas’s phenomenology of jouissance has been paraphrased often enough to dispense me from dwelling on its details (Peperzak 1993: 147–161). Let me therefore immediately formulate two questions that are not fully answered in his descriptions. First, Levinas’s insistence on the hedonistic, almost paradisiacal, aspects of the human life-world leaves pain, disaster, and endurance in the shadow.1 Would a complete description not force us to tone down the ego-centric structure of the elemental economy of enjoyment and naïve happiness? Would ‘interiority’ still be an accurate characterization of this economy, if we equally stressed the hard and painful aspects of our being exposed to the hostile elements of nature and history? If endurance is necessary to resist and cope with elements, forces, or ‘gods’ that spell disaster and if we take our attempts at expulsion and destruction of such forces into account, should we not place greater emphasis on the ambiguity of a life that abandons itself to the elements? Shouldn’t we stress that everyone is also assailed and victimized by primitive hostilities, already on this level of existence?2 We do not find an answer to these questions in Totalité et Infini, but in some later essays Levinas intensely scrutinizes the meaning of suffering. Even then, however, it remains a question as to what extent his earlier phenomenology of living as enjoyment should not be amended in order to do more justice to life as a mixture of happiness and misery or splendour and horror, and to the earth as a sojourn or journey in a valley of joys and tears. Second, in his display of the worldly economy as an arrangement of elementary happiness, Levinas states that enjoyment provides the ego with a certain independence and a ‘presence to itself’, which guarantees its interiority. Enjoyment realizes a basic identity and subjectivity.3 Perhaps more emphasis on our resistance and endurance

1

Levinas does mention the threatening, destabilizing, nocturnal, destructive, and perfidious aspects of the apeiron that makes human life dangerous and insecure (TI, 114–116/140–142), but their consequences for a phenomenology of our ‘vital’ experiences seem to remain marginal. 2 In the long section on ‘Interiority and Economy’, pain and suffering are mentioned very rarely (cf. TI, 118, 138–139/145, 164–165) and their relevance is not thematized. On 87/115, the relative importance of suffering in the economy of life is expressed in the following words: ‘La souffrance est une défaillance du bonheur’ (‘Suffering is a failure of happiness’). 3 See TI, 82/110: ‘vivre de… dessine l’indépendance même, l’ indépendance de la jouissance et de son bonheur qui est le dessin originel de toute indépendance’ (‘[L]iving from… delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and of its happiness, which is the original pattern of all independence’). Cf. also 86/114: ‘La jouissance réalise l’ indépendance … La subjectivité prend son origine dans l’ indépendance et dans la souveraineté de la jouissance’ (‘Enjoyment realizes independence … Subjectivity originates in the independence and sovereignty of enjoyment’); 89/116: ‘Avoir froid, faim, soif, être nu, chercher abri – toutes ces dépendances à l’égard du monde, devenu[e]s besoins, arrachent l’être instinctif aux anonymes menaces pour constituer un être indépendant du monde, véritable sujet capable d’assurer la satisfaction de ses besoins’

3

Sincerely Yours. Towards a Phenomenology of Me

57

vis-à-vis hostile forces could reinforce this point. However, does enjoyment – or endurance – as such provide me with a stance of my own? Does my appropriation of enjoyable experiences and the emergence of me as distinct from the elemental ocean in which I am immersed not already presuppose the awakening of some – albeit very primitive – self or egoity, instead of constituting me as a substance and subject by the mere osmosis between the elements and my enjoying them? This question becomes even more urgent when we read that Levinas characterizes the enjoying ego as egoistic.4 ‘Egoism’ implicitly evokes altruism as its opposite, but no other human individual is encountered in the abstract scene of me-in-the-world, so long as my life, as ‘interiority’,5 is fenced off from the social world, which will be described only later. Even ‘egocentrism’ or the very mention of ‘(the) ego’ and ‘egoity’ would be anticipations at this stage of our investigation – unless we admit, as I suggested above, that my enjoyment presupposes a kind of self in me, a self that centres and concentrates the world of enjoyable entities around me and thus grants them their human significance. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes a new phenomenology of our basic dealing and coping with the enjoyable (and in my view also repulsive) earth.6 This phenomenology is part of a general ontology, which – far from being hostile to all attempts at developing an ontology – forms a subordinate level or dimension of his own philosophy.7 The basic characteristic of all being, including its typically human exercise, is now formulated with the help of Spinoza’s expression ‘conatus essendi’,8

(‘To be cold, hungry, thirsty, naked, to seek shelter – all these dependencies with regard to the world, having become needs, save the instinctive being from the anonymous menaces and constitute a being independent of the world, a veritable subject capable of ensuring the satisfaction of its needs’); and 88/115: ‘parce que la vie est bonheur, elle est personnelle. La personnalité de la personne, l’ipséité du moi … est la particularité du bonheur de la jouissance. La jouissance accomplit la séparation athée …’ (‘[B]ecause life is happiness it is personal. The personality of the person, the ipseity of the I … is the particularity of the happiness of enjoyment. Enjoyment accomplishes the atheist separation…’). 4 For example TI, 84–85/113–114 (‘l’égoïsm de la vie’), 87/114 (‘bonheur essentiellement égoïste’), 115/142 (‘égoïsme de la jouissance’), 131/157–158, 147/173, 148/174, 150/175–176. In Autrement qu’être (1974) egoism is immediately linked to being as conatus essendi and intéressement: cf. AE, 4–5/4–5, 93/73–74 (‘jouissance, as singularization of an I in its recoiling on itself, is the very movement of egoism’), 117/92, 142/111–112. 5 Life, as quest of egoic satisfaction, is characterized as ‘interiority’ (title of the second section of TI, 81–158/109–186, which is in fact the first part of TI) and opposed to the ‘exteriority’ announced in the subtitle of the book and described in Section III (159–225/187–253). 6 I retain the word ‘phenomenology’ to characterize Levinas’s philosophy, despite his own abandoning of it. 7 Cf. Peperzak (1997: 72–120) on Levinas’s own ontology. When Levinas seems to reject all ‘ontology’, he means Heidegger’s claim that the question of being is the basic and decisive question of philosophy. Levinas does not reject ontology as such (how could anyone do this?), but circumscribes it as the elaboration of a subordinate question and perspective. 8 Cf. Spinoza, Ethica III, prop. 6: ‘Every entity, insofar as it is (in) itself, tends to persevere in its being.’ (‘Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur’); IV, prop. 26 + demonstratio; IV Appendix, caput 1. ‘Cupiditas’ (concupiscence) is a synonym for ‘conatus (effort to be).’

58

A. Peperzak

an effort of all beings to be, to maintain and intensify their own being at all costs. To be is to actively have an interest in one’s own being, while being among other beings. Esse (being) is inter-esse or ‘intéressement’: a relational mode of being that is at the same time interested in itself and in other beings, but only for the sake of itself; an interest in other beings because of its being full of interest in itself. Conative interestedness or ‘inter-essence’9 is self-interestedness: self-affirmation, self-maintenance, self-promotion and self-confirmation, through dealing with other beings. According to this phenomenology of being, a basic kind of selfishness is constitutive of all beings by the simple fact that they are, so that the human dimension of ontology can be characterized as a self-centred, egocentric and egoistic manner of existence.10 If, already on the most primitive level of enjoyment and endurance, a kind of organizing self is burgeoning, we might describe its mode of operation as a spontaneous, but self-directed and primitively self-concerned reacting and responding to the affections it undergoes. I am affected by light and darkness, earth and water, spaces, times, things, animals, eyes, faces, hands, bodies, ideas, paintings, and so on. Appropriate reactions are successful whereas inappropriate or awkward ones must be replaced with more adjusted ones. I neither create nor invent from scratch; instead, I react, cope, respond. Adjustments demand (a) openness to occurrences that surprise me, (b) a certain – albeit minimal – distance from automatisms and addictions, and (c) some space between the pure passivity of mere undergoing, on the one hand, and a more or less appropriate manner of feeling myself affected, touched, provoked, challenged, surprised, on the other. As long as I am passively immersed in an economy of pleasure and pain, I remain addicted. Whatever affects me triggers the reactions that nature or habituation have installed in me. On the level of spontaneous consumption, no other realities can affect me than the ones that function within the economy of enjoyment. Neither you nor I myself can show to me how you or I differ from the elements of our hedonistic economy, unless we already begin to be liberated from our addictions. As long as my life coincides with my enjoyment of it, I am not ready to welcome anything other that is radically, essentially, and existentially different from me or my enjoyable and painful world. When you appear in my hedonistic world, I will then respond to this phenomenon by trying to submit you to the habitual kind of satisfactions that have become my norm for dealing with all beings. I might, for example, try to eat

9 Neither Levinas nor Al Lingis’s excellent translation of AE uses this word or ‘interessance.’ I use it here to render the active character of Levinas’s ‘intéressement’ because it sounds more active than the passive interestedness. 10 An ontological view that identifies being as self-centred or even egoistic is problematic insofar as it defines ‘being’ (esse) as a fundamental, but also a particular mode and attitude. In so doing, it seems to forbid the use of ‘being’ as a predicate for ascribing benevolent, generous, or disinterested qualities to certain subjects. ‘Being’ (or ‘essence’) thus loses its universal meaning, and therewith its use as copula. It also excludes completely passive manners of being. Consequently ‘being’ is then opposed to goodness and selflessness.

3


59

you or, if my dealing with the world has become more sophisticated, to use you as an instrument or slave for executing the labour I no longer want to take on. Slavery certainly presupposes that I delay some kinds of immediate pleasure: I cannot eat you, for example, if I want you to mow the grass or pick tomatoes for me. But delayed consumption – which already demands a certain distance toward immediate satisfaction – can still remain a component of my overall addiction to consumerism and self-centred hedonism. Openness to a new, no longer hedonistic, dimension of human existence presupposes that my participation in the economy of pleasures and pains be shattered by the revelation of a new meaning, that is, a hitherto unobserved but more meaningful mode of existence that urges me to adopt another attitude. This revelation draws me out of a merely ‘economic’ way of life and converts me – in my homely complacency in the world – to a more demanding existence. Many histories and autobiographies have been written about the various transitions from one level of interest to another, ‘higher’, ‘nobler’, more ‘disinterested’ – or other-wise interested – one, but Levinas focuses on the turn from hedonism to morality, or from ‘economy’ (in the hedonistic sense he attaches to it) to ‘ethics’. Levinas’s phenomenology of the Other’s – your – commanding height or highness is too famous to be rehashed once more. This does not mean that its interpretation is uncontroversial, or that it is easy to integrate his insights into one’s own philosophy. Here, however, I will not so much discuss the question of its most orthodox interpretation, but rather show how my gratitude for his revolutionary work might express itself in a kind of personalized retrieval. The Other faces me – You face me – this is the centre around which all Levinas’s thinking has developed. The Other’s facing me reveals the Other’s height. You are ‘high’, ‘absolute’, ‘infinite’. But how can one call you – an obviously limited and finite, deficient and sinful individual – ‘absolute’ and ‘infinite’? Do such predicates not suggest that you are not only radically different from anything that is merely useful or enjoyable, but even divine? Levinas has sought for words that could express the radical difference I experience, when I, in the first person, meet another person. In one attempt, he retrieves the relation between the Same (tauton) and the Other (to heteron), two of the five basic concepts analysed in Plato’s Sophist. The anti-Hegelian dialectic between the Same (which Levinas identifies with the I’s self-identity) and the (irreducibly different) Other dominates the first section and many other pages of TI, as it already did its programmatic outline ‘Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite’, first published in 1957 (Levinas 1967: 165–178; Peperzak 1993: 38–119). However, the relation between the Same and the Other does not yet show why the Other should be divine; but in Descartes’s analysis of the Cogito as original and indubitable self-consciousness, Levinas has found another manner of characterizing the difference between you (‘the Other’ or ‘the Face’) and me (including my being at home in the world). According to Descartes, human consciousness cannot be stripped of two inherent ideas: (1) the idea of itself, and (2) ‘the idea of the Infinite’ (l’idée de l’infini). The latter ‘idea’ is the basic relation that links human consciousness to the Infinite, which, in Descartes’s understanding, is a name for the God of the Bible, whom he adores at

60

A. Peperzak

the end of his third Metaphysical Meditation (TI, 170–171, 185–187/196–197, 210–212).11 Levinas describes this relation as a thought that ‘thinks more’ (or reaches further) than what it can grasp, contain, or comprehend. Through the idea of the infinite, I transcend all concepts and forms of comprehension: I ‘think more than what I think’: that which is absolutely different and ‘separated’ from all phenomena or beings or totalities that can be comprehended and composed by a human Cogito. There seems to be a certain similarity between the irreducible difference and transcendence that characterize God and the difference that separates the human Other from me. Both differences are absolute insofar as neither one can be reduced to a higher or deeper or dialectical identity: neither God and creation, nor you and I, can be understood as components of one whole or encompassing unity. The similarity between the two differences has motivated Levinas to adopt the predicate ‘infinite’, which traditionally indicates God’s transcendence, also to characterize the unfathomable and enigmatic (‘face’ of the) human Other.12 As a ‘thought’13 that transcends itself, my relation to You is the contrary of an encompassing grasp or concept; it exhibits the movement and structure of a reaching out or ‘trans(as)cendence’ that Levinas, in the beginning of TI, introduces as Desire (TI, 3–5/33–35). In the trace of Plato’s eros, which reaches out toward the Good-and-Beautiful, he names it ‘Desire of the Absolute’ and ‘Desire of the Infinite’. One may regret the equivocation that Levinas thus introduces into ‘the infinite’, but it is obvious that he neither wants to identify you (autrui) with God (le Très Haut), nor deny the many limitations of human finitude to which you, as everyone else, are subjected. Levinas himself declares that he wants only to borrow the ‘formal design’ of Descartes’s ‘idea of the infinite’ in order to characterize my relation to the Other as revealed by the Other’s entrance into my life (TI, 18–22/48–52; Peperzak 1993: 80–82, 105–112, 55–65). Somewhat similar to God – but also, and much more, dissimilar – You are ‘absolute’ and ‘infinite’, insofar as no encompassing horizon, no totality can enclose or contain you. You disrupt the universe by imposing a radically different orientation on it, an orientation that does not fit any economy. While using philosophical expressions to characterize the otherness that must be heard as a double difference (‘the alterity of autrui and the alterity of God’, my emphasis (TI, 4/34) ), Levinas, at the same time, expresses his biblical conviction that God encounters me by letting me encounter human others who need my hospitality and supportive proximity. God withdraws from the world and hides in order to urge me to serve my neighbour.

11

See also Levinas 1957: 171–174. Levinas (TI, 4/34) writes that the alterity to which Desire is directed is ‘meant as the alterity of the human Other (autrui) and as the alterity of the Highest (le Très-Haut)’. The profound coincidence of religion and ethics, which is implied in this sense, is perhaps formulated nowhere more emphatically than by the title of a piece found in Difficile liberté (1976: 189–193): ‘Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu’. 13 ‘Thought’ should here be taken in the broad, Cartesian sense of penser or cogitare, which also encompasses other mental activities. 12

3


61

The essential point is here that the human Other, like the divine Other, does not fit into any totality – that is why Levinas can speak in one breath of the ‘alterity of the human Other and … the Most High’. You cannot be caught or fenced in by any horizon; you disrupt all wholes within which one would try to locate you in order to determine your essence, worth or function. The dominant tradition of social philosophy looks at human individuals (you and me included) as a multiplicity of instances, that is, as essentially indifferent instantiations of the same universal genus ‘human being’. However, the on-looking thinker, who states and studies this topic, stands outside the social phenomenon which s/he observes from above. If the thinker took my position in order to face you who face him, you would show how and who you really are looking at me from your ‘naked’ face that ‘precedes’ and transcends your functioning as a role-player within a human totality. Facing, looking at me or speaking to me – or, in general, addressing me – cannot be reduced to any of your properties about which an all-observing, dominating, and ‘uninvolved observer’ can tell a story or write a treatise. By facing me, you position me as this unique me who, from my first person perspective, looks up to you, whose ‘height’ or highness obligates me. You awaken me to the discovery that I am at your service, ‘yours’, someone who is responsible for your life and who lives at least as much for you as for himself. By facing me, you forbid me to reduce you or use you as an element or instrument, a means or object, a slave or underling. Your highness – not your wants or needs or wishes or will, nothing that you initiate by inventing, discovering, or deciding it; only your very existence as Other for me – reveals to me that I am for-you, yours. Me voici, mon Seigneur, ma Dame. Here I am, my Lord, my Lady. Après vous; after you. You are welcome; I am at your service. It is crucial to understand that the relation between you and me, which is thus revealed, absolutely differs from the relation between master and slave – a relation that belongs to the world of individual enjoyment ruled by competition, violence, fighting, conquest and submission, exploitation, and opposition between wealthy powers and hungry slaves. When I, as a philosopher, must describe what I experience when you greet me, look at me, gesture at me or just stand there in front of me, the relation between you and me, as it shows up for me, is not the relation between two similar or equal instances of the same species, ‘human being’. When I look at you, who look at me, I experience you as radically different from me, whom I experience from my own inside, without ever being able to see how I look at you or anyone else. I do not experience how you are for me in the same way I experience my being for you. My experience of my own existence is primarily kinaesthetic or mirrored (but in a mirror, I cannot look at my looking at), whereas I experience you as other and confronting me. Self-experience can only guess how exactly I look at, respond to, and confront others who meet me. The relation between you and me consists of poles that are qualitatively or ‘essentially’ (i.e., in their mode of being) different. Not only are you and I different; you are high, whereas I am someone who looks up to you, the person who awakens me to the fact that I am here for you, obligated by you. My relation to you is therefore asymmetric: you command me and I ought to obey this command, whereas

62

A. Peperzak

I do not experience – at least not in the same way – that you ought to serve me. This asymmetry shows clearly when I realize that I can, and in certain circumstances ought to, give my life for another, whereas I cannot demand that any other person should die for me. The radical difference between the manifestation of your height and my beingfor-you, on the one hand, and the master-servant relation, on the other, is grounded in the fact that the radical asymmetry between your height and my being-for-you is not at all a consequence of what you want, or need, or will, or choose; it is ‘only’ the manifestation of how you and I emerge in an encounter from face to face. No human individual has any power to create or cause his/her height or to impose their sovereignty on me; there is no difference between your being you – this unique other human person – and your highness, which I perceive if I am not completely immersed in the realm of those wants and wishes and wills that are driven by privatized comfort and my own striving for egocentric happiness only. It is easy to object to Levinas’s description that it claims to be universally valid and thus implies that everyone must recognize him-/herself in the ‘me’ or the ‘I’ about whom his texts speak. Levinas has always refused to draw the conclusion that I therefore can say that you, whom I ought to serve, is at the same time an ‘I’ that experiences me as an Other, whom you ought to serve. ‘That is for the other to say’ was his standard answer; but this remark does not suffice to prevent further reflection. Phenomenologically, it is indeed difficult or perhaps impossible to show that you and I appear to me as equal or similar, because the manifestation of this similarity or equality seems to presuppose a third person, who sees both you and me – not from a first person nor from a second person perspective, but instead from a freestanding point of observation, outside or above you and me. However, from such a viewpoint one can no longer see the height that you show to me, when I, whom you address, am the one whose experience must be described. Yet, it is true that a reader who agrees with Levinas’s phenomenology of the relation between the Other and me somehow knows that you (as the I you also are) experience me (i.e., my existence that faces you) as high, commanding, and absolute. Even without showing how exactly I discover a fundamental equality between you and me, it seems to me undeniable that the asymmetry that links us together possesses the structure of a double or ‘chiastic’ asymmetry: you experience me as commanding you, just as I experience that you command me (Peperzak 1997: 125–126, 226). Levinas’s analysis of the relation between the Other and me presents itself as a radical critique of the entire history of philosophy, and especially of its modern period. Instead of being a systematic overview of the universe achieved by a solitary thinker – and thus being an egological ontology – philosophy, like all speaking, is primarily an exercise in responding to others who speak to me – and then speaking to others who will respond to me. Ontological analysis of the cogito and reflection on the position of an all-overseeing ego are secondary with regard to the alldetermining perspective of the relation that simultaneously connects and separates you and me. While Totality and Infinity concentrates on the ‘face’ of the Other, Otherwise than Being is a grand treatise on ‘me’. Being-for-the-Other, as illustrated

3


63

in the no less common than biblical expression ‘Here I am’ (‘me voici’) (I Samuel 3:5 ff.; Isaiah 6:9), is now further scrutinized, deepened, and radicalized. The depth of ‘me’ is approached with the help of several metaphors that insist on the ‘absolute passivity’ of me, who discover myself determined by the Other’s command and demands. Obligation – diakonia – liturgy – proximity – responsibility – obsession – accusation – being a hostage – expiation – persecution – traumatism – maternity – substitution… Can the proud, autonomous Ego be humbled and humiliated more deeply than by such a series of qualifications that put me in my place? The modern glorification of the I as complete reflexivity of a transcendental consciousness that, once enriched, reaches out in order to return to itself as a self-possessive self-consciousness is overcome by ‘recurrence’: a movement whose orientation points to the Other, while its source and origin lies behind and before any point of departure that I, through a self-conscious or willed return, would be able to grasp or to own. The circle of a complete being-for-me (être pour soi, für-mich-sein) is broken and overarched by reference to a beginning that I cannot possess. What constitutes me as for-the-Other and responsible for You precedes all my possibilities of beginning, acting, willing, thinking, perceiving, feeling or imagining. In this sense it determines me a priori. All my activity occurs a posteriori, and all my qualifications as responsible, hostage, persecuted, and so on, are ‘mine’ without letting me any choice or decision on my part. As Levinas in his hyperbolic mode states, I am for the Other malgré moi, despite myself, against my will. The abysmal precedence of my responsibility with regard to all my responsible and irresponsible behaviour has been named by Levinas in various ways. A traditional expression, which he does not use, would be to state, with the biblical prophets and martyrs, that I am ‘called’ or ‘sent’ to be a servant. Levinas translates the underlying experience by saying that I meet the Other ‘in the trace of God’. A more secular language, which cannot quite abolish the mystery of our predetermination to responsibility for the Other, would speak of the a priori or always-already ingrained destination or dedication that, before all action, permeates and motivates each one’s individual, unique and unchosen, but given, destiny. The source of all ‘ought’ lies in my own self, but not as a universalizing reason or a transcendental Ego in whose spiritual power I – this unique and so-called ‘empirical’ ego – participate. What moves me is my unchosen Desire for the Absolute (or the Good), which reveals its demands on me through and in the eyes of human Others: you who look at me. How far does my responsibility for the Other stretch according to Levinas’s interpretation of my solidarity with you? I am responsible not only for your survival and well-being, but also for your future and past good and bad behaviour, even for your crimes, including your persecuting me, my family, my friends and so many others. If this is true, we might understand that Levinas uses the word ‘accusation’ to indict me, even if, personally, I am completely innocent. He hears the accusative of ‘me voici’ as an accusation through which I am charged with the misdeeds of all Others, even if I were not to be aware of any participation. I am not only an Atlas who must carry the entire cosmos, but also a scapegoat for all evil that is committed by my brothers and sisters, who comprise with me humanity as such. Am I then the

64

A. Peperzak

Messiah who must suffer for all humanity? This is indeed what Levinas sees as the ultimate consequence of substitution and it is experienced by many unjustly persecuted victims, who, through their suffering, demonstrate their radical attachment to justice and proximity. The accusation they undergo unjustly burdens them with imaginary crimes or with crimes that others have committed, thus confirming and fulfilling their being chosen and dedicated – but not by their own will – to be for others, who, thanks to them, continue their history of a more or less responsible proximity. The originary passivity of my dedication to you is so absolute that Levinas repeatedly dares to declare that it cannot be assumed: my unchosen responsibility is ‘inassumable’. I can only undergo my being-for-the-Other(s) and patiently suffer from it. Levinas fears that any personal assumption or voluntary acceptance of that ‘pure’ and ‘absolute passivity’ would reestablish a human ‘mineness’ or ‘egoity’ that appropriates, masters, and subordinates, and thus transforms it into a selfwilled component of an even more originary activity of my own. Such an integration would show that our passivity can be conquered and assimilated by our own free will. In the end and from the very first beginning, a transcendental Ego would then triumph over our passivity with regard to all disruptions and humiliations. If I could choose to be passive, I would be capable of achieving a complete circle of possessive self-realization. This would reduce all Others to constitutive moments of the Same: the I that embraces all enjoyment and suffering as avatars of its original and final autarky. Levinas’s concern about our absolute passivity radicalizes the admonition that I should not brag about good deeds of my own; I should not even be aware of them: ‘the left hand should not know what the right hand does’. However,14 do undergoing and suffering not demand that I, as a self-aware and responsible individual, freely cope with them? And doesn’t this presuppose that I acquire an attitude of my own regarding my own passivity? Such an attitude might be angry, sad, bitter, resigned or otherwise affective, but it cannot have the passivity of a rock or a machine. Patience is necessary when we are completely unable to change an evil situation, but patience does not imply approval. If my responsibility implies that I must suffer, if I must carry the Others’ burdens even if I would never have chosen them had I been able to reject them, I am still forced to cope with and react to my passivity and suffering. I cannot help but find an attitude toward my being forced into this situation here and now. Several attitudes are possible, but none of them is mechanically determined or predestined by a fate that ignores my responsibility for my own bitterness, anger, patience, or resignation. Patience is a response other than impotent rebellion or schizophrenic denial, but whatever mode of suffering will be mine, I cannot reject all responsibility for my own coping with a world that is not only splendid and enjoyable, but also horrible and disgusting, especially if I am close to the most vulnerable of my Others. The condemnation of persecution and all other forms of evil does not exclude patience and this presupposes a certain kind of acceptance – without any shade or 14 In the following observations I appropriate some of Levinas’s statements without claiming any literal repetition of the way in which he emphasizes ‘my’ (ego’s) original passivity.

3


65

trace of approval – at least at the beginning of a radical extirpation of all evil, if this is a real possibility at all. The a priori, pre-voluntary, ‘pure’, and ‘absolute passivity’, rightly emphasized by Levinas, demands from me that I position my life in response to this very passivity through a personal mode of living it, that is, by a form of acceptance that places, assumes, and embraces what is good in the facticity that confronts me, while condemning its contamination and corruption by powers that persecute you and me undeservedly. To live in a world that is good and bad complicates my responsibility not only for others, whom I would like to be happy, but also for myself whom I would like to be better at responsibility and being good. Levinas hardly ever focuses on my responsibility for my own world and life; but how could I be responsible for you if I were not responsible at all for my own coping with facticity and the attitudes that emerge from it? How could I serve you without care for my own growth, education, purification from corruption, and emendation? Therefore, to end these reflections, let us briefly examine how responsibility toward my own life – or, as Socrates would say, how ‘concern about oneself’15 – is unbreakably linked to responsibility for others. In the first place, it is obvious that being a hostage demands that I make myself as capable as is necessary for helping and correcting, educating and justly appreciating all others whom I encounter. If I do not take the conditions of my own growth in responsibility seriously, I fail in benevolence toward you. Consequently, it is my task and obligation to be concerned about my own amelioration and enabled responsibility. I am responsible for my own advances and failures even if all aspects of my self-concern must be derived from your demands on me. More than enjoyment, responsibility demands a particular form of centralization. In order to prepare myself for a responsible service to others, I must organize my surroundings, the partial histories and traditions in which I participate, the associations and commitments of which I am a member. I then arrange my own world in my way and during my working on it I cannot avoid being the organizing centre of this arrangement. However, to be for you means that this moment of centrism is lived by me as a condition of my service to you; it is subordinate to the others’ worlds and thus to the universe of all worlds. If this orientation toward the well-being of others liberates my centring from its selfishness, it shows that my dedication – also for me – is a realization of the good, for which everyone may feel grateful. However, is there not a more direct way to experience and to show that I ought to be concerned about my own individual existence? Can a phenomenology of ‘me’ (le moi, l’ego) be based – at least in part – on an experience in which my own unique existence appears to me as worthy to be served and in this sense as ‘high’ and commanding or obligating and obsessing me in order to remind me of my responsibility toward myself? If it is true that, from the outset and always already, I exist as linked-to-theOther, it is obvious that none of my experiences of myself can be wholly isolated from my experience of the Other. Your facing awakens me to amazement about the

15

Plato 1960: 127e ff.

66

A. Peperzak

generosity that qualifies the unchosen but given dedication or ‘election’ of my destiny. Even if I do not want it, the Good has elected every me to give support and hope to others. Your and my proximity is the human way in which the Good takes responsibility for our support and hope. I have been dedicated by and for the Good that did not wait for me to provide my life with a desirable meaning. My destination amazes me as an elevation above the needs and wants of an economy of endless satisfactions and dissatisfactions. It joins the humility of my deficient concern for your height with the dignity of an undeserved but demanding highness that, despite my deficiency, has been bestowed on me and on everyone who would like to honestly say or write – or pray: ‘Here – and now – I am – sincerely yours’.

References Levinas, E. (1957). ‘La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini’, in Levinas, E. (1967). En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 2nd edition. Paris: Vrin, pp. 165–178. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff/(1969). Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press [cited as TI with the English page references following the French page references]. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff/(1998). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press [cited as AE with the English page references following the French page references]. Levinas, E. (1976). Difficile liberté: essais sur le judaïsme. Paris: Albin Michel. Peperzak, A. (1993). To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Peperzak, A. (1997). Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Plato (1906). Alcibiades, in Burnet, J. (Ed.)(1906). Platonis Opera, vol. 2, Tetralogia IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Series: Oxford Classical Texts), pp. 103-135.

Chapter 4

Sincerely Me. Enjoyment and the Truth of Hedonism Joachim Duyndam

Abstract Responding to Adriaan Peperzak’s contribution to this volume, this chapter focuses on enjoyment in Levinas, distinguishing it from asceticism, on the one hand, and addiction, on the other. Whereas asceticism and addiction are conceived as an imbalance of activity-passivity, enjoyment refers to the radical passivity of the self, preceding the opposition of activity and passivity. Enjoyment in Totality and Infinity therefore prefigures sensibility in Otherwise than Being. The radical passivity of enjoyment opens the ‘inverted’ self to the transcendent other. Unlike Peperzak, Duyndam stresses enjoyment as providing the subject with a certain measure of independence from being, which is necessary to meet the other as other. Enjoyment performs my part of what Levinas calls separation, whereas the other realizes his/her part of the separation by transcendence. Therefore, enjoyment does not so much conflict with the other’s appeal to me; it is the very condition of my openness to the appeal. This is, as we shall see, what Levinas calls ‘the permanent truth of hedonism’.

Introduction To introduce the argument, let me first quote an evocative story recounted by Sogyal Rinpoche in his The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: Asanga was one of the most famous Indian Buddhist saints, and lived in the fourth century. He went to the mountains to do a solitary retreat, concentrating all his meditation practice on the Buddha Maitreya, in the fervent hope that he would be blessed with a vision of this Buddha and receive teachings from him. For six years Asanga meditated in extreme hardship, but did not even have one auspicious dream. He was disheartened and thought he would never succeed with his aspiration to meet the Buddha Maitreya, and so he abandoned his retreat and left his hermitage. He had not gone far down the road when he saw a man rubbing an enormous iron bar with a strip of silk. Asanga went up to him and asked him what he was doing. “I haven’t got a needle”, the man replied, “so I’m going to make one out of this iron bar”. Asanga stared at him, astounded; even if the man were able to manage it in a hundred years, he thought, what would be the point? He said to himself: “Look at the trouble people give themselves over things that are totally absurd. You are doing something really valuable, spiritual practice, and you’re not nearly so dedicated”. He turned around and went back to his retreat.


67

68

J. Duyndam Another three years went by, still without the slightest sign from the Buddha Maitreya. “Now I know for certain”, he thought, “I’m never going to succeed”. So he left again, and soon came to a bend in the road where there was a huge rock, so tall it seemed to touch the sky. At the foot of the rock was a man busily rubbing it with a feather soaked in water. “What are you doing?” Asanga asked. “This rock is so big it’s stopping the sun from shining on my house, so I’m trying to get rid of it”. Asanga was amazed at the man’s indefatigable energy, and ashamed at his own lack of dedication. He returned to his retreat. Three more years passed, and still he had not even had a single good dream. He decided, once and for all, that it was hopeless, and he left his retreat for good. The day wore on, and in the afternoon he came across a dog lying by the side of the road. It had only its front legs, and the whole of the lower part of its body was rotting and covered with maggots. Despite its pitiful condition, the dog was snapping at passers-by, and pathetically trying to bite them by dragging itself along the ground with its two good legs. Asanga was overwhelmed with a vivid and unbearable feeling of compassion. He cut a piece of flesh off his own body and gave it to the dog to eat. Then he bent down to take off the maggots that were consuming the dog’s body. But he suddenly thought he might hurt them if he tried to pull them out with his fingers, and realized that the only way to remove them would be on his tongue. Asanga knelt on the ground, and looking at the horrible festering, writhing mass, closed his eyes. He leant closer and put out his tongue… The next thing he knew, his tongue was touching the ground. He opened his eyes and looked up. The dog was gone; there in its place was the Buddha Maitreya, ringed by a shimmering aura of light. “At last”, said Asanga, “why did you never appear to me before?” Maitreya spoke softly: “It is not true that I have never appeared to you before. I was with you all the time, but your negative karma and obscurations prevented you from seeing me. Your twelve years of practice dissolved them slightly, so that you were at last able to see the dog. Then, thanks to your genuine and heartfelt compassion, all those obscurations were completely swept away, and you can see me before you with your very own eyes. If you don’t believe that this is what happened, put me on your shoulder and try and see if anyone else can see me”. Asanga put Maitreya on his right shoulder and went to the marketplace, where he began to ask everyone: “What have I got on my shoulder?” “Nothing”, most people said, and hurried on. Only one old woman, whose karma had been slightly purified, answered: “You’ve got the rotting corpse of an old dog on your shoulder, that’s all.” Asanga at last understood the boundless power of compassion that had purified and transformed his karma, and so made him a vessel fit to receive the vision and instruction of Maitreya. Then the Buddha Maitreya, whose name means “loving kindness”, took Asanga to a heavenly realm, and there gave him many sublime teachings that are among the most important in the whole of Buddhism (Sogyal Rinpoche 1994: 191–192).

Asanga and Western Philosophy Although this is a typical Buddhist story, beautifully recounting the ideal of a Buddhist way of life, its central character seems to act according to motives that are familiar in Western philosophy, too. At least three great Western philosophers are present in this story.

4

Sincerely Me. Enjoyment and the Truth of Hedonism

69

First, one could say that Asanga is a Kantian. He retreats from other people and from the world of senses and enjoyment, by imposing a rule of law on himself. Moreover, he is acting in accordance with a law of reason. Living like an ascetic recluse, he despises and rejects the demands of bodily happiness. Unlike Kantian ethics, however, Asanga’s action is motivated by an end: to be blessed with a vision of the Buddha and receive teachings from him. Though he may not be a pure Kantian, Asanga seems to perfectly represent Kant’s ideal of autonomy. His will to resist inclinations and to act upon the determination of reason alone is purely autonomous. Unfortunately, Asanga’s efforts are without result, but for a real Kantian results do not make any difference, at least not in a moral sense. According to Kant, the moral value of actions is neither assessed by results or success, nor by goals. The only thing that matters morally is whether an action, or more precisely the ‘maxim’ of an action, is in accordance with the moral law of reason, the categorical imperative. Moreover, for an action to be moral, it should be done for the sake of the moral law of reason itself. Asanga nevertheless leaves his retreat and his ascetic way of life. In the second instance, one might ask whether our hero turns out to be a Levinasian after his unsuccessful reclusion. The crucial change in the story occurs when Asanga is touched by the appearance of a poor creature. Not a widow or an orphan, as the other is sometimes evoked in Levinas (TI, 77, 78, 215, 244, 245, 251), but the lowest imaginable creature, a half-dead dog, infects Asanga with compassion. Although Levinas does not interpret the relationship between the other and me in terms of compassion,1 it seems evident that Asanga responds immediately to the responsibility laid upon him. Moreover, he is not charged with responsibility by somebody, by the other as an acting subject, but by the other as other, by the mere presence of the other in need. By the face, Levinas would say, despite the fact that here the ‘other’ is a dog. In defence of our interpretation, we might say that the occurrence of the dog in our story – instead of, for instance, a beggar – emphasizes Levinas’s point that the other-as-other precedes the other as subject (OB, 157–161, 166). Prior to saying anything, or even having been able to speak, the other ‘says’, ‘commands’, ‘invites’ or ‘invests’ me, not as an action but as an effect of her otherness. The asymmetry and inequality between you and me precede the symmetric equality that we share as subjects (TI, 53, 215). Finally, Asanga’s response to the challenge of the dog – the cutting off of a piece of his own flesh and the consideration he shows towards the maggots – can obviously be read as excessive generosity and self-sacrifice in Levinas’s sense (Duyndam 2006: 125–138). Not only Kant and Levinas appear in this Buddhist story, though, but also Heidegger, albeit in a somewhat hidden way. By favouring a solitary life, Asanga withdraws from the ‘people’, from the ‘they’ (das Man), as Heidegger would say 1

On the contrary, Levinas rejects compassion, as this would reduce the challenge of my consciousness (feeling) posed by the other to my consciousness of the challenge, which would reduce the appearance of the other to my consciousness of him/her (OB, 123, 125, 128, 146). Levinas says: ‘It is through the condition of being hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity’ (ibid., p. 117, see also p. 166).

70

J. Duyndam

(1978: 149–168). A philosophical-anthropological reading of Being and Time shows the authentic way of life as comprising a retreat from everyday ordinary life through resoluteness and conscience (ibid., p. 312). By everyday life Heidegger means the inauthentic life we lead in the first place, in which one acts, thinks, judges, feels, etcetera, like ‘they’ act, think, judge, and feel. It is the average life of mediocrity and distraction, where all possibilities of being are levelled down and equalized. Heidegger emphasizes that living like ‘they’ live is not a matter of choice, let alone a moral choice, but that it is the way of life that we all usually and primarily lead. Although he expressly does not intend a moral understanding, Heidegger characterizes this average mode of existence as dependence and describes the ‘they’ in terms of dictatorship,2 which he opposes to authentic existence. Because of Heidegger’s insistence upon the dependent and dictatorial nature of everyday existence, I would suggest that one interpret this average mode of existence in terms of addiction. One is addicted to the choices, the thoughts, the preferences, the habits, in short, the way of existence or ‘potentiality-for-being’ dictated by ‘they’. Heidegger does not say ‘the others’, because that would suggest that I am not included, whereas I am principally also part of ‘they’. Neither is he speaking of ‘each other’, which would presuppose the plural presence of autonomous subjects related to one another. In Heidegger, Mitsein or Being-with precedes the (traditionally conceived) subject. Before one may speak of a subject or of subjects related to one another, human beings are involved in Mitsein. This can be understood, according to Heidegger, in terms of the so-called ‘ontological difference’, that is, by not looking for Seiendes (beings), as traditional philosophy does, but for the Sein (Being) of Seiendes. The Sein of human beings is fundamentally Mitsein. Being-with is being addicted to the idle talk (Gerede), curiosity (Neugier) and ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) of the ‘they’. Being dependent on and dictated to by ‘they’ is being enslaved by ‘they’: under the complete control of ‘they’.3 In line with my interpretation, Asanga is torn between addiction and slavery, on the one hand, and asceticism, on the other. As a real Kantian, he struggles for freedom, that is, to be free from bodily inclinations and the temptation of happiness; and to be autonomous, that is, to subsume his will under the law of reason. As a real Heideggerian, he tries to escape from addiction to ordinary life, from the dictatorship of the ‘they’ to follow the voice of conscience, which is the voice of being itself, and to achieve authenticity. Seen from this Western philosophical perspective, autonomy and authenticity are the goals of his effort. But he failed to achieve these goals. Although Asanga may have reached a kind of autonomy and authenticity through extreme hardship, these states appeared not to be what he was really after: that is, enlightenment, being blessed with a vision of the Buddha and receiving teachings from him. That only happened after he showed compassion towards the suffering dog. Genuine and heartfelt compassion enabled him to transcend his ego, whereas autonomy and authenticity only seemed to reinforce the ego – or should we say, the self? 2 3

In German: ‘Botmäßigkeit’ and ‘Diktatur’ (cf. Heidegger 1978: 126). In French, addiction is ‘asservissement’ (made slave); in Dutch, it is ‘verslaving’ (being slave).

4


71

The resolution to Asanga’s struggle between addiction and asceticism suggested by the story seems to be a Levinasian one: going beyond the self by being addressed by the other as other (albeit a dog in our story). How is a self possible that is simultaneously addicted to the world of the ‘they’ and autonomous by imposing a law of reason upon itself? And how is that ‘self’ able to accomplish the ‘Levinasian solution’, surpassing itself through and towards the other? It is well known that Levinas, in his first chef-d’œuvre, extensively describes the life of the subject as one of happiness and well-being, in which enjoyment is the key feature. I will elaborate on enjoyment here, distinguishing it from addiction, on the one hand, and from asceticism, on the other, following the suggestion made by our opening story. Herewith I will be responding to Peperzak’s suggestion in the preceding chapter that enjoyment would be a kind of addiction.4 I confront what Levinas calls ‘the permanent truth of hedonism’ (TI, 134) with the sublime truth of asceticism, which most religions consider to be the way to God or salvation, on the one hand; and with the humiliating truth of addiction, which is commonsensically regarded as the excess of enjoyment, on the other.

Enjoyment and Addiction Addiction is increasingly dominating our present-day culture. Alcohol, drugs, smoking and gambling are notorious instances. But eating, watching television and even sex are also becoming addictive amongst a growing number of people. Most addicts experience serious problems as a result of their addiction, and often their social environment suffers as well, or even more. No wonder that the phenomenon is extensively studied, mostly from a medical or biological point of view.5 A phenomenological analysis, however, can shed an interesting additional light on addiction, especially on some basic assumptions of current scientific approaches. The question I raised above – what is the self or the subject that it can be addicted to the ‘they’, that it can be addicted to anything at all? – typically demands a phenomenological elaboration. I will clarify this by recalling briefly the history of the subject up until Levinas. Since Descartes, the relationships which human beings maintain with the world or reality, including their own inner reality, have been articulated in terms of subject and object. Thinking, willing, perception, consciousness, acting, feeling, suffering, estimating, making sense, but also eating, drinking and gambling, comprise such relationships. The notion of the subject is a technical-philosophical concept, not so much referring to a human being as such but to the human being as the centre of 4

Cf. Adriaan Peperzak’s ‘Sincerely Yours. Towards a Phenomenology of Me’. There is a range of scientific journals on the subject, including Addiction, The Journal of Addictive Diseases, The American Journal on Addictions, etc. On the internet I even found an ‘International Society of Addiction Journal Editors’, which is an alliance of the (apparently numerous) editors of such journals. 5

72

J. Duyndam

knowing, acting, evaluating, etcetera. The opposite of the subject is the object, which refers to anything that is involved in one of the relationships with the subject just mentioned: the known, the acted upon, the estimated, etcetera. Being the centre means taking the initiative in the relationship with the object, not only in active acting but also in passive undergoing. Whatever happens happens to me. Seen from this classical modern subject–object opposition, addiction is hard to understand. Somebody who is addicted to something seems to have surrendered his/her central position as a subject. We all crave for something every now and then, but the addict is obsessed by it in everything s/he does. Essential to the traditional concept of the subject is a basic freedom. Even in the most deterministic circumstances, the subject retains its freedom to take a position relative to these circumstances. Within this tradition, freedom is connected with responsibility. The subject is principally responsible for all it does, including its response to what happens to it. The addict seems to lack both responsibility and freedom. Not only is the word addiction in many languages closely linked to slavery,6 but anybody who deals with addicts – even an addict him/herself – knows that they are barely capable of acting without being motivated by their addiction in some way, and what is more, that they cannot take responsibility for what they do. From a classical subject–object point of view, addiction is not comprehensible, or only negatively as un-free, irresponsible, etcetera. Addiction, therefore, is likely to be understood as insanity or disease, which is common currency in medical and physiological discourses. From a phenomenological point of view, however, there is more to say. The basic notion of phenomenology, discovered by its founding father Edmund Husserl, is the intentionality between subject and object. Criticizing Husserl, Heidegger has deepened intentionality to being-in-the-world. This means that the subject and the object are embedded in a prior relation of inclusion or belonging, which encompasses the allegedly central subject and the allegedly adverse object of classical modern philosophy (Ricoeur 2002: 582). In line with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty interprets this prior relation of belonging as bodily existence. The subject does not stand outside or opposite the object, according to Merleau-Ponty, but both are related to one another within my bodily existence. The bodily intentionality is mutual, that is, it implies both the subject’s involvement with the object and the object’s involvement with the subject. The subject experiencing the object and dealing with it not only accords meaning to the object, but the object also appeals to me with meaning. It attracts or repels me. Subject and object are in Merleau-Ponty’s view like the hungry and food, the curious and the secret, the hunter and the prey, the music and the listener, the philosopher and the truth; involved in one another in a tensed, quasi-erotic mode (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 112–170, 178). Seen from a Merleau-Pontian perspective, addiction is not incomprehensible or ‘mad’, but different from the normal situation only in degree. As intentional subjects, we are all attracted by some objects. Within the bodily existence of the addict, however, the attraction of some objects is so strong that s/he is completely ruled by it.

6

See fn. 3.

4


73

The addicted subject’s behaviour is completely determined by those objects. The various words for slavery express this unequivocally. As stated above, the Heideggerian Being-with can also be interpreted in terms of addiction, in my view. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, the ‘Heideggerian addiction’ is not what some may have – the addicts, who only differ in degree from the normal – and some not. Rather, it is what we all have in the first place. Basically because of the ontological structures of ‘being-in’ (In-sein) – especially being-inthe-world, ‘being-alongside’ entities within-the-world (Sein-bei innerweltlich Seienden), and ‘being-with’ (Mitsein) – we are principally not autonomous subjects, but absorbed in the world (Heidegger 1978: 149). Answering the question who is being-in-the-world (being-in, being-alongside and being-with), Heidegger stresses that this is not the traditional subject who is the centre of its world, but that the ‘subject’ as everyday being-with-one-another, stands in subjection [Botmäßigkeit] to others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please (ibid., p. 164).

But the others are not genuine others. As for me, I am not the opposite of or distinguished from others, I belong to them: One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. “The Others” whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part “are there” in everyday Being-with-one-another. The “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The “who” is the neuter, the “they” [das Man] (ibid.).

Although the ‘who’ of existence is me [jemeinig], I am stolen away in the ‘they’ from the very beginning. I am lost in distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as modes of being of the ‘they’ (ibid., p. 165).

Levinas’s Position Although Levinas explicitly criticizes intentionality in a Husserlian sense,7 it can be argued that the relationship between the self and the other is to be understood as Levinas’s version of intentionality, taken as the prior relation of belonging, as Ricoeur calls it (Ricoeur 2002: 582). My relationship with the other, that is, my being called to responsibility by the other, precedes my subjectivity and my freedom. It actually precedes our being equal as humans; it precedes the ‘they’ in the Heideggerian sense.

7 See, for example, Levinas (1967). ‘La ruine de la représentation’, in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin; Levinas, E. (1983). ‘Beyond Intentionality’, in Montefiore, A. (Ed.) (1983). Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100–115; Peperzak, A. (1989). ‘From Intentionality to Responsibility: On Levinas’s Philosophy of Language’, in Dallery, A. & Scott, C. (1989). The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 3–21.

74

J. Duyndam

Levinas’s notion of enjoyment is crucial to this understanding of my relationship with the other. Enjoyment is the essential quality of subjective life, as it is beautifully described in the extensive middle part of Totality and Infinity. It is the happy, rich, self-satisfied and egoistic life of the I, consisting of dwelling and working, eating and drinking, watching and sleeping, gathering and suffering. My acting in this ‘interior life’ – as opposed to the exteriority of the other – is not functional or purposive in the first place, for example, oriented towards survival, but is enjoyable in itself. Enjoyment is not a relationship with an object, for instance the piece of food I am eating; enjoyment is the relationship with this relationship: the relation with nourishment … is a relation with an object and at the same time a relation with this relation which also nourishes and fills life… Enjoyment is precisely this way the act nourishes itself with its own activity. To live from bread is therefore neither to represent bread to oneself nor to act on it nor to act by means of it. To be sure, it is necessary to earn one’s bread, and it is necessary to nourish oneself in order to earn one’s bread; thus the bread I eat is also that with which I earn my bread and my life. But if I eat my bread in order to labour and to live, I live from my labor and from my bread… Even if the content of life ensures my life, the means is immediately sought as an end, and the pursuit of this end becomes an end in its turn. Thus things are always more than the strictly necessary; they make up the grace of life. We live from our labor which ensures our subsistence; but we also live from our labor because it fills (delights or saddens) life. The first meaning of “to live from one’s labor” reverts to the second… Life’s relation with the very conditions of its life becomes the nourishment and content of that life. Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun (TI, 111–112).

Levinas stresses this character of enjoyment to explain that enjoyment gives us a certain independence. In enjoyment, I secure a degree of independence from what I depend on most: the food I eat, the ground beneath my feet, and the home in which I live. Therefore, enjoyment is paradoxical: although we depend on food, lodging, and other material things for survival, in this very dependency we remain independent owing to our enjoyment of the things we are dependent upon: the food, the water, the air, the sun. Obviously, it is not a total or absolute independence; it is a certain independence within or through our dependence. Furthermore, it is not a spiritual independence, such as the basic freedom the traditional subject holds even in the most determining circumstances; neither is it superior abstinence nor disengagement, let alone asceticism. My independence through my dependency is bodily and material. It is the independence of the physical enjoyment of the things the body needs and depends on (ibid., pp. 113–120). The important meaning of enjoyment in Levinas is that it accomplishes what he calls separation (TI, 142). Throughout Totality and Infinity Levinas underscores the separation of you (the other) and me (the subject) in the preceding relationship mentioned above. You and I are not species within an overarching genus such as ‘humankind’, or ‘being’. The distinction between you and me is not a relative one, as if it were defined from an external point of view, but the difference is radical or absolute. The difference is so radical that even the way you and I differ is different. You are absolved from the relationship by transcending. In a certain way, transcendence is the ‘essence’ or the ‘definition’ of the other, of you. But I also keep a

4


75

distance through enjoyment. It is through enjoyment that I do not coincide with the totality of the world that results from my being a totalizing subject. So while the other remains separated from any totality by transcending it, I remain separated through enjoyment. Separation is crucial for the other to be really the transcendent other, and for me to be sincerely me, capable of meeting the other as other, that is, to be responsible (ibid., pp. 115, 117, 139, 147). Enjoyment completes, so to say, my part of the separation. The importance of Levinas’s interconnected notions of separation and enjoyment can be further explained as follows. It is because of separation, and consequently because of enjoyment, that responsibility is articulated in Levinas through the famous notion of the face. Levinas appeals to the notion of the face to make clear that the appeal to responsibility can only be inferred in direct relationship with the other. It is no ordinary demand, arising from an ethical theory and aimed at everyone. Levinas is not formulating a general order or universal call to responsibility. It’s all about me. I have been chosen for responsibility; it has been imposed on me. How do I know this? I see it in the other’s face. I become aware of it when the other looks at me. To be sincerely me, to be open to the appeal of the other, I must meet him/her directly, in a relationship of separation. To be sincerely me, is to revel in enjoyment. Consequently, enjoyment is not incompatible, or conflicting, with responsibility; it is my part of its necessary condition. Although the other disturbs or interrupts the enjoyment of my happy life, it is precisely because of my capacity to enjoy life that I can meet the other in the face. So it is because of my enjoyment that I can be responsible. Voilà Levinas’s truth of hedonism! Unlike Peperzak, who seems to identify enjoyment with the economy of my egoistic life, with being addicted to my world of consumption (cf. the preceding chapter), I would emphasize the fact that enjoyment is essential for the attainment of independence, which, in turn, is necessary for responsibility. It is not enjoyment or responsibility; it is enjoyment and responsibility. It was Adriaan Peperzak himself who taught me that and is the most important word in the title Totality and Infinity, if not one of the most important and intriguing words of philosophy as such.8

Enjoyment Between Addiction and Asceticism: The Moral Meaning In addition to the theoretical argument of separation developed above, a more practical one can be developed in this context. The important moral consequence of the paradoxical independence implicated in enjoyment is that I can give what I possess. 8 I am greatly indebted to my eminent teacher, Adriaan Peperzak, who not only introduced me to philosophy, but above all to philosophizing. He repeatedly emphasized the importance of and, referring to Hegel who in his all-embracing systematizing work displayed a ‘methodical’ allergy to (the single use of) and. ‘Saying and raises the question what kind of connection is meant, and by that it opens the argument. Concluding with and is the refusal to think any further’, Peperzak used to say quoting Hegel.

76

J. Duyndam

Thanks to the independence of enjoyment I am not addicted to my possession. This relates to what Levinas calls the material character of my responsibility. He rejects concepts of morality as being a matter of good intentions or clear conscience. Highminded ideas and a cleansed soul are not wrong, but they do not suffice. Morality, according to Levinas, is giving what you have, giving way to the other, and making space in your own place. Responding to the other’s appeal with only good intentions or a generous consciousness equals no response. In such a case, I would persist in totalization. Totality is broken open by my responding to the other’s appeal concretely and materially. In Levinas, my responsibility is not inferred from a general ethical theory, as I stated before. Levinas’s philosophy is not ethics in the usual sense of the word. My capacity for taking on the responsibility I bear towards the other is generated by my immediate experience of the other’s face, which is a moral experience, an experience of morality. Thus morality as such comes from both radically separated sides of the relationship: the appeal of the transcendent other and my breaking open of totality made possible by the independence of enjoyment (Duyndam & Poorthuis 2003). The concept of the enjoying I in Levinas can be strengthened by contrasting it once again with the addict. Unlike the relative independence of the I, the addict is totally dependent on his/her fix (alcohol, drugs, gambling, or whatever s/he is addicted to). The life of the addict, that is, everything s/he does and everyone with whom s/he is dealing, revolves around getting a fix. Unlike the one who enjoys, the addict retains no independence in this dependency. This implies, first, that the addict cannot enjoy at all, which is obvious as we look at their obsessive gobbling, swilling and smoking. But what is worse, in the second instance, is that the addict is deaf-blind to primary responsibility, let alone capable of taking on responsibility towards others. Because s/he lacks the independence of enjoyment, s/he cannot have a real relationship with the other as other; therefore, s/he cannot hear the other’s appeal. S/he is fundamentally isolated. Moreover, because of this complete dependency the addict cannot give what s/he has. Indeed, the practice of addicts furnishes us with much evidence in support of Levinas. Addicts usually only take advantage of others. They use others as a means to get their fix, by cheating, blackmailing, robbing them, or worse. This means they are not able to meet the other as transcendent other, for whom one can be responsible. In a culture that seems increasingly addicted – addicted to consumption, to sensational excitement, to television, to status, to celebrity – it is no wonder that a desire for retreat emerges. One may empathize with the Asanga of our opening story. The recluse, the hermit, the ascetic – they seem to be diametrically opposed to the persuasive distraction, superficiality and boredom of present-day culture. Whereas the addict appears to be the victim and the loser, the ascetic conquers consumption, diversion, and tedium. But does the latter really win? The ascetic resists the temptations of the world by reinforcing the self. Autonomously bringing her will under the law of reason, the ascetic relies entirely on herself, draws all power from herself. The stronger the self, the better the subject can stand firm against the things it wants to keep free from, or so seems to be the presupposition of asceticism. But from a Levinasian perspective, the ascetic appears

4


77

to be mistaken. By relying solely on herself and drawing all power from herself, she seems to overlook a crucial point: the other as other. Not only do Asanga and the ascetics do so, but also Heidegger, by situating the escape from the dictatorship of the ‘they’ in authenticity, which may be ‘genuine’ life in proximity to Being itself, guided by conscience and resoluteness, but deeply solitary.

Conclusion To demonstrate the Levinasian solution of responsibility, between addiction and asceticism, I will conclude by following and interpreting a beautiful example provided by the French-American thinker René Girard. In his well-known theory on mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, Girard explicitly adopts Heidegger’s concept of being-with (Girard 1986).9 According to Girard, being-with is the sphere of mimesis, where one desires whatever because others desire the same. Desire is never authentic; it always has a model. It is the sphere of belonging-to, which is unfortunately constituted partly by the expulsion of the scapegoat (see e.g. Williams 1996). Girard considers the Bible to provide a counterforce against this discordant aspect of human nature, by discovering, unmasking and condemning the mimetic scapegoat mechanism. From this perspective, Girard brilliantly interprets the famous passage from the Gospel according to St. John about the adulterous woman (John 8: 3–11). Girard points out that, in Jesus’s formulation – ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’ – all the emphasis rests on the first stone. This echoes on in the deafening silence that follows after these words are spoken. Because the first stone to be thrown lacks precedent, that is, it has no model, it forms the last obstacle to the stoning, says Girard. Once the first stone has been thrown, subsequent stones would follow easily because they would be cast mimetically. Girard says that the fact that Jesus’s words have become proverbial and symbolic proves that the mechanism is just as alive and virulent as it was 2000 years ago (Girard 2001: 49–61). From Levinas’s point of view, one may say that by placing the emphasis on the first stone, Jesus makes each of the accusers responsible themselves. Each accuser holding a stone in their hand is holding the first stone. This makes each ‘the only one’, unique. There is, after all, but one first stone, even though each of them might have it in their hand. What we see happening here is the making singular, the individualizing of responsibility. Being sincerely me means being chosen for responsibility by the other. Being chosen for responsibility might sound like a grave and profound calling, but it can happen in the twinkling of an eye. All of a sudden you are called to account for your responsibility. And you are suddenly the only one. Being singled out as the one (in Levinas: me) breaks up the Mitsein of the hordes, to which we belong first and foremost, according to Heidegger. The hordes break 9 See chapter 12 in particular: ‘Peter’s Denial’ (on Peter’s Denial as recounted in the Gospels: Matt 26:69–75; Mark 14:66–72; Luke 22:54–62; John 18:15–18, 25–27).

78

J. Duyndam

up through the uniqueness of responsibility. Jesus too withdrew from the Mitsein, of which the Pharisees wanted him to be a part. By bending down and writing in the sand, before and after his words about the first stone, he does not look at his adversaries. In this way, even though he is acting as a substitute for the adulterous woman, he avoids being sacrificed as a scapegoat in her place. After all, the intention of the whole scene was to trap Jesus, to place the blame either on him or the woman. Far from being addicted and one of the ‘they’, on the one hand; far from the loneliness of both the ascetic and the scapegoat, on the other, the truth of hedonism encapsulates both enjoyment and responsibility. Being sincerely me.

References Duyndam, J. (2006). ‘Exzessives Geben. Freigebigkeit bei Levinas und Anderen’, in Miething, F. and Von Wolzogen, C. (Hrsg.). Après vous. Denkbuch für Emmanuel Levinas 1906–1995. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, pp. 125–138. Duyndam, J. & Poorthuis, M. (2003). Levinas. Rotterdam: Lemniscaat. Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero. London: The Athlone Press. Girard, R. (2001). I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Heidegger, M. (1978). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Levinas, E. (2000). Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (2004). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press [cited as OB]. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (2002). ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, in Moran, D. & Mooney, T. (Eds.). The Phenomenology Reader. London/New York: Routledge. Sogyal, R. (1994). The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Patrick Gaffney & Andrew Harvey (Eds.). San Francisco, CA: Harper. Williams, J. G. (Ed.) (1996). The Girard Reader. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Chapter 5

The Fundamental Ethical Experience Alphonso Lingis

Abstract The ethical experience is to find that there are things that I am not causally determined, but obligated, to say and to do. Emmanuel Levinas locates this experience not in the perception of the order of nature or of society, nor in the intuition of the imperative of reason within my mind, but in the encounter with appeals and demands addressed to me when another faces me. There are theoretical and practical difficulties with the way Levinas elaborates this experience. Outside of the face to face encounter, Levinas conceptualizes our experience of the things of the world as appropriation. He does not acknowledge the demands things, and living beings of other species, put on us. To fix the distinctiveness of the human face, Levinas attributes to it an infinite dialectic of demands, identified with God. But in the measure that God is conceived as ‘the wholly Other’, constitutive of the otherness of every other human who faces us, the demand put on us loses its location in the midst of the common world and its determinateness. Levinas sees the otherness of another in the need and want with which the other faces us. But the needs and wants of another arise out of the other’s fundamental positivity. The other’s needs and wants are in principle satisfiable, and do not generate an unending unsatisfiability. Levinas’s assertion that I am responsible before all the others for all the others, held accountable for the deeds and misdeeds of others, for the very responsibilities and irresponsibility of others – cannot be the basis for effective action.

The Imperative A neighbour knocks on my door; he has suffered a fall and is bleeding. I see that I can drive him to the hospital. I also realize that I ought to. Facing me, he addresses an appeal to me; his wounds, his mortality are a demand placed on me. His question, his appeal, binds me; his presence, facing me, has imperative force. Coming to knock on my door, facing me, he singles me out. In facing me, he intrudes into my fields of concerns, interrupts my activities. Turning to face me, he calls for my attention. He contests me in the closed sphere of my own tasks and pleasures. Already,


81

82

A. Lingis

while walking down the street, when I look up to answer his greeting, I recognize his rights over me. To decline to answer his greeting requires a justification. A moment ago, I was entangled in the task before me, or absorbed in the character of a television drama, or I was relaxed and dissolved in an anonymous reverie. Now I must arise, mobilize my resources. I find myself summoned forth, called upon to be I, a responsible and responsive agent, before another. His act of facing me that singles me out singularizes me. In being faced, I discover resources with which to answer the appeal and demand placed on me. I discover that I have resources, that I am a resource. The act of facing is an event in the phenomenal field. It is in his facing me that I find myself confronted with an imperative. The imperative may be formulated in the grammatical and rhetorical forms of language, or in certain kinds of gestures. But the indicative and informative meaning and referents of all that he says, in the measure that they are addressed to me, wield vocative and imperative force. They call for my attention, and direct and order my understanding. They already direct and order my action. This vocative and imperative force is not an immaterial and ideal meaning connoted by the sensory signs he makes, his utterances and gestures. The force of his approach and the movement with which he faces me accord his utterances their vocative and imperative force. I see myself singled out and held in the focus of his eyes; I see the nakedness of those eyes that search and appeal. I see the empty-handedness of his gestures turned to me. I hear his voice addressed to me – the frailty and transitoriness of his voice without causal force – that solicits my help. This injured one is not a collaborator in a common project to which I am committed. I recognize that he is a neighbour. In moving into this neighbourhood, I have committed myself to a social contract: committed myself to participate in the neighbourhood utilities and services, conform to zoning regulations. Have I not also committed myself to conform to neighbourhood practices of civility and reciprocal respect, and reciprocal assistance when needs arise? To get rid of my television set, I call up the garbage collection office of my neighbourhood; I am not appealing to the woman who answers the phone, but inquiring about the town ordinances. She tells me to put it out for pickup on Thursday: in conformity with the regulations that schedule the picking up of refuse. But the one who knocked on my door was not simply showing me a copy of the rules. The social contract is not a contract entered with ‘the neighbourhood’. I find myself obligated to respond to this individual who knocked on my door and faces me. My social contract is nothing else than my foreseeing that he and others who live here may face me and put demands on me by facing me – demands that bind me. If I shut the door on my neighbour who needs a ride to the airport, he may say to others that I am not a real neighbour, that I am not civilized, that I do not recognize ordinary humanity. It is as a human being, an adult, someone who speaks the language, to whom I respond, when he knocks on my door late at night. Being adult, being rational, being a member of humanity, as facts, do not by themselves constitute obligations to every human being or every rational agent. But in recognizing myself to be, and in living, as an independent adult, a person with a mind of his own, a

5

The Fundamental Ethical Experience

83

human being, have I not committed myself to a whole set of social contracts? I drive a reliable car others have agreed to manufacture and I to pay for; I make myself an evening meal with food and wine others have agreed to produce according to appropriate standards; in speaking I call upon a body of information supplied by schools and workplaces; in pursuing my solitary reveries I plan my pleasures with thoughts articulated in English. Is it then the commitment I made to the working economy, the community of those who treat one another as adults, the animal species that communicates with intelligible and informed language, the neighbourhood that binds me in terms of the appeal he made? Shall we say that it is the social order, order itself, rational order, to which I committed myself, that I now recognize as binding me? It is one thing to recognize the force of my commitment. It is another to acknowledge the imperative force of that to which I am committed. To recognize myself as bound only by laws that I myself legislate for myself is simply to commit myself to a programme. This commitment involves an acknowledgment of the logical and physical laws that will have to be conformed to if I am to carry out my programme. But my programme itself binds me only in the sense that I have not revoked it. One will object, with Immanuel Kant, that rationality, the imperative for the universal and the necessary, is not a simple project I set before myself. As soon as thought arises, it recognizes that it must conceive things consistently and relate them coherently. It finds it must commit itself to this programme because it finds itself, from the first, subject to this imperative. This imperative is a fact, which thought recognizes in an intellectual sense of respect. But is not my decision to think, to act thoughtfully, a resolution that rests on my freely revocable will? The one who says that in turning him away I do not recognize ordinary humanity is saying that humanity is imperative, makes claims on me. But I do not make a social contract with humanity. Is my membership in humanity anything else than the succession of my responses to individuals who face me, placing demands on me? Is it not, then, that recognizing ordinary humanity is acknowledging that anyone who knocks on my door and faces me places demands on me? Being faced is encountering someone who is not simply similar to me but in another place – occupying a different point of view, acting in a different practical field in which the time marked by his oncoming death encloses him. It is encountering someone who appeals to me and places demands on me that bind me. In his appeal, his demand, he stands apart, other. He is other with the otherness, the exteriority, of an imperative. An imperative is a force that binds me but which does not have its source in my own initiative. The experience of being faced loses nothing of its nature when it occurs out of context. It was not a neighbour who knocked, but an injured stranger who speaks no English. It was a lost child. It was someone mentally retarded, in whose bag we found the train ticket. A leper, outside the restaurant in a country where we came for a vacation, reaches out to us. In the nightly broadcasts from the refugee camps in Iraq and Darfur, images of people driven from their farms, their homes burnt, robbed of their jewellery and clothing, stripped of their identity papers, their birth

84

A. Lingis

certificates and marriage licenses, the force of the ethical imperative stood forth, a powerful and undeniable reality in the world. It was from the extremity of destitution and helplessness that the searing appeal and demand and accusation gripped us. In the ruins of the neighbourhood, devastated by an earthquake, in the outskirts of Hiroshima fuming in radioactive cinders, it was a stranger whose face is charred and from whose throat no voice issues, who turns to me and reaches out to me across the oceans and the years. Utterances do not possess only an indicative or informative form, but also a vocative and imperative force. This force is formulated in the grammatical forms of greetings, questions, and orders, but in fact every statement put forth to someone is put forth in response to other statements and calls for a response in turn. This vocative and imperative force is the force of the movement by which other speakers present themselves, not physically forcing themselves on me or manipulating me: facing me. Emmanuel Levinas has elaborated a striking phenomenological account of what the face does in facing me. What I perceive is the mobile contours and surfaces upon which phrases and kinesic expressions form and subside, shapes and movements that do not endure, visible and audible movements of a surface that is a surface of sensibility, susceptibility, and vulnerability. On the surface of a face I perceive hunger and want, the traces of wounds and suffering, the wrinkles of sickness and aging. They indicate what response is called for, what is to be done. In facing me, someone addresses me with this susceptibility and vulnerability, appealing to my resources and response. The appeal is perceptible in the nakedness of the eyes that look at me, the empty-handedness of his gestures, the ephemerality of his voice which touches me but which I can refuse by doing nothing, by continuing to do whatever I was doing. A face, by facing me, intrudes into the environment that my perceptual movements array about me and my actions order for me. A force arrives from outside the order that my perception and my action establish in my environment, a force that appeals to me and contests my initiatives. How do I understand that this is what a face is doing by facing me? Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have explained that my grasp of the sense of another’s movements is not just a hypothetical construction on my part. I comprehend the movements of others with the motor diagrams of my actions. My body picks up diagrams of movement from others and passes them on to others, as it picks up and passes on patterns of speech and emotional responses. When another faces me, Levinas points out, my intentions and initiatives are interrupted; I find my attention held back from my preoccupations, I am stopped in the course of my movement. I recognize the appeal and demand of another in, and by, actively responding to them. A veridical response in language formulates a state of affairs in the environment open to my observation and to the other’s verification. A practical response to the requirement that another presents activates our skills and uses the resources at hand in our environment. Each time another faces me, it is with a singular appeal and contestation. The presentation of another and of the appeal and demand with which she faces me is then not an intemporal transmundane dimension in which we exist as for-another,

5


85

but an empirical event. In facing me, the wants and needs of another are addressed singularly to me. Her eyes single me out; her gestures and words address me by name. In responding to the other, I come to exist and act as a singular I. Responding to one who faces me, I find myself obliged to formulate the environment I have appropriated in ways that make it available for her view and reorient the things I have appropriated so as to make them available for her needs. However, Levinas elaborates this experience with theoretical concepts that are fraught with difficulties.

Conceptual Difficulties Appropriation and Totality To fix the distinctiveness of the face that faces one from things that simply expose their surfaces, Levinas argues that things are open to appropriation, and indeed are constituted as things by appropriation. Heidegger had replaced a substantive account of things with a relational account. The primary format of our environment, he said, is that of a practical field. The things are found not in isolation but in a layout of things and are dynamically related to one another. We discover things in using them, and what we perceive in them is their serviceability or recalcitrance, the ways they fit together and dynamically resist or move one another. These we discover in handling them, manipulating them. We do not discover properties, that is, features that belong to them, but appropriatenesses, ways they serve, support, or resist our manipulations. It is in our handling and through our manipulating of them that the appropriatenesses, the serviceabilities and recalcitrances of things take form. But Levinas argues that things can be detached and manipulated because they are substances, solids that hold themselves together. Appropriation precedes and makes possible utilization. He characterizes things as meubles – moveable goods, furnishings. The term designates both their character of being detachable solids, substances, and their destination for the home. The practical environment is not an indefinitely spread-out instrumental complex; it is laid out for each of us about our home. A home is a space of rest and tranquillity, withdrawn from the bustle and hubbub of work. Brought back to the home, things support our positions, our rest, and our nourishments. In the home they are no longer used, manipulated, but enjoyed. They are no longer means, but ends: our movement and our sensibility ends in them, without using them as relays to envisage further objectives. Levinas thus argues that the environment of things is constituted as such by an initial appropriation, and that detaching things and treating them as furnishings further subject them to the active I. But do things not possess their own existence, independent of me? They exist in the vast and uncontained realms of the elements – in the air, in the light or in the

86

A. Lingis

darkness, in warmth or cold, supported in their places by the ground. They can be detached and appropriated because they are solids that hold together of themselves, substances. We must then go beyond the phenomenology that reduces things to the structures that govern, and are revealed, in the succession of sensible appearances. Things are as real as we are, and just as our bodily reality is not reducible to a succession of visual and audible patterns, so things are not reducible to what we perceive or can perceive of them. As substances they are not simply solids that hold together of themselves; they maintain crystal, arboreal or organic forms, and to see them is to see what is achieved by them. To see the face of another human is, Levinas says, to see her wants and needs, her vulnerability and mortality. Do not the things of the world also show this essential susceptibility, this contingency? To see other animals, plants, mountains and rivers, and manufactured things is to see what they need to live or to exist in their settings. We see the penguin mired in an oil slick. The young fruit tree now stabilized with guy wires requires water in the drought of summer; its leaves are susceptible to predatory animals and insects; the stumps of its branches broken by the ice of winter are susceptible to fungus and the invasion of dry rot. Even as we detach a piece of rock from the quarry to make it a building-stone, we find our manipulations commanded by its susceptibility to being cracked or shattered. To see things is also to respect their spaces, to recognize our powers to protect them, support them, nourish, or repair them. We discover our powers in the measure that we explore our environment and discover, every step of the way, what the things require. This cannot mean that we always and at every moment must answer to the needs of all the things about us. Every initiative we undertake involves recognizing which needs are important, urgent, and immediate. What then has to be done has to be done by me, when and because I am the one who is there and who has the resources. Strolling in the forest, I come upon a discarded, still smouldering cigarette butt in the dry leaves. Coming upon an ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct for 60 years, I alert the press and launch a movement to protect its habitat from loggers and developers. For Levinas the relationship with the elements is realized in sensuality, in egoist enjoyment. This is surely too limited a conception. Does not the earth extending indefinitely before our feet summon us forth? Does not the light which floods our eyes when we awaken summon us, not only to see illuminated substances laid out for our appropriation, but also to lose our egoism in it, our eyes to become crystals radiating its warmth and delight upon the things and to passers-by? Does not the night, which for Levinas repels us in horror and undermines our power to commence and to stand in in-sistence, summon us to an ecstatic, nocturnal and impersonal destiny?

Alterity and Infinity To fix the distinctiveness of the ethical imperative, over against practical imperatives, Levinas introduces the concepts of alterity and infinity. When someone turns to face

5


87

me, I do not see her visible and tangible face as the side and contour of her physiological substance, nor do I see it as a sign designating something conceptually grasped: her functional identity. I see it as the visible and tangible mark of a lack, a need, the trace of an absence. Her face is abstract and ab-solute, Levinas says, disconnected from the supporting environment of things. To turn to face me is to extract herself from the substance of the world, to denude herself. She faces me in poverty and destitution. She is other than the things that furnish the environment I appropriate. Inasmuch as I observe the visible and tangible body of someone before me, similar to my own, acting in ways I have acted or could act, she is perceived as similar to me, an alter ego. She is similar to me, but different because situated in a different practical field, whose actions I view at a time deferred, past or future, relative to where I am present. But inasmuch as someone faces me, it is someone other than me that I encounter. To be sure, I can represent to myself what she is and what she needs, but in contesting that representation of her, or in accepting it, she arises beyond every representation I form of her presence; she stands beyond every response I offer to her, judging it. This otherness is not given to my appropriative initiatives, but constrains them, appeals to my forces and resources and places demands on them. It is the otherness of a being exterior to me who commands my words and initiatives. But does a like imperative not make itself known to us in our dealing with other living beings not of our species, and with things? For they do not lie about us simply as substances exposed for our use and our enjoyment; to deal with them is to see what we have to do. We do not see a deer caught in the branches of a tree in the flooding river without envisioning how it could be freed and how we could free it. The post of an inhabited birdhouse that is bending in the wind and is in danger of being overturned designates our ability to stabilize it. We do not see the mountain spring without seeing how the plastic bags that the wind has blown into it are choking it. The intrinsic importance of these beings is visible together with the urgency of their needs. Before seeing how rivers and mountains, giraffes and hummingbirds could be important for us, or for other beings, we see that they are important in themselves, for themselves. Their being is in front of us, and our having the available resources to help makes their needs an appeal and a demand placed on us who are there. But, Levinas says, when it is someone of our own kind who faces us, the appeal is displaced and renewed whenever it is satisfied. The response with which we answer another’s question is itself a question put to his judgment, and is open to a further question on his part. Even if he assents to what I say to him, and assents to the representation of his presence I formulate and put to him, he stands apart, beyond that representation, in assenting to it. His very assent is a question asking for my confirmation. As with words, Levinas says, so with deeds. The wound we anaesthetize and bandage will have to be cleaned again and the skin once healed remains vulnerable to the harsh edges of the world. The one who, in Leo Tolstoy’s story or Satyajit Ray’s film, in times of famine gives a stranger some bread from his stores, finds that stranger hungry and at the door the next day, and with his wife and children. The negativity of the need and want with which another human faces us is unending. When he faces us we discover the unendingness of this vulnerability.

88

A. Lingis

Against the juridical concept of responsibility that has dominated ethics since Aristotle, Levinas shows that responsibility cannot be measured by what I have foreseen and intended. To be responsible for my child is to take responsibility for what others have done to him, to take responsibility for what the debilitating or twisted conceptions of the culture that lies beyond me and existed before me have done to him. If he is born deformed or retarded, this is perhaps the result of a recessive gene from generations back, but it is I who must respond to it with all my resources. The responsibilities I have with regard to another, Levinas says, increase in the measure that I respond to them. From the first I find myself responsible for the want and need, and the very irresponsibility of another – I find myself guilty. And this guilt increases in the measure that I speak and act responsibly. In the unsatisfiability of the appeal the other makes to me, its unendingness – infinition – the other remains uncomprehensible and unappropriatable, unendingly and definitively exterior. His face is the trace of an absence. What makes the exposure to a want – hollowing itself out in the measure that it is filled – a demand placed on us? A demand is a force that binds our will. It cannot be understood simply in terms of the negativity of susceptibility and vulnerability. When it presents itself as an event, each time it is a specific force. But it is not positive with the positivity of mundane things. Mundane things regulate our acts with the plenitude of their physical force. The otherness of the other cannot be understood as a juxtaposition, in the same phenomenon, of the negativity of want and the positivity of force. Wants and needs that imperatively command me are something else than being or than nothingness. Levinas concludes that otherness, alterity, must be conceived as an ontological category other than being and other than nothingness. This concept of alterity proves very difficult to formulate. It is an event in the phenomenal world: otherness is presented, as that which is ungraspable and unappropriatable, in the visibility of the face that looks at me. Levinas says that the face is abstract, that it presents a movement of infinition. The face of the other is an absolute, disengaged from the forces of the phenomenal environment. The visible and tangible face is the trace of a past that has never been present. Along with these negative formulations, Levinas also invokes the terms ‘the Good’, ‘the superlative’, and ‘God’, which he aims to construe as something other than positive. In this sense God would not be a separate being but the dimension or the movement by which another facing me commences an unlimited contestation and judgement of me and of the course of the world. Levinas invokes not ‘the divine’, but the monotheistic God, whose uniqueness speaks in the singularity of the one who singles me out to face me. Levinas’s insistence on a monotheistic God, and not a dimension of the sacred, would preserve the irreducible singularity of the other. But in making the alterity of God constitutive of the otherness of the one who faces me, does not Levinas effectively reduce the otherness, between one who faces me and another who also faces me, to difference – difference in time and place, difference between the empirical figure of want and need that each presents? Further, in the measure that God is conceived as ‘the wholly Other’, constitutive of the otherness of every other human who faces us, the demand put on us loses its

5


89

location in the midst of the common world and its determinateness. But a veridical response in language formulates a state of affairs in the environment open to one’s observation and the other’s verification. A practical response to the appeal and demand that another presents enlists our resources and the resources at hand in our environment. A response, in words or in deeds, to the wholly Other can only be wholly indeterminate.

Practical Difficulties 1. For Levinas it is suffering, and not the damaged surfaces of things or even nonhuman living things (which are strangely absent from his thoughts), that has importance and that urgently requires assistance. In the wounds and wrinkles of the skin we sense a surface of exposure of sensibility and vulnerability, we sense a suffering mired in itself that immediately afflicts my sensibility and my powers to act. Suffering is not only the way the other recognizes her lacks, lesions, and wounds; it is the way those lacks weigh on me immediately. For the suffering of another is not an object viewed at a distance; it afflicts me; the onlooking eye flinches, feeling the pain in itself. The recognition of the other is not a conceptual identification; it is an active response. I make, with my words, the things I see visible to her; I make, with my deeds, the resources I have appropriated available to her. Levinas makes the recognition of the other to be from the first, and essentially, recognition of a vulnerable and mortal being. While all organisms that reproduce through sexual union are mortal, has not contemporary philosophy continued an ancient error by making mortality, vulnerability, finitude the defining essence of human existence – envisioning humans, or other animals, as bundles of needs and wants, envisioning life negatively, as the force of lacks driving them to open their eyes and move in the environment? In fact, our bodies, like those of zebras, hummingbirds, and flying fish, generate energy, energy in excess of what they need to satisfy their needs and wants. Our needs and wants are intermittent and superficial, and, in nutritive ecosystems and prosperous lands, readily satisfied. We awaken because our bodies are refurbished and charged with excess energies; most of the movements of our eyes and hands see and touch things gratuitously, delighting in their superabundance; most of our movements as we sway our hands, drum our fingers, walk or run are gratuitous. Our skin is exposed and vibrant, sensitive everywhere, open to and welcoming the world. The feeling of the upsurge of excess energies is that of exultation. Joy is in life; life is joyous. Joy is an upsurge that affirms itself unrestrictedly, and affirms the reality and truth of the face of the landscape illuminated by joy. It is because we first see the life, the intrinsic joyousness of that life, in another that her vulnerability and suffering can figure as something to be supported or succoured, healed or comforted. The presentation of a void, a nothingness, of itself can simply motivate our avoiding it, or recoiling and retreating from it. The observation of emptinesses and

90

A. Lingis

weaknesses can be simply the recognition of possibilities for us to apply our substance and insert our force. It is not the needs of others only, but that which has been achieved in them which appeals to us and places demands on us. When someone greets us and calls for our attention, our attention is turned to the force of life in him or her, which has grown and striven – the force of an individual life. This attention is acknowledgment and concern. We see a life that enjoys living; that finds goodness in living. The one who faces us in the joy of her life radiates this joy that we find immediately on ourselves. This joy requires a response. We find ourselves called upon to let this life be, to respect its space, to let it flourish, to care about it and care for it. We see facing us someone in whom nature has achieved something: we see hale and hearty physical health and vigour, vibrant sensibility, beauty. We also see someone who has done something with her life, protected and nourished, built, repaired, restored, rescued. We see someone who has cared for a sick relative, maintained a farm, been a devoted teacher, is a loyal friend. We see someone who has not achieved anything materially, but who knows that she is a good person, steadfast, open-minded, with a good head and a good heart, has dared to break the rules and make mistakes, has a sense of her worth. We see facing us someone who has suffered the worst oppressions of the social system and the worst destructions wrought by disease or nature, and who has been able to endure suffering and awaits death with lucidity and courage. We see someone who has the vitality to laugh over absurdities and her own failures, has the strength to weep over the loss of a lover and over the death of a child in another land. It is then not simply need and want that imperatively contest us when someone turns to us? Is it not the particular and intrinsic goodness of the life that approaches us which gives force to her contestation of our personal concerns? Levinas does affirm that the encounter with the face of another is an encounter with the Good, and gives a distinctive meaning to goodness: the Good is what makes me good. That is, it makes me responsible. Before the other I am the rich one; I have always something to offer, something to give. Before the distress and perplexity of the other I find I have something to say. I surprise myself, finding resources in myself I did not know I possessed. But to encounter the goodness of life in another also requires a response, and here too I surprise myself, finding energies and exuberance I did not know I possessed. Perhaps there is nothing more empowering than seeing courage, composure, and laughter in someone reduced to destitution in a refugee camp, someone stricken with incapacitating wounds or illness. Contact with another in her vulnerability and mortality becomes ethical when we make contact with the things the other cares about and worries about and the things that delight – the patch of land on the mountainside the refugee longs to return to, the vibrant warmth of the slum the captured and imprisoned guerrilla loves, the frogs and wildflowers of the marsh the child loves but which is being drained for industrial development. The suffering of the one who faces me, a suffering visible in the bloodless white of her anguished face, may well be not the suffering of her own hunger and thirst, but a suffering for the sheep in her care dying of the drought or for the peregrines in the poisoned skies, a distress over the crumbling temple and over the sea birds engulfed in the oil spill,

5


91

a grieving for the glaciers melting under skies whose carbon dioxide layers are trapping the heat of the earth. We must understand that the other may need and want his suffering, in pursuing his destiny. The lover needs the anxieties and torments of love: love is rare because we fear it, knowing that we are never so vulnerable, never so easily and deeply hurt, as when we are in love. The mother has to grieve for her son. The mother has to grieve for the suffering her son plunged himself into devoting himself to the suffering of his people, devoting himself to armed revolution. What is more, the one we see suffering may be suffering because he inflicts great suffering on others and hears the cry of their suffering. The revolutionary finds himself unable to endure the suffering of the oppressed and will inflict upon them still greater oppression when he launches the struggle. Their agony intensifies his pain, which he has to suffer. 2. Levinas notes that to respond to the appeal of another is to expose oneself always to a further appeal. The response with which we answer another’s question is itself a question put to his judgment, and is open to a further question on his part. That which makes the other’s question an appeal is the need and want, visible in his face, which makes it urgent. To respond to his needs and wants is to recognize an unending succession of subsequent appeals and demands. But is discourse animated by an unceasing restlessness, where every response to a question leads to further questions? In fact, our questions lead to the presence of the things themselves. There are, after all, plain truths. Our communication with one another is based on formulations that are plain truths. In whatever alien culture we find ourselves, we soon find that most of what others take to be plain truths, when translated in our language, we too find to be plain truths. Anthropologists, but also ordinary travellers, indeed tourists, do not arrive as aliens with utterly alien minds. It is a mistake to subjugate human discourse to some insatiable greed or obligation to uncover and dissect all the beings of the universe, as though our biological life only serves to record everything in language. So many different kinds of discourse enter as limited segments of so many kinds of practical planning, execution of initiatives, pure fantasies, and in so many kinds of human encounters, celebrations, and amusements. Streams of discourse end in satisfaction, in pleasure or in laughter – the laughter with which we greet and celebrate the nonsensical but also the paradoxical and the enigmatic. It may seem that the scientific community of modern civilization is committed to constructing a discourse encompassing all past and future reality. Yet this discourse continually fragments into more and more specialized discourses dealing with segments of the universe. Levinas had acknowledged that the needs of a living organism are finite; they end in terrestrial goods and nourishments. Our appetite ends in the enjoyment of spring water and forest berries and wine, which we do not take as fuel for subsequent enterprises. Desires are sincere: hungers end in the enjoyment of food and are not relayed unto an indefinite succession of objectives. Needs and wants end and terminate in contentment. If this is true of me, as Levinas argues, is it not also true of the others?

92

A. Lingis

Our practical activities are oriented toward dwelling, toward making a home in the world. Our home is not a factory whose equipment is unrelentingly geared to ever-greater production. Our home is a retreat from the fields of work, a zone of tranquillity, where we rest with things that are no longer implements but furnishings that sustain our rest and our pleasure. The others we encounter do not abide in infinity or in God, but in homes on our Earth. 3. For Levinas, the more one undertakes to bear the burden of existence, the greater are the demands placed on one; the more one justifies oneself, the more extensive one finds the contestation imposed on one. Responsibilities increase according to the measure with which they are taken up. I am responsible before all the others for all the others, held accountable for the deeds and misdeeds of others, for the very responsibilities and irresponsibility of others. This teaching cannot be the basis for effective action. My abilities and my resources are limited. In expending my funds on medical treatment for my son who requires repeated and immensely complicated surgery, and in giving him all the attention and support he needs, I neglect the wants and needs of my other son and my spouse. In famine the bread I give from my stores to the stranger is taken from my own family. No action of any kind can be effective without a perception of the important and the accessory, and without a discernment of what is urgent and what can wait. What makes what has to be done that which I have to do is the fact that I am the one who is there and who has the resources. Someone, in cramps or panicking, is in danger of drowning, and I am the one who can swim. This child has a severely infected cut, and I, the tourist who has come by plane to this Amazonia, am the only one in the region with the money to fly him to the hospital. I do not have the resources or the skills to respond to the needs of everyone about me as well as my own. I cannot be obliged to respond to needs that are unimportant or whose satisfaction can be postponed. 4. Levinas locates the imperative in the phenomenon of the face, and not in the express intention of the subject. Though the other may be too proud or too shy to ask anything of me, her face itself, by facing, addresses an appeal to me, places demands on me. But when facing me is not a deliberate move on the part of the other, her vulnerability and suffering is only observed by me, not addressed singularly to my powers and resources. How is it then that I feel all the more concerned when the bleeding accident victim is no longer able to turn to me and ask for help? Is it not the importance, urgency, and immediacy of her wounds that make what has to be done what I have to do? The paramedic ignores the questions of reporters and bystanders who face him. What we do have to maintain is recognition of vulnerability and need wherever it appears, whether I only see it in fleeting images of starving refugees in another continent or only read about people tortured in secret prison ships and camps. There cannot be an essential difference between perceiving the vulnerability and suffering on the face whose eyes single me out and those who do not or cannot.

5


93

We must be able to maintain this recognition of vulnerability and need of countless multitudes without producing guilt in ourselves. Guilt is harmful, incapacitating to oneself, and useless, and, because it diverts a portion of my energies to maintaining a sense of incapacity, harmful to others.

Chapter 6

Radical Passivity as the (Only) Basis for Effective Ethical Action. Reading the ‘Passage to the Third’ in Otherwise than Being Peter Zeillinger

Abstract Contrary to Alphonso Lingis’s claim that radical passivity cannot be the basis for effective ethical agency, this contribution argues that it is precisely the later Levinas’s reconceptualized notion of alterity and consequently of subjectivity that makes ethical action – understood as substitution and sacrifice – possible. The argument proceeds by way of a close reading of the ‘passage to the Third’ inconspicuously located towards the end of Levinas’s second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). In response to critique levelled against his early conceptualization of the self as radically independent and autochthonous, the later Levinas introduces the notion of substitution, which entails a self alwaysalready ‘infected’ by the other. The encounter with the other is therefore no longer premised on atheism and autarky, but anarchically located within the self. The other concerns me precisely because the other is not absolutely outside-of-me; the other is the other-within-the same, within me, the essence of my humanity.

‘Ethics (or better: ethical action) based on radical passivity’ – this should not be a mere empty slogan to be bandied about. At first sight it seems obvious that any ethical relation to the other (in both senses implied by the French terms l’autre and autrui, i.e. both the generalized other or alterity and the concrete particularism of the personal other) will of course always embrace a certain passivity, insofar as the mere appearance, as well as any subsequent understanding, of ‘the other’ will fail to be simply enclosed in or described by a system of perceptions, speculations and representations of the self. Without a certain receptive and therefore ‘passive’ openness on the side of the self, no actual and effective relation to the other in its (his/ her) alterity could be said to take place. So it seems that there is nothing special to be said about the fact that a certain passivity is always at work within ethical relations (as well as in any relation to the world, or to the realm of the Divine – though for terminological reasons, it might be appropriate to be cautious and avoid here, for the time being, the word ‘God’). Questions only arise with respect to this fundamental obviousness when it comes to the order of precedence between the unavoidable passivity of the self and those elements of agency, which we call ethical action(s). Is passivity to be understood as one part of agency, or might it be necessary to think that ethical action B. Hofmeyr (ed.), Radical Passivity, © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

95

96

P. Zeillinger

arises only out of a prior passivity? And what should this mean for concrete ethical action? Is it only the hierarchical order (if there is any) between passivity and ethical action that seems unclear? Within this context, the uniqueness of the relation between passivity and agency within the ethical relation also seems hardly describable. What kind of passivity are we talking about? Isn’t passivity just the negation of agency? But passivity with regard to an openness to or givenness of the other cannot be taken simply as the negation of an activity, nor can ethical agency be described as the negation of the openness towards the other. In this sense, passivity, or even radical passivity – as found in the later works of Emmanuel Levinas – and its relation to a corresponding ethical act form the background of the following close reading of an often misunderstood passage within the work of Levinas: the passage to the Third as it can be found in Otherwise Than Being.1

From Totality and Infinity to Otherwise Than Being The sudden emergence of the very dense discourse of the Third almost at the end of Otherwise than Being has often been regarded simply as a sort of addendum or retroactive ‘supplement’ to the discourse of alterity located throughout Levinas’s work. As it is only within the context of the appearance of the Third that Levinas seems to be able to focus not only on a quite radical relation to the Other (which for some could perhaps even be considered as ‘inhuman’), but finally also on more common topics of everyday life, juridical justice, the institution of the State, or simply ordinary and reciprocal personal relations between human beings, one might tend to regard this late emergence of everyday relations as a final correction or even relativization of earlier statements in Levinas’s work. Nevertheless, a closer look at this famous ‘passage to the Third’ may show a much more compelling view on what is at stake when the third person appears within the discourse of the later Levinas. Robert Bernasconi (2002) has already paid very careful attention to and followed very closely the major change that occurs in the structure of the argument between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. In his ‘What is the Question to Which “Substitution” is the Answer?’ Bernasconi works out how the core of Levinas’s book, which evolves from a thorough reflection on the understanding of ‘substitution’,2 gives rise to a new understanding of subjectivity on the basis of radical passivity. And finally it is this pre-subjective passivity of substitution that becomes the ‘condition of the ethical’ (Bernasconi 2002: 250) for Levinas. Whereas in Totality and Infinity [t]he subject is presented as already given prior to the other’s calling the self into question … [i]n Otherwise than Being, by contrast, Levinas reframes the question of the possibility of ethics by turning from the other to the ethical subject so as to ask about the possibility of such a subject: how could an independent, autochthonous, solitary being be put into question by the other?. 1

As we shall see, the passage to the Third can be found on p. 156 of the English translation (1998) and on p. 200 of the French edition (1974) of OB. 2 See Chapter IV of OB (pp. 99–129).

6

Radical Passivity as the (Only) Basis for Effective Ethical Action

97

In other words, in Totality and Infinity [TI] ‘it is only for an already established “I” that the other arises’ (ibid., p. 246). As long as ‘the other’ had been thought of as a certain ‘exteriority’ to the self, as was the case in TI, the encounter with the Other in the faceto-face relation was necessarily thought to operate on the level of the ego.3 In Otherwise than Being [OB], on the other hand, Levinas ‘goes behind the back of the consciousness of the I, so that there is no longer any danger that [he] will be read as if the ethical arose as a concrete event in the life of an already constituted ego’ (ibid.). Shortly after the publication of TI in 1961, it was not only the respective critiques of Maurice Blanchot4 and of Jacques Derrida5 that made Levinas rethink his former concept of alterity as exteriority. In addition, from 1961 to 1965, Levinas himself slowly developed his notion of the trace as a phenomenon of the disturbance and disruption of the order of the self. As a trace the Other signifies without appearing, obliging the I to move ‘beyond being’, beyond the mere maintenance of its own being.6 It took some time – from ‘Le signification et le sens’ (1963),7 which Adriaan Peperzak calls Levinas’s ‘discourse on method’ (BPW, xiii & 33), to ‘La trace de l’autre’ (1963)8 and finally to ‘Enigme et phénomène’ (1965)9 – to develop

3 The only reason why this change in structure between TI and OB does not amount to a recantation of Levinas’s earlier thought, is because, as Bernasconi (2002: 249) explains, ‘ “substitution” operates not at the level of the ego (le moi), but of the self (le soi), such that the whole notion of identity has to be rethought, to the point where Levinas refers to the “unjustifiable identity … expressed in terms such as ego, I, oneself”’. Levinas explains the distinction between the ego and self by saying that persecution strips the ego of its dominating imperialism and so reduces the ego (le Moi) to the self (le soi). Subjectivity in Levinas is, therefore, not the ego (le Moi) but me (moi) (CCP, 150)’ [ed.]. 4 Blanchot’s critical reflections on Levinas’s Totality and Infinity have been published in three articles in 1961/62: ‘Connaissance de l’inconnu’; ‘Tenir parole’; and ‘Le rapport du troisième genre’, which are now part of the volume L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 5 Derrida (1964). ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Derrida (1978). Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 79–153. 6 The notion of the ‘trace’ becomes increasingly important in Levinas’s writings after TI. The concept has, as Levinas recognizes, its philosophical and theological origins in Neo-Platonism, specifically Plotinus, and in Augustine’s De Trinitate (vestigia dei). In both cases, trace refers to what the One or God leaves behind in the world. Levinas subscribes to the Neo-Platonic insistence that the trace does not necessarily come after the original event: ‘A trace is a presence of that which properly speaking has never been there, of what is always past’ (CPP, 105). For Levinas, one should not think of the trace as the imprint of something which was originally present. The trace is not a sign pointing to a signified. No memory could remember this immemorial past which the trace evokes. In OB, the face is understood (‘figured’) as a trace. Elsewhere Levinas writes that a face is in ‘the trace of the utterly bygone, the utterly past absent’ (CPP, 103) (Moran 2000: 331) [ed.]. 7 Levinas presented this lecture at the Collège Philosophique in October 1963. It was subsequently published in Levinas, E. (1972). Humanisme de l’autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. It was translated into English as ‘Meaning and Sense’, in BPW, 33–64. 8 Levinas, E. (1963). ‘La trace de l’autre’, in DEHH, 187–202. This text is a short summary of several lectures presented by Levinas from 1961–1963. In some parts, it is identical with ‘Le signification et le sens’. For the English translation see ‘On the Trail of the Other’, in Philosophy Today 10 (1966), 34–45. 9 Levinas, E. (1965). ‘Énigme et phénomène’, in DEHH, 203–236. It was translated into English as ‘Enigma and Phenomenon’ in BPW, 65–78.

98

P. Zeillinger

another, phenomenologically and grammatically adequate way of naming alterity without thereby already identifying or prefiguring the Other person and, on the other hand, without falling into the trap of still presupposing a subject prior to the encounter with the Other and thereby missing its radical alterity as well. A closer look at the development of these crucial texts can show what actually happens to Levinas’s ‘language’ and to the exposition of his argument between TI and the highly developed form of writing and of expressing the inexpressible of OB.10 Nonetheless, the task of the present contribution is not to lead to an understanding of Levinas’s later works in contrast to his earlier thinking, but to examine the possibility of thinking ‘the basis for effective ethical action’ in terms of Levinas’s understanding of radical passivity as it can be found in these texts. To summarize one of the key elements of Levinas’s reframed notion of alterity one can follow Bernasconi’s observation regarding the renewed and increasingly central notion of ‘substitution’ in Otherwise than Being. The relation to the Other in OB, therefore, no longer refers to some ‘exteriority’, but has to be considered as an unbetrayable prior obsession by the Other, so that alterity is no longer faced in the sense of a vis-à-vis, but instead as an always-already happened inherent irruption. ‘The notion of substitution amounts to saying that “the other is in me and in the midst of my very identification” ’ (OB, 125 in Bernasconi 2002: 249). It is this ‘Other-within-theSame’ that forces Levinas to say that ‘I am a hostage [of the Other] (OB, 128). But does this observation actually explain and enable concrete ethical agency? Instead of opening up a clear possibility for thinking the basis of effective ethical action, Levinas seems to achieve the opposite: the utter failure or incapacitation of any self-conscious agency as such. Therefore, the question still remains: if the Third11 is to be considered as the reciprocal Other in our everyday (human) relations, how does this Third emerge in the context of radical alterity and radical passivity?

10 For a close reading of this development see Zeilling, P. (2005). ‘Phänomenologie des NichtPhänomenalen. Spur und Inversion des Seins bei Emmanuel Levinas’, in Blamauer, M., Fasching, W. & Flatscher, M. (Eds.) (2005). Phänomenologische Aufbrüche, Reihe der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie Vol. 11. Frankfurt: Lang, pp. 161–179. 11 Peperzak (1993: 229) explains the significance of the Third in the context of Levinas’s thinking as follows: I am responsible for the other person, my neighbour. In addition, however, I am also responsible for others who exist beside my neighbour. Levinas calls this other other, the Third. If I could limit myself to my neighbour – the one facing me here-and-now – there would be no problem. The third, the neighbour of my neighbour, however, disturbs the immediate relation of the twosome and its intimacy. As soon as I become aware of the third, of others who need me, my responsibility is divided. I am no longer first and foremost responsible for the one other, but also for others simultaneously. I cannot know or calculate who came first. What are my neighbour and the third to one another? Therefore, with the entry of the Third, arrives the need for justice. I must be just in the distribution of my attention and devotion. I must compare and calculate, treat others as equals and conduct myself as judge. The order of consciousness and its totality can consequently be derived from saying and substitution. The ethical relation of the One-to-the-Other obligates us to the rational organization of society, in which justice is exercised and violence is suppressed [ed.].

6


99

The Passage to the Third in Autrement qu’être The passage to the Third, which can be located within a few paragraphs of OB, is of special interest for the question of ethical agency because with it the discourse of alterity in Levinas seems to completely change its (perhaps for many readers its all too ‘familiarly’ aporetic) direction. Instead of being restricted to a discourse about the encounter of a singular self and a singular ‘other’, the passage to the Third opens the discourse of alterity to a thinking of community. Nevertheless, this new focus does not offer a ‘break’ with the former threads of argument but uncovers an important step within the remarkably consistent and continuous development of Levinas’s ethics of alterity in Otherwise than Being. Within the text itself the passage to the Third is accompanied by several structural and linguistic peculiarities. Only through a close reading will it become clear to what extent these details are something other than accidental or unintended. Instead, they may be taken as an adequate expression of the difficulty of ‘overcoming’ – or better – of dealing with the trap of contradicting oneself by expressing that which, in fact, permanently withdraws from any direct identification. Levinas finally has to face up to the following challenge: how to say the Unsayable without making a fool of oneself? And how to avoid this, while at the same time saying nothing at all in the end? In this sense, the passage to the Third in Levinas soon turns out to be the test case for the ethical relevance of Levinas’s thinking of alterity. The introduction of the notion of the ‘Third’ takes place at a particular point in Levinas’s argument – more exactly on a single page within Chapter V of Otherwise than Being, that is, p. 200 in the first French edition (1974) and p. 156 in the English translation (1998). Although this particular page is not specially emphasized – by the beginning of a new chapter or a subheading, for example – it nevertheless marks a crucial and long awaited moment within the argument of the book. This becomes clear from more than a dozen cross references throughout the book, which can be found in footnotes as well as within the reasoning of the main text. All of these references, which already began on the first pages of the book, point toward the introduction of the Third, many of them even to the exact page number. Indeed the entire text seems to come down to the discourse of the Third. Therefore, its introduction should be taken very seriously. Page 156 (of the English edition of OB) is located at the end of the ‘Exposition’ (‘L’argument’) of the book, within Chapter V (‘Subjectivity and Infinity’) and therefore already after the introduction of the central topic of the book: the understanding of ‘substitution’ (Chapter IV) on which Robert Bernasconi has focused in his aforementioned article. Within Chapter V the emergence of the notion of the Third belongs to a subchapter entitled ‘From Saying to the Said, or the Wisdom of Desire’. In the context of the book this title may sound a bit strange. In fact, in its bipartite formulation it expresses a certain inversion of the whole Levinasian argument. ‘Saying’ (le Dire) in Levinas may normally be understood as a certain ‘transcendence’ of or surplus over the Said. The whole first chapter can be read as the attempt to acknowledge within the ‘Said’ (le Dit), that is, within the perception of something

100

P. Zeillinger

actually being written or spoken or otherwise expressed, a ‘Saying’. The Saying (le Dire), therefore, has to be regarded throughout the book as a certain transgression of the Said. It is nevertheless important to remember that there has never been a Saying that could be perceived without a Said, without something being said.12 For this reason, it has never been possible to describe a path leading ‘from Saying to the Said’ as suggested by this subchapter’s title. So, what is one to make of this title then? Has it suddenly become possible to unfold within the realm of the Said, that is, within the realm of a written or spoken discourse (as we encounter it, for example, in Levinas’s book itself), a discourse that would transcend these restrictions? Did a transcendental discourse suddenly become possible? But how would Levinas have been able to overcome the boundaries of the Said in order to exemplify this supposed ontico-ontological incarnation of le Dire into le Dit announced in the subtitle? Perhaps the second part of the title – although equally enigmatic – can shed some light on the significance of these paradoxes. Indeed the second part – ‘Or the Wisdom of Desire’ – appears to be as inscrutable, for is it possible to think of the ‘wisdom’ of desire? Le Désir, for Levinas, always expresses a movement or relation that can never be fulfilled. Therefore, here too the question arises: how could there be a (present) wisdom of what will never be present (or presented) as such? It seems as if the title of the subchapter, which forms the immediate context of Levinas’s passage to the Third, already announces a certain shift or turning point of the argument presented thus far in the book. It makes sense, therefore, to enter into an even closer reading of the following crucial passages.

Defection of and Withdrawal from Identity – the Inversion of Being By presupposing many of the – more or less familiar – main gestures of Levinas’s work, the following reading starts with the very beginning of the aforementioned subchapter: Not includable in the present, refractory to thematization and representation, the alterity of the neighbor calls for [makes an appeal to; PZ] the irreplaceable singularity that lies in me, by accusing this ego (ce moi), reducing it, in the accusative, to itself (a soi). But the self (le soi) is not in a state, is not in position, is not at rest in itself, not ensured in itself as by a condition. Through the obsession with the other – accusing, persecuting – the uniqueness of oneself (de soi) is also the defection of identity that identifies itself in the same. In the coinciding with oneself, this identity would still be protected, would not be exposed enough, would not be passive enough. The defection of [withdrawal from] identity is a for-the-other in the midst of identity; it is the inversion of being into a sign (inversion de l’être en signe), the subversion of essence that begins to signify before (avant) being, the disinterestedness of essence (OB, 153; transl. mod.).

12 Even when Levinas speaks of a ‘Saying without the Said’ it should be understood as a reflexive notion. This phrase is only possible with regard to a mediated experience.

6


101

This text obviously refers back to the notion of ‘substitution’ which Levinas has developed in Chapter IV of OB. It speaks of an ‘irreplaceable singularity’ as well as of an Ego (moi), which is set in the ‘accusative’: le soi.13 Thereby this ‘ego’ is characterized as being ‘not in position’; that is, it cannot adequately respond to the appeal of the other. It is in this sense that the singularity of the Ego as le Soi does not lead to an identity that rests in itself, but instead is obsessed by the Other, thereby withdrawing from any self-assured identity. This is also why Levinas speaks of le Soi as a ‘for-the-other’. The details of this movement of defection or withdrawal are of importance here. The identity of le Soi is likewise not an identity that (by resting in itself) could be called to obey the other. Instead, this last (possible) mastery of one’s obedience is also being contested here. Therefore, identity for Levinas is related to the other even before any activity on the side of the Ego as le Soi becomes possible. ‘Identity’ is in itself a passive concept, a passive noun, insofar as it is identity only with respect to the other. Identity means being ‘for-the-other’. This is also why Levinas here speaks of an ‘inversion of Being’. It is not the gift of Being that is the foundation or the basis of (my) identity, of (my) being-there. Instead, it is only (my) being-for-the-Other that makes ‘I am’ possible.14 The expression ‘inversion of Being’ is mentioned several times in OB and can be traced back to the aforementioned articles and lectures in which the notion of the trace is developed in the beginning of the 1960s. Obviously Levinas’s understanding of ethics only becomes possible when premised on this understanding of an ‘inversion of Being’ in the sense of an inverted ontology. In the last sentence of this quotation, Levinas even goes a step further in his description of the ‘inversion of Being’, which could still be contested insofar as it may seem as if Levinas were able to invert the movement of Being as such. But Levinas, more cautiously, only speaks of an ‘inversion of Being into a sign’. This phrase may not be quite understandable from the quoted paragraph, but it was already explained in the previous subchapter ‘The Glory of the Infinite’, in which Levinas spoke about ‘making signs of the very signifyingness/making signs of making signs’ (faire signe de signification même). The following excursus will recall the meaning of this crucial phrase.

Excursus: Making Signs of Making Signs – Testimony In the preceding subchapter (‘The Glory of the Infinite’) Levinas had already addressed the relation of an (only subsequently identifiable) ‘responding’ subject to the Other in its disturbing alterity. Thereby, he performs a reflection comparable to 13

Cf. fn. 3. This understanding of Being or inversion of Being in Levinas is also no longer compatible with the understanding of Being and the Event in the very late Martin Heidegger – with whom Levinas may still have many gestures in common. When the late Heidegger speaks of the ‘event’ as ‘devent’ (of the ‘Ereignis’, the ‘Es gibt’, as ‘Ent-eignis’), then he still describes a (‘sort-of-’) movement that is entirely negative. Here the inversion of Being is a positive gesture. It is a for-the-Other, even if it is not yet clear what this means. 14

102

P. Zeillinger

the one we have just followed above. Subjectivity is passively bound to a primordial Other to which it may only retroactively refer – always haunted by the threat of reducing the Other to a concept of thematization, objectivation or idealization. What is at stake, therefore, is another mode of Saying or naming. For subjectivity to signify unreservedly, it would therefore be necessary (il fallait donc) that the passivity of its exposure to the other not be immediately converted into activity, but expose itself in its turn; a passivity of passivity is necessary (il faut), and in the glory of the Infinite it needs (il faut) ashes from which an act could not be born anew. This passivity of passivity and this dedication to the Other, this sincerity is Saying. Not the communication of a Said, which would immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the Saying, but saying holding open its openness […]. Saying saying saying itself [Saying, which says the saying itself; PZ], without thematizing it, but exposing it again. Saying is thus to make signs of the very signifyingness of the exposure; it is to expose the exposure instead of remaining in it as an act of exposing. It is to exhaust oneself in exposing oneself, to make signs by making oneself a sign (faire signe en se faisant signe), without resting in one’s figure as a sign (figure même de signe) (OB, 142–143; transl. mod.).

The central phrase of this passage – ‘making oneself a sign’ – can easily be related to a discourse of ‘testimony’ or to the phenomenon of a ‘symptom’ in a psychoanalytic sense.15 The response, as it is demanded by the relation of alterity (alterityrelation), calls for a ‘Saying’ of the subject that no longer resembles a speaking about a content that should be communicated, but in itself has to be regarded as a testifying to the alterity-relation as such. The Saying of the Subject would have to become the ‘symptom’ of that which cannot be mastered by ordinary ‘activity’. Instead, the Saying of the subject becomes the symptom of the eventuous irruption – i.e. the trace – of the Other. The expression of the disturbance of the Self (Soi) by the Other-within-me becomes a Saying that is no longer based on thematization but on the non-neglectable exposure of the Self to the Other. Therefore, it is even possible to say that for Levinas the subjectivity of the subject consists in being the (perceptible) event (i.e. witness or testimony) of the event (i.e. irruption or trace) of the Other. This two-fold ‘event of the event’ will later on mark the inversion ‘from Saying to the Said’ in the context of the discourse of the Third. But even in earlier passages in OB, the risky gesture of ‘testimony’ marks the adequate response to the ethical relation with the Other. Levinas’s formula for this ‘response’ is ‘me voici’: “Here I am” as a witness of the Infinite, but a witness that does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation, is not evidence. There is witness, a unique structure, an exception to the rule of being, irreducible to representation, only of the Infinite. The Infinite does not appear to him that bears witness to it. On the contrary the witness belongs to the glory of the Infinite. It is by the voice of the witness that the glory of the Infinite is glorified (OB, 146).

15 For a reading of the notion of the symptom in the context of the discourses of the late Derrida and the late Lacan, who both come very close to the concept of ethical agency out of radical passivity as it is developed here, see Zeillinger, P. (2006). ‘Das Ereignis als Symptom. Annäherung an einen entscheidenden Horizont des Denkens’, in Zeillinger, P. & Portune, D. (Eds.) (2006). Nach Derrida. Dekonstruktion in zeitgenössischen Diskursen. Wien: Turia+Kant, 173–199.

6


103

Testimony in Contestation Returning to the beginning of the third subchapter, ‘From Saying to the Said, or the Wisdom of Desire’, where Levinas refers to the ‘inversion of Being into a sign’, it now may have become more clear to which form of response the subject (whose identity is transformed by the appeal of the other into a ‘for-the-other’) is called. The Ego in the accusative, le Soi, has to expose its own ‘making signs’ not only in terms of content but also in terms of gesture. It does not only have to speak about making signs, but must expose itself to the other by performing this ‘making signs’, by performing this ‘symptom-like testimony’ as such. For Levinas, such a testimony has to be regarded as an act, where ‘[t]he sign is not posited for itself’, but ‘gives over its plasticity and its function of being sign to the other, repeating always anew, the exposure of what the exposure can outline as essence. This iteration of exposure is expression, sincerity, saying’ (OB, 153). Before being able to follow this argument to more specific and perhaps practically relevant consequences for the question of the basis of ethical agency, ‘a new dilemma’ arises for Levinas. This ‘new dilemma’ has to do with what could be described as a possible remainder of a ‘strong subject’ at this point, which of course would be a hindrance to taking the alterity of the Other as seriously as it should be. Isn’t there still a strong subject at work in Levinas’s discourse that emerges even from the understanding of the Ego as le Soi, insofar as it still seems to remain a core-identity by virtue of which it is called to face its responsibility ‘for-the-Other’? Isn’t the Levinasian hostage of and for the Other still a subject resting in its responsibility like all those ‘good humans’ whose goodness may from time to time also result in the worst kind of behaviour, which is, of course, done with a ‘good conscience’? With respect to the unidentifiable alterity of the Other, one must remain very critical about almost any form of charity in its very subtle brutality. But let us stick to Levinas’s words: How does saying differ from an act commencing in a conquering and voluntary ego, whose signifying is an act being converted into being, and whose “for the other” takes root in identity? The for-the-other of responsibility for the other does not proceed from any free commitment, any present, in which its origin would germinate, or in which an identity identifying itself would catch its breath. That is so, but then there is a new dilemma. Responsibility without a prior commitment, without a present, without an origin, anarchic, is thus an infinite responsibility of the one for the other who is abandoned to me without anyone being able to take my place as the one responsible for him. Does this confer upon me a new identity, that of being the unique chosen one? (OB, 153).

Let us follow Levinas’s text even further as he does not ‘solve’ the encountered dilemma, but keeps it alive as an undecidability which nevertheless takes the form of a revelation and, therefore, of a trace that leads beyond the order of Being: But is not this dilemma rather an ambivalence, and the alternative an enigma? The enigma of a God speaking in man and of man not counting on any god? It is a dilemma or an alternative if one sticks to the phenomena, to the said, where one passes, successively, without being able to stop, from the affirmation of the Infinite to its negation in me. But the question mark in this said, which, contrary to the univocal logos of the theologians, is alternating, is the very pivot of revelation, of its blinking light. It [revelation; PZ] is experienced

104

P. Zeillinger

precisely by incessantly running up against it, and crossing over its own contestation. There is a dilemma in the said, but an ambivalence in the signification of saying, in subjectivity, in the entity (l’etant), which is expelled out of being into itself, in the Saying which enigmatically and diachronically signifies transcendence or the Infinite, [signifies] the otherwise than Being and the disinterestedness of the essence (de l’essence). The enigma of the Infinite, whose saying in me, a responsibility where no one assists me, becomes a contestation of the Infinite, but a contestation by which everything is incumbent on me, and there is produced my entry into the designs of the Infinite. This enigma separates the Infinite from all phenomenality, from appearing, thematization and essence (OB, 153–154; transl. mod.).

Just what is at stake here may at first sight be difficult to understand. To sum up, one may conclude that for Levinas any definition or identification of the Other must be left open, and this means that it must be left open also, in the sense that this openness cannot be simply performed or carried out as such. Instead, any positive designation of the Other would immediately mutate into its contestation, because it contradicts the very notion of otherness. However, this same statement for Levinas can also be read otherwise: it is the contestation, which may be taken as the performance of openness. At the end of subchapter V (‘Scepticism and Reason’), Levinas will conclude this chapter with a very positive reading of scepticism (cf. OB, 171), which might be related to the passages we have just read. But, of course, scepticism and contestations alone hardly seem sufficient as the foundation of an ethics to-come. And so it is also for Levinas. Therefore, we may ask: what will remain from all this? Instead of trying to elaborate a positive answer to this question, however, we shall further follow Levinas who leads his own discourse into an even more obvious aporia. What about our [own] propositions, narrating – as though they were fixed in themes – the anarchy and the non-finality of the subject in which the Infinite would pass? They find themselves to answer in the end not with responsibility, but in the form of theoretical propositions, to the question “What about…?” They do not answer to the proximity of the neighbor. The discussion thus remains ontological, as though the comprehension of being ordered all thought and thinking itself. By the very fact of formulating statements, is not the universality of the thematized, that is, of being, confirmed by the project of the present discussion, which ventures to question this universality? Does this discourse remain then coherent and philosophical? These are familiar objections! (OB, 155; transl. mod.).

Although Levinas leads his own discourse into a seemingly insurmountable aporia, this aporia nevertheless fails to undermine his discourse and its meaning. Levinas finally gives a very phenomenological answer to the question, ‘what will remain from all this?’: What remains is at least the discourse he (and we) are conducting at this very moment. The critical reflection itself will become the testimony (or the symptom) of alterity. How would the contestation of the pretension beyond being have meaning if this pretension were not heard? […] The contradiction which the signification of the beyond being – which evidently is not – should compromise is inoperative without a second time, without reflection on the condition of the statement that states this signification. In this reflection, that is, only after the event, contradiction appears: it does not break out between two simultaneous statements, but between a statement and its conditions, as though they were in the same time. The statement of the beyond being, of the name of God, does not allow itself to be

6


105

walled up in the conditions of its enunciation. It benefits from an ambiguity or an enigma, which is not the effect of an inattention, a relaxation of thought, but of an extreme proximity of the neighbor, where the Infinite comes to pass […] Its transcendence […] does only pass through the subject that confesses or contests it (OB, 156; transl. mod.).

The Third Finally we have reached the exact place within subchapter V, where not only the notion of the Third is first introduced in OB, but also is found that paragraph to which all the cross-references to the Third refer throughout the book (which I have mentioned at the beginning). In the following close reading, I will once more follow Levinas’s argument in the next couple of paragraphs, which can be considered as the most crucial paragraphs in Levinas’s entire oeuvre (perhaps with the exception of the development of the trace in ‘Enigma et phénomène’ in 1965). Even if it is not the words as such that are so extraordinary here, it is still the transformation of the discourse of the Other into the discourse of the Third that occurs in these passages, which marks a revolutionary moment within twentieth century ethical and political thinking. But it is time to show the place that this purely apophantic synthesis, source of the subreption which confers onto ontology the locus of the ultimate questioning, this synthesis more formal than the formal, occupies in thought thinking beyond being. It is not by chance, through foolishness or through usurpation that the order of truth and essence, which the present exposition itself claims to hold to, is at the first rank in Western philosophy. Why would proximity, the pure signification of saying, the anarchic one-for-the-other of beyond being, revert to being or fall into being, into a conjunction of entities, into essence showing itself in the said? Why have we gone to seek essence on its empyrean? Why knowledge? Why is there a problem? Why philosophy? (Il faut donc) Therefore, one has to follow – in signification or proximity or saying – the latent birth of cognition and essence, of the said, the latent birth of a Question in responsibility. Proximity becoming knowing would signify as an enigma, the dawn of a light which proximity changes into, without the other, the neighbor, being absorbed in the theme in which he shows himself. We have to follow down the latent birth of knowledge in proximity. Proximity can remain the signification of the very knowing in which it shows itself. If proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would have not 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 the third enters (OB, 156–157).

From the given context it should be clear that the discourse of the Third in Levinas is certainly not premised on some empirical emergence of another Other. The Third is not an empirical other, as Levinas explicitly says. Instead, it is philosophy and knowledge, the logos and rationality, which were always already orientated towards an Other who may not be taken simply as a singular Other, but as ‘all the others than the other’: It is not that the entry of a third would be an empirical fact, and that my responsibility for the other finds itself constrained to a calculus by the “force of things”. In the proximity of

106

P. Zeillinger

the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice, demands measure and knowing, is consciousness (OB, 158).

The crucial shift in Levinas’s reframed thinking of alterity lies in the fact that the Other – who can no longer be taken as an exteriority in the sense of TI, but has always already appeared as the Other-within-me and prior to me – not only disrupts any given, or to be established, order, but at the same time enables and also forces the Ego to testify to this disruption. And so it is also from this disturbing, but nonneglectable phenomenon of the Other-within-me that subjectivity arises as the instance of a ventured testimony to-come. Levinas further insists that this Ego, obsessed by the Other and always-already put under accusation in order to respond to the appeal of the Other, is nevertheless not enslaved by this appeal. Of course, the call of the Other does not contain any content, no question to be rationally understood. Instead, this pre-rational, pre-logical call requires a concrete representation by the subject being called. In fact, this subject only exists insofar it actually responds to the irruption, that is, the trace of the Other. As a result, Levinas’s discourse of substitution as it was developed in Otherwise than Being had to account not only for the emergence of the Other-within-the-Same but also for the emergence of the subject and of subjectivity. But the very fact of subjectivity and the aporias following in its wake, led Levinas to another unavoidable dilemma: ‘Why would proximity, the pure signification of saying, the anarchic one-for-the-other of beyond being, revert to being or fall into being … into essence showing itself in the said? … Why know? Why is there a problem? Why philosophy?’ (OB, 157). Within a clear thinking of alterity and its corresponding hierarchy (‘I am a hostage of the Other’), there would never have been any problem: ‘If proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would have not been any problem, in even the most general sense of the term’ (OB, 157). Instead, it is the very existence of problems – like those associated with subjectivity – that testify to a more complex relation to the (plural) Other: ‘The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when the third enters’ (ibid.). In addition, and of equal importance, it testifies to the burgeoning concreteness of the autonomy of the subject and its corresponding tasks: the engagement in the development of a concrete, rational and reasonable order, which nevertheless does not simply express and assert the identity of the Ego (a project that is bound to fail), but also the community of reciprocal relations of alterity, which at first sight appear as a self-contradicting formula within the context of Levinas’s insistence upon the non-reciprocal asymmetrical interaction between the self and the other. But insofar as any asymmetrical relation to the Other can be considered as an ethical relation (as it excludes per se or at least unmasks any establishment of egocentricity), and insofar as this ethical relation can only be represented by an effective agency towards a ventured concept (testimony/confession/risked contract) of a community based on alterity, it can be argued that Levinas’s understanding of radical passivity is the only basis for effective ethical action. Critics of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics might object that the effectiveness of radical passivity as the basis for ethical agency is neither sufficiently demonstrated

6


107

within his works nor convincingly argued above. It is my contention, however, that Levinas’s later works do indeed succeed in establishing a fruitful approach to thinking the basis of effective ethical agency. Radical passivity effectively translates into a fundamental reconceptualization of what the subject must be like for ethics to become possible. Levinas’s answer testifies to a commitment to the claim that egoism cannot give birth to generosity. It is in clear opposition to Dasein’s concern for its own existence, and the conviction that it is because the ego is a free consciousness, capable of sympathy and compassion, that it can take responsibility for the suffering of the world. His answer, as we have seen, is that at the heart of subjectivity is not a ‘for itself’, but what he calls ‘the one-for-the-other’. Hereby Levinas not only posits an alterity at the heart of subjectivity, but also accords it an ethical (as opposed to moral) sense. He is not saying that one should sacrifice oneself, as Bernasconi (2002: 235) explains. He merely wants to account for its possibility. Effective ethical action understood as sacrificing oneself for another only becomes possible by virtue of an inversion of identity, ‘a passivity more passive still than all passivity’ in which ‘the self is freed from itself. This freedom is not that of free initiative’, Levinas insists (BPW, 90). ‘This way of being, without prior commitment, responsible for the other (autrui), amounts to the fact of human fellowship, prior to freedom (ibid., p. 91). As far as I can see, the consequences of this approach have not yet been adequately developed. Instead, readers of Levinas still face many forms of prejudice against any thinking of radical alterity.16 Fortunately, the discourse on alterity as a basis for ethical and political agency has been taken up and independently developed by many different contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and, within theological discourses at least, Johann Baptist Metz and Jon Sobrino. Levinas’s own contribution consists in his conviction that our capacity to assume the suffering and failings of the other (autrui) in no way goes beyond passivity: it is passion (BPW, 95). It serves as an effective basis for ethical agency precisely because it is not an empirical accident of the Ego’s freedom, but can nevertheless limit itself: ‘The ego may be called, in the name of his unlimited responsibility, to be concerned also with itself’. The fact that the other person, my neighbour, ‘is also a third in relation to another… is the birth of thought, of consciousness, of justice’ (ibid.). Justice does not do away with ethics, however. Justice, and the institutions to which it gives rise, are susceptible to perversion and corruption. Ethics, therefore, precedes justice and must continue to keep justice in check, for as Levinas explains, our fundamental responsibility dwells in the depths of myself as a self, as an absolute passivity… This passivity… is an impossibility anterior to this possibility [of death], an impossibility of slipping away, an absolute susceptibility, a gravity without any frivolity, the birth of meaning in the obtuseness of being… submitted to sacrifice’ (ibid.).

16 See, for example, Haar, M. (1997). ‘The Obsession of the Other. Ethics as Traumatization’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism 23(6): 95–107 [ed.].

108

P. Zeillinger

References Bernasconi, R. (2002). ‘What is the Question to Which “Substitution” is the Answer?’, in Critchley, S. & Bernasconi, R. (Eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 234–251. Levinas, E. (1967). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin [cited as DEHH]. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (1969). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (1998). Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer [cited as OB]. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers [cited as CPP]. Levinas, E. (1996). Basic Philosophical Writings, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon C. & Robert B. (Eds.). Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press [cited as BPW]. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Peperzak, A. (1993). To the Other. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Chapter 7

Listening to the Language of the Other Anya Topolski

Abstract In this chapter, Topolski explores the idea that Levinas did not, in fact, write in two separate ‘languages’, one so-called confessional and the other so-called philosophical. Rather, it is her contention that Levinas communicated in a ‘language’ that he created as his thought developed, which she labels as ‘Judeosophy’. It is a language that allows for a dialogue between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, that challenges the symbolic boundaries between Athens and Jerusalem as set forth (among others) by Leo Strauss. Judeosophy is the language of Jewish philosophy, the interaction of two modes of wisdom both of which are vital for Levinas’s thought. It is more than a simple translation of ‘Greek’ into ‘Hebrew’ (or vice-versa); more than two parallel languages, one for Jews, the other for philosophers. Hence one cannot fully appreciate Levinas’s genius unless one is willing to consider how he brings together ideas from Jewish thought and Greek philosophy. Practically, this requires that one read – and take seriously – both his so-called confessional and philosophical writings. After making the case for Judeosophy, Topolski begins by making the task easier for her philosophical readers by providing a brief introduction to the ‘language’ of Jewish thought as it is used by Levinas. Next, she focuses on three ‘concepts’ from Jewish thought, discussed at length in Levinas’s Jewish writings and in the Talmudic readings, which play an important role in his so-called philosophical writings. These are the face, ‘here I am’, and God; each of which, she claims, cannot be fully grasped without their Judeosophic roots. Furthermore, each of these allows us to enrich our understanding of the notion of radical passivity, proving the significance of the so-called confessional writings for the so-called philosophical writings.

‘Ej chepas quosse tu parles about’.

Pardon me, can you repeat that? Sorry, one more time please? Excuse me, what language are you speaking? For many, the above utterance seems utterly nonsensical. But nonsense has sense; it is just a sense that is hidden by our own limitations. Let me explain. For those that speak English, there is at least one word in this sentence that makes sense: about. For those who speak French, two words are familiar: tu parles.


111

112

A. Topolski

For those fortunate enough to speak both French and English, it may seem a little less like nonsense. Some may even be able to conclude that it means ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’, in English, or ‘je ne sais pas de quoi tu parles’, in French. This sentence is an example of Chiac, a type of Franglais, spoken in several regions in the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada. Unique about this particular type of Franglais is that it requires that the speakers be fluent both in French and English but have also spent some time interacting with others who speak Chiac in order to be able to understand this culture and communicate in Franglais. In other words, those who speak English will certainly be able to understand certain words, or ideas, when listening to a conversation in Chiac. Likewise, French speakers are able to grasp other terms and concepts from the same conversation. While those who speak both, but have had no interaction with Chiac, may come closest to comprehending a Chiacian exchange, it will still remain rather foreign. Only those who have immersed themselves in Chiac, supported by their own knowledge of French and English, will be able to participate in the unique culture that surrounds this language. Remarkable as this is, what does it have to do with radical passivity in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, you might wonder? Levinas clearly wrote in French and not in Chiac – or did he? It is my contention that Levinas did in fact communicate in a ‘language’ much like Chiac – a language I would like to label as ‘Judeosophy’, that is, a tongue that allows for a dialogue between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, that challenges the symbolic boundaries between Athens and Jerusalem as set forth (among others) by Leo Strauss. In an interview with Richard Kearney, Levinas referred to Jewish thought and Greek philosophy as two languages (Cohen 1986: 18). While he was fluent in both languages – or became so in the years after the war (Duyndam & Poorthuis 2003) – Levinas did not write in two languages; he wrote in one – that of Judeosophy. In it, the interaction of two vital modes of wisdom are apparent, yet it is more than a simple translation of ‘Greek’ into ‘Hebrew’ (or vice versa); it is more than two parallel languages, one for Jews, the other for philosophers. My claim is thus a plea for a specific sort of reading of all of Levinas’s writings, that is, both his so-called philosophical and confessional writings. In addition, this claim is a plea that philosophical attention be accorded to Levinas’s so-called confessional writings in response to the fact that ‘Levinas has been read as a philosopher, while the Jewish dimension of his thought has largely been ignored, or honoured by a mention and then ignored’ (Gibbs 1992: 10). The latter has all too often been overlooked by philosophers as religious and thus in some sense anathema to modern philosophy, even for those who have taken the postmodern religious turn (which has been predominantly Christian in focus). While this philosophical oversight has recently begun to be addressed (Ajzenstat 2001; Gibbs 2000), it argues for a form of translation or parallelism between these ‘two languages’ that I wish to challenge. It is my contention that Levinas’s language of Judeosophy is neither of these (as the comparison with Chiac makes clear). If it were, it would not be necessary to immerse oneself in the culture of Judeosophy, a culture that Levinas has been exemplary in making available to those trained in philosophy. It would suffice to be fluent in one of Levinas’s ‘two lan-

7

Listening to the Language of the Other

113

guages’ and to read only those writings that are written in this language. The rest would simply be a case of translation. While such an interpretation is understandable, given that Levinas often took great pains to maintain an artificial distinction between these two languages, I hope to show that it is not correct. Firstly, he certainly feared that his writings would not be taken as seriously, by either audience, without such an artificial separation. This is certainly justifiable given the controversy surrounding the publication of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption which was thoroughly philosophical (the word religion is not even mentioned), of which Levinas was well aware (Banon et al. 1998). It is also certainly justified since such a separation exists within Christian circles, that between theology and philosophy. This separation, in Levinas’s terms between the religious and the ethical, is foreign to Judaism, however. In addition, an attentive reader cannot help noting that while Totality and Infinity contains but a few Biblical references, this is certainly not the case for Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Likewise, while many of the early Talmudic readings avoid the language of ontology or phenomenology, the latter readings require an extensive glossary of philosophical terms if they are to be understood by non-philosophers. My point is to suggest that while there may be a reason for this separation, as philosophers it is our responsibility to question such artificial separations and to challenge them, which I intend to do in the first two sections of this contribution. This is further supported by the fact that Levinas himself often claimed that the Talmud could be translated into Greek, that is, the language of philosophy, and that Judaism contained a universal message (Levinas 1990a: 21). One might wonder why I am addressing myself to philosophers rather than to Jewish thinkers, for example. The answer is quite simply that it is this group which continues to read Levinas without learning to listen to or learn his language. By way of contrast, the vast majority of Levinas’s audience at his Talmudic readings were academics familiar (to different degrees) with both Jewish thought and Greek philosophy; that is, versed in Judeosophy. According to Catherine Chalier, too many of Levinas’s philosophical readers (either because of the seemingly daunting nature of the task or due to a lack of appreciation of the ‘religious’) have overlooked his ‘non-philosophical’ writings and specifically his Talmudic readings (Critchley & Bernasconi 2002). Many academics deeply interested in ethics have been put off by Levinas’s strange style, which is precisely why it is important to appreciate that he wrote in a particular (and strange) language (Morgan 2007). In response, I intend to illustrate that in order to appreciate the meaning of Levinas’s ethics, we must be willing to recognize the voice and influence of both the Judaic1 and the phenomenological traditions in his thought. In this respect, the Talmudic readings are essential to an understanding of Levinas’s mature philosophical thought and not simply of interest to his Jewish, or religious, audience. As such,

1 To clarify, I use the term Judaic, which I distinguish from Judaism, the religion, and Jewish(ness), the cultural heritage, aware of the fact that this is a distinction that can only be maintained artificially.

114

A. Topolski

there is certainly a need not only to introduce students of Levinas to the Talmudic readings, which on the whole are very accessible, but also to consider them in dialogue with his other writings, which they often foreshadow, elaborate, and develop upon. Furthermore, I suggest that critics of his ethics who fail to consider the importance of the ‘non-philosophical’ writings are themselves to be criticized for their failure to properly appreciate the inspiration of his ethics, without which his ideas cannot be properly understood (Levinas & Robbins 2001). Thus, I assert that given that the so-called confessional writings are fundamental to the ‘recentring of the ethical’, any discussion of an ethics of alterity that fails to consider this source is clearly wanting. This contribution is consequently an appeal to philosophers to learn, if only passively, Levinas’s language for the sake of a richer understanding of his ethical endeavour. What this means is that one cannot fully appreciate Levinas’s genius unless one is willing to consider how he brings together ideas from Jewish thought and Greek philosophy. Practically, this requires that one read – and take seriously – both his so-called confessional and philosophical writings. After firstly making the case for Judeosophy, I will secondly begin by making the task easier for my philosophical readers by providing a brief introduction to the language of Jewish thought as it is used by Levinas. Thirdly, I intend to focus on three ‘concepts’ from Jewish thought, discussed at length in Levinas’s Jewish writings and in the Talmudic readings, which play an important role in his so-called philosophical writings. These are the face, ‘here I am’, and God; each of which, I aver, cannot be fully grasped without their Judeosophic roots. Furthermore, each of these allows us to enrich our understanding of the notion of radical passivity, proving the significance of the so-called confessional writings for the philosophical writings, and vice versa (interestingly, the latter seems to be less controversial).

The Case for Learning Levinas’s Language Inspired by the Halakhah (legal texts) of the Talmud, I intend to begin by pleading the case for a reading by philosophers of Levinas’s so-called confessional texts. As in all cases, one must first define one’s terms. Hence, I begin by providing an account for my use of the qualifier ‘so-called’, with regard to both the confessional and philosophical writings. Contrary to the accepted nomenclature used by Levinas’s readers, I challenge these distinctions and, in addition, claim that Levinas himself did so. In the interview with François Poirié cited in support of the separation of Levinas’s writings, Levinas does not refer to his texts as confessional or philosophical, but as ‘dits confessionnels … dits purement philosophiques’ (Levinas & Robbins 2001: 62; Poirié 1987: 111).2 The dits, repeated twice,

2 The available English translation reads as follows: ‘my confessional texts, the other texts which are called purely philosophical’. Clearly it misses the nuance I wish to emphasize.

7


115

cannot be overlooked (although the first occurrence is omitted in the English translation). The closest translation of the dits is said, or so-called – both of which indicate a distance from these labels. In other words, Levinas did not self-apply these terms: they are applied by someone else. I therefore wish to honour Levinas’s dits by using the qualifier so-called, an adjective that reminds us of a disjunction in the sharp distinction drawn between these two languages, a disjunction within which to situate Judeosophy. While I recognize that Levinas went to great lengths to maintain a separation of these from his philosophical writings by using two different publishing houses (Levinas & Robbins 2001), and appreciate the fact that the reading of texts of a religious bent in a philosophical manner requires a certain delicacy and introduces several tensions, I nonetheless argue that Levinas’s ethics cannot be properly appreciated without these ‘writings’. I think there is sufficient evidence, within Levinas’s writings and based on the judgement of some of his finest readers, to make the case for a so-called philosophical reading of the so-called confessional writings, that is, for the importance of appreciating Levinas’s language of Judeosophy. So, what does Levinas himself have to say in support of the case for Judeosophy? Let us first consider his so-called confessional writings. Is there a space in these writings for philosophy? In the essay ‘The Bible and the Greeks’ (Levinas 1994b), Levinas makes his position quite explicit, from the first sentence alone: that Europe, which is roughly synonymous with Western civilization for him, is the confluence of both philosophy and the Torah. This is clear from his response to the rhetorical question ‘What is Europe?’: ‘[i]t is the Bible and the Greeks’ (ibid., p. 133). At the heart of Levinas’s ethical endeavour is the firm conviction that both the voices of the Greeks and of the Rabbis need to be heard. It is worth recalling that for him, the terms Hebrew, Biblical thought or tradition and Talmud are often synonyms because the former cannot be read without the latter, that is without the interpretation of the Rabbis (ibid., p. 51; see also Gibbs 1992: 167–170). Neither type of wisdom on its own is sufficient to speak to the ethical needs of Western civilization after the Shoah, its awakening to responsibility for the other. The intertwinement of these two traditions symbolizes, for Levinas, the fundamental dialogue between politics and ethics, a dialogue marked by interruption that requires the participation of both philosophers and religious scholars. While Levinas was clearly both, he emphasized the fact that Judaism cannot be limited by the term religion; yet another reason for my apprehension in using the term confessional, which is laden with Christian undertones. By refusing the equation of Christianity and Judaism, Levinas was by no means claiming that Judaism was superior. Rather, he was making the claim that unlike the strict separation of the disciplines of philosophy and theology, Judaism is both a theology (although this term is clearly Greek and thus at odds with Jewish thought) and a philosophy. It is for this reason that he had no difficulty in seasoning his ‘Jewish’ writings with comments by ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers as well as those of many Christian thinkers. Levinas makes this position clear in his first-ever public remark at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs, when he says, ‘Le Judaism n’est pas une religion. … Il est une comprehension de l’etre’ (Mondial 1963: 15). Thus, for

116

A. Topolski

Levinas, Judaism can speak philosophically; it is, paradoxically, a parti-cular perspective that has a universal significance. While he affirms this philosophical possibility in several of his ‘Jewish’ essays – ‘Judaism feels very close to the West, by which I mean philosophy’ (Levinas 1990a: 182, 1990b: 15) – it cannot be taken as self-evident, certainly not from a philosophical point of view, and is thus worth exploring. Based upon Levinas’s own admission (Levinas & Robbins 2001: 37),3 it seems that initially he was not confident that the Biblical traditions were appropriate sources for philosophical reflection. Only after the war, after the reality of its devastation of Europe’s ‘mind and body’ had set in, after Levinas’s realization of Heidegger’s early actions and later silence, did he recognize the Talmud’s philosophical potential. We none the less begin with the idea that this [Talmudic] learning is not only transposable into philosophical language but refers to philosophical problems. The thought of the Doctors of the Talmud proceeds from a meditation that is radical enough also to satisfy the demands of philosophy. It is this rational meaning which has been the object of our research (Levinas 1990a: 68).

In the Talmudic reading ‘Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry’, Levinas refers to this in an overly polemical confrontation of the ontological tradition he associates with the Greeks. ‘The Torah demands [note, this is not a suggestion but truly a command] in opposition to the natural perseverance of each being in his or her own being (a fundamental ontological law) [a clear reference to, and criticism of the tradition from Hobbes to Heidegger] care for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, a preoccupation with the other person [once again a clear allusion to the Biblical tradition]. A reversal of the order of things!’ (Levinas 1994b: 61–62). Is this truly a reversal, or a re-ordering of priorities? Is this tradition completely absent in the Western tradition or simply neglected?4 Levinas’s disparaging critique stems from his sincere concern that his audience will fail to understand the necessity for the re-prioritization of ethics. ‘We do not have as much awe as we should at this reversal of ontology into ethics, and in a sense, the dependency within it of being on the dis-interest-ment of justice’ (ibid.). Thus, what was necessary was a return to an ethics of alterity, which Levinas had first encountered in the Tanakh and which he had rediscovered, through the Talmudic tradition that defines Rabbinic Judaism, with the help of his master Chouchani. Thus, over time and by means of study, Levinas came to discover that the Judaic tradition was philosophically relevant and that it possessed an ethical significance that could complement it by challenging the Greek inspired ontological tradition.

3 Related by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, one of Levinas’s students, in a four-part lecture series held at the Martin Buber Centre of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2006. 4 In other writings Levinas makes clear that this is in fact a question of neglect rather than one of absolute absence (which actually makes his case even stronger for the need to be reminded by the Judaic) in that the Western tradition has always possessed a lateral side and yet it has all too often been silenced and forgotten.

7


117

It is perhaps for this reason that his earliest so-called philosophical texts lack explicit references to the Torah whereas the latter ones are filled with interaction between philosophical and Judaic inspired references. Let me support this claim by a few references to the Judaic in his ‘philosophical’ texts. As if the title, Of God Who Comes To Mind, were not sufficient evidence, in it Levinas reprints an essay, first published in 1973 prior to Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, entitled ‘God and Philosophy’. In it Levinas declares that the Western tradition, not limiting his claim to the ontological tradition, has been responsible for the reduction of transcendence, of the beyond, to being. He states that ‘philosophical discourse, must therefore be able to embrace God – of whom the Bible speaks’ (Levinas 1998: 56). By ‘equating’ God with transcendence and then claiming that philosophy must include God, Levinas is suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that the Bible is philosophically pertinent, and this in the context of a ‘philosophical’ essay. Yet, in order to avoid confusion, let us consider precisely what this entails for Levinas. He explains his position to François Poirié, in an interview, when asked if he is a Jewish thinker. He refuses this title if it is interpreted to mean that a Jewish thinker is not required to engage in a philosophical critique. This reaffirms that for Levinas both the Greeks and the Rabbis are necessary: neither alone is sufficient to explore questions concerning human meaning and experience. He later clarifies that while he finds his inspiration in a verse (from the Torah or Talmud), it must always be complemented by a philosophical, and more specifically a phenomenological, verification. Yet, it is clear that for Levinas, even in his mature philosophical writings, this tradition should not be used ‘to justify’ an argument (as a substitute for reason), and rather constituted a source for ideas, examples, and lessons. ‘This is the sense in which the words “you are a Jewish philosopher” are acceptable for [him]’ (Levinas & Robbins 2001: 61). The case for Levinas’s support for Judeosophy, a Judaic inspired philosophically tested language, has been made.5 Yet, as my closing statement in the case for Judeosophy, I would like to cite several ‘expert witnesses’, that is, Levinasian scholars who are in agreement that learning this language offers one a richer understanding of Levinas’s ethical endeavour. I will begin by referring to Seán Hand who chose not only to consider

5 For those philosophers who were previously convinced of the significance of the Judaic writings, or for those whom I have already convinced, it is important to recall that learning Judeosophy is by no means a simple endeavour. According to Levinas, ‘[t]he analysis of a talmudic text by someone who is not a talmid-hacham, who did not spend his lifetime studying talmudic texts according to the traditional method, is a very daring undertaking, even if the one who dares doing it, has for a long time familiarized himself with the square letters, even if he got a great deal from these texts for his own intellectual life’ (Halperin et al. 1963: 268). While an appreciation for the significance of the Bible for thinking may come easily to philosophers who see themselves as religious, learning Levinas’s language requires, in addition to this, a sincere commitment to immersing oneself in the Judaic. While some may throw their hands up and proclaim, ‘This is impossible – I wasn’t born a Jew!’, this misses the point entirely. Not only did Levinas initially discover the Judaic when he was close to fifty, he continually reminds his readers that it is by no means solely accessible to Jews, although this does not mean that one can access it without considering the insight of the Biblical tradition preserved by Judaism.

118

A. Topolski

the so-called confessional writings but committed himself to struggling to learn Judeosophy (and in so doing translated them into a third language). Levinas’s evaluation of the Talmud turns on a simultaneous separation and linkage of philosophies and world-views, not in a manner that merely reverses hierarchies, but in a way designed to re-pose the relationship between Talmudic readings, the philosophy of politics, and the politics of philosophy.6

Yet in case his testimony is questionable because of his ‘proximity’ to the Talmudic readings, which would equally rule out the admission of Catherine Chalier’s affirmation of this claim (Critchley & Bernasconi 2002: 100), let us consider the position of Bettina Bergo who concludes one of her essays on Levinas, which is dedicated to his philosophical writings, with the following passage: A common thread thus runs through his philosophy and his Talmudic readings. Transcendence is the spontaneity of responsibility for another person. … Responsibility arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the approach of the other person. Because this theme is found in both his philosophy and his interpretations of Talmudic passages, Levinas’s thought has, at times, left both Talmud scholars and philosophers dissatisfied… No stranger to Mishnah and Gemara, his interpretations are, nevertheless, less focused on inter- and intra-textuality than on the ethical tenor of the teachings… It is precisely in these tensions, between the Jewish religious and philosophical traditions, and his phenomenological-existential thought, that Levinas’s originality lies (Bergo 2006: 25).

What I appreciate, and want to conclude by repeating, is this last claim. It is from within the intersection of the Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy that Levinas’s contribution to ethics arises, a contribution that can only be properly appreciated by learning his language – that of Judeosophy.

An Introduction to Judeosophy As an incentive for learning Levinas’s language, I have decided to offer a brief Judeosophy primer using Levinas’s Talmudic readings as my source. It is my belief that these readings are exemplary of Judeosophy as they are inspired ‘by the verse’, in this case of the Talmud, and yet are presented, explained and justified philosophically. While this is the case for Levinas’s Talmudic readings, it is not necessarily so for all Talmudic readings. While all Jewish thinkers would agree with Levinas that ‘Jewish wisdom is inseparable from a knowledge of the Biblical and rabbinical texts’ (Levinas 1990a: 250),7 they would certainly not accept his claim that it is either philosophical or philosophically relevant. Let me explain. By approaching the Talmud in the manner defined by the Mitnagdim,8 that is, philosophically and 6

See Seán Hand’s ‘Ab-originality: Radical Passivity through Talmudic Reading’ in this volume (p. 135). 7 See also the Author’s Foreword in In the Time of the Nations. 8 Mitnagdim (the group that opposed the Hassidim in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), stressed the importance of the study of the Talmud, and of the scholarly and intellectualist approach to Judaism in general. This approach provides a medium that is by no means hostile to a philosophical approach.

7


119

rationally, Levinas denies the import of both the mystical Kabalistic tradition as well as other expressions of Judaism, such as Hassidism. It is thus owing to his particular Mitnagdim education, which was later deepened by Monsieur Chouchani, that Levinas’s Talmudic readings are delivered in the language of Judeosophy. My introduction to Levinas’s ‘language’ is thus, at the same time, an introduction to the tradition of modern9 Talmudic interpretation as presented by Levinas in comments scattered throughout Difficult Freedom, Nine Talmudic Readings, Beyond the Verse, and In The Time of The Nations, and a presentation of the context within which he delivered his readings. Levinas’s first attempt to publicly interpret a Talmudic text was in 1960 at the third annual Colloquia of French Speaking Jewish Intellectuals.10 This particular group began informally in the years after the Shoah as a gathering of Jewish intellectuals who had chosen to stay in Europe, and more specifically in France. The fact that they did not choose to flee Europe means that they had a special attachment to Europe, whether persons or places (a lack of financial means was another possible reason, but since passage to Israel, as well as other services, were free, the former explanation is more likely). This is important for two reasons: first, because the Shoah is – although not always explicitly – a theme that ties together this group; and second, these are Jews who for their own particular reasons chose not to go to Israel or the USA as most survivors did. Thus, this is a particular group of European Jews, which Levinas refers to as ‘le troisième Judaisme’, and which expresses a voice, or voices, that are quite distinct from those coming from the centres of post-Shoah Judaism. What is significant about the context of these particular readings is that the audience, although by no means well versed in the Talmudic tradition, is predominantly Jewish and as such was, at the least, passively familiar with the Judaic. This is another indication of the fact that Levinas’s readings do not necessitate a thorough understanding of the Talmud as they were neither presented for a specialized audience nor were they communicated (by a rabbi) in a traditional rabbinic manner. Furthermore, as Levinas remarks at the beginning of every presentation, he is very new to this endeavour, and realizes its complexity and his simplicity. Given the particular context of Levinas’s Talmudic readings, let us turn to the tradition of Talmudic interpretation in general. Levinas presents his own interpretation of the Talmud in the foreword to Beyond the Verse: ‘the enigmatic surplus of meaning for the reader; hence the implicit exegesis – and the call for exegesis – already in the act of reading’ (Levinas 1994a: x).

9 How one defines the modern period within Judaism is a question we cannot begin to address in this contribution; however suffice it to say that those writing after the Shoah in the language of their particular nation (French in the case of Levinas) are certainly representatives of the modern period. For an interesting article on this topic see Meyer 1975. 10 In 1957, the colloquium became a formal annual public academic event with the support of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), its proceedings being published every year, including the discussion following each presentation, a discussion that is part and parcel of a Talmudic exposition. It is consequently unfortunate that it was not included in the publication of the lectures by Levinas’s publishers.

120

A. Topolski

In other words, reading the Talmud is an experience that points toward something beyond being, a trace of transcendence. In this sense, the Talmud cannot be read without interpretation as there are already two intertwined levels of meaning in every word, meanings which appeal to the reader to respond to the call for interpretation. The act of reading a Talmudic text already discloses a significant aspect of the content of the Talmud – an aspect closely connected with Levinas’s choice to engage the Talmud philosophically. ‘The Talmud embodies an entire world view which can perhaps best be embraced by the words “ethics” ’(Holtz 1984: 171; see also Levinas 1994b: x). It is because of the Talmud’s ‘ethics’, its philosophical message, that Levinas brings together Jewish thought and Greek philosophy; in other words, begins to write in the language of Judeosophy. The Talmud, as an activity, contains the possibility of teaching one how to live. While this includes the workingout of Jewish law, it also includes much, much more (Holtz 1984: 171). Had Levinas been interested in contributing to the Talmud, a possibility that remains open today in the form of responsa, he could have done so. Hence, the fact that he chose to discuss the Talmud with other Jewish intellectuals can be interpreted to mean that he wished to create a bridge between the Judaic and the philosophic. This is also clear in his introduction to his first published volume of Talmudic readings. He expresses his hope of addressing timeless themes through the ‘confront[ation of] Talmudic wisdom with the other sources of wisdom that the Western Jew recognizes’ (Levinas 1990b: 3), the latter being the Greek philo-sophy he had himself studied in Western academic institutions. His readings, then, are attempts to answer questions that motivate both traditions, questions concerning justice, forgiveness, freedom, and politics, which Levinas believes are best answered in the dialogue between the Bible and the Greeks, a dialogue that is facilitated by Judeosophy. The Talmud is, for Levinas, a text that demands philosophical reflection. This is an idea that might strike those unfamiliar with the Mitnagdim as contrary to traditional religious views, which are not meant to be critiqued, or rationally justified. For Levinas, ‘the intellectual has the right to seek out … the real essence of the Talmud’ (ibid., p. 3). This last comment, although seemingly cursory, is rather important within the scope of Jewish thought in that there are many disagreements with regard to who can read the Talmud; who possesses the necessary education and skills; who follows the correct approach: does it have to be solely religious, can it be intellectual, can it be a non-Jew etcetera? As such, Levinas is clearly defining his response to this debate through this comment – the Talmud is open to all those who wish to think – that is, to wrestle with its contents. Levinas understands how those unfamiliar to this tradition may find it confusing, irrelevant, or hair-splitting and tries to convey what he has been taught by his Talmudic master Chouchani, who taught that every seemingly meaningless statement is in fact ‘arguing about fundamental ideas without appearing to do so’ (Levinas 1990b: 4). It is this fundamental notion that Levinas attempts to bring to his audience by sharing with us his intellectual journey, a journey that is incredibly difficult for the one who ‘must carve out a path’ (ibid., p. 5). This act of carving is a unique skill honed by the masters of Talmudic readings, one that

7


121

requires the precision of a surgeon and the imagination of a poet. Knowing when to pause, when to challenge and when to reflect is not easy and in addition, the carver must also bring them back to their life of dialogue or polemic in which multiple, though not arbitrary, meanings arise and buzz in each saying. These Talmudic pages seek contradiction and expect of a reader freedom, invention, and boldness (Levinas 1990b: 5).

How and with what outlook does one approach a Talmudic text in order to inspire it and be inspired by it? To this query Levinas gives us a few clues. We must not approach it from a historical critical perspective; this would prevent us from grasping the universal meanings found within its discussions. Secondly, we must not read the Talmud as an ancient Biblical text without a connection to the present: it is the text which connects the latter with the present; it ‘belongs as paradoxical as this might seem, to the modern history of Judaism’ (ibid., p. 6). Because of this we can continue to learn from it. The text is a living tradition and should not be viewed or treated as something inanimate. Furthermore, it is a particular and concrete tradition dealing with precise questions; only in recognizing this rootedness can one begin to uncover its more universal meaning. ‘Commentary has always tolerated this enrichment of the symbol through the concrete’ (7). This rootedness goes even deeper in that through these attachments one can read the signs within the Talmud, the signs that are a part of life; without this experience one would not have access to them. And yet just as life is not fixed, these symbols have a source that allows for many possible interpretations, according each a particular quality rich with meaning. Taking this a step further, Levinas argues that because of every person’s unicity, everyone has something unique to contribute to a Talmudic reading, ‘the inevitable particularity of this individual approach to Scripture, like the particularity of every historical moment where the approach is attempted’ (Levinas 1994a: xiii). Thus not only are we all invited by the Talmud to read, we all have a unique voice to be added to the historical conversation of the text that never ends. According to Levinas, it is essential never to conclude a conversation because in doing so one is deeming another person’s response unworthy of consideration. Last, but not least, the golden rule is to share with others what one has learned, as the Talmud belongs to everyone. According to Levinas: Real learning consists in receiving the lesson so profoundly that it is transformed into a necessity of being dispensed to the other person; the lesson of truth cannot be limited to the mind of one man, it bursts out toward the other (ibid., p. 99).

Form and content are continuously intertwined by the Rabbinic hermeneutic, a style that Levinas imitates eloquently (as evident from the ethical message of the final clause in the above sentence). What is true of the methods of the Talmud is likewise true of the message(s) and there is a great deal to be distilled from the methodology as concerns the ethics embraced by the rabbis. Firstly, the need for a plurality of interpretations implies that Talmudic ethics finds its basis in difference and diversity. As every individual is unique, each person’s voice adds something new to the dialogue, another perspective to consider, a new example, another experience or lesson to be learned from. This outlook also leads to a positive outcome

122

A. Topolski

in that it rigorously refuses any understanding of ‘goodness’ which would consider even one individual superfluous. More than the democratic slogan ‘every voice counts’, Talmudic ethics stresses the ‘uniqueness and irreplaceability of every voice’. In this way alterity and plurality go hand in hand and are thus essential for such an ethics rather than unity and singularity, which have been emphasized within the Greek approach to ethics. Secondly, Levinas’s rather crude Talmudic definition of ethics as ‘how to live’ brings to light its emphasis on the practical application of its teachings. The aim is to educate one to think, judge, and act critically and always to consider a balance between one’s rights and one’s responsibility to others, rather than to teach a fixed set of rules. Clearly this form of education entails a risk in that there is no guarantee that someone will act in a specified manner although such an education does promote a form of ethics that makes one accountable for one’s actions, rather than simply one’s intentions. Although there is always a gap between theory and practice (one that calls for thought, judgment, and the courage to act upon these), as much as possible the Talmud attempts to provide examples based on the experiences of others that are ‘food for thought’. It is important never to take these examples as rules since neither Levinas nor the Talmud seek to create a normative ethics (perhaps because this limits the deliberation and judgement they see as part and parcel of ethics) (Levinas 1985: 90). The Talmud is not to be applied without adaptation, as the Talmud’s emphasis on the uniqueness of every person entails that the particularity of each situation demands distinct consideration. Furthermore, since the ethics is ‘situational’, it always calls for further consideration, and thus dialogue, which means that it must constantly be reinterpreted in order to remain ‘upto-date’. Thirdly, Levinas’s claim that the Talmud be accessible and inclusive is clearly ‘democratic’ in spirit and yet it is not based on the traditional philosophical notion of equality that guides Western political thought. By contrast, Levinas’s interpretation of the Talmud leads to the position that every individual is unique and different (from which his philosophical concept of asymmetrical relations develops) and therefore needs to be included in the discussion. The end result in both cases is thus ‘democratic’, yet the underlying reasons exemplify the distinct voices of the Bible and the Greeks, which according to Levinas is not a trivial difference to be overlooked. The difference is one between an asymmetrical equality that emphasizes responsibility and a symmetrical equality that emphasizes rights. ‘It is not unimportant to know – and this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century – whether the egalitarian and just State in which the European realizes himself … proceeds from a war of all against all – or from the irreducible responsibility of one for the other…’ (Levinas 1999: 144). While this may seem to some like splitting hairs, Levinas has learned from Monsieur Chouchani that ‘the devil is in the details’. His justification for (re)rooting democracy in the Talmud is that when things take a turn for the worse, such as during the stock market crash in the 1920s, which historically happens all too often, an ethos of asymmetry and responsibility ensures that no human being can be ‘eliminated’ because of their inequality. Thus while the ethos of the Talmud may seem simple – teaching us to consider the

7


123

stranger, the widow, and the orphan (to say ‘après vous’) – its importance is anything but simple. Its commandment is radical – absolute responsibility for the other.

Judeosophy, Ethics and Radical Passivity As I have shown, Levinas does write using the language of Judeosophy and it is a choice that he is aware of. The question that remains to be answered is: why? It is my contention that Levinas chose to use resources, ideas, and concepts from these two distinct, albeit interconnected, traditions of thought because he found Greek philosophy and Jewish thought, in isolation, inadequate to provide an account for his inimitable and radical notion of ethics. In other words, I think that – for distinct reasons – both roots of Judeosophy were in some sense lacking to describe Levinas’s unique meaning of ‘ethics’; a description Derrida himself struggled to explain: It is true that Ethics in Levinas’s sense is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose … moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general … in question, then, is an Ethics of ethics [which] … can occasion neither a determined ethics nor determined laws without negating and forgetting itself (Derrida 1978: 111).

Levinas’s ethics is other than a traditional approach to ethics; it is an ethics before ethics (Levinas 1985: 90; see also Levinas et al. 1977: 90, 224).11 This first ethics, before the ethics of philosophers, is the ethics of the Judaic tradition. Yet Levinas did not seek this prior ethics without its relation to the latter ethics. For this reason his ethics should not be interpreted as either purely philosophical or purely Judaic (if either truly exists). It is deeply entrenched in the language of Judeosophy. Thus, the ability to appreciate Judeosophy offers Levinas’s readers greater depth: that is, it enriches one’s ability to understand the meaning of his ethics. Before turning to the Judeosophic roots of radical passivity, I would briefly like to support my claim that the inspiration for Levinas’s particular approach to ethics has its roots in Jewish thought. If we look at the first pages of Totality and Infinity, this inspiration is evident. In the preface he writes of his interest in discovering the non-knowing, the ‘non-philosophical’, the transcendence, from which philosophy begins, ‘a gleam of exteriority … in the face of the Other’ (Levinas 1979: 24). Likewise, we do not have to look beyond the first page of any of Levinas’s Talmudic readings to be reminded of his raison d’être, which is not in fact l’être but the other.

11 Edith Wyschogrod refers to it as an ethical metaphysics. Nelson and Kapust write, ‘Given how radically different his ethics appears to be in contrast to the ethical discourse dominant in contemporary philosophy … [he] does not seem to speak of generally binding norms and ethical foundations. Even worse, secular intellectuals fear the possible “divinization” of ethics’ (Nelson et al. 2005: xi). Bernasconi, who appreciates both this radicalism and its shortcomings, described it as ‘an ethics against ethics’ (Bernasconi & Wood 1988: 34).

124

A. Topolski

Moreover, he does not delay in pointing to the Jewish biblical tradition as the source of this thought of the other, which ‘educates and elevates the care-for-self of living beings to the care-for-the-other’ (Levinas 1994b: 1). It is clear that for Levinas, the Torah symbolizes the wisdom of a tradition that both complements and goes beyond the self; it teaches us, as individuals, to look beyond ourselves, to think beyond ourselves, and to act beyond ourselves, a wisdom which we must understand as not simply an isolated achievement but one that, step-by-step, person-by-person, brings justice to the world. This is further attested to by his description of the Torah’s role: Preoccupation with worldly understanding in this mode of thought enamoured of justice and peace … the desire for a peace that is no longer the repose of a self within itself, no longer mere autonomous self-sufficiency. … It is an anxious peace, or love of one’s fellow men – the watchfulness awakened by the Torah (ibid., p. 2).

Thus, it is not to be understood as a guide to individual blessedness but as an educational tool for people’s ethical actions (individuals interacting to form a plurality). As with the me thodology of the Talmud , there is a methodology for Talmudic study, which conveys its prioritization of ethics and the other. In ‘Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry’ Levinas speaks of study, or ‘true reading’, as a way of counteracting idolatry. This occurs because one must not read alone, but with a partner, a companion who challenges us to think beyond ourselves, reminding us of our obligation to the other, to society. This also prevents us from being self-absorbed or isolated in the process of reading, both of which are forms of self-idolatry. Yet, this study of the Torah also speaks to idolatry through its contents, through its precepts, which ask us ‘to answer in justice to one’s fellow, that is, to love the other’ (59). In relation to studying and the other, Levinas also makes the comment that the result of ‘study is an other me, who answers me, tearing me away from my solitude, and for whom I am answerable’ (67), which suggests that in the process of learning, I develop another voice or consciousness within me that always reminds me of the other, external to me, for whom I am responsible. Without delving too deeply into the relation between ethics and alterity, as many Levinas scholars have already done successfully, I hope it is clear that Jewish thought plays a significant role in his ethics of alterity and responsibility. With this in mind what I would like to do is to consider three ‘concepts’12 – the face, ‘here I am’, and God – which play a fundamental role in his ‘philosophical’ thought and that are enriched, developed and invigorated by an appreciation of their source in Jewish thought. My selection of these three is related to the shared endeavour that defines this collection of essays – to rethink radical passivity in Levinas.13 Let me begin by first re-introducing these ‘concepts’ in their proper Judeosophic context

12 I use scare quotes because the suggestion that these are concepts is an extreme reduction of the manner with which they saturate even the richest notion of a concept. 13 I also view this endeavour as a response to certain expositions of the meaning of Levinas’s radical passivity that do not even cite a so-called confessional text and are as a result greatly lacking. For an example of this see Wall (1999).

7


125

as: ‫( פנם‬panim), the plural form of the face; ‫( יננה‬hineni), the accusative phrase that is incorrectly translated into English as ‘here I am’; and ‫( והיה‬yod-heh-vav-heh), which is best transcribed in English as G–d. Given that my readers are familiar with Levinas’s so-called philosophical writings, I intend to focus on how these ‘concepts’ are enriched by Judeosophy, although I will, at the least, point towards their so-called philosophical usage by Levinas. My choice to begin with the notion of the face in Levinas is significant. It is perhaps the example par excellence of Judeosophy. In order to describe the experience of the face in the language of philosophy, and more specifically of phenomenology, Levinas turns to Descartes’s idea of infinity: an idea that overflows or goes beyond the concept of infinity which itself is infinite and thus cannot be bounded. What might strike a reader of Levinas’s 1952 essay ‘Ethics and Spirit’ (in Difficult Freedom), in which he dedicates a section to the face, is that it lacks even a trace of Descartes (Gibbs 1992: 165–166). It is ‘as if’ Levinas spent a decade seeking to ‘re-found’ his Judaic idea in philosophical terms. In addition, there is a richness to the meaning of the face for Levinas that is not captured by the analogy with Descartes. For example, Levinas refuses to accept that the face is a concept; he refuses the phenomenality of the face. It is this richness lost in Descartes that Jewish thought can deepen. The Hebrew term for the face, panim, is very odd in that it does not exist in the singular. Levinas was surely aware of this fact, given its common use in the Torah and the many Talmudic discussions of its unicity, not to mention Maimonides’s lengthy commentary on its different meanings (the presence of a person, the hearing of a voice, care for the other) in the Guide to the Perplexed (Bernasconi & Wood 1988: 173). Thus panim, unlike its philosophical expression as the face, already carries with it a great deal of the ethics Levinas wishes to make first philosophy. Panim is always plural, always in relation. In the face-to-face, it is always making an appeal, interrupting, always heteronymous. It is also a ‘concept’ that cannot be detached from God whose panim can never be seen but only heard. Panim also calls to mind the importance of externality, as it can never be ‘seen’ from within. This latter association with externality is enriched by the root of panim, panah, which means to turn towards someone, to respond to the call from the other. While Levinas discusses this at length in several of his Talmudic readings when he speaks of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and judgement, and teshuvah (forgiveness), which means to return, it also plays a fundamental role in his so-called philosophical writings. The entirety of the third section of Totality and Infinity is dedicated to a phenomenological analysis of the face, an analysis that touches upon all the meanings of panim (only a few of which I have mentioned). Let me take one short phrase as an example of how Judeosophy allows us to enrich our understanding of Levinas’s notion of the face as it connects with radical passivity. ‘The face resists possession, resists my power’(Levinas 1979: 173). Given the lack of a singular form of panim, it is clear that the face can never be possessed: it is not a singularity that can be grasped and reduced like other concepts, it is a relation that forces me to turn (panah), to respond, it has power over me and possesses me. Although Levinas does not yet speak of radical passivity in Totality and Infinity, the notion is already present in the term panim, in his philosophical use of the term

126

A. Topolski

the face. Panim, which is perhaps best translated as the face-to-face (given its non-singularity), already points towards a relation that holds me hostage, that has the power to make me turn, to confront me, before I have even had a chance to choose whether I wish to be in relation to another. Building on the meaning of the face, introduced in Totality and Infinity, Levinas continues to introduce terms from Jewish thought, but now much more explicitly, in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. One such ‘concept’ is that of the response ‫( יננה‬hineni) which helps us to understand the meaning of responsibility in Levinas’s ethics, and as such sheds a great deal of light on his notion of radical passivity, which can be interpreted as a responsibility that precedes freedom. While some of Levinas readers have suggested that substitution is not a Judaic notion (Hansel 2008: 302), others have argued that it is clearly Judaic (Gibbs 1992: 162). Yet it is clear that Levinas connects the meaning of being held hostage, being an irreplaceable substitute, with the Shoah (De Saint-Cheron 2006: 31). In this interview, Levinas refers to the double meaning of substitution as suffering and as supreme dignity, the same dignity he affirms in his reflections on the notion of ‫( יננה‬hineni). As if directly challenging the entire philosophical tradition from Descartes, through Kant, to Heidegger, Levinas claims that ‘[t]he word I means here I am [me voici], answering for everything and everyone’ (Levinas 1981: 114). I, the self, the subject, is re-interpreted by Levinas’s ethics as an I that exists for the other, in order to respond, to be responsible for the other. The accusative aspect of this response (completely lost in English and weaker in French but still present) expresses the radical asymmetry of the responsibility that I have for the other. The best example of this is perhaps the responsibility of parents for their child. A child can never grasp this responsibility. It is often said that only once a child has become a parent can s/he begin to grasp the radical nature of asymmetrical responsibility. Yet Levinas does not want to limit this responsibility, the importance of responding to the other with the word ‫( יננה‬hineni), to this relationship. As such, he tries to express this radical responsibility in terms of a relation between the self and other, a relation that is touched by transcendence, in which the trace of God is experienced. Just as a parent’s responsibility to a child is infinite, so is God’s responsibility to her children. In the face of the other, I am paralysed by the infinite responsibility G-d carries and which is, in this experience, passed on to me in the form of a responsibility for the other, for the world. As Levinas says in response to Ricoeur, ‘I carry the weight of the world’ (Banon et al. 1998: 25). In a so-called philosophical essay, Levinas leaves a trace of this weight by making reference to creation, for which G-d is responsible, in his description of radical passivity: A new concept of passivity, a passivity more radical than that of effect in a causal series, beneath consciousness and knowledge … prior to the ontological plane where being is posed as nature, referred to the anteriority of creation, not yet having an outside, to meta-physical anteriority (Levinas 2003: 50).

It is because of this responsibility for the other that comes from the other that we truly relate with the other as other. For this reason Levinas calls this an ethical relation:

7


127

it allows for the ‘I’ to relate to the other without reduction to the same. Levinas cultivates this notion of the ‘I’ by referring to the term ‫( יננה‬hineni), central to the Judaic tradition. It is a response that appears as a leitmotif in Biblical and Talmudic thought, the ethical response par excellence. The recurrence of the self, experienced as persecution, is summoned from without but answered from within and leads the self to its infinite responsibility for the other. Thus for Levinas, the face of the other speaks to the I, demanding that one accept responsibility for the injustice done in the name of the same at the cost of the other and of the third; to answer from the freedom of being is to deny what it means to be truly human. Hineni is thus precisely what Levinas means by radical passivity, a response that is not chosen, a response by a hostage – not yet a subject – who is prior to freedom (and thus prior to sin: a notion that is connected to the Judaic interpretation of Genesis). The ‘I’ of hineni is not yet an I; is not separate from the relation that makes it responsible for the other. Hineni is a response to a command, in the case of its Biblical usage, to a command from God, that has not yet been pronounced. It is consequently the response that arises from within a relation to the other, a relation marked by my radical passivity. The third ‘concept’ I would like to develop, and the most obvious example of what transcends the term concept, is that of G-d. Passing over the controversial and unending discussion of the place of G-d in philosophy, there is no denying the importance of the divine for Levinas’s thought and specifically his notion of ethics. Although it is generally accepted that in philosophical circles, the ‘o’ should be included, in this discussion of Judeosophy it seems appropriate to maintain a symbolic gap between G and d. This also helps one to connect Levinas’s use of God, which occurs throughout his so-called philosophical writings, with the Judaic notion of G-d which has many names, the holiest of which is the tetragrammaton: ‫והיה‬. Levinas in fact dedicated an entire Talmudic commentary to this question, ‘The Name of God according to a few Talmudic Texts’ (Levinas 1994a: 116). If, as I hope, I have convinced my reader of the need to learn Levinas’s language, I would ask that we reconsider the usage of G-d within a philosophical context. Not only does the use of a dash (which is by no means uncommon in contemporary philosophy to indicate the absence of presence, for example) symbolically recognize the source of Levinas’s inspiration, it also expresses, by the absence of the vowel, the philosophical meaning that the divine has for Levinas. The space, created by a lack of vowels, reminds us of the inability to conceptualize G-d, to totalize either the other – whether the ‘o’ is in lower case (as in the other person) or in the upper case (as in G-d). Perhaps the absent ‘o’ acts as a baraita (marginal opinion) reminding us that every relationship, while being inclusive of a particular person or group, also therefore excludes others. In addition, the absent ‘o’ is often interpreted in Jewish thought as an example of tsimtsum, a kabbalistic concept that Levinas cites (Levinas 1979: 104, 291, 1994a: 166), which expresses the idea that G-d withdrew himself after the world was created so that human beings could take over this responsibility to care for the world (Visker in Bloechl 2000: 269). A connection could certainly be made between tsimtsum and radical passivity, which is a responsibility that has anarchic roots.

128

A. Topolski

Secondly, it is clear that radical passivity cannot be understood without a particular understanding of G-d as having chosen me to be responsible for the other: this is the goodness of which Levinas speaks (which is not the same as the Good). While G-d might be understood as the Good, with regard to the intersubjective relation of the face-to-face, it is the trace of G-d that acts as a trace in every human being. This trace carries with it a responsibility prior to freedom, a responsibility that marks each one of us as always – from the start – open to goodness. It is a radical passivity that is prior to the passivity of pleasure and fun, of the ego, it is a trace of the Good within us, a trace left by G-d. This consequently harks back to our discussion of panim, which can also be said to be always already plural because of the fact that the trace of G-d is always in the face of the other, a trace that makes us hostage to the commands of the other. It is in this sense that the face of the other is a non-manifestation of G-d, a presence that is never visible. Yet, understandably, many of Levinas’s philosophical readers wish to understand the face purely phenomenologically, without reference to G-d. While I respect this endeavour, I think it denies the ethos that inspires Levinas’s thought, leaving his reader lost in obscurity. Take for example, Levinas’s motto ‘Ethics is an optics’ (Levinas 1979: 23) which appears in the introduction to his first philosophical opus Totality and Infinity. It has left many of his readers utterly perplexed, to the point of intellectual paralysis (a paralysis that may be intentional as it is the same paralysis that characterizes radical passivity). While I admire their commitment to struggling with the tremendous complexity of this essay, I also wonder: why not consider the possibility that this motto cannot be understood without reference to G-d or, at a minimum, to consider that it becomes much clearer when presented in a context that is non-allergic to the divine? This phrase reappears several times in Levinas’s essays on Judaism collected in Difficult Freedom and in a much more illuminating manner. Ethics is an optics of the Divine. Henceforth, no relation with God is direct or immediate. The Divine can be manifested only through my neighbour (Levinas 1990a: 159).14

From this article published in 1961, the same year as Totality and Infinity, it seems that the motto appears in an abbreviated form in Levinas’s so-called philosophical opus, as if he was not yet ready to introduce the significance of G-d for his philosophy. While this may be unappealing to many of his philosophical readers, a closer look at this claim reveals that Levinas reminds us, even in his ‘Jewish’ writings, that for him G-d is not directly accessible, but only in the relation to the other. This hearkens back to the meaning of panim, and to the verb panah – to turn – in that on Yom Kippur we cannot turn to G-d until we have turned to the other for forgiveness,

14

Preceding this reference, in the introductory paragraph to Jewish Thought Today, is the following: ‘It ties the meaning of all experiences to the ethical relation among humans; it appears to the personal responsibility of man, who, thereby, knows himself irreplaceable to realize a human society in which humans treat one another as humans. This realization of the just society is ipso facto an elevation of man to the society with God. This society is human happiness itself and the meaning of life. Therefore, to say that the meaning of the real must be understood in function of ethics, is to say that the universe is sacred. But it is sacred in an ethical sense’.

7


129

precisely the idea that Levinas’s motto seeks to affirm. Furthermore, Levinas’s use of the term G-d, rather than being theological, as in the source or ‘foundation of the world and cosmology’ (Levinas 1999: 96), conveys an ethical connotation, a philosophical meaning, about responsibility for the other. In this sense, Levinas’s ethics is one of asymmetrical horizontal transcendence which carries with it the trace of a vertical transcendence. It is from the latter that radical passivity arises and yet it is a passivity that is ‘experienced’ (or suffered) in relation to an other for whom one is ultimately and inescapably responsible.

Conclusions One of the most difficult and meaningful experiences of my life occurred when I visited Auschwitz and was guided through the camp by a man who had survived the Shoah. What struck me then, and continues to do so today, is that this man – whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten – felt that he had survived in order to tell his story to others. It was for this reason that he, day in and day out, returned to the place where he had suffered, beyond description, for 3 years. While there are other survivors who have also expressed such a need to share their stories, there are many others who have rarely spoken about these events. While I remember feeling, from the first time I read one of Levinas’s so-called philosophical texts, that the Shoah was a constant presence, perhaps due to its absence, I often wonder why Levinas never dedicated himself to explicitly writing about the relationship between the Shoah and his ethics. While I now believe that his reasons for not doing so are somehow connected with his desire to speak the universal language of Greek philosophy, a language that may perhaps have difficulty accommodating an event such as the Shoah that is neither universal nor communicable, I think that the few moments when he did attempt to do so reveal a great deal about the importance of listening to the language of Judeosophy. Let me conclude by mentioning one of these moments. In 1974, in the dedication to Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas chose to write two distinct dedications on the same page, a truly Judeosophic page. The first dedication is in French, a philosophical language, to the millions of people across the world that have suffered from hatred. The second, in Hebrew, a language that is not widely accessible on the continent or within philosophical circles, is to the memory of those members of his family, each of whom he names individually. Each of those persons was murdered during the Shoah because of this same hatred. Levinas’s last word, which he expresses in the language of Judeosophy, is one that intertwines the universal with the particular, the present with the past, and tragedy with hope. While Levinas wishes to communicate the universal message of the importance of ethics as an interruption and challenge to this hatred, it is a message that for him bears a particular name, or names. Levinas must thus honour the names of those that have led him to bring the Judaic to the philosophic, in the language of Judeosophy, by placing them on the same (somewhat Talmudic) page as all those

130

A. Topolski

who, nameless, have suffered from this same hatred. In order to fully appreciate this message, both in its particularity and in its universality, we must begin to listen and learn Levinas’s language.

References Ajzenstat, O. (2001). Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’ Postmodernism. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Banon, D., Levinas, E. & Ricœur, P. (1998). Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophe Et Pédagogue. Paris: Editions du Nadir de l’Alliance israélite universelle. Bergo, B. (2006). ‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Ed.), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). On the Internet: < http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/levinas/ > Bernasconi, R. & Wood, D. (1988). The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London/ New York: Routledge. Bloechl, J. (2000). The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. 1st Ed. New York: Fordham University Press. Cohen, R. A. (1986). Face to Face with Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Critchley, S. & Bernasconi, R. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. De Saint-Cheron, M. (2006). Entrtiens Avec Emmanuel Levinas: 1992–1994. Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Duyndam, J. & Poorthuis, M. (2003). Levinas. Rotterdam: Lemniscaat. Gibbs, R. (1992). Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibbs, R. (2000). Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hansel, G. (2008). De La Bible Au Talmud: L’itinéraire De Pensée D’emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Odile Jacob. Halperin, J., Levinas, E. & Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise. (1963). La Conscience Juive. Donnees Et Debats: Textes Des Trois Premiers Colloque D’intellectuels Juifs De Langue Francaise. Congres Juif Mondial ed. Presses Universitaires de France. Holtz, B. W. (Ed.) (1984). Back to the Sources: Reading the Classical Jewish Texts. New York: Simon & Schuster. Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague, Boston/Hingham, MA: M. Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague, Boston/Hingham, MA: M. Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. 1st Ed. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1990a). Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, E. (1990b). Nine Talmudic Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1994a). Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1994b). In the Time of the Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). Of God Who Comes to Mind. 2nd Ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (1999). Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia University Press.

7


131

Levinas, E. (2003). Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Levinas, E. (2001). Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E., Ricoeur, P., Haulotte, E., Cornélis, E. & Geffré, C. (1977). La Révélation. Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis. Meyer, M. A. (1975). ‘Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?’, in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal 24 # 3(95): 329–338. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, E. S., Kapust, A. & Still, K. (2005). Addressing Levinas. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Poirié, F. (1987). Emmanuel Levinas. Lyon: La Manufacture. Wall, T. C. (1999). Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. New York: State University of New York Press.

Chapter 8

Ab-Originality: Radical Passivity through Talmudic Reading Seán Hand

Abstract In this chapter, Hand claims that Levinas seeks to overcome some of the contradictions inherent in the postulation of absolute passivity, and in the course of this revisioning to critique some contemporary notions of freedom, by appealing culturally and performatively to Talmudic reading. In a post-war re-signification of his Judaic heritage, Levinas here not only seeks to enact ethical saying but also to re-turn residual assumptions and solutions derived from philosophy about the modalities of radical passivity. But instead of a choice being established, which would merely recategorize the problem, Hand argues that Levinas tries to imply a relationship between phenomenological and Talmudic traditions, which allows him to describe and perform an anachronism or ab-originality on which a practice of radical passivity may then be grounded. From the end of the fifties until late in his life, Emmanuel Levinas regularly produced a Talmudic reading (25 in all), in the first instance for an annual gathering of a recently established Colloquium bringing together French-speaking Jewish intellectuals: the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de langue française. In practical terms, this required Levinas to follow a tradition of presenting a text from the Talmud, which itself naturally included the often conflicting discussions of several sages regarding the meaning of a passage under examination; and in repeating the text, section by section, to offer in turn his own interpretation which subsequently could be cross-examined. Beyond their initial protestations of amateurism and inadequacy, Levinas’s readings are all similar in their simultaneous attentiveness to the dialogic nature of the genre and renewal of its significance through reference to both contemporary philosophical ideas and historical events, while they encourage the Talmud texts in turn to question and enlighten received intellectual schemes. In the 1968 introduction to his first collection of Talmudic readings, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Four Talmudic Readings), Levinas himself gives a detailed historical and generic description of Talmud, while already inserting additional features into the tradition. So he specifies how the original sages or Tanaim compiling the Mishnah (or codification of Jewish law) ‘most certainly had contact with Greek thought’ (QLT, 11/NTR, 4). He contends that the Halakhah (legal texts) and


133

134

S. Hand

Aggadah (moral texts) often extend beyond their classificatory separation, in the way in which the former have ‘a philosophical prolongation’ (ibid., p. 12/4) that is located or even dissimulated within their codification of acts (and implicitly are re-opened by the latter category). And he views the Talmudic text as representing in itself an intellectual struggle (combat) and a resolute opening-up (13/4), a form of action and resistance that is due, above all, to the fostering of a ‘hypercritical’ interrogation and the obligation or expectation which this places on an individual reader to take on the challenges of freedom (liberté), invention and boldness (14/5). Some of the above terms can alert us to the way in which Levinas’s general position here is also allied to a quite definite politics that resonates with contemporary as well as post-war significance. He goes on to describe what it means to ‘evoke freedom and non-dogmatism in exegesis today [de nos jours]’ (QLT, 14/NTR, 5). Within the contexts of both general modernity and post-war politics, this ‘today’ obviously also signals the sentiments of a Paris Nanterre professor in 1968 who, surrounded by a social and intellectual rebellion concerned with definitions of freedom, invention and boldness, with discretion and determination is absenting himself from these politics, including the way in which he does not initially mention it at all, and later makes only very coded and negative allusions. Instead, for Levinas freedom and non-dogmatism ‘today’ involve primarily a de-categorization and a prioritization of response. Reviewing and deeming insufficient both the historical-philological approach, and a purely formalist option which he sweepingly terms structuralist analysis, Levinas adumbrates a task of reading that recognizes but also breaks conventions, seeking to translate a text’s meanings into a modern language, and thereby to extricate its universal dimensions or visions (vues universelles) from the confining details (où nous enferment les données) (QLT, 15/ NTR, 5). In emphasizing this notion of translation, Levinas locates the Talmud in a modern period of history defined by its attachment to, and comprehension of, actuality (la compréhension de l’actualité) (ibid., p. 17/6). This is supposedly in contrast to a more mythological past, and Levinas in fact relates this historical break to a slightly obscure work on Kant. He then goes on to present the Talmud as no mere extension (of the Bible) but rather as ‘a second layer of meanings; critical and fully conscious’ (18/7), before noting that the sages of the Talmud, the Hakhamim, themselves referred to Greek philosophers as the Hakhamim of Greece. And he subsequently compares it to what Paul Ricœur says about hermeneutics (ibid.). This is, of course, the Ricœur who, in 1968 as a senior colleague at Nanterre, had earnestly sought to maintain a discussion with rebellious students, but under pressure from both political extremes finally allowed the police onto the campus, and left not long afterwards to teach at Chicago. The allusion could well be said to add a second layer of meanings, both critical and fully conscious. Levinas therefore associates this hermeneutics with the ‘dialectical, argumentative language’ of the Talmud, and contrasts it negatively with what he calls structural analysis. In pointed reference to the work of Lévi-Strauss in particular, and to a dominant theorizing more generally, which Levinas obviously detects as a driving force within radical expressions of freedom, invention and boldness in 1968, he specifies that nothing is less like the Talmud than the bricolage used by la pensée sauvage (19/7).

8

Ab-Originality: Radical Passivity through Talmudic Reading

135

With evocations and re-positionings of this kind, Levinas deliberately effects a translation of the Talmud into a predominant Western chronology of ideas in order to characterize its aims, but in so doing simultaneously challenges a number of assumed priorities and practices. This envisaged Talmud apparently sits within a conception of modernity taken from Kant, then, but it is also presented as problematizing such an epistemological break through its continued transmission of commentary on commentary (QLT, 18/NTR, 7). Its existence as both sui generis and deferring text complicates any assumed supplementary status, including one in terms of its Greek Other. And its thinking processes, no less than its chronologies, are as sophisticated as either biblical exegesis or the latest intellectual revolution. Levinas hereafter finally relates the Talmud to other, equally significant and also political freedoms. First he alludes to the Liberation of Paris and France during the Second World War, by specifying how his own mode of reading the Talmud is common to a movement which arose within French Judaism at that historical moment. To this he adds the sense of coming into possession of the idea of a heritage rather than just of land, in obvious contrast to Heideggerian concepts of founding. Then, finally, he evokes the foundation of the modern State of Israel, which in being mentioned only at this point carries with it the intellectual and moral weight already attached to the Talmud. Here, in one of several passages wherein he very carefully brings the significance of the Talmud before Israel, Levinas suggests that the return to a practice of ‘reading in search of problems and truths’ (QLT, 23/NTR, 9), which the Talmud pursues in a respectful but unlimited manner, is as necessary to Israel as the return to an independent political life, which some would like to define for Israel in purely political terms. Zionism, Levinas contends, ‘is not a will to power (volonté de puissance)’ (ibid.), the phrase obviously recalling both antihumanist (structuralist) theories and what Levinas regards as their historical political counterpart. Arguing in conclusion for a discursive linkage between Israel and the West, Levinas presents this task as one of almost literal translation, by focusing on the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and its ‘most noble essence of Zionism’, which for him has the task of preserving and developing the study of the Talmud in a modern idiom, confronted by modern problems. It is in this carefully chosen way that Levinas openly endorses a particular vision of Zionist establishment and even expansion, concluding that the translation into ‘Greek’ of the Talmud is the essential task of the University of the Jewish state (24/10). So Levinas’s evaluation of the Talmud turns on a simultaneous separation and linkage of philosophies and world-views, not in a manner that merely reverses hierarchies, but in a way designed to re-pose the relationship between Talmudic readings, the philosophy of politics, and the politics of philosophy, in terms of anachronism or ab-originality. In coining this term, I have in mind not just the abyssal nature of this relationship, but also its Abrahamic perspective. Some of this strategy relies on the dramatic plurivocity of the Talmud, and its consequent dynamic of irresolution, which Levinas extends further by introducing contemporary philosophical or political references. Double voicing therefore becomes the norm, to the point where, if it is normal for a ‘Hebrew’ or Talmudic voice to be contextualized by a ‘Greek’ or philosophical consciousness, it is equally

136

S. Hand

natural that the burning political crisis is that of the Israelites in the desert (QLT, 117/NTR, 54), the existential search for integrity is Jacob’s (ibid., p. 105/48), and responsibility for opposing a Hitler belongs to Rav Zera (186/87). The performative aspect of this naturally extends even to the occasion of the Colloquium itself, with its multiple yet supposedly homogeneous audience: intellectuels juifs de langue française. (Performativity, of course, can foreground cultural specificity, and thus by its very existence can create snags for smoothly undifferentiating notions of an unlimited Other, or a radical passivity of an absolute responsibility.) Levinas’s performance here notably employs pedagogical tools that are sometimes unfortunately absent from the ‘philosophical’ works: orality and engagement, humour and irony, sarcasm and pathos, delight and intrigue. There are memorable instances of sharp wit that remain even in the reworked text, as when, in ‘Promised Land and Permitted Land’, he refers to naysaying explorers as ‘leftist intellectuals’, or when, in ‘As Old as the World?’, he describes a heretic intending to dodge laws regarding sexual abstinence as probably already a Parisian. These moments are partly designed to facilitate the introduction of references to ontology, scepticism, Hitler, war, or the camps. But they are as equally fundamental as the exemplification of humanism, universalism, and even (in his terms) atheism. This mode of exegesis, acting as a performance of passivity, is suggested as early as 1957 in the essay ‘A Religion for Adults’. The essay thus coincides with the Colloquium’s foundation. It includes an early location within the Talmud’s ‘apparently childish language [langage]’ (DL, 34/DF, 18) of the fundamental principles, and often specific terminology, supporting the ethical relation which the major work Totality and Infinity will present in 1961 as a rupture with the Western philosophical tradition. Beginning with an affirmation of monotheism’s common language (before a multi-faith gathering in a Moroccan abbey), Levinas rapidly characterizes the fate of Jews in the Shoah as ‘an experience of total passivity’ (ibid., p. 26/12), the suffering of Israel as something placing it ‘at the heart of the religious history of the world’ (26/12), and his ‘impression of returning momentarily to the human’ (27/12) during a Catholic service as being akin to the fraternity he had experienced, amidst prisoners of war holding different faiths, ‘at the grave of a Jewish comrade whom the Nazis had wanted to bury like a dog’ (ibid.). The historical evils also open up a perspective on Judaism as a universalism. But Levinas then goes on to stress the particular routes (28/13) through which Jewish monotheism keeps faith alive, and pre-eminently the manner in which the exegetical tradition of the Talmud keeps at bay the possession and idolatry that ‘offend human freedom’ (29/14) and which, as the Sacred, constitute ‘a form of violence’ (ibid.). This particular promotion of an intellectual excellence (30/15) is moreover that which, in Levinas’s eyes, brings Judaism ‘extremely close to the West, I mean to philosophy’ (ibid.). This is, consequently, a synthetic approach to Revelation, which Levinas perceives as embodied historically in the philosopher Maimonides; and he therefore conjectures whether the Western spirit, that is to say philosophy, ‘is not in the last analysis the position of a humanity that accepts the risk of atheism’ (31/16), where the term ‘atheism’ here indicates, not for the first or last time in Levinas, a resistance to the seductions of the Sacred or to the ‘participation’ of idolatry. So (Levinas’s form of) Judaism and

8


137

(Levinas’s form of) philosophy are therefore both grounded in ‘the ethical relation’ (32/16), and both teach a ‘real transcendence’ wherein self-consciousness is ‘inseparable from a consciousness of justice and injustice’ (ibid.). Judaism, in other words, is here described and praised in terms that are ultimately indistinguishable from Totality and Infinity’s core philosophical postulation. Levinas then continues rapidly in similar vein. Rashi’s commentaries on the Bible bring out the way in which consciousness recognizes how an existentialist pour soi begins in commitment to the Other. The Talmud directly shows the ‘intermediary space’ of the ethical relation. Justice, the third party and proximity are all here key terms of a Judaism whose ‘interdependence’ and ‘comingling’ are demonstrated within one verse of the Talmud (DL, 36/DF, 19). Levinas’s well-known philosophical postulations, concerning the fact that I am obligated with regard to the other, and am infinitely more demanding with myself than with others, are both expressed here (ibid., pp. 39/21–22) and immediately explained by reference to a Talmudic text. The constitution of a just society is then related to another such text (39/21). Meanwhile, these positive references are tellingly contrasted with negative allusions to Hegel and Heidegger. In terms of textual and intellectual significance, therefore, it is both adult religion and its exemplification in the Talmud that here emerge confidently as the other of philosophy, including even that of Totality and Infinity. Far from having a subordinate or supplementary status, the Talmud’s exegetical process is here granted an ab-original significance and status in relation to the philosophical work. Neither surpassing philosophy nor yet merely illustrating its complexities in an ‘apparently childish’ way for the purposes of a religious retreat, the Talmud here signifies as the site of a fundamental relationality, in terms of both the ethical relation and the difference between modes and genres of revelation; and, as we can also observe, operates at the same time in a performative mode, in order to enact a reconciliation of agency and radical passivity. ‘The Temptation of Temptation’, given to the Colloquium in 1964, demonstrates these characteristics further. It is a presentation of the Tractate Shabbath, 88a and 88b, given within the Colloquium’s theme of the ‘temptations’ of Judaism, and concerned with parts of Exodus relating to covenance and commandment, knowledge and obedience. It eventually formed the second lesson of the 1968 Quatre lectures talmudiques. Recalling at once in prefatory remarks how Plato’s State had expanded to accommodate everything, temptations included, and characterizing Westerners/Christians as those who ‘want to taste everything themselves’ (QLT, 73/NTR, 33), Levinas remarks, in a clear echo of Totality and Infinity, that ‘[t]he whole in its totality [[l]e tout dans sa totalité], is evil added to good’ (ibid.). The temptation of temptation is consequently that of knowledge as savoir, which is not just the catalyst of sin in the Garden of Eden, but is also ‘philosophy as opposed to wisdom’ (ibid., p. 74/34). The subsequent Talmudic reading is therefore being established also as a critique of philosophy which ‘will no longer leave the other in its otherness but will always include it in the whole’ (77/35), and provocatively presents the alternative of doing before knowing (or attending before mastering) as supposedly ‘naïve’ (a dismissal akin to that of childish language and implicitly indicating the Talmud’s approach to knowledge).

138

S. Hand

The text is then read as exemplifying the choices inherent in ‘the difficult freedom of being Jewish’ (QLT, 82/NTR, 37), a phrase that among other things also therefore brings the recently published 1963 Difficult Freedom into relation with both philosophy and the Talmud. Leading us through difficult alternatives in an exemplary way, by suggesting, questioning, and occasionally even cajoling (ibid., pp. 83–84/38–39), Levinas brings us to the point where ‘the freedom taught by the Jewish text starts in a non-freedom which, far from being slavery or childhood, is a beyond-freedom [un au-delà de la liberté’] (88/40). Moreover, Levinas specifies how his extraction from the Talmudic text of the notion of otherwise than (the being of) freedom or beyond freedom (as essence) is an intellectual power facilitated by the Talmud itself, which contains a ‘permanent dissonance’ that is generated between what it draws from the biblical text and what is found in that text literally (86/39). (In a warm illustration of the uses of dissonance, moreover, Levinas breaks off to emphasize the inevitable dissonance of translation, so that ‘our friend Rabi’, an interlocutor at several of Levinas’s Talmudic readings before the Colloquium, will not repeat his objection that he went back to the text only to find nothing of what it was made to say. Just as amusingly, in the questions following the presentation, not given in the text published by Levinas but included in the proceedings of the Colloquium, Rabi asks precisely for proof of the interpretation’s accuracy.) Later, in commenting on the Talmud’s image of a sage rubbing his foot so hard that blood spurts out, Levinas is able genially to extract a similar notion of the need to rub the text hard, that is, to push exegesis further. This echoes his constant invocation to ‘look further’ (QLT, 93/NTR, 42) or to see more (ibid., p. 96/44), for Talmudic reading is (once again) a ‘direct optics’, not least in its revelation of how ‘seeing the other is already an obligation toward him’ (104/47), or – in terms of the text under examination here – is a doing before hearing. In concluding, Levinas then states that he will ‘add a few philosophical considerations’ (QLT, 106/NTR, 48), which turn out to anticipate – by some 4 years in publication terms – the radical language of the article ‘Substitution’ which was to become the central chapter of Otherwise than Being. Thus he writes that Temimut, the uprightness or integrity shown by Jacob in the Biblical text, ‘consists in a substitution for others’ (ibid., p. 107/49), that this beyond-freedom means that freedom is from the beginning un-done or un-made or de-feated by or beneath suffering (dé-faite sous la souffrance), and that this condition or uncondition (incondition) of being hostage is an essential modality of freedom (108/50). In its primary emphasis on suffering subjectivity rather than on the Other, on the figurations of that ethical position, and on the linguistic wrenching that seeks to both say and unsay philosophy, we have a clear demonstration of how the move from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, which philosophically charted a necessary progression from critique of totality to the detotalizing of critique itself, that is, from a thematics of the Other to a more radical passivity, is here predicted by, and to a degree predicated on, Talmudic reading. Finally, ‘Damages Due to Fire’ is based on the Tractate Baba Kama, 60a–b, which concerns initially the deliberations in Exodus 22 regarding restitution. It eventually

8


139

formed the fifth and final lesson of the 1977 Du sacré au saint (From the Sacred to the Holy), having been first presented to the Colloquium concerned with the topic of war in September 1975. On that occasion, it was immediately preceded by a ‘philosophical’ (in truth largely political) analysis of war by Robert Misrahi that employs notions of reciprocity and reversibility. Though Levinas, in his own presentation, refers positively to Misrahi’s analysis of the rationality of war (DSS, 155/NTR, 182) and his association of Jewish messianism with the ideals of democratic socialism (ibid., p. 173/196), and makes a passing reference to Clausewitz who is a key referent in Misrahi’s talk, their field of inquiry and language nonetheless diverge fundamentally. While concurring broadly with Misrahi’s thesis concerning the mechanisms of rationality and irrationality governing war (and associating the latter and the ultimate source of war with Auschwitz), Levinas moves from the text’s concrete subject, concerning who is responsible if a field catches fire, to consideration of what is ‘more war than war’ (154/182): namely, the pursuit of justice. The initial Gemara (or incorporated earlier discussions and rulings) of Levinas’s text itself contains several strikingly ‘Levinasian’ phrases, regarding, for example, how we are responsible for all the rest, how life’s trials may be caused by the wicked but they begin with the just, or how, once freedom is given, the exterminating angel does not distinguish between the just and the unjust (DSS, 150–151/NTR, 179). Here passivity is achieved almost through ventriloquism, in a manner that belies any supposed naivety on the part of the Talmud text. Furthermore, these phrases are located in a Gemara that includes five baraitot, a term which (as Levinas takes care to point out) derives from the Aramaic for ‘external’ or ‘outside’ and indicates the introduction of traditions and techniques not included in the Mishnah. Finally, in a separate section entitled ‘Structure of the Text’, Levinas notes how his text is interesting for the way in which it is actually a Halakhah that becomes ‘transfigured’ into an Aggadah, before adding: [C’est] le mode sous lequel dans la pensée talmudique, se présentent des vues philosophiques, c’est-à-dire la pensée proprement religieuse d’Israël. (Je ne regrette pas d’avoir rapproché dans ma phrase précédente philosophie et religion. La philosophie dérive pour moi de la religion. Elle est appelée par la religion en dérive et toujours probablement la religion est en dérive.) Et cette interprétation aggadique de la Halakha relative au feu se terminera par un nouvel enseignement halakhique; le texte va donc de la Halakha à l’Aggada, et de l’Aggada à la Halakha. C’est cela sa structure originale, très remarquable dans son rythme stylistique, mais non indifférente au problème qui nous préoccupe. Voilà les remarques préalables (DSS, 155–156). [This] is the way in which philosophical views, that is to say, the properly religious thought of Israel, present themselves in Talmudic thought. (I do not regret having brought philosophy and religion together in my preceding sentence. For me, philosophy derives [dérive] from religion. It is called forth and appealed to [appelée] by a religion that derives and is adrift [en dérive], and probably religion always derives and is adrift.) And this aggadic interpretation of a Halakhah relating to fire will conclude with a new Halakhic teaching: the text therefore goes from Halakhah to Aggadah, and from Aggadah to Halakhah. That is its original structure, very remarkable in its stylistic rhythm, but not indifferent to the problem preoccupying us. These are preliminary remarks (NTR, 182).

140

S. Hand

Here, and in the preceding moments, a hermeneutic is woven wherein it is increasingly difficult to maintain distinctions between discourses in terms of originality, authority or acceptability. Into such a weave, reproduced in miniature by this passage, Levinas first inserts the notion that properly religious thought emerges through cross-generic transfiguration, then parenthetically raises the conjunction of philosophy and religion, only to state immediately that philosophy derives from religion and that religion itself is already and always deriving and adrift. This, we are then told, is its original structure, only for all of this to be defined and almost dismissed as merely preliminary remarks! The perhaps preoccupying relationship being suggested here between Levinas’s Talmudic readings and his philosophy, voiced in several complex and contradictory ways both inside and outside a singular discourse, emerges on the margins of the Talmudic text as being itself the ab-original grounding of the ethical reading which this text is to receive. Hereafter Levinas proceeds, at times seemingly en dérive, through the text’s five moments of baraita, realizing connected insights along the way which often sound familiar to us from Otherwise than Being, published the previous year. The phenomenology of the text’s structure thus suggests the re-turn of philosophy through revelation. Tracing the etymology of Rakhmana or ‘Miséricorde’ back to the word for uterus, Levinas therefore sees that God is here defined by maternity (DSS, 158/NTR, 183). This calls forth a composite bountiful figure (maternity and corn) which in turn seems to suggest the text’s own gestation beyond the legalistic dimension of liability and into the ethical recognition of unending and unsatisfied responsibilities. Levinas again comes to see that a rationalist dichotomy of war or peace is ultimately conceptually inadequate (and so drifts diplomatically away from Misrahi’s political schemata), as the text’s fire becomes increasingly delocalized and ‘elemental’, that is to say, ‘the space of total disorder, of the pure Element that is no longer in the service of any thought, beyond war’ (ibid., p. 164/187). This phrase recalls the 1934 essay on the philosophy of Hitlerism, and indeed Levinas next observes that a rationalist epistemology cannot explain Auschwitz, in part because its ‘anthropology’ and ‘perseverance in being’ (167/188) generate just that notion of ‘private righteousness’ that permits evil to occur by absolving itself of responsibility. The generalization of the Element also explains for Levinas why the Talmudic text, with its first baraita, shifts its anxious discussion from localized fire to unlocalized epidemic (it may be relevant that fever in some traditional teaching is presented as one kind of fire). In a moment which he now identifies as the text’s central passage, Levinas realizes that the refuge taken against the epidemic (remaining fearfully indoors, as during the Passover) is the space or rather a ‘no-exit’ [sans-issue], ‘no-place’ [sans-lieu], ‘non-place’ [non-lieu] of Israel itself, that is to say a non-localizable space in response to non-localizable fear. It is in fact a moral and universal space of suffering, and thus ‘tous les hommes sont au bord de la situation de l’Etat d’Israël’ (170/191). That is to say, we are all close to the position of Israel, not just circumstantially in terms of geographical proximity or historico-cultural affinity, but also for Levinas more essentially in relation to an unavoidable ethical situation in which we experience permanent liminality, precariousness and brinkmanship. The mention of ‘non-place’ recalls also Levinas’s description of subjectivity itself near the beginning of Otherwise than Being.

8


141

But the second baraita shifts the image again, this time to famine, a terror which precisely necessitates leaving home rather than seeking refuge in it; which Levinas reads as another encoded fate of Israelis down the centuries in the face of the Elemental, that of diaspora and exile. The third baraita, involving where one should walk to avoid the angel of death, takes Levinas further, into the thought that there is no radical difference between war and peace, or even peace and Auschwitz, since murder and evil, even if in the form of social injustice and exploitation, are always present. His response now is to recognize how the text is presenting him with ‘a call to man’s infinite responsibility’ (DSS, 174/NTR, 193). He then considers more briefly the fourth and fifth instances of baraita, which state respectively that in an epidemic one should avoid the house of prayer, and that dogs will demonstrate, by either howling or being happy, whether it is the angel of death or Elijah who has entered the city (provided there is no bitch among them!), concluding robustly in the first case that churches and synagogues can indeed be places where ‘ideologies, oppositions, and murderous thoughts are born’ (ibid., p. 175/193), and in the second case more wryly that we should not confuse eroticism and messianism (175/194)! Levinas observes, in closing, how the text itself reconciles the imbrication of Halakhah and Aggadah in the figure of a blacksmith-rabbi, who determines that the damage caused by fire is comparable to that caused by an arrow. Levinas sees this as confirmation that war (or fire damage) has a destructive aim (like an arrow), and that war criminals do indeed exist (DSS, 179/NTR, 196). But he also hones in movingly on the final Aggadah offered by the text, which in referring to the image in Zechariah Chapter 2, of a protective wall of fire to be built around Jerusalem, holds out the promise of reconstruction and transfiguration through the very means of original destruction (ibid., p. 180/196). Part of this peaceful use of destructive force (178/196) would derive, of course, from the use of sacred texts, the Torah being traditionally described, for example, as having letters of black fire in a frame of white fire. In this mature Talmudic exercise, Levinas bears witness to an intricate and resonant ‘reading in search of problems and truths’ whose profound self-realizations and difficult exegesis ultimately reveal a universal significance that is in no way secondary to the sensitivities of the phenomenological analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity. In the course of this activity, he also demonstrably seeks to cope with the contradictions inherent in the postulation of radical passivity through use of the ab-originality (performative, historical, generic, cultural, epistemological) opened up for him by Talmudic reading.

References Page numbers refer first to the original French text and then to the appropriate point in a published English translation. Nonetheless, all English translations are here my own. The abbreviations used are given in parenthesis below after the corresponding book title. Levinas, E. (1968). Quatre lectures talmudiques. Paris: Éditions de Minuit [cited as QLT].

142

S. Hand

Levinas, E. (1976) [1963]. Difficile liberté. Paris: Albin Michel [cited as DL]. Levinas, E. (1977). Du sacré au saint. Paris: Éditions de Minuit [cited as DSS]. Levinas, E. (1990a). Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press [cited as NTR]. Levinas, E. (1990b). Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand. London: Athlone [cited as DF].

Chapter 9

L’Être Entre les Lettres. Creation and Passivity in ‘And God Created Woman’ Luc Anckaert

Abstract This chapter consists in a close reading of ‘And God Created Woman’, a Talmudic commentary presented by Levinas in 1972. Its purpose is to deconstruct the concept of creation in order to demonstrate the radical passivity preceding human freedom. In his reading, Levinas points to the orthographic issue of the duplication of the yod in ‘vayyitzer’ (‘made’ or ‘created’). This duplication seems to point to two moments in creation. In the first creation out of nothing, humanity is at stake. Creation is the condition in which man appears as totally exposed to the all-seeing gaze of God. This passivity, without refuge, makes ethics possible. This is called ‘the mystery of the human psyche’. In the second act of creation, the relation between man and woman is established as the concrete shape of the first creation. Here Levinas deepens responsibility to unconditional responsibility: being created means being made responsible. The two concepts of creation are brought into relief with the aid of the thought of Derrida and Nancy. The relation with the alterity of the son is the incarnation of the created responsibility. This aspect is elaborated in dialogue with Kierkegaard’s and Cathérine Chalier’s commentary on the Abraham story. The son teaches by asking the question about the reality of the convenant that registers itself in being created. From the reality of the convenant, the question appears in its ultimate passivity.

The reading of Hebrew square letters leads to a radical ‘de-composition’ of the active subject as it appears in the roundings of European handwriting. In his Talmudic reading And God Created Woman (1972), Levinas refers to the created passivity that precludes closed interiority and the self-original subject (GCW, 167). In our biblical-philosophical re-reading of a part of Levinas’s reading of the tractate Berakhot 61a, we follow the twists of a commentary that pushes us toward the question: how far does absolute responsibility affect identity in its intimate, moral integrity? The series of stories about Abram and Sarai supplies the covenant as a new interpretans of the human condition.


143

144

L. Anckaert

The Duplication of Creation Not the revealing scenes of the carefree Juliette (Brigitte Bardot) who, in Roger Vadim’s 1957 film Et Dieu… créa la femme, makes men and lovers lose their heads in Saint-Tropez and becomes the symbol of emancipation, but the peripetias of the orthographic issue in ‘vayitzer’ (ρεχψ⎡ψ〈ω) in Gen. 2:7 open up space for the word about creation. Although the title, And God Created Woman, suggests that the creation of woman is at stake, the Talmud text begins with statements about the spelling of the word ‘vayitzer’. The orthographic issue concerns the duplication of the yod (ψ⎡Ψ): a duality is registered in the act of creation . Moreover, the creation of the man and the creation of the woman (Gen. 2:22) are indicated by two different verbs: ρεχψ⎡Ψ〈ω (made) and ⎦}εβ⎡Ψ〈ω (built). There is a double duplication (within the verb and between both verbs), so that a double structure of creation is represented: a creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) in which human responsibility is at stake, and a creation out of humanity (creatio ex homine) in which the relationship between man and woman is established. Nothing precedes human responsibility, so it is absolute and unconditioned. The sexual relationship, however, can only be situated within and out of this responsibility. Since the title focuses on the creation of woman, the first creation appears in a Derridean perspective as the inscription or the exergue: the legend or the effigy on the coin, which, in circulation, always acquires new meanings (usurious interest), but which can also, first of all, be blotted out (Derrida 1974, 1998b). Man is given use of the garden to realize humanity in a meaningful way. In the temptation of temptation – the tree of knowledge – this production of meaning is blotted out (TT, 33). As temptation, philosophy departs from an idealistic I who refuses to be tempted by what precedes it and who itself postulates the non-I. But erring as well is related to the exergue (erratique) (Derrida 1979). Kafka elaborated this in the narrative of his novel The Castle, where the land surveyor, as the master of orientation, gets lost in the snowed-under village during his search for the life secret as it is symbolized by the castle. In The Trial, Joseph K. is misled by the doorkeepers about the law, the Thora (translated by Rosenzweig as Weisung or orientation). Kafka’s text can be read as a reversal or inversion of the meaning of the Creation story. Maybe the law is another metaphor for the tree. Anyway, in the British Museum, two colossal guards watch over the crown room of Nimrod. In the middle of the crown room is the tree of knowledge (Anckaert 2004). But the first creation is also an ex-ergon or par-ergon (Derrida 1986, 1987) – a creation preceding and following out of the creation of man and woman: ‘apart from its division into masculine and feminine’ (GCW, 164). The French original ‘en dehors de la division de l’humain en masculin et féminin’ (DCF, 127) expresses the differentiation between inside/outside in a much stronger way. The phrase points to a double division again: ‘dehors’ and ‘division’. To create is to divide. This dividing creation precedes the climax of the division of man and woman.

9

L’Être Entre les Lettres. Creation and Passivity in ‘And God Created Woman’

145

The creatio ex nihilo The creation out of nothing is evoked in three conflicting statements. In their difference and their sequence, they provide the con-text that precedes the text about woman (GCW, 164): Rab Nahman, son of Rav Hisda, taught: Why, in “The Lord God made man” (Genesis 2: 7) is “made”, vayitzer, written with two yods?

The incipit – in the Hebrew text the verb is in the beginning of the sentence – questions the spelling of the word ‘to create’. The letter determines the being. But the letter is essentially divided: why are there two yods? The differentiation precedes the origin, so that an original beginning is impossible. Moreover, the two yods are not the same: the second follows the first and can only be second because there is a first. Two immediately implies an order. Between the letters – which are the same – the difference between one and two gapes. The first creation – or the creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) – means, right from the start, a difference between and within beings. Being human is divided, so that duality is introduced in being human. This passivity of the division radically precedes man’s active responsibility. Jean-Luc Nancy frequently relates the creation out of nothing to ‘Being Singular Plural’ [être-singulier-pluriel] (Nancy 2000). All being is being divided or being with, but this being divided is also being different (Nancy 2004: 67, 197, 230). In being divided there is a repetition in heterogeneity: the second yod repeats the first. The repetition shows an irreducible alterity: the alterity of the other consists in the contiguity to one’s own origin: Right away, then, there is the repetition of the touches of meaning, which meaning demands. This incommensurable, absolutely heterogeneous repetition opens up an irreducible strangeness of each one of these touches to the other. The other origin is incomparable or inassimilable, not because it is simply “other”, but because it is an origin and touch of meaning. Or rather, the alterity of the other is its originary contiguity with the “proper” origin. You are absolutely strange because the world begins its turn with you [le monde commence à son tour à toi] (Nancy 2000: 6).

In every being, creation starts from nothing: Not only is the nihil nothing prior but there is also no longer a “nothing” that preexists creation; it is the act of appearing [surgissement], it is the very origin – insofar as this is understood only as what is designated by the verb “to originate” (ibid., p. 16).

The spatial contiguity implies that the beings are situated in a sequence from the division of the being. The first statement of the Talmudic discussion is made by Rav Nahman, son of Rav Hisda. It is the first and only time that Levinas actually translates ‘bar’ or ‘ben’ from the Talmudic indications of names as ‘son’. Ironically, in the French edition the word is spelled with double ‘ll’ (in quotations from the Talmud text in the comment itself, the double ‘l’ is dropped): ‘Rav Nahman, fills de Rav Hisda, enseigna: “Pourquoi dans ‘L’Eternel-Dieu façonna l’homme’ (Gen. 2:7) façonna, vayitzer, s’écrit-il avec deux yod?’ (DCF, 122). It is the son who teaches by asking the question

146

L. Anckaert

about the incipit or the origin of creation. Derrida writes in a similar way about Cicero’s son’s question (Derrida 1998: 12). In Totality and Infinity, Levinas relates being the son to the creation ex nihilo: Filiality itself can not appear as essential to the destiny of the I unless man retains his memory of the creation ex nihilo, without which the son is not the true other (TI, 63).

The son’s question is the question about the origin that appears to be essentially divided. The essential characteristic of being the son is found in the transubstantiation of being the father. As alterity, the son breaks through the synchronous time of the father’s life and offers a new future exceeding the father’s capacities. The answer to the son’s question is that the Holy One has created two inclinations (‘yetzer’): the good and the bad. Levinas prefers a different translation, though. Referring to Is. 29:6 where the word ‘yetzer’ means ‘creature’, Levinas points out that creation involves two creatures (Levinas wrongly refers to Is. 29:6. The correct reference is Is. 29:16). The inclinations are a double creation. In the act of creation, two creatures are created in one: being human means being two in being one. The substance is ‘torn apart’ in its intimacy. The existence is at the junction of two possibilities excluding one another: conscience and freedom of choice. Together, they make reason. Being human is understood as universal rationality transcending and belonging to the natural order. The created man is a citizen of two worlds. In a first comment, Levinas relates being the son, the creatio ex nihilo, and the division (partage) of being to each other. Passively, man is created with an inner division between rationality and arbitrariness. But there is an objection to this reading: Rav Nahman bar Isaac objected: If this is so, then does this mean that the animal which (he made), vayitzer (Genesis 2:19, where vayitzer is not written with two yods), does not have good and evil inclinations, though we can see that an animal can destroy, bite, and kick? (GCW, 165).

In the case of the animal, ‘vayitzer’ is written with one yod. Yet the animal can bite and kick as well as obey and work. So how can one say that the difference between arbitrariness and rational conscience is distinctive of man? The animal can also make choices. Is creation then not more like a covenant with all life, in which man holds no exceptional place? Do man and animal not belong to the same species, with only a difference in degree? Levinas relates this objection to two important patterns of reasoning in Western philosophy. To put the difference between man and animal into perspective, man is described as a reasonable animal (animal rationale). Man and animal share a preceding generic substance and only differ accidentally or specifically. There is no unbridgeable gap between man and animal. Next, the link is made with Platonic anthropology and ethics. The instincts can receive guidance from reason but reason can also be at the service of the instincts. In this case, Kant speaks about perversity as the fundamental reversal of order between the rational-moral basic maxim and the pathological inclinations (Kant 1960). By linking reason to blind passions, the rupture between man and animal is denied. Reason is not necessarily universal but can also be at the service of animal instincts. We find this line of argumentation in Peter Singer’s deep ecology, which is inspired by Darwin:

9


147

the higher ape species are allocated human rights. This aberration is based on the idea that, on the one hand, the higher ape species possess cognitive models which allow them to learn language and, on the other, that they are more human than people who are marked by lunacy, senility, or organic diseases depriving them of the use of reason (Derrida & Roudinesco 2001: 105). Both the classifying logic and the intellectual anthropology are incompatible with the logic of the division. The common ethos of man and animal is divided. The text pushes forward to a further interpretation: The two yods must be interpreted according to Rav Simeon ben Pazzi; for Rav Simeon ben Pazzi said: Woe is me because of my Creator, woe is me because of my own evil inclination (GCW, 165).

For the second time, Levinas considers the orthographic issue. ‘Vayitzer’ is ‘decomposed’ or broken down into ‘vay-yitzer’. The French verb ‘décomposer’ conveys a quadruple meaning: resolving in prime factors, slowly executing a movement, causing to rot or beginning to decompose, and finally, facial contortions. ‘Vayitzer’ is ‘decomposed’ into irreducible parts or slowly executed to ‘vay-yitzer’: the misfortune of the creature. The de-composition of man’s creation demonstrates the misfortune of the creature. The creature finds itself in an impossible position through an inner dilemma. As obedient to the creator’s will, the creature is no longer a natural creature. Obedience to the law means the misfortune of the sensitive being. But as obedient to its inclinations, the creature becomes a stranger to the creator and the law. The law is the Thora, which is put on man as a dome, not allowing any arbitrary choices (cf. TT). The creature is torn apart between obedience to the law and giving in to its own desires (concupiscentia). Human existence is fundamentally dramatic in its intrinsic rupture with libidinal eroticism. The decomposition refers to the contorted face: Or one must even interpret in the manner of Rav Jeremiah ben Eleazar, for Rav Jeremiah ben Eleazar said: Two faces did the Holy One, Blessed be He, create in the first man, for isn’t it written (Psalms 139: 5) “You hedge me before and behind; You lay Your hand upon me” (GCW, 166).

In a third movement, the two yods are read as two faces. This interpretation is not taken from Genesis, which would mean the faces are turned to each other in the erotic attraction of man and woman, but from Psalm 139:5. This verse finally explains the anomaly of the two yods. With one face, the back of the subject’s head remains hidden. With two faces, everything is visible and there are no mental reservations left. God’s gaze sees into man in all directions, into life and death. There is no refuge or hiding place left. God’s hand seizes and leads man everywhere. There is no escape to the left or to the right: neither up nor down. From the context of the Psalm’s verse, it seems impossible to escape from God, from his all-seeing omnipotent gaze. This look, however, is no misfortune, but an obsessive election. This is the complete visibility of man to the eye of the Invisible. Further on in the text, this is called ‘the mystery of the human psyche’ (GCW, 170). Man’s secret is

148

L. Anckaert

not a hidden and impenetrable unconsciousness, but the complete visibility of the face to God’s eye. The (in)visibility can be understood in two ways (Derrida 1995). Something that is invisible can be made visible by a change of position or a revelation (e.g., the back of a cupboard or the contents of a box). The lifting of this invisibility by Abschattungen (Husserl) leads to the constitution of an ideal object. There is a further invisibility that cannot be lifted because the invisible is beyond visibility (e.g., a smell). In the Psalm text, every darkness or secrecy becomes visible to God’s eye and there is no escape left. There is visibility of the first order. And yet this visibility is only there to the eye of the Transcendent. To one’s fellow man, there is still invisibility. As with Gyges, the mystical relationship where everything becomes visible is invisible to the outside world. But the transparency to God’s eye does not mean that man can see God. Although the subject is visible, God remains invisible. Man’s visibility to God’s invisible eye, which is invisible to his fellow man, is the end of the closed interiority and the active subject. The Western subject as res cogitans, thetic consciousness, idealistic position, constituting intentionality or active consciousness, always considers itself as an original existence that objectifies the world in its different modalities with its personal look upon things (Sartre 2001). ‘Two faces’ means the end of personal noumenal power. The face of the Infinite, which precedes the subject’s objectifying look, is always and everywhere. Finiteness is surrounded on all sides by infinity. The parabola of the double face conveys a deeper meaning yet. The infinity, which sees through the finite, refers to the neighbour whose face calls for a new responsibility. Under God’s eye, without sleep, one is the bearer of another subject. The mysterious being seen by God is a responsibility for the other. The gift of the Thora consists in an ethical commitment. When the skin completely turns into a face, the being experiences a ‘shelling’. This synonym for decomposition refers to a hidden inner core which is exposed. The naked existence before God’s eye – by which the whole skin becomes visible and no secrecy can be left – is the place where responsibility for the neighbour is registered. The double face means that it is impossible to pretend one does not see the other’s need. Levinas has listened patiently to the texts. The one text is a track leading to the other one. Creation was consecutively described as the rational choice, the relation to the bestial and the intimate transparency in godly light. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida writes concerning Patocka’s heretical texts (Patocka 1981) about the history of religion as the history of responsibility. With a reading of Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard 2006; Anckaert 2008) at the back of his mind and his insight into the three stages, Derrida distinguishes the atmosphere of ‘the concept of the daimon (which) crosses the boundaries separating the human, the animal, and the divine,’ (Derrida 1995: 3), which is connected to orgastic sexuality, the universality of the ethical order, and the transparency of the religious attitude. It is remarkable that the order differs. The philosophical and the Talmudic logic are here in conflict. According to Derrida and the Western tradition, the demonic occurs in the speleology of Plato’s cave. The philosopher experiences death or gives death to himself (philosophy as learning how to die: mele/th qana/tou – Phaedo 81a)

9


149

so as to join, in a reversal, the light of the idea of good. From the universality of ethics there is the leap into the religious attitude in which man stands in total visibility to the other in his infinite difference, who is looking without being seen. The transitions from the one atmosphere to the other take place by means of repression, a rupture, a reversal. In Totality and Infinity, the philosopher Levinas describes a similar movement of transascendence from the ‘there is’ via separation to the alterity relation (Anckaert 2006). The reading of square letters shows a different logic. The ethical mystery of the double face is divided in man’s division into the law, on the one hand, and the division from bestiality, on the other hand. The transdescendent movement from the Infinite thwarts the transascendent movement so that the mystery of the human psyche, viz. being created as a double face, is divided in an ethical universality and in a division from the animal. Being created as invisible doubly penetrates visible reality. The concrete ethical choices are the realizations of creation: ‘The world is here so that the ethical order has the possibility of being fulfilled’ (TT, 41).

The creatio ex homine From the triple reading of the double yod, the sexual difference can be situated. The erotic arises out of the social aspect. The meaning of woman becomes clear from the meaning of the inner division of being human. In distinction from the human creation, another word refers to the creation of woman: ‘built’. The following discussion concerns the relationship between man and woman. We follow the thread leading to the second mention of the son: Rab and Samuel are talking. One said: It was a face (the famous rib was a face). The other said: It was a tail (GCW, 169).

The first question is whether the face or the lower tail bone is intended. The discussion about the second creation does not concern the question of whether woman is part of being human. The question is whether she is created simultaneously with man or whether a second act of creation is postulated. In the first case, man and woman are perfectly equivalent and the sexual relationship is part of the essence of being human. In the second case, woman is called to life in a separate act of creation. Man and woman are created in two original acts of creation and are, like the two yods, contiguous. Both creatures are persons. The sexual difference is subordinate in this respect. The difference which, in the first place, is an element of being human, characterizes man and woman as open beings summoned to responsibility. Levinas here rejects the enticing ideal of courtly love and the eternal feminine. Ethics does not originate from libido, be it sublimated or not. The fact that the woman postulates her own creation also means that man and woman do not participate in a preceding common ontological source, as claimed in Plato’s androgyne myth (cf. Symposium 190d–194e). From this position in creation, the feminine is understood as an original category of being. Both in man and woman a specific world comes to life. In various texts (TI, 1969b), Levinas refers to Proverbs where the feminine is the original category of being that

150

L. Anckaert

engenders the home. Woman’s discrete presence provides the house from which man faces the world. Man has a place outside the house. This original fact of being is not based on the sexual difference, but is possible through a division of being in which different people constitute a different category of being. Different people are the full and different manifestation of creation in their responsible actions in the world. This has nothing to do with a conservative view of social roles: the discussion is on a totally different level. Being created is in its diversity an original and irreducible fact of being. The stay-at-home father who keeps the house as a place of reception for his working wife and school-going children, or the Trappist community which safeguards a place of hospitality in the economic world, both demonstrate de facto that the male and the female categories of being are not linked to a sexist place and role in society. While the discussion of the face and the tail is connected to the statements about creation, the reading leads to further reflection. The interpretation of the face does not contradict the Psalm text from which the transparency of the absolute ethical openness is understood. But what about the tail? Rav Ammi reinterprets the Psalm text and sees man as the last in creation and the first for punishment: For the one who said: “It was a face”, the text “You hedge me before and behind” presents no difficulties. But what does the one who maintains that it is a tail do with the text? We must acknowledge that he thinks like Rav Ammi. For Rav Ammi said: “behind” means “the last one created”, “before” means “the first one to be punished” (GCW, 170).

Man is the last created being. The world has not come into being through the projection and the concept of man, nor is it the result of some thetic freedom. On the contrary, the world is given to man. So this means, rather, that man can reply to what he has not made himself, and can be responsible for creation as he received it. Rav Ammi situates humanity in a responsibility for all. As the last in creation, the authentic humanity of man and woman consists in a responsibility for all. The sexual difference is subordinate to this. The interpretation of the tail is kept and given a new meaning. As responsible for creation, man is also the first to be punished, since responsibility is unconditional (ex nihilo). In the discussion concerning the creation of woman, Levinas deepens responsibility to unconditional responsibility. Being created ultimately means being made responsible. The idea is further developed predictably into the secondary difference between man and woman. Levinas finishes off his commentary with a consideration of the risks involved in concrete social relationships. Before doing so, however, he writes about ‘the relation with the other person through the son’ (GCW, 174).

Re capitulatio The incipit consisted in the son’s question regarding the letters of the text necessary to understand man’s being. Levinas’s commentary points out ‘the mystery of the human psyche’ as the radical openness in the light of the Transcendent. Being created man and woman is an original and irreducible act of being. What can the

9


151

suggestive reference to the son evoke here? To this end we return to the preceding quotation in the original language and pay attention to a minor detail, the presence of an ellipsis in the French sentence: ‘le rapport avec autrui par le fils…’ (DCF, 144). How can the ellipsis ‘…’ be completed? What happens to Isaac, the son of the covenant? We read the theme of the dividing creation retrospectively from the covenant. This covenant is cut as a caesura (Hebrew calls it karat berith: the cutting of the covenant). Abram is the type from which the antitype of Adam can be read (Frye 1982). Or, the father of faith incarnates the meaning which creation makes possible. In her reading of the Sarai series, Levinas’s student Cathérine Chalier raises the question about the limit of ethical responsibility (Chalier 2000). If the subject becomes the neighbour’s hostage in responsibility, this may well destroy his/her own identity. How far can the subject go in replying to the other’s appeal, be it justified or not? Or, at what point do violence and evil come in? Concretely, to what degree can a doctor comply with an urgent and sincere request for euthanasia without losing his own moral integrity? The relationship between man and woman becomes a dialogue for the first time in the words that Sarai and Abram exchange with one another (Levy-Valensis 1978). Before that, dialogue was only with God. The first human words are not expressed in the tender mutuality of an enticing eroticism, though, but represent a double ethical test. Abram is tested when he acknowledges Sarai’s beauty when entering Egypt. Sarai’s beauty, which reflects Eve’s beauty, is a threat to his life. To escape, Abram uses a double ruse. He smuggles Sarai into Egypt (Rashi n.d. on Gen. 12:13) in a box, and then asks her to impersonate his sister (Gen. 12:13). Abram tests Sarai by asking her to deny her identity as a spouse and to give herself to Pharaoh. Abram appeals to another to save his life, and the other obeys: ‘The one’s supplication provokes to the other one a rupture in the pure immanence of life, in the simple perseverance in being’ (Chalier 2000: 20). Sarai is willing to bring death upon herself; as an ethical subject, she is willing to save the other’s life in substitution. This substitution consists in a lapse of her moral identity by surrendering to Pharaoh’s bestial passion. But there is also Sarai’s question to Abram. Sterility means to Sarai an ordeal that consists in social death. The woman’s body knows its own cyclical time, marked by the uncleanness of menstrual periods and giving birth. During this uncleanness, woman is banned from social and cultural life. Collective time, which is borne by hope and nostalgia, expectation and regret, is kept apart from woman’s personal time. Only motherhood allows for the woman’s life to be registered in this collective time (Chalier 1992). From the ordeal of her infertility – through which she does not count as a woman and loses her identity – Sarai uses a ruse and begs Abram to deny his identity as a husband in order to father a son with Hagar. Abram complies with Sarai’s request and uses a slave as her substitute. Both put the other’s word above themselves. The tests are the acute question of how far the radical passivity between people, who all find their foundations in their ethical homeland, can destroy the values of moral integrity and identity:

152

L. Anckaert

The idea of the good rises, merely by the fact itself that, in the encounter, the other counts above all else. The Relationship where the I encounters the You is the original place and circumstance of the ethical coming [avènement]. The ethical fact owes nothing to values; it is values that owe everything to the ethical fact. The concreteness of the Good is the worth [le valoir] of the other man (GCM, 147).

The implication is that man’s ‘moral identity and integrity’ is lifted by one’s passivity or submission to the other’s request. Through adultery as a double substitution at the other’s request, the first biblical couple lose their moral integrity. Does this mean the end of being a subject? Can responsibility imply that one considers oneself only as a means to the other’s end and no longer as a purpose or a person? Does absolute responsibility, founded in the covenant of creation, mean the destruction of the universal categorical imperative? As a double discourse the Midrash gives an answer (Chalier 1992: 21–35). Within the ethical commitment there is a difference: Sarai reveals her identity as Abram’s wife to Pharao with cunning tears, so as to escape his violence. Is this indicative of a weakness in Sarai’s reply to Abram’s need? Presumably not. By saving her own integrity as the chosen woman, Sarai saves herself and secures the possibility for the covenant to be incarnated in herself. Because of the prospective third party – Isaac – Sarai is entitled to resist Abram’s request. The third party’s presence breaks through the ethical fascination of the dialogue – a potential sublimation of erotic attraction: ‘I do everything for you’ – where the one is willing to give up his/her life for the other. The fascination of Abram and Sarai facing each other is broken by the third party who was promised in the covenant: The third party – always present – forestalls the psychological disaster of an isolated relationship in which the one only exists through the other. He breaks through the drunkenness of pure satisfaction of the one by the other, of total mutual fulfilment. By introducing an openness to the idea of some “beyond”, by breaking through the illusion of the neighbour as a mirror and an equal, he demands that one frees oneself from the metaphors of the one, of the completion of ultimately fulfilled life (Chalier 1998: 33).

Sarai also has a double face: the responsibility for Abram forces her to look at the other side where she sees the demands of responsibility for the promised son. Her responsibility as a human being is absolute (ex nihilo). It precedes and allows her responsibility as a partner (ex homine). After the double test, the names that express their identity are changed. The letters express a new kind of being. Sarai becomes Sarah and Abram becomes Abraham. To the names Abram and Sarai the letter hè [η] is added. As the letter of creation, it evokes the grace of growing and multiplying. The yod, as the first consonant of the tetragram, numerically possesses the value of two hè’s. This yod is taken away from Sarai and divided between Abraham and Sarah. The covenant is cut and divided so that Abram and Sarai receive a new identity. This is registered in the flesh through the circumcision and the son’s birth. In this way, a new future becomes possible. The new names point to a growing universality of the covenant. Abraham becomes the father of all, while the particularity of the possessive suffix yod is taken away from Sarah. But Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son: the ultimate test. Unlike the first tests there is no request to sacrifice personal identity to save the other, but actually to

9


153

sacrifice the other. Here too personal identity is sacrificed, as is the promise for the future. At this moment the son’s appalling question is: ‘Father, where is the lamb?’ Let us put this question in terms of Levinas’s threefold stratification. Isaac wants to sacrifice the animal so as to end the perversion of man and to restore the ethical order. Abraham wishes to sacrifice ethics as reasonable responsibility and to establish the religious order as the ultimate invisible transparency (Kierkegaard 2006). Both Isaac and Abraham rise from the speleology and from the reasonable-moral universality into mystery. The rise to Moria is an active transascendent movement as the historical evolution to the absolute responsibility. The sacrifice is its ultimate realization. This possibility of ultimate transparency being realized by man is thwarted by a transdescendence. The angel who had enabled the hospitality and the responsibility for the third party (the promise for the future) prevents the sacrifice. Because Abraham is ‘doing the word’ (Gen 22:16: ρ¬φβφΔαη−τε) τψ⌠ι&φ(:), the promise of the son is renewed and multiplied. Dealing death to oneself by dealing death to the other – the final and ultimate sacrifice at Moria – is substituted by the ram. When Abraham returns, the sons are born. In the recapitulatio of the son’s word, the absolute responsibility – the double face of total transparency as suggested in the letter of the text – is calibrated from the concrete responsibility for the third party. This third party is not present but prospective. The son’s initial question concerning creation ultimately means a unique responsibility with a view to the future of the promise. The son refers to the transubstantiation and incarnation of the absolute responsibility in man’s being (TI, 267; 1991). The singularity of this absolute responsibility is an invisible secret that bears the universality of the ethical duty. The action on Moria is the substitution of immortality for mortality: death is killed. This mystery of the human psyche is divided in terms of ethical behaviour: man’s holiness means the rupture with bestiality and the instauration of the universal ethical responsibility. The said transubstantiation is not a rising out of the speleology of bestial perversion or a surrogate and surpassing of the universality of the ethical duty, but the metamorphosis of the identity that becomes transparent from two sides. The responsibility for the third party is the transubstantiation of ethics. The son teaches by asking his question about the reality of the covenant that registers itself in being created. From the relationship of the covenant, the question of creation can be read as the radical passivity that has made the ethical responsibility possible.

References Anckaert, L. (2004). ‘Franz Kafka en de wet’, in Collationes, 34(3): 309–330. Anckaert, L. (2006). A Critique of Infinity. Rosenzweig and Levinas. Leuven: Peeters. Anckaert, L. (2008). ‘The Secret of Abraham and its Repetition. A Narrative Reflection on the Relation between Faith and Ethics’, in De Tavernier, J. (Ed.) Responsibility, God and Society. Theological Ethics in Dialogue. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 25–48. Chalier, C. (1992). L’Histoire promise. Paris: Cerf. Chalier, C. (2000). Les matriarches. Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel et Léa. Paris: Cerf.

154

L. Anckaert

Derrida, J. (1974). ‘The White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in New Literary History, 6(1): 7–74. Derrida, J. (1979). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche, trans. B. Harlow. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Derrida, J. (1986). Parages. Paris: Galilée. Derrida, J. (1987). The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington & I. McLeod. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills. Chicago, IL/London: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1998). ‘Psyché. Invention de l’autre,’ in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, pp. 11–61. Derrida, J. (1998b). ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’, in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, pp. 63–93. Derrida, J. & Roudinesco, E. (2001). De quoi demain… Dialogue. Paris: Galilée-Fayard. Frye, N. (1982). The Great Code. The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge – Kegan Paul. Kant, I. (1960). Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T. M. Greene & H. H. Hudson. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Kierkegaard, S. (2006). Fear and Trembling, trans. C. S. Evans & S. Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. (1969a). Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh-The Hague: Duquesne University Press-Martinus Nijhoff [cited as TI]. Levinas, E. (1969b). ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, in Judaism, 18: 30–38. Levinas, E. (1977). ‘Et Dieu créa la femme’, in Du sacré au Saint. Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit, pp. 122–148 [cited as DCF]. Levinas, E. (1990a). Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press [cited as NTR]. Levinas, E. (1990b). ‘The Temptation of Temptation’, in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 30–50 [cited as TT]. Levinas, E. (1990c). ‘And God Created Woman’, in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 161–177 [cited as GCW]. Levinas, E. (1991). ‘De zon, de maan en de bijbel’, in Burggraeve, R. (Ed.) De bijbel geeft te denken. Schepping, milieu, lijden, roeping, Gods passie voor de ander, vergeving, bevrijding van de ethiek. In gesprek met Levinas. Leuven−Amersfoort: Acco, pp. 265–283. Levinas, E. (1998). Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. B. Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [cited as GCM]. Levy-Valensis, E. A. (1978). La nature de la pensée inconsciente. Paris: Delarge. Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson. Stanford, CA/California: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2004). La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Patocka, J. (1981). Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire, trans. E. Abrams. Lagrasse: Verdier. Rashi (n.d.). Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary – Genesis, trans. M. Rosenbaum & A. M. Silbermann. New York: Hebrew. Sartre, J.-P. (2001). Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. E. H. Barnes & M. Warnock. London: Routledge.

Index

A a posteriori, 63 a priori, 4, 34, 40, 63, 65, 134 ab-original, 9, 137, 140 ab-originality, 9, 118, 133–141 absolute, 4, 7, 10, 21, 28, 40, 41, 45, 49, 59, 60, 62–65, 74, 88, 107, 116, 123, 136, 143, 144, 150, 152, 153 acting, 22, 63, 69, 71, 72, 74, 78, 83, 87, 136 action, 1, 4–6, 10, 15, 16, 18, 23, 26, 28, 63, 69, 81, 82, 84, 87, 92, 95–107, 116, 122, 124, 134, 150, 153 activity, 3, 6, 18, 31–33, 36, 39, 40, 45–48, 63, 64, 67, 74, 96, 101, 102, 120, 141 activity-passivity, 5, 67 addiction, 4, 5, 58, 59, 67, 70–73, 75, 77 aesthetic, 16, 31, 56 affect, 32, 38, 52, 143 affectation, 29, 33, 36, 58 affective states, 37 agency, 1, 6, 9, 16–18, 23, 26–28, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 137 ethical, 1, 6, 16, 18, 27, 28, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107 agent, 1, 16, 18, 23, 82 rational, 82 alterity, 5, 6, 10, 18–20, 37, 39, 41, 42, 60, 61, 86, 88, 95–104, 106, 107, 114, 116, 122, 124, 143, 145, 146, 149 altruism, 2, 15, 28, 32, 57 anachronism, 133, 135 an-archic, 20, 31, 32, 103–106, 127 anarchy, 6, 27 Angst, 35 animal, 58, 83, 86, 89, 146–149, 153 anthropology, 55, 140, 146, 147 appeal, 4, 5, 10, 23, 26, 67, 75, 76, 81–84, 87–89, 91, 92, 100, 101, 103, 106, 141, 120, 125, 151

appropriation, 5, 57, 81, 85, 86 arche, 6 Aristotle, 52, 88 asceticism, 5, 67, 70, 71, 74–77 asymmetry, 55, 62, 69, 122, 126 double (chiastic), 55, 62 asymmetric height, 55 asymmetrical equality, 122 atheism, 6, 95, 136 autarky, 6, 64, 95 authentic, 10, 70, 77, 150 authenticity, 70, 77 autonomy, 3, 16, 19, 22, 27, 28, 69, 70, 106 Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 11, 18, 19, 29, 41, 57, 66, 99 autrui, 6, 17, 39, 43, 50, 51, 60, 95, 107, 151

B Bataille, George, 17 being, 3–10, 15, 17–29, 31–33, 35–45, 48, 50–52, 55–59, 61–65, 67, 69–78, 82, 83, 85–90, 95–107, 113, 116, 117, 119–124, 126–129, 133, 135–138, 140, 141, 143, 145–153 absurdity of, 20 beyond, 97, 104–106, 120 -in-itself, 31 -in-the-world, 72, 73 inversion of, 100, 101, 103, -with, 20, 70, 73, 77, 145 -for-the-Other, 62, 64, 101 -for-you, 61, 62 belonging, 9, 33, 72, 73, 77, 146 Bernasconi, Robert, 6, 96–99, 107, 113, 118, 123, 125 binary, 2, 47 Blanchot, Maurice, 97, 107

155

156 body, 31–37, 40–42, 47–49, 68, 74, 83, 84, 87, 116, 151 body-subject, 4, 48, 51 boredom, 35, 76 Brentano, Franz, 33 Buddhism, 68 Burggraeve, Roger, 3, 15, 16, 23–26

C care, 1, 2, 4, 15, 21, 65, 90, 116, 127, 139 -for-self, 124 -for-the-other, 1, 15, 21, 124, 125 category, 10, 88, 134, 149, 150 Chalier, Catherine, 7, 10, 113, 118, 143, 151, 152 cogito, 59, 60, 62 community, 83, 91, 99, 106, 150 conatus essendi, 4, 43, 57 concern, 1, 2, 10, 15, 28, 34, 37, 38, 41, 46, 51, 55, 64–66, 90, 107, 116, 149 confessional writings, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118 conscience, 9, 22, 32, 37, 44, 46, 70, 76, 77, 103, 146 consciousness, 3, 4, 6, 16, 19, 23, 27, 31–52, 59, 63, 69, 71, 76, 97, 98, 105–107, 124, 126, 135, 137, 148 conscious, 17, 23, 27, 36, 43–45, 134 intentional, 3, 31, 33, 34, 42, 49 consumerism, 4, 59 contraction, 24, 26 contradiction, 4, 7, 42, 104, 121 covenant, 10, 143, 146, 151–153 creation, 9, 10, 60, 126, 143–153 creatio ex homine, 9, 144, 149 creatio ex nihilo, 9, 144–146 second, 10, 149 creature, 5, 9, 10, 20, 69, 146, 147, 149

D das Man, 69, 73 Dasein, 73, 107 De l’existence a l’existant, 19 delirium, 31, 35, 37–39, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 97, 102, 107, 123 Descartes, René, 59, 60, 71, 125, 126 desire, 4, 16, 21, 22, 24–26, 35, 38, 39, 44, 49, 51, 56, 60, 76, 77, 99, 100, 103, 124, 129 for the absolute, 4, 21, 63 determinateness, 5, 81, 89 determination, 19, 21, 22, 69, 124 determined, 4, 22, 34, 44, 63, 64, 73, 81, 123

Index dialectic, 36, 38, 39, 59, 81 dialectical, 60, 134 difference, 3, 9, 10, 15, 17, 27, 33, 46, 59, 60, 62, 69, 70, 74, 88, 92, 97, 12,1 122, 137, 141, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152 radical, 59, 62, 141 sexual, 10, 149, 150 dissonance, 8, 138 divine, 59 the Divine, 26, 61, 88, 95, 127, 128, 148 dream, 37, 38, 40, 45–52, 67, 68 dreaming, 4, 31, 35, 38, 40 dualism, 3, 31, 43, 44 duality, 3, 9, 40, 144, 145 duty, 26, 153 dynamism, 26, 27

E economic existence, 20 economy, 4, 5, 19, 55, 56, 58–60, 66, 75, 83 ego, 3, 4, 16, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32–34, 37, 55–57, 62–64, 70, 87, 97, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 128 transcendental, 16, 19, 37, 63, 64 egocentricity, 106 egocentrism, 2, 4, 28, 57 egoism, 1, 15, 21, 28, 32, 57, 86, 107 egoist, 4, 19–21, 28, 86 egoistic, 4, 5, 19, 57, 58, 74, 75 egoity, 57, 64 egotistical, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27 election, 50, 55, 66, 147 empathy, 15, 17 empirical, 5, 6, 36, 63, 85, 88, 105, 107 encounter, 5, 6, 20, 25, 27, 40, 45, 46, 50, 60, 62, 65, 81, 87, 90–92, 95, 97–100, 152 endurance, 4, 56–58 enigma, 18, 23, 97, 103–105 enjoyment, 4, 5, 20, 21, 39, 56–58, 61, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74–76, 78, 86, 87, 91 epistemology, 8, 47, 135, 140, 141 equality, 62, 69, 122 equivalent, 10, 149 eros, 17, 39, 60 essence, 4, 6, 8, 10, 19, 58, 61, 74, 89, 95, 100, 103–106, 113, 120, 123, 135, 138, 149 ethical, 1–3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15–29, 31, 37–39, 46, 55, 75, 76, 81–93, 95–99, 101–107, 113–118, 121, 123, 124, 127–129, 133, 136–138, 140, 148–153 action, 1, 6, 16, 26, 95–107 agent, 1, 16, 23

Index concern, 2, 15, 37, 46 experience, 5, 81–93 life, 5, 20, 21, 31 pre-ethical, 19–22, 28 problem, 15–29 solution, 15, 24 ethicality, 21 ethics, 2, 4, 6, 9, 15–17, 19–22, 24, 28, 48, 59, 60, 69, 76, 88, 95, 96, 99, 101, 104, 107, 113–116, 118, 120–129, 143, 146, 149, 153 evil, 10, 55, 63–65, 137, 140, 141, 146, 147, 151 exegesis, 119, 134–136, 138, 141 exist, 5, 6, 22, 23, 38, 65, 84–86, 98, 125, 141 existence, 3, 4, 8, 9, 18–20, 24, 25, 38, 39, 43, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 70, 72, 73, 85, 89, 92, 106, 107, 135, 136, 146–148 existential, 20, 118, 136 existent, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28 expulsion, 26, 56, 77 exteriority, 24, 26, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42, 57, 74, 83, 97, 98, 106, 123

F face, 4, 5, 7, 17, 20, 23, 25–27, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 59–62, 69, 75, 76, 81–92, 97, 99, 103, 107, 111, 114, 123–128, 141, 147–150, 152, 153 double, 148, 149, 152, 153 -of-the-other, 4, 25, 26, 88, 123, 126–128 to face encounter, 5, 81 fact, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 15, 21, 32, 34, 39, 40, 46, 57, 58, 61, 72, 69, 73, 75, 77, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92, 95, 99, 104–107, 111–113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 127, 128, 134, 137, 140, 149, 150, 152 fecundity, 25, 51 feeling, 17, 24–26, 32, 50, 58, 63, 68, 69, 71, 89, 129 feminine, 10, 144, 149 flux, 33, 52 for-another 5, 29, 42, 62, 84, 107, 118, force, 16, 18, 27, 28, 45, 56, 57, 64, 70, 77, 81–84, 87–90, 98, 105, 106, 125, 134, 141, 152 potentia, 18, 28 for-itself, 20, 28, 35, 38–40, 42, 45, 103, 107 for-the-other, 2, 6, 19, 24, 26, 28, 39, 40, 62–64, 73, 75, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105–107, 115, 122–129, 148, 152

157 freedom, 1–3, 6, 8, 9, 16–23, 26–29, 32, 44, 45, 70, 72–74, 107, 120, 121, 125–128, 133–136, 138, 139, 143, 146, 150 beyond, 8, 138 free, 1, 3, 15, 20–23, 27–29 of choice, 9, 16, 17, 146 radical, 3, 18, 21, 22, 28 subjective, 3, 19, 28 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 35, 37, 48, 50, 52

G Girard, René, 77, 78 giving, 6, 9, 76, 92, 147, 151 God, 5, 7, 9, 25, 26, 59, 60, 63, 71, 81, 88, 92, 95, 97, 103, 104, 111, 114, 117, 124–128, 140, 143–145, 147–149, 151 good, 4, 28, 51, 63–65, 68, 76, 90, 103, 137, 146, 149, 152 goodness, 2, 21, 26, 29, 58, 90, 103, 122, 128 the Good, 1, 4, 7, 19, 27, 29, 50, 51, 60, 63, 65, 66, 88, 90, 128, 146, 152 Greek, 7, 8, 23, 111–113, 115, 116, 122, 133–135 philosophy, 7, 111–114, 118, 120, 123, 129, 134 guilt, 27, 88, 93 Gyges, 3, 18, 21, 148

H Halakhah, 114, 133, 139, 141 happiness, 2, 4, 21, 24, 56, 57, 62, 69–71, 128 hedonism, 4, 5, 56, 58, 59, 67, 71, 75, 78 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 39, 75, 137 Heidegger: Being and Time, 70 Heidegger, Martin, 35, 41, 42, 57, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 84, 85, 101, 116, 126, 137 height, 25, 55, 59, 61, 62, 66 here I am, 7, 23, 55, 61, 63, 102, 111, 114, 124–126 hermeneutics, 32, 37, 41, 134 heteronomy, 20, 22, 27 hierarchy, 27, 106, 118, 135 highness, 59, 61, 62, 66 historical, 8, 121, 133–136, 141, 153 history, 7, 28, 31, 32, 35–39, 41, 42, 45, 56, 62, 64, 71, 121, 134, 136, 148 historicity, 35, 36, 38, 41 Hitler, Adolf, 136 Hobbes, Thomas, 116 Holocaust, 7 Holy One, 146, 147 hope, 31, 66–68, 113, 120, 124, 127, 129, 151

158 horizon, 4, 40, 60, 61 hostage, 8, 10, 28, 32, 63, 65, 69, 98, 103, 106, 126–128, 138, 151 human, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 34, 41, 43, 45–48, 51, 55–64, 66, 70, 71, 77, 81–83, 86–89, 91, 96, 98, 107, 117, 122, 127, 128, 136, 143–153 condition, humanity, 6, 9, 10, 63, 64, 82, 83, 95, 136, 143, 144, 150 Husserl, Edmund, 16, 32–34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 48, 52, 72, 73, 84, 148 hyperconsciousness, 44 hysteria, 37

I I, the, 4, 18, 23, 25, 55, 57, 59, 62–64, 74, 76, 97, 127, 146, 152 idea of the infinite, 59, 60 idealization, 102 identity, 6, 10, 21, 26, 32, 50, 56, 59, 60, 83, 87, 97, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 143, 151–153 imagination, 33, 121 imaginary, 32, 41, 46, 47, 49, 50, 64 immanence, 4, 25–27, 33, 34, 42, 51, 151 immersion, 56 imperative, 1, 81–84, 86, 87, 92 categorical, 21, 69, 152 ethical, 84, 86 hypothetical, 21 inauthentic, 70 incarnation, 10, 31, 100, 143, 151, 153 independence, 5, 18, 56, 57, 74–76 independent, 1, 6, 18, 20, 21, 57, 74, 82, 85, 95, 96, 107, 135 indeterminacy, 31, 34, 44 indifference, 15 individual, 2, 4, 16, 19, 55, 57, 59, 61–65, 82, 90, 121, 122, 124, 134 individualism, 2, 15 individualizing, 33, 77 individuation, 31, 33 inequality, 69, 122 inertia, 31 infinite, 5, 20, 21, 24–26, 41, 42, 59, 60, 81, 102–104, 125–127, 137, 141, 149 infinity, 25, 42, 43, 86, 92, 99, 125, 148 the idea of, 59, 60 the Infinite, 59, 60, 102, 104 in-itself, 18, 31, 37–40, 42, 57, 58, 74, 89, 100–102, 124, 134

Index intentional, 3, 19, 31, 33, 34, 36–38, 42, 45, 48, 49, 128 intentionality, 25, 37, 38, 44, 45, 47, 72, 73, 148 interest, 33, 58, 59, 99, 113, 116, 123, 144 interestedness, 58 interior life, 74 interiority, 18, 20, 24, 26, 31, 34, 56, 57, 143, 148 intersubjectivity, 3, 31, 32, 34, 38–40, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 128, 141 ipseity, 55, 57 Israel, 8, 119, 135, 136, 139–141

J jouissance, 4, 42, 56, 57 joy, 89, 90 joyousness, 89 Judaism, 7, 113, 115–119, 121, 128, 135–137 Judeosophy, 7, 111–115, 117–120, 123, 125, 127, 129 judgement, 6, 26, 88, 115, 122, 125 justice, 6, 51, 56, 64, 96, 98, 106, 107, 116, 120, 124, 127, 137, 139, 141, 144

K Kafka, Franz, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 15, 21–23, 28, 34, 69, 83, 126, 134, 135, 146 Kantian, 16, 21–23, 27, 69, 70 Kierkegaard, Søren, 10, 143, 148, 153 knowledge, 38, 105, 112, 118, 126, 137, 144

L Lacan, Jacques, 102 language, 1, 3, 7, 8, 37, 38, 45, 51, 63, 72, 73, 82–84, 89, 91, 98, 111–130, 134, 136–139, 147, 151 law, 8, 9, 21–23, 39, 69–71, 76, 116, 120, 123, 133, 144, 147, 149 le moi, 4, 5, 55, 65, 97 life, 4, 5, 10, 18, 20, 21, 24, 31, 34, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49–52, 56–62, 65, 66, 68–71, 74–77, 89–91, 96, 97, 119, 121, 128, 129, 133, 135, 139, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152

M man, 9, 10, 16, 17, 24, 31, 41, 67–69, 73, 103, 121, 128 129, 141, 143–153 masculine, 144 material, 20, 33, 74, 76

Index maternity, 36, 63, 140 me -in-the-world, 57 the me, 55 me voice, 23 meaning, 3, 10, 24, 31, 35–40, 45, 49, 55, 58, 59, 66, 72, 74, 75, 82, 90, 97, 104, 107, 117, 119–121, 123, 126–128, 144, 145, 147–150 memory, 19, 27, 32, 33, 38–40, 97, 146 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 4, 31–52, 72, 73, 84 metaphor, 31–33, 63, 144 metaphysics, 18, 106, 123 mimesis, 77 mimetically, 77 mimetic desire, 77 mineness, 64 Mishnah, 8, 118, 133, 139 Mitsein, 70, 73, 77, 78 modernity, 8, 134, 135 moi, 43, 57, 63, 97, 100, 101, 139 le moi, 4, 5, 55, 65, 97 moral, 1–3, 15–18, 21–23, 28, 34, 69, 70, 75, 76, 107, 123, 134, 135, 140, 143, 146, 151–153 relativism, 2 morality, 4, 59, 76, 123 Most High, 55, 61 myself-as-desire, 21 myself-as-the-host-of-another, 21

N naked, 57, 61, 148 nakedness, 82, 84 naming, 98, 102 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 107, 143, 145 natural, 9, 32, 41, 42, 116, 136, 137 body, 42 order, 146 neighbour, 5, 6, 10, 23, 60, 81–84, 98, 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2 non-freedom, 8, 21, 29, 138 nonintentionality, 17 non-place, 140 nonpresence, 17 nothingness, 20, 31, 49, 88, 89 now-moment, 33, 34

O obedience, 1, 9, 23, 101, 137, 147 object, 15, 24, 34, 37, 39, 41, 46, 52, 61, 62, 71, 72, 74, 83, 89, 106, 116, 148

159 objectivation, 33, 102 objective world, 3, 51 obligation, 63, 65, 82, 91, 124 obsession, 17, 23, 27, 32, 36–38, 42, 44, 50, 63, 98, 100, 106 oneirism, 46, 50, 52 ontology, 4, 35, 37, 40, 41, 51, 57, 58, 62, 101, 105, 113, 116, 136 ontological, 37, 41, 55, 58, 62, 70, 73, 88, 100, 104, 116, 117, 126, 149 Order, 8, 9, 16, 25–27, 38–41, 45, 51, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 65, 73–75, 81–84, 95–98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 112, 113, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 135, 137, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153 rational, 83 social, 83 orthographic, 9, 143, 144, 147 other, -in-the-same, 19, 20, 27, 28, 31, 36, 42–44, 47, 52 needy, 1 the Other, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 17, 19, 20, 22–27, 55, 59, 60, 62–66, 73, 96–98, 101–107, 111–130, 137, 138 transcendent, 5, 67, 75, 76 vulnerable, 17 otherness, 5, 35, 60, 69, 81, 83, 87, 88, 104, 137 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 6, 95, 113, 117, 126, 129 overcoming, 99

P panim, 125, 126, 128 paradox, 31, 100 paradoxical, 3, 15–19, 23, 26, 33, 74, 75, 91, 116, 121 paralysis, 17, 18, 26, 44, 128 participation, 18, 59, 63, 115, 136 particularism, 95 passion, 6, 50, 107, 146, 151 passive, 1, 3, 4, 16, 18, 23, 27, 31–36, 39, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 55, 58, 64, 72, 95, 100, 101, 107 passivity, 1–10, 15–29, 31–52, 55, 58, 63–65, 67, 95–108, 111, 112, 114, 118, 123–129, 133–141, 143–153 hyperbolic, 48 modalities of, 38, 41 of the self, 31, 67, 95 radical, 1–3, 5–9, 15–29, 31–51, 5, 67, 95–107, 111, 112, 114, 118, 123–129, 133–141, 143, 151, 153

160 patience, 55, 64 perception, 3, 4, 17, 25, 36, 39, 41–51, 71, 81, 84, 92, 99 performative, 9, 136, 137, 141 persecution, 23, 27, 32, 38, 44, 50, 63, 64, 97, 100, 127 person, 6, 16, 17, 24, 25, 34, 44, 45, 50–52, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 82, 90, 96, 98, 107, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 150, 152 phantom, 49 phenomenology, 4, 5, 16, 24, 32 34–37, 41, 42, 51, 55–78, 86, 113, 125, 140 phenomenal field, 82 phenomenological, 2, 3, 20, 31, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50, 71, 72, 84, 104, 113, 117, 118, 125, 133, 141 phenomenon, 23, 31, 35, 36, 42, 55, 58, 60, 61, 71, 88, 92, 97, 102, 103, 106 philosophy, 2, 3, 7, 9, 15, 16, 22, 24, 32, 34–36, 40, 47, 57, 59, 61, 62, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 89, 97, 105–107, 111–118, 120, 123, 125, 127–129, 133, 135–140, 144, 146, 148 Greek, 7, 111–114, 118, 120, 123, 129, 134 Plato, 18, 59, 60, 65, 66, 137, 148, 149 plenitude, 41, 88 politics, 6, 39, 40, 115, 118, 120, 134, 135 potentia, 18, 28 praxis, 40 primacy, 3, 34, 36, 42, 51, 52 proximity, 16, 17, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 77, 104–106, 118, 137, 140 psychoanalysis, 21, 36, 37

R rationality, 9, 83, 105, 139, 146 rationally, 106, 119, 120 reality, 10, 17, 24, 25, 40, 42–45, 47, 51, 71, 84 reason, 9, 21, 36, 42, 50, 63, 69–71, 76, 81, 95, 97, 100, 104, 113, 115, 117, 119, 122, 123, 126, 129, 146, 147 recognition, 89, 90, 92, 93, 140 recognize, 1, 8, 15, 18, 19, 23, 34, 62, 82–84, 86, 89, 91, 97, 113, 115, 116, 120, 127, 134, 137, 141 relationality, 9, 137 relativism, 2 religion, 5, 8, 60, 71, 113, 115, 136, 137, 139, 140, 148 religious, 9, 16, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 136, 137, 139, 140, 148, 149, 153 representation, 21, 23, 25, 50, 73, 87, 95, 100, 102, 106

Index represented, 2, 31, 106, 144 resource, 21, 82, 84, 86–90, 92, 123 respect, 10, 34, 55, 82, 83, 86, 90, 95, 101, 103, 113, 128, 149 responsibility, 1, 2, 4–6, 9, 10, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25–29, 32, 37, 47, 55, 63, 64, 66, 69, 72, 73, 75–78, 81, 88, 92, 98, 103–107, 113, 115, 118, 122–124, 126–129, 136, 140, 141, 143–145, 148–153 absolute, 10, 123, 136, 143, 152, 153 ethical, 2, 10, 15, 127, 151, 153 fundamental, 6, 15, 107 inherent, 1, 15 unconditional, 9, 143, 150 revelation, 9, 20, 21, 43, 44, 59, 103, 136–138, 140, 148 Ricoeur, Paul, 72, 73, 126, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16

S sacrifice, 2, 6, 29, 69, 78, 95, 107, 152, 153 Said, 38, 46, 50, 51, 99, 100, 102, 103 Same, the, 1, 17, 27, 59, 64, 98, 106 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48, 148 Saying, 35, 38, 50, 51, 75, 99, 100, 102–104 scapegoat, 63, 77, 78 scepticism, 33, 47, 51, 104, 136 self, 2, 5–7, 16–21, 23–29, 31–36, 38–40, 42–45, 47, 55, 57, 58, 63, 67, 70, 71, 73, 76, 95–97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 124, 126, 127 patient, 55 the Self, 26, 102 self-centred, 4, 5, 58, 59 selfish, 15 selfishness, 4, 58, 65 selfless, 4, 15, 58 self-transcendence, 19 sensation, 33–35, 41, 47 sensibility, 2, 5, 32–38, 41, 42, 46, 47, 51, 67, 84, 85, 89, 90 sensuality, 86 sensuous, 33–36, 41–43, 45, 48, 50, 51 life, 34 separation, 5, 18, 57, 67, 74, 75, 113–115, 118, 134, 135, 149 Shoah, 32, 115, 119, 126, 129, 136 sign, 68, 87, 97, 100–103 singularity, 88, 100, 101, 122, 125, 126, 153 singularization, 57 situatedness, 5 slavery, 8, 59, 70, 72, 73, 138

Index sleep, 3, 34, 38, 40, 41, 43–48, 148 social contract, 82, 83 Socrates, 65 somnolence, 31, 35, 40, 42 son, 10, 91, 92, 143, 145, 146, 149–153 soul, 18, 31, 36, 76 Spinoza, Baruch, 57 spirit, 122, 125, 136 spiritual, 7, 8, 63, 67, 74 spirituality, 55 stranger, 9, 26, 33, 83, 84, 87, 92, 116, 118, 123, 147 structuralism, 21 subject, 2–5, 10, 15–29, 37, 39, 41, 43, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57, 67, 69–76, 83, 85, 92, 96, 98, 101–107, 126, 127, 139, 143, 147, 148, 151, 152 ethical, 16, 20, 21, 28, 55, 96, 151 subjectivity, 1, 6, 9, 18–21, 26, 27, 32, 42, 56, 73, 95–97, 99, 102, 104, 106, 107, 138, 140 substitution, 4, 6, 32, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 49–51, 63, 64, 95–99, 101, 106, 126, 138, 141–153 suffering, 6, 8, 9, 17, 31, 32, 38, 55, 56, 64, 70, 71, 74, 84, 89–92, 107, 126, 136, 138, 140 susceptibility, 31, 42, 84, 86, 88, 107 symbol, 48–50, 121, 124 symbolism, 34, 47–51 sympathy, 1, 17, 107 synthesis, 33, 34, 39, 105 of time, 32, 33 passive, 3, 31–34

T Talmud, 8, 9, 113–122, 124, 133–139 Talmudic Readings, 2, 7–9, 111, 113, 114, 116, 118–121, 123, 125, 133–141, 143 Tanaim, 8, 133 temporal, 33, 34 temporality, 33, 34, 52 testimony, 101–104, 106, 118 thematization, 3, 31, 43, 49, 100, 102, 104 theology, 1, 13, 15 things of the world, 5, 81, 86 Third, the, 6, 95, 96, 98–100, 102, 105

161 Totalité et infini, 19, 24, 55, 56 totality, 7, 9, 21, 60, 61, 75, 76, 98, 137, 138 Totality and Infinity, 4, 5, 9, 18, 37, 38, 40, 44, 51, 62, 67, 74, 75, 96, 97, 113, 123, 125, 126, 128, 136–138, 146, 149 totalization, 43, 76 trace, 32, 45, 50, 60, 63, 65, 84, 87, 88, 97, 101, 103, 105, 106, 120, 125, 126, 128, 129 transascendence, 24, 25, 27, 149, 153 transcendence, 3, 19–21, 23–28, 40, 41, 43, 48, 52, 60, 67, 74, 99, 104, 105, 117, 118, 120, 123, 126, 129, 137 transcending, 9, 25, 74, 75, 146 transcendental, 6, 16, 19, 37, 39, 42, 63, 64, 100 transdescendence, 24, 26, 27, 149, 153 transparency, 148, 150, 153 truth, 67, 71, 72, 75, 78, 79, 102, 105, 121, 139

U unconscious, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 43, 47, 48, 52 universal, 8, 9, 52, 58, 61, 75, 83, 113, 116, 121, 129, 134, 140, 141, 146, 152, 153 utilitarian, 17, 19

V Vayitzer, 144–147 violence, 10, 17, 29, 32, 40, 61, 98, 136, 151, 152 vulnerability, 33, 35, 39, 51, 84, 86–90, 92, 93

W Wahl, Jean, 3, 15, 16, 23–25, 27 wakefulness, 44, 46, 47 West, the, 8, 116, 135, 136 wisdom, 7, 35, 99, 100, 103, 111, 112, 115, 118, 120, 124, 137 woman, 9, 10, 68, 77, 78, 82, 143–153 world, 3–5, 9, 10, 18, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 34–36, 38, 40–52, 55–61, 64, 65, 69, 71–73, 75, 76, 81, 84, 86–89, 92, 95, 97, 107, 118, 119, 124, 126, 127, 129, 135, 136, 145, 146, 148–150

Y yod, 9, 10, 143–147, 149, 152

Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Rethinking Virtue Ethics (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Responsibility and Punishment (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas

Action and Responsibility (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

From Reasons to Norms: On the Basic Question in Ethics (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Radical passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben

Ethical Relativity (International Library of Philosophy)

Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought

Ethics and Economy: After Levinas

The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas

Rethinking ethical foreign policy

Character, Liberty and Law: Kantian Essays in Theory and Practice (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Reflective Equilibrium: Essays in Honour of Robert Heeger (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Reflective Equilibrium: Essays in Honour of Robert Heeger (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

The Importance of Assent: A Theory of Coercion and Dignity (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion:

Applied Ethics in Nursing

Freedom and Value: Freedoms Influence on Welfare and Worldly Value (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Library Of Ethics And Applied Philosophy Volume 8)

Rethinking Virtue Ethics

Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Library Of Ethics And Applied Philosophy Volume 8)

Applied Ethics

Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy)

Radical Judaism Rethinking God and Tradition

Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First

Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy)

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and tradition

Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Rethinking Virtue Ethics (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Responsibility and Punishment (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas

Action and Responsibility (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

From Reasons to Norms: On the Basic Question in Ethics (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Radical passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben

Ethical Relativity (International Library of Philosophy)

Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought

Ethics and Economy: After Levinas

The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas

Rethinking ethical foreign policy

Character, Liberty and Law: Kantian Essays in Theory and Practice (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Reflective Equilibrium: Essays in Honour of Robert Heeger (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Reflective Equilibrium: Essays in Honour of Robert Heeger (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

The Importance of Assent: A Theory of Coercion and Dignity (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion:

Applied Ethics in Nursing

Freedom and Value: Freedoms Influence on Welfare and Worldly Value (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Library Of Ethics And Applied Philosophy Volume 8)

Rethinking Virtue Ethics

Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Library Of Ethics And Applied Philosophy Volume 8)

Applied Ethics

Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy)

Radical Judaism Rethinking God and Tradition

Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First

Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy)

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and tradition

Recommend Documents