Man as a Place of God: Levinas' Hermeneutics of Kenosis (Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy)

MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought Editor: Reinier Munk, University of Leiden and Vrije Univer...

Author: Renee D.N. van Riessen

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MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD

Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought

Editor: Reinier Munk, University of Leiden and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Editorial Board: Resianne Fontaine, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Robert Gibbs, University of Toronto, Canada Warren Zev Harvey, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Albert van der Heide, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Arthur Hyman, Yeshiva University, New York, U.S.A. Howard Kreisel, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel David Novak, University of Toronto, Canada Kenneth Seeskin, Northwestern University, Evanston, U.S.A. Colette Sirat, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France

VOLUME 13 The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis by

Renée D.N. van Riessen Protestant Theological University (Kampen) The Netherlands

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-6227-8 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-6228-5 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer 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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1 PART I: EXPLORATIONS IN HERMENEUTICS

Chapter 1: Time, Finiteness and Infinity: The Real Theme of Levinas’ Conversation with Heidegger

17

Chapter 2: Interpreting Ourselves and Caring for Others: Levinas and Rorty

53

Chapter 3: The Other of the Other: Levinas and Derrida on Generosity and Transcendence

75

PART II: ETHICS, RELIGION, AND KENOSIS Chapter 4: Evil, Transcendence, and God

101

Chapter 5: From Religion to Ethics: The Disruption of the Infinite

131

Chapter 6: Hermeneutics of Kenosis: The Road of Dispossession

173

Bibliography

207

Index

213

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a book is a solitary business, but a highly social activity too. I thank the Protestant Theological University (Kampen) for giving me the opportunity to work on this project in peace and quiet during two sabbaticals. Fortunately, there were also classes, seminars and lectures in which I could exchange ideas on aspects of Levinas’ philosophy. Without the involvement of students, colleagues, friends and family, this book would not have become what it is; indeed, it would never have been realized. Several parts of this book were shown in draft to the Systematic Theology research group. I am indebted to Gerrit Neven, Akke van der Kooi, Rinse Reeling Brouwer and Hans van Loon for their constructive criticism. The same goes for Onno Zijlstra, who has long been my closest colleague. In more than twenty years of philosophical collaboration he shared his insights and sense of humour with me. I have learnt much from his ability to “hide depth on the surface” (Von Hofmannsthal). I was first inspired to write this book while working together with Ilse Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate. Their project on negative theology put me onto the notion of kenosis. For inspiration and debate I am also grateful to Joachim Duyndam, Rudi Visker, Bart Voorsluis and Kees Vuyk. In the final phase Harbert Booij, Jaap Faber, Johan van der Hoeven and Rico Sneller were kind enough to comment on several texts. Wietske de Jong, philosophy research assistant, was a great help in correcting and annotating the first version. In Anthony Runia I found an inventive and always cheerful translator, who saved me from many an error. Chapters 1-5 first appeared in Dutch in various journals and anthologies. They were subsequently reworked, and translated by Anthony Runia. Chapter 6 first appeared in Onno Zijlstra (ed.), Letting go. Rethinking Kenosis, Bern 2002 (translation Frans den Exter Blokland). I gratefully acknowledge the permission of Peter Lang Publishers to reprint the reworked version of this article. vii

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For advice and practical support I am much obliged to Reinier Munk, general editor of the ASJT series, who already believed in this book when I didn’t, and also to Erik Kreiter, who attended to the lay-out and the index. It was a pleasure to cooperate with Ms. Maja de Keijzer and Ms. Anita Rachmat at Springer’s Humanities. Part of this book was written “at home.” I thank my husband Bob Vaalburg for the gift of music and my daughters Evelyn and Rosa for providing welcome distraction.

INTRODUCTION Morality has always been connected with religion, and religion with mysticism. Iris Murdoch, On “God” and “The Good”1

Man is for awhile a place of God Gerrit Achterberg, “Deism”

If the philosophy of Levinas has one fundamental idea, it is the following: human existence should not be thought of as “self-orientated,” but as a “reception of the other.” Spinoza’s principle of the conatus essendi, the will to maintain oneself, as the basic form of existence is constantly undermined in Levinas’ texts by the reference to another layer in the subject which is just as important and which makes ethics possible. The words in which Levinas brings this ethical dimension to life are well known: beingfor-the-other, responsibility, hostage, obsession, substitution, hospitality, all of which can be summed up in the subject as a reception of the other. But who or what is actually received? The words “hostage” and “obsession” indicate that the reception is not based on a free decision of the receiving subject. And in fact Levinas repeatedly talks about the other in terms of an unwelcome intruder: the one who disturbs the peace, the one I do not want, the “unwanted par excellence.”2 This reception of the other cannot be separated from another theme in Levinas’ work: the relation to God, viewed as a relation to “the Infinite.” Levinas has a problem bringing up this relation philosophically, because he does not want to interpret 1 2

Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 360. See Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, 87-116.

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God as a concept, an idea which makes itself present to the thinking subject. He wants to talk about “God” outside of the framework of theoretical knowledge. In the course of his philosophical development he becomes increasingly convinced that the God of monotheism cannot be thought: he is not “thematizable.” Searching for the positive meaning of this negative concept, he arrives at the following in an interview with Emmanuel Hirsch: to be turned toward the other man and to be called not to leave him alone; to be turned contrary to my perseverance in being is “the circumstance in which God has spoken.”3 Apparently there is an intrinsic connection between solidarity with the other and the speaking of God, who cannot be thematised or (re)presented in another way. In a reference to Dante, Levinas once called the movement which occurs here a “divine comedy,” a game in which God makes himself both “knowable” and “unknowable” in the shape of the other—neighbour, stranger. In the term “divine comedy” he acknowledges the metaphysical desire always present in man —desire for God, for contact with a transcendent reality, desire for knowledge of this transcendent reality—, but he makes it clear that this desire always runs up against a limit. For metaphysical desire, too, may be the expression of a need: the need to conceive of God according to a self-made image, and then to interpret this image as we like. Such an interpretation cannot do justice to the absolute transcendence of the Infinite One. Following in the footsteps of the Jewish tradition, and particularly of Maimonides, Levinas considers for our time the possibility of seeing the boundary between man and God as a commandment. As Maimonides stated, the knowledge we have of God can be articulated only in the form of negative attributes, but it takes on a positive meaning through morality. “La connaissance de Dieu nous vient comme un commandement, comme une Mitzwah.”4

3

Is it Righteous to Be? 101. Difficile liberté, 33/17: “The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzwah.”

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INTRODUCTION

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This gives rise to a certain view of metaphysical-religious desire, as a desire that cannot be fulfilled when directly aimed at its “goal”; rather it must be sidetracked and it must sever the relation to its goal. Or, in formulations deriving from Dieu et la Philosophie: interest must be turned into disinterest, the transcendence which is the object of religious desire must be turned into a transcendence which is “beyond desire”: Pour que le désintéressement soit possible dans le Désir de l’infini, pour que le Désir au-delà de l’être, ou la transcendance, ne soit pas une absorption dans l’immanence qui ainsi ferait son retour, il faut que le Désirable ou Dieu reste séparé dans le Désir; comme désirable—proche mais différent—Saint.5

In Levinas’ view, God can be holy only if he remains separate from desire. This means that He who—according to traditional metaphysics—is the supreme object of desire, at the same time refuses to act as such. The object points away from itself, as it were, it points desire to something else, to the other, the “unwanted par excellence.” The notion of “divine comedy” has a biblical origin too. Levinas supports it by quoting and interpreting Isaiah 58, a text which revolves around the question: what is the proper way of fasting? Is it religious fasting? Or does God prefer a different way of fasting: liberating the oppressed, breaking bread for the hungry, admitting vagrants into your home, clothing the naked? Levinas sees the change of perspective found in this text—from religious devotion to ethical dedication—as fundamental to the Jewish religious experience. Here the relation to God and performance of the Torah coincide: The relation to God is already ethics, or, as Isaiah 58 would have it, the proximity to God, devotion itself, is devotion to the other man.6 5 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 113/68: “In order that disinterestedness be possible in the Desire for the Infinite—in order that the desire beyond being or transcendence might not be an absorption into immanence, which would thus make its return—the Desirable, or God, must remain separated in the Desire; as desirable—near yet different—Holy.” 6 “On Jewish Philosophy,” in: Is it Righteous to Be? 243.

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In another interview he links Isaiah 58 to a passage in Matthew 25 which talks about the Last Judgement. This passage evokes the image of the “Son of Man” who divides humanity into “goats” and “sheep” on his left and right hand. He says to one group, the “sheep,” that they are blessed, because they fed him when he was hungry and they welcomed him when he was a stranger. Asked in surprise when this was, he answers: what you did for them—the hungry, the thirsty, strangers—you did for me.7 In his interpretation of both Isaiah 58 and Matthew 25, Levinas refers ironically to the Eucharist: the texts make clear that God’s “true present” can be experienced first and foremost in the poor and the oppressed. The work of mercy, in which the hungry are fed and the thirsty are given drink, thus assumes the character of a sacramental act. This makes for an intrinsic connection between ethics and religion. Levinas interprets ethics as a special relationship with the other, an orientation to the other (or intentionality) which is above all articulated in proximity to the other.8 He interprets religion as a relationship with God who, as the Holy One, always withdraws from the relationship to point to the (ethical) other. This gives ethics a religious horizon and entails that religious desire be constantly criticised from the perspective of ethics. 1. Hermeneutics of kenosis Such a reflection on texts in the Bible does raise a new question, which leads to one of the main themes of this study: Is Levinas’ work an improper mixture of philosophy and theology? Does he smuggle in religious elements via a phenomenology of the ethical relation? Can his thought be taken seriously as philosophy, or is it predetermined by a commitment to a certain religious tradition, in this case the Jewish tradition? To what extent is Levinas’ thought coloured from the outset by the Jewish experience of God and the good? From the desire for a purer phenomenology, 7 8

“Judaïsme et christianisme,” in: À l’heure des nations, 189-196/161-162. Compare En découvrant l’existence, 225.

INTRODUCTION

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Dominique Janicaud surmised that phenomenology is taken hostage in Levinas by “a theology that does not want to say its name.”9 Rudi Visker, too, in his interrogatively constructed analysis of Levinas’ concept of subjectivity, comes up against Levinas’ concept of God, which seems to appear from nowhere, and thus seems unfounded, because the same God cannot be thought or said in the framework of philosophy. “God is the mole which that thinking has tried to live with.”10 At the same time other commentators appreciate the way in which Levinas connects insights from the Jewish tradition with philosophical thought. Particularly in Jewish commentators, the expectation that Judaism could give philosophy a new orientation plays an important role. Robert Gibbs therefore regards Levinas’ ethics as the “Jewish other of philosophy.”11 The danger here could be that Levinas is pinned down to his background in Judaism, which fails to do justice to the originality of his philosophical approach as such. It is important to realise, in this respect, that he regarded himself in the first place as a philosopher, that is, as someone who wants to reflect and in doing so wants to address all people. The label “Jewish thinker” suggests that certain religious concepts are unthinkingly adopted in a philosophical discourse. But the important thing precisely is that they are translated and carefully thought through. In the end everything should be capable of expression in the language of the philosophical tradition, says Levinas in conversation with Philippe Nemo, but it is questionable whether this tradition is the place where the meaning has been thought through first, most originally.12

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Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” 43. Visker, The Inhuman Condition, 82. It is interesting that Visker mentions “dispossession” here as a possible interpretive framework for Levinas’ thought on God: both (ethics and metaphysics RvR) rest on a principle of dispossession that Levinas calls “God” (110). See also: Visker, “No Privacy? Levinas’ Intrigue of the Infinite,” in: Truth and Singularity, 235-273. 11 Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, 4. 12 Ethique et Infini, 19, 20. In a lengthy interview with Francois Poirié, Levinas emphasized the importance of a phenomenological translation and thinking through of religious notions (Is it Righteous to Be? 61). 10

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In Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion, Jeffrey Kosky draws attention to both tendencies: the wish to judge Levinas from the perspective of pure phenomenology (a judgement which is usually negative, because Levinas’ thought oversteps the limits of pure phenomenological thought) and the wish to regard his philosophy as a form of Jewish thought. He warns that commentators who attempt to claim Levinas as a Jewish philosopher betray their master, because they play him into the hands of his critics, and I think he is right.13 It is Levinas’ own intention to reflect, as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, on what the sources—the sources of Jewish thought and the sources of history of philosophy—provide as food for thought. In doing so he carries out a hermeneutical move in two directions: he inquires into the philosophical meaning of conceptions from the Jewish tradition and, conversely, he uses religious contents to break open philosophical thought.14 The study presented here is therefore not an attempt to reduce Levinas’ thought to its origin in the Jewish tradition, but an interpretation of the interaction between religious elements and the phenomenology of ethical experience. I will show that religion and ethics constantly refer to each other in Levinas, without the religious ever being entirely absorbed in the ethical or vice versa. My guide will be the concept of kenosis, a concept that, as I will show, does not just have a religious connotation in Levinas: ethics and mysticism resonate in it too. I will now briefly clarify the above. In this study I interpret Levinas’ philosophy as a hermeneutics of ethical existence which is centred in kenosis. I take hermeneutics in this connection as the explanation or interpretation of human existence as it actually occurs. In many respects Levinas’ thought can be regarded as an answer to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity in Sein und Zeit. It is Heidegger’s framework of finiteness which he must break 13

Kosky, Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion, 157. In her introduction to Levinas’ Talmud readings, Annette Aronowicz suggests that the hermeneutics which Levinas developed to make rabbinic wisdom speak would also be suitable as an interpretive framework for religious experiences in a broad sense. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, xxxi.

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INTRODUCTION

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open to give new meaning to the dimension which he will call “the Infinite.” He does not want to think this infinite separately from time, and so he gives it a place in the experience of temporal existence. In this study I will show that Levinas succeeds in connecting time and the Infinite by thinking both from the perspective of kenosis or evacuation. The existence of the subject in time cannot be exhaustively described as self-maintenance. On the contrary, it is a constant being open to the other / the Other, and should therefore be seen as a permanent letting go. The direction or orientation of this letting go is not nothing, the end, or death, but “the Infinite,” or “God.” From his first philosophical works Levinas thinks through the relation between time, death, and the Other. In the preface to one his of last works, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, he declares thought on the diachrony of time to be the theme closest to his heart. He gives an interpretation of time here as “being devoted” or as an “À Dieu that is no longer intentionality.” Ma pensée la plus profonde et qui porte toute pensée, ma pensée de l’infini plus ancienne que la pensée du fini, est la diachronie même du temps, la coïncidence, le désaississement même: une façon d’“être voué” avant tout acte de conscience, et plus profondément que la conscience, de par la gratuité du temps…Façon d’être voué qui est dévotion. À Dieu qui n’est pas intentionnalité…15

A striking connection is made here between the diachrony of time, which starts the process in which the self loosens its grip on itself and the disposition of devotion or dedication. Existence in time, Levinas says here, must be thought of as an increasingly greater and deeper devotion to the other, the Infinite, and thus as a farewell (À Dieu), in which the concept of intentionality loses the fundamental meaning that it has in phenomenology, as an orientation of consciousness to its objects. 15

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 12/xiv-xv. In translation: “My deepest thought, which carries all thought, my thought of the infinite, older than the thought of the finite, is the very diachrony of time. It is noncoincidence, dispossession itself. This is a way of “being dedicated” before any act of consciousness and more deeply so than in consciousness, by way of the gratuity of time (in which philosophers managed to fear a vanity or privation). A way of being dedicated that is devotion. An unto-God [À Dieu] that is precisely not intentionality…”

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I will look more closely at this idea in various chapters of this book, interpreting it as a movement of kenosis, viewed as dis-possession. This interpretation leads by stages to chapter 6, where I will try to link the motif of dispossession and the way in which Levinas himself brings up the motif of kenosis in his later work. The word kenosis has always had strong theological connotations. In the context of the Christ hymn in the Letter to the Philippians, it means “to make empty,” “to make void or of no effect.” In relation to Christ this text says that he, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing [ekenosen], taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” 16 Following on from the text in Philippians 2, the word kenosis has taken on an ethical and mystical sense. The Christ hymn itself is embedded in the larger context of an exhortation to a certain disposition (humility, mutual love), of which Christ is the supreme example. In mysticism kenosis means giving up and emptying oneself. In our time a philosophical meaning has been added by thinkers like Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, who use the concept of kenosis to make a connection between philosophy and religion in the time after the “death of God.”17

16 The Holy Bible, NIV. The RSV gives “emptied himself.” For more on Levinas’ own view of kenosis and his relation to Christianity in this regard, see Chapter 6. The theological background to the concept of kenosis is discussed by Rinse Reeling Brouwer, “Kenosis in Philippians 2:5-11,” in: Zijlstra (ed.), Letting go, 69-108. A brief sketch of the possibilities of an interpretation of Levinas from the Christian perspective on kenosis is given by Michiel Dupuis (et al.) in “Les figures Lévinassiennes de la kénose,” in: Frogneux et Mies (eds.), Emmanuel Lévinas et l’histoire, 357-365. 17 In Belief Vattimo uses the concept of kenosis to forge a link between the end of metaphysics, thinking about the “death of God,” and the heart of the Christian faith, which he finds in God’s incarnation. For him kenosis is the infinite interpretive space of the Christian faith. Jacques Derrida talks about a kenosis of language which allows us to speak about God in new ways. He thus develops the mystical-theological connotation of the concept and enters into a debate with mystical thinkers like Meister Eckhardt and Angelus Silesius. Derrida, “Comment ne pas parler, Dénégations,” in: Psyché, 535-596 and Sauf le nom.

INTRODUCTION

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This study has opted for the perspective of “hermeneutics of kenosis” to interpret Levinas’ thought on the relation between subjectivity and transcendence. In what follows I will show how the motif of evacuation can be recognised in two ways. First, in Levinas’ view of subjectivity as devotion to the other and substitution. Second, in his thought on God as the “idea of the Infinite in finite existence.” In the last chapter I will connect these two aspects of the concept of kenosis via the motif of contraction in Jewish mysticism. This mystical element allows Levinas to interpret the relation to transcendence as an event in which man and God make room for each other. 2. Composition With kenosis as its leitmotiv, this study investigates two connected problem areas: Levinas’ hermeneutics of the self (Part I ) and his interpretation of the relation between religion and ethics (Part II ). Part I, Explorations in Hermeneutics discusses Levinas’ idea of an ethical subjectivity. Does the view of subjectivity as a “reception of the other” mean the disappearance of the self’s own identity? Doesn’t the ethical subject enter into a paradoxical relation with the other if it can never truly be “with itself,” if “to be itself ” in effect already means “to be there for the other”? Chapter 1 offers an introduction to one of the main themes in Levinas’ philosophy—the possibility of a relation to the Infinite —in connection with the philosophy of Heidegger. Levinas’ texts show traces of a constant debate with Heidegger. In the exchange of ideas I focus on their different interpretations of finiteness and affectivity (Befindlichkeit). For Heidegger affectivity provides access to authenticity, for Levinas there can only be true affectivity if the relation to the other is involved. Isn’t the first sign of affectivity to be touched by the fate of the other? This interpretation of Befindlichkeit, which he develops in opposition to Heidegger, opens Levinas’ way to a kenotic view of subjectivity as “être pour l’autre.” The chapter concludes with critical reflections on the difference between Heidegger and Levinas in this regard.

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Chapter 2 investigates Levinas’ view of subjectivity as “existence for the other” by drawing a comparison with Rorty’s postmodern view of identity. Rorty believes that styling one’s own identity is separate from solidarity with others. By confronting this position, I try to find arguments for Levinas’ idea that solidarity and self-styling should in fact be connected, and I reach the conclusion that Levinas is more open to the confusing experience of loss of meaning. The chapter ends with a first interpretation of Levinas’ view of the relation between subjectivity and transcendence as dispossession and devotion. Chapter 3 focuses on Derrida’s criticism of hermeneutics as an attempt to maintain control over the process in which truth comes about. Can Levinas escape this totalizing tendency? Or does he, too, succumb when he searches in God for a transcendent Goodness which is at odds with “Being” and has not been infected by it? Is goodness, seen as an existence in devotion to the other, a position capable of philosophical defence? Doesn’t Levinas’ attempt to connect the other and God lead to a strained equation of ethics and religion? Guided by Derrida’s critical questions, I develop a hermeneutics of kenosis in debate with Levinas. The relation between the self, the other, and God is to be viewed as a kenotic relation, in which each of the three elements is displaced and dispossessed by each of the other elements. In Part II, Ethics, Religion, and Kenosis I investigate Levinas’ thought on the relation between the self, the other, and God. As well as being “place of the other,” the subject is a place of God. Levinas is very clear on this: if anything can be perceived of God (or: the Infinite One) in existence, the relation to God must be translated in terms of the interhuman, ethical relation. This move raises various questions concerned with the relation of ethics and religion. Does religion have its own place in Levinas’ thought, or is its meaning entirely absorbed in the ethical relation? Or: why should the ethical relation to the other be interpreted religiously? These questions are the subject of the last three chapters of this book.

INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 4 is an introduction to Levinas’ philosophy of religion from the vantage point of his thought on evil. It is in particular the recognition of evil’s omnipresence that leads Levinas to the insight that humanity is in a situation of godforsakenness. He consequently seems to put a great deal of emphasis on human autonomy. The creature is independent, even atheistic. In this chapter I show how Levinas plays down the autonomy by pointing to the “kenotic condition” of the subject in two respects: in his receptivity to suffering and in his non-elective responsibility for the other. The proposition from the first chapter, that radical finiteness is nevertheless the place where an “experience of the Infinite” is possible, calls for a closer reading of Levinas’ idea of the Infinite. Chapter 5 shows how Levinas abandons the framework of traditional metaphysics by offering an ethical interpretation of the idea of the Infinite. Against this background I ask questions about the resulting relation between metaphysics, religion, and ethics. If it is true that God, as “the Infinite,” only takes on meaning in the social relation of proximity to the other and in extreme moral views—isn’t transcendence then liable to disappear? How much scope is left in Levinas for the religious register, for the possibility of thinking a desire aimed in a religious sense at God, the Infinite? Perhaps Levinas’ perspective leaves too little room for religiosity, in the sense of an experience of the holy. At the same time I show, by means of a comparison with Derrida, what positive aspects Levinas’ ethical critique of religion can have in a time that religion is more and more equated with the experience of “the holy” as such. Chapter 6 takes Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought” as the starting-point for an inquiry into Levinas’ perspective on kenosis. In Belief, among other writings, Vattimo criticises Levinas’ philosophy as a relapse into traditional metaphysics. This is due to his interpretation of ethical transcendence as a radical alterity distinct from being. I ask how fair this criticism is and, in response to Vattimo’s criticism, give an interpretation of Levinas’ view of transcendence in terms of kenosis, interruption, and space. The concept of kenosis in the Jewish tradition sees God’s absence as an event which is painful but at the same time creates space for human action. But an interpretation in terms of kenosis also

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sheds light on Levinas’ understanding of the subject, as substitution and as receptivity to the unwanted other. Kenosis is more comprehensive than the event in which God and man make room for each other. For Levinas, creating space, making room for the other is the moment at which the sacred happens. Kenosis is the event in which God makes room for human action. Conversely, for Levinas, the human being is “a place of God.” Its existence is meaningful as a reference to the kenotic God, in the devotional movement of “À Dieu.” 3. Man as a place of God The spatial interpretation of kenosis which I found in Levinas occasioned the title of this study: Man as a Place of God. The poem “Deism” by the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg starts with almost the same words: “Man is for a while a place of God.” Anyone who knows the entire poem may wonder whether the similarity between Levinas and Achterberg is confined to the first line alone. In “Deism” Achterberg describes the relation between God and man as a contract, a covenant that lasts until death separates the two parties again. For the duration of finite life, man is a place of God: a place where the image of God can become visible in reality. The moment of death means a separation: man is for God “a gas can that is full, / that he leaves empty.” Life has been used as a “place of God” and now is discarded by the roadside, like a material thing no longer of any use. To die is to be “written off”: only the name refers to the human being you once were, and what remains is a rusty gas can: Deism Man is for a while a place of God. When not a single equal sign holds anything together any more, he’s written off. (The resemblance seems to go as far as this completion, this abrupt conclusion.)

INTRODUCTION

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For God goes on, moving away from him into his millions. God never is alone. One person goes, another takes his turn. We are to him a gas can that is full, that he leaves empty. He must get rid of it, this refuse, as it contradicts His being. Since He distinguishes Himself from all creation, we die and lie along the path; if not, Christ, dealer in scrap metal, would not have found us here in that condition, as if he had been whispering with the Father.18

Achterberg’s poem links up with the deistic image of God and has strong metaphysical connotations. It deals with large themes like the infinite, death, God, and redemption. Redemption comes as a surprise in the poem, in the figure of a disguised Christ. He appears as “dealer in scrap metal,” who is heedful of the lost gas can by the roadside. Translated in theological terms: Christ is heedful of the way people are tied to death by sin. We find more evidence that the horizon of Achterberg’s poem is strongly coloured by Christian theology when he talks about man as God’s image (resemblance) in the traditional dogmatic sense. The God of “Deism” is the one who, in majestic transcendence, is free to move on, “in his millions,” always looking for new people to realise his image. The question of finiteness— what should be done with the human refuse, with the human remains when the divine resemblance ends?—is given a theological answer, by the appearance of Christ the Redeemer in the disguise of a scrap metal dealer. On this view there is a great difference between Achterberg and Levinas, in whom there is no mediation between God and man in the shape of a redeeming “God-man.” For Levinas man is a place of God in ethical action, in the desire for the good. Ethical action presupposes the absence of God in reality, and ethics 18 Gerrit Achterberg, “Deïsme,” in Vergeetboek (translation from Selected poems of Gerrit Achterberg, 67).

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thus assumes the role of making God present again, via a different route, via the detour of the “divine comedy”: when the desire for direct contact with God is deflected to the other who, following God’s trail, is a call to the good. In Levinas the space which God leaves behind is a void, an empty trail, and only on this trail is goodness possible, as a reference to the absent God. So is it only that single, first line by Achterberg—man is for a time a place of God—that shows a similarity to Levinas’ philosophy?19 My answer is “yes and no,” for there is just a little more. In the surprising image which Achterberg evokes of Christ as a dealer in scrap metal, I see an analogy with Levinas’ perspective on divine kenosis as an inseparable bond between God’s descent and his elevation.20 In this regard there is not just a similarity between Levinas and Achterberg, but also between Levinas and Christian thought on the relation between man and God. This similarity allows scope for a fruitful debate between Levinas’ thought on kenosis and the Christian interpretation of this concept. My study on the motif of kenosis in Levinas’ thought is an attempt to contribute to this debate.21

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I am not the first to use this first line of “Deism” in a title. The Dutch theologian H.M. Kuitert went before me, in Voor een tijd een plaats van God—a systematic reflection on the phenomenon of religion from an anthropological perspective. The similarity between Kuitert and Levinas is that both seek the essence of being human in “being addressed” by the other. 20 À l’heure des Nations, 133-134/115-116. 21 In discussions with Christian thinkers, Levinas’ starting-point is always the kinship between the Jewish and Christian traditions, which creates room for the critical debate between representatives of both traditions. Examples of such a debate are the discussion with Paul Ricoeur and others on revelation (in: Ricoeur, La révélation, 207-236) and the discussion with Catholic theologians in connection with Transcendance et intelligibilité, of which kenosis was one of the subjects: “Entretien avec Emmanuel Lévinas” in Transcendance et intelligibilité, 33-68.

PART ONE EXPLORATIONS IN HERMENEUTICS

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CHAPTER 1 TIME, FINITENESS, AND INFINITY: THE REAL THEME OF LEVINAS’ CONVERSATION WITH HEIDEGGER Levinas’ first major work, Totalité et infini was published in 1961. When readers became aware of its thrust, Levinas was nicknamed “the anti-Heidegger.” Yet throughout his life he continued to engage in a dialogue with Heidegger. In the course of time he apparently could no longer miss this powerful motor, which had once provided an initial impulse for his philosophy. Heidegger’s thought has left many traces in Levinas’ philosophy. These traces are the subject of this opening chapter, which can also be read as an introduction to Levinas. For the dialogue between Heidegger and Levinas addresses fundamental themes in Levinas’ philosophy, such as the relationship between the finite and the infinite, and the relationship between the self and the other. The end of this chapter shows that Levinas’ main reason for engaging in a debate with Heidegger was to clear up the question whether an experience of the infinite is possible in an existence that is viewed as radically finite. In other words: can an experience of the infinite occur in an existence that is finite? This question is also the central theme of this book: how does Levinas account for the possibility of this experience of transcendence against the background of the radical finiteness that pervades twentieth-century thinking? To ask this question is to engage with Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit (affectivity), for it is under this theme that he discusses the receptivity to what you have not chosen. Levinas makes room for the theme of the infinite and transcendence by arguing that Heidegger’s “affectivity” assumes that man is more than a being that wants to persist in his own existence. Unlike

17

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Heidegger, he interprets affectivity as the ability to abandon and devote oneself to what is radically Other. Affectivity presumes the possibility of relating, as a finite being, to “the Infinite.” In the final sections of this chapter I examine the relevance of the difference between Heidegger and Levinas for the presentday debate over cultural identity. I ask here whether the encounter with the other does not presuppose a certain form of self-understanding (or hermeneutics of the self). Levinas discovers a blind spot in Heidegger, but to what extent is the self’s access to itself his own blind spot? 1. The heart of the criticism What criticism underlies Levinas’ attitude to Heidegger? Levinas starts by observing that Western philosophy is characterised by a strong emphasis on knowledge and a solid position of the knowing subject in reality. In the end, according to Levinas, this predilection for a theoretical consideration of reality stems from an imperialistic urge: the urge to subordinate everything to the knowing subject. In other words: the different—everything that this subject encounters as an obstacle on its way—is brought into line with the same. As examples of this way of thinking Levinas also adduces his teachers Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl’s thought is said to be, in the final analysis, egology. His thought offers excessive freedom to the knowing subject. Though Heidegger corrects this egological feature in some measure—his central concern is not the freedom but the historicity of the subject—he develops, instead, a “neutral ontology.” In Heidegger there is a powerful and neutral existent—being—to which all existents are subject and from which they can be understood. In Heidegger’s case, Levinas objects to the primacy of ontology. Is ontology as fundamental as Heidegger assumes?1 Levinas’ answer to this question is negative: not everything can be under1

This is the central question in one of Levinas’ most profound confrontations with Heidegger: “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” first published in 1951, and later in the anthology Entre nous (13-24).

TIME, FINITENESS, AND INFINITY

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stood from the horizon of being. There is at least one phenomenon in our environment that tears itself loose from this horizon, that breaks through it, because it has meaning of itself. This phenomenon is the face of the other. The relationship with the face is a relationship with an existent that is separate and cannot be known within the pattern of a general ontology. La relation avec autrui n’est donc pas ontologie. Ce lien avec autrui qui ne se réduit pas à la représentation d’autrui, mais à son invocation, et où l’invocation n’est pas précedée d’une compréhension, nous appelons religion. L’essence du discours est prière.2

Remarkable in this quotation are the words religion and prayer, which are used in connection with the other person. We can ask whether Levinas turns the relation to the other into a religion which takes the place of religion as the relation to God. But apparently Levinas interprets the word in a formal sense: the relation at issue is that between the existent and transcendence as such. There is religion the moment “the other faces me” in the shape of “hostile, friend, my master, my student.”3 In Levinas the other is not the one who is represented but the one who is invoked, just as the believer invokes God in prayer. The contrast between representation and invocation in this quotation is therefore connected with Levinas’ formal view of religion. He marshals all this in “Is ontology fundamental?” against Heidegger’s position. Heidegger awards a central place to ontology, also in the relation to the other human being. As a result, the other human being should be understood from the general horizon of being. This means that the other is no longer “the one with whom I speak” but becomes one of my representations. According to Levinas, the basis of the relationship with the other is found not at the level of representation but at the level of invocation. The other is primarily the one with whom I speak, 2

Entre nous, 20/7. In translation: “The relation to the other is therefore not ontology. This bond with the other which is not reducible to the representation of the other, but to his invocation, and in which invocation is not preceded by an understanding, I call religion. The essence of discourse is prayer.” 3 Totalité et infini, 53/81.

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or the one who invokes me. The relationship with the other is not characterised by seeing but by speaking and listening. Seeing the face, Levinas ponders at the end of this article, is no longer seeing but “a hearing and a word.” Levinas fails to do justice to Heidegger in the article quoted.4 There is little subtlety in his treatment of the ideas in Sein und Zeit and Heidegger’s later work. The article introduces us to a Heidegger whom Levinas has turned into an image of a philosophical climate which he rejects, because certain important matters are overlooked in it: the relationship with the other as a transcendence which breaks through ontology; the priority of the vocative in speech, religion, and prayer. But the writer of this text, Emmanuel Levinas, was regarded at the time as an authority on Heidegger’s philosophy. Before Sartre and Jean Beaufret, he translated Heidegger’s ideas to the world of French philosophy. Levinas, who sharply criticised Heidegger’s philosophy in the fifties and sixties, started his philosophical career as an admirer of this “Meister aus Deutschland.” I will now discuss Levinas’ kinship with Heidegger in a short biographical excursus. 2. I went to Husserl and I found Heidegger… In 1923 Emmanuel Levinas leaves the town of Kaunas in Lithuania, where apart from a few intervals he had lived so far, for Strasbourg in France to study philosophy and psychology. It is a remarkable choice: geographically speaking, would it not have been more natural to study in Germany? In interviews about his life Levinas always emphasises the positive choice of France, but at the time he also applied to a number of German universities. Unfortunately, all these applications were rejected.5

4 Cf. the criticism which Peperzak levels against Levinas’ interpretation of Heidegger: “since Being is not a being at all, it can neither be a third, mediating term, nor distort or tyrannise any appearance or beingness.” To the Other, 14. 5 Perhaps the level of education at a Jewish lyceum in Lithuania was judged inadequate, or his Jewish background played a role.


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Levinas was eighteen years old when he embarked on his studies. The choice of an academic education went without saying in his milieu. He had read and studied from childhood: with his brothers he attended Hebrew lessons in order to read the Bible in its original language and as a gymnasial pupil he was already drawn to the great Russian novelists. They showed him the way to philosophy. His introduction to Russian literature was no doubt facilitated by the fact that his father owned a bookshop. His discovery of Husserl’s philosophy in Strasbourg was rather fortuitous. A fellow student, Gabriëlle Pfeiffer, advised him to read this philosopher. He began by studying the Logische Untersuchungen, and was immediately attracted by the new intellectual vistas which phenomenology afforded him. The young student Levinas is so captivated by phenomenology that he decides to spend a semester in Freiburg, to attend lectures by Husserl. But he is somewhat disappointed when he meets Husserl in the flesh: Husserl is old and seems done with his inquiries. Only the details of his project interest him; there are no more surprises. Nor is the father of phenomenology much inclined to dialogue: a question from the pupil is followed by a long, rather uninspiring monologue. At the same time the star of Heidegger is rising in Freiburg. This new teacher is now 38 years old and Sein und Zeit, his first great work from 1927, is making him famous. Students regard him as the hidden king of philosophy. With him everything is surprising and unexpected: the analysis of the human mood as undertone of thought, the new access to everyday life via the existentialia, and the ontological difference. Looking back on his life and his student days, Levinas does not mention these characteristics for nothing: they are themes which will continue to exercise him in his own philosophy. Heidegger inspired him by creating the possibility of connecting philosophy with life and existence. Via the ontological analysis there was room for affectivity (Befindlichkeit, Stimmung). Levinas will later use this room to develop a concept of ethical affectivity. Thanks to Heidegger, Levinas could attend the famous 1929 conference in Davos. The leading figures were Cassirer and Heidegger: Heidegger read a paper on Kant and Cassirer talked about Heidegger. Levinas experienced the confrontation be-

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tween these two great philosophers as an encounter between “two souls who could not hear each other or hardly listened to each other.”6 The neo-Kantian Cassirer, a pupil of Hermann Cohen, appeared there as a representative of an aristocratic and humanistic era which was doomed to disappear. Heidegger represented a new perspective: a philosophy which does not start from exact science as the source of all knowledge. Heidegger regarded science as a derived phenomenon. Not science but human existence and the experience of meaning within this existence formed the starting-point of his philosophy. The students hung on his lips, though sometimes they did not wholly understand him. He was different, also in his clothing: in the conference ambiance he always wore skiing clothes, excusing himself by quoting Nietzsche to the effect that a philosopher must always be a good alpinist too. Looking back, Levinas observes with surprise that nobody could then have predicted that this captivating teacher would join the Nazi party three years later. Levinas was told by Alexandre Koyré, who was then studying in Germany, about Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party and how his rectorate of Freiburg University (from spring 1933 to spring 1934) was influenced by National Socialist ideas. He talks about “the blackest of my thoughts about Heidegger and no forgetting is possible.”7 The rectoral address Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität led him to abandon the book on Heidegger which he had started writing after his thesis.8 When public attention was once again focused on the “Heidegger question” by the publication of Victor Farias’ Heidegger et le nazisme in 1987, Levinas’ reaction was therefore moderate, because “almost everything Farias said was known.”9

6

“Interview with François Poirié (1986),” in: Is it Righteous to Be? 33, 34. Is It Righteous to Be? 36. 8 “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,” En decouvrant l’existence, 53-76. On Levinas’ intended book, see: Peperzak, To the Other, 4 and “Phenomenology-ontologymetaphysics,” 121. 9 From the interview “L Autre, Utopie et Justice,” in: Entre nous, 255/225. 7


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3. The verbality of being For all the possible criticism from a philosophical, political, and perhaps psychological point of view, Levinas regards Heidegger’s work as an undisputed high point in the history of Western philosophy, comparable with Plato’s Phaedrus, Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft or Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes.10 But what is the greatness of Heidegger, in Levinas’ view? What fed his admiration for Heidegger? In the thirties and forties Levinas wrote three articles on Heidegger’s philosophy, largely descriptive, with here and there a critical undertone.11 One essential notion comes up again and again: for Levinas, Heidegger is the exponent of the insight that the verb to be refers to an event. Being is not something isolated, being shows itself in beings, and it is constantly different from beings. Heidegger calls this the ontological difference. The distinction between being and beings was slowly forgotten in Western metaphysics. Being became a noun instead of a verb and it was conceived of as a being: the highest Being, the apex of the pyramid of being, God. This led to loss of the awareness that being is in the first place an event.12 Levinas was immediately struck by Heidegger’s discovery of the ontological difference and by the insight that existence is above all an activity, a task in which human existence involves itself. The point of being is being itself, the point is to understand its possibilities—not via the intellect but existentially, that is to say: by being these possibilities, by realising them in existence. Man (Dasein) occupies a special position in this: he is aware of the task of existing. Human activities are forms of understanding being. Thus philosophy is inextricably linked to existence itself,

10 Ethique et Infini, 34/37. On the unforgettable impression which Sein und Zeit made on Levinas: Ethique et Infini, 35-39. 11 “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie” and “L’ontologie dans le temporel” were first published in 1933 and 1948 respectively and republished in En découvrant l’existence (53-76 and 77-90), together with another article on Heidegger: “De la description à l’existence” (91-109). 12 En découvrant l’ existence, 56, 80, 100.

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to the vicissitudes of the concrete human being. Existence has an active meaning. Dasein exists as the subject of its possibilities. It exists amidst possibilities from which it must choose: which to realise and which to pass by. These possibilities are special in that they should not be seen as objects. They are not known in an intellectual or contemplative manner, but are recognised as existential possibilities for this particular human being. 4. Finiteness and transcendence The comprehension of possibilities is transcendent: Dasein anticipates its own future here. It draws to itself a future in the proper sense. In this connection Levinas notes again and again how different this transcendence is in comparison with the traditional idea of transcendence: it is not a going beyond one’s own limits towards an absolute, supratemporal ideal—it is rather a transcendence towards nothing. The Dasein which understands its own possibilities is directed at what is not (or: what is not yet). Non-being is the source of inspiration, the direction of transcendence.13 This awareness of non-being is brought about by the confrontation of Dasein with its own death: the Sein-zum-Tode. Heidegger describes it as a “being open to” or an “anticipation of” possibilities. In this anticipation Dasein discovers death as the truest possibility, which gives access to its authentic conception of existence.14 Dwelling on Heidegger’s concept of transcendence, Levinas also develops his first critical thoughts: is it possible to transcend towards nothing? Does Heidegger’s focus on finiteness not result in a lack of real transcendence? Does the lack of an awareness of eternity not mean that the concept of transcendence in Sein und Zeit remains entirely immanental? Levinas connects this immanence with the word “interiority”: in Heidegger’s philosophy there is not really room for a truth which comes “from outside” and which consequently breaks

13 14

En découvrant l’existence, 104. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 261-263/305-308.


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through the relationship between Dasein and being. This dominance of the internal relations between Dasein and being lends a tragic aspect to Heidegger’s philosophy .15 In a 1949 article on phenomenology Levinas makes this lack of external illumination a feature of phenomenology as such: philosophy here is not a critical external perspective, but coincides with life. For such an external perspective, Levinas refers to the metaphysics of Descartes, where the idea of the Infinite illuminates the thought of the finite subject from outside.16 Apparently the reflection on Heidegger’s philosophy of finiteness spontaneously arouses a certain longing for classical metaphysics in Levinas. Does real transcendence and true knowledge not require an awareness of eternity or at least of a supratemporal truth? Jacques Derrida offers a clever deconstruction of this ambivalence in “Violence et Métaphysique”: is it possible to hold to radical infinity and to the idea of the Infinite at the same time?17 Is there something like a supratemporal truth which manifests itself in temporal reality? Levinas’ attempt to make a plausible case for this centres on the image of the face, which is the vehicle or the incarnation of an absolute truth that shows itself as the essence of a prohibition: thou shalt not kill. But is such a movement still possible after Heidegger’s philosophy without ending up in the aporias of traditional metaphysics? 5. The climate of Heidegger’s philosophy abandoned Levinas’ criticism in the above articles remains confined to a few remarks in the margin of the exposition, but the distance gradually grows. A break occurs in De l’existence à l’existant, the book 15

En découvrant l’existence, 68. The inquiry into the status of this “idea of the Infinite” later becomes an important motif in Levinas, which he sets against Heidegger’s philosophy of finiteness. See Chapter 5 of this book for an analysis of the motif of the infinite against the background of the philosophy of religion. 17 Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” 220/148: “Cet anhistoricité du sens en son origine est donc ce qui separe en profondeur Levinas de Heidegger” (translation: “The anhistoricity of meaning at its origin is what profoundly separates Levinas from Heidegger, therefore.”) See also 153/103, 170/115. 16

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which Levinas started writing before the war and which he finished as a prisoner of war. De l’existence à l’existant was published in 1947, when Paris was in thrall to existentialism. A banderole around the cover read: “ou il n’est pas question d’angoisse” (in which there is no question of anxiety). In the preface Levinas announces that this work has been inspired by the wish to abandon the climate of Heidegger’s philosophy. But, he adds, this philosophy cannot be abandoned by returning to a pre-Heideggerian form of thought. In other words: it is only possible to go beyond Heidegger’s philosophy by going straight through it, by incorporating the central issues of this thought in a new philosophy. Again and again Levinas will set himself this task with regard to Heidegger’s philosophy, and only in this way does he arrive at his own philosophical starting-points. It is clear that Levinas develops his own philosophy as a thought of transcendence, but he conceives of transcendence differently from Heidegger. He also gives his own interpretation of the ontological difference, an interpretation which will colour his entire philosophy of the subject. He emphasises a question which Heidegger fails to raise: how does the human existent enter into a relationship with his own existence? How does he appropriate his own existence? In fact this is Heidegger’s question of Jemeinigkeit (“Das Sein darum es diesem Seienden in seinem Sein geht, ist je meines…”), but Levinas poses it at the beginning of the relationship between being and existent. A second, related difference is that in Heidegger the interaction between Dasein and being is the starting-point of the hermeneutical circle, whereas Levinas makes an attempt to say something about being outside of this circle. Outside of the human perspective? Is this possible? What does being amount to without the existent? Can anything be said about it? Levinas’ answer is: without the existent, being is nothing, it is merely a form of “being there,” il y a, a threatening presence without a face. It is there, just as darkness and time in its elusive progression can be threatening to someone who lies awake at night, waiting for the sleep that does not come.


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In what does the threat of il y a consist? Levinas describes it exactly in his first works: the threat is the experience that being has pinned you down, that you are literally subject, subject to anonymous events over which you have no control. The difference can be experienced if we compare it with lying awake at night, unable to sleep. If this takes too long, you give up waiting, get out of bed, and do something: drink tea, read, wander through the house. As soon as you get up, the threat of the dark and of elusive time disappears at once. Levinas analyses this as follows: at the moment of getting up you have torn yourself loose from the anonymous waking (in which you were there and yet were not). You once again subject being to your will and your plans. Once again you are somebody, an existent, and the anonymity of being no longer has any hold on you. So there are two possibilities: either the existent subject is part of being and experiences its independence in this, or the existent, the I, the human being, is subjected to being. It then comes into touch with the horror of il y a. Not with what Heidegger calls Angst, for this anxiety is connected with Sein-zum-Tode as a source of possibilities, but with il y a as a tragic self-bondage, as the inability to escape from oneself.18 Levinas gives being the new name of il y a. This is at once an interpretative translation and a reference to Heidegger, who detected a generous undertone in the expression es gibt. Being is open-handed and generous. Heidegger’s intention here is to remind us of the joy which the existing world can give us. In using the phrase il y a—the literal translation of es gibt—Levinas points to the other side of this generosity. In the experience of il y a, “being” is an impersonal, neutral presence which creates a sense 18

Levinas uses the expression il y a to denote two different experiences of being. In the first place the experience of being as a universal absence which is a presence at the same time. This meaning comes to the fore when he talks about il y a apart from existents; the interpretation of this experience of il y a is negative (“horreur,” cf. De l’existence à l’existant, 57-64). In addition, the term il y a is also used by Levinas to designate the experience of suffering from existence itself. The corresponding feeling is that of weariness (“lassitude”). This experience arouses the desire for an escape (“évasion”) from being. Earlier Levinas had addressed the theme of “évasion” in an article of the same name: De l’évasion (originally published in 1935 in Recherches Philosophiques).

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of terror and perplexity. Referring to the Hitler era, Levinas regularly notes that, between 1933 and 1945, “none of the generosity which the German term ‘es gibt’ is said to contain revealed itself.”19 The existent which comes about amidst being is given the name “hypostasis”—this time with an oblique allusion to Neoplatonism. There is an existent which has a relationship with being. Levinas does not go deeply into the basis of this origination. He is above all interested in the dynamics of the moment. How does the hypostasis enter into a relationship with being? How does subjectivity come about? He describes the genesis of the I as a dramatic process, in which particularly the relation of the I to itself is not without problems. To be a subject is to be bound to oneself.20 The subject (hypostasis) can be considered from two perspectives: its place in space (position) and its place in time (moment). The subject can only gain a position and a moment when it cuts itself off from il y a and withdraws into itself. In this emphasis on position Levinas departs from Heidegger’s view of Dasein as primarily external in orientation. Levinas places the hypostasis in the temporal perspective of discontinuity and the freedom of the moment. It is not possible to explain the mode of being of the hypostasis historically, for it has a momentaneous character and thus breaks through the infinite progression of time. Hypostasis means a break in three respects: there is a break with anonymous being, with the world as a threatening space, and with the progression of time. The hypostasis is its own form of transcendence, a kingdom for the person amidst the anonymous process of being. But the existent must pay a price for this sovereignty: it is itself and thus fatally bound to itself.21 It is no more than a moment, and therefore has no real relation to time. It provides for itself, but has no relation to the future.

19 20 21

Difficile liberté, 409/292. De l’existence à l’existant, 143/125. De l’existence à l’existant, 151/132.


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6. Death: possibility or impossibility? Here, after all the previous skirmishes, we find a fundamental difference from Heidegger, who connects thought on the future with finiteness and Sein-zum-Tode. Dasein first becomes temporal and future-orientated by being confronted with its own mortality. This insight is coloured by anxiety, which thus, at the same time, becomes the basic mood of Dasein. Heidegger is not concerned here with a conscious meditation on one’s own end, but with the awareness that death is “possible” at any moment. The true relation to death is the anticipation of its possibility. This also gives Dasein an awareness of its own character of possibility, so that real existence can be seen as “no more than a possibility.” The dialectic between possible and real grants freedom to Dasein: it no longer derives its possibilities from the persons and processes around it, but designs its own form of existence. According to Heidegger, the relationship with death opens man up to his authentic possibilities, for one because it gives him the chance to detach himself from the judgements and insights of the people around him. Levinas’ first two post-war works, De l’existence à l’existant and Le temps et l’autre both end in a confrontation with Heidegger on the meaning of death. Experience of the future is not really possible for the subject in its form of “hypostasis,” for it is sovereign but at the same time tragically bound to itself. From the perspective of Sein und Zeit, the hypostasis enters into a relationship with the future by means of death, which colours reality as “no more than a possibility.” This opens up the prospect of other future possibilities. The paradox in Heidegger is that the possibilities come into view through the harsh confrontation with a radical impossibility: finiteness, the death which is part of every life. Hence the designation of death as an “impossible possibility.”22 22

See Sein und Zeit, 262/307: “Der Tod als Möglichkeit gibt dem Dasein nichts zu “Verwirklichendes” und nichts, was es als Wirkliches selbst sein könnte. Er ist die Möglichkeit der Unmöglichkeit jeglichen Verhältens zu …, jedes Existierens.” In translation: “Death as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be “actualised,” nothing which Dasein, as actual, could be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every

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Acceptance of the ultimate possibility of existence makes freedom possible. Levinas disputes this interpretation. Death is not a matter of freedom: rather, in death the subject reaches the limit of what is possible.23 According to Levinas, the confrontation with death brings the subject into contact with im-possibility. It is impossible to live on and shape my life in freedom. And yet there is something liberating even in the encounter with this threatening figure of death. Death liberates because it is totally Other, because it loosens the subject’s oppressive bond with itself. In this bond the subject which is sovereign remains nevertheless bound to its own choices, ideas, and imaginings. Levinas does not, like Heidegger, seek freedom from facticity, for in his view this freedom is implicit in existence. He is above all interested in the dark sides, the impossibilities of freedom. If the subject is always bound to its own existence, how can it ever be released from itself? How can it come into contact with something that is totally other? This is how death makes its appearance in the story, as the agent which robs the subject of the possibilities of dominating, choosing, and planning. This does not yet make for a real relation to the future, for the encounter with death is much more violent in Levinas’ interpretation than in Heidegger. There is simply no longer room (position) or time (moment) for the hypostasis. In the encounter with death it is simply as the classical philosophers said (to dispel the fear of death): either I am, and death is not, or death is, and I am not. It is everything or nothing. Death is an “other,” but a real encounter with it is not actually possible. 7. Eroticism: a future fed by desire One of the major problems in Levinas’ early work is the tragedy of a subject which is bound to its own destiny. In this respect, the first Other is conceived of as “death,” and the encounter with death is found to be liberating because the subject need not exist continually. There is a way out for the subject that is locked way of existing.” 23 Le temps et l’autre, 58/71.


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up in its own identity, even though it is a way out which at the same time means the end. We cannot therefore classify the encounter with death under the subject’s experiences. For death means the end of the subject (hypostasis) itself. But perhaps it is possible to have an encounter with an Other which can be experienced. As a true phenomenologist, Levinas looks for a situation which is comparable with the encounter with death, but which does not result in the subject’s death. Surprisingly, he finds this situation in eroticism. After all, the erotic encounter can also be described as a confrontation with an Other who is absolutely different. Here, too, alterity is the essential characteristic of the person who is encountered. But what is special about the erotic relationship is that the other does not appear as freedom here. Were this the case, we would soon end up in the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. Since Hegel, there has been no lack of thought on the social relationship in which one subject enters into a relationship with the other. But this always involves a conflict between two freedoms, in which the question of mutual recognition or the possibility of subordination is immediately raised.24 In his phenomenology of eros, Levinas tries to escape from this dialectic: the point here is not the relationship of two freedoms, as in Hegel, but a freedom which is related to something elusive, something that escapes from power through a transcendent movement. In eroticism the subject maintains a relation to the future which does not depend on its possibilities, plans, and initiatives. This seems to be the heart of what Levinas, against Heidegger’s thought on time and future, wants to put forward. The real future happens to me—so the subject has a passive rather than ac-

24 Cf. Le temps et l’autre, 80/87: “Car avec une liberté il ne peut y avoir d’autre relation que celle de la soumission et de l’asservissement.” (In translation: “For with a freedom there can be no other relationship than that of submission or enslavement.”) In the same period, Levinas conducts a debate on freedom with the philosophical tradition: freedom does not arise from a relationship with nothing but in the relationship with the other. Levinas describes real freedom here as: to let one’s existence be forgiven by the other, “by the very alterity of the other.” (De l’existence à l’existant, 161/94).

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tive relation to it. Through this possibility of passivity, it severs the ties of its own lot. It is no longer fatally bound to itself and it is freed from the fatality of its own choices. 8. Plural being: response to Heidegger This step, from Sein-zum-Tode (Being-towards-Death) to eroticism, is by no means in the spirit of Heidegger. Levinas’ phenomenology of death and eroticism is the mirror image here of the analysis of human existence which Heidegger offers in Sein und Zeit. In Levinas it is death which breaks through the subject’s loneliness and tragedy and allows contact with the other. The erotic relationship, the relationship with alterity as such, makes possible a real futurity characterised by openness and desire. Futurity is no longer connected with nothing or with death, but with eroticism. So social life does not by definition occasion in-authenticity, as Heidegger believed. In his early work Levinas presents eroticism as the hidden heart of social life. From here it is a small step to the phenomenon of fertility: fertility makes for a broadening of social life and allows us to conceive of a plurality starting from a small nucleus—the asymmetrical erotic relationship. It has now become possible and indeed necessary to think about existence (being) in terms of plurality. From now on, being and time mean: being and fertility. After all, it is fertility which forms the bridge between the time of the self and the time of the other. I can experience the time which starts with my child’s life as being my own and at the same time as not being my own. The arrival of a child means a renewal of one’s own existence which does not depend on the parents’ initiative. It is a renewal which is granted from outside. At the same time this provisional connection between eroticism, plurality, and exteriority is not without problems. Later, Levinas will therefore make a clearer distinction between ethics and eroticism, mainly on account of eroticism’s dependence on the need structure of the subject. In the early work the two forms of the Other—in eroticism and in ethics—simply stand alongside each other. In both relations the Other is the person who sets free.


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The alterity of the other frees the subject from the burden of its existence. It forgives the subject its existence. This alterity reveals itself in a dialogue which costs time. Not everything can be said at once.25 The encounter with the other is a face-à-face. With this description Levinas dissociates himself from Heidegger’s view of being together as a Miteinandersein, in which the emphasis lies on the collective experience of something communal.26 In the encounter with the other there is, rather, an acute awareness of the difference between self and other, which cannot be simply overcome by the idea that the other is a variation on one’s own ego.27 Autrui, en tant qu’autrui, n’est pas seulement un alter ego. Il est ce que moi je ne suis pas: il est le faible alors que moi je suis le fort; il est le pauvre, il est “la veuve et l’orphelin” … Ou bien il est “l’etranger, l’ennemi, le puissant.”28

25

This connection between dialogue and time is inspired by the philosophy of Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig has written a great deal about the connection between dialogue, as the primal form of language, and time. Unlike monological thinking, which can make a thousand connections at one stroke, dialogue depends with all its being on the other. “Sprechen ist zeitgebunden, zeitgenährt; es kann und will diesen seinen Nährboden nicht verlassen; es weiss nicht im voraus, wo es herauskommen wird; es lässt sich keine Stichworte vom andern geben. Es lebt überhaupt vom Leben des anderen…; während Denken immer einsam ist, mag es auch gemeinsam zwischen mehreren ‘Symphilosophierenden’ geschehen…” In translation: “Speaking is timebound, time-nourished; it neither can nor will abandon this, its nourishing environment; it does not know in advance where it will arrive; it lets its cues given by others. It lives in general from the life of the other…whereas thinking is always solitary, even if it is happening among several ‘symphilosophizing’ partners…” For Rosenzweig, this dialogical perspective is closely connected to the philosophy of time. In distinction to logical thought, grammatical thought is characterised by the fact that it needs the other; therefore it is obliged to take time seriously. Rosenzweig, Die Schrift, 199-200/126-127. 26 Cf. De l’existence à l’existant, 162/94-95: “Le Miteinandersein Heideggerien demeure aussi la collectivité de l’avec, et c’est autour de la “vérité” qu’il se révèle dans sa forme authentique.” In translation: “Heidegger’s Miteinandersein also remains a collectivity of the with, and it is around truth that its authentic form is found.” 27 The idea of the alter ego as a variation on my own subjectivity forms the basis of Husserl’s phenomenology of the social relationship (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen V, § 50).

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At the end of De l’existence à l’existant Levinas returns to eroticism as the origin of the intersubjective space. Intersubjectivity starts with asymmetry, with the difference between me and the other. That is why intersubjectivity cannot be thought separately from eroticism and sexuality. 9. A different climate? First evaluation. Did Levinas, in his first works, actually exchange the climate of Heidegger’s philosophy for a different climate? And did he remain faithful to the task which he set himself, not to return to a traditional, pre-Heideggerian form of thought? In its methodology and line of inquiry, Levinas’ philosophy is clearly affiliated with that of Heidegger. Like Heidegger, Levinas takes the ontological difference as his starting-point and relates it to time. But whereas Heidegger understands time and future from the perspective of death and finiteness, time in Levinas is first brought up in conjunction with eroticism as the open futurity of desire. Following on from this is the connection between ethics and futurity. The encounter with the Other is liberating and relieves the subject of the burden of its own existence. In this way Levinas gives his own interpretation of central elements in Sein und Zeit: Sein-zum-Tode and the concept of possibility. The distinctive feature of his interpretation is not the contrast between ontology (Heidegger) and ethics (Levinas), as is usually thought. For Levinas, the real problem of Sein und Zeit is the interpretation of facticity, the bondage of Dasein to itself. Heidegger sees a liberating power in death. Through the fear of death Dasein can distance itself from facticity. But is death in Heidegger not too “personal” to be able to be truly the “Other” and thus “Other”? After all, it is my death, for which no one can substitute. Death throws me back on myself and makes me who I “authentically” am. Behold the problem from Levinas’ perspec28

De l’existence à l’ existant 162/95. In translation: “The other as other is not only an alter ego. He is what I am not: he is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, ‘the widow and the orphan’…Or else the other is ‘the stranger, the enemy and the powerful one.’”


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tive. The solution which he offers has already been outlined above. Levinas thinks death starting from the asymmetrical experience of the Other, coloured ethically or erotically. Heidegger lacks the insight into the experience of the Other as a breach in being or as a disruption of ontology. This is well observed. Levinas rightly plays down the significance of Sein-zum-Tode and the fear of nothing. This fear is not revealing and the idea of death does not mean a real breach in ontology. The other moves ontology towards a plurality for which there is no basis in Heidegger, despite the discovery of the ontological difference. Existence is at once finite and directed at the future. 10. Levinas’ criticism of the later Heidegger: materialism and rootedness Heidegger’s later thought gives rise to a sharper critique than in Levinas’ first works. An eye-catching article often mentioned in this connection is “Heidegger, Gagarin and us.” It was occasioned by the space flight of Yuri Gagarin, but the real subject of this brief article is Heidegger’s philosophy. What is man’s relation to the world? Levinas observes that a journey like that of Gagarin is threatening to Heidegger and the Heideggerians, because in their eyes man cannot and should not leave the earth. On the contrary: man should rediscover the earth, he “should open himself up to the light of mighty landscapes, should have a sense of the architecture of buildings, the presence of a tree, the mystery of things.” Levinas poses various fundamental questions in connection with this starting-point: does it not mean that man enters too fully into the world, so that he becomes deeply rooted in being? Does he not start to resemble a plant: a living being that is tied to the world by a mesh of fine, deep connections? These questions addressed to Heidegger are still topical today, for instance in the holistic philosophy of nature, which regards man as part of nature. Owing to a rational worldview and technological development, this part is seen to have become increasingly alienated from the whole. Consequently, the original ability to perceive and communicate with nature has also been weakened and blunted. We can start to re-experience a deeper

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connection with nature by means of, for instance, meditation. We will then become more aware of the inner harmony and the sanctity of nature. This is reminiscent of Heidegger’s late philosophy, where the separation between man and nature is considered a result of the subject-object antithesis which in the seventeenth century acquired a firm basis in rationalist philosophy. In that time man as a thinking subject was placed outside of nature (compare Descartes’ cogito) and nature was radically objectified, so that the awareness of nature’s sanctity retreated into the background. Heidegger, too, believes that we should once again become receptive to the holiness in nature and in him, too, the meanings “holiness” and “wholeness” are very close to each other. Whereas Heidegger criticises the objectification of nature, Levinas defends the right of objectification and demystification. In terms of history of culture, he aligns Judaism with the principles of modern technology: both have destroyed idols and freed the world of magic and mystifications. Nature is not holy, the earth exists to provide food, drink, and shelter, the three things which man cannot do without. We should seek the holy in our relation to the other human being, not in our relation to nature. Heidegger’s emphasis on the mystery of things is “the source of all cruelty to human beings.”29 Levinas regards the tendency towards rootedness in late Heidegger as paganism and a shameful materialism. Moreover, it is a materialism which by definition relegates the stranger to an inferior position. The emphasis on being rooted in nature—preferably in the “original” environment—means that human existence in Heidegger becomes a form of “autochthony,” though it often involves autochthons who must rediscover their roots. We are only real human beings in a living connection with our natu29

“Heidegger, Gagarin et Nous,” Difficile liberté 325/233. The description of “food, drink, and shelter” as the meaning of the earth and nature for man is derived by Levinas from a Talmudic commentary on Genesis. In the passage concerned Abraham plants a tamarind in Beer-sheba. Though the Bible mentions an individual tree here, the tamarind is a siglum: the three letters required to write its name in Hebrew are Food, Drink, and Shelter. The individual tree implies the meaning of nature for man: provision of the primary necessities of life.


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ral and historico-cultural roots. Heidegger develops this autochtonous view of human existence by means of philosophicopoetic descriptions of the bridge over the river and the farm in the Black Forest.30 It prompts Levinas to ask whether man is ever autochthonous anywhere. Can he rediscover his real homeland in nature or in his own cultural history? Is there in fact something like an original homeland?31 According to Levinas, man is not autochthonous and never was. Exceptionally, he refers directly to two scriptural passages: Psalm 119 and Leviticus 25—as passages which characterise man as a “stranger on earth.” This alienism has nothing to do with the Platonic idea of an exiled soul, but points to a difference between the self and the world, from which the responsibility of one human being in relation to the other becomes conceivable. Being a stranger brings people together as fellow human beings. Nobody is entirely at home with himself.32 Levinas quotes the biblical verses not as proof, but because they give access to a certain kind of experience. Somewhat ironically, he justifies this use of texts with an appeal to Heidegger’s later works, paying attention to the fact that it was Heidegger who summoned poets like Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl as witnesses to gain access to the experience of rootedness. The observation Levinas makes here is that Western philosophy can evidently appeal to various traditions. He does not leave it at that, however, but also considers it important to inquire into the interrelationship of these traditions. Is there a relation anyhow, and, if so, how should this relationship be described? How should we conceive of the connection between the holy writings which are read in the West and the writings of the Greeks?33

30 See for instance Heideggers’ essays “Das Ding” and “Bauen Wohnen Denken” in Vorträge und Aufsätze II. 31 Cf. Humanisme de l’autre homme, 89-90. 32 Humanisme de l’autre homme, 97. The Platonic experience of being a stranger, in the form of the soul living in exile, is perhaps also mentioned by Levinas to distance himself from the Christian idea of man’s foreignness. 33 This could be a reference to Heidegger’s articles on the pre-Socratic thinkers as a different source of Western thought.

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Levinas himself calls attention here to a difference and a similarity between him and Heidegger. It concerns the practice of quotation. Both thinkers take inspiration from texts outside of the strictly philosophical corpus: Heidegger refers to German poets and pre-Socratic thinkers, while Levinas quotes the Bible and the Talmud. Does the dialogue now end in a relativism of traditions, in which one quotes this and the other that? As regards Levinas, this is not the case. In connection with the issue of quotation, he poses the intriguing question whether philosophizing consists perhaps in the decoding of a text concealed in a palimpsest. Is philosophizing perhaps the discovery of the Jewish text concealed in the Greek palimpsest? This would mean that Heidegger digs deeply, going as far back as pre-Socratic philosophy, but in doing so forgets a layer: the Jewish tradition.34 11. Ontology and the panoramic outlook Levinas not only criticises the philosophy of rootedness but also the primacy of ontology in Heidegger. In his view, Heidegger understands the existent from the perspective of being, so that it loses its independence and thus the foundation of its being-different. Levinas constantly finds this “primacy of the panoramic outlook” in Heidegger’s thought and tries to think against it, searching for the moment in which the totality of the horizon of being springs open. By the term “panoramic,” Levinas means that seeing takes a central position in Heidegger: man is a seer 34

Levinas thus returns to an old theme: the possibility of translating Jewish experiences into the language of philosophy. He now approaches it from another side: a Jewish text is as it were concealed in the Greek palimpsest, that is to say: the forgotten Jewish experiences can be rediscovered in Greek thought itself, if questioned in the right way. Fundamental questions about Levinas’ representation of the relationship between Jewish and Greek have been posed by Jacques Derrida. He argues that the logos of Greek philosophy maybe offers a site of encounter for Jewish and Christian philosophical selfunderstanding, but that it cannot remain as neutral as Levinas presupposes. Greek philosophy has its own relation to alterity: “in welcoming alterity in general to the heart of the logos, the Greek thought of Being forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation.” (“Violence et métaphysique,” 227/153).


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who contemplates the world. Levinas searches for the moment in which the totality of seeing breaks open: “the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other.”35At the beginning of this chapter I already showed that Levinas regards speaking as the chief characteristic of the relation to the other. The other human being is in the first place the person with whom you speak or by whom you are addressed. From this being-addressed he may become an object of understanding, but even then the relationship with the other first of all involves answering in the dialogue, and only then, possibly, understanding. So the originality of speaking is urged here against the relationship in which understanding comes first and foremost. At first sight this is an argument from dialogical philosophy, but on closer consideration something else is at stake, something that has to do with the initial impulses of Levinas’ thought. In contrast to dialogical philosophy, Levinas interprets the relation to the other as an asymmetrical pattern: the other criticises me, he is the master, he is my superior and teaches me. Heidegger failed to recognise this fundamental asymmetry, because he makes a neutral intersubjectivity precede the relationship with the other “from face to face.”36 According to Levinas, the relationship with transcendence is not a form of knowledge or understanding, but this concrete and always unexpected word of the other, whereas in Heidegger’s interpretation it is more a question of power and freedom. Aborder l’étant à partir de l’être, c’est, à la fois, le laisser être et le comprendre. C’est à partir le vide et le néant de l’exister—tout lumière et phosphorenscence—que la raison s’empare de l’existant. À partir de l’être, à partir de l’horizon lumineux où l’étant a une silhouette, mais a perdu sa face, il est l’appel même adressé à l’intelligence. Sein und Zeit n’a peut-être soutenu qu’une seule thèse: l’être est inséparable de la compréhension de l’être (qui se déroule comme temps), l’être est déjà appel à la subjectivité.37 35

Totalité et infini, 270/295, see also xvii/29. Totalité et infini, 39/68, cf. 61-62/89-90. 37 In translation: “To broach an existent from Being is simultaneously to let it be and to comprehend it. Reason seizes upon an existent through the void and nothingness of existence. Approached from Being, from the luminous horizon where it has a silhouette, but has lost its face, an existent is the very appeal that 36

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To approach the existent from being is a form of exercising power. The existent is no longer seen as a face, it has only a silhouette of itself, it stands out against the background of something else. Levinas voices this criticism of Heidegger at various places in Totalité et infini. Peperzak regards these passages as the most lucid pieces which Levinas ever wrote about Heidegger.38 This may be true, but another feature which immediately catches the eye is the monumental and deliberate misunderstanding of Heidegger as if now, with one move, his thought can be brushed aside together with all the other “totality thinkers.” Understanding, in this interpretation of Heidegger, only pretends to be Seinlassen, whereas in reality it is a form of exercising power with the help of impersonal Being. The term “possibility,” too, relates only to power and domination in Heidegger. But what is in fact the experience of being in Heidegger? Is it not the experience of an openness which refers to nothing and death? Is it not Befindlichkeit and anxiety which put Dasein in touch with this experience, and is the point of this anxiety for Heidegger not the moment in which Dasein finds itself completely at sea?39 Can we still talk about something like “exercise of power” here? We therefore do not find in Totalité et infini a real confrontation with Heidegger in the sense of an encounter with the fundamental movement of his thought. Rather Levinas is strengthen-

is addressed to comprehension. Being and Time has argued perhaps but one sole thesis: Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (which unfolds as time); Being is already an appeal to subjectivity,” Totalité et infini, 15/45. 38 See also Totalité et infini, 44-48/72-76 and Peperzak, To the Other, 348. 39 In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger emphasises the objectlessness of anxiety— anxiety is a matter of being-in-the-world as such (“Das Wovor der Angst ist das In-der-Welt-sein als solches,” Sein und Zeit, 186). The world falls away in meaninglessness and Dasein is thrown back on itself (an anticipation of the Unbezüglichkeit of Sein-zum-Tode), so that it becomes open to its most particular possibilities, and the two fundamental possibilities (authenticity and inauthenticity) are made visible as such. After Sein und Zeit, this phenomenology of fear is developed in the direction of the experience of nothing. See for instance Heidegger “Was ist Metaphysik,” 103-122.


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ing his own position here. Consequently, the distance to Heidegger increases to the point where it is hardly possible to talk about a real exchange of ideas. 12. Time, finiteness, and infinity: the real theme At the same time another confrontation is going on, one which is less based on misunderstandings. It takes place somewhat in the background, but is fundamental to the framework of Levinas’ and Heidegger’s thought. I am referring to their thought on time, or—more precisely—on the relation of being and time. Is it necessary, after Heidegger, to conceive of time as finite? Or is it possible to offer a philosophical defence of the infinite aspect of time? How can this infinity be connected with the finite, singular existent? At the end of Totalité et infini, Levinas surprises with the introduction of the term “infinition.” He explains the term in such a way that “being in infinity” calls for an origin or beginning: an existent that breaks out of the anonymity of il y a. The existent must be able to extricate itself from the entanglements of being: only in this way can it “exist in truth.” Existing in truth is the real meaning of infinition.40 The existent must have room to distance itself from being. It must not, in a metaphor from Levinas’ early commentaries on Heidegger, become entirely “embarked” in being. It must be able to keep its distance from the ship on which it is sailing. For Levinas, this distance is made possible by two phenomena to which he also accorded an important place in his first works: fertility and forgiveness. Fertility means: the possibility of having a different fate from your own, of starting afresh. The new time born from fertility is the time of infinition. It means a victory over mortality and it should be seen in the perspective of a forgiveness which is always 40

“Mais l’infinition se produit par l’étant qui ne s’empêtre pas dans l’être, qui peut prendre ses distances à l’égard de l’être, tout en restant lié à l’être; autrement dit l’infinition se produit par l’étant qui existe en vérité.” Totalité et infini, 257/281. In translation: “Infinition is produced by the existent that is not trammeled in being, that can, while remaining bound to being, take its distances with regard to being: infinition is produced by the existent that exists in truth.”

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possible. Together, fertility and forgiveness offer an image of what time really is: a boundary which the subject can transcend, not by what it actively does, but by what it admits in receptivity. The question of time continues to exercise Levinas in his later thought. Illustrative in this regard is a passage from the preface of De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, in which he evidences insight into the diachrony of time as the foundation on which his philosophy rests: Ma pensée la plus profonde et qui porte toute pensée, ma pensée de l’infini plus ancienne que la pensée du fini, est la diachronie même du temps, la coïncidence, le désaississement même: une façon d’»être voué» avant tout acte de conscience, et plus profondément que la conscience, de par la gratuité du temps (où les philosophes ont pu redonter la vanité ou la privation). Façon d’être voué qui est dévotion. À Dieu qui n’est pas intentionnalité…41

Striking in this context is the word “devotion.” What Levinas is referring to is devotion to the Other as a responsibility which is not based on the principle of reciprocity. As devotion and responsibility for the other, human life is not isolated, it is not autonomous but always à Dieu—“turned to God.” The meaning of finite life is a devotion to what goes beyond that life. In ordinary time we can hear the voice that calls from another time: infinite time. The word “God” acquires meaning in this experience of infinity as an interruption of ordinary time. It is natural that this insight into time as a devotion to the infinite should lead to another confrontation with Heidegger. In his Sorbonne lectures on death and time, Levinas therefore considers Heidegger as an “obligatory passage,” and consequently dwells at length on the main themes of Sein und Zeit in connection with time.42 Via a discussion of the terms Verstehen, Sorge, and 41

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 12/xiv-xv. In translation: “My deepest thought, which carries all thought, my thought of the infinite, older than the thought of the finite, is the very diachrony of time. It is noncoincidence, dispossession itself. This is a way of “being dedicated” before any act of consciousness and more deeply so than in consciousness, by way of the gratuity of time (in which philosophers managed to fear a vanity or privation). A way of being dedicated that is devotion. An unto-God [A Dieu] that is precisely not intentionality…” 42 Dieu, la mort et le temps, 32-64/22-53.


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Jemeinigkeit, he finally comes to the pièce de résistance: Sein-zumTode. Levinas does not conceal his great debt to Heidegger here, certainly as regards the interpretation of existence. On the other hand he makes it clear from the outset, through brief interventions, that he is unwilling to follow Heidegger in characterising human existence as a Sein-zum-Tode and that he also rejects the corresponding definition of time as finite time. Heidegger’s proposition is that death only gains meaning when I realise that I myself can die. The fact of mortality as such remains insignificant as long as it does not concern me. Everybody dies: the death of others around me is an experience which forms part of the social world. But only when I stop to consider that dying as a possibility is present in every moment of my existence do I become aware of the meaning of death. Not the death of others but the possibility of my own death returns me to the question of my “personal” possibilities and opens the way to an authentic existence. Levinas counters that the death of the other is much more shocking than Heidegger would have us believe. “The death of the Other is the first death. I am responsible for him, because he is mortal.” This experience of death colours the phenomenon of mortality more than Heidegger thinks. The meaning of death is first of all that the other reminds me of his mortality, of invisible death, of which his face is the sign. It lies in the experience that it is impossible to leave the other alone in the presence of death.43 Only by being aware of this and not being insensitive to it, do I respond to a meaning which goes beyond finite existence. Apparently an orientation to a meaning or a call is possible which comes from outside one’s own authenticity-orientated existence. Or, as Levinas puts it elsewhere, death’s meaning does not begin in finite but in interhuman existence. 44 With a certain persistence Levinas defends this perspective in his later work: existence is not in the first place Sein-zum-Tode, it is a “being-for-theother,” which can also be interpreted as a “being-for-beyond-mydeath.” Responding to the call of the (mortal) other is the initiation of an existence beyond the boundary of finite life. 43 44

Dieu, la mort et le temps, 54-55/42-43. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 246/163.

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But how is it possible to “exist for what is beyond death”? What does the word “future” actually mean? Can it only acquire meaning from my existence or is it possible that a future of which I do not form part has meaning for me nonetheless? Is it possible to exist for what is after my end? Can people dedicate themselves to a world which they will not inhabit themselves? To give an affirmative answer to these questions implies the need to show that Heidegger has forgotten something in his ontological analysis of Dasein, that he perhaps has a blind spot precisely in relation to the concept of future. 13. Work, altruism, and a future beyond death In the period after Totalité et infini Levinas formulates an answer to this question by analysing the concept of “work,” by which he means the radical orientation to the other that is lacking in Heidegger’s ontology. He describes the conditions of such an orientation as follows: Work, radically considered, is a movement of the Same to the Other which never returns to the Same. 45 Seen in this way, work calls for a certain altruism, it is not calculating, but rather exists by the grace of patience: the person who starts on it does not count on experiencing its outcome and reaping the possible reward. Levinas gradually discovers that this concept of work calls for a different approach to the future from the existentialist approach, in which the future means something only if it relates to my possibilities. There is a meaning which is no longer one of my possibilities. Heidegger ultimately understood time in terms of projection, the standing-outside (ecstasis) to the future. Levinas now proposes to interpret time, and the relation to the future, in terms of the attitude of patience. The person who works must forego the experience of the result. “He must work without entering the promised land.” Work is energy that is directed at the other and does not return to me in a roundabout way. It implies the ability “to be for what extends beyond my death.” These passages show that the 45

Humanisme de l’autre homme, 40-44.


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real stumbling block for Levinas is Heidegger’s thought on finiteness. The reproach of imperialism or totalitarian thought forms the backdrop to a debate between Heidegger and Levinas on the structure of time itself. Heidegger’s view of the fundamental finiteness of being makes it impossible to interpret time as a relation between the finite and the infinite. A disruption of the ontology which relates finite time to the infinite is inconceivable from the perspective of the paradigm in Being and Time. Levinas, on the other hand, argues that time is a relation of the finite to the infinite. He regards Heidegger’s philosophy as a passage that is necessary to think something new about this subject. According to Levinas, time—like Dasein—is not just orientated to itself. Hence the well-known definition of Dasein as a Being that is concerned with this being itself, and therefore concentrated on its own possibilities, is disputable.46 Time is openness to the infinite, which is why human existence is first of all a receptivity to the other which Levinas interprets as an ethical affectivity. Existence, entirely temporal, can be touched by “the mortality of the face of the other.” The contact between these two finitudes allows us a glimpse of what Levinas calls “the infinite.” It is contact, not outside of finiteness but nevertheless not entirely absorbed in finiteness either. In this way time is the coming about of the future. 14. Time and affectivity If the relationship between time, finiteness, and infinity is the real subject of debate, affectivity is an important subsidiary theme. When Levinas enters into a discussion with Heidegger in his later work, the topic of Befindlichkeit crops up constantly. Heidegger used this theme to formulate a receptivity which precedes a psychology of moods: the human ability to be subject to a mood and to be sensitive to the situation in which you find yourself. In Befindlichkeit, Dasein is attentive to the fact “that it ex-

46

Sein und Zeit, 12/32-33.

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ists and that it has to be.” In other words: it is receptive to its existence as fact and task at once. 47 Levinas acknowledges this fundamental receptivity, but also questions it constantly: Il faut se demander si toute affectivité remonte à l’angoisse entendue comme imminence du néant—si l’affectivité ne s’éveille que dans un étant persévérant dans son être (le conatus), si le conatus est l’humanité de l’homme, si l’humanité de l’homme est son avoir à être. Et cela conduit, inévitablement, à une discussion avec Heidegger.48

These questions prepare the reader for interpreting Befindlichkeit in a different way: affectivity means that the finite is touched by the infinite. The infinite has to be taken here as an endless desire to do justice to the other, as the passivity of the responsibility which impinges upon me before I have become a subject. Meanwhile, “the infinite” is the common translation for the notion of “God” in Levinas; therefore affectivity is also one of the expressions he uses for man’s relation to the infinite/God.49 Both Heidegger and Levinas assume a fundamental 47

Sein und Zeit, 134-135/173-174. Heidegger talks here about “Geworfenheit” as a “Faktizität der Überantwortung.” Dasein has been “thrown” into its situation; it is sensitive to it (Befindlichkeit) and will “have to take it upon itself” (Überantwortung). 48 Dieu, la mort et le temps, 26/18. In translation: “We must ask ourselves whether all affectivity goes back to anxiety, understood as the imminence of nothingness; that is, whether affectivity is awakened only in a being persevering in its being (the conatus), and whether the conatus is the humanity of man. We should ask ourselves whether the humanity of man is his having-to-be. And this leads inevitably to a discussion with Heidegger.” 49 Cf. the central section of “Dieu et la philosophie” where Levinas deals with the relation between the idea of the Infinite and “the way” in which it can be received or experienced: as a breach which introduces a “second moment of consciousness” in consciousness; as a “passivity,” comparable with the suffering of a trauma, or comparable with the situation of the created. (De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 104-108/62-65). Transcendance et intelligibilité offers a related interpretation of the idea of God as affectivity: “L’idée de Dieu est, de fond en comble, affectivité, laquelle ne se ramène pas à celle de la Befindlichkeit de Sein und Zeit, où l’angoisse de la Jemeinigkeit pour sa finitude de l’être à la mort vient toujours doubler l’intentionalité du sentiment ému par un étant appartenant au monde.” (Transcendance et intelligibilité, 26). Translation: “The idea of God is affectivity from top to bottom. An affectivity which does not amount to the Befindlichkeit of Sein und Zeit or the anxiety of Jemeinigkeit for its


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receptivity in man—that is the similarity between them. On the other hand, the differences are striking. In the following, I start with the similarity, to offer an interpretation of the differences between Levinas and Heidegger in this respect. Both affectivity (Levinas) and Befindlichkeit (Heidegger) are passively orientated, both involve an attentiveness to something you did not yourself choose. Reality discloses itself in a certain way, displaying a certain colour. You are touched by something which concerns you—it need not concern another. You cannot explain why it touches and enthralls you so much, but it does form you into the person that you now are. It is as if you were not there when it once touched you for the first time—but can something ever touch you for the first time if there is not already a primary receptivity, caused by being touched earlier? I will never be able to fathom this “something,” this “experience which is not an experience,” I cannot appropriate it and yet it makes me what I am: singular, unique, irreplaceably responsible (Levinas), irreplaceably the person who must take his existence upon himself and must die his own death (Heidegger). Only in this last matter do the paths of Heidegger and Levinas separate. What is the thing that touches me? Is it the Other, more precisely the mortality of the Other (Levinas) or is it the anxiety which at the same time reveals my possibilities to me (in my finiteness) and the Nothing (the absence of anything to hold on to) on which they are “based”? Ultimately I feel uncomfortable about both interpretations of Befindlichkeit. I would like to ask Heidegger whether anxiety and concern about myself truly draw me out of the community and throw me back on myself. I would like to ask Levinas whether he really thinks that affectivity springs from the experience of the mortality of the other, in such a way that this experience of involvement in the fate and the vulnerability of the other replaces

finitude of being-toward-death, which always comes to increase the intentionality of sentiment felt by a being belonging to the world.” Translation from Basic Philosophical Writings, 158.

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or suppresses all the other questions about myself. By this last I mean questions about my own relation to the other or to others in general. In other words: Levinas makes an important issue of the experience of the difference between me and the other as a form of non-indifference. The difference between me and the other should not be indifferent to me, it should always touch me. But he interprets the term “difference” in a fairly limited way: it involves “I the strong one” opposite “he the weak one”; “I the rich one” opposite “he the poor one.” These differences exist and perhaps it is these differences which we first want to forget or erase, because they are troublesome. Levinas is right in this. But it is Heidegger who helps me observe and interpret other differences between me and others, differences which lead me much more back to myself, and, in this, perhaps to the “alterity” or “difference” of the other. It is the small and big differences between people that make them understand each other, but often profoundly misunderstand each other too. These small and big differences sometimes draw more attention than the ethical issues. At first sight these are innocuous differences. To start with myself: I like reading poetry, and especially the Dutch poet Nijhoff. In some of his poems I see the whole of life expressed, and I therefore read them over and over again. Yet I can only share this feeling with few people. It is pointless for me to try to talk to my next-door neighbour about this attachment to poetry and to Nijhoff, but he waxes lyrical about motorbikes. Motorbikes leave me cold, I cannot distinguish one from the other. I do see the connection in his preferences (motorbikes, tattoos, membership of the Hells Angels), but a part of him remains inaccessible and alien to me, just as my attachment to poetry and music for recorders remains inaccessible to him. When my neighbour and I talk to each other, there will always be a moment when one of us feels excluded, thrown back on his or her own choices and preferences: he the motorbikes and the Hells Angels, I the poetry and the music for recorders. The conversation will sometimes undermine my own choices or put them in perspective—why always pursue these things? Why not tour the country on a motorbike for once, or drop in on the Hells Angels?


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Yet I cannot simply shake off my own preferences. They cling to me, but I do not know how I acquired them and what my attachment to these matters really means to me. Nobody is ever entirely transparent to himself in this regard. Only in the course of your life do you discover: this does it for me, I feel comfortable with this, I like doing this, I like having this kind of thing around me. These preferences, these attachments over which you have no control (think of the attachment to certain friends) constitute your life and make you the person you are, different from others. Levinas would consider the differences mentioned here to be futile. They are found in the sphere of cultural differences, whereas, in his view, the encounter with the Other takes place in a different sphere, outside of the cultural and historical foundation which underlies the Other. “The face is signification, and signification without context. I mean that the Other, in the rectitude of his face, is not a character within a context”—the other has no characteristics, no cultural preferences, no skin colour, sex, or religion.50 The language between me and the other is the language of criticism and at the same time the language of brotherhood which overcomes the differences. But what kind of a discussion is this? What do the other and I myself gain in meeting each other on territory where the differences between us no longer matter? Who are actually meeting each other in that case? And can the other still be the Other if he is disconnected from what makes him different in a cultural and historical sense?51 Levinas seems to sum up and reject all these questions under the flag of the conatus essendi. He thus suggests that Heidegger is repeating Spinoza’s movement, so that man never rises above 50

In many articles and interviews, Levinas made it clear that the cultural context of the other is eventually of no importance for the understanding of his “otherness.” The best encounter with the other is the situation in which even the color of his or her eyes isn’t noticed. For Levinas, the other is the one who signifies of itself, he or she is not understood from his cultural, racial of sexual context. (Éthique et Infini, 90. See also: Humanisme de l’autre homme, 3638). 51 Compare Rudi Visker’s question about the meaning of ethnical difference in the experience of the other as the Other, Truth and Singularity, 316-319, 394.

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the level of the (sustained) attempt “to be,” to make existence his “own” in some or other way. Levinas rightly shows that this is not a complete account of Dasein. The radical singularity which stems from Being-towards-death is an exaggeration. But can we exist without inquiring into what characterises us, into what is typical of our “vocabulary” and yet never becomes entire familiar to us? Can we sidestep the question about ourselves? Is a relationship with the other possible if this question is skipped or brushed aside, as Levinas does? Should a philosophy which devotes so many words to the “riddle” of the other not devote some words to the riddle which a human being sets himself all his life? If I try to articulate for myself and for others what spurs me on, what really touches me, by what history I have been formed and how I try to get away from this history without ever really getting away from it—does this mean that I am making an “attempt to be,” that I am heroically holding my ground? Or do we see in Levinas a consistent misunderstanding of Heidegger, caused by his own blind spot in the matters of hermeneutics and historicity? 15. Conclusion Levinas’ desire to leave the climate of Heidegger’s philosophy did not remain confined to the period shortly after the war. Until the end his philosophy was marked by the desire to break away from Heidegger’s way of thinking. It is a passage which he must make time and time again. But precisely his attempts to go beyond Being and Time show similarities to late Heidegger. Where Heidegger tries to break through the closed circle of Dasein by thinking in terms of Ereignis—an experience of the illumination of being—, Levinas connects the experience of truth, light and at the same time dark with the appearance of a mortal face. For Levinas, this affectivity, the being-touched by an endless responsibility for the other, frees the self from itself. The subject is able to get away from its personal identity, that which keeps it bound to finiteness, historicity, its own roots, its native ground.


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But is this dissociation from personal identity actually desirable? In L’humanité perdue Alain Finkielkraut raises this question in connection with the debate over the many forms of new nationalism which flooded Europe after the collapse of the Wall. The same question comes up in the debate over the wearing of headscarves and other religious symbols at work or school. Can the state ask people to refrain from wearing headscarves, yarmulkas, and crosses in public spaces such as courtrooms and schoolrooms? These concrete questions are answered neither by Levinas nor by Heidegger. But the concerns which they emphasise in treating the theme of affectivity do indicate a direction. Heidegger pays a great deal of attention to personal identity and rootedness, but he does not indicate how it could be put in perspective. Levinas understands personal identity (roots, native ground, religious conviction) as something which truly forms part of man, but which can become unimportant at a certain point—in the ethical relationship. At that point the other is “without context” and the commandment to help him/her applies. In that situation it is no longer important where the other comes from, where his roots lie, and what his relation to them is. For Levinas, this raises the question how this ethical moment relates to all those other moments in which these kinds of questions do matter. An example: somebody who for a while takes in a rejected asylum-seeker is responding to an emergency situation. At first the “context” of the asylum-seeker is irrelevant, it may be that the person who offers hospitality knows nothing about his guest’s background. But this will not last long, and soon conversations will take place between host and guest. Where do you come from, what have you experienced, why did you leave, which party did you support in the country that you left? In what conflict did you become involved? Whose side did you choose? This conversation produces contexts, both of guest and of host. They will try to understand each other, but there will always be a limit to their understanding. The other remains a mystery, perhaps less as a “naked” face than, above all, as a face with a context.


CHAPTER 2 INTERPRETING OURSELVES AND CARING FOR OTHERS: LEVINAS AND RORTY What is the relation between how we shape our own identities and how we care for the well-being of others? This question hovers in the background of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Rorty formulates an answer here to criticism that he badly neglected the issue of social responsibility in his early work. He now does pay attention to the problem of living together with others, but, following liberal social philosophy, he draws a sharp distinction between the task of shaping one’s own life and obligations to others. They are opposite values which can exist alongside each other in life, but cannot be reduced to each other in a theory. Metaphysics once tried to do this: to bring together private and public life by showing that self-discovery and public utility could be united. The vocabulary of metaphysics attempts to bring these two spheres together. Ironic theory—after the end of metaphysics—pursues the same aim, though its method is narrative rather than systemic. Rorty regards both attempts as hopeless and draws a sharp line between private and public, for which he is again taken to task.1 My concern in this chapter is not with the questions which Rorty’s separation of private and public raises as such, but with the similarities and differences between his philosophy and that of Levinas in relation to how the solidarity with others is founded. The comparison with Rorty will help me to probe more deeply into the question with which the previous chapter ended: how should we see the relation between cultural and ethnic differences and the ethical difference which Levinas foregrounds? The vocabulary by which people differ from each other proves relevant, but should sometimes be played down with a view to an ethical task which transcends cultural differences. This makes for 1

Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 102.

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a tension between what is personal and what is other. Rorty puts this problem up for discussion by distinguishing the end vocabulary to which we are attached as private persons from the public vocabulary which relates to the solidarity with others. He wants to detach private experiences of the sublime from questions of a social nature. But what characterises Levinas is, precisely, the connection between the most personal identity of the subject and the question of responsibility. This difference is the startingpoint of the following comparison between Rorty and Levinas. 1. A personal lading-list In Contingency, irony, and solidarity Rorty pays a great deal of attention to the themes of contingency and irony. In various chapters he makes an eloquent case for the aesthetic view of the project of self-development. Philip Larkin’s poem Continuing to live forms his guide and points out the problems which are given with the poetic mode of self-creation.2 Unicity is achieved here by the finding of a personal language, a semantic field which is only fully understood in its interrelations by its creator. It is, in Larkin’s words, a “lading-list” which we ourselves know intimately after a certain while, while others fail to understand why precisely these articles have been brought together on our life’s journey. “Continuing to live” means: making the connections between the various components increasingly close and our own. How does this enterprise ultimately profit us? This is impossible to say: when we die, says Larkin, we will have to conclude that our unique connections were valuable, but finite: they applied to one person, “… and that one dying.” The finiteness and the beauty of the life story go hand in hand. To continue to live is to lose, but because we know that we will lose, we are so attached to our own lading-list. It is dear to us because it is not eternal and is not essential to all humanity, but it is of particular, intimate significance to ourselves. In this part of Rorty’s argument contingency and irony belong together: the awareness that 2

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 23. The entire poem is quoted at the end of this chapter.

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there is no final foundation and that we have no knowledge (not even approximate) of man’s essence, means that we will work even harder to shape our own possibilities in a way which is irreplaceable to us and never entirely fathomable to others. In this design project philosophy and literature are not set against but alongside each other. Philosophers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger and writers like Proust and Nabokov answer each other. By reading their work, we come to appreciate “the power of redescription.” We learn to see that the goal of philosophy and literature does not consist in producing the only correct description, but in extending the repertory of alternative descriptions.3 2. Solidarity In this emphasis on the ironic and groundless redescription of ourselves, what is left of our life with others and social responsibility? Rorty answers this question in his discussions of solidarity, which are partly polemical because it is first necessary to reject a transcendental or rational view of solidarity. He proposes, for instance, to stop justifying democratic institutions with an appeal to suprahistorical reason. Solidarity need not be based on objective foundations and is actually rather a matter of contingency. In this respect, too, Rorty starts from contingency: the development of democratic institutions was not a necessary process and their rationale is not anchored in human nature. This implies at the same time a recognition of the vulnerability of these institutions: our culture, with all its attainments, could die out at a certain moment.4 Though Habermas’ massive attempts to provide democratic institutions with a transcendental foundation have thus been sidelined in Rorty’s view, there is a place for other, non-rational connections, in particular for stories. Historical stories about social and spiritual movements are the best instrument for working on ourselves, for they supply vocabularies for reflection on 3 4

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 39, 40. Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 21-34.

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morality, by means of which the individual is able to tell coherent stories about his own life.5 It is not through rational foundations but through shared stories that we can identify with community traditions. These stories, about the rise of liberal institutions and morals, relate to the past. Besides the historical narrative, Rorty also talks about the literary story, which may make us sensitive to forms of cruelty which take place in the present and which are not adequately prevented by existing institutions. Following Judith Skhlar, he describes liberals as people for whom cruelty is the worst they can do. But is it possible to say this without being a metaphysician, that is to say: to pronounce on what all human beings have in common? After all, a universal ethics should be able to base itself on certain fundamental statements about human nature. Does Rorty’s consistently ironic position, in which redescription is always possible and doubt remains under all circumstances, not spell the end of ethics? 3. The liberal metaphysician and the liberal ironist Rorty wards off this criticism by drawing a distinction between the liberal metaphysician and the liberal ironist. The ultimate aim of the first, usually a philosopher, is to dissolve the distinction between the public domain and the private sphere. The end vocabulary of the individual liberal must be the “metaphysical public rhetoric of liberalism”: the language in which it becomes clear what he shares with the rest of humanity. Only in this way can solidarity be guaranteed. The personal vocabulary is seen here as an illusion and at the same time as a threat to solidarity. The liberal ironist, on the other hand, stakes his money on redescription and expects that our chances of preventing cruelty and humiliation can be increased by other, alternative end vocabularies: “She thinks that recognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only social bond that is needed.”6 In the worldview of the liberal ironist there is no conflict between 5 6

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 69. Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 91.


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the individual, optional private part of the self and the shared, obligatory public part, which is thought to guarantee solidarity. Rorty chooses the position of the liberal ironist, but already indicates that the relation between public and private remains problematical in this solution. Why, for instance, would someone care about the suffering and humiliation of another person? According to Rorty, the problem with this question is that it is not the right one and contains metaphysical residues: “(…) human solidarity is not a matter of sharing a common truth or a common goal but of sharing a common selfish hope, the hope that one’s world (…) will not be destroyed.” 7 This hope does not become common through shared objective principles, but through the individual ability to empathise with the world of others by means of the imagination. Not reason but imagination creates a real common world. The public importance of ironic philosophy and literature is not that they provide a metaphysical justification for principles of freedom and equality. They devote themselves to a different work: they give a language to the victims of cruelty, who suffer too much to invent new words for it, and ensure that others can empathise with their situation. Solidarity, too, depends on redescriptions. “Solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognise when we hear it.”8 The main problem with this defence of solidarity lies in the necessity of switching between public and private life. This gives rise to covert conflicts between solidarity and identity: the shaping of one’s own identity is a different life task from caring for others. Rorty therefore refuses to reduce identity and solidarity to each other. Self-discovery and political benefit cannot be accommodated in one consistent system, as metaphysics had always hoped. The fact that Rorty gives priority to the public interest in the case of an imminent dilemma is therefore only a personal and pragmatic solution. Another philosopher could make a different choice.9 Another problem is the place of the imagination 7

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 92. Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 94. 9 Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 196. 8

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in Rorty’s proposal. The imagination must serve two masters, who for the rest want to keep their distance from each other: it feeds the poetic project of self-creation, but is also crucial to the capability of identifying with others. This establishes once again a connection (no matter how loose) between the ironic worldview and the possibility of showing solidarity with others. 4. An ironist and a serious thinker Rorty’s consistent irony seems a major obstacle to any comparison with Levinas, who keeps irony at arm’s length and regularly stresses the importance of a “final seriousness.” However, irony is also the endless renewal of meanings and redescriptions of the same. This game is not alien to Levinas’ philosophy. His later work in particular can be seen as a redescription which aims at keeping the other “in play,” without being able to pin him down to one particular meaning. But this game itself is fed by an ultimate seriousness, le sens unique, which breaks through the game of cultural meanings. If this guiding orientation is not put up for discussion, plurality lapses into mere indifference. On the basis of what has just been said, there are two perspectives which allow a comparison between Rorty and Levinas: the criticism which both philosophers level against transcendental philosophy and foundational thought, and the question of identity. The first perspective will above all show their unexpected congeniality. By means of the second perspective, the question of identity, I will show how Levinas approaches the unsatisfactory dilemma between identity and solidarity. Rorty wants to stop short of this issue: the question of finding one’s own identity and the avoidance of cruelty cannot be further reduced to each other, because either task is then liable to lose its distinctive character. In the first place Rorty criticises metaphysics because of its constant search for final reasons and grounds. This metaphysical stage is over since the unmasking texts of Nietzsche and Heidegger. But Rorty also dissociates himself from these critics of metaphysics, because in their turn they try to take the place of “last philosopher.” It is the trap into which the ironic theoretician eas-


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ily falls: he wants to continue to use the big words of the philosophical tradition and speak a final word at a certain moment— even if it is only to say that there is no longer a final word. Levinas, too, once started by criticising Western metaphysics. Following Heidegger, he set his sights on the one-sided preference which metaphysics shows for theoretical thought. As a result, metaphysics developed into a massive attempt to make everything that potentially goes beyond thought—the infinite, the mysterious, the divine—tractable to theory through mediation. The culmination of this metaphysical endeavour is obviously Hegel’s philosophy, in which alterity is recognised on various levels and is subsequently incorporated in the movement in which the spirit reaches self-consciousness. Levinas applies this judgement to Heidegger’s philosophy too: despite his radical criticism of the theoretical presupposition of Husserl’s philosophy, Heidegger remains indebted to the totalising tendency of Western metaphysics. As a result, the themes concerned with the relation to the other easily become viewed as an appendix to theoretical thought.10 This also explains why most philosophical systems regard ethics as an appendix to ontology. Ethics is concerned with the relation to the other human being, but this relation can only be thought by means of values derived from ontology. Levinas tries to cancel this one-sidedness by regarding ethics, interpreted as a phenomenological inquiry into the relationship with the other, as prima filosofia. Moreover, his phenomenological analyses show a different side of ontology: at unexpected moments they are inspired by the ethical experience, which puts us in touch with the meaning of life. Both Rorty and Levinas are critics of a foundation-orientated metaphysics. Rorty plays down the question of the final foundation by showing that it is asked from a metaphysical tendency which is better resisted. Metaphysical foundations are not necessary and not desirable. Not necessary, because our actions do not change through their presence or absence. To maintain and improve liberal political practices, it is enough to refer to the history of their development. Not desirable, because the identifica10

Cf. the discussion of Levinas’ relation to Husserl and Heidegger in Chapter 1 of this book.

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tion of essential human characteristics, or the belief in a certain well-defined goal in life, is found to limit people in their possibilities of expression. It hampers free self-expression and authenticity. A common basis, as a metaphysical ground or as a transcendental horizon, is not necessary for public life and not desirable for personal development. Levinas regards Western metaphysics, inasmuch as it tends to reduce phenomena to a final foundation, as totalitarian. Totalitarianism ultimately leads to indifference; the theory which is able to reduce the different to the same will no longer have room for special phenomena like a responsibility which goes beyond its bounds and thus becomes an experience of the Infinite. The metaphysical framework equally weakens the alterity of the other and the unicity of the self. 5. Levinas’ defence of subjectivity. Another similarity between Levinas and Rorty is their emphasis on the question of identity. Summed up briefly, Rorty’s view of identity can be described as follows: he regards the private project of self-creation as the task of finding, in the course of life, the unique complex of connections which each of us creates as his own reality. The difference between the self and the other is a difference in vocabulary here: one person will be more attached than the other to certain words and descriptions, on the basis of different life stories. But the separations between the vocabularies are not watertight, so that it is possible to gain some insight into the value systems of other people and even to share certain values. Rorty, however, opposes a view of solidarity in which the unique identity is absorbed in a higher system of values. Hence he upholds a distinction between the two tasks of human life: to discover the subject’s unique identity and solidarity with others. In the preface to Totalité et infini Levinas presents his work as a “defence of subjectivity,” but he adds that this apology does not find its foundation in the I itself, but in “the idea of infinity,” by which he means in any case the infinite responsibility for the


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other.11 So why a defence of subjectivity? Because a subject that is independent and can act by itself is the condition for responsibility. Levinas describes the subject as a separate I, a “separation,” a “name” which breaks out of anonymity. In this it has a development of its own: to be I is not to remain constantly the same, but to weave one’s own pattern from different events.12 Levinas describes the genesis of the self as a process of identification, in which a human being learns to recognise himself in everything that he experiences. It is the primal identity, the primordial work of identification. Only through this ability to be absolutely oneself is a relationship with the other possible as a real relationship, a relationship between two elements which remain heterogeneous. So, for the recognition of the other’s unicity, a defence of a subjectivity is necessary: “A term can remain absolutely at the point of departure of relationship only as I.”13 In what way can this absolute being-oneself go together with an apparently fundamental relationship between the self and the other (after all, Levinas talked about a defence of subjectivity as being founded in the idea of the Infinite)? This question is not really answered in Totalité et infini, but in his later work Levinas solves this problem by taking his starting-point in a subjectivity which does not produce its identity and unicity out of itself, but receives it, as an election: to be held responsible for the other. 6. Identity in diastasis: corporeality and vulnerability In Autrement qu’être, Levinas describes the identity of the subject as being, from the outset, interrupted, an identity which cannot achieve order. The self is a “self without a concept, unequal in identity…” and the identity is “an identity in diastasis… This self is out of phase with itself, forgetful of itself.”14 The interruption 11

Totalité et infini, xiv/26. These motifs can be found in De l’existance à l’existant, 115-145/67-85, in the chapter on the subject as “hypostasis.” They return in Totalité et infini; see especially 75-78/102-105, 81-147/109-174. 13 Totalité et infini, 6/36. 14 Autrement qu’être, 147/115. 12

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in question here is not, in Levinas’ view, an event which happens to an empirical subject, but one which precedes the subject. However, this precedence should not be interpreted as a condition: “Here we are trying to express the unconditionality of a subject, which does not have the status of a principle.” 15 So the interruption by the other (which can also be viewed as a moment of inspiration) is not an Archimedean point, and not a disguised “essence of the subject” either. Nor can it be regarded as a transcendental condition for subjectivity. But how can we conceive of an identity which is interrupted from the outset? And in what way can this fact take on significance for philosophy, which is seen by Levinas as a theoretical matter? By looking more closely at the meaning of corporeality, Levinas gives an answer to both questions. He starts his inquiry into corporeality with the question of knowledge. For empiricism, knowledge starts in sensory perception, but it fails to consider adequately the question of what perception actually is. Is it a revelation or disclosure of reality for a spectator, or is something else involved, something which is more fundamental, and which forms the motivation for the desire to contemplate reality? Levinas thinks that the hidden motivation can be found in the passive side of sensory perception: vulnerability. Sensation means first of all that the subject can be affected and is consequently vulnerable. It is often forgotten, due to the cognitive outlook, that this layer in sensation is primary. Vulnerability indicates an immediate contact; as the process of knowledge continues, immediacy is converted into mediation, and the first stage, that of immediacy, is forgotten and screened off. Sensation does not start by registering, but is accompanied by positive or negative feelings. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the same immediacy. Immediate is the pleasurable contact with the outside world, in which the subject is not yet bent on understanding, but receives only the good from elements which are beyond its understanding. Immediate, too, is the awareness of a lack, which overshadows the primary happiness. Sensory pleasure and physical suffering are not far removed from each 15

Autrement qu’être, 147/116.


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other: the immediacy of pleasure is “at the same time … a coring out (dénucléation) of … happiness.”16 In other words: pleasure, where the subject seems to coincide wholly with itself, also involves a process in which the subject is detached from its own core (dénucléation). Even at this primary level “self-development” is not an ongoing but an interrupted process: interrupted by moments of suffering, lack, and uncertainty. Here, where pleasure and suffering are connected in the immediate perception, Levinas finds a handle for talking about meaning. Levinas’ paradoxical proposition is that precisely in the uncertainty of pleasure, in suffering as the obverse of vulnerability, it is possible to experience the meaning of existence. In other words: only when we realise that it is impossible to weave the threads of existence into one fabric are we unexpectedly brought into contact with the meaning of existence. The human activity of consciousness and its result, theoretical knowledge, are secretly inspired by this vulnerability. Philosophising is only possible by virtue of a manifestation of the real. But reality can only be shown if I have access to it; an access which cannot be provided by representation and thematisation itself, but which is found in the sensation, the vulnerability, and the proximity which form the hidden motivation of knowledge.17 7. Identity and corporeality This discovery of the meaning of sensation is taken further by Levinas in the light of the insight that the relationship of body and soul should be defined as follows: the actual inspiration of the psyche comes from the body. As a unity of body and soul the subject has an identity which is essentially exposed to its environment. Thought on identity in Levinas is therefore guided by the insight that it involves a physical, incarnated identity.18 Not the soul but the body is able at once to be identity and to expose itself to the other. Bodily existence thus shows something of which 16 17

Autrement qu’être, 81/64. Autrement qu’être, 84-86/67-68.

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consciousness by itself is not capable. This positive way of thinking corporeality has consequences for Levinas’ view of the relationship between body and soul. Unlike many Western philosophers, he does not emphasise the task of consciousness in relation to corporeality, which constantly threatens to escape from us on account of its unpredictability and complexity: the task of collecting corporeality in the life of the soul. On the contrary: the relationship between body and soul is characterised by the fact that all attempts of consciousness to “achieve order” can be interrupted by corporeality. The difference between body and soul cannot be overcome by a form of exertion (conatus) from the soul. This difference refers to the difference between the self and the other. Both cases involves a disturbance of the movement or the process in which consciousness tries to establish order. It is an interruption by which consciousness is touched so directly that it cannot remain indifferent. So the difference does not designate something that can be thematised as a difference, but it touches us before we know what we are actually talking about. The appeal which the other makes to me must also be discussed in terms of this immediate relationship. When the prophecy of Isaiah talks about sharing bread with the hungry or receiving the afflicted in one’s house, these actions are not founded on a certain idea of the other, they are not based on free choice, but on a “having been offered without any holding back.”19 The subject cannot retreat into the protection of its identity, for this being-touched by the other has always already taken place. Again the body functions as a sign of the ethical relationship. Levinas even goes so far as to regard the fact that we are flesh and blood as a consequence of the relation to the other: “It is because subjectivity is sensibility … and because matter is the very locus of the for-the-other … that the subject is of flesh and

18

This point is elaborated in comparison with existential anthropology by De Boer in “Enmity, Friendship, Corporeality,” in: The Rationality of Transcendence, 133-147. 19 Autrement qu’être, 94/75.


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blood.”20 For the body is an “incessant alienation of the ego by the guest entrusted to it. Hospitality, the one-for-the-other in the ego, delivers it more passively than any passivity from links in a causal chain.”21 8. A meaningful interruption Levinas regards the relationship with the other as an intrinsic part of identity which should be interpreted as a meaningful interruption: an interruption which brings the subject to its real destination. Identity is first made in the interruption, it rests on an election as a new identity not chosen by the subject. The connection which Levinas makes between identity and corporeality makes it clear that the interruption of identity can be painful and take place against one’s will. Yet he does not stake everything on a victory over the alien elements, so that they can be incorporated in the personal identity. Precisely the fact that we can recognise the alien in the personal makes us receptive to what happens to the other—the foreigner opposite us. According to Levinas, these interruptions of the subject’s self-creation are preeminently meaningful, because they refer to the other. In the framework of a comparison with Rorty, what is the value of Levinas’ proposal, in which contact with the other determines the self so strongly? After all, Rorty draws a sharp distinction between solidarity, or responsibility for the fate of others, and care for oneself. These two spheres of life cannot be reduced to each other and the public sphere does not necessarily take priority over the private sphere. On the basis of the distinction between public and private, the significance of certain philosophers can be confined to the problem of self-creation. Rorty particularly suggests this for the thought of Nietzsche, Hei-

20

“C’est parce que la subjectivité est sensibilité … et que la matière est le lieu même du pour l’autre … que le sujet est de chair et de sang.” Autrement qu’être, 97/77. 21 “…une incessante aliénation de moi … par l’hôte qui lui est confié— l’hospitalité, l’un pour l’autre du moi, livré plus passiviment que toute passivité de chaînons dans une chaîne causale…” Autrement qu’être, 100/79.

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degger, and Foucault. Their striving after the sublime is only of importance for the philosophically interested individual; for public life, their thought is irrelevant, and can even be regarded as dangerous.22 As regards the comparison between Levinas and Rorty, it is important to see that this operation, in which Rorty renders philosophy harmless by locking it up in a reservation, cannot be applied to Levinas’ philosophy. It is impossible to confine the significance of Levinas’ work to the problem of the self’s redescription, because the self is intrinsically connected with the different and the other. On the other hand responsibility cannot be enclosed in a sharply defined public sphere, but pervades the most intimate living-with-oneself. In the light of Levinas’ considerations, the distinction between self-creation and responsibility for the other proves artificial. There is no room in his view of subjectivity for a private life in which I can cut myself off from others. In this way there is no conceivable boundary between one’s own life and the feelings of solidarity with others: the feeling of involvement in the fate of others forms an intrinsic part of our own life. It is therefore worthwhile to stop and consider the distinction between private and public which Rorty draws and which is played down from Levinas’ perspective. In the next three sections I will look more closely at this distinction by taking my cue from their thought on the origin of our solidarity with others, the connection between suffering and meaning, and—perhaps surprisingly, but nonetheless relevant—their interpretation of Proust. In doing so I do not want to rule out the possibility that precisely Levinas’ perspective solves many of Rorty’s problems with the standard ethical categories. 9. The origin of solidarity with others When Rorty writes about ethical issues, he continues to be guided by epistemology, and in particular by his aversion to whyquestions. In Contingency, irony, and solidarity, he searches for forms of solidarity which are not determined by objectivity. He 22

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 119-121.


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opposes attempts to anchor solidarity or responsibility for each other in human nature, a commonly shared humanity, or in natural human rights. There is in us no humanity which reverberates in another, congenial core. Solidarity with others is a chance hit, a form of alliance with others which we have created and which is based on our ability to see others as members of a “we community.” The best way of helping blacks in New York is by seeing them as Americans: this makes it easier for other Americans to identify with them in their imagination. The appeal to a shared human nature, as in Kant’s philosophy, or a shared beinga-child-of-God, as is usual in Christianity, is not effective enough in practice.23 It is open to dispute whether Rorty’s somewhat bloodless account of Christian ethics is correct. Nevertheless, it is striking that Levinas’ ethics, which was developed in a dialogue with the same biblical starting-points, offers a number of possible solutions to Rorty’s problems. In his work Levinas provides a series of answers as to how objectivity and solidarity can be unlinked. The most convincing ones can be found in Autrement qu’être, where the analysis of responsibility leads to the idea that responsibility for others takes place between one human being and another in a sphere of proximity. It is typical of proximity that the experiences undergone there cannot be objectified. They lose their distinctive character: that of an injury or a trauma. So responsibility for the other is not anchored in a principle of human nature and is nevertheless closely connected with the subjective life. This connection is so close that subjective experiences like sensation and corporeality are inconceivable without the proximity of the other. In this regard Levinas goes some way towards meeting Rorty’s anti-fundamentalism. The second point concerns literary imagination, which Rorty regards as a source of inspiration for solidarity with others, because it allows identification with others. Against a universalist ethics, which makes the duty to all equally strong, he thus sets a form of election and particularity: responsibility is stronger toward those with whom already we feel connected. The autonomy of the law (Kant) has been replaced in Rorty by an autonomy of 23

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 191, 193.

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the imagination. But is autonomy of the imagination actually possible? As Rorty shows in connection with Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel can expose our lack of interest in the fate of other people. In that case the imagination has a critical function, but Rorty does not indicate to what extent this criticism can leave the autonomy of the imagination intact. In Levinas we see a radical reversal of this perspective: in his view, no form of identification is comprehensible if we do not involve the preliminary and originally unlimited responsibility for others. It is not based on a free choice from the self, but on an election to responsibility. However, neither responsibility nor election forms part of human nature. Levinas is strikingly reticent on this, and merely shows how being touched by the other is part and parcel of our experience. In the experience of the other he discovers a fundamental asymmetry and an irreversibility which makes it impossible to find a universal foundation for responsibility. In actual fact Levinas is more consistent than Rorty in the rejection of foundations. In Rorty the perspective shifts from a transcendental, rational basis of ethics to the sphere of aesthetic imagination, which allows new forms of solidarity and breaks open overly limited views of community. In Levinas the identity of the subject and the self-evident solidarity with one particular group are open from the outset. Their obviousness was an illusion from the very beginning. 10. Suffering pain and the meaning of life At the end of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Rorty collapses the distinction between public and private and the distinction between “issues of pain” and “issues relating to the meaning of life.” The ability to see that others suffer pain or undergo humiliation makes us responsible for their fate. Yet this responsibility has nothing to do with the search for a form of perfection in our


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own lives (unless, says Rorty, we are Christians, whose search for perfection in private life coincides with the project of wanting to live for other people).24 I showed above how Levinas connects these questions of “pain” and “meaning of life.” In his view, the meaning of life is not a product of self-creation; it only reveals itself when attempts at self-creation are interrupted from outside. The disruptions which unsettle the subject put him to his purpose. Perhaps this is a way of removing the insulation between private and public, without lapsing into a quest for foundations. Rorty and Levinas agree that common metaphysical starting-points do not give access to the meaning of life. Rorty believes that this meaning is created by the subject in a wholly unique manner. Communication or agreement on this conferral of meaning is neither desirable nor necessary. For Levinas, the solitary creation of meaning is an illusion. He holds that the voice of others can even be heard in the most intimate subjective life. We are never alone, and a “meaning” which is formed in solitude has no reality. Only in the collisions with the strange does meaning come to light: in a request for clarification or a request for help. 11. The other in Proust In the light of Levinas’ discussions of the relationship between the identity of the self and the other, it no longer goes without saying that the private life can be presented as a life-for-oneself. The conflict between my aspirations and the desires of others not only takes place on the dividing line between private life and public life, but also pervades the “private sphere” itself. Moreover, we need to ask how vulnerable the pursuit of the sublime, the perfect form, is in private life. Rorty stops to consider this in his commentary on Larkin’s poem: what is most painful for someone who “lives poetically” is finiteness, because it brings to light the futility of his creation. The fundamental fear which, in Rorty too, is connected with consistent irony is the fear of the outsider’s gaze, the fear of one’s own project being 24

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 198.

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redescribed by the eyes of others. This fear, which is closely bound up with finiteness, impelled a number of philosophers to overcome contingency by identifying with something great: Hegel threw his lot in with that of the World Spirit, Nietzsche proclaimed the arrival of superman, Heidegger made himself the mouthpiece of Being.25 In their imagination they saw themselves as the “last philosopher” and thus made it impossible for others to describe their philosophical project as a contingent creation. Consistent irony means a reconciliation with finiteness, because all theory is abandoned without any prospect of a new theory. The writer Proust acts in Rorty as a prototype of the consistent ironist. In all parts of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu Proust explained to himself that others were not authorities but simply contingencies. In this way he made himself autonomous. He was aware that true beauty is not only threatened by finiteness but also depends on it. Proust’s work and attitude to life therefore occupy an important position in Rorty’s description of the poetic form of life. Proust serves as a pattern for Rorty’s poetic culture of private life, the culture of endless variation, doubt, and the rearrangement of elements. The one-sidedness of this form of life, which I observed in the previous section, could have to do with a blind spot in Rorty’s Proust interpretation. Rorty describes Proust as someone who was interested in power and wanted to free himself from the descriptions which others gave of him. His assumption is that the threatening gaze of the other was the main problem for Proust. Levinas discovered something different in Proust: the inspiring role which the other has. In The other in Proust he points to the constant doubling of reality which bestows a mysterious character on all things in Proust’s novels. It is caused by a doubling of the self. Proust describes events as if another I constantly observes the feelings of the “I.” In this way he sheds new light on strangeness of the soul in relation to itself, an alienation which at the same time is the “spur” of the soul 26. This doubling means 25

Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 102, 106. “…cette étrangeté de soi à soi qui est l’aguillon de l’âme,” Noms propres, 120/102.

26


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that the first-person narrator is constantly in contact with others and never entirely by himself. He experiences things through the eyes of Albertine, his grandmother, and his own former I. Proust’s novels evoke a world of inner life which is fed by “insatiable curiosity about the alterity of the other, at once empty and inexhaustible.” For Levinas, Proust is the author who connects the mystery of the self with the mystery of the other. The loneliness of the self and the unreachability of the other have philosophical significance in his novels. They show that communication does not involve the merging of two into one. This view of successful communication betrays a deeper idealism: a desire for the coincidence of knowing and being. Proust’s idea of communication cuts us off in this and shows that social intercourse involves a proximity which does not lead to amalgamation, but which saves our existence from its character of finality and opens it up to new possibilities. So precisely the failure of communication is assessed positively by Levinas: if communication comes to nothing, if there is no mutual understanding and the self is thrown back on its loneliness, it becomes clear that communication is not about knowledge but about the proximity of the self and the other. In this proximity the other may well remain mysterious. A human being can withdraw into himself—this mystery, says Levinas, feeds love (eros). For love is nothing but this relationship with “what gives itself in withholding itself, with the other qua other, with mystery.”27 12. Identity and the other In the foregoing I have merely placed a few question marks over the distinctions which Rorty draws so easily between private life and public life, life-with-oneself and life-with-others. Levinas’ analyses of subjective life as an identity which never coincides with itself offers a new perspective on this distinction. The presence of the other does not give rise to a solidarity which flattens 27

“… relation directe avec se qui se donne en se réfusant, avec autrui en tant qu’autrui, avec le mystère.” Noms propres, 120/102.

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out identity, but inspires a unique form of existence, in which the self and the other can be close to each other without ever coinciding. Near and yet strange, the other is a source of inspiration. Recognition of this inspiration makes it possible to see a connection between the questions which relate to the meaning of life and the suffering and humiliations which others undergo. There is no room in which we seclude ourselves with our own, sublime experiences. The constant checking of our own unique lading-list (Larkin) gives access to an individual creation of meaning. In Levinas’ view, however, there is a deeper meaning which at the same time is more elusive for myself. This meaning has to do with the relationship with others, with communication. For instance: with the failure and success of communication, as Levinas describes it in his article on Proust. Levinas points out that the meaning of your life always escapes you because it is there (and is given) in the moments when you do not see what is going on. What is most intolerable is perhaps not the finiteness of the lading-list of our own meanings, what is intolerable is that we have no control over our contact with others. Take an activity like teaching—despite all your preparations you never know where your words will end up and whether they will make a big or a small impression. Indeed, you hardly know what expression your face assumes when you address your listeners. Or take an activity like nursing or practising medicine. Doctors and nurses want to cure people of their illness and pain, but often they cannot. The power of medicine is great, but so is its powerlessness. Yet in retrospect their presence as a nurse or as a physician proved alleviating at certain moments. Patients or their family talk about it. But it is as if they were not present at the time and as if they did not realise that something important was happening. These phenomena which occur in ordinary activities like teaching or medical care make it clear that the “meaning of life” lies in a connection between our personal outlook (the limited view which have of ourselves and of the things we consider important) and the moment in which a “depersonalisation” takes place. Depersonalisation: contact with something Other which goes beyond these limitations. Depersonalisation which brings us closer to ourselves, which means: not to what we have but to


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what we desire. Desire, transcendence, infinity: they are all words for this experience of a meaning which eludes us, a fulfilment which is deferred but with which we do make contact. Because this experience goes beyond our horizon and provides guidance, Levinas also uses the word transcendence here. Transcendence is the Good, but I have no control over it. Transcendence is another word for the contact with God that we glimpse in this form of depersonalisation—kenosis. Appendix Philip Larkin: Continuing to Live28 Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it’s chess. And once you walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All your behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening, when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied to one man once And that one dying.

28

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, 94.


CHAPTER 3 THE OTHER OF THE OTHER: LEVINAS AND DERRIDA ON GENEROSITY AND TRANSCENDENCE Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are you and I together But when I look ahead upon the white road There is always another walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you? T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

After Heidegger and Rorty, Derrida is the third discussion partner in my quest for the place of the “self” in Levinas. Derrida wrote several commentaries on the work of Levinas. The commentary in “Violence et métaphysique” centres on the paradoxical relation of peace and violence in Levinas’ work. Is it possible to interpret the nearness to the other exclusively in terms of peace, or is there an implicit form of violence in the other’s intrusion on the self? In “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” Derrida focuses on style and intertextuality.1 Whence comes the sense of presence which makes itself so distinctly felt in Levinas’ texts? How does he manage to be so strongly present as a speaking voice in his philosophical work? Isn’t the text a sign of the absence of the author and the reader? But—a differ1

“En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” initially appeared in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Francois Laruelle, Paris 1980; later the article was included in Psyché, Inventions de láutre, 159-202. “En ce moment…” was translated by Ruben Berezhdivin as “At this very moment in this work I am” in, Re-Reading Levinas, Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (ed.), 11-48. “Violence et Métaphysique; Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas” first appeared in 1964 and was collected in 1967 in L’écriture et la différence. References in the text are to Psyché and L’écriture et la différence.

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ent question—why then is it so difficult to enter into a real dialogue with Levinas himself? Is he perhaps hiding something in his texts after all? The second article mentioned, “En ce moment même…” was first published as a contribution to a volume in which Levinas was congratulated on his seventy-fifth birthday. It is a present in the form of a text, and hence Derrida links up here with the theme of the present: how can I give Levinas something if he himself says that giving implies radical ingratitude on the part of the receiver? How can I thank him for what he has given if his idea of giving presupposes such utter purity? Derrida interlaces this with questions about the place of the female principle in Levinas’ work. He is certainly not the first to raise this issue, but he does so in a particularly playful manner. To whom shall I give the thanks owed? Whom shall I honour? If I am to honour Levinas in the manner of ingratitude—perhaps I should I address the female other in particular? After all, she is the one who is mentioned but ultimately forgotten in Levinas’ texts. If we are talking about debt, about “owing the other something”—doesn’t Levinas primarily owe something to “woman”? In effect Derrida here addresses the question whether a face can meaning anything “without context.” In this article he shows that Levinas himself cannot disregard the gender difference in his texts about the other, the face, and God, for all that he would like to exclude this subject from the discussion. Ethics in Totalité et infini is a masculine issue: the male human being is set against the transcendent other. The purity gained here has a price: banishment of the female principle from the sphere of the real, purely ethical relation.2 Despite the appearance of neutrality, the ethical human being in Levinas is ultimately a male human being.

2

The female principle is, however, an important condition for the ethical in Levinas. Derrida returns to this relation between ethics and its conditions in Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas.

THE OTHER OF THE OTHER

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1. Woman, the Other, God: negotiations Is humanity united, or is it separated by differences? How generally can philosophy speak about “man” and “the other”? Most philosophers do not address the gender difference. When they do, it is usually the woman who is presented as an “other” kind of human being, in short “the other.” Emmanuel Levinas, for instance, paid considerable attention in his early work to the difference between man and woman, but interpreted the female principle only in relation to a male consciousness. In his reading, the female principle is something that eludes the light, something that cannot be known, and so always remains a mystery. Owing to the elusiveness of this phenomenon, male consciousness discovers its limits in the confrontation with the female principle: not everything can be known, not everything lends itself to domination. In the last chapter of Le temps et láutre Levinas conceives of the female principle as “the absolutely contrary … the contrary that permits its terms to remain absolutely other.” He explains this form of alterity by pointing to the nature of the gender difference: the gender difference is a formal structure which introduces a gap in reality. The effect of this gap should be interpreted positively: it allows reality to be seen as a plurality and it instigates various forms of passion, as attempts to bridge this gap. Next, he characterises the distinctive nature of female existence as a “flight before the light,” a “mystery” on which the power of the male subject finally breaks down. Here transcendence is a “movement opposite to consciousness.”3 Simone de Beauvoir criticised this approach to the female principle in a footnote to the famous passage “Il est le Sujet, il est Absolu: elle est l’Autre” in Le deuxième sexe. Her reproach to Levinas is that his characterization of woman as “the other” privileges the male perspective. His phenomenology cloaks itself in the guise of an objective description, but is actually governed by the male subject—female object role division. Woman is not a mystery as such, she is only a mystery in relation to man. 4

3

Le temps et l’autre, 85-88.

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Levinas is not the only male philosopher to show embarrassment in confrontation with the female principle. From the moment that Plato and Aristotle associated the female principle with elusive and unknowable matter, there has been in philosophy a tense relation between the female principle and the truth. The stronger the desire for truth, the more vehement the rejection of the female principle. It was Nietzsche himself who exposed this desire for truth as a will to rule and dominate, as a will to power that hides itself. In his desire for an artistic philosophy, Nietzsche often saw woman as an example for the philosopher. Though the passage in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in which he identifies women and Jews as masters of deception and play-acting can be seen as disparaging, it actually testifies to a deep envy of the nimble truth embodied by women. Endlich die Frauen: man denke über die ganze Geschichte der Frauen nach—müssen die nicht zu allererst und –oberst Schauspielerinnen sein? Man höre die Ärtzte, welche Frauenzimmer hypnotisiert haben; zuletzt, man liebe sie—man lasse sich von ihnen “hypnotisieren”! Was kommt immer dabei heraus? Dass sich “sich geben” selbst noch wenn sie—sich geben… Das Weib ist so artistisch…5

Everything about a woman seems play and deception. Even the moment in which she gives herself, apparently in loving submission, may be the moment in which she pretends to give herself. Her desire, her pleasure, when is it ever real? Can her husband or her lover ever really trust her? Do they ever get to see the “true nature” of her submission? Is it possible to love the truth and a woman at the same time? “Perhaps the truth is a woman,

4

“Quand il écrit que la femme est mystère, il sous-entend qu’elle est mystère pour l’homme. Si bien que cette description qui se veut objective est en fait une affirmation du privilège masculin.” De Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, 16. 5 Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 361. Translation: “Finally, women: consider the whole history of women—mustn’t they be actresses first and foremost? Listen to doctors who have hypnotized womenfolk; finally, love them —let yourself be hypnotised by them! What is always the result? That they try to be ‘taken for something’ even when they are being taken … Woman is so artistic…”


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who has reasons to keep her reasons hidden…,” wrote Nietzsche in the preface to Die fröhliche Wissenschaft—thus resolving the dilemma for a moment. In Épérons, a book on Nietzsche’s styles, Derrida discusses the passage quoted above on female “giving and pretending.” He draws attention to the game of quotation marks and dashes. In particular the dash intrigues him, as a typographical mark of the distance which the woman creates, a distance in which “giving herself” can repeat and mirror itself endlessly.6 The woman gives herself, and pretends. She is able to act as if she is giving herself, that she is revealing herself in her innermost being. Someone who tries to think her (“to think the other”) must discover that there is no such thing as an “innermost being”—that there is no truth. The statement—“the truth is a woman” means that both, truth and woman, are indeterminable. 2. Neutralization of the gender difference and disappearance of the text In his texts Derrida creates a constant tension between the truth and the female principle. Using writings by Plato, Hegel, and Heidegger, he shows that the philosopher searching for the one truth must at a given point forget the female principle or— which is not exactly the same—push the sexual difference into the background. If the female “other” is forgotten and the gender difference is neutralised, what remains is a thought which labours under the delusion that it can oversee reality in its entirety from a fundamentally unassailable position. In Levinas, too, a philosopher whom he admires and whose work he knows well, Derrida brings to light such a disappearance of the gender difference. In comparison with other thinkers, nevertheless, Levinas pays a great deal of attention to the gender difference, and tries to do justice to the distinctive nature of the female principle as a position from which the male form of existence is subject to criticism. Indeed, in Levinas’ early works the female principle could be understood as a first challenge to the

6

Derrida, Épérons, 37-57.

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absolute power of the male subject.7 The female principle here is a first manifestation of “the other,” who appears in Levinas’ early works as the critic of the self. Derrida’s commentary shows that something can also go wrong when a philosopher tries to do justice to the alterity of the other. The levelling of the gender difference is not an isolated issue in Derrida’s commentary, but is embedded in at least two other important questions. The first is: how is it possible to start from a “pure other,” i.e. from an other who no longer has “an other” himself, who does not take part in the play of oppositions in which all thought of “the same” becomes constantly entangled? The second relates to Levinas’ underestimation of the written word in favour of the spoken word, in particular the conversation, in which the speaker can be interrupted and criticised by the other. According to Levinas, this conversation is crucial to the event of truth, which is not in fact completed in a philosophical system but occurs when the other targets the completed thought. The view of language implied in this follows on from traditional Western metaphysics: the written is made secondary to the spoken. Spoken language offers scope for a “sincerity,” an “infinity” or “transcendence” which immediately disappears in written language. In effect Derrida connects Levinas’ failure to appreciate writing and his neutralization of the gender difference, assuming that both are informed by his desire for a sincere relation to the other. This is a relation in which the crucial point is to do complete justice to the other in his otherness. But how pure, how absolute can this desire be? Doesn’t it always involve an other who appears behind the back of the Other, an “other of the Other,” who marks the boundary of this absoluteness?

7

In my view, this reading does more justice to Levinas’ intentions than the somewhat superficial interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir.


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3. The infinitely other and the finiteness of language “Violence et métaphysique”—Derrida’s first, extensive commentary on Levinas—criticises at length the aloofness of the concept of transcendence in Totalité et infini.8 The stylistic strategy used by Levinas in this work is said to obscure the finite possibilities of language. According to Derrida, language is rooted in the earth, it is subject to certain culturally determined possibilities of expression. Levinas does not recognise these limitations, but tries to go beyond them, to raise them above their finite origin through the concepts which he uses. He describes the transcendent or Infinite as an “absolute exteriority,” but also states that this does not mean an “outside” in the spatial sense. For place and space are still part of the ontology of the same (le même), which is subject to well-known oppositions which elicit each other (“inside” and “outside”). Within this ontology there is no room for discussing radical alterity, which is referred to as a “positive” or “absolute” infinity. Levinas is concerned here with a form of infinity which cannot be derived from the ontology of finiteness and its oppositions. But—objects Derrida—in order to think and express this positive or absolute infinity, it is necessary to make one’s hands dirty. It is necessary to be “guilty” of using metaphors, figures of speech, and other forms of rhetoric. Another problem on which Derrida touches in this connection is the way that Levinas uses the notion of “face” as a metaphor for the idea of the infinite. The encounter with the “face of the other” opens up the dimension of the infinite, for this encounter arouses in the subject an infinite desire for responsibility. Derrida notes here that the face—as part of the finite, mortal body—is also radically finite, and accuses Levinas of failing to account for this conjunction of the finite and the infinite in the face. When violence and murder are discussed, the question of the face’s finiteness becomes even more urgent. Levinas says that violence and murder are directed at the face, but that they can never touch it. In this context he talks about an “ethical resistance.” Via several routes Derrida shows that Lev8

L’écriture et la différence, 154/104, 170-171/115-116, and 218-220/147-148.

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inas refuses to choose at crucial moments: he makes metaphysics “earthly” by connecting it with the concrete face of the other, but refuses to conclude from this that every earthly meaning is finite and ambiguous. 4. Speaking and writing Initially Levinas’ view of the relation between speaking and writing has a relatively simple and essentially Platonic form: the speaker is present while speaking and can, if necessary, clarify his words. He can be called to account at any moment for what he has said. The speaker is a model of “sincerity” and of “presence in himself.” By contrast, the writer hides in or even behind his work: the work is, as it were, the mask which he holds up in front of his own personality. It is characteristic of the writer to be absent, because the written work (the oeuvre) is usually read in the absence of the writer. It is therefore hard to call him to account for what he writes. It is as if he is already dead, as if he leaves it to others to talk about the work and see in it what they want. The written, the completed work effectively seals the disappearance, the “death” of the author. For ethics Levinas privileges the written word, and particularly the dialogue. There we find full scope for questioning and criticism, so that somebody can be induced to abandon his position and think better of it. Such a thing is impossible for the sovereign written word, because it locks itself up in its existing structure and cuts itself off from such criticism.9 Naturally Derrida criticises the derived position which Levinas assigns to writing and the written work. One of his principal questions is why Levinas only sees language as truly flourishing in the spoken word. Is it right to claim that the written only contains derived meanings? Cannot instruction proceed from the written text too, instruction which can bring about change? And can only the speaker come to his own aid in the case of misun-

9

Totalité et infini, 35-41/64-70 and 66-71/93-100.


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derstanding—or can the written text do this too and perhaps better, because it has the time and the freedom to lend itself to interpretation? 10 Levinas’ reaction to Derrida’s probing criticism was mainly implicit: from the time of Autrement qu´être (1974) he starts to write in a different style, in which he gives a tangible sense of how the other pursues the subject into his innermost being.11 He also drops the term “positive infinity,” and instead chooses to translate the theme of the infinite in terms of a trace, which refers to an Other who has withdrawn into an unreachable past. The trace interrupts finite life, while what it refers to contains a surplus that can never be made fully present. Yet the idea of the infinite as a “trace” is not only a reaction to Derrida’s commentary.12 Before “Violence et métaphysique” appeared, Levinas wrote “La signification et le sens,” an extensive article on meaning and sense in which he not only formulated his first thoughts on the infinite as trace, but also developed a different view of the “oeuvre,” the “work.”13 His view of the relation between spoken and written language has undergone a profound change: the article offers a number of arguments why not only spoken but also written language, the oeuvre, should be regarded as a gift. The author of the written work, too, is someone 10

L’écriture et la différence, 149-150/101-102. Levinas’ only explicit reaction was an article on Derrida which appeared in the periodical L’Arc in 1973 entitled “Tout autrement.” It was later included in the volume Noms Propres. Levinas describes the contact between him and Derrida by means of the figure of the chiasmus: each goes his own way, but sometimes the ways cross at a certain point. In this article Levinas places Derrida in the Kantian tradition, where transcendental illusions are critically questioned. Simon Critchley has pointed out that the remarks which Levinas makes here about Derrida’s method show a similarity to the questions which Derrida poses to Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Both thinkers are concerned with the question of the closure of philosophical language and with the question how a new form of thought can get away from this (Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 145-187). 12 In fact, Derrida borrowed extensively from Levinas in developing the concept of trace. See Robert Bernasconi’s “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida” in: Wood and Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and différance, 63-70. 13 “La signification et le sens” appeared in 1964 and was subsequently collected in Humanisme de l’autre homme, 17-64 (translation in Basic Philosophical Writings, 33-64). 11

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who “gives” himself by means of his work. Writing then appears as a “gift” to the other. In the period after Totalité et infini the verbs “to give oneself to” (se donner) and “to expose oneself” (s’exposer) become characteristic of the ethical subject as a subject who gives himself unconditionally to the other. Written work now forms part of this and so is no longer excluded from the sphere of ethical signification. In the article “La signification et le sens,” however, Levinas offers an interpretation of the “oeuvre” (the work) as a radical movement towards the Other. The work is not a possession, not a completed thing, but a gift. It is the gesture in which one human being gives himself to the other. This giving contains an element of sincerity and directness, which can be mixed with the ambiguity typical of language and signs, but is never absorbed by it. Underlying all expressions, in particular linguistic expressions, is the sincerity with which one human being expresses himself to the other. In the postmodern philosophical practice Levinas sees much attention being paid to underlying meanings, to ambiguity and polysemy. Philosophy has become pluralistic, it has become sensitive to the “difference.” But an experience of plurality is not yet an experience of alterity. How can true alterity be found? How can you track down the “one meaning” which cannot be reduced to a pluralism? Levinas’ answer is: the one Meaning is a movement which goes outside of the identical to direct itself at something that is absolutely other. He describes this movement as “Oeuvre” (with a reference to hermeneutics) or “Liturgy.” What is a work? Radically considered, it is a movement which goes from the Same to the Other and never returns to the Same. In other words, the “work” for Levinas is not a “work” in the sense of a completed lifework that is separate from the author. Such a lifework is only possible when the author is there “for the Other” (“pour l’autre”). Even when the author believes himself to be alone (in his work), he is supported by an “être-pourl’autre” which transcends him. Though it is true that writing a text is only possible in the absence of the addressee, still the text


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can be directed at an other who is absent, or perhaps does not yet exist. Or, as Levinas puts it in imitation of Celan: “Le poème va vers l’autre. Il espère le rejoindre délivré et vacant.”14 5. Derrida’s guilt “The oeuvre is a gift”: Derrida recognised this motif in Levinas and made it the central theme of his second essay on Levinas, entitled “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici.”15 Again it becomes clear that the strategy of Levinas’ style intrigues Derrida. The turns of phrase in the title: “En ce moment même” (At this very moment), “dans cet ouvrage” (in this work), and “me voici (I am) are drawn from Levinas’ work. They are markers of the experience of presence: temporal (precisely this moment), spatial (in this work), and subject-related (here I am). Derrida shows how Levinas uses these expressions to break open the discursive nature of the text into direct speech, which gives the impression that a living present author addresses his reader “at this moment.” On the other hand this moment of breaking open is mentioned in the text, in the discourse. Thus Levinas sometimes refers to the fact that he is holding a philosophical, reflective discourse “at this moment,” other times he uses the same words to indicate that the discourse is being interrupted: it is addressing “at this moment” the person who is listening. All this is intended to show that the philosophical, rational discourse, too, implies a reference to the other and that the text itself is only made possible by its relation to the other or the absolute. But, asks Derrida, can the Absolute that is evoked in this way, by a text, be kept out of the text’s event? Or is it contaminated (contaminé) by its contact with the written text? In this connection he analyzes the curious asymmetry which Levinas introduces in talking about the oeuvre, which “goes to the other without returning”; the work as an absolute gift. Derrida is deeply put out by this description of the Oeuvre, but clearly, too, 14

“The poem goes toward the other. It hopes to find him freed and vacant.” Noms propres, 51/41. 15 See note 1.

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it engages his thought in a special way. For the motif of the gift has long exercised Derrida and continues to do so in recent publications.16 Is a pure gift possible? Or is every giving dominated by an economics of the gift (in which one gives so that the other will give, or because the other has given). Levinas’ description of the oeuvre raises exactly the same problem, by emphasizing that someone who truly gives can expect only ingratitude in return. 17 The description in Levinas with which Derrida links up is: Or, l’Oeuvre pensée radicalement est un mouvement du Même vers l’Autre qui ne retourne jamais au Même. L’Oeuvre pensée jusqu’au bout exige une générosité radicale du mouvement qui dans le Même va vers l’Autre. Elle exige, par conséquent, une ingratitude de l’Autre. La gratitude serait précisément le retour du mouvement à son origine.18

I already pointed out that this text in Levinas occurs in the context of a different thought on “work.” Initially Levinas was inclined to separate the work from the person, who only has living presence in the spoken word. The “work,” once completed, is separate from the person, as is the case with a novel, with a composition that is performed, or with an architect’s design of a house.19 The text quoted above entails a different view of the oeuvre: in a work, too, the maker can “give himself to the other.” He gives himself so radically that there is no way back. Of the speaking person we can still think that, speaking, he remains present with himself. Giving in the form of a work is more radical, because

16

See for instance Glas, 1974; Epérons, 1978 and Donner le temps 1, La fausse monnaie, 1991. In The Logic of the Gift Alan D. Schrift surveys the development of the gift motif in Derrida. 17 The motif of the ungrateful reception of the gift may be informed by Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, though Levinas does not mention this work anywhere. 18 Humanisme de l’autre homme, 41; translation from Basic Philosophical Writings 49: “A work conceived radically is a movement of the Same towards the Other which never returns to the Same. A work thought through all the way requires a radical generosity of the movement which in the Same goes toward the Other. It consequently requires an ingratitude of the other: gratitude would be the return of the movement to its origin.” 19 Totalité et infini, 38 (work as opposed to language) and 204 (work as an unsuccessful action).


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the author renounces the authority which a speaker does have over his words. Written and printed, the words are surrendered to the other, and so “given” even more unselfishly than the spoken word. Levinas’ statement about the work is also a statement about interpreting. It prompts Derrida to ask how Levinas himself wants to be read. Can we accept his work as readers if we must apply to the oeuvre the rule which he himself introduces, perhaps even as an implicit reading guide: that it requires ingratitude on the part of the recipient, because gratitude would return the work to its origin, to the Same? In that case it is impossible to “receive” the text, to incorporate it in a reception history. What must the reader/the interpreter do to receive Levinas’ work in the right way, in accordance with the implicit reading guide, with Levinas’ view of the work? He must be ungrateful, he must receive the work inadequately and incompletely, and never fully do justice to it.20 Derrida concludes that a reading of Levinas cannot be other than “faute” (inadequate). For if he reads Levinas “faultlessly,” and gives him back everything that he gave while writing, the reader/interpreter is “fautif” (“guilty”). But if the reader/interpreter writes back just anything, without really acknowledging what Levinas has written, he risks “la faute”—the wrong reading21. How is interpretation still possible now? This is the doublebind situation in which Levinas places his readers: if the work says in advance “do not give me back what I give to you,” any attempt to understand the writing properly is already a transgression of this command. After all, to understand properly is: to give back adequately the meaning of the text. If the recipient adopts this attitude, there can no longer be any question of a 20

In this regard “En ce moment même” is also an example of Derrida’s criticism of hermeneutics in general, which he sees as being too focused on consensus and the activity of successful understanding. In his debate with Gadamer Derrida argued that understanding is not the last horizon of interpretative activity. Understanding must preserve a rift in the relation, and the possibility of misunderstanding. See Derrida, “Guter Wille zur Macht” in: Text und Interpretation, Philippe Forget (ed.), 56-58. 21 Psyché, 164-165/13-14.

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pure gift. In Levinas’ system a pure gift cannot actually be received. Derrida is therefore forced to conclude that there is no appropriate way of receiving, i.e. interpreting, Levinas’ written work. 6. The ungrateful thinking of the Other “En ce moment même…” should therefore not be read as an essay which criticises Levinas’ philosophy. Rather it is an attempt to decode the implicit reading guide of Levinas’ work. This reading guide says (freely rendered): “you can only receive the work ungratefully. No symmetry is possible in the interpretative relation. On the contrary: it is the asymmetry which keeps the interpretation going. A truly good reading can be only inadequate, only at fault, for if the reader imagines that he has truly understood the other, then something is really wrong.” Derrida’s reading of Levinas is best characterised as an attempt at the right ingratitude. An adequate “giving back” to Levinas, a mirroring or reflection of what he has given in his work, is inappropriate. We are only permitted to understand him wrongly, to be at fault, to wrench his work out of joint. This is how, in radical ingratitude, Levinas should be read. How should this ingratitude be put into practice? Derrida does so by drawing attention to two things that Levinas prefers to forget. The first is the textual corpus, the textual body in which Levinas’ thought of the absolute other is transmitted. Mediated by the text, the experience of the other is no longer as pure as Levinas suggests. It is contaminated. It is subject to negotiation, it is evoked by means of special rhetorical figures. The text needed to evoke this experience is, at the same time, unwilling to be “written.” The second point that Levinas prefers to forget is the gender difference. He neutralises this area of tension by silencing the female voice—as far as it is present in his work. Derrida practises ingratitude by making this voice explicit, even when Levinas does not really want to hear it. An example: in the middle of a passage on responsibility, which states that responsibility is pre-


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ceded by something else—being possessed by the other, as in love—Levinas in passing quotes two phrases from the Bible. First he cites the words which the biblical characters Abraham and Isaiah utter when they make themselves available to the Most High (“here I am,” in Hebrew: “hinneni”). Next, he takes from Song of Songs 5:8 (“I am sick of love”) the word “sick,” explicitly indicating the biblical reference in a footnote.22 Derrida then asks whose voice is heard here. Who says: “here I am”? And who says: “I am sick of love”? The last case is clear: the voice from Song of Songs is a female voice. What does this say about the voice which says “Here I am” and makes itself available?23 Is this patriarchal and prophetic voice a female voice too? Levinas pays no attention to this question. When he quotes Song of Songs he “forgets” that the voice which says “I am sick of love” is the voice of a woman. This is remarkable, because at other times he does render account of the gender difference. Apparently in Levinas there is room in ontology for a female alterity, but when it matters—in ethics—he erases this difference again. For the ethical experience the gender difference is of no importance. More important than the difference between man and woman is the trace of difference which the Infinite Other leaves behind in the self though the intrusion of the ethical experience. Levinas marks this ethical difference in the male direction: he (instead of he/she), son (instead of child or son/daughter), father (instead of father/mother). In his Talmud interpretations, too, Levinas discusses the gender difference as something secondary in relation to the humanity which is present in man and woman and which is seen as a responsibility of one human being for the other.

22 “To this command continually put forth only a ‘here I am’ (me voici) can answer, where the pronoun ‘I’ is in the accusative, declined before any declension, possessed by the other, sick, identical.” To the word “sick” Levinas adds a footnote which refers to Song of Songs 5:8: “Je suis malade d’amour” (Autrement qu’être, 181/142). 23 Psyché, 168-9/18.

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7. The female principle and God Derrida also connects the question of the silenced female principle in Levinas with God. Levinas says most emphatically that he wants to write about a God “non contaminé par l’être,” a God not contaminated by Being. He denies that an analogy can exist between the divine name and human proper names. The divine name is radically different. But is it possible to protect the divine name so absolutely from contact, from human use and abuse? To what extent is God in Levinas truly “non contaminé,” also in the way in which he himself discusses God? If there is really no relation between his Name (Pro-nom) and human proper names, why is he referred to as “Il”? Is this “He” a masculinity which precedes the difference between male and female? Or do we have to say that God in Levinas has a forgotten other, a “country behind his back”: the female principle? In that case the absolute Other, the positive Infinity, who does not derive his infinity from negation, would have an other, and so a limit. He, absolute and disengaged, would be mixed with Being and the economics of being 24. The boundary seems to be the difference between male and female, for in any case God is not female. Again Derrida exposes Levinas’ blind spot: the language in which he tries to say the infinite has its own limits and produces its own differences. Levinas’ attempt to present the Absolute as something of an order of its own, beyond the gender difference, breaks down here on the oppositions in language. For the first opposition is marked by the gender difference: is the Absolute a “he” or a “she”? 25 In this sense the infinite or absolute is always “contaminated” with the finite possibilities of language. The discovery of this “other of God” rescues Derrida from the problem: to whom must he give the text for Levinas in order to show himself radically ungrateful? He must not dedicate the text 24

Psyché, 200/45. If we try to avoid this opposition by filling in “it” here, we lose the personal dimension of the Absolute. But Levinas does not want to give up this dimension.

25


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to “Il,” the Infinite, the One who has passed by and who is absolute, nor to “E.L.” (Emmanuel Levinas), but to “elle,” the woman, who has inspired Levinas’ work as much as the Absolute. Levinas wants thought to be inspired by the absolute-Other, but he also wants to erase the gender difference and make the female principle disappear. Despite appearances to the contrary, the female principle is not really given a voice in Levinas’ texts; it is smothered, gagged, and finally silenced. This suggestion by Derrida smoothly passes into the image of Levinas’ texts as a place where the woman’s dead body is kept and also hidden: the text as crypt.26 By using the word crypte, Derrida gives himself room to realise and mourn the disappearance of the female voice in Levinas’ work, for a crypt is a place of mourning. The deceased has been named and given a resting-place. “En ce moment même” becomes increasingly cryptic towards the end. The text closes with a poetic fragment written in capitals that is best viewed as a funeral ritual, in which Derrida stages a meeting between the female voice in Levinas’ text and the divine name. 27 The female voice was called up by Levinas himself 26

Psyché, 199/43. The text of the “liturgy” reads in English: HERE AT THIS VERY MOMENT I ROLL UP THE BODY OF OUR INTERLACED VOICES CONSONANTS VOWELS ACCENTS FAULTY IN THIS MANUSCRIPT ~ I MUST PLACE IT IN THE EARTH FOR YOU ~ COME LEAN DOWN OUR GESTURES WILL HAVE HAD THE INCONSOLABLE SLOWNESS THE GIFT REQUIRES AS IF IT WERE NECESSARY TO DELAY THE ENDLESS FALLING DUE OF A REPETITION ~ IT’S OUR MUTE INFANT A GIRL PERHAPS STILLBORN OF AN INCEST WILL ONE EVER KNOW PROMISE TO THE INCEST ~ FAULTY OR LACKING IN HER BODY SHE WILL HAVE LET HERSELF BE DESTROYED ONE DAY WITHOUT REMAINDER ONE MUST HOPE ONE MUST GUARD ONESELF FROM HOPE EVEN THAT THUS ALWAYS MORE AND NO MORE JEALOUSY THE BETTER SHE WILL BE KEPT GUARDED ~ MORE AND NO MORE THAN ENOUGH DIFFERENCE THERE AMONG THEM (ELLES) BETWEEN THE INHUMED OR THE ASHES OF A BURNALL (BRÛLE-TOUT) ~ NOW HERE EVEN THE THING OF THIS LITURGY KEEPS OR GUARDS ITSELF LIKE A TRACE OTHERWISE SAID LOSES ITSELF BEYOND PLAY AND EXPENSE ALL IN ALL AND ALL ACCOUNTING FOR OTHERS DONE ALREADY SHE LETS HERSELF BE EATEN ~ BY THE OTHER BY YOU WHO WILL HAVE GIVEN HER TO ME ~ YOU ALWAYS KNEW HER TO BE THE PROPER BODY OF THE FAULT SHE WILL ONLY HAVE BEEN CALLED BY HER LEGIBLE NAME BY YOU AND THEREBY DISPAPPEARED IN ADVANCE ~ BUT IN THE BOTTOMLESS

27

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as soon as he designated the female principle as “alterity par excellence.” But ultimately she disappeared behind the overwhelming ethical alterity. She died and was buried in the texts of Levinas. At the same time the contaminated divine name is also buried as a dead body. The ritual offers room for “Trauerarbeit”: both the divine name and the forgotten woman must be mourned. Here, in this grave, they can meet each other and lie down alongside each other in the expectation of something else: “a new body, without any more jealousy the most ancient still to come.”28 The conclusion of this text written in capitals is: TAKE IT HERE I AM EAT ~ GET NEARER ~ IN ORDER TO GIVE HIM/HER ~ DRINK

This liturgical-poetic text in capitals contains a surfeit of references and associations. It is as if Derrida wants to bring about an excess of language itself. It is as if he wants to show, by means of poetic language, what Levinas implies in a very different way: that language can refer, beyond itself, to something that is completely Other. But their views of this otherness are entirely different. In Levinas it is God, understood in terms of the relation to the other which is responsibility, so radically that this responsibility involves a break with being, and so with all negotiation, jealousy, eroticism, and sexuality. Derrida opposes this and shows, performatively, that God and ethics are nevertheless bound to being, negotiation, jealousy, corporeality, and so also to eroticism and the gender difference. CRYPT THE INDECIPHERABLE STILL GIVES READING FOR A LAPSE ABOVE HER BODY WHICH SLOWLY DISCOMPOSES IN ANALYSIS ~ WE MUST HAVE A NEW BODY ANOTHER WITHOUT ANY MORE JEALOUSY THE MOST ANCIENT STILL TO COME ~ SHE DOESN’T SPEAK THE UNNAMEABLE YET YOU HEAR HER BETTER THAN ME AHEAD OF ME AT THIS VERY MOMENT WHERE NONETHELESS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MONUMENTAL WORK I WEAVE MY VOICE SO AS TO BE EFFACED THIS TAKE IT HERE I AM EAT ~ GET NEARER ~ IN ORDER TO GIVE HIM/HER ~ DRINK (Translation: Ruben Berezhdivin in: Bernasconi and Critchley, Re-Reading Levinas, 46-47). 28 Psyché, 201/46.


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I want to highlight one idea in this game of more or less veiled hints in Levinas’ direction. It is the insight that the female difference has stamped (pre-sealed) Levinas’ work from the outset, so that she (the woman) became the other of his (Levinas’) other. In his work, Le temps et láutre, one difference (the sexual, in which the female is marked as being other) preceded articulation of the other difference, that of the Name, which differs endlessly from being. Derrida quotes Levinas, who asks the following questions in an article on Talmudic precepts regarding the divine name: Le Nom est-il assez libre à l’égard du contexte où il se loge? Est-il préservé dans l’écrit de toute contamination par l’être ou la culture ? Est-il préservé de l’homme qui, certes, a vocation de le retenir, mais qui est capable de tous abus? 29

The text in capitals which follows these questions talks about a (female) body which is buried and eaten so that jealousy will end. The final words: TAKE IT HERE I AM EAT ~ GET NEARER ~ IN ORDER TO GIVE HIM/HER DRINK are reminiscent of the opening words of the Lord’s Supper in the Christian tradition: “Take, eat, this is my body. Drink, this is my blood.” Another possible reference is to Genesis 24 (vv. 11-27), the story in which Rebecca offers hospitality to Abraham’s servant by watering his camels, after which she invites him to spend the night in the house of her father.30

29 Psyché, 200/45. Translation: “Is the Name free enough in regard to the context where it lodges? Is it preserved in writing from all contamination by being, by culture? Is it preserved from man, who has indeed a vocation to retain it, but who is capable of every abuse?” Psyché, 200/45. This is a quotation from L’au-delà du verset, 149/121, see also note 33. 30 Simon Critchley, whose discussion of “En ce moment même” deals at length with the motif of generosity, assumes that DRINK refers to Genesis 24. The one need not exclude the other in Derrida, and so I argue for a comprehensive reading in which DRINK refers both to Genesis 24 and to Numbers 5. I will offer some arguments for this view below (“‘Bois’—Derrida’s Final Word on Levinas” in: Bernasconi and Critchley (eds.), Re-Reading Levinas, 162-189).

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My suggestion is that the word “DRINK” in this text could refer to something else as well. Just before the ritual text in capitals, Derrida discusses Levinas’ article on the Talmudic precepts regarding the Name of God. 31 One of these precepts is a ban on effacing the names of God while copying. If a mistake was made in copying, the whole page containing the miswritten divine name had to be buried “like a dead body.” It is clear that this precept—with its implied likeness between the name and a dead body—led Derrida to write the burial ritual mentioned above. Besides the ban on effacement, there is also a precept in which the Name must be written with a view to its effacement. This ban relates to the situation in which a woman was suspected of adultery but proof was lacking. According to Numbers 5, the woman was to be taken by her jealous husband to the officiating priest in the temple to be subjected to a trial, in which she had to drink water in which a text had been effaced. This text contained an invocation in which the divine name occurred. The water was turned bitter by the ink dissolved in it and presumably became poisonous as well.32 If the woman passed the test, she was found innocent and husband and wife could be reconciled. Levinas leaves out this part. He does not talk about drinking bitter water and shifts attention from the ancient ritual to its explanation in the Talmud: “the effacement of the Name is the reconciliation of men.” Sometimes the divine name must be effaced to reconcile people. In doing so he ignores—following the Talmud commentary—the humiliating and life-threatening aspects which this ritual must have had for the women in question.33

31

“Le Nom de Dieu d’après quelques textes Talmudiques” in L’au-delà du verset, 143-157/116-128. 32 This trial proceeded as follows: the priest uttered an invocation: “If some man, other than your husband has lain with you, then ... The Lord (written as the Tetragrammaton) will make you an execration.” The woman had to answer “Amen, Amen”; then the priest would write these words (mentioning the Tetragrammaton) in a book, and efface them in the water of bitterness. The woman was then ordered to drink this bitter water. The ritual of reconciliation is described in Numbers 5:11-31; Levinas links his discussion to the commentary on this ritual in the treatise Sota. By means of the word DRINK Derrida also calls to mind this drinking of bitter, poisoned water by the accused woman (L’au-delà du verset, 152-153/123-124).


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I see Derrida’s intervention as a performative attempt to take away the innocence of Levinas’ reflection on the divine names in the Talmud. More effectively and painfully than Simone de Beauvoir had done before, he points out Levinas’ blind spot. Levinas uses female alterity to say something about the absolute difference between the self and the other, but the specific situation of the woman remains underexposed. Levinas does not ask questions, neither when he characterises female existence as a domestic existence, nor when he cites an ancient Jewish ritual to express his own ideas about the effacement of God’s name. Couldn’t he at least have said that the woman, by drinking this bitter water, could be driven to her death? The ritual finally staged by Derrida says and does everything that Levinas does not want to “see,” and plays with the things which he would prefer to cloak in silence. Here he puts most radically into practice the absolute ingratitude which Levinas asks for. He thus makes it clear that Levinas’ work is contradictory. On the one hand Levinas does his best to give the female principle its own place in his view of the subject and he pays attention to the operation of the gender difference. On the other hand the gender difference evaporates in the glare of the actual, ethical difference. Where ethical transcendence is concerned, woman’s distinctive voice is silenced and only the male subject is considered to be capable of speech.34

33

In passing, Levinas does mention the possibility of regarding this ritual from a sociological perspective as a divine judgement, but he himself chooses to see it as “a good way to take the heat out of the conflict by the very appearance of a third party, in the form of a priest.” 34 Derrida returns to this issue in Adieu, and reads the texts of Totalité et infini on the female principle more as a kind of feminist manifesto. The underlying argument is that Levinas seeks the origin of ethics in a subjectivity that welcomes the other in or with itself. He considers this ability to receive the other as pre-eminently female. Derrida then critically re-examines Levinas’ subject philosophy, but no longer thinks it necessary to choose between a reading that finds fault with Levinas’ androcentrism and a reading which emphasises the feminist character. Both are to some extent upheld (Adieu, 8085/42-45). Stella Sandfort criticised this about-turn by Derrida in “Levinas, feminism and the feminine,” in: Critchley and Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, 139-160.

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8. A pattern of kenosis In the foregoing I have closely followed Derrida’s reading of Levinas. It is now time for a little more distance, to bring out the main features of Derrida’s gesture of unthankful thanks. The “crossing of paths” between Derrida and Levinas was sometimes seen by Levinas as a Kantian movement, as an attempt to rouse himself and his readers from a dogmatic slumber. What, then, should we look at, what are the blind spots involved? I will formulate here my own translation of Derrida’s questions, which will play a role in the second part of this book. First: is pure giving possible at all? If the movement of giving has once started, to what extent can giver and gift be kept out of ordinary social and cultural relations? In other words: isn’t giving immediately implicated in social and cultural relations on penalty of remaining completely outside of them and simply meaning nothing? Isn’t this a danger that threatens Levinas’ philosophy: ultimately to mean nothing because it is too much aimed at purity? Second: if the above is true, Levinas’ ethical philosophy suffers from an ethical shortcoming. Precisely because it insists so powerfully on pure “being for the other,” it is inclined to forget that that such a giving presence makes victims too. Derrida elaborates this by dwelling on the figure of woman in Levinas. To what extent is she the loser, the victim of negotiations which take place without her between the male, priestly authority and the authority that we will call “God”? God gives his name with a proviso: an attempt must be made to keep the name pure. To what extent is the woman, here the “third party,” a victim of this striving for purity? And why is it so hard to see this form of exclusion from the perspective of Levinas’ own thought?35

35 Derrida pursues this line of thought in Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, when he points to the female character of the welcome, which Levinas foregrounds but also denies (cancelled out in a male ethics of host and guest). See for instance Derrida, Adieu, 70-85/38-45.


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Third: Derrida has put me on the track of a threefold relation in Levinas, which is enacted between the self, the other, and God. The striving for purity which he indicates in Levinas has everything to do with the relation of the other to God. Is God the origin of the giving that wants no thanks for its own gift? Is the reference to God enough to produce an outward movement in ethics—towards an exteriority that constantly breaks open ontological relations? But how can this voice (the voice of revelation, the voice of judgement, the voice of an infinite appeal) be heard and acquire meaning within ontology? Is there a pre-appointed space in the self for receiving this voice, a space which is due to the fact that the “voice of God” or the “judgement of the Other” has sounded before? Or has the voice of God, in the form of the face, the judgement, the command, always echoed in the self? But what is the meaning of this “always”—which is expressed in Levinas’ description of the self as “l’autre-dans-le même”? Does this still leave the other as the one who comes from outside, the stranger, the incarnation of an absolute exteriority? It is these questions in particular which have put me on the track of the relation between the self, the Other, and God as a kenotic pattern. Fourth: The last part of Derrida’s article can be read as an attempt at a different incarnation: the Infinite binds himself to the earth, to the female principle, to death, to the vulnerable, mortal face. See for instance how Levinas interprets the infinite as an ideal which gives itself to and, at the same time, eludes finite consciousness. This “giving itself” assumes kenotic features, especially in the article “God and philosophy.” Likewise the impossible reception of the infinite by the finite subject should be seen as a form of kenosis. It is a strange movement, in which dispossession and possession of the self go together. What seems a moment of extreme alienation (the self is no longer with itself, it is there entirely “for the other”) is at once the highest form of authenticity.36

36

Graham Ward regards this “ethics as kenosis” as a pivotal point in Levinas’ thought on the subject (Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, 157, 158).

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I will examine these forms of kenosis and dispossession of the self in the second part of this book. In these chapters we will come closer to the central thesis of this book, that in Levinas’ philosophy God binds himself to being by means of a subject that is viewed as kenosis.

PART TWO ETHICS, RELIGION, AND KENOSIS


CHAPTER 4 EVIL, TRANSCENDENCE, AND GOD How does Levinas discuss God in connection with suffering? What is the nature of the reflections which he devotes to this theme: are they part of philosophy of religion and should they be viewed as a critique of traditional theodicy?1 Or are they more in the nature of statements of faith, are they attempts to say something from the experience of a survivor about the possibility and the impossibility of believing in God, or speaking about God, or to God, after the Shoah?2 In the course of this chapter we will find that there can be no true separation between these two possibilities, because the question about suffering in Levinas serves as a touchstone for philosophical thought on God. This also explains why Levinas’ discourse on God is always a conditional discourse, so much so at times that Strasser can describe it as an increasingly pointed silence about God.3 This reticence is based on respect for God’s absolute transcendence, a respect which Levinas does not find in the traditional idea of theodicy. Levinas is also cautious in relation to suffering: he does not want to explain away suffering and regards it as something that is without meaning. Like God’s name, suffering refers to a transcendence, to something that does not fit into the ordinary scheme of things and breaks open the boundaries of known reality. In this chapter I will show how the two forms of transcendence—the transcendence of God and the transcendence of suffering—meet each other in Levinas. I will then ask what this means for the relation between religion and ethics.

1

This is the starting-point of H.J. Adriaanse in “Theodicee zwischen Nein und Ja,” in: Vom Christentum aus, 155-170. 2 Thus e.g. Bernstein, “Evil and the temptation of theodicy” in Critchley and Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, 252-267. 3 Strasser, Jenseits von Sein und Zeit, 302.

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1. A religion without hope For Levinas, the meaning of suffering was by no means an abstract issue, but a question which assumed an inescapable urgency in the course of his life, as a Jew in twentieth-century Europe: the Europe of Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes, of Nazism and the extermination camps and the Gulags. For him, being a Jew meant: sharing in the religious and historical adventure of Judaism. In an interview he describes this adventure as an “instruction,” a lesson. Curious as it may sound, he talks about “the instruction of Auschwitz,” and then immediately apologises for this way of speaking. The gist of this instruction is: that the essence of faith is not promise. It is therefore pointless, in his view, to impose or urge a certain form of faith on others. Why would you proclaim to others a faith that promises nothing? To tolerate the idea of Auschwitz without denying God is something which can perhaps be asked of ourselves, but not of others.4 These remarks from an interview with François Poirié show that, for Levinas, Auschwitz did not just mean that theodicy was no longer possible. Religious belief, too, in which there is room for promises and comfort, comes to an end here. Hence Levinas’ philosophy does not defend any form of religious belief, but draws attention to ethics as something that is central to Jewish faith without being subsumed by it. To read Levinas’ biography is to see at once how closely his ideas about the “instruction of Auschwitz’ are connected with his life. He once described his own biography as a “disparate inventory ... dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.”5 Levinas was descended from the East European Judaism of Lithuania, which was characterised by a penchant for a certain intellectualism. In 1923 his studies took him to Strasbourg, but his marriage to Rachel Levy, the girl who lived next door in Kaunas, confirmed the bond with his native country. He developed into an expert on phenomenology, and was one of 4 5

Is it Righteous to Be? 77, 78. Difficile liberté, 406/291.

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the first in France to publish interpretations of the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. After concluding his studies with a thesis on Husserl, he decided to stay in France and assumed French nationality. As a result, he was conscripted to the French army, and thus was mobilised in 1939. He survived the war as a prisoner in a labour camp near Hannover, where he was detained with other Jewish prisoners of war. His wife and his daughter Simone had gone into hiding in the monastery of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, near Orléans. They were reunited as a family after the war, but there were no surviving members of his family and of the Jewish community in which they had grown up in Kaunas. It is against the background of this experience, of being a survivor, that Levinas’ thought should be understood. After the war, when the fate of the six million murdered Jews became known, Levinas, like Primo Levi and Abel Herzberg, asked himself what it still means—to live. The question of meaning— familiar from existentialism—took on a different tone for him. In the book De l’existance à l’existant, which was partly written in the prison camp, he addresses this question. The fear of nothing, a popular theme in existentialist circles, was not the beginning of philosophical inquiry for Levinas. But what was? Ultimately this small book revolves around the question of the meaning of responsibility. In what situation can responsibility assume meaning? Levinas makes it clear that responsibility is based on an assumption. It is not simply there, it must start in a human being who is not tied hand and foot to the world around him. Responsibility presupposes a certain degree of freedom, which is best conceived of as a “separateness.” Freedom is only possible when a human being dissociates himself from the world around him. The first condition for a humane existence is the existence of an answerable person, someone who is able to break out of the mould in which he was formed, and can feel responsibility for the fate of the other. This task, the call to responsibility, is also heard in a quotation from the prophecy of Ezekiel used in the dedication of Autrement qu’être. He who actively commits evil will be punished, this text says, but those who allowed it to happen must also be held responsible. Levinas’ thought on responsibility links up with this text; it starts from the idea that every-

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thing concerns me, so that I know I am responsible for the evil that happens, even though I did not commit it. This responsibility is fundamentally incapable of limitation. Autrement qu’être contains another remarkable dedication, which first of all mentions the victims to whom Levinas felt closest: A la mémoire des êtres les plus proches parmi les six millions d’assassinés par les nationaux-socialistes,

But the memory of the dearest and nearest calls to mind the fate of many, many others, and they are also mentioned in the dedication: …à côté des millions et des millions d’humains de toutes confessions et de toutes nations, victimes de la même haine de l’autre homme, du même anti-sémitisme.6

The dedication links the motif of unlimited responsibility to the evil experienced by Jews and other persecuted people in the time of Nazism. Moreover, the dedication greatly expands the meaning of anti-Semitism: people of various nations and beliefs may suffer under it. 2. The philosophy of a survivor Levinas’ philosophy is written from the perspective of someone who has survived a great disaster. The memory of the murder of the European Jews by the Nazis overshadows his biography. He survived with his wife and daughter, as the only ones in their family. Though little is known about this, he must have suffered from the insistent question: why me? By what coincidence or for what purpose was I spared? And what is my relation to the others, to the people that perished in that night? Primo Levi described this experience as a recurrent agony in which the sur6

“To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists and of the millions and millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism.” Autrement qu’être, dedication.


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vivor sees the faces of his former fellow-sufferers. Visited by these faces, he is filled with a sense of guilt, which he tries to assuage by saying that he cannot be blamed for living, breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and wearing clothes. Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta, Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns And till my ghastly tale is told This heart within me burns. Once again he sees his companions’ faces Livid in the first faint light, Gray with cement dust, Nebulous in the mist, Tingid with death in their uneasy sleep. At night, under the heavy burden Of their dreams, their jaws move, Chewing a nonexistent turnip. “Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people. Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread. No one died in my place. No one. Go back into your mist. It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.”7

A philosophical approach to this experience of guilt can be found in Levinas’ thought on the subject. Subjectivity is not a “being by oneself”; it means being constantly in touch with the other, the other who calls and accuses me. Subjectivity means being pursued by responsibility for the fate of the other, of which the origin cannot be determined. According to Levinas, this mode of existence precedes ordinary existence, in which a human being chooses his or her destiny in freedom. It is its hidden undertone and even its inspiration. This experience, of being a survivor, also colours the question which Levinas asks himself: is faith in God still possible? At first he discusses this question on a totally individual level: he is con7

Primo Levi, “The Survivor,” in: Moments of Reprieve, 13.

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cerned with himself, with how he deals with the religious tradition in the light of history. He does not want to preach to people in this regard, everybody should decide for themselves. For if there is religion in Levinas, it is a religion without hope and without promise. On whom would you want to press such a religion? How could you practise mission with it? All that remains and all that we can reasonably (on the basis not of religion but of philosophy) talk about in a meaningful way is humanism: a humanism centred on responsibility. A “humanism of the other person.” It becomes Levinas’ lifework to think through this special form of humanism and to portray our humanity time and again as a being touched by an infinite responsibility. 3. The God who hides his face People are responsible, they can also be held to account for what they have not done. But why? In this connection I will now discuss the religious inspiration of Levinas’ thought. Though Levinas does not draw his positions directly from the Bible or the Talmud, he develops a form of humanism which does bear relation to his religious background. Biblical notions, motifs from the law, the prophets, and wisdom literature, and insights from the Talmud are “translated into Greek,” into a universal philosophical language which can be understood by all people, whether religious or not. In his ethical reading of interhuman relations Levinas is influenced by the Bible—Western philosophy determined its form of expression in philosophical language. So, as well as biographical, we must also involve religious motifs in an inquiry into Levinas’ philosophical answer to the question of the meaning of evil and suffering. Precisely this question brings thought up against the boundary of the purely thinkable, and often a transition to religious notions takes place. When dealing with suffering and the question of theodicy, we need to connect Levinas’ experience, living as a Jew after the Second World War, with the universal questions of his philosophy. In fact he makes this connection himself by saying that the Shoah forced him to think about man’s relation to God. In the


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years after the war he digested these insights. As a Jew he formed part of a difficult history, and he wondered what the meaning of this history could be, for himself, for other Jews who survived the war, but also for humanity as a whole. Could the history of Judaism be the “central adventure of humanity”? The focus of this adventure is man’s relation to God. “Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu” (“Loving the Torah more than God”) is the title of the article which Levinas devoted to a text, presented as a document written in the last hours of resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. It is a literary fiction, but also, according to Levinas, a true fiction, in which “every one of us who survived recognises his own life in astonishment.” The fiction produces a true text, which occasions reflection on the meaning of God’s absence. God “covered his face” in these years. He chose not to intervene as a saviour and abandoned the righteous. This is how Levinas describes the Jewish meaning of suffering: to be abandoned to righteousness in a world where good does not triumph.8 The experience of God’s absence leads to a phase of atheism, but atheism does not have the final say in Levinas. He tries to maintain both positions at once: God is absent and at the same time is recognised to be present and near. So where is he, what is his place in reality? Levinas needs only one word for this and again the word (as in the context of “Auschwitz”) is: instruction. God is present in the words of the precepts, in the Torah. C’est précisément une parole, non incarnée de Dieu, qui assure un Dieu vivant parmi nous. La confiance en un Dieu qui ne se manifeste par aucune autorité terrestre ne peut reposer que sur l’évidence intérieure et la valeur d’un enseignement.9

Thus Yossel ben Yossel, the fictitious author of the work mentioned above, comes to say: “I love him, but I love even more his Torah…And even if I were deceived by him and became disillusioned, I should nevertheless observe the precepts of the Torah.” 8

Difficile liberté, 203/143. Difficile liberté, 204/144. Translation: “It is precisely a word, not incarnate, from God, that ensures a living God among us. Confidence in a God Who is not made manifest through any worldly authority can rely only on internal evidence and the values of an education.”

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Levinas quotes these words and concludes that man’s true humanity is born from this instruction, from “harsh words of an exacting God.” But he also asks whether this tense situation can exist in perpetuity. Should there not be a moment in which God shows his face, so that justice and power find each other again? Yet the element of concealment remains indispensable in the movement toward religious maturity. “Only the man who has recognised the hidden God can demand that He show Himself.” Yossel ben Yossel’s text leads Levinas to characterise his own position as that of an “integral and strict humanism, connected with a difficult adoration.” He is as far removed from the idea that community with the divine is possible as from the desperate pride of the atheist. The experience of God’s absence leads to a form of religious humanism in which responsibility for the good, for keeping open the path to justice, is in human hands. At the same time God is present in instruction, so that man is not abandoned in his search for justice. In the awareness of God’s absence he can try to find the meaning of the Torah. But the law is not a place for staying. Thus in the post-war years the experience of evil, the “instruction of Auschwitz,” engenders a view of the relation between man and God which Levinas later elaborates into an ethical philosophy of religion. The awareness that such a drastic experience of God’s absence is possible led to a philosophy which focused with increasing severity on human responsibility—because of the existence of evil in the world. This focus on responsibility also led Levinas to criticise philosophy inasmuch as it prevents people from giving shape to this responsibility. The Roman Catholic sacramental doctrine of absolution is one of his targets: Le mal n’est pas un principe mystique que l’on peut effacer par une rite, il est une offense que l’homme fait à l’homme. Personne, pas même Dieu, ne peut se substituer à la victime. Le monde où le pardon est tout-puissant devient inhumain.10 10

Difficile liberté, 37/20. In translation: “Evil is not a mystical principle that can be effaced by a ritual, it is an offence perpetrated on man by man. No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. The world in which pardon is


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Tellingly, there were baptised Christians both among the executioners in the camps and among those who helped people to hide from the Nazis.11 Apparently more is needed for responsibility than a religious faith alone: faith must be practised from the right perspective. For Levinas, this means: from an ethical perspective. 4. Prayer and kenosis Does this position of an integral and strict humanism mean that it is no longer possible to connect God with suffering? A philosophical question, but also one which has to do with religious experience. Levinas talks about “a difficult adoration” which is connected with his view of humanism. But how exactly does this connection take place? Once again I want to draw a parallel with the work of Primo Levi, who in If this is a man finally reaches the awareness that every form of religious conduct has become meaningless. This insight is occasioned by the prayer of “the old Kuhn,” an orthodox Jew who thanked God for being spared the fate of so many others when a selection took place. Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as not to waste the last drops of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from my

all-powerful becomes inhumane.” 11 Levinas often returns to this in interviews. For instance, he says in the interview with Poirié that “the executioners of Auschwitz, protestants or catholics, had all done their catechism.” (Is it Righteous to Be? 40) In this connection he calls his experiences in wartime “paradoxical”—the same faith that inspires some to neighbourly love does not prevent others from collaborating with the practices of the Nazis. Elsewhere he identifies the drama of the Nazi period as the most important moment in the drama of JewishChristian relations. “… Jews, certainly, knew Christian charity, for which I will never be able to render enough thanks, but they also knew that the executioners of Auschwitz must have all done their catechism, and that that did not prevent them from committing their crimes.” (Is it Righteous to Be? 70) Reflection on this absurdity leads Levinas to a view of religion in which ethics is the central expression of what faith means.

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MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realise that next time will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.12

Primo Levi takes himself and the reader back to a situation in which all kinds of prayers and religious acts are meaningless. Life in the camp is desolate; underlying every regulation or omission is the diabolical intention of depriving the prisoners— who are only alive as “material,” as a possible source of labour— of their humanity and dignity. In this connection Levi refers to Dante’s Inferno and notes repeatedly that he “had reached the bottom.” The only thing to rise above this lowest point are the remnants, the almost extinguished sparks of human solidarity. To urge others not to work too hard. To take a comrade along to the latrines via a detour, thus stealing half an hour’s respite from the inhumanly hard labour. An ordinary worker who takes the fate of concentration camp prisoners to heart and makes soup for them from the leftovers of his food, day after day, for months on end, at the risk of his life. Whereas Primo Levi speaks out for the value of human dignity, without reference to God, Levinas chooses a different path: he interprets this solidarity as the moment in which something of God becomes visible in the world. Ethics carries within itself a reference to the religious and the holy, it is the moment in which the idea of God enters human thought and action. This connection between the notion of God and ethics informs the title of a volume of essays on philosophy of religion and phe12

Primo Levi, If This Is A Man & The Truce, 135-136.


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nomenology: De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. The title should be read as a programme: it alludes to the attempt to find an answer, outside of theology, to the question by what route, by what experience, the idea of God enters thought. For Levinas, this route is the encounter with the other. It is in the encounter with the other man that God “comes to mind” or “comes into sense”: Nous pensons que l’idée-de-l’Infini-en-moi—ou ma relation à Dieu— me vient dans la concrétude de ma relation à l’autre homme, dans la socialité qui est ma responsabilité pour le prochain: responsabilité que, dans aucune “expérience” je n’ai contractée, mais dont le visage d’autrui, de par son altérité, de par son étrangeté même, parle le commandement venu on ne sait d’où.13

Levinas’ view of prayer makes it clear what this phenomenology of religious experience means. Does prayer have meaning if the sense of the word “God” is reduced to the concrete encounter with the other, in which responsibility is central? Should Levinas not follow Primo Levi in rejecting the prayer of the old Kuhn? Is prayer not one of the first matters which have become meaningless in the perspective of religious humanism? Remarkably, Levinas makes no proposals to this effect here. He even calls prayer a “key in the spiritual history of Israel,” but he does interpret it in his own way. Even someone who prays for himself in his own distress breaks out through prayer and so imagines the possibility of addressing another. This other is not just any other, it is God. Because it is possible to address God, a possibility to which prayer alludes, prayer can never be for itself alone. Can we give thanks for our own salvation without referring to the others and the world in which this salvation took place? In Jewish piety, prayer is not an entreaty for oneself, but in the reverse, an offering of oneself.14

13

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 10/xiv. In translation: “We think that the idea-ofthe-Infinite-in-me—or my relation to God—comes to me in the concreteness of my relation to the other man, in the sociality which is my responsibility for the neighbor. Here is found a responsibility that I contracted in no “experience” but of which the face of the other, through its alterity and through its strangeness, states the command that came from who knows where.”

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In the second place: someone who addresses God in prayer cannot confine himself to his own social world. He carries along the suffering of the entire world, but this is a world in which God is involved. Indeed, prayer for the suffering world is ultimately a prayer for God who suffers. God is with those who suffer, and praying is “being with God in his suffering which he experiences through us.”15 In two ways this conception of prayer presupposes a kenosis, an emptying of the self or a self-abondonment. In the first place, we see that God identifies himself with the suffering of the world, thus dwelling with those who suffer. In the second place, there is the kenotic nature of human prayer, for it renounces the self, becoming for-the-other. Prayer thus no longer is a request on behalf of the self, but a quest for a bond with God who suffers because the world suffers. It becomes clear here that even prayer is not a space to which the self can withdraw, to be alone with God. Prayer always goes beyond the first person. As soon as prayer is addressed to God, it takes the others with it. Levinas’ view of prayer and suffering shows how he interweaves ethics and religion. Unlike Kant, who subsumes religion under ethical meaning, he approaches the relation between ethics and religion from the other side, the side of religion. He seeks the true meaning-horizon of religious ideas, such as the idea of God or of religious acts, such as the act of prayer, in experiences which occur in the encounter and solidarity with others. Ethical meaning does not abolish religious ideas and practices, but brings them back to life.

14 À l’heure des nations, 146. Levinas’ thought rests on the mystical view of prayer held by Chaim of Volozin in Nefesh Hachaim, which implies a divine kenosis in that God is at once the One to whom all prayer is adressed and the One in whose behalf all prayer is said. See also Chapter 6 of this book. 15 À l’heure des nations, 148/128. As an example of this prayer for others, Levinas often refers to Abraham’s prayer for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham is merely “dust and ashes,” but he intercedes for the others in his prayer (Is it Righteous to Be? 101).


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5. Suffering and theodicy In his thought on God and suffering, Levinas also expresses this connection between religion and ethics. This becomes apparent in the article “Useless suffering,”16 which contains a shocking discussion on the pointlessness of suffering. Suffering is meaningless and does not refer to anything; hence it is not possible to connect suffering with God’s will by means of theological or philosophical speculation. Reflection on the pointlessness of suffering reveals that theodicy has become impossible. In this article Levinas considers the phenomenon of theodicy and wonders whether arguments of this type have succeeded in declaring God innocent of the suffering of human beings. Can theodicy save morality in the name of faith, is it possible to make suffering bearable via this route, by showing that it serves a purpose? Why has the question about the relation between faith in God and the experience of suffering been answered in precisely this way? Levinas regards theodicy as a way of thinking typical of the self-consciousness of European humanity in a certain period. It is striking that this mode of thought even survived when atheism became popular among progressive people. It then changed into a testimony to human faith in the ultimate victory of the Good, in the providential forces operative in Nature and History. But theodicy is also the fruit of a certain interpretation of the Bible: the reading which explains man’s misery as resulting from original sin or from sin as such, or (in Jewish thought) from the sins of Israel. Thought in terms of theodicy became impossible in the twentieth century because the balance between evil and its possible justification was disturbed. This was shown most plainly by Auschwitz. On this point Levinas agrees with Emil Fackenheim, who calls the Shoah an event “without precedent,” because it is so clear that there were no reasons for it. In the concentration camps a “destruction for destruction’s sake” took place, “slaughter for the sake of slaughter, evil for the sake of evil.” Levinas 16

“La souffrance inutile,” Entre nous, 107-120/91-101.

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refers to the fact that more than a million Jewish children were killed, not for their own faith, but on account of the faith of their grandparents that made them Jewish children. Most of the victims fell among the large communities of Jews in Eastern Europe, that is to say: among simple people and innocent children. Levinas thus evokes the notion of a pointless suffering (souffrance pour rien) which renders any theodicy ridiculous and absurd: in a pre-philosophical (where the cause of suffering lies in the sins of the victims) as well as in a philosophical sense. And because the road of theodicy has so clearly become impassable and has been cut off so abruptly, the only remaining possibility is to concentrate on the uselessness and pointlessness of suffering itself. There is nothing else to be done. And only then do we come to see that the suffering of the other person as such cannot be justified in any way. Again Levinas appeals to Emil Fackenheim, who stated that Jewish thought should not be concerned with an attempt to justify the evil that happened here. Rather it should reflect on the question how we can go on living without lapsing into despair or cynicism. Can we discover something of a commandment or mitswah in the experience of the victims of the Third Reich? In this context Fackenheim points to forms of resistance which took place despite the total terror. There were individuals who offered resistance, the resistance was sometimes brief—but it was there. Fackenheim believes that theological and philosophical thought should learn from these aspects of life and assume the form of resistance urged by the “imperative voice of Auschwitz.” Levinas, however, gives a more universal scope to Fackenheim’s proposal: he wonders whether mankind as a whole can remain indifferent to the “useless suffering” which we see around us.17 Now that theodicy has become impossible, isn’t it the task of mankind as such to continue the holy history—the history of faith—in a “faith without theodicy”? This no longer involves a particular history of a certain people—the Jewish people—but salvation of the humanity of mankind as such. Levinas gives a universal scope to the task of which Fackenheim speaks. The 17

See the dedication in Autrement qu’être discussed above, where Levinas equates “hatred of the other” with anti-Semitism.


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“holy history” to which he refers here is not a supernatural history but a history which constantly appeals to the sources of the “I” in each of us, to everyone’s ability to suffer with the other and, consequently, to substitute for the other. In contrast to suffering, compassion is not a useless suffering. The only “meaning” which meaningless suffering could have is that from it proceeds the task of not abandoning the other in his suffering. This experience even gives birth to medical science, which thus becomes a part of the holy history. The transition which Levinas makes here, from reflection on the extreme pointlessness of suffering to a task which nevertheless proceeds from this suffering, is characteristic of his thought on evil. It is not theodicy: no justification can be found for evil and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled with the existence of a good and omnipotent God. Nor can history provide such a route, for history does not have a “happy ending.” Evil means above all: the suffering of others, which is totally pointless and absurd. But precisely this pointlessness and absurdity refer to a task: the task of not looking away and not abandoning the other. For Levinas, as for Kant, the end of theodicy means a more pointed definition of the ethical task. This new interpretation of the ethical task is connected with religious faith and has biblical roots, particularly in the book of Job. Levinas points to the loyalty with which Job perseveres in his faith in God and justice, despite his pointless suffering. In doing so he resists the speculative theodicy of his friends. In the last chapters of the book Job is proved right: the attitude of perseverance in faith is to be preferred to an attempt to declare God innocent of the suffering of the innocent in a speculative theodicy. Levinas puts the emphasis here on Job’s loyalty to God and his loyalty to ethics. For a connection between the two he links up with Kant, who concludes from his interpretation of the book of Job that faith should be based on morality, “in which case faith, however weak it may be, is nonetheless one of a pure and authentic kind, a kind that does not found a religion of solicited favors, but of a well-conducted life.”18 Ethics as a firm foundation

18

Entre nous, 118/242.

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of faith. But, reflecting further on the meaning of evil, can we not say more about Job? Can evil put us on the track of God? And what does this mean—this “track of God”? 6. Once again: Job In a different context Levinas considered this question more closely. The article “Transcendence et Mal,” written in response to Philippe Nemo’s book Job et l’excès du mal, led him to discuss the religious meaning of the story of Job for the thought on evil.19 He starts by describing evil as an excess. It goes beyond normal experience, it occurs as a break with order. As such there is nothing abstract about it: it is the concrete tangible manifestation of something that cannot be justified and therefore cannot be integrated into the normal order of everyday life. In evil we are therefore confronted with something that we cannot give a place, that cannot be adapted to reality as we believe we know it and can rely on it. Evil is “unnatural” and a “monstrosity”; in this sense Levinas also calls it a form of “transcendence.” To transcend means literally “to rise above,” and transcendent is therefore that which rises above or goes beyond our experience of reality. When Levinas calls evil a form of transcendence, he means that it forcibly disrupts our experience of reality as ordered and reliable. But the notions of excess and transcendence do not exhaust what we can say about evil. Guided by the exegesis of Job, we can discover another dimension in it: that of being addressed. Evil is experienced as if “someone” has it in for me: “Why are you doing this to me?” Why do you make me suffer instead of allowing me to experience eternal bliss?”20 Evil prompts questioning, the interrogation of a You, it searches for signs of a good will or a good intention behind the suffering experienced. In other words, evil rouses the soul to enter into a debate with God. This 19

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 189-208/122-136. Compare the quotation from Isaiah 45 with which Levinas opens “Transcendence et Mal”: “J’établis la paix et suis l’auteur du Mal, moi l’Eternel je fais tout cela.” (De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 189/120).

20


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reveals a new aspect of evil as transcendence: evil is not just transcendence as excess. It not only connects us with the beyond by transcending the order of things. As a break with order it also brings the soul in touch with God who is not, God who is outside, transcendent, and who is asked what the meaning of this suffering is. This is the first and most relevant question; it precedes the question of being. 7. Suffering refers to the other Levinas takes a further step: doesn’t the affliction which man experiences through his own suffering contain an opening which refers to the other and his suffering? Shouldn’t Job 38:4 be read as such a silent reference? “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”—this is the question which God asks. This question is more than a reminder of the infinite distance between Creator and creature. It also calls to mind the absence of Job at the Creation, an absence which indicates that he was always responsible for things which he cannot possibly have caused himself. Despite the fact that people have not created the world, they are responsible for what happens to their fellow human beings and the creation as a whole. In “La souffrance inutile” Levinas also makes this connection between suffering and responsibility for the other when he says that suffering never has meaning directly but only in a roundabout way: the suffering which I undergo can make me sensitive to the fate of the other.21 This actually gives rise to two perspectives on suffering: on the one hand it appears to be useless, and so the suffering of the other can never be explained away in a system of checks and balances. On the other hand suffering from the “I” perspective certainly does have meaning in ethics. But this asymmetrical way of thinking is not without its problems. I will consider it more closely at the end of this chapter. The connection between suffering and responsibility also shows a similarity between the experience of the other’s face and the experience of evil. Both are concrete, both also reveal tran21

Entre nous, 109-110/93-94.

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scendence in the sense of: something that is radically other, something that cannot be simply integrated into the whole or the framework of our experiences. The face of the other makes an appeal, it rouses man from the enthrallment of his egoism, from the illusion of a world in which everything revolves around him and is directed at his own salvation. In a formal sense this experience has the same effects as the experience of suffering. Here Levinas makes a remarkable proposal: in fact the other should already be mentioned when the (lonely) experience of evil is discussed. With regard to the evil which happens to the individual we should speak in terms of a response to the question of the other. It is as if, before lamenting my own fate, I must answer the other. This is the moment that a breakthrough of the Good can take place in evil, in the intention of which I am the target. It is a breakthrough which does not mean a simple reversal of Evil but an elevation of it. Evil is not changed into something good but is raised to a different level. This gives it a place in the ethical relation, in the relation of one person to the other as fellow human being. 8. The suffering servant Besides Job there is another biblical figure relevant to Levinas’ thought on suffering. I am referring to the “suffering servant of God” in Isaiah 53. Christians usually understand these texts in Isaiah in relation to Jesus of Nazareth: he identified with this suffering servant and the gospels write about him in the same manner. The Jewish tradition sometimes views the suffering servant of God as a collective and takes it to refer to the people of Israel. Isaiah 53 describes somebody who is “despised and rejected by men” and yet “bears and carries” the sicknesses and grief of others. The bystanders link his suffering to God: “We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. ” Perhaps we should briefly stop to consider the curious figure conjured up in a few sentences here: an isolated human being, the “servant of God,” who not only bears his own suffering but also that of others, while being seen by these others as someone against whom God has set his arm. They hold God responsible for the servant’s suf-


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fering (and perhaps this is not entirely unjustified in view of Isaiah 53:10), but in doing so they fail to see the other connection: that their suffering and their unrighteousness fall on his shoulders. Levinas offers two related interpretations of the suffering servant of God in Isaiah 53. First, he links this figure to all the experiences of persecution and suffering undergone by Jews in the Nazi period. Second, he uses the image of the suffering servant in talking about the responsible subject. The fate of the Jewish people in the Second World War—says Levinas—can be viewed as a modern explanation of Isaiah 53: the Jews underwent a unique experience of total abandonment; persecuted, they entered “a condition inferior to that of things, an experience of total passivity, an experience of the Passion.” In this situation Isaiah 53 seemed entirely applicable.22 The condition can be said to be one of total passivity because racial persecution is a form of absolute persecution which makes escape impossible. Joining the opponent, converting, is no remedy in this case. It is striking that Levinas explicitly connects this suffering with religious history. He believes that, at this point, Israel was at the heart of the world’s religious history and that the bond between present-day Israel and the Israel of the Bible was restored in this time. This, too, shows that he wants to see the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 as a figure of the people of Israel. In this interpretation Levinas puts great emphasis on the godforsakenness of the suffering servant. Doesn’t the suffering of these innocents mean that heaven is empty from now on? Here, too, as in the essay on the text of Yossel ben Yossel, Levinas brings out the importance of the moments in which God withdraws and “covers his face,” moments in which the believer must adopt an atheistic attitude. Someone who has not experienced this atheism cannot achieve a mature religious awareness either. The Jewish meaning of suffering does not lie in some or other connection with a divine plan or a mysterious penance for the sins of the world, but in the possibility for the individual of gaining a victory in his conscience, independent of any external enti22

Difficile Liberté, 25/12.

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ty. The righteous man, who answers for the divine and the pure, must suffer in a world in which disorder rules, in which the good fails to overcome. The suffering of the righteous man is a suffering for “justice without triumph,” that is to say: without hope of an ultimate victory. The second meaning which Levinas gives to Isaiah 53 centres on the responsible man who does his utmost. What we said above about the suffering of the righteous man also applies to the fortunes of someone who is responsible without having consciously chosen to be responsible. Levinas talks here about the special position in which an individual is put by the appeal of the other. At issue now is the calling of every human being, which is not based on free choice and cannot be derived from an obligation that has been consciously taken on. In a certain sense this calling coincides with man’s identity, as being a “self.” “The I does not only become aware of this necessity to answer, as though it were a particular obligation or duty about which it would have to come to a decision; it is in the very position of responsibility, as it is put in Isaiah, chapter 53.”23 The emphasis in this passage lies on the total availability of the suffering servant. Passivity, substituting for others, and bearing the suffering that results from it are not just the task and calling of Israel, but constitute the calling of every human being. Every human being is elected, every human being can be “messiah.” 9. End of theodicy? Levinas and Ricoeur If theodicy is no longer possible, is there still a relation to God in suffering? We have seen that the Jewish experience of suffering in the twentieth century led Levinas to the insight that humanity is in a situation of godforsakenness. God has withdrawn. He has turned in upon himself and has made himself small. He is on the side of the righteous man who suffers, is involved at a distance, but cannot prevent suffering. The creature that feels forsaken by God finds itself in a new situation: it becomes autonomous, inde23

Humanisme de l’autre homme, 50/54.


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pendent, even atheistic. It learns to speak and decide for itself. Though in this independence something can still be observed of the dependence (even the humility) which characterises the identity of the creature, nevertheless: the Jewish faith is a faith of adults. For Levinas this means that a concentration on ethics is the only way of discussing God’s transcendence. God’s transcendence is experienced in the proximity of the other who suffers, from a disease, from injustice, or from persecution. The question how we should connect suffering with God is redirected by Levinas to ourselves: how are we involved in the one who suffers? In a difficult but at the same time extremely spiritual way, this question brings us closer to God than theodicy. Suffering, absurd and meaningless in itself, cannot be justified by an appeal to the hidden plans of a good and omnipotent God. Theodicy ultimately founders on the great evil of the twentieth century, which cannot be justified in any speculative system. A characteristic feature of Levinas’ discussion on the end of theodicy is his resolute turn to the ethics of neighbourly love. Precisely against the background of his thinking on evil, it becomes clear how the lines between ethics and religion are drawn in Levinas. To bring out the particular nature of Levinas’ thought on this subject, we can compare him with his friend and contemporary Paul Ricoeur. In his well-known essay on evil, Ricoeur follows Kant’s criticism of theodicy and the displacement of the problem of evil to the domain of practical reason.24 In particular Kant’s criticism of theodicy occupies an important place in Ricoeur’s analysis; like Kant, Ricoeur displaces the problem of evil to the domain of practical reason, but he adds an argument that Kant left out. Theodicy, says Ricoeur, not only becomes meaningless through man’s theoretical inability to provide evil with a rational foundation, but also through the complaint of the righteous man who suffers. According to Ricoeur, various consequences follow from the challenge of evil. With regard to thought, evil mainly proves a provocation, a spur to reject premature syntheses and, if necessary, to pursue different avenues. But evil also indicates the aporias of rational thought and at the same time it is therefore a rea24

Ricoeur, Le Mal. Un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie.

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son not to regard thought as the last horizon of meaning. Precisely because thought is left empty-handed vis-à-vis evil, it is necessary to take other ways of dealing with evil more seriously. Ricoeur mentions conduct and spirituality here. Evil poses a question to human conduct: what do we do about it? Can we fight and curb the inclination to evil in ourselves and in others? Though this ethical answer does justice to human dignity, it cannot possibly be the final answer. For there is an overwhelming amount of suffering, it is unfairly divided, there are many innocent people who are victims of violence. The source of violence often lies beyond man’s power. Besides ethics, Ricoeur therefore points to the emotional and spiritual dimension of the problem of evil. In what follows I will simply call this the religious dimension. Here the pre-philosophical theodicy is accommodated. Philosophical and theological wisdom can help us to deal with the experiences of evil, they can bring about a qualitative change in the mourning and the complaint. Ricoeur’s analysis of the religious approach to evil again brings him close to Levinas; the agreement appears in three points in particular: the integration of ignorance, the orientation to God, and the distinction between believing and explaining. The first point is the integration of ignorance. The speculative approach to evil (theodicy) was concerned with knowing, the religious mode leaves room for not knowing. It is impossible to find out whether evil can be traced back to the will of God or a punishment for possible sin. Once the role of retribution has been played out, the complaint about suffering is reduced to itself. This agrees with Levinas’ view of pointless suffering. The second point is the orientation to God. The religious and emotional approach to evil leaves room for accusations against God as the one who admits evil; on this basis a theology of the complaint becomes possible. Ricoeur mentions Elie Wiesel in this connection, but we can also think here of the text of Yossel ben Yossel on which Levinas comments.25

25

See section 3 of this chapter.


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Third: within the spiritual space it is possible to discover that the reasons for believing in God have nothing in common with the need to explain the origin of suffering. Suffering is a scandal, precisely if we see God as the source of everything that is good in the creation. Believing then becomes: believing in God despite evil. All the above points are also found in Levinas, but within the last motif we see an interesting difference between him and Ricoeur. Whereas Ricoeur reserves the freedom to recognise God as a source of everything that is good, Levinas talks about holding on to the Torah as a way of enduring the omnipresence of evil and the experience of God’s absence. This already shows how widely the paths of Levinas and Ricoeur ultimately diverge. Ricoeur presents the religious dimension as something separate from the moral aspect. Religion (or spirituality, as he calls it) comes after ethics. In Levinas the two moments coincide: the moral approach to evil is itself a form of religiosity and spirituality. In other words: the ethical is the culmination point. This explains why Ricoeur can finally arrive at an affirmation of God as a “source of everything that is good in the creation,” despite evil, whereas Levinas focuses on pointless suffering and the absence of God. This creates a distance between man and God: we cannot point out the cause of evil, but nor can we say unambiguously that God is the source of the good. In this distance Levinas awards an important place to the ethical task. Unlike Ricoeur and Kant, he sees the spiritual and religious element as being directly connected with the task of neighbourly love. There is little room for affirming God as a source of the good in life; this route seems to have been cut off in Levinas by the experience of evil. God is the mysterious one, who hides behind the law, behind the task of helping one’s neighbour in his or her affliction.

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10. Activity and passivity Not only the relation of religion and ethics but also the relation of activity and passivity forms a point of difference between Levinas and Ricoeur. Both abandon the question of the origin of evil in favour of the ethical dimension. But whereas Ricoeur asks “How can I combat evil?” and so focuses on activity, Levinas starts more on the passive side, with the evil that is undergone. He describes it as the experience of being a target of an unknown sender. In this moment of passivity Levinas sees the origin and reference point of ethical conduct. Ethical conduct starts at the moment when I (the self, selfness, ipseity) am touched by the face and the appeal of the other. In this moment he/she becomes my neighbour and I am urged to do something, to help this neighbour by mitigating his suffering. It is a suffering which I can recognise by reason of my own corporeality/vulnerability. But though there is recognition on account of this material, bodily similarity—the other has a body, as do I—yet I will never know exactly what the suffering of the other is and how he experiences it. A difference remains, an asymmetry which is the sign of a great distance, a chasm between my own self-experience and the other’s experience of himself. The existence of this chasm throws some more light on Levinas’ intriguing proposition that pointless suffering nevertheless has meaning in an oblique way. It is pointless for me and pointless within the framework of an ontology which tries to discover a hidden meaning in it, a meaning which goes back to a hidden origin of evil. But Levinas prefers to speak about the meaning of evil in terms of an interruption of ontology. The existence of evil is a thorn in the side of ontology and the idea of theodicy in which ontological thought on God finally results. If we take this thorn seriously, we end up with an ethical perspective on evil: it is a task for human freedom. From Levinas’ point of view, the task which Ricoeur discerns in evil—the task of doing something about evil—is formulated much too generally. This ethical task only has meaning and direction if we see that it starts in my perception of the suffering of the other (my neighbour) as something which has significance for me (for my conduct).


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If only I am involved, I may think that evil has incomprehensibly chosen me as its target; I can undergo evil, I can complain, or try to do something about it, but I remain enclosed in my own world. Here suffering is purely useless and—in Levinas’ terms— a figure of the il y a, complete meaninglessness. But as soon as the other becomes the target of suffering, this meaninglessness turns into an ethical meaning.26 I am again touched and in a certain sense I am then a “target,” but what touches me now is the suffering of my neighbour, which is a task for me to do something about it, to mitigate it, and to show compassion. For Levinas, this being-touched by the other’s suffering is the moment when the idea of God acquires meaning, not despite evil, but in a certain sense amidst evil. In Levinas’ philosophy the experience of God’s absence is a phase which leaves room for this new experience or meaning of God. 11. Asymmetry and neighbourly love The idea of “pointless suffering” is found to be connected with an asymmetry in the relation between the self and the other. From my own point of view, suffering is pointless, but as soon as the other comes into view, it is possible to discover an ethical meaning in it from the perspective of the “I” or “self.” This asymmetry of the ethical relation was always Ricoeur’s fundamental point of criticism with regard to Levinas. At the end of Soi-même comme un autre, for instance, Ricoeur wonders whether such a fundamental asymmetry between the self and the other can be thought, whether it is not always based on something that is even more fundamental: symmetry, as the beginning of every relation between the self and the other. Can the injunction (order, command) by which the other breaks through the egoistic and en-

26

This is how we should understand the paragraph in Autrement qu’être about “Sens et il y a” (V,4): the absurdity of evil is not only the starting-point but also the condition for ethical conduct in the proper sense. There is a relation between evil, in which the “absurdity of the there is” is expressed, and the possibility of supporting the other without compensation. (Autrement qu’être, 207-210/162-165).

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closing movement of the self take on meaning without reflection on this order being possible? Can the relation to the other ever become a real relation without this possibility of reflection? The culmination of Ricoeur’s criticism of Levinas is in fact the moment when he characterises the relation between the self and the other as an irrelation, an absence of relation.27 These questions of Ricoeur touch on an essential problem in Levinas’ philosophy which already came to the fore in chapter 1. We can gauge how fundamental the asymmetry between the self and the other is for Levinas from his thought on evil. Ricoeur, too, notices at a certain point that Levinas’ thought has perhaps been stamped too deeply by the experience of evil to do full justice to the symmetry. Perhaps there is a causal connection here, but this fact may equally be turned against Ricoeur, thus justifying the claim that, for the sake of the symmetry between the self and the other, he temporarily puts the experience of evil between brackets—though he addressed this issue at length too. Can’t the experience of evil and war be an appropriate startingpoint for thought? Levinas seems more consistent in this regard than Ricoeur, who, curiously enough, ignores the question whether a philosophy which he characterises as “rightly haunted by War, by Evil” can be pacified by an appeal to the reflection that is needed. The reproach that Levinas is “too moral” here does not seem justified. Rather Ricoeur dismisses the experience of evil too lightly. At the end of Soi-même comme un autre this problem returns when Ricoeur tries to steer a middle course between the ontological (Heidegger) and the moral (Levinas) view of conscience. This dialectical approach fails, because it can only be carried through by disregarding the distinctive nature of both Heidegger’s and Levinas’ ethics.28 27

Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 221-223/188-190 and 387-393/335-341. The problem is that the hermeneutical relation of the self to itself is the basis of ethics in Ricoeur. 28 In effect Ricoeur tries here to reduce exteriority to a recognizable and therefore integratable part of the history of the Self. It is possible to argue that Levinas does more justice to Heidegger by connecting the central notions of Faktizität (Facticity), Befindlichkeit (Affectivity), and the Ruf des Gewissens (the Call of Conscience) with the intrusion of the other in the self, which refers to


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Earlier in this chapter we saw how the asymmetry between the self and the other also colours Levinas’ perspective on suffering. “La souffrance inutile”—that is the suffering of the other which arouses the desire for goodness in the self. But if this is so—can it still be called useless? Can the two perspectives—useless for the other, but meaningful for me—still be connected with each other? Or is such an overall perspective lacking in Levinas? If the suffering of the other is entirely useless for the other, it is hard to see how it can become meaningful again in my perception of it. And conversely: if the evil that I undergo refers to the transcendence of the other and ultimately to God, doesn’t the same apply to the other? And if so, can’t we return to a form of theodicy via this analogy? These critical notes regarding Levinas’ thought on evil and the end of theodicy lead Adriaanse to leave behind the asymmetry between the self and the other and to arrive at a more general thinking on evil and a certain revaluation of theodicy. According to Adriaanse, the analogy between the self and the other is unavoidable, and forces us to admit that for both, for myself and for the other, suffering is “useless” as well as “meaningful.”29 One major problem with this refutation of Levinas’ thought on the end of theodicy is that it does away with the dimension of “me” (the passive mode of “I”) and so of ethical election. We saw that Levinas, starting from the experience of evil, puts great emphasis on this dimension, whereas it is absent in Ricoeur. When Ricoeur connects evil and ethics, he is concerned with the question: “what can I do about evil?” Levinas asks about the mode of being of the subject as responsible subject. The transcendence of evil, the inability to make suffering meaningful, points to a responsibility which does not fit into an ontological system. It is infinite, based on election, and cannot be transferred or shared. In comparison with Ricoeur, Levinas puts more emphasis on the mystery and non-accommodability of evil (evil as excess). (the) death (of the other) and so to some or other form of a non-integratable Nothing. 29 Adriaanse, “Theodizee zwischen Nein und Ja” in: Vom Christentum Aus, 157158.

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Levinas’ philosophy refutes as such the argument that everything said about the other must be based on an analogy with the experience that the “I” has of itself. Characteristic of his view on the subject is that subjectivity can communicate with a transcendence which it ultimately cannot integrate and by which it is, as it were, “turned inside out.”30 Levinas regards this ability to turn inside out, this form of evacuation (kenosis), as the ultimate condition of the subject. In the last chapter of this book I will discuss this kenotic pattern itself. For the present it is enough to see that evil is the first to show this kenotic condition of the subject, because it is a reference to something outside of me—the transcendence of the other, the transcendence of God, and thus the obligation to answer.31 I return here to the “haunted by War, by Evil” which Ricoeur saw but did not rate at its true value. A philosophy which does not achieve rest, which is permanently off balance, is this still philosophy? Clearly Levinas’ thought raises a question regarding the place of symmetry in relations. May it also be that the self and the other are equals and can mirror themselves in each other? Is there room to withdraw and to keep the “commands” and “orders” of the other at a distance and evaluate them? We have seen that Levinas arrived at his own philosophical position through an experience of the omnipresence of evil. It characterises his thought as a contextual philosophy: the philos30

Levinas uses this image, of a garment turned inside out, in a section on ethical discourse: “Saying approaches the other by breaking out through the noema involved in intentionality, turning inside out, “like a cloak,” consciousness which, by itself, would have remained for-itself even in its intentional aims.”(Autrement qu’être, 62/48). 31 In his interpretation of neighbourly love, which is presented as a commentary on Kierkegaard but can equally be read as a commentary on Levinas, Paul Moyaert clarifies the kenotic aspect of neighbourly love: in neighbourly love it does not matter who I am and who the other is. Mutual cultural or social recognition seems to lose its relevance here. If there is recognition, it takes place on the basis of material existence: the corporeality which we all share, the imaginability of the other’s suffering. But this imaginability cannot integrate the alien and transcendent character which the other has, precisely in his suffering. In this regard Moyaert’s considerations are also a confirmation of and supplement to Levinas’ thought on neighbourly love as an asymmetrical relation between the self and the other. Cf. Moyaert, De mateloosheid van het christendom, 15-95 and “Lacan on Neighborly Love.”


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ophy of a survivor. In some periods of history there is no spontaneous goodness on which our conscience can fall back. Heidegger’s inner voice could perhaps be heard by himself, but it had no moral force for others. In those phases of history the face of the other is the Sinai, the place where the law is given. Not in the way of an external entity which can be integrated in the conversation which I hold with myself, but as a constant interrupter of this conversation. 12. Substitution and asymmetry Levinas’ unphilosophical attitude is perhaps clearest in the figure of the suffering servant: a plainly religious motif to which he assigns an ethical meaning. Here the asymmetry is accentuated to its fullest extent: the suffering servant is the figure of the substitute, he is the one who takes upon himself the suffering of the world, despite the fact that he did not cause it. He assumes this suffering and bearing role under the authority of Another, who could be designated by the word “God.” But this Other does not become visible. He seems to hide himself away to the point of being absent. In the figure of thought of the suffering servant, which is also the figure of thought of mysticism, the suffering of the self refers to the suffering of the world. Besides the joy of contemplating God, the life of the mystic is also familiar with the experience of pain and suffering. Here we often see a point of contact arise between the life of the mystic and the life of ordinary people, with their various experiences of suffering and pain. In the mystical life the contemplation and transmission of divine visions is kept in balance as a light side by another side which is just as intrinsically connected with it: the experience that the suffering of the mystic is linked to the suffering of humanity as a whole and expresses itself as a desire to bear and mitigate this suffering vicariously. That suffering involves a divine “presence” which is at the same time an absence and helps to bear the suffering is not an everyday experience, but we are familiar with it from mysticism and the lives of saints. Substitution does not mean that one per-

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son takes (over) things from another, so that the autonomy of this person is compromised.32 Rather it is a form of relief offered to a person who has to contend with problems that are too heavy for him alone. This form of substitution comes out in the image of the “suffering servant of God.” It is the figure of thought which Levinas reaches in his essay on evil, and in the same vein he concludes that the suffering of the other mainly has meaning for someone who can pick up its signals. But this is only possible for a subject that knows itself to be vulnerable and susceptible, and that knows what it is to have become, in an incomprehensible way, like Job, the target of evil.

32

Levinas’ approach sheds new light on the starting-points of liberal theology, which puts the theme of substitution up for discussion because it supposedly erodes the autonomy of the subject. See, for example, C.J. den Heyer, Jesus and the doctrine of atonement, 132.

CHAPTER 5 FROM RELIGION TO ETHICS: THE DISRUPTION OF THE INFINITE Nos analyses sont dirigées par une structure formelle: l’idée de l’infini en nous.1

In the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewsky there is a house which, measured from inside, is larger than from the outside. This discrepancy throws the residents off balance, they cannot live with the spatial anomaly and eventually leave the house. The house can apparently contain more than it can really contain, and this difference makes it into a mysterious and ultimately uninhabitable house. In his philosophy Levinas introduces a similar difference causing disquiet and a sense of eeriness. He often calls it “the idea of the Infinite,” specified as “the infinite in the finite” or: “the more in the less.” It is a formal structure indicating that something larger is received in something less large. The result is that the presence of this “more” “destroys” and “overflows” finite life. There are many passages in which Levinas refers to this “idea of the Infinite in us,” and often he also plays with the meaning of the in-finite as an “idea” which is “in” the finite and at the same time infinitely removed from it. All of Totalité et infini can be read as an application of the idea of the infinite as the formal structure which makes philosophy itself possible and guides it. This formal structure is not just formal. On closer consideration it turns out to be Levinas’ alternative for what we usually take to be religion. The ultimate situation to which Levinas constantly refers: the “face to face,” in which the self stands opposite the other (the other: “hostile, friend, my master, my stu1

Totalité et infini, 52/79: “Our analyses are guided by a formal structure: the idea of Infinity in us.”

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dent”) is nothing but the translation of the “idea of the Infinite.” Religion, interpreted as the relation between an independent self and an absolutely other Other, is the concrete way in which the idea of the Infinite occurs. This starting-point has three consequences for Levinas’ concept of religion: (1) He dissociates himself from the common understanding of what religion is. By means of the “idea of the Infinite” Levinas gives an ethical meaning to religion. We must reduce religion to the “face to face” in which the Other appears as the Infinite. He interprets the difference between self and other as a spatial difference: the Other is higher than the self. This spatial difference creates the interspace in which a revelation of God becomes possible: Autrui n’est pas l’incarnation de Dieu mais, précisément par son visage, où il est désincarné, la manifestation de la hauteur où Dieu se révèle.2

(2) The concept of religion taking shape here differs from the numinous concept of the holy and is characterised by a certain aloofness. Levinas criticises the supporters of positive religions for their lack of down-to-earthness and states that the idea of the infinite is the announcement of a “dawn of humanity without myths.” For this demystification and aloofness he tries to link up with the idea of the infinite as it emerges in Descartes’ ontological argument for the existence of God. This figure of thought allows us to think a being who exists separately from the infinity to which he is nevertheless related. This separation serves as a pattern for the atheism which is the starting-point of Levinas’ concept of religion: “Only an atheist being can relate himself to the other and already absolve himself from this relation.”3

2

Totalité et infini, 51/79: “The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.” 3 Totalité et infini, 50/77.

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(3) Against the background of these decisions the believers in positive religions are judged negatively: for they are “ill disengaged from the bonds of participation” and “accept being immersed in a myth unbeknown to themselves.”4 The question is whether Levinas does justice to positive religion in this way. But an equally urgent question is whether he does not actually presuppose the existence of this (positive) religion which he in turn criticises. Doesn’t his thought on God, as the idea of the Infinite, as the transcendent, “the absolute” that moves away from reality and thus always leaves a trace behind in it, depend on the experiences expressed in positive religions? In this chapter I will examine the effect which Levinas’ introduction of the idea of the Infinite has on his thought on the self and religious experience. For it is by virtue of the idea of the Infinite that Levinas is able to make a connection between two worlds which depend on each other for their meaning: the world of the social relation (“the face to face”) and the world of religion. The ontological argument, as the precondition for relating separation and infinity to each other, plays an important role here. Reason enough to look at the possibilities and limitations of Levinas’ fascinating and idiosyncratic interpretation of the idea of the Infinite in the ontological argument.

4

Totalité et infini, 50/77.

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1. The ontological argument Or, l’idée de l’infini, c’est la transcendance même, le débordement d’une idée adéquate… L’impossibilité pour l’être transcendant et l’être qui en est séparé, de participer au même concept, cette description négative de la transcendance est encore de Descartes.5

The ontological argument for the existence of God has always occupied a special place in the history of thought on God. Anselm of Canterbury was the first to formulate it in his Proslogion. Duns Scotus and Descartes varied on the theme which he introduced. Via the philosophy of Leibniz and Spinoza it finally acquired a permanent place in classical metaphysics. The similarity between all the variants of the ontological argument is that they infer a necessary existence of God by analyzing the content of the concept “God.” Kant regarded the reasoning of the ontological argument as invalid; he demonstrated that it cannot in any way form a rational basis for belief in God. Still, he respected the ingenious form of the argument and regarded it as the essence of all other proofs for God’s existence. He also introduced the term “ontological argument,” which can easily lead to confusion. What is ontological about the ontological argument? In a historical analysis Jean-Luc Marion states that it is only since Descartes that we can talk about an “ontological argument” in the strict sense: an argument for the existence of God based solely on an analysis of the content of the concept “God.” In Anselm it is not the concept of God but the belief in God that forms the starting-point for an attempt to think faith through in a rational way (Fides quaerit intellectum). At the end of the Proslogion the rationally deliberated concept of God is re-embedded in the faith from which it came:

5

Totalité et infini, 52-53/80. Translation: “But the idea of Infinity is transcendence itself, the overflowing of an adequate idea. … The negative description of transcendence as the impossibility for the transcendent being and the being that is separated from it to participate in the same concept also comes from Descartes.”


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the focus now is on God’s goodness and inaccessibility. So Kant’s objections to the ontological argument only touch on the metaphysical variant of this proof.6 Though Kant’s criticism seemed to have put paid to the ontological argument, it has attracted new interest in the twentieth century, where analytical philosophy in particular makes use of the subtle line of reasoning deployed by Anselm.7 Its productivity was rediscovered in theology through Karl Barth’s profound and creative reading of the Proslogion.8 Another modern variant of the ontological argument is found in Emmanuel Levinas. In Totalité et infini Levinas announces that his analyses are guided by the formal structure of the Idea of the Infinite in us. He constantly refers to the Cartesian version of the ontological argument and concentrates here on the relation of the finite and the infinite in the proof from the third Méditation Métaphysique.9 Unlike the representatives of analytical philosophy, he is not concerned with a proof for God’s existence in the strict sense, but with a reflection on Descartes’ starting-point: finite consciousness, which through its doubt has discovered itself to be imperfect. Finite consciousness is incapable of originating the idea of perfection or infinity—so it must have been introduced from outside. In this way Descartes becomes one of the sources of inspiration for Levinas’ idea of exteriority, so central to Totalité and Infini that it appears in the subtitle (Essai sur l’Exteriorité). In Rationality and Transcendence Theodore de Boer shows that Levinas does not use Descartes’ argument for rational purposes, but that his concern lies with an interpretation of the experience of infinity.10 An interesting question in this context is which in6

Cf. Marion, “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?” In Fenomenologie en beeldverbod Ruud Welten discusses the views of both Marion and Levinas on Descartes’ argument. 7 Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, Alvin Plantinga. 8 Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum. 9 Totalité et infini, 58-59/86-87 and 62-63/90-92 (Evil Genius); in another chapter Levinas quotes twice from the third metaphysical meditation (184187/209-212). 10 De Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence, especially Chapters 8 and 9.

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terpretation of the argument prevails: that of Anselm or that of Descartes. We will see that Levinas constantly brings Descartes’ “Anselmian” side to the fore by emphasizing the experience of the limit of the thinkable in his argument. In Marion’s view, the element of the transcendence of conceptual thought is represented more strongly in Anselm than in Descartes. So why doesn’t Levinas take his point of reference in Anselm? Besides his preference for French thinkers of his own tradition, there could be another reason: in the Proslogion Anselm starts explicitly from a religious point of view, whereas Levinas rejects a starting-point in what he calls “religious experience,” because by its very nature it is tied up with ontological thought.11 De Boer underlines this point and emphasises that Levinas, with the help of Descartes’ ontological argument, can resist ontological and onto-theological thinking about God. So in this view the resistance to ontological thought is made possible by an ethical interpretation of the ontological argument. Unlike De Boer, Derrida is not convinced that Levinas can completely let go of ontological thought by equating moral and religious experiences via the idea of the Infinite. In “Violence et métaphysique” he points to the confusion which occurs in Totalité et infini between the face of God and the face of the Other. Sometimes Levinas emphasises the similarity, other times he exploits the difference. The face of God, who commands while hiding itself, is at once more and less than other faces. Whence perhaps, despite all Levinas’ precautions, the equivocal complicity of theology and metaphysics in Totality and Infinity.12

No matter how critical of theology Levinas is—his language remains strongly tied to traditional theological concepts. At the end of this chapter I will look more closely at the difference between De Boer and Derrida.

11 12

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 103/62. “Violence et Métaphysique,” 159-160/108-109.


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In the following sections I will first examine Levinas’ reception of the ontological argument and the idea of the Infinite. The critical comments which I will make in the course of my analysis are concerned with the relation between religious experience and the philosophical interpretation of religious experience as an experience of the infinite. How does Levinas actually relate to the religious experience which he wants to interpret? On what basis does he equate the formal structure of the ontological argument, which hinges on the “idea of the Infinite,” with “religion”?13 2. A new interpretation of the ontological argument In the first part of Totalité et infini, as a general guideline of all the analyses in his book, Levinas introduces the insight that there is a difference between objectivity and transcendence. He draws this distinction by means of the philosophy of Descartes, who, in the argument from the third chapter of his Méditations Métaphysiques, regards both the thinking subject and God as first self-evident principles, without one being derived from the other. The thinking consciousness cannot constitute the idea of God, but it does not participate in God either. Descartes describes the relation of the ego cogito to the infinite in the form of “the Idea of the Infinite.” The distinctive feature of this idea is that its ideatum, its “object,” goes beyond the idea which I have of it. This creates an infinite distance between the idea of the Infinite in me and what this idea signifies. The experience of this idea is the experience of transcendence. It then suddenly becomes clear that transcendence cannot be thought as an object. Thinking the infinite, transcendent other is not thinking an object. It actually means, says Levinas, doing something more or better than thinking. This observation lays the foundation for the deformalisation or “concretisation” of the idea of the Infinite which Levinas undertakes in Totalité et infini. This means that the way the idea of the other, transcendent, strange, Infinite appears can be made 13

Totalité et infini, 53/80.

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concrete, for instance through the encounter with the other as “face.” When the other appears as face, he goes beyond the mere idea of alterity which I have in me. The face cannot be confined to the plastic form in which it seems to appear, it appears as expression, it is completely expression.14 Levinas, then, does not adopt Descartes’ entire argument. He distances himself emphatically from the rationalism implied in it; nor does he assume that God’s existence could be proved in this way. He only takes over the notion that the idea of the Infinite transcends finite consciousness and yet means something for consciousness. Finite consciousness exists separately from transcendence. Transcendence measures its own infinity by maintaining this distance in relation to finite thought. In the third part of Totalité et infini Levinas quotes again from the Méditations Métaphysiques. This time he cites the passage in which Descartes derives the self-insight of the cogito from the presence of the idea of a more perfect being in thought.15 Again the double structure of the idea of the Infinite becomes clear: though present for finite consciousness, it cannot be regarded as a product of consciousness. It exists outside, as exteriority. That is why the fundamental form of the ethical relation can be recognised in the Cartesian relation between finite consciousness and the idea of the Infinite. Levinas agrees with Descartes on this point and so must criticise his teacher Husserl, who sees the cogito as an independent starting-point. According to Husserl, the cogito does not need any external support. As a result, the idea of the Infinite in Husserl should be regarded as being constituted by subjectivity. The importance of Descartes’ position, which starts from the non-constitution of the infinite, is that he leaves a door open which Husserl closes. Descartes leaves open the possibility that there are other than objectifying relations for thought:

14 15

Totalité et infini, 21/51. Totalité et infini, 186-187/211-212.


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L’idée de l’infini ne m’est pas objet. L’argument ontologique gît en la mutation de cet “objet” en être, in indépendance de mon égard. Dieu, c’est l’Autre. 16

So the last sentence, God is the other (in French: Dieu, c’est l’autre), follows directly from the foregoing, from Levinas’ interpretation of the Cartesian argument for God’s existence. What does it mean? We already said something above about the character of this “autre”: it is the other, strange, transcendent, Infinite that exists outside of me, independent of consciousness, though it cannot be regarded as an object of consciousness. The ontological argument is based on this independence, this existence external to me, of that which seemed only capable of being thought as an object. Hence Levinas says with Descartes that the relation to God cannot be absorbed by thought of the “object” God. But the opposite position, that the relation to God is a matter of inner motive, is not endorsed by Levinas either. Il est, en tout cas, évident que l’intuition de l’infini conserve un sens rationaliste et ne deviendra, en aucune façon, l’envahissement de Dieu à travers une émotion intérieure. Descartes, mieux qu’un idéaliste ou qu’un réaliste, découvre une rélation avec une altérité totale, irréductible à l’intériorité et qui, cependant, ne violente pas l’intériorité; une receptivité sans passivité, un rapport entre libres.17

Though not absorbed by thought, this relation retains a “rationalist meaning.” But whereas pure rationalism turns against receptivity, this relation must be described as receptivity. Though receptivity without passivity, it is a relation with an irreducible alterity that cannot be reduced to the interiority of consciousness.

16

Totalité et infini, 186/211. Translation: “The idea of infinity is not for me an object. The ontological argument lies in the mutation of this “object” into being, into independence with regard to me; God is the other.” 17 Totalité et infini, 186/211. Translation: “It is in any case evident that the intuition of infinity retains a rationalist meaning, and will not become any sort of invasion of God across an inward emotion. Descartes, better than an idealist or a realist, discovers a relation with a total alterity irreducible to interiority, which nevertheless does not do violence to interiority—a receptivity without passivity, a relation between freedoms.”

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Consciousness cannot produce this idea, it can only receive it. But receptivity does not do violence to the freedom of consciousness. 3. The sublime: aesthetic or ethical? God is the other (Dieu, c’est l’autre). In the context quoted above this sentence emphasises the alterity, the strangeness and transcendence of God. Is this a God who had already revealed himself in another way and in whose revelation the believer already believes, as in Anselm? Or can the statement be read the other way round too? The Other is God. L’autre, c’est Dieu. Such a reversal is not suggested by the context of Totalité et infini. Perhaps we should also take a closer look at the way the word “God” combines with the other words in the book. Totalité et infini introduces the word “God” in connection with the Infinite, and the mode of discourse is strongly determined by Descartes. Descartes also enables Levinas to keep the theological connotations of the word “God” at a distance. Didn’t he himself argue for a strict separation of theology and philosophy? Levinas concludes the section on Descartes with an idiosyncratic interpretation of the end of the third meditation: the passage in which Descartes talks about the contemplation of God himself, which he describes as enjoyment of the beauty of his immeasurable light. It is the highest enjoyment that man can experience in his life. Levinas regards this paragraph not as a stylistic embellishment, nor as a diplomatic concession to religion. Rather it completes the train of thought of the ontological argument, as a conclusion in which Descartes makes the transition from reflection on God as an idea to the contemplation of a divine sublimity which can be approached as if it were a face. Therefore, Levinas comments:


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Cet alinéa nous apparaît pas ainsi comme un ornement de style ou comme un prudent hommage à la religion, mais comme expression de cette transformation de l’idée de l’Infini amenée par la connaissance, en Majesté abordée comme visage.18

For Levinas, this proves that a transition is possible in Descartes from the purely theoretical contemplation of the idea of the Infinite to an experience of God in terms of sublimity, majesty, and “face.” But is this still Descartes’ perspective, or is Levinas aligning him with his own view? In this passage Descartes talks about contemplation of the highest being. In this contemplation God’s majesty is revealed to him as “light” and “beauty.” For a moment Descartes abandons the strict procedure and aloofness of the ontological argument, and leaves room for the aesthetic element in the soul’s relation to God. This element is absent in Levinas. For him, the sublimity is not connected with aesthetic contemplation but with ethical experience. It is ingenious on Levinas’ part to regard the idea of the Infinite as sublimity (“majesty”) and “face” at the same time. Unlike Descartes, however, Levinas’ emphasis is on the ethical instead of the aesthetic. The face, as concretisation of the “idea of the Infinite,” is the beginning of philosophy. The relation to the face is described as a desire which is nourished by the infinity of its “object.” Levinas clarifies this as follows: Que le mouvement de l’âme qui est plus cognitif que la connaissance, puisse avoir une structure différente que la contemplation—voilà point sur lequel nous nous séparons de la lettre du cartésianisme.19

18 Totalité et infini, 187/212. Translation: “To us this paragraph appears to be not a stylistic ornament or a prudent homage to religion, but the expression of this transformation of the idea of infinity conveyed by knowledge into Majesty approached as a face.” 19 “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini” in: En decouvrant l’existence, 174. Translation from Collected Philosophical Papers, 56: “We separate ourselves from the letter of Cartesianism in affirming that the movement of the soul that is more cognitive than cognition could have a structure different from contemplation.”

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In his interpretation Levinas moves away from the letter of the Cartesian argument; what he uses is the severity and aloofness connected with the notion of the idea of the Infinite. The same severity and aloofness colour his interpretation of desire: Le Désir de l’Infini n’a pas la complaisance sentimentale de l’amour, mais la rigueur de l’exigence morale. Et la rigueur de l’exigence morale—ne s’impose pas brutalement—mais est Désir, par attraction et l’infini hauteur de l’être même, au bénéfice de qui s’exerce la bonté Dieu ne commande que par les hommes pour qui il faut agir.20

4. The idea of the Infinite as disruption of thought In his later work, too, Levinas maintains a distance between the subject and the idea of the Infinite, but he adds a new element: the initially independent position of the subject is increasingly eroded from within. The subject undergoes the same fate as the people living in the house in Danielewski’s novel: there is a disturbing discrepancy between its own size and the mysterious space, the mysterious “more” which it must receive inside itself without being able to contain it. This surplus causes deep disquiet in the subject, which Levinas formulates in his later work via notions like “trauma,” “passivity, more passive than passivity,” “obsession,” “accusation,” “persecution,” “being hostage.” Thus strong emphasis is put on the passive mode in which the subject receives the infinite. Again the ontological argument is Levinas’ preferred model of thought. Analyzing the structure of this argument, he shows that the Infinite is present in the finite in a very particular way: as an idea which wrenches thought out of joint. The preposition “in,” says Levinas, is not only a negation of the finite, but also a marker of place: the infinite is in the finite, but at the same time

20

En découvrant l’existence, 177. Translation—slightly modified—from Collected Philosophical Papers 58: “The desire for infinity does not have the sentimental complacency of love, but the rigour of moral exigency. And the rigour of moral exigency is not bluntly imposed, but is a desire, due to the attraction and infinite height of the being itself, for the benefit of which goodness is exercised. God commands only through the men for whom one must act.”


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it is distinct from finite life. In Totalité et infini this relation was seen in terms of separation, between consciousness and the idea of the Infinite. In the later phase Levinas focuses on what the Infinite brings about in the finite. The effect of this contact between consciousness and the Infinite is expressed in violent metaphors: the idea of the Infinite “overturns the universal validity and the original character of intentionality.” Or, even more strongly: L’idée de Dieu fait éclater la pensée...21

The relation between the separate creature and transcendence, which in Totalité et infini could still be described as a relation between two free entities involving “receptivity without passivity,” is now interpreted by Levinas purely in terms of passivity. For finite thought, the relation to the Infinite is not a criterion against which it tests itself, but a negation, an interruption which cannot be thought in any way and which the subject can only undergo in a “passivity more passive than any passivity appropriate to a consciousness.”22 For Levinas is referring here to the passivity of the trauma by which the idea of God has been planted in us. It is interesting, too, that the Infinite both strikes and awakens thought in this disruption: the touch of the idea of the Infinite awakens thought. This is not an experience which can be received and accepted by consciousness. The idea of the Infinite arrives in finite consciousness without being consciously received there. The subject is in Adam’s position: Eve was formed from his rib, but he took no part in process. The arrival of the Infinite is an event which happens to the subject, and which allows him to be truly “conscious.” Consciousness, says Levinas, is more than the processing and comprehending of concepts. Thought can stand in relation to something that is fundamentally other, it can be a desire that has no relation to need, that does not receive or want to receive anything in return for its Desire. A desire without interest, not in pursuit of satisfaction or a well-determined goal. 21

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 105/63: “the idea of God causes the breakup of the thinking.” 22 Totalité et infini, 186/211; De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 105-106/63-64.

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It is this sublime disinterest, this absence of any connection with “being,” which makes it possible to speak of a desire for the Good.23 At the same time this Desire for the Good is nothing but a desire for God, for God is the Desirable. He is “the Good that neither sleeps nor slumbers.” Levinas quotes Psalm 121, without mentioning the source, and so makes a connection between the Good and the God who is invoked in a personal way in the Psalms. At the same time he detaches his entire argument from the sphere of religious experience and moves it away from the common understanding of “desire for God.” Were we to take “desire” to mean a desire for God that is too direct, the desire would deliver itself up to the interests of the self. The desire, says Levinas, cannot and should not be aimed immediately at God, for it would then be in our interest to desire. The desire would abandon its relation to “the infinite” and conform to a finite being’s ideas about what he desires and how this desire can be fulfilled. In other words: the desire would assume the structure of need, and it is precisely this transformation which Levinas wants to avoid at all costs. To keep the structure of desire free and to purify it of anything that refers to need, Levinas analyzes “Desire” as a movement aimed at true infinity. This true infinity reveals itself where the object of desire shows itself as non-desirable, as not an object of desire but as something else, as something that in fact is not adapted to desire at all. This happens because the Infinite (or “God”) refuses to assume the role of an endpoint of human desire. God or the Infinite points way from himself and in doing so proves yet again that he is the “truly Infinite.” In this way the desire for God’s nearness is forced to turn into a desire for the non-desirable nearness of others. A reversal which actually preserves God’s radical transcendence, since in this way the desirable escapes from desire. The radical separation and unbridgeable gap resulting from this movement preserve God’s sanctity:

23

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 112/68.


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Pour que le désinteressement soit possible dans le Désir de l’Infini, pour que le Désir au-delà de l’être, ou la transcendance, ne soit une absorption dans l’immanence qui ainsi ferait son retour, il faut que le Désirable ou Dieu reste séparé dans le Désir; comme désirable—proche mais différent—Saint.24

By referring to the other in the form of the neighbour, the Infinite moves away both from the subject and from the other, both from I and from Thou. A removal which is expressed in French by the verb s’absolver, the root of which refers to the adjective “absolute.” The Infinite is absolute through this act of removal. Dans ce retournement éthique...dans cette mission étrange ordonnant l’approche d’autrui—Dieu est arraché de l’objectivité, à la presence et à l’être. Ni object, ni interlocuteur.25

5. God: the “other otherwise” Dieu, c’est l’autre—in Totalité and Infini this formula flowed from Levinas’ interpretation of Descartes’ argument for the existence of God. He now returns to it and qualifies the earlier statement: God is not simply the other, but differs more profoundly from the I (the subject). He cannot be compared with the other that we encounter in the dialogical relation. In that case he could be regarded in those terms as the first other or the other par excellence, so that the relation to God becomes a specimen of the relation to every other “Thou.” But in his later texts Levinas radicalises the idea that God has some “alterity” in himself. He is not simply “the other,” but “other than the other.” This means, in Levinas’ words: 24 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 113/68. Translation: “In order that disinterestedness be possible in the Desire for the Infinite—in order that the Desire beyond being, or transcendence, might not be an absorption into immanence, which would thus make its return—the Desirable, or God, must remain separated in the Desire; as desirable—near yet different—Holy.” 25 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 115/69. Translation: “In this ethical turnabout...in this strange mission commanding the approach to the other, God is pulled out of objectivity, of presence and out of being. He is neither object nor interlocutor.”

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... autre autrement, autre d’altérité préalable à l’altérité d’autrui, à l’astreinte éthique au prochain, et différent de tout prochain, transcendant jusqu’à l’absence, jusqu’à sa confusion possible avec le remue-menage de l’ il y a.26

In this way Levinas cuts off the dialogical interpretation of the relation to God and declares that God’s alterity, his transcendence, cannot be compared with the absence of the other, but that it springs from an absence which is so radical that it brings us into contact with the il y a, with the absence of any meaning. A possibility that we cannot integrate into thought, but which always lurks at the edge of our thought, on the sideline of any attempt on our part to create meaning. But why, we could ask, is all this necessary? Why is it impossible in Levinas’ view for “the Good” to participate in being? Surely we can conceive of a relation between Being and the Good without going back to the medieval doctrine of transcendentals, which assumes that Being and the Good are convertible (ens et bonum convertentur). Isn’t it possible and also a part of daily, perhaps even religious, experience that the Good momentarily makes contact with Being and is realised in this world? Isn’t the dividing line which Levinas draws here between Being and the Good at odds with the outcome of the ontological argument, which pivots on the necessary existence of the idea of the Infinite? If we look at Levinas’ later texts, we see that he mainly adduces ethical arguments for a separation between Being and the Good. He is searching for a new description of “the Good” that underlies ethical action. In his view, this good cannot arise from nature, nor can it possibly coincide with the natural order of being. For ultimately this natural order of being is based on self-interest, a defensible self-interest in the end, for its goal is self-preservation. Being is here “persisting in being”—remaining who you are and carrying through the projects that you want to do 26 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 115/69. Translation: “Other otherwise, and other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical obligation towards the other and different from every neighbour, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of this possible confusion with the agitation of the there-is (il y a).”


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and that contribute to your survival. Being good can thus be defined only in terms of this central interest: to ensure one’s own survival. In the light of this nature, the good which Levinas wants to talk about is something unnatural or perverse. Being good in an ethical sense is not perfection but rather a defect: “a deficit, a wasting away and a foolishness.” It is: going beyond being, not a moment of being, but “otherwise and better than being; the very possibility of beyond.”27 The ethical must acquire meaning outside of being, for being always involves interest and purposiveness. So a responsibility based on disinterest must always be situated outside of being. The ethical element is not isolated in “Dieu et la philosophie,” it is rather embedded in a broader perspective: that of the loss of the experience of transcendence in Western philosophy. In this article Levinas searches for the meaning of “the beyond, of transcendence.” His argument aims to show that the meaning of transcendence can be found in the ethical, and should then be interpreted as one person vouching for another. The context of this argument is formed by a critique of Western philosophy: in the course of its history it has blocked access to the awareness of transcendence by enclosing it in immanent conceptuality. As a result, “meaning” has become identical with “esse” or “being.” Levinas then asks whether this prevailing philosophical discourse can still be shocked by the intervention of a religious experience in which the reference to transcendence is implied. Can religious experience put us on the track of a true transcendence? In Levinas’ view, this is impossible: in the course of time religious thought has conformed to the criteria of philosophical language and “revelation” there is the same as “the disclosure of a truth.” Religious discourse has changed into a statement of what has been seen outside or experienced inside.28 So can “God” be combined with philosophical language in a different way, other than as a theme of religious discourse? Once again this question leads Levinas to take Descartes’ argument as his starting-point. Philosophical discourse clings to the unity of I think. But in Descartes’ ontological argument God acquires 27 28

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 114/69. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 103-104/61-62.

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meaning within the framework of philosophy, because this argument disrupts the unity of I think in a very radical and extravagant way. The remarkable thing, says Levinas, is that Descartes does not prove God’s existence for a reflective consciousness resting in itself, but that the idea of the Infinite brings about a demystification and a break in reflection. The idea of God causes thought to explode. The entrance of the Infinite in thought is thus an incomparable passivity that cannot be received.29 This “passivity, more passive than any passivity” can be compared with “the trauma by which the idea of God has been planted in us.” Something is found in consciousness which is fundamentally incapable of assimilation. The passivity involved here recalls the passivity of the created. A signification which is more ancient than an exhibition, a meaning which precedes presence, representation, which does not show itself exhaustively in the manifestation. What else can it mean but the trauma of awakening? It is clear what path Levinas has followed. He takes leave of thought that can only give meaning to what is or what appears to consciousness. Instead, he investigates a different mode of signification, which defies the paradigms of being and appearing. The words he uses for this other mode of signification are “ethical,” “command,” “trauma,” or “disruption.” Always this involves something, an event, a call, a voice which cannot be present to consciousness, because consciousness has not yet been awakened. This leads him to a new insight into the nature of consciousness, comparable with Ricoeur’s idea of the “wounded cogito”:30 consciousness is not transparent to itself, it does not have its foundation in itself. It arises through a traumatic shock which it undergoes from outside: the confrontation with the other, who is now no longer seen as standing outside of the self (exteriority) but as the difference between finite and infinite that wrenches the inner of the subject out of joint and makes it restless. The interpretation of Descartes’ argument ends here: in the 29

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 104-105/62-63. Ricoeur develops this idea of a “wounded cogito,” which posits but does not possess itself, in his philosophical interpretation of Freud’s psycho-analysis. See Ricoeur, “Un interprétation philosophique de Freud,” in: Le conflit des interprétations, 160-177.

30


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recognition that the cogito does not rest in itself, nor is it transparent to itself. The fact that we are consciously thinking creatures is not a free choice, but the result of a shock which has happened to us despite ourselves. In this way Levinas translates Descartes’ insight into a moral experience. The shock of the other disrupts a consciousness which without this disruption would not be worthy of the name “consciousness.” Consciousness is in the first place: moral consciousness. 6. A quotation from Rosenzweig At a crucial point in his own argument Levinas introduces his teacher Rosenzweig into the discussion about God and philosophy by referring to Der Stern der Erlösung: Franz Rosenzweig interprète la réponse donnée par l’Homme à l’Amour dont Dieu l’aime, comme le mouvement vers le prochain. Cf. Stern der Erlösung Teil II, Buch II.31

I will return to the substance of this quotation later and will first clarify its context. Why does Levinas quote Rosenzweig? It seems that he seeks Rosenzweig’s support to show that transcendence can gain an ethical meaning. In the previous section we already saw that this proposal implies that the concept of transcendence is separated from the prevailing philosophical usage, in which “being” is directly connected with “appearing.” Transcendence now assumes the sense of a moral shock. In the receiver, the human subject, the cogito, this shock starts a process of reversal, by which the transcendental apperception changes into substitution and hostageship. Insofar as there is still a relation now between God and “the soul” or “consciousness,” we should not interpret it as a relation in which God somehow appears or could be an object of contemplation. God does not appear, but traumatises consciousness. 31

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 114, note 14/69, note 22. Translation: “Franz Rosenzweig interprets the response given by Man to the Love with which God loves him as the movement towards the neighbour. See Star of Redemption, Part 3, Book II.”

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Desire, the traditional term by which the relation between God and soul is described, should therefore be interpreted differently. In actual fact it is not a desire but rather a trauma, for God turns out to be fundamentally inaccessible to human desire. His inaccessibility is a direct consequence of the reversal of transcendence into ethics: the inaccessible God, “the Infinite,” rejects the human soul that desires him. God, “the Infinite,” refuses to be the final goal of religious desire. The human soul in search of God is referred to a different address: the neighbour. Levinas’ interpretation brings about an ethical reversal in religious desire, so that the desire is directed at that which it does not desire and abandons itself to this. Only in that case can the desire be holy, infinite, and untouchable. In Levinas’ words: si le Désirable m’ordonne à ce qui est le nondésirable, à l’indésirable par excellence, à autrui.32

Levinas resolutely breaks here with the Neoplatonic language of love, in which Desire shows traits of eroticism and refers to the need which must be fulfilled, or the openness which yearns to be fulfilled. He reverses the movement of desire, so that the Desirable (God, the Infinite) is liberated and can escape the embrace of Desire. We must realise that God, “the Infinite,” can be called totally “good” only on account of this movement—for every need, so every reference to “Being,” is strongly rejected here: La bonté du Bien—du Bien qui ne dort, ni se somnole—incline le mouvement qu’elle appelle pour l’écarter du Bien et l’orienter vers autrui et ainsi seulement vers le Bien [my emphasis, RvR].33

This passage already raises a number of questions. I merely mention them here, and will return to them in the last section. First: apparently only the movement which turns away from the Good 32 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 113/68. Translation: “if the Desirable commands me [m’ ordonne] to what is nondesirable, to the undesirable par excellence; to another.” 33 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 114/69. Translation: “The Goodness of the Good … inclines the movement it calls forth to turn it away from the Good and orients it toward the other, and only thus toward the Good.” (emphasis RvR).


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can be called truly “good.” But what then is the importance of the earlier stage: the desire itself for the Good, the desire for direct contact with God, the Infinite, the Desirable? Shouldn’t more attention be paid to this stage, given the rest of the argument? Second: in what does the desirability of the Infinite actually consist if this desire ultimately meets with rejection? In what way can the desire for a direct relationship with God take on meaning in Levinas’ perspective? And does it still make sense to use the trope of desire, if the object of desire proves unreceptive to this desire? When Levinas describes the relation of consciousness to its own trauma as desire, isn’t he overstretching the word? Introducing this distance in desire also changes the nature of the I-Thou relation. At a certain point the Thou can no longer be addressed, it changes into a more aloof entity, perhaps better referred to as “He.” “He” means that the addressee withdraws from the relation into a dimension of holiness, separation, and aloofness, for which Levinas likes to use the new form “illeity.” This third person, this He, hides under the Thou, or is at the root of the Thou. So the relation to God is not characterised by the Ich-Du relation central in Buber and Rosenzweig, as it lacks the dimension of “illeity” which Levinas considers necessary for an understanding of God’s absence. The relation to the Infinite is a relation to a Thou that can change into He and in this way has always preceded the I. It is a He that never makes itself present, that “is transcendent to the point of absence.”34 It is all the more remarkable that Levinas quotes Rosenzweig precisely in a footnote to this passage, because he assumes that Stern der Erlösung describes the same movement of the desirable which points away from itself. 7. Rosenzweig on God and the soul As often, this quotation states and at the same time conceals something. Levinas states that man’s answer to God’s love lies in the movement towards the other. But he fails to say that this is 34

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 114/69.

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man’s second answer to God which Rosenzweig mentions. The first answer, which Levinas does not mention, is found in the section of Stern der Erlösung dealing with Revelation. It is a direct answer which man gives based on his experience of the relation to God as a relation to a Thou. Rosenzweig describes it in terms of a dialogue between God and man (“the soul”). It is God who calls the soul by asking “Where art Thou?” “This is none other than the quest for the Thou…,” adds Rosenzweig. When man has answered by saying “Here I am,” thus making himself available, his I awakens in this answer: Hier ist das Ich. Das einzelne menschliche Ich. Noch ganz empfangend, noch nur aufgetan, noch leer, ohne Inhalt, ohne Wesen, reine Bereitschaft, reiner Gehorsam, ganz Ohr.35

In this moment he first hears the commandment which comes first and is the most important: “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.” God turns to man and asks man for love. In his mouth the commandment is not a strange commandment, but the voice of love itself. This desire of the Lover is answered by the confession of the Beloved, man. A confession that is necessary, because only it gives the love reality and duration. But the soul cannot fully confess its requited love, it confesses its own weakness, for which it is ashamed. The answer is: “I have sinned.” Only through this confession, which cleanses and purifies, is it able to confirm that it abandons itself to God’s love by saying “I am thine.” When this answer has been heard, God speaks again, not simply by saying “Thou art mine,” but by recalling the past: “I have called thee by name: thou art mine.” This prevents the revelation from being wholly absorbed in the present and in the relation between the soul and God. Something has gone before: the moment God called, while the soul was not yet aware of anything.

35

Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, 196/176. Translation: “Here is the I, the individual human, as yet wholly receptive, as yet only unlocked, only empty, without content, without nature, pure readiness, pure obedience, all ears.”


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From this moment the human soul finds itself near to God. The dialogue between God and man is living reality and nothing in the world can separate man from God’s love: Die Seele kann mit offenen Augen und ohne zu träumen sich in der Welt umtun; immer bleibt sie nur in Gottes Nähe. Das “Du bist mein” das ihr gesagt ist, zieht ein schützenden Kreis um ihre Schritte. Sie weiss nun, dass sie nur die Rechte auszustrecken braucht, um zu fühlen, dass Gottes Rechte ihr entgegenkommt. Sie kann nun sprechen: mein Gott, mein Gott. Sie kann nun beten.36

In prayer lies the reversal to which Levinas alluded in his quotation from Stern der Erlösung. Prayer proves impossible if the world is not involved in the relation to God. At the end of the section on Revelation, in which the relation between man and God seems to be seen entirely as an I-Thou relation, Rosenzweig sets up a tension between two things. On the one hand there is the soul which knows that it is satisfied by its bond with God. On the other hand there is disquiet on account of the world’s imperfection. Though the soul has been saved, the world has not yet been redeemed. Prayer is therefore a prayer for the coming of the Kingdom. This movement is taken up at the end of the second book, when Rosenzweig reads the dialogue between God and the soul into the language of the Song of Songs. In the Song of Songs he also sees a desire for a fulfilment of love which goes beyond the intimacy of the Ich and Du. Die Liebe bleibt ja immer unter Zweien, sie weiss nur von Ich und Du, nicht von der Strasse.37

36 Der Stern der Erlösung, 205/184. Translation: “The soul can roam in the world with eyes open and without dreaming. Now and forevermore it will remain in God’s proximity. The ‘Thou art mine’ which was said to it draws a protective circle about its steps. Now it knows: it need but stretch out its right hand to feel God’s right hand coming to meet it. Now it can say: ‘My God, My God.’ Now it can pray.” 37 Der Stern der Erlösung, 227/203. Translation: “Love after all remains between two people: it knows only of I and Thou, not of the street.”

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At the same time love does desire to take part in the reality of the street, everyday life. And this desire can only be fulfilled if the beloved soul leaves the magic circle of love and opens its mouth, no longer to give an answer, but to speak. But during this outward movement it keeps in the secret recess of the heart the realization that it receives power from its experience in the magic circle: Wie Er dich liebt, so liebe Du.38

Accordingly, the third book of Stern der Erlösung opens with the words: “Love thy neighbor” and explains them as the commandment by which the soul, now independent, leaves the fatherly house of love to go into the world. So, prior to the passage which Levinas quotes on neighbourly love as the answer to God’s love, Rosenzweig talks at length about the relation between God and man, the religious relation. Though it runs the risk of turning into a “magic circle” without exits, though man should not be absorbed by this union—the love of God which the soul has once experienced remains, in Rosenzweig’s view, a source of inspiration, to which man returns once he has gone out towards the unredeemed world. God is absent in the world, but the human being who has experienced this love remains “in God’s proximity.” Rosenzweig sees human desire as a twofold given: on the one hand it is fulfilled in God, on the other hand it experiences disquiet caused by concern for the unredeemed world. Compared with Rosenzweig, it is striking that Levinas constantly stresses one side of the matter, both in his own argument and in the quotation from Rosenzweig which is meant to underline the argument: the absence of God and the harsh movement by which God fends off the desire directed at him, in order to point man towards the non-desirable neighbour. Rosenzweig talks about a God who exists separately from man and seeks a relationship with man. In this relationship man experiences God’s love and goodness and this individual redemp38

Der Stern der Erlösung, 228/204. Translation: “As he loves you, so shall you love.”


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tion awakens in the mind the question of neighbourly love and the redemption of the world. Certainly in “God and Philosophy” Levinas thinks transcendence more radically than Rosenzweig. God is other, his “otherness” means transcendence to the point of absence: …jusqu’à sa confusion possible avec le remue-ménage de l’ il y a.39

This analysis of the Rosenzweig quotation underlines the questions I raised earlier: is it right to call only the movement which bends away from the Good truly “good”? Doesn’t the possibility of orientating oneself to the other in desire imply something that precedes it: the desire itself for the Good, the desire for direct contact with God, the Infinite, the Desirable, and doesn’t this stage deserve more attention? 8. Rationality of transcendence? In “God and Philosophy” Levinas entered into a debate with Rosenzweig, and by exploring this debate more deeply we saw how Levinas talks about God in his philosophical texts. He likes to refer to the infinite, with the corresponding experience of “infinition” or of a “more” that presents itself to a consciousness that cannot comprehend it. This “infinite” is a radically transcendent designation of God. It is not a starting-point on the road to knowledge of God, but instead means the permanent thwarting of any attempt to know something about God. On the basis of this interpretation, any attempt to get closer to God is nothing but an attempt to get closer to the other human being, who is found in the trace of God, or of illeity. Another attempt to express this enigmatic relation between God and man can be found in Humanisme de l’autre homme:

39 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 115/69. Translation: “to the point of absence, to the point of this possible confusion with the agitation of the there is [il-y-a].”

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MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD Être à l’image de Dieu, ne signifie pas être l’icône de Dieu, mais se trouver dans sa trace. Le Dieu révélé de notre spiritualité judéochrétienne conserve tout l’infini de son absence qui est dans l’ordre personnel même. Il ne se montre que par sa trace, comme dans le chapitre 33 de l’Exode. Aller vers lui, ce n’est pas suivre cette trace, qui n’est pas un signe. C’est aller vers les Autres qui se tiennent dans la trace de l’illéïté. C’est par cette illeïté, située au delà des calculs et des réciproquités de l’économie et du monde, que l’être a un sens. Sens qui n’est pas une finalité.40

In The Rationality of Transcendence, Theodore de Boer has pointed to the critique of natural theology present in Levinas’ ethical understanding of infinity and thus to the significance of Levinas’ thought for philosophy of religion. God is not knowable from nature and by reason. De Boer sets Levinas against the background of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology, in which God is referred to as “supreme being” or “ground of Being.”41 Two aspects are salient here: God is regarded as an unchanging and ultimately unknowable “supreme Being.” At the same time this Being is seen as the necessary ground of being, in which the contingent creature participates. The emphasis on God’s unchanging and unknowable being is due to Neoplatonic thought. Philo already distinguished between two names of God, an eternal name, known to himself, and a temporary name, indicating what he is for us. De Boer observes that this Platonic paradigm, with its opposition of being and becoming, unchangeability and changeability, is still normative in natural theology. Against it he sets Levinas’ philosophy, in which man appears as a freedom, with a possibility of atheism, and in which the creation is seen as a breach, offering scope for

40

Humanisme de l’autre homme, 63. Translation from Basic Philosophical Writings, 64: “To be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God but to find oneself in his trace. The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality maintains all the infinity of his absence, which is in the personal “order” itself. He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity. It is through this illeity, situated beyond the calculations and reciprocities of economy and of the world, that being has a sense. A sense which is not a finality.” 41 De Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence, 183.


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detachment from the “ground of existence.” The relation between man and God can now only be thought outside of this ground: “beyond ontology.” Does this mean that it is impossible to think philosophically about God? Together with Levinas, De Boer resists this conclusion. Thinking about God does not take place on the basis of a correspondence of being (analogia entis) between God and the creature, but has its basis in a distinctive rationality: the rationality of transcendence. In De Boer’s commentary this opens up a path to the ontological argument: as the possibility par excellence of thinking a God who does not coincide with being, but who is “beyond being.” God enters our mind when we are confronted with the infinite goodness which the face of the other evokes in the subject. This desire for the good gives meaning to being, but does not form part of it. It is “otherwise than being,” a dimension of existence expressed in the symptoms of an extreme morality, such as substitution, utterly vouching for the other, being taken hostage by the other. The idea of the Infinite—God—becomes concrete in these symptoms, so that the notion of God as a “supreme Being” is dispelled. But doesn’t this mean a return of natural theology, precisely in the link with a certain dimension of experience (the symptoms of extreme morality)? Doesn’t Levinas, in a roundabout way, try to prove God’s existence on the basis of moral experience? Aren’t we dealing with an ethical argument for God’s existence? De Boer, too, asks whether Levinas develops an alternative natural theology, based on a hermeneutics of facticity.42 In this context he discusses the “naturalness” of Levinas’ philosophy of religion. Levinas appeals to experiences, but to what experience does he actually go back? Everything is found to depend on the experience of responsibility, which Levinas, using Descartes’ argument for God’s existence, interprets as an experience of the Infinite. The experience of responsibility takes the subject “beyond being.” The Infinite reveals itself in the shock of 42

De Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence, 179, 181.

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finite consciousness, as a trauma affecting consciousness, but this wound cannot be reduced to a known content of consciousness. This break offers a prospect of the “other,” of that which is “otherwise than being.” On the other hand, Levinas does ensure that the relation with thought remains sublimely intact, because he assumes that without this experience there can be no real consciousness. The awareness that existed before the break cannot, in his view, be called consciousness, because it is unaware of evil. Only by making contact with the Infinite does human consciousness awaken to true thought and true rationality. Levinas’ variant of the ontological argument makes the relation visible between thought (rationality) and transcendence. At the same time he shows that natural theology’s doctrine of being does not have a monopoly on rationality.43 We can now see that the phrase “the rationality of transcendence” implies two hidden meanings. First: apparently a rationality is possible which cannot be reduced to the ontological discourse. Second: this rationality is real rationality, and not just part of religious language. So it is possible to forge a close link between thought and transcendence. In this way De Boer can conclude on the basis of Levinas’ thought that faith has its own rationality. 9. Transcendence as a disruption of order The rationality of transcendence is a critical rationality, which starts in resistance, in an ethical revolt against accepted truths— including philosophical ones. This critical rationality can be re43

It is interesting to see that Jean-Luc Marion concludes “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?” (see note 6) with exactly the same question about the relation between rationality and transcendence. In his case the question is not raised by the ontological argument as such, but by the argument for God’s existence in Anselm’s Proslogion, because there the distance between the idea of the Infinite and what is meant by this idea (the ideatum) is present in the definition of God. “Id quo maius cogitari non potest” is not a conceptual description of God, as we find it in Descartes, but indicates that conceptual thinking itself is transcended.


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cognised in the disquiet (inquiétude) which Levinas constantly talks about, both in Autrement qu’être... and in De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. It is the disquiet of the vigilance heard in the question of the good, a resistance that awakens the spirit in a creative way. For instance, when political analysis gets bogged down in talk about “inevitable developments,” so that criticism is excluded and neutralised in advance. Despite this neutralizing barrier, the question of the good is raised time and again, and no politician or entrepreneur succeeds in stamping it out. The question of the good has its own rationality, we cannot reduce it to the pseudorationality of “inevitable” social developments. These considerations put the question of the good in a different context. Raising it, we do not start by testing actions against a value. To raise the question of the good is now rather the consequence of hearing an appeal of which we cannot exactly determine where it comes from. It is the reaction to an interruption, a disruption of order which cannot be traced back to the order itself. Levinas once compared this interruption to what one of Ionesco’s characters says about the doorbell: En somme, nous ne savons toujours pas si, lorsqu’on sonne à la porte, il y a quelqu’un ou non...(Ionesco, La cantatrice chauve)44

The doorbell’s interruption does not institute a new order, which then clashes with the existing order. Rather it is a subtle intervention, for which one must be prepared. Attentiveness is needed to apprehend it. It may also not be noticed, because “it enters in so subtle a way that unless we retain it, it has already withdrawn.” In other words: whether the interruption is noticed depends on the subject’s attentiveness.45 Nor does the disruption originate in a different order, a coherent history of “being”—taken as the natural and necessary course of things. It differs from every order by inquiring into the

44

“Énigme et phénomène,” En découvrant l’existence, 203/66. Translation from Basic Philosophical Writings: “In short, we still do not know if, when someone rings the doorbell, there is someone there or not…” (Ionesco, The Bald Soprano) 45 En découvrant l’ existence, 208/70.

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meaning or the good of the “course of things.” Medieval philosophy could still say that being and the good are the same and therefore interchangeable, but this is no longer possible. Hence De Boer breaks a lance for a philosophy of religion which starts in a cry of moral resistance and a testimony of responsibility.46 Against natural theology, which drives thinkers into the arms of a God of philosophers, a God whom they can only end pronouncing dead, this thought offers a new possibility of talking philosophically about God and transcendence. Meanwhile, De Boer underlines that the infinite enters philosophy as an ethical experience. “Morality is the Enigma’s way”, or, as Totalité et infini puts it succinctly: “Ethics is the spiritual optics.”47 But how does this justification of philosophical God-talk relate to certain religious traditions, with their own conceptions of God? Isn’t Levinas’ philosophy an assimilation of specific Jewish experiences? Doesn’t the article “Enigma and phenomenon,” from which we quoted in this section, refer to the experiences of God which Moses and Elijah had? Or is Levinas reflecting on experiences that seem to be religious, but are actually general in nature, experiences which everyone has and for which no religious antenna is needed? This is De Boer’s position. He interprets Levinas’ philosophy as a meaningful way of reflecting on religious experiences in a time in which the reconstruction of a natural rational religion has become impossible. Now that natural theology is no longer founded in a common theistic faith, the only option is to reflect on experiences as Levinas describes them, in which the mystery of the absolute is revealed in the light of morality: He [Levinas, RvR] too pursues the significance of certain facts—facts which transcend the framework of existential ontology: substitution, absolute passivity, being held hostage.48

46

De Boer, The rationality of transcendence, 182. En découvrant l’ existence, 215/76; Totalité et infini, 51/78. 48 De Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence, 150, see also 160: “experiences that have to be thought” and 175: “rationality inheres in facts.” 47


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These experiences reveal the same kind of infinity as the infinity of which the ontological argument speaks. The Infinite is not the referent of an intentional experience, but manifests its infinity in the experience itself, as is the case in the ontological proof of the existence of God.49

De Boer’s interpretation shows that we should understand Levinas’ perspective on the ontological argument as a proposal to read this argument mainly in an ethical register. God is not knowable via natural theology, but his trace can be read in the symptoms of an extreme morality. The ontological arguments of Anselm and Descartes involve the same kind of relation to the infinite as the experience of groundless responsibility for the other. Both set finite thought against a dimension of infinity of which it cannot possibly be the origin and which it cannot comprehend. But if this is the idea, what is the point of referring to God? The previous section raised this question in connection with Levinas’ quotation of Rosenzweig, where the ethical aspect was privileged over the religious dimension. De Boer’s interpretation allows us to formulate our question more sharply: if it is true that God, as “the Infinite,” only takes on meaning in the social relation of proximity to the other and in extreme moral views—isn’t transcendence then liable to disappear in the ethically interpreted infinite? How much scope is left in Levinas for the religious register, for the possibility of thinking a desire aimed in a religious sense at God, the Infinite?

49

The Rationality of Transcendence, 183 (emphasis RvR). In Totalité et infini, Levinas indicates how rigorously this experience goes beyond an epistemological framework: “The direct comprehension of God is impossible for a look direct upon him, not because our intelligence is limited, but because the relation with infinity respects the total Transcendence of the other without being bewitched by it, and because our possibility of welcoming him in man goes further than the comprehension that thematizes and encompasses the object. It goes further, for precisely it goes into Infinity…(emphasis RvR) A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice.” (Totalité et infini, 50/78).

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Unlike De Boer, who accepts Levinas’ equation of the ethical and the religious, Derrida constantly questions the connection between ethics and religion or ethics and metaphysics. He criticises Levinas, first for being too indebted to metaphysical language, later for neglecting the sacral dimension of religion. In The Gift of Death he states that Levinas’ ethics is essentially religious, though Levinas himself claims the opposite. For an answer to the questions raised by De Boer, I will therefore enlist the help of Derrida’s interpretation of Levinas, particularly in The Gift of Death. 10. Ethics as a substitute for religion: Derrida The Gift of Death is mainly an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Derrida makes it clear here that, unlike Kierkegaard, he no longer wants to distinguish between the ethical and the religious register. Indeed, he blames both Kierkegaard and Levinas for wanting to maintain the dividing line between the “ethical” and the “religious”; he believes this to be impossible. The pivotal question here is whether “the quality of the wholly other” can be attributed to God alone.50 For Derrida, Levinas continues to play with the difference and the likeness between the face of the other and the face of God because both can be viewed as “the infinitely other”: Even in its critique of Kierkegaard concerning ethics and generality, Levinas’ thinking stays within the game—the play of difference and analogy—between the face of God and the face of my neighbour, between the infinitely other as God and the infinitely other as another human.

Hence, says Derrida, neither Kierkegaard nor Levinas succeeds in properly distinguishing the ethical perspective from the religious one. Kierkegaard must concede to Levinas that “ethics is also the order of the respect for absolute singularity.” And Lev-

50

Derrida, The Gift of Death, 83.


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inas’ ethics continues to refer to religion because he makes the absolute alterity of the other (by origin religious) into the foundation of ethics. “His ethics is already a religious one.” In The Gift of Death Derrida turns one of Kierkegaard’s important questions in Fear and Trembling into a problem. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard investigated the meaning of Abraham’s sacrifice to understand whether a teleological suspension of the ethical is possible. Can ethics, obedience to the law which applies to all, be suspended in favour of religion, in favour of the commandment that is given only to the individual, and in response to which he becomes entirely an individual, who does his duty, like Abraham? Whereas Kierkegaard’s question is shaped by the distinction between ethics and religion, Derrida’s commentary assumes this distinction to be impossible. He draws an important argument from Levinas’ critique of Kierkegaard in Noms propres. Levinas argues there for the possibility of an ethics which starts from the singularity of the subject “as a unique individual, a Self.” This singularity of the self and of the other is Derrida’s starting-point, and on account of this singularity he believes that a distinction between ethics and religion is no longer relevant. After all, it is now no longer possible to distinguish between the alterity of the other and the alterity of God. Both represent the possibility of the appearance of a singularity, an irreducibility, an absoluteness. Ethics, says Derrida, hinges in the first place on the singularity of the self and of the other. This singularity is caused by a relation to a “Wholly Other,” which we find above all in ethics. For every other can evoke a responsibility in me which makes me wholly singular, incomparable with others, and so (like Abraham) irresponsible. “Ethics can end up making us irresponsible.” 51 Derrida bases this position on Levinas’ thought. Ethics is the place where the singularity of the subject is most emphasised (as Levinas notes in connection with Kierkegaard’s view of ethics). On the other hand Derrida questions the game of “difference

51

Derrida, The Gift of Death, 61.

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and analogy” that Levinas continues to play.52 Is the face of God the face of the other? Or is there, despite the analogy, a difference between the absolute other (God) and the other who is my neighbour? Is ethical singularity identical with religious singularity? Derrida states that this last conclusion is unavoidable. The only problem is that Levinas refuses to take this final step. The formula which Derrida uses as a shibboleth for this figure of thought is: “tout autre est tout autre,” which he explains in such a way that for “tout autre” we can also fill in the word “God”: “Dieu est tout autre” or: “tout autre est Dieu.” What he means is that “absolute alterity” cannot be reserved for God alone. The singularity of God is linked to the singularity, the “complete alterity” of the other. “If God is completely other, than every other one is every bit as other.”53 11. Is every other every bit (as) other? To support his argument, Derrida quotes from Levinas’ critique of Kierkegaard, but he, too, quotes selectively. In the passage cited Levinas does in fact go against Kierkegaard in underscoring the importance of singularity for ethics. But the context of the quotation is extremely critical. Levinas rejects Kierkegaard’s exaltation of subjectivity as religious singularity and believes that Kierkegaard overemphasises the unicity and singularity of the subject, to the point of exhibitionism. The cause of all this is Kierkegaard’s one-sided focus on the problem of religious sacri-

52

Compare Derrida’s earlier critical comments in “Violence et métaphysique”: “The foundation of metaphysics—in Levinas’ sense—is to be encountered in the return to things themselves, where we find the common root of humanism and theology: the resemblance between man and God, man’s visage and the Face of God.” According to Derrida this game of difference and analogy between the face of God and the face of the other can only be ended by recognizing that both, the face of the other and the face of God, are the effect of a trace that was drawn earlier: “and if the presence of God were an effect of a trace?” (citations from the translation, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 108). 53 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 82-83.


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fice. Kierkegaard’s language is said to be no less “violent” than Nietzsche’s style. This harshness seems particularly prominent to him when Kierkegaard feels compelled to “transcend ethics.”54 Kierkegaard believes that ethics should be transcended to arrive at a religious subjectivity; Levinas’ emphasis is a different one. He proposes to assign more meaning to the truly ethical moment: the moment Abraham listens to the voice which leads him back to the ethical order, by prohibiting him from sacrificing Isaac. For Levinas, this is the high point in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice. In his view, Kierkegaard concentrates too much on the sacrifice itself, and this forces him to draw a radical contrast between the ethical and the religious. Religious action thus becomes action that, mysteriously and incomprehensibly, is at odds with ethics. As a result, Kierkegaard pays too little attention to the second time that Abraham hears a voice. This is the voice which calls Abraham back to the ethical order, the voice which prohibits him from carrying out the sacrifice. For Levinas, the ethical is: a concrete appeal to the unique person which moves towards a confirmation of the meaning of life opposite death. In this context he refers to another impressive story from the Abraham cycle, which, to his surprise, Kierkegaard fails to mention: the moment when Abraham, in dialogue with God, stands up for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the name of the few just men who might still live there. Levinas sees this as an expression of the way that life could overcome death. La mort est sans pouvoir sur la vie finie qui reçoit un sens à partir d’ une responsabilité infinie pour autrui, à partir d’une diaconie constituant la subjectivité du sujet, tout entière tension vers l’autre; c’est là, dans l’éthique, qu’il y a un appèl à l’unicité du sujet et une donation de sens à la vie malgré tout.55

54

Noms propres, 89/76. Noms propres, 90/77. Translation: “Death is powerless over the finite life that receives a meaning from infinite responsibility for the other, from a diacony constituting the subjectivity of the subject, which is totally a tension toward the other. It is here, in ethics, that there is an appeal to the uniqueness of the subject, and a bestowal of meaning to life, despite death.”

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This tussle between Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Derrida hinges on the question of what “ethics” is. The term shifts to and fro between the order of the singular (responsibility towards the absolute other, viewed as the neighbour or as God) and the order of the general (responsible towards all others, and able to account for this responsibility in terms accessible to all). Derrida opts with Levinas for an ethics which also offers room for singularity. With Levinas, he seems to oppose Kierkegaard in holding that “ethics, as consciousness of a responsibility towards others …far from losing you in generality, singularises you, poses you as a unique individual, as I.” 56 The subject becomes singular, unique by responding to the command/appeal of the absolute other. Whereas Kierkegaard reserves this form of singularity for the order of the religious, the relation to God, Levinas and Derrida believe that we should seek it above all in the order of ethics, the interhuman relation. But we still need to describe the gap between Levinas and Kierkegaard, and this gap is certainly important. Levinas’ criticism of Kierkegaard is that he make religious singularity into something inaccessible and therefore violent. Levinas, going against Kierkegaard, assigns a more substantial value to ethics. Ethics is not a question of simply “becoming singular,” but is an election to singularity aimed at promoting life. Life must be served, not death. Unlike Kierkegaard, Levinas finds the prototype of Abraham’s singularity not in his mysterious readiness to sacrifice his own son, but in his readiness to respond to another voice, which interrupts his readiness to sacrifice and calls him back to life.57 56 57

Noms propres, 90/76.

In this regard Levinas’ interpretation resembles Lacan’s argument for a distance in relation to the Other beyond the law. Abraham’s radical willingness to sacrifice must be ended once and for all. In connection with Lacan’s analysis of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, Paul Moyaert points out that though ethics is unthinkable without an infinite and unconditional obligation, some restraint should also be imposed on this obligation. The Angel’s intervention makes Abraham resist the urge to sacrifice the dearest thing he possesses and give a substitute sign. Abraham is not only reminded that he must obey, he is also


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In other words: for Levinas, the ethics which makes me a unique person is the ethics which calls me back to life. In the name of the law of life I can resist a God who wants and demands the absurd. In Levinas the other is not simply difference, but a reference to the Good beyond being. Infinition, the relation of the finite subject to the infinite, starts in responsibility for the other. This makes me a singular, independent being that speaks on his own behalf and, if necessary, can stand up for the other before God. The reference to Abraham’s plea for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah goes well with Levinas’ view of the religious subject as “atheistic,” separated from God and separated from divine ordinances. Levinas’ view of religion is stamped by the concept of maturity. This also means that religious man stands on his own feet and that he is capable of Abraham’s surprising subversiveness in the dialogue with God about Sodom.58 We can now see that Derrida’s shibboleth-like formula “Tout autre est tout autre” does not really help us towards a better understanding of the relation between the ethical and the religious in Levinas. “Tout autre est tout autre” can only apply to Levinas’ philosophy insofar as God’s infinity and the infinite task which the Other means for the subject can be said to overlap. This does not involve a confusion between God and the neighbour but an ethical condensation of religious experience. Given the experience of God’s absence in this reality, “the religious” can only be expressed in the form of ethics. The otherness of the other only has this meaning of difference, of a possible absolute difference when it is the reference to a “holy commandment.” The “holiness” of the other is not always there in the same way. The moment the other becomes holy, that is to say, absolutely different, is exactly the moment his alterity reveals itself to me as a commandment. The precondition for this is a space of transcendence which does not coincide

shown the distance which exists between him and the Other beyond the law. “The place of the absolute must remain an empty place.” (Moyaert, Ethiek en sublimatie, 141-146). 58 On the subversiveness of Levinas’ concept of religion, see Dorothee C. von Tippelskirch, Liebe von fremd zu fremd, 376-379.

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with the mere difference of the other (the fact that he/she is different from me) and not with my singularity either. The difference stems from my singularity, which is itself the product of a trace drawn by God as the one who has always passed by, and elects man to responsibility, in the trace of his absence. This is a transcendence distinct from the “ordinary” alterity of the other in the sense of “different from me.” Again we see that Levinas and Derrida, despite an apparent similarity, follow different paths. In Levinas the religious takes on an ethical character. Levinas starts from religion and arrives at an ethics which can function as a critique of religion. In Derrida the ethical itself assumes religious traits. This explains his fascination with the theme of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Derrida starts from Levinas’ insight that the ethical experience is an experience of the infinite or the absolute. But Levinas is clearer in his formulation of the need to subject religion (and possible religious violence) to the critique of ethics.59 He confines the “religious” by means of ethical experience, whereas Derrida seeks the religious and mystical foundation of ethics and justice and concentrates on the problem of religious sacrifice. God is he who “asks that one give without knowing.”60

59

Merol Westphal reaches the same conclusion in an interesting comparison between Kierkegaard and Levinas: Levinas tries to find a middle term in the relation between man and God, whereas Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silentio believes that too much stands between man and God, and he therefore seeks a “direct encounter” (Westphal, “Levinas’s Teleological Suspension of the Religious,” 151-161). From another perspective Paul Moyaert points to the dangers of this direct relation in his analysis of Lacan’s version of Abraham’s sacrifice. Moyaert argues that the acceptance of one’s own finiteness starts with a renunciation of infinity, including the infinity of responsibility. The intervention of the law, that is: the boundary which God himself draws, helps to curb evil infinity and to arrive at a restriction of infinite responsibility (Moyaert, Ethiek en Sublimatie, 143, 146). 60 The last chapter of The Gift of Death is wholly concerned with the theme of sacrifice. Abraham’s “gift of death,” the sacrifice of his son, can only be a real sacrifice if there is a secret between Abraham and God. The heart of this secret is that God asks “that one give without knowing, without calculating, reckoning or hoping...” It is in this space, beyond the economic laws of give-and-take, that Derrida situates the religious secret.


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The confrontation with Derrida shows what possibilities Levinas’ religio-critical approach offers. For him, the ethical and the religious do not coincide, but there is room to introduce a critical distinction within religious meaning itself. The “real” voice of God can be recognised by the degree in which this voice calls me back to the domain of ethics, and interrupts action that is self-absorbed (even if we call it “religious”). So this possibility of interruption also applies to religious acts which seems to lose all touch with human reality. This, in my view, is Levinas’ correction of both Kierkegaard and Derrida. In any case the experience of the infinite is this voice which calls back, which calls back to the ethical order.61 In The Gift of Death Derrida goes along with Kierkegaard in an exaltation of subjectivity as religio-ethical singularity. Levinas is further removed from Kierkegaard, criticizes him, and has a different idea of ethical singularity based on a demystifying interruption. 12. Ethics and religion: the interruption which calls back The comparison with Derrida made it clear that Levinas regards the ethical experience as an interruption of religious action which calls back to the ethical order. The emphasis lies on the subject’s independence from God. The comparison with Derrida already showed the religio-critical possibilities which Levinas’ view implies. But there is also a problematical side to the relation of religion and ethics as Levinas describes it. How much room is there for religious experience itself? The danger is that religious meaning in Levinas is entirely swallowed up by ethical meaning. In the foregoing I investigated how Levinas deals with Descartes’ ontological argument. It became clear that he interprets the “idea of the infinite” in an ethical sense, appealing to experiences which can be called extremely moral (giving oneself

61

Derrida gives more attention to this aspect in “Foi et savoir: les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” where he advances Levinas’ thought as a prototype of the view that holiness is possible without sacrality and that “designates disenchantment as the very resource of the religious” (La religion 84; translation from Acts of Religion, 99).

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up for the other, expiation, hostageship). This raised the question whether experience of the infinite, particularised in the extreme moral experience, is an ethical or a religious experience. How do religion and ethics relate in Levinas? Are the extreme moral experiences of which he speaks a substitute for religious experiences, or are they rather a critique of what is ordinarily called “religious experience”? These questions were brought into focus by Theo de Boer’s interpretation of Levinas in The Rationality of Transcendence. Though I can agree with the view that the experiences of responsibility for freedom, of hostageship, and of existence for the other call for interpretation in the context of an intellectual philosophical culture, even if there is reason to connect these experiences with religious experiences, we can still ask whether it is right to call these experiences pre-eminently religious. Is it for instance conceivable that someone recognises this experience (of infinite responsibility), but is opposed to the term religious? And what does the possibility of this opposition mean? From Levinas’ perspective it is natural to respond to this question with the interpretation of the ontological argument dealt with above: “God” appears or manifests himself at moments involving an experience of infinity in thought. Thought is then thwarted by something which it can no longer accommodate, it suffers a breach which it can no longer mend. But how necessary is the connection between this experience of transcendence and religious experience? Does the holy in ethics derive its holiness from the reference to God? Or is the fact of a breach, a trace of transcendence, enough and is a reference to the (metaphysical) idea of God no longer necessary? And conversely: if the coincidence of the ethical experience of transcendence with religious experience can be justified on the basis of Levinas’ thought, is this the final say on what can be called religious according to this variant of philosophy of religion? Whereas Rosenzweig leaves scope for talking about a (more or less direct) relation of man to God, Levinas, particularly in his later thought, puts all emphasis on the distance between the subject and the Infinite, for instance by constantly pointing to the


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fact that the Infinite withdraws from this relation.62 In Rosenzweig it still makes sense to talk about a desire for God, but in the context of Levinas’ thought it is doubtful where such a desire for God comes from, given that it is neither aroused nor reciprocated. I have the impression that, for this religious experience as an experience of a distinctive order, there is more room in Rosenzweig’s philosophy than in that of Levinas. Levinas introduces a tension between religion and ethics via his own form of religious critique, whose formal argumentation draws on the structure of Descartes’ ontological argument. This allows Levinas to criticise the view of religion in which direct contact between God and man is possible or where this contact is mediated, as in Christianity.63 Only a relation like that of the ontological argument, in which the Infinite One is both situated in the finite and separates himself infinitely from it, does justice to the experience of God as an experience of the Infinite. Any other way of thinking this relationship threatens to destroy its infinite character and swallow up God’s infinity in its own immanence. By bending the religious perspective towards the ethical perspective, Levinas therefore wants to do justice to the Infinite of the Absolute He, the illeity which withdraws from every relation. The problem with this form of religious critique, in my view, is that in the long run it undermines its own foundation. Levinas recognises religious experience only as truly religious when it contains a reference to ethical transcendence. All other forms of religious experience are primitive in his eyes. 62

This chapter mentioned in passing that many of Levinas’ texts allude to the (etymological) connection between the adjective “God” (e.g. God, referred to as the “absolute He”) and the verb “s’absolver” (absolvere, to separate). Compare the chapter “Separation et Absolu,” which introduces the relation between the same and the other as a relation between terms which separate from each other: “Le même et l’autre à la fois se tiennent en rapport et s’absolvent de ce rapport, demeurant absolument séparés” (Totalité et infini, 75/102, emphasis RvR). 63 Thus, in a discussion occasioned by “Ideology and Idealism,” he emphasized that the idea of direct contact with God is a Christian concept: “The direct encounter with God, this is a Christian concept. As Jews, we are always threesome: I and you and the Third who is in our midst. And only as a Third does He reveal himself.” (The Levinas Reader, 247).

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MAN AS A PLACE OF GOD Tout ce qui ne peut se ramener à une relation interhumaine représente, non pas la forme supérieure, mais à jamais la forme primitive de la religion.64

By its very nature religious experience adheres to immanence and thinking in terms of participation, it is “bound to being,” because it can only speak in terms of disclosure and revelation. In this sense religious experience cannot teach philosophy anything about transcendence: D’emblée donc l’être réligieux interprète son vécu comme expérience. A son corps défendant, il interprète déjà Dieu dont il prétend faire expérience, en termes d’être, de présence et d’immanence.65

However, I would claim that both the experience of immanence and transcendence are present in religious experience. So it is both an experience of God’s presence and an experience of God’s absence, both distance and proximity. But a philosophy like that of Levinas, in which the words “being,” “presence,” and “immanence” have acquired a negative connotation and have been contaminated by their relation with “thematizing” thought, can no longer do justice to the element of presence in religious experience. In other words: in order to regard religion as an interruption, there must be something that is interrupted and has meaning apart from the interruption. Levinas fails to appreciate this. He does not show how the religious experience directed at God himself acquires meaning in everyday life and how it could be nourished. His idea of an ethical interruption which interrupts self-absorbed religiosity is valuable for the critical and demystifying effect which such an interruption can have. It is questionable as soon as the interruption starts to feed on what it still depends on: religious experience itself. 64

Totalité et infini, 52/79. Translation: “Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior but the forever primitive form of religion.” 65 De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 103/62. Translation: “From the outset, the religious being interprets what he lives through as experience. In spite of himself, he already interprets God, of whom he claims to have an experience, in terms of being, presence, and immanence.”

CHAPTER 6 HERMENEUTICS OF KENOSIS: THE ROAD OF DISPOSSESSION ...moi responsable je ne finis pas de me vider de moi-même.1

Sometimes words move from one field of language to another. In modern philosophy this applies to the originally Greek word kenosis, which was first mainly used by theologians. Since philosophy’s religious turn, present-day philosophers use the concept of kenosis to search for new ways of speaking about God in an era after the “death of God.” Thus Gianni Vattimo makes a connection between secularisation and the end of metaphysics as forms of kenosis, in which the Christian God sheds more and more of his traditional metaphysical properties, in order to arrive at the real truth of Christianity.2 Derrida’s wanderings through negative theology are also inspired by kenosis. We need a kenosis, an emptying of language, says Derrida, to allow a new way of speaking about God.3 In this chapter I will give an analysis of the meaning of kenosis in Levinas’ thought, against the background of what was previously said about ethical subjectivity and the relationship with God. As a Jewish thinker Levinas relates the kenosis of God and the self-emptying of the subject to each other without reference to the the figure of Christ. He reverts to an older, “Old Testament” view of kenosis, and by doing so he raises the question whether the Christological sense of kenosis actually introduces 1

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 120/73. Vattimo, Belief, 46-48. 3 Derrida’s Sauf le nom (1993) on the kenosis of language needed to allow a new way of speaking about God. In “Foi et savoir” Derrida points to the context of God’s death as a “horizon kénotique” of present-day God-talk (La réligion, 57, see also 24, 31). 2

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anything new in history. In this connection his most important discussion partner is Vattimo, who enters into discussion with Levinas precisely over the latter’s “Old Testament” view of God and who emphasises what is historically new about the Christological view of kenosis. In what follows I will first discuss Vattimo’s criticism. After that, Levinas’ thought on kenosis will be dealt with at length. Finally I will return to the comparison with Vattimo in a roundabout way. But before we get into all this I want to deal with kenotic themes in the novel Disgrace by the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, because Coetzee’s outlook on the “road of dispossession” of his main characters offers a good framework for discussing Vattimo’s and Levinas’ perspective on kenosis.4 1. Disgrace: kenosis as the renunciation of identity The lines marked out in Disgrace gave me the insight that kenosis is not only a theological notion. The main characters of this gripping novel undergo a development that I would like to call “kenotic,” apart from any direct connection with theology or mysticism. The story is about David Lurie, professor of communication sciences, and his daughter Lucie, who lives on a farm in the countryside. Lucie is single and thus an exception in her environment. David Lurie visits her after he has run into trouble at his university: he is being accused of having a relationship with a female student, in which he abused his power and position as a professor. When summoned to appear before a commission, he admits to being guilty on all counts, but he refuses to “show remorse” and can only say that he followed his Eros, who was stronger than he. Because of this affair he loses his job, but it does not seem to move him. So he stays with his daughter for a while and marvels at her life as a woman all by herself in the country. Suddenly something happens that will change the life 4

Disgrace appeared in 1999 and was awarded the Booker Prize in the same year, but Coetzee’s description of relations in South African society, in which, as a reviewer stated, brutal tyranny has been replaced by brutal anarchy, also caused controversy.

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of Lucie and David forever: the farm is plundered by a group of black raiders that rape Lucie and assault and beat up David when he comes to her rescue. David and Lucie respond quite differently to this turn of events: David is outraged and wants the men arrested and brought before a judge as soon as possible. Lucie is sad and turned into herself, but lets everything take its course. When it turns out that she is pregnant, she will not have an abortion. She carries the child of the rapist and agrees to a marriage with her black co-worker and partner on the farm as his second wife. Having been received into his family, she will henceforth be accepted in the rural community. The future husband is a relative of one of the rapists, probably the one who is the father of Lucie’s unborn child. Lucie’s attitude is a mixture of resignation and perseverance: she is willing to give up who she is (an independent woman with her own business) in order to stay in the place where she loves to be, on her own land, with the animals and plants dear to her. David also undergoes a development. He stays around Lucie and starts working together with Bev, a woman that takes care of stray dogs and, if need be, puts them down in a gentle way. He has absolutely no feeling for dogs; in the beginning he considers Bev a bore and unattractive to boot. Yet he grows to like her and in the end he is more intimate with her than with the women who used to be in his life before. At the end of the story we see him doing his job: he personally takes the garbage bags with dead stray dogs to the place where they will be incinerated. A kind of last honour—because nobody else will do it. The story of David Lurie ends in the dedication to this job. Of course the word kenosis is never mentioned in this novel, but the motif is clearly present and operates on different levels. It’s always about letting go, letting go of the past, of an influential position at the university; letting go of a successful future that would seem the natural destiny for the daughter of a professor. Letting go of positions of power and the status connected with them. In addition there is the motif of solidarity with what is insignificant, the stray dogs, the farm and the land, Lucie’s unborn child.

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In Disgrace Lucie and David each in their own way go through a process in which they give up their own identities. With Lucie in particular the results are unnerving and one asks oneself whether the prize is worth the sacrifice. David one sees letting go of his status of professor and his identity as womanizer. In the beginning of the story he is depicted as the man who “follows his Eros,” but who is ultimately indifferent to the feelings of the women with whom he strikes up relationships. At the end of the book compassion for the ugly Bev and the dying dogs prevails in his life. With the kenosis motif in Disgrace Coetzee is working out a new way of looking at identity. Identity is not only the confirmation of what you already are or your own development in a process in which you have enriching or valuable experiences. Identity also exists at another level, where one lets go of the need to “be someone,” for example by connecting one’s life to what is insignificant. We don’t need to call this “loss of self.” To be sure, there is a letting go of individuality here and it is literally about dispossession. But what is striking—and this is exactly what Coetzee gets across—is that the main characters in his story reach a deeper level of their own existence on this road of dispossession: where their existence is genuinely connected with others or the other, human beings, animals, and land. Using the comparison between Vattimo and Levinas at the end of this article, I will show how fruitful and interesting this perspective on kenosis is. 2. Gianni Vattimo: kenosis and the hermeneutical experience With his essay Credere di credere Gianni Vattimo gave a new interpretation of kenosis in the context of contemporary philosophy.5 Initially Vattimo gained a reputation in philosophical circles as an interpreter of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Later he developed a hermeneutical philosophy with a personal perspective on the history of metaphysics. Credere di credere is an elaboration of this hermeneutical philosophy. According to Vattimo, the principal motif of the history of metaphysics is the “weakening of strong 5

Vattimo, Belief.


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structures.” In this he connects up with Heidegger’s criticism of objectivist metaphysics, which identifies Being with the object and ultimately reduces it to a product of the will to power. Vattimo argues that this objectivist metaphysics has turned out to be untenable in the end. Weakening or dissolution characterises “being” in the era of the end of metaphysics. The conception of reality in our culture is not strong and objectivist. Science talks about objects that are far removed from everyday experience. Technology, the production of goods, and the media are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from the artificial, the realistic from invention.6 Vattimo sees this movement mirrored in a metaphysics that gradually becomes nihilist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ending up with a conception of reality in which there is no longer anything that can serve as objective and normative truth. Heidegger and Nietzsche realised that the history of Western thought would end in this type of nihilism. What is more, they refused to see this outcome as an error that could perhaps be rectified retrospectively by discovering a point of view from which reality could be something other than the will to power. On the contrary, the way of Nietzsche and Heidegger is characterised by an ever-deepening turn toward the history of metaphysics as the history of an error that has to end in nihilism. Heidegger consciously foregoes any attempts to overcome (Überwinden) this history within philosophical thought. He recommends the attitude of Andenken; comparable to continually replaying the long feature film that metaphysics after all is. Everything must be experienced anew, so that the insight can grow that everything had to go this way (including the many errors). Being can only be experienced hermeneutically, as a historical tradition of insights that reveal their most characteristic possibility for each period of humanity.7 In Credere di credere Vattimo connects the history of metaphysics as a gradual weakening of powerful structures to the Christian doctrine of the Son of God becoming a human being. The incarnation is a foreshadowing or an announcement of the 6 7

Belief, 31. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 174,175.

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weak ontology that Western metaphysics ends up with. The nature of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the doctrine of the incarnation and kenosis seems to be one of transposition. God has the features that metaphysics attributes to objective being. He is eternal, unchangeable, the ground of what is. Dissolution of metaphysical structures in Christian theology means the “death of God.” We can read the weakening of metaphysics from the incarnation of God, his kenosis. In Vattimo’s eyes the process of secularization, in which the strong conception of God vanishes from culture, is intrinsic to Christianity and has been foretold in a sense by the doctrine of God’s incarnation. From this perspective on kenosis and history Vattimo criticises the philosophy of Levinas and dialectical theology on account of their too radical understanding of God’s transcendence, which causes it to become separated from history. Levinas supposedly holds on to a transcendent ethical truth that is not amenable to hermeneutical interpretation and thus acquires a classical objective nature. In no way does God become part of history in Levinas. He remains “outside.” Appealing to the necessity of radical historicity, Vattimo questions the possibility and the justification of this “outside.” No longer can anybody take the liberty (even partly) to ignore history.8 Becoming acquainted with Vattimo’s view of kenosis is an occasion for me to examine Levinas’ view in greater detail. Vattimo regards him as a kindred thinker, who is trying to overtake metaphysics by rediscovering the biblical roots of Western thought.9 In spite of this laudable start, Levinas, in Vattimo’s opinion, falls back into metaphysics. Vattimo maintains that philosophy needs “the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God” in order to understand itself and the signs of the times.

8

In the same way he criticizes dialectical theology that tries to take advantage of secularization by conceiving of it as a “purification of the Christian faith,” which supposedly leads to a “more open recognition of faith’s authentic essence” (Belief, 46). See also Vattimo’s “La trace de la trace,” where he criticizes Levinas’ idea of alterity for its lack of concreteness. 9 La religion, 102.


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3. Kenosis in Levinas: introduction Unlike Vattimo, Levinas does not advocate a return to religion. Rather he holds that philosophical reflection is open to human experience in the widest possible sense of the word, so that the interpretation of religious experience can be called a task of philosophy as well. Kenosis is such a religious experience. The theme “kenosis” seems to be mentioned fairly late in Levinas’ works. In fact he does not discuss kenosis explicitly before 1968, in a lecture on the problem of the incarnation, entitled “Un Dieu homme?”10 But a closer look at this lecture shows that the ideas Levinas puts forward here do not differ very much from his line of thought in a pivotal article like “Enigme et Phenomène.” 11 Besides, the notion of “giving up oneself” or “purging” is also mentioned in Totalité et infini, mostly in the context of a new perspective on the subject and on the question of goodness. 12 Here, Levinas gives new meaning to the encounter of I and Thou, the Self and the Other. He calls it a confrontation with the quality of critique and judgement. Under the influence of this confrontation the Self undergoes a change. It no longer strives for self-maintenance, it purges itself (se vider de soi) and it no longer centres around its own kernel or nucleus. In this period Levinas also develops the idea of God’s creation as contraction.13 In both insights, the purging of the subject and the contraction of God, we can perceive 10

“Un Dieu Homme?” first published in Exercises de la patience no. 1, Paris 1980, and later in Entre nous (69-76/53-60). 11 “Enigme et phénomène” (1965); with “La trace de l’autre” and “Langage et proximité” it is characteristic of the development of Levinas’ systematic philosophy after Totalité et infini; these three articles were collected in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl en Heidegger (187-236). An English translation of “Enigme et phénomène” appeared in Basic Philosophical Writings (65-77). 12 “The I ... is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation [of the self—RvR], purges itself interminably and is confirmed precisely in this incessant effort to purge itself. This is called goodness.” (Totalité et infini, 222/245). 13 Totalité et infini, 75-78/102-105.

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a foreshadowing of the notion of kenosis in his later works, where it is used to elucidate the subject’s relationship with transcendence. Levinas now emphasises the fact that the relationship of the thinking, rational subject with transcendence is related to philosophy as such. In his view, we must not seek the basis for this relationship in knowledge, because theoretical thought is not decisive in human spirituality. Philosophy will not become less rational or even irrational because of this relationship. Levinas defends the reverse. Philosophy must develop a relationship with this non-theoretical spirituality, in order to become more rational. When philosophy opens itself up to transcendence in the right way, new opportunities arise for real rationality. But the question is: what image, what representation can we have of this openness for transcendence that is not based on intellectual understanding? Confronted with this question, Levinas refers to the notion of kenosis. Traditionally kenosis expresses the descent or approach of the Transcendent to earth. Transcendence (or the Infinite, or God) is no longer a lofty and elevated idea that prefers to remain by itself and can only be understood by itself. This is the representation of God in the philosophy of Aristotle, which greatly influenced the Western philosophical tradition as a whole up to the philosophy of Hegel. A kenotic representation of God’s relationship to reality opens up a different perspective: transcendence can relate to reality by a descent or humiliation that is not contrary to God’s transcendence, but rather an articulation of it. We can conclude this first reflection on the place of kenosis in the philosophy of Levinas by stating that it has an important and distinctive place in his thought. Kenosis is the perspective that helps elucidate and interpret the relationship between philosophy and transcendence, the main theme in Levinas’ philosophy. In the two following sections, I will take a closer look at two articles that explicitly deal with the theme of kenosis. First I will discuss God’s kenosis based on the article “Un dieu homme?” (Can God become man?), which gives a sharper image of the connection between kenosis and transcendence. Next, I will show on the basis of the article “Judaïsme et kénose” how much


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Levinas’ treatment of the theme of kenosis is rooted in Jewish tradition. Interpreting these articles enables me to point out how Levinas deals with the theme of kenosis in other publications as well. I will do this in subsequent sections based on the themes “knowledge of God,” “the face of the other,” and “substitution.” 4. Kenosis of God In 1968 Catholic intellectuals organised a symposium dealing with the question “Who is Jesus Christ?” Levinas was asked for a contribution. At that time he had only been a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre for a relatively short time (since 1963). He had become well known as a representative of the phenomenological tradition and as the author of several Jewish studies. Within the framework of the theme mentioned above—“Who is Jesus Christ?”—Levinas concentrates on the question of the incarnation in a lecture entitled: “Un Dieu Homme?”14 In the lecture’s introduction he poses several questions and expresses his doubts: how can he be expected to make a real contribution on this subject? He is a philosopher, rooted in Jewish tradition. The notion of God becoming man seems to be characteristic of the Christian tradition, not of Jewish thought. The only ties that connect Levinas to the Christian tradition are the ties of friendship. Friendship is also the reason why he is speaking at this conference. So he decides to speak about the question that is set before him, however difficult that may be. But before doing so he limits the scope of his comments. Naturally he is not going to be able to speak from the perspective of a belief that he does not share. The notion of God becoming man may have dimensions for a Christian that are impenetrable for an outsider. He admits that his lecture can be no more than an attempt to define the philosophical meaning and validity of this notion. But philosophical interpretation does not exhaust the meaning of religious representations, and what philosophy has to say about it may not be 14

See note 10.

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enough for a Christian believer. Besides, it can also be useful for a communion of believers to acknowledge the boundaries beyond which religion cannot be substituted by something else.15 What could be the philosophical validity of the religious representation of God’s incarnation? Levinas mentions two possible perspectives here: first, it could be applied to the relationship between immanence and transcendence. In the second place, the idea of incarnation could lead to a new perspective on subjectivity by way of the notion of substitution. For the notions of incarnation and substitution have been closely related in the theological tradition. Christ is God who becomes man (incarnation). In his suffering and death he vicariously bears the burden of the sin of the world (substitution). It is Levinas’ view that the theological idea of substitution sheds new light on the nature of human subjectivity. Apparently subjectivity is not only distinguished by the desire for autonomy or self-determination—as is assumed in the tradition of Western thought—and the subject does not only exist for its own sake. Rather, the self is in essence also a being-for-the-other. Thus the religious conception of the incarnation by way of the idea of substitution contributes to the view of subjectivity as a being-for-the-other that Levinas particularly defends in his later work. In the section on substitution I will deal more thoroughly with the philosophical arguments he offers in this connection. In this section I will limit myself to the first aspect mentioned above: the incarnation of God as the descent of God to mankind without renunciation of his transcendence. Levinas points out the difference between this conception of divinity and that of Greek philosophy, where there are only two possible modes of existence for gods: they can descend to the human level as a mythical figure (thereby losing a part of their divinity). They can also exist by themselves, absolute and pure, having no resemblance to the earthly state of being. This absolutely transcendent divinity is defended by Plato and Aristotle. Their philosophical judgements regarding the essence of God have greatly influenced Western philosophy. Up to the philosophy of Hegel, 15

Entre nous, 70/53.


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thinking that God is indifferent to the world has been the norm. God manifests himself in the finite world, but at the same time he exists at an infinite distance from the finite. In this model of the relationship between God and the world there is no room for a manifestation of the Infinite before the world and human existence. And conversely, there is no possibility for man to exist coram Deo, before God. Levinas concludes that the Hegelian absolute view of God’s transcendence has made it practically impossible to think about the confrontation of man and God philosophically. This is a loss, because this confrontation between man and God, between the finite and the transcendent, is important and fruitful for philosophy itself. Not satisfied with the traditional solutions of philosophy, Levinas proposes a different philosophical model of transcendence based on the philosophy of Kierkegaard and the biblical notion of God’s humility. He states that it is indeed possible for God to manifest himself in the world without giving up his transcendence, when he manifests himself in humility, in an alliance with the defeated, the poor, and the expelled.16 It is possible to recognise God, not in the great facts of history, but in the miserable and marginal conditions of the outcast. He participates in the existence of the expelled. In Kierkegaard’s philosophy this insight is developed in the idea of the persecuted truth, the truth that finds no recognition and is persecuted in the name of another, more universal and evident truth. This truth can manifest itself in public life, whereas the persecuted truth has no place in the prevailing order. The persecuted truth can only exist by way of a rupture, an incision, a disruption of order.17 Transcendence presents itself in humility. This manifestation is disrupting and in a certain way “not of this world.” Levinas here brings to mind the Old Testament representation of God as one who reveals himself not in violence or might, but “in a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:12). God asks for our recognition without giving up his other16

Entre nous, 70/55. Entre nous 74/58. In “Enigme et phénomène” Levinas makes the same connection between transcendence and interruption and Kierkegaard’s idea of a persecuted truth (En découvrant l’existence, 209-210/Basic Philosophical Writings, 71).

17

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ness and his incognito. One has to give up certainty to agree with the proposals and the enigmatic revelations of this “God without daring.” An encounter with Him seems to be possible only if the desire for knowledge and certainty is abandoned. In such encounter in which “true communication” is to take place, it is impossible to play it safe. One always runs the risk of miscommunication.18 This concept of God’s humility contains the seed of a new philosophical notion of transcendence in which persecution and humiliation are seen as signs of truth or “revelation.” A revelation, however, that does not have the character of an unveiling, because what reveals itself in this revelation does not show itself as a phenomenon that can be seen and grasped. Revelation manifests itself in secret. Real transcendence seeks its manifestation in an enigma that conceals itself as it appears. Levinas elucidates this new mode of manifestation through the metaphor of “trace.” This opens up the possibility of thinking of God as the absolutely transcendent. He is present and absent in reality through the traces he leaves behind in the face of the other person. The trace is not just a word, it is the proximity of God in the countenance of my fellow-man.19 This formula gives us an answer to the question how the relationship between the self and the transcendent can be thought of in philosophy. The perspective of the trace makes it possible to conceive of a confrontation with the Transcendent without Him having to give up his transcendence. Man can exist coram Deo: he is confronted with the Transcendent in the face of the other, where traces of God become visible. The face of the other is confronting; it is not an object of perception. In an enigmatic way the face of the other originates from the Infinite. We can come to a concise conclusion of this section. When, in the context of a group of Christians posing a religious question, Levinas starts speaking about kenosis more explicitly, his answer makes it clear that there is much continuity between the theme 18

Here Levinas again follows Kierkegaard, who said that the persecuted truth can only be recognized and responded to by a subject willing to run a risk, a subject that is no longer “stuck” in being. This explains why Kierkegaard put so much emphasis on the uniqueness of the subject. 19 Entre nous, 73/57.


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of kenosis and the themes he developed earlier in his philosophy. For example, the manifestation of transcendence as humility, disturbance, and rupture of the order of theoretical knowledge. Characteristic of the way Levinas treats the theme of the kenosis of the transcendent is his insistence on a close relationship between gnoseological and practical aspects. Transcendence is conceived of as an interruption of knowledge, but at the same time it is described by the metaphor of the trace that is visible in the face of the other. 5. Relating God’s omnipotence to humility: kenosis in Jewish thought Thus far on the philosophical interpretation of kenosis. But what about the relation to the religious language of Judaism and Christianity? Levinas addresses this question in another article, “Judaïsme and Kénose.”20 It is impossible to explain the concept of kenosis without talking about the well-known text on Christ’s kenosis in Philippians 2. Levinas is not afraid to connect this text with representations of God in the Psalms, where God’s majesty is glorified together with his involvement with the poor and with human misery. As a central text he quotes Megillah 31a where R. Jochanan says: “Wherever you will find the power of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, you will find his humility; that is written in the Pentateuch (in the Torah) and said again in the Prophets and repeated in the Writings.”21 Jewish theology, however, has always been cautious in its use of the notion of kenosis, because the term is associated with Christ and the incarnation of God, connotations that are preferably avoided in Jewish theology.22 20

“Judaïsme et Kénose” in: À l’heure des nations, 133-153. À l’heure des nations, 134. 22 Levinas pointed this out during a conversation, an account of which is included as an appendix to Transcendance et intelligibilité (English translation in Basic Philosophical Writings). One of the participants in the conversation brought up the theme of kenosis. In his answer Levinas made it clear that his acceptance of kenosis often causes him to be criticized in Jewish circles. Yet precisely on the issue of kenosis there turns out to be recognition and affinity between Jewish and Christian thought. The point of difference must be sought 21

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Nevertheless, there are testimonies to an authentic Jewish perspective on kenosis. Levinas finds them in Nefesh Hachaim, a book by the Lithuanian rabbi Chaim of Volozin (1759-1821), published posthumously. This expert in the study of the Talmud and the Kabbalah speaks about kenosis without reservation. Chaim of Volozin was a disciple of the famous master Eliahu, the Gaon of Vilna. He founded an important and exemplary Yeshiva (a house of study) in the little town of Volozin in 1802. In his thought everything is centred on the Talmud as the authentic element of Jewish spirituality. The Volozin rabbi did not limit studying to the intellectual realm, but also stressed its liturgical significance: the study of the Torah was considered of value because it connects humankind with the will of God, which, though not incarnate, is contained in the Torah. Levinas’ interpretation of Nefesh Hachaim develops two perspectives on God. On the one hand there is the conception of God as the soul of the world. He has created many worlds in a hierarchical constellation, and he is the soul of these worlds. On the other hand we see the special place of humanity in this hierarchy. Everything depends on man, even the pouring out of God’s spirit. The soul of man, called “divine breath” in Genesis 2:7, is near the throne of God. Divine breath is the soul of the man, who is in living communication with God through the study of the Torah. In this way man nourishes God’s association with the world. His faithfulness to the Torah not only serves his own salvation, but also the salvation of the universe.23 There is a certain kenosis of God in this conception of man as being responsible for the entire universe in terms of its association with God. God only reigns through someone who mediates

in the fact that traditionally within Christianity the notion of kenosis is exclusively related to Christ. In the Geneva conversation quoted above it appeared, however, that the Christian side also realises that it is necessary to broaden the meaning of kenosis. Too much focus on the figure of Christ may compromise the meaning of kenosis for every believer—in the sense of selfemptying and exhortation to humility, substitution, and sacrifice (Transcendance et intelligibilité, 54-60/149-159). 23 À l’heure des nations, 144/125.


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an ethical order, an order in which one being is responsible for another. God subordinates his power to man’s ethical consent. Levinas calls this: “one of the primordial meanings of kenosis.”24 6. The meaning of kenosis: preliminary conclusions “Un Dieu Homme” and “Judaïsme et Kénose,” the articles I discussed in the previous sections, frequently mention the notion of kenosis. Levinas uses it for a more detailed articulation of the notion of transcendence, on the basis of which humility, disturbance, and rupture can be connected with the experience of a transcendent God, who manifests himself as the other, trace, or enigma. It becomes clear, too, that Levinas relies on Kierkegaard’s philosophy for this connection between transcendence and kenosis, but also on a Jewish tradition of kenotic thought, which makes God’s relationship with the world depend on human action in accordance with the Law. In the sections below I will discuss the philosophical implications of this connection of transcendence with kenosis. What does it mean for our knowledge of God? How does Levinas relate the kenosis of God to the kenosis of the subject? 7. Kenosis and the knowledge of God The influence of Jewish spirituality is unmistakable in Levinas´ representation of the descent or kenosis of God, but he makes it clear that religion is not the only road to spirituality. All great religious traditions collect and pass down memories of the positive revelations of God. Levinas, however, is also intrigued by the question of what could have preceded these religious revelations. Can we assume that there is also a call that man has to respond to as such, before the existence of any religious meaning? Can we imagine a connection with the transcendent outside of religious traditions? Perhaps we have to look to philosophy for this connection, because philosophy is subject to an “ancient 24

À l’heure des nations, 143, 145/124, 126.

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spiritual claim” that urges itself before revelation can be heard in a specific religious way. Philosophers also respond to transcendence and articulate it, but what approach is adequate to the transcendent? What is the right way to give testimony of transcendence in philosophical thought? 7.1 Spirituality and awakening In Transcendance et intelligibilité Levinas works out the hypothesis that human consciousness becomes rational because it is touched by the transcendent or the Infinite. This touch has the nature of an awakening. Consciousness is awakened by the touch of transcendence. But transcendence can only get in touch with human consciousness by means of kenosis, because the Infinite has to contract itself, it has to descend in order to be able to manifest itself to human consciousness.25 Again, Levinas makes it clear that not every metaphysical system allows this descent. In Aristotle’s metaphysics God himself is the only true theologian or philosopher. God is intelligible only to God. No other creature but He is capax infiniti. To manifest himself to or before finite consciousness would mean that God is no longer infinite. It is the philosophy of Descartes that inspires Levinas to develop an epistemological model that allows the Infinite to connect with finite consciousness. In his Metaphysical Meditations, Descartes wrote about “the idea of the Infinite in us.” Descartes assumes that the idea of the Infinite is both in and transcendent to consciousness (or the cogito). The reason for this is that the infinite manifests itself in consciousness as a notion that refers to an excess. The idea of the Infinite itself expresses that it contains more than an idea could possibly contain, and therefore it inspires consciousness to exceed its own boundaries. Levinas’ interpretation of the idea of the Infinite differs from that of Descartes in that metaphysical implications are absent. For Levinas the discovery of the idea of the Infinite does not result in a proof of the existence of God. Levinas is not interested in such a proof. Instead he asks how the idea of the Infinite can possibly 25

Transcendance et intelligibilité, 26/157.


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come to a finite mind. How can the idea of the infinite occur to us? The only possible way is a descent of the infinite, a contraction of God. The surprise is: here we come across the notions of kenosis and contraction in the midst of a purely epistemological argument. The confrontation with the idea of the Infinite does not leave consciousness unaffected. On the contrary, the confrontation is disturbing and jolting, because it is an encounter with something completely different. And therefore the nature of thinking itself changes: it is no longer a way of observing, contemplating, or understanding. Thinking gives up its activity here. It is changed into passivity. It is moved and touched by the idea of the Infinite: Affection irréversible du fini par l’infini. Passivité et patience qui ne se récupère pas dans une thématisation, mais où, amour et crainte de Dieu—ou adoration et éblouissement dont parle Descartes dans le dernier alinéa de la troisième Méditation Métaphysique—l’idée de Dieu est, de fond en comble, affectivité...26

In using the word affectivity here, Levinas is consciously referring to Heidegger’s analysis of human existence or Dasein in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger characterises existence or Dasein as Befindlichkeit (Affectivity).27 Affectivity arises in Dasein when it is moved by its own finiteness, its “Being-toward-death.” Levinas also realises the importance of the subject’s affectivity and receptivity. Without this quality human existence would not be able to comprehend or impart meaning. But Levinas points to another cause of affectivity: it has to be found not in our beingtoward-death, but in our anxiety about the death of the other. To be moved by the idea of the Infinite is another kind of affectivity

26 Transcendance et intelligibilité, 26/157. Translation: “An irreversible affection of the finite by the infinite. A passivity and a patience which are not recuperated in a thematization but in which, as love and fear of God—or the adoration and dazzling of which Descartes speaks in the last section of the Third Meditation—the idea of God is affectivity from top to bottom...” 27 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 29.

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that could be called “theological” or “religious,” because it delivers the subject from anxiety about its own existence, and opens it up to the Good and to social proximity. 7.2 The idea of the infinite becomes specific in the face of the other The confrontation with the Infinite that causes an awakening towards rationality can only be really confronting when we meet someone or something that is completely “different.” This otherness cannot have the nature of an idea, because it is easy to absorb ideas into our own thought system. Therefore Levinas leaves the territory of the formal analysis of the idea of the infinite from the Cartesian perspective, and explores reality in search of specific instances of the idea of the Infinite. Metaphysics should come back to earth. This has been made possible by Husserl’s phenomenology, which starts with specific experiences, even when trying to ascertain the meaning of theoretical notions. Levinas characterises the phenomenological method as an inquiry into “the human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility.” He assumes that this is the way “for the wisdom of heaven to return to earth.”28 Totalité et infini as a whole is a treatise about the question of how the idea of the Infinite itself can be made specific. Desire, conscience, ethical judgement, and the face of the other are mentioned as significant horizons that give meaning to the idea of the Infinite. This method of intentional analysis as a search for meaning also guides Levinas in his later works. In De Dieu qui vient à l’idée the question of concretisation is put into words as follows: Nous pensons que l’idée de l’infini en moi—ou ma relation à Dieu— me vient dans la concrétude de ma relation à l’autre homme, dans la socialité qui est ma responsabilité pour le prochain: responsabilité que, dans aucune “expérience” je n’ai contractée, mais dont le visage d’autrui, de par son altérité, de par son étrangeté même, parle le commandement venu on ne sait d’où.29

28

Transcendance et intelligibilité, 27, 28/158.


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In the text quoted above, the meaning of the descent or contraction of God becomes clear. According to Levinas the face of the other is both a manifestation and a hiding-place of God. Only in this way does the word “God” receive its proper significance. In his philosophy there is no other “way towards God”—on the contrary, Levinas opposes any other attempt to discover a way towards God.30 In the concretisation contained in the reference to the “face of the other” we can also recognise a kenosis of God in the sense that it implies the end of a strong ontological idea of God that can be made objective, as in the representation of God as the ground of all reality. God does not enter human thoughts as the result of humanity’s search for an unshakeable foundation of its existence, but the thought of God arises in humans in all its vividness as one relates to the other. When God manifests himself in this way, it happens by way of an interruption. I, the subject, am being addressed. My plans and thoughts are being interrupted by the other appealing to me. 7.3 Kenosis and religious desire This concretization of God has far-reaching implications for the pattern of religious desire. In the Christian tradition religious desire is seen as a desire for God, as the absolute end of all human desire. St. Augustine’s Confessions are the original model for this kind of thinking. Levinas does not consider this a fruitful perspective, because in that case desire ends at the final destination, God. Augustine sees the restlessness of the heart finding

29

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 11/xiv. Translation: “We think that the idea of the Infinite in me—or my relation to God—comes to me in the concreteness of my relation to the other man, in the sociality which is my responsibility for the neighbour. Here is found a responsibility that I contracted in no “experience”, but of which the face of the other, through its alterity and through its strangeness, states the command that comes from who knows where.” This “who knows where” is not a simple negation of knowing, but indicates that the face of the other refers to an intrigue which involves the self, the other, and God and which is connected with the diachrony of time, which Levinas sees as a “being devoted to God.” 30 See the analysis of this theme from “Dieu et la philosophie” (among other texts) in Chapter 5 of this book.

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peace in the contemplation of God, the Eternal one. According to Levinas true religious desire has no final destination. It is without end, because God himself (as the “object” of religious desire) points to something else. The Infinite or God refers, “from the heart of its very desirability, to the undesirable proximity of the others.”31 Levinas here coins a new form of the French pronoun “il”: the Infinite is an “illeity.” God is no longer considered a Thou, open to direct confrontation. He has been changed into a “He,” who withdraws from the encounter and is absent. In this absence He leaves a trace in the face of the other. The pattern of desire is thus interrupted. It is no longer a relationship between two entities, a “third party” is involved, it has become an eternal triangle. Le Desir ou la réponse à l’Énigme ou la moralité est une intrigue à trois: le Moi s’approche de l’Infini en allant généreusement vers le Toi, encore mon contemporain, mais qui, dans la trace de l’Illeïté, se présente à partir d’une profondeur du passé, de face, qui m’approche. Je m’approche de l’Infini dans la mesure où je m’oublie pour mon prochain qui me regarde; je ne m’oublie qu’en rompant la simultanéité indéphasable de la représentation, en existant au-delà de ma mort. Je m’approche de l’Infini en me sacrifiant.32

The interruption of the other changes the pattern of desire into a movement of disinterestedness (dés-intéressement). Here it becomes possible to let go of oneself—existing beyond death—and the other. There is an affinity in this fragment with the Heideggerian theme of Gelassenheit. But the difference is that Levinas considers this letting go of oneself to be devotion, an act of dedi-

31

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 113/69. En découvrant l’existence, 215. Translation from Basic Philosophical Writings, 76: “Desire, or the response to an Enigma or morality, is an intrigue with three personages; the I approaches the Infinite by going generously toward the You, who is still my contemporary, but, in the trace of Illeity, presents himself out of the depth of the past, faces and approaches me. I approach the infinite insofar as I forget myself for the neighbour who looks at me; I forget myself only in breaking the undephasable simultaneity of representation, in existing beyond my death. I approach the other by sacrificing myself.”

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cation. On the first pages of one of his last works, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, he defines this devotion, which is related to the diachrony of time, as the essence of his own philosophy: Ma pensée la plus profonde et qui porte toute pensée, ma pensée de l’infini plus ancienne que la pensée du fini, est la diachronie même du temps, la coïncidence, le désaississement même: une façon d’“être voué” avant tout acte de conscience, et plus profondément que la conscience, de par la gratuité du temps…Façon dé être voué qui est dévotion. À Dieu qui n’est pas intentionnalité…Dévotion qui, dans son dés-inter-essement ne manque précisément aucun but, mais est détournée—par un Dieu qui “aime l’étranger” plutôt qu’il ne se montre—vers l’autre homme dont j’ai à répondre.33

On the level of this “deepest thought” we find in fact three meanings of the word kenosis connected to each other. In the first place: God gives up his divine presence and manifests himself in the other (as a trace in the face of the other). Secondly: this divine strategy of presence and absence interrupts the pattern of religious desire. Religious desire is no longer able to pursue its goal and so it changes its shape. It becomes devotion or “being dedicated to.” This means that in Levinas’ view man can only come nearer to God by forgetting himself as a person who has religious desire and pursues his goal, God. In being disinterested, in renouncing this goal, man can find proximity to God in proximity to his fellow human being. Thirdly: this seems to imply a non-metaphysical philosophy of religion in which only the relationship between the self and the other, seen as responsibility, is left. But this ethical relationship is also interrupted, because the other person cannot be identified with himself alone. He is this person, but more than that, he is 33

De Dieu qui vient à l’idée 12/xiv-xv. Translation: “My deepest thought, which carries all thought, my thought of the infinite, older than the thought of the finite, is the very diachrony of time. It is non-coincidence, dispossession itself. This is a way of ‘being dedicated’ before any act of consciousness, and more deeply so than in consciousness, by way of the gratuity of time. A way of being dedicated that is devotion. An unto-God (A Dieu), that is precisely not intentionality in its noetico-noematic complexion...It is like a devotion that, in its disinterestedness, misses precisely no goal but is diverted—by a God who “loves the stranger” rather than showing himself—toward the other man for whom I have to respond.”

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also a trace of God. He points to an entity that transcends him, to Infinity. In thus pointing beyond himself the other is not the goal of my intentions, my good deeds, or my will to do good to him. In the act of devotion I will have to let go of the other and my intentions towards him as well. So we are dealing with two interruptions. On the one hand religious desire is interrupted, because God turns out not to be the final destination of this desire, but points to the “other not worthy of desire.” The religious relationship points to the ethical relationship. On the other hand the ethical relationship thus evoked is not a closed relationship (not an end in itself), because the other who appeals to me and calls me to account must be regarded as a trace of God. The implication is that the other points to something other than himself as well. Religion and ethics continually point to each other. Therefore both religious desire and ethical pursuit never achieve rest in Levinas. Both have the mark of the infinite. 8. Awakening as a kenosis of the subject In the previous sections we discovered three meanings of kenosis in the philosophy of Levinas. First, kenosis is the process in which God contracts himself and descends to become an experience in the life of the subject. “Of God who comes to mind.” Second, the subject itself undergoes a process of kenosis when confronted with this “kenotic” God. God’s kenosis is echoed in the kenosis of the human being. Third, kenosis is implicitly present at the heart of the ethical experience as an experience of the infinite. In this section, we will have a closer look at the kenosis of the human being. Levinas speaks of “substitution” and of the “denucleation” of the human being in proximity to the other. The notions of substitution and denucleation acquire their full meaning in Levinas’ later works. There he depicts human existence as always in contact with and haunted by the other. The self is never at rest. It is persecuted by the other. Paradoxically, the ultimate reason for its existence is to be found in this persecution.


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This new perspective on subjectivity is elaborated in “La substitution,”34 a compact and daring text in which Levinas contrasts his own view of subjectivity with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel is a perfect sparring-partner for Levinas, because of his strong view of subjectivity. For Hegel, being a subject means a permanent effort to come into full possession of oneself. As in Levinas, the subject is never at rest. It is always striving to incorporate everything alien into the self, so that it becomes part of the self. In this process the subject becomes more conscious of itself and of the world. The subject is attracted by the goal of the process as a whole, a fulfilled consciousness in which nothing alien is left. Hegel regarded this process as an adventure of Being and Spirit and Levinas criticises him on this point. A process that ends in a situation where “nothing alien is left” is not a real adventure. Hegel’s adventure ends with the possession of the self. In Hegel’s thought subjectivity or consciousness is simply another word for domination. La domination est dans la conscience comme telle et Hegel pensait que le Je n’est que la conscience se maîtrisant dans l’égalité de soi, dans ce qu’il appelle “la liberté de cette infinie égalité.”35

Levinas confronts his audience with the question whether subjectivity can be more or something other than domination or consciousness. Does Hegel tell the whole story of human existence in the Phänomenologie des Geistes? Or is it possible to discover a forgotten dimension in this seemingly all-encompassing narrative? Levinas comes up with the hypothesis that the story of the dominant and conquering subject presupposes something else: a soul that is the opposite of this will to dominate and to conquer. On the basis of what follows we can describe this soul as “kenotic.” It constitutes the secret orientation of the whole process of self-knowledge and self-enrichment that is depicted in the 34

“La substitution” was first published in the Revue philosophique de Louvain 66 (1968); a modified version of this text was included in Autrement qu’être, chapter IV, 125-166. 35 Autrement qu’être, 129/102. Translation: “…domination is in consciousness as such. Hegel thought that the I is but consciousness mastering itself in equality with itself, in what he called “the freedom of this infinite equality.”

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Phänomenologie. Why is this so? Levinas shows that without this kenotic soul, consciousness would not be able to return to itself. The movement of going out and returning presupposes a self to which the subject can return. Levinas calls it “ipseity,” selfhood. But is there a place for the soul in philosophy? Is the conception of a kenotic soul not a religious remnant, unfit for a philosophy that wants to concentrate on the ideals of autonomy, selfpossession, and self-knowledge? Levinas’ argument is that these ideals will remain superficial if they persist in their refusal to look at their own presuppositions. There is no self-knowledge without the splitting up of the self, the Ich-spaltung characteristic of German idealism. The “I” splits itself up into a subject that knows and an object that is known. The selfhood that exists before the division is an unsplittable unity. Here Levinas refers to Leibniz’s mysterious formula about the ego as “innate to itself.” This ego or soul, or as Levinas writes: this “one self” guards the secret of its identification as a contraction, as an entrance within.36 The term contraction in this context demands our attention. In the previous sections it referred to the process in which God approaches the mind. Levinas also uses it in connection with the process of creation. In Autrement qu’être, contraction refers to the way in which the kenotic subject is a self-in-itself, a selfhood, or ipseity. It is itself not because it goes out and conquers the world, but because it exists in the way of contraction. It is contracted; it is a recurrence to itself, because it is not alone in itself. The self is, in Levinas’ view, never alone and never at rest. It is always and already with the other, and therefore it exists before the other. Therefore the identity of the self can only be found in the relationship to the other. In this relationship the enterprise of self-knowledge drives the self to a deeper level of selfhood, the simplicity of identity that reveals itself in being for the other. The selfhood in simplicity is found in the proximity of the Self and the Other and it is corporeal rather than spiritual. The body has a specific place in Levinas’ anthropology. It is the place of responsibility itself, the place where the I contracts and denudes itself to the simplicity of being for the Other. Proximity 36

Autrement qu’être, 132, 133.


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presents subjectivity in its meaning of being corporeal. The ego is in itself as “in its own skin,” it undergoes the presence of the other in a “bottomless passivity, made out of assignation.”37 9. Substitution and contraction In “La Substitution” the subject manifests itself as kenosis. It is not primarily seeking the consolidation of its own position, but it denudes itself before the other. This is an important motif that recurs time and again in Levinas’ later works, where subjectivity is described as substitution and responsibility. In “Dieu et la Philosophie,” a thought-provoking essay on the relation between the notion of God and philosophical thought, he writes on this subject: Pas de repos pour soi à l’abri de sa forme, à l’abri de son concept de moi! Pas de condition fût elle celle de la servitude. Sollicitude incessante de la sollicitude, outrance de la passivité dans la responsabilité pour la responsabilité de l’autre. Ainsi la proximité n’est jamais assez proche; moi responsable je ne finis pas de me vider de moimême [my emphasis—RvR].38

A mark of this self without a core of its own is that the other is always already part of it, but that it retains its otherness in it. The presence of the other in the self is the reason for its restlessness. It is not the restlessness of an I that is searching for itself and its own identity, but the drivenness of the one that has a covenant with the persecuted, and thus is persecuted himself. Perhaps the “him/her-self” is a stranger on earth as a result of this. Somewhere Levinas approvingly quotes Psalm 119: “I am a stranger on earth, do not hide your commands from me.”39 But 37

Autrement qu’être, 140-141/110-111. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 120/73: “There is no rest here for the self in the shelter of its form, in the shelter of its concept of ego! There is no ‘condition’ were it only one of servitude. This is an incessant solicitude for solicitude, an excess of passivity in the responsibility for the responsibility of the other. In this way proximity is never close enough; as a responsible I, I never finish emptying myself of myself [my emphasis—RvR].” 39 Humanisme de láutre homme, 97. 38

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it is not alienated by the presence of the other in himself. “The psyche is the other in the same, without alienating the same.” 40 The opposite is actually the case: through this alien presence the subject receives an inspiration to live that it otherwise would not have. Thanks to the proximity of the other the psyche is “inspired.” With these operations Levinas has turned Hegel’s perspective upside down. In Hegel any kind of otherness that the subject faces or discovers in itself is ultimately absorbed in the self. This causes the self to find itself again and to be confirmed in its own position. If the adventure of the spirit ever ends, there will be rest. Levinas discovers a fissure in the subject itself that can never be closed up. The difference between the self and the other— the cause of the responsibility which pursues the subject—can never be removed. This difference is the source from which springs the experience of time. It feeds history with an original inspiration, that of kenosis, the emptying of the self over against the other. We will not find the meaning of existence in the adventure of the subject itself as it develops through obstacles and stagnation. The subject receives its meaning from the relationship with the other, who is close to it in an oppressive and obsessive way. Levinas analyzes this experience against Hegel and Heidegger as the primeval fact, the Befindlichkeit that constitutes experience of meaning. Not in Sein zum Tode and fear for oneself, but in the experience of the nearness of the other and the care that goes with it do we access the question of the meaning of existence. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyewski describes this insight on an almost everyday level in the figure of Ivan, often called the most “impassive” of the three Karamazov brothers. One moment Ivan can mockingly ask “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—thus expressing that he couldn’t care less about what will happen to his brother Dimitri. He also sees himself as a “centripetal force,” a “will to life in defiance of any logic” and says that he sometimes believes in life just for a moment when he sees the sticky leaves of spring and the blue sky, or when he remembers certain heroic deeds. 40

Autrement qu’être, 143/112.


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But after he has told his brother Alyosha the story of the Grand Inquisitor, he says, just before their parting, “Listen Alyosha … if I am able to love sticky spring leaves, then only because I know you exist. The fact alone that I know that you are here somewhere is enough for me and gives me courage to keep on living. ” Here Dostoyewski is playing off two ways of looking at the meaning of life against one another. In the first a person has an irrational will to live, which in essence is indifferent to others and is willing to drink the cup of life as long as it lasts. There is meaning as long as there is health, love, and a sense of energy. Once one can no longer experience that primary energy, time appears to have “cast the cup of life to earth,” as Ivan Karamazov expresses it. In the other perspective on the meaning of life the will to live and energy are no longer on the first level. They do not derive their power from themselves. There is another source through which the energy really starts to flow. The human being is no longer a centripetal force. S/he is driven from the centre. The presence of the other is the secret source from which s/he lives. What appears as a change of perspective in Dostoyewski becomes a choice in Levinas. It all turns on that one perspective: that life only has meaning through the inspiration it receives from the outside, from the “other.” 10. Kenosis and the motif of space Levinas’ texts on kenosis show that he ascribes a double meaning to this notion. Kenosis refers to the conception of God, but also to thought on the subject. Thinking through the notion of kenosis leads to God’s transcendence being articulated in his nearness to people. Levinas thus distances himself from the traditional metaphysical idea of God as a highest being that is only accessible to himself. Precisely because of his ability to humble himself and to hide in this, God shows himself to be exalted and transcendent. Levinas thus also lets go of the notion of universal truth in traditional metaphysics and joins Kierkegaard’s idea of a persecuted truth that can only appear by way of a violation or a

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disturbance. The kenotic manifestation of God implies that he cannot be understood from the point of view of a framework in which universality, generality, or objectivity is normative. Besides the conception of God, the notion of kenosis also gives a different meaning to the conception of subjectivity. Kenosis or to purge, to empty oneself, is one of the words here that Levinas uses for the change in the conception of the subject that he envisions. Other expressions occurring in his texts include substitution, being for the other, sacrificing oneself for the other. Time and again the point is to give expression to a reversal in the subject. The place of the self becomes empty and open for the other. The mutual connection between these words with their various connotations is the motif of space. In Levinas this is connected with one of Pascal’s Pensées: “That is my place under the sun. That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”41 The notion of kenosis allows access to the religious origin of this motif in Judaism and Christianity. Above I have shown that Levinas is responding here to Hegel’s view of the subject. Hegel’s view of subjectivity is a late echo of Spinoza’s description of being as a conatus essendi, an attempt to maintain the self. In “La Substitution” Levinas shows that subjectivity also has a different dimension, which allows an ethical turn-around. Not all strivings and actions of the subject can be reduced to the attempt to maintain the self or to provide for the self. The nature of the ethically turned-around subject is kenotic. The place of the I is emptied. The I gets rid of itself and makes room for the other. To both connotations of kenosis (the kenosis of God and the kenosis of the subject) Levinas gives a spatial meaning. And space is what connects the two. Kenosis is the event in which God and man make room for each other. Creating space, making room for the other is the moment for Levinas at which “the sacred happens.” The sacred can only happen if there is an empty space, if not all meaning has been filled by an omnipresent God or a self that strives to maintain itself. Kenosis is the event in which God makes room for human action, according to the in-

41

Quote from Pascal, Pensées, 112, on the first page of Autrement qu’être.


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sight of Haim of Volozin. Conversely, the human being is “a place of God” for Levinas. Its existence is meaningful as a reference to the kenotic God (À-dieu). 11. Levinas and Vattimo revisited It is time to return to Vattimo’s criticism of Levinas and to point up the differences between them through what we have discovered in the analysis of Levinas’ thought on kenosis. Vattimo’s criticism of Levinas contains two aspects related to kenosis. First, Vattimo reproaches Levinas (and dialectical theology) for too radical a conception of God’s transcendence, which removes God’s relationship to history. Thus, in his view, Levinas and the dialectical theologians are secretly holding on to an absolute, quasi-metaphysical foundation that is remote from hermeneutical experience. This makes for a contrast between a pure, metaphysical God—representative of the truth—and an impure, historical being, in which the true and the untrue are mixed up together. On this issue Vattimo adopts Jacques Derrida’s criticism of Levinas. Levinas is said to be looking for a “God that is unstained by being.”42 Derrida counters this by saying that anything we say about God is infinitely stained by language and confused by history and tradition, which are ambiguous. Second, Vattimo thinks that Levinas’ image of God is “Old Testament.” Levinas stays with the conception of a transcendent Father-God. He does not take the step in the direction of the incarnation. In Levinas God has no Son, and thus he does not enter history.43 Therefore Levinas remains stuck on the threshold of post-metaphysical thinking about God in spite of his criticism of metaphysics. The second point of criticism is the easiest one to refute, because it is based on a misunderstanding. True, the idea of judgement is prominently there, especially in Totalité et infini, and Levinas continually insists on the possibility of a judgement of 42

Derrida, “Violence et Métaphysique” and “En ce moment même”, 159-202. See also Chapter 3 of this book. 43 Vattimo, “La trace de la trace”, 102.

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history. But the true basis of this judgement is situated in the experience of the other. Levinas’ thought on God is kenotic and in this he builds on the insights of the Old Testament. Apparently the “Old Testament” image of God is not nearly as incompatible with kenosis as Vattimo supposes. The first point of criticism, however, is relevant. Particularly in Levinas’ later thought, the image of “being” is coloured very negatively: as an iron cage that keeps beings imprisoned in their drive for self-maintenance. For the transcendent he keeps a place “outside,” a “jenseits,” a place “on yonder side of being,” from which the harsh law of existence derives meaning and hence inspiration. In Vattimo kenosis and the history of being merge. Vattimo is trying to argue that being itself is subject to a process of weakening in its historical development. The reasons he advances for this are of a philosophical-historical and cultural-philosophical nature: the history of philosophy shows a weakening of strong ontology. The time of the world view (as Heidegger called it) is over. Thinking has gradually become “secularised.” From a cultural-philosophical point of view, Vattimo sees kenosis reflected in a weaker and more playful notion of reality influenced by science (models are not reality), the media, and the computer. It is no longer possible to draw a sharp distinction between reality and possibility (“virtual reality”). Influenced by the story of the emptying of God in Christ, a process is going on in our culture in which man is learning to conquer the violent nature of the sacred and of social life. In Vattimo kenosis is the hermeneutical experience itself and refers to a positive ethical effect of this experience: it teaches us to overcome violence. Vattimo criticises Levinas for his lack of historical perspective. A discussion between the two philosophers, if it were to take place, would be about the meaning of historicity. How comprehensive is history? How does God, or ethical experience pointing to the Infinite, relate to history? Why would one hold a viewpoint in which God or the other (with his judgement) transcends history? Early on, in his first articles on Heidegger, Levinas already objected to the privileging of hermeneutical experience, because it means that the person engaged in understanding has already


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embarked and is overtaken by history itself or by historical existence.44 If historicity becomes the last horizon, it is no longer possible to break free from it and judge it. Levinas believes it is exactly this judgement that we cannot do without when speaking about humanity. In many of his texts he defends the possibility and the right to judge history; a significant apologetics, certainly in the light of Heidegger’s persistent silence about his personal history and German history, as if some destiny had unfolded there that defies being spoken of. Levinas’ criticism of Heidegger also enables us to see Vattimo’s weak spot. Vattimo allows kenosis, which became real to the highest degree in the incarnation of God, to be absorbed and dispersed in the hermeneutical experience. For this reason the history of metaphysics appears to be a history of the weakening of ontological structures. Precisely because of this parallelism of the specific (the kenosis of Christ) and the general (the history of metaphysics) one loses sight of kenosis as the critical moment in Vattimo. The specific story of kenosis functions as a mirror, in which all kinds of developments are better seen and understood. Nietzsche’s nihilism and Heidegger as the possibility of a new experience of being, but also the softening effect of modern technology, which has so “medialised” reality that everything becomes possible and nothing appears as “true reality” any more. Vattimo’s model of weakening raises two questions. The first is about the hazy relationship between the Christological and the historical significance of kenosis. Can these two meanings still be distinguished in Vattimo? For him kenosis points to an actual state of affairs (weakening of harsh reality), but also to a regulatory perspective (diminishing violence). It is, however, possible to conceive of situations in which ontological weakening does not lead to less violence. In that case it is necessary to distinguish between being (or the course of history) and the good (or judgement on the course of history). This is exactly the distinction that Levinas pursues and defends. It should be possible to judge history in a way that is independent of the course of history. Unlike Vattimo, Levinas points to the experience of the ethical as an experience of the other, which allows the subject to 44

En découvrant l’existence, 72, 88, 89, 106.

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break loose from history for a moment.45 This does not mean that the subject can leave history. Rather it is shaken up by specific, i.e. historical experiences, and through those experiences the course of history itself can change. The second question concerns the reduction of violence. Levinas and Vattimo both discuss this, and both see their philosophy as an attempt to contribute to reflection on the violence that is present all around us. But Vattimo evaluates the development of history from metaphysics to technology as a reduction of violence that has already begun and steadily continues, a development that can be rendered understandable by the notion of “kenosis.” Levinas is less hopeful. Therefore he does not consider the experience that gives rise to kenosis to be fully historical. When the kenotic moment becomes historical, and thus part of “being,” part of the prevailing system, there is every reason to assume that it will fade away. Levinas works with a contrast between being (which in the end is about violence and harsh necessity) and the good, the moment of inspiration beyond being. 12. Kenosis and the future Perhaps we can bring out the differences more sharply by using Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Disgrace contains the modern approach to kenosis in the openness or emptiness that comes about in the life of David Lurie and his daughter Lucie, because they break loose from the framework that seemed to determine their future. This opens them up to a connection with things that seemed unimportant earlier. Lucie enters into a relationship with the land and the animals. When she gets pregnant after being raped, she does not have the child aborted. Her choices wordlessly express hope in the future that now is as unthinkable as it is invisible, a future in which black and white will live together on the land as relatives, as members of one family in spite of the violence and aggression that reign everywhere. David 45

See Totalité et infini, 23/52: “Quand l’homme aborde vraiment autrui, il est arraché à l’histoire.” Translation: “When man truly approaches the other, he is uprooted from history.”


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Lurie forgets his past as a university professor and becomes concerned with the fate of stray dogs. With Bev he helps them to a decent end and refuses merely to deliver their carcasses to the rubbish dump. Even stray dogs have a right to a proper funeral ritual. As a reader you get the feeling that this “letting go and becoming empty” makes room for a new development in their personal life stories. The kenotic turn-around Coetzee depicts in his main characters is completely unrelated to what Vattimo and Heidegger call “history of being.” It takes place on the level of actual relationships between people. That is where I—with Levinas—think kenosis can become significant, as an incision in history. Perhaps such an incision leaves behind traces. Perhaps history will even show a new development that can be genealogically traced back to the kenotic interruption. But in historical thought (and a fortiori in its “history-of-being variant”), thinking in terms of large connections and structures quickly reasserts its dominance. The extraordinary gets lost. Hence it is important to save always a critical memory of the moment of interruption, which is not itself characterised by the history-of-being and which interrupts history—even if it is reassimilated into it later.


BIBLIOGRAPHY In all citations where dual page numbers are given, the first page number refers to the text in its original form, the second to the English translation. Works by Levinas À l’heure des nations, Paris 1988; translated by M.B. Smith as In the Times of the Nations, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1994. Autrement qu’être où au-delà de l’essence, La Hague 1974; translated by A. Lingis as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Dordrecht (etc.) 1991. Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1996. Collected Philosophical Papers; translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1987. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Paris 1986; translated by Bettina Bergo as Of God who comes to mind, Stanford 1998. De l’évasion, Introduit et annoté par Jacques Rolland, Paris 1982. De l’existence à l’existant, seconde édition augmentée, Paris 1978; translated by Alphonso Lingis as Existence and Existents, The Hague 1978. Dieu, la mort et le temps. Établissement de texte, notes et postface de Jacques Rolland, Paris 1993; translated by Bettina Bergo as God, Death and Time, Stanford 2000. Difficile liberté, deuxième édition, Paris 1976; translated by Sean Hand as Difficult Freedom, Baltimore 1990. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, troisième édition augmentée, Paris 1974. Entre nous. Essais sur la penser-à-l’autre, Paris 1991; translated by M. Smith and B. Harshav as Entre nous. On thinking-of-the-other, London 1998.

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Ethique et infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo, Paris 1982; translated by R.A. Cohen as Ethics and Infinity, Pittsburg 1985. Humanisme de l’autre homme, Montpellier 1972; translations of the essays can be found in Basic Philosophical Writings and Collected Philosophical Papers. Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Edited by Jill Robbins, Stanford 2001. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated and with an Introduction by Annette Aronowicz, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1994. Noms propres, Montpellier 1976, translated by Michael B. Smith as Proper Names, London 1996. La révélation, Paul Ricoeur, avec Emmanuel Levinas, Edgar Haulotte et.al., Bruxelles 1977. Láu-delà du verset : lectures et discours talmudiques, Paris 1982; translated by G.D. Mole as Beyond the Verse. Talmudic Readings and Lectures, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1994. Le temps et láutre, Montpellier 1979 (originally 1948); translated by Richard A. Cohen as Time and the Other (and additional essays) Pittsburg 1987. The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, Oxford 1989. Totalité et infini. Essai sur léxtériorité, La Haye 1974 (originally 1961); translated by Alfonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburg 1969. Transcendance et intelligibilité, suivi d’un entretien, Genève 1984. Secondary and general works Achterberg, Gerrit. Selected poems of Gerrit Achterberg, But this land has no end, translated by Pleuke Boyce, Lantzville 1989. Adriaanse, H.J. Vom Christentum aus. Aufsätze und Vorträge zur Religionsphilosophie, Kampen 1995. Barth, Karl. Fides quaerens intellectum. Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms, Theologischer Verlag, Zürich 1981 (originally 1931).

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Beauvoir, Simone de. Le deuxième sexe 1, Paris 1945; translated by H.M. Parsley as The Second Sex, New York 1977. Bernasconi, Robert and Simon Critchley (eds). Re-Reading Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1991. Boer, Theodore de. The Rationality of Transcendence. Studies in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Amsterdam 1997. Bulhof, Ilse N. and Laurens ten Kate (eds.). Flight of the Gods. Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, New York 2000. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, New York 1999. Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge 2002. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Derrida & Levinas, Oxford 1992. Danielewsky, Mark. Z. House of Leaves, New York 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, Paris 1997; translated by P.-A. Brault & M. Naas as Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford 1999. ———. Donner le temps 1, La fausse monnaie, Paris 1991. ———. Glas, Paris 1974. ———. Épérons. Les styles de Nietzsche, Paris 1978; translated by Barbara Harlow as Spurs. Nietsche’s Styles, Chicago 1979. ———. “Foi et savoir: les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in: La religion, sous la direction de Jacques Derrida & Gianni Vattimo, Paris 1996; translated by Samuel Weber as “Faith and knowledge” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, Edited and with an introduction by Gil Anidjar, New York 2002. ———. The Gift of Death, Chicago 1995. Translated from the French by David Wills. ———. Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris 1987. ———. Sauf le nom, Paris 1993. ———. “Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas” in: L’écriture et la différence, 117-228, Paris 1967; translated by A. Bass as “Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” in: Writing and Difference, Chicago 1978, 79-153. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land and other poems, London 1972.

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Forget, Philippe. Text und Interpretation. Deutsch-Französische Debatte mit Beiträgen von J. Derrida, Ph. Forget, M. Frank, H.G. Gadamer, J. Greisch und F. Laruelle, München 1984. Frogneux, Nathalie et Françoise Mies. Emmanuel Lévinas et l’Histoire. Actes du Colloque international des Facultés universitaire Notre Dame de la Paix (20-21-22 mai 1997), Paris-Namur 1998. Gibbs, Robert. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Princeton 1992. Hammermeister, Kai. Hans-Georg Gadamer, München 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit, Tubingen 1972 (zwölfte, unveränderte Auflage); translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson as Being and Time, San Francisco 1962. ———. Vorträge und Aufsätze II, Pfüllingen 1967. ———. Was ist Metaphysik? (originally 1929) in: Wegmarken, Frankfurt am Main 1978. Heyer, C.J. den. Jesus and the doctrine of atonement. Biblical notes on a controversial topic, London 1998. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen. Eine Einführung in die Phänomenologie, herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Elisabeth Ströker, Hamburg 1977 (originally 1929). Janicaud, Dominique. Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn.” The French Debate, New York 2000. Kosky, Jeffrey L. Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion, Bloomington 2001. Kuitert, H.M. Voor een tijd een plaats van God. Een karakteristiek van de mens, Baarn 2002. Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems, London, 1988. Levi, Primo. If This is A Man & The Truce, Translated by Stuart Woolf, London 1979. ———. Moments of Reprieve, Translated by Ruth Feldman, London 1986. Marion, Jean-Luc.“Is the Ontological Argument Ontological? The Argument According to Anselm and its Metaphysical Interpretation According to Kant” in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, 1992, 201-218. Moyaert, Paul. Ethiek en sublimatie. De ethiek van de psycho-analyse van Jacques Lacan, Nijmegen 1994.

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———. “Lacan on Neighborly Love: The Relation to the Thing in the Other Who Is My Neighbor,” in: Epoché, A Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (1996), 1-31. ———. De mateloosheid van het christendom. Over naastenliefde, betekenisincarnatie en mystieke liefde, Nijmegen 1998. Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature, New York 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in: Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. V, 2, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York 1973, 13-335. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro as The Gay Science, Cambridge 2001. Peperzak, A.Th. Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Religion and Literature, New York 1995. ———. “Phenomenology-ontology-metaphysics: Levinas’ perspective on Husserl and Heidegger,” in: Man and World 16 (1983), 113-127. ———. To the Other. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, West Lafayette/Indiana 1993. Ricoeur, Paul. Le conflit des interprétations, essais d’herméneutique, Paris 1969. ———. La révélation, avec Emmanuel Levinas, Edgar Haulotte et.al., Publication des Facultés Universitaires SaintLouis, Bruxelles 1977. ———. Le Mal. Un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie, Genève 1986. ———. Soi-même comme un autre, Paris 1990; translated by Kathleen Balmey as Oneself as Another, Chicago 1992. Riessen, Renée D.N. van. Erotiek en de dood, met het oog op transcendentie in de filosofie van Levinas, Kampen 1991. ———. “Beyond Representation and Concept: The Language of the Testimony,” in: Marcel Sarot and Wessel Stoker (eds.), Religion and the Good Life, Assen 2004, 41-57. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony and solidarity, Cambridge 1989. ———. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. Philosophical Papers, Volume I, Cambridge 1991.

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Rosenzweig, Franz. Der Stern der Erlösung (Der Mensch und sein Werk; Gesammelte Schriften II), The Hague 1976, 4e Auflage, mit einer Einführung von Reinhold Maier. Translated by William Hallo as The Star of Redemption, Boston 1964. ———. Die Schrift. Aufsätze, Übertragungen und Briefe, Königstein/Ts. 1984; translated by Paul W. Franks & Michael J. Morgan as “The New Thinking” in: Philosopical and Theological Writings, Hackett, Indianapolis and Cambridge 2000. Schrift, Alan D. The Logic of the Gift, New York/London 1997. Sneller, Rico. Het Woord is schrift geworden. Derrida en de negatieve theologie, Kampen 1998. Strasser, S. Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einführung in Levinas’ Philosophie, Den Haag 1978. Tippelskirch, Dorothee C. von. Liebe von fremd zu fremd. Menschlichkeit des Menschen und Göttlichkeit Gottes bei Emmanuel Lévinas und Karl Barth, Freiburg/München 2002. Vattimo, Gianni. Credere di Credere, Garzantí Editore, 1996, translated by Luca d’Isanto and David Webb as Belief, Cambridge 1999. ———. “La trace de la trace,” in: La Religion, sous la direction de Jacques Derrida & Gianni Vattimo, Paris 1996, 87-104. ———. The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in PostModern Culture, Baltimore 1988. Visker, Rudi. Truth and Singularity. Taking Foucault into Phenomenology, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1999. ———. The Inhuman Condition. Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger, Dordrecht/Boston/London 2004. Vries, Hent de. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore 1999. Ward, Graham. Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, Cambridge 1995. Welten, Ruud M., Fenomenologie en beeldverbod bij Emmanuel Levinas en Jean-Luc Marion, Best 2001. Wood, David and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), Derrida and “Différance,” Evanston 1988. Zijlstra, O.K. (ed.), Letting go. Rethinking kenosis, Bern 2002.

INDEX Absolute, the 85, 90, 91, 171 Achterberg, Gerrit 1, 12-14 Adriaanse, J.H. 101n1, 127 affectivity (Befindlichkeit) 17-18, 21, 45-47, 50-51, 189 alterity 31, 32-33, 48, 59, 60, 71, 77, 80, 81, 84, 89, 92, 95, 137, 139, 145, 162-164, 167, 168 Anselm of Canterbury 134, 135, 140, 161 anxiety 26-27, 29, 40, 47, 189-190 Aristotle 78, 180, 182, 188 asymmetry 34, 39, 68, 85, 88, 124129 atheism 107, 113, 119, 132, 156 Auschwitz 102, 107-108, 113-114 awakening, being awake 26-27, 148, 152, 154, 158-159, 188, 190 Beauvoir, Simone de 77, 95 Befindlichkeit see affectivity Bernasconi, Robert 83n12 Bible 4, 21, 38, 89, 106, 113, 119 body 63-65, 81, 91-94, 124, 196 Boer, Theodore de 64n18, 135, 136, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 170 Cassirer, Ernst 21 christian, christianity 13, 14, 67, 69, 93, 109, 118, 171, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 185, 191, 200 Coetzee, J.M. 174, 176, 204, 205 Cohen, Hermann 22 communication 69, 71-72, 184, 186 conatus essendi 1, 49, 200 concretisation 137, 141, 191 consciousness 7, 63-64, 77, 97, 135, 137-139, 142-143, 147-148, 149, 151, 155-158, 188-189, 195-196 contraction 179, 189, 191, 196 corporeality 61-67, 92, 124

creation, creature, see also self-creation 11, 13, 69, 70, 72, 117, 120, 121, 123, 156, 157, 179, 188, 196 Critchley, Simon 83n11, 93n31 Danielewsky, Mark Z. 131 Dante 2, 110 Dasein 23-29, 34, 40, 44-45, 50, 189 death 7, 12-13, 24, 29-35, 40, 42-45, 47, 50, 82, 95, 97, 165, 166, 169, 182, 189, 192 Derrida, Jacques 8, 25, 75-98, 136, 162-169, 173, 201 Descartes, René 25, 36, 132-141, 145148, 157, 161, 169, 171, 188-189 desire 2-4, 13, 14, 32, 34, 46, 69, 71, 73, 78, 80, 81, 127, 129, 141, 143, 144, 149-155, 157, 161, 171, 182, 184, 190-194 dialogical philosophy 39 dialogue 33, 38, 39, 67, 76, 82, 151, 152, 153, 165, 167 difference 33, 37, 48, 49, 53, 60, 64, 76, 77, 79-80, 84, 88-95, 131, 132, 148, 162-164, 167, 198 dispossession 97, 98, 174, 176 disruption 35, 45, 69, 143, 148, 158, 159, 183 divine, divinity 2-3, 13, 14, 59, 90-95, 108, 119, 120, 129, 140, 167, 182, 186, 193 Dostoyewski, Fyodor M. 198, 199 Eliot, T.S. 75 Ereignis 50 eros, eroticism 31-34, 92, 150, 174, 176 ethics, ethical 1-6, 13, 32, 34, 35, 45, 53, 56, 59, 66-68, 76, 84, 89, 92, 95, 96, 110-115, 117-118, 121129, 131-172, 173, 178, 186, 187, 190, 193, 194, 200, 202, 203

213

214


evil, experience of evil 104, 106, 108, 113-118, 121-128, 130, 158 existentialism 26, 103 exteriority 32, 39, 81, 97, 135, 138, 148 Fackenheim, Emil 113, 114, 115 Farias, Victor 22 female principle 76-80, 90-95, 97 fertility 32, 41 Finkielkraut, Alain 51 forgiveness 41 freedom 18, 28-31, 39, 57, 83, 103, 105, 123, 124, 139, 156, 170 future 24, 28-31, 34-35, 43-45, 204 Gagarin, Yuri 35 Gibbs, Robert 5 God 1-14, 19, 23, 42, 46, 67, 73, 76, 90-98, 101-130, 132-172, 173-174, 177-203 Good, the 73, 113, 118, 143, 146, 150, 155, 167, 190 Habermas, Jürgen 55 Hegel, G.W.F. 23, 31, 59, 70, 79, 180, 182, 183, 195, 198, 200 Heidegger, Martin 6, 17-51, 59, 70, 156, 176-177, 189, 198, 202-203 hermeneutics 6, 18, 50, 84, 157 holy, holiness 3, 36-37, 110, 114-115, 132, 150-151, 167, 170 hostage, hostageship 1, 142, 149, 157, 160, 169, 170 humanism 106, 108, 109, 111 humility 121, 183-187 Husserl, Edmund 18, 20, 21, 59, 103, 138, 190 identity 18, 31, 50, 51, 54, 57-72, 120, 121, 176, 196, 197 il y a 26-28, 41, 125, 145, 155 illeïté, illeity 151, 155, 156, 171, 192 incarnation 25, 97, 177-182, 185, 201, 203 Infinite, the 1, 2, 7, 9, 18, 25, 60, 61, 81, 91, 97, 131-171, 180, 183, 184, 188-192

infinity 25, 41-45, 60, 81, 83, 90, 132, 133, 135, 138, 141, 144, 160-161, 170-171 intentionality 4, 7, 142 interiority 24, 139 interruption 11, 42, 61-65, 124, 143, 159, 169, 172, 185, 191-194, 205 intersubjectivity 34, 39 irony 54, 58, 69, 70 Janicaud, Dominique 5 Jewish 2-6, 38, 95, 102, 103, 107, 112114, 118-121, 160, 173, 181, 185187 Job 115-117, 130 Judaism 5, 36, 102, 107, 185, 200 Kant, Immanuel 21-23, 67, 96, 112, 115, 121, 123, 134 kenosis 4-14, 73, 97, 98, 112, 128, 173-205 Kierkegaard, Søren 162-169, 183, 199 Kosky, Jeffrey 6 Koyré, Alexandre 22 language 5, 49, 54, 56, 57, 80-84, 90, 92, 106, 136, 147, 173 Larkin, Philip 54, 69, 72, 73 Levi, Primo 104, 110, 111, 155 love 8, 71, 78, 89, 121, 123, 150, 152154 Maimonides 2 Marion, Jean-Luc 134, 135, 158n43 metaphysics, metaphysical 2, 3, 13, 56-60, 69, 134, 161, 170, 173, 178, 188, 193, 199, 201 morality 2, 56, 113, 115, 157, 160, 161 Moyaert, Paul 128n31, 166n56, 168n58 Murdoch, Iris 1 mystic, mysticism 6, 8, 9, 129, 168, 174

INDEX Nemo, Philippe 5, 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 55, 58, 65, 70, 78, 79, 164, 176, 177, 203 obsession 1, 142 oeuvre, see also work 82-87 onto-theology 136, 156 ontological argument 132-142, 146147, 157-158, 160-161, 169-171 ontology, ontologic 18-20, 34, 35, 38, 44, 45, 59, 81, 89, 97, 124, 156, 160, 178, 202 passivity 32, 46, 65, 119, 120, 124, 139, 142, 143, 147, 160, 189, 197 Peperzak, A.Th. 20n4, 40 phenomenology, phenomenological 4, 5, 6, 7, 21, 25, 31, 32, 59, 77, 102, 111, 181, 190 Plato 23, 37, 78, 79, 82, 156, 182 plurality 32, 35, 58, 77, 84 postmodern 10, 84 prayer 19, 20, 109-112, 153 Proust, Marcel 55, 66, 69-72 rationality, rational 35, 55, 56, 68, 85, 121, 134, 135, 157-160, 180, 188, 190 receptivity 11, 12, 17, 41, 45-47, 139, 143, 189 religion, religious 3-6, 19, 20, 51, 101, 102, 106-116, 121-124, 131172, 179, 182-188, 190-196 responsibility 1, 37, 42, 46, 50, 53-55, 60, 61, 65-68, 81, 88, 89, 92, 103, 104-111, 117, 120, 127, 146, 157, 160-170, 193, 196-198 Ricoeur, Paul 120-128, 148 Rorty, Richard 53-71 Rosenzweig, Franz 33n25, 149, 151155, 161, 170-171 sacrifice 163-168, 176 Sandford, Stella 95n34

215

Sein-zum-Tode 24, 27, 29, 32-35, 42, 43 self-creation 54, 58, 60, 65, 66, 69 sensibility 64 singularity 50, 162-169 solidarity 2, 53-71, 110, 112, 175 soul 37, 63, 64, 70, 116, 117, 141, 149-154, 186, 195, 196 Spinoza 1, 49, 134 spirituality 122, 123, 180, 187 subjectivity 5, 28, 60-66, 105, 128, 138, 164, 165, 169, 173, 182, 195, 197, 200 suffering 57, 62-63, 66, 72, 101, 102, 106-130, 182 Talmud 38, 89, 93-95, 106, 186 theodicy 101, 102, 106, 113-115, 120124, 127 time 3, 14, 26-34, 41-45, 48, 83, 121, 147, 183, 193 Tippelskirch, Dorothee C. von 167n57 Torah 3, 107, 108, 123, 185, 186 trace 83, 89, 122, 133, 155, 161, 168, 170, 184-187, 192-194, 205 transcendence 2, 3, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24-28, 39, 73, 77, 80, 81, 95, 101128, 135-139, 143-149, 155-161, 167-172, 178, 180-188, 199, 201 Vattimo, Gianni 8, 11, 173-178, 201205 violence 75, 81, 122, 136, 139, 168, 202, 203, 204 Visker, Rudi 5, 49n51 vulnerability 47, 55, 62, 63, 124 Ward, Graham 97n36 Westphal, Merol 168n58 woman, see also female principle 7679, 89-96 work, see also oevre 44-45, 82-88

Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought PUBLISHED VOLUMES [Vols. 1–6 published by J.C. Gieben, Amsterdam] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Rotenstreich, Nathan: Essays in Jewish Philosophy in the Modern Era. With an introduction by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Edited by Reinier Munk. 1996. ISBN 90-5063-587-3 Ravitzky, Aviezer: History and Faith. Studies in Jewish Philosophy. 1996. ISBN 90-5063-597-0 Munk, Reinier: The Rationale of Halakhic Man. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought. 1996. ISBN 90-5063-607-1 Boer, Theodore de: The Rationality of Transcendence. Studies in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. 1997. ISBN 90-5063-217-3 Zwiep, Irene E.: Mother of Reason and Revelation. A Short History of Medieval Jewish Linguistic Thought. 1997. ISBN 90-5063-207-6 Harvey, Warren Zev: Physics and Metaphysics in H.asdai Crescas. 1998. ISBN 90-5063-347-1 [from Volume 7 published by Kluwer Academic Publishers]

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