http://www.sandiego.edu/∼atterton/Publications/postmod.htm

EMMANUEL LEVINAS

ⓒ Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, Postmodernism: The Key Figures

Eds. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli, pp. 231-238

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is without question the most original and important ethical thinker in postmodernism. His ethics of compassion for the Other, an ethics that begins with the face of the neighbor rather than with freedom, that emphasizes goodness and responsibility rather than the formalism of universal laws, almost single-handedly gives the lie to the claim that postmodernism is little more than an exuberant textual nihilism devoid of any serious moral content. Yet Levinas hardly invokes the image of the quintessentially French philosophe of postmodernism. In his work we find none of the wordplays, pastiche, and parody that characterize so much of the movement. It may even be said that Levinas’s thinking goes against the grain of contemporary thought in its refusal to abandon ethics after the condemnation that has fallen on the subject since the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. However, the fact that the two leading representatives of postmodernism, namely, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, have found in Levinas’s ethics important resources for their own respective critiques of Western reason should make us think twice about consigning Levinas to the tradition that he was among the first to call into question. As someone who provides an intellectual foundation for the best of the theory disabused of its most vulgar excesses, as well as providing it with an ethics that so many of its detractors have falsely accused it of lacking, Levinas can rightly be called a key thinker in postmodernism.

Ethics as First Philosophy

The guiding principle of Levinas’s philosophy is that ethics is prima philosophia. It is a principle that encapsulates the spirit of his thinking and serves as the basis for his first extended critique of the Western philosophical tradition, Totality and Infinity, published in 1961. In its search for truth, philosophy, according to Levinas, has mostly been “ontology.” It has privileged thematization and knowledge at the expense of neglecting or concealing the absolute priority of ethics. This privilege shows itself in the way philosophy attempts to comprehend the nature of reality by subordinating what exists to an all-encompassing rational structure or “totality.” Confined within the totality, particular beings are understood as the bearers of attributes they share with other beings, whereby they are divested of their individuality and become conceptually “the same.” For Levinas, the only being capable of resisting such totalization is the human Other. The Other absolutely resists all philosophical attempts at knowing and calls into question the violence and injustice of ontology. This calling into question occurs in the “face to face” encounter with the Other which “precedes ontology” (TI, 1969, p.42). Here ethics and justice consist in recognizing in the face of the neighbor someone who is destitute and proletarian, whose very destitution provokes my shame and calls me back to my responsibilities. Exposed to the defenseless nudity of the face, “I am not innocent spontaneity but usurper and murderer” (TI, 1969, p.84), and thus have always to make amends. To respond to the face with responsibility requires all the resources at my disposal without my ever being able to say that I have done enough. This is not the alarming “overload” of responsibilities denounced by moral philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, but the situation of the I divested of its arbitrary freedom, and delivered over to the infinity of responsibility for the Other where duties grow in the measure that they are fulfilled (TI, 1969, p.244). Between me and the Other there is no common measure in that what I have the right to demand of the Other is incommensurable with what the Other has the right to demand of me (TI, 1969, p.50). Responsibility thus lies “beyond the justice of universal laws” (TI, 1969, p.247).

The starting point of these reflections was phenomenology. But it soon became apparent that phenomenology was stretched beyond its limits when it came to describing what does not show itself in terms of any horizon. Hence, immediately following the publication of Totality and Infinity, Levinas embarked upon a discussion of the face by “situating it with respect to the phenomenology it interrupts” (TA, 1989, p.356). The result was the introduction of “the trace,” a concept that Levinas would place at the center of his second major work Otherwise Than Being, published in 1974. It was a concept that also found its way into major work of other philosophers, most significantly Derrida, for whom it provided a means of deconstructing metaphysics.

The Trace of Levinas in Derrida

In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida incorporated into his own thinking

the concept of the trace that is at the center of the latest work by Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology . . . which has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as full continuity of speech. (Derrida, 1974, p.70)

The importance of Levinas’s trace for Derrida resides primarily in its ability to free deconstruction from the double bind of using metaphysical language in order to overcome that language--a problem not only for deconstruction but also for Levinas’s own ethics. In “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” written in 1964, Derrida called into question Levinas’s claim in Totality and Infinity to have left broken with ontology in the name of ethics. While Derrida at the time argued that no such decisive break was possible given Levinas dependence on the language and conceptuality of ontology (Derrida, 1978, p.143), the indications are that later Derrida came to see the trace as a way of mitigating that dependence. The trace, which is not a sign in the conventional sense, whose properties of signification belong to elements of language related to extra-linguistic entities, ruptures the signifier-signified relation by making it impossible to say who or what is present in it. As the trace of a certain absence that defers the decision as to the referent of its term, it signals the relation of differance within the text of philosophy, frustrating its logocentric and phonocentric pretensions.

This is, of course, Derridian parlance and naturally gives rise to the question of whether Levinas would recognize himself in the project of deconstruction. To this question, one would have to answer both yes and no. In his only essay devoted to Derrida, “Wholly Otherwise,” appearing in 1976, Levinas made a point of expressing what he called “the pleasure of a contact made in the heart of a chiasmus.” However, while he acknowledged “the primordial importance of the questions raised by Derrida” (WO, 1991, p.10), he remarked upon the way in which these questions implicitly reestablish the ontology they are meant to undermine. “To say that this lack [of presence] still belongs to Being is to revolve in the circle of Being and nothingness” (WO, 1991, p.7). However, this did not prevent Levinas from finding in deconstruction an ethical meaning apparently not found by its author:

What appears to the deconstructive analysis as truly lacking in itself is not the surplus--which would still be . . . a residue of ontology--but the better (le mieux) of proximity; an excellence, and elevation, ethics before Being or the Good beyond Being. (WO, 1991, p.7)

These lines perform the double reading characteristic of deconstruction itself. In the measure that Derrida’s work converts the “surplus” found within the text of philosophy into something like a deficit of presence, it appears still to be determined by ontology. Hence, it too could be charged with continuing what Levinas calls the “destruction” (CP, 1987, p.154) (not deconstruction!) of ethical transcendence (Bernasconi, 1982, p.37). On the other hand, to the extent that it also reveals the proximity of the Other beyond ontology, deconstruction would have to be interpreted as having an underlying ethical significance.

While it may seem ironic to find Levinas “turning the tables,” as it were, on the master of deconstruction in this way, especially when we consider that Derrida was one of the first to use the logic of negation against Levinas, it is a clear indication of the trace of Derrida’s thinking in Levinas’s own. By this, I simply mean that Levinas appears to have learned an important lesson from Derrida, and from Heidegger before him: namely, that to contradict Hegel is to reconfirm Hegel. To dispute the hegemony of presence by pointing to its deficiency is to reinstate the disputed hegemony by defining deficiency in its own terms. Not that Heidegger and Derrida, of course, are prepared to give Hegel the last word in philosophy. Each thinker announces the end of philosophy in a quite different sense from Hegel, for whom it entailed the final reconciliation of thought with the thinker, leaving nothing outside reason to be known. Where does Levinas stand in relation to the discourse of the end of philosophy that has come to dominate the postmodernist debate?

The End of Philosophy and Humanism

That Levinas does not fully accept the idea that philosophy is at an end, whose totalizing and neutral implications he called into question in Totality and Infinity (TI, 1969, p.298), is clear from an interview given in 1981:

It is true that philosophy, in its traditional forms of ontotheology and logocentrism--to use Heidegger’s and Derrida’s terms--has come to an end. But it is not true of philosophy in the other sense of critical speculation and interrogation. Reason is never so versatile as when it puts itself into question. In the contemporary end of philosophy, philosophy has found a new lease of life. (EI, 1984, p.69)

The last claim is reminiscent of the refutation traditionally leveled at skepticism--a self-refutation to the extent that the Pyrrhonian skeptics were more than prepared to put their own negative assertions into question. If Levinas, then, is unwilling to embrace the notion of the end of philosophy with the same zeal as many of his contemporaries, his hesitancy betokens anything but a failure of skeptical nerve and an uncritical attachment to traditional ways of thinking. For it is precisely the inability of proponents of the end of philosophy to break old habits--totalization, neutralization, and dogmatism--that provokes Levinas’s skepticism.

In Otherwise Than Being, speaking of the end of humanism, another shibboleth of postmodernism, Levinas writes, “Modern anti-humanism . . . is true over and beyond the reasons it gives itself. It clears the place for subjectivity positing itself in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will” (OB, 1978, p.127). Levinas appears unconcerned by that fact that very few anti-humanists would couch their thinking in explicitly ethical terms. What does it matter when we now know better than to trust authorial intentions? Levinas’s notion of subjectivity cannot be equated with anything found within the tradition, and thus is not answerable to the same critique. Indeed, Levinas even shares that critique, though it has for him a quite different meaning from that found in the work of Heidegger, Foucault et al. “Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human” (OB, 1978, p.128). It is not human enough because true subjectivity, according to Levinas, is not defined by rational autonomy but by responsibility for the Other. Here the presumption of responsibility precedes the assumption of responsibility. “The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the Other has introduced it” (TI, 1969, pp.218-19). Clearly, there remains a residue of will and spontaneity in Levinas’s ethics, an element of freedom that no ethics worthy of the name can spirit away. The least that can be said is that Levinas ethics does not begin with freedom, but with obligation. Unlike traditional morality, in which “ought implies can” (Kant), Levinas’s ethics entails “ought” as the indispensable condition for “can.” The “can” of practical reason implies the relation with the Other who “invests” (84) the will by liberating it from arbitrariness and delivering it over to the infinite demands of asymmetrical responsibility. Levinas acknowledges the scandalous nature of such asymmetry from the point view of a traditional ethics of reciprocal obligations. Indeed, he even appears to celebrate it: “There is something more important than my life. And that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable being” (PM, 1988, p.172). Pace Aristotle. Pace Kant.

Levinas, Lyotard, and Justice

If Levinas offers Derrida resources for a meditation on la differance, he provides Lyotard with a basis for thinking le differend. In Just Gaming, appearing in 1979, Lyotard repeatedly appealed to Levinas in the course of insisting on the singularity of the language game of prescriptions (“justice”) and its incommensurability with denotative statements. “This is what, for me, makes the thought of Levinas so important” (Lyotard, 1985, p.22); “What interests me so much in someone like Levinas, is the forceful attention of the original character of requests” (Lyotard, 1985, p.25); “A game of prescriptions without interest . . . Levinas is categorical on this, and I think he is quite right” (Lyotard, 1985, p.53).

Nevertheless, Lyotard is not an uncritical admirer of Levinas’s work. Despite the lack of any foundational criteria with which to judge it, eliminated by his incredulity towards Grand Narratives, he gives notice of the manner in which his own thinking consists in “betraying” it. He writes,

It is obvious that the very way in which I take over [Levinas’s] doctrine . . . is alien to his own. In his view . . . truth is not ontological truth, it is ethical. But it is a truth in Levinas’s own terms. Whereas for me, it cannot be the truth. (Lyotard, 1985, p.60)

The critical flaw in Levinas’s thinking, according to Lyotard, consists in privileging one language game over all the others. For Lyotard, there exists a multiplicity of language games, each with its own set of rules, pragmatically organized around three distinct “poles” of discourse: the “Western” or epistemological pole, marked by the desire for totalization; the “Jewish” or prescriptive pole; and the “pagan” pole, which includes the retelling of myths and popular narratives in artistic works and traditional cultures. Although Levinas’s thinking is explicitly bound to the second pole, to the extent that it ignores the abundance of other (“pagan”) language games that make up the third pole, it implicitly reinstates the first pole in the most traditional of gestures. In other words, Levinas settles the differend of obligation in a litigious manner by passing judgement on all discourses, as though there were universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres, which Lyotard denies.

There is no question that Levinas, like Plato, gives preeminence to the Good and judges everything else in its light, including art: “There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (CP, 1987, p.12). Levinas’s criticism of art, however, pales in comparison with his denunciation of what he calls “paganism,” a brand of discourse that Lyotard elevates precisely because it does “not have any truth value in the sense of speculative discourse” (Lyotard, 1985, p.38). For Levinas, by contrast, it constitutes a throwback to a primitive or nascent stage of humanity in awe of what he derisively calls the “sacred”:

Here we have the eternal seduction of paganism, beyond the infantilism of idolatry, which long ago was surpassed: The Sacred filtering into the world--Judaism is perhaps no more than the negation of all that. . . . The mystery of things is the source of all cruelty towards men. (DL, 1990, p.232)

If there is an unquestioned bias in Levinas’s thinking it is perhaps not so much his privileging of ethics over everything else as the privilege he extends to Judaism in his examples of ethics. It is a bias that nevertheless goes unchallenged by Lyotard, who indeed leans the same way: “the absolute privileging of the pole of the addressee, as the only site in which the social body can hold, is to be found in Jewish thought. By which I mean the thought of Levinas” (Lyotard, 1985, p.37).

Whether or not Lyotard is correct to assimilate the language game of prescription to Jewish thought, he is surely mistaken to characterize Levinas’s thought in terms of the “absolute privileging” of the addressee of obligation. In Levinas, it is never the self who has priority, but the Other who delivers the self over to the demands of infinite responsibility. To be sure, Levinas does not give priority to the Other to the exclusion of all others. For there is in Levinas’s thinking the foundation of a socialist politics, the necessity to introduce parity and equality into the one-sidedness of the face to face in danger of becoming an egoism a deux, neglectful of the rest of humanity. “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other--language is justice” (TI, 1961, p.213). It is the need for the third party justice that justifies the return to philosophy and provides a raison d’etre for ontology, according to Levinas, henceforth called upon to engage reflective judgement in the absence of criteria. This fundamental insight is missing from Lyotard’s reading.

Like Lyotard, Levinas is a thinker of the differend to the extent that he acknowledges the inapplicability of a single rule of judgement that would totalize both the Other (addresser) and the I (addressee). However, he differs from Lyotard precisely insofar as he will not settle for anything less when it comes to the problem of third party justice, which requires that rules of genre be found in order to attenuate the violence that emanates not just from ontology, but, paradoxically, from ethics itself. To privilege the Other at the expense of ignoring justice produces a wrong no less serious, and perhaps more irreparable, than the damages incurred by the litigious practices of the totality. It is in the name of justice to all the potential addressers of imperatives that the search for truth is itself justified, and why Levinas would regard Lyotard’s call for the scientific language game, comprised of “little narratives,” to seek dissent and not consensus (Lyotard, 1984, p.66) as ethically unsound and unjust. In “Secularization and Hunger,” written shortly after the famine that caused some one and a half million deaths in Ethiopia (1971-73), he writes:

The condemnation of technology--which moreover is diffused throughout public opinion by means of all the perfections of the technology of broadcasting--has itself become a comfortable rhetoric, forgetful of responsibilities to which a “developing” humanity, more and more numerous, calls and which, without the development of technology could not be fed. (SH, 1998, p.9 modified translation)

If Levinas considers the Enlightenment idea of progress to be ethically indispensable, it is not because he considers science and technology to be the final goals of humanity. It is because they are needed for the “development” of the Third World. The sacred must be supplanted by secularization, where the land is no longer something to be worshipped, but something in which to plant food for half of the world’s population who currently don’t have enough. This requires not less but more scientific consensus, not less, but more mass agricultural techniques. To the extent that Western science and technology are needed by the Third World, we should perhaps question ourselves about our right to call them into question in these postmodern times.

Bibliography

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