Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed 9781472547019

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Composing a critical introduction to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas involves a precarious balance of a succinct survey of a richly hyperbolic and metaphysically dense philosophy, and detachedly critical appraisal of its most general theses. Although many Levinasian commentators struggle to say enough, it has been my tribulation not to say too much. The goal throughout has been to identify problems, clarify language, propose basic definitions, minimize extensive quotations and utilize sources the introductory reader might find readily accessible at a university library. The result might be regarded as an almost churlish lack of attentiveness to the rhetorical nuances of Levinas's thought: this 'guide' offers few convoluted proposals couched in vertiginous prose, few name-dropping allusions to traditional readings, and few grandiloquent gestures in the direction of the unknowable. Ultimately, it represents an inquiry into the relevance of Levinas's ethics, which requires a balanced clarity of insight and intuition that is much needed in the study of Levinas's thought today. I can only hope that the result is adequate to enable the reader to decide whether to take their curiosity to the stage of active exploration. Many people have contributed to this work on the 'ethics of responsibility', to all of whom I am infinitely responsible and copiously thankful. Continuum's stellar coterie of editors - Hywel Evans, Anthony Hayes, and Ian Price - have been staunch allies in the effort to bring the book from the womb of obscurity. My Oxford supervisor Graham Ward, currently of the University of Manchester, sparked my interest in Levinas's work and occasionally bolstered flagging confidence. My external advisor John Milbank,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

currently of the University of Virginia, has been kindly supportive over the years. Most effusive thanks to Patricia Cunningham, Betsy Chapman, Judy Deboard and the 'End of the World' kin. Above all, to Karen Hutchens, whose unfathomable repository of patient generosity and compassionate perseverance is appreciated beyond words.

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THE PROBLEM OF INTRODUCTION CRITICISM AND INFLUENCE

According to rabbinic wisdom, Emmanuel Levinas teaches sagaciously, nothing is more serious than teaching in the presence of one's masters. The mastery of the teacher and the elevation of the student - and the student's duties - begin whenever even an isolated element of knowledge is communicated from spirit to spirit.1 It is my task in this book to teach in the presence of an absent master who might well have been one of the superlative metaphysical visionaries of the twentieth century. 'Spirit to spirit' with the reader, striving to convey the message of the teacher who observes my performance of duties, I am struggling with my elevation (elevation) as a student (eleve] of E. Lev! I did not have the honour of meeting Levinas before his death in 1995 at the age of nearly 90. However, portraits of Levinas evoke a pained wisdom in the face of a sensitive thinker who described his biography as 'the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror'.2 While the concept of the human face is of paramount ethical significance in his unabatedly stirring composition, his own face provokes a respectful desire to learn from him and teach for him. The reader might have seen reference to Levinas as a 'Continental' philosopher, which is a conceptual flag unfurled in Anglo-American literature and language departments in the late twentieth century. Originally associated with the radical politics of the French 'generation of 1968', including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, it has swelled to encompass not only the nefarious iconoclasts Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, but many other French and German thinkers I

LEVINAS: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

as well. In this sense, Levinas is not a 'Continental' philosopher, if only because he was a Jewish traditionalist who may have abhorred the Western tradition's forgetting of ethics, but abjured revolutionary activism. He vilified the 'death of God' antihumanism of the radical thinkers but found it occasionally useful as a counterpoise to the excesses of humanism. To be sure, Levinas sits uncomfortably with other 'Continental' thinkers because of his Talmudic orientation, and confronts such exemplars as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger with a Judaic alternative. It is more appropriate, and more impressive, to speak of Levinas as a European Talmudist of startling originality who composed philosophical thoughts with the climacteric intention of revamping the Western intellectual tradition through discussion, not rebellion. Like many other philosophers in the modern French tradition, Levinas offers staunch resistance to the rolling, intellectual currents of the West. His work does not disparage traditional philosophies piecemeal but in sweeping, breathtaking movements. Despite its vertiginous nature, it proposes a new paradigm for philosophical inquiry that Jacques Derrida, in his funeral eulogy, claims is changing the course of philosophical refection.3 The fact that it proposes a paradigm indicates that a radical revision of philosophy is necessary. Known variously as an 'ethics of ethics', an 'ethics of responsibility', an 'ethical metaphysics', and an 'ethical transcendentalism', it unrelentingly demands that philosophy consider massive alternative perspectives on the ethical, religious and aesthetic nature of the self and its relationship with other persons, the world at large and the god. With alacrity, Levinas challenges us to recognize that there might be precariously unstable presuppositions buried unnoticed beneath the foundation of the traditional philosophical edifice, especially those that, as Stella Sandford has remarked, threaten to disavow any thinking beyond traditional perimeters.4 Contrary to his reputation as a benign altruist issuing saccharine platitudes about the necessity of greater responsibility is the almost brutal violence of his unwavering insistence on a more ethical world-view that places burdensome demands upon the human self and its condition in the world. There is nothing consoling about his exhortative ethical vision, and something genuinely sobering about his fulminatory account of the violence Western philosophy has justified. Indeed, the reader may be often perturbed by the cacophony of notions of violence Levinas utilizes, including power, privilege, profanation, 2

THE PROBLEM OF INTRODUCTION

destitution, anxiety, deception, evasion, exile, subversion, etc. To read Levinas well is perhaps to read him largely, that is, to open oneself up to a completely novel approach to philosophizing that is often discomforting but rarely unrewarding. Even pro-Levinasian commentators notoriously concede that he is difficult to read with any satisfactory comprehension. Levinas's books are replete with wisdom that is often illuminating, but occasionally vitiating of comprehension. He was a visionary of unrivalled sensitivity who spent nearly a century trying to reshape subterranean strata of Western thought. In some sense, he thought philosophical violence begins with the power of the mind to render experience intelligible. Hence, he devised captious textual games that keep the reader disoriented whenever he or she might be satisfied with an impeccable power of interpretation. Despite Levinas's considerable influence in the contemporary humanities and his sensitivity to new intellectual needs, determining the relevance of his contribution to ethics is frustrating to students and professional academics alike. The problem lies in his strategy of composition, in which how he writes about a subject is interleaved with what he is describing. For example, when Levinas exhorts the reader to be responsible for his own demand for responsibility, it is never quite clear whether this notion of responsibility is coherent, though there is every reason to think that it is ubiquitous in the moral and human sciences, as Jacques Derrida has noted.5 What is most interesting, and occasionally infuriating, is that Levinas, who eschews limpidity of composition, intends to be abstruse and elusive in order to present his ideas in what he regards as the only truly disputatious fashion. And indeed, as a result few people who share in his work for the first time do so with immediate satisfaction. In the main, to demand coherence in a Levinasian text is to be cutting against the grain of its strategy of composition. What follows is a summary of some of the ways the reader might be frustrated by his obstreperous texts. First, Levinas wrote many repetitive books. It might seem that he has merely one or two trenchant formulas in mind, such as 'reducing the other to the same' or 'otherwise than being', each of which is adumbrated at crucial moments of inquiry. The sanguine critic might swear that to read one article is to read them all. Each thought is approached from myriad perspectives and with varying intentions that undergo minor revision, but, despite its many vicissitudes, 3

LEVINAS: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

it retains its evocative meanings. However, these meanings are so protean that one is rarely certain what one has learned. Second, Levinas's textual strategy is obliquitous. His ideas are adulterated with one another, such that, for example, if one is interested in meaning in language, one is quickly forced to read about dialogue, scepticism, time, God and so on. The reader's comprehension is always disequilibriated and deferred. In other words, Levinas postpones the resolution of a reader's line of questioning by simply pointing onwards to yet something else: r is justified by q, which is justified by p, and so on. When one is annoyed by this strategy, the result might look like nothing more impressive than a mess of concepts haphazardly thrown together in a semi-intelligible haze. In certain books, Levinas's reasoning is similar to the black ink an octopus squirts in order to elude capture. But many 'positivistic' readers might believe that authors are not supposed to be as furtive as octopuses, and thus might wonder sardonically why Levinas shows no signs of wanting to be understood. As we shall see, in some sense, being lost in a Levinasian text is a necessary condition for ultimate comprehension. Third, holding formal logic and argumentative rationality in some contempt, Levinas delights in contradiction, paradox and circular reasoning. For example, he might insist that something is both p in one respect and not-/? in another respect, but the respects in which this contradiction is intended to be accepted are exceedingly abstruse and, when refined for understanding, lead on to other contradictions and paradoxes. Sometimes the paradoxes Levinas unveils even seem embarrassingly platitudinous, especially when taken out of context. Finally, we are told that/? justifies q and that