Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas 9781503619708

Citation preview

IS IT RIGHTEOUS TO BE?

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery

Editors

Stanford University Press

Stanford California

IS IT RIGHTEOUS TO BE?

Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

Edited by jill Robbins

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University "Discussion Following 'Transcendence and lmelligibiliry'" was originally published in French as "Enrretien avec Emmanuel Levinas" in Transcendance et intelligibilite ©1984, Labor et Fides. Support for the translation was provided by the French Ministry of Culture. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levinas, Emmanuel. [Interviews. English. Selections] Is it righteous to be? : interviews with Emmanuel Levinas I edited by Jill Robbins. p. em. (Meridian) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8047-4308-8 (aJk. paper)-ISBN 0-8047-4309-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) I.

Omology.

2.

Ethics.

I. Robbins, Jill.

II. Tide.

III. Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) B2430.L484 A)I3 200! 2001040030 Original Printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: !0

09

0~

07

Typeset by BookMatters in n!I3 Adobe Garamond

Contents

Acknowledgments

lX

Introduction: "Apres Vous, Monsieur!" PART I:

INTELLECTUAL AND PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

Interview with

Fran~ois

Poirie (1986)

Interview with Myriam Anissimov (1985) Interview with Salomon Malka (1984) PART II:

ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

The Vocation of the Other (1988)

105

Being-for-the-Other (1989)

II4

The Philosopher and Death (I982) Being-Toward-Death and "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1986)

121

Intention, Event, and the Other (1989) Reality Has Weight (1984) Philosophy, Justice, and Love (1983) The Awakening of the I (1992) In the Name of the Other (1990) The Other, Utopia, and Justice (1988)

200

Contents

Vlll

The Proximity of the Other (1986)

211

Who Shall Not Prophesy? (1985)

219

Responsibility and Substitution (1988)

228

On the Usefulness of Insomnia (1987)

234

PART III: A-DIEU

On Jewish Philosophy (1985)

239

Judaism and Christianity after Franz Rosenzweig (1987)

255

Discussion Following "Transcendence and Intelligibility" (1984)

268

Glossary

287

Notes Select Bibliography ofWorks by Emmanuel Levinas Index

291

30! 303

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book would have been impossible without the tireless labors of Andrew Schmitz and Benjamin Friedlander. They generously gave their time and expertise, reviewed with me the entire manuscript for consistency and readability, and helped with the scholarly apparatus. I am enormously grateful to them. In addition to the translators-Andrew Schmitz, Marcus Coelen, Thomas Loebel, Bettina Bergo, Alin Crist ian, Michael Smith and Maureen Gedney- I would like to thank John Llewelyn, Kenneth Dauber, and Bronia Karst, who read portions of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions. Thanks to Nicole Martello for editorial assistance and to Aaron Alter for technical support.

lX

IS IT RIGHTEOUS TO BE?

Introduction: ''Apres Vous, Monsieur!" by jill Robbins One must yield to the other the first place in everything. From the "apres vous" before the open door right up to the disposition-hardly possible, but holiness demands it-to die for the other. In this attitude of holiness, there is a reversal of the normal order of things, the natural order of things, the persistence in being. -Levinas, Interview with Frans:ois Poirie

In the interviews with Emmanuel Levinas that follow, ceding one's place to the other is paradigmatic of the kind of gesture that Levinas terms ethical. The "place" that "one must yield" invariably denotes "my place in the sun," whence begins, according to the phrase of Pascal that Levin as quotes frequently, "the usurpation of the whole earth." Place also denotes the Da of Dasein, Heidegger's term for man insofar as he asks the question of the meaning of the being of beings. Levinas asks: "Is not ... the Da of my Dasein already usurpation or violence with respect to the other?" ("Who Shall Not Prophesy?"). To cede one's place to the other is, thus, not only to interrupt-on a primordial level-the self's essential tendency "to persist" or "to persevere" in its being, it is also to assert the anteriority of the question of the other to Heidegger's question of the being of beings. The distance between Levinas's sense of ethics-as interruption on a primordial level-and its usual sense as right conduct, a system of moral precepts, or any particular morality, may be apparent. Levinas's descriptions of the encounter with the other take place on a level more originary than the empirical. Jacques Derrida alludes to this transcendental motif in Levinas's philosophy when, in his 1963 "Violence and Metaphysics," he proposes that Levinas gives us not an ethics but "an Ethics of ethics." 1 Levinas specifies that the proper form of the question is not "Is my life righteous?" (a question that would belong in effect to the derivative sense of ethics, insofar as it already presupposes the being of the questioner), but rather, "Is it righteous to be?" ("Reality Has Weight"). "Do I have a right to be?" he asks ("Who Shall Not Prophesy?"). "Does our very being

I

2

Introduction

already legitimate our wish to be? It is ... a matter of ... finding reasons for being, for meriting being" ("The Philosopher and Death"). Within Levinas's description of positive responsibility, the apparent continuum between a simple act of courtesy and total self-sacrifice, or dying for the other, may be surprising. There is indeed something excessive about responsibility in Levinas's account, not just because he names it in extravagant fashion, using terms like obsession, hostage, passivity, persecution, and trauma, but because it is limitless: I am never done with my responsibilities. Yet a similar continuum can be found-in a negative fashion-in Levinas's interpretation of the interdiction that the face of the other (le visage d'autrui) addresses to me. Not primarily a thing seen or intended, the face in Levinas's descriptions is precisely that which divests itself of its plastic form. To encounter a face as a face is to encounter a nakedness, a mortality, a destitution, "a being face forward precisely as if it were exposed to some threat at point-blank range" ("The Philosopher and Death"). Exposed to death (and to murder as well), the face is defenselessness itself But the face (and this is one of the paradoxical features of Levinas's account) commands me in its very defenselessness. It orders "thou shalt nor kill." To encounter the other thus, by way of an interdiction, puts my spontaneity and my-ultimately murderous-freedom into question. This is accomplished as shame, a structure which Levinas likens to an "intentionality in reverse" (Totality and Infinity, 84). Hence in addition to the biblical prohibition against murder, the phrase "thou shalt not kill" announces, in more general terms, the "arrest" of the self's habitual tendency, the cessation of all possibility and power (expressed in the single word pouvoir). "Thou shalt not kill" announces the im-possibility of murdering the other insofar as my freedom is converted to service, as Theo de Boer explains it. 2 Murder is also impossible because the other's ethical resistance is one "no finite power can restrict." 3 "Thou shalt not kill" has, arguably, in Levinas's account an enlarged sense: killing ultimately includes the omission of any act that could alleviate the other's distress. He elaborates: "There are a variety of ways to kill. It isn't always just a matter of killing, say, with a knife. The everyday killing with a good conscience, the killing in all innocence-there is such a thing as well!" ("Being-Toward-Death"). It is as if the habitual economy were all about killing, as if not to cede one's place to the other were to kill, "as if the very imposition of [a being's] existence were already to jeopardize someone's life" (Poirie). The prohibition, then, is not merely negative;

Introduction

3

it is precisely the paradigm for positive responsibility. Levinas glosses it: "'Thou shalt not kill' signifies ... 'thou shalt do everything in order that the other live'" ("Discussion"). "'Thou shalt not kill' signifies 'you shall defend the life of the other ... you will answer for the other!'" ("In the Name of the Other"). Responsibility is thus an incessant answerability for and response to the other. The interviews with Levinas collected here, conducted by diverse interviewers in diverse contexts, took place between 1982 and 1992 (the final one three years before his death, on December 25, 1995). They are situated, then, at the close of a sixty-year career. While many of Levinas's themes, such as his analysis of murder, hearken back to the mature ethical philosophy of the 1961 Totality and Infinity and to key texts from the late 1940s, his formulations about responsibility are invariably marked by the distinctive idiom of the later work, represented by the 1974 Otherwise than Being. Otherwise than Being radicalizes and exceeds Totality and Infinity's project. The ethics that Totality and Infinity defines as the putting into question of the self in the presence of the other becomes, in the later work, a putting into question of the very closure of the philosophical discourse itself. Otherwise than Being seeks to depart from an ontological language, to discursively pass over to what is other than being, even if such an effort always risks falling into a being otherwise, that is, into a modality of being. The later work that sets itself this formidable task necessarily has a certain opacity-both of language and of the themes treated. It is also associated with a specific terminology, two examples of which are already in play. The often-iterated phrase, "perseverance in being," alludes to the conatus essendi, a term used by Spinoza in his Ethics (part 3, prop. 6), which may be rendered as "the essential tendency for a being to persist in its being." Levinas characteristically (and not unproblematically) applies the term to Heidegger, and transforms it into an anti-Heideggerian formula. Levinas even formulates his project as a whole as an effort "to imagine an anthropology different from that which starts from the conatus essendi'' ("The Philosopher and Death"). The term holiness (saintete') also punctuates these interviews. Used interchangeably with the term sacrifice, holiness refers to a being's withdrawal of its interestedness in being. Since, as Levinas puts it at the beginning of Otherwise than Being, "esse is interesse," holiness is its beyond-being or "otherwise than being" (Otherwise than Being, 4).

4

Introduction

In spite of the differences between the later work and the mature philosophy-in which the normal order of things which needs to be challenged is now the conatus rather than the habitual economy-the common threads of ethics as interruption (Otherwise than Being, 43, 56, 89, 101) and the figure of reversal or inversion (Otherwise than Being, 12, 47, 70, 101, 107) are nonetheless apparent. So is the fact that ethics happens in and as language: "Apres vous, Monsieur!" "This little effort of courtesy is also an access to the face! ... Is not the first word bonjour? As simple as bonjour!" (Poirie). A" bonjour presupposed by every cogito and by all selfreflection" ("Proximity and the Other"). Here, as in the account that Levinas provides in Totality and Infinity, language (and generosity) are the sole exceptions to the self's habitual economy, in that they maintain and affirm asymmetry and separation. What kind oflanguage is this that accomplishes the nontotalizing relation to the other? The ethical language is primordial: it precedes and "underlies" all discourse and communication (Poirie). It has neither a semantic function (that is, it is not referential or denotative) nor can it be conceived as a semiosis, which as a system of referrals within immanence would destroy transcendence. Ethical language is interlocutionary; it never speaks about the other but only to him or her. Its essential feature is "interpellation" (Totality and Infinity, 69). "Language," asserts Levinas, "is always addressed to the other" ("The Usefulness oflnsomnia"). In the later work, Levinas invariably calls ethical language the "saying." The saying is speech before it congeals in the said, which absorbs alterity into thematization; it is a mobile orientation toward the addressee. The "interpellation of the I by the £1ce" ("Discussion") inaugurates a "conversation" that is not a dialogue in any usual sense, as it is characterized by neither reciprocity nor recognition. Levinas calls it "a conversation [entretien] which proposes the world. This proposition is held over [se tient entre] two points which do not constitute a totality" (Totality and Infinity, 96). This conversation is not to be confused with the image of two already constituted poles between which speech appears (which would allow the relation to be viewed synoptically). As Maurice Blanchot elaborates it, this strange speech is "beyond the reach of the one who says it as much as of the one who hears it. It is between us [entre nous], it holds itself between us [se tient entre] and the conversation is the approach on the basis of this between." 4 Such is the interpellation, literally an interruption by speaking.

Introduction

5

In this opening conversation, the foct of speaking is more important that any word or content. Ultimately, the primordial conversation is contentless, or prior to content (and for this reason, ethical language is not something that one can ever claim to be taking up). As the previous analysis of "thou shalt not kill" suggested, the other's command is not necessarily a categorial prescription. It is more like what Jean-Frans;ois Lyotard calls "a prescription that there be prescriptions."' There is, in other words, something deliberately general and empty about the other's speaking command. The same observation can be made about the rare examples of ethical language that Levinas provides throughout his writings. The examples-which include "Bonjour" (Poirie; "Proximity"); "Shalom" ("Vocation"); ''Apres vous Monsieur" (Poirie; "Vocation"; "In The Name of the Other"; Otherwise than Being, 117); "Here I am" ("The Philosopher and Death"; "The Other, Utopia, Justice"; Otherwise than Being, n4)-are in fact empty bits of everyday language in which Levinas glimpses transcendence. If the examples of ethical language that Levinas provides are few, one may observe, similarly, that Levinas gives us very few examples for the ethical in his work, as if it could not be translated into empiricism. Specific ethical prescriptions, all of which draw on the resources of the biblical diction, include turning one's cheek to the smiter (Otherwise than Being, 49, m; Collected Philosophical Papers, 146), tearing the bread from one's mouth and giving it to the other (Otherwise than Being, 55-56, 64, 72, 74, 77, 79), assuaging thirst or giving to drink, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry (Poirie). Like ceding one's place to the other, these examples would seem to be located at the intersection between the transcendental and the empirical. In Levinas's interpretation, "apres vous, Monsieur" means "ontological courtesy, being-for-the-other!" ("Vocation"). He states specifically that the condition of saying "apres vous, monsieur" is my being hostage to the other (Otherwise than Being, rq). In a manner comparable to the Heideggerian discovery of "finite transcendentals," exemplified in the Heideggerian analysis of moods, Levinas indeed locates a certain transcendence in the factical. But Levinas also makes explicit precisely where he departs from Being and Time's descriptions. In "Dying-for," a paper first delivered in 1987 at the College International de Philosophie [reprinted in Entre Nous], in an argument which is in the background of a number of these interviews, and which he revisits in detail in "The Other, Utopia, and Justice," Levinas

6

Introduction

formulates his reservations. At issue is Heidegger's association of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) with]emeinigkeit (mineness) ("The Other, Utopia, and Justice"). This association is first apparent in section 4 of Being and Time, where, in Heidegger's formulation, "Dasein is a being that ... in its very being that being is an issue for it," a formulation to which Levinas refers repeatedly. According to Heidegger, in Dasein's concern for its being, the structure of care (Sorge) comes into view, just as it does in Dasein's being "ahead-of-itself," its potentiality for an authentic standing before itself in being-unto-death (section 41). When in section 47 of Being and Time, Heidegger treats the possibility of experiencing the death of others, he asserts that the death of the other in no way gives access to an authentic being-unto-death: "Death is in every case mine." He discounts the authentic possibility of Dasein's going beyond its own being-unto-death, of dying-for the other: "No one can take the other's dying away from him. But that always means to sacrifice oneself for the other in some definite affair. Such dying-for can never signify that the other has thus had his death taken away from him in even the slightest degree." 6 Contra Heidegger, who emphasizes that everyone dies for himself, Levinas asserts: "I am responsible for the death of the other" (Poirie); "Dying for the other can concern me more than my own death'' ("The Other, Utopia, Justice"); "The human consists precisely in opening itself to the death of the other, in being preoccupied with his death" ("The Philosopher and Death"). For Levinas, concern over the death of the other precedes the concern over authentic death and the concern for being. Thus while Heidegger does indeed broach, in section 26 of Being and Time, the possibility of solicitude (Fiirsorge) as an expression of being with others, such solicitude must always, in his account, first come up against a stumbling block, which is the inauthenticity of the "They" (das Man). However, solicitude in Levinas's new understanding of it is not merely to be grafted onto being-with (Mitsein). It is not conditioned by being. At stake is not a being-with (avec) but a for-the-other (pour-l'autre). Everything that in Levinas's later work falls under the name substitution is at work in this "for-the-other." Levinas formulates the difference between solicitude in Heidegger's and his own sense as an alternative between (r) Eigentlichkeit, thought in terms of "the unalterable 'mine' of the human," of ]emeinigkeit, of everything proper, in its own right, and (2) the human devotion to the other, "the excessiveness of sacrifice" (Entre Nous, 2n-12). In short, the relation to the other in sacrifice may not have an authentic

Introduction

7

ontological significance, but it has an ethical one. It is "a breakthrough of the human putting into question the ontological necessities and the persistence of a being that perseveres in its being" ("The Philosopher and Death"); it "indicates precisely a beyond-ontology or before-ontology" (Entre Nous, 217). Like ceding one's place to the other, dying-for is "the very miracle of the human in being," when "the human overwhelms the inhuman in being, always preoccupied with itself" ("Vocation"). Ceding one's place to the other is, for Levinas, an "extraordinary" event ("Vocation"), by which he means that it is an exception to the natural order of things: "We are all enchained to ourselves, in the grips of our concern to be, which Heidegger summarized by saying, at issue for a being-Dasein-is this being itself. ... Within this tension lies the source of egoism .... And yet it does happen that a man dies for another, that the being of the other is dearer to him than his own. This is only possible within the order of the human, and it is found nowhere else. 'Apres vous, Monsieur,' as it is said in French manners" ("In the Name of the Other"). In short, ethics hardly ever happens, but if it does happen, the human is the only possible site for it. The "extraordinary and everyday event of my responsibility"( Otherwise than Being, w) is at once exceptional and ubiquitous in factical speech. To be the other's hostage, in Levinas's terminology, is to be obligated to an immemorial debt that I do not remember contracting. This obligation, which is not voluntary, holds me to a condition of passivity, like that of creation, where I am neither the author of myself nor self-contemporaneous. Moreover, I am obligated, in Levinas's frequent phrase, "straightaway" (d'emblee). This is to say that the obligation is immediate and does not go by way of the theoretical. Responsibility as Levinas conceives it does not begin in freedom, and this is one of the ways in which Levinas's account goes against the grain of the traditional philosophemes of ethics. He explains: "Heteronomy is somehow stronger than autonomy here, except that this heteronomy is not servitude or bondage" ("Philosophy, Justice, and Love"). He also characterizes his ethical thought as "a rehabilitation of heteronomy" ("Discussion"). Levinas's 1968 text, "The Temptation of Temptation" (from Nine Talmudic Readings) had already underscored that the constative origin of freedom cannot be thought in terms of freedom. In addition to a critique of freedom, Levinas's ethical thought contains a critique of identity as well. For the responsibility which Levinas describes

8

Introduction

as so imperiously incumbent upon me is not necessarily something that a self or a subject can do. Turning one's cheek to the smiter is not an act that one performs, Levinas explains (Otherwise than Being, m). Sacrifice is not a will for sacrifice (Otherwise than Being, 55). Since the encounter with the other puts the self and its pouvoir radically into question, the ethical response to the other who puts me in question is not a response-ability at all; there is inability there. How, then, can this responsibility be? Levinas describes it in paradoxical terms: it draws from "the resources-or the poverty-of my uniqueness as an I" ("Being-for-the-Other"). To respond to the other is, as it were, to dig deep into one's poverty, in a hollowing out that allows for neither the self nor its initiative. Levinas's ethics become legible only within a certain experience of impossibility. This impossibility is only underscored by the ontological insecurity of the ethical event. Recall Levinas's assertions: yielding to the other is "hardly possible [a peine possible], yet holiness demands it" (Poirie). "This [dying for] is only possible within the order of the human [Cela se peut dans l'humain]" ("In the Name of the Other"). In his 1980 "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am" Derrida draws attention to the doubleness ofLevinas's syntax at such textual junctures, a syntax which seems to introduce deliberately a precariousness into his ethical discourse. "This is only possible within the human" seems to adhere to the classical form of a statement on the condition of possibility ("it has not been rendered possible except by way of the human"), but it also allows for a second, other sense ("it has been rendered only possible, that is, probable"). The ethical event is, in Derrida's words, "menaced by its very rigor." 7 But this is one of the risks that Levinas's quasi-transcendental philosophy deliberately runs. As an "Ethics of ethics," Levinas's philosophy seeks not to issue particular ethical directives, but to change the way in which philosophy is written. He willingly characterizes his ethics as "utopic" ("the ideal of holiness utopically commands our being") (Poirie), which he means in the more literal sense of the word. Without place, not in the world, holiness is "a no-place prior to the there of being-there, prior to the Da of Dasein, prior to that place in the sun that Pascal feared was the prototype and beginning of the usurpation of the whole world" (Entre Nous, 216).

Due to the range of topics covered in these interviews, I have divided the volume into three parts. Part 2 is concerned with the ethical philosophy

Introduction

9

and is largely continuous with Levinas's formal philosophical publications. As in those works, Levinas tends to assume the reader's familiarity with the history of philosophy. He engages frequently not only texts of Heidegger, but those of Husserl (his studies with these two giants in Freiburg in 1923-24 are a frequent point of reference in the interviews). There are condensed comments on Plato, Pascal, Hobbes, Kant, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty which are of interest. Although nowhere do we find in Levinas a systematic destruction in the Heideggerian style of the history of philosophy from the vantage point of the forgetting of the ethical, we can perhaps begin to envision-especially with regard to Hobbes and Kant-what a "Levinasian" critical retrieval would look like. The decisive place granted to Franz Rosenzweig continues a meditation Levinas began thirty-five years earlier at the Colloques des lntellectuels Juifs de Langue Fran