Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics

DIFFICULT JUSTICE Commentaries on Levinas and Politics

Difficult Justice Commentaries on Levinas and Politics

Edited by Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13 978-0-8020-8009-7 ISBN-10 0-8020-8009-X

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Difficult justice : Levinas, ethics and politics /edited by Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8009-7 ISBN-10: 0-8020-8009-X 1. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2. Political science – Philosophy. 3. Political ethics. I. Horowitz, Asher, 1950– II. Horowitz, Gad, 1936– B2430.L484D55 2005

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C2005-904133-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors

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INTRODUCTION Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism emmanuel levinas

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Is Liberalism All We Need? Prelude via Fascism 12 asher horowitz and gad horowitz ESSAYS Beyond Rational Peace: On the Possibility/Necessity of a Levinasian Hyperpolitics 27 asher horowitz Hands that Give and Hands That Take: The Politics of the Feminine in Levinas 48 tina chanter Levinas in the Key of the Political oona eisenstadt

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‘The Politics’ by Levinas: Towards a ‘Critical’ Political Philosophy 78 enrique dussel

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Hemorrhage and Filiality: Towards a Fecundation of the Political mielle chandler Levinas and Alterity Politics shannon bell

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Public Transgressions: Levinas and Arendt keith anderson

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Can Fig Trees Grow on Mountains? Reversing the Question of Great Politics 148 brian schroeder Levinas, Nietzsche, and Benjamin’s ‘Divine Violence’ victoria tahmasebi

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From Escape to Hostage 191 marinos diamantides The Ethics and Politics of the Handshake: Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Nancy 221 rosalyn diprose Strangers and Slaves in the Land of Egypt: Levinas and the Politics of Otherness 246 robert bernasconi Levinas’s Jewish Perspective on State, Revolution and Utopia ze’ev levy Levinas, the Messianic, and the Question of History robert gibbs

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From a Memory beyond Memory to a State beyond the State 285 joseph rosen Aporia and Messiah in Derrida and Levinas gad horowitz

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Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the following for their generous support towards the publication of this work: the Faculty of Arts, York University; the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto; the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto; the Department of Political Science, York University; the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, York University.

Contributors

Keith Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. His research, which earlier had examined points of contact between contemporary moral realism and the Frankfurt School, now focuses on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and the possibility of a critical, prophetic politics. In addition to his academic work, he has been active in various labour and social justice organizations since the mid-1980s. Shannon Bell, Associate Professor in Political Science at York University, is a fast feminist performance philosopher who lives and writes philosophy in action. She is the author of Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute Body; Whore Carnival; Bad Attitude/s on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (with Brenda Crossman, Lise Gotell, and Becki Ross); and Fast Feminism (forthcoming). She has also edited New Socialisms: Futures Beyond Globalization (with Robert Albritton, John Bell, and Richard Westra). Robert Bernasconi is Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and numerous articles on various aspects of Continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, and race theory. He has edited, with David Wood, The Provocation of Levinas and, with Simon Critchley, Rereading Levinas and The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. With Adriaan Peperzak and Simon Critchley he edited Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Mielle Chandler is a doctoral candidate in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. She is currently working with the

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texts of Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Hegel in an investigation of the relationship between democracy and imperialism, and between identity and genocide. Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers and Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. She is also editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Her book Abjection and Film: The Constitutive Nature of Difference is forthcoming. She has written articles on feminism and Continental philosophy in such journals as Differences, Signs, the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal and Research in Phenomenology, on film, and on a wide range of figures. Dr Marinos Diamantides has studied law in Athens, Barcelona, Lancaster, and London. He works as Senior Lecturer in Law at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, where he teaches constitutional and administrative law, medical law and ethics and legal theory. His primary research interest is in ethical critiques of Western constitutional and health law. He is a specialist in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, which he uses widely in his book The Ethics of Suffering and in a number of articles and other works. He is currently researching the field of ethical critiques of Western–Islamic political relations. Rosalyn Diprose is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her publications include Corporeal Generosity: Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas and The Bodies of Women. Her current research is on ideas of community. Enrique Dussel, of Argentine origin, studied in Argentina, Spain, Germany, Isreal, and France. Professor in Ethics and Political Philosophy in the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico City), he is founder of the Movement of Latin American Liberation Philosophy and the author of more than fifty books. He has been an invited Professor at the University of Frankfurt, Duke University, and others. Among his titles in English are Philosophy of Liberation; Ethics and Community; The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor and Rorty; Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (forthcoming); and Beyond Philosophy.

Contributors

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Oona Eisenstadt is the Fred Krinsky Professor of Jewish Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her research is focused on Levinas’s use, in his phenomenological works, of ideas and images drawn from traditional Jewish sources; the bulk of this work can be found in her book Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’s Postmodernism. She received her training at McMaster University and remains a proud Canadian. Robert Gibbs is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is author of Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities and Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas and is co-author of Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy. He has written extensively on Continental philosophy and Jewish thought. His current research focuses on law and ethics. Asher Horowitz is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University. His publications include Rousseau, Nature and History; ‘Everywhere They Are in Chains’: Political Theory from Rousseau to Marx, with Gad Horowitz; and, as editor with Terry Maley, The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment. He has recently published articles pertaining to Levinas, Adorno, Habermas, and Marxism in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Philosophy Today, and Rethinking Marxism. His current research is aimed at points of contact, difference, and supplementation between Levinas and the Frankfurt School. Gad Horowitz has taught political science at the University of Toronto since 1967. He is author of Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse; ‘Emmanuel, Robert’ (a brief encounter of Levinas with Buddhism) in the Journal of Contemporary Thought; ‘Bringing Bataille to Justice,’ forthcoming in Religiologiques; and co-author, with Asher Horowitz, of ‘Everywhere They Are in Chains’: Political Theory from Rousseau to Marx, and of ‘An Ethical Orientation for Marxism: Geras and Levinas,’ in Rethinking Marxism. Ze’ev Levy was born in Dresden in 1921, and immigrated to Palestine in February, 1934. In 1939 he joined Kibbutz Cheftzi-bah, where he worked mainly as a shepherd, and in 1962 Kibbutz Hama’apil, where he now lives. In 1973 he joined the philosophy faculty at the University

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of Haifa where he became Full Professor in 1989. He has published many books on Jewish and general philosophy in both Hebrew and English, including A Precursor of Jewish Existentialism: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig; Spinoza and the Concept of Judaism; Between Yafeth and Shem: On the Relationship between Jewish and General Philosophy; Otherness and Responsibility: A Study of Emmanuel Levinas’s Philosophy; and, with Nadav Levy, Ethics, Emotions and Animals: On the Moral Status of Animals. Joseph Rosen lives and writes in Montreal. He is currently completing his PhD in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. His research investigates the political mobilization of collective memories of violence. Recent publications address Memory and Violence in Palestine/Israel; Holocaust Monuments in Germany; Poetry and the Politics of Forgetting in Paul Celan and Mahmoud Darwish; and Holocaust Comedy and ‘The Enemy.’ Brian Schroeder is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Religious Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is author of Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence and co-author of Pensare ambientalista: Tra filosofia e ecologia. In addition to publishing numerous articles on Levinas and contemporary philosophy, he is co-editor of Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer and Contemporary Italian Philosophy: Crossing the Borders of Ethics, Politics and Religion (forthcoming) Victoria Tahmasebi is a PhD candidate in the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. Her dissertation concerns the intersection of Levinas’s ethicopolitics with the construction of radicalpolitical subjectivity in social movements. After fleeing her home country of Iran in 1988 she has belonged to the Iranian diaspora in Canada. She has published numerous articles on ethics, politics, and gender in Iranian academic and non-academic journals in Canada and Europe, and translated English articles on Continental philosophy into Farsi.

Introduction

Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism* EMMANUEL LEVINAS

Translated by Seán Hand

Prefatory Note The following article appeared in Esprit, a journal representing a progressive, avant-garde Catholicism, in 1934 shortly after Hitler came to power. The article stems from the conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself. This possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being [de l’être soucieux d’être] – a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, ‘dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht.’ Such a possibility still threatens the subject correlative with being as gathering together and as dominating [l’être-à-reassembler et à-dominer], that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free. We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject. Does the subject arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other man in the act of election that raises him up to this height? This election comes from a god – or God – who beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original ‘site’ of the Revelation. Emmanuel Levinas 28 March 1990 *Reprinted from Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990), 63–71. English translation @ 1990 by The University of Chicago. Printed with permission of the publisher.

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The philosophy of Hitler is simplistic [primaire]. But the primitive powers that burn within it burst open its wretched phraseology under the pressure of an elementary force. They awaken the secret nostalgia within the German soul. Hitlerism is more than a contagion or a madness; it is an awakening of elementary feelings. But from this point on, this frighteningly dangerous phenomenon becomes philosophically interesting. For these elementary feelings harbor a philosophy. They express a soul’s principal attitude towards the whole of reality and its own destiny. They predetermine or prefigure the meaning of the adventure that the soul will face in the world. The philosophy of Hitlerism therefore goes beyond the philosophy of Hitlerians. It questions the very principles of a civilization. The conflict is played out not only between liberalism and Hitlerism. Christianity itself is threatened in spite of the careful attentions or Concordats that the Christian churches took advantage of when Hitler’s regime came to power. But it is not enough to follow certain journalists in distinguishing between Christian universalism and racist particularism: a logical contradiction cannot judge a concrete event. The meaning of a logical contradiction that opposes two forms of ideas only shows up fully if we go back to their source, to intuition, to the original decision that makes them possible. It is in this spirit that we are going to set forth the following reflections.

1 Political freedoms do not exhaust the content of the spirit of freedom, a spirit that, in Western civilization, signifies a conception of human destiny. This conception is a feeling that man is absolutely free in his relations with the world and the possibilities that solicit action from him. Man is renewed eternally in the face of the Universe. Speaking absolutely, he has no history. For history is the most profound limitation, the fundamental limitation. Time, which is a condition of human existence, is above all a condition that is irreparable. The fait accompli, swept along by a fleeing present, forever evades man’s control, but weighs heavily on his destiny. Beneath the melancholy of the eternal flow of things, Heraclitus’s illusory present, there lies the tragedy of the irremovability of a past that cannot be erased, and that condemns any initiative to being just a continuation. True freedom, the true beginning would require a true

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present, which, always at the peak of a destiny, forever recommences that destiny. Judaism bears this magnificent message. Remorse – the painful expression of a radical powerlessness to redeem the irreparable – heralds the repentance that generates the pardon that redeems. Man finds something in the present with which he can modify or efface the past. Time loses its very irreversibility. It collapses at the feet of man like a wounded beast. And he frees it. The burning feeling of natural powerlessness that man experiences in the face of time is what creates the whole tragedy of the Greek Moïra, the whole acuteness of the idea of sin and the whole greatness of Christianity’s rebellion. In contrast to the Atrides, who struggle in the grip of a strange and brutal past that afflicts them like a curse, Christianity puts forward a mystical drama. The Cross sets one free; and through the Eucharist, which triumphs over time, this emancipation takes place every day. The salvation that Christianity wishes to bring us lies in the way it promises to reopen the finality brought about by the flow of moments of a past that is forever challenged, forever called into question, to go beyond the absolute contradiction of a past that is subordinate to the present. Through this, Christianity proclaims freedom and makes such freedom fully possible. Not only is the choice of destiny a free one. Once the choice is made, it does not form a chain. Man retains the possibility – a supernatural possibility, certainly, but also a concrete and graspable one – of terminating the contract into which he freely entered. At any moment he can regain the nudity he had during the first days of creation. It is not easy to recover one’s freedom. Such a plan can fail. It is not the effect of a capricious decree made by a will situated in an arbitrary world. But the depths of the effort required are a measure only of the seriousness of the obstacle and underline the originality of the new order that has been promised and achieved, an order that triumphs by tearing up the bedrock of natural existence. This freedom, which is infinite with regard to any attachment and through which no attachment is ultimately definitive, lies at the base of the Christian notion of the soul. While it remains a supremely concrete reality that expresses the ultimate foundation of the individual, this freedom has an austere purity that comes from a transcendent inspiration. Throughout the vicissitudes of the world’s real history, the power of renewal gives the soul a noumenal nature that is protected from the attacks launched by a world in which concrete man nonetheless is

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placed. This is only apparently a paradox. The soul’s detachment is not an abstract state; it is the concrete and positive power to become detached and abstract. The equal dignity of each and every soul, which is independent of the material or social conditions of people, does not flow from a theory that affirms, beneath individual differences, an analogy based on a ‘psychological constitution.’ It is due to the power given to the soul to free itself from what has been, from everything that linked it to something or engaged it with something [engagée], so it can regain its first virginity. If the liberalism of these last few centuries evades the dramatic aspects of such a liberation, it does retain one of its essential elements in the form of the sovereign freedom of reason. The whole philosophical and political thought of modern times tends to place the human spirit on a plane that is superior to reality, and so creates a gulf between man and the world. It makes it impossible to apply the categories of the physical world to the spirituality of reason, and so locates the ultimate foundation of the spirit outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence. It replaces the blind world of common sense with the world rebuilt by idealist philosophy, one that is steeped in reason and subject to reason. In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christian leitmotif of freedom pervades this autonomy. The French writers of the eighteenth century, who were the precursors of democratic ideology and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in spite of their materialism, confessed to being aware of a reason that exorcises physical, psychological, and social matter. The light of reason was enough to chase away the shadows of irrationality. What remains of materialism when matter has been completely pervaded by reason? In the world of liberalism, man is not weighed down by a History in choosing his destiny. He does not experience the possibilities open to him as a series of restless powers that seethe within him and already push him down a determined path. For him, they are only logical possibilities that present themselves to a dispassionate reason that makes choices while forever keeping its distance.

2 Marxism was the first doctrine in Western history to contest this view of man. Marxism no longer sees the human spirit as pure freedom, or a soul floating above any attachment. The spirit is no longer a pure reason that

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partakes in a realm of ends. It is prey to material needs. But as it is at the mercy of a matter and a society that no longer obey the magic wand of reason, its concrete and servile existence has more weight and importance than does impotent reason. The struggle that preexists intelligence imposes decisions on the latter which it had not taken. ‘Being determines consciousness.’ Science, morality, and aesthetics are not moral, scientific, or aesthetic in themselves, but at every moment translate the basic opposition between the bourgeois civilization and the proletarian one. The traditional view of spirit loses the power to undo all the links of which it had been so proud. It collides with mountains that no faith in itself could shake. Absolute freedom, the type that works miracles, for the first time finds itself banished from the spirit’s constitution. As a result Marxism is opposed not just to Christianity, but to the whole of idealist liberalism, wherein ‘being does not determine consciousness,’ but consciousness or reason determines being. As a result of this, Marxism stands in opposition to European culture or, at least, breaks the harmonious curve of its development.

3 All the same, this break with liberalism is not a definitive one. In a certain sense, Marxism consciously continues the traditions of 1789, and Jacobinism seems in large measure to inspire Marxist revolutionaries. But above all, if the basic intuition of Maxism consists in perceiving the spirit to have an inevitable relation to a determined situation, this link is in no way a radical one. Individual consciousness determined by being is not sufficiently impotent not to retain, at least in principle, the power to shake off the social bewitchment that then appears foreign to its essence. To become conscious of one’s social situation is, even for Marx, to free oneself of the fatalism entailed by that situation. A view that was truly opposed to the European notion of man would be possible only if the situation to which he was bound was not added to him but formed the very foundation of his being. This paradoxical requirement is one that the experience of our bodies seems to fulfill. What does it mean to traditional interpretations to have a body? It means tolerating it as an object of the external world. It weighs on Socrates like the chains that weigh him down in the prison at Athens; it encases him like the very tomb that awaits him. The body is an obstacle. It breaks the free flight of the spirit and drags it back down to earthly conditions, and yet, like an obstacle, it is to be overcome.

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This is the feeling of the eternal strangeness of the body in relation to us that has nurtured Christianity as much as modern liberalism. It is this feeling that has persisted throughout every variation in ethics and in spite of the decline suffered by the ascetic ideal since the Renaissance. If the materialists confused the self [le moi] with the body, it was at the price of a pure and simple negation of the spirit. They placed the body in nature, and accorded it no exceptional standing in the Universe. But the body is not only something eternally foreign. Classical interpretations relegate to an inferior level, and regard a stage to be overcome, a feeling of identity between our bodies and ourselves, which certain circumstances render particularly acute. Not only is it the case that the body is closer and more familiar to us than the rest of the world, and controls our psychological life, our temperament, and our activities. Beyond these banal observations, there is the feeling of identity. Do we not affirm ourselves in the unique warmth of our bodies long before any blossoming of the Self that claims to be separate from the body? Do these links that blood establishes, prior to the birth of intelligence, not withstand every test? In a dangerous sport or risky exercise in which gestures attain an almost abstract perfection in the face of death, all dualism between the self and the body must disappear. And in the impasse of physical pain, is it not the case that the sick man experiences the indivisible simplicity of his being when he turns over in his bed of suffering to find a position that gives him peace? Can we not say that analysis reveals in pain the spirit’s opposition to this pain, a rebellion or refusal to remain within it and consequently an attempt to go beyond it? But is it not the case that this attempt is characterized from the very beginning as desperate? Does not the rebelling spirit remain ineluctably locked within pain? And is it not this despair that constitutes the very foundation of pain? Alongside the interpretation given of these facts by traditional Western thought, facts that it calls crude and unrefined and that it manages to diminish, the feeling can remain that they posses an irreducible originality and that one wishes to maintain their purity. Physical pain can reveal an absolute position. The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does not escape and that no metaphor can confuse with the presence of an external object; it is a union that does not in any way alter the tragic character of finality. This feeling of identity between self and body, which, naturally, has

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nothing in common with popular materialism, will therefore never allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity, the duality of a free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained. On the contrary, for such people, the whole of the spirit’s essence lies in the fact that it is chained to the body. To separate the spirit from the concrete forms with which it is already involved is to betray the originality of the very feeling from which it is appropriate to begin. The importance attributed to this feeling for the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself, is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self. Not only does the Self bring in the unknown elements of these problems in order to resolve them; the Self is also constituted by these elements. Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage [enchaînement]. To be truly oneself does not mean taking flight once more above contingent events that always remain foreign to the Self’s freedom; on the contrary, it means becoming aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this chaining. From this point on, every social structure that announces an emancipation with respect to the body, without being committed to it [qui ne l’engage pas], is suspected of being a repudiation or a betrayal. The forms of a modern society founded on the harmony established between free wills will seem not only fragile and inconsistent but false and deceitful. The assimiliation of spirits loses the grandeur of the spirit’s triumph over the body. Instead, it becomes the work of forgers. A society based on consanguinity immediately ensues from this concretization of the spirit. And then, if race does not exist, one has to invent it! This ideal of man and society is accompanied by a new ideal of thought and truth. What characterizes the structure of thought and truth in the Western world, as we have already stressed, is the distance that initially separates man from the world of ideas in which he will choose his truth. He is free and alone in the face of this world. He is free to the point of being able not to cross this distance and not to make a choice. Skepticism is a

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basic possibility for the Western spirit. But once the distance has been crossed and the truth grasped, man nonetheless retains his freedom. Man can regain control and go back on his choice. Within the affirmation the future negation is already brewing. This freedom constitutes the whole of thought’s dignity, but it also harbors its danger. In the gap that separates man from the world of ideas, deceit insinuates itself. Thought becomes a game. Man revels in his freedom and does not definitively compromise himself with any truth. He transforms his power to doubt into a lack of conviction. Not to chain himself to a truth becomes for him not wishing to commit his own self to the creation of spiritual values. Sincerity becomes impossible and puts an end to all heroism. Civilization is invaded by everything that is not authentic, by a substitute that is put at the service of fashion and of various interests. Such a society loses living contact with its true ideal of freedom and accepts degenerate forms of the ideal. It does not see that the true ideal requires effort and instead enjoys those aspects of the ideal that make life easier. It is to a society in such a condition that the Germanic ideal of man seems to promise sincerity and authenticity. Man no longer finds himself confronted by a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are of his blood. He can no longer play with the idea [jouer avec l’idée], for coming from his concrete being, anchored in his flesh and blood, the idea remains serious. Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer for him the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no. But to what does this sincerity bind man? Any rational assimilation or mystical communion between spirits that is not based on a community of blood is suspect. And yet the new type of truth cannot renounce the formal nature of truth and cease to be universal. In vain is truth my truth in the strongest sense of this possessive pronoun, for it must strive towards the creation of a new world. Zarathustra was not content with his transfiguration; instead he came down from his mountain, bringing a gospel with him. How is universality compatible with racism? The answer – to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism – involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force

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presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea. The idea propagated detaches itself essentially from its point of departure. In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of ‘masters’; it is a process of equalization. To convert or persuade is to create peers. The universality of an order in Western society always reflects this universality of truth. But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. Nietzsche’s will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying, is not only a new ideal; it is an ideal that simultaneously brings with it its own form of universalization: war and conquest. But here we return to well-known truths. We have tried to link them to a fundamental principle. Perhaps we have succeeded in showing that racism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma concerning democracy, parliamentary government, dictatorial regime, or religious politics that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.

12 Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz

Is Liberalism All We Need? Prelude via Fascism ASHER HOROWITZ AND GAD HOROWITZ

[R]acism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.1 Fascism is not only ‘a manifestation within politics.’ One can see ‘in it the natural foundation of politics itself brought to light and to self-consciousness.’2

In 1934 the twenty-eight-year-old Emmanuel Levinas published a short essay, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ printed above. Unusual as it may seem to introduce a book about a philosopher with a little known essay by him, this remarkable, even astounding essay will serve admirably as a gateway into Levinas’s ethical and political thought, and into its ambiguity as well. Many contributions to this volume will focus in different ways on this ambiguity. ‘Reflections’ is important to the development of Levinas’s thought in general. Many have noted its prescient insight into the impending evils of Nazi racialist expansionism. Yet the essay must also be seen as a critique of liberalism that arises in the context of the German conservative revolution’s critique of liberalism. And there is a relation between these two critiques, one might even say an overlap. It is altogether understandable that no one has wanted to notice this until now. In this essay Levinas, in rejecting the right wing’s notion of unlimited obligation to the Volk, is taking a first step towards the idea of infinite obligation to the Other without returning to the traditional idea of freedom inherited by liberalism. The conventional wisdom is coming to be that Levinas puts liberalism on its true philosophical foundations. But the

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question insists: What remains of liberalism were it actually to absorb Levinas’s teaching? The ‘philosophy of Hitlerism’ does not refer solely to the thinking of the Nazi movement, but to the total context of German conservatism since Wilhelmian times. At one point Levinas refers to the ‘Germanic ideal.’ In his 1990 ‘Prefatory Note’ he writes that the source of the philosophy of Hitlerism ‘stems from the essential possibility of elemental evil ... against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself ... We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject.’ Does this mean that ‘we need’ to add something to liberalism or that we need something that supersedes liberalism? We shall see that although Levinas’s meaning is not absolutely clear, he could not simply have intended the former. However, contemporary readers are not likely to notice the ambiguity. They will be tempted to take Levinas’s essay simply as a call for strengthening, deepening, and supplementing, or finding new, more authentic foundations for, the liberal regime. The temptation is to overlook the fact that in this essay Levinas shows that fascism has identified the essential weaknesses of liberalism, and has put forward arguments that ought to be taken seriously and in their own terms; that fascism is not simply a pathological symptom of the breakdown of the liberal order, or of human vices such as ‘hate.’3 For Levinas, already in 1934 and again in 1990, this possibility of elemental evil is rooted in the tradition of the West, expressed as ‘the ontology of a being concerned with being ... that famous subject ... that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free’ (RH, 63). Plato formulated the fundamental dilemma for ethics and politics in the West. ‘Love of one’s own’ is human nature. Human embodiment, sensibility, and finitude are marked by attachment to that which is closest, to that which is most transitory. The life of reason is a radical departure from such embodiment; the rational and therefore just regime is a totality in which all particulars, as Plato’s student Aristotle put it, derive their being and identity from their function. The philosopher, the true dialectician of Plato’s Republic is just she/he who grasps each particular in its relation to the whole. Somehow philosophy, or Reason, must lead from love of one’s own to ‘love of the good,’ from love of the particular goodnesses of concrete bodies to the Idea of the Good. The political philosophy of the West begins in the idea of the antagonism of body and spirit, of nature and reason. This will be the starting point of Levinas’s essay.

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About thirty years after Levinas’s essay, Ernst Nolte theorized fascism as the ‘violent resistance against transcendence’ (FF, 421). ‘National Socialism can only be understood as the expression of a particularity which sees itself threatened as such’ (FF, 418). Liberalism, for Nolte, seeks ‘the elimination of the particular’ entities that are naturally unequal and at war with one another and aims to dissolve them in a rational peace, that is, the ‘universal society, which would dispense certainly with war, and if possible with internal antagonism’ (FF, 422). That is, it would level the hierarchically differentiated functions and values of a cohesive, organic communal order, abolishing the distinction between what ‘we’ love and that which is foreign or inferior in relation to our scale of values, both within and without; there would be no more exclusion, no defences, no enemy, hence nothing, chaos. In a living community ‘antagonism’ is crucial to the autarchic harmony, an antagonism directed both inwards and outwards (FF, 422). The ‘real enemy’ of fascism is ‘freedom toward the infinite,’ which ‘threatens to destroy’ the particular, ‘the familiar and the beloved’ (FF, 430). Transcendence reaches ‘ beyond what exists and what can exist’ (FF, 433); in practice this involves ‘processes which disengage the individual from traditional ties’ (FF, 433) and ‘abstraction of life’ (FF, 434). Most of the European Right had no doubt that this disengagement and abstraction were integrally linked with the nefarious influence of international Judaism. And long before there was any question of right or left, pre-modern Christian anti-Semitism condemned Judaism as a materialist rejection of the Holy Spirit. Judaism substitutes, for the salvation offered by Jesus, a materialist Messiah, offering base material powers and pleasures, destroying the body of Christ.4 For anti-modern thought, the material is opposed to the organic. The organic is inextricably associated with the spiritual; the material is the inorganic, ultimately formless and chaotic. Materialism levels organisms, reducing them to formlessness, sameness, on which plane equality can be for the first time asserted. Matter is abstract. The first gesture of the Hobbesian-Lockean revolution is indeed reduction to the equality of indifferent, abstract material units. The Christian anti-Semitism of the Reaction from DeMaistre onwards wanted to restore the inequalities of precapitalist societies as an essential condition of life for society and its individuals. The racism that developed within German (and European) conservatism thought of itself as the modern scientific theorization of this reactionary project. From Joseph Goebbels’s semi-autobiographical novel Michael (1931):

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the new man is a ‘fanatic of love ... Life is sacrifice for your neighbour: And my neighbour is the one with the same blood ... The Jew is a nonrace among the races of the earth.’5 Non-race: the malevolent particularity that wishes to destroy all others; a perverse particularism devoted to imposing its domination on the goyim precisely as materialist universality. Zygmunt Baumann: ‘As the eponymous ghetto-dwellers the Jews were walking reminders of the still fresh and vivid memories of a stable, transparent caste society; among the first to be released from special laws and statutes, they were walking alarms alerting society to the arrival of the strange new world of the free for all ... They embodied incongruence, artificiality, sham and frailty of the social order and the most earnestly drawn boundaries.’6 The Jew is the avatar of homelessness, dissolving autarkic organic economies in money and organic polities in mobocracy-plutodemocracy-communism. Like the Jew, ‘money has no roots. It exists above the races. It gradually eats its way into the sound organisms of nations, slowly poisoning their creative strength’ (M, 114), destroying the socio-spiritual cohesion within which alone subordinate individual bodies could attain to Spirit and find the meaning of their lives, a higher reality to die for. The contemporary reader might perhaps already be struck by a certain uncanny resonance with the distinctive themes of Levinas’s later writings, as they echo with the Germanic ideals he explored in the 1934 essay. Here are a few of the voices that belong to the Germanic philosophy that gave rise to Hitlerism: In the Hitler youth a ten year old ‘knows that for whatever he does or does not do, not only he himself but the whole community of his comrades is responsible, that the energies of his body and spirit belong to everyone of his companions as much as to himself.’7 In 1934 Werner Sombart defines community as ‘a union ... the ties of which have no external motives, no practical goals, no speculation, no rationality, and no earthly character, but are founded exclusively upon love.’ It is ‘at the same time decisively warlike.’8 Ernst Junger contrasts rootless societies founded upon a ‘contractual and revocable relationship’ and those founded upon ‘destiny’; the latter’s ties are ‘indissoluble’ (quoted in HIW, 30). For Oswald Spengler the abstract man is ‘without history,’ Geschichtslos, indifferent ‘to the destiny of his people’ (quoted in HIW, 72). Levinas: for liberalism ‘man ... speaking absolutely ... has no history’ (RH, 64). Karl Jaspers (1932): ‘The camaraderie ... created in war ... becomes unconditional loyalty’ to one’s ‘people,’ to one’s ‘historicity’ (in HIW, 36). A ‘human universality ... free from every historicity’ falls into the ‘emptiness’ of ‘formalism’ (in HIW,

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37). Liberalism is ‘ametaphysical’ and ‘blind to infinity’ (in HIW, 40). It represents ‘a horrid leveling process’ culminating in ‘superficiality, emptiness and indifference’ (in HIW, 40). Levinas: ‘[T]he power to doubt’ becomes ‘lack of conviction’ (RH, 69). Jaspers again, in 1935: ‘ [W]hen existences originally different in essence consciously face, in the struggle for Dasein [Daseinkampf], the destiny from which no escape is possible,’ then there is the possibility of spiritual transformation (in HIW, 166). Heidegger, in 1934 and 1935, contrasts authentic Volksgemeinschaft to an ‘inconsistent and uninvolved universal brotherhood’ (in HIW, 48). ‘It is precisely the death that each individual must die for himself, that death that individualizes him to the extreme, which, together with sacrifice creates ... camaraderie’ (in HIW, 57). Only this most intimate and incontrovertible experience of one’s own death can ‘unconditionally unite and individualize, that is ... grab the individual from the roots of Dasein’ (in HIW, 57–8). Without this, one could only have ‘at the most ... a modified form of society [Gesellschaft] that is the mere result of establishing reciprocal relationships’ (in HIW, 58). The category of Dasein is aimed precisely against ‘uncommitted, insubstantial, universal brotherhood’ (in HIW, 79). And finally, Goebbels’s dream: ‘... what the fatherland should be like some day. Everyone not equal, but all of us brothers’ (M, 121). For Nolte liberalism and fascism are logically contradictory opposites. Thirty years earlier, however, Levinas argued that the ‘logical contradiction’ that ‘opposes’ universality and particularity only shows up fully if we go back to their source, to the original decision that makes them both possible, the decision to liberate the human as free spirit escaping time; the decision of mind, liberating itself as the rational soul, from the body. Such rational freedom is ‘infinite with regard to any attachment’ (RH, 65). It is ‘a reason that exorcizes ... physical, psychological and social matter’ (RH, 66). What is crucial for our argument is that Levinas phrases this as freedom from any obligation which would be always already prior to the subject in its autonomy, freedom from any inescapable command rooted in the body. Levinas has been looking for a definitive break with the Western tradition culminating in liberalism. Marxism, in this respect, was a half-measure. He is enabled to find this break in the new Germanic view of man that refuses to see the body as an accident that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does not escape ... The

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importance attributed to ... the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself, is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart ... Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage [enchaînement]. To be truly oneself ... means becoming aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this chaining ... From this point on, every social structure that announces an emancipation with respect to the body, without being committed to it ... is suspected of being a repudiation or a betrayal. The forms of a modern society founded on the harmony established between free wills will seem not only fragile and inconsistent but false and deceitful. (RH, 68–9; emphasis in original)

Levinas fervently rejects the fascists’ association of the body’s ‘adherence to the Self’ with the identification of the bodies of singular individuals as mere monads of a Generalized Body of the People, but he welcomes the new idea of unconditional, always-already corporeal obligation. Later he will trace such an idea to its ancient Judaic sources. Levinas says that we need a view in which ‘the situation to which [the human] is bound is not added to him, but formed the very foundation of his being ... [one which] the experience of our bodies seems to fulfill’ (RH, 67). In Otherwise than Being the very terms are repeated: the situation to which man is bound becomes ‘[t]he exposure to the other ... [which] is not something added to the one’; it ‘is the one-in-responsibility and thus the one in its uniqueness.’9 For fascism this ‘situation’ is the People; for Levinas it will be the encounter with the Other. For fascism, acceptance of chaining refers to acceptance of participation in the historical destiny of one’s own People; for Levinas it will refer to acceptance of infinite obligation in responsibility for the Other. Levinas writes that Western freedom harbours ‘the danger’ of scepticism, emptiness, meaninglessness. Could he mean that the danger would be avoided were liberalism to adopt sincere communitarian reforms? That something other than liberalism is not required? ‘Thought becomes a game. Man revels in his freedom and does not definitely compromise himself with any truth. He transforms his power to doubt into a lack of conviction ... Sincerity becomes impossible and puts an end to all heroism’ (RH, 69–70). Ethics becomes the mere coincidence of interests. ‘Such a society loses living contact with its true ideal of freedom and accepts degenerate forms of the ideal ... It is to a society in such a condition that the Germanic ideal of man seems to promise

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sincerity and authenticity’ (RH, 70). Does this mean that the ‘true ideal’ does not already contain degeneracy within itself? How could such a reading be compatible with the radical critique of Western freedom in the preceding paragraph of the essay and throughout? Was Adorno far wrong when he wrote in In Search of Wagner: ‘At its peak bourgeois nihilism is also the wish to annihilate the bourgeois’? Is nihilism not always already at the heart of the ‘true ideal’? The danger to which Levinas refers is not the danger that nihilism would begin but that it would reach a peak. Even before nihilism peaks liberalism is nihilistic. Levinas: ‘Within the affirmation the future negation is already brewing’ (RH, 69). The new Germanic man, ‘chained to his body ... sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer ... the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no’ (RH, 70). In Otherwise than Being the very terms are repeated: The weight of his whole existence returns as ‘the weight of the universe’ to which the subject is subjected. ‘The self ... is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything ... In expiation, on a point of the essence there weighs the rest of the essence, to the point of expelling it’ (OTB, 116, 125). It is under this weight that man will say his yes or his no to the Other. The words written in 1934 describing the chaining to the people could equally have been written in 1972 describing obsession by the Other. In 1934 Levinas has not yet formulated the notion of ‘rational peace.’ What he calls ‘rational peace,’ which in liberalism takes the form of a suspension of antagonism in the adoption of a third-person perspective, a radical distancing that allows for the perception of an ultimate coincidence of enlightened self-interests, is not the peace proclaimed in the ethical relation. In rational peace, the permanent possibility of war among particularities is hidden under the rule of a universal, hence greater, force. For Levinas rational peace, no less than war, reduces the ethical relation to the functioning-together of the members of a totality. The criticism of rational peace that Levinas shares with German conservatism does not mean that he, like they, loved war; ethics, for Levinas, is at bottom the transcendence of war, a transcendence that expresses a chaining older than being. For most German conservatives war is transcendence. They loved war because it did not hide the inevitable antagonism of particulars behind a screen of formal universality. Hitler

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called peace ‘casual, mutual cheating’ (in HIW, 409). According to Losurdo, Ernst Junger considered pacifism, besides being ‘philistine,’ as ‘synonomous with ignoble violence, unconfessed and unconfessable’ (in HIW, 195). According to Losurdo, Heidegger believed that ‘to hypothesize a universal entity able to transcend the different historicities would mean to deny the historicities themselves, and to conduct an intolerable leveling and standardization of the world ... [D]ifference and uniqueness can only happen within the struggle, in the war chivalrously conducted among ... peoples’ (in HIW, 79). For Heidegger, the ineradicable plurality of historical values cannot be transcended. For Levinas particularity is transcended not in universality, but to the Other. For those who are tempted to read Levinas for liberalism, the concluding paragraphs of the essay will be crucial. In them he contrasts the ‘propagation of an idea’ or ‘ideological expansion,’ attributed to a Western, non-coercive ‘universality of truth’ that converts, persuades, and creates ‘a society of masters’ who are ‘peers,’ with a fascistic ‘expansion of a force’ that creates a world of domination and exclusion, a world of ‘masters and slaves’ (RH, 70–1). It is perhaps too easy not to notice that both liberalism and fascism are committed to the universalization of truth, fascism in the form of the expanded reproduction of the particular. So the contrast is not as simple as it might appear. Both liberalism and fascism, rooted in the ontology of being, and committed to formal truth, either of the Nietzschean particular or the Greek universal, are forms of the will to power, the will to expansion. In his later writings Levinas will not, even apparently, give us a choice between two forms of expansion, a nice persuasive liberal form and a nasty coercive fascist form; rather he will expound the commandment/desire towards a ‘maternal’ contraction, a non-expansion of force, into an otherwise than being – force Questioned (not opposed, not even dialectically) by the non-force of the Other. Without the Germanic rejection of liberalism, Levinas could not have developed his phenomenology of the ethical as a going beyond liberalism, even beyond the inheritance of liberalism in Marx. As Levinas says somewhere, Marx is not materialist enough. In ‘Reflections’ he says that Marx does not see individual consciousness as sufficiently powerless (HR, 67). For Levinas Judaism is not a universalism. Neither is it a particularism. There can be no universalism without the duality of body and spirit or its perverse inversion in the Germanic idealization of the body. Levinas is even more anti-liberal than the fascists, because both liberalism and fascism are actually universalisms. For liberalism universality

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corresponds to Man; for fascism, universality pertains to the People. Fascism is a universalism subsuming the unique individual into the People; liberalism subsumes her into Man. It is important to the structure of the 1934 essay that Judaism stands before and outside the Christian-liberal (even Marxist) duality of body and spirit. Neither reason nor participation, but ‘remorse’ is the fundamental political fact. The cancellation of mythical fatalities and historicities that Judaism announces, its version of redemption, is tied neither to any essential invulnerability of the soul/spirit nor to any participation of the person in a tragic destiny. It is only remorse that redeems: ‘Judaism bears this magnificent message. Remorse – the painful expression of a radical powerlessness to redeem the irreparable – heralds the repentance that generates the pardon that redeems. Man finds something in the present with which he can modify or efface the past. Time loses its very irreversibility. It collapses at the feet of man like a wounded beast. And he frees it’ (RH, 65; emphases added). For Levinas the adherence of self and body is an absolute; he will not reproduce another dualism. But the point at which Levinas separates himself from the philosophy of Hitlerism is the same point at which he welcomes the incontrovertible intuition that led that philosophy to its rejection of liberalism. The philosophy of Hitlerism turned the absolute finitude of the body, its radical attachment to a past that cannot be erased, into the power of unconditional, underivable, authentic participation in the body of the Single People. This attachment or identity of self with body and ‘blood’ is for them no longer a ‘problem.’ For Levinas, by contrast, the radical finitude of the body both is and gives a difficult freedom to begin anew, never detached or released from the past suffering of the body of the Other, hence, remorse: no end to the problem, no closure to the Question of ethics. Thus, it is apparent that Levinas’s 1934 essay already contains the essence of his teaching, phrased in the passage at the end of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence as a challenge to ‘us Westerners ... [t]o find for man another kinship than which ties him to being, one that will perhaps enable us to conceive of this difference between me and the other, this inequality in a sense absolutely opposed to oppression’ (OTB, 177). ‘to find another kinship’: in the 1934 essay the body is not ‘something eternally foreign,’ simply ‘placed ... in nature and accorded ... no exceptional standing in the Universe’ (RH, 68); rather, it is ‘an adherence to the Self ... of value in itself’ (RH, 68).

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‘to find another kinship’: not just another version of the fraternity of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, not just a communitarian or communicative strengthening of liberal fraternity, but another kinship in the sensibility and proximity of the me, called to uniqueness in the responsibility beyond the reciprocity that must obtain among formal equals. ‘this inequality’: a term that Levinas knows very well is favoured by the fascists, which is why he qualifies it immediately as an inequality ‘absolutely opposed to oppression.’ When Goebbels says ‘everyone not equal but all of us brothers,’ he means something very different from what Levinas would mean with exactly the same words. Fascist fraternity is based on inequality of function (elitism). But Levinas’s inequality is the asymmetry that elevates the other above me and therefore each other above every other other. One might, perhaps, even think of this assymetrical kinship as something other than just another version of the revolt of the brothers against the primal father (as perhaps indicated in Tina Chanter’s essay below).10 Politics is born(e) in an other-than-rational obligation, which is however not communitarian; it does not assert the exclusivity or even primacy of obligation to one’s own. Neither universality nor particularity. Neither transcendence nor immanence. Both poles are forms of identity thinking that return to the Same, of ‘Man’ or of ‘My People,’ and deny the claim of the Other. For Levinas, transcendence (the infinite) is in the immanent (the finite). The element of individual freedom of choice is not denied, as in fascism, but it is a difficult freedom to acknowledge or to turn away from the unquestionable obligation that is prior to all questions. Levinas opens another way of rooting unquestionable obligation in the body. Levinas, the Talmudic-phenomenologist, already in 1934 has found that obligation is prior to being, but it is an obligation not to similar bodies but to the bodily Other, not to blood and soil, but to the Face, an obligation the source of which is even more concrete than that of the Germanic ideal but at the same time invisible. To love the singular other as against loving ‘the Good’ is goodness or the ‘good beyond being.’ All the contributors to this volume explore, in one way or another, this territory in which liberalism is surpassed. Particularist postscript: Levinas believed strongly that this other way has its source and expression in traditional Judaism. But it requires a revolution in Judaism: a Judaism whose god is acknowledged as not only invisible but as no one, other than my being for the other. Such a Judaism would have to somehow transcend both particularist ortho-

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doxies and Zionisms and universalist communisms, assimilationisms, and Reformisms. This would be a Judaism that, after the Holocaust, responds with sincerity to the claims of anti-liberalisms – even up to and including Hitlerism – rather than simply understanding them as evil, hateful, or psychotic. Without this, who could say, ‘Never again’? A simple reassertion or strengthening of liberalism as determination to expunge fascist-type Reaction and impose universal freedom could only facilitate fascist revivals by turning once again the wheel of the vicious circle of the dialectic of enlightenment.

NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990), 71 (trans. Sean Hand); subsequently referred to as RH. 2 Ernst Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965), 429; subsequently referred to as FF. 3 There are four other existing commentaries on Levinas’s ‘Reflections,’ as far as we are aware. Although one of them succumbs to the temptation to ignore Levinas’s implicit critique of liberalism in this essay, the other three do not avoid it. They are Tina Chanter, ‘Neither Materialism nor Idealism: Levinas’s Third Way,’ in A. Michman, ed., Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 137–54; Miguel Abensour, ‘Le Mal élémentale,’ in E. Levinas, Quelques Réflexions sur la Philosophie de l’Hitlerisme, suivi d’une essai de Miguel Abensour (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1997), 27–103; and R.J.S. Manning, ‘Serious Ideas Rooted in Blood: Levinas’s Analysis of the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ in his Beyond Ethics to Justice Through Levinas and Derrida: The Legacy of Levinas (Quincy, IL.: Franciscan Press, 2001), 8–23. Two of the above three are, interestingly enough, contributors to this volume who do not avoid the temptation. The fourth commentary, which succumbs to the temptation, is by the editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, where the first English translation of this essay appeared: Arnold I. Davidson, ‘1933–1934: Thoughts on National Socialism. Introduction to Musil and Levinas,’ Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990), 35–45. 4 Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society (Cork: Forum Press, 1945), 135, 183. 5 Joseph Goebbels, Michael (New York: Amok Press, [1929] 1987), 65; subsequently referred to as M. 6 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,’ in

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8 9

10

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Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds, Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 150–1. Rudolf Ramlow (a Nazi youth expert), from an article entitled ‘Can Youth Be National Socialist,’ quoted in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 287. Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001, 26–7; subsequently referred to as HIW. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 56; subsequently referred to as OTB. Something perhaps already suggested by Jacques Derrida in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Essays

Beyond Rational Peace: On the Possibility/Necessity of a Levinasian Hyperpolitics ASHER HOROWITZ

1. Plus ça change ... In its reverberations, perhaps especially with political philosophy, Levinas’s thought leaves one in a situation, it seems, where everything is different than it was before, and yet nothing has changed. Ethics as first philosophy, one could hyperbolically say, simply cancels, as foundations, what that tradition, from the Parmenidean Plato through Hegel, took to be its foundations. It would be evident, after Levinas, that even its greatest critics, despite their finest efforts, would not have done that. All of these critics, in one way or another, will find themselves entrammelled in ‘the gnoseological adventure,’ hence within the snares of the Same, whether these snares operate as reason (objective, subjective, dialectical, or communicative), the thinking of being, or the endless deconstruction of endless presence. Yet that tradition, along with its criticism, seems simultaneously restored. Over and over again, from ‘The Ego and Totality’ of 1954, through Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, and up to one of his last essays, ‘Peace and Proximity,’ of 1984, Levinas will, via the demand of the third person and all the others, apparently underwrite the political ontology that had been put in second place. The asymmetry and infinite responsibility, the friendship and faces, the love and desire, the sensibility and proximity of the ethical relation, are always already not merely overlaid but also expressed and sustained by the demands of justice, rule, measure, and law, by comparison and calculation, generality and citizenship, money and the state. Such a flood of categories and relations, and all at once. Indeed, there are too many all at once, as though Levinas has made the decision in advance that, for example, justice immediately brings with it the state and money.

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In ‘Peace and Proximity’1 Levinas puts this problem most succinctly in asserting the extreme importance in human multiplicity of the political structures of society (PP, 168). Ethics and politics are distinct. They must remain distinct if politics is not to absorb and destroy ethics, if fraternity and the human are not to be forgotten in the faceless and anonymous totality that can only efface the dignity, the height of the other, and, along with that, the meaning that human life can find only in its being for the other. Yet their distinction cannot be fixed or grasped within the categories and relations proper to the work of ontology, rationality, and politics. There are many problems here. Not the least of these problems is the all but virtual silence that ethics as first philosophy loudly pronounces about the judgments demanded by the competition and succession of political philosophies. Levinas will not subscribe to any of them. He will clearly reject, or at least distance himself from, all of them. One could spend many years tracing and attempting to systematize the various asides and nuances of his texts in this direction. Yet the question ‘What do I have to do with Justice?’2 (OTB, 157) is for him clearly the first question put by first philosophy. Sometimes the complaint against Levinas’s treatment of the political will come in the form of an objection that he does not, or is even unable to, render a proper appreciation of institutions, politics, and mediations.3 From a different, but not entirely unrelated perspective, one would be able to accuse Levinas of ideologically conflating distinctions that make all the difference. Even if he clearly rejects a politics of, say, blood and soil, or a politics entwined with poetic thinking, ethics as first philosophy does not adjudicate between different versions of what Levinas calls ‘rational peace.’ It almost studiously avoids doing so. Rational peace, or commerce, whether or not it is conceived as somehow embracing the ethical relation at its core, is simply better than war. Not the best, not goodness, but unavoidable. This thinking of politics seems to remain at all too high a level of abstraction, appearing to ignore, if not lose, all of the differentiations that would be of vital importance to the political actor. Whatever distinctions there might be between liberalism and socialism, to take one not insignificant example, would pale into insignificance beside the distinction between ethics and politics. Both will have been found wanting by something like the same criterion. Both, as ontologies, will have attempted to reduce the ethical relation to the belonging of parts to the ultimate unity of some totality. Even the limitations that each recognizes would follow from differing comprehensive grasps of being

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(liberalism, in recognizing the limitations of human nature and of projects for enforcing the good; socialism, in recognizing the limitation of all historical and eventual realms of freedom by a realm of necessity). Both explain their own limitation in terms of a necessary distance between an ideal unity and the actual world of particularity and the stubborn force of natural necessity. For both, the world, of which the ethical is at best a part, is seen in privative terms in relation to the One. The limitations they would recognize would not be the accusation undergone by the self awakening to infinite responsibility. Neither would recognize the freedom of the creature in the radical passivity of substitution. Both would have therefore already forgotten goodness. Yet, for Levinas, both will also have remembered goodness: liberalism, for example, has its justified pathos in ‘the promotion of the person inasmuch as he represents nothing further’4 (TI, 120). Liberalism will thus have contributed something to the wisdom of love, that is, to our understanding of the social relation beyond being, ‘a field of research hardly glimpsed at’ (TI, 62). Marxian socialism has something to contribute, one would venture to say, at the border (if there were such a thing) of the relation of being to the beyond being: ‘When I spoke,’ says Levinas, ‘of the overcoming of Western ontology as an “ethical and prophetic cry” ... I was in fact thinking of Marx’s critique of Western idealism as a project to understand the world rather than to transform it. In Marx’s critique, we find an ethical conscience cutting through the ontological identification of truth with an ideal intelligibility and demanding that theory be converted into a concrete praxis of concern for the other.’5 At this level of abstraction it would seem that ethics is simply not a part of the totality, but apart from any totality. Since it is not reducible to and confinable within being as one of its regions, then it would lack the relation with justice and politics required to make of justice and politics the proper, indeed only, form of responsibility to all the others. In the perspective of ‘the political man’ (TI, 22) ethics would become an ideal, or even worse a world behind or above the world. Various philosophies of suspicion could then fasten on ethics as first philosophy as the latest version of the same old ideological flight from reality that underwrites the dialectic of strength and weakness. Alternatively, remaining at this level of abstraction invites the ultimate misperception that Levinas is or ought to be counselling a strict separation of ethics and politics: in this reading, ethics remains a priviledged but reduced sphere of relations of privacy, simply something that strikes individuals, and that they undertake on their own, or in strictly voluntary associations. Ethics would

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be more general than the intimacy in forgiveness, would certainly reach beyond the face-to-face relation, but would remain restricted to the work of private or public charity, a correction or amelioration of the inevitable injustice attributable to a world of penury and of beings at war.6 Politics would be restricted to the minimal violence needed to sustain a form of sociation as a postponement of war. So many, too many, of Levinas’s readers have left the matter there, reading only one side of the peculiar intrigue Levinas insists upon as between ethics and politics. Or, taking it one step further – and this step can also be supported by selective quotation from the master – the very effort to radically reduce the distance between the ethical and the political demanded by the ethical will be read as unethical, even diabolical, an invitation to totalitarianism. Remaining at this level, or with this type of abstraction, it would then seem that Levinas will not have changed anything, will not have done anything with politics beyond adding his unique voice to the many voices opposed to the state (or even commerce) having a life of its own. Not a contribution to be belittled or disparaged. And not a limitation to be forcibly overcome on the part of a reader who needs more. But my argument is that, at the same time, everything has changed. And the sense of his work as unfinished, even as unnecessarily inhibited, remains in place. This is the philosopher who having benefited from Buber’s difference from Heidegger will criticize the former for leaving economics and politics ‘unexplored and unexplained’ (TI, 69). Everything has changed because Levinas’s whole work displaces, without abolishing, what in the West has been the very logic constituting the terms and relations for the possibility of any social bond at all. At this level, the most formal level, Levinas will assert that not all relations fall into the formal pattern, that is, the simultaneous union and distance of the terms of the relation (TI, 109). Instead, the social relation will be one in which the distance between the terms do not destroy the relation and the relation does not destroy the distance. Thinking the social relation would then require stepping (somehow) beyond the law of the excluded middle. The terms of the relation are not to be unified at a higher level; their relation is not a prior or final unity to which they would have to submit, or interiorize, or even recognize as already within themselves as their truth. The indispensable value of Husserl’s phenomenology lies here, in having allowed this exit from the grip of the One. This is a move that is made repeatedly, and is at the heart of both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.

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What counts, in Husserl’s method, says Levinas, is the overflowing of objective thought from a forgotten experience from which it lives (TI, 28). The formal pattern, the pattern constituted by and constituting the thought of the One and Totality is an operation manifesting the experience of the Same, that which recovers its identity in all that happens to it (TI, 36). The operations of the Same play a role analogous in Levinas to the role given the natural attitude by Husserl, only now inflected through Heidegger’s de-transcendentalizing of phenomenology. (As a result, Levinas is able to subject Heidegger to a critique similar to the critique the latter subjected Husserl – reducing fundamental ontology ultimately to an operation of the Same). But the social relation, following a logic so different it would be otherwise than logic, would be a non-form not constituted by the demands of representation or by the genealogy of representation in labour, dwelling, enjoyment, and living being. The social relation would live from the forgotten experience of the command of all the others. This is, in the terms of either idealism or empiricism, not even an experience, but the trace of an experience, the experience of a trace. But it is not a small, large, weak, or strong thing, this trace. To the extent (extent?), then, that the Same can be separated from the social relation, the ethical relation that precedes the Same – and most of the work of Levinas’s major writings are devoted to this task of showing that the social precedes the Same and its representations – then everything, at least everything that passes as social or political philosophy, has changed. Everything needs not simply to be rethought, but to be rethought otherwise. For political philosophy, everything would need to change. 2. ‘Paradox’ and ‘Betrayal’ But we are still at the same level of abstraction. And at this level Levinas himself usually has recourse to conceiving of the relation between the ethical and the political as having the structure of a paradox. This paradox appears in its most acute and self-destructive form in the earlier essay ‘The Ego and Totality,’ where law clearly has priority over charity, but where the law just as clearly ‘compromises ... the very status of man as an irreplaceable interiority’7 (ET, 33). This essay ends without exit. In Totality and Infinity, where there is less mention of and attention paid to justice and the state, except negatively in the beginning of the book, Levinas restates this paradox (TI, 241–2) and then attempts to open up a beyond of justice. ‘Justice,’ he says, ‘summons me to go

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beyond the straight line of justice’ (TI, 245), and the self always finds itself ‘called to moral overstepping beyond laws’ (TI, 246). In this book, the paradoxical relation of the ethical and the political is rather quickly, with almost unseemly haste, passed by in order to explore generosity and goodness in their structures and abstract relations. Goodness, which arises without relation to need, is a luxury with respect to need and is therefore ‘beyond being’ (TI, 103). Goodness beyond justice is the answer to the question of how the mortal will can resurrect itself (TI, 245) and will find its concretion in the fecundity of the family. In Otherwise than Being, the paradoxical structure of the relation reappears with considerably more fanfare in the famous section of chapter 5 entitled ‘From the Saying to the Said: Or the Wisdom of Desire.’ But here justice has a different face than it does in the previous two works mentioned (a line of thinking that is for all intents and purposes restated in the ‘Peace and Proximity’ essay of ten years later). Here justice, among other things, is given a new task – that of ‘forgetting’ the unlimited responsibility that of course cannot be forgotten, the unforgetting of which is the whole purpose and even method of Otherwise than Being. What was glorified in Totality and Infinity, the goodness beyond justice, is something that, in both Otherwise than Being and in ‘Peace and Proximity,’ should now be, in some sense, but not in the Hegelian sense, superseded. Now, even though the question of justice brings with it the whole realm of intellection operated by the Same, even though it demands the comparison of incomparables, the neutralization of the shock of the other(s), justice is considered a ‘correction’ of the asymmetry of proximity, although it is insisted that correction not be understood as either abandonment or limitation of asymmetry (OTB, 158). Justice is not to be misunderstood: ‘This means concretely or empirically that justice is not a legality regulating human masses, from which a technique of social equilibrium is drawn, harmonizing antagonistic forces. That would be a justification of the state delivered over to its own necessities’ (OTB, 159). The justice beyond legality, whose transcendence of legality is, however, not the limitless self-abandonment of the pure goodness touched upon in Totality and Infinity,8 the justice that corrects asymmetry without replacing it, is a ‘betrayal’ of my anarchic relation with Illeity, but also a ‘new relation with it’ (OTB, 158). Justice is not to be thought of as either a ‘degradation’ or ‘degeneration’ of the one for the other. Something has happened to or within the ‘paradoxical’ structure of the relation between ethics and the politics of justice.

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But it is not that justice is the aufhebung of asymmetry and the proximity of the ethical relation. In the relation of ethics and politics as ‘paradoxical,’ each requires but nullifies the other. Ethics requires a translation into the terms afforded by essence, terms themselves traceable to the One, terms that can be reassembled, related, and compared in ways allowing for commensuration and calculation, by virtue of their ultimate unity. In the ‘paradoxical’ relation, however, this transposition itself undoes the specific difference of the human relations proper to the ethical. Terms that are both distant yet related, or that owe their separation to themselves and not to their privative relation to Totality, yet transcend their separation out of themselves simply on the basis of the appeal of the other terms and not on the basis of a common attribute or shared lack – such terms are necessarily converted to parts, attributes, or manifestations of the One, and their separation would be understood as a lapse of the One into the appearance of many. And the knowledge of such an order, ‘expressing the coherence of concepts, presupposes that the existence of the interlocutors is summed up in concepts ... such is man reduced to his achievements, reflected in his works, and one that has passed away, is dead, is reflected in it totally. The impersonal discourse is a necrological discourse’ (ET, 35). To present the relation between ethics and politics as a paradoxical relation is, however, necessarily to risk reifying the two, and to risk thereby the reification of the relation between the two. In this reified sense, each subsists independently of the other, while their relation is joined by way of a third term they would hold in common. In this case, the role of a third term would be played by the ‘extension’ of responsibility to the other to all the others. When Levinas makes the transition from the analysis of the ethical dyad to an explicitly multiple social relation, by way of the argument that the third already appears in the face of the other, the very mode of analysis, the movement from the simpler case to the more complex, as though the more complex were being derived from the simpler, contributes to the impression that the separation and relation between ethics and politics is the separation and relation between two different things, or between two sets of relations that could obtain each on their own. Yet if the third is present from the beginning, as Levinas avows, then the relation between the ethical and the political should have a structure different from the paradoxical. This structure could still contain and express tensions and conflicts, but

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it would not necessarily frame these tensions as the reciprocal requirement and negation of the terms in tension. The terms themselves might even come to be seen as functions of the tensions. To the extent that the relation is represented in paradoxical and reified form, the presentation itself would have fallen under the very same sway of formal logic, the thought of the One, that is being contested as appropriate to the human and social relation. This would, in turn, produce the reading that is virtually the default position for nearly all of Levinas’s readers: that the political is a privation from, but a necessary privation from, the ethical relation, imposed upon us by the exigencies of being. This latter would, in turn, powerfully suggest the alternatives that ethics is ‘higher’ than politics and that it must remain a separate sphere, or that, at most, ethics can interrupt politics. But is politics a fall from the ethical, a ‘mistranslation’ in Levinas’s eyes, as Robert Gibbs puts it?9 Perhaps, but only if politics and justice are to be identified strictly with rational peace. The trouble with simply identifying justice and politics with rational peace would be that rational peace is itself essentially indebted to the thought of the One and, by only slight extension, to the ‘Said.’ But the Said is not a translation of the Saying. Nor is it its antithesis. In Otherwise than Being Levinas, by making use of the language of ‘betrayal,’ ‘correction,’ ‘non-degradation,’ and ‘non-degeneration’ when characterizing the relation of the ethical and the political, has indicated that, at least, the aspects of tension in the relationship might not be thought of as amounting to a ‘paradox’ and that perhaps a suggestion as to the fuller nature of the relation might be gleaned from his treatment of the correlation of the Saying and the Said, and of its reducibility. 3. Elliptically ... the Non-Negative ... a Moebius Strip Levinas introduces the theme of the relation between the Saying and the Said, a theme that reappears throughout Otherwise than Being, in order to illuminate not only the distinction between being and being’s other, but also to delineate something about their relation. Being’s other represents a difference from being over and beyond the difference between being and non-being. Transcendence, the form of the ethical itself, would be a passing over to being’s other, would be an otherwise than being, admittedly an ‘artifically elliptical turn of phrase,’ but one whose sense must become palpable if transcendence is not to revert to the ‘bankrupt’ meaning of a world behind the scenes or a heavenly city (OTB, 5–7). Saying and Said are inevitably in correlation. Neither is to

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be conceived as quasi-entity, as a transcendent condition of the other. Both, for Levinas, fall ultimately within the horizon of the radical passivity of a self that will have sensed the proximity of the others, and who as a hostage to the other, responds, uniquely in substitution and expiation for the other in all of the other’s lack and vulnerability. The point would not be to reduce the Said to the Saying. It is not as though the Said simply belies the Saying, but that the Saying is betrayed in the Said. It is worth noting again the obvious double meaning of this ‘betrayal’: it is, at once, disloyalty or traduction as well as a revelation. The problem for the investigation, for philosophy, and for theory has two aspects: since subordination of the Saying to the Said, to the linguistic system and ontology, is the ‘price that manifestation demands’ (OTB, 6), the methodological question is whether this subordination can be reduced. It is not whether the betrayal can be eliminated. But the methodological problem will have only been made manageable on the basis of the ‘experiential’ solution of having already practically reduced the betrayal. The central methodological problem of Otherwise than Being will be the reduction of this subordination by recovering the full meaning of the betrayal. In chapter 1, ‘The Argument,’ Levinas will aver that ‘language permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, this outside of being, this ex-ception to being, as though being’s other were an event of being’ (OTB, 6). What transpires here is a double betrayal, or a metabetrayal: The reduction of the correlation of the Saying and the Said to the always-already, recurrent taking place of responsibility, the reduction that is accomplished in chapter 2 and whose consequences are followed through in the remainder of the book, will require a betrayal of the otherwise than being in the terms of being, and this betrayal as revelation will be the betrayal, as thematized demonstration, of the saying in the said. To show that this reduction is not the beginning of an infinite regress will be the task of one of the last arguments, Levinas’s treatment of the recurrent interruption of philosophy by a scepticism that is constantly being mistakenly criticized by philosophy when philosophy assumes that the truth that scepticism asserts in order to make its charge occurs at the same time as the truth of philosophy. In chapter 2, especially its central part, section 2 subsection e, Levinas is, above all concerned to show that the Saying is not ‘strictly’ correlative with the Said; that is, to show that the Saying has another meaning than the enunciation of the Said. If this were not the case, then ontology would be the limit of sense: the subject would be dependent on being and being would refer to the subject.

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The burden of Levinas’s reduction, which follows the path of a phenomenological reduction in leading the appearance back to the horizon from which it ‘lives,’ but not from which it is deduced as from a principle, is to show that the Saying is inevitably in the Said, not simply in the sense, as he admits, that one can go back to the Saying only from the Said, only out of what shows itself (OTB, 44), but also to show that the very correlation of the Saying and the Said lives from ‘exposure to another’ (OTB, section 4 subsection b). As exposure to another, the correlation of the Saying and the Said seems to be immune, as it were, from the amphibology of beings and Being. Although ‘there does not exist a verb that is refractory to nominalization’ (OTB, 42), Saying as exposure to another removes the element of subordination, inasmuch as Saying signifies prior to essence or identification (OTB, 45). Always already present in the Said, but forgotten in the operation of ontology, whose ‘birthplace’ is ‘in the said’ (OTB, 42), Saying is the subject approaching a neighbour ‘in expressing itself, in being expelled, in the literal sense of the term, out of any locus, no longer dwelling, not stomping any ground ... Its being ‘turned to another’ is this being turned inside out. A concave without a convex. The subject of Saying does not give signs, it becomes a sign, turns into an allegiance’ (OTB, 48–9). Saying is therefore both limited and not limited by the Said. The relation of the Saying to the Said would perhaps not be so much like the relation of obverse and reverse, the distinctness of the two surfaces of a plane (which could be thought of as a paradoxical joining), but more like a Moebius strip, where the two surfaces are one and the one surface is two. The reduction of the correlation of the Saying and the Said to the horizon of a radical passivity expressed as unlimited responsibility for the other to the point of substitution does not issue in a paradox or an irony, even though that is the way even a dialectical turn of mind would, or even a negatively dialectical approach might, perceive it. The reduction does not mean the replacement of one ontology by another or indicate a passage from an apparent world to the real. It cannot mean that otherwise than being refers to an entity beyond being. Instead, ‘the reduction is the reduction of the said to the saying beyond the logos, beyond being and non-being’ (OTB, 45). One can say of the Saying neither that it is nor that it is not. Yet ‘beyond the logos’ does not mean that the unsayable Saying cannot be said: ‘[T]he significations that go beyond formal logic show themselves in formal logic, if only by the precise indications of the sense in which they break with formal logic ...

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[W]hat is beyond being ... is the superlative, more than the negation of categories, as though the logical order and the being it succeeds in espousing retained the superlative which exceeds them’ (OTB, 187). Thus, philosophy is called to ‘indiscretion with regard to the unsayable’ (OTB, 7), to a statement that ‘must also be unsaid’ if the otherwise than being is not to be conflated with a being otherwise. If the relation of betrayal of the Saying in the Said is ‘something’ that can itself be a statement with a structure other than paradox or dialectical synthesis, this would be because the relation between transcendence and its concretions is a different relation than the relation between the One and its parts. Not only can the beyond being not be positively stated in the terms of being, the relation between the beyond being and being cannot be stated in such terms. Analogously, the relation between the ethical and the political cannot be stated in the terms of being. 4. What Do I Have to Do with Justice One attractive and fruitful way to respond to this sensed aporia is to detect, as Robert Bernasconi has done, that Levinas’s thought develops in the direction of seeing ethics and politics as ‘conflicting aspects of a single structure.’ Ethics and politics would be intersecting aspects of the structure named variously by Levinas as ‘fraternity’ or ‘the interhuman,’ but an intersection in which, although the ethical seems always favoured over the political, these terms are not set in opposition to each other. The ethical would always interrupt the political, but not to direct it in the sense of determining what must be done, but to challenge the sense that politics is the ultimate wisdom.10 Bernasconi, declining to betray Levinas, restricts his interpretation to what is strictly offered by Levinas’s texts and in doing so cannot or will not move Levinas decisively beyond the ‘paradoxical,’ along with its liberalist implication, the acceptance of rational peace as the limit case in being. Another essential response to this aporia, which must be acknowledged especially by the European world at the height of its autoglobalization, is offered in the liberation philosophy of Enrique Dussel. Here, ‘[t]he face of the other, primarily as poor and oppressed, reveals a people before it reveals an individual person ... The other person ... is primarily social and historico-popular’11 (PL, 44). It is as though Dussel’s daring and comprehensive work were directed at standing Levinas back on his feet. Dussel will depart substantially from Levinas by radically historicizing and socializing the material other. For Dussel, it

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appears that the limitations of Levinas’s philosophy are in large part traceable not simply, as I suggested above, to a methodological problem, the optical illusion, obliquely recognized as such in Otherwise than Being, that is produced in moving from the simpler to the more complex. He will instead suggest that Levinas is entrammelled in an epistemological individualism: ‘[T]o describe the experience of proximity as individual experience, or the metaphysical experience between two persons, is simply to forget that personal mystery is always risked in the exteriority of the popular history of a people. The individualization of this collective personal experience is a European deformation derived from the bourgeois revolution. Each face, unique, inscrutable mystery of decisions not yet made, is the face of a sex, a generation, a social class, a nation, a cultural group, a historical epoch’ (PL, 44). Thus, Dussel will be able to transcend Levinas by inverting him, standing him once again on his feet: ‘The method of liberation philosophy knows that politics – the politics of the exploited – is the first philosophy because politics is the center of ethics as metaphysics ... Politics introduces ethics, which introduces philosophy’ (PL, 172–3). Dussel moves decisively beyond the limits of Levinas’s apparent ‘methodological’ individualism, and by doing so is able to outline a comprehensive critique of fetishism as well as an economics, poietics, erotics, and politics of liberation. Yet does Dussel risk not effacing, but perhaps muting, the specific character of the social relation, of the fraternity espoused by Levinas as one of radical plurality, where ‘the relation that unites them into a multiplicity is not visible from the outside but proceeds from one unto the other’ (TI, 120)? There is a tension, but a tension not articulated as a tension, within the Philosophy of Liberation between the Other as the poor and oppressed and the poor and oppressed as the Other, between the Other in his/her collective quidity or identity and the Other in her/ his absolute transcendence of all identity. To raise this question is not to differ from Dussel in saying that the abolition of reification, domination, exploitation, and alienation are to be put first as the ethical task, as what I have to do with justice. I introduce these remarks not in order to criticize, but mostly to indicate that others have not only felt in a certain way the problem that Levinas has left, but have found, without leaving the atmosphere of Levinas behind,12 ways to take un pas au dela with respect to the paradox of the ethical and the political. However, if the relation of the ethical and the political is not a paradox, but a betrayal that can be reduced,

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then Levinas has himself supplied at least a minimum by way of ‘mediating’ being and the beyond being. In a sense the problem of mediation is short-circuited: the problem itself presupposes a distinction between two distinct identities that share a commonality. Paradox requires mediation, and mediation implies paradox. Reduction of betrayal requires the unforgetting of, development of, and commitment to a meaning that was never constituted by the ego. Moreover, he has indicated, if only indirectly here, that the liberal articulation of the relation between the ethical and the political is radically insufficient. The relation cannot be conceived along the lines of the Same, ontology, the One, and totality and cannot be stated in their terms. The most vital concreteness of ethics is political; and the most vital task of politics is to make room for the ethical already within it. In what terms can the relation between ethics and politics then be articulated, be it by betrayal? Where are the concretions of the intersection of the ethical and the political to be found? Levinas himself insists on speaking of the beyond being not as another plane of existence; instead, it appears that the beyond being is to have already inhabited being, that desire is ‘produced’ as ‘the infinite in the finite’ (TI, 48). Concretions of the beyond being in being, and of the ethical in the political will have already made an appearance. It has been perhaps less difficult, less tortuous and demanding of consciously recursive subtleties, to enact what is beyond being within being than it is to think it. That Levinas himself does not point to many concretions of the ethical in the political, for the purposes of a step beyond/not beyond, does not matter. Nor would we have to limit ourselves to the concretions he mentions or analyses. When it comes to concretions of the ethical in the political, Levinas too often writes as though politics itself were the politics understood and grasped by the Western political tradition, as though politics itself simply were the politics and beings of rational peace, with no exterior. But surely there has always been more, a politics of the exploited and oppressed, that has not been much grasped by most of that tradition, or in its terms. This is definitely a lack that Dussel exposes.13 We will come back to this in bringing up Levinas’s treatment of labour. 5. The Ethical in the Political Levinas begins Totality and Infinity with a startling echo of the questions posed to Socrates in the Republic: ‘[I]t is of the highest importance to

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know whether we are not duped by morality’ (TI, 21). Among many other things, Totality and Infinity presents itself as a response to that question. And by the very last paragraphs Levinas will have indicated that the negative answer the question (which here initiates the investigation rather than, as in Otherwise than Being, concluding it) will have received depends decisively upon the infinite time maintained by fecundity (TI, 300). Infinite time, which, as opposed to eternity, is a time that cannot be gathered into a whole, is, as Jeffrey Dudiak says, a time of always and again rather than a forever and always.14 It is a time of recurrence rather than an eternity, an ‘eternal’ recurrence of the moment of responsibility beyond me.15 And this ‘infinite time of triumph’ is the only thing finally standing between my responsibility and absurdity. Without infinite time, ‘goodness would be subjectivity and folly’ (TI, 280). The fecund self, the self of substitution, ‘opens an order in which death cannot be recognized’ (OTB, 115). A being capable of a fate other than its own is a fecund being, always recommencing (TI, 282). Yet it owes its recommencement not to its own initiative, but to its having been expelled from itself, absolved of itself (OTB, 115).16 Such a being, both itself and not itself, whose fate is the fate of the other, is a being who is for all, who is, as Levinas says, ‘both being and disinterestedness’ (ibid.). Substitution is not self-negation, nor is it abnegation, not ‘submission to the non-ego’ (ibid.). A being in the recurrence of fecundity ‘is human fraternity itself’ (OTB, 116). I have woven these brief statements from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being together to indicate that the concepts of substitution and fecundity share the same structure. Fecundity is not something coming out of the family coming out of biology. Although some biological relations might be instantiations of fecundity, fecundity is not a biological relation, except inasmuch as it is a relation between one living being and others, dead, living, and not yet born. Fecundity and substitution, especially in their link with created or finite freedom are, however, already ‘corrections’ of infinite responsibility. They do not correct the asymmetry of proximity in the way that the state and law, thematization, and the third-person perspective might. They do not install formal equality and rights. But they already include the being transcending itself within the transcendence itself. They do not annihilate or alienate being. They express the unsayable Saying, neither entity nor non-entity, inhabiting the excluded middle. Because they are intimately related to plurality and unicity, and to the relation obtaining between plurality and unicity, they are pre-eminently social and not

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simply dyadic or private. They are the cancellation of the negative alterity between symmetry and asymmetry, and between reciprocity and submission. Briefly formulated, they are the good otherwise than being and not a being otherwise. This would also mean that fecundity and substitution are not ideals, nor are they the telai governing an optimistic philosophy of history. They would be as much conditions as results, if it were possible to assign them to the logic of causality. In order to ‘be’ at all, fecundity and substitution must have been from time immemorial. It would only be by virtue of the withdrawal of all past generations in the welcoming of all subsequent generations – a process without beginning or end – that fecundity and substitution could ever have been carried on. In this way, they would be like the ‘contraction’ of Infinity that leaves a place for separated being (TI, 104). As ‘grace’ themselves, they would also follow the logic of grace. When Bernasconi says that Levinas came to see ‘ethics and politics as conflicting aspects of a single structure,’ and a very complex one at that, this should not be taken to mean that it has been demonstrated that goodness and reciprocity, fraternity and the state, gratuity and comparison, the private and the public are ontological givens. The instantiations of this structure, and the various relations of the instantiations, are not parts of first philosophy itself. If they were, Levinas would not be able to talk about a judgment of history, except as a condemnation of history per se. When Levinas says that it is important to know whether the just state, in which man is fulfilled, is from Warre or from the responsibility of one for all, it is equally important not to presume that the so-called ‘entrance’ of the third party means the subordination of anarchical goodness to the state. The Question ‘What do I have to do with justice?’ has a number of possible inflections. ‘What do I have to do with justice?’ is not quite the same question as ‘What do I have to do with justice?’ Perhaps there are some things that I have to do with goodness, beyond justice. Only one of the questions born from first philosophy can be answered by Levinas’s philosophy of first philosophy. Such philosophy itself, by itself, will be able only to identify, but under its own optics, something of the nature and structure of the realms of being with which it must engage. But it will also have demonstrated that, as with the transcendence of being being the condition of being itself, the transcendence of the state is one of the conditions of the state itself. This is not the telos of a philosophy of history, but the Desire of ethics itself. Not to desire this is to fall away from the ethical relation.

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Neither formal logic nor the non-formal, non-logic required of the thinking of the ethical relation are adequate to the relation of the ethical relation to being. The state and money are thus not final requirements of ethics; they are not unfortunate but necesssary means for the partial realization of an ideal. There are to be no Kantian republics here adequate to a race of devils. There can be no kingdom of ends that is not also a kingdom of means. Goodness is not an ideal, but whatever actual material peace and fraternity, ‘what little there is,’ in being. Anarchical goodness, says Levinas, is not a principle, and it would be self-contradictory for it to set itself up as a principle. When Levinas says that such anarchy ‘can only disturb the State, but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation,’ this in no way can be construed as an endorsement, or even a tragic acceptance of the state (OTB, 194). It is an indication that the transcendance of the state cannot rely on the logic the state relies on. The ethical does not merely interrupt the political in order to deflate its pretensions to being the ultimate wisdom (Bernasconi); it ‘radically disturbs’ the state, always pushing beyond the state, beyond ‘rational peace,’ pushing with patient urgency. It would be peace pushing against war (see OTB, 177 on patience and ignorance). Even if Levinas were to suggest that ethics, in giving birth to the question, requires justice, which in turn requires the state and money (and I do not think his intentions need be read this way), this would violate ‘his’ own logic; it would violate the logic of goodness. The logic of goodness requires a transcendence of rational peace, it requires a certain hyperpolitics. Critique would be one side of such hyperpolitics. Corresponding to the desire of goodness to leave behind the atmosphere of rational peace, Levinas will not turn to ontology, even a new ontology, or an ever more fundamental ontology, in order to disturb the state in a radical way. He will, however, point to the necessity of critique as ‘essential for metaphysics.’ Critique, he says, is better than the ‘great betrayal’ of ontology, calling the search for freedom of the Same into question, albeit by an exercise of that same freedom (TI, 42–5; also 85–7). Although Levinas, despite his critical approach to the tradition, does not follow in the way of critique, he does intend to establish that which critique requires, a fixed point beyond being, to be found in the command to infinite responsibility, the command without which the very search for truth could not be distinguished from ideology. The one for the other, he says, is the foundation of theory, for any truth that does not wish to be pure ideology (OTB, 136; see also 19). The

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critique Levinas would call for would thus be a negation without any affirmation. It would not affirm the very things Levinas also seems to affirm in the betrayal of the ethical in the political. How might such a critique approach some of Levinas’s own affirmations concerning the status of rational peace? Ultimately ethics cannot condone rational peace. To stop with rational peace would be to evade our first and final responsibility. But what is it that seems to make rational peace the necessary limit of ethics within politics? 6. Beyond Rational Peace: Beyond the Market Value of Works Rational peace, the peace of the state, lives from war. The violence of war can be replaced by the rational order, where separate wills are reduced to the participation of wills in reason, which is not exterior to the will. The state would then be the interiorization of external relations17 (FC, 22). Rational peace would suspend war, delay and postpone its outbreak. But Levinas is also clear that war is not original. In fact, at one point, he says that war presupposes peace, the antecedent and nonallergic presence of the other (TI, 199). But he also is clear that only beings capable of war can rise to peace. ‘War, like peace, presupposes beings structured otherwise than as parts of a totality’ (TI, 122). Does this mean that war arises spontaneously, as it were, from the existence of freedoms alongside one another, or forces that affirm one another, as he puts it in ‘Freedom and Command’ (22)? More will be needed to account for war than the separation of beings capable of war. Levinas will find it necessary to account for war also in the context of labour and the context in which labour takes place. Following upon the question of whether we are duped by the good, Levinas in Totality and Infinity is concerned with the question of how the freedom of separation, the freedom that allows for both war and peace, is lost, and how that freedom can be regained. Freedom is ultimately regained on a plane, he says, that both ‘presupposes and transcends the epiphany of the other,’ the plane of goodness and fecundity (TI, 252). Fecundity is a unity that ‘engenders’ multiplicity. Thus, freedom is not regained on the plane of mortality, and the will does not find its finality in the judgment passed on its works by the state or by universal history. The will is confirmed under ‘the judgement of God,’ ‘when its fear of death is inverted into fear of committing murder’ (TI, 240). But how is freedom lost, and how does war arise? It seems that both can take place inasmuch as the human is not only the who involved in expression, but

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the will ‘exposed to the other by its work’ (TI, 226). As opposed to discourse or speech, works cannot express one’s life fully; the who is only involved, not expressed, in activity. The work is, for Levinas, a symbol, calling for interpretation, masking me, rather than expressing my sincerity (TI, 176–8). As a symbol, it is, he says, ‘destined to an alien Sinngebung.’ It ‘separates itself from its author’ and ‘takes on the anonymity of merchandise’ (TI, 226–7). Having already left its author’s hands, work renders the will essentially violable. The will, thus rendered sensitive to its violability, is capable of becoming a servile soul (TI, 229). It has realized that it is not entirely what it wants to do. And this hiatus between the will and its work will be the opening of an unlimited field for psychology and sociology. Materialism, presumably Marx’s materialism, has its part of eternal truth in recognizing the violability of the will in its works. But for Levinas, the non-expressive nature of works is attested in their market value (rather than the other way around) (TI, 227). Cognizant of its impending servitude in its violability, in its dependence upon things that can fall under the will of another, the will may still act to postpone this subjection. In doing so, the will becomes a will against the other and his threat. It finds itself caught up in events and in history (TI, 227). Cognizant of its violability and potential servility, it finds itself at war. Cognizant of war, it will be able to find its way to rational peace, yet no further. Here again, Levinas finds himself ensnared in a certain methodological individualism. Only in this case it is not ‘corrected’ in the way that infinite responsibility is corrected in the question of justice. Yet it is eminently corrigible. There is nothing in Levinas pressing him to connect this methodological individualism with an ontological individualism. His whole work in fact flies in the face of any ontological individualism, although this is expressed in rather roundabout ways. There is nothing about his concepts of enjoyment, interiority, separation, and so forth that commits him to or endorses any ontological individualism. If there is any social ontology here at all, it would lie in the unicity and multiplicity maintained by fecundity, in a ‘fecundity in general as a relation between man and man and between the I and itself not resembling the structures constitutive of the State’ (TI, 306). The market value that, for Levinas, attests to the non-expressive value of the work is a historically generated value, a piece of history itself subject to external judgment and to cancellation in being. The truth Levinas finds in materialism, that the work can be separated from its ‘author,’ and that this separation is the basis of servitude, is only Marx’s criticism of

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the alienation of labour in capitalist society from a viewpoint still within capitalist society, which viewpoint sees both ‘individual’ labour and its alienation as a privation of the one, as a fracturing of a totality to be reunited by the market and/or the state. Yet for Marx, labour, like fecund action or substitution for Levinas, is always already social, a ‘power’ of relation to the other as separate and not simply the reproduction in being of the social totality. For Marx, the deepest and worst mystification lies in forgetting that labour has been from time immemorial, and still is, despite all appearances to the contrary in capitalist society, a social relation and fundamentally an expressive relation between humans.18 The fetishism of commodities arises and is sustained only on the basis of the real illusion of individual works that, for the purposes of putatively efficient coordination, have market or exchange value. To go beyond the fetishism of commodities would ultimately require going beyond justice and rational peace. To go beyond rational peace, which seems to me to be the injunction and desire contained in the relation of mutual betrayal between the ethical and the political, one must go behind war not only to the expression secured in language, but to the language of expression buried in works. Works are not simply acts of the will; they may also be expressions to and for the other. What Levinas variously calls original peace, real peace, sabbatical peace means necessarily a transcending of rational peace through undoing those conditions in being that give rise to the latter’s usefulness. And it means going behind the appearance of necessity attached to it. These conditions are not always with us. That they are a part of being calls not for flight, but for critique. Levinas does not want to ‘disdain being’ or treat it as a fall from a higher order (OTB, 16). Real peace would thereby necessarily involve radically undoing the conditions that give rise to war. And the only way to do that is to abolish not the violability of the will, but the gap between labour and expression, the violation of the will of the other. It is only when all our arrangements are such that the others can express their life to the other others through their works that the self will have brought peace. As Levinas says, ‘[P]eace is my responsibility ... [A] risk, dangerously – the risk will appear to knowledge as uncertainty, but it is transcendence itself’ (OTB, 167). If fecundity and substitution are not to be ‘an anodyne formal relation, but the body extirpated from its conatus essendi in the possibility of giving’ (OTB, 142), the first gift will not be the gift of anything I have ever owned, but the ‘destruction’ of the ownership I never had.

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NOTES 1 ‘Peace and Proximity,’ in A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, eds, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); referred to here as PP. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998); referred to here as OTB. 3 See the brief account given by Robert Bernasconi in ‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (January 1999), 85ff. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); referred to here as TI. 5 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite,’ in Richard Kearney, ed., States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 69. 6 There is a tendency to think of the ethical in the political in terms of providing for the welfare needs of citizens, as though public charity (if this were indeed what welfare programs amounted to) were sufficient to exhaust the ethical demand in the political. This view shows up even in otherwise excellent treatments of Levinas. A recent example might be Richard Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Even Jeffrey Dudiak in the otherwise remarkeable The Intrigue of Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001) has a tendency not to go beyond a rather static understanding of the intersection of the ethical and the political (see 149, 242), despite his acute insights into Levinas on messianic time and its relation to history (295ff). 7 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Ego and the Totality,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); referred to here as ET. 8 Gibbs, in Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 240, reads this as a passing over of the family for the state. 9 Ibid. 10 Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party,’ 83–6. 11 Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985); referred to here as PL. 12 As I believe is still the case with Dussel’s contribution to this volume. If there is a decisive step beyond, it is strictly in one respect.

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13 And this is similar to what is indicated in different ways in the article by Robert Bernasconi in this volume. 14 Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics, 290–1. 15 Ibid., 297. 16 For a powerful account of how this is prefigured in Levinas’s early work, see Marinos Diamantides’s contribution to this volume. 17 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985); referred to here as FC. 18 See, for example, the way this is made fairly clear in his ‘Excerpt Notes of 1844,’ in Selected Writings, ed. L.H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), esp. 50–3 on ‘Free Human Production.’

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Hands That Give and Hands That Take: The Politics of the Feminine in Levinas TINA CHANTER

The underlying continuity of the philosophical discourses of theoria and praxis is a broad problematic that Levinas develops progressively throughout his corpus. Heidegger claims to reorient philosophy by thematizing the hitherto neglected question of Being, thereby dislodging the privilege that the Western tradition of philosophy has presumed for theoretical and reflective thought. Heidegger’s claim is to rethink the tradition by approaching the question of Being by means of Dasein’s practical, affective, lived experience of the world. Incorporating Heidegger’s questioning of the priority of theoria into a reworked notion of the very tradition Heidegger wanted to disrupt, Levinas points to a series of more fundamental philosophical gestures that reunite Heidegger with that tradition. Levinas thus reads Heidegger’s apparent departure from Western philosophy (with all the caveats one needs to add to that description) as one more deviation – albeit a profoundly significant one – from the history of philosophy, which is now recast as a series of exercises that remain bound up with, among other decisive tropes, the metaphorics of light and vision that Levinas would go beyond. Levinas discerns in the discourse of illumination, in the play of disclosure that informs Heidegger’s explication of the question of Being, a reiteration of a discourse of mediation characteristic of the tradition.1 The question arises as to how, if not by means of a model of mediation, whereby the thinker gains access to the world that is represented by means of an idea, Levinas can formulate his position. How can the relation between the I and the other be maintained – and this is a question to which Levinas will constantly return, giving it a variety of formulations, throughout his work – in a way that neither subsumes the

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other into a discourse of representation nor subordinates the I to the other who dominates the I to the point of obliterating its unicity, independence, or autonomy. I propose that the role that the feminine plays in Levinas’s philosophy answers to this question, but that it is answerable in a way that is outlawed by Levinas. The function that the feminine performs in Levinas’s philosophy is one that resists thematization, and yet it is indispensable to its coherence. The feminine is not just exemplary of the movement that Levinas describes when he distinguishes the said from the saying, but it operates in a way that allows Levinas to say what he says, to elaborate the philosophical positions (including the distinction between the saying and the said) he elaborates. Yet its operation is such that Levinas prohibits the articulation of the feminine, or its thematization, since to allow the formal function of the feminine to come to the fore would be to undermine his philosophy of radical alterity. There are a number of clarifications that need to be made before I can proceed to render this suggestion palatable. In Totality and Infinity the welcome of the feminine face functions by way of providing a kind of break, the chance of a withdrawal, a suspension from the immediacy of and immersion in the life of enjoyment.2 But how does this feminine welcome relate to the welcome that Levinas associates with language?3 What happens to the feminine once the ethical relation is fully articulated?4 Does Levinas think through the relationship between these two welcomes, the feminine and the masculine? Or is there a way in which the feminine face plays a role that Levinas fails to thematize philosophically, and does he thereby ask the feminine to conform to a function that is all too familiar in the history of Western philosophy? Can we discern in Levinas’s appeal to the feminine as a ‘delightful lapse’ (TI, 156; TeI, 129) in being, or as that which facilitates the I’s enjoyment in being at home with itself, anything other than the very traditional role of facilitator? The feminine face is silent, it does not teach. And yet the ethical relation mimics the welcome of the feminine. Does Levinas repeat the trope of consigning the feminine to a second-rate version of the ethical, a copy that is in reality a copy that facilitates the original? That is, does the feminine face prepare the way for the encounter with the other as absolute in the face to face, does it render intelligible the philosophical move that Levinas makes from the dwelling, from the home, from interiority, to the ethical relation of the face to face, without itself being formulated, represented, or articulated, except by default? Does the sense in which the feminine plays the role of an ambiguous, inarticulate

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alterity, a face that merges with the facelessness of mythical, pagan gods, or becomes a thing among things, a discreet presence that is taken for granted, allow Levinas to provide an account of the full-blown ethical implications of the face to face, only at the cost of requiring the feminine to remain forever in the background, merging into the elemental? If the feminine plays such a role – a hinge, a hymen, a pivot around which the entire metaphorics of Levinas’s philosophy operates – can it be retrieved in a way that refuses its subordination? Is there anything more to be said than that Levinas (like Hegel, in his use of the figure of Antigone) indulges in the well-worn trope of disenfranchising women, barring them from access to the truly philosophical, or the truly ethical, only to draw from them what inspiration he can? Levinas requires women to remain on the sidelines, marginal to the discourse, apparently incidental to the fabric of thinking – but their role is in fact indispensable, in a way that he does not allow to figure, to bring into discourse, or to represent. The following questions will guide this enquiry: 1 In what sense does Levinas insist that the responsibility to the other ‘does not leave me time’ (GWC, 71; DQV, 117), and in what sense does the ‘infinite and indeclinable authority’ of the other, by whom I am held hostage, ‘leav[e] time’?5 2 What is the relation between the ‘traumatic hold [emprise traumatique] of the other upon the same’ ‘(GDT, 187; DMT, 215) and the sense in which one has or does not have, is left, or is not left, time? 3 What is the import of the hand for Levinas, and how is it related to time? One might say that, for phenomenology, the hand remains one that takes (see EN, 160; ENE, 166), while for Levinas one has ‘hands for giving.’ 4 In what sense does the feminine allow hands that take to become hands that give, and how does the body, corporeity, constitute the ‘condition’ (GDT, 188; DMT, 216) of giving? To what extent do the marginal figures of the feminine that inhabit – or rather haunt, for they are not at home – Levinas’s texts transform the hand that takes into the hand that gives? Let me return to the suggestion that Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s way of being dislocated the priority of theoria, only to achieve for praxis a philosophical primacy. Levinas argues that whether theoria or praxis assume for themselves the privilege of philosophical discourse, both of them are encompassed by a totalizing discourse of being that is

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permeated with a model dependent upon a variation of the priority of vision to which theory appeals, and which is merely replayed by the priority of touch that characterizes praxis. Whether it is an idea that I grasp mentally, or a tool that I grasp physically, the hold that the I achieves over the world reduces that world to me – either as representation or in the context of usefulness. In both cases, the end towards which the representation of objects takes place or the subordination of things to my project, is me. The I remains unassailable in its mastery. The proximity between the eye that sees and the hand that grasps resides for Levinas in what he characterizes as the transcendental register of representation. Of course, Heidegger conceived of his account of equipmental relations in a largely negative way. That is, the context of circumspective concern functions in his philosophy as a way of marking calculative, and ultimately inauthentic, time, the time of rationality and measurement, from which Heidegger wants to distance himself. But Levinas, in effect, argues that the alternative approach to temporality proffered by Heidegger’s understanding of being-towards-death is in fact still governed by an instrumental conception of time, and therefore of oneself. Levinas claims that Dasein’s allegedly authentic understanding of its own death in fact amounts to a replaying of the grasping movement that underlies the everyday conception of time as present-at-hand. In so far as death becomes for Dasein the ground of its action as free, Levinas recognizes in the Heideggerian conception of death a gesture of appropriation. In authentically anticipating one’s death, Dasein succeeds in gaining control over that which initially seemed to elude its grasp. Dasein brings even that apparently opaque and intransigent phenomenon of death into its orbit of understanding, rendering it knowable, transforming it into something over which Dasein can have some measure of control, even if this control is as limited as accepting one’s finitude.7 Heidegger’s account of Dasein remains abstract, according to Levinas’s critique. It fails to do justice to the tangible, material, corporeal elements of lived experience that it nevertheless gestures toward without fully fleshing them out. Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s still too insubstantial Dasein proceeds in terms of an analysis that dissects Dasein’s progressive ontological clarification of its own state of being by emphasizing its mastery. This mastery is analysed by Levinas as virile, and heroic, and is supplemented by Levinas with a description of subjectivity that not only acknowledges the capacity of the subject to control its

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environment, to remain sovereign, but also includes aspects that are more resistant, opaque, and intractable. The subject is weighed down by its materiality, tied to the necessity of having to feed and clothe itself, mired in its own existence.8 It suffers, and is exposed to the burdens of corporeal existence, it undergoes pain and hardship. The materiality of its existence is not, however, limited to these negative traits. The very corporeal existence that requires it to labour and to tire, to exert effort and to collapse in fatigue, also affords it the respite of enjoyment and pleasure. The I can conquer its environment, can rest on its accomplishments, can build up resources from which to live. The I puts a canopy over its head, makes a home for itself, and stores up goods for future use. The I can enjoy life, immerse itself in the sensible enjoyment of air and food. Enjoyment, it turns out, comes at a price. The cost of living a good life is realized in bad conscience, or in the discovery that in the apparent sincerity and innocence of good intentions, one is in fact culpable of usurping the place of another – my place in the sun.9 At this point we can raise a question about the extent to which Levinas’s philosophy avoids reiterating, albeit in a different manner, some of the tropes from which he wants to distance himself in Heidegger. Levinas chastises Heidegger for construing Dasein’s relations with others as a degradation or fall from the essentially solitary quest for Dasein’s own authentic realization of its own destiny. Yet how far does Levinas’s appeal to the infinite obligation to the other eschew endorsing the inauthenticity of everyday life, by a mere reversal of Heidegger’s terms? Does Levinas end up construing the enjoyment of life, which takes place in a more or less solitary mode, or at least within the confinement and security of habitation, as in some sense fallen? More pertinently, for our analysis, does the regime of the feminine, which presides over the dwelling, end up being a casualty of such a reversal? Levinas, of course, wants to pre-empt such a suggestion. Alert to the fact that it will occur to his readers, he asks in Totality and Infinity, ‘Is not to broach being on the level of separation to broach it in its fallenness?’ (TI, 102; TeI, 75); and would separation ‘result from an illusion or a fault’ (ibid.)? Refusing this rhetorical suggestion, Levinas says, ‘To conceive separation as a fall or privation or provisional rupture of the totality is to know no other separation than that evinced by need’ (TI, 102; TeI, 75–6). So, Levinas tells us, ‘it is necessary to cease interpreting separation as pure and simple diminution of the Infinite, a degradation. Separation with regard to the Infinite, compatible with the Infinite, is not a simple “fall” of the Infinite’ (TI, 103; TeI, 77).

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Levinas provides us with an account of Heidegger that is critical of the proximity that emerges between his account of equipmentality and the movement of knowledge and intentionality, since both depend upon an optical metaphor. As I have already said, this metaphor ultimately appeals to a synchrony that unites the eye and the hand, and depends on representing the capacity of the hand to grasp as fundamentally synonymous with the mind’s eye that thinks, or grasps the content of an idea.10 In this account the body is reduced to the hand that takes or the eye that sees, or thematizes, and thereby reduces the world to my conception of it. The corporeal is reduced to a body that consumes; food is reduced to fuel. The body becomes merely an instrument of knowledge. Levinas’s early critique of Heidegger promises to articulate corporeality in a way that avoids such an abstract, instrumental account, but as his critique progresses, so the substantiality of the body that Levinas is still concerned to elaborate in Totality and Infinity diminishes. References to the corporeal become increasingly attenuated, so that the body barely appears, except as hands that give.11 My suspicion is that this abbreviated account of the body assumes the account of the feminine that is provided in Totality and Infinity, but is written out of Levinas’s philosophy later on. My suspicion is that this dependency on the feminine is both crucial to the project of Levinas’s later work, and unthematizable in its terms. I suggested above that despite his disclaimers Levinas might be guilty of effecting a mere reversal of Heidegger, so that rather than casting being-with-others as inauthentic, the solitary existence of the I comes to be seen as a degradation or a fall. This suggestion needs qualifying, for things are more complicated. While it might be useful within certain limits to posit a parallel between the inauthenticity of Heidegger’s Mitsein and the discovery by Levinas’s existent of its very existence as sinful – in the sense that it finds that it has usurped the place of others – two important complications present themselves. First, for Levinas, the subject does not discover itself as neglectful of others straightaway.12 In order for the I to be awakened to its obligation to the other, it must first have been in a complacent relation with the world. It must have been happy, egoist, sovereign, immersed in enjoyment. It is after the fact that the I discovers itself as the usurper of goods that might have kept others alive. To formulate this strange conditionality in another way, in order to give the bread from my mouth to the other, I must have been in possession of it. I must have bread in order to give it. Is there an ethics, then, that precedes the ethics of giving to the other?

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Can we discern an injunction prior to the infinite obligation of the I to the other, one that makes provision for the bread that the I has taken for granted until such point as it encounters the other? The second complication concerns the role of the feminine. In Levinas’s critical commentary of Heidegger’s equipmental world we can discern an ethical injunction, I suggest, that food should not be mere fuel. When the world is such that food can only figure as fuel, something has gone seriously wrong. There is an implicit proposal that food should be enjoyable, that it should be more than fuel, that is should not be confined to the function of staving off death. Accompanying this implicit proposal is the silent presence of the feminine, a discreet presence that facilitates in Totality and Infinity the dwelling, the habitation, the home, and that functions as the background to the I’s enjoyment. To say that the I is solitary, in Levinas’s account, is not quite accurate – not in Totality and Infinity. The I is rather at home, in enjoyment, in the discreet presence of the feminine. What happens, then, to the feminine, when the happy existence of the I is disrupted, and invaded by bad conscience? Is it enlisted in the obligation to the other? There is no thematization of the feminine, for the I is uniquely irreplaceable. But is there a sense in which the feminization of this ethics has surreptitiously taken place? There are a number of reasons to be suspicious of Levinas’s invocation of the feminine, not the least of which is the apparent ease with which he casts the feminine in a very traditional way, by associating it with domesticity, passivity, and invisibility. But if one is to maintain a critical stance toward Levinas for his reiteration of such traditional associations in texts such as Time and the Other (1947), Totality and Infinity (1961), and, arguably, Otherwise than Being (1974), how is one to judge the many texts in which Levinas either entirely forgoes any mention of the feminine, or in which he barely mentions it? Do these texts merely lend support to those critics who remain unconvinced that the theme of the feminine has an important function in Levinas’s philosophy? Or is there a sense in which the feminine facilitates Levinas’s ethical claims even – perhaps especially – in those texts that appear to be oblivious to the feminine? My argument is that Levinas’s philosophy, even when it overtly ignores, excludes, or seems indifferent to the feminine, relies on, appeals to, or is dependent upon the feminine. The feminine is the unthematized, silent, unspoken face of Levinas’s ethics. It is the saying of Levinas’s said. In order to function, Levinas’s philosophy requires the feminine – but it requires that it remain inarticulate.

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One of the central claims of Levinas’s philosophy, one that plays a large part in his critique of Heidegger, and one that perhaps can be expressed in its most succinct form with reference to time, also exhibits an unstated and unacknowledged dependence upon the feminine. Levinas criticizes phenomenology for relying on the priority of intentionality, and thereby renewing the privilege of vision that has long characterized philosophical meaning. His objection to the phenomenological trope by which being shows itself, or is manifested, takes shape in his attempt to secure the sense in which this trope fits seamlessly into a tradition that has always understood intelligibility not only in terms of vision, but also – and this is crucial – in terms of the movement of grasping, seizing, comprehending, or containing. In keeping with his critique of philosophy for having confined rationality to a discourse of representation, Levinas argues that philosophy has prioritized the now over the future and the past. The vision that sees – the guiding metaphor for philosophical thought – is also the hand that grasps. The reduction of every idea to me, or the representation of every thought in a now (maintenant) that is present, is also a reference to the hand that grasps, seizes.13 This account is applied to Heidegger’s understanding of death. If Dasein is that being by which ‘being is in question,’ it becomes the being who, in confronting its own death, confers on death a positive meaning, and thus negates the disquietude of death. Levinas says, ‘Death is no longer a question but rather something to be seized’ (GDT, 136; DMT, 154). For Levinas, on the contrary, there is still always time before death, or rather before death as mine. It is the other who does not leave time. Levinas says that the ‘responsibility for the other ... does not come from time made up of presences, nor from presences sunken into the past and representable, the time of beginnings or assumptions. Responsibility does not let me constitute myself into an I think ... It goes to the point of substitution for the other, up to the condition – or the noncondition – of a hostage. This is a responsibility that does not leave me time: it leaves me without a present for recollection or a return into the self’ (GWC, 71; DQV, 117 [my emphasis]). The idea that responsibility ‘does not leave me time’ is reiterated in a context that reverses the grasp that the phenomenological intentionality, with its aim and vision, exerts. Levinas says, ‘Here, a sort of violence is undergone: a trauma at the heart of my-self [moi-même], a claiming of this Same by the Other, a backwards movement of intentionality. The extreme tension of the command pressed upon me by another; a com-

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mand prior to any opening on my part; a traumatic hold [emprise traumatique] of the Other upon the Same. This is a hold that I discover in the extreme urgency that calls for my help, to the point in the extreme urgency that calls for my help, to the point where I always come too late, for there is no time to wait for me’ (GDT, 187; DMT, 215 [my emphasis]). Instead of consciousness opening onto a world, and converting what it finds into its own ideas, rendering it equivalent to a knowing I, the subject is held by the other in a way that renders it unequal to the call it hears. There is no equality, no rediscovery of the self as adequately representing the call of the other. There is no time for the I to assemble or reassemble itself as a consciousness that is master of the situation. Consciousness does not take hold, or seize, or grasp, or take in hand, or represent the other, but rather it suffers from bad conscience. As Levinas puts it in ‘From One to the Other: Transcendence and Time,’ there is here a ‘suspension’ of consciousness, of sovereignty, and of the subject as master of itself. Consciousness is ‘interrupted in the presence of the face of the other’ (EN, 147; ENE, 158 [my emphasis]). An example of such an interruption, in the figure of Antigone, is provided by Levinas’s discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. A suspension of war and politics, a fear of injustice more than death, inspiration breaking with intellectualism, goodness pulling the self away from its return to self: it is Antigone who embodies this ethics. Levinas points to the ‘exceptional relationship of the living with the dead’ that consists in the ‘act of burial’ that Antigone accomplishes (GDT, 86; DMT, 101). ‘The burial rite is a deliberate relationship of the living with death, through their relationship with the deceased. Here, death is thought and not simply described. It is a necessary moment in the conceptual progress of thought itself’ (ibid.). Tracing the relationship in Hegel between the family, the feminine, and burial on the one hand, and the state, the masculine, and communal life on the other hand, Levinas says: ‘The State is legislation; it is the action of several in view of a common goal. To the State is opposed the divine law, the family bonded in blood and the relation of the difference of the sexes. The divine law is different from the State because it proceeds from that which is common, whereas the State, by way of the universal law, tends toward what is common ... The State proceeds from Reason conscious of itself and raising itself to the universal. The family, on the other hand, is something natural; it is the substratum of life from which human law detaches itself. But family is also the immediate nature of Spirit, and thus it is not a pure nature; it has an ethical principle. It

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becomes moral in relation to the Penates, to the protective spirits of the household’ (GDT, 82; DMT, 96–7). The question that guides Levinas’s enquiry into the exceptional role that death plays for Hegel, that is, the sense in which it escapes being merely a moment of the play of being, is this: ‘What then can the ethical spirit of the family signify? The family’s morality is other than that of the State. This morality is in the State and has many of the State’s virtues: it raises children, prepares citizens for the State, and in this sense it is for the disappearance of the family. But there exists an ethics proper to the family that, on the basis of its terrestrial morality, relates to the subterranean world and consists in burying the dead’ (GDT, 83; DMT, 97). This ethics, although Levinas doesn’t name her, is the ethics that Antigone enacts. Levinas does, however, inscribe this ethics under the rubric of the maternal: ‘In death, there is the idea of a return to a maternal element, to a level situated beneath the phenomenological sphere’ (GDT, 86; DMT, 101). The key significance for Levinas is the sense in which the act of burial interrupts the work of nature, thereby taking on the death of the other. Thus, the burial of a family member signifies in a way that cuts across the subordination of the family to the state; it interrupts the dominant order, its meaning goes beyond, or exceeds, the hierarchy that places the family at the service of the state. Even though Polynices died a traitor to the state, he still deserves a proper burial according to the law by which Antigone abides. The meaning of the act of burial thus signifies in a way that cannot be recuperated according to the logic of the state as dominant. The ethics of the family refuses to be subordinated to that of the state in the figure of Antigone. One can see how the work of memory and witnessing in the context of survivors of the Holocaust could be read in the light of Levinas’s comments on Hegel. Levinas’s interest in Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone’s ethical sensibility focuses on the sense in which, for Hegel, ‘death is not simply a moment playing its role in the thinking of being’ (GDT, 80; DMT, 94). Ultimately, Levinas thinks that the ‘phenomenal model’ wins out in Hegel, that there is a ‘return to the ground of being’ (GDT, 87; DMT, 102). But Antigone’s ethics effects a suspension of that ground. It is not surprising that Levinas would appeal to Antigone, whose affinity with death and whose association with the nocturnal are pronounced. Levinas frequently describes the feminine in terms of slipping away from the light, as modesty and hiding. Even if we overlook the traditional connotations of indeterminacy this has, and stress instead its

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contrast to the grasping movement of light and knowledge, one must still ask, how responsible is responsibility in this account? What are the limitations of Levinas’s infinite responsibility? In the lectures God, Death and Time, women make only the briefest of appearances. Levinas mentions in passing ‘the women’ who, according to Plato’s Phaedo must be sent away from the scene of Socrates’s death, because they ‘weep more than they should,’ they ‘weep without measure ... as if there were an excess in death’ (GDT, 9; DMT, 18). Unlike Socrates, Levinas finds a positive meaning in the ‘excess of emotion,’ in the ‘affectivity’ of the women’s tears. Just as the feminine embodies a meaning that goes beyond ontology in Time and the Other, so the emotion displayed by the women that Plato excludes from the scene of Socrates’ death signifies for Levinas in a way that is irreducible to ‘intentionality’ (GDT, 18; DMT, 27). I suggest that the regime of the feminine supports and facilitates the saying of that text. Without the feminine in the background, there would be no possibility of the hands giving instead of taking. Yet the women that are mentioned remain nameless. Even Antigone goes unnamed, although there is no question that she informs the text. Antigone performs to perfection the unmarked role that the feminine plays in Levinas’s philosophy: she mediates between humans and the divine. She teaches Creon the unforgettable lesson that the human and the divine cannot be separated from one another, as if one were not implicated in the other. It might not be her intention to teach this lesson, and in this sense she does not present herself as a teacher. Rather, she uses her hands to give her brother a proper burial, putting her body to work in her offering of dust and libations, giving what she alone can give, all that she can give, the only thing that she is allowed to give. Giving her life, she gives without asking anything in return. Except, perhaps, remembrance. For we are no longer living in ancient Greece, and women are no longer politically circumscribed in the way that Antigone was: how then do we read an ethical philosophy that continues to require women to maintain the marginality they endured in ancient Greece? Is Levinas’s concept of the feminine, for all its potential in feminizing Heidegger’s ontology, restricted by its own adherence to a conception of femininity that is still too Greek? Without a body, one cannot give, and without bread to give, one cannot give. Levinas recognizes this when he says, ‘The here I am signifies a being bound to the giving with hands full, a being bound to

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corporeity; the body is the very condition of giving, with all that giving costs’ (GDT, 188; DMT, 216). In Totality and Infinity Levinas had identified the ‘dwelling’ as among the ‘conditions for representation’ (TI, 153; TeI, 126), where the ‘event of dwelling exceeds the knowing, the thought, and the idea in which, after the event, the subject will want to contain what is incommensurable with a knowing’ (ibid.). In God, Death, and Time habitation and the comforts of home are not mentioned – but neither are they forgotten. In Totality and Infinity Levinas says that the dwelling is among those conditions that cannot be forgotten (see TI, 153; TeI, 126). If Heidegger’s philosophy is directed against the forgetting of being, Levinas’s philosophy is directed against the forgetting of sociality, against the forgetting of the other. Yet the feminine other seems to have been forgotten by Levinas. It is worth noting that both of the oblique appearances of the feminine in God, Death, and Time – the women who are dismissed from the scene of Socrates’ death and the unnamed but clearly evoked figure of Antigone – embody the mourning of death (but who will mourn for them?). They both attest to the excess of death, to the scandal of death, to the way in which death defies representation. Levinas thus manages to evoke, without naming, the domain of the feminine, the domain that Antigone’s Hegel stands for: death, the family, divine spirit. He thus calls (without calling, silently) upon the feminine to perform the role that makes provisions so that the phenomenological hands of taking, vision, knowing, and intentionality can become the ethical hands of offering, giving, witnessing the other. As caretaker of the body, the feminine plays a silent role, baking bread and providing a home for those who give bread ‘taken from one’s own mouth’ (GDT, 188; DMT, 217), even in those texts of Levinas that do not name women as such. I have argued that to thematize the role of the feminine in Levinas’s philosophy is to produce a philosophy of mediation and to undercut the radicality of God’s alterity. Unless he wants to give up his claims for a radical otherness, Levinas’s hands are tied. In order for the hand that grasps to become the hand that gives, the passage through the feminine cannot be said, except as a betrayal. In this sense, perhaps Levinas’s failure to name the women who nonetheless continue to inform even his later work is more honest than the surreptitious borrowing from the feminine that structures his earlier work. And my thematization of the feminine constitutes a betrayal of Levinas’s philosophy, but, I would say, a necessary betrayal.

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NOTES 1 As Levinas suggests in ‘God and Philosophy’ (1975), philosophy assumes that all other discourses are answerable to it. The authority that philosophy thereby assumes depends upon its restriction of meaning to that which shows itself. ‘To show itself, to be illumined, is precisely to have a meaning,’ Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 55; ‘Dieu et la Philosophie,’ De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), 94 (hereafter cited as GWC, DQV). The question that Levinas poses challenges both the authority that philosophy invests in itself and its restriction of meaning to being, such that all thought is a modification of being, and all meaning is illumination. He poses the question of ‘whether the meaning which, in philosophy, is meaning is not already a restriction of meaning’ (GWC, 57; DQV, 96). For philosophy, thought and reality must coincide, the world of appearances must be brought into conformity with being, whereas for Levinas the idea of the infinite ‘breaks with the coincidence of being and appearing in which meaning or rationality reside for Western philosophy’ (GWC, 64; DQV, 107). Levinas thus reads the history of Western philosophy not, as it is for Heidegger, as a forgetting of Being, but as ‘a destruction of transcendence’ (GWC, 56; DQV, 96). His question is ‘whether, beyond being, a meaning might not show itself whose priority, translated into ontological language, will be called prior to being’ (GWC, 57; DQV, 96). 2 See Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 155; Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 128–9 (hereafter cited as TI and TeI). 3 Levinas asks, in Totality and Infinity, ‘Does not the surplus of signification over representation consist in a new mode of being presented (new with respect to constitutive intentionality), whose secret the analysis of “body intentionality” does not exhaust?’ For Levinas, the ‘primordial event’ of signification is the ‘face to face,’ ‘Meaning is the face of the Other’ (TI, 206; TeI, 181), and ‘the essence of language is the relation with the Other’ (TI, 207; TeI, 182). This is neither the transcendental view nor the phenomenological view of language. It is neither language as converting an ‘antecedent representation’ nor language as speech act, which explicates at a higher or more articulate level the gestural body. ‘This relation is not added to the interior monologue – be it Merleau-Ponty’s “corporeal intentionality” ... [T]he welcoming of the being that appears in the face, the ethical event of sociality, already commands inward discourse ... Signification is infinity, that is, the Other’ (ibid.). This ‘ethical exigency’ that the other presents to us can no longer be thought of in terms of

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5

6

7

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intelligibility and light; rather the face ‘puts into question the consciousness that welcomes it’ (ibid.). Levinas says, ‘We have defined representation as a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other ... To represent to oneself that from which I live would be equivalent to remaining exterior to the elements in which I am steeped. But if I cannot quit the space in which I am steeped, with a dwelling I can but approach these elements, possess things. I can indeed recollect myself in the midst of my life, which is life from ... However the negative moment of this dwelling which determines possession, the recollection which draws me out of submergence, is not a simple echo of possession ... This withdrawal implies a new event; I must have been in relation with something I do not live from. This event is the relation with the Other who welcomes me in the Home, the discreet presence of the Feminine. But in order ... to see things in themselves, that is, represent them to myself, refuse both enjoyment and possession, I must know how to give what I possess ... But for this I must encounter the indiscreet face of the Other that calls me into question’ (TI, 170–1; TeI, 145). In the presence of the other, characterized as height, as ethical, the naïve being ‘discovers itself as a violence, but thereby enters into a new dimension’ (TI, 171; TeI, 146). Levinas, ‘Diachrony and Representation,’ in Entre Nous: On Thinkingof-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 159–177, esp. 175; ‘Diachronie et représentation,’ in Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-a-l’autre (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle), 165–84, esp. 182 (hereafter cited as EN, ENE). Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 188; Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993), 217 (hereafter cited as GDT, DMT). How far one is prepared to follow Levinas in this reading of Heidegger will ultimately depend on the extent to which one is prepared to accept that those moments in which Heidegger emphasizes Jemeinigkeit (mineness) play a role that is not only rhetorically but also structurally more forceful than the moments in which he acknowledges Geworfenheit (thrownness). It is worth noting that in Time and the Other (trans. Richard A. Cohen [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987]; Le temps et l’autre [Paris: Fata Morgana, 1979]) the weight of ‘irremissible [irrémissible] being’ from which there is no ‘exit’ constitutes the ‘absurdity of being’ (50–1; 29), while in Totality and Infinity it will come to figure as the weight of my undeclinable responsibility of the other, in which my attachment to existence is no longer contingent and my enjoyment of the fruits of life is no longer arbitrary. Rather, in the ‘epiphany of the face,’ which is ‘ethical’ (TI, 199;

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Tina Chanter TeI, 173), I discover the unavoidable weight of obligation to the other. ‘The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity – its hunger – without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness ... It is thus the irremissible [irrémissible] weight of being that gives rise to my freedom’ (TI, 200; TeI, 175). See ‘From One to the Other: Transcendence and Time,’ EN, 133–58, esp. 143, 147; ‘De l’un à l’autre: transcendence et temps,’ ENE, 143–64, esp. 153, 159. Levinas distances himself from the vision that is ‘already an aiming that proceeds from need and to the pursuit of things,’ that is the gaze ‘of the hunter with all his ruse, awaiting the capture’ (GDT, 163; DMT, 188). This gaze adheres to the ‘complicity of the eye and the hand’ (ibid.), in which there is a ‘covetousness,’ and in which ‘the eye anticipates the movement of the hand’ (GDT, 164; DMT, 188) See GDT. Others are always already there, alongside the subject, but to the extent that it seems to be crucial to Levinas’s account that the I always comes to recognize its obligation to others too late, his account seems to have built into it the complacency of enjoyment before this recognition of oneself as obligated comes into play. In ‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’ (1957) Levinas says that freedom is nothing but ‘the thinking being’s refusal to be alienated ... the preserving of his nature, his identity, the feat of remaining the same despite the unknown lands into which thought seems to lead,’ Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel Levinas, trans., A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 47–59, esp. 48. Any ‘foreign’ term becomes an ‘obstacle’ for ‘philosophical life’ and ‘has to be surmounted and integrated into this life. But truth is just this victory and this integration’ (49). Thus philosophy, in so far as it consists in a movement that tirelessly identifies the other as the same, becomes a possession, a power of the self over the world. ‘The surrender of exterior things to human freedom’ amounts not only to ‘their comprehension, but also their being taken in hand, their domestication, their possession. Only in possession does the I complete the identification of the diverse. To possess is, to be sure, to maintain the reality of this other one possessed, but to do so while suspending its independence’ (50). The reduction of the other to the same, and priority of freedom and autonomy over the other, amounts to the ‘conquest of being by man over the course of history’ (48).

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Levinas in the Key of the Political OONA EISENSTADT

They turned their faces towards Mount Gerizim and opened with the blessing etc. Our rabbis taught [a baraitha]: There was a benediction in general and a benediction in particular, likewise a curse in general and a curse in particular. (Scripture states): to learn, to teach, to observe [to keep], and to do; consequently there are four (duties associated with each commandment). Twice four are eight and twice eight are sixteen. It was similar at Sinai and at the plains of Moab; as it was said, These are the words of the covenant which the Lord has commanded Moses [to make with the people of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which he had made with them at Horeb] (Deut. 29:1), and it is written, Keep therefore the words of this covenant etc. (Deut. 29:9). Hence there were forty-eight covenants in connection with each commandment. R. Simeon excludes (the occasion of) Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and includes that of the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness. The difference of opinion here is the same as that of the teachers [the Tannaim] in the following [a baraitha]: R. Ishmael says: General laws were proclaimed at Sinai and particular laws in the Tent of Meeting. R. Akiva says: Both general and particular laws were proclaimed at Sinai, repeated in the Tent of Meeting, and for the third time in the plains of Moab. Consequently, there is not a single precept written in the Torah in conjunction with which forty-eight covenants were not made. R. Simeon b. Judah of Kefar Acco said in the name of R. Simeon: There is not a single precept written in the Torah in connection with which forty-eight times 603,550 covenants were not made. Rabbi said: According to the reasoning of R. Simeon b. Judah of Kefar Acco who said in the name of R. Simeon that there is not a single precept written in the Torah in connection with which forty-eight times 603,550 covenants were not made, it follows that for each Israelite there are 603,550 commandments (and forty-eight covenants were made in connection with each of them). What is at issue between them? R. Mesharsheya said:

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The point between them is that of personal responsibility and responsibility for others [responsibility of responsibility]. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah 37a–b

In an article published in 1998, Robert Bernasconi demonstrates convincingly that, in the essays and lectures treating the subject of Judaism, Levinas shows more ‘certainty’ than he does in the philosophical writings for which he is best known. ‘In the philosophical writings,’ Bernasconi explains, ‘the ethical is always associated with a certain questioning that extends even to morality itself, but, even though that dimension is not absent from the confessional writings, it is less pronounced there, and ... Levinas seems sometimes to neglect it.’1 From Bernasconi’s argument, I draw my premise. Levinas’s certainty in the writings that are sometimes called confessional is pronounced enough to suggest a categorical difference, a difference in approach or genre. But what is the difference? What is Levinas certain about? Where does the certainty come from? And is it incompatible with the main thrust of the philosophical works, or not? These are the questions to be addressed. We can dismiss immediately the idea that the certainty arises because the writings are confessional. Whatever sureness or firmness we discern in these lectures and essays has nothing to do with a confidence in the deeply felt truths of faith, for Levinas has no such confidence. To be sure, he distinguishes, in Totality and Infinity, between philosophical or scientific evidences and ‘religion,’ and argues that the latter is truer and more originary than the former. But this is because what he calls ‘religion’ is the face-to-face encounter that challenges every thought and action; ‘religion’ is the rupture that precedes the development of totalizing consciousness; in other words, ‘religion’ can be called truer than reason only insofar as it is the opposite of certainty. And while of course it is the case that religion, as it is practised by real human beings, is rather more dogmatic, I do not think it can be maintained that Levinas simply reverts to the common understanding in the fifty or more essays and lectures in question. He is very much aware of the difference between his conception of religion and the common conception, and addresses it frequently, both by distinguishing the two – religion versus theology – and, almost as often, by drawing equivalences between them in an effort to expose an existential openness at the root of certain theological concepts. And the latter he does not only in the philosophi-

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cal writings, but in all his work. When, for instance, in Difficult Freedom, he compares the religious idea that ‘to know God is to know what is to be done’ with the phenomenological idea that ‘ethics is an optics,’ his intention is not to interpret the phenomenological statement as dogma, but, in contradistinction, to show us that the apparently dogmatic statement is really an expression of an anti-dogmatic phenomenological stance.2 Such attempts to display the openness of lived religion, or to wrench it open, might or might not be convincing. But there is no doubt that what Levinas values in religion is what precludes certainty – and this includes not only his technical use of the term religion, but also his understanding of religious traditions as practised. The explanation for the certainty of the writings has to be sought elsewhere than in the confidence of faith. Still, the certainty must have something to do with religion. It is, after all, in the essays on Judaism that we find it. My sense, which I begin to flesh out here, is that it arises, rather than from any confessional quality, from a communal quality, or indeed a political quality. These writings, while not I think addressed exclusively or even primarily to the Jewish community, take up the topic of that community: its nature, its purpose, and its relations with the rest of the world. And community and questioning do not sit entirely easily together. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the nature of discourse on community leads Levinas, in these writings, to an emphasis on mutuality, generality, and universality, and it is this uncharacteristic emphasis that lends the writings their aura of uncharacteristic certainty. The text I take up is one of many works that treat the topic of community explicitly, the talmudic lecture ‘The Pact.’3 The talmudic excerpt in question in the lecture, drawn from Sotah 37a–b, is particularly delightful, and full of images that resonate with Levinas’s phenomenology. But, as I will argue, those images appear here transposed into a different key, the key of the political or the communal. I turn now to the lecture, but will return sporadically in the course of a lengthy analysis to the more general question of certainty in what I would like to call the ‘communal writings.’ The Pact The talmudic passage is a commentary on three previous texts – from Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Mishnah Sotah – all of which are accounts of the renewal of the covenant at Mounts Gerizim and Ebal. In brief,

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shortly before their entry into the Holy Land, the Israelites divide into two groups and stand on two mountains looking towards one another while the law and its associated blessings and curses are read aloud and confirmed; in addition, the law is written on large plastered stones erected for the purpose. What is perhaps most important for Levinas is that the Israelites here express their commitment as a people under God while standing at the same time face to face and side by side. The face to face is Levinas’s main symbol for the rupturing ethical encounter. In distinction, the side by side would seem most likely to symbolize the kind of unified social action that Levinas calls politics or justice, and might also evoke, in the mind of the reader, the Heideggerean mitsein. Levinas allows the question of community to form around these juxtaposed images. Is community the side by side of a united movement into the future? Or does it also require a kind of face to face? After a brief introduction, Levinas turns to the three earlier texts: Deuteronomy 27, in which Moses explains what the Israelites should do when they reach the mountains; Joshua 8, in which they do it; and Mishnah Sotah 32, which describes what they did. He gives the accounts an extensive description, the main conclusion of which is that the story becomes more universalized in successive tellings. In Deuteronomy, certain precepts of the law are specifically mentioned, and they are to be read to ‘the men of Israel’ (Deut. 27:14). When Joshua performs the ceremony, not only is there ‘not a word of all that Moses commanded which Joshua did not read,’ but he does so in the presence of ‘all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them’ (Josh. 8:35). Finally, in the Mishnah, not only is all the law described as having been read to all Israel, in addition it is said to have been inscribed on the plastered stones in seventy languages, which is commonly understood to mean all languages. Nothing in a later account violates the spirit of a previous one. We are free to assume that the Mishnah tells us accurately how Joshua performed the ceremony and that Joshua performed it the way Moses intended. Nevertheless, the second account extends an emphasis to the whole law and, as Levinas puts it, ‘the totality of the people’ (74), and the third account allows us to see the potential inclusion in the covenant of all humanity. Levinas comments: ‘This transition ... from Hebrew to the universality I call Greek is quite remarkable,’ and adds, further, that translation of this kind ‘begins to signify complete translatability.’ He seems, moreover, to regard this complete translatability as an unadulterated good. He goes so far as to say that the oral Law that translates into

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Greek ‘knows more’ than the biblical or written Law, since it operates ‘in the spirit of the global meaning of Scripture’ (75). Habitual readers of Levinas’s philosophical works may already find themselves wondering at these lines. Levinas’s praise of the ‘Greek,’ which appears to come at the expense of the ‘Hebrew,’ stands in some tension to his usual position that the ‘Greek,’ the ontological viewpoint that knows with certainty, must, if it is to represent justice, be broken by a ‘Hebrew’ rupture, a Mosaic stutter in the face of alterity. But perhaps the problem is that Levinas is dealing to this point mainly with the Bible, a text that, as he now and then suggests, appears ontological until it is read in light of the Talmud. Now Levinas turns to the talmudic commentary and his discourse becomes, for a time, more familiar. The talmudic commentary is not a fourth description of the GerizimEbal event, but a free-wheeling and argumentative discussion of issues that arise from it. Its main content is a very Levinasian multiplication of responsibilities: the rabbis manipulate and add to the Gerizim-Ebal story in such a way that the number of covenants to which each of us is answerable appears to increase, like grains of rice on a chessboard, to thrillingly large proportions. The first half of the calculation is fairly straightforward. Each law (as we learn from an extra-talmudic rabbinic teaching, or baraitha) is both general and particular: here one covenant becomes two. Each (as we learn from the Gerizim-Ebal story) comes with a blessing and a curse: here are two times two, or four. Each (as we gather from Deuteronomy 6:1–7 and other scriptural passages) comes with the obligation to [1] learn it, [2] teach it, [3] observe it, and [4] keep it: four times four are sixteen. And each (as we extrapolate from Deuteronomy 29:1) was taught three times: three times sixteen are forty-eight covenants. But here the calculation gives way to a digression. The rabbis agree that the Torah was taught three times, but they do not agree on the events that qualify for the list of three. The verse from Deuteronomy suggests a preliminary list: Sinai (where Moses brought down the law), the plains of Moab (where Moses iterated the law), and Gerizim-Ebal. But Rabbi Simeon disagrees with this reckoning: his list excludes Gerizim-Ebal and includes the Tent of Meeting. Why the Tent of Meeting? This is the place where the elders judged cases brought before them, the place, in other words, where a necessarily general precept was modified on the basis of the particular circumstances of an individual case, or where, in Levinasian terms, the law was called into question by the otherness of the other. Levinas thus speculates that

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Initial position

Simeon

Akiva

Ishmael

Sinai Moab Gerizim-Ebal

Sinai Moab Tent of Meeting

Sinai Moab Tent of Meeting

Sinai Moab Gerizim-Ebal

Rabbi Simeon is a defender of particularity, a man conscious of alterity. Now the text tells us that this argument – Gerizim-Ebal versus the Tent of Meeting – is the same as an argument between two Tannaim, authoritative rabbis from the first generation of the classical rabbinic era. In that argument Rabbi Ishmael maintains that general laws were proclaimed at Sinai and particular laws at the Tent of Meeting, while Rabbi Akiva maintains that both general and particular laws were proclaimed in both places, and on the plains of Moab. The two arguments ostensibly treat different questions. How can it be that that they are the same? Levinas notes that in Akiva’s statement there is an implied list of three, and that it is the same as Simeon’s list. It must therefore be the case, he argues, that Akiva takes Simeon’s position, while Ishmael is on the other side, against the Tent. Only one more question is required. On what grounds does Ishmael object to the Tent? Levinas’s answer is the conclusion of his intricate and compelling interpretation. Since, as we know from Ishmael’s statement, he believes that only particular laws were taught in the Tent, it must be that he understands the general to be more important than the particular. Thus, the purpose of the passage, as Levinas draws it out, is to present us with a choice between two positions: that of Ishmael, who holds that the particular is less important than the general, and that of Akiva, who ‘affirms the absolutely equal dignity of the general and the particular’ (83). Of course, without dismissing the opposition, Levinas follows Akiva. The treatment here of the importance of the particular in Jewish law seems at first glance solidly Levinasian, that is, compatible with the main lines of his thought as they are expressed in all his works. Nevertheless two questions occur to me at this point, and might also occur to other readers. The first arises from the fact that Akiva does not include Gerizim-Ebal in his list; and, indeed, by the general thrust of the talmudic passage, if the Tent of Meeting is on the list, then Gerizim-Ebal is off. Surely this is problematic for Levinas, who, though a great defender of the Tent both in this lecture and elsewhere, wishes here also to claim special status for Gerizim-Ebal. He deals with the issue quickly, saying that perhaps Akiva ‘thinks that the concrete presence of men is not what

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constitutes the true face to face’ (83), but what this means is not immediately obvious. Maybe Akiva sees the Gerizim-Ebal event as ritual rather than dialogue. Maybe he is put off by its shoulder-to-shoulder aspect. What is more, Akiva’s position may remind us of Levinas’s many suggestions in the phenomenological works to the effect that the face to face does not take place in the context of a side by side: ‘[T]he “face to face” position is not a modification of the “along side of”’ (TI, 80). It may be, in short, that, in refusing Gerizim-Ebal a place on the list, Akiva is thinking along the lines Levinas himself follows in Totality and Infinity, and that those lines are in some opposition to the direction Levinas takes here. The second question arises over the lack of a third position. Ishmael holds that the general is more important than the particular. Akiva holds that the general and the particular are equally important. But no one argues that the particular is more important than the general. The position suggests itself, but Levinas does not mention it. But let us turn back to the talmudic passage and the multiplication of covenants. We have arrived at the number 48, but have much further to go. Rabbi Simeon ben Judah of Kefar Acco says in the name of Rabbi Simeon that since there were 603,550 Israelites present at Sinai, for every precept written in the Torah there must have been forty-eight times 603,550 covenants. Rabbi responds that, according to this reasoning, ‘it follows that for each Israelite there are 603,550 commandments (and 48 covenants were made in connection with each of them).’ The text concludes by asking what is at issue between them, and gives an answer attributed to Rabbi Mesharsheya: personal responsibility and responsibility for others. Mesharsheya’s explanation seems indeed to be the key. Simeon is thinking of the personal responsibility of each Israelite. He represents this with the suggestion that a separate covenant was made with each, and on this basis suggests that the total number of covenants made with all the Israelites can be calculated as follows: each precept × 48 × the no. of Israelites at Sinai or: 613 × 48 × 603,550 Rabbi is thinking of the responsibility of each Israelite for each other. His calculation begins with Simeon’s premise – my responsibility is different from your responsibility – and adds to it a further premise – my responsibility to him is different from my responsibility to her. Thus, his calculation of the total number of covenants made with all the Israelites

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includes an already massive number of covenants made with each Israelite, as follows: each precept × 48 × the no. of Israelites × the no. of other Israelites besides any given one or: 613 × 48 × 603,550 × 603,550 (or, to be precise 603,449) or: 3.2 × 1020 All this is fantastical and charming. But the implications must be unpacked.4 Mutuality and Politics We arrive at the final number by conflating two accounts of responsibility, each of which pays attention to particularity. The first emphasizes the uniqueness of the subject, the second the uniqueness of each relationship in which she is engaged, and the size of the final number, which is so large as to point at innumerability, implies perhaps only the existence of countless unique obligations. This hardly bespeaks an uncharacteristic certainty! On the contrary, the subject appears here stretched on a rack of obligations, pulled ceaselessly in an infinite number of directions: ‘called into question’ would be a rather understated description of her persecuted condition. Except for the fact that Levinas’s closing analysis situates all this uniqueness in the context of a mutual responsibility, a general, symmetrical responsibility, the kind of responsibility that looks after the subject, and gives her security. The closing discussion, which we will take slowly, begins with an entirely symmetrical account, in which the other is as much responsible for me as I am for him. ‘His concern is my concern. But is not my concern his? Is he not responsible for me? Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, “Everyone in Israel is answerable for everyone else,” signifies: all adherents to the divine Law, all men who are truly men, are responsible for one another.’ Levinas then makes a space in the account for asymmetry, such that I am always more responsible than the other. ‘This must also signify that my responsibility stretches to the responsibility that the other man can assume. I always have, myself, one responsibility more than the other, for I am still responsible for his responsibility.’ But, if the first statement remains true, doesn’t it follow that the other is responsible for my responsibility for his responsibility? Levinas admits that he is heading for an infinite regress. ‘And, if he is responsible for my responsibility, I am still responsible for the responsibility that he has

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for my responsibility: en ladavar sof, “it is never-ending.”’ But an infinite cannot function to preserve asymmetry. Mathematically – and we are, after all, dealing with mathematics in this lecture – we find ourselves with an eternal oscillation that is asymmetrical at any given point but which, if taken theoretically to infinity, emerges as a symmetry. To be sure, Levinas finishes with an assertion of asymmetry that ignores the math. ‘Behind the responsibility attributed to everyone for everyone, there arises, ad infinitum, the fact that in the society of the Torah I am still responsible for this responsibility!’ (85). But by now we can see that this statement is at odds with the discussion that precedes it, and thus stands unsupported. The ad infinitum does not show that I always have one more responsibility; at any rate, it could equally well be said to show that the other always has one more responsibility. We will return eventually to what Levinas means by the society of the Torah, and to the very few lines that follow in the lecture. For now it is enough to note that the dynamic we find here is representative of the lecture as a whole. At every point we have either a prioritizing of the general-symmetrical or an argument that the general-symmetrical and the particular-asymmetrical are to be given equal weight, that is, treated symmetrically. We have seen the dynamic in the closing discussion. We have seen it in the discussion of the Tent of Meeting. We find it also in the lecture’s few mentions of ‘responsibility to ...’ or teaching. Unlike in Totality and Infinity, where discourse is defined as ‘the revelation of the other’ (TI, 73), here Levinas speaks of ‘a lesson taught by the other and assumed by the other’ (79), adding that you are to ‘teach the master who teaches you’ (80). And, recall, the lecture begins with praise for a growing universalization in Jewish textual history, or more specifically, with the suggestion that this history is happily marked by an augmenting emphasis on translation into Greek, the language of the general. All of this, I think, can only be accounted for with the idea that the lecture is written exclusively on the level of the third, the level on which symmetry, mutuality, reciprocality, and generality find their places as the bulwarks of justice. Levinas has bracketed out questions of the encounter with the other; there is no anarchy here, no obsession, no persecution. When the Israelites stand looking at one another on the mountaintops, they do not enact a Levinasian face to face, where I encounter you and am emptied of my right to exist. They already form a totality; they are ‘assembled ... visible as if on a stage’ (75). What they enact is a communal memory of such encounters, a residue of the trace in the realm of the political. Insofar as this memory recollects the face to

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face, it calls their side by side into question. Insofar as it is a re-collection, an assembly on the level of the social, it remains a variety of the side by side. My claim, in brief, is that in this lecture, and perhaps in others like it, the basic structure on which Levinas’s philosophy is based – the relation of the ethical to the political – is transposed into the key of the political such that it reappears, as a shadow of itself, in the realm of the same. Once transposed, critical terms can change their meaning. Take, for example, this account of an ethics that begins in ego and moves only as far as symmetricality. We do not need to meet on Mount Ebal or Gerizim and gaze at one another eye to eye to be in a position where we all look at one another. Everyone looks at me. Let us not forget the seventy languages in which the Torah is proclaimed. The Torah belongs to us all: everybody is responsible for everybody else. The phrase ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ still presupposes self-love as the prototype of love. Here the ethical signifies: ‘Be responsible for the other as you are responsible for yourself.’ We avoid the presupposition of self-love – self-esteem – which can be taken as the very definition of the personal. (84)5

Levinas denies the phrase love your neighbour as yourself because it presupposes self-love, but he replaces it with be responsible for your neighbour as for yourself, which, by the same reasoning, presupposes selfresponsibility – not to mention retaining self-responsibility as the definitive limit of responsibility for the neighbour. And he does this in the course of an account of the significance, the meaning, of the ethical. When I delivered an initial account of this material to a group of Levinas scholars in 2002, one of them found himself at this point unable to believe what Levinas was saying. He and several others mounted an argument to the effect that, with the word ‘here,’ Levinas was not juxtaposing the two moral formulas but equating them, and disassociating himself from both. The argument did not stand up, but it did serve to bring home to us how uncharacteristic some of the formulations in this lecture are. Or seem to be, at first glance – since my contention is that this lecture is compatible with the main thrust of Levinas’s thought, once a certain reduction is taken into account. Levinas says in the interview with Richard Kearney that ‘ethics, as the extreme exposure and sensitivity of one subjectivity to another, becomes morality and hardens its skin as soon as we move into the political world of

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the impersonal third.’6 This is where we’ve moved in ‘The Pact’ and in the writings like it. The ethics found here is transposed ethics, or ethics with a hard skin; it is, if you will, ethics as second philosophy. It is not an encounter with alterity calling me to infinite obligation. It is a certain rationale for action, one that stands as a salutary fluctuation in the too smooth workings of symmetrical justice. The Hesitant Task What it means to say that certain of Levinas’s writings operate on the level of the third is that, if he has a political philosophy, it is to be found in these writings. People often argue that he does not have a political philosophy, but the argument rests on the idea that he writes exclusively about an ethics that can operate only as blanket critique. The existence in his thought of ethics with a hard skin belies that premise and provides a space for discussion of the virtues and dangers of socialpolitical specifics. Granted, we are not offered an Aristotelian classification of regimes. But what we are offered nevertheless constitutes a political thinking, and may constitute the beginnings of a body of political thought. That body of thought is only Jewish in certain senses, albeit critical senses. The point must be stressed, since the lecture’s last lines are prone to misunderstanding. ‘[I]n the society of the Torah I am still responsible for this responsibility! It is an ideal, but an ideal that implies the humanity of mankind. In the Covenant, when it is fully understood, in a society that deploys all the dimensions of the Law, society is also community’ (85). When Levinas describes, as the true community, the society of Torah, or the society that deploys the halachah, he means neither that humanity en masse should join the ranks of practising Jews nor that such Jews have access to truths that others do not know. We have here an indication of the nature of Levinas’s good society, but it is an indication of a non-dogmatic kind. Beginning from a minimal position – that Levinas holds that Jews have a political teaching to offer the nations, one that can be described as a deployment of the dimensions of the law – I will explore the matter in four points. 1. There is, in this lecture, an unstated or understated political criticism of Christianity, one of what may be many in Levinas’s works. Christianity and Judaism both have pitfalls, deformations to which they are prone. Christianity, even at its best, maintains that Christ came to everybody, and that the worship of Christ is the true religion. Juda-

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ism, even at its best, maintains that the Jews are a chosen people, singled out by God for a particular mission. The Christian doctrine, at its worst, devolves into triumphalism and thence to mass slaughter and forced conversions; it also has lesser manifestations like the offensive doling out of brotherly love where it is not wanted or reciprocated. The Jewish doctrine, at its worst, devolves into xenophobia, or an abdication of any responsibility for non-Jews or other nations; among its lesser manifestations we may count, for instance, claims that the Holocaust is the gold standard of genocides. Which is less harmful, the Christian notion that their religion is the one truth or the Jewish notion that they are a chosen people? Which is worse, Christian triumphalism or Jewish isolationism? Looked at from the position of Levinasian ethics – my infinite responsibility to you, which calls into question all my other allegiances – the importance of such distinctions is severely relativized. But in ‘The Pact’ we are not looking from the perspective of Levinasian ethics, we are mucking about on the level of the third, trying to figure out how groups should see themselves. And I believe Levinas is choosing the Jewish doctrine, with all its problems, over the Christian doctrine. This emerges particularly in the discussion of the chuqim, the laws that do not occur naturally to the human mind. Levinas argues that the chuqim serve to remind us that morality is not reducible to universal ideas such as the ten commandments, or love thy neighbour as thyself – that the world is not a synthetic brotherhood united in its understanding of reasonable principles, but a collection of disparate peoples with different ideas. In other words, the politics of the Jewish doctrine is a pluralism. Like any politics, it carries a risk, but it is a risk Levinas is willing to take. He is more prepared, on the political level, to have we are different devolve into a refusal of responsibility than to have we are the same devolve into dystopia. 2. To respect difference on the level of the third takes more than an allegiance to cultural pluralism. It also takes a legal openness to the particular circumstances of a given case. That such a notion is central to Levinas’s thinking is well known; it has been thoroughly discussed in the scholarship, and need only be touched on here. But I would like to stress the fact that the action of calling a general law into question on the basis of particulars is not situated between ethics and politics; it takes place entirely on the level of the political. When a judge, in the Tent of Meeting, rules that a mattress which has been taken as collateral from a poor man must be returned to him every evening so that he can sleep, the judge is not, in any obvious way, responding to the trace of

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illeity in the other’s face. His ruling is well within the boundaries of universal, liberal justice. Indeed, the force that drives his ruling is the same force that drives the partial separation between the legislative and judicial branches in modern liberal democracies, a separation that exists so that judges can call general laws into question, a separation that is partial so that judicial rulings can stand as augmentations of the law. Levinas knows full well that this is a liberal political principle. This is the burden of the lecture’s introductory discussion, where we hear that ‘life today’ perhaps ‘retains an understanding of the serious side of things that count,’ and that maybe ‘we have not measured all the implications of the Law which Western society welcomes too formally, and which have got lost within it’ (70). Nevertheless, a certain amount of our law today is based on the assumption of a likeness between fellows. We can still learn, in this respect, from the Talmud, for ‘the great strength of [its] casuistry is to be the special discipline which seeks in the particular the precise moment at which the general principle runs the danger of becoming its own contrary, and watches over the general in light of the particular’ (79). 3. To remember the originary drive behind the law – this raises the question of the political function of memory. In general it can be said that Levinas’s philosophy is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The basic description is that of the infinite responsibility of the I to and for the you, and if there is a prescriptive element, it is only: remember the description – keep in mind, as you function in the realm of totality, that totality is founded on infinite obligation. When Levinas transposes his understanding to the key of the political, the description is not of the ethical encounter but of a society long founded on the ethical encounters of others; and the prescription, remember the description, here means: remember the elements in society that reflect those old encounters. These elements include the chuqim, Rabbi Akiva’s ideas about the Tent of Meeting, Rabbi’s description of responsibility, and the event at Gerizim-Ebal. Yet what I want to stress now is that all of them are matters of the words on the page. If Levinas has a single prescription for the good society, it is to read old books. His political thought begins in a reversal of the war cry of late-modern criticism: hermeneutics is politics. For him, politics is hermeneutics, and good politics is a hermeneutics that is open not so much to the trace, but to, say, Rabbi Simeon’s experience of the trace. To learn and to teach is perhaps not everything, but it is not nothing either. It is already to observe and to do.

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4. Jews have been reading for a long time. They have also been teaching, or, as Levinas puts it here, translating. Most of this effort has gone towards the Bible, and while it is perhaps true that ‘we have not yet finished translating the Bible’ (75), there has been an awfully good beginning. The nations have learned the ten commandments, and the teachings on love, mercy, hospitality, history, God; in short, they have learned everything that goes under the name ethical monotheism. But it is also true that what the Jews have taught, they have given up. The Bible now belongs to the nations as much as to the Jews. Certainly, the Jews do not grudge it them. But equally certainly, the Bible is now a book that speaks of universality rather than cultural difference; it is a shared reservoir of truth, and thus difficult to read as anything but a reservoir of shared truths. The Talmud is another matter entirely. ‘We have hardly begun translating the Talmud. And, as far as the Talmud is concerned, how delicate the task is! What up until now was a patrimony reserved for oral teaching passes, perhaps too quickly, into foreign languages without losing its unusual features in its new forms’ (75). The Talmud does not lose its unusual features in the course of the teaching process, because the Talmud cannot be claimed by anyone but the Jews. It is too late for it to become foundational to another tradition. It will remain an alien book to the nations, and if they read it they will read it as other than themselves, other than theirs. To teach the Talmud is thus to teach difference, not only because of the chuqim or anything else in the Talmud’s content, but because the book is unclaimable, unpossessable. Levinas’s communal writings are, I think, intended to be part of this process of teaching. It is therefore perhaps not the case, as is sometimes said, that they are directed exclusively or even primarily to a Jewish readership. They speak to the nations. And they speak of a deployment of a dimension of Jewish law that is not a matter of halachic practice, but of a hermeneutics that respects cultural autonomy. They are instructions in how to read an other. Judaism is Levinas’s politics: Hebrew is his Greek. Hebrew is his Greek, not only because there’s always more than one other Jew, but because the Talmud show us how to construct a society. Deconstruction, the movement of the restless question, is the beginning. But a political thought must bracket some of the questions raised by ultimate and preoriginary rupture. It must replace uncompromising uncertainty with a compromised hesitancy.

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NOTES 1 Robert Bernasconi, ‘Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Levinas’ Political Messianism,’ Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998), 5. 2 Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 17, cited in Bernasconi, ‘Different Styles,’ 5. 3 In Beyond the Verse, trans. G.D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). All citations to this text appear as numbers in parentheses in the body of the paper. I should add here that I am particularly indebted to the Levinas Research Seminar, to whom I presented the first version of this material at a meeting at Harvard University in the spring of 2002. The members present on that occasion – Annette Aronowicz, Dennis Keenan, Peter Gordon, Bettina Bergo, James Hatley, Claire Katz, Marjorie Hass, and Daniel Conway – challenged my presentation strongly, and forced me to revise my estimation of the material. 4 I am using 613 to represent the number of precepts, so as to turn the rabbinic calculations into hard numbers. 5 Do not forget the seventy languages. What about them? Seventy is always understood to mean all, but is this all an infinity or a totality? Does it hark at endless openness, at infinite translation and commentary, or does it mean the whole, the comprehensive unit? Moshe Idel writes that ‘the kabbalistic view of the infinite potentialities of Torah is significantly different from the midrashic conception that there are seventy facets of Torah ... The figure 70 [in the midrash] stands for the totality of the aspects of a certain limited phenomenon, as we discover by comparing phrases closely related to the phrase “seventy facets”: “Seventy languages,” “seventy nations,” “Seventy angels,” etc. Though pointing to a comprehensive conception of the meanings inherent in the biblical text, the phrase “seventy facets” did not even hint at an infinity of significances.’ Moshe Idel, ‘Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah,’ in S. Budick and G. Hartman, Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 141–57, 155n31. 6 Richard Kearney and Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,’ in R.A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Emmanuel Levinas (New York: SUNY Press, 1986), 13–34, 29–30.

78 Enrique Dussel

‘The Politics’ by Levinas: Towards a ‘Critical’ Political Philosophy ENRIQUE DUSSEL

Translated by Jorge Rodriguez

We want to establish a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas about ‘politics.’ Covering ideas from Totality and Infinity up to a more recent article, we depart from a necessary critique of politics understood as totalized strategic domination. This dialogue shows the difficulties involved in constructing a positive and creative political concept that is liberating in the perspective of exteriority. 1. The Ethical Critique of Politics as Totality in ‘State of War’ Levinas accurately situates the negative sense of politics when it becomes a permanent ‘war state,’ that is, a tautological self-reference of the heroic and public action of the State as Totality. Departing from ‘ethics,’ Levinas deconstructs politics. His politics is negative and, for that reason, critical with respect to politics. But Levinas falls into the Hegelian position that confuses the Lutheran state with a Christianity that Levinas criticizes following F. Rosenzweig. Let us examine some of his statements that emerge in part from his painful experience in the totalitarian Nazi state in the Europe of his lifetime. Ethics criticizes politics: ‘Situated at the antipodes of the subject living in the infinite time of fecundity is the isolated and heroic being that the State produces by its virile virtues. Such a being confronts death out of pure courage and whatever be the cause for which he dies.’1 Almost ironically, Levinas refers to the political ‘virtues’ of the Nazi hero (and other fundamentalist patriotisms). With respect to politics understood in this way, Levinas characterizes ethics with the fol-

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lowing words: ‘The ethical, beyond vision and certitude, delineates the structure of exteriority as such. Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.’2 Under the State’s power, vision and certainty belong to the order of the ontological Totality. Ethics is the ‘anteriority’ or ‘the beyond’ of Being’s Totality: ‘Thus a political and technical existence ensures the will its truth, renders it objective (as we say today), without opening upon goodness, without emptying it of its egoist weight.’3 Thus we arrive at a first negative definition of Levinasian politics: ‘The art of forseeing war and of winning it by every means – politics – is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïvité.’4 Politics is war itself. War is nothing but the pure face of politics. However, Levinas loves to show this violent action as an expression of an ontology of light (to fos). He states even more clearly: ‘Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality ... War is not only one of the ordeals – the greatest – of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory.’5 The most original aspect of Levinas is his characterization of politics as the ‘state of war’ in itself. Levinas transforms Locke’s6 position by considering this state of war as the permanent, ‘normal’ state, the very way in which Totality operates: ‘The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy ... [Philosophers] found morality on politics.’7 Politics would be the strategic action whereby the members of a community, all considered as part, are affirmed as functional, as ‘the Same.’ Their alterity and exteriority are denied, so they cannot be considered as ‘the Other.’ This is what Levinas refers to as ‘the ontology of totality issued from war.’8 The ontology of ‘the Same’ closes progressively upon itself. ‘[B]eing, totality, the State, politics, techniques, work are at every moment on the point of having their center of gravitation in themselves, and weighing on their own account.’9 To this self-referential totalization of politics, Levinas opposes a process of decentring: ‘Justice, society, the State and its institutions, exchanges and work are comprehensible out of proximity. This means that nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other.’10 This ‘responsibility,’ previous to any political anteriority, inaugurates a ‘new’ politics. Levinas will oppose ‘ethics’ to ‘politics,’ this last understood as the order of domination:

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Enrique Dussel It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality ... This ‘beyond’ the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience ... The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak.11

The ‘beyond’ of the totality, of war and politics, establishes itself with the irruption of the face of the poor, the widow, or the orphan who, supplicant, beg for alms. It is an interpellation coming from the outside of the system, from the ‘Exteriority,’ that manifests itself within the Totality. The ‘face-to-face’ relation with the Alterity of the ‘somebody’ (Autrui) is the ethical relation par excellence. This relation breaks the functionality of the actor subjects (the ontic) within the system (the ontological) and situates them one in front the other as Others, as responsible for the Other (metaphysics). In this way, Levinas opposes ethics to politics. Ethics refers to this relationship of ‘responsibility,’ of ‘taking charge of the Other’ as an ‘obsession.’ In this relation, the hungry one imposes himself with his ‘hunger’ as an irrecusable exigency of justice. ‘Feed the hungry!’ is an unavoidable imperative. During the last thirty years, we have said this repeatedly in many works that have allowed us to analyse Levinas’s position in a plurality of ways.12 However, the critical question comes up when we ask Levinas: ‘How to feed the hungry, how to do justice to the widow, how to build an economic order for the poor, how to reconstruct the structure of the law in a political order that functions as a closed totality, so inhospitable to the stranger ...?’ Levinas’s criticism of politics as the strategy of the state of war is accurate, courageous, and clairvoyant. However, his critique does not avoid the difficulties involved in reconstructing the positive and critical-emancipatory sense of the new politics: Thirty years ago, I wrote: ‘When I first read Levinas’ book Totality and Infinity, my spirit experienced a sort of subversive unhinging of all the things I had learned until then.’13 Later I stated: However, what was distancing me from Levinas, in a metaphysical sense, was something more serious. The great philosopher of Nanterre brilliantly describes ... the face-to-face position, the irrespective relation of one’s face before the Other’s, yet he does not culminate his discourse ... The Other calls into question, provokes, claims ... but nothing is said, not only about the knowing how to listen to the voice of the Other, but above

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all about the knowing how to respond through a liberating praxis ... Levinas brilliantly reveals the violent trap intrinsic to politics when it becomes a totality that negates the Other as other; in other words, he philosophizes about an anti-politics of the Totality, yet he says nothing about a politics of liberation ... The poor pro-vokes, but in the end, he stays poor and miserable forever.14

Levinas is the genius of negativity, yet he cannot articulate a positive architectonic of the mediations in favour of the Other. Phenomenology should be ‘mediated’ by categories belonging to other epistemic disciplines. These considerations, for instance, required us to turn to Marx in order to ‘explicate’ the historical and concrete existence of the ‘poor,’ the pauper ante and post festum, and to find the ‘mediations’ to liberate him from his poverty.15 ‘Anti-politics’ as sceptical or deconstructive negativity is fundamental, but ‘critical politics’ is also necessary, the politics oriented to constructive and innovative liberation. 2. Ambiguity of the ‘Davidic State’ We want to indicate certain difficulties that arise when Levinas attempts to enter into this ‘positive space’ of politics. In fact, Christianity appears to Levinas as a daring yet ambiguous ‘positive’ participation in politics. In his view, Christianity has paid a high price for such an attempt. A ‘politics’ beyond politics seems to be sketched when Levinas writes: In Christianity, the kingdom of God and the earthly kingdom are separated yet placed side by side without touching and, in principle, without contesting each other. They divide the human between themselves, and do not give rise to conflicts. It is perhaps because of this political spirit of indifference that Christianity has so often been a State religion.16

Some aspects of this formulation should be clarified. It could be said that both orders are distinct, but it would be equivocal to state that they ‘do not touch each other,’ that ‘they do not confront each other’ (sans se contester), and that they ‘do not raise conflicts.’ And what if, on the contrary, they touch and confront each other, creating permanent and unavoidable conflicts endowed with a deep political sense? In contrast, Levinas points out with respect to Judaism:

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Enrique Dussel The Messiah institutes a just society and sets humanity free after setting Israel free. These Messianic times are the times of a reign. The Messiah is king. The divine invests History and State rather than doing away with them. The end of History retains a political form ... But if the Messianic City is not beyond politics, the City in its simplest sense is never this side of the religious.’17

Levinas resorts to the formulation of a ‘Davidic state’ (État davidique) that corresponds to the Messianic state, ‘beyond’ the historical or merely political state. For the Rabbinic tradition, the empires of Babylon, Partos, Seleucides, or Rome represent these totalized and totalitarian states, the states that ‘incarnate the alienation or paganization of History, political or imperial oppression.’18 I think that these texts allow us to begin to understand the limitations of the Levinasian ‘politics.’ I wish to depart from the position criticized by Levinas, that is, the position of Christianity. I have laboured on this topic in many of my works during the last forty years. I think that the political position of Jeshua of Nazareth, a Jew entirely Jewish, is not exactly as described by Levinas. And perhaps we can situate here the beginning of our debate. Let us examine the problem in detail. For Levinas, the expression ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’19 is a formula that distinguishes the ‘political order’ from the ‘spiritual order.’ Levinas, however, does not notice that he is taking the expression from the already deformed and reductive perspective of later ‘Christianity.’20 What do the ‘political order’ and the ‘spiritual order’ signify? Are we referring to the ‘Earthly City’ and the ‘City of God’ of Augustine of Hippo? Is the Davidic state a ‘Jewish political state,’ or is it simply a ‘political state’ like any other? Is it an exceptional ‘Messianic’ state beyond any state or is it a state against every historical institution of the state? Is it the full realization of the State? Is the ‘Davidic state’ still within the scope of politics or does it belong to the utopian space of an anti-political ethics? The Jewish Jeshua of Nazareth – and I insist that he was entirely Jewish, as ‘rabi’ of a group, a sect, a hermeneutic tradition entirely Jewish, within the first generation of the geographical horizon of Judaea and Galilea – distinguished clearly between two modalities of ‘Messianism’: the political or royal messianism and the prophetic messianism. In my opinion Levinas does not make this distinction. For Levinas, messianism is only the one of the king, the royal messianism (‘The Messiah is king,’ as he writes). The distinction, not accepted by Levinas, between a ‘political order’ (even with the intervention of a King’s

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messianism, and for that reason, profane) and a ‘spiritual order’ (the prophetic messianism) allows Jeshua’s followers to achieve the progressive secularization of the Roman state or Theodosius’s Hellenistic Oriental state constituting, without ambiguities, an ethical and religious ‘pedagogical community’ that, profoundly institutionalized and legalized thanks to the genius of the Roman law,21 acquires a total organizational autonomy from the Roman Empire. The ‘ekklesia’ or the Judaeo-Christian ‘religious community’ (a Jewish sect named in Antioch, for the first time, ‘Messianic,’ that is, ‘consecrated’: from the ‘oil’ that consecrates, that ‘anoints,’ and from there ‘meshiakh’ or ‘Kristós’) never longed for the constitution of a new ‘State of Israel,’ a ‘historical state,’ and therefore not a ‘Davidic state’ either. They never longed for this since the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE (on account of which Titus’s Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple). The constitution of such a state might have enclosed Christians into a narrow ‘nationalism.’ In its origins, Christianity quickly grasped as its distinctive mark the affirmation of a clear universalism that had the entire empire, and other empires (such as the Persian), as the horizons of its Messianic action.22 The ‘ekklesia’ was not looking for the exercise of state power nor was it looking for another Jewish ‘diaspora’ for those who had suffered the destruction of their land and temple. This was a religious community that did not aspire to constitute a state.23 Nevertheless, far from being indifferent, this community began to exercise a prophetic criticism, specific to the ecclesiastic, political-prophetic Messianism of a pedagogic community, distinct from and anterior to, the political community of the Roman state (and from all future states). It was possible to be a ‘citizen’ of ‘two cities’: the ‘City of God’ that constitutes the Messianic eschatological Realm (religious but trans-historical) and the ‘Earthly city’ that constitutes the secular state. John Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, was condemned to exile by the Byzantine emperor because of the prophetic criticisms (prophetic Messianism) that he proffered with regard to the injustices inflicted by the political power of the Empire against the poor. Marx perfectly comprehends the issue at stake when he writes: The confusion of the political principle with the Christian-religious principle has become the official confession24 ... You want a Christian state25 ... You want religion to justify the earthly.26 Has Christianity not been, by the way, the first to separate the Church from the State?27 Read Augustine’s work De Civitate Dei or study the other

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Enrique Dussel Fathers of the Church and the spirit of Christianity ... [C]ome back and tell us which one is the Christian State.’29

And going beyond Levinas, in matters where politics and religion are articulated, Marx explains: ‘Or is it that when you say that we have to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s you do not consider as King and Prince of this world,29 not only the Mammon of Gold but also ... free reason.’30 For Marx, the confusion of Lutheran Christendom consists in having identified Augustine’s ‘City of God’ with the ‘Earthly City’; Christianity with Christendom (as with Kierkegaard in the same epoch; he and Marx both relied upon the antiHegelian critique presented in Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation,31 the course given in Berlin in 1841). This confusion revealed the lack of criteria to distinguish between Mammon or the ‘Prince of this world’ (Satan; later on, capitalism) and Christendom proper (the presumed ‘City of God’ transformed into the ‘Earthly City’; for Marx, the presumed ‘City of God’ of the Lutheran Christendom was, in addition, identified with the capitalist order – a question that will never be clearly analysed by Levinas since he lacks the necessary economic-political categories). We want to point out that Marx, with his Jewish origin, saw this problem with more clarity than our admired philosopher, also a Jew, Levinas. Why do I say this? Because Marx distinguished with more precision and in a more rigorous way the different hermeneutical levels involved. And this derives from the fact that Marx constructed appropriate political and economic categories. The mere phenomenological categories, so important in Levinasian ethics, are not sufficient in political or economic philosophy. Although Levinas accurately and pertinently points to the Messianic aspect of politics, he confuses the political with the prophetic messianism, that is, the political community with the ethical community or (following Kant’s wording in Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason) with the religious community. This last may have, in my architectonic comprehension of ethics, a political function; not as politics, however, but as prophesy. In ancient Israel when the prophets (mainly negative-ethical critics) criticize the kings, they fulfil a political function, but as prophets. David fulfils a political function as a king. When the community of the prophets, with Nathan, criticizes David’s faults (as with the scandal of his relation with Bathsheba, in 2 Samuel 12:1), they fulfil a propheticpolitical function. This function must not be confused, accordingly, with

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King David’s political function, distinct from the function of the community of the prophets. My opinion is that Levinas fails to differentiate between both planes. The Jewish community, after 70 CE, was a religious and cultural community, a sui generis ‘people’ in the Diaspora of the Roman Empire, without empirical reference either to the Israeli state or to the destroyed Jerusalem temple, but never forgetting a Messianic reference to Jerusalem. In Levinas’s interpretation, this situation was ‘defective,’ incomplete. Levinas had a ‘quasi’ Zionist position (certainly anti-fundamentalist and anti-dogmatic since it opens toward a political position rather ‘liberal’32 in relation to Israel’s concrete political institutions since 1948). Accordingly, for him the creation of the state of Israel would contribute to the ‘solution’ of the old conflict. The prophetic community would transform itself, as it was supposed to in Levinas´s view, in the King’s community, in the Davidic community: ‘The State of Israel will be the end of assimilation. It will make possible, in its plenitude, the conception of concepts whose roots go right to the depths of the Jewish soul.’33 This is the problem posited by Albert Memmi, the great Jew of Tunisian origin, when in his work La Liberación del Judío he states: ‘Only Israel will bring to an end the negativity of the Jew liberating his positivity ... [For this to happen] it is necessary to liberate the Jew from oppression and it is necessary to liberate Jewish culture from religion.’34 For Memmi, the state of Israel should be a secular state, with a majority of Jewish citizens, but equally accepting of Palestians, Muslims, or Christians, all of them having equal rights vis-àvis the state (in this case, it should be called ‘Israel’s state’ or the ‘Israeli State,’ but not ‘Jewish state’). Martin Buber was of the same opinion. But Levinas does not examine the issue in this way because, as we have already seen, ‘if the Messianic City is not beyond politics, the City in its simplest sense is never this side of the religious.’ For this reason, instead of moving closer to the foundations, the identification of the ‘Messianic community’ with the ‘Messianic state’ (unification of the religious community with the political community) creates in the ethical and political conscience of many Jews an extraordinary contradiction. Let us take as an empirical example the concrete militarist actions performed by Ariel Sharon with respect to the vulnerable Palestinian community in Israel (today, 19 February 2002) and in the rest of the ancient Palestine. The Jewish ethical-religious community, persecuted throughout twenty centuries, has difficulties with its ethical-critical and religious-messianic conscience when assuming the actions of such a historical state. Levinas must remain faithful to the

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tradition of ‘non-assimilation’ to a non-Jewish culture or state. However, in pursuing the ‘identification’ between the ‘Davidic state’ and the community who bears the Jewish culture and religion, it becomes impossible for him to justify the tyrannical and unjust actions that such a state may perform. The ‘non-assimilation’ with the non-Jewish state that justifies the ‘identification’ with the Israeli state now contradicts Levinas’s ethics of responsibility for the Other. His ethics demands the exertion of justice with respect to the poor (Palestinian?) who attempts to defend his occupied land and create a Palestinian state in the remaining land of the old Palestine. This is a major contradiction and fracture, not only in regard to the last twenty centuries of Israel’s history but since its origins, because the ‘schools of prophets’ never identified themselves with Israel’s monarchy. To return in the twenty-first century to a theocratic conception of the state, deeply and irreversibly secularized in our days, is also to move against the very tradition of the Jewish community of the last centuries of modernity, which does not allow such an identity. The crisis consists in the fact that if the Jewish religious community identifies itself with the ‘Israeli state’ (would it be what Levinas calls the ‘Davidic state’?), even worse, when this state responds to the interests of the more fundamentalist Jewish groups, those who also persecuted Levinas while he was living in Paris, this community would not be critical any longer before such a state, even if it was the Israeli state. Such a state is far from any political Messianism because it has been involved empirically, and regretfully, in clear acts against the human rights of the Palestinians not only during Levinas’s time but much more in the present. Any ‘state’ pretending to be Christian, Muslin, Hindu, or Jewish enters into contradiction with itself when a group of citizens does not confess the religion of the majority (and even of the minority) of such a state. Marx saw very clearly that the Jewish sect called ‘the Christians’ became ‘the first’ in promoting the secularization of the state (when it organized juridically and autonomously the religious community with respect to the Roman empire). This outcome, paradoxically, was the fruit of the Jewish historical experience: it emerged, continuing, radicalizing, and generalizing the experience of the Jewish ‘Diaspora’ in the Roman Empire. However, for this secularization to be possible it is necessary to understand that the ‘City of God’ is not the Christian church; nor is the Roman state the ‘Earthly City’ of Augustine. Indeed, they constitute two different ‘orders’ traversing both the state and the religious com-

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Totality

Exteriority

Earthly city (‘Caesar’)

Celestial city (‘God’)

Political ‘order’

Totalized state (Rome, Hegelian state, Nazi state, etc.)

King’s Messianism (secular), ‘Davidic’ state (?), new State of Liberation

Spiritual order (?)

Christendom, ‘Christian state,’ Jewish state (Idolatrics)

Prophetic Messianism, Christianity (as religion), Judaism (religious community)

munity. The ‘City of God’ is for Augustine ‘Abel’s City’ and ‘Abel, as pilgrim did not found it (non condidit).’35 The ‘City of God’ is ‘the beyond’ of Levinas’s actual political Totality as Exteriority. The ‘Earthly City’ is the totalized (Levinasian) totality. But the ‘Caesar’ of Jeshua is not merely the ‘political order’ but the ‘Earthly City,’ and ‘God’ is in the ‘City of God’ (the ‘Kingdom of God’) and not in the ambiguous ‘spiritual order’ that Levinas talks about. As can be observed in the accompanying table, Levinas’s use of the categories ‘political order’ and ‘spiritual order’ is ambiguous. They have equivocal meanings. Such categories articulate themselves in a complex way with concepts such as ‘Earthly city’ and ‘City of God’ (which, from my point of view, better correspond to Levinas’s categories of Totality and Exteriority). However, for Levinas, the state would not have a ‘Messianic’ quality except for the case of the ‘Davidic state’36 (or ‘State of Liberation’)37 as a state beyond the politics of war. But is the ‘Messianism of peace’ still political? 3. Towards a ‘Critical’ Politics as Abodah38 In 1970, a few weeks after reading Totality and Infinity, and while writing the second volume of Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, I confirmed Levinas’s difficulties in presenting phenomenologically the practical ‘construction’ of the ‘new’ Totality aimed at the ‘service’ (abodah) of the Other, the poor, the widow, the stranger. This practical-political construction opened up an entire problematic that Levinas never examined thoroughly, perhaps because of lack of experience or because he belonged to a Diaspora without any possibility of exercising political power. It is necessary to consider not only the critique of Egypt as the land of slavery but also the ambiguous ‘passage’ through the desert

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and, especially, the ‘strategic’ and unavoidable invasion of the ‘Promised Land,’ the assault on Jericho, and the construction of the Monarchial state in Jerusalem. This complex but unavoidable process demanded by the claim ‘I am hungry!’ posed the question ‘How to leave him without bread to eat?’ However, ‘to feed the hungry’ we need to work the land, produce the grain, prepare the bread, structure in a political way the economic institutions of distribution and exchange, to finally achieve the donation, the gift as charity or the sale of bread to the hungry. The satisfaction of the ‘I am hungry’ is the fruit of a process of ambiguous and necessary ‘mediations’ of every political, social, and economic strategy; it is necessary for the construction of a ‘new’ Totality that, necessarily, will become the ‘old’ Totality, whereby Totality and Infinity starts. Levinas remains in the negative critique of politics. He does not face analytically, the ambiguity of the positive construction of the ‘new’ Totality, which I call ‘liberation’ – as Albert Memmi does, for example. The liberation starts with the slavery of Egypt (negative aspect) and ends in the construction of Jerusalem (positive aspect). But when the dreamed ‘new’ Jerusalem is finally built, it slowly transforms itself into Egypt, the ‘second’ Jerusalem, the Jerusalem to be deconstructed ... and the history will continue, never repeating and always renewing itself, as the history of the politics of liberation. It seems that Levinas ends with the ethical critique of the Totality, but he cannot think the political-liberating (Messianic) construction of a ‘new’ Totality. It appears that Levinas cannot formulate a positive politics, although under the name of ‘Messianism of peace’ the topic begins to emerge. Was it lack of care? lack of interest? the absence of appropriate categories, or perhaps Levinas’s existential situation? I believe it has more to do with the latter possibility and I will advance some ideas to prove it. There are some interesting texts that seem to give us a possibility of formulating a ‘positive’ politics: [T]he idea of a power that does not abuse its powers, of a power that safeguards Israel’s moral principles and particularism, which an institution common to Israel and the nations risks compromising. An idea to which the image of Saul at the beginning of his reign, ‘hiding himself among the baggage’ and continuing to plough his field seems to conform.39

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It is a time in which the king is humble, in which he works by hand. He does not dominate nor use anybody to his own interest. All these things are fulfilled ‘at the beginning of his reign,’ because it is, diachronically, in the always ambiguous moment of creation of the ‘new’ institutions that justice shines without major contradictions. The ‘new’ institution is still very close to the negative and chaotic previous state. The new dominations are not visible yet; the unavoidable institutional ‘entropy’ has not yet shown its erosion. It is in the novelty of the ‘new’ state that a certain ‘Messianic’ (or ‘Davidic’) state seems to be possible. When the institutions articulate themselves, when the ‘new’ order becomes ‘old,’ Samuel’s admonition is remembered: ‘When that day comes they will cry to the Lord for relief from the King they have chosen. And He will not answer in that day.’ Levinas concludes: ‘Would a decision for the State be equivalent to choosing life over the Law, while this Law aspires to be the Law of life?’40 This is understood. It refers to the ambiguity of the political ‘institutions,’ necessary and yet ‘disciplinary’ (as Foucault would say), ‘repressive’ (for anarchism). Without these ‘institutions’ the reproduction of life is impossible (there would not be bread nor its distribution), but the institutions always become, with time, totalized mediations with the potential to ‘kill.’ Politics’ law (the system of Right) becomes the law of the actual system (excluding the weak, the poor, the stranger, the Other). But this ambiguity does not divest politics of its ‘necessity’ or its ‘sanctity’ as ‘service’ to the Other in his nakedness, in his hunger, in his ‘no-right,’ in his ‘no-city,’ in his lack of protection by a political system that allows him to live. The ‘political Messianism’ of the liberators (Moses, Washington, Bolívar, Fidel Castro ...) is a ‘Messianism’ of goodness and justice. The ‘prophetic Messianism’ criticizes the political Totality when it is no longer the original ‘Davidic state,’ the creative times when the emancipators have not yet contaminated their hands with their people’s blood. This emancipating, liberating, critical moment of politics is the moment in which the ‘state of war,’ which denies morality, transforms itself in the ‘state of peace’ still founded in morality. The diachronic dialectics is essential here. There are creative political times that are innovative, novel: the initiation of a system. The ambiguity grows thereafter, when the system is totalized, the Other is excluded, and politics transforms itself into ‘the art of foreseeing and winning the war by all means.’ It is the politics of decadence. Now we are facing Evil, the Empire. The positive and critical politics, the politics of the initial ‘David’s

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state’ is the original moment of every new order. It is the politics of liberation. It represents a qualitative growth of history: it is ‘political Messianism’ that accepts and works conjointly with the ‘prophetic Messianism.’ Trotsky and Lenin still work together; Stalin has not created a domination yet. Washington is not an expansive or imperial hero; he is not thinking of annexing Louisiana, Texas, California, Puerto Rico ... the Pacific, the Atlantic; he has not yet waged yet the Gulf War, nor Kosovo´s, nor Afghanistan ... The impossibility of understanding the ‘ethical necessity’ and despite this, the ambiguity of politics, hence, the impossibility of surpassing, moving ‘beyond’ the Totality, creates equivocal situations. There are two politics in history: (a) war as domination (Totality’s war); (b) struggle as liberation (the overcoming of the ‘old’ Totality and the subsequent creation of a ‘new’ Totality). Levinas does not give us an example; he does not portray an experience of the Jewish people that would allow him to describe the construction of the second Totality (the ‘new’). The State of Israel would have served him as a good first example but, as Michael Walzer and many others have pointed out, he did not discover in a clear way the thematic of the Other in Israel. For this reason, tragically, the traditionalist Zionism, frequently dogmatic, defeats the ‘Messianism of Peace’ of the political party of Arabs and Jews, which Martin Buber promoted in Israel during Levinas’s life. Although Levinas suffered because of the Jewish fundamentalism of the Algerian émigrés who persecuted him in Paris, he failed to think through these problems in a philosophical way. Levinas writes about ‘the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak’41 and ‘[a]n armed and dominating State ... against the unarmed Palestinian people whose existence Israel does not recognize.’42 We have to consider that for Levinas the critique of the Israeli state is difficult, most of all when he states that ‘Zionism is probably one of the great events in human history.’43 If we were clear about the ‘Messianic moment’ of politics as a new, yet ambiguous political order, the necessity could be shown for a ‘land’ for a people that, expelled from theirs, has wandered as strangers during twenty centuries. This does not change the fact that the ‘Davidic state’ can very soon be replaced by a state that, like any state, say Egypt, has ‘slaves’ who need to be liberated. No state can claim that at some point in its history it won’t become totalized, needing to become the object of the critique of the ‘prophetic Messianism’ of those who, like Martin Buber, faced in the name of the Palestin-

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ians in his own Israel the fetishized state (certainly fetishized in Ariel Sharon’s government). If the necessity and the ambiguity of the ‘politics of liberation’ are understood, that is, if the short but empirically possible time of the ‘Davidic state’ is accepted as a moment of politics, the Messianic ‘antipolitics’ can be established as negative critique. In the same way, a positive ‘politics of liberation’ could be established, attentive to the entropy of institutions, to the ‘new’ political order that conveys, from its origins, the always growing possibility of self-referential totalization. In the moment of the state’s totalization, the ‘prophetic Messianism’ awakens again, criticizing David’s injustice (the ‘Davidic state’ has transformed itself in a Totalized Totality) in sending Urias to the ‘front line’ of the war.44 The ‘political Messianism’ that must be differentiated from the former must undertake the transformation of the order that has become ‘old’; of the order that has fossilized itself as dead Law that kills life. This transforming action, this liberating praxis, is the ‘service to the Other,’ is %$"!,45 is critical politics. The critical political philosophy, as a certain ‘prophetic Messianism,’ ethical but not necessarily religious, is indeed the philosophy that explains the possibility of a critical-liberating politics, a politics conceived as an exercise of ‘political Messianism’ at certain crucial moments of history. Nevertheless, it is fundamental to know if the ‘new’ order is born only from the war against the enemy or if it derives from the responsibility for the Other (even if it must resort to a proportional coercion in the defence of the innocent or even the necessary use of weapons, as in the case of Jeanne d’Arc, Washington, Hidalgo, or Mao, for whom war was imposed as an ethical duty), as the ‘interruption of the Infinite being fixed in structures, community and totality.’46 However, we always need to recognize the ambiguity of this totality that as self-referential totality, transforms itself in ‘the state, which, violently excludes subversive discourse.’47 To the unjust politics of the self-centred Totality we oppose the ‘new’ critical politics, and ‘it is because newness comes from the other that there is in newness transcendence and signification.’48

NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy Press, 1969), 306. 2 Ibid., 304.

92 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15

16

17

Enrique Dussel Ibid., 241–2. Ibid., 21. Ibid. For Locke, there were three ‘states’: the state of nature, the civil state (politics), and the ‘state of war.’ The latter puts in abeyance the political state and places the ‘civilized’ condition (in a time before the slave, the Indian, the civil, the colonial barbarian, and the intra-European enemy) out of order. In a certain way, Levinas joins together the civil state and the state of war, making both of them ‘permanent.’ Totality and Infinity, 21–2. Ibid., 22. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 159. Ibid. Totality and Infinity, 22–3. All my works (from chapter 3 of Para una ética de la liberación [Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1973], 1: 188ff.) refer to this original topic (from 1970 until today [2002]). The Alterity of Other opens the world (the Totality) to its Exteriority. See Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1985). Preliminary text written in 1973 and published in E. Dussel and D.E. Guillot, Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Bonum, 1975), 7. Ibid., 8–9. I wrote thirty years ago: ‘The original face-to-face, adequately understood by Levinas against a still intuitionist phenomenology, is that of Eros, of a male in front of a woman. But here the woman is already described as passivity, as house’s interiority, as withdrawal into the home space. That is, Levinas’ description alienates woman through a certain macho view of existence ... The question of children’s education is wrongly posited ... Likewise, the question of the brother is not established. Levinas describes completely the first face-to-face experience but without considering any mediations’ (Ibid., 8). Levinas, ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David,’ in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. G. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 177. Ibid., 180, 183. Again, the position is ambiguous. The Messianic may not be a ‘beyond’ politics (if it is political Messianism), but in this case, it should be an ‘over here’ of the religious (otherwise, we would fall in a theocracy or in a confessional state).

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18 Ibid., 183. 19 Ibid., 177. 20 The concept of ‘Christendom’ is the point of departure in a Latin American tradition of critical interpretation of Christianity. This tradition follows Kierkegaard’s critical position against Hegel. See Karl Lowith, ‘Das Problem der Christlichkeit,’ in Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), 350ff; and E. Dussel, ‘Las cristiandades,’ in Historia General de la Iglesia en América Latina. Introducción General (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1983), 1: 173ff. 21 The Roman people stood out for their juridical creativity, their ‘Lex.’ It is not difficult to imagine that a community inside this empire was contaminated by its ‘legalism,’ institutionalizing itself in such a way that it could differentiate itself from the Roman State. But this juridical fact was possible because of the distinction between two Messianisms accomplished by Jeshua of Nazareth. A ‘canonical law’ is a worldwide, historical novelty with respect to all the former religious communities, even with respect to the Jewish ‘Diaspora’ in the Empire. 22 See E. Dussel, El humanismo semita (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1969), final annex about ‘El universalismo en los poemas del Siervo de Yahveh.’ In this work, written more than thirty years ago, I presented the meaning of the Semitic concept of ‘habodah,’ from my experience of two years of manual work in Israel (1957–9). 23 From 70 CE, the Jewish Diaspora had the clear consciousness of being a religious and cultural community without state. This last moment was experienced as a ‘lack-of’ (a historical state, destroyed by the Romans and, according to some traditions, to be reconstructed by the ‘Messiah’). Zionism, as we will see, will attempt to deny this ‘lack-of’ and will assert the necessity of the Jewish State for a full Jewish self-comprehension of existence. This is not true for Christianity. 24 The ‘official confession’ was the political conception of the Empire as German and Lutheran ‘Christendom.’ This conception was much criticized by Kierkegaard in the name of Christianity against the Christendom of Denmark, also a Lutheran state. It seems that Levinas did not attempt to build adequate political categories to distinguish between religious Judaism and the Jewish state (or Israeli state, as some prefer to call it), lay, profane, and secular, as stated by Albert Memmi: ‘It is necessary to liberate Jews from oppression and the Jewish state from religion.’ La liberación del judio (Buenos Aires: Raíces, 1988), 270. 25 Not being exactly the same, it would be something like a ‘Davidic state.’

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27

28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Enrique Dussel Of course, for Levinas, this state would be a Messianic one, a utopian state of peace and justice. It would differ from the Lutheran Christendom of Marx. But, could such a Messianic state exist without falling for the demands of the legitimate and monopolist use of violence, and therefore, inevitably (due to its imperfection), produce non-intentional negative and unfair effects? Marx, Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Diels, 1956), 1: 11–12. For Hegel, ‘religion is the foundation of the State.’ This is the very same definition of Christendom against which Marx, legitimately, raises himself (like Kierkegaard, still in the name of Messianic Christianity). In saying ‘the first,’ Marx risks a judgment of historical profundity, which I think is accurate. It will be part of a long historical introduction to a work I am currently elaborating and whose title will be Politics of Liberation. Marx-Engels Werke, 1: 100–3. Marx quotes here John 12: 31. Marx, Marx-Engels Werke, 1: 42. See E. Dussel, Método para una Filosofía de la Liberación (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1974): ‘Del Hegel definitivo al viejo Schelling’ (116ff.). This passage from Hegel to Schelling, taken as the origin of the post-Hegelians’ position, has been well studied in my work by Anton Peter, Befreiungstheologie und Transzendental theologie. Enrique Dussel und Karl Rahner im Vergleich (Freiburg: Herder, 1988). ‘[T]he liberal world on which Jewish existence, more or less successfully, was built and was reliant.’ Levinas, ‘Politics After!’ in Beyond the Verse, 190. Levinas, ‘Assimilation and New Culture,’ in Beyond the Verse, 201 La Libération du Juif (Paris: Gallimard, 1966; trans., Buenos Aires: Proyectos Editoriales, 1988), 262, 270. We have, then, three levels: (a) a Jewish religious culture; (b) a secular Jewish cultural community where the ‘holy’ books are taken as the community’s secular literature; and (c) a secular Israeli state where the term ‘Israeli’ would refer to a relation to the secular Jewish culture and not necessarily to a religion. The Israeli state could promote preferentially the secular ‘Jewish culture’ (in the same way that the states of the Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist cultures have done). The Jews would feel at home (zu Hause) by the first time, after twenty centuries. However, the members of other ‘cultures’ would have the same rights. It would be a multicultural state with a Jewish majority (and, for that reason, this state would give priority to the traditional language and culture of Jews). This position of Memmi is sufficiently

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37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

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complex and bears resemblance with the position adopted by Martin Buber. Levinas leaves the matter in a state of bigger confusion. De civitate Dei, L.XV, cap. 1.2 (Madrid: BAC, 1964, 2: 125). As can be observed, the ‘Davidic state’ is either a critical and liberating ‘secular’ state (that should not be called ‘Davidic’) or it is a critical ‘Jewish’ state. Since in this last case the state is still theocratic, its position would be ambiguous with regards to non-Jews, who would be ‘second class’ citizens, as are the Palestinians, Arabic Muslims, or Christians in Israel. They cannot serve in the military. This leaves them, ipso facto, without many citizenship rights. A ‘State of Liberation’ means a state that is creative of new institutions, a state that organizes society in order to give a place to the former oppressed. It is the state that Joshua pretended to create, commanding the ancient slaves of Egypt. In the fifteenth century, the medieval cities created a capitalist world that was liberating and progressive when compared to feudalism. But given the ‘entropy’ of the new institutions, they became repressive centuries afterwards. A ‘Liberating State,’ ambiguously named a ‘Davidic state,’ which should better be called a ‘Messianic state’ (the kingdom of Samuel until David, Washington’s New England becoming independent from England, Hidalgo’s México when it becomes independent from Spain, Zaire freeing itself from Belgium), can transform itself into something tyrannical. Abodáh (%$"!) in Hebrew may signify ‘work,’ ‘opus,’ ‘service.’ This last meaning makes reference to the ‘server’ or the ‘slave’ (ébed, $"!). In Greek, ‘service’ is translated as diakonía (διακον\α). In this sense, we have constructed the concept of ‘service-to-the-Other’ as ‘work’ or ‘praxis of liberation.’ This work transcends the system, the Totality, as a creative action or a ‘critical political service.’ See E. Dussel, Para una ética de liberación latinoamericana, § 22: ‘El bien ético como justicia’ (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1973), 2: 34ff.; and also in many chapters of E. Dussel, Hacia una filosofía política crítica (Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001). Levinas, ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David,’ in Beyond the Verse, 178. Ibid. Levinas ‘Judaism and Revolution,’ in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115. Levinas, ‘Politics After!’ in Beyond the Verse, 193. Ibid., 194; translation modified. 2 Samuel 12:15.

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45 See Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, § 30 (2: 102): ‘The morally good act, then, is the transversal act with respect to the All, a creative act: the liberating service or the work (abodah in Hebrew also signifies work).’ 46 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 160; italics added. 47 Ibid., 170. 48 Ibid., 182; italics added.

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Hemorrhage and Filiality: Towards a Fecundation of the Political MIELLE CHANDLER

Women survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, emotionally and physically scarred, having lost limbs, having had their families decimated, living with the illness and pending death brought about by AIDS, and with the hardships of poverty, nonetheless continue to care for the children. These women not only mother the children to whom they are biologically related, but also ‘adopt’ and care for children who have been orphaned or whose mothers have become too ill to cope.1 And it is with full awareness of the circumstances that these women take in children infected with AIDS, children suffering from trauma, and children conceived during the brutal rapes that accompanied the genocide. It is because of this mothering, mothering even under conditions of the gravest despair, that there can be hope. Hope, yes, for a peaceable future, but also, at a very basic level, for an interhuman future. The work of Emmanuel Levinas reminds one that not only peaceable interactions, but also brutality, war, and genocide are made possible by the maternal. Indeed, even the most violent of actions attest to subjectivity as maternal, to ethics, to elicitation by the other. Maternity is a term Levinas comes to in his later work2 to indicate a paradigmatic concrete example of ethics as first philosophy. Maternity indicates subjectivity as the bearing of and caring for the other that gives rise to all human possibility. It is a term that I read as both encompassing and permeating Levinas’s previous references to the kinship relations of fraternity and paternity, as well as to the feminine. It is this permeating dimension of the maternal that underpins and makes possible the manifestations of language, politics, philosophy, and human sociality, and it

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is insofar as these manifestations subordinate this maternal dimension that world mind, domination by ontology, ascends. While mothering entails a certain absenting of the self for the other, and maternity a bearing of the other and a passive giving-in to the splitting apart and fissuring of the self in this bearing, Western political theory rests upon an ontology of monadic sovereignty. Political man does not admit to being born of and through another, nor does he give himself to the bearing of another. The ontology produced in the modern state, Levinas explains, is that of an isolated and heroic being, a ‘virile’ and conquering ego endeavouring to preserve itself in this mode of being.3 The sovereign individual ‘states’ himself, and is reinstated, through the fundamentally linguistic process of reciprocal recognition. In the Hegelian formulation, being is stated being, coagulated in a process of reciprocal recognition where the two parties recognize each other’s sovereignty and the claims to ownership that substantiate these sovereignties. The individual person can be understood as stated at several levels: as unified with other citizens within the nation state, and/or with other members of a group laying claim to a particular sovereign identity, and as himself sovereign as a rights-bearing and property-owning individual. Stated being, within Hegel’s schema (arguably the dominant schema in Western political thought today), is an instantiation of world mind, but this instantiation is dependent upon recognition as such by another sovereign stated being.4 Although dependent on another’s recognition, the claim of statement is of a selforigination, of absoluteness unto itself, and this claim is substantiated through ownership. Moreover, a reading of Levinas’s texts unfolds the sovereign’s claim to ownership as predicated on the ownership of a dwelling that is an ownership of the feminine. One of the most radical transpositions offered by the work of Levinas is the inversion of this structure in order to show that what has been taken to be the pinnacle, conscious stated sovereignty, is conditioned in its possibility by that which welcomes, by that without which the one claiming sovereignty could not be. Dwelling makes being possible, but the specific shape being takes rests upon how being then responds to its condition of possibility. It is because being subordinates dwelling as property that being is able to take the form of statement. Indeed, what Levinas’s work reveals is the uncomfortable truth that the sovereignty of both the state and the rights-bearing individual is a mastery; that beneath liberation there necessarily lies an enslavement of the feminine.

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On Statement and the Feminine At the empirical level, the feminine creates the habitat hospitable to the interhuman in which language, representation, ethics, politics, history, philosophy become possible.5 At the metaphysical level it is from dwelling that being and time issue forth. According to Levinas, it is through the postponement of death that the feminine welcome, dwelling, opens the dimension of time, and through breaking ‘the plenum of the element’ that the feminine effectuates the separation of the human, effectuates, that is, being (TI, 156). The dwelling both removes and connects the dweller, thereby enabling the dweller to grasp and engulf, to store, hoard, and to lay claim to property, and to that from which he lives as property (TI, 157). It is this separated self who is able to jeopardize his own persistence in being by becoming (which is a becoming less) feminine, that is, who can give to the other, welcome the other, nourish the other. For Levinas, to elicit the feminine dimension of the self, to open to the other, is to open to the infinite. This is significant because inherent in separation is always the possibility of shutting oneself up (TI, 173), which is a shutting out of the other, of engaging with the other politically: through war, through contract and exchange, and through mutual recognition, thereby privileging the preservation of one’s being and reestablishing one’s sovereignty. This shutting up of oneself, egoity, is driven by the fear of a death portending nothingness in the finite time of the political. Political being is far from benign. All that comes into contact with stated being is transformed: enslaved through objectification and ownership or incited to sovereignty in order to avoid or be liberated from objectification. Statement thereby destroys infinity. Stated being brings everyone and everything under the regime of the political, into the ideal being on which democracy founds itself. Democratic reciprocal recognition can be distinguished from a representation without reciprocity that conquers the other. But while mutual limitation may be better than unidirectional colonization or the liquidation of the other, this mutual limitation fixes being as stated, thereby obviating other possibilities of being, possibilities that would perhaps subordinate the modes and dimensions of being less.6 In representing the other to myself, that is, in seeing, naming, and defining the other, I determine the other without myself being subjected to a reciprocated determination by the other.7 Representation is thus

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akin to colonization.8 In reciprocal representation unidirectional determination is replaced by a system of recognition in which both parties represent each other reciprocally as political beings, thereby instating each other and reinstating themselves.9 This diagnosis leads toward a theorization of the objectification of the feminine as endemic to politics. The political, the very serious game of the finite ego, is recast by Levinas as a derivative that has come to dominate, and as made possible by the inhabitation and intimacy of the dwelling in which the stated being, trapped within the trajectory of finite time, strives to preserve itself through the postponement of death. The feminine, as interwoven with infinity, inheres beyond the confines of this trajectory of finitude: [T]he idea of infinity, revealed in the face, does not only require a separated being; the light of the face is necessary for separation. But in founding the intimacy of the home the idea of infinity provokes separation not by some force of opposition and dialectical evocation, but by the feminine grace of its radiance. The force of opposition and of dialectical evocation would, in integrating it into a synthesis, destroy transcendence. (TI, 151)

Levinas feminizes infinity.10 Although exactly how the feminine and the infinite are bound together is less than clear, two implications become evident. The first has already been discussed: separation, necessary for the interhuman, becomes possible through a feminine aspect of infinity. While this thesis can be incorporated into emancipatory discourses seeking the universalization of sovereignty, the second implication – that the political liberation of the feminine, the integration of the feminine within statement, would destroy ethics and transcendence – cannot. Levinas has termed these two forms of integration that cooperate through the regime of mutual recognition ‘dialectical evocation’ and ‘the force of opposition.’ Dialectical evocation can be explained as the ascension of world mind through the unification of opposites within the self-knowing sovereign state, an ascension that brings all existence into statement. As Levinas puts it, in ‘dialectical logic the same dialectically participates in and is reconciled with the other in the Unity of the system’ (TI, 150).11 The force of opposition, ‘where the other of A is the non-A, the negation of A’ (TI, 150), fuels this ascension. In dialectical ascension the potential negation with which the other threatens me is held in abeyance and brought under the rule of law through this higher unification.

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Opposition is transformed into contract and exchange on stated ground and beneath stated skies. But there is another other beneath this schema, the other who does not partake of sovereign being and therefore who cannot be unified under a whole. A passive, silent, permeable other – the feminine – whose absence poses the threat of a different kind of negation: the unravelling of stated being through self-erasures such as welcome, giving without expectation of return, hemorrhage. In political exchange the sovereign being autotomates12 and exchanges its own feminine dimensions in order to assert itself, in order to display itself as sovereign against another sovereign (an ontological replica of the self). Oppositional negation is tempered through an exchange of recognition. The resulting sovereignty requires, however, a casting off and subordination of its feminine dimensions, and it is these dimensions – which can be thought in terms as material as bread and shelter or human bodies13 – that are exchanged. Exchange between sovereign beings presupposes, on both metaphysical and material levels, the feminine autotomated in the exchange. In the autotomization of the feminine, or liberation by another name, what is cast off is not extraneous. The political autotomates the irreplaceable – on the one hand, that from which the very essence of existence itself erupts and, on the other hand, transcendence. Transcendence requires the separated being elicited by the feminine, whereas it is stymied by the separated being of opposition synthesized in dialectical ascension. What I understand Levinas’s work to be searching for is a far deeper opposition to oppression than that dictated by statement and mutual recognition. The opposition to oppression Levinas seeks to reveal is precisely that which cannot be stated, that which cannot be revealed except through betrayal by statement: through naming, defining, (re)cognizing. This deeper opposition to oppression is often indicated in Levinas’s texts through the employment of the terms of kinship, most notably ‘fraternity,’ but moving, in his later work, to ‘maternity.’ While the characterizations of ‘fraternity’ can be understood as exhibitions of the feminine, ‘maternity’ takes subjectivity to an even more radical level of other-orientation, or ethics. Simply put, the kinship terms utilized by Levinas are imbued with feminine attributes and are evoked, as is the term ‘feminine,’ in order to indicate that which is both beneath being and the vehicle for the movement beyond being, that which is both prior to and beyond the oppression/anti-oppression binary. The sensibilities evoked in kinship – responsibility, welcome, one-for-

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the-other – oppose or, more aptly, unravel the oppression that is commonly understood as anti-oppression, that is, recognition, rights, and equality – politics – while simultaneously nurturing and facilitating the very possibility of political anti-oppression, and giving rise to the possibility of political recognition. This simultaneous unravelling and facilitating is the paradox of the feminine. It is this paradox that leads me to put forth a suggestion that appears antithetical to many contemporary feminist arguments, and even to some discourses concerned to counter oppression: it is not the liberation of the feminine that is required in the search for a more ethical politics, but rather it is the feminization of the political. As we consider the relationship of ethics to politics in the work of Levinas, a two-gendered structure can be perceived at the level of being (and being less). This being does not necessarily coincide, and this coincidence continues to decrease, with biological sex and even gender performance.14 In order to understand the significance of the idea of the feminine in Levinas’s project of revealing a beyond and beneath being, I suggest the first step is to read the feminine through a de-essentialization of both sex and gender. Levinas himself makes explicit the distinction between women and the feminine: ‘The feminine has been encountered in this analysis as one of the cardinal points of the horizon in which the inner life takes place – and the empirical absence of the human being of “feminine sex” ... nowise affects the dimension of femininity’ (TI, 158). One also finds, however, significant evidence in Levinas’s texts of a conflation of the feminine with women.15 This conflation is not without empirical truth, as it is women who have and continue to be prescribed feminine roles, and who continue to enact such roles even within a climate in which democratic equality is deified. The matter of my investigation, however, is not the rigour with which Levinas was able to maintain the distinction between women and the feminine, but rather how to read and think the implications of the feminine and the familial, but also ‘masculine’ ontology, not as biological categories but as indicating modes of being and beyond being. My concern is the elicitation of the feminine and the familial from their entrapment within monadic ontological modes upon which identities are applied in the variety of masks we like to call pluralism. The dominant structure of our day is one in which the political and the masculine constitute the pinnacle by positing ethics as derivative and by claiming the feminine as owned object, as a mode to be overcome in the same way as the slave must seek freedom and colonized

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peoples must seek independent sovereignty. One can discern in Levinas’s work, especially in his later work, a resignation to the unchangeability of this structure of manifestation. Still, although politics has the visible and the audible upper hand, these instantiations are the recastings of the ethical that saturate even the most solid of political interactions. If one is to read Levinas’s evocation of the feminine from the position of the political, the feminine, as invisible, unstated, and unstateable, is indeed denied political equality and, within a democratic framework of equality and rights, a framework in which to be is to engage in mutual recognition, this status constitutes subjugation par excellence. While the ground won by feminist struggles has been for the most part at the cost of the further subjugation of the feminine, Levinas’s evocation of the feminine within a structure that posits the priority of ethics perhaps allows for a certain homage to the feminine. Rethinking feminist struggle as also dependent upon the subjugation – the denying, demeaning, devaluation, and objectification – of the uninstantiated, of the silent, the passive, and the mediatory might serve to evoke, on ‘our’16 part, a quietening, a pause. While a recognition of the invisible and the unstated would threaten the presuppositions on which mutual recognition rests, what poses an even greater danger is that a recognition of the unseen, a liberation of the anarchic reply, would serve to bring what is not stated into statement, not only inflicting the ultimate violence upon the silent and the invisible – silencing silence, erasing invisibility – but suturing closed the very fissures of creation and transcendence. The violence of recognition is embedded in very real political struggles. Oppressed peoples and oppressed categories of people have been and continue to be compelled to identify themselves, to frame their oppression according to the criteria of statement, and to seek recognition for that identified delineation in order to enter the regime of mutual recognition. Liberation under the matrix of democratic capitalist equality is statement. In offering a formulation of subjectivity prior to that of equality and recognition, Levinas allows one to glimpse another modus operandi beneath the surface of sovereignty. If one sustains this glimpse it becomes possible to consider interhuman possibilities other than statement. The absent and the invisible must manifest if politics is not to have the last word, but this feminine dimension cannot be brought into the light, it cannot be rendered visible, it cannot be emancipated without being stated and subsumed (TI, 243). In order to subsist as feminine, then, it must be effectuated in proximity, in ethical subjectivity, as that

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which welcomes, in the kinship inherent in all contact, in the substitution for the other that liberates the stated self from its enchainment to its own freedom and identity. Proximity, the relation of kinship outside of biology (OTB, 87), maintains both the irreducibly singular separation of the I and the hemorrhage, the rupture of this I evinced by the face of the other (TI, 214). This I, however, as separate, is capable of proclaiming a sovereignty that atotomizes and encases its feminine mode against the appeal of the other, refusing to listen, to be less, to conduct the very primordial caress from which it is an eruption. Fecundating the Filial In Totality and Infinity the feminine, in the face of the other, precedes being in the unstated and invisible aspects of represented language, in a silence that ‘includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relationship with the Other’ (TI, 155). The feminine is, for Levinas, a way of indicating aspects of subjectivity that do not seek congruence with being, aspects of subjectivity that thereby maintain, without maintaining, the possibility of the ‘not yet’; aspects of subjectivity that maintain, that is, the politically impossible multiplicities that are not yet, and that, as such, cannot be unified within a system, cannot be delineated, limited, defined, or stated. This feminine ‘lapse of being,’ between being and not-yet-being, reemerges, in Otherwise than Being as the maternal fission of subjectivity, as fraternal expiation, as the I, the oneself beyond ontology. In this crevice between books, hospitality becomes hemorrhage, and femininity and paternity coalesce in maternal subjectivity in which the other gestates in the fission of the same, in which signifiyingness necessarily opens an exposing of interiority, in which language attests to vulnerability, a laying bare of silence. These shifts can be explained in part by way of Levinas’s change in focus from separation and ethical alterity to the elaboration of ethical subjectivity, ‘a subjectivity that suffers and offers itself before taking a foothold in being ... a passivity, wholly a supporting’ (OTB 180). Ethical subjectivity is elicited in proximity with the other, the neighbour, the stranger, in my primordial obligation. My obligation as for-the-other disturbs the time of politics, disturbs continuous time in signifying before and beyond being. It is not that in proximity I conceive or give birth to the other, but rather that in proximity I become I as maternal. I do not form myself, I am not self causing nor am I other causing but rather I am formed as I through a passivity not opposed to

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activity, but rather the passivity of a bearing that bears the other through me in my responsibility. Responsibility is the gestation of the other in the same that involves neither freedom of choice nor enslavement, but is rather the unicity and irreplaceability of the I. This subjectivity is recurrence by contraction in which I divest myself of myself as I recur through my responsibility for the other, as the other, without relinquishing or escaping the same (OTB, 108). The metaphor and lineaments of maternity exemplify the expiation and substitution for the other in which I recur as both other and not other. In my recurrence I go beyond myself, fall out of phase with myself, recall the hither side of identity and ontology, the hither side of the political: anarchic passivity, the feminine dimension, the dimension of creation (OTB, 113). In terming this responsibility, this answering that recalls the feminine, ‘fraternity,’ Levinas offers political theory, and specifically democratic theory, a reformulation of the notion of fraternity that counters the deepest of patriarchal presuppositions. But this recasting becomes even more subversive in Levinas’s elaboration of paternity as fecundity, as the lineaments of a diachronic time not trapped within the conatus of stated being. As with the feminine, the biological structure of fecundity is not limited to the biological fact. In the biological fact of fecundity are outlined the lineaments of fecundity in general as a relation between man and man and between the I and itself not resembling the structures constitutive of the State, lineaments of a reality that is not subordinated to the State as a means and does not represent a reduced model of the State. (TI, 306)

Further, the lineaments of paternity as fecund explicate a central problematic arising from the work of Levinas: the nature of the relationship between ethics and politics. In rethinking the ethical as paternal, and thus positing it prior to politics, Levinas is able to replace the despotic father as the origin of the political with an effeminate father that politics, as filial, recommences. To read the relation of ethics to politics in Levinas’s writings as one of fecundity in which ethics is situated paternally and politics is situated as a recommencement and therefore as wholly other, as filial, explains how it is that ‘the isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues’ (TI, 306) nonetheless necessarily retains the potential to fecundate, to move beyond the death-end of continuous time and thereby become for the other, become, that is, feminine. It is precisely due to the fecund, the parental relationship of ethics to

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politics, that the current virile and heroic mode of politics does not, despite its efforts, obviate its own potential to recall anarchic femininity, to re-gender its mode of being, to perform itself otherwise. It is on account of fecundity that this masculinity cannot be total, that politics retains, however hidden and repudiated, the hither side of stated being, the potential to become open to the not-yet. It is as filial, and as such necessarily gestated and nurtured, that political being is encoded with the feminine that engendered it. And it is as filial that the stated one is unable to fully liberate itself as self-originary, is unable to claim its heroisms as fully its own. At best it can only strive to create the ruse of an ontological masculinity that understands itself as residing within a heteronormative structure through positing the feminine as its inverse, its subordinate, and its property. However, as Levinas is concerned to point out, what politics claims as its inverse is rather a preoriginal gestational medium, a prior welcome recalled in recognition, proclamation, and even in the most violent of political exchanges. The lineaments of paternity explicate the diachronic temporality that inheres between ethics and politics, and that can be differentiated from the continuous finite time in which statement is the response to the anxiety of death, in which heroism is a striving for self-preservation in an eternal present. The temporality indicated by the lineaments of paternity differs from this synchronic time in that there is no continuity; the past does not cross over into the present. Diachronically, the ethical is separated by an unbridgeable abyss from the political, and yet, through transubstantiation, the immemorial past, the anarchic prior, is also present, is also politics. Ethics and politics are, then, wholly, radically, temporally separate, and yet not separate. A new category, one that spans both the ontological and beyond the ontological is set up by paternity, a category in which the other is me and is not me, in which I am the stranger and yet am not the stranger. In paternity is evinced a unity that engenders a multiplicity that cannot, and yet must, in a just state, be synchronized, that cannot and yet must, in the political present, be subsumed under a system. In fecundity the ethical manifests as politics, is reproduced in the form of politics, while simultaneously remaining on the hither side. It is as fecund that ethics is able to indicate a mode of being not focused on death, a mode of being outside the continuous and finite time in which one grows old and is compelled to grasp, desperately, through action, politics, history, at immortality, lest the opportunity of the present be lost. It is precisely in its fecundity that ethics can remain ethics, can

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remain prior to and beyond the fear of finitude that would render it an ontology. And it is as the child of ethics, as both the manifestation of ethics and a plane unto itself, that the political holds innumerable undiscovered potentials. While such an analysis might suggest a relaxing of attempts to synchronize ethics and politics, to subsume ethics under its child or politics under its parent, my hope is that such an analysis may also inspire the endeavour to recall and elaborate non-imperialist familial sensibilities, sensibilities that would open politics beyond statement. If politics were to loosen its desperate grip on presence, to diminish its domination, the potentials currently stillborn may come to be. So long as the political fills the interstices of being with statements of presences other interhuman possibilities will remain confined to the ‘not yet.’ The problem that the ontological and temporal entrapment of politics within the framework of being and nothingness poses for those in the West concerned to counter oppression and colonization in a globe now almost fully stated, in which those who remain unstated have been, and continue to be, eradicated through genocide, privatization, and assimilation within globalized statism, must not be underestimated. Alterity is not and cannot be within a completed world mind, within a fully stated world; and yet, paradoxically, the foundations of statement are poured into the very fissures of subjectivity, familiality, openness to the other, vulnerability, and hospitality, which politics as statement is driven, in the anxiety to preserve being in its dominant mode, to colonize. This ontological colonization takes place through the domination of the feminine formulated as enslaveable object, as a lack of being, thus creating a single route of escape: liberation as the same, as stated and stating, monadic and autonomous, as, ontologically, a replica of the colonizer – enclosed, avatar, proclaimer, mind. While countering oppression entails making the voices of the oppressed heard at a political level and attaining the ground and arsenals needed to substantiate these voices, unravelling the system of oppression requires listening, without recognition, to the unspoken and glimpsing the invisible. When the marginalized move toward the centre through engaging in political struggles against oppression, in the fight for rights, autonomy, sovereignty, this war against oppression consecrates war and its virile virtues in good conscience (OTB, 160), ontologically saming the liberated according to these virtues. It is with this concern regarding the globalization of world mind, the all-encompassing reach of stated being that is the eradication of alterity, that I repeat the suggestion

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Levinas puts forth for ‘us Westerners’ at the end of Otherwise than Being: ‘One has to find for man another kinship than that which ties him to being, one that will perhaps enable us to conceive of this difference between me and the other, this inequality, in a sense absolutely opposed to oppression’ (OB, 117). Fecundity indicates precisely such a kinship. Fecundity, explained by Levinas through the trope of paternity, unties ‘man’ from being. But it is undoubtedly worthwhile not to give up the political as barren, as sterile in its ontological isolation and entombed by finite time, but rather to endeavour to elicit the feminine dimensions of the political in the hope that politics may not only be able to cultivate less imperialist ways of being, but may be able to become fecund. I am suggesting that political being suffers not from a deficiency but rather from an over-exuberance of presence. I am suggesting that if it is peace and plurality we seek, the political must refrain from proclaiming itself with such anxious ferocity. Rather than an avoidance of the temporality and responsibilities of parenthood, the vulnerabilities of maternity and femininity, what is called for is a quietude of opening interiority to the other. I am not suggesting that the weighing, calculating, and comparing in statements of democratic equality are not necessary, nor am I suggesting that the door must be kept open to the other at all times and in all circumstances, in an interminable welcome. I am not suggesting that the political collapse into its prior, or seek to return to the ethical. My suggestion is rather that the political seek to fecundate, to gestate possibilities beyond itself. In order to allow unstated and unconceived potentialities to come forth, politics must engage by ceasing to engage, by moments of silence and lapses in being.

NOTES 1 The Guardian Weekly, 13–19 Dec. 2002. 2 Specifically, in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981); hereafter appearing in the text as OTB. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 307; hereafter appearing as TI. 4 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

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5 This echoes the analysis of the feminine in Levinas’s work put forth by Catherine Chalier: ‘Ethics and the Feminine,’ in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds, Re-Reading Levinas: Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). 6 This suggestion might be further elaborated through recourse to anthropological studies that look at the relation between conceptualizations of the self and social orders and dynamics in unstated societies. Pierre Clastres offers particularly fascinating analyses with regard to hunter-gatherer peoples in Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1989). 7 Levinas writes: ‘We have defined representation as a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other’ (TI, 170). Although I am not able to address this issue in this paper I would like to point out my scepticism regarding the proposition that any determination of the other could take place without an alteration of the same, but perhaps an alteration of the same needs here to be distinguished from a determination of the same. 8 Again, I would like to point out that the testimonies of both colonizers and colonized attest to the alteration of the colonizer through the processes of colonization. 9 By recognizing the other I represent myself as a sovereign (and therefore not an object, for example, a slave, an object with only the potential of sovereignty) who is capable of conferring recognition and is therefore recognizable. My sovereignty is re-established both through the act of recognizing and through being recognized as a recognizer. 10 Although the genderless pronoun ‘it’ refers, in this passage, to the idea of infinity, Levinas gives it (infinity) the characteristic ‘feminine’: ‘the feminine grace of its radiance’ (my italics). We have here, then, in reference to infinity, both the characteristic ‘feminine’ and the characteristic ‘thingness’ (indicated by the pronoun ‘it’), which, given the objectification of all that is feminine, does not pose a contradiction. 11 Or, as Hegel explains it in Philosophy of Right, egoist individuals engaging in the regulated reciprocal opposition of commerce and civil society are united in a greater whole: the state. The war of all against all simply moves to another level: the interstate. Conflict between individual persons gives way to solidarity in proportion to the increase of antagonisms between contracting states. Peace (by which Hegel means ‘respite from war’), if prolonged, strengthens egoism, thereby weakening the unity of the state. To ensure national unity, international tensions must be maintained by periodic war.

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12 Autotomy in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from zoology and is defined as ‘the casting off of a part of the body when threatened, e.g. the tail of a lizard.’ I have adapted the biological, following the lead of Levinas in this respect, to speak of the ontological. 13 Luce Irigiray elaborates a similar analysis of the exchange of women in ‘Women on the Market,’ in Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (London: Routledge, 1997). My analysis differs in that my concern is to address the exchange of the feminine as including, but not being limited to, women, or even to bodies. 14 Feminine drag (high heels, make-up, etc.) must be separated from the mode of being (less) that Levinas terms ‘feminine.’ Likewise, masculine drag (a wide stance, cropped or slicked-back hair, etc.) is not correlative to egoism or to claims of self-origination and self-sufficiency. 15 See Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2001) and Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 16 I use ‘our’ in reference to the passage quoted at the end of the paper in which Levinas refers to ‘us Westerners.’

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Levinas and Alterity Politics SHANNON BELL

Enrique Dussel, in Philosophy of Liberation, says that ‘philosophy when it is really ... philosophy ... ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.’1 ‘Levinas has many names for this “non-philosophical” encounter’2 – proximity, substitution, saying, face-to-face. Levinas’s ethics of responsibility for the other before oneself indicates a way to act, to live, that is a way to do non-philosophy. Levinasian ethics is a performative response, the action/doing of saying ‘Here I am’ to the call from an other. From Levinas’s ethics one can develop a pragmatics of acting, interacting. Levinasian pragmatics can be derived from Levinas’s privileging of the other, his formulations of proximity, substitution, and saying and his understanding/dismissal of all but Holocaust art. ‘The Other who dominates me ... is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obliged.’3 Proximity is responsibility for the other; substitution is responsibility for the other by putting oneself in the place of the other,4 the state of being held hostage by the other. ‘Saying is proximity, contact, duty without end.’5 And as Dussel states, ‘[P]roximity is the root of praxis.’6 The problem in Levinas – if there is a problem; perhaps I should rephrase – the omission in Levinas has to do with what may be omitted in his figuration of the other as widow, orphan, and stranger. The material reality or manifest content of the other is ultimately open and this is perhaps why Levinas’s ethics has become so fundamentally important to postmodernism and now to post-humanism or cyber humanism. But there are omissions. First, the Levinasian other is human – ‘that which has a voice and a face.’7 Second, Levinas does not take the economics of poverty into account as a philosopher; this Dussel remedied in his work. Dussel notes that for Levinas ‘the other is anthropo-

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logically the poor,’8 but Levinas ignores the periphery, ignores the Third World other. Levinas does not politicize his concept of the other; perhaps this non-politicization functions as a political gesture of openness to the world. Dussel surpasses Levinas’s Eurocentrism resulting from ‘the invisibility of economics’9 by writing a Levinasian liberation philosophy. Jeffrey Nealon, using Bill Burroughs’s junk experience, extends Levinas’s other to what he terms ‘an other ... that is other to the human’;10 this is a pre-personal, post-personal existent merely present in the il y a as a bare fact of presence. Nealon uses the junky to suggest we might ask about those ethical calls of the future from ‘beings’ that we cannot now even imagine, ethical calls that Donna Haraway categorizes under the heading of the ‘cyborg [which] appears ... precisely where the boundary between human and machine is transgressed.’11 Joanna Zylinska uses the Levinasian ethics of respect for the other to develop what she terms a ‘prosthetic ethics of welcome or hospitality’12 that she sees the cyborg artist Stelarc as offering to non-human alterity. Zylinska situates Stelarc’s PING BODY, PARASITE, and MOVATAR13 performances as engaging in a ‘prosthetic ethics of alterity’;14 in these performances Stelarc pragmatically explores ‘alternative, intimate and involuntary’15 technological interfaces that allow his body to be externally and technologically driven by the code, data, images, speed of the most extensive virtual other, the Internet, and by virtual others through the net. Stelarc concretizes Levinasian ethics – that owed to the other before self – and operationalizes Levinasian ideas of substitution and proximity in his connectivity with and hosting of post-human alterity.16 The direction in which I want to extend the boundaries of the other is somewhat different; for I, like Levinas and Dussel, am staying with a human other in the work I am presenting here; but unlike both Levinas and Dussel, who are blind to others who deviate from the gender order, these gender deviants are my focus. The work presented here is humancentric, but not heterocentric. The aim is to use Levinas in the doing of what I call fast feminism. Fast feminism17 goes beyond both postmodern feminism and post-feminism into a realm of pragmatics derived from an interactive looping from other to self, where the other is not the other I can easily substitute myself for. Rather, the other is a pervert other, who arrives theoretically when Levinasian ethics are brought together with Georges Bataille’s understanding and living of excess and risk. The ethical action of substitution is premised on risk: ‘[M]y position as I consists in being able to respond to the essential destitution of the Other, finding resources for myself.’18 Philosophy comes from action,

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otherwise it is dead theory. ‘We are to the degree that we risk ourselves.’19 We are responsible to the other before self; the self is relational, formed in action and interaction with others. We find resources in the action of responding. As philosophers we owe it to the heart of Levinas’s theory, the philosophy of the other, to pragmatically enact his ethical gesture of ‘respond[ing] to the essential destitution of the other.’20 In marking the other as ‘thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan’ Levinas makes obligation easy. For the latter two of his trilogy of marked others are social victims of patriarchy. As such, they are banally easy to substitute oneself for. There is little risk of self in responding. The ‘widow’ and the ‘orphan,’ although excess categories, are excess to the heteronormative order of reproduction; they have lost their privileged place in the family. They are remainder spewed out from an order formulated on exclusion. The ‘stranger’ is a more open category leaving room for undesirable others, others who threaten the dominant order. It is through the category of ‘stranger’ that one can interject deviant others, those outside the social convention of the dominant order, into Levinas’s philosophy of the other. The other that I am interjecting is the gender deviant, extreme gender deviants – the pedophile and the female-to-male transman. These two entities don’t merely enter as extensions of the category of ‘stranger,’ but reformulate the concepts of ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ in pervert territory. By observing these gender deviants in the degraded social space of pornography, one brings into play not only the embedded absence in Levinas’s marking of the other, but also the ethical imperative to transpose philosophy into sites it was not written and intended for. I use Levinas’s formulations of ‘the other,’ ‘substitution,’ and ‘saying’ in two very different sites of pornography: child pornography and postgender pornography. Substitution and Child Pornography What brings me to engage child pornography as a site of fast feminism and Levinasian pragmatics is the potential to use theory productively, creatively, much like a sorcerer. The sorcerer-theorist Hannah Arendt states that ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice ... lacked the magic formula to break the spell.’21 In the doing/performing of theory, the theorist is often in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice, able to do the work of theory, but unable to break the spell of social convention. What does it mean to do theory as a sorcerer? The sorcerer uses

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theory to save the ass, ‘the face of the other.’22 The face has become the most famous, the most used, of Levinasian terms for otherness. The sorcerer-theorist more than being directed by Levinas’s ethics of responsibility, the infinite responsibility of being for the other before oneself, operationalizes Levinasian ethics in the sense of the pragmatics of doing. Levinasian ethics is a response, a performative ‘Here I am’23 to a call from the face of the other. ‘The Other who dominates me ... is ... the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obliged.’24 Yet, it is not enough to give one’s action of theorizing to the widow, the orphan, the stranger; rather, the Levinasian orientation to the other needs to be conjoined with Bataille’s understanding and living of excess as that which can not be contained by the same, and in its noncontainment is transformative of human existence. Unless Levinas and Bataille are brought together the human other is in danger of remaining a homogeneous other: The heterogeneous world ... consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or superior transcendent value. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body, persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value ... [It is the world of] those who refuse the rule.25

When Levinas and Bataille are brought together these heterogeneous others emerge: the pervert widow, the pervert orphan, and the pervert stranger. It is not so hard to respond to the call of Levinas’s widow, orphan, and stranger; ‘they are the victims, the disasters, ... the powerless ones.’26 For Levinas response is substitution, putting one’s self in the place of the other, and this is the ethical itself.27 The pervert is far less easy to substitute oneself for, especially those pervert others who have been placed, according to Gayle Rubin, at the bottom of what she calls the erotic pyramid: promiscuous homosexuals, fetishists, sadomasochists, those who engage in sex for money, and ‘the lowest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.’28 One of the most demonized others of today is the so-called pedophile. This category, ‘pedophile,’ has been stretched to include a person fantasizing about and/or engaged in sexual encounters with anyone under eighteen, collapsing the differences between a seven year old, a twelve year old, a seventeen year old, and a three year old. There are, as Ken Plummer points out in Telling Sexual Stories, some sexual stories whose time has not yet come to be told by those who live them; conse-

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quently they are narrated only by dominant social authorities. ‘Pedophilia’ refers to a set of stories that remain ‘a story “out of time”’29 Ken Plummer observes that even the postmodern literature and theories on marginality, the other, and silenced voices do not open space to the voices of ‘pedophiles.’30 This was an invitation. The assumption of fast feminism is that it is not enough to do theory as an intellectual endeavour; theory must have both a risk value and a use value; it has to be able to be used in concrete socially dangerous instances. What it means to do theory dangerously is to risk professional credibility and institutional sanction to save the ass of the other, preferably the highest-risk other. If one really wants to make one’s mark as a theoretical sorcerer and a Levinasian/Bataillan pragmatist one needs an excessively perverse subject: not your ordinary everyday pedophile secretly looking at pictures of sexualized ten year olds, not the people who write anonymous detailed romantic sexual stories involving eight and thirteen year olds and post them on disappearing intergenerational web sites. No. One needs the master pedophile whose work is as extreme as the Marquis de Sade’s and who publicly and politically supports it. Enter Robin Sharpe. Two months before the Canadian Supreme Court decision on the Robin Sharpe child pornography case was to be handed down, I received a call from the editor of Constitutional Forum inviting me to write an article on the Sharpe decision from the perspective of the artisticmerit defence. Mr Sharpe drew international attention for his challenge to Canada’s child pornography law; the Canadian Supreme Court interpretation of the child pornography law in the Sharpe case and the subsequent trial judge’s application of the interpreted law to Sharpe’s writing and photos at the trial court has positioned Canada’s law on child pornography as unique and of international concern. I telephoned Mr Sharpe, told him that I was doing a piece on him for a law journal, that I wanted to interview him, and, if his writings were any good, that I thought I could use theory and philosophy to help him save his ass. I flew to Vancouver, spent three days interviewing Mr Sharpe in February 2001; read all three thousand–plus pages of his unpublished work and his two published novellas and two poetry books. The article, ‘Sharpe’s Perverse Aesthetic,’ that I wrote for Constitutional Forum was submitted as an exhibit by the defence in the Sharpe trial. I attended the Sharpe trial 21 January–7 February 2002.

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Robin Sharpe was charged with both possession and possession for the purpose of distribution of written and visual child pornography; it was contended that the written material advocated sexual activities with persons under eighteen; visual depictions of persons under eighteen engaged in sexual activity are illegal. According to Canadian law, persons fourteen and over can legally engage in sexual activity; however, visual representations of persons under eighteen engaging in sex activities and advocating having sex with persons under eighteen are not allowed. Mr Sharpe’s writing was acquitted on two grounds: that it does not advocate or counsel sexual activities with persons under eighteen and that it has artistic merit. The artistic-merit defence is different for child pornography than it is for obscenity: (1) ‘[A]rtistic merit should be interpreted as including any expression that may reasonably be viewed as art.’31 (2) ‘Any objectively established artistic value, however small, suffices to support the defence.’32 Some of Sharpe’s four hundred photos were, however, deemed to constitute child pornography and Sharpe was charged and sentenced to four months’ house arrest between the hours of 4 pm and 8 am.33 What I focused on in my article on Sharpe was the most extreme, most contentious, objectionable story in his Boyabuse collection of charged unpublished child porn, ‘The Rites of Port Dar Lan,’ which is a trilogy structured around boys’ initiation rites. I contextualized Mr Sharpe’s writing in relation to De Sade, Bataille, Algernon Swinburne, and William Burroughs’s Wild Boys. This was largely the tactic of the defence and one of its expert witnesses, who located Sharpe’s work as part of a literature of transgression that has a genealogy traceable through Bataille and de Sade back to Dante. The point of my work, however, was and is not Mr Sharpe’s work, but rather the ethical behaviour of substituting oneself for the other, in this case the maligned pervert pedophile other and ‘answering for his very responsibility.’34 My belief was that if I could not use philosophy and apply it to the site of the most extreme form of written pornography, that is, to do theory as a sorcerer, then I no longer wanted to work as a theorist, to do Levinasian theory or Levinasian pragmatics. In this sense there is a great deal of affinity with the pragmatics of Dussel’s and Stelarc’s work. What is Sharpe’s crime? It’s twofold: primarily it is the portrayal of ‘incorrect,’ improper, Oedipalization; it denies, overrides, the ‘proper’ identity formation of the modern subject: individuation as a process that places the child in subordination to parental authority as prepara-

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tion for later subordination to societal authority. In Sharpe’s work, the children are masters of their own bodies and souls; they are not Oedipalized. Sharpe’s second crime is not being Sadean enough. Specifically, he transgresses the great transgressor de Sade. Sharpe violently disrupts de Sade’s work from its point of excess, silence; that is, ‘from the beyond of the bedchamber.’35 Sharpe, like Bataille, is attempting to write the scream, the narration of the human exposed to pain. Sharpe, like Bataille, is concerned with the moment in which the self is torn open and exposed to what is other to it; the boundary between the self and other liquefy. In a sense Sharpe, in the tradition of Bataille, is delivering the words/feelings of those who remain speechless and thus are merely victims in de Sade’s imaginary world. For de Sade there is no other as bounded being, only the sovereign man; but in Sharpe’s writing this sovereign man comes apart as bounded being when his partners in crime are boys with agency and not the silent child victims of de Sade. Sharpe is writing the scream as a combination of the will to laughter, ‘those moments ... that make one gasp,’ ‘moments when the ceaseless operation of cognition is dissolved’36 (the moments privileged by Bataille), and the will to endure – the practice of the art of fortitude. Sharpe is combining play, laughter, and fortitude; his boys are having fun with the men and with each other, having sex and engaging in sadomasochistic activities. Victim and executioner, man and boy, laughter and feats of endurance, pleasure and pain slip into one another. Sharpe’s stories fall into what I refer to as post-contemporary sadomasochism. De Sade, the excess theorist of Enlightenment reason, destroyed the objects of his desire. Sadism is replayed in the postcontemporary and in Sharpe’s writing, not as the Sadean negation of other, but as respect for the other’s limits. The other is neither a victim nor an executioner but a partner in a power exchange of erotic energy. ‘Each partner serves as an audience, [a witness] to the other, and in the process, contains the other.’37 One has ‘the Other in one’s skin,’ the ‘Other within one’s self,’38 to quote Levinas. The victim and the executioner, the master and the slave, the dominant and the submissive, the boy and the man, are set face to face, endowed equally with the same power. There are moments in which the caress of a whip, the burning piercing of a needle, takes the players to what Levinas refers to as the mystery of alterity, ‘always other ... always still to come ... pure future ... without content.’39 The moment of s/m climax is described as ‘an

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ecstatic mind/body release ... [in which] the building of pain/pleasure so concentrates ... awareness into the here and now ... [that] you spin away ... into no place and no time’40 and no age and no being. This disembodiment is the pure power and joy of s/m, in which one reaches the ecstatic moment of simultaneous escape and presence. That Sharpe’s work has literary merit is unquestionable;41 it no more advocates the actions depicted than does de Sade’s work or Burroughs’s work. Sharpe’s detailed fantasies relate as the dark underside to his published work Manilamanic, a slightly fictionalized ethnographic narration of the street hustling scene on the boy corner in Manila’s now defunct sex zone. Manilamanic is a book about street youth – boys, hustlers, and beggars as seen through the eyes of the Western traveller who spends time with them. Sharpe’s respect and love for his semifictionalized characters recuperates their lives, lives outsiders would portray as merely deprived and at points quite horrendous. Sharpe is able to show the agency of the so-called victims and their joy in life even in often dire material circumstances. Perhaps the real power and beauty of Sharpe’s published and unpublished writing is that it is not recuperable, not co-optable, for it both fits with and in some ways goes beyond the genre that Deleuze and Guattari term ‘strange Anglo-American literature’:42 literature from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Sharpe’s home is with these ‘men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert.’43 Like the writing of Miller, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, Sharpe’s writing ‘overcome[s] a limit, shatter[s] a wall’;44 but unlike that of his literary neighbours Sharpe’s writing does not ‘fail to complete the process.’45 Deleuze and Guattari argue that although these writers ‘shatter the wall,’ ‘the neurotic impasse again closes – the daddy-mommy of oedipalization’46 and capitalism close in and they become counter-cultural icons, despite themselves. Sharpe’s work resists appropriate Oedipalization and mocks the capitalist free market by portraying boys as sexual entrepreneurs supporting, in the case of Port Dar Lan, an extended community. Post-gender Pornography as a Site of Levinas’s Saying There must be a distinction between the pornography that, in the words of Angela Carter, ‘remains in the service of the status quo’47 and ‘codes how to look at women’ in a way that ‘reinforces the prevailing system of [social/sexual] values and ideas in a given society’48 and the pornogra-

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phy that works to take apart the prevailing system of social/sexual values and ideas. The latter Carter identifies as ‘moral pornography’: pornography that functions as ‘a critique of current relations between the sexes.’49 She claims: The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His[/Her] business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.50

Drucilla Cornell poses the question, ‘How can a feminist approach to pornography that challenges rather than replicates gender stereotypes be developed?’51 Cornell’s answer is ‘a different form of “representational politics.”’52 Representational politics ‘describes the effort ... to unleash the feminine imaginary into new representational forms that challenge the stereotypes of femininity governing the presentation of the female “sex” in the mainstream heterosexual porn industry.’53 Following Cornell’s suggestion, I develop what I contend is a nonrecuperable politics of representation, a saying, which can be located in what Kobena Mercer terms the perverse aesthetic. The perverse aesthetic, according to Mercer, in addition to being sexually explicit, contains a textual ambivalence that ensures the uncertainty of any one, singular meaning. I add to Mercer’s configuration of the perverse aesthetic an important third feature: ‘it is the home, the territory of the pervert who resists oedipalization and has invented other territorialities to operate in’;54 it is the territory of ‘a body that is incapable of adapting to family life ... to the regulations of a traditional sex life.’55 In order to engage in non-recuperable pornography production, distribution, and consumption, pornography in which a Saying is operative, three philosophical conditions need to be met: (1) the Saying of the work is not lost in the Said; (2) the work is produced from a new postporn/post anti-porn positionality; (3) the work is an act of labour as self-activity and not labour alienated as labour-power. The first philosophical condition is the locus of Levinasian pragmatics. The first condition is derivative from Levinasian ethics, an ethics of responsibility owed to the other before self, a performative ‘Here I am’

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to a call from the face of the other; through the face of the other one is called by the third and by all others. As part of a perverse aesthetic Levinas’s biblical others – the widow, orphan, and stranger – are queered, becoming the phallic [widow] mother, the post-female/post-male bastard orphan, and the de-Oedipalized stranger. The widow, orphan, and stranger in the instance of non-recuperable porn demarcate that which is outside or a widow to hegemonic male relations, an orphan to the traditional family, and a stranger to and estranged from the Oedipal process. Crucial to theorizing non-recuperable porn are Levinas’s idea of ‘the Saying’ and his positioning of Holocaust art. The Saying is ‘a foreword preceding language,’56 a Saying that is nothing but the Saying itself, phenomenologically preceding any Said. When the Saying moves into language it is located in the symbolic order and ‘subordinated to its theme.’57 Levinas claims a Said ‘is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations.’58 When Saying congeals in a Said it congeals in ‘the linguistic system and ... ontology’59 of domination or as a counter-discourse to the language of domination. Although the saying is necessarily betrayed in any said, Levinas can be read as making a distinction between dead saids, saids in which the saying is congealed as in a commodity form, congealed as an alienated and objectified said, and sayings expressed as saids that operate more like living labour and convey the saying in the praxis of witnessing: ‘[S]aying is witness, whatever be the ulterior destiny into which it enters through the said in a system of words.’60 The Said that has the capability of witnessing Levinas comes close to locating in Holocaust art. Art for Levinas is a fixation of the saying in the said; he contends that ‘every artwork is in the end a statue – a stoppage of time’;61 art, then, as congealed or frozen sayings. When Levinas speaks positively of art, it is ‘art made by survivors or it is art that deals with the Holocaust in some way,’62 that is, it is art of the disaster that witnesses the singularity of beings. This is the type of art that Levinas might see as ‘art that makes the ethical difference.’63 Art that makes the ethical difference can be extended beyond art that witnesses the Holocaust if the Holocaust is taken as a specific manifestation of disaster. Disaster, according to JeanFrançois Lyotard, is ‘Auschwitz generalized,’64 in which he includes ‘everyone whose mind or body, dignity or identity has been damaged or even shattered.’65 Women as a group, regardless of our vast differences, have had our minds, bodies, dignity, and identities damaged in a

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sexist/classist/racist system of domination. This damaged identity is represented and reproduced in hegemonic pornography, and these representations and reproductions act simultaneously as production sites of damaged gender. The moral pornographer, NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) banned artist, art professor, and one of three SSSpread partners, Barbara De Genevieve, indicates that counter-hegemonic or heterogeneous porn, takes ‘the vilified and vilifying genre of image-making found in hegemonic pornography and play[s] with its mark of disgrace.’66 The moral, and necessarily deviant, pornographer witnesses the sexual relations between bio-men and bio-women in the society in which they take place. At the levels of action and imagination the moral pornographer deproduces these relations and reproduces new action-images in which these sexual relations have been exposed, parodied, and given a different meaning. SSSpread.com (Chicago/San Francisco) is a cyberspace of nonrecuperable pornographic images, stories, and interviews. The images, stories, and interviews are non-recuperable on six fronts: (1) The nature of the images and written texts – they are of ‘hot femmes, studly butches’ and involve ‘lots of genderfuck.’ (2) The images and written texts are produced for a specified consumer – ‘the queer community.’ (3) The labour producing the images is the labour of self-determining life-activity enacted by what the three co-producers identify as ‘nonprofessional’ actors and writers. (4) The content is collectively determined and produced as an interactive process between those in the images and scenarios and those shooting the images and scenarios with feedback from those viewing the images. (5) The posted material (images and written texts), the said of the website, is a living said ‘interactive on as many levels as possible,’ inviting viewers to ‘share your stories or articles’ and ‘take a turn being the porn star’; and involving an active viewer gaze that is both laudatory and critical in the feedback forum. The web producers state: ‘We believe that feedback is an essential part of the web experience. Bulletin board forums and direct feedback emails permit members two-way communication’ (www.ssspread.com). (6) The material is made from the positionality of the Sadeian woman: the phallic-widow mother, the post-male/postfemale bastard orphan, and the de-oedipalized stranger.67 The viewer, once logged in for a small monthly member’s fee of $9.95, has four options: Image Galleries, Story Lounge, Articles and Inteviews, and The Forum.

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Image Gallery Each of the current twenty-eight image gallery pages has four different photo scenarios (for a current total of one hundred and twelve individual porn shoots); each individual photo scenario has between seventy-five and ninety thumbnail photos divided into separate series of fifteen photos. I will examine one scenario, ‘Sailor’s Hitch,’ to show how in ssspread sexual Saying is not located in a hegemonic Said of hetero-gender normativity, but rather actively (in production and consumption) degenders both poles of heterogender. ‘Sailor’s Hitch’ begins with a sailor late at night cruising the streets to get laid; he meets a black-haired femme diva who originally asserts her dominance by blowing smoke in the guy’s face. They head off together to her place; the first sexual action is the femme pinning the sailor’s head against the wall; a sailor conventionally considered rough trade is being roughed up by a petite femme who by photo 13 we learn from the background equipment is a practising dominatrix who has taken the sailor to her dungeon. In photo 18 the sailor’s hard prosthetic member is foregrounded; however, by photo 21 it is the sailor who is on his knees worshipping, and by photos 22–28 sucking, the femme-dom’s prosthetic member, which she pulls out from beneath her sheer polkadot dress; the scene begins to shift to SM domination in photo 29 as the femme pins the sailor’s arms above his head on the leather SM work/ play table; this is followed by a bathroom series in which the dom washes the sailor’s mouth out with soap, dons a black lace negligee, and pins him on the floor with her foot, engages in nipple torture before she leads him back to the dungeon (photos 31–45) to be placed in quite severe and expert rope bondage (photos 47–60) using slip knots – a sailor’s trade; the sailor tied face-down has his pussy probed by the femme-dom’s latex gloved fingers until he is ready to be penetrated by her femme-cock (photos 61–74); after being fucked the sailor is released from bondage and sent on his way in the world with only his cap as a shield (photos 76–90). The sailor, an icon of working-class masculinity, is here a stranger to heteromasculinity; the femme-dom occupies the dual positions of bastard orphan to femininity (she has her cock serviced) and phallic-widow mother who disciplines a male icon redesigned on a bio-female body, turning the sailor’s cyber embodied male/female flesh body into her object of amusement to be discharged according to her will. A philosopher’s theoretical work is most interesting when it is re-

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deployed in sites the philosopher never intended. Dussel focuses Levinas’s concept of the other onto the Third World, Nealon onto those who have lost what specifically marks one as human – the ability to respond to the other. Zylinska applies Levinansian concepts to Stelarc’s connectivity to post-human alterity or virtuality. I use Levinasian concepts in the site that is officially the devalued opposite of philosophy: pornography; specifically two extremes in pornography, child pornography and ‘genderfucking’ pornography, which are not dead saids, but rather non-static Saids that witness and allow for the witnessing of extreme others. If Levinas’s formulations are not applied, analytically and/or practically they become dead saids, congealed theory, that dull the ethical intent driving theoretical endeavour.

NOTES 1 Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1985), 3. 2 Jeffrey Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Perfomative Subjectivity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 34). 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 215. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 184. 5 Ibid., 161. 6 Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, 20. 7 Nealon, Alterity Politics, 67. 8 Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity (Atlantic City, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 39. 9 Ibid., vii. 10 Nealon, Alterity Politics, 56. 11 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 12 Joanna Zylinska, ‘“The Future Is Monstrous”: Prosthetics as Ethics,’ in Joanna Zylinska, ed., The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (London and New York: Continnum, 2002), 217. 13 In MOVATAR, a motion prosthesis interface, for example, the body becomes a prosthesis for the manifestation of a virtual entity’s behaviour. ‘Instead of a body animating a computer entity, MOVATAR allows a computer avatar to perform in the real world by possessing a physical body.’ www.stelarc.va.com.au.

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14 Zylinska, ‘“The Future Is Monstrous,”’ 229. 15 See www.stelarc.va.com.au. 16 In the STOMACH SCULPTURE the artist’s body acts as a host for microtechnology in which a dome capsule of high-quality metals is inserted approximately 40 cm into the stomach with a video endoscope tracking and recording the probe. Zylinska states: ‘While differing as to degree and scale in which the body is extended, augmented and transformed, all these performances seem to have been inspired by the idea of openness, of welcoming the unpredictable and the unknown ... By abandoning the desire to master the house of his own body and opening himself to the (perhaps hostile) intrusion of the guest, Stelarc performs the most ethical act of what Derrida terms “unconditional hospitality”’ (Zylinska, ‘“The Future Is Monstrous,”’ 229, 232). 17 See Shannon Bell, ‘The Fast Feminist and Fast Feminism,’ chapter 1 in Fast Feminism (forthcoming), for a more extensive construction of fast feminism. In a nutshell Fast Feminism is writing and doing feminism, fast; positioning after the annihilation of femininist/non-feminist distinctions, the obliteration of intradisciplinary foundations; feminism minus the rehashed exposition of its theoretically grounding from radical feminism to postmodern feminism to queer feminism to cyberfeminism, to postfeminism, to third wave feminism; taking feminism the way bell hooks defines it ‘[F]eminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression ... [It] does not imply that men are the enemy ... [I]t is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult’ (Feminism Is For Everybody [Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000], 1) – and doing it. The power in fast feminism: leave the locations of feminism, write and do feminism in the gait (speed and risk), morph what is needed, what appeals, what thrills to whatever is the present project or event at hand. 18 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 215. 19 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, (trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 72. 20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215. 21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 237. 22 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy Press, 1986), 89. 23 Ibid. 24 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215.

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25 Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds, The Bataille Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 127. 26 John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 119. 27 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, xxix. 28 Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,’ in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 279. 29 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 120. 30 Ibid., 119. 31 R. v. Sharpe, [2001] S.C.J. (Supreme Court of Canada Judgment), no. 3, para. 63. 32 Ibid. 33 One week before Mr Sharpe completed the 120 days of house arrest for possession of child-pornography photos, he was arrested for sexual assault, twenty years earlier, of one of the boys-cum-men in the charged photos. Sharpe went to jail for two years. The Vancouver police on the pornography beat had gone to extra effort to locate one or more of the boys in the photos, as Canada’s national daily, the Globe and Mail, indicates: ‘An unusual public appeal by Vancouver Police paid off when a man came forward recently to identify himself as the boy in a sexually explicit picture taken by convicted pornographer John Robin Sharpe.’ The man alleged that Sharpe had sexually assaulted him between the ages of 11 and 13; the incidents are alleged to have occurred from 1979 to 1982. Robert Matas, ‘Pornographer Sharpe Accussed of Sex Assault,’ Globe and Mail, 27 August 2002, A1, A6. The Government of Canada has introduced new child pornography legislation that abolishes the artistic merit defence. 34 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 84. 35 Marcel Henaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, trans. Xavier Callahan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 78. 36 Georges Bataille, ‘Knowledge of Sovereignty,’ in The Bataille Reader, 309. 37 Anne McClintock, ‘Maid to Order: Commercial S\M and Gender Power,’ in Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds, Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power (London: BFI, 1993), 224–5. 38 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 86, 96. 39 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy Press, 1987), 89.

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40 David Stein, Urban Aboriginals (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1994), 90. 41 For a thorough reading of Sharpe’s work see Bell, ‘The Perverse Aesthetic of an Infamous Child Pornographer: Robin Sharpe,’ chapter 3 in Fast Feminism. 42 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 132. 43 Ibid., 132–3. 44 Ibid., 133. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 17. 48 Ibid., 18. 49 Ibid., 19. 50 Ibid., 19–20. 51 Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 95–6. 52 Ibid., 97. 53 Ibid. 54 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 67. 55 Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 216 56 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 5. 57 Ibid., 6. 58 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 88. 59 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 6. 60 Ibid., 146. 61 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 8. 62 Jill Robbins, Altered Readings (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1999), 133–4. 63 Ibid., 133. 64 Caputo, Against Ethics, 28. 65 Ibid. 66 Barbara De Genevieve, email communication, 5 February 2002. 67 For a detailed examination of the material on the ssspread website see Bell, ‘Post-Porn/Post-Anti-Porn: Queer Cyber Gender Fuckers,’ chapter 5 in Fast Feminism.

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Public Transgressions: Levinas and Arendt KEITH ANDERSON

Both Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas envision a politics that rescues human uniqueness and singularity from the disasters that have befallen it in history: Arendt, through a recovery of public-political life, and Levinas, more tentatively, through a pre-original ethics and justice. Despite certain points of contact in their thought, they do not keep easy company. Arendt would likely refuse any company with Levinas at all. She would not welcome him in her polis. He is obsessed too much by orphans, widows, and strangers; his voice is too much the prophet’s. Yet it is just this voice, we argue, that exposes the inhospitality of Arendt’s conception of politics, a conception that for fear of the shadowy hold of necessity closes the door on the wretched. Levinas’s notion of a pre-originary and infinite responsibility puts into question the very categorical framework – namely, the distinction between private and public – by which Arendt banishes concern for human suffering and need from the political realm. And as it does so, it suggests a different conception of that realm and of politics. It gives birth to the possibility of a radically critical politics – a concrete praxis of concern for the Other – that, although oriented to bodies afflicted by pain and necessity, does not sink into a darkness that eliminates all human singularity, but instead rises in witness to it in the light of justice. Inhospitality to the Body in Arendt’s Conception of the Public-Political When Arendt speaks of human singularity it is primarily in regard to action. It is action that discloses one’s uniqueness, distinctiveness, and unexchangability – one as a novel beginner.1 For Arendt, action and

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singularity are inseparable from novelty and beginning. To act is to begin something new, to bring forth the unexpected. And according to Arendt, our impulse to begin, and indeed the ‘principle of beginning’ itself, is owed to the fact that we ourselves are new beginnings. We are singular actors, beginners, by virtue of our miraculous birth, our entry into existence as unique, novel beings. Action is in fact for Arendt the very ‘actualization’ of our unique beginning, our natality (HC, 177–8).2 Through our disclosive words and deeds, we experience a ‘second birth,’ one in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the ‘naked fact’ of our ‘original physical appearance’ in the world (HC, 176–7). Significantly, however, this second birth is one that, while actualizing and confirming our irreplaceable physical beginning, in fact leaves our very physicality behind (HC, 181). Each speaker and doer is ‘born again,’ but only as a unique personal identity apart from his or her body: a ‘curiously intangible’ ‘who,’ not a corporeal ‘what’ (HC, 179, 181; BPF, 4, 223). And crucially for Arendt, the birth of this ‘who’ occurs necessarily in public, for it is only there, beyond the worldlessness of our mysteriously given bodies, that ‘who one is’ can truly appear and feel real. The reality of oneself, of action, and indeed of anything at all depends always upon ‘publicity,’ upon being seen and heard not only by ourselves but by all (HC, 50). It depends upon a world shared with other people, a world of appearances in-common, of things in-common and in-between us (HC, 52). Only in the world ‘in-between,’ beyond the dark ‘background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature,’ our bodies, is one’s uniqueness really disclosed.3 Its reality there is but a fleeting one, however. For it to last more than an instant, something else is required that, again, is possible only in public: the ‘shining brightness’ Arendt calls ‘glory’ (HC, 180). Glory shines only in public because it is bestowed solely by those to whom the action appears (HC, 180; BPF, 218). It is bestowed by their judgment, by what Arendt calls in a Kantian move an ‘enlarged thinking,’ a ‘disinterested’ imagining of how a particular event or thing might look from the perspectives of others (BPF, 220). This process, one that Arendt conjoins with political opinion-formation and exchange, produces a generalized view of an action that ‘decides’ its glory, that is, how it shall look; that view is a decision that ‘woos the consent’ of others, that invites them to share it (BPF, 200, 224). This judgment enables an action’s specific greatness – the meaning and ‘principle’ manifested through the performative act itself – to endure in the world, for it chooses which performances are exemplary and therefore worthy of our remembrance

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(BPF, 152, 218; HC, 206–7).4 The judgment chooses the world we want to share, now and into the future, and, to the extent that action and the judgment itself disclose us as persons and invite us to share its reality, it chooses also ‘Who’ is to ‘belong’ together in it (BPF, 223). Worldly endurance, remembrance, and belonging are of central concern to Arendt; hence her interest in the foundation of bodies politic, in the establishment of ‘stable, worldly structures’ to secure uniqueness and the power of action against its own fleetingness and contingency (OR, 175; HC, 200–1). Many of the principles she identifies as arising from action – equality, mutual promise, public freedom, public happiness, and common deliberation – reflect this interest (BPF, 152, 243; OR, 89, 119, 214). They indicate the primary importance she places on that which in political life promotes and sustains the body politic and public world itself, the space in which people can shine in their singularity. What appears less important to her in political life, less ‘politically relevant,’ is that which pertains to human bodies that labour, suffer, and need. Indeed, Arendt even goes as far as to argue that when such bodies enter the public light, the space of the public and political may very well be destroyed. This conclusion stems from her fundamental distinction between the public and the private. In contrast to the bright realm of great words and deeds, the ‘private’ is for Arendt ever shadowy and clandestine, the realm not only of our innermost sentiments, motives, and desires, but also of ‘all things connected with the necessity of the life-process,’ especially those things associated with the body (HC, 72, 98, 30–1, 50; OR, 96). The senses, need, labour, household, economy, all that pertains and ministers to the body’s biological life originates in this darkness and is, at bottom, forever unfit for public appearance (HC, 28–31, 50, 71–2, 111). If it were to enter the public light, the public-political realm would simply degenerate into a ‘collective household,’ a ‘nation-wide administration of housekeeping’ in which all possibility of human distinction is eliminated (HC, 28–9). According to Arendt, this disaster has in fact already taken place. Ever since the emergence of the modern division of labour, privatehousehold activities – activities rooted in economy (oikos-nomikos) and hence biological life-processes – have permeated the public-political realm to such an extent that the private and public have been perverted into something neither private nor public: they have become ‘the social’ (HC, 28). And ‘the social,’ Arendt argues, has perverted politics. While she blames this perversion on the division of labour, it is in fact

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her location of labour in what she calls the ‘worldless,’ incommunicable ‘confines of the body’ that places the blame squarely on human corporeality itself (HC, 112). The ‘unnatural growth’ of labour and oikos-nomikos into the public-political realm is at root the ‘unnatural growth’ of our bodies, a transgression by our bodies of their proper limit (HC, 47). Now, it is perhaps not fair to say that this limit allows absolutely no place for bodies – especially bodies that suffer – in the political realm. For Arendt does in fact acknowledge that demands issuing from such bodies can be a legitimate impetus to politics and that, indeed, the fulfilment of such demands is a prerequisite for true public-political freedom and happiness. She insists, however, that such demands must first be ‘translated into political factors’ and explained in ‘political terms’ in order to prevent any corruption of the political realm by the ‘unnatural growth’ of necessity (OR, 63, 139). In On Revolution, Arendt commends the early Marx for translating and explaining suffering in just this way. With his term ‘exploitation,’ Marx explained that mass poverty was ‘a political, not a natural phenomenon,’ the result of ‘violation’ and expropriation by a ‘ruling class’ in ‘possession of the means of violence,’ not the result of ‘scarcity’ (OR, 62). According to this explanation, the economy – the realm of necessity and human misery – ‘rested on political power and hence could be overthrown by political organization and revolutionary means’ (OR, 62). And with this idea, Marx made it possible to conceive of revolution as an uprising for a freedom and happiness defined not simply by ‘bread and wealth,’ by the sensuous ‘happiness of the people,’ but by participation in public affairs, a properly political freedom and public happiness fundamentally antithetical to coercion and rule (OR, 61–2, 119). Here again, of overriding concern to Arendt is the establishment of public spaces for action, for a politics characterized by common deliberation, judgment, and decision. While suffering may arouse a revolutionary politics, that politics must have the foundation of an enduring body politic as its guiding telos. In Arendt’s view, any revolution that is driven by suffering itself, that pursues sensuous happiness, is fated to disaster, the French revolution being exemplary in this regard. Instead of establishing publicpolitical spaces in which freedom could be enacted, that revolution – led by men motivated by shadowy sentiments, driven by the people’s need – unleashed a ‘boundless violence’ and ‘delirious rage’ as if compelled by the ‘forces of nature herself’ (OR, 76, 89–90, 92, 97–8, 110). It was a struggle so much ‘under the dictate of ... bodies’ that it was doomed virtually from the start (OR, 60). According to Arendt, Marx

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himself succumbed eventually to a similar error. As she writes, ‘he later saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind every violence, transgression and violation. And since he ... equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life-process, he strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good and the life-process of society is the very centre of human endeavour. Thus, the role of revolution was no longer to liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men, let alone to found freedom, but to liberate the life-process of society from the fetters of scarcity so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom, but abundance became now the aim of revolution’ (OR, 64). This fearfulness regarding the life-process and its corruptive force informs Arendt’s assessment of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as well. There she praises the foundation of new public-political spaces such as the neighbourhood councils, but judges the new democratic organs in the factories to be a ‘fatal mistake,’ a doomed attempt to make public what belongs to the realm of darkness: again, economy, labour, bodily life (OR, 266–7, 273–5). These, she argues, should never be opened to processes of deliberation and decision, but instead should simply be ‘administered’ in the ‘public interest’ (OR, 91, 273–5). In her view, they are relevant not to the political actor, but only to those who ‘know how to manage people and things,’ to those whose guiding principle is not ‘freedom’ but rather ‘necessity’ (OR, 173–4). When the line between these distinct roles and principles is obscured, there is ‘chaos’ (OR, 275). With this idea, Arendt ultimately reduces the question of suffering and need – the ‘social question’ – to a matter addressable only by a technical elite of ‘experts’ hidden from public view (OR, 91). Indeed, with the rise of technology, resolution of this question by political means has become in her view irrefutably ‘obsolete’; it is now purely a problem of technological management and ought to be treated as such (OR, 114). Underlying this conclusion is Arendt’s distinction between between natural-corporeal existence (necessity, the ‘social’) and public life (action, political freedom). Admittedly, some commentators argue that this distinction is not in fact so clear in Arendt’s thought, that the boundary between ‘social’ matters and what is properly public-political is more ambiguous than she often states. Lisa Jane Disch, for example, points out that Arendt speaks of the ‘double face’ of political problems, one public, the other social.5 The social face is ‘not subject to debate’; it is an aspect of a problem upon which everybody can agree because its necessity is a patent fact: that ‘everybody should have decent housing’

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is a given necessity in this sense, a matter that can be figured out ‘with certainty,’ without deliberation.6 Only the specific location of the housing and who is to share a particular neighbourhood are debatable. Such questions constitute the public face of the problem and are political. According to Disch, if necessity and freedom, the social and the publicpolitical, are but two faces of a problem, they are therefore not inherent properties and, consequently, are disputable. The distinction between them cannot be made in advance. The drawing of the distinction itself is a matter for debate and politics.7 On the whole, however, Arendt herself recoils from this ambiguity. She does not treat the distinction as debatable, but instead presumes that necessity is plainly evident for all to see. And because she does regard matters of necessity as obvious and given, not only does she delegate them too quickly to administrators and experts, but, relatedly, she maintains that certain aspects of human existence – economic activity in particular, bodily life more generally – must never be made subject to deliberative processes, that they have no place in public. Startlingly, this position, and the distinction upon which it is based, blinds Arendt to the possibility that the ‘administration of people and things’ she advocates might in fact result in a destruction of human uniqueness analogous to the destruction wrought by the cold, technical manipulations of bodies in the Nazi death camps, a dehumanization that Arendt herself clearly condemned.8 It is Arendt’s refusal to recognize politically relevant singularity in corporeal life, her willingness to both neutralize and neuter bodies and place them in the company of things, that makes her ironically complicit in such dehumanization. This problem, we suggest, is rooted largely in the combined influence upon her thought of Existenz philosophy and classical Greek political thought. Inspired by the existentialism of Karl Jaspers, with whom she shared both a concern for human uniqueness and Heidegger as an intellectual foil, Arendt developed her notion of the curiously intangible ‘who’ and then grafted it onto a Greek-influenced image of the polis, adopting the classical demarcation between civic freedom and bodily necessity along the way.9 Both influences, each in their own fashion, restrict the relevance of human corporeality in her conception of political life. While a politics that resists the absorption of human singularity into an anonymous whole is to some extent assured, it is done continually at the expense of bodily existence. It is here that Levinas must enter the discussion, for his conception of a pre-originary relation of responsibility for an Other’s suffering and

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need radically undoes Arendt’s rigid distinction between private and public and enables us to conceive of a politics that, while impelled and indeed guided by demands issuing from bodies, is not fated to a loss of human uniqueness and singularity, but rather gives witness to it. What we have in mind here is a politics provoked by the question of justice, a question rarely addressed by Arendt, and one that in Levinas’s formulation is inextricable from an ethical obligation to singularities whose ‘flesh and blood’ bodies cry in pain. The Levinasian Transgression in Totality and Infinity According to Levinas, the ethical relation is a relation to absolute alterity, a relation in which an Other, a trancendent Other signifying transcendence itself, becomes manifest and makes a certain claim upon us. It is a relation co-eval with language, with discourse.10 It is by way of language, of inter-human discourse, that the Other expresses and makes itself manifest as Other, as a unique ‘face’ that is not a ‘what,’ but a ‘who,’ a singularity that distinguishes itself in word, act and gesture as its very expressing (TI, 177–8). Despite its obvious echoes, this uniquely distinguished ‘who’ is radically ‘otherwise than’ Arendt’s. For her, the ‘who’ remains ever a worldly phenomenon, a uniqueness disclosed by its words and acts. In contrast, the face expressed in discourse – Levinas’s ‘who’ – never truly makes an appearance in the world. For Levinas, the face is ‘not disclosure, but revelation’ and, as revelation, as the very attendance to its own discursive manifestation, it is a kind of signifying that breaks through its very form, which is ‘over and beyond form’ and therefore always also over and beyond the phenomenal world (TI, 65–6). In keeping with this biblically resonant conception, Levinas characterizes one’s relation to an Other, to the face revealed beyond the world, as a pre-original ‘approach’ to a transcendent lowliness and height that signifies the ethical itself. ‘Absent’ from the world, the Other is in ‘exile,’ a ‘stranger, destitute’ and naked – Most Low – and yet, as that which exceeds all representation, all conceptual-sensible grasp, the Other is also infinity, teacher, and lord – Most High (TI, 51, 66, 69–70, 75–6). According to Levinas, this Other – Most Low and Most High – ‘solicits’ and ‘concerns’ one in approach from the first (TI, 51, 200). And as it does, it issues a judgment: a judgment against one’s naive claim to power and possession, against one’s egoistic freedom and temptation to violence, a judgment from on High that commands, ‘You shall not commit murder’ (TI, 51, 75–6, 84). This commandment is, according to

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Levinas, the very ‘first word’ of expression, the revelation of the ‘purely ethical impossibility’ of murder (TI, 199). The Other’s judging command does not merely obstruct one’s freedom or limit it (TI, 199). In truth, it liberates; it frees one’s very freedom from its naive sovereignty and arbitrariness. By putting one’s freedom into question, the Other ‘justifies’ it – invites it to justice, ‘renders it just’ (TI, 83, 84, 88). And in keeping with its justificatory invitation, the Other summons one unexchangeably to responsibility and giving (TI, 75, 199–201). According to Levinas, this summons is the very invocation of one as a singularity. It is through the summons and one’s ‘unshirkable’ and unexchangeable turning toward the Other in justified freedom that one ‘expresses’ and is therefore affirmed – indeed ‘created’ and ‘exalted’ – as a unique ‘I’ (TI, 83, 178, 183, 199–201, 244–5). For Levinas, the relation of the one to the Other consists in this singular solicitation, judgment, and command, in this singular responsibility and gift. With this conception, Levinas himself posits a kind of ‘in-between,’ a relation that is also separation. But unlike the ‘in-between’ we find in Arendt, it is one that is both pre-originary and ethical, and located just beyond, or hither to, the public realm (TI, 299). It is not simply one in which human uniqueness and the world itself appear as a reality in-common as it is for Arendt. Levinas is not as strictly ‘partial to the world’ as Arendt would insist he should be. This is not to say, however, that his ethics is therefore a total worldlessness. After all, worldly things do indeed figure in it, but they do so as things ‘designated’ in discourse to an Other, as things placed in its sphere (TI, 209). In Levinas’s view, the ethical relation occurs always through this interposition of things: the inter-human relation, discourse, is at bottom a ‘primordial dispossession,’ an offering of the ‘world’s contents’ in answer to the Other’s call (TI, 96–7, 173–4).11 And, as such an offering, it is for Levinas the ‘ethical event at the basis of generalization,’ a ‘primordial putting in-common,’ through which we come to share a world (TI, 173). With this idea, we can regard one’s pre-originary offering, one’s partiality first to the Other, to be the event at the origin of Arendt’s own ‘inbetween,’ as that which constitutes the very pre-origin of the public world to which we, in her view, are primarily obligated. If the relation of the one to the Other is indeed pre-originary in this way, it profoundly disturbs Arendt’s conception of the public and the political. For Levinas raises the question whether Arendt’s public-political realm is not in fact pre-originally called to concern and responsibility, a concern and responsibility that, for her, would best be kept private or at least adminis-

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tered out of sight. Yet this is not the only question that Levinas poses for Arendt. Inseparable from it is an equal questioning of her notion of the private. Levinas’s conceptions of sensibility, enjoyment, and dwelling are central here. While they encapsulate the key areas of human existence that, for Arendt, constitute private life – corporeality and the household – they capture at the same time the unsettling of that life, the radical dis-location of the body and the home, the opening of their interiors to the light. Because they are key to understanding more fully Levinas’s transgression of Arendt’s public-political realm, it is to them that we first must turn. Throughout much of his work, Levinas argues that the singularity expressed through one’s unexchangeable responsibility is but the exaltation by the Other of a primordial singularization that one already enjoys. An already separate and unique being is actually required for the ethical relation because it is only in relation to such a being that the Other can truly be Other and totalization be truly refused (TI, 60, 62). In Totality and Infinity this being is conceived in terms of a pre-conscious corporeality immersed in the anonymous elements of existence, a ‘sensibility’ contentedly ‘enjoying’ or ‘living from ...’ life (TI, 131–3, 135). As a withdrawal and interiorization, a turning back of corporeal life upon itself, sensible enjoyment effectuates a break from participation in anonymous Being and establishes one as a separated ‘I’ – a ‘unicity’ (TI, 115, 117–18, 127). Sensible enjoyment is but one aspect of corporeal inner life, however. The ‘I’ is a body that also ‘inhabits and possesses,’ a body that ‘dwells’ (TI, 137). It is therefore a body also in relationship to alterity, to an otherness it can appropriate as property and place in its home. The bodily ‘I’ is already destined beyond mere enjoyment, beyond its ‘animal complacency’ in itself; indeed, it is an ‘I’ whose interior is already ‘shocked,’ already ‘incited’ to relations with an outside (TI, 149). This shock and incitation is ‘announced’ within sensibility itself (TI, 137, 149). It is announced as an other – not the Other of the inter-human, but an other that is a pure indeterminancy, an insecurity that murmurs in the depths of the elemental world (TI, 137, 141–2). This other is ‘lived’ concretely ‘in the instant of enjoyment as the concern for the morrow,’ as a menacing uncertainty in regard to the future (TI, 141–2, 150). Here is the first indication of a primordial unsettling of corporeal interiority. The sensibility whose enjoyment echoes the ‘bliss of being alive’ that Arendt associates with our private metabolism with nature is troubled from the first and immediately aroused to another destination (HC,

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106). The menace of its future opens it to a new dimension, to one wherein the ‘I’ can ‘await and welcome the revelation of transcendence,’ a dimension in which the privacy of interiority – the privacy of bodily and economic existence – is radically unsettled, even undone: the dwelling (TI, 150). The dwelling establishes the ‘foothold’ required for the ‘I’ to ‘recollect’ itself and stave off its uncertainty (TI, 131). It is there that nature is represented and worked into products for possession, into the ‘property’ necessary to ‘postpone’ and ‘reserve’ the unforeseeable alterity that haunts it and afflicts it as a dependence (TI, 152, 158, 160). As indeed the ‘condition for all property’ and for interiority itself, the dwelling is for Levinas both a ‘private’ and ‘economic’ domain, a conception he shares clearly with Arendt (TI, 131–2, 152, 154). For Levinas, however, it is a domain put into question by Height from the first. To be sure, the first Other in regard to the dwelling is the face of the ‘feminine,’ the ‘welcoming one par excellence,’ but Levinas does not rest with this ‘discrete’ and private face, the one whose ‘secret’ expression confers upon things the intimate familiarity required for the ‘I’ to feel at home (TI, 150–1, 154–5, 157). He insists at the same time upon another moment in the home: the encounter with Height, the very opening of the domocile to the transcendent Other. With recollection and dwelling, ‘discourse about the world takes form’ (TI, 139). Indeed, all that proceeds from recollection in the dwelling – need, labour, appropriation, representation – presupposes discourse; they are all ‘founded on language as a relation among men’ (TI, 139). Founded on language – that is, on the inter-human relation – they are thus always also founded on a relation to transcendence, to Height (TI, 139). Height is their primordial condition of possibility. The very ‘suspension or postponement of dependence’ that need entails, and that makes labour and appropriation possible, ‘presupposes’ Height; it presupposes Height’s time, the ‘uncharted future’ of the Other (TI, 116–17, 166, 170). From this time comes the temporal intervals required by need and labour to distance human egoism from the elemental alterity upon which it depends (TI, 117). Only ‘by virtue of the human body raised upwards, committed in the direction of height’ does human egoism ‘have time’ to rise above ‘pure nature,’ above the alterity of what it ‘lives from ...,’ and dwell as a separated being (TI, 117). A similar commitment to Height is presupposed by representation. For the ‘I’ to represent to itself the elemental ‘non-I’ – that is, regard it qua thing and thereby situate itself ‘absolutely’ above it – the ‘I’ must in

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fact ‘free’ itself from ‘the very possession’ established by the ‘welcome of the home’ and the proprietary grasp of labour (TI, 158, 171, 174). Things derive their first independence as things only when they no longer belong to the ‘I,’ only when, as Levinas puts it, ‘I know how to give what I possess’ (TI, 158, 162, 171, 174). But to know this, Levinas argues, the ‘I’ ‘must encounter the indiscreet face of the Other’; it must rise upwards to the Height that calls it into question, that ‘contests’ and ‘paralyzes’ its possession (TI, 171). Only then is representation, and one’s absolute elevation above the ‘non-I,’ possible. Now, if the ‘I’ who dwells always presupposes a relation to transcendence, if indeed, as Levinas says, ‘[r]ecollection in a home open to the Other – hospitality – is the concrete and initial fact of human recollection and separation,’ then one’s private domain, one’s feeling-at-home-withoneself, is clearly also a not-feeling-at-home, an immediate unsettling and dis-location (TI, 172; our emphasis). The door that bounds interiority and the domain of the private, the door that Arendt strains to secure, is always at once both ‘open and closed,’ a door swinging open in dispossession and giving (TI, 148). The Transgression in Otherwise than Being In Otherwise than Being we find an even more radical unsettling of the private, this time in regard to sensibility itself, to the very corporeality of the ‘I.’ Here, sensibility is conceived not only as enjoyment and feeling at home with oneself, but also as a radical exposure. As ‘an exposure to wounding and to enjoyment, an exposure to wounding in enjoyment,’ sensibility is now a radical susceptibility to both pleasure and pain: it is exposedness and vulnerability itself (OTB, 64). As exposedness and vulnerability, the immediacy of the sensible indeed entails the ‘ease of enjoyment,’ the complacency ‘of life loving life,’ but it entails ‘at the same time’ a ‘coring out’ of that enjoyment, a ‘noncoinciding’ of the complacent ego with itself, its denucleation, a radically passive openness/opening to otherness (OTB, 64). Immersion and incarnation in the elements is already an obsessive contact with alterity that entails a traumatic exposure to an Other from the first. For, as Levinas argues, it involves a contact with things in a world already human, with things that already ‘bear the trace of an invisible face,’ an incarnation in a ‘plot’ in which one is ‘bound to others’ even ‘before being tied to [one’s] body’ (OTB, 76–7, 191). The ‘immediacy of the sensible,’ Levinas now says, ‘is the immediacy of enjoyment and its

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frustration’; it is ‘living from ...’ in happiness but also immediately a ‘hemorrhage,’ an unshirkable opening to the Other that is a becoming for-the-Other, a substitution, the bearing of responsibility for the Other in one’s very skin that turns enjoyment inside out in a giving (OTB, 55– 6, 64, 69, 72, 74).12 Sensibility is in this radical way a ‘living from ...’ and dwelling in the world already unsettled, already ‘delivered over’ to a transcendent Other (OTB, 138–9). It is an interiority that always already ‘loses its place,’ ‘dislocates,’ and ‘empties itself’ in a ‘no-grounds,’ an interiority that holds onto itself as an ‘I’ only ‘in the trace of its exile’ (OTB, 138). This conception of the ‘I’ as exilic trace profoundly unsettles Arendt’s category of the private. For, while inwardness remains in this trace, it is an inwardness ‘not at all like a way of disposing of private matters’: it is rather an ‘inwardness without secrets,’ a ‘prophetic witness’ in saying to the ‘glory’ of an inordinateness that ‘already commands,’ a glory that leaves no ‘refuge’ or ‘hiding place’ (OTB, 138, 144, 149). Corporeal interiority, the ‘I,’ cannot find rest in privacy, cannot be fully at home, because it is always already exposed to this inordinateness and unsettled by the exile it provokes. In Totality and Infinity this unsettling of interiority and privacy, this dis-location and dispossession, is in fact a ‘primordial putting incommon,’ the ethical event at the basis of a shared world. Elaborating on this point in terms even more reminiscent of Arendt, Levinas states that ‘everything that takes place “between us,”’ between one and the Other, ‘concerns everyone, the face that looks at it places itself in the full light of the public order’ (TI, 212). The ‘epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity’; it is ‘a presence of the Third Party,’ the look of a ‘we,’ a plurality (TI, 213). Levinas develops this idea in his later work, stating that the one-for-the-other is a relation immediately ‘troubled’ by the ‘third,’ by one who is ‘other than the neighbour but also another neighbour and also a neighbour of the Other’ (OTB, 157).13 The face that one welcomes is always also the face of faces, the face of a humanity that is not a ‘genus,’ but rather a ‘fraternity’ of singularities tied about the ‘diachrony of the two’ (OTB, 159). And according to Levinas, this fraternity, this pre-original plurality, ‘obsesses’ one ‘from the first’; it commands a responsibility without limit that gives birth to a question, what he calls the question: the ‘question of justice’ (OTB, 159; PP, 168). Faced now by faces, one must immediately ask: What have the Others already done to one another? What then are the Other and Others with respect to one another? What am I to do? And as an Other now to

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Others (‘thanks to God’), what do I have to do with justice? According to Levinas, this question is the primordial event that makes consciousness – thinking, measure, comparison, thematization, and judgment – necessary (PP, 168; OTB, 157–8, 160–1). It makes necessary that the ‘diachrony of proximity’ enter into concepts and synthesis, into ‘the synchrony of the said,’ that the face become enigmatically both ‘visage and visible,’ comparable and incomparable, that the for-another ‘show itself’ as ‘co-existence and correlation’ and appear as a ‘historical world’ (OTB, 160, 162). The question of justice not only ‘requires’ this ‘phenomenality,’ but as an ‘event of fundamental historicity,’ it inaugurates it (OB, 160, 163). It is the ‘origin of appearing’ itself, the ‘very origin of an origin’ and, as such, the very pre-origin of what Arendt calls the public realm (OTB, 160, 163; our emphasis). The question of justice is an event that thrusts concern for suffering and need into politics. Justice is an event that calls for a politics that is itself radically hospitable, that ‘welcomes in the wretched,’ that does not seal the door against what Arendt calls the private, that is, bodily need and the economic. The human world in-common ‘presupposes economy’; it is a world that is not homogeneous or abstract, but one ‘where it is necessary to aid and to give’ – to aid and give ‘economically’ (TI, 173, 216). Justice, for Levinas, entails economic justice. Justice demands a placing of things and works – material things and works – in the sphere of the Other and Others for their sake. It demands a concrete response to their destitution and nakedness, to their exiling. For Levinas these words are more than metaphorical. ‘Destitute,’ ‘exiled,’ ‘naked,’ ‘widow,’ ‘orphan,’ ‘stranger,’ and ‘proletarian’ all are tropes – biblical and non-biblical – used to describe that which transcends description and yet is profoundly concrete at the same time: human creatures in real pain. It is the suffering inflicted by oppression and exploitation, imperialism and terror, genocide and war, that demands justice (PP, 163). In such suffering, people are stripped down, de-nuded by a pain that, according to Levinas, surpasses the very experience of the pain itself, for inscribed in that experience, in its sensorial content, is something that exceeds all apprehension and any sense that could ever be made of it: something ‘unassumable,’ the ‘unassumability’ of suffering itself, a pure unjustifiable ‘undergoing,’ an extreme ‘helplessness, abandonment and solitude.’14 At first glance, such suffering – a condemnation ‘to itself, with no way out’ – seems closed to any ethical, let alone political, relation (US, 93). It seems an inescapable privacy and worldlessness in the Arendtian sense, a banishment to darkness (HC,

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50–1). For Levinas, however, there is in fact a beyond to this darkness, the possibility of a ‘half-opening’ through which the ‘original call for aid’ – a ‘moan, a cry, a groan or sigh’ – may slip and open it to the ethical dimension of the inter-human (HC, 50–1; US, 93–4). It is in the exposure of bodies that seem to ‘cry, sob and scream,’ the exposure of them in their unjustifiable suffering ‘to me,’ that the very nakedness of the face and ‘precariousness of the Other’ is expressed (US, 93; PP, 167). It is in the other person ‘absolutely stripped’ as other by exploitation or analogous violence that the pre-original cry for responsibility and justice is heard.15 In that cry, the privacy of pain is undone. It forbids suffering to remain a hidden, solitary affair or even a ‘social’ one administered by technicians behind closed doors. With a body laid bare and low by political-economic structures and processes, the face demands a political-economic response, one ordered to political-economic justice in the full light of the public. Prophetic Politics Justice calls for thinking and synthesis, a comparison of incomparibles; it calls for judgment. For Levinas, such judgment requires ‘institutions to arbitrate and a political authority’ to support it; that is, justice, as political (and economic) justice, ‘requires and establishes the state.’16 Of course, the state he has in mind is not one ‘delivered over to its own necessities,’ to its own techniques, legality and reason, but rather one in which its institutions, exchanges, and works are ‘comprehensible’ out of, or ‘begin with,’ proximity (OTB, 159). Such a state would be ‘controlled’ in a certain sense by responsibility, by a vigilance for the Other that recalls ethics as the true origin of legitimacy for all its laws and institutions (OTB, 159; PP, 169). Levinas is aware here not only of the importance of establishing structures supportive of a politics that respects human uniqueness in its plurality, an awareness he shares with Arendt, but also of the ever-present danger of any such structures ‘having their center of gravitation in themselves’ and ‘weighing on their own account’ (OTB, 159). His vision is of a political justice that ‘does not abandon uniqueness to political history,’ a justice that ‘awaits the voices that will recall, to the judgments of the judges and statesmen, the human face dissimulated beneath the identities of citizens’ (U, 196). By these voices Levinas means the ‘prophetic’ ones, voices that proclaim ‘the possibility of unforeseen acts of kindness of which the I is still capable in its uniqueness,’ voices that protest and resist the forgetting of

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the Other and remind the judges and statesmen that ‘justice is always a revision of justice,’ the ‘expectation of a better justice’ (U, 196). The prophetic is a voice of critique. It is heard ‘sometimes in the songs of the poets’ and ‘in the press or in the public forum of liberal states,’ but it is, we suggest, most politically radical when, ‘independently of official authority,’ it shouts from the very ‘interstices of politics,’ from the crevices where we might say ethics and politics touch most closely, where the voice is pre-eminently ethical and political (U, 196). In our view, these interstitial spaces constitute the key junctures where ethics irrupts into the public-political realm, where prophetic words and deeds, in giving witness to the Other, bring responsibility (and the concern for justice) most profoundly to the historical, political world. This claim must be qualified only a little. That Levinas insists upon the an-archy of the one-for-the-Other and its refusal of historical synchronization should not be forgotten. However, he does not at all deny that the ‘unlimited responsibility for another ... could have translation into history’s concreteness,’ that certain ‘utopias of conscience’ that resound with the Other’s an-archic solicitation and command could in fact be ‘historically fulfilled’ and witnessed in the world.17 ‘Utopia of conscience,’ we suggest here, names the space of prophetic words and deeds that opens like a ‘no-place’ on the fracture line of the ethical and political. Such utopias open not only in conversation, that is, among interlocuters concerned about, or ‘held hostage’ by, a concrete situation of suffering, but also, we suggest, in public-political acts. Levinas’s own, albeit heavily qualified, remarks regarding the youth movements of 1968 indicate a willingness to regard certain political actions in just this way (II, 242–3).18 Insofar as these actions embody a ‘concrete praxis of concern for the Other,’ inasmuch as their constitutive words and deeds constitute works in service (work and service: habodah in Hebrew, diakonia in Greek) to those laid bare and low, they bring responsibility and the concern for justice into history and politics, into ‘political history,’ and, in doing so, pronounce judgment upon the works that this virile history has imperiously deemed fit to survive (II, 238; D, 33).19 The prophetic actor, the one who brings the cry of suffering and judgment of justice to the historical world, originates in an-archy. He originates in the an-archic ‘Here I am,’ which, for Levinas, signifies the one created/delivered over to the Other ‘in the name of God, in the service of men,’ the witness to glory in the trace of exile (OTB, 149). As the very provocation and invocation of subjectivity in proximity, a

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saying otherwise than being, the ‘Here I am’ signifies a creature radically out of order, not only with regard to itself, but with the world. Prophetic words and deeds, what Levinas would call the ‘prophetic said,’ echo this saying, this witness-out-of-joint (OTB, 170). Even as they thematize and concretize it in history, they tremble with its an-archic dis-order and are indebted to it. For it is only by virtue of the foranother and the exilic ‘Here I am’ that the prophetic actor is himself out of order and sufficiently free20 to judge the historical world for the sake of the wretched and imagine what new and better life could be ‘under the sun’ for them.21 It is only from out of this exile, this ‘no-place’ of proximity and responsibility, that the prophetic actor might critically discern what is to be said and done both in response to suffering in its concrete immediacy and in expectation and demand of a greater justice. The judgment that begins with proximity, here called discernment, is not one by which ‘particular cases’ are subsumed ‘under a general rule’ (OTB, 159). It operates more reflectively. In it, responsibility, an anarchy without a principle or even the ‘semelfacticity of a unique exemplar,’ becomes, by virtue of the exigency of justice, a ‘search for a principle’ (OTB, 56, 100, 161; our emphasis). With this nod to Kant, Levinas in fact comes quite close to Arendt. Pushing them even closer, we suggest that this judgment seeks a principle in the Arendtian sense: one that inspires and guides just action.22 One such principle is solidarity. For Arendt, solidarity – the only principle she identifies that refers directly to human suffering – is that which orients action to the deliberate establishment of ‘a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited’ (OR, 88–9). In her view, it is a principle that ‘remains committed to “ideas”: to greatness, honour,’ the ‘dignity of man’ in general; ‘aroused by suffering,’ but ‘not guided by it,’ it looks ‘dispassionately’ upon the ‘strong and the rich ... the weak and the poor’ with ‘an equal eye’ (OR, 88–9). Levinas, quite rightly, does not assimilate solidarity to an abstract and indifferent equality as Arendt does here. In making asymmetrical, unequal obligation to the wretched the very ‘condition for all solidarity,’ he provides a crucial corrective (OTB, 102, 117). Incessantly disturbed by this obligation, its own arche continually undone, solidarity in the Levinasian sense would be a ‘principle’ that, although aspiring to equality, never finds rest in it; that always calls the abstract indifference of equality into question. The words and deeds inspired and guided by such an unsettledunsettling, prophetic principle are necessarily public. Prophecy, from the Greek profemi, means, in one sense, ‘to speak out before someone,’

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before the people. This is the sense prophetic witness necessarily assumes when translated into the concreteness of history. Prophetic action is a public proclamation. When activists march upon a vacant piece of private property to claim it for the homeless, they publicly pronounce judgment upon an order that permits the literal closing of doors to the destitute, to the orphans and strangers.23 They do not presume as Arendt does that the need for decent housing is only a ‘social’ matter, a necessity upon which we obviously all agree and for which we assume a technical-administrative resolution to be appropriate. Having recognized that matters such as homelessness will likely be accepted with complacency insofar as they remain relegated to the shadowy wings of the public-political stage, activists are impelled to make them public. And as they do so, most often in conflict with those who guard the existing public order, they announce the possibility of a new ordering of the world, one that puts into question the very privacy of property for the sake of those who suffer by it. This is the radical political implication of Levinas’s thought: if there is to be greater justice, public-political action must tremble with this kind of witness. Just public-political action – prophetic action – actually has little choice in this regard. Prophetic actors do not ‘choose their company,’ those with whom they share the world: they are chosen. The space that they share is one opened by exile, an exile opened to the exiled and invoked by them. And those who stand in it are not first ‘obligated’ and ‘indebted’ to – ‘responsible’ for – the public world itself, as actors and judges are in Arendt’s thinking.24 They are pre-originally responsible for, obligated and indebted to, Others who suffer and, therefore, are always already called to order worldly spaces to them.25 This pre-original obligation and debt, although prior to our commitment to the world and incessantly disruptive of the worldly order, does not necessarily lead to the boundless violence that Arendt believes likely when responsibility for suffering becomes the guide to action. The obligation of which Levinas speaks is in no way based in the clandestine sentiments or instincts that, in Arendt’s view, drive (anti-)political rage (OTB, 111–12, 125). Rather, obligation is that which in fact puts into question such clandestinity and the self-righteous brutality it may harbour. It is an obligation through which we rise upward from the dark recesses of interiority, from potentially murderous egoism, to the light of justice. And to the extent that prophetic action recalls this an-archic obligation and upward direction, it will put into question its temptation to raging violence in its struggle to bring

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justice about. Arising from the interstices that are at once political and ethical, it always hearkens back to the an-archic call, the unshirkable command and welcome, from which a world in-common, free from violence, pre-originally begins.

NOTES 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 41, 176, 181, 183; hereafter cited as HC. Hannah Arendt, Between Past And Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 4, 223; hereafter cited as BPF. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1977), 217. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1973), 301. 4 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 212–13; hereafter cited as OR. 5 Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 64–5. 6 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt,’ in Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), 317–19. 7 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 65. 8 See The Origins of Totalitarianism, 453. 9 See Lewis Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, ‘Existentialism Politicized: Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers,’ in L.P. Hinchman and S.K. Hinchman, eds, Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 143–78, for a discussion of the influence of Jaspers and Heidegger on Arendt, as well as of the problems arising from the assimilation of Existenz philosophy to classical Greek thought. 10 Language, Levinas says, presupposes the inter-human and therefore ‘implies transcendence’ from the first. This idea persists into Levinas’s later works where transcendence is located in an an-archic ‘saying’ within a ‘said.’ See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 73; hereafter cited as TI. See also Levinas, Otherwise than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 37–8, 43–50; hereafter cited as OTB. 11 Arendt too speaks of an interposition of things ‘in-between.’ The disclosure of the subject ‘in-between’ is integral to a ‘physical, worldly in-

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between’ in which objective interests are articulated: ‘[M]ost words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent.’ Some commentators such as Hanna Fenicel Pitkin (‘Justice: On Relating Private and Public,’ in Hinchman and Hinchman, eds, Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays) argue that this is another instance of ambiguity in Arendt, that it suggests her politics may allow for deliberation over social and economic matters. Again, however, we hold that Arendt’s overall conception severely restricts and militates against this possibility, agreeing with Pitkin that Arendt has too little to say about justice. In her contribution to this volume, Mielle Chandler explores ‘hemorrhage’ in terms of maternity and the fecundation of the political. Her work highlights what we could call the ‘feminine’ dimension of the private – a dimension we have not addressed – and points to the potential of the feminine to open politics to modes of being beyond virility and domination and entrapment in the whole. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity,’ in Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 168; hereafter cited as PP. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering,’ in Entre Nous (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91, 92–4; hereafter cited as US. Levinas’s description of the exploited proletarian as ‘stripped’ and ‘deformed’ to formlessness, ‘beyond the simple changing of form’ suggests that the suffering body indeed expresses, puts the self in question, and deposes it for the Other. See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ideology and Idealism,’ in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 243; hereafter cited as II. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Uniqueness,’ in Entre Nous, 195–6; hereafter cited as U. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Questions and Answers,’ Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 81. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘No Identity,’ Collected Philosophical Papers (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 150–1, and Levinas, ‘Dialogue,’ in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 33; hereafter cited as D. In his contribution to this volume, Enrique Dussel speaks also of criticalpolitical praxis in terms of Habodah, emphasizing its positive, constructive aspect, an aspect that Levinas does not adequately explore. Dussel’s argument is an important complement to our own. At the risk of conflating freedom in regard to an intentional act with the freedom invested by assignation in the for-another (‘created freedom’), we

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suggest that the prophetic actor is gifted with a freedom itself out of joint with the world by virtue of his an-archic being ‘held hostage’ by Others, that his freedom to regard the world ‘otherwise’ is owed to the ‘anarchic liberation ... brought out without being assumed’ in proximity and substitution. See OTB, 123–5. 21 ‘Newness,’ Levinas says, ‘comes from the Other.’It is through the Other that newness itself signifies transcendence and comes forth into being to interrupt history and the whole ontological order. Only because of the transcendent Other and the an-archic newness it brings into the world can there be ‘something new under the sun,’ something other than the injustice wrought by the existing totality. This newness is inseparable from the ‘Here I am,’ from the ‘anachronous birth’ of a unique subjectivity in proximity. The ‘Here I am’ is a newness created in newness and opened to it. We have here, perhaps, a kind of an-archic natality, one critical to a critical prophetic politics. Chandler’s notion of political fecundity may provide help in developing this idea. See OTB, 139–40, 182 and II, 245. 22 In our view, one influenced by Arendt, this judgment would involve reflection upon particular instances of pain and injustice in the context of human plurality. It would entail a sharing of perspectives, a patient speaking and listening among those who suffer and suffer for the suffering of others, a deliberative discourse in which every interlocutor is called to recall their irreplaceable substitution for another and their ever-expanding responsibility. It would involve a ‘putting oneself into the place of others,’ but in a way ‘otherwise than’ Arendt’s; it would be comprehensible only out of proximity and occur in and through – for the sake of – justice. 23 John Hout, a witness to such an action in Toronto, Canada, stated, ‘The building being squatted at 1510 King Street West is a four-storey building abandoned a few years ago by its numbered-company owner after he had run up a large unpaid property tax bill and ignored many city work orders. It looks, smells and feels like a “hell-hole,” the refuge of the outcast: survivors of unemployment, the refugee and immigration system and the mental health system. It took well-developed “eyes to see and ears to hear” to discern a sign of hope for the poor in 1510 King Street West. Since the squat began, the building has been cleaned up and a garden planted ... The mood Sunday morning was determined, but still tense: the day before, the police tactical squad had demanded to search the squat for a reported weapon. We spent 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. “under the tent” (makeshift tarpaulin covers) sheltered from heavy downpour. A few of the younger activists were sleeping on several sofas in the large backyard of

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the squat, but most younger folk were asleep somewhere else, having been up until the wee hours. As the downpour continued, the tarps kept slipping, and torrents of water rolled onto those of us huddled underneath. People were holding up the tarps with outstretched umbrellas and lumber. I thought of God embracing this place and people, “pitching his tent among us” (John 1.14) , of the living water Jesus promised (John 4.14), of “justice rolling down like waters” in the words of Amos, the peasant prophet from Bethlehem.’ John Huot, ‘Solidarity Sunday at the Pope Squat,’ Catholic New Times, 8 September 2002: 13. 24 See Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,’ in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1968), 3, 5, 16. 25 They are called also to found such spaces. As Dussel argues, there is a positive, constructive dimension to critical-political praxis. It is a praxis through which new institutions (and spaces) are created – in our view, public-political institutions and spaces like those praised by Arendt, but also, and crucially, public-political-economic ones. Such creations constitute the germs of a new, just order, securing – even if only tenuously – a worldly place for words and deeds that recall the Other’s judging command and one’s unexchangeable welcome.

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Can Fig Trees Grow on Mountains? Reversing the Question of Great Politics BRIAN SCHROEDER

One must be skilled in living on mountains – seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent. Friedrich Nietzsche1 The highest duty, when ‘all is permitted,’ consists in feeling oneself responsible with regard to these values of peace. In not concluding, in a universe at war, that warlike virtues are the only sure ones ... in living dangerously only to remove dangers and to return to the shade of one’s own vine and fig tree. Emmanual Levinas2

Levinas’s importance with respect to the questions of politics and the political lies in his radical reassessment of the historically troublesome relation between ethics and politics and his invocation of the third (le tiers) as the instantiating moment of justice. He propels thinking forward with a simultaneous reversal, a turn back to the history of philosophy. With respect to the notion of subjectivity, particularly ethical and political subjectivity, the philosophies of Plato, Nietzsche, and Levinas constitute major turning points in the history of ideas, while at the same time advancing a continuous line of thought of which a common thread is the relation between command and obedience. 1. Of Friends and Foes Perhaps the best guide for weaving this not so smoothly spun thread is Jacques Derrida, whose own recent writing is accented by an emphasis

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on the political. To this effect he has increasingly engaged and drawn upon the work of Levinas, yet in what is arguably his most concerted statement on the political, Politics of Friendship, Derrida takes as his explicit starting point Nietzsche’s ironic reversal in Human All Too Human of Aristotle’s famous alleged statement, bequeathed by Diogenes Laertius, ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’3 Around this Derrida develops his long meditation on ‘the question of friendship as the question of the political. The question of the political, for this question is not necessarily, nor in advance, political. It is perhaps not yet or no longer thoroughly political, once the political is defined with the features of a dominant tradition.’4 The deconstruction of the question of the political, however, lies neither in the intellectual moves of any past philosopher nor of Derrida himself. Rather, the question itself is called into question by the very act of questioning, always an act to come, determined by the undecidability of the future, or what Levinas refers to as ‘eschatology.’ Rejecting Heidegger’s assertion that ‘Being itself is inherently eschatological,’5 Levinas claims that ‘history is not an eschatology’ since it is a relation beyond the totality,6 thereby seemingly precluding the sociopolitical state as an eschatological possibility. Eschatology, which promises messianic peace as a way of existing, is opposed by Levinas to the political being of ontology. Generally distrusted because it is based on opinion and not on the evidences of reason, eschatology establishes a primordial relation with being: the ethical saying (le dire) in the ontological order of the said (le dit). According to an early criticism by Derrida, however, it is precisely this discourse that eclipses the promise of messianic peace: ‘[E]schatology is not possible, except through violence. This infinite passage through violence is called history.’7 Perhaps Levinas takes Derrida’s critique to heart. In an enigmatic passage toward the end of Otherwise than Being, he states: ‘The totality that includes all eschatology and every interruption could have been closed if it were silence, if silent discourse were possible, if a writing could remain silent forever, if it could, without losing its meaning, renounce all the tradition that bears it and interprets it.’8 Does Levinas modify his stance on totality here, from that which is capable of a rupture by the infinitely other to that which is open to the possibility of eschatological realization? Levinas is well aware of the violent economy of the totality, but is it naive to equate, as many of his interpreters have done, the totality with violence itself? This depends on how one interprets violence. Is all violence negative, or undesirable? Or is negation, as Hegel and Nietzsche have so forcefully demonstrated, necessary for affirmation? If peace is

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ethical affirmation par excellence, then is it, at least partially, contingent on the negation, denial, refusal – the overcoming – of that which is not affirmative? Perhaps eschatology is the very affirmation of apocalypse. Perhaps this is Nietzsche’s great advance, his overcoming of ontotheological metaphysics, in other words, his concretization of what is only abstractly, formally, logically accomplished in Hegel’s speculative dialectics. The eschatological realization of this overcoming, however, is not fully articulated until the advent of Levinas’s philosophy, and it is from this standpoint that eschatology both actualizes and signals a departure from the apocalyptic climate of history (or is it now prehistory?), opening the horizon to the future with the great Yes. Is this not the meaning of religion as ‘a-theism,’ in the sense presented by Levinas? Now a concern of Derrida’s is the relation between the orgiastic, Platonic, and Christian mysteries: ‘Platonic mystery thus incorporates orgiastic mystery and Christian mystery represses Platonic mystery.’9 The Platonic ‘incorporation’ of orgiastic mystery is a subordination of the orgiastic to an ‘essentially political dimension’10 of responsibility, a dimension refused by traditional Christian apocalyptic theology with its emphasis on the mysterium tremendum. ‘This aporia of responsibility would thus define the relation between the Platonic and Christian paradigms throughout the history of morality and politics.’11 In other words, this is the paradoxical tension of Christian apocalypticism: on the one hand, Christian mystery and theology, which is to say, apocalyptic eschatology, has traditionally excluded the political from consideration as the form or embodiment of that mystery; yet, on the other hand, Christian polity has long been pre-eminently socially and politically oriented. This is the aporia of responsibility, the moira of the morality of contemporary (Christian) culture. This is also the aspect of Christianity that Nietzsche confronts with his vision of the Übermensch, revealed in the event of God’s death as the apocalyptic eschaton. Nietzsche poses to the present its deepest ethical wager: to affirm with the sacred Yes of the will the finitude and ultimate darkness of immanent existence. Thus is it that Nietzsche’s thinking takes up the possibility of a ‘great politics’ (den grossen Politik),12 fully confronting the genuine crisis of late modernity – nihilism. Is this a politics that perhaps can also be named, following Levinas, an eschatological, or ethical, politics? Over a century has passed now since Nietzsche beckoned ‘we new philosophers’ and ‘free spirits’ to wander into the ‘godless deserts,’13 to

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become the ‘philosophers of the present and the future, not in theory but in praxis, in practice.’14 But what exactly does he mean here? Aristotle was the first to develop philosophically the notion of praxis, the relation between ethics and politics, but he also wrote that theôria is the highest form of praxis. If we are to take Nietzsche at his word, this is not what he means as the ideal for the philosophers to come. Derrida incisively situates his study on friendship and the political in this very tension between one who was known by many during the past millennium as The Philosopher and one who has been denounced by many the past century as the mad enemy of philosophy. Yet Derrida asks his readers to suspend, for a moment at any rate, their attention on the difference between sagacious and foolish proclamations and focus on the undecidability attending the small word ‘perhaps’ with which Nietzsche announces his eschatological desire. It is significant that besides the word ‘perhaps’ Derrida also emphasizes in Nietzsche’s text the words ‘will come’: ‘Perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim: “Friends, there are no friends” ... “Foes, there are no foes” ...’ How is this ‘will come’ to be interpreted? Certainly the ‘joyful hour’ is most welcome, but is this a resigned ‘well, come,’ a come what will, or may? Two small words, conjoined, perhaps impossibly, but whose meaning, here, cannot be ascertained separately. Yet, they do not mean the same thing and this difference is vital. The sense of certainty accompanying Nietzsche’s phrase ‘will come’ is immediately postponed before its saying is reduced to the said by his word ‘perhaps.’ Postponed, but necessarily not necessarily postponed. Willing in Nietzsche’s thinking never implies certitude, though it does denote necessity. Despite his often cited but equally often misunderstood notions of chance and chaos, amor fati is the affirmation that events necessarily are as they are, or will be as they will be. How they are or will be, though, is determined by the act of willing, by the will to power. To borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, willing maps events, not traces them. To will is to compel, to actuate itself as force. Is Nietzsche saying then that perhaps the philosophers to come must necessarily force the future, if indeed they are the ‘genuine philosophers’15 to come? In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes of ‘the compulsion toward great politics’ (den Zwang zur grossen Politik).16 The politics of the future will come, perhaps, as a ‘great politics.’ However, the undecidability here lies not only in the whether of this event but in the what of this, one assumes, new politics. But what makes ‘great politics’ great, and why

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great and not just different? An all too simple, ready, and inadequate answer appeals to the present-day phenomenon of globalization as corroborating the world hermeneutics announced in Nietzsche’s philosophy. But the advent of the ‘new “infinite”’17 is not primarily concerned with expanding geopolitical and economic boundaries. Its quantitative dimension pertains to quanta of active and reactive force but only insofar as these forces, or wills, affect the qualitative ordering of affirmative and negative expressions of the will to power, that is to say, of life. In other words, the quality, the typology, of the community of the new philosophers is what is at stake here. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra urges his listeners, ‘[L]et us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods.’18 Interestingly, this exhortation, seemingly all too apropos to the subject matter of Politics of Friendship, finds no place per se among Derrida’s numerous references and citations from Nietzsche on the relation between friendship and enmity. Perhaps Derrida merely glossed over them by chance. Or, perhaps, they were deemed implied in Nietzsche’s other pronouncements. Then again, just perhaps, they were deliberately passed over. However, Derrida does draw on similar words from the very same text: ‘At least be my enemy! (Sei wenigstens mein Feind!).’19 Is this to say the same thing? In the first instance, the tone, if nothing else, conveys a sense of abundant affirmation: it calls out to one’s friends to be something other, something besides what they already are; it entreats, out of the fullness of friendship, one’s friends to be what they are not, to be that which friendship normally asks them precisely not to be – enemies. To say ‘At least be my enemy!’ implies not a hyperextension of friendship to the already friend, but rather an imploring to be at least something if the capacity for friendship is not possible. There is a distinct difference between these two very similar invitations, one that is perhaps best and most simply explained by the fact that the second is addressed to ‘woman,’ whom Zarathustra thrice declares is incapable of friendship. So, better to be an enemy, that is, to be recognized, than not to be a friend? Perhaps. It is not, however, the intention here to follow either Nietzsche or Derrida down this complicated path of the ‘question of woman.’ But it is worth noting Derrida on the matter of the five words in question (‘At least be my enemy!’): ‘Conclusion: if you want a friend, you must wage war on him, and in order to wage war, you must be capable of it, capable of having a “best enemy.”’20 Why? Because this is the condition of freedom, which, when added to equality, implies friendship. But not just any type of friendship. The union of freedom and equality is, on this account, the

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condition of the possibility of the community of the friendship to come, a friendship whose arrival is always, necessarily, unfinished: the friendship of democracy. And so does Derrida conclude his Politics of Friendship with the incomplete words, denoted by an ellipsis, ‘O my democratic friends ...’ Two similar yet decidedly different supplications: ‘Let us be enemies too, my friends!’; ‘At least be my friend!’ The first expresses an active will, the second a will more passive, again at least in tone (and though the second is also punctuated by an exclamation mark, this is a sign of desperation, not of power). Does the first exhortation to the friends to be also enemies, though, actually reverse Nietzsche’s reversal of Aristotle’s famous alleged declaration, ‘O my friends, there is no friend’? And what of the second statement, the one addressed to woman? Derrida comments on the latter but not the former. Does this provide a meaningful clue as to how to interpret the conclusion of his frequently enigmatic series of lectures? Is the utterance ‘O my democratic friends ...’ an exhalation of resignation to an admittedly impossible realization of community, or is it the beseeching of others, of ourselves, to bring about, to will, this future state? Or both? Somewhere, somehow, in the midst of this possible reversal the present meditation on great politics will be situated, opening the fecund field of friendship to include a brief consideration of a type of friendship – heroic friendship – and what constitutes this type and distinguishes it from other forms. Part of Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise is to recover what he perceives as a near defunct sense of the heroic ideal as it was valorized among the ancient Greeks. Perhaps the distinguishing mark above all else of this type of heroism was the element of dangerous risk, the risk of personal death for an ideal, a cause, a desire, or for a friend. To die for another is considered by most accounts the apex of heroism. It is also the epitome of friendship. Can a parallel be drawn between Hellenic heroism and Levinasian substitution, the ‘one for the other’? What would it mean to die, not because of one’s enemy, as would normally be expected, but for one’s enemy? Is the question even reasonable to ask? Does not such a question reverse everything that we hold true about the enemy? And about the meaning of meaningful death itself? Would not such a sacrifice be the act of a fool and not of a heroic, much less wise, person? Most importantly for our purposes here, what is the possible relation between this dying for another, even if that other is the enemy, and Levinas’s critical notion of ethical substitution for the Other? This will be taken up later.

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Now it is impossible to discuss the Aristotelian philosophy without some reference to the Platonic, and Derrida draws our attention thither, framing the latter primarily in the context of Carl Schmitt’s disturbing analysis on the status of the enemy. Examining first the dialogues Lysis, Symposium, and Menexenus, Derrida engages Plato’s political masterwork Republic, opening the passage to this work by reference to ‘a sort of hyperbolic build-up that is perhaps the very origin of good and evil, both beyond being ... a hyperbole qua the difference between good and evil, the friend and the enemy, peace and war.’21 Within this hyperbolic difference, in which one of the two primary origins of Western philosophy is grounded, lies the trajectory for the question of who is properly called the friend, a question answerable only with respect to that of who is the enemy. If the question Who is the enemy? is really Who is my enemy? then the logic of identification proceeds ‘from “calling into question” to calling oneself into question’: ‘The enemy in question is he who calls into question, but he can call into question only someone who can call himself into question. One can be called into question only in calling oneself into question. The enemy is oneself, I myself am my own enemy. This concept of “one’s own enemy” at once confirms and contradicts everything Schmitt has said about the enemy up to now ... Who can put me into question? Myself alone. “Or my brother.” Oder mein Bruder.’22 This is the decisive moment in Politics of Friendship, analogous in its own way to the end of book VI and the beginning of book VII in Republic, wherein a paradigmatic discursive shift occurs. In Plato’s masterwork, it marks the ascent into the light of the Good/sun, only to correspondingly commence the descent down the line/cave into a consideration of the various constitutions of political governance. Likewise, in Derrida, the earlier reflections on the form of the friend and the enemy give way to a similar reversal, or ‘recoil,’23 bringing the question closer to home, as it were, and literally so, in revealing the enemy as properly my enemy, and moreover, as myself, or my brother. Henceforth the question of is that of the political, not of politics. Moreover, writes Derrida, ‘the politeia is the brothers’ affair (ton adelphon: Eudemian Ethics, 1241b 30),’24 and ‘brings together in the filiation of the brother a biblical lineage and a Greek lineage. And we are all the more intent on marking off this genealogical bifurcation, which will divide the history of friendship qua the history of fraternity.’25 This is the point, namely, the intersection of the Hebrew and Greek perspectives, where the thinking of Levinas is situated, and it is from this vantage point that the relation between will and command as it occurs in the philosophies of Plato and Nietzsche will be assessed.

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2. On Commanding Early in his writing Nietzsche characterizes his philosophy as an ‘inverted [umgedrehter] Platonism.’26 Certainly few philosophers seem, at first inspection, further removed from each other than do Plato and Nietzsche. Yet Nietzsche’s alleged reversal of Plato’s philosophy, to the point of their virtual identification as antitheses, only indicates the deep proximity between them. The connection between Plato and Levinas, by contrast, is much more apparent. Far more surprising and provocative, however, is the pairing of Nietzsche and Levinas, though the latter takes seriously the challenge and risk posed by the former and does not dismiss the climate of that philosophy lightly. While their obvious differences are numerous, they are also thinkers with profound similarities. For example, they are united in their mutual apprehension of the dangerous risk that nihilism poses, and of the relation between command and obedience in the effort to overcome this danger and, if not overcome, then to loosen its hold on the contemporary consciousness. Moreover, both turn toward a reconsideration of Plato’s philosophy, albeit with fundamentally different aims, to address these concerns. Few certainly evoke such suspicion and offence regarding the question of politics as Plato and Nietzsche, and together with Levinas, often mistakenly regarded as a nonpolitical or apolitical thinker, one finds in them a strange company indeed. But, says Levinas, ‘alongside ethics, there is a place for politics.’27 Indeed, both Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s conceptions of politics are based upon a certain qualified return to Platonic thinking, ironically the very thinking repudiated by Nietzsche as the source of nihilistic ressentiment. Nietzsche reverses the Platonic move that arguably constitutes the formal beginning of Western philosophy, that is, situating the source of the interior life in the exterior beyond. He is the first in the history of philosophy to fully effect the inwardizing of the purely external (power, Macht) as will, an inversion or turning that shatters the unity of the totality, and leaves in shards the hollow, ghostly shell of the Great Idol, only to expose the apparition of the ‘new idol,’ the sociopolitical State.28 But it is actually Plato who first reverses the understanding of the leader–subject relationship, a reversal that (again ironically, given his distrust of democracy) lies at the very heart of the modern theory of representative democracy. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are those whose nature it is to command and those whose it is to obey. This is reflected in one of Zarathustra’s ‘new tablets’: ‘He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but

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much is still lacking before they also obey themselves.’29 The Platonic philosopher-ruler avoids tyranny and despotism precisely because she or he is able to command and obey the self, thereby avoiding the temptations and pitfalls of more common leaders, those often uncritically drawn either from the rank and file of hoi polloi or from the economically and socially privileged few. Nietzsche’s early declaration of developing an inverted or reversed Platonism is echoed, though reversed, by Levinas, who returns to the climate of Platonic philosophy for insight regarding the nature of ethical and political subjectivity. Not as or by the will to power is the Levinasian subject constituted, but in relation to the absolutely other (l’absolument autre), which is to say, as subjection to the ethical command and demand of the Other. According to Levinas, ‘Plato says that qua leader no leader proposes or orders what is useful for himself, but what is useful for the one he commands. To command is then to do the will of the one who obeys.’30 This may seem surprising, as the philosopher-ruler is often interpreted as a benevolent dictator; and to make a connection with Nietzsche may likewise seem surprising, if not shocking, since the teaching of the Übermensch is often rejected on the grounds that such a being could well be a monster or tyrant. However, while it is true that the threat of tyranny looms dangerously near with the possible approach of such a being, the avoidance of tyranny is a common theme not only in Plato and Levinas, but in Nietzsche as well.31 Who is this one who commands oneself by being one who obeys? Levinas is quite specific on this: it is the third, the plural or social One who marks the turn from ethics to politics. Levinas writes: ‘The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other – language is justice ... The poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal. His equality within this essential poverty consists in referring to the third party ... But he joins me to himself for service; he commands me as a Master. This command can concern me only inasmuch as I am master myself; consequently, this command commands me to command ... a command that commands commanding.’32 Derrida echoes this thought, asking: ‘Having come as a third party but always from the singularity of the other, does not the law command me to recognize the transcendent alterity of the other who can never be anything but heterogeneous and singular, hence resistant to the very generality of the law?’33 In other words, the essence of command lies in obedience to the will of the Other, not only the Other who faces me and calls my freedom into question, but the

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invisible social other with whom I am not in direct immediate contact, but am nevertheless relationally bound to. According to Nietzsche, the nature of command also resides in the relation to will, specifically, in the elemental forces (Krafte) of the will to power that constitute the essence and the act of affirmation itself. Interpretation is mastery, the will to command, to order.34 ‘Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!”’35 Command here does not mean the domination of others in the sense of conventional political mastery; rather, it is command over the divergent wills or forces that constitute the ego-self. The ego as will is a fictional unity, teaches Nietzsche, a composite of various multiple forces. As the ability to bring these forces under control, under the guise of a superficial unity that it knows to be a construct, the will to power is selfovercoming (Selbst-Überwindung) via the affirmation of the self’s non-identity or chaotic composition. Will to power is force that commands, not the commanding of a merely passive will, but the commanding of a will or force in opposition to it. As force, will is the pitting of a superior will against an inferior will, a commanding will against an obedient will. The mastery that Nietzsche is concerned with is that of self-overcoming, which transcends more mundane forms of social and political control, that is, reactive forms of will to power. As an active expression of will to power, the commanding element of will orders the chaos of forces that constitute the ego. Will to power does not emerge from within the ego functioning as origin; it issues forth from without, affecting the interior will and actualizing it in either an active/affirmative or reactive/negative mode. ‘We are a plurality that has imagined itself a unity,’ writes Nietzsche.36 The ‘I’ does not think thoughts; it receives them. Neither does the self possess language; it is possessed by it. Levinas advances this thought: ‘Language, which does not touch the other, even tangentially, reaches the other by calling him or by commanding him, with all the straightforwardness of these relations.’37 Furthermore, all ‘commanding is speech, or rather that the true speech, speech in its essence, is commanding.’38 Nietzsche and Levinas are in accordance that speech, command, and authority are intrinsic to willing: ‘To command is to act on a will.’39 What exactly is this will, though, and whence does its force derive? Nietzsche maintains that there is no will in the classic sense of the term, that is, as the principal active agent, and in its highest, ‘purest’ expres-

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sion, as self-caused.40 It is the will to power that commands. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas names ‘“will” a being conditioned in such a way that without being causa sui it is first with respect to its cause.’41 So crucial is the theme of command that Levinas continues to develop it in his later work. In Otherwise than Being, it serves to characterize the enigmatic problem of the infinite in the finite (or the totality), or expressed otherwise, the nondialectical, proximate relation between exteriority and interiority. The exteriority of command is interior precisely because it is command. ‘Inwardness [l’interiorité] is not a secret place somewhere in me; it is that reverting in which the eminently exterior, precisely in virtue of this eminent exteriority, this impossibility of being contained and consequently entering into a theme, forms, as infinity, an exception to essence, concerns me and circumscribes me and orders me by my own voice. The command is stated by the mouth of him [or her] it commands ... but a voice bearing witness to the fission of the inward secrecy.’42 The source or cause of the command that hyperbolically issues forth from without, from beyond the totality, according to Levinas, is a command emanating from the difference of alterity, from the Other, as the trace of the Infinite, calling upon the self to interiorize the command as self-command. Plato reverses the popular opinion of his day that conceived human existence as bound to the ‘daughters of Anankê,’ the Fates. His reversal begins with the call to exile the poets of mimêsis, the perpetuators of the already antiquated doxa of the times, from his new republic. Similarly, Nietzsche’s own reversal or inversion is partly contingent upon his call to expulse if not eradicate the cultural ‘poets’ of his day, the ecclesiastical and political hierarchy of Christendom. The mimetic forces of coercion, as reactive forces become dominant and as nihilistic expressions of the will to power, effect their own subversive reversal of the Good’s ‘transcendence.’ This results in either objective conceptions of the absolute, alienating visions of God, or in unrealizable universal legalisticethical norms, such as the Kantian categorical imperative. It is precisely this non-Platonic idea that Nietzsche reacts against, not realizing that his own reversal reflects, to an extent, the very reversal that Plato attempts to inaugurate. Nietzsche advances the future meaning of subjectivity and subordinates the structure of command and obedience under the thematics of the Übermensch and the will to power. His attempt to revaluate all values, that is, to radically reassess the ground of Greek-European ideas, revolves around a reversal of the dominant metaphysical force

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that he collectively designates as ‘Platonism’: the positing of a transcendental source of values that, in its radical separation from the finite world of becoming, ultimately devalues the world and results in nihilism. Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism signals the non-teleological dialectic of interiority and exteriority, will and power, humanity and divinity, self and other. The self-overcoming that defines the übermenschliche will of the future reveals the ego and the conventionally construed will as nothing but grammatical illusions,43 attempts to fix a sense, however fleeting, of permanence within the flux of becoming. Nietzsche identifies the source of ressentiment in the will’s vain attempts to stabilize temporality and change by positing a beyond or transcendence that finds its most forceful and lasting expression in the Platonist (which is here distinguished from the Platonic, a concept in part conditioned here by Levinas’s reception of Plato’s philosophy) idea of the Good. The great Yes of selfovercoming begins with an equally mighty No. Only when the seeming nihilism of such a perspective is affirmed is nihilism itself overcome, and the doors flung open to embrace the ‘most terrible’ and yet ‘liberating’ of thoughts, that of eternal recurrence, and with it the ingress of the Übermensch, who can now fully affirm the ‘beautiful chaos of existence’ as amor fati.44 However, as Levinas reminds us, ‘Fate does not precede history; it follows it.’45 That is why the question of ethical political subjectivity is inextricably connected to the will, for it is the will alone that ultimately responds to both nihilism and the passive demand placed on the self by the Other. In this response freedom is both gained and delimited. Recognizing the necessity of nihilism enables the mastery of the eternal recurrence, of nihilism itself, but the freedom that such mastery brings bears a tremendous responsibility. Therein does the core of Levinasian ethics teach that freedom is responsibility not only for the self but also for the Other, even to the point of substitution.46 Yet this is not a new insight but an ancient one. Such responsibility is first witnessed in Plato’s Republic, wherein the guardians and philosopher-rulers exchange their material contentment for the sake of the many in the luxurious part of the polis, freely choosing their Spartan existence in the community of guardians. The philosopher-ruler is distanced or separated, along with the other guardians, from the general populace in order to legislate without self-interest. Is this, or could this be interpreted as, similar to the Nietzschean stance of ‘indifference’47 or Levinasian ‘dis-inter-estedness’?48 Here one finds a crucial characteristic of the great political type of subject, the third. Levinas characterizes

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the history of philosophy from Socrates to Hegel as a movement dominated by the ‘way of the same,’ that is, by freedom as the highest of valuative ideals. Plato modifies the freedom-oriented teaching of Socrates in the Republic, however, emphasizing rather that individual liberty is subordinate to the larger question of determining the form of justice. The philosopher’s disinterest toward other subjects is the mode of intersubjective relationality that Levinas maintains must be concretely embodied in the field or arena of historical social relations by all ethically concerned parties. There is of course a significant difference between Platonic and Levinasian conceptions of disinterestedness. The disinterest of Plato’s philosopher-ruler refers to the refusal to meddle in the interests, assigned roles, and obligations endemic to the respective social strata in the polis. For Levinas, disinterest refers neither to a withdrawal of interest or concern nor to a ‘letting be’ on the part of the subject. Rather, disinterest signifies active engagement with the Other that maintains the asymmetry of the intersubjective relationship through the taking up of the irreversible sense of absolute responsibility entailed by that asymmetry. Here is precisely where Levinas advances the sense of responsibility that one readily finds in Plato and less so in Nietzsche. On Nietzsche’s interpretation, future übermenschliche leaders will no longer need the affirmative recognition of others, as Hegel claims. The recasting of the master-slave dialectic in On the Genealogy of Morals bears this out. Nietzsche’s trumpeting for great politics ironically finds its expression, if one turns to his prophetic alter ego Zarathustra, in a ‘quiet micropolitics,’ wherein the idea of the Übermensch, the apex and nadir of self-overcoming, is itself overcome.49 Presumably, for such individuals tyranny over others would be mundane; there is greater chaos to be vanquished within the self than there is to be found in society. The most pressing problem may well prove to be not so much the prevention of tyranny by the Übermensch, but rather the appeal to such a being for concern about the welfare of others, the very concern expressed by Plato in the Republic and expressed by Levinas in the language of responsibility. The frequently misunderstood metaphor of war that pervades Nietzsche’s philosophy is directed primarily toward the internal struggle of self-overcoming. In the ‘revaluation of all values,’ war and heroism are ideals to be waged for the sake of knowledge, not for political dominion.50 ‘War educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for himself. That one maintains the dis-

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tance which separates us ... The free man is a warrior.’51 Nietzsche does not valorize the conventional understanding of war as necessary, or even good, as is often argued. In a rather enigmatic, all too conveniently overlooked, or ignored, passage, he states that the ‘great politics’ of the future will lead to ‘disarm[ing] while being the best-armed, out of an elevation of sensibility that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition for peace; whereas the so-called armed peace, such as now parades about in every country, is a disposition to factiousness ... The tree of the glory of war can be destroyed only at a single stroke, by a lightning-bolt: lightning, however, as you well know, comes out of a cloud and from on high.’52 The lightning (Blitzes) that will usher in the age of peace is the Übermensch, the one who is disposed to being at peace with oneself, which only self-overcoming can produce.53 This internal ‘peace’ is not commensurate with denial or ascetic renunciation. It requires a yet unconceived strength, contingent upon a particular type of renunciation: a rejection of the self-ego that wills to dominate others above all, and the metaphysics and ontologies that attend to it. ‘Perhaps this very renunciation will also lend us the strength needed to bear this renunciation: perhaps we will rise ever higher as soon as we cease to flow out into a god.’54 The rising of humanity beyond itself is contingent for Nietzsche upon reversing the flow of internalized will back toward the earth, not into a phantasm of illusory transcendence. Going over, or self-overcoming, is contingent upon ‘going down’ (untergehen). Is this self-overcoming, this self-annihilation of the ego, actually a death of the enemy, which is also to say, the death of the friend, since the enemy is within, is myself? Is this death then a death for the enemy as much as it is for the friend, a death for the sake of the Other, and hence heroism par excellence? To renounce the necessity of armed warfare when one is most strong, to embrace the option of peaceful conflict resolution before all other alternatives, to acknowledge one’s own implication and culpability, whether immediate or past, in a struggle is the height of self-overcoming. On the political level, such renunciation would be affirmative will to power at its highest expression, and the movement toward a ‘new justice’ (neue Gerechtigkeit).55 What would persuade, however, an individual motivated by neither altruism nor pity, such as Nietzsche’s Übermensch, to act for the interest of others? One need only recall the incredulous response of Socrates’ interlocutors toward his proposal of the philosopher-ruler and the guardian community, able to see only through the lenses of a reactive consciousness and hence judge all else

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by that very measure. Certainly, to work and create without ego-interest was incomprehensible to them, as surely as the Übermensch is incomprehensible to the consciousness of the modern ‘last man.’ In the opening section of The Gay Science, Nietzsche reflects on those who purport to teach the purpose of existence. He admonishes his readers that what is needed is a new purpose, not one concerned with the mere preservation of the species, but one actively concerned with the future: the creation of the genuinely affirmative will, whom in his later writings he designates as the Übermensch. The orientation of the future is to prepare the way for this authentic highest individual, a fecund task that is realized by means of a conception of education that actively incorporates and creatively transfigures the positive transformative aspects of various philosophies, while affirmatively negating or destroying those aspects that are no longer of use, which are hindrances to any future revaluation of values. Thus Nietzsche is actually in accord with the thesis that governs the early to middle Platonic dialogues, namely, that education (paideia; Bildung) is the key to the future. And for Levinas too, education or teaching denotes the principal means wherein the universality of ethics, and by extension the possible of ethical politics, is communicated.56 Plato never puts forth the position that the ideal republic is a utopia; it is always subject to a further degeneration with each new generation. Likewise, Nietzsche never pronounces the historical inevitability of the Übermensch, or the perfection of ‘great politics,’ which are ostensibly beyond the scope of all present conceptions about such events, such events being outside the determination of history, as essentially reactive, the embodiment of affirmation and activity. And since representation is not synonymous with consciousness, but rather a part of it, the possibility of such a radically new conception of subjectivity is exterior to the domain of conscious thinking, even though its disclosure as a possibility is not. This is the eschatological kairos or Augenblick, eluding the scope of philosophy or theory, and made manifest only by this epiphanic will itself, the future embodiment of affirmative will to power. 3. The Risk The risk, the dangerous ‘perhaps’ that accompanies Plato, Nietzsche, and Levinas’s proposals, is the implementation of a new hierarchy, albeit in different ways. With regard to the formulation of a great politics, however, certainly such a revalued hierarchy will be based on

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will and knowledge, not on birth or economic status, and through such come to the standpoint of ethical responsibility as the groundless ground of political subjectivity. It is no wonder that this seemingly undemocratic move is resisted by contemporary democratic (at least in name) societies, which often confuse equality of rights with the natural ‘ordering of rank,’ as Nietzsche claims, based on will and achievement. And taking Levinas into consideration here, if there is an ordering of rank, it is revealed through the ethical priority or ‘height’ (hauteur) of the Other over the self, which ‘reconciles the contradiction which opposes spontaneity to submission,’57 thus leading to the subject’s self-commanding. In other words, writes Levinas, ‘Being is commanded, and consequently its infinite responsibility is the response to a superiority which imposes itself absolutely.’58 In both Plato and Nietzsche the subject assumes an exalted status, in part because of the weight of responsibility that the subject takes on. The danger, however, is that in such a subject disinterest coincides with interest, so that it becomes truly a matter of actualizing a purely active will to avoid the ineluctable temptation to construe command as power over others. What Levinas provides is a map (much in the manner that the divided-line analogy informs the reading of the cave allegory in the Republic) for the self-commanding subject, apprehended in the face of the Other as the trace of ethical signification. Plato, as Levinas reads him, recognizes the formal structure of self-command, and while Nietzsche too can know this it is Levinas’s realization of the irreversible asymmetry of intersubjectivity that theoretically denotes the command of the Other as ethical. The Platonic philosopher-ruler, the Nietzschean Übermensch, and the Levinasian ethical subject are not the embodied negations of democratic choice. Rather, they are, at least partially, the fruition of a democratic process of education, wherein all are afforded an equal opportunity and not one in which only the social elite are allowed to advance in rank and power. Teaching is the cornerstone that connects these three philosophers. Nevertheless, Nietzsche echoes Plato’s conviction that pure democracy as popularly conceived is an inevitably flawed endeavour, one that invariably lapses into the dangerous excesses of despotism and tyranny over the course of time, and Levinas is no less dubious regarding the possibility of political ontology alone overcoming the ‘imperialism of the same’59 that grounds all forms of violence as inevitable and necessary. The execution of Socrates remains the epitomizing example of this.

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Perhaps the revalued notions of power, will, and authority find their initial and most poignant revaluation in the philosophy of Plato himself. Perhaps Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism is the product of a hermeneutical mistake on his part that, ironically, Nietzsche himself identifies when he determines the history of philosophy as the ‘history of an error.’60 Elsewhere he writes, ‘Lack of a historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers.’61 Could it be that Nietzsche’s famous reversed or inverted Platonism is but the reversal of an even earlier encroaching Platonism already reversed, or at least bypassed, by Plato prior to its historically identified commencement? Is Plato’s own undetected reversal the very error that Nietzsche locates as the source of the Western metaphysical legacy, later articulated by Heidegger and others as the ‘forgetting of Being’? If so, then does the source of the famous error lay with Plato’s interpreters, beginning with Aristotle, who refuses in the name of truth and identity, of the logic of contradiction, the paradox of a transcendence within immanence that does lose its separateness? Is this not Levinas’s great insight? Indeed, Levinas also recognizes a reversal of Platonism that overcomes Platonism itself: ‘Platonism is vanquished! But it is vanquished in the name of the very generosity of Western thought, which, catching sight of the abstract man in men, proclaimed the absolute value of the person, then encompassed in its respect for the person the cultures in which these persons stand or in which they express themselves. Platonism is overcome with the very means which the universal thought issued from Plato supplied. It is overcome by this so much disparaged Western civilization, which was able to understand the particular cultures, which never understood themselves ... [But] to catch sight, in meaning, of a situation that precedes culture ... is to return to Platonism in a new way. It is also to find oneself able to judge civilizations on the basis of the ethical.’62 Are Plato and Nietzsche perhaps then better construed as warring companions, as friendly enemies, much as are Zarathustra’s eagle and serpent? If so, then would not Levinas also belong to that company, now as a third? 4. Substitution for the Enemy Returning to the question of a revalued heroic friendship, a type of friendship that enables a new conception of the political, and thereby of great politics: is that predicated, at least partially, on a realization of the ethical demand that, as Levinas teaches, is prior to and makes possible

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the political, insofar as it is precisely the face-to-face encounter, the modality of the ethical relationship, that opens the dimension of speech as discourse? According to Levinas, goodness occupies a higher place than truth, preceding truth as ethics precedes politics. Goodness belongs to metaphysics, or religion, that is, to the ethical. For Levinas, the terms are identical in meaning. Truth, by contrast, belongs to the domain of ontology, the totalizing way of comprehensive knowing. Is the messianic eschatology that Levinas associates with ethical peace and denotes by the language of substitution essentially the same as Derrida’s language of the perhaps? Perhaps. In the opening pages of Totality and Infinity, however, Levinas announces the close connection between eschatology and opinion, therein contesting the alleged claims to objectivity espoused by politics with the radical subjectivity of the ethical subject. Is this the same opinion, though, that Derrida identifies as ‘the politics of opinion,’ ‘a regime of opinion,’ as opposed to the perhaps attending great politics?63 Certainly Derrida shares with Nietzsche and Levinas, and one could say also with Plato (if one reads the so-called doctrine of forms64 in light of the thesis concerning the absolute transcendence and alterity of the Good), a distrust of those who would claim to lay hold of truth in any absolute manner, therein seemingly embracing the Levinasian interpretation of opinion. ‘The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth. But the friends of truth are without the truth, even if friends cannot function without truth. The truth – that of the thinkers to come – it is impossible to be it, to be there, to have it; one must only be its friend. This also means that one must be solitary – and jealous of one’s retreat. This is the anchoritic truth of this truth. But it is far from abstaining from afar from the political – and even if the anchorite plays the scarecrow, such a person over-politicizes the space of the city.’65 Now Levinas resists the Aristotelian naming of the human being as the zôon politikon, a major legacy of Greek thinking, on the grounds that this identification invariably slides into ontology, therein resisting the paradoxically passive power of ethical metaphysics. He also dismisses the Greek heroic ideal, personified for him in the figure of Ulysses, not only the last but ironically also the most human of the ancient heroes, precisely because he is the most flawed, and not least because of his relation to truth and honesty. But is this only a certain type of heroism and only a certain type of political being that Levinas refuses? Perhaps there is another, a veritable other type of heroic friendship that could be considered, the friendship of those to come, of those beyond even the pale of democratic friendship?

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Earlier the question was posed of what it would mean to die for the enemy, even for the sake of the enemy, noting that the very positing of the question invites the interruption of common sense and sensibility by the apparently nonsensical. The reason for asking this is to push the ‘logic,’ if in fact that term can even be appropriately used here, of Levinas’s ethical position to its extreme. Why? Levinas’s philosophy is here called into question on the grounds that it does not sufficiently account for the necessity of a certain type of violence and the need for an enemy, broadly construed. The enemy is precisely what enables one to become better or, in Nietzsche’s nomenclature, to become stronger. ‘What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.’66 The enemy promotes that feeling of power by forcing one to remain strong. Does, or can, a Levinasian variant of ethics accomplish the same? The radical passivity of infinite responsibility and obligation for the other is not just an acknowledgment that one can never do enough for the sake of the other. Ethics is infinite in that it does not apply to only some faces; it must apply to all faces. Even the enemy has a face, and as other also appeals to the self. Formally, ethical responsibility must extend even to the enemy, to the point of substitution: the one for the other. But to the extent of dying for that other? Perhaps. This is the question, here. This is the quandary of responsibility (ethics) and the threshold of justice (politics). Again, what does, or can, this idiosyncratic extension of substitution mean? Perhaps this can is the very possibility of the friendship of the future, that to come associated by Derrida with democracy. Perhaps substitution, even for the enemy, is what alone will make a genuinely political friendship possible. If so, then surely this can only take place by way of a sovereign act of the will, wherein the impossible is taken up and historically, actually, transformed into possibility. To be sure, Levinas does not advocate substitution as self-sacrificial martyrdom. Justice, the mode of ethical political being invoked by the absent presence of the third, is marked by a certain resistance to evil, a resistance to violence toward others. Ethics and politics are not mutually exclusive but coexist in an uneasy tension. However, if the politics of friendship is denoted in its highest, most noble sense as the friendship of democracy, and if that type of politics can rightly be named great politics, then can not that only genuinely occur commensurate with an equally sovereign act of power on the part of the one for the other? In other words, in an act of self-overcoming that refuses to continually respond against brutal violence with yet more brutal violence, forever

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remaining locked in an endless spiral of ressentiment? To die to one’s own power as dying for the enemy so that the enemy may in turn become a friend – and in that new as of yet unheard of friendship remain still an enemy, now not one of arms but of ideas and values? Democracy only flourishes with the critical yet peaceful exchange of different perspectives, struggling, as it necessarily must, but internalizing that conflict, that enmity, and in doing so rising to greater heights of nobility and power. Yes, ‘let us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods.’ Yes, let us run ‘a fine risk,’67 ‘living dangerously,’ if only to set out to do the seemingly impossible – to grow our figs on the peaks of the highest mountains.

NOTES 1 F. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1954), 568. 2 E. Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 121. 3 ‘Perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim: “Friend, there are no friends!” thus said the dying sage; “Foes, there are no foes!” say I, the living fool. ... This is not, this was not, just any promise. The promise promises in that fundamental mode of “perhaps,” and even the “dangerous perhaps” which will open, as Beyond Good and Evil prophesies, the speech of philosophers to come.’ Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 29. 4 Ibid., 28. 5 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Anaximander Fragment,’ trans. David Farrell Krell and F.A. Capuzzi, in Early Greek Thinking (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), 18. 6 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 241. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 130. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 171; emphasis mine.

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9 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9. 10 Ibid., 21. 11 Ibid., 24. 12 Quotation marks will be used in order to distinguish Nietzsche’s employment of the term ‘great politics’ from other usages of it. 13 ‘Truthful I call him who goes into the godless deserts, having broken his revering heart ... It was ever in the desert that the truthful have dwelt, the free spirits, as masters of the desert.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, II, ‘On the Famous Wise Men.’ 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §§289, 343, 372. 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), §211. 16 Ibid., §208. I have altered Kaufmann’s translation to indicate better the sense of futurity and uncertainty implied in the term zur. 17 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §374. See also Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 61–2. 18 The complete citation reads: ‘And behold, my friends: here where the tarantula has its hole, the ruins of an ancient temple rise; behold it with enlightened eyes! Verily, the man who once piled his thoughts to the sky in these stones – he, like the wisest, knew the secret of all life. That struggle and inequality are present even in beauty, and also war for power and more power: that is what he teaches us here in the plainest parable. How divinely vault and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers – with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods.’ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, ‘On the Tarantulas.’ 19 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 282. The reference is to Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the Friend.’ 20 Ibid., 282. 21 Ibid., 112. 22 Ibid., 163. 23 Though Derrida devotes an entire chapter in Politics of Friendship to the theme of recoil, the notion of recoil that is alluded to here is found mostly in Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 13–52. In order to bring the question closer to home, as it were, the relation between the

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friend and the enemy must be thoroughly expunged of any metaphysical meaning. Scott writes: ‘We shall find that in Nietzsche’s thought recoiling, self-overcoming movements remove the discursive, organizing force of the ideal of transcendence’ (15). Since self-overcoming involves the overcoming of any metaphysical transcendence, this necessitates the reversal of the ground of that transcendence, what Nietzsche designates as Platonism. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 198. Ibid., 163–4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 7, in Sämtlich Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montanari (Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 199. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics and Politics,’ trans. Jonathan Romney, in Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 292. Cf. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the New Idol.’ Ibid., III, ‘On Old and New Tablets,’ §4. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. and ed. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 15. Addressing the ‘dangers of intrapsychical tyranny,’ Graham Parkes points out that while Nietzsche is surely united with Socrates in rejecting absolute tyranny, ‘he does see psychical tyranny as a sometimes necessary evil – and, for certain creative types, as a welcome evil to be cultivated for the enhancement of humanity as a whole. This is a crucial point, and one overlooked by readers who imagine Nietzsche’s ideal to consist in undisciplined, Dionysian letting-it-all-flow-out.’ Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 351. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 213. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 277. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19. Ibid., §211. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), §333. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 62. Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command,’ 23. Ibid., 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ‘The Four Great Errors,’ §3.

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41 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 59. 42 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 147; cf. also Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 110. 43 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 483. 44 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §§276, 277. 45 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 228. 46 Cf. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 99–129. 47 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 68. 48 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,’ trans. and ed. Richard Kearney, in Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 29; also, Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 52, 100. 49 See Daniel W. Conway, ‘Overcoming the Übermensch: Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20, no. 3 (October 1989), 211–24. 50 Cf. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §283. 51 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,’ §38 52 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), II, 2, §284. 53 Cf. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, Prologue, §4. 54 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §285; emphasis on perhaps added. 55 Ibid., §289. Cf. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 64. 56 On the relation between Platonic and Levinasian pedagogy, see Brian Schroeder, ‘Breaking the Closed Circle: Levinas and Platonic Paideia,’ Dialogue and Universalism 8, no. 10 (1998), 97–106; reprinted in Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, ed. Claire Katz with Lara Trout (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 285–95. 57 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendence and Height,’ trans. Simon Critchley, in Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 20. 58 Ibid., 21. 59 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 38–9; cf. also Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 92. 60 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘The History of an Error.’ 61 Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, I, 1, §2. Kaufmann translates ‘family failing’ as ‘original error’ (The Portable Nietzsche, 51). 62 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense,’ trans. Alphonso Lingis, revised by Simon Critchley and Adriaan T. Peperzak, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, 58.

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63 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 43. 64 For recent alternative readings of the traditional Platonic ‘theory of Forms,’ see in William A. Welton, ed., Plato’s Forms: Varieties of Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002): Francisco J. Gonzalez, ‘Plato’s Dialectic of Forms,’ 31–84; Drew Hyland, ‘Against a Platonic “Theory” of Forms,’ 257–72; and Silvia Benso, ‘Plato’s Eidetic Intimations,’ 273–88. 65 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 43. 66 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, I, §2. 67 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 166.

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Levinas, Nietzsche, and Benjamin’s ‘Divine Violence’ VICTORIA TAHMASEBI

In an article published in 1973, Emmanuel Levinas claims: ‘[R]ebellion against an unjust society expresses the spirit of our age.’ And he immediately adds: ‘Spirit itself is expressed by rebellion against an unjust society’ (II, 242).1 In this paper, I want to ask what kind of rebellion Levinas is talking about. To address this rather large question, I will explore the traces of a saying that are, in my opinion, manifested in Levinas’s scattered comments on Friedrich Nietzsche. Here my intention is not so much to explore the conjunction and/or disjunction of Levinas and Nietzsche, as to situate Levinas’s comments on Nietzsche as one radical moment intrinsically connected to and constitutive of Levinas’s saying. Towards this end I will relate Walter Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ to Levinas’s radical ethicopolitical undertaking in the hope of showing that Levinas’s ethics is a radical critique of liberal ethics and politics. One of the enigmatic features of Levinas’s text is his favourable attitude to Nietzsche’s thought. The reader cannot help but ask, What does Nietzsche do for Levinas? Why such favourable treatment of a philosopher who announces god as dead, all moralities as lies, and evil as more useful than the good? It is my goal in this chapter to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s presence in Levinas’s text underscores the radicality of Levinas’s own ‘saying.’ Before I go on explaining the centrality of Nietzsche to Levinas’s thought, a brief detour is necessary into some aspects of Levinas’s notion of saying. 1. Ethics and Diachrony Levinas argues that saying is the very ‘signifyingness of signification’; it cannot be thematized, comprehended, or reduced to the said, nor can it

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be constricted to human discourse and language. The fact of the irreducibility of the saying to the said does not mean that, for the sake of conveying the essence, beings do not fix the saying in the said; manifestation always demands that the said, linguistic systems, and ontology have a hold on saying. Yet, the hold of the said on saying never crystallizes into mastery. The saying is never completely subordinated to the themes of the said, since they are not correlative. They are not contemporary nor is their relationship symmetrical, meaning that thought must, at some level, be awakened to the diachronic dimension of time (OTB, 6–7).2 Thus, Levinas insists, the act of betrayal, the hold of the said on the saying, more than just attesting to a ‘fall’ of the saying, testifies that behind what the said conveys lies its motivating, orienting, and disrupting force. It is in this sense that saying, for Levinas, guides discourse beyond being (OTB, 136). This ultimate non-mastery stems from the uniqueness of the ego, which arises, at one level, out of its not existing ‘at the same time,’ as its not being contemporary to the other. In other words, the asymmetrical relationship between the I and the other points to another reality, suggesting that beside the ego’s time, there exists the time of the other. Yet, despite the non-contemporariness of the I and the other, the I exists in proximity to the other and is obliged to respond to his call. Saying carries with it the responsibility for the other prior to the said (OTB, 43). In this sense, responsibility is prior to any commitment, since the latter is chosen within the rational discourse that makes the conditions of ‘free will’ possible. The last point that I want to emphasize is that Levinas’s ‘saying’ is a striking force that in its peaceful approach, will disrupt, guide, and orient; it is not merely an infinite postponement of the final closure of meaning-making practice: ‘Saying is not a game. Antecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding languages, it is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification’ (OTB, 5). In his scattered comments on Nietzsche, Levinas emphasizes two modalities of Nietzsche’s thought, ‘sincerity’ and ‘youth,’ which I will argue are central to Levinas’s own ‘saying’ and inform his ethicopolitical undertaking. For Levinas, Nietzsche’s radical words, which Nietzsche himself describes as ‘philosophizing with a hammer,’ signify Nietzsche’s intellectual sincerity; sincerity is to be in spite of oneself, to act without calculation or, as Nietzsche’s description of nobility goes, without regard to the economy of self-preservation (GS, 77–8).3 Nietzsche’s sincerity signifies that dimension of Levinas’s own concept of ‘saying’ which

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breaks with being and the status quo. Nietzsche himself describes this modality as standing in the midst of discord and trembling with the craving and questioning and the rapture of such questioning (GS, 76–7). For Levinas the question, and the rift resulting from the question, which is an effect of ‘saying,’ fractures the self; they break with being-for-itself and opens that being to what is other. Saying then signifies a break with the economy of self-preservation. For Nietzsche, this break is one of the elements that define noble life. And this break allows Nietzsche’s thought to think more than it thinks, to break with essence, even if and when it is despite Nietzsche’s own thought. Levinas links Nietzsche’s sincerity, his spirit of youth, to Nietzsche’s inability to shut himself up and remain within the time of here and now; Nietzsche’s thought, in other words, constantly grapples with that which exceeds the limit of his thought. His thought is the working of an excess whose traces in his said signify his encounter with the idea of infinity. For Levinas Nietzsche’s thought belongs to ‘thoughts out of season’ (NI, 150–1),4 independent of every evaluation of the forces in the present (MS, 92).5 Nietzsche’s spirit of youth breaks with a selfpreservation whose economy depends, and ends, on the linear time of the past-present-future and therefore opens Nietzsche’s thought to that which is otherwise than being-for-itself. For Levinas this move is crucial, since it allows Nietzsche’s text to open up to a thought that is not in continuity with itself, nor a continuation of itself (NI, 147). It is at this point that I detect a certain resistance in Levinas’s text as he avoids elaborating on the affinities between his own thought and that of Nietzsche’s. The reasons for Levinas’s resistance are probably myriad, but the effect is that he fails to take Nietzsche’s thought to its limit and hence to recognize that Nietzsche’s break with linear time actually allows him to enter into what Levinas calls the time of the other or ethical time. In the economy of self-preservation, the self experiences time as temporalized, what Levinas calls ‘the time of essence’ or synchronic time: the past is assumed to be knowable for what it was, once and for all, and the future is taken to be the logical continuation of this essence, which unfolds itself in a comprehensible configuration. Thus, the time of essence is understood by Levinas as ‘presence’ – manifestation of being – and the present. In this modality, the past is only a recollected present and the anticipated future is a present to come. In this linear progression, the other is always destined to be comprehensible, available to be used as a means, and to be absorbed into the economy of the

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same. The other is your product who is born with you and dies with you, and more importantly is ‘for you.’ Since linear time is the duration between the birth and the death of the ‘I,’ the other is only understood in the ‘said’ and is not encountered through the traces of ‘saying.’ Confined to the said, the other’s irreducibility, which can only be signified in this ‘saying,’ is covered up. Saying is the possibility of ‘one-forthe-other,’ a sign that simultaneously signifies the irreplaceability of one’s responsibility and the incomprehensibility of the other. Levinas argues that in the ethical relationship a temporality arises in which the dimensions of the past and the future have their own signification (PJL, 115).6 In diachronic or ethical time, which Levinas contrasts to the time of essence, the future is not an event already awaiting me, as if it had already happened, nor is it that which never arrives, as it is always to come. In other words, the future is neither the triumphant attempt at recuperation nor its failure. Rather, the diachronic dimension of time is a shattering ‘pro-phecy,’ an imperative, a moral command, an inspiration coming from ‘beyond’ me and my life; it comes from without (PJL, 115). In ethical time, the past of the other – or of all humanity – is not my present, nor have I participated in it. And yet it concerns me. Although the past of the other is incommensurable with mine, I am nonetheless implicated in that past. My expiation for the other requires that I cross the threshold of linear time and encounter another modality of time, for even though I did not participate in the past suffering of the other, I am still responsible to that past. This means that, at the ethical level, I must find myself outside of linear time, in the diachronic dimension of time that does not concern my life. This dimension is where I am chosen, prior to all decision, to be substituted for the other, to bear all the responsibility for all the suffering that is not my doing. My argument is that Nietzsche’s spirit of youth and sincerity enable him to break with linear time, central as it is to self-preservation, and hence give an ethical dimension to his thought. For both Nietzsche and Levinas, the interruption of liner time – interpreted as the time of essence – is the dimension of the ethical. For both, this interruption reverberates in the self, and ends the self as a place of indifference and rest. In my opinion, Nietzsche’s ethical dimension does not simply prescribe a trajectory of being otherwise. For Nietzsche, the disjunction of the self with itself in the sincerity of youth is neither the effect of an internal call nor an external call that, after being absorbed by the same, results in the restoration of identity. Rather, Nietzsche’s spirit of sincerity and youth compel the self to seek beyond itself infinitely. It is in this

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sense that Nietzsche’s thought is in a close relation of affinity with Levinas’s ethics, grounded in ‘otherwise than being’ rather than being otherwise. Nietzsche’s jump out of his own skin, and the repeated use of homelessness as a dominant metaphor in his text, does not signify a present self that is merely different from its past, nor a self that is shattered or lost in ‘non-being.’ Rather, Nietzsche’s spirit of youth and sincerity signify a self that encounters the irreducible alterity of the other. Levinas clearly supports this interpretation in the following quote bearing directly on Nietzsche: ‘[T]his youth is the break in a context, trenchant, Nietzschean prophetic word, without status in being. Yet it is not arbitrary, for it has come from sincerity, that is from responsibility for the other’ (NI, 151). 2. Eternal Recurrence and Diachrony Still, Levinas hesitates to acknowledge fully the depth of radicality in Nietzschean saying, for he argues that Nietzsche’s ‘exposedness is never passive enough: exposedness is exposed, sincerity denudes sincerity itself. There is saying’ (OTB, 147). To put it differently, Levinas’s argument implies that insofar as Nietzsche’s thought on freedom is not enveloped by the primordial responsibility for the radically other, his thought is still caught within being. My intention is not to conflate and equalize Nietzsche’s thought with that of Levinas. However, I think that by exploring to its limit the intimation of anarchical responsibility for the other in Nietzsche’s thought, we can better appreciate not only the affinity of these two thinkers, but also the depth of the radical impulse in Levinas’s ethics. To do just this it is imperative to elaborate on Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal recurrence of the same, since this will allow me to explore Nietzsche’s notion of the spiral movement of time in relation to Levinas’s ethics. The pivotal moment in which the notion of the eternal recurrence of the same strikes Nietzsche is the event of Zarathustra’s struggle with the spirit of gravity as it appears a dwarf and is introduced as Zarathustra’s arch-enemy. It is at this moment that Zarathustra finds the courage to look into the deepest abyss – the mortality of humans and their death. In this moment Zarathustra grasps the necessity of breaking from an ontology of life as ‘being-towards-death,’ from the experience of time as a modality of past-present-future. Zarathustra breaks from a certain construction of time in which the future is actualized through the repetition of the past so as to postpone and defer the

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coming of that future in the hope of overcoming and redeeming human mortality and finitude. Zarathustra encounters the dwarf in the gateway called ‘Moment.’ In that Moment, two paths whose infinite trails have not ever met come together (Z, 178).7 Zarathustra poses the question to the dwarf of whether these paths are in opposition to one another. The dwarf answers, ‘[E]verything straight lies ... time is circular’ (Z 178). Zarathustra is disgusted by this answer. To Zarathustra, breaking with linear time does not mean time is circular. As a matter of fact, circular time is a repetition of the same, and hence is still caught within the time of essence, between the opposite poles of being and not being (Z, 236–8). For Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s critique demonstrates the extent to which in circular time one is always hopelessly caught in the extreme form of nihilism, where the future is an event that is always to come. Taking the Moment of fissure in time, Nietzsche postulates the future as that which arrives every day, every minute. The Moment is that fissure in time, an opening that is eternally recurring so that the now cannot be seized in order for one to be merely different, but in which the thought of beyond strikes. In other words, eternal recurrence and the fissure in time are the condition of possibility for the ‘otherwise than being’ to signify itself. Levinas describes the event of recurrence as central to his understanding of ethics. At one level recurrence is the most fundamental phenomenological experience of being conceived as matter: the recurrence of the heartbeat, of breathing. At another, but intimately related level, the contraction and overflow of breathing, which manifests itself in the breaking up of matter, signify the dimension of the hither side. This breaking up does not just happen in thought, but more concretely in the core of matter. For Levinas, the tightness of one’s skin, the ‘escape without exit,’ the heart beating under one’s skin, are hyperbolic expressions for a fissure, a recurring split, that comes as a strike from the absolute alterity of the other, and manifests as an overflowing of meaning by nonsense (OTB, 64). The body is a site of otherness, not a place of identification and reconciliation: ‘[T]he reclusion in one’s own skin ... is a movement of the ego into itself, outside of order. The departure from this subterranean digs, from the plenum into the plenum, leads to a region in which all the weight of being is borne and supported in the other’ (OTB, 195 n. 11). Levinas characterizes this contraction and breakup as the ‘anguish of this in-itself of the oneself’ (OTB, 108). The ‘in-itself’ signifies the event of being sent back to itself, and ‘the oneself’ one’s inability to stay there. So the anguish of this ‘in-itself of the

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oneself’ is not the anguish of a being ‘towards death.’ Rather, it is the torment of an irreplaceable one in its inability to shut itself up to the idea of infinity. For Levinas this formulation differs radically from what he postulates as ‘being-for-itself.’ Unlike ‘being-for-itself,’ which signifies a self caught in being or in being towards death, ‘in-itself of the oneself’ is being in one’s most inner depth of oneself, in one’s skin without a homeland. In other words, recurrence signifies one’s exile in oneself. It is an expulsion outside of being inside of oneself, without recourse to a resting place, or a ‘fatherland.’ Thus, for Levinas recurrence is a dimension of the irreducibility of the beyond and the possibility of the thought of ‘otherwise than being.’ For Nietzsche, also, the eternal recurrence of the same is the instance when thought exceeds its capacity; it is the moment when one’s thought goes beyond one’s own death. My reading, and the affinity that I find between Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Levinas’s thought of ‘otherwise than being,’ runs against those interpretations that consider Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same as the return of the identical self to itself. However, I agree with Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that eternal recurrence of the same does not depend on a principle of identity (AR, 86).8 If interpreted as the return of the identical self-life, eternal recurrence would pose a dilemma since, on many occasions, Nietzsche declares that time is irreversible. How can an identical life get repeated ad infinitum if the past can never repeat itself? Also, Nietzsche himself repeatedly points out that repetition of the same belongs to the essence of modernity, which for him is one of the signs of decadence. In ‘The Case of Wagner,’ for example, he argues that Wagnerian music is built on one of the principles of the modern soul: that of repetition of the same, a repetition that serves the purpose of convincing one of the truth (CW, 157).9 How, then, does Nietzsche reconfigure the self’s relationship with linear time in such a way that eternal recurrence of the same would not be a mere repetition? The answer, in my opinion, lies in another facet of the eternal recurrence. Some Nietzsche scholars have argued that for the eternal recurrence of the same to be revealed to the self, there has to be a forgetting. For example, Pierre Klossowski rightly argues that a forgetting is involved, since the revelation occurs neither as a reminiscence nor as an experience of déjà vu, both of which imply an attempt to recollect and to repeat the identical. For him, the essence of the eternal recurrence of the same is in the fact that the movement itself is forgotten from one state to the next (NEER, 110).10 In the moment of revelation,

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then, one realizes that one has forgotten, and concludes: ‘[I]t is not possible that it [my life] has not already appeared to me innumerable times’ (NEER, 109–10). Following a trajectory of his own that we may nonetheless relate to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Levinas addresses forgetting in relation to linear time. For him, to think more than one can think, the thought of ‘otherwise than being,’ requires a certain way of forgetting beyond, but through, time: a forgetting of being and non-being (OTB, 177). This forgetting, Levinas asserts, is neither unregulated nor unfettered. It is not the former, since unregulated forgetting merely serves as dissolving one being into another, a forgetting that happens in, for example, one’s ecstatic experience; this still lies within the bipolarity of essence (OTB, 177). Neither is this forgetting unfettered or unbound; it does not serve to disengage. Rather, and here Levinas’s argument relates to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, it is ‘a forgetting that would be an ignorance in the sense that nobility ignores what is not noble ... [S]uch ignorance is beyond consciousness; it is an open-eyed ignorance ... There is ignorance of the concept in the openness of the subject beyond this struggle for oneself and his complacency in oneself. This is a non-erratic openness’ (OTB, 177). Noble forgetting is a binding event through which the subject goes beyond self-preservation and repetition of the same-self, and find itself irreducibly responsible to that which is radically other. In this sense, thematization is a double forgetting covering up this originary noble forgetting, returning the self back to the same, to memory. Reading Nietzsche after Levinas, and expanding on Klossowski’s idea of forgetting in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, I want to argue that the core of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is the aporitic experience through which one is unable to remember that which cannot be forgotten. It is an event of simultaneous inability to remember and to forget. This is a space that you cannot forget but also cannot both remember and thematize at the same time, emanating not from an internal displacement, but rather from the strike of a call beyond and radically other than the ‘I.’ This inability to remember that which cannot be forgotten, in the Moment, points to the fact that, if even for a moment, I am cast outside of myself, yet not destroyed. This revelation cannot serve to keep me within myself. Eternal recurrence, then, contrary to Klossoski’s belief, would not be a circle (NEER, 111) but like a spiral movement; one experiences the same Moment without being the same one. Nietzsche’s attempt is at a revelation of a forgotten past, an anarchical past, that can never be retrieved by memory but rather can

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only be encountered in, and through, another medium. At stake here is the way in which this ‘anarchical past’ is registered on, or signifies itself to, the subject. Eternal recurrence is an encounter that requires a radical departure from the time of essence, and a transmorphing into another modality. The crux of this metamorphosis for Nietzsche is that gateway called Moment. The Moment is the now-time without either the past present or the future present. It is a break in being, a disjunction of identity, a loss of time; it is the restlessness of today without yesterday or tomorrow: a non-intentional, anarchic insomnia, or in Levinas’s term, ‘the anguish of this in-itself of the oneself.’ To be struck, and opened up, by the idea of infinity, as in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, is to be awakened to the infinite metamorphosis of the self through one’s encounter with that which exceeds one’s limit of memory and of recollection. In other words, it is to be awakened by, and to, the idea of infinity surpassing its idea in the idea. Something is being left beyond oneself, exceeding the self, and limiting its power of comprehension. Still the question remains of what it is that returns eternally, remains. I would argue that it is precisely the inability to remember that which cannot be forgotten, the idea of infinity, that occurs eternally: it recurs as a signal, or in Levinas’s term as a trace of a saying in the said. What recurs is the inability of the said to crystallize its mastery over saying. For Nietzsche, the gateway, Moment, is precisely that medium which reveals the inability to remember that which cannot be forgotten, the inability to thematize that which, in its radical separation, is in one’s proximity: closer than close and farther than far. Moment is the moment of succumbing to one’s inability to contain that which overflows and exceeds oneself, and it gives rise to an obsession that prevents one from fixing and thematizing that which is near. This proximity leaves one unable to escape one’s responsibility for the other, despite oneself. For Levinas it is only through the reduction of the past and the moment into a fixed and thematizable memory that one is able to reduce one’s responsibility toward the other to will and commitment. In Levinas’s words, ‘such a reduction refuses the irreducible anarchy of responsibility for another’ (OTB, 76). The inability to reconcile the radical otherness of the other even through memory, and the inability to evade the call of the other, signifies signifying itself, a ‘radical passivity’ at the core of being, prior to all passivity (OTB, 108). Insofar as recurrence is a passivity prior to all memory and all recall, it is more past than any recuperable past. Such radical passivity, Levinas argues, is anarchic, a moment of experiencing the powerlessness of

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power itself. It is to go beyond the ordinary dichotomy of passivity and activity into no longer being able to be able or not able, reaching the limit of mastery. The inability to remember that which cannot be forgotten is not an event in the past nor does it signify an event; rather it signifies the signifying itself that emanates from that passivity. Diachrony is a time of birth or creation, of which nature or creation retains a trace, not convertible into a memory (OTB, 105). Thus, ‘the recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present’ (OTB, 105); it refers to otherwise than being and not being otherwise. It is through the offering of the self to memory that the same can be conceived, and through which difference, or a different other, can be produced. The other in memory is not the inassimilable other; it is only an exteriority that is different from me. The other, for Levinas, is not characterized by difference from me, since difference is still a production and an invention; it is still the projection of the same into that which has already been produced as the outside. In the eternal recurrence of the same, insofar as the self is thrown out of linear time and encounters its own inability to remember that which cannot be forgotten, the self loses its own time. Thus, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same is the plane on which both the same and the other become irreproducible and irreplaceable. In Nietzsche, the irreducible alterity of the other permeates the self not through a peaceful revelation but – as Levinas himself acknowledges – as ‘aphoristic words that demolish’ (NI, 148). Such words, without shedding blood, shatter the moment, destroying what seemed real, and dissolving what seemed total. Levinas describes the spirit of Nietzsche’s destructive force as one of the marvellous moments of philosophy: ‘[T]he Nietzschean man shaking the world’s being in the passage to the overman, “reducing” being not by parenthesizing, but by the violence of an unheard-of word, undoing by the non-saying of dance and laughter’ (NI, 147). Though Levinas conceives of dance and laughter as ‘non-saying,’ I am tempted to say that this would be true only if one considered them as outside of language or as a failure of language and so not calling for any response. This is precisely what is problematic in Levinas’s characterization of dance and laughter as solitary: it limits the radicality of Nietzsche’s thought to the non-saying, at the cost of exploring its radical potential and its centrality to Levinas’s own radical ethicopolitics. Insofar as Nietzsche’s jump out of linear time allows for the thought of the irreducibility of the other through that which is ‘otherwise than being,’ there is an element of ‘saying’

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informing his ethics that manifests not only through dance and laughter, but also through aphoristic words, in a manner described by Levinas as tragic, grave, and on the verge of madness (NI, 147–8). In other words, is it not possible to think of Nietzsche’s words, and his nonsaying of dance and laughter, as a Levinasian ‘saying’? In a curious little footnote in ‘Humanism and An-Archy,’ in a paragraph where Levinas is elaborating on radical passivity as the ‘reverse side of being, prior to the ontological plane,’ he poses this question: ‘Is not Nietzsche the exceptional breath to make this “beyond” resound?’ (HA, 132).11 3. Levinas’s Radical Ethicopolitics: Saying, Eternal Recurrence, and Benjamin’s Divine Violence Nietzsche is a philosopher who realizes that radical transformation, the transvaluing of all values, can be done not by an infinite suspension and deferment of words, but by aphoristic words that demolish the world. This spirit of demolition, I want to insist, is the spirit of Levinas’s ethicopolitics insofar as his one-for-the-other is not merely a reform ‘from within’ of the present ‘said’ as it manifests itself in his critique of the liberal Hobbesian capitalist economy. Here again I want to differ from those who conceptualize Levinas’s critique of the state in liberal terms. What I want to emphasize is how Nietzsche would help Levinas to reveal the revolutionary force of his ethics. Nietzsche helps Levinas to expose the spirit of his saying in a way that, despite thematization, does not compromise its traces, nor can it stop the movement of thought always exceeding that which it thinks. What holds the primordial nonthematizable truth for Levinas is the orientation of being from oneself towards the other. Further, the greatest import is not the priority of one term over the other, but rather the priority of this orientation over the terms that are placed in it. In other words, I want to claim that it is the traces of Nietzschean spirit in Levinas’s discourse that point towards Levinas’s imagination of the impossible as a possibility, exposing the impossibility of the possible. Levinas’s critique of Western morality is a case in point. As Levinas argues, Western morality has been based on contracts among self-interested individuals, with its workability guaranteed by the spectre of violence. Peace in the Hobbesian liberal state is an armed peace and its justice arises in order to preserve the peaceful commerce among the members of that society. Therefore, as Levinas himself insists, the difference between an ethicopolitical order that rests upon the

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responsibility of one-for-the-other (with the limitations that arise out of this) and a state that is based on limiting the freedom (and hence the violence) of autonomous individuals, is not just a theoretical or philosophical difference (PP, 168–9).12 Levinas is not simply revealing the deeper justification, or yet another critique, of the liberal state. Rather, his ethicopolitical project is a question of two radically different views of society, politics, and the state. Thus, Levinas’s ethics of one-for-theother constitutes a radical break with liberal ethics and politics, based as it is on self-interested individuals whose foremost project is the work they do on their own beings. Change is always about changing the same to arrive at and reaffirm the same. Under liberalism, ethics is ultimately a private righteousness (DDF, 188).13 Hence, in liberal states power is merely the power of self-continuation, passed from one master to another. The problem with liberalism, therefore, is precisely that its constitution can only be based on the power of law-preserving violence, maintained by the threat of law-making violence. Law-preserving violence is the mechanism through which the Hobbesian liberal state maintains its hegemony, permitting only that excess and revolt that can ultimately be recuperated, revolt that does not threaten the essentials of the status quo, of the same, and the present arrangement of commerce. In what follows, I will elaborate further on these two terms that I borrow from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in an attempt to draw links between what he terms ‘divine violence’ and Levinas’s saying. Benjamin makes a distinction between three different forms of violence: law-preserving violence, mythical or law-making violence, and divine violence (CV, 284–300).14 Briefly, law-preserving violence is the threat of punishment; it functions as a deterrent. The foundation of lawpreserving violence is law-making or mythical violence, which is always based on the spectre of pure destruction. It is mythical violence that is the origin of all existing laws and legal institutions, the guarantor of existing peace. Benjamin explains that although the pretended mechanism of law-preserving power is the non-violent resolution of political conflict, ‘this remains ... a product situated within the mentality of violence ... because no compromise, however freely accepted, is conceivable without a compulsive character. “It would be better otherwise” is the underlying feeling in every compromise’ (CV, 288). In the above quote, ‘compromise’ alludes to the social contract that results in the creation of the modern state whose end is not justice, but rather the establishment of law through violence. In other words, law-making

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violence is the founding myth upon which all social contracts are created, established, maintained, and perpetuated. As such, the state has to forever rely on law-making and law-preserving violence. It is precisely because of this dependency, and the threat of its return, that the origin of the law, the founding violence, has to be forgotten, producing a cycle upon which the condition of the possibility of legitimacy and life of the modern state is established. In contradistinction to this cycle, Benjamin introduces ‘divine violence.’ For him, divine violence opposes mythical violence as the only power that is able to call a halt to the war of all against all or to stop pure destruction. According to Benjamin, ‘if mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes’ (CV, 297–8). Law-making and law-preserving violence can be annulled only by divine violence that is manifested in ‘educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law’ (CV, 297). Therefore, divine violence, for Benjamin, operates beyond the reach of law-making and law-preserving violence insofar as its locus and its ends are radically different. Yet, divine violence is not without a relation to these spheres in the sense that the expiating power of divine violence refigures both state-law power and the political; through it, both can be imagined otherwise. Benjamin’s notion of divine violence has been interpreted in multifaceted ways, but predominately as a mystical force demonstrating the negative and pessimistic utopianism of his thought. Time and space do not permit me to address these matters in any depth here. However, I want to point out that Benjamin’s divine violence, far from being merely a mystical force, points to the possibility of an alternative communal space-time separate from the state power and, more specifically, from the Hobbesian liberal capitalist state. Divine violence de-legitimizes this regime’s means and end – the maintenance of ‘peaceful’ reciprocal exchange among autonomous individuals through the spectre of law-making and law-preserving violence – posed as the natural and positive end of human collectivity. In other words, law-making and law-preserving violence are the means through which the contract is enforced and maintained, and as such they are integral to the state. The persistence of violence as mediator and as Necessity itself replaces ethics and justice with violence as the end of life, making it the foundation of the state and at the same time manufacturing a forgetfulness about that origin.

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Benjamin’s allusion to ‘educative power’ as one of the manifestations of divine violence gives a concrete, imaginable locus to a space separate from the law-making and law-preserving violence of the state, whose end, ultimately, is mere life rather than a just life oriented to and by the other. The space that Benjamin prophesies would announce justice – an orientation to and by the other – as the fundamental orientation of collective life. Levinas’s saying can help us to understand that, far from originating in a fantastical space of its own, Benjamin’s divine violence, at one level, can indicate the work of ‘saying’ whose orientation breaks the logical supremacy of both self-preservation – mere life – as the end of human existence, and of linear time as the sole reality of human experience. In the previous chapter, ‘Can Fig Trees Grow on Mountains? Reversing the Question of Great Politics,’ Brian Schroeder poses the important question of whether Levinas equates the totality with violence itself, of whether there is a moment in Levinas that negates, denies, and refuses that which is not affirmative. A fruitful way of addressing this issue is to explore the relationship between Levinas’s saying and Benjamin’s divine violence. Benjamin’s exposition of divine violence crystallizes in Levinas’s saying, operating as a radical critique of liberal capitalism. What Levinas deems the most necessary step for a radical break from the oppressive alternation between social contract and the fall into war of all against all is the saying, the ‘preoriginal responsibility for the other.’ Saying is not caught between law-making and law-preserving violence; rather its modality signifies a radical break with this cycle; saying is otherwise than being. This is precisely what Benjamin tries to articulate through his notion of divine violence. Insofar as saying is both a ‘facing’ and a rupture – a strike – it already points ‘beyond being.’ Saying, to the absolute alterity of the other, is an ambiguity, an enigma; it is never contained in my time and as such it is an anachronism, an immemorial trace (AMG, 57).15 Levinas emphasizes that this out-of-timeness, this trace, is neither one more word accessible to consciousness in an unknown future nor a word infinitely withdrawn from consciousness. Rather, it strikes, manifests, and reveals its trace in every said. However, whereas in Benjamin’s exposition divine violence strikes, but its locus is articulated only through an allusion to ‘educative power,’ in Levinas the ‘saying’ strikes directly from the face-to-face relationship, but nonetheless from outside of me. For me to know my unjust deed or injustice done by others to others, someone, from outside of me, has to call me to account. So, although justice, as Levinas suggests, ‘appears like a principle external to history,’ its expiating power is the

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demand by the other that I act to the point of giving my skin to the other, of having to justify my freedom: but all in the here and now within history. And that is where Levinas’s sense of urgency comes from: divine violence is the urgency of each moment in history. Levinas’s saying, like Benjamin’s divine violence, signifies a command to act prior to knowing, experimenting, or even believing. Both notions proclaim that it is necessary, as Levinas suggests, ‘to do in order to understand’; it is not ‘we do and we will understand’ (TT, 42).16 Here a reasonable person – who in the Nietzschean sense cannot pause his reason – may ask, ‘But how can one act before knowing?’ For both Levinas and Benjamin, this alternative relationship between praxis and knowledge, doing and understanding, signifies a realm beyond the rational that is neither intuitive nor impulsive, nor is it reducible to the law of priority of one over the other. Levinas alludes to this distinction when he insists that Nietzsche’s frankness, his spirit of youth, is not a naive spontaneity that is by necessity a temporary stage of life. It is not naivety, for naivety, as Levinas reminds us, ‘is an unawareness of reason in a world dominated by reason’ (TT, 38). Rather, Nietzsche’s spirit of youth and sincerity is more akin to what Nietzsche himself describes as the noble: ‘[T]he reason in the noble has the ability to pose’ (GS, 67). For Levinas, this move indicates a going beyond the temptation of temptation – knowledge – a move that cannot be reduced simply to blind faith or to a naivety of childish trust. It is rather a mode of knowing that makes possible the signification of inspiration, and from which all inspired acts emerge (TT, 42–3). For Levinas one can act prior to knowing only in relation with the true; it is only a direct relation with the true that excludes the prior examination of its terms. It is only my responsibility for the other and all ‘other others’ – justice – that conforms to an order prior to knowing. Nietzsche puts it this way: ‘[W]hat good is my justice? I do not see that I am fire and hot coals. But the just man is fire and hot coals’ (Z, 43). This modality, for Levinas, is pure praxis; pure not in terms of perfection and precision, but rather in pointing to its source – the destitution and nakedness of the face of the other – which needs neither justification nor total comprehension. Understanding, together with the impossibility of its achievement, is always a matter of retrospection and recollection. The expiating force of divine violence is pure praxis, the modality of the ‘true’ itself; rather than imposing a truth with a specific content or law (as with law-making or law-preserving), it signifies a demand on me to act for the other that does not begin with the knowledge of the possible

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(TT, 39–42). It is this spirit that Levinas tirelessly tries to reinscribe into the ethicopolitical undertaking and into the struggle for earthly justice. Although he is clearly not a Marxist, Levinas describes this spirit as ‘a prophetic cry, scarcely discourse; a voice that cries out in the wilderness; the rebellion of Marx and some Marxists’ (II, 238). Levinas reminds us that the saying is always betrayed by the said, by thematization, calculation, and prioritization; however, betrayal is not inevitably translated into exploitation, oppression, and poverty. Levinas himself argues that underlying his philosophy is a concern with reducing this betrayal to the extent that ‘one can at the same time know and free the known of the marks which thematization leaves on it by subordinating it to ontology’ (OTB, 7). Thus, beyond the objectification necessary to the human condition, bondage and suffering are unnecessary and avoidable. I would argue that this means that in order to free the known from the marks of thematization, the knower has to be free, first and foremost, from unnecessary bondage, to have already achieved the first freedom: economic justice. Levinas supports this interpretation when he says that ‘the daily run of our everyday life is surely not a simple sequel of our animality continually surpassed by spiritual activity ... [E]conomic struggle is already on an equal footing with the struggle for salvation’ (TO, 61).17 Economic struggle, in other words, is the first freedom, the freedom of beginning. So although the demand for justice comes from the outside of economic relations, justice, in Levinas’s words ‘can have no other object than economic equality’ (ET, 44),18 and hence, he continues, ‘it is an illusion or hypocrisy to suppose that, originating outside of economic relations, it [justice] could be maintained outside of them in a kingdom of pure respect’ (ET, 44). The class-state structure of Hobbesian liberal capitalism cannot posit justice as its end, not only for the reasons Marx offers, and not only because there is a permanent exclusion of the majority, who are already produced, albeit not in the Levinasian sense, as the other, and whose existence always remains as the negation of this totality; but, more importantly, because to maintain the peace, the liberal capitalist state, increasingly, must rely on law-making and law-preserving violence. Insofar as the coming to existence of ‘being’ in Western philosophy is signified through a split, a fall, the separation of a part, a particular, a body from the One, from the universal, from the spirit, ‘being’ appears in the world as the result of a fall, perceived as a deficiency, a sin, a perversion, and hence in need of re-assimilation into the totality. Therefore, peace is the colonization or disappearance of alterity. This absorp-

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tion, this peace, paradoxically, has to be enforced, maintained, and perpetuated through violence so that ‘beings’ in their freedom, tranquillity, and identity can maintain their reciprocal relations of exchange. To Levinas, to take the other seriously means to take the irreducible otherness of the other as the core of its humanity, in whose proximity the ‘Thought’ is awakened not as a ‘thought of,’ but rather as a ‘thought for’ (PP, 166), and peace becomes a responsibility to the radical otherness of the other (PP, 161). What Levinas finds redeeming in Marxism is that ‘in Marxism, there is not just conquest; there is recognition of the other. Marxism invites humanity to demand what it is my duty to give it. That is a bit different from my radical distinction between me and others, but Marxism cannot be condemned for that. Not because it succeeded so well, but because it took the Other seriously’ (PJL 119–20). He holds that Marxism contains a hope to make political power (read law-making and lawpreserving violence) irrelevant. In an interview, Levinas quotes Lenin as saying that ‘the day will come when the woman cook can lead a country’ (PJL, 120). Levinas finds the trace of a radical break with the given in this statement; a critique posed as coming from a space that seemed an impossibility at the time. He concludes that what Lenin was trying to say was that there would be a day when our political problems would be posed in new terms (PJL, 120). Levinas’s ethical orientation is a move towards precisely such a future, one that seems an impossibility right now. In this future, as Levinas’s ethicopolitical undertaking envisions, the social, the political, and the state emerge from the limitation of the ‘one-for-the-other’ and not from the limitation of violence. Levinas’s insistence on my infinite responsibility for the other, therefore, does not merely mean the impossibility of me meeting my responsibility. Rather, this saying functions as a measure of legitimacy of every social and political arrangement, of every state; the ‘one-for-the-other’ should be the constitution of the society. Therefore, I would argue that Levinas’s ethics is an attempt both to radicalize Marx’s discourse and, simultaneously, to suggest that there is a much deeper crisis in the modern state than even Marx identifies. Levinas’s ethics cannot serve as a justification of liberal capitalism; rather, it is already its most radical critique. ‘It is interesting to note how among the most imperative ‘sentiments’ of May, 1968 the dominant one was the refusal of a humanity that would be defined not by its vulnerability more passive than all passivity, by its debt toward the other, but by its self-satisfaction, its acquisitions and its acquittances. Over and beyond capitalism and exploitation

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what was contested were their conditions: the person understood as an accumulation of being, by merits, titles, professional competence – an ontological tumefaction weighing on others and crushing them, instituting a hierarchized society maintained beyond the necessities of consumption ... Behind the capital of having weighed a capital of being’ (NI, 150 n. 9). Conclusion In this paper I have tried to highlight the presence of two inseparable moments in Levinas’s ethics. One is his radical claim that ‘one-for-theother’ (response-ability for the other) is what makes an ego a subjectivity. The one-for-the-other prefigures a radical, archaic passivity. I have argued that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, read after Levinas, corresponds to this moment and furthers our understanding of radical passivity in relation to the irreducible alterity of the other. The other moment is the destructive force of Levinas’s ethics. I have used Levinas’s comments on Nietzsche’s spirit of youth and sincerity and Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ to suggest the irreconcilable orientation of Levinas’s ethics with that of the modern class-state. I have chosen a rather long trajectory to argue the above; I had two goals in mind for doing so. The first was to demonstrate that Nietzsche – in many respects – is much closer to Levinas than is often imagined. This affinity, I have argued, separates Nietzsche from all other modern thinkers whose projects, as Levinas claims, already assume imperialistic freedom as the constitutive moment of subjectivity. The second was to argue that the radical and destructive force of Levinas’s ethics separates it from the liberal interpretation of his ethics. The spirit of youth and sincerity in Levinas’s saying and the destructive force of his ethics make a liberal interpretation and recuperation of his work a challenging task, if not an impossibility. The impossibility of what he forces us to imagine, and to ponder, is precisely the un-compromiseable force of his ethics.

NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ideology and Idealism,’ in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1989); hereafter referred to as II. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso

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Victoria Tahmasebi Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998); hereafter referred to as OTB. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); hereafter referred to as GS. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘No Identity,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998); hereafter referred to as NI. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers; hereafter referred to as MS. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); hereafter referred to as PJL. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969); hereafter referred to as Z. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Active and Reactive,’ in David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 80–106; hereafter referred to as AR. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); hereafter referred to as CW. Pierre Klossowski, ‘Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal Return,’ in The New Nietzsche, 107–20; hereafter referred to as NEER. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Humanism and An-Archy,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers; hereafter referred to as HA. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity,’ in A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, eds, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); hereafter referred to as PP. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Damages Due to Fire,’ in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); hereafter referred to as DDF. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ in Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections (New York: Schoken Books, 1978), 277–300; hereafter referred to as CV. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘A Man-God?’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other; hereafter referred to as AMG. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Temptation of Temptation,’ in Nine Talmudic Readings; hereafter referred to as TT. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987); hereafter referred to as TO. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Ego and the Totality,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers; hereafter referred to as ET.

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From Escape to Hostage MARINOS DIAMANTIDES

Nausea [is the] revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves ... Nausea ... sticks to us [as] an obstacle that we cannot dodge ... [T]his is the very experience of pure being ... [N]ausea posits itself not only as something absolute, but as the very act of self-positing: it is the affirmation itself of being. And the ground ground of this position consists in impotence before its own reality, which nevertheless constitutes that reality. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape [T]he I flees itself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or of what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes. On Escape [The transcendence of radical passivity consists] in being struck by the ‘in’ of infinity which devastates presence and awakens subjectivity to the proximity of the other.’ Levinas, God and Philosophy

In what follows, I first retrospectively explain Levinas’s mature ideas on the ethical relation in the light of his youthful ideas on being’s nauseating experience of plenitude. The attempt is to salvage the description of ethical subjectivity as ‘hostage,’ in Levinas’s mature work, from being thought of as life-denying morality, by making explicit the theoretical link between the ‘ethical freedom’ of compassion, on the one hand, and the subject’s capacity to ‘escape’ the enchainment to its body without compromising its enjoyment, on the other. The quotes above

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capture the essence of this link: Levinas’s trajectory began by simultaneously acknowledging and subverting the absolute and definitive character of being. In sum, he thinks being, at once, as plenitude and as defective self-referential sufficiency. As it is revealed in the experience of nausea as an ‘obstacle that we cannot dodge,’ our ‘having to be’ is experienced as a suffering, a burden, from which the conscious ‘I’ aspires to ‘flee.’ We are relieved from the existential nausea that ‘sticks’ to us, thanks to being ‘struck’ by the idea of infinity that materializes in our ‘involuntary desire’ to embody responsibility for the neighbour. Crucially, this escape, or ‘transcendence,’ is acknowledged to be beyond being’s powers; ‘impotence of being in all its nakedness’ (On Escape, 68) is thus revealed. What the later Levinas did, however, was to elaborate on the sense in which this revolting immanent impotence of being to transcend being-for-itself functions, at the same time, as its affective power to be-for-its-other. Second, I attempt to derive political lessons from this materialist metaphysics. I highlight Levinas’s sympathy with materialist philosophies to the extent that these expose the capitalist-liberal deception that ‘ethical freedom’ can coexist with an empty stomach, and I offer some examples from the contemporary debate on human rights, democracy, and ‘globalization.’ At the same time, I stress that Levinas’s philosophy is at odds with body-reductionism, insisting, as it does, that recourse to the concept of subjectivity is indispensable, provided that it is understood as a bodily need – not for transcendence, but for redemption of suffering in the present of gratuitous compassion of the one-for-theother. Finally, the chapter attempts to explain the difficulty of engaging Levinas’s ethics with the concerns of political theory by posing a ‘constitutive’ ethical perversity of our juridico-political order. In this connection, I point to the category of ‘sovereignty,’ as based on the power to ‘exclude’ the naked human body that, historically, takes the form of an ‘exclusion through inclusion’ as understood, for instance, in Giorgio Agamben’s theory, and as is evident in the powers of the state, first, to kill, or let die, without committing a crime and, second, to engage bodies only as ‘docile’ – that is, as material conduits for the affirmation and re-production of the social processes that produce them – while excluding these bodies’ aspiration for redemption. In this connection, Levinas’s thesis that the nauseating character of existence is as inescapable as it is repressible and that, when not frustrated, it is productive of the possibility of revolt, can be useful in terms of emancipatory political theory.

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1. Here We Are: Plenitude, Nausea, Escape [A]t the root of need there is not lack of being, but on the contrary, a plenitude of being. Need is not oriented toward the complete fulfilment of a limited being, toward satisfaction, but toward release and escape. Levinas, On Escape

As is known, Levinas’s ethics is peculiar in that it declares itself to be universal and of absolute value at the very moment that it insists that ethical obligation does not arise from the logical and ontological universality of reason but immediately from the uniqueness of the moral situation that obtains between ‘I’ and the other. Take compassion, for instance. On the one hand, the whole of Levinas’s ethics can be read as a generalized commandment, ‘Be compassionate!’ in which compassion is not a promise to cure suffering but the actuality of the caress.1 On the other hand, compassion is the individual’s messianic vocation, or a ‘vocation outside the state, disposing, in a political society, of a kind of extra-territoriality, like that of prophecy in the face of political powers of the Old Testament, a vigilance totally different from political negligence’ (EE, 123).2 Here, I propose to tackle this difficulty by looking at Levinas’s earlier work, before the face-to-face is articulated, in which he attempted to describe the universal implications of each existent’s intimate relation to his or her own ‘pure life,’ by which he meant what the Greeks call zo¥ stripped of logos, which is common to all animals, or, in his terms, esse or persistence in being. Thus, in his ‘inaugural’3 essay On Escape Levinas attempted to show how the ‘I’ arises as a result not of socialization but of a deficiency of pure, self-referential existence.4 The essay contains a phenomenological analysis of the state of nausea as a fundamental aspect of ontology’s problem (66–8).5 Nausea is not experienced as an external obstacle – even if said obstacle is insurmountable or one that ‘we cannot dodge.’ Instead, Levinas draws attention to the fact that, in the very experience of it, nausea, far from appearing as an obstacle, ‘sticks to us,’ signifying the absolute impossibility of fleeing ourselves. It signifies the presence of ourselves to ourselves whereby we incorporate the fact that ‘we are there’ and there is nothing to be done about this. Now because nausea, from which vomiting will deliver us, is not a neutral experience but a suffering, it signifies, simultaneously with the absoluteness of our existence, a desperate ‘refusal to remain there, an effort to get out.’6

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Importantly, Levinas is pointing to the sui generis implication that nausea is not a fact of consciousness – something that consciousness knows as one of its states. In its very instant, and in the atmosphere that surrounds it, ‘the only relationship between us and nausea is nausea itself.’ In other words, Levinas sees in the nauseous mood not a negation but being’s extraordinary intimacy with itself. Yet, even if nausea remains a personal experience, it is also the experience in which the nothingness of impersonal existence (in later texts referred to as il y a) appears intact to being, behind every negation, as the feeling of being riveted or held fast. Nothingness, therefore, is felt not as anxiety7 but as enchainment to the destiny to fulfil the very being of the entity that one is. In this sense, the ‘revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves’ amounts to a fundamental disposition manifesting being qua being and constitutes the very act of self-positing, or, ‘the affirmation of being’ (OE, 68).8 In 1948 Levinas published De l’existence à l’existant, where he clarified many of his assumptions in On Escape before beginning to talk of being’s ability for compassion in relation to its nauseating inability to escape being-for-itself. Existence, we are told, is not synonymous with the (human) being’s relationship with the world but antecedent to it. Therefore, we can talk of a ‘relationship’ with Being only by analogy; Being is tout court; we take up our existence not through a decision but ‘by existing already’ (EE, 21–2). This thought is not yet removed from Heidegger’s. At the same time, however, Levinas adds that each existent’s impossibility of extricating itself from existence is our constitutive experience of Being – an experience of astonishment, questioning, and strangeness (22). Notwithstanding its verbality, Being is deficient because ‘to be’ feels like ‘a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an irrevocable contract’ (24) in the absence of any such contract. Hence, each pure life incarnates ‘weariness’ concerning existence (24), a weariness that ‘must not be confused with a judgment about the pain of being’ (25) and which does not arise from the lack of deliberation. In my view the youthful essays On Escape and Existence and Existents constitute major steps in Levinas’s trajectory. They are the first of a series of steps towards a hermeneutics of the facticity of existence, displaying none of the non-worldliness of other moral philosophers. Like Heidegger, he was concerned with being in the world, albeit not as being with and being towards but as having to be. This earlier work is indispensable for fully appreciating Levinas’s later work on proximity and responsibility, most famously in Otherwise than Being or Beyond

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Essence. What Levinas does is to relate the embodiment of the impotence that attaches to the need for escape to an irrepressible ability of consciousness to refer to ‘an outside,’ before knowledge and representation, in pre-reflexive, non-intentional sensibility. The risk of disassociating the ethical concept of ‘hostage’ from the fundamental hypothesis that being is oriented, in sensibility, towards escape without losing its immanent character is that we may come to forget that Levinas’s is a materialist metaphysics after all. Said differently, the danger is to think of Levinas’s ethics as a life-denying morality of self-abnegation, constructed by a man with no desire for enjoyment, or too good to stay alive. The alternative, to which I subscribe, is to consider his mature ethics – being’s sense of election, being called forth by the other, and so on – as the culmination of his attempt to describe how beings relate to the facticity of their existence in the modality of nausea, where selfpresence is experienced as suffering and ‘enchainment,’ thus forcing being to reflect on the brutal nature of its perfect, self-referential, existence, and, thus, on the dramatic dimension of being-for-itself, one side of which is the tragic irony of egoism. ‘Infinite’ and ‘gratuitous’ ‘responsibility’ for the external other, on the other hand, are not abstract ideas because they correspond to being’s ‘affective incontinence’ that anticipates the responsibility for the other. Willing to be for another, therefore, is not the opposite but the reverse side of being-for-itself, which ‘comes naturally.’3 Linking the young and old Levinas helps to explain why in his philosophy ‘the other comes first’ while, at the same time, responsibility clearly anticipates the real other. The ‘non-intentional affectivity’ with which the ethical self surrounds the other in the face-to-face, therefore, is real. It is ‘out of this world’ only in the sense that it does not need to become conscious will or even unconscious desire in order to be operative. Already, to undergo the burden of being riveted to one’s own existence and yet to aspire to escape the nausea of always only ‘having to be oneself,’ is to hope that it is righteous to be-for-another, in the sense of any other, which later, in the actuality of the face-to-face becomes being-responsible-for-my-particular-other’s-sufferings – irrespective of fault and causality – to the point of being ‘hostage.’ In this sense, even if one is assured that everybody else on the planet is dead, one will continue to exist in ‘vigilance,’ anticipating the external other for whom one can exist. Crucially, therefore, being aspires to be social (being-inthe-world) excessively, its desire for otherness being as infinite as its ‘enchainment’ to immanence is absolute. It is an insatiable desire, that

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is, it does not stop when being discovers that qua subject it already is social, for example, in intending the same objects to satiate its desires as others with whom he/she collaborates. Being-in-the-world, then, is not just a given that one must come to will. It is lived as an excessive aspiration and uncertain hope – arising from the depths of our animal existence – for ‘an order where the enchainment to oneself involved in the present would be broken’ (EE, 89), namely, for the freedom to step ‘out of oneself.’ This aspiration is not exhausted simply in conceiving the idea of freedom, as a feature of self-consciousness, for after having conceived of freedom embodied being continues to be burdened by its load of existence. The ‘I,’ therefore, never ceases to aspire to that impossible escape from being. Unable to escape but, by the same token, able to hope to escape, the socializing consciousness takes the form of hesitation, rather than anxiety, both persevering in being and ‘pulling back’ from engagement with existence. For Levinas this hesitant manner of conscious being, the principal mode of being-in-the-world, is first exemplified in the social being’s capacity to pursue from within communal economy an enjoyment that is a-social in the instant of enjoyment in which one becomes one with the food one eats or the air one breathes. In the instant of enjoyment the ego is solitary yet open to the world – naively, sincerely ‘disinterested in its definitive attachment to itself’ (EE, 90). The main thesis is that there is no ‘intentionality’ in enjoyment, or that enjoyment does not yet correspond to theoretical consciousness, and, therefore, enjoyment does not depend on self-presence. In other words, the enjoying self has an altogether different relationship with the material world, including the body, whereby it is lucid but not yet self-reflexive. The ‘escape’ offered in enjoyment, however, is ultimately unsatisfactory. In breathing, eating, drinking one is attached to things completely as is necessary to ‘escape’ self-referentiality, if only for a moment. But in so far as needs are always reborn, following their appeasement in satisfaction, enjoyment ultimately disappoints the need to escape – revealing, in the depths of our being, a ‘kind of dead weight ... whose satisfaction does not manage to rid us of it’ (OE, 59–60). Being, then, takes recourse in the economic pursuit of enjoyment in which enjoyment is deferred. The ‘I’ gives up the momentary escape and enters the ‘time of economy,’ the monotonous alternation of effort and leisure, only to find that its need for escape persists.9 At this point we could leave behind Levinas’s early texts and fastforward to Otherwise than Being, where, at first reading, it appears as if

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we finally get to hear from Levinas how, after all, this imperious need to escape is met in the face-to-face, in which the I becomes the other’s hostage, through assuming an infinite and gratuitous responsibility beyond all reciprocity. The point, of course, is the opposite: ethical subjectivity is described as ‘hostage,’ precisely because it is impossible to ‘finally’ step out of self-referentiality, to become the other’s hostage. Substitution is an aspiration – not a fact. In sum, I think, one ‘is’ hostage to the other, only because one is nauseously identical to one’s closed existence and, therefore, one is always aspiring to flee oneself. The personal feeling of nausea, on which Levinas staked so much, logically presupposes an experience of plenitude, but the world is split between the rich and the poor. Who is rich and who is poor? In short, the answer is that everyone capable of thinking ‘I’ is rich – full of himself – aspiring to responsibility for its others, whose imperious needs for food, shelter, and care designate them as less than ‘I.’ This de-humanized ‘less than I’ can mean either an absolutized ‘other’ – in sum Levinas’s Face – or another object for my enjoyment. An ‘I’ that does not aspire to escape the burden of looking after its own riches by considering himself to be the absolute other’s keeper would be an ‘I’ that attempts to find escape in the enjoyment of the destitute other as ‘object’ of one’s own need. This would be the essence of ‘cannibalism,’ which playful love-bites, sexualized patronage, and sadistic practices approximate but do not aim to complete for the sake of their own continuation. Exploitation of the other’s labour would also fall under the category of inconclusive cannibalism or love-bite. So would the practices of ‘economical charity’ by donor countries that aim not to serve the recipient but to create market opportunities. By contrast, Levinas’s obsessive ‘ethical responsibility’ connotes the ‘I’ that sees through the illusionary character of seeking escape from enchainment to one’s own riches in the delights of enjoying the poor other as object. He proposes that the ‘I’ can escape nausea in the emotional movement of being-for-the-other who presents himself as infinitely weaker than ‘I,’ that is, as a Face who is irreducible to an object. The Face is protected from cannibalism because it is empty, yet it affords the ‘I’ the supreme opportunity to flee its nauseating plenitude. It is not asking for economic charity or an opportunity to work – it is asking for me, calling me to justify my own existence even if I am not able to account for it. The significance of this exposure to the absolute other’s poverty is that it calls for giving not by giving away from one’s possessions, from what one ‘has,’ but by sustaining the impossible hope that one can give himself – step out of oneself. The ethical subjectivity responds to this demand through the vocation of

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compassion, which is insatiable and anarchic: even if my other bears all the trappings of power, ‘I’ who seek escape from myself will will it to be exposed as ‘naked.’ In this sense, compassion is an indecent force, undoing appearances. This ‘indecent exposure,’ despite what bourgeois manners suggest, is nothing to feel shame about. On the contrary, it alleviates the greater shame of one’s presence to oneself: ‘Being naked is not a question of wearing clothes. It is ... our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves that is shameful. It reveals not our nothingness but rather the totality of our existence’ (65). In sum, for the ‘I’ to escape its shameful plenitude, the other – any other – must be approached as utterly naked. What, however, is the importance of Levinas’s insight on nausea for the modern subject? Like the sitting angel in the midst of a construction site, in Dürer’s famous engraving Melancolia I, that subject seems more given to the joys of melancholy than to nauseating compulsion. With this in mind, I propose in the next section to continue with Levinas’s earlier texts in the hope of finding some insights as to where the young Levinas stood regarding the political economy of capitalism. With its emphasis on accumulation and its deferral of enjoyment, the subject of the capitalist spirit appears unable to experience nausea and, therefore, able to dodge the need to escape. 2. Levinas on the ‘Liberal Deception’ and the Exploitation of Man by Power as Capital How does the subject of the capitalist work ethic negotiate the nauseating experience of plenitude that lies at the heart of every being? On Escape begins with a reference to the ‘bourgeois spirit of self-sufficiency’ that presides over that ethic. The underlying psychology is the attempt to pre-empt any feeling of shame in case one is exposed as lacking confidence in oneself. The strategies employed to this end – accumulation of capital and intense concern with business matters and scienceare described as defensive ‘of the equilibrium in which [the bourgeois] holds sway [où il possède].’ The ‘cult of initiative and discovery’ is also tied to this conservative spirit whose ‘instinct for possession is an instinct for integration, and his imperialism a search for security’ (50). The bourgeois ‘demands guarantees in the present against the future. What he possesses becomes capital, carrying interest or insurance against risks, and his future, thus tamed, is integrated in this way with his past’ (ibid.). Commonplace as these observations may sound, they are significant when coming from Levinas. As the text progresses, and Levinas posits being’s need to escape its own absolute character, the situation of

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the bourgeois retrospectively appears unstable. His immaculate clothes, state of cleanliness, and good manners do not ‘hide’ from himself his shameful nudity qua plenitude, nor diminish his need to escape. The bourgeois strategies to conceal inner division and lack of self-confidence respond to shame only in its social sense, but pure existence, we are told, is as shame unto itself. Preoccupied exclusively with shame in its social dimension, the bourgeois appears resigned to what Levinas called the pre-social feeling of shame associated with the absoluteness of one’s existence. This resignation could be another name for the condition of melancholy, which went from being one of the four humours in medieval times to being the characteristic condition of man from the sixteenth century onwards. It is the condition that Dürer depicts with the image of a winged yet immobile and heavy angel in the midst of a construction site, surrounded by hammers, planes, and geometrical devices. Escape from melancholy is now relegated to the imaginary, the utopian. It is the same condition that Günter Grass, in his novel From the Diary of a Snail, attributes to the factory worker before fantasizing that one day utopia and melancholia will coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy and without consciousness, an age of ‘stasis in progress.’ Levinas’s counter-thesis, that melancholia and utopia cannot totally replace the nauseous urge, can be useful in terms of emancipatory political theory, at least to the extent that it describes existence as inescapably unbearable for every being and, therefore, as forever potentially productive of the possibility of revolt (OE, 52). In his incessant preoccupation with the possibility of future lack, in substituting enjoyment for stockpiling, the puritanical capitalist attempts to defer nausea and therefore the need to escape.10 He is, Levinas says, a mediocre materialist.11 In terms of the relation of ethics to modern politics, the notion of a mediocre capitalism helps us understand how greater riches can coexist with less compassion in our melancholic times. What becomes of the individual being’s ‘need to escape’ through gratuitous compassion for the neighbour, when the melancholic subject seems content to enjoy its sadness rather than seeking to flee itself? Melancholy, I argue, can be a lifelong substitute for compassion only to the extent that the state and civil society provide the subject with collective and anonymous avenues for giving as well as with ideologies of formal equality: one pays one’s taxes to the welfare state, one gives to charities, one considers the other to be equal, and hence one feels not the need to escape one’s existence by being for one’s other. Yet, in economic conditions where production far exceeds consumption, even such ‘tempered

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charity’ is not enough. It is not surprising, therefore, that offloading surplus capital – both material and ‘cultural’ – has become a high priority for the richest of states, including through waging hugely expensive wars that carry the banner of human rights and democracy.12 With such ‘humanitarian wars,’ these states ensure both that their own citizens continue to aspire to more production, consumption, and exchange, despite their sated status, and that the impoverished of the other side are forcefully integrated, cannibalized into a global cosmopolis. In this connection, as I have indicated elsewhere,13 the historically contingent circumstances in which the desire for escape from nausea as compassion becomes repressed among melancholically sated peoples become justified by certain beliefs. I mean: the philosophies according to which the insufficiency of the human condition results from lack – not plenitude; the morality that assures us that there exists, independently of personal effort, a thing called ‘human rights’ that dignifies even the starving, the war victim, the exploited labourer, and so on; the metaphysical belief that there are universal organizing principles, gradually revealed in physics, biology, and economy, that will lead to the removal of all limitations; and the manipulation of some philosophies of becoming (notably Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence), and of psychoanalysis’s comforting techniques, so that they bear the ‘truth’ that being must ‘accept itself’ in a spirit of quietism. Today’s politically complacent man and woman is precisely the one who represses nausea and ‘accepts’ oneself in a spirit of melancholy: the consumer who is barred from enjoyment by the sheer excess of goods, and the man of finances who carries, in his head, a bag of money too big to be useful anywhere. Nausea, and the need to escape it, however, cannot be preempted but only repressed. On the basis of this hypothesis, one could look for signs of such repression amidst the plethora of today’s individual and collective pathological impulses and compulsions. As for our others, towards whose poverty we would orient our need for escape if we did not repress it, we prefer to imagine them as ‘equals’ to us and, thereby, remain relatively indifferent to their plight. Take Europe and its fake refugee crisis. An aging population facing a pension crisis due to too much good health deludes itself that it cannot enter into proximity with its ‘others.’ In our eyes, those whom we unnaturally exclude from our responsibility come to embody our own philosophical construct of man as lack – that which we must avoid at all costs. Levinas, it is worth mentioning, admires Marxism precisely because it is materialistic in a sincere, non-mediocre manner, and exposes

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the liberal illusion. In the second chapter of Existence and Existents (‘The World’) Levinas argues that the intentionality of desiring consciousness is being’s naive and sincere attempt to escape the weariness that comes with enchainment to anonymous existence (il-y-a). ‘Eating,’ we are told, is peaceful and simple; it fully realises its sincere intention: ‘The man who is eating is the most just of men’ (EE, 44).14 Levinas’s thesis, that objects can concord fully with desire, is both anti-idealist and subversive of Heidegger’s15 views of the world as resource, things as tools, technology, and so forth (moreover, obviously, it marks Levinas’s work as the antithesis to Lacanian theory). A full stomach, therefore, is not to be underestimated. This is what he has to say on Marxist philosophy: To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognise the sincerity of hunger and thirst. Under the pretext of saving the dignity of man, compromised by things, it is to close one’s eyes to the lies of capitalist idealism and to the evasions in eloquence and the opiate, which it offers. The great force of Marxist philosophy, which takes its point of departure in economic man, lies in its ability to avoid completely the hypocrisy of sermons. It situates itself in the perspective of the sincerity of intentions, the good will of hunger and thirst, and the ideal of struggle and sacrifice it proposes, the culture to which it invites us, is but the prolongation of these intentions. What can be captivating in Marxism is not its alleged materialism, but the essential sincerity this proposal and invitation maintain. It is beyond the always-possible suspicion that casts its shadow over idealism, which is not rooted in the simplicity and univocity of intentions. One does not attribute to it the second thoughts of deceivers, dupes, or the sated. (EE, 45)

From this we derive that the way to Messianic politics – at least in Levinas’s trajectory – passes through fights against accumulation of capital and the exposure of the deceptions of liberalism. In this sense, every critique of the liberal eighteenth-century ideal of the ‘individual’ endowed with ‘moral autonomy’ as the basis for political theory and action is compatible with Levinasian philosophy. In terms of contemporary politics, this ‘deception of capitalist idealism’ has been exposed in the growing body of literature that has developed around ‘globalization.’16 The deception currently takes the form of the institutionalized myth that the adoption of human-rights laws, conformity to the parliamentarian governance model, and the establishment of conditions for free capital circulation are conditions for development. The forceful

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imposition of this myth has given rise to a number of scandalous results.17 Nevertheless, it would be a gross mistake to claim that Levinas’s ultimate political lesson is simply anti-liberal. On the contrary, (the later) Levinas has written in defence of the European juridico-political culture of human rights, albeit with the immensely significant qualification that ‘anarchic compassion’ must take precedence over formal equality – a qualification that, I believe, is substantial enough to remove the suspicion that Levinas, like a new Aristotle, overvalued the principles of the republic that sheltered him. For example, in ‘The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,’18 the expression ‘human rights,’ as used after the eighteenth century, is celebrated by Levinas in so far as it expresses the aspiration, or impossible hope, that the uniqueness of each person should come before difference. Specifically, Levinas ‘ethicizes’ the idea of human rights as no more than a good idea, which, in spite of all empiricism, expresses the aspiration of ‘the alterity of every person’ (RM, 116), ‘independent of any power that would be the original share of each human being in the blind distribution of nature’s energy and society’s influence [and] of the merits the human individual may have acquired by his or her efforts and even virtues’ (117). Levinas, in other words, correlates the idea of human rights to the individual human need to escape things as they are, by invoking anarchically ‘an original sense of the right,’ or the sense of a pre-original right, ‘prior to all entitlement,’ signifying ‘an ineluctable authority, older and higher than the one already split into will and reason ... that imposes itself by an alternance of violence and truth’ (117). Politically, therefore, we have a pre- or post-liberal idea of the rights of man, as a product not of unifying reason but of existential nausea from which escape is sought anarchically by recourse to the ‘vocation’ for compassion. The only absolute human right from which all other rights can flow is the right to gratuitous responsibility for the other, through which I aspire to escape myself. In this deeply personal sense, the idea of inalienable rights comes to mind with infinitely greater force than is suggested in Kant’s formal universalism. The obligation to care for the neighbour’s material enjoyment is an ‘order having its authority in itself.’ ‘Is it so certain that the entire will is practical reason in the Kantian sense?’ Levinas asks rhetorically (RM, 122). The question arises in view of the fact that in the plurality of free wills united by reason, called the ‘kingdom of ends,’ the idea of human rights is thought to be ‘limited by justice’ and, therefore,

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‘remains repressed,’ inaugurating only an ‘uncertain and ever precarious ... bad peace’ among humans.19 Levinas, by contrast, finds in human rights the aspiration to escape any necessity, false or real. He explicitly lists many of the rights that remain unrecognized and without which the established human-rights principles, enshrined in law, become ‘concretely impossible’: among them the right to health, happiness, work, rest, a place to live, freedom of movement, and, beyond all that, ‘the right to oppose exploitation by capital (the right to unionise) and even the right to social advancement’ (RM, 120). And, beyond all that, ‘the right (utopian or Messianic) to the refinement of the human condition, the right to ideology as well as the right to fight for the full rights of man, and the right to ensure the necessary political conditions for that struggle’ (ibid.).20 However, importantly, the anarchic vocation for compassion that drives the fight to render human rights concretely possible also functions as the limit to this fight. At the end of the day, gentle compassion is superior to the sober intention to cure because it addresses suffering now. This is why Levinasian ethics is so infinitely removed from consequentialism: there is no charitable end that can justify cruelty. The anarchic vocation of compassion that drives the effort to render the idea of human rights concretely possible is qualified by Levinas not as a response to sensual suffering but as an acknowledgment that ‘pain cannot be redeemed’ (EE, 91). When Levinas is talking of the vocation of compassion that motivates the political struggles for ensuring the necessary conditions for the realization of man’s full rights, he is using compassion in exactly the same sense as compassion in the face-to-face, that is, as concerned exclusively with the present, and as directed at suffering that is at once deeply personal and bereft of all meaning but the meaning of the consoling act.21 This is why no one can use Levinasian ethics to justify restrictive interpretations of human rights that compromise compassionate action in the present22 or revolutionary ruthlessness. In sum, we have seen that Levinas admires Marxism in so far as it exposes the liberal deceptions, but this is far from being an apology for crude materialism. In Existence and Existents, two chapters after having praised Marxist philosophy for situating itself in the ‘good will of hunger and thirst’ (45), Levinas appears to be slamming any attempt to derive all value from empirical science. Rather than taking the source of values to be the human body as a cluster of absolute needs, Levinas insists that values are produced in the manner that the existent seeks to escape such absolutes. Here, I argue, lies Levinasian philosophy’s criti-

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cal potential vis-à-vis the current theoretical trend to abandon all associative concepts associated with abstract individualism – such as person, self, individual – and to trust the historically and geographically malleable ‘human body’ as the only foundational concept and privileged site of political resistance and emancipatory politics. This trend is crudely evinced in evolutionary psychology and in Dennett-style ‘philosophy of the mind.’ It is more nuanced in those who follow Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s theories, in the form of the scrutiny and challenge of the representations of the human body in the various fields of the life sciences. From the point of view of Levinas’s notion of the irreducible need to ‘escape’ as being’s primary experience of its body, the conception of the material body as a mere passive product of external processes is flawed. This is confirmed in the conundrum in which body reductionists find themselves: for example, in D. Haraway’s social theory the body is at once universalized as ‘cyborg’ and celebrated as the privileged site for transformative political action.23 It is as though the true means of surpassing the real were to consist in approximating a critical activity that ends up precisely with the real. Just as it happened with classical Marxism, being’s irreducible need for escape – hypostasized in Levinas as ethical subjectivity – is forgotten. Thus, we can conclude, while Levinasian philosophy celebrates the theoretical focus on the body in so far as it exposes the myths of transcendental morality and liberalism, it also discredits the claim that the body can act as the basis for transformative political action. 3. Wasted Affectivity In Existence and Existents, after having pointed to compassion as the means for subjective relief from Being’s burdensome grip, Levinas then introduces, for the first time, the relationship of the face-to-face, which, of course, is the central theme of his well-known Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. I want to emphasize that, in the face-to-face, the ‘I’ cannot escape its factual enchainment to being-for-itself – in the sense given earlier – but the ‘I’ can escape nausea in the emotional movement of being-for-the-other, the other whom the ‘I’ anticipates as less rich and healthy in the moment of apperception. As one knows, this non-intentional affectivity of the being-for-my-other, in which ‘I’ does not step outside itself but lets itself be overwhelmed by emotion, is described by Levinas in very specific terms: it is ‘assumption’ of responsibility despite the absence of voluntariness (it is not an option but an imperative

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bodily need); it is dedication to a particular other despite the impossibility of choice (it is obsession); it is compassion without empathic identification; it is commitment in the absence of any contractual obligation. In short, the possibility of ‘ethical freedom,’ or the escaping of life as being-for-itself, materializes as excessive affectivity in relation to the external other but rests on nothing more than the very impossibility of this escape, the impossibility of this freedom! ‘I’ am confronted with the fact that there is nowhere I could escape to, although I am turned towards an other. There is no freedom from being and yet there can be ‘hope of freedom.’ We know, on the one hand, that death is not an exit but annihilation, where being’s facticity is negatively confirmed. We are told, on the other hand, that ethical ‘freedom does not presuppose a nothingness to which it casts itself’; it is not, as in Heidegger, the event of nihilation. It is produced in the very ‘plenum’ of being through the ontological situation of the subject (EE, 89). The experience of nauseating plenitude allows us to ‘knock on the closed doors of another dimension ... a mode of existence where nothing is irrevocable, the contrary of the definitive subjectivity of the ‘I.’ And this is the order of time’ (ibid.). The doors of this ‘other dimension,’ however, do not open magically: ‘There is no dialectical exorcism contained in the fact that the ‘I’ conceives of a freedom. It is not enough to conceive a hope to unleash a future’ (ibid.). Rather, as we have seen earlier, a future is unleashed only to the extent that we can hope, in so far as ‘to hope is to hope for the reparation of the irreparable ... to hope for the present’ (EE, 91). The essence of time ‘consists in responding to that exigency for salvation’ (EE, 91–2) through compassion, which ‘does not promise the end of suffering’ but ‘concerns the very instant of physical pain’ (EE, 89, 91).24 Levinas’s diachronic time in the face-to-face, therefore, is the product of being’s impossibility of escaping being-for-itself, which also functions as its own possibility – resulting in the aspiration of responsibility and the overflowing of life by non-intentional affectivity. Being, then, embodies hope as affectivity and compassion for its other due to the very absoluteness of the effort-to-be-itself. The ‘other,’ whose face signifies, from the outside, the same non-phenomenal and absurd ‘suffering’ of the having-to-be for no reason and beyond adequate compensation, which plagues me, becomes, then, irresistibly naked, attracting me intensely to take on the role of the elected saviour, the Messiah. This absolutely wretched other cannot function as the object of a mimetic or possessive desire – for I cannot possibly intend something that is not manifest. I cannot escape plenitude by assimilating or cannibalizing the

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other! The Messiah is me, here, now, but my ‘absolute’ other, who I take to have elected me, is beyond my possessive reach! The face-to-face as ‘engagement through disengagement’ can best be understood if we consider the situation where a human being stays by the side of a beloved other who is about to die at any moment, and is perhaps already without self-consciousness, unable to think and respond to questions. We see the healthy one rearranging the pillows under the moribund head, in an attempt to provide comfort. We see him or her crying and speaking to the dead after death has occurred. For Levinas, the significance of such behaviour is not reducible to its intelligibility as impulsive, automatic behaviour. Such actions are a sign of the ‘I’ aspiring to be hostage to an other who can never possess me or ever be mine! It is realized in my ability not to give ‘from my reserves’ but to give myself unreservedly, to be-for-my-other, without investing! Here we find a conception of giving close to that found in Strathern’s anthropology. Strathern argues that, contrary to the dominant Western tradition, Melanesians do not conceive of objects and persons as independent entities involved in exchange, and that the person who gives ‘does not exist’ before giving and the relationship that occurs with this giving. This person only has an identity as part of and as a result of the giving relationship. Thus, she concludes, people only acquire their identities from the relationships in which they participate.25 What, then, is the relationship to my moribund or dead other? I can ‘take’ his or her suffering without making it mine in the form of anxiety over my own mortality! I can act on my desire for proximity even though, as my dying other is increasingly leaving me behind, I know this desire to be beyond satisfaction. I can, in sum, give compassion in the present. That I can do all this by simply staying ‘radically passive,’ allowing the other to ‘dictate to me,’ points to affectivity and compassion as a power in a non-economic sense – not as capital, but in the sense given by Aristotle, that is, power in relation to its own privation.26 Levinas refers to this explicitly when he says that the activity of the mind is ‘not based on an empirical experience of the deployment of intellectual energy [but it] rather is the extreme purity – to the point of tension – of the presence of presence, which is Aristotle’s being in act, a presence of presence, an extreme tension breaking up presence into an ‘experience of a subject’ (God and Philosophy, 157).27 Being’s ability to aspire to affectively be-forits other, in compassion, is a capacity that derives from its incapacity to escape the idea of Infinity and God, or, to put it in the terms of Levinas’s youthful essays, being’s emotional incapacity to simply be itself, mani-

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fested in the state of nausea. Nausea, in other words, is not escapable simply because one cannot bear the suffering involved in one’s naked life – something that we can ultimately comprehend – but because an escape sign has already been planted in us, reading ‘God and Infinity: for directions follow the other.’ It is important to find a way to relate these observations to contemporary accounts of the juridical-political order that explain the exploitation of man not in terms of human nature and the abuse of the weak by the strong – though I think this view too has its links with ethical responsibility, as I tried to show earlier – but in terms of the history of the relation between ‘bare life’ and the history of our political institutions. These accounts, purely secular, belong to the history of Western philosophy that ‘restricts meaning’ (GP, 154) by presupposing that meaning, or intelligibility, coincides with the manifestation of being, ‘as if the very doings of being led to clarity, in the form of intelligibility, and then became intentional thematisation in experience,’ and that ‘all the potentialities of experience are derived from or susceptible to such thematisation’ (GP, 155). A prominent candidate among such accounts is that of Giorgio Agamben and those who follow him. I choose Agamben’s account because, as Anton Schutz has masterfully clarified, [he] focuses, not on the sphere of social relationships or legal artefacts, but on the existence or Dasein which they condition ... The human waste stamped out by the machine of politico-legal rationality are themselves, in their living Dasein, the secret and never formulated, never ‘owned-up,’ living social contract which the legal paperwork social contracts listed in the textbooks of doctrinal history try to cover up. According to Agamben’s radical type of empiricism, then, the point at which the parallels of subject and sovereign converge, at which the diverging rationalities in charge of conduct and meaning intersect, is located neither in a new system of social action (communication), nor in a system of text/meaning/interpretation. It is located in the experience of historically manufactured versions, sideversions, diminutions, of human life.28

The category of history’s human waste, to which Agamben and Schutz refer, encompasses being’s bare life that political history had hitherto ignored, namely, the exploitable bare life that is missing from the abstract accounts of the procedures of subjectivizing power (humanizing power) and of objectification (de-humanizing power). The reader will undoubtedly be aware of the two figures of embodiment that Agamben

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used to theorize, in total, the relation between bare life and the sphere of politics: that of Homo Sacer in Rome and of the Muselmann in the concentration camp. The importance of Agamben’s discussions of these two figures is that they illuminate how bare life functions paradoxically in the history of politics (understood not as a history of power but as a history of ‘a perpetual seizure of power ... a permanent being-forpower, the ever-performing, ever-campaigning esse-in-actu of politics’)29 as that which is both left out of political life (bios) and as the ‘triggering or enabling device for its own transgression, an indicator of an always colonisable, indefinitely politicisable territory.’30 Thus, we understand why the Foucaultian Agamben does not see modernity’s bio-politics as constituting a break with classical politics. The Aristotelian distinction between bios and politically indifferent zoe is not absolute. Rather, in the classical polis, zoe, or bare life is ‘exempted,’31 ‘excluded through inclusion,’ or ‘abandoned.’ In sum, from Athens to Washington: ‘[B]are life has, in western politics, the singular privilege of being that of which the exclusion founds the city.’32 What interests me in these accounts is that their undeniable logic and historical evidence is coupled, implicitly or explicitly, with an attitude of indifference towards the problem of transcendence and hope. Thus, such philosophies are not groundbreaking but can be seen as constituting the latest moments in the history of Western philosophy, which ‘not by chance ... has been a destruction of transcendence’ (GP, 154). They are yet different versions of a philosophy that thematizes being’s actions and then derives all potentialities from those thematizations, seeking to manifest the manifest, that is, the business of the ‘truth of truth’ (GP, 155). This kind of philosophy, in which knowing, thought, and experience are understood as a ‘kind of reflection of exteriority in an inner forum’ (ibid.), is misleading in so far as it defines consciousness as knowing – a concept that presupposes consciousness – and thus loses the specificity of consciousness as presence to self. A different way of pointing out how that specificity is lost is to remind ourselves that consciousness as presence to self is consciousness of pure existence, which, as we saw, feels like enchainment to being. In this connection, the philosophies that define consciousness by knowledge exclude Dasein thought of in the category of nausea. I am referring to the deeply personal experience of being tied to one’s existence that, as we have seen per Levinas, attaches to zoe, irrespectively of bios, and brings about the need to escape that finds its expression in responsibility for another being, or ‘substitution.’ Even if man ever roamed the

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Earth without others, as some a-social animals still do today, he would still not be able to escape the feeling of existence as a burden. He would have to get up from sleep and try to be something other than anonymous existence, in the effort of food gathering and shelter seeking. Even during dreamless sleep he would not have been immune to the demands of otherness, because insomnia, wakefulness, or vigilance are not definable as the negation of the natural phenomenon of sleep, but belong to the ‘categorical, antecedent to all anthropological attention and stupor’ (GP, 156).33 In insomnia, ‘the other is in the same and does not alienate the same but awakens it ... [I]t is a “more” in the “less”’ (ibid.). Thus, our sleeping primitive man would still be an ethical subjectivity by virtue of the ‘passivity of inspiration’ that is insomnia ‘without intentionality, dis-interested’ (ibid.). By daylight, the burdensome feeling of this perseverance-in-itself would be momentarily relieved in the enjoyment of food and shelter, basic needs that can be satisfied. But it would recommence incessantly every time pleasure turned to nausea, and could only vanish in death: hence, the impotence to escape being can be said to be fundamental. Now we can mislead ourselves that ‘since’ primitive man we have come a long way. For example, we now know, through Levinas, that we can ‘knock on the closed doors of another dimension’ and aspire gratuitously to be-forothers; or, we can simply have simple faith in our compassion. If it is to function as the courageous and dramatic need for escape, however, such aspiration to the dimension of hope does not proceed from teaching and knowledge nor is it a matter of faith. Neither can it be explained by saying that, ‘over time,’ our genetic profiles incorporated the ‘accidental’ lesson that co-operation, requiring relative and conditional altruism and promise keeping, helps us secure food and shelter more efficiently. Rather, time became available to us only through the inspiration to ‘knock’ on each other’s ‘closed doors,’ namely, only through each existent’s desire to escape being-for-itself and enter the being-foreach-other. If com-passion gave us hope, society, and time, we cannot subsume it to consciousness as knowledge or as God-given spirit. Without an understanding of the time-producing character of nonintentional affectivity, resulting from malaise at the heart of bare life, our accounts of man’s exploitation will remain without hope, that is, without compassion for the urgent demand of the now. Which is to say, it will remain the business of transcendental idealism defining the activity of the mind as based on the empirical experience of the deployment of intellectual energy, and thus excluding the consciousness that is

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the burdensome experience of pure existence, prior to knowledge or faith. As such it will remain a philosophy that presumes that ‘everything that goes off in the past is recalled or recovered by history’ (GP, 157), a philosophy that stays indifferent to the urgent now of human suffering, a dispassionate philosophy that comes to us ‘full of ideas but with empty hands.’ Let me take, for example, Anton Schutz’s reception of Agamben’s philosophy. The latter’s preferred version of political theory is categorically separated from the more naive ones in which man’s exploitation is explained as ‘exploitation of certain humans by others.’34 In sum, no attempt is made to build a bridge between his theory and such theories as we know have historically underpinned most of the attempts to expose exploitation of man by man, to bring to light the misery of others, and to warn of the implications of the ‘liberal illusion.’ Rather, Schutz is satisfied with restating (Agamben’s) twofold truth, to which I too fully subscribe, but cannot be content with: first, ‘only life laid-bare is subject to exploitation’;35 second, ‘the exploitation of man lies in the industrialisation, i.e. in the systematic use of difference of level between bios and zoe, gifted life and bare life. The accursed, the sinister and unaccounted part of the history of power in the West, is not the monotonous competition between envious or ambitious neighbours; it is the exploitation of pure life by instituted life.’36 If these truths satisfy us, we will have to agree with Schutz that ethical philosophy can play no serious role in emancipation. A suspicion is cast on everyone who aspires to be more compassionate. In fact, in Schutz’s text there is no mention of compassion, in the sense given here, although there is a mention of ‘addictive generosity,’ next to ‘moral pity,’ and ‘political correctness,’ all of which, we can infer, are, literally, a ‘waste of time’ for theory. Time, Schutz implicitly dictates, should concern the theorist only as in Agamben, namely, in the consideration of bare life as political history’s waste, ‘a remainder, with the exhuman, the less than human, the human deprived of humanity.’37 It is a task unfit for passionate humanists because it requires only a ‘philosophical calculus of the uttermost technicality ... [that] addresses the question of power.’38 Thus, I infer, the theorist ‘ought to’ study the ‘experience of historically manufactured versions, side versions, diminutions of human life’39 with the emotional sobriety displayed by Schutz in responding to ‘the Muselmann [as] the living document of the possibility of instituting, as a final, yet permanent state, a stratum of dehumanised, de-subjectivised existence.’40 He concludes his piece with a sentence making an entirely pessimistic reference to the impossibility of

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transgressing, within the political order, the relationship sovereign and subjects: ‘I, the sovereign, who am outside of the law, declare that there is no such place as an ‘outside of the law.’41 Allow me to disagree. Inside his text Schutz inadvertently displays enough appreciation for humanist passion. On page 128, in the course of contributing to the deconstruction of the ethical branch of communication theory, he mentions, in admiration, Agamben’s thought experiment with the ‘time machine’ that would allow a communication ethicist to come face-to-face with a Muselmann. Agamben’s result is correct: when questioned, the Muselmann or ‘de-subjectivised human life in the concentration camp’ would remain silent and, therefore ‘once again be excluded from humanity, this time in the name of communicational ethics.’42 This statement is, I believe, more important than the sombre assessment that is the statement’s manifestation: it is a personal position – a ‘Here I am!’ What matters more than the represented Muselmann status – naked life – is another naked life, that we can conveniently refer to as the being of Giorgio Agamben, or Anton Schutz, that can think ‘naked life’ not in relation to itself but in relation to another. That one naked life can think about another is, for me, evidence that the ‘I’ is always more than naked life if it cares to think about another’s. The inescapably dehumanized Muselmann’s naked life, is re-humanized in the movement of Agamben’s and Schutz’s thought – a thought that ‘thinks more than it thinks, desire, reference to the neighbour, responsibility for another’ (GP, 166). Does not Agamben’s experiment constitute a reflection of ‘something completely astonishing, a responsibility that even extends to the obligation to answer for another’s freedom’? (167) In other words, the Muselmann’s silence is here recognized as having the audible ‘resonance of silence – Gelaut der Stille’ (167–8). Schutz cannot withdraw from the ‘imbroglio ... [of] a relationship to ... that is not represented, without intentionality, not repressed’ (168). He is awake to the Muselmann’s silent cry just as he ‘knows’ himself to be incapable of doing anything other than his sombre philosophical calculations; he is consumed by the other, although ‘the ashes of this consummation are not able to fashion the kernel of a being existing in and for itself ... Such is the consuming of a holocaust’ (168; my emphasis). Of course, Schutz will insist on seeing his work as consisting of dispassionate calculations. But then again, it is extremely similar in tone to my own, consciously dramatic, critique of the inhumanity of any ‘ethics’ that excludes from humanity the incommunicable aspect of existence, for instance, the face of the permanently vegetating being.43

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The point is that for every sufferer there will be a compassionate witness concerned to bear testimony for the instant of suffering. This ‘sufferer’ need not be a subject. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the power of compassion is such that it can even envelop cyborgs/machines, the ‘suffering’ of which can be construed as the event in which they cannot perform the function they have been designed/evolved to perform. Of course, I cannot ‘prove’ the significance of Schutz’s passion, but he might at least concede that Agamben’s thought experiment has a further, unstated implication: for every de-subjectivized human life there will be another who is moved by the scandal. How else do we account for the ability to consider naked life with critical distance? How can any thought – conveniently termed ‘second order observation’ in autopoietic theory – be separate from the docile bodies that simply affirm and re-produce the social processes that produce them? Perhaps we can derive the ability to ‘think’ the other’s naked existence from our ability to transcend our egocentric thinking. In other words, the affectivity beyond representation vis-à-vis bare life would derive not from receiving messages from God, but from our personal inability to accept the simple task of being – which otherwise sufficiently defines us as living beings: an inability that also expresses itself as our reluctance to simply be, to persevere in being, which is to say to be-for-ourselves, without proximity, by totally internalizing the external forces that produce us, be they material or social, in the mould of historical institutions. If this holds true, if we are affectively ‘indigestive’ creatures, disturbed by too many emotions to just accept our being riveted to our existence, then our need to escape, thought of in Levinas in the category of compassion, still has a role to play in theory. We need, then, to theorize compassion in terms of a capacity that relates to our incapacity to accept being as we know it. This would help cast some light over what Levinas termed, rather obscurely, our ‘vocation outside the state, disposing, in a political society, of a kind of extra-territoriality, like that of prophecy in the face of political powers of the Old Testament, a vigilance totally different from political negligence’ (GP, 123). Thus understood, compassion would connote a rebelliously affective power in the sense of ‘I can,’ very different from that of moral charity and generosity, which signify ability in the sense of ‘I have.’ This ‘I can’ is to be traced in the daily manifestations of the face-to-face, even, as Levinas put it, in the mundane ‘apr¥s vous.’ It is anarchic and, crucially, insatiable, because ‘proximity is never close enough; I am never finished with emptying myself of myself’ (GP, 169). This ‘I can’ is that of the

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martyr but in a particular sense. Not as self-flagellation and openness ‘to the other’s objectifying judgement’ (169). In fact, I could not care less for the responsibility of contracts if I cannot aspire to a ‘responsibility for the neighbor ... that ... goes beyond the legal [and that] comes to me from what is prior to my freedom, from a non-present, an immemorial’ (167), from God. Rather, this is the un-assumed, non-self-conscious martyrdom of saying that precedes the said, of exposedness without reserve, of passive giving, of hearing before anything is said (even if nothing is said, as in the encounter with the Muselmann), of inspiration by the idea of the other, of the Infinite that I can neither digest nor articulate. Anton Schutz is just such a martyr. Out of nausea, we can aspire to a political history in which compassion functions, and is seen to function, as an absolute limit to the establishment of an impersonal space of politics, and thus even Anton Schutz would aspire to escape the absolute claustrophobia of the ‘communauté inavouable of legal subjects defined as ever-terrorised incumbents of an indefinitely precarious and revocable mere survival.’45 He will, hopefully, no longer mistake his vocation to care for the Muselmann’s naked body as the task of being the serious political philosopher that he undoubtedly is, ‘only’ dedicated to calculations of the uttermost technicality. He would see his thought as clothing the nakedness of the existence to which he is enchained and which gives rise to an irreducibly passionate, if unavoidably desperate, desire for an ‘otherwise than being.’ The existential situation in which we are bound to aspire to an impossible infinity – divine comedy, says Levinas (GP, 163) – is not without significance or empirical implications.

NOTES 1 ‘The caress of a consoler which softly comes in our pain does not promise the end of suffering, does not announce any compensation, and in its very contact, is not concerned with what is to come afterwards in economic time; it concerns the very instant of physical pain, which is then no longer condemned to itself, is transported “elsewhere” by the movement of the caress. And is freed from the vice-grip of “oneself,” finds “fresh air,” a dimension and a future. Or rather, it announces more than a simple future, a future where the present will have the benefit of a recall.’ Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus 1978), 91; cited hereafter as EE.

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2 In this connection cf. the following: ‘How is it possible to express in philosophical language a situation so strange that it takes place in the most extreme particularity, yet concerns the universal meaning of subjectivity? How is it possible to translate into “Greek,” that is, into philosophical language, this inspiration and this situation that belongs to prophetic eschatology?’ F. Ciaramelli in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds, Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 85–6. 3 In his preface to Levinas’s 1935 essay On Escape (De l’Évasion), Jacques Rolland approaches that piece from the philosopher’s youthful work not as an object of historical enquiry but as ‘philosophically alive.’ This means that the text is read ‘in the introductory spirit in which it sees itself’ (On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 4; cited hereafter as OE) and therefore its central question – over the need for escape from being – is taken to ‘open the path of a thought that is one and whole (6), a thought that is not only premised on the distinction between Being, or existence, and beings, or existents,’ like all existential philosophy, but which, as is shown below, developed into a protestation against the boredom, or claustrophobia, of ontological thought that is content to accept as absolute and definitive the character of being. In this section I, too, assume Rolland’s attitude because I am convinced that the ethical term ‘hostage,’ which the older Levinas uses for ‘ethical subjectivity,’ must be read alongside the younger philosopher’s existential analytic of being as suffering its plenitude to the point of nausea signalling the desire for an escape – which stands, within Levinas’s phenomenology, for being’s need ‘to get out’ of itself without, crucially, desiring to go anywhere in particular. In a more analytically rigorous sense, I am convinced by Rolland’s argument, first, that ‘the meaning of the word being developed in Levinas’ youthful text On Escape remains unchanged into the most mature works, and, second, that behind the choice of the obscure metaphor of “escape” lies the requirement of thinking beyond being and non-being which found more adequate philosophical expression in the analysis of the there is – namely the “presence of nothing” to which the darkness of night rivets us – in Existence and Existents and in the notion of essence – as the indefinite, in the seminal Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence’ (OE, 27–9). 4 The comprehension of Levinas’s youthful On Escape, like all his later work it introduces, requires an understanding of his debt to existential philosophers from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. Specifically, On Escape is premised on the understanding that philosophy’s problem is that of ontological difference, namely, that of distinguishing between being and its meaning, between ‘what is’ and ‘the being of what is,’ which is understood as ‘that

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by which all powers and all properties are posited’ (OE, 57). Moreover, the young Levinas owed to Heidegger the idea that the philosophical enquiry into the structure of this ‘pure being of what is’ can and must proceed against the temptation of or nostalgia for metaphysics that would seek some theoretical notion that allowed us to contemplate pure being. Hence, in the work of both philosophers the elaboration of a concept of this pure ‘being of what is’ proceeds only on the basis by which the existence of the ‘human being,’ or socializing consciousness, is made explicit. This explains the combination of existentialism and phenomenological method in the work of both philosophers. At the same time, however, the young Levinas was conscious that his work was emerging in response to a ‘need to leave the climate of that [Heidegger’s] philosophy [EE, 19, as translated by Rolland, 9], which ‘accepts being’ and asks ‘only not to go beyond being ... as the ground and limit of our preoccupations.’ Cf. H. Caygill, Levinas and the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 5 A specification is needed here. In considering nausea ‘in the instant in which it is lived and in the atmosphere which surrounds it,’ Levinas is disinterested in its physiological sense in order to depict its ontological significance – much as in Sartre’s prose, where ‘the feeling of nausea has its origins in the fact that a glass of beer on a café table, the odious lavender suspenders of the café owner, the roots of a chestnut tree plunging into the earth in a public garden, a simple flat pebble that is, no doubt, humid and muddy on the one side, and altogether dry (and thus in no way ‘nauseating’) on the other – suddenly exist. They exist in such a way that they somehow melt into this existence or this being that alone remains, while what constituted them as manipulable things or knowable things, things utilizable or admirable, fades away: the form that assembled their ‘qualities’ and presented them in a face (eidos)’ (Rolland, in OE, 14). Similarly, anxiety in Heidegger did not only have a psychological sense. 6 ‘The state of nausea that precedes vomiting, and from which vomiting will deliver us, encloses us on all sides. Yet it does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from the inside; our depths smother beneath ourselves; our innards ‘heave’ [nous avons ‘mal au coeur’]’ (OE, 66). 7 Levinas’s nausea differs fundamentally from Heideggerian anxiety. Anxiety is the feeling that corresponds to the realization that beyond beings as such lies nothing. By contrast, as Rolland puts it best, nausea manifests the nothing as being’s act of self-positing or ‘as the very energy of being, as its verb or its verbality, as its esse. What nausea manifests, ultimately, is being as the there is [il y a] of the there is being [il’y a d’être], when there is nothing yet [quand il n’y a pas encore] or when there is no

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longer anything because nausea and anxiety have let all that is drift away’ (OE, 24). 8 Along with affirmation, however, comes the feeling of shame and the disposition to modesty not on the basis of some quality or act but simply for being there. ‘We see in shame its social aspect; we forget that its deepest manifestations are an eminently personal matter. If shame is present it means that we cannot hide what we should like to hide. The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself. What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself’ (OE, 64) 9 ‘The Sunday does not sanctify the week, but compensates for it. The situation, or the engagement in existence, which is effort, is repressed, compensated for, and put to an end, instead of being repaired in its very present. Such is economic activity ... But this compensating time is not enough for hope. For it is not enough that tears be wiped away or death avenged; no tear is to be lost, no death be without resurrection. Hope then is not satisfied with a time composed of separate instants given to an ego that traverses them so as to gather in the following instant, as impersonal as the first one, the wages of its pain. The true object of hope is the Messiah, or salvation’ (EE, 90). 10 Nausea requires an intense engagement with present pleasures, but capitalism extends the horizon of compensations for present efforts so far that the present becomes immaterial. To come to fully appreciate the absolute burden of plenitude being needs, first, to hurl itself ‘in the very depths of incipient pleasure,’ namely, to concentrate on the ecstatic instant of self-abandonment, so that ‘when pleasure is broken, after the supreme break ... being is entirely disappointed and ashamed to find himself existing again’ (OE, 61). That, however, is something that capitalism shields its agents from in so far as it is not permissive of hedonism, but avoids present enjoyment and is absorbed with conservation and the integration of the future with the past. In this sense, capitalism represses nausea – I am thinking of the stereotypical stressed, workaholic, highly paid stockbroker who loses both sleep and ‘life’ over ‘futures’ until ... there is no future. This is not the case in non-capitalist economies. In the former socialist republics revolt against tyranny came in the face of the complete impossibility of hedonism for most. For there, in the sincere life of a labour aimed not at surplus capital but at the satisfaction of all primary needs, the need to escape nausea – that essential pre-condition for transformation – had never been effectively reppressed.

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11 ‘He [the “bourgeois”] would like to cast the white mantle of his “internal peace” over the antagonism that opposes him to the world. His lack of scruples is the shameful form of his tranquil existence. Yet, prosaically materialistic [mediocrètement matérialist], he prefers the certainty of tomorrow to today’s enjoyments. He demands guarantees in the present against the future, which introduces unknowns into those solved problems from which he lives. What he possesses becomes capital, carrying interest or insurance against risks, and his future, thus tamed, is integrated in this way with his past’ (50). 12 In a lecture at Oxford before the latest Iraq war, David Harvey explained that the drive to war had little to do with Iraq, less to do with weapons of mass destruction, and nothing to do with helping the oppressed. The underlying problem the United States administration sought to confront is the one that periodically afflicts all successful capitalist economies: the over-accumulation of capital. While there exist a variety of ways for offloading said capital, Harvey pointed to the reasons – some absolute and some political – that war is the only politically viable option at present. See George Monbiot’s report ‘Too Much of Good Thing’ in the British daily The Guardian, 18 February 2003. 13 M. Diamantides, ‘In the Company of Priests – Meaninglessness, Suffering and Compassion in the Thoughts of Nietzsche and Levinas,’ Cardozzo Law Review 24, no. 3 (March 2003), 1275–1307. 14 ‘Desire is no doubt not self-sufficient; it touches on need and the disgust of satiety. But in the ontological adventure the world is an episode which, far from deserving to be called a fall, has its own equilibrium, harmony and positive ontological function: the possibility of extracting oneself from anonymous being’ (EE, 45). 15 ‘In the effort to separate the notion of the world from the notion of a sum of objects we certainly see one of the most profound discoveries of Heideggerian philosophy. But ... not everything that is given in the world is a tool ... For a soldier his bread, jacket and bed are not “material”; they do not exist “for ...” but are ends ... Desire knows perfectly well what it wants. And food makes possible the full realization of its intention’ (EE, 43). That said, as if anticipating the psychoanalytic view of desire, Levinas at this point reverts to the subject of love and talks of the ‘ridiculous and tragic simulation of devouring in kissing and love-bites. It is as though one has made a mistake about the nature of one’s desire ... which one later found out was a desire for nothing’ (ibid., my emphasis). 16 See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). 17 Of the many examples one could give, suffice it to note that, under current

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Marinos Diamantides international arrangements concerning the protection of human ‘dignity,’ the only way to a meal for millions of people is to suffer, or pretend to suffer, from political or ethnic persecution, torture, and real danger of execution as a means of securing the conditional charity of states with respect for human rights – at least until the asylum claim is rejected, the ‘humanitarian protection zone’ is implicitly or explicitly abandoned by its keepers, or ‘nation-building’ has served its purpose. Other general examples include the selective enforcement of free trade rules – which, of course, remove from developing states the means to protect national production and thereby rob developing economies of the advantages enjoyed historically by their developed trade ‘partners’ – and the linking of humanitarian aid to the formal requirements of democratic governance. In Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 116–25; hereafter cited as OS. This peace is ‘bad’ because it acquires a determinism of its own that can only lead to conservatism. It is ‘[a]n abstract peace, seeking stability in the powers of the state, in politics, which ensures obedience to the law by force. Hence recourse of justice to politics, to its strategies and clever dealings: the rational order being attained at the price of necessities peculiar to the state, caught up in it. Necessities constituting a determinism as rigorous as that of nature indifferent to man, even though justice – the right of man’s free will and its agreement with the free will of the other – may have, at the start, served as an end or pretext for the political necessities. An end [that goes] soon unrecognised in the deviations imposed by the practicalities of the state, soon lost in the deployment of means brought to bear’ (OS, 123). In the context of our attempt to derive immediate lessons for current politics, say the debate on ‘globalization,’ it is important to note that Levinas’s list is both infinite and, at base, quite concrete. Thus, it is clear that his version of human rights is a good starting point for a critique of regimes that dictate that capital circulate freely while restricting the free movement of persons across borders. Levinas elaborated on this in his later essay ‘Useless Suffering’ in Entre Nous. ‘[In order to] envisage [absurd] suffering from an inter-human perspective ... [whereby suffering] is meaningful within me [but] is useless for my other [sensée en moi, inutile en autrui] ... [one must abandon] a point of view of relativity in relation to suffering ... [However,] the inter-human perspective ... may be lost in the order of politics of the City where the Law establishes the mutual obligations of the citizens ... The order of politics – post-ethical or pre-ethical – which inaugurates the “social con-

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tract” is neither the insufficient condition nor the necessary end of ethics. In its ethical position, the me is distinct from the citizen ... [but also from] the individual who precedes all order in pure, natural egoism’ (EN, 118; my translation). See also my Ethics of Suffering (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2000), chapter 3. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated the implications of this ‘repressed’ version of the principles of human rights in relation to the juridical refusal to extend the ‘right to life’ to include a right to life-saving medical treatment for economic reasons, which condemns the parties involved to deleterious bad conscience for failing to save a child’s life. See, inter alia, the discussion of the English case of R v. Cambridge District Health Authority, ex p B, [1995] 2 All (E.R. 129), in Diamantides, ‘In the Company of Priests,’ 1288–9. ‘Objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility.’ Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Re-invention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 190. See below, note 44. M. Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Aristotle’s Book Theta of the Metaphysics, as recently reinterpreted by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, may be relevant here. ‘In its originary structure, dynamis, potentiality, maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its own steresis, its own non-Being. This relation constitutes the essence of potentiality. To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.’ Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 182. Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); cited hereafter as GP. A. Schutz, ‘The Law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben,’ Law and Critique 11, no. 2 (2000), 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 122. ‘The original rapport between law and life is not the application [of norms to facts], but Abandonment [of facts by norms].’ Agamben, Potentialities, 37. Ibid., 15.

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33 ‘Ever on the verge of awakening, sleep communicates with vigilance; while trying to escape, sleep stays tuned in, in an obedience to the wakefulness that threatens it and calls it, which demands’ (GP, 156). 34 Schutz, ‘The Law,’ 136. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 130. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 121. 40 Ibid., 127. 41 Ibid., 136. 42 Ibid., 128. 43 See my discussion of the English case of Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland [1993] 1 All E.R., in M. Diamantides, ‘The Ethical Obligation to Show Allegiance to the Un-knowable,’ in Desmond Manderson, ed., Courting Death: The Law of Mortality (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 181–93. 44 See M. Diamantides, ‘The Subject May Have Disappeared but Its Sufferings Remain,’ in Manderson, Courting Death, note 35. 45 Shutz, ‘The Law,’ 123.

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The Ethics and Politics of the Handshake: Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Nancy ROSALYN DIPROSE

Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the transcendence of the ethical relation as that which initiates sociality warns against a disturbing trend in democratic politics toward a national politics of exclusion (of refugees and asylum seekers, for example), and of pre-emptive strikes against strangers.1 Both practices are justified with reference to an ideal of a national community of shared meanings and values (democratic, egalitarian, humanitarian, non-violent) that are said to require protection from a threat from the foreign. In contrast, Levinas’s formula of the ethical relation to alterity implies that community is only possible through the hand that extends a welcome to a stranger who cannot be grasped. Conceived with Levinas, community is ‘anonymous,’ a society of the ‘I’ with and for the unknowable other.2 Rather than a social unity arising from shared meanings and practices, a unity that at best would merely tolerate difference, community lives from absolute difference in a way that is primordially ethical. Community cannot survive and would dissolve into violence without this hand that welcomes. It is this insight, and the politics it suggests, that this chapter will explore: the proposal that the political hand raised in self-defence through the exclusion of foreigners seeking political asylum or through pre-emptive strikes against strangers is not a politics with which democratic community can live. Drawing out an account of how the handshake of community lives from absolute difference and cannot live otherwise requires, however, some departure from Levinas. His distinction between ethics and politics makes it difficult to get any political purchase from his insight about the transcendence of the ethical relation. There are two limitations to Levinas’s account that I will address here: the asymmetrical

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relation between ethics and politics (ethics orientates politics and not the other way around) and the asymmetrical character of the ethical relation (where the self is responsible for the other and not the other way around). Both asymmetries, I will argue, depend on a problematic distinction that attends the separation of ethics from politics: the separation of the ethical relation to alterity from the social expression of bodies in sensibility. The body, as the place of the expression and sharing of meaning, is where a dynamic sense of belonging with others is lived. Hence, in ways to be discussed, the body mediates the intersection between the ethical relation to alterity and politics, understood as the horizons of meaning that organize society toward the improvement of human survival. Overlooking this social and ethical dimension of the body is a characteristic feature of the ideals of national community that underscore the democratic politics of the West.3 Insofar as that politics may override its ethical basis and so fail to live up to its name, that failure is lived by the bodies it governs. Hence, understanding the way the body mediates the intersection between ethics and politics may help to explain, for example, why a politics of exclusion or of pre-emptive strikes against strangers, especially when justified in terms of protecting the shared values of a national community, seems to effect an implosion of meaning and a moral failure that impacts not only on the bodies excluded or targeted, but also on the bodies of those whom the gesture is designed to unify and protect. While Levinas, in his critiques of these models of sociality, goes some way to redress this neglect of the body in political philosophy, the asymmetries mentioned limit his account. Redressing those limitations involves resurrecting Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body from Levinas’s criticism that his handshake of sociality is totalizing, while maintaining Levinas’s insights about the ethical basis of politics, and introducing Jean-Luc Nancy’s views on both into the debate.4 Levinas: The Handshake Initiated by Absolute Alterity Rereading the preface to Totality and Infinity in the context of contemporary trends in democratic politics reminds us of the enduring significance of Levinas’s account of the ethical relation for a politics of difference. There his ethics is framed in terms that are applicable to a critique of the communitarianism and liberalism that still pervade the politics of Western democracies. Liberal individualism and communitarianism in its widest sense subordinate ethics to politics by basing

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politics on an ‘ontology of war’ (TI, 21–2). On Levinas’s account, eliminating the foreign by war is not an exception to the politics of Western democracies, but rather a logical extension of the totalizing practice of assimilating or excluding the foreign by basing the sharing of meaning that is sociality on knowledge of the other’s difference. Levinas’s critique thereby reveals why the communitarianism and politics of difference that emerged in political philosophy of the 1980s and 1990s, while keen to promote multiculturalism and tolerance of difference, would tend toward the opposite. The value of Levinas’s critique of a totalizing politics for restoring primacy to the other in philosophy has been well rehearsed. But there are two important aspects of this critique that get less attention and that I will emphasize here: how the usual subordination of ethics to politics is a problem not only for the way it supports annihilation of the other, but also for the way it would dissolve the social formations such a politics is meant to preserve; and, second, I will consider how Levinas’s challenge to the way politics derides ethics depends on attending to the social and ethical dimensions of the body more adequately than he does. War and its prerequisite, conscious judgment of difference in terms of the same, are not only disastrous because they do ‘not manifest exteriority and the other as other,’ but also because, in the process, they ‘destro[y] the identity of the same’ (TI, 21). Subjectivity, cultural multiplicity, and sociality cannot survive without preservation of the other’s absolute difference. Levinas more often puts this the other way around: the handshake of sociality, cultural works, and social expressions of difference would not arise in the first place without an ethical relation to alterity. Neither sociality nor cultural multiplicity could be maintained through a politics based on liberal individualism: on such a model, differences can only be maintained in community with others if, contrary to liberalism’s dependence on the assumption that individuals have knowledge of each other, ‘the individual retains their secrecy’ inside his or her body (TI, 120–1). Hence, either liberalism’s handshake of sociality is impossible because each person remains opaque to the other or the other’s interiority is conceived in terms of myself, and he or she is dragged into my community on that basis and at the expense of their difference. Similarly, although for different reasons, community would not be possible or would dissolve with communitarian politics that understands community to be a unity built through shared practices, dialogue, common social meanings and traditions, and on interrelation, mutual recognition, and knowledge of the other.5 For communitarians

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it is as if the body of the community is already in place as unified and coherent before and after the welcome of the other, so that the other can be either grasped, and therefore assimilated, in the handshake or, if perceived to be too foreign, fended off with a hand raised in selfdefence. There is little acknowledgment here of the possibility that the expression of meaning through others is ambiguous, open, and unfinished; or that what drives sociality and its sharing of meaning in the first place is a relation to difference that would be effaced if unity and mutual recognition were ever fully realized. It is against these kinds of politics of difference, which in the end would preserve neither multiplicity nor sociality, that one can posit Levinas’s ethics. Following Levinas, the difference that community lives from is the other’s difference that cannot be grasped, the other’s alterity that ‘initiates the handshake’ of sociality in a way that also accomplishes the separation and uniqueness of the bodies so joined.6 The other’s alterity (apart from any particular signification of difference that this alterity may inspire) touches me, puts self-possession and its tendency to possess the other into question, and opens me to the other and to the world. This is the ungraspable difference that is the condition of transcendence, of sociality, of being-with. In contrast to the philosophies of reflection that Levinas usually targets with his account of the handshake of sociality, it is the body rather than consciousness that mediates the handshake. The handshake is corporeal and affective: it is the strangeness of others felt in sensibility, rather than anything that I recognize, judge, or understand, that opens me to the other. It is through this transcendence of sensibility that the sharing of meaning originates, and this sharing must give to rather than possess the other if the sociality it inaugurates is to survive. The other’s ‘absolute’ otherness signifies (through the face and, as Levinas sometimes admits, the whole of the body [OS, 102]) a ‘unique sense’ (without context and cultural mediation) that inaugurates and situates meaning.7 This unique sense puts being on a human and moral plane by signifying the ‘absolute value of the person’ (MS, 101) and by soliciting my response through discourse (I speak and give rather than kill or possess) (MS, 97). While my relation to absolute otherness is not outside the world (e.g., TI, 173), my world, my cultural expression, including the hand that shakes, would not arise at all, says Levinas, without this orientation toward the absolute otherness of the other ‘whose presence is already required for my cultural gesture of expression to be produced’ (MS, 95). So, through this affective and ethical relation to alterity,

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I am being-put-into-question in a way that not only makes me responsible for the other who moves me, but also opens me to discourse whereby, rather than possessing the other through knowledge of him/ her, I give the other a common world that we could share without thought of reciprocity (TI, 76 and 174). Not only is the community of being-with initiated and maintained by this absolute difference, but so are the humanitarian and egalitarian principles that characterize democratic politics. It is a principle of sociality that we would preserve the other’s unique sense by building a meaningful world in which ‘it’ would better survive rather than our negating or killing it off. It is on this basis that Levinas claims that the ethical relation (the hand extended to the other whom it cannot grasp) orientates politics toward justice (e.g., TI, 212–14). Only if community is understood in these terms of giving a meaningful world to the other who cannot be grasped is politics saved from effecting an ontological closure to the other. It is not that Levinas thinks that it is possible to have a world without the sharing of meaning that tends toward commonality: the uniqueness of the other is not in opposition to the same. Nor does he think that a totalizing politics and its philosophy of war is a problem only because it affects an ontological closure to the other. It is not just the other who is at stake here. A totalizing politics is also a problem because ‘every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them’ (TI, 21). This does not mean simply that violence begets violence from those who are targeted. Rather, as indicated above, a totalizing politics, by destroying or remaining closed to the unique sense that initiates the handshake, by ‘establishing an order from which no one can keep his distance,’ or by establishing a totality that seeks to preserve itself by excluding others on the basis of their perceived difference, ‘destroys the identity of the same’ (TI, 21). With an ontological closure to the other comes the dissolution of the sociality that politics seeks to organize and preserve. With this understanding of sociality, Levinas not only seems to position ethics, as other-directed sensibility, at the foundation of the possibility of community formations that do not make refugees of ‘minority’ ways of being, but also he implies that democracy, insofar as it tends towards totality, could effect a moral and ontological implosion from within. This raises the question, however, of where and how this intersection between politics (that judges, organizes, and sometimes excludes differences on the basis of race, sex, religion, country of origin, etc.) and ethics (the judgment of this judgment coming from the other’s

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alterity) takes place. How and where is one transformed by the other? Or, conversely, where does the disorientation and dissolution of community take place when politics fails the uniqueness of the other? It is through sensibility, the saying of language, that the question of the other’s uniqueness would check the possession of the other brought about through thematization of differences. But if this is the case, then the hand extended to the other in sensibility must already be informed by politics, by the horizons of meaning that are drawn upon in judging the other’s difference. While there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, for Levinas, the other’s uniqueness is not outside of the political organization and expression of differences within existing horizons of meaning, he tends to locate this politics within conscious thematization and so does not account for the political dimension of the handshake of sensibility. For example, Levinas does indicate, even in Totality and Infinity, that politics is always present in the ethical relation from the first through the relation to the third party (TI, 212–14), a co-presence reaffirmed in Otherwise than Being through the formulation of the ethical relation in terms of the saying within the said of language.8 As the ethical relation thus refers to other social beings, it is capable of disrupting the political and the conscious reflection, judgment, and comparison, and the thematization of differences these imply. This way of understanding the intersection between ethics and politics, however, reinforces the distinction Levinas makes between ethics, sensibility, and the saying, on the one hand, and politics, consciousness, and the said, on the other, without accounting fully for where the intersection and therefore transformation takes place. This distinction is problematic insofar as it leads to a difficulty in formulating a satisfactory and politically efficacious relation between the two orders. The distinction between sensibility and consciousness in particular also supports the unidirectional relation between ethics and politics (where the ethical relation orientates and disrupts politics and puts it into question, and not the other way around). Through this asymmetry and by equating politics with conscious volitional acts that judge and thematize differences, Levinas can argue that the politics of the said always effects an ontological closure to the other. Politics (the organization of society for the improvement of human survival) represses the saying of the ethical relation.9 Levinas thus points to the aporetic structure of politics by indicating how a politics of difference, by presupposing judgments of differences, risks effacing the absolute difference that inspires it. However, his ten-

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dency to reduce politics and the sharing of social meaning to conscious judgment and volitional acts, and separate politics from the sensibility of non-indifference to difference, is unnecessary and counter-productive. For example, it renders the sensibility of the handshake passive and strangely indifferent to the ontological-cultural-historical character of both the ‘I’ who is for-the-other and the other to whom I respond. This could imply that no matter what the nature of social relations of domination or how I and the other are constituted and positioned within existing social meanings and values, whatever I do or say, whatever the content of my act, personal or political, it is always and equally a closure to the other. And conversely, the distinction between ethics and both ontology and politics implies a moment of pure sensibility (an ‘affective content ... a dynamism other than that of perception,’ as Levinas puts it ([TI, 187]) that animates the production of meaning and consists in ‘a break with every influence’ (TI, 202). In sensibility, therefore, I would be given to the other unconditionally without absorbing the difference, as if the politics of existing social meanings does not inform or ‘contaminate’ my response to the other from the first. It is necessary to revisit the intersection between ethics and politics to account for how the sharing of meaning of ‘politics,’ informs the ethical relation at the level of sensibility (and not just through conscious thematization); how such sharing of meaning could be challenged and transformed by the other from possessing to giving; and to allow for the possibility of differentiating between different political acts in order to judge some as more open to alterity than others and hence more oriented toward a just community that would not destroy itself. Levinas better allows this two-way relation between the ethical and the political in later reflections on his work. For example, in the interview ‘The Other, Utopia, and Justice’ in Entre Nous he talks of democracy that allows for ‘legislation open to the better’ and that bears ‘the gift of inventing new forms of human coexistence,’ as opposed to politics that is totalizing because it forgets the ethical relation to the other.10 But if politics can orientate ethics as much as ethics orientates politics, then the relation between the two must be mediated by a sensibility that is just as infected by the horizons of meaning that are expressed in sociality as it is open to disruption and transformation by the other’s uniqueness. It is to this possibility that I now turn. What is missing from Levinas’s critique of politics that would base community on commonality at the expense of difference, at least in how I have outlined it so far, is consideration of the importance of commu-

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nity understood as a dynamic sense of belonging with others. Just as community does not live without absolute difference, no one, I would argue, lives without a sense of belonging with others supported by the social expression and sharing of meaning. Against communitarianism and Levinas’s tendency to reduce politics and the said of language to conscious thematization, Merleau-Ponty and the early Heidegger claim that this sense of belonging and familiarity is located in the body as an atmosphere that informs sensibility, pre-reflective perception of the world and of others.11 Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, my style of being is inseparable from its expression informed by the political, by social values and meaning. This incarnation and expression of meaning is not necessarily totalizing, for reasons I will elaborate shortly. Levinas does not deny this socio-political aspect of sensibility. But in his critiques of phenomenology of the body he mobilizes the same charge of totalization that he applies to privileging conscious thematization. Hence, he claims that the phenomenological understanding of sociality in terms of the social expression of bodies, no less than philosophies that reduce sociality to a dialogue between rational minds, effects a closure to alterity. So, for example, in Totality and Infinity Levinas argues that the hand extended to the other in the handshake of community is not the hand of the ready-to-hand of Heidegger’s Dasein. This, he says, is the hand that grasps. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that, while drawing on existing concepts, this hand does so blindly, without recognition of the thing, without conscious reflection on the meaning of the matter at hand. But nevertheless, in the schema of the ready-tohand, the hand ‘relates [rapporte, brings back] to me, to my egoist ends, things drawn from the element, ... conferring on it the status of a possession’ (TI, 159). As the hand takes and comprehends in a way that relates the matter grasped to me, the hand grasping the ready-to-hand, or labour in Levinas’s terms, ‘is not a transcendence’ (TI, 159). For Levinas, more primordial than the competent hand that grasps the matter at hand within a social horizon of meaning is, first, what, in Totality and Infinity, he calls the equivocation of the body: Life is a body, not only lived body [corps propre], where its self-sufficiency emerges, but a cross-roads of physical forces, body-effect ... To be a body is on the one hand to stand [se tenir], to be master of oneself, and on the other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the other, and thus to be encumbered by one’s body. (TI, 164)

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The hand that grasps the thing, or that is extended to the other in the welcome that would forge a communal bond, is not a hand qua hand before this relation; this hand, this lived body, and the interiority of consciousness arise through the grasp and, more primordially, through the welcome. The extended hand puts the body in the other, but, at the same time, ‘the body ... [is] the very regime where separation holds sway’ (TI, 163; my emphasis). Left at that, separation, absolute difference, and uniqueness could be said to arise within the social expression of bodies dwelling with each other. Arguably, then, it would be sufficient for Levinas to point to this equivocation of the body (characterized by groping rather than grasping) to establish how sensibility mediates the intersection between ethics and politics. However, sensibility of the ethical relation, for Levinas in Totality and Infinity, is ‘pure’: the hand that belongs to a body constituting separation through labour, for example, is no longer ‘pure enjoyment, pure sensibility, but is mastery, domination, disposition – which do not belong to the order of sensibility’ (TI, 161). Beyond and before the phenomenon and equivocation of the hand that shakes the other’s hand are physical forces belonging nowhere and animated by the other’s alterity. Or, to substitute the face for the hand as Levinas usually does: ‘What one gives, what one takes reduces itself to the phenomenon, discovered and open to the grasp, carrying on an existence which is suspended in possession – whereas the presentation of the face puts me into relation with being’ (TI, 212). Insofar as Levinas equates the social expression of bodies with possession of the other he puts it in the same order as conscious judgment of differences and the closure to the other that this is said to involve. What allows Levinas to posit a break from the social expression of bodies within the transcendence of sensibility is his novel understanding of temporality (e.g., MS, 103) whereby, as Michael Sanders puts it, the ‘instant [is] nothing short of an interruption or break that occurs within, but as distinctly apart from, the temporal flow of lived experience.’12 But it is not clear to me why this extra step is necessary, particularly when one considers Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. For Merleau-Ponty, the expressive operation of the body open to another mediates the relation to alterity and the expression of existing social meanings without closure to the other through the grasp of possession. Such an understanding of sensibility as an open sense of belonging is necessary, I will argue, to account for how a totalizing politics can effect a dissolution of sociality and a moral implosion from within.

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Merleau-Ponty: The Hand That Touches Its Being-Touched While Levinas commends Merleau-Ponty for his understanding of perception in terms of corporeal expression of meaning, as opposed to conscious representation of differences (e.g., MS, 81 and OS, 98), in his haste to criticize him for a model of sensibility that does not ‘break with every influence’ he misses the political import of Merleau-Ponty’s account. With this account, sensibility can be understood as mediating the relation to alterity and existing horizons of meaning, including political judgments of differences. As the body signifies, expresses meaning as it actualizes existence, only with and through other bodies that are different from mine, belonging is dynamic and community open to otherness. That the intercorporeal social expression of bodies lives from absolute difference is apparent in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, particularly his idea of flesh as the intercorporeal ‘medium’ of sensibility.13 The intercorporeality that is flesh is neither matter, mind, nor substance: it is the ‘element’ of being where meaning is expressed (VI, 139); it is the texture and principle of intertwining whereby my body is caught in the fabric of the world of other bodies in such a way that being has meaning. But in this intertwining the visible, the touched, and the audible are neither separable nor completely merged with the seeing, the touching, and the hearing: only through this divergence or separation [écart] of flesh do we perceive (VI, 131, 135, and 139). For Merleau-Ponty, sensibility, where my left hand feels my right hand (giving me a sense of belonging to myself) as my right hand explores things (in a sense of belonging to a world), is only possible if my hand that touches is ‘accessible from without,’ if it is already touched by another body and so participates in the world it touches (VI, 133–4). Therefore, while my body already inhabits and is inhabited by another body in the expression of sedimented social meaning (such that we perceive a similar world, for example), a difference or distance is opened between the sentient and the sensed, between touching and being touched from without. This distance in proximity is the paradox of being and the paradox of expression that is the ‘thickness of flesh’; it is not an obstacle between my body and the world or between my body and the other’s; it is what animates the social expression of bodies and is ‘their means of communication’ (VI, 135). Unlike with Levinas, this expression of meaning is a two-way process; the ‘handshake is reversible’ between the touching and being touched, without cancelling the

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difference (VI, 142). For Merleau-Ponty, then, the body’s social expression involves both separation from and communion with other bodies in the constitution of community. A sense of belonging that is the expression and sharing of meaning lives on difference, on the touch of difference of other bodies that cannot be grasped by mine. This account of sensibility explains, for example, why a politics of exclusion based on the assumption of a unified national community tends to be internally divisive and destructive: as values and meanings do not exist apart from their expression through bodies, no one actually lives up to those abstract values alone in practice and they can only be articulated by pointing to instances where they supposedly fail – in those others we would exclude from our community ahead of any contact on the basis of what is perceived as foreign in terms of values thought to adhere to race, sexuality, country of origin, religion, and so forth. One problem with justifying a politics of exclusion with reference to abstract ideas and values that we supposedly share is that such ideas necessarily exclude every actual body to eventually leave a community of one. In his criticisms of Merleau-Ponty Levinas misses the way alterity operates in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of intercorporeal belonging. This is a result, it would seem, of Levinas remaining true to his conviction that the sensibility of the ethical relation consists in a break with existing social meanings and hence with politics (whether those meanings are expressed in conscious judgment or in sensibility). ‘The familiarity of the world does not only result from habits,’ Levinas insists; familiarity or belonging already presupposes an intimate relation with the ‘feminine’ other who cannot be possessed (TI, 154–5).14 This claim, however, does not damage Merleau-Ponty’s account of the handshake of sensibility. In a rare concession that the handshake may indeed be reversible, it is significant that, for Levinas, the intimate relation to the feminine other, which belonging to a world (labour and recollection) presupposes, is with one who welcomes rather than questions. However, he goes on to suggest that, even more primordially, familiarity presupposes the ethical relation that puts the familiar world into question. As Merleau-Ponty does not envisage such a break with the expression and sharing of meaning, Levinas charges his model of sensibility with eliminating alterity. Having set up Merleau-Ponty’s equation between sensibility and perception in terms of the reflected touching of two hands of one body,

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Levinas claims that this becomes Merleau-Ponty’s prototype of intersubjectivity (where ‘I shake another man’s hand’). Insofar as the meaning of the sensible content of perception presupposes the constitution of community through flesh, for Levinas this is by way of agreement between the other and me where, through the handshake extended from my body to the other ’s, both become elements of a single intercorporeality (OS, 100).15 Hence, on Levinas’s reading of MerleauPonty, the community of intercorporeality expresses shared meanings and thereby confirms the way I already perceive the world. According to Levinas, with Merleau-Ponty’s model of the ambiguity of the body or the paradox of expression, separation (along with transcendence) is not sustained as it is for Levinas. This handshake, therefore, is of the order of knowledge communicated in the grasp whereby the meanings I already embody would subsume anything foreign about the other or the world under existing terms. Levinas is a little bit right about Merleau-Ponty and a little bit wrong. He is right insofar as Merleau-Ponty does tend to emphasize the tendency toward sharing meaning through intercorporeal sensibility (e.g., VI, 142 and DPO, 139). But then there is little difference in the end between Merleau-Ponty’s position on the tendency toward commonality in community and Levinas’s idea, in Totality and Infinity, that what I give to the other in discourse in response to alterity is the gift of a common world, except that for Merleau-Ponty the gift also comes from the other. Levinas is a little bit wrong about Merleau-Ponty in overlooking how, for Merleau-Ponty, what animates sensibility in the first place is the impact of the world of the other’s body that, while thereby inhabited by my body through flesh, must remain separate, ‘more than [its] being-perceived,’ and hence different, for me to perceive at all (VI, 135). As he puts it in ‘Dialogue and Perception of the Other,’ it is the other’s body entering my field that ‘multipl[ies] it [my body] from within’ and it is through this multiplication, this ‘decentering’ that, ‘as a body, I am “exposed” to the world’ (DPO, 138). What begins the paradox of expression that is the thickness of flesh is being-touched from without by a body that cannot be grasped by mine. This is MerleauPonty’s idea of the unique sense (what he calls ‘singularity’) that animates the expression and sharing of meaning (DPO, 141–3). But it is the body as expression that signifies its singularity, that is, that signifies that the other is a unique mode of belonging to a world that is not me. It is being touched by this absolute difference of the other’s body (actually

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and at a distance) that opens my body to the circulation and expression of meaning through the other’s body (and vice versa). Hence, besides the idea that the handshake of sociality is reversible without cancelling the difference, another related way that MerleauPonty departs from Levinas lies in his claim that sensibility is not a transcendence. ‘It is not a god,’ he insists, that ‘pulls significations from us’ so that we enter into the sociality and signification of the human (DPO, 146). The ‘other is never present face to face’ (DPO, 133), either in the communitarian sense of mutual recognition or in Levinas’s sense of an originary exposure to alterity that is without cultural ornaments or context; rather, between my body and the other’s, between the seer and the visible, is always the thickness of flesh (VI, 135). This means, first, contrary to what is implied in Levinas’s metaphysics, that the alterity that animates the handshake of sensibility is not, for Merleau-Ponty, beyond being nor ‘prior’ to the expressive bodies that ‘it’ animates and links, nor therefore is sensibility outside the history, politics, and horizon of social meaning within which these bodies dwell. Hence, my encounters with others will, from the very first, be informed by the political, by the social style of being that has me and the other through intercorporeal expression (VI, 139). If I notice the other at all and am affected, this will already be with style, with like, dislike, taste, distaste, anger, joy; in red, yellow, or blue; with hand extended, raised, or behind my back. In both pre-reflective sensibility and in thought the social imaginaries that make up the history of my dwelling with others will infect how I perceive others to their benefit or detriment and vice versa. Second, however, even though there is no beyond flesh, this does not mean that alterity is eliminated in my community with others. MerleauPonty’s ontology is not based on indifference to difference, as Levinas claims (e.g., MS, 89). On the contrary, it is this impact of the other’s body that inaugurates the expression of bodies within an existing social horizon of meaning such that they mean anything at all. But also, as alterity is opened within expression such that the body and its expression is real-ized ambiguously and unfinished between the touching and being-touched, the difference of the other’s body can transform meaning, bodies, and the social formations they support. While the handshake is reversible such that neither my style nor the other’s alterity takes priority in the social expression of bodies, reversibility is ‘never realised in fact’ (VI, 147). My left hand never coincides with my right (I am never in complete possession of myself), nor does my right hand

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coincide with the world or the other hand it palpates (VI, 148). This failure to grasp myself or the other attests to the operation of alterity (divergence and disorientation) that is not just necessary for expression but also opens horizons of meaning and modes of belonging to transformation. So while the expression of my body is informed by the political and is lived as a sense of belonging, because this sensibility is animated by the being-touched of a different body, then the meaning of what is offered to the world or to the other in sensibility is opened and transformed by the difference that provokes it (DPO, 143). By allowing that sensibility mediates the intersection between what Levinas calls the political and the ethical, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology supports a politics of the handshake that would welcome difference as opposed to a politics of exclusion that would defend a community against the foreign ahead of any encounter. As the social expression of bodies is essential to the life and belonging of any body and, as this expression is animated by the alterity of the touch of other bodies, then welcoming the impact of the other’s body is neither an unconditional and passive event (as Levinas would have it) nor an act of kindness toward others; but, consistent with Levinas, this welcome is essential to the ongoing well-being of human bodies, of the communities they allow and support, and of the meanings they produce. That the welcome of the other is always conditional (that is, informed by social imaginaries I already embody) does suggest, however, that not all ways of treating others (whether the act is pre-reflective or involves conscious judgment) are equally a closure to the other (which is where Levinas’s metaphysics seems to leave us). For Merleau-Ponty, the said of language and politics of conscious thematization do not necessarily affect a closure to the other. Even when expression is abstracted from expression through flesh, when I speak or reflect upon my perception of others, such ideality is ‘not without flesh nor freed from horizon structures: it lives from them’; even the said of language lives from the ‘divergence, that never-finished differentiation, that openness ever to be reopened between sign and sign, as the flesh is’ (VI, 153). However, language and therefore politics can effect an ontological closure to the other (almost but never completely) by maintaining or precipitating a breakdown of the expression of meaning in sensibility. The (unspecified) strangeness of others and/or of place can evoke a failure of belonging and both the withdrawal from others and the falling toward non-sense that this failure involves.16 What would explain such a failure in the expression of

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meaning is not the disorientation and divergence of flesh necessary to expression, but a clash of styles accompanied by a degree of habit and sedimentation of meaning that may make it difficult in the short term for me to adjust to, tolerate, or welcome the strangeness that confronts me. There is nothing inherently wrong or unethical with this retreat into the familiar. It happens all the time. Merleau-Ponty, from his earliest work, stresses, against Sartre and the early Heidegger, that my freedom to be open to anything at all is necessarily limited by my pre-history, by the cultural sedimentation of meaning that informs my style of belonging.17 Withdrawal from the strangeness of others into the familiar would not only be explicable but also justified if the strangeness that confronts me is expressed as vilification, violence, appropriation or some other form of explicit negation of my expression of existence. It is this violence, this fixing of meaning by one or the other in an encounter with the unfamiliar and the attendant physical and symbolic negation of the other as a unique expression of meaning, that would stop the sharing of meaning and would be unethical. Raising one’s hand in self-defence against alterity as a matter of policy or countering it by violence or negation would be a denial of the divergence of flesh and of the ambiguity and transformation of meaning characteristic of it; it would be a rigidity of perception that refuses the divergence of flesh, the ambiguity of expression, and the transformation of meaning, and hence of oneself, necessary to the social expression of bodies. For Merleau-Ponty, it is in the denial or refusal of the ambiguity of the social expression of bodies that ‘social dichotomising’ arises, that habit of conquering ambiguity by perceiving others as absolutely foreign in one’s own terms and so projecting onto them all those moral, racial, sexual, and other characteristics one would exclude from oneself or from one’s community (CRO, 103–5). Conversely but equally, denial of the paradox of expression finds political support in policies that would conquer the divergence of flesh and the ambiguity of expression by insisting on social unity through the exclusion or denial of differences: ‘There is an abstract or rigid liberalism which consists in thinking that all men are identical’ (CRO, 106). In either case, this denial of the other’s singularity and uniqueness as an expression of meaning would stop the sharing and expression of meaning necessary for one’s own open sense of belonging. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s ontology beyond his own emphasis, we can posit a more nuanced relation between ethics and politics than Levinas allows. If community can be understood as touching my being-touched,

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where bodies are formed as both in and divergent from the other and where meaning is expressed as it is transformed, then a politics that turns one’s back on bodies on the basis of their foreignness, or that denies difference altogether, would strip those bodies, and our own, of their means of expression and hence their sense. The imperative to keep the divergence of flesh and hence the ambiguity of expression going is not just ontological and affective, it is also moral: as what is unique and ‘human’ about bodies is their expressiveness (the body as expression is its singularity), and as the body’s expression requires community (touching its being touched), then it is an ethical imperative that in community bodies not lose their means of expression. A politics that attempts to preserve an ideal of a unified community by pre-emptive strikes against strangers or by shutting strangers out ahead of any encounter therefore risks both an implosion of meaning and a moral implosion. However, there needs to be a shift of emphasis in Merleau-Ponty’s account of community and the social expression of bodies for this suggestion to have the force I have given it here, a shift that would add something like the ethical force in Levinas’s understanding of the relation to alterity that initiates sociality without losing Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the sharing of meaning through the social expression of bodies. Unlike Levinas, Merleau-Ponty ignores the fate of the singularity of the body’s expressiveness (mentioning it only in passing) and emphasizes instead the creativity of expression in sensibility: as the handshake is reversible, the limit between bodies in creative sensibility is ambiguous and undecidable (e.g., VI, 138; EM, 163 and 167). While, as I have argued, this does not mean that alterity is eliminated in intercorporeality (there is a limit between bodies in the divergence of flesh where my body is in the other but also separate), it does mean that for Merleau-Ponty the limit between bodies in sensibility only becomes an issue when introduced for the second time (but as if for the first time) in a denial of ambiguity, in the rigidity of a failure of belonging and at the secondary level of language and reflection. Yet it is in that limit between the touching and the being-touched that the body’s expressiveness, its uniqueness, and its moral dimension are at stake. It is, I believe, Merleau-Ponty’s lack of concern about the limit between bodies that leads Levinas to claim (albeit misleadingly) that Merleau-Ponty’s handshake of sociality implies the formation of a single intercorporeality and to say, against this, that ‘the two hands ... in point of fact do not belong to the same body’ (OS, 102). The problem for an ethico-politics of the handshake of community, then, is how to retain the ethical force

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that Levinas gives the relation to alterity without separating this from politics, ontology, and the social expression of bodies. Nancy: The Handshake and Absolute Skin The idea apparent in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, that the body is the site of separation and merging that forms the basis of community and that it is at this site that meaning is expressed and transformed, seems to be consistent with the role that Jean-Luc Nancy gives to the body in his conception of the ‘inoperative community,’ with at least one important difference.18 Nancy, unlike Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes the Levinasian idea of a ‘unique sense’ operating in the handshake of community. However, unlike Levinas and in keeping with the later Merleau-Ponty, for Nancy this unique sense grounding sociality is a signifyingness of the body inseparable from its social expression. The sharing of meaning in sensibility is, for Nancy, grounded in the sharing of singularity; as with Merleau-Ponty, the sensibility of being-with is not a transcendence and the handshake of sociality is reversible without cancelling the difference between bodies. Community, for Nancy, is neither a work of commonality nor the gift of a common world given in transcendence, but rather an original sharing and ‘com-pearance’ of singular (different and finite) beings exposed to each other. These singular beings are not individuals that come before this ‘exposition’ in community – singular beings are finite beings exposed to their finitude through the otherness of others, and this exposure is also exposition, that is, the expression of meaning that we are (IC, 27–8). This singularity that is also a being-in-common, or sharing that is also a division, appears at the limit of the contact of skin (IC, 27 and BP, 204) or, more generally, at the limit of touching and being-touched. As in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the écart of flesh, it is at the limit of touching my being-touched (the point of separation and communion between bodies) that meaning arises and is expressed. But, in keeping with Levinas’s model of the ethical relation, it is also this limit that marks the moral value of a singular body and is therefore the source of our ethics. Nancy’s emphasis on this limit of the touch allows him to highlight the importance of the maintenance of alterity to community and the social expression of bodies while attending to the ethics and politics of that limit. For Nancy, ‘the body is the absolute of sense’ (BP, 204). It is as finite bodies that we are (as distinct from ‘have’) meaning, and we are so

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uniquely, not just in particular ways given through the social expression of bodies, but absolutely. The body not only signifies finitude in the sense of mortality and hence physical vulnerability to the projects of others, although it does signify this. The body also signifies the existence of another access to the world, another source of signification (the singularity of the body as expression, as Merleau-Ponty would put it), another manner of existence, beside my own (BSP, 14–15). As I am not the other’s access to the world and as I cannot grasp this access, its expression as a body signifies its singularity and exposes my finitude. And just as for Merleau-Ponty there is no perception or expression without this divergence of flesh, for Nancy, that which does not maintain this spacing and separation in sharing is ‘deprived of meaning’ (BSP, 5). Hence, Nancy can say both that ‘“finitude” signifies the infinite singularity of meaning, the infinite singularity of access to truth’ (BSP, 16) and that ‘finitude co-appears’ (IC, 28). As this unique sense only appears within sociality, with the limit or the ‘skin’ formed by the touch of and by other bodies, ‘[w]hat stands “behind” a face [and] also behind a hand ... – the “he” or “she” who hides behind a face’ is not radical alterity beyond being but ‘absolute skin’ (BP, 205). That is, what forms the body as meaning and animates its circulation, what forms the hand and links it to another, is the touching itself. And the ‘law of touching is separation’ (BSP, 5) such that at the origin of meaning ‘every position is a dis-position’ (BSP, 12). ‘It is by touching the other that the body is a body’ and it is through this touch that community takes place as bodies ‘absolutely separated and shared’ (BP, 204). The skin or limit of the touch is absolute in the sense that it marks the limit at which bodies make sense, both absolutely and generally. Another way to put this might be to say that as singular beings we are the unique event of the taking place of meaning and hence valuable in ourselves, but only by ‘exposition’ (BP, 205), by a sharing that constitutes the limit between bodies, exposes this uniqueness, and allows its expression. It is the ambiguity and undefinability of this limit between bodies that makes the ethics and politics of the handshake difficult. That the body is the place of unique sense and yet makes sense only as such and more generally in community suggests that the body’s exposition is inseparable from its social expression.19 The world is the ‘exhibition’ of bodies, as Nancy puts it (BP, 206). Yet the social world is also a body’s risk: there is the risk that a body’s absoluteness will be deprived of exposition either through rejection by the bodies of others on the basis of perceived foreignness or through incorporation by

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other bodies, an appropriation that would also dissolve the limit. If the contact of skin, touching and being touched, marks a limit between bodies made singular/unique and shared through the limit, then touch, as Nancy remarks in passing, is a matter of ‘tact – that is to say, the right touch’ (BP, 190).20 There are three related points I want to make about tact in the light of qualifications Nancy and Merleau-Ponty bring to Levinas’s model of the handshake of sociality. First, through the limit marked by the touch of bodies, my body as expression is open and unfinished such that it owes its life to the alterity of others it may now reject as foreign. I have a responsibility (to the life and value of my own body and those of others) to extend my hand to the other and welcome that difference and the signification it brings. Second, however, this welcome of the other’s difference is always conditional in two senses. The welcome is conditional in the sense that, as the handshake is reversible, so is the responsibility for maintaining the limit and hence the difference between bodies. As I have suggested in the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, there is no obligation here to welcome a hand that grasps or a clenched fist. The welcome is also conditional in the sense that, as suggested in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, it is always filtered through the meanings that provide the horizon of my sense of belonging. I will necessarily exceed the limit of the other’s body in touching my being-touched. Nevertheless, despite the risk, this touching my being-touched is a welcome essential to the life of a body and its community. While this welcome will always therefore involve a lack of tact and the appropriation of difference that this involves, it should be possible to distinguish cases where it is clear that the limit between bodies has been dissolved in its formation to a point that is intolerable and therefore unacceptable. This brings me to my third point about tact: the politics of the right touch. All too easily bodies can be deprived of meaning; they can lose their sense (and sense can lose its bodies) through a lack of tact of bodies that completely withdraw from or exceed the limit of the other’s touch. ‘Deported, massacred, tortured’ bodies are examples that Nancy provides (BP, 195). To these we might add raped, abandoned, and vilified bodies. Within the act of war, exclusion, or vilification, and apart from any specific meaning imposed through the act and its justification, such bodies are being stripped of their ability to signify their uniqueness and be the expression of meaning through community. This is also the case with a more general politics of exclusion. Such a politics would turn the ‘dis-position of the origin,’ the divergence of flesh, or the singularity and separation of sharing, ‘into a matter of exclusion’ (BSP, 24). A

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politics that, as a matter of policy, makes the other absolutely Other in one’s own terms, whether evil or divine, no longer appreciates the paradox of expression, the separation and co-appearance in the origin and circulation of meaning, and hence the singularity of the other as meaning, as a unique access to the world that is hidden from me. Instead, Nancy suggests, a politics of exclusion seeks to fix the meaning of the other, to ‘fix the other ... in one place,’ in order to either become the origin of meaning or expel any other origin outside the world (BSP, 20). It could also be said that such a politics seeks to be the origin of meaning by fixing the limit itself, the paradoxical border between bodies, by making the limit one of separation without sharing and deeming what does not belong on this side to be foreign and not belonging anywhere or at all. But to what end? Deported, rejected, and dead bodies (rendered so by policies of Western governments that are shoring up their borders against asylum seekers and refugees, for example, or by pre-emptive strikes against nation states) are sacrificed in the service of maintaining national unity through a mythical sense of shared communal values. But these bodies are ‘sacrificed to nothing,’ as Nancy puts it (BP, 195). Vilification, violence, and rejection on the basis of foreignness do not unify community by securing the limit between bodies. On the contrary, such treatment of others dissolves the limit necessary to the circulation and expression of meaning. This is because bodies signify their uniqueness and are the expression of meaning through community, by being exposed to other bodies. In abandoning, brutalizing, or vilifying the bodies of others, I dissolve the limit by which this exposition takes place. In dissolving this limit not only have I stripped the bodies of others of their ability to make unique sense, I also lose my exposition, and dissolve my open sense of belonging, my community. If our treatment of other bodies is such that they begin to lose the ability to signify their uniqueness, then with this loss we not only make refugees of other ways of being, but we also in the process reduce democratic community and our selves to non-sense. A politics of exclusion therefore impacts not just on the bodies targeted, but also on the bodies it is designed to unify and protect. This loss of meaning will be lived by these bodies, not as an open sense of belonging, but as a loss of the familiar and, in the extreme, as violent discord. A politics of exclusion presents an image of community with which democratic community cannot live. Merleau-Ponty describes the task of philosophy as bringing ‘things themselves ... to expression’ (VI, 4). This involves philosophy conform-

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ing itself with the paradoxes of which expression is made, rather than transforming the world into something said, negated, fixed, and finished. Nancy describes the task of politics in a similar fashion. An egalitarian politics that aims for justice is not a politics of exclusion but a kind of ‘first philosophy’ that remains sensitive to the ‘co-originality’ of the singularity and being-in-common of bodies that are the place of meaning and its circulation (BSP, 24–7). Levinas would not be adverse to such a philosophy-politics given his rejection of a totalizing politics in favour of ‘first philosophy’ as the ethical relation to alterity that initiates the handshake of sociality (e.g., TI, 304). However, to fully endorse a philosophy-politics that aims for a just and ethical community by keeping open the paradox of expression, Levinas would have to admit that politics orientates (rather than systematically closes) ethics as much as ethics orientates politics, that the handshake of sociality is reversible because of alterity not at the expense of alterity, and that the social expression of bodies is as ethical as it is political.

NOTES 1 This trend is particularly apparent in Australian politics, although not exclusively so. The two policies enacted by the Australian federal government that illustrate this trend are a move in August 2001 (just prior to the events of ‘September 11’) to actively prevent boatloads of asylum seekers (primarily from Afghanistan and Iraq) from landing on Australian shores; and a commitment made in March 2003 to provide military support for the US-led war in Iraq. Both policies have precipitated an extraordinary period of discord and unease in Australia, not so much at the level of government, but throughout the social fabric. My interest in this politics of exclusion is in its capacity to undermine the senses of belonging with each other within Australia. This is not to ignore the plight of those targeted by these policies. But it is the damage done internally that is extraordinary (aided by media reminders of damage done externally) and that warrants explanation. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 47; hereafter cited as TI. 3 Exploring the sociality of the body, its role in identity and social formation, and the ethics and politics of this sociality, has been a dominant theme in feminist philosophy in the past 15 years. Why bodies matter to the ethics and politics of social formation, with regard to the philosophical

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Rosalyn Diprose tradition I am exploring here, is explained well by Ewa Ziarek in An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Ziarek, following Foucault but also Levinas, argues that as the body is the site of social subjection, but also the locus of resistance and transformation of power (17–26), the body is also the site of tension between a transformative politics that aims for justice and an ethical obligation to the other who cannot be appropriated (47). The aspect of that tension between ethics and politics that I am focusing on here is the way bodies matter as the place of the expression and sharing of meaning. While most commentators tend to just note Levinas’s critiques of MerleauPonty in passing, there are a few comparative studies that provide more detailed analysis of the relationship between the two, some of which defend Merleau-Ponty against Levinas’s criticisms. See, for example, papers by Robert Bernasconi, Victoria Burke, David Levin, and Gary Madison in Galen Johnson and Michael B. Smith, eds, Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Thomas W. Busch, ‘Ethics and Ontology: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty,’ Man and World 25 (1992), 195–202; David Michael Levin, ‘Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas,’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6 (1997), 345–92; Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and MerleauPonty (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Michael Sanders, ‘From Time to the Flesh: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty,’ Philosophy Today 43 Supplement (1999), 146–53; and Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), chap. 9. Levinas’s critiques of communitarianism are directed against Hegel (e.g., TI, 217). But they equally apply to contemporary communitarians such as Charles Taylor who base their understanding of community and the sharing of meaning on Hegel’s model of identity and difference. Taylor’s seminal essay on this topic is ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ in A. Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. 32–6. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty,’ in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 102; hereafter cited as OS. Levinas’s most sustained discussion of how this unique sense orientates meaning in a way that is ethical is found in a paper written just before the publication of Totality and Infinity: Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense,’ in Col-

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lected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), esp. 95–6 and 88–9; hereafter cited as MS. Robert Bernasconi discusses this paper in detail in ‘One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonization and Its Ethics’ in Galen Johnson and Michael B. Smith, eds, Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990). Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), 161; hereafter cited as OTB. For recent discussions of the intersection between ethics and politics in terms of the relation to the third party see, for example, Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (1999), 76–87; Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Diane Perpich, ‘A Singular Justice: Ethics and Politics between Levinas and Derrida,’ Philosophy Today 42, SPEP Supplement (1998), 59–70. Levinas’s most succinct description of the relation between the ethical and political in these terms is in an interview entitled ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’ in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 29. See also TI, 212–14, and OTB, 156–62. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Other, Utopia, and Justice,’ in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 230. Red, for example, is not, for Merleau-Ponty, a quality adhering to a thing or an idea that I project onto the world; red is a ‘punctuation in the field of red things’ actualized in the intertwining of body and world through the impact of ‘coloured being’ on incarnated ideas drawn up from ‘imaginary worlds.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 132; hereafter cited as VI. Sanders, ‘From Time to the Flesh,’ 148. Interestingly, Sanders finds a similar break in Merleau-Ponty’s account of flesh that allows him to extend Levinas’s model of the ethical relation to lived embodied experience. While I do not take the path that Sanders does, our aims are compatible. For other discussions of Levinas’s idea of temporality and its significance for positing a break with the said see Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), chap. 4; and Diane Perpich, ‘A Singular Justice.’ Besides The Visible and the Invisible, I will be drawing on several other

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Rosalyn Diprose papers on expression and meaning written in the decade leading up to VI that are compatible with the ontology formulated in that work. These are Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other’ in The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), hereafter cited as DPO; ‘The Child’s Relations with Others,’ trans. William Cobb in James M. Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), hereafter cited as CRO; and ‘Eye and Mind,’ trans. Carleton Dallery, in Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception, hereafter cited as EM. Tina Chanter sums up the problem with the move from the feminine welcome to the ethical relation by arguing that Levinas’s ethical relation relies on an undisclosed feminine that is necessary to turn the hand that grasps into the hand that gives. For Chanter’s most recent discussions of this issue see, in addition to her essay in this volume, her Time, Death, and the Feminine, 245–60. Derrida also suggests that Levinas’s account of the ‘feminine’ implies that, in some sense, the welcome, or what I have called the handshake, must be reversible. See Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. See Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, chap. 9 for a more detailed discussion of Levinas’s critique of Merleau-Ponty and an alternative defence of Merleau-Ponty against the criticism. There is never a complete closure to the other because the body is never completely for-itself: ‘it is neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled.’ VI, 137–8. See, for example, the chapter on ‘Freedom’ in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), esp. 454–5. For Nancy community is inoperative in the sense that it is ‘community without communion,’ a community always in the process of undoing itself. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 144; hereafter cited as IC. In outlining the relation between community and the social expression of bodies I also refer to the chapter entitled ‘Corpus’ in Nancy’s The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et.al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 189–207; hereafter cited as BP. And Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 2000); hereafter cited as BSP. Nancy does sometimes make a distinction between the original sharing and expression of ‘singularity as such’ and the social expression of bodies in terms of habituated character traits such as ethnicity, age, sex, etc., ‘whose particular patterns constitute another level of singularity’ (BSP, 8).

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Given more space I would question the need for such a distinction for the reasons already given in the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, which I favour on this point. It suffices to say here that Nancy is closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Levinas on the viability of the distinction, suggesting, for example, that these ‘typical traits (ethnic, cultural, social, generational, and so forth) ... do not abolish singular differences; instead they bring them into relief’ (ibid.). 20 Nancy also mentions this idea of tact elsewhere: for example, in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 63. Jacques Derrida provides a detailed analysis of Nancy’s motif of tact in ‘Le toucher,’ Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993), 111–57.

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Strangers and Slaves in the Land of Egypt: Levinas and the Politics of Otherness ROBERT BERNASCONI

There is a widespread view that the Other in Levinas is pre-eminently the stranger in the sense of a foreigner, someone who comes from elsewhere, someone different from me, someone against whom I define myself. In this sense the Palestinian is the Other to the Israeli Jew; and, in the United States, the African American is the Other to the European American, as Black to White, and so on. The examples can readily be multiplied indefinitely depending on the context and they can be compounded, particularly if one introduces gender as another form of difference: the African American woman is pre-eminently the Other to the White American man. This tendency to read Levinas as if his use of the language of alterity was consonant with its use in anthropological discourse, the temptation to give Levinasian alterity an immediate cultural meaning, is perhaps as widespread as it is because of the paucity of philosophical resources available to address cultural and political differences from an ethico-political standpoint. But there is good reason to resist this interpretation of Levinas. Levinas himself frequently insists that he should not be understood in this way. In Totality and Infinity he writes that ‘[t]he Other is not other with a relative alterity.’1 He thereby breaks with the logic of alterity as it had been understood since the time of Plato’s Sophist, a point Jacques Derrida recognizes in his classic essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics.’2 When Levinas says that the face is abstract ‘or, more exactly, absolute,’3 he means not only that the face is beyond disclosure and understanding, but also that the face of the Other disturbs immanence without settling into the horizons of the world (HH, 57; CP, 102). In this sense, the face of the Other is without any cultural ornament (HH, 48; CP, 96). On Levinas’s account, to encounter the Other one must overlook the colour of that

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person’s skin or indeed his or her cultural identity, just as one must not notice the colour of his or her eyes.4 Levinas’s refusal to treat the notion of alterity as a sociological category that might be applied as a cultural or ethnic designation was displayed starkly during a radio discussion held in 1982 in the immediate aftermath of the massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila by the Phalangists. The fact that the Israeli Defence Forces failed to intervene to halt the killing raised suspicions against them that have not been fully allayed to this day.5 The host of the radio program, Shlomo Malka, addressing Levinas as the philosopher of the other, asked him whether the ‘other’ of the Israeli was not ‘above all the Palestinian.’6 Levinas rejected this possibility in a response that has attracted widespread controversy: ‘My definition of the other is completely different. The Other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the Other, you’re for the neighbor’ (IEP, 5; LR, 294). This immediate passage from the Other to the neighbour scandalized those readers who understood the Levinasian Other to be the stranger as opposed to the neighbour,7 but it is clear that the sense that Levinas had departed out of political expediency from the fundamental insight of his ethics can be traced back to the failure to recognize what he understood by alterity.8 However, Levinas’s response continues in a way that seems to have only added to the confusion: ‘But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, then in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong’ (IEP, 5; LR, 294). The fact that in these few sentences Levinas proceeds to identify a sense in which the Other can be an enemy further disrupted a popular belief that, for the Levinasian, non-violence is the only possible response to the face of the Other. This ignores the ambiguity of the face, the fact that, even though the Other says, ‘You shall not kill,’ the Other alone can solicit violence.9 More importantly in the present context, this reference to the violence that one neighbour does to another, with the result that it might be necessary for us to take sides, marks the transition to politics. The transition has in a sense always taken place because we inhabit a world permeated by violence, and so are called to pass judgments, to make decisions, and to take sides. This is because we do not live in a closed society.10 There is more than one Other in the world. Although Levinas’s response can – and in my view very definitely

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should – be criticized on the grounds that the circumstances called for him to take this opportunity to condemn the massacre unambiguously, his failure was not a consequence of some inconsistency in his use of the term ‘Other,’ as some critics have maintained.11 The Palestinian is not as such the Other of the Jew. To be sure, in Time and the Other, an early work that opens the way to Levinas’s mature philosophy but which does not represent it clearly, Levinas does toy with the idea of construing the feminine as an alterity-content.12 However, rather than explore the potential of this idea that Levinas himself abandoned, in large part because he was committed to locating alterity beyond race and nationality, I shall focus on the direction in which Levinas chose to take his thought and examine how he conceives absolute, or abstract, alterity in the concrete.13 In particular, I will address the criticism that by insisting on the absolute alterity of the Other Levinas sacrifices the possibility that his ethics can open up a radical politics.14 As part of this same effort, I will challenge the appearance that Levinasian ethics is tied to a form of radical individualism. In Totality and Infinity Levinas introduces ethics as the way in which the formal structure of transcendence is concretized (TeI, 14; TI, 33). However, the fact that the encounter with the infinite is an ethical encounter has serious implications for its concretization. Although the Other is approached in desire, that is to say, at a level divorced from my needs, the Other cannot be approached with ‘empty hands’: ‘No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home’ (TeI, 147; TI, 172). This means that, although, as Levinas insists, ethics interrupts ontology, it does not dispense with the ontological. The fact that he differentiates my desire from my needs and locates the former on a different level from the latter, does not mean that needs are thereby rendered insignificant. It is simply that my needs and problems dissolve in the face of the needs of the Other. But how does the Other approach me as the absolutely Other and at the same time present him- or herself to me as needy? Does not the reference to need introduce particular determinations that compromise the sense in which one can say that the Other as such does not enter into the horizons of the world? Our expectation as readers of Levinas that he is addressing the problem of the demands that poor people make on the rich and powerful is frustrated. When Levinas writes that the Other is ‘for example, the weak, the poor, “the widow and the orphan,” whereas I am the rich or the powerful’ (TA, 75; TO, 83), he does not mean that I

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have ethical obligations because I am rich, although my wealth certainly impacts my political obligations. Rather it is because the Other transcends me, and thereby calls into question my hold on things, that I am obliged to give. More precisely, in the face of the Other I am already dispossessed. What previously I needed for myself, if only because it gave me my self-identity, now seems to be excessive. It is surplus to my requirements. This is the meaning of these sentences: ‘The relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself and empties me without end, showing me ever new resources. I did not know I was so rich, but I no longer have the right to keep anything for myself’ (HH, 46; CP, 94). Just as my ethical obligations do not arise because I am wealthy relative to others, these obligations are not dependent on the Other having specific needs. However, my choice of whom to help and how to help them must be made with reference to those needs. Hence Levinas’s readiness to cite Rabbi Yochanan’s claim that leaving another human being without food is a fault that no circumstance attenuates (TeI, 175; TI, 201). The descriptive terms that Levinas uses to refer to the Other – the widow and the orphan, the stranger – do more than determine the asymmetrical character of the relation whereby the responsibility to do something is mine. Over and beyond their cultural meaning, these terms possess a phenomenological sense. Or, rather, they possess an enigmatic or exorbitant meaning that exceeds the phenomena.15 The stranger produces a disturbance, but, for Levinas, the stranger is not the one who comes to stay without even revealing his or her name. Levinas’s stranger has left even before having arrived, ‘ab-solute in his manifestation’ (EDE, 210–11; CP, 68). He appeals to Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (La cantatrice chauve), where the doorbell rings but there is no certainty whether anyone is there (EDE, 203; CP, 61). One cannot but be suspicious that Levinas’s frequent use of the figures of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor serves as a rhetorical device designed to appeal to our sympathies beyond any philosophical argument, something that would seem inappropriate in a philosophy that vigorously sets itself against rhetoric (TeI, 42–4; TI, 70– 2). How then is Levinas’s use of these labels to be understood? One way of understanding his references to the Other as stranger or foreigner is to understand them as part of a formal ontological language such as that employed by Heidegger in Being and Time. In other words, these figures are being used in a technical sense entirely divorced from their ordinary meaning. However, this interpretation makes Levinas vulner-

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able to the same objection that is now regularly levelled against Heidegger: that is, that one cannot entirely separate the philosophical deployment of ordinary language from the original contexts that give that word a place in our common lexicon. Or, to make the point in Heidegger’s own terminology, the ontological sense of a word cannot be entirely divorced from its ontic sense. In any event, the fact that in Totality and Infinity Levinas explicitly criticizes Heidegger’s appeal to a distinction between the existenzial and the existenziell as an example of ‘obedience to insidious forms of the impersonal and the neuter’ (TeI, 250; TI, 272) tells against an interpretation that relies on this parallel. In making this objection against Heidegger’s deployment of this distinction, Levinas has in mind Heidegger’s claim that terms like care (Sorge) and solicitude (Fürsorge) should be understood ontologically, which means that their ordinary connotations should be disregarded.16 This enables Heidegger to say that being without one another, passing one another by, not mattering to one another are described in Being and Time as deficient modes of Fürsorge (SZ, 121; BT, 158). Levinas contrasts his own method with Heidegger’s in the following terms: Our work in all its developments strives to free itself from the conception that seeks to unite events of all existence affected with opposite signs in an ambivalent condition which alone would have ontological dignity, while the events themselves proceeding in one direction or in another would remain empirical, articulating nothing objectively new. (TeI, 148; TI, 173)

That is to say, Levinas objects not to Heidegger’s use of ethical language, but to his neutralization of it. The neutralization deprives language of its direction, its concrete meaning. By contrast, Levinas describes his own method as follows: The method practiced here does indeed consist in seeking the condition of empirical situations, but it leaves to the developments called empirical, in which the conditioning possibility is accomplished – it leaves to the concretization – an ontological role that specifies the meaning of the fundamental possibility, a meaning invisible in that condition. (TeI, 148; TI, 173)

It is the claim that the meaning or direction (sens) lies in the empirical situation that differentiates Levinas’s approach from Heidegger’s appeal to ‘formal indication’ or formale Anzeige.17 Levinas does not pass from the concrete to the formal, which is the

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procedure of fundamental ontology.18 He is engaged in a search for the concrete (TeI, xvi; TI, 28). He writes: ‘The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore the concrete significance, constitutes a deduction – necessary and yet non-analytical’ (TeI, xvii; TI, 28). Levinas’s deduction takes the form of allowing the concrete to determine the meaning of the formal structure. This is why, in ‘Transcendence and Evil,’ an essay devoted to Philippe Nemo’s book Job and the Excess of Evil, Levinas singles out for praise the way in which Nemo’s book ‘is borne by recourse to a “material datum” of consciousness, to a “concrete content,” rather than by reflection upon some “formal structure.”’19 As we saw, this was already Levinas’s own approach to transcendence in Totality and Infinity. He begins by identifying transcendence as a formal structure. Subsequently he shows how that structure is concretized not in mystical experience but in ethics. More specifically, the subjectivity that is founded in the idea of infinity is produced concretely in generosity and hospitality. To locate the meaning of a formal structure in the concrete is to deformalize that structure. The deformalization of the idea of the infinite in the finite takes place in goodness as a perfectly disinterested desire (TeI, 21; TI, 50). This is in turn produced positively as, for example, giving. A gift is not a transfer of ownership but ‘the abolition of inalienable property’ (TeI, 48; TI, 75). If it was the stranger’s needs that led me to give, this would privilege need over desire and amount to an attempt to deduce ethics from an objective analysis of the situation. To be ethical is to relate to the Other across the world, but not in terms of the world: ‘[T]he relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question the world possessed’ (TeI, 148; TI, 173). It is the break-up of the world rather than the specific needs of the Other that leads to my generosity. Hospitality is similarly construed in the first instance in terms of my desire, not the Other’s needs: ‘Recollection in a home open to the Other – hospitality – is the concrete and initial fact of human recollection and separation: it coincides with the Desire for the Other absolutely transcendent’ (TeI, 147; TI, 172). Because, on Levinas’s account of ethics, the relation with the Other does not render the Other relative to me, the distinction between rich and poor, like that between stranger and neighbour, also cannot be understood relatively: the poor are not those who are worse than off me, any more than the stranger is pre-eminently someone of another nationality. It is in the first instance the abstractness, not the concrete-

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ness, of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger that leads him to name them in his philosophical discourse. The widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger are invoked by Levinas primarily, not because these terms define the needy, but because they are terms used to designate in a general way those who have within a given society no recognized status. Their lack of status means that they are in a sense ‘without identity’ in society. To be sure, their needs are precisely what I must address, and those needs may arise because the Other is from another place, is lonely, or is poor, but that does not mean that Levinas’s stranger is a stranger because he or she is a displaced person or a refugee who has no nationality. The Other is infinitely foreign, infinitely transcendent (TeI, 168; TI, 194). However, the accounts of generosity and hospitality in Otherwise than Being are somewhat different from those found in Totality and Infinity. In the later book Levinas returns to these themes in the course of a discussion of sensibility in which he presents enjoyment as the condition of vulnerability: ‘Sensibility can be vulnerability ... only because it is enjoyment.’20 Enjoyment must be frustrated for both the gift and what in Totality and Infinity was called ‘hospitality’ to take place: ‘It is not a gift of the heart, but of the bread from one’s mouth, of one’s own mouthful of bread. It is the openness, not only of one’s pocketbook, but of the door of one’s home, a “sharing of your bread with the famished,” a “welcoming of the wretched into your house” (Isaiah 58)’ (AE, 94; OTB, 74). In spite of the apparent continuity between the two texts, Levinas explains in a footnote that this analysis of sensibility in Otherwise than Being is to be understood as having broken with that in the earlier work: ‘In Totality and Infinity the sensible was interpreted in the sense of consumption and enjoyment’ (AE, 94n8; OTB, 191n8). In Otherwise than Being, by contrast, the immediacy of sensibility is the proximity of the other. Nevertheless, although the Other is now characterized as the neighbour, desire is still directed to ‘the stranger in the neighbor’ (AE, 157; OTB, 123). If the absolutely other, the stranger, has no other place, is not autochthonous, is uprooted and without a country, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons, it is because of me. Or, rather, it is up to me. The other’s reliance on me constitutes the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbour (AE, 116; OTB, 91). The crucial text for understanding the transformation of Levinas’s thought on strangerhood between his two major texts is the 1970 essay ‘Sans Identité,’ known in English as ‘No Identity,’ although it might also have been translated as ‘Without Identity’ (HH, 83–101; CP 141–51).

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Levinas there unmistakably associates hospitality with Heidegger and makes it the basis of a polemic. In the section on Heidegger and as part of an examination of his account of the relation of Being and man Levinas writes: ‘The process of being, or being’s essence, is from the first manifestation, that is, expansion onto a site, a world, hospitality’ (HH, 89; CP, 144). In this way Levinas, gratuitously it seems, hands over to Heidegger a word that he had worked so hard in Totality and Infinity to establish as a unique term in his own lexicon. It is as if he was taking the word out of his own mouth and giving it to the Other. But the gesture is even more remarkable, if one recalls that, when in Totality and Infinity Levinas writes that ‘my welcoming of the Other is the ultimate fact’ (TeI, 49; TI, 77), it is to contest Heidegger’s account of the thing. The sentence continues: ‘in it the things figure not as what one builds but as what one gives’ (TeI, 49; TI, 77). The idea of hospitality was employed in Totality and Infinity as part of a sustained polemic against Heidegger, and specifically against Heidegger’s notion of enrootedness. At the very beginning of that book Levinas contrasts metaphysical desire as a desire for a country that is foreign to every nature, that has not been our fatherland, and where we will never be transported, with the longing to return (TeI, 3; TI, 33).21 The longing to return is associated with Heidegger, who, in the context of a reading of Hölderlin’s poetry, wrote eloquently about homecoming, and whom Levinas associates with ‘the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth’ (TeI, 17; TI, 46). Given that hospitality is possible only on the condition that I am at home (chez moi), it might seem that Heidegger is better equipped to account for hospitality. However, Levinas introduces another sense of dwelling to counter Heidegger’s. For Levinas, dwelling takes place in a land of exile (TeI, 129; TI, 156). Furthermore, Levinas’s claim that hospitality coincides with the desire for the Other is immediately followed by these sentences: ‘The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics’ (TeI, 147; TI, 172). In order to claim hospitality for those in exile as opposed to sedentary peoples, Levinas highlights the idea of a chosen home.22 If in ‘No Identity’ Levinas gives the word ‘hospitality’ to Heidegger instead of using it against him, it is because between the two works there has been a deepening of the analysis. Already in Totality and Infinity the Other dispossesses me of my sense of being at home, in the

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same way that the Other puts in question my sense of what is mine, so that I am in the face of the Other already dispossessed. But that leaves the question of how the Other puts in question my sense of myself, my possessions, my belonging to a home or to a homeland. Levinas first addresses this question only in ‘No Identity’ when he juxtaposes Heideggerian rootedness, the idea of a fatherland on earth, with the biblical idea of being a stranger on earth (Psalm 119). He explains: ‘It is not here a question of the foreignness of the eternal soul exiled among passing shadows, nor a displaced state which the building of a house and the possession of land will enable one to overcome, by bringing forth, through building, the hospitality of sites which the earth envelops’ (HH, 97; CP, 148–9). Levinas can give the word ‘hospitality’ to Heidegger in this way because his account is now directed, not to the Other putting me in question, but to the passivity of a self more passive than the receptivity of welcome of an active ego (Moi) (HH, 68 and 94; CP, 128 and 147). In what is a crucial sentence for understanding how the deepening of Levinas’s account enables him to enrich his manipulation of the figures of the stranger and the neighbour, Levinas unites sharing with the condition – or the uncondition - of being ‘strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt [which] brings man close to his neighbor’ (HH, 97; CP, 149). Because we share our strangerhood, a condition that arises not from our relation to each other, but from our being in exile, so that ultimately ‘no one is at home [chez soi],’ we discover the underlying and pre-existing proximity that legitimates the employment of the term ‘neighbour,’ thereby authorizing Levinas’s phrase ‘the stranger in the neighbour’ (AE, 157; OTB, 123). If one follows this logic, then one should not be surprised when, at least for a moment, Levinas reclaims the word ‘hospitality’ for himself in Otherwise than Being. He identifies it as the one-for-the-other that delivers me, not to an assembling, but to an incessant alienation of the me (le moi) by the guest. This process of alienation reveals what he calls the self (le soi) of substitution (AE, 99; OTB, 79). Hospitality and assembling are again distinguished as part of the continuing polemic against Heidegger. To welcome the stranger into one’s home is indeed to experience a certain dispossession, to find oneself uprooted. But the important point is that Levinas is here asking what makes hospitality possible.23 This means that Derrida’s claim in Adieu that hospitality is ‘ethicity itself: the whole and principle of ethics’ (AEL, 94; A, 50) is, at best, misleading when extended to Otherwise than Being. So long as hospital-

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ity is identified as such, the established order seems to remain intact, and is left undisturbed. At this point I want to highlight another term that, like such terms as ‘widow,’ ‘orphan,’ and ‘stranger,’ carries a heavy rhetorical force, but which has not received as much attention as them, even though it has a longstanding place in Levinas’s lexicon. That term is ‘slave.’ We have already seen it used in conjunction with the notion of strangerhood, when we cited Levinas’s phrase ‘strangers and slaves in the Land of Egypt’ (HH, 97; CP, 149). It is my contention that Levinas’s use of ‘slave’ reveals something important about his conception of the relation of the ethical and the political.24 The term has a distinctly political meaning that is specified in Difficult Freedom: ‘The traumatic experience of my slavery in Egypt constitutes my very humanity, a fact that immediately allies me to the workers, the wretched, and the persecuted people of the world.’25 It is clear here that Levinas’s thought of alterity and strangerhood culminates, not in an isolated subject haunted in his or her conscience, but in a solidarity with the persecuted. Another essay in Difficult Freedom, ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,’ develops this idea in the context of a reference to Exodus chapter 11, which describes the death of the first-born of Egypt that presages Israel’s release from bondage. ‘Slaves who served the slaves of the State will henceforth follow the most high Voice, the most free path. It is a figure of humanity! Man’s freedom is that of an emancipated man remembering his servitude and feeling solidarity for all enslaved people’ (DL, 201; DF, 152). So it is not only the memory of strangerhood that assembles a humanity where no one is at home (HH, 97; CP, 149), but also a memory of servitude. Nevertheless, although this undoes at the ethical level the distinction between master and slave, persecutor and persecuted, much as the distinction between rich and poor is subjected by Levinas to a radical displacement, at the political level my obligation to those dying of hunger trumps my obligation to those who are not. There is a difference between the slaves of the State and the slaves who serve the slaves of the State. This is confirmed in another essay in Difficult Freedom, ‘Place and Utopia.’ There Levinas sets out the dangers of choosing utopia over ethical action: ‘The faith that moves mountains and conceives of a world without slaves immediately transforms itself to utopia, separating the reign of God from the reign of Caesar’ (DL, 136; DF, 101). Levinas complains that this would reassure Caesar. He claims, by con-

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trast, that the Bible places itself inside the situations that it must assume in order to overcome them. He then turns at once to slavery. The Bible seems to transform these situations ‘by pursuing them right into their dialectical return, which is the enslavement of man by man after the suppression of slavery’ (DL, 136; DF, 101). What this means is that there is no place for an ethical discourse that is not also inextricably linked with a recognition of the political context that it is its task to interrupt. If this is not as apparent to readers of Levinas’s philosophical texts as it is to readers of his confessional writings, it is not only because the limitations of Levinas’s understanding of the nature of philosophy leads him to keep the political at a distance from it, but also because one is inclined to ignore the way that the preface to Totality and Infinity and the two dedications to Otherwise than Being serve to situate the texts that they introduce. To be sure, the notion of the slave operates, like the notion of the stranger, as an abstract term at the ethical level that finds its concretization in the world of needs, that is to say, in the political. But the concrete meaning of slavery enhances its capacity to sustain the way the political and the ethical question each other. Servitude is not only a universal memory for all humanity that unites us. It is also a concrete condition that divides humanity. There is a difference between solidarity with the oppressed and the solidarity of the oppressed. And this division goes to the core of Levinas’s thinking, which is why he must keep the ethical and the political at arm’s length in his exposition of them. In principle the memory of persecution makes Levinas’s decisive insight, the idea of substitution, the one-for-the-other as the other in the self, arise in persecution available to all. But because it is in the ethical responsibility that the persecuted has for the persecutor that the full extent of my responsibility is revealed,26 then it is the solidarity of the persecuted that is both politically and ethically decisive. First, the persecuted have concrete access to the meaning of substitution as the persecutors do not (AE, 155–6; OTB, 121). It is from his experience of persecution that Levinas writes and reaches out to all humanity, but this experience concretely divides humanity, albeit in ways that are not definitive. The persecuted in one context is a persecutor in another context, as the massacres at Sabra and Shatila seem to confirm. But second, substitution, the ‘I is the Other’ concretized as the persecuted’s responsibility for the persecutor, breaks through the difference between oppressor and oppressed (AE, 151, 162; OTB, 118, 126). The persecuted have concrete access to the solidarity that unites them with their persecutors, as the persecutors themselves do not.

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The ethical questions the political not only when it reminds us that even in a just world there would still be tears that the bureaucrat does not see (TH, 102; BPW, 23), but also in the private goodness of a usually mean Russian woman who gives bread to a German prisoner or a soldier sharing his canteen with an enemy.27 The political questions the ethical when it reminds us that in sacrificing myself for the Other I might, given the circumstances, be aiding and abetting an unjust cause, just as I might in showing hospitality to a stranger be sheltering a mass murderer who should be brought to justice. This is why a Levinasian ethics must always be an ethics suspicious of itself.28 What renders Levinas’s failure to have been more outspoken in his condemnation of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila so shocking on his own terms is not the idea that a Palestinian above all is the Other of a Jew, but the unjustified massacre of innocent lives. It is that simple. But the shock is sufficient to raise the question of whether the reading of Levinas I have offered here has not ultimately departed from what he himself would recognize as his own thinking, every bit as much as a reading of his thought that finds there an ethics of relative alterities. Who can say? It is the task of all philosophical interpretation that it be responsive to the situation in which it is written, but that is also its risk.29

NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 168; Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194; henceforth TeI and TI respectively. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence et Métaphysique,’ in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 168–9; ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ trans. Alan Bass, in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 114. See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Alterity of the Stranger and the Experience of the Alien,’ in Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 62–89. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpelier: Fata Morgana, 1972), 47; Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 95; henceforth HH and CP respectively. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Éthique et Infini (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 89; Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85.

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5 For details of the massacres, see Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre, trans. Khalil Jahshan (Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American Graduates, 1983), and the review by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 2: 298–301; The Jews, trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 228–30. 6 Emmanuel Levinas with Alain Finkielkraut and Shlomo Malka, ‘Israël: Éthique et politique,’ Les nouveaux cahiers 71 (1982–3), 2; ‘Ethics and Politics,’ trans. Jonathan Romney, in Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 290; henceforth IEP and LR respectively. I have dealt in more detail with some of the issues raised by this interview in ‘“Who is my Neighbor? Who is the Other?” Questioning the Generosity of Western Thought,’ in Questioning the Ethics and Responsibility in the Phenomenological Tradition (Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 1992), 1–31. 7 The critical response is easier to understand if one recalls that in 1962 Levinas had explicitly insisted that one should avoid the word ‘neighbour,’ because it focuses on what one has in common with another, whereas the Other is the one with whom I initially have nothing in common. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendance et Hauteuer,’ Bulletin de la Société francaise de Philosophie 3 (1962), 106–7; ‘Transcendence and Height,’ trans. Tina Chanter, Simon Critchley, and Nicholas Walker, in Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 27; henceforth TH and BPW respectively. However, twenty years later Levinas had changed his vocabulary for reasons which I explore below. 8 Although I cannot avoid the suspicion that Levinas’s guardedness was to some extent responsible for some of the misinterpretations of his position on the massacre, Howard Caygill has shown very well the richness of Levinas’s response, which in fact would hold Israel to higher standards than those appropriate to other states: Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), 190–4. Nevertheless, Caygill is insensitive to Levinas’s use of the notions of stranger, neighbour, and other, even to the point of imagining that Levinas suggested that ‘the Palestinians are not the other, not neighbours’ (193). For some sense of the complexity of the term ‘neighbour,’ see Adam Zachary Newton, The Fence and the Neighbor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 59–84. 9 See Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Violence of the Face: Peace and Language in the Thought of Levinas,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 6 (1997), 81–93.

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10 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Le moi et la totalité,’ Revue de métaphysique et de morale 59 (1954), 360; trans. CP, 32. 11 This misinterpretation may have begun with Martin Jay, ‘Hostage Philosophy: Levinas’s Ethical Thought,’ Tikkun 5, no. 6 (November, 1990), 87. 12 Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre (Montpelier: Fata Morgana, 1979), 14; Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 36; henceforth TA and TO respectively. 13 Nevertheless, Levinas’s own thinking of absolute alterity does not lead him to be as respectful of difference – sexual and cultural – as he should have been. For a powerful critique to that effect, see Sonia Sikka, ‘How Not to Read the Other,’ Philosophy Today 43, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 195–206. 14 I have discussed elsewhere the coexistence of the ethical and the political whereby each questions the other. Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38, no. 1 (January 1999), 76–87. My task here is more specific. 15 Emmanuel Levinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 209; henceforth EDE. 16 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), 192; trans. Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 237; henceforth SZ and BT respectively. 17 Although often appealed to by commentators today, I do not know of any thoroughgoing study of Heidegger’s frequent, but always only sketchy, appeal to this formula. In the absence of such a study, see Georg Imdahl, ‘“Formale Anzeige” bei Heidegger,’ Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 37 (1994), 306–32. 18 Levinas was at this time unaware of what Heidegger had in 1928 called ‘metontology’ and which represents a transformation (Umschlag) of philosophy, a transformation that represents a return from the formal to the concrete. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, Gesamtausgabe 26 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 202; Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 158. For the interpretation of metontology underlying this claim see Robert Bernasconi, ‘“The Double Concept of Philosophy” and the Place of Ethics,’ in Heidegger in Question (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 25–39. 19 Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’Idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 205–6; Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 133. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence (The Hague:

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22

23

24

25

26

27

Robert Bernasconi Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 93; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 74; henceforth AE and OTB. It is, of course, passages such as this one that call for heightened scrutiny of Levinas’s discussions of the state of Israel, but I will have to confine myself here to referencing my paper ‘Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Levinas’ Political Messianism,’ Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998), 3–19. See also Derrida’s remarks on the subject at the end of Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); henceforth AEL and A respectively. It should also be noted that the idea of strangerhood was already built into Levinas’s early philosophy in the form of the ontological structure of the duality the soi and the moi. Thus, in ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ Levinas wrote of ‘the person’ that ‘it is what it is and it is a stranger to itself.’ ‘La réalité et son ombre,’ Les Temps Modernes 38 (1948), 778; trans. CP, 6. However, an exploration of the relation of these ideas to the early ontology must be postponed to another occasion. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘What Is the Question to Which Substitution Is the Answer?’ in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 234–51. However, it should be noted that Levinas employs the figure of the slave only as an ontological determination that is distinct from the ethical relation of responsibility, not least it seems because of the danger, which Levinas wants to guard against, that responsibility be conceived as a form of slavery. See AE 19, 134, 176; OTB 15–16, 105, 138. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 44; Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 26; henceforth DL and DF respectively. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘“Only the Persecuted ...”: Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed,’ in Adriaan Peperzak, ed., Ethics as First Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), 77–86. These examples come from Vassily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a book much praised by Levinas. See François Poiroé, Emmanuel Levinas. Qui êtesvous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 134; Is It Righteous to Be? trans. Jill Robbins and Marcus Coelen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 81. Also À l’heure des nations (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 104–5; In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 91.

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28 See Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Ethics of Suspicion,’ Research in Phenomenology 20 (1990), 3–18. 29 An earlier version of this essay appeared in an Italian translation by Debora Tonelli in Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filisofica 60 (2002), 587–98 under the title ‘Stranieri e schiavi nella terra d’Egitto. Levinas e la politica dell’ alterità.’

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Levinas’s Reflections on State, Revolution, and Utopia from a Jewish Perspective ZE ’ EV LEVY

Certain left and revolutionary thinkers in South America drew much of their inspiration from Levinas’s philosophy of the other, and designated their thought as ‘philosophy of liberation.’ Levinas was well aware of these trends and referred to them sympathetically. One of his Talmudic lectures even has as its title ‘Judaism and revolution.’1 It deals with a problem, discussed in the Tractate Baba Metziah (83a–b), concerning the wages of salaried workers, and Levinas underscores, on the one hand, its relevance to present-day syndicalist issues and, on the other, its salient humanist implications. He even mentions the Polish Marxist philosopher Adam Schaff in this context, and adds: ‘Hearts open easily to the working class, our purses with much more difficulty, and most difficult of all is to open the doors of our homes’ (SaS, 17). The issue itself – who has to pay for the time of the labourer’s way to work? – is of lesser relevance here, but it reminds us, according to Lévinas, of the ‘inalienable’ rights of the worker and anticipates ‘the future deproletarization of the proletariat’ (SaS, 25). This position that manifests ‘Jewish humanism’ corresponds to the fundamentals of his philosophy in general, where he prefers the notions of ‘responsibility,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘love.’ It is the ‘Other’ whose rights have to be safeguarded. That is also the lesson to be drawn from ‘L’humanisme de l’autre homme.’ All this leads him to the following conclusion: ‘One ought to define the revolution according to its content, according to its values; a revolution takes place when one liberates man, namely, rescues him from economic determinism’ (SaS, 24). In this connection Levinas also interprets another Talmudic saying in the spirit of the young Marx, namely, that the reward for one’s work is not only the salary but the creative activity as such; in a society without exploitation work will be transformed from a

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yoke into a free act that will express man’s potential creative capabilities. Although this looks still very utopian, this view reflects the humanist yearnings of those who fight for social justice. Levinas adds that this notion of freedom has to be supplemented by the responsibility of everyone for the other, for one’s fellow-beings. Although Levinas attempts to interpret several places in the Talmud by general syndicalist, revolutionary, and humanist categories, he also stresses a particularly Jewish aspect. There exists an affinity between Jewish thought and certain leftist tendencies, in particular to defend human dignity; it would be incorrect to identify the destiny of Judaism with the destiny of the proletariat (as did, for instance, Moses Hess in the beginning of Rome and Jerusalem). The persecution of Jews has been much more severe than the exploitation of workers because it was not limited solely to the social plane. It was inspired by hatred of the Jew as the stranger par excellence. Therefore, a revolution can also represent a danger to Judaism; the values of socialism are less delicate than the ancient values of Judaism (SaS, 47). Levinas’s approach is therefore ambivalent: on the one hand, he underlines certain Talmudic thoughts that correspond to contemporary revolutionary humanism; on the other hand, he is apprehensive that those revolutionary trends are liable to blur the traditional humanist values that characterize Jewish thought. One focal idea of Levinas’s philosophy – the otherness of the other and my responsibility to the other – is very strongly linked to the concept of ‘human rights.’ This concept that penetrated philosophy since the Renaissance is alien to the religious tradition of Judaism, which acknowledged duties only. To respect human rights is not derived from any divine command nor from God’s charity; it is a glorious feat of human consciousness.2 It is a clear inference from respecting the other’s otherness. In a more or less similar way Levinas employs the concept ‘anarchy,’ which he prefers to write with a hyphen: an-archie; there is no primordial element (arch¥) that prescribes man’s behaviour.3 It signifies that there is no beginning to man’s infinite responsibility. None of these thoughts are abstract ideas; to acknowledge the other’s freedom and otherness is a real revolutionary act that indicates the new age and civilization of the West. Science and technology prepare the ground for this view of respect for human rights, although they are violated all the time. They demonstrate that the progress of theoretical knowledge (savoir) reflects modern man’s capacities and freedom and reinforce the idea of human rights (OS, 119). World and man have

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ceased to be playthings of arbitrary natural or supra-natural forces whose meaning and ends transgress human knowledge. Regrettably, in many places the world over, especially in totalitarian countries, people are subjugated to the arbitrary mastery of other people, and oftentimes are also victims of natural disasters, but that is not what Levinas speaks about here. He wishes to underscore that the increasing understanding of scientific processes and the growing technological achievements derived from it highlight man’s place in the world and his rights. However, Levinas is also aware of the dangers that accompany scientific and technological development; it not only brings in its wake human freedom and human rights, but is also liable to engender a new and inhuman determinism that annihilates this vey freedom (OS, 121). This is characteristic of highly industrialized, and especially totalitarian, countries. Levinas asserts that exactly what was likely to support human rights abolishes them in these countries in a shameful way. He does not condemn modern technology, but wishes to call attention to the danger that science and technology will be turned against themselves. It is not science and technology that create negative phenomena, but their abuse by man. This is most salient in the ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ worlds, where whole populations suffer from starvation and illness (OS, 119). All these ethical, social, and political conclusions are ultimately derived from Levinas’s conception of the other. To respect the other’s otherness has far-reaching implications, among others with regard to the status of women and children in contemporary society. One cannot disregard today the important role that Levinas’s philosophy fulfils in the critique of various negative phenomena in contemporary society. Love and responsibility must be turned to the other who is my neighbour as well as to the other who is farther away, whom Levinas calls the ‘third.’ The principle of universal responsibility entails the assumption that national justice must engender universal justice, whose ultimate goal is to establish ‘one all-encompassing human society’; then all peoples will be equal, and no people will be exploited or oppressed by another people. One ought to take care of people like orphans and widows; that is the idea of humanism. Levinas employs many biblical terms in order to express his political ethics – stranger, poor, orphan, widow. They are the others that have no home, no place to rest their head; they are the ‘homeless’ of our society, the refugees all over the world, and so forth. They remind us continually of our responsibility towards them, even if the results of our efforts at aid will be small in comparison with the dimension of the disasters that befall

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many human populations today. Although these noble ideas are more implicit than explicit in Levinas’s philosophy, their lesson is clear. He writes in one of his Talmudic lessons: ‘To sanctify the soil is to build on it a just society.’4 And he continues: ‘A society without human exploitation, a society in which all men are equal, such as the first founders of the Kibbutzim wished to create ... that is the challenge to moral relativism’ (ibid.). The Torah proposes norms of universal human justice. These ideas aroused, as was said above, strong echoes among various thinkers in South America, such as Antonio Sidekum, who drew from them inspiration for their so-called ‘philosophy of liberation.’ Sidekum was impressed by the fact that Levinas employed the concept of ‘permanent revolution,’ but overlooked that it had nothing in common with Trotzky’s famous concept. ‘Revolution’ in Levinas’s sense does not mean violent abolishment of the present order; it does not suffice to be ‘against,’ one has also to be ‘for’ something, namely, for a total personal revolution by which every individual achieves universal responsibility for the other. This revolution must be ‘permanent,’ because every revolution that destroys an unjust regime by violent means runs the risk of perpetuating violence itself. ‘The revolution does not destroy the state; it is in favour of another political regime’ (SaS, 36). Therefore, what one needs is an ‘ethical revolt.’5 Levinas himself prefers a regime of ‘anarchy,’ that is, of unlimited responsibility of each and every individual for the other; that is his sense of ‘permanent revolution.’ It is rather questionable if such a society is realizable; he himself describes it as ‘messianic peace.’ All these ideas appear mostly in articles and lectures, and are therefore less elaborated philosophically than in his greater works. However, at the end of Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, which he considered to be his most important book, he advances the political slogan of ‘war against war’ in very similar terms to his remarks on revolution, and asserts that it is incumbent upon us, in the Western world, not merely to concentrate on preventing violence, but to confront the problem: violence or non-violence. Lack of opposition to social evils is likely to lead to moral degeneration, but on the other hand war against violence is apt to institutionalize violence. ‘Does not the war on war perpetuate that which it is called to make disappear, thus in good conscience consecrating war and its virile virtues?’6 Therefore, a just war also necessitates permanent vigilance in order to safeguard moral standards. All these issues are of extreme importance in our present world, and especially in Israel now, with regard to the war against

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increasing terrorism. Levinas admitted that he did not pretend to solve these difficult ethical and political issues by means of his philosophy, but regarded it his moral duty to call attention to them as a philosopher. When asked about the left thinkers in South America who referred to his philosophy, he responded: ‘I am very happy, and even very proud when I obtain such responses in that group.’7 It is remarkable that several Marxist thinkers thus availed themselves of Levinas’s thoughts in order to establish their political philosophy. Levinas himself referred to Marx and to Marxism only on a very few occasions, and then with regard to the question whether the messianic age will put an end to social injustice. ‘All the prophets only prophesied the days of the Messiah ... but they remind us of the strange passages where Marx predicted the socialist society with all its transformations of human society that refute anticipation on account of their very revolutionary essence.’8 Referring to Marx in the context of biblical thought is, at first sight, rather astonishing. In his talk with Richard Kearney Levinas speaks approvingly of the priority of praxis in Marx’s thought: When I spoke in God and Philosophy about the necessity of overcoming Western ontology as an ‘ethical and prophetic appeal,’ I thought indeed of Marx’s critique of Western idealism as a project to understand the world instead of changing it [an allusion to Marx’s eleven theses on Feuerbach]. In Marx’s critique we encounter an ethical conscience that traverses the ontological identification of truth with ideal understanding and with the demand that theory will be exchanged by a concrete praxis of care for the other. This revelatory and prophetic outcry explains the extraordinary force of attraction of the Marxist utopia on several generations. Marxism has obviously been perverted by Stalinism. The revolt of 1968 in Paris was a revolt of sadness.9

On the whole, however, Levinas did not show much interest either in Marx’s thought or in that of contemporary Marxists. The only exception was Ernst Bloch, but in that case it was mainly Bloch’s conception of death that appealed to him. Still, Bloch’s utopian-messianic ideas were certainly close to his ethical views; they also attracted at the time another Jewish religious thinker, André Neher. On several occasions Levinas characterized his political and social ideas as ‘messianic policy.’ The messianic age will ensure that the I will be a véridique I that responds to a command that is derived from its inner self, and does not react out of any outside coercion. In the socialist society the other will be

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accorded the status of the I; then the I will be liberated from the selfalienation that is caused by injustice to the other. This will be a truly altruistic society. The chief goal of Levinas’s political philosophy is to secure justice. A state that does not guarantee just interpersonal relations has no right to be trusted by its citizens. It loses all legitimacy. The slogan of individual freedom that is not vindicated by justice looks suspicious to Levinas. His main criticism concerns the oppression of the I as a subject in the state, not merely by bureaucratic flaws but through the deplorable fact that state officials do not respond to citizens as subjects but as objects, as the next in line, as a number, and so on. Levinas tries to defend the self against governmental hierarchy because the I represents the necessary condition to ensure responsibility for the other. ‘There are tears that the functionary [fonctionnaire] cannot see: the tears of the other.’10 Levinas does not deny the tasks that the state and the government fulfil in social life, but endeavours to underscore the role of the I that has no ethical counterpart. Levinas has no theory of utopia comparable to that of Ernst Bloch or of Buber, but the idea of utopia has its place in his philosophy. Already at the beginning of Totalité et Infini he speaks of a yearning for an invisible country that we shall never reach.11 More explicitly he deals with the notion of utopia in one of the essays of Difficile Liberté and in several other places where he employs the term ‘non-lieu,’ which is a literal translation of ‘u-topia.’ He does not deny that there is a utopian element in his ethical theory; there is no morality without utopianism. This he applies also to his view on Marxism: The great force of Marxist philosophy, which departs from economic man, consists in its ability to avoid completely any hypocritical preaching. It bases itself on the sincere intent, on the good will, of (preventing) hunger and thirst. The ideal of struggle and sacrifice that it proposes, the culture to which it invites us, continue these intentions.12

Notwithstanding his personal aversion to participating in political struggles and his critical approach to the events of 1968, Levinas demonstrated much sympathy for the Marxist idea of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited – the ‘pursued.’ He also underlined similar thoughts in his ethics of the other. The exodus from Egypt expressed the striving for freedom, compassion for the enslaved and oppressed on earth (les damnés de la terre).13 Marxism does not only mean a struggle to

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seize power but ‘proposes to humanity that it demand what it is my duty to give it’ (EO, 130). Marxism, unlike other political theories, does not only fight in order to seize power, but in order – at least in principle – to abolish state power. This was its messianic element. What really happened to Marxism is another question. ‘One of the great disappointments in the history of the 20th century was that this movement gave birth to Stalinism’ (ibid.). Levinas identifies Marx’s explicit priority of praxis over theory (in the 11 Theses on Feuerbach) with his own conception of giving priority to the other. He distinguishes between two interrelated tendencies in Marxism – ethics, which is manifested by the relation of the I to the other and his/her responsibility towards him/her, and morality, which is manifested by a social-political organization that strives for social justice. According to Marxism, justice and politics cannot be separated. But all these kindred ideas cannot blur the essential difference between Levinas’s philosophical-religious outlook and Marx’s secular materialist outlook. When Levinas regards the face of the other, he sees God; when Marx regards the face of the other, he sees poverty, exploitation, and oppression. Levinas of course sees them too, and that is perhaps the connecting link between these two thinkers whose philosophical outlooks are diametrically opposed to each other. In all of this utopia acquires an important place in Lévinas’s social thought. He awards it an original interpretation of his own, to wit: utopia is the subject-matter not of knowledge but of encounter – encounter with the other person and for his/her sake. This conception leaves no place for expressions like ‘concrete utopia’ or ‘dialectic utopia,’ as employed by Bloch, but stresses the relation-encounter between people, in almost prophetic language. The main differences between Bloch’s and Levinas’s conceptions of utopia are the following: Bloch conceives of it as immanent; it signifies the accomplishment of an incomplete existence (Noch-Nicht-Sein). Levinas conceives of it as transcendent; it signifies what is beyond being. However, according to both it is man’s duty to complete what is not yet (pas encore). Also, Bloch adopted the view of the young Marx on the naturalization of man and humanization of nature, whereas Levinas stressed the human dimension that will never become nature, that will always preserve something ‘beyond being.’ Thus, he spoke of what he designated as ‘permanent revolution.’ The ‘proletarian’ or the ‘pursued’ manifests the rupture between humanity and being, between ethics and ontology, that it is incumbent upon us to overcome. This is the challenge for my

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responsibility for the other. The revolution that, according to Bloch, will transform utopia into reality does not suffice. What is needed ‘is something different from revolution or more revolutionary than revolution,’14 namely, a ‘permanent revolution’ in Levinas’s sense of the term. Contrary to Bloch, who stressed the social-political aspect of utopia, Levinas stresses its ethical aspect, that is, the willingness of the I to act for the welfare of the other. Utopia manifests a ‘search’ (recherche) and an ardent ‘desire’ (désir) for a better life that are engendered by the unrest of the present state of affairs and the dialectics of modern emancipation. Levinas gives a new meaning to the messianic idea as yearning for a better world and, what is most important to him, the obligation to do everything in order to strive for its realization. ‘Everyone has to act as if he were the Messiah ... Messianism is not the certainty of the coming of the person who arrests the course of history. It is my capability to take upon me the suffering of all. It is the moment when I recognize this capability and my universal responsibility.’15 All these remarks demonstrate that, despite his difficult metaphysical thought, Levinas was no thinker who secluded himself in an ivory tower, but a committed thinker, un homme engagé, although he did not like the existentialist concept engagement because he considered it to be too vague. This was certainly not correct, because J.-P. Sartre, the chief advocate of this concept, was very much engaged in concrete public political affairs, certainly much more than Levinas himself. From this point of view Levinas’s contribution to the application of ethics to human affairs was much more on the abstract than on the concrete plane. This, of course, does not diminish in the least its importance. It is up to us now to draw from it the necessary implications.

NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 11–53; hereforth cited as SaS. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 113; henceforth cited as OS. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Humanisme et anarchie,’ in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), 71–91. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 141. This was a remark of Prof. Baruch that Levinas quoted approvingly.

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5 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ideology and Idealism,’ Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 130. 6 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Paris: Kluwer Academic, 1988), 271–2. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser à l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 130; hereafter cited as EN. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1982), 218. 9 Quoted in Richard A. Cohen, Face to Face with Lévinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), 33. 10 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendence et hauteur,’ Cahiers de l’Herne, 1991, 105. 11 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’exteriorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 3. 12 Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’exustant (Patis: Vrin, 1968), 69. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, A l’heure des nations (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 91. The last words are taken from the French version of the ‘International.’ 14 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Le surlendemain de dialectiques,’ Cahiers de la nuit surveillée no. 3 (1984), 324. 15 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le Judaîsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 130.

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Levinas, the Messianic, and the Question of History ROBERT GIBBS

I have decided to make of this moment a disturbing challenge – to address the violence of the political as it appears in the Bible. My method will be my habitual one, to comment on a set of texts. But I should underscore here that commentary is the very topic at issue – for in the citation and interpretation of texts we question both politics and history. In an appendix are found the texts to which I will be referring. I include them because commentary is not like reading – it is a doubledreading that alerts the reader both to the task of the writer in citing and interpreting and to the task of the reader herself. This alert makes a place where new questions of the political can be heard. The challenge for the reader here is to follow with me, and to try to keep clear the challenge that thought takes up in addressing the political. At the centre of my interpretation is the interruption of the messianic. The messianic is at once a suspension of the ways of this world and also a turning around to recast the history of the world. As much as my texts are disturbing, the focus of my inquiry is on the reinterpretation of past (and violent) desires and events. When Levinas helped convene the first of the Colloquia of French Speaking Jewish Intellectuals in 1957, he addressed some comments about how Judaism desacralized both the Bible and history. My final text (5a–b) is those comments. But on the way we will see two comments by Levinas on Judaism, interspersed with two traditional Jewish texts. Schematically, I read the biblical text three times: once as a biblical text on theological politics, once as interpreted by the Sages (in the fifth century CE) as a religious judgment on politics, and once by Levinas, interpreting the Sages’ interpretation – as a philosophical question about morality and politics. Progressively we will see different views of politi-

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cal history, and of the meaning of history. One footnote, however, is direly required here. This topic, in a different voice and with great scholarship, has been addressed in part by Oona Ajzenstat in her book Driven Back to the Texts, which includes a less Talmudic reading of the Talmudic passage I will read with you. We begin with text number 1, which is from Levinas’s words of welcome to the tenth colloquium in 1969 on Judaism and Revolution. 1 Explosive ideas, without doubt – doubly explosive seeing as they concern revolution and Judaism – Judaism in revolution; and why not revolution in Judaism? Ideas which cannot in any way remain stable, not fixed ideas; their very contents are rupture and renewal.

Levinas dares us to think the role of Judaism in revolution – in the communist revolution especially, but as a messianic discharge in all modern revolutions. The demand for justice, the vision of world equality, the hope for a radical discontinuity that introduces the future into the present – this is, for many, a Jewish interruption, a role of Judaism in revolution. But perhaps more important to notice is the place of revolution in Judaism – that Judaism is not a single static condition or tradition, but one that is hospitable to revolution, and one that is, perhaps, in need of revolution now. Indeed, for Levinas Judaism is not a fixed or stable idea, not some thing that only represents rupture and breaking-in to the world order, but rather is itself also broken up. In our time it is hard to imagine a Judaism that will not be fundamentally changed by the just claims of women, nor a Judaism that will not go through a revolutionary change in its understanding of its relations to Muslims and to Arabs, and indeed to Palestinians in particular. The needed changes are not foreign to Judaism, but are part of its own rupture and renewal. The Kings of ancient Israel presided over the kingdom in the years from around 1000 BCE to 587 BCE. In the Psalter there are many psalms that express a rather brutal political theology: God reigns over history, and those who obey His commands are rewarded; those who oppose God are destroyed. I hope you will forgive me as I offer this second text, Psalm 2, with a view to a simple if brutal view of politics and of history. You may well have heard this before in Handel’s setting, but if not, you can recognize President Bush’s spiritual bullying in its vision.

Levinas, the Messianic, and the Question of History 273 Why do the heathens rage? Why do the nations throng? And the peoples mutter vain things? Why do the kings of the earth take their stand and rulers intrigue together against the Lord and against his anointed? ‘Let us break the cords of their yoke, and shake off their ropes from us!’ He who sits in heaven and laughs, the Lord ridicules them. Then He speaks to them in His anger, terrifying them in His rage. ‘I have set My anointed upon Zion, My Holy hill.’ Let me tell of the decree: the Lord said to me: ‘You are My son, I begot you this day. Ask from me, and I will give you nations for your inheritance; world-wide empire. You can smash them with an iron staff, shatter them like pottery.’ So now, O kings, be prudent; be warned, rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice with trembling. Worship in purity, lest He be angry and your way be doomed in a flash of His anger. Happy are all who put their trust in Him.

Oh, that history was governed by an all-powerful deity who was on our side! Then we could be sure that God would laugh to scorn the plots of the evil ones; we could be sure of taking possession of the whole world. And everyone would fear His anger. History then unrolls as a set of glorious kings who rule with God’s authority. This is the vision of a people who can still utter their powerful hope of world dominion. No matter that by the time of final redaction (probably in the Second Temple, say, 520 BCE), David and the Davidic line of kings had been destroyed. Ancient Israel had been a client state for much of its life. The dreams of empire and of divine sanction are expressions, we might well say, of desires for vengeance. Surely the image of God laughing enemies to scorn is extreme. The state, as represented by the Messiah, the anointed King, is well suited to this task. Text 3, however, raises the need for a Talmudic reading of the Bible. Levinas insists, regularly, that Jews do not read the Bible on its own, but only through the interpretation of the Sages (from 100 BCE to 600 CE).

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They write in a time of others’ full-fledged world empire (no longer a dream, but become a nightmare), of a state-less Judaism, dispersed and rendered depolitical. Here is the separation of church and state, without which Judaism would have utterly disappeared. But it is not a world without states: 3a In the talmudic literature you also find the affirmation of the State: one must pray for the health of the state, because, without it men would eat each other alive. The state thought in its positive form and in its moral form is acceptable. But otherwise, the state and the political, despite the reason they achieve, announce oppression. And of course, the ‘yoke of the nations’ concerns the yoke of nations that Israel endures. But the image of Israel persecuted by the nations represents, more than an incident in the private history of Israel, violence and political oppression in itself.

Briefly, Levinas reports a limited and negative value for the state. It is only acceptable for preventing civil strife. The state produces reason – but basically as a form of oppression. Chaos or oppression. More important for Levinas is the way that the question of politics is raised. For the Sages, the historical events concerning biblical Israel are a source for thinking and intervening in the world of their time – the time of world empire. To affirm the state, then, on the basis of Jewish history, cannot be a simple immanentist vision. The Jews are the conquered, and so the state as such cannot be affirmed more than a finite amount. Jewish political suffering represents all violence and political oppression. Judaism then represents a way of questioning political violence. Levinas continues: 3b And thus, in every case, one must read the Talmud. My teacher said: the Bible, that is particular to Israel; the Talmud is its thought explicated on a universal plane. Just the opposite of what one would normally say. The Talmud goes beyond the incidents of Israel’s history or at least they are amplified in the universal. The image of Israel oppressed by the nations represents the conflict in the play of the moral and the play of the political. The moral, as Mr Louis Kahn said today, returns in politics, it turns itself to the public matter and submits thus to a determinism that it would perhaps break.

Now comes the first step away from the brutal clarity of the biblical psalm: the Talmud will offer us a universal explication of the thought

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there. Israel’s suffering becomes a mark of the tension between politics and morality. Levinas does not stake out a disjunctive position. Morality may question politics, but returns to it – submitting to history and politics, even as it disrupts them. The Talmudic text shows us the way to transform the biblical – to reread history and political events in order to discern the tensions. The Talmud overcomes the particularism of the Bible. Can it? Let me next bring in a text from the Talmud, from a remarkable introduction to the tractate about idolatry. The Talmud is a commentary composed in the sixth century. CE, commenting on a legal compilation called the Mishnah published around 220 CE. The Mishnah begins with a discussion of the interactions that should be limited between pagans and Jews at the times of their religious festivals. The commentary transposes this discussion to a moment of messianic judgment. It is judgment day, and each nation of the world now wants in, now wants to be accepted by God, and to accept the commandments. I will comment a bit more slowly on this text (Abodah Zarah 3a), in order to explain to you the religious references – and to help gage the transformation of political theology to a religious vision that now judges history. 4a They will say: before Him, ‘Master of the universe, give it to us from the start and we will do it.’

The nations who do not do the commandments are portrayed as finally wanting to be part of the covenant, to live according to the Torah. On Judgment Day they plea for a second chance, says the story. 4b The Holy One Blessed be He said to them: ‘Fools of the world. He who took trouble on the eve of the Sabbath eats on the Sabbath. He who does not trouble on the eve of the Sabbath, whence will he eat on the Sabbath? Nonetheless, I have one light command, and its name is Sukkah. Go and do it!’

On the Sabbath one is not allowed to cook, so that in order to have food for the Sabbath, one must prepare it in advance – you must cook today (Friday) to eat tomorrow (Saturday). The messianic moment is the opening to a world to come, and one will have no share in that world if one does not prepare for it in this world. If the nations want a good deal on Judgment Day, they should be spending their time in this

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world doing the commandments. Notice that while the Psalm promised political destruction and victory in this world politically, the Talmudic text imagines an intersection from the world to come, from an outside of this world’s politics that will judge the politics from the vantage point of the messianic. God condemns the nations as having failed on earth, but he offers a consolation prize: keep one easy commandment, and you can be in on the covenant. That commandment is the commandment of the very week of Sukkot: to dwell in a sukkah. A sukkah is a tabernacle, a booth, un cabin in French – and the Jews are commanded to eat, even to sleep and to study, in a temporary shack (out in the field) for a week during the fall harvest. We will discuss the theology of this temporary dwelling out under the sun and the stars later on. 4c How can you say this? For Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: ‘what does Scripture mean: that I command you this day ... (Deut 7:11). To do it this day and not tomorrow. To do it today, but to do it today but not to receive the reward this day.’ Rather the Holy One Blessed be He does not rule in tyranny over his creatures.

The story is interrupted by two objections. First, the prepare/enjoy sequence is well established, but God makes an exception. It is a question of reading a verse of Deuteronomy 7:11: And observe the commandments and the rules and the ordinances that I command you today to do them.

If one observes them, then why also is the last word (to do them, laasotem) needed? Joshua says that the word today means that they are to be done today and not tomorrow. The command has its time, and the non-Jews missed it. But he complicates the matter: the time to do the command is today (and they missed it), but the time to receive the reward is on this judgement day. But the text answers: God wants to leave his creatures freedom – and so he gives them another chance. A second interruption: 4d And why does he call it a light command? Because it does not involve a loss of money.

God calls it a light or easy command. That is because you build a

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sukkah with sheaves and leftovers. It is not a new construction but a recycling, and the roof is not solid. It won’t cost anyone much. And lo: 4e Straight away everyone will take up the task and go and make a sukkah on the top of his roof. And the Holy One Blessed be He will make the sun blaze hot like on the Summer in July (Tamuz). And each one will kick down his sukkah and leave, as it is said: ‘Let us break the cords of their yoke, and shake off their ropes from us!’ (Psalm 2:3)

God may not want to be a tyrant, but he does enjoy a joke. Everyone builds a sukkah on his roof (for the rabbinic period is an urban not a pastoral one). But God makes it goddamn hot! And they each one kick down the sukkah and go out, cursing God by reciting a verse from our psalm. Leading to another interruption: 4f Make it blaze: didn’t you say ‘Rather the Holy One Blessed be He does not rule in tyranny over his creatures?’ But for Israel too, it sometimes happens that summer heat lasts until the holiday, and they are afflicted. And Raba said: ‘From affliction one is exempt from the Sukkah.’ Sure he is exempt, but who would kick it down?

So is this heat wave God leaving them freedom? Well, it turns out that Israel is often baked in the sukkah too. It happens when the festival comes and it is still the summer season. And to sit in the sukkah is an affliction, a misery. But there is a legal exception: if one is afflicted by sitting in the sukkah, the duty is suspended. And then the nations should have been exempt. True, but leaving it is one thing, kicking it down in anger, another. 4g Then the Holy One Blessed be He, will sit [in court] and laugh at them, as it is written: ‘He sits in heaven and laughs, ... [the Lord ridicules them]’ (Psalm 2:4) Rabbi Isaac said: ‘There is no laughter before God, except on this day alone.’ ... Rav Nachman ben Isaac said: ‘He laughs (daily) with his creatures, but He laughs at his creatures on this day alone.’

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Our psalm continues with this divine ridicule. The verse of God laughing at the nations is now interpreted as laughing at them for kicking down their sukkot. They only need to keep one commandment, and they have a temper tantrum! Then there is this tricky bit that God might laugh with creatures often, but this is confined as the only day (Judgment Day) when God laughs at people. I must, briefly, indicate my reading of this text, as a Talmudic text. It displaces the divine scorn from a moment of judgment in political history to a moment of judgment upon politics, and so upon history. For the Sages, the nations fail not by their political opposition to God’s plan, but by failing to keep the commandments, to live a proper Jewish life. When they kick the sukkot in, they are rejecting Jewish religion, not the Jewish theocracy or kings. The Sages, having been removed from the political struggles of the state and kings, now interpret God’s judgment as an assessment of the willingness to adhere to and to respect (even when they don’t adhere) a religious way of life. A rule about how you live for a week in the fall is not a rule about who gets to be king or hold dominion in the world. The failing of these great empires is their contempt for religion, which is how they express their contempt for God. For God is no longer managing history, but now requires a series of practices that disrupt the rule of politics, but do not revolt against them. We have moved over the 1000 years since the psalm to a messianic theory that allows us to judge the success and failure of the Romans and Persians in terms of their unwillingness to respect the Jewish religious institutions, even when by divine affliction (the hot wind) they are forced to abandon it. Or maybe this text is only about Jews, who must maintain Judaism without the priests and temple, without a state and its control of power – but who must not trample Judaism down. My last revolution comes when Levinas rereads this Talmudic text. For here the move from political theology to religion moves one more step to what I will shamelessly call philosophy. Consider his reading: 5a In the treatise on Idolatry a passage is found which dealt with a sense of history: different people are presented before the Eternal in order to claim their place in history. Romans, Persians have contributed to economic history and to world politics, and by the force of things, they have fulfilled the Torah. Let us affirm in passing that there is no racial superiority for the Jews. A pagan who fulfills the Torah is as great as a high priest. But everything gets its meaning from the Torah. [4a] The enemies of Israel are ready to accept the law. They want to enter in election. Do they come to be

Levinas, the Messianic, and the Question of History 279 the workers at the eleventh hour? [4b] At once this incomprehensible privilege is put in doubt. Anyone who has not prepared Shabbat is not able to enjoy it. The historical preparation of the Jewish people counts in the world economy. God, in this talmudic account, nonetheless extends to the peoples their chance. There exists a simple to fulfill commandment: the Sukkah. [4e] Everyone is put to build a Sukkah. But God sends a torrid heat. Everyone abandons the sheds and demolishes them by kicking them apart. [4f] They cannot withstand the test, ‘but the Jews, would they always stay in the torrid heat?’ – ‘No they also would leave, but they would not destroy the temporary dwelling.’ [4g] And God laughs. This is the only time, says the commentator, where he has laughed at his creatures.

Levinas gives a fair recounting of the text, as you can see. But he is compelled to add two sentences (underlined) – to show that anyone could keep the Torah and be welcomed. Of course, this text is not really an apology addressed to the Romans in our midst, but to Jews – and even Levinas’s audience was Jewish, but perhaps still embarrassed about being a chosen people, and also in ignorance of the fundamental openness to anyone who wishes to join. And racism is utterly excluded for Levinas’s reading. But consider his own interpretation of the import of this text: 5b To retain the possibility of remaining outside the solid dwellings of the sedentary and historic peoples is the privilege of the Jewish people. The essential arises in interpersonal relations and not in the splendours of architecture. The Jews also protect themselves from the heat and set themselves up in a house (the State) but without forgetting the Sukkah because of it. The Jew does not situate his humanity in rootedness.

The key moment is Levinas’s interpretation of this privilege: to live in a sukkah, and not in a house. The suspension of our need and desire to dwell stably, to belong somewhere, that suspension is unique to the Jews. One might notice that other refugee and diaspora communities also learn the value of the sukkah – with other symbols of resisting the desire for enrootedness. Clearly, Heidegger is the point of opposition here, but also the Fascists and the Nationalists. But let us look closely at the key statement when Levinas compares the house to the state. (In passing we might notice that Psalm 2 disappears here, although God still scorns the opponent.) What I had interpreted as the nations’ rejection of religion (and not of theological politics) is now turned to a much

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more general principle. Levinas’s point is that the persecuted Jews know better than to mistake the stability of the state for the promised condition of peace. The Jews will have to leave the state, to live in temporary and refugee conditions. The Jew does not despise the house, nor does he kick down his temporary shack. The way of the world is dreadful (as he quoted, without a state we would eat each other), and a Sukkah is not enough, but neither is a state. The political must respect and retain its shadow (the promise of peace, the messianic), and the Jews live for a week in this interruption of the political. And to this day observant Jews eat, study, even sleep in sukkot for a week in the condition of unfulfilled messianic hope. The other nations do not kick down the state – but when they run away from the sukkah – or even kick it down – they fall prey to the illusion that the political is enough. And thus destroying the extra, the shard of the messianic hope and testimony of incompleteness, they lose their share. Briefly, I wish to make a set of observations – about the discontinuities of the Jewish tradition, and about their import for thinking about politics. The three readings of Psalm 2 move from a political theology to a religious theology to a philosophy. The overwhelming vengeance for the Jews is sublimated into a messianic court, and then into a philosophical claim about the failure of the state in isolation. Such transmutations are not foreign to Judaism, but define its way. Other traditions also live with such discontinuities and also face the collapse of expectations of conquest in this world. The critique of the political is not identical with burning down the house – to judge the political may require temporary institutions that are only makeshifts, but which nonetheless remind us that the state cannot achieve peace on its own. Ultimately, it is the promise of messianic peace that produces the critique of the uses of power and the violence of the state. The Jews link sukkah and peace, saying, Tifros alenu sukkat shlomekha (spread over us the sukkah of your peace), and recognizing the incompleteness of the political only by living outside the house, in the shack. For Levinas the key insight is how the particularity of the Jewish history is not obliterated in philosophy, but neither does it remain as a mark of exclusion. The blunt judgment against the throng of nations yields not only to the messianic court, but even more to a keener sense of the philosophical question at stake – a question that can become clear to anyone. If I have asked you to think the sukkah, as Levinas did too, it has been for the philosophical task of creating a concrete exceptionality

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to the security and to the power of the state. In the process of reading and rereading these texts we can criticize not only the abuses of state power, but also the real and yet fantastic desire for world empire. The truth of the political appears precisely in the rereading of texts that disturb not only us, but others before us. History then appears not merely as the events, but especially as strata of reinterpretations, informed by desires, concepts, practices, and even philosophy. And political critique must face, must cite and re-cite the troubling text, in order to engage and to challenge the assumption of the political – that the political is foundational. Only by reading and reinterpreting Psalm 2 can the Sages interrogate the line between humour and scorn. And only by bringing in the story of the messianic court can Levinas engage the specifically Jewish critique of the state. And thus, only by laying out these strata of texts can I show you how the particularity that lies at the focus of the historiographic activity can orient the philosophic question of the political.

APPENDIX Levinas 1 Explosive ideas, without doubt – doubly explosive seeing as they concern revolution and Judaism – Judaism in revolution; and why not revolution in Judaism. Ideas which cannot in any way remain stable and fixed ideas, their very contents are rupture and renewal. (Quoted in Jeunesse et révolution dans la conscience juive ..., textes introduits, présentés, et revus par J. Halpérin et Georges Levitte [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972], 3) 2 Psalm 2 Why do the heathens rage/ why do the nations throng? And the peoples mutter vain things? Why do the kings of the earth take their stand and rulers intrigue together against the Lord and against his anointed? ‘Let us break the cords of their yoke, and shake off their ropes from us!’ He sits in heaven and laughs; the Lord ridicules them. Then He speaks to them in His anger, terrifying them in His rage. ‘I have set My anointed upon Zion, My Holy hill.’

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Let me tell of the decree: the Lord said to me: ‘You are My son, I begot you this day. Ask from Me, and I will give you nations for your inheritance; worldwide empire. You can smash them with an iron staff, shatter them like pottery.’ So now, O kings, be prudent; be warned, rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice with trembling. Worship in purity, lest He be angry and your way be doomed in a flash of His anger. Happy are all who put their trust in Him. Levinas 3a In the talmudic literature you also find the affirmation of the State: one must pray for the health of the state, because, without it men would eat each other alive. The state thought in its positive form and in its moral form is acceptable. But otherwise, the state and the political, despite the reason they achieve, announce oppression. And of course, the ‘yoke of the nations’ concerns the yoke of nations that Israel endures. But the image of Israel persecuted by the nations represents, more than an incident in the private history of Israel, violence and political oppression in itself. 3b And thus, in every case, one must read the Talmud. My teacher said: the Bible, that is particular to Israel; the Talmud is its thought explicated on a universal plane. Just the opposite of what one would normally say. The Talmud goes beyond the incidents of Israel’s history or at least they are amplified in the universal. The image of Israel oppressed by the nations represents the conflict in the play of the moral and the play of the political. The moral, as Mr Louis Kahn said today, returns in politics, it turns itself to the public matter and submits thus to a determinism that it would perhaps break. (Quoted in La conscience juive ... Textes des trois premiers Colloques ... présentés et revus par É.A. Lévy-Valensi et J. Halpérin, Préface d’André Neher [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963], 288) Abodah Zarah 3a 4a They will say: before Him, ‘Master of the universe, give it to us from the start and we will do it.’

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4b The Holy One Blessed be He said to them: ‘Fools of the world. He who took trouble on the eve of the Sabbath eats on the Sabbath. He who does not trouble on the eve of the Sabbath, whence will he eat on the Sabbath. Nonetheless, I have one light command, and its name is Sukkah. Go and do it!’ 4c How can you say this? For Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: ‘what does Scripture mean: that I command you this day ... (Deut 7:11). To do it this day and not tomorrow. To do it today, but to do it today but not to receive the reward this day.’ Rather the Holy One Blessed be He does not rule in tyranny over his creatures. 4d And why does he call it a light command? Because it does not involve a loss of money. 4e Straight away everyone will take up the task and go and make a Sukkah on the top of his roof. And the Holy One Blessed be He will make the sun blaze hot like on the Summer in July (Tamuz). And each one will kick down his Sukkah and leave, as it is said: ‘Let us break the cords of their yoke, and shake off their ropes from us!’ (Psalm 2:3) 4f Make it blaze: didn’t you say that ‘Rather the Holy One Blessed be He does not rule in tyranny over his creatures’? But for Israel too, it sometimes happens that summer heat lasts until the holiday, and they are afflicted. And Raba said: ‘From affliction one is exempt from the Sukkah.’ Sure he is exempt, but who would kick it down? 4g Then the Holy One Blessed be He, will sit [in court] and laugh at them, as it is written: ‘He sits in heaven and laughs, ... [the Lord ridicules them]’ (Psalm 2:4) Rabbi Isaac said: ‘There is no laughter before God, except on this day alone.’ ... Rav Nachman ben Isaac said: ‘He laughs (daily) with his creatures, but He laughs at his creatures on this day alone.’ Levinas 5a In the treatise on Idolatry a passage is found which dealt with a sense of history: different people are presented before the Eternal in

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order to claim their place in history. Romans, Persians have contributed to economic history and to world politics, and by the force of things, they have fulfilled the Torah. Let us affirm in passing that there is no racial superiority for the Jews. A pagan who fulfills the Torah is as great as a high priest. But everything gets its meaning from the Torah. [4a] The enemies of Israel are ready to accept the law. They want to enter in election. Do they come to be the workers at the eleventh hour? [4b] At once this incomprehensible privilege is put in doubt. Anyone who has not prepared Shabbat is not able to enjoy it. The historical preparation of the Jewish people counts in the world economy. God, in this talmudic account, nonetheless extends to the peoples their chance. There exists a simple to fulfill commandment: the Sukkah. [4e] Everyone is put to build a Sukkah. But God sends a torrid heat. Everyone abandons the sheds and demolishes them by kicking them apart. [4f] They cannot withstand the test, ‘but the Jews, would they always stay in the torrid heat?’ – ‘No they also would leave, but they would not destroy the temporary dwelling.’ [4g] And God laughs. This is the only time, says the commentator, where he has laughed at his creatures. 5b To retain the possibility of remaining outside the solid dwellings of the sedentary and historic peoples is the privilege of the Jewish people. The essential arises in interpersonal relations and not in the splendours of architecture. The Jews also protect themselves from the heat and set themselves up in a house (the State) but without forgetting the Sukkah because of it. The Jew does not situate his humanity in rootedness. (Quoted in La conscience juive ... Textes des trois premiers Colloques ..., 15–16)

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From a Memory beyond Memory to a State beyond the State JOSEPH ROSEN

The political significance of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought is profoundly indebted to the memory of violence. While not explicitly thematized, a particular memory of violence pervasively haunts and informs his writings. This dimension of Levinas’s thought is increasingly relevant in the present, where ‘memory’ has become a cultural obsession – and a profitable media industry. Consumer culture has created an entire ‘memorial’ economy in response to past violence. What Andreas Huyssen calls ‘a globalization of memory discourses’ contains contradictory possibilities. On the one hand, the memory of past violence can be mobilized to address present injustices. But memory discourses can also be economically mobilized to reinforce national identities and perpetuate state violence.1 In this context, Levinas’s work makes a critical contribution to a contemporary ‘politics of memory.’ First, Levinas confronts a problem intrinsic to memory itself: for what might be called a ‘memorial economy of identity’ is a means whereby the violence of the past can repeat in the present. This paper begins, then, by arguing that Levinas’s ethics necessitates a ‘memory beyond memory’ that can be interpreted as an opening onto the other’s memory of violence. ‘Working through’ a traumatic memory therefore necessitates responsibility. Second, Levinas can be mobilized to clarify the relation between a memory of violence and present politics. The second part of this essay will therefore address the ethics of a ‘memory beyond memory’ in relation to the space of politics. The memory beyond memory of violence becomes a spatial-political dilemma that is necessarily confronted in public terrain: through the borders and juridical institutions of the state. My central argument is that a ‘memory beyond memory’ – as an opening to the other’s memory of violence – can only take place through

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an engagement with the political. And through engagement, a particular memory of violence opens onto a universal dimension of violence: the suffering of the other. A memory beyond memory therefore opens the possibility of a new form of ‘solidarity’ beyond identity. These points are critical in light of the current proliferation of memorial discourses – and they also highlight the political stakes of Levinas’s ethics.2 Part 1: Trauma and Responsibility I, the transpierced, am subject to you. Where flames a word that would testify for us both? Paul Celan

The politics of Emmanuel Levinas’s work can be situated in relation to the phrase that begins Otherwise than Being. Before the table of contents a dedication opens the text: ‘To the memory of ...’ Levinas’s philosophical text on ethics inscribes itself in the name of memory. The dedication invokes a memory of the dead, beginning with a particular group: ‘the six million assassinated by the National Socialists ...’ But the dedication then unfolds into a second invocation of ‘the dead’: ‘... and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.’3 ‘Anti-Semitism,’ a term with a very particular historical referent, opens towards a universal category of ‘hatred for the other.’ As Levinas writes in ‘Politics After!’: ‘Anti-Semitism is the repugnance felt towards the unknown of the other’s psyche ... [towards] the pure proximity of the other man.’4 At the bottom of the dedication, Levinas has written, in Hebrew, a memorial to his personal family members that were killed in the Holocaust.5 The memorial is written in the language of Jewish memorial stones, and ends with Hebrew letters: %,71; – an acronym for the traditional memorial phrase, translated as ‘May His/Her Soul Be Bound With the Bonds of the Living.’6 What begins, in the dedication, as a localized memory moves beyond its historical particularism – towards victims ‘beyond’ categories of religion or nation. The shift that memory makes is not simply an expansion of memory towards a larger object: it involves a shift in the structure of memory itself. And in this transition – from a particular memory to what is ‘beyond memory’ – the memorial economy of identity opens to responsibility in the present.

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The Memory of War and the Violence of Memory Both of Levinas’s major philosophical texts are politically charged by their relation to war. Otherwise than Being will struggle to articulate the ‘Beyond Essence,’ for ‘[w]ar is the deed or drama of the essence’s interest’ (OTB, 4). Totality and Infinity also begins with a preface that invokes the philosophical necessity of remembering war. ‘Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?’7 Remembering war involves the past but also opens to the future – for war is not contained by the past. It exceeds the past inasmuch as it is always, still, a ‘permanent possibility.’ Levinas’s philosophical act of memory thus seeks to interact with the past so as to keep open the possibility of another future – a future other than war. For Levinas, ‘War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same’ (TI, 21). But a dilemma emerges in the attempt to remember and memorialize war: for rationality and representation also ‘totalize’ alterity and reduce otherness to the interest and essence of the self.8 As rationality, memory confronts the problem of reducing alterity to presence. And as a representation of history, memory confronts the difficulty of reducing the past to the present. ‘The beings remain always assembled, present, in a present that is extended, by memory and history, to the totality determined like matter, a present without fissures or surprises, a present made up largely of re-presentations, due to memory and history’ (OTB 5). Memory and history therefore run the risk – the permanent possibility – of extending war or reproducing violence by ‘totalizing’ alterity in the present. Memory and history can, in fact, be the very means of the continuation and perpetuation of war. ‘Historiography recounts the way the survivors appropriate the works of dead wills to themselves; it rests on the usurpation carried out by the conquerors, that is, by the survivors; it recounts enslavement, forgetting the life that struggles against slavery’ (TI, 228; see also TI, 55, 240, 242). ‘Historiography’ is therefore an economy of memory that consolidates the identity of the survivor-conqueror at the expense of the vanquished. This ‘memorial economy of identity’ is founded on a simultaneous forgetting of the struggle of alterity against violence in the present.9 In opposition to this deployment of memory, Levinas invokes ‘a past irreducible to a presence,’ which he calls the ‘Immemorial Past’ (DR, 111–12). This past – which is beyond the ‘memory’ of the self – is intimately related to

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Levinas’s concept of ethics. ‘The past articulates itself – or ‘thinks itself’ – without recourse to memory, without a return to “living presents,” and is not made up of re-presentations. The past signifies starting from an irrecusable responsibility’ (DR, 113). Responsibility necessarily signifies from beyond the memorial economy of identity. This is the problem with a ‘memory of violence’: in representing the past, it reduces alterity to the presence of the self, hence reproducing the ‘violence’ that defines the state of war. The memory of violence, of itself, is therefore unable to interrupt the structure of violence. For Levinas, responsibility is necessarily beyond what might be called the ‘memorial terrain’ of the egological self. ‘The responsibility for the other cannot have begun in my commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory”’ (OB 10). Responsibility is therefore ‘prior’ to a memory that constructs the presence of the self at the expense of the alterity of the past. Yet memory is a key site for Levinas: for the alterity of the past is intimately connected to responsibility. The immemorial past is a temporal structure that exceeds the present and presence of the self. And, as Levinas argues in Time and the Other, this corresponds to the very possibility of the future.10 The interruption of a particular economy of memory, by the ‘immemorial past,’ is necessary in order to interrupt the present and open to the future. This interruption in the totality of historiographic self-presence relates to Levinas’s definition of eschatology: ‘Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history’ (TI, 22). Eschatology is a temporal structure of responsibility beyond the memorial historiography of the self. However, it is not a matter of ‘choosing’ or ‘deciding’ on this responsibility. A key structure of Levinas’s thought here emerges: ‘Without substituting eschatology for philosophy ... we can proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself’ (TI, 24). This is Levinas’s central point: to demonstrate that responsibility, an obligation to the other, is the ‘breakup’ of the memorial totalization. Levinas’s ethics thus has a certain ‘precedence’ over politics, memory, and violence: for the ‘totality’ of war is already indebted to responsibility. ‘War presupposes peace, the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the other; it does not represent the first event of the encounter’ (TI, 199). Peace thus has precedence over war as ethics has precedence over politics. But the relation is more complex than simple logical or temporal causality. ‘Only beings capable

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of war can rise to peace. War like peace presupposes beings structured otherwise than as parts of a totality’ (TI, 222). The relation of ‘war’ to responsibility highlights an essential subtlety in Levinas’s thought. For what might be called his ‘method’ defies any attempt to interpret the content of his work as ‘dualistic.’ The relation between ethics and politics, peace and war, is one of ‘posterior anteriority.’11 The anterior – that which is ‘prior’ – only emerges afterwards. The ‘peace’ of responsibility emerges, as anterior, only after the ontology of war. Hence, there is no direct access to the immemorial past or to ‘Saying’: it is necessary to confront the memory of violence in order to unearth the ‘posterior anteriority’ of substitution. In this sense, responsibility can be understood as a ‘testimony’ to past violence. ‘The Saying as testimony precedes all saying. The Saying, before stating a Said – and even the Saying of a Said – is the approach of the other and already testimony.’12 ‘Testimony’ would bear witness to the alterity that is anterior to the memorial terrain of the self. Unlike the memory that fortifies the identity of the self, a testimony to violence would correlate to ‘the very de-posing or desituating of the subject’ (OTB, 48), where there is ‘the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability’ (OTB, 48). Beyond a traumatic memory of violence – including his own dedication – Levinas’s work will ‘testify’ to the ethical trauma of responsibility. Beyond Memory: The Trauma of the Other If only one of us would forget the other so that forgetfulness itself might be stricken with memory! Mahmoud Darwish

But testimony cannot simply be asserted – Levinas will therefore address the trauma of violence as a site in which to unearth the trauma of ethics. He defines violence in Totality and Infinity: ‘[V]iolence does not so much consist in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only their commitments but their own substance’ (TI 21). More than simply physical, or material, violence destroys the subjective ‘substance’ of persons. Though it seems contrary to Levinas’s rhetorical polemic against the egological ‘self,’ responsibility can be considered as the ‘substance’ of subjectivity itself. Levinas declares Totality and Infinity to be a book ‘in defense of subjec-

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tivity’ (TI, 26). Otherwise than Being declares that ‘[s]ubjectivity is structured as the other in the same’ (OTB, 25). Responsibility – as the ‘beyond,’ or ‘break-up’ of the constructed terrain of the self – is the substitution of identity and alterity: ‘[T]he other in the same is my substitution for the other through responsibility’ (OTB, 114).13 The victim of violence – as an effect of violence – is alienated from responsibility as substitution with alterity. Though Levinas does not explicitly make this connection, his logic prompts a provocative suggestion: the ‘self’ that would dominate alterity within the space of presence does not originate in itself – it is already an ‘after-effect’ of the violence that alienates it from substitution. The egological self – formed in the memorial economy of identity – is therefore the means through which the violence of the past repeats in the present. In opposition to this violent alienation is the ‘trauma’ of ethics. For Levinas finds, at the heart of subjectivity, that ‘[t]here is a claim laid on the same by the other in the core of myself, the extreme tension of the command exercised by the other in me over me, a traumatic hold of the other on the same, which does not give the same time to await the other’ (OTB, 141; my emphasis). And Levinas relates this trauma to the immemorial past: ‘[O]ut of an unrepresentable past, the subject has been sensitive to the provocation that has never presented itself, but has struck traumatically’ (OTB, 144). This trauma is not alienating, for ‘[t]he psyche is the other in the same, without alienating the same’ (OTB, 112). The ‘trauma’ of alterity is not a violent alienation: it is the very substance of subjectivity. ‘Paradoxically it is qua alienus – foreigner and other – that man is not alienated’ (OTB, 59). The point I would like to stress is that, for Levinas, the trauma of alterity affects the self aporetically, according to two contradictory possibilities: ‘The one affected by the other is an anarchic trauma, or an inspiration of the one by the other’ (OTB, 123). The trauma of the other is not necessarily ‘traumatic,’ for ‘[i]n the incomparable relationship of responsibility, the other no longer limits the same, it is supported by what it limits’ (OTB, 115). The trauma of alterity is also, simultaneously, an ‘inspiration’ of the one by the other. Levinas does not make this clear, but I would like to extrapolate: the ‘egological’ self experiences alterity as traumatic. But the egological self is already an after-effect of violence: the self has already been alienated from its subjective ‘substance’ as substitution. In other words, alterity is only experienced as traumatic from within a logic of violence. For the economy of self-presence is ‘always already’ the after-effect of violence. It is in this sense that war not only suppresses alterity, but destroys the

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substance of the ‘same.’ To transcend or interrupt the logic and history of violence would be to witness the ethical trauma of ‘the other in the same.’ Beyond alterity-as-traumatic for the self is ‘substitution, the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other, which refers to the transference from the “by the other” into a “for the other”’ (OTB, 118). In this ‘transference’ there is a ‘break-up’ of the traumatic experience of alterity. This ‘break-up’ bears witness to the substitution of responsibility, a responsibility that is simultaneously an expiation of the ‘guilt’ of the egological self that has repressed the exteriority/alterity of the past: ‘In this substitution, in which identity is inverted, this passivity more passive still than the passivity conjoined with action, beyond the inert passivity of the designated, the self is absolved of itself’ (OTB, 115). In the passivity of substitution the self is ‘absolved’ of egological violence while simultaneously being ‘persecuted’ by responsibility: ‘The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as constituted, willful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible; the more just I am, the more guilty I am’ (OTB, 112). The egological self – here defined as imperialist – absolves itself precisely through the discovery of responsibility. This is Levinas’s profound, if inexplicit, provocation: the ‘imperial’ self that suppresses the alterity of the past is already an after-effect of a violence that alienates it from its substance as the substitution of responsibility. Responsibility is therefore ‘beyond’ the memorial terrain of the self and can be defined as a ‘memory beyond memory.’ In this memory beyond memory the self ‘forgets’ itself as imperial self. And the forgetting one’s ‘own’ violence – violence itself as ‘mine’ – corresponds with an opening to the other’s memory of violence. In other words, it is by opening to the other’s memory of violence that the imperial-memorial self confounds the cyclical logic of violence.14 Interrupting a repetition of past violence in the present – and ‘working through’ the self’s trauma – therefore necessitate responsibility.15 Part 2: Memory beyond Memory and the State of Violence in the Present This concept of responsibility is relevant for two reasons. First, it opens the possibility of a ‘memory beyond memory’ as the working through of the ‘self’s’ trauma: of the self as trauma, or after-effect of violence. Responsibility therefore interrupts the memorial economy of memory in which violence is appropriated as the property of the self. And be-

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cause the egological self is the ontological means by which past violence repeats in the present, responsibility – as an opening to the other’s memory of violence – holds the immemorial secret to interrupting an ongoing ‘cycle of violence.’ At present, cultural memory is increasingly used to fortify national identity and perpetuate state violence. A memory beyond memory is therefore necessary to combat the egological violence of nation states that exert themselves in an increasingly global arena. And it is precisely the global dimension of violence that highlights a second necessary dimension of responsibility. For responsibility, beyond the trauma of the self, instigates the shift whereby a particular memory opens onto violence as a ‘universal category.’ Violence thus ceases to belong solely to the self’s past. The ‘globalization’ of memory discourses, rather than consolidating the identity of nation states, is also a potential site of new forms of solidarity: where distinct memories of violence can be brought into relation to one another, and to ongoing sites of injustice. This work, however, does not occur on its own. Responsibility, like violence, cannot be the ‘property’ of the self. For the ‘imperial’ self does not have the capacity to interrupt itself and assume responsibility as its own. Franz Fanon clarifies the stakes of this point in relation to colonialism: ‘[T]he native ought to realize that it is not colonialism that grants such concessions, but he himself that extorts them.’16 In other words, responsibility does not originate in the ‘good conscience’ of the imperial self. A certain conflict, or confrontation with alterity, is necessary for the interruption of the memorial economy of identity. And this ‘forgetting’ – in which the self’s memory of violence is confronted by the other’s memory of violence – takes place in the politics of the present. For it is in the space of the political that one encounters the suffering of the other; and in the present one encounters a global dimension of violence in excess of the self’s memory. Justice: Becoming-Other in Proximity For Levinas, it is through the question of justice that the ethics of memory and the politics of place meet. For ‘postulated by justice, ... space belongs to the sense of my responsibility for the other’ (OTB, 196–7). Our responsibility to the past is inextricable from our orientation to space in the present. In Levinas’s terms, the ‘immemorial past’ is encountered as a proximity of neighbours and strangers. So the ‘unearthing’ of a memory beyond memory of violence necessitates an engagement with the

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conflictual space of the present. The reduction of the past to the present is an ontological process of totalization that reproduces presence at the expense of alterity. As Levinas proposes in Totality and Infinity, this imperial-memorial act is essentially spatial. Through labour and possession, the economy of the self reduces the exteriority of the world to a set of possessions that can be contained within the dwelling, or home, of the self (TI, 154). This spatial economy forecloses the possibility of the future: ‘Possession removes beings from change. In essence durable, it does not only endure as a state of mind; it affirms its power over time, over what belongs to nobody – over the future’ (TI, 160). Parallel to the memorial economy of identity, labour and possession create a terrain in which the presence of the self dominates exteriority, and hence alterity. However, Levinas will unearth something ‘beneath’ the territory of the imperial self. ‘Recollection and representation are produced concretely as habitation in a dwelling or a Home. But the interiority of the home is made of extraterritoriality ... This extraterritoriality has a positive side’ (TI, 150). Beyond the memorial terrain of self-presence, there is an extraterritoriality that Levinas will figure as the spatial (non)site of responsibility. This ‘extraterritoriality,’ which Levinas only hints at in Totality and Infinity, reappears in Otherwise than Being through the concept of proximity: ‘Proximity, difference which is non-indifference, is responsibility. It is a response without a question, the immediacy of peace that is incumbent on me. It is the signification of signs ... Signification as proximity is thus the latent birth of the subject’ (OTB, 139). In this context, Levinas poses a question: ‘Why would proximity, the pure signification of saying, the anarchic one-for-the-other of beyond being, revert to being or fall into being, into a conjunction of entities, into essence showing itself in the said? ... Why is there a problem?’ (OTB, 157). In other words, why does responsibility – proximity, as a condition of possibility – ‘fall’ into the spatial economy of the egological-imperial self? Levinas’s answer to this question – rather than appealing to theology – situates his ‘ethical’ project in relation to politics. Proximity opens – beyond the dual relation between self and other – onto the politics of the third and the question of justice. ‘The third party is other than the neighbor, but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other ... The other and the third party, my neighbors, contemporaries of one another, put distance between me and the other and the third party’ (OTB, 157). If proximity was between two parties, responsibility would be an unavoidable, commanding force. ‘The relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of the asymmetry of

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proximity in which the face is looked at’ (OTB, 158). Because of this correction, the command of the other always opens onto other others: ‘In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice’ (OTB, 158). The demand of justice becomes an imperative – but it is simultaneously the locus, for Levinas, of the necessity of politics. This point cannot be underestimated, for ‘justice can be established only if I, ... always in a non-reciprocal relationship with the other, always for the other, can become an other like the others’ (OTB, 160–1; my emphasis). The other opens onto other others: even to the extent of the self as other. The ‘fall’ into politics is therefore necessary in order to enable the self to become other. In this moment of political self-alienation the egological self – as an after-effect of violence – becomes other to itself, de-structuring its ‘post-traumatic’ memorial-territorial presence in proximity. ‘Working through’ the self’s traumatic memory would therefore necessitate this ‘becoming-other’ in order to interrupt the cyclical logic of violence. For Levinas it is the question of justice, as posited by proximity, that ‘requires’ a return to politics: ‘The way leads from responsibility to problems. A problem is posited by proximity itself ... The extraordinary commitment of the other to the third party calls for control, a search for justice, society and the State’ (OTB, 161). In a sense, Levinas’s philosophy rhetorically privileges the ‘priority’ of proximity as the condition of politics. That is, politics seems to result from the logic of proximity. However, a historical materialism would require stressing the other side of this ‘posterior anterior’ paradox. From a material-historical perspective, the process of ‘becoming-other’ – through the proximity of the third – is only made possible by the political imperative of justice. In other words, a material engagement with historical others is necessary in order to encounter the ‘third’ – and subsequently the possibility of the self’s becoming-other.17 Working through a trauma memory, therefore, would only take place through a ‘political’ engagement with others’ memories and experiences of violence. Through a confrontation with others’ suffering, the self loses its grasp of violence as its ‘own’: the self is ‘de-situated’ from its own memorial terrain. In a sense, responsibility emerges through this ‘conflict.’ It is through the imperatives of justice in the present that the self can become ‘other’ to its own memory of violence. Interrupting the memorial-territorial economy of identity – and a certain cycle of violence – therefore takes place in the ‘becoming-other’ of politics, where the self encounters other dimensions of violence.

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The Politics of Violence and the Talmudic State It was said in Rab’s name: If all the seas were ink, reeds pens, the heavens parchment, and all men writers, they would not suffice to write down the intricacies of government. The Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 11a

In this context I turn to Levinas’s Talmudic readings, where he explicitly engages the relation between violence, memory, and politics. The ethics of memory and proximity are situated in the context of ‘the Bible’s permanent saying: the condition (or the uncondition) of being strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt brings man close to his neighbor ... No one is at home. The memory of this servitude assembles humanity.’18 It is possible, using the Bible, and Levinas, to construct an ethics of diasporic proximity: an ethics of displacement that may even culminate in some ontology of nomadism. But in Levinas’s Talmudic readings he demonstrates the necessity of engaging with the space of politics: ‘The end of History retains a political form ... The epoch of the Messiah can and must result from the political order that is allegedly indifferent to eschatology.’19 In ‘Cities of Refuge’ Levinas addresses a Talmudic Zionism for which ‘there is no spiritual plenitude for Israel without the return to the earthly Jerusalem.’20 In Levinas’s reading, ‘[t]here is no other access to salvation than that which passes through the dwelling place of men. That is the fundamental symbolism attached to this city’ (CR, 38). In the terms of Levinas’s philosophical writings, the ‘memory of servitude’ is necessarily institutionalized in the political terrain of the city or state. Levinas’s ‘Zionism’ – though at times problematic in relation to contemporary Palestine – is not bound to the city of Jerusalem. Nor is it bound to the modern definition of the nation state: for the site of politics oscillates between the city as figured in the Bible and the state as it is addressed in the historical context of the Talmud.21 Levinas’s analysis of the ‘city of refuge’ addresses the ambiguity of justice in relation to unintentional violence. What is worth noting is that Levinas explicitly relates the Talmudic debate to contemporary politics. The city of refuge is both an asylum and a punishment for those who commit unintentional murder. In the Talmudic example cited by Levinas, ‘an axe-head comes away from its handle during the work of the woodcutter and deals a mortal blow to a passer-by’ (CR, 39). This

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ambiguous state – neither innocent nor guilty – characterizes what Levinas calls ‘Western society’ (CR, 40). The advantages of the West – its riches – are in relation to the poor. Levinas asks: ‘Are there not, somewhere in the world, wars and carnage which result from these advantages?’ (CR, 40). His move slyly appropriates the Talmudic debate in order to critique a modern ‘humanitarian urbanism.’ For capitalist economics is precisely such a means of committing ‘unintentional’ violence22 (CR, 41–2). Contemporary violence is therefore the context in which Levinas addresses Talmudic politics. Levinas’s philosophical texts repeatedly condemn politics in the name of ethics. But his Talmudic readings are useful for clarifying the necessary role of politics in his thought. In ‘Beyond the State in the State,’ Levinas provides a clear-cut binary between the Talmudic state and the purely political state of ‘Alexander of Macedon.’23 Alexander represents the separation of politics and value (BS, 97), leaving in politics an ‘irreducible arbitrary tyranny’ (BS, 95). Violence thus becomes legitimized as the ‘natural’ state of political affairs. It acquires a de facto ontological status, leading Alexander into what Levinas calls ‘colonial business’! ‘This conquering march is probably in the invincible logic of political power, whatever be the limits of that power. Political power wants to expand, it wants to be empire. Everything that limits it is already against it and provokes it.’ (BS, 102). Alexander represents the violent colonial expansionism that Marx foresaw in capitalism.24 The purely political state is thus essentially colonial.25 In Levinas’s terms, the ‘outside,’ or ‘other’ of political power is interpreted as a traumatic limit to the self: hence it must be globally-colonially conquered. And the elders of the Negev agree, by ‘refusing precisely tyranny ... and in reserving the supreme popularity for the hatred of this irreducible tyranny and the State that appeals to it’ (BS, 95). The rabbis indicate that a hatred of violence is necessary to counter the arbitrary violence of purely political power (BS, 96). But Levinas also addresses the fact that the rabbis say ‘yes to the state’ (SCSD, 177). For the state protects against a ‘natural state’ of violent animality, ‘the war which pits everyone against everyone else’ (SCSD, 183). In other words, the state may be provisionally necessary, precisely in order to institutionalize a ‘hatred of violence.’ But the rabbis do not unambiguously say ‘yes’ to the state, for ‘Talmudic wisdom is entirely aware of the internal contradiction of the State subordinating some men to others in order to liberate them, whatever the principles embodied by those who hold power’ (SCSD, 184). This contradiction cannot be avoided: the state, as founded on the

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protection of the self, unavoidably subjects alterity to colonization. This might be read as a Levinasian ‘ontologization’ of the state: however, it is more productively read as an acknowledgment of the state of the present – metaphorically and historically. For, as Levinas indicates in ‘Cities of Refuge,’ this is the historical situation that we find ourselves in: in media res, already in the midst of the logic of (colonial) state violence. And for Levinas, the route beyond the logic of state violence necessitates a ‘break-up from within’ that must address the global ramifications of violence. Apocalypse beyond Memory: The Globalization of Violence The ‘global’ nature of state violence is elaborated by Levinas in ‘Who Plays Last?’ In this Talmudic extract the rabbis debate who will win the ‘war that ends history,’ figured as a battle between ‘Persia’ and ‘Rome.’ The rabbis disagree on ‘who’ will ‘play last’: but the purpose of this argument is to indicate the ‘political situation conditioning the Messianic end of History.’26 Persia represents the power of ‘animal strength’: biological force indifferent to moral questions (WPL, 56–9). Rome represents the legacy of Greece, whose ‘vital forces ... become ‘victory of the mind,’ and thus go further than crude acts of violence’ (WPL, 60).27 Greece, as ‘one of the essential moments of the west’ (WPL 60), represents the capacity to dominate through ‘aesthetics’ and ‘rhetoric.’28 Rome, as a ‘Greco-Rhetorical’ state becomes [a] State which would not have reached the ethical law which ensues from the life of a man for the other man: but a law which will have gone through animality to end up dialectically in the formal universality of the law itself, out of a condition in which ‘man is a wolf for other men.’ The appearance of moral law, but, formally, law; both in this appearance and this formalism. (WPL, 65; my emphasis)29

Rome represents the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘rhetoric’ of a justice that is mere appearance: a substantively empty, formal law. And because of this empty formality, the law reverts – dialectically – into ‘animal’ violence. It is for this reason that the rabbis are able to switch opinions as to ‘who plays last’ in the war that ends history: the animal strength of Persia and the formal law of Rome are but reverse sides of the same dialectically apocalyptic coin. There is, however, a strange privilege accorded to Rome: ‘Politics, such as Rome represents it, is a preliminary gestation

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for Messianic generosity itself’ (WPL, 66). In this shocking claim, Levinas attempts to demonstrate the messianic contradiction of politics. The ‘Greco-Roman’ state ontologizes and universalizes natural violence through the rhetoric of ‘law’ itself. In other words, law itself becomes the very means of global-imperial violence.30 However, alongside this apocalyptic extension of violence, Levinas sees a messianic possibility: ‘A world organized entirely around the Law, which politically will have a hold over it. The necessity of a planetary West for the coming of the Messiah’ (WPL, 66–7). A Euro-centrism obviously pervades Levinas’s thought on this issue: the West appears to hold all the cards in Levinas’s apocalyptic-redemptive cartography. That said, a redemptive content can be salvaged from Levinas’s Euro-centric rhetoric. Despite the ‘privileging’ of the West, the globalization of violence is a concept that is vital for a messianic-eschatological politics. The ‘global-apocalyptic’ potential of violence is – like war – a ‘permanent possibility’ that threatens the future and reinvests the stakes of a memory of violence. How, then, does the ‘universalization’ of violence relate to a ‘memory beyond memory’ of violence? In ‘Beyond Memory,’ Levinas addresses the messianic politics of memory in Talmudic thought. Memory is essential to the ‘Biblical’ structure of time experienced as proximity: ‘The proximity of God is experienced in Judaism through memory, and consequently in the prevalence of the past and of the events and imperatives foundational to Holy History.’31 In other words, it is the memory of slavery that distinguishes messianic politics from a politics of arbitrary tyranny. ‘The going forth from Egypt – the Exodus – and the evocation of that exodus in which freedom was given to a people, the coming to the foot of Mount Sinai where that freedom culminated in the Law, constituted a privileged past, the very form of the past, as it were’ (BM, 78).32 This privileged past emerges, significantly, in relation to an emancipation from slavery, or servitude: economic figures of violence. And the past – remembered as an ‘emancipation from slavery’ – culminates in the freedom of ‘a people.’ Now this is an important moment: the ‘hatred of violence,’ the opposition to slavery, must result in the freedom of a people. The memory of a particular violence is therefore essential in the struggle for an institutionalized – and internationally recognized – state of self-determination.33 In other words, the ‘ethics’ of memory must ‘fall’ into the realm of politics. But a dilemma emerges: for once the memory of violence is institutionalized – in, for example, the ‘egoist’ state – it perpetually runs the risk of reproducing ‘political’ violence at the expense of ethics.34 A

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memory of violence can be economically mobilized so as to fortify and consolidate the identity of a ‘nation state.’ And this ‘imperialist’ identity functions so as to perpetuate violence against its ‘others’ – both external and internal.35 Again, we find the inherent contradiction of the political state. How can one mobilize a memory of violence against this memorial economy of identity? The heart of Levinas’s argument resides in the recognition that the ‘freedom’ of Exodus is simultaneously the Law of responsibility. The freedom of emancipation culminates, at Sinai, in a responsibility engraved in stone. ‘The Jew is free qua affranchised: his memory is immediately compassion for all the enslaved or all the wretched of the earth’ (BM, 78). For this reason, Levinas will attempt to unearth the responsibility ‘beyond’ the particularity of a memory of violence. Levinas begins ‘Beyond Memory’ with a description of the messianic memory of violence as the ‘structure of history.’ But, in following the Talmudic argument, he finds that the subsequent rabbinic position contests the first. The memory of Egypt extends beyond its particularity, into ‘human time, beyond the limits of memory. Its meaning comes from elsewhere. Judaism and humanity as a whole ... open themselves to a future more – or otherwise – significant than slavery and emancipation from slavery. (BM, 81–2). Levinas makes a provocative point here: the memory of violence, while necessary, is not sufficient for the creation of a future – a future ‘otherwise’ than slavery. This future, beyond the violence of political ontology, corresponds to ‘[a] history overflowing memory, and, in this sense, unimaginable. A history, as yet entirely novel, that has not yet happened to any particular nation’ (BM, 82). Something beyond national memory overflows the particularity of ‘national’ violence. This history – an ‘immemorial’ past beyond violence itself – is the key, for Levinas, in awakening the possibility of a future beyond slavery. This context highlights the political stakes of Levinas’s critique of messianism in ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David.’36 Levinas widens a rupture in the Talmudic dialogue: ‘In certain texts, Israel is thought of as a human society having gone beyond Messianism ... Messianism and this ‘world to come’ being radically distinguished’ (SCSD, 185). Messianism invokes a structure of history where the memory of slavery is foundational for the ‘earthly Jerusalem.’ Messianism thus remains within the bounds of national memory. Eschatology, however, reminds us of a possibility beyond the nation, beyond the memorial logic of the self. The subtleness of Levinas’s Talmudic readings leads him to an interpretation that might be shock-

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ing to some: ‘Messianism is surpassed ... For Israel, Messianism might be an outmoded stage’ (SCSD, 185).37 The eschatology of the ‘world-tocome’ displaces memory: ‘Zekher ceases to be the meaning of History!’ (BM, 84) Zekher, the Hebrew word for memory, ceases to be the key locus of eschatology. And this opens a space of ‘eschatological’ possibility in the present. The Interruption of the Past: Global Suffering in the Present The immemorial past demands – for the sake of the future world-tocome – a rupture with history. But this rupture is by no means a joyous amnesia. ‘In the Talmudic pages we have just examined I have been especially sensitive to a Judaism that overflows memory, that attempts to conceive of it beyond the Exodus, and senses an unforeseeable future ..., a future opening up through a new mode of trial, new dimensions of suffering’ (BM, 87; my emphasis). The ‘forgetting’ of past violence is not an amnesia. The interruption of a particular memory of violence occurs as an opening onto new dimensions of suffering: onto present violences that are ‘beyond’ the past of a particular nation. In this trial of suffering beyond one’s own memory and nation, we return to the possibility of the apocalypse; beyond a particular national messianism, beyond a particular memory of violence, an ‘apocalyptic’ war that extends beyond a particular nation to humanity ‘in the universal.’ ‘Not a war, but the war: total war. Beyond any memory! There is a deliverance in Isaiah’s promises and the end of all subservience to political power – to all political power, not just that of Egypt’ (BM, 83). This offers another perspective from which to view Levinas’s description of the ‘universalizing violence’ of ‘Rome.’ The possibility of ‘total war’ is a counterpart to the extension of memory beyond a particular historical servitude or slavery. Hence, it is the possibility of global violence – as encountered in the present – that interrupts the memory of past violence. The ‘working through’ of historical trauma therefore intersects with political suffering in the present.38 The suffering of the memorial self can only take on a meaning when it opens onto ‘new dimensions of suffering’: [T]he suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other, opens suffering to the ethical perspective of the inter-human. In this perspective, there is a radical difference between the suffering in the other, ... and suffering in me, my own experience of suffering, whose constitutional

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or congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only one of which suffering is capable, in becoming a suffering for the suffering of someone else.39

This moment – when the self becomes ‘other’ to itself – does not occur through the ethics of memory alone. Transcending the memorial logic of violence – opening to the ‘suffering of suffering,’ the other’s memory of violence – necessitates an engagement with political suffering in the present: the permanent possibility of war extended to global dimensions. Beyond the State: A Solidarity beyond Memory In ‘Politics After!’ Levinas addresses Zionism, but first indicates one of its historical origins in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, initially a ‘nationspecific’ hatred hides an ‘apocalyptic secret’: a hatred of the other man extended to global violence (PA 190). ‘The dramatic events of the twentieth century and the National Socialism which caused a complete upheaval in the liberal world ... have torn the apocalyptic secret from anti-Semitism and allowed us to see the extreme, demanding and dangerous destiny of humankind which, ironically, anti-Semitism denotes’ (PA, 190). The ‘memory’ of anti-Semitic violence moves beyond memory when it acknowledges this apocalyptic secret. As ‘anti-Semitism’ hides an apocalyptic ‘hatred for the other,’ a localized memory of violence opens to a universal dimension of violence. The memory of ‘the six million assassinated by the National Socialists’ that begins Otherwise than Being opens onto ‘the millions on millions of all confessions and nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism.’ For Levinas, this shift in memory is key to responsibility: a responsibility that, beyond the spirit of compassion or empathy, must be made manifest in political spaces. And this, in a sense, is the message of Zionism: ‘One belongs to the Messianic order when one has been able to admit others among one’s own ... To shelter the other in one’s land or home, to tolerate the presence of the landless and homeless on the ‘ancestral soil,’ so jealously, so meanly loved.’40 Despite Levinas’s rhetoric of ‘tolerance,’ the Messianic requires this political de-situation of the memorial terrain of the self. This aporetic message, according to Levinas, is the key to a state beyond the state. For the principles of Talmudic Zionism entail the creation of a state, or dwelling, for a nation in order to ‘protect’ or ‘broadcast’ a message whose content is precisely the

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beyond of that state or nation.41 Levinas makes a provocative claim: ‘For two thousand years the Jewish people was only the object of history, in a state of political innocence which it owed to its role as victim. That role is not enough for its vocation’ (PA, 194).42 The victim, as an aftereffect of violence, is unable to open to the ‘memory beyond memory’ of apocalyptic violence: the other’s memory of violence. For Levinas, the politics of memory culminate – as does Exodus – in a Law that is written in stone: the cyclical logic of memory and violence can only be interrupted by the ‘difficult freedom’ of responsibility. This responsibility does not lie hidden in the immemorial past. No amount of faith, proselytization, or ‘theodicy’ can assert it. The other’s memory of violence – and the universal dimension of suffering – are to be encountered in the politics of the present. The recognition of the ‘suffering of suffering’ opens memory to the universal dimension of violence: the self’s memory of its ‘own’ violence is interrupted by the globally expanding threat of imperial-colonial violence. This encounter with the ‘apocalyptic’ dimension of violence thus enables an interruption in which an other future – beyond the repetition of violence – becomes possible. Responsibility thus holds a certain ‘eschatological’ secret that is becoming increasingly imperative. For at present, information economies relentlessly commodify the ‘globalization of memory discourses.’ These mediated memories are increasingly becoming a site for nation states to mobilize a memorial economy of identity and perpetuate the war against alterity. But it is the very global structure of communications technologies that hides an eschatological hope for the future: that particular memories of violence can be brought into global correspondence. And this memory beyond memory will become a nonidentity-based solidarity when it is mobilized against the apocalyptic expansion of violence in the present.

NOTES 1 See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 2 Another subtext propels my general argument: the relation between memory, the ‘Shoah’ (the Jewish Holocaust in the Second World War), the ‘Nakba’ (the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948), and the present state of Palestine/Israel.

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3 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), unpaginated; cited hereafter as OTB. 4 ‘Politics After!’ in Beyond the Verse, trans. G. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 190; cited hereafter as PA. 5 Inscribed ‘LeZachor Neshamat’ (‘To the memory of the names of ...’) Levinas lists, by name, his parents, brothers, mother-in-law, and fatherin-law. 6 This essay investigates precisely what it would mean for the memory of the dead to be bound to the living. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21; cited hereafter as TI. 8 ‘[I]ntelligence and intelligibility ... consist in privileging, in the very temporality of thought, the present in relation to past and future. To comprehend the alteration of presence in the past and future would be a matter of reducing and bringing back the past and future to presence – that is, representing them.’ ‘Diachrony and Representation,’ in Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 99; cited hereafter as DR. 9 To concretize this abstract formulation, one need look no further than the near instantaneous ‘memorialization’ of the Twin Towers. As the recent American wars demonstrate, the ‘memorialization’ of this catastrophe has been mobilized precisely so as to forget ‘the life that struggles against slavery.’ 10 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 77. 11 ‘The posteriority of the anterior – an inversion logically absurd – is produced, one would say, only by memory or by thought’ (TI, 54). 12 ‘Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony,’ in A. Peperzak, ed., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 103. 13 Some clarifications are necessary: ‘Substitution is not an act; it is a passivity inconvertible into an act, the hither side of the act-passivity alternative’ (OTB, 117). ‘This substitution is not transubstantiation. It is not a question of entering into another substance and establishing oneself in it ... Substitution is not a result and does not signify a lived state.’ God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 186. 14 And thus responsibility makes possible expiation: ‘We have to speak here of expiation as uniting identity and alterity. The ego is not an entity ‘capable’ of expiating for the others: it is this original expiation’ (OTB, 118).

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15 For Levinas, ‘working through’ a traumatic memory would correlate to the ‘memory beyond memory’ that ‘dis-alienates’ the suppressed alterity of the past. Though Levinas undoubtedly disagrees with Freud, I retain the term ‘working through’ precisely in order to argue that it necessitates political responsibility. 16 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 143. 17 This move could be interpreted as ‘turning Levinas on his head.’ But perhaps this ‘inversion’ is more a matter of shifting rhetorical perspectives. 18 ‘No Identity,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 149. 19 ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David,’ in Beyond the Verse, trans. G. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 180–1; cited hereafter as SCSD. 20 ‘Cities of Refuge,’ in Beyond the Verse, 37; cited hereafter as CR. 21 It is worth remembering that the Talmud was written under diasporic conditions imposed by imperial Rome: this ‘empire’ – while not identical to the modern nation state – is again relevant in the current context of supranational economics and globalization. 22 A ‘contemporary’ example would involve purchasing an axe whose handle was, unbeknownst to me, produced under the violent circumstance of slave labour. Hence, the commodity is the capitalist form through which I unintentionally, unconsciously commit violence. 23 ‘Beyond the State in the State,’ in New Talmudic Readings, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 83-4; cited hereafter as BS. 24 Compare the ‘capitalist’ state described by Karl Marx in Grundrisse: ‘Capital is destructive towards, and constantly revolutionizes, all this, tearing down barriers which impede the development of the productive forces ... But from the fact that capital poses every such limit as a barrier which it has ideally already overcome, it does not at all follow that capital has really overcome it.’ Readings from Karl Marx, ed. D. Sayer (London: Routledge, 1989), 106. As with Levinas, the ‘limit’ of alterity cannot actually be destroyed – hence the ever-expanding global cycle of colonialcapitalist violence. 25 In ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David,’ Levinas speaks of ‘the State in search of hegemony, the conquering, imperialist, totalitarian, oppressive state, attached to realist egoism’ (SCSD, 184). 26 ‘Who Plays Last?’ in Beyond the Verse, 55; cited hereafter as WPL. 27 For Levinas, ‘Persia,’ ‘Rome,’ and ‘Greece’ do not necessarily represent historical nations: ‘[T]hese proper names represent above all certain

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notions of power and the State according to the political thought of Rabbinical scholars’ (WPL 55). Nonetheless, who gets used as metaphoric means to what ends in this economy of representation? This ‘hierarchy’ of attributes is suspect through and through, undoubtedly privileging the ‘West.’ Again Levinas highlights ‘contemporary’ stakes, for Greece inaugurates ‘a possibility of rhetoric and pure courtesy, a “courtly language” which veils cruelties and malevolence, the extreme fragility of all this refinement capable of ending up in Auschwitz’ (WPL, 61). Hence, the rabbis compare Rome ‘to a swine whose hoofs are parted without it being a ruminant and, as a consequence, impure and unfit for consumption’ (WPL, 65). While appearing to have a kosher heart, the swine has gastronomic impurities. The ‘stomach’ of Rome: an appetite for endless colonization! In this idea, Levinas anticipates the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: see Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ‘Beyond Memory,’ in In the Time of the Nations, trans. M. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 77; cited hereafter as BM. Along with ‘Rome’ and ‘Persia,’ ‘Egypt’ is read in a metaphoric mode – but again one cannot avoid the political problematics of representation. As demonstrated in the work of Franz Fanon, this point is vital in the context of contemporary anti-colonialism. A provocative example – among far too many – is the necessity of a state for Palestinian autonomy and selfdetermination. Regardless of his personal position, Levinas highlights a contemporary site of this dilemma: ‘Perhaps what is happening today in Israel marks the place where ethics and politics will come into confrontation and where their limits will be sought.’ ‘Ethics and Politics,’ in S. Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 293. One need look no further than the American memorialization of ‘9/11’ to see the way in which a memory of violence can be mobilized by the state so as to perpetuate violence against both external and internal ‘others.’ Often Levinas thinks the ‘messianic-eschatological’ together. But at this point he indicates a difference between the two. The politics of the ‘nation state’ hinges on an exploration of this understated difference. And as the Talmud says of Rab Hillel, who proposes this idea: ‘May God forgive him for saying so.’ Levinas would certainly disagree with a ‘psychoanalytic’ reading that would look for ‘working through’ in the unconscious – collective or individual. This ‘unconscious’ memory can only take place through

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Joseph Rosen spatial, economic, and juridical institutionalization: in other words, politically. ‘Useless Suffering,’ in Entre Nous, trans. B. Harshav and M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 94. ‘The Nations and the Presence of Israel,’ in In the Time of the Nations, 99. Despite the historical form taken by Zionism in the State of Israel, Levinas does not view Zionism as a form of nationalism: ‘Zionism in search of a Jewish state, developing out of the colonies in Palestine, was for a long time interpreted in terms of nationalism ... Yet some men of an elite nature experienced the true essence of the movement, without awaiting Hitlerism and Soviet anti-semitism’ (PA, 192). ‘But this is not to forget the Holocaust. No-one has forgotten the Holocaust, it’s impossible to forget things which belong to the most immediate and the most personal memory of every one of us, and pertaining to those closest to us, who sometimes make us feel guilty for surviving. That in no way justifies closing our ears to the voice of men, in which sometimes the voice of God can also resound. Evoking the Holocaust to say that God is with us in all circumstances is as odious as the words “Gott mit uns” written on the belts of the executioners.’ ‘Ethics and Politics,’ 295.

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Aporia and Messiah in Derrida and Levinas GAD HOROWITZ

Preface: Aporetological Primer (a) Deconstruction is aporetography: aporetic thinking, the thinking of aporia, of the bind and double bind, pervade Derrida’s writing: the thinking of the outside of thought in the inside of thought; of that which (not being any ‘that’) cannot be (re)cognized or straightened out into a continuum or line ... Deconstruction is an ‘aporetology’ or an ‘aporetography.’1 I approach a discussion of Derrida’s ‘messianicity’ with a long introduction (which may be helpful to some: its assembling was helpful to me) consisting of a few attempts to indicate what one might permit oneself to think of as the central decentring aporia with which deconstruction gets under way. This has to do with the notions of ‘origin’ and ‘singularity.’ The original is the original of something, some phenomenon, event, or sign. As the original, it calls for repetition or representation. Precisely in its originality, uniqueness, singularity, it is inseparable and indistinguishable from its representations. In a series of representations, every one in the series will differ from its predecessor in the very moment of re-presenting it, so that access to the original is infinitely deferred. As Geoffrey Bennington says of the sentence, it must be capable of repetition as the same sentence, but these repetitions can’t be identical with the first ... [I]f they were, they wouldn’t be repetitions, but the first, still the first ... the very thing which makes [it] ... identifiable as the singular sentence that it is – its repeatability as the same, immediately splits that sentence with the necessary possibility of its own ghostly doubling.2

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There can be no simple origin, for ‘that which is repeated is split in itself’ (Bennington’s emphasis), not merely reiterated by an ‘addition to itself’ of a representation of itself. ‘The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles.’3 The ‘first’ or ‘original’ sign is already second if it is to be identifiable as the sign that it is, that is, it is doubled, duplicitous, split in itself without any possibility of inhabiting any space on one side of a line that would divide one side of the split from the other; the two ‘sides’ therefore cannot be aligned, straightened out on a line. The singularity of the sign cannot be separated out as present to us prior to its re-presentation. So every presentation is always already a representation. Aporia: repetition is at the heart of the original and vice versa. ‘[T]he mobile slash between’ the (non-)poles of any aporia is ‘simultaneously conjunctive, disjunctive, and undecideable.’4 One pole is not ‘related’ to the other, is not the flip side of the other, does not ‘interact’ with the other; it is and is not the other, undecideably. The singular, for example ‘my’ singularity, or the ‘other’s,’ is not illusory, not some kind of error to be dismissed or corrected; we can only say of it that it is not present, has never been present, or that it is withdrawn, leaving only a trace. All signs, events, phenomena partake of the nature of the trace of withdrawn singularity. The trace erases itself in the very moment of presenting itself, leaving only the trace. (At one point Derrida favours the terms ‘ashes’ or ‘cinders,’ echoing/amending Heidegger’s ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ with ‘why are there ashes rather than nothing?’).5 The notion of singularity is in some important ways akin to Levinas’s notion of alterity or the Other as that in any phenomenon, but especially in any person (but we can’t really say ‘in’), which is irreducible to any sign or concept, utterly beyond thinking, beyond our grasp, our comprehension. As alterity, it is that infinite no-thing (not any unknowable eternal Something) which calls forth (evokes, demands) thinking, languaging, desire to know the unknowable Other. The Other, as that which is always approaching/escaping, eluding my grasp/never arriving, generates the self as that which is oriented to, by, and for the Other, as Desire for the Other. For Derrida and Levinas, to think is to think the Other of thought: the Other is the constitutive outside of thought, that is, it is inside. It has no place of its own on the outside of thought; it is the outside (or infinite) inside the self that generates or evokes the self without ever having been outside. (b) Deconstruction is justice: ‘deconstruction is justice’ (Derrida), not injustice (though as we shall see it is not without injustice). To be unjust

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is to end the seeking of the Other with a finding, that is a definitive defining of the singular, undefinable other. To think that I have defined the other is according to Levinas to violate the only commandment: Do not murder. And it is impossible to not define. How to avoid defining? Refrain from defining in the very moment of defining. And never think that you are successfully accomplishing obedience to this commandment: aporia, no way. For Derrida, as for Levinas, justice (which Levinas calls ethics) means infinite obligation or responsibility to and for the other. This responsibility is indeed the very origin and meaning of human subjectivity. Responsiveness to the other as Other, not as another like myself, another same, alter ego. The other is not simply an ‘individual,’ which means a synthesis of particular instances of universal categories such as beauty, wisdom, compassion, intelligence, cruelty, avarice, old age, even ‘alterity’ – the other is a singular being, unthinkable within any form or frame of thought, not given to or subsumed by my experience or experience of any kind: a ‘non-generic’ being, belonging to no genre.’6 Maurice Blanchot sometimes named the singular being ‘personne,’ someone, no one, no one in particular (and certainly not no one in general, that is, not a particular instance of the class of singular beings). To see the invisibility of the Other doesn’t mean that I ignore or overlook his particular features; on the contrary, my desire, my obligation, is to attend, to enter into them, into the details of the details, endlessly. Justice for Derrida is ‘incalculable’: never a matter of applying a general rule or maxim to a ‘particular’ ‘case,’ always a matter of attending to the absolute singularity of a singular being. But calculation, the application of rules, of law (what Levinas calls justice), is the aporetic companion of attention to the other. Justice can only be realized or enforced as Law; there can be no justice without Law. Thus justice never is, is never realized. We can never say, according to Derrida, that a decision, act, or person ‘is’ just, only that it is in conformity with actually existing custom, belief, or legislation. Justice is always deferred, always to come, like access to the original, to the singular. That is why Derrida says that deconstruction is justice (but not without injustice) and that deconstruction is the impossibility (sometimes the (im)possibility) of justice: if it were simply ‘possible,’ it would be the ‘mechanical application’ of a given program (which is, as inattention to the singular, injustice). Only rule-following is ‘possible.’ Deconstruction, as the possibility of justice to keep on coming, as against ‘truth,’ which is ‘finished,’7 is the impossibility of justice in any here and now. Aporia: justice is inseparable from law and therefore from its violation by law. It

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is ‘necessary to recognize both the typical or recurring form,’ repetition, representation, ‘and the inexhaustible singularization – without which there will never be any event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics.’ But Derrida insists that this must always be phrased negatively: ‘without x [e.g., law], there would be no y [e.g., justice],’ for ‘as soon as it is converted into positive certainty: [on this condition, there will surely have been an event, etc.] one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived, indeed beginning to deceive the other.’8 1. Aporiae of ‘the Third,’ Hospitality, the Vow, and the Gift Levinas has formulated a similar approach to justice in terms of ‘the third’: since my infinite responsibility to and for the singular other must necessarily result in harm, at least in the sense of neglect, to other others, there must be reasoning, calculation, generalization, rational balancing of interests, and submission to Law, which must be always more or less oppressive, that is, more or less forgetful, inattentive to singularity. Derrida has described this as a ‘dreadful, terrifying’ ‘aporia or abyss’ with no exit. We are ‘reintroduce[d] ... as if by force, into places ethics should exceed: the visibility of the [invisible] face [of the Other], thematization, comparison.’9 For Levinas and Derrida the only remedy is relentless critique by a never-ending sequence of prophetic cultural, social, and political movements of the forever more or less unjust and oppressive social order. Whatever new regimes may result must reproduce the structurally necessary violence.10 Thus, infinite obligation to the Other, though always higher than Law, and always the unformalizable standard by which Law is judged, manifests concretely as mitigation of the necessary bluntness, harshness, or oppressiveness of the Law, and never as a radical, thoroughgoing, transformation, for instance, as a really substantial reduction of the might and scope of Law. Levinas and Derrida and most of their followers seem to distinguish better from worse regimes in the time-honoured Western liberal democratic manner: the better regime is open to critique, the worse is ‘closed,’ ‘totalitarian.’ The problem with this is that the notion of an impossible justice that arrives by never arriving (‘openness’) can be and has been very easily taken as somehow more or less subtly endorsing or underwriting the ‘fundamentals’ of the Western status quo and rejecting all revolutionary approaches as ‘apocalyptic,’ ‘totalitarian,’ ‘utopian,’ ‘nostalgic,’ and so on and on. I shall return to this problem later.

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In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas and elsewhere Derrida considers the matter of the third in terms of the aporiae of hospitality and the gift. Infinite responsibility: The ‘être chez soi’ invites and receives into its home the guest, the other. This is the very origin of being at home, since for Levinas and Derrida the subject, the being-at-home, is being for-theOther. But with the immediate presence of the third and the necessity of limitation of obligation (infinite yet not infinite) in the interest of a general order without which there could be no attention to singularity, the host, who has said, ‘Make yourself at home, this is your home,’ must also have said, in order to say that, ‘I have to maintain my home as my home, otherwise I could not offer it to you. So remember, this is not your home. It is mine.’ What ‘the third’ of Levinas means to Derrida is that the ‘pledge,’ ‘oath,’ or ‘vow,’ the ‘jure’ of my responsibility for the singular other, and violation (‘parjure, perjury’) of this vow for the sake of the third, are aporetically inscribed in one another, contaminating one another (structurally speaking, like origin and repetition). Violation of the vow inheres in the vow. Levinas’s way of phrasing this is usually not so purposefully or sharply aporia-focused: the third person is always already regarding me from the eyes of the Other, commanding/imploring justice for all; but Derrida can quote Levinas: ‘[T]he third introduces a contradiction in the Saying,’ Derrida calls it a ‘terrible contradiction ... Contra-Diction itself.’11 Necessity itself. Derrida exclaims that the necessary self-betrayal of the vow of infinite obligation is ‘quasi-transcendental or originary, indeed preoriginary ... [O]ne might even call it ontological.’12 There is a similar aporia of the gift. The pure gift would transcend all orders or systems of exchange; it would be absolutely without any expectation of any kind of return. Even refusal of my gift would acknowledge my intention to give and would therefore be a kind of quid pro quo. Even my own awareness of my intention, giving me a good feeling about myself, is a return. So the gift, like the original, like justice and the vow, and like hospitality, is impossible; yet it is, as impossible, the very possibility of free giving as opposed to mere (one might say, ‘mechanical’) reciprocity or balancing of interest. As John Caputo explains: it’s only a gift or an act of hospitality when you fully realize the dilemma, when you fully experience the tension, torque, or torsion of the two (non-)poles of the aporia. ‘When I know I can’t give a gift, only then can I give a gift.’13 As Derrida puts it, ‘[T]here is no balance,’ no mixture of interested and disinterested motivations; ‘it is a matter of

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affirming the most tense, the most intense difference possible between the two extremes ... The frenetic desire I affirm is to renounce neither.’14 Responsibility, obligation, justice can be genuinely enacted only with full awareness of their impossibility. One is never entitled to any feeling of good conscience, as if the words ‘I’ve done what I can’ could release one from the interminable pressure of the infinite, that is, unfulfillable obligation to respond to the singularity, alterity, vulnerability of the other. 2. Ethics Becomes Liberalism: A Marcusian/Kabbalistic Critique Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ has suddenly cut a Jewish thinking ‘beyond Being’ into the forefront of philosophical discourse in the West. The word that comes forth from Jerusalem to make Athens tremble is a messianic word, otherwise than logos. It condemns this world as unredeemed, fallen, degraded by the cruelty it visits upon the poor, ‘the widow, the orphan and the stranger.’ The Greek philosophical teaching of respect for Necessity, Being, that which is, is uprooted. ‘Fidelity’ to the Torah ‘breaks the facile enchantment of cause and effect and allows it to be judged ... [T]he die is not cast.’15 Like Amos, like Lev Shestov,16 the most fiery Hebrew prophets, Emmanuel denounces any attempt, sanctioned by any Necessity, to evade the appeal of the vulnerability of the other person. Yet, as we have seen, when Levinas brings (as he must ... it is necessary) the Absolute down to earth – economics, politics – the word of God seems to become transmogrified into something like a tentative endorsement or legitimation of the actually existing liberal and social democratic regimes. How is this possible? The transmogrification of ethics as first philosophy into liberal/social democracy seems to have happened in two (more or less simultaneous) stages. The first we have already touched on in connection with ‘the third’: at bottom, my self is sheer asymmetrical responsiveness to the single Other facing me, infinite obligation to this inconceivable Other right here, ‘prior’ to the conscious thematization that must attenuate this responsibility by taking it into equality, symmetry, reciprocity, justice for all including even myself. Yet the singular other has always already included all the other others (the third); that’s why ‘prior’ is in quotes. The necessity of the third must complicate, but it does not yet evade, response to the appeal of the other; in a very significant sense it not only attenuates but also intensifies responsibility, extending the

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insupportable infinity of obligation to all human beings, perhaps to all beings. There’s no denying that obligation to the other is obligation to all others, which must indeed always require some way of balancing values and interests. But Levinas and Derrida seem to assume that the aporiae of the third relate to a fixed Necessity or Contra-Diction which is simply the transhistorical human condition. They seem not to consider that the sharpness of this contradiction, the extent or degree to which caring for one other must deprive other others, might vary in different orders of social relations past and future. They do not seem to recall Marx’s indictment of class society – that it sets the interests of individuals against one another, and those of the individual against the species, more than would be required always by any transhistorical Necessity. Thus, in the second stage of transmogrification of ethics into legitimation, the Law required by the third is silently conflated with the actually existing Law of the West. Levinas’s (and Derrida’s) apparent endorsement of the openness of the liberal regime threatens to overshadow their condemnation of injustice insofar as the regime is the framework within which the struggle for justice is pursued; the regime’s openness is what makes the struggle possible. The framework itself is not condemned as unjust (remember Herbert Marcuse’s question in One Dimensional Man ‘Who countervails against the framework?),’ though there are numerous occasions, to which I shall return later, in Levinas’s and Derrida’s texts where such a condemnation is hinted at. That the actually existing ‘democracy,’ ‘open’ though it may be, is hardly separable from its perpetual reproduction of extreme socio-economic inequality, spiritual constriction, economic exploitation, and lifetimes of joyless servile ‘jobs’ (or worse, ‘redundancy’) for the vast majority of humanity is not highlighted in Levinas’s work (nor in Derrida’s). This is, precisely, evasion. Levinas calls for ‘revolt against the injustice that is founded as soon as order is founded.’17 Though this formulation is far from unambiguous, its implication seems to be that poverty, inequality, exploitation, and so forth will always inevitably recur in more or less the same way and on the same plane where the ontologically necessary injustice of justice, of ‘order,’ must occur. Thus, the (in)justice required by the third is, as I say, silently conflated with the (in)justice required by the few. The ontological necessity of ‘order’ is conflated with the contingent historical necessity of the order of class society. But evasion of the appeal of the other in our world system ought not to be simply ascribed to any transhistorical human condition, or any

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transcendental or quasi-transcendental condition of possibility or (im)possibility. Evasion is no merely human, all too human lapse of ethical fibre or nerve or memory, no mere failure of personal/collective responsibility; rather, it is something like a requirement of the present liberal democratic capitalist regime. This exploitative socio-political system does not simply release or express a potential evil that has ‘always’ been ‘there’ waiting to be released, evoked, or expressed. This system reaches into the human potential for evil and magnifies it, because it must do so in order to survive as the system that it is. What stands in the way of justice in our world system is not simply my human greed and stupidity and weakness and yours, but ... this system. This system, not system-per-se (‘order’) but this system, stands in the way. This is no aporia. The failure to distinguish emphatically between justice for the third and the justice of the few and to put this distinction close to the centre of the consideration of the relation between ethics and politics is what makes the Levinasian/Derridian approach much too easily recuperable by liberalism. For Derrida, as for Levinas, messiah, fundamental transformation of the human condition, never comes. Messiah is nothing other than the place or no-place from which comes constant prophetic critique and constant ‘social justice’ struggles against a constant oppressive status quo. Messiah never, never comes. He is always and forever coming, à venir. Derrida’s ‘messianicity’ is about perpetual openness to the future, the unforeseeable, uncontrollable, incalculable. Messiah is he who is always undermining the calculable law from the no-place of undecideable justice. In the words of John Caputo, ‘the true Messiah is always the one who never shows up, who has no ... phenomenality, and the false Messiah is anyone who does. An instructive example may be Sabbatai Zevi who proclaimed himself Messiah in 1665 only to convert to Islam.’18 I will have more to say about Sabbatai presently. There’s no denying that as long as we exist in a material world there ought never to be an end to critique, because messiah, in the sense of the perfection of ethics and of justice, never does come. Perfection could only be a disappearance of the created differentiated world into its undifferentiated Creator. Of course we ought forever to seek justice since there will always be a gap, dissonance, or conflict between Law, which applies rules of some kind to particular cases, and the ethical insistence of response to the call of the singular Other. But it seems that for Derrida and Levinas this always, this never, this forever, and this gap will always have remained somehow the same gap, the same-sized

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gap, the same pain. They do not descend to a level of thought that would permit or demand an effort to distinguish, to clarify the distinction between the ‘always’ of (quasi-)transcendental ontological Necessity and the false ahistorical Necessity of ‘the poor ye shall have always with ye’ (which does not refer to the poor in spirit). They do not for some reason want to consider a distinction between the pre-originary ‘always’ and its historical mediations. (And it is always historically mediated.) They do not choose to inflect the quasi-transcendental with its historical variability. In only two instances in the secondary literature on Levinas and Derrida have I found any challenge to their ahistoricity: Robert Bernasconi takes a moment, in discussing the aporia of the gift, to point out the absence in the Levinasian and Derridian texts of any questioning of the applicability of the ‘logic of Western metaphysics, with its oppositions and hierarchies, to cultures that proceed differently.’19 Bernasconi asks whether the aporia of the gift should be ‘located within a specific history.’20 Would ‘genealogy ... threaten the status of a paradox that is presented as ahistorical’?21 But Bernasconi, so far as I know, does not pursue this question anywhere else in his work. The other instance is Gianni Vattimo’s remark that for Levinas ‘the eternity of God is revealed as a radical alterity that calls for the assumption of a responsibility which can only be regarded as historically qualified by accident (the neighbour is to be sure always a concrete individual, but that’s the point: always).’22 It is Vattimo who emphasizes the ‘always.’ I was interested to find here the only echo elsewhere in the literature of the ‘always’ I have been wielding in the present essay. Susan Handelman is representative of virtually the entire secondary literature when she asks: ‘Does messianism mean a complete end to history, a pure spirituality beyond all politics, a fully delivered humanity,’23 ‘a quasi-divine life released from all the limitations of the human condition,’24or ‘a continuing struggle within history for a just politics, economics and morality’25 The latter, sane, non-apocalyptic option is that of Levinas, she says; it is the ‘very human condition, its limits and drama, which articulates the life of the spirit’26 – as if the ‘very human condition’ et cetera were a single condition not subject to any radical or fundamental change short of ‘full’ deliverance. Handelman, again speaking for Levinas and almost all his followers, characterizes messianism as the ‘interruptive force that can break through the cruelty and violence of immanent history,’27 without, it seems, ever being capable, even (or especially) in principle, of reducing that cruelty and

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violence to a degree that would seem to us to be unimaginable, or only imaginable. In Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse28 indicated a fundamental distinction between a transhistorical ‘basic repression’ – the ‘instinctual’ deprivation that is inherent in the formation of any kind of stable human existence – and ‘surplus repression’ – that deprivation which is historically necessitated in particular forms of existence founded on domination of human life by the requirements of toil. Marcuse, following Freud, resorts to the figures of Greek mythology – Narcissus, Oedipus, Prometheus, Orpheus, Eros, and Thanatos. Yet psychoanalysis has been considered by some Jewish thinkers, perhaps by Freud himself, by some Nazis, by Jung, and others, as a ‘Jewish science’ – a Godless Judaism. Marcuse represents its left wing. The Greek figures can be taken as historically necessary allegorizations of the Jewish sources of psychoanalytic messianism. Here I begin to investigate – or evoke – a deep resonance between Marcuse’s prophecy of the abolition of surplus repression and his call for a new ‘erotic’ reality principle, with some of the themes of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, especially that of the ARI, the Holy Lion Isaac Luria. These themes have to do with Tikkun, the mending or repair of the catastrophe that has been suffered by man and God since the world’s creation. For the Kabbalist, it is not so much that messiah brings about this tikkun; rather, collective human activity – mystical, religious, and ethical activity – brings the messiah and the messianic age. And the Kabbalistic texts, though they are redolent with images of ultimate mending, perfect unification of the broken cosmos, which is for us the coming of the impossible Messiah, frequently indicate exquisite sensitivity to the possibility of degrees of tikkun – of fundamental transformations short of perfect Tikkun – possible Messiahs. That is, they work with distinctions of what Marcuse would call degrees of repression. Something fundamental can be utterly transformed in the meaning, the quality, the experience of Necessity itself. In Marcuse’s words, ‘a new basic experience of being would change the human existence in its entirety.’29 From the Lurianic Kabbalah: All is in God. All suffering is in God, is God’s suffering. Our disaster, our brokenness, our exile, is the exile of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God in the world. When the world was created, it broke and fell: an accident in God, creation flawed from the beginning, even before Adam’s fall. The very name of God, YHVH, was torn in two, YH/VH. In Kabbalah the world is a symbol of the Name of God, the brokenness of the world is a manifestation of the

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break in the Name. This catastrophic rending is associated in every Kabbalistic tradition with the splitting of God’s attribute of judgement (Din) from his attribute of love, grace, charity, mercy (Hesed). This separation is partly a matter of the necessity of differentiation in any created material world – basic repression – for din has to do with ‘imposition of limits,’ ‘correct determination of things,’ the existence of individual things.’30 However, what happened was not only basic repression that could never be undone in any material world, but also surplus repression – the release of extreme, radical evil into the world, the empowerment of what Kabbalah calls ‘the left side’ or ‘the other side.’ Din is not simply necessary judgment, basic-repressive conscience, but what the Kabbalah calls ‘stern judgment,’ what Freudians call severe, punitive, neurotic, new superego. Scholem: ‘In the process of world creation din is somehow released unmitigated.’31 ‘When in its measureless hypertrophical outbreak it tears itself loose from the quality of mercy, it breaks away from God altogether and is transformed into the radically evil ... the dark world of Satan.’32 The category of judgment becomes an absolute: Marcuse would say, surplus repressive reason in the service of the death instinct. Again in Scholem’s words, the Shekinah ‘can actually come under the sway of evil – because of her weakness, due to her exile ... leading to the preponderance within her of those (divine) forces that because of their stern and punitive nature have an affinity with the other side.’33 In psychoanalytic language, the superego is, at its formation in the Oedipal crisis, very close to the dark powers of the id; it is this closeness that makes morality primitive, punitive, rigid, cruel, destructive. The voice of God that impels us to seek justice, to do the right thing, to resist and fight against evil, can become the voice of Satan. Psychoanalysis, godless Judaism, struggles with the superego, with ethics, to redeem the superego from its involvement with satanic cruelty to self and other. According to Kabbalah, the break in God can’t be repaired by God alone. The Absolute cannot repair itself without human assistance. Scholem: ‘Man must repair the maker of all things in history.’ This is the meaning of Psalm 68:35: ‘[G]ive ye strength to God.’34 Messianic tikkun unifies JH and VH, judgment and love. This could hardly be equated with Perfection, or abolition of basic repression, since justice continues to hold sway, but as unified with God’s other attributes. Evil, and material and spiritual suffering, will not be abolished but radically transformed/diminished. In Marcusean terms, the death drive, Thanatos, is not erased; rather it ‘converges’ with Eros in the context of a new

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reality principle. Tikkun does not make Necessity disappear – it brings about a radical change in the structure or nature of Necessity itself. According to the Kabbalist text Safer Hatemunah, Book of the Image, God creates not one world (one reality principle, we might say) but numbers of worlds, corresponding to the sefirot, the attributes of God; each has its own Torah, its own version of the ‘basic’ (Scholem’s word) Torah.35 Our world is indubitably governed by Stern Judgment. But the post-messianic world will be governed by Mercy and its Torah will reflect that divine attribute.36 So even the Mitzvot, the commandments, requirements, and prohibitions of God, are not fixed for all times, all worlds. The die is not cast. Our world’s reality principle is din. The nonrepressive reality principle of a future world is hesed. In Marcusean terms, superid – ‘a maternal, libidinal morality’37 – will supersede superego. The great Kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, the Shelah, explains why prohibitions have increased in Jewish law since the destruction of the Temple: it is because the power of the other side has increased in the world. When Messiah comes, many prohibitions, including many sexual prohibitions, will be loosened, minimized. Sexuality will no longer be extremely dangerous.38 Is this not a prophecy of the abolition of surplus repression? There is no fixed, eternal, ahistorical ‘human condition,’ no monolithic Necessity that can only be continuously interrupted; evil, cruelty, including the cruel suppression of evil, and deprivation, including sexual deprivation, can be radically diminished. But Torah remains. Din remains, in her proper place. Basic repression is not abolished. Some Kabbalists read the liturgical phrase praising God as He who releases the imprisoned – matir asurim – as He who releases prohibitions – isurim – referring to prohibitions that will no longer be necessary after messiah, since their purpose was to bring messiah. All this can be contrasted with Levinas’s stern ahistorical prophetism: in Handelman’s words, the Law must submit ‘the violent and irrational forces in man to numerous prohibitions.’ Quoting Levinas: ‘[O]ne must impose severe rules on one’s own nature.’39 The implication is that this Nature never changes, that God’s Nature cannot change, that God can’t change her Nature, that Satan’s nature will never change. But according to Kabbalah, even Satan can change. The abolition of surplus repression does not destroy Satan – rather, he returns to his original role as God’s prosecuting angel – for even in a redeemed world there will still be conflict among individuals, sin, misdeeds. One of the many Kabbalistic discourses on the names of God asserts that there are seventy-two, and that one of these is Sha-el. One of the devil’s names is Sha-ma-el. The

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Hebrew word for death is ma-vet. Only when din becomes ruler of the world does the ma of ma-vet, Thanatos, released from union with Eros, enter Shael, transforming it into Shamael; but even then ‘the strength of the primordial holy names shines within the satanic.’40 This brings us to the most astounding idea of Kabbalah, one that resonates profoundly with psychoanalysis: the idea of ‘redemption through sin’ or ‘descent for the sake of ascent.’ Messianic realitytransforming praxis enters contemplatively into impulses that are now prohibited in order to free them from the grip of the evil one and raise them to their sources in God’s attributes; psychoanalytic practice brings troublesome drives to consciousness, liberating some and sublimating others. One can virtually ‘detoxify sin and evil’ by ‘contemplative absorption,’ which ‘sweetens,’ and ‘transforms them at their very roots.’41 Among the shocking innovations of the ‘false Messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi was to experiment with the partial transmutation of contemplative ‘descent for the sake of ascent’ into a real movement of sexual liberation. Even Scholem, the sympathetic historian of the Sabbatean movement, referred to the great dangers it posed, as ‘desire for total liberation,’ ‘nihilism,’ ‘antinomianism.’42 These moments in Scholem’s writing reflect what Marcuse calls the ‘defamation of the pleasure principle,’43 the same defamation that has impelled numerous critics to dismiss Eros and Civilization as a senseless demand for the cancellation of all limitations on human desire and behaviour. It remains easy for critics to make light of Marcuse’s distinction of basic and surplus repression. Marcuse foresaw the fate of Eros and Civilization in the work itself: ‘opposition’ to defamation of the pleasure principle ‘easily succumbs to ridicule.’44 Sabbatai Zevi’s movement was a great upheaval of the whole Jewish world from London to Constantinople. In 1665 Sabbatai proclaimed himself Messiah. Though he and his followers preached and practised what the orthodox of his day and ours would consider sexual license – as descent for the sake of ascent and as tokens of liberation from prohibitions that were considered unnecessary and inappropriate in the messianic age – there was never any question of ‘nihilism’ or ‘total’ liberation. Sabbatai strides up to the Holy Ark in the synagogue, strikes it seven times with his staff, and pronounces aloud the unmentionable name of God, JHVH, manifesting its messianic unification.45 Shocking antinomianism! Later he instructs some of his followers on particular occasions to pronounce the name, no longer prohibited, of He Who Cancels Prohibitions, matir isurim.46 He declares that the fast of the

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ninth day of Av, the date of the destruction of the first and second temples, the mythical birthday of the Messiah and his own actual birthday, will now be a feast day. Other fasts – but not Yom Ha Kippurim, the day of Atonement – are declared feasts.47 (Some Kabbalists had predicted that at a certain point in messianic time Yom Ha Kippurim would be Yom Ke Purim, a day like Purim – of feasting and rejoicing.)48 His followers are commanded to alternate intense ascetic practices – to intensify repentance and hasten the messianic process – with erotic practices.49 Sabbatai declares that contrary to some rabbinic and Kabbalistic teaching Jesus is not to be punished forever in hell-Sabbatai’s tikkun will raise even Jesus’ soul back to God.50 This Messiah liberates women. He commands that they be called up equally with men to the reading of the Torah – something that is still controversial in Judaism 350 years later. He promises women that he will free them from the curse of Eve and make them equal with their husbands.51 Could freedom from the curse of Adam – toil and the performance principle – be far behind? Quoting Scholem: Sabbatai ‘flouted all norms of decency’ by holding a banquet at which men and women danced together, while he himself retired to another room together with a former wife.52 He marries a woman named Sarah, reputed to be a prostitute, because she had a vision that she was going to marry the messiah.53 The messiah’s wife retains her sexual freedom after marriage.54 Scholem writes: ‘[W]e can easily imagine him clad in phylacteries singing psalms and surrounded by women and wine.’55 Shocking nihilism! There were even rumours of homosexuality, God forbid.56 From a Sabbatean document: ‘Abraham, Isaac and Jacob came into the world to restore the senses, and this they did to four of them. Then came Sabbatai Zevi and restored the fifth, the sense of touch, which according to Aristotle and Maimonides is a source of shame ... but which has now been raised ... to a place of honour and glory.’57 Does this not foreshadow Marcuse’s prophecy that the new sensibility following the abolition of surplus repression would liberate the ‘proximity senses’ of touch, smell, and taste?58 Of course, this would have nothing to do with Levinas’s ‘proximity’ of the other. Or would it? ‘Basic repression’ in the Freudian/Marcusian scheme corresponds in some sense (the pun is intended) to the ‘(quasi-)transcendental/ (pre-)original’ in the Levinasian/Derridian register. They converge in this aporetic Necessity: the self, which is response to the Other, must be the self separate from the other in order to respond. This aporia – with its implications for hospitality and the gift – will never be surpassed.

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Yet its ‘torsion’ would be experienced differently, there would be a ‘new basic experience’ of the torsion of ‘being’ in a human order beyond possessive individualism. The host would still say: make yourself at home/this is my home not yours. Beyond possessive individualism, however, the significations ‘mine,’ ‘yourself,’ and ‘home’ would be radically, fundamentally recontextualized, thereby referring to an altogether different sense of self, of other, and of home. A certain possible messiah will have arrived. Some readers of Levinas and Derrida might want to emphasize that there must always be a risk – inherent in the unsurpassable incalculability of the future – of a reactionary overthrow or a monstrous mutation of this messiah. Very well then. My question recurs: ‘always’ the same risk. From Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin Levinas has adopted a much muted version of Lurianic theurgy that stops short of envisioning any future radical Tikkun of God-and-world. For R. Hayim there’s no question of any catastrophe in the Godhead. It is rather that only obedience to God makes possible God’s ‘association’59 with the world in the form of ‘continuous creation.’60 Man is thus ‘answerable for the universe.’61 Human transgression disrupts that association and tends to the total ruin of creation; obedience repairs creation and ‘justifies’ being.62 God, without Himself really being broken or damaged at any level, is ‘bending down to look at human misery or inhabiting that misery.’ My suffering is atonement for transgression and also to some degree it is ‘already the great suffering of God who suffers’ for me.63 Prayer and atonement can diminish or ‘suspend’ God’s voluntary suffering and relieve human suffering.64 So this is a cyclical quasi-theurgy in which evil, suffering, atonement, and relief seem, again, to be always the same in recurrence. Obedience to God, atonement, and so on seem to be destined never to bring about a radical change of God-and-world. 3. Nevertheless Nevertheless it is possible to find statements in both Derrida and Levinas that presuppose or even expressly point to the distinction between the quasi-transcendental aporia and its possible historical variability. For example, Levinas cites some Talmudic texts that announce future ‘new possibilities of the human spirit, a new distribution of its centres, a new meaning of life, and new relations with the other.’ In a footnote he relates these texts to ‘the strange passages where Marx expects socialist society to bring about changes in the human condition frustrating

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any prediction [my emphasis] by virtue of their actual revolutionary essence.’65 In Derrida’s writings there are a number of moments that verge on the radicalism of the Freudian left, especially Marcuse. In ‘Eating Well,’ for example, Derrida asks for a ‘sacrifice of sacrifice,’ a break with the ‘sacrificial logic’ of the ‘phallogocentric structure’ that has dominated civilization. (Here he specifically cites even Levinas as not having escaped this logic.)66 ‘The dominant schema ... implies carnivorous virility ... The subject doesn’t just want to possess and master nature. He accepts sacrifice and eats flesh.’67 In this text Derrida looks toward an ‘infinitely different’ mode of ‘relating to the other human, to animals, and to nature.’68 In ‘The Laws of Reflection,’ in Nelson Mandela: In Admiration, Derrida admires Mandela’s admiration of early African society in which ‘there were no classes, no rich or poor’: the ‘seeds’ of a ‘revolutionary democracy in which ... poverty, want and insecurity shall be no more,’69 of ‘the promise of what has not ever been seen or heard’ in the West ... except briefly, before immediately disappearing.’70 Of course this formulation ambiguously suggests that, although ‘admirable,’ the promise of a future classless society must always remain simply a promise (or perhaps Derrida would say it must ‘perhaps’ always remain a promise). Derrida often seems to suggest that deconstruction, as something that is happening in the world, is a kind of movement of something fundamentally new in history, a movement of radical self-deconstruction, self-pluralization of the ‘One.’ Often this is posed as a question, or as an intimation of a ‘dream’ – again, ambiguously, for ‘dream’ suggests the ‘always’ to come – for instance, ‘of a certain experience of friendship perhaps unthinkable today.’71 It is the question at the very end of the Politics of Friendship: ‘Is it possible to open up the “come” of a certain democracy ... beyond the homofraternal and phallogocentric schema? When will we be ready for an ... experience of freedom and equality ... which would at last be just, just beyond the Law and measured up against its measurelessness’?72 In Spectres of Marx73 Derrida has much to say about ‘messianicity’ as the pre-original quasi-transcendental structure of openness to the future that is undecideably related to concrete historical ‘messianisms’ like Marxism; he is critical in a very au-courant manner of the excesses of corporate globalization; he calls for a decentred, decentralized can’t-put-your-finger-on-it ‘New International’ of resistance to those excesses (some time before Seattle, Prague, Quebec City,

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etc.), but has nothing to say here about a new reality principle or an infinitely different experience of being. Also worthy of note is Derrida’s response to Hayim Yosef Yerushalmi’s book Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, which explores Freud’s identification with Moses, and describes psychoanalytic theory – preoccupied as it was with the superego, the ethical imperative in all its modes from the least to the most humane – as a new Godless Torah, ‘a metamorphosed extension of Judaism divested of its religious forms but retaining its essential monotheistic characteristics.’74 But he accuses Freud of being ‘most un-Jewish’75 in his refusal to hope for a fundamentally better future, and specifically for the future reconciliation of fathers and sons prophesied by Malachi 3:24: veheshiv lev avot al banim velev banim al avot (he shall return the heart of fathers with sons and the heart of sons with fathers). Yerushalmi wants to know ‘what is the future of Laius and Oedipus’?76 Will Oedipal violence go on forever? Though Yerushalmi doesn’t say so explicitly, this is not different from the question Will the severity of the surplus repressive superego go on forever? Yerushalmi also doesn’t mention that according to Malachi, it is Elijah, the harbinger of the messiah, who will come to bring about this healing of the Oedipal wound, this transcendence of the Oedipus complex in its surplus repressive form (please note the qualification). In Archive Fever, Derrida, one of whose Hebrew names is Elijah, seems to line up with Freud, splashing chilly deconstructive water on Yerushalmi’s Jewish hopefulness. Derrida takes Yerushalmi’s hope as a hope for pure and simple perfect reconciliation; erasure of the Oedipal; abolition of basic repression. ‘As soon as there is the One,’ says Derrida – the stable, unique identity, the self as ego or as the Jewish, or any, people, or the One God – ‘as soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding, traumatism ... The One guards against ... the other. It protects itself from the other, but, in the movement of this jealous violence, it comprises in itself ... the self-otherness or self-difference ... which makes it One ... At the same time ... the One forgets to remember itself to itself, it keeps and erases the archive of the injustice that it is, of this violence that it does ... The One makes itself violence ... Self-determination as violence ... Now it is necessary that this repeat itself. It is Necessity itself, Anank¥. The One, as self-repetition, can only repeat and recall this instituting violence.’ There is no escape from ‘the death drive,’ the possibility of destruction, ‘the violence of forgetting.’ ‘This is why Freud might not have accepted in this form’ the alternative between the future and the

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past of Oedipus, or between ‘hope’ and ‘hopelessness,’ the Jew and the non-Jew (for according to Derrida, Yerushalmi wanted to reserve exclusively for the Jewish people Judaism as hope for the future). For ‘the one, alas, or happily is the condition of the other. And the Other is the condition for the One.’ So, according to Freud/Derrida here, responding to Yerushalmi, there is ‘no future without repetition ... no future without the spectre of oedipal violence.’77 It would be easy to read all this to indicate that Derrida would make no distinction between basic and surplus repression, as though the One must always be the same eternally recurring One that must always be lived in the same way by human beings as Necessity itself, Anank¥; never any new forms or modes of the One and the Other; forever the same dance of Eros in and with Thanatos, of Thanatos in and with Eros; never the possibility of a new relation between Life and Death as prophesied in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. But notice: Derrida/Freud rejects Yerushalmi’s alternative ‘in this form,’ not absolutely. And there are other indications even in this text that the matter cannot be so simple. In the final chapter of Archive Fever, for example, Derrida praises Freud, who ‘illuminated ... analyzed ... deconstructed, the authority of the ... paternal, and patriarchic’ principle, which now takes the form of domination by the brothers, ‘the equality and the liberty of brothers.’78 The last paragraph of the book denounces Freud for repeating the very same patriarchal logic he had deconstructed. The denunciation must point to the ‘democracy to come,’ which will overcome the phallogocentric schema, perhaps, at least in our dream life. ‘Perhaps’ the One will learn to repeat itself (basic repression) without violently forgetting its other/itself nearly so much as it has in the past (abolition of surplus repression). There is a quick, easy, but unsatisfactory way of evading the difficulties I am highlighting in this chapter. One could focus on the very openness to the future of messianicity as providing a certain undeniable possibility of fundamental transformation, a new experience of being, and so on, which is what Levinas and Derrida are doing in the passages just discussed. One could argue that far from contradicting the Levinasian/Derridian Contra-Diction, or Aporia, the semi-Marcusean moment in their writings are enabled by it. One could deploy the aporia in a revolutionary direction in some such manner as this: On the one hand, ‘the promise can’t fail to break its promise, and this comes of the structure of the promise.’79 On the other hand (which is, on the other hand, the very same hand), this structure of the promise – messianicity,

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as oriented to the absolute unpredictability, uncontrollability of the future, the Other – must involve a promise of Messiah not only as infinitely deferred, non-arriving, impossible, but also and by the same token, as the possibility of the actual arrival in history of ‘a new meaning of life,’ ‘new relations with others,’ and so on – the possible Messiah. The impossible Messiah – the solution, dissolution, cancellation of aporetology – would never come, but this very impossibility, this nonpassage, no way, would be the opening of the way for the possible messiah of another communism. To put it most simply, undecideability means, obviously, that there could be no predetermined decision of some deconstructionist ruling out revolution, classless society, a new reality principle ... This Levinasian/Derridian formalism (a formalism of extreme antiformalism) is what makes it possible for a Derridian like John Caputo to argue, against Richard Rorty’s pragmatist reformism, that although Derrida is opposed to ‘totalizing transformations,’ to the idea that ‘the world will be made over in toto,’ and is ‘something of a piecemealist rather than a revolutionary,’ he ‘certainly would not confine’ (my emphasis) the democracy to come to ‘reforming the presently prevailing form of democracy ... In making piecemeal interventions on the structures in place ... he puts no limits on where this will end ... [T]he democracy to come might indeed, who knows, lead us toward something unforeseeable’ beyond Rortyan social democratic ‘reform.’ (But all this doesn’t stop Caputo from concluding with Rorty that ‘we’ should ‘rally around the flag of the old and – I would like to think – timeless liberal idea of social justice, of using ... government to lift up the poorest people.’)80 So liberalism, government, and the poorest are ‘timeless’! Why do I say that all this is unsatisfactory? Caputo’s ‘who knows’ actually echos a certain ‘I don’t know’ that is essential to Rortyan pragmatism; Enrique Dussel, the Latin American proponent of ‘philosophy of liberation,’ who has been very much influenced by Levinas, has perhaps correctly identified the core issue here as ‘Eurocentrism.’ European philosophers, including even Levinas, writes Dussel, cannot /will not accept as ‘a fundamental philosophical and ethical theme’ the ‘eurocentrism and the invisibility of “economics” that in turn prevent the development out of poverty of the greater part of humanity’ (Dussel’s emphases).81 ‘Economics’ points to the level of thought I called for earlier, the level that permits or demands an effort to distinguish transhistorical from historically contingent necessity. Dussel describes a

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conversation with Rorty in which he asks Rorty whether ‘the exploitation of Latin America, or of poor North Americans, is a fact caused [his emphasis] by capitalism’? And Rorty answers, ‘I do not know! ... Is there in any event a system without exploitation?’ To the reader Dussel exclaims, ‘[T]here is no room here for the evasive [my emphasis] I do not know. Instead, one has to be in solidarity and attempt to clarify the cause [his emphasis] of [the] suffering’ of the poor.82 For Dussel, evasion of the question of causation by American and European Rortyans, Derridians and Levinasians, due to their high philosophical, or antiphilosophical, disdain for ‘totalization,’ is evasion of the appeal of the other. The other is not the poor who will always be with us (‘perhaps there is no system or order without exploitation’), always urgently demanding that we do our duty to them. The urgent demand for justice is for total abolition, not simply recurrent significant remediation, of this particular material distinction between a prosperous ‘we’ and a relatively impoverished ‘them.’ The distinction between transhistorical and historical levels of Necessity has not been made central in the writings of Levinas and Derrida. Today, ‘Eurocentrism’ is the very failure to insist on this distinction. Today, Eurocentrism is the insistence of a ‘strictly’ philosophical thinking that does not take the causation of the poverty of the greater part of humanity – ‘economics’ – as a fundamental philosophical theme. Even Europe’s turn to Jerusalem in ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and even Europe’s deconstruction have not yet surpassed their Eurocentrism.

NOTES 1 Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 15. 2 Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 289. 3 Ibid. 4 Derrida, Aporias, 25. 5 Ned Lukacher, ‘Mourning Becomes Telepathy,’ Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 1. 6 Paul Davies, ‘Difficult Friendship,’ Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998), 157. 7 ‘[T]he truth is not everything ... for there is more, something else, or something better: truth is finite (finie). Or worse: truth, it’s finished (c’est fini).’ Derrida, Aporias, 1 (parentheses in original).

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8 Ibid., 20 (my brackets). 9 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford University Press, 1999), 30. 10 Emmanuel Levinas, in Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9, calls for ‘revolt for a society that is other, yet a revolt that recommences as soon as the other society is established; a revolt against the injustice that is founded as soon as order is founded,’ inasmuch as order entails an ‘obliteration of qualities that, like death, free men from everything and the whole.’. 11 Derrida, Adieu, 30. 12 Ibid., 34 (emphasis in original). 13 John Caputo at the Institute for Christian Studies Seminar, Toronto, April 1998. 14 Jacques Derrida, Points (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 151. 15 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 212–13. 16 See Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1937). ‘Jerusalem’ for Shestov means above all ethics as the total repudiation of Necessity. 17 Of God, 9. 18 John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 350 n. 17. 19 Robert Bernasconi, ‘What Goes Around Comes Around,’ in Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 262. 20 Ibid., 265. 21 Ibid., 257. 22 Gianni Vattimo, ‘The Trace of the Trace,’ in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds, Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 91. No doubt there are others. After completing this paper I came upon Robert Gibbs’s discussion of Marx and Levinas in Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Gibbs finds in Levinas’s phenomenological description of the structure of caring for children, ‘fecundity,’ in Totality and Infinity, strong intimations of a possible future form of sociality that would evade the ‘intrinsically unethical’ state form, which ‘at best ... reduces the infinity of responsibility’ in an ‘ambivalent transformation of ethics’ (229) in favour of non-state institutions wherein the ‘infinity of responsibility’ is preserved (240). Gibbs is disappointed that by the time Levinas wrote Otherwise than Being this line of thought had given way to acceptance of the inevitability of the state:

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Gad Horowitz ‘liberation’ now ‘becomes solely a praxis ... which can never [my emphasis] be established or instituted’ (242). Gibbs calls for continued thinking of the possibility of a ‘sociality ... without a hegemonic rationalizing power’ and of liberation as a praxis of ‘restructuring sociality to develop the originary responsibility’ (251). Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption (Washington: American University Press, 1991), 306. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 338. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Ibid., 158. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 263. Harold Bloom suggests that din is ‘the Kabbalistic equivalent of the Orphic and Platonic Ananke of Necessity’ in Kabbalah and Criticism (Boston: Seabury Press, 1975), 30. Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 62. Major Trends, 237. Mystical Shape, 189. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 43. Quoted by Joseph Dan, Gershom Scholem (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 301. Ibid., 301. Eros, 231. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) 320. See Isaiah Horowitz, The Generations of Adam, ed. Miles Krassen (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 220–1. The Shelah explains: one must ‘act according to prevailing conditions.’ Fragments, 302. Mystical Shape, 77. Ibid., 129. Messianic Idea, 78, 84, 112. Eros, 159. Ibid., 160. Scholem, Messianic Idea, 393, 387. Scholem Sabbatai, 163, 242. Ibid., 628–30.

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Scholem, Messianic Idea, 21. Scholem, Sabbatai, 880. Ibid., 284–7. Ibid., 285, 404–5. Ibid., 404. Ibid., 193–6. Ibid., 403. Ibid., 404, 880. Ibid., 669 n. 222, 671 n. 227. Sholem, Messianic Idea, 117. Eros, 38–9. Levinas, In the Time of the Nations (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 123. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 126 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 114. Ibid., 130. Levinas, Beyond the Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 217. Compare Scholem’s exposition of the Kabbalistic notion that Tikkun will bring something ‘totally unpredictable.’ Messianic Idea, 21. Points, 279. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 281–2. Derrida, ‘The Laws of Reflection,’ in J. Derrida and M. Tlili, eds, For Nelson Mandela (Henry Holt and Co., 1987), 24. Ibid., 38. In Chantal Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 83. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 306. Derrida, Spectres of Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Compare Marinos Diammantides’s citation, in his article in this volume, of the rest of the rights called for by Levinas in the latter’s ‘The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other’: ‘Many rights that remain unrecognized,’ including ‘the right to health, happiness, work, rest, a place to live ... the right to oppose exploitation by capital (the right to unionize).’ Hayim Y. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press), 99. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 95. Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 78–80.

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78 Ibid., 95. 79 Derrida, quoted by Ned Lukacher in the introduction to Cinders, 16. 80 John Caputo, More Radical Hermaneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 118–24. 81 Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity (Atlantic City, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), vii, viii, xi n. 2. 82 Ibid., 42 n. 44.