my dissertation on Levinas, so I know a lot about his life and work but I will not relate that here, His was, and maybe still is, the greatest challenge to metaphysical, ontological thinking, despite the fact that he remained trapped within it, Well, we all do, or there wouldn't be much to say about anything,
"The face of the other" as the locus for a new ethical thinking is brilliant, Infinite obligation to the other is hyperbolic magnificence, His elaboration of time is real twist on phenomonology and existentialism, showing how "the present instant," the unbreachable NOW of total presence, is essentially fractured,
He was a good man, captured by the Nazis and held in a work camp, Henry Blanchot hid his family during this time, His main line of work was Jewish education, He was also a Talmudic scholar of some note and it is fascinating to read his philosophy through the lens of Talmudic reasoning,
If you ever catch the Levinas bug, start at the beginning, His later works deal with the entirety of philosophy and he doesn't take the time to catch the reader up, so you have to know who he's arguing with and why.
i have to believe that levinas was making fun, otherwise, it's just depressing. Radicalizing his earlier conception of intersubjective responsibility from "mere" asymmetry to a condition of being hostage to the Other, from the welcoming of the always already indigent Other into my home to the feeding of the Other with the bread from my own mouth, from the fraternal to the maternal, Levinas both moves beyond sitelinkTotality and Infinity and problematizes that movement with the introduction of the third party.
The primordially or anarchically unproblematic relation to the Other, to whom "I have always one response more to give, I have to answer for his very responsibility," becomes problematic with the entry of the third, the relationship with whom serves as "incessant correction of the asymmetry of the Other's: proximity.
" The entry of the third describes the movement from intersubjective responsibility to institutional justice, which is not the negation of metaphysical desire but its triangulation,
Simply put, the most valuable philosophical work I've read, The face of the Other implies my facing her, The 'I' is always implied in the face of the Other, For the face is always facing or, as Levinas puts it, speaking, The subject/object dichotomy collapses in the phenomenon of face, as in that of speaking speaking implies listening and vice versa, And if Levinas's axiomatic book, Totality and Infinity TI, discusses face, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence OB discusses facing or, more precisely, my facing of the Other.
OB is about the ethical subjectivity, "What happens to the I when the Other faces me" is the subjective angle that OB takes whereas "What or who is the face" is the objective angle that TI takes.
I and the Other are the two sides of the same coin called the ethical, Thus, OB is Levinas's restatement of TI, a resaying the said with a new set of vocabulary and metaphors all skillfully employed with greater rigor and hyperbole from the subjective angle.
The central problem of the book is: How should the ethical subject be conceived
Derrida is right to say that "Totality And Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise" Writing And Difference, trans.
Alan Bass,:n. Levinas is a poetic philosopher who reads and writes philosophy poetically, The use of metaphor is crucial in his work, as well as that of poetic compression such as: "Kantism is the basis of philosophy, if philosophy is ontology" OB.
But his training in rabbinic exegesis enables him to use metaphors literally, as that tradition demands, so as to move "further than the metaphor" In The Time Of The Nations, trans.
Michael B. Smith,:. Thus, both "the poetic said" and "the prophetic said" OBmust be held together when we read Levinas' work, Or, rather, the metaphoric reading must be tempered with the talmudic exegetical assumptions Levinas deploys in his work, if we are to do justice to Levinas's philosophic language.
Can Aristotle's notion of metaphor as a transport or crossing from the familiar to the unfamiliar and the new work together with Rabbi Eliezer's notion of "the embers still glowing beneath the ashes" the trope which he uses in reference to "the words of the Prophets" Difficult Freedom, trans.
Seán Hand,:
Like Descartes who exaggerates his methodological doubts, Levinas exaggerates out of necessity the description of the moral subject, employing such tropes as maternity, persecution, trauma, hostage, expiation, hemorrhage, sacrifice, etc.
"The irremissible guilt with regard to the neighbor is like a Nessus tunic my skin would be"or, "Anarchy is persecution", Notably, however, the following two terms frequently used in TI are hardly mentioned: the Other as the master teacher, Also absent are the extensive and remartable analyses of enjoyment, eros, and fecundity, Ricoeur observes: "Levinas's Otherwise Than Being employs even greater hyperbole than TI, to the point of paroxysm" Oneself As Another,, This is an unfortunate remark made with respect to the term "hostage, " Ricoeur reserves such criticisms with respect to other equally extreme metaphors found in OB, some of which are listed above, But Ricoeur is correct to diagnose that Levinas's use of hyperbole is not simply a figure of speech, It is the very production of the excess of the Other in the said of the text, Ricoeur thus writes:
By hyperbole, it must be strongly underscored, we are not to understand a figure of style, a literary trope, but the systematic practice of excess in philosophical argumentation.The Other is no longer the master who teaches me but is always already in me as in inspiration or maternity as in "the gestation of the other in the same" OB.
Hyperbole appears in this context as the strategy suited to producing the effect of a break with regard to the idea of exteriority in the sense of absolute otherness Id.
,.
The self as a subject is expelled forever, never to return to itself, always already delivered over to the Other as a gift, as a hostage: "The refusal of presence is converted into my presence as present, that is, as a hostage delivered over as a gift to the other".
Hostage as a gift to the other! We are no longer in the realm of legality but in poetry, Levinas forces us to rethink radically both "hostage" and "gift" by such a juxtaposition of two extreme metaphors,
Levinas becomes relentlessly metaphoric, Subjectivity, he says, involves "the gnawing away at oneself in responsibility"or "the self emptying itself of itself" kenosis, Its identity is formed to the extent that it is given over to the Other as "the other in me"the maternal metaphor again, The self as such is the onefortheother, sent to the Other as in 'Here I am,' where, as Levinas comments, "'Here I am' means 'send me'", nIsaiah says: "Here I am send me" Isaiah:.
To be an I is to be sent to the Other, forever abandoned to the Other to the point of persecution or persecution turned into expiation, Only in the trope of redemption "a subject is a hostage",
The passivity of hostage, he further writes, "is the birth of a meanig in the obtuseness of being, of a 'being able to die' subject to sacrifice".
Or, in yet another metaphor, the self
is a lung always already exposed to the outside air, whose respiration consists of the inspiration turning into an expiration, where "inspiration arouses respiration"cf.
,,. In other words, the self breathes his last in expiation, like Christ on the Cross,
But there is no shift Kehr here in Levinas' thoughtthe purported shift from TI to OBas
the basic concepts reoccur with greater vigor, precision, and in greater hyperbolealbeit in new set of metaphors.
If the Totality And Infinity seeks to break away from Hegel's all encompassing totality, Otherwise Than Being paves a new ground for conceiving human subject apart and independent from the conception of subjectivity, which in the West, according to Levinas, has always been thought of in terms of the primacy of the present or beingbe it the 'I think' in Descartes consciousness in Hegel, Husserl, or Sartre or Dasein in Heideggerthe primacy which Levinas sweepingly but insightfully characterizes in terms of "the gesture of being" geste d'être, whose impulse conatus is analyzed, in the manner of Spinoza and Hobbes, as being's endeavor to persevere in itself or in its being, as a movement of losing itself only to regain itself, an adventure taken on the way home TIlike that of Ulysses, who himself unchanged returns to his own home also unchanged after all those years.
Husserl would have us believe that the internal time consciousness is one that gathers in the present the past as recalled in the present and the future anticipated in the present, the unity of temporal consciousness that culminates in the present, for which Derrida aptly doubs "the classical metaphysics of presence" Speech And Phenomena, trans.
David B. Allison,:. To have an identity means for consciousness to represent itself to itself so as to remain in the same Idem means "the same, " Thus, Levinas writes: "Essence, the being of entities, weaves between the incomparables, between me and the others, a unity, a community, . . , and drags us off and assembles us on the same side, chaining us to one another like galley slaves, emptying proximity of its meaning"or, "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, from which becoming is expelled, a present largely made up of representation, due to memory and history".
The task for Levinas then is to conceive human subject beyond the mode of, apart from the sway of, being or essence, which amounts to articulating that which lies beyond ontology, or doing philosophy beyond philosophy or transcendental ego.
"Not to philosophize would not be still to philosophize," Levinas says a year after completing Otherwise Than Being, perhaps in response to Derrida, in "God and Philosophy,".
Or, it is to open up the selfsufficient, selfcausing ego in freedom causa sui in "a reverse conatus or an inversion of essence" OBor "in subversion of essence into substitution" OB.
However, Levinas would be the first to admit that he is not paving a new ground, He has precedence to cite: Plato, Plotinus, and Kant among others,,
It is remarkable that the chapter IV on "Substitution," which he identifies as the "centerpiece" of the book xli, ends with the highly condensed and yet suggestive reference to Kant.
While praising Kant for conceiving "a sense that is not measured by being or not being"the Kantian moral subject who is conceived independently from the 'I think' of the transcendental apperceptionhe laments the fact that he could not retain a trait from Kant's philosophic system while "neglecting all the details of its architecture"for to do so would be to collapse the system all together.
Levinas's task then is not to improve or renovate Kant's moral philosophy but to craft his own and unique description of human subject unaffected by ontology, if such is possible, while letting Kantian echoes "reverberate" throughout the description as Levinas had said as early asin "Is Ontology Fundamental".
The result is a highly original and profound analyses of a subject, described as subsuming all, bearing alla subject held responsible even for the responsibility of the other, and even for the freedom and fault of the other humanan excessive and infinitely exceeding responsibility beyond any measure assumed prior to any initiative or choice, prior to will or consciousness chosen, elected, or assigned in an immemorial and irrecuperable past elected at the 'time' of creation, as it were to be so designated as "me," accused, me voici, as the onefortheother.
"But this desire for the nondesirable, this responsibility for the neighbor, this substitution as a hostage, is the subjectivity and uniqueness of a subject", Levinas's language here verges on extreme metaphors which never remain merely as metaphors and sometimes must be taken literally and is hyperbolic and radical, He states in hindsight in the Conclusion: "Here the human is brought out by transcendence, or the hyperbole, that is, the disinterestedness of essence, a hyperbole in which it breaks up and falls upward, into the human".
To be continued in "Comments" below, .