I have taken this quote from Kevin Hart from a public lecture delivered in 1996 entitled The Experience of Poetry, because it offers us some insight into the ethics of Levinas.

"My backdrop this evening is the deep romantic chasm of experience and understanding. Levinas proposes a way beyond romanticism by aligning experience and presence then distinguishing experience and epiphany, and he is led to do so by taking exception to one aspect of the reduction. In the Crisis Husserl proclaims, 'when I practice the reducing epoche on myself and my world-consciousness, the other human beings, like the world itself, fall before the epoche; that is, they are merely intentional phenomena for me'...Declining to regard the other person merely as a phenomenon for me, Levinas turns to name and explore a gap between consciousness and obligation. His analyses of the sites where pre-original alterity coincides with the other person - death, sexuality and fecundity - illuminate much that I would gather under the heading 'the experience of poetry'. Unlike Levinas, though, I preserve the word 'experience' while resetting the concept so that it does not presume a fusion of subject and object. Levinas speaks of ethics, not poetry; even so, his studies of the prophetic word and the vulnerability of Saying, could tell us a great deal about poetry. This is not a path I propose to take this evening, even though I will not be going in another direction. To repeat: my response to the deep romantic chasm is that any gap between experience and understanding is foreshadowed by a division in experience itself. Poetry does not reveal the meaning of being through the genius of a poet, but holds being and meaning together for a while in an intense and unequal relationship."

Nor am I much interested in aligning experience with presence with its fusion of subject and object either. Why should we 100 years after The Phenomemology of Spirit? Seems like philosophical regression to me. Moreover, aligning experience with presence, with its fusion of subject and object, sounds like mysticism to me. What is missing from this is the idea of a habitus, and the undergoing an ordeal which is at the same time a transformation.

Nor am I interested in poetry holding meaning and being together in an intense and unequal relationship. 'Tis Levinas and the pre-reflective ethical openness to alterity that concerns me. How do we approach, given the critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics?

Hart offers us a signpost.Levinas and his conception of the ethical obligation to the other is indicated by the phrase 'Declining to regard the other person merely as a phenomenon for me, Levinas turns to name and explore a gap between consciousness and obligation.' That makes sense.

Levinas works in the tradition of the monadic phenomenology of Husserl, which proposes the reduction as a methodological preface to thought, a leading back to the living present of intentional experience, even if it never manages to attain such purity. Levinas rightly recoils from treating organic beings as phenomena just like trees or stones. There is no way you are going to get the ethical from 'phenomena.'

What this suggests is that the pathway to Levinas is through Husserl Likewise with Derrida. Husserl's phenomenology is Derrida's most immediate philosophical heritage. Derrida usually characterises the traditional concept of experience in the philosophical tradition of the West as "the experience of presence," an absolute proximity to consciousness of that which is experienced. The justification for this association of "experience" with "presence" is Derrida's reading of Husserl's phenomenology as carring the traditional sense of experience as an experience of presence to its most explicit expression.

If the pathway to Levinas is through Husserl (and, preumably Heidegger),then we come upon a fork: one leads to aesthetics and the other to ethics. It is an oppositional polarity within the contemporary Continental philosophical scene (including the North American, British, and Australian outposts?) since many who take the aesthetic pathway appear to treat ethics as trivial or secondary. Those who take the ethics pathway have little time for serious aesthetics.

It appear that Levinas and his students represent one of the few ethical possiblities with their concern for the priority of the other person and of responsibility. It would also appear that Levinas, and his students, have almost no direct engagement with the Frankfurt School and its ethical concerns. Levinas appropriates Jewish religious traditions of interpretation to develop a (humanistic?) ethics.

What Hart is suggesting is that Levinas' analyses of the sites where pre-original alterity coincides with the other person ---death, sexuality and fecundity---is the ground for ethics. Even though I have no idea what pre-original alterity means (does pre-original mean pre-reflective?) I can see that this phenomenology is outside of, and disconnected from, the phenomenology of Hegel.

Yet this is an ontology of social space that is constituted ethically; a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life. This suggests that practical conflicts can be understood as an ethical moment in the movement occurring within a collective social life and give us the formative process of ethical life practical conflicts in which conflicts would make subjects aware of the underlying relations of recognition. This gives us an ethically textured conflict model of social progress (isn't this what Marx latched onto?) that makes the role of struggle, conflict and transgression a part of the ethical.

Aren't the concerns of both Levinas and Hegel with injustices to the other? Is not this injustice enacted in cultural practices of sacrifice and scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the other to the same in laws of immigration?

Why should we take Levinas' pathway to the ethical, rather than Hegel's? I can see the Levinas' emphasis on unsettling the self in order to open the self to the other. Does not that pathway also lead to an ethics whose response to big time evil is to say that suffering is truly useless; that only my own suffering undergone for another is capable of meaning; and that ethical responsibility is based on a refusal to justify another's suffering.

It is not clear to me why we should walk down Levinas' ethical pathway.