A nice excerpt from Levinas that merits some close attention.

Levinas' relation to Hegel is interesting. It's well-known that he opposed the Hegelian system. But I don't yet know precisely how or why he does so.

In one respect Hegel could be an ally for Levinas, if one considers the mutual dependence of consciousness on one another. "No subjectivity without intersubjectivity," one might say.

The contrast with Hegel suggests that Levinas is not a thinker of equality, mutuality and reciprocity; he is a thinker of asymmetry, guilt, passivity, and what he calls "substitution." The other comes from the outside and he calls my spontaneity into question; he asks me, "by what right?," and I am answerable to the other. Before, I was answerable to no one; I lived and enjoyed. Now, I am answerable to the other, and I am responsible to he other even before I am responsible to myself.

Yet we should not forget that Levinas decisively sided with Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and even defended the Sabra massacre in 1987. Sharon, who permitted the massacre to take place, is under indictment for war crimes because of his actions taken in this incident.

In short: here's an ethics of passivity and asymmetry and being hostage to the other which is used to apologize for what many consider to be war crimes.

It's hard not to sense that something has gone wrong here. But I don't know what.

Perhaps Levinas was personally unable to see the humanity of the other when the other is a Palestinian, and this attests to the ways in which thinkers can fall short of their own thoughts.

Perhaps seeing the humanity of the other and putting them in a concentration camp are not incompatible. (But if that's the case, then Levinas' project is a failure.)

Dr. Spinozs:

I'm not sure what you refer to in saying Levinas "defended" the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1987, but if rather you're referring to the Finkelraut interview in 1982, that's a gross mischaracterization amounting to a slur. In the first place, the interview took place just after news of the atrocity was first broadcast, when it was not as yet clear exactly what had happened and what the lines of responsibility were. He was asked whether the Palestinian was not the other of the Jew. In the first place, he rejected the (implicitly ethnocentric) terms of the question, explaining that the other is any other, and then distinguished the level of the other from the level where the problem of the other of the other, the third, arises, since one's responsibility for the other includes realizing the the other is related to still other others and questions of justice must be delimited in those terms. The statement, then, that "Israel" is itself the place of the other is not an assertion of ethno-centric identification, but rather the imposition of a normative obligation on the very notion of "Israel". Levinas' admittedly idealized acceptation of Zionism bears as much relation to an uncritical endorsement of really existent Zionism, as Adorno's Marxism does to "really existent socialism": in both cases, it is a matter of rehabilitating the particular beyond, rather than over against the "universal". One can take issue with any number of problems with Levinas' thinking, but stupidity is not one of them.

The relation of Levinas' thinking to Hegel is a curious topic. (I myself took some stabs at it below.) Levinas, of course, was not alone in a certain animus and revolt against the dialectical "Aufhebung"; aside from proximate French neo-Nietzscheans, something of the some impulse animates Heidegger (and Benjamin, as well). But the contrast is intriguing: the Hegelian "absolute" is infinite self-reference in otherness, whereas the Levinasian "absolute" is the infinite otherness in self-reference. Levinas' insistence on the asymmetry of the ethical relation to the other, aside from claiming a priority of the ethical, as "pre-original", to any established oder of being, and hence a fracturing of any such order, "an-archy", makes the obvious point that the imperativeness of morality is not vitiated amidst the reality of evil, which may attend any established order. The Hegelian notion of "Anerkennung", introduced with the master-slave dialectic, after all, quickly becomes sublimated into and lost by a dialectical "Logic" of reflective thought, which culminates in the "pure self", which "reconciles" the real with the rational, that is, rationalizes the given order of the world, rendering the other and the "equality" of one's symmetrical relation to the other merely projective.

The other point, with respect to the passage Gary cites above, is that the asymmetry and hence "infinity" of the relation to the other is a riposte to Heideggerian "Sein-zum-Tod"; that is, it is a limit that is prior to and more constitutive than any consideration of or concern with death. Levinas thus refuses the world as a finite totality: at the root of Levinas' conception of the ethical is the notion that "another world is possible", in a way much different from, more existentially and historically concrete than, the Kantian postulates.

John,

I accept your correction of my statement concerning the Finkelkraut interview. Thank you for putting this interview in context (both historical and in terms of Levinas' ethical project).

The comparison of Levinas' rehabilitation of Zionism with Adorno's rehabilitation of Marxism is very intriguing. I suppose that the criticisms of the dialectic by way of Rosensweig and Benjamin are part of the intellectual background here.

The main point which you hit on here, and which I think was missing from my previous comments, is the priority of ethics over ontology. In contrast to Hegel, in which the unity of the right and true is posited as an ideal or goal (but which already exists as a goal), Levinas uncovers an ethical relation which is somehow more fundamental than any totality.

However, the critique of ontology requires that ontology be a totality. I'd like to explore more carefully if the critique also applies to ontologies which are not totalities, i.e. Deleuze.

Levinas and Deleuze: two ways out of the Husserl-Hegel double-bind?

I can readily agree that Levinas' distinction between "totality" and "infinity" follows Kant's distinction between knowledge (which is confined to possible experience) and thought (which allows us to conceive of the postulates of practical reason). And in that respect Levinas undoes Hegel's attempt to re-integrate the Kantian distinction. (But here I may be basing my understanding on a deficient understanding of Hegel.)

Dr. Spinoza:

Levinas had no apparent knowledge of or contact with the Frankfurt School, (which, in retrospect, seems rather willful), but he cites Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" as one of his primary sources of inspiration. I myself know next to nothing of Rosenzweig, but I'd guess that some of what I pick up on from Benjamin transmits something of his influence on Benjamin.

Levinas was, though little known, a key "player" in the post-war French reception of Heidegger, such that some of his philosophical attitude bears some resemblance to the French philosophers that in the Anglophone world are termed "post-structuralist", though Levinas was actually a generation older, if a bit of a late bloomer. But one difference is that he is untouched by "structuralism", refusing to theorize about language, as opposed to the phenomenological interpretation of "meaning": the point would be that language is always a modal,- ("illocutionary"),- relation to an other, which subtends and inflects, as "saying", whatever signs or semantic categories, the "said", might be deployed. That philosophical "fact" is what he leverages as the source of "the ethical". I don't know from Deleuze, (though Gary has been dealing with him), and don't particularly find him intelligible, but I think the point that Levinas insists upon is that "the ethical" is a completely different dimension from the normativity of cognition or ontology, "truth". In other words, "the ethical" is angular to any possible ontology, even a deliberately pluralistic one. The "ethical", whose source is the relation to the other, as something that exceeds any particular norms, is a transformative dimension, which would not depend on any changes in being, even as it is implicated in them.

Levinas' conception of ethics, as "fundamental", is obviously deontic and partly directed against any utilitarian/instrumentalist, consequentialist conception, which brings up a comparison to Kant. But, among the differences, in contrast to Kant's positing of the "fact" of pure practical reason, Levinas uncovers a "fact" phenomenologically, that is, undeniably, which concerns a concrete mode of existence and not an intellectual deduction, and which is not based on the supposed necessity of my freedom qua "autonomy" as the ground of any possible morality, but rather defines freedom as "heteronomous", as the "law" of the other, which precedes, as "responsibility", (the assumption of) my freedom- no doubt, a diffficult thought. Still another difference is that the other is not a (function of) thought, but rather precisely what can not, does not allow itself to, be thought, except in the mode of obsession/persecution/substitution/insomnia.