conversations

The question of the transcendental vs. empirical abuts upon a question of technical phenomenology, which Levinas refuses. (No doubt referring to Husserl, he says one could become entirely absorbed with methodological questions at the expense of addressing any really interesting issues.) "Totality and Infinity" is caught up in the paradox of using the means of phenomenological reason to critique and step out of the presuppositions of phenomenological reason. Hence some of the formulations there will still treat of basic conditions as "transcendental". The basic point about the phenomenon of "the face" of the other is that it constitutively resists and repels any incorporation, whether cognitive or practical, into the unity of a phenomenological, intentional "constitution". The other is a source of intentionality, which, whatever its practical or semantic manifestations, withholds itself from the latter. (Hence there can be no Husserlian "constitution" of "intersubjectivity" through the cross-sections of such intentionalities, since the "empathic" identification of such intentionalities is question-begging.) There are two parallels and contrasts with Heidegger here. One is that "that which conceals itself in revealing itself" is transferred from "Being" itself onto the other qua other. The second is that the "Zugen" of "Being", which gets translated as "traits", but just as well, more literally, means "draws" or "pulls", are attributed rather to the modal relation to the other, which is "manifested" solely through the inflections of the "saying" upon anything that is "said". Hence the upshot here is that the very manifestation of "the face" of the other disrupts and overturns the project of the "transcendental constitution" of the world, whether it concerns the epistemological question of knowledge or the ontological question of Being. But it does so "phenomenologically", that is, precisely from within the world. "Transcendental" means fundamentally referring to a necessary "condition of possibility", whereby the world is or can be projected, which is to say, it requires a recuperating, self-mastering "presence" as the basis of the world, which is the very thing that Levinas is denying, in insisting on the relation to the other as "pre-original" and referring to an immemorial past. But just as well, that relation to the other is constitutive of the singularity of a self from without any being of the world. The upshot, then, is that "the ethical", as a source of normativity, is angular to and a fundamentally different dimension from any normative conception, whether epistemological or ontological, of "truth", regardless of whether the former can be said to subtend the latter or not.

I myself have trouble with Levinas' insistence on the primacy of ethics as "first philosophy" or "fundamental". The question is whether there can be any normativity of "truth" without it being subtended by an ethics of justice. Clearly, Levinas' "fundamental ethics" is meant to show forth the source of there being anything like ethical normativity at all and its unavoidability, rather than providing any systematic rational prescriptive ethics, as per impossibile and a reification of the very point of there being ethics. "Ethics" here means an account of the transformative dimension of the ethical, regardless of any state of being. That would contrast with any technological/instrumentalistic account of the transformation of any state of being, as the transformation of human relationships is more fundamental than and criterial for any such potential. But just the same it's doubtful that any ethical project could fail to take into account its truth conditions. The normativity of justice and the normativity of truth, for all that each falls upon the particularity of instances, are cross-implicated. "Truth" without "justice" would go by the name of "cynicism", whereas the opposite would be "fanaticism". Levinas' point against "ontology", it seems to me, apart from the difference between the normative dimensions of "truth" and "justice", focuses on the contingency and hence fatality of any state of being, which resists the "necessity" of any (ontologically projected) order of being, in the name of the "universality" of justice.

Which brings us to the question of the political implications of Levinas' philosophy, which the reviewed academics were so keen to remark upon. But the answer is that there are no (direct) political implications, that Levinas is focused narrowly on ethics rather than the more gnarled questions of politics. As I've said before, part of the point of Levinas work is to set limits to the political, in terms of a pre- and post-political dimension, so as to forestall ideological or "Hegelian" murder. But the political domain raises the realistic question of the third, the other that is other to my relation to the other. It all but inevitably occurs that in honoring my obligation to the other, I impugn or transgress the claims of the third. Levinas point about irremissible responsibility means precisely that, in any commitment that I undertake, I remain accountable to and responsible for the very violations of the other others that "necessarily" occur. I must bear and repair such accountability. Hence, aside from pointing to the "break" to any sheer relations of power involved in the relation to the other and the corresponding introgression of a self, any political relations are subject to the delimiting constraints of such transgression/reparation. Which means that any given institutional arrangements are subject to pre-political, "an-archic", criticism and arraignment,- (on the Biblical model of the prophets and the kings). Implicitly and sotto voce, Levinas entire work is a post-holocaustal thinking. Were he have attempted to think the Holocaust in ontological terms, presumably he would have ended up with some sort of gnostic monstrosity. But the Holocaust was not just the murder or annihilation of contingent human beings. Implicitly, its project was to retract their very existence. (Jews were to be eliminated because they were unaesthetic, a blemish on the beautiful order of Being). As Benjamin put it prospectively, should the fascists triumph, "even the dead would not be safe". Levinas' insistence on the unretractability, in its very intractability, on the irremissibility, of the relation to the other is set against any such project.

After "Totality and Infinity", Levinas worked to eliminate his dependency on the phenomenological idiom/method, with its transcendental/ontological/projective dependencies, resulting in the terribly difficult idiom of "Beyond Essence or Otherwise than Being" and its rhetorical method of "exorbitation". Its leitmotif of "insomnia", promoted from early phenomenological descriptions, is apostophized, in mock-Heideggerian idiom, as "a formalism more formal than any possible formalism". I take that to mean that "insomnia" occurs as a formal structure within experience, qua sensibility and affectivity, without being separated from it as a transcendental condition of its possibility. It is not something subsisting unto itself, but, folded one way, it might be intentional consciousness, whether practical or theoretical/cognitive, another way, the dread of being-towards-death, still another way, the guilt-strickenness of conscience or the tenderness of the erotic caress. But all such syndromes are penetrated by, inspirited with and denuded from the "infinity" of the relation to the other. In other words, philosophy is to be de-transcendentalized: stripped of its ontological defences, thinking is cast into its restlessness and its degrees of wakefulness.

Comments