Levinas and the Political

Howard Caygill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415112499
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831425
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Howard Caygill systematically explores for the first time the relationship between Levinas' thought and the political. From Levinas' early writings in the face of National Socialism to controversial political statements on Israeli and French politics, Caygill analyses themes such as the deconstruction of metaphysics, embodiment, the face and alterity. He also examines Levinas' engagement with his contemporaries Heidegger and Bataille, and the implications of his rethinking of the political for an understanding of the Holocaust.

1

PRESENTIMENTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

What remains for me is the general application of the phenomenological analysis discovered by Husserl, and also, the horror of 1933. (EI)

Political horror

In ‘Signature’ – the autobiographical sketch that closes Difficult Freedom – Levinas described his life as a ‘disparate inventory…dominated by the presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror’ (DF, 291). He expressed this even more forcefully in a 1986 interview with François Poirié by asking ‘Will my life have been spent between the incessant presentiment of Hitlerism and the Hitlerism that refuses itself to any forgetting?’ (RB, 39) By locating the consistency of his life and signature between the presentiment and the memory of political horror, Levinas unambiguously aligned his philosophical work with the thinking of the political, or, more precisely, with the thinking of political horror. The event of National Socialism, feared and mourned, marks all of Levinas’s writing, from the early phenomenological texts of the 1930s to the late essays on prophetic politics and human rights.

Levinas’s two major philosophical works – Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority (1961) and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974) – are both works of mourning for the victims of National Socialism. Levinas described the critique of totality worked through in all its ramifications in Totality and Infinity as following ‘a political experience that we have still not forgotten’.¹ This political and personal experience is explicitly recalled in the dedication of Otherwise than Being to ‘the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, 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’, followed by the names in Hebrew of Levinas’s murdered family.² Yet, while the working through of a life and an authorship suspended between the presentiment and ineluctable memory of political horror marks everything written under Levinas’s signature, it does not exhaust its possibilities, for the work of mourning the political horror of Nazism and its consequences is also dedicated to exploring the possible openings for a non-fascist modern politics.

An important dimension of the attempt to mourn the event of National Socialism was the understanding of what it implied for philosophy. This required not only the analysis of the ways in which philosophy was implicated in National Socialism, an inquiry opened as early as the 1934 essay ‘Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, but also the implications of continuing to philosophise after its defeat. The complicity of philosophy with political horror was unforgettably figured in the work and National Socialist political allegiances of Martin Heidegger. In almost every post-war reference to his former teacher, Levinas describes both National Socialism and Heidegger’s involvement with it as ‘unforgettable’ events, after which neither politics nor philosophy could remain the same.³ The question of the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his National Socialist politics remained open for Levinas until the end. In a late reflection (1988) on this question, ‘As if Consenting to Horror’,⁴ Levinas confronted Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. His erstwhile ‘firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance’ separated the ‘extreme analytical virtuosity of the one’ from ‘the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by evil’ in the other was already shaken in the early 1930s and hardly restored by Heidegger’s posthumous self-justification in the ‘Only a God can Save Us’: the Spiegel Interview (1966). Just as it was impossible to forget National Socialism, so was it impossible to forget the complicity of Heidegger and, through him, of philosophy in its crimes.⁵

On a certain reading of Levinas’s oft acknowledged debt to Heidegger, Levinas mourns the victims of National Socialism while remaining indebted to a philosophical language – Heideggerian phenomenology – deeply implicated in it.⁶ Far from the later alignment of Being and Time and Mein Kampf ventured in ‘As if Consenting to Horror’, Levinas’s thought can be taken as a development of the non- or anti-National Socialist elements that can be found in Heidegger’s thought. Another reading would affirm Levinas’s debt to Husserl over that to Heidegger, and see in his work a development and defence of Husserlian phenomenology against Heidegger’s alleged misappropriation.⁷ Each of these readings carry with them a particular politics and a particular way of working through the memory of National Socialism, but, by exclusively reading his work with respect to the phenomenological tradition, they underestimate the complexity of Levinas’s development.

The price of locating Levinas too exclusively in the phenomenological tradition is a loss of political and philosophical focus. His debt to phenomenology was always qualified by other considerations, primarily by the Jewish prophetic and talmudic traditions but also by the historical climate of his French philosophical education at the University of Strasbourg during the 1920s. The latter institution was imbued with the philosophical and political ‘principles of ’89’, namely the tradition of radical republicanism bequeathed by the French Revolution of 1789. The inquiry into the relationship between the republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity was for the members of the Strasbourg school never far from even the most abstract of their philosophical analyses.⁸ Levinas’s immersion in these debates predated his turn to phenomenology, and in many subtle respects gave his reading of Husserl and Heidegger its peculiar direction and momentum. During the late 1920s and early 1930s it was the republican more than the Jewish or phenomenological traditions that shaped Levinas’s presentiments of National Socialism, although from the mid-1930s these were articulated in the language of the phenomenological and Jewish traditions.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

…it is necessary to fight for the Republic (DF)

Levinas claimed that certain presentiments of National Socialism predated his arrival in France to study at the University of Strasbourg in 1923: he avoided studying in Germany not only because of the inflation and terroristic disorders of the early Weimar Republic, but also ‘a presentiment perhaps’ (RB, 28). With the exception of certain incidents during visits across the border that exposed the ambient anti-Semitism of the German university, Levinas’s years in Strasbourg were marked only indirectly by the emergence of the German National Socialist movement. Yet the question of the relationship between the Jewish experience and the founding principles of political modernity – liberty, equality and fraternity enshrined in the revolutionary declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen – had taken on a new urgency in the wake of the ‘Dreyfus Affair’. The debate on the meaning of these principles and their relationship to each other was as old as the Revolution, but it had been sharpened in the late nineteenth century by the anti-Semitic injustice of the fate of Alfred Dreyfus. The Affair provoked a debate on the character of the French Republic that continued directly and indirectly into the early decades of the twentieth century. Levinas arrived at Strasbourg carrying with him the Eastern European heroic folk memory of Dreyfus, and later often recalled how moved he was to discover that the ethical and political implications of the affair were still being worked through by French philosophers and sociologists such as his teachers Charles Blondel, Maurice Pradines, Maurice Halbwachs and Henri Carteron.⁹

In his recollections of Strasbourg, Levinas recalled specifically the ‘very strong impression’ made by Maurice Pradines’s course on the relation between ethics and politics. Pradines’s use of the Dreyfus Affair as an example of ethics overcoming politics was obviously important for the development of Levinas’s later thoughts on the relationship between ethics and politics.¹⁰ Yet the direct and indirect significance of the Dreyfus affair for the development of Levinas’s philosophy was far more profound. It formed a locus for the statement of his radical republican politics and its relationship to the issues of nation and race. The Affair highlighted the importance of the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity but called also for their reformulation, especially with respect to the third principle of ‘fraternity’. Instead of regarding the principle of fraternity in classical Jacobin terms of the male nation armed, or in those of the pre-political fraternal categories of class, gender, race or religious confession, Levinas was stimulated by his teachers at Strasbourg to seek an ethical concept of fraternity framed in terms of solidarity with the victim of injustice.

In her chapter on the Dreyfus Affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt claimed that ‘the Dreyfus affair in its entirety offers a foregleam of the twentieth century’ and that its ‘true sequel’ took place not in France but in National Socialist Germany.¹¹ The controversy surrounding the Affair continued well into the twentieth century and even in 1924, the year of Levinas’s arrival at Strasbourg, the rightist and anti-Dreyfusard Action française (1899–1944) republished the anti-Dreyfusard Precis de l’affaire Dreyfus, while in 1931 an anti-Dreyfusard play by Rehfish and Wilhelm Herzog, L’affaire Dreyfus, was staged in Paris.¹² The slogan ‘Death to the Jews’ that emerged at the time of the Affair was revived by the French fascists and widely used from the mid-1930s. For Arendt the Dreyfus Affair was a presentiment of National Socialism whose significance became increasingly ominous during the 1930s.

The facts of the Dreyfus case should now be uncontroversial, but at the time, and throughout the Third Republic and beyond, their significance was violently disputed. The discovery, by a French spy in the office of the German military attaché, of a piece of handwritten paper promising to deliver French military secrets initiated the chain of events that led to the rapid condemnation for treason of the Jewish officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus. In a wave of official secrecy and anti-Semitism, Dreyfus was convicted by court martial, stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Two years later, new evidence emerged proving Dreyfus’s innocence, but the army high command refused to admit their error and attempted a cover-up with forged documents and the transfer of the new and inquisitive Head of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff, Colonel Picquart (who had become convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence) to Tunisia. In the face of mounting evidence for Dreyfus’s innocence, the army, supported by the Church and conservative public opinion, refused to reconsider its earlier verdict.

By 1898 a battle for public opinion opened with the publication of Zola’s J’accuse, and the call for acquittal was supported by other liberal Dreyfusards such as Anatole France, Charles Peguy and Emile Durkheim, along with the foundation of the League for the Rights of Man and Citizen.¹³ Zola was tried and convicted of calumny of the army, but with the emergence of new evidence and the confession of the real German spy Major Esterhazy, the high-level conspiracy to incriminate Dreyfus was revealed, and one of its architects, Colonel Henry, committed suicide. The case was re-examined by the Court of Appeal and, in 1899, the original sentence was annulled and the prison sentence reduced to ten years on the grounds of ‘alleviating circumstances’. Dreyfus was pardoned by the President a week later but was not to be acquitted until 1906 by the Court of Appeal. The case was never fully closed and Dreyfus continued to be an object of hatred and assassination attempts by the French Right until his death in 1935.

Beyond the facts of the case itself, the Dreyfus Affair became a shibboleth: in Arendt’s words, ‘The Dreyfus Affair in its political implications could survive because two of its elements grew in importance during the twentieth century. The first is hatred of the Jews; the second, suspicion of the republic itself, of Parliament and the state machine’.¹⁴ Behind both elements lay a broader, less articulated suspicion of the revolutionary principles declared in the Rights of Man and Citizen, and of their effect on the organisation of state and society. In the eyes of the Action française and Catholic France, the principle of fraternity – defined in terms of nation, religious confession or even race – was more important than the principles of liberty and equality. For liberals, however, the case called for a thorough rethinking of the place of fraternity within revolutionary principles, one that would make fraternity compatible with modern liberty and equality. An enlarged concept of fraternity would have to guard against excluding potential citizens from participation in the republic on the basis of their religious confession, gender or other distinguishing feature.

When Levinas arrived in Strasbourg in 1923, French philosophical culture continued to be marked by the reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair. More than an example in Pradines’s lectures on ethics and politics, the Dreyfus Affair was the site of the battle for the soul of French Republicanism and, as such, determined the climate of French thought. It was never far from the surface of the three main currents of French philosophy with which Levinas quickly became familiar: the Cartesian rationalism associated with Leon Brunschvicg; the sociological approach to philosophy pioneered by Emil Durkheim and represented in Strasbourg by Maurice Halbwachs; and the brilliant, idiosyncratic and extremely influential philosophising of Henri Bergson.¹⁵ In the highly politicised context of the Third Republic, each of these schools was situated within a particular political and cultural context inherited from the French Revolution and sharpened by the experience of the Dreyfus Affair. The first current regarded the founding declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen along with its principles to be rational, and considered sociability to rest on the free use of reason. The second, Durkheimian, school accepted the rational kernel of the declaration but argued that a sociologically informed education would supply the deficit of fraternity (anomie) that had emerged in the liberal modernity of liberty and equality. Bergson’s philosophy subordinated equality and fraternity to freedom, but freedom understood as radical spontaneity or ‘creativity’.

While Levinas was later to pay elegant tribute to the person and work of Brunschvicg¹⁶ by whom he was taught in the early 1930s, the main influence on his thought before the discovery of phenomenology came from the Durkheimian and Bergsonian schools represented by his teachers at Strasbourg. In the Nemo interviews, Levinas described his education at Strasbourg as an

Initiation in the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and the Cartesians, Kant. Not yet Hegel, in the 1920s in the faculty of letters at Strasbourg! But it was Durkheim and Bergson who seemed to me particularly alive in the teaching and in the interest of the students. There were the ones to be cited and the ones to be opposed. They had incontestably been the teachers of our teachers. (EI, 16)

Levinas’s teacher Maurice Halbwachs, later murdered in Buchenwald, worked in the Durkheimian tradition, applying Durkheim’s concept of collective representations to social class and collective memory. His work was indebted to the framework of Durkheim’s sociological analysis of modernity elaborated in the early 1890s and in its turn sharpened in response to the Dreyfus Affair.

The conceptual structure of collective representation and social solidarity adopted by Halbwachs from Durkheim was inseparable from the latter’s radical republican critique of the Third Republic and his defence of the revolutionary principles. In a programmatic essay, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, written in response to the Dreyfus Affair, Durkheim attempted to re-order the equation of liberty, equality and fraternity.¹⁷ Insisting on liberty and equality, he argued that they were not only compatible with fraternity, but were in fact inseparable from it. Modern individual liberty and equality were the outcome of fraternity understood as ‘organic solidarity’ – one that emerged from the social division of labour. In his Division of Labour in Society (1893) Durkheim opposed mechanical or pre-modern with organic or modern solidarity: the former emphasised social uniformity, the latter social differentiation. For Durkheim, the anti-Drefusards represented social regression, a return to mechanical solidarity and an understanding of fraternity in terms of such categories of ‘mechanical solidarity’ as church and nation. Durkheim’s work later led him to a closer analysis of the relationship of consciousness and social solidarity and the argument that a secular educational system would be the most appropriate institution for the teaching of the republican values of organic solidarity.

Levinas’s later assessment of the significance of Durkheim’s work and its often underestimated political and philosophical motivation is subtle, and explains why he did not abandon Durkheim’s categories and why they persist even in Totality and Infinity. However hard Durkheim tried to present himself as the founder of scientific sociology, he was always for Levinas first and foremost ‘a metaphysician’. Levinas perceptively understood Durkheim in terms of the derivation of ‘the fundamental categories of the social, or as one would call it today, an “eidetic of society” starting from the key tenet that the social cannot be reduced to the sum of individual psychologies’ (EI, 17). Unlike many critics of Durkheim, Levinas understood that the his critique of individualism was not undertaken in the name of totality or the renewal of mechanical solidarity, but in the name of differentiation or organic solidarity. It was intended to deepen and strengthen individual liberty and equality, rather than dissolve them into collective uniformity. Levinas’s description of Durkheim’s metaphysics of the social is framed in the language of his own later political philosophy:

The idea that the social is the order of the spiritual constitutes a new intrigue in being beyond animal and human psychism. The plan of ‘collective representations’ defined rigorously inaugurates the dimension of the spirit in the individual life itself where the individual comes to be recognised and even emancipated. There is with Durkheim, in a sense, a theory of the ‘levels of being’ and the irreducibility of these levels to each other – an idea which receives its full meaning in the Husserlian and Heideggerian context. (EI, 17)

At its strongest, the Durkheimian ‘social’ points beyond being; more modestly it establishes levels of being – the social, the psychic, the animal, consciousness – which cannot be reduced to each other. Levinas’s final comment may be read as a reference to his intellectual autobiography: what he learnt about the social from Durkheim was later given its ‘full meaning’ by Husserl and Heidegger. That is to say, the phenomenologists confirmed and deepened an insight into the nature of radical republican modernity that had already been prepared by the work of Durkheim. This insight was deepened through reflection upon the character of ontological difference, here pre-dating Heidegger and appearing within a very different political and intellectual cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Presentiments of National Socialism
• 2 The Post-War Political
• 3 Between War and Peace: the Burdens of Totality and Infinity
• 4 Prophetic Politics, or ‘Otherwise than Freedom’
• 5 Israel in Universal and Holy History
• Afterword: Strange Fire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index