Facing the Other

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

Sean Hand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317832485
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself.

This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.

Chapter 1

The Feminine, Otherness, Dwelling

Feminist Perspectives on Levinas

Alison Ainley

Anglia Polytechnic University

The feminine is described as the of itself other, as the origin of the very concept of alterity.

The pathos of love consists in an insurmountable duality of beings. (Levinas)

In developing an ethical philosophy which attempts to approach relations with others in a very different way, Levinas also opens up the question of sexual difference. From his earliest works where he first formulates the connection between le féminin, ethics and otherness, through his discussion of eros, voluptuosity and fecundity in Totality and Infinity, to the section on maternity in Otherwise Than Being Levinas explicitly raises the issue of embodiment and sexual difference in the context of philosophy. This approach to difference conjoins with Levinas’ thinking about radical otherness and ethics in a way which seems to offer some scope and potential for feminist philosophy.¹ Levinas is an intriguing figure in this regard, partly because of his strikingly different approach to ethics and partly because it is unusual for a philosopher to give such a central place to sexuality and to write so specifically about otherness as feminine. But Levinas’ equivocal stance on these questions perhaps gives rise to similarly equivocal responses to his work. Luce Irigaray, philosopher and psychoanalyst, has written remarkable essays on Levinas’ work from a feminist perspective,² and it is her reading of Levinas I will consider shortly.

Although the connection between ethics and otherness as feminine in Levinas’ writing was first noted by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex as early as 1949³ as part of her examination of Woman as Other, her footnote on Levinas is quite dismissive. Given that her project in that book is to explore the damaging conflation of femininity as a quality or property with the female sex, where women are cast as Other in ways which appear to compromise their freedom, it is perhaps not surprising that she is wary of Levinas’ account of le féminin. For de Beauvoir, Levinas is presenting yet another image of the eternal feminine as man’s other, thereby placing women back into the problematic or inappropriate role of the essentially other once again.

But both de Beauvoir and Levinas do recognize that the issue of sexual difference raises questions for traditional philosophical approaches to ethics. Bringing attention to this issue through the history and vocabulary of philosophy ensures that this problem can be re-addressed in a philosophical context. This approach makes it possible to put together the questions raised by phenomenology and existentialism regarding embodiment and lived experience on the one hand, and feminist questions about power and relations between the sexes on the other. After de Beauvoir, feminists have continued to reflect on the philosophical resources available for approaches to questions of sexual difference. Some have extended or expanded de Beauvoir’s thoughts about Woman as Other, but have also raised doubts about the particular goals of equality and freedom that de Beauvoir seems to espouse. De Beauvoir’s existentialist approach aims to establish reciprocity as a relation of equality which would level out differences and makes women equal to men. But the projects for both sexes are assumed to be the same, to unite them under a universal principle of similarity and make them part of a moral community whose existence is assumed before ethics. The particularity of difference, the very reason ethics calls for respect for others, seems to be effaced by making such differences merely contingent features.

It is these assumptions which Levinas challenges by making ethics ‘prior’ to ontology and suggesting the face-to-face relation comes ‘before’ philosophy, in immediacy. The suggestion that it might be possible to think ‘otherwise’ to the mainstream Western tradition attracts the attention of feminists seeking to raise critical questions about the construction and maintenance of that philosophical tradition.

I will begin, however, with the question of dwelling in Levinas’ work, since it introduces the general problem of ‘being at home’ and what this might mean. The explicitly Heideggerian theme of ‘homelessness’ as the deracinated condition of modernity seeks to capture a sense of crisis in contemporary relations, and, perhaps, to provoke a search for more appropriate forms of living. The question of dwelling also opens up the contrast of the privatized realm of the home with the public sphere, a prevalent theme in feminist ethics when the public/private split maps on to sexual divisions (although I do not deal with this area of feminist theory here). Dwelling also raises questions about what it might mean for women to feel ‘at home’ in philosophy, particularly when the discipline has tended to prioritize particular clusters of questions and practices associated with masculinity.

What Levinas has to say about dwelling in Totality and Infinity clearly refers back to Heidegger. The possibility of ‘dwelling poetically’, of building locations in language, in the material world and in philosophical ontology, is, for Heidegger, a re-thinking of an elemental, material basis of existence. It implies a reconsideration of the philosophical history which has housed our metaphysical questioning since the beginnings of Greek philosophy, and an attempt to re-address the destructive technological potential now threatening to annihilate our world utterly. To dwell for Heidegger, then, is obviously much more than the domesticity of home living. In the course of the essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, he points out that the old meaning of building as dwelling – literally staying in the same place – also had connotations of being at peace, to free or to spare as an activity of ‘letting be’ (1977: 327). This also signified preserving, cherishing, care and cultivation. But building can also be read as the creating of edifices, construction and making, suggesting a merely instrumental relation to a location. Cultivation, care in order to allow growth, has been replaced by domination and control. Heidegger’s essay then calls for the recognition of the older version of dwelling which would, in ‘sparing the earth, set it free into its own essence’ (1977: 318) and allow us to see ‘the real plight of dwelling’ (1997: 339). This recognition can also be connected to the development of more ethical intersubjective relations, and the possibility of allowing the flourishing of different forms of life. The phenomenological and hermeneutic dimensions to Heidegger’s suggestions about dwelling (he points out that it is really by virtue of human horizons that location or space are to be grasped at all [1977: 334]) would suggest that the understanding of space is open for revision and re-interpretation. But whether Heidegger’s ‘dwelling’ is in fact another form of colonization, closure, and repression, subsuming relations with others under more anonymous headings, is the question which preoccupies both Levinas and Irigaray.

Despite the obvious and acknowledged influence of Heidegger upon his work, (Levinas writes: ‘It is impossible to be stinting in our admiration for the intellectual vigour of Sein und Zeit, particularly in the light of the immense output this extraordinary book of 1927 inspired. Its supreme steadfastness will mark it forever.’ [1989b: 487]), Levinas attempts to separate his own phenomenological reading of dwelling from Heidegger’s, in three main ways. Levinas sees Heidegger’s attempt to return to the elemental through a re-thinking of ‘dwelling’ as a will to return to ‘a peasant rootedness’, ‘a pagan existence’ entailing ‘a rule of power more inhuman than technology’ (1987: 52). The question of being, understood from this perspective, is not merely about the ‘letting be’ of Being, but the brutal imposition of an impersonal ontology, which Levinas links with Heidegger’s Nazi connections. Levinas also suggests that in making death or mortality the horizon of Being, Heidegger foregrounds negation at the expense of the dimension of lived existence, and prioritizes the individual’s relation with his own death at the expense of relations with others (Levinas prioritizes ‘enjoyment’, and being with others). Finally, because Levinas employs a sensualized, erotic phenomenology, he is able to accuse Heidegger of making Being neutral, asexual or de-sexualised.⁴ As Irigaray will suggest, not all of the criticisms Levinas makes are exactly fair, although she does make use of the last criticism for her own feminist reading of Heidegger. She writes:

Being (être) is used to refer to a disposition which leads me to approach any being (étant) in a certain way. In this sense, the philosophy of Heidegger cannot be seen simply as an ‘ethics of the “fruits of the earth’” (nourritures terrestres), nor of the enjoyment (jouissance) of objects, such as the other in sexual love. (cf. Totalité et infini: 45–6, Totality and Infinity: 62–4). The philosophy of Heidegger is more ethical than the expression conveys, than his philosophy itself says explicitly. To consider the other within the horizon of being should mean to respect the other. It is true that the definition of Being in terms of mortal destiny rather than in terms of living existence raises questions about the nature of respect. And in addition, this philosophy is more or less silent on man’s sexual dimension (la dimension de l’homme comme sexué), an irreducible human dimension (1991: 114).

In Totality and Infinity Levinas explicitly links the notion of ‘the welcome of the home’, and dwelling with le féminin, as one means of elucidating the ‘immanent transcendence’ of his thought, and as an attempt to redress the neutrality of Heideggerian dwelling (1969: 154). For Levinas, otherness and ethical care are already present in the structures of ‘interiority’ and ‘habitation’, and already imply a feminine dimension, a dimension which disrupts ‘the virility of the force of Being’. The ‘intimate familiarity’ (1969: 154) of the feminine is a realm where dwelling is in enjoyment, the proximate contact with an other neither based upon disembodied consciousness nor on physical mastery. The feminine, as the instantiation of interiority and habitation, is ‘a dimension’ through which it will be possible to ‘await the revelation of transcendence’ (1969: 150). As a dimension, rather than an essential definition of a sex, the feminine presents another way of approaching questions of subjectivity and ethics.⁵

This equivocal realm is later characterized in terms of a relation of love (éros), an ambiguous and erotic encounter which establishes both vulnerability and the responsibility owed to an other. The caress, the mode of touch which brings two into close contact, does not suggest a prior structure into which the particular instance will fit, but a ‘fundamental disorder’, an immediacy of discovery which engages with the material and carnal existence of an other without exhausting its meaning.

The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet … It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search … what the caress seeks is not situated in a perspective and in the light of the graspable. (1969: 257)

For Irigaray, this mode of relation accords with her own attempts to think the ethical implications of sexually different beings in close proximity, where difference is preserved even as an exchange takes place, and where the flourishing of new potential is born out of the creativity of discovery. It is Levinas’ description of a relation where possession is suspended and the fixity of subject/object transformed that intrigues Irigaray, and influences her reading of ethics in a phenomenological mode. The possibility of ‘rebirth’, mutual enrichment, and a freeing of the dangerous constrictions of stereotypical sexual roles suggests, for Irigaray, ethical potential for relations with others which opens up the radical difference of alterity. It is ‘the fecundity of a love whose most elementary gesture, or deed, remains the caress’ (1993: 186). In seeking ‘an ethics of the passions’ (1981: 12) Irigaray seems to share Levinas’ view that ethics might arise in the material and carnal encounter, in the ‘ambiguity of love’ (1969: 254).

Levinas suggests that the equation of otherness and the feminine can be taken up as an existing equation – but the context in which he places this equation also has potentially subversive implications, not only for philosophical themes but also for method. Rather than domesticating the feminine, the preservation of difference as absolutely other is a prelude to ethical relations which do not seek to reduce, capture or flatten out the specificity of the other. One of the reasons Levinas characterizes otherness in this way, as we have seen, is to reproach Heidegger for what seems to have been forgotten; the question of sexuality in relation to ontology. This question might be re-phrased as it was put to Derrida in an interview (1982: 66): ‘Is sexuality merely a regional question within ontology, or would sexuality challenge the very possibility of a general ontology?’ Because Levinas identifies ontology with totality, or Being as such, sexuality (or sexual difference) is one way to disrupt the totalizing closure of metaphysics and open it up for ethics, or to ensure that the other retains the otherness of difference. As Derrida comments in an essay on Levinas, ‘Totality and Infinity pushes the respect for disymmetry so far that it seems impossible, essentially impossible that it could have been written by a woman … Is not this principled impossibility … unique in the history of metaphysics?’ (1981: 320, fn. 92). This mode of writing is a way of approaching philosophical questions which refuses to assume neutrality or objectivity and seems prepared to recognize the embodied nature of thought, to try to think ‘otherwise’ to existing patterns of thought.

However, Levinas’ evocation of le féminin has to face the charge that it is merely instrumental, in so far as it is used as a reminder of the materiality of lived existence, but ultimately seems to be in service to a larger conception of ethical goodness: the path of metaphysical transcendence. Despite Levinas’ insistence that this path is opened through experience and through ethical relations with others, the feminine seems to ‘furnish’ the face-to-face relation. Irigaray takes issue with Levinas on this point in her essay ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, a clarification and counterpoint to the earlier essay ‘The Fecundity of the Caress’. She had already warned of the danger that:

The beloved woman would be mute or reduced to speaking in the spaces between the male lover’s discourse. She would be relegated to his shadow as double … She is brought into a world that is not her own so that the male lover may enjoy himself and gain strength for his voyage toward an autistic transcendence. (1993: 208)

In ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’ she reiterates this charge, suggesting that although Levinas ‘opens the feminine in philosophy’ yet he still seems to ‘write out’ the feminine, so that there is no place for women in what Levinas proposes – as she puts it: ‘the caress, that “fundamental disorder”, does not touch the other’ (1991: 110). She adds:

To caress, for Levinas, consists, therefore, not in approaching the other in its most vital dimension, the touch, but in the reduction of that vital dimension of the other’s body to the elaboration of a future for himself … This description of the caress is a good example of the way in which the temporality of the male subject … makes use of the support of the feminine in the intentionality of pleasure for its own becoming. (1991: 110)

She goes on to argue that we have not yet reached an age in which onto-theological issues can simply be reintroduced with impunity – therefore she suggests that although Heidegger may have ‘shelved’ the question of the relation between philosophy and theology, Levinas mixes them together (or rather, ‘intentionally fails to distinguish the foundations’) (1991: 114). The divine, which is the incomplete, unfinished promise to come, glimpsed th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Feminine, Otherness, Dwelling: Feminist Perspectives on Levinas
• 2 On Substitution
• 3 Levinas and Freud: Talmudic Inflections in Ethics and Psychoanalysis
• 4 Shadowing Ethics: Levinas’s View of Art and Aesthetics
• 5 ‘Let’s Leave God Out of This’: Maurice Blanchot’s Reading of Totality and Infinity
• 6 Infinition and Apophanisis: Reverberations of Spinoza in Levinas
• 7 A Supreme Heteronomy? Arche and Topology in Difficult Freedom
• 8 Levinas and the Jewish Ideal of the Sage
• 9 On Time and Salvation: The Eschatology of Emmanuel Levinas
• Bibliography