Levinas, Law, Politics

Marinos Diamantides, Marinos Diamantides

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135308575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

Emmanuel Levinas' re-formulation of subjectivity, responsibility and the good has radically influenced post-structuralist thought. Political and legal theory, however, have only marginally profited from his moral philosophy. Levinas' theme of one's infinite responsibility for the other has often been romanticized by some advocates of multiculturalism and natural justice.

In this volume, political theorists, philosophers and legal scholars critically engage with this idealization of Levinas' ethics. The authors show that his crucial formulation of the idea of 'the other in me' does not offer a quick cure for today's nationalist, racist and religious divides. Nor does his notion of anarchic responsibility provide immediate relief for the agony of dealing with matters of life and death. The rebelliousness of Levinas' thought is rediscovered here and used to challenge preconceptions of social, legal and individual responsibility.

Part I
Face-to-face with the Other or just before the law?

Chapter 1

Politics not left to itself: recognition and forgiveness in Levinas’s philosophy

Julia Ponzio

1. Forgiveness and justification

Levinas’s work is an attempt to discover, to shed light on, what ‘stays beyond’ totality. The task of philosophy, Levinas says, is to ‘proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other.’¹ When philosophy proceeds beyond totality, discovering its exteriority, it reaches the ethical relation, the relation with the other, the absolute and unjustified responsibility for the other, and this means that philosophy reaches the ethics as a condition of possibility of ontology. The principal question I pose here is whether ‘the political’ in Levinas’s thought is placed on the level of what, in Otherwise than Being he calls ‘justice’ – defining it as ‘comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces (. . .) a co-presence in an equal footing as before a court of justice’² – or whether it is placed on the level of the ethical encounter where, as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, my spontaneity is called into question by the presence of the other.³ Ultimately what we are trying to understand is whether, for Levinas, the political has its place inside or beyond totality. In the last pages of Totality and Infinity Levinas writes:

‘In the measure that the face of the Other relates us with the third party, the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of the We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws which are the source of universality. But politics left to itself bears a Tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus as in absentia.’⁴

In this sentence the answer to our question about the place of the political in Levinas’s thought seems clear: it seems that the political is indeed placed on the level of totality and justice, that is to say on the level where, Levinas says, interiority is under the tyranny of totality. Levinas, however, specifies: it is not the politics in general that bears a tyranny within itself, but the ‘the politics left to itself,’ so we have to question: what is the meaning of a politics that is not left to itself and where is it placed with regard to the totality?

The very dense sentence quoted above contains all the problems that we want to deal with in this text. The principal one is that of the relation between inter-subjective recognition and the recognition of a position in a socio-political community. The inter-subjective recognition happens in the relation of what Levinas calls entre nous, that is the relation between two persons, in which the other is always a thou. In this relation, the other is addressed and recognised neither for his role in society, nor for his political rights, nor for what he owns, but for himself, for his irreplaceable otherness. The other in the entre nous is not a Third that demands justice, that claims for his rights, and for the recognition of his place in society but is the Feminine that is to say the irreplaceable otherness in the love relation. The problem of the relation between these two modalities of recognition is also, in Levinas’s thought, the problem of the relation between the other as Third and the other as Feminine. In a conversation with Bracha Lichtemberg-Ettiger, Levinas explains very clearly what he means with ‘feminine’:

Le féminine est cette différence, le féminine c’est cette chose inouïe dans l’humain par laquelle s’affirme le fait que sans moi le monde a un sens.⁵

In Levinas’s discourse, therefore, the ‘feminine’ is not related to biological sexual difference but signifies a human possibility. In fact, as Levinas says in an interview with Nemo:

‘All these allusions to the ontological difference between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attributes of every human being.’⁶

The other therefore, presents itself, in Levinas’s thought, in two modalities: the feminine and the third. The encounter with the feminine precedes language, identity, totality, history and justice but the constitution of identity, totality, history, and justice is determined by the encounter with the other as third. The fact that Levinas places the feminine at a level in which interiority does not yet have an identity, a language, a recognised place in society, has been often interpreted as a subordination of the feminine, as the impossibility of political participation and recognition of the feminine. In my opinion such critics, who have their most important references in Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray,⁷ disregard the fact that the entre nous and justice are not in Levinas’s thought two alternative and separated dimensions from which we have to choose, but they are deeply linked and the feminine is precisely the possibility of this link. Thus, this essay argues that Levinas does not relegate the feminine to a dimension that ‘precedes’ totality, justice, and socio-political recognition since, in his thought the feminine is the condition of possibility of the relation between totality and its beyond, of the relation between the socio-political recognition and the recognition in the entre nous. In what follows I show that what Levinas calls feminine, is not something, is not a state of being that could be placed in or beyond totality, but is a possibility, and precisely the possibility of the relation of the totality with its beyond. I think that such a possibility that the feminine represents, in Levinas’s thought is at the same time, the possibility of a politics not left to itself, that is to say a politics different from a detached and justified application of an already written law.

In order to reflect on the possibility of a ‘politics not left to itself ’ it is crucial to first clarify what kind of relation Levinas establishes between totality and its ‘beyond’. To clarify this relation, I argue, it is very useful to analyze the concept of forgiveness. In his essay The I and the Totality,⁸ written in 1954, Levinas defines the ethical dimension of the entre nous as the space in which forgiveness is possible. The space of forgiveness, says Levinas, is that of an intimate society, a society that ‘consists of two people, I and thou. We are among ourselves. Third parties are excluded’.⁹ Therefore, forgiveness becomes impossible when the Third bursts into this intimate space, that in Totality and Infinity is the space of the dwelling, asking for a justification of the place that the interiority occupies in the world. The space of dwelling, where forgiveness is only possible is the dimension of feminine. Thus, the possibility of forgiving marks the border between relating to the Other as Feminine and to the Other as the Third who bursts into the intimate space of entre nous asking for a justification. Because interiority cannot be indifferent to the Third’s request of a justification of the place it occupies in the world it constitutes its identity in the answer it provides, justifying itself. When this answer is given forgiveness is no longer possible. In Levinas’s discourse, therefore, forgiveness is crucially placed at this very important moment of the passage from the ethical experience to that of the justice.

The problem of forgiveness is intimately linked in Levinas’s thought with his analysis of the concept of present. Present, according to Levinas, is fundamental to the process of recognition. It is, in fact, the moment in which an interiority recognises itself as separated from the anonymity of existence or il y a. What characterises present, in Levinas’s thought, is that it is not inside a history, but it starts from itself, and so, there is no origin that can justify it.¹⁰ ‘Present’ breaks with the anonymous duration of existence, it is the possibility of a position in the ‘here and now,’ which is the possibility of creating a reference point in the otherwise anonymous flux of existence. This here and now that is my present is what Levinas calls position. Therefore, to acquire a present means to take position, that is to say to come to an unforeseen ‘halt’, Levinas says, in which time’s duration is interrupted and linked up again.¹¹ In different words, the ‘present’ is the apparition of a positioned interiority that ‘digs its heels’ in the mode of duration, and, consequently, becomes the ‘zero point’ of the duration. In position, the anonymous existence in which whatever happens does not yet happen to any-one, becomes the existence of some-one, that is, the existent. The existent is the subject of being. From this moment on, existence is divided in two: there is a part of existence that belongs to me and a part of existence that does not belong to me. The part of existence that belongs to me is my interiority. In interiority we are no longer exposed to anonymous existence, but we are posed as subject of a part of it. ‘Present’ is this unforeseen jump from the exposition to the position. Levinas says: ‘. . . position is the very event of the instant as a present.’¹² This means that interiority does not exist ‘before’ the position but, as soon as the present appears in the taking of position – without any reason and motivation – interiority is constituted and can identify, that is to say recognise, itself. This identification or recognition of the fact that there is a part of existence that is my existence, is precedent and necessary to the constitution of consciousness and identity.

From this very first moment, however, the present is no longer free. Following its free beginning the present is condemned to be, namely, to flow from a past and anticipate a future in consciousness. Present as position, however, ‘halts’ this sentence. That is to say, in the instant of taking a position the present’s links to past and future are suspended in the double meaning of this word: suspension means either the temporary, not definitive, stopping of something or the absence of a ground and route. In this double sense the instant of position is a ‘suspended’ present: it is without any provenance and destination and does not flow in historical time. Levinas says in Existence and Existents: ‘Before linking up with the instants that precede or follow it, an instant contains an act by which existence is acquired.’¹³ This event, this absolutely free act with which I take up position in existence becomes my present. I become the subject of this present. The instant that is my present, that is the existence that belongs to me and of which I am the subject, becomes part of my history, it is caught and linked to my past and my future. In this consists the ambiguity of ‘position’. Position, then, is the event of constitution of an existent, whereas ‘the existent’ is the impossibility of the event. Position is the suspension of duration, but, at the same time, it is the constitution of the existent in which no more suspension is possible. As Levinas puts it in Existence and Existents:

‘Consciousness, position, the present, the ‘I,’ are not initially although they are finally existents. They are events by which the unnamable verb to be turns into substantives. They are hypostasis.’¹⁴

Now the fact that present requires and brings about a position means that it is the moment in which interiority is no longer absolutely exposed to existence.

But it also means that, after its free beginning, it gets a position in relation to the instants preceding and following it so that the present is henceforth caught in an indissoluble link with the past and the future. Crucially, for our discussion here, it is only in connection with my past and my future that the instant of the position can acquire a justification and become justified: justification is the link of the present with past and future. Thanks to justification the present is no longer ‘beyond history,’ it is no longer unjustifiable and unjustified. To justify something means to tell a story linking it with the past and future. When someone asks me to justify an act of mine, I always answer with a tale situating this act in connection with my past and my future. This link in which the present is connected to a past and a future, and so it is justified, is what Levinas calls ‘economic time’. In economic time, namely the time in which every instant is justified at the price of losing its freedom, present is no longer outside history, no longer starting from itself. By the same token, however, the entry into economic time means that the present is shielded from unlimited exposure, it is no longer exposed. The term ‘exposition’, which we find throughout Levinas’s work, is used for the first time in Existence and Existents to describe the il y a which, in turn, means anonymous existence without existents. Thus, in so far as being lacks present ‘One is exposed. The whole is opened upon us.’¹⁵ In this openness of the nocturnal space over us, Levinas says, we are opened to being. Exposition, therefore, amounts to a strange openness because, in absolute existence, there is not yet any interiority (any-thing or any-one) that could be opened. Interiority begins through being exposed. This is a situation of an absolute and paradoxical exposition to which the taking position puts an end. After taking position and with the constitution of economic time, interiority seems definitively safe from this paradoxical situation of exposition.

‘Forgiveness’ also appears in Existence and Existents in the discussion of the situation in which the existent’s position and exposition seem to be alternatives. In this situation the function of forgiveness is to give back to present its original freedom, its ‘Être à partir de lui même’ after the constitution of interiority. In which way does forgiveness give back to present its freedom? Forgiveness gives back to present its freedom not simply by creating a new passage from position back to exposition, not even coming back to absolute exposition, that is to say not remaining in the alternative of position and exposition, but, in a certain way, by removing this alternative. Forgiveness, therefore, shows that the positioned interiority remains exposed. Forgiveness, in other words, is the interruption of the absoluteness of presence. Levinas writes:

‘Reaching the other is not something j...