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Chapter 1
Empty Hands: The Tragic Irony of Totality and Infinity
He who depends on a miracle will experience none.
—Sefer Hachinukh
I. Introduction
In the voluminous secondary literature on Levinas’s work, it must be noticed how little focused attention has been paid to the precise specificities of his ego analysis. Most treatments analyze his phenomenology of sensibility and economy—of the “Same”—as a kind of necessary propaedeutic to the face. Such an approach seems questionable, insofar as Levinas himself appears to insist on its central importance for grasping the overall sense of his ethics. Indeed, if ethical “alterity presupposes the tranquil identity of the same,” and if this sense entails that “no … interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy: no face can be approached with empty hands,” then meticulous attention to his ego analysis is necessary to both understand and assess Levinas’s broader claims.1 In this chapter, I endeavor to fill this lacuna in the scholarship by giving exclusive attention to his description of the genesis and meaning of the ego, in section II of Totality and Infinity.
Beyond the interest this holds for Levinas scholarship in its own right, a more thorough analysis of Levinas’s account of the ego may also be illuminating for intra-phenomenological debates. As Lee has recently underlined, nearly the entire tradition of TI interpretation simply accepts Levinas’s own claims for sensibility at face value.2 The story goes something like this: Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (allegedly) gives “representation” or theory the most basic status in its overall account of meaning, and hence repeats the empty “theoreticism” of tradition he heroically sought to overcome. Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology properly criticized Husserl’s (alleged) theoreticism by describing Dasein as a more primitive transcendence disclosed in pre-theoretical Zuhandenheit, being-in-the-world, being-with, and ultimately care. Though Heidegger’s description of the priority of practice over theory is a laudable contribution, he nevertheless repeats the alleged “violence” of tradition by construing self and other in primarily ontological terms. As such, Heidegger also (allegedly) fails to grasp a more primitive structure still, what Levinas puts forth as sensibility. With a few notable exceptions,3 nearly the entire tradition of TI scholarship simply accepts Levinas’s own narrative, or what Lee calls a “process of unidirectional development”: theory/practice/sensibility, Transcendental Subject/Being/Other, phenomenology/ontology/ethics.4 In this chapter, I pay special attention to whether this narrative is tenable on the basis of Levinas’s descriptions alone.
In what follows, I begin by conducting a close review of Levinas’s account of the ego. I have chosen to systematically ignore the numerous debates, differentiations, and polemical asides Levinas conducts with other philosophers, unless their treatment is deemed necessary to clarify his own position on a matter. These moments pepper TI from cover to cover, and I by and large seek to avoid them. I propose here to read TI as a phenomenology, or, in other words, as Levinas wanted it to be read.5 To read in this way means to pay very close attention to the (alleged) “phenomenological deduction[s]” Levinas performs, and to the “expressions [he uses] such as ‘that is,’ or ‘precisely,’ or ‘this accomplishes that,’ or ‘this is produced as that.’ ”6 As is well known, Levinas’s phenomenology is controversial.7 I do not intend to take sides in this controversy or question Levinas from an external point of view. I perform strictly immanent critique, along the lines laid out in my introduction. As such, I pay special attention to whether and if Levinas’s descriptions actually show what they purport to show, and whether and if these descriptions are internally consistent. To practice immanent critique fairly, I must perform a detailed and charitable reconstruction of his descriptions. Only then do I turn to critical analysis. In what follows, I show that, on Levinas’s own methodological terms, his (1) analysis of the “Same” is viciously circular, that is, sensibility actually presupposes the various meanings held to be subsequent to it. (2) Levinas’s account of “substance” is methodologically arbitrary. (3) The circularity of (1) and arbitrarity of (2) is concealed by his own determination of theory as so-called “anterior a posteriorly.” I argue that (a) the “anterior a posteriorly” is a question-begging confusion of empirical and phenomenological priority, (b) this confusion is rooted in a correlative problem with Levinas’s description of the singularity of the ego, and (c) the consequence of his own descriptions suggests that the ego must tragically—and ironically—approach the other with empty hands.
II. Phenomenology of the “Same”
Levinas’s account of the ego proceeds by way of a threefold movement of progressively enriched phenomenological description: enjoyment, dwelling, and labor. As Cohen notes, these moments present three distinct yet related “syntheses of identification,” or distinct ontological modes of ecstatic existence.8 As such, Levinas is careful to mark the difference between “relations analogous to transcendence and that of transcendence itself.”9 As we will see, qua “ecstatic,” the ego originates or comes-to-itself in being-outside-itself—that is, in relation to “others” of various kinds—and hence resembles a movement of transcendence. But insofar as these movements consist in identification, they do not delineate transcendence proper. Transcendence proper, construed as a meaning presupposed by and determinative for intentionality as such, is reserved for the ethics of the face. We should also note that each form of identification is presented as remaining dependent on the one that precedes it (theoretical activity presupposes practical activity, practical activity presupposes dwelling, and dwelling presupposes enjoyment within the regime of sensibility), and all three, taken as whole, present a “phenomenological deduction” or something like a phenomenological constitution of subjectivity qua the Same.10
II.A. ENJOYMENT
Subjectivity originates in the independence and sovereignty of enjoyment.11
Primordially, life is lived as enjoyment [jouissance]. We “live from ‘good soup,’ air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep …”12 In the first instance, all the contents that fill my life signify neither as the means for brute survival nor as objects of reflection. Prior to our practical relations with things and our theoretical relations with ideas, “things” and ideas are lived from … [vivre de]. The enjoyment of the lived from … , or what Levinas also calls nourishment, constitutes the I’s independence, the independence of happiness:
Nourishment is the transmutation of the other into the same, which is the essence of enjoyment: an energy that is other, recognized as other, recognized … as sustaining the very act directed upon it, becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my strength, me.13
The dependence involved in the lived from … is enveloped by happiness. When I am hungry, I anticipate the fulfillment of my need in eating, and even enjoy my hunger: hunger heightens the anticipation I feel while planning, shopping, and cooking the meal. I will not only savor the shwarma that awaits me at Ahmed’s eatery down the street, but I also savor the hunger I now experience and the anticipation of that shwarma as I write these very lines. Need heightens and enhances enjoyment. In just this way, “The human being thrives on his needs, is happy for his needs.”14 Happiness is an outcome “where the memory of the aspiration confers upon the outcome the character of accomplishment. Enjoyment is made of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching.”15 What of the suffering undergone in, for example, poverty or famine? Suffering, too, is one dimension of our affective pre-practical and pre-theoretical life in sensibility. In the first instance, suffering is of the “order” of sensibility, not theory or practice. As we will see below, suffering opens another dimension of our originary relation to the world. This dimension will involve the insecurity undergone when the happy ego becomes aware of the fragile character of its happiness, when it runs up against a situation or milieu not completely under its sway (think of famine). Egregious forms of suffering rooted in injustice—poverty, oppression, exploitation, and so forth—presuppose the affectivity of the I, and the ethics and justice proper to sociality (to which subsequent sections of TI are dedicated). At this level of description, Levinas insists that “Life is affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life. To despair of life makes sense only because originally life is happiness. Suffering is a failing of happiness; it is not correct to say that happiness is the absence of suffering.”16 Put another way, Levinas presents suffering as a deficient mode of happiness. Though suffering originarily belongs to sensibility, its “sense” is secondary within the order of sensibility.
At this point, let us underline the “alimentary” or consumptive character of enjoyment and broach the specific character of its “independence,” “sovereignty,” “self-sufficiency,” or in a word: “separation.”17 “[B]ecause life is happiness,” Levinas insists, “life is personal.”18 Happiness opens what Levinas calls the “unicity” or ipseity of the I; it constitutes the I as an ego:
The self-sufficiency of enjoying measures the egoism or the ipseity of the Ego and the same. Enjoyment is withdrawal into oneself, an involution. … The I is the very contraction of sentiment.19
As “contraction,” the self emerges as “a being absolutely isolated.”20 What precisely can he mean, because he appeared to describe above a self that enjoys, at the very least, “others” as contents lived from? First, the ego not only enjoys its needs and the contents that sate them, but it also enjoys its own enjoyment of these contents. “In enjoyment we maintain ourselves always at the second power, which, however, is not yet the level of reflection.”21 Happiness produces a self and self-awareness, but not (as of yet) practical or theoretical self-consciousness. In this spontaneous self-sensing or affective reflexivity, “others”—all the contents I live from …—are both (a) “recognized as other” and (b) “transmuted into the same,” and these two dimensions display the “ecstatic” character of enjoyment.22 The happy ego comes to itself outside of itself, or put another way: “contracts”23 or originates in both enjoying what it is not and in enjoying this enjoyment of what it is not. By enjoying the contents lived from, the ego identifies them (in a pre-theoretical way)—that is, precisely consumes and enjoys them—and as such absorbs their alterity. In enjoying its enjoyment of what it lives from, the ego comes to and becomes aware of itself. The ego is outside of itself in itself, that is: in contact with “others” it enjoys and consumes as it folds back and affects itself. The self produced in this moment has become aware that its sensibility is properly its own: no one else can feel my joys for me or inhabit my sentience from my own first-person perspective. In this sense, the self is “a being absolutely isolated.”24 This “contraction” occurs as a fundamentally temporal differentiation:
Happiness is a condition for activity, if activity means a commencement in duration … Action implies being, to be sure, but it marks a beginning and end in an anonymous being—where end and beginning have no meaning. But within this continuity enjoyment realizes independence with regard to continuity: each happiness comes for the first time. Subjectivity originates in the independence and sovereignty...
