Between Levinas and Lacan

Self, Other, Ethics

Mari Ruti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628926422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

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Breaking the obstinacy of being: Levinas’s ethics of the face

Ethics, concern for the being of the other-than-one-self, ­non-indifference toward the death of the other, and hence, the possibility of dying for the other—a chance for ­holiness—would be the expansion of that ontological contraction that is expressed by the verb to be, ­dis-inter-estedness breaking the obstinacy of being, opening the order of the human, of grace, and of sacrifice.

Emmanuel Levinas¹

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It is, these days, a theoretical commonplace that there is no self without the other—that the self owes its very existence to those who have facilitated its coming-into-being and who sustain its ongoing attempts to claim a foothold in the world. Human ontology, in other words, is inherently social so that it makes no sense to talk about the self as an autonomous entity who unilaterally acts on the world. Rather, the self—the human subject—is formed and maintained through its bonds to others, bonds that, among other things, make it susceptible to suffering. This has tremendous repercussions for ethics, for if subjectivity is inherently relational—if the presence of the other is constitutive of subjectivity as such—there is no way to envision the subject outside of ethics; the subject is implicated in an ethical relationship to the other from the get-go, before it has developed the capacity to make normative distinctions between right and wrong. This way of envisioning subjectivity is one reason that Levinasian phenomenology has played such a crucial role in recent ethical theory, for Levinas sought to understand precisely what it means to proceed from ethics to ontology rather than the other way around. He sought to grasp how ethics is something that the subject engages in through its very act of taking up space in the world, through its very act of inhaling oxygen that is, consequently, not available to someone else.

For Levinas, every breath I take is a breath that the other cannot take. I am, in a fundamental sense, always already guilty in that my existence, almost by definition, diminishes the other’s chances of survival; the simple fact of my being—my capacity to ­be—represents an infringement of someone else’s being. This is why Levinas argues that my “place in the sun” is nothing but “a usurpation of places that belong to the other man who has already been oppressed or starved by me” (EN 130). On this view, the Pascalian notion of “a place in the sun” is the prototype of violence, “of occupying the place of another, and thus, concretely, of exiling him, of consigning him to the miserable condition in some ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ world, of killing him” (EN 149). Though it is easy to find moments of Eurocentrism, xenophobia, and racism in Levinas, in this instance he connects the violence of (ontological) being to the violence of Western imperialism specifically, suggesting that there is a link ­between the flourishing of the Western subject and the nonflourishing of the non-Western one. That is, an awareness of biopolitical and necropolitical forces seems intrinsic to Levinasian ethics even if this awareness often remains implicit. On the most concrete level, this ethics is premised on “a concern for the other man, a care for his food, drink, clothing, health, and shelter” (EN 212).

This concern for, and primacy of, the other leads to an unconditional, irrevocable, and asymmetrical ethical accountability that makes me answerable to the other regardless of how the other behaves. Later in this chapter, and throughout this book, I will address the problematic aspects of this vision. But at this early point in the argument, let me merely emphasize that this unqualified responsibility arises precisely from the fact that, for Levinas, there is no self without the other: because of the essentially relational nature of subjectivity, the other animates my being in ways that make it impossible for me to dissociate myself from the other. Or, to use a verb that Levinas often uses, the other “interrupts” my consciousness and self-consistency, leaving an imprint that is both inaugurative and ineradicable. This imprint brings me into existence as a subject and there is nothing I can do to rid myself of the ethical burden it places upon me; my social formation means that I cannot, under any circumstances, refuse, renounce, or trade away my responsibility for the other, nor can I expect the other to reciprocate it. I am, as Levinas puts it, a “chosen hostage”: I have been selected for an eternal bondage to the other (“For all eternity, one man is answerable for an other”), yet I welcome my bondage as the precondition of my being (EN 227).

Levinasian ethics notoriously crystallizes on the other as face. Although Levinas maintains that the face should not be understood in a narrow way—that the face “is not the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc.” (EN 232)—there is obviously something about the face that, for him, most viscerally conveys the vulnerability, defenselessness, woundability, and mortality of the other. As Levinas indicates, the face represents “extreme exposure—before all human intending—as to a shot at ‘point blank’ range” (EN 145). Such an exposed face “summons me, demands me, claims me: as if the invisible death faced by the face of the other—pure otherness, separated somehow from all unity—were ‘my business’” (EN 145). The other “regards” me not only in the sense that he looks at me but also in the sense that his well-being is, immediately and primordially, my responsibility. If I turn away from the other in indifference, I become an accomplice in, and answerable for, his death. Again, Levinas emphasizes that the face should not be taken literally, noting that if I am standing in line outside of Lubyanka, Moscow, waiting for news of a friend or relative arrested for “political crimes,” the naked neck of the person in front of me can evoke my responsibility for him or her just as effectively as a face would (EN 232). Yet there is still something about the face that conveys the absolute singularity of the other, reminding me that the other is utterly irreducible to myself; the other as face is completely exposed yet also enigmatic, beyond my grasp, which is why he or she cannot but derail (“interrupt”) my ontological complacency.

The Levinasian notion of the other as a site of irreducible alterity has had a tremendous impact on posthumanist theorizing about interpersonal ethics. From the attempts of Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida to conceptualize a form of relationality that does not strive to assimilate the other to the self to Eric Santner’s attempts to conceptualize ways of embracing the contorted opacity (or “creatureliness”) of the other,² contemporary thinkers have been fascinated by the idea that the other intrinsically eludes our comprehension. Levinas certainly lends himself to such a reading, for he envisions the face as what cannot be “possessed” by our conceptual grids. As he expresses the matter, “The face, for its part, is inviolable; those eyes, which are absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, none the less offer an absolute resistance to possession.”³ This resistance to possession defies fusion between self and other, preserving “the discontinuity of relationship”; it ensures that the other remains utterly transcendent, utterly foreign, in the sense that I cannot reduce him to what is familiar to me: while the other as face appeals to me, rendering me responsible, he simultaneously “breaks with the world that can be common to us.”⁴ It is for this reason that ethics, for Levinas, is an invocation “prior to commonality,” “a relation with a being who, in a certain sense, is not in relation to me—or, if you like, who is in relation with me only inasmuch as he is entirely in relation to himself” (EN 33). “In its epiphany,” Levinas specifies, the sensible part of the other “turns into total resistance to the grasp” (TI 197).

The other’s resistance to my grasp can, unfortunately, cause me to want to violate the other. As Levinas explains, it is a “resistance in which the temptation to murder is inscribed”: “The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation of murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill,’ and to hear ‘You shall not kill’ is to hear ‘Social justice’” (DF 8–9). The face therefore presents both the temptation and the impossibility of murder. Because the face reveals what is weak, bare, and destitute in the other, it raises the possibility of the other’s death, and therefore of what Levinas describes as “an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the other” (EN 104). But it also functions as an absolute prohibition against murder; the face may provoke my aggressive impulses, but it also calls me to an unqualified responsibility to not act on that aggression. As Levinas argues, if the face opens the prospect of a “total negation,” to be in relation to the face is, precisely, “to be unable to kill” (EN 10). Ethics, in this sense, does not eradicate violence but rather entails a relentless struggle to fend off the temptation of aggression. As Judith Butler remarks in a different context, nonviolence “involves an aggressive vigilance over aggression’s tendency to emerge as violence.”⁵

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Levinas thus privileges relationality over ontology, particularly over consciousness as a structure of “being,” which is exactly why he—to refer back to the quotation with which I opened this chapter—seeks to break “the obstinacy of being,” to explode the “ontological contraction that is expressed by the verb to be,” so as to move beyond the sovereign, self-contained I to the realm of what he calls “the order of the human, of grace, and of sacrifice” (EN 202). Levinas repeatedly contrasts his vision with that of Heidegger: if Heidegger is primarily interested in Dasein’s undertaking of being—in a relatively self-centered venture that does not leave much room for the idea that “giving, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked is the meaning of being” (EN 116)—Levinas locates meaning solely in the subject’s relationship to the other. He in fact draws a distinction between “being” as a site of ontological exertion on the one hand and “the human” as a modality of intersubjective generosity on the other, specifying that ethics is where “the human” erupts into the economy of being in ways that disrupt the age-old plot of ontology (EN xiii); “humanity,” in short, ruptures “being.” In this manner, ethics—what Levinas famously characterizes as “otherwise than being”—shatters the subject’s preoccupation with itself, its struggle for survival, its solipsistic obsession with its “perseverance,” and replaces these by a devotion to the other: “When human existence interrupts and goes beyond its effort to be—its Spinozan conatus essendi—there is a vocation of an existing-for-the-other stronger than the threat of death: the fellow human being’s existential adventure matters to the I more than its own, posing from the start the I as responsible for the being of the other” (EN xii–xiii).

The properly human, for Levinas, therefore begins when I transcend my ontology and begin to exist for the other. In this sense, ethics brings about a kind of crisis, upheaval, or suspension of being, which jolts me out of my absorption in my own life. Furthermore, Levinasian ethics demands that I prefer “injustice undergone to injustice committed” (EN 132), which is why I cannot, under any circumstances, injure the other. Quite the contrary, I should be willing to sacrifice myself for the other, to die in the other’s place or—when this is not possible (say, because the other is going to die anyway)—to make sure that the other does not die alone. Of course, I cannot actually die for the other in any ultimate sense for the simple reason that the other will always eventually die; I cannot make the other immortal. But there are situations where I can postpone the other’s death, where I can, for instance, redirect the aggressor’s murderous rage from the other to myself. And, at the very least, I can make sure that I do not remain indifferent to the other’s death, that I do not callously turn away from the other’s need at the moment of his or her death.

In this context, Levinas postulates that there is something self-serving about Heidegger’s attempt to locate the possibility of existential authenticity in Dasein’s relationship to its own death. Referring to Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death,” Levinas complains: “The uniqueness of the human I, which nothing should alienate, is here thought in terms of death: that everyone dies for himself. An inalienable identity in dying!” (EN 226). In this manner, Levinas faults Heidegger for not recognizing that it is not my own death, but the death of the other, that should concern me. Along closely related lines, Levinas criticizes Heidegger for conceptualizing authenticity “in terms of the ‘mine,’ of everything personal, in terms of Jemeinigkeit, an original contraction of the me in mineness . . . in terms of a belonging to self and for self in their inalienable self-belonging” (EN 225–6). In other words, Heideggerian authenticity is problematic for Levinas because it “must remain pure of all influence undergone, without admixture, without owing anything to anyone, outside of everything that would compromise the noninterchangeability, the uniqueness of that I of ‘mineness’” (EN 226).

It may well be theoretically inconsistent for Levinas to attack the uniqueness of the I while at the same time insisting on the uniqueness of the other (on his “total resistance to the grasp”), for this implies that the I never occupies the place of impenetrable otherness. Yet Levinas’s accusation that Heideggerian authenticity aspires toward the kind of pristine purity of being that cannot tolerate “admixture” of any kind also carries a particular poignancy in the post-Holocaust world within which Levinas sought to stage his ethical intervention. For obvious political reasons, such solipsistic authenticity—which dissolves the subject’s connection to others—is what Levinas wishes to reject; arguing that the authenticity of the I is not predicated on the self’s virile “mineness” but rather on its willingness to sacrifice itself for the other, Levinas effectively undermines Heidegger’s Dasein as an entity that seeks to reject all “influence undergone.”

Though Levinas’s critique here is aimed at Heidegger specifically, ultimately it extends to the entire Western metaphysical tradition, of which Heidegger could be argued to be the last—already somewhat rebellious—representative. I say “rebellious” because Heidegger’s analysis of the ways in which Dasein finds itself “thrown” into a preexisting world, imbricated in the concrete texture of its surroundings, and surrounded by objects and living entities that it should not seek to subjugate, already goes some distance in discrediting the sovereign subject of the metaphysical tradition. Levinas, however, is not convinced by Heidegger’s efforts to break with this tradition, for he reads Heidegger as an inheritor of metaphysical paradigms that defend the self’s independence, its robust autonomy, by denying the self’s debt to the other, by holding tight onto its “mineness” in the face of any and all contamination by the other. And, as did many other European thinkers of his generation, Levinas concludes that this ethos of “every man for himself,” this instinct for “pure being before or without ethics,” is “a metaphor for the cruelty of the cruel in the struggle for life and the egotism of wars” (EN 202). Levinas thus sees a direct link between the self-governing subject of Western metaphysics and the devastating violence of National Socialism. And, logically, once this link has been established, the only way to prevent similar violence in the future is to find a new model for subjectivity. This is exactly what Levinas’s “being-for-the-other,” the ethical subject who has been “chosen” for self-sacrifice, is designed to furnish: “It is in the personal relationship, from me to the other, that the ethical ‘event,’ charity and mercy, generosity and obedience, lead beyond or rise above being” (EN 202).

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It is in part because of his resistance to the metaphysical tradition that Levinas stresses that the ethical relationship to the other is not one of thinking. Thinking, according to him, seeks to triumph over all otherness, to synthesize or summarize it so as to confine it within thought’s conceptual system of abstraction. In this sense, thought aims at precisely the kind of possession of the other that Levinasian ethics is meant to counter. As Levinas elaborates, “Thought, qua learning [apprendre], requires a taking [prendre], a seizure, a grip on what is learned, and a possession. The ‘seizing’ of learning is not purely metaphorical. . . . The being that appears to the knowing subject not only instructs it, but ipso facto gives itself to it. Perception already grasps” (EN 125–6). To this grasping, greedy attitude toward the other Levinas opposes a reciprocal, “interhuman” discourse which does not aim to reduce the other to a set of concepts, for when the other is mediated by concepts, he is forced into a mold that is alien to him. If metaphysical attempts to understand the other ask him to capitulate to a foreign horizon of intelligibility, the Levinasian face-to-face represents “a relation with a depth,” “a gap in the horizon” (EN 10). Or, to express the matter slightly differently, if inert things let themselves be taken by surprise by understanding, t...