Presentation of
Resaying the Human.
Levinas between Humanism and Antihumanism
(Presentation by Naud
van der Ven of the book
Resaying
the Human. Levinas beyond Humanism and
Antihumanism by Carl
Cederberg,
published in Dutch in Mededelingen
van de Levinas Studiekring 23, 2018)
Introduction
Emmanuel
Levinas at times summarized his ideas under the
banner of ‘humanism for the other’. Nevertheless
his work cannot, if only because of the overtly
religious overtones, be classified as
classically humanistic. Neither can it be called
antihumanistic. So then, what exactly is
Levinas’s position between humanism and
antihumanism? That’s the subject of the
beautiful book Resaying the Human. Levinas
beyond Humanism and Antihumanism (2010) by
Carl Cederberg. In the below article I try to
sketch an outline of Cederbergs work.
My
presentation will consist of two parts. To begin
with, I offer an overview of the book. In the
second part, I will highlight two themes from
the book that recur in several places. First of
all the emphasis by Cederberg on Levinas’s
aspiration to move from abstractions to the
concretely human. And then the question of what
otherness and difference mean exactly in
Levinas. It will appear that Levinas and a
number of his readers arrive at a wide range of
varying understandings of otherness.
The book
When
Carl Cederberg summarizes in Resaying the
Human what, according to him, the
philosophy of Levinas is about, he does so as
follows: “In fact, Levinas’s philosophy is both
an attempt at safeguarding the notion of the
human by reforming how we understand it in
philosophy, and at retrieving in the notion of
the human the condition of possibility for
philosophical critique, that is, the very
possibility to think beyond any seemingly
safeguarded consensus”.
Cederberg
uses a compact formulation here, with a number
of concepts each of which deserve further
explanation. Most notable is ‘the notion of the
human’, but there are a few more. These concepts
play a central role in the whole of Resaying
the Human, and in my presentation of the
book I will start, because of the importance of
these central concepts, with an explanation of
them.
Besides
his summary points to a development over time,
namely the reform of the way in which the notion
of the human can be philosophically understood.
Cederberg puts a lot of effort into following
that development in Levinas’s work itself, thus
of Levinas’s own philosophical understanding of
the notion of the human. In his book, Cederberg
goes through the various stages in Levinas’s
work, from 1930 to 1980, with a special focus on
the question of what at different times Levinas
understands by ‘the human’. I will summarize
that briefly.
Concepts used by Cederberg
In his
presentation of Levinas, Cederberg uses of a
number of concepts that are interrelated and
partially overlap each other. These concepts
play central roles in his book, which is why I
call them his core concepts.
Those
core concepts are:
- The
notion of the human
- Restlessness
- The
possibility of critique
The notion of the human
A
preliminary remark should be made before
discussing this concept. As can be seen from
Cederberg’s aforementioned quote, the notion of
the human is constantly evolving. So when I try
to describe it here, it concerns a few concise,
robust features. The more variable aspects are
discussed below in the historical overview of
the development of Levinas according to
Cederberg.
What
then is the notion of the human? Well, we make a
detour because Cederberg approaches the concept
in various places by telling what it is nót. For
example, it is not what the classical Greeks
made of it. Because in the Greek vision “to be
human is to understand being”. Classically,
according to Cederberg, defining the human was
tantamount to setting a moral standard for
oneself and for others. And the standard had to
be lived up to through control by reason, as a
pre-eminently human quality.
Nor is
it what the Enlightenment philosophers made of
it. The conception of man as subject in the
sense of the ‘transcendental unity of sensation’
(Kant) – additionally referred to in terms of
consciousness, presence and power – does not do
justice to the notion of the human. Insofar as
humanism is guided by that view, a strong
antihumanist impulse is needed, according to
Cederberg, to arrive at Levinas’s
notion of the human.
One
implication of this approach to the notion of
the human through faulty conceptions of it from
the past is the premise that the notion of the
human has always been there, but that its core
had not been touched. The notion existed, but
the Greeks and the Enlightenment philosophers
did not find adequate formulations for it. Thus,
the formulations they díd produce must be
contradicted, or made ‘unsaid’, in order to find
a more adequate ‘resaying’. Hence the importance
Cederberg attaches to Levinas’s claim that
“antihumanism did not negate the human subject
but unsaid it, opening the ground thereby for it
to be resaid”.
So,
finally, what does that reformulation sound
like? The notion of the human is “finding
oneself defenseless before the other”, it is:
the subject speaking before there is truth and
information that can be communicated; it is the
relationship referred to as ‘one-for-the-other’.
With two important characteristics: an
indomitable restlessness and the possibility of
‘critique’. These are therefore the two
following core concepts that I will discuss.
Restlessness
At the
heart of the human, Cederberg says, for Levinas there is “an
essential restlessness”. Levinas even at an
early stage defines the human as restlessness,
indicating that the human leaves no room for
complacency of a metaphysical or political
nature. “[T]he human must, according to Levinas,
be understood as restlessness – never to be
founded in Being…”
Critique
According
to Cederberg, there is a direct line in Levinas
from the notion of the human to critique. For
Cederberg, critique is a philosophical genre
which he describes as “the very
possibility to think beyond any seemingly
safeguarded consensus”; and as “an emancipatory
function, allowing one to transcend the present
state of affairs”. You might say, critique is
philosophy par excellence. It is important to
see the link that Levinas makes according to
Cederberg: critique is only possible thanks to
the notion of the human. The notion of the human
is the condition of possibility for critique.
If
it’s true, as suggested above, that an intuition
of the human was already present in the Greeks
and the Enlightenment thinkers, then also
critique has to be found there. And that’s the
case indeed, according to Levinas. After all,
the Greeks sought to transcend the given state
of affairs with the help of the Ideas, the good
had to be confirmed in Plato by the Idea of the
Good. As to the Enlightenment thinkers, for them
the word ‘critique’ was never far away. And as
for modern philosophy: the word ‘critique’ in
the sense of philosophical research can be
linked to both humanism (Kant, Descartes) and
antihumanism (Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault).
Thus,
the two concepts of the human on the one hand
and critique on the other are inextricably
linked, though it should be noted that the
relationship between the human and critique is a
difficult one. Cederberg puts it this way:
“Critique… always presupposes a ground, a basis,
if not a foundation. But since the human must,
according to Levinas, be understood as
restlessness — never to be founded in Being —
these foundations will, if relied on, be seen as
new layers of hypocrisy, which critique must in
turn cut through”.
Focuspoints in Levinas's
development
1930s and 40s: In Search of
the ‘Concrete Human’
As to
Levinas’s 1934 article on Hitlerism, Cederberg
argues that therein the notion of the human is
the key concept. In this and other texts from
this period – so you can safely say: from
Levinas’s beginnings – the notion of the human
is linked to transcendence, to a movement beyond
and escape from the self, thus to the ‘concept
of the beyond’.
But,
says Cederberg, this transcendence had an
ethico-political meaning from the very start,
and in Levinas this ethical dimension will
remain linked to the notion of the human. That,
says Cederberg, has a lot to do with Levinas’s
quest to give the notion of the human a concrete
content. For while the notion of the human may
have been fundamental to Western philosophy and
civilization for centuries, that Western
philosophy had failed to conceive of anything
concrete in that transcendence or escape. “In
clinging to a description of the beyond,
Western philosophy has betrayed the insight of
the need to escape beyond.” (my
emphasis, NvdV)
As a
result, Levinas’s main problem with the Western
tradition was that the liberation of man
performed therein was linked to an increasingly
abstract conception of the human. It was based
on the soul’s freedom from matter and history.
This has positive aspects, but a negative result
is that people come to lack, certainly in the
era of liberalism, a certain feeling for their
embedding in the flesh, in history and culture.
Levinas
was looking for a non-mystical concretization
for this transcendent movement. To find this, he
turns to phenomenology, but it does not offer
him exactly what he wants. A problem with his
texts from these early years, according to
Cederberg, is that the ideal of concreteness
that Levinas sets for himself is not achieved
anywhere. The ethical-political orientation
comes close, just like eroticism a little later,
but they do not meet what Levinas is looking
for.
As far
as Cederberg is concerned, this gives his work
from the later thirties a somewhat dull
character. “On the one hand he does not want to
reduce the human to an immanent play of forces.
On the other, in his attempt to think the human
as transcendence, he wishes to resist the
subordination of the human to the otherworldly.
Framed in this way, Levinas is developing a
problematic relation to the notion of the
transcendent.”
That
changes in the 1940s when he introduces ‘the
other’. This happens for the first time in
writing in Existence and existents from
1947. That book is not primarily about the
other, but about the subject’s relationship to
his own existence. It treats the subject as a
break from anonymous existence, the il-y-a.
The
possibility of a radical loneliness of the
subject is necessary in the works of this
period, in order to describe the other as
radically different. Because this radical
loneliness means that the otherness of the other
is more than just the specific physical, mental,
social and cultural differences that make us two
unique and therefore different individuals.
Otherness now becomes an quality in itself.
This
thought, according to Cederberg, is definitely a
first step towards a more precise description by
Levinas of the notion of humanity-beyond-being.
For Levinas, we do not relate to the human other
as to a specimen in the category of ‘humanity’,
as a horse belongs to the category of
‘horseness’. The human relates to the other qua
other.
1950s: Taking position
opposite Sartre and Heidegger
From
the 1950s onwards, the terms ‘ethics’ and
‘humanism’ have become increasingly common in
Levinas’s work. It is – perhaps not
coincidentally – the time when Human Rights were
established in all kinds of international
treaties. This observation leads Cederberg to
the question: “What is the notion of the human
intended in humanism as formalised in Human
Rights?” And: what kind of humanism can Levinas
embrace?
In any
case, the answer to the latter question is not:
the humanism of Sartre and De Beauvoir. With
regard to Sartre, according to Cederberg, a
crucial difference is emerging. While for Sartre
it is individual freedom that is forgotten in
the humanistic ‘City of equals’, Levinas seeks
this forgotten origin in the asymmetrical
relationship to the other. From Existence
and existents, Levinas’s work is aimed at
concretizing the transcendence in this
asymmetrical relationship with the other. In
contrast, the central structure for Sartre is
precisely the authentic self-relationship.
Diametrically
opposed to Sartre, Levinas sees the ‘greatness’
of a “humanism starting from the economic
problem”. He does not, according to Cederberg,
want to give existentialism the monopoly to
define what is sensible or nonsensical; through
the eyes of a socialist humanism, Levinas says,
existentialism can be seen as ostrich behavior.
At the
same time, Levinas does want to take the
humanism-critique of Sartre and De Beauvoir
seriously. It appealed to Levinas that those two
thinkers were trying to arrive at an ethics, or
even a humanism that would no longer depend on a
particular abstract image or form of ‘man’.
Just
as, according to Cederberg, he wants to take
Heidegger’s critique of humanism seriously, when
it is disturbed by definitions of the human that
are borrowed from time-bound metaphysics, and in
which the authentic proper dignity of man is not
recognized. But Levinas also wants to go further
than Heidegger, and he sees possibilities for
this in the appearance of the other, “preceding
all ontological descriptions of Man”.
1960s: Humanism of the Other
Levinas's
own humanism, which he presented in the 1960s,
had to do justice to the other as other. What,
then, does his humanism look like, for example
in Totality and Infinity, which
appears in 1961, and in the important article Meaning
and Sense from 1963?
Totality
and Infinity
Levinas
says in Totality and Infinity that the
notion of the human is accessible through the
human face, and that this specific relationship
is the human. Here the metaphysical longing for
the other carries the promise of humanity, of
goodness, understood as the possibility of
interrupting self-satisfaction, according to
Cederberg. It is the consciousness of a lack of
freedom, or of duty, that constitutes the human.
Levinas also calls this relationship with the
other ‘religion’,
but at the same time for him it is a secular
agnostic humanism, not mysticism. As he wrote
elsewhere: “Monotheism is a humanism”.
But
Cederberg finds in Totality and Infinity,
next to the face, another view, or face, of the
human. “Levinas explains: ‘To enjoy without
utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without
referring to anything else, in pure expenditure
– this is the human’. It might be surprising
that he uses the name ‘human’ for pure
enjoyment, given that the name is given also to
that which transcends the economy of enjoyment.”
The
two faces of the human have something in common,
Levinas wants to make clear according to Cederberg: “Interestingly, both the
egos enjoy the elements and the face-to-face
relationship to the other are related to as
immediate.”
In
both cases – that of enjoyment and that of the
ethical relationship – the notion of the human
is, according to Levinas, bound to an idea of
deneutralization, a search for the concrete that
is not mediated by generic-neutral concepts.
Levinas claims that both relationships are
immediate in the sense that they precede the
theoretical subject-object dichotomy.
Cederberg
doesn’t find that convincing: “Levinas's claims
remain unfounded”, he says of Levinas’s embrace
of immediacy. Specifically with regard to the
face-to-face relationship, he says: Levinas
would like to withdraw ethics from ontology, and
therefore speaks of the immediacy of that
relationship. The problem is that his
descriptions of the other, which are always the
starting points of his philosophy, are
themselves ontological. Think of ‘Man as being
par excellence’ or the possibility of
‘experience of the other’. Although Levinas
refers to these terms as metaphysical, they
describe essences and foundations in the
traditional way. For example, Cederberg catches
Levinas in a classical-sounding sentence like
the following: “The true essence of man is
presented in his face, in which he is infinitely
other than a violence like mine, opposed to mine
and hostile”.
Meaning and Sense
If
Levinas continues to use the term humanism for
his own philosophy in the early 1960s – and he
does – then, given his own history of humanism
critique, it must be a qualified humanism. This
is certainly the case in the article Meaning
and Sense.
Qualified
in what sense? Levinas gives according to
Cederberg his own twist to his humanism in three
ways:
-
He links it to Platonism
-
But without the traditional implications
thereof
-
And while retaining the Heideggerian reserve
against foundation thinking.
Ad 1: The link to Platonism
In Meaning and Sense, Levinas explicitly
calls his philosophy both a humanism and a
Platonism. Because Levinas is, in spite of the
antiplatonic zeitgeist around him, looking
for a point of orientation, and therefore,
according to Cederberg, he is “provocatively and
unfashionably Platonist”. Levinas’s
main point here is that materialism, like any
ontology, refers to something else beyond itself.
And he finds that orientation in a primal event in
which historical life is situated, namely a
dialogue with the Other.
Only
the other has an original meaning. The multitude
of all other meanings in the world is derived
from it. Ideological positions that claim a
complete lack of orientation, if we follow
Levinas, are not reliable. It is precisely the
notions of direction and work that presuppose
the relationship to the other. The humanism that
Levinas envisions here, according to Cederberg,
focuses on the other, prior to any cultural
belonging or historical situation.
Ad 2: A Platonism, but without its traditional
implications
The sense beyond all meanings for Levinas is not a
highest meaning outside the world, but the
direction of meanings ín the world. Levinas
therefore wants to get rid of the hierarchical
implications of Platonism.
Ad 3: While retaining the Heideggerian reserve
against foundation thinking
Levinas, according to Cederberg, retains in Meaning
and sense the humanism-critical reserve
against metaphysical foundations, despite the fact
that, unlike Heidegger, he still ends up with
Plato. That may be a strange mixture, but
Cederberg praises Levinas for it: “Levinas’s most
important addition to this mixture is what he
terms the de-neutralization of being”.
Summarizing
for the 1960s, Cederberg states, “Meaning and
sense is where Levinas most convincingly
argues for his philosophy as a humanism of the
other man; in this sense he reaches the goals he
had set in the 1930s, namely to establish the
notion of the human in a new way. But there is a
certain political naïveté in his philosophy of
the human, couched here as a humanism”. And: “At
this juncture, what has temporarily fallen out
of the picture is his early definition of the
human as restlessness, which does not sanction
either a metaphysical or a political
complacency. In order to do justice to this
notion, he will have to reconsider the notion of
the human, such that the central question will
have to be raised: should the problem really be
posed in the language of humanism?”
1970s: Antihumanism and
Otherwise than Being
Although
the collection of articles entitled Humanism
of the Other was published as late as
1972, according to Cederberg a different
orientation had already been set in motion by
the end of the 1960s. Levinas’s attitude to
humanism, however qualified, changed then,
perhaps under the influence of Lévi-Strauss,
Althusser and Foucault. Levinas gradually became
convinced of the depth of the humanism crisis.
Cederberg
sees how Levinas in Otherwise than Being
(1973) paints the picture of a time that
understood that “nothing is more conditioned
than the alleged originary consciousness and the
ego”. In the age of the hermeneutics of
suspicion, triggered by Nietzsche, there seem to
be no facts about the human upon which a science
of the human could be built. The known factual
explanatory constructs, such as the
sociological, ethnographic, historical or
biological approaches to the human, all have
something arbitrary.
They
moreover have something violent about them. The
sciences claim to give access to the truth and
the good for humanity, but in doing so they also
provide a totalitarian starting point, in which
everything and everyone is ordered according to
a uniform model and where the human disappears.
The human, ‘proximity of the neighbor’, is not
based on facts about humanity.
Levinas
therefore agrees with a lot of humanism
critique, according to Cederberg. But a
difference with the others mentioned is that
Levinas does not accept the resulting situation.
We have to get past “the incessant discourse
about the death of God, the end of man and the
disintegration of the world”, he says in Otherwise
than Being.
Levinas
is looking for a new, more radical understanding
of the human. So he wants to work, together wíth
the antihumanists, on the ‘unsaying’ of the
human (that is, participating in the
antihumanistic deconstruction of the human
subject), but nót on its total elimination.
‘Unsaying’ must lead to ‘resaying’, that is, of
the human, according to Cederberg.
The
antihumanists deny the possibility of a return
to the human. Levinas finds that possibility
precisely in ‘the proximity of the neighbor’ and
‘vulnerability for others’. As far as Levinas is
concerned, it is precisely that notion of the
human which, as a condition of possibility, has
always been underlying in humanistic science.
And which, now that humanistic science is
bankrupt, can ensure its renewal. The innovation
will mainly consist in that the human, as
understood by Levinas, will not be regarded as a
category in which the other and I fit as
specimens of a species.
For
this revitalization of the notion of the human,
Nietzsche could be used just as well as he could
be used in the deconstruction of its old form.
In Nietzsche, Levinas finds, according to
Cederberg, what he previously called ‘youth’,
and that he now equates with the authenticity at
the heart of antihumanism. In the movement of
1968, Levinas perceived a spark of this
Nietzschean youth as authenticity. And a promise
of critique, of philosophy. Philosophy is
critique for both Nietzsche and Levinas, a
critique that ultimately does not exist for the
sake of the philosophizing ego, but for
something else. Nietzsche calls this other
‘life’; for Levinas, this critique points to a
concern for the neighbor.
All in
all, according to Cederberg, antihumanism has
been fruitful for Levinas. It has opened up
space for Levinas’s own position, and for a
notion of critique that does not begin with a
philosophy of human consciousness. Antihumanism
has not denied the human subject but ‘unsaid’
it, creating the possibility to resay it.
Cederberg even thinks that the approach to
Levinas’s notion of the human has to proceed
mainly through anti-humanist critique.
Recurring accents in the book
Throughout
the book, Cederberg takes a special interest in
various themes. This applies to, for example
- The
theme of the relationship between the
universal and the particular
- The
question of whether the transcendent can be
experienced
- The
function of philosophy
- The
relationship between abstract and concrete
- The
character of the differences that Levinas
speaks about.
I
would like to elaborate on the last two themes.
From abstractions to the
concrete
One of
the lines that Cederberg observes in the whole
of Levinas’s oeuvre is that Levinas gradually
succeeds in shaping his program of the 1930s:
making the human concrete. For him, this takes
the form of ‘resaying subjectivity’. In Otherwise
than Being, according to Cederberg, this
means that he no longer wants to talk about
people in generic, abstract terms, because you
can only address a concrete other.
When
ontological concepts such as ‘man’ or ‘the
other’ are seen through the lens of the
condition of asymmetry of human relationships,
they turn out to be over-determined, namely by
an ethical meaning. The subject is already a
welcome from the other. The problem of ‘other
minds’, whether or not existing in isolation
next to a lonely subject, disappears. This is a
secondary abstraction, which arises from the
search for certainty undertaken by the Cartesian
ego in its hypothesized solitude.
The
ethical overdetermination means an end to that
uncertainty in one fell swoop. This means that
it is not the responsibility of an abstract
subject for an abstract other, but my
responsibility for a concrete other, which
ultimately determines the meaning of these
concepts. “Saying is always addressed to
someone.”
Difference in Levinas
At
several places, Cederberg discusses
interpretations by others of Levinas that, in
his opinion, are not entirely correct. This
concerns, for example, Levinas’s relationship
with religion: is he or is he not a religious
thinker? About his dealings with ethics: is he
or is he not a moralist?
Likewise,
about Levinas’s dealing with difference
Cederberg points to some controversial
interpretations which I want to discuss here.
What is difference, what is alterity in Levinas,
that is the question. There is a popular
interpretation of ‘the Other in Levinas’ that
Cederberg disagrees with. That interpretation
says: the Other, that is the one with a
different, especially cultural or ethnic,
identity.
The
interpretation in which the Other is conceived
of as the one with a different identity is also
called the ‘ethics of difference’. And the
difference at issue is also referred to as the
‘other than’ difference, which means a
difference that is the result of comparison and
therefore a relative difference. That is,
measured against some context that makes the two
compared entities comparable.
Cederberg
does not cite examples of the ethics of
difference, but the Levinas expert Rudy Visker
from Leuven does. Like Cederberg, he criticizes
the popular tendency – at least at the time – to
see the Other in Levinas primarily as the other
in a multicultural society.
In
that frame Levinas’s difference would refer to
the differences between cultures within the
context of a multicultural ideal. “There seems
to be a kind of speaker’s
gain in our argument about the multicultural,
about the stranger, who seems time and again to
be the one who has to detach us from ourselves,
who has to break us open, who has to give us a
different direction”, Visker says.
In
this context, Visker also speaks of the double
bind of anthropology: anthropology is on the one
hand bound to an epistemological imperative that
demands inserting of the studied human being in
a context. But at the same time anthropology is
considered to be able to demonstrate precisely
on the basis of that knowledge that this studied
man cannot actually be known because he is
someone else.
Cederberg,
like Visker, does not agree with such an
identity-oriented view of difference. “The
distinction between an ethical alterity of
proximity (that the other is my neighbour) and
the cultural difference of the other to me is
often blurred in the secondary literature.” What
Levinas is looking for is not the other as in
‘other than’, because that is really nothing
more than a relative negation.
He
rejects that because of its negative aspects.
First, this dominant reading of Levinas
threatens to put him on an apolitical dead end.
It leads to a position of ‘all cultures are
equally good (except perhaps the Western ones),
so who would dare to say anything about it?’
Second,
there is the threat of diversity moralism.
Understanding the concept of proximity from an
idea of ethnic or cultural otherness seems to
involve the risk of what can be crudely termed
an ‘ethical exoticism’: the more culturally
different someone is, the more I have to
accommodate her. In other words, by giving
cultural denominations an exaggerated ethical
load, we contribute to strengthening racial and
cultural hierarchies. Or it leads to ‘hugging
exotic people’.
That
is why Cederberg fights against that frame. In
his own words: “By highlighting the notion of
the human rather than that of the other, my aim
is to show how the ethics of difference, often
associated to Levinas, is unjustified”. The
alterity of the other does not relate to a
difference in (cultural) identity, but to the
asymmetrical ethical relationship to the other.
Levinas is not about an ‘ethics of difference’
but about an ‘ethics of dissensus’, says
Cederberg.
But
Levinas could have been more clear about this:
he could have propagated more consistently that
he was not interested in the relative otherness
of the other (ie ‘other than’, as with cultural
identities) but in absolute otherness. He could
have been more clear about this by banning
context-bound terms even more strictly.
To be
sure, Levinas does not speak about cultural
otherness, but, as Visker shows, he dóes speak
about socio-economic otherness, and that’s
also an ‘other than’ difference. He speaks of
others who are miserable, penniless, or naked.
If it’s the case, says Visker, that the face is
not dependent on the context in order to be what
it ‘is’, “if it is ‘meaning without context’ (as
in Totality and Infinity and in Otherwise
than Being), how then can Levinas speak of
that autarky of the face, that ‘infinity of the
Other’ at the same time as ‘penniless’?” Are not
misery, pennilessness, nakedness terms from the
world of context?
Derrida
has rightly pointed out to Levinas inaccuracies
of this nature, Cederberg says. Derrida’s
message could be summed up as: you cannot think
outside context, even if you pretend to.
Cederberg: “Levinas’s focus on the concept of
alterity causes confusion”. As long as otherness
could be perceived as ‘other than’, and thus
context-related, Derrida could rightly object to
Levinas’s transcendent pretensions.
But on
the other hand, Derrida kept a bit sham deaf,
says Cederberg. In Totality and Infinity
as well as in Otherwise than Being, to a
good listener it could be clear already that
Levinas did not want to talk about ‘other than’,
in the sense of differences against the
background of an overarching context. The
quotation above already shows this, and there
are more to give.
Derrida
sometimes chooses not to hear that. And in those
moments, like a pedantic schoolmaster, he
forbids Levinas to explore these kinds of
boundaries in his own way. If Levinas makes it
clear somewhere that it is a different kind of
otherness, a radical asymmetry, then Derrida
does not listen well. “Derrida denies Levinas’s
claim of a radical asymmetry between the other
and me: according to Derrida, this asymmetry
must be preceded by a symmetry.”
According
to Levinas, Cederberg says, the words ‘God’,
‘the ethical’, ‘the sacred’, ‘the face’, ‘the
absolute other’ all represent the possibility of
transcending the economy of violence (Derridian
for: the immanent world, the world of context),
“and God is the word that expresses this the
most extremely and boldly”. But transcendence
and immanence, the Other and the Same are always
mixed together indeed in Levinas. Which
according to Derrida is impossible.
Visker,
avant la lettre, agrees with Cederberg.
If you listen carefully to Levinas, he says, you
will hear Levinas say: the Other is not unknown
(so: he has context), but unknowable (ie:
without context). Levinas wants to avoid filling
in from a context. To avoid that, Levinas wants
the Other to have a ‘meaning of its own’ that
does not ‘depend on the meaning he receives from
the world’, but disrupts it. Along these lines
he arrives at two meanings: one with and one
without context.
Levinas
fully and deliberately acknowledges the
absurdity of this position, against Derrida's
objections. Cederberg notes that even Derrida
himself, at an earlier stage, had made
statements in the same direction, when he said
that God both transcends the economy of
violence, as well as is part of it, or, in other
words, that He is part of it by transcending it.
About this earlier statement by Derrida,
Cederberg says: “This earlier claim, which is
the one I shall seek to defend, thinks the
economy of violence and that which exceeds it as
co-originary”.
Cederberg’s
conclusion on this theme of difference is as
follows: “Derrida’s critique clearly reveals
where the real contribution of Levinas lies: if
there is an ethical otherness it cannot be
interpreted as the ‘other than’, which as Plato
had already showed, is nothing but a relative
negativity. It also forces Levinas to find a
more radical formulation for his conception of
asymmetrical responsibility”.
Which
then, I think, did not satisfy Derrida either.
Literature
Cederberg, C.
(2010) Resaying the
Human. Levinas beyond Humanism and
Antihumanism.
Stockholm: Soderton University.
Derrida, J. (1967) Violence
et Métaphysique. In : Derrida, J.
L’écriture et la difference. Paris :
Éditions du Seuil.
Levinas, E. (1990) [1934] Reflections on the
Philosophy of Hitlerism. Translated by
Seán Hand, in Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 17. Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press,. pp. 63-71.
Levinas, E. (2001) [1947] Existence
and Existents. English translation by Alphonso Lingis
of De l´existence à l´existant.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1991) [1961] Totality
and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. English
translation by Alphonso Lingis of Totalité
et Infini. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Levinas, E. (1987) [1963] Meaning and Sense.
In: Collected Philosophical Papers.
Phaenomenologica (Collection Fondée par H.L. van
Breda et Publiée sous le Patronage des Centres
d’Archives-Husserl), vol 100. Springer, Dordrecht.
Levinas, E. (2008) [1974] Otherwise than
Being. Originally Autrement
qu'être. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
Ven, N. van der (2010) The
Trap of Universalizing Reason.
Ven,
N. van der (2011) The Shame of Reason in
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Perspective. London: Springer.
Visker, R. (2004) The Inhuman Condition.
Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger.
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