Levinas

“Nothing could limit the homage due him” — such was Emmanuel Levinas’s estimation of Martin Buber (OS, 41). The numerous essays Levinas dedicated to the examination of Buber’s thought reveal the high esteem in which he held Buber. Yet these essays also demonstrate the profound disagreement between the two thinkers on a number of fundamental issues — a disagreement that has not been sufficiently explored. In the following pages, I shall focus on Levinas’s critique of Buber’s notion of reciprocity, contrasting it with the prominent place of the “other” in Levinas’s thought. Levinas’s emphasis on
the other contributes notably to contemporary ethical discourse, particularly in a time characterized by increasing intolerance towards the other and the violence that accompanies this intolerance. However, Buber’s thought does not lend itself to an ethical relation that commences with the other, or to an ethical relation founded upon the other. Unlike Levinas, Buber believed that “if all were clothed and well nourished, then the real ethical problem would become wholly
visible for the first time” (PMB, 723).

This is the third chapter of Altared Ground: Levinas History, and Violence (Routlledge, 1996) and focuses on Plato's "idea of the Good beyond being," which plays a pivotal role in determining Levinas’ understanding of the ethical transcendence of alterity. The radical exteriority of the Good and the One, vital for Levinas’ conception of the Infinite, is examined with an eye to  Gadamer’s interpretation of transcendence via the form of the beautiful. The tension between whether justice (Levinas) or beauty (Gadamer) as that which makes accessible the Good, underscores the movement of this chapter.

This is chapter 2 of Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence (Routledge, 1996). This chapter opens with a brief assessment of the history of the early Greek understanding of violence. It then centers on the importance of the imagination (eikasia, not phantasia) in Plato’s effort to dialectically grasp the forms. This brings into play the decisive question of Western metaphysics as a whole—namely, the status of “truth.” Heidegger’s construal of the history of metaphysics is taken up through an analysis of his interpretation of aletheia as unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit) in Presocratic and Platonic thinking. This is of vital importance, as Altared Ground is an effort to determine whether violence is indeed rooted in theoria—in the conceptual positing and grasping of truth—as Levinas contends.

The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty serves both as a ground and a site of departure for Levinas' thinking. This essay takes up their relationship, with particular regard to the question of whether Merleau-Ponty's later shift from phenomenology to ontology brings him under Levinas' critique of ontology as a totalizing philosophy of power that ultimately either denies or negates the radical alterity of the other. Both thinkers reconceive the intersubjective relation, and focus much of their analyses on the problem of language as the means by which this relation is expressed. However, though similar in scope, they arrive at fundamentally different positions regarding the self-other relationship, which jointly affirming the role that paradox plays in the constitution of intersubjectivity. This essay considers both their differences and confluences in contributing to the existential question.

This essay engages the later thought of Tanabe Hajime and that of Emmanuel Levinas in order to assess their respective interpretations of alterity in light of their mutual attempts to establish a fundamental conception of ethics and religion. Central to both, I contend, is the possibility of the ethical transformation of the self in response to an imperative posed by the passive power of the other, a necessary condition for confronting the problem of evil—a pressing issue in the wake of recent world terrorism, especially since recent terrorist activities have been repeatedly cast by many as a matter where religion takes center stage. To bring about this self-transformation, the concept of “breaking through,” employed by both Tanabe and Levinas, will be examined in order to acquire an adequate understanding of the dialectic between good and evil, power and passivity, response and reconciliation, mediation and proximity, self and other, humanity and divinity, and God and absolute nothingness. Standing on common ground regarding the priority of religion over philosophy, Tanabe and Levinas each formulate a religious philosophy as the heart of their thinking, and abandon ontological philosophy as the principal means to realize the meaning of the ethical. In both there occurs a conversion from philosophy to religion wherein the notion of responsibility becomes central.

This essay examines the theme of desire, its logical and religious structures, and its relation to the most extreme form of interpersonal violence—war—by assessing Hegel’s philosophy through that of Levinas, who radically reconceives the relation between intersubjectivity and desire.  On Hegel’s reading, desire (Begierde) assumes an essentially negative function in that it fills a lack or void between the subject and object, between the self and its other; while for Levinas, Desire (désir) is that modality of subjective being that brings us into a genuine relationship with otherness while preserving the Other’s alterity. What are the differences and similarities between their respective positions? How is Levinas’ philosophy influenced by Hegel’s, and in what respects does it represent a significant departure and advance from it? Does the negativity, i.e., otherness, that desire negates in its movement as Spirit render the relation with the Other obsolete; or does it bring one into a genuine relation with the Other?  What is the role that desire plays in the promotion and/or overcoming of the violence that is war?

The question of politics in Emmanuel Levinas is complicated by the concept of metaphysical “transcendence,” which he uses to designate the asymmetrical character of the ethical relationship. Politics and law necessitate an operative sense of reciprocity in order to be effective in any democratically based framework. Levinas’ notion of ethics, however, is predicated on the nonreciprocity of the ethical demand that the Other places on the self, a nonreciprocity that expresses itself in terms of substitution, the “one-for-the-Other.” This essay addresses the question of transcendence by relating it to the difference between the concepts of “the political” (le politique) and “politics” (la politique) in the thinking of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in an attempt to develop the idea of an ethical politics. The dimension of transcendence, alterity, and difference, claim Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, is precisely what is lacking in present politics and what needs to be recouped through a consideration of the meaning of the political.

This essay brings together what might initially appear incongruous pairings: Emmanuel Levinas and Henry Fielding, philosophy and comic romance, ethics and the ridiculous. In asking why we bring them together, what one half contributes to the other, we will perhaps find the thread of reasoning needed to weave together the respective projects of Levinas and Fielding, and to do so not as a corrective of one by the other, but rather as a complement. Reading Fielding through Levinas certainly yields an ethically richer Fielding, but more importantly for my present purposes, reading Levinas through Fielding renders an aspect of being that, while not fully absent in Levinas’ thought, is, unfortunately, overshadowed by the magnitude of his philosophy and the excessive burden of ethical responsibility it conveys: the playfulness of existence.

Nietzsche and Levinas each affirm a certain understanding of the “death of God.” For Nietzsche, this death is absolute and fully historical; for Levinas, the question of the death of God is a matter of which version of God is no longer tenable. In Nietzsche, transcendence is radically inverted as immanence, undermining all previous metaphysical grounds for ethics; in Levinas, transcendence signifies the dimension of the future as fecundity in a wholly different way, construed now primarily as the ethical relationship, predicated on the face of the other as the trace of the absolutely other. Nietzsche’s philosophy represents therefore an apocalyptic standpoint whereas Levinas’ is eschatological. Nietzsche’s apocalyptic reversal of the primordial alterity of God also reverses the knowable ground of God’s kenotic death. Unlike Hegel’s realization of the death of God, wherein the primordial otherness of divinity is nullified and transformed into the fullness of historical actuality, in Nietzsche this alterity is once again recovered, though now not in the sense of an eternal return to a primordial plenum or transcendence, but as the openness to futurity, as eternal recurrence. Rather than merely commenting on their differences, this essay engages the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas in an effort to think the ethical from a new apocalyptic eschatological “ground,” contending that both think the future as a fecund future that refuses a conception of the future as ground for a jurisdiction over beings.

Levinas’ philosophy is in part predicated on a retrieval or recasting of select Platonic motifs, yet his relationship to such thinking is frequently, and necessarily, ambiguous. While refraining from the often hyperbolic language of Nietzsche’s reversal or inversion of Platonism, Levinas’ more sober approach effects both a radical move away from and toward the Platonic teaching on paideia. Echoing Nietzsche’s injunction that the teacher is sometimes a “necessary evil,” and calling into question the visual luminescence of the so-called Platonist doctrine of forms, and the closed interiority of the subject in which they are instilled, I propose a Levinasian-oriented metapaideiac model based on the primacy of the exteriority of hearing, and thus of dialogue, as that which comes from a height, from a nondominating “mastery.” I reconsider Plato’s image of paideia, the essence of which is “turning around” and Levinas’ rejection of the Socratic maieutic method of elenchus in an effort to advance the question of whether a universal conception of ethics can be taught, and if so, how teaching produces ethics.

In many ways the thinking of Blanchot moves between that of Nietzsche and Levinas. Nietzsche, the thinker of immanence, calls every previous form of self-identity, rationality, legality, and morality into question while Levinas, the thinker of ethical transcendence, aspires to the Law, despite its absolute unattainability. Blanchot’s work is testimony, however, to the undecidability that subtends all thinking about madness, and thus also its relationship to law, sovereignty, the self, reason, and above all, for him, writing. This paper considers Blanchot’s relationship to Nietzsche and Levinas punctuated by reflections on Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida.

Nietzsche’s recognition of existence as an ever-shifting play of surface appearances presages his “revaluation of all values,” his response to those who would stabilize becoming by metaphysically reifying it as being. Nietzsche arguably provides Levinas with his deepest ethical challenge. Consequently, Levinas himself undertakes a similar revaluation of the ground of traditional values and of the subject. Both put forth heterodox notions of subjectivity insofar as the subject is constituted by a radical exteriority that is paradoxically realized as such interiorly. However, Levinas repudiates the postmodern conception of the subject as an empty, fragmented phantasm (a position often attributed to Nietzsche), the hollow legacy of a now debunked and defunct modernist project, characterizing his ethical philosophy as a “defense of subjectivity.” Nietzsche and Levinas simultaneously
invert and intertwine the traditional hierarchical relation between seeing and hearing. In doing so, they reveal essential dimensions of the ethical relationship that would appear to be contradictory, self-negating, or at least incompatible. However, they also have their sights set on a similar site— that of the “eye that listens.” This essay interrogates the role that the metaphor of the “listening eye” plays in determining their respective conceptions of subjectivity and ethics. Both employ this provocative and necessarily ambiguous metaphor to emphasize the radical role that teaching plays in their philosophies.

The philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Levinas are taken up in an effort to advance the ethical, political, and technological implications of how we interpret, inhabit, and territorialize the Earth. The difference between their views on the relation between immanence and transcendence and their respective analyses of the face and faciality are brought to bear in addressing the questions of ethics, politics, and values in relation to the constitution and liberation, or resingularization, of subjectivity. The contemporary world has produced to a historically unprecedented degree a tension between machinization and wildness—both of which are expressions of the inhuman. Somewhere in between this difference, transversing the borderlines between the human and inhuman, lies a possible way for rethinking the relation between subjectivity, identity, difference, and singularity.

In traditional or orthodox Christian theology, the concept of “atonement” refers to the sacrificial death of Christ that redeems a fallen humanity from the bondage of original sin. Yet while this atonement has already occurred for the believer in Christ as the realized eschaton, orthodox soteriology nevertheless holds that the final, complete actualization of this atonement lies with the establishment of the otherworldly Kingdom of God. Thus does the concept of atonement reveal a deep connection to an yet unrealized eschatological future, wherein the apocalyptic cosmic battle between absolute good and absolute evil is waged, with the outcome being the prophesied victory of God over Satan. Those on the side of goodness are completely atoned with God, and those siding with evil are irrevocably separated from Him. In the radical theology of Thomas Altizer one encounters a different conception of atonement. Rather than absolutely dirempted, good and evil are reconciled, atoned, as coincidentia oppositorum, a movement occurring first within the Godhead to rectify the “fall”—the separation of the transcendent from the immanent—within Godhead itself. The originary atonement of God with God thus inaugurates the genesis of creation, setting into motion the Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, first apprehended by the prophetic revolution of Israel. The atonement of Godhead is not however an ultimate annulment of the difference between the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ one effecting either a fusion of meaning or a complete negation of one term. Drawing on the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, Altizer interprets this reconciliation in terms of apocalyptic totality, which makes possible the epistemological standpoint of radical theology. Here the dialectical opposites of good and evil, transcendence and immanence, sameness and difference, are grasped as necessarily dichotomous in their abstraction yet simultaneously unified in their historical actualization.

Levinas has a decidedly ambiguous relation to Neoplatonist thought, retaining some of its fundamental insights while clearly rejecting its gnostic overtones and its totalizing, idealist objectives. A principal concern is whether Levinas’ Jewish-based philosophy truly marks a significant departure from the idealism of Plotinus and later variants of Neoplatonist theology, expressions of the very ontology that he claims is implicated in the originary
violence of absolutely conceptualizing, that is to say, of totalizing the other. Although taking recourse to a preoriginary difference that ostensibly frees thought itself from the “imperialism of the same,” does Levinas’ thinking nevertheless signals a return to a primordial transcendent plenum, one that is barely distinguishable in the end from the primordial myth of the eternal return, the very myth that captivated preexilic Israel along with the rest of the ancient world, ultimately finding a full philosophical expression in Plotinian metaphysics and a theological one in orthodox Christianity and Islam. Three main points are considered wherein Levinas and Plotinus are brought into proximity: the transcendence of the One, the status of the trace, and
the problem of evil.

Recognizing the importance of the Kyoto School and its influence on philosophy, politics, religion, and Asian studies, Japanese and Continental Philosophy initiates a conversation between Japanese and Western philosophers. The essays in this cross-cultural volume put Kyoto School thinkers in conversation with German Idealism, Nietzsche, phenomenology, and other figures and schools of the continental tradition such as Levinas and Irigaray. Set in the context of global philosophy, this volume offers critical, innovative, and productive dialogue between some of the most influential philosophical figures from East and West.