Abstract
The dominant questions of this Chapter can be expressed as follows. First, what would the universalization of Levinas’ ethics entail? What, would this generalization look like? Second, is there any sense in speaking of the enactment of responsibility?
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References
Translation modified. I have, among other things, preserved Levinas’ capitalization of Essence and Evil OBBE,223 (Fr.), 176–77 (Eng.).
OBBE, 232–33, 184–85. 3/bid.,232, 184.
OBBE, 223 (Fr.), 176–77 (Eng.).
OBBE, p. 232, 184. Levinas writes here, “This book interprets the subject as hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as substitution, breaking with the essence of being. The thesis exposes itself imprudently to the reproach of utopianism in an opinion where modern man takes himself for a being among beings, while his modernity bursts forth like an impossibility of remaining at home [chez soi]. From the reproach of utopianism—if utopianism is a reproach, if any thought escapes utopianism—this book escapes by recalling that that which humanly took place was never able to remain closed up in its place. There is no necessity, for this, to refer to an event where the non-event or non-place [non-lieu], making itself into an event or place [lieu], should have entered exceptionally into the spaces [espaces] of history”
Jacques Derrida has written a difficult and beautiful text, as a recipient of Levinas’ gift, see “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” in François Laruelle, ed., Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1980), pp. 21–60. English translation by Ruben Berezdivin, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds. Re-Reading Levinas, (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11–48. Also see Simon Critchley’s remarks about the writing of OBBE in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), esp. pp.108–129.
For her interesting remarks on the absence of irony and the cloak of pseudonymity such as Kierkegaard used this, see G. Rose, The Broken Middle. Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) p. 254 ff. Rose remarks, comparing the ethics beyond reason of Levinas with Kierkegaard, and decrying the utter absence of any viable mediation between the Other and the others, ethics and justice: “Instead of suspending the ethical teleologically, which would be to allow the simultaneous exploration of freedom and
he initial duo should become trio. But the contemporaneousness of the multiple is tied around the dia-chrony of two: justice only remains justice in a society where there is no distinction between the neighbors and the distant ones… It is thus not without importance to know whether the egalitarian and just State, wherein man fulfills himself… proceeds from a war of all against all or from the irreducible responsibilityof faith, of eros and of paternity, without denigrating or absolutizing either realm, Levinas has to police proximity as initial duo and subsequent trio with the ‘incessant rumbling’ of the ‘there is’. There can be no faith, only threat which lapses back into violent love and violent state. Authorship without irony and without aesthetic, without pseudonym, or facetiousness, modestly inscribes itself as ‘skeptical’, when it is alternatively herald in the heights of glory, witness of the sign given to the other, and ‘passing from prophecy to philology and transcending philology towards prophetic signification’,“ emphasis added.
See for example ORBE, p. 231,183.
OBBE, p. 201, 158. “C’est grâce à Dieu seulement que, sujet incomparable à Autrui, je suis abordé en autre comme les autres, c’ est-à-dire ‘pour moi’. ‘Grace à Dieu’ je suis autrui pour les autres.… Le ‘passage’ de Dieu don’t je ne peux parler autrement que par référence à cette aide ou à cette grâce, est précisément le retournement du sujet incomparable en membre de société.”
Ibid., p. 203, 159. One wonders whether the litotes employed here, “It is thus not without importance to know…” is not equivalent, or at least close to the repetition of “it is necessary” [il faut] in the passages cited at the beginning of this Chapter. If we assume that these two expressions have a certain confluence of intention
Ibid., p. 228–29 (Fr.), 181 (Eng.).
Ibid., pp. 185, 187 (Fr.), 145, 147 (Eng.).
That Judaism is the source and spirit of Levinas’ philosophy is not of itself remarkable. How many philosophies, including a variety of idealisms from Kant to Hegel to Schelling, did not attempt to express conceptually the insights and ‘spirit’ of Christianity, for example? How many philosophies have not attempted to rationalize and justify other ‘faiths’—supposed by some to be less dogmatic—such as that of the historical perfectibility of humans and society, or indeed that of the progress of reason toward universality and transparency? Whatever the putative or explicit separation between them, faith or belief and philosophy do not tread separated paths. Indeed, as Hegel well saw it, every time philosophy raises the necessity, or simply the value of a meta-rational, meta-logical cognition or manner of being, it opens the door to a certain subservience to faith and religion. This may be all the more so when it sets about to demonstrate the impossibility of God or of faith.
For a discussion of what it means to discover oneself a ‘creature’ see TI, “Séparation et absolu,” p.77–78 (Fr.), 104–5 (Eng.); and “la Création.” pp. 269–270 (Fr.), 293–4 (Eng.).
See G. Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Past, pp. 255–57. I do not share her certainty, moreover, that Levinas’ philosophy necessarily entails a theological politics without much likelihood of a stable secular justice. It is one thing to make a claim such as this, and another to maintain that the political ‘sphere’ is equivocal in that it is the scene of competition and the assertion of a manifold of powers and rights and of concern and (limited) responsibility.
In his commentary on TI, “Violence and Metaphysics,” J. Derrida rejects any interpretation of Levinas’ notion of “metaphysical desire” (which, significantly enough, is not emphasized in OBBE) as unhappy consciousness. He writes, “Desire… permits itself to be appealed to by the absolutely irreducible exteriority of the other to which it must remain infinitely inadequate. Desire is equal only to excess. No totality will ever encompass it. Thus, the metaphysics of desire is a metaphysics of infinite separation. Not a consciousness of separation as a Judaic consciousness, as an unhappy consciousness: in the Hegelian Odyssey Abraham’s unhappiness is… the provisional necessity of a figure and a transition within the horizons of a reconciliatory return to self… Here there is no return. For desire is not unhappy. It is opening and freedom.” in Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 93 emphasis added.
It is, however, important to note that the theme of desire is all but salient in OBBE. This is certainly tied in some fashion to the continual danger that the notion of ‘metaphysical desire’, as opening— although not precisely freedom!—to the other, degenerate into a phenomenology of willing; no matter how explicitly Levinas denies the connection of metaphysical desire and desire understood as need and enjoyment. Furthermore, in Ti Levinas grapples with the difficult question of a return from ‘an experience’ of transcendence. For there is always some sort of return. However the return implies neither formal or practical reconciliation, nor any other conceptual thematization.
In OBBE, the question of a return is complicated and to a certain extent disqualified by the elaboration of the (non)notion of ethical interruption, and the focusing of attention upon transcendence in immanence. As to Hegel’s sometimes truly cruel remarks about Abraham in “the Spirit of Christianity,” it may well be argued whether the unhappy consciousness is a mere passing figure in Hegel. Or in philosophy indeed! Such an argument, as we shall see, may be established with the assistance of Jean Wahl’s La conscience malheureuse. To restrict one’s understanding of unhappy consciousness qua dirempted consciousness, to its first instantiation, i.e., Abraham, is to fail to grasp the significance and fecundity of this notion in Hegel and beyond
Recalling Feron’s remark here concerning the duality at the heart of meaning: namely, a primordial vulnerability and its thematization. E. Feron, op. cit., p. 184.
Certainly, for Heidegger, the question, what is speech, and what is a word (or we might say, what is the sense of a word, as expressed and as something else) calls for the question, ‘how is the word.’ What is the manner of being of a word, or sense? Yet such a question fails to lead us to the ‘word as the word’ or to speech as speaking. Language has factical being of limited interest to Heidegger, it is doubtful in any event that he would speak of an excess of meaning over being. Yet language does have a certain excess in Heidegger; an excess, for example, that makes the simple tautology, ‘the very word is the word’, more than empty repetition. This excess is found in the paradoxical efficacity of poetic language and a certain call that is harbored therein. He writes, “Like the call which names things, calls to come from out of the distance and carries its appeal into the distance, so too the Saying which names the world is in itself such a contrast: call from afar—call to the distance. It returns the world to the things.” As such, the word is a non-mediating intermediary, the condition for world and things—that may not be deduced. Cf. Jean Beaufret, tr. “La Parole” in Heidegger, Acheminement vers la parole (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) pp. 13–18, 27.
It is as if Levinas had, in returning to the question of signification, reconsidered the work—especially the later investigations—of Heidegger. This reconsideration, discussed by Feron, does not lead to anything like a reevaluation of the notion/question of being in his ethics. However to understand speech, or language, as a sort of call which comes out of an immeasurable distance, and summons us to a likewise distant else-where, is not so far from Levinas’ understanding of it. In his essay, “Le nom de Dieu d’après quelques textes talmudiques,” (and doubtless in other works), Levinas describes responsibility as the essence of language. We could also say that substitution is the kernel or germ of meaning—and thereby say much the same thing. Now, what is responsibility, what is substitution, if not a ‘defection of identity’ or consciousness (OBBE 195 [Fr.], 153 [Eng.])? If consciousness is undone in the figural wake of transcendence, has it not vanished toward an unreachable in-side? What need is there to answer, consciously, a call that is pure efficacity without mediation. In the metaphoric hearing of the call, Levinas’ prophetic consciousness, is always already evacuated as intentionality; the call and the interruption of consciousness are the same. A sameness well expressed by Heidegger, in his turn and for his quite different ends, by terms such as a ‘call from out of the distance’ and a call to the distance.
The most evident difference lies in the relation—in both cases enigmatic—which makes speech and language possible. In the case of Levinas, evidently, the relation between what he here calls “the Soul and the Absolute” amounts to the essence of language. Shall we read this to mean the relation between a self and a human other? It is not clearly indicated. For Heidegger the relation would concern Being and the space in which it calls or glimmers. And, as always, Levinas’ relation to Heidegger is one of a certain debt and a massive opposition.
Although I am not following his arguments here, this passage in “Le nom de Dieu…”, is cited by Simon Critchley in his interesting discussion of Derrida’s final essay on Levinas, “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” in Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 126.
TI, pp. 224–25 (Fr.), 246–7 (Eng.) also 222 (Fr.), 244 (Eng.).
TI, p. 223, 245. 20T1, p. 220, 242.
Cf. TI, pp. 58–61, 86–88. J. Derrida reminds us justly that the exteriority of the human other is a certain spatial exteriority, but that for Levinas true exteriority is other than the spatial implications of this concept. “Levinas also intends to show that true exteriority is not spatial, for space is the Site of the Same.” But if this is so, Derrida continues, “Why it is necessary still to use the world ‘exteriority’… in order to signify a nonspatial relationship?” See Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference, p. 112.
Perhaps the Levinasian metaphor of hearing makes this somewhat more understandable. We do not ‘hear’ something in space, not even obviously in some inner space. Yet, hearing it, we distinguish between the interiority of hearing that which is outside us, and the interiority of hearing, say, the voice of our for intérieur. This remark addresses only a part of Derrida’s questions, however. For the latter deepens his reflection on space in what follows, showing that this play of inside-outside metaphors is primordial, “congenital” to philosophy. The presupposition of space, “being the… finitude of birth… without which one could not even open language, one would not even have a true or false exteriority to speak of.”
Now, clearly, that language is opened for Levinas, by the approach of the other, may have blinded him to that other primordiality, the horizon against which the other appears and the area or site deployed around the other, which is not the other yet is inseparable from the apparition of the other. Let us note that Derrida adds, definitively, “To say that the infinite exteriority of the other is not spatial, is non-exteriority and non-interiority, to be unable to designate it otherwise than negatively—is this not to acknowledge that the infinite… cannot be stated?” (p. 113).
Perhaps it is for this reason, as well, that Levinas chose to transpose the encounter with (infinitely separated) alterity into an inside, a within of sensibility. This trans-duction simply displaces the question of space, within, and it problematizes the relation between the other as undergone within and the other, as appearing without.
Perhaps also we can hear, in Derrida’s words, “to designate it otherwise,” a certain germ of a most unorthodox ‘thought’ which caught the interest of Levinas.
Cf. TI, p. 52 ff. (Fr.), 79 ff. (Eng.).
T/,p.186,211.
TI, p. 276, 300; the French expression is “le Très-Haut,” Lingis translates this as “the On High.”
But also through Levinas’ own text, offered as gift to us. See Ti, pp. 271–72 (Fr.), 295–6 (Eng.). “The description of the face-to-face [i.e., of fundamental ethics] is said to the Other, to the reader who reappears behind my discourse and my wisdom. Philosophy is never a wisdom because the interlocutor that it has just embraced has already escaped it…. Should not the transcendence [i.e., also the goodness] of exteriority bear witness of but an unfinished thought and should it be surmounted in the totality?” The answer would appear to be ‘yes’.
See F. Ciaramelli, Transcendance et éthique: Essai sur Uvinas, pp. 147 ff. 27 Ibid., p. 147.
See Levinas, “Et Dieu créa la femme,” in Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 122–148. Translated into English by Annette Aronowicz as Nine Talmudic Essays (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press 1990). This is a commentary on the Mishna, Tractate Berakhot. As Levinas writes, “The text shall speak of woman [la femme]…. In question here, from the outset, is a duality in man and an attempt to define what is human. It is in the light of such an attempt that the feminine and the masculine shall be discussed thereafter.” He concludes his reading of the Tractate with the remark, “You see thus: the feminine is quite well placed in this hierarchy of values which shows itself at the moment in which choices become alternatives. It [the feminine] has the second place. It is not woman who is thus misunderstood. It is the relation based upon the difference of the sexes which is subordinated to the inter-human relation—irreducible to the forces and complexes of libido—to which [i.e., the inter-human relation] woman has arisen as has man. Perhaps the masculine is more directly tied to the universal, and the masculine civilization shall have prepared, above the sexual, the human order into which woman enters, as distinctly human.” p. 148.
“Et Dieu créa la femme,” loc. cit., p. 146.
Ibid., This appears to be a development, and spiritualization, of Ti’s notion of the son’s election by the father.
Cf. Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques, (Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit, 1982) pp. 158–181; or D. Coppieters de Gibson, ed. “La révélation, pp. 55–77. Translated in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader, pp. 190–210.
May one speak of a prophetic consciousness as unhappy? The answer is ‘yes’, insofar as no prophetic consciousness is always prophetic consciousness, even prophetic consciousness requires the more banal states of consciousness as well as measure and justice. As such the prophetic consciousness, which moves between ethical announcement and every day representations, recognizes the utter diremption of its being between the madness of its investiture by an other and the infinite separation of that other.
In this way, Justice stands as if opposed to the possibility of the ethically primordial, prophetic consciousness. This is why the possibility of the ‘order’ of justice, which is a formal and pragmatic possibility, must be guaranteed by an Other who does not face me. Justice requires, in OBBE, a transcendental condition in order not to be immediately and irretrievably separated from the efficacity of transcendence in immanence. Justice complicates the diachrony and makes the appeal to God qua the absent Other inevitable. Yet does it provide a passage from ethics to questions of practical justice? I think not.
That said, of the proto-subjectivity called the Self, we can affirm that it is the figural embodiment of ‘extreme unhappiness’ for Levinas. Now this is an unhappiness that has nothing to do with reflective consciousness. It is the unhappiness of a subject over-filled with what it can not know to carry; the unhappiness, that is, of its own destruction. Out of the midst of the destruction of consciousness, according to Levinas, the experience of suffering in election also is one of laughter through one’s tears. But, I think, not in the moment in which it experiences this election; perhaps after the fact, when election is secured as a concept by thematization.
See TI, p. 56, 84.
’Note Alphonso Lingis’ remarks on the innovations of OBBE in his “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. xi—xxxix, see esp. pp. xvi, xx—xxii.
lndeed what is music, be this the interpretation of a song, or the extreme and continually interrupted pathos of a work such as Mahler’s first symphony? Although such suggestions run contrary to the argument of Levinas, here. Moreover the latter’s negative appreciation of art, as the mimicry of the experience of transcendence precludes such discussion
Is not the epiphany of the face, even if we consider it as an absence, also and as if in the ‘next moment’ recognized as a ‘human face’; is not this recognition so utterly spontaneous that it appears to precede conscious recognition? Yet the ‘human face’ as this spontaneous recognition seems to presuppose the others.
One might then wonder, why maintain this figure, of this ‘force’—when the term is taken in its most de-materialized sense? If the face is truly an absence, then what has become of the signification carried by the glance, or offered by the mouth that speaks to me? Are there now two faces, the corporeal face, which shall no longer figure in an ethical schema, and the transcendence effected in (?) and by (how, if not in its appearing or gazing?) the face? As Derrida writes, “If the face of the other was not also, irreducibly, spatial exteriority, we would still have to distinguish between soul and body,… between a true, non-spatial face, and its mask or metaphor, its spatial figure. The entire Metaphysics of the Face would collapse.” loc. cit., p. 115.
These remarks of Derrida’s echo his remarks about the denial of spatiality to the Infinite other, or to the infinity, the infinite distance (!) of the other. I believe they also apply to, and crystallize the difficulties in, the configuration of eros qua caress, fecundity qua birth of the son, and election/fraternity qua the son experiencing his election from the father and serving his (factical) brothers. If a certain ‘physical’ dimension, be it naïve or naturalist, is denied to these analyses, these figures, they become like metaphors without any point of meaning (life, facticity, etc.,) relative to which they proceed outward. Moreover, if the physical dimension is maintained, then the risk is always run that Levinas’ fear, i.e., of a confusion arising in his text between the figuration of fundamental ethics and a philosophical anthropology, be justified.
I refer here to André Néher’s remarks on Ezekiel 30:30–33. Without any frivolity of intent Néher suggests that the supposedly large and eager audience of Ezekiel can be likened to a crowd avid to witness a spectacle. In the scene established by these verses, “the prophet is no longer the organ of God, but neither is he a Don Quixote whom one abandons to his chivalresque chimeras; the prophet is an artist, and one passes to listen to him, evenings, as one might go to a recital. The message of the prophet is not neglected here… that which, in it, seduces, but in a poignant and irresistible manner, is its form…. Ezekiel is listened to because his prophetic vocation has made of him an accomplished lyric actor.” In this transmutation, a curious nexus arises between biblical pathos and an aesthetic form into which certain commentators have remarked that “God consents to enter” (p. 76), in such a way that eventually, the curious may discern a reality that is their own. Néher supports his remarks with a commentary from the Sanhedrin Tractate (Talmud Babli, p. 39a), in which Rabbi Abbahou is attacked by a heretic, who tells him that his God is a kind of joker. “Rabbi Abbahou responds to the Min (heretic) by the theme of the Suffering Servant: the trials merited by the entire people, God has only imposed on the prophet alone who, thus, becomes the vicarious [recipient] of universal suffering. The tragic seriousness of the response and the hypothesis of the grotesque comedy in the question [of the heretic] are tied together, in this brief Talmudic passage, and in one and the same breath. And, for the reader of the fourth chapter of Ezekiel, the ambiguity subsists:… Should one laugh at the comedy staged by God, or weep over the unfathomable mystery of divine intention? See A. Néher, ”Ézéchiel 30, 30–33: Un paroxysme du psychodrame prophétique“ in F. Lamelle, ed. Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel
Place, 1980), pp. 71–77, esp. 72–73 (my translation).
F. Ciaramelli, op. cit., p. 150. “The perspective in which Otherwise than Being analyses prophetism neglects the relation to the third party, whose entry into the intimacy of the face to face, although ‘permanent’ (OBBE, p. 204 [Fr.], 160 [Eng.]), is superposed upon the intrigue of the ethical and engenders ontology and the political. Prophetism, on the other hand, belongs to the pre-originary structure of the psyche, it is its inspiration and disquietude… the awakening by the Other.”
Writes Levinas, “It is in prophetism that the Infinite [now intended in a different sense than that of the ‘infinite’ as radically inexhaustible and increasing responsibility; now intended as the condition of possibility of the former] escapes the objectivization of thematization and of dialogue and signifies as illeity, in the third person; but according to a ‘tertiality’ [third order] different from that of the third man, different from the third party interrupting the face-to-face of the welcome of the other man—interrupting proximity or the approach of the neighbor—[different] from the third man by which begins justice.” OBBE,p. 191, 150. See also p. 199, 156–7 (my translation).
Note, with regard to the difficulties of sense posed by the proper name God, OBBE, p. 206, 162. “The Infinite leaves a trace.… It causes the word God to be pronounced, with letting one say ‘divinity —which would have been absurd, as if God were an essence…, or as if he were a process, or as if he admitted a plurality in the unity of a genre. Does God—[as] proper and unique name entering into no grammatical category—enter without embarrassment—into the vocative?—and, thus, non-thematizable and who, in this very spot [ici-même], is only a theme because, in a Said, everything is translated before us, even the ineffable, at the price of a betrayal that philosophy is called to reduce: philosophy called to think ambivalence, to think it in several times; even if called to thinking by justice, synchronizes again, in the Said, the dia-chrony of the difference of the one and the other and remains the servant of the Saying…”
OBBE, p. 221, 175. Levinas writes, “Essence, Knowledge and Action are tied to Death. As if the Platonic Ideas, themselves, only owed their eternity and their purity of universals to the perishing of the perishable before requiring a Republic in order to depart, efficacious, from their bad idealism.”
See also F. Ciaramelli, op. cit., pp. 152–153. Ciaramelli admits that the recourse to Illeity, or the excluded Third, is not without difficulties. “This deduction [i.e., of justice from prophetism],” he writes, “in effect, is so problematic that it demands a strange type of ‘recourse to God’ to justify itself. It is true that in the texts subsequent to Otherwise than Being, this recourse disappears; yet these texts only resume and abridge the argument of Otherwise than Being, wherein the recourse to God appears inevitable.”
He adds on the following page (153) “Without this ‘passage’ [i.e., of God], the ‘social super-structure’ wherein, concerning myself with the third party, I must judge, weigh, compare and concern myself also with myself, [this structure] would be deprived of any ethical value.” Emphasis added
See Ciaramelli’s remarks, n. 35.
OBBE, pp. 202, 159.
See J. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in, Writing and Difference, op. cit.,p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91; to which Derrida adds “Not pure and simple absence, for there logic could make its claim, but a certain absence. Such a formulation shows clearly that within this experience of the other the logic of non-contradiction…. ‘formal logic’, is contested in its root.”
“Violence and Metaphysics”, pp. 106–107. 49“Violence and Metaphysics”, p. 107.
The structures of living… experience described by Levinas are the very structures of a world in which war would rage… if the infinitely other were not infinity, if there were, by chance, one naked man, finite and alone. But in this case, Levinas would no doubt say, there no longer would be any war, for there would be neither face nor true asymmetry. Therefore the naked… experience in which God has already begun to speak could no longer be our concern. In other words, in a world where the face would be fully respected (as that which is not of this world), there no longer would be war. In a world where the face no longer would be absolutely respected, where there no longer would be a face, there would be no more cause for war. God, therefore, is implicated in war. His name too… is a function within the system of war, the only system whose basis permits us to speak… With or without God, there would be no war. War supposes and excludes God.50
“TI, pp. 188–189, 213. Levinas writes, ”The epiphany of the face as face opens humanity. The face in its nudity of a face presents to me the denudation of the poor and the stranger; but this poverty and this exile… remain expressions of a face. The poor one, the stranger is presented as equal. His equality in this essential poverty consists in referring to the Third Party, thus present in the encounter and which, in the midst of his misery, the Other [Autrui] already serves. He [the Other] joins with me. But he joins me to him in order to serve, he commands me as a Master. A commandment which can only concern me insofar as 1 am [once the Third Party is considered] a master myself a commandment which, consequently,commands me to command.“ Emphasis added (my translation).
How then does the Third party enter the intrigue of I and the Other? He enters by way of the effectivity of the Other’s face.
’Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”, p. 108. Now Derrida is not interested in assailing Levinas from the perspective of the non-believer. He immediately thereafter retracts his question, qualifying its intent, “Here it is a question of knowing whether the trace permits us to think presence [and hence the presence of God in being] in its system, or whether the reverse order is the true one. It [the latter] is doubtless the true order.”
Following the qualification of his question, Derrida resumes the stakes underlying his criticisms. “But it is indeed the order of truth that is in question. Levinas’ thought is maintained between these two postulations.”
’Violence and Metaphysics“, p. 107. 54 /bid., p. 108.
“Néher, op. cit., p. 72. Néher’s study concerns three ostensibly unproblematic verses from Ezekiel 30: 30–33. These verses appear to be the consolation of the unheeded prophet by God. For Néher, reading the verses from within the Talmudic tradition, these words, reproduced below, describe marvelously the relation of dialogue between man and God. This relation, Néher emphasizes, must not be taken as a sort of ”prometheanism“, but instead as ”biblism“, the love of God through love of the Book of His words. No one is playing at being God here, but rather ”through the word and the silence of the game lieu], God and man found themselves in quest the one of the other.“ (Néher, toc. cit., p. 72)
The passage from Ezekiel reads as follows: 30:30. “Also, thou son of man, the children of thy people still are talking against thee by the walls and in the doors of the houses, and speak one to another… saying, Come, I pray you, and hear what is the word that cometh forth from the Lord.
:31. “And they come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them: for with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth after their covetousness.”
:32. “And, lo, thou art unto them as a song of loves]also ‘jests] of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument: for they hear they words, but they do them not.”
:33. “And when this cometh to pass, (lo, it will come,) then shall they know that a prophet hath been among them.” Cited from the King James Version of the Bible.
’Ibid., “Psycho-drama” here refers to the work of Jacob Levy Moreno, a contemporary of Freud and psycho-analyst himself. Moreno read the Bible both psychologically and theologically, producing what was a profoundly nuanced interpretation (to follow Néher) that is consonant with certain Talmudic commentary.
Néher, op. cit., p. 72.
/bid., To justify his argument the heretic reminds Rabbi Abbahou that, in Ezekiel 4:4, God tells the latter to lie on his left side, while the following day, (Ez. 4:6), He orders him to lie on his right side.
Néher, ibid., p. 73.
Néher, ibid., p. 74.
Néher, ibid., pp. 74–75. Author’s emphasis.
See the two quotations from OBBE which introduce this Chapter, supra.
Néher, ibid., p. 76.
bid., author’s emphasis
See Wittgenstein’s “Conférence sur l’éthique” in Leçons et conversations suivies de conference sur l’éthique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976), p. 155. Note that the “Conference on Ethics” does not appear in the English edition of Lectures and Conversations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966).
In a perfect accord with Levinas, Wittgenstein defines ethics more broadly than does G.E. Moore, whom he cites. “Thus, instead of saying: ‘ethics is the investigation of that which is good’, I might have said that it is the investigation of that which has a value… or I might have been able to say again that ethics is the investigation of the meaning of life, or of that which makes life worth living…” (p. 144)
He then remarks the inevitability of ethics and its linguistic and conceptual absurdity. “All that I have tended toward [here]—and, I believe, that to which all men tend who have ever tried to write or to speak on ethics or on religion—was to confront the limits of language. It is perfectly, absolutely, without hope to strike one’s forehead thus against the walls of our cage. Insofar as ethics is born of the desire to say something about… that which has an absolute value… ethics can not be a science. That which it says adds nothing to our knowledge… But it documents for us a tendency that exists in the mind of man, a tendency that I can not but respect…” Emphasis added.
One may read this as easily in a strictly Humean-Kantian fashion, thereby substituting for the term ‘language’ that of ‘understanding.’ Or (and?) one may see in these words the very challenge Levinas has given himself as philosophical task. The task of irony, such as we describe it above, or that of a certain derangement.
See “Dieu et la philosophie” in, De Dieu qui vient a l’idée (Paris: Vrin: 1986, Second edition), p. 94, 55–6 (Eng.)
He writes here, “‘Not to philosophize is still to philosophize’. The philosophical discourse of the West asserts the amplitude of an all-inclusiveness or an ultimate comprehension. It compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy….
“If the intellection of the biblical God… does not reach the level of philosophic thought, it is not because [this intellection, theology] thinks God as being without making clear to begin with the ‘being [être] of this being’, but because, in thematizing God, theology has brought him into the course of being, while the God of the Bible signifies in an unlikely manner the beyond of being, or transcendence. That is, the God of the Bible signifies without analogy to an idea subject to criteria, without analogy to an idea exposed to the summation to show itself true or false” (my final emphasis).
This repetition of “without analogy to” responds to Derrida’s “unheard of analogy” and most significantly, to his remark, “But it is indeed the order of truth that is in question.” At the very least, Levinas’ answer points away from philosophical notions of truth as applying to what is capable of showing itself or to that which is susceptible to a criterion.
See G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism.- And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 5.
Robert Bernasconi suggests that Derrida has actually not written a critique of Levinas. He explains that Derrida’s reading of Totality and Infinity is plausibly a double reading, or deconstruction, by virtue of which Derrida is able to suggest that ‘Levinas’ text is betrayed by the intentions announced in that text’. This is especially true of Levinas’ claim made for the face to face ‘relation’, which gives rise to language as ethical response. See R. Bernasconi, “Levinas and Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics,” in Richard Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 187–88.
G. Scholem, op. cit., pp. 12–17.
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Bergo, B. (1999). Ethics as First Philosophy and the Question of Its Universalization. In: Levinas between Ethics and Politics. Phaenomenologica, vol 152. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2077-9_10
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