Thomas Trezise
Editor’s Preface
Leora Batnitzky
Encountering the Modern Subject in Levinas
Samuel Moyn
Transcendence, Morality, and History: Emmanuel Levinas and the Discovery of Soren Kierkegaard in France
Alain Toumayan
“I more than the others”: Dostoevsky and Levinas
Luce Irigaray
What Other Are We Talking About?
Paul Ricoeur
Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
Philippe Crignon
Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image
Edith Wyschogrod
Levinas’s Other and the Culture of the Copy
Yale French Studies
Encounters with LevinasYale University Press
Copyright © 2004 Yale University
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-300-10216-1Contents
THOMAS TREZISE Editor's Preface.........................................................................................................1LEORA BATNITZKY Encountering the Modern Subject in Levinas..............................................................................6SAMUEL MOYN Transcendence, Morality, and History: Emmanuel Levinas and the Discovery of Sren Kierkegaard in France.....................22ALAIN TOUMAYAN "I more than the others": Dostoevsky and Levinas.........................................................................55LUCE IRIGARAY What Other Are We Talking About?..........................................................................................67PAUL RICOEUR Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence..........................................82PHILIPPE CRIGNON Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image.............................................................................100EDITH WYSCHOGROD Levinas's Other and the Culture of the Copy............................................................................126
Chapter One
LEORA BATNITZKY Encountering the Modern Subject in Levinas
INTRODUCTION
The scholarly literature on Levinas and Descartes is surprisingly sparse, given Levinas's bold claims in Totality and Infinity that he is drawing on a number of profound Cartesian insights. Some attention has been given to Levinas's use of Descartes's conception of infinity and some to his use of Descartes's evil genius in arguing for a goodness beyond being. My focus in this essay, however, is on Levinas's appropriation of Descartes's philosophy in order to argue for a separable, independent subject. Levinas's claim about ethics rests upon his elucidation of the subject of ethics, the "I" who is uniquely responsible. It is the separate, independent, indeed atheistic self that he means to affirm in Totality and Infinity. Despite his arguments about the inability of philosophy to grasp the face of the other, Levinas's project is nothing short of a defense of the modern philosophical project-and the modern subject in particular-after Heidegger.
If postmodern philosophy takes as its villain the subject of Descartes's cogito, the reading of Levinas presented in this essay calls into question the view of Levinas as a "postmodern" thinker. I argue in what follows that Levinas's phenomenological description of the subject in Totality and Infinity, and also in Otherwise than Being, bears its greatest debt to Descartes. Levinas in fact presents his readers with an ethical encounter with Descartes's modern subject-an encounter that he claims is already present in Descartes.
Yet surely, one would quickly reply, Levinas's subject is not Descartes's subject. I argue in what follows, however, that the subject described by Totality and Infinity is none other than Descartes's so-called modern subject. In an important sense, this claim isn't even a claim because Levinas says as much. If Heidegger, in Being and Time, takes Descartes to have expressed and determined the modern dichotomy between subject and object, Levinas seeks nothing less than to reaffirm such a distinction. In order to appreciate Levinas's arguments, as well as their impetus, we must turn to his debt to and reliance on Husserl's view of the ego. To be sure, Levinas transforms Husserl's egology into an ethics of the other. Yet against Heidegger, he turns to Husserl's account of the ego to offer his view of ethics. We will see, however, that in returning to Husserl, Levinas in fact returns (as he himself says) to Descartes. Where Husserl locates Descartes's mistake in the claim that the ego is "a piece of the world," Levinas reaffirms, against Husserl, Descartes's initial impulse. In order to appreciate this appropriation of Descartes, we turn now to the overall argument of Levinas's first major philosophical work, Totality and Infinity.
PART ONE: THE ARGUMENT OF TOTALITY AND INFINITY
Totality and Infinity does not make a linear argument. Levinas seems to move from claim to claim without any apparent attempt to alert his readers to a clear progression of thought. A number of interpreters have commented that this lack of linear argument is part and parcel of his philosophical claim that ethics is first philosophy. These interpreters contend that Levinas's claims about ethics do not lend themselves to propositional argument. Yet while there is certainly much to be said about Levinas's style and choice of structure, Totality and Infinity does make a philosophical argument, one that we can outline fairly clearly. I make this claim for two reasons. First, this view conforms to Levinas's own self-understanding. Levinas very much understands himself as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. As such, he must have an argument to present that can be questioned, for this is the business of philosophy. Second, by appreciating the actual argument of Totality and Infinity, we can grasp Levinas's central philosophical claim, which is not, as many might believe, a claim about the self's obligation to the other. While this contention of course marks Levinas's entire philosophical project, his central argument in Totality and Infinity is for a separable, independent subject. If Levinas can adequately describe and argue for such a subject, then his claim about ethics follows.
I have set myself the not small task, then, of explaining the structure of Totality and Infinity. For despite the book's complexity, there is a structure to it and its argument emerges from this structure. To appreciate this, we must turn to the table of contents, which I reproduce here:
Section I. The Same and the Other
A. Metaphysics and Transcendence
B. Separation and Discourse
C. Truth and Justice
D. Separation and the Absolute
Section II. Interiority and Economy
A. Separation as Life
B. Enjoyment and Representation
C. I and Dependence
D. The Dwelling
E. The World of Phenomena and Expression
Section III. Exteriority and the Face
A. Sensibility and the Face
B. Ethics and the Face
C. The Ethical Relation and Time
Section IV. Beyond the Face
A. The Ambiguity of Love
B. Phenomenology of Eros
C. Fecundity
D. Subjectivity in Eros
E. Transcendence and Fecundity
F. Filiality and Fraternity
G. The Infinity of Time
In Section I, "The Same and the Other," Levinas lays out what will be the argument, to be made in greater detail, in the next three sections. Section I itself has four parts, which mirror the structure of the book as a whole. Part A of Section I, "Metaphysics and Transcendence," describes the broad arguments that are developed in the next three parts (B-D). In this part, Levinas lays out his general claim: that ethics precedes ontology and that ethics is transcendence. The following three parts (B-D) make in short the argument that...
