Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas: 20 (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosoph

Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy) Series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy (Book 20 ).
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To be sure, there is an inevitable artificiality to presenting as immediacy what is already past. But this is a wager we also find in religious language's continuous revivification of the present. It is likewise a wager in Levinas's philosophical discourse; one ventured in the hope that hyperbole and strategic negations will convey a meaning that would otherwise disappear in predicative statements.

The final chapter of Otherwise than Being thus makes a transition out of philosophy into a certain lyricism, repetition, and bearing witness. It is Levinas's step toward the affective conditions of possibility of prophetic speech. I n the work, Levinas's earlier concern with charges of psychologism i.

The ontological language also changes. The ways in which existence echoes in language is taken up resolutely. As in his discussion of need and nausea, the complex of sensibility and affectivity overflows representation, while providing an index to the Being that is our own being. Interwoven layers of affectivity are unfolded in Otherwise than Being. Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of sensibility.

We should recall that the spatial distinction between inside and outside falls as one effect of phenomenological bracketing. Faithful to the spirit of Husserl's phenomenology, Levinas suspends that distinction. Rather, it problematizes that more ontological approach. There is good reason for this. As we know, responsibility is an event that repeats.

It even increases as it repeats, according to a logic of expanding significance. That is why the question of immanence arises in regard to responsibility's enduring, and its rememoration. The status of a memory of sensuous events, which affect us before we can represent them, must frame sensibility as intrinsically meaningful, intrinsically beyond-itself.


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But that implies that the sensuous meaning-event is vulnerable to a skeptical challenge. Levinas does not solve the question of memory and repetition in cognitive terms. As an interpretive phenomenologist, his concern is to pursue transcendence back behind Husserl's transcendental ego, that formal, passive accompaniment of all conscious contents. The opposition to Heidegger now takes place through an analysis of temporality and language, with the focus on the dynamism of verbs and their inflections by adverbs.

Temporalization is the verb form to be.

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He continues, this time undermining Heidegger for whom there is no concept of the ad-verbial: In sensibility the qualities of perceived things turn into time and into consciousness… [But,] do not the sensations in which the sensible qualities are lived resound adverbially …as adverbs of the verb to be? If Being resonates in the verb to be, then transcendence must belong either to Being and verbality, or transcendence must differ from them. The Saying hearkens to his theme of sincerity, introduced in Existence and Existents. In Otherwise than Being , he will radicalize sincerity by insisting that the structure of sensibility-affectivity is to be always already fissured.

It is this that opens us to venture communication. Sensuous vulnerability is the locus of the birth of signification, understood as approaching or speaking-to another whether words are actually spoken or not. There is more, in living affectivity, than Heidegger's conception of Being coming to pass, can designate.

If transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence in , it is not simply the continuous birth of intentional acts of consciousness that bestow meaning, as it was in Husserl. Has this ultimate approach to transcendence charted a new apophatics, a new discourse of the unspeakable? Levinas does not refrain from thinking the lapse of time, which is also the gnawing of remorse, and the symptom of the Other-in-the-same. But he now argues that what is said about transcendence and responsibility must also be unsaid , to prevent it from entering into a theme, since it transcends every thematic.

The history of Jewish philosophy, from Philo and Sa'adya Gaon to Maimonides, and then from Cohen to Rosenzweig, alone clarifies Levinas's strategies and figures. Levinas has recourse, for example, to Maimonides' approach to the Infinite, using a negative interpretation of affirmative propositions. A similar proposition is found in Levinas's characterization of transcendence. We can be otherwise, if we choose to do so, he argues. In the wake of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Heidegger realized in the early 's that life as concrete, lived immediacy can be interpreted, but that we cannot be certain that what we are interpreting does not move perpetually within the circle of discursive conceptuality.

Interpretation spawns interpretation of itself , and a hermeneutic circle arises from this. Does that mean that factical experience is structurally inaccessible? Levinas's text here echoes his claims about the face as expression that pierces through phenomenality. This is not allegory; that is, it is not the signification, born of a Christian reading of the Bible, of higher realities hidden under everyday objects and events.

It is almost the contrary: Levinas seeks the factical and moral depths from which signs arise. Levinas is thus performing a non-technical, interpretive reduction in his text. His radical reduction aims to get at the affective meaning of his ethical interruption of Being and consciousness. It is like a light out of which arises speaking the dibbour , or Saying, of the Infinite. These thematic parallels are not accidental. The temporality specific to the sensuous passivity that precedes the passive synthesis of time as a unified flow, is stranger than Husserl's complex stream of consciousness with its retentions and protentions.

Like living, the time of sensibility occurs despite oneself. No longer do we heed spontaneously our own immanent voice, as in Husserl; no longer do we hearken to a silent call of Being, as in Heidegger OBBE, 56, 62, We are constituted, affectively, by the other within and without. Being or existence remains on the parallel tracks of a naturalistic will to persist in being and its implications for culture and politics. Levinas's adaptation of the Spinozist conatus essendi predictably has nothing of the latter's monism or pantheism.

Nevertheless, existence is not so markedly identified with war as it was in The question remains, as it did in Totality and Infinity: How do responsibility and transcendence enter into the continuum of time and Being? And, how does an investiture of this intensity pass into reason? Here too the passage to reason, sociality, and measurable time occurs because the spatio-temporal lapse is as if spontaneously integrated by consciousness. Levinas accords Husserl his argument that sensibility and affect are always on the verge of becoming intentional consciousness.

The responsibility and fraternity expressed now as the abyssal subject or other-in-the-same leaves a trace in social relations. Moreover, faithful to his project of , the form of the trace is not traditionally metaphysical. It is found in our concern for reparatory justice, even for modest equity. But neither could the adverbial change the verbal quality of being in its continuous becoming. In however, the difficulty of holding together the time and passivity likened to aging OBBE, 54 , with the flowing time of consciousness and its projections toward future possibilities, is more obvious in the text.

Insoluble, this proves a question for us as well. It is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice? Now, attempts to express lived facticity occurred not infrequently in philosophy over the course of the last century.

The text as first person witness may well date from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But the inevitable thematization of intersubjectivity, from a standpoint outside the face-to-face encounter, simply underscores the necessary double reading Levinas demands of us: For that reason, Levinas is not interested in pursuing a deduction of questions of equity.

The site at which comparison, justice, and normativity can be deduced is beyond Levinas's immediate concern. Illeity and fraternity lose the quality that defines them, that excessive and intensive sensibility-affectivity, when they are incorporated into conceptualizing discourse. The hiatus, here, is well known: The notion of a just politics has meant different things according to the form of the State absolute, noninterventionist, liberal. Given his occasional evocations of a pluralist Being in Totality and Infinity , Levinas's argument that justice is marked by the trace of responsibility accords relatively well with liberal theories of political justice and sovereignty.

Anglo-Saxon theorists of sovereignty always emphasized that individuals live in multiple social associations, which impose a host of responsibilities on them. This pluralist cultural existence diminishes conservative emphases on sovereignty as concentrated in the State itself. But Levinas never decided whether politics meant war or a real possibility of peace. For the Jewish philosophical tradition, justice forms the core of the prophetic message.

In that respect it has a distinctive political dimension. If the prophets demanded justice as well as repentance of their wayward communities, their hyperbolic invocation of justice concerned humanity as a whole. But the prophetic message did not aim at the enactment of justice in the public sphere , whether agora or parliament. Levinas's works subsequent to Otherwise than Being refine its complex thematics. It is plausible to see in them two sides of a single coin: But Levinas had essentially one philosophical project: To that end he consistently revisited Husserl's phenomenological method.

He reconceived Heidegger's ontological difference as the difference between existence and the Good.

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He had extensive, often undeclared recourse to the profound, anti-totalizing intuitions into religious life found in Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig's philosophies. Yet Levinas never remained wholly within any one philosophical system. That does not mean that Otherwise than Being was not motivated by the difficulties highlighted in Totality and Infinity by Jacques Derrida and others. There is little question that the sophistication of Otherwise than Being lies in its three innovations: A common thread thus runs through his philosophy and his Talmudic readings.

Transcendence is the spontaneity of responsibility for another person. It is experienced in concrete life and expressed in a host of discourses, even before a de facto command is actually received from that other. We do not choose to be responsible. Responsibility arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the approach of the other person. Because this theme is found in both his philosophy and his interpretations of Talmudic passages, Levinas's thought has, at times, left both Talmud scholars and philosophers dissatisfied.

For the first, his thought is thoroughly humanistic, with Infinity proving a more rarefied concept of divinity than Maimonides' apophatics. No stranger to Mishnah and Gemara, his interpretations are, nevertheless, less focused on inter- and intra-textuality than on the ethical tenor of the teachings. To the philosopher, Levinas's thought may not escape the hermeneutic circle of facticity, which Heidegger first adumbrated. It is precisely in these tensions, between the Jewish religious and philosophical traditions, and his phenomenological-existential thought, that Levinas's originality lies.

A list of works, translated into English but not appearing in any collections, may be found in Critchley, S. Cambridge University Press, , pp. Transcendence as the Need to Escape 3. Inflections of Transcendence and Variations on Being 4. Transcendence as Responsibility, and Beyond 4.


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    4. Transcendence as the Other-in-the-same 5. Concluding Remarks Bibliography Works by Levinas: He is the eldest child in a middle class family and has two brothers, Boris and Aminadab. The family returns to Lithuania in , two years after the country obtains independence from the Revolutionary government.

    Levinas studies philosophy with Maurice Pradines, psychology with Charles Blondel, and sociology with Maurice Halbwachs. He meets Maurice Blanchot who will become a close friend. His Lithuanian family is murdered. Basic Philosophical Writings Outside the Subject , a collection of texts, old and new on philosophers, language, and politics.

    The annual colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle publishes a volume devoted to him. Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris, December And yet modern sensibility wrestles with problems that indicate…the abandonment of this concern with transcendence. As if it had the certainty that the idea of the limit could not apply to the existence of what is…and as if modern sensibility perceived in being a defect still more profound OE, Inflections of Transcendence and Variations on Being The writings of the s prolong Levinas's counter-ontology against Heidegger's question of Being, but always with recourse to interpretations of embodiment.

    We will have more to say on this when we discuss time and transcendence in Otherwise than Being 5. Concluding Remarks Levinas's works subsequent to Otherwise than Being refine its complex thematics. Bibliography Works by Levinas: Principal Philosophical Works of Levinas: Levinas's doctoral dissertation, first published in Paris: The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, Notes by Jacques Rolland. First published in Stanford University Press, Alphonso Lingis, The Hague and Boston: Le temps et l'autre.

    First published in Ed. Jean Wahl, Le choix, le monde, l'existence. Time and the Other. Duquesne University Press, Reprinted with new essays. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Cohen and Michael B. The Hague and Boston: Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Indiana University Press, Second edition corrected and enlarged. Collections of Philosophical Essays and Lectures: Miguel Abensour, Paris, France: Rivages, First published in Chicago University Press, Humanisme de l'autre homme.

    Humanism of the Other. Nidra Poller, Introduction by Richard A. Urbana and Chicago, IL: Illinois University Press, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel.

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    Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paperback reprint Livre de Poche, Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Stanford University Press, Meridian, La mort et le temps. Jacques Rolland, Paris, France: Lectures given during the academic year — Barbara Harshav and Michael B. Smith, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, Dieu, la mort et le temps. God, Death, and Time. Bergo, Preface by Jacques Rolland.

    Cohen, Urbana and Chicago, IL: Livre de poche, Quatre lectures talmu diques. Annette Aronowicz, Bloomington, IN: This translation regroups the lectures of and Talmudic Readings and Lectures. In the Time of the Nations. New Talmudic Readings , Trans. Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas. Is it Righteous to Be?


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    Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Driven Back to the Text: Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. A Critique of Infinity: Die Frage nach dem Anderen: Le sujet chez Emmanuel Levinas: Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. Cambridge; New York, NY: In Silence with Heidegger. The Question of Invisibility. The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics. State University of New York Press. Bercherie, Paul and Neuhaus, Marieluise, Levinas et la psychanalyse: Levinas Between Ethics and Politics.

    For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth. The Hague, the Netherlands: Liturgy of the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility. From Self-Development to Solidarity: Centre for Metaphysics and Philosophy of God. The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love: Bloechl, Jeffrey, Milwaukee, WI: Burggraeve, Roger and Anckaert, L. De vele gezichten van het kwaad: Meedenken in het spoor van Emmanuel Levinas.

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    Levinas Group 3

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    La sagesse de l'amour. Une philosophie de la transcendance: Forthomme, Bernard and Hatem, Jad, Levinas et la signification. Emmanuel Levinas et l'histoire. Cerf and Presses Universitaires de Namur. Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan. Garanderie, Antoine de la, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics and the Feminine. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Guibal, Francis and Breton, Stanislas, Emmanuel Levinas ou les intrigues du sens. Presses universitaires de France.

    De ander in ons: Emmanuel Levinas in gesprek: The Problem of Justice in Plato and Levinas. London; New York, NY: De la bible au talmud: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable. From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other: Levinas and Habermas on Language, Obligation and Community. Emmanuel Levinas and the Sanctification of Suffering.

    Ethics at a Standstill: History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School. A Guide for the Perplexed. The Call of Conscience: Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate. University of South Carolina Press. Responsibility, Indifference and Global Poverty: Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Philosophers: Keenan, Dennis King, Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, Before the Voice of Reason: Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion.

    Freiburg and Munich, Germany: Es ist nicht alles unerbittlich: The Paradox of Power and Weakness: Levinas and an Alternative Paradigm for Psychology.

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    Emmanuel Levinas

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    La part de l'autre. Man as a Place of God: Levinas' Hermeneutics of Kenosis. Out of Our Ancient Past. Un saying of the Other: The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Humanism for the Twenty-First Century. Levinas, History and Violence. Simmons, William Paul, Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas. The Argument to the Other: In the Margins of Deconstruction: Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Thomas, Elisabeth Louise, Ethics, Justice and the Human beyond Being.

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    While Levinas stresses our overriding responsibility towards the Other, and insists that freedom is unimportant in ethical decisions because it is self-serving, this volume confronts him with the following — as of yet underexposed — critique: And what is the moral significance of responsible action if it is not freely chosen but passively imposed?

    This article explores the problem of freedom underlying radical passivity. Is freedom a necessary condition for the possibility of ethical action or is freedom, as an expression of self-concern, a hindrance thereto? Hence, a false opposition has emerged between an absolutized egoism and a crushing altruism that threatens to undermine the recent resurgence of ethical concerns.

    This article addresses this hitherto unaddressed problem without succumbing to a biased account by opting for either egoism or altruism. I succeed in showing that a mediation between these two oppositions is not only necessary but indeed possible — contrary to the prevailing reading in favour of Other-concern, which ultimately amounts to an untenable ethical position. This article lays the groundwork upon which such an encounter could be explored by critically assessing some of the hindrances hampering dialogue. Levinas and his thought are beset by racist and Eurocentric biases that threaten to derail his ethical project.

    Finally, there is the seemingly insurmountable gap between ethics — a relation between two — and politics, the realm where the countless appeals of other Others impinge upon the face-to-face relation. In addressing these challenges this article makes an important contribution to leveling the playing field by inverting the gaze from North to South. This article forms part of an ongoing investigation into neo-liberal power and how it conditions our possibilities for thought and action. The focus is on the impact on conditions of work and subjectivity of an economic rationality that has become the dominant political programme.

    It offers a much needed corrective of those who have interpreted Foucault as a proponent of neo-liberalism. It has been argued that power so conceived leaves little room for resistance. In Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe. Philosophy as Analysis of the Present. A Multi-disciplinary Approach , 4 International Journal of Philosophy 17 2: In British Journal of Phenomenology 47 2: In Filozofia 69 2: