02-tatransky

ABSTRACT. The conception of the unconditional, irreducible, and irreversibleasymmetry of the relationship between I and the Other is one of the crucial issuesof Levinas’s ethical metaphysics. Since it is precisely in the name of the asym-metry that reciprocity as an ethics-founding principle is excluded from Levinas’sconceptual framework (in spite of Levinas’s enigmatic expression in Otherwisethan Being: “‘thanks be to God,’ I am the Other for the others”), many scholarshave judged his ethics as unfeasible. This article aims to examine the key pointsof the debate about the Levinasian conception of asymmetry, to go, eventually,beyond Levinas, in an attempt to re-address the following questions: Is there a“transcendental symmetry” (Derrida) as a basis of the ethical asymmetry? Canwe reconcile asymmetry and reciprocity? Does the requirement of mutual recog-nition touch the Other’s asymmetrical transcendence, as Ricoeur suggests?Finally, the article presents a conception of “asymmetrical reciprocity” thatfocuses notably on the reality of friendship and of gift, a conception seen as thebasis of the relationship characterized by gratitude, generosity, and desire forcommunion.

KEYWORDS. Levinas, ethics, asymmetry, reciprocity, friendship, gift

“Grâce à Dieu” je suis autrui pour les autres.Emmanuel Levinas1

The very title of this article suggests that the strategy I am going topursue here is a kind of reading of Levinas that would attempt to go

beyond him: that is, to pose Levinasian questions to Levinas to develophis thought in a way different from what can be found in his writings. I shall do so by focusing attention on Levinas’s account of ethical asym-metry, which will be reconsidered in the light of what Ricoeur called “themost profound ethical request” (1999, 46): the claim for the reciprocity.

ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 15, no. 3 (2008): 293-307.© 2008 by European Centre for Ethics, K.U.Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.15.3.2033153

A reciprocal asymmetry? Levinas’s ethics reconsidered

Tomás TatranskyGraduate School for Social ResearchPolish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

1523-08_EthPersp_02_tatransky 19-09-2008 14:06 Pagina 293

I would argue that what is at stake here is the very feasibility of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics today. Why? On the one hand, Levinas chal-lenged any kind of totalitarianism and this remains, no doubt, his majorachievement. Yet on the other hand, he did so by asserting an irreconcil-able contrast between asymmetry and reciprocity, and thus by sacrificingthe possibility of building ethics on a reciprocal kind of relationshipbetween me and the other. Now, it seems to me that – in an age whenglobal dialogue has become a necessity rather than an option – Levinas’sapproach proves quite risky, as phenomena related to various forms ofinterdependence of human beings impose themselves perhaps moreurgently than ever before.

In this essay, I will initially report Levinas’s argumentation in favourof the Other’s asymmetry (or, to be more precise, of the asymmetry ofthe Other’s ethical appeal), which is a synonym of his or her absolutetranscendence. It will be shown, then, that the very core of Levinas’sethics is the paradoxical intersection of the Other’s incommensurablesuperiority on one hand and of his or her ethical proximity on the other.In Levinas’s view, I perceive the Other’s order (which is even independ-ent from the Other’s initiative) to take on his or her suffering or evenguilt, but he or she simultaneously remains a stranger who does not enterthe relationship of reciprocity with me. Moreover, in Levinas the primor-dial ethical experience is that of trauma or obsession, since the Other isalso (or even originally) my enemy and persecutor. Even though Levinashimself tried to moderate those claims by introducing the accounts offraternity and justice, he never definitively admitted that the asymmetri-cal relation of ethics could be in any way inverted, so to speak, in myfavour. Secondly, I shall briefly turn to Derrida and Ricoeur, whose effortsaimed to think ethics after Levinas, that is to do justice to the Levinasianethical requirements and at the same time to the epistemological neces-sity to perceive and recognize the other in his or her specificity anduniqueness. Finally, I will develop the concept of an asymmetrical reci-procity or reciprocal asymmetry, which will challenge some of the basic

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assumptions of Levinas. To do so, I shall focus attention notably on thereality of friendship and that of gift, which will be seen as the basis of therelationship characterized by gratitude, generosity, and desire for com-munion.

1. THE ACCOUNT OF ASYMMETRY IN LEVINAS AND ITS “CORRECTION”

First of all, let us recall briefly how Levinas justifies his concept of asym-metry. In Totality and Infinity we read:

What I permit to require from myself is not comparable to what I havethe right to require from the Other [Autrui]. This moral experience, sobanal, indicates a metaphysical asymmetry: the radical impossibility tosee myself from outside and to speak in the same sense of myself andof the others; in consequence, also the impossibility of totalization(2000c, 46).

Further, this basic phenomenological observation leads Levinas to declarethat “[t]o be myself is always to have an extra responsibility” (1998, 71).Then from a more metaphysical standpoint, Levinas asserts that “good-ness [la bonté] consists in placing myself in being in such a way that theOther [Autrui] would count more than me” (2000c, 277). But the Other’ssuperiority is not, in Levinas’s view, only relative to my ethical solicitudefor him or her – it is rather an expression of his or her absolute transcen-dence, which excludes the possibility of equivalence between me and theOther, as any possibility of comparison is precluded, despite the absoluteethical proximity of the Other at the same time. The Other, according toLevinas, towers over me, obliging me to responsibility from “[t]he dimen-sion of the height [hauteur]” (ibid., 86).

Significantly, Levinas locates the Other beyond the very horizon ofthe phenomenological field: even granting his or her ethical proximity, theOther is never within the reach of my intentionality, as if he or she were


TATRANSKY – A RECIPROCAL ASYMMETRY? LEVINAS’S ETHICS RECONSIDERED


an alter ego in the Husserlian sense. The Other is not present to me in thesame sense in which I am present to myself; instead, he or she is givenprecisely as a face, or as Levinas also puts it, as a trace which is not a phe-nomenon, but rather an enigmatic epiphany of the infinite ethical demandof the Other. The Other remains, therefore, always a separate being,whose transcendence prevents me from establishing a direct relationshipwith him or her, as “[t]he significance of the trace places us in a ‘lateral’relation, inconvertible to rightness [rectitude]” (Levinas 2000b, 64). AsChalier points out, there is in Levinas “an insurmountable distancebetween the self and the Other, an irreducible duality, even in love, whichwe should guard as a precious good” (1993, 104).

Another important feature of Levinas’s ethics is my uniqueness,which makes it impossible to any other to substitute for me in my ethical commitment for the Other (see Levinas 1986, 148), while I amcalled – and even elected – to a truly Messianic task to substitute all (seeLevinas 2001, 200). I am called to sacrifice myself to expiate the others’guilt, whereas the claim that the Other should do the same is, in Levinas’s view, absolutely illegitimate, because it would mean “to preachthe human sacrifice!” (ibid., 201). Levinas’s ethics is hence not an ethicsof sacrifice in general, but an ethics of exclusively and inalienably my sacrifice. “I am responsible for the Other – says Levinas – without wait-ing for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair” (2000a,94-5). Ultimately, in this perspective the true name of such an ethics ofinfinite responsibility – leading as far as to my expiation for the Other –is Messianism, understood as “my power to support the suffering of all”(Levinas 1976, 120).2

Moreover, in Levinas’s view (notably if we consider his analysis inOtherwise than Being) the Other is seen basically as a stranger, or even asmy persecutor, thus as an enemy (again, even independently from theOther’s actual intentions). Levinas does not hesitate to suggest that onlythe persecuted subject can be responsible for the Other (see Levinas 2001,162), and he insists that the Other is the one who hurts, traumatizes, and




obsesses me, whereas my attitude faced with the Other can be definedperhaps most aptly as the passivity of the Passion (see ibid., 162 et passim). In other words, Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face relationship isultimately that of pure self-sacrifice with no return or communion. It isa radical ethics of unilateral non-reciprocity, of the irreversible “one-for-the-other,” hence an ethics without or before friendship and eros (seeibid., 143 n.1). These would threaten to reduce the absolute alterity of theOther, perceived rather as an alien than as my neighbour and likeness, oreven partner. Importantly, thus, pure ethics precedes dialogue, which isalways associated, in Levinas, with reciprocal exchange that would onlyconfirm the subject in his egoism or “imperialism” (ibid., 183).

However, Levinas was aware that such a radicalization of his ethicsneeded some mitigation. While maintaining the radical impossibility ofthe equalization between me and the Other, he nonetheless employed thenotion of fraternity as a basis of the unity of the human race (see ibid.,258). Importantly, in Levinas the idea of the human race is not rooted ina biological genus, but rather in the reality of common paternity, offeredby monotheism. We are not equal, but we are still brothers because weare all children of one Father, suggests Levinas. In a debate with Ricoeur,Levinas was very straightforward as to this point: “[w]hen I speak of non-reciprocity, I privilege fraternity over equality” (Levinas and Ricoeur1998, 19).3

In addition, Levinas tried to develop his own conception of justice(and hence politics), which would be established with the arrival of “thethird” (or with the latent presence of “the third” in the face of the Other),who revokes the incommensurability of the Other. Even though justicein Levinas is apparently an ambiguous and shifting term – since Levinasseems to maintain a certain tension between ethics based on a face-to-facerelation on one hand, and politics as a realm of justice, required by thethird, on the other – it is worth noticing that according to him “[t]he rela-tionship with the third party [le tiers] is an incessant correction of the asymme-try of proximity” (2001, 246; my emphasis).4




Does this correction mean a simple neutralization of the Other’sasymmetry, or does it imply the reversibility or even the inversion of therelation between me and the Other? Although Levinas did face this ques-tion, the answer he gives is very equivocal and cautious. Already in Total-ity and Infinity he concedes that “I can… feel like the Other [Autre] of theOther [Autre]” (2000c, 83), but he fails to follow this path. In Otherwise thanBeing, instead, Levinas seems to go further, when he says that “‘[t]hanksbe to God’ I am the Other [autrui] for the others” (2001, 247). Does itmean that reciprocity can be established between me and the Other?According to Levinas it tends not to: indeed, just a few lines below heexplains that “[t]he ‘passage’ of God… is precisely the return of theincomparable subject as member of society” (ibid.). Yet on the otherhand, one could read those quite enigmatic assertions by interpreting theexpression “thanks be to God” as an allusion to the primordial love ofGod that precedes my ethical commitment to the Other – Levinas him-self seems to allow such a reading, when he writes that “[t]he Good [le Bien, which is here used as a synonym of Infinity]… loves me beforeI have loved him. By this anteriority love is love” (ibid., 25 n.1).

Admittedly, what we have here is neither the reversibility nor theinversion of the relation between me and the other human being. At best,the surplus of my responsibility over that of the Other can be justified andexplained by God’s prior love towards me, whilst I can become the Othernot for the Other (in a situation of inverse dyadic relationship, or of dou-ble asymmetry), but always for the others (in plural): that is, in a situationwhen “the third” has already counterbalanced and thus somehow neutral-ized my original ethical assignment by placing the Other before the neces-sity to do justice to me. Only with the arrival of the third can law andequality appear (see ibid., 202), but Levinas carefully remarks that “theequality of all is borne by my inequality, by the surplus of my duties overmy rights” (ibid., 248).

In any case, Levinas sees justice as a kind of corruption (althoughnecessary) of the genuine ethics of unilateral relationship, where all the




forms of social relations should be ideally rooted (and by which they mayand should be unceasingly questioned). Indeed, while on the one hand,as Levinas claims, “dissymmetry precedes reciprocity” (Levinas andRicoeur 1998, 15), on the other hand “the reciprocity is always present”(ibid.) in a society arranged by justice, law, and institutions. In otherwords, reciprocity in Levinas is a matter of politics, not ethics; reciproc-ity is a result of ethical compromise,5 not an encounter of two humanbeings who freely love one another. Levinas, when questioned about thistroublesome issue, was always extremely insistent on his principles, stress-ing the inevitable link between reciprocity and contractual exchange oreven expediency. The expectation of the Other’s ethical commitmentwould contaminate the pure gratuity of my solicitude; therefore, the eth-ical asymmetry must remain unconditional, irreducible, and irreversibleso as to preserve the Other’s original alterity and transcendence.

But does the fact that I should not expect the Other to treat me as hisor her Other imply that the Other cannot or even should not approach mewith the same ethical solicitude as that obliging me? This is already a ques-tion going beyond the Levinasian conceptual framework, a question explor-ing precisely the possibility of what we shall call a reciprocal asymmetry.

2. SOME SEMINAL CRITIQUES: DERRIDA AND RICOEUR

The first philosopher who expressed perplexity when confronted withLevinas’s account of asymmetry was Derrida. He did so in his outstand-ing essay Violence and metaphysics (first published in 1964, ten years beforeOtherwise than Being appeared), in which Derrida claims that the alterity ofthe Other does not preclude the fact that I perceive the other as Otheronly because I still perceive him or her necessarily as my alter ego. Draw-ing on a Husserlian vocabulary, Derrida sets forth the notion of “transcen-dental symmetry [that of the other as my alter ego] of two empirical asym-metries [those of the Other’s alterity and of my alterity seen as such from




the other’s standpoint]” (2005, 135). To put it more simply, usingRicoeur’s words, this transcendental symmetry “institutes the other as mylikeness and myself as the likeness of the other” (Ricoeur 1999, 46).Within this basically phenomenological framework, symmetry is conceivedof as reversibility based on the similitude between me and the other. Ifthe other were not my likeness, I would fail to recognize him or her asmy neighbour, that is to say as another human being I am responsible to.

That I am also essentially the other’s other – Derrida concludes –, andthat I know I am, is the evidence of a strange symmetry whose traceappears nowhere in Levinas’s descriptions. Without this evidence, Icould not desire (or) respect the other in ethical dissymmetry (2005,137).

There seems to be therefore a sort of fundamental or transcendental rec-iprocity of cognition, which would represent the very condition of pos-sibility of the ethical recognition of the Other. The Other must be givenas a phenomenon to me, otherwise it would be impossible to perceive hisor her ethical summons. “Without reciprocity – Ricoeur says – or… with-out recognition, alterity would not be a matter of one other than myself,but the expression of a distance indistinguishable from absence” (1999,46). In Ricoeur’s view, only reciprocity can guarantee the possibility of thevery relationship, while, in contrast, the Levinasian emphasis on theincommensurability of the Other makes him or her absolutely indeter-minable, hence absent.

Elsewhere – in a dialogue with Levinas we have already quoted from– Ricoeur separates the epistemological and ethical levels of analysis: “[i]nsum there is a sort of epistemological primacy of ‘I’ and an ethical primacyof ‘you.’ Therefore, it seems to me that we need to maintain the equiva-lence of those two dissymmetries” (Levinas and Ricoeur 1998, 14). HereRicoeur seems however to concede to Levinas the primacy of asymmetrywithin the realm of ethics, as also Derrida does in his later writings onself-giving, where he claims that there is a primacy of my responsibility




established in the “abyssal dissymmetry in the exposition to the other’sregard” (1999, 48). It is precisely this exposition that constitutes me in mypersonal singularity, says Derrida echoing not only Levinas, but alsoKierkegaard and Patocka (see ibid., 21). In this perspective, ethics is seenas “infinite and dissymmetrical economy of sacrifice” (ibid., 145), or thatof love which is ready to address also an enemy who does not reciprocatewhat is given to him or her.

In his celebrated book Oneself as Another, Ricoeur pleads for the ethicsof friendship by emphasizing that in true friendship the uniqueness ofthe other is in no way effaced, since the other is regarded in his or hervery singularity. The generous movement of recognition respects the ini-tial asymmetry, while it also invites the other to “compensate” for it byestablishing an exchange of mutual giving and receiving (see Ricoeur 1996,221). But the mutuality of recognition, Ricoeur insists, is not a matter ofan economic logic of do ut des, driven by a utilitarian or selfish spirit – itrather represents a situation where the other gives me “a sort of secondfirst gift” (Ricoeur 2004, 351), in the sense that the other’s gift is free andunconditioned.6

All those accounts (as well as the notion of “inter-donation” used byJean-Luc Marion) lead us to the conception of “asymmetrical reciprocity”7

or reciprocal asymmetry, which could arguably pave the way towards anethics after Levinas, leaving untouched the Levinasian concept of asym-metry. At the same time, this conception would remedy the exclusion ofreciprocity from ethics, insofar as it would break the yoke that fatefullybinds together, in Levinas, reciprocity and the logic of mere contractualagreement.

3. THE CHALLENGE OF A RECIPROCAL ASYMMETRY

When we speak of reciprocal asymmetry or asymmetrical reciprocity, we may mean different things. Our experiences, indeed, include a large




spectrum of degrees of reciprocity and may vary from a rather epistemo-logical reciprocity with an enemy who, nevertheless, recognizes me as hisor her other, to a perfect (yet still asymmetrical, I would claim) reciproc-ity or (as Ricoeur would prefer to say) mutuality of love which circulatesin a dialogic relation of friendship (which was altogether overridden byLevinas, as we have already suggested). All this can be found in humanexperience, even if we leave aside religious or mystical experience of mycommunion with God, where asymmetry – in both the chronological andontological sense – is obvious.

Consequently, I would point out that in our empirical experience,reciprocity is at least in some measure necessarily a matter of asymmetry,and vice versa, asymmetry refers to reciprocity or bi-directionality, at leasta minimal one. A perfect symmetrical reciprocity, if such a thing wereever concretely possible, would imply complete sameness of me and theother, with the annulment of the uniqueness of each one as a logical con-sequence (and here Levinas would certainly agree). An absolutely gratu-itous gift, on the one hand, and an impeccably equivalent exchange, onthe other, are just abstractions (and as such are useful, however, as regu-lative ideas); in the real world, instead, we always find ourselves betweenthese two poles, the former being an ideal of ethics and the latter beingthe chief principle of justice and economy. Hence, the Levinasian equiv-alence between asymmetry and incommensurability (at least an absoluteone) proves to be nothing but a speculative assumption with no phenom-enological evidence that could back it up. The other is always other-than-me and simultaneously someone who can be compared to me – withoutcomparison there would be no recognition of the other precisely in hisor her otherness.

In what follows, I will consider such a conception of reciprocal asym-metry that would represent an ideal pattern of friendship. Since the timesof Aristotle, who – while drawing on the basically reciprocalist scheme offriendship – wrote that in friendship it is more worthwhile to love thanto be loved,8 friendship can be seen as an ambiguous reality. Employing




Levinasian terminology, we could say that friendship – like the intimacyof the erotic relation, whose ambiguity was abundantly commented on byLevinas – involves such a model of intersubjectivity that it cannot be sub-sumed either under purely ethical or political terms. Personal enjoymentaccompanying the experience of friendship distinguishes it from the expe-rience of unilateral sacrificial giving, whereas the familiar closenessbetween friends, on the other hand, makes friendship irreducible to therelation of mere justice, characteristic of economic or political rules andlaws which are objective and institutionalized. As Marsh puts it,

[p]ersonal and intimate friendship would represent a type of interme-diate region between the ethical drama and the task of justice….[P]ersonal friendship appears as an excess reducible to neither ethicsnor enjoyment, while nevertheless passing through ethics and enjoy-ment. Friendship marks a space of non-violent familiarity and exteri-ority, a site of solidarity between identity and difference (2005, 5).

Friendship might be defined as a free exchange of gifts, as an “economy”of hospitality, or as a logic of communion, where differences are sharedwithout being jeopardized by the “logic of the same,” so harshly stigma-tized by Levinas. Of course, unilateral, disinterested or even self-sacrific-ing acts9 are constitutive components of the asymmetrical model of rec-iprocity, but they do not have the last say, being just moments aiming atthe establishment or recovery of lacking or broken reciprocity, or at itsgrowth. However, it is also true that friendship is always a “happy acci-dent” (Marsh 2005, 8), in the sense that my friend’s freedom makes friend-ship unnecessary, and precisely “contingent upon the grace of my friend’sdescent from height” (ibid.). The “accidental reciprocity” (ibid.) of friend-ship, beyond any calculation, implies indeed a gift, “a gratuity directed atme, even me!” (ibid.).

Now let us develop the example of giving, which has a uniqueexplanatory power, if gift can be understood as not necessarily a materialthing – for instance, I can give to the other my time, while listening to




him or her. Even for a material gift, however, the value of the gift ideallytranscends the worth of the thing I give, since it is rather an expressionor a token of gratuity and generosity of my love towards the other.10 Assuch, my gift awakes in the other originally not an obligation to giveanother gift in return, but a feeling of gratitude, which eventually movesthe other – but from within, so to speak – to reciprocate, even if I haveno right to expect the return of the gift (here again Levinas is surely right).In other words, the loving response of the other is not enforceable, sinceit must remain free as my gift was, and since there is, indeed, no contractor law obliging the other to respond positively to my gift. The other’schoice to reciprocate is an autonomous act, an expression of his or herself-determination – it is fully up to the other whether to reciprocate ornot. The binding of gratitude is soft enough to respect the other’s free-dom and self-governance, even though, of course, it orients him or hertowards the good, exerting admittedly a certain moral pressure.

At any rate, all I can do is to invite the other to reciprocate, but with-out requiring the control over the situation, even if I can desire or hopeto be eventually loved by the other. I can even take into account theother’s will to reciprocate, but I have no guarantee as to when the coun-tergift would arrive and as to its exact value. But all this is not to denythat I not only can or may, but should wish myself loved – if not, it wouldmean that I am just indifferent towards the other and that I do not carewhether he or she enters the dynamics of reciprocity which would bene-fit both me and the other. In the last analysis (and here I am probablymost at odds with Levinas), the absolute unilaterality of a non-reciprocalasymmetry would only imply epistemological solipsism and ethical isola-tion, under the guise of a heroic morality of a solitary subject, elected –like a Messiah – to “bear all the responsibility of the World” (Levinas1998, 71).11

If the other decides to reciprocate the gift, he or she does so not onlyto do justice, but, like me, out of love (though justice is also included inlove). The return of the gift is not a mechanical result of the other’s auto-




matic reaction, but of his or her conscious and responsible ethical com-mitment. Hence, mutuality is rather a matter of responsiveness than ofmere reversibility. Moreover, the gift that I receive from the other is obvi-ously not the same thing that I gave him or her (otherwise it would bejust restitution of a loan), and it may as well have quite a different worth– if it is ever possible to measure it. Briefly, the other’s giving is not a sim-ple repetition of my giving, but the other’s original act, his or her uniquecontribution to the development of our relationship. And even if theother’s gift had hypothetically exactly the same “economic” value as mine,it would still remain, in an ethical sense, incomparable because of (or,better, thanks to) the other’s irreducible alterity.

To conclude, only if the other enters the realms of reciprocity, I amand can feel wholly recognized, accepted, and appreciated in my unique-ness. And in addition, as I have already mentioned, I gain benefit andenrichment from the other’s gift, which is always, in some measure, a sur-prising presence of something new in my life. Once I have this experi-ence, I understand that I should cherish and promote the unique other-ness of the other not only for the other’s sake, but also for the sake ofmy own uniqueness and growth (and thus for the sake of my very iden-tity and authenticity), which I discover fully possible only in an atmos-phere of communion and mutual acknowledgement, where gifts are freelyshared and joyfully welcomed.

WORKS CITED

Bernasconi, Robert. 2005. “The third party. Levinas on the intersection of the ethicaland the political.” In Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers,edited by Claire E. Katz, vol. I, 45-57. London and New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London and NewYork: Verso.

Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée.Derrida, Jacques. 2005. “Violence and metaphysics. An essay on the thought of

Emmanuel Levinas.” Trans. Alan Bass. In Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of




Leading Philosophers, edited by Claire E. Katz, vol. I, 88-173. London and New York:Routledge.

Chalier, Catherine. 1993. Lévinas. L’utopie de l’humain. Paris: Albin Michel.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1976. Difficile Liberté. Paris: Albin Michel.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1986. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. Paris: Vrin.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Entre nous. Paris: Le livre de poche.Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000a. Éthique et Infini. Paris: Le livre de poche.Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000b. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Paris: Le livre de poche.Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000c. Totalité et Infini. Paris: Le livre de poche.Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Paris: Le livre de poche.Levinas, Emmanuel, and Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. “Entretien Lévinas – Ricœur.” In Emmanuel

Lévinas. Philosophe et Pédagogue, 9-28. Paris: Nadir.Marsh, Jack. 2005. “Friendship Otherwise – Toward a Levinasian Description

of Personal Friendship.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 5, 2: 1-8,http://www.ipjp.org/december2005/Jack_Marsh_5e2.pdf.

Milbank, John. 1999. “The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice.” First Things 91: 33-8.Ricoeur, Paul. 1997. Amour et justice. Paris: PUF.Ricoeur, Paul. 1996. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil.Ricoeur, Paul. 1999. “Approaching the Human Person.” Trans. Dale Kidd. Ethical

Perspectives 1: 45-54.Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Parcours de la reconnaissance. Paris: Stock.

NOTES

1. “‘Thanks be to God’ I am the Other for the others” (Levinas 2001, 247).2. Ironically, this account of Messianism – which gives up the idea of a Messiah who will

come to halt or reverse the course of history – is closer to Hasidism (normally opposed by Lev-inas) than to the Talmudic tradition, which was the milieu intellectually and spiritually congenialto Levinas (see Chalier 1993, 146).

3. It is important, however, to be aware that when Levinas speaks of fraternity, he also meansthe primordial pattern of brotherhood as it is presented in the conflict between Cain and Abel(Genesis 4:1-16): Levinas’s expression “the one-for-the-other in so far as the one-keeper-of-his-brother, in so far as the one-responsible-for-the-other” (2000b, 10) is clear enough to suggest thatLevinas still thinks of fraternity in terms of original culpability – as if the words addressed by Godto Cain, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me” (Genesis 4:10) applied to me and to each one.

4. According to Bernasconi, in Levinas the ethical and the political complement and evenquestion one another: “The face to face would serve as a corrective to the socio-political order,even when the latter is based on equality, whereas the presence of the third party in the face ofthe Other would serve to correct the partiality of a relation to the Other that would otherwise haveno reason not to ignore the demands of the other Others” (Bernasconi 2005, 46).




5. Or the paradox: to rule a society on a just basis means indeed to level out its members(despite the uniqueness of each of them), thus, as Levinas puts it, to “compare the incompara-ble” (see 2001, 33 and 246), which is a paradoxical task. Which can also explain why Levinascomes to say that “justice is violence” (Levinas and Ricoeur 1998, 20)

6. Whereas in Soi-même comme un autre (1996, 215) Ricoeur founds the ethics of reciprocityupon the Golden Rule (see also note 11), in Amour et justice (1997) he distinguishes between thedemand for reciprocity and for love (agape), the latter being pure unilateral generosity demandingnothing in return. In Parcours de la reconnaissance (2004) Ricoeur somehow reconciles all his previ-ous views by introducing a distinction between reciprocity (as a logic of justice) and mutuality (asa free exchange of gifts, i.e., as a logic of agape which has become mutual).

7. This term (as well as that of “non-identical repetition”) was already used by John Mil-bank (1999) with a meaning similar to the one that I ascribe to it.

8. This nature of love to act as first – i.e., before being loved – as described by Aristotle isconsidered, in their key texts, by both Ricoeur (1996, 223) and Derrida (1997, 7).

9. How are such acts possible? A consistent answer seems to be the following one: it is onlythe experience of having already gratuitously received love that enables me to give love to the oth-ers. My capacity to love in a generous and disinterested way seems therefore to be rooted in a radical passivity (that is in acceptance of the primordial gift of love) or gratefulness preceding anyactive ethical commitment. Arguably, Ricoeur tries to reflect philosophically on this basically reli-gious experience that transcends the horizontal account of friendship developed by Aristotle.

10. In this sense, Ricoeur speaks of “gage de l’engagement du donateur dans le don” (2004, 342).11. It is noteworthy that Levinas’s ethics is practically irreconcilable with the so-called

Golden Rule (plainly confuting the incommensurability of the other), which is one of the basicimperatives of the Judeo-Christian (and not only that) tradition. Even though in the Bible we findits positive formulation explicitly only in the New Testament – “in everything do to others as youwould want them do to you; for this is the law [i.e., the Torah] and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12)– its negative version appears in the book of Tobit – “what you hate, do not do to anyone” (4:15).Significantly, there is a Judaic document from the first century B.C. (known as Targum of Pales-tine) that employs the Golden Rule as an explanation of Leviticus 19:18 (“you shall love yourneighbour as yourself”). Furthermore, we find the same association in the Talmud, namely in theteaching of Rabbi Hillel (who preached between 30 B.C. and A.D. 10), according to which theGolden Rule is the very heart of the Torah, all the rest being nothing but commentary (B. Tal-mud, Shabbath 31a). Given these facts, I would claim that Levinas as an eminent Talmudist shouldhave taken the Golden Rule – which demands reciprocity – more seriously into account whileengaged in his ethical theorizing.




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