“WHILE THE LONELY MINGLE WITH CIRCUMSTANCE”

THE POLITICS OF ETHICAL SUBJECTIVITY

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

© Copyright by Samuel David Newman 2016

Theory, Culture, and Politics M.A. Graduate Program

May 2016

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Abstract

“While the Lonely Mingle with Circumstance”

The Politics of Ethical Subjectivity

Samuel David Newman

Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy focuses on the idea that no human subject exists outside

of their relationship to other people. Each of us holds a profound degree of responsibility

to and for all others. Since responsibility is fundamental to human (co)existence, it does

not impede on freedom but proves that the sovereign individual is a dangerous myth: any

philosophical, political or economic system which places us in antagonism is inherently

violent and arguably fallacious. Many instances of injustice and violence can be

attributed to advances in technological rationality and other forces of modern egoism

with historical roots. By forwarding a somewhat politicized interpretation of Totality and

Infinity and drawing on Jacques Derrida’s landmark reading of Levinas, this thesis

explores the implications of Levinas’ thought for modern politics and the potential of

Levinasian ethics as a remedy for both the alienation of the modern subject and the

continued justification of oppression.

Keywords: Levinas, Ethics, Relation, Other, Same, Subjectivity, Responsibility, Politics,

Sovereignty, Egoism.

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Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Dr. Elaine Stavro for wonderful guidance throughout in this project; Dr.

David Holdsworth for spectacular help and insight; Dr. Asher Horowitz for his very

valuable work and participating on my committee; Nancy Legate; Catherine O’Brien;

Erin Davidson; Dr. Feyzi Baban; Dr. Charmaine Eddy; Dr. Dorota Glowacka; Jonathan

Kwinta; and my parents Fred and Elaine Newman; grandmothers Dorothy Newman and

Fran Kirshenbaum; and my family and friends, especially my brother Ricky for

unconditional and invaluable support.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Anti-traditional Subjectivity 6

Chapter Two: Phenomenology and Critical Theory 35

Chapter Three: Justice and the Paradox of Identity 48

Chapter Four: Identity and Totality 62

Works Cited 79

Introduction

By questioning the basic structure of subjectivity and forwarding an approach to

philosophy which stresses the fundamental plurality of human existence, Emmanuel

Levinas challenges the character of the modern subject. He extends a radical approach to

thought and politics the consequences of which this thesis will explore. Though his work

is rigorously philosophical, Levinas is easily read as a social critic. By replacing ‘being’

with ‘ethics’ as the founding principle for philosophy and so rewriting the terms of

subjectivity after Heidegger, Levinas challenges the basic Western structures of thought

and sociality and provides the space for a more egalitarian political imagination. This

project argues for a specific reading of Levinas as a politically motivated thinker, and

progresses according to an understanding that a great deal of contemporary social and

political inequality is attributable to a tradition of individual sovereignty which places

human subjects in fundamental antagonism to one another. Comparable to recent trends

in postmarxist, poststructuralist and postmodern thought, with an understanding of a

world in which capital circulates, power is concentrated, and individuals’ actions are

subject to the recognition of unavoidable interrelation, this perspective is unique in its

criticism of the concept of the individual and it’s analysis of the psychosocial structures

which perpetuate competition, selfishness, and various forms of oppression. Injustice can

be explained by Levinas’ understanding of a systematic ‘Totality’ which is structured

around a misapprehension of the inescapable relation between human subjects (TI 71).

Justice itself rests on an understanding of truth which necessitates a sort of knowing

rooted only in a proper assessment of the ethical relation (ibid). Contrary to traditional

philosophy and political and social theory, Levinas denies the possibility of an emergent

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human existence which precedes sociality. The concerns of other people trump the

desires and even the needs of the self, so there is less opportunity for competition,

traditional capitalism or even contractarian approaches to politics which focus on or give

ontic precedence to the individual subject. This approach to intersubjectivity also

challenges the psychoanalytic notion of the boundaries of the self: to delineate the interior

from the exterior in order to prioritize the self, rather than situating the self as exterior to

the world of the Other, becomes impossible.

Levinas’ understanding of a human subject bound in ethics has profound

consequences for social and political life. There are three themes which characterize

Levinas’s work, all of which is centred on his fundamentally anti-egoistic understanding

of subjectivity: one has to do with human subjectivity and the way that Levinas’ subject

exists in and through relation to others (the phenomenological or anti-ontological theme);

another has to do with ‘Totality,’ the spectral threat of oppressive power characterized

but not limited to political totalitarianism, which is antithetical to the sense of ‘Infinity’

drawn from the realization of inter-human responsibility (which in turn is related to

poststructuralism and critical theory, and in which we find Levinas’ political

messianism); and the third has to do with the specifically ethical nature of the relation,

and the sense of responsibility inherent to human life, which purports to mitigate totality.1

This moral theme is where a ‘third-wave’ Levinasian social critic might extrapolate a

social or political imperative. The first chapter of this essay is somewhat exegetical,

1 Current Levinas scholarship also recognizes three ‘waves’ of academic response to his work. In the

introduction to their anthology Radicalizing Levinas, Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco explain that the

first “was concerned predominantly with commentary and exposition,” focusing on Levinas’ criticisms of

seminal thinkers like Kant and Mill, and laying out a new approach to subjectivity and ethics. The second

wave is where they place Derrida’s conversion of Levinasian ethics into deconstruction, and the third

focuses roughly on the political implications of Levinas’ radically ethical approach to subjectivity (Atterton

and Calarco x).

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focusing on Levinas’ project in Totality and Infinity, to problematize various aspects of

traditional understandings of subject hood and to further his concept of relational

subjectivity and to establish his political and theoretical framework. The second chapter

looks more specifically at the structure of material politics. Levinas’ Totality explains

myriad forms of overarching power and dogmatic social, cultural, and political

phenomena. Taking Herbert Marcuse’s criticism of the ‘one-dimensionality’ of modern

life to illustrate the effects of hegemonic power in the late modern era, this chapter

employs Levinas’ concept of Totality to begin to imagine the possibility of a remedy for

the oppressive tendencies of capitalist culture. Despite two very different views on

human subjectivity and on political right, there are some profound similarities between

Levinas’ and Marcuse’s understandings of organized or totalizing power, so Marcuse’s

diagnosis of modern oppression helps to illustrate some of the potential symptoms of

Levinasian Totality. Levinas’ thought may help in finding a “way out” of some of the

problems Marcuse identifies but which remain largely unaffected by now decades of

revolutionary critical theory and poststructuralist thought. The third chapter explores the

potential implications of the concept of infinite responsibility. As Derrida makes clear in

his early exegesis on Levinas, ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ he is heavily indebted to

Levinas in his approach to philosophy and his understanding of human coexistence,

though he does take a more ‘hands-on’ approach to specific modern problematics. In the

context of Derrida’s Levinasianism, this chapter considers questions of international

import such as Truth and Reconciliation commissions and the possibility of ‘real’

forgiveness beyond the scope of the formal and judicial, impossible without looking at

the structures of subjectivity and human inter relation. The fourth chapter returns to the

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question of subjectivity from the first through a discussion of the most scathing criticism

of Levinas’ work, his apparent reliance on an archaic and hypocritical understanding of

feminine alterity. Simone de Beauvoir points out that Levinas risks betraying his own

project in his assertion of the feminine other, and Luce Irigaray rightly takes issue with

Levinas’ maintenance of the beloved feminine object of Desire. Judith Butler however

finds value in Levinas’ more central disavowal of identity, arguing that the precarity and

ultimate ontic poverty of all human life might provide the basis for a thoroughly

democratic social and political world. In response to some feminist epistemological and

phenomenological critiques of Levinas, this chapter argues that Levinasian subjectivity is

anti-totalitarian to an extent preclusive of the dogmatism of Identity, and which is anti-

oppressive to its core. At the point where Levinasian subjectivity appears to break down,

we come to an opportunity to discover the nuanced structure of subjectivity. Rather than

simply or naively replacing identity with ipseity or stubbornly denying the social reality

of individualism, Levinas argues that the human subject is fundamentally social. Where

he ostensibly fails to regard the idealized feminine as an Other, or as an independent

being, it is not because she is supposed to lack human-hood or access to world-forming

agency, because for Levinas there is no mythic personhood in which she could be

included, and therefore there are no independent beings. The sort of interpersonal

knowing which is required for truth and ultimately for justice, an unadulterable and

universal goal of thought and politics, insists on a respect for the other and for all other

people which precedes and disavows difference (including and exceeding lines of identity

such as gender or race), making violence – institutional, structural, and otherwise –

impossible or at least theoretically unjustifiable. While this initially presents as his

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biggest failure, it is ultimately the lens which validates and makes sense of his work. Far

from professing a solution to a legacy of gender oppression, Butler finds in Levinas an

approach to the interhuman relation which carries vastly positive radical potential.

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Chapter One – Anti-traditional Subjectivity: Levinas versus Liberalism

Levinas’ understanding of relational subjectivity bound in responsibility is

contrary to many axioms of traditional continental philosophy (TI 43). He admits in the

preface to Totality and Infinity that it is much easier to find in his writing something

contrary to ontology or politics than anything like a clear thesis, and that he takes a

critical approach to his engagements with previous and seminal thinkers. An attentive

and ‘generous’ reading exposes his project in a positive light: all of this admittedly

combative work is necessary in elucidating his radical reconceptualization of what it is to

be a self-conscious human. This section explores the nature and implications of Levinas’

approach to and understanding of subjectivity largely by examining the differences

between Levinas and some seminal thinkers whose understandings of subjectivity inform

popular discourse. By straying from the canon Levinas’ ethical account of human

subjectivity constitutes the basis of a far-reaching critique of the structure of modern life.

The call of the Other: Infinite Responsibility and its Sociopolitical Implications

i. Totality and Infinity

In Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority, Levinas develops an

understanding of ‘Totality,’ a concept he uses to describe any number of purportedly

whole things or institutions which often perform some form of exclusion or dogmatism,

beginning with the commonly held notions that the self is a comprehensive, self-

contained, or individuated existent, or that the relationship between any two subjects is

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comprehensible. Levinas suggests that the mere recognition of the way in which humans

relate to one another performs a meaningful breach of Totality (TI 35). Totality itself is

conceptually fallible and given Levinas’ approach to subjectivity, theoretically

impossible. In the context of politics Totality forms the threat of hegemony and

oppression, typified in totalitarianism but also variably applicable to less overt types of

institutions or phenomena which threaten the freedom of the subject. Totality impedes on

the sense of justice associated with Responsibility and the ethical relation and what

Levinas calls ‘Infinity’. Whereas the egoism of interiority makes it impossible to

conceive of or recognize totality, an awareness of the Other, and so of the Infinite realm

of responsibility, is radical (TI 58). ‘Infinity’ for Levinas is located only in relations

between people, where we approach the transcendent. Levinas’ subject is definitively

exterior to others, to interaction, and to social structures, but is not at all sovereign.

Beginning from exteriority rather than the interiority or egocentricity typical of traditional

philosophy, locating the self in relation to the other and denying the popular tendency to

being ‘within,’ Levinas imagines the world differently from how it appears to Descartes

and Kant, for instance, as something comprehendible or internalizable. The self is not

the central figure but is situated as radically exterior to what is important. Making the

subject secondary challenges philosophy’s failed account of the relation and recognizes

the violence inherent to totality. Totality and Infinity is framed as a “defense of

subjectivity… as founded in the idea of infinity” (TI 26). The book is partly intended as

a criticism of Heidegger’s ontology, which Levinas reads as a dogmatic and oppressive

“philosophy of power,” and heir to a tradition of Totality (TI 46). Heidegger allows

ontology to precede metaphysics, and so subjugates the other in order to allow for a sense

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of egoistic freedom (Derrida 1978 112). Levinas reverses the inequality inherent to

ontology by insisting that metaphysics follow the relation to the Other. Jacques Derrida

suggests that Levinas’ rejection of ontology forms the basis of a “critique of the state’s

alienation whose anti-Hegelianism would be neither subjectivist, nor Marxist, nor

anarchist,” but one which operates thoroughly contrary to established tropes (Derrida

1978 120). Much of Levinas’ radicalism has to do with his implication of traditional

dialecticism in sociopolitical power, and his accusations that philosophical shortcomings

in Descartes, Kant, and Hegel contribute to various forms of violence.

ii. The metaphysics of the relation: Substitution beyond Mitsein

“In making the structure ‘inside-outside’ tremble at the point where it would have

resisted Heidegger,” Derrida writes, “Levinas in no way pretends to erase it, or to deny its

meaning and existence. Nor does he do so when the opposition subject-object or cogito-

cogitatum is in question… Levinas respects the zone or layer of traditional truth; and the

philosophies whose presuppositions he describes are in general neither refuted nor

criticized” (Derrida 1967 109). Levinas does not reject the history of philosophy, but

does point out some of its most dangerous dogmatisms. Neither does he reject outright

the work of the seminal thinkers with whom he engages: the rebellious value of his work

lies in awareness of his debt to Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. Far from a knee-jerk

rejection of convention, Levinas’ criticism of subject-object opposition is highly nuanced,

his issues tend to lie in the most esoteric passages. By ‘traditional truth,’ Derrida means

to refer to the axioms and tendencies of the cannon, as they pervade and inform much

thought and work, also notes that there is a sense of fallibility or temporality to even

unchallenged conventions. Levinas accuses Heidegger not merely of following a

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tradition of Totality, but of subordinating Justice to Freedom, and so of contributing to

the emergence of a definitively and immediately violent theoretical, political, and

material Totality, which impedes any real sort of freedom (TI 45). The centrality of

Being in Heidegger “places ethics under the heel of ontology,” whereas Levinas precedes

even metaphysics with ethics (Derrida 1967 169). By denying the possibility of an

emergent individual outside of or prior to engagement with others, Levinas progresses

from a philosophy which merely recognizes the Other to one in which alterity and

exteriority are central.

Self awareness is a product of the recognition of the poverty of the other (HO 30).

Consciousness belongs to the individual, but depends on alterity. Ethics is all that can be

taken away from the encounter, and is the starting point for introspection (EI 85).

Levinas says “…the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and

to whom I owe all. And me, whoever I may be, but as a ‘first person,’ I am he who finds

the resources to respond to the call” (EI 89). The “I” emerges as the subject, as the ‘first

person,’ in response to the destitution and need of the Other and the ability and

requirement to help. So subjectivity is overwhelmed with non-reciprocal, non-horizontal,

and asymmetrical servitude. To approach the other as an equal rather than as the

peculiarly destitute and powerful figure we find in Levinas would imply an egalitarianism

which could allow for a sort of privileging of the same or the justified reluctance to

provide for the other. The other’s initial poverty leads to the destitution of the Same as

the subject is forced into servitude. Robert Bernasconi suggests that the ethics of

Levinasian thought is centered on the “surplus of responsibility,” rather than “the

psychological event of pity or compassion” (Bernasconi 239). Levinas suggests also the

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correlative, that “It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but the

Infinity of the Other” (TI 80). Whereas for instance a Kantian might appeal to the

humanity of the other, to sympathy or egoistic relativity in order to encourage moralistic

action or categorical ethics – which is always patronizing to the other – Levinas insists

that the sense of responsibility born of the relation has to do with the power the Other

holds over the same and not the privilege of the self over the other. Such affects as

generosity and sympathy are misguided functions of a liberal ethical economy. What is

necessary isn’t a mere recognition of the poverty of the other, but a call-to-action based

on the phenomenon of an existence wholly invested in the Other. Substitution, the

fulfilment of responsibility, implies “putting oneself in the place of the other by taking

responsibility for their responsibilities,” despite the eternally asymmetrical nature of the

relationship. Bernasconi points out that “the trope of one-for-the-other is contradictory,”

because it maintains the sovereign subject-hood of the ‘one’ (Bernasconi 239).

Substitution requires a selflessness so radical that is throws subjectivity into question.

Derrida writes: “Levinas simultaneously proposes to us a humanism and a metaphysics.

It is a question of attaining, via the road of ethics, the supreme existent, the truly

existent… as other” (Derrida 1978 178). Whatever sense of Immanence is permissible by

Levinas cannot be isolated from relationality and responsibility. If capitalism is by nature

aspirational, if resources are limited or if gain depends on others’ loss, there appears to be

little space for traditional economics in a Levinasian world.

For Heidegger, at least according to Levinas, intersubjectivity is antecedent to

subjectivity as such (TI 68). Heidegger acknowledges the irreducibility of the relation,

the relevance of inter-subjectivity, and the importance of being-in-common, but Levinas

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goes further, outright denying the possibility of any subjectivity that isn’t relational.

Where Heidegger’s intersubjectivity may refer only to the discourse between subjects,

Levinas’ use of the term implies that it precedes and conditions subjectivity. The

primacy Heidegger gives to the individual self or first to the metaphysical possibility of

Being suggests a Totality which impedes the Ethical Relation and performs a sort of ontic

violence entrapping the subject (the Same). Heidegger describes a singular existence

mediated by the reality of being-in-common, but for Levinas there is no possibility for the

subject to exist outside of the ethical relation, and so responsibility is the principle of

consciousness. Heideggerian Being towards an end is eschatological, totalitarian, and

conducive to the violent exclusion of the other. John Wild characterizes both Heidegger

and Hegel as writers of a Totality which “…accepts vision rather than language as its

model. It aims to gain an all-inclusive, panoramic view of all things, including the other,

in a neutral, impersonal light like the Hegelian Geist (Spirit) or the Heideggerian Being”

(Wild TI 15). For them, the emergence of the existent simultaneous with or even

preceding the other makes ethics secondary. Levinas describes the way in which the

dominance of Heidegger’s work might effect change in the thinking and actions of

broader society. “The Heideggerian analyses of the world have accustomed us to think

that the ‘in view of oneself’ that characterizes Dasein, care in situation, in the last

analysis conditions every human product” (TI 170). The singularity available for

Heidegger allows for a fully interior understanding of human existence, one in which the

solitude and containment of the self is possible. This sort of Totality inhibits a subject’s

freedom to perform the demands of Responsibility or to experience Infinity in the eyes of

the other due to material or political barriers. Heidegger makes a mistake in

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subordinating specific being and coexistence to being-in-general (TI 67-8). The

universality of Heideggeraian thought is anti-humanist: in recognizing the specificity of

experience, Levinas seeks to draw a more fundamentally democratic and ultimately

peaceful conception of human co-existence.

iii. Recognition, Communication, and the Face

In Ethics and Infinity, an extended interview and perhaps Levinas’ most

accessible book, he and Philippe Nemo discuss the possible real-world implications of

having ethics precede metaphysics. They begin by examining the phenomenal character

of the face, irreducible to any specific instance of itself, which Levinas calls

“signification without context” (EI 7). The infinity of alterity, the experience of the face-

to-face, is irreducible to phenomenon: “The relation with the face can surely be

dominated by perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to

that” (EI 85-6). In terms of individual experience, the face exists in the realm of

sensation, precisely as the point of mediation between interior and exterior, other and

same. But because of the way in which sensation is both wholly liminal and of infinite

import, and the way in which the transcendent (infinity) is only accessible through

experience, the face for Levinas is both entirely worldly and supremely important, it is

the place in the world in which what lies outside of the immediate becomes knowable. It

is the failure of phenomenology to account for the transcendence of alterity, and the

arrogance of metaphysics to try, that leads Levinas away from the continental tradition.

In the face the Other is exposed in complete vulnerability, and in that moment of

recognition and communication the other exercises their demand on the same, making the

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first person vulnerable. The self is beholden to the other, and given the other’s ontic

poverty the self becomes similarly destitute. It is also towards the vulnerability expressed

in the face that the same reacts. Levinas writes:

The Other who faces me is not included in the totality of being that is

expressed. He arises being all collection of being, as the one to whom I

express that I express. I find myself facing the Other. He is neither a

cultural signification nor a simple given. He is, primordially, sense

because he lends it to expression itself, because only through him can a

phenomenon such as signification introduce itself, of itself, into being

(Levinas HO 30).

The Other for Levinas is neither a simple metaphorical stand-in for every other person,

nor a universal spectre of difference. The encounter with the other is not merely

mediated by sense, but takes place only and entirely within the realm of the sensory. But

that recognition does not diminish the power of the encounter or the importance of the

Other person, since Infinity is only accessible through and in the face-to-face. Simon

Critchley writes that what Aristotle saw in the heavens Levinas finds in the eyes of the

other (Critchley 27). The transcendental, which Levinas calls ‘Infinity,’ emerges only in

the feeling of responsibility experienced in the gaze. Rather than “some other-worldly

mysticism,” such as a literal belief in an existent creator-god, or a nebulous spiritual

metaphysic, Levinas finds transcendence in the other person (EI 91; Critchley 27). This

approach to transcendence does not require a demiurgical figure or literal soul, and so

Levinas’ thought, despite his personal religion, is compatible with a secular ethics.2

2 It is important to note that Levinas was also a theologian. Though his French-language philosophy is

potentially consistent with a secular ethics, he simultaneously wrote another body of work, of religious

commentary of which the best-known publication is his Nine Talmudic Writings. He was adamant

however, that his two corpuses follow two traditions (the Greek and the Hebraic), and should be read as

isolated projects in their own contexts.

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Self awareness for Levinas comes with a recognition of the poverty of the other

(HO 30). By poverty, he means a sort of ontic lack, borrowed from Heidegger’s

suggestion that various beings are ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ in world, though in more immediately

political sense, the Levinasian sense of poverty could be taken to refer to a lack of

material or immaterial privilege, which the subject is similarly induced to mitigate

(Heidegger 176). Though Levinas maintains that his project is intended to encourage the

sort of jouissance other phenomenologists fail to acknowledge, he leaves little space for

self-indulgence (Wild 12). The “I” emerges as the subject, as ‘first person,’ in response

to the destitution and need of the Other and the ability and requirement to help (EI 89).

To be the ‘first person’ is to be beholden to the call. Subjectivity is synonymous with

non-reciprocal, non-horizontal, and asymmetrical servitude, or, Responsibility: There is

no self is not more properly described as a ‘same,’ regarding the pre-eminence of the

Other.

‘Accidental Egoism’: Levinas and Early Modern Ethics

i. Separation is not individuation

For Levinas inter-subjectivity precedes and informs subjectivity. The Other is

always precedent, and not merely present.3 What we might call relational subjectivity

3 While other phenomenologists recognize the inescapability of relationality, neither Beauvoir, Merleau-

Ponty nor Heidegger place the subject as fundamentally subordinate to the Other as does Levinas. John

Wild explains in his introduction to Totality and Infinity that Levinas is heavily indebted to Heidegger,

Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and that while each of these thinkers recognize the inescapable sociality of

human life, Levinas argues that they all fail to appreciate the structure of sociality in its import or height.

Rather than a sort of co-dwelling in the world, for Levinas the Other, and the knowledge accorded through

the relation, is requisite for all self-awareness, understanding, and justice. Where Marxist existentialists

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stands in opposition to Cartesian immanence, Kantian ethics, and the notion of a Social

Contract. Descartes divorced the conscious self from the physical, allowing for the

possibility of a freer psyche which could be understood outside of the context of the

corporeal. His novel understanding of doubt also allows for a degree of reflection which

would previously have been impossible outside of religious intuitionalism. Descartes

maintains the space for being-qua-being, existence independent of material or historical

circumstance, which Levinas points out assumes a sort of relation with the pseudo-being

of Being, or to a theistic or transcendental existent, which problematically requires and

denies the possibility of a singular, sovereign existence: how can the one relate directly to

Being-as-such if that being is necessarily universal? Despite the fragmentary nature of

mind-body dualism, the Cartesian ‘radical individual’ is a singular sovereign with a sort

of egoism which Levinas finds not so much violent as implausible. Descartes’

understanding of human subjectivity allows for an egocentric approach to thought and

politics, the radicalism of which allowed for later canonical thinking, but the Cartesian

approach is too conducive to ways of thinking which privilege the sovereign self over the

other. Levinas takes issue with Descartes’s egoism, arguing that the ontological

argument requires a visceral understanding of the ideas of the Infinite and absolute which

reify the relevance of absolutism. For Levinas this points to the sort of Infinity which

emerges out of the relation, rather than to a prescient infinite being. He suggests that the

cogito rests on the assumption of a relation to an “Other who is God” (TI 86). The

presume some varied form of responsibility despite maintaining the precedence of existence, if ethics

precedes metaphysics while existence precedes essence then ethics overwhelms existence. So even the

radically debased existentialist subject can be seen as overwhelmed with responsibility. The failure of a

modern subject to recognize their situation with regard to other people, and the corresponding lack of

access to the transcendent meaning associated with relationality may be said to be what underlies angst.

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theistic figure then is one with whom the self (same) in some sense interacts, and is not

only beholden to. This makes the self for Levinas somewhat more central but also less

sovereign than it is for Descartes, and makes the scope of otherness infinitely more

profound.4

Instead of the monistic conception in which the emergent self is discovered in

relation to Being or the cosmos, Levinas begins with the plurality of shared existence. In

spite of the egocentricity of primary experience, and so in contest with Descartes, Levinas

‘breaches’ Totality by locating the experience of desire in the face. By subjugating desire

to the relation, he argues, we come to a more meaningful sort of freedom than is

experienced by the angst-ridden modern sovereign. Levinas writes that the cogito

“evinces separation” (Levinas TI 54). Separation is not the same as individuation: there

is no denying the singularity of consciousness, but existents are separated out of or after

the relation, and cannot come to be independent of one another. We are certainly

separate, isolable beings with specific experience, but to try to conceive of any human

outside of relationality would be absurdly arrogant. What follows is a radically

democratic approach to all aspects of human life which presents no opportunity for

individuation. The Cartesian cogito is invaluable as an illustration of what Levinas calls

‘primary experience’. Descartes articulates a lot of things about the Human experience

and forwards a way of thinking which underlies most of our popular conception of the

term ‘self’. There is no contesting the importance of the cogito. Where it becomes an

element of ‘traditional truth,’ though, the Cartesian conception begins to appear in some

4 Levinas’ explanation of atheism follows: any understanding of a self which exists outside of or free from

the relation to the transcendent other is necessarily referential to the possibility of the relation to that

theistic figure, and so is inescapably seated in relationality in general. There may be escape from the

power-dialectic of religion, but not from relationality as such.

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ways contestable and in some ways problematic. Levinas finds in Descartes evidence of

the dogmatically egoistic conception of a self concerned primarily with itself, and so

suggests that the cogito be understood as an expression of an experience rather than a

founding principle of thought.

ii. Ethical existence is not systematic morality

By maintaining axiomatic individual sovereignty as the starting-point for ethical

discourse Kant fails to recognize the primacy of the ethical relation. Levinas writes that

“Metaphysics is enacted in ethical relations. Without the signification they draw from

ethics theological concepts remain empty and formal frameworks. The role Kant

attributed to sensible experience in the domain of the understanding belongs in

metaphysics to interhuman relations” (TI 79, emphasis added). Whereas for Kant

sensation refers to the effect of an external object on the sensing self, but is contained

within that self, to Levinas sensation is better described as the mediation between

knowing and known, objectivity and subjectivity (TI 42). It is the only way the subject

becomes aware of the possibility of the transcendent, but is of course limited to the

immediate. Levinas recognizes the common understanding of semiotic representation in

which the “same defines the other without being determined by the other,” but insists that

such an egocentric approach to inter-human relations is wrong, that the other defines the

same (TI 125-6). The other cannot be described as either an extension or a negation of

the self, but must be recognized as an independent and precedent being in a conception in

which the independence of the self is challenged. He denies the possibility of a general

or imaginary ethical system because there is only the specific and the present, there is no

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utility in imagining things otherwise or in pretending there is an objective order to life.

Something like The Categorical Imperative requires both a generalized approach to

subjectivity and a sovereign subject around which the ethical sphere is imagined. The

way in which Kant recognizes the plurality of human subjects reifies the sovereignty of

each. The possibility of an external metaphysic robs the relation of its finality. Levinas

recognizes the democratic potential of Kantian reciprocity, but argues for an approach to

subjectivity which disavows the egoism necessary for such thinking (TI 128). The notion

of universal law, and the economic approach to interhuman relations it engenders,

encourage an antagonistic and individualistic understanding of human coexistence.

Kant argues for the widespread adoption of reason in the interests of democracy

and freedom, believing that there is an almost miraculously democratic quality to pure

reason, that so long as we operate according to apparently natural laws of reason,

maintaining criticality and social awareness and ensuring the universal application of

categorical rule, justice will certainly prevail. Levinas recognizes the value and necessity

of reason, but is also wary of (the potentially dogmatic Totality of) rationalism, arguing

instead for something specifically human which reaches beyond what is accessible by the

purely rational:

Reason makes human society possible; but a society whose members

would be only reasons would vanish as a society. What could a

being entirely rational speak of with another entirely rational being?

Reason has no plural; how could numerous reasons be

distinguished? How could the Kantian kingdom of ends be possible,

had not the rational beings that compose it retained, as the principle

of individuation, their exigency for happiness, miraculously saved

from the shipwreck of sensible nature? In Kant the I is met with

again in this need for happiness (TI 119).

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Kantian ethics is ends-oriented and arguably utilitarian, focused more on social good than

epistemology. Self-awareness and criticality are important for an egalitarian, free, and

safe society. While Levinas is undoubtedly a ‘utopian’ thinker, he insists on a means-

oriented, if not completely pragmatic, approach which is opposed fundamentally to

Kantian idealism. Without being outright irrational, he is doubtful of the democratic

potential of Kantian reason and skeptical of idealist ends-orientation, since reason is

incapable of accounting for the human condition. Levinas’ messiansim is more of a

dynamic than an eschatological thing: he is interested in an idealized democratic freedom

as a focal point for the specific and present, but is decidedly opposed to forms of thinking

which prioritize the future. The point is not to imagine the world eventually or

idealistically otherwise, but to engage with the material world as if it could be better and

with a clear vision of what that might look like.

The Kantian understanding of the self as a sovereign situated amongst others, and

with the capacity and imperative for critical thought, is widely understood to inform early

modern liberalism. The contingency of individual sovereignty is largely unquestioned in

the social contract which informs the development of modern politics. In his early essay

‘Reflection on the Politics of Hitlerism,’ (Published in Esprit in 1934 and reproduced by

Horowitz and Horowitz in 2006) Levinas warns that Liberalism is insufficient to protect

against political violence. Even the most humanistic or democratic approaches to

liberalism assume a problematic conception of the self, and allow for what Levinas warns

constitutes a dangerous totality of egoistic violence. He means not merely that the

political and intellectual structures of 20th century western democracy would fail to quash

the rise of Nazism - a haunting prediction - but that the basic structure of the liberal ego is

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inherently conducive to injustice because it does not necessitate an adequate appreciation

for the Other. Any recognition of the selfhood of the other person in modern liberalism is

based on the perspective of the self, the ego, or what Levinas dubs the Same. Where

subjectivity is appreciated in its relational quality it contests the liberal conception of the

sovereign self.

Levinas tells the story of a dog who would visit the German Prisoner of War camp

where he was interned. In a world where the humanity of the prisoners was lost on both

guards and the general population, “For [the dog], there was no doubt that we were men”

(DF 153). He muses that the dog was the “last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the

brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.” (ibid) The dog is ‘Kantian’ of course

not for his remarkable capacity for reason or sympathy, or his adherence to law, but for

his apparent acceptance of the humanism of the prisoners who by other men had been

declared homines sacrii.5 His ethics lies in his lack of capacity for reason. Where

practical reason fails in the face of Totality and idealist ethics is demonstrably impotent,

the dog’s simplicity illustrates the humans’ inhumanity and irrationality. The failure of

the humans in and around the camp, the obvious lapse of the categorical imperative, is

accountable as a lapse in reason. Not simply a failure of humans to practice reason, but

the failure of reason itself to prevent the violence of dehumanization.

Diane Perpich recounts the story of the dog and explains:

…Levinas’ is not a philosophy in which some quality or capacity, no matter how

important or distinctive, is that in virtue of which I am responsible to or for an

5 Giorgio Agamben adopts the term from ancient Rome: a disenfranchised person whose murder is declared

not legally punishable becomes a non-citizen, politically and civilly irrelevant. Dehumanization,

statelessness and internment, renders human life valueless. For his inability to distinguish between captive

and captor, the dog shows the impossibility and hence the violence of dehumanization, and the massive

failure of traditional ethics (Agamben 17).

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other...For Kantian moral theory, what matters about us is reason, that in virtue of

which we are most godlike; for utilitarianism, what matters is that we are sentient

that this puts us in ethical proximity… and for Levinas, what matters is not at all a

what but a who: an absolutely incalculable other who cannot be reduced to some

subset of properties and who is not worthy of ethical or moral consideration only

in virtue of certain qualities or capacities… (Perpich 154).

Levinas begins from a different place and forwards a different approach to subjectivity

than Kant, operating according to an ostensibly more comprehensively ethical paradigm,

but certainly follows Kant’s assertion of the primacy of ethics within the sphere of

philosophy (Perpich 153). The Kantian notion of appearance is similar to the way in

which for Levinas all knowledge is mediated by the sensory. The two also share

something like the notion of a transcendent approach to ethics. In Kant’s transcendental

idealism, the metaphysical, accessible through reason and outside of the binds of

dogmatic religious or political authority, is still exterior to or above the human subject,

whereas for Levinas the transcendent is accessed through the inter-human relation.

Kant’s subjectivity and enlightenment self-reflection suggest a world contingent on the

rational beholding subject: all things are mere appearance, so there must be a Self to

behold, rationalize, and experience them: Kant relies on Descartes. Levinas’ realism

takes a different approach. As noted above, Levinas understands sensation to be the

mediating factor between known and knowing, subjectivity and objectivity, and to an

extent, self and other. Sensation is not limited to physical ability or comprehension, but

is a function of the face through which we experience communication and hence achieve

all knowledge. To suggest that all things exist only in the realm of sensation implies that

they belong to the sensing subject. But for Levinas, the world experienced in the sensory

is something to which the subject is decidedly external. The Kantian world of sensed

things is fundamentally egoistic, where Levinas’ subject’s separation from the Other, and

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recognition that much of the sensed world is shared and in a way precedes each

individual, makes the existent less sovereign, less important. Primary experience is

egoistic, but is not representative of the depth of human life. The contingent world of

human interaction operates in a way in which the individual subject is far less central than

it is for Kant. The Other precedes the Same, and the Other’s existence is not hinged on

the subject’s experience or recognition of them. Levinasian non-horizontality holds

subject-hood as a contingency of the relation, but does not allow the broader world and

the Other’s existence to be contingent on comprehension. While Levinasian and Kantian

ethics speak to the same need, and share the same ultimately democratic spirit, Levinas

problematizes Kant’s inherited conception of what it is to be human, and so challenges

the flawed system in which Kantian ethics operates.

The dialectical myth of linear history

Hegel fails to account for the inescapable dimension of self-alienation of the

individual subject (TI 23). Hegel’s ends-orientation allows for the radical alienation of

the individual historical actor. Levinas writes: “In history, not merely in historiography,

but in the real history of human society, individuals are reduced to being ‘bearers of

forces that command them’ behind their backs; the very meaning of their lives is derived

from their function in the totality and ‘sacrificed’ to the future. The eschatological vision

detaches individuals from the history that bears them and it addresses them in their

unicity” (TI 21-22). Levinas is critical of Hegelian eschatology because of its potential to

detach people from the specific conditions of their existence, in so doing also to fail to

address the specific, real, material, and historical settings of circumstance. Even as Hegel

23

empowers the sovereign individual, and in precisely that moment of sovereign power, he

performs the violent alienation of the subject from other subjectivities. Perpich suggests

that difference or alterity in the context of Levinas’ work be read as ‘singularity’ (Perpich

2010 46). The ‘unicity’ of each subject does not imply sovereignty, but places each

subject as specific and detached from the potentially dogmatic totality of social context.

Levinas maintains specificity but not the usual sense of individual sovereignty. The

‘unicity’ that he sees operating in Hegel is more radical that the singularity or specificity

in which he locates the individual. Levinas recognizes the singularity of each actor but

only in the context of the relation. He denies the possibility of a subject divorced from

context, despite the obvious dogmatism of context, in order to prevent the subject from

becoming anything like a victim of history. ‘Unicity’ trivializes the importance and

relevance of the conditions of subjectivity, but relationality accounts for them.

Levinas is outwardly critical of eschatology and is opposed to Hegel’s

understanding of dialectical history and human subjectivity: “The eschatological notion

of judgement (contrary to the judgement of history in which Hegel wrongly saw its

rationalization) implies that beings have identity ‘before’ eternity… that beings exist in

relationship, to be sure, but on the basis of themselves and not on the basis of the totality”

(TI 23). Hegelian egalitarianism, like Kantian Immanence, is in spirit ethical, but

approaches human life from an uncritically interior and ego-centric perspective. John

Wild suggests that Levinas does not “take account of these inner depths of alien existence

by regarding the other along Hegelian lines as a mere negation of the self,” because to do

so would encompass “him in a supposedly neutral system that is readily identified with

the rational self.” Wild asks, “Can it be that the underlying, unifying one of our monistic

24

systems has been the avaricious, power-seeking, organizing, self-same self?” (Wild TI

13). The possibility of sovereignty might allow for the violence allegedly common to

modern life. Levinas implicates Hegel in forces and psychological tendencies typical of

both fascism and capitalism, stating that “…traditional theories are one-sidedly

egocentric and reductive” (TI 13). For Levinas, Hegel’s understanding of the self is

readily consistent with modes of thinking which prioritize egoism, deny the agency of the

other, and perpetuate oppressive structural forces.

Hegel was also wary of the “capricious and subjective,” dogmatic understanding of

inner life, and so sought to “subordinate, or even repress, the individual” (Wild TI 15).

While Hegel is aware of the uncomfortable proximity of anarchy and the tyranny of

traditional subjectivity, he and Levinas mediate this dichotomy differently. Levinas does

not challenge Hegel’s conviction that the singular subject should not be the focal point of

human life or political organization but disagrees on how subjectivity is to be

constructed. Wild writes: “As Hegel said, Die Weltgeschichte ist die Welgericht. History

itself is the final judge of History” (Wild TI 18). Despite his insistence that Hegelian

linearity is itself a dogmatic form of Totality, Levinas is firm in his resolve that his task is

to judge history, to find evidence of Infinity in and through human action and so to

identify and deconstruct Totality and totalities (TI 23). Levinas writes: “Hegelian

phenomenology, where self-consciousness is the distinguishing of what is not distinct,

expresses the universality of the same identifying itself in the alterity of objects through

and despite the opposition of self to self” (TI 36). The same (the ego) becomes the

universal from and through which the other, and the entire exterior world is understood.

For Hegel this is not necessarily problematic, but for Levinas, it is too ego-centric and so

25

reductive. He explains that “Hegel places at the origin of his dialectic the sensed, and not

the unity of sensing and sensed in sensation” (TI 59). The somewhat simple conception

of a sensing subject and an articulable object which is obvious for Hegel is impossible for

Levinas.6 Levinas implicates Hegel in Traditionalist dogmatism for which history, linear

time, the absolute character of spirit and mind, and the corresponding situation of the

human subject, all of which are necessary for the possibility of world historicism, are

elements of an imposing Totality (TI 272). There is of course much in Hegel with which

Levinas is aligned, they both forward an egalitarian approach to human co-existence.

Hegel’s dialectic undeniably rephrased traditional thinking in a way which made Marxist

materialism possible, and which may be requisite for Levinas’ radicalism. Levinas

explains his indebtedness to and difficulty with Hegel:

Hegel returns to Descartes in maintaining the positivity of the infinite, but

excluding all multiplicity from it; he posits the infinite as the exclusion of

every ‘other’ that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby

limit it. The infinite can only encompass all relations. . . We recognize

in the finitude to which the Hegelian infinite is opposed, and which it

encompasses, the finitude of man before the elements, the finitude of man

invaded by the there is, at each instant traversed by faceless gods against

whom labor is pursued in order to realize the security in which the ‘other’

of the elements would be revealed as the same. But the other absolutely

other – the Other – does not limit the freedom of the same calling it to

responsibility, it founds it and justifies it (TI 196-7).

In Levinas, as in Hegel, there is no separating the human self from the political subject.

There is accordingly little opportunity for idealism. Even his most esoteric writing is

6 Whatever might be said to be a ‘Levinasian dialectic’ would not occur between a self and an Other (a

slave and master, signifier and signified, subject and object) in which one is either same or other in

opposition, (which seems necessary for an ontological turn toward object-centricity) but one in which the

two are conflated, but also held in unadulterated alterity. The same/other relation is understood differently:

in non-horizontality, but also where the self is eternally secondary.

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focused on some political reality. The tendency of Hegel’s “positivism” -and all

positivism- to “smother the protestation of the private individual” is the failure of an

ostensibly democratic approach to philosophy to endow its subjects with agency.

Positivism by definition assumes a totality of relevant factors and so relies on a

problematically exclusionary logic. The utilitarian position Levinas locates in Hegel fails

to provide space for the infinite realm of possible human subjects (TI 197). While it may

arguably be a more apt account of reality, for Levinas not to “limit the freedom of the

same,” but to “found” and “justify” the freedom of the subject requires a radical debasing

of the egoistic structure of political subjectivity in favour of fully relational subjectivity.

If the Hegelian position is commensurate with capitalism, Levinas here begins to emerge

as an anti-capitalist. Later in Totality and Infinity, he asserts that “The will is free to

assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this

responsibility itself; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of

the Other has introduced it” (TI 219).The ‘meaningful world’ in which responsibility

bears freedom is only possible when it is preceded by the call, by the face-to-face

encounter with the Other, but is the only real site of freedom. Because the relation is

non-negotiable, an egocentric or positivistic economy is contrary to right.

Levinas and Marx

Asher Horowitz identities three major approaches to Levinas scholarship: the

“Levinasian Left,” in which he situates Robert Bernasconi; the “Levinasian Right,” where

he places Richard Cohen; and the “anti-Levinasian Left” (Horowitz 2008 37-8). The

Levinasian Left is inclined to read Levinas as a radically democratic thinker.

27

Responsibility dictates not a politics of generosity, but a profound obligation to recognize

other people, to account for and overcome all forms of (material and ontic) poverty, and

so one which demands the alleviation of exploitation and the equal distribution of

resources. From this perspective, a Levinasian politics would have to be one in which all

are equal and equally influential, and in which all persons have equal access to resources

and opportunity. This does not necessarily carry a critique of private property, but does

suggest the need for some radical safeguard against hegemonic greed. It is not difficult to

imagine a political affinity between Levinas and Marx: both thinkers have as their goal

human equality and freedom, and both engage with the origin of subjectivity in attempts

to discover and counteract the social causes of inequality. Unsurprisingly, though,

Levinas does find fault in Marx, having to do mostly with what he sees as Marx’s tacit

inheritance of a Hegelian approach to subjectivity which Levinas implicates as

liberalistic.

Tim Woods writes that

Levinas’ promotion of ethics is to counteract the perceived

repression of the interhuman relationship, and, as such, his project to

re-think a peaceful, non-violent structure for relations with others

has specific implications for Marxism... Levinas’ philosophy attacks

one of the fundamental structures of Marxism: the attempt to

overcome alienation through the recovery of self-consciousness,

gathering the alienated ‘self’ though a return to one’s

‘self’...Levinas’ arguments appear to convict Marxism of clear forms

of ontological violence, based as it clearly is on the Hegelian model

of consciousness as a movement of the same to the other and a return

to the same (Woods 1997 58-9).

One could imagine a form of Marxism which relies less heavily on Hegelian dialecticism,

or an approach to radical communalism based on responsibility rather than utility.

Levinas purports to delve beyond the scope of subjectivity which was present for Marx.

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By founding his philosophy in a debased sort of subjectivity he aims to build a more

thoroughly radical conceptualization of human existence and interrelation.

Robert Manning suggests that Levinas recognizes that Marx offered “the first

doctrine in Western history to oppose” the liberal view of autonomous freedom. Marx

brought to light the profundity of material conditions and specificity, and the important

link between experience and subjecthood. Levinas does not believe circumstance to be as

changeable or fungible as does Marx. Manning writes,

Levinas insists that the break Marxism made with liberalism was not radical

in that Marx believes that human beings could still become free to break their

ties to their determined material situation. ‘To become conscious of one’s

social situation is, even for Marx, to free oneself of the fatalism entailed by

that situation’ (p. 67). To Levinas, Marxism ultimately affirms the ability of

human beings to critique and to change their situation, which Levinas refers

to as the essence of true freedom” (Manning127).

Such a possibility is idealistic and, for Levinas, impossible. Where Marx maintains a

degree of the enlightenment idea of rational criticality, Levinas is more cynical. Manning

argues that for Levinas, the radical break from traditional liberalism which is necessary

but which Marx fails to perform would be fundamentally opposed to the traditional

understanding of ‘Man,’ so that specific circumstance “forms the very foundation of our

being,” rather than being something external to the phenomenon of individual existence.

Where Marx goes so far as to recognize the relevance of circumstance and the contingent

importance of situation, Levinas makes it much harder, maybe impossible, to divorce

individual subjectivity not just from conceptual relationality but from any set of specific

relations. Where Marx appears to free the subject, he fails to transcend the unfreedom of

modern egoism. Personal autonomy does not equal freedom in the sense in which

Levinas experiences freedom in servitude.

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Horowitz suggests that Levinas’ hesitation with Marx lies in the residual sense of

liberal determinism Marx inherits from Hegel and Kant (Horowitz “How Levinas Taught

me to read Benjamin” 140). Dialectical Materialism could be seen as the pinnacle of

Kantian idealism, as a recognition of the contingencies of modern life in which all things

are reduced to the material, or as a challenge to precisely that idealism, as a recognition

of the way in which material reality precedes and alienates the subject. There is in Marx

a recognition of historical circumstance, but an insistence on the contingency and

importantly the fallibility of circumstance. Determination is relevant but not

unimpeachable, as it is for Levinas. According to Levinas, Marx maintains the

possibility of absolute subjective freedom, the subject could theoretically exist outside of

any particular circumstance. Horowitz explains: “The idealism of Marx’s materialism

reveals itself not only in such a search [for truth] but also in the conception of a socialist

society, where the human is only ‘conceived of as an I or a citizen – but never in the

irreducible originality of his alterity, which one cannot have access to through reciprocity

and symmetry. Universality and egalitarian law result from the conflicts in which one

egoism opposed another’ (TaH 14)” (Horowitz 2006 143-4). Levinas argues that Marx’s

realism is insufficient to “overcome idealism” because it maintains the totalizing

antagonism of egoism, in Marx’s idealism, there is a sense of freedom of determination

of time, place, or labour (TH 15). Where Marxist politics believe in the power of human

agency to effect material and circumstantial change, and in the meaningfulness of

material revolution, Levinas sees circumstance as almost entirely unchangeable, and

would argue that much of what appears as progress is elusive.7 Levinas does not suggest

7 Given the obvious relevance of biography and the conditions of authorship which come with such a

recognition, it seems appropriate to ask whether this sort of materiality is born in part by Levinas’ own

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that nothing changes, but that it would be arrogant for any individual to believe they have

the power to effect meaningful world-historical change. The weight of circumstance on

the subject is disproportionate to the ability of any subject to alter circumstance.

Likewise, the extent to which we might need to alter the conditions of modern experience

far exceeds the ability of any individual. The sort of revolution which might be

productive for a Levinasian would have to entail a fundamental change to the structure of

thought.

Horowitz points out that alienation is perhaps worse in the post-cybernetic world

than it was even in the early industrial era. “For Levinas, today’s anxiety is more

profound [than that present to Marx]. The ‘revolutions gone bad’ have led to a state in

which ‘the disalienation itself is alienated’ (143)” (Horowitz 2009 145). To the degree

that the project of the Left has been subsumed by the totality of liberalism, or the

hegemony of cultural globalization the potential for alienation, and the difficulty of

overcoming alienation, has proliferated. There is no argument in Levinas against Marx

except for the sense in which the revolution necessary to combat the past century’s rise in

coercive power is greater in scope than could have been identified in the early

technological age. In order to overcome the dogmatism of a modernity which has taken

noble attempts at dis-alienation, Levinas calls for a more thoroughgoing reappraisal of the

elements of subjectivity. His anti-idealism bears a recognition of the apparent

shortcoming of Marxism to prevent its own fall to cultural hegemony. (As Derrida points

experience as a Prisoner of War, living in conditions far outside of his control, and unforeseeably

changeable by action or theory. In this, particular sense, his imprisonment is a symptom and he is a victim

of Totality. So his frustration with Kantianism, Idealism, and universal Ethics is born of experience and is,

to an extent, a realist reaction to real violence. Given the extent to which subjects are shaped by

circumstance, there is of course an imperative to alter future circumstances for the better, which is where

Levinas’ messianism lies, and why the whole project is worthwhile.

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out, the inevitable canonization of Marx risks spoiling the spirit of this work.) Levinas’

take on democratic subjectivity is perhaps less accessible and certainly less appealing

than Marx’s, though the two share a desire for a democratic world of human subjects.

The Democratic Potential of Relationality

In place of Identity, Levinas refers to ‘ipseity,’ an articulation of selfhood which

leaves space for the self-hood of the other, and so is compatible with his fundamentally

socio-ethical understanding of subjectivity. It operates much in the same way as

‘identity,’ but carries an acknowledgement of the non-centrality, or exteriority, of the first

person. Likewise, Levinas’ reference to the ‘Same’ rather than the ‘Ego,’ or the ‘Self’ is

intended to recognize the centrality of alterity (Derrida 136). The Same might be

understood as ‘that which is not Other,’ and the alterity between Other and Same is

irreducible. Derrida explains, “to make the other an alter ego… is to neutralize its

absolute alterity” (Derrida 153). Representation and relativism are insufficient

protections against totality. Robert Bernasconi writes that Levinas “proposes an account

of what he calls the identity of ipseity or singularity that differs from the identity of

identification. The identity of identification, as described by Hegel, involves a return to

self, but in the identity of ipseity there is no separation out of which a unity can be

established, except as a unity without rest or peace” (Bernasconi 242). Levinas asks “Is

Identity not itself a failure? Sense would be sought in a world that bears no human traces

and is not falsified by the identity of significations. In a world pure of all ideology” (HO

60). The danger of identity reaches its pinnacle in fascism, but operates throughout

32

neoliberalism, and even in attempts to combat oppression which fall short of questioning

the institution of identity.

Levinas writes “I find myself facing the Other. [The Other] is, primordially,

sense because he lends it to expression itself, because only through him can a

phenomenon such as signification introduce itself, of itself, into being” (HO 30).

Language, and indeed all signification precedent to and necessary for discourse, follows

the relation. Self-consciousness, insofar as it is something one becomes aware of, can

only be relative to the way in which the self emerges through engagement with an other,

call-and-response. Existence understood otherwise, as a force which each existent has

access to individually, is fallacious: “Being, since it is nothing outside the existent…

could in no way precede the existent, where in time, or in dignity… one cannot

legitimately speak of the subordination of the existent to Being or, for example, of the

ethical relation to the ontological relation” (Derrida 170). The totalizing thought of

ontology maintains the conditions for injustice. The subordination of the existent to

Being, and so of the Other to the Same, creates a hierarchy which is totalizing, limiting,

and unjust.

Richard Cohen writes that to be “concerned for the concerns of the other, to be for

the other before being for oneself is one’s true self. – without external identity and

without internal identity – the self that rises to the height of its proper humanity, its

proper dignity. [sic]” (Cohen, HO, xxxiv-xxxv). The Levinasian self is humble in the

service of the nonspecific other. Being understood as the ability to let be signifies a sort

of respect beyond that which is available in ego-centric approaches to thought, even when

focused on egalitarianism or moralistic sympathy (Derrida 176). The relationality in

33

which the self finds itself vis-a-vis the other is irreducible. But that relation does not

protect against violence. As Judith Butler points out, the face is the site of both the

prohibition against and the possibility for violence (Butler 3). Though the socialist ideal

of phenomenological non-horizontality would ideally produce an equal and fair world,

there is a certain vulnerability to the relation. Derrida writes, “in my ipseity, I know

myself to be for the other. Without this, ‘I’ (in general egoity), unable to be the other’s

other, would never be the victim of violence” (Derrida 1978 157). The threat that the

other’s potential for violence poses to the Same is a necessary if unfortunate precondition

for subject-hood and accompanies the power that the self holds to respond to the needs of

the other. A sort of humble submission is the most likely way to mitigate the violent

potential of the imagined collapse of relationality. To the extent that Levinas can be said

to expound a theory of existence, it is one of external-orientation: “To love one’s

neighbor is oneself”. (HO xxvii, emphasis added). The potential moral8 and political

implications of non-horizontality and responsibility are broad, but must follow a

discussion of the existential and ontological implications of relational subjectivity.

Levinas describes the ethical relation as “an irreducible structure upon which all the other

structures rest…” (TI 79). His approach to social constructivism is unique in that for

him, the one is always already engaged in a being which is for the other. Levinas writes

that “no one can stay in himself; the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for

others, an extreme vulnerability” (HO 67). To be is to be in the service of the other, to be

8 It is worth noting that the term ‘moral’ is used here not to allude to any sort of unquestionable universal

law but to express that within this interpretation of the Levinasian paradigm there appears to be a sense of

something like morality.

34

human in the humanist sense of ‘apres-vous,’ which is both a verbal imperative and an

adjectival description of the ontic relation.

Levinas’ understanding of a world in which human subjectivity follows the ethical

relation is heavily informed by the Western canon. There are many ways in which

Levinas strays from or directly challenges the traditional model of human existence. The

central figure of the self, which operates without examination largely throughout the

history of thought, comprises a dogmatic axiom which Levinas challenges. Perhaps

driven by the violence and theoretical difficulty of the 20th century and by the trauma in

his own life, Levinas writes to outline an approach to humanism which is radically

democratic. In this conception, there is little opportunity for individualistic thought. The

demands of living in an ethical relation pervade human being, and dictate that the Other

precede the self. This has profound consequences for theory, but also as will be explored

in the coming sections, for the structure and practice of politics.

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Chapter Two: Levinas versus Liberalism: Phenomenology and Critical Theory

Totality as Political Power

From a left perspective it should be easy to find in Levinas the imperative for

egalitarianism. One cannot be expected to be able to respond to the call of the other or

fulfil the demands of responsibility within an inherently hierarchical or exclusionary

economy, so democratic or socialistic political change is a must. The call to respond to

the poverty of the other insists in some ways on a reduction in the relative wealth of the

Same. Economic equality and the insurance of universal opportunity and comfort are

imperative for the realization of the ethical relation and so for any experience of the

infinite. ‘Totality,’ is present in modern capitalism and is likeable to other articulations

of coercive power identified as undemocratic, violent, or oppressive by various post- and

neo-Marxian thinkers.9 In more concrete political terms, the socioeconomic forces of

hegemony and globalization, which concentrate power and perpetuate injustice, and those

of rationality which provide for the conditions in which violence is perpetrated, are

examples of precisely what Levinas means by ‘Totality’. In this sense, and in the context

of Levinas’ pedagogical and biographical background, his approach to both subjectivity

and philosophy reveals itself as profoundly critical of the structures of modernity. This

chapter will proceed with a comparison between Levinas’ understanding of Totality and

the Frankfurt School’s concept of power as typified by Herbert Marcuse’s description of

cultural capitalist domination overtaking and oppressing the free individual. Besides a

9 Foucault’s early understanding of Power, for instance, something nebulous and coercive, often invisible

and pervasively threatening to human freedom and equality, is in many ways conceptually similar Levinas’

Totality.

36

Leviansian critique of capital or a synthesis between his particular phenomenology and

the Frankfurt School’s political work, this section elaborates an understanding of Totality

which is hopefully more pragmatic than Levinas’ sometimes vague writings. Short of the

naïve and optimistic approach to politics he is so critical of, I aim to locate in Levinas the

need and opportunity for a new and specifically ethical approach to politics.

Totality and Domination: Levinas and Marcuse

Marcuse writes that “‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of

society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates

through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” (Marcuse 3) He explains in One-

Dimensional Man that the sometimes subtle forces of domination inherent to liberal

capitalism reduce human life to a ‘one-dimensional’ cultural conception lacking in

criticality. Fascist and capitalist forms of Totality are different in that the latter is often

less violent and compatible with an apparent pluralism of political voices, though the

extent of meaningful dissent possible in late capitalism is likely more imaginary than real.

Totality in both the Marcusean and the Levinasian senses operates without clear

leadership and progresses through the false influence of public opinion and mass culture.

Following Emile Horkheimer and anticipating Theodore Adorno, Marcuse sees the

modernist obsession with and submission to neo-Kantian rationality as a dangerous trend

which is more likely than not to result in its own demise: a dogmatic reverence for reason

which fails to achieve the critical and democratic ideals of the enlightenment. Levinas

warns that rationality risks becoming a totality of its own, potentially one which appears

democratic and so eludes established political and academic anti-oppressive frameworks.

37

The convergence of modern rationalism and positivism with structures of power

and domination results in what Marcuse calls a “bureaucratic takeover of identity”

(Marcuse 32). The quantification of virtually all aspects of life, while allegedly

liberating, allows for functionalist ideology to pervade and to deeply affect individual

experience. Marcuse explains how dominant rationalism traps the subject by stripping

‘higher culture’ of the potential for meaningful criticism: “It is a rational universe which,

by the mere weight and capabilities of its apparatus, blocks all escape. In its relation to

the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things – opposition and

adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of

freedom in the refusal to behave” (Marcuse 71). One-dimensionality is the effective

reduction of intellectual life to the level of consumption. Marcuse implies that in another

possible world, or in the pre-industrial world, there could be more potential for a depth or

richness to human life which is not quantifiable or reducible to the economic. Marcuse

laments the diminishing importance of personal identity, but Levinas outright challenges

the institution of identity. Levinas might call Marcuse naïve for believing

multidimensionality to be a lost reality rather than a mythic idealism.

The Levinasian relation is opposed to the dominant capitalist structure which

Marcuse describes as limiting the human subject to the singular dimension of the market.

In spite of the unavoidable demand of responsibility, there is no room in one-

dimensionality for responsibility. The logic of aspirationalism, tied closely to the belief

in the sovereign individual, implies a specific lack of concern for the other.

Responsibility is, from a capitalist viewpoint, certainly inefficient and arguably

incompatible with sovereignty. Such is the perverse logic which for example declares

38

Keynsianism an affront to personal liberty. This is what Marcuse finds problematic in

industrial society. The individual eventually loses the capacity for meaningful dissent or

even critical thought. The potential to misbehave is nonexistent when what looks like

dissent is commoditized under the guise of legitimization. Marcuse writes:

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the

‘conquest of transcendence’ achieved by the one-dimensional society.

Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the

qualitative difference!) In the realm of politics and higher culture, so it

does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental

organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one

remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy

Consciousness comes to prevail (Marcuse 79).

“Institutionalized Desublimation” is Marcuse’s term for the way in which domination

overtakes individual consciousness. Marcuse reaches beyond Freudian sublimation or

Erich Fromm’s understanding of internalization to describe a preconscious influence

which completely robs the human of free subjectivity. Dominant Industrial society

perpetuates itself by ridding the subject of the agency required for the production of

higher culture or meaningful criticism.10

In the same sense in which Levinas fears the unbridled proliferation of Totality,

Marcuse describes the illogic, hypocrisy and danger of rationalist domination:

That a political party which works for the defense and growth of

capitalism is called ‘Socialist’ and a despotic government ‘democratic’

and a rigged election ‘free’ are familiar linguistic – and political – features

which long predate Orwell… Relatively new is the general acceptance of

these lies by public and private opinion, the suppression of their monstrous

10 Jodi Dean might explain this in terms of Communicative Capitalism: the political potential of an

organized, marshalled rally, disruptive piece of writing, or left-wing vote are all ultimately useless gestures.

Each are commoditized, and as such always already relegated to the sphere of the economic. The social

function of these ‘neoliberal fantasies’ is considerable, but they can only serve to reinforce the hegemonic

structure of late capitalism, the infinitely expansive colonialism of Totality. (Democracy and Other

Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.)

39

content. The spread and the effectiveness of this language testify to the

triumph of society over the contradictions which it contains; they are

reproduced without exploding the social system (Marcuse 89).

This is merely one incarnation of Totality, and one example of the way social domination

automatically consumes and reproduces its own mythology. Institutionalized

desublimation allows for the concentration of power and the continued reproduction of

the structures of domination (Marcuse 74). Simultaneous to the individual’s falling

victim to the campaign of domination is the containment of all cultural variance. John

Fremstad writes of the psychology behind what he calls Marcuse’s “Dialectics of

Hopelessness” that “Certain developments have paved the way for the smooth, ubiquitous

repression or sublimation that has settled in on the economically advanced capitalist

societies” (Fremstad 87). While Marcuse purports to identify trends which are central but

surmountable, he also proves that domination which perpetuates itself through false

comforts, subsumed culture, and rationalist psychology is deeply entrenched. It is

ideologically powerful and by nature overwhelming. Given that political criticism is

absorbed or denatured by domination, structural change within the poisoned

sociopolitical paradigm is almost certainly impossible. It seems as though a complete

cultural overhaul is the only potential way towards true progress, but revolution is

increasingly beyond reach. Marcuse proffers a catastrophic appraisal of sociocultural and

political totality. Without relying on Kantian idealism, a Levinasian resolution to the

problems Marcuse identifies requires a radical new political scheme following a

fundamental shift in the philosophy underlying daily life.

Enlightenment-wariness

40

For Marcuse, the lack of space for cultural alternatives, the subsumption of

countercultural output into a hegemonic mainstream, and the effective impotence of

criticism are typical of post-enlightenment hypocrisy (Kellner xiii). The most pressing

effect of one-dimensionality is that dominant culture subsumes the plurality of artistic

and critical media. In his introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Douglas Kellner

explains that “Marcuse… like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality

colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing

technological imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior” (Kellner

xiv). When criticism is contained by its own object, potential alternatives become futile.

Marcuse writes, “Ascending modern rationalism in its speculative as well as empirical

form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and

philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward

established and functioning social institutions” (Marcuse 15). Dissent is limited to a

confined stage within an established rational order. Domination maintains itself in two

ways: by rendering countercultural action useless, creating cynical, resigned, and

disaffected citizens; and by pacifying its subjects towards a sort of satisfied, ego-centric

disengagement. This combination of cynicism and comfort might explain phenomena

like low voter turnout, general political disinterest, or some forms of reactionary

conservatism. Marcuse’s catastrophism illustrates Levinasian totality and the need for an

at least marginally utopic approach to criticism. Marcuse offers a comprehensive

diagnosis of a specific and pervasive incarnation of totality.

Levinas’ own politics are complex. He is sometimes sympathetic to statism,

declaring Western democracy a great achievement, but also implicates the structures of

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capitalist power in the same totalitarian institutions as the fascism to which he was

victim. He has been criticized for his adherence to Israeli Zionism, his refusal to

participate in the May 1968 student movement, and for a misogynistic element to some of

his writing on alterity and eros, all of which appear grossly contrary to the spirit of his

writing.11 In the 1990 preface Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, Levinas writes

that the “source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some

contingent anomaly within human reasoning,” but in “the essential possibility of

Elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy

has not sufficiently insured itself” (Levinas, Horowitz and Horowitz 3). He suggests that

liberalism is insufficient to prevent injustice of the most banal or overtly violent forms.

The “servile soul” which is articulated as the specific focus of his much later Freedom

and Command (1953) is something of a spectre throughout his work. Horowitz suggests

that the servitude Levinas sees as afflicting the individual is identical to the notion of

“freedom created by late capitalism” (Horowitz 124). While subjectively experiencing an

illusory but convincing ersatz intellectual freedom, an individual might submit to and so

reproduce the structures of Totality. Where Marcuse identifies the ways in which the

11 Though neither of these three criticisms may be dismissed or apologized away, his Zionism might be

attributable to a somewhat reactionary belief in the need for Jewish refuge, though such blatant idealism is

no question inconsistent with his theoretical work and though the violent implications of the political

movement are no doubt ethically fraught. It is hard to imagine an ethics which allows for politicized

violence or racial, cultural, or ethnic difference of any sort, even one so focused on specificity. His

criticism of identity politics, as outlined in No Identity, is due to his doubt that the identity-reifying

grassroots of 1968 could adequately divorce themselves from the sociocultural structures of totality. His

criticism was borne not of an adherence to the status quo, but to his thinking that the student leaders were

not nearly radical enough, that they inadvertently contributed to a totality of divisive identity which is

ultimately unproductive. We could pause here to consider the inconsistency between Levinas’ critique of

Identity in the context of 1968 and his apparent comfort with the concept regarding ethnic statism, though

since he wrote very little on the complex topic of Israel, many of these criticisms may be founded largely

on hyperbole. His most dubious and arguably more theoretically important shortfall of course lies in his

apparent antifeminism, which despite appearing to maintain gender difference is arguably seated really in

his radical refusal to accept the relevance of political identity, but which will be discussed in the fourth

chapter.

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sovereign individual is subject to capitalist domination, Levinas sees sovereignty as a

totalitarian myth. Both thinkers see Liberal politics and traditional ontology as linked

and dangerous, and suggest that practical politics fails to address the eminent threat.

Idealism and Anti-Dogmatism

Horowitz suggests that “If Hegelianism is the idealist reduction of eschatology to

objective history understood in teleological terms, materialism would be the reduction of

history to an eschatology still understood in teleological, purposive-instrumental terms”

(Horowitz 28). In the sense that Horkheimer and Adorno, and Marcuse, accuse

enlightenment rationality of failing to produce justice and actually facilitating fascism,

Levinas sees the logical reduction of human ends to historicism as dangerous because it

still operates in a fundamentally capitalist, instrumentalist way. Horowitz writes that the

Hegelian concept of Natural History “reproduced again and again the law of the stronger

as the law of all, or the law of the few as the law of the third. Radical enlightenment does

not bring this to an end, but brings it to a head, to an extreme” (Horowitz 321). If Marx’s

Hegelianism causes him to fail to account for the dogma of Natural History, Horowitz

suggests, Levinas’ socioethical phenomenology might provide for a way out of history

which provides for humanity. The intentions of the enlightenment have been perverted.

Rather than democratizing knowledge and encouraging the growth of an informed, free

society, rationality contributes to the perpetuation of class difference and other structural

injustice. Levinas and the thinkers of the Frankfurt school share an approach to cultural

criticism which, without being specifically anti-rational, is focused on identifying the

forces and structures which contribute to injustice, including the dogmatic institution of

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reason. They also share the conviction that a critical approach to historical determination

is necessary. Horowitz argues that despite their differing approaches to subjectivity and

political tact, something of a synthesis between their work might produce something both

politically viable and philosophically consistent.

Relational Subjectivity and Redistributive Politics

Horowitz writes that the Frankfurt School neomarxist anti-rationality typified by

Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional

Man is carried out in search of a “negative dialectics that reaches towards a new

categorical imperative beyond universalizing totalization,” because “an understanding of

the ethical relation is needed that is modeled neither on knowing nor simply on the self-

negation, the dialectics, of identity” (Horowitz 2009 xix). They call for a radical re-

thinking of human co-existence which could be compatible with Levinas. Of Marcuse,

he writes: “The loss of multidimensionality is not only in the loss of the distinction

between potentiality and actuality, a loss that occurs in many domains at many levels of

experience and thought, it is also, although he does not use the same terms as Levinas, a

loss of ‘height,’ of the ethical relation” (Horowitz 122-123). It is precisely an awareness

of the subject’s situation in regard to other people that is lost to the mono-dimensionality

of domination. Without appealing to any sort of spiritual transcendentalism, Levinas

presents the possibility to move beyond the oddly and hypocritically totalizing nature of

enlightenment rationality to situate the human subject in ethical terms without relying on

the re-mythologization or pseudo-idolatry of reason. The triumph of Levinasian Totality

in Marcusean one-dimensionality comes with the negation of the relation. It is

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impossible in the world described by Marcuse to be fully human, to realize the ethical

relation, respond to the call of the other, and experience the infinite extent of subjectivity

properly situated. Domination is both a function and a form of totality.

In his articles “Levinas and Political Theory” and “The Opposite of Totality,”

Fred Alford pits Levinas against the Frankfurt school. He suggests that Levinas’ and the

Frankfurt school’s solutions to the ills of totalizing politics differ: “against totality,

Theodor Adorno sets the particular. Levinas sets infinity,” and that Jurgen Habermas’

“distant nearness” and Levinas’ “relation without relation” represent radically different

approaches to intersubjectivity (Alford 2004 158). The degree to which Levinas relies on

Husserl might be unpalatable to the Frankfurt School theorists, whose criticism of Kant

does not transcend the confines of materialist rationality and whose Hegelianism is to

Levinas seriously flawed. The anti-materialist transcendentalism of Levinas’ conception

of the infinite allows his criticism to be hopeful where the Frankfurt school finds itself up

against an undefeatable rationality. Levinas provides the hypothetical or theoretical

space in which to imagine potentially viable alternatives to the seemingly insurmountable

problems Marcuse identifies. The world does not operate according to the terms by

which Levinas describes it. The dominant political order operates according to an

understanding of the world in which sovereignty is unquestioned and violence is

permitted. Marcuse sees this as almost uncontestably established, and Levinas seems to

call for a complete reimagining of subjectivity in order to address injustice. Other

attempts to effect this sort of change are necessarily compromising, like Erich Fromm’s

ultimate lack of revolutionary imperative, or idealistic and unviable.

45

Alford argues that the Frankfurt school’s and Levinas’ approaches to human

subjectivity are incommensurable, and so a synthesis of their politics and theory would be

fruitless. Horowitz offers a more nuanced account of this difference, arguing that in

many important ways Levinas and the Frankfurt School complement each other.

Levinas’ messianism offers some potential relief from Marcuse’s hopelessness, and

Marcuse’s political realism lends some import to Levinas’ sometimes abstract work.

Marcuse’s ‘Happy Consciousness’ and Levinas’ ‘servile soul’ both describe a subject

who has internalized the propaganda of a dominant culture and, while experiencing a

deceptively contented daily life, lacks access to any transcendental freedom. The

entrapment of the potentially free subject is requisite for the reproduction of the means of

production and the perpetuation of docility and pacification of dissent when “the political

needs of social domination have become the needs and aspirations of individuals”

(Horowitz 123-5). Horowitz points towards scientific rationality as the universal

dominant and dangerous force at play when Marcuse likens the bourgeois subject to a

“Nazi,” or “a modern city dweller” who can “only imagine friendship as a ‘social

contract’” (Marcuse 155; Horowitz 134). What has apparently been lost to the

enlightenment, scientific rationality, the Taylorist politics of efficiency, and the

presumption of democratic freedom in capitalism is the space for human interaction

which is non-rational and non-economic. The ethical relation precedes and precludes the

image of the sovereign taxpayer.

Discussing the effects of Totality in “Without Identity”, Levinas writes:

That an action can be hampered by the technique destined to make it easy

and effective, that a science born to embrace the world delivers it to

disintegration, that politics and an administration guided by the humanist

ideal maintain the exploitation of man by man, and war – these are singular

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reversals of reasonable projects that disqualify human causality and,

thereby, transcendental subjectivity understood as spontaneity and act. It is

as if the Ego, identity par excellence where all identifiable identity is

derived, defaulted on itself, could not coincide with itself. (Levinas HO

59-60)

Totality fails to account for the ego, but insists on the relevance of singularity. The

product of mythic, dogmatic identity in a modern world which both demands and denies

the ego is an individual who lacks access to the infinity born of the relation. The

hypocrisies inherent to modern totality are manifest in ongoing injustice. By

“disqualifying human causality [and] transcendental subjectivity,” the totalizing forces of

domination and rationality perpetuate themselves. Levinas is concerned by a liberal

society in which absolute totality is a philosophical possibility (EI 78). Nemo points out

that a society truly “respectful of freedoms” could not be founded on Liberalism because

“an objective theory of society which posits that society functions best when one lets

things go liberally… would make freedom depend on an objective principle and not on

the essential secrecy of lives” (EI 79). The liberal obsession with privacy and individual

life is incommensurate to any possible attempt at freedom, insofar as it places each

subject against each other. Modern or contemporary capitalist-liberal culture pretends to

hold freedom in privacy, for the establishment of positive liberty above negative rights,

but in isolating the individual under the guise of democracy and insisting that freedom be

synonymous with privacy.12 For Levinas, however, freedom is found only in servitude.

This demands an understanding of existence which is common and so a political

12 Of course this is not to ignore the importance of privacy, which is inarguably prerequisite for freedom,

and even more so in modern context. The institution of individualism is a dangerous affront to freedom.

Freedom however opposed to antagonistic individualism is also opposed to hegemonic surveillance. Bill

C-51, for instance, and its attack on privacy, is as much an attack on freedom and an antagonism to

subjectivity as anything. To challenge the ‘secrecy of lives’ in favour of a more democratic humanism is

also absolutely opposed to the overt concentration of power in government surveillance.

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subjectivity which is wholly relational (Levinas TI 45). In this way, Levinasian

subjectivity is incompatible with the late-capitalist world of individual actors, and in

which freedom is supposedly quantifiable.

The Frankfurt School’s radical criticism of modern capitalist culture presents an

exciting revolutionary imperative, but is dismissibly idealistic. Given their Hegelian-

Marxist background and insistence on socialist revolution, this is a fair criticism: wealth

redistribution is unlikely to be achieved without a massive political shift. In going

‘further,’ – by challenging the paradigm of subjectivity in which the Frankfurt school, as

well as traditional politics, operate – and so in shifting the focus of revolution from

politics to philosophy, Levinas makes egalitarian politics seem more viable, if less

imminent.13 Marcuse’s writing of the malcontent associated with industrial domination

serves in this context to highlight some of the most pressing violences of capitalist

totality, and so contributes to an argument for the timeliness of a Levinasian shift.

Likewise, Levinas offers a theoretically interesting if impressively messianic solution to

the problems Marcuse and he both identify in late modernity.

13 Suggesting that the marriage of Levinasian subjectivity with Frankfurt School politics might allow for a

unique mediation between viability and radicality risks discounting the importance of a recognition of the

ways in which people interact in society and eschewing the divisions between tactics and strategy, theory

and praxis, and philosophy and life. In the prospective phenomenological revolution which lies behind this

project, these dichotomies might be seen as more divisive than productive, even Totalitarian.

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Chapter Three – Justice and the Paradox of Identity

Deconstruction and Ethics

Deconstruction is the methodical analysis of the structures of texts, movements, or

institutions, applicable to literature as well as politics, sociology, and history. Beyond the

scope of linguistic structuralism, Derrida dismantles the contingencies of social

institutions and phenomena. By problematizing the apparatuses which perpetuate

injustice, his ambition is to present the opportunity for reorganization of the human world

(Derrida 1994 xviii). Deconstruction is a theoretical practice, always already engaged in

analysis. In his introduction to Derrida as part of his Dialogues with Contemporary

Continental Thinkers, Richard Kearney suggests that Derrida be read as a rebel to the

Western continental tradition. Inherent to deconstruction is the imperative to challenge

any axiom, including the fundamental structure of subjectivity. Kearney writes that

“Derrida proposed to show how the major metaphysical definitions of Being as some

timeless self-identity or presence, which dominated Western philosophy from Plato to the

present could ultimately be ‘deconstructed,” which he attributes to Derrida’s criticism of

the “‘logocentric’ tradition of Western thought” (Kearney 106). The logocentricity of the

canon constitutes a potentially oppressive structure, as the presumption of an authority,

however nebulous, requires adherence to a necessarily hierarchical ontological structure.

As he makes clear in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s intention in challenging

such a fundamental and long-standing axiom of thought is inherited from Levinas’ radical

approach to philosophy (Derrida 1978). Kearney elaborates:

By redirecting our attention to the shifting margins and limits which

determine such logocentric procedures of exclusion and division, Derrida

continues to dismantle our preconceived notions of identity and expose us

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to the challenge of hitherto suppressed or concealed ‘otherness’ – the other

side of experience…

He characterizes deconstruction as a “radical challenge to such hallowed logocentric

notions as the Eternal Idea of Plato, the Self-Thinking-Thought of Aristotle, or the cogito

of Descartes” (Kearney 106). Derrida questions the inherently egoistic notion of

subjective sovereignty, which is implicated in many instances of political violence, and

which is central to the operation of late capitalist society. He is radical not for holding an

extreme view on a specific issue, but for throwing the paradigm of traditional knowledge

into question. Much in the same vein as Levinas’ veneration for ‘traditional truth,’

Derrida subjects the traditional ‘order’ to deconstruction, but leaves space for its

operation respecting the value and historical relevance of traditional knowledge, because

“To deconstruct the subject does not mean to deny its existence. There are subjects,

‘operations’ or ‘effects’ (effets) of subjectivity” (Derrida, Kearney 125). Derrida

challenges the assumption that subjectivity-as-such requires a sort of political

sovereignty. In the preface to Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Kearney

and Simon Critchley suggest that deconstruction is a “concrete intervention in contexts

that is governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice” (Derrida 1994 viii). The

terms through which the relation between people is dealt are open to analysis but the

fundamental relevance of social existence is always already present for Derrida. In his

Exordium to Spectres of Marx, Derrida makes it clear that his goal is for humans to “live

otherwise, and better,” having been better situated in history and as socio-ethical actors

(Derrida 1994 xviii). He is interested in discovering and facilitating justice by

challenging and altering the popular discourses and institutions which inform the

practices and ways of thinking associated with coercive power and injustice. Through

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this process we may re-organize power and rethink politics.

Levinas’ approach to phenomenology, according to Derrida, is an anti-philosophy

in which the immediacy of immanence makes both egoism and subjective subordination

impossible (Derrida 1978 147). The primacy of the present precedes any

transcendentalism which could otherwise inform the construction of a self situated in and

under a prescient order, and through which philosophy could purport to account for

human life. Derrida suggests that the structure of Heideggerean Ontology is violent in its

failure to recognize the ontic status of the Other. He writes:

The neutral thought of Being neutralizes the Other as a being: [to Quote

Levinas,] ‘Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power’ (TI p.

46), a philosophy of the neutral, the tyranny of the state as an anonymous

and inhuman universality. Here we find [in Levinas] the premises for a

critique of the state’s alienation whose anti-Hegelianism would be neither

subjectivist, nor Marxist; nor anarchist, for it is a philosophy of the

‘principle, which can be only as a commandment’ (Derrida 1978 120).

Heidegger is implicated in the perpetuation of the oppressive totalitarianism which gives

primacy to the individual, and which facilitates the injustice which Derrida seeks to

disavow through deconstruction. Despite situating the subject in the relation of

responsibility assumed by Mitsein, Heidegger maintains the figure of a solitary,

individuated self (Fynsk 185).14 Heideggerian ontology may also be implicated in the

more overt political totalitarianism of National Socialism, a function rather than an

anomaly of traditional heterogeneous egoistic thought. Derrida asks “if ‘ontology’ is not

14 Christopher Fynsk suggests that while Heidegger binds the being of Dasein in the being-with of Mitsein,

and finds the subject thrown into the relation of guilt and responsibility, alterity is a source of angst rather

than freedom (Fynsk 193). Heidegger’s individuated subject is enslaved by the Other, whereas Levinas’

Same, being preceded by relationality, finds freedom in an existence conditioned by plurality. For

Heidegger there is a sense of violence in friendship (Fynsk 201). For Levinas relationality precludes the

possibility of the violence of Totality.

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a truism, or at least a truism among others, and if the strange difference between Being

and the existent has a meaning, or is meaning, can one speak of the ‘priority’ of Being in

relation to the existent?” (Derrida 1978 170). Giving priority to ontology “enslave[s]

ethics” (ibid). The idea of being-as-such is itself a contingency, rather than a fact. If

Deconstruction can be said to have an ‘end,’ it would be the realization of responsibility.

“Being, since it is nothing outside the existent… could in no way precede the existent,

whether in time, or in dignity… one cannot legitimately speak of the subordination of the

existent to Being or, for example, of the ethical relation to the ontological relation”

(Derrida 1978 170). Whereas Levinas’ work is decidedly theoretical and rarely addresses

specific political issues, Derrida more directly engages with the here-and-now.

Injustice is the failure to account for the other, and deconstruction is an attempt to

allow for the recognition of the ethical relation and fulfilment of responsibility. Derrida

asserts that justice is not “possible or thinkable without the principle of some

responsibility.” He compares war with “political or other kinds of violence, nationalist,

racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations,” and “oppressions of capitalist

imperialism,” as all are “forms of totalitarianism” (Derrida 1994 xviii). Political violence

is the result of the cultural disavowal of responsibility. Imperialism is possible only for a

dominator with a belief in their own divine right to rule. If ethics sat at the foundation of

consciousness – if there were no emergent sovereign or axiomatic ego– it would be

impossible to think of others as viable subjects of domination and so to justify any sort of

governance other than the most thoroughly and purely democratic. David Campbell

suggests that “The affinities between ‘Levinasian ethics’ and ‘Derridean deconstruction’

are considerable. Most notably, alterity incites ethics and responsibility for each, as both

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depend up on the recognition of a structural condition of alterity prior to subjectivity and

thought” (Campbell 468). Derrida suggests that Leviansian ethics could liberate

metaphysics and so open the space for ‘transcendence’ (Derrida 1978 102). The

transcendent is contained in a sense within immanence, so by ordering the world in this

way and focusing on the self’s exteriority from the other rather than from some unknown

metaphysic, Derrida follows Levinas in allowing the subject access to the transcendent.

Without turning to a prescriptive or moralistic philosophy, he echoes Levinas suggesting

that the forces which perpetuate physical and social violence are related to those which

further a mythic and oppressive sense of singular subjectivity. According to Campbell,

responsibility “commissions a utopian strategy. Not a strategy that is beyond all bounds

of possibility so as to be considered unrealistic, but one that, in respecting the necessity of

calculation, takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible…”

(Campbell 473). This ends-oriented approach to theory does not, as some suggest,

engender a religious messianism or flighty utopianism.15 Rather, Derrida and Levinas’

shared refusal to accept Hegelian eschatology points to a pragmatic sort of messianism

which operates without idealism. The infinite is contained, in a sense, in the present.

This approach to politics is a middle-way which allows, for example, for immediate

political work to be performed in the context of its contribution to eventually more

meaningful structural change. This could avoid the perceived futility associated with the

limits of political materialism on one hand and the unlikeliness of idealist politics on the

other. The dynamic of this radical approach to democracy situates deconstruction in a

15 Some scholars, such as Christopher Wise, take the admittedly messianic tone of Derrida’s writing as

evidence of either a lack of political utility or a “latent Judaism” betraying a covert and dogmatic thesism

(Wise 61).

53

positive political context shaped by Levinas’ conviction that re-conceptualizing

subjectivity is what is necessary for the prevention of ongoing totalitarian violence (TI

299).16 Derrida operates largely according to Levinasian ethics. He characterizes

deconstruction as “a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or

motivates… The other precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and provokes the

subject before any genuine questioning can begin. It is in this rapport with the other that

affirmation expresses itself” (Derrida, Kearney 118). The other, for Derrida as for

Levinas, precedes the establishment of individual subjectivity. The relation between self

and other is deconstructable but cannot be transcended. Derrida writes of a

characteristically Levinasian sense of “obligation” beyond the realm of the living or of

the here-and-now, “a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust

the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity” (Derrida 1994 xx).

The imperative of the ethical relation extends across human history and transcends social

and political boundaries. He writes that unless we pursue something like a deconstructive

revolution, “justice risks being reduced once again to juridical moral rules, norms, or

representations, within an inevitable totalizing horizon…” (Derrida 1994 34). Both

Levinas’ and Derrida’s understandings of overarching political and the social structures

have much in common with Foucaultian power and the Frankfurt School’s understanding

of hegemony, and is arguably what operates in Althusser’s State Apparatus (TI 81). It is

an omnipresent, coercive, and self-perpetuating form of authoritative power, though not

16 Levinas’ relationship to the messianic is certainly cloudier than Derrida’s. His French-Language

phenomenology is supposedly inherited from the Greek tradition, and not incommensurate to secular

atheism, but he was simultaneously engaged in Hebrew-Language Talmudic scholarship, and accusations

of crossover influence, while denied by the author himself, are perhaps more not as outlandish as ones

pitted against Derrida, who’s lifework was fully engaged in the characteristically secular pursuit of

deconstruction, and who declared himself a secular thinker (Kearney 49 and 107).

54

one which is overt or always apparent. His specific targets are often historical, and his

larger political project is timeless (Derrida, Kearney 112). The hegemonic, oppressive

structures characteristic of the contemporary world are not limited to the present, but

have their roots in history and in the Western Tradition. As a warning to other post-

Marxists, Derrida writes of “the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance,”

which should be accounted for in order to avoid the potentially limiting and totalizing

effects of orthodoxy (Derrida 1994 18). The failure to do so perpetuates a hegemonic

dogmatism possible even in decidedly anti-dogmatic movements. The structure of

inherited thought contributes to the reproduction of the oppressive and totalizing

institutions of modernity. A deconstructive analysis of the institution of sovereign

subjectivity might open the theoretical space for a more ethically-ordered world but only

if it is performed with a degree of self-awareness. By uncovering the structure and

failure of traditional justice, Derrida takes a Levinasian approach to an immediate

political issue.

The Aporia of Forgiveness

To “reorient the politics of the state” would require the revolutionary mass

adoption of irrational unconditionality (Derrida 2001 4). Derrida argues however that the

steps that have already been taken to mitigate the worst modern injustices should be

legitimized as appropriate responses to very real phenomena. Vincent Leitch writes,

“Unconditionality without sovereignty in Derrida’s late work injects hope and idealism

into politics” (Leitch 237). Where Levinas wrote of responsibility without a clear

political imperative, Derrida calls for broad sociopolitical reform through deconstruction

55

and specific actions towards social justice, and explains the specifics of what such action

might look like. With ‘irrational unconditionality,’ Derrida points well beyond the scope

of what is typically meant by ‘unconditional forgiveness’ or ‘uncondtional love’, to an

understanding of human intercourse which bears a generosity so profound that it

transgresses the limits of reason. Mariana Valverde writes of the political potential of

this, “Derrida’s thought on justice provides some tools with which to support social

movements while avoiding the political and theoretical problems of identity politics”

(Valverde 655). Derrida’s Levinasian approach allows us to consider justice in a broader

sense and ‘move forward’ without relying on identity, in a third way besides affirmative

identity politics and the oppressive regimes which bear them in supposed opposition. By

allowing for the deconstruction of fundamental structures of oppression, and by focusing

temporarily on specific issues, it becomes possible to challenge particular institutions

without either perpetuating or being beholden to devote energy to the contingent structure

of social and personal identity. Furthermore, Derridean deconstruction points to a

Levinasian world in which it is conceivable that human beings interact outside of the

dogmatic institution of identity. It is possible to work towards social justice in a way

which is consistent with the political and ethical project of deconstruction without

insisting on immediate political revolution. Leitch suggests that “the well-known

Derridean critique of traditional binary concepts,” which informs “Derrida’s

commitments to democracy, justice, and internationalism showed him a political

optimist” while maintaining an important degree of informed skepticism (Leitch 245).

The idealism of unconditional forgiveness and hospitality does not make it an

unreachable site of transcendence – and therefore unworthy of pursuing – but insists on

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real, material measures towards its actualization. Leitch points out that “Derridean

unconditionals, such as pure hospitality, absolute forgiveness, or democracy to come,

work on and in the future. Politics explicitly operates there” (Leitch 239). The future-

orientation of Derridean politics is imperative, but in the way that it calls for immediate

action. Like Levinas’ messianism, Derrida calls for the present deconstruction of past

violences in the hope of a non-violent future.

Derrida is wary of the assumption of the possibility of forgiveness, and of any

institution which might assert the right or ability to practice or offer forgiveness. In “On

Forgiveness,” an essay on the democratic potential and fundamental impossibility of

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, he identifies two sorts of forgiveness: conditional

forgiveness, which is common, negotiated, and potentially approachable through the

juridical; and unconditional forgiveness, which is impossible, aporetic, and absolutely

necessary (Derrida 2001 39). The former is convenient, politically expedient, and may

operate according to established rules without challenging the construction of

subjectivity. The latter constitutes an impossible demand, and is rooted in the Levinasian

ideal of infinite responsibility. To expect a victim of violence to unconditionally and

truly forgive a perpetrator for committing a fundamentally unforgiveable act which is the

project of Truth Commissions, is at once an absurd proposal and a prerequisite for the

dismantling of oppressive structures. Kearney and Critchley suggest that for Derrida the

logic of forgiveness is fraught: “On the one hand, there is what Derrida calls an

‘unconditional purity,’ which could be described as ethical in the Kantian sense of the

Moral Law or the Levinasian sense of infinite responsibility. On the other hand, there is

the order of pragmatic conditions, at once historical, legal, political, and quotidian, which

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demand that the unforgivable be forgiven, that the irreconcilable be reconciled” (Kearney

and Critchley xi). The task of forgiveness, according to the sense of responsibility

inherent to deconstruction, and towards the end of a more equitable world, is irrational.

Forgiveness of the horrendous and for the perpetrators of political totalitarianism requires

an articulation of culpability where guilt has been denied or diffused. Truly meaningful

forgiveness requires the articulation of inarticulable elements of human experience and

the quantification of irrational things: the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. This is not

hyperbolic, but intended to elucidate the difficulty of a very real and absolutely necessary

task. Unconditional forgiveness is the principle of the ethical relation. The deconstructed

subject sees the other – the perpetrator – as impeded in circumstance, and must approach

them as an other in the sense of a source of responsibility. Any attempt to approach

something like justice beyond the scope of established or formal law, to account for the

ethical relation between people, must move beyond the bounds of rationality in order to

account for humanity. This task overwhelms Kantianism. The sort of justice required by

a proper account of subjectivity necessitates the reduction of every specific instance of

injustice to the bareness of the face-to-face relation.

Derrida writes that “One could never, in the ordinary sense of the words, found a

politics or law on forgiveness. In all the geopolitical scenes we have been talking about,

[of large-scale politicized violence or exclusionary politics] the work most often abused

is ‘forgive’. Because it always has to do with negotiations more or less acknowledged,

with calculated transactions, with conditions and, as Kant would say, with hypothetical

imperatives” (Derrida 2001 39). The type of negotiation at hand is specifically not

commensurate to the institutional. Valverde asserts that “justice is what law claims to

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enact but always in fact negates” (Valverde 657). Justice overwhelms reason. Derrida

says that it is impossible for the state, or any institution, to forgive because forgiveness

can only be enacted by a human subject (Derrida 2001 43). Likewise, a legal

transgression cab be pardoned, but not forgiven (Minkkinen 514). Justice and law run

parallel but are not identical. Truth Commissions seek to bridge the space between the

‘justice’ of law and the justice which operates beyond the juridical. They risk failing to

quantify the unquantifiable, but succeed in approaching the space where something like

true forgiveness might be exercised. The sort of forgiveness approachable by law

requires an economic approach to human interrelation which is entirely inadequate, and

which would be fundamentally unjust (Minkkinen 515). As Panu Minkkinen points out:

The suffering that refuses to take on meaning overwhelms the

victim more violently and cruelly than any violation of his personal

integrity and in Levinas’ terms also renders it ‘useless’: because it

refuses to make sense, suffering is essentially ‘for nothing’. But

for Levinas, this uselessness also marks the possibility of an ethics.

The refusal to take on meaning [provides the space for the ethical

call] and it is only by responding to this original appeal that

intrinsically useless suffering and become just within the radical

humanism that Levinas calls the interhuman: the other’s suffering

will finally make sense as my suffering for the suffering of the

other (Minkkinen 528).

There is no suggestion that by internalizing the suffering of a violent criminal

should or could make a victim ‘feel better,’ or that Truth and Reconciliation

Commissions can effect national healing through shared pain, but there is a sense

in which a victim of violence is induced to recognize the bare humanity shared

with their aggressor. It appears unfair to insist that a victim recognize the

humanity of their aggressor prior to or regardless of the aggressor’s being made to

recognize the victim. The victim in this way is in a way further beholden,

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oppressed by the imperative to recognize the humanity of the aggressor and to

experience a sort of responsibility for their actions. This does not make a victim

accountable for the violence committed against them, but it should preclude the

social possibility of violence in the first place.17 ‘Forgiveness’ is, short of

impossible, a remarkably grand, and Responsibility exercised to its extreme is

remarkably controversial.

In the context of Derrida’s work on truth and reconciliation, we see that the

immediate uselessness of suffering and resentment does not render them unfortunate

symptoms of human affect, but that the profound power of human actions is testament to

Levinasian infinity. Our vulnerability to each other, and the power that corresponds to it,

exceeds the immediate limits of formal organization. In holding the sovereign potential

for progress, the victim has the power for reconciliation which can allow unconditional

forgiveness to “eventually acquire its conditional framework and its concrete and

historical relevance” (Minkkinen 515-6). Legal retribution bears on the perpetrator, but

justice relies on the victim’s exercise of responsibility. Valverde points out that for

Derrida, “The question of justice is not a matter of universal definition, but is rather the

following question: How can we, in our particular time and place, work towards justice?”

(Valverde 657). The project isn’t to laboriously formalize the irrational, but to find ways

to mediate resentment, deconstruct the most invisible oppressive structures, and work

towards a distant (pseudo-eschatological) peace built on the ontic equality of relational

subjectivity and responsibility. Derrida suggests that forgiveness “only becomes possible

17 This is not to suggest the possibility of victim-blaming, but to point out that the subject bears a

responsibility to intervene in a sense in any instance of violence. This speaks mostly to the profound

difficulty and absolute necessity of this work.

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from the moment that it appears impossible” (Derrida 2001 37). Minkkinen identifies a

sort of Nietzchean resentment which constitutes a further barrier to reconciliation. He

asks, “following Derrida, how can we reconcile – and yet dissociate – forgiveness and

persistent resentment? How can we overcome a resentment that denies any possibility of

an unconditional forgiveness and, subsequently, any hope of reconciliation between the

victim and his persecutor?” (Minkkinen 516). Forgiveness precludes vengeance, and

forces the subject out of the false economy of lex talionis. Derrida points out that

“Forgiveness has precisely nothing to do with judgement” (Derrida 2001 43). Anything

like true forgiveness, as a response to violence which denies reason, has also to be

performed outside of the reasonable. As forgiveness is intended to re-establish the ethical

relation, it is an act not of rational judgement, but one of ethical responsibility:

forgiveness is the ultimate response to the un-ignorable call of the face of the other. The

task of reconciliation is not to appraise crime or absolve a criminal, but to recognize the

importance of the relation between human subjects. Formal law is inherently incapable

of administering forgiveness (Derrida 2001 39). There is absolutely no space for residual

resentment in Levinasian ethics. The central aporia for both deconstruction and truth

commissions has to do with his seemingly unsurmountable barrier. Leitch points out that

according to Derrida, the statement “I forgive” implies the victim’s sovereign

subjectivity. (Leitch 239) That subjectivity, however incommensurate to the Levinasian

ideal, functions to reorient power in a productive and ultimately egalitarian way.

Derrida’s realistic attempts to mediate this tension have led to criticism of him as a

hypocritically (neo-)liberal thinker (Wise 59). By acknowledging the expedience of

allowing the victim of violence a sort of sovereignty which is ultimately inconsistent with

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the end of his project, Derrida takes a meaningful step towards fundamental change, at

the expense only of his esoteric integrity.

The breadth of analysis necessary to deconstruct any long-standing cultural or

political regime is impressive, testimony is traumatic. The task of addressing the

unimaginable, and working towards the eventual forgiveness of the unforgiveable, is

grand but necessary. Derrida writes, “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal,

normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of

the impossible as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality” (Derrida

2001 32). The end is not to judicially process reparations, exchange absolution, and

proceed in the course of liberalism, but to bring to light a form of historical violence in a

way which disrupts the course of history and contributes to a world more aligned with the

tenets of Levinasianism. Peace is not achievable through the satisfaction of formal

justice forgiveness is “mad” (Derrida 2001 49). Truth Commissions address and

problematize totalitarianism in a deeper way than traditional law can, and so begin a

deconstructive process which demands the recognition of responsibility and purports to

open the space for meaningful social change. This sort of work is absolutely essential for

the messianic imagination of a world organized consistently with the ideals of ethical

philosophy.18

18 Derrida’s immediate subject was the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a landmark

project for reparation and national re-construction. A similar though necessarily different analysis could be

made for a number of similar projects, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. A

Derridean analysis of the current international migration crisis, and of European ethnic nationalism and

refugee displacement, seems overdue.

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Chapter Four – Identity and Totality

Levinas’ work continually denies the relevance of the basic sociocultural

structures which perpetuate injustice of all sorts and at many levels. Perhaps his most

pressing criticism though is the suggestion that his work perpetuates a traditionalistic

gender divide and maintains the ontic subordination of women. Linguistically, Levinas

does not shy away from associating the feminine with alterity, but Alterity is a different

thing for Levinas than it is for traditional thinkers. Simone de Beauvoir and Luce

Irigaray both argue that Levinas’ treatment of the feminine, as a category of human being

and a theoretical subject, constitutes a reductive and traditionalistic masculinism which

amounts to the perpetuation of gendered difference and the marginalization of the

feminine in both theory and practice. Judith Butler and Diane Perpich offer an alternative

reading, in which Levinas’ approach to alterity and subjectivity promises to transgress

traditional lines of identity, making gender difference historically relevant but

prospectively moot in a world in which subjectivity operates without divisive identities.

A progressive reading of Levinas finds him very much in agreement with both Beauvoir

and Irigaray in their presumption of the relationality of subjects. In a politics which by

all accounts should be free of the divisiveness of gender, his failure here is notable.

Perpich argues that while it may seem that Levinas takes advantage of gendered

language, his project is ultimately to combat the totality of the political order, and to

problematize traditional thought, including the structures of patriarchy. In this light, the

ends of Levinas’ work justify his means: where many attempts at identity-based politics

problematically reify identities in order to combat them, Levinas uses unfortunately

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gendered language, but ultimately points towards a world in which identity is irrelevant.

Short of apologizing for Levinas’ use of gendered language as a function of his maleness

or time, Perpich argues that the association of the feminine with alterity, paired with the

height given to alterity in the non-horizontality of the relation, endows the feminine with

a sort of access to the infinite beyond that which is available to the Same. It is worth

noting that this does maintain the relevance of something called ‘the feminine,’ in an

arguably dogmatic and hypocritically totalitarian binary. Butler finds something of a

utility in the ‘precarity’ of alterity, and finds in Levinas the opportunity to explore the

possibility of a radically debased approach to intersubjectivity. To Butler Levinasian

alterity is so profound that it is well-suited as the starting point for anti-oppression.

Responsibility renders the subject so vulnerable as to be unable to perpetuate oppression.

Beauvoir offers perhaps the first, maybe most oft-cited critique of Levinas, but

which as Tina Chanter points out, is limited to a dismissive footnote from The Second

Sex. (Chanter 20) She writes of a sort of dissonance in Levinas, in which woman’s

subjectivity “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not him with

reference to her she is the incidental the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the

Subject; he is the Absolute-she is the other. [sic]” (Beauvoir xxii) Beauvoir implicates

Levinas in this traditionalist misogyny: “E. Levinas expresses this idea most explicitly in

his essay Temps et L’Autre.” Which she quotes as saying that “‘…Otherness reaches its

full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite

meaning.’” (Beauvoir xxii) The equality of rank is important, but does not save Levinas

from what appears to be his own deeply-seated and potentially oppressive understanding

of gender difference. Beauvoir continues,

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I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her

own consciousness, or ego. But it is striking that he deliberately takes a

man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object.

When he writes that woman is mystery, he implies that she is mystery for

man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an

assertion of masculine privilege (Beauvoir xxii).

No honest reader can ignore that for Levinas the woman is the paradigmatic example of

difference and that he often uses extremely problematic, even reductive, language in

describing gender, politics, and Eros (TI 264). Any attempt to defend Levinas against

Beauvoir would appear vain and risks apologizing for a profound theoretical violence.

Nonetheless, there are two academic approaches to his defense. Chanter points out that

Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex quite early in Levinas’ career, and may have been quick

to judgment or misunderstood the nuanced spirit of his work. She suggests that Levinas’

complex understanding of difference is not made clear until his later works. His project

is to disavow the very totality which perpetuates Identity as such, but that is not fully

elucidated until Otherwise than Being. Nonetheless, Beauvoir’s point stands: if Levinas

published dangerous and reductive words, he should be held responsible for that,

regardless of what a nuanced Levinasian might insist he means. The second defense is

that, while it is true that Levinas finds otherness reaching its apex in the feminine, what is

important for him is the absolute universality of subjectivity. What Chanter describes as

a ‘generous’ reading might argue that he has no intention of asserting masculine privilege

but that the relation implies the impossibility of privilege. In non-horizontality, the

masculine same would be always already be subordinate to the feminine other, an implied

inversion of traditional power. It may be Levinas’ ideal that social hierarchy be done

away with, but he does too little to address the pressing reality of hierarchy.

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Levinas insists on the supreme alterity of the feminine. Despite his best

intentions, or his ‘real point,’ this is undeniably masculinist. This cannot be dismissed as

a function of his gender or time or the conditions of authorship: such an apology would

trivialize theory entirely. Beauvoir is right in her assertion that, to a great degree,

Levinas perpetuates male privilege. This obvious sexism does not however render his

oeuvre inherently violent or useless. In using gendered language, even if he only does so

to use well-established tropes to illustrate ‘alterity’, Levinas fails to extend the principles

of responsibility to the other, in this case, any and all women. The passages in which

Levinas approaches Eros and the fecund further his understanding of alterity, but fail to

demonstrate some of the most important tenets of his work. Whether or not this failure

betrays a latent misogyny so profound as to trivialize the ethics of Levinasian scholarship

is debatable. In as radically anti-traditional thought as Levinas’ there is no space for the

covert or overt maintenance of traditional forms of power.

Luce Irigary is often critical of Levinas for many of the same reasons as is

Beauvoir. In ‘Fecundity of the Caress,’ a critical reading of Totality and Infinity, she

offers a more thorough criticism of Levinas’ characterization of the feminine other in the

erotic relationship. As Diane Perpich explains, Irigaray argues that Levinas’s placement

of the woman as ‘beloved’ and never as a lover betrays an archaic patriarchalism.

Irigaray writes, cuttingly, of a

Beloved woman. Not female lover. Necessarily an object, not a subject

with a relation, like his, to time. She drags the male lover into the abyss so

that, from these nocturnal depths, she may be carried off into an absolute

future (Irigaray 126).

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The otherness of the feminine is not mere alterity, but is, in Irigaray’s reading of Levinas,

a site of total domination, to the point of consumption and administration. Her

consciousness is mediated through a subjectivity derived from a fundamentally

oppressive power relation.

Against Levinas’ characterization of Eros, but seemingly sympathetic to his

approach to subjectivity, Irigaray writes “The mystery of relations between lovers is more

terrible but infinitely less deadly than the destruction of submitting to sameness” (Irigaray

123). Acknowledging the alleged non-horizontality of Levinas’ relationality, she points

out that there is a necessary alterity to Eros, and so to all difference. The risk is that

“When the lover relegates her to the realms of infancy, animality, or maternity, one

aspect of this mystery, the relation to the cosmos, is not brought to light. What is left out

is participation in the construction of a world that does not forget natural generation and

the human being’s role in safeguarding its efflorescence” (Irigaray 127). Levinas

disallows the female object of male Eros the possibility to participate in something like

Heideggerean world-formation, by virtue of her fatal object-ness. This is performed by

both his language and by the way in which he sees the erotic relation as somehow

separate from but simultaneous to the ethical. If this enacts a denial of female

subjectivity, it is a major shortfall. If, however, Levinas means to give priority to the

romantic over the other forms of relationality, then he tragically fails to mediate romantic

difference with the same quality with which he endows all other alterity. The reading

most consistent with the spirit of his work is that in situating the gendered other as

supremely other, Levinas means to point to a sort of infinity which is beyond that

typically available to inter-human relations. There is more ‘height’ to the romantic than

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to other sites of relation. In doing so, even with the best theoretical intentions, he

unmistakably reifies gender difference and places the female other as a fundamentally

inaccessible figure. Of course, in non-horizontality, alterity is supposed to be a virtue,

but it is difference nonetheless.

Even where gender identity is fluid, the Levinasian approach to eros rests on a

bizarre primacy of the masculine. Perpich suggests that

Levinas rejects any suggestion that woman is merely the complement of

man, or that is in any way less than fully human. However […] the

positive possibilities of this point of departure are eroded as Levinas goes

on to relegate the feminine other to those domains that have traditionally

been her purview and her lot: on the one hand, the home and domestic

arrangements, and on the other, the erotic relationship and maternity…

(Perpich 36).

Caging a potentially oppressive, if not immediately violent, discussion in terms of

‘dwelling and habitation’ instead of domesticity, and ‘Eros’ instead of sex, does not

insulate Levinas from the dangerous effects performed by his use and normalization of

traditional tropes, especially those which perpetuate oppressive totality. According to

Perpich, “Irigaray argues that in stripping the feminine of her active subjectivity, Levinas

clings to the ‘rock of patriarchy,’ abandoning the feminine other, leaving her ‘without her

own specific face,’” (Perpich 2001 29). Levinas might disagree, arguing that the

feminine face is the face par excellence. If Irigaray misunderstood what he means by

‘alterity,’ it is because of his lack of clarity on the matter. Irigaray accuses Levinas of

extreme hypocrisy, as Perpich writes, “especially serious, of course, given that Levinas’

philosophy s proposed as a re-thinking of the meaning of the ethical” (Perpich 2001 29).

Sonia Sikka recognizes that Levinas’ philosophy is intent on fighting any “violent

attempt to grasp the Other,” including “attempts to subsume the Other under a definition

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that is an extension of oneself” (Sikka 101). But as Sikka points out, “the other side of

the erotic relation as Levinas describes her simply is not the Other of the ethical relation

as Levinas describes him” (ibid). Levinas’ failure to appreciate the female other as an

Other in the sense of a Self entitled to ontic equality with the same exposes him as

fundamentally misogynistic. His thought is reduced to a function of an oppressive

masculinist totality. The egoism Sikka accuses him of is obviously incommensurate with

the spirit of his work. Where Levinas situates femininity as the site of otherness, that

Other is immediately deserving of the full sense of responsibility which saturates the

Same-Other relation. This responsibility requires a politics which accounts for gender,

and which guarantees true, real, and wholly experienced equality.

Sikka agrees with Craig Vasey that “‘chez Levinas the innovative concept of

feminine otherness has little to do with any challenge to the sociopolitical traditions of

patriarchy’ (325)” (Sikka 103). In her reading, Levinas only challenges the sociopolitical

tradition of patriarchy as it is part of a Totality which is also responsible for other forms

of structural oppression. The ethical relation demands ontic equality. The primacy of the

female Other precludes the perpetuation of patriarchal roles. Sikka writes “He fails to

recognize her as a subject, and to constitute her alterity on the basis of this recognition…

Levinas’s failure to be just to the feminine does not merely constitute a lapse or

hypocritical moment within his thought, but indicates a problem at the very heart of it”

(Sikka 105).

Sikka agrees with Beauvoir that the female subject’s

being for another is then not the being for the other of the ethical face-to-

face; it is the being for another constituted by that other’s anxiety and

desire. It is functionality rather than obligation, and to be a function is

inescapably to be the second sex. This difficulty is not eliminated by

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Levinas statement that it is not the woman who is secondary, but the

relation with her (DEC, 135). Since to suggest that the human prior to

sexual differentiation is nonetheless somehow masculine is to say, and no

so subtly, that she achieves her humanity in the transcendence of her

gender awhile he achieves his humanity in the fulfillment of his (Sikka

108).

The genderlessness of the pre-identified being is a de facto maleness. This is

extremely un-democratic, and presents a troubling problem for a Levinasian

politics invested in overcoming the history of oppression.19 Levinas places the

subject in inescapable relation, but in a way which precedes and precludes the

construction of the identities which underlie oppression. The subject, emerging in

relation but outside of other social contingency, should be genderless, and if Sikka

19 Sikka writes This is not because he writes from ‘a man’s point of view,’ but because he writes from a deeply patriarchal one, which is not necessary for man and such. It is from that patriarchal point of view that the subordination of

woman to man is seen not as a form of manmade injustice, but as a necessary part of the divine plan (DCF, 142),

instituted by the god of a religion whose superiority to all others supposedly lies in its refusal to locate the divine anywhere for than in ethics (!) [sic] (Sikka 108).

Here Sikka’s criticism loses traction as it borders on the anti-Semitic. Levinas’ Jewish intellectual heritage

is no secret, but it is possible to read him in the context of secular philosophy, as is his wish. Her

suggestion that the Hebraic tradition is characterized by an elitism is absurd and un-cited. If there is such a

thing as the ‘divine,’ or, perhaps what Levinas calls Infinity, could there be a better place to locate it than in

ethics? Sikka is dead on in this: for Levinas, the transcendence of Infinity is found foremost, and only, in

relationality, in the experience of the face-to-face, and in the sense of responsibility which emerges from it.

But there is nothing specifically theistic, hierarchical, or antifeminist about that, and certainly nothing

specifically Jewish.

Another major stumble in Sikka’s argument which falls outside the bounds of this project lies in her

hypothetical proof of Levinas’ anti-feminism. She writes: Notice what happens, in this regard, if one introduces, into the portrait of ideal maternity painted by Levinas,

the image of a woman who, in order to secure her own well-being, chooses to eject the other whom she harbors within her body. From the perspective of Levinas’s ideal mother, must not his latter woman, whether or not her

choice is guaranteed by the law of the land, be judged as monstrous? It must, I think; and at the risk of sounding

prosaic, this suggests to me (since I find such a judgement monstrous) that feminism may be better served by an old-fashioned discourse of rights in which alterity is predicated on the basis of a recognized identity, and by an

even more old-fashioned metaphysics in which being is judged as in itself goo, evil consisting in a deprivation

of it and so, in the case of moral evil, in the act whereby one unjustly deprives another of his or her fair share of it. (Sikka 109)

This is a grave accusation which at first glance appears consistent with both the tenet of responsibility

which prohibits murder even in cases of self-preservation (Butler 6) and Levinas’ allegedly inherent

misogyny. But it is an accusation premised on the supposed subjectivity of the unborn. For the ‘other who

she harbors within her body’ to be an Other in the sense of a human subject bearing Responsibility requires

that it possess full world-forming subjectivity. Such a claim is far outside of the bounds of the topics of

Levinas’ writing. Sikka, rather than Levinas, suggests that the unborn be regarded as such, making this

bizarre pro-life argument and attributing it unfairly to Levinas, and doing more potential harm to the cause

of feminism than Levinas’ complex, if gendered, anti-ontology could even remotely be accused of.

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is right that Levinas arbitrarily applies maleness to the abstract subject, even

without assuming a hierarchy, it would be an absurd oversight.

Perpich suggests that Sikka fails to understand the important and characteristic

aspects of Levinas’ thought. Alterity precedes and transcends lines of worldly identity

such as race and gender (Perpich 21). In the context of the social reality of life in late

modernity, a theoretical movement against Identity seems insufficient. Ignoring the

relevance of such divisions risks perpetuating patriarchy and colonialism. Perpich

suggests that Sikka’s first fault is in approaching Levinas as a traditionalist. Levinas

engages in an age-old axiomatic and patriarchal subsumption of the feminine, but “if we

understand his conception of alterity as a reference to the singularity rather than the

difference of the other, this ethics is not only largely compatible with the emancipatory

aims of current progressive politics, but also does a better job than many versions of

identity politics or the politics of recognition in meeting those aims.” (Perpich 22) The

‘politics of recognition,’ in every of its myriad schemas, relies to some degree on the

recognition (but not necessarily the reification) of the same sorts of identity they

challenge. At this point, it takes an understanding of Levinas’ thought to be able to see

the positivity and egalitarianism of his work.20 Levinas’ gendering of alterity cannot be

dismissed or apologized away as just the convenient employment of well-established and

understood roles. Rather, Perpich writes that “It should be clear from even Even from

[sic] this cursory overview that ‘alterity’ in Levinas’s sense is clearly not understood as

20 This is of course not uncommon in the more esoteric fields within philosophy, but brings to light two

remaining problems: The first is that esotericism performs a reductive form of intellectual classism, and the

second is that a thinker’s thought should not be so complex that it requires such thorough explanation. If

Levinas’ work is only coherent to its most well-informed readers, and it his word appear at first to perform

an effect opposed to his intention, he fails to write in an accessible way. This does not render his work

meaningless, but certainly negatively affects the viability of his project.

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relative or oppositional difference. A more appropriate understanding of alterity makes it

synonymous with ‘singularity.’ The other is not an absolutely different being (because

difference can be determined only by starting from the subject or the same); rather the

other is an absolutely singular being.” (Perpich 29) Levinas stands outside of the

Platonic-Parmenidean tradition of individual egoistic sovereignty with an understanding

of subjectivity that refuses the possibilities of sameness and of subsumption. The

oppression inherent to gendered identity is itself a Totality, to which Levinasian thought

is fundamentally opposed. He refuses to recognize the traditional egocentricity which

ironically precedes the formation of all difference and all identity.

Furthermore, Perpich points out that Levinas might meaningfully mitigate some

of the aporias inherent to typical identity politics. She writes, “Rather than dismantling

the privileges of the dominant position, identity politics can have the unintended

consequences of upholding the larger systematic structures… that produce social and

economic inequities and that, indeed, naturalize and depoliticize them” (Perpich 27). She

is weary of the risk of basing a political agenda on a “primary recognition of difference”

(ibid). What sometimes appears as Levinas’ willful ignorance of the reality of difference

indicates rather a novel view which allows for representation beyond the limits of

identity. (Perpich recalls Butler’s argument that mere recognition does not guarantee

“social justice or the acknowledgement of one’s humanity or singularity” (Perpich 35)).

Levinas’ project is to fully debase the construction of subjectivity in the interest of

overcoming the totality of individual sovereignty and producing a fairer social world.

The subject understood in terms of the ethical relation allows for the imagination of a

world quite different from that understood within the tradition of singularity. Judith

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Butler finds some value in Levinas’ approach to phenomenology. The face, which she

sees as non-specific, not limited to the physical face, and having to do with all bodily

expression of agony and vulnerability, simultaneously presents the possibility for

violence and the prohibition against it (Butler 8). In Levinas, Butler sees an “extreme

passivism” beyond Kant, prohibiting murder even in cases of self-preservation, because

the self cannot be of higher import than the other. Situating the Levinasian self in

relation, Butler writes:

…the nonviolence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a

peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of

undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence... We can imagine

uses of both consequentialist and deontological justifications that would

give me many opportunities to inflict violence righteously. A

consequentialist might argue that it would be for the good of the many. A

deontologist might appeal to the intrinsic worth of my own life. They

could also be used to dispute the primacy of the interdiction on murder,

and interdiction in the face of which I would continue to feel my anxiety

(Butler 9).

Subjectivity for Levinas is not sovereign and strong, but primarily subject to the other,

and unable to make those judgements. Levinasian responsibility extends to the point that

a victim of violence is responsible even for that violence. The other, even as a

perpetrator, precedes the subject. Butler writes “to be addressed is to be, from the start,

deprived of will, and to have that deprivation exists as the basis of one’s situation in

discourse” (Butler 10). But that addressing is not necessary the oppressive address

performed by the male subject toward the female other, the point of masculine

domination. The Same is subject to the address of the other. The subject emerges in this

sense without will, and always-already in and for and in response to the call of the Other.

The relational subjectivity of being is radically anti-egoistic. For this, Butler

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characterizes Levinas as an “elevated masochist,” rather than simply a traditional

misogynist (Butler 11).

In Butler’s view, Levinas’ radicalism presents a great opportunity for the cause of

human equality. Where identity-based politics repeatedly fail to surmount long-standing

structures of oppression, Levinas’ thinking of subjectivity offers an opportunity to truly

imagine a differently-ordered world, outside of the binds of traditional hegemony, and

without the tediousness of identity politics. Butler points out that the economic, political,

social, and cultural forces of oppression are so great that “We cannot, under

contemporary conditions of representation, hear the agonized cry or be compelled or

commanded by the face…” (Butler 18). She also suggests that many attempts at identity

politics rely on a problematic reintroduction of the very sorts of difference they seek to

overcome, and so fail to vanquish the destructive forces present in society (Butler 15).

There is little question that Levinas does not do enough, practically, to overcome the

reification of gender-difference, but many of the valid feminist criticisms of his work

might be guilty themselves of relying on an identity based in difference. The face-to-face

relation, understood as the site of singularity and vulnerability, undoes the possibility for

such difference, and begins a politics which does not directly combat existing

oppressions, but only because they are theoretically unavailable within it.

Judith Butler suggests that Levinas’ approach to ethics, the debasing of the dogma

of the self, and most importantly Levinas’ rejection of the notion of identity, may be

extremely valuable for anti-oppressive political work. In arguing that Identity is a

divisive and ultimately violent concept, because it reifies the sovereignty of the Self,

Levinas stumbles on a political aporia. Identity Politics, which organize around markers

74

of marginalization in order to combat the oppressive forces which perpetuate many forms

of oppression, necessarily maintain the identification of identity. For Levinas, identity

politics relies too heavily on an egoistic form of power. Butler laments the failure of

identity-based political work to effect meaningful change, and argues that by overcoming

the subject Levinas disrupts the structure of oppression at the root. In “Without Identity,”

Levinas questions the utility of identity-based politics. While there is undoubtedly a

sense of urgency, and arguably a righteous sort of reactionary indignation to identity

politics, a natural and positive attempt to challenge the dogmatisms of an oppressive

political, economic, and cultural hegemony, Levinas warns that grassroots organizing

risks either failing to escape the bounds of the hegemonic political totality of late

capitalism, or worse, falling into and perpetuating an exclusionary totality of its own.

Instead of the elusive sort of empowerment that comes with identity-based politics, and in

order to evade the dogmatism of the institution of identity, Levinas argues for a more

complete reconceptualization of the relation between individuals and between individuals

and loci of power. As Butler points out, in making human life precariously beholden to

relationality, Levinas fundamentally disavows the potential for oppression.

75

Conclusions: The Social Implications and Political Potential of Relational Subjectivity

Levinas proposes a radically social approach to the philosophy of being, one

which makes existence itself secondary to the existence of others, and so challenges the

assumptions of much established thought. His conception of the ipseity of the same –

rather than the identity of the self – problematizes much established political structure,

and establishes him as a political critic. Though Levinas himself was often loathe to

address specific issues, there is much potential in his and in Derrida’s work to apply the

fundaments of Levinasian ethics to varied political problematics, in a radically critical but

ultimately optimistic way. Levinas’ approach to first philosophy is novel in that he gives

precedence to ethics over metaphysics. The other precedes the self, and all social and

political questions must be framed in terms of responsibility. In terms of the formation of

subjectivity, Levinas strays from the Western Tradition, throwing the fundamental

conception of the sovereign self into question. If the self is the fundament of thought,

and of political and economic engagement, then Levinas’ approach to subjectivity is

inherently contrary to the established tradition of western thought, and to the capitalist

economic and social systems which it bears. The two major forces in Levinas’ early

work, ‘Totality’ and ‘Infinity’ articulate the problem at hand for philosophy and politics.

Following the situation of the self in terms of the Other, Levinas’ Infinity places the

possibility of the transcendental purely within the binds of the interhuman relation. It is

only through the recognition of responsibility that Infinity emerges. Totality, an

articulation of oppressive power, such as is practiced in totalitarian and hegemonic forms

of political, economic, and social domination, is host to the violence of history and

76

modernity. Levinas’ understanding of metaphysis is commensurate to that of Frankfurt

school critical theory, and is antithetical to capitalist power. In terms of immediate

political application, Levinas maybe have been sometimes vague, but opened the space

for much reflection and imagination. Second and Third-wave Levinasian scholarship

engages in finding application for Levinasian ethics, or considering the ways in which

ethics might inform a humanist politics. Jacques Derrida is, arguable, a Levinasian.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are Derridean and Levinasian projects which

purport to go beyond the scope of the sort of judicial power allowed by Totality. In the

wake of totalitarian violence, Truth commissions work to deconstruct the workings of

totality in the interest of producing positive and productive forward change. At the root

of these projects is the hope of overturning Totality and finding the space for the

recognition of alterity and responsibility. In his lifetime and posthumously, Levinas is

met with criticism for his apparent failure to enact the messianic ideals of his own

thought. A major site of this hypocrisy lies in his traditionalist and totalitarian misogyny,

insofar as he appears to maintain the primacy of the masculine and the alterity of the

feminine. In Levinas’ defense, his thought problematizes the conception of primacy and

subjectivity theoretically prior to the emergence of the masculine and the feminine,

however care must be taken to avoid apologizing for or perpetuating potentially

dangerous theoretical tendencies. This apparent lapse, or what may be attributed to a

misreading, reminds us that no thinker and no philosophical, ethical or political system is

completely democratic, and that consistent care must be taken to maintain critical

thought. Despite Levinas’ apparent failure to enact his own messianism, there remains

spectacular political as well as social and theoretical potential in his work for a political

77

philosophy which is neither idealistic nor materialistic nor eschatological but still

optimistic.

In the first section, this project addressed the ways in which Levinas rebels

against the tropes the western canon and some of the axioms underlying common politics

and modern daily life. The Levinasian worldview is different in that it allows no

possibility for selfishness, a move which carries broad-reaching social and political

implications. The second section engaged with the project set on by critical theory, to

identify and imagine alternatives to the hegemonic cultural institutions of modern

capitalism. By comparing Levinasian Totality with other articulations of political power,

the chapter established the possibility for Levinasian philosophy to inform a structural

change to political systems and cultural mores. In the third, Derrida’s interpretation of

Levinas allowed for an exploration of the implications of Levinasian thought for more

particular problematics. Forgiveness, even in cases of institutionalized crime, and even

for crimes which are attributable to cultural or social phenomena, is a thoroughly

personal and specific thing. Levinas can be interpreted in many ways, but all are

applicable to the broad and the particular. By addressing a major and un-ignorable

criticism of Levinas, the fourth chapter returned to the question of subjectivity and

considered the democratic possibility of a world free of the politics of identity.

Altogether, this work has established that if the world operated according to the terms of

the ethical relation, violence and oppression would be theoretically impermissible, as to

commit violence would be to transgress reason or logic. But at the same time it has

become clear that we cannot rely on reason. Furthermore, it is demonstrable that the

world does not operate according to ethics: people commit and justify exclusion,

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oppression, and myriad physical and social violence all the time. It would be outrageous

to try to end all violence or injustice, and completely meaningless to muse on just how

philosophically bad totalitarianism can be. All that can be said to have been attempted in

these pages has been to further an understanding of what it means to be human and to

think briefly about that it could mean to act accordingly.

79

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