Lecture: Levinas

NCTU Graduate

Emmanuel Lévinas (1905-1995). Lithuanian Jew who migrated to Germany after the Russian Revolution. There he studied with Husserl, learned of and read Heidegger. He migrated to France with the rise of Nazism and there he introduced Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to the phenomenology of Husserl and the ontology of Heidegger. It can be said that he still remains the most stimulating elucidator (and contaminator) of the thought of both German philosophers. One way to approach Lévinas philosophically is to see how, in the course of his career, he dismantles Heideggerian categories, on the one hand, and, on the other, and how he articulates new meaning from out of Husserl’s phenomenological cogito. Each German thinker is a perennial ‘interlocutor’ for Lévinas. Lévinas’ masterworks are: Time and the Other, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. There are also numerous collections of essays.






Lévinas I: Delimitation of First Philosophy (Ontology): “Infinity”



One chief critique of Heidegger is to rethink his characterization of Dasein’s latent and pre-thematized involvements with things, world (Dasein’s primordial in-der-welt-sein, being-in-the-world) 1. as a pre-understanding or as primordial ontological comprehension; 2. as power (the “confinement” to possibility I spoke of last time and especially Heidegger’s subordination of the impossibility of death to the horizon of power, possibility: Dasein, at its utmost, can die, whereas the animal merely perishes, the vegetable merely decays.); 3. as the totalization of World within which Nature, others, and the universe itself are inhabitants; 4. as ontological (and not metaphysical or ethical) difference; and 5. to re-think ontological “illumination” (the unveiling, or uncovering of objects which I mentioned last time); among others. (His critique is not entirely fair to the ‘spirit’ of Heidegger who is after all the first philosopher since Nietzsche to try to ‘speak’ philosophy otherwise than according to traditional metaphysics. Nonetheless…)



What Lévinas (and with him Blanchot) sees in Heidegger’s descriptions of being-in-the-world [in-der-welt-sein] is a latent heteronomy (rather than a totality) and a priority of involvements over discrete intervals of comprehension. This latent involvement is not an ontological illumination but, in Blanchot’s inspiration, ‘the other night’: an inilleminable rapport with indefinition (the Infinite, in Lévinas’s inspiration). The heteronomy is radically ‘outside’ or ‘here below’ negation and power (which are the essential predicates of manifestation). The heteronomy is an alter-economy foreign to ontology and is the ‘other side’ of phenomenology. Lévinas and Blanchot tend to (not entirely unfairly) conflate Heidegger and Hegel in certain ways (although Hegel remained a figure of fascination for Blanchot more than for Lévinas) because Heidegger’s articulation of Dasein as potentiality, as historical and factical, and as potentially being-a-whole (Ganzsein) are a distinct fidelity to the adventures of Spirit in Hegel. What is more, Lévinas is severely critical of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s being “resolved” in the faced of death as an appropriation and comprehension of powerlessness and impossibility.



The chief predicate that opens Lévinas’s thought for us is communication and primarily communication as excess over manifestation, power and comprehension. (In IOF? Lévinas makes the seeming innocuous but highly important point that I do not comprehend the other person (Autrui), I talk to the other person. Interlocution is a passivity and an instance of obsession, I will try to come back to this.) Communication is the proximity of Same and Other, not a comprehension. The climate or context of intellectualization which Heidegger, in spite of himself, retains is rejected by Lévinas as spurious or even as dangerous. Proximity is an obsession, not a comprehension. (But indeed, Lévinas’s own rejection of Heidegger is betrayed by the nearly obsessive way in which Heidegger’s name appears at critical moments in his ‘answer’ to Being and Time: Totality and Infinity.) Lévinas conceives of being as an economy and as a regional manifestation of that latent heteronomy—or alter-economy—which passively resists comprehension and totalization. Comprehension, power, and the Totality remain the horizons Lévinas consistently resists and toward which he sees much (not all) of Western philosophy tempted. (Exceptions inclue Plato, Descartes, and Bergson.) It was no accident, then, that Martin Heidegger remained in Germany during the Nazi era and succumbed to the temptation of a Total State. In this, for Lévinas, Heidegger illuminated a perennial temptation:



Ontology as primary philosophy is a philosophy of power. It leads to the State and the non-violence of the totality, without taking precautions against the violence upon which this non-violence lives and which appears in the tyranny of the State. The truth [philosophy] which is intended to reconcile persons, exists anonymously here. Universality presents itself as impersonal and there is here another inhumanity. [Totality and Infinity, p. 46]



To Levinas, philosophy’s involvement with power and comprehension can never do justice to the encumbrance or disturbance of the Other (Autrui*) who approaches the Same (the ego, the self-same) from the dimension of an irreducible exterior proximity. This dimension is outside ontological difference and is characterized by Lévinas as “separation” (cf TI, pp. 175ff). It is precisely this separation that certain philosophy tries perennially to reduce via Reason, the Peace of Reason, the Universality of the Impersonal, etc.



Lévinas, accordingly, conceives of communication outside the dimension or correlation and adequation and outside of any sort of pre-comprehension. Note that Lévinas does not attempt yet to say that this dimension precedes first philosophy (ontology) but more that it contaminates it. Western philosophy is characterized by Lévinas as that which posits a limited comprehension in order to prescribe a superior comprehension; that which posits a veiled or forgotten adequation in order to prescribe a superior or primordial adequation, or a total appropriation (of being). For Lévinas this movement of philosophy is a manifestation of another dimension within which the ego-thinker-philosopher is perennially restless. Lévinas often, for example, praises skepticism as the attestation to the perennial failures of superior comprehension or perfect appropriations to which certain philosophies (primarily Hegel and Heidegger) are prone.



















* Autrui is the critical term in Lévinas’s ethics. Strictly, ‘autrui’ is the other person but in Lévinas’s text it designates that which exceeds the other person as person, as agent, as alter-ego, as another ‘version’ of the same; ‘Auitrui’ is the form (‘visage’ the ‘Face’) of separation itself, an irreducible exteriority by which the integrity of Same is complicated, obsessed, troubled, “in hostage to”, and so on. [On this see especially Otherwise Than Being.]

Edmund Husserl : Erlebnis and Ur-impression



Husserl was unsatisfied with Kantianism’s rigid division between the theoretical and the practical (the empirical); between the constituting ego and the constituted ego. He sought for a ‘passage’ between the two which would not be an intellectual synthesis but a ‘lived experience’, in Erlebnis, and in the Ur-impression. His career as a philosopher is complicated and he was continually re-beginning the pursuit for an origin.



He begins with the challenge from the German Neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp (1854-1924) who said that either logic is founded on itself or there is no logic, there is only psychology. He asserted that logic is not a subjective experience and thus it has no genesis. Logic is a universal consciousness outside time. Truth is a-temporal. (Years later, Wittgenstein will take up this question in his “Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics” and ask, well, if that’s true then how do we account for developments in mathematics? Doesn’t mathematics have a history, and if so, then a genesis, a beginning-middle-and ending in concrete, historical time? For Wittgenstein (and others) mathematics begins with the psychological act of abstraction from which is born the concept of number.)



Husserl will note that the whole of mathematics is given, concretely, to consciousness and is not a result of a psychological act. It is given as constitutively whole just as consciousness is constitutively intentional. The object—mathematics—is immediately present to consciousness and this whole is what makes the psychological act of abstraction—number and arithmetic—possible (and not the reverse).



There is a problem, however, which Jacques Derrida is alert to: OK, the whole, the totality is given a priori to any empirical, historical, concrete psychological act. It, the whole, is a transcendental synthetic act. But syntesis implies time, the time in which the synthesis is actualized. Is that time transcendental or empirical?



Husserl will, initially, decide to divide time into worldly, psychological, real time and transcendental, phenomenological, reel time. The latter is phenomenologically ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) which is worldly time ‘reduced’ , or, put in brackets. But is the reduction itself transcendental or empirical? Husserl then turns to logicism in his Logical Investigations. He wonders, how do logical forms become available to consciousness (to ‘lived experience’, Erlebnis?) There seems to be an irreducible constituting/constituted aporia. But for Husserl, at the level of the constituting there is no aporia: both are ‘lived’ as originary. This is “internal time consciousness” which, Husserl says, “it makes no sense to doubt.” Consciousness is always in the presence of time as duration, or, time as such; that which is a priori is not a form (as in Kant) but a manner or a way whose essence is to be-lived (Erlebnis).



The classical phenomenological question is: How is it possible to perceive a melody? The present note only makes melodic sense if there is somehow retained a previous note and somehow anticipated a subsequent note. For Husserl’s teacher, Franz Bentano (from whom he got the idea of intentionality) it is imagination that accomplishes this feat. But then Husserl asks himself: how do I distinguish between a perceived and an imaginary melody? With regard to melody, the categories ‘fact’ and ‘essence’ (or ‘imaginary’) dissolve into, Husserl hopes, an Ur-impression.



The Ur-impression is continually changing, being modified by, “retention”. The present note is present as it were ‘in the raw’ and at the same time it is being retained by consciousness. Now, as retained it is no longer ‘raw’ data (as in Hume, for example) but what Husserl calls hyletic data. The hyle is the modification of the present in the present. Each retention (modification, hyle) modifies the raw and also modifies previous retentions. Hence, what is produced is a time that was never present in the raw. A new present is presented-as-retained, or as-past. What is produced is a past that was never (in the raw) present. That is melody. Melody is never present in the raw. Following Hume, only note after note is present in the raw.





Given new raw present

Retained new raw present which modifies given new present into a new new1



Given new raw present

Retained new raw present which modifies given new present into a new new 2 and which modifies new new 1 into an ‘old’ or ‘previous’ or ‘past’ new new 1A



Given new raw present

Retained new present which modifies given new raw present into a new new 3 and which modifies new new 1 and 2 into an ‘old’ or ‘previous’ or ‘past’ new new 1AA and 2A



And so on and so on…





That which is given to intentionality via this retention-ur-impression synthesis is a new object: the past never present or the whole never present (in the raw). That which intentionality receives is not that which it constitutes, but is that which is imposed on it: a whole (the whole melody or the whole of mathematical logic). The past as such, as essentially past, as raw, is never given to consciousness. But isn’t the withdrawal of this raw past itself a temporalizing or an auto-temporaizing that escapes consciousness? For Lévinas and Derrida, this become a key question.



Review: the present is always immediately retained; it is retained NOW and thus the present is always NOW immediately modified (not constituted, not formed—modified). The present is the new in the raw, and, as modified, it is a new new. This is the essence of time in human consciousness: re-newal. Re-newal is the sense[sens] of time (its ‘meaning’ and its ‘direction’). The ‘new new’ time is raw time reduced only to its being new, not to its being in the raw. But, again, is this process of reduction not a raw fact of consciousness? Something raw, empirical, given cannot be eliminated. Is a melody empirical or is it not? Is melody phenomenological/transcendental or empirical/factical/ontological?







Lévinas II : Delimitation of Phenomenological Cogito : “Awakening”



Essentially, cogito awakens within an element that precedes it and that describes a rooting of consciousness within a heteronomous economy rather than within an a priori opposition of subject and object. Cogito is rooted in an economy that exceeds, or is otherwise than, being; it is not rooted in being and is outside of the Hegelian/ Heidegerrian realms where cogito is rooted in being either dialectically, or as a ‘forgetting”. Intentionality is the key that opened philosophy to a thinking than exceeds manifestation, correlation, and power. Intentional consciousness is rooted in that which exceeds it and reverses it—turns it ‘inside out’—and about which it is latently obsessed:



I bathe in and am nourished by the world I constitute. It is an aliment and a ‘milieu’. The intentionality which envisages the exterior, changes its sense [change de sens: change of meaning or change of direction], in its very aim [vise: orientation or inclination], becoming interior to the exteriority it constitutes, comes, in a way, from the point toward which it goes, recognizing itself as past in its future, lives on [or from] what it thinks. [TI p.129]



The change of sense or of direction is evidence of an inadequation of cogito and that at which it intends or aims at, for in living from what it aims at it finds itself as (from our reading) a “transcendence in immanence”. The essence of intentionality for Levinas (not for Husserl) is the inter-esse or (inter-est) of sensationality and the paradox of sensation. Sensation is touch: I touch and at the same time I am already being touched. It is a double movement, not a singular correlation. Lévinas and Luce Irigaray’s analyses of the “caress” (where intentionality continues to seek that which it has already found) are enthusiastic attestations to this principle of inversion of the sens [direction]. Cogito becomes voluptuous [cf TI section IV, and Irigaray “Questions to Emmanuel Lévinas” (from Re-Reading Lévinas, pp 109-118)] and cannot take a distance from that which affects it, hence it can and cannot aim because that at which it aims is already in contact with it.



Intentionality, in living from what it intends, is involved in jouissance, is approached by dispossession which is the contamination of its power to aim at and apprehend an exteriority. Cogito is haunted by a prior contact which invests it with what for Lévinas then becomes Subjectivity whose ultimate involvement is not jouissance but the more severe gravity of the approach of the Other in the infinite economy which Lévinas so repetitively describes as ethical. (Blanchot, and others, are skeptical that the ‘ethical’ properly describes the gravity and inversion of directionality involved in the approach of the Other and Others*.)



* But, on this point see OBBE, p.193 n. 35 where Lévinas says that “only the language of ethics is equal to” the paradoxes of Husserlian intentionality etc. This is odd since inadequation is one of Lévinas’s chief predicates and note that he simply does not flatly declare that he is describing the ethical. It would be possibly and in the spirit of Lévinas to say that the language of ethics is better than any other discourse (ontological, phenomenological, psycho-analyticalical, or literary) to describe what he is articulating.)



That element in which cogito bathes is not in-the-world as in Heidegger, it is not pre--comprehended and in primordial pragmatic contact with things. Cogito is in-joy, in enjoyment; not in labor, not pragmatics. Enjoyment is the primordial affirmation that contaminates cogito-as-intentional and is the birth to that latent wakefulness, or insomnia( as when, with your lover, you are always ‘waking up’ to her—she cannot be reduced to a category (lover, girlfriend, wife—that insomnia is Subjectivity for Lévinas). In sensation, jouissance, inter-subjectivity, and in the interiority of the cogtio, there is the aptitude for Subjectivity’s latent birth in its receptivity, its ability to be impressed. For Lévinas this being-impressed—troubled, obsessed—in enjoyment is communication, is already language. To be impressed is to ‘answer’ –not a Call, not a vocation—but to the Other and this is the latent birth of responsibility (another chief predicate for Lévinas): the inability not to answer to the other and inability not to express—(as we read in our essay, IOF?). Or, what I have called, elsewhere, ‘radical passivity’.