The Memory of the Immemorial
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, September 2024.
Abstract
Levinas argues against memory, or at least against its ethical import. Yet Otherwise than Being is also dedicated “to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists.” To find a way out of this apparent contradiction, I describe a kind of memory that grants access to immemorial ethical commandments. This memory does not retrieve or recapture the past, reducing it to the present. Instead, it allows the past to disturb the present and condition the future, yet without ever reducing to either. This 'memory of the immemorial' therefore enacts the formal structure of diachrony.
Levinas argues against memory, or at least against its ethical import. Yet Otherwise than Being is also dedicated “to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists.” To find a way out of this apparent contradiction, I describe a kind of memory that grants access to immemorial ethical commandments. This memory does not retrieve or recapture the past, reducing it to the present. Instead, it allows the past to disturb the present and condition the future, yet without ever reducing to either. This 'memory of the immemorial' therefore enacts the formal structure of diachrony.
The Alibi of Metaphysics
Metaphysical Society of America, March 2023.
Abstract
The first lines of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity have always been enigmatic: “The true life is absent. But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.” The book opens with an account of how metaphysics “arises and is maintained,” that is, with an analysis of the conditions of possibility for any metaphysical inquiry. Several scholars have indeed read these lines as opening a transcendental investigation into the conditions of possibility for metaphysics as a science. Levinas would be concerned with the preconditions of metaphysics “in the most general form it has assumed in the history of thought.” However, the problem is not so much to determine whether Levinas is committed to transcendentality but to figure out the meaning of the word ‘alibi’ in this passage. Why would a metaphysician require an alibi? What is the crime from which a metaphysician would need to be exempted? More crucially still, why would an alibi be presupposed in the birth and existence of metaphysics?
This paper presents Levinas’s account of the grounds or preconditions of metaphysics. For him, metaphysics must preserve a perpetual distance between the subject and the object of its questioning. The subject never coincides with its object; it is always elsewhere. My contention is that Levinas intends a middle ground or, better, a strategic hesitation between “the true life is absent” and “we are in the world,” between idealism and materialism. Either option, considered in itself, would reduce reality to a single comprehensive principle. Materialism dissolves the human subject in the fabric of reality; idealism absorbs reality within the structures of subjectivity. Both trends constitute violent forms of monism—what Levinas has called the imperialism of the same. Metaphysics must avoid both crimes by walking a tight rope between materialism and idealism.
The first lines of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity have always been enigmatic: “The true life is absent. But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.” The book opens with an account of how metaphysics “arises and is maintained,” that is, with an analysis of the conditions of possibility for any metaphysical inquiry. Several scholars have indeed read these lines as opening a transcendental investigation into the conditions of possibility for metaphysics as a science. Levinas would be concerned with the preconditions of metaphysics “in the most general form it has assumed in the history of thought.” However, the problem is not so much to determine whether Levinas is committed to transcendentality but to figure out the meaning of the word ‘alibi’ in this passage. Why would a metaphysician require an alibi? What is the crime from which a metaphysician would need to be exempted? More crucially still, why would an alibi be presupposed in the birth and existence of metaphysics?
This paper presents Levinas’s account of the grounds or preconditions of metaphysics. For him, metaphysics must preserve a perpetual distance between the subject and the object of its questioning. The subject never coincides with its object; it is always elsewhere. My contention is that Levinas intends a middle ground or, better, a strategic hesitation between “the true life is absent” and “we are in the world,” between idealism and materialism. Either option, considered in itself, would reduce reality to a single comprehensive principle. Materialism dissolves the human subject in the fabric of reality; idealism absorbs reality within the structures of subjectivity. Both trends constitute violent forms of monism—what Levinas has called the imperialism of the same. Metaphysics must avoid both crimes by walking a tight rope between materialism and idealism.
Levinas, Plato, and the Metaphysics of Separation
Metaphysical Society of America, March 2022.
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Levinas finds in Plato a fundamental ingredient for understanding the very structure of the ethical relation: the notion of ‘separation’ (chorismos). It is well known already that ethics involves, for Levinas, the interruption of the Same by the presence of the Other; but what is not often acknowledged is that such interruption presupposes an initial separation between the terms under consideration. Same and Other must affect each other while remaining separate, that is, irreducible to each other. They must enter into a mutually-determining relation that neither dissolves the Same into the Other, nor reduces the Other to the Same. Surprisingly, it is Platonic metaphysics—specifically the non-totalizing relation between the orders of sensibles, forms, and the Good in Republic VI 509b—that allows Levinas to formalize an ethics of absolute alterity.
In this paper, I argue that Levinas finds in Plato a fundamental ingredient for understanding the very structure of the ethical relation: the notion of ‘separation’ (chorismos). It is well known already that ethics involves, for Levinas, the interruption of the Same by the presence of the Other; but what is not often acknowledged is that such interruption presupposes an initial separation between the terms under consideration. Same and Other must affect each other while remaining separate, that is, irreducible to each other. They must enter into a mutually-determining relation that neither dissolves the Same into the Other, nor reduces the Other to the Same. Surprisingly, it is Platonic metaphysics—specifically the non-totalizing relation between the orders of sensibles, forms, and the Good in Republic VI 509b—that allows Levinas to formalize an ethics of absolute alterity.
Human Reciprocity and Divine Asymmetry
North American Levinas Society, July 2021.
Abstract
This paper seeks to understand Levinas's puzzling claim that "the passing of God... is precisely the reverting of the incomparable subject into a member of society." It is well known already that the other person who faces me "is from the first the brother of all other men," so that the face must be considered not only in the uniqueness of its appeal here and now, but also universally in its essential references to all those Others who share the earth. It is much less clear, however, how God's passing may open a communal space of identity and reciprocity where I and Others all partake--a space where I and Others are counted together as citizens. In fact, Levinas goes so far as to claim that "it is only thanks to God" that, as a subject incomparable with the Other, I am nonetheless approached as an Other by the Others, that is, "for myself." My responsibility is total and inalienable, but "thanks to God" I am not alone: there are Others who have their own responsibility, as radical as mine.
In approaching this problem, I turn to Levinas's discussion of the third party in Otherwise than Being, specifically to Ch. V, Sec. 3, entitled "From Saying to the Said, Or the Wisdom of Desire." I contend that Levinas's turn to politics seeks to avoid a double risk: neither to render the human community atomistic and conflictual, nor to subsume it under a mediating totality. The result is an ethical plurality of humans anterior to any totality, bound to one another by the self-withdrawal of infinity. Collective responsibility is thus assured by constant reference to an authority which can never be embodied by any single one of us. Human reciprocity is therefore grounded in the trace of transcendence, in divine asymmetry.
This paper seeks to understand Levinas's puzzling claim that "the passing of God... is precisely the reverting of the incomparable subject into a member of society." It is well known already that the other person who faces me "is from the first the brother of all other men," so that the face must be considered not only in the uniqueness of its appeal here and now, but also universally in its essential references to all those Others who share the earth. It is much less clear, however, how God's passing may open a communal space of identity and reciprocity where I and Others all partake--a space where I and Others are counted together as citizens. In fact, Levinas goes so far as to claim that "it is only thanks to God" that, as a subject incomparable with the Other, I am nonetheless approached as an Other by the Others, that is, "for myself." My responsibility is total and inalienable, but "thanks to God" I am not alone: there are Others who have their own responsibility, as radical as mine.
In approaching this problem, I turn to Levinas's discussion of the third party in Otherwise than Being, specifically to Ch. V, Sec. 3, entitled "From Saying to the Said, Or the Wisdom of Desire." I contend that Levinas's turn to politics seeks to avoid a double risk: neither to render the human community atomistic and conflictual, nor to subsume it under a mediating totality. The result is an ethical plurality of humans anterior to any totality, bound to one another by the self-withdrawal of infinity. Collective responsibility is thus assured by constant reference to an authority which can never be embodied by any single one of us. Human reciprocity is therefore grounded in the trace of transcendence, in divine asymmetry.
Levinas’s Wounded Speech
North American Levinas Society, July 2019.
Abstract
Levinas quotes Isaiah: “Before they call, I will answer” (Is 65:24). This obedience prior to the hearing of the order is a constant theme in Levinas’s late magnum opus, Otherwise than Being. But how can the answer precede the call, all the while remaining an answer and not a mere enunciation or statement? And what need would we have of a call that comes after its answer? We seem not to be dealing with temporality in a straightforward sense. Could there be an immemorial call to which I answer even before hearing the call which incarnates it in the present? Levinasian ethics, it seems to me, is centered on a call that occurs at two different times: the concrete call ascribed to the face of the neighbor presupposes a more originary call by which my ears are made open to hearing him. The Other’s call resonates in its truly ethical depth only on the condition of a prior violence which has inflicted an originary wound (vulnera) upon my narcissism. Wound, as the etymological root of the word vulnerability, points to the very constitution of the ethical subject for Levinas.
My goal in this presentation is, first, to analyze the notion of diachrony in Levinas’s philosophy of time (§1). This notion receives its most insightful account, I think, in Levinas’s reading of Descartes’s Meditations, which I examine in detail (§2). These sections allow me, at last, to gesture towards an understanding of the call-and-response structure which highlights the inherently wounded nature of all human speech. (§3).
Levinas quotes Isaiah: “Before they call, I will answer” (Is 65:24). This obedience prior to the hearing of the order is a constant theme in Levinas’s late magnum opus, Otherwise than Being. But how can the answer precede the call, all the while remaining an answer and not a mere enunciation or statement? And what need would we have of a call that comes after its answer? We seem not to be dealing with temporality in a straightforward sense. Could there be an immemorial call to which I answer even before hearing the call which incarnates it in the present? Levinasian ethics, it seems to me, is centered on a call that occurs at two different times: the concrete call ascribed to the face of the neighbor presupposes a more originary call by which my ears are made open to hearing him. The Other’s call resonates in its truly ethical depth only on the condition of a prior violence which has inflicted an originary wound (vulnera) upon my narcissism. Wound, as the etymological root of the word vulnerability, points to the very constitution of the ethical subject for Levinas.
My goal in this presentation is, first, to analyze the notion of diachrony in Levinas’s philosophy of time (§1). This notion receives its most insightful account, I think, in Levinas’s reading of Descartes’s Meditations, which I examine in detail (§2). These sections allow me, at last, to gesture towards an understanding of the call-and-response structure which highlights the inherently wounded nature of all human speech. (§3).
Divine Polyvalence: God and Metaphor in Levinas and Eriugena
Mystical Theology Network, March 2019.
Abstract
More than a millennium separates Emmanuel Levinas from John Scotus Eriugena, so that any strong comparison between them risks erring into immediate anachronism. And yet, their attempts to think God—the Infinite for Levinas, Nothingness for Eriugena—otherwise than through the category of being bring them remarkably close. For both thinkers, God does not merely surpass all positions within an ontological hierarchy—which would still determine Him according to the positional type—but rather adopts another mode than the ordinary mode of being. This entails a deconstruction of all categorical predication to God (saying that God is something), and hence a move beyond literal cataphatic language. What emerges from this destruction of ontological categories is, for Eriugena and Levinas, a re-centering of metaphorical language as the proper movement that carries us towards God.
My claim is that Levinas’s and Eriugena’s re-centering of metaphor within their theories of language is instrumental to their conceiving of a speech that elevates us to Him who “escapes the comprehension of every reason and intellect” (Eriugena) and whose thought “thinks infinitely more than it thinks” (Levinas). Language in this picture becomes literally a metaphor, in its etymological sense of carrying over—carrying us away from the sameness of experience that designates objects ‘as this or that’, and over to the transcendent and beyond. Metaphors for these thinkers point to an urge toward the Creator that operates precisely by disrupting the thematizing activity of conventional language.
More than a millennium separates Emmanuel Levinas from John Scotus Eriugena, so that any strong comparison between them risks erring into immediate anachronism. And yet, their attempts to think God—the Infinite for Levinas, Nothingness for Eriugena—otherwise than through the category of being bring them remarkably close. For both thinkers, God does not merely surpass all positions within an ontological hierarchy—which would still determine Him according to the positional type—but rather adopts another mode than the ordinary mode of being. This entails a deconstruction of all categorical predication to God (saying that God is something), and hence a move beyond literal cataphatic language. What emerges from this destruction of ontological categories is, for Eriugena and Levinas, a re-centering of metaphorical language as the proper movement that carries us towards God.
My claim is that Levinas’s and Eriugena’s re-centering of metaphor within their theories of language is instrumental to their conceiving of a speech that elevates us to Him who “escapes the comprehension of every reason and intellect” (Eriugena) and whose thought “thinks infinitely more than it thinks” (Levinas). Language in this picture becomes literally a metaphor, in its etymological sense of carrying over—carrying us away from the sameness of experience that designates objects ‘as this or that’, and over to the transcendent and beyond. Metaphors for these thinkers point to an urge toward the Creator that operates precisely by disrupting the thematizing activity of conventional language.