apologies: levinas and dialogue

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Vol. 14(1), 79–94

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2006 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09672550500445145

Apologies: Levinas and Dialogue

Bob Plant

Taylor and Francis LtdRIPH_A_144497.sgm10.1080/09672550500445145International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis1410000002006BobPlantDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of AberdeenOld AberdeenAberdeenAB24 [email protected]

Abstract

In his recent article ‘Speech and Sensibility: Levinas and Habermas on theConstitution of the Moral Point of View’, Steven Hendley argues that Levi-nas’s preoccupation with language as ‘exposure’ to the ‘other’ provides animportant corrective to Habermas’s focus on the ‘procedural’ aspects ofcommunication. Specifically, what concerns Hendley is the question of moralmotivation, and how Levinas, unlike Habermas, responds to this question bystressing the dialogical relation as one of coming ‘into proximity to the face ofthe other’ who possesses ‘the authority to command my consideration’. Hend-ley’s thesis is bold and provocative. However, it relies on too partial a readingof Levinas’s work. In this paper I argue that the sense in which Levinas thinksof ‘justifying oneself’ cannot be adequately understood in terms of an‘outstretched field of questions and answers’. Rather, Levinas’s primaryconcern is to show how, prior to dialogue, the ‘I’ is constituted in existentialguilt: the violence of simply

being-there

.

Keywords:

Levinas; Habermas; dialogue; discourse ethics; suffering; apology

Dialogue is the non-indifference of the

you

to the

I

,a dis-inter-ested sentiment certainly capable of degenerating intohatred,but a chance of what we must – perhaps with prudence – call love…

(Emmanuel Levinas,

Of God who Comes to Mind

)

I am infinitely more demanding of myself than of others.(Emmanuel Levinas,

Difficult Freedom

)

Introduction

In his short 1980 essay ‘Dialogue’, Emmanuel Levinas observes how ‘anentire series of philosophers, theologians and moralists’ have come toattach great significance ‘to the notion, or to the practice – and in any caseto the word – of dialogue’, that is, to ‘the discourse that men facing eachother hold between them, summoning one another and exchanging state-ments and objections, questions and answers’.

1

Although Levinas here

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

80

names Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Gabriel Marcel, it seemsreasonable to include Jürgen Habermas in this grouping as the mostrecent (and arguably most systematic) example of the turn toward‘dialogue’. But what interests me about this essay is Levinas’s laterremark:

[T]he great problem placed in the path of those who expect theend of violence starting from a dialogue that would only need toperfect knowledge is the difficulty … of bringing to this dialogueopposed beings inclined to do violence to each other. It would benecessary to find a dialogue to make these beings enter intodialogue.

2

This question applies not only to any naïve contractualism (Levinas alsoalludes to ‘the allegiance that is prior to any oath’,

3

‘a dialogue precedingreason’

4

and a ‘

bonjour

’ that ‘underlies all discourse’

5

), but also to theproject of discourse ethics. Whether or not ‘peaceful coexistence’

6

ispresupposed in any genuinely ‘communicative action’ (as Habermassuggests

7

), this does not answer the question of why one should ‘preferspeech to war’

8

– or, less dramatically, why one should prefer communica-tion to something merely ‘strategic’. In a recent article, Steven Hendleyargues that Habermas’s focus on the ‘procedural’ aspects of (rational)communication and Levinas’s preoccupation with language as ‘exposure’ tothe ‘other’ can, despite appearances, be read as ‘complementary accounts’.

9

Thinking about Levinas in relation to the project of discourse ethics isimmensely ambitious, not least because those sympathetic to the Haberma-sian project are unlikely to be drawn to Levinas’s quasi-theological concep-tion of ethics. Hendley is doubtless correct that these thinkers

can

be readas mutually supportive. But the question I want to pose is How much is lostin forging this relationship? More specifically, what concerns me is howsuch a reading of Levinas overlooks some of the most important features ofhis philosophical œuvre.

Moral Motivation

The question Hendley’s analysis raises is, I believe, essentially a ques-tion about moral motivation. Thus, of Habermas, he asks: ‘Why doesthe moral orientation implicit in speech need to be articulated inanything more than procedural terms?’

10

That is to say, in his prioritiza-tion of ‘communicative’ over ‘strategic’ action, Habermas fails toexplain why ‘I should refrain from unfairly taking advantage of youmerely because it is inconsistent with an impartial consideration of yourpoint of view’:

11

APOLOGIES: LEVINAS AND DIALOGUE

81

It is one thing … to establish the necessity of a procedural commit-ment to taking an impartial point of view onto life and quite anotherto establish the moral importance of that commitment as one thatought to be taken more seriously than any of our other commitmentsor desires … Without a sense of the point of that procedural commit-ment … it is merely one commitment among others with no greaterclaim on us than the others.

12

In short, Habermas fails ‘to answer

why

we should be moral’.

13

Now,whether or not this charge is correct, it is at this juncture that Hendley main-tains that ‘Levinas’s account of the face of the other does not fall prey to thisshortcoming.’ Why? Because ‘for Levinas, to speak is to do more thanundertake a particular mode of action with distinctive procedural commit-ments. It is to come into proximity to the face of the other to whom myspeech is addressed who, in that proximity, emerges for me as the one withthe authority to command my consideration.’

14

This is not inaccurate;certainly Levinas

does

think that ‘to speak’ amounts to more than engagingin either ‘communicative’ or ‘strategic’ action. But it remains unclear that inturning to Levinas we have not merely shifted the same problems else-where. So, for example, a sceptical reader might here be inclined to ask: Inwhat sense does the other ‘emerge’ as an ‘authority’? Why is the other‘deserving of our care … even to the point of taking the bread from ourmouths’?

15

And why does ‘every communicative orientation to anotherperson’ have ‘this sort of sacrifice as its potential’?

16

One could thereforepose the same sort of question asked of Habermas to Levinas, namely, Whyshould I refrain from merely taking advantage of you simply because youand I are in ‘proximity’ and you are the one ‘to whom my speech isaddressed’?

17

The answer, it seems to me, is no more obvious in the Levina-sian context. Of course, it is tempting simply to reiterate that the other’svulnerability ‘commands’ me, but this does not seem entirely satisfactory.Likewise, it is often suggested – or at least implied – that one’s ethicalresponsibility is (somehow) generated by the mere ‘otherness’ of the other.But again, this hardly seems to do the conceptual work that is needed. Foreven if the other

is

‘radically other’ (and this claim is hardlyunproblematic

18

), nothing of any

ethical

significance necessarily follows.Much more needs to be said here. But what, exactly? In order to answer thisquestion I first want to consider aspects of Hendley’s discussion of Levinasalongside another recent attempt to deal with the question of moralmotivation in Levinas: A. T. Nuyen’s ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’.

Let us recap: Hendley claims that Levinas escapes the problems thatemerge in Habermas’s concern with purely ‘procedural’

19

commitmentsinsofar as the former conceptualizes ‘speech’ primarily in terms of one’scoming ‘into proximity to the face of the other’.

20

Moreover, here we ‘findourselves … coming to see the other as deserving of our care’.

21

But, as I


82

have suggested, at this juncture we might reasonably ask not only

how

this‘coming to see …’ happens, but also what we can say when it does

not

happen. In answer to the first question (

how

does this happen?) Hendleyoffers a tentative hypothesis that draws (broadly) on socio-biology. So,while Hendley has concerns that ‘Levinas gives us no compelling reasonsto suppose that this sensibility is a universal feature of human existence’,

22

he nevertheless believes that it may be possible to overcome this specificproblem by making ‘a case for the universality of the moral point of view… by taking note of the way Levinas stresses the corporeal nature of oursensible vulnerability to the face of the other’.

23

Hendley does this byappealing to the ‘instinctive’ form of care that we find (for example) in thematernal relation: ‘The caring sensibility which brings me into proximity tothe face of the other is, like maternity, older than language.’

24

Hendley isrightly cautious here, for as he notes, Levinas is a profoundly anti-natural-istic thinker,

25

and as such would resist this sort of trajectory. (Indeed, it isworth highlighting that although Levinas also talks of the maternal rela-tion,

26

and acknowledges that ‘[c]ompassion is … a natural sentiment’, hequalifies this latter admission by adding ‘… on the part of him who washungry once, toward the other and for the hunger of the other’. ThereforeLevinas insists that (genuine) ethical responsibility constitutes a ‘break’ inwhat he considers to be an ultimately egoistic, ‘mechanical solidarity’.

27

)Still, this naturalistic rewriting of Levinas is only proffered ‘as one plausi-ble way to come to terms with the contingency of Levinas’s account of ourcorporeal vulnerability to the other’.

28

But Hendley is not alone in beingtempted to rewrite Levinas at this critical juncture. Nuyen has similarquestions here regarding ‘the problem of moral motivation’,

29

for, as heputs it, ‘What is needed is an account of how the other affects the sensibil-ity of a finite, flesh-and-blood person’.

30

According to Nuyen, Levinas’sown answer to this question is, simply stated, ‘

conscience

’,

31

but as heproceeds to enquire: ‘The question is: What awakens this conscience?’

32

(IfNuyen’s concern is with the case of the persistent amoralist, then there islittle Levinas – or anyone else for that matter – can say in response. AsBernard Williams rightly notes, what the amoralist needs ‘is help, or hope,not reasonings’.

33

Nuyen’s worry then cannot (reasonably) be aboutLevinas’s (in)ability to respond to the threat of amoralism.) Having raisedthe critical question of what ‘awakens’ Levinasian ‘conscience’, Nuyenprovides his own answer in terms of ‘pity’:

Phenomenologically, the pitier feels as if he or she has the duty or theresponsibility to relieve the distress experienced by the pitied, as if heor she is somehow responsible for the latter’s suffering. … Pity … is ahuman emotion to which we are all vulnerable, a feeling to which weare all susceptible. Our susceptibility to it is general enough for us tosuspect that it may be biologically hardwired into human beings.

34


83

He then elaborates: ‘the feeling of pity does not just reveal the subjectivityof the I; it also puts the I in question: Why this Other and not me? Why theyrather than me? As Levinas has pointed out, morality consists just in thisputting oneself in question. It is in this way that the feeling of pity fulfilsLevinas’s metaphysics of morals.’

35

Nuyen thus thinks that pity will do thenecessary conceptual (not to mention practical) work of answering thequestion of moral motivation because ‘feeling pity … is not just the pain ofthe distressed Other to which I have to respond; it is also, and primarily, myown pain to which I have to respond’. In other words: ‘The feeling of pityhas a motivational force because, in pitying, the pitier has his or her ownpain to deal with.’

36

(According to Nuyen this does not amount to adisguised egoism.

37

) Again, then, in Nuyen’s work we find a

rewriting

ofLevinas in broadly naturalistic terms. The second question I posed above(What can we say when such other-oriented concern does

not

happen?) cannow be answered fairly straightforwardly. In fact the answer can already bediscerned in Williams’s remarks concerning the persistent amoralist: Whatcan we say when ‘see[ing] the other as deserving of our care’

38

is not natu-rally forthcoming? Very little; as Wittgenstein might put it, the most wecould do here is

show

the other an instance of suffering and await an appro-priate response. It is for this underlying reason, I think, that Hendley simply

reiterates

the fundamental importance of one’s being ‘capable of beingtouched by the other’s suffering … in a way which can move me to care’.

39

Clearly he thinks that this sort of response answers the question of moralmotivation that arises in Habermas’s work, for as Hendley goes on: ‘I wouldnot be capable of fully making sense of the demands I find myself encum-bered with as a communicative agent if I were not also someone capable ofbeing touched by the suffering of another person and moved to care for her/him.’

40

In much the same way, Nuyen can simply

insist

that ‘[t]hose who stillask “Why should I be moral?” are those who have not felt the force of pity’,and as such do not qualify for ‘an entry ticket into the moral community’.

41

Needless to say, while all this may be persuasive, it is wholly at odds withLevinas’s conception of ethical responsibility. For while he does on occasionrefer to our ‘natural goodness … with respect to the other’,

42

his overridingemphasis is on how ‘the human breaks with pure being’

43

or ‘the natural’ –indeed, he explicitly maintains that ethics is ‘

against nature

because itforbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my own existencefirst’;

44

‘The human is a scandal in being.’

45

Accordingly, any appeal to ournatural dispositions toward feeling pity or compassion runs precisely

counter

to Levinas’s thinking.As I have already suggested, such a rewriting of Levinas may be useful,

perhaps even necessary.

46

But it could not be ‘faithful’ to his work inanything but the most tangential way. (Hendley is, I think, more sensitive tothis necessary betrayal than Nuyen.) Still, there are moments in bothNuyen’s and Hendley’s analyses that gesture toward something which

is


84

profoundly Levinasian, despite the fact that neither commentator seems torecognize its full significance. This is what I want to turn to next.

Justifying Oneself

Focusing on certain passages in

Totality and Infinity

, Hendley wants tostress Levinas’s preoccupation with ‘language as conversation’.

47

Heproceeds (citing Levinas): ‘the very fact of being in a conversation consistsin recognising in the Other a right over (one’s) egoism, and hence in justify-ing oneself’.

48

Now, according to Hendley; this claim is of ‘tremendousimportance in understanding Levinas’s work’, not least because the face ofthe other ‘is always the face of my interlocutor, the one who addresses mein speech’.

49

As far as it goes, this claim is reasonable enough. However,what Hendley fails to note is how this passage from

Totality and Infinity

continues: ‘Apology, in which the I at the same time asserts itself andinclines before the transcendent, belongs to the essence of conversation.’ Inother words, in every conversation lies an ‘apologetic moment’.

50

(Indeed,this ‘calling into question’ of me that is ‘brought about by the other’ is whatLevinas wants to label ‘ethics’

51

as such

.) Why is this significant? The reasoncan be located in Hendley’s further remarks:

[According to Levinas] my interlocutor is my master, my teacher, theone to whom I am obliged to be attentive. … Hence, Levinas’s refer-ence to the conversational duty to justify oneself. To converse withanother person is to find oneself called into question … calledprecisely to question what one would say in the light of what the otherhas said.

52

Hendley is right to highlight the notion of the other as ‘master’ in Levinas’swork (Levinas even refers to a certain ‘masochism’

53

here), and likewiseLevinas’s emphasis on one’s call to ‘justify oneself’ before the face of theother. These are indeed crucial and recurrent themes. But Hendley’s finalremark is far too Habermasian in orientation. Indeed, in this sense Levinas’svarious allusions to ‘conversation’ are, though doubtless tantalizing forthose concerned with discourse ethics, ultimately misleading. To put thisdifferently, Hendley gives

too much content

to what are rather ambiguousconcepts in Levinas.

54

(As I have said, there is nothing wrong with this if oneis seeking to

rewrite

Levinas, but Hendley wants to use Levinas as a comple-ment to Habermas’s project.) Still, if reading Levinas in this broadly Haber-masian way gives ‘too much content’ to the notion of ‘justifying oneself’,that does not mean that

no

content can be given here. In this respect I wantto argue that Levinas’s deeper question (though one which is perhaps lessuseful with regard to the project of discourse ethics) concerns, not ‘justifica-tion’ in the sense of being ‘called … to question what one would say in the


85

light of what the other has said’,

55 but rather the ‘justification’ of one’s verybeing.56 This, I believe, is the primary sense of ‘justification’ in Levinas’swork, and it is this that the other’s face ‘accuses’ me of before any actual‘conversation’ begins.57 Thus, the very ‘presence’ of the other, Levinasremarks, ‘is a summons to answer’.58 In ‘Notes of Meaning’, he thereforeexpands on the claim that the other puts me ‘in question’:

I cannot enter this by questioning myself, in the theoretical mode of aproposition within a statement. Rather this is a question where I enterstrictly obliged to responsibility for the mortality of the other man and,concretely, as losing before the death of the other the innocence of mybeing. This is a putting in question before the death of the other whichis like a remorse or, at least, like a hesitation to exist. … The I is the verycrisis of the being of beings … because, as I, I already ask myselfwhether my being is justified. This is a bad conscience that does not yetrefer to a law. … [T]his bad conscience, this putting in question, comesto me from the face of the other. … This is a question that does notawait a theoretical response in the guise of ‘information’. It is aquestion more ancient than that which tends toward the response …59

In other words: ‘The question par excellence, or the first question, is not“why is there being rather than nothing” but “have I the right to be?”’60 Inmy being ‘accused’ by the other, there is no ‘alibi’,61 for ‘[t]he I is accused ofeverything, but without a guilt that it might recall, and this before havingtaken any decision or having accomplished any free act, and consequentlybefore having committed any offence from which this responsibility mighthave flowed’.62

As previously mentioned, Nuyen claims that in response to the problemof moral motivation, all Levinas can offer is ‘conscience’.63 But Nuyen doesnot find this particularly satisfactory, for the question remains: ‘What awak-ens this conscience?’64 His own answer to the problem of moral motivationis, as we saw, ‘pity’. But what is interesting about Nuyen’s ‘phenomenolog-ical’65 observations about pity is his further claim that ‘the pitier feels … asif he or she is somehow responsible for the [other’s] suffering. … Thecircumstantial proximity with the pitied typically makes the pitier feel thathe or she has somehow escaped the misfortune that should have been his orhers’,66 and likewise: ‘the feeling of pity does not just reveal the subjectivityof the I; it also puts the I in question: Why this Other and not me? Why theyrather than me?’67 Now, toward the end of his analysis Nuyen cites a passagefrom Otherwise than Being where Levinas alludes to ‘identity gnawing awayat itself – in a remorse’.68 I would (again) like to draw attention to what Levi-nas goes on to write: ‘Responsibility for another is not an accident thathappens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, inwhich a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done


86

anything and I have always been under accusation – persecuted … ahostage.’69 Nuyen says nothing about this allusion to ‘remorse’ beyond bothfreedom and any determinate acts or omissions. But, as I have alreadybegun to argue, it is precisely this notion that lies at the heart of Levinas’sdistinctive conception of ethics. Despite Levinas’s occasional uneasinessregarding the concept of ‘guilt’ (in one interview he expresses this reserva-tion with specific reference to Heidegger’s (allegedly) ‘theological’ concep-tion of ‘guilt’70 in Being and Time), it remains essential to understanding hiswork. So, for example, when he remarks: ‘What is important is the notion ofa responsibility preceding the notion of a guilty initiative’,71 Levinas is notrejecting the notion of guilt per se, but rather attempting to conceive of aguilt that is not tethered to freedom, debt, and thus (by implication) thepossibility of reparation or the ‘promise … of the Happy End’.72 In short,Levinas’s is a ‘Guilt without fault’.73 Thus, in his 1985 interview ‘Who ShallNot Prophesy?’ Levinas remarks:

I think that philosophical discourse is independent of this guilt andthat the question ‘Have I the right to be?’ expresses above all thehuman in its concern for the other. … [I]s not my place in being, theDa of my Dasein, already a usurpation, already a violence in respectto the other?74

And similarly in Difficult Freedom: ‘What is an individual, if not a usurper?What is signified by the advent of conscience, and even the first spark ofspirit, if not the discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing byassassination?’75 These are not essentially claims about the distribution ofprimary goods. Whether or not in his reference to ‘my opulence’76 Hendleyhas material assets in mind, it is worth stressing here that there are placeswhere Levinas himself seems to be making a point about such inequalities.77

The ‘irremissible guilt with regard to the neighbour’78 is not, however,reducible to a scarcity argument, for, according to Levinas, my responsibil-ity for you does not spring from, and is not simply proportionate to, our rela-tive material assets. Rather, my asymmetrical responsibility precedes theresponsibilities arising from such material inequalities. In other words, I amfirst responsible, not in virtue of what I have or even what I can do, but invirtue of the fact that I am. This ‘bad conscience’ results from my being‘accused’ for my ‘very presence’.79

As I have argued elsewhere,80 Levinas is best thought of as a post-Holocaust thinker, though by that I do not mean that his work has no signif-icance beyond the confines of Holocaust Studies.81 My reason for makingthis claim is, as we have begun to see, the role existential guilt plays in histhinking. More specifically, Levinas’s work must be read as, in part, anextended confession of ‘survivor’s guilt’ – something Jacques Derrida alsohighlighted.82 (In more autobiographical moments Levinas refers to his


87

own feeling of ‘survivor’s guilt’.83) Indeed, Derrida’s intervention here isgermane, for according to him, I am ‘a priori guilty’,84 and hence ‘have toask … for forgiveness even before committing a determinable fault’. This,he goes on to suggest, might be called ‘original sin prior to any originalsin’.85 Derrida is therefore candid that ‘the main motivation’ of his ethicsand politics is ‘bad conscience’,86 but the same thing could justly be said ofLevinas.87

Giving Reasons

If, according to Levinas, ‘the first question … is not “why is there beingrather than nothing?” but “have I the right to be?”’,88 then this mustprecede the ‘outstretched field of questions and answers’89 that Hendleymakes so much of in his analysis. This ‘first question’ cannot be ‘answered’in any orthodox way. Indeed, I take Levinas’s point to be that one cannot‘justify’ oneself without indulging in (what Derrida calls) the ‘scandal’ of‘good conscience’.90 Moreover, while the primordial question of one’s ‘rightto be’ sets up the asymmetrical relation Levinas emphasizes, the impossibil-ity of justifying this ‘right’ in the face of the singular other does not demandpassive submission to his/her whims. For this face-to-face relation with thesingular ‘interlocutor, the one who addresses me in speech’,91 is, much likeHabermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’,92 something of a transcendental illu-sion. This is an important and frequently overlooked point, but one thatLevinas is relatively clear about. Thus, for example, in Totality and Infinityhe remarks:

Everything that takes place here ‘between us’ concerns everyone. …Language as the presence of the face does not invite complicity withthe preferred being, the self-sufficient ‘I–Thou’ forgetful of theuniverse; in its frankness it refuses the clandestinity of love. …The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other … the epiphany ofthe face qua face opens humanity. The face in its nakedness as a facepresents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger … thewhole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me.93

And similarly in Of God who Comes to Mind:

[I]n the relationship with another I am always in relation with the thirdparty. But he is also my neighbour. From this moment on, proximitybecomes problematic: one must compare, weigh, think; one must dojustice, which is the source of theory. The entire recovery of Institu-tions … is done … starting from the third party … we must havecomparison and equality: equality between those that cannot becompared. … [I]n reality, the relationship with another is never


88

uniquely the relationship with the other … that is, in the very appear-ance of the other the third already regards me.94

According to these passages, then (and they are by no means exceptional),the face-to-face relation ‘in reality’ always already refers us to the otherothers – even ‘the whole of humanity’. Whatever one makes of this claim, itcannot, I think, be treated as a hasty after-thought to Levinas’s account ofthe face-to-face relation. That the third-party ‘regards me’ in the face of thesingular other is no mere supplement, but crucial to understanding hisdistinctive, if often troubling, contribution to contemporary philosophy. ForLevinas’s apparent preoccupation with ‘the proximity and uniqueness of theother man’ is, he insists, ‘in no way a repudiation of politics’.95 In order tosee why this is the case, it is worth noting here something else Hendleyclaims – namely, that ‘to end a conversational relationship with anotherperson … is not an option consistent with the obligation I have undertakenin conversing with [them]’. Indeed, such silencing would be a ‘betrayal ofthat obligation’.96 But in the light of Levinas’s remarks on the third party,this cannot be quite right. For my responsibility for the other other(s) may,not only permit, but actually demand that I ‘end a conversational relation-ship’ (or at least converse ‘strategically’ in the Habermasian sense of thatterm). Indeed, here Levinas makes it clear that he does not rule out overtaggression on behalf of the other other:

If there was only the other facing me, I would say to the very end: Iowe him everything. I am for him. … I am forever subject to him. Myresistance begins when the harm he does me is done to a third partywho is also my neighbour. It is the third party who is the source ofjustice, and thereby of justified repression; it is the violence sufferedby the third party that justifies stopping the violence of the other withviolence.97

In other words, the ‘Other’s hunger – be it of the flesh, or of bread – is sacred;only the hunger of the third party limits its rights’.98 A ‘measure’ therefore‘superimposes itself on the “extravagant” generosity of the “for the other”,on its infinity’.99 Accordingly, for the sake of the other other (your ‘neigh-bour’ or ‘brother’100), I may have to appeal to official powers and institu-tions.101 Failing that, I may even have to repress, silence and confront youwith force, for while ‘violence must be avoided as much as possible … onecannot say that there is no legitimate violence’.102 So, in Levinas’s work theethical and political realms are not discrete, but rather mutually contaminateone another. On the one hand, the face-to-face relation with the singularother is quasi-mythical; there never was such an ethically ‘pure’ I–Thouencounter. Nevertheless, he wants to insist that in every encounter with another there remains a trace of just such a ‘pure’ relation.103 As Levinas


89

remarks: ‘what seems to me very important, is that there are not only two ofus in the world. But I think that everything begins as if we were only two.’104

The demands of worldly justice must therefore always be ‘held in check’105

by the ‘initial charity’106 of the (quasi-mythical) face-to-face relation.107 Withall this in mind, Hendley’s claim (referred to above) that ‘to end a conver-sational relationship with another person … is not an option consistent withthe obligation I have undertaken in conversing with [them]’ (and that suchsilencing would be a ‘betrayal of that obligation’108) is not wholly unwar-ranted. Nevertheless, it is misleading insofar as it suggests that a certain‘betrayal’ of the other is avoidable.109 But as Derrida rightly insists: ‘in orderto be just, I am unjust and I betray. … I always betray someone to be just; Ialways betray one for the other, I perjure myself like I breathe.’110

To conclude, then, for Levinas (as also for Derrida), primordial guilt is notrestricted to my simply being-in-the-world – my ‘usurpation of spaces belong-ing to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or drivenout into a third world … A fear for all the violence and murder my existingmight generate’.111 Rather, this guilt permeates throughout moral-politicallife insofar as even the most ‘responsible’ word or deed (even the most‘communicative action’, to use Habermasian terminology) is always at theexpense of another other. In short, the ‘discourse’ which ‘underlies alldiscourse’112 is confessional or apologetic: ‘Apology … belongs to the essenceof conversation.’113

University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Notes

1 Emmanuel Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, trans. B. Bergo (California:Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 137; see also Basic Philosophical Writings,ed. A. Peperzak (and others) (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 1996), p. 38.

2 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 142; see also p. 141; Is it Righteous toBe? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. J. Robbins (California: StanfordUniversity Press, 2001), p. 56; Outside the Subject, trans. M. B. Smith (London:The Athlone Press, 1993), p. 16.

3 Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo (California:Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 164.

4 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 142.5 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 47; see also pp. 211–12; Entre Nous: Think-

ing-of-the-Other, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1998), p. 7; Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas,trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and M. Naas (California: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999), p. 88; Acts of Religion, trans. and ed. G. Anidjar (London andNew York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 390ff.

6 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 46.7 In this paper I will not be discussing Habermas’s work in any detail. For useful

analyses of the Habermasian project see especially Emilia Steuerman,


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‘Habermas vs. Lyotard: Modernity vs. Postmodernity?’, in A. Benjamin (ed.)Judging Lyotard (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 99–118;Donald Moon, ‘Practical Discourse and Communicative Ethics,’ in S. K. White(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 143–64; Axel Honneth, ‘The Other of Justice:Habermas and the Ethical Challenge of Postmodernism’, in S. K. White (ed.)The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 289–323; William Rehg, ‘Discourse Ethics’, inEdith Wyschogrod and G. P. McKenny (eds) The Ethical: Blackwell Readingsin Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003), pp. 83–100.

8 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 46.9 Steven Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility: Levinas and Habermas on the

Constitution of the Moral Point of View,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 37(2004), p. 153.

10 Ibid., p. 158.11 Ibid., p. 160. As Steuerman notes, for Habermas ‘an agreement in language is

an agreement about the commitment to provide reasons for the claims raisedin communication’. This view therefore ‘reduces communication to communi-cative action’, and specifically to ‘giving reasons in language’ (Steuerman,‘Habermas vs. Lyotard’, p. 106). Against this position Steuerman (rightly)situates Wittgenstein’s allusion to ‘agreement … in form of life’ (LudwigWittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), §241). For Wittgenstein clearly thinks that‘giving reasons’ is but one of the ‘multiplicity of language-games’ (Philosoph-ical Investigations, §23) possible for human beings. In other words, reason-giving is just one feature of our ‘natural history’ (Philosophical Investigations,§25) – certainly not its essence or ultimate destination (see Steuerman,‘Habermas vs. Lyotard’, p. 113). Indeed, in the context of religious belief,Wittgenstein thinks that ‘giving reasons’ constitutes a sort of irreligiousness(see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychol-ogy and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp.53–63). This point becomes even clearer in On Certainty, for here Wittgen-stein suggests that what counts as ‘giving reasons’ (not only what is considereda legitimate and/or ‘good’ reason, but what counts as a reason) will, for themost part, be determined by one’s ‘world picture’ (see Ludwig Wittgenstein,On Certainty, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe and D. Paul, ed. G. E. M. Anscombeand G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), §§94–5, 162, 167, 336).Moreover, Steuerman’s criticism of Habermas could be extended furtherhere, for the latter’s demarcation between ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic’action is not merely insensitive to the sheer multiplicity of language-games,but neglects the fact that ‘communicative’ action ultimately finds itself in therealm of the ‘strategic’ insofar as ‘[a]t the end of reasons comes persuasion’(Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §612; see also §262).

12 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 160.13 Ibid., p. 159.14 Ibid., p. 160.15 Ibid., pp. 160–1.16 Ibid., p. 161.17 Ibid., p. 160.18 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of

Emmanuel Levinas’, trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference (London andNew York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 79–153.


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19 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility,’ p. 160.20 Ibid.21 Ibid., p. 160–1.22 Ibid., p. 162.23 Ibid., p. 163. Moon remarks of the Habermasian project: ‘If there is a universal

moral community, it is constituted by a relatively narrow set of norms.’ He thenproceeds: ‘Because the forms of the good are plural and because all humansare subject to common vulnerabilities, the solidarity projected by a discourseethics must be based largely on a vision of the “damaged life” rather than anaffirmative view of the “good life”’; ‘To the extent that all humans arevulnerable in similar ways, it is plausible to suppose that there are “generalizableinterests” that could provide the basis for norms that would command universalassent’ (Moon, ‘Practical Discourse and Communicative Ethics’, p. 152; see alsoJ. D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation withConstant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 1993), p. 41). However, Habermas clarifies that he is primarilyconcerned with vulnerabilities of socialization (Jürgen Habermas, Philosoph-ical-Political Profiles, trans. F. G. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1983),pp. 120–2; The Habermas Reader, ed. W. Outhwaite (Cambridge, UK: PolityPress, 1996), pp. 196–7).

24 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 163. Wittgenstein refers to the mother–child relation in order to distinguish between sceptical doubt and madness(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. J. Klagge andA. Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), p. 383. See alsoBob Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought (Oxfordand New York: Routledge, 2005), Ch. 7.

25 See Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 164.26 See Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 117.27 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 173.28 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 165.29 A. T. Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, International Philosophical

Quarterly, 40(4), Issue No. 160 (December 2000), p. 411.30 Ibid., p. 416.31 Ibid.; see also Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 107.32 Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, p. 417.33 Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Harmondsworth,

England: Penguin, 1973), p. 17.34 Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, pp. 417–18.35 Ibid., p. 420. For a more detailed ‘ethics of pity’ see Arthur Schopenhauer,

On the Basis of Morality (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), especially PartsIII–IV.

36 Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, p. 420.37 Ibid.38 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, pp. 160–1.39 Ibid., p. 161.40 Ibid.41 Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, p. 421.42 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 55.43 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel

Levinas’, trans. A. Benjamin and T. Wright, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood(eds) The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1988), p. 172; see also Entre Nous, p. 157.


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44 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, in R. Kearney, Dialogues withContemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 60.

45 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 115.46 In Wittgenstein and Levinas I attempt to do this by way of Wittgenstein’s later

naturalism.47 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154.48 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A.

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996), p. 40; see also Hendley,‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154.

49 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154.50 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 40.51 Ibid., p. 43; see also p. 253.52 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154.53 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 46.54 See Levinas, Entre Nous, pp. 4–7.55 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154; see also Levinas, Of God who

Comes to Mind, p. 141.56 See Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 143.57 See Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 143.58 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 54. Interestingly, though this is more

Habermasian than Levinasian in orientation, Winch remarks that ‘humanbeings are essentially potential critics of each other’ to the point where evenanother’s presence can constitute ‘an implicit criticism’ of one’s ‘views of life’and ‘roles in life’ (Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1987), p. 180; see also pp. 146–7, 150).

59 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 165 (my italics); see also p. 174.60 Ibid., p. 171; see also p. 175.61 Ibid., p. 165.62 Ibid., p. 170.63 Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of Pity’, p. 416.64 Ibid., p. 417.65 Ibid., p. 418.66 Ibid.67 Ibid., p. 420.68 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. A.

Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 114.69 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 114; see also Entre Nous, p. 192.70 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 141.71 Ibid., p. 52; see also pp. 192, 204.72 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 175; see also Entre Nous, pp. 18–20.73 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 52.74 Ibid., p. 225; see also Entre Nous, p. 148.75 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 100.76 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 161.77 See Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith

(London: The Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 23, 30, 179; ‘The Paradox of Morality’,p. 173.

78 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 109.79 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 21. In some astonishing passages Levi-

nas says of this non-symmetrical relation: ‘I am responsible for the Other with-


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out waiting for reciprocity. … Reciprocity is his affair’ (Ethics and Infinity:Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: DuquesneUniversity Press, 1992), p. 98), and likewise: ‘What I say here of course onlycommits me!’ (Ethics and Infinity, p. 114; see also Entre Nous, pp. 145, 186) –remarks that clearly seem to problematize the universality of anything norma-tive one might want to derive from Levinas’s work (see Hendley, ‘Speech andSensibility’, pp. 161, 163). There is a claim to universality in Levinas’s think-ing, specifically when he discusses the ‘third party’, but I will return to this ina moment.

80 See in particular Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, Ch. 6; ‘Ethics without Exit:Levinas and Murdoch’, Philosophy and Literature, 27 (2) (October 2003),pp. 456–70; ‘Doing Justice to the Derrida–Levinas Connection: A Response toMark Dooley’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29 (4) (July 2003), pp. 427–50.

81 See D. G. Myers, ‘Responsible for Every Single Pain: Holocaust Literatureand the Ethics of Interpretation’, Comparative Literature, 51 (4) (Autumn1999), pp. 266–88.

82 See Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 6–7; Acts of Religion,pp. 382ff. According to Levinas ‘confession’ is a ‘genre that one shoulddistrust’ (Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 78). But this circumspection does notcontradict my claim that his work is (broadly) ‘confessional’. I take Levinas’sworry here to concern the confessional ‘genre’, for as a genre the confessionis always at risk of becoming ritualized or programmatic. Although I havediscussed this elsewhere (see Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, Chs 5–6),describing Levinas’s work as ‘confessional’ may be useful for other reasons.For while Levinas may not be able to compel us (his readers) to acknowledgeour own primordial guilt (which would, after all, only amount to a ‘forcedconfession’), he must presumably hope that his readership responds to hiswork ‘responsibly’.

83 See Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. S. Hand (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1996), p. 291; Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 126.

84 Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 384; see also Jacques Derrida, ‘To Forgive: TheUnforgivable and the Imprescriptible’, in J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley and M. J.Scanlon (eds) Questioning God (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 2001), p. 22.

85 Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 388; see also ‘To Forgive’, p. 43; Jacques Derrida,The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills (Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press, 1995), pp. 51, 67ff.

86 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with JacquesDerrida’, in J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley and M. J. Scanlon (eds) Questioning God(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 69.

87 See Levinas, Entre Nous, pp. 229–30.88 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 171.89 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 96.90 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with

Jacques Derrida’, in R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds) Questioning EthicsContemporary Debates in Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge,1999), p. 67; see also Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, trans.P. Kamuf (and others), ed. E. Weber (California: Stanford University Press,1995), pp. 184, 194, 286–7, 361–2; Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstructionand Pragmatism’, trans. S. Critchley, in C. Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction andPragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 86; Jacques Derrida,‘On Responsibility’ (interview with J. Dronsfield and others), in J. Dronsfield


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and N. Midgley (eds) Responsibilities of Deconstruction, Warwick Journal ofPhilosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 20–1.

91 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 154.92 See Steuerman, ‘Habermas vs. Lyotard’, p. 104.93 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 212–13 (my italics).94 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 82 (my italics).95 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 195; see also pp. 202–5; Otherwise than Being, p. 159.96 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 159.97 Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind, p. 83.98 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. xiv.99 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 195.

100 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 157–8.101 See Levinas, Entre Nous, pp. 103, 203–4.102 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 106; see also Alterity and Transcendence, p. 172; Is it

Righteous to Be?, p. 167, 221.103 Much the same point can be made about Levinas’s remarks on the ‘Saying’ and

‘Said’. So, for example, when he claims that ‘[t]he Saying is … communicationnot reducible to the phenomenon of the truth-that-unites: it is a non-indifference to the other person, capable of ethical significance to which thestatement itself of the Said is subordinate’ (Outside the Subject, p. 142), Levinaswants to maintain that while the Saying is not exhausted by the Said, neverthe-less ‘[t]here is … no Saying that is not the Saying of a Said’ (Outside the Subject,p. 141).

104 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 170 (my italics).105 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 132.106 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 104.107 See Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 90; Otherwise than Being, p. 159.108 Hendley, ‘Speech and Sensibility’, p. 159.109 See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 158–9.110 Derrida, ‘To Forgive’, p. 49; see also Acts of Religion, p. 388; The Gift of

Death, p. 69.111 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 82.112 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? p. 47.113 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 40.

apologies: levinas and dialogue

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