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Lévinas and An-archic Metapolitics

Michael Kim

What has Lévinas to do with politics? “Politics” is one of two words Lévinas

hesitates to use often.1 Not only is “Lévinas” an uncommon name in political theory

(particularly if not coupled to “Derrida” or “Critchley”), the discourse on Lévinas is

dominated by the term “the Other” and not “the third”.2 While a number of commentators

have observed that the third is not merely a derivative term after the Other, the resistance to

a discourse of a “political Lévinas” seems to stem either from a suspicion of Lévinas’

Zionism3 or the belief that Lévinas leaves untouched the status quo of our standard liberal

institutions and that the ethical subject in Lévinas resembles (or simply is) the autonomous

liberal subject. If Lévinas uses the familiar terms of the state-form (or nation-state), rights,

sovereignty, etc, this is not “liberal politics as usual”, however, insofar as Lévinas has changed

its meaning—redefining the very sense of politics—by supplementing the former semantic

field with the concept of “an-archy”. Lévinas presents not the grounding of politics in ethics

but the mutual implication of ethics and politics in the very structure of the dividual4 who

must answer to what can be called an an-archic metapolitics of infinitely demanding

1 The other is “love”. Although he never names Lévinas, Marion clearly “supplements” Lévinas’ ethics in The Erotic Reduction. The same could be said of attempts such as Critchley’s work on the side of politics; this essay is an attempt in the same spirit. 2 As Bernasconi reminds us (“The Third Party”), there are three distinct (if related) senses of “the third” in Lévinas: le tiers, la troisième personne, and illéité. By “the third” I intend to refer to the complex of these three. I will use the standard translations to distinguish between each of these when necessary (i.e., “third party”, “third person”, and “illeity”, respectively). For more detailed investigations into the notion of the “third”, see Archivi di Filosofia, Vol. LXXIV, No. 1-3. 2006. 3 Critchley, for example, has so criticized Lévinas (“Five Problems”); see also Butler’s critique of Lévinas’ Zionism in her own motivation of a Lévinasian ethics of responsibility (viz. Butler 91-101). 4 “The subject shapes itself in relation to a demand that it can never meet, which divides and sunders the subject, the experience of what I will call ‘hetero-affectivity’, as opposed to the ‘auto-affection’ of the autonomy orthodoxy.” (ID 40)

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responsibility.

1. An-archical being

Modern philosophy, Critchley says, begins not in wonder but in disappointment—

either religious or political disappointment5 in the failed promises of a naïve modernity that

promised secular redemption (after the death of God), the end of history (Comte, Hegel), or

“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”. Could one not, especially in the early part of the twentieth

century, say as well that philosophy’s anguished birth is of the experience of trauma and,

consequently, that the subjective imperative is one of (self-)recuperation?6

In On Escape, which is widely regarded as Lévinas’ first significantly original work,

Lévinas makes the first step toward his later philosophy by separating the Good from Being.

Although this separation becomes more pronounced later in Existence and Existents,7 it did

not take the horrors of WWII and Lévinas’ own imprisonment in a Fallingsbotel in 1940 for

him to recognize the crisis and the “trauma” of modern man and modern philosophy; there

is, rather, another trauma prior to the world-historical traumas of modernity.

It is worth noting that just one year prior to On Escape, Lévinas published a short

essay on the “Philosophy of Hitlerism”. When Lévinas brings Hitlerism up to the status of

“philosophy”, at the same time he brings philosophy down to the level of Hitlerism insofar

as the true task of philosophy is to resist the thinking—and Hitlerism is, he says, a form of

thinking and not simple irrationality—that makes Hitlerism possible. Lévinas opens the essay

by saying that “the philosophy of Hitler is simplistic [primaire]. But the primitive powers that

5 The former is treated in Very Little … Almost Nothing; the latter most recently in Infinitely Demanding. 6 So too this subjective crisis is articulated in the aesthetics of the early twentieth century. Lukács, for example, would describe Expressionism as “subjective idealism”. For the role of what I have called “subjective recuperation” in the memory of trauma in Lévinas, see Rosen in Horowitz (ed). 7 E.g.: “the evil in Being, the evil of matter in idealist philosophy becomes the evil of Being” (EE 19).

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burn within it burst open its wretched phraseology under the pressure of an elementary

force”.8 Despite the Durkheimian inflections of the “elementary”,9 the real concern here is

with the element(al) conceived as an arche—an original evil beneath the evil of Hitlerism.10

Racism is itself tied to this original evil in which, “chained to his body, man sees himself

refusing the power to escape from himself”.11 To this “pagan religiosity”12—whose

particularity and materiality can be universalized only by force at the cost of judgment—is

counterposed the monotheistic tradition of separation. Hence Hitlerism says that “to be

truly oneself does not mean taking flight once more above contingent events that always

remain foreign to the Self’s freedom; on the contrary, it means becoming aware of the

ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this

chaining”.13

To be sure, Lévinas has not yet made the ethical turn, but certain key concerns are

already present in this essay that will remain throughout his later writings. Among these

concepts—which no doubt are later reworked—are freedom,14 equality, and religion.

Particularly, it is striking how freedom is here described as a freedom from enchainment—

enchainment to the body and to oneself. But what is this (human, all too human) self from

which we must escape? from what and to what? what are the paths of escape?

* * *

8 “Reflections on Hitlerism” 64. 9 See, e.g., Caygill chapter one. 10 “[C]ette experience de l’être rive, motile en quelque sorte, aboutit-elle à un être rive au second degré, comme si l’hitlérisme avait traversé l’être rivé en en interrompant la dynamique interne, le processus qui fait signe vers la révolte et l’évasion, et n’en avait retenu, sous la form du sentiment du corps, que la brutalité du fait d’être” (Abensour, “Le Mal elemental” 82; cf. 86-7). 11 “Reflections on Hitlerism” 70. 12 Caygill’s term (see Caygill 32). 13 “Reflections of Hitlerism” 69. 14 Caygill rightly points out the influence of Bergson on Lévinas’ conception of freedom. Not only is Bergson, both implicitly and explicitly, persistently present throughout the early writings, one is easily tempted to forget (so too with Merleau-Ponty) the influence of Bergson for the more obvious and explicit influence of phenomenology (viz. Husserl and Heidegger).

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Not a few philosophical and religious traditions have held that birth is an original

trauma, perhaps an expression of an original guilt, or that “it is better not to be”.15 But,

Lévinas says, this remains a banal expression of anxiety unless the “brutality” or the

unrelenting givenness of existence brings reflection16 straight to the problem of the origin:

“this weight of the being that is crushed by itself, which we revealed in the phenomenon of

malaise, this condemnation to oneself [cf. Sartre’s “condemnation to freedom”], can also be

seen in the dialectical impossibility of conceiving the beginning of beginning …” (E 70). The

paradox is in natality (what Arendt calls “Gebürtigkeit”)—i.e., that it is in the being that

begins (to be) that the beginning becomes indistinguishable from the being that (it) is; the

paradox, simply, is that such a being is left with two options. Either one seeks, through (self-

)reflection, this inconceivable origin, or “it is a matter of getting out of being by a new path”

(E 73), of escape.

In the first place, Lévinas insists on positivity but asks whether being is “sufficient

unto itself” (E 70).17 Does not being—the being that is—itself call for an escape, at first out

of the impersonality of the il y a? “The emptiness is full, as if the silence were a noise” (EI

48), Lévinas says.18 This “anonymous rustling of existence manifests itself particularly in

certain times when sleep evades our appeal” (EE 65); that is, in those times when one is

alerted precisely when one wishes to avoid this call and fall into the sleep of oblivion (the

15 For one account of at least some of these traditions, see Dienstag’s Pessimism. Whether Lévinas fits into the “pessimistic tradition” Dienstag describes, at least in terms of his conception of what I am calling “an-archical being” is an open question. 16 Reflection is thus an “ethical” problem in an existential sense. 17 “Nothingness is the work of a thinking essentially turned toward being.” 18 Cage puts it differently. When one enters an anechoic chamber, Cage says, there will always be two sounds: “one high, one low. … the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death” (Cage 8, emphasis added). Silence is immediately and absolutely fullness—the fullness of presence. For Cage, “music is an oversimplification of the situation we actually are in. An ear a lone i s no t a be ing ...” (Cage 149). Music brings us out of Being by bringing us to being—to presence via a circuitous route. (So too for the painter Newman, Lyotard’s question arrive-t-il means precisely that the function of the sublime painting is to make the viewer present.) Music is mimesis insofar as it is a doubling of my immediate presence, a calling back into pure presence—the presence of silence is (an excessive, abundant) presence “to myself”.

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“sleep of death” in Hamlet) or the desire for nothingness. Instead one finds the impossibility

of such a nothingness and of this kind of forgetting—one is alerted (frustrated,

maddeningly) to every stirring but then, ultimately, in that limit case of absolute silence, one

is alerted to “a noise returning after every negation of this noise” (EI 48). One is drawn away

from every noise, every object and attention to objects, into the anonymity of silence that

invades and ultimately consumes the freedom of the attentive consciousness that had wanted

to forget its attentiveness: the il y a is the “reawakening … in the heart of negation” (ibid). It

is no longer “I” who stays awake, but “it” stays awake (EI 49); it is no longer I, the being

who “is there” (Da-sein), who is to “guard the truth of being and watch over being”19 but,

instead, “wakefulness [la veille] is anonymous” (EE 66).

I lose myself in insomnia: “in insomnia one can and one cannot say that there is an

‘I’ which cannot manage to fall asleep” (EI 49). The duality of this statement (“one can and

one cannot say …”) attests to the paradox and the duality of the origin. Insomnia is not

simply that from which I emerge; insomnia is the limit20 of experience. What would it mean

to “emerge” from insomnia (as a consciousness)? It is, Lévinas says, precisely in forgetting—

not the forgetting that I had wanted in oblivion, but the forgetting of silence. Consciousness

is “a hesitation in being” (EE 67) or, one might also say, a “fold”:

the consciousness of a thinking subject, with its capacity for evanescence, sleep and unconsciousness, is precisely the breakup [la rupture] of the insomnia of anonymous being, the possibility to “suspend,” to escape from this corybantic necessity [d’échapper à ce devoir de corybanthe] … (EE 65)

But so far I have only managed to escape “to” being by being taken “from” being

(being, in other words, is immanent to itself—see below). Yet this is not merely a circular

return. Something has happened: the origin has doubled. In sleep I “am”; in sleep I dream

19 Heidegger, e.g., “Letter on Humanism” and “Building Dwelling Thinking”. 20 I intend “limit” in a dual sense. On the one hand, a limit (as in mathematics) indicates that toward which something tends but is itself not included in the definition because, on the other hand, it is that which makes the definition possible.

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and in my dreams I am absolute and absolutely solitary, solipsistic. My existence, my own

existence, is certain (Descartes) insofar as even if I am (only) dreaming it is my dream.21 I am.

But what must have happened for me to escape from insomnia into being, into this being

that is my own? Have I not had to forget my nightly vigilance, to sleep? But if it is precisely

because it is an unconsciousness—a forgetting—in what sense can one speak of insomnia as

an origin? The sleeping consciousness is in a way without origin. The origin is inconceivable,

but the nature of this inconceivability does not permit us autarkically to proceed to posit an

origin (as “ideal” or “regulative”) insofar as the origin is that which I must forget but which is

not “forgotten”—the il y a is not opposed to being (as being is opposed to nothingness). It is

“otherwise than being” on one side of being, at the limit of being (on the other side of being,

“otherwise than being”, is that which is “beyond essence”).22

It would be too strong to call this forgetting a “repression”, although the cognizance

of this lost, forgotten origin is traumatic in a sense; especially because, when I am sleeping, I

am alone—the certainty of my existence, my solitude, is absolute.23 Having lost the origin,

consciousness is alone; it is self-identical. Self-identity, however, requires a certain duality

expressed even linguistically as self-reference by a repetition: I express self-identity not

merely by saying “I” but “I am myself”. I am alone and present with myself,24 bound to

21 Or, perhaps, we can be sure of Being insofar as it is a dream in the mind of God. 22 “The ‘originary complication of origin,’ therefore, alludes to a real aporia of the philosophical thought, forced to wander between the impossibility of coming out of the original immediacy of the origin which cannot be preceded by any mediation, and at the same time the need to postulate an articulation inner to the origin, a complication of the simple, a circularity of the initial, thanks to which origin originally springs from itself, and in this way ‘comes to itself’ without starting from anywhere. Thus, the origin, as origin of itself starting from itself, precedes itself, presupposes itself, as it cannot presuppose anything else but itself. Therefore, the origin as ontological principle, the self-originating origin, implies the otherness of itself with respect to itself, an immanent otherness coming to being within the same movement of the primordial jump …” (Ciaramelli 128; cf. note forty-eight). 23 In what sense can the Cartesian ego be said to be “with” God at the end of the Meditations? Is not the entire problem of origin, as Augustine so dramatically articulated, the fact that we are (infinitely) separated from God? 24 “Existence is an absolute that is asserted without reference to anything else. It is identity. But in this reference to himself [soi-même], man perceives a type of duality. His identity with himself loses the character of a logical or tautological form; it takes on a dramatic form …” (E 55)

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myself, and unable to escape myself—this is the imperative of identity (as we commonly say,

I must “be myself”) or what Lévinas calls “shame”. Moral shame as we usually understand it

is based, Lévinas says, on this shame of solitary existence,

on the very being of our being, on its incapacity to break with itself. Shame is founded upon the solidarity of our being, which obliges us to claim responsibility for ourselves. … It is therefore our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. It reveals not our nothingness but rather the totality of our existence. (E 63, emphasis added)

This shame of existence is the impossibility of not being ourselves, the impossibility for me to

escape myself, and the necessity of being “with myself”: shame is auto-affection,

enchainment and suffering (E 55), and a kind of impotence, i.e., I am unable to escape

myself, since in so doing I must always return to myself. I cannot help but “be myself”, the

solitary dreamer.

An-archic autonomy

Already there is an an-archy within the subject in the paradox of natality: I must have

been born, but my birth (so too my death) cannot be an experience for me; I cannot

remember my birth.25 Even before the ethical responsibility of an immemorial past,26 there is

yet another kind of “past that has never been present (for me)”, i.e., my birth.27 My relation

to this immemorial past is not yet responsibility except perhaps in the sense that it is the very

work of my self insofar as I am a being who endures. I am not this dark origin but constitute

myself through the work of establishing a relation to this origin—i.e., “remembering” this

past (being “true to myself”) that I have been but which escapes me. The immemorial past is

Lévinas suggests that Husserl was aware of the kind of duality I am suggesting here: “in the identity of presence to self, in the silent tautology of the pre-reflexive, a difference between the same and the same takes shape—a dephasing, a difference at the heart of interiority” (EN 86). I will comment on this below. 25 Augustine was well aware of this problem of origin in the Confessions. 26 See “Diachrony and Representation” in TO (also collected in EN). 27 If “my solitude is … not confirmed by death but broken by it” (TO 74), then it is my birth that so confirms my solitude.

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not only the history and the world into which I am born in media res but it is also my own

origin, my own past—that which I will have been. This is why “existing resists every

relationship and multiplicity. It concerns no one other than the existent. Solitude therefore

appears … as the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of existing” (TO 43).

The conatus essendi is therefore not merely a persistence in being (striving toward the

future) but also the remembrance and repetition of the past as present (presence), as my time

(duration).28

In other words, the subject is traumatized even prior to ethics, and is constituted by

the recuperation of this trauma, closing upon itself into a “circle of immanence” (yet one

with an absent or “dark” center).29 What is autonomy in such a subject? Can it be anything

other than a narcissistic autonomy or “autonomy” in the strictest sense of the word—i.e., an

“auto-nomos” whose only reference can be to itself and its own activity (not, viz., nature or

the world).

In some sense, can we cleave the order of being from the order of knowledge? In the

order of (immanent) being (i.e., the solitary subject), I am in a world of nourishments, yet

there is no real alterity of things. Where in Time and the Other Lévinas immediately connects

nourishment, enjoyment, and knowledge,30 in Totality and Infinity he makes the passage from

solitude and egoism to knowledge clearer. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas says that “life is

affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life” (TI 115). Life is “personal” (ibid) and

solitary—it is my life (ipseity):

28 In using the term “duration” above, I refer especially to Bergson. Lévinas too will say that the opening of the same onto the Other “appears at the height of various philosophies”, (EN 89) including the “epekeina tes ousias” of Plato, the agent intellect in Aristotle, the idea of God in Descartes, the practical reason in Kant, recognition in Hegel, lucidity in Heidegger, and “the renewal of durée in Bergson” (former emphasis added). This “renewal” is what above I have called “repetition” or “constitution” across the gaps immanent to the subject. 29 Thus there is no “peace become real at the depths of the I, that is, the acceptance of being” (E 55). There is a need for escape even within the self—an escape from self, from the enchainment not just to the I but to the impenetrable darkness of my own origin. 30 “All enjoyment is a way of being, but also a sensation—that is, light and knowledge” (TO 63).

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to be cold, hungry, thirsty, naked, to seek shelter—all these dependencies with regard to the world, having become needs, save the instinctive being from anonymous menaces and constitutes a being independent of the world, a veritable subject … Needs are in my power; they constitute me as the same and not as dependent on the other (TI 116, latter emphasis added).

But how do we move from the solitary, egoistic, narcissistic subject to the intentional subject

(where we are directed toward things or “something”)? Husserl and Sartre would call this the

moment of reflection—the knowing of the object is not the same as the object itself. But, as

Freud too would remind us,31 we cannot say that the object is “given” to us unless, in

reflection, we understand it as given. In other words, there is never pure presentation, but

always representation: “in [Cartesian] clarity an object which is first exterior is given that is, is

delivered over to him who encounters it as though it had been entirely determined by him”

(TI 123, latter emphasis added). It is because of this “as though” that “in the intelligibility of

representation the distinction between me and the object, between interior and exterior, is

effaced” (TI 124) and the other is reduced to the totality of the same.

Autonomy is never simply given in being. Being is transitive; reflection requires work

(e.g., the reduction). Intermingling with the “everyday”, which is immediately “at hand”, is

not yet autonomy. Autonomy comes on the scene as power, conatus essendi, in the

reflective moment—an escape “from” the il y a not from being but to being, when what is

needed, Lévinas says, as an escape in the other direction.

1.5 Excursus: Being-with (I)

The subject thus far has been described as autonomic, egoistic, and solitary. Yet this

solitude is neither a factical nor an existential solitude. It is the solitude of reflection.

Heidegger has already demonstrated that Da-sein never stands “apart” from the world but,

31 Specifically, when Freud speaks of the narcissism and megalomania of primitives and children to believe they can control and master the world, he speaks of an “original libidinal cathexis of the ego” (see, e.g., “On Narcissism: An Introduction”).

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rather, is always already “entangled in the world in which it is and to interpret itself in terms

of that world by its reflected light …” (BT 18). Da-sein is always already “in the world,

which consists not only of Da-sein but also of mere things, tools, and others (BT 111).

Others “are like the very Da-sein which frees them [in being made distinct from nature

“objectively present”]—they are there, too, and there with it … The world of Da-sein is a with-

world. Being-in [the world] is being-with others” (BT 111-2). It is not that Da-sein merely

happens to discover that it is not alone: “the disclosedness of the Mitda-sein of others which

belongs to being-with means that the understanding of others already lies in the

understanding of being of Da-sein because its being is being-with” (BT 116). In other words,

Da-sein is always relational—ontologically one cannot be “alone” with a “free”

understanding of the world.

Because Da-sein is never alone in the world, “the they [das Man] is an existential and

belongs as a primordial phenomenon to the positive constitution of Da-sein … Da-sein is dispersed in the

they and must first find himself. … The they itself … articulates the referential context of

significance” (BT 121). Hence arises the problem of in/authenticity, and in this light,

morality, understood as an internalizing of norms, mores, and constraints, clearly falls into

the realm of inauthenticity. But the problem cannot simply be one of an unreflective moral

conscience; instead, Heidegger puts into question moral conscience as such: “the heart of the

issue is … whether the phenomenon of moral conscience opens one up to existence as a

whole”.32 Moral guilt conceals a more primordial guilt—the “thrownness” of Da-sein, i.e.,

recognizing that Da-sein is responsible for a world over to which it comes in media res.

Thus, “understanding the call means resolving to accept the anxiety which accompanies

32 Vogel 18. Below I generally follow Vogel’s analysis and interpretation as presenting the strongest case to my knowledge of an ethics in Being and Time. Critchley has also suggested that for “a sense of self that might begin to meet the claims of [true] ethical and political responsibility” one needs to leave Heidegger for Lévinas (“Prolegomena to Any Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity” 25).

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facing the uncertainty of Being-in-the-world”33 in authenticity (“Eigentlichkeit”,

“Eigentum”—Da-sein is always “my own”).

Yet authenticity cannot merely be a matter of will, for this would merely be a return

to Nietzsche. Nor can authenticity simply be a matter of rational legislation, for the

legislating subject proposes a dualism Heidegger resists since it posts a self standing above

and beyond a world which it can “interpret”.34 There are, rather, no neutral facts insofar as

understanding, for Heidegger, is an “attunement” in which Da-sein allows the world to be

disclosed to it such that Da-sein “is its possibilities as possibilities” (BT 134, 136).

Authenticity, rather, is the condition for treating others as ends-in-themselves insofar

as anxiety forces Da-sein to recognize itself as Being-in-the-world. Not only do we avoid an

existential solipsism but “Da-sein is individuated as being-in-the-world” (BT 176). This

movement toward individuation is double: it leads back to the world and to Others as such

(as well as to my own groundlessness and responsibility for that groundlessness): “as the

nonrelational possibility, death individualizes, but only, as the possibility not-to-be-bypassed,

in order to make Da-sein as being-with understand the potentialities-of-being of the others”

(BT 244). In understanding the potentialities of others, we see that others are not mere

things or tools but other Da-sein who face the same primordial guilt and anxiety that Da-

sein itself faces: “resoluteness brings the self right into its being together with things at hand,

actually taking care of them, and pushes it toward concerned being-with the others” (BT

274). Da-sein’s own care is not in opposition but rather the condition for caring for others.

This concern for the others [Fürsorge], as a mode of being-with [Mitsein], is a care

about the other’s existence itself.35 This means that Da-sein does not “leap in” for the others

33 Ibid 21. 34 Cf. ibid 43. 35 Cf. ibid 74.

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but rather respect that the others must also choose, as Da-sein has chosen, to “own up to”

its possibilities; instead of “leaping in”, Da-sein “leaps ahead”.36 In the most literal sense of

the word, then, authenticity creates the possibility for “responsibility”. Moral obligations

arise here from the ontological conditions that make it possible for me to respond at all to

the other’s alterity (recognizing the other as other).37 The relationship between ontology and

ethics, then, is “not that I am obligated to be the conscience of the others and leap ahead of

him, but that I am obligated to act toward him in ways consistent with the possibility of being his

conscience”.38

But can there be anything more than a negative obligation here, lest acts of charity

slip into the very “leaping in” prohibited by the act of “leaping ahead”? But to be “ahead” of

the Other, to respect the Other, do I not need to withdraw? And into what do I withdraw

except into myself, constraining my autonomy so that it ceases at the tip of the Other’s

nose? How can the “leaping ahead” of the Other become a duty except insofar as it becomes

that of a citizen in the liberal state? Being-with thus becomes a problem of civil association,

in which case we are in familiar (contractarian) territory:

such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an I … [Ontology] issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State (TI 46).

Here Lévinas articulates what Critchley calls the modern “motivational deficit” in ethics (ID

6-8) wherein the motivations of the citizen are cleaved from the motivations of the man

(and, indeed, these may even be opposed).

36 Ibid 81. 37 Vogel thus says that the other has a “commanding alterity” (Vogel 88). 38 Vogel 91.

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Hobbes had his own version of this problem, which has in a sense defined the

distinctive feature of all subsequent modern politics: “the laws of nature oblige in foro interno;

that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place: but in foro externo; that is, to the

putting them in act, not always”.39 However the sovereign is conceived within the

contractarian tradition (viz. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls), it is precisely this

gap between the external compulsion of the state and the natural liberty of the subject that

makes the state necessary insofar as politics is “the act of foreseeing war and of winning it by

every means … [which is] enjoined as the very exercise of reason” (TI 21)—i.e., the violence

at the heart of non-violence.40

Heidegger seems not to move past Kant when the latter wondered why it is that

“reason cannot render conceivable the absolute necessity of an unconditional practical law

… Reason cannot be blamed for not willing to explain this necessity by means of a condition

…”41 Hobbes had already grasped that the natural equality of mankind—that others are “like

me” or that I am always already “with others”—makes it possible not only for me to respect

the other42 but also is precisely the cause of diffidence.

The question for politics thus becomes: must politics be always grounded in

violence? Lévinas’ alternative to the Hobbesian solution43 will consist of two parts: the

39 Leviathan I.xv.36. 40 Rousseau presents a special difficulty insofar as his conception of the general will begins from the very observation that “to yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will—at the most an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?” (Social Contract I.3). The question of the general will, however, is that we must leave aside for the purposes of this essay. 41 Kant 62; cf. ID 33-7. 42 It is often overlooked that Hobbes acknowledges that there is a nobleness of character according to which men do not tread on their neighbors or break their covenants for pride of not having the need to do so (see, e.g., Leviathan I.xiv.31, I.xv.10). The necessity of the sovereign is due to the dearth of such nobility. As Oakeshott points out, however, this is not a deficiency of reason but of passion—what is lacking in most men is this specific sort of pride (see, e.g., “The moral life in the writings of Thomas Hobbes”). Although the laws of nature are discoverable by reason, Hobbes is equally attuned to the passionate motivation for the social contract and, arguably, is exempt from the Kantian problem to which Critchley objects. 43 Hughes has argued that Lévinas marks an improvement over Hobbes on account of the latter’s conception of individuals as radically self-interested such that “in Hobbes’s account of the state of nature, there is no

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rejection of the idea that others are “like me” and, consequently, the search for a politics

beyond violence of the state and also beyond the violence of being.

2. Traumatism of the Other

Lévinas praises the transcendental method and phenomenology because in

representation consists the very possibility of meaning, including enjoyment (e.g., TI 127).

Nothing that is illumined by the light of reason—so say the claims of modernity—can fail to

serve as a possible source of enjoyment or of meaning. Are we thus left, however, with a

choice between Kant and Nietzsche?

Here we are still caught, Lévinas says, within “drowsy intentions” (EN 83) that need

to be “awakened”:44 “representation is bound to a very different ‘intentionality’ … The way

representation is bound to a ‘wholly other’ intentionality is different from the way the object

is bound to the subject or the subject to history” (TI 126). On the one hand, this other

natural ground for cooperation other than fear of death; there is no ground for responsiveness to others since this sets up an irrational vulnerability; and there is no ground for moral responsibility since this is also irrational and impractical until there is a coercive political order with the power to enforce contracts” (Hughes 90). Unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of stock account of Hobbes that fails to notice that the moral life in Hobbes is nothing other than responsiveness to others (and that the political problem is how to make such responsiveness and association practical such that ethics cannot be reduced to politics [ibid]), that the “ground for moral responsibility” is the same ground as Hobbes gives everything else (i.e., a materialist ground, which translates here into the passions), and that Hobbes is no mere sociologist (although one would be hard-pressed to call him a “phenomenologist”) in his account of the state of nature (“Hobbes uses a thought experiment to arrive at the necessary conditions for order and security in civil society” [Hughes 82]). Hobbes is not without regret when he concludes that only the absolute sovereign can save us. More than this, however, he is keenly aware of the “motivational deficit” when it comes to the possibility of rational action (see previous note), which is precisely why he looks not to the “moral law within” (neither to what is later articulated as “moral sense” in Hutcheson) but to violence without. The question that Lévinas and Critchley pose vis-à-vis this violence, however, is not whether we can be rid of it, but how we can distance ourselves from it such that neither ethics nor politics are grounded in violence (this is the face for Lévinas and the concept of “interstitial distance” for Critchley). It is not simply that politics is the arena of “competing wills”. It is precisely the impassability of the Other that is the condition both of war and of peace. The question at hand is how this fact of impassability becomes a demand. 44 This language is predominantly found in “Philosophy and Awakening”. For example, Lévinas quotes Husserl: “Sleep, on close inspection … has meaning only in relation to wakefulness, and in itself bears the potentiality for awakening” (EN 86, emphasis added).

15

“intentionality” is conditioned45 in the divided subject (the “dividual”) in whose structure we

have deduced both an eternal return and repetition into a circle of immanence (the solitude

of being) but on that basis also the possibility of meaning (for existence) insofar as the

activity of the reflective subject in knowledge—the “correlation” of the subject and a

world—results in certainty to the extent to which the subject “recognizes and measures [its]

non-adequation in an adequate way and is thus called apodictic. Thus, in the adequation of

reflection, there is the completion and closing in upon itself of a knowledge that is both

knowledge and non-knowledge …” (EN 84).46 There is thus a double condition presented in

the subject: that of my presence to myself in which I am opaque to myself47 (in which I surpass

my own ability to represent my dark origin in the very work of constituting my own

duration) and the gap or space of inadequation (in other words, non-coincidence) through

which the unrepresentable and the inconceivable (i.e., the Other) comes to pierce my circle

of immanence.48

This entry is a shock, a “rupture”, a “trauma”:49

the Other Person tears me away from my hypostasis [i.e., my solitude from TO], from the here, at the heart of being or the center of the world in which, privileged, and in this sense primordial, I place myself. … Husserl’s theory of the Intersubjective Reduction describes the

45 One uses this word with hesitation insofar as the entry of the Other as other is precisely that which cannot be signified or anticipated by the subject. There is no reason why I could not enjoy a solitary world, which is why the Other comes as a shock and a surprise. 46 Is this not what happens in an exemplary way in Kant’s analytic of the sublime? 47 Narcissism requires this opacity insofar as it requires a doubling of the self, i.e., a subject split by the excess of its desire. 48 In a similar vein, Renaut has suggested: “how can [Lévinas] … confound autonomy and independence, failing to see that the idea of autonomy already contains the openness to the other? ... [T]he subject that gives itself its own law must, in order to rise to the level of this auto-nomy, have transcended the self-identity of the desiring subject (individuality) and opened itself up to the otherness of the human species. Transcendence-in-immanence is by definition what autonomy means” (Renaut 164-5). Aside from having reservations about Renaut’s Kantianism, this essay attempts to justify the spirit of Renaut’s claims by examining the early metaphysics of the il y a and the double origination of the subject (above). 49 Critchley (in “Das Ding” and briefly in ID) has noted that there is more than a surface resemblance between the traumatic entry of the Other in Lévinas and the Thing in Freud and Lacan, particularly insofar as the Thing (as the other person) is that which both is the first to be grasped and that which it is forbidden for me to grasp. What is more, however (although this particular homology must be deferred for another essay), what brings me out of myself in Lacan is precisely entry into the Symbolic, into language (viz. the “nom du père”), the fact of being addressed by a “saying” that troubles my relation to the Real.

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astonishing or traumatizing (trauma, not thauma) possibility of a sobering up in which the I, facing the Other, is freed from itself, and awakens from dogmatic slumber. … an awakening that remains a first movement toward the other, the traumatism of which is revealed in the Intersubjective Reduction, a traumatism secretly striking the very subjectivity of the subject[.](EN 86-7)

Some aspects of this trauma deserve mention. While heteronomy is here being opposed to

autonomy, the autonomy being interrupted is one that is itself the result of a prior work and

a prior trauma (see above). It is only for this reason that this trauma can be a threat to the

immanence of the ego (while at the same time being the source of its power, i.e., its power to

escape). My autonomous power is a “guilty” enjoyment that negotiates the shame and

impotence of existence and the impossibility of escape. If autonomy were not of such a

character, if the immanence of the ego did not lack the center of its dark origin, then

interiority would be impenetrable (cf. note forty-six).50

It is for this reason that the Other confronts me as an “ethical resistance” (TI 199)—

a demand that expresses itself in the form of an injunction: “Thou shalt not kill” or “here

you shall not pass”: “I can wish to kill only an existent absolutely independent, which

exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the very

power of power. The Other is the sole being I can wish to kill” (TI 198). Despite the

disagreements between Lévinas and Hobbes (cf. notes forty-three and forty-four), the

impassability of the Other consists in the resistance of what is other to my power. For

Hobbes this resistance represents the ultimate threat to that power insofar as what resists my

power is able to dissolve it. Without the transition into politics (for Hobbes) or ethics (for

Lévinas), we are in the “natural” condition of war.

50 Badiou’s criticism of Lévinas only makes sense if one supposes such an impenetrable interiority. While mentioning this dispute in the space of a footnote is gratuitously unjust, there is nothing in the formulation that “the Same, in effect, is not what is … but what comes to be” (Badiou 27) to which Lévinas would object in at least two senses: 1) in the sense described above insofar as the truth of sameness is the truth we come to in an alterity that is always already there in the multiplicity of existence and also 2) that ethics is an ethics “of” (Badiou 28) insofar as the ethical encounter names nothing other than an event which requires my fidelity either in love or in what I call below “metapolitics”.

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But this transition is difficult. Some commentators have noticed in Hobbes that

power is precisely that which cannot be transferred to the sovereign because it is constitutive

of the very being who must so relinquish it. So too the radicality of the ethical demand for

Lévinas is one that displaces subjective power: not by threatening to dissolve it, but by an

appeal to my power by a “solicitation that concerns me by its destitution and its Height” (TI

200). It is not merely that I do not kill the Other, but that I exist for the Other. The ethical

injunction is not merely “hands off!” but “help me!”

The eyes express either the freedom of the Other—insofar as the Other is

inconceivable—or destitution—insofar as the Other’s appeal cannot be refused. Yet this

seems to leave me in neither a state of mere freedom nor mere unfreedom. Of course I can

always kill the Other. If it were a matter of a struggle for life and death between competing

wills, the ethical demand would then become a dialectic. Instead of a dialectic, the ethical

demand is an aporia: the power of the Other over me is a powerlessness (destitution,

nudity51)—the Other can be killed, after all—in the face of my power. The ethical demand of

the Other is a demand that is approved by me: “ethical experience is, first and foremost, the

approval of a demand, a demand that demands approval” (ID 16). More specifically, this

demand is a prohibition52that is paradoxically neither uttered by the Other (this would be

sovereign force), nor by the subject (this would be auto-nomy). The prohibition consists in the

(non-)relation between the self and the Other—i.e., it is situated between self and Other:

“demand and approval arise at the same time …” (ID 18). The ethical demand takes the

form of a prohibition because of this circularity of approval and demand—it is not “free”

for me to approve of this demand insofar as the very structure of the demand demands

51 “The nakedness of the face is destituteness [la nudité du visage est dénûment]” (TI 75). 52 “The face is the fact that a being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative, and is thus outside all categories” (“Freedom and Command”, CP 21, emphasis added). One might even say this is a super-egoic prohibition.

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approval or one could also say “affirmation”—i.e., it is in the space of aporia that ethics

arises as possible.

What opens this aporia is not a negation. For Hobbes, what confronts me in the

Other is non-being—it is not my own non-being that is a threat to me but the approach of

non-being from outside. But—and this is the radicality of Lévinas’ metaphysics—the outside

is not non-being but an other from being (what is “otherwise than being”) that is “not yet”

being nor non-being. It is this sense in which the ethical encounter is an event (cf. notes fifty-

one and fifty-four) or what Lévinas terms an “anachronism”.53 To say “there is” a relation to

the Other (in ethics) must mean that “there will have been” such a relation:54

alterity occurs as a divergency and a past which no memory could resurrect as a present. And yet disturbance is possible only through an intervention. … In order that the tearing up from order not be ipso facto participation in order, this tearing-up, this ab-straction, must by a supreme anachronism, precede its entry into order; the past of the other must never have been present.55

The epiphany of the face is an event insofar as it is that which cannot be anticipated by the

subject (the excess and impossibility of the idea of infinity “in me”) and, more importantly,

that which exceeds the structure of the current situation. The anachronism of the face at the

same time recalls a past that has never been present and indicates the possibility of an

absolutely unique future. But here it is only a possibility: that future depends on what

happens in the wake of this event.56

53 In the very first sentence of Otherwise than Being Lévinas says that “if transcendence has meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of being … passes over to what is other than being” (OB 3). My suggestion is that it is possible to inflect the word “event” here in a more contemporary sense by analyzing the temporality of the event—the passing of being to an otherwise than being. 54 This relation is one of “religion” in the precise sense that it is the attempt to form a bond with what cannot be related, to what is separated, unconceivable: “we propose to call ‘religion’ the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (TI 40; cf. TI 80). It is the “relation without relation” that preserves the alterity of the other—i.e., the radical difference that opens the space for the event. 55 “Phenomenon and Enigma”, CP 68; cf. OB 24 where this past is called an “anarchical antiquity”. 56 The aspect of temporality is significant in what I am suggesting is the evental character of ethics: “the essential theme of my research is the deformalization of the notion of time. … Hence, what seems remarkable in Heidegger is precisely the fact of posing the question: What are the situations of circumstances characteristic of the concrete existence to which the passation of the past, the presentification of the present, and the futurition

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Not only is this anachronism distinguished from the synchrony of justice and the

state57 but also what Lévinas had previously called “diachrony”. Not only do we have the

intersection of two orders of time, but also the possibility of a new futurity: “does not

responsibility for the Other’s death … consist in understanding, in the finite being of the

mortal ego starting from the Other’s face, the meaning of a future beyond what happens to

me, beyond what, for an ego, is to-come?”58 It is not a to-come for me that can be anticipated:

this way of passing, disturbing the present without allowing itself to be invested by the arche

of consciousness, striating with its furrows the clarity of the ostensible, is what we have

called a trace. Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity without the

mediation of any principle, any ideality” (OB 100). Thus the “ana-chronism” of my

responsibility has two senses: the usual sense of anachronism according to which this

responsibility “will have been” anterior to my approval of the demand on the one hand and,

on the other, that the very order of time is interrupted with an anarchism.59

The evental character of ethical responsibility is also indicated by the temporality of

the saying and the said [le Dire et le Dit]. The non-identification of the saying with the said

requires the passing of the saying in the sense that something is being said and not that

something is said. What is said corresponds to the order of totality, synchrony, justice, and

meaning (signification) whereas the saying of the said is what signifies “beyond” the order of

the said and makes it possible (signifiance): “the otherwise than being is stated in a saying that

of the future—called ecstases—are essentially and originally attached?” (“The Other, Utopia, and Justice”, EN 232, former emphasis added). This concrete existence is nothing other than the face for Lévinas. 57 See, e.g., “Diachrony and Representation” (TO 106). 58 Ibid 116. So too: ethical responsibility is “an ecstasis toward a future which counts for the I and to which it is answerable: but a future without-me … which is no longer the to-come of a protended present [Husserl]” (“The Other, Utopia, and Justice”, EN 228). Durie draws attention to this aspect of the passing of the event of transcendence in saying (see below) by analyzing how this conception of diachrony is Lévinas’ extension of Husserl’s account of flow in time-consciousness. 59 “Anarchy is persecution” (OB 101); the ethical demand is “the command prior to institutions [i.e., the state of the situation]” (“Freedom and Command”, CP 21); cf. also “Humanism and An-archy”, CP 133.

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must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which it

already comes to signify but a being otherwise” (OB 7). But, Lévinas asks, “can this saying and

this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?” (ibid).60 The answer, of course,

is that we have instead a “temporal breaking point where being comes to pass” (OB 9) in the

act of saying in which this “saying” is transitive.

This saying is the promise made to the other: “here I am”.61 The “I” here is unique in

a strong sense: “in the saying of responsibility [the promise], which is an exposure to an

obligation for which no one could replace me, I am unique … Peace with the other is first of

all my business. … Not as a particular case of the universal, an ego-belonging to the concept

of ego, but as I, said in the first person—I, unique in my genus” (OB 138-9). As Lévinas had

said in Totality and Infinity, there is no third person in the ethical relation—this is its

uniqueness. But the “I” of this relation does not precede the relation (as an ego): the

subjectivity of this “I” consists in nothing other than its interpellation in the ethical relation.

This “I” is unique insofar as it is a “universal exception”. (1) It is exceptional in being the

unique I called to responsibility for the Other such that the “truth” of the event is not a

truth of knowledge that could be given by a third person (from within the totality of being).

(2) The truth of the ethical event is one that takes place between the I and the Other—it is

declared not by the I (this would be autonomy) nor by the Other (this would be force) but in

the response to this aporia of the destitution of the Other—a destitution that does not call

60 Expression “consists, prior to any participation in a common content through understanding [in the order of the said], in instituting sociality through a relationship that is, consequently, irreducible to understanding” (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” EN 7, emphasis added). Blanchot also points out that “my responsibility for the Other … can only be marked by a change in the status of “me,” a change in time and perhaps in language” and that “it is in friendship that I can respond” (Blanchot 25, 27; former emphasis added). The politics of friendship must be reserved for another essay, however. 61 Marion will say that the temporality of this saying is not only in the oath “here I am” (which Lévinas himself invokes in EI 97) but “here I am—and here I shall remain”.

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for not just “my” truth but the truth—a universal truth beyond the universality of consent or

knowledge.62

The epiphany of the face is evental in the sense in which I am constituted as a subject

by the call of the Other. I do not seek the face—it is revealed and I am “interpellated” by the

face:

responsibility, the signification which is non-indifference, goes one way, from me to the other. In the saying of responsibility, which is an exposure to an obligation for which no one could replace me, I am unique. Peace with the other is first of all my business. The non-indifference, the saying, the responsibility, the approach, is the disengaging of the unique one responsible, me. … Not as a particular case of the universal, an ego belonging to the concept of ego, but as I, said in the first person—I, unique in my genus. … Signification as proximity is thus the latent birth of the subject. … It is an anachronous birth, prior to its own present, a non-beginning, an anarchy (OB 138-9).

In short, the subject of ethical responsibility does not pre-exist this responsibility. The

conatus essendi of the autonomous subject is interrupted (traumatized) by a passio essendi

with respect to the impassibility of the Other.63 Unlike the original darkness of autonomy,

the an-archy of the heteronymous Other opens something absolutely new, something

“otherwise than being”.64

3. Being-“with” (II): Anarchic Metapolitics

62 Cf. Lévinas’ comments on love : “to love is to exist as though the lover and the beloved were alone in the world. … The society formed by love is a dual society, a society of solitudes, excluding universality” (“The Ego and the Totality”, CP 31). 63 “The natural conatus essendi of a sovereign Self is questioned in the presence of the face of the other …” (“From the One to the Other”, EN 150). So too: “in a responsibility always more ancient than the conatus of substance, more ancient than beginnings and principles, in the an-archical, the ego come back to itself, responsible for the other, is a hostage for everyone, substituted for all …” (“Humanism and An-archy”, CP 138). And again: “the position of the [ethical] subject is a deposition, not a conatus essendi. It is from the first a substitution by a hostage expiating for the violence of the persecution itself. … The assumption of the suffering and the fault of another nowise goes beyond the passivity: it is a passion [a passio essendi]” (OB 127-8). 64 Responding to Critchley, Peter Hallward raises an important objection to this particular reading of Lévinasian ethics as an “event” in Badiou’s sense (an objection to which a full response would require another essay): “an event does not make a demand on your, precisely because you cannot experience it or cannot be receptive to it. The exposure of inconsistency does not make a demand—it is inconsistent, it is unthinkable, it has no imperative, it cannot address you even, not strictly speaking. So that is why … Badiou refuses an inaugural passivity or sensitivity or receptivity to some kind of appeal or demand or call from the other or the infinite or the beyond” (Critchley et al, “Fault Lines”, 299).

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The event of the epiphany of the face has a dual aspect. On the one hand, there is

the ethical responsibility of the one for the Other, which is the familiar face of Emmanuel

Lévinas. On the other hand, at the same time and for the same reason, there is the anarchic

disturbance of politics or, rather, to distinguish this aspect of the event from what Lévinas

usually calls “politics” (i.e., in the order of justice and juridical discourse), we might say there

is the possibility of an anarchic metapolitics.65

The implication of ethics and politics is indicated explicitly: “the third party looks at

me in the eyes of the Other … the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity … ” (TI 213,

emphasis added; cf. another crucial text in OB 157-162). In the third party, there are two

possible relations between ethics and politics: either politics is derived from ethics (politics

considered as the operation of reason for the institution of justice, in which case Lévinas

simply defers to conventional liberal political theory)66 or ethics and politics “coexist in

tension with each other, each with the capacity to question the other”.67

The difficulty of deriving politics from ethics arises from the fact that the subject is

always equally and equiprimordially divided between the two in that the Other that calls me

to ethical responsibility is the same Other to whom I must administer justice (i.e., I cannot be

65 I follow Abensour’s use of this term, especially his exposition of the prefix meta- as a “turning”: in this case, “metapolitics is a departure from politics, a move away from the particular being that is politics in order to go towards an Other that would be metapolitics” (Abensour, “An-archy between Meta-politics and Politics” 2). 66 Näsström hass argued for a conception of Lévinasian politics as that which limits this responsivity to the Other—i.e., politics as the limitation of ethics. Lévinas occasionally gives some indication of this way of viewing the State: “[T]here is a limit to the state. Whereas in Hobbes’ vision—in which the state emerges not from the limitation of charity, but from the limitation of violence—one cannot set a limit on the state” (“Philosophy, Justice, and Love”, EN 105). For Näsström, “if we associate freedom with the responsive subject, the antonym of freedom can neither be described as interference by an equal or dominating other. The antonym of freedom should rather be seen as interference by the alterity of the other. The act of freedom is emancipation from the an-archical subjection to the other” (Näsström 167). Thus, for example, Näsström argues that the welfare state is one way in which my responsivity to the Other is limited by channeling it through the distributive state (ibid 195). While Näsström compellingly shifts the meaning of standard liberal discourse on freedom and legitimacy in the “an-archical state”, she nevertheless remains within the limitations of a conception of politics that derives the state from ethics. The problem with such a limitation is that it is unable to think the event of politics or to think politics beyond the terms of the state-form. 67 Bernasconi, “The Third Party” 77. Cf. Simmons 69-70 and Ciaramelli 130-2. I have drawn much from this latter essay, which deserves separate treatment but, unfortunately, not at this time.

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committed to others to the exclusion of the Other) on the one hand; but, on the other, the

third party prevents my responsibility for the Other from excluding others: “in the measure

that the face of the Other moves in the form of the We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws,

which are the source of universality” (TI 300; cf. EI 89-90).

The subject is thus divided between ethics and politics. Lévinas is conscious of and

maintains this tension, refusing to transform one into the other. Ethics does not end in

politics (in the State):

the interhuman perspective can subsist, but can also be lost, in the political order of the City where the Law establishes mutual obligations between citizens. The interhuman, properly speaking, lies in a non-indifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another, but before the reciprocity of this responsibility, which will be inscribed in impersonal laws, comes to be superimposed on the pure altruism of this responsibility inscribed in the ethical position of the I qua I. It is prior to any contract that would specify precisely the moment of reciprocity …The order of politics … that inaugurates the “social contract” is neither the sufficient condition nor the necessary outcome of ethics.68

On the one hand, “community arises from doing the work of justice together” in the State;69

on the other, prior to the work of justice there is what Lévinas identifies as a more “original”

right than the rights of man: “rights that, independently of any conferral, express the alterity or

absolute of every person, the suspension of all reference: a violent tearing loose from the

determining order of nature and the social structure in which each of us is already involved

…”70

Lévinas insists that we cannot consider “humanity” as a genus:

one can appear scandalized by this utopian and, for an I, inhuman conception. But the humanity of the human—the true life—is absent. … To be human means to live as if one were not a being among beings. As if, through human spirituality, the categories of being inverted into an “otherwise than being”. Not only into a “being-otherwise”; being otherwise is still being (EI 100).

68 “Useless Suffering”, EI 100, latter emphasis added; cf. EI 94. 69 Bernasconi, “The Third Party” 79. 70 “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other”, Outside the Subject 117. So too: “the Rights of Man are originally the rights of the other man, and … they express, beyond the burgeoning of identities in their own identity and their instinct for free perseverance, the for-the-other of the social, of the for-the-stranger …” (“The Rights of the Other Man”, Alterity and Transcendence 149).

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Lévinas shares with others a suspicion of bureaucratic fascism according to which mankind

might become “standing reserve”, but is also skeptical of forms of being-with that reduce

individuals under the category of a genus, thus equalizing and leveling the uniqueness71 of

each.72 The danger of the state is precisely its impersonality—in commerce and justice every

element is equal,73 interchangeable (cf. TI 226, 298). But the bureaucrat or the technician

cannot—and even should not, according to many liberal theorists—see the tears of the

Other.74 The metapolitical question, therefore, is: can there be a form of being-with that does

not fall prey to this particular danger?75

71 “…this non-in-difference with regard to the difference or the otherness of the other … is not a simple failure of objectification, but precisely a doing justice to the difference of the other person which … is not a formal, reciprocal, and insufficient otherness within the multiplicity of individuals of a genus, but an otherness of the unique, exterior to all genus, transcending all genus” (“Uniqueness”, EN 194). 72 Referring back to Heidegger’s notion of being-with, for Lévinas, as Greisch has suggested, the “for” of Fürsorge is more originary than the “with” of Mitsein. So too Lévinas is suspicious of Heidegger’s “watchfulness” over Being (even if does not explicitly name him): “even if the existence of man, his being-there, consisted in existing in view of this very existence, it is to the guardianship or the illumination, or the occultation or the forgetting, of being which is not a being that this existence is devoted—all these movements and turns raise up and situate the human” (“Humanism and An-archy”, CP 129). 73 Cf. Badiou and Rancière who would say that equality is the presupposition of politics and cannot be its end. 74 Cf. “Transcendence and Height”, Basic Philosophical Writings 23 and Alford 11. So too Critchley notes that “justice must be informed by proximity; that is to say, the equality and symmetry of the relations between citizens must be interrupted by the inequality and asymmetry of the ethical relation. … The anarchic, pre-original relation to the Other needs to be supplemented by the measure of the arche: of principles, beginnings, and origins. Ethical subjectivity needs to be shown in its political role of ‘citizen’ …” (The Ethics of Deconstruction 233-4). 75 There is also the political sense in which the liberal state-form of democracy is precisely that set of conditions in which the State questions itself. As Lévinas says, “justice is not the last word; within justice, we seek a better justice. That is the liberal state” (“The Paradox of Morality”, Wright et al 175). There is a sense in which ethics can serve the intra-political function of state criticism such that “la légitimité d’un l’État … ne repose donc pas, pour le philosophe, sur un acte de liberté mais sur le respect de la fraternité et de l’égalité, de la justice et de la paix. … Un État qui interdit cette fraternité ou la rend impossible perd donc toute légitimité. Un État qui se passe de visages et se laisse dominer par ses propres nécessités, comme si son centre de gravité reposait en lui-même, atteste de sa violence et de son inhumanité, c'est à bon droit que les hommes luttent contre lui.” (Chalier 155). Such a striving and the entire discourse of legitimacy requires, à la Critchley, not an intra-political motivation but a metapolitical one. “When Lévinas says that [anarchical goodness can disturb the State in a radical way] … it is an indication that the transcendence of the state cannot rely on the logic the state relies on. The ethical does not merely interrupt the political in order to deflate its pretensions to being the ultimate wisdom (Bernasconi); it ‘radically disturbs’ the state, always pushing beyond the state, beyond ‘rational peace,’ pushing with patient urgency” (Horowitz 42). What Horowitz calls “hyperpolitics” I, following Badiou, call “metapolitics”. So too Watson makes some sketches toward exploring at least a resemblance between the metapolitical conceived in this way and Arendt’s notion of a “miracle”: “‘becoming who we are’ requires interruptions of ‘what we have been made into.’ It is the totally non-natural character of political space that makes political events the human creation par excellence” (Watson 120).

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The one whom I am with, in the first sense, is my “neighbor” (within the State).

Levinas refigures this term when he asks: in the ethical relation, “across the unbreakable

chain of significations … was there not an expression, a face facing and interpellating …

cutting the threads of the context? Did not a neighbor approach?”76 In a note to this sentence,

Lévinas says that he had previously refused this term, precisely because it “seemed to us to

suggest community by neighboring”.77 If I am sitting in a crowded subway car, I am “with”

others who are my neighbors in a banal sense, e.g., under a genus or (even worse) a

demographic. I shamefully turn my eyes away when someone else’s eyes meet mine. But,

Lévinas asks, what would happen if I instead welcomed the Other: “now we retain in it [the

term “neighbor”] the abruptness of the disturbance which characterizes a neighbor

inasmuch as he is the first one to come along”?78 The neighbor approaches me as one with

whom I was not, insofar as I did not welcome79 him. The others were my neighbors under

simply the brute fact of being. My being-with the neighbor as an ethical subject is, rather,

evental: “the community with him begins in my obligation to him. … Consciousness is not

interposed between me and the neighbor; or, at least, it arises only on the ground of this antecedent

relationship of obsession …” (OB 87, emphasis added).80 This “original right” of the neighbor

precedes the rights of the (social) contract (cf. OB 88-9) by which I am obligated to the

neighbor in justice and the discourse of equality (of the “multipliable”).

76 “Phenomenon and Enigma”, CP 64, emphasis added. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid, emphasis added. So too, in the relationship with a neighbor “in which before being an individuation of the genus man, a rational animal, a free will, or any essence whatever, he [the neighbor] is the persecuted one for whom I am responsible to the point of being a hostage for him … I am then called upon in my uniqueness as someone for whom no one else can substitute himself” (OB 59). 79 Welcome in what Derrida calls “hospitality”. As Lévinas says: “to be reduced to having recourse to me is the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbor. It is incumbent on me” (OB 91). 80 So too: “consciousness is born as the presence of the third party in the proximity of the one to the other, and thus it is to the extent that it proceeds from it that it can become dis-inter-estedness” (“Peace and Proximity”, Alterity and Transcendence 144).

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In the first sense, being-with is structured by the State. The “anarchism” of politics

(i.e., metapolitics), on the other hand, is not—as in some other forms of (vulgar)

anarchism—one that would have done with the State. The problem, rather, is in the

possibility of creating an “interstitial distance”: working within the State, independently of

and sometimes even against the State81 (e.g., ID 112, 117).82 It is in this sense that the scene of

politics is an event (just as ethical responsibility was seen to be an event) or, in other words,

that the other side of the ethical event is anarchic metapolitics. Strictly speaking, metapolitics

“is not” or cannot be said to “take place”: anarchy cannot become a principle; rather,

“proto-political, an-archy opens the way beyond politics and ontology” (i.e., not politics itself

but the “scene” of politics).83 The neighbor is the “first one” to approach insofar as the

relation thus instituted is one that was not given by the State and is first insofar as the Other is

not only the Other.

81 “A state extending beyond the state. Beyond justice, an imperious reminder of all that must be added to its necessary harshness [i.e., violence], and that springs from the human uniqueness in each of the citizens gathered in the nation, from resources that cannot be deduced, nor reduced to the generalities of a legislation” (“Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other”, EN 203). Lévinas acknowledges that it is part of the functioning of the liberal state to question and limit itself (e.g., EN 205), but there are moments when Lévinas suggests that we cannot rest content with the state-form—e.g., he says we need “a rebellion against injustice that begins once order begins …” (“Ideology and idealism”, The Lévinas Reader 242) even as elsewhere he insists in the necessity of the state: the state’s “necessity is ethical—indeed, it’s an old ethical idea which commands us precisely to defend our neighbors. My people and my kin are still my neighbors” (“Ethics and politics”, The Lévinas Reader 292). Lévinas explicitly links his belief in the necessity of the state to his Zionism (ibid), which makes many commentators uneasy. Even if this is so, Lévinas says that “unfortunately for ethics, politics has its own justification” (ibid) and that “there is a direct contradiction between ethics and politics” (ibid). The suggestion being made in this essay is that such need not be so even from within the direction indicated in Lévinas’ writing. 82 In a similar sense, Lévinas speaks of the state as the structure of intelligibility of a situation or system, and that “we can distinguish in the movement from the one to the other [i.e., the ethical relation] a hesitation, a time, the need for an effort, for good or bad luck, for the structures to be packed in. It is through this event, this becoming open, in the intelligible itself that we can understand the subjectivity that would here be wholly conceived out of the intelligibility of being” (OB 133, emphases added; cf. TI 182-3: “the return to univocal being from the world of signs and symbols proper to phenomenal existence does not consist in being integrated into a whole … There the independence of the separated being is lost, unrecognized, and oppressed.”). As Critchley has suggested, it is precisely this hesitation, this hiatus, between ethics and politics that makes possible an an-archic (meta)politics that is not simply the arbitrary result of an sovereign will (see Critchley, “Five Problems”, which sketches what is elaborated more fully in Infinitely Demanding), and which indicates the possibility (“with good or bad luck”) of a restructuring of the state, not out of “compassion”—which would be the result of the same sovereign will (see e.g., OB 1323)—but this responsiveness and responsibility to the Other qua other. 83 Abensour, “An-archy between Meta-politics and Politics” 6.

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The scene of politics is occupied by the third (see note two). Politics happens as

justice in which the third party measures what is incommensurable and institutes a rational

State of intelligibility and discourse by constituting relations of equality under the sign of

humanity. Yet at the same time, justice “derives from an anarchic signification of proximity”

(OB 81). Without this original relation of proximity and the “original right” of the Other,

there is nothing to prevent the complete totalitarianism of the State (cf. TI 208). Proximity is

a disturbance in the totality of the State insofar as “it comes to be without the mediation of

ideality or of a principle that takes the place of an ideality or of an arche”.84 This is

accomplished through the notion of illeity: “while being designates a community, without

any possible dissidence ... in the trace of illeity, in the enigma, the synchronism falls out of

tune, the totality is transcended in another time”.85 On the one hand, illeity is an interruption

in the state, but it is also and at the same time an interruption of the ethical relation: it is the

withdrawal or “subtraction” of the infinite from the relation:

this detour at a face and this detour from this detour in the enigma of a trace we have called illeity. … [I]t indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me. … The illeity in the beyond-being is the fact that its coming toward me is a departure which lets me accomplish a movement toward a neighbor. (OB 12-3)

It is this withdrawal both that prevents me ever from “satisfying” my responsibility for the

Other and, within this infinite and interminable responsibility, that which is “an incessant

correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at … it is only thanks

84 Ibid 8. 85 “Phenomenon and Enigma”, CP 71. It is not merely a coincidence of language that Lévinas uses the concept of “illeity” to account for this way in which the relationship with the Other is contextualized in politics: just as it was the impersonality of the “il” of the il y a that signified the appearance of the I qua rational subject, so too the third person is paradoxically the universal exceptionality of a uniqueness to which I emerge as a subject by fidelity to the demand of responsibility (although it is true that there is another sense of uniqueness that I am in enjoyment, in ipseity—see TI 118). I bracket for now the fact that “illeité” is also Lévinas’ term for the absoluteness of the divine; in other words, I leave the question of the theological-political for another time.

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to God that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the

others …” (OB 158).86

Paradoxically, the separation of proximity provides the basis of a being-with that is

nothing other than a resistance against the State:

the space of the polis is not an enclosed or immanent structure, but rather a multiplication of spaces, a structure of repeated interruptions, in which the social totality is breached by the force of ethical transcendence. … Any attempt to bring closure to the social is continually denied by the non-totalizable relation to the Other. Social space is an infinite splintering, or fragmentation, of space into spaces in which there is consequently a multiplication of political possibilities [and political relations of being-with].87

This is a being-with that is “not yet”, where a space is opened in being (be-ing) not as a

negation or a nothingness88 but as the metapolitical construction of a new relation—not as a

form of association between given subjects in their autonomy but between subjects who are

constituted by the relation itself; not a return89 to the origin (see above) but in an opening to

a new future.90

86 “Meaning and justice consist in the interruption of reconciliation, an interruption and awakening that is never completed but which remains conscious to the other voice which ‘drowns out or tears’ not only the first voice, but every subsequent voice that would resonate within it. This is the ‘other voice’ that may be the voice of the other but may also be the voice of the third or lleity that will interrupt even the voice of the other in the name of justice” (Caygill 149-50). 87 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction 238. 88 Not, that is, the “nothingness at the heart of being” that characterizes human freedom for Sartre. 89 “To understand intelligibility does not consist in going back to the beginning. There was a time irreducible to presence, an absolute unrepresentable past” (OB 122). As suggested above, however, even in my own freedom there is no absolute past. 90 “Anarchy should not seek to mirror the archic sovereignty that it undermines. That is, it should not seek to set itself up as the new hegemonic principle of political organization, but remain the negation of totality and not the affirmation of a new totality. Anarchy is a radical disturbance of the state (of the situation), a disruption of the state’s attempt top set itself up or erect itself into a whole (s’ériger en Tout) [whatever ideological forms this may take, including the dogmas of autonomy and community]. … We might say that ethical anarchy is the experience of the multiple singularities of the encounter with others that defines the experience of sociality” (ID 122-3). There are intimations of the evental, metapolitical character of the ethical relation in Critchley’s work even before Infinitely Demanding. For example, Critchley says that “politics … or the articulation of democracy to come [Derrida], is the task of political invention in relation to the other’s decision in me. Non-foundationally, but non-arbitrarily. But how does one do this exactly? Perhaps in the following way: each decision is necessarily different, each time I decide I have to invent a new rule, a new norm, which must be absolutely singular in relation to the other’s infinite demand made on me and the finite context within which this demand arises. … [T]he infinite and incalculable ethical demand of deconstruction … is the pre-political [metapolitical] opening of the political, and in this sense it is the anarchic source of the political arche …” (Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity 277, 282).

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The metapolitical event “is not”91—it is not yet, it is “to come”, not given under the

current (state of the) situation. What Lévinas proposes instead is the possibility of a radical

politics in radical difference or, better, radical alterity. Lévinas “prophesizes” an escape from

what is toward a new futurity—the “escape” to which Lévinas had gestured from among his

earliest works is found in the ethical event whose concrete existence is manifested in the

face. From Lévinas’ early attack on a notion of “elemental” freedom and his commitment to

a Bergsonian conception of freedom as spontaneity,92 the paradoxical unfreedom of ethical

responsibility—in which I am “hostage” to the Other—contains the possibility of a new

kind of freedom in the metapolitical event. This is the freedom of a new thinking of politics

beyond the redistributive state and beyond juridical discourse:93 not con- but dis-sensus

“articulated around the experience of the ethical demand, the exorbitant demand at the heart

of my subjectivity that defines that subjectivity by dividing it and opening it to otherness”

(ID 130): to the oppressed, “the widow, the orphan, the stranger”, the invisible (Rancière),

the ones who cannot speak (Lyotard)—the others who are forgotten under the usual

arch(a)ic ideologies of freedom challenged by Lévinas’ persistently an-archic thinking.

List of Abbreviations BT Heidegger, Being and Time CP Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers

91 “Not only can the beyond being not be positively state in the terms of being, the relation between the beyond being and being cannot be stated in such terms. Analogously, the relation between the ethical and the political cannot be stated in the terms of being” (Horowitz 37). 92 See Caygill 14-6. As a suggestion, it is worth noting that Bergson always spoke of freedom and creation in terms of time (especially in Time and Free Will); so too Lévinas uses the language of “multiplicity” in separation: “the dimension of height from which the Metaphysical comes to the Metaphysician indicates a sort of non-homogeneity of space, such that a radical multiplicity, distinct from numerical multiplicity, can here be produced. … For a multiplicity to be maintained, there must be produced in it the subjectivity that could not seek congruence with the being in which it is produced. … Multiplicity therefore implies an objectivity posited in the impossibility of total reflection, in the impossibility of conjoining the I and the non-I in a whole. … Totality absorbs the multiplicity of beings, which peace implies” (TI 220-2). 93 Even beyond the politics of recognition (Fraser) insofar as the problem of ethics is not the re-cognition of the other but the very cognition of what is not cognizable under either any genus or differentia.

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DF Lévinas, Difficult Freedom E Lévinas, On Escape EE Lévinas, Existence and Existents EI Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity EN Lévinas, Entre Nous ID Critchley, Infinitely Demanding OB Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being TI Lévinas, Totality and Infinity TO Lévinas, Time and the Other References and Selected Bibliography Abensour, Miguel. “An-archy between Meta-politics and Politics”. Parallax. Vol. 8, No. 3. 2002. ---. La démocratie contre l’État: Marx et le moment machiavélien. (Paris: PUF, 1997). ---. “Le Mal elemental” in Lévinas (1997). Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward. (London: Verso, 2001). Bankovsky, Miriam. “Derrida Brings Lévinas to Kant: the Welcome, Ethics, and Cosmopolitan Law”. Philosophy Today. Vol. 49, No. 2. Summer 2002. Bernasconi, Robert. “Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Lévinas’ Political Messianism”. Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 28. 1998. ---. “The Third Party. Lévinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Vol. 30, No. 1. January 1999. Bernasconi, Robert and Stacy Keltner. “Emmanuel Lévinas: the Phenomenology of Sociality and the Ethics of Alterity”. Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, ed. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). Bergo, Bettina. Lévinas Between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. (Lincoln: UNP, 1995). Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. (New York: Fordham UP, 2005). Cage, John. Silence. (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961). Caygill, Howard. Lévinas and the Political. (London: Routledge, 2002). Chalier, Catherine. Lévinas l’utopie de l’humain. (Paris: Editioins Albin Michel, 1993). Chanter, Tina. “Neither Materialism nor Idealism: Lévinas’s Third Way”. Postmodernism and the Holocuast, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. (Amsterdam: Rodops, 1998). Ciaramelli, Fabio. “The Circle of the Origin”. Reinterpreting the Political: Continental Philosophy and Political Theory, ed. Lemore Langsdorf et al. (Albany: SUNY, 1998). Critchley, Simon. “Das Ding: Lacan and Lévinas”. Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 28. 1998. ---. “Demanding Approval: On the ethics of Alain Badiou”. Radical Philosophy. Vol. 100. March/April 2000. ---. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Lévinas. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). ---. Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity. (London: Verso, 1999). ---. “Five Problems in Lévinas’ View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them”. Political Theory. Vol. 32, No. 2. April 2004. ---. Infinitely Demanding. (London: Verso, 2007). ---. “Metaphysics in the Dark: A Response to Richard Roty and Ernesto Laclau”. Political Theory. Vol. 26, No. 6. December 1998. ---. “The Need for Fiction in Poetry and Politics”. Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. Vol. 4,

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Lemore Langsdorf et al. (Albany: SUNY, 1998). Watson, James R. “Lévinas’s Substitutions and Arendt’s Concept of the Political: Becoming The Plurality Who We Are”. Postmodernism and the Holocuast, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. (Amsterdam: Rodops, 1998). Wright, Tamra et al. “The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Lévinas:. The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. (London: Routledge, 1988).