Abstract
War, as a "state of exception", deeply influenced Levinas's life and presents significant challenges to the core principles of his ethical metaphysics. Focusing on the Preface of Totality and infinity (TI), the sole extended reflection on war in Levinas's work, this analysis critically explores three central questions posed by war that Levinas’s ethical metaphysics somehow must account for.
In the first instance, the Preface of TI raises a crucial issue: Does war, by suspending rather than opposing ethical relations, render ethics powerless? In other words, what becomes of our infinite responsibility even for the Other’s faults and crimes when one finds oneself in deadly combat with the enemy? Is the Other that I am responsible for the same Other as the one I meet on the battleground? While TI starts with the question of war, Levinas concludes TI with a conceptualisation of uppercase Peace that is more fundamental than the kind of temporary peace agreements negotiated through political rationalisation. The preface of TI, in which war takes centre stage, was written after the conclusion, and the philosophical labour performed in the body of TI might be understood as the path or journey from war to peace – an extended argument that not only are we not duped by morality, but in fact morality rather than ontology or epistemology represents humanity’s only chance of not being duped. It is morality that is the foundation of Peace – a peace that proceeds from the I. This is the extraordinary ethical relation of an I that maintains itself yet exists without egoism in a relationship with an Other that remains beyond the reach of compromise, knowledge and rational negotiation. The question remains how this Peace withstands the worst kind of violence – the violence of war.
In the second instance, this analysis examines the concept of a just war: If war inherently involves a moral suspension, what normative framework can justify calling a war just? In other words, if war temporarily suspends the validity and function of ethics, what justifies Levinas’s defence of the possibility of a just war? These questions become all the more confounding in light of the fact that Levinas considers war to be “useless suffering”. Levinas’s provision for the possibility of a just war is based on his contention that in some instances war is unavoidable when the wellbeing of my neighbour is threatened. The question is who qualifies as my neighbour, since in reality, contrary to Levinas’s denial, even the Enemy is an Other, a Neighbour – even aggressors have faces, and I am responsible even for them. On the one hand it is, more often than not, very difficult to determine who the guilty party is, since in times of war all combatants assume the role of victim and assailant in turn. On the other hand, Levinas insists that the I is responsible even for the Other’s sins.
To complicate matters even further, there is a constant slippage of conceptual registers in Levinas’s argument: He does not speak of war simply in terms of deadly combat, but also speaks of uppercase War, that is, the brutality of the very nature of Being itself. One might arguably contend that the useless and arbitrary but persistent suffering characterising the human condition can be ascribed to the very being of Being as War. According to Levinas, the only thing that remains after theodicy capable of salvaging meaning in the face of useless suffering is the “interhuman order”. Here Levinas argues that from the interhuman perspective suffering may be meaningful in me while useless in the Other. The useless suffering of the Other finds its meaning in the way in which it calls the I forth to rise to the occasion of his/her true reason for being: facing up to the responsibility we have for the very suffering of another. As in Just War Theory, Levinas’s justification of a just war between the I and the Other hinges, then, on a political consideration that belongs to the ontological order of knowledge and judgement. However, the ontological order is superseded by the ethical order in which the interhuman relationship remains intact. Ethics turns the useless suffering of war into non-useless suffering through the responsibility it imposes on all other Others to show compassion towards the suffering of the I and the Other embroiled in war.
This brings us, in the third instance, to the tension between ethics and politics in Levinas’s thought: The judgement necessary to label a war as just suggests that the foundational ethical relationship existing before ontology and epistemology cannot be entirely separated from the political considerations involved in the concrete world that emerges from a war-like existence that somehow attempts to establish law and order and ensure justice. How can Levinas's philosophy reconcile this apparent disconnect between ethics and politics or the divide between ethics and justice? Justice is the necessary thought of deciding what constitutes ethical action when the I is confronted with his/her responsibility not only towards a single Other but towards many others. Justice marks the transition from ethics to politics. It is the difficulty of accounting for how exactly the face-to-face is incarnated in political justice, legality, the state, and so on. Levinas contends that the interhuman perspective can subsist but also be lost in the political order in which the Law establishes mutual obligations between citizens. The interhuman relationship or ethic that lies in a responsibility of one for another nevertheless precedes the political order. The political order is then superimposed on the ethical order and complicates the asymmetry of the ethical I’s responsibility towards the Other, because it calls for the reciprocity of this responsibility, which is inscribed in impersonal laws. According to Levinas the order of politics, which institutes the “social contract”, is neither the sufficient condition of ethics – as Hobbes thought – nor the necessary outcome of ethics. The ethical relationship between the I and the Other therefore does not stand in a causal relationship to the political relationship between the I and all the other Others. While Levinas insists that the ethical I is distinct from the political and prepolitical I, the problem of evil reminds us again that the humanity of ethics is not an unfaltering state but a struggle against the inhumanity of evil inscribed in the very fibre of pure Being that reveals itself as war. The ethical I, then, it would seem, cannot maintain its insularity from the political I.
The article concludes that the tensions between concepts like Totality/Infinity, War/Peace, and Politics/Ethics cannot be resolved with a simple binary framework. Instead, they are deeply interconnected in a Derridean "double-bind", where humanity's ethical dimension is not a fixed state but an ongoing struggle against the inhumanity represented by Totality, War, Politics and even, at times, "Justice". The ongoing debates over the justice or injustice of the Israel/Palestine conflict underscore how "Justice" often risks losing its ethical grounding in distinguishing between Neighbour and Enemy.
Keywords: ethics; infinity; justice; just war; Emmanuel Levinas; morality; peace; politics; totality; war
- This article’s featured image was created by Polina Tankilevitch and obtained from Pexels.