Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to critically trace the evolution of ethical subjectivity and the concomitant notion of ethical agency in the major works of Levinas spanning a period of more than four decades to cast some light on certain questions it raises. Levinas announces his trans-phenomenological quest in an early programmatic essay titled De l’évasion (1935), but truly succeeds in thinking “otherwise than Being or beyond essence” only in his second magnum opus bearing the same name, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence published in 1974. In the course of this journey he moves from the self to the Other, from the activity of economic “auto-personification” to the radical passivity of the Other-invoked ethical subject. He moves from the enjoyment of living of/from provisional alterity in the world to the traumatisation of the ethical encounter with absolute Alterity, the trace of Infinity inscribed in the finite.
The major themes recur again and again. and in the iterability of that repetition subjectivity is pushed ever further from the unity of apperception and intentionality as the Other is inscribed in a proximity so close it succeeds in altering the very immanence of the subject in her innermost identity. Here responsibility becomes a traumatisation of the ego in which the subject is cored out as if enucleated, deposed from its kingdom of identity and substance. It is here that Levinas introduces the radically passive ethical agent as opposed to the free, rational, autonomous “I think”. It is precisely in the excess of passivity that ethical agency becomes possible, the passivity of a trauma through which the idea of the Infinite will-always-already-have-been placed in the finite.
Accordingly, in my retracing of the development of Levinas’s thinking I proceed by way of a problematisation of a pivotal transition in Levinas’s thought: from the ethical priority and import Levinas accords to the self and her existential practices of self-concern in his first three major works to the subsequent ethical devaluation of the self and complete disqualification of any existential base in the world in Autrement qu’être (AE). It is a disqualification that entails the thoroughgoing deposition of the self as “individuated”, “auto-personified”, and “substantialized” – the self that is self-formed in the happiness of enjoyment (cf. TI, 147/120). The jouissance and joie de vivre of Totalité et Infini (TI) dissolve in the face of the devastatingly traumatic encounter with the Other in AE. The self’s ethical conversion announces “accusation”, “persecution”, “obsession” and “substitution” for the Other – the taking on of responsibility even for her debt. How are we to understand Levinas’s relational ethics here with the self “delivered over to stoning and insults” (AE, 192/110)?
Importantly, in Levinas’s early works up to and including TI, the existent’s “auto-personification” or self-formation, the immanent process of individuation, is postulated as a necessary condition for the possibility of establishing an ethical relation with the other person: You cannot receive the Other with empty hands, without the riches of self-sufficiency. You cannot give selflessly if you are not self-sufficient. You cannot give to the needy if you are in need yourself. Being independent is not a sufficient condition, however. Without an intervention by the Other, without a leap of faith, Levinas’s self-created, “atheist” self will remain self-occupied and oblivious to its ethical responsibility towards others. In its self-sufficiency the self therefore “needs” the Other to make it aware of its murderous egotistical nature.
On the face of things, Levinas’s scheme threatens to collapse into the binary opposition of a before and after: “Before” the Other’s intervention the existent appears to be doomed to fully actualising its “atheist” potential. It is ethically stunted and inept, incapable of initiating any semblance of a generous gesture towards others. This “before” is, however, not unethical but a-ethical, i.e., lacking an ethical sense or incapable of being concerned with the rightness or wrongness of its egoism. The gravitational pull of its egoism is all-consuming, leaving it not only incapable of relating in any other way to the not-self, but, importantly, necessarily impelled to be concerned primarily with its own continued existence. Everything other-than-the-self figures only as a means to the own existence. The question of Being – to exist – is being-for-oneself. “After” the Other’s intervention, on the other hand, or, put more precisely, dia-chronically, i.e., through-time or through the Other, the subject is rendered radically passive. With the introduction to time the subject is no longer capable of not being-for-the-Other even before being-for-itself. Levinas fully articulates the radical (trans-)ontological consequence of this Other-orientation only in AE.
The “before” of an apparently passive participation in a hopeless amorality now makes way for an always-already inherent infection or affectedness by the Other to which the consciousness of an autonomous rationally responsible ego always comes too late. It is only with the introduction of time, in this “instant”, in this “now”, which signals a radical incapacitation of the compulsion of connatus essendi, the urge to persist in self-preservation, that individuals can be expected to “take on” responsibility for the Other in need. This “taking on” is not, however, an autonomous action proceeding from a rational consciousness, but a transferential “being able” that precedes rational reflective consciousness. It is activity or ethical capacitation following from passivity: radical passivity as the radix or root of ethical agency.
From the perspective of a tradition of Western subjectivity, conceptualised first as the Cartesian cogito and subsequently as the Kantian autonomous transcendental Subject, Levinas presents us with a rather contentious conceptualisation of subjectivity which starts out ethically inept and ends up passively delivered over to the Other’s tutelage. It could easily be construed as a notion of subjectivity that ultimately exempts the self from assuming any responsibility, ceding it to the Other. Levinas appears not only to caricature human ethical ineptitude (by portraying the existent as a “hungry stomach without ears” (TI, 134/107)), but also renders the ethical subject, which comes into being by virtue of the Other’s invocation, radically passive. It could be argued, therefore, that the worrisome consequence of this conception of subjectivity is that responsibility becomes the Other’s responsibility, since of its own accord the self is incapable of taking any ethical initiative.
A close reading of Levinas’s early work, then, uncovers what appears to be a binary scheme: On the one hand, Levinas constructs an “ethically challenged” subject that is incapable of saving itself by itself. After intervention by the Other, on the other hand, it is stripped of its egoism and rendered radically passive. It is now for-the-Other despite itself and because of the Other-in-the-self which predisposes it towards alterity.
This apparent binary scheme is interrogated by plotting Levinas’s phenomenological analyses of the self’s a-ethical, economic existence during which the existent exists by enjoying the provisional alterity of the world in the works up to and including TI. Here Levinas sketches the radical independent existence of the existent as the condition of possibility of his/her ethical conversion in the face of the Other. The self can answer the ethical call of the needy Other only as a self-sufficient being. This is the gist of Levinas’s position in his first three works. One of the questions that come to mind in this context is why the self would make itself accessible to the Other and sacrifice its happiness and independence to the Other that imposes an unbearable responsibility.
As we have seen, a transition takes place in Levinas’s second magnum opus, Autrement qu’être, from the self to the Other: He moves from the enjoyment of the existent’s worldly existence to the traumatisation of the ethical encounter with the absolutely Other. In this second major work there is no further mention of the necessity of the existent’s economic existence. The question that confronts us here is: What is the nature of the ethical relation if it is inherently no relation in the true sense? The self is stripped of his/her egotistical core and confronted with an Other within the self. Levinas describes ethics not as a community of generosity, but as a traumatic crushing of the egotistical I by the Other.
In the final instance, Levinas maintains that ethics is not vested in the rational weighing of options. According to him it is precisely such rational reflection on responsibility, which implies total freedom of choice, that is responsible for Cain’s sober, calculated coldness. For Levinas, responsibility must be vested in something more fundamental than the freedom of the subject.
Keywords: Emmanuel Levinas; ethical agency; ethical metaphysics; ethics; Other; radical passivity; responsibility; Self
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