Abstract
In Levinas’s early works, the ‘body as subjectivity’ is the focus of research bearing significant implications for his later philosophy of the body. How this is achieved becomes the thrust of this article. We analyze how the existent, through hypostasis, emerges hic et nunc, and explores further its effort to exist is effected in its relation to existence. In delineating this, we argue that the existent does not emerge from the il y a as an idealistic subject, but rather is born as a natural subject. This is arguably the most remarkable aspect of Levinas’s analysis of the dawn of the bodily subject. However, the subjectivity of the subject is to be found in the inescapable self-possession of its embodiment. The body, in turn, is a conditional possibility for being a corporeal subject. We argue that the subject as a being in the flesh is the meaning of the embodied human subject, and it bears fertile implications for the ethical signification of the body. In re-conceiving the meaning of the ‘body as subjectivity’ to ‘ethical signification of the body’ against the odds of the traditional dichotomies, we argue that Levinas tries to overcome the bio-political understanding of racist conception of the body subject. Given this ethical meaning beyond materiality we reconsider how the embodied subject is a radical passivity as a ‘here I am’ (me voici). In suggesting the implication of this claim with Levinas we find how the ethical subjectivity is beyond dualistic assertions and racist conceptions.
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Notes
In using the term il y a within the present text, we mostly retain its French use, but sometimes employ its English translation, ‘there is.’ We use the two terms interchangeably. In 1946, Levinas published an article entitled ‘Il y a’ in Deucalion I (Cahiers de Philosophie) which was incorporated into the Introduction and Chapter 3, section 2 (‘Existence without Existents’) of Existence and Existents. In this work, Levinas uses the term ‘il y a’ exclusively to speak of ‘Being in general’. For more on this theme, see the sections (‘Existence without Existents’) (Levinas 1978: 57–64) and ‘Insomnia’ (1978: 65–67). In a later work, Time and the Other, Levinas employs the term ‘il y a’ under the title ‘Existing without Existents’ (Levinas: 1997a: 44–51). Yet in another major work, Totality and Infinity, the term il y a appears again where it is called ‘the elemental’ in a number of sections: ‘Element and Things, Implements’ (Levinas 2007b: 130–134), ‘Sensibility’ (2007b:135–140), ‘The Mythical Format of the Element’ (2007b: 140–142), ‘The Home and Possession’ (2007b: 156–158), and ‘Sensibility and the Face’ (2007b: 187–193).
Michael Morgan rightly observes that the subject that first emerges from the il y a and lives in the world is a self-initiating subject who enjoys the world, and that this is the case for all natural beings as well as the human subject. Morgan (2009), p. 152.
In this same vein, Levinas writes about the barbarity of Hitlerism in his essay ‘Being Jewish’. There he states that ‘[t]he recourse of Hitlerian anti-Semitism to racial myth reminded the Jew of the irremissibility of his being. Not able to flee one’s condition—for many this was like a vertigo.’ Levinas (2007a), p. 208.
On Escape explores and explains this affective feeling through analyses of the experiences of shame, nausea, need, and fatigue that tie the subject to its own being as a kind of ontological challenge. In analyzing shame, Levinas shows that one’s inextricably being tied to oneself and to one’s shame is founded upon the solidarity of our being and connected primarily to our body (Levinas 2003: 64–65).
This notion of the il y a—meaning the ‘there is’ as ‘an existence without existent’ (un exister sans existant) (Levinas 1978: 57–64, Levinas 1997a: 44–51), first appears in Levinas’s earliest work, On Escape and is later developed in Existence and Existent and continued in Time and the Other. Levinas (2007b), pp. 131–132. The il y a appears in Totality and Infinity as the elemental (2007b: 131–132, 156–157, 140–142). We shall postpone a detailed discussion of the elemental at this stage, but will offer a more detailed discussion later on in formulating the notion of enjoyment and living in the world (Levinas 2004: 166), where the il y a reappears in this work as the il y a of ethics.
For Adriaan Peperzak, Being in Levinas is not an abstract categorical structure such as one finds in Hegelian (onto)-logic. Conceiving this idea of the il y a in Levinas, he comments, ‘[t]he phrase there is points to the dimension of a completely contourless and dangerous protoworld, the anonymous underworld of faceless monstrosity, a chaos in which there are no facts, no data, no givens, a neuter without any giving, the contrary of generosity. The il y a burdens and bothers us, but at the same time it seduces us by the magic of its invitations to self-abandonment and dispersion’ Peperzak (1999), p. 196. For Davis notes that ;[i]t would be difficult to attempt to assess the notion of the il y a in terms of its truth or persuasiveness. Levinas does not offer anything that could easily be qualified as an argument for preferring the anonymity of the il y a to the generosity of the es gibt. Since the il y a precedes and presupposes anything that can be known by reason, its appeal is to intuitive recognition rather than philosophical investigation.’ Davis (1996), p. 23.
The idea of place has ethical implications, as one finds claimed in a much later text, Difficult Freedom, in a section entitled ‘Place and Utopia.’ There, Levinas describes space as a ‘here-below’ where one is responsible for the other. This space is the location where oneself is held responsible for the other and thus provides the concrete conditions for ethical action. Place is conceived of in terms of the relationship to the other. This idea is not yet apparent in Levinas’s early conceptions of the subject; in those early writings, place is primarily a condition that makes the emergence of the subject possible, and the self is directed to itself just as it is riveted to Being. The self is solitary and wholly for itself. Levinas (1997b), p. 99–102.
In his foreword to Existence and Existents, Bernasconi writes, ‘[b]y “position” Levinas meant that condition or basis from which the subject posits itself: it refers to the body as an event and not as a substantive. However, position is not a site within being, but the arising of the human being in impersonal Being. It represents a transformation of the event into an existent.’ In referring to this foreword, I am making use of the Duquesne University Press edition of Existence and Existent. It is in absent from the Martinus Nijhoff edition of 1978. See Bernasconi (2001), p. xii.
In Time and the Other, Levinas analyses the event of the Other in relation to death, face, eros, the feminine and paternity, arguing that the questions of embodiment, of the meaning of bodily subjectivity, and of the self-other relation all preserve both duality and separation. In the limited scope of this paper, we limit our focus to considering some key elements of the later works Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence to pin point how Levinas’s early understanding of bodily subjectivity informs and foreshadows his later account of the ethical incarnate subject in her flesh.
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Varakukalayil, J.J. Body as Subjectivity to Ethical Signification of the Body: Revisiting Levinas’s Early Conception of the Subject. SOPHIA 54, 281–295 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0475-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0475-z