Abstract
This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True.
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Notes
Badiou is a particularly scathing critic of Levinas. ‘To put it crudely: Lévinas's enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that every effort to turn ethics into politics is essentially religious. We might say that Lévinas’ is the coherent and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to which it is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general, ethics is a category of pious discourse’ (2002, p. 23).
Gillian Rose, by contrast, and as I have mentioned elsewhere (Loumansky, 2005, pp. 16, 181–200), deprecates postmodernists, among whom she includes Levinas, for their ‘playful sophistry’ in opposing Old Athens with a seductive New Jerusalem that only succeeds in traducing both the Greek and Judaic traditions. She identifies a common theme among this fraternity (Girard, Arendt, Heidegger, Taylor and Levinas) a reactive violence towards philosophy's insufficiency, its tyranny of reason (1992, p. xii), its ‘grey on grey’, that through their seductive and alluring discourse would paint a rainbow of colours when nothing can disguise the fact that a painted door is still a door.
According to Bauman, Rose's views deserve particular consideration as they provide a highly eloquent and articulate expression of concerns, shared by others, of the moral subversiveness of post-modernism and indeed ‘no-one has, perhaps given this uncertainty (nay fear) a more poignant fear [particularly with regard to the unchallengable fact that] that there is no guarantee of any sort that morality will gain by exposing itself point blank to the moral self abandoned to his or her own moral sense’ (1995, p. 7).
In Ethics and Infinity the quotation is turned from an accusation into an injunction: ‘we are all responsible for all men before all, and I more than all the others’.
Indeed, as Llewelyn observes, ‘if both the other and the other other, the third party, call for responsibility, my responsibility calls for third personal justice, the institutionalized system within which competing claims are to be judged’ (1995, p. 140). And Derrida remarks that ‘the illeity of the third is thus nothing less, for Levinas, than the beginning of justice, at one law and beyond the law. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence speaks of this illeity, in the third person, but according to a ‘thirdness’ that is different from that of the third man, from that of the third interrupting the face to face welcome of the other man – interrupting the proximity or approach of the neighbour – from that of the third man with whom justice begins’ (1997, p. 29).
Did not Nietzsche's saying about the death of God take on, in the extermination camps, the meaning of a quasi-empirical fact (EN, p. 84)?
Thus ‘the God who passed by is not the model of which the face would be the image. To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in his trace. The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality preserves all the infinity of his absence which is in the personal ‘order’’ (HO, p. 44).
Salomon Malka, 30.
Although Levinas appears to indicate that Auschwitz defied reason when he quotes from Emil Fakenheim's work, God's Presence in History, ‘whole peoples have been killed for ‘rational’ (however horrifying) ends. The Nazi murder … was annihilation for the sake of annihilation, murder for the sake of murder, evil for the sake of evil’ (EN, p. 84). This is not to say that the Shoah was not the outcome of reason but rather that, working through reason, it cast off reason to become its beyond.
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Acknowledgements
The inspiration of this title is drawn from Elie Wiesel's novel, Night, in which the author recalls his experience in the death camp and his encounter with the most profound moral desolation that came with the realization that any feasible faith in God had been utterly and irrevocably destroyed along with one child, hanged from a gallows, with the face of an ‘angel’, who he could not, would not protect. Can the murder of one child be any less shocking than the murder of millions and can emotion be multiplied?
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Loumanksy, A. Reply to Fagan: Hanging God at Auschwitz: The necessity of a solitary encounter with the Other as the genesis of Levinasian ethics. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 23–43 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.47
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.47