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Notes
See Bergo (2018) for a helpful overview.
Husserl also talks of “pairing” as another possibility (see Husserl, 1960: § 51), but this is less developed.
An exception is Dan Zahavi’s, 2001 paper. But even here Levinas is accorded a single paragraph, in which the key criticism – that for Levinas “the project of intersubjectivity [is] a problem of radical otherness, and [Levinas] denies that any form of intentionality (including empathy) will ever permit us to understand this encounter” (159) – is noted without further analysis. As we shall see, the claim that Levinas denies that any form of intentionality will permit us to understand this encounter may be too strong – at least from the perspective of Totality and Infinity.
In this paper, my focus will remain on Totality and Infinity. Although, as I mentioned above, Levinas discusses empathy in his earlier work, these discussions do not reflect Levinas’s mature view on the topic, and so can be passed over. And, although I will draw on ideas from Levinas’s second masterpiece, Otherwise than Being (1974, 1998b), full consideration of this difficult text must be reserved for a separate discussion.
See Levinas (2006).
In this paper, I prescind from commenting on the accuracy or exhaustiveness of Overgaard’s reprisal of Levinas’s critique of Husserl. I simply accept it for the sake of argument.
Jacques Derrida mounted a comparable criticism but focused on the logical relation of the same and other (see Derrida, 1978: 126).
If, against this, Overgaard wishes to insist on a primary empty intending of the other as alter-ego in general, this would only enervate Levinas’s original argument against Husserlian phenomenology, so construed. It strains phenomenological credulity to think that the I first encounters the other in ‘empty generality’ as a strictly formal alter-ego; it backtracks on the key phenomenological insight of the immediacy of intersubjective apperception.
It is important to emphasize that, for Levinas, the intersubjective relation is a condition of an objective world. That is, of a world of intentional objects that are experienced as “there for everyone” (Husserl, 1960: 91), or as intersubjectively available, rather than as “my private synthetic formation” (Husserl, 1960: 91). And, for Levinas, the objective world is not established simply by empathic projection of the other as another set of eyes on the object that I perceive, but rather through discourse, a dialogical ‘struggle’ between interlocutors, in which thematic concepts are first formed and then developed. “Language,” writes Levinas,” accomplishes the primordial putting in common…” (Levinas, 1969: 173). Specifically, Levinas explains: “To be an object, to be a theme, is to be what I can speak of with someone who has broken through the screen of phenomena and has associated me with himself. […] Thematization is the work of language, as an action exercised by the Master on me, is not mysterious information, but the appeal addressed to my attention. […] But the eminently sovereign attention in me is what essentially responds to an appeal. Attention is attention to something because it is attention to someone” (Levinas, 1969: 99).
The notion of a desire that does not ‘want’ to be satisfied is relatively familiar within the French literature on desire: e.g., for Jean Hyppolite, it can happen that desire “no longer strives after ‘satisfaction’, but endeavours to sustain itself as desire, ‘reject(ing) all permanence except the permanence of itself as desire’” (Butler, 1987: 88). And the early Sartre argued that “desire is seen to be a response to the desirable, an ‘apprehension’ and ‘discovery’ of the other, and yet it is also seen to be an imaginary pursuit that must remain a mere ‘incantation’ that can never reach its object but only effect an imaginary construction” (Butler, 1987: 104).
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Thornton, S. Levinas on Empathy, Desire, and the Caress. Hum Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09714-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09714-9