SubStance

The following is an interview with Derek Attridge, whose The Singularity of Literature (2004) has helped to reframe the ethical debates in literary studies in a highly innovative manner. This exchange took place via email, August-September 2008.

Zahi Zalloua: Emmanuel Levinas’s influence has been quite significant in the last 15 years, fueling the (poststructuralist) ethical turn in philosophy and literary studies. Yet now that his reputation is well established, philosophers have growingly expressed their concerns about the limits and viability of an ethics of difference, a philosophy of the Other. There is an almost deafening call to go beyond—Oublier Levinas!—in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, two of Levinas’s staunchest critics. Badiou scrutinizes Levinas’s contention of the radicality of the other (“The other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure of his alterity to be necessarily true” [Ethics 22]), while Žižek objects to the mystification of the other, which leads to blindness of the suffering concrete others: “the true ethical step is the one BEYOND the face of the other, the one of SUSPENDING the hold of the face: the choice AGAINST the face, for the THIRD” (“Smashing the Neighbor’s Face” [2006]). Are these objections valid? Is there an irresolvable tension between politics (justice) and ethics that an ethics of difference purportedly eschews?

Derek Attridge: Levinas was immensely important to me in thinking through the problem of responsibility as it operates in the domain of art, and this could not have happened had I not found his account of ethics in the wider sphere compelling. The boldness of his gesture in reversing the relation of ethics to philosophical analysis and generalization cut through a Gordian knot in the old problem of the passage between “is” and “ought,” and opened up an entirely fresh approach to familiar questions. This is not to say, however, that his thought is without its difficulties, and the two critics you mention, Badiou and Žižek, focus on what are probably the two most problematic aspects. (Other problematic areas, such as his treatment of gender and his disregard of art, are less implicated in the central claims he makes.) [End Page 18]

Badiou makes the point, to my mind a perfectly correct one, that the other is never, phenomenally speaking, an absolute other, and calls on psychoanalysis to argue that my response to the other is always a matter of identification, combining narcissism and aggressivity. He acknowledges, however, that Levinas is not in fact making claims about the phenomenality of the other person as he or she impinges upon my psyche; the ethical demand of the other operates in another register. Badiou asserts that this other register must be a religious one; that the only sense that can be made of Levinas’s absolute other is that it is the ethical name for God.

Badiou is undoubtedly right in raising the question – it has been raised many times before – of the relation between Levinas’s ethical philosophy and his religious commitment. Clearly, they can’t be kept entirely separate in the way that Levinas sometimes seemed to want them to be: it seems likely that he would not have been able to advance ethical thought in the way he did without bringing to bear on the traditions of Western philosophy a mode of thinking absorbed from the Jewish tradition. But those of us who find Levinas’s account of ethics valuable and who at the same time resist the notion of the divine underpinning of that account are not, I think, falling into incoherence. That “other register,” the register that is not a question of phenomenality or the psyche, does not have to be religious; it is, precisely, an ethical register, understanding ethics as the realm of a responsibility that exerts itself prior to philosophical analysis. It may appear to have some of the qualities of religious belief because of this priority, which resists the attentions of the rationalist or positivist, and it is certainly extremely difficult to talk about in the kind of philosophical discourse Badiou favors...