Nemo, Heidegger, Levinas, and Onto-Theology
In his translator’s introduction, Cohen highlights Heidegger’s critique of “onto-theology.” Simplifying a bit, we can understand onto-theology as the desire for a foundation, for a metanarrative, for a transcendental grund. Of course, such a foundation can be strictly theological, as God, or secular, as Reason (Kant), Progress (Hegel), Capital (Marx), or Sexual Desire (Freud). Regardless, what we desire is to stabilize reality as a representation, a playing out, of a higher authority. Cohen notes that, building in part from Nietzsche’s gay science, Heidegger offers us an optimism. He writes:
A new age and a new humanity are called for, an age of honesty, courage, and innocence. Henceforth, existence will be affirmed joyously, gaily, in its coming to be and passing away in its expenditure without reserve, its bountifulness. Henceforth our obligations will be our own, authentic, in the self-conscious creation of value or the quiet harkening to being. (3)
Levinas’s response, as Cohen foreshadows, will be to challenge the fundamental optimism that underwrites Heidegger’s philosophy. I will leave the details of this challenge to your reading and our discussion next week. But understand that Cohen is setting up the fall with those sentences–virtually every clause will be taken to task.
In the process, one might claim that Levinas is trying to undo Nietzsche’s fundamental achievement–laying waste to the concept of original sin and the slave morality (the Apollonian spirit, Platonism, etc.) that chained the Dionysian enjoyment of the world. To which I would respond tentatively, yes. Yes he is questioning my enjoyment of the world. Again, the philosophic reasons why will wait until class.
But one might begin to work out why by considering Levinas’s experience of the Holocaust. He was a soldier in the French army, forced to surrender earlier in the war. He spent the majority of the war in a German military prison. It is likely that being in the military saved him from the death camps. It was during his imprisonment that he drafted what would be his first major publication, Existence and Existents (1947) and a series of lectures later published as Time and the Other. He discusses both of these works with Nemo.
What Levinas doesn’t discuss too much in that work is his concept of “justice,” a concept that he works out in later essays and mostly in later interviews–what happens when we acknowledge that face-to-face relation with the other person (a relation that may trigger an experience with the Other, in the same way that, for Barthes, a photograph may sting us) is always, already surrounded, interrupted, monitored, influenced, etc. by a third party? What do we make of the third party? The readings I send out later this week will touch upon this subject.
Teaching, Learning, and the Ethics of Postpedagogy
Heidegger, postpedagogy, and teaching. Ulmer “Problems ‘B’ Us.” Under the best circumstances, I think, teaching is not a matter of direct transmission, nor even an exposure to a particular set of problems. Rather, teaching is an opening to the question of what it is to be “problemed,” to question/think in Heidegger’s language, to be exposed and dispossessed by the Other / obligated to others in Levinas’s.
While preparing for class this week, three troubling stories passed through my Facebook feed.
- “What is Fourth Wave Feminism and What Does 4chan Have to Do With It?” via Daily Dot
- “After Being Denied A Snow Day, University Of Illinois Students Respond With Racism And Sexism” via BuzzFeed
- “ALCU Alleges Comically Unconstitutional Religious Harassment in rural Louisiana School” from the Daily Caller. A PDF of the ALCU legal complaint is available here.
But, seriously, this is why I consider ethics the first priority of rhetoric. These people are out there, and their desire for lulz, their desire to destroy, should not be dismissed or ignored. Hate is real. And I hope that rhetoric can prepare us to deal with it. I think a reading we didn’t do this week, Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” helps us to understand just how rhetoric can accomplish such preparation (here’s an old blog post dealing with how I present Corder in my writing classes).
Key issues to bring up concerning Levinas’s Ethics and Infinity:
- Levinas’s definition of phenomenology (30 vs. folks like Harmon who argue that Levinas’s methodology is a rejection of phenomenology).
- Levinas’s framing of Heidegger’s politics in relation to his philosophy (38)
- Levinas’s short summation of the distinction between the saying and the said (42, 88; note that this distinction is from Otherwise than Being)
- Levinas’s problematical thematizing of the feminine as a mode of being in constant withdrawal (67-68; it becomes easier to frame the feminine purely in metaphysical terms when you aren’t actually female)
- Levinas’s critique of totality (75)
- Levinas’s explication of “face” (85)
- Levinas’s articulations of justice (89-90, 99), responsibility (95), hostage (100), and substitution (101). I especially want to discuss how Levinas’s concept of justice anticipates the critiques of plurality offered by scholars such as Levi-Bryant and David Roden
And a few issues from our reading of Totality and Infinity:
- “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics” (43).
- Levinas’s castigation of rhetoric (70-72)
- The Other and nakedness (74-76)
- “The presence of the Other is a calling into question my joyous possession of the world” (75-76).
Smiling at the Death Camps
Julia Kristeva, channeling Nietzsche’s comic spirit:
the humorist goes right through uncanny strangeness and–starting from a self-confidence that is his own or is based on his belonging to an untouchable universe that is not at all threatened by the war between same and others, ghosts and doubles–seeing in it nothing more than smoke, imaginary structures, signs. To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts. (Strangers to Ourselves 191)
Levinas picks up an argument we have heard before–from Lyotard, Readings, and Heidegger, that philosophy “compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy” (“God and Philosophy” 55). Levinas couples this compulsion with Western/Greek/Philosophy’s opposition to transcendence, its prioritization of ontology/Being as the foundation of thought/logos. The desire for the return of the same as a kind of allergy to the Other who is not merely an other but Otherwise to Being. In short, Levinas imagines the possibility of thinking what is beyond thought (see what happened there? but impossibility does not signify the limits of the imagination), or of signifying what opposes the essence of signification. Levinas: “Our question is whether, beyond being, a meaning might not show itself whose priority, translated into ontological language, will be called prior to being” (“God and Philosophy” 57).
Note that Davis will argue that, given Levinas’s framing of this meaning in terms of passivity/receptivity, first philosophy is actually a primary rhetoricity. Amending Levinas’s proclamation of ethics as first philosophy, Davis charges rhetoric as first philosophy. Ernesto Grassi similarly offers a compelling argument in Rhetoric as Philosophy.
Ok, but why?
For a roundabout answer, let me start as saying: the prioritization of ethics is a response to the problem of atheism. But let me also immediately say that, by Levinas’s understanding of God, many folks who consider themselves “religious” would show us as atheists. How?
Because for Levinas to inhabit God, to be religious, is to awaken from what Heidegger might call the tyranny of the technological, the confining of Being. Levinas:
It is not proof of God’s existence that matter to us here, but rather the breakup of consciousness, which is not a repression into the unconscious but a sobering or a waking up that shakes the “dogmatic slumber” that sleeps at the bottom of all consciousness resting upon the object. (63)
Why the swipe at psychoanalysis? Because it is an attempt to know the other. Levinas resists this desire to know the Other, to thematize the other, to treat the Other as an object of knowledge (Ethics and Infinity 57). Vitanza will remind us that we are fearful of the other, that knowing the Other is the first step to “no-ing” them:
The negative– or negative dialectic–is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous. (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not–because in error–exist). The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric 12-13).
The first brick in the path to Auschwitz is laid by Isocrates, mortared by Heidegger. Any notion of “authentic” being is a step toward killing something/one. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. Perhaps.
Let’s clear up Levinas’s notion of atheism: exactly what are we waking up to? “The Infinite affects thought by simultaneously devastating it and calling it” (66). That is, God is not a knowledge. We cannot know God. Any claim to know God trespasses against God’s holiness. God, for Levinas, marks the absolute transcendence beyond the bounds of Being, beyond the bounds of what a being can know (see the distinction between “books” and “determinate beliefs” on 23 of Ethics and Infinity).
What is it that we Desire? What is the “desire for what is beyond satisfaction? (“God and Philosophy” 67)? It is the desire for the foundation, for the home, for atheism, for a solitary self left to question the boundaries and horizons of its own Being (you didn’t think Heidegger was getting off scot-free, did you?). Levinas would–perhaps like the Heidegger of “The Question Concerning Technology”–interrupt this desire with the exasperating question posed by the other. He would have us face this question. We Face the question of the Other (l’Autre) in the face of the other-person (l’autrui). And the obligation to the Other which I repay via the prioritization of the other-person is vexed from the start by the presence of third party which institutes the demand for justice and the comparison of incomparables (see especially Ethics and Infinity 89-90). Violence is unavoidable, but silence is inexcusable: “…one must not be silent” (“Questions and Answers” 99).
Yes. This is confusing as hell. Let’s not even mention the hard stuff like “responsibility” or “substitution.”
But, like almost every theoretical system, there is a simple anecdote that animates its concerns. For Levinas, this is the immediate demand we feel when we look at another person. From the interview “The Awakening of the I”:
Q: What would you respond to someone who said that he did not admire holiness, did not feel this call of the other, or more simply that the other left him indifferent?
E.L.: I do not believe that is truly possible. It is a matter here of our first experience, the very one that constitutes us, and which is as if the ground of our existence. However indifferent one might claim to be, it is not possible to pass a face by without greeting it, or without saying to oneself, “What will he ask of me?” Not only our personal life, but also all of civilization is founded upon this. (184)
Davis, via Ronell, via Derrida, picks this up. We can choose to ignore the call of the Other (l’Autre) faced in the other’s (autrui’s) face. We can burry our head into a book or a screen. We can deflect the question of the other via some phatic non.sense about the weather. We can choose to ignore alterity. But we cannot deny alterity’s primacy. We cannot but feel alterity. This resonates with much of contemporary rhetoric’s concern with affectivity as a “mode” of signification that precedes being / logos.
But, then, at the end of all this, why? Because “only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor” (“Questions and Answers” 91). It was Blanchot who reminded us that Levinas took up the challenge of thinking how philosophy might think after the horror of the Holocaust. Levinas admits that the Holocaust is his ghost, it pervades all his thought. And his philosophy, as perverse as it might sound, is an attempt to find a smile in its strangeness.
“My critique of the totality has come in fact after a political experience that we have not yet forgotten” (Ethics and Infinity 78-79)
