Levinas Unhinged

by Tom Sparrow

Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.,

Genres: Philosophy

165 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 16, 2013

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely exploration of the dark side of Levinas. The received idea of L is as a kindly old Jewish man, a guru guiding us away from the violent assimilation/metabolism of the Other and towards a reverential ethics is here, to put it mildly, smashed to smithereens. This traditional version of the story, Sparrow demonstrates, ignores the horror implied by L's ethics as first philosophy. The metaphor of being taken hostage by the Other is by now a common place; rarer are Sparrow's discussions of the metaphysics of light, nocturnal anonymity, the racialized face and ultimately the sheer indifference of the il y a. I won't quibble with Sparrow's construction, but I would like to highlight some key distinctions.

In footnote 40 to chapter 3 ("Aesthetic Identity"), Sparrow gives a crash course on Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception: "the body is synchronized with the existential world, not the sensible, which remains at all times foreign and disruptive of the body's competence. That is, there is a basic diachrony or dissymmetry between the subject of perception and the sensible environment." It's easy to lose track of what Sparrow is getting at, but the basic point is sound: if we collapse the existential into the sensible, we end up flattening our ontology. Note the word "synchronization" - the coincidences (as well as non-existent synchronicities) between the body and the existential world constitute the subject-matter of L's hyperbolic phenomenology.

Sparrow gets frustrated with Levinas' divinization of the face in chapter 5 ("Complexions"). Sparrow mentions the critique of the white Christian face, which stigmatizes its others through the accusation of 'facial deviance.' Sparrow, rightly, dismisses this facial conservatism as an unfortunate spandrel of a pre-theoretical ethics. Levinas wants us to abandon Athens and embrace a New Jerusalem; Sparrow isn't convinced. The choice between the two cities is false, insofar as both ask us to forget mediation, making Wisdom or the Law immediate, respectively. Instead of the face revealing a transcendent God, Sparrow suggests we focus on a less violent bodily site: the nape. The "bare, defenseless texture of the back of another's neck works autonomously to dismantle the hegemony of the face, and paralyzes violence in the web of passions triggered by the fragility reflected in that disarming surface." We don't need God to prevent murder. It is enough to recall cervical tension and act accordingly (hot tip: don't pull an Althusser).

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Not really an argument (in the accepted philosophical sense), but the idea for an argument. Or maybe the kernel of an idea for an argument. Whatever it is, it's definitely a compelling and useful corrective to the prevailing image of Levinas as some sort of den mother of ethics. The only problem is that once Sparrow has stated as much--that sunny interpretations of Levinas keyed to "hospitality," "the face," and "transcendence" are belied by disturbing figurations of night and the nocturnal--he's more or less shot his bolt. The chapter on sensation, for example, is tantalizing, but reads like a detailed precis for a fuller treatment. The book is clearly written and amply supplied with references, but also feels a bit hasty and disjointed as if it had been developed from a series of ambitious blog entries (in his defense, Sparrow refers to the chapters as "essays," so maybe I'm wrong to insist that there be more sinew between them...). Still, I find it a good starting point, a provocation or invitation to further thought along these lines: what more, really, can one ask?