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Jenseits Des Seins Oder Anders Als Sein Geschieht
Levinas' Kritik an der abendlandischen Ontologie besteht darin, dass sie weder die Frage nach dem Anderen noch die ethische Frage nachdrucklich genug gestellt hat. Er betont, dass seine Beziehung zur Unendlichkeit des Anderen letztendlich der Erorterung unzuganglich bleibt. Gleichwohl halt er es fur die Aufgabe der Philosophie, dieser Beziehung Sprache zu verleihen. Levinas nimmt die Krise des neuzeitlichen Humanismus so ernst, dass im Kampf um die Sinnhaftigkeit einer bis an die Grenze gehenden Sprachlosigkeit die Berufung zu einer vorgangig anders bestimmten Conditio humana vernehmbar wird. Ihr Ort ist die Sinnlichkeit und Verletzlichkeit des Menschen, ihre Bestimmung eine "unubernehmbare Passivitat", fur die man sich sowenig vertreten lassen kann wie fur das eigene Sterben.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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1544 people want to read
About the author
Emmanuel Levinas
151 books402 followersEmanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel Levinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani", whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 7, 2007
Radicalizing his earlier conception of intersubjective responsibility from "mere" asymmetry to a condition of being hostage to the Other, from the welcoming of the always already indigent Other into my home to the feeding of the Other with the bread from my own mouth, from the fraternal to the maternal, Levinas both moves beyond
Totality and Infinity
and problematizes that movement with the introduction of the third party. The primordially (or anarchically) unproblematic relation to the Other, to whom "I have always one response more to give, I have to answer for his very responsibility," becomes problematic with the entry of the third, the relationship with whom serves as "incessant correction of the asymmetry of [the Other's:] proximity." The entry of the third describes the movement from intersubjective responsibility to institutional justice, which is not the negation of metaphysical desire but its triangulation.
Simply put, the most valuable philosophical work I've read.
Simply put, the most valuable philosophical work I've read.
November 18, 2013
Wrote my dissertation on Levinas, so I know a lot about his life and work but I will not relate that here. His was, and maybe still is, the greatest challenge to metaphysical, ontological thinking, despite the fact that he remained trapped within it. Well, we all do, or there wouldn't be much to say about anything.
"The face of the other" as the locus for a new ethical thinking is brilliant. Infinite obligation to the other is hyperbolic magnificence. His elaboration of time is real twist on phenomonology and existentialism, showing how "the present instant," the unbreachable NOW of total presence, is essentially fractured.
He was a good man, captured by the Nazis and held in a work camp. Henry Blanchot hid his family during this time. His main line of work was Jewish education. He was also a Talmudic scholar of some note and it is fascinating to read his philosophy through the lens of Talmudic reasoning.
If you ever catch the Levinas bug, start at the beginning. His later works deal with the entirety of philosophy and he doesn't take the time to catch the reader up, so you have to know who he's arguing with and why.
"The face of the other" as the locus for a new ethical thinking is brilliant. Infinite obligation to the other is hyperbolic magnificence. His elaboration of time is real twist on phenomonology and existentialism, showing how "the present instant," the unbreachable NOW of total presence, is essentially fractured.
He was a good man, captured by the Nazis and held in a work camp. Henry Blanchot hid his family during this time. His main line of work was Jewish education. He was also a Talmudic scholar of some note and it is fascinating to read his philosophy through the lens of Talmudic reasoning.
If you ever catch the Levinas bug, start at the beginning. His later works deal with the entirety of philosophy and he doesn't take the time to catch the reader up, so you have to know who he's arguing with and why.
August 1, 2007
perhaps if my brain was big enough to comprehend the vastness of this book, i would have enjoyed it more (rather than throw it against the wall). but still, it was rather a triumph to complete.
November 17, 2007
I had to read this about 5 times before I finally started to get it. This + Heidegger's Mindfulness = truth. And if you don't think they're compatible, you're not reading closely or liberally enough.
February 13, 2020
The face of the Other implies my facing her. The 'I' is always implied in the face of the Other. For the face is always facing or, as Levinas puts it, speaking. The subject/object dichotomy collapses in the phenomenon of face, as in that of speaking (speaking implies listening and vice versa). And if Levinas's axiomatic book, Totality and Infinity (TI), discusses face, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence (OB) discusses facing or, more precisely, my facing of the Other. OB is about the ethical subjectivity. "What happens to the I when the Other faces me?" is the subjective angle that OB takes; whereas "What or who is the face?" is the objective angle that TI takes. I and the Other are the two sides of the same coin called the ethical. Thus, OB is Levinas's re-statement of TI, a re-saying the said with a new set of vocabulary and metaphors all skillfully employed with greater rigor and hyperbole from the subjective angle. The central problem of the book is: How should the ethical subject be conceived?
Derrida is right to say that "Totality And Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise" (Writing And Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978: 312n7). Levinas is a poetic philosopher who reads and writes philosophy poetically. The use of metaphor is crucial in his work, as well as that of poetic compression (such as: "Kantism is the basis of philosophy, if philosophy is ontology" (OB 179)). But his training in rabbinic exegesis enables him to use metaphors literally, as that tradition demands, so as to move "further than the metaphor" (In The Time Of The Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith, 1994: 128). Thus, both "the poetic said" and "the prophetic said" (OB 170) must be held together when we read Levinas' work. Or, rather, the metaphoric reading must be tempered with the talmudic exegetical assumptions Levinas deploys in his work, if we are to do justice to Levinas's philosophic language. Can Aristotle's notion of metaphor as a transport or crossing from the familiar to the unfamiliar and the new work together with Rabbi Eliezer's notion of "the embers still glowing beneath the ashes" --the trope which he uses in reference to "the words of the Prophets" (Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand, 1990: 53)?
Like Descartes who exaggerates his methodological doubts, Levinas exaggerates (out of necessity) the description of the moral subject, employing such tropes as maternity, persecution, trauma, hostage, expiation, hemorrhage, sacrifice, etc. ("The irremissible guilt with regard to the neighbor is like a Nessus tunic my skin would be" (109); or, "Anarchy is persecution" (101)). Notably, however, the following two terms frequently used in TI are hardly mentioned: the Other as the master teacher. Also absent are the extensive and remartable analyses of enjoyment, eros, and fecundity. Ricoeur observes: "Levinas's Otherwise Than Being employs even greater hyperbole [than TI], to the point of paroxysm" (Oneself As Another, 338). This is an unfortunate remark made with respect to the term "hostage." Ricoeur reserves such criticisms with respect to other equally extreme metaphors found in OB, some of which are listed above. But Ricoeur is correct to diagnose that Levinas's use of hyperbole is not simply a figure of speech. It is the very production of the excess of the Other in the said of the text. Ricoeur thus writes:
Levinas becomes relentlessly metaphoric. Subjectivity, he says, involves "the gnawing away at oneself in responsibility" (121) or "the self emptying itself of itself" [kenosis] (111). Its identity is formed to the extent that it is given over to the Other as "the other in me" (111)--the maternal metaphor again. The self as such is the one-for-the-other, sent to the Other as in 'Here I am,' where, as Levinas comments, "'Here I am' means 'send me'" (199, n 11; Isaiah says: "Here I am; send me" (Isaiah 6:8)). To be an I is to be sent to the Other, forever abandoned to the Other to the point of persecution or persecution turned into expiation. Only in the trope of redemption "[a] subject is a hostage" (112).
The passivity of hostage, he further writes, "is the birth of a meanig in the obtuseness of being, of a 'being able to die' subject to sacrifice" (128). Or, in yet another metaphor, the self is a lung always already exposed to the outside air, whose respiration consists of the inspiration turning into an expiration, where "inspiration arouses respiration" (116; cf., 107, 115). In other words, the self breathes his last in expiation, like Christ on the Cross.
But there is no shift (Kehr) here in Levinas' thought--the purported shift from TI to OB--as
the basic concepts reoccur with greater vigor, precision, and in greater hyperbole--albeit in new set of metaphors. If the Totality And Infinity seeks to break away from Hegel's all encompassing totality, Otherwise Than Being paves a new ground for conceiving human subject apart and independent from the conception of subjectivity, which in the West, according to Levinas, has always been thought of in terms of the primacy of the present or being--be it the 'I think' in Descartes; consciousness in Hegel, Husserl, or Sartre; or Dasein in Heidegger--the primacy which Levinas sweepingly but insightfully characterizes in terms of "the gesture of being" (geste d'être), whose impulse (conatus) is analyzed, in the manner of Spinoza and Hobbes, as being's endeavor to persevere in itself or in its being, as a movement of losing itself only to regain itself, an adventure taken on the way home (TI 27) like that of Ulysses, who (himself unchanged) returns to his own home also unchanged after all those years. Husserl would have us believe that the internal time consciousness is one that gathers in the present the past as recalled (in the present) and the future anticipated (in the present), the unity of temporal consciousness that culminates in the present, for which Derrida aptly doubs "the classical metaphysics of presence" (Speech And Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, 1973: 26). To have an identity means for consciousness to (re)present itself to itself so as to remain (in) the same (Idem means "the same.") Thus, Levinas writes: "Essence, the being of entities, weaves between the incomparables, between me and the others, a unity, a community..., and drags us off and assembles us on the same side, chaining us to one another like galley slaves, emptying proximity of its meaning" (182); or, "[t]he beings remain always assembled, present, in a present that is extended, by memory and history, to the totality determined like matter, a present without fissures or surprises, from which becoming is expelled, a present largely made up of re-presentation, due to memory and history" (5).
The task for Levinas then is to conceive human subject beyond the mode of, apart from the sway of, being or essence, which amounts to articulating that which lies beyond ontology, or doing philosophy beyond philosophy or transcendental ego. ("Not to philosophize would not be still to philosophize," Levinas says a year after completing Otherwise Than Being, perhaps in response to Derrida], in "God and Philosophy," 1975.) Or, it is to open up the self-sufficient, self-causing ego in freedom (causa sui) in "a reverse conatus [or] an inversion of essence" (OB 70) or "in subversion of essence into substitution" (OB 162). However, Levinas would be the first to admit that he is not paving a new ground. He has precedence to cite: Plato, Plotinus, and Kant among others (95, 129).
It is remarkable that the chapter IV on "Substitution," which he identifies as the "centerpiece" of the book (xli), ends with the highly condensed and yet suggestive reference to Kant (129). While praising Kant for conceiving "a sense that is not measured by being or not being"--the Kantian moral subject who is conceived independently from the 'I think' of the transcendental apperception--he laments the fact that he could not retain a trait from Kant's philosophic system while "neglect[ing] all the details of its architecture" (129); for to do so would be to collapse the system all together.
Levinas's task then is not to improve or renovate Kant's moral philosophy but to craft his own and unique description of human subject unaffected by ontology, if such is possible, while letting Kantian echoes "reverberate" throughout the description (as Levinas had said as early as 1951 in "Is Ontology Fundamental?"). The result is a highly original and profound analyses of a subject, described as subsuming all, bearing all--a subject held responsible even for the responsibility of the other, and even for the freedom and fault of the other human--an excessive and infinitely exceeding responsibility beyond any measure assumed prior to any initiative or choice, prior to will or consciousness; chosen, elected, or assigned in an immemorial and irrecuperable past (elected at the 'time' of creation, as it were) to be so designated as "me," accused, (me voici), as the one-for-the-other. ("But this desire for the non-desirable, this responsibility for the neighbor, this substitution as a hostage, is the subjectivity and uniqueness of a subject" (123).) Levinas's language here verges on extreme metaphors (which never remain merely as metaphors and sometimes must be taken literally) and is hyperbolic and radical. He states in hindsight in the Conclusion: "Here the human is brought out by transcendence, or the hyperbole, that is, the disinterestedness of essence, a hyperbole in which it breaks up and falls upward, into the human" (184).
[To be continued in "Comments" below.]
Derrida is right to say that "Totality And Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise" (Writing And Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978: 312n7). Levinas is a poetic philosopher who reads and writes philosophy poetically. The use of metaphor is crucial in his work, as well as that of poetic compression (such as: "Kantism is the basis of philosophy, if philosophy is ontology" (OB 179)). But his training in rabbinic exegesis enables him to use metaphors literally, as that tradition demands, so as to move "further than the metaphor" (In The Time Of The Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith, 1994: 128). Thus, both "the poetic said" and "the prophetic said" (OB 170) must be held together when we read Levinas' work. Or, rather, the metaphoric reading must be tempered with the talmudic exegetical assumptions Levinas deploys in his work, if we are to do justice to Levinas's philosophic language. Can Aristotle's notion of metaphor as a transport or crossing from the familiar to the unfamiliar and the new work together with Rabbi Eliezer's notion of "the embers still glowing beneath the ashes" --the trope which he uses in reference to "the words of the Prophets" (Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand, 1990: 53)?
Like Descartes who exaggerates his methodological doubts, Levinas exaggerates (out of necessity) the description of the moral subject, employing such tropes as maternity, persecution, trauma, hostage, expiation, hemorrhage, sacrifice, etc. ("The irremissible guilt with regard to the neighbor is like a Nessus tunic my skin would be" (109); or, "Anarchy is persecution" (101)). Notably, however, the following two terms frequently used in TI are hardly mentioned: the Other as the master teacher. Also absent are the extensive and remartable analyses of enjoyment, eros, and fecundity. Ricoeur observes: "Levinas's Otherwise Than Being employs even greater hyperbole [than TI], to the point of paroxysm" (Oneself As Another, 338). This is an unfortunate remark made with respect to the term "hostage." Ricoeur reserves such criticisms with respect to other equally extreme metaphors found in OB, some of which are listed above. But Ricoeur is correct to diagnose that Levinas's use of hyperbole is not simply a figure of speech. It is the very production of the excess of the Other in the said of the text. Ricoeur thus writes:
By hyperbole, it must be strongly underscored, we are not to understand a figure of style, a literary trope, but the systematic practice of excess in philosophical argumentation. Hyperbole appears in this context as the strategy suited to producing the effect of a break with regard to the idea of exteriority in the sense of absolute otherness (Id., 337).The Other is no longer the master who teaches me but is always already in me as in inspiration or maternity (as in "the gestation of the other in the same" (OB 105)). The self as a subject is expelled forever, never to return to itself, always already delivered over to the Other as a gift, as a hostage: "The refusal of presence is converted into my presence as present, that is, as a hostage delivered over as a gift to the other" (151)). Hostage as a gift to the other! We are no longer in the realm of legality but in poetry. Levinas forces us to re-think radically both "hostage" and "gift" by such a juxtaposition of two extreme metaphors.
Levinas becomes relentlessly metaphoric. Subjectivity, he says, involves "the gnawing away at oneself in responsibility" (121) or "the self emptying itself of itself" [kenosis] (111). Its identity is formed to the extent that it is given over to the Other as "the other in me" (111)--the maternal metaphor again. The self as such is the one-for-the-other, sent to the Other as in 'Here I am,' where, as Levinas comments, "'Here I am' means 'send me'" (199, n 11; Isaiah says: "Here I am; send me" (Isaiah 6:8)). To be an I is to be sent to the Other, forever abandoned to the Other to the point of persecution or persecution turned into expiation. Only in the trope of redemption "[a] subject is a hostage" (112).
The passivity of hostage, he further writes, "is the birth of a meanig in the obtuseness of being, of a 'being able to die' subject to sacrifice" (128). Or, in yet another metaphor, the self is a lung always already exposed to the outside air, whose respiration consists of the inspiration turning into an expiration, where "inspiration arouses respiration" (116; cf., 107, 115). In other words, the self breathes his last in expiation, like Christ on the Cross.
But there is no shift (Kehr) here in Levinas' thought--the purported shift from TI to OB--as
the basic concepts reoccur with greater vigor, precision, and in greater hyperbole--albeit in new set of metaphors. If the Totality And Infinity seeks to break away from Hegel's all encompassing totality, Otherwise Than Being paves a new ground for conceiving human subject apart and independent from the conception of subjectivity, which in the West, according to Levinas, has always been thought of in terms of the primacy of the present or being--be it the 'I think' in Descartes; consciousness in Hegel, Husserl, or Sartre; or Dasein in Heidegger--the primacy which Levinas sweepingly but insightfully characterizes in terms of "the gesture of being" (geste d'être), whose impulse (conatus) is analyzed, in the manner of Spinoza and Hobbes, as being's endeavor to persevere in itself or in its being, as a movement of losing itself only to regain itself, an adventure taken on the way home (TI 27) like that of Ulysses, who (himself unchanged) returns to his own home also unchanged after all those years. Husserl would have us believe that the internal time consciousness is one that gathers in the present the past as recalled (in the present) and the future anticipated (in the present), the unity of temporal consciousness that culminates in the present, for which Derrida aptly doubs "the classical metaphysics of presence" (Speech And Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, 1973: 26). To have an identity means for consciousness to (re)present itself to itself so as to remain (in) the same (Idem means "the same.") Thus, Levinas writes: "Essence, the being of entities, weaves between the incomparables, between me and the others, a unity, a community..., and drags us off and assembles us on the same side, chaining us to one another like galley slaves, emptying proximity of its meaning" (182); or, "[t]he beings remain always assembled, present, in a present that is extended, by memory and history, to the totality determined like matter, a present without fissures or surprises, from which becoming is expelled, a present largely made up of re-presentation, due to memory and history" (5).
The task for Levinas then is to conceive human subject beyond the mode of, apart from the sway of, being or essence, which amounts to articulating that which lies beyond ontology, or doing philosophy beyond philosophy or transcendental ego. ("Not to philosophize would not be still to philosophize," Levinas says a year after completing Otherwise Than Being, perhaps in response to Derrida], in "God and Philosophy," 1975.) Or, it is to open up the self-sufficient, self-causing ego in freedom (causa sui) in "a reverse conatus [or] an inversion of essence" (OB 70) or "in subversion of essence into substitution" (OB 162). However, Levinas would be the first to admit that he is not paving a new ground. He has precedence to cite: Plato, Plotinus, and Kant among others (95, 129).
It is remarkable that the chapter IV on "Substitution," which he identifies as the "centerpiece" of the book (xli), ends with the highly condensed and yet suggestive reference to Kant (129). While praising Kant for conceiving "a sense that is not measured by being or not being"--the Kantian moral subject who is conceived independently from the 'I think' of the transcendental apperception--he laments the fact that he could not retain a trait from Kant's philosophic system while "neglect[ing] all the details of its architecture" (129); for to do so would be to collapse the system all together.
Levinas's task then is not to improve or renovate Kant's moral philosophy but to craft his own and unique description of human subject unaffected by ontology, if such is possible, while letting Kantian echoes "reverberate" throughout the description (as Levinas had said as early as 1951 in "Is Ontology Fundamental?"). The result is a highly original and profound analyses of a subject, described as subsuming all, bearing all--a subject held responsible even for the responsibility of the other, and even for the freedom and fault of the other human--an excessive and infinitely exceeding responsibility beyond any measure assumed prior to any initiative or choice, prior to will or consciousness; chosen, elected, or assigned in an immemorial and irrecuperable past (elected at the 'time' of creation, as it were) to be so designated as "me," accused, (me voici), as the one-for-the-other. ("But this desire for the non-desirable, this responsibility for the neighbor, this substitution as a hostage, is the subjectivity and uniqueness of a subject" (123).) Levinas's language here verges on extreme metaphors (which never remain merely as metaphors and sometimes must be taken literally) and is hyperbolic and radical. He states in hindsight in the Conclusion: "Here the human is brought out by transcendence, or the hyperbole, that is, the disinterestedness of essence, a hyperbole in which it breaks up and falls upward, into the human" (184).
[To be continued in "Comments" below.]
July 27, 2014
I am speechless, and yet I have so much to say. A masterwork, in ways, that inaugurates a way of thinking that can have no real beginning or end.
Dare I say it is even better than Totality and Infinity?
I will return to this work time and again, I know already.
Have I said too much? Have I said anything at all?
Or is it not about the said, but rather the saying, and what it says (and what remains unsaid)?
Dare I say it is even better than Totality and Infinity?
I will return to this work time and again, I know already.
Have I said too much? Have I said anything at all?
Or is it not about the said, but rather the saying, and what it says (and what remains unsaid)?
September 29, 2010
I don't think "I really liked it" is a proper way of describing my attitude towards this book. It is probably one of the most important books and, certainly, the most difficult book in my reading history (and, mind you, I've read few of Lacan's texts as well). It takes a lot of patience and self-discipline to get to the end, but when you finish you truly feel victorious. Fortunately for me (I am not particularly patient or disciplined), I had someone to read this book with and I deeply believe it is a way to go. My friend and I, we were meeting in various cafes to discuss the ideas that Levinas tries to develop. Not only did it give me a feeling that I wasn't alone in my confusion and lack of understanding, but it actually helped to develop quite exciting interpretations and find a way to grasp Levinas's meandring thought.
I think this book is a must for those interested in ethics. The basis of Levinas's ethics is an encounter with the other. Out of this encounter, the subject emerges as responsible beyond its capabilities. I wouldn't like to summarize the book bacause I still don't feel that familiar with the concepts. I guess it takes more hours of serious study to fully embrace and comprehend this philosophy.
It is also a useful read for literature and litarary theory students. The notions of "the said" and "the saying," which he developes carefully, might be particularly interesting.
If you are not into ethics or literature, you might want to read it just because it's a pretty puzzling way of thinking, a new system through which you can perceive the world differently. It's a great exercise for both intellect and will. And, to be honest, sometimes it's just breathtakingly beautiful.
I think this book is a must for those interested in ethics. The basis of Levinas's ethics is an encounter with the other. Out of this encounter, the subject emerges as responsible beyond its capabilities. I wouldn't like to summarize the book bacause I still don't feel that familiar with the concepts. I guess it takes more hours of serious study to fully embrace and comprehend this philosophy.
It is also a useful read for literature and litarary theory students. The notions of "the said" and "the saying," which he developes carefully, might be particularly interesting.
If you are not into ethics or literature, you might want to read it just because it's a pretty puzzling way of thinking, a new system through which you can perceive the world differently. It's a great exercise for both intellect and will. And, to be honest, sometimes it's just breathtakingly beautiful.
December 1, 2018
In 1964, Jacques Derrida published what would become one of his most influential early essays, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which he both expressed profound sympathy with and objections to Emmanuel Levinas’s first major work, Totality and Infinity, published earlier in 1961. On the one hand, Derrida praises Levinas’s attempt “to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself. Experience itself and that which is most irreducible to experience” (VM 83). Levinas’s ethics, he observes, relies upon a so-called metaphysics established in interpersonal relation and discourse, “a metaphysics that Levinas seeks to raise up from its subordinate position and whose concept he seeks to restore in opposition to the entire tradition derived from Aristotle” (VM 83). On the other hand, Derrida points out that despite Levinas’s effort to move beyond the “Greek” philosophical discourse of traditional metaphysics with discourse he calls “prophetic exultation,” Levinas, a Jewish philosopher, must nevertheless revert to Greek terms and concepts; his attempt to describe absolute alterity (the Other, whom I encounter in ethical relation) beyond the totality of all there is necessarily—and contra Levinas’s own insistence—falls back into and relies upon the philosophical discourse of the Same, or totality, rather than the infinite transcendence manifested by the Other. Thus, Derrida concludes (in the words of Diane Perpich, one of his current expositors), “alterity in Levinas’s sense requires that exteriority be ‘crossed out’ as soon as it is invoked, since it implies a relative and not an absolute alterity—an exteriority that maintains itself by reference to and in relation to an interiority, and vice versa” (EEI 66). Put simply, Derrida asserts that Levinas fails to demonstrate how the Other can liberate metaphysics from Greek universalism, that his “essay on exteriority” (the subtitle of Totality and Infinity) in fact demonstrates that “it is necessary to think true exteriority as non-exteriority, that is, still by means of the Inside-Outside structure and by spatial metaphor; and that it is necessary still to inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches” (VM 112). The tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches—Derrida’s is a severe critique.
While it is impossible to prove that Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, first published in 1974, is first and foremost a response to Derrida’s criticisms, Levinas’s second major philosophical work certainly addresses many of Derrida’s objections. Otherwise Than Being seeks to move entirely beyond the terms and concepts of traditional Greek philosophy which, Levinas says, represent le dit, the said. The “lived time which allows a phenomenon to appear,” memory, recollection, and representation, thematization and conceptualization, even words themselves—these are all part of le dit, and thereby coincident with totality, with être, with “Greek” philosophy (37). One of the primary theses of Otherwise Than Being is to show how le dit is conditioned by and dependent upon le dire, typically translated as the saying. Le dire, we are told, is “unrepresentable, immemorial, pre-historical . . . the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present, the insurmountable diachrony of time, a beyond the said” (38). The concepts of le dire are, by definition, not concepts; one cannot thematize the movements of le dire insofar as they resist temporalization in predicative statements. Or rather, as soon as one does thematize such movements, as Levinas must in the written text of his book, le dire is subsumed in le dit and only the trace of le dire remains in le dit. The task, then, is “to awaken in le dit le dire which is absorbed” (43); that is, to unsay what has been said “in order to thus extract the otherwise than being” (7).
This task is the thrust of Levinas’s philosophical project in Otherwise Than Being, and he is upfront with the obstacles it poses, many of which Derrida mentions in “Violence and Metaphysics”: “Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?” Levinas asks in his introductory chapter. He immediately recoils from this question and notes that even the desire for synchronization is a retreat into le dit. Thus, while his attempt to philosophize what cannot be philosophized appears utterly futile, the inescapable tension constitutive of Levinas’s discursive effort is, I think, exactly the point. Levinas’s attempt to establish ethics as first philosophy is parallel to his effort to unsay the said of Greek philosophy, and both efforts convey “the desire for the possession of unshakable normative principles or an ethical fundamentum” beyond metaphysics, the traditional philosophical basis for all ethics (EEI 77). Nevertheless, as Levinas makes clear over and over in Otherwise Than Being, this effort is doomed from the start, since the search for an ethical fundamentum leads one back into the totality of Greek philosophy where the search must start anew. Levinas’s philosophy is then “the performance of the ethical life, . . . the enactment of our ethical situation” (EEI 77). On this interpretation, ethics—coincident with le dire on Levinas’s view—is never quite secure, and every attempt to wrestle it down to first principles from which we can derive moral theories fails. After all, how can we ever properly justify our actions? There are always and always will be impossible ethical knots that no Alexander can cut. Yet I must justify myself to the other person, and my responsibility to answer the Other’s demand makes the search for ethics perpetually necessary. We cannot do without ethics, however elusive it may be.
While the terms Levinas uses in Otherwise Than Being differ somewhat from those he employs in Totality and Infinity, the basic structure of transcendence remains in place. Here, le dire (synonymous with transcendence, infinity, and ethics) still manifests in the face-to-face encounter with the Other, the relation that founds rationality and thus makes possible “Greek” philosophical discourse. Yet whereas Levinas primarily describes the Other in Totality and Infinity (at least in the sections devoted to the ethical encounter; the subject does feature prominently in the first parts of Totality and Infinity’s “plot”), he mostly focuses on the subject, the I, in Otherwise Than Being, and in particular who I am in responsibility to the Other. In 1961, Levinas was adamant that the Other solicits my attention, that she disrupts my self-absorbed interaction with a world whose objects I use and enjoy; here, in 1974, he shows how my response to the Other constitutes me as an ethical subject just as it puts me in infinite and asymmetrical responsibility to the other person. Whereas the Other, the call, Desire, and transcendence are some of the major themes in the earlier text, responsibility, subjectivity, proximity, sensibility, and most importantly, substitution, are the critical themes here. For the rest of this review, I will focus specifically on Levinas’s notion of substitution, out of which the rest of the book developed in the years between 1968 and 1974.
“Substitution” was, in fact, the name of an essay published in 1968 which inspired Otherwise Than Being. In its simplest formulation, substitution captures how I am constituted as an ethical subject in my unique responsibility for the other person; more specifically, I am responsible even for other person’s death, such that a truly ethical response to the Other’s call requires my death in the place of the Other. Substitution thus describes who I am and what I should do as an ethically constituted subject. Substitution—to be disinterested, to be responsible, to be unequivocally for another person (the one-for-another vs. the for-itself)—is therefore not an act; it is quite simply to be oneself. The self is sub-jectum, subjected wholly to the Other, and in this subjection, I “find” my subjectivity and individuation, I am awakened to who I am. For Levinas, such individuation is constitutive of and circumscribed to substitution: “Responsibility for another,” Levinas explains, “is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made” (114). Substitution is a non-choice that precedes all freedom, and insofar as I am responsible in substitution prior to the formation of an identity to which I can lay claim, I always stand accused—I must always justify myself in responsible relation to the other person. Simply put, in the words of Paul Celan, whom Levinas quotes at the start of his chapter on substitution in Otherwise Than Being, “I am you, when I am I” (99). We can render Celan’s statement somewhat differently to say, only when I am for another, am I really the “I” I should be. To be responsible to another person, to substitute oneself for the other person, to be accused, obsessed, persecuted, and subjected, all terms Levinas uses to describe substitution—this is not to say that I am responsible “before” I am an “I” in a literal, temporal sense, but that my relationship with the other person matters before I am who I should be, thus before my capacity to think and act as an responsible subject.
Substitution is only one of a constellation of new themes Levinas introduces in Otherwise Than Being. The second most important theme is politics, or justice, which builds upon a very short discussion of “the third party” in Totality and Infinity. Unfortunately, a full discussion of politics exceeds the scope of this review. Yet with politics, just as with the notions of le dire and le dit, Levinas responds to some of the most powerful critiques of his philosophy. In this case, to those who say that ethics as construed by Levinas is not ethics at all—that, in fact, his description of the ethical is so far removed from our ordinary sense of what we owe each other that what Levinas says is ethical may well be unethical—Levinas demonstrates how politics, i.e. the assessment and comparison of responsibilities in a world where there are many others, is bound up with his view of the ethical, which he claims is the foundation or the source of all justice. As then is clear, I hope, Otherwise Than Being is a momentous text that builds upon, departs from, and converses with Totality and Infinity. Like its predecessor, it represents a seminal moment in twentieth century philosophy, and whether or not one subscribes to its distinct vision of the ethical, one can appreciate the creativity with which Levinas thinks, particularly in response to Derrida. Battered, confused, disillusioned, and frustrated, many readers like me nevertheless find themselves inspired and uplifted by Levinas’s defense of human subjectivity, especially by his insistent, albeit sympathetic reply to the skeptic that we are not, contra skepticism, “duped by morality.” Rather, we must always look for it.
While it is impossible to prove that Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, first published in 1974, is first and foremost a response to Derrida’s criticisms, Levinas’s second major philosophical work certainly addresses many of Derrida’s objections. Otherwise Than Being seeks to move entirely beyond the terms and concepts of traditional Greek philosophy which, Levinas says, represent le dit, the said. The “lived time which allows a phenomenon to appear,” memory, recollection, and representation, thematization and conceptualization, even words themselves—these are all part of le dit, and thereby coincident with totality, with être, with “Greek” philosophy (37). One of the primary theses of Otherwise Than Being is to show how le dit is conditioned by and dependent upon le dire, typically translated as the saying. Le dire, we are told, is “unrepresentable, immemorial, pre-historical . . . the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present, the insurmountable diachrony of time, a beyond the said” (38). The concepts of le dire are, by definition, not concepts; one cannot thematize the movements of le dire insofar as they resist temporalization in predicative statements. Or rather, as soon as one does thematize such movements, as Levinas must in the written text of his book, le dire is subsumed in le dit and only the trace of le dire remains in le dit. The task, then, is “to awaken in le dit le dire which is absorbed” (43); that is, to unsay what has been said “in order to thus extract the otherwise than being” (7).
This task is the thrust of Levinas’s philosophical project in Otherwise Than Being, and he is upfront with the obstacles it poses, many of which Derrida mentions in “Violence and Metaphysics”: “Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?” Levinas asks in his introductory chapter. He immediately recoils from this question and notes that even the desire for synchronization is a retreat into le dit. Thus, while his attempt to philosophize what cannot be philosophized appears utterly futile, the inescapable tension constitutive of Levinas’s discursive effort is, I think, exactly the point. Levinas’s attempt to establish ethics as first philosophy is parallel to his effort to unsay the said of Greek philosophy, and both efforts convey “the desire for the possession of unshakable normative principles or an ethical fundamentum” beyond metaphysics, the traditional philosophical basis for all ethics (EEI 77). Nevertheless, as Levinas makes clear over and over in Otherwise Than Being, this effort is doomed from the start, since the search for an ethical fundamentum leads one back into the totality of Greek philosophy where the search must start anew. Levinas’s philosophy is then “the performance of the ethical life, . . . the enactment of our ethical situation” (EEI 77). On this interpretation, ethics—coincident with le dire on Levinas’s view—is never quite secure, and every attempt to wrestle it down to first principles from which we can derive moral theories fails. After all, how can we ever properly justify our actions? There are always and always will be impossible ethical knots that no Alexander can cut. Yet I must justify myself to the other person, and my responsibility to answer the Other’s demand makes the search for ethics perpetually necessary. We cannot do without ethics, however elusive it may be.
While the terms Levinas uses in Otherwise Than Being differ somewhat from those he employs in Totality and Infinity, the basic structure of transcendence remains in place. Here, le dire (synonymous with transcendence, infinity, and ethics) still manifests in the face-to-face encounter with the Other, the relation that founds rationality and thus makes possible “Greek” philosophical discourse. Yet whereas Levinas primarily describes the Other in Totality and Infinity (at least in the sections devoted to the ethical encounter; the subject does feature prominently in the first parts of Totality and Infinity’s “plot”), he mostly focuses on the subject, the I, in Otherwise Than Being, and in particular who I am in responsibility to the Other. In 1961, Levinas was adamant that the Other solicits my attention, that she disrupts my self-absorbed interaction with a world whose objects I use and enjoy; here, in 1974, he shows how my response to the Other constitutes me as an ethical subject just as it puts me in infinite and asymmetrical responsibility to the other person. Whereas the Other, the call, Desire, and transcendence are some of the major themes in the earlier text, responsibility, subjectivity, proximity, sensibility, and most importantly, substitution, are the critical themes here. For the rest of this review, I will focus specifically on Levinas’s notion of substitution, out of which the rest of the book developed in the years between 1968 and 1974.
“Substitution” was, in fact, the name of an essay published in 1968 which inspired Otherwise Than Being. In its simplest formulation, substitution captures how I am constituted as an ethical subject in my unique responsibility for the other person; more specifically, I am responsible even for other person’s death, such that a truly ethical response to the Other’s call requires my death in the place of the Other. Substitution thus describes who I am and what I should do as an ethically constituted subject. Substitution—to be disinterested, to be responsible, to be unequivocally for another person (the one-for-another vs. the for-itself)—is therefore not an act; it is quite simply to be oneself. The self is sub-jectum, subjected wholly to the Other, and in this subjection, I “find” my subjectivity and individuation, I am awakened to who I am. For Levinas, such individuation is constitutive of and circumscribed to substitution: “Responsibility for another,” Levinas explains, “is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made” (114). Substitution is a non-choice that precedes all freedom, and insofar as I am responsible in substitution prior to the formation of an identity to which I can lay claim, I always stand accused—I must always justify myself in responsible relation to the other person. Simply put, in the words of Paul Celan, whom Levinas quotes at the start of his chapter on substitution in Otherwise Than Being, “I am you, when I am I” (99). We can render Celan’s statement somewhat differently to say, only when I am for another, am I really the “I” I should be. To be responsible to another person, to substitute oneself for the other person, to be accused, obsessed, persecuted, and subjected, all terms Levinas uses to describe substitution—this is not to say that I am responsible “before” I am an “I” in a literal, temporal sense, but that my relationship with the other person matters before I am who I should be, thus before my capacity to think and act as an responsible subject.
Substitution is only one of a constellation of new themes Levinas introduces in Otherwise Than Being. The second most important theme is politics, or justice, which builds upon a very short discussion of “the third party” in Totality and Infinity. Unfortunately, a full discussion of politics exceeds the scope of this review. Yet with politics, just as with the notions of le dire and le dit, Levinas responds to some of the most powerful critiques of his philosophy. In this case, to those who say that ethics as construed by Levinas is not ethics at all—that, in fact, his description of the ethical is so far removed from our ordinary sense of what we owe each other that what Levinas says is ethical may well be unethical—Levinas demonstrates how politics, i.e. the assessment and comparison of responsibilities in a world where there are many others, is bound up with his view of the ethical, which he claims is the foundation or the source of all justice. As then is clear, I hope, Otherwise Than Being is a momentous text that builds upon, departs from, and converses with Totality and Infinity. Like its predecessor, it represents a seminal moment in twentieth century philosophy, and whether or not one subscribes to its distinct vision of the ethical, one can appreciate the creativity with which Levinas thinks, particularly in response to Derrida. Battered, confused, disillusioned, and frustrated, many readers like me nevertheless find themselves inspired and uplifted by Levinas’s defense of human subjectivity, especially by his insistent, albeit sympathetic reply to the skeptic that we are not, contra skepticism, “duped by morality.” Rather, we must always look for it.
December 9, 2024
Lectura rápido. Volver.
January 1, 2026
Das wird wohl die erste Lektüre von Weiteren gewesen sein 👀
July 17, 2024
un 1/5 porque no me he enterado de nada, voy a darle una vuelta a ver si me lo explican
June 10, 2020
NO LEER SI ES LA PRIMERA VEZ QUE TE ENFRENTAS A LEVINAS O A LA FENOMENOLOGÍA
No sé si ponerlo en leído. Me ha pasado lo mismo que me pasó en su día con Hermenéutica y Estructuralismo de Paul Ricoeur, que no entendí nada. Por suerte, con el tiempl y estudiando acabé entiendo lo que quería decir y espero en algún momento suceda lo mismo con Levinas. Titulo escogido inicialmente para configurar un corpus teórico para la investigación de la otredad en el Livro do dessassosego de Fernando Pessoa. Me decantaré por Bachellard que me resulta más accesible.
Edit 7/01/2020: He cogido Trascendencia y alteridad que son estudios sobre Levinas realizados por José María Aguilar López. Con suerte, será una forma más amena de abordar este campo
No sé si ponerlo en leído. Me ha pasado lo mismo que me pasó en su día con Hermenéutica y Estructuralismo de Paul Ricoeur, que no entendí nada. Por suerte, con el tiempl y estudiando acabé entiendo lo que quería decir y espero en algún momento suceda lo mismo con Levinas. Titulo escogido inicialmente para configurar un corpus teórico para la investigación de la otredad en el Livro do dessassosego de Fernando Pessoa. Me decantaré por Bachellard que me resulta más accesible.
Edit 7/01/2020: He cogido Trascendencia y alteridad que son estudios sobre Levinas realizados por José María Aguilar López. Con suerte, será una forma más amena de abordar este campo
December 6, 2025
Exegese des Gesagten, um es anders zu sagen, um es zu verdecken, zu entstellen, zu verraten und dem Appell, das Übersetzte als immer nur vorläufig Gesetztes aufzunehmen. Ist doch die Übersetzung nicht zuerst das Ergebnis eines Übersetzens ans andere Ufer, sondern ein Erfahren des Abstands, ein Ins-Werk-Setzen der Differenz. Was übersetzt, ist noch nicht angekommen. Ein schönes Wagnis, auf das man sich einlassen muss.
und die schlecht eingehaltene Verpflichtung, die Tugend zu belohnen und die Laster zu bestrafen, lässt dunkle Gerüchte über den Tod Gottes oder den leeren Himmel glaubwürdig erscheinen. Niemand wird ihrem Schweigen mehr glauben.
das Sich-vom-Sein-Lösen ohne entschädigenden Ausgleich, ohne ewiges Leben, ohne die Lust des Glücks, die vollständige Unentgeltlichkeit
Ich-Einzigkeit, unvergleichlich, weil außerhalb der Gemeinschaft, der Gattung und der Form, Ruhe in sich nicht mehr findend, un-ruhig, mit sich selbst nicht in Übereinstimmung.
Eine bestimmte Art zu schreiben, sich mit der Welt einzulassen, die wie Tinte an den Händen, die sie zu entfernen suchen, kleben bleibt
Die grenzenlose Verantwortung, in der ich mich vorfinde, kommt von diesseits meiner Freiheit, von einem „Früher-als-alle-Erinnerung", einem „Später-als-alle- Vollendung", vom Un-gegenwärtigen, dem schlechthin Nicht-ursprünglichen, Anarchischen, von einem Diesseits- oder Jenseits-des-sein. Die Verantwortung Anderen ist der Ort, an dem der Nicht-Ort der Subjektivität seinen Platz findet und an dem das Vorrecht der Frage: wo? verlorengeht.
Denn der Zeitlauf bedeutet zugleich Uneinholbares,
Widerständiges gegenüber der Gleichzeitigkeit der Gegenwart, Unvorstellbares, Unvordenkliches, Prähistorisches. Vor den Synthesen der Auffassung und des Wiedererkennens vollzieht sich die absolut passive Synthese des Alterns. Eben dadurch vergeht die Zeit, vollzieht sie
sich, wird sie vollzogen. Das Unvordenkliche ist nicht die
Folge einer Gedächtnisschwäche, einer Unfähigkeit, die
großen zeitlichen Abstände zu überwinden, aus zu tiefen
Vergangenheiten wiederaufzutauchen. Vielmehr ist es für
die zeitliche Zerstreuung unmöglich, sich wieder zu Gegenwart zu versammeln - ist die Diachronie der Zeit unüberwindbar, ein Jenseits-des-Gesagten.
In der Umgebung dessen, was betäubt worden war, erklingt für „das hörende Auge" erneut eine Stille; die Stille, die das Sein hervorperlen lässt, wodurch die Seienden in ihrer Identität erhellt werden und sich zeigen.
Klagt eine Seele in der Tiefe der sich brechenden Klänge oder frohlockt sie zwischen den Noten, die sich nicht mehr zu einer melodischen Linie zusammenfügen, den Noten, die bisher, in ihrer Identität definiert, aufeinander folgten und so zur Harmonie des Ganzen beitrugen und ihr Kratzen überdeckten? Doch trügerischer Anthropomorphismus, animistischer Irrtum! Das Cello ist Cello in der Klangfülle,
die in seinen Saiten und in seinem Holz schwingt, selbst
wenn sie bereits in Noten zerfällt - in identische Einheiten, die auf Tonleitern ihren angestammten Platz finden, von hell bis dunkel, nach unterschiedlichen Höhen.
Die Verantwortung für den Anderen ist genau ein solches Sagen vor allem Gesagten. Das erstaunliche Sagen der Verantwortung für den Anderen ist allen Widerständen des Seins zum Trotz eine Unterbrechung
des sein, ein aus guter Gewalt auferlegtes Sich-vom-Sein Lösen. Die Unentgeltlichkeit der Stellvertretung, unentgeltlich und gleichwohl gefordert - Wunder des Ethischen, älter als das Licht -dieses erstaunliche Sagen muss doch ans Licht kommen, und zwar aufgrund des Gewichtes und des Ernstes der Fragen, die auf es einstürzen. Es muss sich ausbreiten und sich sammeln zu sein, es muss sich aufrichten, sich hypostasieren, Weltzeit werden im Bewusstsein und im Wissen, es muss sich sehen lassen und den Einfluss des Seins ertragen
Bedeutung, die dem Anderen gilt, in der
Nähe, die sich von jeder anderen Beziehung abhebt, denkbar als Verantwortung für den Anderen; man könnte sie
Menschlichkeit oder Subjektivität oder Sich nennen. Das
Sein und das Seiende haben Gewicht durch das Sagen, das
sie entstehen lässt. Nichts wiegt schwerer, nichts ist erhabener als die Verantwortung für den Anderen, und das Sagen, das absolut nichts Spielerisches hat, ist von einem Ernst, der schwerer wiegt als sein eigenes Sein oder Nicht- sein.
und die schlecht eingehaltene Verpflichtung, die Tugend zu belohnen und die Laster zu bestrafen, lässt dunkle Gerüchte über den Tod Gottes oder den leeren Himmel glaubwürdig erscheinen. Niemand wird ihrem Schweigen mehr glauben.
das Sich-vom-Sein-Lösen ohne entschädigenden Ausgleich, ohne ewiges Leben, ohne die Lust des Glücks, die vollständige Unentgeltlichkeit
Ich-Einzigkeit, unvergleichlich, weil außerhalb der Gemeinschaft, der Gattung und der Form, Ruhe in sich nicht mehr findend, un-ruhig, mit sich selbst nicht in Übereinstimmung.
Eine bestimmte Art zu schreiben, sich mit der Welt einzulassen, die wie Tinte an den Händen, die sie zu entfernen suchen, kleben bleibt
Die grenzenlose Verantwortung, in der ich mich vorfinde, kommt von diesseits meiner Freiheit, von einem „Früher-als-alle-Erinnerung", einem „Später-als-alle- Vollendung", vom Un-gegenwärtigen, dem schlechthin Nicht-ursprünglichen, Anarchischen, von einem Diesseits- oder Jenseits-des-sein. Die Verantwortung Anderen ist der Ort, an dem der Nicht-Ort der Subjektivität seinen Platz findet und an dem das Vorrecht der Frage: wo? verlorengeht.
Denn der Zeitlauf bedeutet zugleich Uneinholbares,
Widerständiges gegenüber der Gleichzeitigkeit der Gegenwart, Unvorstellbares, Unvordenkliches, Prähistorisches. Vor den Synthesen der Auffassung und des Wiedererkennens vollzieht sich die absolut passive Synthese des Alterns. Eben dadurch vergeht die Zeit, vollzieht sie
sich, wird sie vollzogen. Das Unvordenkliche ist nicht die
Folge einer Gedächtnisschwäche, einer Unfähigkeit, die
großen zeitlichen Abstände zu überwinden, aus zu tiefen
Vergangenheiten wiederaufzutauchen. Vielmehr ist es für
die zeitliche Zerstreuung unmöglich, sich wieder zu Gegenwart zu versammeln - ist die Diachronie der Zeit unüberwindbar, ein Jenseits-des-Gesagten.
In der Umgebung dessen, was betäubt worden war, erklingt für „das hörende Auge" erneut eine Stille; die Stille, die das Sein hervorperlen lässt, wodurch die Seienden in ihrer Identität erhellt werden und sich zeigen.
Klagt eine Seele in der Tiefe der sich brechenden Klänge oder frohlockt sie zwischen den Noten, die sich nicht mehr zu einer melodischen Linie zusammenfügen, den Noten, die bisher, in ihrer Identität definiert, aufeinander folgten und so zur Harmonie des Ganzen beitrugen und ihr Kratzen überdeckten? Doch trügerischer Anthropomorphismus, animistischer Irrtum! Das Cello ist Cello in der Klangfülle,
die in seinen Saiten und in seinem Holz schwingt, selbst
wenn sie bereits in Noten zerfällt - in identische Einheiten, die auf Tonleitern ihren angestammten Platz finden, von hell bis dunkel, nach unterschiedlichen Höhen.
Die Verantwortung für den Anderen ist genau ein solches Sagen vor allem Gesagten. Das erstaunliche Sagen der Verantwortung für den Anderen ist allen Widerständen des Seins zum Trotz eine Unterbrechung
des sein, ein aus guter Gewalt auferlegtes Sich-vom-Sein Lösen. Die Unentgeltlichkeit der Stellvertretung, unentgeltlich und gleichwohl gefordert - Wunder des Ethischen, älter als das Licht -dieses erstaunliche Sagen muss doch ans Licht kommen, und zwar aufgrund des Gewichtes und des Ernstes der Fragen, die auf es einstürzen. Es muss sich ausbreiten und sich sammeln zu sein, es muss sich aufrichten, sich hypostasieren, Weltzeit werden im Bewusstsein und im Wissen, es muss sich sehen lassen und den Einfluss des Seins ertragen
Bedeutung, die dem Anderen gilt, in der
Nähe, die sich von jeder anderen Beziehung abhebt, denkbar als Verantwortung für den Anderen; man könnte sie
Menschlichkeit oder Subjektivität oder Sich nennen. Das
Sein und das Seiende haben Gewicht durch das Sagen, das
sie entstehen lässt. Nichts wiegt schwerer, nichts ist erhabener als die Verantwortung für den Anderen, und das Sagen, das absolut nichts Spielerisches hat, ist von einem Ernst, der schwerer wiegt als sein eigenes Sein oder Nicht- sein.
June 17, 2024
Incredibly difficult, but very rewarding. The implications of these teachings made me tremble and cry. Levinas puts ethics at the very center, in an insistent space, an inescapable position, where the verb "to be" has no more dominion. ("Si nul n'est bon volontairement, nul n'est esclave du Bien») If we continue to keep ethics as a supplement of being (A "is" good, B "is not" good) responsability will always be situated "dans quelque zone de basses tensions, aux confins de l'être et du ne-pas-être."
In other words, Levinas shifts this "responsability for the other" to the center of the human experience. At the core of this subjectivity lies no longer the "I", but a curious accusative form of the self, a so-called "l'un-pour-l'autre", the one-for-the-other. This subject presents itself passively, not as in "I am here for you" (and I cast my shadow on you, as in Nietzsche or Heidegger), but "me voilà", the I as a substitution, with proximity as its conducting field.
A curious focal point becomes the Face of the other, le visage Autrui. The face, for philosophers who have never survived working camps or concentration camps, must hold little more importance than a mask on the wall, but when placed in another context, the face becomes something very different, something sacred.
Maybe we too, in some other sense, are "that face" to the refugee or beggar we cross on the street.
In other words, Levinas shifts this "responsability for the other" to the center of the human experience. At the core of this subjectivity lies no longer the "I", but a curious accusative form of the self, a so-called "l'un-pour-l'autre", the one-for-the-other. This subject presents itself passively, not as in "I am here for you" (and I cast my shadow on you, as in Nietzsche or Heidegger), but "me voilà", the I as a substitution, with proximity as its conducting field.
A curious focal point becomes the Face of the other, le visage Autrui. The face, for philosophers who have never survived working camps or concentration camps, must hold little more importance than a mask on the wall, but when placed in another context, the face becomes something very different, something sacred.
Maybe we too, in some other sense, are "that face" to the refugee or beggar we cross on the street.
May 14, 2025
Damn
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July 6, 2025A general comment but, the reader would greatly benefit, when reading this book, to do it with the original French by the side.
February 27, 2024
Masses voltes a un sol tema. El llibre no s'entén fins al final.
July 30, 2011
Franchement, avant de comprendre ça, il faut déjà avoir fait pas mal de chemin. Le livre est sans doute important, et lourd de sens. Cependant, je le déteste. C'est à se demander parfois si Lévinas écrit pour ses lecteurs. Il est trop exigeant. Il demande trop d'attention lors de la lecture. C'est l'Héraclite des temps modernes.
November 4, 2023
To me, it was by far the most hard to read of Levinas' books. It was still definitely worth it though. Here, Levinas is at its most radical, I almost read it while picturing him as preaching, crying, laughing, praying. A philosophical poem. Which, on contrary to what Vienna's Circle thought, can exceed and be even more life-affirming, life-depicting than art.
August 13, 2007
i have to believe that levinas was making fun. otherwise, it's just depressing.
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December 23, 2018This book complements Totality and Infinity and takes us further down the Levinasian road in a way that feels like either needs to be read again to make more sense of it. The shift away from an ontological way of speaking demands multiple attempts.
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