Constellations: Gabriel Marcel's philosophy of relative otherness

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 80, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 369-392

  Treanor, Brian ^a  

^a LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84881125432     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq20068036     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Jacques Derrida, "Adieu", in his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1-13, at 3.
2. Bob Plant, "Doing Justice to the Derrida-Levinas connection: A Response to Mark Dooley", Philosophy and Social Criticism 29(2003):427-50, at 436.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 39;
4. and Jacques Derrida, "Sauf le nom", in his On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavy, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 35-85, at 74.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 142. The other thinkers mentioned in this vein include Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jean Wahl.
6. Paul Ricœur, "Entre éthique et ontologie: la disponibilité", in Gabriel Marcel: Colloque organisé par la Bibliothèque Nationale et l'association "Présence de Gabriel Marcel", ed. Michele Sacquin (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1989), 157-66, at 157.
7. That is, ethics and ontology are tied together, or joined. Ricœur feels that Marcel's meditations on disponibilité have both ethical and ontological aspects and, therefore, walk a line between ethics and ontology (see Ricœur, "Entre éthique et ontologie: la disponibilité ", 158).
8. However, it is worth nothing that in Oneself as Another Ricœur points out that the question of otherness is properly situated at the "crossroads of ethics and ontology", going on to acknowledge his indebtedness to Levinas on this point (Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992], 189).
9. It will no doubt be objected that this is an oversimplified generalization, which fails to do justice not only to the philosophies of individual thinkers (Levinas, Derrida, Caputo et al.) but also to the differences among these thinkers. As is often the case, this paper offers a condensed version of an argument made at much greater length in a recently completed monograph (Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel and the Contempoary Debate [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006]). While the claim that philosophies of absolute otherness are generally motivated by certain ethical concerns, certain epistemological concerns, or both may well be a generalization, it is a valid and legitimate one given the constraints of space.
10. John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 1.
11. John D. Caputo, "Richard Kearney's Enthusiasm: A Philosophical Exploration of The God Who May Be" Modern Theology 18(2002):95-107, at 92.
12. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 88.
13. See Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), xx.
14. Caputo, "What Do I Love When I Love My God? Deconstruction and Radical Orthodoxy", in Questioning God, ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 291-317, at 296.
15. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 119.
16. Jill Robbins claims that "ceding one's place to the other is paradigmatic of the kind of gesture that Levinas terms ethical' (Jill Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], 1). This is surely a gesture that is often repeated by Marcel.
17. Richard Kearney, States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 191.
18. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 98.
19. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 25.
20. See, for example, Caputo, "What Do I Love When I Love My God? Deconstruction and Radical Orthodoxy", 296;
21. Prayers and Tears, 338;
22. and "Richard Kearney's Enthusiasm", 93.
23. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 338.
24. Levinas, Totalité et infini (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 1.
25. Robert Rosthal, translator's introduction Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Company, 1964), xxii.
26. See Levinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg", in his Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 39-45.
27. Levinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg", 44.
28. Richard Kearney, States of Mind, 191;
29. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 119.
30. (Kearney, The God Who May Be, 72). "Levinas is vulnerable to all of the criticisms that beset metaphysics, for this is metaphysics indeed, a metaphysics of the Good not the true, a metaphysical ethics, not a deontology, but metaphysics still"
31. (Caputo, DemythologizingHeidegger [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 200-01).
32. See Richard A. Cohen, "Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian Response to Ricœur on Levinas", in Ricœur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity, ed. Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 127-60, at 151.
33. Boyd Blundell, "Creative Fidelity: Gabriel Marcel's Influence on Paul Ricreur", in Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricœurs Unstable Equilibrium, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 89-102, at 92.
34. One might object that Levinas does account for the concrete "incarnation" of the other by locating the site of revelation in the face; however, the face of the other is not, necessarily, an actual face. Absolute otherness does not have a particular eye color. Matthew Edgar notes, "the more [Levinas] stresses the otherness of the other, especially in opposition to dialogical co-presence, the less the capital 'O' Other has to do with this concrete other" (Matthew Edgar, "The Other Speaking in My Voice: On the Suppression of Dialogue in Otherwise than Being", Philosophy Today 47:5(2003):23-7, at 23).
35. Thus, while Levinas does address certain aspects of the concrete manifestation of the other as autrui, this is done amidst the incessant focus on the otherness of the other. Likewise, for Derrida and Caputo there is a conceptual difference between the divine and the monstrous, but there is no phenomenological difference (see Caputo, "Richard Kearney's Enthusiasm", 92).
36. We ought to distinguish, to some degree, Levinas from Derrida and Caputo on this point. Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics" (Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics", in his Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 79-153) makes this very point, and Caputo returns to it in Prayers and Tears (20 ff.). Where Levinas tends to insist on otherness outside my horizons of experience, Derrida and Caputo prefer to speak in terms of otherness intruding on, disturbing or shocking my horizons: "[T]he tout autre comes but it comes relative to a horizon of expectation which it shocks and sets back on its heels [because it is unexpected], instead of confirming and reinforcing this horizon in its complacency"