The possibility of an ethical politics: From peace to liturgy

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 49-73

  Drabinski, John ^a  

^a GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

ethics; law; Levinas; liturgy; peace; politics; redistribution

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992817985     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600403     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. See the work of Gillian Rose for a vivid example of this criticism, most recently in her Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rose's criticisms overlook the fact that Levinas will consistently insist on the necessity of the ‘Greek’ when it comes to the case of politics. While this does not directly address the sense of Rose's appeal to a ‘third’ city beneath the ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, it does, I think, bring Levinas and Rose into a proximity she perhaps does not anticipate.
2. Again, the work of Gillian Rose is exemplary in this regard. See her sustained criticism of the ethics/politics disjunct and her remarks on the problem of the third party in The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 270–96.
3. See also Charles Scott's On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), Chapter 11. Rose and Scott are by no means cohorts in critique. Despite the fact that both are suspicious of Levinas' account of politics, Rose argues for a politics ‘below’ ethics, while Scott remains suspicious of both ethics and politics. A recent article has gone so far as to conclude that ‘the privilege accorded to absolute alterity in Levinas leads to an inability to support political action’, which of course fails to take into account Levinas' own efforts, often very nuanced, in that direction.
4. See Ed Wingenbach, ‘Liberating Responsibility: The Levinasian Ethic of Being and Time’, International Philosophical Quarterly XXXVI(1) (March 1996): 29–46.
5. In A l'Heure des Nations, Levinas will remark: ‘What is Europe? It is the Bible and the Greeks’ (AHN, 128/133).
6. See also an interview with Florian Rötzer, conducted in German, where Levinas remarks, ‘Europe, that's the Bible and the Greeks’, and links this simultaneity with the question of justice (‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in Französische Philosophen im Gespräch, ed. Florian Rötzer [Munich: Boer Verlag, 1986], pp. 93 ff.
7. ‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary Ayelsworth [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995], p. 60). What is most interesting about the latter interview is that Levinas insists that the necessity of the state does not, and indeed cannot, dispense with the relation of goodness with the Other. So, universality and law (in a word, justice) are always bound to singularity and goodness. Explicating this binding is the task of the present essay.
8. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 37, my emphasis, 36.
9. Here my description of Levinas' account of the relation between ethics and politics will run counter to that of Simon Critchley, who contends that ‘the third party ensures that the ethical relation always takes place within a political context, within the political realm’ (The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas [Oxford: Blackwell, 1992], p. 225).
10. This remark puts the case too strongly. While Critchley is correct that Levinas situates ethics and politics in a common significative locus (the face of the Other), we will not claim that ethics takes place within the public realm. Rather, it is quite the contrary. Politics (the politics of peace) is set out from the ethical, and the intertwining of the face and the third is commanded as much by Levinas' methodological allegiance to the principle of concretion as it is by the matters of politics. We cannot, however, go to the opposite extreme of Critchley and claim, as Brian Schroeder does, that for Levinas ‘the ethical is prior to and “better” than the political’ (Altared Ground [New York: Routledge, 1996], pp. 102–3, also p. 72). Schroeder underestimates how seriously Levinas takes the articulation of a politics of peace and how in that context law may be configured as the protection of the Other.
11. IaI, 247–8 and also see the parallel remarks concluding ‘Peace and Proximity’. With the phrase homo homini lupus, Levinas is recalling Hobbes' famed question posed to William, Earl of Devonshire, in the 1855 dedication of De Cive. The phrase is of course originally from Plautus' Asinaria. We might suspect that Levinas has in mind Freud, who employs the phrase in Civilization and its Discontents, but in an interview from 1988 Levinas uses the same phrase — translated into French on this occasion — and invokes Hobbes' authorship. See ‘Responsabilité et substitution’, in Augusto Ponzio, Sujet et altérité sur Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1996), p. 141.
12. In our own formulations, we will use the phrase ‘rights of the human’ to avoid the gender exclusive ‘man’. But it is important to note that this alteration, though in accord with current literary convention, is not without dangers. It covers over the important link, for Levinas, between politics and illeity. This connection is linked of course to the masculine il, which is a problematic unto itself and cannot be adequately treated here. On this issue, see Simonne Plourde, Emmanuel Levinas: Altérité et responsabilité (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1996), pp. 127–48
13. she outlines both the linguistic and the temporal aspects of illeity, attempting to show how immemoriality ‘takes root in the surprising human fraternity’ (p. 141).
14. See also John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: Genealogy of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 209 ff., for another sort of structural account. Llewelyn attempts to negotiate a path around the simple identification of illeity with masculine privilege by pointing out that, according to Levinas' logic, ‘it must be emphasized that the trace of the other [the He-ism of illeity] passes also through the She-ism and elleity of maternity, so through a non-neutral illelleity’ (p. 209). I must thank John Llewelyn for alerting me, in numerous personal conversations, to this problem of substituting ‘human’ for ‘man’ and s/he for ‘he’ in Levinas' work.
15. Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 233, 227.
16. The obvious gender exclusiveness that comes with the term ‘fraternity’ is a significant problem, one that comes also with the question of ‘illeity’ mentioned above in note 9. This problem entails the wider issue of Levinas' problematic use of the feminine and the patriarchal privilege that use betrays. Such issues take us afield from the immediate task at hand, but we should note that they have an enormous impact on both the ethics of Levinas' ethics and the politics of the same. See Tina Chanter's Ethics of Eros (New York: Routledge, 1995), Chapter 5 for a rigorous and critical examination of the role of sex/gender in Levinas' ethics (and by extension his politics). Her reading of Levinas, and especially of Irigaray's critique of Levinas, is uniquely sensitive to the complexities of the issue, which in turn yields a sophisticated account of both the feminine in Levinas and the future of an ethics of alterity.
17. At this point, one may note how this impacts on Levinas' quiet, yet lifelong, polemic against Hegel. In the Grundlinien, Hegel will describe political subjectivity in terms of the ‘patriot’.
18. Hegel writes: ‘This is the secret of the patriotism of the citizens [das Geheimnis des Patriotismus der Bürger] in the sense that they know state as their substance, for it is the state which supports their particular spheres and the legal recognition, authority, and welfare of these’ (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982], p. 458
19. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], pp. 329–30). Levinas' articulation of the genetic priority and resistance of ethics to politics effectively reverses the Hegelian logic of the state, without eschewing the idea of law.
20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), p. 8; my emphasis.
21. Cf. Luce Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) p. 185 (question six).
22. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Dialogue: Œuvre et Altérité’, in Ponzio, Sujet et altérité sur Emmanuel Levinas, p. 150.
23. Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 239.
24. In numerous places Levinas will define sainteté as being called to ‘sacrifice’ for the other. See, for example, his ‘Avant-propos’ to Entre Nous (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1991), p. 11 and the interview ‘Responsabilité et substitution’, in Ponzio, Sujet et altérité, p. 143.
25. See, for example, Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
26. Chapter 10 and Simon Critchley, ‘On Derrida's Specters of Marx’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 21(3) (1995): 12–19.
27. See Levinas' remarks in ‘Ideology and Idealism’ on Marxism as a ‘prophetic cry’ (in De Dieu qui vient à l'idée [Paris: Vrin, 1992], p. 19; IaI, 238) and on Stalinism and the meaning of Marxism at IEI, 197 f.
28. Luce Irigaray, J'aime à toi: Esquisse d'une félicité dans l'histoire (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1992), p. 231; I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 148.
29. Catherine Chalier, Levinas: L'utopie de l'humain (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). Chalier is playing on Levinas' scattered remarks regarding the idea of a utopia without eternity. Levinas will write, for example, that ethics transformed as justice conceives a subjectivity that says ‘here I am for the others’, thereby ‘[losing] his place radically, or his shelter in being, to enter into ubiquity which is also a utopia’ (AE, 233/185). Or elsewhere, Levinas will remark that ‘[t]his concern for the other remains utopian in the sense that it is always “out of place” (u-topos) in this world, always other than the “ways of the world”; but there are many examples of it in the world’ (IEI, 197).