Reading Marx with Levinas

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas is a profoundly influential figure in several post–World War II continental European philosophical traditions. A growing scholarship has started to explore the links between his work and Judaism and, inter alia, phenomenology, feminism, and deconstruction, but very little has been written in the English-speaking world on the connections between his thought and that of Marx. This essay is an attempt at an encounter between the two thinkers, exploring how Levinas’s radical critique of ontology in the Western philosophical traditions can be brought to bear on Marx’s antihumanist critique of capitalism as a way to think of an alternative ethical stand that starts from alterity, which is where the essay finds the spirituality of both thinkers to reside. While the theoretical planes on which they operate are different, through a difficult but necessary conversation, Levinas and Marx can pose to one another fundamental questions with crucial implications for their orientation.

Key Words:

• Class
• Ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Karl Marx
• Ontology

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our friends Anna Challenger, Antonio Callari, Anjan Chakrabarti, George DeMartino, Anup Dhar, Rob Garnett, and Stephen Healy for incisive comments. Thanks are also due to Howard Caygill for helpful suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1 Treanor (2007, 19) argues that according to Levinas it is impossible to sustain alterity in ontology: “Levinas's arguments assert that philosophies based on ontological foundations do not allow the self to encounter anything truly foreign, anything other than that which merely orbits the self as a satellite.”

2 Levinas was taken as a prisoner of war with the Tenth French Army in June 1940 and was sent to a military prisoners’ camp where he did forced labor. Most of his family was killed by the Nazis (Critchley and Bernasconi 2002, xix). In the dedication of his magnum opus, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, he wrote the following words: “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of all the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism” (Levinas 1999).

In a more piercing reference that links ontology to the Holocaust, Levinas (1990, 292) says the following: “Is the Being of being, which is not in turn a being—phosphorescence, as Heidegger has it? Here is the path taken by the author of this book: an analysis which feigns the disappearance of every existent—and even of the cogito which thinks it—is overrun by the chaotic rumbling of an anonymous ‘to exist,’ which is an existence without existents and which no negation manages to overcome. There is—impersonally—like it is raining or it is night. None of the generosity which the German term ‘es gibt’ is said to contain revealed itself between 1933 and 1945. This must be said! Enlightenment and meaning dawn only with the existents rising up and establishing themselves in this horrible neutrality of the there is. They are on the path which leads from existence to the existent and from the existent to the Other, a path which delineates time itself.”

3 For Levinas, holiness in the Bible has to do with this. In a fascinating interview with Chalier, he says that holiness in the Bible is “the position where the other is more important, where, as a result, the subject, at this moment doesn’t think of itself. It is absolutely absorbed by the other. It is, uniquely, alterity. It's about taking charge, of being responsible, of preserving something and reassuring it. That's holiness, in as much as it is the situation par excellence, where the other comes before me.” See “Levinas: The Strong and the Weak,” section 3 of “Penser aujourd’hui: Emmanuel Levinas,” YouTube video, 7:44, from an interview with C. Chalier in 1991, posted by Eidos84, 26 June 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AGDjpg72ng.

4 Putnam (2002, 54) goes on to argue that Levinas is more like Hume in thinking of ethics as a relation, a reaction. But there is an important difference: for Hume, since the essence of ethics is one's ability to sympathize with others, it still relies on the perception of the sameness of the other with oneself. We may be able to sympathize with some but not all. And if we fail to sympathize with some but not others, then we are not ethical. Ethics in this sense is a universal position, yet it is not based upon a humanist first principle or assumption. Sympathy works on the basis of our ability to think the other like me: “What would I do if I were in his/her position?” The necessity of understanding the other, of positing the Other in terms of a Being that is similar to Me, reveals the inherent cracks in ethics, which derive from philosophy based on ontology.

5 This responsibility is my responsibility and mine only. Zygmund Bauman (1999, 183) sees this nonreciprocity as the core of subjectivity: “Indeed, according to Levinas, responsibility is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. Responsibility, which means ‘responsibility for the Other’ and responsibility ‘for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me.’ This responsibility, the only meaning of subjectivity, of being a subject, has nothing to do with contractual obligation. It has nothing in common either with my calculation of reciprocal benefit.”

6 Blanchot (1995, 25) gives us one of the most illuminating explanations of responsibility in the work of Levinas: “Responsible: this word generally qualifies—in a prosaic, bourgeois manner—a mature, lucid, conscientious man, who acts with circumspection, who takes into account all elements of a given situation, calculates and decides. The word ‘responsible’ qualifies the successful man of action. But now responsibility—my responsibility for the other, for everyone, without reciprocity—is displaced. No longer does it belong to consciousness; it is not an activating thought process put into practice, nor is it even a duty that would impose itself from without and from within. My responsibility for the Other presupposes an overturning such that it can only be marked by a change in the status of ‘me,’ a change in time and perhaps in language. Responsibility, which withdraws me from my order—perhaps from all orders and from order itself—responsibility, which separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the other in place of me, requires that I answer for absence, for passivity.”

7 Butler (2009, 77) repeats this elsewhere: “Importantly, there is no self prior to its persecution by the Other. It is that persecution that establishes the Other at the heart of the self, and establishes that ‘heart’ as an ethical relation of responsibility.”

8 Ciaramelli (1991, 88) states that the ethical relation of radical nonreciprocity is prior to ontology, to “I am.” As written earlier, this relation does not derive its meaning from the universal logos. What imposes this command on me is the transcendence of the other. It is the immediate presence of the other, which I cannot comprehend, that impels me to present myself to the other.

9 Zygmunt Bauman (1999, 183) argues that for Levinas morality “is the primary structure of the intersubjective relation” and that “society starts when the structure of morality … is already there.” So for Levinas, “Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates—exploits, re-directs, jams.” Bauman then goes on to argue that the Holocaust was made possible by the neutralization of the attitudes of ordinary Germans rather than the traditional arguments, based on German exceptionalism, that point at the unique intensity and murderousness of German anti-Semitism in the long history of European anti-Semitism (185).

10 For a different take on the relevance of Levinas for Marxism, see Horowitz and Horowitz (2003).

11 The reading of Marx's analysis along the lines of the overdetermined processes of fundamental and subsumed class processes was proposed by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff (1987) in their groundbreaking work, Knowledge and Class. Fundamental class processes refer to those economic processes through which surplus labor is performed and appropriated. Subsumed class processes are those that constitute the distribution of the surplus labor that has been appropriated.

12 Gibbs's work insinuates the importance of this without taking up the task. His analysis draws on the fundamental differences between capitalist and communist societies. This observation is sufficient to notice the necessity of class, since one of the most important differences that mark a capitalist society from a communist one in traditional readings of Marx is the existence of exploitative class relations in the former and their absence in the latter.

13 Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012) develop a very sophisticated and radical analysis of the other, drawing from the work of Levinas, among others, in the context of a novel notion of development.

14 “I knew Enrique Dussel, who used to quote me a lot, and who is now much closer to political, even geopolitical thought. Moreover, I have gotten to know a very sympathetic group of South Americans working out a ‘liberation philosophy’ … There is a very interesting attempt in South America to return to the spirit of the people … I am very happy, very proud even, when I hear the echoes of my own work in this group. It is a fundamental approval. It means the other people have also seen ‘the same thing’” (Levinas 2006, 102).

15 We thank Anjan Chakrabarti for helping us develop this point.

16 “For the transformation of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization [Verwiklichung] of his labour-power” (Marx 1977, 272–3).

17 Jeffrey Reiman (1999, 160) makes an interesting observation of how the sense of “freedom” liberalism forges comes to be internalized and accepted as the norm in time: “Furthermore, because capitalism requires freedom (in the sense of an absence of overt violence) in exchange, capitalism will survive only if exchange relations are normally free in this way. Thus, members of capitalist societies will naturally come to see such freedom as the (at first, statistical) norm and to see overt violence as something to be resisted or corrected. As people come to expect it, the statistical norm will be subtly transformed into a moral norm. And then people will naturally assume that the content of the freedom they value is the absence of violence … The moral doctrine of liberalism is then arguably ‘read off’ the face of capitalism.”

18 See “Emmanuel Levinas: Being in the Principle of War,” section 1 of “Penser aujourd’hui: Emmanuel Levinas,” YouTube video, 11:01, from an interview with C. Chalier in 1991, posted by Eidos84, 10 June 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1MtMzXNGbs.

19 In this primordial obligation toward the Other, in going beyond ourselves, we realize our true humanity. In freeing ourselves from the ego and presenting ourselves without any expectation to the Other, we find our true “homeland”: “A homeland which has nothing to do with becoming rooted or with being the first owner” (Chalier 1991, 124).