THE UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF LEVINASIAN ETHICS

Abstract

Levinas's treatment of persecution as the inaugural basis of ethical responsibility tacitly relies on the ethical subject's availability for seduction through an invitation to profane the beloved that is the obverse of the face. Using Jean Laplanche's conception of the enigmatic signifier, I interpret the face–beloved dyad as a pathological response to the primary, overwhelming, and persecutory demand of the breast on the infant. Furthermore, I suggest that Levinas refuses to acknowledge what precedes the anxiety of the enigmatic signifier – the encounter with spacing and temporality that announces the subject into the world. Finally, I challenge the viability of an ethical model that relies on a Judeo-Christian notion of non-reciprocity, which forces survivors of violence into an untenable subject position, thereby reifying their continued erasure as ethical subjects.

Keywords:

• Levinas
• ethics
• trauma
• Derrida

Notes

1 This tendency, interestingly enough, is part of what Levinas himself, in “Hermeneutics and the Beyond” (1977), finds objectionable in Edmund Husserl's definition of presence. At that time, Levinas is clearly wary of a conscious subject that “already allows itself to be forgotten for the benefit of present entities” (Entre Nous 67).

2 Is it possible that isolation contains the attraction towards violence, the probability that no one is watching in this isolated space of (almost-)profanation? No one will see, interfere, or bear witness.

3 To whom is Levinas writing, if not to a self-identified heterosexual masculine subject for whom this impossible transaction with the beloved represents an otherwise impermissible fantasy of violation without consequence? It is as if Levinas himself is seduced by the very transgression he describes.

4 We find the same opposition to psychoanalysis in Levinas's claim that he “has never been a Freudian” (Entre Nous 113).

5 Though he is careful to level the affective register by substituting “caregiver” for “mother,” Laplanche elides the question of why every gesture, caress, or act of “impingement” on the infant necessarily carries the same weight and/or valence. Why are all things equally persecutory to the infant? Can we really conflate the incidental or passing touch of various caregivers with the process of providing nourishment to the infant, which likely takes place before all other examples of care? How can the affective magnitude of breast-feeding and other forms of care be the same? Regrettably, a full analysis of the problematic of Laplanche's position is beyond the scope of this article.

6 Laplanche is also guilty in his turn of situating us at a specific time and place – the infant before the mother's breast – without sufficiently accounting for the temporal specificity of that encounter. Because the infant, the subject-to-be, lacks motor skills, language, and cognitive understanding, the mother cannot impinge on him out of sight, or beyond the range of his perception, except as absence: in either case, the space occupied by the infant in relation to the mother is vital in determining the event horizon of the adult's impingement on the child. Any act of caregiving demands a certain relational distance: the infant must be able to see, hear, or touch the adult who will subsequently generate the excessiveness of alien desire. As Irigaray notes, “[y]our appearance to me creates a distance, a perspective which maintains the two” (46). Nothing occurs without spacing as a determining factor.

7 Extending Nancy's argument, Derrida asks:

What if the work of mourning, philosophy perhaps, philosophy precisely, far from only dealing with “keeping at a distance the incorporation of the dead,” were, by way of this, working on such an incorporation, on a denying avoidance, by way of the incorporation of the dead? (Touching 52–53)

This seems to me part of the issue at stake for Levinas: the attempt to incorporate death into an ethical posture of mourning whose denial of spacing and temporality (“by way of” the face and the beloved) constitutes a “denying avoidance” of death proper.

8 Irigaray offers another insight when she notes that “the sadist and the masochist play with death” (41). As an example of the two poles of the Levinasian ethic, the sadist, in his profanation, and the masochist, in his self-flagellating responsibility for everyone else at all times, are quite suitable figures for my argument. What unites them is the excessive magnitude of their desires: what exceeds containment in both material and affective terms.

9 The demonic or orgiastic mystery “is originally defined as irresponsibility,” residing in “a space in which there has not yet resounded the injunction to respond” (Derrida, Gift 3). Though platonic responsibility “breaks with orgiastic mystery,” Platonism still contains a certain “demonic mystery” (7). Finally, the Christian mysterium tremendum (trembling mystery) incorporates or represses both the older traditions by asking the Christian subject to keep the secret of their sublation. As Derrida notes, “[r]epression doesn't destroy, it displaces something from one place to another within the system” (8).

10 Badiou also points out the frequency with which the Holocaust and the phenomenon of Nazi Germany are invoked as the “absolute form of Evil,” yet are constantly “used to schematize every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions, an effect of the awareness of Evil” (62–63). A historical atrocity passes into the register of radical atemporality, from where it can now signify as an unquestionable first example of Evil's primacy. This sort of erasure uncomfortably parallels Levinas's own work, which is bound up with the need to frame the Holocaust as “the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, in which evil appears in its diabolical horror” (Levinas, Entre Nous 97).