Emmanuel Levinas and the “specter of masochism”: A Cross-Disciplinary Confusion of Tongues

Abstract

This article addresses persistent concerns within clinical contexts that Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics harbors a “masochistic”—or otherwise unwholesome—conception of subjectivity. Mobilizing Emmanuel Ghent’s distinction between masochism and surrender, and extending it into ethical terrain, I argue that Levinas instead offers us an ethics of surrender. What underpins this vital distinction, I propose, is a different orientation to the question of vulnerability vis-à-vis relational trauma. I argue that post-traumatic psychopathological formations (such as masochism or narcissism) defend against relational vulnerability—a defense that manifests as a form of “ethical impairment.” Levinas’s ethical for-the-other existence, by contrast, is predicated upon a defense of relational vulnerability—as the condition of possibility for ethical subjectivity. This crucial point of difference not only explains why Levinasian ethics is not moral masochism but also invests Ghentian surrender with a decidedly ethical dimension.

Keywords:

• Ghent
• Levinas
• masochism/surrender
• narcissism
• relationality
• trauma
• vulnerability

Notes

¹ In raising this point, Bernasconi (2002) is fully aware that Levinas would not disagree: “Far from challenging this potential criticism, Levinas accepts its terms even before it has been posed. A subject obsessed with the other is incapable of indifference” (pp. 239–240).

² Ferenczi (1994) spoke of a confusion of the “language of tenderness” with the “language of passion,” suggesting that “incestuous seductions may occur” if a child’s longing for tenderness from its parent is misread (or misconstrued) by the parent as sexual desire (p. 161).

³ I am very doubtful, for example, that Levinas’s willing acceptance of suffering for the other could ever rightly be called the kind of willful (if unconscious) “seeking out of submission, pain or adversity” that is Ghent’s definition of masochism. Invoking Freud, Orange (2015) makes a similar point when she emphasizes the perverse enjoyment that masochism brings. The “Freudian moral masochist,” she says, “unconsciously enjoys the suffering” as a kind of deserved self-punishment for “some indefinite crime, never identified and never adequately expiated (p. 51). Such enjoyment has little to do with Levinas’s account of suffering; as he writes, in “Useless Suffering,” “Accusing oneself in suffering is undoubtedly the very turning back of the I to itself” (p. 99). In other words, the perverse pleasure the “I” gets from its self-punishment leads to a narcissistic loop that is devoid of ethical value because it simply “forgets” the other in its ruminations.

⁴ If I am, following Marcus, gently shifting the focus from masochism to narcissism at this point, I do so on the understanding that the pathologies are not unrelated. A notoriously slippery term, “narcissism” can present not just in healthy or pathological forms; to confuse matters further, the latter may take on both grandiose and submissive characteristics, where each contains (and conceals) the other. It is in its “masochistic” incarnation that pathological narcissism comes to stand in a chain of equivalence with those various other submissive and compliant forms of behaviour (“false self,” “pathological accommodation,” etc.) that Orange’s interlocutors worry about. Clearly, it is also only in its “masochistic” form that a narcissistic adaptation could ever function as the kind of “lookalike” that might be mistaken for its ethical twin; in its a grandiose inflection, a narcissistic adaptation would not be a mere “perversion” of ethical subjectivity, but instead what Levinas (1985) calls its outright “inversion” (p. 89).

⁵ Simon Critchley (1999), for example, notes the “traumatic logic of substitution” at the heart of Levinas’s work—although he joins the popular chorus and misleadingly refers to this logic as a “self-lacerating, even masochistic logic” (p. 189).

⁶ This is not to say, of course, that Western philosophy might not fear the other. Although he never states it in such terms, Levinas’s (1969) account, in Totality and Infinity, of the Western philosophical subject’s “egology” and his own efforts “toward apperceiving in discourse a non-allergic relation with alterity” (pp. 44, 47; italics added), certainly should give us pause for thought. I develop this point in Drichel (2017).

⁷ The term is Andrew Tallon’s (cf. Tallon, 1995).

⁸ For a critical view, see, for example, David Goodman’s discussion in Chapter 8 of Goodman (2012).

⁹ I develop this line of thought with regard to Descartes in Drichel (2016).

¹⁰ The citation refers to Levinas (1969, p. 173).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simone Drichel

Simone Drichel, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the English & Linguistics Programme at the University of Otago.