ALL OUR RELATIONS

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to examine the status and promise of Emmanuel Levinas’s humanism for a posthuman and more-than-human age. I suggest that, even though Levinas’s approach partially reproduces classical forms of anthropocentrism, a careful reading of his writings on humanism uncovers surprising resources for thinking about ethics and relationality beyond human beings. I close by suggesting that one of Levinas’s early writings on ritual anticipates the need to adopt practices that reconfigure our habitual relations to the world as a whole, both human and more-than-human. As such, I argue that his work can be mined for important insights for reconstituting a genuinely post-anthropocentric form of life.

Keywords:

• humanism
• posthumanism
• anthropocentrism
• subjectivity
• ritual

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I borrow the phrase “leave the climate” from Levinas (Existence 19), where he notes the profound need to leave the climate of Heidegger’s philosophy but without returning to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy.

2 By the term anthropological difference I mean a difference (or set of differences) that would purport to mark a specific, unique human nature or essence and that would allow for a differentiation to be made between human beings and animals as well as other non-human others.

3 The reader will note that my focus throughout this essay will be on the iteration of posthumanism that attends to the more non-anthropocentric aspects of the critique of humanism. I agree with Wolfe in his characterisation of transhumanism as constituting less a version of posthumanism and more an intensification of the aims and ethos of traditional humanism. Of course, my focus on this non-anthropocentric strand of posthumanism should not be taken to suggest that Levinas himself leaned in this direction. To the contrary, there are several threads in Levinas’s work, especially in his remarks on technology, that could quite reasonably be read as consonant with the aims and overarching ethical vision of certain transhumanist thinkers and projects.

4 “A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin’s idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle of life without ethics” (Levinas, “Paradox” 172).

5 I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pushback on this point concerning the attitude toward the non-human world found in Levinas’s mature writings. I am suggesting here that the later writings are characterised by a near exclusive focus on the interhuman order and an equating of religion with the ethical relation among human beings to the exclusion of obligations toward more-than-human others. This reviewer suggests that a careful reading of one of Levinas’s later confessional texts, “Judaism and Kenosis,” indicates that the motif of prayer serves as a correlate of the early Levinas’s discourse on ritual (which I discuss below) and that it is through human prayer and supplication that God condescends and empties himself into the innumerable “worlds” he creates. If one reads these “worlds” as including both human and more-than-human beings, then prayer functions in these texts as a human way of caring for the whole of God’s creation, whether human or otherwise. Although Levinas does not explicitly emphasise the more-than-human dimension of creation in this specific essay, the reviewer is correct to suggest that it is implied and that this text serves as a way of lessening the charge of dogmatic anthropocentrism against Levinas’s later work in toto. A fuller account of the tension between the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric strands of Levinas’s thought cannot be elaborated here, but I would suggest that the increasingly anthropocentric tendency of Levinas’s mature thought is developed in regard to what David Clark calls the “sentimental humanization” of animals and the concomitant dehumanisation and animalisation of Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust (see Clark 168).

6 The literature is too vast to cite here. For readers unfamiliar with this discourse, two recent, popular scientific accounts by specialists in the field of ethology provide an excellent overview of the state of the research (de Waal; Lents).

7 For some of the most helpful works on this theme, see Atterton; Clark; Guenther; Llewelyn; Plant.

8 Cary Wolfe’s work on posthumanism is an important exception here, as it consistently contests the need to reiterate a new human/animal distinction.

9 In a penetrating set of reflections, an anonymous reviewer inquires whether Levinas’s notion of ritual ultimately returns us back to Greek philosophical notions and practices of thaumazein, or wonder. In response, I would suggest that Levinas is, in fact, occupying the same space of the ritualised practice of wonder that gives rise to and sustains philosophy. But here, Levinas is slightly recasting this project in view of the specific rituals of de- and re-habituation required to practise wonder in contemporary contexts. I should also add that Levinas’s approach to ritual forms an interesting complement to the contemporary philosophical discourse on spirituality and spiritual exercises found in, among others, Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot. I hope to explore the related but distinct role of askēsis in these philosophers in a forthcoming project on spirituality and conscience.

10 The phrase “all our relations” or “all my relations” is commonly found in Native American indigenous discourses and practices, and I risk using the term here in view of marking a point of possible overlap between the surprisingly broad ethical vision in Levinas’s early thought and the correspondingly rich and diverse conception of ethical and social relations in many indigenous traditions. Two particularly helpful sources for exploring the implications of this conception of “all our relations” in indigenous contexts are LaDuke and (even closer to the concerns of the present essay) Robinson.

11 It should go without saying that any return to the climate and vision of Levinas’s early thought would need to be carried out carefully and critically. In particular, Levinas’s remarks on animal sacrifice toward the end of “The Meaning of Religious Practice” constitute precisely the kind of dogmatic inability or unwillingness to “sacrifice sacrifice” for which Derrida has rightly criticised Levinas (see Derrida).