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5.0 out of 5 stars
the scandel of levinas, March 16, 2006
This review is from: Addressing Levinas (SPEP) (Paperback)
We should never underestimate the significance of scandal. Whether as an effacement of religious strictures or simple bad manners, the scandal shocks the given and proper. In this wide-ranging and interesting collection of essays, the fact of being addressed - the scandal of a Saying that exceeds and disrupts the Said - is operative in pathos and vigor. The editors open the volume with a seemingly innocuous question: how should `readers address Emmanuel Levinas' and his work? (p. ix). As the preface and introduction venture into this question, the editors effectively deploy its aporetic complexity. These essays take up the necessary Levinasian task of `[...] deepening articulations, criticisms, and extensions of his thought' (p. xi). These gestures of depth, extension, and critique suggest that Levinas's writings move beyond themselves. As the editors announce, the varied contents and disciplines traversed throughout this book not only speak to the breadth of Levinas's work, but also to the necessity of bringing his themes to bear on issues he left unsaid. This disturbing yet necessary labor runs the risk of doing him an injustice. As we deepen, extend, and critique, as we follow Levinas even in holding him to account for his own areas of hypocrisy and injustice, we risk effacing the Saying which overflows his Said. Indeed, in reading this volume one feels that the problematic of justice which haunts Levinas's underdeveloped politics structures the very approach to his texts. Because we are shocked by his sayings, we labor with Levinas beyond or against Levinas.
These essays circulate within the tertiary fields of fidelity, prospectus, and evasion. In my view, the manner of address to a large extent circumscribes the salience of the analyses, suggestions, and encounters presented in these papers. With David Wood, we might invoke Heidegger's distinction: `In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of reading another thinker: going to them (through critique, polemic), and "going to their encounter"' (p. 153). It is in this manner of encounter that the scandal becomes decisive. Do we let Levinas disturb us? Do we allow the scandalous shock to operate through us even as we interrogate him? Do we take up his challenge in such a way that we can justly offer it back to him? This shock impressed itself upon me as I read this volume and will serve as the critical thread of this review. Indeed, it is the degree that each essay manifests disturbance, taking seriously the scandal of Levinas' Saying, that constitutes the measure of its fidelity, or at the very least, a viable critical prospectus that requires a more extensive address. In the essays I will term evasive, one gropes to even find real criticism. A number of essays fail to even rise to the level of a reading, let alone a critical `encounter.' It is here the question of justice becomes decisive. Whether or not one buys into Levinas's wager, we ought, at the very least, seek to hear him rather than simply using the name `Levinas' as a placeholder, as a mirror to reflect our own projects back to ourselves. The evasive responses to the Levinasian scandal either liquidate his particular themes in the author's own preferred topos, or knock down their own confused constructions of what Levinas is saying in the gesture of `moving beyond' him.
Rather than offer a gloss of each of the nineteen essays in this volume, I will proceed by discussing a few essays which exemplify the deepening, extension, and critique noted above. After briefly reviewing essays of the first two types, I want to tarry with the critical essays for a while. For as I hinted above, the manner in which these critical essays address Levinas dramatically illustrates the issue of justice in reading, and the justice of the reading suggested to me the manner in which the authors are disturbed by him, that is, how they take up the scandal.
The essays which open this book consider Levinas's philosophical work in relation to various biblical and Talmudic verses. In his essay, `Beyond Outrage: The Delirium of Responsibility in Levinas's Scene of Persecution', James Hatley takes up Levinas's controversial description of ethics as obsession, persecution, and so forth. Rather than seeking to assuage the controversy, Hatley intensifies and defends it in a moving reading of the Cain narrative. Rather than simply opposing the delirium of ethics to the orthodoxy of politically correct critics, Hatley brilliantly shows how the delirium operates within the persecutor, with one who seeks to evade responsibility as illustrated in the figure of Cain. In extending the ethical persecution to the persecutor, and then comparing the Cainic and Abrahamic responses to it, Hatley traces an interesting equivocity in its operation. In identifying and distinguishing the madness of ethics and the madness of Cain - of the faithful Abrahamic response and of the malicious ressentiment of the murderer - Hatley asks: `Would not Cain, in his state of mind, see the very call to which Abraham submits as a curse?' (p. 45). Abraham and Cain both see each other as cursed. Both are, in their own ways, dispossessed. Hatley intimates that the manner of response to the other determines this expropriating movement. While Abraham is disturbed to faithful attendance, Cain's evasion ossifies into the madness of forgetting and oblivion. Though he suggests that this evasion terminates in a forgetful celebration of the void, Hatley's reading opens the possibility of even Cain's redemption. Is not Abrahamic faithfulness, in its way, a search for Cain, the lost and guilty one? Is not the Abrahamic exodus - in all its madness and pathos - the redeeming movement where Cain is sought in the patience of God? Here, Cain's outrageous suffering is irreducible to simple retribution, but operates to open him to a responsibility which could redeem him. This beautiful essay exemplifies a deepening of Levinasian reflection, of successfully extending his concerns to regions left unsaid, and in manner which manifests a deep fidelity to his corpus.
In `The Responsibility of Irresponsibility: Taking Yet Another Look at the Akedah', Claire Elise Katz compares Kierkegaard's and Levinas's reading of the Akedah, the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac. Katz promises to take their respective readings seriously as she attempts to `[...] synthesiz[e] Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Judaism' (p. 19). For those of us interested in bringing Kierkegaard and Levinas into contact, this prospect is intriguing. One often gets the feeling that Levinas's critique of Kierkegaard's readings is somewhat blunt and a bit anachronistic, even if one is sympathetic to the thrust of that critique. It is almost as if there were a gap between Kierkegaard's reading and Levinas's rejoinder. This gap operates in Katz's framing of the relation between their readings: `Kierkegaard's drama ends where for Levinas [...] the climax begins' (p. 29). Though Katz hints that she ultimately affirms Levinas's interpretation, she implores us, with Kierkegaard, to `read the story slowly and carefully,' (p. 25) to imagine with Kierkegaard the psychological turmoil, the fear and trembling Abraham experiences preparing for the terrible moment. She suggests that this turmoil lends force to where Levinas picks up: the hineni, the `here I am' of ethical election, as the decisive moment of the story. At this point the gap asserts itself all the more strongly: if Abraham is already an ethical subject, why go through the drama of preparation? In other words, to take Kierkegaard's reading seriously one must leave open the possibility of teleological suspension. If one closes this possibility, then the Akedah is simply a moral tale that illustrates the drama of Levinasian ethics. Katz must, then, mediate - must fill in the gap where Kierkegaard leaves off and Levinas begins. How does she do it? Katz claims that:
`[...] Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his child, and his receptiveness not to continue with the action, depict a necessary moment in the genesis of the ethical itself. Even if Levinas does not want to locate the ethical in an archē, [...] there is none the less the sense in which the ethical calls for its own explanation.' (p. 28)
What began as an intriguing prospect comes to a rather disappointing climax. Either Katz is not aware of the implications of her synthesis or it is a calculated attempt at onto-theological reductionism. In either case, her suggestion simply regresses to a type of rationalist valorization of the righteous self. Statements like the following seem to confirm this diagnosis:
`It is only through Abraham's bodily actions, through his preparation to sacrifice Isaac, that he has the epiphany of the ethical. And just as Abraham comes to understand through his actions, so too must we understand through the act of reading and reflection.' (p. 26)
The singularizing ordeal of faith and the singularizing hineni of ethical election evaporate in the auto-didactic movement of reflection. Katz's synthesis reinscribes precisely what Kierkegaard and Levinas rebel against. Her attempt to secure a `genesis' of the ethical, an ethics which `calls for its own explanation,' would reinscribe ethics back into the very universalism Levinas rescued it from. The site of this `genesis,' for Katz, is Abraham's own reflexive auto-affection. Thus, it is neither the ordeal of faith nor the face of Isaac that inscribes Abrahamic singularity, it is his own self-constitutive action. This Abrahamic in-and-for-itself would inaugurate the very violence Levinas contests as he thematizes the an-archic responsibility of ethics and it is against such a movement that Kierkegaard summons his teleological suspension.
One even questions whether Katz is aware of the onto-theological implications of her `synthesis.' In that the...
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