Man and World24: 219-233, 1991. �9 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Review essay

The other comes to teach me: A review of recent Levinas publications*

ROBERT GIBBS Department of Religion, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1006

Perhaps the clearest sign of the greatness and the profundity of Emmanuel Levinas' thought is our hesitation in defining him. Is he a phenomeno- logist? A transcendental philosopher? A Jewish philosopher? An em- piricist? A prophetic writer? That hesitation lies at the heart of the life of Levinas' thought, for Levinas teaches that the other is resistant to all classification, that the other is my teacher. Levinas breaks with the existen- tialists: it is the other, not I, that is undefinable. The other produces respon- sibility in me: the responsibility to learn from the other and to answer not just for myself but also for the other. That reversal of my intentionality leaves me always ignorant, always too hurried in aiding the other to grasp the other conceptually. If I learn from Levinas, I will learn that not only he, but every other must elude my definitions.

Levinas' elusiveness provides a useful route through the recent publica- tions by and about him in English. While the major philosophical works have been available for several years, the density of Levinas' prose and the radicality of his re-orientation have left his thought inaccessible and undervalued by many readers. Several readers, however, have developed strikingly rich relations with different sides of Levinas, and their writings are more widely accessible. Thinkers as diverse as the postmodem Lyotard, Liberation Theologians and Philosophers, deconstructionist Derrida, radical and other feminists (including Irigaray), psychoanalysts, and Levinas' close friend Maurice Blanchot, all hear something valuable for their various projects and writings. We can now open him both to include the other Levinas's and to provide us with the insights of these diverse interpreters.

*This review was begun as a cooperative effort with the late Professor Steven S. Schwarzschild, of Washington University. Although he had left it in my hands several months before his untimely death, I am sure that I could not have written it without his criticism and help. I dedicate it to his memory.

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In place of a single Levinas, we will find both a complex teaching of Levinas and also many others who come to teach that we need to learn from the other.

The publication of two anthologies of Levinas' works finally provide broader access to his own thought in English. Collected Philosophical Papers and The Levinas Reader serve different tasks. The Papers are a set of eleven essays which stretch from 1948 to 1978. That period was punctuated by his two major works: Totality and Infinity 1 (1961), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence 2 (1974). While those two great works of philosophy have daunted many readers, the essays of the Papers provide an excellent introduction to the sequence of philosophical issues that Levinas explores. I shall begin by sketching a rough map of Levinas' philosophical concepts, to provide not a full explanation of his analyses but rather a sense of orientation in his thought.

The best place to start is with the face-to-face situation. In Chapter Two ("Freedom and Command"), Levinas contrasts the violence of my freedom, the willfulness of myself, with the non-violent opposition of the face of an other. That face commands me "You shall not kill," putting my arbitrary freedom in question. My freedom then finds its foundation not in my own consciousness nor my own rationality, but in the face of the other.

This core of Levinas' thought appears in its metaphysical dimensions in Chapter Four ("Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity"). The self constructs in consciousness its own pre-ethical world, a world where everything is homogenized to my consciousness, a world of my totality, a world where all difference is reduced to the same. The face of the other challenges me ethically. It breaks down my system and opens into an infinity of respon- sibility. In the face of the other I am called to serve the other, and the more I serve, the more I am responsible, the more my duties multiply. The infinitiz- ing responsibility in the face of the other goes beyond all capacities of my consciousness, beyond my intentionality, even against my own efforts to appropriate and to construct a world.

When the face-to-face interrupts my world of sameness, signification and meaning acquire new importance. In the longest of the essays in this volume, "Meaning and Sense" (Chapter Seven), Levinas, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, develops a phenomenological account of how signification rests upon a prior, established system of meanings. Nonetheless, this cognition within the cultural totality of meanings is broken in upon. Again, the face of the other makes an ethical demand upon me. "But the epiphany of the other involves a signifyingness of its own independent of this meaning received from the world. The other comes to us not only out of context, but also without mediation; he signifies by himself" (p. 95). Indeed, Levinas now proceeds to found all meaning, all

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use of language, on the face-to-face relation. But the essay then turns to ask how it is that the other, without context, can signify at all. Why is it that the ethical signification is not merely part of a presupposed moral world view?

In response to these questions, Levinas introduces the concept of the trace. The face signifies from beyond being, and that beyond, that out-of- context, is present as a trace - or one may say is absent as a trace. "In a trace the relationship between the signified and the signification is not a correlation, but unrectitude itself" (p. 103). The beyond does not appear as an object for consciousness, for if it did it would relapse into being. It leaves a trace in being, a trace which does not point to another world, another entity, but which reveals, as it were, a shadow of being, a beyond which can never appear in being. In a simplification, Levinas insists on the difference between the is and the ought - that the ought is not and cannot be an entity, nor does it arise from an entity.

But for Levinas this good beyond being, this trace or absence in the face of the other, is God. God who is the "infinition" of responsibilities for the other, God who never "appears" but always has already been past. In Chapter Ten ("God and Philosophy"), Levinas presents what could be termed, paradoxically to be sure, a philosophical theology. The first and dramatic step is to reject thinking about God as a being. Without depending on revelation, Levinas insists that "the God of the Bible signifies the beyond being, transcendence" (p. 154). His thinking about God arises, once again, from the priority of the ethiCal. Levinas links ontology and Western metaphysics to the hegemony of the same, to an immanence mastered by the self. God calls us in the experience of the face to infinite responsibility but never appears, cannot appear. There is no discourse about God, nor is there even discourse with God. Instead, God "gets mixed in with words," in my response to the demand, in a phrase said to a neighbour: Here I am. One bears witness, saying, "In the name of God, I am at your disposal" (p. 170). This move culminates Levinas' reflections about God. He displaces all objectifying discourse about God, not with the personal religious ex- perience of God, but with the intensification of the ethical responsibility for the other.

Thus this set of essays leads us from a moral philosopher, to a phenomenologist, to an ethical metaphysician, the proto-deconstructivist of the trace, and finally to a kind of theology (although clearly not an onto- theology). If this changing yet continuous variety presents a thinker, a philosopher most of all, then we find a fuller range in The Levinas Reader. As philosophical text, the Papers have a grandeur and indeed a brilliance that few texts in recent memory have had. Yet Levinas exceeds this defini- tion. The Reader, on the other hand, suffers from a certain silence on the very heart of Levinas' thought. The first section of the Reader, "From

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Existence to Ethics," rehearses his philosophical thought from his early work on Husserl through the chapter "Substitution" from Otherwise than Being. Unfortunately, much of what makes the Papers so important - the discussion of infinity, of the trace, of social and economic ethics, and of prophecy - is lacking here. The path here is longer, but somehow avoids much of the important way. It contains a decisive essay, "Ethics as First Philosophy" where Levinas shows how ethics displaces ontology. "To be or not to be - is that the question? Is it the first and final question... [or does the first question pose] the question of my fight to be which is already my responsibility for the death of the Other, interrupting the carefree spon- taneity of my naive perseverance" (p. 86). The right, the province of ethics, is more fundamental than being itself. The other interrupts my concerns with my own being, with authenticity, even my concern with the Question of Being, raising the question of my responsibility for that other.

But beyond that essay, and beyond the absence of so much found in the two major works, this Reader open up a landscape unimaginable from previous translation - and indeed unaddressed in the English secondary literature. Lumped together as Part II, "Reading, Writing, Revolution, or Aesthetics, Religion, Politics," and then split apart by the second set of three lables, we discover a remarkable other Levinas, or remarkable other Levinas's. The aesthetics essays are, perhaps it is no surprise, really still essays in ethics. Chapter Seven ("Reality and Its Shadow") is shared with the Papers (Chapter One, there). It is Levinas' most sustained attempt at aesthetics and asserts the ethical priority of the critic over the ecstatic creativity of the artist. It is an early essay (1948) and holds echoes of Franz Rosenzweig's discussions of art's unfettered reality in The Star of Redemp- tion - perhaps most of all by its brief gesture that the need for criticism is coupled to the temporality of relations with others.

The other three 'aesthetics' essays are all on literature. We see, again and again, Levinas recapture contemporary literature (Proust, Leiris, Blanchot) as an exercise revolving around the ethics of relation to the other. I will return to the essay on Blanchot below, but if Levinas has little to say about art~ least of all about the plastic and the performing arts, he does examine literature. He shows us the way a book seeks an other, and how within the book there is the struggle to relate to the otherness of the other.

Nonetheless, it is in the second two sections Writing/Religion and Revolution/Politics that we meet another Levinas who is unique. Before he wrote Totality and Infinity, Levinas was principal of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale, in Paris. One of the leaders of French-speaking Jewry for over thirty years, he has segregated his essays on Jewish topics from his philosophical works in order to secure for the philosophical writings a philosophical reading. A decisive question in classifying Levinas is this

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constructive relation of Judaism and Philosophy. That relation is complex on several levels: first from a question of rhetoric and anti-semitism, for Levinas is one of the first Jewish intellectuals in Paris to have established himself as an intellectual and an observant Jew. Second, in terms of the rhetoric of universality in philosophy, it seems that any presence of Judaism or other religious stance would taint the thought, making it theology and no longer philosophy. Third, in relation to the Jewish community, traditional and normative interpretations might reject Levinas' philosophical thought.

But fourth, the last complications recur in combination upon themselves, for Levinas locates within Judaism a philosophical tradition that refuses to become dogmatic theology and refuses any privilege to religious ex- perience. Indeed, the almost astounding conclusion in his reading of Talmudic texts is that Judaism requires of itself that its wisdom become philosophical and universal. In the essay called "Assimilation and New Culture," Levinas writes of the Biblical principle of responsibility for the other:

It still needs to be translated into that Greek language which, thanks to assimilation, we have learnt in the West. We are faced with the great task of articulating in Greek those principles of which Greece had no knowledge. The singularity of the Jews awaits its philosophy. (Reader, p. 287)

The Jews need to learn philosophy - and the West depends on the Jews. Levinas' brilliant and daunting fabric of ethical philosophy is ultimately Jewish. The face, infinity, the trace, the demands of justice, all are transla- tions from Biblical thought. If our reading of Levinas is an archaeology of the texts, then we must read his "Jewish works." But again the question, the second difficulty emerges: does this compromise philosophy?

The answer here is more complicated. For Levinas there is no unique religious experience of the Jews. Plato, Kant, and even sometimes Plotinus, stand out in Levinas' texts as 'Greeks' who grasped something which is properly 'Jewish.' But still, even if there is an access outside the tradition, is it not access to religion at the expense of philosophy, a compromise of the autonomy of reason? To this we must return to the phenomena which are 'religion' - the ethical encounter with the other and the birth of lan- guage in order to respond to the other. If 'philosophy' needs this sort of 'religion,' then does not Levinas claim that philosophy itself is born of these very origins? The philosophical arguments of the Papers and also of the first part of the Reader show that the other interrupts the autonomy of ontological philosophy, forcing us to begin to respond, to reason to the other, to philosophize ethically. This other Levinas, the Jewish thinker, then is not only essential to our understanding of his philosophy, he is essentially

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philosophical. Twenty years after the first translations of Levinas into English, we finally receive the first taste of this other Levinas who is both philosophy's other and an other philosophy. 3

The essays on Judaism that Se~in Hand has drawn together in these last two parts draw across a wide set of Levinas' genres. He begins in Chapter Eleven with "God and Philosophy," discussed above in the context of the Papers. But then we have three important essays on Judaism, the central one being one of Levinas' unique genres: the Talmudic reading. Since 1960, he has been presenting these readings to the Colloquia of French- speaking Jewish Intellectuals. They are a central event in these annual colloquia and have been published in his 'Hebrew' writings, now totalling five volumes. The one included in the Reader ("The Pact"), shows Levinas working on an example of bizarre rabbinic mathematics. The chapter includes a translation of a short passage and Levinas' line-by-line exposi- tion of the text. A 'Greek' coherence is his first task, but the second and more important task is to discover the challenge the text brings to us. His lesson, in reading after reading, is the responsibility for the other. In this case, the covenants between the Jews and God are multiplied by various factors, but the ultimate addition is the responsibility not only for all of the others, but for the others' responsibility for all of the others' others. "This must also mean that my responsibility includes the responsibility taken up by other men. . . In the society of the Torah, this process is repeated to infinity; beyond any responsibility attributed to everyone and for everyone, there is always the additional fact that I am still responsible for that respon- sibility" (p.226).

The latter texts, which do not seem to have much to do with revolution, but have much to do with the ethical critique of politics, continue to explore Judaism. They address different Jewish audiences at different times with the teaching that Jewish survival and identity depends on our responsibility for others and on the study of this teaching in traditional texts. Levinas' repetitions and variations on this theme are directly parallel to his teaching in philosophical works: the origin of philosophy is responsibility for the other, is the face-to-face encounter with the other. This parallel now appears in English materials because of the Reader.

The political dimension is raised in this context by the State of Israel, which Levinas endorses warmly but also with qualification in terms of ethics. His Zionism requires a severe twisting of his thought. In Totality and Infinity, he submits politics to a rigorous ethical critique, arguing that religion (as social responsibility) offers an alternative to politics. Although Levinas backs off from this complete critique of politics in later essays, he retains his basic insight, that the political originates in the ethical. The ethical is a realm of infinite duties, while the political is the translation of

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those duties into a marketplace where responsibilities are rationalized and finitized. As a result, politics both receives its impetus from ethics and remains always vulnerable to the critique of ethics - the teaching of the other. No state, therefore, has its justification in itself, but any state is in ambiguous relation to ethics.

When Levinas then turns his attention to Israel over a period of thirty years, he attempts to hold Zionism to the image of ethical politics he developed. He repeatedly denies that Israel is a state like any other or that it is politics as usual (pp. 227, 283, 293), and in so doing he insists on the ethical challenge of Israel. But the more he insists on the rights of self- defense (p. 292), and on the unique opportunity of establishing an ethical community on this land (p. 261), the more his political sympathies seem to be on the verge of compromising his philosophical critique of geopolitical power and nationalism.

To Levinas' great credit, he explores Zionism's ambiguity. He insists that Judaism depends ultimately on its books and not on national politics for its existence. In an essay called "Means of Identification," he shifts Jewish identity from an Israeli identity card to traditional Jewish texts. He writes: "Jewish identity is inscribed in these old documents. It cannot be annulled by simply ignoring these means of identification... Is this worm-eaten old Judaism to be preferred to the Judaism of the Jews? Well, why not? We don't yet know which of the two is the more lively. Are the true books just books?" (p. 266).

The teaching of Jewish books, though yearning for that land, sets a clear priority of people over land - and in this Levinas does not limit himself to Jews. In the somewhat troubling discussion which concludes the Reader, following the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, he cites a Talmudic passage about calumny. 4 He refers to the spies who misreport on the land while Israel is in the wilderness (Numbers 13). Their offence is seen to be a lighter offence than calumny against people. Levinas concludes:

"For if calumny of that which is 'but stones and trees' already merits death, then how serious, afortiori, must be calumny relating to human beings. The argument - the afortiori of it - is remarkable. A person is more holy than a land, even a holy land, since faced with an affront made to a person, this holy land appears in its nakedness to be but stone and wood." (p. 297)

It is this conclusion, which also concludes the Reader, which shows how even in a problematic guise, as defender of Zionism, Levinas' talmudic role re-affirms the teaching that runs through his other Jewish writings and his philosophical ones as well.

There are two other recent translations of Levinas' works. Time and the Other, and Ethics and Infinity (both by Richard A. Cohen). The former is an

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early series of essays by Levinas from 1946-47. The second is an interview with Philippe Nemo conducted in 1981. Ethics and Infinity is a brisk and unchallenging interview. It leads from his first introductions to philosophy, through the training with Husserl and Heidegger, and then step-by-step through the main themes of his philosophical career, including the earlier discussions of ontology, the face, responsibility, and on to the theological reflections. The later half of the interview is largely quotations from Levinas' major works, and I am afraid that his answers do not explain his ideas very clearly. Moreover, Nemo's questions do not probe some of the more difficult or vulnerable sides of Levinas' thought. Which is not to say that the work is useless - far from it. When it was published in 1985, it was clearly the best introduction to his work. Today, however, with the publica- tion of the Papers and the Reader, the interview is most helpful only to readers who do not wish to engage Levinas seriously.

Time and the Other, on the other hand, is an important essay. I suspect, unfortunately, that the Duquesne University Press version will not be a big seller, largely because the heart of that book is re-published in the Reader. Parts III and IV (of four) are included as Chapter Three, including Cohen's helpful and copious notes. The essay as a whole was the seed of Levinas' major work, as he sketches here the move away from Ontology into Ethics. Many of the phenomenological analyses which constitute Totality and Infinity appear here for the first time. This essay shows a series of excurses from the self into the world. Levinas develops a counter-Heideggerian interpretation of being-in-the-world, where I find myself alone in my existence. My excursions into the world are a seeking after something other than myself. But I discover that I can appropriate the things of the world: I can eat them as food, I can bring them to my home. Only through the confrontation of death is my security of inwardness broken into. Only then is my authentic being put into question. Death does not bring me back to my true self but opens me up to others. Here is Levinas' familiar theme that the other displaces me as the focus of my concern.

what is novel in this essay, and indeed in the two essays which are bound in the separate volume, is the transformation of the interpretation of time. Levinas develops the claim that "time itself refers to this situation of the face-to-face with the Other" (p. 79). He draws heavily on Rosenzweig, as Cohen notes, and also on Bergson (the subject of the last essay, "The Old and The New"). In place of Heidegger's ecstatic present of authentic being, remembering of the past, and resolution toward my own death, Levinas opens up a different sequence of times. There is a parallel sequence of re- presented past, present and future, but there is also an ethical diacronic sequence of time. This present is the urgent demand of the other, whose hunger requires immediate relief. We cannot remember the past which lies

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beyond the grasp of consciousness. This is the past of which we have only a trace, which leaves no direct evidence. The future, on the other hand, opens beyond our goals and projects, onto a messianic future, which will never be present. The echoes of Schelling's Weltalter, and Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, are distinct and clear. But in the context of the Heideggerian ecstases of time in Being and Time, the transformation of time beyond self- relation is intimately linked to the ethical encounter with the other person. Time emerges as intrinsically ethical and intersubjective; while the con- sciousness of time is derivative and ego-centered. Thus Levinas makes time, the center of contemporary ontological metaphysics, become subor- dinate to ethical metaphysics.

Having lost a monotonous Levinas even to regain a more complex one, I now will turn to Levinas' dispersion, to some of the many thinkers who are engaged with his thought. While the English literature is small and recent, we are fortunate to have two collections of quite different quality and purpose: Face to Face with Levinas, which includes essays by several prominent French thinkers, including Lyotard, Blanchot, Irigaray, and The Provocation of Levinas, which is a volume from the University of Warwick and includes several provocative essays which lead Levinas' thought into applications in psychotherapy and feminism. Each is worthy of reading, but clearly the essays in Face to Face are essential to an examination of Levinas.

Each book includes an interview with Levinas, and in addition an essay by him. The interviews with Richard Kearney (Face to Face) and with three graduate students (Provocation) are more focused than the interview of Ethics and Infinity. With Kearney, Levinas discusses time, but his most interesting comments concern the theological tradition and his relation to both its methods and also its onto-theology. Moreover, he includes a brief discussion of Marxism which is almost unique in his works. However in the other interview, with Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, Levinas discusses the universal access to his thought, notwithstanding its Jewish character. He also makes use of an illuminating distinction between force and authority, to explain how the face has irrefusable authority without any force at all. In addition, Bemasconi included a useful English- language bibliography of Levinas in the Provocation. 5

What is striking in both collections is the dispersion of Levinas' thought. The value of his reflection on the other as the origin of meaning and of reason, as well as the insistence on the ethical dimension of experience suits several disciplines. Perhaps the most expectable is the application in psychotherapy, one of the foci of the Provocation. John Heaton's essay, "The Other and Psychotherapy," addresses this connection directly and suggests that Levinas' account of the same and the other provides useful

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insight into clinical narcissism. Levinas still awaits a fuller appropriation for therapy, as either a re-interpretation of traditional analysis or as provid- ing new methods more dependent on discovering the other's view.

The situation is much further developed in various philosophical applica- tions, particularly for what is called postmodemism. Jean-Frangois Lyotard has written an important essay on Levinas, called "Levinas' Logic" which appears in Face to Face. This essay ties Levinas to Kant, particularly the Kant of the Critique of Practical Reason, the Kant who prohibits any deduction of the categorical imperative. Lyotard provides a brilliant interpretation of the parallel between Levinas' account of the ethical prior to reason, and Kant's unique faktum. Indeed, Lyotard symbolises the categorical imperative in order to show how reason itself constitutes the imperative in Kant - and so does not allow a true priority to the ethical. That rational move allows speculative reflection to formalize the impera- tive, and so divests it of its distinctive imperative force by transforming the imperative into a description - all in contrast to Levinas' thought. Lyotard also develops a careful analysis of the difference between an enunciation and an obligation. This links his essay to that of Jan De Greef ("Skepticism and Reason" in Face to Face), who explores the interruptive effects of skepticism, but concludes with a move to Searle and Grice. Indeed, the link between pragmatism, particularly in speech-act theory, and Levinas' thought would be a fertile field for further discussion. De Greef, and even more Lyotard, have begun a dramatic exploration of the pragmatic forces in Levinas' texts.

Another essay which takes Levinas' thought in the direction of logic is Steven Smith's "Reason as One for Another: Moral and Theoretical Argument" (in Face to Face). This careful piece demonstrates the moral force of Levinas' argument, exploring the development of the idea of substitution. The essay climaxes in a re-appropriation of rhetoric, of the appeal in discourse, the intrinsic relationship to an other in speech which itself originates the theoretical discourse called ontology or phenomenol- ogy.

Beyond this horizon of pragmatism and its link to Lyotard's postmodem- ism, there is evidence in these collections of interactions at once more intimate and more remote. The most intimate interaction is with Maurice Blanchot; the remote will be with Feminism, and a middle-term, of sorts is the absent Derrida, presented but silent himself.

Levinas met Blanchot in the late 1920s, and they have been close and strong friends eTcer since. Each has written extensively on the other. 6 The materials now available in English are still too brief to do anything more than introduce us to this remarkable friendship. Blanchot for his part draws on many thinkers, but has developed his extremely sensitive reflection on

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reading and writing in closest proximity to Levinas. And Levinas, if I may hazard a thought, has been kept away from Jewish pietism in his writings because he has had to satisfy his most rigorous reader, Blanchot.

What we now have is on the one hand, Levinas' essay "The Servant and Her Master" in the Reader, and Blanchot's essay, "Our Clandestine Com- panion" in Face to Face. Levinas admires and stumbles along with Blanchot's fiction. In his essay he finds Blanchot writing of the saying which unsays the said, of the use of speech to fight with its own produce, narrative. The enigmatic, anethical speaking of Blanchot's characters fascinates Levinas and leads him to wonder at the density and opacity of signification - because Blanchot, for Levinas, explores signifying without any referent, the origins of meaning in poetry prior to the bestowal of meaning in ethics.

But in Blanchot's essay we find that the 'clandestine companion' that occupies these two thinkers and writers is simply Philosophy. Blanchot struggles and delights in Levinas' characteristic moves, in the primacy of ethics, in the infinity of obligation, in the priority of the saying over the said. Indeed, Levinas had kept himself non-fanatical, staying on the side of universal access even when at his most Jewish. Blanchot writes: "If Levinas pronounces or writes the name of God, he does not pass over into religion or theology, nor does he thereby conceptualize it" (Face to Face, p. 49). Blanchot moreover, recognizes that Levinas' thought follows the Holocaust, marked pervasively by that disaster which more than anything else marks the 'post' of postmodern. This friendship of a great philosopher with a great critic has many other textures, but Blanchot's evocations of philosophy as their companion, and of the holocaust as the disaster that traverses all of their thought, provide us a unique glimpse of their love.

There are dispersions of Levinas which are not presented in these two volumes. Absent altogether is his relationship to Liberation Thought. Levinas is one of the grandfathers or uncles of this extremely vibrant theological movement. It was from Levinas that those theologians and philosophers learned of the priority of the other, that the stranger and the poor were the teachers for the center, of the powerful. And absent also is Levinas' most famous interaction: that with Jacques Derrida.

Derrida's two major essays on Levinas are separated by Levinas' Otherwise than Being. "Violence and Metaphysics" appeared in Derrida's Writing and Difference, but "En ce moment mSme darts cet ouvrage me voici" has not yet been translated. It appeared in Levinas Festschrift 7 as did several essays by others which were translated in Face to Face. Their relation is complex. In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida had challenged the possibility of identifying the experience of the face in language, especially in written language. Yet in Otherwise than Being, and

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in the essays that lead up to it (including Chapters Five to Seven of the Papers) Levinas redevelops his thought to emphasize the non-appearance of the face, the concept of the trace. The two argue further in material still untranslated. But if we have no new next from Derrida, at least we have an essay by John Llewelyn and two fine essays by Robert Bemasconi, one in each volume, that explore this important and complex argument.

In "Levinas and Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics" in Face to Face, Bernasconi examines Derrida's critique of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics" by focusing on Derrida's questioning of Levinas' claim to go beyond ontology, to interrupt the philosophical tradition with Ethics, with the face. He retraces Derrida's challenge to Levinas with the thought of Heidegger and the 'End of Metaphysics'. Bernasconi has also examined their debate in another essay, "The Trace of Levinas in Derrida. ''8 In that essay, he discusses how Levinas' trace eventually found a home in Derrida's deconstruction. The two essays belong together, and Bernasconi is working on a book that further examines this relationship. The essay on the trace concludes with two claims: that Derrida's critique in "Violence and Metaphysics," while not a critical rejection, is successful in forcing Levinas to examine language and significa- tion, and that Levinas' use of the trace also is successful in forcing Der- rida's thought toward a consideration of the ethical dimension of speech.

A further essay on Derrida's relation to Levinas appears in Provocation. John Llewelyn's "Levinas, Derrida, and Others Vis-a-vis" sets out Levinas' distinction from the main phenomenologists, especially Heidegger, Sartre, and Husserl. But Llewelyn follows Derrida's critique more persistently, and suggests that Levinas has failed to get beyond Being and Essence. Indeed, the separation of the saying from the said, the ethical action of speech from the articulated text, proves impossible. Levinas' claim to discover an immemorial past which was never present, is somehow remembered within his text, and so he cannot make the radically transcendent moves that will orient ethics as first philosophy, over against ~ntology. Nonetheless, deconstruction, not unlike Lyotard's 'postmodemism', draws deeply upon several key motifs of Levinas' thought: the interruption of the totality by an other, the privilege of some other (in deconstruction, the text), the trace which is not a phenomenon, which cannot replace philosophy and ontology, and so on.

Last, there is a difficult interaction of Feminism with Levinas' thought. Levinas is no feminist. Indeed, he not only views sexual difference as creative of different gendered experience, but he used that difference centrally in Totality and Infinity. In a discussion that is appalling to feminist sensibilities, he writes that women hide their faces, keep silent and withdraw. Ethics is for Levinas only between myself and an other man;

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women relate to men pre-ethically, helping by making a home for the man. But (if any feminist is still reading), Levinas' thought has still found respect and serious interest from some feminists. In these collections we find essays by Alison Ainley and Tina Chanter (Provocation)and the prominent French feminist, Luce Irigaray (Face To Face). Irigaray has a certain affinity for Levinas, and in her essay "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, section IV,B, 'The Phenomenology of Eros'," she creates a rhapsody on his analyses of desire, eros, voluptuousity, etc. Levinas there discusses how the caress holds the lover between being and not-yet being, how it is not the relation to an object, but also not the relation to a face. Irigaray insists on the relation to alterity in this tender touching. She explores and criticizes the ambiguity of eros in Levinas, for he claims that eros hovers between re-asserting the self as the same, as returning to itself through its eroticism and self-intoxication and the self bound to the other, preserving the freedom of the other. She criticizes him for not emphasizing the eroticism of the other's desire, the ethicality of the beloved's relation to the lover. It is not that she wishes to reduce male and female eroticism to the same eroticism, but that each allows to each the ethical relation to the other that characterizes only the masculine for Levinas. She insists on the primacy of touch: "Before orality comes to be, touch is already in existence. No nourishment can compensate for the grace, or the work, of touching" (Face to Face, p. 232). And it is this very move from the visibility of the face, to the tactility of proximity that makes the move from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being. Edith Wys- chogrod has noted this in the only English essay in Levinas' Festschrift. 9 She discusses the shift to proximity and to the vulnerability of the skin as the chief form of sensibility. But for Irigaray, the sensuality of touching the other becomes a way of restoring to the female her own responsibility and her othemess in a positive light.

Chanter's "Feminism and the Other" recognizes the difficulties of appropriating Levinas, but she also explores him as a resource for rethink- ing othemess. She discovers in Levinas' thought parallels with Marx's reflection on the fusion of the social with the natural - in that Levinas takes the physiological difference as productive of gender difference. Chanter's analysis of his 'worst' texts is remarkable, because she displays how both the pre-ethical status of women, and their 'reduction' to roles of volup- tuousity and fecundity, indeed open up new possibilities for feminist thought. She, too, desires to allow the othemess of the feminine to be other than a privation of the rule of the male logos.

Despite his all too traditional interpretation of femininity, Levinas appeals to these feminists for reasons similar to his appeal to the Liberation Thinkers, and even to Derrida and Lyotard. For he bestows on the Other the

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superiority that the center has always preempted for itself. To be other in Levinas' thought is not to be subordinated to the discourse of the powerful, but is to be elevated as teacher and rendered inviolable. It is as though the other of two millenia (The Jew) finally comes to teach that we must learn from others. Philosophy finds its master discourse interrupted by some other (the text, the differend, a woman, a person of the third world, a Jew), and so these various others turn to Levinas. And yet the pragmatic force of his thought reveals how careful his translation into philosophic thought has been, for he does not claim to himself the role of other, of teacher. The pragmatic force is critical: I must learn from the other and may not say to the other (with that long tradition of philosophy) "learn from me." Levinas opens our ears to the voice of the other but not as preacher for the alienated Jews or ventriloquist of the oppressed. Whatever he is, Levinas teaches me to criticize my project to make the other the same as me, and so I come to see myself as bound to learn from the other, from Levinas and also from all other others.

Books reviewed in this Essay:

By Emmanuel Levinas:

Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Phaenomenologica, Vol. 100. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. xxxi + 186 pages. Cloth $56.50; paper $17.50.

The Levinas Reader, edited by Se~n Hand. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989. vii + 311 pages. Paper $16.95.

Ethics and Infinity, translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univer- sity Press, 1985. xi + 126 pages. Paper $9.50 (OP).

Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ix + 149 pages. Paper $20.00.

About Levinas

Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. xi + 264 pages. Cloth $59.50.

The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bemasconi and David Wood. London: Routledge, 1988. xii + 194 pages. Cloth $69.50.

Notes

1. Translated by Alphonso Lingis in 1969 for Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.

2. Translated by Alphonso Lingis in 1981 for Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague. 3. In late 1990 we will receive two other volumes of Levinas' Jewish writings:

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Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Se~in Hand (Johns Hopkins University Press), and Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Indiana University Press).

4. Babylonian Talmud, 'Arakin, 15a. 5. The comprehensive bibliography by and on Levinas is by Roger Burggraeve

Emmanuel Levinas. Une Bibliographie primaire et secondaire (1929-1985). Leuven: The Center for Metaphysics and Philosophy of God. 1986.

6. Levinas, Sur Maruice Blanchot (Montpellier" Fata Morgana, 1975). Several essays and sections of works by Blanchot, see especially L'Entretien lnfini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

7. Textes Pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Fran9ois Laruelle (Paris: Editions Jean- Michel Place, 1980).

8. In the reprinted volume Derrida and Difference (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

9. "Doing before Hearing: On the Primacy of Touch," in Textes Pour Emmanuel Levinas, p. 179-203.