In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas’s develops a phenomenology of the other and totality. Levinas shows how the other’s infinity breaks with totalization. By totalization, Levinas means the reduction of other to the same. The same or totality is the aim of Western philosophy, i.e. an exhaustive albeit scientific systemization. Levinas’s phenomenology of the other is a both a descriptive and normative account of the meaning of ethical relations. Levinas interest in ethics, however, is not in the traditional sense, but in how the other’s otherness subverts the possibility of total explanation.
Levinas’s phenomenology of the other subverts traditional assumptions of philosophical rationality, i.e., the attempt of Western philosophy’s “all-consuming force which absorbs everything.” [i] His phenomenology overcomes the abstract/isolated subject (that of Descartes or Husserl), placing the subject in the concrete world, in the midst of ethical relations. He critiques adequation/representation of the other as violent. Philosophical violence is thus bringing the transcendent other into the immanent same. As a result, Levinas’s ethics of the other is an understanding of ‘non-adequation’ or ‘non-representation’ of the transcendence and infinity of the other, e.g. of eros, God, or the Stranger, and so forth. Levinas’s phenomenological argument is that, “the other can not be totalized” (TI, 35).
The infinity of the other breaks or explodes totality. Levinas states, “The other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is reproduced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence. Speech proceeds from absolute difference” (TI, 194). If the transcendent is infinitely foreign, then it “breaks with the world common to us.” If there is no world common to us, the other remains other, i.e. absolute difference. Levinas states, “Absolute difference, inconceivable in terms of formal logic, is established only by language. Language accomplishes a relation between terms that breaks up the unity of genus” (TI, 195). For him, language itself (as difference) undermines formal logic, such that, Levinas concludes, “Language is perhaps to be defined as the very power to break the continuity of being or of history” (TI, 195). He adds, “The formal structure of language thereby announces the ethical inviolability of the Other” (TI, 195).
In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida describes, rather than defines “a genealogy of the subject.” The subject says about itself, “myself.” Derrida regards, “the subject’s relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity, and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other” (GD, 3). Derrida continues, “the other in its relation to infinite alterity, [is] one who regards without being seen…” (GD, 3). So the “the subject” or the “self” is described by “liberty,” “singularity,” and most importantly “responsibility.” The subject is described in relation to the responsibility to “the other” and “infinite alterity.” Thus here we have a kind of phenomenological ethic of the other.
Interestingly, here Derrida also asserts that the historicity of man is undermined by an abyss. “Historical man,” Derrida says, “does not want to admit to historicity, and first and foremost to the abyss that undermines his own historicity” (GD, 3). Later he says, “For at the heart of this history there is something of an abyss [il y a de l’abime], an abyss that resists totalizing summary” (GD, 4). Yet, a question arises, namely, what is this undermining and resisting abyss? Derrida’s historical abyss is the other. It is the always already of “deconstruction,” which “is always already at work in the work.”[ii] Derrida here comes close to Levinas’s phenomenological critique of totality, asserting that totality is broken by the other’s otherness.
[i] Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, (NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 329.
[ii] Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering (Jane Doe Films, 2002), DVD.
fragments of philosophy 