An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism

Edited by

Roberto Cantú

An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism, Edited by Roberto Cantú

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Roberto Cantú and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5292-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5292-0

NOT HUMAN ENOUGH: LEVINAS AND A CALL FOR NEW (OLD)

HUMANISM

ZLATAN FILIPOVIC UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN

The only absolute value is the human possibility of giving the other priority over oneself.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous

We have never been so brutally shaken by the maelstrom of our own history as in the last century, which promised emancipation and possibilities of infinite progress but brought on unprecedented bloodshed, devastation and loss of human life that have come to question the very meaning of humanism and the value of its merits. Humanism is often assumed to stand on the firm basis of rationality and autonomy of the subject. Its meaning seems to articulate the very development of the West from its Greco-Roman origins through the Renaissance, the Hellenic ideals of the early German Romanticism and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century to the present-day values of liberal democracy. The notions of the autonomy of human reason, of free agency and integrity of the subject, seem supported not only by the critical heritage of the West but also by its firearms, by the violent history of its military and economic power whose might we have witnessed in the last few decades, marked by wars of aggression always relying on the justifying causes of freedom and dignity of the human being. These notions, together with the rear-guard systems of thought that back them up and that are distinctive of the imperialistic claims of the West, are in Levinas called into question. Might is called to justify itself, to account for itself and renounce its prerogatives for the sake of the vulnerability of the other person.

Zlatan Filipovic

105

To be human, in Levinas, is to be called to Goodness, “such that the other counts more than myself.”1 Freedom of the subject, as he suggests further, “is not the source of all right and meaning,”2 but rather the possibility of self-sacrifice and being for the other person. Elected by Goodness, one is “sobered up” to responsibility that for Levinas is manifested as the-one-for-the-other, as substitution even unto death. Humanity in me, as we shall see, is not what reaffirms or ensures the spontaneity of my being, but what calls it into question, what exposes the prejudice of my freedom and my self-righteousness. As a human, I discover myself not as an agent but in passivity, as pure for-another, as radical generosity of the Ego. The other person’s vulnerability, his mortality, comes as the effraction of my being, of my rights, and exposes the injustice of my selfish will. True humanness seems, in fact, to demand more than my capacity in Levinas. I am thus never responsible enough, I am never human enough. The presence of the other person, the unabated pathos of his need and vulnerability, reveals me to my own shame, to self-effacement and indiscretion of my own presence. For there is a supplication to freedom that precedes mine and to respond to it is to be human.

In this paper, I will point towards a certain inadequacy of liberal humanism to respond to the anxieties of human existence and questions of human relations, insofar as the rights and freedoms of the individual are usually already presupposed in such relations as the rational and unquestionable cornerstones of the notions of justice, equality, solidarity and political existence. It is in the context of Levinas’s writing that the shift from “rights” to “responsibilities” I will consider is most acutely articulated and where a call for new humanism that, as we shall see, is older than all the permutations the inheritance of its concept may have endured, emerges as a call to a renewed critique and a need for vigilance against the abuse of humanity in the very name of humanism that is all too readily appropriated to justify violence and questionable political projects.

In this context, Levinas can also be seen as a powerful voice of a post-Enlightenment critique both of the notions of freedom and autonomy of the subject that are put in question in the responsibility for the other person but also in terms of the humanist pre-critical naiveté about “the human nature” that is based on the metaphysics of the unified subject. Self- 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969): 247. Hereafter cited as TI. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985): 122. Hereafter cited as EI.

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

106

relation and integrated consciousness are broken in Levinas by the infinite incumbent responsibilities for the other that devolve on the subject like an insolvent debt one can never settle in good conscience. The self with all its resources is here in a “permanent deficit,” as it cannot acquit itself of its obligations.

The humanity of man, as Levinas argues in Humanism of the Other,3 is not defined by rationality or subjectivism of freedom, it is found instead in absolute humility and subjection of my freedom to the vulnerability of others. Indeed, for Levinas, the subject itself is constituted as singular or unique by an assignation of responsibility it cannot escape. The fact that no one can respond to the distress of others in my stead is what so imperially consigns me to my identity. My ipseity is thus structured as a response to the need of others. Being a response, the others are there before me and my assertion or declaration of subjectivity is already indebted rather than autonomous, determined by the other to whom and for whom I am accountable.

The critique of humanism that is implicit in Levinas, however, does not testify so much to its failure as to the hypocrisy of the humanist projects based on reason, integrity, autonomy and the dignity of the subject, its naive rights of freedom and self-assertion often appropriated by the discourses of exploitation and used as a shameless pretext for virile imperialism and colonial aggression. Instead, for Levinas, it is as if humanism has not risen to the true height of what it means to be human and it is the status and meaning of this question that has been clouded by the liberal humanist projects based on the spontaneity of the subject as the creator of all meaning and the animating force of history. Liberal humanism, as Catherine Belsey writes in The Subject of Tragedy, is “laying claim to be both natural and universal.”4 It is sustained by its institutional commitment to safeguarding the spontaneity of the human agency and self-determination of the subject. This would be the mainstay of modern liberalism that has come to replace and signify the meaning of humanism today:

The common feature of liberal humanism, justifying the use of the single phrase, is a commitment to man, whose essence is freedom. Liberal humanism proposes that the subject is the free, unconstrained author of meaning and action, the origin of huistory. Unified, knowing, and

3 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Chicago: Illinois UP, 2003): 27. Hereafter cited as HO. 4 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985): 71.

Zlatan Filipovic

107

autonomous, the human being seeks a political system which guarantees freedom of choice. Western liberal democracy, it claims, [is] freely chosen, and thus evidently the unconstrained expression of human nature. (Belsey, 8).

It is this concept of subjectivity as autonomous and free, which has dictated the meaning of humanism and historical progress since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that Levinas calls into question. Commitment to freedom, for Levinas, reaffirms only the natural inclination of any being to care for its own being, ensuring its own perseverance in being. This is the imperial ontological law of the conatus essendi, of one’s “right to be,” that reigns in the natural world. But, for Levinas, what defines humanness is the capacity to defy the conatus, to reverse the course of nature by committing oneself for the sake of another without concern for one’s own being, committing oneself beyond one’s being, in compassion of being for the other before oneself. For it is not enough to be; it is in our capacity to exceed the limits of our being and the imperial egotism of our needs and be better than being. Humanism is not a rear-guard work of freedom, as it were, it is what, in Levinas’ terms, abrogates the self-serving interests of freedom and the egotism of the conatus.

Whenever subjectivity is cornered and stripped of its attributes, its social and cultural significations, its contingency, we might say, it relies on the notions of the biological and the natural to justify its claim on the world. It retracts back to its “essence” that it sees in its perseverance in being at all costs. The sole matter of its concern and its obligations becomes its struggle to be and what is left is the barbarism of the fittest. Indeed, in this time of political discontent, of general bankruptcy of the Western value systems whose dominance is rightly called into question, and the increasing fragmentation of the social bond, no longer able to offer any unified articulation of subjectivity, one of the currencies that always seems available to reaffirm our impoverished sense of identity and belonging is what Levinas, in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” calls “the biological.”5 With “the notion of inevitability it entails,” the biological becomes not just “an object of spiritual life” but its very essence. “The mysterious urgings of the blood,” writes Levinas, “the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle,” can organize a vicious racial rhetoric capable of stirring the most elementary passions. “Man’s essence lies no longer in freedom but in a

5 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990): 69.

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

108

kind of bondage… Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself” (69, 70). The impossibility of escaping one’s own skin to save it, the unpardonable fact of being riveted to oneself, is the absolute horror of racism. Political ideals become reduced to and consecrated in “the community of blood” (70) that one is defenceless to escape. In racism, the priority of biology over spirit is total and when the biological becomes the essence of subjectivity, the self is without recourse. It is no longer able even to repent or expiate itself, to wash away its sin, that is to say, its skin.

In a time when such attitudes are proliferating everywhere, Europe in particular, in good conscience, and when self-interest in the guise of freedom has become a virtue that defines human subjectivity, the concern for the other person—his dignity and his uprightness—becomes not only an exigency of all thought but a call to Goodness. For, biology is not a destiny of man; it is rather that which reverses the course of its inevitability. Insofar as man is capable of self-sacrifice, of setting aside the imperial selfishness of his own needs and the freedom of his will for the sake of others, the natural law of conatus essendi, of persevering in being at all costs, that is at bottom the law of the free market and competition, cannot be what defines the essence of humanity. It is not, in other words, in the sovereignty of freedom that we find the source of the human agency but in responsibility for the other person that calls this sovereignty to account.

It is this concern for the other person prior to any consideration of my freedom that for Levinas constitutes the supreme dignity of human subjectivity. Our ethical commitment is where we recognize ourselves as human. Humanism in Levinas is thus always burdened by the anguish and torture of bad conscience, of not having done enough to relive the distress of others, of never being human enough. This is because, as Jacques Derrida says in Aporias, “one must avoid good conscience at all costs.”6 Derrida’s imperative alerts us to the possibility of ethical somnolence and atrophy of our own humanity that, in complacency of good conscience, no longer feels the disturbance of the other who approaches me in need and whose suffering comes as an effraction of my right to inner repose. The disturbance I feel at the approach is the consciousness of my own injustice. In bad conscience my freedom comes to feel the prickly shame and arrogance of its own prerogatives.

6 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994): 19.

Zlatan Filipovic

109

Derrida’s work, in particular his later writing, as we know, is very much indebted to Levinas and his idea of ethics as a disinterested concern for the needs of others without any consideration of reciprocity.7 In Levinas, the submission of the Ego and the tyranny of its rights that dictate its existence to the needs of others is unilateral, expecting nothing in return. The self is put out of the equation. Ethical commitment, in other words, is not an economy that in the end benefits the Ego; it exceeds all economic relations of exchange because it is purely for-the-other. This being-for-the-other of the Ego is the dawning of humanity in me, the birth of subjectivity. Humanism as responsibility for the other beyond myself or my being thus becomes what is eminently human. But it is not heroism in its glorifying recognition of man and his capacity for occasional greatness; Levinas defines humanism rather as “the most humble experience of the one who puts himself in the other’s place, that is, accuses himself of the other’s illness or pain” (HO, 62). Humanism is the compassion of being that is better than being and its entitlement to freedom. The other in all his vulnerability—in the very fact that he is mortal—solicits my being better than I am, my being open beyond myself and the concern for my own being towards Goodness. The other’s frailty and destitution, which Levinas often refers to as the frailty of “the stranger, the widow and the orphan”8 in order to alarm us to the essential precariousness of the human condition that for him is universal, calls me and the freedom of my Ego into question because I am not doing enough. Levinas wants us to sober up from intoxication with our own being that prevails and dictates our existence and recognize in the other person a supplication to freedom that surpasses our rights.

Humanism of the Other, a collection of three essays by Levinas published in the latter half of the 1960s, could be seen as a response both to structuralism where “all that is human is outside… and everything in me

7 Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001); The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999); Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000); Acts of Religion, Ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), to name a few where Derrida’s powerful ethical landscape of the wholly other, of unconditional hospitality, of politics and of infinite justice unravels against the backdrop of sometimes explicitly Levinasian themes. 8 Cf. Totality and Infinity (77, 78, 215, 244, 251).

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

110

is open” (HO, 62) but also to Heidegger and other existential conceptions of man that privilege freedom and the isolated Cartesian subjectivity in the attempt to account for the humanity and dignity of man. That “existence precedes essence,” as it does for Sartre, does not mean that man, in the complete absence of foundation, is condemned to his freedom without any available excuse or alibi. For there is something older than his existence, something prior to the Ego and the question of his freedom or non-freedom for Levinas, and that is the presence and existence of the other, already calling me to justify myself and, in this justification, constitute my subjectivity. The “I” asserts itself first in and by the recognition of the claim the other makes on me, that is, in my responsibility. For Sartre, man is always in the making insofar as he chooses his own essence; for Levinas, the other and my responsibility for his mortality are there prior to the question of my freedom. For Sartre, to recognize anything prior as incumbent upon man’s existence is to be self-deceived or in “bad faith” that only dissimulates “man’s complete liberty of commitment,” as he writes in his famous lecture Existentialism and Humanism.9 For Levinas, the subject first comes to itself in the movement of bad conscience, one could say, where the claim of the other is already incumbent upon subjectivity as responsibility that precedes free commitment. The “I” is not an “I,” for Levinas, that asserts itself in freedom, but a “Here I am,” he says, thus already constituting itself as a response to the call of the other.10

“Here I am” is the dawn of subjectivity for Levinas. The subject is constituted as a response, unique and individuated precisely because no one can answer in its stead, irreplaceable thus in its responsibility and not in the expression of its freedom or its spontaneity. The subject is not an “Ego” or an agent acting upon the world in order to appropriate it according to its needs, but a “me,” an object in the accusative, already responsible and under obligation. As Levinas writes in Entre Nous: “Human subjectivity, interpreted as consciousness, is always activity. I can always assume what is imposed on me. I always have the capacity to consent to what I submit to and to put a good face on a bad situation. Thus, everything happens as if I were at the beginning; except at the

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948): 61. 10 “The word I,” says Levinas, “means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.” Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998): 114. Hereafter cited as OB.

Zlatan Filipovic

111

approach of my fellowman.”11 The approach of the other signifies the deposition of my originative status and my authorship.

However, my agency and my power are interrupted in the approach of what is essentially powerless. My need to secure the resources that shore up and solidify my continuing capacity to act, that is to say, my freedom in all its claims, is suspended in the approach of another who disarms me and all my resources by his vulnerability, by the strange force of his frailty. The other, as we have said, approaches me not as another will to dominate, as a force in the struggle for ascendancy that follows the natural law, but as poor and destitute, as one without support or shelter, and it is his poverty that overpowers me. It is the suffering and mortality of others that obligate me. This strange authority that can halt an approach of armies but that itself remains without power is the force of ethical resistance. Here, in the approach of my fellow human being, who comes not as a force opposing my freedom but as an ethical resistance that can offer no resistance and that puts itself radically in my power, Levinas continues, “I am recalled to a responsibility never contracted,” a responsibility I have never freely consented to, in other words, but that still imperially obligates and that is “inscribed in the face of an Other.” The face, for Levinas, what is most open and defenceless, puts a stop to the conatus and announces my humanity as responsibility. It is in the face, where my power is absolute because of the utmost exposure and nakedness of the face, that the natural law, which instigates war and oppression in order to secure the freedom of my being, reverts to charity of being, to its originary humility and compassion. It is the face of the other that reveals my humanity to me. “Nothing is more passive than this prior questioning of all freedom” that the face of another signifies. “It is an event that strips consciousness of its initiative, that undoes me and puts me before an Other in a state of guilt; an event that puts me in accusation—a persecuting indictment, for it is prior to all wrongdoing—and that leads me to the self, to the accusative that is not preceded by any nominative” (EN, 58-59). To be human is to be a persecuted subject under obligation, to be exposed to the exorbitant ethical demand. But it is this “fact of exposing oneself to the charge imposed by the suffering and wrongdoing of others [that] posits the oneself of the I,” for Levinas. To be me, in other words, is to feel the weight of the world that I support. The subject, says Levinas in his uncompromising terms, “is the one who, before all decision, is elected to bear all the responsibility for the World” (EN, 60). 11 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia UP, 1998): 58, emphasis added. Hereafter cited as EN.

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

112

It is time, therefore, for the ego cogito to be brought to account, to own up, to justify itself, to acknowledge all others on whose suppression its own freedom is based. Responsibility in Levinas’s terms, is “prior to all free engagement” (HO, 52). One is “elected” to Goodness before being free, before positing oneself as integrity and inviolable sovereignty of the person that the modern conception of humanism demands. Man, writes Levinas,

[U]nderstood as an individual of a genus…persevering in being, like all substances, has no privilege that would establish him as the aim of reality. But man must also be thought from the responsibility more ancient than the conatus of substance or interior identification, thought from the responsibility that, always calling on the outside, precisely disturbs that interiority; man must be thought from self putting himself despite himself in the place of everyone… from the condition of hostage, hostage of all others, who, precisely others, do not belong to the same genre as me, because even for their responsibility I am, in the last analysis and from the beginning, responsible. (HO, 68)

Subjectivity, as a result, far from being the integrated consciousness of the ego cogito that masters the world, discovers itself in accusation from the outset and, for Levinas, it is constituted as “the impossibility of evading the assignation of the other without blame” (OB, 109). This is what Derrida in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas calls “subjectivation,”12 the articulation of subjectivity in subjection, which, of course, questions the very possibility of liberal humanism that finds the dignity of man in the sovereignty of his freedom, rather than subjection, and in the supreme value of intentional consciousness associated with the will of the individual. Consciousness in ethics is not a movement of knowledge into a possession and mastery of the world. In ethics, the Ego loses his sovereignty and responds to the call of Goodness where the other counts more than myself. Now “good conscience” would destroy the very rectitude of the ethical movement where subjectivity is stripped of itself and of its self-assertion, and exposed to the other. Levinas even talks about the skin being turned inside out, the opening of subjectivity as “the stripping of the skin exposed to wound and outrage” (HO, 63). In other words, ethical consciousness is pure passivity, deeply traumatised by the other’s dereliction and exposure to wounding. It is sensitivity itself, vulnerable to the needs of others. Levinas thinks of it in visceral terms even as “hemorrhaging” for the other’s suffering (OB, 74). 12 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999): 56.

Zlatan Filipovic

113

Humanism, for Levinas, is thus the responsibility for others that is older than the freedom of the subject or integrity of the Ego, “more ancient than the conatus of substance or interior identification.” For prior to “consciousness and choice,” he writes, “before the creature collects himself in present and representation to make himself essence, man approaches man” (HO, 67). Man is first moved to alleviate the need and destitution of the other, the other’s vulnerability and exposure to death—these are my responsibilities that are unilateral and absolute; they are not subject to the contingency of cultural significations for Levinas but rather foundation for all thought.

This excessive concern for the other in Levinas can be articulated as a persistent demand for human solidarity that permeates his thought and that, in view of the last century and the searing wound its cruelties have left on the human psyche, appears to be the only exigency and justification of thinking. It is not ontology that Levinas sees only as “a philosophy of power” (TI, 46) and a primitive form of naturalism but ethics that is the foundation and basis for all thought. Ethics with its exorbitant demands opposes the naturalism of ontology and the perseverance in being of each being; it demands rather an escape from being and the horror of its truth and a projection towards being-for-the-other. It is in this for-the-other or “substitution,” as Levinas calls it, “where responsibility is said to the utmost” (HO, 75), that humanism can reclaim its meaning as care for the needs of others.

However, the absolute primacy of the other in human relations, the other whom Levinas sees as “the Most-High” (TI, 34) and as pure transcendence that resists appropriation and cannot be reduced to a set of representative attributes without violence, implies also a profound questioning of our notions of solidarity and human relations. If my subjectivity is taken hostage by the vulnerability of the other prior to my freedom of commitment then human relation that liberalism assumes is founded on reciprocity is what Levinas implicitly puts in question. There is an originary asymmetry in ethical relation that for Levinas begins in the face-to-face encounter where the other’s vulnerability that the face immediately signifies precedes the concern for my own being and becomes the gravity of my being. This asymmetry that makes the other matter more than myself is also given as the very uprightness of the other person whose height signifies a transcendence I cannot equal or reduce to my categories. The asymmetry signifies obligation or immediate assignation of responsibility that otherwise would have to be imposed upon the relation it in fact constitutes. This originary inequality of human relation whereby the subject is elected to responsibility before

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

114

commitment is the very origin of charity and justice: “The equality of all,” writes Levinas, “is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights.” And this “forgetting of self” and my rights in the face-to-face is what first “moves justice” (OB, 159).

For Levinas, equality is not enough. It is only a temporary respite from the natural hostility and imperialism of the Ego trying to persevere in its being and ensure the freedom of its own enterprise. This equality is nothing but an arms race or a militant equilibrium gathering momentum and ready to flare up in violence and madness whose devastating power we have witnessed in the destruction and suffering of the last century. In other words, equality based on freedom and reciprocity as the political fate of man rather than on justice as the infinite responsibility for the other—infinite because it is for-the-other beyond my being—is, to evoke Levinas, “the path of peaceful violence, of exploitation, of slow death… [now] substituted for the passion of war” (EN, 30). Levinas demands infinitely more than equality of political justice and its institutions. Indeed, politics and equality come after the more ancient modality of justice that begins in the absolute charity of the Ego without reciprocity, an originary movement of consciousness towards the other without the economy of calculated returns or restitution. Without this infinity of justice or “ethical peace,” which can never be fully instantiated in body politic because this would sanction oppression and to which the political remains forever unequal, there would be no inspiration for politics to change what is, to be better than being.13 Where subjectivity of the Ego is affected by the needs of others to the point of substituting itself for their suffering in expiation, the passage from power politics that dominates our existence towards Goodness and beyond the political opens up. And it is in this space that humanity finally recognises itself. This would not be equality of recognised rights or a provisional ceasefire based on “pure security and non-aggression, which guarantees everyone their position in being,” and which rationality imposes to limit the violent nature of the conatus, but precisely humanity of the human that is “non-in-difference itself:”

Non-in-difference that must be understood not as the neutrality of some disaffected curiosity, but [as] the “for-the-other” of responsibility. Response—a first language; primordial goodness which hatred, in its

13 This would be what Derrida in Adieu identifies as “a messianic politics” (74) or “the prophetic ideal” (78) in Levinas that overtasks the political with a commitment to be better than being, and that demands “political invention” (79). It is a question of ethical commitment that goes beyond the political, opening it thus to the possibility of transformation.

Zlatan Filipovic

115

attentions, already presupposes. Love without concupiscence, in which man's right assumes meaning; the right of the beloved, that is, the dignity of the unique. (EN, 194)

For the other before myself, or my non-indifference towards the other who remains other, who in each case is unique and cannot be synthesised to a common concept of identity, of ethnic, cultural or other belonging that would do away with dignity and rectitude of the ethical commitment, is the primordial meaning of social being. It is love that burns with unconsummated desire that, as Levinas says elsewhere, “nourishes itself on its own hungers” (EI, 92), because the other is never possessed in satisfaction but remains an alterity irreducible to my interiority and beyond my grasp, and in that it does, is my inspiration. What inspires must be other than me, that which keeps me open beyond my being. And if my subjectivity first emerges in my responsibility for the other person that surpasses the comfort of my being and freedom that reaffirms it, then subjectivity is not integrated or unified but cut open from the outset by the commitment it can never assuage without fault. In other words, humanity that no longer feels “the torsion of a complex,” as Levinas puts it, whenever it excuses suffering is no longer human (OB, 87).

The meaning of intersubjectivity or human relation lies then “in a non-indifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another, but before the reciprocity of this responsibility, which will be inscribed in impersonal laws, comes to be superimposed on the pure altruism of this responsibility inscribed in the ethical position of the I qua I” (EN, 100). What is important here is the fact that the ethical relation is originary, not biology or naturalism of the conatus that would prevail in the bellicose state of nature prior to the social contract. This implies that what is most human, that is to say, when all the accouterments and predicates of being have been phenomenologically reduced, what is exposed as the bare bone of humanity is responsibility for the other as the “pure altruism” of the will. “It is prior to any contract,” Levinas continues,

that would specify precisely the moment of reciprocity—a point at which altruism and disinterestedness may, to be sure, continue, but at which they may also diminish or die out. The order of politics (post-ethical or pre-ethical) that inaugurates the “social contract” is neither the sufficient condition nor the necessary outcome of ethics. In its ethical position, the I is distinct both from the citizen born of the City, and from the individual who precedes all order in his natural egotism… (EN, 100)

Equality, in other words, is imposed to limit the infinite responsibility that precedes it in the ethical approach where the I, or “ipseity” as Levinas

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

116

says, “is a hostage” (OB, 114) of the other’s vulnerability, irreplaceably called to respond and unable to shirk. Human relation is originally unequal. There is a gradient of answerability for all to subjectivity that is prior to humanist and political projects of co-existence and that is all too often overshadowed by the grand eloquence and the humanist rhetoric of freedom, of rights, and the human will as the unconstrained author of history. For Levinas, humanism is not human enough and his critique is a reflection of the failure of humanism to surpass the subject or individual and look for meaning in the approach of others: It is “the idea of subjectivity—unto substitution—responsible for all others and, consequently, the idea of defense of man understood as defense of the man other than me, [that] presides over what is called in our day the critique of humanism” (HO, 69, emphasis added). In Levinas, the questioning of the integrated notion of the subject, usually identified with critical posthumanist discourses of psychoanalysis and (post)structuralism, is motivated by a different departure from ethical obligation as “the idea of subjectivity unto substitution,” being for the other and expiating for another’s suffering, that is to say, by the compassion of being that opens the subject under responsibility from the outset.

Liberal humanist projects grounded in the subjectivism of freedom and naïve fundamental rights of the individual are often used as a rhetorical alibi for the imperialistic ambitions of the West in order to secure access to untapped natural and strategic energy resources, or to ensure hegemony in the opening markets. Humanism, after all, has always been an empty signifier looking for another victim. This humanism that continues the grand narrative of progression and self-emancipation and that is driven by pure interest and vitalism of the conatus is what Levinas’ critique of humanism puts in question as the basis of contemporary discourse on humanity. This calls for a new—but older—humanism where to be human is to be sobered up to a responsibility that goes all the way and beyond the naturalism of being, where my fear and concern for the other is the gravity stronger than the fear for my own being. For what is it that defines our humanity? It is, once again, not our nature but precisely our ability to reverse its course. “My place in the sun,” as Levinas is often fond of quoting Pascal, “is the beginning and the prototype of the usurpation of the whole world” (EN, 231). This is what I am recalled to in the approach of the other and what reveals my humanity beyond my freedom and my right to be. “This way of understanding the meaning of the human,” continues Levinas, “the very dis-inter-estedness of their being… [begins by] thinking above all of the for-the-other in them, in which, in the adventure of a possible holiness, the human interrupts the pure obstinacy of being and its

Zlatan Filipovic

117

wars (231). It is thus my humanity that questions the prejudice of my freedom and

the self-righteousness of my projects. To be human is to find oneself contested by the vulnerability of the other that reveals me to my own shame and indiscretion of my own insistence on being, of “my place in the sun.” The human in me reveals me on tiptoe, so to speak, “as being without daring to be,” says Levinas (EN, 143). This happens even as an everyday occurrence in that visceral, primitive flinch of a nerve that makes us avert our eyes in shame whenever a homeless person appears in our way, whenever we look elsewhere or do whatever we can to avoid his haunting eyes because they traumatise our self-assured legitimacy of being and reflect the burning wound of our shame. It is this shame, in fact, that reveals the originary impossibility of Narcissus, or, which amounts to the same thing, subjectivity under obligation.

The responsibilities that devolve on the subject are too much to bear, they tear the subject apart—and this is what Levinas in Otherwise than Being calls the anarchic origination of subjectivity, where Goodness that elects me as a subject under obligation “does not proceed from any initiative of the subject” (OB, 166). Prior to my freedom or initiative there is already a supplication to freedom of the other that first moves me. The self in ethical relation is both anarchically dispossessed and disempowered by a resistance of what is, in fact, absolute vulnerability, and this is what constitutes “the adventure of possible holiness,” referred to earlier, that puts a stop to my power because of Goodness where the other matters more than myself. The point is that the conatus, the ontological epic of subjectivity in its struggle and effort to be, is not what justifies our right to be and what constitutes the meaning of our existence. The ethical is prior to this. Ethics trumps ontology, it is in spite of ontology, it can reverse its course through the possibility of substitution and self-sacrifice. Goodness, structured as the-one-for-the-other calls for self-sacrifice; which is also why Goodness is infinite or beyond being. This is why in Levinas, the other’s death is the first death, because my commitment to the other is in-finite, which simply means beyond my being.14

To be human today is to be torn apart by increasingly disparate demands that constantly call for revision of our responsibilities. But this also means that the inherited concept of humanism is somehow insufficient to meet the specific requirements of our time. What Levinas 14 “It is for the death of the other that I am responsible to the point of including myself in his death…The death of the other: therein lies the first death.” Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 2000): 43, emphasis added.

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

118

offers is difficult. Subjectivity that consumes itself like cinders in order to respond to the destitution and vulnerability of the other, and not because the other’s demand is powerful but precisely by virtue of his vulnerability. “The uprightness of the face of the other”—the face being the birth of ethics for Levinas, is also the “uprightness of an exposure to death, without defence,” as Derrida notes in Adieu (121). It is the other’s frailty, in other words, that brings down the might of empires to its knees. “I am responsible for the other in that he is mortal,” writes Levinas (GDT, 43). It is the precariousness and mortality of the other that sobers me to my responsibility, not his power.

The humanism that Levinas offers is a subjection to the helplessness of the other before any commitment to the truth that might constitute him. It is a subjection to the foreigner who is there before me and whose face, in its very destitution and nakedness, in its openness to assault, “to wound and outrage,” in Levinas’ more visceral terms (HO, 63), commands me and makes my freedom ashamed of asserting itself. The other’s face, as we have seen, is also what ex-poses me beyond the limits of my being, insofar as my responsibility prevents me to close in upon myself as a complete subject. To be responsible is to discover oneself contested and summoned to respond, to give account, to justify oneself. Where one could be a spectator, one becomes responsible and this is how responsibility and the exorbitant demand of ethics that constitutes our humanity calls into question the autocracy of the ego and the dominance of the subject.

In the end, for Levinas, to be human is to say “Here I am,” which is a saying with inspiration, as he claims. He defines “the human” as “the return to the interiority of the non-intentional consciousness, to bad conscience, to its possibility of fearing injustice more than death, of preferring injustice undergone to injustice committed, and what justifies being to what guarantees it” (EN, 148). Subjectivity is for-others. And, in that it is, subjectivity is also, and by the same token, the recognition of its own insufficiency before the commitments that devolve on it—I am never responsible enough, I am never human enough. The more responsible I am, the more just I am and the more guilty I feel. With regard to the other, I am always indebted. The ethical demand is insatiable, which is also the very root of its infinity.

So what is it that makes us human? What is it that we all share, if not precisely our mortality, our vulnerability. Responding to the face of the other, says Judith Butler in her reading of Levinas, means being “awake to what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life

Zlatan Filipovic

119

itself.”15 Humanity that rises up to the very dignity of its name responds to this precariousness that manifests itself as a call to peace in the very epiphany of the face. Vulnerability of others, their mortality, is my visceral concern. This is what we share, our helplessness. Because beyond all subject positions, all stances and assertions, all our ambitions, our vanities and declarations, the ego is, first of all, vulnerability. “The ego,” says Levinas, “from top to toe and to the very marrow is—vulnerability” (HO, 63). Vulnerability then would be, perhaps, what reveals us to one another as human. It certainly points to a world that is better than ours, more human, perhaps a world we cannot achieve, but this does not mean that one is free to give up trying.16

Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985.

Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

—. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of the-Other. Trans.

Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

—. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.

—. God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

—. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Chicago: Illinois UP, 2003.

—. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.

—. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17. Trans. Seán Hand. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990.

—. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.

15 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 134. 16 As Richard A. Cohen writes in his introduction to Humanism of the Other: “Responsibilities are infinite, even if humans are insufficient for them. Rather guilt than guile, rather responsibility than risibility [...] In the words of Rabbi Tarfon, from Pirke Avot: ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work; yet you are not free to desist it’” (xxxvii-viii).

Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism

120

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948.