Alterity and Transcendence ./ / EMMANUEL LEVINAS Translated by Michael B. Smith - dt THE ATHLONE PRESS LONDON c\'7·" '· Tb V, S "f ~ Contents I · ~t H UNlV -lJ l L \8 c~ 1o First published in the United Kingdom 1999 by Translator's Note Vll THE ATHLONE PRESS Preface by Pierre Hayat IX 1 Park Drive, London NWll 7SG © 1999 The Athlone Press Oringally published as Alterit( et Transcendence© Fata Morgana 1995 I THE OTHER TRANSCENDENCE 1 The publishers wish to express their appreciation of assistance given 1 Philosophy and Transcendence 3 by the government of France through Le Ministere de Ia Culture in 2 Totality and Totalization 39 the preparation of his translation. 3 Infinity 53 C~UTJT" British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available II PHILOSOPHY OF DIALOGUE AND from the British Library r J -1 FIRST PHILOSOPHY 77 K ),)~ NL L. ISBN 0 485 11519 0 N (I 4 Beyond Dialogue 79 5 The Word I, the Word You, the Word All rights reserved. No part of this publica­ tion may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval God 91 system, or transmitted in any form or by any 6 The Proximity of the Other 97 means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying 7 Utopia and Socialism 111 or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. · ~ III PEACE AND RIGHT 119 Typeset by Ensystems, Saffron Walden 8 The Prohibition against Representation Printed and bound in Great Britain by and 'The Rights of Man' 121 Cambridge University Press 9 Peace and Proximity 131 10 The Rights of the Other Man 145 v Contents IV CONVERSATIONS 151 11 The Philosopher and Death 153 12 Violence of the Face 169 Translator)s Note Bibliographical Note 183 Notes 185 193 Index The French 'moi' is consistently translated as I, and the French 'je' as I, without the italics. The pronoun 'he' and related forms are sometimes used, as in the French original, to refer to hypothetical persons of either sex; the terms 'man' and 'fellow man' are also used in this way. Levinas's 'prochain,' a nominalized adjective meaning 'next,' is translated sometimes as 'fellow man' and sometimes as 'neighbour.' English words in square brackets, if in the main text, are intended to clarify ·ambiguities in my trans­ lation; if in the footnotes, to differentiate my notes from. those of the author. Italicized French words in brackets are Levinas's own, which I supply either in cases in wliich a technical distinction might otherwise be lost, or when the morphology of the original word carries semantic connotations _that cannot be translated. !f I would like to express my gratitude to Alisa Ray of the Berry College Faculty Research and Sponsored Programs Office for final manuscript preparation, and to my wife Helen for her helpful stylistic / suggestions. Vll VI l Preface Philosophy Between Totality / and Transcendence by Pierre Hayat 'Philosophy is Platonic' (Emmanuel Levinas) 'Alterity and Transcendence' the title Emmanuel :·1 Levinas has chosen for the present volume, which groups twelve texts written between 1967 and 1989, leads us directly to the idea that · transcendence is 'alive in the relation to the other man' (see below, p. 126). How are we to perceive what is at stake in this thesis of Levinas's? First, by recalling that 'transcen­ dence' can be construed variously. Levinas insists that l etymologically 'transcendence indicates a movement l of crossing over (trans), but also of ascent (scando).' 1 In its etymological sense, transcendence leads us to the notion of going beyond, of upward movement, or I of a gesture that moves beyond itself. Transcendence rI would appear to be the marker of the paradox of a relation with what is separate. 'It is a way for the I distant to give itself.' tf IX ... I~ Preface Preface This tension toward the beyond - this look lifted Thus, man is no longer required to dissolve into a toward the heights - would, on this view, originally higher reality. Transcendence becomes the intimate be mediated through ~he sacred. Human beings structure of subjectivity. In other words, it is subjec­ bowed before what was beyond them. Their greatness tivity that is found at the beginning of the movement came from their being dissolved into a higher domain of transcendence. Levin as calls upon Jean Wahl, his of being, that of the absolute or eternal. friend and interlocutor for several decades, to express II' Such is clearly not the direction taken by Levinas. that idea. 'Man is always beyond himself. But that For in that figure of transcendence we recognize the beyond-oneself must eventually be conscious of the 'magic mentality' that prompts men to believe that fact that it is himself that is the source of transcen­ the world in which they live is governed by mysteri­ dence.'4 The transcendence of subjectivity attests to ous powers. Levinas reminds us that Western philos­ this amazing possibility of going beyond any actual ophy has contributed to the liberation of men from situation and exceeding any definition. that 'false and cruel transcendence.'2 Reason delivers But 'modern philosophy,' looking at transcendence us from the illusion of a 'world-behind-the-world.' It from the point of view of subjectivity, renders the frees mankind from the fear of an imaginary beyond. notion of transcendence problematic. Indeed, is there The world that, having become for man an object of not something like an an antimony in the proposition: knowledge, has lost its troubling strangeness, hence­ 'The subject transcends itself? Either we have a true forth appears without secrets and open to theoretical transcendence, but in that case the subject is carried investigation and within technology's grasp. along in its transcendent movement, and, in that Does this mean that today transcendence has lost adventure, .the subject, ceasing to be itself, loses its all meaning? With the modern philosophies of the identity, or its substance; or the subject remains itself subject, we are witnessing a transmutation of the idea in its movement of transcendence, but then there of transcendence, rather than its eviction. Transcen­ may be doubt as to whether or not there is true dence cannot be reduced to the transcendent. It does transcendence.5 Thus, 'the celebrated project of the not define a dimension of the real that reaches beyond modern philosophers, in which the subject surpasses the inner life. It accompanies the birth of human itself by creating,' returns the subject to itself, without subjectivity. 'It is not a question here of making making a true transcendence, a going out from self, transcendence subjective, but of being amazed at possible.6 subjectivity (... ) as the very modality of the What is the source of this impossibility, for the ~ rrtetaphysical.'3 modern philosopher, of maintaining the subject intact X Xl Preface Preface tn the movement of transcendence, without the lat­ In such a relational context, conflict inel uctably ter's losing its meaning? It lies in his persistant becomes the essential mode of the relation to the attachment to the age-old privilege of the One. other, as each subject sees its power of transcendence I Whether transcendence expresses the subject's ability wrested from it by the other. And as Sartre writes: to distance itself from any real actuality and affirm 'The other as a look is nothing but this: my transcen­ itself as pure freedom, or whether it refers to the dence transcended.'8 subject's power of realizing itself in history through In order for a true transcendence to be possible, its works, its underlying principle is in the idea of the the other must concern the I, while at the same time identity of being. remaining external to it. It is especially necessary that Levinas is dedicated to rethinking transcendence the other, by his very exeriority, his alterity, should by other pathways than those taken by the modern cause the I to exit the self. Levinas wants to show philosophies of the subject. To do this; he does not that the other, by his face, attests to himself, simply, give a definition of transcendence a priori, but shows directly, without going through any mediation. That how a 'new transcendence' is the very meaning of exceptional capacity of the face to testify to itself 'the human.' Levinas's philosophy is constructed on outside all objective context and independently of the the basis of a non-constructed intuition: that of the intersubjective field is, of itself, a message addressed upsurge of transcen~nce as a 'question to the Other to the subject. By the non-ordinary manner in which and about the other.'7 Transcendence is born of the it manifests itself, the face opposes violence with intersubjective relation. metaphysical · resistance. In doing so, the face raises But in order to bring transcendence into view does the subject to responsibility. it suffice to assent to the foundational character of W e see how Levinas proposes to think the inter­ intersubjectivity? When the intersubjective relation is subjective relation: not as a reciprocal but as a asym­ metrical relation; not on the basis of a common space presented as a mirror - lik~ relation in which each subject stands face to face with the freedom of the but across the ecart separating the I from the other, other, alterity is still being thought on the basis of the as a lowering, in discontinuity. identity of the I . Transcendence, or the going out In such a relation, the I does not put itself in from oneself, cannot, under these circumstances, come question; it is put in question by the other. It is into view.