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LEVINAS and the TRIPLE CRITIQUE of HEIDEGGER Graham Harman

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LEVINAS and the TRIPLE CRITIQUE of HEIDEGGER Graham Harman LEVINAS AND THE TRIPLE CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER Graham Harman As twentieth century philosophy fades into of purposes, but close off in themselves, with a the distance, Martin Heidegger seems to be sort of inviolable integrity apart from all net- standing the test of time. His stature in conti- worksorfunctions.Humansalwaysstand nental philosophy is beyond question, and somewhere in particular, bathing in the mate- those French thinkers who avoid his influence rial reality of wind, water, and stars, not to most noticeably (such as Alain Badiou and mention hammers and cigarettes, none of them Gilles Deleuze) are often difficult for precisely entirely used up by their assignment to wider this reason, since it is Heidegger who has purposes. It is often forgotten that this second shaped our vision of philosophy more than criticism of Heidegger is the basis for the first: anyone else. Even analytic philosophers have for in Totality and Infinity, it is “separation” begun to find useful insights in Heidegger’s that paves the way for exteriority and transcen- works, while no analytic thinker has a compa- dence.1 rable influence in the other direction—not In this article, I will claim that there is also a even Wittgenstein. As the dust settles on the third critique of Heidegger to be found in past hundred years of philosophy, it is Levinas, one more closely related to the sec- Heidegger who looms as the ancestor whose ond than to the first. As Alphonso Lingis has influence we most need to absorb and resist. lucidly observed,2 Levinas gives us a new defi- No one has seen this more clearly than Em- nition of individual substance without relaps- manuel Levinas. His claim that we must leave ing into the traditional substance discredited the climate of Heideggerian philosophy, and by Heidegger’s shifting system of tools. For that we cannot do so by returning to a philoso- Levinas, specific things are not just ontic de- phy that would be pre-Heideggerian, strikes bris to be dissolved in a mighty ethical Other, me as definitive. Nor does Levinas offer this but neither are they just formless elements statement as merely a vague program: in my such as water or clouds. Things are substances, view, he has done more than anyone else to closed off in themselves even while permeated move us into the post-Heideggerian climate by what lies beyond them. If metaphysics for that he recommends. In the works of Levinas, Levinas is inconceivable without the com- the lasting breakthroughs of Husserlian phe- mand of the Other, it is also unthinkable with- nomenology are present in easily recognizable out the integrity and resistance of specific, au- form, even if played in a strange new key. He tonomous entities. Heidegger misses the grapples with Heidegger’s question of being ethical moment, but perhaps more fatefully, he and his famous tool-analysis, reworking them also misses the unyielding autonomy of spe- in ways their author never attempted. Levinas cific objects. While Heidegger is quick to dis- does this along two separate paths. First and miss drums, houses, and tea plantations as most famously, he senses the lack of any ethi- “ontic,” Levinas glimpses the metaphysical di- cal philosophy in Heidegger, and also identi- mension of particular things. My one criticism fies a new space for such an ethics: the famous of the Levinasian approach is that it remains alterity or exteriority of the other. In this way too human-centered, too much in the shadow Heidegger is challenged from above, with an of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Things may appeal to the good beyond being. In a second hide behind their contours in substantial pleni- and less prominent sense, Levinas challenges tude, resisting human effort, but Levinas also Heidegger from beneath, with his concepts of seems to grant them independence only when enjoyment and the elemental. While humans are on the scene to feel resistance. A Heidegger submits all objects to a relational genuine, full-blown metaphysics would also system of tools serving a series of purposes, need to account for the causal interaction of Levinas objects to this form of holism. Entities substances even when no humans are any- are not simply dissolved in some global system where in the vicinity. The separation and exte- PHILOSOPHY TODAY WINTER 2009 407 © DePaul University 2009 riority found in Levinasian metaphysics does not manifest exteriority and the other as should not be seen just as new categories of hu- other; it destroys the identity of the same.”3 man experience, but should be injected into re- And finally, “individuals are reduced to being ality as a whole— even in pure inanimate colli- bearers of forces that command them unbe- sions between rocks and grains of salt. Only in known to themselves. The meaning of individ- this way do we make a clean break with the uals (invisible outside of this totality) is de- Heideggerian climate, where being and Dasein rived from the totality....Fortheultimate always come as a pair. Against Heidegger’s meaning alone counts; the last act alone claims, while it may be true that being needs changes beings into themselves.”4 If we take beings, it does not need human Dasein at all. In the word “war” in its literal sense, these state- this respect Levinas lays the groundwork for a ments are certainly true for the Blitzkrieg strange new form of realism, without taking through Poland and the Ardennes, the strug- the final step of severing concrete entities from gles at Dunkirk and Normandy, and all the var- their dependence on human being. ious massacres and deportations that touched Let’s now take a closer look at the three the Levinas family to no small degree. Yet the ways that Levinas overcomes his strategic en- primary target of these anti-war passages is not emy—totality. What Levinas most abhors is the Nazi war-machine, but the philosophy of the model of the world as a totalized system, Heidegger, whose tool-analysis presents the each thing defined by its relations to the others. world as a system of entities that gain meaning If Levinas has one original idea in metaphys- only in relation to a totality of purposes. All ics, it is this: the world is not a system, but is beings are assigned to the full system of be- split up into dignified local zones that demand ings, and nothing can be viewed as an inde- to be taken seriously. And we must remember pendent substance. For Heidegger, autono- that Levinas does not oppose totality only (1) mous or separate things exterior to the whole with the infinity that lies beyond it, but also (2) of meaning could only be present-at-hand with the elemental enjoyment that lies beneath entities, and his contempt for presence is it, and (3) the kingdom of substances that lie clearly central to his philosophy. directly within it and prevent totality from Surely Heidegger must have realized that gaining a foothold in the first place. Although we deal with individual cigarettes and loaves Totality and Infinity is the title of his most fa- of bread, and that such objects are not entirely mous book, it could just as well be phrased as used up in a totality of meaning. But this Totality and Separation, Totality and Enjoy- “surely” is irrelevant in judging any philoso- ment, or Totality and Substance. Or rather, the pher— Parmenides must surely have realized book could easily have been designed with that our perceptions are filled with entities in these as the titles of three separate chapters. motion, yet this did not prevent him from treat- ing them dismissively. The question is not 1. Separation what philosophers “must have known,” but only what they openly honored and welcomed The enemy is totality, and another name for into their thinking. And it is Levinas, not totality is war. For Levinas, the metaphor of Heidegger, who makes sufficient room in phi- war means not just that each thing struggles to losophy for individual beings such as wood, impose its will on the others, but also that each silk, or apples. In his own words, “the handling loses its identity in this struggle, fully de- and utilization of tools, the recourse to all the ployed without reserve in all the conflicts and instrumental gear of a life, whether to fabricate relations with its neighbors. As he puts it, the tools or to render things accessible, concludes “black light [of war is] ...acasting into move- in enjoyment . the lighter to the cigarette one ment of beings hitherto anchored in their iden- smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the tity ...byanobjective order from which there lips.”5 Our world is not a unified totality of ob- is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the jects plugged into other objects, and so forth real.” More than this, war makes things “play without end. Instead, we live amidst a carnival roles in which they no longer identify them- of independent zones, districts, and termini, selves, making them betray not only commit- and explore a world without fissures or gaps,6 ments but also their own substance. ...War where the meaningless hum of insects and the PHILOSOPHY TODAY 408 © DePaul University 2009 feel of cotton garments on our skin is not dis- pitchforks, towers, and windmills that give us solved into some global empire of references. separation, but only the human being who hap- We live in a milieu or medium, not in a tool- pens to be experiencing these things. In a system.7 In this sense, the things are partly sep- word, hypostasis means people.
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