Encounters With Levinas (review)

This issue of Yale French Studies offers a timely and significant contribution to Levinas studies. It places into proximity a series of important reflections on Levinas's work by a selection of scholars and thinkers, including Luce Irigaray and Paul Ricœur. As the editor's introduction points out, an 'extraordinary number of publications' (p. 1) on Levinas's thought have appeared since the late 1960s. This critical abundance notwithstanding, the approach taken by this volume is one which manages to engender new and exciting reflections: it explores dialogues between Levinas's ethical thought and other philosophies and disciplines, under the rubric of staging 'encounters with Levinas'. This is not the first edited volume to use the motif of the encounter to explore influences and meeting points between the work of Levinas and others. Sarah Harasym's intriguing and valuable collection Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (SUNY, 1998) has a similar agenda. In Levinas's account, it is the encounter with an other, irreducible to the same, that calls the subject to an awareness of his or her absolute ethical responsibility. Thus, for Levinas, ethics precedes ontology and is transformative. Treize's volume follows through on the promise of its title, using the juxtaposition of Levinasian theory and other discourses (intellectual history in Samuel Moyn's article; Dostoevsky's writing in that of Alain Toumayan; and recent genetic theory in that of Edith Wyschogrod), to forge new ethical marriages and previously unforeseen intertexts and applications for Levinas criticism. Other essays re-examine or re-stage encounters that have been taken for granted, sometimes fallaciously, in existing work. Leonora Batnitzky's article seeks to re-examine the grounds for the fashionable adoption of Levinas by postmodernists. She argues that Levinas's concept of responsibility anchors his thought in a resolutely Cartesian model, which is incompatible with the decentered postmodern subject. This view both of Levinas and of Descartes opens the way for important debate. In her contribution to the collection, Luce Irigaray seeks to dismantle the widespread critical assumption that she is a 'disciple or inheritor' (p. 67) of Levinas's work, arguing that his account of the ethical ignores the full potential of sexual difference and proceeds on the basis of the assumption of 'a single and unique world' (p. 72), which is implicitly masculine. This logic precludes the possibility of a more desirable ethical relation: the 'reciprocal desire between two different existents and beings' (p. 81). The article is seminal reading both for Irigaray scholars and Levinasians. Finally, two articles in the collection point up unasked questions or problematic tensions in Levinas's thought. In Philippe Crignon's piece, Levinas's simultaneous evocation and dismissal of the field of vision in the 'face-to-face' is the starting point for an imaginative and open-ended reflection on the vexed relationship between ethics and figurality. Paul Ricœur's provocative reading of Autrement qu'être addresses the poignant discrepancy between, on the one hand, Levinas's professed rejection of memory on the grounds of its tendency to ethical reduction and, on the other, his personal memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust. Ricœur closes with the thought-provoking question: 'With justice can one not hope for the return of memory, beyond the condemnation of the memorable?' (p. 99). The distinction towards which Ricœur gestures here goes right to the heart of contemporary critical debates in post-Holocaust ethical discourse. In sum, this collection of essays offers innovative perspectives on Levinas's body of work and invites further reflection on a series of profitable, and as yet under-developed, directions for readers of Levinas, including feminist thought; visual and film cultures; and medical ethics.