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Reviewed by:
  • Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis
  • Richard N. Williams
Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis, by Paul Marcus. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008. 278 pp. $30.00.

Colin Davis introduced scholars to the "Levinas Effect," which refers to scholars' seeming unlimited ability to find within the work of the Lithuanian French phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, ideas and themes that support their own point of view, and also find in their own work ideas and themes compatible with Levinas's perspective. Given how daunting an intellectual task it is to bring Levinas to a discipline, much less to bring a discipline to Levinas, Paul Marcus's Being for the Other is a remarkable volume and a genuine accomplishment. It is a noteworthy contribution, not only as a solid yet accessible introduction to Levinas, but as a clear, sophisticated, and yet gentle invitation to the field of psychoanalysis to consider what a Levinasian perspective might [End Page 174] contribute not only to their theoretical understandings, but to the lives of their analysands.

One thing is apparent from Being for the Other; it is that Paul Marcus is a first-rate scholar. He demonstrates on every page both breadth and depth of understanding not only of Levinas's philosophical work, but also of psychoanalysis. His command of the literature is impressive. Marcus achieves great depth and clarity in his treatments of both disciplines. To one not familiar with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I would recommend this book as a useful and reliable introduction to his thought. To one not familiar with contemporary psychoanalysis and how recent trends have become part of the movement, I would recommend this book as an integrative treatment. On a more personal level, one senses a genuine affection throughout the text. When a work of this type is so meaningful to the author on an affective level, it has the power to draw the reader in.

It is clear in the book that Marcus understands and articulates—although perhaps understating—the most significant challenge facing not only psychoanalysis, but psychology (and the other social sciences) as well. It is the challenge of discovering, formulating, and integrating into practice a foundation for meaning in human life. That foundation is the ethical. Most readers will identify with psychoanalysis the idea that moral struggles and conflicts are at the heart of behavior and pathology, but the idea that psychoanalysis is aimed at moral improvement in general will be new to many readers.

Marcus is able to compare, contrast, and weave together in impressive and helpful ways the various strands and strains of psychoanalytical thought and practice. However his doing so raises a significant question. As Freud's basic notions about our nature, our lives, psychopathology, and cure have been significantly recast, redefined, and reoriented by subsequent thinkers, one wonders just what is left of psychoanalysis qua psychoanalysis so that the term "psychoanalysis" has any substantive anchoring referent. I sense that the surviving commonality has to do with a set of tacit assumptions that manifest themselves chiefly in therapeutic practice, but I was left hoping for more on the topic.

Reading Marcus's treatments of the various psychoanalytical approaches brought to my mind a line from Fiddler on the Roof with which Tevye concludes his contemplation of yet another in a series "unthinkable" and "unheard-of " challenges to his tradition. To paraphrase Tevye, "If I bend that far, I'll break." Just as it is important to show how substantively different alternative formulations of psychoanalysis are compatible and are still pschoanalytical in some non-trivial sense, it is essential to show how Levinas's radical moral metaphysics and psychoanalysis can be made compatible in a non-trivial sense. Dr. Marcus's intent is to show how Levinasian ethical perspectives can enhance [End Page 175] psychoanalysis. But there is a point where enhancements become alternatives. Marcus does not want to go there, but in the mind of this reviewer, perhaps he will have to.

The first six chapters provide a good introduction to Levinas and to psychoanalysis. The last two chapters, where Marcus lays out his project, showing how Levinas can inform psychoanalysis, and...

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