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73 ∑ Paul Ricoeur and the Possibility of Just Love CHRISTOPHER WATKIN An ‘‘ontology of totality’’1 pervades postmodern ethics, forcing a radical dichotomy of economy and excess, justice and love, framing the possibility of such an ethics—and its impossibility. Nowhere is this dichotomy more radically exposed than in Emmanuel Lévinas’s Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence,2 in which the increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric of substitution, expiation, and the hostage disrupts, in its very excess, calculating judgment and measure. A similarly rigorous refusal of determinate commensurability is characteristic of Derridean ethics,3 where the doubly aporetic disjunction of calculating ‘‘justesse’’ and the singular decision of ‘‘justice’’ guards against the reduction of alterity to calculability.4 The relation of calculating justice and singular love negotiates the same problematic (non)relation of economy and excess, where justice is ranged with knowledge and totalization, and radically dislocated from uncalculating and uncalculable agape. The dichotomy of love and justice is not, however, the sole preserve of deconstructive ethics, since mention could be made, for example, of Chaïm Perelman’s opposition in the New Rhetoric between the ‘‘immediate virtue’’ of charity to the mediate virtue of justice,5 or Luc Boltanski’s assertion that a clash of different principles of justification fuels conflict, whereas agape ignores calculation and makes references to equivalence redundant.6 Paul Ricoeur occupies a strategic site from which to understand and critique this unbridgeable separation, writing as he does at a distance, but a sympathetic distance, from an ontology of totality and its radical disarticulation of love and justice. Sensitive to the difference between the rule of justice and the singularity of agape, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology does Christopher Watkin 74 not—and here he is markedly unlike Lévinas and Derrida—consider an aporetic disjunction of love and justice to be the price to pay for maintaining an éthicité beyond the merely calculable. We will consider Ricoeur’s non-dichotomous thinking of love and justice through three texts. Beginning with his assessment of the Lévinasian position in Autrement, a reading of Lévinas’s Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence,7 we will then turn to the relation of love and justice in Ricoeur’s own thought, first in the essay ‘‘Love and Justice’’8 and subsequently in the third study of Parcours de la reconnaissance, entitled ‘‘Mutual recognition.’’9 It is a journey that will reveal how Ricoeur cautiously feels his way toward a just love, moving beyond an aporetic disjunction of justice and agape to inscribe the particularity of compassion at the heart of discourse. Reading for an ‘‘Otherwise’’ In the thirty-nine pages of Autrement, Ricoeur situates his attempt to re-think the relation of love and justice at the point of their most radical disjunction. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas is at pains to disassociate the ‘‘otherwise than being’’ from its betrayal in all figures of the other as ‘‘being otherwise,’’ which are systematically reabsorbed by the totalizing ontology it is his intention to disrupt. Lévinas eschews the manifestation of otherness, which merely substitutes the said for the Saying, thereby annulling it. Modeling the reduction of Saying to said on the correlation of verb and noun leads Lévinas to condemn its nominalization and ossification: to thematize is to nominalize. To forestall this collapse into nominalization, Lévinas performs a ‘‘betrayal of the betrayal’’ of Saying: unsaying.10 Passionately concerned to preserve the radical nature of responsibility before the other in proximity, Lévinas rejects even the language of love, for insofar as love implies unity and agreement, it ‘‘is too easy and natural to pass for the ethical rigour of being elected to responsibility,’’11 a distinction that Lévinas seeks to preserve at all costs. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas frames the disjunction of ontology and ethics in terms of the (non)relation of, on the one hand, the escalating hyperbole of proximity to substitution, of suffering by the other to suffering for the other and, on the other hand, justice as truth and logos, judgment and coherence .12 However, Lévinas also insists—and this juxtaposition is the impetus for Ricoeur’s intervention—on the proximity of the Other in the call to responsibility . How, Ricoeur will ask, given both this disjunction and this proximity, might we mediate on the one hand the irreducibility of Saying to the said in the Argument of Otherwise than Being and, on the other hand, the discourse...

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