Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion

3. Reduction to Responsibility

3 Reduction to Responsibility Chapter 2 concluded by showing that the ethics of Totality and Infinity is still part and parcel of the tradition whose violence it intends to surpass. Like metaphysics as Heidegger understands it, Totality and Infinity has forgotten the ontological difference, and so its descriptions of the absolute are relativized or determined by this unthought forgetting. Totality and Infinity, that is, would still presuppose an unasked question of Being, wherein Being is no longer the matter of ontology but of a Seinsfrage that thinks it in its difference from beings. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the 1977 preface to the second edition of De l’existence à l’existant Levinas comments as follows on the “philosophical progress going from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence”: To glimpse in the “existant,” in the human being, and in what Heidegger will call “the beingness of beings,” not an occultation and a “dissimulation ” of Being, but a step towards the Good and towards the relation to God and, in the relation between beings, something other than “an ending of metaphysics”—this does not mean that one simply inverts the terms of the famous Heideggerian difference by privileging beings to the detriment of Being. This reversal will have been only the first step of a movement which, being open to an ethics older than ontology, will allow the signifying of significations beyond the ontological difference, which, without a doubt, is, in the end, the very signifying of the Infinite. (EE, 12) This passage claims that the progress to Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence is made with respect to the ontological difference. Whereas Totality and 48 Part 1. Beyond Totality and Infinity Infinity was only a reversal of the difference, in Levinas’s subsequent work it is a question of passing to significations beyond or on the hither side of the ontological difference. In making such a passage, ethics is no longer a relation in which the relation between two beings simply precedes and in this way dissimulates the relation to Being; it is instead one in which there is “an exception putting out of order the conjunction of essence, entities, and the ‘difference’” (OBBE, xli). Disqualifying the difference which holds together and apart Being (what Levinas calls “essence”) and beings, ethics introduces a disjunction of beings and Being such that the “beings” involved in the ethical situation are not joined to Being and therefore are not, so to speak, beings. “The hither side or the beyond being is not an entity on the hither side of or beyond being” as it appeared to be in Totality and Infinity (OBBE, 45). Thus, in Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, when it is a task of surpassing the ontological difference, Levinas will speak of an “ontological indifference” (OBBE, 178). The task of Levinas’s later book is to achieve this indifference by articulating an order of signifying in which the ontological difference is rendered indifferent. The Ontological Difference Ignored This “ontological indifference” sounds strikingly similar to the “forgetting” which Heidegger stigmatized throughout his writings on metaphysics, a forgetting which seems to have determined Totality and Infinity. As Levinas admits , the ontological in-difference does indeed entail “a forgetting of being and non-being” (OBBE, 177). However, according to Levinas, in this indifference , forgetting is not “an ‘unregulated’ forgetting. . . . [b]ut a forgetting that would be an ignorance in the sense that nobility ignores what is not noble, and in the sense that certain monotheists do not recognize, while knowing, what is not the highest. Such ignorance is beyond consciousness; it is an open-eyed ignorance” (OBBE, 177). The ontological in-difference is reached not by forgetting that one has forgotten the ontological difference but by seeing it with open eyes and at once seeing through it in the way that one sees through an impostor impersonating the king or through the emperor’s proverbial new clothes. In a way that strangely evokes Nietzschean nobility (though reversed) and monotheism together, Levinas sees the ontological difference only to ignore it. As nobility passes by the pitiful, Levinas passes by the ontological difference without being troubled by it; as monotheism sees idols of the divine only to reject their claim to divinity, Levinas sees the ontological difference only to see through it and thereby disqualify its claim to ultimacy. Such an ontological in-difference is achieved by envisioning the ontological difference from the perspective of a different difference, a difference...