Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca

FIVE

In “Choreographies,” Jacques Derrida asks, “What kind of an ethics would there be if belonging to one sex or another became its law or privilege? What if the universality of moral laws were modeled on or limited according to the sexes? What if their universality were not unconditional, without sexual condition in particular?”1 What kind of ethics indeed? Derrida’s questions are directed at Levinas’s philosophical project, and they illuminate what would be disturbing about an ethics that discriminates in the manner he suggests. Moreover, there is a sense in which Levinas’s account comes dangerously close to such an ethics. Derrida’s questions arise out of a discussion of “woman’s place,” particularly as described in the biblical books of Genesis and Job. What is woman’s place? Responses to this question often take the form of familiar clichés such as “in the home” and “in the kitchen.” Metaphorically, the Bible indicates woman’s place as wife (“rib”) or mother (“womb”).2 Derrida takes up these responses in light of Levinas’s talmudic readings in order to explain the relation between sexual difference and woman’s place within Levinas’s thought.3 The question of sexual difference also motivates Luce Irigaray to ask Levinas, “What of sexual difference?”4 although, ironically, Irigaray’s question is motivated by her concern that Levinas neglects sexual difference. More specifically, she wonders why the feminine cannot be an other, like the son, who renders incomplete the return to self. In Irigaray’s view, Levinas has never experienced “the transcendence of the other which becomes im-mediate ecstasy (extase instante) in me and with him—or her. . . . Pleasure between the same sex does not result in that im-mediate ecstasy beFIVE Eros, Sexual Difference, and the Question of Ethics  The feminine is the absolute contrariety contrary. —Levinas, Time and the Other tween other and myself. . . . [I]t does not produce in us that ecstasy which is our child, prior to any child (enfant avant tout enfant). . . . Is it the fact that Levinas is a man that makes him unaware of this creation of pleasure prior to any son?”5 This chapter will focus on the criticisms of Levinas’s project, specifically with regard to the issue of sexual difference, offered by Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. IRIGARAY ON LOVE The focus on the future, on fecundity, motivates “The Fecundity of the Caress ,”6 Irigaray’s remarkable essay on Levinas’s conception of love. Although indebted to Levinas, Irigaray still takes issue with the way in which his ethics, radical as it might be, nonetheless remains blind to its own limitations .7 In particular, she takes him to task for his conception of the erotic, on the grounds that he values voluptuosity only for its utility—namely, that it potentially engenders a child. Irigaray takes issue with this view of love on two counts: first, in questioning the necessity of procreation as the end of voluptuosity, she attempts to establish that eros exceeds the merely physical; second, she calls into question the heterosexual framework that Levinas presupposes.8 She plays on words such as “nuptials,” “weds,” and “threshold ” to indicate what she suspects to be his unintended “purification” of eros within the context of marriage. Her style of writing, especially her repetitive use of key phrases, serves to underscore the way in which these themes, which play a significant role in Levinas’s description of the erotic relation, are inverted for her own use. In Irigaray’s view, Levinas characterizes voluptuosity such that it can be redeemed only in the marriage-bed, and with the intent to produce a child. And yet, Irigaray also calls into question this assumed relation, or unification, by recalling that when the erotic relation comes to an end, or rather, is fulfilled temporarily,9 the lover is “left to his solitary call to his God,”10 while “the beloved woman is relegated to an inwardness that is not one because it is abyssal, animal, infantile, prenuptial .”11 In Irigaray’s description, the lovers are “withdrawn to opposite poles of life, they do not marry.”12 Thus, in spite of what they seek, lover and beloved are not unified in life. Each plays a different part in the erotic drama. He, as lover, is the subject who acts on the beloved, the passive woman who waits and receives him. And while the woman gives the man a son, it is he, the lover, who achieves transcendence. The son...