Addressing Levinas

Sensible Subjects

Can it be argued that embodiment is a necessary rather than contingent condition of the ethical relationship? And if so, then needn’t we also conceptualize the ethical relation in terms of the question of sexual difference ? That is, if ethical life has a meaning only for embodied beings and only on the basis of that embodiment, then isn’t an ethics of sexual difference a necessary aspect of ethics? Two separate claims can be distinguished here, and will provide the focus for parts one and two of the paper, respectively. The first claim posits the necessity of thinking the ethical relation on the basis of human embodiment. This could be interpreted as stating that human beings are, as a matter of (contingent) fact, embodied beings and that, therefore, an adequate theory of their relationships to one another will have to take this into account. In this form, the claim may be uncontroversial , but it is also fairly uninteresting, since it says little or nothing about how embodiment is ethically significant. Of greater interest would be a stronger claim to the effect that the very idea of an ethical relationship is meaningful only in connection with an understanding of subjectivity as embodied. In the first part of this paper, I contend that just such a non-contingent relationship between ethics and embodiment is at the heart of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.1 In particular, I want to argue that for Levinas the relation to absolute alterity—a relationship synonymous, for him, with ethics—is possible only as a relation between embodied or “carnal” beings.2 The second claim of the hypothesis, and the corresponding second part of the paper, considers the further necessity of thinking incarnation in relation to sexual difference. Here, too, it is possible to distinguish a weaker and a stronger version of the claim, and again it is the stronger version that is of interest. The weaker claim says something like this: since all Sensible Subjects: Levinas and Irigaray on Incarnation and Ethics Diane Perpich 296 living bodies are as a matter of (contingent) fact sexed bodies, then some attention will have to be given in any ethics of embodiment to the question of sexual difference. Like the weak version of the first claim, this says very little about the ethical significance of sexual difference, nor does it maintain an internal connection between an ethics of embodied subjectivities and the sexual specificity of bodies.3 In the second part of the paper, I want to consider the stronger claim—central, I will argue, to the work of Luce Irigaray—that an ethics of incarnate beings is not secondarily or contingently an ethics of sexual difference, but from the first and necessarily so. For Irigaray, only an ethics of sexual difference will be sufficiently ethical. Where sexual difference is denied ethical relevance, where the sexually specific subject is replaced by the neutral or neutered agent, the formative experiences of ethical life—autonomy and responsibility , relations to oneself and to others—are distorted in the direction of an abstract, one-sided, and ultimately oppressive universality. In Irigaray’s account, sexual difference is not only the exemplar or paradigm of a relation to alterity, it supplies the very morphology of that relationship. Ethics and Incarnation: Levinas On both sides of the Atlantic, the study of ethics has been marked in recent decades by a critique of subjectivity that rejects the abstract, disembodied ego of modern rationalism in favor of a concrete, particularized subject constituted by language and embedded in determinate material , cultural, social, and historical contexts. Within Continental philosophy, this “situated” or “decentered” subject has a long history associated first with the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger , and more recently with figures such as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida . For Levinas and Irigaray, the critique of the modern subject, and the desire to reconceive the principal categories of subjectivity explicitly in intersubjective terms, form the shared horizon of their ethical projects. In this part, I want to outline the main elements of Levinas’s reconceptualization of subjectivity, with particular attention to the way in which his reinterpretation makes embodiment central not only to our understanding of the subject, but to the possibility of an intersubjective ethical relationship . I will argue that, for Levinas, it is from the unique constitutingconditioned structure of embodied consciousness that ethics first arises as a possibility, and that, thus—and this is fundamental to Irigaray’s appropriation of Levinas—ethics has a meaning only...