Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire

ONE. The Origins, Aim, and Ends of Human Longing: Levinas and Plato in Dialogue

19 ONE The Origins, Aim, and Ends of Human Longing Levinas and Plato in Dialogue LEVINAS ON LONGING Levinas never uses the term “longing” in his work. This is not because, as we have already noted, he is not interested in it as a phenomenon, but rather because his native language does not provide him with a suitable equivalent. Longing is traditionally rendered in French merely as désir, though it is sometimes modified as being a particularly grand, intense, or ardent désir. It is alternatively translated as nostalgie, though as we will see Levinas goes to great pains to distinguish what he understands to be true longing from the experience of nostalgia. Indeed, it is precisely because of this perceived distinction that Levinas is forced to coin a new term for his analysis of human longing, namely: metaphysical desire. To understand Levinas’s notion of metaphysical desire one must first correctly accent the phrase. In this case, the accent 20 Longing for the Other should fall on the first word, metaphysical, and not, as one would initially think, on the latter. The notion of the metaphysical is in many ways the central theme in Levinas’s works. It is in fact the subject of the first three lines of his most famous work Totality and Infinity. There he writes, quoting Rimbaud, that “‘the true life is absent.’ But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi” (TI 33). Metaphysics consists then for Levinas in what he terms the “‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ and the ‘other’” (33). Given its metaphysical bend, then, Levinas identifies the desire we have termed longing as one which “tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other” (TI 33). As a desire directed toward that which remains, by definition, always and forever something else and absolutely other, metaphysical desire must necessarily function within us as a kind of transcendence—that is, it will serve to perpetually draw us outward and onward, always further afield than ourselves and that which is present to us. But the transcendence initiated by Levinas’s metaphysical desire results in more than merely noncoincidence with the self, although this too is part of it. Much more than this, it is primarily, Levinas thinks, a transcendence which is directed toward that which is “other than” and “exterior” to the subject (292). Indeed, the whole of Totality and Infinity is labeled an “essay on exteriority.” As exterior, the metaphysical expresses that which is always beyond the subject. But, the metaphysical for Levinas is still more than sheer exteriority. Its identity is not maintained in its relation to the subject as that which is simply exterior. Not everything which is outside the subject carries the weight of the metaphysical for Levinas, the desk at which we sit or the pen with which we write. Instead, he claims, the metaphysical proper bears a specific positive meaning and ethical value. It thus not only represents for him that which is “elsewhere” and “otherwise,” but also that which is superior and above us. The metaphysical is, he Origins, Aim, and Ends of Human Longing 21 claims, situated on a height (TI 34–35, 200, 297; BPW 12, 18). Metaphysical desire is thus directed, he claims, not merely outside , yet on the same level as, the subject, but rather it is directed toward that which is superior to the subject. Indeed, argues Levinas, the transcendence initiated in metaphysical desire is thus directed toward that which is transcendent proper. Hence Levinas’s nomination of the movement which typifies metaphysical desire as transascendence (TI 35). In metaphysical desire one feels oneself ascendant, elevated, lifted up, over and beyond not only oneself, but everything which is horizontally immediate and available. For this reason, Levinas not only avoids employing the French rendering of longing, nostalgie, but in fact pointedly distinguishes his metaphysical desire from it. Nostalgia, in stark contrast to the longing of metaphysical desire, is not oriented toward that which remains other, but remains forever solely on the level of the self—specifically that which the self has lost. As such, it is much more akin to what he terms a need (see BPW 51). Levinas writes, “As commonly interpreted need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from it past grandeur. It would...