Ethics at a Standstill: History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School

One. Totality, Ethics, and History

1 ONE Totality, Ethics, and History Justice Is Not the Solution At the limits or on the horizon of ethics as first philosophy Levinas leaves thought with a conundrum and in an impasse. The ethical relation demands, or has inexorably laid upon it, contains — as though it were a condition of its own possibility — another relation that, while not quite negating ethics, betrays ethics, and in betraying it, strains ethics to the breaking point. Even though Levinas unfolds his analysis of ethics beginning always from the situation of a single and singular subjectivity in a relation to absolute alterity, to the other or the Face, before he breaks off the analysis it will in each case have become clear that what, for purposes of phenomenological clarity might have appeared to be a relation of the one for the other, was always my relation to an unlimited number of unique and incomparable others, each of whom is related to and for an unlimited number of other unique and incomparable others. This does not simply complicate the ethical relation, leave it the same while adding more instances to its first instance. Society is not composed, like an onion, of a finite or even infinite number of identical layers, each layer being the relation of me to an other. Rather, the “real society” as he says, does not add another, and 2 Ethics at a Standstill another, ethical relation to the one from which I might have begun, in an indefinite and open-ended series. Much more than that, society alters the very nature of the relation, even turning the ethical relation against itself, consigning the ethical relation to the very domain from which it is also the only escape, the domain of being or totality. The ethical relation, without reference to or abstracted from the social, signifies the unlimited responsibility of a singular sensibility to the height of the other, a responsibility and desire that can never be fulfilled and that increases as it is assumed. Such obligation is inordinate, beyond reciprocity and comparison, measure and calculation. It is not visible from the vantage of any third person perspective; it is an unbreakable bond, no matter how attenuated empirically, across an absolute distance between terms that, in themselves, are sufficient unto themselves. The proximity of the one to the other is an exception to the rational order: “It is both the relation and the term of the relation” (OTB, 85). Yet it is this very relation that enjoins what appears to be its negation. The multiplicity of singular others, their very relation to each other as singularities requires — but requires ethically, and not formally — the thematization and formalization of all relations within a totality. It requires the “comparison of incomparables” (158). Levinas states, “There must be a justice among incomparable ones. There must then be a comparison between incomparables and a synopsis, a togetherness and a contemporaneousness, there must be thematization, thought, history and inscription. But being must be understood on the basis of being’s other” (16). There must be, in other words, the very relation which the ethical relation both subtends and transcends. Justice, law, the state, and politics are required, and required by the ethical relation, yet their very existence has the status of a paradox: “This conclusion is paradoxical; the certainty that the relation with a third party resembles neither my own intimacy with myself nor the love of a neighbor compromises...the very Totality, Ethics, and History 3 status of man as an irreplaceable singularity, which is, however, presupposed by every aspiration to innocence.” This “priority” of law over charity (ET, 33) means that not only is the singularity of the subject compromised, the singularity of the other is compromised as well. It could not be otherwise. The ethical relation of a singularity to the absolute alterity of the other thus becomes, but instantaneously, as a quantum leap without transition, the relation of a particular to a universal, or of a particular to other particulars of the same universal, identical bearers of symmetrical rights and reciprocal duties. But if the latter condition were all that obtained, then ethics, and with it justice, would be truly and simply impossible. The ethical relation is prior to justice, with a priority more temporal than logical. It is prior, but “not presupposed the way a principle is presupposed ” (OTB, 160). Yet if one were...