Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas

14. DERRIDA’S READINGS OF LEVINAS

14. DERRIDA’S READINGS OF LEVINAS “Violence and Metaphysics” Jacques Derrida’s essay on Levinas, “Violence et métaphysique,” is a defense on Derrida’s part of other philosophers — namely Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger — against what he considers to be Levinas’s inaccurate interpretation of them. This approach, though negative in an obvious sense, has the advantage of moving us with great accuracy toward what is most properly Levinasian — since it is precisely the convergence of all these “biased” readings that points most directly to the heart of Levinas’s own philosophy. At the same time, Derrida’s text can be read less felicitously as reductive, overemphasizing the sites from which the stones of a new edifice have been constructed. This tendency is observable in the early criticisms of philosophers before their importance was firmly established. To understand the novelty of a work is, paradoxically, to cease perceiving it as a recombination of elements that already exist, and to apprehend it in the direction of its own teleology. The phenomenon may also be described in terms of an epistemological process with which Levinas himself has familiarized us: knowledge as the reduction of otherness to the same. And we must bear in mind that Derrida’s critical essay — the first extensive analysis, bringing Levinas to the attention of the distinguished readership of Revue de la métaphysique et de morale — was published in 1964, a full decade and scores of publications before Otherwise than Being or Beyond 140 Essence,1 which many consider Levinas’s crowning philosophical achievement. Derrida’s substantial essay of over 100 pages undertakes a task that appears to its author such that the “brevity” of its pages will hardly suffice to its task. What is that task? To summarize Derrida’s own statement of purpose (84),2 it is to give a simultaneously genetic and thematic account of Levinas’s philosophy, an enterprise condemned thereby to “incoherence,” but prompted by Hegel’s warning that the result is nothing without the becoming. He will maintain “the possibility of the impossible system” on the horizon to protect him from “empiricism.” Since empiricism will be Derrida’s main charge against Levinas, we should note this precaution he himself takes, and examine it for any clues it might contain concerning the precise nature of this pitfall. What Derrida reminds himself to beware of choosing between is “the history of Levinas’s thought and works,” i.e. their becoming, and “the order or aggregate of themes,” i.e. the result. Neither will be chosen, which will result in incoherence, but Levinas will not “systematically” resign himself to incoherence. The essay begins by setting the scene of the enquiry: It is an “archeology” of the Greeks, a “repetition” of sorts. It is made up of Husserl’s phenomenology and of Heidegger’s ontology. 1. The Greek origins, and the fraternal differences of interpretation of the Greeks, particularly Plato, by Husserl and Heidegger. 2. A subordination, transgression, or reduction of metaphysics (in different senses, for Husserl and Heidegger). 3. A disassociation, in this agreed upon dispensation, of ethics from metaphysics. (Clearly Derrida is setting up the philosophical situation in such a way that Levinas’s arrival on the scene will appear in its most jarring aspect.) Our philosophical tradition has thus become, according to Derrida, a dialogue between Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian “ontology,” within a Greek context or background. Derrida’s Readings of Levinas 141 It is difficult not to be struck by the narrowness of the tradition Derrida is adducing here. Having established this context, Levinas’s thought is introduced as one that no longer wants to have as its foundation the thought of being and “phenomenality.” Derrida then goes over the three “motifs” just mentioned. 1. Levinas’s thought (which is “in Greek, but not Greek”) summons us to a “dislocation” of the Greek logos, and toward an “exhalation” (French: “respiration”), a prophetic speech. A Jewish content within a Greek expression and tradition? Derrida finds a more agile metaphor: “A thought for which the entirety of the Greek logos has already erupted, and is now a quiet topsoil deposited not over bedrock, but around a more ancient volcano.” This thought frees itself from Greek domination “solely by remaining faithful to the immediate, but buried nudity of experience itself” (82). This faithfulness to experience (or undue reliance on it, since here experience appears to be incorrigible in...