Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas

2. SAME/OTHER

2. SAME/OTHER The concepts of “same” and “other” are treated in Plato’s dialogue , the Sophist, and they play a prominent role in the metaphysics of Hegel. What is new in Levinas’s use of them is that he associates same with the “I” of subjectivity, and other with the other person and, in the form of illeity, with God. From a purely logical point of view, same and other are diametrically opposed — and therefore interchangeable in the sense that same can be defined as the other of the other. Levinas uses the concept of same (often though not consistently capitalized in his work) to define the confinement of self within itself and its tendency, through knowledge, to annex otherness to itself by knowledge, possession, mastery. This “I,” or naturally egotistical self, is designated as the moi in Levinas, a term I will transpose unchanged in this work, in order to preserve an important distinction that often becomes somewhat obscured in translation. Vital to Levinas’s analysis of the relation between self and other is an undoing or emptying out of the self (dénucléation), as it is ethically solicited by the other. The self does not simply merge with the other in these circumstances, but is transformed into what Levinas calls the soi. The term soi means self in French, but not specifically myself, as does moi. It would be a mistake to try to draw too much from the normal usage of the word soi, however, in our attempt to grasp Levinas’s usage, since soi is impersonal, and the transformation from moi to soi is described as one of not less but more “uniqueness.” More precisely, the difference is really not of degrees of uniqueness but of the sort of uniqueness concerned. 37 The importance of the association of self with same in Levinas’s thought can hardly be overestimated. In Totality and Infinity, more clearly than in Otherwise than Being, it is the self’s confinement within itself that dramatizes the movement of transcendence; first the lower-level transcendence of perception and our dealings with the world of objects, and then the transcendence driven by “metaphysical ” desire, which increases with the approach and “feeds, so to speak, on its hunger.”1 It is the ineradicable anchoring of moi in same that introduces all the drama into Levinas’s philosophy. The corps propre or “lived body” of phenomenology plays a similarly vivifying role in the philosophies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but that implantation or incarnation of self is interpreted in the direction of a commonality or conaturality of self and world. Levinas’s identi- fication of knowledge and power with an imperialism of the self/same includes philosophy itself in this assimilative drive. Ultimately, only metaphysical otherness and transcendence, “exteriority ” and infinity, can break through the advancing imperialism of same. It is not surprising that at the conclusion of Totality and Infinity, therefore, we should find embedded a quote from Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du Mal,” with its spiritual quest fueled by a soif d’absolu, a thirst for the absolute, for something new that would lead us out of our boredom, our ennui. Here Levinas is describing the false — tragic-heroic — solution of the Hegelian hero, but also of the Heideggerian one, who meets death with resolve. It is the solution of any salvific doctrine that seeks preservation of a self not previously “unselved” (“denucleated,” in Otherwise than Being) by the “infinite time of fecundity.” Heroic existence, the isolated soul, may make its peace in seeking an eternal life for itself as if its subjectivity could somehow not turn against itself in returning to a continuous time; as if, in this continuous time, identity itself did not affirm itself like an obsession, as if, in the identity that remains at the heart of the most extravagant metamorphoses, there did not triumph “ennui, 38 Part One: Concepts fruit of mournful incuriosity, which takes on the proportions of immortality.2 Description of the Moi in “The I and the Totality” One might expect that, as in certain religious traditions, the self (the moi or selfish self ) would be depicted negatively in Levinas. On the contrary, there is a marvelous vigor and freshness in Levinas’s description of the ipseity, or unique identity of the self. The self is essentially separation and interiority...