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8. The Rights of the Other: Levinas and Human Rights
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171 EIGHT The Rights of the Other Levinas and Human Rights ScottDavidson Humanrightsarethereminderthatthereisnojusticeyet. —Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality” This proposal to conjoin Levinas and human rights might be met initially with reservations from some Levinas scholars, especially those who would be concerned that an emphasis on human rights would betray the essential insight of Levinas’s philosophy, that is, his defense of an absolute ethical responsibility for the other. Is it not a confusion to associate Levinas, the thinker of responsibility for the other, with human rights, and in particular, with their enshrinement in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) whose preamble proclaims the equality of all individuals and the goal to promote individual freedom? Perhaps such concerns would explain why Levinas scholarship has been slow to engage Levinas’s writings on human rights.1 Yet, a more careful reading of Levinas’s work suggests that the so-called “rights of 172 Scott Davidson man” are a topic of interest, if not direct focus, starting with some of his earliest and continuing on to some of his last writings.2 Levinas, after all, does list the discovery of human rights among the “exceptional” moments in which the ethical emerges in Western civilization and engages this topic explicitly in four of his later essays (EN 155).3 So, even if human rights are not taken up as a major theme in Totality and Infinity, I want to suggest that they form something like the reverse side of Levinas’s emphasis on the absolute responsibility for the other. This suggestion, if it turns out to be true, would imply that, together with its reconfiguration of ethical responsibility, there is a parallel reconfiguration of the traditional understanding of human rights. This too might be something Levinas himself has in mind when, in his 1987 preface to the book’s German translation, he alludes to the importance of establishing the “source of a right of the other coming before mine” in Totality and Infinity (198). But, even more than its import for how that book might be read or reread, this reconfiguration of human rights based on “the rights of the other” should be of much interest to human rights theorists. My primary aim, accordingly, will be to situate the Levinasian conceptionofhumanrightswithinthebroadercontextofhuman rights discourse, and in so doing, to highlight the unique and compelling features of his account. Human rights are, to be sure, among the hallmarks of liberal political thought. In fact, one of the primary measures of a just political arrangement, on such a view, would be its ability to secure the rights of individual citizens, however broadly these rights may be construed. Yet, the standard criticism of the liberal emphasis on human rights is that it promotes an individualistic and antagonistic picture of community. Such a view, for instance, is conveyed by Marx’s famous observation that “none of the so-called ‘rights of man’ go beyond egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself , his private interest and his private choice and separated from the community as a member of civil society.”4 The gist of this objection is that rights talk leads people to think of their [54.152.77.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:31 GMT) The Rights of the Other 173 own interests as being separate from those of others, and as a result, they become preoccupied with asserting their own interests in opposition to those of others. Levinas, likewise, rejects this egocentric and antagonistic model of community. Unlike Marx and other critics, however, this does not lead him to discard the notion of human rights altogether. Instead, through his development of a “phenomenology of the rights of the other man,” Levinas reconfigures the traditional understanding of human rights in such a way that, on the one hand, it breaks free from traditional liberal justifications of them but, on the other hand, still recognizes them as an indispensible part of just political arrangements. The Levinasian account of human rights should appeal to theorists, as I will set out to show, in virtue of the unique way that Levinas answers the standard objections to them—that is, through his development of a nonantagonistic, other-centered conception of human rights (OS 125). THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL HUMAN RIGHTS JUSTIFICATIONS The Levinasian account of human rights follows the contours of the broader critique of totality developed in Totality and Infinity. What makes the work of totalization problematic, on Levinas’s view, is the specific way...