The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

Profligacy, Parsimony, and the Ethics of Expenditure in the Philosophy of Levinas

Profligacy, Parsimony, and the Ethics of Expenditure in the Philosophy of Levinas E D I T H W Y S C H O G R O D The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is one of radical self-giving, of boundless expenditure in the interest of the other. Does not giving without reserve encourage an ethic of prodigality, an unlimited generosity that, in the long run, may exhaust the resources of the self so that future giving is impaired? If the prodigality of Levinasian giving is not to result in the depletion that is likely to follow upon sheer profligacy, must there not also be a turn to a parsimony that would husband the resources needed for further expenditure? What is more, if self-giving in acts of total selfdonation are seen as the ultimate good, am I not, in the interest of the other, obliged to bring home to the other the necessity for her or him to engage in the same sacrificial prodigality I impose upon myself? Would the failure to demand of the other what I require of myself not deprive that other of the opportunity for her or him to engage in the ultimate good of generous self-emptying in the interest of another? Can such an ethics enter the world of actual existence nondiscursively and without attention to moral rules? In addressing these questions, I shall take into account alternative views of the ethical subject in Levinas’s thought by turning first to its emergence following the coming into being of an autonomous self, depicted principally in the opening sections of Totality and Infinity, and next to its meaning in the context of time and language, as described in his essay ‘‘Substitution.’’1 This view is further developed in his major work Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence.2 I shall then consider the works of 171 Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille as they bear upon the relation of the individual subject to an economy of the sacred, a self that will be shown to bear striking affinities with the pre-ethical self of Levinas. Finally, without endorsing the economic theories in which they are embedded, I hope to recast the radical self-giving of Levinas’s ethical subject in terms of prodigality and parsimony as they are framed in the conceptual language of classical economics in order to examine some outcomes of unfettered profligacy. I hope to reconfigure Levinas’s ethical subject as one who not only gives but who also stores, not in order to keep but in order to bestow. I shall also assume that the question of storing in the interest of practicability is important for both Judaism and Christianity. Differences between the religions adumbrated by Levinas in a number of contexts are significant, but since practicability is the subject of this essay, I shall not consider these differences here. Common to both religions is the textual appeal of Jeremiah 2:16: ‘‘He judged the cause of the poor and the needy. . . . Was this not to know me saith the Lord?’’ From this passage, Levinas concludes that there is a radical shift from Creator to creature.3 Although self-interest figures prominently as a motive for action in the work of Adam Smith, I shall not forgo the primary signification of Levinas ’s ethical subject as a venture of self-giving, the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of ethical existence. However, by analyzing the benefits and drawbacks attributed to parsimony and profligacy, to thrift and expenditure , from the perspective of Smith’s version of classical economics, I hope not to abandon but to enhance the viability of an ethics of alterity. Far from suggesting that Levinas’s thought belongs (even indirectly) within the conspectus of classical economics in its older or revisionist forms, I hold instead that the primacy of self-interest that motivates economic activity ought not to preclude the appropriation of Smith’s work in the interest of enhancing the comprehensibility and practicability of a Levinasian ethics. From Freedom to the Moral Subject Consider first the account in Totality and Infinity of an ethical subject who arises in a world that can be construed as a rudimentary economy.4 A monadic solitary self, a conscious existent that is not yet a moral self, emerges from what Levinas calls the elemental, undifferentiated being that precedes the being of the existent, being that is simply there in a...