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C H A P T E R 9 Substitution: Marcel and Levinas THE LOGIC of uniqueness displaces the focus of our thought from the self to the other. But responsibility requires a self who retains at least the capacity to respond. In the currents of postmodernism, the modern philosophical subject seems adrift, if not already drowned and vanished. Can any sense still be made of the concept of responsibility without such a subject? Can ethics survive the fracturing, de-centering, deconstructing of the self? It is ironic that, long before the current hubbub called postmodernism, the de-centered self was already discovered—and in an explicitly ethical context. Dialogical philosophers found that interpersonal ethics was the foundation of the self, or rather, that the subject was not its own foundation , but depended upon others in order to be itself. And perhaps less ironic, the theme of that interpersonal self, that de-centered self, is directly correlate with traditional religious concepts. The antireligious agenda of postmodernism is not a necessary conclusion from the de-centered self. Levinas’ work continues that of the dialogical philosophers, and he is closely bound not only to the Jewish authors but particularly to Marcel. Levinas attended Marcel’s soirées in the 1930s and there encountered Marcel’s remarkable philosophical and religious approach to thought. Levinas has written on Marcel occasionally, and always with respect (HS 34f./EN 77f., 137–38). What I will discuss here is how Marcel’s manner of writing grapples with the set of difficulties that concerned Levinas and also Rosenzweig. While a medieval Christian thinker might begin with a dogmatic claim that God created human beings and, therefore, that one must not hope to be one’s own foundation, Marcel must struggle in a world that discredits the appeal either to authority (Rosenzweig’s sense of dogmatism) or to merely idiosyncratic opinion (Rosenzweig’s fanaticism ). The task of de-centering the self in a world after Descartes must be performed through an engagement with the self, with the self’s own conviction of its self-possession—and it must also be done in a way that is in principle communicable. Like Rosenzweig, Marcel must avoid dogmatics and also strive to overcome the threat from personal experience—of fanaticism . The solution, once again, is to look at the performance of speech. Substitution • 193 The issue for this chapter is not merely a manner of thinking, but is, first of all, a question of how to display that my responsibility to an other constitutes the self. One of the most disturbing themes of Levinas’ thought is that my spontaneous freedom is secondary, that I am responsible for another person before I can rationally choose to be so. In the first moment, I am not autonomous. The center of my agency is another person . Both Levinas and Marcel claim that there is a radical and ethical heteronomy. They explore the de-centered self, who is capable of substitution , as locus of responsibility—in opposition to an interpretation of the dispersion of the self, where there is no longer any responsibility. But if the self becomes responsible through the agency of the other, then with what freedom can I refuse or simply choose to ignore others? If responsibility precedes freedom, than how is it possible to be irresponsible or nonresponsible? This chapter traces a motion from the freedom of the other, discovered in the last chapter, to the responsibility of myself. Marcel, even more than Levinas, focuses on the performance of speaking. The constraints of pronouns are explored to discover the nature of the relationship to the other. The practice of speaking displays how my freedom to resist the other itself rests on responsibility for the other. I do not first have a spontaneous freedom to choose whether to be for the other or to be for myself. A certain attention to the orientation of speech in its fundamental asymmetry will lead Marcel’s reader to see that responsibility creates the possibility for the illusion of autonomy. One more word of introduction, however. This chapter is a series of commentaries. I comment first on two texts by Marcel from the 1930s, and then on two texts by Levinas from the 1970s (all four texts are included in an appendix). Levinas’ texts are from the final version of the central chapter of Otherwise than Being, a chapter titled “Substitution.” I believe that you will find these passages extremely opaque if read on their own. More importantly...

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