Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence

Introduction

1 Introduction This book postpones the discussion of Sartre’s and Levinas’s conceptions of the Other until its last chapter. Nevertheless, a large part of its motivation lies in the fact that the name of Jean-Paul Sartre conjures the proclamation that “hell is other people,” while Emmanuel Levinas is that name which reminds us that, in the end we are held “hostage” by the Other. Enough scholars have analyzed these positions, making clear how each harkens to those intellectual traditions in which Sartre and Levinas are situated, respectively. Nevertheless, the curious relation between these two claims has always struck me as loaded with implications that far exceed the explanation pertaining to the difference between the existentialist and poststructuralist camps. Can the recognition of my being hostage to the Other also underscore the sense of hell brought on in that concrete moment of Sartrean intersubjectivity? Why would the trauma imbedded in the Levinasian claim not also be the torture implied in Sartre’s? My project began in pursuit of these and other such questions, and ended up with “transcendence,” or rather, the unfolding of the relation between formal structures of transcendence and more concrete phenomenological analyses. Not only in the case of their phenomenologies of the Other, but in several other lived moments of disruption and “limit experiences ,” Sartre’s and Levinas’s descriptive analyses read as nearly indistinguishable from each other. Said otherwise, when the focus is on their faithfulness to the phenomenon, the similarities revealed truly explain how someone (like myself) can be equally Sartrean and Levinasian in her philosophical commitments. Nevertheless, according to the standard interpretation in recent French Continental philosophy, the positions that these thinkers occupy could not be more diametrically opposed. Such interpretations hold that the hell of intersubjectivity, portrayed so poignantly in Sartre’s No Exit makes no accommodations for the radical call to responsibility that underlies my being held hostage by face of the 2 Moments of Disruption Other. The rupture of Roquentin’s world, made avidly alive in Nausea, is to be understood as something other than Roquentin encountering the Levinasian il y a. And last, the shame of my being-for-the-Other, described in the pages of Being and Nothingness, is not quite evidence for the structural priority of passivity over spontaneity, which informs Levinas’s conception of identity in Existence and Existents. Though these accounts hold some legitimacy, it is important to remember that they are informed by the notions of transcendence with which Sartre and Levinas, respectively, begin. Despite Roquentin’s ordeal, transcendence remains exhausted by the movement of intentionality. This is Sartre’s starting point, and it is sustained throughout the entirety of his work. As such, the experience of nausea does not reveal the rustling anonymity of the il y a, because that account would find ground in an alternative formalization of transcendence as “excendence.” In other words, transcendence would have to be what Levinas claims it to be, namely, that radical exiting of being, or the disruption of the intentionality that illuminates being with meaning and sense. Herein lies the most fundamental difference between Levinas and Sartre, a difference without which (for instance) the hell of Sartre’s intersubjectivity could arguably indicate the hostage situation of Levinas’s obsessive responsibility for the Other. It is a consequence of these and other such observations that this book brings Sartre and Levinas into precisely this conversation—a conversation that begins with “transcendence.” On careful juxtaposition of certain key tropes (selfhood, spontaneity, passivity, and temporality, to name a few), it demonstrates that the question of transcendence is the fundamental question around which French Continental philosophy ought to be bringing these two intellectuals. However, as it currently stands, the relevant scholarship has not yet done so. There is but a handful of expositions that recognizes the value in bringing Sartre and Levinas into a single scholarship, and they have used questions of Jewish identity, ethics, and to a lesser degree, politics to guide their analyses. To be clear, these are important moments of intersection, the pursuit of which has contributed much to philosophy. Nevertheless, in understanding the relationship between Sartre and Levinas without, at the outset, making central their respective accounts of transcendence, the takeaways are cursory at best, and misguided at worst. As this book demonstrates, this is because the vast difference between Sartre’s and Levinas’s formal accounts of transcendence stands at odds with (concrete) phenomenological accounts that, in both thinkers, describe the fundamental place...