Levinas Between Ethics and Politics (review)

Levinas Between Ethics and Politics. Bettina Bergo. Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. x + 309. $144.00 ISBN 0-7923-5694-2.

In this complex and provocative work, Bettina Bergo questions what might be termed problems of transposition in Levinas's thought, the gaps or fissures opened by the move from a formal ethics grounded in the transcendence of the other person to the demand for justice in the realm of politics. Is the Good other than and beyond being so that everyday existence becomes secondary or, per contra, do the conditions for ethics arise within the sphere of ontology? Can we discern an elevation within existence itself accessible in and through justice? If so, would the difference between self and other not be obliterated? Still another problem of transposition is that of converting rabbinic thought that, for Levinas, subjects the cause-and-effect mode of reasoning to ethical judgment into philosophical discourse. How, he asks, do the Hebraisms in which prophecy and messianism are couched manifest themselves in Greek, the language of philosophy? If an Ethic of ethics requires the evacuation of the subject who sacrifices himself in the interest of the other as Levinas insists, is the agency required for participation in economy and polity subverted?

The thorny issue of the ambivalence of freedom often passed over by Levinas interpreters is addressed head on by Bergo: "Freedom can open into generosity, only if it is subverted or interrupted. It is not by itself a force for good or evil but . . . has to be redeemed . . . by an act of continuous creation. . . . the inevitability and repetition of my responsibility for the other" (32). When grappling with Levinas's thought as it wends its way from a phenomenological exposition of being in the world to a hermeneutics of the subject, Bergo refuses to lose sight either of the aporetic nature of freedom or the difficulties involved in explaining the grip of transcendence upon historical time. She discerns in the transition to hermeneutics a move from seeing another as like oneself (a family member) to encountering the alterity of the stranger, the latter demanding hermeneutical reflection.

Part I of Bergo's opus explores shifts in the meaning of time, social existence, and ethics in Levinas's major works from Totality and Infinity (1961) to Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence (1974). ¹ She shows how and why the face-to-face relation, eros and fecundity of TI give way to wounding and vulnerability, the distinction between the Saying and the said in OBBE. Bergo's account is driven by a thematics of instability, that of a Good that is both transcendent and yet arises within the lived realities of sensibility and language. Part II turns to critical readings of Levinas by others, to historical parallels to Levinasian arguments in German Idealism and to issues such as how responsibility as manifested in the text's narrative voice can be universalized.

Bergo is a master of rhetorical strategies designed to capture the inexpressible. In Part I, the key structural polarities of TI are troped as "the figure of two parabolas intersecting at their bases," the opening at the top suggesting Levinasian "transascendence," the beyond of ontology, and the aperture at the base implying the "transdescendence," the faceless being of the il y a, being without existents. Bergo notes that TI proceeds as a phenomenology of sensibility contingent not upon perception but upon enjoyment and through descriptions of labor, the home, eros and fecundity, an account that requires the creation of a hierarchy of levels and an explanation of how they are linked. In TI, Bergo maintains, we are seen as natural beings, but in giving what we own to others, our natural wills are thwarted. She goes on to consider Levinas's account of intersubjectivity as an intertwining of dialogical and transcendental approaches, the latter interrupting monadic individual consciousness and calling it to responsibility.

The transcendental phenomenology of TI is seen as giving way...