-
10. Levinas and Kierkegaard: Ethics and Politics
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
10 Levinas and Kierkegaard: Ethics and Politics Zeynep Direk I Although Kierkegaard and Levinas are both religious philosophers, there are reasons to suspect that Levinas is disturbed by Kierkegaard’s philosophy more than any other philosophy he engages. The symptoms of this can be encountered in Levinas’ texts even though explicit references to Kierkegaard are often absent. Although communication with Kierkegaard is incessant, the final judgment seems to be crude and harsh, if not violent. In this chapter I shall explore the possibility that both Kierkegaard and Levinas can be read as thinkers of the political beyond their concern with the “ethicity of ethics” and the “religiosity of religion.” However, before taking up the question of ethics and politics , I would like to point out that Levinas has a more complicated response to Kierkegaard’s thought, beyond what seems to be a rapid dismissal. Levinas’ allusions to Kierkegaard in Totality and Infinity and other works and his brief evaluation of Kierkegaard’s position in Proper Names show that in Levinas’reading, Kierkegaard’s critique of ontology in the name of subjectivity remains within the egoism of the I and the care for the self. This final judgment that Levinas has passed on Kierkegaard’s philosophy cannot surely foreclose the possibility that Kierkegaard’s writings remained a source of inspiration for Levinas.1 Derrida, the first major commentator on Levinas’ work, was also the first philosopher to comment on Levinas’ reception of Kierkegaard’s thought.2 In“Violence and Metaphysics”Derrida cites Levinas’ phrase“the egoistic cry of a subjectivity still concerned with Kierkegaard’s own happiness or salvation”3 in order to establish that for Levinas Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian existentialism remains a “violent and pre-metaphysical egoism.”4 Levinas confirms and elaborates this reading in his brief commentary entitled “Kierkegaard : Existence and Ethics.”5 Derrida’s inquiry into Levinas’ interpretation of Kierkegaard belongs to his thematizing of Levinas’ break with phenomenology and ontology, and especially Levinas’ objection to Husserl’s strategy in the fifth of Cartesian Meditations6 in which the other’s alterity appears first as a question of the other’s egoity. Derrida insists against Levinas that the alterity of the other human being remains a question of subjective existence, and therefore implies that Kierkegaard in his defense of subjectivity cared not only for him- 212 Zeynep Direk self but also for the others: “The philosopher Kierkegaard does not only plead for Søren Kierkegaard . . . but for subjective existence in general (a noncontradictory expression); this is why his discourse is philosophical, and not in the realm of empirical egoism.”7 Indeed Levinas admits in the final analysis that to conceive alterity in the form of egoity or subjective existence would be to reduce it to totality or anonymous universality. However, this is not the accusation that Levinas makes to Kierkegaard, for in his view Kierkegaard appeals to pre-philosophical experience and provides a non-philosophy in his defense of subjectivity against idealism. Derrida, on the other hand, makes the point that to deny this universal form of egoity and the truth or essence of subjectivity to the Other would not only be to renounce philosophical discourse, but also to exercise the worst violence on the Other. Hence he suggests that Levinas’ empirical altruism risks even more violence than the Kierkegaardian philosophy of subjectivity. Derrida represents Levinas as saying, “Søren Kierkegaard pleads only for Kierkegaard.”Although this is a fair reformulation of Levinas’ final judgment on Kierkegaard’s existentialism, its grounds are not clear at all unless we go back to Levinas’ critique of idealism.“Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics” begins by indicating that Kierkegaard’s strong notion of existence derives from his critique of idealism. First, it is in that very critique that Kierkegaard opens the dimension of interiority for human subjectivity in European thought. Even though Kierkegaard continues to rethink subjectivity in terms of “self-knowledge,” he accounts for it in non-epistemological terms by concentrating on the stages of the subject’s self-constitution in the world through “a sacrificial dialectic.”8 This sacrificial dialectic of inwardness is not detached from the subject’s situation in the world, its pre-philosophical experiences of its own worldly situations . I think that Levinas’ enterprise to rethink the genesis of subjectivity in non-epistemological terms such as hypostasis, enjoyment, economy, dwelling, encounter with the other, and so on, is essentially Kierkegaardian.9 His Kierkegaardianism shows itself especially when he proceeds to account for the separation of the I in...