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SIX The Other and Violence Whereas the previous chapter elaborated what might be thought of as a destiny to which we must be answerable, I now turn to another, more active face of skepticism or sin, namely violence. What is the connection between violence and my relation to the other? How can the motives behind violence be understood, and how is it entangled with religion? Levinas’s understanding of how violence is bound up with the face of the other provides a rich phenomenological account, one that I believe can be supplemented with Cavell’s subtle understanding of its motivation. Despite the fact that Levinas and Cavell are embedded in distinct traditions , they have in common at least two themes that deserve mention at the outset. First, there are parallels in Cavell’s and Levinas’s philosophical focus on the other. Cavell’s pivotal notion in this respect is, of course, acknowledgment, which presupposes that the other lays a claim on me, singles me out, and that I am exposed to the other in a way that requires my response (CR, 84). For Levinas , my exposure to the call of the other, along with my responsibility in return , not only constitutes a striking parallel to Cavell’s acknowledgment, but is perhaps the sole theme of his entire oeuvre, defined against the Western philosophical tendency to reduce the other to the same. Levinas’s key concepts, such as alterity, separation, and proximity, can be derived from his account of the concrete face-to-face encounter. Perhaps Cavell’s and Levinas’s common perception can be encapsulated in the following passage from Cavell: “Speaking together face to face can seem to deny that distance, to deny that facing one another requires acknowledging the presence of the other, revealing our positions , betraying them if need be. But to deny such things is to deny our separateness ” (SW, 65).1 This leads into the second similarity: both locate their philosophical interests at the interface between the ordinary and the extraordinary. As discussed in chapter 2, Cavell speaks of what I called the ordinary sublime in terms of “the extraordinariness in what we find ordinary (for example, beauty) and the ordinariness in what we find extraordinary (for example, violence)” (CW, 34). At first glance, Levinas’s philosophy seems far removed from the ordinary; his preoccupation with absolute alterity, height, trauma, and epiphany feed the suspicion The Other and Violence 103 that Levinas participates in what Cavell calls the flight from the ordinary. But then Levinas repeatedly insists that his philosophy is summarized in discrete and ordinary gestures, such as “After you, sir.” If we take this insistence at face value, it means that Levinas also wants to turn our attention to what Critchley has called “the moral grammar of everyday life,” employing extraordinary terminology to circle in the impact of most ordinary encounters.2 Whether this reading captures the overarching orientation of Levinas’s philosophy is open to debate—there are indeed tendencies in his prose that clearly push beyond the grammar of ordinary life. But to the extent that Critchley’s reading is legitimate, the constellation between his and Cavell’s thought might be summarized as follows : whereas Levinas strives for an approach to the ordinary from above, as it were, by overturning the Western metaphysical tradition, Cavell starts from below, disclosing the various impulses to escape the ordinary, and turning them toward a more mature perception of the eventual ordinary. In the first half of this chapter, I show how Levinas’s account of violence and the other is relevant to Cavell and elucidate how Cavell’s skepticism can shed further light on the underlying motives of such violence; in the second half I relate violence to religion, both with regard to the potential violence connected with the idea of God and with regard to ways of overcoming violence. However , I first prepare those accounts by discussing Levinas’s and Cavell’s views on skepticism. The Truth and Threat of Skepticism The point of convergence between Levinas and Cavell on skepticism has attracted surprisingly little attention from commentators.3 Although Cavell mentions Levinas’s writing on skepticism, he resists any elaboration on that common occupation (LK, 528). In introducing skepticism in his late opus Otherwise than Being , Levinas remarks that the epistemological attention to uncertainty and risk entailed in our relation to the other displaces the real impact of uncertainty: if one believes that uncertainty should be mended by certainty, one has already...

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