Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca

THREE

In a footnote to her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir takes Levinas to task for what she sees as his attempts, allegedly like those of preceding philosophers, to posit woman as Other. The footnote, including the passage that she cites from Time and the Other, reads as follows: E. Levinas expresses this idea most explicitly in his essay Temps et l’Autre. “Is there not a case in which otherness, alterity [altérité], unquestionably marks the nature of a being, as its essence, an instance of otherness not consisting purely and simply in the opposition of two species of the same genus? I think that the feminine represents the contrary in its absolute sense, this contrariness being in no wise affected by any relation between it and its correlative and thus remaining absolutely other. Sex is not a certain specific difference . . . no more is the sexual difference a mere contradiction. . . . Nor does this difference lie in the duality of two complementary terms, for two complementary terms imply a pre-existing whole. . . . Otherness reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.” I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness, or ego. But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s THREE The Inauguration of Sexual Difference  Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This shall be called Woman [Isha], for from man [Ish] was she taken.1 —Genesis 2:23 Male and female He created them. —Genesis 1:27 Femininity . . . appeared to me as a difference contrasting strongly with other differences, not merely as a quality different from all others, but as the very quality of difference. —Levinas, in the preface to Time and the Other point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object. When he writes that woman is mystery, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.2 Thus, even Levinas’s positive transformation of the other, from a threat to the very ground of my subjectivity, employs a conception of the feminine as other that does not escape de Beauvoir’s attack. But to understand de Beauvoir ’s criticism of Levinas, one must realize that she understands this relationship of subject/other in its most disparaging form. To be ‘other’ to the male subject is to be incidental, to be inessential to the essential.3 De Beauvoir takes issue with what she sees as Levinas’s disregard for reciprocity and his attempt to disguise his masculine privilege as an objective position. According to de Beauvoir, Levinas assumes a masculine privilege when he maintains the subject/object dichotomy. He, qua male, occupies the position of subject, until the feminine, the “mysterious” feminine, occupies the position of object. As we saw in de Beauvoir’s note, the mystery is not any mystery: the feminine is a mystery for men. In a translator’s note to Time and the Other, Richard Cohen defends Levinas by claiming that de Beauvoir has misunderstood his analysis and simplified the relationship between the subject (he) who is absolute, and the feminine other. Cohen’s defense reminds us that, for Levinas, the other has priority over the subject. Thus, de Beauvoir was too quick to chastise him. However, each of these notes—de Beauvoir’s criticism, which assumes the other as antagonistic, and Cohen’s defense of Levinas—represents an extreme view, between which we may more faithfully situate Levinas’s work. De Beauvoir does not see the positive implications of alterity, and Cohen does not allow that de Beauvoir’s intuition may have some merit. De Beauvoir is right to pose this question to Levinas—that is, she is right to ask how he conceives of the feminine. However, by attacking him for blithely casting woman as other, she reveals her misunderstanding of what he means by the other, and of the priority he assigns to the position that the other holds in his analysis.4 Levinas first introduces the concept of the feminine in his work of the 1940s: Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. Both are short books that do not usually receive the attention given to Totality and Infinity or Otherwise than Being. But these early books lay the foundation for what is to follow. Although the discussion of the feminine in these books is...