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

FOUR

We saw in the previous chapter that in Time and the Other, the feminine , conceived as eros, is the originary experience of alterity. We also saw that sexual difference informs the theme of separation and individuation and establishes the conditions for the ethical relation, even though the ethical is not yet named in this book. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas tells us that in order for the ethical to arise, there must be an intimacy—a familiarity or an enjoyment—that is disrupted. In habitation, the ‘I’ takes pleasure in the handling of a tool (over and against the mere instrumentality of tools, as we see in Heidegger). However, habitation also provides the space from which the man “enters” the world. The man goes into the world as someone who is at home with himself and who can return to his home. The home, which provides the place to which the man can return for enjoyment , is thus characterized by intimacy. Hence, the man has a life that is both inside (enjoyment) and outside (the ethical) the home. And the role that woman plays in making possible man’s transcendence extends beyond the dwelling and into the erotic relationship. In this chapter, we see that the role of the feminine is doubled: it functions both as the welcoming in the dwelling and as the access to fecundity via the erotic relationship. Thus, we can raise questions not only about how Levinas understands the erotic relationship —that is, the love relationship between the man and woman—but also about how his conception of eros has been understood by his commentators . FOUR The Hospitality of the Feminine  If, however, there is a needy person among you . . . do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs. —Deuteronomy 15:7–8 A man’s home is his wife (The house is Woman). —The Talmud THE DWELLING The gentleness of habitation is the feminine presence.1 The relation of the I to the Other in the face-to-face is identified by language, and the face, though always eluding my grasp, is not hidden. In contrast to the Other, woman, who is “discreetly absent” and “silent” (TI 155/TeI 128), accomplishes the task of making the home hospitable; woman makes possible the “condition for recollection . . . and inhabitation” (TI 155/TeI 128). Levinas tells us, “The Other who welcomes in intimacy is not the you [vous] of the face that reveals itself in a dimension of height, but precisely the thou [tu] of familiarity: a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret” (TI 155/TeI 129).2 The confusion that arises from Levinas’s use of the feminine has its roots in its ambiguous reference: Does the feminine refer to empirically existing women, or does it describe metaphorically what might be interpreted as stereotyped feminine attributes such as gentleness?3 Certainly, one could argue for the latter alternative, namely, that Levinas’s account of the feminine is merely metaphorical. And comments by both Levinas and his readers support this position. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas avows his reliance on metaphor: “Need one add that there is no question here of defying ridicule by maintaining the empirical truth or counter-truth that every home in fact presupposes a woman? . . . [T]he empirical absence of the human being of the feminine sex in a dwelling nowise affects the dimension of femininity which remains open there, as the very welcome of the dwelling” (TI 157–158/TeI 131). And in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas says, “Perhaps all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species, they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being. Could this be the meaning of the enigmatic verse of Genesis 1:27: ‘male and female created He them’?” (EI 68–69/EeI 71). Commentators often claim that Levinas uses the feminine only metaphorically. Adriaan Peperzak, for example, does so, and he concludes that Levinas does not exclude woman (or women) from the ethical relationship.4 However, Peperzak arrives at this conclusion by substituting “man, woman, and child” for Levinas’s references to “the stranger, the widow, and the orphan,” respectively. Peperzak thus interprets Levinas as using the triplet to encompass all human beings...