Ethics at a Standstill: History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School

Introduction

ix Introduction This essay grows out of the conviction that both the Frankfurt School and Levinas each fall short of their own theoretical ambitions , yet do so in ways that allow for the possibility of a mutual fecund embrace. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy is wanting in the promotion and orientation of the social critique his ethics actually calls for and requires. The social critique of the Frankfurt School remains deficient in perceiving and unearthing its own ethical substance. In allowing these lacunae, moreover, each has inadvertently opened itself to appropriations that either limit or belie their most fundamental truths. In Levinas’s case, ethics as first philosophy, remained open to being assimilated to liberalism — a view that his philosophy is far from endorsing , if not essentially opposed. In refusing or being unable to unfold a positive ethical optic, the Frankfurt School ironically invited, in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, its own historical succession by a renewed program, and dialectic, of liberal enlightenment. Yet each, by heeding the other, could have possibly taken several important steps further. It is not uncommon today for Levinas’s philosophy to be recognized as a radical departure in our understanding of the ethical relation and its subject, including a devastating critique x Ethics at a Standstill of the rationalist ethics of Western ontology, as well as the irrationalist, naturalistic, and sentimentalist reactions to such ontologies. His work is increasingly being welcomed as one of those rare watershed moments in the development of Western thought where, once its import has been absorbed, it will be impossible to go back. It is a thought that, in the words of one of his eminent commentators, demands “nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of Western spirit — philosophy, logic, rhetoric, praxis, ontology, science, art, politics, religion — in the light of morality and justice.”1 Levinas evokes this demand through a nonidealist phenomenology exquisitely focused on the ethical relation, and on the subject that is not only in this relation but also is this relation, a relation that precedes and even constitutes the subjectivity responsible for all of these ontological activities, yet a relation binding subjects radically separated from any totality and from one another, therefore subjects with no identity, who escape ontology. The ethical exigency to which this radically embodied material subject will always already have been irretrievably summoned means that my ethical relation to the other includes an infinite responsibility that is unconditional, nonreciprocal, and asymmetrical, a responsibility that is also my freedom, bien entendu. Furthermore, Levinas also insists that the ethical relation cannot be restricted to the realm of the private or to relations of intimacy. My responsibility to the other brings with it the same and as much, indeed infinite responsibility to the third party, all the other others. The ethical relation is thus inseparable from the need and necessity to realize political justice, and justice as some form of law. But the very same law that the ethical relation brings with it or commands, also necessarily undermines that which makes the ethical relation ethical. Ethics requires law, and therefore objectifying distance, thematization, universality, comparison, calculation, measure, and symmetry. But ethics and the justice it commands also require that the law be simultaneously transcended in my singular response to the Introduction xi singularity of the absolutely other. Political and social critique is simultaneously emboldened and stymied in this impasse. If Levinas’s phenomenology of the ethical arrives at an impasse, the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School has had little or no issue. Its so-called second and even third generations are so far removed from its original sources of inspiration, its goals and its methods that they constitute altogether different, even antithetical, schools of thought. In Habermas, whose claim to be a legitimate successor to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School rests to a large extent on his effort to reground critique in a moral point of view itself rooted in a universal pragmatics of linguistic communication, there is an overriding impetus to assimilate the ethical relation to the universalizing trend expressive of and functional for the highly differentiated form of modern capitalist social structures. In Habermas’s theory of communicative action and in communicative ethics there is a reduction of the moral plane to the development of rationalizable action coordination, where the normative is simultaneously more than instrumentality and part of it. Ironically, Habermas...