Totality and Infinity at 50

3. “All that Is Holy Is Profaned”: Levinas and Marx on the Social Relation

57 THREE “All that Is Holy Is Profaned” Levinas and Marx on the Social Relation AsherHorowitz The presence of a deep affinity between Marx and Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, is a subject that, though occasionally broached, largely has been overlooked.1 An essential level at which to explore this affinity—without which certain tensions would also not exist—is in what may be called their respective social ontologies.2 I will proceed by first drawing attention to what seems to be an all-but-unnoticed ambiguity in Marx’s social ontology by way of a brief analysis of the concept and provenance of species-being. Marx, in his concept of species-being, both approaches and withdraws from an understanding of the social relation as something eerily like Levinas’s sense of the ethical as an imperative obligation directly binding me to the other in an asymmetrical and thereby radically plural fashion. There is an ambiguity or equivocation about this which traverses Marx’s career, beginning from the early “Excerpt Notes on James Mill,” and it never goes away. It is this double understanding of what it means to be 58 Asher Horowitz a social-historical being that, as much as anything else, allows for the quarrels between “humanistic” and “structural” readings of Marx. Totality and Infinity is a book that also contains a social ontology; it can and should be read as a phenomenologically inspired answer to the question of what it means to be a socialhistorical being. The social historicity of the human is a theme that is already crucial to Levinas in his first book on Husserl, recurs in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” and remains present in his subsequent works.3 Yet in Totality and Infinity he both approaches and withdraws from the question of the ethical relation’s own social historicity. The historical future is not approached as a potential field for the realization of the ethical relation on the societal plane. The ultimate meaning of being human is in a fecundity that enshrines goodness as good deeds, but not, one might say, as good works.4 The concept of fecundity, as a result, is not extended or linked up to the institution of a good society. After tracing the ambiguity in Marx surrounding the relation between what could be called the ethical bond and positive subjective freedom, along with a few of its implications, the analysis will turn to the ways in which Totality and Infinity resolves it. But while resolving it, Levinas will also unnecessarily introduce an important equivocation concerning the necessary extent of alienation into his own social ontology, an equivocation that he does not clearly see as already, in principle, resolved by Marx. Finally, I would like to go on very briefly to suggest that this mutual correction points not so much toward a synthesis , but to an alignment in which these thinkers supplement and enrich each other. In filling out and actually strengthening the concept of species-being, Totality and Infinity can immeasurably enrich future conceptions of socialism. By introducing a clear distinction between alienation and objectification, Marx can lead Levinasian ethics in the direction of its realization on the planes of the societal and the political. “All that Is Holy Is Profaned” 59 Underlying Marx’s critical theories of class societies and their past and potential transformations, there is a social ontology of the human, an interpretation of what being human means. To be human for Marx means to be social, as the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach so forcefully announces. Humanity is not “an essence inhering in each single individual. In its actuality it is the ensemble of social relations.” Moreover, as the eighth Thesis asserts, “All social life is essentially practical.”5 It is not simply theoretical , but involved and expressed in the active life of the senses. These propositions are not simply asserted as facts, they are referred back, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to what is perhaps the most ambiguous and opaque, but also most central and foundational concept in his work, the notion of the human as a “species-being,” a being that, because its life activity expresses both “universality” and “freedom,” is capable of, if not impelled to, making its own history and thereby itself. Speciesbeing cannot be simply taken as a constant. It refers both to actuality, to the past and present, and to a potentiality; speciesbeing is...