Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 4: Levinas and Hillel’s Questions

4 Levinas and Hillel’s Questions ‘‘Philosophy is in crisis,’’ says the postmodern thinker. ‘‘Yet,’’ she continues, ‘‘we are forced to comport ourselves within its ambit, forced to dance its dance, to use its concepts and to unsay them even before they are said.’’ But what is meant by ‘‘philosophy,’’ and how are we to unsay it if we have at our disposal only its notions? Can philosophy provide its own critique without lapsing into self-referentiality ? Is there an exteriority, an outside of philosophy that speaks otherwise than philosophically, that can call into question philosophy ’s hierarchy of constructs? And if there is, what boots it if this exteriority must enter into conversation with philosophy, so that it is once again trapped by philosophy? Levinas treats these questions in terms of a relation of languages, by which he means discursive practices: ‘‘Greek,’’ the language of philosophy, is the nexus of concepts that constitutes Western thought; ‘‘Hebrew,’’ with its square script, les lettres carrées, is the vehicle for the interpretive approaches deployed by the sages of Jewish tradition, strategies that speak without speaking and are the language of an ethics that is prior to philosophy. This claim is not meant to imply that ethics is an apophatics, a language of silence, but rather that ethics is spoken otherwise than ontologically. Philosophy for Levinas is an ontology, a thinking of the meaning of being. It is selfenclosed , offering only an internal point d’appui for ethical reflection, that of a subject that is construed either as a consciousness in the 61 manner of German idealism and Husserlian phenomenology or as Heideggerian being-in-the-world. To be sure, Heidegger criticizes a material ethic and the positing of conscience as bound up with taking action, but he fails, from Levinas’s perspective, to contest the subject as a freedom and thus to check the violence endemic to political and economic life. Rather than proclaiming the demise of ethics, Levinas sees ethics (freshly interpreted) as a challenge to ontology and to a philosophy of the subject. ‘‘Philosophy is an egology,’’ says Levinas, in a terse formulation; it must be called to order from outside itself. Judaism will provide postmodernity’s thorn in philosophy’s side, perpetually remonstrating with philosophy, accusing it not because of any specific infraction but simply for being what it is, the arena at best of cognition and at worst of politics. But the matter does not end here. If Judaism is to do its job, it must be understood; it must somehow enter into this universal language that it cannot do without; philosophy, in turn, must become Judaized. Each is, as it were, both contaminated and rescued by the other. Although early interpretations of Levinas’s philosophical thought often cordoned off his Jewish writings, their essential reciprocal relations have recently come under close scrutiny.1 In what follows I presuppose the bond between philosophy and Judaism without attempting to develop this line of analysis in detail. Nor do I wish to consider any particular Talmudic text as the inspiration for some aspect of Levinas’s thought (for example, the Talmudic invocation to supreme obedience, to do before hearing), as it bears upon his own account of alterity. Instead, I hope to expose a deep and unmanifest connection between a specific rabbinic text and the structure of Totality and Infinity,such that the former provides a homologue of the latter as an exposition of egology and alterity. The rabbinic text will be seen as a miniature (in a sense yet to be specified) of Levinas’s work. The apothegm to which I refer is one of the most celebrated sayings, virtually a commonplace, of Jewish Talmudic wisdom, from Tractate Aboth, 1:14, of the Mishnah. Aboth is a compilation of contemplative and folkloric sayings, or Agadah, which contrast with the legal writings or Halakhah of the Mishnah as a whole. The chapters of Aboth were set aside and ultimately published under the title Pirke Aboth. The term Pirke simply means chapters, not ethics, and the title has been misleadingly translated as Ethics of the Fathers.2 The saying in question reads, ‘‘He [Hillel] used to say:—If I am not for myself who is for me? and when I am for myself what am I? And if not now, when?’’3 62 God I shall turn first to the meaning of miniaturization...