Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence

Notes

155 Notes Introduction 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” trans. Joseph P. Fell, Situations, I (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1947), 5. Hereafter cited as “Intentionality.” 2. I identify Levinas’s Existence and Existents as a text in which the endeavor is akin to that of Being and Nothingness, insofar as it establishes our most fundamental encounter with being. See Emmanuel, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne, 2001). Hereafter cited as EE. 3. Sartre, “La Transcendence de L’Ego, Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique,” Recherchers Philosophiques VI (1936–67): 86–123, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick under the title The Transcendence of the Ego, An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness (New York: Noon Day Press, 1972). Hereafter cited as TE. 4. Sartre, L’être et Le Neant, Essat d’ ontologie phenomenology (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes under the title Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Hereafter cited as BN. 5. François Raffoul reads, in Sartre, an underlying indebtedness to Cartesianism, in his conception of “willful subjectivity and the motif of authorship [present in his work].” See The Origins of Responsibility (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2010), 122. 6. I discuss this in detail in chapter 4, alongside other modes of affectivity in Sartre, which escapes his formal account of transcendence. 7. Levinas, De l’évasion (Montpellier, France: Fata Morgana, 1982), trans. Bettina Bergo under the title On Escape (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003). Hereafter cited as OE. 8. Levinas, Totalité et Infini, Essai Sur L’Extériorité The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), trans. Alphonso Lingis under the title Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Hereafter cited as TI. 156 Notes to Chapter 1 9. See Christian Howells’s “Sartre and Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas, Rethinking the Other, ed. R. Bernasconi (London: Routledge, 1998), 91–99); Joanne M. Pier’s “Sartre/Levinas, An Is/Ought Gap of Ethics?” Dialogue (April 1989): 52–57); Arne Vetlesen’s “Relations with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing Some Implications for an Ethics of Proximity,” Constellations 1, no. 3 (1995): 358–382); and Dan Zahavi’s “Beyond Empathy, Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5–7 (2001): 151–167. 10. Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1938), trans. Lloyd Carruth under the title Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1964). 11. Sartre’s novel was first published some nine years prior to the first publication of Existence and Existents; one wonders how much (if any) of Nausea influenced Levinas in 1947. Both publications follow Levinas’s On Escape (1935– 36). Even at these early stages of Levinas’s thought, one finds precursors to the ideas developed in Existence and Existents. The main theme of On Escape is our rivetedness to being, and ultimately, the encounter with being as burdensome. I show that all three texts explicitly illustrate experiences in which we are riveted to our position in being, positions from which there is no avenue for escape. Considering the chronology of these somewhat similar texts, the possibility of Levinas’s exposure to Sartre, and Sartre’s to Levinas, are worth pursuing. I do not take this up at this stage, as it is out of the range of my more explicit concerns. Chapter 1: The Role of Being in Sartre’s Model of Transcendence-as-Intentionality 1. Stephen Priest, The Subject in Question: Sartre’s critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 148. 2. Sartre’s views on the epoché can be found in Imagination, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972). “How do I distinguish after reduction between the centaur I imagine and the blossoming tree I perceive? The ‘imagined centaur’ is also the noema of a fulfilled noetic consciousness. . . . But before reduction we were able to find in that very unreality a way to distinguish a fiction from a perception, for the blossoming tree existed somewhere outside us. We could touch it, clutch it, turn away from it, then, retracing our steps, come upon it again in the same spot. The centaur, on the contrary, was nowhere, neither in me nor outside me. Bracketed now, the tree-thing is now known only as the noema of our actual” perception, and thus as an irreality (unirreel), just like the centaur,” (139–140). 3. In his tracing of Sartre’s critique...