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

Chapter 2. Positionality in Levinas’s Transcendence-as-Excendence

43 Chapter 2 Positionality in Levinas’s Transcendence-as-Excendence In this chapter I establish that Levinas advocates for a model of transcendence that is built on the existent’s positionality in (or rivetedness to) Being, to the degree that this structure is necessitated by the subject’s concrete experiences.1 These experiences are, in turn, possible given what he identifies as the structure of human identity (or selfhood).2 Although Levinas finds, in these experiences, moments when phenomenology’s thematization is ruptured, it is ultimately out of the phenomenological method that he conceptualizes transcendence as an excendence from being.3 Said otherwise, the legitimacy of his investigation rests in the priority he gives to the concrete over the formal. By this chapter’s end, I show that, for Levinas, it is our rivetedness to Being that makes possible this movement of excendence.4 His conception of positionality, which captures this rivetedness, shows that, to a large extent, transcendence is concretized in the ways in which we experience embodiment. Positionality introduces a level to the structure of human subjectivity, whereby the subject is a “lived” passivity, despite his or her projections of intentionality through which meaning is created. Levinas’s account establishes that it is precisely when that position (or our experience of it) is at its most intense, and not in an abnegation from that position, that transcendence-as-excendence takes place. In being positioned, I am burdened by an obligation that I neither choose nor give meaning to, since the event of positionality categorically remains outside of a constituted “world.” In many ways, this Levinasian conception of positionality echoes much of what Sartre describes 44 Moments of Disruption in ­ facticity. To recall from the last chapter, those factical aspects of consciousness represents a (negating) foundation in being, of which consciousness is not the creator. In this regard, Sartrean facticity conveys a transcending movement of consciousness that is always “in situation,” or anchored in being. However, Levinas’s conception of positionality describes an encounter with being that is more accurately likened to rivetedness than to an anchoring. His phenomenological descriptions, which I discuss in the following sections, account for being as “an oppressive weight that we cannot shake off.”5 I argue for a resonance between these conceptions of positionality, in Levinas, and facticity, in Sartre. I substantiate my position by showing that, in the concrete descriptions they use to underscore these formal structures, Sartre and Levinas are more similar than they are different. However, for Sartre, identity is fundamentally an “identity in freedom.” As we have seen, even at the level of facticity, what is given over to me is a meaningful field of phenomena. This field might not be an intentional construction for consciousness, but it is, as the very least, for consciousness . Nevertheless, I identify this similarity between Sartre’s and Levinas’s concrete descriptions as calling for a reading of Sartre’s phenomenological analysis through the Levinasian account of “transcendence as excendence.” I claim that the vulnerability at the heart of consciousness, to which Sartre ’s descriptive work points, can be better articulated by supplementing Sartre’s formal account of experience (and of identity) with those found in Levinas. Because this Levinasian conception of identity is already built on a fundamental positioning in being, his model of transcendence is, in many ways, better suited than Sartre’s model to formalize the concrete analysis found in both thinkers. Said otherwise, transcendence-asexcendence better accounts for the possibility of those experiences, which Sartre himself describes in his work.6 Much of Levinas’s investigations work along the concrete and formal levels simultaneously. He determines his treatment of these levels of inquiry to be distinct from what, in Heidegger, gives the existentiel/ existential divide insofar as he reads Heidegger to be rendering the concrete meaningful in terms of a more formal analysis. Levinas sets himself apart from this strategy in his claim that “a logical contradiction cannot judge a concrete event.”7 He grounds his work in an inversion of this order of priority between the “logical” (or formal) and concrete levels of investigation, and identifies a legitimacy of his formal structures solely in their being concretized in experience.8 This is the strategy that shapes 45 Positionality Levinas’s essay in 1934, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” a work that provides the political-historical formulations of his more theoretical ruminations on identity. The essay...