From: Goodchild P <p.goodchild-AT-ucsm.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Levinas
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 96 10:33:00 BST



Aden,

I'm saddened by your news - if there's anything I can do to help, let me 
know; but I have minimal institutional status and clout.

I haven't read all of Levinas closely, and I expect there to be many 
resonances between two such vital minds working in a similar intellectual 
context.  Both moved away from Heideggerian ontology, and I would 
(shockingly, as usual) suggest that Deleuze's use of Spinoza makes 
metaphysics flee into ethics, and this is comparable to ethics as first 
philosophy.  (I've recently completed a paper on this, contrasting Deleuze 
with Zygmunt Bauman, a social theorist turned Levinas disciple - I can send 
you a copy if its helpful.)

The differences between the way in which they conceive the ethical - as 
desire (D) and obligation (L) - might account for the difference between 
trapping and commanding.  But there's quite a similar structure - I'm 
thinking of:

'The face is signification, and signification without context.'  (Ethics and 
Infinity, p.86) - a transcendental signifier - 'the face signifies the 
Infinite' (E&I p.105)

But the face, as you say, 'breaks its own form', averts itself.  Moreover, 
there are many destitute others - so each face is not the infinite, but 
refers back to the Infinite as its passional point of subjectification. 
 Remember the links between signification and law, drawn out in Masochism 
and Anti-Oedipus.  But if signification is no longer the once for all of the 
despot's commands, then it becomes the obligation announced by  the Other.
'The first word of the face is "Thou shalt not kill."' (E&I p.89)  I am 
confronted with the death of the Other as a black hole, which is my 
responsibility.

Even within Levinas' thought, there is something that seems to me to be 
inverted in priority: 'If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; 
but there is someone else . . . The interpersonal relation I establish with 
the Other, I must also establish with other men; there is thus a necessity 
to moderate this privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice.'  (E&I 
pp.89-90)  But I am never alone with one other person; my commitments to 
other people (animals, plants, etc.) already preexist in the space in which 
I encounter an Other.  This is not incidental, after the fact - you can't 
get to a 'first philosophy' by beginning with an abstract event of 
encounter.  In this sense, I would go along with Jean-Luc Nancy (whose work 
I know  less well) and believe that community has to be thought prior to 
obligation.  And DandG's thought perhaps offers the best resources to do 
this in a posthumanist, ecological context.

Does this clarify what I meant?

Phil

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