To see somebody suffer is nice, to make somebody suffer even nicer—that is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful human-all-too-human proposition. . . . No cruelty, no feast: that is what the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us.
—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human.
—Levinas, Useless Suffering
Levinas and Nietzsche?
Suffering and vulnerability to the cruelty of violence constitute the contexts of Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s accounts of morality and moral value. Suffering, moreover, is central for both of them to the formation of moral selfhood. For Nietzsche, it is through the refusal of the meanings attributed to suffering by the herd that the sovereign noble both differentiates himself from the herd and contemplates a reversal of the will, which has become mired in forms of ascetic idealism that are “hostile to life.” For Levinas, ethical responsibility is premised on the radical differentiation of suffering in me from the suffering of the other, such that the ethical subject can be open to the approach of the other. A principal focus of this chapter will be the significance attached by each of them to the materiality of sensation and embodiment in their accounts of subjectivity. For both philosophers, I shall argue, however different the destinations of their thinking, the passage of thought “beyond suffering” is crucial—for Nietzsche to what he refers to as “the affirmation of life,” for Levinas to the claims he makes concerning “infinite responsibility.”
Richard Cohen has written, in his admirable book Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy, that Nietzsche was “troubled” by the “‘meaninglessness of suffering’ “and that he “rejects all interpretations whatsoever for suffering,” finally offering only a “brave but fantastic heralding of the heralding of yet another messiah: Zarathustra, heralding the Overman.”1 I want to begin by recalling, however, that it is only from the perspective of herd morality that the “meaninglessness” of suffering is an issue, according to Nietzsche; only the “lower type” of human being suffers from the “meaninglessness of suffering”—by bringing it upon themselves. Of course, this entire discourse might be judged highly objectionable, even protofascistic nonsense, were it not for the simple fact that the noble and the herd are also to be understood as aspects of every one of us. And, for that reason, everywhere there is tension and loathing between these “two” in Nietzsche’s genealogical account, we are effectively referred back to the internal struggle between them. Nietzsche’s analysis of morality in the Genealogy goes hand in hand with the critique of antithetical thinking per se.
Suffering, I want to suggest, is a point of condensation for Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s respective philosophical positions tout court. It is fundamental for Nietzsche’s project, expressed in such terms as “becoming,” “overcoming,” and “the affirmation of life,” and for Levinas’s project of ethics, expressed in terms of the “humanism of the other” and “transcendence.” Both of them articulate responses to the problem of “the meaninglessness of suffering” from within suffering itself. My own questions in this context concern the sense in which Nietzschean affirmation and Levinasian responsibility are accessible only “beyond suffering.” Are these notions of affirmation and responsibility complementary or mutually exclusive alternatives, and what is at stake in deciding between them?
There is, of course, no denying that these thinkers generally present us with radically differing perspectives on suffering. In Nietzsche we read:
You want if possible—and there is no madder “if possible”—to abolish suffering; and we?—it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it ever has been! . . . And do you understand . . . that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined—that which has to suffer and should suffer?
(BG §225)
And in Levinas we read:
The vortex—suffering of the other, my pity for his suffering, his pain over my pity, my pain over his pain, etc.—stops at me. The I is what involves one movement more in this iteration. My suffering is the cynosure of all the sufferings—and all the faults, even of the fault of my persecutors, which amounts to suffering the ultimate persecution, suffering absolutely.
(LR 122n 20)
This juxtaposition is illustrative of the inescapable difficulty of trying to think with Nietzsche and Levinas on suffering: the strategic and fictitious “we,” the voice of Nietzsche’s aristocratic noble at pains to differentiate itself from the “you” of the herd, cannot strictly be compared to the actuality of the inclusive Levinasian “me”—which includes Levinas himself, me, you, and every other singular “me” for whom, on the matter of the responsibility for suffering, Levinas’s last word will always be “the buck stops here.” The initial difficulty I identify, then, concerns the matter of the “who” or “what” of suffering, and this in turn directs us to a set of questions concerning various relationships: for instance, the relationship between the self and suffering—both myself in relation to my suffering and my relation to the other in his or her suffering, and not forgetting the other’s relation to me in my suffering. The way I shall approach these relationships now is along the lines of connection they suggest between Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s thinking of “individuation” and “separation,” respectively, and the roles they play in their discourses on pain.
Pain and Individuation
One of Nietzsche’s earliest and most abstract figures of suffering can be found in his early work, The Birth of Tragedy, in the sufferings of the God Dionysus. As Keith Ansell-Pearson notes, Dionysus experiences the sufferings of individuation as such, adding:
This gives us a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world: what exists is a unity and primordial oneness; individuation is mere appearance and is the primal source of all evil; art offers the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken and unity restored. We suffer from life because we are individuals alienated from nature and because consciousness of this separation afflicts us.2
If we let this stand as an early sketch of the Nietzschean project of thinking, then we can say it is generally aimed at producing a reversal of this metaphysics of individuation and at a re-aestheticization of life. In contrast to such a reorientation of thought toward the restoration of “unity,” the orientation of thought “beyond being” in Levinas’s work is actually premised on an account of individuation as the “substantive” subject’s separation from being: separation is established as the fundamental condition of possibility of the orientation of the “I” toward the Other (l’Autrui) by way of my relationship to the face of the other person whose separate existence is secured. Separation is accomplished, for Levinas, in the “upsurge” of the existent, which sustains itself through “nourishment,” “labor,” and “enjoyment” in relation to “the element” that it inhabits; the existent is born of “effort” and it can collapse in “fatigue” (as the phenomenological studies in Existence and Existents and Totality and Infinity claim to show). Such an existent can suffer, but its life is happiness and enjoyment in the first instance: “suffering is the failing of happiness; it is not correct to say that happiness is an absence of suffering” (TI 115). Phenomenological descriptions such as these offered by Levinas do not refer to any consciousness; they are rather presented as descriptions of moments (or “instants”) of the existent’s life.
The achievement of aestheticized life in its highest form for Nietzsche is premised on a prior accomplishment of a certain dis-individuation rather than an individuation, whereas the “substantivity” of the subject for Levinas is premised on the individuation (separation) of the existent from existence in general (or impersonal being—the “il y a”). Levinas’s account of the existent explicitly aims to counter the characteristic forms of the “dissolution of subject” (TI 298) that he identifies with much of modern philosophy—especially that of Heidegger and, perhaps less obviously, Nietzsche. Where these two accounts of suffering touch, I suggest, is in terms of a suffering that causes, or threatens to cause, the failure of a certain projected fulfillment—for Levinas that of the “satisfaction of needs” of the existent, for Nietzsche life’s quest for “unity” as the reunification with nature. Though Nietzsche equates Dionysian “joy” with such dis -individuation, and “enjoyment” is said to secure separation for Levinas, and though Nietzsche valorizes a return to “unity,” whereas “ipseity” is the condition for transcendence for Levinas, with suffering, in both cases, we are in the presence of a certain less-than-wholly-individualized subject; a subject that is either halfway to coming into being or halfway to becoming unified—depending on the “direction” one supposes. In both accounts the suffering of such a subject threatens to forestall the process at hand, and what is called for is the unblocking of its movement.
One way to approach the relationship between the two philosophers, then, is to consider how they each understand the relationship between suffering and what lies “beyond suffering.” Intriguingly, both philosophers address the problem of the “meaninglessness of suffering,” but neither supposes the “abolition of suffering” to be a meaningful goal: suffering is approached by both, rather, as a feature of the human condition. Any justification of suffering, or theodicy, is impossible not only because of the disproportionate degree of suffering in the world (the paradigm of which, today, is the excess of suffering represented by the Holocaust),3 but just as much because of the lateness of the justification, in the sense that it comes always “after the fact” of suffering and hence always deals with its representation. Having rejected theodicy from their differing perspectives, Nietzsche and Levinas both direct their thought to the question of how we might live our proximity to suffering.
Suffering and the Body
Even though The Birth of Tragedy presents an abstract image of suffering, one apparently far removed from the suffering experienced in the body and the banality of physical pain, it is important to remember that such “high-mindedness” is grounded in the materiality of sensation. In a note at the end of the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche says: “Every table of values, every ‘thou shalt’ known to history or the study of ethnology, needs first and foremost a physiological elucidation; rather than a psychological one” (GM 37). And at the root of the second essay’s account of how modern moral indignation over suffering is aimed not “at suffering itself, but at the meaninglessness of suffering” (GM 48) is a recollection of how historical punishment in the form of the infliction of bodily pain in torture was through and through a “physiological” matter. The cultures of antiquity, such as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and more recently even the medieval Germans, Nietzsche notes, lived by penal codes that were practiced quite literally on the body of the miscreant (GM 42). By showing how such corporal punishments were, in fact, entirely “meaningful” practices within certain cultures, Nietzsche presents his evidence that “meaningless suffering” is actually a recent invention. In his genealogy of the concept of “suffering as meaningful,” he locates such punishments “half way” (in the sense I indicated earlier and corresponding to a particular stage of individuation) between the characterization of a relation to suffering as pure “joy” and “festivity” and the transformation of the concept of debt (Schuld) into that of guilt (Schulden). Punishments are indicative of a point where “compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty” (GM 88–90). There is no need here to recall the full trajectory of Nietzsche’s account of how the “negative” value assigned to suffering emerges through various stages of the reversal of its origin in “the joyous life,” culminating in Christianity’s seeking to abolish suffering altogether. I wish only to recall at this point how the “superior type,” the noble, accomplishes individuation in the form of his or her response to the suffering of pain. Nietzsche’s texts frequently invoke examples of the life subjected to extreme suffering, in the pains of torture and punishment or in those of illness. In each case, the suffering of pain forces the sufferer into the sensual dimension of bodily existence, a force against which the body itself can offer no resistance. It can do nothing (other than suffer), and its becoming thus falters in such pure suffering. However, Nietzsche views such a condition of life positively, as the occasion for a revaluation of suffering, and thereby of life itself.
In their thinking on suffering, Nietzsche and Levinas overlap most significantly, I suggest, in their respective accounts of the formation of morality as it emerges from the experience of the body. Nietzsche emphasizes this in many places, for example, in Zarathustra’s “I am body and nothing beside” (TZ 61; a sentence uncannily echoed in Levinas’s remark that I am “entrails in a skin” [TI 77]), and, for instance in the following late remark from Will to Power: “Our most sacred convictions, the unchanging elements in our supreme values, are judgments of our muscles” (WP 173). Similarly, the suffering of the “I” for each of them, as noted above, is an “undergoing” rather than conatus essendi. The meaning of suffering, as such, has its origin in the response to pain undergone at the level of sensation. The manner in which they each articulate their thinking on this point may differ, but the rootedness of the pained subject in material life, approached by way of the theme of embodiment, is crucial to both. In neither case, let us be clear, are we referred to the body as it is objectified in the sciences of biology, physiology, and anatomy, all of which deal with representations of the body: both thinkers direct us, rather, to the not-yet-represented materiality of sensation. For Nietzsche, the sensibility of the body is the origin of “our most sacred convictions,” and the suffering body signals the possibility of overcoming the individuation it suffers in its very suffering of extreme pain. Even Christ himself, in the most painful moment of his suffering on the cross, Nietzsche speculates, may have discovered the “complete disillusionment and enlightenment in regard to the deceptions of life” and thereby “insight into himself.” This is perhaps evident, suggests Nietzsche, if the words “‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me!’” are understood in their “ultimate significance” (DB 114). Extreme pain, for Nietzsche, is the occasion for self-mastery and self-insight, the production of something new, growth and the affirmation of life. It is because of the transformative power of sensate suffering that suffering is deemed to be necessary—and desirable. The difference between aristocratic and ascetic sensibilities is that the former appropriates and directs the energies of suffering “inward,” using them to reinvent the self, whereas the latter directs them “outward” in a gesture of pity for all those whom it recognizes to be the same as itself—to all “humanity.” Pain thus places the sufferer in a situation where “it could go either way.”
That Levinas also directs us to this same point of “decision” is most clearly to be seen in his account of ethical subjectivity, where he speaks of the “subject” in terms of its being a “being-in-a-skin,” as he does throughout Otherwise Than Being.4 In his account of ethical subjectivity, the skin is said to be “a modality of the subjective” (OB 26)—a nonphilosophical, unthematized actuality, no less. And yet this “actual” should not be misconstrued as the physical skin—which is indeed only “known” by way of its conceptualization in the natural sciences. It is discussed, rather, as the as-yet undecided, as both vulnerability and absolute passivity: “exposure to the other is at one and the same time the surface of all possible ‘contact’ and the exposedness to injury, wounding and violence—and physical pain itself. As a passivity, in the paining of the pain felt, sensibility is a vulnerability” (OB 55).
Levinas holds fast to this moment of the undecidedness of pain in his phenomenological discourse in order to reveal the manner in which “the possibility in suffering of suffering for nothing prevents the passivity in it from reverting into an act” (OB 74; emphasis mine). Where Nietzsche’s thinking goes outward from pain in the direction of dis -individuated “unity,” Levinas’s thinking goes toward what he calls the superindividuation of the substantive subject as a being-in-a-skin: “The individuation, or superindividuation, of the ego (le Moi) consists in being itself, in its skin,” but, take note, this is “without sharing the conatus essendi of all beings which are beings in themselves” (OB 118). Is it not possible to say here that Nietzschean dis -individuation directed at the accomplishment of “unity” and Levinasian “superindividuation” of the substantive “being-in-a-skin” directed at the openness to alterity share a common starting point, if we understand this starting point to be the rejection of a certain egological interiority? In other words, both Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s projects are premised on a certain notion of “dis-individuation,” if one understands that as a refusal of the naturalness of the psychological notion of “the ego” or “self.” For Levinas, this is the moment in which there is an “ambiguity” of which the “body is the very articulation,” in which “it frees itself from all the weight of the world, from immediate and incessant contacts” and is “at a distance” (TI 116). All of this pertains to the “I” viewed from the perspective of the “I.” In Nietzsche it corresponds to a point at which there is a tentative balance of the forces that are given the names “noble” and “herd”: the herd becomes, so to speak, self-obsessed, and its pity (Mitleid) for the suffering of the other is simply an inversion of self-pity as it turns outward. The noble is presented as the disruption of this equilibrium through the articulation of its contempt for the herd as it turns inward. And just as these two perspectives are in reality aspects of a play of forces at work within one individual, Levinas’s “I” emerges through a process of differentiation from what is other (autre), played out through the satiation of its material needs (for example, in the satisfaction of the hunger it suffers). This accomplishment of independent existence—interiority or ipseity—which, I am suggesting, could just as well be called the “becoming I,” is the necessary precondition of such an ethical subject’s orientation toward an alterity beyond being.
The significant difference between Nietzsche and Levinas, which we must pursue further, concerns what happens next.
Meaningless Suffering and Useless Suffering
For Nietzsche the theological conundrum of the “meaninglessness” of suffering, in response to which the herd resorts to theodicy, marks the point of its entrapment in a cycle of bad repetition; it is, in other words, a figure of the “eternal return of same,” but a negative one, one that can be discerned in the structure of the Mitleid, which is redoubled in the pity expressed for suffering and multiplied further in the pity for that pity. The herd is thus caught in a downward spiral of pity. It wills suffering upon itself in order to indulge itself further; it embraces, even celebrates its victimhood and becomes a neutered will to impotence. It would be only too easy (and shortsighted) to view Levinas’s discursive deployment of the biblical figures of “the widow, the orphan and the stranger” in his articulation of responsibility for the other human being—and especially his suggestion that the other person is “a value”5—as the insignia of Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. But to do so would be to disregard the manner in which “what happens next” comes after his account of the substantive subject by means of a certain phenomenology.
If we accept the discoveries of this phenomenology, worked through in extraordinary detail throughout Levinas’s writings and culminating in his claim that “suffering sensibility . . . is an ordeal more passive than experience,”6 then we have to accept that the suffering that is a pure “undergoing” (of pain) is of a radically distinct order from “suffering as meaningful.” Meaningful suffering is but the reflection of suffering in conceptual thought. It is on the basis of his phenomenological studies that Levinas can insist on this splitting of suffering into two as an irreducible fact and mark “meaningless suffering” as a simple tautology: it has the descriptive value of “suffering suffers.” Nietzsche’s discourse misses this discovery, not only because he has no recourse to phenomenology but because he is preoccupied with the struggle between two impersonal perspectives on suffering occurring within the same individual, whose ideal resolution (in both senses of “whose”) he conceives of as a re-turn toward primordial unity. Levinas’s description of the suffering of pain as “unassumable” by the subject is of the pain which “results from an excess, a ‘too much’ which is inscribed in sensorial content” (US 156). As such, it neither lacks nor awaits a meaning; it is said, rather, to “penetrate” the dimension of meaning, which is “grafted on to it.” He continues:
What counts in the non-freedom of the undergoing of suffering is the concreteness of the not looming as a hurt more negative than an apophantic not. This negativity of evil is, probably, the source or kernel of any apophantic negation. The not of evil is negative right up to nonsense. All evil refers to suffering. It is the impasse of life and being. The evil of pain, the harm itself, is the explosion and most profound articulation of absurdity.
(US 157)
This could perhaps be viewed mistakenly as an identification of suffering with evil (mal), and hence as making an error comparable to that made by Nietzsche’s herd, were it not for the fact that this does not amount to the same thing as the identification of the meaning of suffering with evil. The coincidence of evil and absurdity in suffering means, rather, that suffering is “for nothing.” There is nothing to be said about suffering qua suffering. By itself suffering is without any moral implication. However, Levinas’s “positive” thesis is that for
pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless [i.e., useless] and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human . . . the suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other person, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the Other, opens upon suffering the ethical perspective of the inter-human. . . . Properly speaking, the inter-human lies in the non-indifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another.
(US 158–65)
The brazen “no cruelty, no feast” of Nietzsche’s noble is effectively challenged, though obliquely, by Levinas’s “no suffering, no ethics.” Levinas’s ethical perspective, that of responsibility, is no more assumable, to use his word, by me than is my own suffering, and to be ethical is not my decision: it is not a matter of my good character or my personal qualities but rather of what intransitively articulates my very existence, my entry into existence as such.
As it is made clear repeatedly in Otherwise Than Being, my responsibility for the suffering of the Other is a matter of accusation. It comes to me prior to any subjective interpretation I may place upon it: I may regard it as a matter of my shame, guilt, or conscience; I may “walk away” in fear, but this does not diminish its objective ethical implication for me. That such an “absolute alterity” and “ethical objectivity” remained invisible to Nietzsche is illustrated well by the following passage:
If we love, honour, admire someone [who] . . . is suffering . . . our feeling of love, reverence and admiration changes in an essential respect: it grows tenderer; that is, the gulf between us and him seems to be bridged. . . . We try to divine what it is that eases his pain, and we give it to him . . . but, above all, if he wants us to suffer at his suffering, we give ourselves out to be suffering; in all this, however, we have the enjoyment of active gratitude—which, in short, is benevolent revenge.7
(DB 138–39)
Nietzsche here views tenderness toward the suffering of the other as an inverted form of self-interest, and the scene of suffering as the continuation of a struggle of wills. The Levinasian notion of the Other’s “absolute otherness” (Autrui)—the coincidence of the Good beyond being and the other person who suffers—remains undiscovered by Nietzsche. This is not, however, the consequence of a truly vengeful, malevolent, or sadistic philosophy of suffering; it is, rather, a consequence of Nietzsche’s theoretical insistence on the other as an individual who always calculates his or her own interests, even in his or her moment of suffering. Levinas’s phenomenology of suffering shows to the contrary that in moments of extreme suffering the “I” can no longer even constitute itself so as to be so self-pitying: hence his idea of an infinite responsibility that is “all mine,” with no scope for “pretence” on either side. In contrast to Nietzsche’s thought in the above citation, the “tenderness” of my proximity to the Other in his or her suffering is expressed in terms of the “tenderness of skin,” which “is the very gap between approach and approached, a disparity, a non-intentionality, a non-teleology,” and “I can enjoy and suffer . . . because contact with skin is still proximity of a face” (OB 90). We might therefore say that Nietzsche’s account of “tenderness” is of the psychological “tenderness of the heart,” whereas Levinas’s “tenderness of the skin” points to the precedence of my ethical obligation.
Pity, Compassion, and the Ambiguity of Language
The Judeo-Christian discourse of pity (Mitleid) is so dominant that Nietzsche’s rejection of it must struggle against the determining force of language itself, which forces us to speak in its terms—as must Nietzsche in order to get through to his audience. This situation is compounded somewhat further by the fact that the term “Mitleid” in German expresses both “pity” and “compassion.” In Beyond Good and Evil he unravels the structure of Mitleid so as to distinguish between the pitying of the pitiful (essentially for themselves and their kind) and the pity the strong feel for the piteous attitude of the weak toward the world while at the same time blaming the weak for infecting the strong with such piteousness:
Anyone conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on [the herd] with derision, though not without pity. Pity for you! That to be sure is not pity for “social distress,” for “society” and its sick and unfortunate, for the vicious and broken from the start who lie all around us; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination—they call it “freedom.” Our pity is a more elevated, more far-sighted pity—we see how man is diminishing himself, how you are diminishing him!
(BG §225).
This is just one of Nietzsche’s many attempts to distinguish noble and herd understandings of Mitleid. Noble Mitleid amounts to saying “I do feel ‘sorry’ for you, but above all in that you feel sorry for yourselves.” Characteristically, he expresses contempt (Veracht) for this wallowing in the reciprocity of piteous sympathy for the suffering of the herd. Elsewhere he says that what the herd cannot appreciate is that “to offer pity is as good as to offer contempt” (DB 135). All of this is articulated within a discourse of antithesis forced, as it were, upon the noble (and Nietzsche), who responds to the concept of pity by stridently calling for an intensification of suffering as an antidote to the sentiment ultimately directed at its elimination. Why? Because unopposed pity does not merely serve to define the moral identity or value system of the herd. If that were all it did, it would be safe to let the herd go off on its self-piteous, suffering way. Pity signifies a threat to the health of the noble—it is a contagion, and the sick are viewed as the greatest threat to the strong, who must, therefore, guard against the corrosive effects of pity.
Nietzsche’s legitimate critical concern—“beyond suffering” and the form of Mitleid that suffering demands in all of this—is clearly with the fate of culture as a whole. It is not with the relationship between anyone in particular and any particular other. Levinas’s thinking “beyond suffering,” on the other hand, returns us to the primal scene of a certain “intimacy”; something that cannot be “given as an example” of some greater whole (such as culture) “or be narrated as an edifying discourse” (US 163).
I now want to look more closely at the suggestion—voiced by Richard Cohen, for example—that Levinas takes up, specifically, “Nietzsche’s challenge” (EEP 270), which I take to refer generally to the problem of moral value after the “death of God.” Bearing in mind the discussion so far, I want to return briefly to their overlapping interpretations of the ambiguity of the other’s suffering in its relation to the perspectivist strategies of each philosopher. First, there is a sense in which they each refuse the suffering of the other, albeit for different reasons. For Nietzsche it is because suffering signifies a manipulative demand for pity; for Levinas it is because the “I” cannot literally suffer the other’s suffering any more than it can be the other. The other’s suffering is ambiguous for Nietzsche because the other (the herd, for example) prevails within me, it is in fact a part of me, and without this other’s suffering “in me” I could not contemplate the prospect of overcoming the self that I already am. The Other’s suffering is ambiguous in Levinas because the Other is the one who “obliges” me to be responsible and calls me to my responsibility, such that responsibility may be said to be the very modality of my subjectivity. In both cases, ambiguity is a matter of the coarticulation of (their respective senses of) self and other. In Nietzsche’s work this takes the form of the play of opposing forces “present within one soul,” and for Levinas this corresponds to the precedence of the ethical obligation to the other person over the egological relation of the self (le soi) to itself. Second, it is now clear that the ambiguity of suffering is a matter also of the ambiguity of language and, specifically, related to the limitations imposed by the subject/predicate structure of language. In their philosophical responses to this, both Nietzsche and Levinas use perspectivism in formulating theories of value. This is evident in Nietzsche’s Genealogy as a whole being forced to express itself in the language of the herd while simultaneously asserting the noble’s “seigneurial privilege of giving names” (GM 13). It is precisely because of this “privilege” that one can only too easily read Nietzsche as an enemy of “compassion” (Mitleid) in his critique of “pity” (Mitleid). But his negative account of “pity” does not imply a negative account of, or for that matter even an insensitivity on his part to, the value of and need for what is ordinarily called “compassion” in the face of actual suffering. All one can say is that the danger Nietzsche highlights is that of “over-identifying” with the suffering of the other, which leads to deleterious effects on oneself. The dead God of salvation, let us recall, died “of his pity for Man” (TZ 114).
The ambiguity of language in Levinas’s ethics comes to the fore in his attempts to articulate the difference and the asymmetry of the I-Other conjuncture and to give expression to the unthematized situation of suffering. It is evident in every attempt he makes at “unsaying” (dédire) the objectification effectuated by “the said” (le dit). Turning once again to how this plays out in Levinas’s account of suffering: in the instant of physical pain, the very existence of the “I” “merges with the impossibility of detaching oneself from suffering” (TO 69). Such pain is, “in its undiluted malignity,” described as “useless” and “for nothing” (US 163). And, as he says elsewhere of the skin—Levinas’s trope of unthematized sensibility—the suffering of it might also be described as “wholly sign, signifyingness itself” (OB 26). The Levinasian “I,” which is “being-in-a-skin,” exists as pure sensation. Richard Cohen in his summary of Levinas on this point says, “Just as a bodily being enjoys enjoying, it suffers suffering. The unwanted and at the same time inescapable character of pained corporeal reflexivity is what distinguishes the phenomenon of suffering: one suffers from suffering itself” (EEP 272). The “reflexivity” of the substantive “I” in its suffering is, emphatically, “bodily” rather than of consciousness. In speaking to us from within the discourse of phenomenology, of the pain lived by “me” from the perspective of the pain of the other person considered as a “me,” this voice has to express such a “saying” in defiance of the subject/predicate structure of language. While “compassion” is perhaps the word that in its ordinary usage is best suited to express what I “feel” for the suffering other—and Cohen uses this word to name what Levinas calls “the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible”—Levinas’s discourse of obligation and my being “hostage” to the Other, in Otherwise Than Being, emphasizes better the absence of any volition on my part with respect to what he calls my responsibility for the Other’s suffering. From a transcendent perspective, there is the sense in which I and the other person are united in his or her suffering, but the term “united” here refers always to relatio rather than res. It is, as he says of it at one point, a “relation without relata” (TI xxx). Perspective, for both Nietzsche and Levinas, is always a matter of relatio rather than res. As far as my relation to the suffering of the other is concerned, then, this means that I do not, indeed cannot, suffer the other’s suffering for him or her but, without ever willing it, I suffer for the other’s suffering in me:
In this perspective a radical difference develops between suffering in the Other, which for me is unpardonable and solicits me and calls me, and suffering in me, my own adventure of suffering, whose constitutional and congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible, in becoming a suffering for the suffering—be it inexorable—of someone else.
(US 159)
Despite its explicit origins in the physiology of the body and its experience of pain, one wonders whether Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the general health of culture could ever be united with the reality of individual suffering. In contrast to the remoteness of the everyday to the Nietzschean project of “revaluation of all values,” Levinas’s ethics can be seen as move toward a certain kind of ethical realism or even an empiricism of suffering (notwithstanding all the caveats that apply to Levinas’s own use of that term). The Other’s suffering, his or her “pure pain,” directs me to “the problem which pain poses ‘for nothing’: the inevitable and pre-emptory ethical problem of the medication which is my duty” (US 158). This particular formulation may be awkwardly Kantian rather than Levinasian, but “duty” is the way we tend to think and represent to ourselves the obligation that the suffering Other brings to me by virtue of his or her “absolute alterity.” Hence, according to Levinas, I have no excuse and no alibi: after the death of the God of salvation, waiting any longer for His saving actions is “impossible without degradation” (US 159).
NOTES
1. Richard A. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 270–71. Hereafter abbreviated EEP.
2. Keith Ansell-Pearson, How to Read Nietzsche (London: Granta, 2005), 12.
3. See EEP chap. 8 for a detailed discussion of this aspect of Levinas’s account of suffering.
4. See my “Skin-Nihilism Now: Flaying the Face and Refiguring the Skin,” in Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Diane Morgan (London: Macmillan, 2000).
5. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value and the Prospects for Humanism” in Value and Values in Evolution, ed. E.A. Mariaz (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 187.
6. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” trans. R. Cohen, in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. D. Wood and R. Bernasconi (London: Routledge, 1988), 157. Hereafter abbreviated US.
7. For further discussion of the relationship between love and contempt in Nietzsche’s Genealogy and Zarathustra, also see my “Levinas and Nietzsche: In-between Love and Contempt,” Philosophy Today 39, no. 4 (1995): 345–57.