Levinas is thus at once quite close and quite far from Nietzsche.
—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
I
Absolute responsibility is significance as my signifying to another my always-already, a priori having answered yes to another’s always-already having required of me that I be not violent to him or her. My affirmation is a priori in that it precedes my having heard another human being’s words—“You shall not kill”—words that may be understood, consistent with what Levinas writes, as a prohibition of any deed that diminishes the duration or quality of the life of another, diminishes his or her well-being. The responsibility thus affirmed is absolute because it is a necessary condition of responsibilities constituted by moral laws or contingent circumstances. It is absolute through being that which prevents obligations defined by law from being the violence of responding to another only as a case subsumed under a law. This particular violence, though not necessarily all violence, is prevented by the dissymmetry of my being face to face with the other. Not all violence is excluded thereby, not, for example, the violence of injustice relative to specific laws. But such relative injustice assumes that the unjust deed is done to one who is not merely a case. A case is symmetrical with another case. This holds when one of the cases is myself. In the plane geometry of cases, the subject makes both of itself and of others an object of consciousness. In the alternative geometry of myself facing and being faced by another addressing to me the command “You shall not kill,” my “experience” is not measurable according to any metric available to perceptual or conceptual consciousness, that is to say, consciousness defined as consciousness of an intentional object. Levinas sometimes writes of a consciousness that is other than intentional. He sometimes writes of a consciousness whose intentionality is inverted. It is intentional consciousness that he means when he opposes consciousness to absolute ethical responsibility. Absolute responsibility is not perceptually or conceptually representative. Although in the light of the ambiguity of the French word for “consciousness,” it is permissible to think of absolute consciousness as absolute conscience, it is not permissible to think of it as a scientia. Nor, strictly, is it a cum-scientia, a knowledge-with. Being with the other, Mitsein, is a possibility only thanks to being for the other. Being for the other is not a possibility but an impossibility or an unpossibility in that it is prior to any “I can.”
So is what Levinas understands by absolute responsibility logically prior to the relative responsibilities for which holds, according to Kant, the principle that “I ought” presupposes “I can”? Yes and no, depending on whether “logically” is understood in terms of the logic of what is said or in terms of Saying. According to the first way of understanding logic, Levinasian absolute responsibility is logically prior not only to relative responsibilities but also to the Kantian absolute moral law and therefore to the feeling of respect experienced as a categorical imperative by human beings. This feeling for a rational object, here for universal practical reason as such, would not be an ethical feeling, according to Levinas, unless it were supplemented by an “experience” of responsibility toward another singular human being. How does Levinas escape the risk of the sentimentalism that Kant would consider to be incurred through focusing upon particularity? By doubling the focus. It is in terms of their sentiments, likes, and taste that one human being is distinguished from another, according to Kant. If we took this analysis of particularity as a guide to what Levinas understands by singularity, we would be in danger of interpreting his account of ethicality as one more sentimentalist account among those of Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith, to which Kant wished to present a rationalist alternative. We would be confusing the “Desire” that Levinas usually spells with an uppercase initial and “desire” sometimes spelled by him with a lowercase initial. Now particularity is in the same logical category as universality insofar as it is a determination of a concept. And conceptual thinking falls under the principle of noncontradiction. How can singularity fail to fall under that principle, too? By not allowing the principle of contradiction that defines the logic of the conceptual sense or form of what is said to be divorced from the nonformal logic of saying. Otherwise put, the third personality of logical form and dialectical conceptuality does not stand alone in a space of its own. Its logic and the principle of noncontradiction is an abstraction removed from the concrete settings in which the third-person-ness of the “he” or the “she” or the “they” can be traced back to an “I” or a “me” faced by a “you.”
When Levinas invites his readers to interpret this facing before casing as saying, he is not referring to the utterance or hearing of empirical words. Saying, “Dire,” as spelled sometimes but not always by Levinas with an uppercase initial, is the silent testimony that precedes and makes possible the distinction between saying as vocal utterance and the content that may be said by an indefinite number of speakers. Therefore it is an oversimplification to treat Saying as an act of speech, parole, as contrasted by Saussure with language as langue. It is also an oversimplification to read what Levinas writes about Saying as a variation on what John Austin writes about speech-acts. Saying as “Dire” is not speech as vocalization. And it is not an act. Further, to repeat a point already made, its passivity is prior to the passivity usually attributed to hearing in opposition to speaking. It is more passive than “entendre” understood as hearing. Its passivity is more like that of “entendre” understood as understanding and as understanding understood as what is “understood,” sous-entendu, as what goes without saying. Its being more passive than the passivity of sensing by the ear or any other sensory organ is at least in part its being more passed, more passé, than any passedness that may characterize such sensing or the act of uttering or writing words, for instance, words by the speaking of which one performs the deed of entering into a contract. The passedness of Saying is not a passedness of something that was once present. It is exterior and anterior to any experience that is integrated into the transcendental unity of apperception. Therefore, when in an essay entitled “Language and Proximity” Levinas refers to Saying, Dire, as a contact, the “-tact” cannot be empirical touch and the “con-” (cum) cannot mean the linguistic communication of information. When it is called communication by Levinas, it is qualified as “pure” (CPP 119; ED 228). And it is language as in the French langage, interpreted as addressing not a message to another but as addressing oneself to another, which Levinas singles out as the “signifiance” that would be expressed in the words “Here I am” or “I hear you” or “Contact.” When Levinas writes of “langage originel, sans mots ni propositions, pure communication,” he does not mean that this pure original language can happen without something being said. He means that language as the medium in which something is said (affirmed, asked, commanded, etc.), langue in which a linguistic sign signifies something, presupposes langage d’avant la langue (CPP 122; ED 232), addressing in which someone is herself or himself a sign to the other and indeed assigned as for that other, as responsive to that other—as sensitive to the other.
II
Levinas’s teaching of passivity more passive than the passivity traditionally contrasted with activity is a reworking of what Husserl writes about passive synthesis in the context of the question of intersubjectivity in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. In the lectures and other writings published under the title Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis,1 active synthesis is the association of data for which the ego’s intentional acts are responsible, “act” having the wide connotation that actus has in Scholastic philosophy. Husserl writes also of a “passive intentionality,” of an attraction (Reiz) and of “affective rays” projected by the object itself toward the subject. His reference to this as a self-giving on the part of the object, as though the object were in its own right a subject, might well have suggested to Levinas an extension of such passive intentionality from the field of sensation that is Husserl’s chief topic here—though Husserl himself treats also of axiological and practical applications—to the self as the self of another human being. Again, it is as though Husserl’s analyses of association in the context of sensation and more generally consciousness (the bewusstseinsmässig) are extended by Levinas via Husserl’s reflections in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations to the primary socius, the society of the first-person singular and another human being, initially a you, in the horizonless, contextless context of ethical responsibility.
In what way is this context contextless? Is Levinas here challenging Derrida’s assertion that there is no contextlessness, Il n’y a pas de hors-texte?2 This is a question again about the cum, and the answer is the same as was given when it arose earlier in relation to Levinas’s references to consciousness, contact, and communication. In the symmetry of the “with” of consciousness construed as a subject with an intentional object or with another subject, con-scientia, persists the dissymmetry of my not being equal with another because equality assumes a point of view outside the other and myself, whereas in my facing the other nothing is visible. I do not see my seeing. I do not see the other’s looking. I address my regard to the other and the other addresses her or his look to me. We can call this a context provided that the “con-” is not construed as the “com-” of comparison. The relation or quasi relation of address, whether it be looks or words that are addressed, or words through looks, is not effected from any temporal zero point of Olympian survey sub specie aeternitatis. This is a kind of context. It is the context of all contexts in that without it no other context is possible. One could call it the contexte d’avant le contexte, where the “con-” of the latter “context” connotes the lateral togetherness of semantic signifiers with what is signified and of human signifiers and signs with one another. The laterality of the latter relationship could be contrasted with what one might characterize as the verticality of my facing another human being—or my facing God, as would be said by Kierkegaard, and is said by Levinas when, in the last words of “Language and Proximity,” he says of the first saying, le premier dire, that it is indeed only a word, n’est certes qu’un mot, but that this word is “God.” He does not say “the word ‘God’” or “God.” No quotation marks are used. To put God in inverted commas would be to convert God into a named being imagined and perhaps imaged as either a part of our world, and thereby profaned, or as an entity above the world, looking down on it and us as his (or His or Her or Its) creatures. This would be to take “the smooth path by which pious thinking too swiftly deduces theological realities” (CPP 124; ED 234). That mistake is avoided, Levinas emphasizes, only if the only way toward God is through the instant in which one human being—Emmanuel (God-be-with-me) Levinas or someone else—addresses the word “hineni,” “Hear me here at your service,” to another human being: a “Hebrew” word that breaks open the smooth surface of the “Greek” logos (CPP 126; ED 236), disrupting the togetherness of the syntax of the context formed by the formality of what is said, deconstruing its construed synthesizing structure. By following Levinas along this rough path, we not only learn why Judaism is difficult. We learn also why the madman of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra shouts that God is dead.
III
Nietzsche’s first doctrine of redemption is a doctrine of redemption through art. But when he attended some of the first performances of Wagner’s music at Bayreuth in 1876 he was appalled to discover that the audience was more interested in the food, the drink, the chit-chat, and being seen than they were in the music. This raised doubts in him about the viability of what he calls his metaphysics of art. But metaphysics itself was abandoned once he came to have doubts about the tenability of Schopenhauer’s post-Kantian belief in an independent reality antithetically opposed to appearance. In the conversation he has with himself in the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” added in the edition of The Birth of Tragedy published in 1886, he judges the book to be badly written, clumsy, sentimental, so sugary as to be well-nigh effeminate—and romantic. He condemns it for being as romantic as by this time he finds the work of the person with whom he imagined himself to be having a conversation in the book itself, his erstwhile friend Richard Wagner. Why romantic? Because behind the Schopenhauerian pessimism of the book lurks an optimistic longing for an otherworldly metaphysical consolation before “the old God.” This old God is the God of Christianity. Despite the honor the book seems to pay to ancient Greece, he now deems the book to be anti-Hellenic. It is anti-Hellenic because it is pro-Helenic, Helen being she for whom Goethe’s Faust yearned, she whom Nietzsche now sees as a metaphor for the metaphysical, for what is beyond the physical, beyond the natural.
Nietzsche now endeavors to forge a nonmetaphysical or what he will call a physiological idiom that negotiates a path between Darwin and the old God of Christendom whom Darwin had killed. He will eventually discover a principle of selection that is an alternative to Darwinian natural selection yet that is natural in the sense of a “second nature”: not the supernatural second nature of which St. Paul speaks, but a second nature incorporating a culture that, instead of distinguishing humanity from animality, distinguishes certain select human beings from the rest of humanity. This alternative both to Darwindom and to Christendom will show more respect for Jesus than had been shown in The Life of Jesus, whose author, David Strauss, is the topic of an essay published first in 1873 and later included in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Strauss, failing to recognize that his “scientific faith” is a contradiction in terms, is in too great a hurry to preach Darwinian scientism as the new faith, replacing the old faith of Christianity. Nietzsche finds in this scientism a symptom of a European nihilism, which is as unacceptable as what he considers to be the Indian nihilism of Buddha. European nihilism is the disappointment that follows from loss of the belief that the universe has a goal or any other unifying principle such as that of the Pauline and Lutheran Christianity preached by Nietzsche’s father, founded on the proposition that redemption turns solely on faith in the Resurrection. Nietzsche will say toward the end of his writing career that with this “impudent doctrine of personal immortality” regarded by Paul as a reward, “the entire concept of ‘blessedness,’ the whole and sole reality of the Evangel, is juggled away—for the benefit of a state after death!” (AC §41:154). Love is another name for the whole and sole reality practiced by “the noblest human being,”3 variously named Jesus, Christ, and the Redeemer. It is worth bearing in mind that Dionysus, too, is called the Redeemer (in Greek “lysios,” in German “Erlöser”) and that he was born (at least twice) of a divine father and an earthly mother. Moreover, it will be to a certain non-Christian conception of love that Nietzsche will turn when, like Plato calling upon Socrates, he finally calls upon Zarathustra, the “soothlaugher” who pronounces laughter holy, to teach an art that will redeem the suffering of this world now that the art of aesthetic illusion taught in The Birth of Tragedy has proved to be itself an illusion. Disappointed in his hope of finding this redemption by way of art, he goes on to seek it by way of a doctrine of eternal return.
IV
Despite the emphasis put on difference in artistic creativity, the teaching of eternal return makes much of sameness, if “same” is an allowable translation here of Nietzsche’s word “gleich,” which can also mean equal or like. There is a conservatism about the doctrine of the eternal return of the same. This is what makes it, as Nietzsche says, the most abyssal or unfathomable (abgründlichste) idea. For this doctrine, introduced in The Gay Science and further articulated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power, challenges us to utter a tremendous, unbounded, and joyful Yes “to all things,” to say Amen therefore to what is painful and as mean as the all too human morality of the slave. This affirmation is Dionysian in a sense that perhaps picks up the careless or careful remark made in his first book that, while the main characteristic of Apollonian music is rhythm, what is proper to Dionysian music is harmony. In any case, the Dionysian is no longer opposed to the Apollonian because to the proliferating differences of images, perspectives, and the “mobile army of metaphors” in terms of which truth is analyzed in the essay “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), is added the sameness constituted by the eternal repetition that the overman not only accepts but rejoices in and loves.
According to Nietzsche’s teaching of eternal return, suffering is not redeemed by a hoped-for goal. That would be to give priority to a state of being. The “same” of the eternal return of the same is not a same to which a return is made. It is the same of the eternal return itself as such. If there is anything for the sake of which the return is made, it is the circling of the return itself. The only unity affirmed by the Dionysian Amen is the unity of this circling, not an aimed-at unity or community. So, despite what was said above about the conservatism of Nietzsche’s doctrine, it must be said now that this is not incompatible with experimentalism, such experimentalism as one expects of the great artist. The doctrine itself is a thought experiment, an appeal to imagine what will appear unimaginable to the all too human person referred to in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as “the last man.”
What the last man finds unimaginable is that he should want the eternal repetition not only of his own suffering or that of others, but “all the woe of the world together” (BG §30:43). He either does not understand or does not accept what Zarathustra says when the latter asks, “Did you ever say Yes to one joy?” and then adds, “O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love” (TZ §10 “The Intoxicated Song”: 331–32). This is an elaboration of a doctrine espoused by some of the pre-Socratic thinkers of whom Nietzsche writes in his early essay “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks” (1873), for instance, Empedocles, where an antithetical opposition between love and strife is questioned the moment one asks whether the relation between love and strife is one of love or of strife. In Heraclitus, to whom Empedocles may have been indebted, love as harmony enters on the scene as that which gets expressed in the idea of a friendly struggle (polemos) that is said to go on among all things. The friendliness of that struggle may appear to get overlooked in those places where Nietzsche’s overman is said to be a friend of war and of malice. Zarathustra declares in the section of Ecce Homo devoted to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I should like to rob those to whom I give; thus do I hunger for malice.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parody of the Bible. The title Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man,” is an echo of what Pilate is reported to have said in that book (John 19:5). Thus spoke Pilate. And when Zarathustra speaks about giving, what he says is meant to bring out the way giving may be a way of achieving mastery over the recipient. Hence instead of holding that it is more blessed to give than to receive, Zarathustra dreams that it is more blessed to steal than to give.
So can one say of the values of the new Nietzschean man what Levinas says of the essence beyond essence of the ethical, that they are beyond intéressement? They are beyond this according to Levinas in two ways. They are beyond esse, beyond being. And they are beyond the inter in so far as this means a reciprocity. Thus far Nietzsche, too, would seem able to go. The revaluation of values returns value to becoming. And the priority of becoming excludes such a reciprocity as definitively as it is excluded from what Levinas means by the face to face. There is hierarchy in both the Nietzschean and the Levinasian doctrines at this point. In the Levinasian doctrine the hierarchy is not one of power. When Levinas insists on this he may well be thinking that he is wanting to distinguish himself from the philosopher of the will to power. But even the latter, although he distinguishes what he calls the morality of the herd from a new master morality of the hard, does not appeal to a neutral third morality in terms of which to grade the master morality above the morality of the herd. And in the morality of the master, the mastery sought is primarily mastery over oneself and over the residue in oneself of human nature as conceived according to the old tablets of law.
Sometimes when Nietzsche writes that the new philosopher must do his work with a hammer, the work must be understand on analogy with the way a physician might tap gently on a part of the body to detect whether there is a weakness hidden beneath, so that if one wished to call this work deconstruction this should not be equated with destruction. But Nietzsche’s new Dionysian philosopher has a second hammer in his kit, or he uses the first one in a different way. It is sometimes wielded in order to destroy. “Among the conditions for a Dionysian task are, in a decisive way, the hardness of the hammer, the joy even in destroying” (EH §8 “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: 309). The overman is his own hammer. What he destroys is the tablet of the old law. On the new tablet that replaces it is written—with hammer and chisel—“Become hard.” By the norms of the old law this will be judged an evil prescription, but that can be an objection to it only if we can make out a case for rejecting Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and the revaluation of all values that it entails. Among the laws the new law replaces is “Love thy neighbor,” if by neighbor is meant any other human being whomsoever. For not only, as we have seen, are the duties prescribed by the new table of law not duties for everyone; they are also not duties toward everyone. But Nietzsche writes: “The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits—as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility . . . has the conscience for the collective evolution of mankind” (BG §61:67–8). That conscience will require of us, us free spirits, the new Dionysian philosophers, “not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and exercising of them among our duties” (BG §272:191). That is to say, the yet to be continued list of new commands bears a parodic relation to the old ones to the extent that the command to love one’s neighbor returns in the new tablet and in the amor fati that inspires it, and to the extent that one’s neighbor means those who come after us. It is primarily for their sake that Zarathustra descends to preach his sermon at the foot of his mount. But does not the doctrine of eternal return imply that future mankind has already existed? If so, the duty of love and the love of duty comprised in amor fati is directed also to that segment of mankind of which one says “it was” and “it is.” Does this mean that it is still only toward the future of the past, present and future mankind that this love is addressed? Not if we take seriously Nietzsche’s doctrine that everything is connected with everything not only in our mental life where, he maintains, willing is a complication of sensing, feeling, and thinking and thinking is a relatedness of desires, but also in the physical world and between those whom we meet there and ourselves. Given the combination of that doctrine with the doctrine of amor fati, the commandment to love one’s neighbor would appear to figure on the new tablet, too. Even if this inference is denied, there is no denying that the higher man, the highest man, and the overman are moved by love of others.
That is to say, even with regard to the relation of the old to the new tablets of law Nietzsche displays his distaste for antithetical opposition. And, in line with the unsettling thought that the nature of humanity remains unsettled, the new tablet of laws is fated to remain incomplete. According to the first law that Nietzsche holds to be inscribed on this, greater love hath no overman than to cry out in the face of this incompleteness not “Thy will be done,” for there no longer is or ever was a personal Thou to carry this “Thy,” but, impersonally and joyfully, “So be it,” over and over and over.
Nietzsche once wrote, and he was still quite sane when he did so: “A certain emperor always bore in mind the transitoriness of all things so as not to take them too seriously and to live at peace among them. To me, on the contrary, everything seems far too valuable to be fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything.” Nietzsche’s greater love is such that by it, after all, almost everything, almost everything, gets saved. Perhaps even God gets saved provided a distinction be made between the God of ontotheology and the God of which Levinas says that it is the first saying.
V
One of the most noteworthy respects in which, in their vis-à-vis, Nietzsche and Levinas might be supposed to be most distant from each other is that while Nietzsche teaches will to power, Levinas teaches passivity. The seeming opposition marked here has already been qualified by recognition that, in will to power as manifest by the overman and the man in his service, will to power is turned upon one’s own will. It must now be acknowledged also that although Levinas tells us that the center of gravity of our world is the other human being, the weight is borne by what he refers to as the “Moi,” the “I” construed as me in the accusative and accused by the other human being, pursued as hostage and persecuted by the other human being without possibility of evasion: without that possibility, but not without power. His word is “pouvoir” (CPP 123; ED 233). It is not possible that that pouvoir is the possibility of the “I can,” the “I can” of the free will as understood by Kant. That freedom is a conditioned freedom, conditioned, Levinas maintains, by absolute passivity. It is therefore in the power of that passivity, the power of a certain impower that cannot be identified with weakness or unfreedom. In saying this he is again saying something that brings him into proximity with Nietzsche when the latter, on analogy with his statement in the second section of the Twilight of the Idols that if you destroy the true world you destroy the apparent one, too, criticizes the metaphysical concept of free will endorsed by Schopenhauer and says that with the dismantling of the idea of a human or divine free will alleged to be causa sui, the antithetically opposed idea of an unfree will is dismantled as well (BG §21:33).
Perhaps the deepest difference between Nietzsche’s doctrine and Levinas’s is the former’s obsession by redemption. Levinas is obsessed, but he is not obsessed by redemption. He is obsessed by obsession, a state of siege from which there is no escape. The inescapability is analogous to that of a Greek tragedy such as that through which Nietzsche first sought escape and redemption, where there is an irreconcilable conflict between two principles. The analogy, however, is one that straddles the difference between the logos of conceptual contradiction of things said and the logos of saying. We have seen that Levinas distinguishes the latter from matters of interest, intéressement. We have also seen that Nietzsche’s aristocrat holds himself aloof from the indulgence of such interests in achieving happiness and escaping pain as shape the morality of the herd. It is important to say such interests. For Nietzsche has another interest, an interest that is “higher” or “nobler” than the interest in avoiding suffering: an interest in redeeming suffering. In this he is closer to Kierkegaard than to Levinas, who, when he writes of interest, may have Kierkegaard, but also Kant, in mind.
Kierkegaard distinguishes God’s interest from human interests. The latter include the “worldly” interest in happiness and its ostensible opposite. But the singular individual’s interest is not one that is shared with other human beings. It is one that turns on a secret between, inter, the singular human being and God. Kierkegaard gives to interest a special force in which it relates to the interim of transition from one stage to another, from the aesthetic to ethical generality or from the latter to the religious. It would be interesting to consider how with this force it might be extended to the transitions beyond slave morality as man becomes overman in the scheme of Nietzsche and his pseudonymous Zarathustra. This would be interesting in the less special sense in which Kierkegaard also uses the word in which it is assimilated to what he defines as the aesthetic.
Interest, according to Kant, is either a desire whose object is happiness or, in the case of an interest in duty, an interest in an action and its law itself. The ultimate law for the human being defined as a rational animal is a teleological principle directed at the highest good. This last is for Kant a totality of virtue and commensurate happiness. The good beyond being as defined by Levinas is not a telos. If we say that it is an end in itself, we are saying something that may remind us of our earlier denial that suffering is redeemed, according to Nietzsche, by a hoped-for goal and that the “same” of the eternal return of the same is a same to which a return is made. It is, we have said, the same of the eternal return itself as such. If there is anything for the sake of which the return is made, it is the circling of the return itself. This gives us a for-its-own-sake that may be seen as Nietzsche’s alternative to the for-its-own-sake Kant attributes to deeds done out of respect for the moral law. But Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return is a this-worldly mimicry of the doctrine of an immortal afterlife that is an article of faith for Christianity and Kant. And it inherits that doctrine’s pattern of theodicy, albeit in an atheistic form. It is a doctrine of justification, whether we conceive it as justification by works or as justification by faith or, forcing a little bit Kierkegaard’s reading of Luther, justification by a little bit of both.
Now, following Nietzsche, in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being Levinas wants to tell a this-worldly story. He wants to do that by not following Kant: by not restricting the for-its-own-sake to rationality as defined by the principle of noncontradiction and the moral law. He would have us believe that rationality thus conceived is immoral unless supplemented by a nonprinciple of contradiction, the contra-Diction, contre-Dire, of a singular you, as it were, saying to a singular me, “You shall not kill,” “Let me not suffer,” a noncategorizing categorical imperative to which I will have always already responded by saying, as it were, “I have heard.” But others, each and every one of them, address their commands to me not only on behalf of themselves. They address me also on behalf of other others. This is what it is to touch and be touched by another. It implies a dissymmetry like that of which Husserl and Merleau-Ponty write when they show (a showing that sheds some light on the “problem of other minds” treated in the fifth Cartesian Meditation) how the experience of touching with my finger another of my fingers or some other part of my own body or the skin of another fails to coalesce with and can only alternate with the experience of being touched. Touching teaches us something of what Levinas means by the immediacy of the contact of that other form or rather unform of rationality that he calls “langage.” This contact is trauma, the “immediate experience,” the donnée immédiate of the contact of the fact that in the language Kant uses of the “experience” of obligation, we could call the undeniable Faktum, recorded in the lines etched on your brow, that I can never redeem either the suffering arising from the neglect entailed by my coming to your assistance rather than to theirs or my suffering from that suffering. This suffering from suffering is a suffering from the wound of love. This is why Levinas links it to glory and joy. But when he does this he cannot mean that the joy and the glory have the power to redeem the suffering. That would be to undermine his affirmation that responsibility suffered for you is suffered for nothing, pour rien. More and less than obligation conditioned by freedom from contradiction as described by Kant, the responsibility that Levinas would count to be a condition of such obligation would be a contra-Diction, the contre-Dire inherent in the fact that in addressing and being addressed by you I am at the same time addressing and being addressed by him and her, and other others every one of whom, chaque fois unique, as Derrida says, is also a you. This conflict is not a conflict of principles. It is the conflict between cases and faces. This is a situation that is tragic in a sense other than that of the tragedies that Nietzsche saw as a vehicle of the redemption of suffering. In this situation, whether or not the suffering of others be redeemable, my suffering in the face of their suffering is beyond redemption. The distance between these two senses of tragedy is a measure of the distance that, notwithstanding moments of proximity between the two philosophers, keeps Nietzsche and Levinas very far apart. Now this distance might be construed prima facie as a difference between Levinas’s “spirit of seriousness” and Nietzsche’s sense of fun. However, Nietzsche values redemption of suffering above substituting happiness for suffering, while according to Levinas it is for the sake of the happiness of others that I am called to substitute myself. It is arguable, therefore, that Nietzsche is the more earnestly religious of the two thinkers, and that in his suspension of the ethical he is closer to Kierkegaard in the latter’s suspension of the ethical than he is to Levinas.
NOTES
1. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).
2. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 227; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1984), §475, 229.