In fond memory of my father.
Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality
On the Genealogy of Morals offers Nietzsche’s most systematic, pervasive, and devastating criticism of all moralities based on the notion of a transcendent good inhibiting life, the enjoyment of life, and the will to power. Nietzsche does not simply question a certain morality; rather, he challenges “the value of morality,” and especially of that “morality of pity” (GM Preface: 5) in which “‘moral,’ ‘unegoistic,’ ‘ désintéressé’ [are taken] as concepts of equivalent value” (GM 1:2). Nietzsche’s well-known criticism can be reformulated as focusing on three issues: altruistic morality stems from ressentiment, fosters asceticism, and displaces the value of life onto an ascetic ideal. All three notions, ressentiment, asceticism, and ascetic ideals, are characterized by the same structural or formal movement—the movement of negation: of the other, of oneself, and of life. One could thus legitimately conclude that the morality of ressentiment is a morality of negation, the minister of which is the figure of the ascetic priest. In criticizing morality, I argue, Nietzsche is condemning this notion of negation that functions as its foundation.
Two types of negation can be retraced in Nietzsche, which can be named affirmative negation and negative negation. Affirmative negation is the movement of denial enacted by the noble (GM 1:10). This negation stems from a first affirmation within the self; therefore, it is autonomous. Negative negation belongs to the rabble, who can assert themselves only by means of what Deleuze calls a “paralogism.”1 This group proceeds to affirmation only through a previous negation of what is other than itself. Negative negation starts in heteronomy, outside the self, from the other to which it says “No” (GM 1:10). Whereas affirmative negation is favored by Nietzsche, who pursues it in many of his works (from the early Birth of Tragedy to the later Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as a form of activity and affirmation of differences, negative negation is sharply rejected by him because of its reactive character.
Nietzsche’s hermeneutic strategy for evaluating the dangerousness of a given morality is that of reading moral values as symptoms of the health conditions of the will that underlies them. If the proposed values reveal an affirmative structure, the will behind them is salubrious, nonreactive, and concerned with an affirmation and enhancement of life. Such values can be embraced with confidence. However, if the proposed values prove to come out of a dialectical structure of negation and ressentiment, the morality founded on them should be rejected since it fosters self-infliction of pain, debasement, décadence, and nihilism, and the will that proposes them is itself reactive, sick, and degenerated. Altruistic morality is the danger of dangers when it comes to the assertion of the value of life because, by operating through negation, such a morality denies life.
The minister of altruistic morality (that is, the ascetic priest) as a type “appears in almost every age; he belongs to no one race; he prospers everywhere; he emerges from every class of society” (GM 3:11). Nietzsche’s age, as well as ours, is not immune to such a presence. Moreover, not only is the priest’s activity endemic to different epochs; it is also contagious. The ascetic priest thrives on the existence of some herd whose weakness he can parasitically exploit. Therefore, his own well-being is conditional upon the diffusion of a nihilistic (that is, altruistic) morality. The priest must encourage negation. As long as there exist priest-type individuals, morality represents the danger of a deadly contagion, which the physician of culture (the Nietzschean philosopher) needs to combat.
On the Necessity of the Confrontation Between Levinas and Nietzsche
The latest appeal to ethics in continental philosophy comes from Levinas. Two main claims give his philosophy its ethical connotation. The first is the radical assertion that ethics is first philosophy, philosophia prima (TI 304). The second is that ethics is essentially heteronomy, a response to an appeal that comes from the other and never returns to the structures of identification of the same.
Any ethics that wishes to claim some credibility after Nietzsche cannot exempt itself from a confrontation with Nietzsche, I argue. To move against Nietzsche is in fact not yet to disprove Nietzsche. Despite the awareness of its anti-Nietzschean motif (OB 177), Levinas’s philosophy must show that it does not result in an ironic, or even dialectical, confirmation of the powerfulness of Nietzsche’s critique. More specifically, Levinas’s ethics must be capable of withstanding two conditions. First, it must not display the reactive structure characterizing ressentiment; that is, it must prove not to be another case of slave morality. Second, and consequently, Levinas must prove that he is not the latest incarnation of the ascetic priest; that is, he must demonstrate that he is not advancing another example of asceticism and the ascetic ideal. Were Levinas’s philosophy incapable of satisfying these two demands, then the force of his ethical project would be neutralized by the power of Nietzsche’s critique. Conversely, were Levinas’s answer to the two demands satisfactory, then his philosophy would not only prove that it is capable of saying something meaningful about ethics after Nietzsche’s criticism; it would also undermine such a criticism and therefore also the devastation provoked by Nietzsche when it comes to the possibility of ethical thought. In either case, the confrontation between Nietzsche and Levinas is crucial.
Levinas’s Appeal to Ethics: A Nietzschean Reading
Let me start with a characterization of Levinas’s ethics from the perspective of a Nietzschean reader concerned with emphasizing the reactive aspects that assimilate Levinas’s project to the morality of ressentiment and thereby turn Levinas into an ascetic priest.2 On such a reading, in Levinas’s philosophy the place of the Nietzschean noble would be taken by the “I.” In On the Genealogy of Morals the nobles are spontaneous, active, and self- sufficient (GM 1:10). Similarly, in Existence and Existents Levinas describes the I as virility, solitude, and mastery of existence (EE 65–69). The atheistic separation and self-sufficiency of the I is reaffirmed in Totality and Infinity. The egoism of the I, its being satisfied by and within itself, is there described as contraction upon itself, enjoyment, and happiness (TI 107–83). The I is for itself, alone, immanent to its world, which appears as its home, its dwelling, the space where it feels at ease, even in fear (TI 152–74). The I’s feeling of happiness and egoism receives a substantial contribution through possession and work (TI 158–68). The world becomes an economy, the law of which is established by the I through representational knowledge, which is spontaneity, creation, and legislation. Through it, the I constitutes itself as stable and enduring. At the origin, for Levinas, there is a citizen of paradise (TI 144) who is not dialectically constituted as an antithesis to the other or to the infinite. Like Nietzsche’s noble, Levinas’s I is lord and master of its own existence.
Yet, Levinas claims, the mastery of the I gets interrupted by the appearance of the face (TI 187–219), which signifies otherness and whose first expression immediately presents the I with a prohibition in the form of the commandment “You shall not commit murder” (TI 199, emphasis added). “No” is the other’s first word (CPP 55). The other’s first signification questions the power and mastery of the I, forces the I to justify its activity and spontaneity, and (ideally) compels the I to end its conditions of blessed egoism and solipsism. The other asks the I for a suspension of the I’s will to power. It commands a negation of the I’s enjoyment of life and an epoché of its domination and mastery. The Nietzschean interpreter would have no difficulties recognizing that a familiar type is disguised behind these requests: the other is a figure of ressentiment, the activity of which is marked by the negative attempt to stop the expansive forces of life and egoism, as if it were possible “to demand of strength that it should not express itself in strength” (GM 1:13).
Otherwise Than Being—the book where Levinas describes the figures of passivity by which the ethical self responds to the visitation by the face of the other—would be for the Nietzschean reader the clearest elaboration of such an ethics of ressentiment. In such a work, the other is said to command the I to become powerless, to take care of the other, to open the doors of the I’s own warehouse and sate and slake the other even when the other leaves constitutively undetermined the content of her or his command—hence (and here is where the Nietzschean interpreter would put forward her criticism) the I’s infinite guilt, its inadequacy and inability to be good enough to respond responsibly to the other’s demands; hence the I’s becoming the other’s hostage, that is, the hostage of an unfulfilled and unfulfillable obligation toward the other. Because the other, described by Levinas through the images of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger, is unable to implement self-(im)position as a sovereign, the other demands proximity, the Nietzschean reader would argue. In this demand, the deceitful trick (the idealistic deception, the Nietzschean interpreter would relentlessly contest) that the other plays upon the I lies in the constant displacement of the possibility of achieving real and effective nearness. The other is always a step beyond, always further than the I can reach (the ascetic ideal! the Nietzschean would retort), always at a distance, a trace, and an immemorial past.
Despite the other’s infinite inaccessibility, the I should still be directed by the other rather than by itself, Levinas claims; this should be so to the extent of becoming passive, more passive than passivity (asceticism! the Nietzschean would exclaim), substituting itself to and for the other and rejoicing and suffering not for itself but for the other, in place of the other (OB 90). The I should renounce being the creator of meaning, even of the meaning of its life, and receive such a meaning from the encounter with the other. On a Nietzschean reading, this would certainly correspond to an inhibition of the I’s creative activity of interpretation, which is replaced by the unidirectionality of the relation oriented by the other and the other’s appeal and demands. From this perspective, the other becomes the giver of all meaning, the donation of which happens through that first “No” with which the encounter begins.
That this is an inversion of the noble morality and not a substitution of a previous mastery (the I’s) with a new one (the other’s) is confirmed to the Nietzschean interpreter by that first negation that characterizes the appearing of the other. The alleged “mastery,” to employ a Nietzschean vocabulary, that the other imposes on the I bears the features of what the Nietzschean interpreter would consider a reduction to the rabble: the other is the poor, the weak, the destitute, Levinas argues; therefore, it is to a proximity to this condition that the other calls the I. Whereas the other may be described as a master, nevertheless the other is only the master of her or his own destitution, since the other’s is a mastery without possessions, Levinas claims. That is, the other is a master of nothingness, the Nietzschean would retort. Therefore, the Nietzschean reader would continue, the other cleverly inverts such evident lack of strength by transforming it into what Levinas calls ethical authority. According to this, powerlessness and passivity become the victorious keys of affirmation. The aim is somehow to force the I to be ashamed of its own power, to feel guilty, to renounce its egoism, to become subjected to the other and to transform itself into an “Autrui -ist,” that is, to be directed by Autrui and become good. In its negativity, the first imperative with which Levinas’s other greets the I would be considered by the Nietzschean reader as an expression of the other’s ressentiment and of the other’s inability to cope with its own lack of physical (or psychological for that matter) power of self-affirmation. Rather than fighting, the other surrenders by placing an infinite demand that amounts to a surreptitious victory. This is what Levinas calls ethical resistance (CPP 55), but what for the Nietzschean reader is a mere product of ressentiment.
Viewed from such a Nietzschean perspective, the move that represses the I’s instinct for domination amounts to the affirmation of an ascetic ideal. For Levinas, the other is always beyond, à-Dieu. The other comes from an immemorial past of which there is neither grasp nor control, and the other’s appeal to the I to become good still concerns the beyond. The reward for the I’s renunciation of its egoism of life and being, or what Levinas calls the ontological I, is the transmutation of the I into an ethical self. Yet, the Nietzschean interpreter would object, the good toward which Levinas’s ethical self should strive is always beyond being; it is the desire for the infinite that never gets fulfilled because the infinite does not expose itself to possession (TI 33–35). That all this amounts to an ascetic ideal is further confirmed for the Nietzschean analyst by the marginalized role history plays within Levinas’s philosophy: the forces of life do not serve the immanence of action but the transcendence of eschatology.
When interpreted from this (perhaps overly) Nietzschean perspective focused on power, affirmation, and activity, Levinas’s ethics would maintain all the features of the morality Nietzsche so sharply condemns. When the ascetic priest begins to philosophize, Nietzsche warns, the result is metaphysics. It is therefore very appropriate that Levinas reserves the term “metaphysics” to his thought. And on a Nietzschean account it is again very appropriate that for Levinas metaphysics indicates the philosophy of the beyond, of the infinite, of the transcendent—what the Nietzschean has no difficulty identifying as the ascetic ideal. The Nietzschean interpreter would conclude that Levinas’s philosophy offers powerful theoretical tools for a successful infection and spreading of that debasing disease that is ethics and that Levinas’s success as an ascetic priest—and the consequent fatal contagion—increases every time a new reader joins Levinas’s audience and lets her- or himself be convinced by his thinking.
Levinas’s Appeal to Ethics: A Retrieval
The assimilation of Levinas’s philosophy with slave morality is what may immediately occur to the shrewd and unsympathetic Nietzsche scholar (but perhaps an excessively naive Levinas reader, I argue). However, a more attentive reading of Levinas’s philosophy, that is, a reading that is faithful to the internal structure of his thinking, will reject the assimilation and absolve Levinas from the charges of being an ascetic priest. Such a reading, on which I will now embark, will liberate Levinas’s project from Nietzsche’s condemnation while simultaneously regaining for philosophy the possibility of a meaningful ethical discourse after Nietzsche.
The task of rehabilitating Levinas is not unproblematic. Levinas seems to take a special pleasure in employing terms and concepts that invite the very criticism and condemnation that Nietzsche advocates. Nevertheless, retrieving Levinas’s philosophy from the grips of Nietzsche’s criticism remains inevitable if one wants to assert the continuing relevance of ethics and all ethical projects. More fundamentally, such retrieval becomes crucial if one wishes to assert different modalities of relations between the self and the other than those contemplated by Nietzsche. The goal of reasserting the valence of ethics after Nietzsche cannot be successfully pursued simply by claiming that Levinas’s notions are situated on a level (that is, the ethical level) different from the analogous concepts criticized by Nietzsche (which would still move on an ontological plane). The invocation of a difference of levels is precisely the displacement that the ascetic ideal performs and Nietzsche deconstructs. Nor is it enough to claim that Levinas does not recur to traditional ethical concepts such as virtue and duty, as if this lack were sufficient to construe a different model of ethics and hence could provide a satisfactory exemption from a Nietzschean criticism. A more structural analysis is required.
What characterizes ascetic morality, the ascetic ideal informing such a morality, as well as the ascetic priest, is the structure of negation—of the other, of oneself, and of life. The very engine of such a morality, ressentiment, is negation; it gives birth to phenomena of repression and denial, as Nietzsche portrays it in his description of the origin of (bad) conscience, responsibility, and guilt. The strategy I will employ to retrieve Levinas from a Nietzschean criticism will be to show the following: not simply ressentiment (a psychological feeling) but rather negation (a structural movement) is alien to Levinas’s philosophy. The rest of my analysis will focus on three moments constructed around a common structure of negation: the lack of external negation, the lack of internal negation, and the lack of the ascetic ideal in Levinas.
The Lack of External Negation
Despite the scarcity of his references to Nietzsche, it seems legitimate to infer that Levinas shares with Nietzsche a philosophically deep aversion to negation. More radically than Nietzsche, however, Levinas extends his contempt to include not only what has been identified earlier as negative negation but also affirmative negation. The reason for Levinas’s double rejection lies, I argue, in the formal character of negation, rather than in its genealogy. From a formal point of view, negation is the main feature characterizing dialectics, since negation is inherently bound to the object of its denial. Every dialectical project aims at keeping together the I and the non-I (the other) precisely through negation, in a connection that can be more or less stringent, more or less open. When dialectics operates, there arises a link or dependency between the two terms or beings that no revolt can ever dissolve.3
It is immediately evident how negative negation, that is, the negation carried out by slave morality, depends on the existence of the non-I, which the self needs to deny for its own self-assertion. Nietzsche identifies the reactive character of negative negation in this dependency, which binds the I and the non-I together as an a priori condition for the affirmation of the I. That affirmative negation also is, despite Nietzsche’s effort to say the opposite, somehow dependent on the existence of the non-I is more difficult to assert, since the non-I enters the scene at a later stage, when the I has already affirmed itself independently from the non-I. In his philosophy, Levinas challenges precisely the independence of the I enacting affirmative negation. Such an I, according to Nietzsche, is autonomous. What Levinas’s entire philosophy questions is the nature of this autonomy.
Although the reference to Nietzsche is never explicit, for Levinas Western subjectivity since Parmenides has been shaped (with very few exceptions) by an autonomy and an egoism (CPP 48) analogous to those Nietzsche favors. However, as Levinas claims, the identity of the subject is never a status but rather a process of identification (TI 36). To reestablish continuously the autonomy of its identity, the I needs to reduce to itself “all that is opposed to it as other” (CPP 48). Since the I’s inception, the I’s need for integration (that is, for a necessarily totalitarian, continuous self-assertion) contemplates the other not as an absolute other but rather, always and already, as another from the self, that is, as a relative otherness (and hence Levinas’s complaint about the artificial alterity of this other). Thus, exactly like Nietzsche’s noble, the I engages in an activity of reduction to itself, its own non-I (representational objects, nature, bodies, and so on), with the goal of being able to enjoy its own power and strength more satisfactorily. If the dependence of the autonomous I on the non-I is not a priori (that is, if it is not a condition for self-affirmation, as is the case for Nietzsche’s slave), nevertheless such a dependence comes a posteriori, as a necessary consequence of the process of self-identification. In the case of Nietzsche’s affirmative negation, this movement means that the masters could not appreciate the extent of their mastery unless there are slaves to be mastered. Even the beast of prey depends on its victim to be the ferocious predator that it is. Otherwise, it is only a hungry animal. The presence and negation of some non-I, at whose expense the process of self-identification is carried out, becomes essential. The deceiving alterity of the other within any dialectical system mirrors the deceptiveness of the autonomy of any I (even the I of positive affirmation) within such a dialectical movement of thought.
Stated more clearly, albeit perhaps also more abruptly: in (either negative or affirmative) negation, the negator and the negated always stand in a relation binding and committing the one to the other. The I of negative negation (in Nietzsche’s description, the slave) posits itself as a negation of its other. The I of affirmative negation (in Nietzsche’s analysis, the master) considers its other as an impediment and a negation of itself. No matter where the negation is generated, the I and the non-I (its non-I) remain within the horizon of one and the same system, since, as Hegel would claim, negation is always determined, that is, it is always reciprocally determined. Therefore, when Nietzsche claims that the noble is autonomous, he is mistaken. There cannot be real autonomy—or real heteronomy, and this is Levinas’s point—when some form of negation is present. Formally, although this may not be true genealogically, the nobles are not much different from the slaves as to their participation in dialectical dependency. Certainly there is a dialectics of the noble and a dialectics of the slaves, and the differences between them are not irrelevant. But negation as a formal feature assimilates both.
Levinas’s criticism of Western philosophy turns Nietzsche’s criticism against itself to include Nietzsche as part of Nietzsche’s own targets. Conversely, the complete absence of negation, that is, the possibility of an absolute separation as delineated by Levinas, eliminates the structural motif from which ressentiment arises. It is to this absence in Levinas that I now turn.
Levinas’s project aims at withstanding dialectics by withstanding the negation that lies at its core. For him, the relation between the ego and the other cannot be dialectically, that is, oppositionally, constituted. Between the I and the other there is distance, which allows for the separatedness and absoluteness of each of them. That is, in Levinas both the I and the other stand as autonomous and independent from each other when it comes to their existence. Neither is constituted in relation to the other because between them there is no reciprocity. Exteriority rules their existence. Although this may create difficulties of a different order, the relation between the I and the other is said to be a “relation without relation” (TI 80). This is what Levinas characterizes as ethics.
First, let me illustrate the I’s “autonomy”—which Levinas identifies as separatedness, to distinguish it from ontological autonomy. As already mentioned, the I enjoys the world (and the presence of a Nietzschean motif in this could be explored), possesses the world, and shapes it through its activity of labor. In such accomplishments, the I is solitude, distance from its creator, atheism, joy, and plenitude of life. As if truly inspired by Nietzschean themes, Levinas’s I is master because it does not lack anything. It is the artistic creator of its own world and representations. It is a “here I am” of Pascalian memory that imposes itself upon the world—its world. The fact that the ontological “here I am” can transform itself into the availability of infinite ethical responsibility (the hineni of Abrahamic memory) is subsequent to the encounter with the other, who does not found the I (even when the other precedes the I), since the I is already there. Here lies the nondialectical paradox of Levinas’s philosophy: ontologically the I is already there, without the other, with no need for the other in order for itself to exist, and yet ethically the I is already haunted by the other who comes before, precedes the I at all times in the other’s own separation and absoluteness.
The other’s separatedness or “autonomy” is, for Levinas, as originary as the I’s separation. Retrieving the ontological argument, Levinas gives his own version of it in terms of the other: “the exteriority of a being is inscribed in its essence” (TI 196). This means that the otherness of the other is absolute, that is, absolved from the identity of the same: it “is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and it is not formed out of resistance to the same, for in limiting the same the other would not be rigorously other” (TI 38–39). As Levinas phrases it, the other is Autrui, the absolutely or wholly other who remains irreducible to any content of the I’s consciousness. Between the I and the other there is no common theoretical ground.
The relation that the I and the other are called to establish (ethics) but in which they are already is this “relation without relation,” in which each is maintained in her or his own separatedness. The relation is a face-to-face—on both sides. There is no foundationalism of the I through the other, or vice versa. The temporality of the I and the other, and of their relationship, is not synchrony, in which the before and the after of foundationalism find their place in a chronological order. Rather, it is diachrony, that is, two different, incommensurable temporalities in a time that is that of inspiration and prophecy.
What appeared as a first negation, the initial “You shall not kill” with which the other greets the I, must be thus reinterpreted not as a denial of the I and its power of affirmation but as an affirmation of the other’s existence in its own separatedness. It becomes an appeal, an injunction, and an order only because in their separatedness the I and the other are already in the ethical relationship, in a face-to-face prior to any representation. That is, the ethical relationship precedes the separatedness of the I and the other, but it does not sublate it, or them. In this sense we can say that in Levinas’s ethics the I and the other are independent in a more fundamental way than is the Nietzschean master. It is not negation that acts in ethics. If anything, it is a philosophy of separation and proximity in which there is no reduction of the one term to the other.
Because of the lack of negation (whether affirmative or negative), Levinas’s position certainly cannot be qualified as that of a Nietzschean master. But neither can Levinas’s thought be qualified in terms of ressentiment. Levinas stands with Nietzsche in performing a strenuous critique of negation, but moves further than Nietzsche in assimilating both kinds of negation (affirmative and negative) as a single mode of denial. While liberating him from the charge of being moved by ressentiment, this move affords Levinas a new meaning for heteronomy and ethics.
The Lack of Internal Negation
At this point, the Nietzschean reader might argue that Levinas’s ethics still operates a negation in terms of the imposed self-denial of the I, which, despite its separatedness, is directed by the other’s demands. Asceticism implies self-abnegation. Levinas’s notion of heteronomy is precisely this movement, the Nietzschean interpreter could claim. It therefore becomes necessary to show that despite or even because of its specific heteronomy, Levinas’s ethics does not reintroduce negation at the stage of the individual, causing its exhaustion rather than its empowerment. It must be shown that besides not being structured by external negation, Levinas’s ethics does not produce asceticism.
Two considerations must be developed at this juncture. The first concerns the origin of the ethical relation. According to Levinas, the I is involved in an ethical relation with the other before any theoretical acknowledgement or recognition of norms—that is, before moral choices (TI 25, 113). Heteronomy, or orientation by the other, is inscribed in the I’s separated-ness. Ethical responsibility is neither “the recall of some prior generous disposition toward the other,” nor “a decision resulting from a deliberation” (TO 113). In other words, ethics is not chosen, is not the product of volition, of an intentional act of the will (to power or to décadence). On the contrary, ethics is an-archic. It does not start because it always is.
The second consideration concerns the meaning and implications contained in the notions of power/empowering (and hence debasement) for Nietzsche and Levinas. Because of the lack of external negation, in Levinas mastery as well as power cannot be understood as a violent, tyrannical, or dominating physical force of imposition. What could be considered as, in Nietzschean terminology, the Levinasian master, that is, as the I in its separation, is not “a beast of prey” (GM 1:11) but rather a separated existent. On the other hand, the other does not oppose the power of the I with any physical resistance. Rather, the other exerts resistance by subtracting itself from the I. The halting of the killing is by withdrawal, not by oppression or repression (TI 198, CPP 55). This institutes a distance between the I and the other that places the other in a dimension of unreachable height. The other is my master and my lord not because the other dominates me but because the other commands to me from a distance, which is the distance of destitution rather than force and violence (CPP 58). Asymmetry rules the ethical relationship for Levinas. Not the community of association (GM 3:18) but proximity, that is, once again, nearness in separation, becomes the way by which the I encounters the other. À la Nietzsche, Levinas’s perspective is not immediately egalitarian. Justice is the preservation (and proximity) of differences (although not in the aristocratic sense Nietzsche advocates), and only thus an appeal to democracy.
In Nietzsche, on the other hand, the notions of mastery and power subtend the notion of the will to power. As Heidegger remarks, the will to power implies a metaphysics of the will, or at least a voluntarism,4 that unfolds as one more instance of subjectivism and the bad infinite (in the Hegelian sense). Conversely, Levinas’s notion of power avoids subjectivism and voluntarism because it does not originate from the subject. The powerful I is for Levinas the one who, thanks to the other, has been liberated from the limits and constraints imposed by self-concern and self-interestedness. Through this liberation, the I gains freedom from and for itself and thereby can afford the generosity of giving even its own being. The result is not a weakening of the I but its empowerment as gift giver. This implies a novel form of subjectivity. Similar perhaps to the Nietzschean Übermensch, whose generosity, like the sun’s, stems from excess rather than from a voluntaristic, guilt-led attempt at being altruistic, Levinas’s I is so full, rich, and wealthy that it can afford emptying itself out, exposing itself, and even giving itself to the other. This is its ethical power.
It is not toward a negation of all subjectivity, toward its ascetic abnegation, that the appeal from the other is directed, but toward its declension: for Levinas, the I becomes an accusative, a Me. And the Me is always appealed to as a first person, in its uniqueness and irreplaceability. In a move that Nietzsche would appreciate, no conformity with the herd or universalization of the I is possible for Levinas. That the Me be defined in terms of passivity, absolute passivity, passivity more passive than any passivity (rather than being defined by activity), is not relevant at this point because the structure of (self-)negation, even in passivity, has been relinquished. The movement is from a closed subjectivity trying to impose its own closure on the external world to an open subjectivity responding in terms of generosity and gift giving. The other does not deny the I, does not alienate it; the other keeps the I awake as a one-for-the-other, as an exposure, as a Me capable of the excesses of generosity. This is not a submission to what is other-than-the-I, to a non-ego (OB 54, 112). It is, rather, the mobility, fluidity, porosity, and displacement that the I, as a Me, reaches through the other. To retrieve this dimension is for the I to place itself at the origin of its genealogy, since ethical responsibility—the Me—is “prior to the will’s initiative (prior to the origin)” (OB 118). In other words, in suffering, substitution, being a hostage, in the ethical categories by which Levinas describes the relation with the other, the self gets reinforced, although through a different modality of subjectivity. Not only does Levinas reinstate the possibility of ethics, he also describes a different subjectivity for it. In being heteronomous, the I does not renounce its separatedness; that is, the self is never denied. What the self gives up is what renders it a resentful, and hence violent subject: the structure of (self-)negation.
A major accusation Nietzsche advances against asceticism is that it represses sensuality, corporeality, and the body. Levinas’s notion of passivity, however, is based precisely on sensibility, which is understood as the possibility of being affected, or affectivity. The declension of the I as Me, as an accusative passive to the demands of the other, is for Levinas a celebration of the body. Nietzsche would agree that it is not the presence of suffering per se, but rather the modality of suffering that makes a life ascetic. Therefore, it is not the presence of suffering that may constitute a charge against Levinas. Levinas finds an ethical justification for suffering in the form of responsibility for the other. Nevertheless, unlike ascetic morality—which also provides a justification for the suffering endemic to human existence (GM 3:28)—Levinas’s justification does not posit self-denial as the supreme goal of life. Negation does not appear, not even as self-negation. Therefore, the analogy between the categories of suffering, subjection, and substitution that Levinas employs, and the same categories that Nietzsche criticizes is only superficial, nominal and not semantic. Any such critique neglects the structural novelty of Levinas’s project. It is not hetero-directedness that should be criticized, but rather the ab-negation—of life and self—that is usually associated with such a heteronomy. In subtracting himself from negation, Levinas escapes also its criticism, since, having dissociated heteronomy from (self-)negation, he is able to retain the former while relinquishing the latter.
In other words, Nietzsche and Levinas have a common enemy: negation. Nietzsche fights it by condemning what he sees as the most powerful instances of negation—morality, asceticism, Christianity. Levinas, on the contrary, having severed ethics from negation, can still fight the latter without having to dismiss the former. In still different words, Levinas fights not against the symptoms of the morality that Nietzsche rejects—this is the peculiarity of the anaesthetizing rather than therapeutic method of the ascetic priest (GM 3:17); rather, he fights against the causes at work in such a morality—mainly, negation, the consequence of which is the ontological ego. The result is an enhancement of life and sensibility. But since sensibility is defined in terms of affectivity, the reevaluation of life becomes a reevaluation of passivity—although a passivity that precedes all distinctions between active and passive, that is, between master and slave and between master and slave expressions (morality/dialectics/ontology [or anything else]).
The Lack of an Ascetic Ideal
One more issue remains to be examined: whether Levinas’s notions of the other and the goodness toward which the other directs the self work as ascetic ideals for the ethical self. For Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal displaces the value of life into another world, connoting the mundane existence of negative attributes of lack and imperfection. This dislocation does not apply to Levinas, despite the fact that for him the desire for infinite goodness is admittedly insatiable and goodness itself is transcendent, beyond being—and, analogously, that the other always speaks from the inaccessibility of the beyond, from a temporality that is never that of synchronicity but of diachrony, ungraspable and unreachable. Levinas’s phenomenology of desire clearly manifests how for Levinas desire does not originate from lack but from plenitude. That is, there is nothing in mundane existence that is in need of fulfillment or replacement by redemption. Again, goodness does not repress the I through its limitations. It rather enhances the I by opening it up to its possibilities, not for power but for becoming good.
Need originates from a lack in the soul; it stems from and is oriented toward the subject. It is nostalgia in need of a fulfillment that, while fulfilling, also erases the subject by restoring it to a primordial unity with the object of need. On the contrary, for Levinas desire is animated by what is desired, it moves from the other. Rather than fulfilling the desirer, desire “hollows it out, at the same time in a strange manner nourishing it or me ever again with new hungers” (ED 193). In its being beyond satiation, desire escapes the economy of closure that need attempts to establish. The I is opened up by this emptiness that nourishes without satiating it. Heteronomy, but not negation of the desirer, is at the core of the desire for goodness. Levinas writes that “truth is sought in the other, but by [her/]him who lacks nothing. . . . The separated being is satisfied, autonomous, and nonetheless searches after the other with a search that is not incited by the lack proper to need nor by the memory of a lost good” (TI 62). That is, the desired is not meant to complement (Plato), supplement (Hobbes or Hegel), or even substitute and replace the desirer (Christianity). In Levinas the desirer, because of its separatedness, is not “a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from its past grandeur” (TI 33), which the ascetic ideal should sublimate by an annihilation amounting to redemption. For Levinas, the infinite, the good—in short, everything that Nietzsche characterizes as the ascetic ideal—certainly calls into question the I’s spontaneous freedom (TI 51). But transcendence for Levinas is not negativity any more than the other is negation of the I.
Levinas makes this point explicit in a passage that, in certain respects, reminds its reader of Nietzsche’s criticism of the ascetic ideal. “The movement of transcendence is to be distinguished from the negativity by which discontent [human beings] refuse the condition in which [they are] established. . . . The ‘otherwise’ and the ‘elsewhere’ they wish for still belong to the here they refuse” (TI 41). Conversely, from its absolute alterity, the infinite to which Levinas subscribes does not deny imperfection. It rather designates a distance, “a passage to the other absolutely other” (TI 41), which does not remain on “the common plane of the yes or no at which negativity operates” (TI 41). In being designated as height, nobility, and mastery, the transcendent cannot be a mere negation of the imperfect, of the mundane. In “God and Philosophy” Levinas acknowledges that the “in-” of “infinite” must be read not only as a separation of the infinite but also as meaning that the infinite is found within the finite.5 And in Totality and Infinity Levinas says: “This ‘beyond’ the totality and objective experience is . . . not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience” (TI 23).
Levinas’s affinity with Nietzsche in rejecting any explanation that denies our world and existence in favor of another world is explicitly acknowledged in the opening pages of Otherwise Than Being. The God that dwelled above the earth is dead. Any recourse to a Hinterwelt is now forbidden (OB 8). Levinas’s rejection is restated when he situates his work in continuity with Nietzsche’s project of demythologization: “in this work which does not seek the restoration of any ruined concept . . . after the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes” (OB 185). The transcendence Levinas advocates is not a being otherwise but an otherwise than being (OB 3). Not a negation, transcendence is rather a positivity that does not annihilate (TI 41–42). The relation to it is what Levinas calls “metaphysics.” The infinite does not direct the ethical self beyond the world but to this world, toward an enjoyment of the fruits of the world.
It is true that, for Levinas, the fruits of the world acquire their meaning not by themselves but by becoming gifts for the other, that is, through the ethical dimension. Nevertheless, the ethical relation that is thus enacted retains all the features of an immanent ethics, an ethics where the call from the other and the response to it occur and unfold in this world. In this worldly gift giving, there is no negation of the other or of the I. The gifts from the I are met by the other with ingratitude. This move of nonreturn prevents a negation of the other by the I’s return to itself. The gifts are pure generosity without remuneration. Their being pure gifts means also that to exist the I does not need the other’s recognition. The I is sacrifice, but sacrifice, when it stems from plenitude, is gift giving, expenditure, and excess—heteronomy that does not deny autonomy; it only redefines it.
To conclude, Levinas accepts old Jewish categories, but he twists them in a direction that is immune to Nietzsche’s charges. Bearing with Nietzsche in criticizing negation, Levinas goes further than Nietzsche in retrieving an ethics and a subjectivity that, simultaneously, condemn Nietzsche’s ontological imperialism, absolve themselves from Nietzsche’s criticism, and even espouse some clearly Nietzschean themes such a lack of negation, separation, sensibility, immanence, and faithfulness to the earth. Levinas is not an ascetic priest, nor is his metaphysical project a reproposal in new terms of the old ascetic ideal. Metaphysics must be understood as a rupture of participation in the totality that the dialectics of negation constitutes. Unlike the ascetic priest, Levinas does not infect the reader with a dangerous and fatal disease. Conversely, he signifies the death of the ascetic priest, since after Levinas there can be ethics without ressentiment, asceticism, and the ascetic ideal. It is an ethics of exposure, expenditure, and nonreturn. As Nietzsche would appreciate, it is an excessive ethics.
NOTES
An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1996): 137–56. The essay has not been significantly changed in content, although it has been shortened for editorial reasons. The form has also been considerably edited for clarity and readability.
1. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 122.
2. I thank Daniel Conway for pointing out to me the dangers of asceticism inherent in Levinas’s ethical project.
3. Therefore, the inanity of Kierkegaard’s protest against Hegel’s system.
4. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 95 ff.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” trans. R. Cohen, Philosophy Today 22 (1978): 133.