Emmanuel Levinas is a haunting figure. Inside his texts, too, there are ghosts.
For a while now I have wanted to write a book that would display some of the underappreciated dimensions of Levinas’s philosophy. This book would focus specifically on aspects not necessarily ethical in nature, but metaphysical instead; it would emphasize the dimension of materiality that accompanies, and in some respect grounds, his ethics. When taken as more fundamental to Levinas’s project than the ethical, the dimension of materiality presents Levinas in a light radically different from that which illuminates his popular reception. Some may see this as darkening his image. While not untrue, such a view—typically expressed with a hint of reproach—misses the mark. I have assembled Levinas Unhinged to explain why. One recent day I realized that I had written several interrelated essays—which is to say, a book—on Levinas’s philosophy. You are now reading that book. Its purpose is to exhibit what might be called a proto-materialist metaphysics leaking through the cracks of the familiar portrait of Levinas as a philosopher of transcendence. It resists the well-worn view that the Levinasian problematic is primarily, if not exclusively, ethical or theological in nature. The singular claim uniting the following chapters is that Levinas provides us with a speculative metaphysics and aesthetics which foregrounds the following: the body in its materiality; the irreducibility of aesthetic experience; the transcendental function of sensation; the ecological aspect of sensibility; the horror of existence. Levinas surprisingly keeps pace on occasion with philosophers of immanence like Gilles Deleuze. Therefore, what you find in these pages is a heterodox (perhaps heretical) and markedly non-phenomenological approach to Levinas’s philosophy, one that features his insistence that subjectivity is nourished by the aesthetic environment, that is to say, the matter of sensation.
Adherents of Levinas’s philosophy are notoriously protective of their master thinker, just as career Heideggerians often come off as dismissive of any commentary or criticism that does not issue from the inner circle of Heidegger scholarship. At times this adherence verges on religious piety, an attitude which really has no place in philosophy. Criticism of Levinas is often rebuffed as contrary to the spirit of Levinasian hospitality, as if highlighting the tone of an argument were enough to disarm its critical strength. Failure to enter the Levinasian problematic as Levinas understood it is seen as a failure to engage legitimately with the thinker, as if reading Levinas against his self-interpretation necessarily entails getting him wrong. It is perplexing that after the deconstructive revolution in reading, which for so long dominated the continental philosophy scene, this rebuttal carries as much weight as it does. It is doubly perplexing given that Levinas is often regarded as a principal ally of Jacques Derrida. As a reader of Levinas who places his ontology before his ethics, I read him otherwise than many of his commentators would have him read and perhaps otherwise than he would like to be read. This may be seen as an act of impiety, but whether or not it is heresy is irrelevant to the productivity of my reading. I am not trying to “get Levinas right” or advance his ethical program as it is typically understood. What I hope to have accomplished here is an account of Levinas as someone obsessed with matters besides God, the face of the Other, radical alterity, transcendence, and the usual Levinas catchwords. This is necessary, I think, because there are enough readers out there who believe that Levinas is little more than a quasi-religious thinker whose biggest contribution to philosophy is made as a member of the so-called theological turn in phenomenology denounced by Dominique Janicaud; others see him as a forerunner of Derridean deconstruction. I make little attempt to engage either of these readings here. With any luck this book will end up enticing some of the uninitiated into Levinas’s philosophy so that its metaphysical potential can be fully exploited.
The most familiar approach to Levinas obliges us to pass through his unique attempt to establish ethics as first philosophy. Nearly as influential is the reading of Levinas as a philosopher of difference or radical otherness. Additionally, he is seen as an undeniably central figure in the phenomenological movement (or as merely a phenomenologist, depending on your sympathies), as well as a Talmudic scholar. His contributions to political and environmental philosophy have inspired monographs and edited collections, but to a lesser extent and only recently. In the text that follows I present Levinas as first and foremost an engineer of ontology, as someone explicitly engaged in the establishment of a materialist account of subjectivity. At its most general level this book is about Levinas’s sustained attention to the tangibility of being and the corporeal dimension of human existence. As I have already admitted, this is a deviant way of casting Levinas’s project because it explicitly disregards the interpretation of his work that he and his faithful commentators provide. It does not keep with the spirit of Levinas. Nevertheless, my portrayal is grounded in evidence from the letter of his texts; this evidence is documented in the notes that close each chapter. The ontology I present is generated by Levinas’s forays into phenomenology, especially the concepts of intentionality, representation, sensation, embodiment, and affectivity, but it entails a radical rethinking of the nature of subjectivity, the constitution of the environment, and the relationship between body and world. This radicalization takes place when subjectivity and environment are refracted through the lens of sensibility. At the end of the day Levinas’s philosophy can be read (as I have here) as a concerted “rehabilitation of the sensible,” as he himself would say. Sensation and sensibility, I argue, are concepts just as important to Levinas as the Other, the face, God, infinity, transcendence, or discourse.
Given the significance of sensation in Levinas’s ontology it is time we read him as a philosopher of aesthetics as customarily as we read him as a philosopher of ethics. Each of the chapters that follow engage the aesthetic dimension of Levinasian philosophy, with the collective effect of raising the question: Isn’t aesthetics first philosophy for Levinas? The question was first posed by Graham Harman in an essay titled “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human,” which appeared in the contemporary art and theory magazine Naked Punch. 1 Instead of pursuing the depths of individual substance in Levinas’s ontology as Harman does, my investigations remain at the level of what he calls “enjoyment along the shallowest facades of the world.” This is not to say that my attention is fixed on the phenomenal world, the world of appearances. What I am after, following Levinas, is the immanent reality the aesthetic harbors along its surfaces. To speak of the surfaces of things is also to speak of the source of sensation, the material currency of aesthetics. And to speak of enjoyment is to speak of the way in which sensation affects the body, folds back upon itself, and generates subjectivity.
This book is an assemblage of reworked conference papers, unpublished essays, and a couple of previously published articles. In addition to their critical commentary and productive engagement with Levinasian metaphysics, the chapters also touch upon themes in philosophical ecology, philosophy of race, philosophy of the body, and philosophy of art and architecture. The first three chapters provide strategic readings of Levinas’s texts in order to foreground his attention to aesthetics and develop a sense of the materiality of his metaphysics. The fourth and fifth chapters apply this metaphysics to social and ethical issues to see what kind of practical work the heterodox reading of Levinas can do. The final chapter shows how Levinas’s metaphysics of the subject evolves in the work of Alphonso Lingis, Levinas’s translator and one of the most startling American philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Chapter 1 introduces the theme of the night (pursued also in the second chapter) and shows in some detail how Levinas’s discourse on the night contests the privileging of light and illumination in the Western philosophical tradition. In addition to offering a counterpoint to the pervasive metaphorics of light in Plato, Descartes, and Heidegger, Levinas’s thinking of the night contributes to the history of ontology and the philosophy of embodiment. These two lines converge on the question of how the night figures into the adventure of subjectivity.
Chapter 2 looks at the function of sensation in Levinas’s aesthetics and argues that sensation is for him the most basic element of experience. His metaphysics of sensation is remarkably similar to Deleuze’s, so it is instructive, even if unorthodox, to read them side-by-side. Both thinkers defend a non-phenomenological logic of sensation that finds sensation at work behind the scenes of representation and below the level of perception and cognition. Any engagement with sensation entails a descent into the nocturnal anonymity of being and a confrontation with the rhythm of the sensible. While in one respect terrifying, this descent reveals itself to be crucial to the aesthetic edification of the subject.
Chapter 3 injects Levinas’s thinking about sensation into discussion about the link between the body and its aesthetic environment. As embodied our identities are necessarily dependent on their natural and built surroundings. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology deals with this idea at length; his work is enlisted by some architecture theorists who see phenomenology as a productive approach to their discipline. When read alongside this line of research, Levinas proves to be a useful tool for conceiving the materiality of the body/environment relation. But it is not his phenomenology that is instructive; it is his ontology of individuation. Phenomenology, I contend, must be abandoned in favor of an ontology that sees corporeal identity as generated by the materiality of aesthetic relations. Such an ontology is available in the work of figures like Deleuze and Spinoza, both of whom break down the natural/artificial and human/nonhuman distinctions. Levinas too contributes to this effort. Together they engender an environmental ethics grounded in the immanence of aesthetic relations and the plasticity of identity.
Chapter 4 looks at what Timothy Morton would call the “dark ecology” of Levinasian metaphysics. It engages recent attempts to extend Levinas’s concept of “the face” (le visage) into the environmental sphere precisely by resisting such attempts. Levinas’s ecology, instead, should be seen as providing us with a thorough account of the otherness of the environment and the strangeness of ecological life. Like the previous two chapters, this chapter recognizes the anonymity of the environment as one of the grand horrors of existence. Environmental ethics must begin from this premise if it is to make any progress confronting problems, like climate change, that exceed our capacity to conceptualize them.
Chapter 5 likewise takes up the quintessential Levinasian concept of the face. The face is often construed as a window on the transcendent that issues a divine ethical imperative and serves to institute an infinite responsibility for human suffering. This conception has undesirable social implications—the reinforcement of racial discrimination and colonialism, for instance—which are clarified by insights developed in critical race theory, feminist philosophy, and poststructuralism. The danger can be mitigated by treating the face as a material complexity which contains its own immanent imperative, a move that does not entail renouncing Levinas’s notion of the face; rather, it means attending to the face as a sensible infinity and tangible force. A mundane view of the face, grounded in its aesthetic singularity and material complexity, which follows the spirit but perhaps not the letter of Levinasian ethics, is adduced to illustrate this.
The book concludes with an essay on Alphonso Lingis as a unique heir to Levinas’s theory of the subject. Lingis, exceptional among Levinas’s interpreters, fully appreciates the materiality of Levinasian metaphysics and its aesthetic dimensions; he likewise has little patience for Levinasian piety. In a way, Lingis is the apostasy of Levinas. While Chapter 6 is not explicitly about Levinas, its purpose is to demonstrate what Levinas’s texts are capable of producing when read against the grain.
As I draw this preface to a close it dawns on me that what links each of the chapters together—apart from the litany of themes already mentioned—is the sense of horror that looms over Levinas’s ontology. This sense of horror is detectable in his mobilization of metaphors of darkness, shadow, insomnia, fatigue, strangeness, and the like, which double as proper metaphysical concepts in his texts. These concepts are, we could say, essential to any real encounter with the other as other. The other is by definition that which eludes us, escapes our attempts to catch hold of it both practically and intellectually. The other remains forever anonymous, unknown to us, and yet present to us. The dark presence of the other was never lost on Levinas. He recognized that there is something terrible and terrifying about existence, something that is perhaps summed up with a single word: indifference. This, I suspect, is why he insisted that we see ethics as first philosophy. Only a radical upheaval of our metaphysical priorities could confront indifference writ large, an indifference woven into the fabric of being and coursing through the veins of nature. But there is always the possibility that existence truly is nihilistic, which is to say, without ground and beyond our capacity to make sense of it. It is quite possible that ethics is not first philosophy. In other words, it is possible that metaphysics describes a reality that is, in the final analysis, apathetically detached from our concerns and unmoved by the precariousness of our well-being. Levinas’s deep appreciation of this horror is what I have tried to evoke in the following pages.
I am grateful to Cierra Clark, whose companionship gives me the energy to write and whose careful eyes helped prepare this text. A big thanks is also due to Dave Mesing for his diligent proofreading and friendship.
Tom Sparrow
Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania
1. Graham Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human,” Naked Punch 9 (2007): 21-30.