Levinas, Translation, and Ethics
ROBERT EAGLESTONE
Many commentators have suggested that translation is central to the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Not, clearly, translation from one language to another, in the sense of translating, say, German into French, nor translation in the sense of introducing intellectual developments from one national tradition into another, although Levinas is widely credited with introducing phenomenological thought into France in 1930. The commentators suggest that Levinas offers translation in a wider sense between what he calls “Hebrew” and “Greek,” where the names for the languages stand in for much wider frameworks or worldviews. However, although this is a constructive approach that offers much insight into his work, and has no little backing from his own remarks, I will suggest that to see his work in this way is to offer a limited view both of his achievement and of the nature of translation. More than this, I will suggest that his own thought runs against this way of understanding it: instead, I will argue that Levinas’s work offers an understanding of ethics that suggests the impossibility of translation.
What hangs on this question—which seems at first to be one limited to “Levinas scholarship” or obscure phenomenological debates—is a set of questions about the nature of what it is to be human, what it is to be part of a community and a world, and how the West should engage with other cultures. All of these, too, of course, are issues of translation.
TRANSLATING THE GREEKS AND THE BIBLE
Levinas argues that there are two fundamental discourses that both orient and form the horizon for Western thought: the language of the Bible and the language of the Greeks. Seeing things in these terms is not new, of course. It was a staple of nineteenth-century intellectual life: For example, Arnold wrote that Heine
had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art—the Greek spirit of beauty, the Hebrew spirit of sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of cleanness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his “longing that cannot be uttered” he is Hebrew. (Arnold 127–28)
Moreover, putting these two together is not a new project either: Maimonides in the Jewish tradition, for example, and Aquinas in the Christian both attempted to reconcile faith with philosophy. In the Islamic tradition, too, Avicenna and al-Farabi tried to bring the Koran together with philosophy. However, Levinas is slightly different: “I have never aimed to ‘harmonise’ or ‘conciliate’ both traditions. If they happen to be in harmony it is probably because every philosophical thought rests on pre-philosophical experiences and because for me reading the Bible has belonged to these founding experiences” (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 24). For many commentators, Levinas’s work is not one of compilation, but of translation.
Levinas discusses what he means by “Greek” in a particularly illuminating interview. He says that the
essential character of philosophy is a certain, specifically Greek way of thinking and speaking…. Philosophy employs a series of terms and concepts such as morphe (form), ousia (substance), nous (reason), Logos (thought) or telos (goal) etc which constitute a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility. French and German and indeed all Western Philosophy is entirely shot through with this specific language; it is a token of the genius of Greece to have been able to thus deposit its language in the basket of Europe. (Kearney 54–55)
This need not be seen simply as a Heideggerian insight, although it clearly is for Levinas. Wittgenstein, for example, remarks:
We keep hearing the remark that philosophy does not really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. Those who say this, however, don’t understand why this is so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. As long as there is a verb “to be” that looks as though it functions in the same way as “to eat” or “to drink,” as long as we still have the adjectives “identical,” “true,” “false,” “possible,” as long as we talk of a river of time and an expanse of space etc etc, people will keep stumbling over the same cryptic differences and staring at something that no explanation seems capable of clearing up. (Wittgenstein 22e)
Here, it is not only the formal language of philosophy that is shot through with “deposits of Greek,” but ordinary language: “to be,” “true,” “false,” “possible,” rivers of time and an expanses of space. What is new is the awareness of the significance of this. “This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time has inherited from nihilism,” writes Agamben: “We are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language” (Agamben 45). Levinas’s relation to this language, to the “Greaco-European adventure” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 82) of the West is one of tension, caught between an awareness of its insight and a suspicion of its power, and changed over his career.1 To summarize briefly: on the one hand, Levinas knows that this language, “the language of the university such as it should be,” (Levinas, In the Time of Nations 53) is one that allows “comparison … judgement” (Wright, Hughes, Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality” 174–75) and so communal interaction, or politics: reason makes society possible. But, he writes, “a society whose members would only be reason would vanish as a society” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 119). The discourse of the Greeks is not complete: “its unbiased intelligence risks sometimes remaining naïve” and “something may be lacking in its ‘clear and distinct ideas’ ” (Levinas, In the Time of Nations 52). What it is lacking is a way of understanding, or responding to the ethical: Greek philosophy cannot answer the question, Why should I be good?
In a key passage in Otherwise than Being, Levinas asks this key ethical question in three different ways: “Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” (117). His answer is not straightforward but it does explain why “Greek” cannot answer the question. “These questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself” (117)—an echo of Heidegger’s definition of dasein, that being for which its own being is an issue. “In this hypothesis” Levinas writes, that is, in Greek, “it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-of-me, the other, would concern me” (117). There seems to be no way of justifying ethics inside this system of thought, in this language. However, “in the ‘prehistory’ of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism is the religiosity of the self” (117). “ ‘Hebracism’ has frequently been identified as one of the two counter-critiques by which Western civilisation has been kept vigorous and alive. Precisely what Hebracism is, however, has rarely been recognised” (Hartman and Budick ix): For many commentators on Levinas, it is this “religiosity” that represents “hebracism,” which is why many readers of his readers argue that Levinas is translating the Bible into Greek. It is only in “Hebrew” that this can be articulated. However, I suggest that this reading of Levinas relies on a faulty understanding of translation. It has, for example, many risks.
RISKS OF TRANSLATION: THE EXAMPLE OF “ATHENS AND JERUSALEM”
“ ‘Athens and Jerusalem,’ “religious philosophy”—these expressions are practically identical: they have almost the same meaning. One is as mysterious as the other, and they irritate modern thought to the same degree by the inner contradiction they contain. Would it not be more proper to pose the dilemma as: Athens or Jerusalem, Religion or Philosophy?” (Shestov 47).
One of the most serious risks or temptations that argue that Levinas is translating—in this large sense—the Bible into Greek, translating Jerusalem into Athens, is highlighted, probably unwittingly, by Levinas himself: “I often say, although it is a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest—all the exotic—is dance” (Mortley 18). Here, Levinas has taken the grounds of possibility of the translation between these two discourses—their centrality in Western thought—and has presupposed that they are the only two discourses. The remark is racist because “humanity”—however it is understood—draws on much wider traditions than only the Bible and the Greeks and is Eurocentric because only those in the European tradition might think that “we” (whoever we are) do not. It might be possible to defend this remark: one might suggest that it was made, off the cuff, in a interview and not a long-deliberated written essay, or that Levinas is foregrounding the way in which the category of the “human” is, or has been, a Western category, through and through a construction of a certain metaphysics that does indeed have its roots in the Bible and the Greeks (“When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe,” Fanon wrote, “I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders” (Fanon 252). But these defenses and excuses would be disingenuous. It is more honest, it seems to me, to admit that this remark is both racist and Eurocentric and to admit that there may be “a racist logic intrinsic to European philosophy” (Critchley 128) uncovered here by thinking about translation and community: but more, to suggest that Levinas’s thought nearly always runs against such a remark, which I will aim to show here.
Levinas’s thought is about an openness to the other at the expense of the self. This is the meaning of his recurrent use of the term “persecution”: the other “persecutes” the self, leaves no room for escape or evasion of responsibility. Or, as Derrida puts it, Levinas’s first major work, “Totality and Infinity bequeaths to us an immense treatise of hospitality” (Derrida, Adieu 21). To be hospitable means to welcome the other, the stranger and in no small part, this involves recognizing the otherness of the stranger precisely as otherness, not as some version of one’s own thought.
The opposition or relation between Athens and Jerusalem is a recognizable part of Western thinking, and is the trope that Levinas picks up on. Athens, the cradle of philosophy and reason, is opposed to Jerusalem, the city of faith: a very binary opposition. Tertullian, in an attempt to de-Hellenize the early Christian church, wrote “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?.” Lev Shestov’s monumental Athens and Jerusalem is an example of the use of these cities in the twentieth century, and they have played a role in more recent work by, for example Martin Jay, Gillian Rose, and Susan Handleman.2 However, these two names, as metonyms, are very revealing about the discourses that use them. Athens and Jerusalem are not the only cities, not the only traditions. It might be possible to contrast them with cities that stand for other traditions: Mecca, or the Forbidden City, or Zimbabwe. More than this, it might be possible to contrast them not to cities but to other places that embody traditions: the Ganges, Mt. Fuji, Ayers Rock. But these comparisons all work on the assumption that “as Athens is to the tradition of Western Philosophy, so (say) the Ganges is to Hinduism.” This is a faulty assumption that masks the “otherness” of other communities, and reveals that Western thought takes for granted—at least in this limited context—an idea of the polis, the city/community. It is as if each community, defined as much by its thought and traditions as by its location—its nature as imagined community—has to become a recognizable Western “polis” before it can be recognized as a community or as a people by the Western thought that stems from and recognizes Athens and Jerusalem. Unless each community (understood in its widest sense) has an Athens, it is not recognized by Western thought. It is as if being a Western-style community or polis is the grounds for the possibility of translation. If a community does not speak a language that relies on a Western-style polis, it will not be recognized. It is not surprising that this idea has entered, at a deep level, Western thought.
And it is this idea that Levinas criticizes. He takes Heidegger as the paramount example of this theme in Western thought and writes that “Heidegger with the whole of Western history takes the relation with the other as enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth. Possession is pre-eminently the form in which the other becomes the same” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 46). This “leads inevitably,” he writes “to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (46–47). His thought of hospitality aims to run counter precisely to this. Even the metonym of Athens and Jerusalem is inhospitable and exclusive. It would turn other cultures (that draw on neither the Bible nor the Greeks) into the poorer versions of European culture, or simply refuse to recognize them. In the light of Levinas’s own thought, this remark made in an interview looks out of place and mistaken. However, it does highlight the dangers of translation if it is understood in this way.
“WHOLE VESSELS”: UNDERSTANDING TRANSLATION AFTER BENJAMIN
These dangers may be bypassed if we understand translation differently. As Walter Benjamin argues, a translation “instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel” (Benjamin 79). Over all, Benjamin argues that “the act of translation negotiated not so much between language x and language y as between the forbidden idea of the absolute, original language and its pale reflections in human language—the language of God and the language of Man” (Steinberg 17–18). The whole vessel, for Benjamin, is the language of God.
Levinas uses something akin to this model by maintaining the same structure: languages (Greek, the Bible) can be translated because they refer to a third and all encompassing category, a whole vessel. However, although Levinas is often seen as a religious thinker, he does not rely on the idea of the “language of God.” His position is, as Robert Gibbs points out, closer to that of Rosenzweig (an influence on Levinas so great that it is too “present … to be cited” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 28). Rosenzweig argues that revelation “reveals its truth in human words, leading us towards the original speech of humanity. This historical speech is not an historical claim about an adamic speech but rather a reference to the experience of social conversation” (Gibbs, Why Ethics? 289). For Benjamin, the claim is that “languages are not strangers to each other, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” (Benjamin 73)—the divine language of which they are pale shadows. But Levinas goes further, and is even more “Greek”: He argues that the “whole vessel” arises “within experience” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 23). That is, he argues that the ethics—the relation with the other—is grounds of the possibility of experiencing the world in the first place, the ur-experience and that the discourse of philosophy has not yet found a way to explore, explain or justify this. His work, then, as Derrida writes, “seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself. Experience and that which is most irreducible within experience: the passage and departure toward the other; the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 83). Levinas, in this respect, is a good phenomenologist, and seeks to make his case by recourse to reflection on experience alone. This is why his books move through detailed phenomenological readings (“a thicket of difficulties,” Levinas, Totality and Infinity 29) that all come from human experience. John Llewelyn compares Totality and Infinity to Mediations on First Philosophy or Phenomenology of Spirit since, like those works, it follows a narrative and a “chronological order” of “stages of the analysis of the self” (Llewelyn 200) beginning with experience.
If Levinas is translating, then, what for him serves as the language of God, the “whole vessel” is not—contra those who argue for it—simply a question of a religious tradition: it is experience itself that is shared by every “human being” (before the term “human being” and all that this implies—the UN declaration of human rights, for example—has even been applied to them). However, that aspect of experience in which he is most interested—ethics—is best revealed not by Greek reason that cannot explain it. Rather, it is that aspect of experience that a religious tradition reveals, or reveals best. When Levinas writes that beyond “egoism and altruism is the religiosity of the self” (Levinas, Otherwise 117) by “religiosity” he does not mean being religious in the sense of being Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or so on. He understands the essence of religion etymologically: the things that bind. “We propose to call ‘religion’ the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 40). Texts that are religious—the Bible and the Talmud are Levinas’s texts—are those in which this “religiosity” is explored most explicitly, and it is to these that Levinas turns in all his “confessional” writings. However, and significantly, this religiosity of the self, its putting into question by and responsibility for the other does not only come from religious texts. It appears
at the summit of philosophies … the beyond-being of Plato, the entry through the door of the agent intellect in Aristotle; it is the idea of God in us, surpassing our capacity as finite beings [Descartes] … the exaltation of theoretical reason in Kant’s practical reason … the study of recognition by the Other in Hegel himself … the sobering of lucid reason in Heidegger. (Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening” 215)
Indeed, some of Levinas’s work aims to show precisely how this appears in the work of other thinkers. As Tamra Wright argues, “Levinas finds indication of the ‘ethical relation’ and the ‘beyond being’ both in the Bible and in the … western philosophical canon” (Wright 169). (More than this: Derrida’s whole project can be seen as a Levinasian one. Derrida’s readings are searches for the “exorbitant” in philosophical texts, that which is outside the orbit or orb (as in “eye”) of Western thought: “the point of a certain exteriority to the totality of the age of logocentrism” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 161–62). He does this precisely for “ethical” reasons and this putting into question of that tradition in thought is clearly similar to Levinas’s aims). But, for Levinas, ethics can only appear as a subject for philosophical discourse because it arises from pre-philosophical experience.
PRE-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE?
This is all very well, but it raises a difficult question of what a pre-philosophical experience might be. Levinas, in general, seems to suggest that the languages of “the Bible” and “the Greeks” supplement each other: each revealing blindspots in the other and filling them, to some degree. The blindspots are caused by their failure to match up with experience (or, one might add, how we reflect on experience—the experience of experience, as it were). However, are these “outside philosophy?” For Levinas, to some degree they are: he writes that “Not to philosophise would not be ‘to philosophise still’ ” (Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers 172). In contrast—and this is the crux of their disagreement—Derrida writes that “the attempt to achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse, by means of philosophical discourse, which can never be shaken off completely, cannot possibly succeed within language” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 110). To speak—in Greek—is to speak philosophically. But more than this, the power of Greek is such that the “meaning of the non-theoretical as such (for example, ethics or the metaphysical in Levinas’ sense)” is only made clear by “theoretical knowledge” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 122). That is, that which is not Greek is only understood in relation to the Greek language of philosophy. For Derrida, there is no area of (Western) existence that is not infiltrated by Greek philosophical thinking. It is impossible to escape both the technical language of philosophy (morphe, ousia, nous, Logos, telos, etc.) when we are “doing philosophy” (in the seminar room, for example) but also in our everyday discussions and business (“identical,” “true,” “false,” “possible,” “a river of time,” “an expanse of space”). To appeal to experience is, as Derrida argues, an empiricism that is only a “dream” that “must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 151).
To put this another way: Is there a universal human experience to which Levinas can refer and that could serve as the “unbroken vessel”? When Levinas offers analyses of “bare life,” of shelter, of isolation, which in turn lead to an uncovering of the “religiosity of the self,” its unavoidable relation to and responsibility for the other, are these phenomenological analyses applicable universally? Or do they rely, as he says for his case, on the “pre-philosophical experience” of reading the Bible.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz offers a way of exploring this by contrasting two ways of understanding the human being, the “stratigraphic” with the “synthetic.” The stratigraphic version comes from the Enlightenment and suggests that there is “a human nature as regularly organised, as thoroughly invariant, and as marvellously simple as Newton’s universe. Perhaps some of its laws are different, but there are laws; perhaps some of its immutability is obscured by the trappings of local fashion, but it is immutable … men are men under whatever guise and against whatever backdrop” (Geertz 34). This belief goes on to suggest that one can “strip off the motley forms of culture” from an individual like layers of an onion and find the “structural and functional regularities of social organisation”; beneath these the “underlying psychological factors and—at the bottom—the “biological foundations” (Geertz 38). In a way, this is what Levinas appears to be doing in his phenomenological analyses.
Geertz criticizes this as “an illusion”: “what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is and what he believes that it is inseparable from them” (35). Indeed, he argues that modern anthropology asserts that “men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed and most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist” (35). Simply, there is no universal human being: no woman and man, only particular men and women (one might go so far as to say “men” and “women”). Geertz argues this by showing how attempts to draw links between so-called “underlying needs”—the urge to reproduce, for example—and the many different so-called cultural strategies to fulfill them—“marriage”—flounder both because of the huge range of very different practices and the inability to “construct genuine functional interconnections between cultural and non cultural factors”: instead there are “only more or less persuasive analogies, parallelisms, suggestions and affinities” (43). In contrast, Geertz suggests we replace the stratigraphic view of the human being with a “synthetic one … in which biological, psychological, sociological and cultural factors can be treated within a unitary system of analysis” (44). This view does not seek to “peel the layers off”—indeed, there are no layers to peel—but rather to take the whole complex of body, culture, and identity together. Geertz writes that
extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacities mean that the particular pattern his behaviour takes is guided by predominantly cultural rather than genetic templates, the latter setting the overall psychophysical context within which the precise activity sequences are organised by the former … [thus] it is through the constructions of ideologies, schematic images of social order, that man makes himself for better or worse a political animal. (217–18)
These images of social order in turn are what “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them”: this accounts for their “highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held” (220). These “cultural templates” can be seen as the “deposits of Greek” in our technical language or in our ordinary language (a verb “to be” that looks as though it functions in the same way as “to eat” or “to drink”) or, by the same token, the deposits of “Hebrew,” too: the “longing that cannot be uttered,” the “religiosity of the self.”
From this point of view—from the philosophical view that there is nothing comprehended that does not rely at some level on a basic philosophical vocabulary, from the anthropological view that behavior and thought are guided by “predominantly cultural” ideas—a third space that could encompass this all, Benjamin’s “whole vessel” or the language of God, looks impossible or even imperialistic.
This seems to leave us with two possibilities, to generalize. Either we can affirm with Levinas and Benjamin that there is something to be understood metaphorically as universal human experience (perhaps in the very basic form of “bare life,” those things every human organism might be said to have in common), the language of God, “the unbroken vessel.” Or we can affirm with Geertz and Derrida that there is no such vessel and that we are enmeshed in a highly complex weave of culture and beliefs held so deeply that we no longer recognize them as beliefs or even as ideas.3 With the first, we might translate “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” as “The Task of the Translator”: with the second, after de Man as “The Defeat of the Translator” (“If you enter the Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe—“er hat aufgegeben,” he doesn’t continue the race any more” (de Man 80). How might one decide between these two possibilities?
THE LIMITS OF COMMUNITY
However, as with the example of Athens and Jerusalem, it might be possible to find a way to exceed this opposition in Levinas’s own work. This opposition relies on a sense of “who we are,” what language we speak: a sense of community. In his essay on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” Paul de Man suggests that translation “implies … the suffering of what one thinks of as one’s own—the suffering of the original language…. We think we are at ease in our own language, we feel a cosiness, a familiarity, a shelter in the language we call our own, in which we think that we are not alienated. What translation reveals is that this alienation is at its strongest in our relation to our own language” (de Man 84). For de Man, this suffering is not pain or pathos, nor even individual suffering: it is “specifically linguistic” (86):
The way in which I can try to mean is dependant upon linguistic properties that are not only [not] made by me, because I depend on the language as it exists for the devices which I will be using, it is not made by us as historical beings, it is perhaps not made by humans at all…. To equate language with humanity … is in question. If language is not necessarily human—if we obey the law, if we function within language, and purely in terms of language—there can be no intent. (87)
Intention and agency are removed and “[W]hat I mean is upset by the way I mean” (87). However, what I want to concentrate on here is not the way that language reduces agency and seems to defer meaning rather than guarantee it—that staple of literary deconstruction—but the sense that translation reveals our own alienation in our own language: once the possibility of translation—that is, the appearance of other languages—exists, one language does not appear to be enough. This seems particularly devastating to those languages that have claimed—or seem to have claimed—that they are enough: the Bible, the Greeks.
However, I would suggest, after Levinas, that it is precisely this “failure to be enough,” that disrupts our cosiness in our communities which makes these languages ethically significant. Benjamin praises Pannwitz, and cites him: “ ‘Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from the wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek English’ ” (de Man 81). However, even the second (better, for Pannwitz) of these still takes the latter language away. No matter how much the language is abrogated by shifts in vocabulary, grammar, allusion, register switching, vernacular transcription, neologisms (to make “German like Hindi,” say) it is still “German.” No matter how much other discourses may try to resist, the discourse of the Greeks and the Bible will still consume other discourses as they assume that they are comprehensible in the languages of Europe: Greek and the Bible. However, if the point for Levinas’s philosophy is that the self suffers an infinite persecution and an infinite demand for hospitality, based on the assumption that the other is other and not like one’s self, then it is precisely the untranslatability, the otherness, of another language that makes it important. Levinas writes that “the other is a neighbour … before being an individuation of the genus man” (Levinas, Otherwise 59) and again that the “unity of the human race is in fact posterior to fraternity” (166) where fraternity means the unmediated relation with the other. In a wider context, translation can be seen as what I have called elsewhere the “metaphysics of comprehension”: knowing the other is most often a comprehension, a “taking power.” Comprehension works by understanding, by grasping, the other by reducing the other into a third, neutral term. These terms vary: Socratic Reason, “Hegel’s universal, Durkheim’s social, the statistical laws that govern our freedom, Freud’s unconscious” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 272) and Heideggerian “Being” are all ways to turn the other into a category understood by the same. I suggest that the possibility of translation—if it is understood as relying on a “whole vessel,” the “language of god” or a “universal human experience”—is also one of these terms. To translate the neighbor is to turn him/her/it into a category of our own language and so to deny him/her/its otherness. It is only by approaching the neighbor, the other, as that which we cannot understand or comprehend, or translate, that we act ethically: “I posit myself deposed of my sovereignty. Paradoxically it is qua alienus—foreigner and other—that man is not alienated” (Levinas, Otherwise 59). This means that the Western question of the relation between language, polis, and the human is bypassed by the neighbor.
This is only to argue, really, that ethics (how should I behave?) precedes and underlies epistemology (how do I know what sort of thing this is?). It is to argue that the “cosiness” and security found in communities seems to mitigate against ethics in the Levinasian sense. Levinas’s thought is about translation—but that movement is heading out from the community to the other, precisely where translation is impossible. Levinas argues for an unending (and so infinite) ethical responsibility incumbent on each of us. The counterintuitive conclusion is that we are each responsible for those we do not, cannot, and could not understand. This conclusion has particular force in the era of hybridization, globalization, and global terrorism, where those from communities we (whoever “we” are) in the West do not understand are not far from “us” and “our” everyday lives. Does this mean that we should not translate? No. But it does mean that we have ethical grounds to be even more suspicious of the idea of translation and the way in which it relates to communities: “what I translate is upset by the way I translate.”
1. Two studies by Robert Gibbs go into these changes and this relationship in detail. Moreover, it is to his most recent book, Why Ethics?, and to a very stimulating paper that he gave at the “Jewish Textualities” Seminar at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London, in Summer 2001, that this paper is indebted and is, in part, a response: that he would disagree with much of what I have to say I do not doubt, but I write it in a Levinasian spirit.
2. See, for examples, in addition to Shestov, in particular: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (London: University of California Press) (esp. pp. 23–24, p. 33); Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982); Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, Midrash and Literature (London: Yale University Press, 1986).
3. Although this is not to say, for example, that Derrida does not recognize the benefits of such a universalism or what Paul Gilroy, after Fanon, calls “planetary humanism.” Indeed, his book The Politics of Friendship seems to suggest that it is this or something like it for which we should be aiming and trying to shape: thus “messianic telepoesis.” Gilroy writes, in a similar vein, that our “challenge should now be to bring even more powerful visions of planetary humanity from the future into the present and to reconnect them with democratic and cosmopolitan traditions” (Gilroy 356).
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——— Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
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