ABSTRACT
These quotes sum up why Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy can be so theoretically irresistible (or hard to ‘shake off ’, depending how you see it). On the one hand he conceded that contemporary subjectivity appears only in view of its own disappearance – eclipsed as it were by the ‘very abundance of
our means for acting and the extent of our ambitions’; on the other hand this situation is described in terms of experience and in particular as the experience of a fracas: in a world ‘where everything has its place’ the tragiccomic idea of ‘man’ is dead weight; ‘inefficacity’ in the midst of efficiency. Whether we ignore or heed this experience respectively determines whether we declare ‘man’ forever ‘lost in history and in order’ and, by the same token declare the ‘right’ of the world to be free of tragic-comic readings; or, whether we remain sceptical over the efficacy of such declarations and, by the same token, we declare the right of humans to trace in their speech a ‘pre-historical and an-archical saying’ that is irreducible to language, history and order.3 This is a typical example of the ability of Levinas to look a cynic in the face and discover a hint of unease in the stern façade that gives it away as a cover of scepticism. As if anticipating bio-political critique Levinas acknowledged that as the new order is ‘neither human nor inhuman’4 anti-humanist theory is right to assume the ‘purely operational and provisional role of man in the unfolding and manifestation of a set of terms that form a system’.5 He added, however, that as the crisis of humanism entails the singular experience of ‘witnessing the ruin of the myth of man [as] an end in himself,’6 ‘we see man being born again out of the inanity of man-as-principle, the inanity of principles, out of the putting into question of freedom understood as origin and the present.’7 Hence Levinas set himself the task to ‘find man again in this matter and a name in this anonymousness,’8 a task that entailed an abuse of language. To the existentialist truth that existence precedes essence Levinas added his peculiar ‘materialist metaphysics’ whereby being and becoming have a ‘hither side’, a ‘reverse side’, which is ‘pre-originary’, a ‘passivity more passive than the passivity involved in receptivity’ and which designates a subject ‘outside of being’, but ‘in itself ’.9
