Levinas' Totality and Infinity by Large William

Author:Large, William
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

The World of Phenomena and Expression

This is the smallest part of the section ‘Interiority and Economy’, and the reader, for that reason, might pass it by for being insignificant. Its brevity, however, belies its importance. For, at its heart, it manifests one of the most important problems that arises out of the reading of Totality and Infinity. It is a problem both Blanchot and Derrida point out, even though both of them are very generous readers of Levinas and are clearly inspired by his work.

Levinas’ emphasis on the experience of the other as the basis of ethics prioritizes speech over writing. Now on initial reading we might think this does not matter at all, but there are two problems with the precedence Levinas gives to speech. One is methodological, and the second logical. Taking the methodological problem first, if ethics is direct speech, and any indirect discourse would mean the reduction of the other to the same, then what is the status of Levinas’ own work? Is it not absurd to write about the other, if in so doing one betrays the very transcendence one is attempting to describe? Is not the pure experience of speech Levinas describes impossible? Second, the logical problem has to do with the internal logic (a paradoxical logic no doubt) of the argument itself. Levinas tells us that the relation of the terms in ethics is asymmetrical. The difference between the I and the other is not the same as the difference between the other and the I. The relation is irreversible. Yet the very quality that distinguishes the ethical relation from any other relation, speech, is reversible. I am just as much present in my speech in responding to the other, as the other is present in their speech in speaking to me. What then would be the difference between the speakers? Am I not other to the other when I speak, as the other is other to me when they speak? Levinas defines the alterity of the other, borrowing Plato’s indictment of writing, as the first person presence of the speaker in speech, but one would think that this would better define the position of the ‘I’ in speech and not the other, and if it does define the other, then it does not seem possible to distinguish between the position of the speakers, as the asymmetry of the ethical relation implies.

If we return to Levinas’ own explanation, the difference between direct and indirect discourse is first of all explained through labour, because what is similar to both labour and indirect discourse is anonymity. Labour, for Levinas, following Marx, is always alienation and this is because the worker is never present in the work they produce, unlike language. The alienation of labour is expressed in the anonymity of money, where each individual is reduced to a part within a whole. Even in the economic relation itself, the other is reduced to the status of their work. Rather than revealing their face, their role reduces them to anonymity.

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