Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other by Eric S. Nelson;

Author:Eric S. Nelson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Dusselian Interpretation of Bloch and Levinas

This chapter has traced in outline the works of thinkers who have disclosed the bonds between dignity and temporalizing material life, delineating how the works of Bloch and Levinas offer two strategies for relating the ethical-political demands for dignity and rights with the temporal sensuous embodiment of existence.

In God, Death, and Time, Levinas reflects on dignity in the context of human temporality and mortality. Bloch provides a more adequate way of conceiving this nexus than Heidegger, who—Levinas contended—prioritizes one’s own death and one’s mastery over it rather than the death of the other and the dignity of the other in material moments of suffering and death.44

Levinas’s reading of Bloch can be situated in the larger circumstances of their thought as argued in this chapter. Bloch and Levinas unfold the social-politically oriented implications of the interruptive and reorienting temporality of the prophetic. Bloch undertakes this in terms of the anticipation of that which exceeds and disturbs the present, a historically immanent and revolutionary concrete utopia of hope—hinted at in dreams, imaginings, stories, and religious visions—in the realization of the flourishing of temporal, sensuous, material subjects with ethical poise and dignity.45 Levinas proceeds in contrast through an infinite (which is not merely the negation of the finite) asymmetrical (in contrast to hierarchically superior) responsibility to the other’s vulnerable sensible existence and suffering.

Finite temporal material life is thought by neonatural law theorists to entail the elimination of human dignity through the reduction of validity to facticity, and universal natural law to positive historical laws. But is this the case? Can natural law be “naturalized” in the sense of being linked to material sensuous existence?

Levinas’s reading of Bloch concludes that love—the receiving of the other—is as “strong as death” and the anxiety of “my own death.”46 Bloch expresses not only the love of the other in response to the other’s mortality and vulnerability, instead of the Heideggerian “my own,” but also solidarity to others in their material life. Bloch’s unrestricted solidarity offers a correction to Levinas. Levinas’s Bloch offers an alternative interpretation of time based on the other rather than the self, which my argument in this chapter has extended from Heidegger’s Dasein to the soul of the natural law tradition. The nothingness in the utopian confrontation with the present is not the nothingness of death, as Levinas noted, but it is also not the nothingness of a nontemporal eternity. Levinas’s reading of Bloch reveals how temporal material configurations of labor and hope reveal dignity and glory in a time that is defined neither by death (Heidegger) nor deathlessness (as in natural law).

If the arguments of Bloch and Levinas are correct, the materiality of concrete sensuous life does not entail the elimination of dignity. The early Marx could contest the commodification of existence and labor by presupposing the distinction between price and dignity that capitalist economic processes dismantle. Dignity is not solely a concern of Marx’s early works. In Towards an Unknown Marx, Dussel analyzes how the exteriority

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