Ontotheological Turnings? by Schrijvers Joeri

Author:Schrijvers, Joeri. [Schrijvers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438438955
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2011-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Intermediary Conclusions and the Question concerning Ontotheology

The Turn to ‘Jemeinigkeit’ in Levinas and Marion

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to critique the notion of a ‘reverse intentionality’ at issue in the works of Lacoste, Marion, and Levinas. I have tried to show that the very idea of a reversal of intentionality remains stuck in the problem it wanted to resolve, for time and again the subject under critique is replaced by another instance, whether God, the other, or givenness, that takes on the contours of modern subjectivity. In the remaining chapters of this work, this problem will be examined from the perspective of ontotheology. Indeed, if another subject is needed to decenter the subject, are we not left with the metaphysics that these authors tried to criticize?

And yet, through a reading of Derrida's “Violence and Metaphysics,” we have seen that Levinas adjusts his understanding of the subject in his later works, especially in Otherwise than Being. In this book, Levinas tries to think subjectivity without presupposing that it is first in the nominative in order to, in a second move, decenter it by turning to the other. It is thus not that the human being first constitutes and posits itself and then needs to be decentered—roughly the movement we recognized in Totality and Infinity—it is that we in each case already have a self that is, from the outset, summoned to ethics. It would be too simple to say that for Heidegger this comportment would be an ontological one (being-toward death), whereas for Levinas it would be a matter of taking up one's responsibility for-the-other, since this distinction relies on the fact that both Dasein and Levinas' ‘self’ are depicted from out of the idea of Jemeinigkeit. For Heidegger, ‘mineness’ means saying that being is in each case mine: I cannot talk about being otherwise than from out of my being. And for Heidegger too this ‘existential’ of Dasein serves to distinguish Dasein from entities that are simply present-at-hand or objects. Dasein cannot be taken as, and we know Levinas would readily agree, “an instance or special case of some genus of entities.”1 Such an understanding of the human being from out of the substantiality of present-at-hand objects is precisely what Heidegger wants to avoid, as Raffoul notes: “Dasein is thus mine, not in the sense of a substantial property, but in the sense of a finite and temporal event to assume.”2 Note too that I deliberately used the active “taking one's responsibility,” despite Levinas' insistence on the radical passivity of the self. For the Jemeinigkeit Levinas envisions is precisely a “reverting of heteronomy into autonomy” (OB, 148).3 To be sure, this reverting is, for Levinas, “the very way the infinite passes” (ibid.), but it passes in a particular way and with an ambivalence “that is the exception and subjectivity of the subject” (OB, 148) “to the point that it is I that only says […] this unheard-of obligation” (ibid.). Solus ipse?

Earlier in this text we saw Marion

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