Phenomena-Critique-Logos by Marder Michael;

Author:Marder, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

53. Heidegger, Ontology, 37.

54. Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 41, 60.

55. Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”, 154.

Chapter 3

Ethical Critique

Levinas and the Trembling of Phenomenology

Shaken Grounds: Critique as an Earthquake

In his iconic essay “Violence and Metaphysics”, Derrida writes that “the thought of Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble”.[1] This deceptively simple statement demands infinite exegetical and hermeneutical attention, not only for the sake of a careful theoretical interpretation, inquiring into the meaning of trembling (or, as we would say today, an intense “somatic reaction” provoked by something as ethereal as a thinker’s thought), but also for the purpose of allowing ourselves to be more thoroughly shaken—both practically and theoretically—by placing ourselves right at the epicentre of the tremors eradiating from Levinas’s philosophical oeuvre. Wishing to live up to this demand, we must be capable of experiencing the gravity of an exceptional thought, which, far from being immaterial, induces a violent response of trembling in the totality of our being, affecting us “body and soul”. More precisely, the questions that crop up along the hermeneutical lines Derrida has already anticipated are: Who or what trembles in us when we are exposed to the unsettling thought of Levinas? In what ways and across what channels are its critical reverberations transmitted to everything and everyone it touches, from the philosophical tradition it destabilises to the readers who come across it? How to decipher the effects it can have on our bodies and minds, levelling the distinction between the two? And, finally, what is the sense of ethical potentiality inherent in this modal verb (“can”) devoid of potency or power?

The “thought of Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble”, above all, because it awakens in us the very attitude it describes—namely, a visceral self-critique as the critique of the self: the nonindifference of ethical existence turned, in a heteronomous and unwilled fashion, towards the (nonphenomenal) other, who prompts me to speak—to offer an interminable apologia, which is not at all different from my life—and who inspires my logos. Formally, Levinasian ethics can stimulate this awakening because it occupies the place of the other, the Hebraic stranger, the destitute outsider vis-à-vis the Hellenistic ontological tradition it shakes up.[2] But it is an other who or that insinuates itself intus et in cute[3]—“inside and under the skin” of the same—inhabits the tradition and makes it quake from within, in the manner of the movements of the earth’s mantle that presses upon and sporadically displaces the outer crust. The other elicits a preontological critique of phenomenology without offering any solid evidence, since the intentionality driving the ethical relation to alterity is unfulfilable. But this critique is not entirely privative, either; in the writings of Levinas, ethical experience implies the overabundance of sense, in which nonfulfilment instigates me to further action for the good of the other and intentionality is inverted, so that I am made sense of by the other, who functions in a way similar to the Hegelian/Heideggerian absolute. We tremble because we are no longer in full

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