The Subject and its Other According To Levinas

In this second part on the Subject and its Other, I give an overview of Levinasian Ethics and explain how it shifts the discourse on the Other, and some feminist philosophers are listening in.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): The Face-to-Face Encounter With The Other

Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking on intersubjectivity and the Other begins from the rejection of previous models that don’t seem to allow for an authentic encounter with the Other. Levinas’ begins Totality and Infinity (1961) by criticizing Husserl in particular for imagining that our relation to others is, first and foremost, epistemic — that it is a question of knowledge and of how we can come to know the Other. This desire to know the Other has connotations of comprehending and controlling. (If you’ve ever had that friend who tries to tell you who you are and what you like, against your own understanding of yourself, you know this controlling mindset.) For Levinas, the Other is not there to be known, and the Other resists our attempts to comprehend them in this controlling way.

Instead, Levinas insists that our relation to others is first and foremost a concern for Ethics, and Ethics is founded precisely in and through what he describes as the face-to-face encounter with the Other’s otherness — “radical alterity” is the phrase he adopts. Imagine that, faced with someone whom you’ve just met for the first time, instead of assuming that they are just like you because of an assumed underlying humanity, so that you only see in them what you recognize as a mirror of your own self, you maintain a certain curiosity and openness to them. Not reducing the Other and their experience to what you can already understand, this seems like the right approach. But it is a difficult attitude to maintain because we do have a tendency to reduce complexity, even at the level of perception we only see what is most relevant to us in the moment. So it requires effort to maintain an ethical attitude towards the Other.

This encounter with radical alterity calls us out, can calls us to our responsibility to the Other, a responsibility that cannot be done away with. In short, our responsibility to the Other is irreducible. Our ability to respond to the need of the Other, that is how our humanity is forged.

Finally, the face-to-face encounter with the Other inaugurates language and thought, and therefore, it is the condition for the possibility for knowledge of any kind. Levinas comes to be well known for his assertion that Ethics precedes Epistemology, a purposeful reversal of the usual hierarchy that places knowledge above all else.

Here it seems that we are going in the right direction, however Levinas’ language around the Other is not grounded in curiosity, joy, or building on shared experiences despite differences, but often he evokes images of hunger and pain in the encounter. Understandably, he is wanting to exorcise and remnant of any self-interest in the encounter, and his historical frame of reference as a Jewish philosopher and theologian in the post-World War II era is the Jewish holocaust. So for him, the Other produces a crisis in us, one that arguably is the product of conflicts in Europe and it’s colonies.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): Woman As Other

In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir appropriates Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic to argue that woman has historically been constituted as Other with respect to an assumed masculine Subject. Just as the Slave must lay claim to its own independent self-consciousness, woman too must come to realize man’s dependence on her, and come to make a claim to her own independent self-consciousness. That is, when women assert man’s otherness with respect to them, then an authentic woman’s standpoint will emerge to make women’s economic, political, and social projects possible.

One of the chief examples that Levinas uses to develop his idea of alterity is that of sexual different and the feminine. In a long footnote to the Introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir addresses Levinas’ appropriation of the feminine as a figure for alterity. She argues that Levinas, while recognizing the concept of the Other, paradoxically reinforces traditional gendered roles by associating otherness specifically with a mysterious feminine. Beauvoir contends that Levinas’s philosophy situates women as the quintessential Other in a way that perpetuates their marginalization, highlighting how this characterization solidifies women’s status as secondary to men who are assumed to be the subjects in this equation. This, she argues, undermines women’s autonomy and perpetuates their subordinate position in society. It’s like he walked right up to the Other and still missed the point entirely.

Luce Irigaray (1930-present): The Feminine Other

Luce Irigaray, on the other hand, will find something of value in Levinas’ assertion of sexual difference as par excellence alterity. For her, the radical alterity of the feminine is the starting point for thinking about irreducible differences between sexually differentiated subjects, and sexual different is the basis for all other social and political differences according to Irigaray. (She has defended this difficult assertion tooth and nail….) Moving away from the idea of sexually indifferent subjects, subjects that end up being modelled always on masculine subjectivities, Irigaray argues strongly for sexual difference as the starting point for understanding how subjectivity emerges, and she brings a psychoanalytic perspective to the question.

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray argues that women are conceived of in spatial terms — as wombs and containers for man’s transcendence through time. In order to truly think (sexual) difference, we need to rethink the metaphysics of time and space. In other words, the problem of the Other is, at its core, a problem for Metaphysics and Ontology (the study of Being). It is a bold claim that she bears out in the rest of her work. It gets pretty gnarly, but the Cartesian mind/body division that kicks off Husserl’s skepticism over the possibility of knowing others outside our own minds, this is based on an ontological hierarchy between time/subject/mind/masculinity as opposed to space/object/body/femininity. In this way, Irigaray tries to get behind and under the problem of intersubjectivity, to offer an alternative framing. For her, the problem of the Other is anchored in a metaphysics that establishes a false dichotomy that has yet to be interrogated. Until we grapple with this underlying reality, we will not be able to imagine true difference, or live with radical alterity without seeking to obliterate it.