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Maternity as the Gift of Responsibility:

On the Concept of Moral Economy in Levinas’s Otherwise than Being

I. Introduction

At the core of Emmanuel Levinas’s late major work, Otherwise than Being (OTB), is an

apparently simple thesis: human subjectivity is not reducible to consciousness. Implicit in this

thesis is another: that human dignity is not reducible to what philosophers have typically

considered to be the highest achievement of conscious mental life, i.e. the production of

theoretical knowledge. Now, when reading OTB, it is first of all important to understand that

Levinas does not maintain such theses merely on some irrationalist whim, but in fact holds them

for what are essentially philosophical reasons. Namely, for Levinas the defining feature or eidos

of human subjectivity is an obligation of infinite responsibility that relates me to the other; to

interpret such a relation as a consciously assumed and therefore finite commitment, would be to

conceive of responsibility in a way that violates the identity condition of this concept as Levinas

understands it. It therefore follows for him that, in any philosophical investigation into human

subjectivity, if we were to delimit the range of our inquiry to the field of consciousness and its

corollaries (understanding, reason, etc.), we would have always already occluded the 'object' of

our study: responsibility. We would, to echo one of the refrains of OTB, have already forgotten

what is better than Being: the Good.

In other words, if Levinas is right to say that humanity is founded upon a relationship of

infinite responsibility to the other, at stake in thinking such responsibility differently than a

consciously contracted obligation, is not only the possibility of developing any kind of ‘ethics’

that would be worthy of the name, but also nothing less than the ability to give an account of

ourselves as distinctly human beings. For humanity, at least as Levinas conceives of it, to be

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accounted for in a philosophical discourse, a reorientation of the very concept of philosophical

inquiry would thus be required: instead of the love (philia) of wisdom (sophia), philosophy

would need to be understood as the wisdom of love; instead of taking one’s cues solely from

contents immanent to one’s own consciousness (phenomenology), one would need to account for

the necessarily transcendent conditions of what Levinas calls “the extraordinary and everyday

event of my responsibility for the faults or the misfortunes of others” (10), “even the little that

there is, even the simple ‘Après vous, Monsieur!’” (117). Such is the task of OTB. 

Leaving aside de facto objections that can be raised against its humanism, there seems to

me at least two groups of questions that Levinas’s thesis might provoke on its own terms:

(1) Isn’t it contradictory or even dangerous to separate freedom from responsibility as Levinas does here? How can I be ‘responsible’ for the other if not but for the fact that I am also able to voluntarily, which is to say consciously, choose such a commitment, as an (at least potentially) autonomous agent?

(2) In what else could responsible subjectivity consist if not consciousness? To think responsibility as Levinas advocates, is one not committed to some concept of the unconscious? Doesn’t Levinas then necessarily find himself in conversation with a discourse that he for the most part wanted to avoid or dismiss, i.e. psychoanalysis? Would such a conversation only yield the psychoanalytic conclusion that what Levinas describes as infinite responsibility is nothing more than a pathological feeling of guilt: moral masochism?

The aim of this paper is to defend and deepen the core theses of OTB by way of a response to

these two sets of questions. It is divided accordingly into two major parts and a conclusion.

In part one, I argue for the need to situate Levinas’s perhaps alarming conception of

responsibility sans freedom within the context of his critique of liberalism; as we will see,

Levinas's mature arguments about responsible subjectivity as being irreducible to consciousness

in OTB emerged from longstanding doubts about the autonomous subject of liberal discourse.

According to Levinas, this secularized, Enlightenment picture of subjectivity, presupposing as it

does an untenable mind-body dualism, is a mere derivative of a once robust, Judeo-Christian

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doctrine of human finitude and remorse; insofar as it has been dislocated from its original

theological context, however, this Western ideal of the self-conscious subject and its freedom has

degenerated into bourgeois narcissism. It is for this reason that any concept of responsibility that

is dependent upon a classical concept of freedom will be for Levinas untenable.

In Levinas’s estimation, the stakes of liberal nihilism could not be higher: the devaluation

of the value of freedom under conditions of liberalism -- and with it the only concept of

responsibility the West has ever known -- forms the element of what he calls, in an early paper,

“the philosophy of Hitlerism.” Importantly, Hitlerism is for Levinas not reducible to the actual

philosophy of National Socialists, but instead refers to a much more pervasive metaphysic of

bodily (and, by implication, racial) immanence -- a kind of dialectical inversion of liberalism’s

disembodied subject. Levinas’s explanation of the decline of liberalism and the rise of Hitlerism

is thus founded upon a phenomenology of embodiment: whereas liberalism, in its commitment to

the value of freedom, is precariously constituted by a disavowal of a fundamental experience of

identity between the self and the body, Hitlerism’s force derives from its affirmation of corporeal

facticity. Levinas's mature conception of subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness, I want to

argue, can be helpfully understood in the context of this problematic: on the one hand, insofar as

it figures human subjectivity as a responsibility to the other, Levinas's philosophy is engaged in a

struggle against Hitlerian immanentism; on the other hand, such a struggle is waged with a

profound sense of disillusionment about the efficacy of any appeal to a dualistic or liberal

conception of responsibility. Thus Levinas’s insistence that responsible subjectivity requires

other grounds than those of consciousness and autonomy.

As I hope to show in Part II, Levinas finds such grounds in his pivotal, 1968 article

"Substitution" (the germ of what would later become OTB). Specifically, rather than attempting

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to resurrect the animal rationale of the West’s perennial moral tradition, Levinas counters the

Hitlerian picture of the subject at its very core: he offers an alternative interpretation of the

experience of self-body identity upon which Hitlerism is founded. For Levinas, as we will see, to

recuperate the concept of responsibility is to necessarily also recuperate the concept of the body--

both from liberal disavowal and Hitlerian mania. Specifically, Levinas argues that responsible

subjectivity can only be meaningfully understood as rooted in a relationship of concern that the

sensible human body establishes (despite me) between me and the other, prior to my self-

consciousness. What is otherwise than consciousness then for Levinas? The body.

However, as we will also see, if the body is to do the kind of ethical work that Levinas

wants, it is also necessary for him to radically reinterpret this concept. As Levinas defines it, in

an important footnote in OTB: the body is "neither an obstacle opposed to the soul, nor a tomb

that imprisons it" (the liberal interpretation of embodiment), but is instead "that by which the self

is susceptibility itself.” He continues: “Incarnation is an extreme passivity; to be exposed to

sickness, suffering, death, is to be exposed to compassion, and, as a self, to the gift that costs"

(195). It is this last phrase -- ‘the gift that costs’ -- that will (among others like it) guide the

interpretation of OTB developed here. For in those moments in the book when Levinas argues

that corporeal sensibility conditions my relatedness to the other, he also always characterizes this

bond in terms of a logic of giving. For Levinas, the extraordinary and everyday event of my

responsibility for the faults and misfortunes of others, is only explicable on the basis of what he

calls "gratuity" -- a "dealing" of "signifyingness" by me to the other that cannot be accounted for

among any of my conscious acts. This paradoxical logic of givenness or donation implies that the

donor-subject (me) can never be said to have transitively given any thing to the donee (the

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other); the gift or present of my responsibility has, as it were, never been present. For Levinas,

the subjectivity of the human subject is the gift of me-for-the-other: substitution.

In emphasizing this logic of the gif in my account of substitution, I thus emphasize

Levinas’s necessary recourse to some conception of what I call “moral economy.” By linking

responsibility and economy, I argue that Levinas finds himself in conversation with a perhaps

unlikely interlocutor: Nietzsche. In particular, I suggest that it is instructive when reading OTB to

consider Nietzsche's derivation, in the Genealogy’s second essay, of the apparently spiritual

concept of responsibility or 'guilt' [Schuld] from what he refers to as “the very material” (39) or

economic concept of 'debts' [Schulden]. Specifically, while a Nietzschean might hear in

Levinas's invocation of an infinite responsibility to the other nothing more than an extreme case

of bad conscience, I hope to show that Levinas's concept of moral economy (substitution)

confounds some of the presuppositions of Nietzschean moral economy. Drawing on a distinction

from Jacques Derrida's Given Time, I argue that, unlike Nietzsche, who conceives of economy in

terms of ownership (in terms of what one 'has'), the Levinasian moral economy is founded upon

the transfer of oneself (what one 'is'). While Levinas would likely agree with Nietzsche's critique

of the concept of responsibility on the latter's terms, he would thus also likely hear in it only a

critique of the narcissistic calculus of self-interest characteristic of the liberal moral economy. By

defending a concept of disinterestedness beyond property, propriety, and the present of

consciousness, I thus argue that Levinas articulates a novel vision of moral economy.

Finally, in addition to the comparison with Nietzsche, in the conclusion of the paper I

will also argue that Levinas’s conception of the giving body invites comparisons with the

concept of corporeality found in the writings of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Notably,

throughout the third chapter of OTB ('Sensibility and Proximity'), Levinas figures the "sensible

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experience" (77) that conditions my relationship to other as "a maternity"; this pre-discursive

signifyingness that is dealt to the other, he says, ultimately "signifies [...] in nourishing, clothing,

lodging, in maternal relations" (77). As we will see, much like Levinas, in her account of

infantile development, Klein figures the relationship of human beings to goodness as founded

upon enjoyment and exteriority; the Kleinian concept of the 'good breast' -- the maternal body --

is "the prototype of maternal goodness, inexhaustible patience and generosity, as well as of

creativeness" (Envy and Gratitude 180). Moreover, I will contend that Klein's characterization of

infantile development as founded upon a non-conscious phase of "partial-object relations" -- of

introjections and projections, of fantasied transferences of oneself into the body of other and of

the other into the body of oneself -- is analogous to Levinas's account of substitutive subjectivity.

One of my aims here will be to suggest the salience of Klein's account of infantile development

to ethical thought. However, I also will identify some dis-analogies between the account of

maternal relations in Klein and Levinas, outline a potential Kleinian criticism of Levinas, and

make some suggestions about how this line of inquiry might be pursued further.

II. Freedom and Responsibility: Beyond the Moral Economy of Liberalism

In March of 1934, writing amidst the ascendance of Hitler to power in Germany, a young

and relatively unknown philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas published an article entitled

"Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" in the Catholic journal Esprit. As he would later go

on to clarify, in a "Prefatory Note" that appeared with the article upon its re-publication in 1990,

Levinas's intention in this early paper was not so much to critique the actual philosophical views

of Hitlerians, as it was to argue that National Socialism is symptomatic of a more general

tendency of Western culture: "an essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led

by logic and against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself" (64).

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For the young Levinas, then, the 'philosophy' of Hitlerism lies neither in "some

contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological

misunderstanding." Rather, it is rooted in what he calls "elementary feelings" that in themselves

"harbor a philosophy," expressing in turn what he calls "a soul's principal attitude towards the

whole of reality and its own destiny." What then is Hitlerism? What is 'the soul's principle

attitude towards the whole of reality and its own destiny' for this so-called philosophy?

Significantly, Levinas foregrounds his account of Hitlerism by first providing a

description of the other metaphysical positions that have prevailed in Western culture, beginning

with that of Judeo-Christian religion. Levinas associates this worldview with what he calls "the

spirit of freedom" (64), or "the feeling that man is absolutely free in his relations with the world

and the possibilities that solicit action from him". Despite his apparent enchainment to the

becoming of time and history, man is ultimately freed from his attachments to the past by his

capacity for remorse -- "the painful expression of a radical powerlessness to redeem the

irreparable" (65) -- and the pardon of God. This is because man is able to both freely enter into

covenant with God and terminate the divine contract: "The soul's detachment is not an abstract

state; it is the concrete and positive power to become detached and abstract" (66). Finally,

Levinas argues that this conception of the soul's freedom in turn formed the basis for the later,

Enlightenment picture of the soul, and in particular its emphasis on the sovereignty of human

reason: "In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christian leitmotif

of freedom pervades this autonomy." Such is the metaphysical position of classical European

culture.

Now, in the second section of the essay Levinas briefly considers the system of thought

that first called into question this interpretation of man: Marxism. In its refusal to see the human

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spirit "as pure freedom, or a soul floating above any attachment" (66) -- in its insistence on the

determination of human existence by its material needs -- Marxism "stands in opposition to

European culture or, at least, breaks the harmonious curve of its development" (67).

Nevertheless, for Levinas such a fissure is only partial. For although Marxism lays such

emphasis on the determined situation of the soul, it ultimately engages in an analysis of such

determination in the name of a struggle for emancipation that promises liberation: "To become

conscious of one's social situation is, even for Marx, to free oneself of the fatalism entailed by

that situation." It is through this account of Marxism as the semblance of a rupture with liberal

culture that Levinas articulates the features of an interpretation of human existence that would

actually constitute a genuine break with it. Specifically, whereas the "social bewitchment" of

individual consciousness described by Marxism is ultimately "foreign to its [consciousness's]

essence," for Levinas a truly anti-liberal picture of subjectivity "would be possible only if the

situation to which he was bound was not added to him but formed the very foundation of his

being." He then suggests that ultimately only a certain interpretation of our experience of the

body would fulfill such a condition.

In the third and final section of the essay, Levinas explores the metaphysical position

whose interpretation of the body marks a definitive break with liberalism: Hitlerism. In order to

demonstrate the radical character of this interpretation, he first considers some traditional

accounts of corporeal experience. Interestingly, in language that echoes the negative definitions

of definition of the body (cited above) in OTB, Levinas describes how for the traditional view the

body is a mere "object of the external world" to be tolerated: "It weighs on Socrates like the

chains that weigh him down in the prison at Athens; it encases him like the very tomb that awaits

him". Under such a view, which Levinas identifies, not only with Socratic philosophy, but also

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"every variation in ethics" from Christianity to modern liberalism, corporeal bondage, though a

brute fact, ultimately only matters insofar as it is to be overcome. Levinas is particularly

interested in the tendency of classical theories of embodiment to "relegate to an inferior level,

and regard as a stage to be overcome, a feeling of identity between our body and ourselves" (68).

It is at this point that the essay takes a turn with (as is so often the case in Levinas's

essays) a series of rhetorical questions that call into question this set of views about the body that

he has just expounded. Specifically, Levinas seems to break with the classical tradition's

reduction of the feeling of bodily identity on phenomenological grounds:

Not only is it the case that the body is closer and more familiar to us than the rest of the world, and controls our psychological life, our temperament, and

our activities. Beyond these banal observations, there is the feeling of identity. Do we not affirm ourselves in the unique warmth of our bodies long before any

blossoming of the Self that claims to be separate from the body? Do these links that blood establishes, prior to the birth of intelligence, not withstand every test? [...] And in the impasse of physical pain, is it not the case that the sick man experiences the indivisible simplicity of his being when he turns over in his bed of suffering to find a position that gives him peace? Can we not say that analysis reveals in pain the spirit's opposition to this pain, a rebellion or refusal to remain within it and consequently an attempt to go beyond it? But is it not the case that this attempt is characterized from the very beginning as desperate? Does not the rebelling spirit remain ineluctably locked within pain? And is it not this despair that constitutes the very foundation of pain? (68)

For Levinas, despite the dismissal of such experience by the classical tradition of Western

thought, "the feeling can remain that they possess an irreducible originality and that one wishes

to maintain their purity." As he goes on to say: "Physical pain can reveal an absolute position."

And again, in language that will foreshadow the definition of embodiment given in OTB, he then

gives embodiment a positive determination: "The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident

that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is

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an adherence that one does not escape." For Levinas, in other words, an analysis of our bodily

being belies the mind-body dualism that is the cornerstone of Christian and liberal ethics,

constituting a kind of permanent anxiety for this tradition.

It is in this context that Levinas identifies what he calls Hitlerism. Hitlerism represents an

inversion of the liberal evasion of bodily identity insofar as it endows such an enchainment with

a spiritual value: "Man's essence no longer lies in freedom but in a kind of bondage

[enchainement]" (69). Under such a view, the body becomes a site of authenticity and, given its

ties to notions of heredity and blood, becomes the vehicle for the invention of a concept of racial

integrity. In turn, the traditional Western conception of thought and truth, with its emphasis on a

detached rationality that man wields in sovereignty, gives way to to the view that he is linked to

certain ideas and people by blood. It is amidst this alluring conception of corporeal enchainment

that man "sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself" (70). And although this new

conception of truth seems to be particularistic, as with all doctrines of truth, it entails a certain

principle of expansion: the race of one group finds itself under the imperative to subordinate the

rest. This Levinas identifies with Nietzsche's will to power.

So basically, there is the factum of a feeling of identity and body. Liberalism tries to evade or repress this factum. Hitlerism is the return of this repressed fact. It takes form as a complete acceptance of enchainment. It gives up on escape. Escape which is humanity.

II. The Moral Economy of Substitution

In the opening lines of “Principle and Anarchy,” the first section of his 1968 article

“Substitution,” Levinas begins by giving a brief gloss of the Western interpretation of what he

calls “spirituality” (80). By spirituality, Levinas means distinctly human subjectivity, at least as it

has been interpreted by Western philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Such

subjectivity, he explains, has traditionally been identified with consciousness, which has in turn

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been interpreted as an encounter with beings that is mediated by an ideality: logos. According to

this tradition, then, the conscious subject is defined by a movement of identification, both of its

own being and of other beings across a series of moments in time, by means of a detour through

the concept or discourse. Subjectivity has thus always been understood by the West as an

essentially “ontological event” or “ontological adventure.”

However, for Levinas this is not quite an adventure, since, under this view of subjectivity,

“what arrives of the unknown is always disclosed, open, manifest, cast in the mold of the known,

and can never come as a complete surprise.” Between mind and world, in other words, there

could never be a case of total untranslatability, since the very condition of (even obscure or

vague) phenomenality is some kind of conceptuality. To think otherwise would be to fall prey to

what Hegel’s descendants in analytic philosophy have called “the myth of the given,” or what

Jacques Derrida, writing critically of Levinas’s earlier work Totality and Infinity, calls

“empiricism”: “the dream of a purely heterological thought [...] pure though of pure difference

[…] dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens” (151).

Levinas’s article is located within this quandary. Namely, on the one hand it maintains

that accepting the tradition’s identification of spirituality and consciousness presupposes a

problematic interpretation of subjectivity as (at least ultimately) “self-possession, sovereignty,

arche.” This interpretation is problematic because, as we have seen, it can only account for

responsibility as a finite commitment, assumed by the subject in his self-consciousness. On the

other hand, Levinas is well aware of Derrida’s critique that giving an account (logos) of that

which is anarchic with respect to consciousness, is to tarry with the illogical. The relationship to

the other is thus for Levinas, at least at this moment in his writing, not a given to be reckoned by

philosophical discourse, but that which essentially threatens to lead philosophy into non-

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philosophy. Thus in “Substitution” the possibility of such a responsibility to the other is posed as

a question: “How can there be in consciousness an undergoing, or a Passion, whose ‘active’

source would not in any way fall into consciousness?” (82).

In order to develop this phenomenology of the un-phenomenologizable, Levinas makes

use of a series of concepts that he refers to collectively as “ethical language”: proximity,

obsession, persecution. Ethical language is Levinas’s answer to the quandary identified above: it

a series of concepts that refer to that which is excessive of conceptual experience, or concepts

that “communicate” their referent only by a calculated betrayal of this excess. First, Levinas

defines proximity as “a relationship with what cannot be resolved into ‘images’ and exposed […]

a relationship not with what is inordinate with respect to a theme but with what is

incommensurable with it; with what cannot be identified in the kerygmatic logos, frustration of

any schematism.” To begin with, it is important to specify the particular sense in which this

relationship is ‘beyond’ the visible. Levinas does not mean ‘beyond’ in the sense of an absent

relationship that was at one time present. The ‘beyond’ consciousness characteristic of

proximity, Levinas stipulates, loses its “proper signifyingness” as soon as it becomes an object of

intentional experience: “as soon as the logos interrogates, invests, presents, and exposes it” (80-

1). Thinking proximity thus requires thinking this ‘beyond’ in a temporal sense, or in terms of

what Levinas calls the trace. Namely, proximity is only ever ‘experienced’ as the always already

past, as that which troubles the present without ever being itself present. It is temporality of the

trace that characterizes my relationship of responsibility to the neighbor: “an obligation which is

anachronistically prior to every engagement.” Likewise, if consciousness is the arche or

principle of a subjective economy, then the relationship to the other characterized by obsession,

he explains, is an-archic with respect to this economy. In fact, Levinas goes so far as to say that

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this anarchy takes the form of a persecution, insofar as the subject is troubled by the trace of a

past, an obligation to the other, that can never be rendered present, that has afflicted it prior to

any conscious awareness of it. Levinas calls this obsession a “passivity this side of all passivity”

in the sense the subject is not suddenly affected at one moment, does not assume its passivity,

but has always already been affected. The question on which the first section of the essay

concludes is the one with which we began: of how this relationship that is irreducible to

consciousness can nevertheless be registered there.

Levinas’s response to this question takes the form of a new understanding of the Ego. Rather

than reducing the Ego to the for itself of consciousness, Levinas insists on a dimension of egoity

that he calls the “oneself” or ipseity that is prior to such consciousness. “The identity of

ipseisity,” he maintains, is different from that of “the identity which allows a being to enter into

discourse, to be thematized, and to appear to consciousness.” Levinas, in other words, is

attempting to articulate a new conception of identity in the case of the subject. Contrasting his

interpretation of the oneself with “the return to self of consciousness” (84) found in Hegel and

Sartre, Levinas describes ipseity through the metaphor of palpation as a kind of recurrence. For

Levinas it is not that the self recurs in the sense of being divided from itself and then reflecting

upon itself in its own being (Descartes), but rather as a “unity without rest, whose unrest is due

neither to dispersion of exterior givens nor to the flux of time biting into the future while

conserving a past.” In an important sense, the oneself is not a phenomenon: “It does not enter

into the indiscreet play of concealemants and unconcealements” known as the phenomenon”

(85). Significantly, Levinas likens this identity of the oneself to the identity of one’s body: “The

oneself is ‘in itself’ as one is in one’s skin.” For Levinas, then, the return to self or for-itself of

self-consciousness is not the foundation of but rather has as its conditions for possibility the

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recurrence of the oneself: “If the return to self, which is consciousness, the original truth of being

can be accomplished, this is because the recurrence of ipseity has already been produced.” It is

not an “act of folding back” (87) but it “still makes possible the act of consciousness returning to

itself.”

For Levinas the question is how this unity of the self or subjectivity identity, which

founds the subjectivity identity of consciousness, of the self returning to itself as a being, can

nevertheless be irreducible to consciousness, can nevertheless be what he calls “a tension.” As

he says, although the oneself is an identity, it “does not rest in peace under its identity.” This

relation of the oneself to itself is thus not a relation of consciousness of itself, rather a “relation

without a disjunction of the terms that are in relation, a relation which does not lead back upon

an intentional opening upon the self” (86). It is at this point that Levinas once again has recourse

to a corporeal metaphor in his attempt to describe that in human subjectivity which is irreducible

to consciousness:

The ego is in itself like one is in one’s skin, that is to say, cramped, ill at ease in one’s skin, as though the identity of matter weighing on itself concealed a dimension allowing a withdrawal this side of immediate coincidence, as though it concealed a materiality more material than all mater. The ego is an irritability, a susceptibility, or an exposure to wounding and outrage, dealineating a passivity more passive still than any passivity relating to an effect.

Remarkably, for Levinas the expression “‘in one’s skin is not simply a metaphor for the in itself”

(87) and the body “is not merely an image or a figure; above all, it is the in-oneself and

contraction of ipseity.” However, Levinas also stipulates that while the “fundamental concept of

ipseity” is “tied to incarnation” it is nevertheless “not a biological concept.” In an elliptical

passage, he suggests that “movement of contraction” characteristic of ipseity “takes us further”

insofar as it “outlines a schema in corporeality which permits us to attach the biological to a

higher structure.”

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If it is the case, then, that subjective identity is not founded upon the reflection of the self

upon itself in consciousness, but instead the tense palpation of the body, Levinas’s question

becomes: how is corporeal ipseity obsessed? That is: how is identity constitutively defined by a

tension? It is at this point that Levinas gives a further definition of obsession: “a relationship

with the outside, prior to the act that would open up the outside.” For Levinas, then, it must be

the body that establishes this relation. This relationship with the outside is defined as a

persecution in the sense that the outside is related to the oneself in the form of an accusation: an

accusation of its “imperialism”. “The return of the Ego to the Self through obsession is not a self-

reflection, a contemplative turning back on the self, but the reduction of the ego to the self” (88)

“In the obsessive approach, the subject is not detached from itself so as then to become its own

object and to have care for the self.” Identity as constituted by a persecutory accusation. And the

body is the channel of this address. “the responsibility of obsession implies an absolute passivity

of a self that has never been able to depart from itself […] responsibility for the other does not

wait for the freedom of commitment to the other. Without ever having done anything.. I have

always been under accusation: I am persecuted.” “In obsession, the self’s responsibility is, as it

were, a deficit […] Such is the ego’s responsibility for what it did not will, that is to say,

responsibility for others.”

The proximity-obsession-persecution that conditions the ipsety of the subject comes to be

figured as a substitution. The self is able to free itself from itself in substitution, but in an

important sense this is not the freedom of an act: “This freedom is not that of a free intiative, an

absolution which, in substituting for others, escapes relationship with them” (90). Rather than the

ego being equal to itself as in Hegel, the obsessional relation to the other “can be stated only in

terms of inequality.” “Rather, it signifies the passage of the identical to the other in substitution,

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which makes possible sacrifice.” It is not an “event” (90) but rather “a conjunction which

describes the ego”.

“… we discern in obsession a responsibility not resting on any free commitmen, that is, a

responsibility without freedom, a responsibility of the creature; a responsibility of the one who

comes too late into being to avoid supporting it in its entirety. This way of being, without prior

commitment, responsible for the other (autrui), amounts to the fact of human fellowship” (91).

“To be a ‘self’ is always to have one degree responsibility more.” (91)

“The ego is not a being which is capable of expiating for others; it is this original expiation which is involuntary because prior to the initiative of the will”s

“… communication rests on incertitude […] and is possible only as deliberately sacrificed. Communication with the other (autrui) can be transcendence only as a dangerous lfife, as a fine risk to be run. These words receive their full weight when, instead of merely designating a lack of certainty, they express the gratuity of sacrifice” (92)

“persecution is the precise moment where the subject is reached or touched without the mediation of the logos” (93)

“Entering too late into a world created without him, he is responsible over and above what he experiences. And yet, in the same way, he is better for not being a mere effect of this world” (93).

The thought of creation has to be linked to that of maternity.

Negative determination of the unconscious:

“But to speak of the hither side of consciousness is not to turn toward the unconscious. The unconscious, in its clandestinity, rehearses the game played out in consciousness, namely, the search for meaning and truth as the search for the self. While this opening onto the self is certainly occluded and repressed, psychoanalysis still manages to break through and restore self-consciousness,. It follows that our study will not be following the way of the unconscious” (83).

Footnote 42:

Positive determination of the unconscious

Gustafson 17

“Persecution is a traumatism, violence par excellence, without warning, without a priori, without the possibility of apology, without logos. Persecution leads back to a resignation without consent and as a result traverses a night of the unconscious. This is the meaning of the unconscious, the night where the ego comes back to itself in the traumatism of persecution, a passivity more passive still than all passivity, on this side of identity, becoming the responsibility of substitution” (183)

“Prior to the Ego taking a decision, the outside of being, where the Ego arises or is accused, is necessary. This occurs not through freedom but through an unlimited susceptibility, anarchical and without assumption, which, unlike the susceptibility of matter determined by the energy of a cause, is overdetermined by valuing. The birth of the Ego is a gnawing remorse, which is precisely a withdrawing into oneself; this is the absolute recurrence of substation. The condition, or noncondition, of the Self is not originally an auto-affection presupposing the Ego but is precisely an affection by the Other, an anarchic traumatism this side of auto-affection and self-identification, a traumatism of responsibility and not causality” (93-4).

“I am not merely the origin of myself, but am disturbed by the Other. Not judged by the Other, but condemned without being able to speak, persecuted” (94).

As we will see, Levinas explicitly distances his conception of human subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness from the psychoanalytic concept of an unconscious repressed. This clearly makes sense: for Freud repression always designates a past that was at one time present, whereas for Levinas substitution and the trace refer to an absolute past that is foreign to (even as it conditions) the presence of the present. However, Levinas seems unaware of the fact that the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is not limited to the unconscious repressed and that in some of its other articulations comes quite close to his own. In particular, I want to suggest that Levinas's conception of ethical subjectivity bears a particular resemblance to and could benefit from comparison with the account of the depressive position found in the writings of Melanie Klein.

To put it simply: for Levinas the perennial tradition of Western moral thought -- in its various Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian formulations -- all partake of the (ultimately nihilistic) metaphysics of liberalism and thus cannot insure us against the possibility of elemental evil indicated by National Socialism. Responsible subjectivity requires other grounds.

Gustafson 18

Footnote 1: The invocation of Heidegger is not accidental. As is the case in so many of his earlier works, the ambivalent influence of Levinas's former teacher is palpable throughout the Hitlerism essay. Indeed, although he is not named in the 1934 text, in the 1990 preface Levinas invokes Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis when he suggests that the possibility of Hitlerism is also "inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being -- a being, to use the Heideggarian expression, 'dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht" (63).

-- the most notable of these differences being the order of their respective discourses. Whereas

Levinas is careful to stipulate that the ego involved in substitution is not an empirical ego, Klein,

as a psychoanalyst whose theory of mind is ultimately an accessory to empirical observations

taken in the context of a clinical practice, undoubtedly conceives of responsibility as the

achievement of an empirical ego. While responsibility signifies for both Levinas and Klein in

maternal relations, the status of the concept of maternity is thus nevertheless somewhat distinct

in their respective discourses. However, I argue that this difference is ultimately a source of

productive conversation: despite its commitment to “metaphysics,” insofar as Levinasian ethics

is founded upon a phenomenology of embodiment, Kleinian psychoanalysis provides the

descriptive tools for fleshing out an account of the development of responsibility. Klein, unlike

Levinas, we will see, thus also gives us a diagnosis of the vicissitudes of responsible subjectivity

in the lives of human beings -- the denials and evasions that it occasions and the environmental

conditions of its possibility.