The face of the Other and the trace of God : essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas PDF
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The Face of the Othera nd the Trace of God PERSPECTIVIENS C ONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY John D. Caputo, series editor 1. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with JacquesD errida. 2. MichaelB arber, Etlzical Hermeneutics:R ationality in Enrique Dussel's Plzilosophy of Liberation. 3. Michael Strawser, BotlalAnd: Reading Kierkegawd-From Irony to Edijication. 4. James H. Olthuis,e d., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. 5. James Swindal, Rejlection Revisited: Jiirgen Habermas's Discur- sive Theory of Truth. 6. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodem. Second edition. 7. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to lncor- poration-Essays on Late Existentialism. 8. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmunuel Levinns: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. 9. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Toda y. THE FACE OF THE OTHER AND THE TRACE OF GOD Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas edited by BLOECHL JEFFREY Fordham University Press New York 2000 Copyright 0 2000 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in anyf orm or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other- except for brief quotationisn printed reviews, withoutt he prior permission of the publisher. ISSN 10894938 Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, No. 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The face of the Other and the traceo f Cod : essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel LCvinas /Jeffrey Bloechl, editor.”lst ed. p. cm.-(Perspectives in continental philosophy; no. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-1965-8 (hc)-ISBN 0-8232-1966-6 (pbk) 1. LBvinas,E mmanuel. I. Bloechl,J effrey,1 966-1 1.S eries. B2430.L484 F32 2000 194-dc21 99-049540 Printed in the United States of America 00 01 02 03 04 4 5 3 2 1 First Edition CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Editor’s Note ix Abbreviations xi Introduction xiii Jeflrey Bloechl PART IR. ELATIONWS ITH OTHERS 1. The Body of Difference 3 Didier Franck 2. The Phenomenology of EPOSA: Reading of Totality and Ztlfinity, 1V.B 30 Paul Moyaert 3. The Encounter with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin 43 Rudolf Bernet 4. The Alterity of the Stranger and the Experience of the Alien 62 Robert Bemzasconi 5. Sensibility, Trauma, and the Trace: Levinas from Phenomenology to the Immemorial 90 Michael Newmnn 6. Ethics as First Philosophy and Religion 130 Jeflrey Bloechl PART1 1. THE QUESTIOONF G OD 7. The Bible Gives to Thought: Levinas on the Possibility and Proper Natureo f Biblical Thinking 165 Roger B.urggraeve vi CONTENTS 8. The Significance of Levinas's Work for Christian Thought 184 Adriaan T. Peperzak 9. Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence in 200 K ierkegaarLd e vinas and Mero2d WestphaZ 10. The Voice withoNu at mHe o: mage to Levinas 224 Jean-Luc Marion 11. The Price of Being Dispossessed: Levinas's God and Freud's Trauma 243 Rudi Visker 12. Adieu-sans Dieu: Derrida and Levinas 276 John D. Capto Contributors 313 . . . " ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Although all of the essays in this volume are published here for the first time in English, several have appeared previously in other languages or have been delivered as lectures. DidierF ranck‘s text wasp ublished first as “Le corps de la diffkrence,” in Philosophie no. 34 (1992). Paul Moy- aert’s “Phenomenologyo f Eros” is the text of a paper given at a confer- ence onL evinas’sw ork held in Leusden in 1987, and published as “Fenomenologie van de eros” in Etntnunuel Levinas over psyche, kunst en maul, ed. H. Bleijendaal et al. (Baarn: Ambo, 1991). An earlier version of Rudolf Bernet’s “The Encounterw ith the Stranger” was read before a gathering of Eastern and Western philosophers in Hong Kong in April 1996. Portions of Jeffrey Bloechl’s “Ethics as First Philosophy and Religion” have been taken from a lecture given in April 1997 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Adriaan Peperzak’s essay is a revised version of a paper given at a conference held in Aachen and Simpelveld in 1982,a nd published as “Das Bedeutung des Werkes von Emmanuel Levinas hr das Christliche Denken” in Veran- twortung fur den Anderen -urd die Frage w h G ott, ed. H. H. Henrix (Aachen: Einhard Verlag, 1984). Jean-Luc Marion’s homage to Levinas is the unpublished text of a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1996; parts of it have since appeared in his book Etant don& (Paris: P.U.F., 1997). Rudi Visker’s contribution is a revised version of his “De prijs van de onteigening: Levinas, God en het trauma,” which appeared in De God uand enkerse n dichters (Amsterdam: Boom, 1997). Portions of John Caputo’s “Adieu-sans Dieu” were given at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association inD ecem- ber 1997. The contributions by Franck and Marion were translated from the French by Jeffrey Bloechl. The contributions by Moyaert, Burg- graeve, and Visker were translated from the Dutch by Jeffrey Bloechl. Peperzak’s contribution was translated from the German by Gregory Renner. Both translators thank the authors for the generous help and attention. Thee ditor also wishest o thank Jonathan Lawrence, for count- less improvements on the final text, and John Caputo, for graciously inviting it into his series on contemporary Continental thought. This Page Intentionally Left Blank EDITOR’S NOTE The reader will notice from the following list of abbreviations as well as bibliographical information for each contribution in this volume that English translations have been cited in, by far, most but not quite all possible instances. Owing to the technical difficulties always involved in reading and explicating a complex thinker, several con- tributors have sometimes preferred to work and argue directly from Levinas’s French.I n my “Acknowledgments” I have already ex- pressed my gratitude to them for taking up the extra work this has implied for an English rendering. Levinas is notoriously difficult to translate even from his own lexi- con and perspective into one’s own, and quite apart from the chal- lenge of his terse, yet lyrical French. This is due mainly to his use of capital letters-as well as irregular refrain from doing so-precisely withs ome of his mosti mportants ets of concepts:( impersonal) “other”/(personal) “other,” “being”/”beings,” and what is rendered variously as “infinity” and “the infinite.’’ There is no clear rule for when to capitalize these words within Levinas’s own work, and con- siderable discord on the point among his interpreters. Needless to say, decisions especially about autre and autrui are already enough to imply a specific interpretation of much of his argument as a whole, and whether one intendsi t or not. It is with this in mind that I have sought a middle path between a wish to remind the reader of Levi- nas’s extreme definitions of those terms and, of course, a responsibil- ity to preserve the intentions of eacha uthorc ontributing to the volume. What has resulted is a general tendency to capitalize all in- stances of the word “Other“ (whether autre or autmci)-except, of course, in secondary literature-wherever it seems necessary to clar- ify that it is indeed Levinas’s particular definition at stake. A similar practice has been followed regarding the Heideggerian distinction between “Being” (Sein) and ‘beings” (Seiende), which, however, is additionally complicated by Levinas’s own growing insistence on re- ducing Sein to a lowercase, verbal ‘being” (&e). As for Levinas’s
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