Abstract
In thinking the question of responsibility between Levinas and Heidegger, it is both a movement of expropriation towards the other and a relation to a secret that come to the fore. Levinas’ entire itinerary of thought has been structured by the effort to escape the closure of philosophies of totality, to exceed the horizon as such, to move beyond ontology, a movement towards exteriority or towards the other that has taken with it and redefined the very concept of responsibility. No longer a responsibility for oneself, or for one’s actions, but a responsibility for the other and for the sake of the other. However, can the other only be said to lie beyond being, if being, as Heidegger would show, is itself the beyond, the transcendent pure and simple? Being might include a relation to the other, which explains why Heidegger thematizes being-with as a constitutive feature of existence. To that extent, one may seek to inquire into the ontological senses of responsibility. Heidegger’s thought of being entails a profound philosophy of responsibility. But it is no longer developed in terms of subjectivity, even in its reversal. Rather, Heidegger shows that one is ultimately responsible for an inappropriable, a secret or mystery. This secret of being represents a sense of otherness that is not reduced, as in Levinas, to the “other human being,” that is, within a subjectivist, anthropocentric horizon. I will explore in the following pages the terms of this debate.
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Notes
- 1.
Emmanuel Levinas. Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 105. Hereafter cited as EN, followed by page number.
- 2.
Emmanuel Levinas. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Kluwer Academic, Le livre de poche, 1996), p. 252. Hereafter cited as AE, followed by page number. All translations mine.
- 3.
Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), p.46. Hereafter cited as GD, followed by page number.
- 4.
See Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme. (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), rendered in an English translation as Humanism of the Other (University of Illinois Press, 2005).
- 5.
See for instance Ethics and Infinity, p. 37–38 (hereafter cited as EI), and Is It Righteous to Be?, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 31–37.
- 6.
On Levinas’ role in the early reception of Heidegger in France, see Dominique Janicaud’s Heidegger en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), in particular pp. 31–36.
- 7.
Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
- 8.
The French word “visage” immediately gives a human character to the face as thematized by Levinas, as visage refers exclusively to the human face, whereas the term “gueule” refers to the animal’s “face”. The humanism of Levinas’ thought is thus already inscribed linguistically, in the French language.
- 9.
See my The Origins of Responsibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. Press, 2010).
- 10.
Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit (1927), ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), GA 2, p. 12. English translations used: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962). Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Revised and with a Foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). Hereafter cited as SZ, followed by original pagination.
- 11.
On this point, I take the liberty of referring the reader to my Heidegger and the Subject (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999).
- 12.
Martin Heidegger. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p.116.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 60. Hereafter cited as Contributions, followed by page number.
- 14.
See Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, rev. and exp., ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 237.
- 15.
Martin Heidegger. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 100.
- 16.
Martin Heidegger, The Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 159.
- 17.
On this question, see my “Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible,” Research in Phenomenology, 38, Spring 2008.
- 18.
Martin Heidegger. Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. O. Saame et I. Saame-Speidel, 2nd edn, 2001 (Wintersemester 1928/29), vol. 27 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), p. 340. Hereafter cited as GA 27, followed by page number.
- 19.
Martin Heidegger. What is Called Thinking? English translation by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 7–10, 17–18. Hereafter cited as WCT, followed by page number.
- 20.
Jacques Derrida. “Autrui est secret parce qu’il est autre” [Autrui is secret because it is other], interview by Antoine Spire, Le Monde de l’Education (July–August 2001), www.lemonde.fr/mde/ete2001/derrida.html.
References
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Raffoul, Francois. 2008. Derrida and the ethics of the im-possible. Research in Phenomenology, 38, Spring.
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Raffoul, F. (2016). Responsibility for a Secret: Heidegger and Levinas. In: Foran, L., Uljée, R. (eds) Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 86. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39232-5_10
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