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Identity, Alterity and Racial Difference in Levinas

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Identity and Difference

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Abstract

The concept of identity has changed considerably over the past half century as philosophical theories concerning the subject have been transformed by positivism, post-war experience, the collapse of Empire, the rise of multiculturalism, feminism, and the post-structuralist and postcolonial deconstruction of the subject. Emmanuel Levinas is one voice in a large company of theorists who have criticised the claims of Enlightenment reason and the centrality of the Cartesian subject and the category of identity; his critique of Western philosophy has been hugely influential across a broad range of disciplines. In particular, Levinas’ description of the self in relation to the Other, a relationship he describes as essentially ‘ethical’, decentres the Cartesian subject and opens up a positive account of difference that places ethics at the heart of identity and alterity. His thought is also evocative in an extra-philosophical sense as the reintroduction of Jewish concepts and narrative into philosophy disrupts the univocality of a tradition that has worked hard to eradicate its theological inheritance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Simon Critchley, “Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them”, Theory, 32(2) (2004), pp. 172–185.

  2. 2.

    Cf. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the other woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: The Athlone Press, 2001).

  3. 3.

    Luce Irigaray, “What Other are We Talking About?”, Yale French Studies, 104: Encounters with Levinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 68.

  4. 4.

    Irigaray, “What Other are we Talking About?”, p. 69.

  5. 5.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 166–167.

  6. 6.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.

  7. 7.

    Robert Bernasconi, “Who Is My Neighbour? Who Is the Other? Questioning “the generosity of Western thought’”, Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Volume IV: Beyond Levinas, eds. Clare Katz and Lara Trout (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), pp. 5–30.

  8. 8.

    Simone Drichel, “Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial”, Levinas Studies, 7 (2012), pp. 21–42.

  9. 9.

    John E. Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 68.

  10. 10.

    Raoul Mortley, ed., “Emmanuel Levinas”, in French Philosophers in Conversation (New York: Routledge, 1991), 18; cf. Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 182–194. Caygill has raised questions in relation to Levinas’ published essays also.

  11. 11.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 137.

  12. 12.

    Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, p. 149.

  13. 13.

    Cf. Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial, pp. x–xvii, 1–16; Oona Eisenstadt, “Eurocentrism and Colorblindness”, Levinas Studies, 7, (2012), pp. 43–62; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics, Radical Philosophy, and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization”, Levinas Studies, 7 (2012), pp. 63–94; Robert Eaglestone, “Postcolonial Thought and Levinas’s Double Vision”, in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (eds.), Radicalizing Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2010), pp. 57–68.

  14. 14.

    Cf. Louis Blond, “Levinas, Europe and Others: The Postcolonial Challenge to Alterity”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 48(2) (2016), pp. 260–275.

  15. 15.

    Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996).

  16. 16.

    Cf. Dussel, The Underside of Modernity, pp. 49–73; Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity”, boundary 2, 20(3) (1993), pp. 65–76.

  17. 17.

    Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1999), pp. 89–92.

  18. 18.

    Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 179.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., p. 180.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., pp. 184–185.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 185.

  22. 22.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 233.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 244.

  24. 24.

    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) §§25–27, 74.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., §25.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., §26.

  27. 27.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 21–30.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., p. 304.

  29. 29.

    Peperzak, Adriaan, “From Intentionality To Responsibility”, A. B. Dallery and C. E. Scott (eds.), The Question of the Other (Albany, NY: S. U. N. Y. Press, 1989), p. 17.

  30. 30.

    Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity”, in Nidra Poller (trans.), Humanism of the Other (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois), p. 58.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 59.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., p. 59.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 60.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., pp. 62–65.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 62.

  36. 36.

    Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 294–298; Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 5–7, 45ff.

  37. 37.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Dordrecht: Kluwver, 1991), p. 148.

  38. 38.

    Levinas, “Without Identity”, 66.

  39. 39.

    Simone Drichel, “Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial”, Levinas Studies, 7 (2012), pp. 21–42.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 27.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., pp. 26–28.

  42. 42.

    Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial, p. 3.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., pp. 2–13.

  44. 44.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo¸ trans. Richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 85.

  45. 45.

    Cf. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 11.

  46. 46.

    Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (London: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., p. 86.

  48. 48.

    Eisenstadt, “Eurocentrism and Colorblindness”, pp. 43–62.

  49. 49.

    Cf. Robert Bernasconi, “The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances”, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 284–299; Bernasconi, “Who Is My Neighbour?”, pp. 5–30; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics, Radical Philosophy, and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization”, Levinas Studies, 7 (2012), pp. 63–94.

  50. 50.

    Bernasconi, “Who Is My Neighbour?”, p. 17.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 18.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., p. 25.

  53. 53.

    Maldonado-Torres, “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics”, pp. 89–91.

  54. 54.

    Drichel, “Face to Face with the Other Other”, p. 39.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., p. 40.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., pp. 41–42.

  57. 57.

    Emmanuel Levinas, “Signification and Sense”“ [1964] in Nidra Poller (trans.), Humanism of the Other (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 36.

  58. 58.

    Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial, 7.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., p. 200.

  60. 60.

    Cf. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 7.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., pp. 7–8.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 16.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., p. 8.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 12n20.

  65. 65.

    Cf. Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial, pp. 37–48, 200. Drabinski inherits his account from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and describes the new inscriptions on the body as ‘incarnate historiography’ where incarnate traditionally would be describing the mind or the word made flesh.

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  1. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Louis Blond

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  1. University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Rafael Winkler

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Blond, L. (2016). Identity, Alterity and Racial Difference in Levinas. In: Winkler, R. (eds) Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40427-1_11

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