The Gaze of the Big Other Levinas and Sartre on Racism

Abstract

Levinas is often said to provoke. And although I am hardly in a position to deny this (how could I, since I am obviously obsessed enough by what he has to say, to keep coming back to it?), I cannot help it if the very solemnity with which one refers to the‘provocation of Levinas’makes me wonder whether it is not hiding a less solemn erotics. I cannot help it if, like Alcibiades back then with those who were attracted by Socrates’s powers to provoke, I feel the urge to‘enlighten’Levinas’s co-symposiasts and to warn them against his powers of seduction. For I am at war with the man, and if, again like Alcibiades, I risk insulting those who are under his spell by claiming that he is not at all what they think he is, it is in a sense because this war has become too big for me to fight alone and because I need allies. And as an abounding Levinas-literature shows, to forge such an alliance it is not enough to point to the‘provocation of Levinas’, for it seems as if a whole readership is precisely attracted to Levinas because he provokes or because of the sort of provocation contained in his work. As if there is something about its way of shocking people that is sufficiently soothing to make them choose its side. How else to explain that this philosophy has met with virtually no resistance and is on its way to monopolizing at the very least the intersection between phenomenology and ethics?