There Is No Racism Intended

Emmanuel Levinas: I always say — but under my breath — that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing. I think these texts are open to the whole world. There is no racism intended.

Questioner: "Everything else is dancing" — one could naturally think of Nietzsche.

E.L.: Yes, but you know television shows the horrible things occurring in South Africa. And there, when they bury people, they dance. Have you seen this? That is really some way to express mourning.

Q.: It, too, is an expression.

E.L.: Yes, of course, so far I am still a philosopher. But it supplies us the expression of a dancing civilization. They weep differently.

— EMMANUEL LEVINAS, "Intention, Event, and the Other"

Dedication to the movement of hips requires asking whether Emmanuel Levinas's refusal of dance is anything more than a moment in the ongoing, unintended, anticipatory recording with a difference of racism's last word. It's not only that one wants to avoid the conclusion that Levinas was as devoid of funk as Hendrik Verwoerd; for so far as one still desires philosophy one is compelled to ask if philosophy's representative man — the perennial insider who stands as if he were outside, enthralled by his authentic mirror image; the one who thwarts impediment and enters, and always more fully inhabits, always as if saving and returning; the one who declares the end — is necessarily prone to that brash, invasive stillness that has enforced the openness of the whole world to the Bible and the Greeks. This question invokes an incalculable rhythm, moving in and out of measure like a fugitive. It concerns the locale and the age of elusion, a spatiotemporal coordinate that is, as we'll see, beneath the underbreath. Consider that a tempo-topology of flight is offered, in its greatest intensity, as a problematic of crossing and gathering, of the bridge, of translation not only as distance and traversal, but also as scar and transverse city. This, too, is Levinas's transport. So that the one who with such sad clarity expresses the fixation of unintended racism is also the one who would forge and enact a philosophy of escape. One of these things is not like the other, a condition requiring some choreatic intervention. For Levinas, the example of Franz Rosenzweig is decisive: fateful in the linkage of translation with true vocality as the protection and projection of things; fatal in the exclusivity of what is valorized as exemplary and worthy of translation.

The true goal of the mind is translating: only when a thing has been translated does it become truly vocal, no longer to be done away with. Only in the Septuagint has revelation come to be at home in the world, and so long as Homer did not speak Latin he was not a fact. The same holds good for translating from man to man.

The ethical imperative of translation — more fundamentally, the figuring of the ethical as translation — bears, in breath, a utopian social weight, the heft and density of a rematerialization of the city from deep outside. But how will the outside have irrupted into the incorporatively exclusionary nexus of the Bible and the Greeks that is implied in Rosenzweig and amplified in Levinas? And what does that nexus tell us about the project of philosophy as Levinas defines it, the danger of philosophy as he diagnoses it? What if we trace the decaying orbit of his commitments by way of their own units and methods of measure? Meanwhile, there remains the possibility of another geometry, another dynamics of the bridge, the dispersed and dispersive thing, (the laws of) its movements and its loads, its choreographic madnesses, its phonographic flights and descents (and fights and dissents), its pornographic restraints and licenses: perhaps we can go from a restricted to a general economy of translation.

Reading Levinas requires some attempt to both account for and disrupt the trajectory between the following passages, the first from 1934, and the second from 1986:

How is universality compatible with racism? The answer — to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism — involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the ideaof expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea.

The idea propagated detaches itself essentially from its point of departure. In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of "masters": it is a process of equalization. To convert or persuade is to create peers. The universality of an order in Western society always reflects this universality of truth.

But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. Nietzsche's will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying, is not only a new ideal; it is an ideal that simultaneously brings with it its own form of universalization: war and conquest.

But here we return to well-known truths. We have tried to link them to a fundamental principle. Perhaps we have succeeded in showing that racism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma concerning democracy, parliamentary government, dictatorial regime, or religious politics that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.

I think that Europe is the Bible and the Greeks, but it is also the Bible that renders the Greeks necessary. ... The great problem would consist in asking, what is the relation between the two traditions? Is it simply the convergence of two influences that constitute the European? I don't know if it is very popular to say this, but for me European man is central, in spite of all that has happened to us during this century, in spite of "the savage mind." The savage mind is a thinking that a European knew to discover, it was not the savage thinkers who discovered our thinking. There is a kind of envelopment of all thinking by the European subject. Europe has many things to be reproached for, its history has been a history of blood and war, but it is also the place where this blood and war have been regretted and constitute a bad conscience of Europe, which is also the return of Europe, not toward Greece, but toward the Bible. Old or New Testament — but it is in the Old Testament that everything, in my opinion, is borne. This is the sense in which I will answer your question: am I a religious thinker? I say sometimes: man is Europe and the Bible, and all the rest can be translated from there.

What's in question, in the question of racism, is the very humanity of man. That question opens this series: How is European man discovered? How does he discover? What is such discovery's relation to expansion and envelopment? How does Levinas come to embrace expansion under the rubric of envelopment? How does he come to include himself within the category of the European after "all that has happened to us"? What does "all that has happened to us" have to do with discerning the most authentic modalities of "savage thought"? Us? Who? What is the relationship between racism — detached, if only for a moment, from its question and attached, if only for an apparently interminable moment, to a certain interplay of discovery, expansion, and envelopment — and "the very humanity of man," and what ought to be the implications of this relationship for one who speaks not just of the centrality of European man, but of man as Europe, Europe as the Bible and the Greeks? Who or what can be translated from this standpoint? How does a kind of sneering dismissal of "what one calls decolonization and the end of a dominating Europe" (reduced here to a mere object for structuralist thought) emerge from the thinker of the terrible interplay of universalization and force?4What philosophical task propels the movement from the latter to the former? What other philosophical tasks, what other possibilities of and for thinking, are forgone in that movement? How does Levinas's arrival at the cusp of a clear vision of the end of philosophy as decolonization, as an abolition both internally and externally directed in its relation to what he will come to speak of under the rubric of "escape," turn into another version of the same (racism), however unintended?

Consider this essay's epigraph, a passage from another late interview in which the appearance of the question of intention demands retracing our steps to consider Levinas's attention to the topic of intentionality in an early text. It would be wrong to attempt to debunk or discredit Levinas by locating and exposing him at his worst; and it would be fruitless either to evade or obscure him by dwelling on work that some would argue lacks his distinctive and mature signature. But Andrew McGettigan requires us to acknowledge that Levinas's signature bears a sustained, practically originary distortion. In taking up the fact that "those who have sought resources in Levinas for a project of anti-racism have been confounded by some of his comments about non-Western cultures," relegating them to an exoticism for which he has no "nostalgia" and that is marginal to European centrality, and in considering that "many of his advocates have been confused by the metaphysical apparatus of the 'face' (le visage)," McGettigan moves beyond the tendency to understand these features "biographically or as functionless remnants of religious beliefs and personal prejudices," arguing instead that

the two problems — metaphysical apparatus and unpalatable comments — are fundamentally connected through Levinas's conception of transcendence. The failure to foreground paleonymy in his writing means that the systematic reconfiguration of terms such as "face," which transforms its everyday sense, goes unaddressed. The "face" is not a physical countenance; it is an interpretation, beyond philosophy and phenomenology, tied to a particular historico-cultural formation: the "culture issued from monotheism." This has the consequence that the special idea of the "face" of the Other (Autrui), as encounter with the idea of the Infinite, in drawing from one particular culture, is not open to all other cultures: it is not a universal possibility.

In declaring that the very animation of those texts Levinas says are open to the whole world are, in Levinas's fully elaborated estimation, subject to a culturally determined closure enacted through a certain problematic technology of facial recognition, McGettigan directs us toward the consideration of openness and the open and what these mean that must also move through the reinstantiation, in Levinas, of the universal(ist) exclusion. It requires recognizing that, for Levinas, flight is from being, a matter to which we must return by way of the demand that we recognize, along with McGettigan, that "there is a misapprehension when 'alterity' in Levinas's work is understood simply as difference. For him, it marks a positive plenitude that breaks with being." In this regard, intra-ontic difference would be encompassed by knowledge and is, therefore, merely part of "the Same." Intra-ontic difference in the human field, determined already by a larger discrimination in the worldly surround between humans and things, is easily given over to a violent, regulative understanding of a certain faulty, inhuman simulation of European man whose exclusive suitability for instrumentalization is posited in a vast idiomatic range of justifications by Man, the end, in subjection. Moreparticularly than Hegel, Levinas links difference in human sameness to history. Here the difference is between those who are "with and without sacred history." A specific and exclusionarily Judeo-Christian monotheism, understood by Levinas as (something that is at once the essence and the destiny of the) European, characterizes those who are given to sacred history, those whose historicity is structured by a relation to the Other as infinite and transcendent. "The transcendental," in McGettigan's words, "is no longer understood as universal." Instead, relation or nonrelation to it constitutes the difference between humanities. The cultural/spiritual stranger does not stand in for or instantiate alterity or exteriority. She is, rather, degraded precisely insofar as she cannot stand in relation to alterity, which McGettigan glosses as "a presence that is not integrated into the world, a presence that can be effaced by 'humble chores' and 'commonplace talk.'" Idle chatter is aligned, here, with the pagan "who seeks the satisfaction of the self before the other," the one who is "rooted in Being and Fate." Here, idle chatter has a differential function not unlike the one it takes up in Heidegger. The difference is that in Levinas it is aligned with a fall into being; in Heidegger it is aligned with a fall from being. In both, concern with earthly affairs indicates thingly incapacity. A predisposition for being-instrument, given in the absence of that ethical "self-control" that is manifest both as submission to the Other and dominion over the other, is interinanimate with a certain predisposition toward servility. Again, the stranger's, the other's, ethical disability — her intra-ontic difference from and within the same (a standard that is born/e, as it were, in the guise of Judeo-Christian, European Man) — does not simply mark her radical difference from the Other but also marks her radical inability to encounter Him. She is a maid, from Thokoza, say, or Thrace. Dangerously given to the Other's effacement, she is an invasive instrument, bearing the capacity to breach an exclusive totality of the breach with profane and common song and dance. This effacement and its corollary refusal of ethical subjection (to and in the form of a transcendent intention) are understood as emerging from an inability to intend. She bears but does not exercise capacity. The ethical subject must deal with what he has posited as impossible. He must, moreover, attend to her domestication, which he has also declared impossible as a matter of law and impenetrable, originary sexual and cultural difference. The impossible domestic was always a household terror. Her thingly presence in the European's place in the sun (which will have been whatever imperial zone either at home or in the settler colony, whose difference from the metropole disappears the more we come to recognize that the history of, say, Paris, is two thousand years of conquest) is nothing other than violent usurpation, an immanence whose most shocking manifestations are always also a terpsichorean disruption of mastery, an unruly student's fallenness in refusal of the master's standing, breaking the substitutive transcendence of His face, revealing, as McGettigan shows, the prephenomenological insistence on the very idea of a "master who does not belong to my 'plane.'" If the epiphany of the master's, the Other's, face opens humanity or produces a whole new experience of humanity, it does so precisely by instantiating intraontic difference in the human, now understood as mastery's representational field, within which fraternity's hierarchical drama is staged after the fact of "the propagation of an idea" (of sacred history) that "creates a community of 'masters.'" The tragedy that is marked by and attends "the unity of a world of masters and slaves" that Levinas presages is only a concern within the European reserve, which is defined by its expansionist opening of the world, its intrusive imposition of its sacred texts on the divided world that it opens. In 1934, the capacity to conjure pre-Hitlerian Europe as a community of masters without slaves is as chilling as the unity of a world of masters and slaves that Levinas presages for Europe's immediate future. That chill is intensified with every dismissive reference Levinas makes to decolonization and redoubled by every refusal to acknowledge it that is offered by his devoted readers. And it is important to remember that what they refuse to acknowledge is not just a series of unfortunate misstatements that are extraneous to the proper philosophical work. They are, rather, restatements of a theme that is constitutive of that work. The theme does not sanction a dismissal of Levinas or a justification for not reading him. Rather, it sets the terms for an ever more rigorous engagement with his work, something McGettigan both argues and enacts. It is in and by way of such a reading that one recognizes, along with McGettigan, that Levinas's "idea of fraternity is premised upon the monotheistic concept of alterity as height, the [Euro-]human [master] as potential image of God, in opposition to a notion of alterity as difference that would be premised upon a 'saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures.' Western thought is privileged in so far as it contains the germ of this value given to the individual as the finite site of the incarnation of the infinite." McGettigan adds: "Levinas concludes that desire for exteriority and the beyond, as found in monotheistic culture, provides [a single orienting] sense in the midst of the variety of cultural totalities: 'the [presence of the] Other dispels the anarchic sorcery of the facts.'" McGettigan convincingly argues that this single sense, this image of single (transcendence of) being — the hopelessly and delusionally self-reflective picturing of alterity in and as individuation, which then performs as teleological principle's regulation of the "anarchic sorcery" of differentiated, differentiating swarm's swoon-inducing, profligate, (de- and re-)generative facticity — is the instantiation of Levinas's sense of the generosity of Western thought as well, manifest not only in its objectification of cultures that had heretofore "never understood themselves," but in its masterful instrumentalization of the ones who will have given themselves over, in any case, to a whole other theory of the instrument, some wholly other vernacular disruptions of whatever mastery. McGettigan concludes that Levinas's disturbing views of the intra-ontic human other "whose sheer frequency should be underscored, do not 'run counter' to Levinas's ethics — if Levinas's radical, metaphysical transformation of that term is appreciated." He continues,

Indeed, I have argued that the "idea of the face," the spur to ethics, is fundamentally tied to a theory of separated cultural totalities which circumscribe the particularity of its obligating force. Levinas fears a valorization of alterity that would not orient around the transcendence resulting from "Sacred History" distilled into ideas. To repeat, the alterity of height is distinguished from an alterity of difference. For Levinas contiguity without orientation will lead to wars worse than those witnessed in recent history.