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169 pages

English

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Levinas's account of responsibility challenges dominant notions of time, autonomy, and subjectivity according to Cynthia D. Coe. Employing the concept of trauma in Levinas's late writings, Coe draws together his understanding of time and his claim that responsibility is an obligation to the other that cannot be anticipated or warded off. Tracing the broad significance of these ideas, Coe shows how Levinas revises our notions of moral agency, knowledge, and embodiment. Her focus on time brings a new interpretive lens to Levinas's work and reflects on a wider discussion of the fragmentation of human experience as an ethical subject. Coe's understanding of trauma and time offers a new appreciation of how Levinas can inform debates about gender, race, mortality, and animality.

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Deformalizing Time
2. The Traumatic Impact of Deformalized Time
3. The Method of An-Archeology
4. Between Theodicy and Despair
5. The Sobering Up of Oedipus
6. Anxieties of Incarnation
7. Rethinking Death on the Basis of Time
8. Animals and Creatures
Conclusion: Inheriting the Thought of Diachrony
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Éthique et morale

Movements

Moral Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophie et théologie

Phenomenology

Ethics

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	12 mars 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253031983
Langue	English

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LEVINAS AND THE TRAUMA OF RESPONSIBILITY
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
CONSULTING EDITORS
Robert Bernasconi
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
James Risser
Dennis J. Schmidt
Calvin O. Schrag
Charles E. Scott
Daniela Vallega-Neu
David Wood
LEVINAS AND THE TRAUMA OF RESPONSIBILITY
The Ethical Significance of Time
Cynthia D. Coe
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Cynthia D. Coe
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03196-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03197-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03198-3 (e-bk.)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
1 Deformalizing Time
2 The Traumatic Impact of Deformalized Time
3 The Method of An-Archeology
4 Between Theodicy and Despair
5 The Sobering Up of Oedipus
6 Anxieties of Incarnation
7 Rethinking Death on the Basis of Time
8 Animals and Creatures
Conclusion: Inheriting the Thought of Diachrony
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
A N EARLIER VERSION of chapter 5 was published as The Sobering Up of Oedipus: Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility in Angelaki: A Journal of Theoretical Humanities 18, no. 4 (December 2013). An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as Contesting the Human: Levinas, the Body, and Racism, in Epoch : A Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (Fall 2006). Many thanks for the editors permission to publish revised versions here.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to: Matt Altman, whose encouragement, editing skills, fellow parenting, and good sense have made this book very much better than it might otherwise have been; Paul Davies, Arnold Davidson, and Cheyney Ryan, who each had a key role in introducing me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas; Central Washington University, for granting me a sabbatical during the 2014-15 academic year, to Graduate Studies for their support of my scholarship, and my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Women s and Gender Studies Program, for letting me focus only on writing while they did the hard work of teaching, advising, filling out curriculum forms, and so on; my students, especially those in two courses where some of the ideas for chapters 4 and 5 initially arose: an interdisciplinary honors seminar called Trauma: Memory, History, and Identity, and a philosophy seminar on The Problem of Evil. I appreciate their grappling with these somber ideas thoughtfully and (mostly) cheerfully; and my parents.
Introduction
Intrigues of Time
T HE IMAGE ON the cover of this book is a photograph of plaster casts and masks made in the studio of sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd for French World War I veterans who had suffered facial wounds. Fred Albee, an American surgeon who treated soldiers in that war, noted that the way that the war was fought, including the relatively new military technology of machine guns, made soldiers more vulnerable to such wounds: soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun. They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets. 1 After multiple surgeries, soldiers faces would often be so disfigured that interacting with other people or catching sight of their own reflections would cause further psychological distress. In British hospitals that treated these patients, mirrors were banned, and benches outside the hospital were painted blue to warn passersby that it might be upsetting to look at anyone sitting there. Between 1917 and 1918, under the auspices of the Red Cross, Ladd and her staff sculpted almost two hundred masks, designed to allow veterans to go out in public (and, in at least one soldier s case, to return home to his mother) without provoking revulsion and fear. The sculptors at the Studio for Portrait Masks would talk with each soldier, study photographs of the soldiers faces before their injuries, and ascertain their remaining range of facial expressions. A plaster cast was the basis for a copper mask, which would then be painted to match the man s skin (balanced between the tone on a sunny day and on a cloudy day) and to represent a typical expression. Sometimes a mustache would be attached, and a pair of glasses would hold the mask to the person s face. These masks are palimpsests of the face in its vulnerability and its ethical demand; they simultaneously mark and cover over a wounded face.
Emmanuel Levinas lived through World War I as a child, although his life in Lithuania and then the Ukraine was much more directly impacted by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. However, Franz Rosenzweig, one of the major influences on his thought, wrote The Star of Redemption while serving in the German trenches during the last stages of the war and in an army hospital immediately following the end of the war. In that text, Rosenzweig vehemently rejects the idealist neglect of the human being as a finite and unique individual. Levinas repeatedly gestures to Rosenzweig s critique of Hegel in contrasting totality and infinity, where infinity is the transcendence of the singular other. Totality categorizes individuals in order to incorporate them into a larger system, whereas Levinas argues that ethics begins from attending to the singularity of the other person-her uncategorizability. 2 Levinas discusses this singularity with reference to the face, in all its sensitivity and exposure. But the face for Levinas is not a phenomenon that lends itself to representation, although portraits can be painted, photographs can be used for identification, and masks that reconstruct one s uninjured face can be sculpted. In its immediacy, the face imposes the command Thou shalt not kill, and that command forbids both physical violence and the violence that assimilates the other into a mere idea, a set of characteristics that makes no particular claim on the observer. Levinas recognizes that such a command does not prevent violence- murder is a banal fact -but in a moral sense the face resists it (EI 87; see Abbreviations for definitions of this and other terms). In an interview, Philippe Nemo notes that it is difficult to kill someone who looks straight at you, and Levinas responds that the face is meaning all by itself. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable (EI 86-87). The mask is a representation of a face, which hides its vulnerability, and a trace of wounds.
Levinas s project should be read with the same duality in mind, in the sense that he tries to indicate both the trauma of responsibility and the limits of that conceptualization. This is the subtle ambiguity that he notes between the individual and the unique the mask and the face (OUJ 229). The obliqueness of his discourse attempts to do justice to that ambiguity. Levinas s insistence that the meaning of the face is not contained in its physical attributes runs counter to Ladd s careful attention to reconstructing the shape of an injured soldier s jaw or nose and to painting the mask with an expression that reflected the individuality of each person. His point is also that the face in general, not specifically a wounded face, disturbs our ordinary representation of the world. But the plaster casts and masks, at least one step removed from the immediacy of the face, and the photographic representation of those objects, one further step removed, still evoke the ethical resistance of the face (TI 199). It is difficult to look at them simply as historical artifacts of the war, as pieces of medical equipment, or as sculptures. The representations lead back to the exposure that Levinas argues we experience in the face of the other. We may try to mask [the] poverty and exposedness of the face by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance, but such a facade gestures to the face itself (EI 86). To be addressed by the face, I cannot study it as a specimen or catalog its features or take aim at it across a battlefield, but the face is always susceptible to such reductions. Indeed, to engage in philosophical discourse about the face is to trade in representations of it. Levinas s challenge is how to sustain the ethical force of alterity even as he describes it.
In his later work, Levinas shifts from speaking of the other as the excessive presence of the face to using the language of the trace, by which the other escapes conceptualization by never being fully present but instead only leaving marks of its passing in the present. The face is never present as just one perception among others. It instead imposes an obligation on the subject, and Levinas uses temporal language to express the sense in which the subject cannot avoid that obligation. The demand arises out of an immemorial past, a source that cannot be represented and thus subjected to scrutiny (OB 89). As a trace, the face addresses the subject as a remnant of something past, but it makes a claim on the subject precisely because of this temporal distance. The claim is made before I analyze the source of the claim and judge its legiti