Ethical subjectivity, hospitality and the recognition of "the other in me"

Por Dave Boothroyd

Recent Levinas scholarship has focussed in the issues posed by Levinas’ account of the relationship between ethics and politics. In contradistinction to what Simon Critchley has characterised a tradition of ‘angelic’ readings of Levinas’ ethical philosophy, recent significant critical engagements (for example, Howard Caygill’s Levinas and the Political) have often drawn attention to difficulties that arise with any attempt to deduce real-world political perspectives from it, or, indeed, any politics which would claim to be informed by it. Jacques Derrida, for instance, suggests, on the one hand, Levinas’ philosophy can be read as an ‘immense treatise on hospitality’ (Adieu), and, on the other, that the ‘unconditional hospitality’ expressed by Levinas’ notion of ethics is an impossibility in terms of politics.

In this paper I shall explore the problematic of the ethico-political in Levinas, paying particular attention to his key notion of ‘separation’. Levinas’ account of separation is developed in his early work in terms of the separation of the substantive existent from existence in general. It is central to his various quasi-phenomenological accounts of the ethical subject as a substantive existent. Separation then becomes the key term expressing the ‘condition’ for openness to the absolute alterity of the Other in the ethical relation, or, the face-to-face. The notion directs us doubly, then, to the intersection of finite and Infinite; both in relation to the immanence accomplished by the emergent, substantive existent, and in relation to the interruption of the Same by the transcendence of the Other, for whom, it is claimed, it bears infinite responsibility.  Separation thus stands in Levinas, I shall argue, as a figure of the unconditional condition of transcendence by virtue of the reversal of intentionality which the ethical subject ‘suffers’ in its passivity. As Derrida observes:  ‘[O]ne would understand nothing about hospitality without clarifying it through a phenomenology of intentionality, a phenomenology that renounces... thematization.’

The question I want to address here is, finally, how  Levinas’ account of what can be described as the affective ‘impression’ of the Other in me can also serve as the basis for a pragmatic ‘politics of recognition’; a politics truly inspired by an ‘unconditional hospitality’ toward the Other.