Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication In Levinasian Ethics more

This article was downloaded by: [Gehrke, Pat] On: 4 February 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 919081522] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Review of Communication Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713780320 Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics Pat J. Gehrke Online publication date: 04 February 2010 To cite this Article Gehrke, Pat J.(2010) 'Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics', Review of Communication, 10: 1, 5 — 19 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/15358590903248769 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15358590903248769 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The Review of Communication Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 5Á19 Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics Pat J. Gehrke Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 This essay provides an explanation of how Levinas’s unique philosophy of ethics, his separation of justice from ethics, and his views of language and communication come together to articulate not a system or code of ethics, but the impossibility of any systematization or codification of one’s obligations. Only by understanding the tensions between ethics and justice in Levinas’s writing and by relating those to his philosophy of communication can we understand the significance of a Levinasian communication ethic. Keywords: Emmanuel Levinas; Communication Ethics; Justice; Alterity Introduction In the past decade communication scholars have paid increasing attention to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. While a few in the 1990s made reference to his works (Cmiel, 1996; Woodward, 1996), more recently he has become a central figure in studies of ethics and justice in communication (Arnett, 2003; Hyde, 2001; Jovanovic & Wood, 2004; Lipari, 2004; Murray 2003; Pinchevski, 2003). Though certainly not as well-known as other Continental philosophers, Levinas has become, as Thomas Carlson wrote, one of the twentieth century’s ‘‘most forceful and enigmatic thinkers’’ (1998, p. 42). That combination of force and enigma aptly describes the experience of many who read Levinas and find something irrevocably compelling and maddeningly difficult. For all his volumes on ethics and obligation, Levinas does not produce a new ethical system. His task is not to construct what ethics should be, but to trace out the obligation that is always prior to any knowledge (Levinas, 1985, p. 90). What he offers is not a groundwork upon which one may build a new cathedral of right thinking and Pat J. Gehrke is an Associate Professor in the Program in Speech Communication and Rhetoric and the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. Correspondence to: Speech Communication Program, J. Welsh Humanities Center, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. Email: PJG@PatGehrke.net ISSN 1535-8593 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/15358590903248769 6 P. J. Gehrke Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 action but instead a reminder of our first obligation, our debt, and our inevitable failure to ever systematize ethical response. This essay provides an explanation of how Levinas’s unique philosophy of ethics, his separation of justice from ethics, and his views of language and communication come together to articulate not a system or code of ethics, but the impossibility of any systematization or codification of one’s obligations. Only by understanding the tensions between ethics and justice in Levinas’s writing and by relating those to his philosophy of communication can we understand the significance of a Levinasian communication ethic. In order to work through these concepts, this essay first explicates Levinas’s ethical theory by focusing on his claim that ethics is ‘‘first philosophy,’’ prior to ontology or epistemology. Following this, it explores the tension between ethics and justice: one’s relations with the Other in relation to a community of multiple others. The discussion concludes by considering how Levinas’s concepts of ethics and justice affect his philosophy of communication and the possibility of Levinasian communication ethics. Ethics as First Philosophy Wayne Woodward argues that Levinas’s principal goal is the countering of the ‘‘primacy of the same’’ that ‘‘has haunted Western philosophy since Socrates’’ (1996, p. 178). This move against ‘‘sameness’’ is what Arne Vetlesen describes as Levinas’s ‘‘determination to dismiss both being (i.e. ontology) and knowledge as founding and sustaining relations to others’’ (1995, p. 365). In the tradition of communication and rhetorical studies in the United States, we might say that what Janice Norton calls the common ‘‘master’’ trope of identification not only limits communication and ethics but exacerbates the violence of both (Norton, 1995, p. 42). That trope, for Levinas, is especially dangerous when it takes the form of essentialism or substantive humanism, but also poses great risks when articulated as inter-subjectivity or negotiated agreement. Levinas, however, does not seek to vacate ethics, but locates ethics prior to ontology or epistemology by releasing ethics from the need for a grounding principle outside of ethics. Thus, Levinas seeks what Jeffrey Nealon refers to as ‘‘postmodern ethics of response’’ (1997, p. 135). Placing ethics prior to ontology is contrary to most of the history of Western philosophy. As Levinas notes, philosophy ‘‘has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures comprehension of being’’ (1969, p. 43). Roger Gottlieb (1994) details the philosophical tradition of situating ethics as ‘‘secondary to the knowledge of ‘things’ . . . including knowledge of or concerns about oneself ’’ (p. 223). We could likewise map this history of philosophy onto communication ethics, particularly in the rhetorical tradition, which has taken its substance and justification from some essence, be it of nature or the human. Thus, rhetorical theory and ethics have historically been posterior and subordinate to ontologies, especially to humanism (cf. Gehrke, 2009). Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 7 Hegel’s Subject of Desire It is not merely anti-humanism that drives Levinas’s philosophy. As Gottlieb alludes, part of Levinas’s argument is a reversal of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel refers to as the stance of desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, but an unspecified and insatiable desire that seeks affirmation of one’s autonomous will (Hegel, 1977, para. 167Á168). At heart, desire is an anxiety about the possibility of a subject lacking autonomy. In order to cope with this anxiety, one places the world in a condition of dependence; the meaning of any thing is to exist for the desiring subject. The dependence of all things on the desiring individual for their meaning, without anything upon which the desiring individual would depend, thus grounds one’s autonomy. Everything is for the ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘I’’ is for nothing but itself. However, anxiety is produced by the need for a similarly autonomous individual to provide validation of one’s own autonomy. The desiring ‘‘I’’ looks for another autonomous will to recognize the autonomy of the ‘‘I.’’ Yet, if there is another whose will can be autonomous, this risks the possibility that my existence is actually for this other person, and not the other way around. The contradiction is created by the combination of needing to subjugate all things to a status of existing for the desiring subject and yet also needing another desiring subject who can validate one’s own autonomy. This makes the desire insatiable because its satiation is self-negating. According to Hegel, this drive may lead us to kill or enslave others (1977, para. 186Á187). Yet, the death of the other cannot satisfy desire, for then the desiring will is left without the presence of another to validate its autonomy. The only way for desire to escape this dilemma is to subjugate another autonomous will to the service of the desiring self. This is why the dialectic of the master and slave is born out of the dialectic of desire in Hegel’s phenomenology. However, desire and its consumptive force can also be manifest as theorizing: an intellectual enslavement that makes things objectively mean what they subjectively mean for one’s desiring will. Levinas’s Inversion: From Desire to Responsibility Levinas inverts Hegel by arguing that the otherness of the Other, her/his alterity, or most simply the fact that we are not one being and can never become one being, is both essential to the possibility of the emergence of any will and already bears one’s responsibility to and for the Other. The very possibility for subjectivity and individuality comes in the approach of the Other; I become an ‘‘I’’ only in response to the Other’s approach. The first event of will is always, for Levinas, to respond, and will exists only as response. Thus, in the Other giving to me my subjectivity, I already find myself in a relationship of obligation and debt. Unlike a Hegelian understanding of the will that exists and then encounters the world and another will, for Levinas there is no possibility for will except as a response to having been approached by an Other, and every moment of will or choice is due to (‘‘due to’’ meaning both ‘‘because of ’’ and ‘‘owed to’’) this Other in front of me at this specific moment. Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 8 P. J. Gehrke The first fact of the possibility of being, then, is a relationship of obligation, and that relationship precedes (and exceeds) not only desire but even the possibility of thought or language. Preceding cognition and subjectivity, giving the possibility of cognition and subjectivity, means that both the Other and my responsibility to the Other are beyond containing or schematizing in thought. This is one reason why our study of Levinas*and ethics generally*can never yield a stable system or code of communication ethics. The Gift of the Other The difference between the capitalized Other and the uncapitalized other is significant in reading Levinas. In the original French, Levinas uses two different terms, both of which are translated as other. The capitalized Other is used for autrui, which might best be described as ‘‘the personal other, the you,’’ whereas the uncapitalized other is used for autre, which simply means the common usage of other, such as another (Lingis, 1991, pp. 24Á25). The capitalization is significant, for Levinas does not mean that the Other is a collective or a generalized other, but this singular and unique Other before me: you as an individual, different from all other individuals, in this specific moment of appearance, different from every other moment, ultimately exceeding every attempt I might make to organize you into a system of meanings or responses. I do not exist prior to this relation. Rather, I only come to be as an ‘‘I’’ when the Other approaches me. This approach of the Other places me in a capacity to respond, which Levinas might call my responsibility. Thus, the self is constituted by and of responsibility. ‘‘For Levinas there can be no such thing as a self-constituting subjectivity. Instead subjectivity is the accomplishment of a movement*a movement not within an I but between an I and a thou, whereby the thou is the locus from which the constitution of the I springs’’ (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 374). To be a free individual ‘‘does not mean to claim authorship for oneself, to be autonomous, to be the archaic principle of one’s life, but rather to respond (or not to respond) to an appeal coming from the exterior’’ (Benso, 1996, p. 136). In all these explications what becomes clear is that subjectivity is a gift from the Other that bears with it an obligation that cannot be declined. It is thus that ‘‘I’’ exist, as much as one can say that ‘‘I’’ exist, for the Other. My existence is an existence given by the Other and it continues only in its constant rearticulation in moments of the Other’s approach. Hence, Levinas argues, I do not find that my dependencies and responsibilities are limits upon my subjectivity or will, but are the very possibilities for any subjectivity or will at all. My entire being*the very possibility of my being*is already owed to the Other, and thus all my responsibilities and obligations are for that Other, and never for myself or my desire. Responsibility as Subjectivity The approach of the Other is not a relation of the self to something similar to itself, which would allow one to see oneself in the eyes of another. Unlike the traditional search for Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 9 identification and sameness as the grounds of ethics, Levinas moves toward unicity, the uniqueness of each person one meets and in every event of meeting: ‘‘The strangeness of the Other, his [or her] irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question my spontaneity, as ethics’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 43). The approach of the Other interrupts identification by presenting one with something that can never be fully appropriated into oneself or one’s cognition: the ultimate otherness of this Other before one*the alterity of the Other. ‘‘The subject comes into its own insofar as it is addressed from outside, that is to say, by the alterity of the Other. This is the sense in which moral responsibility is not added to an already existing substance; on the contrary, it proceeds from the ‘essence’ of my substance’’ (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 375). This ‘‘essence of my substance’’ is nothing more than my capacity to respond to the Other, a capacity that cannot exist prior to the approach of the Other. Since responsibility constitutes the self, then I can only be open to this ethical call if I acknowledge it as prior to all my capacities to think, speak, or know. Levinas reverses the traditional role of ethics as derivative from ontology or epistemology, instead making ethics ‘‘first philosophy, nonderived and absolute’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 210). The Other before me demands response*demands my responsiveness and responsibility. This obligation to respond is prior to any thought or action*‘‘before the solidification of any theoretical rules or political norms of ethical conduct’’ (Nealon, 1997, p. 131). This is not to say that I respond without thought, but that thought can never grasp nor be the ground for my responsibility. Since my responsibility to the Other precedes my very being, thinking, or acting, my responsibility is inescapable. I cannot choose or think or act in a way that brings about or escapes responsibility: ‘‘Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation*persecuted’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 114). Vetlesen clarifies Levinas’s point well when he writes, ‘‘the thou*the other, the neighbor, the stranger, is before the I. Therefore, the I stands not in the nominative, but in the accusative, as the accused one, addressed by the Other prior to any chance to address him’’ (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 372). I am a self only in relation to the Other, and thus the Other precedes me, leaving me awaiting the approach of the Other*waiting for the other to accuse me of an ability to respond. It is only in the approach of the Other, which demands my response, that I am given to be as a self. Thus, I find myself accused ‘‘within a relation that the self does not initiate’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 50). My responsibility is undeclinable, as is my subjectivity, for before I can ever be in the nominative*as an ‘‘I’’*I must first be in the accusative*as a ‘‘you.’’ Levinas points to a communication ethic driven by response and attentiveness to the Other. The ‘‘I’’ is not a communicative agent but is a response called forth by the Other. The Ethics of Infinite Otherness This call of responsibility might most accurately be described in relation to the absolute otherness of the Other, the utter alterity of this Other before me, but this is Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 10 P. J. Gehrke not to say that the Other and I exist in opposition or contradiction. Rather, we exist in a relation of otherness so absolute that it cannot be systematized into an opposition or a dialectic. The Other is so utterly other that s/he cannot be thought of as being in relation to me, or at least that relation cannot be thought of except as infinite otherness, which precludes the possibility of containing that relation in thought, placing it along a geometry, or making it a substantive difference. As Nick Smith recognizes, I can never locate the Other ‘‘within my egocentric systems of comprehension’’ (1997, p. 524). In Levinas’s terms, ‘‘the absolutely other is the Other . . . He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I’’’ (1969, p. 39). If I am to be a self*an ‘‘I’’*then my existence as such relies upon my own subjectivity or singularity, which can only be ‘‘given as a function of the other’s unique and irreducible infinity’’ (Nealon, 1997, p. 135). To attempt to erase or reduce the alterity of the Other is to deny my own subjectivity and singularity; it is to act against the very possibility of my capacity for action. Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Difference Beyond Differentiation In this way, Levinas interrupts thinking of myself or the Other as instantiations of a category. Since ethics is found in absolute difference, ‘‘in order to be responsible to the other, which means in order to respect the alterity of the other, my obligation to the other must not be grounded upon the in-common, for it is precisely this difference without community that makes it impossible for me to remain in-different’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 63). This Other before me is not an ‘‘example of the same genus’’ nor is s/he united with me by ‘‘common nature, individuation of the human race, or chips off the same block’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 159). If my ethic is merely a ‘‘system that understands the other as simply ‘like the self,’’’ I will be ‘‘unable to respond adequately to the other’s uniqueness and singularity’’ because such a system of ethics will have already violated my obligation to the Other by reducing all of the Other’s desires to ‘‘the desires of the ‘home country,’ the self ’’ (Nealon, 1997, p. 129). Likewise, if I create an ideal thought of what it means to be human, to think, or to communicate, then I have already effaced the ‘‘irreducibly ethical dimensions of the self and its language’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 48). Since any form of ethics under the sway of idealist or humanist thought conforms the Other to the Same so that s/he must always be, in some way, a reflection of me, idealist and humanist ethics result in the Other being unable to make her/his mark as Other (Busch, 1992, p. 196). Maintaining a relationship of alterity, in which the Other can remain infinitely other and make its mark as Other, without subordination to identification or classification in a typology of differentiations, is the first call of Levinas’s ethics. The failings of totalizing schemes of thought are twofold on this account. First, totalizing the Other ‘‘is a lie because its modality of knowing is essentially alienated from the known’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 217). However, the lack of veracity is far less important for Levinas than the ethical implications: ‘‘since what is being misknown is not an idea but another person, the distortion is ethical as much as it is epistemological’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 217). Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 11 This should not motivate us to seek to know the true Other in some more accurate system of classification or differentiation, such as a new psychology; Martin Buber calls this ‘‘the monstrous, the dreadful phenomenon of psychologism’’ that dooms community in our time (1992, p. 86). The reduction of the Other to the same is a movement of violence against the Other, even if that similitude is built upon categories of distance as well as proximity. As Levinas writes, ‘‘violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action’’ (1969, p. 21). This violence is found in any system that attempts to reduce the Other to an order of identification, because such moves ‘‘must empty the particular of those features that are anomalous to the whole, but that are essential to concrete existence’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 217). Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Ethics as Limit to Knowledge The history of Western ethics is marked by ‘‘this inability to accommodate otherness’’ which ‘‘bespeaks a grave ethical shortcoming’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 507). The move to contain ethics within knowledge, especially within an ontological system that unites the Other and the self, is itself an ethical failure. Knowledge is the dual move toward and away from alterity: ‘‘Knowledge or theory designates first a relation with being such that the knowing being lets the known being manifest itself while respecting its alterity . . . But theory also designates comprehension*the logos of being*that is, a way of approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 42). Thought itself, moving from self to Other and back to self, is to some extent always an attempt ‘‘to strip the other of its alterity in order to make it fit the categories and structures of thought’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 216). As Gottlieb phrased it, ‘‘knowledge of others necessarily reduces the other to something we possess, something we have acquired’’ (1994, p. 223). To know something, to be able to theorize and explain it, is to make it mean what it means to the will of the knower. When the thing about which one claims knowledge is not an object or a force of nature, but instead a person or persons, the movement of the desire for knowledge becomes the dialectic of the master and slave. After all, there is no subjugation more complete than being able to define the meaning and essence of another person. Whether we are referring to social sciences or humanism, the Other is most often reduced to an instantiation of the universal, shared, categorical, or dialectical, and ‘‘is thus stripped bare of any semblance of independent identity’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 545). The movement of my inherited modes of thinking imprisons the Other within ‘‘imperialistic cognitive categories’’ and performs the ‘‘extermination of alterity that Levinas so passionately denounces and calls us to resist’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 545). Cognition and theory move toward totality, subsuming the Other, ‘‘stripping it of its infinity and making it into something different from itself ’’ (Farley, 1992, p. 217). Levinas is offering not only a particular explication of the movement of ethical 12 P. J. Gehrke Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 responsibility, but a stern warning that our desire for a knowable schema of response or a set of guidelines for good behavior is dependent upon knowing the Other as a generalized ideal or principle outside of the Other’s uniqueness and the uniqueness of each moment of approach. Yet, the Other is not merely different in some definable way but is defined by an alterity that is without limit or schema. The term most often used to describe this is infinity, for the alterity of the Other cannot be given either a quantitative or qualitative value*it is absolute. The infinity of alterity is instructive in clarifying the impossibility of theorizing ethics. Infinity can never be fully accounted for; it ‘‘overflows the thought that thinks it’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 25). Infinity is not a mathematical operator, it is not deployable in a formula, and though we may have words and symbols to represent infinity, they are no more (nor less) sensible or referential than ‘‘God.’’ I cannot contain infinity within language or within thought, for the attempt to think infinity ‘‘thinks more than it thinks in the sense that there is an excess in this idea for which the I which contemplates it is unable to account’’ (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 368). Infinity itself cannot be ‘‘the object of a contemplation’’ for it ‘‘is not proportionate to the thought that thinks it’’ (Levinas, 1986, p. 56). The infinity of the alterity of the Other calls me to a position of consciousness that is more fundamental than intentionality (Levinas, 1969, p. 27). This infinite strangeness and irreducibility of the Other is what is ‘‘sought, neutralized, and overcome in theory and ontology alike’’ (Vetlesen, 1995, pp. 365Á366). Otherwise Than Instrumentality and Reciprocity Since my responsibility emerges in response to the infinite alterity of the Other and I am called to guard that alterity, my responsibility is something that I ‘‘can never fully meet, a responsibility which thereby manifests the infinite’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 44). If my first responsibility is a respect for the infinite alterity of the Other, then my first obligation is already infinite, hence unconditional. As Smith writes, ‘‘if I were to treat the Other with the types of respect called for by Levinas only because I expect the Other to do the same for me, I would miss the point altogether since I would again be attempting to fit the Other into my instrumental and systematic understanding of the world. We must neither expect nor be motivated by reciprocity’’ (1997, pp. 531Á532). Since my obligation precedes my subjectivity, precedes my capacity to think or choose, and overflows my thinking and intention in its infinity, it is not an obligation that can be opted out of, nor that I can be released from by any action or condition. If I attempt to move to an ethic of reciprocity or contract, I find myself moving away from the I-for-the-Other that is demanded in the primordial subjectedness that produces the ‘‘I’’ as the possibility of responding to the Other (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 376). Vetlesen outlines four issues arising in reciprocal ethics that turn away from the infinite alterity of and obligation to the Other. First, ethics of reciprocity revolve Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 13 around a question of desert: does the other deserve my reciprocity? Second, desert also assumes reward*a calculation of gains and losses that are tallied as a sort of balance sheet. Third, reciprocity limits the ethical obligation to those others who are capable of reciprocating. Finally, reciprocity places obligation to the Other as something from which one can be released (1995, pp. 376Á377). For Levinas, each of these moves is contrary to ethics, which is to say that they are contrary to the obligation that is inherent in me as I am given to be as a subject. Each positions my obligation to the Other as deduced from a cognitive system*calculated, accounted for, and contained within thinking*which is only possible if I can both contain the Other within thought and give myself to be as an ‘‘I’’ outside of the obligation of response, as first a subject onto whom responsibility is later added. The Problem of Justice Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Levinasian ethics are most often articulated as a non-equitable I-for-the-Other that calls for no return or reciprocity. It is an incomparable and incommensurable obligation, preceding and exceeding any action or thought that might seek to meet my obligation of being for the Other. In this way, one might say that Levinas’s ethic ‘‘actually resists an articulation of community’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 42). Of course, Levinas recognizes that my obligation does not occur in pure dyads: ‘‘The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also establish with other [women and] men; there is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions, which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation’’ (Levinas, 1985, p. 90). Justice is what is confronted at the moment that I am in relation to the Other and another Other (which is every moment), and justice lies in tension with the initial articulation of obligation to the Other. The interpersonal relation is defined by a relation between two: ‘‘the one self and the other’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 65). The approach of another Other ‘‘introduces a contradiction’’ by introducing a third party who also demands my infinite obligation (Levinas, 1991, p. 157). Thus, the approach of the Other-to-the-other ‘‘is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 157). Yet, the responsibility that is limited is also infinite, which produces the irresolvable contradiction between the obligation for the Other and the obligation for the Other-to-the-other. Ethics and Justice in Tension Ethics stands in tension with justice and in opposition to politics, which ‘‘unavoidably attempts to master alterity by conflating it with the self and organizing and codifying the infinite with its instrumental strategies’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 540). Thus, I find myself in a position of contradiction, requiring that I act out of infinite obligation to the Other and yet also violate that infinite obligation in my attempt to 14 P. J. Gehrke do justice to my infinite obligation to another Other. It is exactly because we find ourselves in an irresolvable quandary of comparing the incomparable and weighing the incommensurate that we have need of language, decision, politics, and justice. Levinas does not believe that justice should be avoided under the rubric of preserving ethics. Rather, ‘‘justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality and the intellect, and in intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a system, and thence also a copresence on an equal footing as before a court of justice’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 157). One simply cannot live in the world without these things, but even more important one could not respond to the call of multiple others without such tools. My obligation in this dilemma is to maintain the original ethical obligation for the Other as an interruption of the totalizing movements of politics and justice. Justice cannot and should not be avoided, however it is likewise constantly interrupted and complicated by the ethical. ‘‘There must be positive political formation . . . but these concrete political axioms must always be problematized by the ethical’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 541). Thus, justice must find its articulation in its own interruption by the original dyadic obligation to the Other. Such being for the Other could not be justice if one saw the self as valueless or irrelevant. To the contrary, Levinas believes that ‘‘my lot is important’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 161). However, the value of my lot is a result of my responsibility for the Other. Tension between the value of the self and obligation to the Other introduces the danger that the importance of my lot may ‘‘encompass and swallow up’’ this responsibility, ‘‘just as the State issued from the proximity of the neighbor is always on the verge of integrating him into a we, which congeals both me and the neighbor’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 161). My obligation to justice, then, is the maintenance of this uncomfortable position of tension with ethics; this alterity that ties what can never be common in a community of infinite Others. Ethics is tied to the particularity of the call of the Other, void of humanistic trappings such as sympathy and similarity. Living with Others Justice is the question of the ‘‘down-to-earth’’ and the ‘‘practical.’’ Moral dilemmas that place one in contradictory obligations, such as Jeffrey Murray’s (2000) use of the Heinz dilemma or Michael Hyde’s (2001) grappling with questions of euthanasia, while steeped in ethical calls, are fundamentally in the purview of what Levinas would call justice and politics, of the measurement of the immeasurable and the weighing of incommensurables. The attentiveness to alterity and unicity in Levinasian ethics might give us a sense of an approach or a style of response, but the enactment of response in the world in which we live is always a response to multiple others, to the Other and to the Other-to-the-other. In short, from Levinas’s view, we are never faced plainly with concrete or specific questions of ethics, since ethics is the space of the one for the Other, a space in which we never purely live. The world of lived experience is Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 15 Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 always the space of the one for the Other and the one for the Other-to-the-other. Lived experience occurs in the tension between ethics and justice. We might, through considerable simplification, distill an ethical imperative from Levinas’s writings. Michael Barber (1998) attempts to do so through a focus on the concept of docility. For Barber, five key elements compose docility: (1) a capacity to be taught; (2) responsiveness to others; (3) flexible action in deference to others’ feelings; (4) allowing others’ needs and beliefs to impact oneself; and (5) making a space for the independence and autonomy of others (1998, p. 125). Yet, such a position reduces Levinas to little more than a reciprocal dialogical position similar to Buber’s, which Levinas explicitly resists in his contention with Buber’s emphasis on reciprocity (Levinas, 1994). Any such position already stings of the tension between ethics and justice. Rather, we might say that Levinas refuses to be systematized into a set of ethical rules or commandments, for to do so would reduce the Other to a being that could be identified and recognized, through the system of obligation, prior to its actual moment of approach. Communication, Communion, and Otherness In its concern for ethics, justice and community the discipline of communication studies has largely followed a tradition of identification. Peter Simonson notes that ‘‘at least since the Progressive Era onward, there has been a dream that communication, especially mass communication, might overcome the distinct finitude of local civil society and bring about a far-flung nationwide community’’ (1996, p. 342). Similarly, Kenneth Cmiel writes, ‘‘the search for community became one of the most important themes in communication research’’ (1996, p. 99). All of these moves toward community represent desires to subordinate difference in favor of identification or similarity. Simonson notes that the dream that communication might bring about a new unity is not simply a relic of thinkers such as John Dewey, but continues to hold sway today (1996, p. 333). This desire for sameness is not only a hope that communication might build a community, but also that communication might help us to triangulate the true meaning of being human and being together. Levinas recognizes a similar tendency for philosophy to view language as a space where the truth of being might reveal itself. Language ‘‘is always seen as an order of phenomena destined to do the same work as that of thought: to know and to reveal being’’ (Levinas, 1994, p. 141). The Speaking ‘‘I’’ In radical contradiction to the history and hope shared by traditional philosophy and communication studies, Levinas focuses on the role of expression in a relation of the ‘‘I’’ to the Other. Woodward describes Levinas’s perspective on dialogue as ‘‘one that challenges important assumptions of a triadic model based on principles of relation, continuity, commonness, unity, and participation’’ (1996, p. 178). For Levinas, in speech there is ‘‘a relationship with a singularity located outside of the theme of the speech, a singularity that is not thematized by the speech but is approached’’ 16 P. J. Gehrke Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 (Levinas, 1986, p. 115). This singularity that cannot be thematized is the Other, whom I approach through speech. The Other and I do not even share a border. S/he persists in her or his alterity. This is why Vetlesen argues that ‘‘language is fundamentally non-monologic; indeed it presupposes that there be a plurality of interlocutors’’ (1995, p. 371). In speaking with the Other, Levinas contends, the first thing that must happen, prior to any verbal utterance, is ‘‘bearing witness to oneself ’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 201). When I approach the Other in speech, the first thing I always do is attest to myself. Without uttering a word, I say, ‘‘Here I am.’’ Being-for-the-other is a communicative moment in which ‘‘the subject who speaks does not situate the world in relation to himself,’’ but instead, ‘‘by offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays’’ (Levinas, 1989, p. 149). This communication is not a linking nor a connecting, but an opening up before the Other, making myself vulnerable to the demand of the Other. Contrary to Hegelian or even Habermasian notions of subjectivity bearing witness to itself, for Levinas this is neither an originative nor an autonomous subjectivity. Instead of a subjectivity that pushes itself out into the world as agent or that takes the world into itself as meaning, Levinas posits a subjectivity erupting as a response to the interruption of its own continuity. As Ronald C. Arnett puts it, Levinas holds that the self is ‘‘a responsive derivative,’’ rather than ‘‘a willful agent’’ (2003, p. 39). Subjectivity is not first a making sense of the Other, but is the imposition of subjectivity upon me in the Other’s indeclinable demand for my response. The Saying and the Said Thus, Levinas emphasizes the Saying over the Said. The specific words being offered are less important than the offering of words. Levinas does not value communication for ‘‘its informational contents’’ but rather for ‘‘the fact that it is addressed to an interlocutor’’ (Levinas, 1985, p. 42). This is the distinction between Saying and Said, which, while perhaps mundane, is important for the relationship between ethics and communication. As Thomas Busch notes, the Said attempts signification, but the Saying is ‘‘the performative act of ‘exposure’ and ‘approach’ at the basis of all communication’’ (1992, p. 197). While the Said may attempt to inscribe itself as representation, the Saying ‘‘takes precedence over and forever interrupts and problematizes the said’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 523). The Saying is the ‘‘here I am in relation to you, the Other, being for you’’ that stands under every statement said, making the Said possible. The Saying is beyond the possibility of the Said. The Said lies in tension with the Saying, interrupted by it, just as politics and justice find themselves at tension with and interrupted by ethics. Yet, the Saying must inevitably bear a Said, just as ethics must bear the obligation for the Other-to-theother that necessitates the consideration of justice (Levinas, 1985, p. 88). The significance of the Saying, however, is not in its function toward or for the Said. The Saying is neither merely, nor even first, a vessel or vehicle for the Said. Saying extends Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 17 beyond the ‘‘thematization of the Said and of the content stated’’ to signify ‘‘the approach of the other person’’ (Levinas, 1994, p. 142). Saying comes to be defined as ‘‘the anarchic givenness of oneself to the other in a relation whose significance precedes any thetic subjective activity’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 61). In my sheerest existence, before any words are spoken, I am ‘‘always already responding to and before the other’’ (Nealon, 1997, p. 146). Thus, for Levinas, ‘‘at bottom, communication is not an operation of information-transfer in which one might or might not choose to engage. Rather, the self in its very structure is a ‘communicating of communication, a sign of the giving of signs’’’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 58). I stand before the Other, in the accusative, already in a mode of response*of Saying. My very subjectivity is structured by the necessity of a Saying that already says that I acknowledge the alterity of the Other, and which interrupts the possibility of ever unifying or mediating between myself and the Other. To speak is to respond to the approach of the Other, and to recognize the Other as other and yet also in proximity. Yet, the moment that I speak*the moment I respond to the Other*I also violate the Other, making my ethical obligation only more pressing with each attempt I make to live up to it. Every act of language is another act of colonizing violence, reducing the Other to a system of signs and cognition, making it impossible to expect a resolution of myself with my infinite ethical obligation. Since I cannot avoid perpetrating violence in my use of language, just as justice and politics cannot help but place the alterity of the Other at risk, I must struggle with the risk of all discourse, recognizing the danger that is carried with my every use of language. Perhaps the most important aspect of the Saying, as the ethical obligation that interrupts the Said, is to ‘‘realize my violence as such’’ so that I may use such a realization to ‘‘inform each word I subsequently speak’’ (Smith, 1997, p. 528). In a hypersensitivity both to language’s colonizing of the Other and to my simultaneous obligation to respond, I might find the possibility of speaking with pained attentiveness. For communication scholars and theorists, Levinas can be considered a counterpoint to the historical preoccupation with humanism, identification, and commonality. Cmiel notes that the traditional desires of American communication scholars are in contradiction with Levinasian ethics: ‘‘For Levinas, however, this [normative communicative convention] was a mistaken search for ‘fusion.’ It tried to create a knowledge and clarity that would make the ‘multiplicity of reality’ refer to a ‘single being,’ but such a goal, if successful, would ‘abolish the proximity of the Other’’’ (1996, p. 108). Downloaded By: [Gehrke, Pat] At: 13:28 4 February 2010 Levinas might go even farther, to claim that the search for fusion is only the most blatant manifestation of the priority of the Same. For Levinas, any communication that does not begin from an attentiveness to alterity*infinite otherness*is already a communication that attempts to erase my ethical obligation and invites ‘‘war, domination, precaution and information’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 119). Communication ultimately finds its struggle with ethics in its infinite obligation to the infinite otherness of the Other and to the Other-to-the-other. ‘‘To communicate is indeed 18 P. J. Gehrke to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition’’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 119). The Other as A Priori In conversation, this recognition of the alterity and unique singularity of the Other ‘‘consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying oneself. Apology, in which the I at the same time asserts itself and inclines before the transcendent, belongs to the essence of conversation’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 40). As I speak with the Other, I apologize; I incline myself before the Other, as in prayer, and recognize the priority of the right of the Other over me. My infinite, inescapable, undeclinable, a priori ethical obligation manifests itself in communication through my efforts to maintain ‘‘within anonymous community, the society of the I with the Other’’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 47). I must respect the alterity of the Other, take responsibility for my inevitable violations of that alterity, and accept my infinite obligation to guard against such violations. Perhaps most important is that I must address the Other. Above all, I cannot let my infinite and impossible obligation paralyze me nor drive me to seek an inside of myself away from any responsibility. Such would be the ultimate violence, in that it would refuse my responsibility for the Other and would place the Other outside of those to whom I am in response. Responsibility is first and foremost found in my ability to respond, which is given to me by the Other. If I respond with non-response then I do even more profound violence to my responsibility and to the Other. Even if something as basic as acknowledgement must also always carry the violence of language and cognition, such a dilemma only highlights the necessity of justice, the requirement that I compare the incomparable, and struggle endlessly in this irresolvable quandary. After all, as Alphonso Lingis wrote, ‘‘real action in the world is always action in which the devil has his part’’ (1991, p. xiv). The fact that such will always place ethics at risk only magnifies the obligation and makes me responsible for the vigilant (and by necessity inadequate) attentiveness to the ethical responsibility that makes all being, thinking, and choosing possible. References Arnett, R. C. (2003). The responsive ‘‘I’’: Levinas’s derivative argument. Argumentation and Advocacy, 40, 39Á50. 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