Europe, that’s the Bible and the Greeks. It has come closer to the Bible and to its true fate. Everything else in the world must be included in this. I don’t have any nostalgia for the exotic. For me Europe is central.
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: ‘the exotic’. In addition, many of his advocates have been confused by the metaphysical apparatus assembled in support of the valorization of the ‘face’ (le visage): these features tend to be understood biographically or as functionless remnants of religious beliefs and personal prejudices.
This article attempts to demonstrate 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. My strong claim will be that the problematic of the face is at root mobilized in a valorization of the Judaeo-Christian legacy against those who come from outside ‘the West’.
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 hence merely part of ‘the Same’. Infinite responsibility remains a metaphysical gesture. In the essays contemporaneous with Totality and Infinity, alterity references height, the better, ‘trans-ascendence’ and as such depends on determining the value of the individual in the possibility of effectuating the infinite beyond the finite.2 It should be stressed at the outset that the present essay does not circumscribe Otherwise than Being, a work that operates with a different temporality and largely eschews the vocabulary of ‘metaphysics’ and ‘exteriority’ found in the first book.
Here, I reconstruct the context for Totality and Infinity by bringing together Levinas’s writings on anthropology and Judaism with the more familiar ‘philosophical’ text, so as to illuminate the axis of ‘Sacred History’ in its exemplariness.4 Only by reading these texts together can the importance for Levinas of a philosophically reconfigured religious inheritance be located as it interrelates with and qualifies his phenomenology, such that the differentiation of ‘philosophy’ and ‘eschatology’ may be comprehended.
