04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 427

Bob Plant

Doing justice to the

Derrida–Levinas connection
A response to Mark Dooley

Abstract Mark Dooley has recently argued (principally against Simon

Critchley) that the attempt to establish too strong a ‘connection’ between
Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas not only distorts crucial disparities
between their respective philosophies, it also contaminates Derrida’s recent
work with Levinas’s inherent ‘political naivety’. In short, on Dooley’s
reading, Levinas is only of ‘inspirational value’ for Derrida. I am not
concerned with defending Critchley’s own reading of the ‘Derrida–Levinas
connection’. My objective is rather to demonstrate, first, the way in which
Dooley’s argument hinges upon a misreading of Levinas and Derrida, and,
second, why Derrida’s recent thinking is in fact fundamentally Levinasian.
Key words contingency · guilt · Holocaust · hospitality · institutions ·
nature · suffering · third party · violence

There is much to be commended in Mark Dooley’s recent analyses of

the relationship between Jacques Derrida’s work and that of Richard
Rorty and Søren Kierkegaard. However, in Dooley’s antipathetic treat-
ment of the ‘Derrida–Levinas connection’1 his reading of Emmanuel
Levinas calls for critical attention insofar as it both misrepresents and
neglects crucial aspects of the latter’s thinking. This, combined with
some ambiguities in his treatment of Derrida, leads Dooley (contrary to
his intentions) perilously close to reducing Derrida’s position on ‘hos-
pitality’ to the rather banal affirmation that we should ‘try to ensure
both that the stranger receives safe passage, and that the community
which is welcoming him or her is not unduly thrown into chaos as a
consequence of such a policy’.2 While I agree with Dooley that Derrida’s
recent writings are important, I believe that he is fundamentally

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 29 no 4 • pp. 427–450

PSC
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com [0191-4537(200307)29:4;427–450;034069]
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 428

428
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
mistaken in his suggestion that Derrida merely employs the rhetoric of
Levinas’s ethics. In this paper I shall initially foreground the most prob-
lematic areas of Dooley’s argument, and then indicate where the sub-
stantive ‘connections’ between Derrida and Levinas are to be found.

Critical moments in Dooley’s reading of Derrida and Levinas

1 Contingency, suffering and practical life

Given Derrida’s own remarks on the cultural-political necessity of ‘rules,
conventions and stabilizations of power . . . precisely because stability
is not natural’,3 it seems plausible for Dooley to maintain that the
former believes that ‘contingency goes all the way down’. But Dooley
proceeds by claiming that it is this fathomless contingency that founds
Derrida’s ‘belief in the historicity of ethics and truth’.4 That is to say,
because Derrida ‘speaks of contingency and a future full of surprise and
unpredictability’5 this (allegedly) leads him to hold that ‘there are no
transhistorical tests for normative efficacy’. (Dooley nevertheless main-
tains that the ‘only guiding criterion is to identify who is currently
suffering or who is being given a raw deal by the body-politic’,6 while
Levinas is criticized for omitting to provide any ‘concrete suggestions as
to how suffering, cruelty and humiliation might be avoided’.7) A number
of questions need to be raised here:
First, Dooley tells us that Derrida’s belief in ‘contingency’ leads him
to reject all epistemic and moral absolutes. Yet we are also informed
that Derrida’s primary ethical concern (allegedly contra Levinas) lies
with the political disenfranchisement and suffering of the other. On the
one hand, then, Derrida is portrayed as an extreme relativist (some-
thing he has vehemently denied8), and yet, on the other hand, he is pre-
sented in quasi-Benthamite terms.9 But one cannot assert that
contingency goes ‘all the way down’ (and therefore that normativity is
entirely historically determined) and then appeal to ‘suffering’ as a
‘guiding criterion’ for ethical-political deliberation. Indeed, Dooley’s
own affirmation that ‘We cannot . . . take up a view from nowhere’ in
order to locate something ‘that transcends . . . cultural and linguistic
differences’10 not only contradicts his appeal to ‘suffering’, it does pre-
cisely what he denies is possible; namely, takes a ‘view from nowhere’.
As Derrida might put it, even when I speak against ‘truth’, I do so in
the name of another, more fundamental or encompassing ‘truth’, and
this is the pre-performative condition of any linguistic act.11 If Dooley
– or Derrida for that matter – actually held such a radically sceptical
position, this would not only proscribe the possibility of identifying
‘suffering’ as something morally troublesome, it would lead to the most
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 429

429
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
extreme form of ethical-political paralysis – again, precisely what
Derrida has repeatedly denounced.12
Second, Dooley’s parallel claim that Derrida ‘speaks of . . . a future
full of surprise and unpredictability’ is similarly misleading. Although
it is true that Derrida talks repeatedly about the ‘surprise’, he is careful
to distinguish between the ‘future’ (which refers to an horizon of expec-
tation; to something that ‘will be present’) and ‘what is to come’ (which
‘does not necessarily . . . fall under the ontological category of being
present’13) – a distinction which, as we will see later, plays a central role
in his account of hospitality, specifically regarding the ‘invitation’ and
the ‘visitation’.14 In any case, if one could be sure that the future would
be ‘full of surprise’ then it would cease to be all that surprising; a future
that is genuinely ‘surprising’ must entail the possibility of becoming
stable and predictable.15 More pointedly, Dooley’s emphasis on the
‘unpredictable’ sits uncomfortably alongside his own claim that, accord-
ing to Derrida, ‘unconditional hospitality is the way to ensure that con-
ditional hospitality does not become too conditional’.16 This is a
questionable reading, for Derridean hospitality ‘ensures’ nothing.
Indeed, Derrida’s account of hospitality constitutes the deconstruction
of the very possibility of ‘assurance’17 (and thus of ‘good conscience’18)
in ethical-political life. After all, what could be a more tempting ruse of
good conscience than the self-assurance of one’s bad conscience?
And third, Dooley criticizes Levinas for failing to provide anything
‘concrete’ in order to determine ‘how suffering, cruelty and humiliation
might be avoided’. We are thus warned against being overwhelmed by
the ‘sublimity, sensitivity and sheer beauty’ of Levinas’s writing, not least
because ‘the true measure of any thinker’s ideas . . . must lie in their
ability to respond effectively to the most pressing demands of the age’.
In short, the question we must ask here is: Does Levinas’s work enable
us to ‘respond pragmatically to those whose needs warrant immediate
practical attention’?19 There are at least three responses to Dooley’s
overall allegation. First, if one’s fundamental criterion for ‘legitimate’
theorizing is the ‘ability to respond effectively’ or ‘pragmatically’, then
it seems strange to look to either Levinas or Derrida for such advice.
This is not to deny that their thinking has important things to say which
might bear upon our practical, worldly engagements, but this is rather
less than Dooley is requesting. Second, and more pertinently, it is the
very distinction (assumed in Dooley’s pragmatic criterion) between the
‘possible’ and the ‘impossible’ that Derrida seeks to question. Thus, for
example, he insists that ‘the unconditional and the conditional’ are
simultaneously ‘absolutely heterogeneous’ or ‘irreducible’ and yet also
‘indissociable’.20 In other words, a desire for the impossible (for a ‘pure’
hospitality, gift, forgiveness, and so on) haunts even the most pragmatic
of political engagements. This brings us to the third point. What
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 430

430
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
preoccupies both Levinas and Derrida is precisely not secure, program-
matic moral formulae,21 but rather the necessarily precarious nature of
our ethical lives (or, to put this in more explicitly Derridean terms, the
conditions of im/possibility of ethics). As Derrida has recently confessed,
the ineliminability of ‘remorse’ or ‘bad conscience . . . is the main moti-
vation of my ethics and my politics’.22 What prompts Dooley to suggest
that Derrida’s work escapes the inherent ‘political naivety’23 of Levinas’s
is his (Dooley’s) misrepresentation of Derrida’s position on hospitality.
For Dooley repeatedly characterizes hospitality in teleological terms –
as, for example, ‘unrealistic and idealistic’,24 and as an ‘ideal’25 that is
‘impossible to realize’26 (likewise, we are told that ‘what currently passes
itself off as democracy always falls far short’ of Derrida’s ‘notion of a
democracy to come’,27 and that Derrida ‘yearn[s] for a day when our
dreams will become the stuff of reality’28). Although Derrida himself
occasionally slips into this sort of rhetoric,29 his prevailing emphasis lies
upon the necessary interminability of bad conscience concerning ethical-
political relations. For
By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by pre-
ferring my activity as a citizen or as a . . . philosopher, writing and speaking
here in a public language . . . I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sac-
rificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obli-
gations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of . . .
my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness . . . to those who don’t
speak my language . . . to those I love in private, my own, my family, my
son, each of whom . . . I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed
to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of
every day.30
In short, murder is ‘inscribed in the structure of our existence’,31 and
as such ‘the experience of responsibility’ is transformed ‘into one of
guilt’.32 In a similar vein, Levinas refers to the ‘excellence of democracy,
whose fundamental liberalism corresponds to the ceaseless deep remorse
of justice. . . . A bad conscience of justice!’33 But neither Levinas nor
Derrida is alluding to anything teleological – not even when the former
seems most ‘utopian’ and ‘prophetic’.34 Rather, as Derrida puts it,
‘justice is not the law’ because ‘Justice is what gives us the impulse, the
drive, or the movement to improve the law’.35 Thus we should be wary
of Dooley’s claim that Derrida wants to keep ‘hope in unconditional
hospitality alive’36 for this formulation is again too teleological. Lev-
inasian ‘desire’ (which Dooley briefly discusses37) is a preferable term
to use in this context insofar as it implies an insatiability without end
– precisely, without even the hope of an end.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 431

431
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
2 Moral motivation and the natural
For Levinas, or so Dooley alleges, the ‘face-to-face encounter is ethical
in and of itself. It does not require, that is, anything more than a mere
observance of everyday etiquette’38 or ‘social protocol’.39 Moreover,
Dooley’s general preoccupation with Levinas’s allusions to ‘God’ and
the ‘Infinite’ lead him to suggest that, if asked ‘why . . . our most
profound responsibility is to the widow, the orphan and the stranger’,
Levinas ‘would not retort that we should so respond because cruelty is
the worst thing that we can do’, but rather ‘that we should respond
because, in so doing, we come closer to the Infinite’40 (because in so
doing ‘I bear testimony to the trace of God in his or her face’41). In
other words, our ethical responses ‘are inspired by some supra-temporal
power’.42
Now, the first thing to say about this reading is that it is difficult to
think of anything less Levinasian than the idea that ethical responsibility
is hypothetical in the Kantian sense of ‘If you want to get closer to God,
then you must help the other’. While I share Dooley’s general uneasi-
ness concerning Levinas’s overly metaphysical rhetoric,43 it would
nevertheless be mistaken to assume that the substance of what he says
hinges on theological-ontological posits. Levinas’s conception of religion
is not anything other than his conception of ethics – after all, Levinas
defines religiosity in markedly terrestrial terms as ‘love without
reward’,44 and condemns traditional humanism, not for being insuffi-
ciently theological, but rather for being ‘not sufficiently human’.45
Contrary to Dooley’s claim, Levinas does indeed think that, in his/her
stark vulnerability and suffering, the other is of immediate ethical
significance. Indeed, this is the power of powerlessness which, Levinas
maintains, constitutes ‘the categorical imperative’.46
Given Dooley’s emphasis on the role of ‘supra-temporal’ forces in
Levinas’s work, it is thus surprising that he should characterize the latter
as thinking that ‘we have a natural propensity to respond unselfishly’47
toward others (indeed, such a characterization is all the more startling
given that Dooley quotes Levinas as saying that ‘the face . . . calls for
an ethical conversion or reversal of our nature’48). Despite Derrida’s
recent claim that, in Levinas’s work ‘there is no concept of nature’,49
Levinas does in fact possess a vision of the ‘natural’, and it is a pro-
foundly bleak one at that. Not only does he suspect Martin Heidegger’s
Dasein to be an essentially Darwinian creature preoccupied with its own
‘struggle for life’ or ‘persistence in being’,50 ethics, we are assured, is
‘against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will
to put my own existence first’.51 Thus, according to Levinas, a radical
break occurs between the ‘being of animals’ and ‘the appearance of the
human’, for only the latter is capable of ‘saintliness’.52 Interestingly,
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 432

432
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
Dooley’s reference to our ‘natural propensity’ for selflessness is in
keeping with Simon Critchley’s own claim that Levinas provides a
‘material phenomenology of subjective life’ which emphasizes the
‘sentient subject of sensibility’; that the
. . . ethical relation takes place at the level of sensibility, not at the level of
consciousness, and thus, in a way that recalls both Bentham’s and
Rousseau’s criteria for ethical obligation . . . it is in my pre-reflective
sentient disposition towards the other’s suffering that a basis for ethics and
responsibility can be found.53
While I am sympathetic to Critchley’s re-writing of Levinasian ethics at
this juncture, it is misleading to suggest (as both he and Dooley do) that
Levinas’s intentions are in any way naturalistic. For Levinas the ethical
relation is opposed to nature – or at the very least ‘earlier than nature’
or ‘pre-nature’.54

3 Ethics, politics and the third party

On Dooley’s reading, Levinas maintains that one ‘ought to become
hostage to the Other’55 (that ‘we must, if we desire to be responsible,
become hostages of the other’56), not least because ‘I must always be
prepared to entertain the shocking possibility that my self-possession
has contributed to oppression, starvation, exclusion, and even
murder’.57 In order for me to become such a hostage it is required ‘that
the welcome which I afford the Other be totally unconditional,’58 for
‘the self is ordained to give up everything he/she owns in the name of
the Other’59 – even to the extreme point of ‘becoming a hostage unto
death’.60 Furthermore, Dooley believes that Levinas and Derrida can be
contrasted on the question of political-legal ‘institutions’ because only
the latter holds that ‘we are always already co-implicated with others
in institutional life’.61 That is to say, only Derrida maintains that we are
‘always before the law, always already coimplicated with others in total-
izing relationships, institutions and communities’ and that the ‘ethical
imperative is not to try and escape one’s totality/community in the name
of the Infinite’. In short, Derrida (unlike Levinas) takes the question of
institutionality seriously on an ethical level as he seeks ‘to ensure’ that
institutional life ‘remains flexible and open to the incoming of the
other’.62
Concerning the first of these allegations, Dooley misrepresents
Levinas insofar as the former’s emphasis on one’s ‘becoming hostage’
tends to imply something essentially voluntaristic, or at least teleologi-
cal. Of course Levinas, like Derrida, believes that one can be more or
less ethical toward others (one can always ‘seek a better justice’63
because ‘one is always failing, lacking hospitality . . . one never gives
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 433

433
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
enough’64), but the precondition of this is that one is already hostage
to the other. Whether or not I choose to respond ethically to the other
does not alter the fact that I am called to respond; as Levinas puts it,
the ‘other haunts our ontological existence and keeps the psyche awake’,
for ‘Even though we are ontologically free to refuse the other, we remain
forever accused, with a bad conscience’.65 In short, one does not become
a hostage – as Dooley implies. Rather, one already is a hostage (‘The
Da of Dasein is already an ethical problem’66 Levinas remarks else-
where). Moreover, it is not that my having contributed to ‘oppression,
starvation, exclusion, and even murder’ constitutes a ‘shocking possi-
bility’ for me to ‘entertain’.67 Rather, my finite, corporeal existence (my
being-here) is by definition murderous and sacrificial, and this is why
‘the subjective’ is irrevocably ‘knotted in ethics’.68 The ethical relation
should not, therefore, be construed as something grievous, tragic or
‘terrible,’69 for this would miss Levinas’s point that there is no pre-
existent ‘I’ to which the accusation of the other ‘happens’. Only if this
were the case would the vocabulary of lamentation be appropriate, for
only then would an existential nostalgia (and, by implication, Dooley’s
‘yearn[ing]’70) be meaningful.71 Rather,
. . . the responsibility for the other . . . is the contracting of an ego, going
to the hither side of identity . . . in a remorse. Responsibility for another
is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it . . .
I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation.72

Now, Dooley’s second allegation (regarding ‘institutions’) identifies

something that should concern any critical reader of Levinas; namely,
whether the excessive responsibility emergent from my being faced by
the singular other (here, now, face-to-face with me) leaves any concep-
tual space for the more complex questions of political life? But the
reading which informs Dooley’s position is extremely partial. Indeed,
what is most startling about Dooley’s interpretation in general is his
neglect of Levinas’s numerous remarks on the ‘third party’. Such an
oversight is surprising, not only because this constitutes a central theme
in Levinas’s work, but, more importantly, because this is precisely where
Levinas attempts to explain how the ethical and political realms
mutually contaminate one another. Thus, not only does Levinas extend
the meaning of the ‘face’ to encompass the ‘whole sensible being’73 or
‘human body’74 (including even ‘the hand one shakes’75), he proceeds
to claim that the ‘human face is the face of the world itself, and the indi-
vidual of the human race’:76
Everything that takes place here ‘between us’ concerns everyone. . . .
Language as the presence of the face does not invite complicity with the
preferred being, the self-sufficient ‘I-Thou’ forgetful of the universe; in its
frankness it refuses the clandestinity of love. . . . The third party looks at
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 434

434
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
me in the eyes of the Other . . . the epiphany of the face qua face opens
humanity. The face in its nakedness as a face presents to me the destitu-
tion of the poor one and the stranger . . . the whole of humanity, in the
eyes that look at me.77
Elsewhere Levinas declares that, in the face-to-face relation ‘I am always
in relation with the third party’ who is ‘also my neighbour’. Henceforth
‘proximity becomes problematic: one must compare, weigh, think; one
must do justice, which is the source of theory’ (the ‘entire recovery of
Institutions . . . is done . . . starting from the third party’). Levinas is
therefore emphatic that ‘in reality, the relationship with another is never
uniquely the relationship with the other’, for ‘the third is represented in
the other; that is, in the very appearance of the other the third already
regards me’.78 According to these passages then the relation to the
‘singular’ other must be understood in terms of the demand for worldly
justice. Levinas’s apparent preoccupation with the ‘uniqueness of the
other man’ is clearly not (as Dooley thinks) a ‘repudiation of politics,’79
for the ‘Other’s hunger . . . is sacred; only the hunger of the third party
limits its rights’80 (Indeed, Levinas insists that the ‘other’ who concerns
him is not merely the ‘neighbour’ – geographically speaking – but he/she
who is ‘very distant’, or ‘the one with whom initially I have nothing in
common’81):
[I]f there was only the other facing me, I would say to the very end: I owe
him everything. I am for him. . . . I am forever subject to him. My resist-
ance begins when the harm he does me is done to a third party who is also
my neighbour. It is the third party who is the source of justice, and thereby
of justified repression; it is the violence suffered by the third party that jus-
tifies stopping the violence of the other with violence.82

To summarize: If there were only two of us I would be infinitely

indebted to you – even, as Dooley puts it, ‘becoming a hostage unto
death’. Between only the two of us there would be no possible question
of (or appeal to) justice, and to that extent ‘there wouldn’t be any
problem’.83 However, given that we are not alone in this way, any
violence you (as other) perpetrate against a third (another other)
demands justice – indeed, this marks the very birth of justice and
political-legal institutions. Here I must make a judgement between
parties and, as Derrida puts it, ‘calculate with the incalculable’84 in order
to ascertain ‘which of the two takes precedence’.85 In this way a
‘measure superimposes itself on the “extravagant” generosity of the “for
the other,” on its infinity’.86 I must therefore appeal to the political
establishment and official powers. And if these appeals should fail, or
if the mechanisms of legal arbitration are too ponderous, I might even
have to repress, silence or confront you with violence (although
‘violence must be avoided as much as possible . . . one cannot say that
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 435

435
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
there is no legitimate violence’87), not, however, for my own well-being,
but for the sake of the other whom you wrong. Contrary to Dooley’s
reading then, Levinas insists that what remains ‘very important, is that
there are not only two of us in the world. But I think that everything
begins as if we were only two’.88 Thus, the pragmatic demands of
worldly justice must always be held in check by the ‘initial charity’89 of
the face-to-face relation. In short, the ethical and political realms forever
haunt one another.
It is worth noting, however, that Dooley is not alone in misrepre-
senting Levinas on this crucial question. For Derrida misleadingly
suggests that the ‘call for justice’ inaugurated by the third party is (for
Levinas) something lamentable; that in his work we can hear a ‘com-
plaint’ or ‘cry’ of the form: ‘ “What should I have to do with justice,
because justice is unjust?” ’.90 In short, Derrida cannot help but discern
‘a certain distress’91 in Levinas’s account of the relation between ethics
and politics. There may be something in this claim. After all, Levinas
does say that ‘there wouldn’t be any problem’92 if there were only two
of us, and that the third party becomes a ‘complication’93 to the face-
to-face relation. But caution is needed here. Thus, for example, in
Otherwise than Being Levinas refers to the ‘relationship with the third
party’ as a ‘correction of the asymmetry of proximity’ (indeed, where
‘illeity is betrayed’94). Now, this looks like corroborative evidence for
Derrida’s hypothesis. However, Levinas immediately proceeds:
There is betrayal of my anarchic relation with illeity, but also a new
relationship with it: it is only thanks to God that, as a subject incompar-
able with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is ‘for
myself.’ ‘Thanks to God’ I am another for the others . . . there is also justice
for me.95

This ‘Thanks to God’ could doubtless be taken in a number of ways,

but I think that the following is most in keeping with the spirit of
Levinas’s work. Where Derrida discerns a ‘cry’ of ‘complaint’ in
Levinas’s remarks on the third party, we should instead hear a certain
rejoicing. Although it is only through this ‘new relationship’ that I
‘become another like the others’96 (and thereby have care owed to
myself) this need not be taken to be the primary source of Levinas’s
‘Thanks to God’. The fact that the other other demands justice may
mean that I can legitimately demand justice for myself, but what moti-
vates this is not primarily my own needs for myself, but rather the needs
of the other. That is to say, ‘My lot is [also] important’97 insofar as it
provides me with the requisite protection and provisions to aid the other
(as Dooley rightly asks, ‘How could I be a host if I did not possess a
home?’98). And it is in this sense that worldly justice rightly permits me
a degree of self-preservation. We might indeed discover a certain ‘relief’
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 436

436
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
in Levinas’s ‘Thanks to God’, but this is again relief for the other whose
suffering can now be eased from other resources (to which I do not have
access) in addition to my own efforts in this regard.

Reconsidering the Derrida–Levinas connection

Derrida is so persistently self-effacing in the presence of those writers
he comments upon that one might be forgiven for thinking (as Dooley
does) that his outspoken gratitude to Levinas merely bears witness to a
characteristic generosity. For example, Derrida remarks that it is Levinas
who ‘reinvented’ the word ‘ “welcome” ’, and in doing so ‘invites us –
that is, gives us to think – what is called “hospitality” ’.99 This is praise
indeed, but it is not all that excessive – at least, not if we are to properly
understand the ‘Derrida–Levinas connection’. In the remainder of this
paper I shall identify those areas of Derrida’s thought which are funda-
mentally Levinasian.

1 Trespassing/survivor’s guilt
As we saw above, Levinas claims that the other ‘haunts our ontological
existence’ to the extent that ‘we remain forever accused, with a bad con-
science’.100 This allusion to haunting and guilt is neither incidental nor
mere rhetoric. Indeed, in this passage we find Levinas’s entire philosophy
in condensed form. But while Dooley is not oblivious to this crucial
theme in Levinas’s work,101 he neither develops it nor discerns its central
role in Derrida’s own thinking. This omission is due to his casting
Levinas as a ‘postmodern’, ‘postsecular’ and ‘postmetaphysical’102
thinker – categories which, it seems to me, remain ambiguous and
unhelpful.103 I will instead argue that Levinas is best approached as a
post-Holocaust thinker whose ‘ghosts’ emerge from the Nazi death
camps of the 1940s – and specifically their potentially cataclysmic
ethical-religious implications. For
before the twentieth century, all religion begins with the promise. It begins
with the ‘Happy End’. It is the promise of heaven. Well then, doesn’t a
phenomenon like Auschwitz invite you, on the contrary, to think the moral
law independently of the Happy End?104
One need not attempt a biographical reconstruction of Levinas’s work
in order to see how significant the Holocaust is for his philosophy, for
his writings abound with Holocaust imagery. But what is of particular
interest here is Levinas’s repeated emphasis upon the trespassing nature
of human existence; that in my very being I take the place of or sacrifice
another. Levinas openly confesses that he feels ‘guilty for surviving’105
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 437

437
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
the Holocaust. But it would be mistaken to think that this reference to
‘survivor’s guilt’ (something which Derrida has also noted106) is merely
confessional, not least because Levinas describes his conception of ethics
in terms of the ‘culpability’107 or ‘responsibility of the survivor’.108 Why
Levinas should make this startling admission becomes clearer once we
attend to the distinct vocabulary he employs when describing being-in-
the-world as an ‘exclusion’ or ‘exiling’109 of another human being, and
likewise when he asserts: ‘This is in fact the question one must ulti-
mately pose. Should I be dedicated to being? By being, by persisting in
being, do I not kill?’.110 (Elsewhere we are told that ‘to be in the first
person, precisely to be me . . . one has to respond to one’s right to be’,
for ‘my “place in the sun”, my being at home’ have also been ‘the
usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already
oppressed or starved’.) In short, being-in-the-world is always already an
act of ‘repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing . . . of occupying
someone else’s place’.111
The ‘bad conscience’ which results from my being ‘accused’ by the
other for my ‘very presence’112 is not therefore to be understood in the
broadly economic terms in which guilt is traditionally conceived. That is
to say, the guilt Levinas has in mind is not something from which I can
have liberation – earthly or otherwise. Nor is it comparable with original
sin, which, insofar as it posits a prior state upon which guilt supervenes
(an ‘origin’), retains both a memory of innocence and a hope of salvation.
At the most we could here speak of what Derrida calls the ‘sin of
existing’.113 Thus, when Blaise Pascal suggests that ‘the primitive model
for the usurpation of the whole earth’ lies in the naive exclamation ‘This
is my place in the sun’,114 Levinas adds that it is to this extreme point
that ‘Pascal’s “the I is hateful” must be thought through’.115
It is not incidental then that Levinas’s vocabulary parallels that of
more overtly confessional Holocaust writers. For example, Primo Levi
similarly interrogates himself: ‘Are you ashamed because you are alive
in place of another?’ Despite the fact that, upon self-examination, one
finds ‘no obvious transgressions’, one ‘cannot exclude’ the suspicion that
‘everyone is his brother’s Cain, that everyone of us . . . has usurped his
neighbour’s place and lived in his stead’; in short that one has ‘usurped,
that is, in fact killed’.116 The concurrence between Levi’s rhetoric and
Levinas’s own becomes even more striking when the latter speaks of my
being held ‘hostage’117 and being ‘persecuted’118 by the other, of my
‘despoiling’119 them, and not least in his numerous references to the
neighbour as ‘exposed’,120 ‘defenceless’,121 ‘destitute’,122 ‘frail’,123
‘vulnerable’124 and ‘naked’.125 This deliberately shocking vocabulary is
not mere rhetoric. Rather, it is employed to remind us that even the most
peaceable human existence is possible as such only to the extent that it
is also sacrificial and murderous.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 438

438
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
From this brief overview, it becomes clear that the respective
positions of Levinas and Derrida are very close. Indeed, in a number of
recent texts Derrida’s debt to Levinas has become increasingly con-
spicuous. Thus, for example, Derrida maintains that being ‘originarily
guilty’ is ‘inscribed in a scene of forgiveness’ because ‘any subject, any
Dasein, is in the process of asking for forgiveness insofar as he is’. That
is to say, ‘Forgiveness asked . . . does not occur at a given moment for
such particular fault or unacquittable debt, but for the unacquittable
that is the fact of being there’:126
. . . as soon as there is a third . . . I am called by justice, by responsibility,
but I also betray justice and responsibility. I have to ask, therefore, for for-
giveness even before committing a determinable fault. One can call this
original sin prior to original sin, prior to the event, real or mythical, real
or phantasmatic, of any original sin. Since it is from this substitution that
subjectivity (in the sense that Levinas gives to it) is determined, subjectiv-
ity as hôte or subjectivity as hostage.127
In his work on hospitality and forgiveness Derrida’s arguments and
readings resound with Levinasian motifs, whether or not Levinas is
referred to explicitly. Indeed, the very themes of hospitality and for-
giveness are themselves deeply Levinasian, and in his appropriation and
development of them Derrida has done more than most to demonstrate
this basic fact. But in order to substantiate this claim further, it is neces-
sary to focus specifically on the question of hospitality – not least
because Derrida describes Levinas’s Totality and Infinity as ‘an immense
treatise of hospitality’.128

2 Hospitality/being-at-home
‘Hospitality’, Derrida tells us, is ‘the deconstruction of the at-home’.129
In other words, the notion of being-at-home (with all its philosophical,
cultural, ethical and political resonances) can be seen to undergo its own
‘autodeconstruction’130 once we examine the concept of hospitality.
However, this self-unravelling of the being-at-home is already present –
at least in embryonic form – in Levinas’s analysis of the ‘dwelling’ in
Totality and Infinity. There Levinas claims that the dwelling constitutes
a ‘privileged’ theme because the ‘recollection necessary for nature to be
able to be represented and worked over, for it to first take form as a
world, is accomplished as the home’; one ‘abides in the world as having
come to it from a private domain, from being at home with [oneself],
to which at each moment [one] can retire’. In other words, ‘the dwelling
is not situated in the objective world, but the objective world is situated
by relation to the dwelling’.131 To truly ‘have a world’ presupposes that
one ‘has a home’, no matter how temporary or fragile the latter might
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 439

439
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
be. ‘Home’ here signifies a site from which one’s worldly excursions are
oriented and to which they return, and it is in this sense that the home
(including, one should add, the mobile home) is ‘not a possession in the
same sense as the movable goods it can collect and keep’.132 Of course,
insofar as the home provides one with a site of ‘withdrawal from the
elements’133 it thereby constitutes a break with ‘natural existence’.134
Levinas’s point is that this taking refuge is, existentially speaking, rather
more significant than a mere sheltering from natural forces. For in the
subject’s ‘recollecting’ itself in the home both ‘labor and property
[become] possible’ (it is the ‘window’, Levinas remarks, that ‘makes
possible a look that dominates’135). In short, the raw material of the
natural world is ‘fixed between the four walls of the home’ and is
thereby ‘calmed in possession’.136
The primary understanding of the home would therefore appear to
be ‘in fact egoist’ insofar as it is first ‘hospitable for its proprietor’.137
Thus far the subject has been described as if it existed in glorious iso-
lation, and the home – as essentially a ‘project of acquisition’138 – cannot
as yet, it seems, be described as a ‘violence’ because, Levinas suggests,
here acquisition and possession concern ‘what is faceless’.139 But this
economy of ‘intimacy’,140 and the domestic good conscience it spawns,
is little more than an egological fantasy. For ‘possession itself refers to
more profound metaphysical relations’; namely ‘the other possessors –
those whom one cannot possess – [who] contest and therefore can
sanction possession itself’. In other words, in the ‘face of another
being’141 the subject’s home (and all possession manifest therein) is
called ‘in question’.142 It is at this point that the question of hospitality
shows itself to have always already arisen, for ‘now’ the issue is not pri-
marily about the home as ‘hospitable for its proprietor’,143 but rather
about the ‘welcome [that] the Home establishes’; my knowing how to
‘give what I possess’ and thereby ‘welcome the Other who presents
himself in my home by opening my home to him’.144 Levinas thus con-
cludes that ‘no face can be approached with empty hands and closed
home. Recollection in a home open to the Other – hospitality – is the
concrete and initial fact of human recollection and separation’. That is:
‘The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. . . . The possibility of
the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home
as closed doors and windows.’145
To summarize: the home’s being made ‘hospitable for its proprietor’
(that I can occupy this site as home) refers to other possible proprietors.
Indeed, it is this necessary possibility to which the face of the other
gestures when it accuses me of usurping the place of another and thus
of partaking in the violence of being. My-dwelling-here can therefore
be said to be necessarily ‘haunted’146 by the ghosts of others ‘whose
presence is discreetly an absence’.147 As such ‘my’ home can never be
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 440

440
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
described as thoroughly intimate or calm, never a total ‘secrecy’148 or
‘refuge’149 – indeed, not even as wholly mine.
With this brief synopsis of Levinas’s phenomenology of home in
mind, Derrida’s allusion to the etymological link between ‘host and
hostage’ – and specifically why the ‘host . . . is a hostage insofar as he
is a subject put into question’150 – becomes extremely pertinent. Derrida
agrees with Levinas that the ‘separation’ between self and other ‘is the
condition of the social bond’,151 and remarks that this ‘nonknowledge
is the element of . . . hospitality for the transcendence of the stranger’.152
His reference to hospitality is significant because it is around this Lev-
inasian theme that Derrida develops a number of ethical, political and
quasi-religious concepts. Pursuing Derrida’s own conceptual vocabulary,
the relation to the other can be explicated as follows: the other (qua
other) can always surprise me. That is to say, for ‘the other to happen,
to come to me’ means that I find myself in the domain of the
‘perhaps’.153 (In keeping with my earlier suggestion, even this category
of the ‘perhaps’ cannot be determined too rigidly because it must necess-
arily entail the possibility that the other might, as a matter of fact, not
surprise me at all.) Derrida’s emphasis on the other’s unforeseeableness
takes on explicitly political overtones when he proceeds to distinguish
between the ‘invitation’, and – borrowing a Levinasian term154 – the
‘visitation’ (or hospitality). These can be demarcated as follows.
In the invitation (by which Derrida is primarily referring to the
‘closed’ invitation) the coming of the other is brought under regulatory
control; you are invited and I am therefore ‘expecting you and am
prepared to meet you’.155 Although even here there remains a necessary
possibility (otherwise this would be mere coercion) that the other will
surprise me by coming sooner or later than requested – or even not at
all – the essential function of the invitation is to inhibit such possible
interruptions of my being-at-home. An analysis of the ‘grammar’ of the
invitation thus reveals it to be infused with conditionality insofar as it
neither stands indefinitely nor precludes its later amendment or with-
drawal.156 More specifically, this conditionality is founded upon notions
of property rights; my being ‘at home’.157 What the invitation thus effec-
tively says is: You are permitted to come and I shall thereby grant you
some of my space and time, for I rightfully belong here; I am not (and
here cannot be) an interloper or trespasser. These presuppositions are
clearly problematic on Levinasian (and Derridean) grounds, for as we
have seen ‘the Other . . . calls me into question’ and ‘paralyzes posses-
sion, which he contests by his . . . face’.158 Given this fundamentally
‘accusative’159 structure of my relation with the other, I am never simply
or unproblematically ‘at home’. One is, as Derrida puts it, always the
‘stranger at home’,160 for ‘my home’ undergoes a continual haunting by
the other.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 441

441
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
In contrast to the economics of the invitation (though, as we will
see, this demarcation is necessarily blurred), hospitality knows no such
prudence. Like Derrida’s account of the ‘pure’ gift,161 hospitality is
without ‘ruse’162 insofar as it ‘supposes a break with reciprocity,
exchange, economy and circular movement’.163 Genuine hospitality
depends rather upon one’s being open to the possibility of a surprise,
for the other, ‘like the Messiah, must arrive whenever he or she
wants’,164 not when I decide they are least inconvenient. This messian-
icity or not-knowing when, how or even if the Messiah will arrive is the
‘unconditional law of hospitality . . . which tells us or . . . gives us the
order or injunction to welcome anyone’ – even ‘without checking at the
border who he or she is’. In other words, the law of hospitality is ‘a
way of being open whoever comes. Whoever comes should feel at home
here.’165 If ‘I am unconditionally hospitable’, Derrida concludes, ‘I
should welcome the visitation’, not merely the ‘invited guest’.166
According to Derrida then, I must – somewhat paradoxically – be
‘prepared to be unprepared’.167 Unsurprisingly, this curious practice of
interminable openness to the coming of the other (this ‘madness . . .
linked to the essence of hospitality’168) brings in its wake inevitable and
considerable risks.169 As we previously saw, the ‘invitation’ represents
one way of circumscribing such perils. But, as also became clear, it is
precisely the desired invulnerability motivating such practices that
renders them ethically problematic. Regarding the ‘visitation’, however,
such risks play a constitutive role. That the visitor might come bearing
tribulations and catch me ‘absolutely without protection . . . incapable
of even sheltering’170 myself (that she might oppose my being-at-home
to the point of ‘ruin[ing] the home’171 – or even by bringing death to
my home) is a necessary condition of hospitality qua hospitality. It is
also, one might add, a necessary condition for the home to be a home,
and not some self-regulated form of quarantine, that I am vulnerable in
this way172 (as Levinas remarks on a related topic, the exposed, mortal
‘body is the very condition of giving, with all that giving costs . . .
[giving] implies a body, because to give to the ultimate degree is to give
the bread taken from one’s own mouth’173). If there is such a thing as
‘pure’ hospitality one cannot ‘exclude the possibility that the one who
is coming . . . is a figure of evil’,174 and the force of this prohibition is
not merely empirical; it is structural, or part of what I previously called
the ‘grammar’ of hospitality. Of course, ordinarily the visitor is most
often courteous toward the hospitality she receives. Derrida’s point is
that this customary goodwill cannot be demanded or programmed in
advance if hospitality is to be even conceivable (thus, contrary to
Dooley’s claim, hospitality cannot ‘ensure’175 anything at all). Locking
away one’s valuables to avoid their possible theft at the hands of the
visitor, or physically restraining him/her upon entering one’s home for
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 442

442
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
fear of possible violence; these sorts of practice (no matter how reason-
able in specific circumstances) would be incommensurable with ‘pure’
hospitality, just as a necessary condition for the gift to be a gift is the
possibility of its being unwanted, inappropriate or offensive. In short,
‘For an event to happen, the possibility of the worst, of radical evil,
must remain a possibility. . . . Otherwise the good event, the good
Messiah, could not happen either.’176 The possibility for hospitality is
thus haunted by evil insofar as it is structurally necessary that the other
who is received as a guest can always turn out to be radically inhos-
pitable. There are no absolute safeguards against this possibility, and if
there were then hospitality as such would be an empty concept. The
possibility for my-being-hospitable thus depends upon a certain
intractable vulnerability, both of the relation of hospitality in general
(the contexts of its ‘occurrence’) and of its specific ‘participants’ therein.
Now, clearly measures can be taken to render hospitality less sus-
ceptible to violations and breaches of trust. But if, as Derrida sometimes
seems to suggest, a measured hospitality is no hospitality at all,177 then
how can such cautious, self-defensive manoeuvres ever be justified? In
order to answer this question we must recall the structural importance
of the third party in Levinas’s work. To recap: if there were only two
of us inhospitality would indeed be wholly unjustifiable and irresponsi-
ble. But given that the third party also addresses me in the face of the
‘singular’ other, my responsibility toward them (this other other) must
be given due consideration. Only in this way does inhospitality become
inscribed into the demands of hospitality itself (and this is why Derrida,
like Levinas, resists equating ‘violence’ with ‘evil’178). ‘One must be
responsible for what one gives and receives’, Derrida notes, because even
the ‘excess of generosity of the gift – in which the pure and good gift
would consist’ can turn into ‘the bad . . . even the worst’.179 With the
arrival of the third party (who, we will remember, has always already
‘arrived’ in the face of the singular other), not only do we find the ‘birth’
of theory, justice and institutions, it is ‘now’ that we also hear the call
for legitimate violence. Thus, if I am protecting x from the violence of
y, then my inhospitality to y becomes an essential component of my
hospitality toward x (that is, my inhospitality toward y constitutes the
conditions of possibility of my being hospitable toward x).180 It is in
this way that there remains a necessary mutual contamination between
‘the unconditional law of hospitality’ and ‘conditional . . . laws of hos-
pitality’,181 between love and violence, friendship and enmity, and so
on. In short, here the categories of ‘exclusion and inclusion are insepar-
able’.182
For Derrida then, violence (and thus an ineliminable bad conscience)
is inscribed into the ‘gratuitousness’ of Levinasian ethics insofar as: (1)
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 443

443
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
I can never rest assured that I have ‘done enough’ – or even ‘done the
right thing’ – for this other, (2) any ethical relation I have with regard
to this other (or these others) is always at the expense of another other
(or those others), and (3) my responsibility to this other (or these others)
may thereby demand my overt inhospitality toward another other (or
those others).
Following Levinas’s account of the third party we have thus seen
how certain contaminations transpire between hospitality and hostility
– or, more broadly, between ethics and politics. What Derrida draws to
our attention is the way a Levinasian ethics of ‘pure’ generosity is not
merely (in actual fact) impossible, but necessarily so. Hospitality – like
the gift – is therefore ‘the very figure of the impossible’,183 and as such
it is highly misleading for Dooley to represent Derrida as ‘yearn[ing] for
a day when our dreams will become the stuff of reality, or for a time
when what currently seems impossible will be rendered plausible’.184
On Dooley’s rendering Levinas is little more than an overly pious,
neo-conservative metaphysician, who is only marginally concerned with
the practical realities of cultural-political life. By contrast, Derrida is
portrayed as a politically engaged thinker, fundamentally preoccupied
with the alleviation of worldly suffering. While Derrida may frequently
dip into the well of Levinas’s religious rhetoric, he nevertheless remains
essentially uncontaminated by its ‘spirit’. In short, the accounts of justice
provided by Levinas and Derrida are, according to Dooley, of ‘a
different constitution entirely’.185 Dooley’s thesis is bold and provoca-
tive. It is not, however, sustainable in the light of those crucial aspects
of Derrida’s recent thought that we have briefly examined. As I said
above, it is Dooley’s neglect of the third party in Levinas’s work that is
by far the most serious defect of his reading, for this constitutes the
point at which Levinas negotiates the relationship between the ethical
and political – precisely what Dooley claims to be lacking in Levinas
and (thankfully) present in Derrida. It should have become clear why
this reading of Levinas is inadequate, for while it is true that Derrida
works through the aporias of ethical-political life (not least of how the
ethical and political realms cannot be straightforwardly demarcated or
opposed) in a more systematic way than Levinas, all the conceptual
building-blocks of Derrida’s analyses are nevertheless already present in
Levinas’s thinking. This is not to trivialize Derrida’s ethical-political
writings, but rather to situate them in a just and responsible way;
namely, within their Levinasian heritage. In short, the real value of
Derrida’s recent work lies in his development, refinement and cautious
re-articulation of the Levinasian themes examined above. And of
particular significance in this regard is Derrida’s deeply Levinasian
inscription of guilt into ethical life; a guilt without origin or the promise
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 444

444
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
of atonement, and thus by implication without either nostalgia or
political assurances.

Department of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

PSC

Notes
1 Mark Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope: a Response to Simon
Critchley’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27(5) (September 2001): 35.
2 Mark Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus: Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Levinas
on “Hospitality” ’, in R. L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard
Commentary: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,
2000), p. 179.
3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in
C. Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 83–4.
4 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 43.
5 ibid., p. 39.
6 ibid., p. 42. See also pp. 49, 50.
7 ibid., p. 37.
8 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: a Dialogue
with Jacques Derrida’, in R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds) Questioning
Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999),
p. 78.
9 See Derrida’s positive remarks on Bentham’s criterion of suffering in J.
Derrida and E. Roudinesco, De quoi demain. . . . Dialogue (Paris:
Fayard/Galilee, 2001), p. 118.
10 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 49.
11 See Jacques Derrida (with A. Dufourmantelle), Of Hospitality: Anne
Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. R. Bowlby
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 67.
12 See Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, p. 66 and Derrida’s
remarks in J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley and M. J. Scanlon (eds) Questioning
God (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001),
p. 62.
13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’ (interview with A. G. Düttmann) in
J. Dronsfield and N. Midgley (eds) ‘Responsibilities of Deconstruction’,
Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (Summer 1997): 2. See also ‘On
Responsibility’ (interview with J. Dronsfield and others) in the same
volume, pp. 19–20, 30.
14 See Derrida’s remarks in J. D. Caputo and M. J. Scanlon (eds) God, the
Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1999), p. 77; ‘Hostipitality’, in Acts of Religion (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 360, 362, 381. The ‘visitation’
is a central theme in Levinas’s work, as Derrida himself acknowledges in
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 445

445
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), pp. 62–3.
15 See Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 42.
16 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 169; emphasis added.
17 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 389.
18 Jacques Derrida in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon, Questioning God, p. 69.
19 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 177.
20 Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley and M.
Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 44. See also p. 51;
Of Hospitality, p. 147.
21 See Derrida’s remarks on the ‘decision’ in The Gift of Death, trans.
D. Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
pp. 67–8, 70–1, 95; Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994,
ed. E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995), pp. 272–3, 359; Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law:
The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, trans. M. Quaintance,
Cardozo Law Review 11(5–6) (1990): 947, 961, 963; Derrida, ‘Remarks
on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, pp. 83–4; Derrida, Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 112–13, 115; Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and
Responsibility’, p. 66.
22 Derrida, in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon, Questioning God, p. 69.
23 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 179.
24 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 44.
25 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 169. See also p. 170.
26 ibid., p. 178.
27 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 50; emphasis added.
28 ibid., p. 54.
29 See, for example, Derrida, in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon, Questioning
God, p. 57.
30 Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 69.
31 ibid., p. 85.
32 ibid., p. 51.
33 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M. B.
Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998),
pp. 229–30.
34 ibid., p. 203. See also Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality: an Interview
with Emmanuel Levinas’, trans. A. Benjamin and T. Wright, in
R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds) The Provocation of Levinas: Rethink-
ing the Other (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 178.
35 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with
Jacques Derrida’, in J. D. Caputo (ed.) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A
Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1997), p. 16; emphasis added.
36 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 44; emphasis added.
37 See Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, pp. 173–4.
38 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 37.
39 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 178.
40 Mark Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 38.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 446

446
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
41 ibid., p. 41.
42 ibid., p. 42.
43 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, in R. Kearney, Dialogues
with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Tra-
dition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 61.
44 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, pp. 176–7.
45 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 128; emphasis added.
46 Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press,
1993), p. 158.
47 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 183; emphasis added.
48 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 36; emphasis added.
49 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 90.
50 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 172. I shall not discuss why this
reading of Heidegger (and Darwin) is problematic.
51 Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, p. 60.
52 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 172.
53 Simon Critchley, ‘Deconstruction and Pragmatism – Is Derrida a Private
Ironist or a Public Liberal?’, in C. Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Prag-
matism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 33.
54 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 75.
55 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 175.
56 ibid., p. 183. See also p. 186.
57 ibid., p. 174.
58 ibid., p. 176.
59 ibid., p. 178.
60 ibid., p. 188. See also p. 191.
61 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 42.
62 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 181. See also p. 187.
63 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 175.
64 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 380. See also in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon,
Questioning God, p. 22; The Gift of Death, p. 51.
65 Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, pp. 63–4. I shall not examine Levinas’s
account of the face. Suffice it to say that: (1) ‘[B]ad conscience . . . comes
to me from the face of the other’ (Entre Nous, p. 148), and (2) the primary
meaning of the face is the command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – an order that
simultaneously betrays authority and destitution. (See ibid., pp. 168–9,
186; Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. A.
Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1992), p. 89; ‘The
Paradox of Morality’, p. 169.
66 Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 48.
67 Dooley makes a similar remark in ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 39.
68 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 95.
69 Derrida, ‘On Responsibility’, p. 20.
70 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 43.
71 See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 114; Levinas Ethics and Infinity,
p. 96; Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Peperzak
et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996),
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 447

447
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
pp. 144–5; Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time, trans. B. Bergo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 195–6.
72 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 114 emphasis added.
73 Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 102.
74 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 97.
75 Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 102.
76 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 73.
77 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,
trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1996),
pp. 212–13.
78 Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes To Mind, trans. B. Bergo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 82; emphasis added.
79 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 195.
80 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. xiv.
81 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 27.
82 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 83.
83 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 106. See also p. 227.
84 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 947.
85 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 104.
86 ibid., p. 195.
87 ibid., p. 106.
88 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 170; emphasis added.
89 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 104. See also Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 90;
Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, pp. 83–4;
‘Perhaps or Maybe’, p. 12; Derrida, ‘On Responsibility’, p. 25, 27, 32;
Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, pp. 68–9.
90 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, p. 68.
91 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 30.
92 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 106.
93 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 1997), p. 82.
94 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 158.
95 ibid., pp. 158–9.
96 ibid., p. 161.
97 ibid.
98 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 180.
99 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 16.
100 Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, pp. 63–4.
101 See Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, pp. 174–5.
102 ibid., pp. 170–1.
103 See Derrida’s remarks on the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in Caputo, Dooley
and Scanlon, Questioning God, p. 67.
104 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 175. See also Derrida, Points,
pp. 380–1. In fact, both Levinas and Derrida owe something to Martin
Heidegger’s analysis of Conscience and Guilt in Being and Time, trans.
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), §§56–60.
I shall not develop this point here.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 448

448
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
105 Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. S. Hand (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1996), p. 291.
106 See Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 6.
107 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 12.
108 ibid., p. 17. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence,
trans. M B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 162.
109 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 82.
110 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 120.
111 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 82.
112 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 21.
113 Derrida, in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon, Questioning God, p. 43. See also
‘Hostipitality’, p. 388.
114 Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1961), §231. Levinas cites this passage in, among other places,
Ethics and Infinity, p. 22 and Entre Nous, pp. 130, 144, 216.
115 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 22.
116 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London:
Abacus, 1998), p. 62.
117 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 91.
118 ibid., p. 89.
119 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 23.
120 Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 94.
121 ibid., p. 158.
122 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 75.
123 Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, p. 170.
124 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 102.
125 Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 102.
126 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 383.
127 ibid., p. 388.
128 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 21.
128 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 364.
130 ibid., p. 362.
131 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 152–3.
132 ibid., p. 157.
133 ibid., p. 153.
134 ibid., p. 156.
135 ibid., p. 170.
136 ibid., p. 158.
137 ibid., p. 157.
138 ibid., p. 162.
139 ibid., p. 160.
140 ibid., p. 153.
141 ibid., p. 162.
142 ibid., p. 163.
143 ibid., p. 157.
144 ibid., pp. 170–1.
145 ibid., pp. 172–3.
146 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 112.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 449

449
Plant: Doing justice to the Derrida–Levinas connection
147 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 155.
148 ibid., p. 156.
149 ibid., p. 154.
150 ibid., pp. 56–7.
151 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility, p. 71.
152 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 8.
153 Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, p. 5. Although Levinas also refers to the
‘perhaps’ in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 75, it figures prominantly in
the pyrrhonian scepticism of Sextus Empiricus.
154 See, for example, Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 54, 59.
155 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, p. 70.
156 See Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 25.
157 ibid., p. 51.
158 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 171. See also Derrida, Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas, p. 45.
159 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 111; Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 161.
160 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), p. 10.
161 See Derrida, in Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift and Postmodernism,
p. 72.
162 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit trans. D. Wood et al.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 74.
163 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, p. 69.
164 ibid., p. 70.
165 Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, p. 8.
166 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, p. 70.
167 ibid.
168 Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin,
trans. P. Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 89,
n. 9.
169 See Derrida, Points, p. 198; The Gift of Death, p. 68; ‘Perhaps or Maybe’,
p. 10; ‘On Responsibility’, pp. 23, 28–9; Monolinguism of the Other,
p. 62; ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, pp. 70–1; and in Caputo
and Scanlon, God, the Gift and Postmodernism, p. 72.
170 Derrida, Aporias, p. 12.
171 Jacques Derrida, remarks in ‘Arguing with Derrida’, Ratio (new series),
XIII (4) (December 2000): 353.
172 See Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 61, 125.
173 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 188. See also Otherwise than Being,
p. 77.
174 Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, p. 9.
175 Dooley, ‘The Politics of Exodus’, p. 169.
176 Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, p. 9. See also Derrida, Points, pp. 198, 387;
and Derrida in Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift and Postmodernism,
pp. 132–3.
177 See Derrida, The Gift of Death, pp. 107, 111–12; On the Name, p. 74,
133; ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, p. 86; Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas, p. 48.
04 Plant (jr/d) 19/6/03 12:19 pm Page 450

450
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (4)
178 Jacques Derrida, ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in J. Derrida and
M. Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. G. Donis and D. Webb trans.
G. Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 90.
179 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 63–4.
180 See Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 19; Derrida, Of Hospitality, pp. 53–4, 59–61.
181 Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 79. See also pp. 147–8.
182 ibid., p. 81.
183 Derrida, Given Time, p. 7. See also pp. 122–3; ‘Arguing with Derrida’,
p. 353.
184 Dooley, ‘A Civic Religion of Social Hope’, p. 54.
185 ibid., p. 38.