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The Entwining of Freedom and Intersubjective Sensibility : Levinas, Thinker of an

Embodied Philosophy of the (ethico-political) Subject
Bettina Bergo, Université de Montréal
APSA 2009 bettina.bergo@umontreal.ca

1. Levinas’s Essay “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”

Levinas’s first written critique of politics was penned in 1933, probably in the

aftermath of Hitler’s election as chancellor. It appeared in 1934, in the Catholic

personalist journal Esprit, whose editor Emmanuel Mounier would collaborate, for a

time, with the Vichy regime—for what were, no doubt, ambiguous reasons. The much

discussed, brief essay, “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” is an

overview of the genealogy of the Western notion of autonomy and certain fundamental

tendencies at work in European liberalism. It aimed to explain the force and

seductiveness of ideologies whose primary, but far from unique, example was that of

German National Socialism: these propounded a vision of the human being that united

body and mind. In that attempted unification, the long-standing emphasis on freedom and

autonomy took a backseat to the biological community, which ultimately translated into

the paradoxical racial-spiritual community, whose primary target was liberalism of all

sorts. The terrifying genius of the philosophy behind Hitlerism lay in its revival of a

complex philosophical anthropology: humans are embodied, situated and determined, as

or even before, they are rational beings. Only by laying out the seduction of this thought

can Levinas trace the genealogy of individual autonomy and, in the 1940s, sketch a

philosophy of his own, designed to preserve autonomy and embodiment. Let me read you

a part of his presentation of this “philosophy of Hitlerism.” In a moment you will see how

it leads Levinas to a pretty innovative genealogy of European liberalism through the

secularization of certain religious principles. Thus, Levinas on embodiment, in 1933:

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What does it mean to have a body, according to the traditional

interpretation? It is to bear [that body] as an object in the outer world. It

weighs on Socrates like the chains that hang on the philosopher in the prison

of Athens; it encloses him like the very tomb that awaits him….[However,]

beside the interpretation of these facts given by the thought traditional in the

West—facts that [Western] thought deems crude and vulgar—there may

subsist the feeling for [the body’s] irreducible originality and the desire to

maintain [its] purity….

In this passage, the only way past the age-long ‘illusion’ of the superiority of spirit to

body, freedom to natural necessity—the only way past this would be through a

philosophy grounded on the equipollence of body and mind; but above all on our utter

rootedness in a body-world, which is our concrete situation. This idea, which also

resembles aspects of the emerging Existentialism (the German Kierkegaard reception,

Nietzscheanism, Heidegger), is the insight that Levinas grasps at the base of Hitler’s

philosophical anthropology. Speaking of the post-Renaissance heritage of materialism

that re-prioritized the embodiment, and whose most shocking avatar erupts much later in

mysticial vitalisms and the ‘philosophy’ of Hitlerism, Levinas adds:

The sentiment of identity between the ego (le moi) and the body, which

clearly has nothing in common with popular materialism, will never allow

those, who would use it as a point of departure [no doubt the intellectuals of

fascism], to rediscover, at the base of this unity, the duality of a free spirit
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struggling against the body to which it would be enchained. To the contrary,

for them it is in this enchainment that the whole essence of the spirit

consists. To separate [mind or spirit] from these concrete forms in which

[spirit] is caught up forever after, is to betray the originality of the very

feeling from which one should start….

These are the various forms of philosophy of life that we find in Alfred Baeumler and

Ludwig Klages’s adaptation of Nietzsche and Bachofen. Their radicality lies

simultaneously in the transposition of a host of romantic qualities to the embodied human

being, but above all their self-legitimation in a search for the primal ancient religion, or

Urreligion discussed by Bachofen in 1926. For Levinas, the movement from this body-

rooted, philosophical anthropology towards a political aesthetic is what posed the greatest

danger: it quickly becomes an aesthetic of body and blood. He argues:

The biological, with all the fatality it entails, becomes more than an object

of spiritual life; it becomes the heart of it. The mysterious voices of the

blood, the appeals of heredity and of the past for which the body serves as

an enigmatic vehicle, lose their nature as problems subjected to solution by a

sovereign, free Ego (un Moi)….From then on, any social structure that

proclaims some liberation (affranchissement) with regard to the body but

does not engage it, becomes suspect, like a denial, like a betrayal.
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The suspicion, whose principal target are the formalist philosophies of mind and liberty,

tied to liberal politics but even certain Marxisms—the suspicion nevertheless cannot be

dismissed as readily as can its racist extensions; the human being is a compound entity.

We cannot think the mind without the body, reason without sensibility, the rational

without the passions in which it bathes.

These selected passages from Levinas’ argument reminds us of the emergence of

philosophies of life out of the ideological ruin of the thought that interpreted the body as

the vehicle of the soul, from the Greeks to the Christians. The rehabilitation of material

embodiment, and our immersion in a ‘world’ of forces and natural necessity, is not so

much new as it is inflected in increasingly surprising ways after Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche. For the older ‘vitalism’ of Leibniz always ascribed soul or some spiritual force

to all monads—and thus Leibniz worked in a direction opposite to the philosophy that

would ground “Hitlerism.” Even Schopenhauer held the pathos of anxiety to be the

reflection of a Noumenal will. However, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche repudiated

the illusion of freedom through their philosophies of forces. What was emerging as novel

in the philosophies of life of the inter-War period was the ideologization of forces and the

drift toward a conception of identity in social and biological solidarity. The profound

disgust for the politics of Weimar and the Third Republic in France flowed into the

aesthetics of simplicity, sincerity, but above all will and vitality; Ernst Jünger’s “Kampf

als inneres Erlebnis” exemplifies this. These qualities were predicated of a “we” in

search of the true enemy or non-brother; a “we” connected by lineage. “This ideal of
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man,” writes Levinas, “is accompanied by a new ideal of thought and truth”: forces

harnessed by the resolute Will, but forces above all in expansion.

I emphasize this moment in twentieth century history for two reasons. First, the

critique of liberalism as given to a cynical drift, and to game-like rituals where freedom

means political non-commitment, points even now to an ongoing danger. And the

question of a social democracy that is not constructed on a unified if imaginary “we”—

“we others”—is still current. Second, the antithesis of political rationality sets its

predecessor in a sharp light: liberal conceptions of autonomy flow out of the conviction

of the separability of reason and passions or, more profoundly, the distinction between

embodied life and rational detachment. Given that, how could one possibly avoid

biologistic and corporatist aesthetics at moments of political crisis, when reason and

passions seem to fuse in various salvific “destinies”? Levinas’ first essay in political

thought then proceeds to a discussion of the ways in which inertia and cynicism emerge

within parliamentarianism. It explores how a philosophy of freedom and individualism

can veer toward condoning radical freedom for scepticism and disengagement from

political life. Social, but also philosophical cynicism erodes the sense of the significance

of politics. And the reactive critique readily denounces the inauthenticity of everyday

political life. When these reactive positions flow into a positive philosophy of Blut und

Boden, blood and ground, it forges a new body; it corporatizes and places situated

embodied selves under the protection of a State to which they owe their very survival; a

conception already found in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The corporatist aesthetic

captivates some of the best minds of its time, and the true essence of “the political” will

be defined in terms of friend and enemy, life and death. As if grasping the implications of
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Carl Schmitt’s 1932 argument, Levinas writes, “A society based on consanguinity flows

immediately from this concretization of the spirit. And then, if race does exist, it shall

have to be invented!” (p. 5). How else to conceive an ontological “them”—maybe even

in our midst—who allows “us” to define politics in terms of life and death, and

eventually “infection” of the body politic?

While the only philosopher explicitly cited in this six page essay is Nietzsche,

read through the German neo-Nietzscheans, this is the same year, 1934, in which

Heidegger proposed his seminar on racial anthropology, or Rassenkunde. I want to repeat

that the interest of this essay lies precisely in that Levinas takes very seriously the

critique emanating from embodiment philosophies. Indeed, for the next half-century,

Levinas will work toward a philosophy of the human being that combines embodiment

and autonomy. All of his subsequent political arguments turn on this initial effort. To

grasp his critique of liberalism, we thus have to see how he works toward a different

conclusion, while holding together the centrality of the body, our concrete, even destinal,

situatedness, and the value of fundamental freedom.

Levinas is not the first to trace the genealogy of liberal thought back to its

condition of possibility in a certain separability and distinctness of thought, or reason,

and natural necessity. He shows the dual currents of Greek and Jewish thought moving

into the Christian drama of repentance and pardon, which undoes the necessity of time

because it—pardon—would repair the past. Note that the “dramatization” characteristic

of Christianity points to the importance of aesthetics in this genealogy. With the

confluence of the three currents of thought, the chains of natural and historic necessity
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prove modifiable in the present: “Time loses its very irreversibility. It collapses

exhausted at men’s feet like a wounded animal, and it frees him,” writes Levinas (p. 24).

What frees humanity is the possibility of interrupting the flow of events determined by

the past—similar to the act of will that Nietzsche tried to rethink by way of amor fati and

the courageous endurance of eternal recurrence. What Levinas points out, however, is

that the separability of nature and human acts is already found in Judaism and

Christianity, which together prepare the way for the possibility of freedom—including

freedom from worldly commitments. “This infinite freedom in regard to every

attachment, through which… no attachment is ultimately definitive, is at the basis of the

notion of the soul,” he writes (p. 25). It is thus this operation of separability that will

literally trans-late, move into, conceptions of liberty, and thereafter, secular autonomy.

But the later versions of separability dispense with the Christian “drama of the

phenomena”—the vivid story and aesthetic of a man-God who freely gives up his life in

mortal suffering. The core of Levinas’s argument is that liberalism has inherited a de-

dramatized conception of the specificity of being human, in our ability to rise above the

drives and confusion of the body and the passions. And even when idealist philosophy

celebrates the passions, as the mature Hegel will do, it will be for their service rendered

to the progress of Spirit. However pale, we carry at least this logic, this evaluation today;

and we inherited it from the Christian drama. More importantly, a secular phenomeno-

logy may retrace the lived origin of this separability of body and soul, and that is

precisely what Levinas will attempt to do.

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My purpose in this essay is to show how Levinas addresses the vitalist critique of

liberalism, (which may possibly open to a certain communitarianism), even as he

rethinks, or recontextualizes freedom itself. I should say immediately that my essay is

indebted to a real political philosopher, namely Jill Stauffer. I am not such a creature,

myself. And my interest is partly existential, partly epistemological: I’m convinced that

Levinas has gone as far as philosophically possible to showing us how reason conditions,

and is modalized in, human autonomy even as affectivity—certain feelings and

emotions—leave us open to intersubjective ‘connections’ that precede if not undo the

political subject as a mere monad or as abstract rationality.

Before proceeding, and in case you felt uneasy about this genealogy of autonomy

in a de-dramatized Christianity, let’s recall that a political thinker such as Hobbes is

utterly explicit about what Levinas calls the separability of mind and body, conscience

and action. We see this in a number of places, but it is noteworthy that the ultimate

purpose of the law, for Hobbes, is to bind the body and the acts, but never the conscience,

which cannot be dominated. Some, like Leo Strauss, have argued that Hobbes was a true

precursor of liberalism. But what is important, here, is that Hobbes be recognized as a

thinker of negative freedom: freedom from certain constraints and powers. Thus, in an

early essay devoted to human nature and to political formations, namely The Elements of

Law, Natural and Politic (1640), Hobbes will write “that human law is not intended to

oblige the conscience of a man, but the actions only. For seeing [that] no man (but God

alone) knoweth the heart or conscience of a man, unless it break out into action, either of

the tongue, or other part of the body; the law made thereupon would be of none effect”
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(DCP, ch XXV, sect. 3). To legitimate this crucial distinction between conscience and its

freedom, and the body that requires laws, Hobbes cites no fewer than eight direct biblical

justifications, mostly from New Testament sources. Ultimately, freedom of conscience

proves more fundamental, because it is guaranteed by the Christian drama of the

resurrection which, for a thinker like Hobbes, proves the immortality of the rational soul.

And this position will not change, even after the debacle that will be the Cromwell

revolution.

The separability of conscience, thanks to its ties to the Creator, does not

completely emancipate conscience from the passions, and therefore Hobbes will speak of

charity in terms of contract and “purchase” of friendship or fear (Human nature, chapter

9, § 17). In contemporary parlance this is called socialized self-interest, and it finds a

number of versions in liberal theories. Jill Stauffer has called socialized self-interest a

“structural ambivalence” in liberalism itself. This ambivalence touches the topography of

rights’ application and the ultimate limits on the enforcement of rights—as well as of

civil laws. From Stauffer’s elucidation of the structural ambivalence of liberal theories—

i.e., universal rights applied and enforced locally—we see why framing social rights and

privileges according a Blutgemeinschaft or biological community seduces. It appears to

outstrip the calculative quality of socialized self-interest. Group identification then takes

on a perversely material form, and social rights and protections draw legitimation from a

common ancestry, a Volk and its destiny. Here, the contradiction is lifted between the

Enlightenment’s universality of rights and the necessary localization of jurisdiction and

policing. In fact, the old sense of race, in Boulainvilliers for example, according to which

some blood became noble thanks to the heroism of one’s ancestors (or through Bildung)
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works very well here. In the absence of a biological ideology, and some corresponding

aesthetic (out of a narrative that dramatizes one’s origins and destiny)—in the absence of

these, one is left with socialized self-interest. However, as Jill Stauffer argues, the

legitimacy and ultimate purpose of all political regimes are posited beyond their everyday

operation; and it would seem that such regulative ideals explain how socialized self-

interest grows, or develops self-correcting mechanisms. Quoting Stauffer: “the self

sufficient subject founded on the primordiality of the self’s freedom would not be capable

of having justice beyond socialized self-interest as a motivation, nor perhaps even as an

idea” (JS, 3, emphasis added). This question of regulative ideals is also found, directly or

indirectly, in the corporatist critiques of liberalism, which, although frighteningly

dangerous, nevertheless “become philosophically interesting,” in 1934, according to

Levinas.

The preservation of the notion of liberty, as the capacity to extract oneself from

the moiling of the passions, and the question of justice as inhabited by equity and a

potential for ongoing enlargement, will be two challenges that confront Levinas’s

philosophy. If we assume that after the death of God—Hegel or Nietzsche’s God—it

becomes at least peculiar to speak of “intelligible character,” much less of “the soul,”

then we have to revisit the inherited conception of a political subject. The embodied

subject, the subject who rises to autonomy because of having been sub-jected in advance

to pragmatic and symbolic powers—we are all familiar with this thought, which passes

from Merleau-Ponty through social constructionism into the works of Grosz, Butler, and

others. But the originality of Levinas’s contribution is to work within phenomenology,

which identifies rational intentionality with the formal but real unity of flowing
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consciousness. Thus, to understand Levinas’s contribution to a political subjectivity, we

have to review some of the principles of phenomenology.

In Husserl’s phenomenology, consciousness is always consciousness of

something. Guided thus by its objects, intentional consciousness has a dynamic threefold

structure of retention, occurrence, and protention. Given this, lived time, time as a

continuous experience, unfolds without fundamental breaks. The unification of

experience as of this “temporality” just happens: phenomenological unification is a

synthesis analogous to Kant’s schematism; and it takes place passively, without voluntary

or otherwise forced consolidations. Consequently, and on the basis of the unity of our

experienced time consciousness, we say that the world itself has unity—for us. The unity

consists of horizons and profiles, all of which can be enlarged through successive

perspectives, as the object, any object, is constructed in pursuit of an idealizing intention.

The words, “pursuit of an idealizing intention” simply mean that our experience fills out

the profiles missing in our ideal conception of, say, a four-dimensional object—a house,

for example, or a mountain range, both of which we take to be wholes even if we never

see all of them at once, at the same time. Phenomenology is thus a philosophy of sense.

It is a formal philosophy where the unity of world and consciousness result from passive

syntheses; and, even before we presume the objectivity of what is outside us, we have

experienced it in the joining of an intentional aim with its intentional object. This is, in

the 20th century, the real cash-out of Aristotle’s enigmatic claim: “the soul is, in a sense,

all things.”
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There remains a certain naïveté to phenomenology, which approaches perception

as if it were basically free from conceptual “interference.” This is a blind spot in the

philosophy, to which Levinas is sensitive—in part thanks to Heidegger’s criticism of

Husserl. Thus, to the linguistic, conceptual blind spot in Husserl’s phenomenology,

Heidegger added the following, partly Hegelian, consideration: ‘What-is’, being or

existence itself, resonates in language. There is no constructing of the ideal house-object

unless there is also the accompanying conceptuality furnished by language, and above all

structured by the grammar of a substance, its qualities; the actions of some substance, and

the qualities or modes of that action. The openness of existence resonates in the poetic

said. But what does that mean? For Heidegger, the very difference between things and

the fact that they are, is almost uncaptable by language, any language. This is because

language can say everything, and in expressing something—whether it is a material

object or an idea—language transforms it into a being or a noun. Now, the ontological

difference is neither a noun nor a thing. And so, the power of poetic language is to open

predication deconstructively so that the fixity of beings, taken as a whole, comes almost

to vibrate as a process and a mood.

Levinas accepts the Husserlian equation that the psyche merges with its objects,

and that only through this spontaneous merger can we make determinations about the

objectivity and externality of things. Levinas also inherits and takes up Husserl’s flowing

time consciousness as unified, stable but dynamic, in which each event stretches along as

it is lived, occupying a specific place in immanent time, which continually flows

backward and away. Thus, Levinas accepts Husserl’s claims about the activity of

consciousness, its idealizing intentions, and its constructivist nature. But from Heidegger,
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he understands that something about this processuality may not enter so simply into the

universal flow of time consciousness. To be sure, existence, that which-is, can be said; it

can resonate in the poetic word; and names can stand in the place of things, which means

that they can be substituted for things—often, with no loss of sense. I will return to the

theme of substitution shortly. What Levinas wonders is this: whether the processual

dynamic expressed by verbs might not point, in another way, to an aspect of existence

that names and concepts miss. To get this right, let us take a step back.

When Husserl describes the flow of consciousness as one now-moment followed

by another, in a flow continually fed by the upsurge of new nows, he emphasizes the

united form of the flow. Nothing in experience is foreign to experience. And the unity of

consciousness is also, in a sense, what makes it reasonable, predictable. For all that, there

would be no flow if something did not feed it, if no new waters entered the river. But the

metaphor of waters can only refer to sensations. Whether these basic sensations come

from within the body or from outside, they are comparably lived, although it may be that

the continuous upsurge and modification of our embodied, endogenous sensations

represent the most fundamental of these. Husserl calls the endogenous sensations urhylè,

originary matter. He insists that at the level of the origin of pure feeling, matter and form

should not be distinguished—they are really one and the same thing.

But note that becoming aware of an emerging sensation requires a (metaphoric)

split second during which time something changes; either the sensation itself modifies or

something about its context changes. It is in and thanks to that modification that we
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become aware of what fed the flow of intentional consciousness. I mean that it is only as

it changes that we become aware of what we felt. As it is occurring in or to us, we are

initially unconscious, or preconscious, of it. This is Levinas and Husserl’s argument, and

it is not only theirs. Psychology from William James to Freud discovered the peculiarity

of embodiment. To be a human being or a subject means to be situated in a body that

feels and senses, and what we feel enters our consciousness as a comparative intensive

magnitude. That occurs in and through modifications, as when an intense pain, which has

obliterated my intentionality and my will, lifts, so that I can step back, make the suffering

into an object of thought, and declare: “I’m in terrible pain,” or “That was a horrible

feeling.” That is possible when something about the sensation alters. However, when the

sensation is not modified, we are “in it” to the precise degree that we are it, or are driven

by it. Hence William James can say that it may first be in running, in fleeing, that I

realize just how terrified I am.

Keep in mind the political question, which is the critique of those philosophical

anthropologies centered on freedom from, and freedom for increasing detachment from

one’s situation—freedom for political cynicism. The project of integrating into an ethical,

and eventually political subject, certain affects along with rational detachment represents

Levinas’s life project. The preconscious moment in sensibility allows us to glimpse how

it is that Levinas can bring embodiment into a philosophy of consciousness, understood

as the free dynamic construction of world and things. More importantly, he can do this

without recourse to a metaphysics of drives or an existential “will.” But how do we grasp

the role and activity of embodied sensation in relation to language; that is, in light of

Heidegger’s claim that existence requires language, is indissociable from language?

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Levinas will argue by 1974 that if we grasp existence as something verbal—if being is, or

essence essences, as Heidegger argued—then sensibility is best captured linguistically

through the ad-verb, which gives us its modalizations—like quickly, intensely, darkly,

differently, otherly, autrement.

But did I not just say that sensation only becomes conscious after the slightest

interval of time, which allows it to be integrated into the regular flow of time

consciousness? That is absolutely the case and it will be that interval, which Levinas

argues is always reintegrated into consciousness, that suggests those moments which may

escape our full awareness. It is not his purpose to write a psychology of the preconscious.

We know clearly today that a great deal is, as it were, happening to us without our being

fully conscious of it. Ask Madison Avenue. Or ask political campaigns. However

Levinas’s interest concerns the openness of our sensibility to others. This is not just a

peaceful openness that resembles moral altruism; it is our “originary susceptiveness.”

Merleau-Ponty explored such an openness in the relations of infants to the faces of their

mothers. Caught up in a circuit with the mother in which there was neither child nor

mother per se, the affect and expression on the child’s face changed with those in the face

of the mother. But the infant was too young to have consciously decided to imitate her.

And it is circuits analogous to this that Levinas is reaching towards, though he is not

writing a psychology because his project aims to set out some intersubjective conditions

of our sensuous openness—which is embodied and which persists well after childhood.

If sensation temporalizes with a lag, if it occupies an indeterminate zone between

intentional objectivizing consciousness and a pre-conscious dynamic which is not the

mirror image of consciousness, then we can address Husserl’s phenomenology of

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intentionality and supplement it: it may be that accompanying consciousness in its free

ability to step outside its immediate circumstances, is a less clearly determined domain

that does not belong necessarily to force or natural necessity. Sensibility is openness—to

upwelling sensations in the body and incoming stimuli from outside—and sensibility is

passive. It is lived as pathos; some “self,” some “me” feels it. That does not mean that

instincts and drives are not active. It means that we become aware of them as they are

happening to us, processually—always thanks to a tiny lapse of time or change. That

said, sensibility hooks into affectivity or emotion in extraordinarily complex ways. We

may be in great pain and yet feel real joy when we accomplish our goal despite all the

pain: the sports victory, helping or saving another, even giving birth are examples of this.

And the converse is also possible. We may feel well enough physically, yet be quite sad.

The point is that sensibility and affectivity are not isolated autonomous spheres, or are

not necessarily so. Thus, when Levinas frames his subject as a subject simultaneously

embodied and rational he is also framing that subject in phenomenological hermeneutic

terms as a being, ongoingly able to abstract itself from the immediacy of its embodied

circumstances; yet also as one in whom the abstraction would never take place without

the complex waves of sensibility and affectivity conditioning it. One of the primary

sources of sensibility, that specific sensibility wherein we feel we are “unique” because

unable to sneak away, can be found in the face-to-face encounter in which I am singled

out by a gaze. Sensuously speaking, the gaze is not yet two objects called “eyes.” It is

unclear, too, just what of the face, gazing at me, has yet come into the phenomenality that

is gendered or raced. In a word, a brief sensuous moment comes to pass in which I am as

if driven into my skin, unable to get away, anxious, and maybe later hostile and angry.
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The moment is quickly reabsorbed into active, identifying consciousness. Much of my

subsequent reactions will depend on my will and my freedom. For that moment I am as if

occupied by that non-thing that is the look. I feel it. And Aristotle’s “the soul is in some

sense all things” shows its sensuous component. Or maybe Paul Celan’s expression is

better, here: “I am I when I am you.” This is exactly what Levinas is trying to get at.

Before or at the same time as words can take the place of things, enabling linguistic

communication, a sensuous semi-conscious substitution takes place, which is specific to

human intersubjectivity. In one passage, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas admitted that the

face “is the only thing I can wish to murder.” This is only because of the way it inter-

venes, temporarily debarring my freedom of flight. What could be more onerous, after

all, than to be trapped by something so naked, expressive, and alien? Clearly, my books

and my car do not have this effect. We tend not to murder the other, however. And that is

in part thanks to law and habit; but it is above all else thanks to the fact that we discover

this sensuous-affective moment after it has begun, when we respond. Those of you who

know Levinas will remember that our response can be as simple as “Excuse me,” or

“After you, sir.” Nevertheless, there is a kind of generosity in the response which may be

due to habit or socialization, but sometimes happens so quickly that the possibility of

willing it seems short-circuited.

Someone will tell me, like the young Nietzsche arguing that repetition forms habit

and habit forms a second nature, that socialization is all it takes and that no preconscious

“substitution” occurs at the level of sensuous perception. But in his later works Levinas

seems to dig deeper, toward affects that look more like an affective memory of the flesh,

as though an event we lived through insists in us, and repeats, perhaps without any
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“other” being present. The gnawing of remorse is one of his examples. “Maternity” is a

trope he uses to express the way we are ourselves; that is, as carrying the other in us,

willy nilly, and in manifold affective modes. Psychoanalysis called these fragments of the

other-in-the-same “identifications.” Yet psychoanalyses worked with a model of the

unconscious that sometimes resembled a “scene” close to consciousness itself. Still, the

Ego is the sum of its fragmentary identifications, Freud argued. And Levinas would

always say that psychology erred in one fundamental way: it was blind to the ontological

implications of its claims, because it assumed these as it worked out diagnoses and

taxonomies.

But the other-in-the-same tells a story about how we become who and what we

are. For Levinas, we do not so much identify with these others, as they impact us

affectively. And the impact is sensuous as well as emotional, because of the continuum

sensibility-affectivity, and because the skin is the site par excellence of non-intentional

consciousness. His example of the caress is illustrative: the caress seeks nothing, it

identifies nothing. What is not intentional, however, becomes intentional. It can be taken

up, stated; it receives predicates. In its incipience, however, as it first unfolds, it is in a

kind of entre-deux, between the flowing formal time of consciousness that identifies

objects and the nowhere of insomniac floating.

It would be difficult to explain why we respond to the other; as difficult as it is to

determine the extent of those intensive magnitudes that Kant schematized with concepts

to produce “experience.” The fact is that philosophy—including much political

philosophy—works by preference with constructivist schemes, whether these are the

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“autonomous subject,” independent of its material situation and readily separable from it,

or whether this be the omnipresence of “sense,” as in traditional phenomenology. These

are constructivist choices. In that respect Levinas’ conception of a subject includes,

because of its corporeity, its emphasis on the body, the extra-rational, which is above all

relational. Alongside the subject that envisions projects, constructs objects through

perspectives—alongside the subject that wills and evaluates, is a dense, non-static

sensuous dimension, which does not quite inhabit the same time, and which is

perforable—i.e., non-monadic. “I am I when I am you,” is Celan’s formulaic way of

speaking of the dual genesis of a human being. Whatever we think of Levinas’s rhetoric,

he is proposing a wager: to describe what does not fully enter predicative description and

to plumb the intersubjective preconscious before it is fully intentionalized. Given recent

discoveries about mirror neurons, it might be possible empirically to show that more is

going on, neuro-physiologically, in our encounter with others than that of which we are

directly conscious. What is important for my purposes here is that the conception of a

social being that Levinas proposes is different from—in some senses antithetical to—

many liberal versions thereof. That is why he found “interesting” that primary, elemental

philosophy of bodies that devolved into Hitlerism. But that is also why Levinas set about

conceiving a phenomenology in which there was space for sensibility-affectivity as well

as the autonomous subject able to agree to constraints on its freedom out of socialized

self-interest. If we elide one or the other, sensibility or rationality, our political thought—

like our theories of economic behavior—will suffer alternately from too much

irrationality, too much drives, or again an abstract, reductive autonomy whose lived

evidence is clear and demonstrable as intentionality, but which could never sum up an
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embodied human being—much less the way in which she/he is, firstly and complexly,

intersubjective.