STEVEN SHANKMAN

  WAR AND THE HELLENIC SPLENDOR OF KNOWING: LEVINAS, EURIPIDES, CELAN 

THE TERM THE OTHER is continually evoked in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Mineke Schipper, a scholar of African and comparative literature, has remarked on the "Western multinational Otherness industry" that has developed in recent years. Schipper goes on to observe that the term the Other has become "so fashionable in [the] Western academy that words such as ‘difference’ and ‘Otherness’ have come to function—in the words of Edward Said . . . —as a talisman, serving to guarantee political correctness."  While the Otherness industry is indeed in high gear, the term the Other has gone remarkably unexamined. It seems to have lost its moorings in—or has flatly rejected the reality of—the intersubjective encounter, as discussed by Martin Buber and especially Emmanuel Levinas, who is surely one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers. Levinas, whose work participates in the phenomenological tradition of philosophical analysis, was a student of Husserl and Heidegger and was the revered teacher of such important modern (or postmodern) thinkers as Jacques Derrida. Alarmed by the apparent complicity of the most sophisticated philosophical speculations on the nature of Being with ethical turpitude and indifference, as evidenced by Heidegger’s association with Nazism, Levinas sought to rethink the relationship between philosophy and ethics, by which he means the face-to-face, concrete encounter with a unique human being for whom I am personally and inescapably responsible. Levinas argues that ethics must precede ontology, which is always in danger of betraying ethics.

In the current climate of opinion within literary and cultural studies in the United States, cultures are often blamed for injustices, but we hear relatively little of the human, of what Levinas insists is my personal responsibility for a unique Other—a responsibility that constitutes my very subjectivity. For Levinas, the Other is the other person, my neighbor, and not primarily or even necessarily the culturally different person. For Levinas, to view the Other primarily as culturally (or racially or sexually) different would turn the face of the Other into an object of knowledge that has been assimilated by my consciousness, and hence not an occasion for the transcendence of the ego in the direction of what it is not, that is, of what is truly other. If for much contemporary literary/cultural criticism the Other is socially constructed, for Levinas the Other is precisely that which eludes construction and categorization (or what Levinas calls "thematization"). The Other is what does not appear. It is not a category or an epiphany. Rather, it is that which, for Levinas, disrupts Being and presence.

Levinas understands European civilization to be, in essence, the product of what he calls "The Bible and the Greeks." For Levinas, "the Greeks" means ontology, reason, essence, the articulation of what he calls "the said" ("le dit"), while the Bible (which he associates with "le dire," or "saying") commands me, calls me to my responsibility for the Other, a responsibility that precedes ontology.

How valid is Levinas’s distinction between the Bible and the Greeks? In the case of some Greek philosophers, the distinction certainly holds. If the Bible, for Levinas, is a call to peace, he sometimes associates philosophy with war, recalling the influential fragments of Heraclitus: "It is necessary to know that war is common and right is strife and that all things happen by strife and necessity"; and "War is the father of all and the king of all" (Fragments 80 and 30). For Levinas, the act of knowing involves a grasping and a possessing of the true. This experience of "eureka!"—meaning "I have discovered it!"—strikes the consciousness of the seeker with a sense of shock and awe as the order of reality, or of Being, is revealed in its startling and chilling impersonality. In contrast, Levinas argues, the other person cannot—and should never—be grasped as an entity to be known. The Other is truly exterior to the consciousness; it is that which interrupts knowing and presence. As Levinas states in the preface to Totality and Infinity, "War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other."

But is it accurate to associate Plato’s philosophy with war? After all, it is possible and even plausible to identify Platonic philosophizing as an attempt to analyze, and to offer an antidote to, the corruptions of Athenian society that led to the Peloponnesian War and its devastating impact on Athens. Philosophy, in the Platonic sense, begins with a concern for others, with an attempt to better human society by imagining a world of ideas—such as justice—against which contemporary existence can be measured. The Republic, for example, opens with Socrates generously accepting an invitation, issued by the young Glaucon and Polemarchus, to join them in a discussion about the nature of justice. Is it better, Socrates asks, to be corrupt and enjoy a good reputation, or to be just and have everyone think you are unjust? He then proceeds to argue that the latter alternative—the ethical alternative—is indeed preferable.