“Violence does not aim simply at disposing of the other as one disposes of a thing . . .  It proceeds from unlimited negation . . . Violence can aim only at a face.”
(Levinas, 1969, p. 225)

For Emmanuel Levinas, Talmudic scholar and postmodern philosopher, violence aims not merely at the destruction of the other.  Violence aims to possess the otherness of the other, the sheer difference from me that is the reality of the other.  Because this is impossible, Levinas concludes that murder is impossible. (1969, pp. 198-199, 232-234; 1990a, p.  8)  The other may be destroyed, but his or her otherness can never be possessed.  About this Levinas seems correct.  If what the murderer wants is to possess the otherness of the other, then murder is impossible.

On the basis of my research with murderers at a maximum security prison, I don’t believe that this is what murderers want.  [1]  Many murderers want, I believe, to possess aspects of the other with the bother of the other’s otherness.  It’s not the same thing.  To be sure, the result is the same as far as the poor victim is concerned.  But how we understand the motive of the murderer and the psychology of violence in general makes a difference in what we might do about it.  For Levinas, murder is a violent negation that is bound to fail.  In my experience, murder is a perverted object relationship.

Maurice Blanchot, who inspires Levinas, writes of murder as though it were a colossal mistake, a violent misreading of infinity.  “Murder takes the infinity by which Autrui [the other] presents himself as if it were a property of Autrui and wishes to reject it absolutely.  Thereby it misses Autrui: `it changes him into absence, but does not touch him.’” (Robbins, 1999, p.  66; Blanchot, 1993, p.  61)  The other can be annihilated.  In neither life nor death can the infinite otherness of the other be possessed, for otherness is by its nature a quality not subject to appropriation.  This is what Levinas means when he says that while murder is a real possibility, it is an ethical impossibility.  (1969, pp. 198-199; 1999b, p. 10)
 

Violence is not just murder.  For Levinas,
Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons
as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.  (1999, p.  21)

Violence, it seems, is everywhere people treat others as objects.  Violence, says Levinas. is when we treat a being with a face as though it were faceless.  [2]

This most well-known of all Levinas’ concepts, the face, is more subtle than first appears.  Neither the particular face of my beloved, nor the abstract face of humanity, the face (visage, but occasionally face) represents the one who is before me in all his or her immediacy, but with none of his or her particularity.  The face is naked and vulnerable, common to all humans and absolutely unique at the same time.  It is the face of the other that challenges me to murder, and calls me to devotion.  These are, says Levinas, the only choices, which is really no choice at all.  To murder the face is impossible.  “This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face.”  (Levinas, 1990a, p.  10)

It’s tempting to interpret Levinas along the lines of Kant.  To define violence as treating a being with a face as though he or she were faceless sounds like a version of Kant’s dictum “act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means.”  (Kant, 1981, p.  36)  To treat a being with a face as faceless means to treat a human as though he or she were a thing, a means not an end.  Or so one might conclude.  There is evidence in Levinas for such an interpretation, as when he defines violence as “all action by which one acts as if he were the only acting person; as if the rest of the universe existed only for the reception of this action.”  (1990a, pp.  8-9)

The comparison with Kant is misleading.  Levinas is far more radical than Kant, though that puts it too mildly.  In important respects, Levinas thinks more radically about violence than any Westerner in years.  Not just because Levinas sees reason as always risking violence, imposing itself and its categories on the other, in order to render the other subject to categorization and control  That insight has by now almost become a cliché among postmoderns, which does not make it wrong.  The Frankfurt School, Foucault, and Derrida have all seen the latent totalitarianism of reason—that is, reason’s aim to see the world as subject to a single human principle.  Levinas is more radical than any of these because he sees being (selfhood, just existing) as itself a form of violence.

Is Murder Really Impossible?

Whether murder is truly impossible, in Levinas’ sense, depends not just on whether it is impossible to possess the otherness of the other, but whether this is what murderers really want.  As Levinas formulates the issue, there is self and there is other, leading to the logical conclusion that if self is not serving the other, then self must want to possess the other’s otherness, erasing its sacred difference and distance.  What other relationship could there be between two such opposite and logically contradictory entities, except perhaps mutual coexistence in ignorance of each other’s otherness? [3]   While Levinas’ logic is unassailable, my experience interviewing murderers leads me to conclude that the psycho-logic is more complex.

What does the distinction between possessing the other and possessing the otherness of the other mean?  To want to possess the other has the quality of what Melanie Klein (1975) refers to as the scooping out of the breast, taking the contents for oneself without any regard for the integrity of the other.   Winnicott (1989) talks in similar terms about the ruthless use of the object.  One might argue that the distinction between possessing the other and possessing the otherness of the other could be similarly elaborated in Kleinian terms: when I am jealous, I want to possess the other, so that you cannot have his or her affections. (Klein, 1964)  When I am envious, I want to destroy the other, so that the very existence of a goodness that is not me, and not within my control, no longer exists.  The psycho-logic is that of Milton’s Satan, who famously says “Evil be thou my good.” (Paradise Lost, 4.110)  Because he cannot be the good, Satan will devote himself to its destruction.  Isn’t this what Levinas is talking about when he refers to possessing the otherness of the other?

No.  In the accounts of Klein, Winnicott, and Milton, the destruction of the other is the result of failed attachment.   How badly Milton’s Satan wants to serve God, how much he admires Him!   Envious hatred has a hot, relationship-seeking quality.  To be sure, the relationship envy seeks is one of destruction, but it’s still a relationship.  There is no one to whom we are more closely bound than those we envy, for they contain what we would be.

This way of thinking is entirely absent in Levinas’ account.  One might argue that this reflects no more than a difference in genres, psychology and literature on the one hand, philosophy on the other.  Perhaps, but it is worth noting that there is very little relationship-seeking in Levinas.  Even the erotic caress seeks not to touch the other person, but infinity.  “A movement unto the invisible” is how Levinas describes the caress. (1969, 258)

When he writes about seeking to possess the otherness of the other, Levinas seems to refer to the desire to possess otherness itself, and so become the creator of a world that is all me, not just within my possession and control, but an extension of me, a world without otherness.  It is this way of thinking that leads Levinas to conclude that reason itself is violent, always seeking to reduce other to an instance of the same, what Levinas means when he refers to Western thought as an egology.  Is this what the murderer wants?

It depends on the murderer, a distinction that Levinas’ approach does not allow.

Three murderers

“I stood over them and watched them die,” said Mr. Krebs.  “I shared their last moments, their pain, their sorrow.  For once my family was close.”   Mr. Krebs is talking as if his parents died in a car wreck, as if he had rushed to the hospital to share their beautiful deaths, as if he hadn’t shot and killed them.  His eyes close for a moment.  I think he is experiencing bliss, an oceanic merger with the idea of his parents separated from their awful reality.   Awful they truly were, locking him in his room for days at a time.

Mr. Krebs wanted to be close to his parents and free of them at the same time.  Only he could not do the abstraction, the distinction between his real parents and their mental representation, internalizing their image while leaving their bodies behind.  Or rather, the intensity of his hatred bound him to them so that the only way he could have their image was to destroy their bodies.  He killed his soul murdering parents in order to possess their souls all for himself, free of the bother of their bodies: the terrible, and terribly complex, reality of their hatred, their power, and their love, totally under his control for the first time in his life.

Since he killed his parents, Mr. Krebs dreams about them almost every night.  He likes it that way.  “While they were still alive, I never dreamed about them.  I was too angry.  It’s better this way.  Not I can have them in my dreams.”

Mr. Krebs raises an important question.  Rather than seeking to possess the otherness of his parents, he annihilated their reality in order to possess something better: his ideal image of his parents, his version of their souls without the bother of their bodies.  This is the way it works in real life, which is why the either/or logic of self and other is not too helpful.   Not “I want the otherness of the other,” but “I don’t want to be bothered by the otherness of the other.  I want the other in small, easily digested doses,” is the way many murderers think.

Mr. Krebs is no average murderer, but his psychology is not so different from most who murder someone with whom they have a prior emotional relationship.   “I couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t stay,” said Ms Carlton, who shot her lover to death on Christmas Eve.  “So I killed him.”  Though she doesn’t say so, I think she means that murder offered her a way out of her terrible dilemma, allowing her to stay and leave at once.  I think this is what she is referring to when she says “I feel much calmer now.  It was having to choose that made me feel crazy.”

A surprising number of those who kill loved ones do so, it seems, as an alternative to leaving them, almost as if through murder they could stay and leave at the same time.  Even Mr. Krebs.  The parents who had locked him in his room for years had recently told him that he must leave their house.

Not all I interviewed killed a loved one.  One who shot down a fellow drug-dealer in the street said simply “for a moment right before I killed him, I was this man’s god.  Whether he lived or died was in my hands.”   For Mr. Andrews, Levinas’ account of violence and murder comes close.  Though he does not talk about wanting to possess the otherness of the other, Mr. Andrews wanted to play God, the One who is so other that every other distinction pales in comparison.  To be like God is not just to possess otherness, but to become Otherness itself.

There are, it turns out, different kinds of murderers, and different inflections of violence.  One of the problems of Levinas’ approach, an approach that divides the world into other and same, is that it must suppress distinctions, including the subtle distinction between how Mr. Krebs would relate to his soul-murdering parents and how most who do not murder relate.  The difference is not just one of degree.  Those who do not murder generally substitute symbolic destruction for the real thing.   Destroying the symbol while allowing the reality to live, those who do not commit murder recapitulate Mr. Krebs’s logic in the realm of the symbol.  Conversely, those who murder are often strikingly unable to tell a story about their hatred—unable, that is, to symbolize it.  This claim is supported by an observation of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1994,  p. 235), who states that “symbol formation derives from the need of the child to protect his object, or parts of the object, from the effects of his attacks.”  If I can symbolize the other, I need not destroy the other in order to possess him or her.  I return to this theme after considering Levinas’ account of violence in more detail.

Someone Rings Your Doorbell

An epigraph to Otherwise than Being, Levinas’ late masterwork, defines violence in the words of Pascal.  “`This is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”  Even to exist, suggests Levinas, is an act of violence and usurpation.  (1985, pp.  128-132)   Jacques Derrida (1978, 147) puts it this way in “Violence and Metaphysics.” “In the last analysis, according to Levinas, non-violent language would be a language which would do without the verb `to be,’ that is without predication.  Predication is the first violence.”  If we assume that Levinas is not just writing about words, but lives, then we will have to conclude that to exist as an individual is itself an act of violence.  In existing, I make a claim on the world’s resources, a claim to my own little share of happiness.  Merely by virtue of existing, I assert a right to be here.  That too is violence.

One is tempted to compare Levinas’ view with that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School (de Vries, 1989).  For Adorno, particularly, the goal was to approach the beings of this world with the utmost care and gentleness (the opposite of instrumental reason), so that I might let them reveal themselves to me as they truly are.  Says Adorno,
 

Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.  To gain such perspectives without velleity (ohne willkür) or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects–this alone is the task of thought. (1974, p. 247)

This is not what Levinas is talking about.

For Levinas, a careful, tactful approach to the beings of this world is not enough . . . and too much.  To the non-human beings of this world, it is too much: to them one owes almost nothing.  To care for any being but the being with a human face is paganism. (1990b)  To the human beings of the world one owes everything.  Levinas’ favorite saying (he quotes it half a dozen times throughout his works) is from The Brothers Karamazov.  “Every one of us is guilty before all, for everyone and everything, and I more than others.”

How to live with such guilt?  As hostage to the other, substituting myself for the other, even for the guilt of the other when he or she persecutes me!  “I am responsible for the persecutions that I undergo,” says Levinas.  (1985, p.  99)  One is tempted to think in terms of the language of fusion and merging: I feel the pain of the other, even the one who persecutes me.  That, however, would be incorrect.  Substitution, as Levinas, calls it, is not merger.  Instead, I switch places with the suffering other person, undergoing the torture, hunger, depression, or whatever that would otherwise befall the other.  I starve myself so that you might eat, even if you tried to kill me for my food.  That is Levinas’ ethic.   One is tempted to call it an ethic of self-abnegation, but that wouldn’t be right either.  If I abandon or deny myself, I will not be there in all my powers to serve you.

Levinas explains the experience that could generate such devotion in terms of a story that is more like a simile, Levinas’ version of Plato’s cave.  Imagine that someone rings your doorbell and disturbs your work.  As you walk to the door you are distracted, still thinking about your latest project.   It takes you a moment to recognize your neighbor at the door, the one who lives upstairs.  As soon as you recognize his face you invite him in.  You talk for a while.  He tells you his problem; you tell him what you might do to help him.  You share some pleasant conversation, and soon enough your neighbor leaves.  What you originally experienced as an interruption you now experience as a pleasant interlude, in which some understanding has passed between you and your neighbor.  Or so it seems to you.  [4]

Instead of immediately returning to your work, or allowing the memory of a pleasant interlude to linger, Levinas asks that you try to recapture the shock of the other’s intrusion, the moment when you were first confronted with the other person’s face, but before you recognized him.  What did you feel?  Was it not an irruption, not just into your life, but into the order of your world?  Just for a moment did you not feel that a door had been opened into another world, not just into the hallway of your apartment building, but into infinity?

One could hardly characterize such an experience as pleasant, but perhaps it was a relief.  The world of your apartment, your desk, and your work is fulfilling, but limited.  You soak up the morning sunlight that pours in through the big windows, and at night the sparkling lights of the city make it seem as if you live in an enchanted world, ready to meet your needs.

Though you live a satisfying existence in your apartment, something is missing from your life, and your encounter with the face at the door reminds you of what it is: the rest of the world, one that extends to infinity.  When you heard the doorbell ring it could have been anyone, a world of infinite possibilities at your door.  Or at least so you might have imagined for a moment.  For a moment the order of your world was exposed to the disorder of infinite possibility.  Your neighbor could have been anyone, needing anything, asking everything.

Levinas’ work is a reflection upon this moment of infinite possibility, though it is I, and not Levinas, who locates this moment in time, and it is I who makes it a reflection.  Levinas would call it an imperative, the experience a command to serve the other.  For Levinas it is an experience that comes from somewhere beyond “scientific” time, which is why one cannot say that it occurs prior to becoming an adult, a responsible human being, or whatever. (1985, p. 27)  It is prior to everything.  One experience follows the other only because that is how I have to tell it, step by step, as story time is linear.  In reality you were always already in thrall to the other; you just didn’t know it yet.  It is the encounter with the other at the door that reminds you of what you already knew, although that puts it too much like Plato’s anamnesis.  Levinas understands the encounter in terms closer to the medieval nunc stans, an encounter beyond time.  The result is not so much to lift you out of nature as to expose you to the heavens above.  Levinas calls it an experience of exteriority.

How might you respond to this experience of the infinite?  You feel shocked, maybe a little scared, but mostly you feel gratitude for being released from your little world of pleasures and worries.  It is a defeat of your self-satisfied little world that is ultimately a victory, as you now belong to another.  You feel small and insignificant, but not devalued, because your life now has a purpose, to serve the other.  It is almost as if you were called to devote your life to a god.

Prior to your exposure to the other you existed in your own little world, like the apartment in which you were working before the doorbell rang.  Others existed, they met your needs, but they were part of the background.  One might say the same thing about your self.  It is only with your exposure to the other that you come to be.  Not, however, by means of what Hegel called the dialectic of mutual recognition, in which you define yourself through struggle with another.  Dialectic requires dialogue, contact, even conflict, and across the infinite space that separates you from the other there can be little human contact.  Levinas calls it a “relation without relation.”  An encounter takes place, but it is “without relation,” as the other remains absolutely other. (1969, p.  80)

The face of my neighbor at my door renders me guilty as one who has done less than he could.  (Here I must change grammatical subjects, for I may only talk about my guilt, not yours, according to Levinas.)  This must always be so, for the other’s need is infinite, as well as infinitely unknowable.  I can never get it right, which is why I must devote myself to trying.  Once I am exposed to the other, I can never return to my desk and forget about the other, no matter how much I might want to.  The other has intruded itself between me and myself.  Responsibility is persecuted subjectivity, the only way in which subjectivity may be known, as the prosecution of the narcissism of the I.  “The word I means to be answerable for everything and for everyone,” says Levinas. (1996b, p.  90) This, it seems, is the only circumstance under which to be an “I” is not to commit violence: if I dedicate myself to you, and all the others.

Good Violence?

Is Levinas’ a fruitful way to think about violence?  Or does he end up making almost everything one says or does an act of violence, so that the most brutal acts of violence, such as terrorist violence, get diluted in a vast sea of violence?  This is, to be sure, not just a problem for Levinas.  Some postmodernists see even the act of writing as violent, fixing a shimmering subjectivity forever in the words of a text.  (Pucci, 1980)  Let us look at this question from two perspectives, first that of the subject, the “I,” and then that of the other.

My experience of the other that Levinas characterizes in terms of answering the ringing of the doorbell is itself violent, as Levinas recognizes. Counter-violence, non-allergic violence, good violence: it is with terms like these that Levinas characterizes the violence of being torn apart by the experience of the other.  (1998, p.  15) John Llewelyn (1995, p. 177) puts it this way.
 

Peace is the traumatic violence of my being hostage to the Other, called to
 . . . expiate for him or her.  It is because Levinas can find no hint of this peaceful violence in Heidegger’s thinking of being and letting be that he judges it to be a letting be of totalitarian violence and war.

Are these really the only choices, to be persecuted by the other unto death, or to usurp of the world?   Has not Levinas cleaved the ethical world in two, leaving no place for human relationships of sympathy and empathy?   For make no mistake, sympathy and empathy, what Levinas derides as “transfers of sentiment” (transferts du sentiment), play no role in his account of human ethics. [5]  Ethics is not a human connection, but a human separation, a relation without relation, as Levinas calls it.  (1969, p.  89)  Good violence is what separates us, turning us from partners in a strained human relationship, the dialectic of master and slave as Hegel put it, into lord and bondsman, who participate in no dialectic (that is, dialogue) at all.  About this, Levinas is insistent.  What he calls “saying” (le Dire) is my exposure to the other, in which I wordlessly assert “here I am, naked and exposed to you.”   Saying is not a dialogue. (Levinas, 1998, pp.  153-162) [6]

The question we have to answer is whether this experience of the subject is really good violence?  Mine is not a logical question, as in “isn’t good violence an oxymoron, a logical contradiction?”   Rather, mine is a practical question: is good violence necessary so that humans not be contemptuous of each other, so that they do not usurp the world?  It is hard to imagine that it is.

What about the effect of good violence on the other?  That question has already been answered by Derrida (1978) in “Violence and Metaphysics,” so I do not have to repeat his argument here, but only the conclusion.  Levinas’ refusal to see the other as an alter ego risks becoming itself a type of violence to the other.  Because he insists on seeing the other person as strictly other, not an other person, just other, Levinas risks not seeing the other as a fellow human.  “To refuse to see in it [the Other] an ego in this sense is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence.”  (Derrida, 1978, p. 125)  Not just a sappy humanism, but any ethical approach to human beings, requires that we recognize in them in fellow humanity, similar and different at the same time.  That, after all, is who the stranger is.  As Derrida (1978, p. 127) puts it, “the other, then would not be what he is (my fellow man as foreigner) if he were not alter ego.”

One can put this same point in a slightly different way.  Levinas insists that the ethical relation with the other is not just a modification of intentionality, but a reversal of intentionality, akin to the experience of God that Descartes writes about, God thinking himself in me, and so breaking me open. [7]  What we must ask is whether turning the other person into a God, in order to grant him or her the power to break me open, denies the humanity of the other person, who after all is not God?  Is this denial not itself a type of violence, and not necessarily the good kind?

The Ruthless Use of the Object Creates Separateness

Transitional relationships, as D. W. Winnicott calls them, are marked by mutual fantasy, based on the reluctance of both parties to ask who’s who and what’s what?  It is for his account of these relationships that Winnicott is best known.  Toward the end of his career, however, Winnicott turned to another way of thinking about relationships, what the came to call the use of an object.  The use of an object is marked by the ruthless exploitation of the other, the greedy consumption of everything the other has to offer and more. [8]  That sounds bad.  Winnicott thinks it is good, for it is through this process that the reality of the external world is created.  “It is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality.  This is central in the structure of my argument,” says Winnicott. (1989, 226)  If, that is, the object resists destruction.  The result is not just the recognition of an objective reality outside the self, but frequently joy at a world outside me. Only through the unsuccessful attempt to destroy objective reality do we come to recognize a reality separate and distinct from the self.

Winnicott treats the ruthless use of an object as a type of communication, frequently inventing little dialogues (mock Punch-and-Judy dialogues, Adam Phillips calls them) to illustrate the relationship.
 

The subject says to the object: `I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication.  From now on the subject says: `Hullo object!’ `I destroyed you.’  `I love you.  You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.  While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’  (1989, 222)

Winnicott’s idea is stranger than first appears.   For Freud, one would destroy the object because it is beyond one’s omnipotent control, because its independent reality frustrates the will.  This is the way of thinking that Levinas assumes in his critique of totality: we reduce the other to the same out of rage at its separateness, its existence beyond the realm of my control.  (“Idealism as rage” at a world too different to be dominated, is how Adorno puts it.)  Winnicott is saying the opposite.  It is the destructive impulse that creates the quality of externality, and it is this externality that makes the object available for satisfaction.  With the term “creates” Winnicott means something like Kant’s synthetic a priori: destructiveness allows us to discover in nature what our minds allow to be there, the real separateness of the object.

Nor is Winnicott’s use of the object identical to Klein’s view.  For Winnicott, “Klein’s concept of the depressive position now seemed more like a protection-racket, a sophisticated version of being nice to mother.”  (Phillips, 1988, 132) Not the act of reparation, but the mother’s continued survival in the face of her child’s attacks, is what makes not just a separate reality, but a valued one.  The object survives on its own, and the child is overjoyed.  Now the child has someone to use, which brings pleasure to both mother and child.  People want to be used.  It is a deep source of satisfaction.  “For most people the ultimate compliment is to be found and used.”  (1987, 103) Using and being used by other people is one of the ways people get close to each other, almost as though one could reach out and take what one needs from inside the other person.  It sounds destructive, invasive, and it is, but only if we can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy must it hurt the other.

If Winnicott is correct, then Levinas’ distant approach to the other, a relation without relation, must actually make it more difficult to know, or rather feel, the separateness of the other.  If it is only through a ruthless encounter with the other that we become convinced of the other’s separateness, then the absence of this encounter must make it seem as if the other is not only incredibly vulnerable (as one has not had the experience of the other successfully resisting one’s attempts to destroy it) but not quite separate.  Or rather, the separateness of the other must itself seem so terribly tenuous, to be guarded and guaranteed by the stringent self-control that marks hostage-being, or saying (le Dire).  If one has not bumped up against the other and felt its resistance, then one will be terribly careful about even touching the other.  The other’s otherness will continue to be recognized, but somewhere there will always be a doubt, if not about the other’s otherness, then about the other’s ability to resist intrusion.  This seems to characterize Levinas’ attitude toward the other, so fragile and vulnerable because one has never bumped up against it and felt its resistance.

In response one might argue that this ruthless encounter with the other finds its place in Levinas in his account of the pre-doorbell state, as I have called it.  But that is not right either.   The pre-doorbell state is one of narcissistic unawareness of the other’s difference.  At its best this state comes close to what Winnicott calls a transitional state, in which one does not question differences too closely.  In this state one does not yet fully know or recognize the otherness of the other.  That takes an encounter marked by the ruthless use of the object, and it is this that Levinas seems to have no place for.  For Levinas we move directly from babies to saints.  More precisely put, we move from narcissists to moralists, so anxious that we will totalize others that we can barely let ourselves know the other qua other.  This is what a relation without relation means.  If we used the other more (use, not abuse), we might learn that the objective reality of the other is not quite so fragile as Levinas imagines.

Not so fragile as Levinas imagines, but still fragile.  Though Winnicott is not just talking about mothers and babies, that remains his model, and we are all fortunate that babies cannot destroy everything they get their hands and mouths on.  Adults can, and while Winnicott draws a sharp distinction between destruction in reality and in fantasy, it is not enough.  As Levinas reminds us, the other is naked and vulnerable, and what is needed is a morality of ruthlessness, if I can put it that way.

A morality of ruthlessness would know that we unavoidably engage the world in ways that use and even exploit it, taking from it what we need to survive, and learning in the process the reality of the other.  Consider the difference between consensual sex and exploitative sex; both use the other, but only one respects the other while using him or her.  Or consider the difference between corporate agriculture and organic farming.  Or between hunting and fishing for food (or catch-and-release fishing) and the slaughter of animals.  Or between strip mining and mining that protects and reclaims the land.  The list goes on, the point being that the use of the object is bound up with what it is to be human in the world.  Man’s metabolism with nature, as Marx called it, is not confined to inhuman nature.  We eat and breathe each other.  What’s needed is an ethic of limits and responsibility.

Levinas is helpful here, but not as helpful as he might be because there are really no limits for Levinas.  If I owe you everything, if I’m responsible for your sins, if there is nothing I dare withhold, then it actually becomes more difficult to think about limits, above all the limits that circumscribe the necessary ruthlessness of life.  Infinity is not a limit.  Levinas’ political theory, with its introduction of the third (le tiers), addresses this issue, as discussed in chapter 4.  But it does not address it in the spirit considered here, a morality of the inherent exploitation that is life.  If Winnicott is correct, life is inherently exploitative not just because we use others to survive, but because in using others we discover they are real.  Exploitation is the price of knowledge of the reality of others.  Absent this knowledge, Levinas must work twice as hard to protect others, which is why he posits such a terrible distance between humans.

Conclusion: Violence and Human Distance

Is Levinas’ strategy not the opposite of Mr. Krebs’s, who killed his parents in order to possess them?  Would Levinas not kill the self in order not to possess the other?  Trouble is, that leaves both self and other in a world destitute of ordinary human relationships.

If we pose the troubling question “Who comes closer to the way we actually relate to humans, Mr. Krebs or Levinas?” the answer is surely Mr. Krebs.  That is truly troubling, which does not mean that we should go to the opposite extreme.  Both Mr. Krebs and Levinas eschew ordinary human relationships, and that is the problem.

If Levinas does not get it right, he nonetheless understands something important about violence, something that would be helpful not just to Mr. Krebs, but to us all.

The tendency in thinking about violence is to imagine that if we could just get closer to people, if we could just see them as fellow suffering humans like ourselves, then we wouldn’t hurt them.  Violence is the obliteration of the other, and to do that I must first make the other distant and different.  Dozens of books and countless articles in political psychology (the field in which I do most of my work) have been written on this theme–the distancing of the other as the first step toward violence.

Maybe this critique has it backwards, assuming that morality is marked by symmetrical reciprocity, each willing and able to take up the position of the other.  Not only is this impossible, but one might better understand morality as asymmetrical, more like a gift than a conversation, an opening rather than an exchange.   This is the direction pointed at by Levinas, and about that he is not mistaken.

Violence isn’t mitigated by closeness.  Violence is mitigated by our ability to symbolize destruction.  That takes a little distance, the distance between external object and its internal symbolic representation.   A little distance, but not all the distance in the world, not the infinite distance between self and other that Levinas writes of.   At that distance, the other is at risk of becoming merely other.  Needed, in other words, is a human distance, one close enough to feel the terrible ambivalence of loving and hating the same person, but distant enough to distinguish object and its symbolic representation.  There is nothing like this human distance in Levinas.

In response to the suggestion that Levinas risks impoverishing ordinary human relationships, a follower of Levinas might respond that I am confusing realms, the ontological with the ethical.  When he talks about ethics, Levinas is talking about a relationship with the infinitely other, the profoundly distant and different.  When he talks about ontology, Levinas is talking about our everyday relationships with other people, relationships that run the gamut from erotic relationships to the institutions of law and justice.  The trouble with this defense of Levinas is that it would render Levinas abstruse and irrelevant to everyday life in order to defend him.   In other words, the defense is worse than the crime, which Levinas does not commit in any case.  On the contrary, Levinas often writes about ethical relationships as though they were real relationships with real people.  The rhetorical, almost magical, power of his texts stems from this strategy.  One moment the other is a person, the next a mirror whose face is infinity.  Alphonso Lingis, translator of Totality and Infinity, says that with the author’s permission he capitalizes the word “Other” (autrui, in contrast to autre) when the word refers to another person, the “personal Other, the you.” (Levinas, 1969, 24)   Most of the appearances of the term are capitalized.

One might still argue that when he talks about the infinitely other, Levinas is referring to an aspect of our relationship with real others (that is, not every aspect), and that would be true.  What is not true is that Levinas is talking about some Other more august and transcendent than real other people. That would miss the point Levinas is trying to make, that we know the infinite only in and through other people.  To his credit, Levinas does not, cannot, and would not separate the ethical from everyday life, which means that he can and must be criticized when his ethics risk impoverishing not just everyday life, but our internal lives as well, that realm in which we destroy those we love a hundred times a day.  Through this destruction we come to know and appreciate them as separate human beings.

Notes

 1.  Eighteen inmates of a maximum security prison were interviewed.  Five were women from a small women’s facility on the grounds of the prison.  The interviews were part of a year-long discussion seminar that I undertook with these inmates.  Most of the interviews were conducted toward the end of the seminar.  The advantage of this approach is that I came to know each interviewee quite well, having spent about one-hundred fifty hours with each of them as part of the discussion group.  These were not quick interviews, but part of year long (three hours per week) discussion with inmates about murder, evil, and the meaning of life and death.  For more on my research with inmates, see Alford, 1997.

2.  There are no subtle nuances of the French term, “violence,” that are not implicit in the English “violence.”  From “violence verbale,” to “rèpondre à violence par la violence,” the semantic range of the French and English terms is nearly identical.

3.  Levinas posits such a state, before the recognition of the otherness of the other.  In this state, says Levinas (1969, 134), “I am absolutely for myself.  Egoist without reference to the Other, I am . . . outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate.”   I will characterize this state in terms of life before the doorbell rings.

4. This is my version of Levinas’ example in “Enigma and Phenomenon.”  (1996a)  I have elaborated upon Levinas’ example, and made it more concrete.   It is on the basis of this example that I organize my recent book on Levinas. (Alford, 2002)

5.  Says Levinas.  “It is through the condition of being a hostage [to the other] that there can be pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity in the world–even the little there is, even the simple `after you sir.’   All the transfers of sentiment which theorists of original war and egoism use to explain the birth of generosity (it isn’t clear, however, that there was war at the beginning: before wars there were altars) could not take root in the ego were it not, in its entire being, or rather its entire nonbeing, subjected not to a category, as in the case of matter, but to an unlimited accusative, that is to say, persecution, self, hostage, already substituted for others.” (1996b, p. 91)

6.  Saying (le Dire) is the unspoken, unwritten dimension of the said.  The said (le Dit) is the text, my words, what I say.  Saying is my exposure to the other, in which I wordlessly assert “here I am, naked and exposed to you.”  It is this aspect of Levinas’ work that many deconstructionists have become so intrigued with, as it seems to justify what is sometimes called reading against the grain.  But notice what saying is not: conversation.  Levinas’ view is in sharp contrast to Rosenzweig’s (1985), with whom he is so often compared.  In Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig refers to speech-thinking, it, in which I participate with another in creating “my” thoughts, which are really “our” thoughts, product of the inter-person.  There is hardly a hint of this in Levinas.

7. Descartes’ third Metaphysical Meditation (1641).

8.  Seven papers on the “use of an object” are collected in Winnicott 1989, chapter 34.  Rather than cite each paper separately, I cite the page numbers to this source.  The lead paper is “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” which is reprinted in Playing and Reality.

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Prof C Fred Alford
Department of Government and Politics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
301 405 4169  office
301 314 9690  fax
falford@gvpt.umd.edu