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only twice in Totality and Infinity.

      On page 28 Levinas writes:

      The relation between the same and the other

      is not always reducible to knowledge

      of the other by the same, not even to

      the revelation of the other to the same,

      which is, already fundamentally different

      from disclosure.

      In a footnote to this he discusses Nietzsche’s notion of “drama.”

      There can be a dramatic unfolding of Apollo or Dionysus

      through their actions in maybe five acts of a tragic drama.

      On page 203 Levinas continues this contrast between the ethical

      of me and the other and Nietzsche’s character as a work of art.

      In Proper Names Levinas links Kierkegaard and Nietzsche together

      in going beyond the ethical to a religious level that is more mystical

      than ethical and concerned with my fulfillment rather than the other’s.

      He sees them both as contributing to a Heideggerian view of a self-

      centered, egoistic authenticity that can support National Socialism.

      So Levinas does not look into the face of Nietzsche any more than

      he looks into the face of Kierkegaard: he treats neither

      The Works of Love, which belong to Kierkegaard and not his pseudonyms,

      nor the amor fati and love of all existence that in The Antichrist

      Nietzsche connects with the all-loving Jesus.

      Nietzsche’s Jesus has an agape that really loves the enemy

      for Nietzsche loves most of all the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount.

      Derrida is a much more complete reader of both Kierkegaard

      and Nietzsche than is the Levinas of Totality and Infinity and

      so when Derrida deconstructs the early Levinas and helps

      him move to the later Levinas of Otherwise Than Being Derrida

      will have the complete Kierkegaard and the complete Nietzsche

      in mind and not settle for a misreading of the faces of those two.

      II,2 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Totality and Infinity

      II,2.1 With a Jewish Aporetic Ethics That Deconstructs

      Derrida greatly appreciates Levinas’s ethical philosophy and

      in his seventy-five-page essay on Levinas’s early thought, which he called

      Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,

      Derrida refers to “[t]he great book Totality and Infinity” and

      approaches it with an Introduction and five parts:

      Introduction 79

      I. The Violence of Light 84

      II. Phenomenology, Ontology, Metaphysics 92

      III. Difference and Eschatology 109

      IV. Of Transcendental Violence 118

      V. Of Ontological Violence 134

      Right away, at the beginning of his preface to Totality and Infinity

      Levinas discusses the violence of war and reminds us that we

      are constantly involved in war and winning at any price, which

      means that we are most concerned about conquering our enemies.

      Ethics, insofar as it has to do with loving other persons,

      even our enemies who do not love us, is forgotten and self-defeating.

      Most ethical ways of thinking have to do with self-realization

      and to even preserve ourselves in a state of nature that is

      “nasty, mean and brutish” we have to be constantly unethical.

      From his Jewish tradition Levinas knew about caring for

      widows, orphans, and aliens and, as he says right away

      in his preface, he does think of an eschatology and a place

      that living ethically can help bring about if we really take

      responsibility for responsibility and try to bring about shalom.

      Derrida, also a Jewish philosopher, wants to lessen

      violence as much as possible and to do that he wants to

      become more and more aware of the limits of making

      ethical decisions and even to decide to have an infinity

      that excludes any totality for already that distinction is violent.

      II,2.2 Levinas’ Logic of Exclusive Opposites

      At the beginning of his essay on Levinas in Writing and Difference

      Derrida (p. 79) quotes Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy:

       Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points

      of influence moves our world.

      At one time it feels more powerfully

      the attraction of one of them

      at another time of the other;

      and it ought to be, though never is

      evenly and happily balanced between them.

      As Derrida thinks back to the ethics of the Greeks he goes especially

      to Socrates, who first moved from Greek physics to ethics.

      Socrates was concerned for the care of the soul and in taking

      this responsibility he decided that the best approach was skepticism.

      He claimed that he was the wisest man in Athens because he alone

      knew that he knew nothing and he trusted in that humble way.

      In Greek a road or pathway and even the pathway of thinking

      is called a poros and “a” negates that so that aporetic means

      that there is no certain way of knowing just how to decide things.

      As Derrida claims, following Socrates, we can only make

      decisions over the abyss of indecidability because things are

      so complex that we never know the total big picture with certainty.

      Because we live in a world about which we are always learning more

      we should have the best of intentions but given that the future

      might reveal all sorts of things of which we were ignorant.

      When Derrida thinks about Levinas’s ethics he appreciates

      the infinity of things so much that he is skeptical about totality.

      We may think we know a totality but we never really can.

      In following the Socratic aporetic ethics Derrida begins

      to deconstruct Levinas’s non-skeptical logic of exclusive opposites.

      As Derrida develops his aporetic ethics in which deconstruction is

      justice he opts for a metaphysics of excess and a logic of mixed opposites.

      II,2.3 And Levinas’s Deconstruction of Buber’s I and Thou

      Buber’s

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