7.eisenstadt

(XURFHQWULVPDQG&RORUEOLQGQHVVOona Eisenstadt

Levinas Studies, Volume 7, 2012, pp. 43-62 (Article)

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Eurocentrism and ColorblindnessOona Eisenstadt

W e are not in the habit of drumming philosophers out of the canon because of unfortunate political opinions they happen to hold; on the contrary, the philosophical canon, however it is delimited, includes misogynists, racists, and xenophobes. But for each important philosopher and particularly for those who have found their way into the standard repertoire of philosophy departments in the course of the twentieth century there is a process of reflective consider-ation in which the life is weighed up against the thought, a period during which the scholarship turns its attention to the question of how large the thinkers biases should loom in an interpretation of his ideas. In the case of Heidegger, for example, this period began in the mid-1980s and to some extent continues: it remains necessary for Heideggerians to ask whether his Nazism can be understood as contingent to his philosophy; and, if the answer is no, the philosophy falls.

Levinas scholarship moved into its period of reflective consider-ation beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, the first wave involving analyses of the problematic nature of his account of the feminine, and the second wave involving what might be called exposs of his Eurocentrism. This second wave is now at an apex. The accusation of Eurocentrism is made at almost every academic meeting on Levinass work: his more problematic statements are quoted and misquoted, and stories, some of them hearsay, are told

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44 Levinas Studies 7

and retold. And while the scholarship on Levinass attitude to women is balanced with defenders and detractors both making compel-ling and well-sourced arguments I have not been able to find many scholars defending him from the second charge. Instead, the strongest essays on the question tend either to argue that Levinass Eurocentrism renders the very most basic structures of his philosophy dubious, or that we can defend those structures but only in a post-Levinasian form.

Two scholars who stand for the positions Ive just described are Rudi Visker,1 for the position that Levinass Eurocentrism renders the basic structures of his thought dubious, and Robert Bernasconi,2 for the position that the basic structures are solid but have to be adapted in a way Levinas would not have accepted. I take up these two not just because I find their work to be masterful, but because their essays on the question seem to me representative while others, too, have shown great insight on the matter, such as Simon Critchley and Judith Butler but together Visker and Bernasconi seem to encom-pass what is most crucially at stake here.

Why is it we take Levinass Eurocentrism so seriously? Why is it that the world of scholarly continental philosophy, for the most part com-fortably able to bracket out Heideggers Nazism, is up at arms when Levinas tells us that Europe is the best of cultures? Why are many of us unable to remind ourselves that, unlike Heideggers, Levinass is not actually a criminal position, and put it behind us? The beginnings of an answer, as Visker suggests, are found in the fact that discussions of the question bespeak a sense of betrayal, and at times a consequent resentment, and I add that, where such sentiments exist, the rea-sons for them depend on ones interpretations of Levinass politics. Leaving aside those who simply misinterpret his politics those who find in the otherwise than being an ideological plan for the forma-tion of better institutions the range extends from those whose read-ings require Levinas to be an absolute political minimalist to those whose readings emphasize his criticisms of Western philosophy and read this as a generalized critique of the West. On the one hand, we

Eisenstadt Eurocentrism and Colorblindness 45

have people inclined to see in Levinas no prescription whatever, and who argue that ethics enters the sphere of politics only in the form of critique, and who would therefore be distressed by any expression of political certainty and all the more so by praise of Europe, as the ethical critique of politics ought surely to begin at home. On the other hand, we have those whose eyes were opened by the idea that the philosophical tradition is oppressively ontological, and who there-fore see Levinas as a major figure in the anti-Eurocentric academic discourse that has been dominant since the 1960s, a discourse that over time has dismantled many of our metanarratives. These readers are naturally even more distressed by paeans to Europe. In short, some of us learned from Levinas to criticize institutions at large, and some to criticize Western institutions, and in either case praise of Europe appears more like a betrayal than an irrelevant eccentricity: hence our anxiety. But what I want to make clear here, at the outset, is that if there is any truth in what Ive just said, then the resentment is somewhat churlish. If we are angry about the Eurocentric passages, it might be because most of what Levinas has given us is such a fine ground for critique of those passages.

It might help to remember that the reason Levinas admires Europe is because he sees its culture as the one most open to self-criticism. In an interview conducted in 1980, he responds to an interviewer who mentions the multiplicity of cultures, Jews, Greeks, but also the Bororo of the Mongols, the Indians by saying, To be sure, but it is Europe which, alongside its numerous atrocities, invented the idea of de-Europeanization. This represents a victory of European gen-erosity. For me, of course, the Bible is the model of excellence, but I say this knowing nothing of Buddhism (IR 164).3 Now we could criticize these lines for ducking the question, for changing the sub-ject, for constituting a too hasty dismissal of the idea that these other cultures might fruitfully be explored, or for implying that Europes atrocities may be done away with a subclause allowing us to move on to her virtues. Such criticisms would be just and are the meat of the accusation of Eurocentrism, and which need to be unpacked. Yet


Levinass words make it clear, at the very least, that when we charge Levinas with Eurocentrism the position we are charging him with is not some unreflective jingoistic notion that the West is the best, but the position that the West is best because it best encourages criticism of the West criticism Levinas himself provides in large doses.

Admittedly, these doses are not as large as they might seem. In two representative essays from the mid-1980s,4 Levinas takes up the question of Europe directly, speaking of its historical failings and the bad conscience they have brought about, a bad conscience that pits Europe against Europe, resulting in a self-contradiction that Levinas clearly finds fruitful (BPW 163). The trajectory of the discussion in the two essays is the same: Levinas acknowledges the wrongdoings of Europe and associates them with a love of wisdom or truth, the heritage of the Greek philosophers. He then suggests that in addition to this love of wisdom, Europe needs to recognize a different and more originary kind of love. But while this seems a solid basis from which to move to a discussion of how Europe might learn from other cultures, this is not where Levinas goes. The best expres-sion of the other love is presented, in both essays, as the Hebrew Bible: and so the conflict between Europe and Europe, which seemed at the beginning a tension between a colonial Europe and a postco-lonial Europe, emerges in the end as a tension between what are, to Levinas at least, the two pillars of Western culture: the Greeks and the Bible. In fact, in these essays he is performing a relatively familiar move: he is using the Hebrew/Greek distinction as a correlate, on the level of the third, of the ethics/politics distinction, such that the Hebrew comes to represent the rupturing force at the heart of our cultural experience, and the Greek the necessary ordering force that holds that cultural experience intact. Levinass Europe, as an entity that can criticize itself, is thus also a dialectic complete unto itself; it is this dialectic the interviewer is trying to break open when he speaks of the Bororo and the Indians, and which Levinas closes when he says he knows nothing about Buddhism. But despite the fact that this divided Europe is shaky ground on which to build any real openness,


it is still more than blind prejudice. Despite the fact that the hints Levinas drops throughout his corpus to the effect that the history of philosophy (meaning Western philosophy) tends toward totalization are, in these essays, completed by the thought that the corresponding thematization of infinity can be found in the Bible, I will nevertheless return to Europes bad conscience in the conclusion and try to make something of it.

In perhaps the most unfortunate statement Levinas ever made, he comments: I always say but under my breath that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing . . . . Television shows the horrible things happening in South Africa. And there, when they bury people, they dance . . . . That is really some way to express mourning . . . . It supplies us the expres-sion of a dancing civilization; they weep differently (IR 149).5 He states these thoughts in an interview, so they might thus be read as a momentary slip; unfortunately, however, the same thought with small variations appears in a second interview conducted six years later and must therefore be understood as something Levinas wanted heard. Indeed, the fact that the lines are repeated suggests that the words under my breath, far from signaling a passing, unguarded experi-ment, constitute a complaint against censorship: I say it under my breath so that the politically correct cannot hear me. There is no guilt here but rather something more like glee at stating a truth commonly forbidden. And that statement, that truth, reveals an undeniably grave insensitivity. It is not that Levinass they weep differently implies they feel grief differently. But it is bad enough without that, for there can be no doubt that he here shows himself unwilling to be challenged by this other expression of grief and by what he is good enough to call its civilization. The problem is not just that our way is better than their way; it is that dancing is the activity of people who are not speaking. The nonverbal physical act appears here almost as a refusal of the voice, a refusal or at any rate a momentary lack of that which is, for Levinas, the organ of ethics and politics alike, and definitive of what it is to be human.


Levinas shows himself unwilling to be challenged. Critics who focus on these lines therefore take up the question of where in his thought Levinas locates challenge the idea of being called into question, which after all is the very heart of his thinking asking: has he placed the idea properly? As is well known, Levinas draws a distinction between two structural levels of human experience, a preontological level and an ontological level. On the first, I meet an other and am eviscerated by the others alterity, an alterity that has no contextual or definable content, not even that of physical fea-tures. The best way of encountering the Other, says Levinas at one point, is not even to notice the color of his eyes (EI 85), and at other points he makes it clear that the eyes have no color, since the face that faces me, presenting me with the others absolute ungrasp-able difference, eludes appearance: it is disincarnate6 and stripped of its very form . . . shivers in its nudity (BPW 54). This is the level on which ethics passes, on which I shoulder an infinite responsibil-ity for the other and to the other, and I do this because the others not being me has led me to question my very right to exist. On this level, in short, I have been challenged to the core. On the second level, the ontological level, I meet the other in the context of other others, and now I can see a variety of attributes perhaps some per-sonal history, something about community or income level, and cer-tainly the color of his eyes, not to mention his skin. But though these differences and they include almost everything that we would, in common parlance, designate a difference are crucial to consider for the sake of justice, they do not have the power to eviscerate me. I treat the others qualities with the utmost seriousness, but they do not lead me to question my right to exist. And nor do they evoke in me the infinite responsibility of ethics; they are operative, in distinc-tion, in the sphere of politics.

Philosophically, this is strong position. Based as it is in the idea that the others eyes challenge me not because they are brown but because they are the others, it has all the advantages of classic, lib-eral colorblindness, and yet it also incorporates a cultural or ethnic


sensitivity insofar as the brownness of the others eyes (or indeed of the others skin) rises to a primacy on the ontological plain, which is where justice can be done. Levinas makes room for the impor-tance of every attribute for which the other might have been per-secuted or that may have given the other privilege. And yet Levinas also provides us a ground from which to criticize any institution that is based on these attributes in the understanding that even the best of them does not inscribe or express what is most fundamental about the individual. And in fairness to Levinas, one more thing should be said. Though he often speaks as if the preontological level were the sphere of the nonreciprocal, and the ontological level the sphere of the reciprocal such that on the former level I am challenged while on the latter level we challenge each other it remains the case that what is challenged on the preontological level is precisely my onto-logical conceptions, so that when I turn my mind to consider politics, I remain perhaps more likely to criticize my own institutions and alle-giances than those of others.

Nevertheless the position is not universally satisfying. To many of Levinass critics, it seems both truer and more just to say that an attribute that unites the other to a certain group might be an abso-lutely fundamental attribute, definitive of his alterity rather than sec-ondary to it. What is more, it strikes these critics as problematic to say that these attributes do not form part of my experience of being called into question. Am I not, in fact, challenged by the color of the others eyes? Should I not be? Levinass position is strong insofar as it incorporates the two levels, one on which attributes are not impor-tant and one on which they are. But it is possible that this having ones color and eating it too results from of a sort of philosophical sleight-of-hand; and of course it is also possible that it is simply not the way we experience things. I have shown, albeit quickly, the way the distinction between the preontological and the ontological ethics and politics can be employed to shield Levinas from critique, and yet I cannot help admitting that there may be artifice in the argument.


It seems that in the quest for a position that does greater justice to attributes, particularly cultural and ethnic attributes, one could shift Levinas in two different directions. The first would involve modify-ing the position, taking what was a distinction between noncontext and context and remaking it into a distinction between difference and homogeneity, nonreciprocality and reciprocality. This has the advantage that ethnic and cultural attributes would now be of the first order and the disadvantage that one would lose the touchstone of alterity qua alterity. The second would seek a second moment of visceral challenge, a moment (or for that matter many moments) of evisceration, with each subsequent moment of rupture as fundamen-tal as the first encounter, but taking place after the entry of the third, on the level of the ontological and the political. This latter seems to me to be the most fruitful direction to take, preserving what is radical and new in Levinass philosophy while at the same time invalidating the sentiments that make us so uneasy when we read the dance pas-sage. But now, having laid the ground, I want to step back and sketch the reasoning of our two critics, Visker and Bernasconi.

What interests me most about their arguments is that they repro-duce the broadly familiar critique of colorblindness common to pop-ular theory today. I divide this critique into two stances, though they are not mutually exclusive: the position that colorblindness is unde-sirable, and the position that colorblindness is impossible.

In the first camp, those who see colorblindness as undesirable, we have Robert Bernasconi. Has one welcomed the victim of color-prejudice, he writes of Levinass ethical encounter, when one still welcomes him or her only as a human and without recognizing the positivity of that which has previously been devalued? . . . Does Levinass claim about the . . . face [not] mark a certain continuity with abstract humanism and its complicity with homogenization?7 Bernasconi establishes with painstaking exegetical work that, for Levinas, there can be no acknowledgment, in the ethical, of ethnic-ity and therefore no acknowledgment of a concomitant past history of prejudice. He then turns to a search for the solution I have just


suggested, for a second moment of challenge, in which a subject might be called into question by a culture, or a culture by a culture, but he does not find it. Instead Bernasconi finds lines such as the one from Meaning and Sense where Levinas speaks of this so much dispar-aged Western civilization, which was able to understand the particu-lar cultures that never understood themselves (BPW 58) lines in which culture-to-culture or culture-to-subject challenge are clearly lacking. For Bernasconi, the colorblindness of the subjective vision and the exaggerated claims for European civilization are sides of the same coin, such that the decolored face becomes the white face, the face of the normative, Western, European male. He asks: Is abstract humanism not the contemporary form of western ethnocentrism, sus-tained by its tendency to define and measure the humanity of man in terms of approximation to a European model?8 In sum, he finds in Levinass thought a homogenizing gaze that subsumes everything to a Western standard at both the points where it dismisses culture and at the points where it takes it up making it, he states provocatively, perhaps complicitous with the racism it is supposed to contest.9

Now Bernasconi is a great admirer not only of the structures of Levinass thought but also of its political applicability. As he sees it, the Levinasian complicity just described is at odds with a better Levinas: the Eurocentric passages represent a less good, less truth-ful account than the potentially anti-Eurocentric openness to alterity that we find as the main thrust of his thinking. Therefore, Bernasconi concludes, his thought can be improved without fundamentally abandoning what is at its heart. The route to this improvement is to fall back from the aforementioned second solution of multiple vis-ceral challenges to the first solution, incorporating attributes into our understanding of the encounter, or regarding the other ethnically as part of regarding him ethically. Indeed, even were Bernasconi able to find a second moment of challenge on the level of the political, it would not be enough for him, since he sees culture and ethnic-ity as among the most foundational elements of human experience, the elements that constitute alterity. Bernasconi sees the difference


of which Levinas speaks as too thin; Levinasian alterity cannot be real difference because it has no shape, it lacks what he calls alter-ity content. He wants something thicker, and he wants it there at the beginning, encompassed in first philosophy. Thus he proposes to develop [Levinass] thought in a way different from what can be found in his writings.10

In the second camp, those who see colorblindness as impossible, we have Rudi Visker. Referring to the dance passage, Visker writes: Rather than become indignant over Levinass reaction here, let us consider whether this reaction does not point to a different relation with . . . alterity . . . than the one implied by Levinass philosophy. What if the otherness of the Other can make me feel uncomfortable, ill at ease, even before it can make me feel shame? I would interpret this prior discomfort . . . as following from the fact that the others other-ness confronts me in turn, and without even intending to do so, with an otherness in me.11 As Visker sees it, when I meet another, I am not only challenged by the nudity of his face or alterity per se, but I am also challenged by something Visker calls (borrowing a term from Finkielkraut) the others inscription the others personal history, the whole host of things the other and the world have written on him to make him what he is. Just as the face is invisible, the inscription is, says Visker, illegible and not only to the one who faces me, but to me as well. I do not know what I am any more than I know who I am, and even if I name myself and claim a certain heritage, my identarian words carry and obscure a mass of associations I can never wholly fathom. Using this philosophical anthropology as a springboard, Visker argues that what the other wants from me is more than to be fed, and more than to teach me in the Levinasian sense of unsettling my ego. Beyond the others destitution and height, the other craves a recognition and appreciation not of himself, but of things the other recognizes and appreciates, for it is this intimate connection between us and what, for example, we devote our lives to that makes us so sensitive to praise, criticism, or respect.12 The other will appre-ciate our appreciation of what the other appreciates: that is Viskers


model of an ethical encounter. But while this sort of thing can hap-pen and indeed probably happens all the time, his broader description of the encounter with alterity is not so happy. It is the story of two people who cannot read their own inscriptions and are thus strangers to themselves, feeling before one another an anxiety that cannot be recuperated into a story of responsibility.

At first glance, the argument between Visker and Levinas might appear to amount to a conflict between the idea that we meet alterity with responsibility, and the idea that we meet it with hostility. But it is not as simple as this, on either side. Levinas understands full well that alterity arouses hostility: that violence can only aim at a face (TI 225). But, for him, this violence is not a disproof of responsibility, but in contradistinction, its very proof. For why, faced with the other, do I not simply walk away? Why does the others difference matter so much to me? For Levinas, it can only be my sense of obligation that evokes the violence; the hostility I almost inevitably feel toward alterity is a reaction against the obligation that persecutes me. Thus at the core of Levinass philosophy we do not find simple responsibil-ity, but a responsibility that can, and perhaps often does, manifest as hostility. Visker is similarly complex, for what he describes is not a straightforward hatred of difference, but, as in Levinas, a hatred that results from unease within the subject an unease that, however, is not a reaction to responsibility but to a lack of self-knowledge. The heart of Viskers critique of Levinas is thus not that the unease I feel is different from obligation, but that it is different from a resistance to obligation. It is caused, on the contrary, by the way my sense of the other as inscribed signals to me the illegibility of my own inscription. And, for Visker, this is the dynamic we see at work in the dance pas-sage; that is what is happening to Levinas when he watches his televi-sion, and later when he speaks those ugly words.

To summarize, like Bernasconi, Visker sees the Eurocentrist pas-sages as incompatible with the rest of Levinass philosophy, but he does not draw the conclusion that we should retain the philosophy and attempt to strip it of its Eurocentrism; rather, we should abandon


the philosophy. This is because for Visker the Eurocentric comments are neither unsound nor untrue. On the contrary, they express the critical truth about the human relation to others: that the face does not appear to me naked, or without cultural ornament, and that I am hostile to alterity not because its nakedness is a persecuting obli-gation but because its ethnic, cultural, and historical features remind me of my own unresolved crisis of identity. Where Bernasconis account is prescriptive, Viskers is descriptive: Bernasconi, for whom colorblindness is undesirable, says that when we look at the other we should see color and culture; Visker, for whom colorblindness is impossible, says that when we look at the other we do see color and culture. Bernasconi believes that we can look at the other, see cul-ture, and yet preserve what is most original in Levinass account of the face: still feeling ourselves hostage, breadwinner, student, judged-one, nurse, and so forth. Visker believes that we look at the other, see culture, and feel hostility. Thus we find in Bernasconi a modified Levinas, a Levinas who continues to be in certain ways original but is shading back into pre-Levinasian ethical discourse. And we find in Visker no Levinas at all; the basic structures that make up the thought are plain wrong, disproved by his own assertion of Europes cultural superiority.

Visker knows that Levinasians are unlikely to accept his argument.13 He notes more or less explicitly that he has no more proof for his idea that we approach alterity with hostility than Levinas does for his idea that we approach with open arms and a willingness to be judged, becoming violent only as a result of these things an account that, one might think, explained the dance passage as well as anything in Viskers argument. Visker may even be aware, though he does not explicitly say it, that his own methodology renders his argument sus-pect, for he approaches Levinass words not with hostility but with openness let us not become indignant, he cries, even if we are sur-prised by these sentiments, let us learn from them. It is indeed possible that, paradoxically, by taking the dance passage seriously as an expres-sion of Levinass personal, unlikable truth, Visker shows us how it


is that one might, and indeed does, approach the other as a height, abandoning ones preconceptions as one listens and is struck. But whether that line of argument is compelling or not, it remains the case that one cannot disprove Levinas by pointing out that he himself was ungenerous any more than by pointing out that people in general are ungenerous. Still, Viskers idea of inscription seems to provide a means to correct a tendency toward totalizing in Bernasconis argu-ment. For why should it be the case, as Bernasconi holds, that ethnic-ity is definitive of alterity? Is Bernasconis argument not itself open to an accusation of orientalism insofar as it spins its theories from the (Western) intellectuals abstract universalized particularity? This is to say that while ethnicity is obviously tied to historical persecution, it is perhaps not particular enough for us. It should be possible to say that skin color does not mark the deepest truth about an individual with-out decoloring or whitening that skin. Viskers notion of inscription helps us do this by providing us with a challenging force made up of an unsortable morass of idenity and alterity.

Embracing the idea of inscription does away with the abstract humanism that Bernasconi sees in the idea of the face and that so provokes him. But it must also be said that we cannot do away with every instance of abstract humanism in Levinas. For on the level of the political proper, when he considers and ranks regimes and civiliza-tions, Levinas places Europe ahead of the pack precisely for its capac-ity to abstract and its allegiance to humanism: these are the qualities that allow Europe to criticize itself. This is a source of some distress to Bernasconi, who would rather Levinas use his particular ethnic alle-giance, Judaism, to criticize European homogeneity. For Bernasconi, one of the secondary but important functions of an ethnicity is to ground a critique of the prevailing colonial colossus, and after the Holocaust it is particularly the work of the Jewish ethnicity. But while there are times when Levinas comes close to making this move, it is also true that he often proposes an alliance between Jews, Greeks, and modern techno-scientific Europe, an alliance formed as a capacity for philosophical detachment and a certain universalism. In the Gagarin


essay, for instance, he lists three forces as providing resistance to the the Heideggerian world and . . . the superstitions surrounding Place: technology, Judaism, and the Socratic message, for these three are premised on our ability to be wrenched out of our blind enroot-edness, and placed in situations where the human face [can] shine forth in all its nudity (DF 23233). And in Meaning and Sense we find much the same alliance in an infamous passage: The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justifying itself in its own context, creates a word which is, to be sure, de-occidentalized, but also disoriented. To catch sight, in meaning, of a situation that precedes culture, to envision language out of the revelation of the other . . . in the gaze of a human being looking at another human pre-cisely as abstract human disengaged from all culture, in the nakedness of his face, is to return to Platonism in a new way (BPW 58) In these passages, Greeks and the Jews have, as it were, no culture, or at any rate not a culture that binds or defines. They catch sight of what pre-cedes the parochial, and this sight allows them to stand momentarily outside it. Their culture is anticulture, or, in short, abstract humanist universalism. This is the position from which they say everything seri-ous about human life.

In an article titled A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism, Slavoj iek argues that universalism is the only possible position from which we can combat globalization, as well as the only possible posi-tion from which an authentic revolutionary sentiment can arise. In an illuminating footnote, he describes how, as East Germany was push-ing toward freedom, the crowds yelled, We are the people! but then, one day, the slogan had mysteriously shifted to, We are one people which in German is also the same as, We are a people. Clearly, the desire for unification had become paramount, supersed-ing any other sentiments demanding expression. But for iek some-thing more dangerous, or at least disappointing, was happening: the revolutionary impulse of the first slogan we are the people: we want a voice had given way to something potentially totalitarian, both insofar as we are one people implies we speak with one voice, all with


the same voice, and also insofar as we are a people implies one people among many, with particular, historical claims to justice and redress. Reading the argument that follows it is almost possible to conclude that, for iek, the incipient fascism of we are one people and the iden-tity politics of we are a people are A-side and B-side of the same bad 45 since, as he puts it, the demands of identity politics require an intricate police apparatus . . . for identifying the group in question; for punishing the offenders against its rights; for determining how legally to define sexual harassment or racial injury, and so forth; and for providing for the preferential treatment that is intended to outweigh the wrong this group suffered.14 Or if it is going too far to say that iek sees a quasi fascism in identity politics, it is certainly true that he sees identity politics as aligned with globalization, since the right of the (ethnic/religious/cultural) Other to choose the way of life that suits it best justifies the renunciation of requests for democracy, opening the door to the less easily renounced free circulation of capital. Thus, the only possible solution, he argues, is the universal-ism of what he calls, following Balibar, galibert, which breaks out of the vicious cycle of ressentiment into the properly political domain of universalizing ones particular fate as representative of global injustice.15 This new universality, is the only way to under-mine the global empire of capital.16 This new universality, however, seems similar to Levinass return to Platonism in Meaning and Sense. iek calls galibert the fundamental European legacy;17 is this not also Levinass Europe that is not an identity among identi-ties but stands above them and judges them?

Here we have a possible defense of Levinass Eurocentrism, though it is a defense that only works, if it works at all, against a particular critical position, that of identity politics. In closing therefore I mount a different defense, returning to the idea that the West, in its bad conscience, criticizes the West. Through an examination of a pas-sage from the talmudic lecture Beyond the State in the State (NT 79107), it can be shown that this idea is not such an evasion as it might appear. In this lecture we find a situation in which a subject


and culture are called into question by another culture, in which a white, male, Western subject is subjected to judgment not by the nudity of the face stripped of its form, nor by an inscription. Rather the subject is subjected by faces that are black, female, foreign to the subject, and who speak together in one voice, thus, perhaps, repre-senting these features. The reading treats a talmudic passage in which Alexander the Great, who is presented here as a philosopher in the Greek style, puts questions to a body named the Elders of Israel. Here we have a juxtaposition of the two originary halves of Levinass West: the Greeks and the Jews, which (I note once again) present for Levinas the only serious issues in human life. And yet in this pas-sage, both are taken to task.

Alexander begins with a series of questions treating metaphysical and moral matters, questions such as, What has been created first? and, What should one do to live? (NT 86, 92). To these ques-tions the rabbis offer answers sometimes clear and sometimes cryptic, seeming to wish to deter him from too easy an acquisition of the wisdom he seeks. But Alexanders goal is not only wisdom; it is also, and mainly, conquest. As is foreshadowed in his very first question, Whether the distance is greater from heaven to earth than from east to west (83), his desires extend horizontally as much as or more than vertically, and at the end of the exchange he announces that he is off to Africa, at which point the metaphysics appears suddenly as a device to soften the rabbis so they will advise him on how best to go. They do at this point make a brief attempt to curtail his colonial desires, but quickly turn and offer him advice about the road. Alexander fol-lows their advice, and makes the journey.

What he finds is a village inhabited only by women. It is an image that is almost necessarily a parody of the orientalists exotic the dark, African, feminine and Levinass comment treats it as such, drawing from the Talmud a mocking contempt for the virility of colonialism: Women! Humans who would not be men! These are the natives of colonial conquests, ever ambiguous faces, under a mask. Human beings who one does not challenge like veritable men.


And here among these women among these humans but not men, among this mass of natives Alexander the Great is taught a lesson (NT 103).The lesson has two parts. The Talmud says: He wanted to engage in combat against them, but they said to him: If you massacre us, people will say that you have massacred women. If it is we who kill you, it will be said that a king has been killed by women (ibid.). Levinas is delighted. The Talmud tells us, through these women, that colonial combat is inherently inglorious. It is an undertaking pursued, at least ostensibly, for the sake of honor, and, paradoxically, win or lose, it can produce only dishonor. That is the first part of the lesson. The second part addresses the real motive for colonial conquest: not reputation or recognition, but money: [Alexander] said to them: Bring me bread. They brought him a bread of gold on a table of gold. Do humans eat bread of gold he wondered? [And they answered:] If you wanted ordinary bread, does it not exist in your region that you had to come here to seek it? (NT 81; cf. 10304). This is a lovely passage, even better than the last. Levinas draws out the meaning: Victorious irony of these women! They know the secret of com-bats of conquest, as they were able to divine the vigorous dialectic which annuls the glory of these combats. They denounce the poli-tics of a force which is not the mastery of an insatiable desire; [they denounce the] will to riches which always wants the portion with which the other person makes do. Remarkable lessons! (104). Thus, for Levinas, the women first uncover that colonial conquest is inglo-rious, and then that it is about gold and only gold: it is a matter of those who are already rich enriching themselves further with the pos-sessions of the poor.

Admittedly, the talmudic passage may be understood to treat not Alexanders defeat at the hands of African women, but his defeat at the hands of the rabbis: this is suggested both by the fact that the story shows the Elders of Israel as wiser than the Greek philosopher and by the fact that the African women who outwit the Greek are characters created by the talmudic rabbis, themselves the authors of the vigorous dialectic Levinas so enjoys. Indeed, the view that the


talmudic text is presenting itself and its rabbinic heroes as the source of the lessons Alexander learns in Africa is suggested by the next epi-sode of the story. On the way home, Alexander is prevented from entering the Garden of Eden and, in explanation, given an eyeball that is heavier than all his silver and gold, and he is told by the rabbis that it is a human beings eye, which is never satisfied (NT 105). Another reading, however, is possible, one by which the rabbis have only come to their insight about the spiritual weight of human greed after and in the wake of Alexanders humiliation in Africa. To see it, we must return to an earlier conversation.

When Alexander tells the sages he is going to Africa, their first response is to tell him, you cannot, for the mountains of darkness will stop you (NT 104), and once they have been pressured into giving him advice, they say: Take Libyan donkeys that can travel in the dark and coils of rope that you will fasten on the side of the route. This will help you on the way back (103). The suggestion here is, of course, that according to the Elders of Israel, Africa is an impass-able unintelligibility, a labyrinth requiring Ariadnean attentions, an untrustworthy darkness. But while this is clearly the opinion of the rabbis who appear in the text as characters, it is not necessarily the opinion of the text itself or the rabbis writing it. On the contrary, if Levinas is correct that the text confounds Alexanders expecta-tions, it must also be confounding the expectations of the Elders, for Alexander encounters no darkness in Africa but rather illumina-tion, no Minotaur but rather women. The text thus pits the African women against the whole of what Levinas sees as the West: Jews as well as Greeks. To be sure, by the end of the story the rabbis have learned, and are able to school Alexander on the weight of the eye. But that they have only learned this, as it were, in Africa, is made clear not only by the ignorance of their earlier words about darkness, by which they showed they did not understand what it was to see. It is also suggested when they return to the image of sight and dark-ness in a final comment. After they tell Alexander that the eyeball he holds is a human eye, never satisfied, Alexander asks them how


they know, and they respond: Cover it with a little dust and it will become light (106). The rabbis gloss these words with a biblical verse about death, which Levinas picks up in his commentary. But are the rabbis not also mocking their earlier selves, suggesting that the light shines out most clearly in the places that are dark and obscure? This Levinas only hints at in a rhetorical question: Must the path from the Occident to the Orient be more promising than that from earth to heaven? (ibid.). Nevertheless the suggestion is there: the text turns on the Jews as much as on the Greek.

To be sure, it does not solve the problem of the dance passage, for that refers to real Africans rather than literary Africans existing in a Western text. Nothing can mitigate the fact that what we have here is a Western text, in Levinass terms, a story in which the West criticizes the West and thereby supports its own credentials as the most admi-rable culture, a kind of second-tier colonialism as our critics would have it. But, those things said, the story must show at the very least that Levinas is willing to embrace a tale of a Western subject being called into question having what is very close to a Levinasian ethi-cal relation not with a face stripped of its form, and not even with a cultural other, but much more simply and straightforwardly with another culture. It is worth noting, too, that this talmudic lecture was originally delivered in 1988, which places it after the two essays I criticized for creating the dialectic of Greek and Hebrew complete unto itself. It is possible, then, to think that the Talmud presented Levinas an opportunity to rethink a position that concerned him in this period, and that he took it.

A certain amount of scholarship lately has been devoted to the question of how good Levinas is as a reader of Talmud. Analyses of the matter tend to range from an argument that Levinas is a dreadful reader of Talmud, entirely anachronistic, and unwarranted by the text itself or the interpretive tradition (see Daniel Boyarin), to an argu-ment that the readings are indeed anachronistic, but that perhaps this is the very point (see Martin Kavka). I take my stand with Kavka, and wish here to extend the point from temporality to geography. Those


who object to anachronistic readings are making an accusation that is analogous to those who charge Levinas with Eurocentrism; what they want is more attention paid to historical particularly in precisely the way the anti-Eurocentrists want more attention paid to cultural particularly. Thus, the idea is that anachronistic readings overlook the intrinsic differences of various historical periods, forcing a certain homogeneity on textual history, and Eurocentrism measures every-thing by the standard of the West, forcing a certain homogeneity on global culture. But this is far from what Levinas actually does in his talmudic readings, which is always to use the premodern to unsettle the modern, to create a Benjaminian constellation such that a moment from the past is torn up from its roots and made present as a conceptual violence, the West devastated by its past. Can we not see a spatial version of this in Beyond the State, in which a conceptual Africa devastates the West that is Levinass own cherished symbiosis, Hebrew and Greek? Still and always, Levinas looks for the moments in what he is and what he knows, which deconstruct what he is and what he knows. The Europe he defends, with perhaps too much delight, is at any rate, this rupturing act; Europe is the psychism to which he must turn, because it is his own.

Threshold of Spirituality, ed. James H. Olthuis (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 165. Cf. Davis, Levinas, 53.

Robert Bernasconi, The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the 40. Ethical and the Political, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (1999): 76.

Critchley, 41. The Ethics of Deconstruction, 260.Derrida, 42. Adieu, 33.Bernasconi, Third Party, 78.43. Ibid., 77.44. Ibid., 77.45. Ibid., 86.46. Bernasconi, Invisibility, 289.47. Ibid.48.

Notes to eiseNstadt, euroceNtrism aNd colorbliNdNess

Rudi Visker, Is Ethics Fundamental? 1. Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 263302.

Robert Bernasconi, Who is my neighbor? Who is the Other? Questioning 2. the generosity of Western thought, in Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Claire Elise Katz and Laura Trout, vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 2005), 530.

In fact, this statement is even more problematic than I have suggested, 3. and not only because of Levinass shift from the Bororo and the Indians (perhaps too primitive for him to comment on?) to the Buddhists. To see how, let us venture an experimental restatement, substituting Germans for Jews and Jews for Buddhists: It is the Germans who, alongside their numerous atrocities, invented the contemporary philosophy of guilt and instituted a vast system of memorializa-tion and remuneration. This represents a victory of German generosity. For me, of course, Luther is the model of excellence, but I say this while knowing nothing of Maimonides. Though I am not certain the experiment is entirely legitimate, the sound of this restatement is certainly troubling.

Levinas, Peace and Proximity, in 4. BPW 16269; and Levinas, Uniqueness, in EN 18996.

The original interview from which this formulation is drawn is from 5. 1985. The other interview is with Raoul Mortley and conducted in 1991: Raoul Mortley, Levinas, in French Philosophers in Conversation (London: Routledge, 1991), 18.

TI 6. 79. The face has no body, and therefore couldnt dance even if it wanted to.

Bernasconi, Who is my neighbor?, 89. We are all familiar with quota-7. tions that will support this. These include not only passages on the featurelessness or non-phenomenality of the face, and on its lack of context or culture, but also

Notes to Pages 3750 225

passage like the one cited by Bernasconi from Difficult Freedom: monotheism sees that one man is absolutely like another man beneath the variety of histori-cal traditions kept alive in each case (DF 178, cited in Bernasconi, Who is my neighbor?, 2021). Bernasconi points out that this kind of antiracist statement has been known to accompany acute and violent racism (ibid., 21).

Ibid., 17.8. Ibid., 17.9. Ibid., 6.10. Visker, Ethics, 288.11. Ibid.12. Accept Levinass reasoning, writes Visker, and of course the problem 13.

I am trying to formulate is spirited away (Ibid., 283).Slavoj iek, A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism, 14. Critical Inquiry 24,

no. 4 (Summer 1998): 1006.All three previous quotations, ibid., 1007.15. Ibid., 1008.16. Ibid., 1006.17.

Notes to maldoNado-torres, leviNass heGemoNic ideNtity Politics, radical PhilosoPhy, aNd the uNFiNished Project oF decoloNizatioN

I wish to express thanks to the editor of this volume, John E. Drabinski, for valuable feedback.

For a consideration of various angles of the ethical turn see, Marjorie 1. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). For the more radical cri-tiques of Levinasian ethics and deconstruction see Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001); Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003).

Badiou, 2. Ethics, xxxv.Ibid., 25.3. Slavoj iek, 4. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

(London: Verso, 2000), 4.Ibid., 211.5. iek, 6. The Puppet and the Dwarf, 7.Ibid., 35.7. I explore ieks orthodoxy more in depth in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 8.

The Regressive Kernel of Orthodoxy, review of The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj iek, Radical Philosophy Review 6, no. 1 (2003): 5970.

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