Derrida Brings Levinas to Kant

Abstract

This essay explores nature of Derrida's longstanding interest in relation between Levinasian ethics and Kantian moral and political philosophy. As early as 1964, in his very first work devoted to Levinas, Derrida turns his mind to this relation, expressing regret that systematic and patient confrontation had yet been organized by Levinas Kant in particular.1 Despite this lack, Derrida wants to demarcate early Levinasian ethics as at once profoundly faithful to Kant (for 'Respect is applied only to persons' Practical Reason) and implicitly anti-Kantian, lacking the formal element of universality, without pure order of law.2 Without answering his question in this early stage, Derrida asks, one hand, how it is that Levinasian ethics manages to escape Kantian underwriting morality and politics, and, other hand, in what respect Levinas's particularist ethics, insofar as it is presented as humanism, remains close to that of Kant's. Focusing Derrida's A Word of Welcome in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1996),3 I will maintain that Derrida's analysis is motivated by more fundamental question, namely, nature of relation between ethics and politics. For Derrida, where Levinasian ethics appears as unconditional hospitality, Kantian politics offers conditional hospitality within boundaries of law. Hence, Derrida brings Levinas to Kant to explore ethics-politics relation by asking whether, in Levinas's ethics of hospitality might be discovered a legitimating foundation . . . able to found law and politics, within society, nation, State or Nation-State,4 that is, kind of conditional hospitality he sees in Kant. Derrida provides two responses. Immediately, he says no: one cannot deduce from Levinasian ethics, law or politics in some determined situation today. There is no relation of founding and founded between an ethics or first philosophy of hospitality and law or politics of hospitality.5 The remainder of his essay comprises his second response. Although one cannot deduce law or politics from ethics, there is something we can say about passage. First, derivation of politics or law from ethics is absolutely necessary. Ethics itself requires law. Second, derivation is irreversible: passage is from ethics to politics and not vice versa. Further, derivation is conditional. If politics is obligated by Levinas's ethical relation, law should be made on basis of an analysis that is each time unique.6 This means that we are required to think law and politics otherwise7 than way in which Kant thinks law and politics where morality and justice are equated with universality of law. Finally, where, for Levinas, there is no universality of law in Kantian cosmopolitical sense, there is law that Derrida wants to say holds universally, namely, that required law be irreversibly conditional upon ethical relation.8 This essay will examine each of these points in detail. Section one will explain in what sense law cannot be deduced from ethics, by detailing Derrida's reading of how it is that Levinasian ethics opposes formal deduction of Kantian politics from morality. Section two will explain what Derrida thinks we can say of ethical-political relation, and why, in finally arguing for universality of law's conditionally derivative nature, Derrida needs to leave Levinas who, rather than emphasizing universality of law's hold, provides determinate content to ethical-political, thematizing imperative as particular demand of Judaic humanism, universal only insofar as non-Jews affirm Jewish particularism. Following this structure, this essay will elucidate not only Derrida's answer to question of ethical-political via Levinas and Kant, but also his critical stance in regard to both.9,10 Derrida's First Response: Politics Cannot be Deduced from Ethics Derrida How Levinasian Ethics Cannot Found Politics Contained in Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics are four propositions: (1) Ethical uprightness, and what Levinas calls freedom, is suffering that self experiences for suffering of Other in face-to-face relation. …