Individuation in Levinas and Heidegger

Abstract

Derrida's Violence and Metaphysics (1964) remains the most sustained encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger. In it, broadly speaking, Derrida criticises Levinas for attempting to access the other as a positive infinity rather than a negative one, an absolute trauma that leaves no mark on the ego. In opposition to this I shall attempt to show that access to the other always presupposes a One from which it would depart, in a negative gesture of putting in question which occurs when death impinges upon an ego. This understanding of otherness forces Levinas to understand Heidegger's death as owned by the ego and to reverse this ownership by giving death to the Other, in order to prevent death's appropriation and ensure that it remain other. This is Levinas's point of departure: otherness can be produced only on the basis of a prior unity. This means that there can be no otherness in the pre-individual il y a or as a whole: the oneness of the human ego must be replicated here. As a result, Levinas cannot say why individuation occurs since this would require some form of otherness within the il y a. This principle of individuation would need to be other than the field in which individuation occurs in order to be explanatory. The general problem, then, is that Levinas models his understanding of oneness and otherness on the ethical situation of the human One (ego) and the human Other (V Autrui). In other words, for Levinas, the only otherness is death and in the il y a there is no death, since there are no humans, indeed there are no individuated entities at all: there is nothing that could die and thus open up a passage toward otiierness. The notion that death is the only guise which otherness can assume is precisely what Heidegger finds necessary to contest. Heidegger's early meditation on death differs from that of Levinas in a way that Levinas cannot see. Levinas understands Heidegger's death to be proper to the ego and so reverses this ownership, but, in fact, for Heidegger the most basic function of death is closer to Levinas's notion of hypostasis. Death creates singular entities. It does not belong to anyone but first produces an entity which can have such things as belongings. It is this subtle displacement of death and the incompleteness that its always outstanding character imposes that will eventually allow Heidegger to explain in a way that Levinas cannot because he situates death and its otherness after the process of individuation, which is to say subsequent to a complete individuated substance. This failure can be demonstrated by examining the problems which Heidegger found with his early position on death, which necessitated the alterations that produced his later work and which center around the humanism that restricts otherness to human death. These problems, in a slightly different way, haunt the Levinassian position, and it is this difference that prevents Levinas from seeing and overcoming the difficulties that this entails. Since Heidegger is not lumbered with an understanding ofthe human being as a complete ego, he is not compelled to understand beings as a whole as complete. Hence he can later explain individuation on the basis of a certain original incompleteness of beings as a whole. We can formalize this reading of Heidegger by way of Zizek's juxtaposition of Lacan and Hegel. The initial difference between Heidegger and Levinas with regard to the function of death causes the respective paths of the two thinkers to diverge, as Heidegger tirelessly pursues the hypostasis in the guise of ontological differentiation, while Levinas's meditation is barred from this path and must stabilize in a description of the relation to the Other. The One of the Ego Levinas versus Derrida-The Necessity of the One The emphasis of Violence and Metaphysics (1964), obscures the most fundamental problem with Levinas's work as a whole. …