Justice and Action in Otherwise than Being

Abstract

Are we not at this very moment in the process of barring the issue that our whole essay attempts, and of encircling our position from all sides? (OB, 169). One of the most provocative aspects of the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for many readers, seems to be his misuse of the term "ethics" in describing what it is he is doing. Ethical philosophy, in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, has set itself the task of providing a philosophical reflection on ethical action. It has attempted to provide some basic rules for conduct that can assist ethical decision making in particular circumstances. Levinas, in Otherwise than Being (OB) and elsewhere, does not only fail to do this; he in fact presents an "ethics" that is not even to be thought of as thematizing the world of concrete action in any way. He not only fails to provide rules for action, he presents a theory in which to describe an action as ethical would be a strict impossibility; it would be to misunderstand the very meaning of the ethical. Why this disorienting transformation in vocabulary? In fact, the traditional ethical realm has not disappeared from Levinas's account, it has merely been displaced and renamed-- the sphere of ethical action in the traditional sense is the sphere of justice in Levinas. But while it is useful to recognize this, it should not allow us to be less disturbed by what Levinas has done. For while there continues to be a sphere of ethical (or in his terminology, just) action, his sphere of justice remains deeply connected with what he calls ethics. To understand the former, we will have to try to understand the latter. The question remains of whether Levinas provides us any guidance for just action. I would argue that this at least is a legitimate question, as opposed to two possible questions regarding ethics, which I will claim are simply based on a misunderstanding: that is, does Levinas gives us the means to predicate "ethical" of some actions and not others; and does he provide us with any way to guide our own ethical decisions. "Ethics" for Levinas is simply not something of which these questions could be asked. I would like, then, to explore the relation of ethics to justice in Levinas, by way of the parallel relation of the saying to the said. I will argue that action must be described in terms of justice and not ethics. Then I will attempt to show that Otherwise than Being itself can be considered as an attempt at a just action in philosophy-which for Levinas means that it has the specific task of thematizing the relation between the just and the ethical. Extrapolating from this reading of Otherwise than Being as a performative philosophical intervention in the sphere of justice, I will argue that Levinas has in fact provided some general criteria for what a just action must look like. Ethics is to justice as Saying is to Said The relation between ethics and justice, for Levinas, parallels the relation between the saying and the said. In fact, more than merely being in parallel, ethics/justice and saying/said are two ways of talking about the same relation. One of the preeminent features of the saying, the first that any discussion of Otherwise than Being, as well as Levinas's own discussion within the text, must run up against, is that the saying cannot be said without betraying it. It is that which cannot be fixed in discourse, nor even in synchronic time. It is a pre-originary, irrecuperable past. The said, on the contrary, is discourse insofar as it is set down and given meaning, it is philosophy as phenomenology or ontology, it is ethics in the traditional sense of rules for conduct. The said organizes, structures, assigns meanings, compares, asks questions. The saying interrupts all of these-it is an-archical, the overturning of any possible arche. The said is the order of being, and the saying is the "otherwise than being" which, as Levinas insists, is not simply a "being otherwise" (OB, 3). …