Reading Camus “With,” or After, Levinas

Abstract

Jacques Derrida has remarked that what occurred in Emmanuel Levinas's post-war philosophy : a discreet but irreversible mutation, one of those powerful, singular, and rare provocations in (Derrida 1996, 9). It certainly holds, if we accept the premise of Levinas' postwar philosophy, that then the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is to be called to account before something that would at once precede and exceed its terms. In a way that challenges the age-old distinction between theory and praxis, asserts that philosophy answers to a more fundamental ethical exigency which all humans undergo, practically, all the time. This is the exigency, simple yet finally incomprehensible, of being faced by another (or precisely Other) person. It would be a difficult task, and one that is not mine here, to condense in a few words Levinas's accounts of this primal ethical encounter. The focus of this essay is on a path less well travelled in philosophic circles: Albert Camus's post-war ethical and political philosophy. Needed here is only a stress on how Levinas's ethics is an ethics of radical responsibility. As readers will know, Levinas's pivotal contention is that, in encountering the Other, a certain (non)relation is lived through by the subject, radically outside his/her conscious control. The Other is, if we can still say this, a uniqueness who signifies to us at that moment otherwise than through her/his relation to any informing semantic or historical totality (e.g., Entre Nous, 194-45; Totality and Infinity, III B). Rather, the Other's alterity manifests itself to the subject in this encounter as a lasting ethical call to answer for itself and to justify its place in the sun. For Levinas, indeed, we always - as speaking subjects - have responded to the Other. And this ineradicable responsibility, maintains, is the transcendental origin of language, and thus underlies (as it undermines) our capacity to give meaning to our Being. This is the discreet but powerful mutation in the history of ideas that Derrida sees first essayed in Levinas. This essay presents three contentions. First, through bringing the later ethico-political philosophy of Albert in The Rebel into an engagement with the more widely known ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will contest the lasting silence concerning Camus's political philosophy in philosophical literature.1 Secondly, I argue that Camus's account of political subjectivity in L'Homme Revolte decisively anticipates that later expounded by Levinas. What unites with on the nature of subjectivity, I will maintain - and this is the essay's third contention - is that Camus, before Levinas, ties subjectivity to a primordial responsibility before and for other subjects. To be a subject for Camus, as for Levinas, I contend, is - before it is anything else - to have been called to take a stance vis-a-vis the others in whose time one lives.2 These contentions are carried out in the essay's three parts. Part I presents an exposition of Camus's ethical position in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. This exegesis of Camus with Levinas presents Camus's argument as an alternative attempt, before Levinas's, to conceptualize an ethics refractory to all totalizing philosophical systems. Part II then considers Camus's ethics after Levinas, as it were. There are resources in Camus's texts which, I contend, importantly at once resist and anticipate the kind of criticisms that offers of the occidental philosophical heritage, and which we can feasibly imagine he might accordingly have leveled at Camus's mature - avowedly Graecophile - position. The horizon of the essay, which is explicated in the Conclusion, is that Camus's theoretical voice is a potentially timely one in today's theoretical scene. What he offers, we will see, is a very rare thing: namely, a post-metaphysical ethical contention that is at once post-Nietzschean, yet avowedly universalist. …