Tracing the density of human being: through a Levinasian anthropology of invisible otherness

Abstract

AbstractFor Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to ‘liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things’. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human ‘no longer offers itself to our powers’: to go beyond the category‐thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes – Self, Society, Culture, Nature – into question. The ‘liberation’ of human nature is an unconscious process that does not have the structure of intentionality but rather the character of inspiration. Examining the possible accommodation of a Levinasian philosophy within anthropology, this article pays particular attention to the human ‘density of being’ that, for Levinas, accompanies any individual life. It is impossible for Ego to know the Other, Levinas insists – subjectivity is ‘secret’, identity is ‘invisible’ – but otherness can nevertheless ‘inspire’ recognition and respect through its physical proximity. The article argues that a ‘cosmopolitan’ anthropology devoted to discerning the nature of a universal humanity might practise an artistry sufficient to identify the outline of that invisibility: the silhouette even if not the substance. Here are the traces of otherness that are evident, willy‐nilly, when the densities of being of individual human lives impact upon one another in social milieux.