A note on Levinas
I feel it useful to summarize Levinas’s discussion about participation, atheism, and optics here, just for reference.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas sketches an ideal relationship between the subject and the Other, which he limpidly terms “face to face.” The Other, for Levinas, does not exist as an object for the subject — the I, that is — to know, to conceptualize, or to disclose. It is, instead, a face. It is a living presence, an expression, an absolute alterity whose infinitude goes beyond all attempts of grasping made by the totalizing power of the I. The encounter of the I and the Other is thus a face to face encounter, in which both parties maintain independence, and engage with each other at a distance.
What occupies this distance, that is, what communicates the I and the Other in between them is discourse (language). For Levinas, language is the transcendental relation through which the two faces enter into a conversation. Discourse forms a universality, one that is different from the universalizing power of knowledge or reason. Through this universal relation, the I and the Other become two interlocutors, and I address the Other without dissolving the infinity of the Other in my knowledge or reason. I must be prepared to give myself into words, and offer them as a gift to the Other. In this generosity and welcoming gesture, an ethical I can be found, and an escape form egotism becomes possible.
As a project aiming at salvaging philosophical thinking of the Other from theology, Totality and Infinity banishes the entire idea of participation out of the subject-object, face-to-face relationship. In Christianity, participation is the notion that everything comes from, and depends upon God (see Andrew Davison Participation in God). For Levinas, however, it is precisely this notion of participation that makes the distance between the I and the Other, the maintenance of the independence of the I from the Other (or vice versa) impossible. To break away from participation is crucial for a face to face relation to exist. It is to “maintain contact” yet without “deriving one’s being from the contact” (61). In this sense, the I should be an atheist. The break with participation marks the “possibility of seeking a justification for oneself, that is, a dependence upon an exteriority without this dependence absorbing the dependent being, held in invisible meshes” (88).
Abolishing participation, Levinas turns to optics as a metaphor of the ethical relationship between the I and the Other. Ethics is likened to a “vision without images . . . bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision” (23). The immediate relationship of face to face is thus also a relationship of eye-to-eye, except both eyes are blind, both eyes “see without being seen” (61). For Levinas, only this relationship is ethical; only this relationship is free from the violence of the totalizing I. As he puts it, “A God invisible means not only a God imaginable, but a God accessible in justice” (78). Only this double-blind relationship between the I and the Other does not deny the divine — the divine of both the Other and the I. Levinas’s atheism, must then be understood as a-theism. Rather than a direct negation of God that is not-theism, the negative prefix a- points instead to an affirmation of God in denial, that is, to a vision of God in blindness.
