Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea
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only twice in Totality and Infinity.
On page 28 Levinas writes:
The relation between the same and the other
is not always reducible to knowledge
of the other by the same, not even to
the revelation of the other to the same,
which is, already fundamentally different
from disclosure.
In a footnote to this he discusses Nietzsche’s notion of “drama.”
There can be a dramatic unfolding of Apollo or Dionysus
through their actions in maybe five acts of a tragic drama.
On page 203 Levinas continues this contrast between the ethical
of me and the other and Nietzsche’s character as a work of art.
In Proper Names Levinas links Kierkegaard and Nietzsche together
in going beyond the ethical to a religious level that is more mystical
than ethical and concerned with my fulfillment rather than the other’s.
He sees them both as contributing to a Heideggerian view of a self-
centered, egoistic authenticity that can support National Socialism.
So Levinas does not look into the face of Nietzsche any more than
he looks into the face of Kierkegaard: he treats neither
The Works of Love, which belong to Kierkegaard and not his pseudonyms,
nor the amor fati and love of all existence that in The Antichrist
Nietzsche connects with the all-loving Jesus.
Nietzsche’s Jesus has an agape that really loves the enemy
for Nietzsche loves most of all the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount.
Derrida is a much more complete reader of both Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche than is the Levinas of Totality and Infinity and
so when Derrida deconstructs the early Levinas and helps
him move to the later Levinas of Otherwise Than Being Derrida
will have the complete Kierkegaard and the complete Nietzsche
in mind and not settle for a misreading of the faces of those two.
II,2 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Totality and Infinity
II,2.1 With a Jewish Aporetic Ethics That Deconstructs
Derrida greatly appreciates Levinas’s ethical philosophy and
in his seventy-five-page essay on Levinas’s early thought, which he called
Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,
Derrida refers to “[t]he great book Totality and Infinity” and
approaches it with an Introduction and five parts:
Introduction 79
I. The Violence of Light 84
II. Phenomenology, Ontology, Metaphysics 92
III. Difference and Eschatology 109
IV. Of Transcendental Violence 118
V. Of Ontological Violence 134
Right away, at the beginning of his preface to Totality and Infinity
Levinas discusses the violence of war and reminds us that we
are constantly involved in war and winning at any price, which
means that we are most concerned about conquering our enemies.
Ethics, insofar as it has to do with loving other persons,
even our enemies who do not love us, is forgotten and self-defeating.
Most ethical ways of thinking have to do with self-realization
and to even preserve ourselves in a state of nature that is
“nasty, mean and brutish” we have to be constantly unethical.
From his Jewish tradition Levinas knew about caring for
widows, orphans, and aliens and, as he says right away
in his preface, he does think of an eschatology and a place
that living ethically can help bring about if we really take
responsibility for responsibility and try to bring about shalom.
Derrida, also a Jewish philosopher, wants to lessen
violence as much as possible and to do that he wants to
become more and more aware of the limits of making
ethical decisions and even to decide to have an infinity
that excludes any totality for already that distinction is violent.
II,2.2 Levinas’ Logic of Exclusive Opposites
At the beginning of his essay on Levinas in Writing and Difference
Derrida (p. 79) quotes Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy:
Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points
of influence moves our world.
At one time it feels more powerfully
the attraction of one of them
at another time of the other;
and it ought to be, though never is
evenly and happily balanced between them.
As Derrida thinks back to the ethics of the Greeks he goes especially
to Socrates, who first moved from Greek physics to ethics.
Socrates was concerned for the care of the soul and in taking
this responsibility he decided that the best approach was skepticism.
He claimed that he was the wisest man in Athens because he alone
knew that he knew nothing and he trusted in that humble way.
In Greek a road or pathway and even the pathway of thinking
is called a poros and “a” negates that so that aporetic means
that there is no certain way of knowing just how to decide things.
As Derrida claims, following Socrates, we can only make
decisions over the abyss of indecidability because things are
so complex that we never know the total big picture with certainty.
Because we live in a world about which we are always learning more
we should have the best of intentions but given that the future
might reveal all sorts of things of which we were ignorant.
When Derrida thinks about Levinas’s ethics he appreciates
the infinity of things so much that he is skeptical about totality.
We may think we know a totality but we never really can.
In following the Socratic aporetic ethics Derrida begins
to deconstruct Levinas’s non-skeptical logic of exclusive opposites.
As Derrida develops his aporetic ethics in which deconstruction is
justice he opts for a metaphysics of excess and a logic of mixed opposites.
II,2.3 And Levinas’s Deconstruction of Buber’s I and Thou
Buber’s