Phenomenological / Political

This is a study of Levinas’ paradoxical phenomenology of embodiment. In the broadest sense, it provides readers new ways to understand Levinas’ difficult sense of “transcendence-in-immanence.” A curative to religious readings which don’t take the ‘immanence’ part seriously enough, and materialist readings which don’t take the ‘transcendence’ part seriously enough, Ethics and Embodiment exposes a deeply paradoxical logic of “double-grounding” at the heart of Levinas’ notion of embodied life. In the paradoxical logic at hand, ethics grounds embodiment and embodiment grounds ethics–which is in part to say that Levinasian transcendence both grounds and is grounded by immanence. Paradox in this way frames the entirety of Levinas’ project and we arrive at a picture of Levinas–in and through a picture of Levinasian embodiment–that far exceeds any number of overly-simplified and incorrect religious and materialist readings, and with wide-ranging phenomenological and political implications.

Ethics and Embodiment engages Levinas through a brand new lexicon that will help new readers of Levinas get a more intuitive sense of his project while challenging seasoned Levinas readers to think new thoughts. The project takes up a novel four-fold approach to Levinas in terms of “paradox, pardon, pause, and pastness” as it explores excess (i.e. transcendence) in relation to both embodiment and ethics, itself in relation to a four-fold move in Levinas from Birth to Bread, and from Effort to Ethics. In this way, the project explores human subjectivity in and through a constant precarious ‘compresent motion’ from ethics to embodiment and from embodiment to ethics.

In its emphasis on a novel mode of “pastness” in Levinas, the project examines Levinasian phenomenology in productive comparison and contrast with “times before time” in Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, in productive encounter with Levinas’ earliest Biblically-inflected notions of “Times of Genesis and Exodus” in relation to the curse of labor (Genesis) and the miracle of the burning bush (Exodus). I explore his important 1947 metaphysics of “the instant” in relation to his Neoplatonic emphasis on “hypostasis” alongside his deeply anti-Heideggerian phenomenology of fatigue and toil. And in all of this, I excavate new non-traditionalist, non-conservative, non-deterministic, and non-fatalistic senses of pastness related to a mode of Covenantality in Levinas that reframes embodied human life. (And by offering a novel spin on Works-and-Grace–in short, each grounds the other–we are also given new ways to interrupt supercessionist descriptions of Christianity’s relation to Judaism and new embodied ways of thinking the “Judeo-Christian”).

In its emphasis on “pardon,” Ethics and Embodiment excavates an arresting sense of “hopeless hope”–and in particular, the hopeless hope that our neighbors pardon us–at the heart of human life and at the core of Levinas’ thinking. Moving from Levinas’ earliest 1930s writing on Hitlerism to later Talmudic Readings from the 60s, the project helps us to new ways of reading Levinas’ famously cited claim that it is “difficult to forgive Heidegger,” and it invites us to exceed and defy the more common liberal sense that we ought to “forgive everyone for everything” (and forget the past, while we’re at it). Taken in the context of a more embodied Levinasian worldview (which, among other things, is critical of liberalism), pardon (and in particular, the hopeless hope that we be pardoned) is shown to emerge as a key marker of ethical excess (i.e. transcendence) in Levinas’ work.

The other key marker is “pause.” Not a common term in the study of Levinas, “pause” emerges in early Levinas as a key marker of the self’s non-coincidence with self–and so, is shown to mark a pre-ethical mode of excess/transcendence in Levinas. In particular, “pause” is shown to mark the self’s embodied excess in relation to three grounding past-inflected paradoxes: (1) A self-paradox in which the self precedes the self, (2) a paradox of self/Other at the core of subjectivity: I am myself inasmuch as the Other calls me from a time immemorial (related to my own self-grounding in a hopeless hopes for pardon), and (3) in the spirit of “double-grounding” at the heart of embodiment’s own complex relation to the ethical: each of these two paradoxes grounds the other. It is not merely that I ground myself and the other grounds myself; and it is not merely that I am grounded by being interrupted (prior to myself) by myself and by the Other; it is, rather, that the paradox of self’s self-grounding both grounds and is grounded in the paradox of self’s ground in and from the Other. This, at any rate, is the paradoxical and past-inflected logic of “pausality” at the heart of Levinas’ phenomenology of embodied life, and I speak in this regard of Levinas in terms of a “tripart pausal structure.”

Developing an entirely-new Levinas Lexicon in terms of paradox, pardon, pause, and pastness, and centering our attention on the unusual modalities of “birth and bread,” “effort and ethics,” and the complicated notion of a “time before time,” the project focuses on Levinas’ early work, including Existence and Existents (1947) and the oft-skipped-over section in Totality and Infinity (1961) on embodied joy. And it ends with political takeaways regarding a provocative “covenant-evental” politics of “trembling agency” with anti-Schmittian, anti-Pauline/Badiouan, and anti-Deleuzian senses of the political.

In this book, I invite us to challenge our assumption that when it comes to politics, our only options are “rancor” or “rainbows”: Either we wish each other to hell (and worse), or we dance our way to the happy/warm friendship pole. Drawing on a widely interdisciplinary and intercultural range of texts and traditions in ways that defy any number of “Right” and “Left” expectations, I invite us to instead consider seven “responsible and risky” approaches to living with our neighbors and with ourselves towards better–in the sense of more ethical, more equitable, and more effective–coexistence outcomes. Read more here.

Written in accessible prose for a general readership, this study invites readers to explore a sense of pardon that is far more vulnerable than the more confident approach to pardon that dominates contemporary culture. Where we often find ourselves certain that others should forgive us and even that we can, if we so desire, forgive others, Hope/less Pardon draws on a wide range of traditions to help readers to a more fragile point of view: Ethical life is about living with the reminder that we are not the kind of creatures who can forgive at will and (relatedly) we are precisely the kinds of creatures who can often not be forgiven. Drawing on figures from Kierkegaard to Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Anzaldua to Judith Butler, Franz Kafka to Franz Rosenzweig to Frantz Fanon, and Martin Buber to Emmanuel Levinas, Hope/less Pardon reminds us that real hope is a kind of fragile hope-in-hopelesness, not an upbeat sense of bright-eyed optimism that can often make our relationships with our neighbors worse not better.

In this project–aimed primarily at religious and spiritual practitioners, though ending with a chapter for atheists, agnostics, and others who don’t identify as religious/spiritual–I reframe interfaith work by highlighting the mysterious and miraculous element that is often overlooked. Doing so involves a practical shift from interfaith work to INTRAfaith work, and from work primarily centered on (1) improving literacy and (2) meeting as many people from other religions as possible to: liturgy.

I speak of ‘liturgy’ in two senses: (1) Prayer: I call on congregations to engage in INTRAfaith prayers and sermons that highlight the miraculous nature of interfaith encounter by using resources strictly from within their own thought/action traditions. (2) Works: Focusing on the etymology of “liturgy” (lit. people-work), I connect The Miracle Option to doing concrete works together in the world. While this second point (albeit not under the header of ‘liturgy as people work’) is much more common in existing interfaith frameworks, MANY important differences emerge when the spirit of working together is recast within the context of prayer itself understood as the main appropriate response to an inter-human miracle.

In the end, while I think there is a place for increased religious literacy, I recommend giving new (and higher) priority to approaching interfaith relations under the primary sign of the miracle. Our work in interfaith in this way becomes more intra-group focused as we embark on the delicate and risky (and uncomfortable) task of precipitating, fostering, and revering the miracle of encounter with someone whose form of life is nothing like our own.