Current Readings of Levinas' Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence

Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, published in 1974, produced nothing less than a profound in contemporary philosophical thought. Pursuing the breakthrough made in the work of 1961, Totality and Infinity, but by interrupting its phenomenological movement, Levinas deploys and describes an ethical subjectivity already awoken to the responsibility for the Other, a vulnerable subjectivity, a subjectivity “more passive than all passivity”, persecuted, haunted and elected to the point of substitution for the Other.

From which “place”, and towards which heading and ethico-political orientation, are we to think this “substitution” and this “expiation” at the heart of the infinitely responsible subjectivity for the Other and for the death of the Other? Which are the risks and the chances of this hyperbolical ethics, engaged by a responsibility without conditions for the Other? Can it furnish the space – and if so, how to determine such a space – for a political or a sociality, a manner of rethinking, or even, reconfigure our democratic institutions?    

In engaging a thinking towards the alterity of the Other irreducible to the classical modalities of intersubjectivity or recognition, Levinas deploys a wholly other disposition towards Being and ethical duty, truth and justice, singularity and universality, and in this sense redefines what we could call humanism, and thereby, rethinks anew the possibility of the Good after the irremediable breaks and caesurae of our History and indeed after what the philosopher names “useless suffering” has put into abyss the human rational ideal of moral benevolence or the reconciliatory tendency of the historical becoming of humanity. In effect, Levinas indicates how and why substitution for the Other – infinite response of responsibility for the Other always preceding the call of the Other – will have torn us away from Being and the different modalities of Being-together and thus marks, both in the face of History and before the alterity of the Other, responsibility cannot be circumscribed within the established limits of a social contract or normative morality, but must “infinitize” itself and translates itself as “infinition” for the Other. Before freedom, the ethical subjectivity thus finds itself emptied of its own substance and, substituting itself for the Other, remains already engaged beyond its autonomy in what Levinas calls its “disinterestedness,” its “exception” and “election” – let us also say its “escape” from the perseverance of its existence in Being towards an unprecedented opening, in spite of itself, towards its irreplaceable responsibility. Here, in this “space”, all the structures of appearing are overturned and the intentional order of the “world”, of our “lived experience” or of the “horizon” of intentionality from which phenomenality can be understood and in which intersubjectivity can be constituted as sameness are disrupted. Levinas’ hyperbolic ethics thus commits us to rethinking subjectivity as “absolute expiation” for the Other and draws us into an otherwise than being, irreducible to a “being otherwise”, and where the relationship with the Other interrupts subjectivity whilst inspiring it to an expiration without return for the Other.

Our conference will return to Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence and will seek to understand how its “extravagant hypothesis” can initiate a transformation or a transmutation of philosophical thought and ethical action within our contemporaneity. Our questions cannot not be posed today and in the wake of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence where Levinas considers extra-ordinary possibilities for the Human and in the name of an ethics entirely inhabited by a certain promise, even messianicity. How can or may we restore meaning to this demanding promise today? What can it mean and how can we translate this hyperbolic meaning of ethics, this messianicity, in our era powerfully undermined by the proliferation of a devastating nihilism and geopolitical desolation? What can ethics still do in the face of the often perilous extensions and propagations of the technological enframing of the human?

“As soon as now!” wrote Levinas. We could also, by continuing, say: “as soon as now” for an “otherwise from now on”. Returning then to Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, rereading it after the 50 years of its publication and studying it again and from the novelty that this work still presents for us today whilst engaging a beyond of violence, of war, of the reduction of the Other that still rages today in the four corners of our world – such will be the horizon and the purpose of our conference.