Response+to+Benson+and+O'Neill+on+Levinas

Quotes from text are in **bold.**

First, a quick gathering of Levinas’s key ideas from the Benson and O’Neill paper:


 * “One of the main thrusts of Levinas’s philosophy concerns Western philosophy’s systematic reduction of ‘the other’ (//l’autre//) to ‘the same’ (//le meme//)” (32).**


 * “There is something about the other that cannot be synthesized like any other object, something that eludes the understanding of the self. Levinas calls this the ‘face’” (32).**


 * “Travel is an important trope for Levinas. For Levinas, there are two kinds of travel. One kind is envisioned as a return to ‘the same’…Another kind of travel is a journey away from the self” (33).**


 * “Because the subject is inherently social, it is amidst this sociality that the face-to-face relationship with another person reveals the mutuality of existing in an immediate, visceral form. The face makes the other’s vulnerability apparent and makes the self responsible, someone with the potential to do violence. The self becomes infinitely responsible without having done anything wrong or made a decision to be embroiled in the other person’s life—what Levinas calls an ‘epiphany.’ The self is forever more responsible for the other than for itself” (33).**


 * “What is it about the face that expresses alterity and vulnerability?...The time of the face is that which is without power, destitute and vulnerable, capable of dying, naked no matter how the other is clothed, powerless no matter how robust the other might be” (33).**

This reminds me of the language of some Buddhist authors I have read, who remind us that within everyone is a child. Part of the motivation toward compassion is to see in everybody that vulnerability and sensitivity that we naturally understand a child to have. There is the person’s visible body; then there is the true nature. However, I am not sure what Benson and O’Neill mean by “the time of the face.”


 * “…the face is the vital singularity that guarantees nothing more than ‘there is,’ the fact that the other person is capable of being killed and that, as someone capable of executing such an event, the self is already bound by this ethical relationship” (34).**

Benson and O’Neill focus on the phenomenology of ethnography, looking at the experience through a Levinasian perspective:

Borrowing from Castaneda: **“To counterweight anthropology’s critical focus on representation, Castaneda has sought to describe the ‘actualization, conduct, and corporeal doing of the activities and practices that comprise and constitute ethnographic fieldwork’” (35).**

In reality, it turns out the ethnographer cannot maintain the distance between him or herself and the subject. Nor can he consistently impose the structure of his research framing upon the reality of lived experience with the subject.


 * “Face-to-face encounters make ethnography an inherently ‘open’ method, improvisational and potentially transformative of the structured design or set of questions that guide research from the outset” (36).**

Not to allow transformation, to try to maintain the scientist’s distance between the ethnographer and the subject is “unethical,” also in Levinas’s sense; it is to deny the face-to-face encounters and the ethical responsibility they include.


 * “In Levinas’s terms, fieldwork is a mix between the two modes of travel” (37).**


 * “Das emphasizes the importance of continuously recognizing the experiential asymmetry between the ethnographer and respondents and a form of critical awareness about one’s location and presence that sustains openness and ambiguity. The methodological advantage of this ever ambivalent mode of empathy, the ‘love’ is that it helps maintain a productive but potentially irritating and emotionally risky sense of incomplete control that constantly nudges a researcher into critical self-reflection about the cultural and moral assumptions that guide research design and analysis” (38).**

Quoting Asad: **“[Colonialism] made possible the kind of human intimacy on which anthropological fieldwork is based, but ensured that that intimacy should be one-sided” (42).**

I am not sure how Benson and O’Neill ultimately come down on this asymmetry in anthropology. There is clearly a sense of guilt that their profession is only possible as one of the products of an exploitative history. However, they seem to want to use Levinas to rethink the position of the anthropologist in a way that acknowledges that asymmetry (it can never be reduced to sameness; nor should it be), and reaffirms the importance and value of the other, and one’s ethical responsibility to the other:

Quoting Levinas: **“The other approaches me not from outside, but from above” (33).**

Again: **“To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches…in a dimension of height” (45).**

Levinas places the other before the self. Though there is an essential asymmetry, it is the reverse of the asymmetry in colonial thinking. Psychologically, one could ask a lot of questions about Benson’s and O’Neill’s reasons for gravitating toward Levinas as a tool for understanding the asymmetry of ethnography. Is it an attempt to soothe a sense of guilt? Is it an attempt to rewrite inequality as something potentially productive for everyone? Perhaps it’s impossible to say. Maybe that’s why they present this as a phenomenological account. They take as their basis the experience of doing field work, and cite accounts that suggest the possibility that the Levinasian understanding of the ethical relationship actually corresponds to lived experience.

On “culture of ethical despair” (quoting Welch): **“The despair is cultured in the sense of its erudite awareness of the extent ad complexity of many forms of injustice; and the knowledge of the extent of injustice is accompanied by despair, in the sense of being unable to act in defiance of that injustice” (43).**


 * “For Levinas, clear-minded and principles-based moral actions can actually distract people from ethics” (43).**

Why don’t Benson and O’Neill think people should act? Still trying to figure this out. Does it somehow extricate us too much from the “despair” they mention?

Yet, they say: **“Levinas is not constructing an outlet for people to avoid real political action where they come, instead, to see themselves as living pious lives” (44).**

Quote from //Brothers Karamazov// which Levinas uses to explain his position in an interview: **“ ‘We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others’” (44).**

I’m not sure what Benson and O’Neill think this quote helps us understand about the possibility/impossibility of action…seems to just lead us back here:


 * “So Levinas also seems to provide no answers at all, only a plethora of others to which one is endlessly responsible” (44).**

Ok, so it’s hard to use Levinas for politics. You want to, but he pushes back. He seems to ask us to dwell in the“despair” of being incapable of fulfilling our responsibilities to others. However, perhaps we just have to set that aside, and see what can be productively made of the “primacy of ethics” claim.


 * “The consciousness born out of Levinasian ethics—the recognition of one’s responsibility to others //and// the impossibility of ever exhausting that responsbitility—can provoke an empowering turn toward an unending, critical self-reflection aimed at ensuring that the other’s experience cannot finally be assimilated into the mental and moral models of the self” (45).**


 * “Anthropology’s ‘love’ becomes a practical ethnographic orientation defined by the maintenance of an elected affinity to being marked by the other’s knowledge and experience” (45).**

Talking about Nelson’s experience of the pickpocket in Bogota: **“…nothing materially changed because of the encounter—so, for her, although ethics must necessarily be linked to social action, it is not principally defined in terms of action…It was essentially about a certain kind of interpersonal relationship, one which led to an experience of passivity and, in turn, to the transformative possibilities of being marked by others” (47).**


 * “An ethic of risk emerges from the practical impossibility of Levinasian ethics. If one cannot, even though one must, be endlessly responsible for all other people, then the daunting significance that Levinas accords the face-to-face encounter in fact becomes relaxed, the self becomes passive to contingency and spontaneous marking” (48).**

Quoting Welch: An ethic of risk is **“an ethic that begins with the recognition that no one can guarantee decisive changes in the near future or even in a lifetime. The ethic of risk is propelled by the equally vital recognition that to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die. The death that accompanies acquiescence to overwhelming problems is multidimensional: the threat of physical death, the death of the imagination, the death of the ability to care” (48).**

Here it seems Welch is expanding Levinas’s responsibility to others in the face-to-face into a global responsibility, a responsibility to mark (as in recognize) and be marked by “overwhelming problems.” This is “irritating” because it involves constantly resisting the closure of identity, a constant openness to being “marked.”

However, here at the end of this essay Benson and O’Neill seem to be moving away from the “despair” discussed earlier. Because of the “practical impossibility of Levinasian ethics,” they seem to be arguing that it is sufficient just to try, to ceaselessly try. And when success is no longer an expectation, there is a certain relaxing of anxiety over failure. Whether Levinas says this himself, I do not know; but it is an encouraging interpretation. It may be the only interpretation that permits one to act, and to care (and thus avoid dying), and yet not to be caught up constantly in intense despair.

A cynic could see the end of this paper as a successful squirming out of guilt for the legacy of colonialism. Or one could see it as a powerful and insightful statement of the existential problem of caring about a world that one can hardly hope to influence.