Old Notes on Levinas's Otherwise than Being

11 Jan, 2025

Chapter 1

-Levinas wishes to articulate an otherwise to being that unlike non-being is not subsumed as merely an event of being like how death is a part of life. But initially runs into trouble with the possibility language itself is ontologically loaded. -Levinas declares the drive of being to persist in the events of its self interest and permeation into its negation manifests as the struggle between individual beings in their conatus's striving to persist against each other in war. Levinas then ponders if an otherwise of being can be found in the peace of rationality and the economy, with some skepticism as this peace is always tenuous. -Levinas contrasts the play of being with the responsibility of language… (I think) And what I think he is saying is that language most manifests itself in the expressive conatus of beings making it seem like an event of being, when really to even be articulated it is already responsible to transcendent rules of the otherwise than being. He dichotomizes this as the saying and the said, where the saying is the otherwise and the said is the ontological. Yet Levinas still seems to think language might also be contaminated by ontology. -Levinas thinks the otherwise than being will be found in subjectivity which he characterizes in passing as a restless flux that is taken back to itself in language. -Levinas first talks of the flow of time that maintains unity in difference through retention in order to declare a type of time where one remembers a far off the past but does not present it again in the flow as modified by the present. Levinas then says that one such type of lingering yet never represented past is in our sense of responsibility for another. -Levinas talks of the good coming to us outside our own freedom and the retention of the past, yet being accepted on account of its well, goodness. This is the infinity of the good which is beyond presentable succession. This develops into a boundless responsibility and debt to the other. Levinas speaks of how we put ourselves in the other without becoming their conatus in the saying of language's ability to substitute me for another. This substituting of the saying Levinas sees as an otherwise than being. -Levinas declares the subject is the pure passivity to pain which includes the pain in the face of responsibility and being held to the good, which means in our sensibility we serve the good involuntarily to our guilt of our instant guilt substitution. -Levinas says being finds its place in justice where the conatus of a subject is returned back to its dignity by being the otherwise than being of a third party which is also an otherwise than being. -Levinas declares the signification of the subject in the good, renders the subject as beyond being which some philosophers dispute due to their collapsing of the subject object dichotomy. -Levinas says at the end of the intro that the other of transcendence is not encountered or explicated in a linear order.

Chapter 2’ -Levinas talks of an ontologizing form of questioning where the desire for the static being of truth searches to reduce the other to intelligibility but the loyalty of the other to said intelligibility is defied by the other… (At least that is what I think he’s saying) Levinas then says part of the condition for any sort of intelligibility is the ability for a question to be answered but this already subordinates truth to the pre-indebted standard of language where the interface of intelligibility must enter in from the unrepresentable past of responsibility that language/saying depends on for the said to manifest. -Levinas talks about how the questioning of the “who I am that is asking” puts me in comparison with other beings which in turn reflects being’s own folding in upon itself in the altering retention of memory which is temporalization for Levinas where being changes but still remains the same in its changes through the aforementioned retention. -Levinas goes on exposition of Husserl’s notion of time consciousness which characterizes it one being toward the side of ontology in its structure due to its focus on retention which Levinas wants to get away from in this work. -Levinas contrast nouns and verbs in languages putting nouns on the side of ontologizing totalization, and verbs on the side of slippery lived time. He goes further in saying the identity of the noun can only be done in an already said which goes beyond retention… (I think…?) -Levinas talks of the elusive time of aging and the elusiveness of the already said that goes beyond the re-presentable ontologizing of certain discourses. -Levinas exposes the nature of verbs as being the temporalization of how an entity returns to itself in language throughout its different forms, and how the “to be” which is both verb and noun are one is part of the origin of ontology. -Levinas talks of the saying the said depends upon being reduced in any exposition of it but that this exposition can be made less ontologized in the ambiguity of language. -Levinas talks of saying as a un-representable responsibility to the other that in its relationship of passivity to the other in the subject’s encounter with them goes beyond the totality of ontology. -Levinas describes the first saying before the said as the pure exposure to the pain of the other that renders the self certain continuity of intentionality and retention broken apart and exposed as vulnerable to another, that’s made more alienating by the purposelessness of the pain. -Levinas says the very wound of aging itself goes beyond the representationalist logic of ontology where the past is not reducible to something retained by the present and is constantly taken away from us beyond our own egoism. But we are still called to react to our aging making us responsible for something beyond our own egotism in our very constitution of our subjectivity due to the phenomenological split of aging. -Levinas says our passivity and feeling of pain in the face of the other is not just in their ability to harm us but our ability to substitute ourselves in the place of another which makes the pain of another our own. This goes further in interrupting our subjectivity’s self subsistence by forcing us to give our own enjoyment over to the other in order relieve our pain creating a binding of responsibility. -Levinas says the involuntary election of goodness which makes one responsible for the other also makes one entirely unique in their passive uniqueness of such a responsibility that cannot be substituted for another. -Levinas wants to investigate the primacy of the human condition… (I think this chapter felt more like a tangent or summary.

Chapter 3 –Levinas makes a dense hard to summarize point about the truth of the sensible being a structure where before the said truth there is a sense which corresponds to an idea through the understanding of the subject engulfing the said of truth in ontology which takes away the immediacy of the original sensibility. Levinas then seems to say the true domain of sensibility is enjoyment and the exposure of pain which draws the self out of its continuity in the truth. (I think???) -Levinas makes another dense and hard to summarize point about how the attitude of intelligibility presupposes a desire for the object to fulfill a theme, but Levinas wishes to highlight an interaction with the sensible that does not reduce the sensed into an intelligible theme through pure spectation and the excessive abyss of irreducible meaning. He also mentions something about the intelligible attitude reducing the psyche to that which merely parallels the intelligible. -Levinas seems to, based on my very hazy first reading to invert the inwardness he describes in intelligibility by pointing to its coinciding dependence on language and (I don’t think he say this explicitly but…) that we make things intelligible in order to give them to the other we are responsible to making intelligibility subordinated to the relation of justice… (Again I am very unconfident with my understanding of this chapter on a first reading.) -Levinas says that our consumption of something like food cannot be satiated by repeatable intelligibility but instead must be consumed directly in enjoyment. Enjoyment for Levinas is the ego’s wallowing in itself in the other it assimilates into itself, and the giving of food to another is only meaningful in that breaks up this very self continuity of enjoyment’s assimilation of matter -Levinas seems to argue corporeality breaks from the intelligibility structure of ontology as we are exposed to and for an other made just an object among others for this other which is immediately within us (Levinas uses the metaphor of maternity), that we in fact give ourselves in our corporeality to the other in our responsibility toward them. -Levinas by my impression seems to describe proximity not as a spatial relation but as a gradient of restlessness or disturbance in the subject relative to how much they are exposed to an other, and an example Levinas gives of this restlessness is signification itself. -Levinas describes an asymmetric relationship between the self and the other called obsession that the self cannot reduce down into its process of intelligibility. -Levinas talks of a complete foreign and unreducible encounter with the other in proximity as he has done in many works… -Levinas talks of the contact with the other as being a presence of the other that is also absent which also puts one’s self into the very universality of signification in exposing one’s skin to another’s…(There’s a lot more but I am barely even confident with that note lol.) -Levinas talks of a trace that lingers in the face of the other that instigates a perpetual raising of indebted glory to the other. -Levinas states that phenomenology is wrapped up in the teleology of the intending of the object in anticipation and the philosophy of the other goes beyond this teleology by the anticipation never being completed in regard to a relation to the other.

Chapter 4 -Levinas contrasts (again I think) the self certain reintegration of the self in being and the obsessive intrusive presence of the other that breaks up this continuity in the other’s signifyingness which Levinas calls anarchy. -Levinas makes a point about the self being dependent on a restlessness in relation to the other rather than a perfect self continuity through thematization that he thinks most of philosophy declares the self to be constituted by. -Levinas says we go beyond what he calls “egos” into what he calls ‘selves” when we take responsibility for what the other does despite not having done it in what he calls “persecution,” if I am reading him right he thinks this occurs ironically due to our very egoism as the more we take ownership for the world the more we can no longer divest blame on it to the other. Levinas also seems to talk about how the language of responsibility itself makes the self unique in a way not totalizable through ontology.

Substitution with the other might(?) be the transcendental to the other's restlessness brought about by all sense/information/language(?) as all sense is in us and we put ourselves in it but this makes us responsible and unique as the one pregnant with the all???? Thoughts from a rereading of the substitution section…

-Levinas describes a total passivity of responsibility for all others that constitutes the self and this responsibility which combines uniqueness with restlessness in the continuity of being is the very thing that exceeds being’s own self certain reintegration of itself and makes it have to defer to the beyond of a good. -Levinas makes a point about how language arises from duty to the other rather than the egoism of truth. (And he said other stuff I didn’t pay much attention to.) -Levinas describes in concluding chapter 4 how the subject arises out of the held hostage responsibility of the prerepresentational trauma of encountering the other and taking the responsibility for all others into the self thus making the subject unique in being. He later talks about in passing how justice and the second other makes care for the self possible and concludes in talking about the importance of death’s sting which only comes to us through the death of the other.

-Chapter 5 -Levinas first talks about how the subject subordinates its internal continuity to the objective when it enters into signification and that this entering into signification is deceived within the subject’s own ideology emerging from its finitude as Levinas sees consciousness and being as one. -Levinas talks of the interdependence of signs upon each other and how being emerges in the self by the capacity of the subject to make the sign’s interdependence into a totality through accelerating their relationships into a single present. -Levinas talks of a preintersubjective language that being accesses through lies in the subject that would reduce away alterity (or something I’m not quite sure what this little section means to be honest.) -Levinas say the responsibility for the other is not reducible to a reintegration into a structure. -Levinas seems to equate what he calls the good with signification and says this signification is prior to any event of representation. He ultimately says this fidelity to signification is what grounds our responsibility to the other without devolving into slavery. -Levinas reiterates the pre-themeatized encounter with the other I have responsibility for that makes the subject unique in responsibility. -Levinas says the responsible subject exposes themselves to the other in their naked sincerity which is made possible only by the saying and not the said. -Levinas talks of glory as the unconditional exposure of one’s uniqueness as a responsible and chosen one to the other in the saying of “here I am’. -The infinite for Levinas seems to expose itself when the inwardness of the subject becomes an absolute exteriority in the subject’s signifying of responsibility to the other without thematizing themselves into anything besides their own uniqueness. -Levinas talks of this exposure of the subject to the glory of the infinite as a pre-representational obedience to God who is not even named. -Levinas says the unrepresentable ethical duty to the other becomes representable in the entry of society and the third party which requires equivalence to mediate the responsibility to the others, and miraculously this equivalence also makes the subject an other to the others meaning the asymmetry between the subject and other is balanced and the subject is restored to their conatus.
-Levinas talks of how the reappropriation of being into the subject through justice and signification is a double edged sword as it seems like he’s saying that this also makes the subject themselves part of exchangeable economy of being which they in their egoism seek to defy with their individuality. -Levinas talks of a dichotomy between skepticism and philosophy where skepticism is put on the side of language, the otherwise than being, and mediacy of interpretation or saying and philosophy is on the side of ontology, the reintegration of representation, and the immediacy of the said which ultimately put the struggle between ontology and metaphysics in a deadlock .

Chapter 6 -First Levinas says Hegel can only isolate being into nothing by being’s very totalizing essence of exchangeability which allows it to equally negate all determinations, and then goes on to state this universality is the universality of death itself. Levinas then ponders if there can be an openness in humanity beyond the bipolar interplay of being and death in the passive exposure of the subject to the other which is responsibility. He then reiterates key points from the book and talks of a war against war.