Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (original) (raw)

Searching for Normative Difference: Heidegger and Levinas on the Other

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the normative differences between the theories of alterity given by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, and Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity. This task is made difficult because we can easily become distracted by Levinas’ own statements on the moral difference between his metaphysical theory of alterity and Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, which he claims “reduces the other to the same”(Levinas 1961 42). Levinas’ comments on Heidegger are based on a reading of Being and Time which is deeply flawed. Proper consideration of Heidegger’s texts can reveal its account of alterity as an ethical text in its own right, one that has similarities and indebtedness to ethical thoughts in Aristotle and Kant. The actual basis of Levinas’ anger with and divergence from Heidegger is, I argue, a fundamentally different way of thinking transcendence, one which presumes the subject to be infinite in its nature. On the basis of this notion of transcendence I suggest we read Levinas as a phenomenologist. Levinas' phenomenology differs from Heidegger's because his notion of transcendence implies different precepts, or pre-understandings which force ethical life to reveal itself in a different way. It is on the basis of these different kinds of phenomenological experience that we can inquire into the normative differences between Levinas’ theory of radical separation, and Heidegger’s theory of authentic and inauthentic being-with-Da-sein. On this basis we can distinguish a number of significant normative advantages Heidegger’s theory of alterity possesses over Levinas’s approach, although space and scope limitations prevent us from simply asserting Heidegger's phenomenology to be normatively superior.

Levinas's Criticism of Heidegger

Producing a confrontation between Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger is in many ways an awkward undertaking. The difference between the two thinkers could be said to be, in an important sense, fundamental. The standard view is to see Heidegger as concerned with the question of the meaning of being and thus as favouring Ontology as first philosophy, whereas Levinas, on the other hand, is said to be concerned with the question of alterity or Otherness and explicitly states that ethics is first philosophy. What I wish to do is to set up such a confrontation by means of comparison of two areas of their work: the question of our fundamental way of being-in-the-world and the related question of our relation to other people.

The other of Derridean deconstruction: Levinas, phenomenology and the question of responsibility

Minerva-An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 2001

Derrida has been rather frequently acclaimed for his conception of alterity, which we are told is irrecuperable and beyond the dialectic. However, this essay will argue that his attempts to instantiate an ethics of responsibility to the "otherness of the other" are more problematic than is commonly assumed. Much of Derrida's work on alterity palpably bears a tension between his emphasis upon an absolute and irrecuperable notion of alterity that is always deferred and always 'to come', and his simultaneous insistence that the other is somehow always already within the self. These two aspects of his treatment of alterity do not necessarily contradict one another, but they represent an important tension between a Levinasian inclined account of alterity (the other is that which can never be known), and a more traditionally phenomenological conception of alterity (i.e. the imperialism of the same, in which the other is always partially domesticated by the self's horizons of significance).

Review of _Between Levinas and Heidegger_Eds. Drabinski & Nelson_NDPR_Feb 8, 2015

The political background to the debate between Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas has often distorted the philosophical dispute. At its worst, Levinas is cast like the Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, valiantly battling the dastardly Deutsche. Fortunately, this volume approaches the debate with a clear view of the philosophical issues. It avoids polemically misconstruing Heidegger's thought without making light of Levinas's modification of it. The chapters approach the debate from a range of complementary angles that bring the discussion to a new level of nuance and understanding. The variety of contributors, which includes established experts and younger scholars, both from France and the U.S., adds to its interest.

PhD 2006: Disputes in First Philosophy - Levinas & Derrida

My thesis contests a putative congruity between Derrida and Levinas concerning discussions of responsibility, ethics and otherness. It attends to the fundamental ‘metaphysical’ differences between the two with respect to ontology, language and historicity. Consequently, it foregrounds two distinct conceptions of philosophy, which differ with respect to task, strategy and presentational form. Since Levinas’s key notion of the ‘face’ [le visage], which cannot be equated to any actual countenance, breaks with phenomenality – no small issue for an avowed phenomenology – this thesis will begin by treating the category of the other (or Other) in Levinas’s writings as a conundrum. By analysing the two major topographies of the Other developed by Levinas in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being (with particular attention to their differences), I ask: who or what counts as the other for Levinas? Concurrently, I track Derrida’s writings across his career to see if he can be held to subscribe to either of these models, noting the transformations that Derrida effects upon Levinas. By analysing them in tandem, the metaphysical and speculative contours of both thinkers (which if not neglected in the secondary literature are transformed into quasi-theological positions) come to the fore. Thereby, this thesis seeks to revive questions of speculative thought in contemporary philosophy, whilst simultaneously asking how this speculative dimension preserves its status as philosophy despite its break with norms of written form and argumentation. Crucially, this is the terrain on which Derrida, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, had first criticised Levinas – his lack of attention to language and presentation meant his writing remained non-philosophical.

The Relation of Derrida's Deconstruction to Heidegger's Destruction: Some Notes

I will be examining Derrida's texts on Heidegger in order to establish a relationship between Derrida's deconstruction and Heidegger's destruction. Derrida, while acknowledging the importance of aletheia for radicalizing the notion of truth for Western philosophy, establishes some distance from Heidegger in his readings of Heidegger's post-metaphysics and postrepresentational thinking. Derrida argues that Heidegger's negation of metaphysics does not manage to overcome or destroy metaphysics as he sets out to do, because his reversals of metaphysics remain bound to the ontological structure and vocabulary of metaphysics. Basically he asserts that non-metaphysics or a reversal of metaphysics remains a form of metaphysics and is no different from metaphysics. Although Heidegger's attempts to overcome representational thinking in Aletheia retain some semblance to representational thinking, since the assumption of the Platonic thing-in-itself is implicit in the concealed entity and its utility and equipmentality becomes its unconcealed entity, Heidegger betrays a dual ontological structure that resembles metaphysics.

Heidegger, Levinas, and the Other of History

From John E. Drabinski and Eric S. Nelson (editors), Between Levinas and Heidegger, 2014

The possibility of an ethically infused historicity and an immanent transformative praxis challenges both the reification of alterity in the eternal and transcendent and the alienation of immanence in an imprisoning and debilitating historical relativity. This prospect leads beyond both Heidegger and Levinas. But it is intimated in reading Heidegger through Levinas’s critique, in particular those appealing to the righteous demand for justice and goodness, without adopting Levinas’s anti-historical position: the alterity of history to itself is irreducible to history, it is anarchic in being irreducible to a determinate totality or an efficient-causal or teleological order. Yet such challenging difference has neither definitive name nor identity, and cannot be calculated or counted on. It defies being articulated as either a principle immanent to history or as an absolute transcendent point external to history.

John E. Drabinski and Eric S. Nelson - Introduction to Between Levinas and Heidegger

Preview of the forthcoming volume (SUNY) on Levinas and Heidegger edited by Eric S. Nelson and John E. Drabinski, titled Between Levinas and Heidegger. This short piece introduces the volume's topic and the grouping of essays. Essays by Ann Murphy, Philip Maloney, Eric Nelson, Didier Franck, Emilia Angelova, Simon Critchley, Françoise Dastur, Robert Bernasconi, François Raffoul, Peter Gordon, Krzyztof Ziarek, and John Drabinski. First volume of its kind...surprisingly!