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Teaching, Subjectivity and Language in Totality and Infinity

Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.

(TI, p. 51)

Let us begin this reading of the nature of education in Levinas’s philosophy with the question of language, for Levinas claims that it is through language, or more specifically, through discourse, that my being is produced. He writes: ‘My being is produced in producing itself before the others in discourse; it is what it reveals of itself to the others, but while participating in, attending its revelation’ (TI, p. 253). If this is true, what does it mean for our understandings of discourse in education and the nature of education itself? The idea that discourse is fundamental to the trajectory of the individual’s ‘becoming’, and that this is in some sense basic to what education is, appears relatively uncontroversial. Dewey writes: ‘All communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience’ (Dewey, 1966, p. 5). Martin Buber writes: ‘The relation in education is one of pure dialogue’ (Buber, 2002, p. 116). In this chapter, we will examine Levinas’s presentation of discourse as teaching in Totality and Infinity, in which subjectivity is produced through the revealing of myself to others in discourse.

My focus is Totality and Infinity because it is here that we find Levinas’s clearest and most distinctive discussion of the nature of teaching. To say that the discussion is ‘clear’ is misleading, however. The language of Totality and Infinity is strange, enigmatic, attempting to draw attention to the impossibility of capturing the relation with the Other1 in language. Colin Davis describes how the difficulty of Levinas’s writing should be understood in relation to Levinas’s awareness of the pitfalls of overcoming ontology, his attempt to become ‘Abraham boldly stepping out into the unknown rather than Ulysses seeking only what he had left behind’ (Davis, 1996, p. 35). This difficulty of Totality and Infinity is, as Hand argues, an implicit element of Levinas’s whole project, which aims to expose the ways in which the history of Western philosophy, down to the very language and methods it has employed, has involved a totalizing suppression of the Other:

These… claims are put forward in an almost prophetic or messianic way, rather than as stages in a logical argument. But Levinas embraces such an approach, as the way to break free from the process of offering philosophical evidence, and therefore to get back to an original relation with being that for him exists before and beyond totality and history. The danger is that such an approach, relying on terms like transcendence, infinity and revelation, could be dismissed as a purely spiritual rather than rational vision. Again, Levinas recognizes this possibility, but turns the tables by suggesting that the systems of totalization given by Western philosophy and history have merely tried and failed to contain the idea of infinity. (Hand, 2009, p. 37)

Despite this difficulty of reading and writing about Levinas, the challenge Totality and Infinity presents to preconceptions about the nature of language and knowledge are forcefully conveyed. Let us examine how Levinas presents teaching as the Other’s offering of the world to me through speech, in contrast with more maieutic understandings of teaching and how this challenges other conceptions of language in education.

Teaching is, for Levinas, the space of encounter with the Other in which subjectivity is revealed as ethical. In teaching, subjectivity is constituted through Desire and goodness, both encountered through language. What does this mean? ‘Desire’ for Levinas means desire for the absolutely Other, a metaphysical desire that can never be satisfied, as opposed to the kinds of desires we can satisfy, and he uses this term, capitalized, to describe a movement of the subject outwards towards the absolutely Other. This metaphysical Desire can be distinguished from ‘desire’ that aims to bring the Other into the field of the same, or aims at the synthesis of self and Other. Desire for Levinas must maintain the otherness of the Other as beyond my possession. He outlines this sense of Desire in the 1964 essay ‘Meaning and Sense’:

The idea of the Infinite is Desire. It paradoxically consists in thinking more than what is thought and maintaining what is thought in this very excess relative to thought – in entering into a relationship with the ungraspable while guaranteeing its status of being ungraspable. (BW, p. 55)

How, then, does this view of subjectivity as bound up in relation with the ungraspable relate to education?

DISCOURSE AS TEACHING

Before examining Levinas’s presentations of language and teaching in Totality and Infinity, let me briefly address the question of Levinas’s philosophical approach. I have already commented on the influence of Husserl and Heidegger, and in the Preface to Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes his approach in this text as indebted to Husserl:

The presentation and development of the notions employed owe everything to the phenomenological method. Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them are nevertheless, unbeknown to this naive thought, revealed to be implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons endow them with a meaning – such is the essential teaching of Husserl. (TI, p. 28)

What matters in this approach is, however, not Husserl’s thesis of intentionality but rather ‘the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives. The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates… constitutes a deduction – necessary and yet non-analytical’ (TI, p. 28). Nevertheless, although the account of ethical subjectivity is presented in phenomenological terms, scholars have suggested different ways of reading Levinas. Robert Bernasconi, for example, has suggested that it is possible to read Levinas both transcendentally and empirically, but that neither reading is sufficient since Levinas aims to trouble the distinction between the two (Bernasconi, 1989). Levinas describes his own philosophy in his 1965 essay ‘Énigme et phénomène’ as a philosophy of darkness, darkness being an allusion to the idea of light in phenomenology. This helps us understand his ‘method’: while adopting the Husserlian phenomenological method, Levinas at the same time departs from intentional analysis by drawing attention to what lies beyond the phenomenon, opaque to consciousness itself. Levinas is operating beyond either descriptive or normative ethics, and his statement that ‘ethics is an optics’ (TI, p. 23) reveals the sense of ethics as what enables things to be brought to light in the phenomenological sense, while disturbing the field of consciousness itself. Levinas thus points to an ethical phenomenology, demonstrating the ethical as beyond and yet revealed by the phenomenon. This, then, is the philosophical ‘framework’ within which I take Totality and Infinity to operate.

Levinas’s philosophy has been seen as underpinned by one far-reaching theme: that ethics is first philosophy. It is in Totality and Infinity that this idea is first articulated at length. Levinas uses the term ‘ethics’ not in a traditional sense as a code of morality or moral decision-making, or meta-ethical examination.2 It is rather a relation of responsibility to the Other, which, Levinas argues, Western philosophy has sought to suppress through bringing the Other into the order of the Same. In Totality and Infinity, the linguistic order is the site of totality but also the site of infinity, or ethics. Levinas states that ‘the essence of language is goodness… the essence of language is friendship and hospitality’ (TI, p. 305): having language depends, as we will see, on the precondition of having responded in peace to the demand that the Other addresses to me. The use of language, however, may be totalizing, bringing the Other within the totality of the Same: ‘Thematization and conceptualization, which moreover are inseparable, are not peace with the other but suppression or possession of the other’ (p. 46). In Totality and Infinity, Levinas seeks to show that the essence of language is interpellation, the Other’s addressing me and my response. As thought is conditioned by language, so the very structure of logical thought is anchored by the relation to the Other.

For Levinas, language presupposes a relation to the Other, who remains transcendent to the same. In Part I of Totality and Infinity, Levinas states that one of the aims of his work is to demonstrate that the relation with alterity is language itself:

We shall try to show that the relation between the same and the other – upon which we seem to impose such extraordinary conditions – is language. For language accomplishes a relation such that the terms are not limited within this relation, such that the other, despite the...