Sincerity and the end of theodicy - three remarks on Levinas and Kant

If we know how Levinas must react to that de-scription, bemoaning the fact that the object of respect remains themoral law, the universality of which tells against the asymmetry of the e

8 Sincerity and the end

of theodicy: three remarks

SINCERE [ ad L sincer-us clean, pure, sound, etc.

Cf Fr sinc `ere (1549) The first syllable may be the same

as sim- in simplex: see SIMPLE a There is no probability

in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’.]

[Oxford English Dictionary]

In Difficult Freedom and elsewhere, Levinas writes of the radically

anachronistic nature of Judaism He sees it as simultaneously theyouthfulness that, attentive to everything, would change everythingand the senescence that, having seen everything, would seekonly

to return to the origin of everything Its difficult, if not impossible,relation to the present is bound up with its refusal of the ‘modernist’imperative that one ‘desire to conform to one’s time’ Simultaneouslyyouthful and aged, engaged (committed) and disengaged, such would

be the figure of the prophet: ‘the most deeply committed (engag ´e)

man, one who can never be silent, is also the most separate, theone least capable of becoming an institution Only the false prophethas an official function’ (df212) Levinas’s religious (Talmudic) writ-ings are always concerned with illustrating, rehearsing and reflectingupon this anachronistic wisdom, finding both in the Biblical expres-sion of monotheism and in its endless rabbinical revisions and inter-pretations a wisdom that is absolutely irreplaceable Irreplaceable,

above all, by philosophy; but perhaps, above all, not just by any losophy, or, rather, not by philosophy under just any name:

phi-(T)his essential content, which history cannot touch, cannot be learned like

a catechism or summarized like a credo Nor is it restricted to the negativeand formal statement of a categorical imperative It cannot be replaced by

Kantianism (kantisme) [df 213]

161

Would Kantianism not be a synonym for modernism? And Kant, theleast anachronistic of philosophers, the one most concerned that phi-losophy, in a newly won official capacity, speakto and for its owntime, its present? A bookcould be written on the uses of this word

kantismein Levinas’s work But it is not overly disingenuous to pose that one of the differences between the religious and the philo-sophical writings lies in the fact that the former address a scriptural

pro-content that cannot be replaced by this other -ism and so remain,

as do the religious writings themselves, untroubled by it, whereasthe latter in part describe what must always be distinguished fromKantianism and what sometimes perhaps, along with the philosoph-ical writings themselves, cannot avoid resembling or repeating it Ifthere is a sense in which the sentence ‘Judaism cannot be replaced

by Kantianism’ can be taken as obviously true and as asserting thesort of thing Levinas and Levinasians might sometimes want to say,there is surely also a sense in which the sentence itself need never

be said or written In the religious writings, it is unnecessary or perfluous; in the philosophical writings, it is irrelevant, at least tothe extent that the relation to Kant and Kantianism staged in and

su-by Levinas’s phenomenological project, especially as we find it in

Otherwise than Being, can never arrive at such an unequivocal ment of the ‘truth’ or ‘place’ of Kantianism Indeed, were it to do sothen arguably that project would cease to be a philosophical one atall Whatever else it names or entails, Levinas’s thought cannot beconstrued as a prophetic indictment of Kantianism.1

state-the word kantisme

The topic is irresistible How can the Levinasian call for ‘ethics asfirst philosophy’ fail to bring to mind that earlier insistence on theprimacy of practical reason which crucially centred around the de-scription of reason’s being affected by the moral law, laid low byits own imperative? If we know how Levinas must react to that de-scription, bemoaning the fact that the object of respect remains themoral law, the universality of which tells against the asymmetry

of the ethical relation where it would have to be a matter of my spect for the other, might it none the less not be a matter of retrievingsomething from this description? Apparently not Of course, it all de-pends on how and where you begin, and on the context in which you

re-first encounter the word (kantisme) But if Levinas’s philosophical

writings would give a phenomenological exposition of the nistic life affirmed in the religious writings, if this would be their

anachro-inspiration, it is hardly surprising if the negative tone is dominant In

Otherwise than Being, Levinas pursues his exposition of ity He likens it to ‘a cellular irritability’ and describes it, crucially,

responsibil-as ‘the impossibility of being silent, the scandal of sincerity sibilit ´e de se taire, scandale de la sinc ´erit ´e]’ (ob143) Responsibility,

[impos-always asymmetrically and sincerely for the other, belongs to the

analysis of an affectivity that contrasts sharply and deliberately withthat of respect

Levinas does not need to dispute the fact that one has to learn how

to be sincere just as one has to learn how to lie and how to tell thetruth As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘a child has much to learn before it canpretend (A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can it be sincere

[aufrichtig].)’2But Levinas does, it seems, want to suggest that beingsincere is not simply one type of linguistic behaviour among myriadothers The uttered (said) ‘Yes’ and ‘Hello’, once learnt, do not bringaffirming and greeting into the language, nor do they only denotemastery of the language games of affirming and greeting, therebyadding to the stockof games at the speaker’s disposal Rather, inLevinas’s hands, they tell us about all language, any language gamewhatsoever They provide (phenomenological) insight into what it is

for there to be any said at all ‘Sincerity’ is, perhaps, Levinas’s last

word on what he calls the saying of the said, the saying of all the –

de jure and de facto – systematizable, theorizable and describable

saids It permits us to speakof the sincerity of the always unsaid

‘yes’ or ‘hello’ presupposed in everything that is said The subject

thought in relation to the saying, and exposed as this relation,

can-not avoid a sincerity that makes of every said, however violent orthoughtless, a bearer of the trace of its saying, a sign of the giving ofsigns When I begin to speak, in addition to everything that is said,

my words attest to a relation between language and me that is alwaysalready underway and that makes of me as a speaking subject a term

in a fundamentally asymmetrical relation Note that Levinas doesnot want to move from a theory of communication, intersubjectivity

and the speaking subject to a more primordial thought of language as language, a language that somehow is or speaks before man, before

the subject Instead of losing the subject in and to language, Levinas’s

account of subjectivity in Otherwise than Being makes of language itself something always already for the other His account attempts

to show that, however else it might be analysed and studied, language

is first destined to this drama, this intrigue To this end, Otherwise

than Being proposes two alterations: first, the language that weunderstand as a system of signs is derived from the thought of analready spoken language (Wittgenstein might agree with this anti-theoretical or pre-theoretical grounding of systematicity); secondly,the philosophical thematizing of signification is derived from a

thought of signification in its signifiance, its signifyingness –

otherwise said, its sincerity

My words always indicate both that I am speaking and that there ismore to this ‘I’ than a traditional theory of language and subjectivitycan disclose or, better, expose This exposed subject of saying whocan never keep silent is also to be thought as ‘separation’ This term

is deliberately and necessarily opposed to a Kantian conception ofautonomy What prevents the institutionalization of this Levinasianresponsibility both from being raised to a level where it is distributedacross all subjects and from being referred to the allocation (the equal

or fair allocation) of duties, rights and values, derives from an tal passivity And although this passivity grants the subject an originoutside the causal mechanisms of nature and so, in some degree,

elemen-a freedom from thelemen-at celemen-auselemen-ality, it celemen-an never be formulelemen-ated in quitethis fashion Its subjecthood is not a function of its freedom It doesnot stand apart from the sensible and sensibility in the manner ofKant’s subject The passivity of responsibility also implies that thatother origin can never be known as such Moral self-knowledge andknowledge of my origin as a free subjectivity are not prerequisitesfor ethical life Neither my origin as a subject nor anything I think

I come to know about that origin can stand in my defence Theyprovide no grounds for excuse

One of the key subtexts of Otherwise than Being will thus be a

polemical engagement with Kant, a polemic that reachest its est judgement in the final chapter with the book’s last reference

harsh-to Kant and the claim that ‘Kantianism is the basis of philosophy[Le kantisme est la base de la philosophie] if philosophy is ontology’(ob 179) What is the context? Levinas asks whether there can be

a sense of openness that is not one of the disclosure of beings Herecalls Kant’s argument concerning the ideality of space and notes

that it would make space a non-concept and a non-entity Would

we not have here an exteriority, an outside, that prompts a verydifferent thinking about essence? No For Kant ‘space remains thecondition for the representation of beings’ It is thus one more way

in which essence continues to be determined as ‘presence, tion, and phenomenality’ and one more way in which thought isheld to such determinations From this Kantian non-entity (space)which serves solely as a condition for the possibility of objectivity,from this exemplary essentializing, Levinas infers that ‘one cannotconceive essence otherwise, one can conceive otherwise only thebeyond essence’ (ob 179) Levinas’s project, announced in the title

exhibi-of the bookwe are just finishing, is not and can never be Kant’s orKantian There is no way of getting from the Kantian reflection onthe subjectivity of space, and time, to a sense of the subject ‘outside’ontology Thus, Levinas writes, ‘Kantianism is the basis of philoso-phy, if philosophy is ontology.’

Recall that in the transcendental aesthetic of the First Critique,Kant’s isolating of sensibility and sensible intuition from pure intu-ition, and indeed, at this moment, pure intuition from the cognitiveactivity of the understanding, is achieved by way of a challenge tosubtract from the representation of a thing all the qualities or at-tributes to which the sensibility and the understanding, respectively,would relate it It is a challenge to thinkspacelessness, and the failure

to meet it requires that thought define itself differently in relation tothe irreducible remainder I cannot thinkspacelessness; my thoughtspatializes Interestingly the move is not dissimilar to that taken

by Levinas in Existence and Existents when he attempts to show

the impossibility of arriving at nothing or nothingness One runs up

against the impersonal il y a, existence without existents In each

in-stance, a methodological subtraction leads to a condition from out ofwhich a different account of subjectivity is to arise The difference isthat, in Kant’s case, ontology is strengthened, is made critically pos-sible; knowledge, drastically and critically limited, is neverthelessextended to knowledge of those drastic and critical limits, the condi-tions of the possibility of the knowledge and the representation of anybeing whatsoever In Levinas’s case, ontology, and especially a criti-cal ontology, falters Although replayed in its most convoluted ver-

sion in Otherwise than Being, it would be possible to show that the narrative of Existence and Existents still holds a certain sway: from

ontology to its faltering, and from its faltering to a thinking otherthan ontology, a thinking in which neither the being of the subjectnor the being of the other is a primary concern and in which the other

is never first encountered cognitively How, then, can it not be a ter of continuing to argue for its non-Kantian motivation and result?

mat-If Otherwise than Being closes with a criticism of the manner

in which space is still tied to essence in Kant, and since Kant, themain focus of the bookhas been on time and on the attempt toliberate time from essence To conceive the temporalizing of time

‘not as essence but as saying’ It is ‘the equivocation or enigma’ ofsaying that names the book’s central topic and contribution And,again, its exposition requires Kant and Kantianism to be kept at adistance ‘Subjectivity and Infinity’, the fifth chapter, continues todescribe a subject whose origin can in no way be bound to cognition.When Kant is invoked here it as the author of a thought which cancountenance no other origin In linking the subject with infinity,Levinas effectively unpacks the claim he will later make, ‘Since Kant,philosophy has been finitude without infinity’, (gdt 36) so as toinclude Kant The infinity we can hear in the crucially pre-Kantian

‘good beyond being’ and that is named in the crucially pre-Kantian

‘infinite’ of Descartes’s Third Meditation has, it seems, no echo inKantianism

‘Kantianism’ for Levinas also seems to denote a breakwith na¨ıvety,and so the beginning of a whole philosophical discourse of breaks,ruptures, ends and closures ‘Tout autrement’, Levinas’s essay onDerrida, begins by asking ‘May not Derrida’s work cut into the de-velopment of Western thinking with a line of demarcation similar

to that of Kantianism ? Are we again at the end of a naivety?’

(wo3) The end of a na¨ıvety also necessarily problematizes the ness of beginning, and Levinas has a fine ear for the way in whichphilosophers since Kant have laboured to show that their beginnings

busi-are anything other than na¨ıve In the ‘itinerary’ of Otherwise than

Being, Levinas appears to concede defeat He speaks, with Husserl,

of ‘every movement of thought involving a part of naivety’, (ob20)and the hint is that there might in fact be something misguidedabout these dreams of a unna¨ıve beginning Is it to be a question ofLevinas’s retrieving a pre-Kantian na¨ıvety, and a pre-Kantian honestyabout such a na¨ıvety, not for the sake of ontology but for the sake

of a subject whose na¨ıve ‘yes’ to submission and subjection must

always be pitted against the na¨ıveties and immediacies protected

in the methodologies (the ‘critical’ beginnings) of what remain sentially theoretical and ontological undertakings? It would not bedifficult to compile two vocabularies or trajectories, a Kantianismand a Levinasianism:

es-1 Kant: respect (for the moral law); freedom; spontaneity;autonomy;

2 Levinas: responsibility (for the other); sincerity; passivity;separation; heteronomy

From Kant to Derrida, we could follow the instituting and the calizing of a critical ontology of finitude and the gradual dissolution

radi-of subjectivity in an ever-renewed thought radi-of language The secondline would recall another subject and subjectivity It might be read

as a polemical retrieval of something pre-modern, anachronistic andna¨ıve, something that elsewhere will be given the religous, scripturaland historical status of the irreplaceable

But it all depends on how and where you begin, and on the context

in which you first encounter the word ‘Kantianism’ For we mighthave begun with the following passage and with this reference to anoutside we have apparently just seen being explicitly denied Kant:

If one had the right to retain one trait from a philosophical system and glect all the details of its architecture we would thinkhere of Kantianism,

ne-which finds a meaning to the human without measuring it by ontology andoutside of the question ‘What is there here ?’ that one would like to take to

be preliminary, outside of the immortality and death which ontologies run

up against The fact that immortality and theology could not determine thecategorical imperative signifies the novelty of the Copernican revolution: asense not measured by being or not being; being, on the contrary, is deter-mined from sense [Si on avait le droit de retenir d’un syst `eme philosophique

un trait en n ´egligeant tout le d ´etail de son architecture nous penserions

ici au Kantisme qui trouve un sens `a l’humain sans le mesurer par voudrait

pr ´ealable, en dehors de l’immortalit ´e et de la mort auxquelles achoppent lesontologies Le fait que l’immortalit ´e et la th ´eologie ne sauraient d ´eterminerl’imp ´eratif cat ´egorique, signifie la nouveaut ´e de la r ´evolution copernicienne:

le sens qui ne se mesure pas par l’ ˆetre ou le ne pas ˆetre, l’ ˆetre se d ´eterminant,

au contraire, `a partir du sens.] [ob 129]

Levinas cites this passage in full in the proceedings to the 1975–6 ture course on ‘Death and time’, where we are also told that although

lec-the First Critique presents a philosophy of finitude it acknowledges

a necessity to questions which require and promise another ophy One of those questions, for example, concerns hope: what am

philos-I entitled to hope for? A question in which Levinas hears a reference

to a beyond, a time after time, irreducible to an ecstatic ity despite Heidegger’s attempts so to reduce it (gdt61) And mightthis not be the crux of the matter, Kant bound to ontology by way

temporal-of his Heideggerian reading? Is it then that the unity temporal-of Kant’s ical project when construed in terms of a relation to finitude, i.e.when read from the standpoint of a fundamental ontology, will gen-erate a theoretical unity, the gathering of Kantian critical philosophyand of critique itself under the heading of theoretical philosophy? IsLevinas not inviting us to begin to find in Kant’s practical philosophyand in the announcement that the critical philosophy is not limited

crit-to the conditions of theoretical knowledge, something of a genuine

‘outside’?3 In ‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition’, describing anobedience and so an ethics prior to freedom, Levinas writes:

This obedience cannot be assimilated to the categorical imperative, where auniversal suddenly finds itself in a position to direct the will; it derives ratherfrom responsibility for one’s neighbour The relationship with the other

is placed right at the beginning! Moreover, it is towards a relationship ofthis kind that Kant hastens, when he formulates the second version of thecategorical imperative by a deduction – which may be valid or not – fromthe universality of the maxim [bv 146]

A Kant on the way to responsibility? Emboldened, now would be

the time to embarkon a search through Kant’s texts looking forsigns of ethical asymmetry One of the places that might usefully

be examined is the discussion, in The Metaphysics of Morals, of the

specific vices that result from a failure to fulfil the duties whichfollow from my respect for the moral law Granted that that re-spect, in its universality and its object, seems to remain immune to aLevinasian retrieval, the same is not so obviously the case with whatfollows Kant’s concern is with those vices deriving directly fromrespect They have no corresponding virtues; I must simply refrain

from them Kant distinguishes three vices: arrogance (der Hochmut), defamation (das Afterreden) and ridicule (die Verh ¨onung) In the sec-

ond and third of these, it is not primarily, if at all, a matter of lying

or slander, but rather of the intentional spreading of what reduces

the esteem in which another human being is held by right of ing human There are moral limits to the truths I am entitled totell about others In relation to the second, defamation, Kant speaks

be-of ‘a mania for spying on the morals be-of others (allotrio-episcopia)’

which is ‘already by itself an offensive inquisitiveness on the part

of anthropology’.4There is a sense of my being prevented from quiring into others in the way in which I am elsewhere obliged toenquire into myself Note that if there is something of an asymmetryunderway here, it is not produced logically; nor does it follow from

en-an empirical or psychological fact, i.e from my ability to examinemyself (to report on my beliefs, desires or whatever) in a way I cannotexamine others If there is asymmetry here, it is imposed morally.This, then, would be one such reading With a Levinasian eye onemight detect many others; and is it not such an eye and such a means

of re-encountering the history of philosophy that Levinas, on at leastone reading, might be said to provide?

Yet recall the passage: ‘If one had the right to retain one trait from

a philosophical system and neglect all the details of its ture we would thinkhere of Kantianism’, which is surely to beg

architec-the question of why one does not have such a right Would not architec-theretention involved in exercising it simply amount to a Levinasianretrieval of the trace or trait of the ethical relation, a moment when,against the dominance of its theoretical and thematizing manoeu-vres, ontology can be shown to be ethically oriented? Would ethics

as the sense or the saying of the ontological said not depend upon

such a selective re-reading? Surely such a re-reading or something tremely close to it is implicit in Levinas’s treatment of Descartes’snotion of the infinite and Plato’s notion of the good beyond being,

ex-to give the two best-known examples of the results of what hasbeen taken to be a Levinasian engagement with the philosophical

tradition Do not these other interpretations, with their references

to certain exceptional words and phrases, presuppose the very rightLevinas seems not to want to allow us in the case of Kant? What sort

of special case is Kant? There is a difficulty in understanding whyLevinas does not take one of two fairly clear alternatives: either, first,

to endorse (retrieve, retain) as another exceptional moment, thoseparts of the description that workdespite the universalizing and pre-scriptive genus implicit in ‘practical reason’ and in the categoricalstatus accorded the imperative; or, secondly, to argue that such an

endorsement cannot come about here at all Instead, as we have seen,Levinas concedes that there is something that would be retained, had

we the right to do so Perhaps an answer is actually given in the sage, in the slight awkwardness with which the trait, rather than thephilosophical system from which it would be retained, seems to be

pas-named kantisme, as though with Kant it could not be an exceptional

word or phrase which once isolated could be added to the list, if list

there is, but in some peculiar way the whole system, the -ism itself.

‘Kantisme is the basis of philosophy, if philosophy is ontology.’ And

if one could retain just one trait? Well, it would be kantisme.

theodicy and the end of theodicy

Levinas’s argument against theodicy follows from the description ofsuffering He does not begin with, and never really sees the needfor, an attackon the actual theoretical content of a theodicy Thedescription suffices, inviting us to infer the immorality of theodicyfrom its inability to address suffering as it is exposed in the descrip-tion Given what we have seen of Levinas’s response to Heidegger’sKant interpretation, it is interesting to realize just how the prioritygiven to a philosophical description has changed from the days whenLevinas was content to write to a consciously Heideggerian agenda

In 1930, we were instructed that

in order to go conclusively beyond naturalism and all its consequences, it isnot enough to appeal to descriptions which emphasize the particular charac-ter, irreducible to the naturalistic categories, of certain objects It is necessary

to dig deeper, down to the very meaning of the notion of being [tihp 18]

Later, we can say, it is the description of what in its ity always betrays the irrelevance of the question of being that, forLevinas, reawakens the ethical sense of ‘first philosophy’

irreducibil-More than anything else it is suffering that with its exemplaryphenomenology brings us straight to the heart of what we now take

to be Levinas’s own project For suffering to be thought or described

quasuffering it must be thought or described in its senselessness, aswhat everywhere and always resists being given a meaning or con-text There can be no thematizing of suffering; if there is or seems to

be then it is no longer suffering that is really being addressed or sidered but rather something which enables us to move away from

con-suffering The phenomenology Levinas insists upon here will onlyever permit the sense of suffering, the sense such a phenomenology

is to workwith, to lie in suffering’s excessive senselessness, in itscapacity to resist the thematic bestowing of a sense It is in this re-sistance, this undermining of the very act of sense bestowal, and so

in this checkto a whole phenomenology of thought based on the

essentially meaningful character of mental acts, that we begin to see the force and the necessity of the passivity that is to play such a key

role in Levinas’s work In my inability to give a meaning to ing, I suffer: I fall backupon a passivity always this side of an activesense-engendering life, a life from which, in so far as I would attend to

suffer-suffering qua suffer-suffering, I can gain or claim no support It is the scene,

too, of a radical asymmetry: my suffering here is always referred tothe suffering of the other, a suffering whose senselessness provokes

my suffering As Levinas puts it in Otherwise than Being, ‘The vortex

[Le tourbillon] – suffering of the other, my pity for his suffering, hispain over my pity, my pain over his pain, etc – stops at me The I iswhat involves one more movement in this iteration’ (ob196, n 21).Unlike the Kantian transcendental ‘I think’ that uniquely effects themove away from the recursivity of the empirical ‘I think’, the regress

of empirical reflection, Levinas’s I does not ‘think’: it suffers; it is sessed; it is nothing but ‘for the other’ And the descriptions served

ob-by each of these terms and constructions will endlessly exacerbateand underline the passivity and the asymmetry The I with whichthe phenomenology of suffering must begin is an I for whom theother’s suffering is unthinkable and unjustifiable Theodicy will be

the proper name of a philosophy that seeks to avoid this suffering,

the suffering of suffering, ‘the just suffering in me for the fiable suffering in the other’ (us159) Levinas, reluctant to endorse

unjusti-any discourse of ends or the end, will speakunapologetically of the

end of theodicy ‘For an ethical sensibility the justification of the

neighbour’s pain is the source of all immorality’ (us163)

Consider epistemological scepticism about another’s pain Herethere is, if you like, asymmetry, but it is theoretical I have to live,the sceptic concedes, as though untouched by my scepticism Butwhere must one start from in order to arrive at that question, inorder to arrive at that as a philosophical problem (How do I knowthe other is in pain ?)? For Levinas, it is not a matter of knowledge

or even of wondering whether or not it is a matter of knowledge, but

of being affected Levinas does not want to describe the world so thatthis epistemological asymmetry does not arise, in the manner, say, of

Heidegger’s description of being-in-the-world where Mitsein simply

is an existentiale, part of the structural unity of being-in-the-world.

Such a description loses asymmetry altogether, save unsurprisingly

in Dasein’s relation to what is most its own, its death Levinas wants

to describe the subject as a relation to the other in which this

ques-tion must not arise! It is to be a matter of refusal not refutaques-tion.

And Kant? Kant and theodicy? In so far as Kant belongs to a dition both epistemological and ontological, that either treats thesceptical question as legitimate or else loses it altogether in a moreoriginal ontology, and in so far as Kant’s subject can only be heldaccountable under certain knowable and reasonable conditions, theconclusion is straightforward But again, there are two passages andtwo stories The first, and seemingly most straightforward, from

tra-Otherwise than Being:

The unconditionality of this ‘yes’ (the naive ‘yes’ of submission) is not that

of an infantile spontaneity It is the very exposure to critique, the exposureprior to consent, more ancient than any naive spontaneity We have beenaccustomed to reason in the name of the freedom of the ego – as though

I had witnessed the creation of the world, and as though I could only havebeen in charge of a world that would have issued out of my free will Theseare the presumptions of philosophers, presumptions of idealists! Or evasions

of irresponsible ones That is what Scripture reproaches Job for He wouldhave known how to explain his miseries if they could have devolved fromhis faults! But he never wished evil! His false friends thinklike he does: in

a meaningful world one cannot be held to answer when one has not doneanything Job then must have forgotten his faults! But the subjectivity of asubject come late into a world that has not issued from his projects does notconsist in projecting or in treating this world as one’s project The ‘lateness’

is not insignificant [ob 122]

The two trajectories and vocabularies we outlined earlier can be seen

in operation throughout this passage There would be little difficulty

in marking a Levinasian na¨ıvety explicitly introduced in opposition

to a Kantian na¨ıvety (submission against spontaneity); an exposure tocritique that can never itself be the object or theme of critique, and so

an exposure or exposition that finds me (exposes me as) pre-criticallyanswerable for what exceeds the possible Everything falls into place.Levinas sides with scripture, with God (with His angry and silencing

‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ?’), and

against Job, his friends and any philosophy that would insist that inthe absence of meaning or justification I can be under no obligation.The critical and diagnostic response to suffering is always misplaced;

it is never to the suffering that one is so responding When Job speaks

of his suffering he speaks of it as though it could have been justifiedand understood had he only done something wrong, something todeserve it Job’s complaint concerns neither suffering as sufferingnor the idea of a meaning being given to suffering Its sole object isthe fact that there ought to be a meaning but, in this instance, inJob’s case, there is none The Levinasian alternative and challenge totheodicy can here be equated with and read alongside its alternativeand challenge to Kantianism The subject who would define itselfsolely by its own time and by the origin that ensures that that time

is the subject’s own will always detect in a certain lateness, a mate, logical and moral defence (I wasn’t here then: that was before

legiti-my time: I can only be held to account for what is of legiti-my time) To thisinsignificant lateness, to this lateness that the subject is justified ingiving no significance, a lateness that would secure the subject inits origin as a rational moral agent, Levinas opposes a paradoxicallysignificant lateness in which the subject is answerable for all it didnot know and did not do even when there was nothing it could knowand nothing it could do As with the first of the Kantianisms above,the picture seems clear But is it? Lookat what we have just written:

‘When Job speaks of his suffering ’ Is it not somewhat churlish to

criticize Job – after all he is suffering? His is not the just suffering

in the face of the unjustifiable suffering of the other, but the tifiable suffering itself On what grounds and by what right can wechallenge anything that the one (the other) who suffers says abouttheir suffering? It would, to say the least, be strange if Levinas weretaken as having provided such grounds and such a right Unjustifiablesurely means unjustifiable by me The onus is on me not to construct

unjus-a theodicy, not to themunjus-atize or theorize the other’s suffering Theremust be something wrong with my taking ‘unjustifiable’ as a means

of criticizing the one who is suffering from attempting to survivethat suffering by making sense of it The asymmetry must surelyalso extend at least this far There is perhaps a more general worryhere about whether and in what sense the suffering one (the other)can be said to speak Can the other have a theodicy? And when I do