What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer

subject must be like for ethics to be possible.1On this understanding the core argument of the essay is stated near its end when Levinas explains that ‘the passage of the identical to th

11 What is the question to which

‘substitution’ is the answer?

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The main text for addressing the concept of ‘substitution’ is Levinas’s essay of the same name The essay exists in two versions The first version was delivered as a lecture in Brussels in November 1967 and

was revised for publication in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain in

the following year (bpw79–95) Although the essay was published on its own, as a lecture it had been preceded the day before by a reading

of ‘Proximity’, the contents of which are familiar from the text of

‘Language and Proximity’ (cp109–26) The second and better known version of ‘Substitution’ was published in 1974 as the central chapter

of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (ob99–129) I shall focus

on the first version of ‘Substitution’ in the conviction that Levinas’s train of thought is more readily identified in his initial formulation

of it, referencing the second version only when it departs from the first in some significant way

Just as the chapter, ‘Substitution’, is, as Levinas himself insists,

the centrepiece of Otherwise than Being (ob xli), so the notion of

‘substitution’ is the core concept of that book, and yet it remains enigmatic There is not even a consensus about what the question is

to which substitution is supposed to be the answer Only when this

is established will it be possible to address with any confidence the questions scholars tend to debate, such as the extent to which the concept of substitution represents a departure from the philosophy of

Totality and Infinityand the degree to which it should be understood

as a response to Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’

The initial hypothesis to be examined is that Levinas introduces the concept of substitution to address the question of what the

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subject must be like for ethics to be possible.1On this understanding the core argument of the essay is stated near its end when Levinas explains that ‘the passage of the identical to the other in substitu-tion makes possible sacrifice’ (bpw90) The same claim is refor-mulated a little later as follows: ‘It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity in the world – even the little there is, even the simple “after you sir” ’ (bpw 91) This suggests that Levinas is asking what underlies that behaviour which is sometimes called superogatory, gratuitous or, as

he prefers to say, ethical His answer is that at the heart of subjectiv-ity is not a ‘for itself’, but what he calls ‘the one-for-the-other’ This

is his working definition of substitution, and when Levinas explains substitution as ‘the one-for-the-other’ he not only posits an alterity

at the heart of subjectivity, but gives it an ethical sense Levinas is

not preaching He is not saying that one should sacrifice oneself He

merely wants to account for its possibility

Although there is some doubt as to whether this exhausts the pos-itive doctrine of ‘Substitution’, Levinas clearly identifies the rival accounts that he targets in the essay There are at least three of them The first is a form of egoism:

All the transfers of sentiment which theorists of original war and egoism use

to explain the birth of generosity (it isn’t clear, however, that there was war

at the beginning; before wars there were altars) could not take root in the ego were it not, in its entire being, or rather its entire nonbeing, subjected not

to a category, as in the case of matter, but to an unlimited accusative, that

is to say, persecution, self, hostage, already substituted for others [bpw 91]

Levinas obviously has Thomas Hobbes in mind, and this is in fact only one moment in an ongoing polemic against Hobbes (e.g

en 100–1), although Levinas never engages with Hobbes textually Levinas is strongly committed to the claim that egoism cannot give birth to generosity, but that, by contrast, egoism arises from ‘an intrigue other than egoism’ (bpw 88) If egoism is true, then sacri-fice would be impossible, except perhaps under extreme conditions

of self-deception Levinas moves beyond egoism but without having recourse to altruism (ob117)

As almost always in Levinas, Heidegger is also a target of his polemics For Levinas, sacrifice is not possible if the human subject

is understood as concerned for its own existence, as Heideggerian

Dasein is on Levinas’s interpretation.2Levinas’s third target is the hypothesis that the condition of the possibility of sacrifice lies in freedom He rejects the claim that it is because the ego is a free consciousness, capable of sympathy and compassion, that it can take responsibility for the sufferings of the world The experience

of responsibility is not the experience of a free choice, but rather

‘the impossibility of evading the neighbor’s call’ (bpw 95) Some

of the claims Levinas opposes echo theses of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and Sartre is named in ‘Substitution’, as is Hegel, who here again attracts Levinas’s critical attention (bpw84)

‘Substitution’, as Levinas understands it, cannot be accounted for by the Western philosophical tradition To the extent that that tradition has largely restricted its purview to whatever is accessi-ble to consciousness, a radical challenge to the subject is excluded

by it from the outset Communication with the other is transcen-dence only in so far as the sovereignty of consciousness is displaced (bpw92) In so far as whatever appears to consciousness is a function

of the structures of subjectivity, as in Kant’s schematism, there are

no radical surprises in store for the subject The self-sufficiency of the subject, its self-satisfaction, is secure because this is a subject who cannot be challenged from the outside The possession of

self-consciousness rules as an arche and is not submitted to the other’s challenge as described in Totality and Infinity It was already clear from Totality and Infinity that the relation with the stranger was not

conducted through a representation of the other, but in ‘Substitution’ Levinas radicalizes this account by insisting that one does not know from whom the summons comes This enables Levinas to accom-modate better his hyperbolic notion of responsibility that includes those we do not even know and with whom we cannot therefore have contracted But, more importantly in the immediate context, it takes responsibility out of the realm of consciousness

This helps to explain why Levinas believes that it is necessary to depart from the postulates of ontological thinking in order to think

‘the in itself of persecuted subjectivity’ (bpw89) This approach is not motivated by a dogmatic rejection of the Western philosophical tradition, still less a fascination for new modes of thinking Levinas’s strategy is philosophically motivated To breakfrom traditional on-tology Levinas speaks of the creature and creation rather than of

being These terms were already introduced in Totality and Infinity,

but he now emphasizes their role in the analysis Levinas’s previous hesitation about their significance seems to have arisen from his concern to protect his philosophy from being understood simply as Jewish philosophy, largely because he seems to have feared that that would have been a way of dismissing it His greater confidence on this score is indicated by his comment in 1974: ‘It is not here a ques-tion of justifying the theological context of ontological thought, for the word creation designates a signification older than the context woven about this name’ (ob113) And it should not go unnoticed that the notion of substitution was already introduced by Levinas into his confessional writings in a lecture he delivered in 1964, three years before it found its way into his philosophical writings (ntr49).3

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Unlike much contemporary writing on ethics, Levinas does not as-sume or even expect rationality and morality to be in agreement Nor does he conceive his project as an attempt to elucidate the way

we actually thinkabout morality Indeed, the good conscience that arises from satisfying the often very restricted demands imposed by conventional morality is one of his central targets Levinas’s radical departure from traditional ethics is signalled by the claim added to the 1974 version, ‘The ethical situation of responsibility is not com-prehensible on the basis of ethics’ (ob120) Although he never says

so in exactly these terms, Levinas suspects that rationality, as ordi-narily conceived, serves to tame or domesticate morality To release

a more demanding sense of ethics, Levinas questions the inherited sense of rationality

Levinas is well aware of how radical his claims are and the bur-den they place on him as he tries to articulate them They not only lead him to the difficult thought of substitution, but in preparation for introducing this thought he believes himself compelled to aban-don certain theses central to the Western philosophical tradition as

he understands it He identifies one of them when he says that the reduction of subjectivity to consciousness ‘dominates philosophical thought’ (bpw83) Levinas announces that, according to the Western tradition, ‘all spirituality is consciousness, the thematic exposition

of Being, that is to say, knowledge’ (bpw 80) The initial taskthat Levinas sets himself in ‘Substitution’ is to provide an account of

subjectivity that runs counter to that offered by those representatives

of the Western philosophical tradition according to which the pri-mary relation to beings takes place in knowledge This leads Levinas

to entertain the possibility of a relation ‘with what cannot be iden-tified in the kerygmatic logos’ (bpw80), thereby setting himself on

a difficult path

As I stated earlier, Levinas had prepared the audience of his lec-ture on ‘Substitution’ in Brussels by giving an account of proximity

in ‘Language and Proximity’ When at the outset of ‘Substitution’ Levinas interprets language not in terms of the communication of information, but as contact or proximity (bpw80), he is rehearsing one of the claims of the earlier piece (cp115) It leads directly to Levinas’s now familiar distinction between the saying and the said, which is intended not only as a theory of language, but also as a guide to how he himself should be read, albeit on certain interpre-tations of the distinction this threatens to diminish the content of his thought in a way that makes it virtually irrelevant what is said

by the saying In any event, the account of language presupposed by

‘Substitution’ makes of it an essay that self-consciously resists any attempt to reduce it to a thematic analysis This raises questions as to what it means to attempt to elucidate his text as I am attempting to

do here.4Levinas seems to have foreseen this problem and bypassed

it at the outset The complexity of his strategies, in so far as they can even be identified, are such that one is in no danger of reducing the essay to a theme It is not only subjectivity as such that cannot be pinned down or identified, but also Levinas himself And when he says that proximity is a relationship that frustrates any schematism, the reader shares in the frustration (bpw80) There are times when one wonders if the question to which ‘Substitution’ is the answer is not ‘what is the most obscure philosophical concept of the twentieth century?’ The difficulty is that Levinas nowhere clearly sets out the rules under which his exposition is to be judged The status of his discourse is unclear However, some indications emerge during the course of the investigation as Levinas expresses his own concerns about the direction it is taking

Levinas’s text is marked by an anxiety that arises from the diffi-culty of being faithful to the an-archy of passivity (bpw89) The term

‘an-archy’ in this context signals that Levinas is not attempting to in-troduce a new principle or foundation But his deeper concern is that

passivity is constantly threatened by the possibility of an activity, a freedom, being posited behind this passivity (bpw89) This anxiety motivates some of the heavy rewriting that Levinas undertakes be-tween the two versions of the essay, but the anxiety remains (ob113) Indeed, it is extended to embrace the question of whether he had not,

in his presentation of persecuted subjectivity, succumbed to the pos-tulates of ontological thought more generally and in particular the sway of eternal self-presence and of self-coincidence (ob 113–14)

At the basis of responsibility Levinas locates the passivity of the hostage, and not the freedom of an ego that can find in its actions a source of pride

The ‘for’ of ‘one-for-the-other’ of substitution signals a surplus of responsibility that extends even to those one does not know, includ-ing people of the past and the future Substitution is not the psy-chological event of pity or compassion, but a putting oneself in the place of the other by taking responsibility for their responsibilities Because substitution is my responsibility for everyone else, includ-ing their responsibility, the relation is asymmetrical: ‘No one can substitute himself for me, who substitutes myself for all’ (ob 136) Hence the trope of the-one-for-the-other is contradictory (ob 100)

My responsibility for the responsibility of the other constitutes that

‘one degree of responsibility more’ (bpw91), a ‘surplus of responsibil-ity’ (ob100) Against the traditional notion of responsibility Levinas can claim that I am for the other without having chosen or acted:

‘Without ever having done anything, I have always been under accu-sation: I am persecuted’ (bpw89) Levinas likes to quote Dostoevsky’s account of the asymmetry of guilt and responsibility: ‘every one of

us is guilty before all, for everyone and everything, and I more than others’ (see bpw102 and 144) Just as Sartre argues that either one

is totally free or one is not free at all, so Levinas argues that either one is responsible for everything or one has refused responsibility This is how Levinas answers those who say that to be responsible for everything is to be responsible for nothing

In ‘Substitution’ Levinas focuses on sacrifice, but the limit-case is being accused of and responsible for what others do at the concrete level, even to the point of being responsible for the very persecu-tion that one undergoes (bpw88) What is this but neurosis, mania, obsession? Far from challenging this potential criticism, Levinas ac-cepts its terms even before it has been posed A subject obsessed with

the other is incapable of indifference One should not suppose that this analysis shifts the blame for violence and murder to the victim, because that would be to confuse Levinas’s discussion of ethical re-sponsibility for the legal form of rere-sponsibility that Western ethics tends to focus on The question is not who should be blamed, but

‘what am I to do?’ (bpw 168) To accept responsibility for the suf-fering undergone is to be challenged to act, but this action does not have its seat in the spontaneity of a willing subject conceived in ar-tificial isolation The gift is a good example: the other can be said to dispossess me on occasion so that giving is not an act, but an

ethi-cal event whereby I lose my sense of mine in the face of the other.5 Levinas thus introduces an account of how ethical action arises in the extreme passivity of obsession The relation to the other is now

a bond rather than a form of separation, as it was in Totality and Infinity Whereas the structure of desire, which dominates Totality and Infinity but not Otherwise than Being (cf. ob 88), is that of exteriority, obsession is inscribed in consciousness ‘as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium, undoing thematization,

elud-ing principle, origin, and will’ (ob81) Obsession is a persecution that reveals the passivity of a subject already in question (bpw82)

‘Obsession’ is not the only word that undergoes a transformation as

it enters into Levinas’s lexicon Equally striking is his use of the term

‘persecution’ Levinas introduces it by equating it with obsession He then explains: ‘Here persecution does not amount to consciousness gone mad; it designates the manner in which the Ego is affected and a defection from consciousness’ (bpw81) The denial seems to suggest that Levinas is trying to distance himself from the idea of a persecu-tion complex, just as he does not want his use of the term ‘obsession’

to be understood psychoanalytically Nevertheless, the fact that he invokes these connotations, albeit to warn against them, is evi-dence that he is fully aware of the danger of these terms and is willing

to take the risk In the context of the opening pages of the essay the terms ‘obsession’ and ‘persecution’ seem arbitrary Only retrospec-tively, when the argument is complete, is it apparent that the politi-cal sense of ‘persecution’ in all its concreteness is crucial to Levinas

At the outset, all that is clear is that Levinas introduces these terms

to assist him in establishing the terms ‘passivity’ and ‘passion’ at the heart of the analysis (bpw 82) This enables him to establish a cer-tain distance from the conventional analysis of consciousness as the

site of intentionality and of freedom Levinas also uses these terms to bring into question the traditional assumption that the ego coincides with itself or is equal with itself (bpw80, 82, 90)

The one who bears the suffering of others and responds to it, no longer has the appearance of a free being but of one who is over-whelmed So when Levinas counters the hypothesis of a free ego de-ciding in favour of solidarity for others, he responds: ‘At least it will

be recognized that this freedom has not time to assume this urgent weight and that, consequently, it appears collapsed and defeated under its suffering’ (bpw95) However, such a claim, like many others

in the essay, makes it seem that Levinas is constructing his argu-ment, not as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental investigation, but as a description of experience But if this is what he is doing, philosophical opponents might appropriately respond by offering alternative descriptions It is Levinas’s attempt to negotiate this dilemma that accounts for much of the complexity of ‘Substitution’ Before showing how he addresses it, it is necessary to explore another theme of the essay

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Although toward the end of the essay Levinas addresses the ques-tion of the possibility of sacrifice, at the beginning of ‘Substituques-tion’ the dominant philosophical problem is that of identity The theory that the identity of the I is reducible to a ‘turning back’ (bpw84) of essence upon itself is put in question This conception, identified with both Hegel and Sartre, presents the sovereignty or imperialism

of the oneself as an abstraction Consciousness must lose itself so

as to find itself (bpw85) and it finds itself in the concrete process of truth That is to say, it finds itself in the return to self that is accom-plished across time, through the ideality of the logos (bpw84) or in the project (bpw82)

By contrast with the tradition as he understands it, Levinas locates

an identity beyond or behind distinguishing characteristics Unlike consciousness which loses itself to find itself, the Levinasian self is unable to take a distance from itself (bpw86) It is unable to depart from itself so as to return, once having recognized itself in its past (bpw 89) Traditional theories of identity allow for the individual

to become a subject of thematization in language Levinas does not

challenge the conventional accounts of identity directly, so much as undercut them He proposes an account of what he calls the identity

of ipseity or singularity that differs from the identity of identifica-tion The identity of identification, as described by Hegel, involves a return to self, but in the identity of ipseity there is no separation from out of which a unity can be established, except as a unity without rest or peace (bpw84–5) Levinas gives the name recurrence to this structure Recurrence ‘breaks open the limits of identity’ (bpw 89)

by being free of duality and Heideggerian ecstasis Recurrence is the

simple identity of the reflexive pronoun, itself, free of a system of references (bpw88) Although the oneself or rather the me (the dis-tinction, although important, cannot be rehearsed here)6is ‘in itself’,

it is not ‘in itself’ like matter, of which it can be said that it is what it

is (bpw86) The me is in itself ‘like one is in one’s skin’ – cramped, ill

at ease (bpw86) The self is the body but not conceived biologically (bpw87) It is exposure (bpw89)

The identity of singularity is not conferred by a proper name It is nameless, identifiable only by a personal pronoun (bpw85) Unut-terable, it is nevertheless said by Levinas to be ‘shameful and hence unjustifiable’ (bpw85) These are crucial terms for Levinas because they marka change of register as he passes from formal description to

concretion, which is here, as in Totality and Infinity, ethical In other

words, the formal ontological analysis becomes ethical by virtue of the passage to concreteness (cf.bpw90) Levinas not only wants to insist that the identity of singularity, the recurrence of ipseity, is the condition of the identity of identification as it takes place in the re-turn to self (bpw85 and 87) He also insists that it is the condition

of sacrifice, and this by virtue of its passivity, its susceptibility, its exposure to wounding and outrage (bpw 86) Unable to take a dis-tance from itself (bpw86) or slip away, the self is responsible prior to any commitment (bpw87) I am radically responsible for the other prior to any contract, prior to having chosen or acted, indeed prior

to my taking up a subject position in relation to an other In Other-wise than Being the responsibility inherent in subjectivity is prior

to my encounter with an other, whereas Totality and Infinity had

located the possibility of ethics in the concrete encounter that re-alized the formal structure of transcendence Levinas clarifies this new conception of a responsibility older than interior identification

in an essay first published in 1970 under the title ‘Sans identit ´e’ Here Levinas explains that if there is a responsibility from which

no one can release me, the human being must be ‘without identity’:

‘a uniqueness without interiority, me without rest in itself, hostage

of all, turned away from itself in each movement of its return to itself’ Responsible for all, I must substitute for all, substituting for everyone by virtue of a certain ‘non-interchange-ability’ (cp150) Levinas’s subversion of traditional theories of identity is apparent

in his adoption of Rimbaud’s phrase, ‘Je est un autre’.7This formu-lation, for all its obscurity, avoids the difficulties that arise if the same and the other are understood as ontological categories Here the subject is not itself but other, to the point of standing in place

of the other, of being substituted for the other Like the idea of prox-imity that also comes to prominence at this time, substitution as the one for the other runs counter at very least to the rhetoric of

alterity that pervades Totality and Infinity, although the language of

exteriority is retained (bpw80–1) In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ Der-rida had problematized Levinas’s notion of alterity by confronting it

with an argument that he drew from Plato’s Sophist He appeals to

the full force of the Western tradition to say that the other is other only as other than myself The other cannot be absolved of a rela-tion to an ego from which it is other; it cannot be absolutely other.8 Rimbaud’s phrase serves Levinas as a response With it Levinas rad-ically transforms the classic opposition of the same and the other and thus the language within which his own thought is framed To

be sure, Levinas does not underwrite Rimbaud’s phrase as the latter meant it Indeed it could have been of that phrase that Levinas writes

in Totality and Infinity:

The alterity of the I that takes itself for another may strike the imagination

of the poet precisely because it is but the play of the same: the negation

of the I by the self is precisely one of the modes of identification of the I [ti 37]

That is to say, Levinas in Totality and Infinity can be understood as rejecting the phrase that becomes central to Otherwise than Being,

but in fact he only rejects it in the sense Rimbaud meant it and not

in the sense that it comes to be given in the latter text Levinas em-phasizes that by ‘I is an other’ Rimbaud may have meant alienation (bpw92) or, as he says in ‘Sans identit ´e’, ‘alteration, alienation, be-trayal of oneself, foreignness with regard to oneself and subjection

to this foreigner’ (cp 145), but Levinas understands it to mean ‘a subjectivity incapable of shutting itself up’ (cp151)