Levinas conceives of subjectivity as something that is constituted through the Other, or the other person. But this isn’t the Hegelian sense of requiring an other person for self-recognition; coming to recognize and know yourself in and through the eyes of the other. Could you explain what this sense in which the subject comes to be a subject through the other in Levinas’ thought is? Is the experience of guilt a part of this process?

AD: When you first encounter Levinas’ work what you encounter is the capitalized Other and it’s terrifying! At least it’s one way to read Levinas and certainly in some sense also the dominant way to read him. But I find that profoundly unappealing. Firstly, in a sense I don’t really know what it means. Secondly, I can’t connect it to any concrete experience. To come back to the earliest phenomenological descriptions, I just don’t see it as having the same force. Relationships aren’t always ones of awe, which they tend to be presented as in the quasi-divine descriptions that you hear from readers of Levinas.

SC: There is a part of Levinas that’s never really emphasised because people stick to the headline, which goes: ‘ethics is a relationship to the other’. But then the question is: ‘who’s the other?’. As Alexis says, the Other quickly begins to look like God, even if God is shown with a human face. What people leave out is that Levinas’ work is a savage critique of intersubjectivity in its Husserlian, Hegelian and Heideggerian modes: I do not need the other to be myself. This is what he argues – or let’s say describes – at length in section two of Totality and Infinity. The ego is an ego, which constitutes itself in atheist separation. Levinas argues that it constitutes itself ‘alimentally’ through food, through good soup, the elements, the dwelling and all these stages. He very carefully lays out a kind of genetic phenomenological structure of different elements in the structure of selfhood. It’s that self, which doesn’t need the Other, that is called into question by the presence of the Other. That’s the thought in Levinas, whereas the Hegelian thought is that of self-recognition in absolute otherness. It’s the idea that, in order to be a subject at the level of spirit, you need recognition from the Other. But Levinas is trying to think the subject without recognition. It’s an idea of subjectivity which is almost monadic in a phenomenological way. But it’s that subject which can be called into question by the Other and this calling into question is not nice.

AD: It’s violent.

SC: But it doesn’t induce guilt in me; that would be Heidegger. Guilt would then be an experience of ontological indebtedness, which I can take over. Levinas is a thinker of shame, but not a thinker of guilt. Shame is phenomenologically different from guilt. If guilt is the interior affect that accompanies my sense of lacking, my sense of not making up a whole, then shame is what comes over me externally. Shame is, as it were, on the surface of the skin. Obviously the context for that is biblical, as shame is something, which comes from the outside and which I feel in relation to the way in which my body is seen simply as a body. So Levinas is a thinker of shame, like many others, such as Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity. Most of our discussions in moral philosophy turn on questions of guilt, whereas for Levinas it is about shame.

“Levinas is a thinker of shame. Shame is, as it were, on the surface of the skin. Shame is something, which comes from the outside and which I feel in relation to the way in which my body is seen simply as a body.”

On Levinas’ chronology of what we are as subjects we begin as an ego, which is self-reliant. As you say, it doesn’t require the Other in order to be at home with the world, to engage with the exterior world and enjoy itself. But when the Other comes along and calls me into question it is an ethical experience. What happens then? Would the Other be constituting who I am permanently after that initial encounter?

SC: I’ve developed a very idiosyncratic reading of Levinas over the years, in order to fill in the gaps within his work, so I’m not sure how much I can speak for him. The way I see it is that my subjectivity is violently threatened by the Other. But that’s not a permanent state, as it is something that goes away; I can go back and watch Netflix and go to sleep or listen to music and go to sleep or just stay asleep forever! In this case the other wouldn’t bother me at all. I can be comfortable in my skin, walking through the street, but then something happens, which calls me into question again, a kind of address. But the address isn’t permanent, you remember it, but you desperately want to forget it and through a variety of means we can.

The other thing is that the ultimate structure of the subject that’s given to us in Totality and Infinity is the structure of fecundity, which is about the relationship to the child and which passes through Eros or desire. Again, it isn’t a guarantee, but the only way in which a Heideggerian view can be superseded by Levinas, is by describing a future form of subjectivity that is not the future of the individual self. The answer he gives is that it’s a future subjectivity, which is not my future, but the future of the child. If you reverse that thought, it also means that we, by definition, are children too. So that subjective, atheist ego that we are, is also something which is defined genetically by layers of dependence upon the past, in this case our fathers. So I guess what Levinas is trying to do is to come up with a phenomenological picture, which relates the self to an experience of the past and one of the future which lies outside its control. I don’t find that an entirely hopeful thought, but still an interesting line of thought to develop.

AD: This is where desire becomes so important in the sense of the address, a very immediate present form of that address. Presumably what’s at stake in something, such as an erotic relationship, is precisely the confrontation with the Other, how it fails and how it succeeds. Where Levinas becomes particularly interesting to me is precisely in that moment and that opening.

SC: This also ties in with the question of the male signature of Levinas.

What do you make of the idea that Levinas’ work has an inextricably male signature? What implications, if any, can his work have for someone with a non-male sexuality? It seems quite problematic to me.

AD: The history of philosophy is, by and large, a history of male signatures. To call it one sided doesn’t really capture why that’s so much of a problem. In the context of Levinas’ thought, it’s right to say that his work has a male signature. However, I also think it’s right in broader terms, given that philosophy as a whole has a signature, which you can look at through the question of gender. But you could also think about it through other kinds of questions, such as race.

Regarding the second part of your question, I’d like to pick up on the phrase ‘non-male sexuality’. Presumably what you mean by that is feminine sexuality or anything other than hetero-normative male sexuality, which opens up the question of what this prefix “non-” is signifying. Phrased this way, I don’t think it’s an interesting question! However, it’s the right question, given the sort of materials and history that we have to work with. We don’t really understand what “non-male” forms of sexuality could even begin to look like, so we attach the ‘non-’ to it in a model of privation. This, however, already assumes that anything that isn’t male suffers a lack and so becomes something of a locus of ambiguity. Given the misogyny that marks the history of philosophy, of culture, and so on, the model of female or “non-male” sexuality goes no further than castration. I see philosophy as in particularly rough shape here; this is why people like Lacan, Porete, Carson and Irigaray, show up at the end of The Problem with Levinas. But the problem runs much deeper than simply a set of texts.