Levi on Levinas and OOO

Here’s what he just posted:

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been surprised to discover that there’s a profound overlap between OOO and the ethical thought of Levinas. At its core, OOO is, I believe, an ontology of radical alterity. Every object is an absolute alterity with respect to every other object. This, I believe, is the key meaning of Harman’s concept of withdrawal and vicarious causation.”

In NBA basketball, they sometimes talk about players who are so underrated that they become overrated. BEN WALLACE was the example Bill Simmons liked to use, and Simmons was right. A few people started talking about what an underrated player Wallace was, and within a few years everyone was saying it, and so it got to the point that his skills were really overblown. This had consequences for my Chicago Bulls, who in 2006 overpaid for Wallace with a 4-year, $60 million deal that he was never really good enough to deserve. (And by the way, I was one of those who was fooled by this deal. I was one of those who still thought he was underrated; I should have listened to Simmons.)

But back to philosophy… Levinas is the opposite of the Ben Wallace phenomenon. Levinas is so constantly viewed as overrated that he is actually now badly underrated. The reason is simple: the people who “overrate” him do so for the wrong reasons, and as a result his true strengths are rarely talked about.

Think about it this way. You could make the case (I certainly would) that Husserl and Heidegger are two of the pivotal philosophers of the century, and you could also make the case that France has done more than Germany to further their insights. Levinas is a key player here. He was among the first in France to discover Husserl and “Frenchify” him a bit. He is also, for my money, the most interesting Heidegger interpreter. Better yet, he’s not just an interpreter, but takes Heidegger in a completely different direction. And he did this under extremely dramatic circumstances, refining his reading of Heidegger in a POW camp, even as his wife was being saved from deportation through the friendly efforts of (the incidentally very right-wing) Maurice Blanchot.

But back to the philosophy itself. I just want to add two corollaries to what Levi said.

Levi: “Every object is an absolute alterity with respect to every other object.”

Yes, I agree. But just to clarify, as I think Levi knows, Levinas doesn’t go that far. For Levinas, everything is an absolute alterity with respect to us.

[ADDENDUM: Sorry Levi, my brain completely malfunctioned and skipped a key sentence in your very first paragraph. Or maybe you added it after I made my post. Either way, I missed your saying this: “The difference here would be that where Levinas’ thought indexes the withdrawal of the Other to other humans and the divine, OOO indexes this infinite excess to all objects.” Exactly.]

A lot of times, people will dismiss the supposed novelty of OOO by saying things like: “this sounds just like the Kantian things-in-themselves,” or “Adorno already knew that there was something outside human access,” or “Derrida already knows that there is something outside the text.” But none of this does the job. It doesn’t do the job because it’s not enough to have a philosophy filled with dark residue for humans. Nor is it enough to think (as Levinas does, unfortunately) that the dark residue is infinity, or God, or something of that sort. If you read “De l’Existence à l’Existant,” despite the absolute brilliance of that piece, Levinas comes right out and says something very bad about metaphysics: being itself is a big lump (experienceable in insomnia rather than Angst, by the way) and human consciousness cuts it into pieces.

I took my big realist turn in 1997. But it was during spring 1994, while trying to write an article on that work by Levinas that never got finished, that I realized: “Hey, this doesn’t really work. Why should human consciousness have the unique ability to carve up a lump-world into sectors?” Sometimes when you have a doubt like that, it takes a few years to come to fruition in the form of a positive thesis. Lingis had warned me in 1991 that my M.A. paper on Heidegger/Levinas (which he otherwise liked very much) was too holistic. He wasn’t willing to buy my view at the time that the global tool-system is primary and the individual pieces secondary. Lingis was still thinking through that problem himself. He hadn’t yet written his brilliant Catholic Philosophical Quarterly piece on Levinas on substance, nor had he yet written The Imperative, which he would begin a few years afterward. But he was onto something with his objections. He sent a letter filled with counter-examples from his travels about how individual items exceed any system in which they are involved. (I still have it, of course; you’d have to be a fool to throw away a Lingis letter, since they are treasure chests of masterful prose.)

But if Levinas doesn’t show enough respect for the plurality of the world of otherness (at the end of the day, monotheism is simply a very big deal for him philosophically) he does have a magnificent sense of what I would call sensual objects. He gives beautiful descriptions of how bread, ciagrettes, cigarette lighters, cars, and cities are not just part of a system, but also termini that we expend our energy in taking seriously and living amongst. It really bothers me that he has been reduced to a two-dimensional theorist of the Other the Other the Other the Other the Other the Other the Other the Other the Other. He’s now so overrated that he’s underrated, in inverse Ben Wallace style.