Morton on Levinas

NICE FOLLOW-UP POST BY TIM on Levinas.

Just one point of clarification. Morton says:

“It seemed to me that this was the one moment at which we might possibly see what Levinas calls ‘the element’ not simply as an anonymous lump (Harman is spot on about this) that needs to be articulated/cut up by humans (Harman also spot on about that).”

Yes, I do agree with both points. But just to clarify, I see two different levels, both of them treated as undifferentiated into individuals.

One is the il y a, or being. That’s the anonymous rumbling lump that is hidden, but to which you can have acccess during insomnia. (Gotta love a philosophy that puts insomnia near the center of things.)

The element, by contrast, is the anonymous whole on the surface of reality. The element isn’t hidden from us; it’s fully accessible. But it’s still not carved up into parts.

But oddly enough, Levinas (from Totality and Infinity onward) starts to see that individual substances do have some individual resistance to us. That’s what Lingis has written about so beautifully: substance in Levinas precedes Heideggerian tools, because tools must be made of something, and also they support multiple uses.

What Levinas never gives us is wind and cigarettes being substances for each other. The “for each other” crept back into philosophy through Whitehead, and the phenomenologists simply weren’t reading him regularly. (Sometimes, yes: Merleau-Ponty in La Nature.)