Journal for Cultural Research, 2014

Vol. 18, No. 3, 249262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2013.866814

Bauman and Levinas: Levinas cannot be used

C. Fred Alford*

Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
(Received 2 September 2012; accepted 11 October 2013)

The most ambitious attempt to use Emmanuel Levinas to justify a new moral
philosophy in a postmodern world is that of Zygmunt Bauman in Postmodern
Ethics. Levinas cannot be used. Bauman would use Levinas in order to desocial-
ize the subject. That is, to render the subject less a creature of the organization,
community, and group, each of which is the enemy of ethics. While Levinas would
also desocialize the subject, the terms and concepts he employs are only super-
cially similar to those employed by Bauman, as well as other social theorists. Terms
such as the other or the face are employed by Levinas in such unique ways that
they are unavailable to be used as guidance or inspiration for social theory. In many
respects this is a good thing, for it means that Levinas must be encountered on his
own terms.
Keywords: Bauman; Levinas; postmodern ethics; ethics

Emmanuel Levinas was a Talmudic scholar whose work has found a wide following
among postmoderns, primarily because he seems to offer an ethic without grounds. Or
at least without the traditional grounds. Zygmunt Bauman is an inuential sociologist
who has sought to nd a new ethic for the postmodern, liquid world we live in. He
claims to have found it in Levinas.
While Baumans attempt to use Levinas to create a postmodern morality is admira-
ble, it does not work. There are key aspects of Levinas philosophy that prevent it from
being used as a support for an ethical postmodern practice. Most important is Levinas
desocialization of ethics. Yet, it is precisely this aspect of Levinas philosophy that
Bauman nds so fruitful. Others have sought to integrate Levinas into social theory.
Not all (Butler, 2004) rely on Derridas (1978) critique of Levinas in Violence and
Metaphysics, but most do, attempting to assimilate Derridas thinking on alterity to
Levinas ethics of the other. Deconstruction becomes an aspiration to a non-violent
relationship to the other, as Drucilla Cornell (1992, p. 62) puts it in her book, The
Philosophy of the Limit.
The basic idea of all these readings is expressed most clearly in Critchleys impor-
tant book, The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992, p. 189), where he argues that in decon-
struction itself one nds an afrmation of alterity, of the otherness of the Other.
Bernasconi (1985) made a similar argument, as did Robbins (1999).
The simplest thing to say about such an argument is that one should respect the
other if the other is good, or at least not bad. But there is nothing in the very concept
of otherness itself that implies that it is good. One cannot assimilate Levinas and

*Email: calford@umd.edu

2013 Taylor & Francis

250 C.F. Alford

Derrida because Levinas nds in the other the trace of God. This is what makes the
other good. Though Derrida too uses the term trace, he nds no grounds for such a
claim about the goodness of the other. Otherness is always mediated through ones
own limited experience, as he argues in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida, 1999,
pp. 6869), his eulogy to his late friend (Hgglund, 2004, p. 47, 60).
If others are more philosophical in their attempt to transform Levinas into a social
theorist, none has been more thorough, sociological, and down to earth than Bauman.
There is much to be admired in Baumans descent from metaphysics to practice.
However, he too fails to transform Levinas into a useable social theorist. That Levinas
offers no solution to Baumans interpretation of the social problem suggests there may
be none. Or at least none that Levinas can offer.

Bauman
All social organization, says Bauman (1989), consists in subjecting its units, by
which he means people, to either instrumental or procedural criteria of evaluation. More
important still is to delegitimate all other criteria, particularly any standards that might
encourage individuals to resist the uniformizing pressures of the organization. All
social organization consists therefore in neutralizing the disruptive and deregulating
impact of moral behavior (p. 215).
Modernity and the Holocaust explains the phenomenon, Postmodern Ethics elabo-
rates upon it, attempting to solve it through the work of Levinas. Bauman argues along
lines that will be familiar to those acquainted with Hannah Arendts Origins of
Totalitarianism. There she writes about the loss of distance between people, resulting
in the masses, characteristic of modern society. The totalitarian attempt to make men
superuous reects the experience of modern masses of their superuity on an
overcrowded earth. Arendt (1973) continues

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and
the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and
superuousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the
industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the
last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own
time. (p. 475)

Bauman (1993, p. 4) too sees mass society as anomic and normless, both cause and
effect of the disintegration of the social bonds that tie individuals to each other, as well
as to the institutions they live in. Bauman is referring to mass society, and with it mass
culture, in which the other becomes faceless that is, completely other and just like
me. We have lost the proper distance between self and other through which the self
might feel responsible for the other, a theme Bauman shares with Arendt. In one sense
the other is alien, because the other has become faceless, not just a face in the crowd,
but part of a faceless crowd. In another sense, mass culture obliterates the distance
among individuals, so that everyone is just like me and I am just like them. We all
have the same face. In neither case is there sufcient distance to allow a sense of
responsibility for the other to emerge.
If one takes Baumans critique of the irresponsibility generated by bureaucracy and
the division of labor, and couples it with his critique of mass society, one can see the
appeal of Levinas. The face of the subject, the individual, has disappeared. Levinas tell us
how much we have lost, and how to get it back. For Levinas is the theorist of the face.
 Journal for Cultural Research 251

To look at the face means to be open to the demand placed on us by the naked vul-
nerability of the other. This is quite different from simply experiencing the other as
other. In fact it is the opposite. To truly see the face of the other, says Levinas, is to
recognize that the life of the other matters more than my own. I sacrice my interests
and complacency in being for my responsibility for the other. Here, the existential
adventure of the neighbor would matter more to the I than does my own (Levinas,
2001, pp. 228229). This is how Levinas describes the difference between an ontology
based on being, and a holiness that is focused on alterity, beyond or otherwise than
being. Holiness or substitution, the terms are virtual synonyms for Levinas, means the
sacrice of the in-itself (the individual) for the being outside-of-oneself. This is not
necessarily a sacrice of my life. Perhaps just my interests, my comfort. It is holy
because it is beyond nature, beyond being.

Charity, or mercy makes it possible for man, created in Gods image, to be otherwise than
being. This means that man is capable of putting the others existence before his own.
This gives meaning to my expression, a humanism of the other man. (Levinas, 2001,
p. 231)

It is difcult to know how to take Levinas references to God. The simplest thing to
say is that Levinas is not interested in the existence of God. He is interested in what he
calls the holiness (saintet) that is the source of every value. Theological recuperation
comes after a glimpse of holiness (Levinas, 1998a, p. ix). Holiness, in turn, resides in
the experience of alterity, in the shock of the face of the other.
Uninterested in Levinas struggles with God, Bauman believes that only a revela-
tory experience such Levinas account of the encounter with the other can provide a
foundation for ethics in a world in which all the traditional sources have lost their legit-
imacy. By and large, Bauman (1996) considers this a good thing. Just as the bureau-
cracy sought to transform its members into uniform unthinking units, so community is
yet another case of the by now familiar tendency to expropriate the individuals moral
responsibility (p. 26). Community comforts the individual by telling him or her who
to hate, generally those who do not follow the rules, and other communities. Unlike so
many critics of modernity, Bauman feels no nostalgia for community. Community, no
less than bureaucracy, is always at risk of resembling George Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
One can make this point in a slightly different way, one that follows the steps of
Postmodern Ethics more closely. Baumans theme there, as well as in Modernity and
the Holocaust, is that individual morality is always a threat to the social order. Real
ethics requires that I be for the other ( pour-lautre) before being with (avec) the other.
Otherwise, our morality is bound to be a product of society, whose rst concern is
always about normalizing our relationships with others in the service of social power,
deference, and hierarchy. Being for is primordial. Each man or womans innite obliga-
tion to the other person is prior to society. Indeed, prior to speech, language, culture,
civilization. There is no state of nature in Levinas. Or rather, for Levinas (1969, p. 21)
the state of nature is already a state of war.
Trouble is, the status of being for in Levinas is unclear. It is easier to say what it is
not. Being for is not a relationship that takes place within ordinary time. I am not for
someone before I am with someone because the relationship is not temporal. It is not a
relationship with an actual person. The relationship Levinas is writing about stands
outside time, like the medieval nunc stans, the belief that all eternity exists in the
252 C.F. Alford

present moment. Furthermore, though Levinas writes about the face, the face he writes
about has little to do with an individual human face, for the human face is something
that we might hold onto as an image in our minds, as one holds onto the memory of a
loved one. For Levinas the face [visage, but occasionally face] is above all means by
which alterity presents itself to me. As such it lies beyond what can be experienced in
everyday life. As Levinas (1985) puts it, the face is signication, and signication
without context (p. 85). Though Levinas invites the confusion, this is not the face of
the human other.
The experience Levinas writes about requires an actual human face to bring the
experience of absolute otherness in play, but the tender vulnerability of the particular
face with all its unique characteristics is not what Levinas is writing about. To be sure,
one can hardly help assuming that he is writing about the human face. In an interview,
Philippe Nemo repeatedly assumes that Levinas is writing about the human face.
Levinas (1985) repeatedly insists he is not.

The way in which the Other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the Other in me, we
here name the face The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overows the
plastic image it leaves me The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice
the color of his eyes! (pp. 5051, 85)

The reality of the other remains abstract, so that a particular experience of otherness
may possess ones soul.
Such a concept of the face is not readily transformed into the basis of social history.
Social history is rst of all developmental history that is, the socially constituted
conditions compatible with human survival under which humans develop. From birth
on, individual development takes place in groups. The rst group is mother and baby.
Levinas (1998b) writes about care in terms of mothering, but it is a metaphor, not a
relationship (pp. 7175, 104). In reality, it is from the small group of mother and baby,
and what this group requires, including a stable family or substitute, love, and care, that
morality is born. Not always a nice morality, particularly when it comes to strangers.
Most of the real progress in morality has been made by including more and more
people under the category of people like you and me (Rorty, 1989, pp. 189198).
Morality is non-symmetrical, claims Bauman, a claim with which Levinas would
concur. Morality is not an exchange, not even in the sense of Martin Bubers I-Thou
relationship (Ich-Du), in which you become sacred to me. Not only are you not a
means or an instrument for me, but for Buber all sensation that stands between you
and me recedes into the background, as all I am is engaged with all who you are. Such
an idea, such intimacy, would horrify Levinas, even as he transforms it into a
transaction in the marketplace of relationships. Indeed, Levinas (2001) characterizes
Bubers I-Thou relationship as a commercial relation the exchange of proper
procedures (p. 213). The only relationship that carries moral conviction for Levinas is
one in which I give you everything, and expect nothing. Levinas has called this
relationship love, but it is a special kind of love, love in the absence of desire for the
particular person, what Levinas calls love in the absence of concupiscence: love in the
absence of desire for a unique one.
Once Levinas writes about love he is writing about a relationship that requires a
degree of withness coupled with degree of separation. I must be close enough to feel
your pain, distant enough so that I am able to do something about it, if only to comfort
you. Indeed, Levinas (1998c) goes quite far in recognizing the interhuman order, as
 Journal for Cultural Research 253

he calls it. With this term he means something like what I have called withness. He
continues to insist, however, that the interhuman order must be brought about by the
experience of the astonishing alterity of the other. It cannot emerge from an ordinary
human relationship, what he refers to as the banalization of alterity (pp. 100101).
In Interpersonal World of the Infant, Stern (1985) showed how sophisticated was
the relationship between mother and baby. In Diary of a Baby, Stern (1992) writes
about four-and-a-half-month-old Joey.

Her [mothers] smile becomes a light breeze that reaches across to touch me. It caresses
me. In reaching across to touch him, her smile exerts its natural evocative powers and
sets in motion its contagiousness. Her smile triggers a smile in him and breathes a vitality
into him. It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His joy rises. Her
smile pulls it out of him. (p. 65)

If all goes well, our early encounters are like this, exchanges in which one party (baby)
has no idea how much he or she is contributing, no intent to contribute, no ability to
form the concept, but an innate aim to do so. This in turn graties the mother, and so
it goes, around and around. The relationship is unequal, the exchange incommensura-
ble, as one party has no concept of exchange. But nonetheless the relationship is built
on exchange, which means that it is emotionally reciprocal. Both mother and baby are
satised.
Bauman turns social relationships around, as though he were writing in the spirit of
the traditional state of nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), in which not actual
developmental history, but an idealized version is presented, one that denies our origi-
nal social being. Says Bauman (1993),

What follows is that if solitude marks the beginning of the moral act, togetherness and
communion emerge at its end as the togetherness of the morality party, the achieve-
ment of lonely moral persons reaching beyond their solitude in the act of self-sacrice
which is both hub and the expression of being for At the heart of sociality is the
loneliness of the moral person. (p. 61)

Solitude could mark the beginning of the moral act only if humans were concocted in
retorts instead of born of mothers, generally raised by families, which are part of com-
munities. The danger is that that not only communities, but families, are being subor-
ned by mass society. (The issue is not one of traditional vs. non-traditional family; the
issue is whether any social unit that mediates between child and larger world can with-
stand the onslaught of mass society.) Only in abstract, atemporal philosophical space
are individuals for the other before they are with the other. Or as Bauman (1993) puts
it, responsibility for the other begins before being with, in a state of being for. This, he
says is the frail foundation for morality, but it is the only foundation there is. This
responsibility which is taken as if it was already there is the only foundation morality
can have (p. 75).
Foundation is a misleading metaphor, as though one were going to build an insti-
tutional or ethical structure upon it. In fact, this frail foundation is no foundation at
all. It represents an abstract philosophical rather than a social space. Baumans goal is
to make the former, interpreted as individual responsibility, the ground of the latter.
They remain incommensurable realms of experience.
Bauman (1993) contrasts Levinas vision with the hermetically closed, lonely
monad [who] is abandoned among a multitude of others who are close to hand yet
254 C.F. Alford

innitely remote and estranged beyond repair (p. 83). Yet, one wonders if Levinas
man or woman is not better described as a monad with a window. The monad can see
the face of the other, can estimate the need of the other in the most general terms
(food, clothing, shelter, and so forth), but is so distant and lacking in communication
with the other that the particular, unique needs of the other are unknowable. Recall
how Levinas describes the encounter with the face, one in which I must keep my dis-
tance, lest I come to know this unique other person. An enormous distance remains
because there is no with, but only a for.
Does not one have to be with the other to know the details of his or her needs?
And by then the distance that obligates may have been transformed into the withness
of friendship (of whatever degree) that wants to do for and be with the other not out of
sacrice and duty, but out of amity, love, or pleasure. But this is no longer Levinas,
indeed no longer acceptable to Levinas.
Derrida (1978, pp. 125127) makes a similar point. If we do not know other people
as in some sense alter egos, then we shall not be able to know them well enough to
help them. Not only must I imagine the other as not entirely other, but I must imagine
him or her as in fundamental respects like me. Like me, the other wants to be free of
pain, warm, dry, well fed, and so forth. But because individuals have particular needs,
unique needs, I also need to know the other as a particular person, a person unlike me.
However much one argues that doing so risks totalization or violence, there is no alter-
native to this type of knowledge, one that combines the assumption that the other is in
fundamental respects like me with the assumption that if I get to know the other, I will
learn how different he or she is too. Absent this knowledge, I will be unable to care
for the other in any but the most uniform physical sense. And this care too will assume
the other is an alter ego.
There is another way to look at Levinas, one that Bauman (1993, p. 129) appreci-
ates, even if he does not fully draw out its implications. The need of the other creates
the subject who in turn lives for the other. The subject becomes a subject by virtue of
recognizing the need of the other. The subject is constituted by and through its obliga-
tion to the other. Before it was not really a subject. It was a contented cow, drinking
up the milk of the world. The subject becomes a subject only when it lives to serve the
other.
Reading Levinas in this way suggests that we may dene postmodern ethics as the
ethics of the caress. The caressing hand remains open, never tightening into a grip,
never grasping, touching without pressing, its movement obeying the shape of the car-
essed body (Ouaknin 1992, pp. 127131). One is reminded of Adorno (1974), who
writes of a knowledge obtained without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact
with the objects this alone is what thinking is about (p. 247).
The image of the caress is more intimate, and one with which Levinas is familiar.
He used the image in Totality and Innity and has used it intermittently ever since
(Levinas, 1969, pp. 257258). Unlike some of his other images, such as the face, with
the term caress Levinas writes about an actual physical encounter, in this case about
a man who reaches out to caress a womans body, only to nd it is never enough. The
caress seeks the body and wants innity. It is tempted to grasp, but resists. But to
write of the real caress is already to make Derridas point. Any touch, even the caress,
made at the wrong moment risks violence. And that is just the way it is. The violence
of the unwanted caress, given for example when the other is preoccupied, angry, trying
to sleep, whatever, will be minimal in any case. Unless, that is, the caress is wholly
improper (for example, an improperly placed caress by an adult upon a child), but that
 Journal for Cultural Research 255

is an entirely different matter, and really no caress at all. There is a minimal amount of
violence, if one insists upon that word, in any human relationship, even the most ten-
der. One does away with this violence only be remaining at light years remove.
Postmodernism, as Bauman points out, is a misleading term. We still live in a mod-
ern world. Postmodernism is a disbelief that a universal ethics is possible. Liquid
modernity is Baumans preferred term. Liquid modernity is an acceleration of the expe-
rience of the modern: that change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only cer-
tainty. What is different is that 100 years ago change meant to chase a state of
perfection, such as Marxs socialist utopia. Today, there is no nal state in sight and
none is desired (Bauman, 2012, pp. viiiix). In Postmodern Ethics, Bauman is con-
cerned with postmodernism as the suspicion of metanarratives, as Lyotard (1984)
puts it. Postmoderns suspect that the state and other centers of power are always trying
to suborn universal ethics for their own purposes. The result is an ethics extrinsic to
the actor, a traditional, deontological, universal or rules-based ethic. Or, more com-
monly today a nihilistic rejection of ethics by those who see through the veil, but can
imagine no substitute.
Against both alternatives, Bauman (1993, p. 92) adopts Levinas anarchic,
pre-ontological space of ethics, where the self is for the other before it is with the
other. In this space the self can only resist. It resists organization, rationalization,
institutionalization, or bureaucratization. It resists normalization on the basis of a
primordial pre-social memory. It remembers that it was for the other before all the
others came along that is, before it was with others. This, says Bauman (1993,
p. 249), is the basis in philosophy for Arendts claim, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that
the few who were still able to tell right from wrong went only by their own judgments,
as there were no rules left, no rules for the unprecedented.
Bauman has turned a philosophical claim into a developmental stage. Or, he has
turned a metaphysical claim into a version of the ctional state of nature. Or, he
has turned theology into sociology, or history into philosophy. Or he has turned Levin-
as into a philosopher with an implicit social theory. None are correct. Nor should we
be taken in by the language. What in the world does the pre-ontological space of
ethics mean anyway? The term has meaning in Levinas, for it is part and parcel of a
metaphysics that would make ethics prior to being. But it makes no sense as part of a
social theory that is ontological before we even begin. Social theory, every social
theory, is about being. Every thing is being. One can seek to write a metaphysics that
is otherwise than being, as Levinas does, but there is no recipe by which one can mix
the two. A social theory based on an ethics of non-being makes no sense. Levinas
understands this, which is why his forays into social theory are terse, even cryptic, a
point elaborated shortly.
From a social, developmental perspective, the distinction between being for or with
the other makes no sense in any case. To be with the other in a caring way is to be for
the other. We learn this as infants and young children, as Stern, Winnicott (1971), and
Bowlbys (1988) attachment theory have taught us. Philosophically, this idea is best
expressed by Bubers characterization of the I-Thou relationship.
We learn to care for others by being cared for, and in return caring for and
about others. First in families that are bounded, as the family is able to shelter
members within its eshy walls, while remaining open to the larger world.
Openness is important to Levinas. It is how he denes the ethics of holiness. The
question is whether openness is experienced as an alien but eventually welcome
intrusion that takes place outside of time, as Levinas would have it. From a
256 C.F. Alford

phenomenological or experiential perspective, that is from a perspective within time,

we learn openness rst from permeable families, protective of the young childs
security and integrity, while leaving open a pathway to and from the world. Such
families are likely to be found in large number only in societies with comparable
values: valuing and respecting its (and others) borders and boundaries, while
remaining open to the world.
Needed too are families and communities that resist the intrusion of mass culture.
Today this resistance is more difcult than ever before. What Herbert Marcuse (1970,
pp. 1318) referred to over 50 years ago as the massication of domination by which
he meant the intrusion of mass culture into the developing self before the self was there
to defend against it, has only increased. There are fewer places to hide, less space for
young people, especially, to develop a self that is capable of resisting a mass world.
Baumans adoption of Levinas is no solution. Levinas is simply not writing about
an experience that can be transformed into social space. Or as Abbinnett (1998) puts it,

Baumans sociological deployment of moral proximity [Levinas idea of the face] demands
from its very inception the postulation of a regulative political programme: something
whose explicit purpose would be to identify and alleviate the causes of violence and suf-
fering. (p. 106)

Bauman (1993, p. 248) assumes that individual conscience (which represents a

stance for the other in the midst of a society in which morality has been neutralized by
the organization and rendered extrinsic) can be more than an act of individual revolt, of
individual resistance. It cannot. The morality of the for the other begins as an indi-
vidual act and remains one, an act of resistance to the morality of the group, the moral-
ity of the with the other.
Levinas (2001) argues that it is impossible to organize goodness. Goodness results
from the individual, anarchic reaction of one person to the undeniable appeal of the
other. To organize this is to crush it. Every attempt to organize humanity fails It is
goodness outside of every religion, every system, every social organization. Gratuitous,
that goodness is eternal (pp. 217218).
Levinas uses an example from an epic novel of World War Two, Life and Fate, by
Grossman (2006, p. 940). Shortly after the siege of Stalingrad is lifted, a Russian
woman is delighted to see a half-dead German soldier cleaning out a wrecked building,
clearing out the corpses of the men they had tortured. For a moment she is lled with
joy at the soldiers suffering; suddenly, for reasons she cannot understand she reaches
out to him and gives him her last piece of bread. This is the only way goodness can
occur in the world, Levinas seems to be saying, through isolated acts that do not
change systems, acts in which the face of the other breaks through murderous hatred. It
is what Levinas (2001) calls goodness without regime, the miracle of goodness, the
only thing that remains (p. 81).
The attempt to systematize this goodness into a regime of charity is bound to fail,
and will always become oppressive. One cannot impose, systemize, or legislate good-
ness or charity. Trying to do so fails to understand that fragile place from which good-
ness comes, the irruption of the face of the other into my daily life of satisfactions and
sorrows, what Levinas calls ipseity, from the Latin ipse for self. Regimes of goodness
become regimes of dominion. Of course, bureaucracy is necessary, but hardly to be
praised. Oh, the violence of administration! sighs Levinas (1996).
 Journal for Cultural Research 257

There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the Other. The I
alone can perceive the secret tears of the Other, which are caused by the functioning
albeit reasonableof the hierarchy. (p. 23)

Here is the justication for individualism in Levinas, and one should not underestimate
its strength. Some one must be there to see the tears of the other.
The state too is necessary. But Levinas (2001) endorsement is hardly wholehearted.
I am a democrat. What more would you like me to say? Democracy, he continues,
allows us to change our tyrants under law, and that is necessary. But how do you
expect me to move from the absolute splendors of charity to an analysis of the state
procedures at work in our democracies (p. 195)? Democracy cannot compete with
charity. Democracys value consists in protecting the third, and all the others, from the
excesses of charity to the other. Necessary, but hardly inspiring.
Bauman (1993, pp. 249250) concludes Postmodern Ethics with a quote from
Arendts (1965) Eichmann in Jerusalem.

These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judg-
ments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by because no rules
existed for the unprecedented. (pp. 294295)

About Arendts statement, Bauman (1993) says that it articulates the question of
moral responsibility for resisting socialization and any other pretenders to extra-indi-
vidual adjudication on the ethically proper (pp. 249250). It does, but not in a
way that is compatible with either Baumans or Levinas project. Taken in the
context of Arendts work as a whole, the quotation Bauman relies on is best
interpreted in terms of her late work, The Life of the Mind (Arendt, 1978, part 1,
pp. 181193). There Arendt argues that those who refused to cooperate with the
Nazis did so from their fear of self-abhorrence. Not primarily motivated by the
wrong done to others, they were motivated as Socrates was in Platos Gorgias
(482c): by a fear of having to live their whole lives long with a coward. Had I
not helped, said one who rescued Jews, I would have found it unpleasant to live
with myself. Here and elsewhere Arendt endorses a version of virtue ethics, some-
times called an aretaic ethic, an ethic of personal excellence.
This is exactly not what Levinas and Bauman are writing about. It is the ethic that
Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes in After Virtue. A virtue ethic is generally based
upon the education and training a young person receives as he or she is growing up.
This is Aristotles argument in his Nicomachean Ethics (bk 2), and it still stands. To
take all moral decision-making onto oneself, rejecting the ethical guidance of others as
inevitably suspect or corrupt, is impossible and dangerous. The most important ethical
training and guidance we receive is when we are children, before we are self-aware.
One might argue that as an adult our task is to unlearn what we have been taught. So
be it, but to do so on ones own, if that were even possible, risks becoming a moral
monster. Imagine, for a moment, a person who was able to cast off his or her moral
socialization, listening to no other moral voice but his or her own. Would this person
be a saint? Or a sociopath? In neither case would he or she be fully human.
Moral responsibility is precisely the act of self-constitution. The surrender, if any,
occurs on the road leading from the moral to the social self (Bauman, 1993, p. 14).
There is no self-constitution. We learn both who we are, as well as our moral responsi-
bility to each other, in families whose members care for each other, while remaining
258 C.F. Alford

open to the larger social world. Mass culture threatens these families and hence the
moral self. The danger is real, but it cannot be bypassed by desocialization.

Bauman leaves Levinas

Bauman (2000/2012) seems to recognize this point in his Foreword to the 2012 edition
of Liquid Modernity. The book itself, originally published in 2000, sets freedom against
security. Liberation from community brings freedom, but often at the price of an
unbearable insecurity, so that sociologically speaking, communitarianism is an all-
too-expectable reaction to the accelerating liquefaction of modern life, a reaction rst
and foremost to the deepening imbalance between individual freedom and security
(p. 170). About the communities that are created as a result, Bauman is not very keen.
Self-consciously created communities are almost bound to be based on an us vs. them
mentality.
However, in his 2012 Foreword, Bauman writes in a different vein. The only true
values, the only worthwhile things, are those shared with others inside relationships,
families, neighborhoods, and communities. Are those forms of life-in-common known
to most of us solely from ethnographic reports irrevocably things of the past? Or is
it possible that the episode of chasing happiness through shops was a one-off
detour from the truly valuable things in life? These include honest and sincere com-
munication inside communities, shaming and honoring, and respecting the commons.
The values that sustain communities are not merely instrumental; they are the highest
values in themselves (pp. viixix). My argument, in any case, is not that Bauman has
said little in the intervening years about how genuine community might emerge, though
that is true. My argument is that Baumans position is now thoroughly incompatible
with Levinas. It always was. Now there is no hiding it.
At one point, Bauman argued along lines reminiscent of Arendt. Individual citizens
who have taken the task of judgment upon themselves might then come together to prac-
tice the vigorous sharing of collective responsibilities. It is in this context that Bauman
(1996) wrote about a society that engages its members, as the polis did, in the different
yet imperative task of caring for, and running common affairs (pp. 3536). This way of
putting it still leaves Levinas far behind, in so far as it makes a societys running of its
common affairs in common important. For Levinas, only charity or holiness, the one for
the other, is important, which is why administrators and democratically elected tyrants
are sufcient.
For all the extremity of Levinas language, his claim is a simple one. It is our
responsibility for others that gives our lives meaning, that makes our lives good ones
(Morgan, 2011, p. 163). Levinas is making a judgment, couched as an assertion, over
and over again. Assertions about how this must be what the good life is, given our pri-
mordial (atemporal) experience of the other. And ourselves.
Our primordial experience of ourselves, according to Levinas, is characterized by
the il y a, which translates readily as there is. There is is the burden of being.
Being for-the-other introduces a meaning into the nonsense of there is. Mere exis-
tence is meaningless. Eating, to take pleasure in eating, to take pleasure in oneself,
that is disgusting; but the hunger of the other, that is sacred. The I subordinated to
the other: this seems to be the only experience that gives meaning to the meaningless
burden of being. It is a burden Levinas (2001) explores in various ways, primarily in
terms of a loathing of oneself. There is (il y a) is close to disgust for oneself, close to
 Journal for Cultural Research 259

the weariness of oneself (pp. 4546). Levinas comparison of there is with Antoine
Roquentins nausea in Sartres (1949) novel of the same name seems apt.
At several points Levinas makes this same claim in a different tone, one in which
pleasure is the primordial experience by which we learn what we most desire: to escape
from being. In an essay On Escape, by which he means escape from being, Levinas
(2003, pp. 6163) writes that physical pleasure, indeed ecstasy, is of genuine value, for
with it comes a momentary loss of self, and with that loss the promise of escape from
being. Levinas (1969, pp. 257258) makes a similar point about the caress that seeks
innity, as previously discussed. In fact, it is the failure of pleasure to deliver on its
promise that opens us to new possibilities. Traditional religion and idealism have
expressed the inexpressible hope implicit in these possibilities (2003, pp. 7273).
Neither has found an exit from being. The closest we can come, Levinas tells us, is to
subordinate ones very being to that of another, and all the others too. He calls this
substitution.
Levinas view is not simply one of disgust at taking pleasure in ones own being.
Like Platos Socrates in the Symposium (210a212a), he sees physical pleasure as
valuable because it points beyond itself. In Levinas case it points toward innity.1 But
while pleasure is valuable in pointing us beyond being, absent in Levinas is any real
pleasure in being with another person for its own sake. For the sake of sharing the
company of another, sharing oneself, and so being open to experiencing others in ways
that one never imagined. In doing so one learns that the world and its inhabitants are
far more varied, diverse, and interesting than one could ever imagine. There is no sense
of this experience, no sense of the pleasure of this experience, in Levinas. And yet one
suspects that it is only from this experience that we develop an imagination for other
people, an imagination that creates a sensitivity to what others might need, even if they
are unable to express it.
Bauman believes he has found a foundation for postmodern ethics, frail as it may
be. In fact, it is no foundation at all. Levinas is just one more judgment, one more
choice in this modern world of endless choices. When examined more closely it is not
even a particularly attractive choice. Relationships of withness, such as Bubers
I-Thou relationship are more authentically human choices, and equally threatened by
mass society and mass culture.
My point has been not to show that Levinas is wrong, but that he is unavailable to
Bauman to use as he wishes, because Levinas is not writing about the same events,
even when they share the same terms, such as the face. Levinas is writing about
experiences beyond being. Because he is a social theorist, Bauman is necessarily
writing about being. Terms such as the face, or being for the other, sound as though
Levinas were writing an especially abstract social theory, or at least about its
foundation. He is not. Consequently, he is unavailable to social theorists, or at least
unavailable to be used as a frail foundation. There may be other uses. But because
Levinas is so abstract and radical, it is best to be careful about appropriating him, lest
one get more, or less, than one bargained for.

Conclusion: can Levinas be used?

Levinas can be used to explain and explore a morality that nds no ready place in
academic life. His is not a virtue (or aretaic) ethic, one based on character. Levinas
ethic is not a universal ethic, an ethic of binding obligation, often called a deontologi-
cal ethic, such as the ethic of Kant. Obviously his is not a utilitarian ethic. Levinas
260 C.F. Alford

ethic comes closest to a religious ethic, but it is a religious ethic without God, an ethic
in which it is otherness itself that obligates us to the other person. Otherness itself has
become sacred. One can see why many postmoderns would nd such an ethic
attractive, even if Levinas cannot be appropriated as readily as some believe. Otherness
without the trace of God is just otherness.
When one thinks through Levinas ethic, problems arise. The simplest is the most
troublesome: most people do not experience the other as sacred. On those occasions
when people act with extraordinary humanity (as we say), as does the Russian woman
who offers her last piece of bread to a starving German, we generally imagine it is
because she has recognized their common humanity amidst the horrors of war. And yet
this is not Levinas argument, as we have seen. Indeed, the category of common
humanity as a moral classication is intentionally absent from his work. Perhaps he
would acknowledge that what the Russian woman saw in the prisoners need was a call
that could not be refused, lest she herself become less than human. Nevertheless, it is
the terrible (in the terms original sense of mysterium tremendum) distance between
humans that Levinas emphasizes.
This is an aspect of morality that deserves recognition. Many moralists emphasize
the need to draw the human circle wider and tighter, so that nobody is left out. Rorty
(1989) is exemplary. Levinas reminds us to respect with awe the terrible distance
between us, and the way in which that recognition too can create the deepest moral
sensibility. For it is in this space that the awe that was once reserved for God still has
a chance to appear.
What this conception of morality cannot do is provide social guidance, guidance
regarding the proper organization of society. To be sure, Levinas recognizes the neces-
sity of the state. But Levinas endorsement is hardly wholehearted, as we have seen.
Democracys value consists in protecting the third, and all the others, from the excesses
of charity to the other. Democracy steps in to prevent my obligation to the other from
so obsessing me that I forget all the others and their needs. Government is necessary,
democracy its least odious form, but hardly inspiring.
Levinas great value is to have created a placeholder for a moral God, a placeholder
he calls innity. It is in this place that theological recuperation might begin, as old
myths are reinvigorated. This though is not the important thing. The important thing is
that individuals develop an attitude of holiness (saintet) that is the source of every value.
They do this not when they regard the other as a fellow human, but as a placeholder for
the God who has passed by and left his trace on the face of the other. In many respects an
admirable ethic, it is socially quite useless. But perhaps that is its virtue.

Note
1. Elsewhere, Levinas (1986, p. 347) assimilates Platos One with the wholly other, an odd con-
fusion of opposites, as Hgglund (2004, p. 51) points out.

Notes on contributor
C. Fred Alford is professor of Government and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University
of Maryland, College Park. He is author of over 15 books on moral psychology, including Levin-
as, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalysis (Wesleyan University Press and Continuum, 2002).
His most recent book is Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (Cambridge
University Press, 2013). He is executive director of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture
and Society and co-editor of the Psychoanalysis and Society Book Series with Cornell University
Press.
 Journal for Cultural Research 261

References
Abbinnett, R. (1998). Postmodernity and the ethics of care: Situating Baumans social theory.
Cultural Values, 2, 87116.
Adorno, T. (1974). Minima moralia: Reections from damaged life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.).
London: Verso.
Arendt, H. (1965). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York, NY:
Viking Press.
Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Bauman, Z. (1996). Alone again: Ethics after certainty. London: Demos. Retrieved from www.
demos.co.uk
Bauman, Z. (2012). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press (original publication 2000).
Bernasconi, R. (1985). The trace of Levinas in Derrida. In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Eds.),
Derrida and diffrance (pp. 1330). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development.
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Buber, M. (2000). I and Thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Scribner.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life. In Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence
(pp. 128151). London: Verso.
Cornell, D. (1992). The philosophy of the limit. New York, NY: Routledge.
Critchley, S. (1992). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell.
Derrida, J. (1978). Violence and metaphysics. In (A. Bass, Trans.), Writing and metaphysics
(pp. 79153). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (P.-A Brault & M. Nass, Trans.). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Grossman, V. (2006). Life and fate (R. Chandler, Trans.). New York, NY: New York Review of
Books Classics.
Hgglund, M. (2004). The necessity of discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas.
Diacritics, 34, 4071.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and innity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and innity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. Cohen, Trans.).
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1986). The trace of the other (A. Lingis, Trans.). In M. C. Taylor (Ed.), Deconstruc-
tion in context (pp. 345360). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Levinas, E. (1996). Substitution. In A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Emmanuel
Levinas: Basic philosophical writings (pp. 7996). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Levinas, E. (1998a). Of God who comes to mind (B. Bergo, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998b). Otherwise than being: Or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998c). Useless suffering. In (M. Smith & B. Harshav, Trans.), Entre Nous: On
thinking-of-the-other (pp. 91102). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, E. (2001). Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. In J. Robbins (Ed.),
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Levinas, E. (2003). On escape (B. Bergo, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B.
Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press.
Marcuse, H. (1970). Five lectures: Psychoanalysis, politics and utopia. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Morgan, M. (2011). The Cambridge introduction to Emmanuel Levinas. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Ouaknin, M.-A. (1992). Mdititations rotiques. Paris: Balland.
262 C.F. Alford

Robbins, J. (1999). Altered reading: Levinas and literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1949). Nausea (L. Alexander, Trans.). New York, NY: New Directions.
Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and
developmental psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Stern, D. (1992). Diary of a baby: What your child sees, feels, and experiences. New York, NY:
Basic Books.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Routledge.
Copyright of Journal for Cultural Research is the property of Routledge and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.