With regard to this post…

I just read this post and am in the process of reading some others with a few preliminary comments. I think you may be giving short shrift to Levinas from a more traditional Christian apologist point of view. Speaking as one with many years experience in traditional Christian denominations and un-denominational Churches I have seen an abuse of the ‘salvation’ motif as a kind of license for abuse of the other. I see this abuse in a similar light as Levinas’ critique of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity (see my latest post here for a little more on this). If salvation empowers, endows one with a special knowledge, this elevated and founded origin (arche) can make Ethics in Levinas’ sense secondary just as Heidegger’s authenticity gives short shrift to ethics.

Did Jesus ever promise that salvation eliminated personal guilt? Sure, there is the notion of substitution, Jesus taking on the sins of the world, paying the price, etc. but isn’t the promise of salvation concomitant with following in his footsteps, becoming the servant not the master, the first being last and the last being first? Wouldn’t this mean the believer should accept the free gift not as merited or earned but as an interruption of the other, the other being Jesus, while we were “yet enemies”. Why would Christians use salvation as an excuse to bash the other, condemn the other, totalize the other in Levinas’ sense. Did Jesus totalize the other or did he meet each one as unique, as personal, as worthy of unconditional love even as sinners. This type of ethos puts the other in the place of a radical alterity, an interruption of mine-ness whether it be authenticity or salvation. As long as the other is known and understood in some prior understanding, disposition, metaphysics of ontology, there can be no place for a Jesus-like attitude or an Ethics in Levinas’ sense. The violent history of Christianity, while not reducible to it, does show another option for Christians that is more akin to the heretical disposition of the Pharisees and Scribes that Jesus decried. It might also be more along the lines of Levinas’ critique of ontology, totalizing the other.

Additionally you state in protest, “for Levinas, salvation comes by stopping the flight, turning, and with open arms embracing that which pursues and condemns me”. I believe that here is where Jesus has a noble but radical philosophy, in short, yes. Remember turn the other check? Remember, walk a mile for the other that forces you to do so, give your coat to the other that takes it? Remember while we were yet enemies Jesus gave himself, sacrificed himself to the enemies? Did he protest to Pontius Pilate? Did he claim that he was God and therefore innocent? He freely gave himself to be counted as a common criminal, guilty of sin even to the point that “God made him that had no sin to be sin “. Are you suppose to turn yourself over to the persecutor? If you want to follow the radical lead of Jesus, the answer is yes. The doe turning to the hunter is not so different than the sheep being led to the slaughter, is it?

I do not want to imply an across the board equivocation to Levinas and Christianity nor do want to imply that I am a Christian but I do see some deeper confluences in Levinas and Christianity (and Kierkegaard) than the conclusions I read in this post.

Also, in response to this post:

“The Other is totally absolved of my guilt. The Other cannot be made guilty for the guilt he or she places on me. This is a form of slavery, of imperialism. If the Other were to share in my guilt, even in a relational sense, than the self knows the guilt of the Other, and this is the Same.”

In Levinas this is not a reciprocal relationship. It is not what the other places on me, it is how I efface the other. This non-reciprocity cannot be brought into to ‘light’ of mediation. It is not synchronous with my time, my worldhood. The rupture happens diachronous to me. I do not share a origin with the other. The other is anarchical. Slavery and imperialism imply a relationship. This is not what Levinas has in mind. A logic of this sort would totalize the other in Levinas.

“Levinas argues strongly that when we were first created that we already had this guilt upon us. There is a choice in the guilt, but it is not ours. The choice of guilt lies in the choice of the Other. If I could assent to the choice of guilt, that would be an acquiring, a taking over. And this, again, is to acquire the Other.”

For Levinas, it is not a matter of choice or “acquiring”. It is before your choice. Is original sin your choice? That choice is not given to you either. Likewise, in Levinas your guilt is not up to whether you accept Levinas’ philosophy or not. Even more so, when the other is mediated into an object of my choice, the other is no longer other but a moment of my reflection, a facsimile of the other that Levinas would call totalization or murder.

Levinas does not say that “that we humans are free” but that freedom is a result of effacing the other. Freedom, whether it be in the first moment of Hegel’s Logic or in some vague notion, denies the absolute alterity of the other which gives me no choice except to cover it over (e.g. history), to declare my freedom from the interruption of the other which, in Levinas, implicates me before I can answer. I am responsible to the other before my choice. I owe a debt which does not originate in me but ruptures all my originations in the face to face encounter with the other. I would also call your attention to the famous Anaximander fragment which could also be thought from this context:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

If infinity looks back at us in the face of the other we would expect that my attempt to retreat and cover over such absolute otherness would require my destruction, the destruction of the plastic cast I make of the face of the other as infinity breaks through in the encounter with the other, by necessity. What is required is my guilt, my original sin (the sin of arche if you will), for effacing the call of the other, the rupture of infinity. In my time, my imposed temporal synchronicity to all things, to the other, I am implicated, founded as injust, as murderous in my obliviousness to the call. This is what Levinas calls guilt.