The Provocation of Levinas

Rethinking the Other

Robert Bernasconi, David Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134985357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

There is a growing recognition of Levinas's importance. It can in part be attributed to an increasing concern that twentieth-century continental philosophy seems to have no place for ethics. In making ethics fundamental to philosophy, rather than a problem to which we might one day return, Levinas transforms continental thought. The book brings together some of the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas, in three different areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy, and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. It includes a newly translated paper by Levinas on suffering, and a specially commissioned interview.

.1.
The Other and Psychotherapy

JOHN HEATON

The problem of the Other is crucial in psychotherapy, yet is covered over by most theoretical writing in the field which is occupied with various modes of treatment that endeavour to cure a pathology. Usually the texts of psychotherapy are part of a theoretical system and merely attempt to elaborate or add to it; its concept of cure and its methods of obtaining that cure are subsumed under the system. The cured individual and the psychotherapeutic system are simply correlated with each other. The system defines what cure is—integration and individuation, attainment of the depressive position, the ability to carry on one’s own self-analysis, and so on—and the cure occurs because of the correct application of the method of cure generated by the system. As one influential book puts it, analysis depends on ‘the state of mind of the analyst’; this is embodied in ‘the psycho-analytic attitude’ and ‘the foundation of this attitude must be dedication to the psycho-analytic method’. ‘The value of the analytic process derives from the degree to which it is determined by the structure of the mind.’¹

But the Other cannot be subsumed in a system and cannot be reached by a method however dedicated one is to it. The desire for the Other is the fundamental desire; and therefore is most pertinent when a person consults an analytical psychotherapist. It is not a desire for satisfaction or for non-satisfaction, for success or failure; it has another intent. It desires beyond anything that can simply complete it. Its desire is not for fulfilment by a method or to be determined by a structure but for deepening.

The Other is not a simple presence of a self to a self; it is not contained in a relation which starts from a distance and ends in a bringingtogether. The Other is radical only if the desire for it is not the possibility of anticipating it as the desirable or of thinking it out beforehand but if it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death.

The Other cannot be described or subsumed in the theoretical language which is used in most psychotherapy. This language purports to describe various structures in the mind and processes which occur in the interaction of the subject and his ‘others’, some of which are pathological and drive him into a mental illness. So the psychotherapist who is well versed in his particular theory finds it wherever he looks. The Freudian finds Oedipal themes, the Kleinian the presence or absence of the depressive position, the Jungian various stages of individuation, and so on. Psychotherapy, wherever it looks, only finds itself: a form of violence to the Other.

It is notable that on the group of patients to whom the problem of the Other is most acute the effectiveness of psychotherapy is minimal. These patients are called narcissistic. Freud admitted that the fundamental problem yet to be resolved in psychoanalysis is that of narcissism.² There have been many attempts since then to solve this problem, all of which have failed except to show the narcissistic nature of the authors of the various theories and treatments. An obvious sense of frustration informs the literature, and all it has shown is how common narcissistic problems are in our society.

These attempts to ‘cure’ narcissism have all failed because their fundamental assumption has been that the problem is to ‘get through’ to the analysand. They assume that the state of mind of the analysand has to be got at in some way and altered. Narcissistic patients fail to respond to these seductions. They either are not seduced at all or are completely seduced but fail to respond in the sense that their deep unhappiness and frustration with living remains. Narcissistic patients fail to respond to attempts to ‘get through’ to them because this is simply an attempt to subsume them within the same, to bring them within the system of thought and language which the analyst uses, whereas their problem lies with the Other.

The Other is an infinity irreducible even to the representation of infinity, it exceeds representational thought. The Other is infinitely distant from my own reality yet without this distance destroying the relation or the relation destroying the distance as would happen in a relation within the same. It does not become a confusion with the Other or effect its identity.

No language can contain the Other, whom it is impossible to understand, explain or interpret. The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the manifestation of the Other of a face, over and beyond form. The manifestation of the face is already discourse, it speaks, it sees and is seen. So discourse is not primarily a yes or a no; it is not a modification of thought but an original relation with the Other.

The Patient

I will now quote some remarks made by a lady I saw for three years or so, who was wrestling in a particularly cogent and intelligent way with the problem of the Other. She was about thirty years old and had had much psychiatric treatment since she was fourteen, including an attempt at psychoanalysis.

Her Position

She could only be comfortable in the room with me when we were back to back, she in one corner of the room and I in the opposite corner; so we would each face the wall and speak facing the wall. When she left we might glance at each other as she went through the door, but even then she would always lower her eyes and say that I was staring at her. She could not bear to be stared at and felt that this was what people always did to her; she had broken off previous attempts at therapy because of this, although her difficulty had been ‘interpreted’ to her.

She was acutely conscious of the assymetry of inter-subjective space; for her the Other was the stranger who stares, the enemy, the powerful scientist who knows. But our separation, the apparent failure of communication, our disengagement from participation, evoked the Other for her which would otherwise be swamped. This absence of the Other is precisely his presence qua Other.

Vision

She made many remarks to me about vision—seeing and being seen:

‘I don’t want you to see me as if you saw my body it would not be me. It keeps it purer by not being seen.’

‘People don’t know how to look. I do. People only look at what they want.’

‘As a child I used to cut the eyes out of people in magazines. The eyes are dead like dead people. I remember people staring at me when I was a baby in my pram.’

‘Everyone and the furniture is part of the air. It is only the eyes which are nothing, it is as if they were another world.’

‘I can’t look at people’s eyes as they are black and round. Round is a perfect shape while the rest of the body isn’t, and black is no colour.’

‘I have a festering boil in the middle of my eyes and I am staring at it.’

‘My eyes are like two holes in the sky. They seem to point to a beyond. Does everything belong to me or do I belong to everybody?’

‘Things are just shapes, objects look distant, they seem to quiver out of reach. They look as if teasing me.’

‘I dream of darkness and then feel everyone has gone mad around me.’

‘I dream that I am in my house and someone kept staring at me even if I draw the curtains.’

‘When I was a child I felt we were all in a shoe box and the stars were the holes in the lid.’

‘Things don’t seem to be orientated from my body, they are not in reach. The whole world is too bright, like on a summer’s day; everything is black and white. Therapy brings shadows, darkness to see better by and then I see some colours.’

‘If I wear clothes I like I feel exposed. If I wear clothes “they” like then I don’t feel exposed but then my husband is frightened of me.’

Dream: ‘A man is throwing knives at me, he told me if I moved I would be hit. I moved my foot and the knife went through it. It bled, no-one could staunch it. I put a sock over it and it appeared OK but went on bleeding inside. Then I was a ghost, I could not materialize. But my foot was material. People were around and I could not make my foot disappear.’

Comment

The face sees and is seen, and a glance recognizes this. But a stare does not, and a person stared at may easily cease to be Other to the one who stares. The face resists possession. This resistance is not like the hardness of a rock that opposes my power by an equal resistance, but it defies my ability for power. It breaks through the form that would grasp it by inviting me to a relation incommensurable with an exercised power. The coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses is how the face manifests itself; the face speaks, and this is over and beyond form and is the Other.

The eyes break through the mask of the face which can lie, for the language of the eyes is impossible to dissemble. The eyes do not shine but speak, and it is their absolute frankness which gives the possibility of truth and lying. The grace of the face’s radiance provokes the idea of infinity which is necessary for separation and the Other to break through.

Moreover, the exterior world being flooded with light is a violence which prevents the radiance of the face; this requires shadow and colour to provoke the Other.

The Relation with the Therapist

‘Why do I come to therapy? I want to and I don’t want to. I am being suffocated by the appearance. I am living a nightmare.’

‘If you look at me I feel it is me looking at me.’

‘I feel you are the most frustrating person I have ever met. I feel you are brainwashing me so I tell myself, “I must not let him brainwash me” but then I find I keep quoting you.’

‘I feel you will catch me so I keep distant; I try and catch myself. I get in a big muddle on days when I don’t see you.’

‘I have a terrible fear, an energy, is it me? I feel I have to do what others expect me to do. Is that evil? It can’t be, I don’t believe in evil. I want to name it but can’t.’

Dream: ‘I can’t find you.’ Association. ‘I have a feeling of pressure in my head and I point far away and feel I am rushing towards it but get no nearer.’

‘I feel I am part of everything and yet feel apart from it all. Are you me? Am I everybody? To feel real I would have to trust you for no reason.’

Comment

Many of her remarks remind me of Wittgenstein in On Certainty³ where he explores, much in the manner of the classical sceptics like Sextus Empiricus, the limits of our knowledge; for example, ‘I know that I am a human being’. In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation. At most it might be taken to mean ‘I know I have the organs of a human’ (for instance, a brain which,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Notes On the Contributors
• Key to Abbreviations of Levinas’s Texts
• Introduction
• 1. The Other and Psychotherapy
• 2. Responding to Levinas
• 3. Feminism and the Other
• 4. The Personal Is Political: Discursive Practice of the Face-To-Face
• 5. Amorous Discourses: ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’ and Love Stories
• 6. Levinas and Pontalis: Meeting the Other As In a Dream
• 7. Sartre and Levinas
• 8. ‘Failure of Communication’ As a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue Between Buber and Levinas
• 9. Levinas, Derrida and Others Vis-À-Vis
• 10. Useless Suffering
• 11. The Paradox of Morality: An Interview With Emmanuel Levinas
• Levinas: An English Bibliography