Encountering the modern subject in Levinas

The scholarly literature on Levinas and Descartes is surprisingly sparse, given Levinas's bold claims in Totality and Infinity that he is drawing on a number of profound Cartesian insights. Some attention has been given to Levinas's use of Descartes's conception of infinity and some to his use of Descartes's evil genius in arguing for a goodness beyond being. My focus in this essay, however, is on Levinas's appropriation of Descartes's philosophy in order to argue for a separable, independent subject. Levinas's claim about ethics rests upon his elucidation of the subject of ethics, the "I" who is uniquely responsible. It is the separate, independent, indeed atheistic self that he means to affirm in Totality and Infinity. Despite his arguments about the inability of philosophy to grasp the face of the other, Levinas's project is nothing short of a defense of the modern philosophical project-and the modern subject in particular-after Heidegger. If postmodern philosophy takes as its villain the subject of Descartes's cogito, the reading of Levinas presented in this essay calls into question the view of Levinas as a "postmodern" thinker. I argue in what follows that Levinas's phenomenological description of the subject in Totality and Infinity, and also in Otherwise than Being, bears its greatest debt to Descartes. Levinas in fact presents his readers with an ethical encounter with Descartes's modern subject-an encounter that he claims is already present in Descartes. Yet surely, one would quickly reply, Levinas's subject is not Des-