Totality and Infinity a'Separation as Life b'Enjoyment and Representation

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Totality and Infinitya.Separation as
Lifeb.Enjoyment and Representation

• Levinas Study Group
• Presenter Chuang, Yuan-Chih
• 2008.11.08

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A. Separation as Life

• 1. Intentionality and the Social Relation
• Husserls primacy of objectifying act
• ? Levinass metaphysical relation
• a. intentionalitythe consciousness of, the
  relation with the object, the posited, the
  thematic (109)
• b. metaphysical relation does not link up a
  subject with an object
• Metaphysics approaches without touching. Its way
  is not an action, but is the social relation. the
  social relation is experience preeminently, for
  it takes place before the existent that expresses
  himself, that is, remains in himself. (109)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• a. The things we live from are not tools, nor
  even implements, in the Heideggerian sense of the
  termThey are always in a certain measureand
  even the hammers, needles, and machines
  areobjects of enjoyment, presenting themselves
  to taste, already adorned, embellished. (110)
• ??live from means of life ex ???????
• ??? goal of life ex ??????????
• b. Conversely, the independence of happiness
  always depends on a content it is the joy or the
  pain of breathing, looking, eating, working,
  handling the hammer and the machine, etc. (110)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• c. Nourishment, as a means of invigoration, is
  the transmutation of the other into the same,
  which is in the essence of enjoyment an energy
  that is other, recognized as other, recognized,
  we will see, as sustaining the very act that is
  directed upon it, becomes, in enjoyment, my own
  energy, my strength, me. (111)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• d. living fromis not a simple becoming
  conscious of what fills life. These contents are
  lived they feed life. (111)
• e. One lives ones life to live is a sort of
  transitive verb, and the contents of life are its
  direct of objects. (111)
• f. One does not only exist ones pain or ones
  joy one exists from pains and joys. (111)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• f. enjoyment is the ultimate consciousness of
  all the contents that fill my lifeit embraces
  them. The life that I earn is not a bare
  existence it is a life of labor and
  nourishments these are contents which do not
  preoccupy it only, but which occupy it, which
  entertain it, of which it is enjoyment. (111)
• g. Thus things are always more than the strictly
  necessary they make up the grace of life. We
  live from our labor which ensures our
  subsistence but we also live from our labor
  because it fills (delights or saddens) life.
  (111-112)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• h. Life is love of life, a relation with contents
  that are not my being but more dear than my
  being thinking, eating, sleeping, reading,
  working, warming oneself in the sun. Distinct
  from my substance but constituting it, these
  contents make up the worth prix of my life.
  (112)
• i. The reality of life is already on the level of
  happiness, and in this sense beyond ontology.
  (112)

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2. Living from(Enjoyment) The Notion of
Accomplishment

• j. What I do and what I am is at the same time
  that from which I live. We relate ourselves to it
  with a relation that is neither theoretical nor
  practical. Behind theory and practice there is
  enjoyment of theory and of practice the egoism
  of live. The final relation is enjoyment,
  happiness. (113)
• k. Subjectivity originates in the independence
  and sovereignty of enjoyment. (114)

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3. Enjoyment and Independence

• a. What we live from does not slave us we enjoy
  it. Need cannot be interpreted as a simple
  lackThe human being thrives on his needs he is
  happy for his needs. (114)
• b. Living fromis the dependency that turns into
  sovereignty, into happinessessentially egoist.
  (114)
• c. Need, a happy dependence, is capable of
  satisfaction, like a void, which gets filled.
  (115)

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3. Enjoyment and Independence

• d. Enjoyment, in relation with nourishment, which
  is the other of life, is an independence sui
  generis, the independence of happiness. The life
  that is life from something is happiness. Life is
  affectivity and sentiment to live is to enjoy
  life. To despair of life makes sense only because
  originally life is happiness. Suffering is a
  failing of happiness it is not correct to say
  that happiness is an absence of suffering. (115)
• e. Happiness is accomplishment it exists in a
  soul satisfied and not in a soul that has
  extirpated its needs, a castrated soul. (115)

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4. Need and Corporeity

• a. Needs are in my power they constitute me as
  the same and not as dependent on the other. (116)
• b. The distance intercalated between man and the
  world on which he depends constitutes the essence
  of need. A being has detached itself from the
  world from which it still nourished itself! (116)
• c. Need has thus the time to convert this other
  into the same by laborFor a body that labors
  everything is not the midst of the facts, to be
  me though living in the other. (117)

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5. Affectivity as the Ipseity of the I

• a. Separation in the strictest sense is solitude,
  and enjoymenthappiness or unhappinessis
  isolation itself. (117)
• b. The I is not uniqueThe unicity of the I does
  not merely consist in being found in one sample
  only, but in existing without having a genus,
  without being the individuation of a concept. The
  ipseity of the I consists in remaining outside
  the distinction between the individual and the
  general. The I is thus the mode in which the
  break-up of totality, which leads to the presence
  of the absolutely other, is concretely
  accomplished. (117-8)

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5. Affectivity as the Ipseity of the I

• c. Happiness, in its relation with the other of
  nutriments, suffices to itself it even suffices
  to itself because of this relation with the
  other it consists in satisfying its needs and
  not in suppressing them. Happiness suffices to
  itself through the not sufficing to oneself
  proper to need. (118)
• d. The breach of the totality that is
  accomplished by the enjoyment of solitudeor the
  solitude of enjoymentis radical. When the
  critical presence of the Other will call in
  question this egoism it will not destroy its
  solitude. Solitude will be recognized in the
  concern for Knowing, which is formulated as a
  problem of origininconceivable in a totality.
  (119)

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5. Affectivity as the Ipseity of the I

• e. The upsurge of the self beginning in
  enjoyment, where the substantiality of the I is
  apperceived not as the subject of the verb to be,
  but as implicated in happiness (not belonging to
  ontology, but to axiology) is the exaltation of
  the existent as such. (119)
• f. One becomes a subject of being not by assuming
  being but in enjoying happiness, by the
  interiorization of enjoyment which is also an
  exaltation, an above being. (119)

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5. Affectivity as the Ipseity of the I

• g. When the I is identified with reason, taken as
  the power of thematization and objectification,
  it loses its very ipseity. To represent to
  oneself is to empty oneself of ones subjective
  substance and to insensibilize enjoyment. ?
  Reason makes human society possible but a
  society whose members would be only reasons would
  vanish as a society. (119)
• h. For the I to be means neither to oppose nor to
  represent something to itself, nor to use
  something, nor to aspire to something, but to
  enjoy something. (120)

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6. The I of Enjoyment Is Neither Biological Nor
Sociologicalsingularity

• a. Individuation through happiness individuates a
  concept whose comprehension and extension
  coincide the individuation of the concept by
  self-identification constitutes the content of
  this concept. (120)
• b. The relation proceeding form me to the other
  cannot be included within a network of relations
  visible to a third party. If this bond between me
  and the other could be entirely apprehended from
  the outsideThe individuals would appear as
  participants in the totality the Other would
  amount to a second copy of the I. (121)

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B. Enjoyment and Representation

• 1. Representation and Constitution
• a. In clarity an object which is first exterior
  is given that is, is delivered over to him who
  encounters it as though it had been entirely
  determined by him. In clarity the exterior being
  presents itself as the work of the thought that
  receives it. (123)
• b. Intelligibility, characterized by clarity, is
  a total adequation of the thinker with what is
  thought, in the precise sense of a mastery
  exercised by the thinker upon what is thought in
  which the objects resistance as an exterior
  being vanishes. (123-4)

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1. Representation and Constitution

• c. In the intelligibility of representation the
  distinction between me and the object, between
  interior and exterior, is effaced. (124)
• d. Intelligibility, the very occurrence of
  representation, is the possibility for the other
  to be determined by the same without determining
  the same, without introducing alterity into it
  it is a free exercise of the same. (124)
• f. Representation is pure spontaneity, though
  prior to all activity. Thus the exteriority of
  the object represented appears to reflection to
  be a meaning ascribed by the representing subject
  to an object that is itself reducible to a work
  of thought. (125)

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1. Representation and Constitution

• g. The way representation is bound to a wholly
  other intentionality is different from the way
  the object is bound to the subject or the subject
  to history. (126)
• h. The total freedom of the same in
  representation has a positive condition in the
  other that is not something represented, but is
  the Other.
• i. The I of representation is the natural passage
  from the particular to the universal. Universal
  thought is a thought in the first person. (126)

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2. Enjoyment and Nourishment

• a. To hold on to exteriority is not simply
  equivalent to affirming the world, but is to
  posit oneself in it corporeally. (127)
• b. The body naked and indigent is the very
  reverting, irreducible to a thought, of
  representation into life, of the subjectivity
  that represents into life which is sustained by
  these representations and lives of them its
  indigenceits needsaffirm exteriority as
  non-constituted, prior to all affirmation. (127)
• c. The way in which the same is determined by the
  other, and which delineates the place in which
  the negating acts themselves are situated, is
  precisely the way designated above as living
  from. (128)

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3. Element and Things, Implements

• a. To live is to play, despite the finality and
  tension of instinct to live from something
  without this something having the sense of a goal
  or an ontological meanssimply play or enjoyment
  of life. (134)
• b. In enjoyment the things revert to their
  elemental qualities. (134)
• c. Enjoyment, the sensibility (whose essence it
  exhibits), is produced as a possibility of being
  precisely by ignoring the prolongation of hunger
  into the concern for self-preservation. (134)

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3. Element and Things, Implements

• d. The need of for food does not have existence
  as its goal, but foodneed is naïve. In enjoyment
  I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without
  reference to the Other, I am alone without
  solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not
  against the Others, not as for mebut entirely
  deaf to the Other, outside of all communication
  and all refusal to communicatewithout ears, like
  a hungry stomach. (134)

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4. Sensibility

• Objects content me in their finitude, without
  appearing to me on a ground of infinity, The
  finite without the infinite is possible only as
  contentment. The finite as contentment is
  sensibility. (135)
• b. Sensibility establishes a relation with a pure
  quality without support, with the element.
  Sensibility is enjoyment. The sensitive being,
  the body, concretizes this way of being, which
  consists in finding a condition in what, in other
  respects, can appear as an object of thought, as
  simply constituted. (136)
• c. The sensibility is therefore to be described
  not as a moment of representation, but as the
  instance of enjoyment. (136)

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4. Sensibility

• d. Enjoyment seems to be in touch with an other
  inasmuch as a future is announced within the
  element and menaces it with insecurity. (137)
• e. I do not ground them in a more vast system.
  It is they that ground me. I welcome them without
  thinking them. I enjoy this world of things as
  pure elements, as qualities without support,
  without substance. (137)
• f. Sensibility is the very narrowness of life,
  the naviete of the unreflected I, beyond
  instinct, beneath reason. (138)
• g. To sense is precisely to be sincerely content
  with what is sensed, to enjoy, to refuse the
  unconscious prolongations, to be thoughtless,
  that is, without ulterior motives, unequivocal,
  to break with all the implicationsto maintain
  oneself at home with oneself. (138-9)

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5. The Mythical Format of the Element

• In enjoyment quality is not a quality of
  something. The solidity of the earth that
  supports me, the blue of the sky above my
  head...do not cling to a substance. They come
  from nowhereand consequently coming always,
  without my being able to possess the
  sourcedelineates the future of sensibility and
  enjoyment. (141)
• b. The element suits meI enjoy it this need to
  which it responds is the very mode of this
  conformity or of this happiness. The
  indetermination of the future alone brings
  insecurity to need. (141)

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5. The Mythical Format of the Element

• c. Enjoyment does not refer to an infinity beyond
  what nourishes it, but to the virtual vanishing
  of what presents itself, to the instability of
  happiness. (141)
• d. The future of the element as insecurity is
  lived concretely as the mythical divinity of the
  element. (142)
• e. The nothingness of the future ensures
  separation the element we enjoy issues in the
  nothingness which separates. (142)