Readers of Levinas are often puzzled by the move from the ethical to the political. The ethical relation is that of the face-to-face. It is marked by inequality and exclusivity. The political, however, is characterized by equality and universality. Since the Enlightenment, its ideal has been a justice that is no respecter of persons; the touchstone of the political has been equal justice for all. How, then, are we to move from the ethical to the political? Does Levinas provide us with a way to mediate between the two? The very notion of mediation presupposes that there are levels that intervene between the individual and the political. For Levinas, such levels are provided by the family. This, I argue, is the import of Levinas’s account in Totality and Infinity of the erotic origin of society. In the final sections of this article, I draw out the implications of Levinas’s account of fecundity for the concept of the political.
If the motif of sociality has its roots in sexuality, then sexuality itself is situated in the ambiguous throbbing of immanence and transcendence. Desirous Eros thus brings us to fundamental immanence, and also elevates us to the Other, to a love without desire. The deformalization of time undergoes several registers in Totality and Infinity. It goes from the “the night of the erotic”, to “the equivocal […, that] allows profanation”, bringing us to Eros, which delivers us from “encumberment” and “it goes toward a future which is not yet and which I will not merely grasp, but I will be […]”. Here, Levinas alludes to the eroticism of time, to fecundity, which manifests the social structure of enamored subjectivity. The affected identity is truly fecund, and that with the fecundity of voluptuosity, which never withdraws into itself. The time variations described in such a manner culminate the movement of the deformalization of time, from the first generative cell (sexuality) to the highest ethical demand (Justice).
Olejomalba na mědi (63 x 47, 5 cm): nahá Psýché v okně vztahuje ruku k odlétajícímu Amorovi (luk, toulec). Okno nevede do místnosti, ale do lodžie otevřené na druhé straně sloupořadím, uvnitř je socha objímající se dvojice. I vnější výzdoba fasády stavbu charakterizuje jako palác všemocné lásky: nad oknem je spoutaný Jupiter a Neptun, v nice napravo spoutaný Herkules, pod ním Herkules a Omfalé. Na římse pod oknem nalevo Amor Lethaeus hasící vodou pochodeň a na pravo zápasící Eros a Anteros. and Kaufmann 1988#, 20.69.
Reliéf, polychromovaná sádra, barevné sklo, v. 91 cm, š. 65 cm. Sedící spící chlapec, hlava dozadu zvrácená - "Znavený cupido"., Horejc 2016, s. 167., and Varianta z pálené hlíny v Severočeském muzeu v Liberci, inv. č. PK 4586.
It is clear that Levinas’s critique of the dominance within Western philosophy of the concept of totality in Totality and Infinity was intended as a response to totalitarian-ism, but the extent to which this determines the organization of the book and the way in which this takes place has been largely misconceived. This is because of the failure to take seriously the opening question of whether or not we are duped by morality. The ethical resistance of the face of the Other does not adequately address that question until morality is secured against the challenge issued by a philosophy that equates being with war and that takes place only through the account of the infinite time of fecundity. Fecundity concretized in the family is the site of resistance to the totalitarian tendencies of any state that seeks for the sake of its preservation to legislate procreation. Hence fecundity and Eros are “beyond the face.” This reading draws on the important role given to fecundity in Time and the Other as well as the texts newly available in the first three volumes of Levinas’s Oeuvres.