And in second place....

'You see: the feminine is in a fairly good position in this hierarchy of values, which reveals itself when choices become alternatives. It is in second place. It is not woman who is thus slighted. It is the relation based on sexual differences which is subordinated to the interhuman relation - irreducible to the drives and complexes of the libido - to which woman rises as elevation. From which a certain - provisional?- priority of man. Maybe the masculine is more directly linked to the universal, and maybe masculine civilization has prepared, above the sexual, a human order in which a woman enters, completely human.

('And God Created Woman,' Levinas (emphasis added by me) ).

I am having serious problems with writing objectively on Levinas in preparation for a presentation that I am giving next week. I find that he is an interesting critique of Heidegger and am interested in notions of Alterity but the more that I read of his work the more I am troubled. The primacy of the masculine in relation to the feminine puts his whole system of ethics into question. How can a system of ethics exist that discounts half the human race as being in second place and thereby destroying any notion of equality? Whether there is equality in the world or not is one matter but if one is trying to posit a system of ethics that prior to fundamental ontology how can one place the feminine in a secondary position? How can one even begin to think that universality was only created for men? That would mean that universality does not exist.

There is a point in 'Time and the Other' where he refers to the feminine as hiding, fleeing, modesty (I can't find my copy so that is from memory). While the masculine rises from the ilya to become an existent, the feminine is always shrinking back into the ilya, which makes it appear that the feminine can never really become an existent and subsequently cannot have an ego, become a subject or engage in the social. The feminine is only there as a 'salvation' for the masculine, always 'discreetly and absence.' Fecundity becomes the relationship between the masculine and the son where the masculine encounters yet another other and continues to involve himself in the social while the feminine simply shrinks back into the ilya.

I argued with a friend over whether Levinas really means women when he talks about the feminine and it appears that he does when in Totality and Infinity the woman is the hearth, the habitation and the dwelling while the man engages with the social. And the above passage from one of Levinas' Talmudic readings explicitly says that woman is secondary, that man creates the ethical and universal framework which woman simply slips into.

It seems that Levinas should have played with Dostoevsky's quote when he took it from The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps it should instead read 'Each of us, if he is masculine, is reasponsible for the other; but I more than anyone else (provided that I am a man).'


Puzzles and Problems.... no doubt I will be very angry by the time I have finished this presentation.

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