ethics in which by being virtuous I can be happy.
Love for him is friendship and the friend is the other half of my soul.
Derrida stands in between Aristotle and Levinas and sees the
subject as decentered and never at home so I am not a Levinasian
accused me and I am not an Aristotelian substantial thing in itself.
So Derrida deconstructs what would be both the Aristotelian destruction
of Levinas and the Levinasian destruction of Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Levinas can identify with Platonic eros and take it in
the direction of his infinitizing desire but Aristotelian friendship
has nothing to offer him and though his philosophy of an ethical
asymmetry would be critical of Aristotle and Aristotelians argue
to a first cause which is pure act and the Supreme Being
but Levinas is interested in the Infinity beyond any such Being.
As Derrida think of the Jewish reciprocal ethics of Buber
and the asymmetrical ethics of Levinas he chooses the ethics
of asymmetry and what he comes to call the ethics of pure giving.
Already in Violence and Metaphysics Derrida is thinking
of the notion of the pure and on pages 146–47 he begins
to think of pure violence and pure non-violence together.
II,2.8 And Levinas’ Destruction of Descartes’ Infinite
At the beginning of his essay on page 82 Derrida writes:
The consciousness of crisis is for Husserl
but the provisional, almost necessary covering up
of a transcendental motif which in
Descartes and in Kant was already beginning
to accomplish the Greek end;
philosophy as science.
Aristotle defined science as a certain knowledge of things through
causes and Descartes begins with the quest for that certainty.
His tree of philosophy has the three metaphysical roots the
second of which is the God of Infinite perfection or infinity
which idea enables him to doubt any idea that is imperfect.
Then growing out of the roots is the trunk of physics and
then there are the branches of medicine, mechanics and morals.
Levinas shows how this Cartesian idea of the infinite does
not have the transcending value of Platonic metaphysics but
belongs to the Aristotelian criticism of Platonism and thus on page 83
Derrida writes:
Levinas seeks to raise up metaphysics
and to restore its metaphysics of the Infinite
in opposition to the entire tradition
derived from Aristotle.
The Platonic Infinity, which has to do with the Good beyond Being,
is central in Totality and Infinity as Levinas uses it in going
beyond the Being of Heidegger to his ethics of the Infinity of the other.
The desire for that Infinity that is an ever increasing desire is
central to the love in Totality and Infinity and remains so in Otherwise
than Being for it makes up the very core of the wisdom of Love.
Descartes as the father of modern philosophy has none of this and puts
all his emphasis on the ego that is not essentially related to others.
The scientific method seeking certainty fits with this individualism.
II,2.9 And Levinas’ Destruction of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Of course, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche together with Dostoyevsky and
Hopkins are the founders of the postmodern ethics as first philosophy.
But Levinas never does come to appreciate Kierkegaard or Nietzsche
even though Heidegger was so positive in many ways to both of them.
Levinas did not seem to know of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
and his philosophy of loving others as more important than self.
Levinas always seemed to think of Nietzsche as violently
philosophizing with a hammer and only announcing the death of God.
On pages 110 and 111 of his essay on Levinas Derrida defends
Kierkegaard against Levinas and shows that Kierkegaard is not an
egoist thinking only about his own salvation and on page 93 he writes:
Despite his anti-Kierkegaardian protests,
Levinas here returns to the themes of Fear and Trembling,
the movement of desire can be what it is
only paradoxically, as the renunciation of desire.
These two kinds of desire are central to Totality and Infinity and
as Derrida is deconstructing what Levinas says about Kierkegaard
he shows that Levinas is contradictory in critiquing Kierkegaard.
Derrida is very favorable toward both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
and does speak positively of Nietzsche in Writing and Difference.
Jack Caputo pictures Derrida as a Dionysian Rabbi or a
Nietzschean Levinasian and Derrida is very much a Nietzschean.
As Derrida helped Levinas move from Totality and Infinity
to Otherwise Than Being perhaps Derrida’s Nietzsche had more
of a role to ply than Derrida’s Kierkegaard because already
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