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The Anarchic Breeze: Emergent Post-Metaphysical Utopian Movements as Methodology

Ryan Fritch
McGill University, Canada

Preamble

There is today a political resistance in Toronto that identifies as utopian and aesthetic. Drawing on a a multiplicity of environmental, globalized, sustainable, artistic and home-grown philosophies, the effort is to re-discover and express a renewed conception of utopian and idealistic thinking that is simultaneously critical and constructive, while also reaching beyond ideological, teleological or monistic visions of totality.

In my presentation I will argue that the utopian aestheticism alive and well in Toronto is closely related to the eschatological philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas's philosophy shifts the foundation of metaphysical thought -- and hence the history and future of utopian political imagination -- from a discourse of totality to one of infinity. He does this by locating the "end" of philosophy not in the State or some universal philosophical foundation but in the phenomenological unknowability of the "Other," to whom I am responsible even before myself and which manifests as a first ethical principle without specific or apriori content. This results in the re-conceptualization of the terms by which we define the social "Good" and responsibility between neighbours, and offers the potential to radically recast notions of proximity and causation to more closely reflect the realities of our lived experience in a globalized existence and on a finite Earth. It is my hope that where a connection is made between Levinas and the movement which identifies as utopian and aesthetic, it will be possible to proliferate political and personal decisions that live and breathe by an anarchic breeze which, like the wind, can never be commanded nor entirely predicted.

The intention of the following paper is not to summarize my conference presentation (which will focus primarily on the experiences and constructions of the Toronto movement) but rather to compliment it by providing a philosophical primer on Levinas's philosophy (with which many might not be familiar) in relation to utopian thinking generally, and as a specific response to the title of this conference, "Another World is Necessary." I read this not as a demand but rather the expression of a utopian desire that does not quite know what the term "utopia" or "idealism" might mean in the post-modern world and philosophy. Levinas's philosophy is difficult, at times seems to "invert" metaphysics and much of our daily usage of common terms and presumed temporal linearity. Even as a basic summary the paper is dense and difficult reading. It is intended as a supplement to a presentation that I hope will be far more lively and concrete in the best tradition of face-to-face philosophy!

1. “Another World is Necessary.”

Is not every hope and dream for a better world encapsulated in this demand that, in its hesitancy about which world is necessary, is really a question? And hasn’t this question already been repeated everyday in the Hellenic tradition? What novelty in material conditions, technology, communications, politics, philosophy or culture presumes that when we ask this question today, at the end of the century of metaphysic political totalities, we mean that the question has somehow changed, is somehow different, will now lead to increased freedoms, greater equality, and less violence simply by being asked and acted upon? What, in other words, is the utopianism of the present, and why does the utopian demand no longer seem satisfactory in itself?

The tension between the demand that “another world is necessary” and the question mark that is “which world?” is the illusory difference between the competing totalities of utopian and dystopian, wherein the possibility of escape is locked within the demand itself, the demand between jailer and jailed. This dialectic -- just one of many -- is explicitly between two political worlds linked by a presumed and formal arrow of time: ‘this one,’ the present that reads history as the anticipation of the demand, and the ‘another’ that follows after and which is known to respond to the demand. This act of transformation or translation from the past, through the present and towards the future is expressed as the necessity -- the need, the fulfilling of a lack which is known and experienced -- of thebeing of the political present tobecome what is hypothesized or evangelized about the after: the order of the more just or more orderly, more Good or more necessary. This ‘utopia of the after,’ the much maligned utopia of calculable and idealistically determined historical teleology, is merely the antithesis to the yearning for the classical or conservative ‘utopia of the nostalgic.’ In either vision, in satisfaction of either desire as need to complete the incomplete or return to past grandeur, the unknown future is made servant of the present to be overcome by itself (just as with the more familiar re-vision of history). The unknown future is itself delayed and the possibility of escape or transcendence -- freedom, equality, fraternity -- is reduced to the political within itself. Or as Donald Rumsfeld said of the need to violently foreclose dangerously unimagined futures from happening: “there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know... it is [this] latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

The demand for “another world” and the necessity that a world be demanded are inseparable in this reading because of the immanentism of the concept world which collapses place and time, as in the Old English root w(e)ourld from the German Welt, into the unifying ‘age of man.’ As a philosophical gesture complimenting the political,‘man’ is posited as a foundation for all questioning and the needs of the ‘I’ ground all epistemology and ontology. For Heidegger, “this gesture of foundation... is not novel; it is the classical metaphysical gesture with respect to politics that one finds in Plato’s Republic.” This is a closure of the possibility of “another world” rather than an openness to it because the struggle to find harmony between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ is reduced to a search for sameness, a search where the future is only open to the present in itself as becoming. The need or necessity that demands “another world” is lost to this one as the mere filling of a lack, whereas the desire to attain a truly other world, an-other, one not yet possessed or needed, is collapsed into this need, into the need to present ever more comprehensive vision. Any political questions thus remain trapped in the form of a demand and the question “which world?,” the question of the utopian question, has not yet been asked without already initiating its own answer, without already foreclosing the very unknown future in whose name it speaks and for which it claims a right to as “more just.” In other words, the ‘saying’ -- the active pursuit of an always distant justice -- is reduced to that which has already been ‘said’ about it.

Such a politics of closure is experienced today as the paralysis of the concept of utopia. ‘Vision’ and ‘revision’ have been discredited (even in their secular formulations) as impossible and violently self-referential structural ends -- the “comprehension that encompasses” -- while preferentially remaining expedient over an ongoing and open-ended process of the apparently formless and subjectively arbitrary ‘visionary.’ The ‘need’ for justice and the ‘desire’ to attain it have been conflated into a political simulacrum that grotesquely pantomimes its own malnourishment, that feeds on its own agony and procreates by accumulating itself like capital or poverty, and which effaces the positivity of a relationship that comes “from remoteness, from separation, for it nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger” (TI 34). Negator and negated are inmates of the same institution, “posited together, form[ing] a system... negating while taking refuge in what one negates” (TI 41). Politics, in this formulation, is locked in an endless iteration between perfect structure and perfect anarchy, between total objects and and total relativisms, between the self and self-same, and lacking in precisely the otherness of the Other. The expressive hope for ‘an-other world’ is rendered politically inert no matter how strongly it is demanded. It is reduced to an intuitive yearning that shares a truly utopian desire to access that which is excluded from politics, that which has no-place and as absent in it, but which is unable to re-present these absent actors without totalizing them in this very utopianism as vision. How is the impasse between the no-place of idealistic totality and the no-place of political exclusion, of non-represented absence, to be crossed? How is utopia to exceed itself?

2. Levinas and the an-other as an-arché

When we speak the language of responsibility to beginnings, ends and the idealistic possibility of ‘others’ beyond the dialectical violence of metaphysic foundation, we are speaking with Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the possibility of the utopian can only be thought where metaphysical questions about ideal social conditions can not go: beyond ‘being’ in itself. Building on the phenomenology of Husserl and the ontology of Heidegger, Levinas finds that metaphysical thinking and the history of utopian imagination since Plato has been an ontological effort to reduce human happiness to a theme or scheme capable of encompassing all relations between the individual ‘I’ and the social ‘We.’ Though there have been a wide variety of historically postulated ontological permutations on this theme -- not the least of which are those ‘third terms’ such as the Spirit of Hegel, the Being of Heidegger, the Good in Plato or Categorical Reason in Kant -- all have argued from and towards an essentialism and naturality of an ‘I’ capable of constituting philosophical and political foundations in their selfhood (TI 43). In turn, the sameness of an ‘I’ as common to all people (or absent in non-persons) can be invoked to command limits on freedom and equality within the ‘We,’ and also offers a ground from which the alien and other can be colonized, disciplined, and measured for authenticity. In time, these commands are reified into commandments, normative foundations from which an authority can assess the subjectivity of others from an ‘outside’ no-place that privileges their perspective. Any attempt to conceive utopian societies is a claim to be speaking from an ‘outside’ whose imagination is, in fact, firmly rooted in a framework of reducing every other to the same, including competing metaphysical foundations. Societies of such utopianism become societies of that which has already been ‘said’ rather than open to the active process of ‘saying,’ societies of totality that have characterized the worst violence of the 20th century, and which similarly threaten the 21st century on a global scale. This is politics left to itself, the closure of metaphysics, claiming to at once be totalizing and outside of itself (TI 300; 212-14; OB 156-62). Idealism completely carried out reduces all ethics to politics.

Themeatizeation and conceptualization, which moreover are inseparable, are not peace with the other but suppression or possession of the other... Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power... Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity (TI 46).

The innovation in Levinas’s thought, and why he is so incredibly important to the question of the question of utopia in our age, is his phenomenological insight that metaphysics does not begin with the onto-ego-logical need of the demanding ‘I’ to fulfill what is identified as a lack in its metaphysical system (just as every utopian account from Plato to Thomas More begins as social critique). Instead, metaphysics is inexorably intertwined with a desire for the ‘I’ to exceed itself with something not yet possessed or known: the ‘other.’

The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same... The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I’ (TI 38-9).

Although sharing Heidegger’s phenomenological belief (contra Aristotle) that contemplation of Being is through the sensory experience of an inexhaustible existentialism of everyday life, the desire for the other is necessarily pre-eminent to Being because the experience of the self is only made possible through the other. Any attempt by the self to encapsulate or subtend the other (as Sartre argued was possible in Being and Nothingness) is to commit the Heideggerian error in which “Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being... [and so] precisely mark[ing] the apogee of a thought in which the finite does not refer to the infinite” (CPP 52). To need something is to know it as a hunger or lack that demands ingestion and digestion to be satisfied. Desire is marked as the experience of the distance between two beings, is a passion that is maintained in the permanence of that distance, and finds satisfaction in that distance.

Levinas’s gesture to the infinite and unknowable as simultaneous to the emergence of the ‘I’ is instructively similar in form to the Cartesian relation between the cogito and God. At the end of his First Meditation, Descartes describes the ‘I’ as a prisoner locked in a dark jail, a primordial state in which no light is capable of illuminating even a notional awareness of the self. How this apriori state can be known by the non-conscious goes unexplained. Nevertheless, the Third Meditation provides the means of escape when the ‘I’ is made aware of the existence of God as the idea of the infinite that already exists within the human mind. For both Descartes and Levinas, the presence of the infinite in the mind is placed and received with a non-intentional passivity that is passivity itself, “the pure passivity that precedes freedom is responsibility. But it is a responsibility that owes nothing to my freedom; it is my responsibility for the freedom of others” (CPP 136). In turn, interiority has a relationship to alterity that is both non-violent and irreducible (TI 210-12). It is the distance between the self and the inability to fully grasp or comprehend the infinite which produces being (TI 210). But this comprehension is not a proof of the existence of God so much as it is an acknowledgment of a presence in the mind that is a fundamental rupture or exception in all categorical thinking. What then is this rupture?

For Levinas, to call this rupture ‘God’ is a phenomenological impossibility because the ‘I’ can neither contain the infinite within itself nor experience the unexperienced (CPP 53-54; 160-62; TI 48-54). Instead, Levinas places the God of Descartes in the Other, s/he to which any first shout of “I am here! Look at me!” from out of the primordial ‘il y a’ is addressed, and whose response is always a surprise from outside of my experience alone. The other takes on the role of the sacred, infinite, unknowable, but nevertheless experiential as a face-to-face relation. The Other as God resists the ability to posit a place to stand or a perspective of the ‘outside,’ an approach most clearly enunciated in the utopian context by St. Augustine’s perfectible ‘City of God’ as the choice above the corrupt and banal ‘City of Man.’ Man instead becomes the site of infinity:

In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinity, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept. The infinite is the radically, absolutely, other. The transcendence of infinity with respect to the ego that is separated from it and thinking it constitutes the first mark of its infinitude. The idea of infinity is then not the only one that teaches what we are ignorant of. It has been put into us. It is not a reminiscence. It is experience in the sole radical sense of the term: a relationship with the exterior, with the other, without this exteriority being able to be integrated into the same... Experience, the idea of infinity, occurs in the relationship with the other. The idea of infinity is the social relationship (CPP 54).

The Other who “dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger... to whom I am obligated” (TI 215). The encounter with the other can not be reduced to Husserl’s intentionality thesis between the noesis (the intentional gaze) and the moema (the objects that I give my intention to) because there is more to this person than simply their face or simply an absolutely relative subjectivity. This ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ of the face-to-face encounter -- an excess that occurs in all subjective experience -- always resists my categories or vision of it because it can not be reduced to a totalizing representation. It calls into question the ‘I’ and the same (TI 195). The face is merely a visage for an unknowable ego inside. Lived experience itself is infinite. “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name the face... The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me” (TI 50-1). The face-to-face is a final and irreducible relation which no concept could cover. But because this encounter is mutually constituting it is non-violent, and as such “ maintains the plurality of the same and the other” (TI 203) and “makes possible the pluralism of society” (TI 291).

What comes of this encounter is not a demand for vision but rather the necessity of language. The unknowability of the other thus resists images of it, eludes ones ability to grasp it whole (OB 78), and instead demands that I address myself to it. Levinas calls this conversation between others ‘ethics,’ the “speech that proceeds from absolute difference... [and] cuts across vision” (TI 194-95). The quest for utopia is thus located in an ethical discourse of the infinite where the idea of perfection

“exceeds conception, overflows the concept; it designates distance: the idealization that makes it possible is a passage to the limit, that is, a transcendence, a passage to the other absolutely other. The idea of the perfect is an idea of infinity... it is not reducible to the negation of the imperfect; negativity is incapable of transcendence. Transcendence designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying this distance” (TI 41-2).

This ethical discourse exposes how “idealism completely carried out reduces all ethics to politics” in which the Other and I are reduced to merely playing the role of “moments in a system, and not that of origin” (TI 216-17). This is the key to Levinas’s thought as politics. It is an anti-foundational foundationalism. Without this constant source of resistance, multiplicity loses its meaning, and all language, politics, and discourse merely contributes to its own absorption by the universal State. “The introduction o the new into a though, the idea of infinity, is the very work of reason. The absolutely new is the Other” (TI 219).

To summarize then, Levinas shows how the expression of utopia as immanent in the world and expressed as a necessity leaves politics to itself at precisely the moment that one wants most clearly to over-come it. This anti-foundational gesture does not lead to an absolute relativism however because the Other, while infinitely unknowable but experienceable by me, is unavoidably placed in a relationship with me. This relationship is ethics itself, and is maintained through our mutually constitutive presence as phenomenologically traceable entities. No vision of the face of the other will suffice as a complete representation that does their difference justice. Instead, we call on language in its infinite malleability and fallibility to express our needs and desires. Because there is always a reduction that occurs between what one spontaneously says and is historically said to have communicated, language always over-flows and betrays itself, resisting any attempt to adequately translate and contain the other. The ethics of alterity is thus a call to achieve relations with others that are excluded from common communion: communication, community, and comity. This call is felt as a desire for the infinite, for an-arche, for a responsibility and justice that exists simultaneously between all Beings and which asks us to consider existence otherwise than Being reduced to some colonizing principle. This call for that which is to come rather than to that which is posited or presumed is the reform of utopia as a metaphysics of the infinite rather than the total. This call, as addressed to everyone, is the true possibility of an anti-foundationalist political plurality that resists any gambit to merely obscure foundations and envelope the other, as we might characterize the intersubjective discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas. Levinas’s

foundation of pluralism does not congeal in isolation the terms that constitute the plurality. While maintaining them against the totality that would absorb them, it leaves them in commerce or in war. At no moment are they posited as causes of themselves (TI 221).

This opens up the possibility of social discourse to a playful, heterogeneous, creative and radical imagination. Only that which is to come can hope to over-come, to exceed the future as futurity itself made present.

3. Utopia as Political Methodology

If it is only the “absolutely new” which is the Other, how then does one introduce the new into politics, and how does one use politics to generate the new? The infinitude of phenomenological experience and responsibility and the ethics of alterity recast the concept of utopia as a strategy for displaying ‘cans’ rather than ‘oughts’ and opposes it to the pragmatopian and teleological ‘is.’ But if the ethics of alterity is non-thematizable by definition, then how does one translate it into a political methodology capable of mobilizing groups and institutions to act? “What meaning” Levinas asked, “can community take on in difference without reducing difference?” (OB 154). Can this utopia be made a politics?

Two avenues present themselves to this effort. First, the question of the question of politics, as posed by Philippe Lacoue-Lebarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in the 1980’s, wonders if politics doesn’t already contain the sort of discourses of rupture and deconstruction that Levinas exemplifies as ethics itself and which defines a reinvigorated utopian impulse. The second is to consider the creativity of utopia for instantiating alternative political responses outside of established foundations as a sort of aesthetic gesture. It is in this later conception that Levinas’s philosophy reforms utopia as an ethical style of thinking which takes on the character of a pervasive -- almost pneumanal -- anarchic breeze that is always gently blowing.

On the first point, Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction is most helpful. Critchley questions whether deconstruction, which bears a closeness to Levinas’s effort to continually upset the ‘said’ with the irreducible surplus of language, “fails to thematize the question of politics as a question -- that is, as a place of contestation, antagonism, struggle, conflict and dissension on a factical or empirical terrain” (ED 189-90). The answer to this question is “no” insofar as deconstruction, like Levinas’s ‘saying,’ exposes how questioning as the origin of thinking can be identified with the ontological Being of Heidegger. By exposing this question, deconstruction raises the question of the question and so places thinking in relation to the Other. However, this passage through the undecidable does not offer any substantive political content other than to note the very madness that is the moment of decision making (ED 199-200). For Lacoue-Lebarthe and Nancy, deconstruction has ‘re-treated’ politics (la politique)but has failed to ‘re-trace’ its essence (le politique) into something otherwise than metaphysics (ED 206-7; 214-15). A plain reading of the Levinasian response to this challenge legitimately wonders is Levinas’s philosophy doesn’t lead to the very political quietism that he charged his predecessor Martin Buber with.

My feeling is that the positive and radically transformative strength in Levinas’s work is demonstrated through a return to aesthetics, a topic which itself has been experiencing considerably renewed academic interest recently. Levinas has already revealed that ethics is non-thematizable and that a face can never substitute as a total representation of the other who exists behind it. “Ethics is an optics” he writes, “but it is a ‘vision’ without image” (TI 23). This resistance is reproduced in the distance between the saying and the said as a reduction. However, Levinas’s aesthetics are almost entirely preoccupied with the reduction of reality to its representative shadow, and he rarely explores the optics of ethics beyond the need for this resistance to idolatrous images. In so doing, I argues, he misses out on a key externality that is increasingly confronting humanity, which is the fact that his entire living environment is the product of his own design and the phenomenological experience of the existential is now to a great extent the work of Others. ‘Design’ per se is also dominating the post-industrial economy to such an extent that the intellectual property invested in an object often greatly over-values that object itself in its utility and is what legitimates its authenticity. In other words, utility is secondary to the value in styles as novelties. Economies are shifting to economies of the creative, where objects and products don’t count nearly as much as their design content and fashionability. Cities of the present, long the primary site for utopian imagination, have embraced this shift with zeal.

Levinas’s aesthetic philosophy in part helps us resist domination by the constructed unreality of these trends, but it misses out on an important aspect: artistic creativity as keeping open the space in which his relational ethics is most powerful (cf. TI 84). The unaccountable excess between the active and ethical process of ‘saying’ versus the reductive and representative practice of the ‘said’ produces what Wayne Hudson calls the ‘utopian surplus’. This surplus, which is found in all cultural materials as a by-product of artistic creation, helps to generate utopian practices constituted of both reason (critique) and imagination (re-creation or re-iteration) because it recognizes that the ‘saying’ of an artist is immediately betrayed as a ‘said’ once it has been expressed as some phenomenological object. The artist, naturally, recognizes this effect and as a corollary of it is compelled to move on and create yet more works. Thus, as a constructivist political program, this utopianism

depends on establishing simple institutional arrangements across a very large number of organizations that make the consideration, evaluation and redesign of proposals for reform a normal part of organizational life... even though no overall utopia can ever be achieved (RU 6).

All activity thus remains a contemporary enterprise, but with the important addition of a utopian impulse which de-formalizes time itself, and which exceeds ‘time and narrative’ as a form of anti-foundational resistance. According to Levinas, the ‘time’ of universal history remains as the ontological ground in which particular existences are lost (TI 55), and it is only when “man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history” (TI 52). The utopian impulse as ethics as critique posits phenomenological moments in the system which are not designed to reconstitute it but rather transcend it iteratively and with the intention to be later exceeded. Constructivist moments as the saying thus conflict with other such moments, and never seek to provide the answer to manifold problems other than to offer another conflicting response from outside a predominant and conventional normative dialectic. These moments promote awareness of ethical choices for the different kinds of perfection that exist within specific contexts and which expose otherwise self-referential foundational claims and methods so often concealed by the social simulacrum. The result is the abandonment of either metaphysics or idealism as a monism -- particularly in the sense of the “national aestheticism” that Heidegger claimed was immanent and collective -- in favour of dis-aggregation and plurality (RU 27-28) which “opens the way for the utopian organizational perspective of non-uniformitarian community” of “critical cultures” and “a tensional conception of citizenship as a set of distributed comportments rather than a single ethic” (RU 77-79; 92-94). This is perhaps what we can say Levinas was referring to as the “relation without relation” (TI 271) where the “ethics as optics” is revealed ultimately as an ethical style of thinking. The conflict of these utopias linguistically produces values which are so vital to the negotiation of our contemporary world of excessive facticity, the question not of “what do we do now?” as Foucault left us with, but rather “now that we can do anything, what will we do?” as Nietzsche asked. This goes right to the heart of Levinas’s philosophy, which questions “the semantics of the verbal form ‘to be’ -- inevitable stations of Reason -- as the ultimate authorities in deciding what is meaningful” (EN, 198). Thus, instead of offering social imagination the image of a closed circle, this utopianism reflects the Derridean image of invagination, a constant folding and refolding upon the social fabric that is nevertheless productive rather than merely recursive. Utopia as politics is always a gesture to the ethical phenomenology of the infinite other as a responsibility and proximity to others and call to creation that knows no bounds.

4. Post-Script: uTOpia

It is always pleasing to say that a paper is not a work of pure speculation. There is today in the Canadian city of Toronto a working political movement that self-identifies as both unashamedly utopian and imaginatively aesthetic. In their book uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto they present a series of experiences imagining and applying the utopian aesthetic to a wide variety of social contexts, institutions, projects, and polities. Their efforts are works of both flesh and concrete, or what we might be tempted to characterize as ‘the face’ and the ‘saying.’ The simultaneity of their efforts evidences a sense of infinite phenomenological responsibility, incorporating into their projects aesthetics, the globalization of production and consumption, ecological sustainability, democracy, creative economy, and the building of new forms of community. Their projects are multiple and rapid-fire, with more ambitious and widely transformative efforts afoot. Their members are diverse, from academics to activists, workers to the homeless, poor and rich, and even the mayor of Toronto himself. At the conference, I will be speaking about the experience of this project in relation to Levinas’s philosophy and the reform of utopia, with a particular consideration of the legal dimension (or lack thereof) of their efforts.

An acute reading of the utopianism of J.S. Mill and Bentham in light of what follows can be found in chapter one of John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Nieghbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (London: MacMillan Academic Press, 1991).

February 12th, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing, in response to questions about phantom linkages between the government of Saddam Hussein and the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Transcript available online (last checked June 15th, 2006): http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t02122002_t212sdv2.html .

Simon Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction (London: Blackwell, 1992), 203 (hereafter ED).

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 34 (TI). I shall also refer to the following key books of Levinas, designated by the initials of their titles: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981) (OB); Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) (EN); Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998) (CCP).

Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas (trans. Alan Bass) (London: Routledge, 1978), 79-80 (WD).

A useful example of which are the lengthy contemplations in Proust’s Swanns Way of common everyday objects.

Hilary Putnam, ‘Levinas and Judaism’ in Simon Critchley (ed.) Cambridge Companion on Levinas (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42 (CCL).

See for example Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference and Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Levinas’s main aesthetic treatise is the rather short and rather dense ‘Reality and its Shadow’ in CPP.

A representative and popular example of which is Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). That this shift is expressed in terms of a “class” is quite revealing, and instances one example where a utopian ethic could intervene to recognize not a new “class” but a new mode of socio-economic living or Being altogether that defies this ideological framework and thus limits its potential for foundational change and reorganization.

Wayne Hudson, The Reform of Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 2-4 (RU).

The clearest example of this would likely be Jackson Pollock, who we view in this way as literally trying to capture the moment of the saying unmediated through any kind of convention. His kinetic style could be said to evidence an attempt to leap the chasm between Saying -- acting or doing -- and the said, the performitive doing that can not be reduced to a propositional description. But even these works were reified and canonized, and typically characterized as “something my kid could do.” This is, amusingly enough, the highest compliment possible according to the theory I am attempting to present here.

Here a useful comparison between Levinas’s post-structuralism and Marxist structuralism is made in a consideration of Ernst Bloch’s notion of time in utopia. A foreshadowing of Paul Ricouer’s Time and Narrative, Bloch’s notion of time nonetheless re-inscribes Marxist historicism back into his systematic imagination rather than freeing it from it. The very first words of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, for example, begins with a formulation that is indictable according to the theory presented here: “I am. We are. And that is enough.” A sustained consideration of resistance and aesthetics is found in Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Another useful comparison to Levinas would be Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in relation to Levinas’s central notion of ‘desire.’

Where would we locate this effort in the taxonomy of ethics as a philosophy? Probably in meta-ethics if anywhere. Levinas is emphatic that it is the relationship between Others that is ethical, and not that an ethics is a product of that relationship. As the other is infinite, the ethics of it is a first philosophical principle. For a worthwhile look at the relationship between ethics and imagination, see Nathan Tierney, Imagination and Ethical Ideals: Prospects for a Unified Philosophical and Psychological Understanding (New York: SUNY Press, 1994).

Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox (eds.), uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005).

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