Levinas... a possible opening?

 An attitude that Levinas defines under the idea of the “feminine.” This term, which Levinas associates with “weakness,” “fragility,” “sweetness,” “passiveness,” and “absence of language,” has given rise to numerous criticisms by feminist theorists. The first such criticism came from Simone de Beauvoir, who, after the publication of Le Temps et l’Autre in 1979, wrote that Levinas approached the man-woman dialectic viewing man as the subject and woman as the Other. Without delving into a debate on Levinasian terminology, I will adopt the contrary position taken by scholars like Chalier (2007), Chanter (2001), Ainley (2001), and Cassigoli (2008), who see a possible opening in Levinas’s ideas for reflections on feminism. According to Tina Chanter, for example, de Beauvoir’s criticism of Levinas “fails to engage with Levinas’s overall philosophical project, which is to elevate the notion of alterity above the notion of totality,” understanding the feminine as “outside of being” and as a “disruption of the virile categories of mastery, domination and self-possession” (Chanter 2001, 2 and 16). From this perspective, through the feminine Levinas was not trying so much to “define the essence of woman as to seek concrete concepts for presenting the Other” (Dubost 2006, 334).

In Figures du féminin, Catherine Chalier explores these concepts based on the premise that the feminine is crucial in Levinas’s work not only for “thinking about difference” but also for “the destruction of the self” and the “liberation of a space of transcendence which he [Levinas] calls ‘metaphysical’” (Chalier 2007, 9). Through a gaze opposed to possession and mastery, Akerman’s heroines make an appeal for difference and for the disruption of the virile categories of domination to which Chanter refers. But what is the space of transcendence that they open up? This has to be looked for in the place to which the Other’s gaze does not have access: the space that the heroine preserves of herself as a being separate from the Other, which Simon cannot see of Ariane, which she conceives in her dreams, in her bedroom. “The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation,” suggests Levinas (1979, 155). For Chalier, inhabitation is one of the concepts that Levinas understands in feminine terms, because it marks the beginning of separation and cultivates a new language, a language of equality with the other (the “face to face” in Levinasian terminology), but also of intimacy in that it cultivates language through separation from the Other. Levinas conceives it this way: “Inhabitation and the intimacy of the dwelling which make the separation of the human being possible thus imply a first revelation of the Other” (Levinas 1979, 151).