On Not Knowing the Other, or Learning from Levinas

Abstract

What has recently been coined the ethical turn in philosophy — and there is certainly evidence of this turn in educational theory as well — has been noticeably inflected by an emerging interest in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 1 who is described by one literary critic as " offering the gift of ethicity. " 2 This gift is marked by Levinas's attention to the category of the Other as a necessary condition for ethical interaction and his insistence upon an ego-less and non-conscious passivity in relation to being responsible for that Other. Ethics, in his view, is rendered less in terms of consciousness and agency, which are the usual hallmarks of moral theory and education, and more on a " pre-originary " susceptibility and openness to Otherness. It is precisely for these reasons that educational theorists have either turned to Levinas in order to reconsider notions of responsibility as a relation across differ-ence, or have been skeptical about how his work can address difference in education at all. While I place myself firmly in the former camp, I wish to begin this essay by exploring what some of the worries and concerns are with respect to Levinas's view of the Other and his insistence on susceptibility as a condition for responsibility. I then want to consider how learning from and not merely about Levinas might help us to work through those worries and to read education differently. EDUCATION, ETHICS AND THE VIOLENCE OF KNOWING For those who are skeptical, it appears that Levinas's privileging of the Other serves to reify the very otherness that has been at the heart of hideous inequity and social violence. Moreover, emphasizing non-conscious openness seems to leave education with little to do, for how can it address itself to a non-knowledge that cannot be taught? How can an ethical theory that relies so heavily on the category of Other be at all helpful? To put the question rather crassly, what can we do with Levinas?