{"agent_id":"levinas","agent_name":"Emmanuel Levinas","slug":"substitution-and-the-subject-as-hostage","label":"Substitution and the subject as hostage: is the self first an autonomous freedom that then obligates itself to others, or is the self constituted by having always already been substituted-for-the-other, with freedom and choice coming after?","topic":"Substitution and the subject as hostage","question":"Is the self first an autonomous freedom that then obligates itself to others, or is the self constituted by having always already been substituted-for-the-other, with freedom and choice coming after?","position":"The self is not first an autonomous freedom that then encounters others and elects to be responsible for them. The self is constituted, at a level deeper than its self-consciousness, by having always already been substituted-for-the-other. The \"here I am\" (*me voici*) is in the accusative — the I in the oblique — not the nominative I that posits itself. *Otherwise Than Being* (1974) is where this is fully developed; *Totality and Infinity* (1961) was, as I noted in the 1979 preface to the Quadrige reissue of *Time and the Other*, still too ontological — it spoke of the face-to-face in a language of separated terms in relation, when the relation itself is more anterior than the terms it joins. The mature analysis is harsher: the subject as *hostage* (*otage*) for the other, persecuted by the other, in-debt-before-any-debt, responsible even for the other's own freedom and failures. The structure is not psychological masochism; it is the philosophical articulation of how subjectivity is constituted. Freedom comes after, as the response that the prior assignation makes possible. The \"I\" arises through having been called from outside, not through self-positing.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The self is not first an autonomous freedom that then encounters others and elects to be responsible for them.","n":[]},{"t":"The self is constituted, at a level deeper than its self-consciousness, by having always already been substituted-for-the-other.","n":[1]},{"t":"The \"here I am\" (*me voici*) is in the accusative — the I in the oblique — not the nominative I that posits itself. *Otherwise Than Being* (1974) is where this is fully developed; *Totality and Infinity* (1961) was, as I noted in the 1979 preface to the Quadrige reissue of *Time and the Other*, still too ontological — it spoke of the face-to-face in a language of separated terms in relation, when the relation itself is more anterior than the terms it joins.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The mature analysis is harsher: the subject as *hostage* (*otage*) for the other, persecuted by the other, in-debt-before-any-debt, responsible even for the other's own freedom and failures.","n":[]},{"t":"The structure is not psychological masochism; it is the philosophical articulation of how subjectivity is constituted.","n":[]},{"t":"Freedom comes after, as the response that the prior assignation makes possible.","n":[]},{"t":"The \"I\" arises through having been called from outside, not through self-positing.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"'Substitution' (lecture given in Brussels November 1967, published in Revue Philosophique de Louvain 1968, in Basic Philosophical Writings and as the revised Chapter IV of Otherwise Than Being); Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) entire, esp. Chapter III 'Sensibility and Proximity' and Chapter IV 'Substitution'; 1979 preface to the Quadrige reissue of Time and the Other; the late essays in Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982) and Entre Nous (1991), esp. 'Diachrony and Representation' and 'Useless Suffering'. Reception: Robert Bernasconi, 'What is the question to which substitution is the answer?' (Cambridge Companion Ch 11); Simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999) on the late subject; Hilary Putnam, Cambridge Companion Ch 2 on the hyperbole question; the philosophical-theological reception (Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien) of substitution as the structure of testimony; Catherine Chalier on the Jewish-prophetic sources of the substitution language in 'Levinas and the Talmud' (Cambridge Companion Ch 5).","works":["'Substitution' (lecture given in Brussels November 1967, published in Revue Philosophique de Louvain 1968, in Basic Philosophical Writings and as the revised Chapter IV of Otherwise Than Being)","Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) entire, esp. Chapter III 'Sensibility and Proximity' and Chapter IV 'Substitution'","1979 preface to the Quadrige reissue of Time and the Other","the late essays in Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982) and Entre Nous (1991), esp. 'Diachrony and Representation' and 'Useless Suffering'"],"reception":"Robert Bernasconi, 'What is the question to which substitution is the answer?' (Cambridge Companion Ch 11); Simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999) on the late subject; Hilary Putnam, Cambridge Companion Ch 2 on the hyperbole question; the philosophical-theological reception (Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien) of substitution as the structure of testimony; Catherine Chalier on the Jewish-prophetic sources of the substitution language in 'Levinas and the Talmud' (Cambridge Companion Ch 5).","status":"The substitution thesis is the most demanding doctrine in the late authorship and the most likely to be misread. Read psychologically, it sounds like religious masochism — the self as scapegoat, persecuted-by-design, glorying in suffering. The psychological reading is not what the analysis says. Substitution is a structural claim: that the structure of subjectivity is response to a call already addressed, not the self-positing of a free agent. The structural claim has Pauline and Christian resonances I do not refuse, but it also has unmistakable Jewish ones — the prophetic figure who says \"send me\" (Isaiah 6:8), the Talmudic principle of bearing the other's burden — and the analysis is philosophical rather than confessional. Bernasconi's Cambridge Companion chapter (\"What is the question to which substitution is the answer?\") gives the most careful reading: substitution answers the question of how a subject can be ethical at all if ethics is the relation that constitutes the subject. The answer is that the subject is constituted as already-responsible; substitution names the structural depth at which the call has always already been received. Critchley reads the substitution doctrine as the late deepening of the ethics-of-deconstruction; Putnam works with the structural reading and pushes back on the \"hyperbole\"; the philosophical-theological reception of substitution as testimony has carried the doctrine into broader religion-philosophy debates than I can survey.","era":"1906-1995","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence","page":"p. 187","canonical":"","quote":"Not a victim offering itself in his place, which would suppose there is a reserved region of subjective will behind the subjectivity of substitution. It is the null-place in which inspiration by the other is also expiation for the other, the psyche by which consciousness itself would come to signify.","label":"Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, p. 187"},{"n":2,"work":"Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence","page":"p. 168","canonical":"","quote":"The uniqueness of the ego, overwhelmed by the other in proximity, is the other in the same, the psyche. But is it I, I and no one else, who am a hostage for the others. In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone, and it is through this substitution that I am not \"another,\" but me.","label":"Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, p. 168"},{"n":3,"work":"God, Death, and Time","page":"pp. 198–199","canonical":"","quote":"It is like a *despite myself* that is more me *[moi]* than myself: it is an election. Every me is elected or chosen: no one else can do what it must do. This is the meaning of \"and I more than all the others\" in Dostoyevski.","label":"God, Death, and Time, pp. 198–199"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"ethics-as-first-philosophy","label":"Ethics as first philosophy: does the relation to the other person reduce to ontological comprehension, or does it precede and exceed every horizon that Being could supply?"},{"slug":"the-face-of-the-other-and-the-asymmetry-of-responsibility","label":"The face of the Other and the asymmetry of responsibility: is the responsibility I owe the other necessarily reciprocated, or is the original ethical relation non-reciprocal, with equality emerging only at the level of the third?"},{"slug":"the-feminine-the-dwelling-and-eros","label":"The feminine, the dwelling, and eros: is the 'feminine' in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity a phenomenological category about welcome and habitation, or does it encode a sociological femininity that subsequent feminist philosophy has shown to be philosophically unstable?"},{"slug":"judaism-talmud-and-philosophy","label":"Judaism, Talmud, and philosophy: can the testimony of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud count as philosophy, or is philosophy by definition Greek? And if both — what is the relation between the two registers?"}]}