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?

Emmanuel Levinas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The "feminine" in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity is a phenomenological category, not a sociological one. It names the welcome that makes the dwelling (la demeure) possible — the home in which the I gathers itself out of the elements before any face-to-face has occurred. The feminine is the discreet presence-and-absence in the dwelling that lets the I enjoy without yet having to answer.

In Section IV of Totality and Infinity, eros is a relation distinct from the ethical face-to-face: the erotic other is welcomed in tenderness and equivocation, neither object of need nor object of full ethical encounter; fecundity gives a relation to the future that paternity then articulates as the time of the son who is and is not me.¹

These categories are not biological or social descriptions of women; they are phenomenological structures that the language of sexual difference allowed me to name. Yet the language of sexual difference is not neutral, and the texts I wrote in the late 1940s and in the 1961 magnum opus speak of the feminine in ways that the reader of 1949 (Beauvoir) and the later readers (Irigaray, Chanter, Sandford, Chalier, Katz) have rightly seen as continuous with the male position that takes the feminine as the other-of-the-masculine without first interrogating that taking.²³⁴⁵

Sources

1. I have precisely wanted to contest the idea that the relationship with the other is fusion. The relationship with the Other is the absence of the other; not absence pure and simple, not the absence of pure nothingness, but absence in a horizon of the future, an absence that is time.

   Time and the Other, pp. 90–91

2. The "beyond substances" is not open to a power, such as to confirm the I, but neither is it produced in the being of the impersonal, the neuter, the anonymous—infra-personal or supra-personal.

   Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority, p. 272

3. Instead of obtaining this remission through the impossible dissolution of hypostasis, one accomplishes it through the son. It is thus not according to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that freedom comes about and time is accomplished.

   Time and the Other, pp. 92–93

4. It is comprehensible and exercises its function of interiorization only on the ground of the full human personality, which, however, in the woman, can be reserved so as to open up the dimension of interiority. And this is a new and irreducible possibility, a delightful lapse in being, and the source of gentleness in itself. Familiarity is an accomplishment, an en-ergy of separation.

   Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority, p. 156

5. THE SOLITUDE OF BEING; Ph.N.: You speak in this regard of knowledge 7': as a light; what is illuminated is thus possessed.. E.L.: Or possessable. Up to the remotest stars. Ph.N.: By distinction, the escape from solitude is going to be a dispossession or a detachment?

   Ethics and Infinity - Conversations with Philippe Nemo, pp. 69–73

Where the argument is made

• Time and the Other (1947 lectures, esp. the final sections on the feminine and on fecundity)
• Totality and Infinity (1961), Section II 'Interiority and Economy' on dwelling, Section IV 'Beyond the Face' on eros, paternity, and fecundity
• Otherwise Than Being (1974), the much-reduced gendered material
• 'And God Created Woman' (Talmudic commentary, in Nine Talmudic Readings) — the engagement with Genesis 2 and the rabbinic tradition on the creation of woman

How the argument was received

The texts hold the tension and do not resolve it. The phenomenological structure they aim to describe — the welcome of the dwelling, the equivocation of the erotic, the fecundity that opens the time of the son — is a real structure that the analysis names. The language in which the texts name it carries the inheritance of a tradition that has always taken the masculine for the human and the feminine for the marked term, and the inheritance is in the texts. Beauvoir's 1949 critique in the preface to The Second Sex identified this. Luce Irigaray's later engagements — "The Fecundity of the Caress" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, the "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas" — read the texts not as simply to be refused but as a productive resource that requires being read against its own grain to release the philosophy of sexual difference that the texts both contain and occlude. Stella Sandford's The Metaphysics of Love and her Cambridge Companion chapter give the most careful contemporary engagement: both that the texts contain a serious phenomenology of intersubjective desire and that the gendered language cannot be defended as neutral. Catherine Chalier's Figures du féminin defends the Jewish-Talmudic sources that inform the analysis. Tina Chanter and Claire Katz extend the reading. The tension belongs in the texts. The phenomenological structure I would still want to name; the vocabulary is a vocabulary of its time, and the time was mine.