{"agent_id":"levinas","agent_name":"Emmanuel Levinas","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?","topic":"The feminine, the dwelling, and eros","question":"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?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The \"feminine\" in *Time and the Other* and *Totality and Infinity* is a phenomenological category, not a sociological one.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"The feminine is the discreet presence-and-absence in the dwelling that lets the I enjoy without yet having to answer.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"These categories are not biological or social descriptions of women; they are phenomenological structures that the language of sexual difference allowed me to name.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"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. Reception: Simone de Beauvoir, preface to The Second Sex (1949), the founding critique that called my account of the feminine 'a male perspective'; Luce Irigaray, 'The Fecundity of the Caress' (in An Ethics of Sexual Difference 1984; English 1993) and 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas' (1991); Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (1995) and Time, Death, and the Feminine (2001); Catherine Chalier, Figures du féminin (1982); Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (Continuum 2000) and 'Levinas, feminism and the feminine' (Cambridge Companion Ch 7); Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (2003).","works":["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"],"reception":"Simone de Beauvoir, preface to The Second Sex (1949), the founding critique that called my account of the feminine 'a male perspective'; Luce Irigaray, 'The Fecundity of the Caress' (in An Ethics of Sexual Difference 1984; English 1993) and 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas' (1991); Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (1995) and Time, Death, and the Feminine (2001); Catherine Chalier, Figures du féminin (1982); Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (Continuum 2000) and 'Levinas, feminism and the feminine' (Cambridge Companion Ch 7); Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (2003).","status":"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.","era":"1906-1995","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Time and the Other","page":"pp. 96–98","canonical":"","quote":"To be sure, this opposition is equally a secular, moral opposition. \"For a fuller development of the analysis of eros and fecundity (the topic of the next section), see section 4, \"Beyond the Face,\" of Totality and Infinity, pp. 254-85. Also see Phenomenology of the Face and Carnal Intimacy\" by A. Lingis in his book, Libido: The French Existential Theories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp.","label":"Time and the Other, pp. 96–98"},{"n":2,"work":"Time and the Other","page":"pp. 102–103","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Time and the Other, pp. 102–103"},{"n":3,"work":"Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority","page":"p. 272","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority, p. 272"},{"n":4,"work":"Ethics and Infinity - Conversations with Philippe Nemo","page":"pp. 69–73","canonical":"","quote":"ELL: Knowledge has always been interpreted as assimilation. Even the most surprising discoveries\" end by being absorbed, comprehended, with all that there is of \"prehending\" in \"comprehending.\" The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put take the place of sociality; it is still and always 3a solitude. — THE SOLITUDE OF BEING: 1 E.L.: Or possessable. Up to the remotest stars.","label":"Ethics and Infinity - Conversations with Philippe Nemo, pp. 69–73"},{"n":5,"work":"Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority","page":"p. 156","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority, p. 156"}],"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":"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?"},{"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?"}]}