Europe and embodiment: a Levinasian perspective

ENThe meaning and status of embodiment in Levinas philosophy is located in a different perspective in James Mensch’s essay, “Europe and Embodiment: A Levinasian Perspective.” Here the issue is not the subjectivity of a person or persons, but the subjectivity and subjectivities, as it were, of nations. Mensch questions the commonly understood European account of identity within the universality of rational thought by recalling another term for another universality, katholikos, which while referring to universality does so by signifying “according to the whole.” “What is the whole according to which we can think the identity of Europe?” is Mensch’s question. Applying Levinasian conceptions to European nations would mean a transforming of current self-understanding, leading to a new definition of the nation or state not in terms of force relations but rather as responses and responsibilities, the nation thought in relation to alterity. The unicity of European nations would then have to be rethought not in relation to powers, and struggle for dominance, but by their responsibilities to one another. Raising the question of radical uniqueness, of national self-identity, Mensch turns to Lcvinas’s notion of the body and embodiment. Body not only binds us to the world but also sets up a nonrepresentability and nonsubstitutability independence. As Poleschuk’s essay elaborates, such a perspective—the body as vulnerable—immediately introduces ethics into the equation. Mensch draws the parallel with nations, social relations, as “embodied,” going beyond current political theories of self-interest to factor in the ethical responsibilities and obligations to which Levinas draws attention. As with Keintzel’s introduction of the Third, for Mensch ethical responsibility would thus extend beyond the face-to-face to issues of national identity, and to issues of international and transnational relations.