Responding to “The Scandal of Skepticism”: Levinas and Cavell

Abstract

My paper interrogates Levinas’s and Cavell’s responses to skepticism. Contrary to Cavell’s reading of Levinas, I argue that Levinas’s reading of Descartes is closer to Cavell’s reading than Cavell might admit. I show that Levinas’s account of the “saying” of “illeity” contributes to a moral language which aligns with Cavell’s non-theistic concept of “passionate utterance” which likewise informs his concept of “moral perfectionism.” For Levinas, illeity refers to the absent condition of an encounter with another; it is the very act of effacement, the act of undoing which indirectly accounts for responsibility. For Cavell, passionate utterance is a form of language which reveals a self moving between a self-conforming “attained self ” and a self moving against itself toward an “unattained yet attainable self.” As “doubled and divided”, there is an inherent failure or absence obtaining to subjectivity, which for both Levinas and Cavell paradoxically provides an opening for moral responsibility.