1. What is substitution? A critique of an “ethical” reading

Otherwise than being can perhaps be seen as the ultimate formulation of Levinas’s critique of the sovereign subject. Whilst Totality and infinity began from an already existing subject whose sovereignty is called into question by another in the relation with the face, Otherwise than being begins from the claim that the other is always already within the same, a situation which Levinas ultimately conceptualizes in terms of substitution in chapter 4 of the same name. But although substitution forms the “centerpiece” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, xlviii) of Otherwise than being and perhaps of Levinas’s later thinking as such, this does not mean that the argument of the book should be understood to proceed in any progressive order. Indeed, in the first chapter, Levinas writes: “The different concepts that come up in the attempt to state transcendence echo one another” (19). The chronological exposition of the chapters thus does not reflect the relation between the themes addressed; rather, each chapter echoes, speaks, or breathes through the others (19). Thus, although I focus here on the notion of substitution insofar as it forms Levinas’s ultimate attempt to “state transcendence,” the themes of sensibility and proximity—addressed earlier in the book—are always already implied in this notion of substitution.Footnote ⁶

To understand what is at stake in and what is meant by the notion of substitution, it is necessary to go back, for a moment, to Levinas’s early formulation, from the 1930s and 1940s, of transcendence as the need to escape identity, of which bodily materiality is, at this stage in his thinking, considered the ultimate manifestation. Through a phenomenology of embodiment, Levinas describes how a being is bound or “riveted” to its Being, generating an impossible need to escape this Being. This need for escape is thus not simply the need to escape a property of one’s being; rather, it is the need to break with this being itself: “Thus, escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I (moi) is oneself (soi-même)” (Levinas Reference Levinas2003, 55). In On escape, he argues that the experience of shame is emblematic of the need for escape insofar as shame involves an exposure of oneself in one’s very being, and thus of the impossibility of fleeing oneself. Shame is thus not linked to any contingent features but rather to one’s very existence as a body that takes up space in the world: “the fault consists not in the lack of propriety but almost in the very fact of having a body, of being there (d’être là)” (Levinas 2003, 67; Reference Levinas1982, 117).Footnote ⁷ Analogous to shame is the feeling of nausea which “sticks to us” insofar as “the state of nausea that precedes vomiting, and from which vomiting will deliver us, encloses us on all sides. Yet it does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from the inside” (Levinas Reference Levinas2003, 66).

The need for escape should not be understood as the need to get to a noumenal world behind the phenomenal one, nor is it a desire for death. Rather, the need for escape expresses the paradox of having to escape one’s self-identity without annihilation. Levinas thus formulates this ambiguous need for escape in the early work not in terms of a transcendence but rather of an excendence, denoting the need to get out (ex) of being rather than to get beyond or across (trans) (Levinas 1978, 15; Reference Levinas2003, 54). Yet in the early works, Levinas does not find a satisfactory answer to the question of how, exactly, such an escape might be possible. Pleasure appears, at first sight, as a possible escape, but it ultimately fails insofar as it casts us back to ourselves at the very moment it appears to deliver us outside of ourselves (Levinas Reference Levinas2003, 62). Whilst Levinas finds resources for his early critique of identity within a phenomenology of embodiment, then, the body remains, at this stage of his thinking, at once the manifestation of the need for, and the obstacle to, any escape from identity.

If the need for escape is formulated as the impossible need to break with one’s self-identity, such an escape, as Levinas suggests as early as Time and the Other, will only be possible through the relation with the Other. In this text, hypostasis, the act through which the I posits itself as a self-identical ego, is conceptualized as the solitude or solipsism of the ego which by definition could only be broken by an other. Levinas asks the familiar question of how a relation with the other is possible which neither annihilates my own self nor reduces the other’s alterity (Levinas Reference Levinas1987, 77). This question, he writes, “is the very problem of the preservation of the ego in transcendence” (77; see also Levinas Reference Levinas1969, 274), expressing the paradoxical notion that the ego must escape its own identity without annihilating itself in the process. How, then, might such an escape be possible through the relation with the other?

Levinas’s solution to the need for escape in Totality and infinity takes the form of fecundity which is thought as a simultaneous continuation of the subject only through the discontinuity that the new child brings, yet as the feminist literature has rightly argued, this notion ultimately fails given its conceptualization as paternity.Footnote ⁸ Thus, it becomes not only politically problematic but also ontologically untenable. Whilst the idea of fecundity sees the possibility for escape in having a child, with the notion of substitution in Otherwise than being, Levinas makes the more fundamental claim that the subject has always already “escaped” through its pre-originary substitution for another. The notion of substitution, then, begins not from a solitary subject whose sovereignty must then be questioned by the other, but rather from the premise that the subject is always already interrupted by the other. This means that, “from the start, the other affects us despite ourselves” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 129), hence the move from the subject as a host to the subject as hostage.

According to Levinas, the subject has always already substituted herself for another prior to any consciousness, perception, or reflection, in a past that has never been present: “Substitution is not an act; it is a passivity inconvertible into an act, the hither side of the act-passivity alternative” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 117). The notion of substitution, then, provides us with a conceptualization of the subject as always already questioned by the other, thus always already “freed” from the enchainment to herself. Levinas argues that this originary opening qualifies subjectivity as always already “ethical,” in his specific sense of this term. Yet whilst the specific meaning of the term “ethical” in describing subjectivity per se has received a significant amount of attention in the literature (and we shall return to this in a moment),Footnote ⁹ the question of the specific meaning of substitution has received surprisingly little.Footnote ¹⁰ What does substitution mean? At what level might we make sense of this notion? I will argue, and we shall see this in more detail in the following sections, that the way in which the notion of substitution must be thought for it to make concrete sense is at a bodily level.

Indeed, Levinas analyzes substitution in increasingly visceral terms, although he never defines it as a notion that has a specifically bodily signification. Yet the notion of substitution forms an account of the prehistory of the subject, describing an anarchic and immemorial time that comes before and, in an absolute sense, cannot be recuperated by the subject, although it remains as a trace that continuously disrupts any claims to sovereignty: “The subjectivity as the other in the same, as an inspiration, is the putting into question of all affirmation for-oneself, all egoism born again in this very recurrence” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 111). I want to argue, although Levinas never goes this far, that these descriptions can be made sense of concretely in relation to the time of gestation and, correlatively, in relation to the fact of having been born. Indeed, the fact that all (human) bodies are born from the body of another perhaps forms the strongest critique of the sovereign subject.

This is perhaps part of the reason why Levinas, in Otherwise than being (but not in the 1968 text, “Substitution,” which forms the basis for chapter 4 of the same name in Otherwise than being), employs the figures of pregnancy and maternity,Footnote ¹¹ the “gestation of the other in the same” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 75), as the model for substitution:

Whilst the feminine, in Totality and infinity, was excluded from ethics per se, in Otherwise than being, the maternal body is thought to be emblematic of the ethical relation, of “the-one-for-another.” What is the significance of this from a feminist perspective?

It is important at this point to note that Levinas’s notion of the ethical is not reducible to an ethics or a morality (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 120) but rather describes what the subject must be like—always already opened, questioned by the other—for something like empirical ethical acts to be possible (117; see also Bernasconi 2004). One could argue, then, that the “ethical” relation of substitution is merely the name for a rethinking of subjectivity which does not in itself carry any normative significance. Yet Levinas nonetheless characterizes the “ethical” relation of substitution itself in increasingly normative terms: “The ego is not an entity “capable” of expiating for the others: it is this original expiation” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 118). And: “The uniqueness of the self is the very fact of bearing the fault of another” (112). These descriptions compromise any claim that the “ethical” describes a normatively neutral condition of possibility for empirical ethical acts.Footnote ¹² Instead, with the notion of the ethical, Levinas effectively reconceptualizes subjectivity as constituted in and through its responsibility for the other.

The notion of responsibility here does not refer to the capacity of a conscious agent to act in accordance with her moral principles but rather describes a situation in which the Other affects me and obliges me to respond to her prior to any consciousness or choice, and where the other always has priority over the self. Responsibility is “the impossibility of evading the assignation of the other without blame” or “deficiency” (carence) (Levinas 2016, 112; Reference Levinas1974, 142). The self is “incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give” (105; my emphasis). And we could find many similar passages. Of course, Levinas’s reason for characterizing responsibility as having taken hold of the subject prior to any consciousness or choice rests on his attempt to avoid reverting into a conception of the sovereign subject who “chooses” whom to respond to and whom to ignore, or who acts morally only for self-serving purposes. Yet given his hyperbolic use of language, positing the pregnant/maternal body as emblematic of the ethical relation raises at least two problems for any feminist reader, the first pertaining to the normative idea of the self-sacrificing mother reflected and reinforced by this model, and the second pertaining to the problem of abortion.

Defenders of Levinas argue, in various ways, that the maternal body should be understood not in a literal sense as referring to actual women but rather as a metaphor that plays a specific role within and lends rhetorical support to Levinas’s philosophy (Rosato Reference Rosato2012; Evans Reference Evans2017; Reitman Reference Reitman2021). Yet as Stella Sandford rightly points out—in relation to the category of the feminine in Totality and infinity but equally applicable to that of maternity in Otherwise than being—any metaphor necessarily refers, at some level, to the empirical content from which it draws its meaning, and so the notion of the maternal cannot be understood in any meaningful sense in abstraction from the empirical situation of motherhood (Sandford Reference Sandford2000, 58–59). The maternal body, then, only works as a meaningful metaphor or model for the ethical relation because maternity is traditionally understood in terms that very much reflect Levinas’s notion of ethics: putting the other before oneself, tearing the bread out of one’s own mouth, in short, the selfless and self-sacrificing mother.

Failing to recognize the relation between the category of the feminine and empirical women, or that of the maternal and empirical mothers, as Sandford argues, not only ignores the way in which a metaphor works as a meaningful rhetorical/literary device; it also fails to appreciate the way in which concepts influence or structure our understanding of the empirical content to which those concepts refer: “The descriptive and/or ideological content of the notion of the feminine cannot simply be dismissed as unrepresentative of empirical women because how we understand what it is to be an empirical woman is influenced—to some extent, that is, constituted—by this (and other) notions of the feminine” (Sandford Reference Sandford2000, 49). Thus, any responsible implementation of the notion of the “feminine” or the “maternal” must consider not only its theoretical functioning within a given philosophy and the empirical content from which it draws its meaning, but also the political stakes involved in its employment. Whilst the situation of parenthood is perhaps the only case in which Levinas’s controversial claim that ethics means being responsible even for the faults of the other (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 75) resonates somewhat phenomenologically, then, it is telling that it is the maternal, and not the parental, that is Levinas’s example. Traditionally, the mother, not the father, was expected to sacrifice herself for others, this being most obviously the case insofar as it is women who, willingly or unwillingly, can bear children and whose social role has historically been reduced to their reproductive capacities.

This leads us to the second and perhaps more serious problem with the modeling of a Levinasian conception of ethics upon the maternal body. This problem pertains to the fact that such a conceptualization compromises the attempt to think abortion in ethical terms. Indeed, when thought as emblematic of the pregnant/maternal body, Levinas’s hyperbolic characterization of responsibility risks perpetuating all sorts of normative ideas about motherhood which have traditionally worked to justify the coercion of women into bearing children, even if this is not Levinas’s point. As a result, the feminist reader committed to a Levinasian conception of ethics is compelled either to reject the maternal body as a model for ethics, or to find a way to think abortion and ethics together.

The best example of the latter is Lisa Guenther’s book The gift of the other: Levinas and the politics of reproduction in which she develops a maternal ethics which is not exclusively bound up with empirical women. Emphasizing Levinas’s assertion that the ethical relation is “like a maternal body,”Footnote ¹³ (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 67) Guenther writes:

Guenther is careful to emphasize the importance of recognizing that “[w]hile anyone, male or female, may become ‘like’ a maternal body, only a woman can become pregnant, and only a woman can be faced with her own unwanted pregnancy” (141) and hence the importance of recognizing the real historical situation which has traditionally coerced women into bearing children.Footnote ¹⁴ To do this, Guenther argues, maternal ethics needs a feminist politics which she develops from Levinas’s notion of the third (138).

Yet whilst Guenther makes a convincing case for the need for a feminist politics to keep maternal ethics “in check,” I am not convinced that she manages to sufficiently respond to the problem of modeling a Levinasian conception of ethics upon the maternal body in the first place. Responding to the objection that modeling the ethical relation upon the maternal body reinforces the normative idea of the selfless mother, Guenther argues that this notion of self-sacrifice amounts to a misunderstanding of what Levinas means by “ethics.” Levinas’s notion of ethical subjectivity, she argues, is not reducible to a pure self-sacrifice and hence does not simply reflect the normative notion of the selfless mother: “The traditional image of the mother as pure selflessness, pure sacrifice to the Other, amounts not to ethics but to the empty ideal of a nonself” (Guenther Reference Guenther2006, 111–12). A few pages on, she elaborates: “The persecution of the hostage is not the same as self-sacrifice; in bearing the fault of the Other and forgiving for him, I become uniquely myself. My own flesh acquires a new, ethical significance in being given to the Other whom it bears” (126–27).

It is true, of course, that the ethical, on Levinas’s account, does not annihilate subjectivity but rather describes an a priori disruption of sovereignty which gives rise to a new kind of “ethical” subjectivity. Yet employing the maternal body as the model par excellence for this kind of subjectivity remains problematic insofar as it perpetuates normative ideas about motherhood as the supreme responsibility for others before oneself, rather than imagining different ways of thinking about motherhood that are not stuck within patriarchal ideals. Guenther seeks to resist the dichotomy between, on the one hand, a conservative antifeminist myth that casts women as naturally self-sacrificing mothers, and, on the other, a liberal feminist myth that argues that, insofar as women have historically been reduced to their biological function of reproduction, they must be liberated from motherhood as such (Guenther Reference Guenther2006, 9). Guenther explains that, whilst the first myth reduces women to their biological function of reproduction, the second myth contests the first myth but in overprivileging the autonomous and sovereign subject, it advances a reading according to which “any gift is a loss, a theft, a diminishment of what’s properly one’s own” (9). We might add that this second myth inadvertently affirms the patriarchal notion of a sovereign subject rather than questioning sovereignty as such.

Yet whilst Guenther seeks to avoid the double myth of pure submission and pure sovereignty in the development of a maternal ethics, the hyperbolic ethical language which she adopts from Levinas—of hostage, persecution, expiation—compromises the attempt to find this middle way.Footnote ¹⁵ It appears, then, that a feminist reading encounters a problem when it comes to understanding substitution as a pre-reflective—that is, as I will argue in more detail in the next sections, effectively a bodily process—which is emblematic of a Levinasian conception of ethics. Whilst this poses a problem that anyone committed to Levinas’s ethics must address, I want to take this as a cue for a heterodox reading which does not necessarily think of substitution as bound up with a Levinasian conception of ethics. What is left, then, if we dislodge Levinas’s analyses from the hyperbolic ethical framework with which his work is otherwise so strongly associated or even identified? What is left, as I will argue in the remainder of this article, is a thinking on time as bound up with the pre-reflective dimension of bodily life which can help us formulate a concept of the body as an original intercorporeality through the fact of having been born.

2. Before the first breath: an ontological reading of substitutionFootnote ¹⁶

Two different modalities of sensibility are implicitly at work in Levinas’s philosophy. Whilst the first designates the digestive movement of enjoyment through which the body nourishes itself from that which is other to it (Levinas Reference Levinas1969, 111), the second describes the incapacity of the body to digest or assimilate the sensible materiality of the world or another living body.Footnote ¹⁷ As such, conceptualizing these two modalities in the terms of assimilative and non-assimilative sensibility helps us make sense of their ambiguous functioning within Levinas’s work.Footnote ¹⁸ Whilst in Totality and infinity, assimilative and non-assimilative sensibility are thought as two distinct modalities, in Otherwise than being, these two modalities collide at various levels in Levinas’s evocations of the pregnant body. The gestation of life cannot ultimately be “chosen,” and thus Levinas characterizes sensibility in terms of a passivity or a “non-initiative [that] is older than any present” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 75). Pregnancy does not immediately lend itself to knowledge or perception of it and hence “sensibility is being affected by a non-phenomenon, a being put in question by the alterity of the other, before the intervention of a cause, before the appearing of the other” (75).

Levinas describes this situation in terms of persecution: “Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity, the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne?” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 75). Levinas’s hyperbolic evocation of pregnancy in terms of persecution and suffering serve to emphasize, in an exaggerated way, the non-assimilative sensibility that partly characterizes the modality of coexistence of mother and fetus. Despite the absolute dependence of the fetus upon the mother for its survival and development, they yet remain irreducible to one another: “To be in contact is neither to invest the other and annul his alterity, nor to suppress myself in the other” (86). The contact of mother and fetus is then not reducible to an assimilation of one by the other; rather, what at once separates and binds the two bodies is conceptualizable as the sensible materiality from which all living bodies are ultimately formed.

Whilst the analyses of enjoyment in Totality and infinity describe the situation of an already born body that lives from and is immersed in the elemental (Levinas Reference Levinas1969, 147), the analyses of substitution in Otherwise than being evoke the capacity of the sensible materiality of a living body to generate and sustain new life from within itself. For this new life to form, the pregnant body differentiates itself from itself to make room within itself for the other. With this comes necessarily a disruption from within of any coinciding of the body with itself. Levinas characterizes this situation as an escape or a transcendence of identity from within: “It is not a flight into the void, but a movement into fullness, the anguish of contraction and breakup” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 108). Playing on the meanings of the word “anguish” or angoisse whose etymology describes it not only as a state of distress but also as physical pain from constriction or narrowness, Levinas characterizes this situation in terms of suffering and restlessness.Footnote ¹⁹

If, as we saw above, Levinas had previously understood physical suffering as the ultimate manifestation of the impossibility of escaping bodily materiality and identity, in Otherwise than being, a certain conceptualization of physical suffering becomes emblematic of the way in which the body has always already “escaped” identity through having the other within itself. Yet this does not mean that transcendence as an escape from identity is possible only through the specific case of pregnancy; this would place an undue burden on women to bear children. Rather, the case of pregnancy is highlighted insofar as it illustrates par excellence the fact that all (human) bodies were born from the body of another, and in this sense, as we shall see in the next section, all living bodies retain a trace of the other within themselves which in advance and continuously precludes any claims to self-coincidence and identity.

Yet although Otherwise than being tends to characterize sensibility in terms of vulnerability and exposure, it also defines it in terms of enjoyment (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 62–63). In relation to gestation, the assimilative sensibility of enjoyment is necessary for the survival and nourishment of both the pregnant body and the fetus. The mother, Levinas implies, must enjoy her bread to give it to the fetus, who in turn assimilates it whilst remaining other, or non-assimilative, to the pregnant body itself: “It is the passivity of being-for-another, which is possible only in the form of giving the very bread I eat. But for this one has to first enjoy one’s bread, not in order to have the merit of giving it, but in order to give it with one’s heart, to give oneself in giving it” (72). This is a bodily interaction: it is not that the mother consciously “chooses” to give the bread that she eats to the fetus; rather, her body does this below the level of reflection or perception.

Whilst Levinas conceptualizes the interaction of what I term the assimilative and non-assimilative sensibility between the mother and the fetus in terms of eating, the modality of sensibility through which this happens is even more strongly illuminated through the case of breathing. Without any thought at all, the mother, insofar as she is a living body, breathes and thereby provides oxygen to the fetus who assimilates it through the placenta. Indeed, this interaction of assimilative and non-assimilative sensibility that describes the relationship of mother and fetus as one of simultaneous binding and separation is, although Levinas never intended this, descriptive precisely of the mediating functioning of the placenta. As the French biologist Hélène Rouch explains in an interview with Luce Irigaray, the placenta at once binds and separates the mother and the fetus: “On the one hand, it is the mediating space between mother and fetus, which means that there’s never a fusion of maternal and embryonic tissues. On the other hand, it constitutes a system regulating exchanges between the two organisms” (Rouch and Irigaray Reference Irigaray1993, 39). Consequently, Rouch continues, the placenta “establishes a relationship between mother and fetus, enabling the latter to grow without exhausting the mother in the process” (39).

It is in this ontological register that I interpret Levinas’s conceptualization of this situation of the other in the same of which the pregnant body is emblematic as a substitution. In our terms, the interaction of the pregnant body and the fetus is literally a substitution through which the pregnant body, prior to any level of conscious reflection, responds to the needs of the child, whilst at the same time maintaining its own integrity. Apart from a Levinasian conception of ethics, then, the notion of substitution allows us to conceptualize the material process through which the pregnant body substitutes itself, its own sustenance, oxygen, and nutrients, for the fetus whose very life in turn depends upon this substitution. The notion of substitution thus evokes the concrete process through which one living body sustains another. From the perspective of the child, this means that any living body does not have its origin in itself, as if it were author of its own existence, but rather in another’s substitution for it. The notion of substitution does not only refer to the particular case of pregnancy and gestation, then, but is a way of thinking about the ontological status of all (human) bodies: insofar as they were all born from the body of another, their origin consists in the substitution from another. If Levinas’s analyses of diachrony and sensibility help us to think concretely the time before birth—in a sense the alterity of time itself—how does this trace of the diachronic time of birth continue to operate within the bodily existence of all (human) bodies?

3. Having been born: the oneself as an original intercorporeality

With the notion of the oneself, Levinas describes the modality in which a substituted subject exists, and thus the oneself, as I will argue, does not only refer to the pregnant body but more generally describes the bodily existence of all bodies insofar as their existence depends upon an immemorial substitution from another body. The oneself, Levinas writes, is “an attachment that has already been made, as something irreversibly past, prior to all memory and all recall. It was made in an irrecuperable time which the present, represented in recall, does not equal, in a time of birth or creation, of which nature or creation (créature) retains a trace, unconvertible into a memory” (Levinas 2016, 104–05; Reference Levinas1974, 132–33). Here, the translation of the French créature into creation rather than creature deflects from the sense in which the created one, the child, retains a trace of its own creation from the body from which it was born, a trace of that which can never be recollected or remembered. The notion of the oneself, then, apart from a Levinasian conception of ethics, gives us a notion of the body as an original intercorporeality through the fact of having been born. Indeed, Levinas writes: “The sensible—maternity, vulnerability, apprehension—binds the node of incarnation into a plot larger than the apperception of the self. In this plot I am bound to others before being tied to my body” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 76). How, then, does this trace of birth continue to operate within the bodily existence of the subject throughout its life? How does the notion of the oneself differ from the earlier analyses of bodily materiality from the 1930s and 1940s?

The oneself describes a binding of the body to itself which is yet not a peaceful contentment; rather, this binding is at the same time a separation of the body from itself which makes bodily existence essentially uncomfortable. It is described hyperbolically as a writhing, a discomfort, a being ill at ease in one’s own skin (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 104). The paradoxical notion that the body is at once bound to and separated from itself is evident in the description of the oneself as the “presynthetic, pre-logical and in a certain sense atomic, that is, in-dividual, unity of the self, which prevents it from splitting, … It is in a certain sense atomic, for it is without any rest in itself, ‘more and more one,’ to the point of breakup, fission, openness” (107). The oneself, then, is at once “atomic,” an indivisible unity, which prevents it from “splitting,” that is, from creating a lag within itself through which it would separate itself from itself to grasp itself as an object. Yet the paradox consists in the notion that this binding of the body to itself does not amount to a flat self-presence or a pure auto-affection insofar as the oneself opens itself or breaks open from within.

The oneself, then, is “without any duality” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 107) yet constantly moves and pants: “The restlessness of respiration, the exile in oneself, the in itself without rest … is a panting, a trembling of substantiality, a hither side of the here” (180). Whilst Levinas does not explicitly characterize the oneself as such, I will argue that this notion expresses something like the movement or the vibration of the life of (human) bodies. Indeed, writes Levinas, “[t]he expression ‘in one’s skin’ is not a metaphor for the in-itself; it refers to a recurrence in the dead time or the meanwhile which separates inspiration and expiration, the diastole and systole of the heart beating dully against the walls of one’s skin” (109). The oneself is not a metaphor, rather it is, as I argue along with Critchley, best understood as a literal conceptualization of bodily existence. The notion of the oneself, as Critchley writes, designates “an identity that repeats, that throbs, that insists, that contracts. It’s an identity that’s not just like a heart beating, it is a heart beating, it is a lung breathing, it is my blood flowing” (Critchley Reference Critchley and Dianda2015, 86). Indeed, the oneself, Levinas writes, is a “materiality more material than all matter” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 108), meaning that the oneself should not be understood as a positivist conceptualization of the biological body “which, perfectly espoused by its form, is what it is; [the oneself] is in itself like one is in one’s skin, that is, already tight, ill at ease in one’s own skin” (108). The notion of the oneself, then, is not simply a reformulation of the abstract concept of the subject but rather forms a concrete conceptualization of the body as a living, throbbing, breathing body.

Yet this does not mean that the notion of the oneself merely rehearses the early conceptualization of the impossibility to transcend one’s identity through the impossibility of escaping one’s own body. Given the fact that the oneself was born from the body of another, that “[t]he oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 104), any claim to a flat identity is precluded in advance. The oneself then retains the structure of the other in the same: “The other is in me and in the midst of my very identification” (124–25). It is this immanent alterity, this trace of the diachronic time of birth, that disrupts any claims to self-coincidence: “The oneself is prior to self-coinciding” (195). In this sense, although the notion of the oneself reformulates rather than breaks with the concept of identity as such, the oneself is an escape from the identity identified by Levinas in the early work. In the early work, the body was thought as chained to itself prior to any relation with the other, that is, it was a solipsist conceptualization of bodily existence. In the later work, however, the body is increasingly thought as an original intercorporeality which has always already escaped any notion of identity as a pure auto-affection. Thus, although the notion of the oneself remains a conceptualization of identity, this identity is one whose solitude is broken in advance.

This trace of alterity that is retained within the identity of the oneself is detectable in Levinas’s references to inspiration and respiration: “What we are here calling oneself, or the other in the same, where inspiration arouses respiration, the very pneuma of the psyche, precedes this empirical order, which is a part of being, of the universe, of the State, and is already conditioned in a system” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 115–16). What does it mean to say that inspiration arouses respiration? It means that my capacity to breathe is given to me—inspired—by a maternal other who once breathed for me. It is this immemorial inspiration that has always already opened my body up from within and which makes possible at once the indivisibility of my body and its continuous opening up. Indeed, Levinas conceptualizes this simultaneous indivisibility and openness of the oneself in terms of breathing: “It is as though the atomic unity of the subject were exposed outside by breathing, by divesting its ultimate substance even to the mucous membrane of the lungs, continually splitting up” (107).

Through breathing, the body opens itself from within and in a certain sense exposes its extreme vulnerability to the elements: “It is a fission of the nucleus opening the bottom of its punctual nuclearity, like to a lung at the core of oneself” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 49). The fact of breathing exposes a “cellular irritability” (143), the extreme susceptibility of the body to its environment. Whilst in Totality and infinity, sensibility is conceived primarily in terms of enjoyment, in Otherwise than being, then, sensibility is increasingly conceived as an extreme susceptibility even to the point of the membranes of the lungs. But why must sensibility be an extreme susceptibility, a discomfort, a writhing? Is breathing not also included in the assimilative sensibility of enjoyment, the process through which the body maintains and nourishes itself? Whilst the mother breathes for the unborn fetus, the first breath after birth must be taken by the child herself. Is breathing then not, in fact, emblematic not only of the fundamental susceptibility of sensibility but also of the sensible body’s relative autonomy and its capacity for enjoyment?

4. Breathing by oneself: bodily existence between dependence and autonomy

In To be born, Irigaray writes: “We were also the ones who gave birth to ourselves through our first breathing. In spite of the long dependence of the little human on others for its survival, it gave life to itself to come into the world, and it gave life to itself alone” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray2017, 1). Whilst the first breath is not a conscious act, for Irigaray, it yet bears witness to the inherent life force of the child and at the same time forms the first step towards a relative autonomy that is yet not sovereignty or domination: “[The human being] can do nothing else, but such an exploit will prey on its entire existence as an incentive to and an anguish of venturing to attempt the impossible: to live by oneself. Coming into the world amounts to exposing oneself to dying for living” (7). Irigaray adds: “Of course, this ‘by itself’ does not exclude the intervention of other elements in its evolution” (13). Whilst Irigaray thus emphasizes the ambiguity of breathing—at once emblematic of the autonomy of the body and its exposure to injury and death—Levinas, in his critique of the sovereign subject, tends to overprivilege the level of susceptibility involved in the fact of breathing necessary for life. At the end of Otherwise than being, he writes:

Taking its first autonomous breath, Michael Marder similarly writes: “The ostensibly autonomous respiring existent … forgets—or rather fails to remember—the preoriginary inspiration” (Marder Reference Marder2009, 91–92). The problem, then, is not with breathing or enjoyment per se, but with the possibility that the relative autonomy of the breathing body presents itself as if it were an absolute sovereignty and hence forgets the original inspiration from the other which precisely makes possible any autonomous breathing.

Irigaray too emphasizes, although in a very different way, the immemorial and irrecuperable origin of the human being, as she writes: “Unlike a tree, a human being … comes into the world by separating off from its first vital roots” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray2017, 10), and thus, “[w]e are for ever deprived of an origin of our own” (vi). Yet rather than conceptualizing this immemorial diachrony at the origin of the subject as the source of an extreme susceptibility, for Irigaray, this diachronic origin gives rise to the possibility for the human being to cultivate her breathing and thus to assume her existence without this turning into sovereignty or domination: “If the little human succeeded in coming into the world by breathing by itself, a culture of its own breathing is also what can enable it to pass constantly from the vital to the spiritual stage of its existence” (3). Whilst Levinas conceptualizes breathing in terms of an extreme exposure, Irigaray notes in breathing a potential for rethinking the autonomy of the living body beyond the extreme dichotomies of subjection and domination. Reading Levinas and Irigaray together, then, reveals a thinking according to which autonomous breathing does not necessarily result in sovereignty or egoism but rather functions as a silent reminder of the immemorial inspiration by the maternal body. It is in this sense that Levinas’s description of the substituted subject as “an openness of which respiration is a modality or a foretaste, or, more exactly of which it retains the aftertaste” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 115) makes sense. My autonomous respiration retains the aftertaste or the trace of the maternal body’s substitution for me, her breathing and inspiring for me.

It is in this ontological register that I interpret Levinas’s characterization of the body as a psyche (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 69). Whilst it is possible to trace Levinas’s usage of the term “psyche” to a biblical sense (see, e.g., Marder Reference Marder2009, 94; Reitman Reference Reitman2021)—not least given the discussion of bearing witness to the infinite in chapter 5 of Otherwise than being—I wish to emphasize the ontological and material significance of the notion of the psyche. Etymologically, psyche derives from the Greek psuche meaning breath, life, or soul. Pneuma, as used today in the sense of pneumatic, is traceable back to the Greek verb pnein, to breathe, and the noun pneuma, wind. The “pneuma of the psyche” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 69), then, is something like the breath of life itself, the movement of life which animates or “ensouls” a living body. Indeed, Levinas writes: “Freedom is animation itself, breath, the breathing of outside air, where inwardness frees itself from itself, and is exposed to all the winds” (180). It is the activity of breathing which animates the living body as always already “soulful,” and hence, as Silvia Benso writes, Levinas’s notion of “psychism, which the tradition has understood as nonmaterial, spiritual being, is described and defined through the body” (Benso Reference Benso, Schroeder and Benso2008, 20).

Whilst the references to breathing, inspiration, and psyche are to be found throughout Otherwise than being, these reach their apex in the final short chapter titled “Otherwise Said” (Autrement dit), in which Levinas characterizes the subject as “a lung at the bottom of his substance” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 180). In this final section of the book, Critchley writes, “the breath of spirit or pneuma becomes the materiality of the lungs” (Critchley Reference Critchley and Dianda2015, 82). Rather than reducing the spiritual to the material, which would be a kind of positivism, the animation through breathing effectively spiritualizes the material (see also Benso Reference Benso, Schroeder and Benso2008, 16). The point is thus not that the spiritual is left behind but that the body, in its materiality, is itself “spiritualized” through its interaction with the elemental. Animation, then, does not merely describe, as Jennifer Rosato suggests, “the relation between body and psyche or soul” (Rosato Reference Rosato2012, 353), as if this were a relation of two pre-existing entities. Rather, the notion of the body as a psyche describes the body as itself spiritualized, animated, or soulful. Indeed, Levinas writes: “The psyche is not grafted on to a substance, but alters the substantiality of this substance which supports all things. It alters it with an alteration in which identity is brought out” (Levinas Reference Levinas2016, 145–46). What is offered through our reading of the notion of the psyche, then, is a conceptualization of the body as always already soulful through the original inspiration from an immemorial other and through the basic rhythm of breathing which, whilst happening automatically, can nonetheless be encouraged to become deeper or shallower.

The role played by alterity is significant in that it describes at once the immemorial other who breathed for me and gave me life and the sensible materiality that, through the simple fact of breathing, continues to flow through me throughout my life. There is, Levinas writes, “a claim laid on the same by the other in the core (coeur) of myself, the extreme tension of the command exercised by the other in me over me (par autrui en moi sur moi), … Through this alteration (altération) the soul animates the object; it is the very pneuma of the psyche” (Levinas 2016, 141; Reference Levinas1974, 180). It is the double trace of alterity within the body—i.e., that of the original inspiration from a maternal other who once breathed for me before “I” was even there; and that of the sensible elemental—that animates the body as a living, moving body. Two interrelated meanings of alterity are at play here; first, the noun which refers to the Latin alter, the other (of the two); and second, the verb to alter, to change something. In the context of the oneself as an original intercorporeality these two senses collide: it is the trace of alterity from the maternal body that is retained within my body which has always already altered my body so that there can be no “unaltered,” absolute, or fixed foundation for a sovereign subject.

Yet given that the maternal body itself retains the trace of an immemorial other who gave her life, and before her, another other, and so on, the trace of the other within me points towards an intergenerational intercorporeality. Given that the notion of the oneself describes the interconnectivity of (human) bodies across generations, it itself opens up for the possibility for an ethical response to past and future generations. As such, the notion of intercorporeality developed here could itself be understood as the (ontological) condition of possibility for empirical ethical acts and behavior. Yet when the body is conceptualized as always already ethical in a Levinasian sense (with all the ambiguity that this notion entails), we run the risk of overprivileging the susceptibility and subjection of the body over its creativity. It is true, of course, that the body is characterized by a fundamental vulnerability and exposure to alterity, but it is equally characterized by a certain creativity and a relative autonomy, as Levinas’s own analyses of enjoyment show. It is this aspect of bodily existence, however, which tends to be overshadowed by a thinking which defines the body too strongly in terms of a Levinasian conception of ethics.

Whilst the reading of Levinas developed here was critical, then, I argued that his thinking on time, sensibility, and breathing remains productive for a rethinking of bodily existence as intercorporeal, even if, as I have argued, this compels us to move beyond his explicit philosophical project. I argued that the body as the oneself retains within itself—as an immanent transcendence—the trace of an indefinite number of immemorial others who breathe through it. It is this trace of the immemorial other within the sensible body which in advance precludes any claim to sovereignty and at the same time forms a materialization of the alterity of time within the sensible body itself. Yet whilst the concept of the body as an original intercorporeality, as I have argued, provides material depth to Levinas’s critique of the sovereign subject, this concept does not rehearse his (patriarchal) presumption that susceptibility forms the most convincing alternative to sovereignty. Rather, reading Irigaray and Levinas together facilitated a critique of the latter’s tendency to overprivilege the level of susceptibility involved in sensibility, as I argued that breathing should be understood as at once a modality of enjoyment and as exposing the fundamental vulnerability of life. Our reading—at once developed out of and going beyond Otherwise than being—thus gives rise to a feminist conceptualization of the body as intimately dependent upon others yet capable of cultivating a relative autonomy through the simple fact of breathing by oneself.