Abstract
In this rather intricate book, John Drabinski sets out ‘to explore the limits and possibilities of Levinas’s work on the ethical and companion issues’ (p. xi) against the currents of postcolonial/transnational thinking and politics. For Drabinski, this task assumes significance in that it opens up Levinas’ Eurocentric thought to the entangled history and identity with empire. The resulting move towards decolonising Levinas’ thought entails addressing the problematic nature of his conception of the Other and the ethical which otherwise remains crucial in fracturing the totality and centrality of the knowing subject.
The central problem, according to Drabinski, is this: Levinas’ conception is enmeshed in Eurocentric and transcendental moulds such that it forecloses meaningful engagement with ‘the other Other’ (p. xiii), that is, the empirical life-world (involving history, culture and politics) across postcolonial/transnational contexts. Drabinski therefore employs the method of ‘A Levinasian thinking’ or ‘thinking with, yet beyond, Levinas’s texts’, (p. 21) devised in chapter 1, and eruditely engages with paradigmatic cases of postcolonial/transnational politics in the subsequent chapters which are nicely schematised, with each signifying a successive progression in the reconfiguration of Levinas’ work.
Gayatri Spivak’s account of the subaltern further radicalises Levinas’ critique of epistemology by conceiving the Other not as a relationally disruptive term but as a prior limit to the epistemic structuring of identity/sameness (chapter 2). The neglected question of how to think subjectivity after radical difference in Levinas is addressed by drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity that harps on generative mixing of identities and cultures borne out through the migratory movement across borders (chapter 3). In conjunction, Levinas’ sense of fecundity after catastrophe is problematised through Edouard Glissant’s rhizomatic reconstruction in the Caribbean context marked by discontinuity with the past on account of the historical experience of forced migration (chapter 4). And finally, the theoretical exploration of Glissant is given practical rendering in the form of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which engages in grassroot political activism by way of cultivating an ethical relation with the Other, in the meantime demonstrating the inadequacy of Levinas’ understanding of politics as necessarily antithetical to the ethical (chapter 5). In all these cases, the intersection between Levinasian thinking and postcolonial/transnational politics and how they enrich one another is skilfully explored and underlined.
Across the chapters, Drabinski frequently plays on the shift in Levinas’ work – between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being – depending on which one suits his own charted line of enquiry. This cannot but raise the issue of whether we can talk about ‘Levinasian thinking’ in unproblematic fashion. Nonetheless, the book provides a refreshing and inventive reading, especially for those interested in probing the ethical underpinning to the politics of postcolonial critique.