“The arche-writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The non-ethical opening of ethics. A violent opening,” Wrote Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Are moral values merely our creations, or do they derive their authority from the very nature of things? Levinas formulates his moral phenomenology thus: “I have attempted a ‘phenomenology’ of sociality starting from the face of the other person… ” That moral commandment, appearing in and through in the face of the other, can, however, be intimidating, almost menacing. But what is revealed of this event or impression is nothing but the trace of a trace, a relation to the other irreducible to the present and beyond the serial orders of conventional time. Levinas writes of “the trace of the utterly bygone, the utterly past absent… before the present, older than the time of consciousness that is accessible to memory.” Levinas wants to argue, moreover, that even before the time of my first “actual” encounter with another before the encounter, the “trace of a passage”, a trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of an excessive, but always ambiguous trace of itself.
Morality, for Levinas, is not an obligation mediated, as for Kant, by the formal and procedural universalization of maxims; nor is it grounded in a “good conscience” constructed through processes of socialization. Instead, morality is first of all a bodily affected and bodily constituted sense of obligation. Merleau-Ponty introduces anonymous, pre-personal and pre-egological: a bodily responsiveness when face to face with the other. Even before beholding the other, the I is already rendered beholden; thus, in the normal case, when the I actually beholds the suffering and destitution of another face to face, there can be an “immediate” response. Levinas speaks of my “prelogical subjection” to the other and my “involuntary election” by the Good. Is it possible that they are nothing but the wishful projections of certain norms, values and ideals, cast onto “human nature” in order to give them the force of nature?
We are our body… and are in the world through our body. In my organs of perception a thought older than myself of which those organs are merely a trace. “It is precisely my body which perceives the body of another person, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the body of the other are one whole. The anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously”, the “trace work nature” of the flesh, an elemental being “of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts.”… “..My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven.”… “The body is solidified or generalized existence and existence is a perpetual incarnation.” All the latent knowledge of itself that my body possesses is an “anonymous life”, an “amorphous existence” which “preceded my own history.” I am borne into personal existence by a time which I do not constitute, all my perceptions stand out against a background of nature. An “anonymous life”, an “amorphous existence” which “preceded my own history” that is the deeper experience of embodiment whose traces he sets out to retrieve.
We shall have to rediscover, beneath the objective idea of movement, a pre-objective experience from which it borrows its significance. The constitution of others does not come after that of the body; others and my body are born together from an original ecstasy. It is in the traces of this original “ecstasy” that the traces of a normative alterity are to be retrieved. There is here no problem of the alter ego, because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general childhood “pre-communication” wherein, as he says, “the other’s intentions somehow play across my body while my intentions play across his.” Even the adult can therefore say—if appropriately self-reflective: “I live in the facial expressions of the other as I feel him living in mine.” Levinas says, “against nature”, against the nature in the sense that, whilst the obligation comes over us, is adequately represented in terms of some “natural benevolence” or “divine instinct.”