Levinas, Frankfurt School, and ethics

Levinas's ethics of responsibility and the Frankfurt School's critical theory of politics are complementary rather than oppositional. Politics without morality becomes tyrannical; morality without politics becomes sentimental. Marxist rejection of ethics as the ideological "superstructure" of the ruling class is re-evaluated in view of Levinasian ethics conceived as the trace of the signifying of the other's "saying" in the "said." The Frankfurt School's critical transcendence, as a politics of justice, especially in Marcuse, is shown to depend on diachrony, proximity, and a surplus of intersubjective obligations that spur individuals to relieve the other's suffering, which in its turn requires political realization and fortification. Together, morality and politics constitute the irreducible and mutually supportive demands of ethics; lacking one another, they each fail.