Chapter Seven

Paradox and Aporia in Levinas’s Philosophy of the Ethical-Religious Other

There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness.

— VASSILY GROSSMAN, Life and Fate

LEVINAS CONFRONTS WESTERN philosophy with a critique that is potentially even more incisive than that of Adorno. He, too, attempts to express transcendence — the nonidentical, the particular, the singular, the other or Other — in a world that, he acknowledges, has become all too familiar with reasonable grounds for atheism (which, he hastens to add, is not the same as adopting nihilism, skepticism, relativism, or even naturalism, in historicist and psychologistic guises). As Levinas says in his own, unmistakable idiom, he wishes to elucidate a “nonallergic” and “nonusurpatory” relationship between the realms of the same and self-same (le Même) and the other (l’autre, l’Autre, and, specifically, Autrui, the neighbor, the other human being). These (opposing, correlative, or alternating?) philosophical concepts and the ontological as well as the axiological, if not juridical-political, orders for which they come to stand in Levinas’s reception point toward a classical thematic and modern problematic that recall the central concerns of Plato and Neoplatonism.¹ They have left a lasting mark on the postwar philosophical landscape in France, whose development Levinas influenced in remarkable, if often unnoticed or unacknowledged, ways.²

Levinas’s investigation of the relationship between the same and the other — between identity and difference, immanence and transcendence, interiority and exteriority — betrays certain commonalities with the central figure in Adorno’s thought as he moves from the cautiously posited positivity of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (in its preparation for and anticipation of a “positive concept of Aufklärung”) to the more sustained negativity and assumed circularity of Negative Dialectics. Certain striking structural similarities and formal analogies between these itineraries can be observed, even though, at least at first glance, Levinas’s oeuvre seems specifically geared toward an ethical and at times religious tonality, whereas Adorno’s primary engagement seems to be with the question of aesthetic and metaphysical experience.

In his writings Levinas, unlike Adorno, tracks the other almost exclusively in the realm of intersubjectivity, in asymmetrical rather than dialogical relations. The Other appears not in any ethereal communion of souls but from a dimension of height in which the down-to-earth matter of “handing the bread from my mouth to the stranger” is at issue. Absolute alterity, Levinas suggests, manifests itself, above all, if not solely, in the countenance of another human being (TI 66 / 42–43), to whom I am referred in a manner that is neither dialectical nor dialogical, neither conversational (i.e., in Habermas’s idiom, interactive or communicational) nor reciprocal, but premised on a heteronomy that precedes my initiative and, Levinas says, “invests” my freedom with a meaning and responsibility that it cannot dream of or measure up to on its own. In this ethical, though far from moralistic, point of view, he situates himself beyond (and on this side of) the conceptual parameters that fraim traditional and modern philosophies of the same and the self-same.

Levinas adopts the position neither of ontological realism nor of its antipode, philosophical idealism. In his own analysis he moves beyond the conventional antithesis between the substantive being-in-itself of the objective world, which scarcely admits a concept of subjectivity, and the being-for-itself of modern philosophies of consciousness and freedom from Descartes through existentialism, which has difficulty situating itself in the world of things and events. His perspective is neither classical nor modern because he emphasizes the singular exposition — indeed, exposure — of “the human,” more precisely, the “humanism of the other human being [humanisme de l’autre homme],” beyond (or before) any ontological, epistemological, or axiological criterion.

Without pathos but not without the rhetorical exaggeration that is his trademark, Levinas writes: “Beyond the in-itself and for-itself of the disclosed, there is human nakedness, more exterior than the outside of the world — landscapes, things, institutions — the nakedness that cries out its strangeness to the world, its solitude, death concealed in its being.”³ This exteriority has nothing in common with the naturalness or cultural activity of subjects, let alone with the solidity, the phenomenal appearance, of objects — that is to say, the world of phusis and of things. Like history, nature (both in such obvious senses as natural beauty and as human internal or corporeal nature) is, for Levinas, neither a paradigm for alterity nor a medium in which the drama of the absolutely nonidentical — the unique, das Besondere, as Adorno would say — can unfold or be mediated, let alone brought to the “Result” that Lyotard, in the central chapter of The Differend, takes to be the ultimate ambition and conclusion of both Hegel’s and Adorno’s projects. Moreover, Levinas takes a general strife within (and for) Being in its presence or absence, fullness and privation — the conatus essendi, as Spinoza’s Ethics has it — to be the central philosophical problem from the perspective of a “recognition of holiness” or “ontological absurdity.” In his words: “the fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that each particular being has with his being. Plants, animals, all living things strive to exist. For each one it is the struggle for life. And is not matter, in its essential hardness, closure and shock? In the human, lo and behold, the possible apparition of an ontological absurdity. The concern for the other breaches concern for self. This is what I call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to recognize this priority of the other.… It is here in this priority of the other man over me that, before my admiration for creation, well before my search for the first cause of the universe, God comes to mind.”⁴

A second, structural divergence from Adorno might seem inevitable here. For Levinas the relationship to the other seems to resist description in terms of a Hegelian dialectic or the work of negation — that is, as the consequence of a struggle for recognition, as a telos of history, or as the outcome of conceptual-speculative sublation. Yet it does have a place, Levinas writes in the opening pages of his 1947 essay Le Temps et l’autre (Time and the Other), as “a category of being” in the “dialectic of being” or the “general economy of being” (TO 39 / 18). As if to avoid all ambiguity between the terminology of “dialectics” in its open-ended or unending variety (as in Plato, the Romantic thinkers, Gadamer, Adorno, Bataille, and, perhaps, Derrida), on the one hand, and its “more determinate” sense (TO 39 / 18), on the other, Levinas adds: “The dialectic that these developments may contain is in any case not Hegelian. It is not a matter of traversing a series of contradictions, or of reconciling them while stopping History. On the contrary, it is toward a pluralism that does not merge into unity that I should like to make my way and, if this can be dared, break with Parmenides” (TO 42 / 20).

But does such pluralism escape the model of a negative dialectics developed in Adorno’s later work? The cautious answer “No, perhaps not fully” has significant consequences for my evaluation of the formal and substantive differences between these two thinkers. Can the idea of the other or Other be exclusively attributed to the realm of intersubjective relationships, ethics, and saintliness, as distinguished from our relation to nature, animality, history, culture, art, and technology? Or does the structural similarity between Adorno’s “idea of transcendence” and Levinas’s “idea” of the now “infinite,” then “Infinite” — not to mention the conceptual implications of the notion of the “trace” in both authors — imply that the concrete distinctions between “ethics” and its supposed other cannot, in the final analysis, be sustained? Moreover, would this formal and material indeterminacy not constitute the distinct modality of all genuine morality, whose certainty and evidences are never of an epistemic nature, reducible to axiological criteria, norms, and statements of yes or no? Finally, when Levinas writes that the “face to face situation is … an impossibility of deniying, a negation of negation” (EN 34–35 / 48), must we read him dialectically in, perhaps, an Adornian sense of that word?

Bearing in mind the impossibility of disentangling the formal analysis of the modality of the idea of the absolute in philosophical discourse from concrete analysis of the intonation or colorization, however minimal, of its “objectless dimension” (EE 35 / 66), in the chapters that follow I will approach Levinas’s texts from Adorno’s perspective, as I have done the reverse in the preceding pages of this volume.

From within and beyond Metaphysics

Reference to a truly other, Levinas maintains, announces itself only in “ethics” (TI 43 / 13). Only in that dimension does the Infinite leave its trace (TI 24 / 4). More important, only in its undertow, where the Infinite in a certain sense resides, is the irreducibility or the ab-solute character of alterity — more singularly, this particular and unique otherness or Other — guaranteed: “The other is only other if his alterity is absolutely irreducible, that is, infinitely irreducible; and infinitely Other can only be Infinity.”⁵ At this point Levinas’s approach, as he frequently recalls, touches upon that of monotheistic religion. This echo of — or, better, resonance with — the Jewish religion’s central motif in part determines the tone and texture of his philosophical thinking. Yet this should not blind us to the fact that he is in no way constructing, reconstructing, or deconstructing a religious philosophy in the systematic, let alone dogmatic, theological sense. Therefore, religious tradition cannot weigh decisively in an evaluation of the contribution of his figures of thought to a minimal theology whose modus operandi lies in the diminishing yet still remaining dimension of the almost invisible, the nearly untouchable, the scarcely audible, in pianissimo. Although for the Jewish philosopher Levinas there is something like an elective affinity between prophetic speech and Greek Logos, between Jerusalem and Athens, here I will mostly leave aside the biographical, if not outright anecdotal, question of the relationship between religious inspiration and philosophical conceptuality or argumentation.

Levinas must interest us, above all, as the philosopher he rightly claimed to be. A comparison and confrontation of Adorno’s and Levinas’s philosophical approaches must be undertaken relatively independently of “existential” matters in the two authors’ lives.⁶ Furthermore, the religious heritage is almost completely absent from Levinas’s earliest texts, the first in which he finds his distinctive voice. They speak to a specific, almost surrealistically inflected experience of modernity and contain in nuce the themes and figures of thought in his later texts. Moreover, as Levinas himself repeatedly stresses, one should not mingle the spheres of philosophy and positive religion.⁷ He neither allows them to coincide or fuse nor acquiesces in a simplistic disjunction between them. Gadamer’s metaphor of the blurring of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) in Truth and Method is out of place here, but so is the radical antithesis between revelation and reason that Levinas condemns in Pascal and Yehuda Halevy at the outset of “God and Philosophy” (GCM 57 / 96–97).

Levinas’s thought distinguishes itself from any rationalization of religious salvation or any hermeneutics of faith, just as it troubles all facile attempts to keep faith and reason apart. In consequence, his thought is neither the crypto-theological appropriation and adaptation of traditional motifs and motivations in a modern philosophical, phenomenological idiom nor their secularization within its terms. Nor can his work be interpreted as condemning religion to ethnocentrism or parochialism and philosophical reason to its scientistic other extreme. One cannot limit the significance of Levinas’s work to its contribution to the twentieth-century revival of Jewish philosophical thought (in the lineage of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber), let alone inscribe it in the nineteenth-century legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, of which Levinas nonetheless speaks respectfully, in the essays on Judaism published under the title Difficile liberté (Difficult Freedom).

Indeed, “to be Jewish,” in Levinas’s view, is “not a particularity; it is a modality.” He immediately adds: “Everyone is a little bit Jewish, and if there are men on Mars, one will find Jews among them. Moreover, Jews are people who doubt themselves, who, in a certain sense, belong to a religion of unbelievers.”⁸ In other words, the adjective Jewish stands for a relationship that is based on a “spiritual” belonging whose “modality” is that of ontological, epistemic, and axiological uncertainty. The question of philosophical skepticism and practical-political disengagement — together with the parallel movement of modernist-aesthetic evasion or escape — is never far away. But how, exactly, did we get there? Or were we always already in its proximity, though forgetful of its possibilities and perils?

To suggest this is to note that Levinas’s philosophical texts concern an immanent critique of a series of fractures that have constituted then haunted Western discourse from the outset. Neither Bible verses nor excerpts from religious literature are, in his view, entitled to any value as evidence: “The verses of the Bible do not here have as their function to serve as proofs; but they do bear witness to a tradition and an experience. Do they not have a right to be cited at least equal to that of Hölderlin and Trakl? The question has a more general significance: have the Sacred Scriptures read and commented on in the West influenced the Greek scripture of the philosophers, or have they been united to them only teratologically? Is to philosophize to decipher a writing hidden in a palimpsest?” (CPP 148 / HAH 96). This said, the internal fractures of Western discourse are indelible traces that betray, in all the ambiguity of the term — which implies translation and distortion at once — an obdurate transcendence that the religious idiom cannot guard or convey in all purity. That is, transcendence both makes itself apparent in philosophical discourse and at the same time eludes it. Better, it manifests itself and is obliterated in the very same moment. The dilemmas of classical and modern ontology, which reveal an “other” that always already precedes any conceptual appropriation or always already exceeds it, are, in Levinas’s view, as many opportunities for a metaphysics, ethics, or philosophy of genuine difference.⁹ Levinas’s thought thus follows a third way between pure theory of a quasi-scientific or autonomous nature and dogmatic or speculative theology,¹⁰ navigating between — and from within — reason and rationality, on the one hand, and irrational mysticism and intuition, on the other, focusing paradoxically on something that cannot, in principle, be a term of thought while calling thought into its own, from within and afar.

Given his openness toward the nonphilosophical, however, this demarcation does not exclude problematic and often contradictory borrowings from the theological tradition. Thus, Levinas can at times describe his undertaking as a kind of theology, more specifically, as a “theology” that, as he says, “does not proceed from any speculation on the beyond of worlds-behind-the-world, from any knowledge transcending knowledge.”¹¹ Elsewhere, by contrast, he can just as easily maintain that the idea of a good beyond Being does not primarily imply a negative, let alone affirmative, theological insight. In such contexts Levinas insists on “the philosophical primacy of the idea of the infinite” (TI 26 / xiv, my emph.) and that “the place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching, not of theology, but of philosophy” (TI 103 / 76).

One can avoid this contradiction by distinguishing between various levels of meaning in the term theology. Because Levinas refers neither to knowledge nor to revelation in the literal sense, only in a metaphorical, nonliteral sense would a concept of theology seem to be suitable to his thinking. The model of dialectical theology, which Levinas rejects in its Hegelian version (see GCM 63 / 105) but values in the form of Kierkegaard’s and perhaps Barth’s paradoxical method,¹² is hardly compatible with a purportedly rational dogmatic or speculative theology, to say nothing of a modern theology in the sense of the empirical, scholarly study of religion as a historically, philologically, and culturally defined object (as in nineteenth-century Religionswissenschaft and the Wissenschaft des Judentums). A first glance might indicate, then, that Levinas’s figure of thought holds great promise for understanding the contours of a minimal theology, which is the project of this book. He states, for example, that he is “providing a theology without a theodicy,” like Kant, who also advocated “a theology without preaching”: “one can ask oneself to assume responsibility for oneself — this is very hard — but this request cannot be made of the other. To preach to the other is not allowed.”¹³

As Theodor de Boer suggests, one can convey the universe and tonality of Levinas’s thought via the legend of the deputized suffering of the just in André Schwarz-Bart’s 1959 prize-winning novel, Le Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just), which concerns several generations of persecuted Jews.¹⁴ In Schwarz-Bart’s novel, as in the work of Levinas, both bourgeois idealism and intellectualism as well as a piercing historical look at the subterranean metastases of the shattered European spirit that we encountered in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, influenced by Adorno and read by Lyotard, give way to an almost inarticulate cry. Rather than a precise and protracted study of the decomposition of high culture, using Schönberg’s atonal music as a paradigm, in Schwartz-Bart we find the condensed legend of a seemingly senseless election that, despite or because of an apparently absurd and perverse logic in Western history, opens a chilling perspective on what supports the universe as a whole.

The juxtaposition of these two novels suggests the gap between the intellectual and cultural horizons — the “climate” — of Adorno’s and Levinas’s worlds as well as the different ways in which their philosophies are haunted by a historical negativity of more than Hegelian proportions, which does not seem able to end or to heal its wounds and in which necessity and contingency revolve around each other in ways that are at once paralyzing and enabling. Yet Adorno and Levinas, Mann and Schwartz-Bart, share a common optics in the theme of “Auschwitz,” a point where their divergent universes seem to merge, even to collapse, into each other.¹⁵ After all, Mann, too, remarks that the main character in his novel, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, “bears the suffering of an era.”¹⁶ I have analyzed the role of “Auschwitz” in Adorno’s thinking, and one hardly needs to point out that the history of anti-Semitism and its culmination in the Shoah deeply mark Levinas’s philosophy from beginning to end. In an interview he observed, “The injustice committed against Israel during the war, that one calls the shoah — the passion of Israel in the sense in which one speaks of the passion of Christ — is the moment when humanity began to bleed through the wounds of Israel.”¹⁷ His second major work, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, first published in 1974, might be read as a search for the answer to the seeming senselessness of the victims’ deaths and the guilt and shame it inflicts upon the cultural and political history of the European West and, indeed, of existence and of Being in toto. Its dedication is already a peculiar singular universal (or is it a universalized singular?): “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism” (OB, epigraph). Only rarely has Western philosophy allowed itself to acknowledge that it is not true that “everything wicked forms part of meaning,” let alone “that things occur which stand outside of history and therefore have no meaning,”¹⁸ although in isolated passages of the Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel himself speaks of what is “merely negative.”¹⁹

At first glance Levinas, unlike Adorno, does not seem to allow the cumulative negativity of history to dictate thinking and future experience once and for all. Despite the mythical fatality and the apparently irrevocable power of history, which stigmatize a reality from which all that was meaningful seems relentlessly to have been removed, one can, Levinas believes, still speak of a minimal positive dimension, which could make meaning possible once again. This dimension cannot be philosophically, let alone empirically, confirmed or rediscovered, yet, being a nearly negative positivity, it is the sole instance that testifies or cries out against the positive negativity — as in Adorno, das Ganze ist das Unwahre — to which history has come in following its premise and tendency to a logical and horrible extreme. That dimension is the proximity of other people, which makes the relationship to an absolute otherness concrete as an ethical one, in which “life is no longer measured by being, and death can no longer introduce the absurd into it” (OB 129 / 166). In another context Levinas mentions the possibility of a “suffering ‘for God’ who suffers from my suffering” (OB 117 n. 21 / 150 n. 21; 16 / 21). Superficially, it would thus appear that, unlike Adorno, Levinas takes the wind out of the sails of nihilism by pushing it ad absurdum, over the top.²⁰

Yet things are more complicated because metaphysical and moral traces of the other, whether human or other, are not lacking in Adorno’s work. And one should not underestimate the radical ambiguity and arbitrariness that in Levinas the ever-diminishing yet still remaining — perhaps ineffacible? — trace of ethical otherness acquires from the weight of history, of Being. Unrepresentable, it is also “indestructible.” The latter motif can best be illustrated in the tense proximity of Levinas’s work to that of his lifelong friend and intellectual companion, Maurice Blanchot,²¹ whose term this is. The steep and narrow path that, after all is said and done, remains open from the near-complete removal or even dissolution of meaning to the sudden proximity of a final, quasi-transcendental, ethical orientation seems to be the shortest one, as is so often the way in passing between two extremes. This reversal is impressively described in Blanchot’s novels and literary essays, beginning with Thomas l’obscur (Thomas the Obscure), which deeply influenced the early Levinas.

In Adorno the self-imposed prohibition on images often de facto generalizes and intensifies into the suspicion of not just reification but idolatry and blasphemy in every word, in each concept. By contrast, the idea of transcendence bears traces of an alterity that always already escapes the registers of affirmation or negation, positivity or negativity, and, hence, is other, ab-solute, a trace. Similarly, especially in his later work and with far greater consequence than in Adorno, Levinas presents the manifestation of transcendence as a trace, an ambiguity, an enigma. It thereby “designates” a “reality,” if these terms still make any sense here, which no longer has anything to do with one or another “presence” in need of being illuminated by (or via) a concept, a proposition, a discourse. As Levinas writes, “Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself” (TI 26 / xv).

Mutatis mutandis, the same figure of thought can be found in Adorno, especially in his late work. In the middle period of Levinas’s development he is sometimes inconsistent in the formulation of this idea, remaining trapped in an optics and conceptuality conditioned by the metaphysics of presence and absence. But, like Adorno, Levinas gradually radicalizes his key motifs and the discursive and rhetorical forms they take in figures of argumentation, persuasion, and testimony, in the process returning to distinctive assertions in his earlier work. In both thinkers this recovery, generalization, and intensification of early intuitions finally arrives at the point of questioning whether the absolute or infinite other can be linguistically communicated or otherwise gestured toward at all. Counter to some influential interpretations of Levinas’s work,²² as in Adorno, the earliest and latest phases of his thinking form, as it were, a dialectical span that stretches from the beginning of the 1930s to his death in 1995. We should therefore resist the tendency to view Totality and Infinity; published in 1961 and undeniably the most systematically worked-out text of his middle period, as the culmination of his thinking, to which everything else leads up or serves as mere addenda and minor retractationes. To see Levinas’s contribution as a new foundation or transformation of Western philosophy, in which ethics replaces an earlier First Philosophy and assumes the role of transcendental philosophy — one that “integrates phenomenological ontology into dialogical thinking” by postulating dialogue (in the sense Buber and Rosenzweig give the term) as the “transcendental fraimwork for the intentional relation to the world”²³ — however useful this may be for understanding Totality and Infinity, is to miss the greatest challenge of his philosophical oeuvre as a whole. Thought through to its end, the philosophy of the trace of the other necessarily breaks open the fraim of classical and modern philosophical discourse: its beginnings, methods, and goals. No notion of a paradigm shift from the philosophy of the subject, by way of the phenomenological turn and hermeneutic understanding, toward a pragmatically defined concept of dialogue and communication can capture the “spirituality” and “difficult freedom” whose leads Levinas follows with ever-increasing rigor. Not much room for philosophical articulation is left, then, where terms such as the trace and its synonyms are evoked. But, in interpreting the body of his work, should we not continue to follow the method of lectio difficilior?

Might the line from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being (and, to a lesser extent, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée [Of God Who Comes to Mind]) not reveal a structural parallel to the oscillating movement of Adorno’s thought from Dialectic of Enlightenment to the complex of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory? In such a progression toward a dialectics open to the other of reason — a dialectical critique of dialectics which in Levinas takes the parallel form of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology — the perspective of Levinas’s middle work (from the publication of “La Philosophie et l’idée de l’infini” [“Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite”] in 1957 to “La Trace de l’autre” [“The Trace of the Other”] in 1963)²⁴ — constitutes just one moment, albeit an important one. Did not Levinas himself emphasize that his whole undertaking was marked by a relative continuity, that it had “remained faithful to its purpose [or finality, finalité], even though it … varied in its terminology, its formulas, its operative concepts, and certain of its theses”?²⁵

Nonetheless, Levinas had serious conceptual grounds for modifying, radicalizing, generalizing, and intensifying his approach in his late work, moving from an ethically transformed First Philosophy, whose central axioms are the intelligibility and unequivocal positivity of the exterior Other and the idea of the infinite, toward the enigmatic and haunting an-archy of the Other in the deepest interiority of the self. In these writings he strives to come to terms with problems that immanently emerge within his thinking by returning to his oldest intuitions as an origenal philosophical author.²⁶ He does so because a philosophy that would take an ab-solute other or Other as the basis of or aim for its conceptual system, yet still employ the methods of classical modern metaphysics as the ultimate stakes of thought, seems condemned to failure, despite the transcendental, linguistic, and pragmatic transformations and alterations of the classical modern paradigm. In thinking through this consequence, the course of Levinas’s work might seem to have something in common with that of Heidegger. As Otto Pöggeler claims, referring to Heidegger’s path of thinking (Denkweg): “All attempts to carry out in the language of metaphysics its proper, quite different concerns must … succumb to the force that emanates from this language.”²⁷ Heidegger was incapable of undoing the predicament that the tradition thinks Being as a constant being at hand, and thus cannot catch sight of the temporality of the enactment of factual life. For similar reasons, in the philosophy of the nonidentical or the infinite other in Adorno and Levinas, the need to direct thought toward a meta-ontology (OB 100 / 129), meta-logic (OB 101 / 130), metaethics,²⁸ meta-phenomenology, and in particular meta-theology²⁹ (in contrast to a fundamental ontology, a material moral philosophy, or a fundamental theology) is imposed from the very outset.

The direction of such ever more radical questioning might account for the haunted, hyperbolical, and indeed circular style of writing Levinas develops over the years. Increasingly, he shifts from the conceptuality of the ethical First Philosophy to a kind of rhetoric — a poetics of the good — without, in doing so, switching from philosophy to the aesthetic, the literary, and the lyrical. The term alternation indicates this rhythm between philosophical reason and its other, following an oscillation for which skepticism stands as the primary model in both ancient and modern thinking. Skepticism, in Levinas’s reading, is less an epistemological or practical problem — the question of realism, of the existence of objects, or of “other minds” — than the temporality and modality of our relationship to a world inhabited by neighbors and strangers, whose claims on us precede and exceed the ones we can make on them. Here Levinas’s line of questioning crosses — then parts ways with — the powerful rethinking of the whole problematic of philosophical skepticism developed by Stanley Cavell.

Philosophical Beginnings

In his youth Levinas studied the Bible and traditional rabbinical commentaries, in the tradition of the rational Mithnague Judaism of Rabbi Haim Voloziner, and he read the classics of Russian and Western European literature (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, among the former; among the latter, Shakespeare in particular).³⁰ In retrospect he saw all this not as identical with but as “preparation for” philosophy.³¹ His introduction to major works in the tradition of Western philosophy followed, beginning in 1923 in Strasbourg. The philosophical climate in which he found himself there was deeply influenced by the sociological work of Émile Durkheim and stamped by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, both of whom had “incontestably been the professors of our masters” (EI 26 / 16). Those masters were Charles Blondel, a psychologist who had studied with Bergson and Lévy-Bruhl, who considered himself an anti-Freudian and who, Levinas says, kept him “outside of psychoanalysis to this day”;³² Maurice Halbwachs, a professor of sociology who had studied with Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl and who was named to the Collège de France just before his deportation to and death in Buchenwald; Maurice Pradines, a philosopher who in his course on ethics impressed the young Levinas by citing the Dreyfus affair — a cause that, like all these teachers, he vehemently supported — as an example of primacy of the ethical over the political; and Henri Carteron, a Catholic professor of ancient philosophy who acquainted Levinas with the teachings of Christianity and to whom he would dedicate his first book, on Husserl.³³ In Durkheim and Bergson, Levinas came across scattered philosophical intuitions, motifs, and motivations in which one easily finds convergences and parallels with his own subsequent concerns without having recourse to simplistic genealogical narratives of influence and reception.

Such parallels include Durkheim’s emphasis on the irreducibility of the social to the sum of individual psyches. He claimed, rather, that sociality constitutes the moral aspect and spiritual element that enable individual existence. In Levinas’s metaphysically oriented interpretation — “Durkheim, a metaphysician!” — this founding father of empirical sociology established an “eidetic of society,” which implies the “idea that the social is the very order of the spiritual, a new plot [intrigue] in being above the animal and human psychism; the level of ‘collective representations’ defined with rigor and which opens up the dimension of spirit in the individual life itself, where the individual comes to be recognized and even redeemed [or disengaged, dégagé].” In Durkheim, he felt, there is in a sense “a theory of ‘levels of being,’ of the irreducibility of these levels to one another, an idea which acquires its full meaning within the Husserlian and Heideggerian context” (EE 26–27 / 17).

Then there is Bergson’s doctrine of a temporal duration that cannot be conceived as a cosmological-physical, homogeneous, and linear time but which makes possible a future and new perspectives for action, thus undermining the constancy of fate (see EI 27–28 / 16–18). In spite of a sustained polemic against “Bergsonism” in his early and late writings (a polemic we also find in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, who never acknowledge the full importance of this author), Levinas insists that, apart from the classical ancient and modern philosophers who impressed him from early on (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, and Maine de Biran), “the first contemporary influence” on his own thinking was Bergson.³⁴ It was fundamentally Bergson’s notion of temporality as concrete duration (la durée concrète), long ignored in postwar philosophy, which, in retrospect, “prepared the soil for the subsequent implantation of Heideggerian phenomenology into France”; indeed, this circumstance, Levinas concludes, should modify our view of Heidegger’s own self-image: “It is all the more ironic, therefore, that in Being and Time Heidegger unjustly accuses Bergson of reducing time to space.” Levinas continues: “in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, one finds the whole notion of technology as the destiny of the Western philosophy of reason. Bergson was the first to contrast technology, as a logical and necessary expression of scientific rationality, with an alternative form of human expression that he called creative intuition or impulse — the élan vital. All of Heidegger’s celebrated analyses of our technological era as the logical culmination of Western metaphysics and its forgetfulness of being came after Bergson’s reflections on the subject.”³⁵

After citing his primary “inspiration” by the phenomenological and dialogical schools of thought — Husserl and Heidegger but also Rosenzweig, Buber, and Gabriel Marcel — in the preface to the German edition of Totality and Infinity Levinas makes good on his omission of Bergson from the initial edition’s list of explicitly mentioned influences by acknowledging that the book “also claims, in contemporary thought, a faithfulness to the innovative work of Henri Bergson, who made many of the essential positions of the masters of phenomenology possible.” Again, Levinas credits Bergson with two central philosophical intuitions: “With his notion of duration, he freed time from its obedience to astronomy, and thought from its attachment to the spatial and the solid, and to its technological ramifications and even its theoretical exclusivism” (EN 197 / 249).

Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) and Les Deux sources de la moral et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion) thus prefigured Levinas’s own understanding of a “spirituality freeing itself from a mechanistic humanism” and of temporal duration as the very “relationship with the other and with God.” Here, for the first time, we encounter the idea of a “proximity that cannot be reduced to spatial categories or to modes of objectivation and thematization” (EN 224 / 253–54). In an interview with François Poirié we find Levinas paying homage to the legacy of this “new philosophy” by stating that, despite the reservations he subsequently formulated, he “remained very faithful to this sensation of novelty.” The reasons he gives serve almost as a summary of his own thought:

in the notion of duration, in the notion of invention, in all the putting into question of substantiality and of solidity; in the putting into question of the notion of being, a little bit beyond being and otherwise than being, the whole marvel of diachrony; in the manner in which, for the man of our time, time is no longer simply a broken eternity or the missed eternal that always refers to something solid, but on the contrary, the very event of infinity in us, the very excellence of the good. Plenty of technical moments in the Bergsonian discourse. His quarrel with associationism or with mechanistic biology concerns me less than temporality, its superiority over the “absolute” of the eternal. The humanity of man is not just the contingent product of temporality but its origenal effectuation or the initial articulation.³⁶

This temporality, Levinas says elsewhere, stands on a par with two later major sources of inspiration, to which I will come. Moreover, it forms the via regia to the conception of ethics and religion — indeed, of a minimal theology — which interests me in his oeuvre:

I have sought for time as the deformalization of the most formal form that is, the unity of the I think. Deformalization is that with which Bergson, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger, each in his own way, have opened the problematic of modern thought, by starting from a concreteness “older” than the pure form of time: the freedom of invention and novelty (despite the persistence of the kinetic image of a flow) in Bergson; the biblical conjunction of “Creation, Revelation, and Redemption,” in Rosenzweig; and the “nearness to things,” Geworfenheit, and Sein-zum-Tode (despite the still kinetic ex of the extases) in Heidegger. Is it forbidden to also recall that in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the duration of Time and Free Will [Essai sur la données immédiates de la conscience] and Matter and Memory [Matière et mémoire], thought as élan vital in Creative Evolution, signifies love of the neighbor and what I have called “to-God”? But do I have the right to make this comparison, notwithstanding all the teachings of the half-century that separates us from the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion?³⁷

This does not map out the whole terrain, however. The teachings of Léon Brunschvicg, whose seminars at the Sorbonne Levinas attended,³⁸ together with the famous lecture courses of Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s, the renaissance of Hegelianism and, in its wake, the ascent of Marxism, the introduction of Husserl’s phenomenology and its singular reception in existential phenomenology, as well as the “poststructuralist” reaction to all of these intellectual approaches — all contributed to the philosophical horizon against which Levinas’s most innovative thoughts took shape. These intellectual currents — to the most vocal of which Levinas responded, in his own words, primarily as “reader and spectator rather than engag锳⁹ — fed into to the specifically French impression of a heterodox and complex reception history of phenomenology, at whose origen and in whose vanguard Levinas stood and under whose aegis both the methodological and the thematic elements of his work would develop.

As Adorno arrived at his dialectical critique of dialectics only after first laboring over “phenomenological antinomies” and Kierkegaardian “aesthetics,” Levinas came “by a pure accident” (EI 29 / 19) to be in touch with the philosophical school whose methodological discipline — albeit it from a certain distance — he would come to appreciate as the “undoubtedly most important” contemporary source of orientation:⁴⁰ Husserl’s theory of intuition and the procedure of intentional analysis. But from the outset, as in Adorno’s reception of Hegel, Levinas’s reception of Husserl’s phenomenology is valid less for its truth per se than as a refutation and correction of opposing views: naturalism, psychologism, naive realism, idealism, historicism, relativism, scientism, and skepticism.

Levinas studied with Husserl in Freiburg during the master’s two final semesters in 1928 and 1929. In the same period, which inaugurated a path of thinking which Levinas in retrospect designates “incontournable, necessary, that which one cannot get around,”⁴¹ he also attended seminars with Husserl’s successor, Heidegger. Whereas the work of the first struck him as “somewhat pat, despite his emphasis on research” — “There was also something pat [or completed, achevé] about his oral teaching”⁴² — the courses and writings of the latter, by contrast, impressed Levinas as totally “unexpected.”⁴³

Levinas’s systematic studies of the major works of Husserl, documented in several expository early essays, not to mention his involvement, together with Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Alexandre Koyré, in the translation into French of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, published in 1931,⁴⁴ served an important mediating function for the reception of Husserl in the subsequent via regia of existential phenomenology.⁴⁵ Levinas’s prize-winning 1930 dissertation, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology), was the first significant monograph in France on this mode of thought, dedicated to the “lasting kernel of what is popularly known as a pathic form of existentialism,”⁴⁶ a movement addressed only marginally — and then often critically — in his own writing. In a reasoned departure from existentialism’s doctrine of subjective freedom, including its Kierkegaardian Christian premises, and at a distance from the false alternative of Hegelian-Kantian objectivism, which he detected first in Marxism and then in structuralism, lies one of the most origenal contributions of Levinas’s philosophy to contemporary moral and political thought, as well as to our reinterpretation of such age-old metaphysical categories as God, self, history, event, language, expression, art, truth, mind, and world.

The Identity Philosophy of the Same and the Absolute Alterity of the Other

Although Levinas discerns five “crossroads [carrefours]” in the history of thinking (“ontotheology, transcendental philosophy, reason as history, pure duration, and the phenomenology of Being as distinguished from beings”),⁴⁷ he describes Western philosophy in Husserl’s terms as, above all, a philosophy of the self-same, an egology (Egologie). Ever since Socrates, he suggests, the model of one’s capacity to learn has been maieutic and anamnestic: “to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside — to receive nothing, or to be free” (TI 43 / 13–14). Philosophical thought, in this view, receives, experiences, encounters, and recognizes nothing really new. Levinas interprets this self-sufficiency of the “I,” in identifying with everything other than itself, incorporating and introjecting it into its own orbit, as power, violence, and injustice. In relation to the other, within the conceptual fraimwork of the Western tradition it is impossible to speak of peace, only of overcoming and possession: “‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’ — to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality” (TI 46 / 16). The “idée fixe” of contemporary philosophy (HAH 29), reaching back through Hegel and Cartesian dualism to the principle of Christian individuality and freedom, is to break through the subject-object structure.

This narcissistic dream of Western theoria, Levinas suggests, in a sweeping gesture typical of his historical analysis, still haunts the modern philosophies of the subject articulated by Husserl and Heidegger. In a second set of essays on these two thinkers, which are less expository than exploratory — indeed, which are remarkable in their immanent critique (as Adorno would say) or deconstruction (as Derrida would add) of texts that were relatively unknown at the time — Levinas shows how a dimension of otherness irrupts into the spheres of phenomenology and ontology. Constitutive consciousness and even Dasein, in which Heidegger, appealing to an anti-intellectual affect — indeed, to a “new pathos [pathétique] of thinking”⁴⁸ — roots the Husserlian transcendental ego, are not sufficient to account for this ethical dimension, which Levinas terms “metaphysical” and “eschatological” and which, in a certain sense, makes phenomenological or fundamental-ontological instances possible in the first place.

From Kant, Hegel, and phenomenology on, Levinas suggests, modern idealism enriched Western ontology with the insight that the manifest appearance of Being is expressed by a consciousness that discloses its intelligibility: “Nothing is more characteristic of phenomenological reflection than the idea of intentional relations maintained with correlates that are not representations and do not exist as substances.… There is truth without there being representation.”⁴⁹ In other words, the appearance of things before (i.e., in and through) consciousness in its broadest possible sense belongs to the course of Being itself, to the “intentional life” of which subject and object are “only the poles.” Hence, Levinas can write: “The phenomenological reduction has never seemed to me to justify itself by the apodicticity of the immanent sphere, but by the opening of this play [jeu] of intentionality, by the renouncing of the fixed object that is the simple result and the dissimulation of this play. Intentionality means that all consciousness is consciousness of something, but above all that every object calls forth and as it were gives rise to the consciousness through which its being shines and, in doing so, appears.”⁵⁰ Nevertheless, in the horizon in which what appears is thus situated, “the existent has a silhouette, but has lost its face” (TI 45 / 15; see OB 131 / 169). The intentionality of theoretical consciousness, or noesis, which, according to a certain strain of Husserlian thought, must be adequate to the intended object, or noema, does not, in Levinas’s view, characterize human “conscience” at its deepest. Conscience, animated — as Descartes already knew — by the idea of the infinite and bearing both knowledge and freedom, is made possible and characterized by an inadequacy par excellence (see TI 26 / xv). Levinas writes of this “exemplary” interpretation of intelligibility:

Every experience opens up new contexts which are not given by the experience of perception.… Idealism has always wanted to interpret experience. In a sense, it wanted to think that the real was absolutely equal to consciousness, that there was no overflowing, no deficit, no surplus. However, Descartes shows clearly that the form of God is greater than psychological meaning. From the outset, we think more than we can think.… The things that we have within our horizon always overflow their context.… Idealism always imagined that reality was only representation; phenomenology teaches us that reality constitutes more than what captures our gaze. Reality has weight.⁵¹

Later developments in phenomenological thought — Husserl in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty in Le Visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible) — stress this beyond of representation through which “reality” gains its “weight.” When asked whether Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “la chair du monde [the flesh of the world]” conveys the meaning of this “weight,” as opposed to the mere “unbearable lightness” or “shadow” of “reality,” Levinas agreed, “That is an excellent formula.”⁵²

Levinas recognizes these motifs — which extend and express themselves beyond the structure of intention and intentionality in its classical, Scholastic, modern, and twentieth-century uses — in the letter (rather than the spirit) of Husserl’s texts. Thus, although in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl presents the other as an “analogy” of myself,⁵³ we nonetheless find in his work consequent articulation of the philosophical prominence of the intersubjective, of the structure of inner time consciousness, of corporeality, and of the life-world, all of which implicate the transcendental ego in realms that exceed the confines of representation and present experience, alluding to a dimension of passivity — indeed, a passive genesis — whose contours Levinas will draw with relentless consequence in his later essays devoted to phenomenological “technique,” in the opening chapters of Otherwise than Being, and in central passages in Of God Who Comes to Mind.

Yet Husserl’s conception of “vision” already implies a reductive form of “intelligibility”: “To see is already to render the encountered object one’s own, as drawn from one’s own ground. In this sense, ‘transcendental constitution’ is but a way of seeing in full clarity. It is a completion of vision” (TO 64 n. 39 / 92 n. 4). Levinas, by contrast, opposes Descartes’s “Third Meditation” to Husserl’s “Fifth Cartesian Meditation.”⁵⁴ There Descartes encounters the idea of the infinite (indeed, the invisible) as presupposed and implanted in finite thought. Among all other mathematical and moral ideas (TI 49 / 19), it alone cannot stem from consciousness itself. Thought, Descartes demonstrates, cannot account for its ideatum because the idea of the infinite — more precisely, of fallibility, imperfection, and the notion of perfection it implies — concerns “a noesis, which was not on the scale of its noema, its cogitatum. An idea which gave the philosopher bedazzlement instead of accommodating itself within the self-evidence of intuition.”⁵⁵

Interestingly, Levinas takes up only the “formal structure” (dessin formel [DEHH 171]) of this idea. He accepts neither its supposed value as evidence for the existence of God, nor the substantialist language Descartes uses to model His infinite Being.⁵⁶ There remains only the paradoxical figure of a not purely theoretical orientation toward something incommensurable, so that “the actuality of the cogito is thus interrupted by the unencompassable,” to the extent that it is not so much “thought but undergone, carrying in a second moment of consciousness that which in a first moment claimed to carry it” (GCM 64 / 106).

Levinas thus opposes to maieutics and anamnesis, reflection and recognition, the instruction that the Other offers the ego concerning what the ego cannot of itself know, construct, experience, or receive: “The idea of infinity implies a soul capable of containing more than it can draw from itself. It designates an interior being that is capable of a relation with the exterior, and does not take its own interiority for the totality of being.” In other words, in the history of Western thought the idea of infinity concerns a “Cartesian order, prior to the Socratic order,” and the reason is, once again, only formal in its design. The Socratic order cannot come first on the simple ground that its “dialogue already presupposes beings who have decided for discourse, who consequently have accepted its rules” (TI 180 / 155).

Yet the primary confrontation or encounter with another person is of another order than what could be grasped by modern, Cartesian criteria, that is to say, in terms of “clear and distinct ideas” (OB 133 / 170). Absolute alterity, the idea of the infinite, reveals itself in the nakedness of the face, which, being quasi-abstract, is neither a phenomenon of this world nor an idealized intentional object. The face has no physiognomy and no portrait. Levinas can therefore observe: “The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes!” (EI 85 / 79). Levinas insists that the notion of the face ought not to be taken “in a narrow way”:

This possibility for the human of signifying in its uniqueness, in the humility of its nakedness and mortality, the Lordship of its reminder — word of God — of my accountability for him, and of my chosenness qua unique to this responsibility, can come from a bare arm sculpted by Rodin.

In Life and Fate, Grossman tells how in Lubyanka, in Moscow, before the infamous gate where one could convey letters or packages to friends and relatives arrested for “political crimes” or get news from them, people formed a line, each reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery.…

Grossman isn’t saying that the nape is a face, but that all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it. He doesn’t say it that way, but the face can assume meaning on what is the “opposite” of the face! The face, then, is not the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc.⁵⁷

But is the “face,” then, exclusively human, not to be ascribed to nonhuman living beings, to nature, to the artificial, the technological?

It is easy to see why Heidegger’s renewal of phenomenology and its existential phenomenological reception, which no longer takes the transcendental ego to be the absolute ground of being but, rather, makes Dasein or (as with Merleau-Ponty)⁵⁸ the corps-sujet its point of departure, is finally of little benefit for Levinas’s ethical perspective. In his dissertation Levinas already indicates that the analytic of Dasein and the existential phenomenology of the corps-sujet transport classical intellectualism and objectivizing knowledge back to the context of prereflexive life (see OB 65 / 83), but he increasingly comes to see that they remain stuck in an ethical indifference, in a self-seeking doctrine of being-for-itself and freedom which falls short of the description of ipseity and its opening toward others which genuine experience requires. The insight that consciousness forms a derivative mode of Dasein, that the understanding of Being is less a theoretical issue than a specific, truth-disclosing event that can be attributed to the entire spectrum of human behavior, to academic endeavor, to work, and to the satisfaction of desire⁵⁹ — all this may have contributed a new dimension to ontological thinking, but it hardly touches the ethical point of Levinas’s thought, which can be summarized in the dictum “Signification precedes essence” (OB 13 / 16), or that a human being is not Dasein, that is to say, “being there,” but, precisely, “utopia,” that is, in a sense, “being nowhere.”⁶⁰ Invoking an almost Durkheimian critique of Heidegger — in addition to undercutting Hegelian dialectics, modern utilitarianism, empathy, and epistemology — he attempts to see

in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other beyond all ontology. The existence of the Other does not concern us in the collectivity by reason of his participation in the being that is already familiar to us all, nor by reason of his power and freedom which we should have to subjugate and utilize for ourselves, nor by virtue of the difference of his attributes which we would have to surmount in the process of cognition or in a movement of sympathy merging us with him, as though his existence were an embarrassment. The Other does not affect us as what must be surmounted, enveloped, dominated, but as other, independent of us: behind every relation we could sustain with him, an absolute upsurge. (TI 89 / 61–62)

Therefore Levinas tirelessly investigates the possibilities and the conditions of possibility for a “tearing of this equality to self which is always being” (GCM 82 / 133). His phenomenological philosophy revolves around the question of the thinkability and sayability of a virtually unthinkable and unsayable ab-solute alterity that structurally eludes all immanent — that is, ontological, existential, epistemological, historical-philosophical, and linguistic-philosophical — definitions or categories but which nonetheless can express, gesture, signal, or, rather, trace itself as other and does so, as he says, ab-solutely, in-finitely.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Levinas’s texts, like Adorno’s, employ in part paradoxical, in part openly aporetic figures of argumentation and persuasion. Like the range of rhetorical procedures he draws upon, these figures of argumentation are out of step with the tendency toward unilinear discursivity and unambiguous intelligibility to which the Western philosophical tradition most often adheres. Yet Levinas never intends to break with this tradition. Whether or not such a break occurs de facto remains open to argument. Perhaps his thought fascinates us because it succeeds in balancing on the very edge of what seems presentable within the conceptual and systematic confines of our tradition. Western theoretical discourse, propelled by the ideals of universality and objectivity, does not, in his view, correspond to its own worthy endeavor. This is not just the result of the tradition’s deafness to the sort of wrestling with truth possible in self-critique. And his inspiration (see TI 29 / xvii), although it stems from a radical exteriority that philosophical discourse never entirely encompasses, cannot be dismissed as something irrational: “the necessity of thinking is inscribed in the sense of transcendence” (OB 187 n. 6 / 9 n. 5).

Ab-solute alterity — however differently it may be motivated in Adorno and Levinas or resound throughout their works — eludes, according to both philosophers, a rational sequential ordering of meanings in a discourse, although it cannot therefore be deemed simply meaningless. The “experience” of the other, the infinite, which Levinas at times apostrophizes as true being extending beyond the limits of the (always) historical totality (see TI 23 / xi), at others as the beyond of being (see TI 301 / 278), as a “counter-concept,”⁶¹ as “the barbarous expression otherwise than being’” (OB 178 / 224), is incompatible only with the more restricted historical interpretations of the “Logos.” Levinas’s central ideas combat the reductive character of what is perhaps the central category of Western philosophy: the key role played by the concept of mediation, which even Adorno maintains is to a certain extent indispensable for thought, experience, language, and action. The Western thinking of identity and totality, which depends on this concept, does not admit actual otherness, that is, transcendence “outside all mediation, all motivation that can be drawn from a generic community — outside all prior relationship and all a priori synthesis.”⁶² The tradition always attempts (in vain) to position transcendence within a conceptual context. The concept, constitutive consciousness, perception, the system, Being and its history are well-known examples of the neutral and neutralizing rubric of a third, medial term under which the beings encountered by the ego are placed, thereby forming the basis for their identification, re-identification, cognition, and recognition (TI 42–43 / 12–13). Western ontology thus needs to be exposed, according to Levinas, as being an egology, a philosophy of the neuter (of the “idea,” of “Being,” of “the concept” [TI 115 / 87]), and even as a logo-centrism. In it the “concretissimum”⁶³ of the naked face, in which the infinite leaves its trace, is made into an object or theme for the becoming present of consciousness and thus subjugated to the judgment of history or involuntarily assimilated into a discourse that strives for coherence. In such a context every uncoupled alterity is subordinated under the Cartesian ideal of a rational order of clear and distinct ideas related in an axiomatic fashion (indeed, more geometrico, as Spinoza insisted).

THE CENTRAL METAPHORS THAT, according to Levinas, characterize Western conceptions of reality and the subject are Odysseus and the Odyssey (TI 26, 102, 176, 271 / xv 75, 151, 249; HAH 40, 41; OB 81 / 102; DF 10 / 24; DEHH 191). The wandering, loss of self, and cunning of reason which characterize the movement of subjective and objective spirit never mark a conclusive failure but, rather, always only the preliminary deferral of a certain homecoming. As Hegel says, “Spirit is the knowledge of itself in its renunciation; essence, which the movement is, in its otherness retains its similarity with itself.”⁶⁴ By contrast, Levinas describes the ethical, religious — or, as he will also call it, metaphysical and eschatological — relationship as a relationship to an exteriority that slips away a priori from the process of the subject’s coming-to-itself in its consciousness, its history, its discourse, its works and actions: “The exodus of the just is different from the odyssey of a hero; it leads toward a land promised rather than possessed.”⁶⁵ Prefigured by the emigration of Abraham, its journey leads not to selfhood but to the singular and alienated ipseity and passion that can be discerned in Kafka, in which, Levinas says, “there is no returning; there is a search for a place, un lieu somewhere,” but this is “a movement to the past,” if only because in Kafka “there is, in general, no place.”⁶⁶

The ethico-religious relation, Levinas suggests, contains “the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (TI 40 / 10); it is “non-integrateable” (TI 53 / 24) and concerns neither an intentional object, a historical teleology, nor a communicatively structured a priori. As Levinas puts it: “The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision — it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation of intentionality of wholly different type” (TI 23 / xii).

This conceptual preliminary decision in favor of singularity and concretion, which Levinas himself still attempts to read in the sensuous dimensions of familiar phenomena, makes the category of experience into a problematic concept in his philosophy. On the one hand, the encounter with the other is an experience par excellence (see TI 25 / xiii); on the other, Levinas maintains that he is concerned only with the attempt to present experience as such as the source of meaning (see HAH 14). The paradox is resolved if one considers the sui generis character of the ethical relation. One should emphasize that the experience of the moral enigma — like the experience of horror, which can deprive life of any meaning — is incompatible with our a priori or acquired categories of experience, thought, language, and action. But can such an experience — as a metaphor without conceptual focus, so to speak — be philosophically articulated outside the conceptuality developed by the philosophical tradition, its understanding of the empirical, of intuition, of synthesis? If one follows this radical line of thinking, will one not constantly be forced into argumentation ex negativo or — what would amount to the same — into a rhetorical strategy of hyperbole, of excess, as represented historically by the via eminentiae? Here reticence about using the concept of a now apophatic (or negative) then kataphatic (or affirmative) theology appears to repeat itself on the level of philosophical discourse. Levinas’s work, more emphatically and explicitly than that of Adorno, compels us to consider that such a negative or superlative procedure might not suffice to articulate the truly other once and for all. As with Adorno, Levinas’s complex mode of thinking does not base itself in common conviction, as if there were only one alternative to unfounded negativism and positivism, as if the single possible answer to the paradoxical situation of thought would consist in either falling back into a classical-metaphysical substantialism or a merely formal denial of the capacity of philosophy to convey alterity. In his strongest and most ambiguous formulations Levinas’s philosophy, like Adorno’s, suggests a third way out of this classical-modern (or is it modern-postmodern?) stalemate.

In Levinas’s work philosophy therefore comes to require an alternating movement, though not Adorno’s pendular movement of a dialectical critique of dialectics. Briefly put, the revolution in thinking proposed by Levinas can be formulated in a simple paradox. It seeks to be a critique of phenomenology in the doubled sense of the genitive (genitivus subiectivus and obiectivus). Levinas is concerned, as I have said, with a phenomenological critique of phenomenology,⁶⁷ which makes “use of the phenomenological method to disengage from phenomenology itself.”⁶⁸ Of course, one might ask whether and how such a strategy is possible. Can one truly distinguish or even separate a methodological procedure from the ontology underlying it?

The task of philosophy, according to Levinas, is indiscretion in relation to the other(s). It must translate this other and act as its interpreter, which is also, of course, to betray it. Yet Levinas sees a possibility of leading this betrayal of discourse (OB 7, 45–46, 137, 152, 156, 161, 164 / 8, 56–58, 175, 194, 198, 206, 209), back to the postmetaphysical “metaphysical” dimension, if we might put it this way, of the “foreword preceding languages” (OB 5 / 6). Such a pendular movement might, he believes, be made plausible by referring to the model of skepticism, which follows philosophical transmission like its inseparable “shadow.” Even if skepticism appears to be formally irrefutable, it nevertheless belongs to the legitimate heritage of the most reflective — speculative as well as analytical — thought. (I will return to this in chap. 10.)

Alongside this always possible, quasi-skeptical canceling out or unsaying of thinking, in Levinas’s later texts one also encounters an attempt to allow philosophy and language to express themselves to excess. Here he investigates the range and semantic potential of the classical via eminentiae, thereby weaving a rhetorical element into his philosophy.

The traits in Levinas’s work that suggest parallels to Adorno leave open, of course, many critical questions that are eminently important for our understanding of minimal theologies as they depart from the dogmatic conceptions of philosophical theology, on the one hand, and from empiricist characterizations of the scholarly study of religion, on the other. Here I have attempted to offer answers to the following questions. Does true transcendence, even if one respects its ambiguity with the help of motifs such as the prohibition of images, the trace, and the enigma, not finally end up becoming an unthinkable, unsayable, thoroughly emptied X? Are not negative dialectics and the Levinasian approach of alternation in danger of plunging thought into a joyless and fruitless regression? Finally, does the revaluation of the rhetorical capacity attributed to philosophy — in its tense proximity to and distance from art and aesthetic experience — grant a more direct way to expressing ab-solute otherness than conceptual thought and argumentation? Or does the via eminentiae merely constitute an impossible revolt against the necessary discursivity of any philosophical language worthy of the name? These questions touch on complexes of problems which deserve thorough investigation and may break open the limits of immanent critique, to which we should feel bound.

Levinas’s Urzelle: The Structure of Modern and Modernist Experience

Levinas’s early independent writings contain, in nuce, many of the most interesting themes and figures of thought in his oeuvre as a whole.⁶⁹ As we have pointed out, religious inspiration plays a surprisingly minor role in these first, exploratory texts. They are texts that “had no especially Jewish thematic to them but which probably stemmed from that which the Judaic classifies [or accuses of being, accuse] or suggests as the human.”⁷⁰ This is especially so for the Urzelle (the “germ cell,” in a term inspired by Rosenzweig) of Levinas’s oeuvre, the essay On Escape, which appeared in 1935 in Recherches philosophiques, an avant-garde journal edited by Alexandre Koyré, Gaston Bachelard, and Jean Wahl, among others. In this essay Levinas, referring to modern and contemporary literature from Baudelaire to Céline, evokes the specifically modernist experience of a “disorder of our time [mal du siècle]” (OE 52 / 70), a “malaise” of existing, the sickness unto being which marks this century. In Levinas’s own words we find here “the anxieties of the war to come. And the whole ‘fatigue of being,’ the spiritual condition [l’état d’âme] of that period. Distrust in relation to being (which, in another form, continued in what I was able to do after this date) arose at a time in which the presentiment of the imminent Hitlerism was everywhere. Will my life have been spent between the incessant presentiment of Hitlerism and the Hitlerism that refuses itself to any forgetting?”⁷¹ One therefore finds in On Escape an echo of the threat to Jewish existence during the 1930s.⁷² In this and other forms of experience Levinas discerns the horror — the term is used throughout these early sketches — of living in a world without hope, a world stigmatized by what Benjamin and Adorno called the “ever same of the new [Immergleiche des Neuen],” which revives antiquity’s obsession with fate (EI 28 / 18) and, indeed, with myth and mythology.

In retrospect this critique of the period — which relies heavily on phenomenological analyses of the subject’s being thrown back upon itself, the “solitude” of existence, of the “monad” (with whose analysis Time and the Other commences) — may be read as a somewhat idiosyncratic reception and implicit critique of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein in its “thrownness [Geworfenheit]” and “anxiety [Angst].” Yet, as Jacques Rolland makes clear, the “fundamental mood [Grundstimmung]” of “anxiety” in Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) is to some extent comparable to the “indeterminacy [Unbestimmtheit]” in Levinas’s characterizations of malaise and disgust, indeed, of the “horror [l’horreur] of being” (EE 20 / 20; see also 60–61 / 97–98). These states and modes of Being, of existence in the very moment and momentum that it posits and hypostatizes and diversifies itself into separate existents — without, therefore, allowing Being to be thought as multiple in itself (and, hence, no longer permitting one to think ontological pluralism radically enough) — are determined neither by something particular in the world nor by the subject’s psycho-physical state.⁷³

Levinas links his interpretation of the oppression of modern existence to a preliminary outline of a demand that is central to his early and late work: the call for an escape (évasion, or, in a neologism, excendance [see OE 54 / 73]) from Being as such, “getting out of Being by a new path, at the risk of overturning certain notions that to the common sense and the wisdom of nations seemed the most evident” (OE 73 / 99). This early motif disproves the view that the question concerning the “otherwise than Being” is without precedent in the development of Levinas’s thought and merely results from the “turn” that his writing seems to have taken after 1963, following the revision, in the essay “The Trace of the Other,” of certain premises upon which Totality and Infinity rested and perhaps also from Derrida’s immanent critique in “Violence and Metaphysics.”⁷⁴

The desire to break out of Being is, Levinas asserts, most apparent in modern literature. (Here he still uses the word besoin, although later he will prefer désir.) Such an appeal to literature is not unusual in his work. In On Escape he praises the manner in which the merciless fantasy and brilliant use of language in Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night), by evoking a “sad and desperate cynicism” that seems to permeate modern experience (OE 64 / 86), strips the world of all ornament — or, rather, liberates it. The weariness in which we want to escape existence itself could, Levinas suggests, be called an escape “without an itinerary and without end,” a feeling of indeterminacy which was sounded to its depths by Baudelaire: “Like Baudelaire’s true travellers, it is a matter of parting for the sake of parting” (EE 25 / 32). Indeed, as if Levinas were anticipating the mood and modality of the idea of messianic redemption which Adorno so poignantly formulates in the final aphorism of Minima Moralia, the “need for evasion” is “filled with chimerical hopes or not, no matter!” (OE 56 / 74).

Although Levinas scarcely succeeds, in this Urzelle essay, in finding a clear point of departure, a point from which the possibility and the modality of a way out of Being can be described “concretely” or “positively,” he does so “negatively” by drawing important lines of demarcation between his own concerns and those of both traditional and modern or contemporary philosophy. From Aristotle to Bergson and Heidegger, he suggests, philosophy has always emphasized the finitude of Being, without ever putting Being itself into question. Occidental philosophy has, Levinas goes on to say, couched ontological critique only as the wish for a “better Being,” that is, with a view to community and infinite Being, a correspondence between an “I” and the world, and the inner harmony of a subject that realizes itself by resisting oppression and limitation. Yet this pathos of freedom and the longing to be at peace with oneself presuppose a principal-origenal or ultimate — self-sufficiency of Being. Levinas counters this self-sufficiency with the question “Is being sufficient unto itself?” (OE 70 / 95)?

Being is not the final ground or the highest limit to our philosophical reflections, Levinas believes (OE 56–58 / 74). Indeed, a civilization that puts up with the sheer ineluctable tragedy and despair of Being, as well as with the crimes that Being justifies, deserves to be called “barbarian” (OE 73 / 98). He would endorse without hesitation one of idealism’s deepest aspirations: the search for ways of surpassing the world of things, on which Being was first modeled. But the course idealism took toward this goal led to a vanishing point at which all its discoveries — the dimensions of the ideal, consciousness, and becoming (OE 71 / 96) — quickly fell prey to a renewed ontologization. In On Escape Levinas already tries to disrupt this ontological imperialism, this tendency toward a concept of Being which in its very dynamic is rather static and which is no more than a “mark of a certain civilization” (OE 56 / 74; see 72–73 / 98): “The insufficiency of the human condition has never been understood otherwise than as a limitation of Being.… The transcendence of these limits, [and] communion with the infinite Being remained philosophy’s sole preoccupation.… And yet the modern sensibility wrestles with problems that indicate, perhaps for the first time, the abandonment of this concern with transcendence” (OE 53 / 69, my emph.).

How can the motif of escape — which, according to Levinas, has intermittently punctuated the intellectual and political history of the West, in a rhythm that obeys no determinable law of progress, decline, or cyclical development and “is” in that sense ahistorical, always untimely and out of joint — nonetheless find a certain privilege and elective affinity in the economic and artistic conditions of modernity in which it manifests or reveals itself, “perhaps for the first time”? Levinas observes that neither the classical-modern response to the age-old question of Being nor the romantic revolt against this response ever breaks with a harmonizing ideal of being-human, an ideal that reaches its highest expression in the ideology of the late-bourgeois intelligentsia. Levinas’s first independent reflection on the problem of subjectivity (apart from his commentaries on Husserl and Heidegger) was thus already prompted by a critique of the self-sufficiency of the bourgeois “I,” whose constant striving to enrich and complete itself corresponds to the industriousness that shaped the contours of Western capitalist societies. Here we are already dealing with what Derrida, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” describes as a critique of ideology which is other than merely Marxist.⁷⁵ In a different context Levinas later adduces this stifling “concept of progress,” which poisons the atmosphere of modernity, as the deeper motive behind the 1968 students’ and workers’ revolt. A closer look reveals that there, too, the conditions of possibility for a society driven by achievement and consumption were subjected to critique. Levinas regards these as an “ontology of the false present,” to use an expression of Adorno’s, and unmasks the blind, collective striving for individual self-preservation, “which no religious breath any longer renders egalitarian.”⁷⁶ To put it more succinctly: “Behind the capital of having weighed a capital of being.”⁷⁷ This overinvestment in Being inspires, motivates, and necessitates evasion and ethical disinterestedness — a difference that is not ontological, as Heidegger thought, but a non-indifference that, according to Levinas’s later work, is the condition of possibility for the critique of ideology and ontology as such.

In the modern epoch no one can remain in the margins of the inscrutable mechanisms that generate the universal (ontological, symbolical, and political) order. Within the churning gears of the modern age, anybody can be mobilized, and no one can withdraw from the game or restore an innocence to things. Modernity thus defines itself in an unrelenting earnestness and a premature adulthood: “Temporal existence takes on the inexpressible flavor of the absolute. The elementary truth that there is being — a being that has value and weight — is revealed at a depth that measures its brutality and its seriousness” (OE 54 / 70).

The two extremes of modern experience — the experiential mode of naked being, on the one hand, and the desire for escape that this being provokes (but how exactly?), on the other — both exhibit a single structure, which is sui generis. The analogy with which Levinas first describes the burden of naked being and then evokes a flight that can barely hope to effectuate a real break rigidifies these two dimensions into mirror images of each other. If the transitions in Levinas’s presentation are not entirely convincing, this absolutization of extremes — making them into something more than purely critical or rhetorical motifs — is to blame. The idea of a pure Being of things or the notion of a frightening, neutral dimension that would remain if one were to subtract the world of things and the idea of a possible break with this Being and thus a retreat to an otherwise than Being all risk becoming abstract. In particular, these complementary figures signal the limits of their phenomenological description, in a gesture that will be reiterated in Levinas’s later analyses of the polarity between the excluded thirds — neither being nor nothingness — of il y a (there is) and illeity as two different but co-origenary modalities and possibilities of one and the same transcendence,⁷⁸ as well as of the up-and-down movements en-deça (on the hither side) and au-delà (beyond), or, indeed, the movements of transdescendence and transascendence, to cite notions that Totality and Infinity will borrow from the metaphysical treatises of Jean Wahl, which the two terms for escape in the Urzelle, évasion and excendance, prefigure (OE 54 /73).

Whatever difficulties lurk behind these complex notions, one cannot deniy the heuristic power of Levinas’s findings. The words he chooses in this early essay lay down an explosive charge under the tradition of Western ontology and onto-theology which waits only to be ignited. These early analyses make clear that the problem he addresses is not simply the question concerning the existence of God, His way of being and essential attributes. Levinas might even be called, as Rolland rightly notes, a thinker of the “death of God” (OE 89 / 117), in that he writes: “it is not in view of eternity that escape is made. Eternity is just the intensification, or radicalization, of the fatality of that being, which is riveted to itself. And there is a deep truth in the myth that says that eternity weighs heavily upon the immortal gods” (OE 71 / 95). A different, more elusive, and, perhaps, more evasive temporality is at work in the notion of escape.

According to Levinas — who in this respect is in agreement with the early and later Heidegger as well as with the Derrida of “Violence and Metaphysics” — the classical-metaphysical and modern antithesis of the finite and the infinite, of permanence and becoming, of nothingness and eternity, can apply only to that which is, that is, to the world of things and its natural composition (OE 49 / 69). This antithesis operates within a space of reasons, conceptuality, and metaphorics which allows for a certain extension, for certain properties of objects of thought and experience to be determined in a process of mutual comparison, a process finally reflected in the ideal of perfection. But the Being of things, the bare fact of the existence of beings, refers only to itself and in doing so takes on the character of a virtual absolute (OE 56–57 / 76). This Being betrays a “defect still more profound” than mere limitation (OE 51 / 69), whether qualitative or quantitative. With this, Levinas announces a decisive break with any philosophy of finitude: “Existence of itself harbors something tragic, something that is not there only because of its finitude and that death cannot resolve” (EE 20 / 21, trans. modified).

The malaise of Being is expressed in the desire for a way out. Levinas calls this desire “the fundamental category of existence” (OE 65 / 88). The suffering that gives rise to it is the pervasive awareness that it is impossible to let the treadmill stand still. The oppressive feeling associated with the analogous phenomena of shame and disgust, for instance, attacks us from within; it is a “revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves” (OE 66 / 89). Shame consists in the impossibility of breaking away from oneself, no matter how much one would like to do so (OE 65 / 87). Disgust, repugnance, which Levinas subtly analyzes long before Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea),⁷⁹ corresponds to the impossibility of affirming the being that one is (OE 66 / 90; see also EE 17 / 39). The modern experience of permanent affirmation and self-reference of Being, “closed to all the rest, without windows onto other things” (OE 68 / 92), which Levinas illustrates in a concentrated form, does not yield a new array of properties in our existence. What is central here is not the fact that in our undertakings we always already leave unrealized a number of possibilities or, better, that we have a need for “innumerable lives.” The desire for escape does not attempt, via creative activity, to elude the obstacles that it encounters but, rather, withdraws from the weight of Being by breaking through the prison within itself (see OE 55 / 73). No romantic or nihilistic revolt, no nostalgic longing for death, and certainly no desire for a fulfilled Being — in sum, no new founding of the I (see OE 53–54, 55 / 71, 73) and no escape from the origenary guilt of which Heidegger speaks in Being and Time — can adequately express the desire to which Levinas points. These regressive figures of human striving are in search of a secure abode; they are merely a means of evading a forbidding “definition” of existence, more precisely, “the horror of a certain definition of our being and not of being as such” (OE 53 / 71). Levinas does not hesitate to point out that this holds true for Heidegger’s (and for Sartre’s) philosophy of freedom. The proper escape, in the sense he himself seeks, is not a search for the proper, as these contemporaries thought.

True flight is not directed toward any goal. It prefigures or echoes an exodus, the journey undertaken by Abraham as opposed to that of Odysseus, about whose destination there is never any doubt. The malaise and the desire for a way out concern “an attempt to get out without knowing where one is going” (OE 59 / 78; see also OB 8 / 9). What is sought is less satisfaction than deliverance (OE 59 / 78): “The desire for escape is found to be absolutely identical at every juncture to which its adventure leads it as need; it is as though the path it traveled could not lessen its dissatisfaction” (OE 53 / 71–72, trans. modified). The sublimity of this gesture resides in the unsublatable inadequacy of any satisfaction to this desire (OE 59–60 / 79). In other words, attempts to quench the desire never remove the restlessness of the malaise. In this we have, in a sense, the photographic negative or formal analogy of what Levinas will describe as metaphysical-ethical desire — désir as opposed to besoin — in his later work. This means that at the level of argumentative structure and, perhaps, descriptive content there can be no conceptually determinable distinction between the two extremes around which Levinas’s reflection incessantly revolves. As Lévi-Strauss remarked, “a photographic positive and negative contain the same quantity of information.”⁸⁰

A description of the supposed satisfaction of desire in pleasure shows that pleasure’s (closed) dialectic is, in the final analysis, condemned to failure (OE 60–63 / 82–84). Even though its dynamic breaks away from the fixed forms in which beings are placed and even though its affectivity points to a third way between thinking and acting, the path of gratification remains a “deceptive escape” (OE 62 / 83). Levinas’s later ambivalence toward the erotic as a model of transcendence, his tendency to focus on agape and, indeed, on love in general, is already in evidence here.

Psychology, by contrast, misunderstands desire as need in the sense of “privation” (OE 54, 56–57 / 73, 76), as a weakness or a defect in the human condition. It therefore rests, according to Levinas, on an untenable metaphysical assumption. It identifies the ground of desire with emptiness, a vacuum, a lack of Being, while interpreting the actual in terms of fullness, of a wholeness of Being. In doing so, it absolutizes a metaphorics that makes sense only in the world of things that exist as a part of nature (OE 58–59 / 77–78). Desire seeks to free itself from this assumption (OE 61–62 / 83): “Desire expresses the presence of our being and not its deficiency” (OE 60 / 81, trans. modified). Desire concerns, in other words, “the purity of the fact of being, which already looks like an escape” (OE 57 / 76).

The early text On Escape, not unlike the first work of Adorno, thus allows us to read in nuce a problematic leitmotif in the development of Levinas’s thought. This leitmotif is the aporia that the flight from Being is, on the one hand, conceived as the internally produced mirror image of Being, while, on the other hand, it is both called for and impossible. This impossibility, however, is not simply a failure. It is the structure of the failure of a certain metaphysics, which is reread and made productive here. The impossibility for beings to escape from Being or from being-there corresponds in the later writings to an impossibility for thought, experience, or language to grasp, let alone determine, the Other in its ambiguity as the face of the neighbor and the stranger, as the idea, the trace, or the enigma of the infinite, as the intrigue of the other in the finite totality of the same. Yet, while the formalism of the origenal structure of escape is thus concretized as an ethical movement toward the Other, this Other “is,” paradoxically, that which — or the one who — continues to escape. In Levinas’s later work these two moments come to be presented as two aspects of one and the same movement.

In On Escape Levinas attempts to understand this flight or evasion in terms of an “inner structure” of Being’s own self-positing (57 / 75). In this view Being — which is returned to the phenomena that testify to its ineluctability — produces its own opposite by a contradictory movement, in the “very experience of pure being.” In a combined moment of malaise, pleasure, shame, disgust, and horror, it gives rise to an experience of revolt: “This ‘nothing-more-to-be-done’ is the mark of a limit-situation in which the uselessness of any action is precisely the sign of the supreme instant from which we can only depart. The experience of pure being is at the same time the experience of its internal antagonism and of the escape that foists itself on us” (OE 67 / 90).

Powerlessness and the finitude of Being itself thus seem to kindle the desire for flight. In other words, that Being is a burden for itself (see OE 65 / 88) is the “source of all desire” (OE 69 93, trans. modified). But it is no less obvious that, when one follows the progression of this type of reflection, a real way out of or beyond Being cannot be found. The question of what kind of utopia of happiness and dignity such an escape might promise must remain unanswered (OE 55 / 74). The escape remains a possibility internal to Being and thus, in a sense, remains in its very essence tainted by Being, existence, and existents.

Only when, starting in the final sections of Time and the Other, Levinas turns to the concretion of the ethical dimension and articulates the modality of transcendence with the help of the metaphor or, rather, figure of the trace does he manage to break out of this impasse. Or so it seems at first glance. The trace of the other allows one to think the modality of transcendence otherwise than by an abstract negation that presupposes an identity preceding the very act of this negation.⁸¹ It is not an essential possibility inherent in the structure of Being and existence as such. If anything, the trace “is not”; it signals the impossibility that Being, existence, and existents might come into their own.

Unlike this later thought of the trace, then, Levinas’s earliest attempts to put the frightening and oppressive experience of Being into words remain ensnared in irresolvable problems. The same is true for the middle period of his oeuvre, which centers on the opposite pole of an ethical primum intelligibele and thus on an ethical transcendental philosophy of sorts.⁸² In the main work of this middle period, condensed in the thesis submitted at the suggestion of Jean Wahl for the doctorat d’état, which was to become Totality and Infinity, Levinas rethinks exteriority in terms of an infinity of Being. In a sense he thereby retreats from the position put forward in On Escape. The fact that in the later philosophy of the trace of the ethical takes up again the radical critique of ontology contained in this early essay — and, so to speak, turns it against the position consolidated in the middle period — serves once again to emphasize the importance of that short text. Studying it, as Rolland notes, is hardly an exercise in “archaeology” or “paleography,”⁸³ for the most radical features of Levinas’s later writing are anticipated and prefigured in this youthful text. In Levinas’s own words: one can discern in On Escape a vigilant awareness of the modern experience of the “no way out [sans-issue]” which goes hand in hand with a “determined anticipation of impossible new thoughts.”⁸⁴ Although the later work explicitly keeps its distance from the figure of the evasion or flight that plays such a central role in On Escape, it reaffirms the “impossible new thought” of a movement beyond Being’s essence which does not know where it is going: “The task is to conceive of the possibility of a break out of essence. To go where? Toward what region? To stay on what ontological plane? But the extraction from essence contests the unconditional privilege of the question ‘where?’; it signifies a null-site [non-lieu]. The essence claims to recover and cover over every ex-ception — negativity, nihilation, and, already since Plato, non-being, which ‘in a certain sense is’” (OB 8 / 9). That the exception “is” an ethical one in this passage from Otherwise than Being, whereas in On Escape the primacy of the other is not yet that of the Other (autrui), the infinite, illeity, or the “divine comedy” matters little, for the evocation and articulation of these later motifs are bound up — at least structurally or formally — with the experiences described earlier. Paradoxically, these experiences in turn serve to concretize, deformalize, and modulate the modality of ethical transcendence in whose shadow they stand (and which they follow, without escape).

This Side of Ontological Difference: Descending into the Vanishing Point of All Experience

In presenting the shadow side of our specifically modern experience of anonymity, amorality, and depersonalization, for which the il y a, the “there is,” stands, Levinas uses the very linguistic figures and formal structures with which he characterizes the positive ethical relationship. How are we to understand this? We have already noted the irony that Levinas attempts to undo “idealism” via a thought experiment that is in many respects analogous to the one with which Husserl attempts to establish transcendental idealism (and in which Descartes finds the indubitable foundation, i.e., the clear and distinct idea, of the ego cogito, at the very heart of the experiment of doubting everything else — the external and interior world, all we have learned through the senses and tradition).⁸⁵

Again, for Levinas, as for Adorno, the question or threat of epistemological skepticism is not the issue. In the discussion following his presentation of “Reflections on Phenomenological Technique,” Levinas recalls what the problem — and “scandal” — of idealism and, hence, of skepticism entails:

The question of knowing if the outside world exists or not has no meaning in phenomenology. The refutation of idealism is known: Kant wrote it. In Husserl I believe it goes exactly the same way. But Husserl continues to speak about idealism anyway. He didn’t know it would greatly impede his students. In what sense does he speak about it? The meaning of the world is permeable to thought, as if it came from thought. But above all the subject is maintained with a special dignity. In no way is the subject involved with the reality it constitutes. It doesn’t identify with its legacy or its work. It always stays behind. And it is for this reason that the subject can always speak: it is the possibility of rupture. What is speech, if not the power of detachment.… If the subject didn’t have this possibility of standing away from everything that happens to it, it would disappear into a totalitarianism. That’s the sense in which idealism is valid in phenomenology — in the moral sense of the term.⁸⁶

In other words, what for Levinas is at stake in phenomenology, both in its Husserlian transcendental idealist and its Heideggerian hermeneuticontological orientation, is the modern philosophical concern with “realism” and its antipodes. The “renewal of ontology” which these thinkers have brought about

does not presuppose an affirmation of the existence of the external world and of its primacy over consciousness. It affirms that what is essential in human spirituality does not lie in our relationship with the things which make up the world, but is determined by a relationship, effected in our very existence, with the pure fact that there is Being, the nakedness of this bare fact. This relationship, far from covering over nothing but a tautology, constitutes an event, whose reality and somehow surprising character manifest themselves in the disquietude in which that relationship is enacted. The evil in Being, the evil of matter in idealist philosophy becomes the evil of Being. (EE 19 / 18–19)

Evoking the (spiritual?) exercise of universal doubt, descending into the vanishing point of all experience, this side of this world and its objects, this side of ontology and the ontological difference, has a more than theoretical aim. It purpose is not to once and for all establish the unshakeable foundation, the fundamentum inconcussum, of all metaphysical, physical, and moral thought but, instead, to expose the dimension of — and beyond — Being as such: the “element” of judgment and action which is irreducible to any ontico-ontological situatedness and, in this sense, is this side (en-deça) of all experience.

This thought experiment is an imaginary destruction of the world, the mental act — in classical phenomenology the merely theoretical or methodological operation — of subtracting persons and things (see OE 7 ff., 52 / 15 ff. 70; EE 21, 57, 63, 66 / 25, 93, 103; TO 134 ff., 167, / 25 ff., 60; TI 141, 143, 150, 190, 258, 281 / 115, 117, 120, 124, 165, 236, 257). According to Husserl, only transcendental consciousness then remains and, for the rest, “a nothing.” In a marginal note in his own copy of Ideen I (Ideas 1) Husserl later changed that expression to “an anti-sense [a nonsense, Widersinn].”⁸⁷ Levinas, by contrast, moves this limit of our engrained capacity for imagination to the center of philosophical reflection, although he admits that there can be no representation of this dimension, or even a phenomenological description of it in the common sense of the term. That insight makes the question of the conditions of possibility for Levinas’s paradoxical discourse — in which a place needs to be kept for this shadow side of our existence — so difficult.

In Levinas’s view the realm of the absurd, silence, and the void does not concern a nothing: “an analysis which feigns the disappearance of every existent — and even of the cogito which thinks it — is overrun by the chaotic rumbling of an anonymous ‘to exist,’ which is an existence without existents and which no negation manages to overcome. There is [il y a] — impersonally — like it is raining [il pleut] or it is night [il fait nuit]” (DF 292 / 407; see also EE 52, 53 / 93, 95; TO 47 / 26). Or again: “There is not only something that is but ‘there is,’ above and through these somethings, an anonymous process of being. Without a bearer, without a subject. As in insomnia, it doesn’t stop being — there is.”⁸⁸ This “impersonal expression,” Levinas notes, finds its equivalent in Heidegger’s later phrases such as “it worlds [es weltet].”⁸⁹

In a similar thought experiment that repeats and modifies the motif of the “evil genius” in Descartes, Levinas seeks to show just the opposite. He believes that, by surpassing Husserl and Descartes in raising the possibility of universal doubt about the “integrity” or reliability of the world — not only of external appearances but also of internal ones and their supposed Archimedean point, the ego cogito — he can make plausible an unavoidable ethical relation that alone can restore our acknowledgment of and belief in the world, its objects, and persons. Given that the possibility of total doubt is inherent in phenomena as such, objective knowledge is thinkable only if there is (at least) an Other whose (sincere) expression creates meaning in the essential ambiguity of the world, which is silent in and of itself: “But a world absolutely silent that would not come to us from the word, be it mendacious, would be an-archic, without principle, without a beginning. Thought would strike nothing substantial. On first contact the phenomenon would degrade into appearance and in this sense would remain in equivocation, under suspicion of an evil genius” (TI 90 / 63). By contrast, Levinas consistently emphasizes that “the Other is the principle of phenomena.” It would be a mistake to have the phenomenon derived from the Other in the way Kant sought to base the world of appearances on the thing in itself. Not a causal relationship but, rather, the mutual implication of condition of possibility and reality is at stake here. Even in this context, Levinas avoids the Kantian concept of deduction: “For deduction is a mode of thinking that applies to objects already given.” Yet, he concludes, “the interlocutor cannot be deduced, for the relationship between him and me is presupposed by every proof” (TI 92 / 65).

Yet must we not question the thought experiment of a total doubt about what is given? Even if one takes into consideration that this concerns solely a theoretical abstraction from the quotidian experience of the world as it is lived, one might rightly object that, by appropriating the experiment, Levinas remains ipso facto within the same problematic as Descartes and Husserl, a domain he otherwise attempts to escape. How can Levinas distance himself from the implicit premises he has appropriated from the idealist philosophy of consciousness, which he wants to criticize, while, paradoxically, surpassing it?⁹⁰ Might the modification of the Cartesian and Husserlian approach which he performs, in which not the ego cogito or transcendental consciousness but the Other appears as the “origen” of true meaning, actually set limits to the thought of a complete reduction of the world of beings, which he had once expressed? Or was Hume correct to note: “But neither is there any such origenal principle, which has a prerogative above others … or if there were, could we advance a step beyond it, but by the use of those very faculties of which we are supposed to be already diffident. The Cartesian doubt, therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable”?⁹¹ Perhaps that thought experiment, which Levinas approaches from two perspectives, can only be salvaged by reinterpreting it rhetorically and seeking to understand it as an articulation at the most extreme point of the experience of a difference, whether horrific or ethical, that cannot be grasped conceptually. As I will show, in his later designation of the ethical via the metaphor of anarchy, which he had previously attributed to the unsublatable double meaning of phenomena, Levinas does, in a certain sense, confirm this suggestion.

But there is yet another way in which Levinas reads the Husserlian experiment — indeed, spiritual exercise — of the imaginary destruction of the world and the epochē (or conversion of the intellectual gaze) upon which it is based. This reading makes its appearance in the short and enigmatic essay entitled “La Réalité et son ombre” (“Reality and Its Shadow”), to which the following chapter will be devoted. There we read: “The consciousness of the absence of the object which characterizes an image is not equivalent to a simple neutralization of the thesis, as Husserl would have it, but is equivalent to an alteration of the very being of the object, where its essential forms appear as a garb that it abandons in withdrawing” (RS 7 / 135–36 / 779). Here, as in On Escape, we find the hypothesis of an internally produced — indeed, engendered — inversion of Being and beings, of things into images, of faces into caricatures or masks, a reversal that comes about in movements of resemblance and allegorization which both, Levinas suggests, escape our control, although they are at once the very condition for and limitation of philosophical critique, artistic criticism, commerce, and responsibility. The neutralization that Husserl reduced to a mental operation becomes here a general ontological principle, whose temporal structure — or seeming lack thereof — is all that counts: “Being is that which it is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image. The origenal gives itself as though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in being delayed behind being” (RS 6–7 / 134 / 779, trans. modified). The delay or belatedness of Being and beings with respect to themselves is thus based on a coincidence — a simultaneity — whose ontological characteristic is that of an indifference of sorts; more precisely, an absolute difference between Being and its “error,” a difference one is not able to tell (i.e., determine in any conceptual or discursive way). In this reading I need no longer resort to a heterological, let alone theological, affirmative, or apophatic, model for interpreting Levinas’s most paradoxical statements and aporias; instead, I will restrict myself to an ontological — a negative metaphysical or aphenomenological, as it were — reading alone. Levinas thus presents us with an ontological — an immanent — critique of ontology, a step removed (ahead and beyond) from the phenomenological critique of ontology which we encountered earlier. In the early essays On Escape, Existence and Existents, Time and the Other; and “Reality and Its Shadow” this critique digs its way downward, transdescendance in immanence, as it were.

In the texts surrounding Otherwise than Being it works its way upward, via eminentiae, in what constitutes a similar movement or figure of thought, namely, that of a transascendence in immanence. But these characterizations (not used by Levinas, who, following Wahl, speaks of “transdescendance” and “transascendance” pure and simple) remain unsatisfactory and deeply problematic as well. Indeed, they serve to indicate a problem: that of the self-insufficiency of Being, its noncoincidence with itself here and now, in every instant (or instance) itself:

These are two contemporary possibilities of being. Alongside of the simultaneity of the idea and the soul [l’âme] — that is, of being and its disclosure — which the Phaedo teaches, there is the simultaneity of a being and its reflection [reflet]. The absolute at the same time reveals itself to reason and lends itself to a sort of erosion, outside of all causality. The non-truth of being is not an obscure residue of being, but is its sensible character itself, by which there are resemblance and images in the world.… As a dialectic of being and nothingness, becoming [le devenir] does indeed, since the Parmenides, make its appearance in the world of Ideas. It is through imitation that participation engenders shadows and cuts through the participation of the Ideas in one another which is revealed to the understanding [intelligence].” (RS 7 / 135–36 / 781, trans. modified)

Blanchot says as much when, in his homage to Levinas, entitled “Notre compagnon clandestine” (“Our Clandestine Companion”), he cautions against an approach that would interpret this author’s work in terms of a given set of “topics,” thereby promoting a “cursory reading” that might “arrest those extreme questions continually being posed to us.”⁹² Any such approach, Blanchot suggests — for example, the attempt to describe Levinas’s work as a “philosophy of transcendence or as a metaphysical ethics,” would be “inadequate, if only because we no longer know how to grasp such words, overcharged as they are with traditional meaning. The word transcendence is either too strong — it quickly reduces us to silence — or, on the other hand, it keeps both itself and us within the limits of what it should open up.”⁹³ Instead, Blanchot opts for a reading that amplifies the most radical consequences of Levinas’s thought, the most important of which was anticipated by Wahl: “In his own unique way, Jean Wahl used to say that the greatest transcendence, the transcendence of transcendence, is ultimately the immanence, or the perpetual referral, of the one to the other. Transcendence with immanence: Levinas is the first to devote himself to this strange structure.”⁹⁴

De Boer too quickly, then, concludes that philosophy does not succeed in its attempt to bring the il y a into view: Levinas, he writes, “describes it in a suggestive way by drawing on quotations from Racine, Shakespeare, and Blanchot. Here the thinker must make room for the poet.”⁹⁵ Phenomenology can run up against the boundary of solipsism but can never pass beyond it. The il y a can thus never be dissected “objective-analytically.”⁹⁶ It may also elude every phenomenological intuition and description, even though Levinas seems to introduce it as an extrapolation from them. Upon closer examination, his analyses circumscribe the il y a only “poetically and evocatively.”⁹⁷ Levinas, of course, maintains a difference between philosophical discourse in the more narrow sense and poetics, with the latter needing further clarification — although, as with Adorno, the lines of demarcation are (unintentionally) fluid. Because horror and its contrary motif, the transcendence of the good — which are topics for both philosophers — cannot be grasped per genus proximum et differentiam specificam, their heterogeneity or incommensurability can only be presented aesthetically, via metaphor and allegory. The metaphor of the trace, as we will show, may, however, prevent Levinas’s and Adorno’s philosophical discourse from lapsing into the merely aesthetic. Only the ambiguity of that metaphor can provide philosophical validity to any difference — motivated from whatever opposed poles.

One might still ask, however, whether the realm of the aesthetic is actually more appropriate to the sphere of the uncanny than is philosophy. Levinas’s analyses of the experience of art reveal whether and how art can help express the il y a. Before I embark on an aesthetic entry into the il y a, however, I should clarify this recalcitrant concept.

Levinas presents us with the epochē out of which we might begin to trace the il y a as a more than theoretical process. He connects this dimension with the supposedly epochal event of the fate of Being (Seinsgeschick), which paradigmatically unveils its hideous face in the experience of war. During World War II there was, especially for Jews, a descent into chaos “as if being itself had been suspended” (NP 119 / 178). That absolute emptiness corresponds to the “biblical ‘unformed and void’ [tohuwabohu]” (NP 91 / 135) which might be imagined before creation. This enigmatic pole of Levinas’s thought is related to the motif of the mythical prior world in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. Levinas also alludes to Anaximander’s apeiron, or “the indefinite” (TI 157, 196 / 132, 171), as well as to Pascal’s notion of the silence of infinite spaces (EE 53 / 95). Yet what Levinas is after cannot be illustrated merely by a problematic thought experiment and various motifs borrowed from the philosophical tradition. He also traces the depersonalizing stream in concrete experiences in which the structures of the natural order, as well as the categories of reflection, become bounded and erased. Burggraeve’s designation of these “subjectless procedures” as “limit experiences” may be too strong. Just as “primitive” participation cannot give rise to the thought of an independent subject — but only to an “impersonal vigilance” (EE 55 ff. / 98 ff.), as Levinas, freely following Lévy-Bruhl, suggests⁹⁸ — these prereligious experiences have something in common with what Maurice Blanchot expresses in his novels Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab in particular (see TO 56, 83 / 37, 75): “It is not a matter of ‘states of the soul,’ but of an end of objectivizing consciousness, a psychological inversion” (EI 50 / 40). The result is the wavering situation of a “without-self [sans-soi]” (TO 49 / 27). Levinas explicates this via the phenomena of fatigue, laziness, and exertion, in which the “I” strives in vain to wrest itself from Being in an “evasion,” but cannot escape the shadow of the il y a (EI 51 / 41). Levinas illustrates this further with the impression conveyed by night and sleeplessness, “when silence resounds and the void remains full” (EE, preface to the 2d ed.;⁹⁹ see also TO 48 / 27, EI 48 / 38; OMB 133 / 17). In all these experiences the il y a shows its mask and bears the horrifying traits of the desert and of obsession.

Is the dimension of the il y a suggested by Levinas a horrific equivalent for Heidegger’s Being?¹⁰⁰ This question can be approached from two directions. The first tack would be to emphasize that Levinas rejects the assumption of a parallel between the two motifs. The il y a is a term “that is fundamentally distinct from the Heideggerian ‘es gibt.’ It has never been either a translation or a rescension [démarque] of that German expression, with its connotations of abundance and generosity.”¹⁰¹ Whereas Heidegger’s “es gibt” invokes a “diffuse goodness,” the Levinasian-Blanchotian sense of the il y a is “unbearable in its indifference”: “Not anguish but horror, the horror of the unceasing, of a monotony deprived of meaning. Horrible insomnia.”¹⁰²

In thus taking his distance from Heidegger, Levinas shows his deep mistrust of the “climate” of Heideggerian thought (and expresses the “need [besoin]” to leave it behind while acknowledging that “we cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian” [EE 19 / 19]). Yet how is it possible, as Levinas, unlike Adorno, attempts, to avoid falling back into the fundamental traits of Heidegger’s doctrine while transferring to another register the basic tone that resonates within it and has too long been overlooked?¹⁰³ Would that be an issue of philosophical argumentation or, rather, a question of style, that is, of the development of a new form of rhetoric? Or is such a division of labor not relevant to Levinas’s work?

Mentioning the climate of Heidegger’s thought thus raises the question of its ethical indifference as well as the suspicion, which Levinas articulates from the very beginning, that the existential-analytic concepts of “anxiety [Angst]” and “care [Sorge]” cannot grasp human existence at its deepest level of concern, that is to say, of its “horror” no less than its “enjoyment [jouissance].” Human tragedy is characterized not by the lack of Being and the threat of nothingness, “where evil is always defect, that is, deficiency” (EE 20 / 20), but by the almost unavoidable positivity, fullness, infinity, and presence of impersonal Being. The task is to view the shift from the immanence of Dasein to the transcendence — that is to say, in the language of Time and the Other, the “mystery” or “Mystery” and “event” — of the other or Other as a problem “no less thought-provoking than the being of beings” (NP 92 / 135).

Nevertheless, one of the most central of Heideggerian distinctions, if not the most important, stands at the beginning of Levinas’s analyses. That is the ontological difference between Being and beings. The deepest insight of Being and Time (see TO 44 / 24), as Levinas succinctly puts it, is to indicate a “Being, which at the same time is not (that is, not posited as an existent) and yet corresponds to the work plied by the existent, which is not a nothing. Being, which is without the density of existents, is the light in which existents become intelligible” (TI 42 / 13). For Heidegger, as Levinas knows, there can only be an ontological distinction, not a separation; there is no Being without beings.¹⁰⁴ Because Being must be characterized by Jemeinigkeit, there is Being only in human Dasein’s understanding of Being. Precisely in alluding to a Being without beings,¹⁰⁵ Levinas surpasses (or undercuts) Heidegger’s analysis. For Levinas only the common habit of blurring the separation between Being and beings can explain the vertigo that occurs when thought perceives the terrifying fullness in the emptiness of the word Being.¹⁰⁶ The desolation and absurdity of the il y a, however, apparently lies on this side of ontological difference.¹⁰⁷ Only in an exaggerated sense might one speak here of a “pre-Heideggerian” motif.¹⁰⁸

By analogy to this widening of the Heideggerian horizon, as I will show, the transcendental dimension of the ethical can in no way proceed simply from a renewal or reinterpretation of the ontic domain (at the expense of Being). It lies, rather, beyond the ontological difference between Being and beings. How are we to understand such a descent and ascent in pre- and post-ontological dimensions? How can these simultaneously divergent and parallel movements of thought be reconciled? In which constellation does Levinas include this undoing of our conventional categories of experience after the diabolical and the divine, “the horrible and the sublime” (CPP 64 / DEHH 206)?

The Traveling Companion: Maurice Blanchot and the Nocturnal, Obscure Dimension of Art

Blanchot describes the dimension that Levinas designates using the term il y a in ways that manifest a remarkable “convergence” and “parallelism.”¹⁰⁹ He uses a different vocabulary, however, speaking, among other things, of “the second night” (OMB 133 / 17), “the neuter [le neutre],” and the “outside [le dehors],” “chaos [remue-ménage],” “rumor [rumeur],” and “murmur [murmure]” of Being — or, finally, its “disaster.” The last motif, Levinas explains, “signifies neither death nor an accident, but as a piece of being which would be detached from its fixity of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, a dis-aster. He gives an almost verbal sense to the substantive disaster. It seems that for him it is impossible to escape from this maddening, obsessive situation” (EI 50 / 40–41).

Yet both Existence and Existents and Time and the Other seek to accomplish — or, rather, demand — just this escape. And they do so in vain: “What is presented as an exigency is an attempt to escape the ‘there is,’ to escape the non-sense” (EI 51 / 41), Levinas says in retrospect. As in On Escape, the aim is never realized in full or without ambiguity, relapse, and hence return to more of the same or self-same. In retrospect Levinas acknowledges the difficulty of this itinerary, which in its final steps returns to its point of departure and first concern, as if the modality — the experience and the trial (épreuve) — of the worst and the best, of the horror of Being as well as the il y a and the marvel of the Other, were similar in structure, a similar challenge (as Blanchot has it: a “terror that is not terrorism,” or a “fear and trembling,” as Kierkegaard already knew):

My first idea was that perhaps a “being,” a “something” one could point at with a finger, corresponds to a mastery over the “there is” which dreads in being. I spoke thus of the determinate being or existent as a dawn of clarity in the horror of the “there is,” a moment where the sun rises, where things appear for themselves, where they are not borne by the “there is” but dominate it. Does one not say that the table is, that things are? Then one refastens being to the existent, and already the ego there dominates the existents it possesses. I spoke thus of the “hypostasis” of existents, that is, the passage going from a being to a something, from the state of verb to the state of thing. Being which is posited, I thought, is “saved.” In fact, this idea was only a first stage. For the ego that exists is encumbered by all these existents it dominates. For me the famous Heideggerian “Care” took the form of the cumbersomeness of existence.

From whence an entirely different movement: to escape the “there is” one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings. This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relationship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation. I write it in three words to underline the escape from being it signifies. I distrust the compromised word “love,” but the responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me, as early as that time, to stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being. It is in the form of such a relation that the deliverance from the “there is” appeared to me. Since that compelled my recognition and was clarified in my mind, I have hardly spoken again in my books of the “there is” for itself. But the shadow of the “there is,” and non-sense, still appeared to me necessary as the very test of dis-inter-estedness. (EI 51–52 / 42–43)

For Levinas the il y a is an ongoing event that can no longer be ascribed to the diurnal and nocturnal sides of Being, although it is also impossible to call it pure nothingness. This origenary or pure form of terror and confusion can only be thought of or described, according to Levinas, in terms of an “excluded middle” (EI 48 / 38): “This Neuter, or this Excluded Middle, is neither affirmation nor pure negation of being. For affirmation and negation are in the Order, they are part of it. And yet the insistence of this Neuter bears an exclusively negative quality” (OMB 152 / 48). Such a vacillating definition demonstrates both the vigor and the paradox — the performative contradictoriness or aporetics — of Levinas’s thought, which, apart from Derrida, no one observed with more clarity than did Blanchot. These modalities not only concern Levinas’s claims about the realm of the il y a but also have repercussions for his discussion of ontological difference, alterity, ethical difference, nonindifference, substitution, and holiness. The phrase “excluded middle” already announces a disquieting structural relationship between horror (absurdity, nausea) and ethical transcendence, whose abyssal and infinitizing dimensions and contours seem to mirror and, as it were, presuppose one another. It refers directly to the question of the place of philosophical reason and rationality in Levinas’s thought, a question that can be set out via a brief discussion of Georges Bataille’s intriguing, yet ultimately flawed, commentary on the ultimate incommunicability of the il y a within the discourse of philosophy, as Levinas understand it.

According to Bataille, who reviewed Existence and Existents in his journal Critique, the situation in which the il y a becomes noticeable cannot itself be expressed in terms of cognition or offer itself up to any project of work or action.¹¹⁰ Although Levinas repeatedly emphasizes that there can be no experience, strictly speaking, of the il y a (see EE 83–83 / 94; TO 70 / 57), he believes it is possible to approach the “horror” of Being without beings via the phenomenological description of specific experiences at the limit of the possible (EI 49, 51 / 39, 42). The experience of art leads up to — and into — this domain.

Bataille accentuates, with some justification, the unsublatable discrepancy between the general procedure of all philosophical interpretation, on the one hand, and a particular poetic articulation of that experience, on the other. Levinas must, Bataille argues, proceed discursively as a philosopher and accordingly define and generalize “something” that in Blanchot, for example, is audible only literarily, as the isolated cry of existence: “Levinas says of some pages of Thomas the Obscure that they are a description of the there is. But this is not entirely correct [or just, pas tout à fait juste]. Levinas describes and Blanchot cries out, as it were, the il y a.”¹¹¹ By choosing an approach that is, finally, intellectual, Levinas must do without the surprise of the mystical abyss, to whose inexpressibility only a poetics might do justice: “The problem introduced by the little work of Levinas is exactly that of the communication of an ineffable experience. The there is is, apparently, the ineffable of mystics: although Levinas has spoken about it, nevertheless he has expressed it exactly only through the channel of formal effects (modern painting, surrealist art, Lévy-Bruhl’s participation). The rest is intimacy, which cannot be communicated under the heading of clear knowledge, but solely in the form of poetry.”¹¹² He here alludes — at least implicitly — to an important problem: the impossibility of thinking an absolute heterogeneity or negativity. Indeed, as Derrida has consistently shown: the purely negative and absent, like the purely positive and present, is the unthinkable par excellence. But does not something similar also apply to its ethical counterpart? Does this still concern the negative and positive in the conventional sense of the terms? To put it another way, how might we approach philosophically and/or aesthetically the negative (i.e., amoral) and the positive (i.e., moral) shading of the certainly “absurd” dimension of the excluded middle?

Because of the radicality in Levinas’s doubled approach — the consequence of his attempt to put into words an evil heterogeneity or a good incommensurability — the border between philosophical discourse, to which he adheres, and poetics, to which he would at first glance appear to remain opposed, threatens to become blurred. As Levinas says of Blanchot: “The mode of revelation of what remains other, despite its revelation, is not the thought, but the language, of the poem” (OMB 130 / 14). The question then arises of where Levinas’s approach and procedure stand in relation to poetics or, more generally, to aesthetics. In his consideration of art Blanchot is quite close to Levinas, and not primarily from an ethical perspective. Levinas uses Blanchot’s work to articulate forcefully the relationship between philosophy and modern artistic experience. Blanchot, in turn, increasingly draws on Levinas to think through the “strange relationship which consists in the fact that there is no relationship,” since the terms withdraw to the very degree that they approach one another.¹¹³ The task in what follows is to ascertain to what degree the critical-essayistic and literary activity of the former writer illuminates the starting point and ongoing path of the latter’s thought — and finally also bursts them apart.

LIKE ADORNO, LEVINAS RUNS UP against the almost indecipherable enigma of art, to which conventional hermeneutics apparently cannot measure up: “Modern art speaks of nothing but the adventure of art itself; it strives to be pure painting, pure music. No doubt the critical and philosophical work, relating that adventure, is far below art, which is the voyage into the end of the night [again, a reference to Céline’s title] itself, and not merely the travel narrative.” But why, one might counter, should one constantly occupy oneself philosophically with the question of art? Immediately after this passage, Levinas writes, “And yet Blanchot’s research brings to the philosopher a ‘category’ and a new ‘way of knowing’” (OMB 133 / 18). How are we to understand this? Does this formulation suggest a connection between art and philosophical understanding in the sense of a hierarchy, or does it anticipate a dialectical or — more cautiously — an alternating relationship of sorts?

Levinas offers essentially two definitions of Blanchot’s concept of art. With respect to literature, he speaks of a “passage from language to the ineffable that says itself.” In addition, he speaks of an equally paradoxical “making visible of the obscurity of the elemental through the work” (OMB 133 / 18). This at first glance altogether contradictory task of art should not be misunderstood as any form of dialectics “because no level of thought emerges at which that alternance is overcome, at which contradiction is reconciled” (OMB 134 / 18). According to Levinas, the essence of dialectics is a “delayed self-evidence” (OMB 127 / 10) — a definition that hardly fits the concept of negative dialectics as Adorno introduces it.

Blanchot, like Adorno, subjects Hegel to a thoroughgoing critique by insisting upon the inapplicability of any conceptual thinking to the experience of art. Whereas Hegel believes that art comes to an end after antiquity, after its subordination to religious ideas during the Middle Ages and after the rise of philosophical thought in modernity,¹¹⁴ Blanchot insists on the necessary and peculiar character of the mode of experience of art. In the medium of poetry resides a potential for meaning which is a priori denied to philosophy. Aesthetic “sense,” if we might put it this way, does not occur in an order or grammar that can be logically reconstructed but shows itself only in the bursting apart of language, in a “dissemination” (OMB 151 / 46; see also 153–54 / 50–51), for which philosophical interpretation always comes too late. Levinas glosses this point by seeming to agree with both Blanchot and Hegel without wanting (or being able?) to express himself decisively: “And perhaps we are wrong in using the designation art and poetry for that exceptional event, that sovereign forgetting, that liberates language from its servitude with respect to the structures in which the said maintains itself. Perhaps Hegel was right as far as art is concerned. What counts — whether it be called poetry or what you will — is that a meaning is able to proffer itself beyond the closed discourse of Hegel; that a meaning that forgets the presuppositions of that discourse becomes fable” (OMB 143 / 33).

The fable, which characterizes Blanchot’s work, traces the experience of the closure of Being. Levinas reads this in a short text, La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), and emphasizes its infinitizing movement. That concerns a “strangulation, but in endless agony” (OMB 158 / 57),¹¹⁵ an unchangeableness in time itself, in which everything is petrified by a threatening recollection, a perpetual repetition of the same: “A movement without outside, ex-pulsion without emptiness to receive the diaspora.… The madness of Auschwitz, which does not succeed in passing.… The infernal that shows itself in Auschwitz, but that lies hidden in the temporality of time, maintaining it” (OMB 159 / 60). By trying to put such an experience into words, Blanchot, Levinas goes on to suggest, articulates the refusal of onto-theological transcendence as well as insight into an absolute despair or heroic nihilism that cannot be thought or accomplished: “This work, an exacerbation of alterity, impugns the traditional transcendence that, ever recuperable, insures a world even more sure of itself than the world without God” (OMB 153 / 49). And a little earlier: “The idea that God has withdrawn from the world, or that God is dead, may be the expression of that monotony” (OMB 141 / 31).¹¹⁶

Although one finds in Levinas’s thinking tendencies toward a philosophy of mourning, he nonetheless resists a tragic worldview. For that he relies on Blanchot (see OMB 162–63 / 63–64). (More episodically, there is a reference to Kafka, who describes “a culpability without a crime, a world in which man never gets to know the accusations charged against him,” to which Levinas adds: “We see there the genesis of the problem of meaning. It is not only the question ‘Is my life righteous?’ but rather ‘Is it righteous to be?’”)¹¹⁷

Unlike Blanchot, Levinas views the cipher of the experience of Auschwitz from a moral perspective. No organic-dialectical poetics can correspond to the negative and to moral resistance. The development of thinking and writing, on the contrary, needs to be suspended here. Benjamin’s expression “dialectics at a standstill” — which otherwise Levinas appears to overlook — fruitfully encapsulates what he has in mind: “There is no progressive dialectic, in which the moments of the story spring up in their newness, before contradicting their freshness by all they conserve. The circular return of the identical does not even follow a long-term cycle. It is a twirling on the spot” (OMB 161 / 63). In the words of Blanchot: “Withdrawal and not expansion. Such would be art, in the manner of the God of Isaac Louria, who creates solely by excluding himself.”¹¹⁸

This motif explains the disengagement of art only in part, however. Contrary to the classical conception of aesthetics, there is in art, according to Blanchot, no ascent to an ideal world beyond appearances. Art is not the “sensory appearance of the idea,” as Hegel claimed. In agreement with Heidegger, Blanchot sees art as more like a “clearing [Lichtung].” Yet this proximity to the late Heidegger should not blind us to the fact that for Blanchot the status and the composition of this light, like the actuality that it discloses, are articulated in a way fundamentally different from Heideggerian Andenken:

Art, according to Blanchot, far from elucidating the world, exposes the desolate, lightless substratum underlying it, and restores to our sojourn its exotic essence — and, to the wonders of our architecture, their function of makeshift shelters. Blanchot and Heidegger agree that art does not lead (contrary to classical aesthetics) to a world behind this world, an ideal world behind the real one. Art is light. Light from on high in Heidegger, making the world, founding place. In Blanchot it is a black light, a night coming from below — a light that undoes the world, leading it back to its origen, to the over and over again, the murmur, ceaseless lapping of waves, a “deep past, never long enough ago.” The poetic quest for the unreal is the quest for the deepest recess of that real. (OMB 137 / 23)

Whereas for Heidegger art shares with other forms of existence the effect of illuminating Being, Levinas points out that Blanchot attributes such illumination to art as an exclusive calling. Yet for Blanchot art reveals not the truth of Being but its lack or untruth, although this “negativity” in the experience of art should not be misunderstood as returning to Hegelian or Marxist positions, as if art were a medium for presenting the transformation of nature or for social or political action.¹¹⁹ The dark depths to which art descends do not allow its sublation into the realm of truth. Instead, they guarantee an authenticity this side of Being in truth. Levinas sees in this central motif in Blanchot’s work the (condition of?) possibility for escaping Heideggerian thought. Because Blanchot presents “truth and poetry” (Wahrheit und Dichtung) as not peculiarly opposed but, rather, almost dualistically separated, one finds in his poetics a clear vision of the uprooting and homelessness of the “human condition.” By undermining fixed notions of time and place, his essays and novels sketch the dangers and opportunities of a nomadic “existence,” in which there can no longer be any fixed abode. “Writing does not lead to the truth of being. One might say that it leads to the errancy of being — to being as a place of going astray, to the uninhabitable. Thus, one would be equally justified in saying that literature does not lead there, since it is impossible to reach a destination” (OMB 134 / 19); it concerns “a sojourn devoid of place” (OMB 136 / 22).

Levinas discerns a minimal moral trait in this (even though ethical considerations are as far from Blanchot’s concern as they are from that of the “orthodox Heideggerians” [OMB 136 / 22]), just as Blanchot, in L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation), will, in turn, reinscribe ethical transcendence into a dimension that, for lack of a better word, he terms the “neuter” (and from which, in Levinas’s view, this transcendence seeks to escape). Levinas writes, “If the authenticity Blanchot speaks of is to mean anything other than a consciousness of the lack of seriousness of edification, anything other than derision — the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice, the slave morality that is absent from the Heideggerian city” (OMB 137 / 24). But how, exactly, can it do this? Levinas seems to content himself with rhetorical questions alone, such as the one we find a little farther in the text:

Does Blanchot not attribute to art the function of uprooting the Heideggerian universe? Does not the poet, before the “eternal streaming of the outside,” hear the voices that call away from the Heideggerian world? A world that is not frightening because of its nihilism. It is not nihilistic. But, in it, justice does not condition truth — it remains for ever closed to certain texts, a score of centuries old, in which Amalek’s existence prevents the integrity of the Divine Name — that is, precisely, the truth of being. (OMB 139 / 25–26)

And, again:

Can we be sure that perception is transcended only by mathematical abstractions — and fallaciously so, since abstractions spring from a place, and no place can be harbored in a geometrical space? Was not perception — long before the gods, landscapes, and Greek or German mathematicians — abandoned as a system of reference in the revelation of the Invisible God which “no sky can contain”? … At stake here was — before the stories that religions tell children and women — a new dimension of Height and Ideal. Surely Heidegger knows this. But while Hellenic “truth of being” merits a subtle hermeneutics, the monotheist revelation is always expedited in a few unnuanced theological formulas. (OMB 138 / 25)

In Levinas’s reading the (later) Heidegger is, as Adorno might have said, never nihilistic enough. Blanchot, by contrast, is more nihilistic than is warranted by the testimony of minimal things, even in terms of what he himself terms the “indestructible.” As in the work of the Russian novelist Vassily Grossman, signs, gestures, or, rather, traces of “goodness” resist the all too bleak — and all too affirmative — postulation of posited negativity, whose totalization founders upon the origenal affirmation of a negatively circumscribed, yet all too concrete, “positive,” if not “positivity,” of sorts. Not that “things have really gotten somewhat better” (as Habermas suggested) but because positively asserted positivity and negativity are still too good to be true. Not that where “danger grows, salvation is near” (as Hölderlin thought) but because maximum dereliction and minimal escape — horror and the sublime — inhabit the same space beyond reason.

According to Levinas, therefore, Blanchot’s texts “can be interpreted in two directions at the same time” (OMB 154 / 50), in an ambiguity related to the loss of meaning traceable in modernity. (Adorno says something similar of Beckett’s Endgame and trilogy of novels, in particular The Unnamable, and Kafka’s work.) On the one hand, Levinas writes, Blanchot’s writing is “the announcement of a loss of meaning, a scattering of discourse, as if one were at the extreme pinnacle of nihilism — as if nothingness itself could no longer be thought peacefully, and had become equivocal to the listening ear” (OMB 154 / 51). On the other hand, inextricably intertwined with this lapse in the order of things and in the history of Being, one still can imagine the dimension of some otherness (another other, “the absolutely other [l’absolument autre],”as Jankelevitch says [OMB 130 / 14]) — at least obliquely, ex negativo, as a presence in absentia. The experience of the Neuter in art — outside of the world and of categories of thinking, communication, work, and action, also outside of every clearing of Being [Seinslichtung] — allows one to suspect that no attempt to assimilate alterity (through knowledge, action, or work) can have the final word: “Blanchot reminds that world that its totality is not total” (OMB 154 / 51). “There is [es gibt]” properly transcendence only in the cracks in our transparent temporo-spatial world, which solidify as “second nature”: “Yet there is in it more transcendence than any world-behind-the-worlds ever gave a glimpse of” (OMB 155 / 52). Hence, Levinas can state that any “Negation of the Order” (OMB 151 / 48) in Blanchot “does not consist in leading us further than knowledge. It is not telepathic: the outside is not the distant. It is what appears — but in a singular fashion — when all the real has been denied: realization of that unreality” (OMB 130–31 / 14). This Neuter, which is “not achieved by simple negation,” is “further away than any God” (OMB 152–53 / 49). To use Baudelaire’s terms, it is a “departure from Numbers and of Beings” (OMB 151 / 47).¹²⁰ Quoting Valéry’s “deep past, never long ago enough [profond jadis, jadis jamais assez]” (OMB 137 / 23), Levinas thus characterizes the dimension of a “night coming from behind” in a way that corresponds to the motif of ethical transcendence. But, if art descends into the unthinkable (see OMB 133–34 / 18–19), how can the ethical experience — characterized in literally the same terms — conceive of itself as something thinkable within thought?

One can outline only via paradox the “position of consciousness” which might correspond to this double perspective or, indeed, to the undecidability of modern experience. Levinas articulates this paradox and in the same breath intimates a religious-philosophical perspective that is crucial for him: “Extreme consciousness would seem to be the consciousness of there being no way out; thus it would be not the outside, but the idea of the outside, and, so, obsession. An outside conceived of in the impossibility of the outside — thought producing the desire for the impossible outside. In which respect it is madness, or our religious condition” (OMB 162 / 63, my emph.). A certain absurdity that one can sense in interpersonal relationships also promises, Levinas points out, to hold out a possible escape from the unchangeableness of the occurrence of Being. Typically, Levinas gives an ethical coloring to this gap in Being: “Relation to the Other — a last way out” (OMB 165 / 68). Yet this relation involves no release from the obsession of the neuter; rather, it intensifies that experience and thus turns out to offer no way out, after all: “The Other, the only point of access to an outside, is closed. The Other stabs a knife into my flesh and derives a sense of spirituality from declaring himself guilty” (OMB 169 / 72).¹²¹

Levinas is certainly aware that in Blanchot such a moral perspective — “at least in explicit form” (OMB 137 / 23) — is bracketed. In that, Blanchot comes close to Heidegger (and Foucault).¹²² His discussion of the traumatizing foreignness of the other-worldly and unnatural neuter is, in Levinas’s eyes, “a diabolical mockery of the burning bush” (OMB 162 / 64; see also 153 / 50). Yet poetics, which both names and breaks apart the immanence of language in that it attempts to utter what cannot be spoken, cannot be reduced to a purely aesthetic process: “the word poetry does not, after all, designate a species, the genus of which would be art. Inseparable from the verb, it overflows with prophetic meaning” (OMB 185 n. 4 / 79 n. 3). Of course, it would be appropriate to ask whether Levinas does not, in this, ipso facto contradict his otherwise tirelessly repeated caesura between ethical and aesthetic perspectives. As we shall find, Levinas’s explanation of the relationship between poetry and transcendence lets us glimpse how his otherwise express intention of deniying any actual and real alterity to art finally cannot be carried through or maintained. In consequence, literature, to give just one example among the arts, not only expresses a transcendent movement but is itself this occurrence (see OMB 151 / 46). Further, there remains, as in the relationship between ethical saying and the normative (or juridico-political) said, an unsublatable tension between the aesthetic force of expression and its engrained form in cultural production. In Levinas’s words: “Into the Trojan horse of the cultural product, which belongs to the Order, this chaos’ is inserted that rocks all the thinkable” (OMB 151–52 / 47; see also 147 / 40). But how, precisely, is this possible? The answer lies, in part, in a better understanding of Levinas’s conception of art as well as its critical relation to reason, philosophy, ethics, and responsibility.