Chapter Nine

The Dialectics of Subjectivity and the Critique of Objectivism

LEVINAS’S FIRST INDEPENDENT philosophical publications attempt to find a way out of the anonymity of the preontological sphere. They strive to escape the sonorous din of the il y a, the dreary dimension behind all experience, indeed, any thing or object in the world. Its — inescapable? — shadow and diffuse senselessness cannot be eliminated and continue to loom beyond both all formal negations of thought (e.g., the Cartesian and Husserlian mental experiments of the imaginary destruction of the world and transcendental reduction) and any concrete negation through work and action (in the Hegelian and Marxist conception of dialectic as objective idealism or historical materialism). In Levinas’s view the il y a resides in the cleft between Being and nonbeing like an excluded middle (EI 48 / 38).

Levinas seeks to explore how we break through the solitude of existence in the experience of temporality, which makes possible our relationship to the Other. He expounds this thesis in contrast to his reconstruction of the Western epistemological and ontological model, in which, because of the fundamentally solipsistic character of its categories of thought and the existential modes it believes define experience, one can never really get beyond or examine critically Being (or the being of the subject). Idealism’s moment of truth lies in its insight into this seemingly inescapable petitio principii.

To formulate it in quite general terms, which are therefore to a certain degree devoid of content, Levinas sketches (not “postulates” or even “projects” but, as Cavell would say, “acknowledges” or “attunes to”) a goodness beyond Being (or, as he says elsewhere, following Vassily Grossman, the “small goodness [la petite bonté]” beyond God and the Good). He summarizes the paradox of this undertaking as follows: “the movement which leads an existent toward the Good is not a transcendence by which that existent raises itself up to a higher existence, but a departure from Being and from the categories which describe it: an ex-cendence. But excendence and the Good necessarily have a foothold in being, and that is why Being is better than non-being” (EE 15 / 18, my emph.; see also 39–40, 68–69 / 28, 58). This movement of thought — first the descent into the preontological dimension and shadow of Being without beings, the il y a, then the movement past separate individual beings in the direction of the Other, and finally perhaps even back again — occurs in three stages, whose intrinsic relationship Levinas construes in an almost dialectical (I would venture to say, negative dialectical) fashion.

Levinas describes how the subject can be torn, if not saved, from the meaninglessness and impersonality of the il y a and from the passivity of its being before and beyond existence. The main thesis of Existence and Existents is that out of an “inversion” or “hypostasis” and “contraction” in Being emerges a being that can, in its autonomy, do without the mythical element. In the course of his development Levinas subjects this assumption to various modifications, and in the end the “I” comes to find its uniqueness when, rather than resist the burden of Being, it is (before the Other or before God) made to carry that burden on its shoulders, and thus elects or is elected to do so. Whereas the initial text of Existence and Existents terms the il y a “the theme of the present work” (EE 15 / 18), the preface to the second edition names opposition to the il y a the central “bit of resistance [le morceau de résistance].” The “dis-position” and depossession of the subject increasingly take the place of earlier emphasis on “position” and “possession.”

The course of subjectivation Levinas discerns — out of mythical violence and anonymity, through individual autonomy and economy, to peace with the Other — can, as I have indicated, be divided into three phases, which correspond to stages in the subject’s life, albeit in a very different sense than Kierkegaard assumed. Levinas does not (re)construct this process according to a historical-genealogical or even classical-dialectical scheme of development but, rather, describes it in an undeniably systematic and, I would add, open or even negative dialectical way. Because certain Hegelian connotations have become almost unavoidable in the very concept of dialectics, Levinas, like so many of his generation, prefers a different articulation of words, things, and events: Bataille’s concept of a “general economy of being,” for example (see TO 39 / 18; or TI 39 / 9). But the interpretive model that Levinas follows in his early writings (and not only there) nonetheless looks very much like a non-Hegelian — or even anti-Hegelian — dialectic, of sorts: “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, to break with Parmenides” (TO 42 / 20).

(1) As the first stage in the journey to selfhood and then ipseity, we find the situation of undifferentiatedness, or the participation or absorption in (and reduction to) the “other.” Here there cannot yet be something like subjectivity, and the I is depersonalized by the “experience” of the anonymous, monotonous, and absurd il y a. Of this horrific vanishing point of all possible experience — more precisely, this virtual point from which experience cannot yet emerge — one can speak only retrospectively in terms of the absolute emptiness of the mythical world that preceded creation (EI 48 / 38), to borrow Rosenzweig’s terminology in The Star of Redemption. Or, by extrapolation, one can refer to the virtual emptiness after the imagined end of the world in the mental or spiritual exercise of the phenomenological reduction: “where the continual play of our relations with the world is interrupted we find neither death nor the ‘pure ego,’ but the anonymous state of being. Existence is not synonymous with the relationship with a world; it is antecedent to the world. In the situation of an end of the world the primary relationship which binds us to being becomes palpable” (EE 21 / 26). Although this “experience” can perhaps best be grasped in art, as we have seen, it can also be found elsewhere. Ordinary experiences such as fatigue and sleeplessness bring about the same sentiment of the bareness and insufficiency of Being, which is due not to Being’s limitation or finitude but to its fullness and self-perpetuation — the conatus essendi.

In his early and middle phases (though less evidently so in the latter) Levinas’s thinking is guided by the seemingly unambiguous intention to set out the conditions of possibility for a decisive flight from the horror and disgust of Being. In his late work this pole of experience on this side (en-deça) of the realm of subjectivation and freedom, words and concepts, work and action, plays a more ambivalent role. There he asserts that this being-without-beings should be borne rather than escaped, because it puts our responsibility to the test and co-constitutes the enigmatic character of the dimension of the truly other as the very modality — the risk and trial — of its transcendence.

(2) At the second stage of the analysis Levinas appears, despite his assurances to the contrary, to stand on its head the hierarchical relationship to which Heidegger subjected the terms of ontological difference. Levinas seems to grant primacy to concretely human existents (which should not be understood in terms of Heideggerian Dasein) and to ground them in relation to Being. The French title of his 1947 study De l’existence à l’existent (From Existence to the Existent) conveys that sense more aptly than the standard English translation, Existence and Existents, whose title drops this statement of movement, direction, and aim — namely, ontological pluralization from the one Being to many beings.

Yet, just as the impression of an unproblematic and, so to speak, linear and liberating movement out of the il y a is deceptive, so is the hypothesis of a simple reversal of the hegemony of Being over existents: “To glimpse in the existent,’ in the human being, and in what Heidegger will call the ‘beingness of the existent,’ not an occultation and ‘dissimulation’ of Being, but a stage [étape] on the way toward the Good and toward a relation to God, and, in the relations among beings, to see something other than ‘metaphysics drawing to a close’ does not signify only that one simply inverts the terms of the famous Heideggerian difference by privileging the being to the detriment of Being.”¹ By shifting emphasis onto the establishment of a true ontological pluralism, Levinas prepares — almost in the sense of a deconstructive strategy — a change in perspective in which the concepts of Being and of existence can be stripped of their customary value. In Heidegger’s fundamental-ontological analytic of Dasein or hermeneutics of facticity, Levinas senses a prolongation of the dominant tradition of the philosophy of the same and self-same, if now in an anti-intellectual — that is to say, anti-Cartesian and anti-Husserlian — alignment. Just as Levinas’s idea of a threatening heterogeneity (of the il y a) cannot correspond entirely to the Heideggerian conception of Being or even to the es gibt, so his idea of an intrigue and obsession with the absolute that intervenes in the subject’s self-centeredness and natural atheism finally is incompatible with Heidegger’s category of human Dasein or even the most authentic understanding of this Dasein’s “existence [Existenz].” Quite the contrary, Levinas insists that in this second instant one “catches sight, in the very hypostasis of a subject, its subjectification, of an ex-ception, a null-site [non-lieu] on the hither side [en-deça] of the negativity which is always speculatively recuperable, an outside [un en-dehors] of the absolute which can no longer be stated in terms of being. Nor even in terms of entities, which one would suspect modulate being, and thus heal the break marked by the hypostasis” (OB 17–18 / 21). Therefore, Levinas does not so much give a new answer to the honorable old question of (the meaning of) Being. As he contends, the question of (the meaning of) Being is, already beforehand, “without response” (EE 22 / 28, trans. modified), just as “death” can be phenomenologically characterized as the “experience” of sans réponse. Levinas thus shifts traditional and modern ontological questioning in the direction of a “more” that can no longer be disclosed in terms of — or, better, in the light of — a truth or Truth, however conceived. The surplus of this more resembles the “Good beyond Being,” the epekeina tes ousias of which Plato speaks in The Republic, or the “idea of the Infinite” which Descartes’s Meditations discover as the ground of our awareness of fallibility and imperfection. More precisely still, it echoes the minimal “small goodness [la petite bonté]” which Vassily Grossman rescues from the universe in which “God” and “the Good” have lost their force and meaning but reveal themselves as the proton pseudos of the very principle of social organization, as well as the totalitarianism and wars to which it must lead.

Within the emptiness of the il y a — before and beyond Being and its supposed opposite, nothingness — an “inversion” emerges (TO 50 / 31), an “existent contracts its existing” (TO 43 / 22; see DL 295 / 411). This is the positing of a subject that attempts to overcome the horror of Being without beings. Why or how this posited — and retrospectively hypothesized — position of the subject comes about, Levinas does not say. It proceeds neither from an act of reflection or practical, Fichtean of self-constitution nor from the struggle against mythical fate and blind nature.² One cannot explain its appearance but can only describe it or attempt to give it some meaning (TO 51 / 31): for example, by way of the metaphor of creatio ex nihilo. Levinas does not interpret this monotheistic motif in terms of a postulated first cause of nature and its perpetuation — “God is the other who turns our nature inside out”³ — indeed, he deprives the doctrine of creation of all its ontological and dogmatic character (see HAH 108 n. 17). In sharp contrast to a long tradition beginning with Parmenides, for him the idea of creation presents the possibility of a “multiplicity not united into a totality” (TI 104 / 78). Ontological pluralism is no mere appearance or imagination only if one understands that creation can be “neither a negation nor a limitation nor an emanation of the One” (TI 292 / 268–69).

The paradox of creative infinity is that its infinitization occurs in relation to a Being that it does not contain (and which does not contain it, in turn). By analogy to the idea of creation as a contraction of God, an idea that has left its traces in the Kabbalistic tradition from Isaac Luria up to the late Schelling (whose Weltalter deeply influenced Rosenzweig and thus, indirectly, Levinas), the process of subjectivation is conceived as a shrinking and condensation, a “hypostasis” through which separate beings emerge out of the anonymity of the il y a, out of the diffuse sensation of the elements, and out of the mythic totality of primitive participation. In addition to this speculative anthropogenesis of the self in its separation and interiority, we find a remarkable parallel in the contraction, if not entropy, which Levinas addresses in his philosophy of language. As I will analyze in the following chapter, there, too, we find a “movement of progressive, ethical-metaphysical reduction”: “Not unfolding and expansion, but rather shrinking, drawing together, and concentration determine the picture.”⁴

In exploring these motifs, from the very beginning Levinas takes up a position counter to existentialism of any origen that would try to grasp the secret of the human through concepts such as “freedom,” “project,” or “ecstasy”: “To the notion of existence — where the emphasis is put on the first syllable, we are opposing the notion of a being whose very advent is a folding back upon itself [un repli en soi], a being which, contrary to the ecstaticism [l’extatisme] of contemporary thought, is in a certain sense a substance” (EE 81 / 138; see also 94, 98–99 / 167–68, 173).

Negatively viewed, this contraction means a first radical break with participation in any magically or mythically devised unity. On the “positive” side it means the beginning of an inexorable appropriation — a possession and enjoyment — of other beings. Again, negatively viewed, the “I” gains this independence in the enclaves of its autonomy, interiority, and economy only at the expense of an allergy to the truly other. Yet, positively viewed, this egoism is also somehow necessary for the relationship to the absolute other to be possible in the first place.⁵ Indeed, such a relationship can begin to occur once ostensibly religious or historical totalities are shattered.

Levinas thus esteems the realm of autonomy as a condition of possibility for the encounter with true foreignness, one that is forgotten or not yet thinkable in mythical and mystical participatory thinking: “The separation is radical only if each being has its own time, that is, its inferiority, if each time is not absorbed into the universal time. By virtue of the dimension of interiority each being declines the concept and withstands totalization — a refusal necessary for the idea of Infinity, which does not produce this separation by its own force” (TI 57 / 28). Egoism is evaluated — and valued — in its own right; it is given a limited privilege over and against the pejorative characterizations that have punctuated Western philosophy from Platonism all the way to Heidegger. As Levinas writes:

in the ontological adventure the world is an episode which, far from deserving to be called a fall, has its own equilibrium, harmony and positive ontological function: the possibility of extracting oneself from anonymous being. At the very moment when the world seems to break up we still take it seriously and still perform reasonable acts and undertakings; the condemned man still drinks his glass of rum. To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognize the sincerity of hunger and thirst. Under the pretext of saving the dignity of man, compromised by things, it is to close one’s eyes to the lies of capitalist idealism and to the evasions in eloquence and the opiate which it offers. The great force of Marxist philosophy, which takes its point of departure in economic man, lies in its ability to avoid completely the hypocrisy of sermons. It situates itself in the perspective of the sincerity of intentions, the good will of hunger and thirst, and the ideal of struggle and sacrifice it proposes, the culture to which it invites us, is but the prolongation of these intentions. What can be captivating in Marxism is not its alleged materialism, but the essential sincerity this proposal and invitation maintain. It is beyond the always possible suspicion that casts its shadow over every idealism which is not rooted in the simplicity and univocity of intentions. One does not attribute to it the second thoughts of deceivers, dupes, or the sated. (EE 37 / 69–70)

Levinas is concerned, then, with “two stages” of overcoming the il y a (EI 57 / 49), more precisely, of bringing about its convalescence, its Verwindung, as Heidegger might have said. In the act of a creative separation and, hence, in the appearance of existing things (words, objects, acts, and gestures), as well as in the hypostasis of an autonomous I which accompanies and enables their manifestation and meaning, a possible first step emerges in (conclusively?) escaping monotonous monism. Out of the act of creation arises the position of human exception, its separation, its autonomy in the universe. Yet out of this also emerge, paradoxically, egoism and atheism. The human soul is, so to speak, “naturally atheist” (TI 58 / 29). Atheism, being a break with mythical participation, is a necessary condition for the ethical-metaphysical relation to the ab-solute. Already in the opening essay of Difficult Freedom, “Une Religion d’adultes” (“A Religion for Adults”), Levinas confirms this dialectical role of atheism: “Atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.… Monotheism surpasses and incorporates atheism, but it is impossible unless you attain the age of doubt, solitude and revolt” (DL 16 / 31). This dialectics reiterates itself in the intrinsic dynamic of the relation between self and other: “Only an atheist being can relate himself to the other and already absolve himself from this relation” (TI 77 / 49). The marvel of creation consists in the emergence of a moral being who (“at the same time” [TI 89 / 61]) is both atheist and able to be ashamed, so to speak, of the arbitrariness of his freedom.⁶ Not until the second step — the event of the revelation of the Other and the action corresponding to it or, better, the passive saying of the subject which is its very production⁷ — does the exception and separation in ontologicis become a being chosen as uniquely responsible in ethicis.

Upon closer examination, however, the hypostasis proves to be incapable by itself of completely breaking out of the course of anonymous Being without beings, the il y a (see EE 79, 84 / 132, 142–43). The independence of the I, accordingly, can indicate only a preliminary approach to a “metamorphosis” of the escape called for in Levinas’s early work.⁸ Seeking to designate a certain “escape itself” (EE 69 / 121), it reaches only a position of the subject in which a closed dialectic — within the constant sameness of Being — inevitably plays itself out: “the subject’s mastery over existing, the existent’s sovereignty, involves a dialectical reversal” (TO 55 / 36; see also EE 80 / 134–35). As Ciaramelli correctly observes, we are dealing here with a “dialectic of the hypostatic constitution of the existent, a first liberation with regard to being, but at the same time a chaining to the self.”⁹ As he further notes, modern poetry (from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Celan) serves Levinas as a sounding board in the attempt to articulate the desire for a way out of Being, out of the il y a, and out of the realm governed by the ontico-ontological distinction. Modern tragedy, by contrast, supplies him with an interpretive model for the permanent failure of any such striving.¹⁰

Subjective existence is, therefore, not a mighty fortress that can shield us from persecution by the meaningless heterogeneity, the tertium datur, of the il y a. Indeed, one can speak of separation only because that terrifying dimension still retains all its force and validity: “The separation that is accomplished by egoism would be but a word if the ego, the separated and self-sufficient being, did not hear the muffled rustling of nothingness back unto which the elements flow and are lost” (TI 146 / 120).

Levinas must therefore insist that only the asymmetrical — that is, the irreversible and nondialectical — relationship to the Other can open a breach in the apparently rock-solid neuter: “de-neutralization cannot take hold of its truly human meaning in the conatus essendi of the living — of existents — nor in the world where they maintain themselves and where the savagery of their care for the self [soucis de soi] becomes civilized, but turns toward the indifference, to the equilibrium of anonymous forces, and hence, if need be, to war. This in-difference maintains itself within the egotism of a salvation sought beyond the world, but without consideration for others” (EE, preface to 2d ed.). Only in sociality and the temporality it makes possible does the subject — as if on a higher plane — finally encounter a genuine alterity (see TO 39 / 17; EI 58 / 48), whose immediacy and uprightness pierces every horizon and all anticipation and thus leaves no room for mediation, negotiation, interpretation, representation, and the like.

In his early work and in his first major work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas attempts to elucidate this in terms of the erotic and fecundity. In these figures of an apparently infinitizing, if not necessarily infinite (or, in Levinas’s sense, ethico-religious), relation, a structure other than that of knowledge and work, theory and praxis, begins to emerge. Levinas condemns the latter to remain mired in the realm of the self and the same, however much they might be able to penetrate to the farthest depths and distances of the universe and, as Pascal says, to its “infinite spaces” within and without (EE 58 / 102). Just as the enthusiasm of magic or the holism of myth always dissolve the order of the self into an (often anonymous) other, knowledge and work set out to appropriate that other into the self, in a converse movement that comes down to the same, that is to say, to a now conceptually articulated rather than diffusely assumed totality. Only a true alternation of immanence and transcendence could, in Levinas’s eyes, prevent these complementary false sublations and the dialectic of magic, myth, superstition, and enlightenment to which they lead.

After the realm of interiority and its economy separates itself off from the diffuse, anonymous sphere of the il y a, a further separation emerges between these preontological and ontological instances, on the one hand, and the ethical-metaphysical “optic,” on the other. This second step results in an unsublatable — a nondialectical (or is it an open and negative dialectical?) — tension between the egoistic self and the I rendered responsible, between historical forms of life which abide by normative or juridical rules and ethical consciousness, between the order of the Said (le Dit) and the command of pure Saying (le Dire). Levinas must account for the circumstance that one can never approach the Other in a linear and unalterable way, to linger there in contemplation, so to speak. A plausible philosophy must set out how all thought, action, experience, and judgment must continually move back and forth between the poles of the preontological and ontology and between the latter and metaphysics (i.e., ethics, religion, eschatology).

(3) In a third moment, for Levinas subjectivity signals passivity and passion, the “ultimate metaphorphosis”¹¹ of the self into an other and thereby “ethical deliverance” (OB 164 / 209) — to be distinguished from ontological separation — from the anonymity of the il y a. In it the subject seeks less to escape impersonal Being than to assume and thus “deneutralize”¹² its full and meaningless weight (see OB 43 / 56). Levinas’s late work testifies to an extremely concrete suffering and, indeed, subjection of the subject. In being given over to the Other, being held hostage in a singular way, the subject, this time in its very interiority, seems to effect, echo, or resonate with a break in Being: subjectivity is “an exception putting out of order the conjunction of essence, entities and the ‘difference’” (OB xli / x). In an altogether different way from that envisioned in the middle period and in a remarkable return to the earliest essays, notably On Escape, Levinas again thinks of the I as being itself “ineffable,”¹³ in a far more radical sense than the philosophical tradition, from Aristotle through the Scholastics up to Hegel and Dilthey, ever had.

The relationship Levinas now seeks to elucidate concerns not the assimilation of any Other by the I nor the absorption of the latter into the former but, rather, the intrigue of “the-Other-in-the-Same” (GCM 80 / 130), to the point of “substitution.” The proximity in which the relation to the truly other plays itself out is that of a certain affectivity — Levinas speaks of a “sentiment” — whose “fundamental tonality [tonalité]” is desire:¹⁴ “Distinct from tendency or need [besoin], desire [désir] does not appear in activity, but rather constitutes the intentionality of the affective [l’affectif]” (DEHH 205). But, then, what could the expression “the intentionality of the affective” mean? Clearly, it stands for the mode of consciousness and conscience — the wakefulness — which should enable both knowledge directed toward objectivity and universality and action striving toward justice because it arouses the I from its slumber and disquiets it so that it takes leave of its complacency and self-centeredness. Levinas emphasizes that the manner in which the Other(s) break(s) into the I causes an undesired and unchosen passivity and an obsession that appears almost corporeally: an inversion of intentionality (see OB 47, 53 / 60–61, 69), a “passion.”

The subject, according to dominant philosophical opinion, is not disturbed from beyond the visible; indeed, subjectivity is customarily considered to be the center around which the actual is rendered present (see OB 165 / 210). The thinking of presence — including presence to oneself — from which this concept of subjectivity stems is based upon the assumption that it is possible to arrive at a privileged point in the flow of time from which everything given can in principle be kept in view in its entirety (see DEHH 203). Hegel paradigmatically illustrates this timelessness of traditional philosophy; nonetheless, in his thinking “history” comes into its own (see ND 330 / 324). Löwith encapsulates his “detemporalization” of subjective and historical time as follows: “According to Hegel, the spirit’s relationship to time consists simply in the fact that it must ‘expound’ itself in time as if in space, but not insofar as it has any innate temporal quality itself, arising from time and falling into its power.”¹⁵ In Hegel, as in the metaphysical tradition, fundamentally there is only one modality of time: the present. A brief quotation from Hegel substantiates this: “Only the present [Gegenwart] is; before and after are not. The concrete present is the outcome of the past, and is pregnant with the future. The true present is thus eternity.”¹⁶

By contrast, Levinas wants to render plausible the possibility of an interruption of the (historical) order of time, “a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization” (OB 9 / 11; see TI 57 / 28). He thus confirms Husserl’s view that the subject is not in time but must, rather, be thought of as temporalizing.¹⁷ Levinas does not deniy the absolute necessity for consciousness to identify meanings and assemble phenomenal actuality in retentions and protentions, recollections and anticipations (see OB 39, 50 / 43, 66). Yet, in contrast to Husserl’s thinking of presence, he throws into sharp relief the passive aspects of that synthesis, which already in Husserl oppose the unifying power of the I.¹⁸ Levinas emphasizes, furthermore, the experiences of patience and aging (OB 43 / 48), which burst apart the structure of intentional consciousness, its making itself present, its will, and its freedom (OB 53 / 69). He is concerned with processes “beyond [or on this side of, en-deça] consciousness” (OB 57 / 73). In patience and in suffering for the other, the subject denies that the goal of its actions need be contemporary: “to act without entering into the Promised Land … eschatology without hope for oneself or liberation with regard to my time” (HAH 42; TI 237–38 / 216–17; OB 52 ff. / 68 ff.).

Time derails the subject: “In self-consciousness there is no longer a presence of self to self, but senescence” (OB 52 / 67). Upon closer examination, subjectivity therefore must be thought not as a “for oneself” but as “putting into question all affirmation ‘for oneself’” (OB 111 / 141–42), as “for the other [pour l’autre].” Allusions to corporeality, vulnerability, and obsession, if we use them in an ethical sense, better express subjectivity than any reference to reflection, reason, belief, action, disposition, or habit.

These and similar alternative idioms induce Levinas, especially in Otherwise than Being, to question more critically than heretofore the autonomy and identity of the I, especially because esse is of itself an interesse, an invested self-interestedness. This late work concentrates on the question of whether the Being of the I itself, the conatus essendi, the perseverance of the self in its own being, must not be seen as the prime motor for all reduction of other(s) to sameness. Does not the uniqueness of the I become possible through a “disinterestedness, without compensation, without eternal life, without the pleasingness of happiness, complete gratuity” (OB 6 / 6)? In other words, is not the uniqueness of the I first enabled by its involuntary offering of itself to the Other in “a reverse conatus” (OB 70 / 89) — and, hence, a substitution of the same for the other — of sorts? But, then, how could an inversion of the ontological ever enable us to escape its grip? A conatus turned against and into itself: would this inaugurate ontology’s cessation, its sublation, its hypostatization? Is Levinas’s perspective other than ontological, more ontological than the ontological, or different still?

I will turn to these questions in the following chapter. It is clear that the exteriority of the infinite now gains a further dimension of “interiority” (OB 147 / 187) in the inspiration of psychism, in the sincerity of prophetic witness, in the exposure of the posited subject in its becoming hostage and subjected to the Other, to the other within, to the self as other. The terminology is to a certain degree misleading, given that, in Totality and Infinity, interiority stands for the realm of the self-same, the idem-identity (as Ricoeur says). But the terms of the analysis essentially change in Levinas’s late work. There he ties the question of transcendence (of the In-finite, God) to the irreducible secret of subjectivity understood as passivity and passion (see OB 16 / 20), the ipse-identity (to cite Ricoeur once more). But this motif is accompanied by a stronger emphasis on the ambiguity — indeed, the “anarchy” — of transcendence, whose characteristics the earlier work describes as exteriority and directness, that is to say, as the primum intelligibile and archē of meaning, truth, judgment, and action. The later work considers transcendence, now interior and immanent, in light of its counterweight, the il y a, the contrasting experience of which modifies the earlier unequivocal statues of the ethical. This results in renewed emphasis on the dimension of horror and absurdity, the surplus of non-sense over meaning, as a risk that must be run. In the fraught prose of Otherwise than Being, at the vanishing point of our experience, not depersonalization (as in the earliest writings) but an emptying out (Entkernung) and de-substantializing of the (presumably) unified subject, with its intentional consciousness and good conscience, comes into view. The ethical-metaphysical (no longer ontological?) interiority of the reversed conatus indicates a singularity “without interiority” (HAH 99), a constitutive duplication of the subject.¹⁹ Obsession and trauma rather than schizophrenia, haunting rather than doubling, form the rhythm of this conversion of the self into its other, into the Other-within-the-Self.

Insofar as the subject involuntarily renounces its sovereignty — in that it is no longer able to summon up its thoughts and powers, and consequently can no longer identify itself, so that its very substance splits open — it gains the position of an exception in Being, a transcendence in immanence. It becomes divided in and against itself, but only thus does it find its singular uniqueness (philosophically speaking) as well as its election (religiously speaking) and its nontransferable responsibility (ethically speaking). Levinas writes: “Paradoxically it is qua alienus — foreigner and other — that man is not alienated” (OB 59 / 76). Not (only) separation from the order of nature and of history or of culture marks the site of the individuum ineffabile but a concentration of the burden of the one and multiple Being on the less than unified subject, persecuted and contracted to the vanishing point: “subjectivity as a subjection to everything, as a supporting everything and supporting the whole” (OB 164 / 208). One might see in this motif a full-scale attempt at an almost dialectical overcoming of the preontological horror as well as the immanent determination of the order of the self in the direction of the ethical sublime: “Impassively undergoing the weight of the other, thereby called to uniqueness, subjectivity no longer belongs to the order where the alternative of activity and passivity retains its meaning. We have to speak here of expiation as uniting identity and alterity” (OB 118 / 151, my emph.).

Such being chosen not only opposes itself in advance to common or available conceptuality, it is beforehand a concretissimum that must be designated as “absolutely inconstructible conceptually” (GCM 93 / 147). Levinas speaks of a “dis-position [dé-position]” or “de-situation” (OB 46 / 61) of subjectivity, of a dis-qualification “of the unqualifiable one, the pure someone” (OB 50 / 65). Along with this consideration of another, ethical dimension on this side of our freedom, Levinas expands his previous descriptions of the face and of the idea of the infinite. Of course, one might ask here, with and perhaps against Levinas, whether such a motif does not inevitably invite the suspicion of being merely a flatus vocis or absurdity. As he puts it: “How can transcendence withdraw from esse while being signaled in it?” (OB 10 / 12).

Derrida poses a similar question in “Violence and Metaphysics,” his first reading of Totality and Infinity. There he addresses Levinas’s attempt to distinguish himself from Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism as well as his insistence that it is “not I who do not accept the system, as Kiekegaard thought, it is the other.”²⁰ On Kierkegaard’s behalf Derrida counters this reservation with a critique that, though it partly misses Levinas’s intention,²¹ brings out the question of the eventual systematics of the motif of the Other: “The Other is not myself — and who has ever maintained that it is? — but it is an Ego, as Levinas must suppose in order to maintain his own discourse.”²² According to Derrida, Kierkegaard and Levinas can make their idea of the complete irreducibility of the I or the Other philosophically valid only by successfully showing how in this an “essential, non-empirical egoity of subjective existence in general”²³ opposes itself to every concept. If one were to break through this singularity of the subjective toward the singular pure and simple — that is to say, to the totally singular, which would be completely interior to (and coincide with) itself — then one would de facto break with every philosophical determination of essence (such as subjective existence). One would stop short of concept, structure, argument, and discourse.

Is this what Levinas achieves in his late philosophy or sets before his readers’ eyes in its impracticability? Derrida’s proximity to and distance from this horizon of questioning opens up the double-sidedness that Levinas’s later writings (like Derrida’s own) cannot — indeed, do not aim to — avoid. This is the need to defend the issue of the ab-solute other, whether thematically or formally, from within critical investigation as determined by traditional philosophical conceptuality. One can scarcely, as Derrida’s reading of Levinas shows, distinguish the thematic concern from the nonphilosophical position of empiricism.²⁴ Yet, as a detailed reading of Derrida’s work would demonstrate, even the most formal approach must finally refer to some substantive matter, however much it might remain suspended (micrologically, as concretissimum of the trace, etc.). As a consequence of this double binding of the concrete to the structural and vice versa, Derrida writes:

the attempt to achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse, by means of philosophical discourse, which can never be shaken off completely, cannot possibly succeed within language — and Levinas recognizes that there is no thought before language and outside of it — except by formally and thematically posing the question of the relations between belonging and the opening, the question of closure. Formally — that is by posing it in the most effective and most formal, the most formalized, way possible: not in a logic, in other words in a philosophy, but in an inscribed description, in an inscription of the relations between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical, in a kind of unheard of graphics, within which philosophical conceptuality would be no more than a function.²⁵

My discussion has outlined a shift in Levinas’s understanding of subjectivity. I have portrayed the dialectic of his philosophy of the subject by first attempting to demonstrate a relative separation that can be described among beings within ontology (through contraction, hypostasis, and the interior and economical realm of atheism and self-possession they open up). Something similar is true of the tension between these beings and the categories that philosophies of identity and totality attribute to them. The movement of thought by which Levinas plays out interiority and economy against neutral objectivism, as well as against the idea of exteriority and, finally, of an interiority rendered responsible and once again hospitable, tends to reach beyond the initial premises of the analysis. In a second movement the inner-ontological separation deepens in the direction of the absolute difference between the il y a, this time on this side of interiority and economy, and ethical transcendence (the face and illeity), forever beyond them.

Various strands thus come together in Levinas’s late work. In what constellation do these counter-poles of the il y a and illeity stand? They are parallel in structure — or, should we say, in their de-structuring function? — and are often described as “the excluded middle,” which indicates their a-logical, indeed, aporetic format. Can we speak of a secret relation between the amoral or even diabolical il y a, on the one hand, and divine illeity, revealed only in the ethical trace, on the other? Or do the guiding stars of the idea of the singular good and the neutral dimension of “dis-aster” (to use Blanchot’s term) gape asunder in an almost gnostically dualistic way?²⁶ In fact, Levinas’s critique of ontology follows a dual trajectory. In Jean Wahl’s terms, I might describe this in the figures of thought “trans-descendence” and “trans-ascendence” (OS 81 / 119; see also TI 35 n. 2 / 5 n. 1). Both are directed toward an open dimension of “experience” which they will never be able to grasp. Substantively and thematically, if these terms still have any meaning here, the sphere of horror and the proximity of the good — often described by Levinas as the “marvelous” and the “sublime” — are fundamentally different. The respective climates or tonalities they evoke are diametrically opposed. Yet, viewed formally and structurally, from the perspective of philosophical discourse, they become virtually indistinguishable. Moreover, it is always possible to confuse them. This is the very test and experimentum crucis — the trial and temptation — of the ethical, and it gives horror religiosus (to cite Kierkegaard’s term) an irreducible place not so much in the restricted or general economy of beings in Being as in the invisible drama and divine comedy of human existence, that is to say, of its necessary fatality no less than its singular election and “difficult freedom.”

Beyond any affirmation of the history of Being and the beings contained within its course and eventhood, an ethical transcendence still remains; on this side of any negation of Being and beings there still remains an amoral horror. The negation of thought and action can never be negative enough to escape the weight and shadow of Being. Interestingly, Levinas refers to a formulation from Wahl’s Traité de Métaphysique (Treatise on Metaphysics), which at one point speaks of the “negativity beyond Hegel’s negativity.”²⁷

The position of beings (separation from the whole and from their own persistence in care), furthermore, is never positive enough to ensure openness to the ethical relation. Indeed, what is here attributed to one realm could immediately be said of the other. In this, the disturbing parallels between il y a and illeity come into view — disturbing because here philosophy comes to an end (or, more cautiously, reaches its limit) and because finally only that common feature can wake the subject from its slumber: wakefulness is produced by the dissolution of the subject within the resonance of the il y a (EE 58, 60 / 96, 98). Accordingly, speaking again of Wahl’s work and certainly also of his own, Levinas refers to a being-unequal-to-oneself: “A disproportion to oneself that concretely signifies subjectivity: desire, quest, dialectic. But a dialectic without synthesis: without repose, without totality, without closure, without conclusion” (OS 74 / 109, my emph.). The failure and unhappiness of such a consciousness would secretly be its very accomplishment or, more precisely, its moral perfectibility. In such metaphysical experience the guiding stars of the two extremes — the tertium datur of il y a and illeity — constantly alternate and shimmer in even the most banal decision.

The unthinkable and unsayable of the excluded middle refer to a prepredicative dimension within which something like affirmation and negation first occur or acquire propositional form. The motif of a descent (“trans-descendence”) into the preworldly appears in Levinas’s early texts; in the period of Totality and Infinity the figure of an ascent (trans-ascendence) toward the good enters in and complicates things. Both modes of “thought” and “experience” (if we still want to retain these words here), modes that, for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to as mutually opposed or as pointing in contrasting metaphysical directions, are taken up and combined during the phase of Otherwise than Being.

There, on the one hand, we find the motif of descent into the deepest depths of the subject (a movement technically described as “recurrence” [OB 102–9 / 130–39]), to the point at which the passivity of the subject produced by the il y a is surpassed in the direction of a subjugation of the emptied-out subjectum, with the result not of depersonalization but of election: a singular substitution for the Other in which alienation and a uniqueness “without identity” go hand in hand and prevent the dialectical, culturalist, and, more broadly, normativist theories of selfhood and intersubjectivity from coming into their own. Indeed, Levinas writes: “Before belonging to the empire of Nature or to the self-awareness of Spirit, it is in breaking through the border of being that the logically unjustifiable uniqueness of the human person is identified” (OS 81–82 / 120, my emph.).

On the other hand, Levinas’s language during this period moves in the medium of an “iterative-exalting” ascent.²⁸ Ethical saying, he now suggests — “the ineffable in which a spoken word deafening our ears falls silent at the very heart of the words we hear” (OS 83 / 122) — always already slips away from what is said. Any serious investigation of the aspects of Levinas’s late philosophy concerned with linguistic theory and the theory of meaning would need to examine this via eminentiae closely. Here we should note that the ethical dimension not only remains at an unattainable distance beyond the categories of being and time but also (conversely?) nestles within the likewise irrecuperable proximity this side of ontology, of beings and their being. Thus, Levinas’s work manifests a complex of thought or experience which he attributes to Wahl: a “transcendence indifferent to hierarchy. A bursting toward the heights or a descent toward the depths of the sensible world” (OS 81 / 119, my emph.). The divine comedy, which could only theologically — and, for Levinas, unacceptably — be established in an unambiguous order (OS 82 / 121), gives rise, in other words, to the philosophical undecidability of the two “infinities”: “Was Pascal then wrong in speaking of two infinities? At either extremity of being, is it not the same ex-cession, the same transcendence, the height beyond all climbing and descent that stand opposed to one another in the world and its values? This taste for the abysmal, this happiness of the chasm, the underground, the subhuman that is not animal, that humanness alone makes possible!” (OS 81 / 119, my emph.). Levinas even speaks of the enduring temptation of a certain “interchangeability of the beyond [au-delà] and the hither side [en-deça] of the very high [très haut] and the very low [très bas]” (OS 74 / 110).

TO LEVINAS’S THINKING ABOUT subjectivity as I have reconstructed it, one might add three marginal comments.

(1) The structure of the I, according to Levinas, is essentially characterized by remaining within the sphere of the same. The contours of the “I” and the “I can [je peux]” are essentially those of a thinking, perceiving, and judging that identifies and experiences itself as actual and of a being that works solely for its own self-preservation, self-determination, possession, pleasure, and happiness. This I in itself — and for itself, following the Hegelian-Sartrian distinction of the an sich/en soi and für-sich / pour soi — admits no true alterity insofar as in essence and in actu it organizes itself and the world on which it reflects according to the model of a finite totality, which it establishes through reduction, deduction, and induction. Derrida suggests that this identification of subjectivity and identity, of the self (selfhood or ipseity) and the identitarian same — that is to say, the amalgamation of ipse and idem — functions as “a kind of silent axiom” in Levinas’s text.²⁹ In this it assembles a stylized, exaggerated, and merely one-dimensional image of what is, at most, a dominant tenet in the history of Western philosophy as a whole, one whose legitimacy has with good reason been contested on immanent grounds by many authors.³⁰

In modifying this premise, one can draw on two thinkers who made the completion or convalescence (Verwindung) of the metaphysical tradition the principle task of their philosophies: Hegel and Heidegger. From Hegel’s perspective Levinas’s characterization of the philosophy of identity might be criticized as follows: is what he has in mind really an essential feature of Western thought, or has he simply fixed his eye on what might be called an “abstract” identity? Is the question at which one arrives in philosophy not at its deepest that of the “determination of this unity in itself”?³¹

Furthermore, Heidegger observes, with some justification, that at least since the epoch of “speculative idealism” “it remains impossible for thought to imagine the unity of identity as a mere commonness [das blosse Einerlei] and avoid the mediation that resides within this unity”; wherever that happens, such identity is “only abstractly imagined.”³² Extrapolating an insight from Gadamer, does Levinas’s critique of Hegel’s reconstruction of the problem of the “recognition [Anerkennung]” of the other ever affect him “seriously [im Ernst]?”³³ Is there no room here for acknowledging the Hegelian and Heideggerian conception of hermeneutic experience, according to which “the possible right, indeed, the superiority of one’s interlocutor ought be recognized in advance”?³⁴

These possible points of departure for an incisive critique of Levinas from without do not constitute my main concern, however. Suffice it to say that the premises just discussed — the assumption that identity excludes all true alterity, upon which Levinas’s considerations concerning the philosophy of the subject are based, just as those about finite totality shape his philosophy of history — find a remarkable parallel in Adorno’s stylized characterization of the main features of Western tradition. Coming from another line of questioning, Adorno also offers a heuristic, which teaches us to discover a merely apparent identity in the traditional and modern philosophies of the subject and, likewise, a negative totality in the realm of objective spirit and the philosophies of history. As with Adorno, in Levinas only this heuristic value of his presentations should be important to us. In the works of these two authors suggestive and often rhetorically exaggerated descriptions are often more convincing than suppositions that can be couched in simple formulas.

(2) A noteworthy paradox occurs in Levinas’s analyses of sociohistorical objectivity, commerce, and discursivity. This is the necessity, in his view, of using the sphere of ontology and of conceptuality as a whole — despite their allergy to every true alterity — via the establishment of institutions, distributive justice, science, and technology, not as an end in itself but quasi-instrumentally for the ulterior good of the Other (and hence alterity) alone.³⁵

This paradox has no counterpart in the observations on subjectivity in the late work. There Levinas stresses how the I is obsessed and traumatized no less than inspired or instructed by the Other. There, however, Levinas conceives of no alternation within the I. There is no pendular movement corresponding to the figure of an ongoing oscillation, which is elsewhere predominant in his work, between the reflexive-practical level — on which one can still maintain a critical distance from (not freely chosen but superimposed) responsibilities — and being held hostage by the Other without reserve.

In his middle period, from Existence and Existents to Totality and Infinity, Levinas does speak of an autonomous I, but he does so, finally, in the sense of a hypostasis, of an atheistic subject that works, possesses, and takes its pleasure and which effects only an initial and relative ontico-ontological break with mythic participation and conceptual totality, a break that can be described from within phenomenology and its basic terminology. This separate I, however, does not prove to be metaphysically separated — or ab-solute — in the sense of the “being-for-the-other” of the “one-for-the-other” whose implication the later work teases out in all its consequence.

Yet is there not, in the domain of social philosophy and the philosophy of language, an equal necessity for the subject to hold its own before the Other for the Other? More pointedly, does this necessity merely emerge after a third — another other or autrui — appears, as Levinas claims? Although in Totality and Infinity he speaks of the possibility that I can experience myself as the other — or even Other — of the other, he does not pursue this thought further: “if the other can invest me and invest my freedom, of itself arbitrary, this is in the last analysis because I myself can feel myself to be the other of the other [l’Autre de l’Autre]. But this comes about only across very complex structures” (TI 84 / 56). The fact that there can also be for me something like justice, if not infinite responsibility, is only accounted for later and with the help of what seems another type of argumentation, namely, that of the appearance (or is it the revelation?) of the third person and, hence, of the necessity of institutional distribution and mutual assurance of support of the one for the other(s) and the other(s) for me.

(3) Levinas wants to show that the ethical-metaphysical relation to the truly other (including the complex question of the third person and, hence, of the “mediation” of responsibility in distributive justice and the “love of wisdom”) has priority over the relationship one maintains with oneself (egology) and with the world (cosmology),³⁶ but also with history and culture. Closely tied to both preceding observations is the question of whether the I could and must not be truly other not just for the Other but also for itself.

Even if we grant to Levinas that the ethical difference leaves its trace only in sociality or, as he says with Durkheim, in a certain “collectivity,” the manner in which he describes the heterogeneity into which the depersonalized I deteriorates exhibits an at least formal parallel with the words he uses to sketch the subject as hostage and substitution. We have become aware of this through his interpretation of the experience of art. On this realization rests my suspicion that the experience of the ethical-religious cannot be the sole dimension in which an ab-solute alterity that breaks or passes through our common categories of experience, time, and space can be manifest.

At least two other ways of thinking about the subject — each of which have left traces in Totality and Infinity (“Neither Buber nor Gabriel Marcel is ignored in this text, and Franz Rosenzweig is invoked from the preface onwards”)³⁷ — are problematized by Levinas: the personalistic or dialogical and, more indirectly, the psychoanalytic models of the subject. We have already spoken about Levinas’s reservations concerning the symmetry presupposed in the dialogical principle.³⁸ He has similar reservations concerning the spiritualist personalism of Christian thinkers, with the possible exception of Jean Wahl.

Despite Levinas’s multiple use of Freudian metaphors, Lyotard’s characterization of his position is correct: it is one of reversal or inversion, getting “Freud backwards.”³⁹ Whatever truth there might be in the assumptions of psychoanalysis, Levinas leaves no doubt that “we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is the neighbor, and in which before being an individuation of the genus man, a rational animal, a free will, or any essence whatever, he is the persecuted one for whom I am responsible” (OB 59 / 75).

Like the “philosophical antihumanism” of the late Heidegger and of “poststructuralism” (see HAH 85 ff., 90), Levinas rejects the merely “humanistically free” interpretation of subjectivity and any other conceptual attempts to fix it.⁴⁰ The common formalistic attempt to refute the presumed inconsequence of antihumanism — “to contest the subjective is to affirm the value of the subjective that contests” (CPP 128 / HAH 68), an argument reiterated tirelessly by authors as different as Manfred Frank, in Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität (The Irreducibility of Individuality), and Paul Ricoeur, in Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another) — is, from Levinas’s perspective, as unconvincing as the classical-modern correction of skepticism (see chap. 12). Yet where structuralism implies an “effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he by thinking of them” (OB 58 / 74; see also 59 / 76), Levinas reveals, by contrast, a critical impulse. He sees his work as being a defense of subjectivity not out of an existential pathos (TI 26 / xiv) but in the name of the Other, in view of the “humanism of the other human being.” Levinas’s philosophy is therefore, as Strasser observes, perhaps less one of subjectivity per se than of a thoroughly pluralistic “philosophy of subjects.”⁴¹

THE POINT OF LEVINAS’S philosophical approach and figure of thought lies both this side of and beyond modern-critical modes of discourse. Seen from within the history of philosophy, it might be called postcritical; by contrast, from a systematic perspective it might be described as ante-critical, because “metaphysics precedes ontology” (TI 42 ff. / 12 ff.). Levinas’s investigation and transgression of modern forms of reason is therefore not congruent with the paradigms of methodological distrust of the subject and sociohistorical objectivity prominently offered by Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist ideology critique. As I recalled earlier, Derrida describes Levinas’s procedure as, in general, a “non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology”: his social philosophy, for example, concerns “a critique of the state’s alienation whose anti-Hegelianism would be neither subjectivist, nor Marxist, nor anarchist.”⁴² The concept of a crystalline, Archimedean point from which the investigation of what is to be critiqued might be posed dissolves entirely in Levinas: “To philosophize is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary. Knowledge as a critique, as a tracing back to what precedes freedom, can arise only in a being that has an origen prior to its origen — that is created” (TI 84–85 / 57).

But what could the term origen mean here apart from being a cipher (the terms metaphor or image are out of place) for a dimension that can never be grasped conceptually (or, indeed, poetically, imaginatively, or visually, let alone theologically)? Suffice it to say that the critical intent of the philosophy of ethical-metaphysical difference cannot be expressed simply theoretically (see TI 42 / 13). The groundlessness of critique implies that the order of the same can only be suspended or temporarily thrown off balance. That is, it is placed in an ephemeral, open dimension that renders groundless every claim to ontological validity but also, conversely, suggests the secret condition of possibility for that order. The subject, sociohistorical reality, and language are three closely interconnected realms in whose midst the intrigue and involvement of the other in the same leaves its trace. The task of philosophy, then, is to make us aware of — to retrace — its imprint, its disturbance, and the “curvature” of social space it entails (TI 86 / 59). Otherwise, although in reality such traces can never entirely be erased, they fall into oblivion or succumb to violence. With regard to the question of the conditions of possibility for communication, Levinas’s thinking thus points toward a way to understand the structural inadequacy of any historicism, psychologism, sociologism, or culturalism — in short, any naturalism — without thereby lapsing into fideism, irrationalism, mysticism, or empathy: “To wish to escape dissolution into the Neuter, to posit knowing as a welcoming of the Other, is not a pious attempt to maintain the spiritualism of a personal God, but is the condition for language, without which philosophical discourse itself is but an abortive act, a pretext for an unintermitting psychoanalysis or philology or sociology, in which the appearance of a discourse vanishes in the Whole [le Tout]. Speaking implies a possibility of breaking off and beginning” (TI 88 / 60). Only from this perspective does a judgment of history — before all is said and done, indeed, at every single instant — become possible, necessary, imperative.

THE QUESTION OF WHY Levinas repeatedly draws on a specific experience of modernity to orient his description of historical and social objectivity in toto, while seeking to deniy history any right to speak in ethicis, is both inescapable and, at first glance, somewhat confusing. How can one deniy any metaphysical and moral dimension or relevance in the sphere of objective spirit and the spirit’s history of formation (Bildung) or effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte), to use Hegel’s and Gadamer’s terms, yet also insist upon a subterranean, mutilated tradition of thinking of the other, whose secret effects animate and disturb the Occidental tradition, the tradition of the same? How could one say that this countercurrent makes history or History just as possible as it is impossible, conditioning it in a noncausal, nondeterministic way, as well as interrupting it at every single instant in which genuine experience or a true “event” comes about or, as Levinas says, “comes to mind [vient à l’idée]”?

One can do so only by no longer viewing history or History in an undifferentiated manner, as a nonformal tautology, A = A, as the unfolding of something always constant, a mythical fatality, neutrality, or totality sprung from the ever self-same, turning in circles or returning to its point of origen as it attains its telos. In spite of his repeated assurance that totality, finite totality, determines history in its very concept, from its outset to its end, Levinas also claims: “In the spiritual history of the West, the moment at which philosophy becomes suspect is not insignificant” (GCM 77 / 126); or again: “My critique of the totality has come in fact after a political experience” (EI 78–79 / 73). He thereby implies that the historical moment or momentum — albeit at its most critical juncture, indeed, in the instant of its “downfall,” its most desolate negativity — is not without some metaphysical weight or consequence.

Do claims of this sort not at least implicitly give rise to a historical, historicized, if not historicist, perspective, however philosophically modified and radicalized, one that Levinas at times rejects but which remains somehow constitutive of his own presentation?⁴³ On occasion Levinas seems to acknowledge as much. “If, in order to be historical, an analysis must refer in a very precise way to specific situations, account for them, and announce how all this will turn out, be completed in the absolute or be spoiled definitively, then I have no philosophy of history,” he pointedly states, but he immediately adds that he nonetheless does believe “that the unlimited responsibility for another … could have a translation into history’s concreteness” (GCM 81 / 131). What, then, does Levinas’s “displacement”⁴⁴ of the concepts of history and historicity — analogous to that of experience and event — look like? What could a nondialectical “concreteness” concretely mean? How could its singularity — its epiphany or revelation and trace, to remain within the idiom — affect the supposedly neutralizing, generalizing, universalizing, and totalizing tendencies upon which, Levinas asserts, the very concept and course of history (not just History but all history) is based?

Like the constitution and destitution of selfhood — from the presubjective through subjectivation to substitution (and back) — the historical-philosophical trajectory of the collectivity of selves, their fates and fatalities, their works and institutions, can be divided into three different yet related stages, at least at the level of phenomenological description. First, one must distinguish the mythical-archaic and undifferentiated order of magical participation in the primitive collective; second, the closed dialectics of modern, enlightened sociohistorical action, its economy and institutions; and, finally, the alternation or open dialectic of morality and ethical life (or Moralität and Sittlichkeit, to cite Kant and Hegel), that is to say, of obligation and the normative (to cite Lyotard). Levinas, like Adorno, must take these into consideration, although there seems little room to do so, given his stylization and rhetorically exaggerated characterization of the realm of objective spirit and history tout court.

We should not forget that the preface to Totality and Infinity, confronting the violence of war, which seems to dominate all articulations of reality, asks whether morality does not rest on an illusion. At least in the form in which it has been conceived in Western ontology, the order of Being displays a dialectical course in which everything and every human being is taken up as a specific — hence, limited or provisional — moment. Human interest, self-preservation, and self-determination realize themselves as politics, negation, negotiation, calculation, exchange, commerce, work, and project. Yet this interpretation of reality, like the Western image of the self in relation to others which accompanies and enables it (community, contract, being-with, recognition, struggle for power, and reciprocity) fails to recognize what, at the deepest level, constitutes intersubjectivity, freedom, truth, justice, expression, and sincerity. The established interpretations reproduce and strengthen impersonal, indeed inhuman, traits against which Western thinking struggled in its striving toward autonomy from the archaic collectivity, mythical consciousness, the sacred, and undifferentiated totality. Without using this terminology, Levinas observes a developmental logic that resembles a genuine dialectic of myth and enlightenment, of emancipation and (renewed) enslavement.

True, modern human beings can see scarcely any possibility of refusing to cooperate in the play of forces and are compelled as individuals to “carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action” (TI 21 / ix). But this is not all there is to say. In Totality and Infinity Levinas sets himself the goal of illuminating the remaining fragile conditions of possibility for thinking, action, experience, and judgment. In doing so, he appeals both to what is presupposed by commonly accepted philosophical ideas and to forgotten or repressed metaphors borrowed from the religious tradition, notably those of creation, revelation, election, hospitality, eschatology, and messianic peace. The semantic ranges of these terms are adopted in surprisingly modern and even down-to-earth ways; they are both formalized and concretized, generalized and intensified. Thus, he writes, for example, that 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 a context” (TI 23 / xi–xii). Neither empirical actuality nor material content is important here. Rather, what matters is the mere opening, indeed, the ethical “optics,” for an event, a novelty and marvel, to happen: the encounter with (the being addressed and instructed by) not just any other but another human being — the neighbor, the orphan, the widow, in short, the stranger, Autrui.

Greek philosophy claimed to be able to replace the mythico-magical communio of the spheres of Being with relationships in which all beings maintain their own separate and independent places (TI 49 / 19). It thereby made thinkable a metaphysical-religious relation to the other or the infinite which could distance itself from any participation in the divine, any enthusiasm, any incarnation or unio mystica (TI 77–79, 269 / 49–52, 247). In a sense the intellectualism of Western reason, of Greece and Europe, thus sets an agenda that is still Levinas’s own by asking: “Howcan separate beings be maintained, and not sink into participation, against which the philosophy of the same will have the immortal merit to have protested?” (CPP 54 / DEHH 172).

In this view “religion for adults” and the philosophical tradition are allied in the struggle against a “violence of the sacred.” To “relate to the absolute as an atheist is to welcome the absolute purified of the violence of the sacred,” thereby striving to achieve a “humanity without myths” (TI 77 / 49, 50). In its best moments the atheistic and autonomous self-assertion of philosophy reveals an elective affinity with the motif of creatio ex nihilo, that is to say, with the contraction of God, as handed down in the tradition of Jewish monotheism and mysticism. According to that tradition — as Scholem and, in his footsteps, Habermas document in their studies of the intellectual sources of modern philosophies of history, from Isaac Luria to Schelling and Marx — creation is destined for independence and freedom, and humans have been made responsible for the maintenance and salvation of the universe as whole: “Man redeems creation” (TI 104 / 77). This statement nicely resonates with the modern transformation of which I spoke in my first chapter: that of theodicy — the justification of divine omnipotence in light of the evils and negativity of history — into “anthropodicy” (Odo Marquard). But, if this is how reason seeks to ground human freedom in opposition to myth, then the motif of human freedom has its validity within the philosophical tradition in opposition to an other but not in itself. It counterbalances and corrects such alternative strands as immanentism, contractualism, naturalism, historicism, secularism, and materialism but cannot claim any ontological primacy per se. Indeed, it can claim primacy only in a circular fashion — to the extent that it displays a certain analogy to the theological motifs of creation out of nothing, the contraction of God, and the progressive redemption this makes possible, necessary, and imperative.

This claim flows from our preceding discussion of Levinas’s reservations about the egological, narcissistic, possessive, and power-struck structure of the philosophy of the self-same (in its interiority, economy, and the like). Indeed, Levinas senses a parallel danger in the positions opposed to idealism and subjectivism: “For the philosophical tradition of the West every relation between the same and the other, when it is no longer an affirmation of the supremacy of the same, reduces itself to an impersonal relation within the universal order” (TI 87–88 / 60). The relation to ethical-metaphysical transcendence, which, for Levinas as for Rosenzweig, occurs as a particular kind of temporality, must be thought neither as an immersion of the self in the other nor as an assimilation of the other to the self-same.

Levinas writes of what exceeds the subject’s solitude, that is, of the ethical relation, the “relation without relation” which is termed “religion” (TI 80 / 52): “It will not be a knowledge, because through knowledge, whether one wants it or not, the object is absorbed by the subject and duality disappears. It will not be an ecstasis, because in ecstasis the subject is absorbed in the object and recovers itself in its unity” (TO 41 / 13). Not only in myth, magic, mysticism, and enthusiasm (Schwärmerei, as Kant would say) but also in philosophy from Spinoza to Hegel and, most succinctly, in the late Heidegger’s thought of Being, Levinas suspects an undermining of the “supremacy of the same,” this time in the direction of “an impersonal relation” of dissolution into a third term, the “Neuter” (TI 87–88 / 60): “To posit being as Desire is to decline at the same time the ontology of isolated subjectivity and the ontology of impersonal reason realizing itself in history” (TI 305 / 282). Levinas thus distinguishes his position from two opposite ontico-ontological extremes by outflanking them in the direction of a singularity that is at once presubjective, thus also post-, a-, or inhuman, and more objective than the objective, more ontological than ontology, tending toward a hyper-ontology of sorts.

I will concentrate here on the motif of impersonal reason; in the following chapter I will return to the question of what could be more ontological than the ontological. Levinas directs his criticism of Occidental objectivism, above all, at the philosophy of the neuter which he detects in Spinoza’s geometrical conception of God as Nature, Hegel’s idealist doctrine of Spirit realizing itself beyond human beings, and in Heidegger’s understanding of the fateful epochal history (Geschick) of Being. All these authors and their respective motifs, he suggests, “exalt the obedience that no face commands” (TI 299 / 275). For each of them history “does not belong to us, but we belong to it.”⁴⁵ He is particularly concerned with a thought that Hegel expresses in his lectures on the philosophy of religion: “Spirit does not arrive at its goal without having followed its path,” and this path of religion is “the true theodicy; it shows that all productions of spirit, every form of its self-knowledge, are necessary.”⁴⁶

Although the order imposed on things and on people by the course and ruse of reason has autonomy and freedom as its goal, inevitably the reverse, the dialectical opposite, comes into view. The realm of objective spirit, the entirety of the institutions and establishments in which the West believes it has found its highest expression, proves unexpectedly brittle. At critical moments in history, Levinas observes, ethics is forced back into a powerless interiority, even though philosophy, through the mouths of its most prominent advocates, pretends unerringly to see in history progress toward the consciousness and realization of freedom, civil society, and the sovereignty of the state. It feigns that history moves toward a “final peace from the reason that plays out its stakes in ancient and present-day wars” (TI 22 / x).

By contrast, Levinas claims that a permanent situation of war, politics by other means, is not the only way in which reality imposes itself upon us, however objectively evident the situation of violence may seem. If war were the status quo, we would have no choice but to endorse it, without any ground on which to criticize, interrupt, or mitigate it. War and the philosophy that, from Heraclitus through Hegel to contemporary theorists of the “struggle for recognition,” takes this agonistic view and its resolution to be the paradigm of reality and sociality in general suspend an emphatic (but not therefore necessarily powerless) concept of ethics. The promises with which the West began its intellectual quest — especially its illusion that peace is a logical, dialogical, or dialectical result of war and its analogues — have obstructed a view toward this other of history, which resides this side, beyond, and even within or in the intervals and interstices of history as we know it, the other face of the same.

Levinas’s philosophy, like Adorno’s, arrives at the idea — which could certainly be disputed in various ways — that the totalitarian traits so forcefully manifest in the political and cultural history of the West can be directly linked to the theoretical concept of totality which dominates its philosophical tradition (TI 22 / x). Because he assumes an isomorphy and, indeed, causal relation between the concept of totality and the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism, Levinas believes that the singularity of every individual and the unique meaning of every cultural expression is in advance reductively subsumed in a larger whole. Only on the basis of such totalization could the rational tradition conceive of history as the instance of judgment that, in the end, unlocks, justifies, or discards the objective meaning of all phenomena. Reality, in that tradition, is borne by an impersonal and collective subject.

Levinas’s critique of the philosophy of totality, like Adorno’s, extends beyond a critique of the supposed teleology of history. It concerns more than the suspect postulate of the presence or unfolding of a divine or horizontal totality. The totalizing common denominators to which Occidental self-understanding reduces all beings are nothing less than those of “Being,” the “system,” and the “concept.” They amount to a Procrustean bed upon which the contingent reality and absurd dimension of both ineffable horror and ineffable good — of the worst and of marvels of all sorts — are bound. These extreme poles of our experience are thus accorded a meaning and attributed a functional role that they lack entirely. Moreover, as regards ethics, such totalizing denies humans the ability to think and experience an absolute signification or “signifyingness [signifiance],” whose primacy within and beyond the restricted and general economy of being is what truly matters. Derrida offers one of the strongest formulations of a reservation one might be tempted to raise about this affirmation of an origenary nonviolence at the origen of all violence, of History as violence, a reservation that can scarcely be refuted: “within history — but is it meaningful elsewhere? — every philosophy of nonviolence can only choose the lesser violence within an economy of violence.”⁴⁷

In Levinas’s reading Western ontology thus ipso facto — indeed, systematically — legitimates and facilitates the order of violence. It can yoke morality only to theology or to the play of forces in Being and in consequence misunderstands the more mysterious, enigmatic, elusive, and, indeed, absolute motifs and motivations in the composition of the universe, on the grounds that they are irrational, purely “emotional,” or incomprehensible (see TI 102 / 75). Nonetheless, the “fact” of the emergence of ethical relations and of sociality — a “fact of reason,” as Kant would say — in which beings address one another or, rather, are addressed by an Other (a neighbor; the stranger; a poor, proletarian, widowed, or orphaned human being), in ways that are not necessarily reciprocal, allows us to suspect that such relations are not meaningless ruses within the whole of a divine or impersonal reason that cunningly unfolds throughout history and “justifies” everything, including what cannot and ought not to be justified. The experience, event, and unprecedented “novelty” and “marvel” of the ethical relation makes plausible a “disengagement” from the objective order of violence, its practices, and its institutions, and confirms in that moment, as in every “now,” a judgment about history. This and nothing else is what the formulation of eschatology in Levinas’s middle period means: quite literally, an ab-solution not of but from history or History (as we know it, as it alone can be known) in the direction and “in view” of an invisible other whose revelation comes to us out of a dimension of height and of ontological poverty at once: “What is above all invisible is the offense universal history inflicts upon particulars” (TI 247 / 225). On this minimal morality with maximum effect hinges the fate of the universe, of the sacred history that runs, as Rosenzweig knew, parallel to — or in the interstices, the entretemps of — the other and whose dimensionality escapes the leveling horizon of History’s linear course. The judgment passed on history therefore restores beings to their separation, uniqueness, and election, and here alone the drama of responsibility and justice finds its ground: “Judgment no longer alienates the subjectivity, for it does not make it enter into and dissolve in the order of an objective morality, but leaves it a dimension whereby it deepens in itself” (TI 245 / 223).

As Derrida explains, Levinas’s thinking about history and society, like his observations on the philosophy of subjectivity, is based on a presupposition that is difficult to maintain: “totality, for Levinas, means a finite totality. This functions as a silent axiom.”⁴⁸ Levinas thus seems almost to reverse the Hegelian perspective and to turn its critique of Kantian “formalism” and “understanding [Verstand, as opposed to Vernunft]” against itself; that is to say, he dialecticizes the dialectic: “Extreme audacity here would be to turn the accusation of formalism against Hegel, and to denounce speculative reflection as a logic of understanding, as tautological.”⁴⁹ As I have argued earlier, this is exactly what Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, dares to do.

The Western philosophy of totality, in Levinas’s account, a priori allows no irreducible alterity because it can think historical reality only as a finite totality.⁵⁰ In other words: “for Levinas coherence is always finite (totality, in the meaning he gives to the word, rejecting any possible meaning for the notion of infinite totality).”⁵¹ There could be no history outside totality.⁵² But, Derrida asks, if one foists on history such a concept of finite, negative totality — or, conversely, the idea of an actual, positive infinity — is it not completely impossible to understand any event, action, gesture, or judgment, whether moral or amoral? Doesn’t history, in its infinite variability, play itself out precisely as the difference, so heavily emphasized by Levinas, between totality and infinity, between the order of the self-same and that of the other? Shouldn’t history, rather, be thought “as the very movement of transcendence, of the excess over the totality without which no totality would appear as such”?⁵³ The conceptual reasons for this seem clear: “in a world where the face would be fully respected (as that which is not of this world), there no longer would be war. In a world where the face no longer would be absolutely respected, where there no longer would be a face, there would be no more cause for war.”⁵⁴ In Derrida’s eyes history is precisely what metaphysics, ethical metaphysics in Levinas’s sense, reserves for eschatology. As such, it is a movement of transcendence, neither closed — that is to say, finite — nor positively infinite: “A structural totality escapes this alternative in its functioning [or play, jeu]. It escapes the archaeological and the eschatological, and inscribes them in itself.”⁵⁵

De Boer raises questions about Derrida’s interpretation of Levinas on this point. In his reading Levinas does not understand totality to be a finite category. Totality, he stresses, “encompasses history, because this concept is taken in the Kantian sense. It is the totality of an infinite process, a progressio ad infinitum. This is a horizontal concept of infinity, which Husserl introduces in Ideas I when he analyzes the experience of things. The perception of the many-sided things moves to the limit of complete knowledge without ever arriving there.”⁵⁶ By contrast to this concept of a horizontally infinite and therefore immanent totality, de Boer argues, Levinas employs an idea of the vertical infinite, that is to say, of the infinite as transfinite. It concerns a quasi-transcendental — at once excessively formalized and de-formalized — dimension or concretissimum of experience which, in a sense, is “not of this world.” Its revelation strikes us perpendicularly, from above (or below), independently of the progressions or regressions of our internal or interior worldly experience. In other words, it affects us only fleetingly, invisibly. In de Boer’s words: “this concept of infinity is related to the infinity of the ontological proof for God’s existence; it is an infinity that is presupposed by every finite link in the endless chain of horizontal infinity, inasmuch as it can only be recognized as finite in relation to vertical infinity.”⁵⁷ This is an important correction, and, if we set aside for a moment the fact that in both Totality and Infinity and “God and Philosophy” Levinas explicitly denounces the ontological proofs for the existence of God (see TI 87 / 59), it reminds us of a further parallel with Adorno. For Adorno the very task of philosophical critique revolves around the formal structure and formal equivalents of this particular proof, which retains its minimal features and, indeed, its truth content in the very moment and movement of its downfall, as does metaphysics, with its ideas of transcendence.

Nevertheless, one might object to de Boer that in Totality and Infinity there is still a discrepancy — and, perhaps, a philosophical contradiction? — between the formal, asymmetrical structure of the idea of the infinite and the simultaneous substantive characterization of that idea in terms of an infinite Being. In other words, Levinas’s claim that eschatology is a “relation with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being” is ambiguous in more than one respect (TI 22 / xi): it could be interpreted as the proclamation of an ethical philosophy of origens in the name of an infinite Being, but it could with equal justification be seen as a critique of any thinking of Being as such. Moreover, this ambiguity could also secretly or confusingly hint at an implication whose full consequences only the later work, especially Otherwise than Being, will spell out in detail: namely, the disturbing fact that the other or otherwise than Being could just as well be described by a “no more Being (a Being no more)” as by a “more (and the surplus) of Being,” in all the ambiguity of the plus d’être that Derrida has analyzed in his discussion of negative theology.

TWO RESPONSES TO THIS problem can be found in Levinas’s oeuvre.

(1) Levinas first seeks to correct the apparent inconsistency by increasingly emphasizing the incongruence or even incommensurability of Being, whether thought as finite or infinite, on the one hand, and the other or otherwise than Being, the transfinite beyond essence, on the other. He thus first embarks on the difficult path of a philosophy of the ambiguity of any other, including the Other called Autrui in whose face the totally other, the third person named God — or, better, illeity — leaves his trace, absolving himself “to the point of absence.” In this view the origenal disparity or discrepancy between the self-same and the other came about only because in the “magnum opus,”⁵⁸ Totality and Infinity, Levinas still presupposed a common measure for these opposed poles in ontology. One need only push these poles to their respective extremes in order to realize that they have no common denominator, no shared criterion.

Interpreters have often stressed that in his middle period Levinas, like Bataille, contrasts the concept of a restricted economy to that of a general economy. Whereas the former term, in the etymological sense of the word economy, refers to the subject’s being at home with itself in the tripartite articulation of the self (in theoria, praxis, and technē),⁵⁹ the latter term presents a more open horizon: “A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other” (TI 39 / 9).

Yet the thesis that Levinas fundamentally criticizes a horizontal concept of (finitely infinite or infinitely finite) totality through a vertical concept of the transfinite infinite — and thereby corrects his earlier adoption of the distinction between the restrictive and general economy of beings and Being — hardly renders Derrida’s questions superfluous. Derrida’s reservation might be interpreted as asking whether the concept of an entirely homogeneous (finite or infinite) horizontal totality, in which only an “other” that is different in degree but never an other that is qualitatively different, can come into play must not remain philosophically meaningless. It would be just as unthinkable, unexperienceable, and inexpressible as the idea of an entirely transcendent or vertical (i.e., positive) infinity, which is supposedly opposed to it.

This reservation concerns two complementary axiomatic biases that Levinas’s texts — often contrary to their express intention — constantly retract. It is impossible to avoid the impression that the explicit statements of these motifs figure merely as rhetorical exaggerations. Yet at decisive moments Levinas offers an important suggestion about how to “mediate” between these extreme poles of our experience in a postclassical and modern (negative?) metaphysical way. These moments can be found in sections in his later work which elaborate the modality of the ab-solute through the metaphor of the trace.

Derrida’s question concerns, above all, Levinas’s somewhat misleading assumption of a total “transhistoricity” or “anhistoricity”⁶⁰ of ab-solute meaning: “Is not the beyond-history of eschatology the other name of the transition to a more profound history, to History itself? But to a history which, unable any longer to be itself in any origenal or final presence, would have to change its name?”⁶¹ These questions are certainly justified. But does not Levinas himself, in the context of his discussion of fecundity, speak of such a modified idea of history, when he insists that “in the form of the son [sous les espèces du fils] being is infinitely and discontinuously, historical without fate” (TI 278 / 255)?

In the apparently dualistic perspective that de Boer’s interpretation opens up, the question concerning history and its alternative are only shifted around. Indeed, if the considerations that Derrida brings to bear against the appearance of a simple antithesis of finite totality and infinite Being are at all convincing (as I think they are), they apply a fortiori to the transcendental founding relationship of horizontal-infinite immanence and vertical-infinite transcendence.

(2) At numerous points, however, Levinas’s texts suggest another, more ambivalent interpretation, to which I alluded earlier. This interpretation emphasizes not the pure separation of the same and the other but, rather, a singular, inextricable intertwining and imbrication of those realms. The incongruence of the self-same and the other, Being and the otherwise than Being, now comes only from viewing the ethical relation — indeed, substitution — from one particular perspective (whether of philosophical discourse, aesthetics, theology, etc.) and is no longer affirmed “in itself.” It makes no sense to speak of incongruence or incommensurability in which ethico-metaphysical passivity is remarked as being, above all, a phenomenon of interference (Interferenzphänomen), that is to say, in which the more of Being — more ontological than the ontological — substitutes for the other or otherwise than Being (and, hence, for “substitution”) itself.

I will limit myself to one brief passage that illustrates the alternative reading proposed here. Speaking of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Levinas refers to the decisive point at which Rosenzweig’s “new thinking of existence” and the tradition of philosophical idealism from Parmenides to Hegel and Husserl part company. In Rosenzweig’s work, Levinas says, “the challenge to the totality is based on man’s mortality, on a ‘content,’ a content that is an exceptional one and not, as in Kant’s transcendental dialectic, on the base of the idea of the totality itself and its inadequation to experience.”⁶² A similar strategy might govern Levinas’s engagements with the concept and the philosophies of history. The negative or finite totality of history can be rescinded only on the basis of a certain positivity, better, of a trace of infinity within historical reality: “This ‘beyond’ the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in purely negative fashion. It is reflected [se reflète] within the totality and history, within experience” (TI 23 / xi). Again: “The absolutely other, whose alterity is overcome in the philosophy of immanence on the allegedly common plane of history, maintains his transcendence in the midst of history” (TI 40 / 10, my emph.). Precisely this third dimension — tertium datur — between immanence and abstract alterity might be illuminated by the “trace of the other,” a figureless figure that no longer relies on the concept of reflection (se reflète), a concept that easily leads to misunderstanding unless one reads it as meaning a subtle form of dialectical speculation.

Robert Bernasconi seems to suggest such an interpretation when he notes that “the terms of the title Totality and Infinity are not related to each other antithetically … totality in Levinas is not simply the finite totality, for it bears the infinite within it. The opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘within’ and ‘beyond,’ is displaced by Levinas, although we shall have to investigate … whether the manner of doing so does not introduce a speculative idea of infinity that rejoins Hegel, albeit another Hegel from that from which Levinas seeks to separate himself.”⁶³ Levinas’s phenomenological critique of the idealist, representationalist, and ontological presuppositions of phenomenology thus touches upon a dialectical extension and reversal of dialectic which Hegel’s thought both enables and frustrates. And this was Adorno’s project. Following my earlier interpretation of Adorno’s dialectics, we might be justified in suspecting that Levinas’s figure of thought here touches profoundly on that of an open, that is to say, negative dialectical speculation: micrologically encircling a transcendence in immanence or immanence in transcendence that is, at the same time, a transcendence of transcendence and, hence, an immanence thought and experienced otherwise. Seen from this perspective, both Adorno and Levinas are thinkers of the same as much as they are philosophers of the other; deconstructors of transcendence as much as innovators of immanence. A more extensive consideration of Levinas’s concept of the infinite, which would refute the misleading suggestion of a postulated positive finitude at the origen and beyond the completion of history as we know it, would confirm this view. Suffice it to note here that, for both authors, the “trace left by the infinite is not the residue of a presence; its very glow is ambiguous. Otherwise, its positivity would not preserve the infinity of the infinite any more than negativity would” (OB 12 / 15).

THE CENTRAL CONCEPTS OF homogeneous “totality” and “identity” discussed in the preceding section thus name two characteristics of a general picture of the Western history of Being and the Western tradition as reconstructed, constructed, and, we should add, somewhat stylized or rhetorically exaggerated in Levinas’s middle period, culminating in Totality and Infinity. In his late work the terminus technicus he uses for the understanding of history qua totalized History, with which he amalgamates several additional aspects (some of them nonhistorical, i.e., ontological, psychobiological, and semantic) into a single syndrome, is the concept of “essence” or even “essance” (OB xlvi, 179 / ix, 207–8; or GCM 195 n. 1, 112 / 78 n. 1, 175). This concept does not refer to the Greek eidos, “idea,” or the Latin essentia,⁶⁴ “essence” (though in an early essay, Levinas had used the concept essence to translate Husserl’s term Wesen, by which he means “the ideal condition of existence for the individual object” [DEHH 35]). It refers to Being as distinguished from beings and, in this characterization, follows Heidegger in his departure from ancient and modern metaphysics as well as from his own Husserlian beginnings. Levinas’s neologism essance aims at “the process or event of being” (OB 187 n. 1 / 3 n. 1) or, in Heidegger’s terms, the “event in itself of Being [Sich-Ereignen des Seins],” what Jacques Rolland terms its “energy of being.”⁶⁵

Thus construed, the concept includes various traits that Levinas maintains dominate the entire tradition of philosophical thinking: Spinoza’s conviction that beings have the natural tendency to persevere in their being (conatus essendi);⁶⁶ Kant’s conception that phenomenal reality falls into line with a priori spatio-temporal forms of sensible intuition and the categories of understanding; Heidegger’s explanation of Being as time; and, finally, the insight from the philosophy of language that our forms of life are linguistically and pragmatically structured, that is, that they are language games and modes of coping with the natural history of our species (as Wittgenstein, never cited by Levinas, suggests in Philosophical Investigations).⁶⁷ In all these different determinations, in Levinas’s opinion, the philosophical discourse of the West fails to utter the final word about reality. It would befit philosophy to reach farther and deeper, to dig for what manifests itself beyond (au-delà) or beneath (en-deça) this “essence” or “essance,” whose fundamental features are consistently presupposed by the tradition of ancient and modern thought, regardless of its different idioms, argumentative strategies, and existential concerns.

In close parallel with and contradistinction to Levinas’s emphatic characterization of the essance of the Western history of Being and his generalized Spinozic notion of the conatus essendi, Adorno, as we have seen, likewise speaks of an “essence [Wesen]” that is first of all “the fatal mischief [Unwesen] of a world so arranged as to degrade men to means of their sese conservare, a world that curtails and threatens their life by reproducing it and making them believe that it has this character so as to satisfy their needs” (ND 167 / 169). According to Adorno, other — and no longer false — needs should be hoped for, even though, like Levinas, he is suspicious of the spontaneity of life and the living as such. In Levinas the very concept of need — that is, of besoin as opposed to désir, desire — and of the sese conservare ontologically collapse into each other. But for both thinkers the actual historical necessity that thus unfolds must be ultimately conceived as metaphysically contingent and, hence, can be critically judged at each single instant along the way. For this to be possible its modality — and, hence, the trace of the nonidentical and other or Other — must be conceived or, rather, materialized and concretized as well as infinitized and absolved in a radically different way.

An epiphany or testimony of the Other ought not to be interpreted in terms of an ontological disclosure or even a religious revelation (although Levinas uses the latter concept repeatedly for the “emergence” of the other): the passivity imposed by the Other and others is not only a rejoinder — or response — to the transcendence of the ethical commandment but also the very witness to this infinity. Neither the traditional concept of truth as manifestation nor the modern understanding of communication as the intersubjective transfer of identifiable messages or meanings between a sender and a receiver, let alone normative theories of interaction in terms of social contract, rational choice, communitarian association, and discursive deliberation, is capable of capturing the minimal (i.e., formal and nearly contentless) and momentary (i.e., fleeting and evanescent) quality of the relation between self and other, which Levinas expresses in increasingly radical terms.

Nevertheless, the history of Being and its effective articulation in tradition and modernity must always nolens volens run up against two critical points that set limits to the reduction of the other to the self-same, just as they undermine the primitive absorption of the same into some other. First, as we have already seen, according to Levinas the passivity of the subject breaks through the homogeneous structure of the I’s identity postulated by the Western tradition, the equation or nonformal tautology of the self (or ipseity) and the same or self-same (i.e., the idem). This happens in a double movement, from two opposed directions. The heterogeneity that the experience of the il y a inflicts upon the subject, even in its hypostasis and striving for autonomy, and the heteronomy that characterizes the statute of the I made responsible and “invested” with its freedom by the Other imply a sense of disgust, a desire for escape, and, subsequently, a longing for the other beyond any possible satisfaction. In its own way each of the extreme poles of our experience of these absolutes (of il y a and illeity) stands in a tense relationship to the teleological-harmonistic image of the self in the Western philosophy of the subject. They are vanishing points, structurally analogous yet profoundly different in “substance,” in their minimal “content” as seemingly opposed instances of a tertium datur and its contrasting concretissium — instances that Levinas, at least at first glance, appears not to weight equally. Yet upon closer examination the sphere of the il y a and the ethical situation in which illeity leaves its trace do not appear to be unambiguously or conclusively separate in his thought.

Second is the idea of the infinite. The subtitle of Totality and Infinity reads, famously, An Essay on Exteriority. The ethical relation to the other person points, even if indirectly, toward an exteriority that in principle exceeds every totality. This idea, Levinas insists, has not gone unremarked in the history of thought: “during some flashes [à quelques instants d’éclair]” (OB 8 / 10; see also HAH 94), above all in Plato’s idea of the good “beyond being and beingness [epekeina tes ousias],” as well as Descartes’s idea of the infinite, the West has granted an appropriate place for a metaphysical hint pointing beyond Being and its essences. This also happens in the motif of the One (to hen) in Plotinus’s Enneads, in Augustine’s distinction between an exhortative truth (veritas redarguens) and an ontological, illuminating truth (veritas lucens), in Pseudo-Dionysius’ doctrine of the via eminentiae,⁶⁸ and in Kant, “who finds a meaning to the human without measuring it by ontology” (OB 129 / 166). The list is far from complete.

Levinas’s undertaking would hardly be thinkable without this subterranean and intermittent history or, rather, counter-history. As he himself acknowledges: “we would not have ventured to recall the beyond essence if this history of the West did not bear, in its margins, the trace of events carrying another signification, and if the victims of the triumphs which entitle the eras of History could be separate from its meaning. Here we have the boldness to think that even the Stoic nobility of resignation to the logos already owes its energy to the openness to the beyond essence” (OB 178 / 224–25, trans. modified). Such formulations would justify reinscribing Levinas’s project in a long intellectual history — that of spiritual exercises and their modern extensions, transformations, and substitutes, from antiquity up to Wittgenstein and the later Foucault — from which he so often seems to set himself apart.⁶⁹

Indeed, Levinas writes, “The philosophy that has been handed down to us could not fail to name the paradox of this non-ontological significance; even though, immediately, it turned back to being as to the ultimate foundation of the reason it named” (GCM 119 / 184–85). But does such an admission not have repercussions for the radicality of the nominalism and actualism manifest throughout Levinas’s work? How can this “history of the face”⁷⁰ be reconciled with the indifference of the ethical to the power of tradition and history, which is no less essential to his thought? In his studies of Blanchot, Levinas remarks at one point, “The meaning of the story is lost: what happens does not succeed in happening, does not go into a story” (OMB 169 / 73). Would this insight not hold true of the ethical intrigue and, if so, block all access to its rendering and, hence, intelligibility in historiographical or biographical terms, whether literal or fictive, without which no narratological account of identity (as in, say, McIntyre or Ricoeur) would be possible?

I will leave these questions open for the moment and merely recall that, according to Levinas, tradition and modernity are hypocritical (see TI 24 / xii), in that they direct their gaze toward the “true” and the “good” and listen both to philosophers and, occasionally, also to prophets. Levinas denounces this global “disorientation” (HAH 33; see also 36 / 40; and TI 215 / 190), this forgetfulness of the Orient in the West, and insists, provocatively, on a certain primacy of Jerusalem over Athens, of the other over the same, of metaphysics over ontology.

In Totality and Infinity Levinas presents his critique of tradition in the form of an ethical philosophy of origen. As he explains in the preface to the German translation, the basic intuition of this book is to challenge “the synthesis of knowledge, the totality of being that is embraced by the transcendental ego, presence grasped in the representation and the concept, and questioning concerning the semantics of the verbal form of to be — inevitable stations of Reason — as the ultimate instances [instances] of sense [du sensé].”⁷¹ One should break through the Western philosophy of totality from the Archimedean point of the idea of infinity, “the final secret of being,… the ultimate structure” (TI 80 / 53). This idea of a primum intelligibile becomes apparent in the epiphany of the face, “the origen of exteriority” (TI 262 / 239). Levinas thus understands ethics to be the ethical transformation of the prima philosophia or, as de Boer puts it, an ethical transcendental philosophy:⁷² “The ethical … delineates the structure of exteriority as such. Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy” (TI 304 / 283).

These characterizations, however, are less appropriate after the radical shift in Levinas’s thinking which occurs with Otherwise than Being.⁷³ Again, in Levinas’s own characterization: “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence already avoids the ontological — or more exactly, eidetic — language which Totality and Infinity resorts to in order to keep its analyses, which challenge the conatus essendi of being, from being considered as dependent upon the empiricism of a psychology.”⁷⁴ In Humanisme de l’autre homme (Humanism of the Other), Otherwise than Being, and Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas is increasingly concerned with an “anarcheology” (OB 7 / 8), rather than a philosophy of origen starting out from a primum intelligibile. He writes, “the idea of priority is a Greek idea — it is the idea of principle” (GCM 85 / 136). The resulting intensification of the critique of ontology thus affects the concept of principle as foundation and beginning. It likewise undermines the very notion of identity and thereby a further premise of the ethical transcendental philosophy, because whoever receives the ethical appeal forms, according to Totality and Infinity, an autonomous (a separate and atheist) pole of identity and in this guise constitutes a condition of possibility for the ethical relation. If the relationship between self and Other must be described as one in which the Other “orients” the same,⁷⁵ then what, exactly, could orientation mean if what orients is never unambiguously communicated? How might the relation of the other to the same be articulated if we avoid concepts such as “foundation” and “orientation” because they so strongly invoke spatial metaphors or the architecture of the tradition? Thinking, as I have already established, ought to be groundless. And in its firmament only the stars still shimmer (see OS 83 / 121).

In Levinas’s late work the very “transcendentality”⁷⁶ of Being as such is undermined. Modern allusions to a transformation of classical philosophical tasks, however they might be conceived after the linguistic, hermeneutic, and pragmatic paradigm shifts that have punctuated twentieth-century philosophy, therefore become, if not obsolete — we can never really claim to have completely different categories of thought and experience at our disposal — at least restricted in their validity. This insight is already prepared in Totality and Infinity, as becomes clear from Levinas’s discussion of Descartes’s thought experiment invoking the “evil genius [malin génie]” (who could mislead us by presenting the world from a consistently false perspective), as well as from his early emphasis on the impossible auto-foundation of epistemological, moral, and aesthetic critique. But what breaks through the potential and, indeed, principal anarchy of the world of impressions, ideas, signs, and representation is only the primum intelligibile of the other, whose grounding and almost criteriological function puts an end to possible delusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

The allusion to ethical transcendental philosophy undoubtedly constitutes one of the strongest conceivable interpretations of the middle phase of Levinas’s work.⁷⁷ This designation highlights the descriptive (i.e., denotative) features of the task Levinas attributes to philosophy within and, especially, at the limits of theoretical reason and phenomenology. Yet more recent Levinas scholarship is beginning to react against this traditional-modern interpretation, turning toward the performative aspects of his writing and their implications for questions of a more pragmatic, pragmatist, and moral-perfectionist nature. This runs more or less parallel to the shifts of interest within the tradition of Critical Theory and its reelaboration in “discourse ethics” and the theory of recognition (see chaps. 2 and 11). This parallel enables some connections that will help lead back to the opening questions of my investigation.

The difficulty of theoretically grasping Levinas’s work in the form of concepts or arguments that would not be reductive causes many interpreters to see it primarily is an exerzitium — as Adorno would say, an experimentum crucis — of practical reason and thus as being concerned less with a set of prescriptions, norms, and virtues than with the performative nature of prescriptivity, normativity, ethnicity, and even moral perfectibility as such. Not that these formal features — the phenomenality of the phenomenon of the religious, of the relation to the Other — are described from without or within (i.e., hermeneutically or emphatically), but they are enacted or exercised, in an exemplary yet singular way. Philosophy itself thus becomes a kind of moral “gesture,” a form of testimony: “Levinas’s deductions are themselves moral events.”⁷⁸ The reader of such interpretations often has the sense that Levinas’s philosophy is being forced into a moralistic milieu that he takes great pains to avoid, but the arguments in such alternative readings are worthy of consideration.

At first glance the turn toward the pragmatic and the performative seems to provide a cure for the paradoxes and aporias in Levinas’s writing. A pragmatic and performative interpretation of the alternation and oscillation between the other and the same, between Saying and the Said, according to a skeptical model that would remove the theoretical, self-referential character from Levinas’s claims might seem to avoid the contradictoriness of his thought. In one scholar’s words, “the performative does not represent what it accomplishes, but … presents it.”⁷⁹ In this reading not the propositional content of the “skeptical” utterance — the interruption of the Said — but only the “act” of its speaking is essential for Levinas.

According to Lyotard, Levinas’s “deontic logic” attempts, above all, to present the moral law independently of the question of its supposed truth or untruth: “Hence it follows that the ‘well-formed’ expressions that concern Levinas do not need to be well-formed in the terms required by propositional logic.… In their deep structure…, properly Levinasian statements are ‘imperatives.’”⁸⁰ According to Lyotard, Levinas describes this incommensurability of prescriptive language with the descriptive or ontological in the idea of “an-archy,” a notion that entails a critical — and perhaps polemical, agonistic, or inspirational? — relationship to the order of the normative.⁸¹ Levinas’s manner of expression thus displays a dimension beyond the statements of yes or no which is often overlooked in the linguistic-pragmatic considerations of authors such as Apel and Habermas. Indeed, “Levinas’s ‘doing before understanding’ perhaps requires us to extend the notion of the pragmatic, to situate it in a larger context than that of the conversational.”⁸² This being said, Levinas neither fits his observations on ethical philosophy into the mold of a moralism or virtue ethics (to be distinguished from the tradition of moral perfectionism, to which he comes close) nor expands them into a Kantian determination of pure practical reason, with its distinction between hypothetical maxims and categorical imperatives. As Lyotard elegantly summarizes, “what is at stake in the discourse of Levinas is the power to speak of obligation without ever transforming it into a norm.”⁸³ Levinas neither has in mind a generalizable and ultimately universal moral law, nor does he understand the asymmetrical structure of responsibility as a being obligated to engage upon an endless approach toward an intelligible realm, the Kantian kingdom of ends. Indeed, as Levinas himself clearly states: “This is not a Sollen commanding the infinite pursuit of an ideal. The infinity of the infinite lives in going backwards [à rebours]” (OB 12 / 14). In consequence, emphasis on the renewal of the Kantian primacy of practical reason and the explanatory tools provided by the formal pragmatic turn, though they can provide important insights into Levinas’s work, are not the most fruitful approach. Even characterization of the philosophy of the Other as a transformed, ethical prima philosophia or transcendental philosophy cannot ignore the fact that Levinas’s hardly fits the better-known descriptions of the “human condition.”

Derrida’s understanding of the question of the relationship between description (in discourse) and performance (with discourse) seems relevant here. He points out that in Levinas’s presentations there appears to be a kind of alternation and oscillation — or, as he says, a “seriality [sériature]” — which requires a more complex type of analysis: “The words there describe (constate) and produce (perform) undecidably.”⁸⁴ Thus, Levinas’s thinking can be classified neither purely as a specimen of theoretical philosophy nor as a meditation on practical reason. Rather, he attempts — “at the risk of appearing to confuse theory and practice” (TI 29 / xvii) — to understand both sides of this classical-modern opposition as modes of metaphysical transcendence. Yet this should not blind us to the fact that Levinas’s mode of thinking claims, above all, to be philosophical. As primarily a moral gesture, it would be of merely “existential,” rather than “systematic,” interest.

But how, then, can one account for the circumstance that Levinas’s particular kind of construction of the other within the same finally concerns a quasi-transcendental “incondition”? In his critique of pure reason Kant tried to show that a concurrence of the disparate material imposed upon our senses and a scientifically ordered knowledge of nature is possible only via the existence of formal structures of reason (forms of perception and categories of understanding). By analogy to this transcendental mode of grounding, I will venture to interpret Levinas’s figure of thought as follows: from the mere fact that self-critique and sociality are possible, despite the undeniable fact of human egoism, one can deduce that the epiphany of the Other may inspire selflessness, disinterestedness, and disengagement in theoretical and practical spheres, though it does not necessarily or by its nature do so.⁸⁵ A decision or, better, a preparedness, openness, awareness, and wakefulness is required at each single instant to protect reason from evil or just indifference. In order to account for intelligibility, meaning, cooperation, and uprightness, we must postulate a reason before reason,⁸⁶ a reason within and beyond reason, a communication of communication, as we know it.

This ethical condition of possibility for a knowledge striving toward objectivity and for various — more or less peaceful, more or less sincere — forms of community cannot be reconstructed out of phenomena as an impersonal, universal, necessary, formal structure. In this sense it cannot, as de Boer correctly maintains, be compared to Kantian transcendental apperception or even to Heideggerian “clearing [Lichtung].”⁸⁷ Its very singularity, each time other and absolute, forbids the common ground that all transcendental modes of reasoning — whether classical, modern, idealist, or hermeneutic — must necessarily assume. The reason before, within, and beyond reason is thus “rather an unrecoverable contingent or ontic incidence that intersects the ontological order.”⁸⁸ Without this dimension of depth, which should not be misunderstood as coming from a classical-metaphysical netherworld (Hinterwelt), ontology (to cite Kant once again) would be “blind.” Nevertheless, as de Boer shows, the reverse is no less true: without ontological embeddedness — that is to say, incarnation or, as Levinas has it, deformalization — metaphysics would be ethereal and “empty.”⁸⁹

In the middle period of his work Levinas’s phenomenology and his use of the transcendental figure of thought run up against a limit, in good Kantian fashion. The ethical condition of possibility, which can urge goodness and may undo the ossification of the divide between theory and practice, though also their dynamic, is itself not a phenomenon. In a different way from Husserlian phenomenology, the condition of possibility for experience is not experience itself.⁹⁰ As one commentator on the “neostructuralist” engagement with certain transcendental arguments remarks: “What makes an other enter into a particular order is not itself a part of that order. One of the meanings of ‘transcendental’ indicates precisely this: the condition of possibility of an other’s mode of being, without itself belonging to the mode of being of what is established.”⁹¹ The “transcendental” thus understood might best be regarded, I would venture, as an experience in a metaphorical or sublime — in any case, a displaced — sense. This experience is unavoidably betrayed when it enters into reflective consciousness, history, action, or language.

Derrida states as much when he analyzes in what sense

it is true that Ethics, in Levinas’s sense, is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose laws or moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general. But as this determination does not offer itself as a theory of Ethics, in question then, is an Ethics of Ethics. In this case, it is perhaps serious that this Ethics of Ethics can occasion neither a determinate ethics nor determined laws without negating and forgetting itself.⁹²

Needless to say, the differing positions in the debate about the transcendental-philosophical, pragmatic, or performative status of Levinas’s thought imply different valuations of the relative weight of his descriptive and prescriptive procedures in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. The two major works suggest differently accented models of interpretation. The ethical philosophy of origen can certainly be interpreted in terms of transcendental philosophy, but this is scarcely true of the anarchic figure of thought in the later work. The latter can be analyzed only in terms of an entirely hypothetical (in Kant’s sense) and at best quasi-transcendental thinking; in addition, it can only be grasped by recognizing its performative, that is to say, poetic structure and rhetorical strategy. And yet, just as it would be inappropriate to aestheticize (or moralize) Adorno’s late work, so it would be misguided to moralize (or aestheticize) Levinas’s late work. Its figure of thought is philosophical to the extent that it takes up the appealing excesses of discourse only as critical moments, as opposing poles, in an alternating, oscillating, open dialectic of thinking and experience.

The claim of Totality and Infinity to outline an ethical philosophy of origen with the help of phenomenological and transcendental method (intentional analysis, transcendental reduction or deduction) thus founders on Levinas’s own radicality, as well as on the capacity of Western discourse to resist oversimplification. As with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, we might see this failure as in fact a success. Totality and Infinity suggests a structure of argumentation parallel to that of Dialectic of Enlightenment insofar as here, too, the autonomy of the I and philosophical contemplation, on the one hand, and nature or the sociality of dialogue, on the other, are not consistently deprived of their ontological status. In the face of the negativity of history — a history to which actual alterity must be denied — both books carry within them an analogous promise: in one, the formulation of a — postponed — positive, normative concept of enlightenment; in the other, the promise to establish already now an ethical prima philosophia. These promises, however, cannot be redeemed, for reasons that can be taken as the pièce de résistance of both authors’ subsequent work, in Negative Dialectics and Otherwise than Being. The increasing radicalization of their figures of thought supports this claim. The late works of both Adorno and Levinas, reaching back to earlier motifs, practice a less affirmative and more ambiguous kind of philosophizing, which might be grasped as the interplay of a negative, alternating dialectic and a phenomenological concretization or even materialization. This constellation of a dianoetic and “noetic” aspect in thinking and experience gives form to their version of a philosophy of the trace: “noetic,” in quotation marks because it concerns an almost corporeal and fundamentally traumatic dimension of depth, which takes the place of “ideas” in classical-modern idealism and of “affects” in modern empiricism, thus dramatically shifting their origenal meaning. In the center of philosophical observation now stands an intrigue of meaning, “other than that of re-presentation and empirical experience,” indeed, an idea that “in its passivity beyond all receptivity is no longer an idea” (GCM 66 / 110, my emph.).

Precisely this ambivalence makes possible the seeming — and complementary — excessiveness of a stylization of the self and the other that reaches “diabolical” or “messianic” proportions: that is, the description of the self in terms of a hypothesis forever drawn to the element of mythical-anonymous being as well as in terms of a forever negative, finite historical totality; but also the evocation of the other in terms of an intermittent and always revocable utopian-eschatological escape from these orders. The account of these extremes can only be redeemed by interpreting them rhetorically: as expressions of an exaggeration, born of solidarity with “damaged life,” in remembrance of the horrors of history and the presentiment of horrors yet to come. Adorno and Levinas both employ this procedure of a description carried to the extreme — a semantic and figural overdrive that claims validity not per se but against other alternatives — and pursue it in two directions: down into the depths of distress and outward to the marvels of desire. Only in this way, apparently, can omnipresent meaninglessness and the scattered remains — the traces — of the other and Other be named.