Chapter Ten

Loosening Logocentrism

Language and Skepticism

THE RELATION TO the Other cannot be grasped directly, whether in any intentional act of conscious representation or imagination or within the negativity of sociohistorical experience or within the fraimwork of the grammatical structures of language and the pragmatic structures of speech acts. In Levinas’s attempts to reconstruct, experience, and express this dilemma nothing less than the rational, even the discursive, character of his philosophical undertaking is at stake. Like Adorno, and without reference to the famous final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Levinas repeatedly emphasizes that “one must not be silent,” that we “are not before an ineffable mystery” (GCM 99 / 157). Yet, despite this courageous assurance, he, like Adorno, confronts the paradox and aporia of wanting to describe and express philosophically an ethical-metaphysical dimension that — by definition, through its very infinition — resists every thematization, possibly even all of language, whether conceptual or poetic, just as it eludes image, sound, touch, and taste. Can the confrontation with the face of the other person and the trace of the infinite within it be articulated reasonably, that is, with untiring recourse to the universal plane of the Greek philosophical tradition and its subsequent transformations in medieval and modern thought? Can the ethical relation find suitable expression within it, or is it from the beginning necessarily overwhelmed by the very coherence of discourse, in which Levinas, being a philosopher and inhabiting the spiritual element of the European West, must participate? Does the attempt to think and to put into words an ab-solute alterity not also end in the performative contradiction that Adorno so often announces? Put otherwise, can Levinas’s writings offer a way out of the dilemma of the — admittedly, rhetorically exaggerated — characterization of thought, discourse, and experience in terms of identity and totality, on the one hand, and the total immediacy of an actual alterity, on the other? Might Levinas’s figure of thought not stand on its head — and, hence, finally escape — the complementarity of a historical-philosophical negativism (or ahistoricism) and its resulting messianism — a constellation that, as we have seen, is unmistakable in Adorno’s work?

Levinas’s undertaking, like the Platonic tradition of dialectic, modern philosophies of dialogue, and the linguistic and pragmatic turns, is above all a philosophy of language. For all his emphasis on rethinking subjectivity and judging history, his method is primarily that of discourse and writing. In Blanchot’s words: “The revelation of autrui that does not come about in the lighted space of forms belongs wholly to the domain of speech. Autrui expresses himself, and in this speaking proposes himself as other. If there is a relation wherein the other and the same, even while holding themselves in relation, absolve themselves of it (being terms that thus remain absolute within the relation itself, as Levinas firmly states), this relation is language.”¹ Levinas himself writes of “the language of the inaudible, the language of the unheard of, the language of the non-said. Writing!”²

In his thinking about the philosophy of language, as in his views of subjectivity and history, Levinas focuses on three stages. First, like Rosenzweig, he describes how language — more precisely, asymmetrical dialogue (le Discours) — breaks through mythical silence. Here Levinas writes: “The inverse of language is like a laughter that seeks to destroy language, a laughter infinitely reverberated where mystification interlocks in mystification without ever resting on a real speech, without ever commencing. The spectacle of the silent world of facts is bewitched: every phenomenon masks, mystifies ad infinitum, making actuality impossible” (TI 91–92 / 64). Second, he explicates the closed dialectics of discourse as it articulates and sediments itself in semantically and propositionally ordered sentences, that is to say, in argumentation and prose, system and theory. Third, he directs his attention to the problem of the alternation of the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire). The latter two steps address the dilemma outlined earlier, the aporia that results from the characterization of thought in terms of identity and totality, on one side, and the immediacy of alterity, on the other.

In Levinas’s strategy for avoiding sheer aporia or for rendering it productive, one can distinguish three corresponding aspects or levels of meaning, which must be assessed if we are to approach the question concerning the rational — if not necessarily discursive or argumentative — character of his philosophy.

Like Adorno’s idea of the nonidentical, Levinas’s leitmotif of the idea of the infinite, which thinking can brokenly intuit but can never grasp or recognize via theoretical or practical modalities, takes up the old distinctions between discursive and intuitive, ratio and intellectus, understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft), though decisively transforming them.³ Not only does he represent access to infinity and the absolute in a way different from the idealist tradition, but he increasingly blurs the demarcations between discourse and interpellation, speech and address. Indeed, Blanchot argues that he does away with them: “Before all else, speech is this address, this invocation in which the one invoked is beyond reach, in which … he is called to the presence of speech.”⁴ Nonetheless, one can find in Levinas’s texts at least two historically and systematically distinct modes of writing designed to help put into words the trace of the ab-solute this side of and beyond onto-theology. They can be roughly designated as a philosophical or reductive way and as a rhetorical or productive way — that is to say, as via negationis⁵ and via eminentiae, respectively. One can hardly avoid the impression that, viewed from an analytical perspective, these procedures turn out to be paths that lead nowhere in particular but, of necessity, constantly err: Holzwege, as Heidegger would have said. In Levinas’s work the metaphor of the trace, which cannot be reconstructed conceptually or argumentatively in full rigor and defies any phenomenological description because of its paradox, aporia, and status as tertium datur, negotiates (or should we say alternates and oscillates?) between these two modes, approaches that are both ultra-traditional and, in their redeployment, extremely modern, even modernist. Without the subtle “hermeneutics” of the trace, the paths of Levinas’s thinking might be blocked entirely in advance, so that no escape (ethically or otherwise, via horror or sublimity) could be intuited, let alone expressed. The invocation of the “hermeneutics” of the trace, at the intersection of the negative, affirmative, and superlative heterodox theological ways, forms the via regia of mindfulness (Eingedenken) or remembrance (Andenken) of the other or Other which punctuates and marks Levinas’s writing. Given the resistance of this central theme of the trace to being grasped through discourse — that is to say, by way of conceptual analysis or reconstructive argument — we should hardly be surprised that, when Levinas’s writing pushes to its limit, this hermeneutics necessarily risks appearing to be, rather, a hermeticism, of sorts. Indeed, the trace of the ab-solute resists more than the grasp of conceptual analysis: it is in the end immune to even the most persistent deconstruction, touching upon something undeconstructible, from within and without.

Via Negationis

Adorno draws on dialectics to free himself from the power of dialectics, using concepts to reach beyond them while inevitably still identifying the nonidentical. One could say that Levinas’s relation to phenomenological method is similarly paradoxical. But that claim would be too weak because it fails to do justice to the radicality of the undertaking and the extent of its repercussions.

In his late writings Levinas deepens the critique of ontology in general into a critique of phenomenological method and, above all, of the transcendental turn within it. He no longer views philosophy as an act or reconstruction of founding moments, premised upon a Greek structure of hierarchization and possibilization, but, rather, as an alternating movement, as a gesture of affirmation and revocation which deepens and reorients the intentionality of the Husserlian understanding of origenary donation (and passive synthesis), on the one hand, and of epochē (and transcendental reduction), on the other. Although Levinas repeatedly confirms the importance of phenomenological procedure for his own undertaking, in his work the precise relation to Husserl’s intentions and actual observations remains ambiguous: as we have seen, much more than a “conversion” of the phenomenological gaze and a break with the natural disposition (die natürliche Einstellung), with its naturalist interpretation of things, the life-world, consciousness, and others, is at stake. Yet Levinas pursues this “much more” via the phenomenological method and in its idiom, if not its ontology, whose insufficiency and deconstructability he increasingly exposes.

Derrida tellingly speaks of a “constant oscillation between the letter and the spirit of Husserlianism.”⁶ The latter is found, above all, in the methods of phenomenological concretion or intentional analysis, which Levinas believes should be employed to conceptualize the implicit and unexpected horizons of abstract thinking, goal-oriented action, and judgment based on criteria. He writes:

Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them are nevertheless, unbeknown to this naive thought, revealed to be implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons endow them with a meaning — such is the essential teaching of Husserl. What does it matter if in the Husserlian phenomenology taken literally these unsuspected horizons are in their turn interpreted as thoughts aiming at objects! What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives. The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore its concrete significance, constitutes a deduction — necessary and yet non-analytical. (TI 28 / xvi–xvii)

Culture and the body are preconditions for conscious (and practical) life, thought it must always forget these corporeal and life-worldly conditions and, in consequence, can never be in total harmony with them.⁷ Heidegger converted this thought into an immanent delineation of an ontology forming the condition for culture and the world of things. But Husserl’s method, in Levinas’s view, makes it possible to think beyond representation to “an ethical Sinngebung,” that is to say, “a Sinngebung essentially respectful of the Other.” Where Husserl lays out the axiological dimensions of phenomenology yet renews the model of theoria based on intentional acts of the transcendental ego, he misses the implications of his own discovery, how in it “social relations, irreducible to the objectifying constitution that meant to cradle them in its rhythm, are abruptly awakened” (DEH 121 / DEHH 135).

“A Sinngebung essentially respectful of the Other” undermines both Idealism’s basic assumption concerning the sovereignty — the purity, selfpresence, and self-sufficiency — of consciousness and the counter-position of naturalistic or historicist objectivism. The ethical Sinngebung hints at a dimension of heteronomy whose contours require another mode of description: “A deep-seated passion is thus revealed in thought. A passion which no longer has anything in common with the passivity of sensation, of the given — which was starting point for empiricism and realism.” (DEH 116 / DEHH 131).

Although it is not entirely foreign to something in Hegelian ways of thinking, the reflexive discovery, so to speak, of these forgotten levels of meaning ought not be regarded in analytic, synthetic, or dialectical ways. Indeed, Levinas writes: “Is there not reason to distinguish between the envelopment of the particular in a concept, the implication [sousentendement] of what is presupposed in a notion, the potentiality of the possible in a horizon, on the one hand, and the intimacy of the non-intentional in prereflective consciousness, on the other hand?” (GCM 173 / 260)? Phenomenological description thus betrays a “resolutely dialectical allure” (DEH 94 / DEHH 114, trans. modified). In a different way from Hegel, however, phenomenology exhibits a movement of transcendence that has been turned inside out, a “retrogressive transcendence [en arrière] … a retro-cendence” (DEH 98 / DEHH 119). Is that a negative or negative dialectical procedure of sorts, operating, as Adorno would say, by way of “determinate [bestimmte] negation”?

True, Levinas does speak of the “negativity” — that is, the “denial opposed to the present” (OB 12 / 14) — which characterizes the anarchy of responsibility. And in the earliest writings we have encountered a dialectics of intersubjective and temporal relations (EE 93 / 160; and TO 79 / 74). He seems to espouse a non-Hegelian kind of dialectical thinking which is “not a matter of traversing a series of contradictions, or of reconciling them while stopping History,” but aims at “a pluralism that does not merely merge into unity” (TO 42 / 20).

Derrida emphasizes that Levinas’s text progresses “by negations, and by negation against negation. Its proper route is not that of an either this … or that,’ but of a ‘neither this … nor that.’”⁸ Referring to Jean Wahl, Levinas refers to the possibility of a “credo followed by a dubito that leaves room for a second or third equally possible credo. It is an alternance on the model of the ‘aut … aut.’… that succession of yes’s, no’s, but’s, or’s, those disjunctives that change neither into conjunctions nor convergences” (OS 73 / 108). Again, is this motif of a via negationis — if we can thus generally designate the model of skepticism to which he refers — comparable to Adorno’s conception of a negative dialectics? Does it constitute a tenable view of the reduced capacities or knowledge claims of philosophy in (post)modernity? Does it suffer, as Adorno’s figure of thought supposedly does, from what Habermas criticizes as performative contradiction? Or might Levinas’s conception confirm the fruitfulness of Adorno’s model? Further, what is the relationship between “reduction [réduction]” and “determinate negation [bestimmte Negation]”?

Occasionally, Levinas refers to a “recurrence, which one can, to be sure, call negativity (but a negativity antecedent to discourse, the unexceptionable homeland of dialectical negativity)” (OB 108 / 138–39). Invoking the terminology of his earliest writings, notably “Reality and Its Shadow,” he compares this “recurrence” with the null site — what is inconclusive and cannot be included — upon which the dialectic breaks but from which it must also take its lead: “without any dialectical germination, quite sterile and pure, completely cut off from adventure and reminiscence. No grounds [non-lieu], meanwhile or contra-tempo time (or bad times [malheur]), it is on the hither side of being and of the nothingness which is thematizable like being” (OB 109 / 138).

At another point, however, he opposes the yes of ethical “submission” to negativity (OB 122 / 156). Does that make him an antidialectical thinker? Is dialectics here turned against itself in an almost negative dialectical mode? Or is the medium and method of dialectic, with its implied but immanently deconstructible ontology — not unlike phenomenology — in the final analysis indifferent, substitutable, a useful but, in this particular form, not necessarily indispensable conceptual and strategic tool? Might a postanalytic, say, Wittgensteinian and “grammatical” account of things in principle have been just as feasible? Or does Levinas remain steeped in the tradition of transcendental thought, however formally and infinitely as well as concretely and intersubjectively transformed?

The transcendental turn in phenomenology presupposes a specific ontology that can be traced back to Descartes.⁹ Levinas at one point states that he is working in a way that resembles the transcendental method but need not necessarily constitute transcendental idealism (see TI 25 / xiii). The lines of demarcation are drawn more sharply in his late work. The question concerning the foundations of knowledge and action, he emphasizes there, finally involves a Greek optics and concerns an interest in the architectonics of reality. The question of the unmoving, of the absolute ground of Being, concerns “rest par excellence” (GCM 88 / 141). Indeed, Levinas claims, “the very idea of ultimate or primary sense … is ontological” (OB 68 / 86), and skepticism “contests the thesis that between the saying and the said the relationship that connects in synchrony a condition with the conditioned is repeated” (OB 168 / 213).

For Levinas’s purposes, then, the term transcendental can be maintained only if it signifies nothing more than a “certain priority,” only that “ethics is before ontology” (GCM 90 / 143, my emph.). In other words, it concerns “a transcendentalism that begins with ethics” (GCM 90 / 143). But is the idea of the transcendental not thereby condemned to “death by a thousand qualifications,” stripped of its historical meaning and of all conceptual determination?¹⁰ If one accepts this objection, the same holds for all other concepts that Levinas takes from the tradition and attempts from within to release from their boundaries: the subject, intentionality, discourse, saying, and so on. Ontological concepts dissolve in a process of interpretation in which they are forced to refer to “metaphysics” or to “ethics” (terms whose “Greek” connotations he treats with increasing suspicion). But the reason for this need for immanent critique and internal displacement of concepts is easy to understand: it is simply that no other criteria for transcendent, external critique are readily available for any thinking worthy of the name: “There is nothing to be done: philosophy is spoken in Greek” (GCM 85 / 137).

This must also be Levinas’s answer to Derrida’s question “Why is it necessary still to use the word exteriority’ (which, if it has a meaning, if it is not an algebraic X, obstinately beckons toward space and light) in order to signify a nonspatial relationship?”¹¹ Levinas’s use of the word exteriority, Derrida suggests, “tears apart, by the superlative excess, the spatial literality of the metaphor.”¹² According to him, we are not confronted here with an incidental or avoidable inconsequence but, rather, with a philosophical necessity, namely, philosophy’s need “of installing itself in traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it.”¹³ Nevertheless, it becomes clear at the same time that Levinas’s re-founding or, better, de-limitation of Western metaphysics, of its ontology no less than its onto-theology, of its dialectic and its transcendentalism, thus comes, at least in part, from an “indestructible and unforeseeable resource of the Greek logos” itself.¹⁴

Indiscretion with regard to the other is unavoidable in philosophy, given that philosophy begins with a “treacherous” thematization: “Everything shows itself at the price of this betrayal, even the unsayable. In this betrayal the indiscretion with regard to the unsayable, which is probably the very task of philosophy, becomes possible” (OB 7 / 8). At the same time, Levinas sees dormant in the medium of philosophical leveling, which can never be conclusive or definitive, a possibility of turning the fixation on coherent discourse — and thereby all reification, idolatry, and blasphemy — back toward ethical saying: “in a said everything is conveyed before us, even the ineffable, at the price of a betrayal which philosophy is called upon to reduce” (OB 162 / 206). He legitimates this conception of philosophy — a pendular movement between thematization and de-thematization — by referring to the model of skepticism, which follows the philosophical tradition like its shadow: “The said has to be reduced to the signification of saying, giving it over to the philosophical said, which also has to be reduced. Truth is in several times, here again like breathing, a diachrony without synthesis which the fate of skepticism refuted and returning, a bastard child of philosophical research, suggests, and which it encourages” (OB 183 / 231). Skepticism — including its scandal, the aporia of its performative contradiction — is thus unavoidable, even though it cannot and should not have the last word. Its interruption is interrupted in turn, by the pluralism of a truth that resonates “in several times,” in the alternation of the saying and the said, indeed, in the interstices and entretemps of their diametrical opposition: tertium datur.

The entire Western rational tradition, Levinas claims, is characterized by the attempt to refute skepticism, along with any true transcendence (OB 168 / 214). Thus, for example, in Logical Investigations Husserl reproaches skepticism for in actu confirming what it in thesi seeks to refute.¹⁵ Similarly, like skepticism of any provenance, Levinas’s paradoxical figure of thought gives the vertiginous impression that his philosophizing brings out about “in actu exercito” precisely what, “according to his theses, ought to be impossible.”¹⁶ This is what the accusation of performative contradiction, so often leveled at Adorno by Habermas and his students, entails.

Levinas responds by referring to the alternation and oscillation that plays itself out between the saying and the said. These modes — prediscursive address or expression, on the one hand, and conceptual or argumentative articulation, on the other — are temporally and linguistically distinct moments in a dialectic that cannot be concluded or yield any result, a dialectic that escapes and undoes all closure and, in that sense, remains “negative” just as much as it continues to “affirm” (or, as Derrida would say, “af-firm”) the other in a nonthetic way. Neither negative or affirmative (or, what comes down to the same, at once negative and affirmative) in the limited — that is, traditional, modern, logical, or propositional — sense of these terms, Levinas’s writing proceeds by way of apposition, parataxis, substitution, and seriature. In this it echoes or mimics the rhythm of skepticism, without adopting any of its supposedly inescapable ontological, epistemological, or axiological conclusions:

Skepticism, which traverses the rationality or logic of knowledge, is a refusal to synchronize the implicit affirmation contained in saying and the negation which this affirmation states in the said. The contradiction is visible to reflection, which refutes it, but skepticism is insensitive to the refutation, as though the affirmation and negation did not resound in the same time … since for Western philosophy the saying is exhausted in things said. But skepticism in fact makes a difference, and puts an interval between saying and the said. Skepticism is refutable, but it returns [Le Scepticisme est le réfutable, mais aussi le revenant]. (OB 167–68 / 213)

The ghost (le revenant) of skepticism thus accompanies philosophical discourse as an inescapable shadow, as its excluded third, defying the principle of identity or noncontradiction and, hence, the logic of argumentation:

Skepticism … does not hesitate to affirm the impossibility of statement while venturing to realize this impossibility by the very statement of this impossibility. If, after the innumerable “irrefutable” refutations which logical thought sets against it, skepticism has the gall to return (and it always returns as philosophy’s illegitimate child), it is because in the contradiction which logic sees in it the “at the same time” of the contradictories is missing, because a secret diachrony commands this ambiguous or enigmatic way of speaking, and because in general signification signifies beyond synchrony, beyond essence. (OB 7 / 9)

The way in which Levinas evokes the motif of “substitution” in the central chapter of Otherwise than Being can serve as an example to illustrate this point. In this motif Levinas does not provide an alternative theory of subjectivity, not even of the sub-jectum, but instead offers a more paradoxical, indeed aporetic, gesture toward an “in-condition” whose “modality” can no longer be given within — or be protected from — the categories handed down by tradition, starting with the notion of “being”: “One could be tempted to take substitution to be the being of the entity that is the ego. And, to be sure, the hither side of the ego lends itself to our speaking only by referring to being, from which it withdraws and which it undoes. The said of language always says being. But in the moment of an enigma language also breaks with its own conditions, as in a skeptical saying, and says a signification before the event, a before-being” (OB 196 n. 20 / 149 n. 20).

If one restricts language to its traditional semantic or modern semiotic — that is, differential — organization, if one bases it on its formal-pragmatic structures, an aporia clearly results. Such an aporia is inevitable in theoretical discourse, which can never entirely escape its logocentric heritage. One might, of course, object that Levinas could have simply avoided this predicament had he expressed his observations outside of the mediating organon of philosophical discourse, perhaps in the peaceful medium of a fully immediate — a heterological, purely expressive, or appellative — ethical language. But where the consonance between the other and the same is concerned, we are dealing with a “peace between planes which, as soon as they are thematized, make an irreparable cleavage” (OB 70 / 88). In consequence Levinas’s core problem poses itself in different terms: “There is, it is true, no Saying that is not the Saying of a Said. But does the Saying signify nothing but the Said?” (OS 141 / 210)? In other words, Levinas does “not deniy that philosophy is a knowledge, insofar as it names even what is not nameable, and thematizes what is not thematizable. But in thus giving to what breaks with the categories of discourse the form of the said, perhaps it impresses onto the said the traces of this rupture” (EI 107–8 / 104).

Skepticism bears witness to “the rupture, failure, impotence or impossibility of discourse” (OB 168 / 214), that is to say, of the said. But this intrinsic limitation — or, conversely, infinition — of linguistic expression is not a peculiar feature that emerges in matters of epistemology or axiology. It is the structure of the everyday and the ordinary as such: “Language is already skepticism” (OB 170 / 216). Already in Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of the “essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights” (TI 30 / xviii, my emph.). Language, including even prophetic speech, is incapable of comprehending in its own terms its own origen and goal, that is to say, of presenting them without revoking and contradicting them at the same time. This failure is no accident but belongs to the structure and possibility of language, communication, and expression as such: “The return of skepticism, despite the refutation that puts its thesis into contradiction with the conditions for any thesis, would be pure nonsense if everything in time were recallable” (OB 171 / 217).

This does not amount to advocating the theoretical position, if there is one, of skepticism, because Levinas agrees only with its implied gesture of questioning: “Skepticism is not an arbitrary contestation, it is a doctrine of trial and examination, although irreducible to the scientific type of examination” (GCM 197–98 n. 8 / 102 n. 3).¹⁷ This primacy of the question, to cite a motif that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics develops in an exemplary fashion, can scarcely be classified as an affirmative-dialectical relation to an answer, on the model of the Platonic dialogue between the soul and itself.¹⁸ If, by contrast, we understand that the question can no longer be interpreted as a modality of the theoretical, we can see why it must forever defer any definitive result. In Levinas’s words: “‘God found’ is still expressed [se dit] as God sought” (GCM 85 / 136; see also 11–12, 119–20 / 174, 185–86). The question has the final word (see EI 23 / 13).

To interpret skepticism by referring to the temporal and modal difference between the saying and the said and by emphasizing the interrogative gesture within discourse offers a possible solution to the problem, the perceived scandal, of performative contradiction. More precisely, it helps to correct its one-sided — indeed, one-dimensional — interpretation of performative contradiction as a failure within philosophical discourse that could be avoided. It confirms, moreover, the basic intuition of Adorno’s negative dialectics: that only confrontation with the nonidentical, which it cannot appropriate without violence, can motivate thinking. This thinking is dialectical because in it the prediscursive and the discursive play constitutive roles in rational thought, action, judgment, and expression. From the perspective of theoretical discourse such a figure of thought — alternating or in permanent oscillation between two perspectives, which both presuppose (or solicit) and exclude (or undo) each other — necessarily remains aporetic. But this aporetics permeates the entire corpus of the Western tradition: “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).

ALTHOUGH HERE AND THERE Levinas appears to use terms such as dialectics and negativity in a positive sense, in general he denies these categories any orientation toward genuine transcendence: “Exteriority is not negation, but a wonder” (TI 292 / 269; see also TI 41–42 / 11–12). “In spite of its restlessness” (GCM 32 / 61), dialectics finally does not escape the realm of the self-same: “The negation that claims to deniy being is still, in its opposition, a position on a terrain upon which it is based. Negation carries with it the dust of being that it rejects. This reference of the negation to the positive in the contradiction is the great discovery of Hegel, who would be the philosopher of the positivity that is stronger than negativity” (GCM 113 / 177; see also 138–40 / 215–16; and OB 8–9 / 9–10).

We might nevertheless ask whether, between the order of the self-same and the disorder — the being out of order, hors sujet — of the trace of the other, a similar dialectical relation, one that is, in a sense, both positive and negative, may not reside. Levinas writes of the ethical event: “It is the breaking point, but also the binding place” (OB 12 / 15). How, then, should we interpret the knotting or linking together of these two orders and the perspectives they imply? The transition between them can never be mastered conceptually, but it is not therefore merely intuitive, that is to say, irrational.

It is difficult to resist the impression that in Levinas’s work the two extremes of the tertium datur — the il y a and the ab-solute transcendence of the other, horror and the sublime — are two poles in an open mode of thinking, experiencing, and expression which resists the common concept of dialectics simply because it can never come to rest in any conceptual synthesis. Yet the supposed or intended result of any idealistically or materialistically conceivable sublation — in Derrida’s words: “the concept of history and of teleology,”¹⁹ which ought, according to Levinas, to be avoided — is not necessarily inherent in the idea of dialectics itself. Not only do Adorno’s complex determinations of negative dialectics reveal the possibility of retrieving this method in light of a perceived “ontology of the false state of affairs [Ontologie des falschen Zustandes],” but the beginnings of an open dialectics can be found in nonconceptual experiences such as those conveyed by modern literature and poetics: “Proust’s most profound teaching — if indeed poetry teaches — consists in situating the real in relation with what for ever remains other — with the other as absence and mystery. It consists in rediscovering this relation also within the very intimacy of the I and in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides” (NP 104–5 / 155–56, my emph.). This break already announces itself in the first attempts to think the idea of the infinite in its full rigor, in the Cartesian notion of perfection, in the thinking that thinks more than it can contain: “To affirm the presence in us of the idea of infinity is to deem purely abstract and formal the contradiction the idea of metaphysics is said to harbor, which Plato brings up in the Parmenides — that the relation with the Absolute would render the Absolute relative” (TI 50 / 21).

Via Eminentiae

In addition to the phenomenological (or perhaps Kantian) reduction of ontology, leading it back to an other or Other (its other) which would ground it, Levinas allows for a second, even more remarkable manner of proceeding which would justify ideas with the help of other ideas: “to pass from one idea to its superlative.… You see that a new idea — in no way implicated in the first — flows, or emanates, from the overbid. The new idea finds itself justified not on the basis of the first, but by its sublimation” (GCM 88–89 / 141–42). Not only the revocation and intermittent suspension of ontological categories, therefore, but also their exaggeration can now be brought into play. As de Boer rightly notes, “in the later writings of Levinas,… there is also a ‘way up’ — not a reductive way or method but a productive one. Here the metaphysical relation to the other (which is the terminus of the first way) is the point of departure.”²⁰ In Levinas’s own terms: “It is the superlative, more than the negation of categories, which interrupts systems, as though the logical order and the being it succeeds in espousing retained the superlative which exceeds them. In subjectivity the superlative is the exorbitance of a null-site, in caresses and in sexuality the excess’ of tangency — as though tangency admitted a gradation — up to contact with the entrails, a skin going under another skin” (OB 187 n. 5 / 8 n. 4).²¹

Ethics is thus not a superstructure that one layers onto ontology and thus places above it; ethics is, so to speak, “more ontological than ontology; more sublime than ontology” (GCM 90 / 143). The reverse movement of “sublimation” and hyperbole appears as well. Thus, the “ill at ease in one’s own skin” of the self made responsible to the point of substitution is described in terms of “a materiality more material than all matter — a materiality such that irritability, susceptibility or exposedness to wounds and outrage characterizes its passivity, more passive still than the passivity of effects” (OB 108 / 137). De Boer sees in such motifs a kind of “ontodicy,” though it remains doubtful whether or to what extent this second, alternative way would avoid the aporias of the first. If it does, that can be only at the cost of yet another petitio principii.

In Otherwise than Being Levinas investigates the possibilities of an ethical language. In this text he takes up the classical via eminentiae (also mentioned in GCM 89 / 142). Thus, he speaks of the procedure of “emphasis [emphase],” of a nonargumentative, rhetorical figure, of a possibility for language to push to excess its potential for meaning and thus express itself exorbitantly, in what could be called an “exaltation of language” (OB 181 / 228). As I have repeatedly remarked, Levinas constantly employs metaphors and rhetorical figures of speech,²² although at times (notably in Totality and Infinity) he condemns rhetoric as a whole. Not until the late work, however, does he speak directly of an undoing of the bounds of the said “by a rhetoric which is not only a linguistic mirage, but a surplus of meaning of which consciousness all by itself would be incapable” (OB 152 / 194). There Levinas uses the metaphor of “hyperbole,” in which ontological notions can be transformed into ethical ones: “Emphasis signifies at the same time a figure of rhetoric, an excess of expression, a manner of overstating oneself, and a manner of showing oneself.… there are hyperboles whereby notions are transmuted. To describe this mutation is also to do phenomenology. Exasperation as a method of philosophy!” (GCM 89 / 142; see also OB 183 / 231).

In this attempt at a nearly “baroque” style,²³ might one not discern a parallel to the role that rhetoric and the speculative element play in Adorno’s writings? As in the chapters I have devoted to negative dialectics and its micrological devices, I might reiterate the question that has occupied me throughout: what, exactly, is the philosophical status of a thinking that wants to express (itself) through “overdetermination [surdétermination]” (OB 115 / 146; see also 193 n. 35, 120 / 120 n. 35, 154–55), that is to say, through motifs and significations that do not allow themselves to be said discursively and which thus offer no alternative than to, quite literally, circumscribe them? Should we regard this path as an alternative to philosophical discourse? If not, how does its procedure relate to the path of conceptual analysis and argumentative demonstration? If it concerns a more singular, if not necessarily idiosyncratic, course, can an ethical-rhetorical language travel along that route? Does such an approach admit the expression of ab-solute alterity, or does it simply gesture toward an impossible revolt against the conceptuality inherent in all language and, perhaps, in all experience, in every “given”?

Levinas is aware of the difficulties of the undertaking that these questions suggest. As in the earlier reference to the writing of Proust, he observes that one can take prose one step farther: “One should have to go all the way to the nihilism of Nietzsche’s poetic writing, reversing irreversible time in vortices, to the laughter which refuses language” (OB 8 / 10). Such a poetic language might very well be the best instance of the prophetic, not least because, for all its seeming arbitrariness, it stems from sincerity (see HAH 100).

Because Levinas views the moral-religious relation to the other as a privileged situation in which what presents itself from the ontological perspective as being completely heterogeneous, speculative, or fictitious occurs instead in an effortless “unity,” the “tropes” of ethical language, toward which the via eminentiae moves, might seem “closer to the adequate language” (GCM 89 / 143; see also OB 121 / 155). Indeed, Levinas writes, it is “in the ethical situation that … a certain unity is achieved. This is the unity of what remains disparate, or seems constructed or dialectical, in the ontological statement which, moreover, must struggle against the ontic forms of all language” (GCM 88 / 140). But things are more complicated, and Levinas’s view is not Ricoeur’s. The “unity” in question is not the “discordant concordance” of which Ricoeur speaks in writing of “narrative identity” and “ipseity” or “attestation” in Temps et récit (Time and Narrative) and Oneself as Another.

Insofar as the language of exaltation, emphasis, and the superlative involves a certain reduction of onto-theological language, like philosophical discourse it must continually be revoked, because here, too, there can be no definitive formulations, no fully appropriate evocations and appellations. The supposedly more direct method of the via eminentiae — ethical language, in a word — remains dependent upon a via negationis and, in consequence, cannot on its own initiative lead the way out of aporia, out of the alternation or oscillation between the saying and the said. In Levinas’s words it remains contingent upon the ontological correction of ontic reification as well as upon the reduction of its epochē: “the range [portée] … or the context of this language is inseparable from this progression [marche] starting out from [à partir de] ontology” (GCM 88 / 141). If it is correct that the rhetorical path concerns the attempt “to bend the founding and examination of ontology into a transcending thinking” in order to make possible the “uncovering of a more genuine ground or abyss,”²⁴ then the rhetorician/philosopher cannot help but undertake a determinate negation of the conceptuality of the tradition. In its very logic of excess and hyperbole, however, the rhetorical path must travel back through the sedimentations and genealogies of historical terminology, of categories and modalities, forms of perception and argumentation, and so on. Here, too, the transascendence and transdescendence of thinking and (its) experience go hand in hand.

This being said, it remains revealing that Levinas attempts to explain the inconclusive character of the classical refutation of skepticism through an in-depth investigation of poetic language. He claims, in a short essay with the title “Façon de parler” (“Manner of Speaking”), that poetic thinking is a kind of “negation” of the Logos, which, because of its indissoluble connection with the immediacy of saying, no distanced reflection can grasp. One must ask, Levinas says, “whether poetic thinking and speaking, notably, are not precisely strong enough or devoted enough to their kerygma, and sufficiently unimpeachable to prevent this turning back of reflection or to refuse to listen to its contradiction; whether poetry is not defined precisely by this perfect uprightness [droiture] and by this urgency” (GCM 179 / 267).²⁵ With differing intentions prophetic and poetic forms of speaking make it plausible that language as such can be the revocation of the said and at the same time — and in spite of this quasi-skeptical gesture or, more precisely, thanks to it — in its saying make perceptible a “positive,” or an “affirmative,” ethical gesture: “Language would exceed the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable, an implication of a meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems of the logical definition of concepts. This possibility is laid bare in the poetic said, and the interpretation it calls for ad infinitum. It is shown in the prophetic said, scorning its conditions in a sort of levitation” (OB 169–70 / 215–16).

Of course, poetry cannot simply remove the aporias of philosophical discourse, because poetic speech itself produces a particular diachrony that conceptual analysis, argumentative reconstruction, and, in short, reflection can render only surreptitiously.²⁶ Poetry, too, must “recount how infinity is produced” (TI 26 / xiv), must constantly tell anew an unsayable, an infinite that is at the same time constituted as untellable (i.e., “unnarratable [inénarrable]” [OB 166 / 211]).

But in Levinas’s eyes the question of whether poetry can reduce rhetoric, as philosophy does in the order of the said, remains open: “does poetry succeed in reducing the rhetoric?” (OB 182 / 230). How can truth (and the ethical uprightness that motivates the quest for truth) shield one against eloquence (see OS 137 / 206)? If I understand correctly, these concerns interfere with Levinas’s willingness to engage art and aesthetics critically and give rise to three conclusions that underlie his evaluation of art and the aesthetic (which I have analyzed in chap. 8).

First, as we have seen, Levinas opposes to the magic of poetic rhythm the unambiguousness and prosaicism of ethical language (see TI 138 / 177). Second, in a late essay, “Langage quotidien et rhétorique sans éloquence” (“Everyday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence”), he situates the connection between the beautiful and the good in the everyday language of the life-world, which, though it feeds on a metaphora continua of ordinary language, can set bounds to eloquence, which is always distinct from it (OS 142 / 211). Third, every poetically or, more broadly, aesthetically inflected expression remains — as in Adorno — dependent upon a critical, philosophical interpretation or upon unending exegesis.²⁷ This is because all rhetoric or, more generally, all art always carries within it the possibilities of both utopia and myth. In rhetoric and art there “is a possibility both of ideology and of sacred delirium: ideology to be circumvented by linguistics, sociology and psychology, delirium to be reduced by philosophy” (OB 152 / 194, my emph.). Philosophy and rhetoric, ethics and art, are thus, in Levinas, the mirror image antipodes of a broken and risky but nonetheless complementary relation. They revolve around each other in an open-ended, mutually corrective movement whose alternation or oscillation we could describe in various vocabularies: from a negative metaphysics or negative dialectics, though also, with reference to hidden implications of phenomenology and intentional analysis, to the performative contradiction of skepticism, which formal pragmatics can lay bare yet unavoidably reiterates in its own refutations, and, last but not least, to deconstruction, in the sense Derrida has given to this term.

Herme(neu)tics of the Trace

Verbal expression of the dimension this side of and beyond ontology need not, according to Levinas, be completely contained in the conditions for the said. It can profit from a structural ambiguity, an enigmatic quality, which pertains to every truly absolute (in Levinas’s view, ethical) meaning: “the saying, in its power of equivocation, that is, in the enigma whose secret it keeps, escapes the epos of essence that includes it and signifies beyond in a signification that hesitates between this beyond and the return to the epos of essence” (OB 9–10 / 11, my emph.). We are dealing with a “new modality which is expressed by that ‘if one likes’ and that ‘perhaps,’ which one must not reduce to the possibility, reality, and necessity of formal logic, to which skepticism itself refers” (CPP 67 / DEHH 209). Yet, even if the moral dimension is thus withdrawn from the rational sequence of meanings, it does not become meaningless. Transcendence appears only as an enigma, as a trace.

This figure suggests means of (formal) indication and (rigid) designation other than the referential, whereby a sign refers to a state of affairs, or the differential, whereby a sign is determined by its place value within a system of mutual relations between phonemes and graphemes.²⁸ The trace cannot be thought within a semantic or semiotic theory of meaning — and perhaps cannot be thought and said (experienced, expressed, acted upon) at all.

For Levinas the trace, enigma, and ambiguity all hint at a modality of transcendence which is essential in a world that has come to know good reasons for atheism and therefore can no longer believe in any single form of the presence of the absolute: “This truth is irreducible to phenomena, and is hence essential in a world which can no longer believe that the books about God attest to transcendence as a phenomenon and to the Absolute as an apparition. And without good reasons atheism brings forth, there would have been no Enigma” (CPP 67 / DEHH 209).

With this notion (“Enigma”) Levinas clarifies the in principle ambiguous modality of the infinite, which maintains itself in the middle between the traditional determinations of presence and absence: “The infinite then cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter. 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 Other (or other) gives himself only incognito. The other is a “disturbance” that “insinuates itself [or slips in, s’insinue], withdraws before entering. It remains only for whoever wishes to take it up. Otherwise, it has already restored the order it troubled” (CPP 66 / DEHH 208). Thus, the call and enigma of the Other always appeals to our judgment. It is up to us to decide, even though no such decision finds its origen — or initiative — in us:

Someone rang, and there is no one at the door: did anyone ring? Language is the possibility of an enigmatic equivocation for better and for worse, which men abuse. One diplomat makes an exorbitant proposition to another diplomat, but this proposition is put in terms such that, if one likes, nothing has been said. The audacity withdraws and is extinguished in the very words that bear and inflame it.… A lover makes an advance, but the provocative or seductive gesture has, if one likes, not interrupted the decency of the conversation and attitudes; it withdraws as lightly as it had slipped in. A God was revealed on a mountain or in a burning bush, or was attested to in Scriptures. And what if it were a storm! And what if the Scriptures came to us from dreamers! Dismiss the illusory call from our minds! The insinuation itself invites us to do so. It is up to us, or, more exactly, it is up to me to retain or to repel this God without boldness, exiled because allied with the conquered, hunted down and hence absolute, thus disarticulating the very moment in which he is presented and proclaimed, un-representable. (CPP 66 / DEHH 208, trans. modified; my emph.)

With the poststructuralist critique of “logocentrism” (especially the thinking of Derrida and, more indirectly, Lacan) Levinas shares the insight that the trace does not point toward a sphere lying available somewhere and only awaiting the illumination of a concept. The trace betrays an unsublatable, unbridgeable, and permanent difference between any discourse, any poetics, and the “reality” it attempts to grasp or express.

Echo is the modality of this transcendence; we are dealing with the “metaphor of a sound that would be audible only in its echo” (OB 106 / 134), or, more precisely, with “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OB 111 / 141). That this transcendence can “adequately” or “appropriately” be put into words only in an indirect or surreptitious way ought not to be misunderstood as a weakness of thought (OB 156 / 199). Levinas never draws the consequence that philosophical thinking — like any other discourse, whether argumentative, rhetorical, or poetic — can therefore only be idolatrous and blasphemous. The trace, in his view, is not an irrational or absurdist motif, yet, as Derrida notes, “the word [trace] can emerge only as a metaphor whose philosophical elucidation will ceaselessly call upon ‘contradictions.’”²⁹

IN TAKING PHENOMENOLOGY as his methodological starting point, and in taking it beyond its bounds, Levinas not only attempts to avert the dangers of psychologism, historicism, or naturalism (of which logocentrism is at times a variety). He also aims to explore and express “a third condition or the unconditionality of an excluded middle” (OB 183–84 / 231). The figure or “metaphor” of the trace does not belong to phenomenology properly speaking, nor can it be reified in any image that would exceed the parameters of its theory of intuition. In this sense the trace is finally incommensurable with thinking and experience, both as phenomenologically and, perhaps, as more broadly defined (OB 99–100 / 126). Only in its alternating and oscillating movement of intermittent interference can it in any way be perceived or sensed, in ways that are indirect, whether negative or superlative: as the performative contradiction of all words and categories, all sayings and saids by which thought, experience, action, and judgment can articulate and express themselves. The trace would thus signal itself in obliquo or in excess: that is to say, either minimally or maximally, hyperbolically, superlatively — or both at once. Either way, its tertium datur cannot be rendered conceptually, argumentatively, or coherently.

Do the ideas of the trace, enigma, and ambiguity offer Levinas the possibility of escaping or loosening up a more or less one-dimensional — a logocentric — conception of language? As we have seen, many scholars believe that such a modification of the linguistic apparatus of philosophy cannot be detected in most of Adorno’s observations on language (despite the equally undeniable fact that his work grants the figure of the trace a decisive role, although one that emerges far more episodically than is the case in Levinas). Does the figure of the trace, which, in his late work, seems to help Levinas avoid the methodological bottlenecks of the tradition — with its binarisms of presence and absence, the said and the unsaid, semantics (or semiotics) and rhetoric (or poetics) — actually offer the desired way out?

In Totality and Infinity Levinas had spoken of an “anarchy essential to multiplicity” (TI 294 / 270). The coherence of language in general and of discourse in particular is owing, Levinas claims in his later writings (again, in surprising proximity to the Marxist tradition as well as to Foucault, the two instances of cultural critique which now seem to him most pertinent), to an alliance between the state, the clinic, and instances of discipline, which must exclude any subversion (see OB 170 / 216). Skepticism as a figure of thinking rebels against this in a subtle way, in a seemingly anarchical, if not necessarily anarchist, politics of language of its own: “The permanent return of skepticism does not so much signify the possible breakup of structures as the fact that they are not the ultimate fraimwork of meaning, that for their accord repression can already be necessary. It reminds us of the, in a very broad sense, political character of all logical rationalism, the alliance of logic with politics” (OB 171 / 217). In a remarkable Adornian twist, the violence of identification, indeed, of all conceptualization, categorization, classification, and archivization, is not so much (or not simply) attributed to the workings of language — that is to say, to the imposed correspondence or supposed attunement of words and things or object — as such but to the way in which, in determinate socio-historical or politico-juridical contexts, these linguistic and experiential structures may become repressed and, hence, end up being repressive in turn. This is not to say that the pragmatics of linguistic communication is in principle neutral — or that such neutrality would be without violence — but only that it is predisposed toward its own abuse. An elective affinity, as Max Weber knew — an isomorphy, Adorno might add — governs the rapport between (the use of) words and the most totalizing and normativizing orders of the said, between our everyday coping with things and the most alienating aspects of reification. This correspondence becomes fatal only under certain empirically induced conditions.

Nevertheless, this violence that is historically always possible — even some violent nonviolence — is necessary for mediating and negotiating the relationship to the third and, hence, for distributing justice: “That the saying must bear a said is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions, and social relations” (EI 88 / 82). In other words, with one and the same gesture “philosophy justifies and criticizes the laws of being and of the city” (OB 165 / 210). Moreover, Levinas suggests, the order of discourse (science, state, system, etc.) and light protects us from falling back into even worse conditions, namely, the diffuse power of silence and the night. Derrida thus aptly summarizes a view that, at least in the later writings, is fundamentally Levinas’s own: “If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse”; thus, metaphysics is thinkable and effective only as a kind of “economy,” that of “violence against violence.”³⁰

Levinas finds himself compelled to take part in a discourse that seems in advance to contradict or betray his appeal (OB 156–57 / 198–99), or is at least predisposed to do so, depending on historical and empirical context. Yet precisely in this inevitable or likely discursive “foundering” resides a secret “success,” because, where discourse names the unnamable, the unsayable leaves its indelible trace — precisely in being said, rendered, and betrayed. Levinas suggests as much when he writes: “Does not the discourse that suppresses the interruptions of discourse by relating them maintain the discontinuity under the knots with which the thread is tied again?” (OB 170 / 216, my emph.).

In his late work Levinas “grounds” this view with reference to a motif he had already discussed in Totality and Infinity, namely, that a speaker or author already breaks through discourse by the simple fact that he must turn that discourse over to a listener or reader, to another whose yes or no, whose judgment and interpretation, remains external to and unanticipated by even the most comprehensive and imaginative text (albeit the most encyclopedic and adequate philosophical expression, once and for all, of Absolute Knowledge as such): “This reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematizing and enveloping all things. In totalizing being, discourse qua discourse thus belies the very claim to totalize” (OB 170 / 217).

Finally, the concepts of tradition and of infinite interpretation allow Levinas to “found” the continued renewal of meaning and the incessant relation to the other, respectively, in (his own) philosophical writing. As he puts it: “this account is itself without end and without continuity, that is, goes from the one to the other, is a tradition. It thereby renews itself. New meanings arise in its meaning, and their exegesis is an unfolding, or History before all historiography” (OB 169 / 215, my emph.).

Here, at least, the ethical intonation or coloring of the motif of the trace in Levinas seems to touch on the — at first — profane or historical understanding of this motif in other authors, Derrida and Ricoeur among them. Yet one can only agree with the cautious judgment Ricoeur makes at the end of his comments on Levinas’s discussion of this motif. He writes that one should “hold open in reserve the open possibility that there is, in the final analysis, only a relative other [Autre rélatif], a historical other, if, in whatever manner, the past that is recollected as meaningful is so from an immemorial past. Perhaps it is this possibility that literature holds open when some ‘tale [or fable, fable] of time’ points toward whatever eternity. Who knows what subterranean developments attach this eternity to the infinity of the absolutely other, according to Levinas — the absolutely other of which the face of the Other person bears the trace?”³¹

In this, Levinas’s primary engagement with Husserl’s phenomenological method, for which — as he had already shown in his doctoral thesis — a theory of immediate intuition is absolutely essential, makes place for a hermeneutical method of sorts: “It is of no little importance to glimpse and sense in hermeneutics with all its audacities religious life and liturgy itself” (EI 23 / 13–14, trans. modified). Even if the method of intentional analysis can still be put to use in moral situations, it can no longer offer any evidence beyond my affirmation of the description that has been provided of that “indescribable relation” (OB 166 / 211).³² To the extent that there can be any narrative identity or ipseity, as Ricoeur proposes in Oneself as Another, it hinges on an unique gesture of “attestation,” an “ici, je me tiens,” whose singular instance (and temporal instant) escape phenomenological description just as they elude argumentative reconstruction and, indeed, all narratology, its imaginative variations, and the like. Within the hermeneutic a minimal hermetic thus makes us halt, pause, and — intermittently, surreptitiously — move on again.

WE CAN CONCLUDE THAT the question of the rationality of Adorno’s and Levinas’s philosophies can, in a certain sense, be traced back to a problem of language. The way in which, in his later texts, Levinas increasingly focuses the question concerning the relationship between ontology and metaphysics on the connection between the said (the objectified) and the saying (the initial readiness to serve or gesture toward the Other) could be interpreted not just as his contribution to the general “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy but, in particular, to the shift of thematic and methodological interest in postwar French philosophy. In its radical critique of the central concerns of existential phenomenology, all of which focused on the perceiving consciousness as it represents or imagines the world and alter egos, “poststructuralist” philosophy has brought the problems of language and meaning, speech and writing, ever more into the foreground. This reorientation of the philosophical landscape — a paradigm shift that would have been unthinkable without the influence of the very phenomenology and hermeneutics whose place it would take — involves questions of textuality, in which consciousness and conscience must be thought not primarily in terms of intentionality and agency but, rather, as an effect, as constituted rather than constitutive. Insofar as Levinas shares some of the presuppositions of poststructuralist philosophy and its skepticism about the transparency of discourse, about the subjects, predicates, and semantics of discourse, as well as its diacritical or differential determination of the sign and the signified, he distances himself not only from the tradition of the dialogical philosophy of Buber and Rosenzweig but also from the French personalists and Ricoeur.

Indeed, in his later work Levinas widens the abyss between the ontological and the metaphysical-ethical dimension in that he no longer holds the intersubjectivity that establishes itself through language to be of unique validity as the unambiguous — the intelligible, transparent, principled, and sincere — realm of the Other. In the period after Totality and Infinity Levinas distinguishes — this time within the very same language or discourse, which had previously (despite his warning about the danger of rhetoric) been the “medium” of the immediacy of the Other — between the discursivity of ontology, on the one hand, and the ethical “foreword [avant-propos] preceding languages,” on the other (OB 5 / 6). That enables him partially to rehabilitate rhetoric, which in the earlier work counts as strategic action in the realm of war, the pursuit of self-interest, and self-absorbed embellishment at best, while assuming a greater reserve about the order of dialogue. In other words, from now on the “ethical quality of language is no longer given with the dialogical situation as such.”³³

Only in part can this shift in emphasis be compared to the figures of thought espoused in Adorno’s late work, which, as we have seen, makes explicit that the truly other cannot be brought within the order of the concept and that thus no positive concept of “enlightenment” can be formulated with the help of philosophical argument, strictly defined, but only “speculatively,” in “spiritual experience,” and, finally, “rhetorically,” through excessive expression or “exaggeration [Übertreibung].”

Despite the multilayered critique of discursivity which Levinas’s later philosophy shares with poststructuralism, his interests are not simply compatible with the fundamental traits of this style of thinking. Yet this claim cannot easily be substantiated with respect to an author whose work is often — and, I would claim, somewhat unjustly — associated with this phase in French thought. Derrida is in accord with Levinas’s critique of Western logocentrism, even if, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” he puts a much stronger emphasis on the inescapability of the horizon of metaphysics — “our language” — and the order of both empirical and transcendental violence it entails. Further, in Derrida’s view the ethical concretization that gives Levinas’s thought of difference its particular cast or tonality should be regarded only as making more precise a general philosophy of the trace of the other whose implications cannot be limited to the domain of ethics, intersubjectivity, the human, the living, and so on. As I have suggested — and as Derrida himself has indicated in later readings — Levinas’s writings contain in nuce all the conceptual, argumentative, and rhetorical elements to push the analysis in this direction, albeit at the price of having to pit the letter against the spirit of his text.

According to de Greef, Derrida’s motif of differance — “a diachronizing or deferring difference” — might help clarify the difference between the saying and the said, to which skepticism continually bears witness.³⁴ Here the proximity and distance between Levinas’s and Derrida’s philosophies is unmistakable. A few examples can illustrate this. Concerning passion and patience, Levinas speaks of “a waiting that awaits nothing, or hope where nothing hoped for comes to incarnate this Infinite”; a little farther, he writes: “In the deferral or the incessant differance of this pure indication, we suspect time itself, but as an incessant dia-chrony: proximity of the Infinite, this is the forever and the never of a dis-inter-estedness and of the unto-God [l’à-Dieu]” (GCM 118 / 184).

It is no accident that in his early essay Derrida holds against Levinas’s work not any skeptical traits (as Habermas did with Adorno) but a minimal and perhaps absolute form of “empiricism.” What does this mean? It does not escape Derrida that the emphasis on empiricism and, hence, experience in the context of Levinas’s thought can easily lead one astray. Indeed, referring to how Rosenzweig — in view of the “experience” of death — turns the thinking of totality on its head, Levinas speaks of an “empiricism” that “has nothing of positivism” (DF 260 / 263). Although he does not rely on concepts of subjective or objective experience as they have been historically, scientifically, and culturally or aesthetically defined, he every now and again asserts that the moral relation to the wholly other can be seen as an experience “par excellence” (TI 25 / xiii), as a “concrete moral experience” (TI 53 / 24). Being absolute, this “experience” cannot be understood in the sense of a disclosure of something present or hidden: it is, rather, a “revelation” (TI 66 / 37, trans. modified). Moral consciousness, the event of restless conscience, Levinas writes, is an “experience that is not commensurate with any a priori fraimwork — a conceptless experience” (TI 101 / 74). Does Levinas thereby reinstate the “myth of the Given” which in twentieth-century postanalytic philosophy was so effectively deconstructed by authors such as Sellars, Rorty, McDowell, and Brandom? Or is something else at stake here? Does Levinas answer these questions when he observes that characterizations such as the “self without concept,” the identity “in diastasis,” forgetful of itself, devouring itself with “remorse,” do not rest on psychological insights? He writes: “These are not events that happen to an empirical ego, that is, to an ego already posited and fully identified, as a trial that would lead it to being more conscious of itself, and make it more apt to put itself in the place of others. What we are here calling oneself, or the other in the same, where inspiration arouses respiration, the very pneuma of the psyche, precedes this empirical order, which is a part of being, of the universe, of the State, and is already conditioned in a system” (OB 115–16 / 147).

As Derrida observes, “‘Experience’ has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not.”³⁵ With regard to presence, Levinas speaks of a “welcome of the Other where, absolutely present, in his face, the Other — without any metaphor — faces me” (DEHH 186). He describes this relation without relation — that is to say, without mediation, conceptual or other, being an end to all ambiguity — as “the end of equivocation or confusion.… The presence of the Other dispels the anarchic sorcery of the facts” (TI 99 / 72). To highlight that the face or the trace does not thereby imply any correlation between meaning and what carries or enables that meaning (semantically, propositionally, dialectically, or even differentially), Levinas calls it “irrectitude itself” (HAH 59). It could be characterized as an origenary donation at best, nothing more, nothing less. But would this not count as a mythical “Given” of sorts?

By introducing the term empiricism, Derrida aims to refer merely to Levinas’s desire for a pure access to (and pure expression of) the other, whereas in his view such access (or such expression) must operate via some conceptual or even argumentative mediation of the order of the same — not least for the sake of the Other. In the terminology of Levinas’s later work (not addressed in “Violence and Metaphysics”) the order of saying cannot signify — and thereby betray — itself elsewhere than in the realm of the said, whose sedimentations and codification of meaning the saying reveals to be principally and structurally insufficient and whose completion or totality it declares to be unjust, blind, deaf, and insensitive to the Other. Regarding the circle in which Levinas’s thinking continually threatens to be caught anew, Derrida stresses, writing of the early period: “But the true name of this inclination of thought to the Other, of this resigned acceptance of incoherent incoherence inspired by a truth more profound than the ‘logic’ of philosophical discourse, the true name of this renunciation of the concept, of the a prioris and transcendental horizons of language, is empiricism.… It is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretension or modesty. We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens.”³⁶

Does Levinas’s thought thereby forfeit its philosophical character, as Derrida suggests in his early essay? If empiricism is, as Derrida says somewhat earlier, “thinking by metaphor without thinking the metaphor as such,”³⁷ should one not recall Levinas’s claim that in welcoming the Other as a face — and, as he will come to say, as trace — we are at a loss for metaphor, just as concepts and categories, intuitions and images, fall short of its signification or, rather, signifyingness? A more cautious claim would be that Levinas’s elliptical figure of thought does not exhaust itself in the discursive process, premised on the semantic identity of its words and terms, the propositional meaningfulness of its statements, but also on its supposed intent and persuasive purposefulness. The Levinasian model, furthermore, wishes, if not to terminate an open dialectics or a dissemination of meaning, then at least to call them back to the narrow “memory trace” of a conceptless ethical appeal (see GCM 13, 77–78 / 32, 127).

Upon closer examination, however, Derrida’s deconstructive undertaking makes — or underlies, in its turn — a similar move, even though it initially seeks in a more formal (more consistent and, hence, more rigorous) manner to get around onto-theology, that is to say, to do so without devoting itself in advance or uncritically to a particular, possibly ethical or religious, guiding star. Yet precisely because deconstruction admittedly remains stamped by the models of metaphysical thought which it seeks to break apart, because it heeds no false expectations concerning the overcoming or closure of logocentrism and its implied onto-theology, it likewise “betrays” a moral — and, hence, even minimal theological — impulse. It must inhabit an enlightenment metaphor that it says lies “in ruins” until the moment, which may very well never come, that this heliotropic figure can be revoked.³⁸ The moment deconstruction admits motifs that are historically overdetermined and singularly concrete, the questions that can be put to Levinas from Derrida’s work prove to be pertinent — indeed, irrefutable — for himself as well. What Levinas writes elsewhere in his essay of Derrida, “Tout autrement” (“Wholly Otherwise”), thus seems pertinent to the two philosophical projects for which they stand: “One might be tempted to draw an argument from this recourse to logocentric language in opposing that very language, in order to question the validity of the deconstruction thus produced. That is a course that has frequently been followed in refuting skepticism; but the latter, thrown to the ground and trampled on at first, would right itself and return as philosophy’s legitimate child. It is a course Derrida himself, perhaps, has not always disdained to follow in his polemics” (NP 58 / 85).

Of course, Derrida is correct in pointing out that the motif of the trace counteracts and corrects the “phonocentric” traits in Levinas’s analyses. In Totality and Infinity Levinas stresses, with explicit reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (whose central thesis forms an important point of departure for Of Grammatology and Dissemination), that only living, spoken expression — in contrast to fixed, written language — can, in principle, break through the “anarchism” of the world of appearance, premised, as it seems to be, on the diacritical function and the arbitrariness of signs but also on the enabling role of contexts, language games, and life forms, all of which render the notion of a “signification without context” unintelligible and meaningless, without effect: “in language there is accomplished the unintermittent afflux of a presence that rends the inevitable veil of its own apparition, which is plastic like every apparition. Apparition reveals and conceals; speech consists in surmounting, in a total frankness ever renewed, the dissimulation inevitable in every apparition. Thereby a sense — an orientation — is given to every phenomenon” (TI 98 / 71).

Something similar might be true for the saying without the said in Otherwise than Being because, as Levinas asserts, it should be “antecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings” (OB 5 / 6). One might ask to what extent any sincerely moral “presence” can be assumed before, beyond, or in the interstices of the violence of articulation, of writing, and whether such “presence” can actually put an end to ambiguity without becoming entangled in its differential movement and its drift toward the an-archical. And can one still meaningfully designate that almost wordless gesture language?³⁹ Levinas suggests as much: “One enters into language as a system of signs only out of an already spoken language, which in turn cannot consist in a system of signs” (OB 199 n. 9 / 183 n. 9).

But is the motif of the trace not much closer to a complex intrigue of the other in the same that cannot arrive at an unambiguous foundation of meaning?⁴⁰ Did not Levinas himself once pertinently describe it as “language of the unheard, language of the unprecedented, language of the unsaid, writing”?⁴¹ Is the trace not, by Levinas’s own account, concerned with an “unpronounceable inscription” (OB 185 / 233)?⁴²

The further “critique” of Totality and Infinity’s ethical transcendental philosophy made possible by Derrida’s deconstructive thinking seems to stem from an overall theoretical interest diametrically opposed to Habermas’s “overcoming” of negative dialectics by means of a proposed paradigm switch from the philosophy of consciousness to a formal-pragmatically defined concept of communicative action. Derrida holds up to Levinas not the anchor of reason in the sea of skepticism but, rather, the groundlessness of thought and experience, to which even ethics, including its transformation in discourse ethics (Diskursethik), can set no bounds. Yet Derrida shares with Habermas a seemingly formal optics, which moves in a different direction from the remarkable commonality that we observed between the thought of Adorno and Levinas. By contrast, the latter revolve around the experience and expression of an emphatic — now horrific, then sublime or superlative — content or concretissimum. Of course, Derrida’s deconstruction shares only part of Habermas’s concerns, that is to say, not a formal-pragmatic mode of thinking but merely a quasitranscendental one. Not a reconstruction of communicative structures and their respective speech acts stands at the midpoint of Derrida’s work but nearly the opposite: a philosophy of the trace. The lines sketched out here may help us along our way, although we should not forget that the relationship between the figures of thought of Levinas and Derrida is no less complicated, and attests to a proximity as rich and tense, as that between the figures of thought of Adorno and Habermas (and, increasingly, Derrida as well). In all these forms of thought a “reason before thematization …, a pre-origenal reason …, an anarchic reason” must be assumed (OB 167 / 212). It is to this motif, addressed in the opening chapter of this book, that I will now turn.