Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics (Suny Series in Contemporary French Thought)

S U N Y s e r i e s i n C o n t e m p o r a r y F r e n c h T h o u g h t S U N Y s e BEFORE THE VOICE OF REASON ...

Author: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

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S U N Y

s e r i e s

i n

C o n t e m p o r a r y

F r e n c h

T h o u g h t S U N Y s e

BEFORE THE VOICE OF REASON

r e s

Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics

i

Echoes of Responsibility in

i n C o n t e m p o r a r y F r e n c h T h o

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

u g h t S U N Y

s e r i e s

i n


F r e n c h

T h o u g h t

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Before the Voice of Reason

SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, editors

The Creation of the World or Globalization Jean-Luc Nancy, translated and with an introduction by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul Bergson-Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual Valentine Moulard-Leonard French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception edited and with an introduction by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul

Before the Voice of Reason Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics

8 David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

state university of new york press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Published in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, 1939– Before the voice of reason : echoes of responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s ecology and Levinas’s ethics / David Michael Kleinberg-Levin. p. com. — (SUNY series in contemporary french thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-7814–7549–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. 2. Ecology—Philosophy. 3. Lévinas, Emmanuel—Ethics. 4. Ethics, Modern. 5. Responsibility. I. Title. b2430.m3764k54 2008 1943—d22 2007050820 1 2 3 4 5

Dedicated to Ev From the child of joy, a song, and friendship borne in the echoes


“The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.” —Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics


“[T]he voice of reason . . . speaks equally in each and maintains the same language for all. The voice of reason, Kant says, . . . speaks to each without equivocation, and it gives access to scientific cognition. But it is essentially for giving orders and prescribing.” —Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy”

“The unity of reason is still treated as repression, not as the source and ground of the diversity of its voices.” —Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking


Acknowledgments 8 The publisher and I would like to thank Random House, Inc. and Faber & Faber for their kind permission to quote from “Chocorua to Its Neighbor”, a poem by Wallace Stevens published in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). I wish to thank Galen Johnson and Glen Mazis for their careful, critical reading of the penultimate draft of this book. The book also benefited from invaluable discussions with Giorgio Agamben, Rudolf Bernet, Jay Bernstein, Daniel Brandes, Gerald Bruns, Mauro Carbone, Edward Casey, Gregg Horowitz, Thomas McCarthy, Michael McGillen, Guiseppina Moneta, Robert Scharff, Dennis Schmidt, and David Wood. Whilst assuming complete responsibility for all the deficiencies in this work, I want to thank these friends for their generous time and challenging thoughts. I also wish to keep in remembrance some wonderful conversations with Géza von Molnár, my colleague in the German Department at Northwestern University. Years ago, when I was just beginning to contemplate this project, he and I ventured our thoughts together on the philosophies of nature in Schelling and Jena Romanticism. That he is not alive to read and talk over what I have finally committed to writing greatly saddens me. And for interrupting his imperative homework and skillfully preparing my two diagrams, Noah Kleinberg deserves both praise and gratitude, which I am very happy to acknowledge.


Contents 8 Introduction 1. A Human Voice 1 2. The Project 14 3. The Ethical Root of the Voice 24 4. The Voice of Reason 25 5. Reconciling Voices: the Political Register 35 6. Conversation 41 7. Reading This Book 46

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Part I The Singing of the World The Claim of Nature in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology Chapter 1. The Remembrance of Nature in the Voice of the Subject 1. Invocations of Nature 53 2. The Song of the Winds 71 3. The Song of the Earth 86 Chapter 2. The Question of Origins 1. Silence 98 2. Song 102 Chapter 3. The Voice of Ecological Attunement in a Practice of Caring for Oneself 1. Prologue 110

53

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Contents

2. The Singing of Language 114 3. Caring for Oneself: The Three Phase-Dimensions of the Voice 119 4. Dying Echoes: What Must Be Remembered 134 Part II Levinas On the Claim of the Ethical Chapter 4. The Saying and the Said: Giving Time to the Voice of the Other 1. Unavoidable Violence 148 2. Responsibility: Claiming the Voice 152 3. Inspiration 153 4. Heterology, Heteronomy: The Lyrical Voice 157 5. The Ethical Dimensions of the Voice 158 6. Ethical Saying: The Claim in Dialogue 164 Chapter 5. The Pre-Originary Dimension of Saying 1. Preliminary Soundings 181 2. The Voice of Reason 193 3. The Pre-Originary Voice 200 4. Palimpsest: The Trace of the Other in the Text of Our Flesh, or, The Echo of the Other in the Trembling of the Flesh 205 5. Enigmatic Echoes: Retrieving the Trace 223

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Epilogue

241

My Voices

245

Notes

247

Index

287



Introduction 8 §1 A Human Voice I would like to open this Introduction with some lines of verse from Wallace Stevens, a poet whose works I have lived with and learned from for many years. In a poem titled “Chocorua to Its Neighbour”, we are given this: To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that, also, cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech.1

This stanza, presumably the poet’s homage to Hölderlin, recalls, in its echoes, the earlier poet’s simple yet strangely provocative and unsettling words, appearing in an early version of his “Hyperion”: “Permit me”, he writes, “to speak humanly.”2 And perhaps, Stevens also had in mind Hölderlin’s no less challenging evocation of the “voice that makes us human”, a line from “At the Source of the Donau”, that likewise compels us to question the humanity of our own voice.3 These humbling references to the human voice have been immeasurably significant sources of inspiration guiding my writing of this book. The humanity of the voice is, in fact, the very subject to which I want here to give some thought: the morality and politics of the voice and its speaking. One might say that it is what is at stake here. Whether or not I have been able to serve the wisdom that the poets’ words suggest I must leave to the judgement of others. But the attentiveness that these two poets’ invocations of the voice demand is arduous: not only to speak of human things, things that matter, things worthy of being bespoken, but also to speak of them with a human voice—a voice, I shall say, that comes from the heart, a voice exposed, audibly vulnerable, without dissimulation, without the conceits of egoism, without the arrogance of knowledge, a voice that expresses one’s openness to learning. A voice for which ethical life urgently calls. But that may well seem to be an almost impossible

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voice! I concede that this very understanding—its resignation before the almost impossible—can serve as a defense, masking sincerity and feigning vulnerability. Philosophical thought, and the writing of it, have their own distinctive ways of subverting this voice, betraying it even when that effect may be least expected. In the end, we can be assured of nothing. I think it worth desiring, nevertheless, that there be here no easy settlement of any ethical claims.4 In Language and Death, Giorgio Agamben argues that “the voice is the originary ethical dimension” and that “to think the voice is therefore necessarily the supreme task of philosophy.”5 However, he says, the voice is “that which has always already withdrawn [già sempre scinde] from every experience of language.” And although philosophy is “a dialogue between man—the mortal who speaks—and his voice”, in the long history of metaphysics, “the takingplace of language (the fact that language is) gets to be forgotten in favour of what is said in the moment of discourse”. Consequently, “this taking-place (the voice) is thought only as the ground of the said, so that the voice itself never comes, as such, into thought.” I do not want to continue this repression of the human voice—of what Levinas, after Kierkegaard, will call “Saying”. Nor, in fact, do I want to consent to the silence into which the voices of nature have been for too long abandoned by a philosophy deaf to their ways of communicating. Each thing in nature has a voice, an expressiveness, indicating something about the world that would otherwise remain concealed. What is a “human” voice? What is involved in speaking “humanly”? In Dieu, la mort et le temps, Levinas argues that “the most extraordinary thing that Heidegger brings [us] is a new sonority of the verb ‘to be’: precisely its verbal sonority”.6 Levinas is, as this remark reveals, keenly aware of the implications of this “new sonority” for philosophical reflection on ethical life— but, as I will argue, he is no less conscious of the ethical significance of the voice—the voice called upon to speak, as the poet has expressed it, “humanly”. But what does this adverb mean? If “humanity” is always an unapproachable ideality, if it is always an achievement still to come, how could there be any final, conclusive meaning for this adverb? How could we—anyone, including philosophers—possibly, without moral offense, assume that we know this voice? Presuming to speak for all and for all times, is there not a certain inevitable temptation to arrogance in the philosophical voice? The search for a voice—a more human voice—must be internal to the activity of philosophical thought. Thus, if it is distinctive of modernity that it throws us into an unsettling time, and if philosophical thinking is a useless passion unless it can be responsive to its own time, then it must confront the unsettling of its own identity—and questions about the character of its voice, its ways of expressing itself. In the Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot asks a question that would always have been Levinas’s question as well:

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How might one speak in such a way that speaking is essentially plural? How may one affirm the search for a mode of plural speaking no longer founded on equality and inequality, hierarchy and subordination, or reciprocal mutuality, but rather on dissymmetry and irreversibility [. . .]?7

For both Blanchot and Levinas, these are questions of morality that compelled them to think critically about the voice—about its responsive origination, its gathering of tonalities, its echoes, its ways of saying, its indebtedness, its generosity, its hospitality. Concerned, above all, to stake out the difference—a difference constitutive of essence—that separates the human animal from the other, lower animals, but also to maintain the essential difference, legacy of Platonism, between the sensible and the intelligible, Aristotle removes speech, human language, from the voice, reducing voice to mere sound. In the power of speech, he recognizes, above all, its role in establishing shared values and ideals. The “telos” of speech is the communication of right and wrong, the useful and the harmful, the just and the unjust. Speech thus forms and informs the very fabric of ethical and political life. Indeed, for Aristotle, speech is the very essence of the political. His conception of speech accordingly excludes the voice, which he reductively identifies with our animal nature: Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for the purpose of making man a political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by animals also and used by them to express pleasure and pain; for the natural powers of some animals do indeed enable them both to feel pleasure and pain and to communicate these to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is right and what is wrong. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household or a city.8

And yet, as Aristotle well knows, rhetoric is an art that disciplines the voice, finding advantage in its freedom, its capacity for modulations in tone, accent, rhythm, pitch. But, of course, the other animals have no freedom in the use of their voices: nature denies them the freedom that sociality alone can bestow, as it receives human beings into the community of a shared language. But if only human beings can enjoy the gift of speech, must there not also be, then, a distinctly, essentially human voice? A voice—or voices—one voice or many voices, but in any event, something uniquely human? “Is there”, Agamben asks, “a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey?

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And if it exists, is this voice language?”9 Things have, and make, sounds; and some things make recognizably distinctive sounds. Animals make sounds, but they also have voices—voices, however, incapable of speech. We human beings can of course make, with our voices, an impressive range of sounds; we also have identifiable voices, and, in spite of the singularity of our voices, our voices, similar enough to an ideal norm, are capable of becoming speech.10 The cricket, the donkey, the songbird: each has its distinctive voice; but it is as if these creatures have been punished, condemned to repeat the voice of their species: always the same sequence of sounds, a predetermined programme elicited by their present situation without the mediation of consciousness. Agamben’s point is that, having denied the existence of a human voice, Aristotle would seem to be unsettling his definition of the human being as the animal possessing language. For what would language be, what would speech be, without a voice? I cannot imagine Aristotle believing what many today think, namely: that there are only individual voices with nothing—no essence at all—in common. But even if we think the deconstruction of essentialism to be right, must we renounce the very thought of a voice speaking “humanly”? Or capable of speaking more humanly? Beyond challenging Aristotle, Agamben is of course also questioning, at the same time, the metaphysical assumption that we should think of the “human voice” in terms of an essence: a voice whose sonorous possibilities would be completely predetermined by biology, for example, or indeed dictated by any a priori conceptual legislation. Whatever else we might want to say about the human voice, we must, at the very least, subtract it from all absolute determinisms, whether empirical or transcendental. The human voice is nothing, if not, as such, a manifestation of freedom, a gift of nature that we have been entrusted to respect and preserve with all the political wisdom we can muster. In “A King Is Listening”, one of many marvelous short stories by Italo Calvino, there is a thought-provoking meditation on the voice, asserting that the human voice is always in truth a singularity, but recognizing that this singularity may be deeply buried beneath, or within, the constructed, or “artificial” voice we have in common: Buried deeply within you, your true voice perhaps exists: the song that does not know how to leave your closed throat, your lips dry and tight. Or else your voice wanders in dispersion around the city, its timbre and tones disseminated amidst all the din. What no-one knows you are, or have been, or would be capable of being—this would reveal itself in that voice.11

How would this “true voice” of individuality be heard? Is there anything signifying the ethical in this voice? Why is it deeply buried? Why does it need to be buried—or repressed?

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What is it for a voice to be a “human” voice? What is required of speaking, of the voice, for them to be speaking “humanly”? These questions are formulated in a way that seems to ontologize or essentialize the voice. I would prefer to think of the human voice as always becoming, as being, in its being, always unsettled, since, in its coming into being, its remaining in being, and even in its departure from being, the human voice is always engaged in a dialogical relationship with other voices. Echoing Theodor Adorno’s beautifully precise characterization, I want to think of this voice as “the voice of human beings among whom all barriers have fallen”.12 Finding such a voice, attaining such a voice, requires, I believe, that we get in touch with our body’s felt sense of the moral Idea that, in his Critique of Judgement, Kant described as “the humanity in our person”.13 Which means that the voice of the I is always answerable to a voice that comes from a time, a dimension of human existence, that can never be mastered, possessed, made entirely one’s own.14 Perhaps these thoughts were on Kant’s mind when, in the Critique of Pure Reason, he remarked that the question of the origin of the human voice—the origin of its ability to enter into a world of language—will inevitably draw us into a “veritable abyss”, where human Reason risks madness.15 Unfortunately, instead of giving thought to the ethical significance of this abyss and exposing his thinking of Reason to its consequent deconstruction, Kant, like Aristotle before him, takes the danger to require the exclusion of the voice from the realm of philosophical contemplation. This proto-ethical dispossession of the voice, its heteronomy, its heteroaffection, must not be confused, however, with the totally different dispossession of the voice that has taken place in the contemporary phase of capitalism. In his essay on Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, Adorno observes that “the individual is revealed [there] to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it.”16 Thus, he argues, “what is left of the subject is its most abstract characteristic: merely existing [da zu sein] and thereby already committing an outrage.” Consequently, the characters that Beckett shows us in his plays are “empty personae, truly mere masks through whom sound merely passes”:17 they have been robbed of their own voices, voices turned into mere ventriloquisms, voices consumed in the programmed mimesis of alienated, meaningless desire. “What is left of spirit, which originated in mimesis, is pitiful imitation [. . .].”18 What is left of the voice is something uncanny, no longer recognizably human, yet also not reduced to “animality”: the merest chatter, utterly bereft, finally emptied of all possible meaning. In the dialogue between the animals and Zarathustra, Nietzsche brings us to the very extremity of the problematic nature of the human voice.19 In the chapter on “The Convalescent”, Zarathustra, “roaring in a terrible voice”, a voice that frightens all the animals, summons what he names his “abysmal thought”. The exertion, and perhaps that thought itself, overwhelm him and

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he falls to the ground, unconscious for seven days, whilst the animals attend him. Upon awakening, he says to them, “O my animals, [. . .] chatter on like this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear your chattering: where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?” “For me,” he says, continuing the thought, “there is no outside-myself. But all sounds make us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget. Have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that, man dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all the deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows.” The animals respond to this speech by evoking an eternity of cosmic cycles, the endless “wheel of being”. Zarathustra replies, lightly mocking them: “O you buffoons and barrel-organs!” And, in what I take to be merely a semblance of irritation, he accuses them of having turned the episode of his lapse into unconsciousness, and the symbolically charged episode that followed his awakening, into a “ditty”: “And you, have you already made a hurdy-gurdy song of this?” The animals, however, realizing that Zarathustra is still suffering and in need of convalescence, respond simply by counseling him to go to an environment that is healing: Go out to the roses and bees and dove-cots. But especially to the songbirds, that you may learn from them how to sing! Singing is for the convalescent; the healthy can speak. And when the healthy man wants songs, he wants songs that are different from those needed by the convalescent.

And Zarathustra now, as I imagine him, considerably more irritated, but still master of his temper and still capable of finding amusement in their semblance of divine wisdom, repeats his tempered admonishment: O you buffoons and barrel-organs, be silent! [. . .] How well you know what comfort I invented for myself in seven days! That I must sing again, this comfort and convalescence I invented for myself. Must you immediately turn this too into a hurdy-gurdy song?

To this the animals reply: Do not speak on! [. . .] Rather, O convalescent, fashion yourself a lyre first, a new lyre! For behold, Zarathustra, new lyres are needed for your new songs. Sing and overflow, O Zarathustra; cure your soul with new songs that you may bear your great destiny, which has never yet been any man’s destiny [. . .].

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Now, this text is exceedingly rich, but I will restrict my commentary to just a few thoughts, matters distinctly pertinent to the argument at stake in this present book. But first, some of Heidegger’s commentary: Zarathustra agrees with his animals. With their injunction to sing, the animals are telling him of that consolation he invented for himself during those seven days. Once again, however, he warns against turning the injunction to sing into a call for tunes on the same old lyre.20

“What,” Heidegger asks, “is being thought here?” “This”, he says: that the thought most difficult to bear, as the convalescent’s conquering thought, must first of all be sung; that such singing, which is to say, the poetizing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, must itself become the convalescence; but also that such singing must be singular, that it dare not become a popular tune.

The teaching that Heidegger wants most of all, it seems, to draw from this story is that “poetry, if it is to fulfill its task, can never be a matter for barrelorgans and ready-made lyres. The lyre, viewed now as an instrument for the new singing and saying, has still to be created.” What I would like here to stress is that, as Heidegger says—but without fully recognizing the implications: such singing or poetizing “must itself become the convalescence.” In other words, the achievement of poetizing will bring about, will constitute, the achievement of convalescence: the two moments are constitutively one and the same, for poetizing is possible only to the extent that the metaphysical diremptions—above all the opposition that the intelligible maintains against the sensuous—have all been radically deconstructed. Only in this way will Zarathustra be able to sing. Only then will he experience the healing spirit in his song. Heidegger notes that, upon hearing the animals’ words, Zarathustra “lay still” in order to “commune with his soul”. The great thought that he now bears—the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same, comes to him “in its full import”. “He now knows,” says Heidegger, “that the greatest and the smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teaching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel-organs, the latter always accompanying its true proclamation.”21 But Heidegger, for one, will never be comfortable with talking animals; nor with the authentically human voice reduced to a hurdy-gurdy song. The human voice—the voice that will speak most humanly, is destined for fulfillment, he maintains, in the “elevated” language of poetry and the “sobriety” of thought. My interpretation of “The Convalescent” does not greatly differ from Heidegger’s; but, whereas he wants to concentrate on the metaphysical question of the eternal return, “die ewige Wiederkehr”, I wish to concentrate instead

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on ethically charged questions concerning the relation between philosophical thought and its investment in language. I have my own philosophical obsessions! I want to draw out of the quoted passages four distinct, yet intricately interrelated threads of thought, all of them bearing on that singularly fateful relation. For our purposes, Zarathustra will here represent the figure of the philosopher, the one whose relation to language—to truth, sincerity, voice, meaning, song and the abyssal, is contested and put to the test. Tested, in fact, by animals who can talk, who thereby transgress the very boundary between themselves and the human that, for Heidegger, it is of the greatest importance—even urgency—for philosophical thought to maintain. [1] The animals in the textual passages I have cited have been provocations to question the “status”, or say the “legitimacy” and “authority” of what Zarathustra has to say. Zarathustra hears mockery in the animals’ discourse. Though he accuses them of trivializing, turning his greatest thought into a hurdy-gurdy song, the voicing of this accusation is, ironically, more than sufficient to give some credibility to that possibility. Like a snake, the accusation, though directed at the animals, turns around to bite him. Do Zarathustra’s deepest reflections amount to nothing but a ditty played on a barrel-organ? Do his words have any substance, any truth to tell? Are his words an indulgence in idle chatter? This in turn raises another constellation of questions, for whether or not his speech is idle chatter is in part a question of the truth-content and, at least in part, a question of sincerity. Can idle chatter be true? Is chatter to be defined by its content—and if so, does its truth matter? Or is it to be defined by more subjective and intersubjective factors— by intention and attitude, say, making it, as it were, a distinctive languagegame? How seriously does Zarathustra mean what he says? Does he really mean what he is saying? Because, if he does mean what he says, if he is in that sense serious, then maybe it should not be treated as a idle chatter—or as a mere ditty. But in that case, should what is being said be judged by its truth or its reason? Then is what he is saying—the claim, namely, about the eternal return of the same—just foolish? Or is it perhaps simple-minded, reducing the complex, or the incomprehensible, to something all too simple to understand that way? Would we ourselves be foolish if we repudiated “chatter”? What is wrong with “chatter”? Is it necessarily meaningless or empty? Could “chatter”, toying with this thought, toying with that, even be, as the early German Romantics thought, the beginning of philosophical thinking—or, at the very least, one of its sources? Can “serious philosophical thought” always be distinguished from “idle chatter”? In Novalis’s “Monologue”, which I will quote at some length, this question is understood to represent a serious challenge to the seemingly unbreachable disciplinary walls that philosophical thought has constructed around itself:

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There is really something very foolish about speaking and writing. . . . One can only marvel at the ridiculous mistake that people make when they think—that they speak for the sake of things. The particular quality of language, the fact that it is concerned only with itself, is known to no one. Language is such a marvelous and fruitful secret—because when someone speaks merely for the sake of speaking, he utters the most splendid, most original truths. But if he wants to speak of something definite, capricious language makes him say the most ridiculous and confused things. This is also the cause of the hatred that so many serious people feel toward language. They notice its mischief, but not the fact that the chattering they scorn is the infinitely serious aspect of language.

Continuing this argument for the virtues of chatter, Novalis contends that words, like mathematical formulae, “constitute a world of their own”: [These formulae] play only with themselves, express nothing but their own marvelous nature, and just for this reason they are so expressive—just for this reason the strange play of relations between things is mirrored in them. Only through their freedom are they elements of nature and only in their free movements does the world soul manifest itself in them and make them a sensitive measure and ground plan of things.22

Thus he encourages an experience with language, and with the voicing of thought, that releases language from the suffocating rule of a severe rationality that would tolerate, if it could have its way, no free play, no free association of words, no voice unwilling to subordinate its tone, its melody and measure to the demands of the voice of Reason. Reflecting on Kierkegaard and Heidegger, two philosophers who, in different ways, compel us, their readers, to question our reliance on conventional notions of sense and nonsense, Wittgenstein once observed: Everything that we feel like saying [here] can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This “running up against” Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated in a quite similar way (as running up against Paradox). This running up against the limits of language is Ethics.

“Yet,” he confided, “the tendency represented by the running up against points to something.”23 Perhaps this is why he once wrote a note saying, “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness [Dummheit]!”24 In another note, he pursues this point, suggesting that, “For a philosopher, there is more grass growing down in the valleys

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of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.”25 One could take these remarks to mean that, in the valleys of silliness, there is much for the philosopher to do, cutting through the silliness and bringing the inhabitants of those valleys to their senses. But one could also take these remarks to suggest that there is much to learn and much to provoke thought precisely in such silliness. I think it crucial to realize, however, that these two readings are not necessarily incompatible. If it is true that philosophical thought is needed to “correct” sound sense that has somehow gone astray, it is no less true that philosophical thought will find, precisely there where it must go to rescue “common sense”, great provocations, great challenges, new angles and perspectives from which to continue its adventure. Wittgenstein himself must have thought so, for he also remarks, in another note, that, “Our greatest stupidities may [also] be very wise.”26 He believes not only that these wise stupidities show themselves in language, but also that it is what language permits, or even encourages us to say—what language makes it possible to say—which tempts us to wander into nonsense. Thus, for him, the philosopher is inevitably compelled to struggle with language: struggle to overcome its temptations to nonsense—but struggle, also, to say what needs to be said in the best possible way. But Wittgenstein read his Nietzsche well, and he learned, as had Nietzsche before him, that it will often be in what appears to be nonsense that the limits of language—limits that are also its conditions of possibility—are encountered, offering fertile ground for the transformation of all-too-settled experience. Zarathustra climbs to the heights; but precisely there, he learns that he cannot avoid the return to the chattering of the valley, the silliness, the hurdy-gurdy song. Nietzsche’s trope of the barrel-organ returns us to the question of sincerity, to the extent that the image conjures up a certain blustering pomposity, a deceitful self-inflation. Sincerity and truth are intertwining here and cannot be disentangled. What if the desire for sincerity—for speaking humanly—can find no secure measure in the essence? What if the aporetic logic of sincerity—being true to oneself—were to turn it into its opposite? If sincerity means—requires— being true to one’s word, hence being true to oneself, such that word and self correspond; if it requires the coincidence of the self with itself, or in other words, an essentialism of identity, then it is not only that sincerity is impossible—because temporality is the condition of all consciousness, and because all our knowledge, both of ourselves and of our world, is finite, and susceptible therefore to error; but also that the claim is rendered deceptive, mere pretence, necessarily insincere, for it claims sincerity on the ground of an impossible coincidence or correspondence. Thus, a fortiori, the only way to sincerity would pass through insincerity. According to Kant, one should not count on hearing the truth when one hears a “tone of truthfulness” in the voice.27 The animals’ exchange with Zarathustra supplements this sobering skepticism: How can the philosopher claim to speak with conviction—how can the voice communicate

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this conviction? Resuming, in A Pitch of Philosophy, certain Nietzschean contestations that Wittgenstein set in motion, Stanley Cavell raises his own questions in this regard, calling attention to the tone or pitch of the philosophical voice, in large measure a question of its “speaking humanly”: Could I speak philosophically and mean every word I said? . . . And does it mean that I have—before I speak—to ask myself whether I am sincere in my words, whether I want all their consequences, put to no matter what scrutiny? Who would say anything under such conditions?28

The animals, Zarathustra’s interlocutors, are, in an uncanny sense, voices of conscience, voices of sobriety, tolerating no delusions, no easy victories. Misrepresented by philosophical thought, the animals cannot resist finding ways to question its claims—and its voice. Philosophy itself—the question of its boundaries, its ways of marking and remarking the difference between it and, on the one hand, science (domain of objective truth) and, on the other hand, the art of fiction (domain of subjective truth)—is ultimately at stake: one might even dare to say it is at risk. If the borders cannot be defended, if they become porous, or fissured, like the Great Wall of China in Kafka’s story, then the old confidence, our assuring ourselves that philosophical discourse is not a ditty, not a hurdy-gurdy song—not even resembling such a form, is disturbed, and thought must renounce the need for settled accounts, absolute differences, even revising its conception, its theory, of truth. More scandalous still, thought must allow for the questioning of its meaningfulness: not merely its significance, but, more essentially, its very sense: whether or not it even makes sense. But, of course, thought could make perfect sense, could, that is, be intelligible—and yet be utterly trite, utterly pointless, “a waste of breath”, as we sometimes are stirred to say. Banality is perhaps just another form of madness. Compelling Zarathustra to defend the difference between his “thought” and the hurdy-gurdy tunes of the barrel-organ, the animals also compel us— not only to question the philosophical voice with regard to the seriousness and sincerity of its conviction, but eventually to confront the exclusion of the imagination from the interior of philosophical discourse. Is philosophical thought free from the operations of imagination? Is it possible without the art—the artifice—of the imagination? Can there be knowledge of the world without the imagination? Can there be truth without fiction? Kant conceded a role for the imagination in the production of empirical knowledge; and he even, in his late essays in the philosophy of history, believed there could be intimations of providential truth in the conjectural reconstruction of history by a power of imagination—although he required that the imagination agree to the company of Reason. Even Kant, whose argument for truth-telling verges on a fanatical madness, recognized the usefulness of the imagination

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in philosophical thought: an employment distinct from its schematizing role in the acquisition of empirical knowledge, but equally distinct from its role in aesthetic judgement. Can we always say, or anyway easily say, where the essential difference lies between the philosophical and the fictional—or, for that matter, between the meaningful and the meaningless? Can we isolate the intelligible from the sensible? Must we always be able to answer—I mean resolve, settle—all these questions once and for all? Is it not, after all, important that philosophical discourse maintain its openness to contestation? If such thought requires an exercising of the imagination, then thought must acknowledge, must avow its employment of conjectures, speculations, hypotheses, stories, myths, metaphors, and an assortment of other tropes and tricks. And must it prove its worth—prove that it is not a mere nursery-rhyme, or a mere ditty? Must it demonstrate its truth-value, its seriousness of purpose, its conviction, justifying its sobriety? If so, how? Could such demonstration be truthful, worthy of trust, without acknowledging that which, in showing itself, shows its incomprehensibility? Can thought ever hope to “come to terms” with the incomprehensible—or with the incomprehensibility of the incomprehensible? These questions take us to the verge of the abyssal—there, precisely there, where thought imagines its return to itself. To be worthy of its name, philosophical thought must never cease to ask itself about its sincerity, about its humanity, its commitment to truth, its avoidance of idle chatter, its defense of boundaries, its rhetorical investments, its tone of voice. And it must never cease to question the adequacy of its responsiveness to the needs of its time, questioning its capacity to “speak humanly”, questioning its arrogation of the right to speak for everyone. [2] A second thread that intrigues me is the question of convalescence. To identify the achievement of song with the moment of convalescence, as Zarathustra’s animal companions suggest, is, in effect, to deconstruct the dualisms that have ruled the history of metaphysics; it is to celebrate, as the possibility of a utopian moment, an intimation, indeed, of redemption, the reconciliation of the sensuous and the intelligible, the sensible and the conceptual, the rational and the corporeal. (I take Freud’s insistence on “free association” to be based on a certain recognition of the fact that these diremptions have actually become manifest in numerous pathological symptoms: “free association”, bringing together, hence accepting, what repression has kept apart, would thus answer the need for a procedure to cure the psychopathology for which the dualisms in our cultural life are responsible.) What does it take to heal the fateful wound of mortality and transmute all the suffering that afflicts us into forms of moral strength? The animals are telling Zarathustra that there is healing power in singing the truth, in making it sing; and that is because the singing of truth roots it in the earth, and because singing involves the harmony of mind and body, reason and feeling, sense

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and sensibility—the overcoming or sublimation of our culturally constructed dualisms. But whilst the earth nourishes & nurses, it also threatens the truth with the abyssal withdrawal of its grounding. Poetic language is rooted in an earth, a materiality it must struggle to claim: it can take nothing for granted. What does this mean for the voicing of philosophical thought? What does the voice need to learn to become more “human”, more responsive to the suffering that summons it? Why is there a prevailing sense that the power of language—and in particular, the power of the philosophical voice—to alleviate suffering, to edify and redeem, has been lost? What are Zarathustra’s animals trying to tell us? [3] A third thread in the quoted passages concerns the question of the origin of language in song. What is the significance of the fact that Zarathustra expresses his deepest thought in the form of a song? Many have said that the origin of language is song—or that when the philosopher’s saying makes a strong connection with its origin in language, then it may become, by grace of that connection, having received its inaugural, inceptive, original richness, an original song. To convey the essence of the spoken language, Hölderlin calls the word “a flower of the mouth”. The name he gives is a poetic image for poetizing speech. In this poetic figure, he sees the word in the brief moment of its flowering. But if words are flowers, then their origin is the elemental earth, ground of being. And the voice that bears them is not merely the “expression” of subjective meanings, for this understanding of language penetrates the phenomenon so deeply that it even disturbs our investment in the boundaries that install the speaking subject in the world. The voice, drawing its tonality, strength, and measure from its rootedness in the earth, is what takes place in a dimension that hovers between world and earth. It is thus in language that, according to Heidegger, the strife between earth and world takes place most intensely, most consequentially. Moreover, it then becomes necessary for philosophical thought to avow its grounding, its rootedness, not only in the realm of the living, on and above the earth, but also in the realm of the dead, the realm beneath the earth. For there can be becoming, can be life, only if there is passing away: the eternal requires a time in transience, a passage through the apparitional, the ephemeral. If thought is grounded only in the earth, the strife, the rift deprives it of an unshakable ground, the presence of an origin. The language of thought would thus be rooted in an origin that cannot be made present. Indeed, the earth threatens to make thought absolutely abyssal. Simply because of that threat alone, the threat as such, thought is rendered already groundless, already abyssal. So a question for the philosopher becomes this: Whether or not that suspension over the abyss enables the language of thought to attain the poetic heights of song—song understood as an opening of truth. The truth is an abyss, though, that requires the voice, the song of thought to pass through the realm of echoes, the realm of the dead. It must let itself be touched and

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moved by absence, by the passing away of every presence. How, then, is thought to negotiate the necessary work of mourning? How is the voice, or the voicing, of philosophical thought to remember, to avow, its forever absent origin? How is the voice, the voicing, of thought to keep in remembrance the singing of voices, the gathering of voices, from which it learned to speak only by sacrificing its connection, letting those voices withdraw into their immemorial, unretrievable past—and relinquishing its originary rootedness? [4] A fourth thread, also bearing on the question of the origin of language, concerns the relation between nature and culture, nature and voice. In Nietzsche’s story, as in so many stories for children, the animals can talk. They have distinctive voices. Children, of course, do not think it at all strange or unnatural that animals can talk with them. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s story, as in so many stories for children, the animals are guardians of a certain wisdom—perspectives on the world that human beings cannot adopt, cannot possess. In fairy tales, they often appear as teachers, warning, showing the way, imparting useful secrets. If, as the animals assert, Zarathustra needs to learn from the songbirds how to sing, how to make his words sing or poetize, then nature teaches culture. The relation cannot be restricted to culture teaching nature. Culture must recognize its origin in nature. Language must acknowledge its mimetic origin in nature—and its need for a continuing relationship to nature. Is it not true, after all, that, when we were children, our voices were solicited and educed by the sounds of nature, sounds we found immeasurable pleasure in responsively learning to imitate? The story that Nietzsche tells calls our attention to the fact that the songs of nature—of its birds, for example—enter into our own voices. These voices, these songs, solicit the human voice, drawing it out of itself, giving it sounds to turn into phonemes and syllables, teaching it through the mimetic faculty how to sing. This indebtedness to the sounds, the voices, the songs of nature needs to be recognized; and the giving of that gift calls for the giving of thanks. But how can the human voice give thanks? There is, I suggest, only one way: by the beauty of its voice, the beauty of a voice in remembrance of its origin in nature. Would not the very realization of this remembrance transform the voice (re)turning its speech—the speech that, in obedience to the discipline, the law, of intelligible meaning, emerged only by suppressing, by sublating, the ek-static, song-like babbling of infancy—into poetizing song?

§2 The Project In Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer wrote: “Language reflects the longings of the oppressed and the plight of nature.”29 Nothing I could say condenses so exactly the two themes I want to address in this book: unfolding in Part I what is implicated in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I will attempt a philosophical

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response to the plight of nature, bringing out the responsibility, the ecological commitment reverberating in the voice; then, in Part II, concentrating on Levinas’s discussion of discourse and drawing out the implications for the experience of voice, I will attempt something of a philosophical response to the ethical claims of the oppressed. In Walden, Thoreau observes that, “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor.”30 It is this danger of forgetting that has compelled me to write this book. I want to think of this danger in terms of the experience of voice: not only the voice I call “mine”, but all the other voices that have declared their presence in the world. This is, as my title indicates, a book about voices—voices that, before the voice of reason, have already summoned us, already addressed us, already been heard—but in a receptivity to their claims that takes place long before they can be acknowledged. Thus this will also be a book about the voices that have been suppressed, denied, or gone unheard. It will be a book celebrating voices, celebrating their song; but it will also be a book of remembrance and mourning, lingering, if only briefly, on the voices that have been lost in time, leaving, as they withdraw into the silence from whence they arose, only the faintest, now, of echoes. In Houses and Travelers, W. S. Merwin shares in poesy the ancient memories and dreams gathered by the echoes he hears: Everything we hear is an echo. Anyone can tell that echoes move forward and backward in time, in rings. But not everyone realizes that, as a result, silence becomes harder and harder for us to grasp—though in itself it is unchanged—because of the echoes pouring through us out of the past, unless we can learn to set them at rest. We are still hearing the bolting of the doors of Hell, Pasiphae in her byre, the cries at Thermopylae, and do not recognize the sounds. How did we sound in the past? And there are sounds that rush away from us: echoes of future words.31

What would be required of us to set at rest those distressing echoes from the past? What is the fact of their afterlife, their persistence, telling us about ourselves—about the way we live our lives, about our way of inhabiting time, about suffering, guilt, forgiveness, and redemption? What are they telling us about our responsibilities to the past and the future? My voice, the voice I call “mine”, both is and is not my own. Listening to “my” voice, I can sometimes, if silent enough and attentive, hear, gathered and resounding within it, the voices of family, friends, teachers, and countless public voices: the intonations, inflections, rhythms, and cadences of my familiar life-world, my nation, my culture, the historical past.32 And sometimes I can hear echoes within my voice of the ghostly voices of the dead: persons I knew, persons I could never have known. There are voices that

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somehow continue to resonate, coming alive through their recordings or through their traces, left behind in words of print. Reading great poetry, one may find oneself able to hear the poet’s voice in its uncanny transpersonal afterlife. But not all the voices that inhabit our own are friendly and congenial. Even the shrill voices of those already inhabiting Hell may live on, regardless of our wishes, inhuman voices distorted by their hate, haunting the nightmarish depths of our own voices. I also can sometimes hear, lingering in my voice, mimetic reverberations, echoes, of the artifacts and machines that surround us and, in ways too subtle for consciousness, constantly solicit us, informing our voices. (The spoon that the infant dropped whilst learning how to handle it made a sound that, with a mixture of earnestness and delight, he tried to mimick.) And I can hear, within my voice, the voices of nature—its animals, its birds, its creaking, sighing and whispering trees, its raging waters, waters descending the mountains, howling winds, thundering clouds. Adopting words first used to describe the sounds of animals, we speak, for example, of people barking, growling, howling, snarling, purring, parroting, chirping, hissing, and croaking. Learning to speak, the infant’s voice is solicited by all these sounds, beckoned and bestirred, finding itself admitted into meaningful communication as it gathers them up into a wondrous repertoire of phonemes, syllables, and the recognizable shapes of words. Thoreau’s prescient warning is one of the things that stirred me to write this book, for it is my argument that Merleau-Ponty and Levinas understood the danger of forgetfulness and, sought, each in his own way and for his own purposes, to guide the voice to its remembrance, a remembrance without which the voice would remain bereft of its humanity. In Merleau-Ponty we find an effort to overcome the diremptions at work in our relation to language: diremptions that are bringing our relation to nature—our relation to its ecology—close to a time of catastrophe. And in Levinas, we find an effort to recuperate the ethical moments in our relation to language that rationalism and empiricism, both forms of egoism that, deaf to the voices of others, deny our dispossession, deny our indebtedness, deny our subjection to the other, and deny our responsibility to be as responsive to the needs and concerns of others as we can possibly be. Although I can have, by now, few illusions about the effectiveness of philosophical ruminations—about the power of such reflections to make a real, material difference in the way we inhabit the world, I would nonetheless like to think of this book as a phenomenologically argued contribution to a certain mindfulness, a certain attentiveness and vigilance. After Levinas, I want to educe from an experience of the voice an ethics of the other—or, more broadly considered, a humanism of the other; and, after MerleauPonty, I want to elicit from an experience of the voice a heightened consciousness of our place in nature, an intricate consciousness of our chiasmic interactions with nature—intertwining interactions such as might eventuate

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in ways of relating to the natural environment that would respect its needs and serve its sustainability as a whole. There is, therefore, a distinctive logic behind my attempt to conjoin the projects of these two philosophers. In the phenomenologies that they both unfold, an ethical claim is at stake: on my reading, they both direct our attention to a claim on our responsivity, our responsibility, appropriating the nature of the body at, or in, its prereflective, prepersonal, “metaphysical” dimension, taking hold, and making us beholden, prior to the acquisition of language and the corresponding emergence of an ego-logical consciousness formed within the grammar of the subject-object structure. I will accordingly be concentrating on the deeper dimensions of our embodied experience—especially earlier moments in our experience with speech and voice—that a phenomenology, hermeneutically engaged with the recessive, can bring forth. Thus, in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I am arguing that the “logos” is always already ecological—that, in a pre-linguistic dimension or moment of embodied experience which, in his early work, is described as preconscious and prepersonal, and in his later work as “chiasmic” and “intertwining”, there is already a responsive interaction with nature, such that the voice is already eco-logical: ecologically generated, ecologically attuned, ecologically indebted—and accordingly, as such, it has already implicitly acknowledged what cannot be denied, namely, its ethical responsibility for nature. I will argue that, in the attempt at a recuperation, a “reprise”, of the prepersonal origination of the voice, the echoes, inevitably fading and almost gone, of an originary ethical relation to ecology can still be heard, despite the impossibility of any adequation, any coincidence with this originary past: through the body’s responsivity—that is, through its assumption of the sensuous linguistic materials nature bestowed, making the human voice possible, and through its exposure in anamnestic feeling, we find ourselves in phenomenological reflection already charged with a pre-linguistic claim on our responsibility for nature: a responsibility resounding through a felt sense of the inaugural attunement with which nature once graced the human voice. Phenomenological reflection on the prelinguistic origin of the voice that bears the “logos” could thus become a remembrance of nature: a remembrance, moreover, with the power to inspire, to motivate, appropriate action. But how, more specifically, though, should we understand this responsibility? In poesy, the voice returns to nature the songs it has received, celebrating and commemorating its origin and inspiration in nature. This is one of the ways for the voice to correspond to its responsibility. But it can also speak out with eloquence, warning against the wonton destruction of the environment; arguing in the public realm for the preservation and restitution of lakes, rivers, forests, meadows, bogs and swamps; giving itself to the animals, who, creatures without speech, can only suffer their starvation and extinction in an unspeakable silence; and letting a felt sense of the earth, in

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Thoreau’s incomparable image, cling to its words, giving weight to their sense.33 As Emerson observed, one who is mindful of nature “forges the subtle and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command.”34 But can nature be filled once again with the breath of inspiration? I have a story to tell here: a narrative that takes up, or takes over—in French one would perhaps use the word “reprise”—what, whilst remaining unthought in Merleau-Ponty’s deep phenomenology, is nonetheless, I believe, implicitly indicated. Expressed in a way that is reminiscent of Hegel and Schelling, both significant sources of inspiration for a phenomenology of nature, I suggest that the chapters on Merleau-Ponty constitute a narrative which follows the course of spirit’s increasing self-consciousness and self-recognition in its return to a dying nature, a nature bereft of spirit, a nature already undergoing the catastrophes that spell its death: a narrative which attempts to reanimate a realm that spirit, precisely in its estrangement, has emptied of meaning and value. The story I want to tell, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, brings out both the entanglements and the estrangements in this relationship between nature and spirit, noting the dialectic of irony in the reduction to mechanics of a nature that spirit expelled from itself and repudiated, not recognizing itself in nature’s laws. Bereft of spirit, nature becomes a mechanism, dying but lingering on, a haunting presence, persisting as a realm of unfreedom, the most extreme, most abject compulsion, hostile, finally, to the very life of spirit. Can nature again become normative for us—as it was, we surmise, for the ancients? What reconciliation can spirit, realizing its guilt and responsibility, now hope for, since, even in its dying, or rather, precisely in and because of its dying, nature is still powerful enough to make its moral claim and compel a responsivity befitting the plight? There is, in this historical hour, affected so acutely by the traumas of rational disenchantment, a disavowed remembrance of nature that summons us, urgently demanding our thought and action. Thus, what will be offered here is a phenomenology that, in working with subjectivity, attentive to the echoes of nature persisting in the human voice, recalls our eco-logical responsibility and guides our thinking into the realm of objective spirit. It is in this realm that nature is now revealing its suffering. As Jay Bernstein has argued with eloquence in an essay commemorating the critical thought of Adorno, in the process of releasing human life from the primordial powers of nature, the abstract Reason of the Enlightenment separated itself, and consequently us, from all that is “rooted in or parts of an anthropomorphic nature, the nature implicit in our animal embodiment and its objects: what is seeable by the human eye, touchable by the human hand, whose size and heft are measured in relation to the human body. . . .”35 But, as he points out, a critique of the Enlightenment conception of Reason, a critique grounded in our present historical experience with nature, is extremely

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difficult, because the very nature in whose name we must argue has been destroyed by the Enlightenment, replaced by “the mechanical nature of Newtonian science and the autonomous culture of capital.”36 Does “Nature” even exist anymore? As Hegel anticipated, the dying away of spirit within a nature increasingly subjected to the operations of “rationalization” would eventually turn anthropomorphic nature into an adverse “fate”.37 Consequently, the suffering of nature that we have caused finally appears in, and as, the condition of our own suffering: we of today are experiencing, as Habermas says, echoing Hegel, “the reactive force of a life that has been suppressed and separated off.”38 The dialectic of Enlightenment now reveals its ironic truth in relation to the realm of nature: the causality of fate, from which we mortals struggled to win our release, overcomes the causality of freedom, once again exposing us to the violence of nature. The remembrance of nature in the subject, stimulating a longing for what has been lost, accordingly becomes imperative. In “Das Allgemeine Brouillon”, Novalis remarked: “The largest part of our body, our humanity itself, is still sleeping a deep sleep.”39 We are in exile from nature; but we still carry a felt sense, slumbering in our bodies, in our voices, of remembrance, echoes of a preconscious, prelinguistic attunement that once was. Is any awakening possible? Is any kind of reconciliation possible? Is any resumption, any “reprise” of that attunement still possible? How can the voice that bespeaks our humanity be aroused, so that it triumph wherever now the destructive prevails? At stake is the possible spiritualization—or, in a sense, the reënchantment—of nature as the only responsible response to the normative moral claim that cries out for recognition in the otherwise dangerous naturalization of spirit—a process that captures spirit in a nature quantified, mechanized, and finally mortified. This possibility, however, requires that spirit bring into subjectivity the remembrance of nature, remembrance of a relation to nature, to earth and sky; that spirit avow its emergence from nature, acknowledging its own sensuous, material, corporeal nature—this relation of spirit to nature “slumbering” (as Novalis, and Schelling too, would want to say) in our bodies and voices; and that it assume a fitting guardianship of this nature, philosophically, phenomenologically revivifying a quietly dying nature. (Heidegger would perhaps suggest here the wonderfully resonant word, “Wächterschaft”, to describe the vigilance, the alertness, the attentiveness of this guardianship.) Thus, to borrow words from Gregg Horowitz, the task here is to use Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to tell a story about the voice that enables us to hear more sympathetically and more understandingly the echoes which, precisely in their passing away, beyond hearing and beyond recall, attest to the truth that a “memorialized dead nature confronts cheerful spirit with its forgotten conditions of emergence.”40 If, for Hegel, “the work of art is,” as Horowitz says, “spirit’s survival of nature’s death in essentially

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sensuous forms”,41 we might think of ecologically attuned consciousness as an urgent task of spirit: as the spirit’s attempt to survive by reanimating a dying nature in the form of a concrete, material practice, a practice related to social and cultural institutions. I am accordingly proposing in my chapters on Merleau-Ponty that we understand ecology in terms of an experience with the human voice: as a form of consciousness, or rather, as a practice of the self constitutive of a new form of subjectivity, in which we would attend to the echoes within the voice we call “our own,” attend to the sounds and voices of nature, letting those sounds and voices that gather within our voice echo and resound within us, bringing us closer in attunement to the realm of nature, not only summoning us, but teaching us their language, giving us sounds we turn into syllables, forever thereby, however, separating the human voice from the voices of nature, which remain dependent for their redemption on the human voice. If one can make any sense out of the idea of the redemption of language (with the genitive case in the second “of” understood here in both its subjective and objective forms), then it would be precisely in this mythopoetic moment, when the voices of our language have become openings or clearings that, “letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself” (as Heidegger put it in Being and Time, radically altering its Husserlian antecedent), would let the voices of nature freely echo, assuring nature’s normative claim together with its eternal promise. If it is true, though, as Horowitz has argued,42 that the concealed history of spirit’s reckless “progress” is the dying of nature, then I want to argue that, in responding to the moral character of the claims of nature and assuming responsibility for a viable ecology, philosophical thought must tap into a terrible nagging guilt that our present historical consciousness—the present shape of spirit—has not avowed, for it is increasingly apparent that nature has returned spirit’s violence, turning its ravaged, wasted countenance towards spirit in a final warning, a final remonstrance. More specifically, the first task for phenomenology—I mean a phenomenology indebted to Merleau-Ponty—must accordingly be to abrogate the supposed externality of the natural world, breaking through the structure of subject-and-object to reveal, beneath and before it, a prelinguistic attunement that lets us hear the normative claims for its safekeeping that nature makes, in return for its generosity, on the life of spirit. We are beings of flesh and blood; we are sensuous as well as rational. So we need a sensuous presentation of the conditions of possibility constitutive of ethical life. The intent in this book is therefore to interpret the normativity of our moral ideas and ideals in terms of their corporeal manifestation—“wie sie leibhaft gegeben sind”. And now some correspondingly preliminary words about my approach to Levinas. Levinas’s ethics likewise requires a narrative detailing the phenomenological moments in the journey of spirit towards an incarnate self-consciousness

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that absolutely shatters the ego’s constructs of identity, opening the self to the conditions of its other. In the context of Levinas’s phenomenology, where the principal virtue of our methodology, from the standpoint of his ethics, is its restriction of ethical judgements to the first-person singular—not for the sake of a Cartesian, Kantian, Fichtean or Husserlian idealism, grounding knowledge in subjectivity, but rather, out of regard for the absolute alterity of the other, in order to avoid imposing on the other the philosopher’s own experience and own interpretations of experience, I am arguing that there is a prelinguistic dimension or moment of embodied experience where corporeal matter is transformed into the flesh of spirit and that this is where, in a time that Levinas describes as prior to volition, prior to consciousness, and thus prior to (egological) memory, the ethical responsibility to and for the other first takes hold. In other words, just as, working through the phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty evolved, we will elicit an ecologically attuned, responsive voice from a dimension of experience that precedes the “logos” of the “ego cogito” and lies beneath it—a voice, namely, that bespeaks an “ancient” commitment of responsibility for the safekeeping of nature, so I want to argue that Levinas’s phenomenology intimates traces or echoes of a proto-ethical voice that lays down the conditions of possibility for ethical life and already bespeaks an immemorial commitment of responsibility to and for the welfare of the other person. This is the voice of the other; but call it, if you like, the commanding voice of God borne by the already heteronomic body of pre-linguistically felt experience. Moreover, just as, through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, we can learn to hear, within our own voice, the gathering of voices through which the forms of nature summon us, bringing forth our voice, teaching us their languages, giving us sounds we turn into syllables, yet forever separating thereby the human voice from the voices of nature, which henceforth become dependent for their redemption on the human voice, so, through the phenomenology of Levinas, we can learn to hear, echoing within “our own” voice, the voices of other persons, voices that summon us, bringing forth our own voice, teaching us their languages, giving us a shared world, voices hostile as well as friendly, but all requiring recognition and response in the singularity of the ethical relation and in keeping with the universal justice of the ideal political order. In both cases, it will thus be a question of setting in motion reflections that could, perhaps, contribute to “new forms of subjectivity”, leaving behind, as Michel Foucault argued, “the kind of individuality imposed on us for several centuries.”43 Thinking with the phenomenologies of both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, what I want to show is that, in the deepest structural dimension of subjectivity, the supposedly sovereign ego-logical subject, which at the dawn of modernity asserted its desire for absolute independence, freedom from all of nature’s exterior determinability, is always in fact embedded in a context of relations that inherently charge the subject with responsibilities corresponding to its existential position.

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Our present time, suffering the cumulative consequences of centuries of reckless individualism, desperately requires a new, more enlightened form of individualism: a form in which freedom is grounded in a strong sense of responsibility for the flourishing of the natural environment and its animal inhabitants, and in a recognition of our moral obligation to do as much as we possibly can to ensure the well-being of all human beings—those living now and those to come. Phenomenological reflection is capable not only of taking us into the deeper dimension of subjectivity, there where such responsibility and obligation will reveal themselves; it is also capable of strengthening our mindfulness, sharpening our perception of the specific, concrete situations in which we find ourselves, sharpening our perception of what response each situation calls for. Thus understood, phenomenological reflection becomes what Foucault thought of as a “practice of the self”. But what this practice of reflection brings back from its venture into the depths of the embodied subject is the “logic of alterity” that claims the process of “caring for the self”: to “care for the self” is to care for the other, without which the self could not be, and could not survive. In one of his “Working Notes”, written not long before his untimely death, Merleau-Ponty wrote: What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference—(VIF 318, VIE 264)

With this Schellingian formula, Merleau-Ponty would remind the prevailing subject of its responsibilities and obligations. This is a reminder, however, that subverts the entire ontology on which this subject stands.44 In his reflections “On the Concept of Philosophy”, Max Horkheimer remarks that, “Philosophy must become more sensitive to the muted testimonies of language and plumb the layers of experience preserved in it.”45 But is social theory the only way to become more sensitive and plumb the dimensions of experience? In the present book, it will be a sensitively attuned hermeneutical phenomenology that can and must assume this obligation. In Part I, working with or from Merleau-Ponty, I will be bringing out, from the depths of the human voice, precisely this “muted testimony” regarding our ecological responsibility: the “logos” is always already eco-logical, always already indebted to and responsible for the realm of nature. But we require a hermeneutically calibrated phenomenology to educe a felt sense of this originary, prelinguistic moment or dimension; for ecological appropriation, the ecological claim, structures a prelinguistic, prepersonal, pre-egological experience with the voice—an experience of attunement by and to the voices of nature buried underneath subsequent “layers” of experience, “aufgehoben”, repressed and surpassed in the child’s entrance into the language of its community, but still preserved in the felt sense of traces, vestiges, echoes of

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echoes. (This “reserve” of embodied experience, of language and voice, is part of what I take Merleau-Ponty to be calling to our attention with his late introduction of the concept of “institution”.) And in Part II, working with Levinas, I will attempt to bring out, not the ecological responsibility of the voice, but instead its ethical responsibility to and for the other: a responsibility, likewise requiring a hermeneutical phenomenology in order to access the “muted testimony” that has been registered in the enigma of a pre-originary Saying. This is a Saying which bespeaks the ethical claim by the other that appropriated the ego-logical voice in a time before time, in a time unbeknownst to egological consciousness, and which persists in echoing its commitment within the depths of the ego-logical voice. The ethical claim—Levinas will call this “substitution”—structures the voice of the ego-logical subject: its “muted testimony”, still echoing faintly, and as if it were nothing, constitutes the ethical character of our intersubjectivity. Entering the depths of my experience with the voice, the testimony I would hear tells me that my voice belongs to the other: not only in the sense that it is deeply indebted to the other, without whom I would not have learned to speak, but also in the sense that, by the fact of its responsiveness, its ability to be responsive, this voice has always already committed me to “using” my voice for the sake of the other. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seems to have approximated this level of ethical awareness that we are concerned with, observing that phenomenological reflexivity can teach us that, “our relationship to the social, like our relationship to the world, is deeper than any express perception or any judgement.” Explaining this remark, he says: We must return to the social with which we are already in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification. [. . .] Prior to the process of becoming aware, the social exists as a muffled sound and as a summons [sourdement et comme sollicitation]. (PPF 415–16, PPE 362)

If we were to substitute “the ethical” for “the social”, we could I think suppose that Levinas would easily have agreed to this proposition: like Merleau-Ponty, he takes us into a dimension of our experience with language—with the voice—in which, prior to our becoming aware, we are always already in an existential relation. For Merleau-Ponty, this is a symmetrical relation, in fact, a relation of transpositions, reciprocities and reversibilities. For Levinas, this is, on the contrary, an asymmetrical ethical relation of supererogatory obligation. But, for our voices to make contact with their social and ethical origination—to become truly human voices capable of “speaking humanly”, we need to develop our capacity to hear. The echoes that Merwin evokes— echoes from the past and the future, echoes belonging to the dead and to

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generations not yet born, are dependent on our learning to listen in a way that “escapes the thrall of the philosophy of the subject”46 Blanchot again: In the august sense, to hear is always already to have heard: to take one’s place in the assembly of prior listeners [écoutants antérieurs] and thus permit them once again to be present in this enduring hearing [dans l’entente persévérante].47

The ethical relation requires that the voice come from and return to such a listening. This is its openness, its exposure, its vulnerability—its responsibility for responsiveness. Such is the human voice, listening, summoned to become memory, drawing inspiration from an ethical origin not entirely forgotten and forsaken.

§3 The Ethical Root of the Voice In “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Benjamin remarks that, “The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth”. I take it that he is here arguing not only against empathic projection as the appropriate method for a historiography committed to social justice but also, perhaps even more vehemently, against “historicism”, a historiography that mortifies the past by burying it forever in a temporal continuum that denies its radically emancipatory potential any future intervention, any future return. But his remark lends itself to multiple interpretations. We might, for instance, suppose that that “void” is the abyss of silence from which the historian, like Benjamin committed both to materialism and to messianism, must attempt, whatever the risk, whatever the pain and sacrifice—and despite an awkwardness almost certain of failure—to bring to fitting words that which remains incorruptibly unspeakable. In that unspeakable silence, the cries of all the innocent victims that history has thought buried continue to resound, reminding us not to forget the redemption of the past. But it is all too easy for the historian to betray the past, even with the noblest of intentions. The “good tidings”, the promise of redemption that summons us to realize it, can all too easily be lost, buried in the silence of indifference and cowardice. How is the historian to speak of this promise? How is the historian to let the voices of the dead, voices whose cries for justice have been forever silenced, speak to us, the living? If the unspeakable is to be confronted in the suffering of extreme injustice, the terror of tyrannical regimes, the brutality of war, the horror of genocide, it is also to be recognized in the absolute silence in which one waits for the promise of redemption to resound. All speech, all poetic song worthy of the name must draw its words from the dialectical force-field of the unspeakable, an abyss of unspeakable silence.

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Benjamin’s remark provoked some reflections that bear on the project with which the present book is concerned. The eyes, as we know, are capable of both seeing and weeping. Is there not great significance to be derived from this common origin? In the involuntariness of weeping, there prevails, beyond every relation to a singularity, the expression of a utopian wish for a redeemed world. As I first argued in an earlier work, The Opening of Vision, the ethical root of vision, of our capacity to see, is weeping, that moment, underlying the settled structure of the subject and object, in which what binds is an unsettling affective connection, an experience that the eyes are incapable of seeing clearly and distinctly. What would the ethical root of speech be? Perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s text on “The Child’s Relations with Others” suggests a way to think about this question. Drawing on empirical research, he calls attention to the phenomenon, not uncommon in nurseries, of a “contagion of cries”, in which, as if by contagion, the crying of one unhappy infant provokes in other infants, seemingly contented, a sympathetic outburst of crying. I suggest that the ethical root of speech is the experience of unspeakable sympathy, a responsive cry, a voice overcome by the suffering of the other. The root is the voice of sympathy, deprived of adequate words, the voice choked, broken, stuttering, drawn from an unspeakably deep chiasmus: this, I think, is the ethical root of the voice that needs to be permitted to come—and needs to be experienced as coming—before the voice of Reason. The voices that come before the voice of Reason are not only to be judged by the rigorous principles of Reason; they also come before it in accusation, repudiating the reduction of critical Reason to the false enlightenment of an administrative, technocratic, merely instrumental rationality committed to positivism and objectivism. And, in their involuntary deprivation of the ability to speak in the measured tone and rhythm of Reason, these voices, however distorted by the oppression or compassion they suffer, give, in their resistance, momentary expression to a utopian dream that an enlightened, critically charged Reason alone is powerless to communicate and actualize. And where, in philosophical discourse, are the voices of ordinary life to be heard?

§4 The Voice of Reason “Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.” —Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, 165–66.

In the performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm says to Clov, “We’re not beginning to . . . to mean something?” Clov retorts: “Mean something! You and I mean something!” And, with a mocking laugh, he adds:

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“Ah, that’s a good one!” This provokes Hamm to say, “Imagine, if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough?” At this point, an offstage voice suddenly interrupts the events on stage to ask: “What is the voice of a rational being?”48 Neither Hamm nor Clove are stirred to answer, leaving the audience to struggle, if it will, with the question. Philosophers, however, cannot avoid this struggle, cannot avoid questioning the tone of voice in which their philosophical thought is embodied—and first of all, their right to take that tone. As Stanley Cavell points out, Wittgenstein’s “conception of philosophy’s poverty” speaks to our time in this regard, acknowledging, after the collapse of the great philosophical systems, the obligation to examine the authority and the tone or pitch of its own voice: The writer of the Investigations declares that philosophy does not speak first. Philosophy’s virtue is responsiveness. What makes it philosophy is not that its response will be total, but that it will be tireless, awake when the others have all fallen asleep. Its commitment is to hear itself called on, and when called on—but only then, and only insofar as it has an interest—to speak. [. . .] All my words are someone else’s.49

One might profitably think of this conception of philosophy in relation to Levinas’s emphasis, in his early writings, on the unavoidability of “insomnia”. In a letter sent in 1799 to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Jacobi, Nietzsche’s source for the term “nihilism”, reflects on a significant etymological connection, observing that: The root of Reason [Vernunft] is listening [Vernehmen]. Pure Reason [Reine Vernunft] is a listening which listens only to itself. Or: Pure Reason listens only to itself.50

To understand Reason as listening, or as requiring listening, is surely admirable. It certainly suggests an alternative to the hegemony of vision, an inheritance from Platonism, which continued the connection, secured by the language of ancient Greece, between “I see” and “I know”. Its virtue, in this regard, would be that it makes Reason take part in dialogue. However, the words “only to itself” are cause for some hesitancy. Jacobi undoubtedly meant that Reason listens—and should listen—only to what meets its normative conditions of reasonableness. But what is being excluded here? What is it that a Reason which listens only to itself will not listen to? On what grounds does Reason determine what is and is not itself, is and is not identical with itself, is and is not outside, or beside itself? The language of “purity” also raises questions. Troubling questions, for it implies that what is not included in “Reason” must in some way be

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contaminated—even perhaps contaminating. The history of that word should at the very least cause us to be wary. Could the predication of “purity” itself contaminate Reason? And what about madness, which Descartes invoked only in order to define Reason as its negation? Is there nothing to be learned from listening to the voices of madness? Although Socrates was presumably an exemplary “man of reason”, he always listened to the voice of the wise daemon that watched over him. And, as we know, this voice reminded him of a divine form of love, a love that expressed divine madness. Who can say what the voice of a rational being is or must be? What is the voice of Reason—the only voice that Reason will consent to hear? If it claims to be a “universal” voice, how does it do justice to what is thought to be other than Reason? Since the beginning of modernity, processes of rationalization have tended either to standardize or to exclude the human voice. In Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the loss of voice does not remain unnoticed: [H]e had come to this ancient city only to recuperate a little, under the baroque spell of the old Austrian culture, from the calculations, materialism, and bleak rationalism in which a civilized man’s busy working life was spent nowadays. . . . . “Yes”, he had said, “we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives.”51

The first voices to be extinguished, of course, were the “inner voices”. But with their extinction, the ordinary voices of everyday life are left without their roots, vulnerable to the uncompromising forces of rationalization. This book is also a contribution to “genealogy” in a sense close to that of Nietzsche and Foucault, inasmuch as it attempts to expose the deafness and arrogance in the procedures that, in the name of Reason and its “rationalization”, are controlling discourse formation; and it attempts to bring to light some of the more fateful effects of these procedures. As we know, in Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida launched a powerful attack on the historically unexamined commitment of philosophical thought to what he named “logocentrism”, defining it as a “limitation of sense to knowledge, of logos to objectivity, of language to reason”: a commitment that posits “the unity of thought and voice in logos”. He also set in motion a critical examination of “phonocentrism”, the priority, the privilege, granted to speech, to voice—a status explicitly articulated by Plato, who favoured speech and voice over writing because of the total presence of meaning he assumed they enjoyed. Derrida, however, argued that the ego cogito cannot enjoy absolute self-presence, that even in speech and voice there is unavoidable absence, and that the historical commitment to an ontology of total, constant presence—absolute metaphysical presence—is not at all defensible. Speech and voice cannot be rescued from iterability, difference, selfdivision, absence—the fate of “écriture”. As Daniel Heller-Roazen argues:

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“Essentially variable by virtue of the time that is its element, speech is incapable of being fully possessed and so, too, completely lost; always already forgotten, it can never be recalled.”52 At the end of “The Supplement of Origin”, the concluding section of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida argues that, It remains, then, for us to speak, to make our voices resonate throughout the corridors in order to supplement, or make up for [suppléer], the impact [éclat] of presence.53

Derrida is here instancing the undecidable, uncontrollable ambiguity of meaning, once the authority of the author has been relinquished, for “suppléer” can mean either “supplement” or “make up for” and “éclat” can mean either “impact” or “disseminating explosion”. In any event, however, it must be pointed out that the resonance of the voice itself breaks up, or calls into question, the metaphysical “experience” of presence. As long as voices are resonating, the “absolute presence” desired by metaphysics remains impossible. Hence my claim that resonance defeats the possibility of presence. Thus, for example, whereas the language of literature—the language of the imagination—favours resonance, the language of science, the language of jurisprudence, and the language of facticity are required to avoid it. But insofar as the voice can neither be excluded nor totally controlled, and is never without resonance, it can never actually effectuate and guarantee absolute presence. Philosophers who assert the superiority of speech in relation to writing, believing that speech, or voice, can claim and enjoy a presence impossible for the written word have simply shut their ears to the phenomenon of resonance—indeed a “phenomenon of the labyrinth”. Other philosophers, however, recognizing the unreliability of the voice, attempt to write in a style that is free of the voice. But Cavell is right when he persists in arguing that there is no philosophical discourse free of the voice and he accordingly misses no opportunity to remind philosophers that they must attend to the rhetorical tone or pitch of the philosophical voice that they adopt, since it inevitably carries its own significance and has its own life, even in their supposedly “strictly rational” discourse. Derrida rightly deconstructs the metaphysical desire that clings to the human voice, convinced that it can stabilize meaning by reference to something absolutely immediate and complete in its presence: a self-certifying, selfauthorizing presence. Such pure presence, ever dear to idealism, is, as he demonstrated with bold and compelling rigour, an impossibility, a mere illusion. Husserl’s restless efforts to preserve and protect a realm of pure expressivity from the vicissitudes of indication and communication are, in the final analysis, doomed to failure. For meaning cannot escape the fate of speech; and in speech, meaning is no more metaphysically present than it is when invested in

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the written word. Moreover, it is precisely because speech takes place through the voice that its meaning cannot escape the possibility, the permanent risk, of equivocation, indeterminacy, the multiplication of meanings. “Yes, yes!”, exclaimed in a certain tone of voice, would indicate wholehearted affirmation, eager approval, or strong immediate agreement. But, if uttered in a very different tone, it could indicate an impatient and reluctant agreement; or ironically, if expressed in slow, drawn-out syllables and a falling tone of voice, it could also be the expression of a skepticism wearied by the repetition of its argument. “Who cares?” could be a genuine question, perhaps a request for information, or it could be an expression of indifference. “Who’s to say?” could express a desire to know the answer; but it could also indicate one’s doubt as to the very possibility of an answer. This is simply the fate of a sense that is necessarily sensible. In “Vox Clamans”, making the vocabulary of inside and outside speak against itself, Jean-Luc Nancy dramatizes this fate in biblical terms, supporting Derrida’s argument that the voice “is not present to itself”: it is only an exterior manifestation, a trembling that offers itself to the outside, the half-beat of an opening—once again, a wilderness exposed where layers of air vibrate in the heat. The wilderness of the voice in the wilderness, in all its clamor—has no subject, no infinite unity; it always leaves from the outside, without self-presence, without self- consciousness.54

I wholeheartedly concur, but cannot refrain from remarking that, in its own ways, vision can also support logocentrism, the metaphysical delusion of absolute self-presence, total knowability, constancy and permanence. Indeed, from its most archaic beginnings, Western philosophical thought has always favoured vision because of its power to enframe and dominate a field of presence. Nevertheless, in the wake of these critiques, I suppose it necessary to say, here, that it is not because I hold the voice to grant absolute presence, nor in order to defend the voice against such critiques, that I have dedicated a book to the voice, but rather because I want to call attention to the normative ethical claims of the voice: the voice that, in its multiple manifestations, comes before the voice of Reason. This is in no sense, however, to be understood as a total, sweeping repudiation of the voice of Reason! On the contrary, what I believe the phenomenology we will be undertaking here brings out is the fact that the human voice, always a gathering of voices that precedes the voice of Reason, gives essential support to the ethical claims for which Reason argues. Moreover, as the chapters will, I trust, make clear, my philosophical “rehabilitation” of the voice is in part an effort to free the voice as a sensuous and sympathetic medium, as sense and sensibility, from its historical subordination to, hence its repression by, the “intelligible meaning” that idealism posits as the substance that turns mere sound in its materiality

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into a human voice, a medium bearing meaning. It is not at all an attempt to rescue the voice from its “erasure”, from “écriture”. For, on my reading of them, both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas recognize—indeed, insist on—the abyssal dimension: the voice in its withdrawal, its echoing absence. Nevertheless, if we are attentive to the phenomenological character of the voice that comes before the voice of Reason, attentive to the human voice in all its hermeneutical manifestations—as the strange voice of the moral law, as the tonal expression, or revelation, of the humanity within us, as the voice of conscience, as the gathering of singular human voices within each individual voice, as reverberating with the echoes that preserve in sublimation our mimetic appropriation of the voices of nature—we might sharpen our understanding of the way in which the philosophical endeavour to ensure the autonomy of Reason has taken language out of—away from—sense experience, away from sensibility, and away from the voice that bespeaks, and indeed confers, our humanity. Renewing phenomenological contact with our experience of the voice can accordingly be, contrary to Derrida’s assumption, a way for philosophical thought to contest and subvert the still powerful authority of logocentrism. My intention is thus very much in accord with that expressed by Gerald Bruns, who asserted that the objective “is not an embrace of chaos, but a search for alternatives to principles and rules, on the belief that what matters is absolutely singular and irreducible to concepts, categories, and assigned models of behaviour.”55 My cause is not the defense of “phonocentrism”, but rather the defense of the ethical claims of all the voices that, in their singularity, come before the voice of Reason. Among them, not least of all, the dissonant voices of dissent. Hence, the task: a deconstruction of the exclusive entitlement that the voice of Reason claims. The universality that this voice claims to defend is powerless and worthless unless it acknowledges the ethical significance of the voices that come before it—acknowledges the fact of a responsibility already avowed long before its rational institution. We need to oppose the reduction of the “logos” to Reason—and, a fortiori, the reduction of the ordinary human voice to the voice of Reason. Despite Plato’s argument for privileging the voice and its speech, the history of philosophy, as I am reading it, tells a story of the dire forgetfulness into which, within this discourse, the experience of the human voice and the voices of nature have silently faded away. For a brief time, the human voice as register of the voice of Reason could be heard; but the critical resources of Reason itself gradually subjected it to skeptical arguments against which it could not defend itself. I am writing this work because, very much like Agamben, and like Cavell, I want “to help bring the human voice back to philosophy”.56 And not only in the individualized way that it appears in the writings of, say, Herakleitos, Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Emerson. I also want to bring it back into philosophy as a matter for thoughtful engagement; because, after Plato and Aristotle, voice almost vanishes as a subject for

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philosophical reflection, briefly reclaiming attention in the writings of Kant, the early German Romantics, and Emerson, but for the most part, suffering exile in discourses on rhetoric and studies in literary criticism. However, as Zarathustra’s animals suggest, bringing voice back into philosophical thought would mean recognizing a commitment to questioning the tone of philosophical discourse—and the philosopher’s right to assume that tone. In “Public Voice and Private Voice”, Rainer Nägele points out that, contrary to the common conception of Kant’s thought as exemplary representative of Enlightenment logocentrism, even Kant recognized that the use of the voice of reason is but one of many discursive practices: Kant’s ear hears the voice of reason among other registers of discourse, such as telling stories (Erzählen) and joking (Scherzen), and it almost seems as if reasoning finds its place among these other registers as a latecomer. In any case, it finds its place, but it does not take over. It is part of a conversational chorus. [In his discussions of Kant’s conception of the public use of reason,] Habermas casually silences the other voices and hears only the reasoning, which seems to have occupied all the places. Although we can no longer hear the voices speaking to Kant, we can still read the texts of the Enlightenment. We can also read its obsession with jokes, wit, comedy, tears, ghosts and ghostbusters, Schwärmer and Geisterseher, criminals, clowns, and Hanswürste.57

Peter Fenves’s recent work, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth, artfully reinforces this argument: he calls attention again and again to passages in Kant’s philosophical writings in which, whilst reflecting on a “serious” subject, Kant interrupts himself and “digresses”, letting discursive registers “outside” the “use of reason” make their surprising appearance.58 These passages are typically ignored by philosophers, who want only to get at the “serious” matter for thought, and by historians who, reading Kant only within the framework of the grand narrative of the German Enlightenment, find in his writings nothing but confirmations of his transcendental rationalism. Nevertheless, Derrida is unquestionably justified in reading “logocentrism” into the history of philosophy. Indeed, for the most part, Kant’s positions easily fit the terms of Derrida’s critical category. According to Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, whose thought is, as we know, strongly influenced by Kant, has been the most outstanding contemporary representative of “logocentrism”. Now, although Habermas recognizes, and unequivocally repudiates, the repression and violence that has often been the historical consequence of a totalitarian interpretation of “rational universality” and that has sometimes even been claimed to have its justification in the universality that the voice of Reason calls for, he will not renounce his faith in the unity of Reason, arguing, in “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices”, that,

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in the consciousness of the public, the idea of unity is still linked to the consequence of a forced integration of the many. Greater universalism is still treated as the enemy of individualism, not as what makes it possible. [. . .] The unity of reason is still treated as repression, not as the source of the diversity of its voices.59

In other words: in the process of linguistic communication, a synthetic force is at work that generates unity within plurality in a different manner than by way of subsuming what is manifold under a general rule.60

Instead of an imposed unity, a totalizing universality, subordinating and in that way repressing the multiplicity and diversity of voices, Habermas’s discourse ethics proposes a conception of practical Reason that posits unity only as a desideratum, and only as something to be achieved, if at all, by the free consent of all concerned parties, taking part in a discussion grounded in principles and procedures of Reason assuring that the multiplicity of voices will be given an attentive, open-minded, respectful hearing. Nevertheless, the formal requirements for entering into the discourse remove these voices, in the name of Reason, from their contact with sense and sensibility—the body of felt experience. Habermas’s “unity of Reason” may welcome all voices, but only insofar as they conform to an ideal of dispassionate, impersonal, invariant tonality. The many voices must speak in the same register, the same tonality: a univocity still prejudiced in many subtle ways thus continues to control their participation. His discourse ethics will certainly entertain no Bakhtinian carnival of voices and echoes!61 No polyphonic perversity! No unruly, “free association” of sounds and voices! Could Reason hear, and could its voice register, the dissonant voices of dissent? To be sure, the universal voice of Reason does, in many decisive ways, welcome and protect the multiplicity of voices—the voices of the many. Conversely, however, the universal voice of Reason itself requires hospitality and protection: without that, the voice of Reason has no legitimacy, no authority. But if this voice of Reason—a socially constructed voice—is a gathering of voices, each of which is already itself a gathering of voices; and if the voices that Reason must gather are voices of pain and suffering—the voices of the foreign migrant worker, the orphan, the poor and chronically ill, the homeless, the destitute—voices whose ethical claims, according to my reading of Levinas’s phenomenology, reverberate as categorical imperatives in all human voices, even if unbeknownst, without reflective attention, to their speakers, then it becomes necessary to ask how the “ideal tonality” constitutive of this “voice of Reason” can avoid a certain exclusionary violence. And of course, Reason is not well-prepared to hear the voices that can speak only

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through their silence: the voices of the dead and the unborn, and the voices of those too hopeless to speak. What difference would it make if the “attunement” functioning at the prereflective, simply lived level of our “intercorporeal being” were allowed to set the tonality, the “Grundton”, the “Grundstimmung”, for the voice that takes part in philosophical discourse? In a long-neglected text, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy”, that Derrida brought back to a philosophical life, Kant rightly and sharply castigates those philosophers who assume an arrogant, elevated tone of voice, implying, in effect, their privileged access to a metaphysical realm of knowledge denied to all other people.62 To what possible right could philosophers appeal in justification of a metaphysically privileged tone of voice? Provoked by these two texts, Kant’s and Derrida’s, I would like to reflect on what I will name the “standard professional tone” assumed by the majority of academic philosophers of our own time. Today, I think, the problem is not the adoption of a tone that expresses its elevation to a claim of intuitive knowledge concerning ultimate metaphysical reality, but rather the adoption of a standardized tone of studied indifference: a tone of voice that sets the tone for thought and its communication. What is the character of this tone? As the tone presumably befitting “the voice of Reason”, it tends to speak in a monotone, a flat, neutral voice, a finely measured voice, carefully modulated to remain constant, consistent, unchanging. As if Reason needed to make its speech accommodate and conform to its objects of thought: eternal, immutable things—the “essences” or “forms” of Platonism. This is a voice, a tonality, that at all costs would avoid echoes, resonances, unmastered vibrations, every conceivable equivocation, every audibly indeterminate implication of meaning, anything that might disturb the impassive equipoise of the philosophical voice. This is a voice that banishes metaphorics. This is a voice that assumes it is in total and absolute possession of itself and its meaning, assumes the possibility—or indeed, rather, the actuality—of a perfect detachment, a perfect theoretical abstraction, from the world as we live it: without emotion, deliberately unmoved, untouched, unaffected by what it is bringing to speech, it assumes that, by virtue of this studied indifference, this neutrality, it can become—indeed, has the right to become—the universal voice of Reason, gathering all singular voices into a universal consensus. (Consider the difference between the “serene” tone in Hegel’s “systematic” works—his Encyclopaedia, for example, where he feels confident in the progressive triumph of Reason, and the darker, more agitated tone in some of his private letters and political commentaries, where one can detect some hesitation and uncertainty, and even, perhaps, a hint of despair.) Not unlike the voice whose tone Kant questions, this voice makes assumptions that are not acknowledged and claims that are not mindful of alterity, of singularity, multiplicity, and difference. When confronted with evil,

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is the appropriate tone of voice for Reason to adopt necessarily one of emotional indifference or neutrality? Should the philosopher’s voice sound as if it were a machine? Recalling, here, Merleau-Ponty’s remark about understanding what a philosopher most deeply has to say by listening to its tonality, I contend that the philosophical voice required today by the profession is a voice that, despite the most noble of intentions, cannot register the multiplicity of voices, the dissonances, clamoring for a hearing within a flourishing democracy. If totalitarian regimes can tolerate no undertones and overtones of meaning; if they require absolute obedience to univocity, fearful of what might be said by double meaning, then we must ask ourselves, I think, whether or not the philosophical voice has relinquished its subversive power, its ability to defy, to resist oppressive political totalities. In a society where the public use of Reason requires univocity, the hope for freedom counts on the voice of the philosopher to subvert this tonal law. In Dawn and Decline, Max Horkheimer observes that, “There is a particular tone of voice which guarantees inner freedom from unauthorized emotions. The person that wants to train his child for a career in this system should see to it that his voice produces that tone when it becomes an adult.”63 No one should reflect more ruthlessly on this question than the philosopher, for the vocation amounts to nothing if it does not remain outside the “system”. In his Nietzsche book, Heidegger accuses this tone in even more disturbing terms, emphasizing the dangers in “univocity”: The life of actual language consists in multiplicity of meaning. To relegate the animated, vigorous word to the immobility of a univocal, mechanically programmed sequence of signs would mean the death of language and the petrification and devastation of Dasein.64

In the lectures he gave, published under the title What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger explicitly connects this univocity to the imperatives of a technology-driven economy. Identifying this tonality with “one-track thinking”, “das eingleisige Denken”, he says: This one-track thinking, which is becoming even more widespread in various shapes, is one of those unsuspected and inconspicuous forms in which the essence of technology assumes dominion—because that essence wills and therefore needs absolute univocity.65

This critique, echoed by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, can seem similar to the critique of the Frankfurt School; but when one takes into account the contexts, their larger projects, one cannot avoid noticing that there are profound differences between their respective analyses and ways of responding to the danger. Heidegger does not submit univocity to a political critique.

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It would seem that, when Merleau-Ponty wrote, in his Phenomenology of Perception, about an experience with language “singing” or “celebrating” the world, he did not have this subversive voice in mind; but, as we will soon see, the political use of Reason does figure in his critique, in that book, of the Cartesian “cogito”. For now, I would like simply to suggest that “chanter le monde” points towards an experience with language in which a different interpretation of the voice of Reason might freely resonate. It would be a question of an audible transformation of the philosophical voice, audibly exposed, vulnerable, audibly responsive to the alterity of voices and the voices of alterity. But, as I will be arguing, this transformation would depend on a remembrance of the “first” voice, the voice that comes before Reason, the polyphonic gathering of voices in whose responsiveness a responsibility to the other has in fact always already been resounding. In the Preface to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to the voice, “bridging centuries”, that figures in Thus Spake Zarathustra. “Here,” he says, “no ‘prophet’ is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from the mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom.” The first part of what he says, here, is reminiscent, of course, of Kant’s scathing denunciation of the “elevated tone”; but with his invocation of the “halcyon tone” in the second part, he is beginning to sound a note that would, no doubt, have shocked Kant and worried him. Today, however, it may be precisely this mad tonality that alone can break through the systemic univocity that survival in an economy determined by the exigencies of capital and technology has increasingly forced us to adopt.

§5 Reconciling Voices: The Political Register “We are human beings and belong to one another only by way of the word. —Michel de Montaigne, “Of Liars”66

*** In “Mélange”, one of the notes in his Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno asserts, long before the time of deconstruction: An emancipated society [. . .] would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.67

A fine sentiment! But he tells us nothing about how to accomplish this “reconciliation of differences”—a reconciliation that must be realized without

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coercion, and without the distortion or exclusion of differences. When, in his last years, Foucault got together with Habermas for some public discussions, and Foucault was pressed to make his seemingly anarchic politics more specific, more concrete, what, among other things, he proposed— some ground rules for the public use of Reason—turned out to be surprisingly like Habermas’s discourse ethics. After years of arguing against the theory of rights, Foucault approached the position held by Habermas, conceding that, in any discussion within the space of the political, all participants must be granted certain discursive “rights” to ensure respect for the expression of their concerns. At the end of the day, he could, after all, concur with Habermas’s life-long obsession: the renewal of the “communicative capacities of the lifeworld”.68 I can imagine no other way to achieve this reconciliation than by the discursive use of Reason within a framework of consensually legitimated procedures. However, as I have already argued, this use of Reason needs to listen to the voices that come before it—above all, the voices that register the suffering of the other. In “How It Is”, Beckett questions the practical effectiveness, and perhaps even the sincerity, in the transcendental grounding of the voice in political universality, referring to “the anonymous voice self-styled qua qua the voice of us all”, or the voice “of someone in another world yes whose kind of dream I am.”69 Such questioning has today become imperative—even, one might say, urgent. With the passage of time, it is now possible to recognize the negative dialectic at work in the Enlightenment. Reason promised the eventual reconciliation of the diremptions that besiege modernity; but its encouragement of freedom, of independence, of self-reliance and self-interest has produced isolated egos without any progressive social sense: individuals that do not know and do not acknowledge their indebtedness to others. Consequently, it is my hope that, through this study, the dependencies and indebtednesses of the human voice—not only in relation to other people, but also in relation to the whole of nature, will be retrieved from a certain forgetfulness. Remembrance is necessary, if the violence inherent in the semblance of social universality—and in the semblance of a reconciliation with nature—is ever to be ended. But this requires—presupposes—a critical awareness of the moment of violence in the voice of Reason. For Kant, as we know from his essays, the word that recognizes enlightened political maturity is “Mündigkeit”, a word that derives from “Mund”, the German word for “mouth”. Accordingly, “Unmündigkeit” is, as Rainer Nägele puts it so nicely, “a state in which man is not capable of using his mouth and reason to speak for himself”.70 Kant, of course, gives no heed to the mouth, whose disciplined opening—a regulated freedom—is a necessary condition for speech. But he does define the world of “Enlightenment” as a world in which it would always be possible to speak humanly without fear.

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No doubt with Kant’s definition of the enlightened attitude in mind, Adorno once remarked that, If humanity is still not yet mature, then that means, in the most literal sense, that it still has not yet been able to speak.71

Even after many centuries, civilization is still too weak to root out its barbarism; and we still need to learn how to speak to one another, creating a discursive space without inequalities in power and the threat of violence. In another note, Adorno reminds us that such speaking requires listening to the origination of speech, of voice, in the conscience vivid in sensibility: In an all-embracing system, conversation becomes ventriloquism. The voices of speakers are meeting the same fate as befell that of conscience, from whose resonance all speech lives: they are being replaced, even in their finest intonations, by a socially prepared mechanism.72

These are reflections with which I think both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas could concur, although, as we will find, the phenomenology of language that Levinas evolves in Otherwise than Being reveals the ethical origination of speech—of “Saying”—in the resonance of a voice infinitely deeper than that of conscience. Anticipating Habermas’s discourse ethics and theory of communicative action, George H. Mead lucidly frames the political problematic, imagining an ideal public space for conversation in which the voices of dissent would receive encouragement to speak out and, perhaps more than Habermas, recognizing, in this representation of the ideal, the importance of voices coming not only from the past but even from the future: A person may reach a point of going against the whole world about him; he may stand out by himself over against it. But to do that, he has to speak with the voice of reason to himself. He has to comprehend the voices of the past and the future. That is the only way in which the self can get a voice that is more than the voice of the community. As a rule, we assume that this general voice of the community is identical with the larger community of the past and the future; we assume that an organized custom represents what we call morality. [. . .] If we take the attitude of the community over against our own responses, [. . .] we must not forget this other capacity, that of replying to the community and insisting on the ways in which, from our particular perspective, the community needs to change. We can reform the order of things; we can insist on making the community standards better standards. We are not simply bound by the community. We are engaged in a conversation in which what we say is listened to by the community and its response is one which is affected by what we have to say.73

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For Mead, who has a much more capacious sense of the public use of Reason than does John Dewey, the political conversation must include the voices of the future: perhaps not only our voices, speaking on behalf of future generations, whose welfare is all too often, all too easily forgotten and betrayed by an egoism of the present, but also even their ownmost voices, coming from a future already staked out, already claimed by the immemorial voice, the originating voice, of the moral law, whose universality, extending throughout time, speaks from and for the future. For the existence of a flourishing democracy, nothing is more important than the institutions and practices of civic life that make possible—and protect—the public use of Reason in democratically constituted processes of deliberation. In such processes, it must be possible for political subjects to contest and transform inherited political identities, values, boundaries, and even the deliberative procedures themselves. Marginalized and oppressed groups must be encouraged to communicate their needs and concerns in a sympathetic atmosphere in accordance with procedures that ensure fair and inclusive dialogue about differences and conflicts of all sorts and at all levels. Peaceful coexistence is necessary; but political consensus, though often desirable, must not take precedence over the recognition and representation of differences. Nor must the achievement of consensus be esteemed more important than the maintenance of deliberative procedures and outcomes that all the parties concerned can accept as uncoerced, reasonable, and fair. In “Le ‘non’ du père”, Michel Foucault observes that the “death” of God, which both rationalism and empiricism, the two forks of the Enlightenment, have brought about, “profoundly influenced our language; for at the source of language [where once upon a time we recognized the sovereign authority of God], it placed a silence that no work, unless it be pure chatter, can mask. Language thus . . . comes to us from elsewhere, from a place of which [and from which] no one can speak. . . .”74 I will not question, here, the first clause of this asseveration; but we must interpret the second. It seems to me, rather, that, as one might expect, the “death” of God, the most absolute of all monarchs, ending the most tenacious of hierarchies, has in fact opened up a place for the possible flourishing of democratic conversation—the plurality of voices. Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality and political discourse is unquestionably a contribution of major historical significance to the revitalization of critical social theory, rescuing it from the melancholy dialectical fatalism to which it seemed, in the late, postwar writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, to have mournfully resigned itself. Invoking the principle of intersubjectivity, Habermas’s theory succeeded in a fundamental sublation of the monological rationality of the Kantian subject, whose deliberations never actually recognized the voices of others, whilst his own emphasis on normative procedures in public discourse redeemed the critical function of Reason. Language itself, returned from the Kantian monologue to its communicative

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role, enjoyed thereby a corresponding recognition of its moral-political destination. But Habermas’s theory remains stubbornly committed to a conception of communication that completely forgets voice and its sensibility, its felt embodiment: ignorant of our intercorporeality, it is unable to hear the sympathetic communications that take place, as Merleau-Ponty has shown, in that dimension of our existence. For him, there can be no meaning in sense. Thus, his theory cannot draw on the fact that there is moral, normative sense always already silently sounding and resounding within the communicative abilities of the voice—the fact that there is already embodied, already registered, in the prepersonal, pre-egological depths of the human voice, in its very responsiveness, the felt sense of a certain responsibility to and for the other. One could perhaps hear in this responsiveness, prior to any appeal, any solicitation from the other, the “emotional essence” (MerleauPonty’s phrase) of the voice of conscience. Habermas’s project deserves our praise for its demonstration of the normative commitments, the normative principles, presupposed by our communicative practices and institutions; but it suffers a tragic deafness, not able to hear, to recognize, the phenomenological evidence of such commitments already registered in a rudimentary way by the very nature of the voice. For it is in that register that the principles he formulates for communicative practices and institutions are first announced; and it is therefore only when these principles can be heard already resonating within their first register that they can become constitutive of one’s life. Everything depends on the remembrance, the recovery or restitution, of a forgotten intercorporeal attunement, the voice in which alterity has already been avowed—long before the I knowingly hears it. Every dimension of language testifies to our ethical responsibility, our commitment to universality: not only the thematic, but also, prior to that, the very sensibility from which the voice arises. In a thought in which one can hear echoes of Montaigne, a man of the Renaissance whose writings often seem more “modern” than Descartes’ and sometimes seem almost “contemporary”, Merleau-Ponty asserts that, There is a taking up of the other’s thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others, which enriches our own thoughts.75

This “thinking according to others” is made possible, however, by the chiasmic gatherings and intertwinings of voices, bearing a sensible sense that resonates “beneath” the semantic structure of the sense posited by thought. The point about the voice’s felt registering of alterity needs to be read together with the claim made in a later passage, where he says, also echoing Montaigne: There is one particular cultural object that is destined to play a crucial role in the perception of other people: language. In the experience of dialogue, there

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is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven in a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us [alone] is the creator. We have here a dual being [. . .]; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist in a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself. [. . .] And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him my thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too.76

Is this an accurate description of our prevailing social reality, or nothing but a beautiful phantasy? There is often, as I noted in some studies published many years ago, an unsettling equivocation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological way of writing: it frequently hovers between a constative and a performative sense, compelling us to struggle with the undecidability. If my interlocutor were a terrorist who had chosen the methods of violence, I cannot imagine that this would describe the phenomenological truth of our communicative encounter. Perhaps the account is true, though, as a description of the ideal; and if we think of it in this way, namely, as the evocation of such an existential possibility, we might come to appreciate the fact that it is expressed in a phenomenological language designed to function performatively, making itself into a true description by altering the experience in question. In this case, it would make itself true by actually connecting us to our lived experience of intercorporeality—to the dimensions of our experience from which we have become disconnected—disconnected precisely through the very processes of socialization that were supposed to teach us to respect the concerns voiced by the other. The disconnection occurs because the formation of the ego-logical subject requires us to grow out of that initial phase of life which, in “The Child’s Relations with Others”, Merleau-Ponty describes as a “syncretic sociability”, an “initial community”, based on the operation of a certain involuntary or spontaneous “originary sympathy”.77 Growing up, we become disconnected from the inaugural intertwinings of our identity with others. But, on my reading, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology suggests the possibility that, at some later stage in our maturity, a process of reconnection could be voluntarily undertaken, recalling the debt to alterity that never ceases to murmur within the voice each one of us calls “my own”. A similar rhetorical style of equivocation often seems to be operative in Levinas’s apparently descriptive sentences. Perhaps both philosophers wrote in this way because of the conviction that, in the nature of the voice, there are echoes of a paradise lost and a promise of redemption.78 Be this as it may, their style bequeaths a problem that seems to lie in understanding just how these sentences are working. For, in the writings of both philosophers,

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sentences manifestly having the grammatical form of constatives, and hence seeming to be descriptive, can be regarded only as untrue, if read straightforwardly: without the intervention of some supplementary interpretation, they can be read only as failing faithfully to record the experience in question in its apparent facticity. But perhaps they both wrote in this way because they had faith in the power of phenomenological description to transform our experience, making it live up to the ideality, the potential, solicited by the description. It is perplexing, and certainly unfortunate, that they did not themselves reflect on how their descriptions were functioning—how their phenomenological descriptions performatively interact with the experience they are describing. Yet, greatly to their credit, neither philosopher substituted dreams of the ideal for the painful truth. As philosophers committed not just to the truth, but also to the peculiar sincerity, of first-person singular experience, the very essence of the phenomenological method, neither would tolerate evasions of this methodological imperative. Even Emerson, frequently— though, in my judgement, wrongly—thought to represent a complacent transcendentalism deaf to uncomfortable worldly truths, once confided in his journals—the year was 1845—that: I woke this morn with a dream which perchance was true, that I was living in the morning of history amidst barbarians, that right and truth had yet no voice, no letter, no law, every one did what he would & grasped what he could.79

How far, I wonder, is the “barbarism” that Emerson perceives in civilization from the one that Benjamin laments? Perhaps the measure lies only in the difference between a barbarism that is in civilization and a barbarism that emerges as civilization itself and as such. In both cases, though, the human voice, the voice speaking humanly of human things, would be absent: absent in a “not yet” that might even last beyond the end of history. Undoubtedly it was with such a dark thought in mind that, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno felt provoked to ask us: “What after all is left to do but scream?”80 But his question already instantiates an alternative.

§6 Conversation Because of the chiasmic nature of the flesh—the flesh that brings forth the voice, because of its intertwinings and reversibilities, the reconnecting of speech with this chiasmic dimension of our embodiment could have, as both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas eventually realized, profound consequences for an ethics and a politics of dialogue, since such reconnection would alter the structure of subjectivity, would alter the very identity, and sense of self, of the subject who is speaking. This, perhaps, is what

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Merleau-Ponty was getting at in the lengthy passage that we last cited. Merleau-Ponty does not, however, explicitly address this possibility. Nevertheless, his phenomenological archaeology brings to light our prepersonal existence and excavates even below this level, to show the auditory, dialogical flesh of our existence. He will not, however, reflect on the performative transformations in experience that such constatations make possible. It seems as if he is still caught up in Husserl’s methodology—a procedure, supposedly doing the work of description, that Husserl called, quite mischievously, a “positivism”, and consequently fails to realize the transformative potential in phenomenology: that, because phenomenology is reflexive, is self-referential, its language is never merely descriptive, but is always functioning performatively, enacting and making true that which it is describing. Phenomenological reflexivity, as a “practice of caring for the self”, offers us the possibility—which we may always, however, refuse—of radical alterations in our existence. But only a phenomenological account of the process through which this possibility could be realized would justify the claim being made here in abbreviated form. What needs to be appreciated is that, the stronger our reconnection of the voice to its intercorporeality, the stronger we make the moral principles of Reason. This is the sense I would like to ascribe to Karl Kraus’s assertion that “justice and language remain founded in each other.”81 In the essay, “On the Phenomenology of Language”, indebted as always to the genial wisdom of Montaigne, Merleau-Ponty says that, “We who speak do not necessarily know better than those who listen to us what we are expressing.”82 Ludwig Wittgenstein says things very similar to this. What they are attacking is the Cartesian and Husserlian representation, according to which the mind gives birth to meanings, mental objects, prior to investing them in language. These meanings thus enjoy independence from language. In another text, Merleau-Ponty elaborates his point: A genuine conversation gives me access to thoughts I did not know myself capable of, that I was not capable of, and sometimes I feel myself followed in a route unknown to myself which my words, cast back by the other, are in the process of tracing out for me.83

For Levinas, too, conversation—what he calls the face-to-face relation—can give one access to a thought one did not know oneself capable of: the dimension, namely, of the infinitely precious, the Holy, revealing itself through the face, the voice, of the interlocutor. In such conversation, reversibility, the touchstone of justice, is allowed to work. Beneath the words exchanged, before the surprising recognition of a meaning I had not thought of, making the chiasmic connections, the voice of the other has been received into my own voice and silently registered there.

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Of course, not many conversations are, or will be, deeply connected to their intercorporeality, their chiasmic flesh. But if they were, a radically different kind of experience could set the tone for the conversation, giving it an attunement more conducive to a peaceful and agreeable conclusion: The chiasm, reversibility, is the idea that every perception is doubled with a counter-perception, is an act with two faces, so that one no longer knows who speaks and who listens.84

It is not a question, here, of a fusion and confusion of identities, which is how Levinas scholars tend to read passages such as this, but rather of the achievement of a phase, or level, of dialogical intercorporeality that, when recuperated, would make it possible for the interlocutors to attain a certain sympathy for one another—or for the differences in the positions they hold. In the context of political discourse—where, as Levinas would agree, the fairness of symmetry, hence reversibility and reciprocity, are essential, what this achievement might make possible is a certain shared understanding or concurrence. A “concrete universal”. The passage is ultimately, then, an invitation to think, as a regulative Idea, the possibility of a radically different model of political dialogue: a model in which the speakers are brought together not only by the force of Reason, but also, much more deeply, by an intercorporeal attunement, a sensible communication and recognition, a “motor echo” taking place beneath their ego-logically constituted identities. As Merleau-Ponty avers, This new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as expression are the point of insertion, of speaking and thinking in the world of silence.85

To the extent that, in the philosophical discourse of modernity, the paradigm of the one who speaks is an ego-logical subject, i.e., the possessive and aggressive individual whose pragmatic pursuit of self-interest in accordance with an instrumental rationality has been favoured by the economy and ideology of the ruling bourgeoisie, to that extent the democratic ideal of political dialogue and the principle of the public use of Reason become seriously compromised, since none of the parties is disposed to adopt the standpoint, if there can be one, of the common good. As Levinas has pointed out in critical comments on Martin Buber’s conception of symmetry in dialogue that could equally be read as indicating how he would regard Habermas’s conception of the ideal moral conditions of discourse, this ideal conception must presuppose the good will of the participants—it cannot be expected to create that good will out of nothing.86 Without denying often intractable difficulties, though, Habermas would undoubtedly argue that, to the degree that those ideal conditions can be actualized, they can in fact create good will

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where suspicion and hostility had prevailed. Moreover, I would argue, to the extent that phenomenology can show the way to a radically different subjectformation, reconnecting the one who speaks to a “universal flesh”87—to what in Levinas would be the medium of the subject’s subjection to “substitution”, and to what in Merleau-Ponty would be an experience of chiasmic reversibility, registered within the voice, that interrupts or overcomes its monadic identity—the conditions of political dialogue could be correspondingly altered, encouraging, though never guaranteeing, a certain consonance, a certain attunement of singularities, in favour of an approach to the common good. Formulated phenomenologically, i.e., in terms of the first person singular: Hearing the voices of the others gathered into my own, resonant within my own, and also hearing, in my interlocutors’ echoing reception of the words to which I gave my voice, the emergence from my own words of surprising new meanings, I would likely find it easier to discern our common cause. But there are voices that will not—cannot—be gathered into the unity and totality represented by the voice of Reason. Even these voices, however—despite being hateful, wrathful, violent, perhaps no longer recognizably human—must somehow be acknowledged and heard. There is, nevertheless, or rather precisely because of such challenges to the voice of Reason, a significant critical potential in this reconnection with the chiasmic. For the reconnection of the voice and its speech with the chiasmic body of experience would itself constitute a challenge to our culturally dominant paradigms of political dialogue, political rationality, and the autonomous political subject. But the recognition of this critical potential would require that Merleau-Ponty’s initially appealing phrase, “singing the praises of the world”, undergo reinterpretation: “chanter le monde” must not be taken as an attunement implying unconditional approval or agreement with the world as it is. To set the reinterpretation in motion, it would be necessary, rather, to understand it as meaning that speech must begin by taking up into itself the conditions that make it possible in the first place—conditions that the sonorous world, and most of all, the voices of others, provide. Although the infant’s originary chiasmic attunement is tamed and conventionalized in the course of socialization, it remains—like the mimetic impulses that Benjamin and Adorno hope to rescue from the depths of their repression—a source, a point, too, of reference, for the possibility of a radical critique of the dominant economy and its political discourse. As early as the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty was already articulating the way in which the experiencing of our prepersonal, prelinguistic, and prereflectively lived intercorporeality constitutes the most fruitful ground for the eventuality of a freely attained “consummate reciprocity”, the situation that Levinas interprets, somewhat awkwardly, not entirely satisfactorily, in terms of “the third party”, “le tiers”:

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In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground: my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric [. . .], inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. [Thus] we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.88

Still committed in his later years to this ideal of political dialogue, MerleauPonty will imagine, in his 1952–1960 lectures on “The Concept of Nature” at the Collège de France, the possibility of “an ideal community of embodied subjects, of intercorporeality”, a public realm in which every voice would communicate in the felt acknowledgement that it began as an echo, as a response to the other, hence began already bearing an asymmetrical debt to the other. If, in this context, we should agree that, from the moment that the infant begins to speak, begins, in babbling song, to enter into the realm of language, the voice becomes an organ for the “celebration of the world”, we must nevertheless also register a sadness, refusing an unqualified affirmation—for the moral world is still shuddering from what it has witnessed, and still witnessing: the most terrible injustices and almost unimaginable, unspeakable brutality. Perhaps, then, we should hear in Merleau-Ponty’s inspiring little phrase, not an affirmation of goodness, but rather, as Levinas surely would, an expression of hope, hope for the fulfillment of a promise audible, if only barely, in that communion of voices echoing ever so faintly within each singular voice. In Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig comments that communal singing, very common in earlier, less urbanized, less rationalized times, “does not take place for the sake of a particular content; rather, one looks for a common content only for the sake of singing communally . . . . The singing, thanking, and acknowledging [of God’s goodness] are paramount, while that which is sung about, thanked for, and acknowledged is only its rationalization.”89 Ethnographic research into nineteenth-century peasant life confirms this observation: what mattered was the participation of the entire community in the singing, for this participation constituted a moral affirmation, both of the community as such and of each member of the community in his or her singularity. Thus, in what Rosenzweig calls the community’s “chant of redemption”, the people will have learned a way to reconcile the historically conflicting exigencies of singularity and community: “All voices have become independent, each singing the words to the melody of its own soul; yet all these melodies adapt themselves to the same rhythm and unite in the same harmony.”90 We might also find a register of hope, perhaps, in some well-known words that come to us without adornment, straight from a poet’s heart. Let us listen, once again, to Hölderlin, whose “Celebration of Peace” hears so purely the communions of the past, the present, and the future that are already taking place in the depths of the voice, recalling each one of us to the

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hearing of our earthly destination as mortal beings gifted with voice, recalling each one of us to enter into dialogue with others, so that we may learn from one another how to respond together to the needs of our time: Much, from morning onwards, Since we have been a conversation and have listened to one another, Has human kind learnt; but soon we shall be song [bald sind wir aber Gesang].91

But who is the “we” here? Has there been a “conversation”? Has everyone listened? Has everyone been heard? Has there been enough learning? And what is required for the historical moment of song? I cannot deny my skepticism, questioning whether it is true that “we” have achieved a “conversation”—assuming this “we” to refer to the whole of humanity. I even hesitate to say “perhaps, but not yet!” But there must be hope. And, as Adorno says in a note on Goethe’s “Faust”: “Hope is not memory held fast but the return of what has been forgotten.”92 Have we not forgotten the uncanny gathering of voices that reverberate still, despite everything, within the all-too-familiar voice—or seemingly familiar voice—we are wont to call “our own”? And have we not forgotten that unless I acknowledge the humanity of the others—not only by talking things over with them but also by the way, the tone, in which we talk with them, my voice will be reduced to nothing but a series of sounds, mere acoustic figures signifying nothing? It is to remind us of this that Rosenzweig asks us: “For what is redemption, other than that the I learns to say Thou to the He?”93 He also concedes, there, that, “Redemption is only a hope . . . only something [to remain] anticipated in the course of [endless] wanderings.”94

§7 Reading This Book There are, as the discussion in the preceding sections indicates, many different ways of approaching the reading of this book. One significant way, as I conceive it, is to think of it as a phenomenologically generated critique of Reason—or, more specifically, as a critique of the voice of Reason grounded in our experience of the multitude of voices that already address us and summon us prior to the voice of reflective Reason. The title is intended to suggest this critique, moving with deliberate discretion towards the philosophical redemption of the human voice. The voices in question are [1] the voices of nature, discussed in Part I, concerned with Merleau-Ponty and [2] the voices of other human beings, discussed in Part II, concerned with Levinas. The heart of the critical argument is that, in relation to the phenomenologies of both philosophers, the voice of Reason that has prevailed since the beginning of the Enlightenment has suppressed as well as protected the countless voices that have come under its sovereign sway.

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The task is therefore to retrieve the voices that Reason does not hear. I want to argue that this is in part a question of memory-work. Two types of memory are required for this task: [1] remembrance and [2] recollection. Thus: [1] In the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, we shall be bringing into remembrance the voices of nature echoing within our own voice. And in the context of Levinas’s ethics, we shall be bringing into remembrance the voices of all those whose voices solicited and summoned forth our own, bringing our voice into the language of our community. And [2]: In the context of Merleau-Ponty, we need to recollect for our human voices the attunement with the voices of nature that we enjoyed as infants and children. In the context of Levinas, we need to recollect the voice of the preoriginary Saying of the moral law. In the first part, I argue, as part of a critique of Reason, that, in order to secure its autonomy from nature, the voice of Reason separated itself from, and suppressed, the voices of nature that came before it and contributed to its very emergence. Under the pressures of rationalization, the voices of nature have lost their powers of enchantment: just as all the wonderful fairy tales, that encouraged children to keep those voices, voices to which, once upon a time, they were immediately attuned and responsive, in the chambers of their memory, end up abandoned, hidden away in the attic, together with old toys. This loss of connection to the voices of nature has had dire consequences for ecology. My project in this regard is to retrieve these suppressed voices, to overcome the separation, the dualism, and indicate the promise of the redemption of nature in a phenomenologically grounded ecology and, correlatively, in a reconciliation between the voice of Reason and the voices of nature. The singing that is the essence of poetry expresses the longing for this reconciliation in its achievement of a certain harmony between sound and sense, the conceptual and the sensuous, the ideal and the real, the rational and the affective, the realm of the spirit and the realm of matter. I have argued that the human voice, voice, inaugurally, of the child, drawing mimetically on the multitude of voices of nature for sounds, phonemes, and even syllables as it enters the language of its community, is accordingly indebted to nature for these gifts, and that this indebtedness constitutes a moral claim on us to carry nature in our remembrance, not only taking responsibility for the protection and preservation of nature, but also retrieving a bodily felt sense of the echoes of the voices of nature and bringing them in that remembrance, that anamnesis, into our own voices. I argue that, in this way, to the extent that it is possible to retrieve, within the mature human voice, a felt sense of the mimetic origination of the infant’s voice in the voices of nature, to that extent the infant’s mimetic babbling, which I want to call a kind of first song, could become, following its years of sublation in the speech of the adult, what might be called song in a second, higher sense, namely, as

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the poetry of a conscious celebration of our indebtedness to nature and a way of expressing our gratitude for the gifts of nature. (See Diagram I following Part I, chapter 3.) If the Enlightenment disenchanted the realm of nature, virtually destroying its auratic presence in our lives, the “remembrance of nature in the subject” for which Adorno calls, and to which this present work is intended to contribute, is interpreted so as to set in motion a course of reflection that hears in Merleau-Ponty’s argument, summarized in his little phrase, “chanter le monde”, not merely the recognition of our mimetic, onomatopoetic borrowings from nature, but also the possibility of a new reënchantment. For in the human voice that has recovered echoes of its mimetic emergence from nature, echoes of the infant’s free singing, to become, through this anamnesis, song once again, there are promising intimations of our eventual reconciliation with nature. In the second part, I argue that the voice of Reason has a tendency to universalize, unify, and totalize in a way that can forget, neglect, and suppress the plurality of voices that express, each one in its own way, the singularity of the other. I also argue that phenomenological reflection suggests that, before the voice of Reason, there is an experience of the (audibly) inaudible voice of the moral law, which has appropriated and laid claim to our voices—to the “human” voice—in an immemorial time: a past that has never been present, and that can be recalled only in, and as, a felt sense of the echoes of its echoes still reverberating through the human voice. The remembrance of the voice of the moral law—what Levinas, in my reconstruction, will call “Saying”—and the attempt to retrieve it are constitutive of our moral responsibility. The moral law is a voice that reminds us to listen, and be responsive, to the voices of the other, the singular voices of human beings, that the voice of universalizing Reason can, in its paradoxical deafness to the particular, suppress in its very effort to assure these singular voices the justice they deserve. What connects the two parts of this book, then, is the way they read in both Merleau-Ponty and in Levinas a critique the voice of reflective Reason and a consequent attempt to retrieve the voices that Reason neglects or suppresses, indicating still resounding echoes of the moral claim these prior voices have already made, prior to the emergence of the voice of Reason, on our capacity for responsibility—which, in the context of Merleau-Ponty, puts in question our responsibility for the protection and preservation of nature, and in the context of Levinas, puts in question our responsibility to care for the welfare of the other. Here, more specifically, is how I have conceptualized what unifies Part I and Part II. [1] In both cases, the voice of Reason is shown to have a negative moment. However, whereas, for Levinas, the voice of Reason, despite its noble intentions and its history of support for progressive causes, tends to

Introduction

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universalize at the expense of particular voices, subordinating them—and in particular, the voice of each singular other—to the “rational” principle of unity, for Merleau-Ponty, the voice of Reason suppresses, forgets, or neglects the voices of Nature in order to achieve and secure its domination over nature and, at the end of the day, its autonomy. [2] In both cases, the suppressed, neglected, forgotten voices, voices prior to the emergence of the voice of Reason, make a moral claim on our responsibility, because they are the summons not only of our ordinary voices, but of the voice of Reason itself. Our entrance into language is indebted to these earlier voices—the voices of mother, father, family, friends, teachers, and countless others— which in this way make their moral claim. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, it is a question of the moral claim on our responsibility to care for Nature, for we are indebted to its voices, not only as preceding our entrance into the language of our community, and indeed summoning and soliciting our very capacity to speak, but also as bestowing the very condition of possibility for the voice of Reason. For the voice of Reason is, as voice, a formation emergent from nature. Whereas, in the case of Levinas, it is a question of the moral claim on our responsibility to care for the well-being of other persons: an indebtedness, and therefore a responsibility, which their voices, preceding our entrance into language, summoning and soliciting our capacity to speak, and preceding the voice of Reason, already constitute. Before the emergence and sway of the voice of Reason, there are other voices—a multitude of voices, in fact—that are already “informing” us of responsibilities for which the sovereign voice of Reason must later argue and fight. This “informing” begins to take place, however, in a time prior to, and below the threshold of, the formation of ego-logical consciousness—therefore, prior to, and below the threshold of, volition and memory. What is at stake in both contexts is, therefore, the remembrance of these voices—and the consequent attempt to retrieve them from the oblivion into which they have retreated. For it is in these voices that we are first exposed to the moral claims that they make, having given us, even before we have developed any steady consciousness, hence long before the emergence of the voice of Reason, their sublime powers of expression, their powers of communication. Retrieving something of these voices—a bodily felt sense of their presence, perhaps, in the echoes of their echoes that may still resound within our own voices, does not subvert or nullify the authority of the voice of Reason, but on the contrary, can supplement and strengthen it, giving its moral claim a stronger embodiment in sense and sensibility—and a more enduring rootedness in nature. For the fate of nature and the fate of ethical life are forever bound up in the corresponding fate of Reason.


part i

8

The Singing of the World The Claim of Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology


c ha pter 1

8 The Remembrance of Nature in the Voice of the Subject “The whole historical enigma of our existence, the impenetrable darkness of its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quem, is resolved and explained by the first and primal message of the Word made flesh.” —Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke1

“Listen, rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: that is a more honest and a purer voice [. . .], and it speaks of the meaning of the earth.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra2

§1 Invocations of Nature In the project of writing about what, in the course of more than thirty years, I came to think of as a hermeneutical and phenomenological account of the “emerging body of understanding”, the “body” is inseparably both literal and metaphorical; and the “understanding” which is at stake calls for learning what it could possibly mean for us as human beings to be standing on the earth and under the sky. In a 1946 discussion of his philosophical project, Merleau-Ponty declared it his objective “to find again the bond with the world that precedes thought properly speaking”.3 My intention in the following three chapters, is to bring out the implications of this project for the experience and understanding of our relationship to nature, casting these implications very specifically in terms of a phenomenological exposition of the nature of the human voice, the voice gifted, as Aristotle said, with the “logos”, the voice, namely, that speaks. As Merleau-Ponty helps us to realize, drawing on the distinction between the prelinguistic “logos endiathetos” and the “logos prophorikos” that carries it forward into speech, there is a “lien natal”, a bonding with the world, a bonding in fact with nature, that precedes the “logos” which

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thought appropriates, forgetting, in that theoreticism, that presumption of mastery, its humble origination in the realm of nature.4 If the voice that enters language must take up into itself the sounds, the sensuous material, that culture has fashioned from nature’s vast resources, then the “logos prophorikos” that thought fetishizes is, in an important sense, but an echoing of the voices of nature. I want to find again, by what can only be understood as a paradoxical gift of memory, echoes of that originary bond with nature, that bond of communication prior to thought, prior to the concept, which is still, even though surpassed, carried by the human voice, within which the voices of nature are gathered into their appeal. This, in any case, is how I propose to begin reading two jottings among Merleau-Ponty’s late “Notes de Travail”, powerfully influenced by a renewed encounter with Heidegger’s “deconstruction” of metaphysics: 1. “It is not we who speak, it is the truth that speaks itself in the depths of speech.”5 2. “That language has us and that it is not we who have language. That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being.” (VIF 247, VIE 194)

To be sure, there is much more at stake in these two propositions than my interpretation and consequent narrative will be discussing. In particular, of course, it is their scandalous reversal, their radical overturning of anthropocentrism, of Cartesian egoity, their radical displacement of the speaking subject, hence of the subject-object structure and its ontology, reflected in rules of grammar, and seeming to introduce an unjustifiable metaphysics, around which the critical commentaries swirl. Heidegger himself, as we know, was not spared ridicule and contempt for the displacement of the speaking subject in his later writings on poetry and the “Wesen” of language. However, I will not attempt, here, to defend that metaphysics. I will instead take up for further thought Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, concentrating on its implications, still to some extent left unthought in his writings, for a radically different relation to the realm of nature. Thus I would derive an important proposition from the two above: [3] The “truth” that speaks itself in the depths of our speech is that the voice that we, each one of us, call “our own” is a voice that has gathered, and is still gathering into itself, the voices of nature. Ruthless plundering and exploitation of nature have now set the planet on a course of destruction that might some day be irreversible. The Enlightenment believed that we could overcome our dependency on nature and achieve autonomy by organizing nature according to our projects of rationalization. But the truth that we are gradually compelled to recognize is that relating to nature in the light of this belief is actually self-destructive: in the

The Remembrance of Nature in the Voice of the Subject

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final analysis, these projects cannot be separated from economies and technologies of total domination, ending forever our immemorial exposure to natural fate. We need to learn the ways towards some kind of creative reconciliation with nature. The argument that I want to propose in the three chapters on MerleauPonty makes the following claims: [1] That the sounds and voices of nature, sounds and voices coming from nature, are in truth communicating—are summoning us—from within the depths of language, the language that informs our voice. [2] That even before we assign names to the beings of nature, these beings have already addressed us, already communicated with us. [3] That consequently, our very first gestures of speech—even the infant’s babbling-songs—already constitute, however “originating” they may seem, a response to the solicitations borne by these communications of and from nature. [4] That this responsivity constitutes an implicit acknowledgement of the indebtedness of the human voice. [5] That this indebtedness constitutes an imperative summons to take responsibility for the flourishing of nature. [6] That the alarming devastation of nature calls our attention to the need—and indeed the urgent necessity—for a “remembrance of nature in the subject”. [7] That this remembrance calls for encouragement by an “anamnesis” that is paradoxical, because impossible: a phenomenologically disciplined attentiveness to the voice, attempting to retrieve, from within it, a felt sense of our originary, prelinguistic attunement to the sensible dimension of our language. [8] That this “anamnesis” is paradoxical, not only because the constitution of this attunement by the voices of nature belongs in a past to which we can never actually return, but also because, even if, per impossibile, we could somehow return to this moment of constitution, we would be returning to a moment that belongs in a prelinguistic, prepersonal, and preegological temporality, and, as such, this moment was consequently never actually present. And finally, [9] that, in attempting to retrieve something of this attunement, we can experience, as if once again—but this time in keener consciousness and despite the subsequent sublation, or rather, repression of the experience through which the voices of nature summoned us—the moral claim in these voices. For at stake is a moral claim to care for nature that is inherent in the voices of nature originarily gathered into the forming of this attunement and that persists as long as the voices are still uncannily echoing, as, or through, a felt sense of the indebted origin of our voice. Such, in its outlines, will be my argument.6 In drawing out implications that Merleau-Ponty left without much elaboration, I want to call attention to a bonding with nature that takes place in and through the medium of the voice: a bonding, or more specifically, a communication, that, already acknowledged by the fact that the voice always emerges and arises in a mode of responsivity, accordingly makes an ethical claim on our responsibilities for the condition of nature. The “logos” that figures

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in the history of metaphysics must finally, therefore, be recognized as eco-logical. In other words, the voice of the “logos” bears within it a normative ecology: such, I claim, are the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language for an environmental ethics and politics. Borrowing Heidegger’s idiom, namely, a transformation of the noun “Wesen” into a verb, which Merleau-Ponty also borrowed, I want to say: it is now urgent that the ecology suppressed by the rationalism and empiricism of this “logos” “west”, that is, surge into phenomenological awareness. And the phenomenology I am taking over from Merleau-Ponty with a great sense of indebtedness, must, I believe, bring this ecological responsivity always already affecting the voice— and the responsibility this hetero-affection entails—into our hearing and speaking insofar as this is possible, turning what would amount to a “practice of the self” into socially responsible action. At the centre of my discussion of the relation between language, or the human voice, and nature will be two brief phrases, introduced by MerleauPonty to characterize this relation. Though seeming to be unproblematic, they are in fact, as I hope to show, neither transparent in meaning nor beyond the pressure of questioning: “chanter le monde” and “célébrer le monde”. In the chapter on language in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty reflects on the sounding of spoken words: If we consider only the conceptual and delimiting meaning of words, it is true that the verbal form—with the exception of endings—appears arbitrary. But it would no longer appear so if we took into account the emotional content of the word, which we have called above its “gestural” sense. . . . It would then be found that the words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of singing [or celebrating] the world [chanter le monde], and that their function is to represent things not, as the naïve onomatopoetic theory has it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence. (PPF 218, PPE 187)

This claim about the mimetic intimacy between voice and nature is the very heart and soul of Walter Benjamin’s early reflections (1916–1921) on language. In “On Language as Such and the Speech of Human Beings”, he maintained that it is only in “the bourgeois view of language . . . that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is merely a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention. Language never gives mere signs.”7 The story that he likes to tell is that signs came into existence following the Fall: their necessity in all current languages betrays the fact that in no human language can the proper name, as such and by itself, make the thing itself present. “Night”, “Nacht”, and “nuit” are three different ways of indicating and referring to what in English we call “the night”. But after the expulsion from Paradise, human beings can no longer hear the sublime language, the


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pure voice, of the things themselves. We no longer dwell in the world of holy names where words and things are two dimensions of the same ontology. In our world, the night appears to be forever deprived of speech, forever deprived of its essential voice. And yet, like Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty seems to nurse the hope that there might be a way to bring this lost prelapsarian speech, this forgotten voice, back into audibility. In question will be whatever an ecological phenomenology might be able to accomplish. The argument against an arbitrary relation also has some historically significant support. Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, wrote that “One must free oneself of the notion that language can be separated from that which it designates,” although he followed this remark by making the considerably more controversial claim that even proper names often seem, somehow, to fit the persons they name.8 This is a controversial claim, contestable without much difficulty, even when it renounces objectivity; it is, however, usefully provocative, compelling us to attend not only to the material dimension of language, the sensible registers of sense, but also to the bodily felt sense, the “emotional tonality”, of the words we use. Even if this claim is in some respects problematic, the recuperation of the sensible here, casting to the winds of fate the suppression and betrayal of the sensuous in both intellectualism and empiricism, both guilty of a certain reification, nevertheless makes a contribution the significance of which, as Merleau-Ponty so eloquently argued, cannot—must not—be ignored. It registers a strong departure from rationalism, philosophies that exalt the concept by sacrificing the sensuous, bodily felt dimension of language, the very medium of semblance, and, with equal force, a departure from empiricism, philosophies that submit language to a cold objectivity. Like Schelling before him, Merleau-Ponty sought a way to “rehabilitate the idea of nature in the framework of a reflexive philosophy.”9 If, as Heidegger argues, Nietzsche merely overturns the metaphysical priority of “the intelligible” in order to redeem “the sensible”, Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of ambiguity”, calling attention to the phenomenon of reversibility, finally erases the very opposition, bringing these two “moments” into the chiasmic differentiations of their intertwining. In the reversibilities of the chiasm, the intertwining, even the opposition between subject and object is deconstructed. With profoundly radical implications for the experience of our relation to both language and nature. Thus, in one of the two readings I propose for consideration, we might try reading “chanter le monde” as an expression of the philosopher’s endeavour—in the wake of the disenchantments of the Enlightenment and later modernity, to re-enchant the world, or rather, more precisely, to re-enchant nature by rethinking the relation between language and nature, voice and nature. But what are we to make of these “ways of singing the world”, these “celebrations” of the world? Is this “chanter” merely a figure of speech? I would like to think not; but in any event, the philosopher’s scare-quotes around

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“singing” suggest that it is not a question of reviving the old metaphysical argument, an argument dear to Romanticism which, though hopelessly vulnerable to objections both empirical and theoretical, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, attempted, as we know, to sustain, to the effect that the true origin of language, the “first” language of mankind, was not speech, not prose, but the pathic and mythopoetic singing of words. Today it must instead be, or anyway become, a question of bodily lived experience. Can skepticism temporarily be silenced—long enough, at least, to lend an ear to the mimetic soundings of language? It is still possible to hear, in all its resonant truth, what Edmond Jabès says of the vowel: “La voyelle est chant mélodieux du matin. . . . ”10 This is the mimetic experience of nature—very different from the “naïve” experience of mere reproduction in Plato and Aristotle—that Merleau-Ponty, like Benjamin and Adorno, hoped to retrieve from a fateful oblivion. The philosopher’s recognition that the “conceptual and delimiting meaning of words” cannot be included within the purview of his argument is no doubt a wise and prudent caution. The argument that he wants to make instead, exceedingly conscious of the controversy and the risk, continues: If it were possible, in any vocabulary, to disregard what is attributable to the mechanical laws of phonetics, to the influences of other languages, the rationalizations of grammarians, and assimilatory processes, we should probably discover in the original form of each language a somewhat restricted system of expression, but such as would make it not entirely arbitrary, if we designate night by the word “nuit” and use “lumière” for light. The prominence of vowels in one language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions . . . , but several ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises [célébrer le monde] and in the last resort to live it.11

As Charles Johnson puts it in a hermeneutic study concerned with the latent racism inherent in the culturally conditioned uses of words, “connotative meaning clings to sound like ants to a sweet apple”.12 Now, in this second passage, however, it is not speech, but the body that sings; and now the claim shifts, for it is a question of “singing the world’s praises”: not quite the same thing as “singing the world”—which, in the second of the two of the readings that this latter phrase suggests to me, I would take to mean letting the world sing, giving one’s ear to the multitude of sounds, echoes, voices, reverberations, and tonalities that gather into our sense of the world. The difference between the two phrases may seem insignificant, essentially nothing, I suppose; but this judgement depends on how one takes the introduction of the “praises”, the “celebrations”. If, for instance, one hears in that phrase an ethical or political interpretation, one certainly might want to question the ground for such praises. We shall in fact have cause—reason enough—to return to this


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reservation. For now, though, we will explore, with Merleau-Ponty, and drawing on the resources that his phenomenology provides, the experience of the voice in its mimetic relation to the world. So I hear in the little phrase,”célébrer le monde”, both a questionable celebration of the world and an unquestionable affirmation, or celebration, of the sensuous resources that the world—nature—provides for the language that comes to the voice. And it is in this second interpretation that I find the suggestion, or implication, of a relation between language and nature, “logos” and ecology that carries a moral imperative. What we will accordingly be undertaking here is what I should like to think of as an ecological phenomenology—or, equally, a phenomenological ecology, disclosing a relation between language and nature that bears within it, as I shall argue, a categorical moral claim on our responsibility for that nature.13 Although ecology does not figure as a significant theme of concern in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, we know that an understanding of our experience of nature and a consequent critique of naturalism were persistent topics for reflection in his lectures. But is there not a Romantic version of naturalism finding its voice or resonance in Merleau-Ponty’s claim about words the sounds of which echo, or reverberate with—or say register—the body’s felt sense of the things encountered in its world? Is there not, in Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the communicative voicings of the natural world, a Romantic repudiation of the completely disenchanted understanding of language? Indeed, does he not attempt a certain anamnestic “reprise” of these voicings? This question returns us to the debate in Plato’s Cratylus, in which rationalism, or essentialism, was set in the most strenuous opposition to conventionalism, or nominalism. Although arguing against both rationalism and naturalism, unwilling to suppose a pre-established affinity or harmony between word and thing, Merleau-Ponty is no less dissatisfied with the sweeping claims of conventionalism, which, in its deafness, can hear only arbitrary, meaningless associations: none of the “Angemessenheit”, the contingent, but emotionally significant affinities that a poetic sensibility would claim to discern.14 What is perhaps most striking in Merleau-Ponty’s account, an account that in a bold and novel way seems to revive something of Rousseau’s Romantic narrative regarding the natural origination of spoken language, is that, at precisely the moment in the historical self-reflectiveness of modernity when, as exemplified in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, an experience with language in which the sovereign autonomy, arbitrariness and contingency of the word—precisely its artificiality and nominalism—asserted its absolute triumph over both metaphysical rationalism and the mortifications of scientific naturalism, we find Merleau-Ponty arguing for something like what Wordsworth once called an “organic sensibility” and attempting to solicit, to revive, our remembrance of a certain natural consonance between word and thing, word and world, word and nature: what the early German Romantics

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would call a “chemical affinity”.15 This attempt to set in motion a poetizing or meta-phorical naturalism radically different from the one that has prevailed in the sciences, only confirms, however, the truth of our irrevocable estrangement from nature: it is an acute indication of the extent to which artifice, technology, “Machenschaft”, has taken over the modern world, severing all our affective ties with nature. As Herder noted in his Essay on the Origin of Language, “the sounds of nature have been dispossessed by the artificial languages of society.”16 The word can function, can signify, just as Mallarmé, anticipating Derridean deconstruction, says, despite “l’absence de toute rose.” The word can signify, can mean, even when deception severs its connection with the thing—as even Homer’s Odysseus, cleverly outwitting Polyphemous, already understood. That power of conjuration, equally a power to annihilate, seemingly magical, reaching even into the abysses of absence, even creating those abysses, unquestionably demonstrates the word’s incomparable sublimity. The “logos” finally wins its freedom from nature; but in forgetting its ecology, an origination whose echoes it cannot entirely escape, it risks complicity with the forces of nihilism, a will to power that recognizes no limits, no measure outside itself. What would remain to be said, when the wasteland has spread, luxuriant gardens have died, and there are no more roses? That is the catastrophe of an absence that no one, least of all a poet of the most sublime elegies, could possibly desire. The meaning of the word “nature” is subject to the endless play of differences; and its signifying function in discourse is of course independent of the presence of its referent, and for precisely that reason, it releases meaning, releases significance, to the surprises of chance, the aporetics of interpretation, and a finality in endless deferral. But our resolve to reverse the fateful destruction of nature itself, its dying into an irrevocable and eternal absence, cannot be deferred forever. The fact of its dying is not open to endless questioning. So I want to argue that there is an implicit echo-ecology in MerleauPonty’s phenomenology, and that, by calling attention to the voices of nature ever echoing in the human voice, his phenomenology brings these voices to an audibility the mere hearing of which constitutes the avowal of a normative moral claim: a summons to respond to the sounds, the voices, that nature has given us for our use in bringing language to voice, recognizing the gift of nature and responding by giving thanks in practices and institutions—ways of dwelling—that show their care for nature. For there is only one possible way to receive the gift of nature: by assuming responsibility for the natural environment. The word I have introduced here, “echo-ecology”, requires, of course, an explanation—one that, as we proceed, will not only, I believe, assume more clarity, but also acquire greater significance. Perhaps it will suffice to say, for the time being, that what I want to retrieve—the gift, namely, of an attunement by nature, an attunement through which the sounds and voices of nature


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become available for the constitution of the human voice—can be retrieved only by a paradoxical memory, since it is a question of a mimetic experience with language that compels its constitution not only [1] as belonging to a past to which, because it is past, we can never return but also [2] as taking place in a past that never has been present. Consequently, what we might retrieve could never be more than the merest echoes of echoes, the merest vestiges of—as I shall argue—a summons to responsibility that already bound the voice in beholdenness to nature from the very moment the voice and the things of its world sought entrance into language. Moreover, because of this originary absence, this withdrawing of the originary moment into an irretrievable past, there can be no memory without entanglement in the fabulations and alembications of the imaginary, for in a certain crucial though paradoxical sense, the attunement, together with the moral claim it makes, having originally preceded the emergence of ego-logical consciousness, is not realized, and does not actually take place, until the belated moment of its reflective recuperation. The “always already” that memory strives to retrieve is inseparable from a “not yet”, a future conjectured in hope. Our principal concern will be the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology for an ecologically attuned ethics and politics. My argument, here, formulates an ontological claim grounded in the phenomenological powers of memory and bearing normative significance for our interactions with nature. I am arguing that the human body is an ecological body and the human voice is an ecological organ. But, although body and voice are always already ecologically appropriated and attuned by virtue of our never-ceasing interactions, there is a sense in which the character and extent of our corresponding responsibility for the environment have not yet been adequately recognized. Attending with phenomenological care to our experience of the voice is one of the ways through which a deeper, more adequate, more compelling recognition of this responsibility can be encouraged. At stake, then, is a remembrance of nature in the subject: the phenomenologically reflexive retrieval of a reversible communicative relationship with nature that, in a prepersonal experience prior to the child’s entrance into the language of its community and prior to the emergence of ego-logical consciousness, has always already evoked and attuned the human voice and accordingly charged it with a responsibility for the safekeeping of the natural world. In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson remarks that, “When a man lives with his God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.”17 If, now, not unreasonably, we take his “living with God” to require living in remembrance of nature, we may then be struck—as was Merleau-Ponty—by the thought that the human voice, having originated in the realm of nature, gathers into itself, perhaps mostly in a time prior to consciousness, some of the qualities of the nature it has experienced, and that, by virtue of this remembrance, those qualities, mostly dormant or latent, can be

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brought into the actuality of the speaking voice. Whenever this takes place, remembrance realizes the intertwining of the human voice and the realm of nature. Remembrance and avowal are the beginning of responsibility. As Emerson suggests in this same essay: “The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.”18 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology reveals that it is possible to hear, reverberating within the human voice, gathered into its registers, the voices of nature; and that it is possible to hear our reversible interconnectedmess with nature in the chiasmic intertwining that recalls us to our indeclinable responsibilities: responsibilities for a nature from which the human voice originally emerged and on which we are nevertheless, no matter how extensive our mastery and dominion, permanently dependent. The ontological rehabilitation of language that Merleau-Ponty attempts to consummate in the final phase of his thought is inseparable from the ontological rehabilitation of the sensible as such.19 To the extent that the “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” is at the same time a recuperation of the sensible dimension of language, namely, language as voice, hence the voices of language, it inaugurates a phenomenologically generated redemption of the potential for a relationship with nature that would recognize and make manifest what, in his late work Merleau-Ponty calls “the chiasmic intertwining” of the elemental, the flesh, there where the destinies of the human world and the realm of nature will have been—always already, that is, prior to the emergence of ego-logical consciousness—secretly conjoined. It must accordingly be a question, here in this present book, of drawing out, from MerleauPonty’s phenomenological accounts of language, nature, and the human incarnation, resources for an environmental philosophy—drawing out, from the originary experience of the logos, the ontological claim of a certain ecology, and relinquishing the conception of nature as “a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by lawful relations of causality”.20 Inspired, no doubt, by Husserl’s late writings, but also very much by Schelling’s philosophy of nature, Merleau-Ponty abandons the conception of nature that figures in Descartes and in Kant’s first Critique, embracing nature as an organic system that we inhabit and within which we dwell through a chiasmic intertwining.21 Thanks to the resources in phenomenology that he drew upon for a critique which challenged not only the “natural attitude”, but also both the intellectualism of the philosophical tradition and the reifying naturalism of the sciences, what he argues for, in his later lectures and writings, brings together in the most startling and consequential ways the latest empirical research in the life sciences and the poetic experience of nature expressed in nineteenth century Romanticism. If philosophical thought always emerges, as the Greek philosophers of antiquity believed, from the experience of wonder, from something essentially enigmatic and wondrous, must we not acknowledge that the voice of


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human speech is a phenomenon whose emergence and acquisition are still, even after the sciences have had their say, enigmatic and most wondrous? An awesome phenomenon, not without, however, as history will always remind us, its role in the suppression of voices and the rhetorical reproduction of the monstrous. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, one will find the silent emergence of language from the sounds, the voices of nature eloquently celebrated; but one will also be provoked to question and continue the patient unfolding of an experience with language that can have, precisely because it is an “institution” inhabited by historicity, no reassuring benevolence. Indeed, as I hope to show, in his writings on language, Merleau-Ponty perfectly exemplifies what Nietzsche once wrote about the philosopher: He tries to permit all the sounds of the world to resonate within himself and to present this total sound outside of himself by means of concepts, expanding himself to the macrocosm while at the same time maintaining reflective circumspection.22

In these words, one can hear echoes of Emerson, whose transcendental Romanticism shaped for his time and generation the American experience of nature and history. Although Emerson seems as different from Nietzsche as anyone could possibly be, the Emersonian influence on his thinking—like that of Spinoza—must not be underestimated. Moreover, I think it still haunts what might be called the American “collective unconscious”. Schelling, Emerson, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty. What brings these four together is cosmology: a certain metaphysical sense that the universe is a living organic unity; a sense that, despite equally real singularities and multiplicities, there is an encompassing coherence, a comprehensive meaning that, for the appropriate frame of mind, can be deeply yet lucidly experienced. In his Journals, Emerson writes: Upon a mountain-solitude a man instantly feels a sensible exaltation and a better claim to his rights in the universe. He who wanders in the woods perceives how natural it was to pagan imagination to find gods in every deep grove & by each fountain-head. Nature seems to him not be be silent, but to be eager & striving to break out into music. Each tree, flower, and stone, he invests with life and character, and it is impossible that the wind, which breathes so expressive a sound amid the leaves—should mean nothing.23

Except that, unlike Emerson, Nietzsche would frequently find the temptations, the dangers in nihilism equally irresistible. Emerson, in the end, has not the courage to affirm, to celebrate, whatever shows itself—even the absence of metaphysical meaning, the reduction of life to nothing. Although

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there are moments when Emerson approaches the abyssal, finding in that experience all his imagination could bear of the sublime. Be that as it may, in Emerson’s New World transcendentalism, all of nature sings, awakening the human voice and welcoming its response. In “The Poet”, marking no mediations, and giving uninhibited expression to a naïve Romanticism that bears a certain resemblance to Benjamin’s reflections on language in his essay, “On the Nature of Language and Language as Such”, Emerson remarks that: It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy [. . .], by abandonment to the nature of things; [. . .] then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.24

The poet, he adds, “knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ‘with the flower of the mind’, [. . .] with the intellect inebriated by nectar.”25 Significantly, Emerson writes “flower of the mind” whereas, learning from his anguished struggle over the translation of Sophocles, Hölderlin, more daringly, writes “flower of the mouth”; but in what follows his phrase, Emerson seems to return the “intellect” to what Merleau-Ponty would call its “pensée sauvage”. Thus, for “men of more delicate ear”, the language in which such an “intellect” communicates its acquired energy fulfills its essential destiny in gathering and recapitulating the sensuous presencing of nature—for everything in nature is communicative, and it is in the very nature of language, according to Emerson, to be a “transitive” medium.26 A medium not only for the communicative resonances of nature, but also for what Emerson calls “the ground-tone of conventional life”, using words that will find their uncanny echo, despite their reference to an ontologically forgetful dimension of experience, in Martin Heidegger’s late meditations on language as well as in Benjamin’s reflections. Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s more rustic contemporary, undoubtedly experienced the truth in this Romantic “secret” even more immediately, even more intensely; and in Walden, he educed from his experience the imperative warning: “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.”27 Is this danger merely imminent, still to come? Or have we not already—and indeed long ago—forgotten? Friedrich Schelling, in the Old World on the other side of the Atlantic, sought to call attention to the lament of nature, implying a forgetfulness of ancient origins, however much the industrialization he was witnessing could be heard to hasten and deepen this estrangement.


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What would our lives be like, were this language finally, irrevocably forgotten? Are we now, living lives increasingly mediated by the fabrications of our technology, perhaps drawing nearer to that time of desperate reckoning? In a poem written in his youth, “I hear things singing”, “Die Dinge singen hör’ ich so gern”, Rainer Maria Rilke gives poignant expression to the experience that Thoreau fears the modern world is fatefully losing: I am so fearful before human words. They express everything so lucidly; and this is called dog and that is called house, and here is the beginning and the end is over there. Their very sense also frightens me, their play with banter, mockery. They know everything that was and will be; no mountain is to them wonderful any more; their garden and estate bounded by God. I will always warn and, resisting, defend: Remain at a distance. Things singing I hear so gladly. You touch them: they are rigid and mute. You rob me of all things.28

Attaching words to things, naming them and thereby invoking them, calling them into presencing with their name, is the first of a succession of moments all too frequently ending—not, as is commonly believed, in their enduring remembrance, but rather, as Mallarmé understood, and later, also Blanchot, in their mortification and oblivion. Words frighten the poet because of their awesome power, a power that can become their complicity in an economy of destruction—flowers of evil. So I take the “You” in the last stanza to express an accusation directed against all who abuse this power. And yet, despite the silencing that careless words, the fixation of names, can impose on things, the poet is still granted the privilege of hearing the singing of things. What connection, what affinity, exists between the singing of things and a body of philosophical thought that sings the world’s praises and celebrates the voices, the singing of things? If the sublime truth for which, in his later years, MerleauPonty sought approximate expression is in the intertwining, in reversibility, then “chanter le monde” cannot name only the singing, or the affective qualities, of human language; it must also name the singing of the things themselves, the sounds and voices in which things in the realm of nature and the realm of our fabrications communicate their condition, their disposition. What I want to argue here, invoking Kant’s first and third Critiques and Adorno’s profoundly radical reception of them, is that Merleau-Ponty’s writings in the phenomenology of language register and affirm, with the singular force that phenomenological method bestows, the voices of the non-identical: what cannot be subsumed and contained—that is to say, kept and limited—by the “sober”, tone-deaf concepts produced by our strictly

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“rational” understanding. His writings are an attempt to give the voices of nature—whatever is received and registered in what Kant calls “the manifold of intuition”—a hearing in excess of, or say beyond, our concepts for grasping and comprehending them; a hearing impossible within the ontologies codified by both rationalism and empiricism, both of which enshrine in reification the structure that positions a subjective interiority opposite an objective exteriority. It is this structure that Rilke, like Merleau-Ponty, will attempt patiently, and with the finest sobriety, to deconstruct: “Turning-Point”: Animals trustingly stepped into his open gaze, grazing ones, even the captive lions stared in, as though into incomprehensible freedom; birds flew through it unswerving, it that could feel them; and flowers met and returned his gaze, great as children.29

The voices of nature vibrate and resonate, becoming the singing of things— but only when released from the old dualisms. Their communication will sing only when, in poetry and poetizing thought, they cannot be captured by the determinate concepts of a rationality complicit in domination. Attempting to open language to the voices of nature that have for too long suffered from our deafness, our denial, our exclusion of their siren-call to freedom, the poet and the philosopher are daringly welcoming the return of the repressed. And celebrating the acknowledgement of this experience of connection, celebrating the intelligibility of the sensuous, audible once again within the human voice—but as if for the first time, marking its indebtedness to a nature virtually lost to all remembrance. In Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard, an important figure for MerleauPonty’s thought, boldly extends the implications of this experience of connection—of interconnection, observing: That the language of waters is a direct poetic reality; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount, and that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.30

This astonishing thought, which the sciences of language will immediately dismiss as “mere poetizing”, but which I take to indicate a truth of experience whose significance and implications have still not been fully realized by philosophical thought, is at the heart of the argument for the sake of which this book has been written.


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In beautifully simple verse, Octavio Paz expressed a part of this argument when he wrote: “It flowed/ At my body’s edge/ Among the unbound elements.”31 In what he calls “the looms of language”, he weaves his body into the elemental flesh of the world, returning it in a metaphorics that assigns the voices of language itself to the elemental intertwining—precisely there where the continuity that Bachelard invites us to experience takes place. As we shall see, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on language—on the voice in particular, elaborate with phenomenological discipline the experience that, in “La Pythie”, Paul Valéry commends to our attention with a descriptiveness that is already as precise as it is contracted: [. . .] this solemn Voice/ Which knows itself when it sounds/ To be no longer the voice of anyone/ As much as the voice of the waves and the forests.32

Our language is greatly impoverished when, as we could when we were children, we can no longer hear, and can no longer welcome, gathering into our own voices, the voices of nature—the warbling of song-birds, the sighs of the wind, the creaking of trees in the freeze of winter, the laughter of streams meandering through the woods. To hear again this gathering is to hear the sense in which language is essentially ecological. Once upon a time, our voices belonged—and they still do—to a deep ecology. But of course the phrase “once upon a time” bespeaks what the early German Romantics called a “mythology of Reason”—and it cannot disguise the difficulty in sustaining a remembrance of what, beyond all measure, has been forever lost. The child’s desire to learn speech is solicited and awakened not only by the voices of other human beings—parents, teachers, friends, but also by the sounds of our artifacts, our machines, and by the sounds and voices of nature. One must listen to Fragment B50, attributed to Herakleitos, the philosopher who declared that nature loves to hide. One of the places where nature loves to hide is in the sensible flesh of language. Within the philosopher’s responsive words, almost obliterating them with their supernatural force, can be heard the eerie voices of a roaring, howling, furious wind, a terrible, frightening, violent wind coming from the abysses of being: dreadful sounds, made audible through the sounding of the words, a wind swirling and echoing, finally dying away, returning to the silence that accompanies all. Let us listen to the sound of the philosopher’s words: Ouk emou alla tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin hen panta.

The words say: “Listening not to me, but to the primordial Logos [another name for the being of beings, the word without which no beings would be], it

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is wise to be in attunement with the thought that all things are one.” This fragment concerns the thought of being. But at the same time, the words that the philosopher uses, reiterating the long “ou” sound, conjures the wind into presence and lets us actually hear the resounding echoes of this primordial speech. This wind, the very sound of the presencing of being, the very voice of the “Logos”, is an extraordinary gift that the thinker has bequeathed. But it is almost too dreadful, too monstrous for us to hear. Human speech retains vestiges of the voices of nature that summoned us in a time before we were able to speak the language of our community. I will show how, in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty was already laying out in a hermeneutical phenomenology the prelinguistic dimension of our experience with language—he will call it there the “prepersonal”—that is not yet “the voice of anyone”, so much as it is an appropriation of, or rather by, the voices of the things that compose our world. It is worth noting here, however, that whilst both poet and philosopher invoke the voices of nature—the waves, the winds, the forests, they ignore the sounds of industry, the sounds of our cities—sounds that assumed the greatest significance for the poet, Charles Baudelaire, recording the “shocks” of life played out in the modern city of his time. In a characteristically generous gesture towards his teacher, MerleauPonty states that, “in a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience. . . . ”33 And the key to this restitutio in integrum will be the “ultimate truth” of the intertwining and its chiasmic irreversibility: a truth to be redeemed, in part, by the remembrance of nature in the subject (VIF 203–04; VIE 155). For Emerson, likewise concerned about a restitution, a life, indeed a society, dwelling in attunement with nature, it is a matter of deepest faith that, as he puts it in “Two Rivers,” a poem reminiscent of Homer’s narration of Odysseus’s encounter with the song of the Sirens, but inspired by the sounds—the song—of the Musketaquit: “they lose their grief who hear this song.”34 They lose it because what the poet’s song retrieves or recovers from the river, namely, its “singing”, returns them to the whole of nature—the glorious presence, one might say, of the divine. Thus, as Emerson remarks in “Self-Reliance”, “When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.”35 Now, if “living with God” may be taken to mean caring for nature and preserving it as God’s creation, could one then say that this “sweet” attunement of the voice corresponds to—is moreover an expression of—the caring and preserving, not only a gift bestowed by virtue of that relationship to nature, but also part of what must be involved in that caring and preserving, involved, that is, in imparting it? But how, as the possibility of a relation, a correspondence or attunement to nature, is this “restitution”, this experience with language—that is, with


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the voice—to be thought? Recapitulating Theodor Adorno’s critical reflections on utopia in his late work, Negative Dialectics, one is compelled to recognize that for the actualization of freedom in relation to the world, to all that is its other, the subject must eventually learn to live by the dialectical principle of “nonidentity”, transcending rigid ego-logical boundaries. Merleau-Ponty, likewise a dialectical thinker, would, echoing Schelling, invoke an identity that is “the identity of difference” (VIF 318, VIE 264). This dialectical principle serves the imagination of a utopia radically different from those represented in the discourses of the French and British Enlightenment, where the sovereignty of the subject required the subjugation of nature and where the voice of Reason, deaf to the voices of nature, proclaimed its authority to subordinate the silent realm of stone, plant and animal to its regulation and reckoning. Any “restitution” would require a radical transformation in the very character of the subject, the one who speaks. In the reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology into which we will be venturing, it is precisely these rigid ego-logical boundaries, boundaries constitutive of character, legacy of Cartesian and Kantian idealism, that are called into question, subjected to the reversibilities of an intertwining of subject and object that deconstructs the dualistic, antagonistic structure, opening language—opening the speaking voice—as it has been represented by the philosophical tradition to the infinite registers of alterity, the non-identical, all the possibilities for good and for ill that a world of sounds and voices can communicate. What I take Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to be suggesting is that, if we listen and speak with chiasmic attunement, our words, our “logoi”, may escape their ego-logical instrumentality: they may become, in fine, ecological, letting the voices of nature be heard, echoing, resonating, within their human register. And if we hear these echoes, these reverberations, we cannot—we must not—avoid the responsibility to which they are summoning us. Thus, in the representation of selfhood and language that his phenomenology generates, there is a profound alteration in the experience of nature. No doubt inspired by Thoreau’s questioning in Walden, John Seed nicely expresses the logical, or grammatical structure of this displacement, this shift, in the disposition of consciousness: “I am protecting the forest” develops into “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself.” I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking.36 Reformulating Husserl’s concept of intentionality, I suggest that I am, or have, roots, tendrils, and branches that intertwine me into the world. Arguing that we need, today perhaps more than ever, a much deeper sense of our belonging to the realm we call “nature”, a much deeper understanding of our interdependencies, our participation in all of its processes, Arne Naess maintains that the cultivation of a “deep, intense inner life”—not at all the same as the ego’s self-indulgent absorption in itself and its interests—is actually conducive to a caring relationship with nature, because it

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inherently restructures the character of the boundaries that the ego has constructed, making them more receptive, more responsive, more finely attuned to the conditions of nature. As Heidegger has frequently pointed out, in the German word for “belonging”, “Gehörigkeit”, one must recognize the verb “hören”, or “hearing” and “gehörig”, “obedient”: a responsibility to hear—to hear, indeed, in an appropriately responsible, responsive way—is constitutive of “belonging”. Attuned and responsive, most of all, to the lament of nature—its cries of distress, its ways of objecting to being objectified and used. This attunement and responsiveness could thus literally become the formation of a “second nature”, for nature would accordingly be doubled, dwelling in the “interiority” of the human heart as well as in an environment said to be “outside”. Everything depends on a radical alteration in the construction of our identity—our elective affinities and identifications—as human beings and as singularities. And in the studies from which Merleau-Ponty drew to lay out his phenomenological reflections on the child’s acquisition of language, it is already clear that this construction is a contingent effect—not of course an illusion, but certainly a projection—of the grammar of the language taking hold of the child’s world. Writing, in his ethnographic narrative, about the life of the BaMbuti, a tribe that has dwelt since time immemorial deep in the Congo’s Ituri rainforest, Colin Turnbull reports an elder telling him, once, by way of explaining the singing and music he found there so enchanting and haunting, that, living within the forest’s benevolent embrace, “we sing to the forest because we want it to share in our happiness.”37 In these simple words, all the attunements that are gathered in the human voice are recognized and acknowledged—and thoughtfully thanked. But there would be nothing to sing—no happiness to share—were there not already a deep attunement between the lives of these people and the forest within which they live. I am reminded of the invocations of an ancient Navajo Mountain Chant, two stanzas of which, in the translation provided by a Smithsonian Institute ethnographic report, accomplish that very “singing of the world” which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is calling to our attention: The voice that makes present the beauty of the land! The voice above, The voice of the thunder Within the dark cloud, Again and again it sounds, The voice that makes present the beauty of the land! The voice that makes present the beauty of the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper


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Among the plants Again and again it sounds, The voice that makes present the beauty of the land!38

In this chant, the human voice doubles the gift it receives from nature, singing with a beauty that invokes the voices of nature, calling them into presence and revealing their beauty. The voice of the chant is a voice that, without saying so, gives thanks—simply by the beautiful way in which it remembers, naming and making present the voices of nature. But the singing recognizes that it is only through the human voice that these voices of nature can be made present, heard as such. Thus the origin—or say imparting—of the gift is understood to be divided, eternally doubled. The origin can be, or rather can become origin only by being doubled. And thereby also forever estranged from itself, an impossible possession. The Navajo chant is a form of ventriloquism, gathering the voices of nature into its mimetic physiognomy. In the human voice, there sings a deep ecology.

§2 The Song of the Winds “As our souls, being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the entire universe.” —Anaximenes39

“You could never in your going find the limits of the breath-soul, though you traveled as far as you could: so deep is its law, its gathering [logos].” —Herakleitos, Fragment 4540

“The breath-soul [psyche] has its own law, its own speech [logos], by which it develops itself.” —Herakleitos, Fragment 115

“The hidden harmony is stronger than the one that is apparent.” —Herakleitos, Fragment 54

“We speak of “inspiration”, and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of being [. . .].” —Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”41

“[T]he human being, just as all organic beings, is a mediating agent insofar as he originally was placed between fluid and hard elements. The other species live only on the bottom of the sea of air; the human being elevates himself more freely within that sea. Just as the nature of the human being

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Before the Voice of Reason in and for itself expresses a connection between heaven and earth, so also does his form express this connection [. . .]. Breathing, during which the breast alternately rises and sinks, shows the first mutual relationship between heaven and earth.” —Friedrich W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art42

“Every breath of air is the carrier of the universal mind.” —Emerson, Journals43

“[The poetic spirit in Man] forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command.” —Emerson, “Nature44

Breathing is already a primal logos, a legein, a gathering of the song of the winds that prepares the human voice for the discipline of speech. In our breathing, there is already song to be heard: the singing of the winds. But if the winds around us are singing, if they give their song to us as air for breathing, could our breathing become song, could it, inspired, turn this air it receives into a song, shaping the air into words that would celebrate the nature, the rhythm, of the cycle? How else might we express our gratitude, our joy in having been given the breath of life? The airs that we breathe, the winds that we welcome into our chest, belong to the atmosphere; they come from the harmonious sphere of elements which encompasses and embraces our earthly lives, sustaining our capacity to breathe. And with a rhythm all their own, these airs, these winds we breathe in are exhaled, returned to their source. The ancient Greek language acknowledged the soul’s indebtedness to this atmosphere, giving the soul a name that identified it with its breath. This name is a recognition that breathing not only manifests our dependence on the atmosphere, making us inseparable from its nourishment; it also reveals the fact that the corporeal boundaries constitutive of our identity, our integrity as individual egos—boundaries we are wont to think of as solid, as fixed, as substantial—are not that way at all. These boundaries are nothing but the ego’s defensive projections: nothing solid, they can be dissolved, vanquished into thin air. What would it mean for the ego-body fully to avow its airy essence, its chiasmic insubstantiality? What would be required of the ego-body, once it admitted that it is a phenomenon born of chiasmic reversibility? When breathing takes place with phenomenological mindfulness, it becomes an experience of interaction, interconnectedness, and interdependence. Such experience thus becomes a provocation to reflect on our responsibility for the atmosphere—indeed, for the entire ecology on which our breath depends and in which it participates. Accepting responsibility for a


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flourishing nature is the only way that we can give thanks to nature for the atmosphere it grants our breath. And how might the voice give thanks for this breath? Might it not be in virtue of a remembrance of nature, turning the air on which it depends into song? This is the experience with breath and breathing that we are now going to engage. For, although Michel Foucault’s concern to create conditions that would promote revolutionary transformations in the discursive formations of knowledge is not to be dismissed, we must surely hesitate before casting to the winds the “idea that words are wind, an eternal whisper, a beating of wings that one has difficulty hearing in the serious matter of history.”45 Why would that be a way to freedom from the oppressive weight of history? Would not such an act tragically disconnect us from the atmosphere, from the airs we breathe—from a nature for whose caring we need to give thought? Would this act not in fact, therefore, subvert Foucault’s impressive efforts to deconstruct the “sovereignty of the subject” that has ruled over the course of history? William Wordsworth understood, as poets would, that “Visionary power/ Attends the motions of the viewless winds,/ Embodied in the mystery of words. . . . ”46 In his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke celebrates the connecting that Schelling ascribes to our breathing: Breathing, you invisible poem! World-space forever in pure interchange with our own being [eigne Sein]. Counterweight, wherein I rhythmically happen [rhythmisch ereigne].47

This is the first strophe. In the second, the poet sings of dwelling in Schelling’s “sea of air”: Solitary wave, whose gradual sea I am; most sparing you of all possible seas,— winning of space.

And, in the third strophe, he reflects on the teaching of the wind, which passes in and through, in and out of his body, and recognises in the nature of his existence no absolute, impermeable boundary between what he has been raised to believe is the inside and what he has been raised to believe is the outside: How many of these places in space have already been within me. Many a wind is like a son to me.

In another one of the Sonnets, the poet, inspired by a god, learns that the very meaning, or essence of existence is song:

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Song, as you teach it, is not desire, not a request for something to be finally gained; song is existence. Easy for the god. But when do we exist?48

We were listening to the second strophe. In the same sonnet, he addresses “youth”, saying: Youth, this is not it, your loving, even if then your voice thrusts your mouth open,—learn to forget your burst of song. That will run out.

For the poet has learned that something else—something much more difficult—is required of him. Thus the fourth strophe concludes: In truth to sing is a different breath [ein andrer Hauch]. A breath for nothing [Ein Hauch um nichts]. A wafting drifting in the god [Ein Wehn im Gott]. A wind.

If we give thought to what the poet has given us, we must let it reverberate through our questions. What more can be said about this “breath for nothing”? What is the connection between this “different breath” and the authentic singing of the poet? In what way is the breath-soul to which Herakleitos calls our attention bound to the law, the gathering of voice into speech? Our silent breathing is the necessary condition not only, of course, for the possibility of speaking, but for the very possibility of life. As such, it is also the very first phase-dimension of our attunement. But, as Aristotle observes in De Anima (II, 8, 420b5–421a5), the voice, sound which bears meaning, and which therefore is bound by the rules of speech, cannot speak when we are breathing: for speech, it is necessary not only that we bind the voice to the rules that determine meaningful discourse; it is also necessary that we hold, or bind our breath. Speech requires the disciplined shaping of the breath. And yet, although speaking binds the breath, it cannot ultimately escape the rhythms that nature has made constitutive of our breathing. But whilst the breath of life is a necessary condition for speech, for the speaking of language, the early philosophers of the West considered the capacity for language to be the very essence of the human soul or spirit—that gift of nature the possession of which separates the nature of human beings from the nature of all other sentient beings. This understanding of breath and soul or spirit is indicated by the fact that “psyche”, the ancient Greek word for breath, also referred to the soul or spirit. What is the significance of this “double reference” in their language? This question will be the beginning of our attempt here to understand the vital relationships between breath and soul, breath and spirit, breath and the spirit of language. The deeper our understanding of the psyche, the deeper may be our understanding of the


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legein, the gathering and laying-out, of its logos. If voice binds breathing and speech binds voice, speech is also subjected to a binding: but it is the truth that binds speech. Heidegger’s thinking and the research of Carl Jung converge, in spite of all their differences; and one of their points of convergence, perhaps even the main one, is the cosmology of the pre-Socratics. Both of them found themselves attracted to the utterances of Herakleitos; both found in those fragments a deep source of inspiration. I would like, now, to continue what they began, returning, with them, to the words of that enigmatic philosopher, in order to learn something more about the psyche, which, for Jung, is not only breath, soul, and spirit, but also Self—and learn more about the relation between the psyche and its eventual logos. According to Jung, the Self, which realises and fulfills the psyche, must not be reductively identified with the ego. As we shall understand it here, the term “ego” refers us to a tightly organised structure polarised into an ego-subject and its co-emergent object: a structure in the emergence and maintenance of which, as Sigmund Freud recognised, the experience of anxiety figures very prominently, and which, for the most part, and even in its more stable configurations, assumes the function of a massively defensive system. Relative to this ego, the Self constitutes a much more open, more expansive system of integration and wholeness. Instead of a massive organisation of unnecessarily restrictive, and ultimately, therefore, self-destructive defenses, defenses themselves generating a high level of anxiety, the Self is strong in its trusting, its openness, its interactive relationships—strong even in its vulnerability. Thus, if we attend with phenomenological rigour to our experience with breathing, we may come to realise that breathing is not only essential for biological survival—but that, as a continuous cycle of inspiration and expiration, a continuously flowing interaction between what we are taught to think of, in experiencing our embodiment, as the inside and the outside, breathing can actually deconstruct the body of our egoity, and consequently deconstruct egoity itself, opening it up, as a breathing body, to a selfhood not determined by anxiety, paranoia, and self-destructive forms of defensiveness, but released instead into the fulfillment of a life which has learned a certain wisdom from the elemental attunement of breathing. If the life of the Self begins as a spontaneously breathing body, its fulfillment-phase, rejoining and reconciling in the rhythms of song the breath of the psyche and the voice that called for its binding, requires a recollection and retrieval of this elemental psyche. Many ancient traditions teach that breathing with awareness is the first moment of the ego’s adventure on its way to a Selfhood in which psyche and logos, the song of the heart and the speech of reason, would no longer constitute an antagonistic dualism. Gently altering the boundaries of embodiment that the ego constructed, breathing can open the ego to identifying its destiny with the ecology of a larger whole. As Rilke’s Sonnet says:

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Before the Voice of Reason Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath is still increasing space . . . . 49

The boundaries of the Self are potentially as vast as the sky: nothing limits the extent of its breath; nothing limits the measure of its becoming. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard remarks, in this connection, that an “existing individual is constantly in process of becoming.”50 Our concern here is to give thought to what this might mean in regard to our breathing, our existence as beings that breathe. I want to argue that the hermeneutical movement I have been describing—a movement by which (in the first phase) we should “go down” into the elemental attunements of the breathing body and (in the second phase) retrieve our felt sense of those “ecstatic” attunements, “raising up” that sense (in the third phase) into a higher awareness which can guide our living and our use of language—would be the beginning of a process of reconciliation, overcoming the socially constructed dualisms that have been not only the great strength of the modern subject, but also the locus of its deepest cultural pathologies. This movement, raising the attunement of breathing into a song of life, would accordingly be a movement that, once again—and yet, in a sense, for the first time—could begin to make the breathing body whole, integrating past into present, infancy into maturity, human “nature” into human “language”. The recollection and retrieval of a felt sense of the breathing psyche could make a difference in the use and character of language: instead of being determined by the restricted voice of the ego-logical subject, language would instead inhabit a voice attuned and opened by its awareness of the rhythmic song of the breath. If, as Heidegger points out in his work on Herakleitos, “logos” derives from a “legein” that means “gathering” and “laying out”, we might think of the psyche in its elemental sense, namely as breathing, as an elemental legein, gathering and laying-out an atmospheric field. Breathing is a legein, for it gathers around the living being a sphere of air, an elemental atmosphere. It is in fact our first, and most primordial articulation (logos) of the meaning of being, the gathering of an elemental fourfold—the Geviert that, in Heidegger’s later thought, is said to bring together earth and sky, gods and mortals—by rhythmic cycles of inhaling and exhaling, receiving and giving. But, as Merleau-Ponty’s argument in his lectures on the child’s acquisition of language implies, breathing is also a legein because it is the laying out of a communicative space, a field of communication. Breathing is our most primordial articulation of the conditions necessary for speech. Inhibiting itself, restricting and then releasing itself, our breathing gives way to speech. Thus speech is born in the “sacrifice” of breath—its disciplined binding for the sake of a voice capable of producing recognisable and meaningful sounds. And logos, in the sense of speech, accordingly presupposes psyche, the gift of breath, for the gift of speech is given first of all to the breath. Breathing is then


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the gift of an elemental gathering and laying-out that the logos gathers up into itself and lays down in communicative patterns of speech. The logos also bears a special relation to the formation of the Self—to the psyche in that sense as well. For it is only by grace of the word, the word brought to speech, that we become human beings. (One recalls, here, that it is not the breath but rather the ability to speak which is, for Descartes, what will permit him to tell whether the apparitions he observes on the street outside are really human beings or mere machines instead.) It is only in speech that the truly human is born; and it is only when we have entered into the depths of our language and made ourselves at home in its rhythms, its tones and inflections, resonances and echoes, that we can take our first steps towards becoming a self. Later steps would, I suggest, require of us the experience of a certain alienation or exile from our native language. The breath’s sacrifice for the sake of voice could thus be described as redeemed by the self-estrangement—the sacrifice of its “mother tongue”—which the voice makes in its passage on the way to the singing of language. But if the logos is dependent on the breathing of the psyche, the psyche is dependent on, and must be obedient to, the elemental, primordial attunement laid down by the primordial Logos, that which Heidegger understands as an ancient name for the being of beings. The Logos named by Herakleitos is a gathering that lays out the primordial, existential conditions for the self’s body of breath; and in its great gathering, its gift of the winds, an atmosphere, it lays claim to that breath, which it endows with the potentiality to become what it both already is and is not yet, namely—a human voice. This is a claim that one might be inclined to say can ultimately be redeemed only by a breathing which, becoming the thinker’s “song”, the poet’s “song”, retrieves a thoughtful sense of the primordial Logos, ancient name for the being of beings, in a hermeneutics of recollection that discloses it for our hearing in its most primordial gathering and laying-out as the bringing-forth of our breathing—and as the law of being which is always already presencing through the rhythms of our breathing. Thus it might be said that the claim of the primordial Logos, the claim brought by the facticity of being, is to be redeemed in a thoughtful saying, a speaking voice that lets itself open up to the deepest resonances of this facticity. But a mindful breathing, a breathing aware of its law and deeply in touch with it, might also respond immediately to the claim, for it is in breathing that we come closest to a primordial integration, attunement by the very facticity of being. Breathing is our body’s first moment of openness to this facticity—this enigmatic “there is” whispered by the winds. Thus here, in the present context, the metaphysical “question of being”, Heidegger’s “Seinsfrage”, would translate into a reflection which must become, in the most radical way, a reflexive self-awareness that can call into question our everyday, characteristically “normal” experience with breathing. What does such critical reflexivity reveal? Does it not reveal a breathing

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that is shallow, tight, and constricted by an unfathomable, inexpressible anxiety? If we were to get more in touch with our experience of breathing, we might perhaps begin to feel, to become aware of, the anguish—and also, perhaps, the melancholy, no less unfathomable and inexpressible—that it is holding, and that holds it back. The Latin word, angustia, from which we derive our words “anguish” and “anxiety”, means “narrowness”. In a state of intense anxiety, the throat tightens, and the passage it offers to breathing narrows. In such an atmosphere, breathing may become extremely difficult. And, since the rhythmic pattern of our breathing is responsible for generating a basic, inwardly felt sense of time, disturbances in breathing will even manifest, sooner or later, as disturbances in our being-in-time. These reflections are to be understood as “ontological” in the sense that, by calling into question our “normal” experience with breathing, they call attention to the possibility of a deeper, more primordial experience with being, an ecstatic potentiality for breathing always already granted, but not yet realised through awareness. Our reflections suggest the possibility that we could enjoy a more life-enriching experience with breathing—especially in relation to the realm of nature—to the extent that we are able to open ourselves to that most open openness which is the uncanny facticity of being— the enigma of the “there is”. But in this enigma there is also the possibility—the threat—of nothingness. The contingency of that which is means the possibility that what is might not have been—and might not, in future, always be. Our “normal” experience with breathing betrays a certain deeply concealed sense of this possibility. Thus, our condition as “fallen”, our “pathology” as finite, as mortal, as “thrown” into the contingency of a groundless existence, even affects, and is manifest in, the very nature of our breathing. The “symptom” of our condition as mortals appears in and as an anxiety which restricts our breathing—and may even suffocate. In the “normal” situation, this symptomology may be very deeply concealed. Or it may manifest in the disguise of a nervous cough or a nervous clearing of the throat—or in some pathology of speech: in uncontrollable stuttering, for example, or in an excruciatingly oppressive compulsion to fill every moment of silence with idle chatter, concealing the sound of death. Unpleasant though it is, anxiety can, however, be a useful experience, reminding us to make contact with our breathing. For breathing is the gift of our original integration into the wholeness and openness of being, of nature. Could we overcome the ontological forgetfulness—the pathology of everydayness—that haunts our “normal” breathing? Could we somehow return, hermeneutically, to the experience of a pre-ontological body of breath, an experience more primordial than the one we normally inhabit as adults, and retrieve it for present living? Could we, going deeply into our breathing, retrieving an inspiration from its primordial ecstatic openness—that openness which the


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healthy infant unknowingly enjoys? The infant’s body of breath is a body without airtight defenses, without fixated boundaries. Confronted by the child’s experience, can we say where our breath ends and where the winds begin? Is there any point in the atmosphere that can really be a matter of indifference to our breathing? Breathing is our most fundamental openness, our most fundamental experience of non-duality. If, through our understanding of this, our experience with breathing were to begin realising its pre-ontologically given potential—that is, the ontological potential with which we are originally endowed, we might find that it could even issue in a speaking correspondingly charged with great inspirational energy—the very singing of the atmosphere. In the spirit of Romanticism, many poets have evoked this phenomenon, which, through the hermeneutical thrust in his phenomenology of language, Merleau-Ponty was attempting to retrieve from its oblivion. In our infancy, before we are able to speak, we are already, of course, breathing, already participating in a relationship of the most intimate taking and giving. With every exchange of air, breathing in, breathing out, we are being woven into the currents of the wind, an atmosphere. Breathing is our very first teaching—a silent teaching—in the way of interdependency, continuity, relationship, giving and receiving. Our first teaching is one of perfect—albeit involuntary—integration, harmony, non-duality, non-identity. Breathing comes naturally; it is so rudimentary that it requires no action of volition, no attention of thought. But, for that very reason, the “wisdom” borne by breathing is difficult, and may be the last thing one ever learns. If we wish to learn a way of being that is not that of the will to power, we must first give thought to our breathing. Only when our breathing is released from this power could it give to our voice a breath drawn from the songs of existence that fill the air, carried by all the winds. In “The Child’s Relations with Others”, Merleau-Ponty points out that, at the very moment of the child’s birth, The body is already a respiratory body. Not only the mouth, but the whole respiratory apparatus gives the child a kind of experience of space.51

But if breathing gathers and lays out a breath-space, an “atmosphere”, and indeed participates in the constitution of our being-in-space, and if its rhythms are involved in the constitution of our being-in-time, then we should expect that changes in our breathing, changes induced by our mindfulness, our reflexive awareness, could bring about corresponding changes in our experience of being-in-space and being-in-time. Moreover, since we inhabit a matrix of space and time which is inherently social, practices that effected changes in our patterns of breathing could in principle also bring about changes in our way of being with others—changes that could significantly alter our processes of communication.

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If there really is, as Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology suggests, an inspiration and expiration of being, then that could be taken as the ontological measure for the ekstatic fulfillment of our experience with breathing. In The Sickness Unto Death, Sören Kierkegaard makes a connection between our breathing and our existential-ontological possibilities: Without possibility, a man cannot even, as it were, draw breath.52

He then elaborates this connection: Personality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. The condition of its survival is therefore analogous to breathing (respiration), which is an in- and aspiration. The self of the determinist cannot breathe, for it is impossible to breathe necessity alone, which taken pure and simple suffocates the human self.53

Breathing beings will suffocate without space to breathe; they also require time, otherwise, pressured by time, they will experience shortness of breath. The space and time that would correspond to a spiritually developed experience with breathing would therefore be a space, and a time, of the greatest possibility. The spirit, the psyche, needs an openness within which to breathe. And if we are to breathe freely, we need the openness of truth—for truth is an opening which sets us free. The event opening this openness is one that we always experience, regardless of our theory of truth, as a “space-time matrix” in which we may breathe more freely. Thus it is not at all accidental that the socalled “Gestalt shift”, that moment, discussed at length by Ludwig Wittgenstein, when something new and surprising “dawns” on us, is called the “Aha!” moment of experience—a moment of relief when the breath is released through the widely opened mouth.54 The truth that releases the spirit into the space of possibility also releases the spirit’s body of breath into that openness. What Kierkegaard says is: . . . only the man whose being has been so shaken that he became spirit by understanding that all things are possible, only he has had dealings with God.55

This becoming spirit, however, is connected to breathing not only by analogy, but ultimately by a much deeper affinity: So, to pray is to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.56

The identity of breathing and prayer is, of course, a possibility that only the spirit can realise; but, for Kierkegaard, human beings without a spiritual


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relation with God are not only suffering the despair of a breath denied the healing power of prayer; they are even suffering the fate of a breath denied true speech. In the absence of an absolute relationship with God, he says, man is essentially as speechless as the brutes.57

Breathing and prayer are, for Kierkegaard, equally necessary for life. Moreover, he thinks, without a relationship with God, our breathing cannot receive the “inspiration” of prayer, our most “authentic”, most deeply fulfilling form of speech—and also of course, the source, for him, of all authentic speech: But for the possibility alone or for the necessity alone to supply the conditions for the breathing of prayer is no more possible than it is for a man to breathe oxygen alone or nitrogen alone. For in order to pray, there must be a God [. . .].

In sum, Kierkegaard seems to be saying: 1. That speech is a spiritual development of breathing 2. That prayer is the spiritual fulfillment of speech: the voice, as Emmanuel Levinas says it, in which, “before and beyond” the subject, and “coming from horizons greater than those in which ontology is situated,” the “Infinite is heard” 3. That in prayer, therefore, in “the breathing of prayer”, our breathing is consecrated and brought to fulfillment.

But my interpellation in this deduction, this constellation of propositions, reminiscent of Levinas’s assertion that “the essence of discourse is prayer”,58 suggests an even bolder fourth proposition, namely: 4. That breathing itself, and as such, is already and essentially a mode of prayer, a way of giving thanks.

But of course, it is always a possibility—indeed, more likely than not—that we might not experience our breathing in this way at all—might not hear, within our breathing and its voice, any echoes of this “inspiration”, this relation to the nature of the Infinite, which, for the two philosophers we are now considering, has already withdrawn from presence even before we have taken our first breath. But if we surrender our dualistic conceptions—of mind as separate from body, of spirit and flesh as irreconcilable enemies, of the body which breathes as nothing but a physical system of respiration— then we are at least free to recognise, in breathing, its ownmost ontological

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potential: to be so filled with awareness that it is open to the openness of being, and becomes quite literally, as Merleau-Ponty says, an inhaling and exhaling of being, a continuous, endless “prayer” giving praise and thanks. If Kierkegaard draws breathing into a theological interpretation and Merleau-Ponty incorporates it into a phenomenological account of infancy and the infant’s entrance into the language of its community, Emmanuel Levinas draws it into the realm of the ethical. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas observes that “breathing is transcendence in the form of opening up.” Reflecting that “perhaps animality is only the soul’s still being too short of breath,” Levinas comments: It is the longest breath there is, spirit. Is man not the living being capable of the longest breath in inspiration, without a stopping point, and in expiration, without return?”59

Could this infinite extent be what the poet Rilke is referring to when he invokes our spiritual potentiality for being “more daring by a breath”?60 Breathing becomes the prayer, the song of being, it already essentially is, one might say, when the prayer is not “imposed” upon it from outside its own most natural way of being, but is, rather, a breathing which, just by virtue of its constant mindfulness, gives praise and repeated thanks. The body that breathes prayerfully, the body whose breathing is a continuous prayer, a grateful celebration of being, would then become the ontological fulfillment of the infant’s primordial body of breath. But this fulfillment is only an existential, “elective” possibility. It cannot come about by the laws of nature alone. It requires a mindfulness that opens and deepens our breathing. It requires that the ego, learning from the flowing in and flowing out of its breathing that the body is not, as it seemed, a selfcontained solid, and that the boundaries it has constructed are actually the cause of its endangerment—or its paranoia, should finally overcome its anxiety and release its breathing into the openness of the atmosphere.61 Overcoming sedimented ego-logical anxieties over the boundaries of its identity, the subject could consecrate its breathing, returning it to a remembrance of nature. If, as Jacques Lacan maintains, the basis of neurosis is the tendency to solidify energy into a barrier that divides spaces into two self-enclosed entities, “I” and “Other”, the space “in here” and the space “out there”, then it is up to the ego to release the psyche from its self-created anguish, so that it may be attuned and “at one” with the whole of being through every breath it gives and takes.62 According to Lacan, “the ego is structured exactly like a symptom [. . .]. It is the human symptom par excellence, it is the mental malady of man.”63 But we can, in effect, virtually breathe away the solidity of the ego, breathing it into an utterly open flow of energy, so that we are free to draw our inspiration from the whole of being. As Levinas formulates this point:


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It is as though the atomic unity of the subject were exposed outside by breathing, by divesting its ultimate substance even to the mucous membrane of the lungs [. . .].64

But we should not underestimate the difficulties: the ego will always fight to survive—fight, perhaps, even if that means its death. Levinas’s critique of egoity, motivated entirely by ethical concerns, found early encouragement in Heidegger’s bold critique, which, however, was strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s analysis of Western civilisation and aimed at the will to power that figures in the philosophical representation of the ego-logical subject that has risen to power in the modern age. Positing this subject in a relation to the “nothingness” of being, Heidegger disturbs the ego’s self-inflation: the immeasurable extent of the breath negates the ego’s narcissism. Thus, in “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger will remind us that “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing [Hineingehaltenheit].”65 An encounter with the nothingness of being—an experience with nothingness into which our breath, if we follow its flow, can draw us—is a crucial moment of trial and passage for the ego, for “without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood, no freedom.”66 “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety,” when our breathing takes us beyond the security of the realm of things, “the original openness of beings as such arises [. . .].”67 In the restricted breathing of “original anxiety”, drawn into an openness that it can only experience as nothingness, the ego is fighting for its very survival. For such anxiety “can awaken in existence at any moment.” Although “usually repressed,” as Heidegger says, Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the “Oh, yes” and the “Oh, no” of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring.68

Thinking, which Heidegger always understands to be mindfulness of being, needs to be embodied; it needs a body whose breathing is already itself a mindful, “eingedenk” openness to the open. To live one’s life—to breathe— with a keen awareness of our nothingness, is to become, as Rilke says, “um einen Hauch wagender”, “more daring by a breath”.69 Levinas argues that “there is a [deeply encrypted ethical] claim laid on the same [on the “I”] by the other in the core of myself.” Moreover, he suggests that this claim is from the beginning constitutive of the breathing psyche: The psyche signifies the claiming of the same by the other, or inspiration [. . .]. It is an undoing of the substantial nucleus of the ego that is formed in the same [. . .].70

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“I exist,” he explains, “through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation: I am inspired. This inspiration is the psyche.”71 With every breath that the ego takes, its self-assertion, its privilege, is already being denied. Denied by— an openness in which the essence of being is surpassed in inspiration. It is an openness of which inspiration is a modality or a foretaste, or, more exactly, of which it retains the aftertaste. Outside of any mysticism, in this respiration, the possibility of every sacrifice for the other, activity and passivity coincide.72

My responsibility for the other engages me first of all through my breathing: with my first breath, I am already bound, already subject to the other—and already informed of a moral destiny beyond egoism. Breathing is already an “intertwining” of myself and the other, an opening to the other, an opening that precedes volition and that is not merely “being-in-the-world”, since it transcends the world in its relation to the “infinite divinity” of the other. According to Levinas, the breathing by which entities seem to affirm themselves triumphantly in their vital space would be a consummation, a hollowing out of my substantiality, that in breathing I already open myself to my subjection to the whole of the invisible other, that the beyond or the liberation would be the support of a crushing charge.73

Thus in question is the ethically charged possibility of “a further deep breathing even in the breath cut short by the wind of alterity.” For, as he says, the approach of the neighbour is a fission of the subject beyond lungs, in the resistant nucleus of the ego, in the undividedness of its individuality. [. . .] To open oneself as space, to free oneself, by breathing, from enclosure in oneself already presupposes this beyond: my responsibility for the other and my aspiration by the other, the crushing charge, the beyond, of alterity.74

Thus, breathing is a freedom prior to, and radically different from, the freedom recognised by egoism. Hence, it is, in truth, already an assumption of responsibility, already subjection to responsibility: Freedom is animation itself, breath, the breathing of outside air, where inwardness frees itself from itself, and is exposed to all the winds. There is exposure without assumption, which would already be closedness. That the emptiness of space would be filled with invisible air, hidden from perception, save in the caress of the wind or the threat of storms, non-perceived but penetrating me even in the retreats of my inwardness, that this invisibility or this


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emptiness would be breathable or horrible, that this invisibility is nonindifferent and obsesses me before all thematisation, that the simple ambiance is imposed as an atmosphere to which the subject gives himself and exposes himself in his lungs, without intentions and aims, that the subject could be a lung at the bottom of its substance—all this signifies a subjectivity that suffers and offers itself before taking a foothold in being.75

Describing in the first person grammar of phenomenological discourse what is, in effect, his conception of the ideal ethical experience, Levinas says that my relation to the other, my neighbour, should be one that, in the literal sense of the term, “inspires” me: “Inspiration, heteronomy, is the very pneuma of the psyche. Freedom is borne by the responsibility it could not shoulder, an elevation and inspiration without complacency.”76 Breathing is already an experience of the ethical relation. But, despite his invocation of winds, storms, and atmosphere, events in nature, Levinas does not make these textual references an occasion to recognize in breathing a relation to nature constitutive of any indeclinable ethical responsibility—any responsibility, analogous to that which binds me to the other human being, also binding us to respect and care for nature prior to all volition, prior to all memory. What I want to suggest, here, is that, for a careful reading, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can bring us to this understanding, for it implicitly recognizes a corresponding responsibility for nature carried by our breathing. In a text conveying his homage to Maurice Blanchot, Foucault remarks that “silence is the immeasurable, inaudible, primal breath from which all manifest discourse issues.”77 In the pauses that the very nature of breathing imposes on the speaking voice, moments of silence are opened up, giving the interlocutor an invitation to respond. In this way, the breath already constitutes an ethical interruption, enjoining an ethical imperative on the one who is speaking. Returning the said (le Dit) to breathing, Levinas returns it to the saying (le Dire) which opens to the other. Breathing, by its very nature compelling pauses, interruptions, and silence, is accordingly already, to some extent, “an incessant unsaying of the said”, already to some extent the ethical exigency of an opening that welcomes the other into dialogue.78 In Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street,” there is a vignette in which he draws on his own experience of childhood to describe the receptive, welcoming openness of a child reading. Completely absorbed in his book, “wholly given up to the soft drift of the text,” this child of his memories, who entered into the story with “limitless trust”, not knowing where the hero’s adventures would take him, is himself, in his own way, “more daring by a breath”. For, as Benjamin writes: His breath is part of the air of the events narrated, and all the participants [in the story] breathe it.79

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Breathing thus, he says, the child “mingles with the characters” in a way that grown-ups no longer can. Even in reading, the child’s breathing is sympathetically attuned to the breathing of the characters that the text’s grammar, the text’s punctuation, silently registers and communicates. Even in reading about fictional characters, the child’s breathing is ethically related to the lives of others. Merleau-Ponty understood—perhaps even more lucidly than Heidegger— that, when the voice arises from within a breath-body whose breathing is inspired by this trusting openness and stays in touch with that breath as it expires into the winds, its communication extends to the farthest reaches of the atmosphere, extends into the four corners of the Fourfold, communicating with gods and mortals, receiving the offerings of the earth and the sky. Speaking through the voice of “Reb Salinas”, Edmond Jabès asserts that “our first breath comes from the remote past; our last still owes it its warmth.”80 Although we cannot retrieve the lived experience of that very first breath, we can benefit, nevertheless, from its remembrance in an act of thought, for that makes a connection which was already functioning prior to thought—and yet, in a certain sense, of course, not yet, gathering into a universal community all who have ever received the breath of life—plants and animals, and all of nature, even stone, petrified life, included. Perhaps this remembrance is the most precious gift that one generation could give to another. And perhaps this is why, in one of Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”, the poet sings of this gathering, this harvest: Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath is still increasing space . . .81

Breathing is our first song—a song, however, we have not yet sung. The song is the gathering of breath: a gathering of earth and sky, gods and mortals. And “the rest,” as Hamlet says, “is silence” (Act V, 2).

§3 The Song of the Earth “ . . . [T]he climate of the earth circulates within the throat [. . .].” —The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine82

“There is a sort of climate in every man’s speech running from hot noon, when words flow like steam & perfume—to cold night, when they are frozen.” —Emerson, Journals83

“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to natures out of him. All his faculties predict the world he is to inhabit. . . . Insulate a man and you annihilate him. He cannot unfold—he cannot live without a world.” —Emerson, Journals84


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“Earth Spirit, living, a black river like that swarthy stream which rushes through the human body, is thy nature, demoniacal, warm, fruitful, sad, nocturnal.” —Emerson, Journals85

“[. . .] language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, of the waves and the forests.” —Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible86

Nature, though eternally deprived of speech, nevertheless sings. But in the singing of a nature itself deprived of speech the infant’s voice is nevertheless solicited, recalling it to speech. Thus there is more of nature, more mimesis in the sounding of our language than we normally hear and realize—a thesis argued for in its boldest, but certainly most problematic form in Walter Benjamin’s essays on language, notably “On the Mimetic Faculty” and “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”.87 But Merleau-Ponty also defends a version of this thesis—a version making no metaphysical or theological claims and with which it is accordingly much easier to concur. In the context of a discussion of the persistent question concerning the “origin” of language, he eschews metaphysical speculations and reflects simply on what nature contributes to its cultural formation. He is thus brought to consider whether there is any secret affinity between word-sign and meaning. Noting that there is an essential difference between the natural signs of gesture and the conventional signs of spoken language, he contends that, “conventions are a late form of relationship among human beings; they presuppose an earlier means of communication, and language must be put back into this current of intercourse” (PPF 218, PPE 187). This observation is what will have tempted him, in the passage we read earlier, to take account of the “emotional content” of words and suggest not only that words are “so many ways of ‘singing’ the world” but also, much more debatably, that the correlation between what words mean or refer to and the sounds of the vowels and consonants is “not entirely arbitrary“: “ne représenteraient pas autant de conventions arbitraires”. (Ibid.) One must note, here, though, a certain hesitation, a certain grammatically indexed caution, no doubt a matter of prudence, for he would already have known that the sciences of language would immediately contest this claim, regardless of its phenomenological weight. But even if empirical research should compel a much more restricted claim, Merleau-Ponty could continue to argue that the voices of nature have influenced the elective conventions of language, maintaining, in other words, that these voices were at one time actually heard and that their appeal, their mimetic reverberations and echoes, sedimented, if not petrified, in the current life of the words, might sometimes still be heard. For

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there is, in any case, “a communication with the world more ancient than thought” (PPF 294, PPE 254). In the English translation of the French sentence, the noun “thought” inherits a useful ambiguity: as both noun and verb, it makes an important point, unsettling idealism, unsettling intellectualism. It is this prelinguistic “communication”, quite often “mimetically” engaged, that speech eventually suppresses, doing what it can to conceal the role of such “communication” in the cultural history of the language, yet compelled to repeat, with a vigilance never able to rest, what amounts to an abiding prohibition, enjoining each generation of children to ignore and forget the wondrous voices of nature, voices remembered in fairy-tales, some terrifying, some reassuring, that once drew them out of themselves into the world of communication and continued to accompany them as they made their way with joy and dread into the sociability of language. But the sounds of nature that children encounter in the fairy tales that mothers read to them at bedtime continue to haunt, finding uneasy refuge in the echoing grottoes of the child’s voice. The haunting experience with the voices of nature that the child undergoes in a prelinguistic awareness is avowed but poorly expressed in philosophical terms, when it is said to be “aufgehoben”, or “sublated”, surpassed but nevertheless preserved by later experience, within which the voices continue to echo, enjoying only a fairy-tale kind of reality. This “ancient communication”, then, is not something we commonly realize, commonly hear, within what we think of as “our own voice”, but it is nevertheless possible for us to retrieve a certain sense of the attunement that once registered—and always still registers—those voices, those sounds and echoes of nature, in their gathering. The song of the earth, like the song of the winds, is nature’s original poetry, a singing to be taken into the poetry of a language, a voice, that has listened to that gathering and gathered those elemental voices, those sounds and echoes, into itself, retrieving them from their inevitable withdrawal. The poets of Romanticism brought this gathering to expression in their song. But it has not been part of their calling to interpret it, as we shall, in the discourse of philosophical thought. Evoking the sounds of nature and the singing of peasants working in the fields and vineyards, Hölderlin recalls a world that he knew was passing away: On a fine day [. . .] almost every mode of song [Sangart] makes itself heard; and / Nature, whence it originates, also receives it again.88

The poet is one who, as if collecting wild flowers from a meadow, carefully gathers up these sounds of nature and then returns them, transfigured in song, song different, however, from the original, back to the realm of nature. This


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hermeneutic cycle is given what is without doubt its most sublime expression in his poems, “Germania” and “Bread and Wine” (Brot und Wein”). In the first of these, the poet says: Departing at noon, I left behind for you a token of friendship, The flower of the mouth [Die Blume des Mundes], and lonely you spoke.89

In the second poem, we are asked to contemplate the nature of the human: Such is man; when the wealth is there, and a god in presence is caring for him with gifts, blind he remains, ignorant. First he must suffer; but now he names what he loves the most, Now, for it, he must find words like flowers [Worte, wie Blumen] bursting forth.90

In these passages of verse, the poet gratefully returns his words to the earth from whence he feels that he received them. Not merely imagining, but actually experiencing the word as a flower, a flower emerging and growing out of the mouth, he roots the word in the earth and gathers up, from his sense of that earth, the song it offers. The saying of it is made possible by this “rooting”. But the sound of that rooting is gathered into the saying, which lets it be heard. As Heidegger remarks, “when the word is called the mouth’s flower and its blossom, we can hear the sound of language rising from the earth.”91 It would be a grave mistake, therefore, to take the poet’s words as mere figures of speech, mere “embellishments”. They are metaphors in the etymological sense of that term, namely, words that take our experience somewhere unfamiliar, words that produce a shift in our experience—in its very sense. Not to take poetic metaphors literally is therefore not only to deny them their distinctive function and power; it is also to deny ourselves their gift, the transfiguration of our experience. The same may be said with regard to Heidegger’s comment. The hearing in question—the hearing at stake—is not a merely imaginary experience, a flight of fancy; but it is a modality that hearkens with exceptional openness to the depths of silence and with a no less exceptional sensitivity to the tonalities, rhythms and weights that bespeak the relation of the words to the earth. The poet’s words are metaphorical in the exact sense that they let what they say be enacted, realized, in their very saying. Words bearing such a relation to the earth are, as Thoreau would remind us, words that reveal a centre of gravity, words resonant with the earth’s gravitational pull—and with the consequent tension in their emergence, their separation, their freedom.92 The very sounding of the phrases “Blume des Mundes” and “Worte, wie Blumen” is dense and heavy with the felt heaviness, the pull, of the earth. But for words still to carry with them traces of the earth, we need first, as Rilke says, to learn what it means to

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listen with an “ear of earth.”93 (The sounding of Rilke’s phrase, too, “Ohr der Erde”, carries the weightiness of the earth. Can these felt affinities be entirely arbitrary in origin? Has a bodily felt experience with the heaviness, the denseness of the earth—an experience much too ancient to be recalled— somehow influenced the selection of these sounds to communicate, and not merely speak about, these things?) In another poem, “Exhortation” (“Ermunterung”), whose words, singing life’s praises, are echoed in those of Merleau-Ponty, Hölderlin notes that, although the “heavenly powers” attempt to inspire and guide us, we fall silent, despite the blessings of life they have bestowed; and he registers hope that we may someday soon find a way to communicate—and celebrate with joyous words—our gratitude for these blessings: O hope! now soon, now soon not the groves alone shall sing the gods’ praise, for the time is almost come when through the mouths of mortals [aus der Menschen Munde], the soul, divine, will make her coming. Then more lovingly, in binding with mortals, the element will form, and not rich or full but when her pious children thank her, the breast of the Earth, the unending, will then unfold, And once again, like blossoms, our days will be [. . .] And he who speechless rules and in secret prepares things yet to come, the Godhead, the Spirit living in human words, once more, at noontide, will speak clearly to future ages.94

The poet speaks, or rather sings, letting his words come up to him—letting them make their way through him—up from the elemental earth, whose grounding firmness, whose gravity, he can sense and feel beneath him. If one listens well to the original language of the poet’s verse, one can hear the influence of this earth-element, very different from the influence of the airs, the winds. In this verse, the poet is not merely invoking the earth, not merely evoking it; he is also addressing us through a mouth made of earth, filled with earth, words dense and heavy. Listening to the earth with “an ear of the earth”, “ein Ohr der Erde”,95 and speaking what is to be heard with a “mouth of nature”, “ein Mund der Natur”, Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus tell us that they draw their words from the sounds of the earth, even as they invoke the earth in song. And in a poem without title, probably left unfinished, we can hear Rilke straining to hear the voices of nature and attempting to gather them into his own poetic voice, a voice thereby becoming song:


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Louder than gale, louder than raging sea, men have roared and yelled. . . . What preponderances of stillness must reign over the cosmic spaces, when the cricket is still audible over the yelling of men.96

The poet continues his lament, urging us to become “listeners at last”, “the first human listeners”, in fact, so that we might hear—so that our words might hear—the singing of even the less insistent of nature’s voices. In Kant’s philosophical anthropology, “Mündigkeit” represents the maturity of the individual whose life, in its autonomy, is an exemplary achievement of moral and aesthetic enlightenment. The word he uses, of course, retains its genealogical connection to the German word for the mouth. As in the Socratic vision, the European Enlightenment is very much a question of the moral use of speech—the public use of reason. But, unlike the poets Hölderlin and Rilke, Kant does not heed the etymological connection. The voice and the mouth that reason opens are silently repressed, despite its “enlightened” use. In this representation of moral enlightenment, he recognizes no need to overcome the diremptions, the “Entzweiungen”, of a modernity in which “progress” is measured by the extent of our success in achieving the domination of both external and internal nature. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue in their Dialectic of Enlightenment that Kant does not think to question a modernity in which we are increasingly cut off from our awareness of ourselves as nature, and as a part of nature: a modernity in which we have suppressed and forgotten our nature, and in which the voice of a Reason reduced to the technology of instrumental means can no longer hear within itself the voices of nature still gathered, and reverberating still, despite their suppression, within it. If, however, there is to be any hope for the future, a future in which life redeemed can truly flourish on this planet—and I mean, here, not only our human life, but the life of plants and animals, and also the “life”, or say the “potency”, in all stone—then we must somehow find our way back to a “recollection of nature in the subject”: as the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment put it, an “Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt”.97 It seems that, when Merleau-Ponty writes, in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, that, “Like crystal, like metal and many substances, I am a sonorous being”, he is undertaking—or undergoing—just such a recollection (VIF 190, VIE 144). What he is recording, here, is an allegorical recollection of his essential, elemental connection with earth, the very substance of his identity. But language itself must be redeemed through this recollection, for, as Adorno remarks in a beautiful essay on the poet, Joseph von Eichendorff: “Language transcends itself to become music only by virtue of that reconciliation” between man and nature which only language can effect.98 Intimations of that “reconciliation” can be heard in “Wünschelrute”, one of the poems on which Adorno reflects:

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Before the Voice of Reason There is a song sleeping in all things that dream on and on and the world begins to sing if only you can find the magic word [das Zauberwort].99

In discussing the lyricism of Eichendorff’s poetry, Adorno remarks that, “The subject turns itself into Rauschen, the rushing, rustling, murmuring sound of nature: into language, living on only in the process of dying away, like language.” A lovely example of a voice coming from what MerleauPonty calls “the intertwining”. Adorno continues: “The act in which the human being becomes language, the flesh becomes word, incorporates the expression of nature into language and transfigures the movement of language so that it becomes life again.”100 In the intertwining, from the depths of which the poet returns to us with his words, the flesh of the voice is the flesh of nature: in the poetic work, we can hear nature becoming human voice, nature itself bearing the word. We also can hear, communicated precisely in the poet’s mimesis, the very sounding of nature, a nature that is becoming ever more objectified, denatured, and disenchanted, making its catastrophic plundering seem ever more justifiable. But when Schelling, repudiating the Cartesian and Kantian domination of nature—and the Fichtean subject that carries their thought to its most fateful extreme, submitted his words on the nature of language to the restitution, the justice, of recollection, what he heard within them was a song of lament, the tragic sadness of nature, mute, violated, unable to communicate its warnings of catastrophe. This tragic indifference is all the more fateful, since, as he puts it, “the Word which is fulfilled in man exists in nature [only] as a dark, prophetic (still incompletely spoken) Word.”101 Nature’s “song” may not be the expression of pure joy that von Eichendorff—and Merleau-Ponty, too, for that matter—seem to want to believe. Benjamin and Heidegger also felt a need to communicate their recognition of nature’s song, her cry of lament. In The Origin of the German Mourning Play, Walter Benjamin observes that, Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns. But the converse of this statement leads even deeper into the essence of nature: its mournfulness is what makes it become mute. In all mourning, there is an inclination to silence, and this infinitely more than any inability or reluctance to communicate.102

Nature was already mute in the world that existed before the Fall; but after the time of the Fall, she fell silent in a different way. Thus, in a later work, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, Benjamin maintains that, After the Fall, when God’s word curses the ground, the appearance of nature is deeply changed. Now her other speechlessness begins. [ . . .] It is a metaphysical


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truth that all nature would begin to lament if language were granted her. This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first: she would lament language itself. Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and language of man—not only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in nature). This proposition means, secondly: she would lament. Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, most impotent expression of language; it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, within it is always the sound of a lament. It is because she is mute that nature mourns.103

But can the philosopher and the poet take up this lament and give speech thereby to nature? Have not Schelling and Benjamin in fact already done just this—at least to a certain extent? According to Giorgio Agamben, Benjamin cannot avoid a melancholy skepticism: To be named—even when the one who names is godlike and blissful—perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not from the one blessed, paradisiacal language of names, but from the hundreds of languages of man, in which the name has already withered [. . .].104

Nevertheless, it is, he thinks, the calling of the poet to bring into words the concealed kinship between the language of poetry and the language of nature—a kinship which becomes manifest most intensely in the very moment when it is most endangered. Benjamin’s thought continues, proposing a “song of praise” that, precisely because it is so different from the one which Merleau-Ponty describes, provokes me to contemplate some intriguing questions: Every lament is always a lament for language, just as all praise is principally praise of the name. [. . .] Lament arises when nature feels betrayed by meaning; when the name perfectly says the thing, language culminates in the song of praise, in the sanctification of the name.105

Can the poet and the philosopher bring nature’s melancholy, nature’s lament into language without betrayal? It would seem that the poet has been granted that power. But what about the philosopher? Does the philosopher, whose language is bound to a Reason that, in its willful estrangement from nature, has called for its domination, have any intuitions in this regard? How can the conceptual apparatus of Reason grasp that which it can take only as incomprehensible? Might we infer, from what Merleau-Ponty says, that the song of praise can be heard even in what Benjamin thinks of as our fallen, corrupt languages, since there are so many ways, “not entirely arbitrary”, in

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which our words are responsive to the communication of things and evoke, through the “mimetic” qualities in their sounds, the things they name? Mindful of Schelling’s reflections on nature’s melancholy condition, Heidegger argues, no doubt thinking of nature as “deprived” of the word, that, If deprivation in certain forms is a kind of suffering, and poverty and deprivation of world belong to the animal’s being, then a kind of pain and suffering would have to permeate the whole animal realm and the realm of life in general.106

Of course, he adds, Biology knows absolutely nothing of such a phenomenon. Perhaps it is the privilege of poets to imagine this sort of thing.

But would it be possible, then, for the philosopher to speak of nature’s “poverty” in such a way that the philosophical voice would remain in contact with its capacity for sympathy, and hence could bring nature’s lament into words without betrayal? Would this not be the responsibility of what Friedrich Schlegel called “symphilosophy”? Or is betrayal even by such a sensitive philosophical spirit inevitable, since the words that would recall this lament could only be a poor substitution? Would it be possible for the philosopher’s voice, the “voice of Reason”, to retrieve some felt sense of its primal attunement to nature, drawing its own voice from that lament? Or must the “voice of Reason” permanently relinquish—sacrifice—this primal connection in order to become what it is? In The Nine-Headed Dragon River, Peter Matthiessen records a moment of Schellingian longing, a moment of nostalgia, languor and melancholy which we might call “metaphysical homesickness”, that, in writing, he has drawn from out of his bodily felt experience of nature: The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place that is filled with longing.107

Could the philosopher also draw his voice, his speech, even his commitment to Reason, from such a place? Do we not need philosophical thought to address questions such as this, if there is ever to be a truly ecological rationality—the logos, voice of Reason, attuned to nature’s songs, attuned by a dialectical logic still awaiting time. This time, if it were ever to come, would be the beginning, perhaps, of a redemptive ecology. There is a fragment attributed to Herakleitos that says: “The Sibyl with raving mouth uttering her unlaughing, unadorned, unincensed words reaches


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out over a thousand years with her voice, through the [inspiration of the] god.” If there be any hope for nature, a hope which the argument presented here represents, it lies, for Merleau-Ponty, in the recovery of chiasmic experience—an experience that radically disturbs our habitual sense of identity. The restoration of felt contact with the intertwinings and reversibilities implicit, or latent, in our experience of nature promises the possibility of an alteration in the way we dwell in language; and much depends on the nature of the dimension—the field of resonance, the field of voices, both human and nonhuman—in contact with which and out of which we are speaking. It accordingly also promises the possibility of a radically different relationship with nature, encouraging the formation of a deeper sense of responsibility for the planet Earth and all the forms of life whose inconceivable beauty it has so far sustained. Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus are joyous celebrations precisely because they communicate a deep understanding of lamentation: Ah! The Earth. Who knows her losses? Only one who with nonetheless praising sound would sing the heart, born into the whole.108

For Rilke, this experience is of a beauty that now can appear only in the beautiful tones of heartfelt lamentation. Thus these three lines of verse remind us of the losses suffered by the earth and declare it to be the responsibility of the poets—as the ones who know its suffering most profoundly, but who also know most painfully that semblance is all that poets can offer—to celebrate the earth through the beauty of heartfelt lament. Ernst Herbeck: “Poesy one learns from the animals one meets in the forest.”109 But, as every day, species of plants are vanishing unnoticed into oblivion and species of animals are disappearing forever, environmental action cannot be deferred: for many species of plants and animals, our assumption of responsibility for the fate of nature will already be much too late. Who even knows all the losses? Who can hear nature’s claim? So many of nature’s voices have already fallen into eternal silence, leaving behind not even the faintest of echoes. And what remains of the time of hope is quickly passing away. In a letter to Horkheimer, Adorno remarks: “Philosophy is here only to redeem what lies in an animal’s gaze.” Bearing in mind the Nazi reduction of human beings to mere animals, this comment carries singular moral weight.110 It is my contention that this redemptive responsibility is assigned to us—us human beings—through the voice, a voice that originates in part in mimetic response to the calling of nature and in a time prior to ego-logical memory. How deep is this origination? How old? Among the loose fragments that Franz Kafka left behind, there is one that reads: “Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.”111 “We are digging the pit of Babel.” There are undoubtedly many

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ways to interpret these words. But as I propose to take them, they are contemplating the connection between our languages and the elemental earth, pointing to the truth that the secret of the origin of language, thus the origin of the singing of things, is very deeply buried—buried beyond recall in the perpetual silence of the earth. Hence a poet’s lament: We are lacking the song that would release [löset] the spirit.112

La parole soulève plus de terre/ que le fossoyeur ne le peut. [The word elevates the earth more/ than can the digger of graves.] —René Char, in conversation with Martin Heidegger

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8 The Question of Origins §1 Silence In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty remarks that, Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to the origin [of language], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action that breaks this silence.1

But can phenomenology become “a phenomenology of origins”? (PPF xiii, PPE xviii) Certainly not, he thinks, in the Cartesian, Fichtean or Husserlian ways, returning to the absolute cognitive activism of a transcendental egology. In fact, there is no way, no sense in which phenomenology can serve, or measure up to, the origin-dreams of metaphysics. Is there any other way? Why not finally renounce the project, declaring it a lost cause? Why is this “primordial silence”, this “originating silence”, origin of language, treasured? It must be questioned, after all, whether there is, ever was, or ever could have been, preceding the acquisition of language, a conscious experience of pure, absolute silence—an experience, a silence, that could be retrieved somehow by an effort of memory. What is this “primordial silence”, this “origin”, if not just an enchanting fable? In any event, we must understand that, in the very process of retrieving such a silence, we would lose it in its primordiality, for it would be accessible to memory only through the mediation of language. Why, then, and with what phenomenological support, posit such a moment?2 It should be granted, of course, that there is a sense in which infants who have not yet entered the language of their community live in silence; but if the child is able to hear, this time prior to language is actually filled with sounds and voices. Moreover, even in this temporary phase of “silence”, infants are straining to learn how to communicate, already disposed toward

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language like flowers that are turned toward the sun for necessary nourishment. Their silence, then, such as it is, is always already affected by language—and by their desire for language. But it is unquestionably true, nevertheless, that language always breaks—or breaks into—silence. Surrounding every act of speech, there is a certain silence that it interrupts, retroactively bestowing upon this silence a meaning that will have anticipated whatever has been brought to language. If there is meaning in silence, it is to be found only through—and in—the meaning posited by the language that interrupts it. In discussing Nietzsche’s thought of the “eternal recurrence of the same”, Heidegger, much like Merleau-Ponty, places the origin of language in the realm of silence, “Ort der Stille”: a place that is essentially different from the quotidian silences that surround and inhabit conversation. Heidegger also, however, calls attention to a “telling silence”, a silence that somehow “speaks”, telling what words could never say—although, without the failure of words, the silence would not be “telling”: Supremely thoughtful utterance does not consist simply in growing taciturn when it is a matter of saying what is properly to be said; it consists in saying the matter in such a way that it is named in nonsaying. The utterance of thinking is a telling silence. Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence. As one in touch with telling silence, the thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of poet; yet he remains eternally distinct from the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker. (Italics added)3

What can we learn from listening into this silence? What comes—what remains to come—in and from this silence? In a late text that denies the possibility of entering and telling anything about this “telling silence”, silence before the event of language, Merleau-Ponty remarks that, everything comes to pass as though he [the philosopher] wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire “work” is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with being; but he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. (Italics added) 4

But the silence that is “within himself” is not the ever-withdrawing, selfconcealing silence of being to which Heidegger wants us to hearken. Elsewhere, in a spirit not unlike that which one recognizes in Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty says, bringing out even more emphatically the inherent paradox in the philosopher’s dream of possessing the secret of silence:

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The very description of silence rests entirely on the virtues of language. Taking possession of the world of silence [. . .] is no longer this world of silence, but is this world articulated [. . .]. (VIF 233, VIE 179)

But perhaps the two philosophers, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, are not after all as far apart as these passages can make them seem. If the origin of language is not accessible, if a return to the origin is nothing but a hopeless and absurd dream, then, instead of finding an origin, the philosopher would find silence. Not just any silence, but precisely a “telling silence”, a silence telling, that is, of the absolute withdrawal of the origin, its impossibility as a presence. There are, of course, many different silences; but the one that is of “philosophical” interest is the silence of, or at, the origin of language, a silence out of which language is conjectured to have emerged. This, however, seems to be the one silence that we cannot comprehend: “Sigé the Abyss”, MerleauPonty calls it, echoing the poet Paul Valéry (VIF 233, VIE 179). The silences we can know and penetrate have many different causes, reasons, motivations, contexts, depths, durations, felt qualities of character.5 Recalling some of these silences brings out, by contrast, the singularity, the peculiar nature, of the metaphysician’s silence. What come to mind are these: the heavy silence of one going deep into her grief; the silence of one whom unspeakable horror has rendered speechless; the awkward silence of shame or embarrassment; the aggressive silence of the one who is hiding his guilt; the benumbed silence of a deep depression; the silence of an anger which accuses and causes hurt by using silence as a weapon, withholding the kindness of speech; the heroic silence of the political prisoner, who refuses to surrender the names of his comrades even under extremes of torture; the guarded silence of citizens who must endure constant surveillance under the rule of a police state; the silence of timidity; the silence of shyness; the silence of rapt attention; the silence of prayer; the silence of spellbound anticipation; the silence of a joy that needs to be deeply felt. Not one of these, however deep, however inscrutable, draws us into the absolutely unfathomable—that unspeakable metaphysical silence, perhaps in truth a metaphor and allegory, imagined to be the origin of language. Since the silent origin of language could be accessible only through the mediation of language, language must precede the presence of the origin to which we want to accede. Thus, the origin in its immediacy, its pure beingorigin, the origin which metaphysics posits and longs to know, cannot in fact be known, cannot ever be grasped, neither by conceptual cognition nor even by intellectual intuition, a conceit that Kant showed to be vain and fanciful. As Maurice Blanchot states it, the “origin” of which language dreams is, in effect, nothing: “an event that cannot take place.”6 The “origin” that is sought withdraws into an abyss of silence; and this means that the one which can be attained, grasped, and known can only be a repetition, or rather, a repetition


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that both is and is not a repetition, for the origin that is repeated is necessarily a different origin—its echo, the ventriloquism of its Doppelgänger. This also means that the only “origin” which matters is the one that language itself can locate only in its future anterior, an “origin” always still to come: for “what was” can be what it will have been only for a future that that origin cannot even begin to determine, to predict. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty declares that, we would never [be able to] talk about anything if we were limited to talking about those experiences with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, as the purelylived-through has no part in the discursive life of the human. The fact remains, however, that the primary meaning of discourse is to be found in that text of experience which it is trying to communicate. (PPF 388, PPE 337)

If, on the one hand, there is no experience without passage through language, hence no experience of the origin of language without passage through language, on the other hand, there is no language without some experience of its taking-place, its originating. Language itself is an event of experience. But this relationship is not an equivalence: speech is already, and inevitably, in separation, in divergence: from the beginning, it enacts what Merleau-Ponty calls an “écart”. In separation, therefore, not only from the experience it is meant to articulate, but also, a fortiori, from its moment of origination. But could there nevertheless be a reflexive, hermeneutical turn in thought, such that a phenomenology of language could retrieve—could, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “récuperer”—something of this originary, or preoriginary moment of experience prior to the event of language? Would it nevertheless be possible for phenomenology to become, somehow, “a phenomenology of origins”? If we must abjure all forms of idealism, if we must abandon all metaphysical dreams of transcendence, in what sense could there be a “retrieval” of the origin? What in this present work I would like, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, to argue, to show, is that, although no retrieval of the origin itself and as such is possible, nevertheless, much more significantly, in fact, it is possible, if I may draw a distinction between an experience of the “origin” and an experience of “origination”, to effect a retrieval of the spirit—or say the sense—of origination: a retrieval, then, of the creativity of an inaugural moment. And indeed, this is a possibility for our use of language at any and every moment. But it would require an openness, in our listening, to whatever might claim us, coming from the limitless dimensions of silence. A return to silence in this sense will always open our experience to ever-new possibilities of meaning—to an “origin”, or “origination”, in this sense.

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Lame Deer, a sage of the Lakota Sioux long deceased and speaking from out of a tradition not easily maintained in today’s world, talked shortly before his death of his relationship to the presencing of an embracing silence that he experienced as holy—and deeply healing. His words need to be recalled: The wicasa wakan [the sage, or holy man] is one who loves the silence, wrapping it around himself like a blanket—a loud silence, sometimes, with a voice like thunder, which tells him many things. [. . .] He listens to the voices of the wama kaskan—all those who move upon the earth, the animals. He is as one with them [through this silence]. From all living beings something flows into him all the time, and something also flows out from him.7

One can almost hear Herakleitos speaking these words—and Heidegger acknowledging their ancient wisdom. This is a wisdom that has learned to speak by listening into the depths of silence—a silence that gathers the echoes of sounds and voices persistently reminding us, recalling us to our ecological responsibilities.

§2 Song In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposes his own version of a much older, legendary theory, or allegory, according to which the origin of language, or at least the first language, was not silence but rather a kind of song—or more precisely, expressed in his own version, something “songlike”.8 “The first languages,” he wrote, “were songlike and passionate.” Before that, human beings had resorted to spontaneous cries and animal-like sounds, sounds imitating various animals: sounds not stable enough in their iterability, their meaning and referentiality, to constitute “proper” language. Although, at the time of this essay, there were some treatises on language that resisted the temptation to posit any such origin, Rousseau was certainly not the only important voice claiming song, drawing its sounds from living nature, as the origin of language—the origin of its voice. Here is Novalis, writing in the early years of German Romanticism: Our language was in the beginning much more musical and only later made itself so prosaic—so bereft of tonality [entönt]. It has now become empty sounds, mere echoes [Schallen]—mere signifying sound [Laut], if this beautiful word can be so degraded. It must again become song [Sie muß wieder Gesang werden].9

Is there compelling historical evidence for the claim in the first sentence? If not, how can we avoid reading it as either an allegory or a dogmatic claim in


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speculative metaphysics? Perhaps Novalis is merely reporting, merely taking note, of past doctrines. Whatever may be the case, in this brief but emphatic passage, the narrative connects a supposedly factual historical claim about the “poetic” origin, or beginning of language, rich in concrete metaphor, to a claim about the increasing degeneration of language, a complaint about its corruption, its loss of musicality, tonal intricacy, metaphorical beauty. But there was then, when that text was written, and is now, no secure empirical support for any of these narratives. They are nothing more than fabulous inventions—although it certainly could be argued that there are grounds for complaining about the economy of standardization imposed on language—on the written and spoken word—in our present technologically driven, technocratic society. Novalis himself, much to his credit, will at least not turn his claim and its correlative complaint into a metaphysical thesis: “There is no absolute beginning,” he wrote, expressing his commitment to a methodological principle of “sobriety”: “it belongs to the category of imaginary thoughts.”10 Nevertheless, so that the language to which we give our voices might once again become song, he thought it useful to return through the imagination to an intuition of a beginning in song. With Herakleitos’s words about listening to the “Logos” reverberating in the ear of my mind, I find myself wanting to imagine the wild singing of the wind as the origin of the human voice. But what could it mean for us living today, though, to return our language to song? How could we reclaim the origin and inherit our language a second time—as song? Even if we renounce the dream of a metaphysical origin of the human voice, of language, the claim for an historical beginning in song, or anyway in a more musical language, still appears to be on shaky ground. And if it is not feasible to retrieve this song-like language from the depths of our cultural forgetfulness, of what use could such a historical assumption be? Is there any way, perhaps, to appropriate it within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological claims about the “mimetic” connection between certain wordsounds and the things they represent?11 In the case of Rousseau’s narrative, the matter is at any rate clear: We can no longer find that story compelling, for the disenchantments of modernity have destroyed its power, the power of its sublimity, forever. But is there no other way to think, to imagine this question of song as the beginning—beginning, and not, of course, metaphysical origin—of language? The argument of this book is that, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—in his early reflections on the prepersonal dimension of embodied subjectivity, in his late writings on the experience with language in infancy, and in his late manuscripts on chiasmic intercorporeality, we can find the resources for the articulation of such another way. Moreover, this, I suggest, is a way that enables us to engage the originary dimension of the ecologically responsible voice. For the human voice is already in communication with nature, a medium for the gathering of

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nature’s many voices, long before it becomes a speaking voice, a voice bearing signification. Before becoming a voice able to speak, the human voice is a voice attuned, learning to feel its way into the rhythms, melodic lines, cadences, pitch, and intonations of the language it desires to speak—and it is a voice exposed without prejudice to the “singing” of voices that communicate the solicitations of nature. In “Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language”, written for lectures in the later years of his life, Merleau-Ponty summarizes the history of the science of language and the Romantic theory of language, noting that, Our language is less emotional than its rudimentary forms. There would not have been an initial difference between the act of speaking and the act of singing. [. . .] The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song. Men would have sung their feelings before communicating their thought.12

The counterfactual, subjunctive mood of this passage, however, should not be ignored. It reveals the philosopher’s recognition that this is a reverie that belongs to the realm of allegory and fable. And yet, he evidently found himself sufficiently attracted by it to explore ways in which the possible truth in its semblance might nevertheless be preserved. Could it be that our vowels and consonants have preserved a memory of the song-like nature of the first speech of the first human beings? Could they be, after all, the memory-traces of the speech of those first human beings—Giambattista Vico’s earliest “poets”? And could we think of the retrieval of this memory, still reverberating in the sounds of our voices, our speech, our words, as “returning” language to its singing? The persistent appeal of the story that the origin of language is to be heard in song argues prima facie, I think, for some sense in which it is true. But what sense could that possibly be? How might we give to Merleau-Ponty’s little phrase, “chanter le monde”, some phenomenological credibility? And if we take that phrase to be not, or not so much, the affirmation of a fact but rather an expression of desire and hope—a way of drawing our attention to the way that language as he hears it sings the world, how far is he from the Romanticism of Novalis, who argued, never forgetting his dream, that language “must” again become song? Could not the effort to hear that singing in our language awaken childhood memories that would set in motion again the musicality which language had to suppress in order to become useful speech? In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot refers to “that profound, immemorial memory that originates in the time of the ‘fabulous’, at the epoch when, before history, man seems to recall what he has never known.”13 And song, he said, is precisely this memory.14 Could the singing that Merleau-Ponty hears in the vowels and consonants of present-day words be memory-echoes


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of the earliest language, a mimetic language resonant with the voices of the things it is naming and evoking? (PPF 217–18, PPE 186–87) Could the “story” that Merleau-Ponty recites in the passage we have just cited bear in any sense a truth? It is appealing, tempting. But how could its truth ever be established, since it refers to a time before language as we know it? And yet, if this narrative is nothing but romantic fable, its recurrent inclusion within philosophical texts spells the deconstruction of the boundary separating philosophical thought, with its commitment to truth, from the fictions of literature. But before we consign the story to the realm of fiction, casting it outside the bounds of the philosophical and preserving the ancient, though occasionally violated distinction, we need to keep it within the philosophical archive long enough to consider whether it might not, after all, be explicated in a way that brings out a certain phenomenological truthcontent—in spite of the fact that nothing in empirical history and nothing in the sciences of language can give it the slightest credibility. Could we think the question in terms of a phenomenology of spirit? When Merleau-Ponty asserts that, “our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to the origin [of language], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action that breaks this silence,” might we not say, bearing in mind his own phenomenological narrative, that what comes before and lies beneath the chatter, suppressed or sublated by it, is the pure singing of language—its musicality? This question suggests an intriguing possibility, one that Merleau-Ponty comes quite close to affirming: What if the voice were able to retrieve something of this sublated musicality, this silenced “singing”? What if our speech, like that of the poets, were to become more sensitive to the sensuous materiality, the musicality of language—the resonances and rhythms of vowels and consonants, for example—and, by virtue of this “musical” sensibility, this bodily felt sense of language and situation, could endow the sensuousness of the medium with heightened expressive qualities? In light of Merleau-Ponty’s repeated affirmation that phenomenology is engaged in a never-ending process of incarnation, I suspect that, when he called our attention to a “singing” of language that occurs as an immediate function of the very nature of the sounds, he secretly wanted to believe that there could also be, by virtue of a process of reflective recuperation, what I will simply call, for want of a better term, an “accomplished” language, a “renewed” voice: a voice, drawn from the depths of memory, that would once again, and yet in a certain sense, only for the first time, “sing the world”. With this song, gathering into remembrance the mimetic origination of the human voice in the sounds and voices of nature, something of the “musical” origin of language—its emergence and separation from nature— might for the first time let itself be heard in a way that need not offend the tolerance of reason.

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Although the “singing” in question here—singing” as the “origin” of language in a sense that I have still not fully explicated—is obviously not to be identified with the singing of songs, it would not be extravagant, I think, to suppose that the historical role that the singing of songs once enjoyed should give some measure of support, albeit indirectly, to the argument that the musicality of language, its sensuous materiality, its gathering of countless voices, figures significantly in the origination and formation—the child’s acquisition—of spoken language. Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, records in poignant, elegiac narratives this historical role, letting us hear what the elders could recall of a village way of life that has vanished: [. . .] But I have forgotten one thing—the singing. There was such a lot of singing in the villages then [. . .]. Boys sang in the fields, and at night we all met at the Forge and sang. [. . .] Twenty men and boys scythed the corn and sang as they went.

The author then asks the old man: “What was the song, Davie?” And the man protests, “Never you mind the song—it was the singing that counted.”15 Such reminiscences testify to the historical importance of song in the daily lives of the people. But the old man’s reply—that it was the singing as such and not the song, the “content”, that mattered—suggests the affective importance of the sensuous materiality of language—the expressive qualities that constitute what Merleau-Ponty will refer to as its “emotional essence”. And this supports the thesis for which I am arguing, namely, that, in the individual’s acquisition of language, be it the entrance of a child into the language of its community or the learning of an alien tongue on the part of an adult, this “origin” in the attunement, the “singing” of language is of decisive significance. In this book, I would like to turn both the metaphysical question of origins and the fanciful history of the beginning of speech in poetic song into a more modest phenomenological account: of our experience with language as a bodily felt process and also of our experience in and of the social acquisition of language. This is the project that I think we must pursue if we are to take account of the “emotional essence” of words that figures in MerleauPonty phenomenological version of the story about the mimetic origination or emergence of the human voice—and our consequent indebtedness to the voices of nature. Could we not take the metaphysical and historical stories as allegorical tropes for this experience—tropes that would turn phenomenological reflection towards our bodily felt sense of the attuned engagement we understand as “speaking”? And could we, drawing—as Merleau-Ponty does—on observations of infants and young children, delve into this sense deeply enough to awaken, but precisely and only as a bodily felt sense, a


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memory-echo of our earliest experiences with the speaking of our native language? Is anything of those earliest experiences preserved, even if only in the faintest of echoes—and even if buried beneath the later years of experience, determined to a large extent by the conventional understanding of language that suppresses or sublates them? And, finally, if we are beings who understand ourselves to be essentially defined by our ability to use language, could not the retrieving of such a sense of beginnings make a profound difference in our speaking with one another—indeed, in the very conditions of our lives? What I am proposing is a thoroughgoing transposition or displacement of the centuries-old question of origins—a new employment for the allegory. It will thus not be a question of unverifiable metaphysical conjectures, or claims to know origins that precede historical beginnings, but rather a question of consulting our presently available experience with language in the light of what we know about the beginnings of speech in infancy and early childhood. At stake is what, in Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann reports the poet emphasizing, namely, the need for “a restored, or returned childhood”, “eine wiederholte Kindheit”.16 Against Jean Piaget, Merleau-Ponty defends precisely such a project. Finding encouragement in Hegel’s phenomenology of sublation and Husserl’s phenomenology of sedimentation, he insists that “the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest years remains as an indispensable acquisition underlying that of maturity” and that, in a creative return to our experience, vestiges of this earlier experience, never entirely transcended and erased, can be retrieved by appropriately disciplined reflection (PPF 408, PPE 355).17 Thus I propose, borrowing a term from Foucault’s studies of ancient Greek life, that we think of this new undertaking as contributing to a “practice of caring for oneself”—a practice, moreover, that is, at the very same time, the practice of a deeply caring ecological attunement, emerging and developing through a bodily felt experience with the language we speak. It will be necessary, however, to attend to the bodily felt experience with language. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle observes, “Before it is a practice, language is a body—a body of sounds.”18 Bronislaw Malinowski, writing after years of anthropological fieldwork, makes a similar assertion: “Ultimately, all the meaning of all words is derived from bodily experience.”19 MerleauPonty succinctly expresses this point when he says, in Phenomenology of Perception, that “the body is [already] a power of natural expression” (PPF 211, PPE 181). But these propositions must be understood to imply that the lived body-subject—the body which, as a whole, serves as an auditory organ, an ear of attunement—is also the first beneficiary of the sounds and voices that will eventually elicit the child’s attempts to engage in speech and enable the adult to acquire an alien tongue.

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I would thus like to retrieve, from our individual and collective experience of the acquisition and development of the voice that is immanent in the language we are given to speak, some sense of the transition from the musicality, the attunement, of infancy to the speech of maturity, of “Mündigkeit”, when modes of reflexivity make possible the normativity of dialogue and the heights of poetic expression. The intention is to hear once again—and yet, in a sense, only for the first time, the “singing” of language that claims us ear and mouth from the beginning of our lives to the moment of our death. And, beyond this, since in the “singing” of language there is a mimesis of the voices of nature, voices to which we are indebted for the solicitations that brought us to the threshold of human language, the intention is to retrieve for our hearing the gathering, within our “ownmost” voice, of the voices of nature, rendering more audible their claims on our responsibility for the condition of nature. At stake, then, is the possibility of a creatively recovered attunement to these sounds that would heighten and encourage our ability to be responsive to the world of nature. But, it is important, before we proceed any further, to note that the project in this book is not proposing a naïve version of naturalism to displace a discredited intellectualism. As Merleau-Ponty remarks, there can be no equation of the artificial sign with the natural one, nor a corresponding reduction of language to spontaneous emotional expression. “There is,” as he says, “no natural sign” (PPF 188, PPE 219). In Language and Death, Giorgio Agamben usefully elaborates this matter: The Voice is defined by way of a double negativity: one part of this negativity consists in the fact that this voice is posited only as a “restrained” or “withdrawn” Voice [voce tolta], as the has-been of the natural phoné, and this taking itself back is the original articulation . . . in which is consummated the passage from phoné to logos, from the natural, living expression to language; the other part consists in the fact that this Voice cannot be said by (within) the discourse in which it [nevertheless] shows itself as originarily having-taken place [l’aver-luogo originario]. That the originary articulation of language can take place only through this double negation signifies that language both is and is not the voice of man. If language were immediately the voice of man, as braying is the voice of the donkey and rhythmic buzzing is the voice of the cicada, man . . . would accordingly not be able to bring to experience the taking place of language and the unconcealment [aprirsi] of being.

Thus, he says, in thinking about this double negation, this alteration in sound that turns it into a voice of language, “western culture is thinking one of its most important problems: that of the passage from nature to culture, the relation between phusis and logos. This passage into speech, which Aristotle already recognized in his discussion of the binding of the breath, has always


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been thought as a discontinuity which is, at the same time, a certain continuity, a taking back, a withdrawing, a restraining [of the freely sounding voice], that is also a retaining, sustaining, preserving. . . . ”20 In The Visible and the Invisible, there is a note, only a fragment, really, no doubt jotted down quickly, but in summation of many hours of troubled thought: “Philosophie de la parole et malaise de la culture” (VIF 293, VIE 239). What is the malaise? And what is the connection? How far can the voice formed by culture depart from nature without risking its destruction? Are the prevailing philosophical theories about language reflections, or expressions, of a cultural malaise? Are these theories reinforcing the malaise that hides in the diremptions of modernity: the dualisms that oppose the intelligible to the sensuous, subjective meaning to public expression, the silence of thought to the sounding of the voice? Or is a philosophy of the word the “therapy”, the “cure” for this malaise? If the human being is, according to Aristotle’s thought, an animal that has become human through the possession and mastery of speech, we might say that the voice, in speech, is the miraculous coming-together of the sensible and the intelligible, a mastery or sublation of the sensible nature of the voice for the sake of intelligible speech. The double meaning of “sense” should remind us of the expressive singing, already emotionally meaningful, from out of which, for a phenomenological reflection no longer strictly distinguishable from the art of memory, an “intelligible meaning” shaped by the voice can be experienced as emerging. Must the voice eternally sever its connection to nature in order to become human—or would such severance be not freedom, not the self-affirmation of the human, but instead a monstrous de-naturing, the irrevocable destruction of our humanity? How deeply into the oblivion that repressive civilization and its culture of discipline require must the voice reach in order to preserve and redeem that relation to nature which it had to renounce for the sake of acquiring speech? Perhaps the note indicates Merleau-Ponty’s conviction—or hope—that, in a philosophical project which retrieves a sense of the word’s origination, a sense of its mimetic past, hence a sense reconnecting the word to nature, a way might be found towards the redemption of a culture deeply troubled by the consequences of its willful separation from nature—and haunted by the threat to its very survival that is emerging from its ruthless destruction of nature. What can the word accomplish—the word that, in remembrance of its past, returns to nature? As we engage in the phenomenological hermeneutics this question requires, it will be important to keep in mind Benjamin’s sobering words: “Only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past.”21

C ha pter 3

8 The Voice of Ecological Attunement in a Practice of Caring for Oneself §1 Prologue What would be required of us to be—to become, in Rilke’s phrases—an “ear of earth”, a “mouth of earth”?1 With what voice, and with what words, would we acknowledge, esteem, and celebrate our binding relation to nature—to the earth, the air, the waters? The dying of nature, a nature on which, despite the freedom from necessity, from chance and fate, that we have achieved, we will always depend, summons us to a responsibility which requires that we maintain a felt connection to nature, responsive to its many sounds and voices. Having in part acquired language by the repression of nature—by withdrawing and separating our voices from the sounds and songs of nature, how are we now to reconnect? Or is the connection perhaps still with us, its echoes buried under the voices of civilization? Do we perhaps need only to listen with more attentive ears in order to hear, gathered within our own voices, the voices of nature? Only when we have become a “mouth of nature”, then, to borrow words from Merleau-Ponty, [shall] we have relearned to feel our body; [shall] we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it [. . .] by virtue of the fact that we are our body [and] are in the world through our body. (PPF 239, PPE 206)

In the wake of the philosophical renunciation of a metaphysical origin for language, we must turn to a more modest beginning in the infant’s entrance into the speaking of its native cultural community. I would like here to begin the setting out of a topology that, I believe, will carry forward Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on language, bringing out, in a way that these reflections have not,

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the singular significance of our prepersonal and prelinguistic experience with the voice for a practice of caring for oneself in which the voice’s ecological attunement with nature, disrupting ego-logical identity, could become an audible summons and provocation for forms of speech and action that would assume responsibility for the care of nature.2 In contact with this attunement, language could become a poetry that would, in the beauty and sublime dimensionality of its singing, lend its voice of mediation to the sounds and voices of nature, so that they might in new ways, but in their own incomparable ways, appeal to the sensibility and imagination of our time. This book is thus about possibilities for the acquisition and development of our nature-endowed ability to speak—thus not merely about the beginning, “origins” in this more modest sense of our entrance into the language of our community, but also, and indeed more so, about the “recuperation of the sensible”, the experience of voice, of the singing of language, the experience of attunement that the learning of a language originally depends upon but eventually suppresses. Although this moment of attunement is necessarily “aufgehoben”, surpassed but preserved, as the musicality of language gives way to the formation of words, it does not entirely disappear, its echoes remaining accessible in and as a felt sense of the language. The retrieving of a sense of this sensible dimension of language, a sense of the attunement necessary for one’s entrance into the language of the community, is equally necessary for the poetic development of that ability. What comes into question, then, and ultimately calls us into question, is the legein of the logos as eco-logical: the formation of the human voice as organ for what one might describe as the “redemption of nature—of the voices of nature. For in the reflectively recovered voice of the human, originally a gift of nature, the voices of nature get a voice they could never have gotten on their own. That is because, recovering a lively sense of our linguistic beginnings, we ourselves can be brought to a different voice, a voice that would bespeak a fateful transformation in the way we have existed in the world—and, in particular, how we are related to the realm of nature—as linguistically bestowed beings. Although the phenomenological thought that Merleau-Ponty unfolds does not tell us about this transformation, nor, a fortiori, about its implications for the “redemption” of nature, the very logic of the experience with which it makes contact, supposedly merely to describe and argue, inevitably points towards such performative effects. But it is nevertheless to be regretted that he never attempts to describe what happens to our experience and our use of language once we become engaged in the process of radical phenomenological reflection that excavates the infant experience—the experience of attunement, of musicality, the singing of voices, which in fact anyone in the process of learning a new language must first pass through—that underlies our familiar mature relationship to language. Even though he represents the phenomenology of

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the beginning “moment” in language acquisition and discusses the phenomenological method of reflection as the way to make contact with, or say enter, this dimension; even though he repeatedly argues for the “récupération” of this inaugural “moment” in our experience with language, he never tells us—never describes in the grammar of the first person singular—what our “recovered” or “reconstituted” experience becomes when retrieved in this way. It is essentially a question of continuing the process of reflection, attending to the effects of reflection, reflecting on the alterations that reflection induces or introduces—and ultimately bringing that reflection into a critical social praxis concerned for the preservation and flourishing of nature. In other words, what this calls for is a phenomenology of spirit. In reflecting on Thoreau’s distinction between the “mother tongue” and the grammatical lawfulness imposed as the “father tongue”, Cavell comments, in The Claim of Reason, that “language is not only an acquirement but a bequest”, a fact which he takes to suggest the possibility that “we are stingy in what we attempt to inherit.” This prompts him to venture the thought that, in his words: One might think of poetry as the second inheritance of language. Or, if learning the first language is thought of as the child’s acquiring of it, then poetry can be thought of as the adult’s acquiring of it, as coming into possession of his or her own language. [. . .] Poetry thereby celebrates its language by making it a return on its birth, by reciprocating.3

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, I would like to suggest that the second inheritance might also be an opportunity to avow our indebtedness to the sounds and voices of nature—and to acknowledge our ecological responsibilities. At the heart of this project is a bodily carried memory, its faintly audible echoes haunting the human voice, reminding of a chiasmic attunement in relation to nature—and reminding of the favour of nature’s sounds and voices, giving the voice mimetic resources and bringing it forth in its capacity for an attuned responsiveness. The spirit’s journey towards self-knowledge which Merleau-Ponty’s work challenges us to think is not possible without our learning to feel our body, learning to make contact—again—with the body’s own felt sense of existence. And this means: self-knowledge depends on our body’s immediately sympathetic interconnectedness with the beings of the natural world: an interconnectedness through which we can recognize in the human voice its prelinguistic, mimetic responsiveness to the voices of nature gathered pre-reflectively—one might, with the appropriate reservations, say unconsciously—within it.


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Although Merleau-Ponty already began to articulate a topology of embodied existence in his Phenomenology of Perception, the strongest formulation of his project in its relation to the history of philosophical thought— and, in particular, the philosophical accounts of language—is without doubt to be found in much later writings: seminar material and the material published as a collection of texts bearing the title Le visible et l’invisible. It is in a text published in this collection that he gave expression to an intricate and difficult thought: The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon being, because they most closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin. Hence it is a question whether philosophy as reconquest of brute or wild being can be accomplished by the resources of eloquent language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say.4

This defines well his own use of words, which often, in order to “open upon being”, function (to some extent without signs of his recognition) both constatively and performatively, both describing a phenomenon and enacting it. And their “vibrations” often, as he rightly surmises, cause our “habitual evidences”—or, perhaps even more frequently, the unrecognizable philosophical representations of our experience—to lose their tenacious hold. Drawing on the medial power of language to evoke a phenomenon with a certain incontrovertible immediacy, his phenomenology thus often effects a “deconstruction” of philosophical systems, revealing their failures to register the actual nature of our experience. But sometimes, as he says, his phenomenology conflicts with our experience as we inattentively live it, bidding us to delve deeper into this experience, attending to it more closely, more carefully. And since phenomenological description always interacts with the experience it is describing, a description that is not true of our experience as lived superficially can make itself true of our experience by directing a mode of attentiveness that alters the experience in keeping with the description. This is what is to be thought when he speaks of seeking words that can “open upon being”. Of course, it is imperative not to separate “being” from the opening, taking the “being” invoked in this phrase as if it referred to a “thing”—to a “something”, instead of reading the phrase as an indivisible whole. Thus, although “being” seems to be a normal noun, in fact it is here functioning otherwise, namely, as a way of granting, or sustaining, the immeasurableness of an opening. Refuting, for example, the common notion that we hear only with our ears, MerleauPonty observes that sound first “vibrates in me as if I had just become the flute

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or the clock”, before it becomes a recognizable, determinate sound (PPF 262, PPE 227). Elsewhere, causing traditional theories about tactility to vibrate and shatter in a similar way, he observes that our bodies, viscerally responsive to what they see, can actually feel textural physiognomies, textural qualities at a distance. That things in the world—even such things as doorknobs and kettles and oak floors—sing to us, and that our speaking of these things might be our way of “singing” their praises: this, too, of course, causes a certain shift in our experience, never thereafter quite the same. His phenomenology is in this sense, in this way, inherently metaphorical: that is to say, always effecting a shift, a “translation” or “transposition” and “displacement” in our experience. At the most fundamental level, his phenomenological descriptions deconstruct the subject-object structure and the logic of identity it embodies. This is also an opening of the human voice to the voices of nature that gathered within it, bringing their sounds, their songs. And now, the echoes of these voices, echoes of echoes, are still to be felt, still to be “heard”, in spite of their suppression, their “Aufhebung” beneath the disciplined language that emerged in their wake. In Merleau-Ponty’s way of working with words, itself a way of making the words for things—and thereby the things themselves—sing, phenomenology is always assuming and communicating with a dimension of worldrelatedness, a dimension of communicativeness—Husserl wrote of a “fungierende Intentionalität”—that is always already operating prior to and beneath the world-structuring involvement of an ego-logical subject. Thus, his phenomenology—and the way he uses words to articulate it—may be said to gather up into the memorial register of their own resonances, their own reverberations, the unnoticed voices of the world, letting their singing be heard through the voice that this method lends them. As I want to understand his phrase, “singing the world’s praises” means being appropriately responsive to whatever the world gives us to be heard and brought to word. It also means, a fortiori, hearing the singing of language as such: hearing its originary dimension of musicality, released from the discipline that reduces the vibrations, the resonance to words, recognizably meaningful configurations of sound.

§2 The Singing of Language “It should have sung, this ‘new soul’, not spoken!” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music5

In one of Nietzsche’s notes, assembled after his death under the title The Will to Power, we will encounter this:


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The aesthetic state possesses a superabundance of means of communication, together with an extreme receptivity for stimuli and signs. It constitutes the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures—it is the source of languages. This is where languages originate: the languages of tone as well as the languages of gestures and glances. The more complete phenomenon is always at the beginning: our faculties are subtilized out of more complete faculties. But even today one still hears with one’s muscles, one even reads with one’s muscles.6

I would like to begin our endeavour to hear the singing of language with a true story that confirms all the things that Nietzsche says in this note. In his later years, Manuel Cordova-Rios, a Peruvian medicine man, told a story about his experience as captive of a tribe of natives dwelling in the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. This story was told to a respected ethnographer in the context of his anthropological research. Here is a summary of the research report. When Cordova-Rios was a young man, his father sent him into the rainforest to live for a while on the family’s banana plantation. His father expected that, during his time there, he would learn how to manage the plantation, so that, eventually, he could take over the business. One day, however, whilst at work in the fields, he was captured by a tribe of natives and taken to their place of dwelling in a remote region of the forest. For a long time, and without much success, he struggled to learn the tribal language. Spanish, his mother tongue, was of little use for communicating with his captors. But one day, his fluency in their language suddenly changed. What brought about the change—the astonishing improvement? CordovaRios does not himself attempt any explanation; nor does the ethnographer suggest anything. But his story of the events preceding this change is nevertheless telling; and indeed, in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, it is possible to understand and explain the man’s sudden entrance into the secrets of the tribal language. What Cordova-Rios tells us is that he was eventually invited by the elders to participate in one of their most sacred ceremonies, and that the ceremony involved the use of “ayahuasca”, a tropical vine which the natives mash into a fine powder, mix with other plant medicines, and make into a dark, thick liquid capable of inducing very powerful psychotropic dreams and visions. He naturally drank the brew they offered him and listened in a dream-like condition to the night-long chanting of the ancient tribal songs. The next day, after having passed the night with the elders in the forest, he found, much to his surprise, that it had become “noticeably easier” for him to “understand the meaning of their previously incomprehensible language.” Although it would still be “many months” before he could speak their tongue with fluency, he claimed that, following that night, he “began to understand most of what was said.”7

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In the ethnographic report, there is, oddly, no attempt to understand what this man experienced, no attempt to connect his exposure to a night of chanting with the break-through in the acquisition of the alien tongue. What induced this break-through? Certainly not the drink itself! I want to argue that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the way we acquire, inhabit and experience language can make good sense out of what transpired. Two textual passages from his writings will be especially useful. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he notices that, I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language conveys its own teaching and carries its own unique meaning into the listener’s mind. (PPF 209, PPE 178–79. Italics added.)

In “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, a much later text, he remarks, even more pertinently, that, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to welcome it fully in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says [l’entendre]. The meaning is not on the phrase like butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said; it is given in and with the words, for those who have ears to hear. (VIF 203, VIE 155)

I propose to account for the sudden acceleration in the man’s ability to understand and speak the tribal language—his ability to hear in their language their way of living what Merleau-Ponty is calling the “chanter le monde,” by pointing to the elemental affective attunement to their language of which, thanks to the dream-like state induced by the psychotropic plant, he was finally capable. What made the difference was a shift in his relation to language, a shift in his experience of language: a shift to a more bodily felt, pre-linguistic level, more passive or receptive, more akin to that of the infant. What made the difference was his attunement to and by the singing of their language: all its “expressive” qualities, its sonorous inflections, rhythms, tonal registers, overtones, undertones, rhymes, melodic accents, pitch, echoes, reverberations, mimetic qualities. Thanks to the ceremony and the potion it involved, the man’s experience of their language shifted from an experience at the cognitive level to an experience with language in its most sensuous and emotionally immediate presence—language as a “physiognomy”, an “emotional essence”, whose meanings could be bodily felt and understood in that way. The situation also induced another, related shift, even, perhaps, more fundamental, namely: a shift out of what modern metaphysics represents in terms of the subject-object structure and into a certain “écart”, a more open, ecstatic mode of presence. This would make a profound difference not only in the way an


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alien language is experienced, but also in the way one’s “own” is experienced. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy remarks in “Vox Clamans in Deserto”: “Someone singing, during the song, is not a subject.”8 This experience with language acquisition would suggest that, beyond breathing in the silence, beyond hearing the importunings, the solicitations that come from the world, the first phase in acquiring a language is a question of one’s opening oneself to the elemental feeling-tones of its sonorous field of sense, attuning oneself to the underlying “song” of the language— the way that the language “sings”, listening not just with one’s ears, but with the sympathetic participation of one’s whole body, and moreover, with one’s body as a whole. For, as he says, making implicit use of the topology I want to draw upon and make explicit: beneath the conceptual meaning of the words, [there is] an existential meaning which is not only rendered by them, but which continues to inhabit them, and is inseparable from them. (PPF 212, PPE 182)

To learn a language—any language—we need to hear and feel, shifting down to an experience with language even earlier, hence “beneath” the “operant” or speaking language, its aesthetic physiognomy, its aesthetic attunement. We must somehow find, “beneath the chatter of words”, not only the “primordial silence”, and “the action which breaks this silence”, but also the way(s) that the language “sings” (PPF 214, PPE 184). In a later text, “The Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, Merleau-Ponty declares that phenomenology must attempt, as he puts it, once again referring to the topology of what is earlier, hence echoing “beneath”: to detect, beneath spoken language [langage parlé], whose sounds and sentences are cleverly suited to ready-made significations, an operant or speaking language [un langage opérant ou parlant], whose words have a silent life like the animals at the bottom of the ocean and come together or separate according to the needs of their lateral or indirect signification.9

Working with this topology, but adding, now, a diachronic axis, MerleauPonty refers us to a “silent logos” that precedes the language to which we normally listen. It is this “silent logos”, this “langage opérant or parlant”, that he wants to describe topologically as both “before” and “beneath” the language that we are accustomed to hear ourselves and others speaking. This “logos” is described as “silent”, however, only because we do not ordinarily hear it. But if one were to listen for it, if one were able to hear it, one would hear its singing—an uncanny silence that, in its potency, is full of sounds, full of voices, richly evocative, a language that as a matter of principle the objective sciences of language would not be able to recognize and hear.

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If intellectualism ignores the sensuous, affective, and conative dimensions of meaning, the bodily felt dimensions, and thereby also the situational attunement that is constitutive of the body of language, thinking of language, therefore, as a system of disembodied, purely mental meanings formed without any inherent connection to the worldly situations in which they take place, empiricism, the apparent antithesis of intellectualism, is equally ignorant of the subjective and bodily dimensions; and although empiricism insists on taking into account the situatedness of meaning, its mechanistic understanding of embodiment and the relation between language and situation makes it impossible to comprehend how uses of language could ever connect with their situations. In empiricism, there is no speaker, no subject; in intellectualism, “there is certainly a subject, but it is a thinking one, not a speaking one” (PPF 206, PPE 177).10 We speak as embodied subjects; it is the body—the body of felt experience, the body of sense and sensibility—that bears the voice which listens and speaks. Moreover, in the very young child, it is the entire body, the physiognomic body as a whole, which listens and communicates. This is why, in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tells us, in a passage important enough and neglected enough to bear repetition once more, that, as we engage in the practice of phenomenological reflection, we [shall] have relearned to feel our body; we [shall] have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it [. . .] by virtue of the fact that we are our body [and] are in the world through our body. (PPF 239, PPE 206)

This is the only way to hear and make sense out of the song of the Kagaba of Colombia, who believe what their words say: The Mother of Songs, the mother of our whole seed, bore us in the beginning.11

It is from song that we are born, by song that we are made human. But our humanity remains connected to the realm of the animals, and even to that of the plants, for our generations are planted like seeds and our intentionalities are more like roots than like the visual rays or sunbeams in Husserl’s strictly intellectualist account. Our souls, as I think Aristotle unquestionably understood, have a certain vegetative dimension—an affinity with the life of plants that we of today can ignore only at our peril. Does phenomenology not insist on intentionality—our many ways of being rooted in the world? And there is also, of course, a dimension in which we are connected—intertwined—with the life of all the animals of earth and sky. Through our voices, too, we are connected, from the beginning: solicited by their voices, learning from their songs.


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In Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber tells a beautiful story about the beloved Maggid, Dov Baer of Metzritch: After the Maggid’s death, his disciples came together and talked about the things he had done. When it was Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s turn, he asked them: “Do you know why our master went to the pond every day at dawn and stayed there for a while before coming home again?” They did not know why. Rabbi Zalman continued: “He was learning the song with which the frogs praise God. It takes a very long time to learn that song.”12

§3 Caring for Oneself: The Three Phase-Dimensions of the Voice For Merleau-Ponty, the “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” is a necessary condition for the possibility of an “ontological” relationship to the language of voices, the voices of language.13 But this requires that we retrieve, in so far as feasible, our bodily felt sense of a phase-dimension of our experience with language that (diachronically) precedes the formation of the egological structure—and that in fact (synchronically) continues to underlie it, in spite of a withdrawal that makes way for the emergence of this structure. In his Lectures on Fine Art, G. W. Hegel asserted that, “in song, the soul rings out from its own body.”14 I take him to be suggesting that song not only expresses the (possibility of or hope for the) overcoming of the metaphysical self-diremptions that inaugurated modernity—the tragic splittings, in particular, between soul and body, reason and sensibility, but it also can return to language its connection to the body of sense and sensibility, reuniting the spiritual sense of words with their originally sensuous sense.15 The arguments that Merleau-Ponty lays out in his Phenomenology of Perception compellingly deconstruct the traditional representations of the subject, together with the subject-object structure into which they posit this subject. In fact, what Merleau-Ponty shows shatters irrevocably our standard sense of our identity as “speaking subjects”, exposing it to voices its identity was formed to shut out and deny. In learning how to speak, the child is also learning a whole way of being in the world. It is this social construction that the philosopher’s phenomenology wants to destabilize even as it shows its initial necessity. For although the subject-object structure is certainly a necessary, crucial phase-dimension in the life-history of the individual, an identity-formation that must be achieved, its ego-logical defensiveness, coupled dialectically with an aggressive reification of the object, eventually becomes an obstacle to further self-development, which requires the extension, or rather deconstruction, of this identity: the realization of an ecological identity that is ultimately chiasmatic, recognizing the ego’s inseparability

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from nature, realizing its dependencies and opening itself to the possible ways it could participate in the preservation of nature. In order to hear the singing of the world and sing or re-enchant the world, the voice needs to be drawn from the depths of its prelinguistic consciousness, its involuntary attunement by the voices of nature, the singing of voices gathering, indeed always already gathered, into its linguistic configurations. But when drawn from this depth, the voice can no longer speak harmoniously and without audible suffering in an economy of pervasive rationalization that, ordering the total instrumentalization of a nature it has denatured, denies this chiasmic attunement. In one of his fragmentary remarks, drafted in 1797, when intimations of the complicity of the German Enlightenment in the reckless plundering of nature could already be discerned, Novalis wrote these prophetic, incendiary words, words of warning, bearing a message with echoes that, to my ears, seem to be coming, strangely, from the Day of Judgement: Nature is the enemy of eternal possessions. According to strict laws, she destroys all signs of property and obliterates all distinctive marks of its formation. The earth belongs to the generations—each one has a rightful claim to everything. The earlier ones may not owe any advantage to this accident of primogeniture.16

If the earth belongs to all generations, though, it effectively and essentially belongs to none: “Nature is the enemy of eternal possessions”. The “justice” of nature is deconstructive, sentencing all human laws, all human institutions, to the “naturgeschichtlich” fate of all things brought forth from nature and indebted to its benevolence: eventual ruination and obliteration, a return to the elemental earth, the deeply hidden, whence everything that was, is, and will ever be must enter into the world. The fragment is also reminding us that the “justice” of ecology cannot be a responsibility to future generations without also being a responsibility to care for the claims of nature. Our fate—the fate of our species—cannot be separated from the fate of nature. Even in the child’s acquisition of language, establishing the child’s ability to voice its subjective identity, one can discern this intertwining of fates. Only through a remembrance of nature in the subject can there be freedom: not only, for us, freedom from nature’s necessity and freedom for harmony with nature, but also, correspondingly, freedom in the realm of nature itself, released from our greed and ignorance to the unfolding of its own law.17 What, now, in our present historical moment, might be required of us to return the realm of nature, enemy of eternal possessions, to its freedom? Could we, in our relation to nature, somehow break out of anthropocentrism? What would that require of us? What new form of subjectivity, of self-identity,


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would be needed? How would we need to experience otherwise the very concepts of identity and difference? In a note bearing the date November 1960, Merleau-Ponty entrusted to paper one of his most uncanny thoughts, a thought the contemplation of which could be even more disquieting than he realized: “language and chiasm” (VIF 315, VIE 262). The character of the language we are normally taught to speak as children is of course, as the philosopher says, an “egocentric language” (VIF 255, VIE 202). And it is through this formation of language, subjecting the voice to the discipline of culture and suppressing the voice as an expression of nature and a companion of nature, that the child is constituted as an ego-logical subject. As we know, subjectivity becomes possible only when the child, the young speaker, has acquired the capacity to posit herself or himself as an independent ego through the grammatical use of pronouns and self-referential terms. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in “The Child’s Relations with Others”: The acquisition of language [. . .] is a phenomenon of identification. To learn to speak is to learn to play a series of [ego-logical] roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures.18

The question this must raise for us concerns the way in which this identification tends to exclude an identification of our human needs with the needs of nature, and how the formation of our sense of voice tends to be deaf to the voices of nature already gathered into its register. In the acquisition of language, the singing of nature, its countless voices, play a crucial role—a role that, after a certain stage, is increasingly sublimated or repressed. These arguments, which in later years Merleau-Ponty developed into even bolder displacements, have profound implications for the philosophical understanding of our experience with language: not only the philosophical representations of our relation to nature to be found in intellectualism, but also the representations formulated in empiricism, whose “naturalism” is actually hostile to nature. And it follows, of course, that these arguments have devastating implications for our relation to nature, our ecological attunement. Some of these implications, however, were not even fully recognized by Merleau-Ponty himself. I will accordingly attempt to educe these implications that his thinking left unthought, bringing out the ecological “inspiration” of language. In his critique of “objective thinking”, Merleau-Ponty argues that the intention behind objectivism is, as he puts it, to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It thereby severs the links which unite the

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thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world. (PPF 370, PPE 320)

What this critique shows is that, when I perceive, when I draw on the resources of language, I belong to the world as a whole (PPF 380, PPE 329). Therefore, just as “we shall have to rediscover, beneath the objective idea of movement, a pre-objective experience from which it borrows its significance, and in which movement, still linked to the person perceiving it, is a variation of the subject’s hold on his world”, so we shall need to rediscover a “deeper intentionality”, the echoes, the reverberations, of a primordial ecological attunement, an attunement or communicativeness preceding what both objective thought and idealism call “language” (PPF 141, 309; PPE 121, 267). It is this “older language”, “older voice”, virtually inaudible, its intentionality more like the roots and tendrils of plants, that phenomenological reflection (a hermeneutical art in its very essence, as Heidegger demonstrates in his “Introduction” to Being and Time), must somehow render audible—even if this audibility must be recognized as that of the forevervirtually-inaudible. Merleau-Ponty contends that what philosophers have termed “subject” and “object” are in reality “two abstract ‘moments’ of a unique structure”, a structure with its own genesis and strategies of maintenance, of selfpreservation (PPF 254, 419, 492; PPE 219, 365, 430). It accordingly becomes the task of phenomenology to “rediscover” what experience both precedes and still lies underneath this structure (RF 3, RE 98). What is the primordial cogito here—and what is its logos? Can the “singing” of this logos be retrieved? How would its retrieval alter our experience with language—and with the realm of nature out of which it emerged? Scrupulous fidelity to the phenomenon—that is to say, an openness to its mode of presencing that lets it show itself from out of itself—leads MerleauPonty down into the dimension of incarnate experience where this question can be fittingly explored: “I am borne into personal existence,” he says, “by a time which I do not constitute” (PPF 399, PPE 347). Moreover, “I find in myself, through reflection, along with the perceiving subject, a prepersonal subject [. . .]” (PPF 399, PPE 347). In other words, When I turn toward perception, [I] find [je trouve] at work in my organs of perception a thought older than myself, of which those organs are merely a trace. (PPF 404, PPE 351–52)

This trace, which we might also think of as an echo—the echo, namely, of “a communication with the world more ancient than thought” belongs to “an originary past, a past that has never been present” (PPF 280, 294; PPE 242, 254). It is consequently not accessible to the modes of reflection that prevail


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in empiricism and idealism. The method that Merleau-Ponty deploys, however, elicits from our experience echoes of a past to which philosophical thought has become deaf: My personal existence must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draws every particular focus into a general project. (PPF 294, PPE 254)

It is crucial for our purposes to note, here, that Merleau-Ponty sets this prepersonal life in a topology that is both diachronic and synchronic: it exists “before” the formation of a stable sovereign ego and persists even after the ego’s installment, but in a “sublated” or “suspended” condition, preserved “beneath” it, never actually eradicated. Thus I am claiming that, from this “sublated” preservation, suspended between an “already” and a “not yet”, some echo or reverberation, some bodily retained, bodily felt sense of our prepersonal communicative life, our prelinguistic and prepersonal way of being attuned to and by the “singing” of the world, should always be potentially retrievable: The stages passed through are not simply passed; they have called for and required the present stages. [. . .] The past continues therefore to be in the present stages—which also means that the past stages are retroactively modified by what came later. (VIF 123, VIE 90. And see PPF 293, PPE 253)

But how are the past phases still “present”? In what way are there vestiges, “traces”, “echoes” of the prelinguistic, prepersonal attunement, submerged, but still functioning, “beneath” current experience? Although not specifically referring to the trace in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, Jacques Derrida has argued that the “logic” of the trace which figures both in his own writings and in those of Levinas is such that it “erases itself in presenting itself [and] muffles itself in resonating, like the ‘a’ writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance.”19 Actually, this trace or echo is less than a trace, less than an echo, nothing more, in fact, than a ghostly trace of a trace, echo of an echo, since it not only is “of a ‘past’ which has never [even once] been present”, but is also such that it can never be made present, neither in the present now nor in any future present, for its time now and its future to come can never be “a production or reproduction of the form of presence”: the temporality of experience, which Husserl articulated so clearly in his Lectures on Inner Time-Consciousness, makes any such thought of presence nothing but a

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metaphysician’s dream. But on my reading, Merleau-Ponty, who—it must be noted—is after all the original author of the phrase “a past that has never been present”, takes great pains to show that his project is not committed to a metaphysical form of presence, and that the reflective “récuperation” of a prelinguistic, prepersonal experience which is effective in the present even whilst remaining submerged, or withdrawn into perpetual oblivion, never can “possess” more than a hermeneutic echo—a bodily felt sense—of that lost experience. One is easily tempted, and almost compelled to wonder, of course, whether this vestige of our prelinguistic attunement is nothing, after all, but a retroactively constituted experience, a belatedly invented past, a phantom experience of the incarnate voice. In this regard, however, we are fortunate in not being restricted to the phenomenological evidence accessible through our own experience; we can make use of what can be observed in the expressive comportment of infants and children to guide us towards the reflective retrieval of our own prepersonal experience. In other words, there is a second source of confirmation: a source that, because it is other than our own reflectively retrieved experience, indeed intersubjectively observable, can serve as a “directive”, a “hint” at the very least, for our first-person phenomenological practice. (To his credit, Merleau-Ponty was never afraid to defy traditional research regimes and break through the delimitations that in the past had isolated phenomenology as a “purely philosophical” endeavour from the social and natural sciences. Just as Derrida subverted the boundary marking the difference between the philosophical text and the literary, so Merleau-Ponty unsettled the boundary between philosophical thought and the discursive archives of the social sciences, psychology and anthropology in particular.) In the topology I now would like to lay out, there are two axes, namely the diachronic, or vertical, and the synchronic, or horizontal. The diachronic is a question of temporal phases in the formation or development of the voice, whereas the synchronic is a question of the structural dimensions of the voice. I will therefore refer to “phase-dimensions” in order to register the fact that, since the earlier phases are to some extent always preserved in the later phases, both axes are always involved. We will here be following, to some extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of the topology, although, whereas he proposes a highly speculative, highly questionable history, representing the origin of language as such, I will be proposing, much more cautiously, a topology only of the individual’s observable acquisition of the ability to speak its native language. In Émile, ou de l’education, Rousseau asserts that, Man has three kinds of voice: the speaking, or articulate voice; the singing, or melodious voice; and the pathetic, or accented voice, which serves as the language of the passions, and gives life to song and speech.20


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For Rousseau, the “first” voice, that of the infant or young child, is the “pathetic”, the voice immersed in inchoate, inarticulate feeling. Initially, it is, for him, as he says in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, “the simple cry of nature”.21 For it is with a cry that the infant breaks out of the womb of silence and enters the world of sounds and voices. The cry, however, “dies away and collapses”, as Heidegger observes, because “it can offer no lasting abode to either pain or joy.”22 So we find that, in the nature of the infant’s progressively more articulate capabilities, crying and emotional outbursts soon give way to babbling—what I propose to call the child’s first “song”. (See Diagram I following this chapter.) In the words of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, “simple sounds emerge naturally from the throat.”23 Thus, he wants to claim that “the first languages were songlike and passionate.”24 The “second” voice in Rousseau’s schematism is, of course, the articulate voice of speech. And the “third” is the “melodious voice”, the voice that sings—the voice, I take it, of the philosophical poet, who harmoniously unifies the intelligibility of conceptual meaning with the sensuous expressiveness of sound in beautiful and moving ways and accordingly reveals, as Schelling puts it in his “First Projection of a System of Nature”, “the concealed trace [or echo] of freedom in nature”.25 If it is granted that the infant’s babbling is also a kind of singing—is already singing, it must nevertheless be conceded that what is taking place is merely the beginning of an attunement; and of course it is without selfconsciousness, without the beauty of an immanent, reflectively achieved awareness. But when the child enters into the world of speech, speech ruled by the “rationality” of grammar, its speech becomes, as Rousseau argues, a “deprived language”, without “the lively and passionate tone that had originally made it so songlike.”26 Thus Rousseau dreams of the return of humanity to a “harmonious and perfected language”, one that would be capable of speaking “as much by means of sounds as by means of utterances [la voix]”: a paradisical language that would again—and yet for the first time—be shaped in the form of song.27 In terms of the topology I wish to propose, the first phase-dimension is what Merleau-Ponty would call “the prepersonal”. The synaesthetic attunement of the prepersonal, an ekstatic openness of the voice to the world of sounds and other voices, is the beginning of the process through which the child enters the language community and acquires a voice of its own, communicating recognizable and familiar sounds pregnant with sense. I suggest understanding this prelinguistic relation to the world, in which the child babbles, trying to imitate the musicality of the language, as an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, “chanter le monde”: it is, we might say, recalling Friedrich Schlegel’s trope, “the kiss that the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song”.28 Of course, since this phase-dimension was originally not conscious of itself as such and was moreover repressed in this process, the beginning that

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can be retrieved and brought to consciousness in later years both is and is not the beginning, for it is a repetition in temporal difference, audible for the first time only through the mediations of a necessarily hermeneutical reflection, a phenomenologically sensitive mode of reflection taking place in an unsettling equivocation between discovery and fabulation, recognition and invention. (Correlatively, the constative grammar of phenomenological description must function as a performative: once liberated from the correspondence theory of truth, one can see that phenomenology is, as it were, enacting the fable, the dream of utopia, the “promesse de bonheur”, and making it true.) Merleau-Ponty makes it unquestionably clear that no return to some metaphysical “origin”, some “ultimate” beginning of the voice, no adequation or coincidence with the pure eventing of language as it breaks into “primordial silence”, could ever be actualized. But even if such a return were possible, he would still insist that there could be no restitution of the origin as a metaphysical plenitude, since the inherence of the beginning in the temporality it inaugurated means that it never was, and never could have been, a moment fully present to itself. In spite of this, however, the task of reflective restitution, recreating a living sense of the infant’s prelinguistic, prepersonal experience with the voice, remains an important, if not imperative, encouragement for a responsible relationship to nature—a relationship responsive to the countless sounds and voices through which, even in its muteness, nature never ceases to speak to us, claiming our indebtedness and our co-responding responsibility. There is no more audacious challenge to the subject-object structure— and indeed to the very logic of identity—within which the ontology of the modern age has persisted in thinking our relationship with nature than what is to be found in some of the texts published in The Visible and the Invisible. The boldness of these texts is, despite their fragmentation, despite their sketchiness, breathtaking. And yet, these are texts that, rather than introducing a new direction for his project, continue the earlier work, excavating and recovering, as prior to and beneath the experience that, in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had called “the prepersonal”, an even deeper phase-dimension of our experience with speaking. Here, in these texts, our embodiment is figured in radically new terms, for he wanted to articulate a phase-dimension that the prevailing discourses could not possibly comprehend and appropriate: that phase-dimension he calls “flesh”, drawing on mythopoetic language from the ancient beginnings of philosophical thought. It is in terms of flesh, he says, that we must think “the formative medium of the object and the subject” (VIF 193, VIE 147). This way of thinking shows us that: My body is made of the same flesh as the world, [. . .] and moreover, [. . .] this flesh of my body is shared by the world. (VIF 302, VIE 248)


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If this is so, then the voice that issues from the flesh of this human body must be akin to—or even, say, inseparable from—the flesh of the voices that come from the realm of nature. There must be a chiasmic “participation mystique” binding the human voice to the voices of nature. But, he warns, We must not think the flesh starting from substances, from [the metaphysical splitting that opposes] body and spirit [. . .] but as an element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being. (VIF 193, VIE 147)

Thought in terms of the old substance-metaphysics, these chiasmic relationships—of the flesh of my body with the flesh of the world and, correlatively, of my voice with the voices of nature—can only be regarded as an impossibility, a monstrous phantasm. “The flesh,” he says, is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element”, in the sense it was used to speak of a general thing. [. . .] The flesh is in this sense an “element of being”. (VIF 183–84, VIE 139)

The ego is, in truth, a being of flesh, a being of abyssal depths: “être charnel, comme être des profondeurs” (VIF 179, VIE 136). Thus, we are compelled to conclude, I can speak only because my organs of speech belong to the elemental flesh, the “prose of the world”, drawing the voice I use from the depths of a nature from which I can never completely remove it. Even when it accedes to the exalted heights of poetry, the human voice remains an endowment, a gift, of nature: in this precise sense, it is forever a borrowed voice, an eco-logical voice, echo of the sounds and voices of nature that summon it into the responsivity of speech (PPF 147, PPE 127). What voice does not preserve persistent echoes of the “communications” of nature? If there is an “ideality not alien to the flesh”, it is surely the spirit that inhabits the nature of the human voice: a voice of inspiration that demands our reconciliation with nature (VIF 199, VIE 152). Now, I want to argue that the “origin” of language for which we are listening, breaking away from the metaphysical speculations of the past in order to attend to the babbling of the infant, can be drawn only from a dimension of the experience with the voice in which memory and oblivion, hence memory and fabulation, are inextricably intertwined. Without expecting to get around this ambiguity, I have nevertheless suggested that we think of the first phase-dimension of the human voice in its emerging from the “silence” of the “origin” as constituting the infant’s experience of attunement, a chiasmic, prelinguistic, prepersonal attunement to the soundings—especially the voices—in the surrounding auditory field. Sounds—the noises of nature and the noises of the city—have always, of course, solicited responsivity, spoken and written language from people who have already acquired

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the language of their community. How could these sounds not also take part in the very awakening of the capacity for language in the infant? Would they not suggest sounds for mimetic repetition, sounds to be tried out in babbling, sounds to be reproduced in a generalized, pre-linguistic communicative responsiveness to the evocations of the infant’s lifeworld? This attunement solicits from the infant a period of expressive babbling— a playful experimentation with the mimetic possibilities in sound and voice that I would like to recognize as our originary way of “singing the world”, singing its praises, celebrating existence. The infant “sings” in response to the world’s solicitations: its sonorities, its voices, the songs that come from the things. For the infant’s babbling is freely sensuous, polyphonic, an ekstatic gathering of sounds and voices. But this song of voices is without selfconsciousness and is consequently soon lost in the silence of oblivion. All languages emerge from a semblance of “Lethé”, bearing within them echoes of a time of forgetting. Silence marks the place of oblivion—the abyss out of which the infant’s mimetic voice slowly emerges, bringing with it the first recognizable words. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, a fascinating compendium of empirical research that supports in a number of striking ways the mimetic connection between language and nature for which I have been arguing in these chapters on Merleau-Ponty, Daniel Heller-Roazen notes that, As everyone knows, children at first do not speak. They make noises, which seem at once to anticipate the sounds of human languages and yet to be fundamentally unlike them. As infants approach the point at which they will begin to form their first recognizable words, they have at their disposal capacities for articulation that not even the most gifted of polyglot adults could hope to rival.29

He continues this analysis, which he derives for the most part from the work of Roman Jakobson,30 pointing out that, a babbling child can accumulate articulations which are never found within a single language or even a group of languages: consonants with the most varied points of articulation, palatalized and rounded consonants, sibilants, affricates, clicks, complex vowels, dipthongs, and so forth.

In fact, he contends, at the very “apex of babble” there are no apparent limits on the child’s phonic powers. Nevertheless, between the prattle of the infant, its unselfconscious vocalizing or singing, and the first words of the child, there is a decisive caesura, and the hitherto-unlimited phonetic abilities begin to exhibit hesitations, restraints, the evidence of self-imposed discipline. Thus, in Jakobson’s asserveration:


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the child loses nearly all of his ability to produce sounds in passing from the prelinguistic stage to the first acquisition of words, that is, to the first genuine stage of language.31

This is only “natural”, though, since children must inhibit their ability to produce sounds that have no role in the language they are learning. However, the striking fact of the matter is that children lose much more than the capacity to produce sounds not in the phonetic system of the language they are first learning to speak. For even many of the sounds common to their babble and the adult language also now vanish, as they gradually master the phonemes of their mother tongue. In this regard, Heller-Roazen suggests that, It is as if the acquisition of language were possible only through an act of oblivion, . . . [surrendering to forgetfulness] an apparently infinite capacity for undifferentiated articulation.32

The explanation for this is, as he says, “complicated by the fact that, at the moment the infant falls silent, he cannot even say “I”, and one hesitates to attribute to him the consciousness of a speaking being.” Nevertheless, he finds it, as he says, difficult to imagine, in any case, that the sounds the child was once capable of producing with such ease have departed from the voice forever.

However, he observes that, at the very least, two things are produced in the voice left empty by the retreat of the sounds the speaking child can no longer make, for a language and a speaking being now emerge from the disappearance of the babble.

“Perhaps,” he reflects, “the loss of a limitless phonetic reserve is the price a child must pay for the papers that grant him citizenship in the community of a single tongue.” At a certain moment, then, the infant begins actively, though still without a certain self-consciousness, a certain presence, to repress this natural song, increasingly restraining the babbling, the sounds it once made with expressive abandon, increasingly giving recognizable shape to the sounds it voices and reiterates. As Stéphane Mallarmé expresses this moment so well, “l’enfant abdique son exstase.”33 And, if we are convinced by Emerson that infancy is “the perpetual Messiah”, then with the infant’s entrance into the ego-logical language of the community, the child and its community lose a connection to the redemptive song of Paradise, lose a point of contact with

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the voices of nature, a gathering of voices that, prior to the formation of egological consciousness, the infant’s primal attunement gathers into itself. But our connection with these voices is essential for the realization of the dream of reconciliation, ending the destruction of nature, ending the violent repression in language.34 According to Emerson: “These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint or inaudible as we enter into the world.”35 It is ultimately concern over our loss of connection with these voices that motivates my argument for the phenomenological attempt to retrieve or make contact again with the gathering of the voices, the songs of nature that, in this phase-dimension, engages the infant’s “singing”, at once soliciting its vocalizations from outside and penetrating its interior life, to bring the child sensuous material for the making of words. It is an experience with language, with the voice as ecological, as a gathering of nature’s singing, the sounds and voices, that have been virtually lost to memory, buried in a past that was never present (PPF 294, PPE 254). But some echoes, almost phantoms, seem somehow to persist. And it seems that, through appropriately phenomenological concentration, their register in our bodies, our voices, can still be sensed, still be felt. Heller-Roazen accordingly asks whether the languages of the adult “retain anything of the infinitely varied babble from which they emerged.” “If they did,” he says, it would be only an echo, since where there are languages, the infant’s prattle has long ago vanished. . . . It would be only an echo—of another speech and of something other than speech: an echolalia, which guarded the memory of the indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be.36

This leads us to the claim I want here to make, drawing out the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the way word-sounds “sing” the world: it is that the infant’s mimetic borrowings from the sounds and voices of nature do not entirely vanish, but are preserved in echoes: echoes that vibrate and resound, if only very faintly, within a felt sense of the voice that the adult can get in touch with—echoes that bear within themselves a summons to responsibility for the nature that first aroused and blessed the slumbering human voice with so many sounds and voices from which to learn the possibilities of spoken language. Heller-Roazen again, pointing out a most intriguing phenomenon, certainly not what one would have expected: It has often been observed that, when children in the process of learning a language seek to imitate the inhuman noises around them, they consistently use, not the sounds they are capable of making in their new mother tongue,


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but those they seem otherwise unable to make, which they once produced without the slightest effort.37

Citing Jakobson on children’s mimetic reproduction of the sounds of the world—not only the sounds of nature but also the sounds of our artifacts and machines, Heller-Roazen remarks: “Imitations of animal and mechanical noises seem to belong to a curious and complex dimension of the child’s speech, whose exact status in the evolution of language is far from clear.” Thus it seems that we need to ask: Do the sounds that the child makes in onomatopoeias represent the last remnants of an otherwise-forgotten babble or the first signs of a language still to come?

In any event, whatever may prove to be the truth, for Heller-Roazen, Jakobson’s research into the exclamations children so easily produce—their marvelous repertory of sounds and voices—indicates that, “however resolutely one speech may develop, it continues to bear within it elements— echoes or announcements—of another.” As the elemental attunement-body of the child matures physiologically and is increasingly subject to processes of socialization and the civilizing forces of culture, which of course require a degree of ego-logical consciousness that the infant does not possess, this body gradually becomes an egobody, a body ruled by ego-logical processes; and through practice, trial and error, the child becomes capable of speaking the language of the culture within which she or he dwells.38 Thus, in this second “moment”, this second phase-dimension, the babbling tonality of the child’s voice submits to discipline, to training, to grammar and its ontology, and finally achieves a certain equilibrium, a certain stability as it assumes the shapes of words. But this voice is no longer attuned to, and by, what Rilke calls the “Open”. Although there is no determinate point in time when the first phasedimension ends and the second begins, the second phase-dimension may nevertheless be said to begin when the child incontrovertibly tries in earnest, and frequently succeeds, to make sounds that will be recognized and understood as meaningful speech. In this second phase-dimension, the sensuousness of language, its felt sense—all its resonances, echoes, reverberations, tonalities, prosopopoeia and onomatopoeia—will be for the most part repressed as nothing but an undesirable distraction from the indicative and signifying functions proper to the ego-logical voice. Sociable communication with others takes precedence over the “jouisssance”—and its “promesse de bonheur”—in and of the voice. In his De Anima, Aristotle wrote this about the physiognomic formation of the human voice:

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[. . .] voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing; in voice the breath is used as an instrument to knock against the walls of the windpipe. This is confirmed by our inability to speak when we are breathing either in or out—we can do so only by holding our breath; we make the movements [of speech] with the breath so checked. (Book II, ch. 8, 420b34–421a4)39

If the infant voice begins with the “binding” of the breath, making it conform to recognizably meaningful sounds, the second, ego-logical moment in the life of the voice achieves completion in the “binding” of the voice, the socalled “mother tongue”, by the rules of grammar, the “grammatology” of “correct” speech, subordinate to the authority of a writing—the so-called “written law of the father”—that will interrupt and disturb its comforting conviction of presence. Perhaps with Rousseau’s “three voices” in mind, Thoreau imagines two “tongues”, deploying the gender-assumptions of his time to mark the “interval between the spoken and written language, the language heard and the language read”: The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.40

From its very beginning, the human voice is the responsive issue of the world of sounds and voices that surround it: in its character as “mother tongue”, it emerges from silence always in bonded responsivity, as an answering voice, gradually learning what counts as a response. If the “mother tongue” is at first the voice more concerned to communicate its most urgent intention than to satisfy the conditions of more refined meaning, the “father tongue” is the voice bound to the laws of writing, a grammar that makes the successful communication of more intricate meanings possible. Grammaticality stabilizes the voice, controlling its equivocations, limiting its play. Language becomes an instrument to be used. The voice of the ego-logical subject is finally the settled, normatively modulated voice of the adult, absorbed in the exigencies of everyday life. This is a voice in which the sounds and voices of nature that, once upon a time, gathered into the child’s own voice—sounds and voices that inspired that emerging voice and solicited from it responses that drew on, and sometimes imitated, the sonorous materials that they provided—have become captured and structured by ego-logical subjectivity, by what we might call its law-abiding grammatology; and as a consequence, these sounds and


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voices are virtually inaudible: though still echoing and murmuring beneath the words that we speak, they have been suppressed and are no longer significantly effective. And the enchanting voices of nature that, once upon a time, gathered, rich with marvelous meaning, into the child’s hearing and speaking, become empty sounds bereft of all meaning, located in the objective realm of an alienated nature. Summarizing the research of Nikolai Trubetskoi into the principles of phonology, Heller-Roazen asserts that, Trubetskoi demonstrated that the sounds a human uses in interjections, imitations of inhuman voices, and commandments to animals are rarely found in regular expressions within the speaker’s tongue. They typically lie well beyond the limits that define the sound-shape of a particular language. . . . Passing beyond the borders that normally define it, a single tongue now moves into an indistinct region of sound that belongs to no one language—and that often seems, in truth, not to belong to any human idiom at all.41

The “inhuman” sounds that inhabit this “indistinct region” are, I suggest, the haunting echoes of a primordial communication between the human voice and the beings that belong to nature. By a fascinating twist of irony, it is precisely these sounds, these voices, that we designate as “unnatural”. Sensible of the irony, Heller-Roazen concludes his commentary on Dante’s discussion, in De vulgari eloquentia, of human imitations of animal voices, remarking that, Nowhere is a language more ‘itself’ than at the moment it seems to leave the terrain of its sound and sense, assuming the sound-shape of what does not— or cannot—have a language of its own: animal sounds, natural or mechanical noises. It is here that one language, gesturing beyond itself in a speech that is none, opens itself to the nonlanguage that precedes it and that follows it. It is here, in the utterance of strange sounds that the speakers of a tongue thought themselves incapable of making, that a language shows itself . . . in the sounds of the inhuman speech it can neither completely recall nor fully forget.42

But we must remember! Because these sounds are vestiges of our “participation mystique” in nature—and our belonging to nature; and because their haunting presence, mere echoes, now, of voices long since withdrawn into oblivion, nevertheless bespeak our indebtedness, and consequently make a claim on our responsibility, we must make an effort to keep these voices in our remembrance. For most people, what I am calling the second phase-dimension, beginning with the learning of the “mother’s tongue” and ending with the grammaticality of the “father’s tongue” and defining the conventional experience

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with language, essentially marks the end of the acquisition of language as a developmental process—not only a process of self-development, selfrealization, and self-fulfillment, but also a process of inheritance, hence the taking on of an ethical responsibility to the community of one’s language and to the realm of nature. (This is not to deny, of course, that we do not continue to learn new words, that we may still learn new ways of speaking, and that we may continue to refine our sensitivity to the language we speak, to tones of voice, to styles of communication, and so forth.) But a third phasedimension—one in which the individual attains a distinctive development of the spirit in relation to nature—is nevertheless, in fact, a contingent existential possibility; it would depend entirely, however, on the individual’s “election” of a recuperative moment, a second inheritance, as it were, whereby one would attempt an anamnestic return to the infant’s primal experience of indebted attunement, a “return” to the infant’s paradisical moment of ekstasis, in order to retrieve from the depths of its present silence felt echoes of the gathering of nature’s sounds and voices—the singing of the world—and the infant’s reciprocating song, his or her responsive voice, solicited and educed by those sounds and voices of nature. It is crucial to appreciate that the earlier phase-dimensions are, even in their “sublated” condition, and without conscious intention, recapitulated, at least to some extent, in every event of language. The story of Manuel Cordova-Rios is, I take it, one kind of confirmation in this regard. This sublated continuation and recapitulation are crucial for the further development of the voice that I want to derive from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a “pratique de soi”, a “souci de soi” that is also, at its very heart, a caring for nature. This further development would constitute a third phase-dimension of the voice, a contingent moment exceeding the normal achievement of the second moment. For it would be only in this third phase-dimension—a moment that has been given no representation in Merleau-Ponty’s own topology, that something of the contingent potential, in and of the voice, for an eco-logically attuned response-ability might be realized. The voice would accordingly become song, song again, beginning its fulfillment, reconnected to a nature for whose welfare it must speak with a compelling voice of earth.

§4 Dying Echoes: What Must Be Remembered In his third Critique, Kant writes of a “weak ray of hope”, “eine schwache Strahl der Hoffnung”.43 In Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, this trope is echoed, assuming the more overtly theological investment of “a weak messianic power”, “eine schwache messianische Kraft”.44 It is fervently to be hoped, for the sake of a nature whose historical devastation


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is becoming ever more apparent, that in this third moment in the phenomenology of spirit, there would be an attempt at a reconnection to the infant’s originary attunement, recovering something, however weak, however precarious, of that attunement of the voice in and as a bodily felt sense of the eco-logical “derivation” and indebtedness of the human voice. Now, I will not claim for this effort at restitution a messianic or ontotheological significance; but I will not demur or complain if it is thought that some more modest version of this claim seems to make sense in regard to our eco-logical attunement: it will be recalled, after all, that, for Emerson, infancy belongs in a uniquely consequential way to the destiny of the messianic. And it is certainly my conviction that there is a hope for the assumption of eco-logical responsibility borne in and by the infant’s originary attunement, since the emergence of the human voice is, in part, a response to a gathering up, within it, of the sounds and voices, the calls and claims, of nature. My hope, here, is that the effort at restitution could make us more open to the solicitations of nature—those belonging to our childhood, but also those more recent ones, and ones presently claiming us, claiming our voice. This, in turn, might encourage and guide us towards a deeper experience of nature, in particular, our interdependencies and participations; and this could in turn perhaps strengthen our sense of responsibility for the future fate of nature, which at this point it is very much in our power to determine. The contingent possibility of a third moment depends, as I have already indicated, on a retrieval of the bodily felt sense of the moment of ekstatic attunement that institutes our entrance into a language: a felt contact, however, that is necessarily greatly attenuated. No adequation, no coincidence, no complete restitution of the originary moment is possible; indeed, what can be retrieved is nothing but an echo of an echo of an ecological responsivity, experienced as belonging to “a past that has never been present”. Although Merleau-Ponty does not orient his reflections, as have I, towards any process of self-development, nor is he disposed to conceive phenomenological reflection as a practice of caring for oneself, he does contemplate a process of reflection concerned with the emergence of language—of the voice—from a certain experience of silence: Everything comes to pass as though [the philosopher] wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire “work” is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with being; but he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences. [. . .] One has to believe, then, that language is not simply the contrary of the truth, of coincidence, that there is or could be a language of coincidence, or a manner of making the things themselves speak [or sing]—and this is what he seeks. (VIF 166–67, VIE 125)

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And, just as we should be preparing to find him guilty of slipping into an intuitionism he had in earlier years repudiated, or anyway embracing a doctrine of epistemic immediacy, he adds a qualification that represents language in a way that is reminiscent of Heidegger’s late meditations on language, often accused (in my judgement, however, without sufficient justification) of a reckless mysticism: [But] it would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor. [. . .] But we have to recognize that the consequence of language is not necessarily deceptive, that truth is not coincidence, nor is it mute.

This language, this voice, a transpersonal voice that both is and is not our own would be an eco-logical gathering, reverberations of the originary Legein, echoing the sounds and voices, the polyphony of nature, lifted up by a certain recapitulation—and by the self-sacrifice of the ego-logically fortuned voice—into a poetizing voice that, by virtue of its reflexively intensified consciousness, its felt attunement, would transmute it into song, wholeheartedly singing and making the world sing—in effect, enchanting the world, reenchanting nature. What could be accomplished if the voice were to retrieve echoes of its originary attunement and inheritance? In “The Poet”, Emerson offers what we might read as the beginning indication of a response to this question: It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy [. . .], by abandonment to the nature of things; [. . .] then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind [. . .].45

Emerson’s poets, “men of more delicate ear”, are not afraid to depart from “the ground-tone of conventional life”, opening their voices to the voices of nature: plants, animals, the earth and the sky. In What Is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre remarks that “A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief.”46 His remark would be just as true if it referred to the “lament” of a nature exploited, despoiled, suffering. The poet or philosopher who, hearing this lament, this cry, brings it to passionate and eloquent words, gives the human voice to the cry, thereby transposing it into song. This song would be an eco-logically responsive voice, inspired by its


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moral vocation as guardian of the natural world. But can it be pure rejoicing, pure celebration and praise, when the world—and the nature on which it depends—are in such great distress? When Merleau-Ponty evokes a celebration of the world, a singing of our praise, our gratitude, he does not have in mind a singing that would be possible for the human voice only when the entirety of creation has been redeemed: not only human beings, but all the creatures of nature. Thus I cannot consent to a “celebration” whose time has not yet come. I want to say that, until the time of this complete redemption, the voice and its song can only be elegiac, mournful, true to the loss of harmony, the mimetic dissonance that registers our catastrophic relationship with nature. I am arguing that the full realization of the potential in poetic language, in what I am calling “song”, our capacity to use language in a way that brings out its aesthetic and moral beauty, requires more than a society in which its internal contradictions and its destructive relation to nature— both our own “inner” nature and the realm of nature “outside” us—have been overcome; the singing of poetic language also requires a phenomenological transformation in our “subjective” experience with language: the necessity, namely, of overcoming, the ancient diremptions, the persistent cultural representations, that have posited the human as opposed to nature, mental as opposed to the corporeal, the ideal as opposed to the real, the intelligible as opposed to the sensible, words as opposed to sound, and purely cognitive meaning as opposed to the expressive tonalities of the voice. The singing of the voice ultimately requires a holistic, wellintegrated experience of embodiment—embodiment, that is, as MerleauPonty represented it in his late writings, evoking an elemental intertwining of spirit and flesh. The fulfillment of the dream constitutive of song would accordingly require uses of language in which these oppositions are reconciled and brought into harmony. Until that time, as Rilke’s elegiac poetry asks us with incomparable delicacy to hear, the singing of poetic language will always bear within it, no matter how beautiful its semblance of reconciliation, an undertone of melancholy, an inconsolable sense of the tragic condition of human existence. We cannot ignore the fact that the moral vocation always presencing in the voice is something that one must struggle against many odds to recognize—even to hear. Although the poetry that sings out of this attunement is a protest against all the ancient dualisms and their violence—a spirit hostile to the flesh, a reason hostile to feeling, an ideality of meaning hostile to the voice, an intellectualism hostile to the sensuous, an empiricism equally hostile to the sensuous, a physicalism in science that that can conceive only a nature of inert, dead matter, an analytic spirit hostile to the wholeness of nature, an individualism and autonomy hostile to the interdependencies of the natural world—no final, absolute reconciliation is conceivable.

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In Work of Fire, Blanchot wrote: “It is [. . .] because poetry exists that the future is possible.”47 The highest accomplishment of the process, the practice, that we have been considering here would take place in the poetry of thought and action, that singing of the world which would let the wondrous polyphony of nature reveal its hermeneutic beauty, laying claim—just as Kant suggested, when he said that beauty is the symbol of morality—to our moral conscience as keepers of the sacred language of nature, keepers of a nature still awaiting its redemption. But only in the time of our reconciliation with nature, a time of redemption fulfilling the possibilities for harmony, would the human voice be able fully to retrieve and redeem its originary attunement with nature—its most beautiful song. Only in a time of our reconciliation with nature would it be possible for our voices once again—and yet, in another sense, only for the first time—truly to sing the praises of the world, to become song, celebration of nature. Only in a time of reconciliation with nature, when the human voice has learned at last to let its felt sense of its originary attunement by the voices, the sounds, the echoes of nature—all the voices of nature gathered within it—set the tone and measure for its words and deeds of truth, would the utopian dream faintly audible still in the vowels and consonants of our speech be realized. Only in a time of reconciliation, when we have come to terms with our animal nature and learned what the life of plants and animals can teach us, only then would we really have right and reason to sing with joy, celebrating the world, singing our praises. In the meantime, it is, or should be, not celebration, or not only celebration, but an experience of mourning that summons our voices, calling upon us to speak and act, halting wonton destructiveness, salvaging what we still can of a nature that our species is recklessly reducing to a wasteland. For, as Adorno has argued, even if the reconciliation constitutive of redemption were to become possible, it still should be refused or denied—for the sake, precisely, of the inconceivably possible. In “On Beauty as the Symbol of Morality”, concluding the first part of his Critique of Judgement, Kant speaks with sobering presentiment and foreboding, coming close to denying us, indeed all the generations to come after his own, all hope. His words, frighteningly prophetic, seem to conjure up the image of a nature that is dying, a nature whose beauty could vanish without a trace, leaving a world bereft of the beauty that should reveal to spirit the possibility of its own freedom: It is not likely that peoples of any future age will make those models [of beauty in works of art] dispensable, for these peoples will be ever more remote from nature. Ultimately, since they will have no enduring examples of nature, they will hardly be able to form a concept of the happy combination [in one and the same people] of the law-governed constraint [des gesetzlichen Zwanges] coming


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from highest culture [Kultur] with the force and rightness of a free nature that feels its own value.48

The dire condition that Kant’s warning foresees belongs to a world in which our sensibility and the perceptivity of our senses have lost their symbolic connection to morality. When nature becomes totally disenchanted, its voices, its singing, will fall silent; it will no longer be able to give voice to spirit; it will be powerless to awaken and inspire moral sentiment. In the time of such a loss, there would be little to celebrate. But could the attempt to hear the singing of nature begin to re-enchant it? Or are the voices of nature the mere echoes and residues of a “promesse de bonheur”, a promise of reconciliation, whose loss no remembrance in the subject could ever retrieve and redeem? It is in this regard that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment remind us of “the contradiction of song in civilization”: the contradiction, namely, between the pleasure we receive from the beauty of song and the misery prevailing in a civilization still far from the realization of its promise.49 As long as there is injustice in the world, and greed, and the suffering they cause continues, the singing of the poets can be heard only as a stammering of the voice. But as long as there are poets sacrificing their voices for the sake of their song, some measure of hope, still audible, will remain. Thus the poet— Paul Celan—will remind us that: “[. . .] es sind/ noch Lieder zu singen jenseits/der Menschen.”50 There are still songs to be sung—but, as Nietzsche also thought, they are on the other side of mankind. The future of our hope is possible—but only for a transfigured humanity—a humanity that has founded a different way of dwelling: on the earth and under the sky. That different way of dwelling, of being with nature and returning to it our borrowed voice in thankful remembrance, is a way that Heidegger named with the word “Gelassenheit”, referring us to the “equanimity” of an ontological dimension in our experience that would let be what presences, and would thus, by virtue of its openness, respect, protect, and preserve nature’s necessary self-concealment, its withdrawal from presentness. That way, involving a return to the childhood experience of attunement—and to the forgetting, the repression it suffers, comes in part to exquisite expression in the “Crise de Vers”, where Stéphane Mallarmé explains the poetic voice he is attempting to achieve: “When I say ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns [relègue] all floral form, something different from the known calyces [les calices sus] arises [. . .] the flower that is absent from all bouquets.”51 It is the singing of echoes in that absence that our voices, naming in a “reminiscence” which has relinquished knowledge, must protect and preserve in “a speech” that, as Maurice Blanchot phrases it, “speaks without exercising any power.”52 This would be, as he says, a speech, a voice, belonging wholly to the infinite. It would be a voice in which the silence of Nature—both its suffering and its gift to us—would finally come to expression. As what, in

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his later thought, Merleau-Ponty calls “institution”. As our indeclinable responsibility to future generations. Perhaps there is, after all, another way of hearing Merleau-Ponty’s remarkable phrase, “chanter le monde”: not as an extremely naïve idealism, celebrating and praising a world that has forgotten its indebtedness to nature, a world no longer responsive to nature’s voices, but instead as an expression of indomitable spirit, rejoicing in its attempt to re-enchant the natural world, returning us to our experience of wonder and enchantment, and awakening, through the audible beauty of nature’s songs, nature’s voices, an irresistible desire to transform our relation to nature. In other words, his memorable phrase would not be a naïve, premature affirmation of our reconciliation with nature, but would celebrate, instead, in and as an act of remembrance, a utopian moment in the direction, the “sens”, of a deferred reconciliation. Environmental action, however, cannot be deferred. In fact, for the many plants and animals that have already departed forever, the necessary action is already much too late. No voice, no words, can bring them back. The luna moth of my New England childhood is gone—forever. But what voices, what words, can rescue the nature that lives on? When, in the song of the earth and the song of the sky, the voice should open the flesh of its words to respond to the summons of its time in the midst of nature, that would be when it might come closest to the voice of the spirit, remembering what it must sacrifice of beautiful expression for the sake of a dying nature whose sensibly ephemeral beauty was already anticipated by the moral claim in its gift to the infant voice: awakening the new voice, welcoming it into the world, the singing of things. Song begins in memory.

Diagram I The Remembrance of Nature in the Subject:


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Levinas On the Claim of the Ethical

No dejéis morir a los viejos profetas pues alzaron su voz contra la usura que ciega nuestros ojos con óxidos oscuros, la voz que viene del desierto, el animal desnudo que sale de las aguas para fundar un reino de inocencia, la ira que despliega un mundo en alas, el pajaro abrasado de los apocalipsis, las antiguas palabras, las ciudades perdidas, el despertar del sol como dádiva cierta en la mano del hombre. —José Ángel Valente, Material memoria 1977–1992, Obra poética 2 Do not let the old prophets die, for they raise their voices against the usury that blinds our eyes with dark oxides, voice that comes from the desert, naked animal that emerges from the waters to found a reign of innocence, rage that unfolds the world in wings, the bird charred in the apocalypse, ancient words, lost cities, the awaited wakening of the sun as sure gift in the hand of the human.

Mit den Sackgassen sprechen vom Gegenüber von seiner expatriierten Bedeutung—: dieses Brot kauten, mit Schreibzähnen. —Paul Celan, “Schneepart” With dead ends speaking of/from the counterpart/face-to-face about its expatriate meaning—: this bread to chew, with writing-teeth. “Snow-Part”


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8 The Saying and the Said: Giving Time to the Voice of the Other “I woke this morn with a dream which perchance was true, that I was living in the morning of history amidst barbarians, that right & truth had yet no voice, no letters, no law, everyone did what he would & grasped what he could.” —Emerson, Journals1

“After the wind an earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, [. . .] and after the fire a still small voice.” —God to Elijah, Kings I, 19:11–12

“And he said to me, prophecy to the breath, prophecy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”’” —Ezekiel 37:9

“Were our mouth filled with song as the sea [is filled with water], and our tongue with ringing praise as the roaring waves; were our lips full of adoration as the wide expanse of heaven, [. . .] we would still be unable to thank thee and bless thy name, O Lord our God, God of our Fathers.” —Talmud Pesahim, Nishmath2

“When I weld my spirit to God, I let my mouth say what it will, for then all my words are bound to their root in Heaven.” —Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim3

“Have you no desire to speak, to cry,/ Why are you silent when you hear my laments?/ Can’t you speak out using the throat of flowers?” —Jean Cocteau, “Renaud et Armide”4

“The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.” —Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics5

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§1 Unavoidable Violence “The violence of a language is not that it refuses the other [das Fremde], but that it devours it [es verschlingt].” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections6

In “Enigma and Phenomenon”, Levinas declares that, “Language is the possibility of an enigmatic equivocation for better and for worse, which men abuse.”7 This essay was first published in 1965, just a few years after the publication, in 1961, of Totality and Infinity. But it suggests, perhaps, a significant shift in Levinas’s thinking about the possibility of an absolutely non-violent language. Be this as it may, in “Violence and Metaphysics”, written before 1963, Jacques Derrida presses a critique of Levinas’s metaphysics and ethics on precisely this possibility.8 Is not all language committed to violence, he asks, insofar as it cannot avoid predication, i.e., subsumptive categorization, cannot avoid, at least not implicitly, the copula “is”, imposing an unequivocal identity on what is other and excluding the different? If everything in regard to its being is more than, is other than, that to which any finite predication limits it, how can language avoid the violent reduction of its subject? And must we not recognize that, as Julia Kristeva and others have convincingly argued, there are also many other ways—norms of intonation, for example—by which language can be exclusionary and oppressive?9 Could language ever, therefore, be redemptive—be a means or medium for redemption? Could it ever, itself, be redeemed, completely and permanently rescued from its complicity in violence? If language, speech and voice, are inherently violent, how could ethics— how could metaphysics—avoid all violence? For Levinas, the very possibility of ethics—and that means also the possibility of metaphysics, or transcendence—is dependent upon and inseparable from the possibility of language, of speech. In fact, the face, on his account, is nothing but speech; and my ethical responsibility for the other is a responsibility for the metaphysical convocations of language. Moreover, even more fundamentally, according to him, thought is not even possible without language—indeed, it consists of nothing but what language bears. How, then, could thinking ever think the other without getting caught up in the violence of language? Thus Derrida: “A speech produced without the least violence would determine nothing, would say nothing, would offer nothing to the other; it would be speech without phrase.”10 It would have to be, he says: a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, without predication. Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun, nonviolent

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language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation, pure adoration, proffering only proper nouns in order to call the other from afar. In effect, such a language would be purified of all rhetoric [. . .], purified of every verb.

“Would such a language,” he asks, “still deserve its name? Is a language free from all rhetoric possible?” Derrida is of course reluctant even to grant that non-violence could ever be the telos of language, since the positing of such a telos would be the fixing of a future presence, a future plenitude: not only an illegitimate assumption, but itself a form of violence. Only “a language of pure invocation, pure adoration” could be entirely innocent of violence. All one can do, then—according to Derrida—is choose the least possible violence. A compelling argument—and a verdict we cannot like to hear. But can Derrida’s critique entirely escape the logocentrism it repudiates? Derrida himself would be the first to deny such a victory over history. One cannot therefore fault him for not escaping logocentrism; nor can one accuse him of assuming an imaginary victory, a false wish-fulfillment. However, it seems to me that, when he belittles “a language of pure invocation, pure adoration”, assuming that to be of no ethical, no metaphysical significance, he has failed to recognize the logocentrism pressing this disparagement. To be sure, our communicative relations with others cannot be restricted to such a language; to that extent, his conclusion is incontrovertible. Nevertheless, he shows himself here to be surprisingly deaf to the affective, non-linguistic dimension of human relationships; he entirely misses what Levinas calls “proximity”: the fact that there is comfort and consolation, security and peace, simply in having someone sympathetic nearby. A “language of pure invocation, pure adoration”, a language simply communicating sympathy— “I understand”, “That makes me sad”, or “Here I am, with you”—is not nothing. Even if one remains a silent companion, saying nothing, he or she can still be communicating simply by being present in proximity, participating, sharing, in the joys and sufferings of the other. A “language of pure invocation, or pure adoration” is not only not nothing; we may be reluctant to call it “language”, but we cannot easily deny that that relationship might be an offering by the other that communicates immeasurable meaning without violence. Could I, however, be the one to receive it without any violence? Could gratitude be expressed before the voice of Reason takes over? A language, a speech, a voice entirely free of violence may be possible only in the time of redemption. And it may be, as I have argued, following out Levinas’s thinking, that this impossible possibility—or possible impossibility—requires retrieving the body’s felt sense of the voices that come before the voice of Reason. Nevertheless, before the time of redemption, we cannot and must not abandon the voice of Reason. This is an essential claim in Levinas’s

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sense of “eschatology”, which is not merely an evocation of the ending of a violent history, history as we have known it, but also a call for a new openness to the multitude of voices that have been denied a hearing in the public realm of Reason. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, there is a remarkable passage, wherein Levinas himself speaks in defense of the voice of Reason, invoking a modest and sober rationality, and imagining it in the casual, informal communicative situations of everyday life, where the talking is face-to-face, and more like conversation than debate or argument: Can the rational be reduced to having power over the object? Is reason domination, in which the resistance of the being as such is overcome not by appeal to that resistance itself, but as if by a cunning trick of the hunter [. . .]? Can intelligence as cunning, the intelligence of struggle and violence, made for things, constitute a human order? Paradoxically, we have been trained to seek in struggle the manifestation of the mind itself and its reality. But is the order of reason not constituted rather in a situation in which things are “talked over” [où “on parle”], in which the resistance of beings quâ beings [l’étant en tant qu’étant] is not broken but pacified?11

Levinas here is certainly not renouncing the need for the voice of Reason, though he is denouncing its capture by the forces of violence. But if, on the one hand, the voice of Reason speaks out on behalf of the universal, on the other hand, the voices that, in their absolute singularity, come before the voice of Reason both in the order of time and in the order of the ethical relation must nevertheless, in their turn, come before the “court” of Reason, submitting their claims to interrogation by a voice that speaks in the name of the universal, the “volonté générale”, the justice that is good for all. Why must the voice of Reason be used—as it is so thoroughly in our time—only for cunning, serving the investments of self-interest? A more formalized paradigm for reasonable dialogue could undoubtedly be derived from the philosopher’s suggestive words. And at the purely formal level, it might, at the end of the day, seem little different from the detranscendentalized model, finally abandoning the telos of consensus, that over many years Jürgen Habermas eventually developed. But if it should take into account Levinas’s discussion of the ethical role of Saying and the phenomenology of pre-originary Saying that I want to elaborate here, the paradigm would nonetheless function quite differently, even though the Habermasian model could perhaps—at the formal level—accommodate Levinas’s ethical concerns without extreme difficulty, and even though it could be said to have already incorporated much of their counterpart in the ideal speech conditions that it proposes for the conduct of political debate. But the numerous negotiations, compromises, accommodations, symmetries and reciprocities that Levinas concedes as necessary and desirable in the


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realm of the political would remain absolutely unacceptable—indeed, they could be only a confirmation of egoism—in the face-to-face of the ethical relation. The Saying of the pre-originary voice comes before the voice of Reason, revealing vestiges of irrationality and violence always still operative in the language and communicative practices of formal, enlightened Reason. Here, “talking things over” would demand of the I—of me—comportment of a radically different character: a responsibility that, though not really infinite, as Levinas’s frequent hyperbole insists, is certainly without any predetermined, a priori limit, paradoxically bound to the inspiration in ethical rules and principles, and yet also at the same time absolutely beyond all calculation, rules, and principles.12 Here too the voice of Reason is to be heard; but only if it lets the voice that comes before it breach the universal, rational order for the sake of the singular. Whereas, according to Habermas’s “discourse ethics”, our discursive engagements with other persons constitute a realm of intersubjectivity that presupposes, and thereby commits us to certain normative, regulative principles of practical reason operating at the highest level of abstraction, Levinas’s phenomenology reveals, in the very attunement, the very responsiveness of the voice, the operation of a certain proto-moral predisposition that corresponds, at the deepest level of concrete sensibility, to those principles of reason and is, in truth, their pre-originary anticipation and their strongest motivating support. As pre-originary, opening the voice and exposing it to the voice of the other, this sensibility is, in effect, “transcendental”, if I may use a term that in obvious ways does not fit and must eventually be cast away; so it cannot be argued, as one can with regard to feelings, emotions, and desires, the passing and inconstant configurations of a supposedly unruly nature, that principles of Reason are necessary to keep this sensibility, this source of the ethical voice, appropriately informed and directed. But this is not to imply that such principles are useless. On the contrary, they are always needed to reflect upon and discuss the merit of our judgements and actions. And they would be needed even in a utopian world. Ultimately, I think that Levinas would agree that, as Adorno says, not even conceding to poetry the overcoming of violence: What accedes to language enters the movement of a humanness that does not yet exist. . . . 13

And he thus would also agree with Max Horkheimer, who argues, in The Eclipse of Reason, that “Philosophy must become more sensitive to the muted testimonies of language and plumb the layers of experience preserved in it.”14 But, whereas Horkheimer expects—or hopes—to find, in these depths, the undistorted voice of Reason, Levinas, closer to Adorno, believes that we must listen to the Saying of a voice that comes from “the Infinite”, from an

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“Eternity” before the voice of Reason. Unlike Adorno, however, who will listen for the voicing of the absolutely other—the other that Reason cannot possibly express—in the mimetic resources of works of art, Levinas will listen for testimonies of destitution in the voice of the other, binding his listening to the imperatives of ethical responsibility. This listening will subject him to further suffering. But, as he would perhaps want to argue, bearing in mind both the immeasurable need and the immeasurable hope: This must be reckoned a fine risk!

§2 Responsibility: Claiming the Voice In Philosophical Passages, reflections drawing on his own experience with language, Stanley Cavell remarks that, the price of having spoken . . . is to have spoken forever, to have entered the arena of the inexcusable, to have taken on the responsibility for speaking further, the unending responsibility of responsiveness, of answerability, to make yourself intelligible.15

I do not know the extent of Cavell’s engagement with Levinas, but one can hear the compelling voice of the French philosopher in the wording of these reflections, which draw on the writings of Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Austin, and Derrida, philosophers with whom he recognized in himself certain deep sympathies and affinities, and in whose thought he says he found the unavoidable provocations that contributed to the emergence of his own distinctive voice—a voice that, even through the medium of writing, resounds with convincing feeling. In any event, I would judge that there is much in what Cavell says here with which Levinas could wholeheartedly concur. For Levinas, however, what must matter just as much as, if not more than, making myself intelligible is the responsibility that my talking owes to others. To have spoken is to be responsible for keeping the ways of communication open to the other—open to the other’s claims on me, not merely in relation to the content of what I said, but also in relation to the possibilities, the opportunities, for responding. Since my speaking right now continues to be indebted to the other—to others—for the ability I acquired and now possess to enter the language of my community, my speaking is always—even when it seems to initiate—in the character of a response. Thus, the price of my having spoken is to have taken on a responsibility for the other’s opportunities to respond—a responsibility for the free continuation of the dialogue. And this means, also, my own continuing answerability, my own continuing responsibility for responding to all those whom I have addressed—addressed, in fact, regardless of my intention, my knowledge, my concern. Having spoken,


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I become forever answerable to my interlocutors. In that sense, I may be said to have “spoken forever”. But, as Levinas will argue, the character of my responsibility is such that, in a sense, what I have said is—is to be—immediately unsaid: otherwise, I will always have subtly warped the communicative field in my direction and taken from my interlocutors the freedom to speak their minds, usurping their discursive moment. To speak is to make myself forever answerable to the ethical imperative that gives an urgent voice to the other. And the corresponding responsibility of philosophical thought must then be to bring the claim in that voice into our hearing. As Cavell says, with words that I cannot read without thinking of Levinas’s frequent evocations of insomnia: if the “virtue” of philosophical thought consists in its “responsiveness”, then in its assumption of that responsibility, it must be “tireless, awake when the others have all fallen asleep.”16

§3 Inspiration In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson observes that, “Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”17 Following out Emerson’s etymologically dictated choices in words in this essay—I refer to the derivation of “dictation” and “condition” as terms for the efficacy of language, we might say that there are ethical conditions already operative in the breath, conditions that dictate our talking-together, the sense of the good in our communication—the intertwinings of our lives. In Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence, Levinas remarks that spirit is “the longest breath there is.” And he then poses the following question: “Is man not the living being capable of the longest breath in inspiration, without a stopping point, and in expiration, without return?”18 I shall take him to mean, by “the longest breath”, a breath that our communicative ability extends, a breath that, because of its appropriation in language, is capable, in fact, of an immeasurable extension, reaching out in space and time to the other. In his translations of Sophocles’ tragedies, Hölderlin’s caesurae mark the places where he could hear the rhythm of the playwright’s breathing, extended by the word across the centuries. Like Emerson, like Kierkegaard, Levinas finds an ethical, a spiritual, and indeed a deeply religious dimension in the experience of breathing, which he tries to bring out using the “reductive” procedure he inherited from a Husserlian phenomenology, although it is poorly prepared to educe the ethical significance of that experience. Nevertheless, he succeeds in drawing out the ethically relevant essentials. If inspiration exemplifies—teaches—the reception of an unbidden gift, already indebting me to the other from the very beginning of my life, expiration exemplifies—teaches—unconditional generosity, giving

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away that which is most precious without expecting or requiring anything in return. Breathing also attests, at what Merleau-Ponty would doubtless want to call the “anonymous”, “prepersonal” level of existence, our thoroughgoing interpenetration and interconnectedness, the inextricable intertwining of lives; but for Levinas, it accordingly signifies, as prior to volition, prior to memory, prior to ego-logical consciousness, my indeclinable, immemorial exposure to the other, an ethically charged, asymmetrical relation in which I have already, unbeknownst to myself, been committed to bear responsibility for the other, even to the point of substitution and sacrifice. Levinas comments that, Freedom is animation itself, breath, the breathing of outside air, where inwardness frees itself from itself, and is exposed to all the winds. There is exposure without assumption, which would already be closedness. That the emptiness of space would be filled with invisible air, hidden from perception, save in the caress of the wind or the threat of storms, non-perceived but penetrating me even in the retreats of my inwardness, that this invisibility or this emptiness would be breathable or horrible, [. . .] that the simple ambience is imposed as an atmosphere to which the subject gives himself and exposes himself in his lungs, without intentions and aims, that the subject could be a lung at the bottom of its substance—all this signifies a subjectivity that suffers and offers itself before taking a foothold in being. (AE 226–27, OB 180)

“My exposure to another in my responsibility for him takes place without a decision on my part”: this is the moral lesson that Levinas draws from the experience of breathing. (Ibid.) “It is,” he says, exposure to the openness of a face, which is the “further still” required of one who is enclosed within himself, the opening-up which is not [to be interpreted in terms of Heidegger’s notion of] being-in-the-world. A further deep breathing even in the breath cut short by the wind of alterity. The approach of the neighbour is a fission of the subject beyond lungs, in the resistant nucleus of the ego, in the undividedness of its individuality. [. . .] (Ibid. Translation revised)

The text continues: To open oneself as space, to free oneself by breathing from closure in oneself already presupposes this beyond: my responsibility for the other and my aspiration by the other, the crushing charge, the beyond, of alterity. That the breathing by which entities seem to affirm themselves triumphantly in their vital space would be a consummation, a coring out of my substantiality, that in breathing I already open myself to my subjection to the whole of the invisible other, [. . .] is to be sure surprising. (AE 228, OB 180–81)


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Surprising, most likely unsettling, but nonetheless, he thinks, an incontrovertible fact concerning the sources of our ethical life! Transmuted, by Levinas’s pen, from being the most compelling demonstration of the “conatus essendi”, nature’s conceit of self-preservation, the violence in self-affirmation, breathing becomes one’s first ethical experience, already a communication with others in the intertwining of an atmosphere; and giving me a life I owe to others, it commits me to caring unconditionally for their welfare. “To be sure,” he concedes, “breathing is said more simply in terms of biology”. Thus it might be said that, answering a fundamental need for energy, it brings to the tissues the oxygen necessary for the functioning of the organism, and eliminates the waste. Air and the oxygen it contains are then treated like wood and iron; air can be healthy or unhealthy [. . .]. But the relationship to air by which the experiences expressed in these truths are formed and stated is not in its turn an experience, despite the status of objectivity it acquires even in the philosophical language that describes the signification of these experiences by going behind these experiences, or reducing them to the horizon of their thematization. But in [phenomenologically] “reducing” [i.e., returning] the said to the saying, philosophical language “reduces” [i.e., returns] the said to a breathing that is [already] opening [oneself] to the other and signifying to the other its very signifyingness [i.e., its ethical acknowledgement and responsibility]. (AE 228, OB 181. Translation revised.)

He adds that this “reduction”, this phenomenological concentration of attention on the saying of the said, makes possible “an incessant unsaying of the said, a reduction to the saying, [which is nevertheless] always betrayed by the said.” Having recognized the ethical moment in breathing, Levinas is not willing to abandon it to biology, a science in which what breathing “says” about us as ethical creatures is subverted by the rational objectivism of its propositions: An openness of the self to the other, which is not a conditioning or a foundation of oneself in some principle, [. . .] but a relation wholly different from the occupation of a site, a building, or a settling of oneself, breathing is transcendence in the form of an opening up. It reveals all its meaning only in the relationship with the other, in the proximity of a neighbour, which is responsibility for him, substitution for him. (AE 228, OB 181)

Not satisfied, yet, to leave the question of biology behind, he asks: “Could animality be an openness upon the beyond-essence?” “Perhaps,” he says, without settling this question, “animality is only the soul’s still being too short of breath.” (Does this not echo Heidegger’s claim that the animal is revealed as

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“world-poor” in contrast with the human being?) Of course, animals cannot speak: even if they enjoy a certain openness, their openness remains speechless, free of the ethical intention binding all language. But, whatever accounts for the animal’s deprivation, Levinas wants to say that, “In human breathing, in its everyday equality, perhaps we have already to hear the breathlessness of an inspiration that paralyzes essence, that transpierces it with an inspiration by the other, an inspiration that is already expiration,” giving without thought of reciprocity (AE 229, OB 181–82). It is immediately after saying this that Levinas says that spirit is “the longest breath there is”. The longest, because, as spirit, breathing is not merely an autonomic biological process, but a consecration that dedicates its life to the other who is “infinitely” beyond its extension. Ethical speech must be the measure of my breath. Breathing, which already binds and sacrifices itself for the sake of saying, for the sake of a language through which its pre-originary responsibility for the other can be realized, belongs to the immemorial origin of ethical life. Although seemingly nothing more than an automatic process, a process, therefore, belonging entirely to the realm of nature, in reality it takes place in an uncanny zone, where ethical life emerges, or erupts, into language, into communication with others, from the sensibility of nature—a nature it loves and fulfills—but only through defiance and prohibition. In the Jewish community, the oral tradition of scriptural interpretations, commentaries, and stories is regarded as an essential part of the Holy Scripture, for the breath breathes life into the inert materiality of the written words, and each voice that lends itself to these words, being the expression of a singular individual, contributes its unique experience of the truth to the life of the whole. Thus, when anyone dies, the world which figured in that person’s experience also disappears: The totality of the true is made up of multiple persons: the uniqueness of each way of hearing bearing the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation, precisely as it is inflected in the ear of each person, would be necessary to the All of truth.19

This is what the Talmud teaches, as Levinas rightly notes. And it could not be more at odds with Platonism, for which access to the truth requires the abandonment, the relinquishing, of all particularity—all opinions, perspectives, and experiences that retain their association with the individual as such. It cherishes the voice—but not only because of its breath, its life, a natural breath disciplined in obedience to the universal law of speech, the more particular law of a native tongue, and the law imposed by the voicing of the syllables given in the texts in the oral tradition, but also because each voice is the expression of a unique and irreplaceable testimony, a revelation of “God” for which there can be no substitute.


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§4 Heterology, Heteronomy: The Lyrical Voice In his “Song of Myself”, a poem whose title the substance of the work deconstructs, Walt Whitman listens to all the voices that are gathered into his own voice, singing within him. In what sense is his voice still “his own”? I want to suggest that it is not exclusively “his own”; but perhaps, precisely for that reason, and in virtue of an avowal of indebtedness to the other voices, the voice that sings this song, consciously dispossessed, disappropriated, becomes, paradoxically, the poet’s “ownmost” voice, expressing the very essence, in fact, of the lyrical voice. In the gathering that his song welcomes, celebrates, hosts, there are voices from the past as well as voices that speak from a future whose possibility is still to come. The poet’s voice is intimate, personal, intensely subjective; yet, true to its lyrical form, it is also a democratic, transpersonal voice that opens itself to welcome and greet the other: Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the fatherstuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me, forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

This is not self-aggrandizement, but the joyful aknowledgement of indebtednesses, conscious of what the mere saying of these indebtednesses— the singing that avows them—can mean, can accomplish. This “Song of Myself” is actually a song of the one-for-the-other, as the preceding stanza indicates. Consequently: Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. [. . .] By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.20

If the voice of the lyrical poet is a gathering of voices, so is the poet’s hearing, as the third stanza of another poetic work, “Salut au Monde!” tells us, singing of “the Hebrew reading his records and psalms”, “the cry of the Cossack”, “the sailor’s voice putting to sea at Okotsk”, “the Arab muzzin calling from the top of the mosque”, “fierce French liberty songs”, “workmen singing”, “the sounds of children”.21 What the true lyrical poet hears is what has

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been already gathered up into his voice, waiting to be transposed into song. The poet’s lyrical voice is thus simultaneously intimately personal, a rigorously singular subjectivity, and yet absolutely, uncompromisingly universal: universal, in fact, precisely because of the way in which it retrieves its most intimate subjective singularity.22 The ego must virtually become a stranger in the language in which it expresses itself, even to the point of disowning its owning of a “proper” voice. Arthur Rimbaud, whom Levinas quotes, once wrote: “Je est un autre.”23 It is never just the “I” who speaks. The human voice is always a voice in which other human voices can be heard. It is always, in Nancy’s lapidary phrase, a “partage des voix”: a sharing of voices.24 In poetic song, the lyrical voice gathers these disparate voices and brings them into an intimation of their redemption.

§5 The Ethical Dimensions of the Voice Against the Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian representations of subjectivity, which are all essentially designed to address questions in epistemology and metaphysics, Levinas offers a representation that, before contemplating these questions, is committed to being faithful to the ethical relation—committed, that is, to doing it justice. Thus, whereas these earlier accounts posit as their beginning a solitary self, an ego “for itself” that in its first moment does not pass through an experience of the other, an experience of “l’autrui”, in the account that Levinas proposes, an account that commits “first philosophy” to the ethical relation, there is, at the heart of subjectivity, within every “song of myself”, an ethically binding relation to the other, signified in the form of an absolute summons, an unequivocal commandment, to assume the utmost responsibility for the welfare of the other. Thus, in a sense, the self or ego of the philosophical tradition is not just one, but, from the very beginning, one-forthe-other: plurality. The other is, in a sense, always already “within” me, constitutive of my very identity, its “substitution” denying me an absolute, complete identity. This indebted identity, claimed by the ethical even before it enjoys consciousness, belongs to a self prior to the emergence of the selfcentred ego; before self-consciousness, before the time of ego-logical memory, this pre-egological self is already exposure to the other, traumatic vulnerability, subject to the imposition of an indeclinable responsibility that makes this self not yet conscious of itself already guilty of lateness in responding to the situation of the other. The emergence of the ego suppresses this claim, this obligation, deepening its withdrawal in the enigma of a pre-originary oblivion; but in the moment of actual encounter with the other, in the moment of the face-to-face experience, the voice that summons to the ethical relation is awakened and attempts to make itself heard: “It is by the voice of the witness


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that the glory of the infinite is glorified” (AE 186, OB 146). This “witness” constitutes “a unique structuring” of subjectivity; and its voice, given resonance, given strength, by virtue of its recurrence, its subjection to the immemorial voice that summons and claims it in the name of the other, becomes possible only when the ego has been “stripped by the trauma of persecution of its scornful and imperial subjectivity” (Ibid.). Interpreting the ethical relation in terms of a phenomenology of language, Levinas calls our attention to the ethical difference between “le Dit” and “le Dire”, the Said and the Saying. In the phenomenology that, on my reading, I think Levinas invites us to confirm in our own experience of the speaking voice, the exposition of this difference requires the recognition of four irreducible dimensions. However, only the first and the second, of the four I will now characterize, can be unequivocally derived from the philosopher’s own words. Despite his obsession with the intricacies of our ethical experience, the ethical life that he invokes requires an even more differentiated or more deliberately thematized phenomenology of speech and voice than his explication of Saying and Said seems to provide. Thus, the sublime experience of the voice of the moral law is in fact, I believe, compellingly presented in his phenomenological writings; but it is not configured, or not articulated, in the way it appears in my “reconstruction” of his thought. In particular, this “reconstruction” will open up the pre-originary gift of the moral law as Saying, voice, and echo; will elaborate its being as flesh; and will tackle the densely aporetic logic of its retrieval from the immemorial. [1] Quotidian saying. This is saying in its everydayness, indifferent to the ethical relation. In the actual dialogical event, what Levinas will call “saying” is always correlated, of course, with a “said”, since something, however insignificant, is always thereby said. But, in contrast to other discursive relations, in which the said is what matters and the saying of it—the simple fact of its being said or having been said—falls into oblivion, in the ethical relation, respect for the interlocutor requires the unsaying, or silencing, or suspending, of the said, holding the dialogue open to further saying. Only by this unsaying can one’s saying approximate, or perhaps rather attempt, a sincere respect for the other. When such saying heeds its responsibility to and for the other, the obligation constitutive of the ethical relation, it has become an ethical Saying. [2] An ethical Saying. In order to mark its difference from quotidian saying, saying with this character will henceforth be capitalized. It is an act of quotidian saying that, by virtue of its overwhelming concern to give others the time they need for their saying, becomes an ethical Saying. In such Saying, registering my experience of the moral law in its way of presencing within the dialogical situation, what I have said, namely “le Dit”, is subordinated to the ethical importance of “le Dire”, the other’s participation in the dialogue. Thus, my “own” saying is suspended, and even undone as mine,

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transferred from its hold on the present into a “meanwhile”, an “entretemps” that opens to, waits for, the speech of the other. Voice matters here because unsaying the said, or the saying of the said, is not something that can be understood in the framework of conventional logic. It is not straightforward contradiction, not negating what was said, not denying one said something, but rather a particular way of saying, a particular tone of voice, that says ‘p’ and at the same time unreservedly welcomes one’s interlocutors, or anyone at all, to express their differences if they wish to. [3] Pre-originary Saying. This is the uncanny voice of the moral law—the commandment to care unconditionally for the welfare of the other. There are, in Levinas, elusive intimations of this sublime dimension of our ethical experience with speech and voice: a dimension that is infinitely deeper than “le Dire”, the ethical Saying that can take place in a dialogue; a dimension not only pre-personal, but pre-linguistic and pre-originary, in which, prior to consciousness, prior to ego-logical memory, and prior to volition, the one— the one who will assume its egoity—is subjected to the voicing of the “moral law”, which summons and commands me, making me responsible for the welfare of the other and calling upon me always to render my saying an ethical Saying, host and hostage to the voice, the speech, of the other. Moreover, when consciousness emerges, it seems that the ego begins to learn that it has always already been subjected to the voice of this law, claimed by it, bound by it, even “obsessed” by it, and commanded to an irreversible, asymmetrical, indeclinable “substitution”, whereby the ego is obligated to bear absolute responsibility for the welfare of the other.25 This registering of the moral law is, and comes to us as, the sublime, seemingly impossible voice of a pre-originary Saying, not an event that can be assigned a moment in ego-logical time, but a commanding ethical voice already addressing me at a time in my life that is pre-personal, prelinguistic, and so originary, so immemorial, so prior to all representable origins that it is necessary to call it pre-originary, a voice that informs me of my absolute, indeclinable responsibility to and for the other. Though its origin and coming are inaccessible to memory and absolutely resistant to all attempts to make its presence present, its calling to me somehow nevertheless leaves a trace—or say an echo—of its passing invocation. Despite all the distracting noises of the world, the voice of this pre-originary Saying never ceases to call upon me, never ceases to reverberate through my body, never ceases to cause me to tremble, reminding me of my infinite obligation in relation to the other. For Levinas, what I am calling “pre-originary Saying” is nothing other than “the Word [of God] made flesh”. It is, as he will finally declare in Otherwise than Being, a Saying of the moral law that has been invested—“inscribed”—in our very flesh. As such, I will argue, this Saying commands and obliges all our acts of saying, all the uses of our voice. Before all else, it commands and obliges us to respect the voices of others—not least


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all the voices of the living and the dead that, still gathering and echoing within “our own” voice, brought us, as infants, into the language of our community and have continued to accompany and instruct our voice on its journey through life. The pre-originary Saying accordingly obliges us to work at making every speech act, every saying, a truly ethical Saying, suspending what we have said, even sacrificing it, for the sake of the other’s saying—the other’s right to a voice. Here I want to add that the ego which gives itself to speech is to be called a “subject” precisely because it is subjected to the obligation to respond to the claims of the other—claims that are already constituted by the subject’s continuing indebtedness, first incurred even before the time of its entrance into the language of its community, to the voices of other. Of course, in any moment of actual encounter between the ego and its interlocutor, the face-toface may or may not be intense enough or significant enough to awaken, or reactivate in the ego-logical subject the voice of the pre-originary Saying. The ego may be too “deaf”, too indifferent, may simply be unwilling to heed the summons. The pre-originary Saying does not have the power to overcome the freedom that the ego enjoys and compel saying (in the sense of the first moment) to do its bidding. The “I” in its egotism is always free to disregard its ethical obligations. If, however, the ego should hear and heed the preoriginary Saying, the moment of actual encounter is one that Levinas would describe, drawing on the narratives in the Holy Scriptures, using the words “Me voici!”, “Here I am!”. (The Hebrew word is “hineni”, from “hiné”, meaning “Behold here!” and “ni”, meaning “I” or “me”) In other words, the “I” would make itself available to the other—without reservation, without holding back. And this putting itself at the disposition of the other is precisely what Levinas will call “being-for-the-other”, the ego’s awakening to a self of “no identity”. Pre-originary Saying requires that our quotidian saying become an ethical Saying, a saying that recognizes its usurpation of the other’s time, its silencing of the other’s voice, and remembers the obligation to suspend its own saying and even to sacrifice what it has said for the sake of the other’s speaking. Pre-originary Saying, will be the subject of further analysis in the next chapter. [4] The countless voices gathering within “my own” voice. There is also, as I will now argue, another dimension of our ethical experience with speech and voice—one that, as I have already argued, Levinas does not seem unequivocally and consistently to recognize and distinguish with sufficient attention, but one that, I suggest, his phenomenology requires: a dimension of the voice that I call “my voice”, in which there is a never-ceasing gathering of human voices, a never-ceasing inheritance of voices, many of which enabled the infant subject to enter into the language of its community and in fact to continue throughout a lifetime to develop as a speaking subject, drawing on that gathering of voices.

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In its mindfulness of this gathering, the ego would become attentive to all the voices in its life that have summoned its “own”, awakened it, and borne it into the language of its community—all the voices, friendly and hostile, gathered in harmony and in discord, to which it is indebted for its ability to speak, all the voices, past, present, and even future, voices still to be felt in their echoing within its “own” voice, for whose welfare—above all, a question of the right to speak and be heard—it must now assume a co-responding responsibility. Pre-originary Saying requires that our quotidian saying become an ethical Saying that remembers this gathering of voices, remembers our indebtedness, remembers our responsibility to let these voices speak, and remembers the need to be responsive. Despite its ethical significance, this “heteroglossia”, this heteronomous inheritance and gathering of voices within the subject’s voice, a “mimesis” taking place for the most part beneath consciousness, is never brought to adequate recognition in the philosopher’s thought; but it is perhaps implicit in what he says from time to time. For example, in “Useless Suffering”, one finds an extremely significant remark. One could take it, I suppose, to be mere hyperbole, mere metaphor; but that, I submit, would betray its ethical weight, its very point, as a kind of testimony. Mindful of Rosenzweig’s recognition of a polyphony of voices that includes the past in its “congregation,” Levinas writes: I think that all the dead of the Gulag and all the other places of torture in our political century are present when one speaks of Auschwitz.26

This uncanny “presence” inhabits the voice that speaks of these horrors. So I want to say that the voices of the dead live on within our own voices, reverberating there as echoes bearing an ethical claim—a claim on our responsibility of which we can, at least in principle, retrieve a felt sense. The ethical obligation that binds the voice of the pre-originary subject will accordingly be an obligation to heed, to attend, the voice of the other: not only the voices that are summoning one from their present exteriority, but also all the voices of the past that are gathered by mimetic inheritance into the sounding of “one’s own” voice. Our inheritance of the language of our community constitutes a continuing gift, a continuing obligation, and a continuing task, for there is no moment, no stage, in which that language can be said to have been completely inherited, once and for all. If the infant’s acquisition of language is a first inheritance, the continuing inheritance and appropriation becomes a second inheritance. And if, bearing in mind, of course, the cultural prejudice, we were to follow Thoreau, drawing such insight as we can, we might designate this first inheritance as the “mother’s tongue” and designate the second as the “father’s tongue”. Mindfully attending to the echoing multitude of voices


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gathered—and continually gathering—within the voice that we call “our own”—the voices of one’s mother and father, the voices of siblings, the voices of friends, teachers, and the countless personages encountered in the public world—would, I believe, bring us closer phenomenologically to this inheritance of voices that makes us forever ethically indebted—and forever claimed by an indeclinable responsibility. But this inheritance, this gathering of voices, is something that Walt Whitman, perhaps even more than the other great lyrical poets before him, understood long ago—for, in his unconditional celebration of the spirit of democracy, his non-judgmental naming of the voices made that democratic gathering sing freely for us. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cavell notes that, “Lacan’s image of empty as opposed to full speech seems counter to his idea that what is empty in my speech is that the words on my lips are those of another—which suggests that because I am usurped, possessed, by the other, filled with their words, my words are empty of me.” Questioning this characterization, he writes: “But to let this knowledge expose and perhaps purge us of our false feasts of affection and of disaffection, of idolatry and of iconoclasm, would we not already have had to strip ourselves of these lendings . . .?” “What exchange between us,” he wonders, “can we understand as working to cleanse our imaginations of each other—to mend the heart of language in a heartless world?” These questions provoke, finally, another: “Where do words come from?”27 I of course have been asking where the ego’s voice comes from, understanding this question to take us deep into the phenomenology of that dimension of our experience with the voice where we might perhaps achieve a felt sense of its heteronomy, the presencing, gathered within what we call our “own” voice, of the multitude of voices, some harmonious, some discordant—a multitude including even the persecutory, hate-filled voices of our enemies—to which we are forever indebted and which accordingly summon an ethical response. A response never more necessary, perhaps, than in relation to the voices of hate that, however much they seem to belong only to the other, also find refuge all too frequently within the unconscious recesses of the voice we call, with unwarranted pride, “our own”. Although the inheritance of all these voices, beginning in the immemorial days of infancy and continuing into the very last words our breath lets us utter, denies the egological subject its narcissistic dream of absolute sovereignty, perfect selfsufficiency, I want to argue that what Cavell terms “these lendings” have not emptied our words and turned our voice into a ventriloquism: on the contrary, they have solicited our voice, have brought it forth into the human world, and have bestowed the power to use words in ever-new conditions and ways. This of course is not to deny that, all too frequently, our words are thoughtless chatter and the voice we call “our own” is hollowed out, bereft of feeling, poorly attuned, and actually not enowned.28 Nor is it to deny that, in spite of our indebtednesses, in spite of our inheritance of voices, we fail all

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too frequently to find a way to be responsive—to speak humanly to the other in a voice that only heartfelt meaning could, in the end, make our own.

§6 Ethical Saying: The Claim in Dialogue “The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.” —Thoreau, Walden29

In the “Cratylus”, Plato thinks the word as a way of referring to a higher reality that we are still seeking. His word for the word is a refusal to grant any final word. In this way, he honours the saying more than the said. But, when we take his method into account, that refusal also means that he honours the dialogue, the sharing of a passion for enquiry, more than getting answers— and more than solitary reflection. That it is the dialogue he favours for the activity of thinking is an indication of the weight he gives to the ethical relation. Contrary, therefore, to most contemporary interpretations, this refusal is not merely, perhaps not even primarily, a recognition of our limited knowledge, a recognition of the difficulties thinking encounters in achieving a metaphysical vision and finding the words to signify the reality for which that vision is longing. The dialogue form, denying any final word, is, at the very least, a demonstration of Plato’s conviction that it is ethics, and not epistemology or metaphysics, which must claim the title of “first philosophy”. But it is certainly true that Plato also renounces any final word because of an unshakable skepticism, a firm suspicion that words of human origination can only be deceptive, spell-bound, captivated by the materializations that take place in the realm of semblance. For Plato, the human appropriation of the “logos” already represented the degeneration of language—its “diseased” condition. His recourse to “mythos” represents an attempt to retrieve the spirit of language for the sake of ethical life. In one of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche, with words reminiscent of Rousseau, reflects that, Language is everywhere diseased, and the oppression of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of the human being’s development. Inasmuch as language has had continually to climb up to the highest rung of achievement possible to it in order to encompass the realm of thought—a realm diametrically opposed to that for the expression of which it was originally supremely adapted, namely the realm of strong feelings—it has during the brief period of contemporary civilization become exhausted through this excessive effort: so that now it is no longer capable of performing that function for the sake of which alone it exists: to enable suffering mankind to come


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to an understanding with one another concerning the simplest needs of life. Man can no longer make his needs and distress known to others by means of language; hence he can no longer really communicate at all.30

One might argue with some plausibility, I think, that language is today undergoing exceptional distress—that the voice has already suffered intense standardization and lost its metaphorical powers; but the historical version of the argument that Nietzsche is here repeating—Rousseau’s story, which he tells to support his accusation against civilization, his complaint, itself justifiable, about the repression of sentiment, or about the estrangement of the voice from feeling—cannot easily be defended. And yet, even if one repudiates the theologically cast history and the inevitable fall it is supposed to entail, one can find oneself tempted to believe that the communicative conditions of contemporary society tend to compel us as individuals to suppress our contact with the resonances of feeling and subordinate our voices to the univocity-requirements of technocratic forms. Is the suppression of the voice in language taking us ever deeper into the realm of death? In Language and Death, Giorgio Agamben takes the critique much deeper, remarking that, Philosophy is a dialogue of man—the one who speaks, the mortal—with his voice, this strenuous recovering of the voice—and with it, a memory [memoria]. [. . .] The voice is the mute ethical companion that hastens to rescue language at the point where it reveals its groundlessness.31

How so? As we already noted, according to Agamben, The voice is the originary ethical dimension. [. . .] Thus, to think the voice is necessarily the supreme task of philosophy. [. . .] But the voice is that which always already withdraws from every experience with language [La Voce è, però, ciò che sempre già scinde ogni esperienza di linguaggio].”32

Arguing against metaphysics on a point similar to the one that induced Levinas to insist on the ethical priority of “saying”, Agamben explains that, In metaphysics, the taking-place of language (that by grace of which language may be) is obliterated in favour of that which is said in the moment [istanza] of discourse; thus this taking-place of the Voice is thought [if in fact it is thought at all] only as ground of the said, in such a way that the Voice itself never comes, as such, to be thought.33

Now, in the writings of Levinas, one of Agamben’s major sources of inspiration, we are led into thought-provoking discussions on the “taking-place” of

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language, the origin of the voice, and the ethical character of speech, of what is—and should be—“taking-place” in acts of communication. Thus, even if the voice is only, as Agamben states, a “mute ethical companion”, the reflections that Levinas has committed to writing are able to alter the phenomenological method he inherited so that, in ways still not well understood, it could guide us to the recognition and reanimation—the “repetition” in Kierkegaard’s sense—of the voice that speaks to us from the “pre-originary ethical dimension”. But before we delve further into Levinas’s discreet recuperation of the voice and its saying, we should recall Søren Kierkegaard’s discussion of “indirect communication” in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. An obvious inspiration for Levinas, Kierkegaard not only touches on the question of voice, but also implicitly prefigures the ethically consequential distinction that Levinas makes between the saying and the said. According to Kierkegaard, in “authentic” existential communication, there is an imparting of inwardness in which, as he says, The reception of inwardness does not consist of a direct reflection of the content communicated, for this is echo. But the reproduction of inwardness in the recipient constitutes the resonance by reason of which the thing said remains absent.34

What is crucial, here, is the saying, the imparting, not what is being said, or imparted. The said can be anything whatever—it may even “contain” an ethical proposition; but it is the saying of it that matters first of all from the ethical point of view. It is the saying that is first of all ethical, for it is the simple acknowledgement of the other: like the “Behold! Here I am!” of Abraham’s response to God (“Genesis” 22:1). As Kierkegaard puts it: “Objectively, the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively, the emphasis is on how it is said.”35 It is not a question of “style”, but rather of: the relation of the existing person, in his very existence, to what is said. [. . .] At its maximum, this ‘how’ is the passion of the infinite [. . .] which is precisely subjectivity.36

(If what Heidegger said, in his 1949 interview with Der Spiegel, comparing the atrocities in the Nazi death camps to contemporary techniques in agriculture, and seeing in both a terrible mechanization, a dangerous “Machenschaft”, leaves us disturbed, how much more distress must we feel at the brute fact of his saying that? Even if there be an important insight, a sobering truth, in what he said—as indeed I think there is—I find it impossible to avoid feeling that the saying of that truth was exceedingly insensitive, thoughtless and coldhearted. The truth can be betrayed by the circumstances or the tonality in


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which it is asserted. And even if the said is true, the context can call into question the sincerity of the saying.) The imparting to which Kierkegaard is calling our attention communicates, and in a sense “transfers” or “reproduces” inwardness: but an inwardness in the heart of which the other is felt and recognized as dwelling. For Levinas, it is the very impossibility of pure interiority, pure egoity, the impossibility of absolute inwardness, that constitutes the very condition of ethical life. Thus, the ethical character of imparting, as a saying that, without holding anything back, gives the one to the other, even to the point of substitution, taking onto oneself the other’s suffering and destitution, is what Levinas will name the “prophetic dignity of language”, always capable of giving to the other more than it says, saying more than its said can possibly say. Furthermore, because of the way in which the Saying takes place, the other’s reception of the imparted is released from imitation and “parrot-like echo”— indeed, released from all reciprocity, all symmetry, all correlation.37 The Saying has the power to address and transform the other’s inwardness—but without the slightest coercion, so that it is, paradoxically, as though, in a way, nothing at all had been said. I am reminded, here, of Heidegger’s characterization of the “genuine greeting”, formulated, perhaps with Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of “indirect communication” echoing in his mind, in the course of his commentary on Hölderlin’s “Andenken”: Remembrance [Das Andenken] is a kind of greeting. [. . .] From the used-up, empty greeting of thoughtless exchanges to the rarity of the true greeting, and indeed to the uniqueness of this poetic greeting, we encounter many levels. In the greeting, the one who greets does indeed name himself, but only to say that he wants nothing for himself; instead, he addresses everything to the one who is greeted, everything fitting and proper [was diesem gebührt]. The true greeting acknowledges what is greeted in its own proper being, yet takes its own place, belonging to a different and therefore distant will. The greeting unfolds the distance between the one greeted and the one greeting, so that in such nearness there may be grounded a nearness that does not need to intrude. A true greeting acknowledges in the one greeted the harmony of its essence, its being [Der echte Gruß schenkt dem Gegrüßten den Anklang seines Wesens]. The true greeting can at times let the greeted one shine in its own essential light, so that it loses a false individuality. The true greeting gives priority to the supposedly “unreal” as opposed to the merely “real”. The pure and at the same time simple greeting is poetic. Its remembrance [Denken an] of the one greeted is a fundamental recognition by virtue of which what is greeted can enter into the esteem of its being, so that, as what is greeted, it may henceforth have its essential abode in the greeting. [. . .] Greeting is a remembrance whose enigmatic rigour shelters again the one who is greeted

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and the one who is greeting in the distance of their own essential being. The greeting wants nothing for itself, and precisely for this reason receives everything that would enable the one greeted to enter into its own being.38

Very moving! But how could a philosopher who wrote so profoundly about welcoming and greeting give the Nazi salute? Although Levinas was always uncomfortable within the peculiarly pagan “atmosphere” of Heidegger’s philosophical thinking—especially everything that followed Being and Time, this characterization of the greeting would not actually have been difficult for Levinas to accept, incorporating it into his phenomenology of “proximity” in the ethical relation. Be this as it may, an echo different from the “parrot-like” is certainly involved, for Levinas, in the Saying that takes place in the receptivity, the “greeting”, of the ethical relation: its timing is anachronous, since one can never be sure that the sound of the pre-originary voice that it heeds and repeats has ever resounded; but even if nothing but “semblance”, there comes an echo that can draw us into the immeasurable depths of the voice, there where an indeclinable responsibility is to be most deeply felt for the plight of the neighbour, “le prochain”, the one whose existence is forever beyond being. (This is equally true for Heidegger, whose use of “Wesen” in the passage quoted above is intended to break away from the reifications of “being”, understood as constant, totalized presence.) So the distinctively ethical communication that Levinas is concerned with, like the compassionately religious communication that Kierkegaard analyses, could not be more different from the communication that MerleauPonty describes in Phenomenology of Perception: In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. . . . We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other and we co-exist through a common world. (PPF 407, PPE 354)

Is this a description of fact or a description of an ideal? It is not easy to say, although the philosopher presents it as if the answer were not debatable! Be this as it may, Levinas could readily concur, insofar as this passage is understood to be a description of the ideal of discourse in the political realm, realm where there is always “le tiers”, the other of the other: here, reversibility of roles, reciprocity, comparisons, and calculations of equality are, for him, not merely appropriate, but rigorously imperative. In the ethical realm, however, as in the religious, radically different exigencies are involved: Not synchrony, but


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diachrony; not reversibility, but the asymmetry of substitution, whereby I am assigned responsibility for the other; not reciprocity, but subordination to the other; not comparison, but the absolute incomparability of the other; not equality, but the absolute immeasurability of the other, beyond all calculation, beyond all categories—quite simply, beyond being. For Levinas, symmetry, substitution, reversibility, reciprocity, and synchronicity appear in two antagonistic forms of sociality: [1] within the dehumanizing economy of capitalism, they appear as commodified exchange equivalence, functional substitutability, a violent distortion of human relations whereas [2] within the political order, they appear as necessary conditions for the peaceful achievement of social justice. The “ethical relation”, however, requiring, as it does, a certain diachrony, asymmetry, nonreversibility, non-reciprocity, and also, as we shall see, a radically different form of substitution, uncompromisingly opposes the first of these two forms, hoping to encourage its overcoming or transformation, whilst it is the morally imperative precondition for the second, namely, the possibility of a political order determined to achieve social justice. Actually, according to Levinas, even in the political realm, where what might prevail is symmetry, the correlation of the saying and the said—not worse, the obliteration of the saying under the medusan spell of the said, even here, there is an oppression that his moral-political philosophy strongly opposes: the injustice and violence of a totalizing rationalism that only reluctantly tolerates interruption and permits only limited resistance to the power of the said (AE 217, OB 171). It remains a question, however, to what extent, if any, the “an-archy” of the ethical relation, saying for the sake of a justice due to the other, can be translated into the discursive conditions of political life. In the ethical relation, dialogue becomes, as we have already noted, what Levinas calls “le Dire”, “Saying”.39 I will continue to capitalize this word in order to emphasize that it is a question of embodying the ethical imperative, the “moral law”: the “authentic” saying that all our speech-acts, all acts of saying, should become. This is a crucial point: the philosopher is not using that word to describe the ordinary, common experience of speaking. Indeed, if he were using it with that referent in mind, his descriptions would, unfortunately, be far from the tragic truth. Thus I have risked introducing a certain lucidity here, despite the betrayal it inevitably imposes, using a visible typography to distinguish ordinary, non-ethical “saying” (ordinary statements of fact, the discourses of sciences, and, more generally, any speech, any discourse, that does not heed the obligations constitutive of the ethical relation) from ethically responsive “Saying”; whereas, for reasons that, in the context of his work, I acknowledge to be compelling, Levinas wants to maintain the ethical pressures in ambiguity, using the same font to describe our ordinary experience with saying and to urge, or prescribe, a more ethically attuned experience. In this way, he attempts more than a description of fact; he is also

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addressing us, appealing to us to communicate with others in keeping with the ethical responsibility to which, he argues, such saying/Saying incontrovertibly commits us. His “own” saying/Saying must bear the weight of this ambiguity, this persistent disturbance of univocity—a “fine risk”. Like Levinas, Kierkegaard understands the ethical relation to require of the I, the self, immeasurable respect for the other. At stake is the very possibility of sincerity, a sincerity the truth of which never ceases to feel problematic, questionable: The highest degree of resignation that a human being can reach is to acknowledge the given independence in every man, and after the measure of his ability do all that can in truth be done to help someone preserve it.40

In “The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis”, Jacques Lacan crystallizes something of the ethical import implied by this Kierkegaardian teaching: Even if it communicates nothing, the talking [le discours] represents the existence of communication [i.e., recognition of the other and a desire for connection]; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that the word constitutes the truth; even if it is destined to deceive, here the discourse expresses its faith in testimony.41

As Levinas says, in every encounter with another, there is always “witnessing”, an acknowledgement of the other—recognition of a sacred humanity in the other: In every encounter, there is always “a greeting—even if it is only the refusal of greeting.”42 Thus, there is always a saying that is also, if more deeply, more spiritually experienced, a Saying. The other, “l’autrui”, is never first of all an object of comprehension, an object taking precedence for me over the role of my interlocutor. Knowledge, comprehension, and even recognition—all forms of cognition, in fact—presuppose “invocation”, addressing the other, a relation with the other that exceeds, and even disrupts, the very possibility of comprehension: Not only because knowledge of the other requires, outside all curiosity, also sympathy or love, ways of being distinct from impassible contemplation, but because, in our relation with the other, he does not affect us in terms of a concept.43

To address oneself to another is to “neglect”, therefore, “the universal being that this other [nevertheless] incarnates, in order to remain with the particular being he is.” In other words, saying that I should relate to the other “as a human being”, or out of respect for his or her “humanity” cannot escape an ethical aporia: it holds that I am obliged to treat the other as a singularity in virtue of a universal that is inherently deaf to the voice of this singularity, a


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conceptual order subordinating its very existence.44 Both the other’s humanity and the other’s singularity remain, for different reasons and in different ways, forever unsayable and unvoiceable; and yet, every saying is a Saying that bears witness to this unsayable, this unvoiceable. “The unsayable saying lends itself to the said, to the ancillary indiscretion of the abusive language that divulges or profanes the unsayable” (AE 57, OB 44). For Levinas, as for Kierkegaard, “the [ethical] essence of discourse is prayer”.45 As an exemplary example of the ethical relation that takes place in communication, Kierkegaard offers this striking vignette: To stop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him, is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempting to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way. Such is the relation between one existing individual and another, when the communication concerns the truth as existential inwardness.46

What Levinas will call “the said” is precisely communication that causes, or is at, a stand-still: it is speech already arrested, arresting further speech. It is speaking reduced to statement, closed to the very existence of the interlocutor whom it nevertheless presumes to address. So in order to avert this standstill, this fixation, the act of speech, “the Saying”, must somehow both impart and withdraw that which it is saying. It must withdraw itself, in fact, even prior to the being of the said. “To speak,” Levinas writes, “is to interrupt my existence as a subject, a master.”47 It is a question, as Blanchot puts it, of my being able “to enter into the responsibility of a speech that speaks without exercising any form of power.”48 The ethical obligation that claims the speaker requires that he or she take responsibility for communicating in a way that not only does not take away from the other the ability to be independently responsive, but actually encourages the other to persevere in whatever way feels right and true, even if that means continuing in the opposite direction. Saying “has to be silent as soon as one listens for its message [in the said]” (AE 194, OB 152). What Levinas means by “Saying” is saying, communication, that embodies and manifests the ethical relation: always “a fine risk”, since the immediately said always threatens to absorb the Saying into itself, effectively negating its openness, its exposure, its sacrifice for the sake of the other (AE 153–54, OB 120). As Saying, saying says to the other “Here I am!”, “Me voici!”, just as Moses and Abraham responded to the summoning voice of God: “Here I am, at your service.” Levinas puts it this way: As a sign given to the other of this very signification, the “Me voici!” signifies me in the name of God, at the service of human beings who can look at me, [completely denuded of all ego-logical defenses,] without having anything to

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identify myself with, but the sound of my voice or the figure of my gesture— the saying itself. (AE 190, OB 149)

Although, so far as I know, Levinas nowhere explicitly comments on, nor ever explicitly refers to, the vignette I have quoted here, his ethically pressured analysis of the distinction between saying and said may usefully be read as a commentary on the indirect discourse that Kierkegaard’s vignette illustrates. In “Language and Proximity” (1967), he observes: Proximity is not a simple co-existence, but a restlessness. Something passes from one to the other and from the other to the one, and these two movements do not differ only by their direction. Is something said, then, or learned, in the contact? Is something thematized? Nothing—but the contact, by the contact itself. Nothing will be uttered but this very contact, this alliance and this complicity, which is precisely a complicity or alliance “for nothing”, without content, if not for the sake of this very complicity or this alliance, this proximity antecedent to every convention, all understanding or misunderstanding, all frankness and all guile. This utterance of the contact says and learns only this very fact of saying and learning—here again, like a caress.49

Having given to the “Saying” that takes place in proximity an uncanny ethical signification, a signification that, in what I myself am writing, I will continue to indicate, whenever possible, by capitalizing the noun, he then asks: Isn’t not placing oneself in the universe of a common language, in culture, still a saying? Isn’t it only a way to invoke the community whose members are not linked to one another as individuals of the same genus, or as pure intellects around the same truth?

And yet, the Saying in question here is radically different from the speech acts with which we are all familiar: This saying no doubt precedes the language that communicates propositions and messages: it is a sign given from one to another by proximity about proximity. This sign is not already a discourse that would be still stammering. Not to have any content other than the very proximity that utters it, to invoke or recall a complicity “for nothing” and an alliance that was not chosen is to invoke or recall fraternity, which is an understanding without object or choice, and is the essence of proximity and the condition for all circulation of messages.50

Saying what he wants to say in a discourse the very saying of which will always be undecidably ambiguous, inherently enigmatic, torn as it must be between constative utterance and performative utterance, between the


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treacherous commonplace signification and the ethical one, prophetic and messianic, which he is attempting to draw out, Levinas notes that what makes this understanding exceptional is the fact that it passes from singularity to singularity in an anachronistic temporality and without the mediations constitutive of communicative universality (AE 194, OB 152). When Saying takes place, God’s “glorious epiphany” is silently witnessed in and as the transcendence of the other. Saying takes place in language, a system of signs; but it breaks through this system, this immanence, to speak to the other: A sign is given from one to the other before the constitution of any system of signs, any common place formed by culture and sites, a sign given from null site to null site. The fact that a sign, exterior to the system of evidences, comes into proximity while remaining transcendent, is the very essence of language prior to every particular language.51

For Levinas, Language is the possibility of entering into relationship independently of every system of signs common to the interlocutors.52

Indeed, he will argue, “fraternity with the neighbour”, when “the Infinite” comes to pass, is “the essence of the original language”, the language that, signifying the glory of a less barbaric humanity, and already a summons to absolute responsibility, figures, namely, in Saying.53 Consequently, his analysis will show that “universality, or more precisely, universalization”, starts with “absolute singularities.” Although language can always—and all too frequently does—capture and reify singularities, casting individuals in category-roles and betraying the trust that all communication presupposes, Saying is what originally takes place between singularities, interlocutors, who cannot be fixed in any quiddity. Refusing “participation in a transparent universality”, Saying is—or strives to be—sincerity (AE 193, OB 152). And there remains “a trace of sincerity”, or say an echo of sincerity, “which the words themselves bear even when the said dissimulates the saying in the correlation set up between the saying and the said” (Ibid.). “Thus Saying always seeks to unsay that dissimulation, and this is its very veracity” (Ibid.). However, “there can be no sincere said. No said can demonstrate, [merely] in its being said, that it is sincerely said. Sincerity can only be thought in relation to the command that there continue to be something said” (AE 233, OB 185). Saying is accordingly also my “exposure” to the other, “exposure” also, therefore, to the judgement that represents the other: “This exposure is the frankness, sincerity, veracity of saying. Not saying dissimulating itself [. . .] and protecting itself in the said, but saying uncovering itself [. . .] offering itself even in suffering” (AE 18, OB 15). Saying is: “a sacrifice without reserve,

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without holding back” (Ibid.). This sacrifice must be so absolute, so extreme, that it takes Saying to the verge of an uncanny silence, where nothing can be heard but the echo of a voice, simply an echo, the passing of a welcoming voice, making of this silence an opening for the other to speak (AE 182–83, 190; OB 143, 149). The problematic entanglement of the ethical in the universality-conditions of conceptual language is taken up in another major text, “Enigma and Phenomenon” (1957, 1967), where Levinas maintains that, All speaking is an enigma. It is, to be sure, established in and moves in an order of significations common to the interlocutors, in the midst of triumphant, that is, primary truths, in a particular language that bears a system of known truths which the speaking, however commonplace it is, does stir up and lead on to new significations. But behind this renewal, which constitutes cultural life, the Saying, that is the face [ethical consciousness], is the discretion of an unheard-of proposition, an insinuation, immediately reduced to nothing, breaking up like the ‘bubbles of the earth’ which Banquo speaks of at the beginning of Macbeth.54

Such is the “extra-ordinary duplicity” of the “enigma”, in which the one must simultaneously say and unsay, in order to respect the ethical singularity of the other, the interlocutor. “Enigma concerns subjectivity”: thus, indeed, “subjectivity is enigma’s partner [partenaire], partner of the transcendence that disturbs being.”55 In Kierkegaard’s vignette, what is at stake—as Levinas would express it—is the possibility of “a word that knows how to speak as though nothing has been said.”56 For it is not only a question of avoiding the immobilization of the Saying, the petrifying of it in the persistence and usurpation of the said, reducing the spiritedness, the vigour, and the hospitable openness of the Saying to the forbidding closure of the statement; the whole point of submitting the said to Saying is ethical: a question of one’s respect for the other’s independence, the other’s autonomy as a singularity. The said puts both the said and the address under the rule of the logic of identity; Saying takes the said out of that violent logic. Saying is not the transmission of “factual information”: Is language the transmission of, and a listening in to, messages which would be conceived independently of this transmission and this listening, independent of communication (even though thoughts resort to historically constituted languages and conform to the negative conditions of communication, to logic, to the principles of order and universality)? Or, on the contrary, would language involve a positive and antecedent event of communication, which would be an approach to and a contact with the neighbour, and in which the secret of the birth of thought itself and of the verbal statement that bears it would lie?57


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But what makes this “enigmatic”? For Levinas, Saying is always an event that ultimately belongs to the “enigmatic”, in that, as he remarks, an enigma is not a simple ambiguity [équivoque] in which two significations have equal chances and the same light. In an enigma, the exorbitant meaning is already effaced in its apparition. [Thus,] the God who spoke said nothing, passed incognito; [whereas] everything in the light of phenomena gives lie to him, refutes, represses, persecutes him.58

Similarly, with Saying: “What is essential here,” he notes, “is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning is inserted in the meaning that remains in an order, the way it advances while retreating.”59 Saying, in Levinas’s peculiar sense always “kerygmatic”, can be only a “disturbance”, a “dérangement”, within, and from the standpoint of, the conventional order of meanings and understandings: The disturbance [. . .] is possible only as the entry into a given order of another order which does not accommodate itself to the first.60

Thus, The enigma, the intervention of a meaning which disturbs phenomena but is quite ready to withdraw like an undesirable stranger unless one [i.e., the one receiving the communication] harkens to [tende l’oreille] those footsteps that depart, is transcendence itself, the proximity of the Other as Other.61

In ordinary discourse, even discourse with both a literal and a figurative or metaphorical dimension, “the different orders are simultaneous, or have a point of contact and synchronism. The tearing up of one order from another would already be a reciprocal participation. The difference between contents is not strong enough to break the continuous form, the unbreachable plot, in which this difference is still regulated.”62 Thus, no ethically signifying disturbance. However: For there to be the possibility of disturbance, a fissile present [un present fissile] is required, “destructuring” itself in its very punctuality. The alterity that disturbs order cannot be reduced to the difference visible to the gaze that compares and therefore synchronizes the Same and the Other.63

Nor, for that matter, can a univocal, monotonic voice, registering, tolerating, no other registers and rhythms of voice, bring about the ethically signifying disturbance that my responsibility for the other requires of me. Saying takes place in, or rather, first opens up, a certain “entre-temps”: interrupting the order of Reason, the logic of unity and identity, of state-ment, it inaugurates

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an arrhythmia between past and future, letting it become the time of, and for, the other, time that invites the other to speak. It is, as Blanchot suggests, a way for saying to become hospitality, a waiting that, without conditions, receives whatever voices, whatever speech, might take place: “Only waiting maintains, between what they say, a certain relation, words spoken to wait, a waiting of words.”64 One of the ways in which Saying effects a disturbance is that it irrevocably equivocates: through the pre-originary depth of the voice, Saying lets what it says vibrate, reverberate, echo uncontrollably, refusing to let its meaning become fixated, objectified, cast into the dogmatism, the intolerance of the statement: Everything depends on the possibility of vibrating with a meaning [la possibilité de vibrer à une signifiance] that is not synchronized with the speech that captures what cannot be fitted into its order; everything depends on the possibility of a signification that would signify in an irreducible disturbance.65

Drawing its responsiveness from the pre-originary depths of the ethical, from a bodily felt sense of a responsibility that cannot be represented in the language of conceptual immanence, ethically charged Saying speaks with a distinctively open, impassioned, and borrowed voice. Moreover, it speaks with a vibration in tonalities that can only be intensely disturbing to the ego’s control over meaning. The vibrations, the estranging sonorities, the echoes of the pre-originary Saying—and, too, the echoes of countless human voices— that are sheltered within ethical Saying deny the ego its right to possess what is said. If language always offers “the possibility of entering into relationships independently of every system of signs common to the interlocutors,” then Saying is that ethically imperative “use” of language whereby one realizes this possibility for the sake of the other, his or her interlocutor.66 “Fraternity with the neighbour,” according to Levinas, is “the essence of the original language; it finds universality, or more precisely, universalization, starting with absolute singularities.”67 In Kierkegaard’s enigmatic vignette, the communication is not mediated by universality; it is precisely in order to elude “participation in a transparent universality”, elude “betrayal” by the “stasis”, the “fate” that rules in the said, that the Saying takes the form of “indirect” discourse.68 For here, it is a question of proximity, contact, a relationship of “tenderness and responsibility”, absolutely concentrated on an ethico-religious communication: “a language without words or propositions, a pure communication,” anachronistically unsaying what has been said.69 For this proximity, absolutely “beyond intentionality, is the relationship with the neighbour in the moral sense of that term.”70 Already obligated even to the point of sacrifice and substitution to care for the welfare of


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the other, in the ethical relation that Levinas calls “proximity”, I assume responsibility for the “pre-originary vocation of Saying” (AE 7, OB 6). And this responsibility requires signifying transcendence, the beyond-essence, the otherwise-than-being; but this is possible only in an apophantic use of words that invariably betrays this transcendence, returning the signified to the abusive synchrony of essence. Kierkegaard’s vignette thus represents his attempt to work through the methodological problem to which, a century later, Levinas will devote so much intricately sensitive thought. In his “Divinity College Address” of 1838, a sermon calling upon the graduating students to remain faithful to the ideals of their mission—truthfulness in their rhetoric, courage and sincerity in their speech, and humbleness of tone in their voice, Emerson declared that, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul.”71 If we may take the pre-originary Saying of the moral law to be our “instruction”, we might correspondingly take the proximity of the other, the face-to-face relation with other human beings in their concrete singularity, to be our ethical “provocation”, a “presence” that, in its uncanny unapproachableness, provokes by reminding us in the most undeniable way of our ethical obligation. For Levinas, my encounter with the other, my experience, as he puts it, of the face, “opens speech to the dimension of transcendence,” “where the first word is obligation”.72 But in this proximity through transcendence, Saying takes on a double role, a “duplicitous” role, inevitably taking place within the totalizing presentness of meaning, yet also trying to evade the overwhelming power of being, of essence, in order to communicate “sincerely” something of the greatest ethical and spiritual significance: For the saying, in being said, at every moment breaks the definition of what it says and breaks up the totality it includes. Even if it makes of this breakup itself its theme, and thus reconstitutes the totality it recounts in an, if possible, yet more total form; even if it thus shows its binding thread never worn out, here it interrupts its totality by its very speaking.73

“Someone,” he says there, enjoying for a moment the triumph of ethics over the violence of ontology, enjoying the elusiveness of the enigma within whose discretion the infinitely transcendent humanity of the other is blessed, “has thereby escaped themes”. But no certainty, no assurance, here, is possible. “Sincerity” itself is always questionable—indeed precisely in the name of sincerity! “Giving time to the voice of the other”: a phrase that bears a readily accessible sense—and makes sense—outside the semantic field in which the interruptions by Levinas’s ethically motivated thought cause such an unavoidable disturbance. But on one level of meaning, what Levinas intends by drawing the distinction between Saying and said is indeed to be understood

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in this most readily accessible sense. It most certainly is a question of “courtesy” and “civility”, submitting communication to the imperatives of sociability. I must give time to the voice, the speech, the words of the other. But for Levinas, the ethical relation is infinitely more urgent and compelling. I must, whatever the sacrifice, keep the dialogue open, entirely releasing it from my control, from my will, free even from the slightest echo of velleity. My words turned to the other must be said, must be audible—and heard, of course; and I remain forever responsible for them, as if they could continue to reverberate, even beyond my death; yet they must also fade away, as if never uttered, into a silence that, thus released from my will, my intentionality, can welcome the voice, the saying, of the other, my interlocutor, serving as a sanctuary for the concerns, the voice, of this other. As long as my words remain “in the air”, as long as they continue to resound, they constitute a constraint, a usurpation, a coercion. But before I have even uttered a single word, I am, for Levinas, already under obligation to the other, already indebted to my interlocutor, already witnessing in him or her the glorious presence of God—a revelation. My first actual words, therefore, must already be coming from a preceding Saying that is serving as “testimony”, as “witnessing”, as a sign given to the other in ethical proximity: “The saying prior to any said bears witness to glory” (AE 184, OB 145). Such a Saying is strange, indeed paradoxical; for it comes from another time, a time before ego-logical consciousness, memory, and volition, and cannot be identified with any actual saying, no matter how ethically worthy this saying may be. As he argues in “Enigma and Phenomenon”: my communication to the other is a saying/Saying that “does not lend itself to the contemporaneousness that constitutes the force of the time tied in the present, because it imposes a completely different version of time.”74 It is “already too old”, “déjà trop vieux”. The “disturbance” that Saying performs in the “egological” and “rational” orders of discourse—and in the order of time which, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”,75 Walter Benjamin calls “homogenous” and “empty”—“is possible,” according to Levinas, “only through an intervention”, an intervention belonging to another dimension of time, a prophetic or messianic dimension. This is the enigma: A stranger is then needed, one who has come, but [already] left before having come [parti avant d’être venu], absolute in his manifestation. “At the same time” [“À la fois”] would not be enough for the breakup [rupture] of order. In order that the tearing up [l’arrachement] from order not be ipso facto a participation in order, this tearing up, this abstraction, must, by a supreme anachronism, precede its entry into order, the past of the Other must never have been present.76

This final phrase echoes the striking phrase that suddenly appears at the very end of the chapter on “sense experience” in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; but the passage-fragment as a whole is intriguingly


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reminiscent, I suggest, of Benjamin’s observation, in his essay on Kafka, remembering the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death: “he divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end.”77 What Kafka attempts is the opening up of gesture to the stranger, to alterity, to the prophetic or messianic dimension, within which its ethical relationship to the other has always already—and yet, not yet—taken place. The absoluteness of the obligation to provide for this opening also explains Kafka’s remark, recognizing, like Levinas, the paradoxical, anachronistic time of the ethical, that the Messiah will be recognized to have come “only on the day after his arrival”: “not on the last day, but on the day after”.78 Levinas notes, in “Enigma and Phenomenon”, that, as “transcendence,” that is, as implicitly invoking a prophetic, messianic temporality, the saying of the ethical is always a Saying that is “pure passage”, an event that enters the communicative world as already past: nothing but a trace—or say an echo.79 It is precisely in this negation of presentness, in its inspiration coming from a supervenient temporality, that the Saying manifests the absoluteness of its ethical vocation. The more Levinas elaborates his description of the ethical character of the dialogical situation, the more apparent it becomes that, understood in the context of Levinas’s ethical philosophy, “giving time to the voice of the other” requires interpretation on an other, much stranger, and indeed more thought-provoking level of analysis. For any “giving of time”—supposing it is mine to give—could only be an imposition on my interlocutor: however just and good my intentions, the mere fact that I am the one giving the time is already a usurpation and a violence. Moreover, the “time” in question here is, in the last analysis, paradoxical, indeed anachronistic. For, as “witnessing”, as “testimony”, Saying takes place both in conventional time and also in another dimension of temporality: in Kantian terms, not in the temporality of nature, where the causality of fate must reign, but in the temporality of freedom—in what Kant might have wanted to call the “Kingdom of Ends”, since it is a question, here, of recognizing and acknowledging the suprasensible and transcendental “humanity” of the interlocutor. This touches on what Levinas is getting at. But Levinas will invoke a temporality of responsibility instead of freedom; and, instead of the “Kingdom of Ends”, he will invoke a prophetic, messianic temporality, according to which the Saying participates in, conjoins, or crosses two orders of time: if, on the one hand, it has not taken place until, according to conventional understanding, the time of utterance, namely, in a particular “now-present”, when the one actually addresses the other, on the other hand, it will always have taken place already, but also not yet, within the dimension of, a prophetic, messianic temporality, since the one whom I address, the one whose humanity commands me, reminding me of my indeclinable responsibility, bears the glorious countenance of the hidden, eternal God (AE 192, OB 150). As Saying, my

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words are consequently equivocal—“duplicitous”, Levinas will say; for they also belong to and avow this other time, communicating with the other in terms of a time that is—paradoxically, anachronistically—a time already passed, passed in a time before time, but also a time that has not yet come to fulfill, or complete the prophetic, messianic promise that still must summon us to realize our humanity. In the final analysis, then, “de facto” Saying, the ethically charged Saying that actually enters into dialogue, originates in a deeper dimension: “not a babbling or still primitive or childish form of saying”, but an experience beyond the very possibility of ego-logically constituted consciousness and memory, that nevertheless bespeaks my “involuntary election” to bear responsibility for the other; a dimension where our experience, our voice, is immeasurably more passive than the passivity that is normally contrasted with activity (AE 18, OB 15). Thus, when we are actually engaged in a saying that is, according to Levinas’s criteria, an authentically ethical Saying, our voice, our Saying, originates in the enigma of a Saying that “has never been present” (AE 214, OB 168). With these evocative descriptions, however, we have already crossed the threshold and entered into the pre-originary dimension of the voice: another, even more enigmatically charged dimension of Saying than that of the “actual” sayings and Sayings with which we have been concerned so far. For if the first is ethically indifferent, the second, namely Saying, is compelled by a third: the moral law—that enigmatic voice which instructs us in a “pre-originary Saying”. (See Diagram II, following chapter 5.) It will perhaps be recalled, from the Introduction, that, in Dieu, la mort et le temps, Levinas commented that, “the most extraordinary thing that Heidegger brings [us] is a new sonority of the verb ‘to be’: precisely its verbal sonority.”80 Recognizing the philosophical significance that “sonority” can have, Levinas will occasionally draw our attention to tonalities of voice when characterizing ethical Saying as a way of communicating that causes the habitually egocentric experience structuring our discursive relations with others to undergo a powerful “disturbance”. Breaking through the ego’s defenses, its many ruses and evasions, this “disturbance” comes to the voice from a depth that is pre-originary. From that depth, a pre-originary Saying commands my voice to open itself to the other. Another sonority, another tonality is at stake. Pre-originary Saying—what in the terminology of the tradition would be termed, despite the differences that resist this tradition, the transcendental imperative that calls for ethical Saying—will be the subject of the next chapter.

C ha pter 5

8 The Pre-Originary Dimension of Saying “The greatest part of our embodiment, our humanity itself, is still sleeping a deep slumber.” —Novalis, “General Draft”1

“Existence [is] a perpetual incarnation” —Merleau-Ponty (PPF 194, PPE 166)2

“The body [Körper] is a moral instrument. It was created to fulfill the Commandments. It was formed at the Creation according to this purpose. Even its perceptions indicate how far they draw the body away from its duty or bind it close.” —Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem”3

“. . . [T]he ethical body must incessantly repeat the spiritual act of its upsurge, must always be reborn, must always recall itself to its name and its freedom.” —Jacques Derrida, Glas4

§1 Preliminary Soundings In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says of the word: “Before becoming the symbol of a concept, it is first of all an event which grips my body . . .” (PPF 272, PPE 235). He also says there that, “Metaphysics—the coming to light of something beyond nature—is not localized at the level of knowledge: it begins with the [body’s] opening out upon ‘another’” (PPF 195, PPE 168). The opening quotations from Novalis, Benjamin, Derrida and Merleau-Ponty set the stage for our analysis in this chapter of the ethically significant pre-originary dimension of Saying and for our interpretation of Levinas’s presumed retrieval—what we might also describe as his “reenactment” or “reanimation”—of this sublime Saying. They set the stage

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by calling attention to a proto-moral, “metaphysical” dimension of our embodiment, by recognizing the ethical-political significance of this dimension, and by provoking us to think the saying of the word as an ethically responsible event that is felt as originating beyond comprehension, beyond the possibility of conceptual representation, in the depths of the flesh, the spiritual nature of the body. More specifically, they provoke us to experience and think the saying of the word as an event that, if deeply experienced, can be felt to realize the spiritual, ethical nature of the human voice. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, published in 1951, Levinas wonders “whether language is not based on a relationship [i.e., an ethical relationship] that is prior to understanding”.5 It is in and as what I have been calling a preoriginary Saying that the voice of the moral law speaks to us, claiming our voice for the ethical relation. The moral law comes to us, mysteriously, as a promise, a promise in two senses of that word; for its commandment is not only the first form in which the prophetic promise of redemption is pronounced, but also the “mise-en-scene”, the investment or installment, of an ethical responsibility given (“-mise”) to the voice in advance of (“pro-“) our entrance into the language of our community. It is, we might say, the gift of a felt sense of our humanity, a humanity-for-the-other, that can audibly appropriate the voice, bestowing its capacity to be a human voice, a voice not merely capable of speech, but capable of responding to the other, friend or foe, with unconditional compassion. The human voice originates in an ethical relationship. In “For What Tomorrow?”, a “dialogue” with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Derrida connects responsibility to inheritance, declaring it to be, as I read him, an assignment constitutive of the conditions of our very existence as human beings: Only a finite being inherits, and his finitude obliges him. It obliges him to receive what is larger and older and more powerful and more durable than he. . . . Precisely in order to respond to the call that preceded him, to answer it and to answer for it—in one’s name as in the name of the other. The concept of responsibility has no sense at all outside of an experience of inheritance. Even before saying that one is responsible for a particular inheritance, it is necessary to know that responsibility in general [. . .] is first assigned to us, and that it is assigned to us through and through, as an inheritance. One is responsible before what comes before one, but also before what is to come.6

I want to suggest that we might read this statement as a gloss on my interpretation, here, of Levinas. What human bodies inherit is, for Levinas, the assignment of a moral responsibility for the other: an assignment constitutive of our very identity, and indeed subverting our very right to that identity,

The Pre-Originary Dimension of Saying

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that precedes “what comes before one” and also precedes “what is to come”. I want to suggest, moreover, that this assignment comes in the form of a preoriginary Saying, a commanding inspiration, a symbolic appropriation of the body, commanding and compelling a voice that communicates ethical responsibility long before the voice of Reason. Whereas the voice of Reason commands subsumptive unity and identity and totality according to formalidentitarian principles, this pre-originary Saying exposes the same to the other, hinging identity on difference. The pre-originary Saying, radically heterological, is to be felt as a voice that exposes us to the inheritance of the anarchic, polyphonic gathering of voices which precede the formation of “our own” voice—all the inherited voices to which “our own” voice is indebted and to which, long before the voice of Reason has spoken, we have already been made (to feel) responsible. What I call “my voice” is in fact a gathering of many voices. At a later moment in the dialogue with Roudinesco, Derrida says: I am not alone with myself, no more than anyone else is—I am not all-one. An “I” is not an indivisible atom.

And he adds, expressing with lucidity Levinas’s ethical deconstruction of ego-logical identity, that one “could say ‘I’ only in one piece”: only by expelling from himself all alterity, all heterogeneity, all division, indeed all altercation, all “explication”, or “coming to terms” with oneself.7

The “pre-originary Saying” disrupts and disturbs egoism long before the voice of Reason calls it into question for the sake of an ethical relation grounded in responsibility. In concluding his discussion of “the Ideal of Beauty” in §17 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant asserts the importance of making the connection of moral ideas to our lives “visible in [their] bodily manifestation” (in körperliche Äußerung sichtbar zu machen), demonstrating that human nature, hence the human embodiment, is indeed a fitting medium for the realization of the objectives laid down for us by morality.8 It is of the highest concern to Reason that its moral ideas have “objective reality”—that, as he puts it in §42, “nature should at least show some trace or give some sign [wenigstens eine Spur zeige oder einen Wink gebe] that it contains in itself some sort of “ground” for the moral law.9 Given that we are sensuous and not merely rational creatures, we need a sensuous, yet heterological presentation that confirms the conditions of possibility of morality. This visibility, this connection, is, for him, an essential moment of encouragement for the cultivation of an ethical life; but, as he argues, a “very strong imagination”, together with a reflective sensibility, is required for this exhibition.10 I am introducing Kant here as a

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way of indicating the problematic I will address in this chapter. For, although Levinas’s commitment to phenomenology springs from the very same conviction, I believe that his work does not adequately elaborate the dimensions of embodiment—the dimensions of the voice—that our ethical life as he understands it must engage. Although claiming that there is a preoriginary dimension to our ethical responsibility, he leaves the embodiment that this claim presupposes and requires very much in the dark. This neglect is both unfortunate and unnecessary. Moreover, whilst insisting on the enigmatic nature of the pre-originary ethical disposition, he neglects to acknowledge and question the role of the imagination in positing a trace or echo—the “gift of nature” that comes, as I shall argue, in and as a bodily felt sense—of that pre-originary dimension. Inheriting Levinas’s phenomenological ethics, we must take up what he left without a satisfying phenomenological account: we must interrogate this “trace”, this “echo” or “sign” of the moral law; we must “exhibit” its most sublime, most abyssal transcendental effect, a peculiarly paradoxical, enigmatic mode of sensuous incarnation, dependent, as I shall suggest, on the “weak messianic power” of the imagination.11 Bearing this enigma in mind, I nevertheless want to argue, in keeping, I believe, with Levinas’s phenomenology, that, even before I have begun to speak, my voice has always already been a response to the other, “responding before the call [to respond] resounds”, responsive in its “bottomless passivity” like “the echo of a sound that would precede the resounding of this sound” in the recuperated voice of my responsibility.12 The infant’s entrance into speech—the gift of a voice—is not possible without the child being already obligated by the ethical relation. As he says, the coming of an order to which I am subjected before hearing it, or which I bear in my own saying. It is an august command, but one that does not constrain or dominate [. . .]. (AE 191, OB 150)

For the voice is a gift from the other. This gift, he says, is: the ultimate secret of the incarnation of the subject; prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made out of assignation [. . .]. (AE 142, OB 112)

For me to speak is not just for me to be responsive, but for me to be responsible to and for the other, my interlocutor. The ethical relation comes before the speaking; its pre-originary Saying comes before my saying: before I can be conscious of its Saying, it has always already shaped and directed my voice.


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To some extent, Levinas could be read as undertaking a “repetition” of Kant’s invocation, in the Critique of Practical Reason, of an “intelligible substrate within us”, calling attention to the phenomenological traces or echoes—the phenomenological “evidence”—of the functioning of a protomoral, distinctly metaphysical dimension of transcendence, a “beyondnature” within our corporeal nature: the deeply slumbering potential “humanity within us”, which Kant identifies with the moral law, that binding obligation which acknowledges “no temporal distinction”, and which, as Novalis will remind us, is still, despite all Kant’s efforts, slumbering.13 The point is that, for Levinas, this “humanity within us” announces itself through an imperative voice: the voice, namely, of a pre-originary Saying. However, although I will refer to this Saying, in the context of Levinas’s ethics, as “the moral law”, it must be understood that this Saying is in some ways like and in some ways unlike Kant’s notion: it will be a commandment, an absolutely indeclinable imperative that categorically forbids treating the other (l’autrui) as the means to some end that I have posited; and it will require that I respect the humanity of the other. So it is like Kant’s second and third formulations of the moral law; but it is also radically unlike Kant’s first conception of the moral law in that it is not to be understood as authorizing a universal prescription, binding equally, symmetrically and reciprocally on everyone. Rather, it is binding only on me, uniquely and asymmetrically, summoning and commanding only me. Moreover, it calls to me first not through the office of a universal voice of Reason, but by way of my sensibility: it is not to me as a sovereign rational being or a transcendental ego that, in a moment of auto-affection, its supererogatory obligation is addressed, but rather to me as “hostage” to the other, bound in absolute subjection to the needs and concerns of the other, bound in a moment of extreme heteroaffection, extreme dispossession, already failing in my obligation to the other. There are two more differences to note: its commandment is not reducible to the eternal present, but, prophetically historicized, it is felt to come from an immemorial past that can never, in fact, be mine, but always of the other; and its command is somehow felt to be deeply inscribed in the flesh, an incarnation, not merely maintained as an intellectual ideal. We embody ethics: it is not merely in words and deeds that the ethical is to be found. Not even Merleau-Ponty affirms this facticity, this materiality, as decisively as Levinas. In the reading that I will argue for in this chapter, although Levinas begins with the word—and the voice that carries the word, he eventually turns us towards the body, the flesh, enigmatic recipient of the divine inscription, the proto-ethical, pre-originary Saying, that commands us from its secret depths. I am convinced that Levinas’s writings call for and justify the reading to be undertaken in this chapter. But it must be observed here, at the very beginning, that Levinas himself nowhere sharply or explicitly makes the distinction

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that figures in the division of these two chapters: the distinction, namely, between an actual “de facto” ethical Saying—an actual event, such as, for example, the event of indirect communication that takes place in Kierkegaard’s vignette—and a proto-moral, pre-originary Saying, opening the condition of possibility for ethical life: irreducibly anachronistic, radically passive, absolutely silent, withdrawn from presence and representation, and invoking the imperative of substitution. And yet, it seems to me that his discussions implicitly make and depend on—indeed, must make and must depend on—precisely such a distinction. If this reading is right, then it would certainly be essential to describe and interpret these two dimensions of voice and communication. Accordingly, after marking the difference between ordinary quotidian saying, correlate of the said, and ethical Saying, which disturbs and interrupts the said, the first chapter concentrates on the actual event of a saying that would pass the trial of sincerely ethical Saying. This second chapter, however, concentrates on a pre-originary Saying, the Saying of my obligation, my supererogatory responsibility for the other, a Saying so withdrawn from its presence and representation in ego-logically constituted time, so immeasurably inspired by the ethical summons of the Infinite, and bound so deeply to a responsibility that has already appropriated the voice, its summons deeply buried or encrypted in the sanctuary of the flesh, the very flesh of language, even before our first word is actually uttered, that it not only precedes all actual events of speech (both customary, quotidian saying, ethically indifferent, and ethically mindful Saying), but it even precedes what we typically think of as the “voice of conscience”. Here, then, we will reflect on the Saying that opens and lays down the very conditions of possibility for ethical life. For Levinas, this requires reflecting on the trace of an inscription. But if the protoethical comes as a Saying, would it not also be a question of the echoes of a certain voice? But first, I want to take a brief detour through Merleau-Ponty, to whom in so many ways Levinas is indebted. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty points to the fundamental sociality of our existence as embodied beings: Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. [. . .] We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification. [. . .] The social is already there when we come to know or judge it. [. . .] Prior to the process of becoming aware, the social exists mutely and as a summons [sourdement et comme sollicitation]. (PPF 415–16, PPE 362)

There is nothing in this passage with which Levinas would have disagreed; but he would have wanted to excavate beneath the social to touch upon the


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ethical, which, like the social, is a summons that we carry in our bodily endowment by the mere fact of existing as embodied beings. But, for Levinas, the ethical summons that we bear appropriated our flesh in a time prior to volition and memory—prior to all forms of consciousness. Could this be considered, or taken to be, the “buried voice” that, citing Charles Péguy’s “La Patrie”, Merleau-Ponty invokes here? (Ibid. Also see PPF 417, PPE 363, where the philosopher invokes “a call”.) There is, according to Merleau-Ponty, “a communication with the world more ancient than thought” (PPF 294, PPE 254). Thus, “in so far as I have sensory functions, a visual, auditory, and tactile field, I am already in communication with others” (PPF 406, PPE 353). Again, without disagreeing, Levinas would have wanted to call attention to an even deeper, earlier dimension of communication, thinking it in the ethical terms of a “preoriginary” Saying. Thus, in “God and Philosophy” (1973, 1975), he maintains that, “Sincerity is not an attribute which eventually receives the saying: it is by saying that sincerity—exposedness without reserve—is first possible”, and comments, with words that to some extent echo those of Merleau-Ponty, that there is a Saying which opens me to the other before (any) saying (of) what is said, “before the said uttered in this sincerity forms a screen between myself and the other.”14 Pre-originary Saying is not signification, predication, information; it claims the voice for testimony, for an acknowledgement of the absolute singularity of the other human; it is the inspiration that consecrates our uses of language, turning them into prayers of caring for the welfare of the other: Saying [i.e., pre-originary Saying] opens me to the other, before saying something said, before the said that is spoken in sincerity forms a screen between me and the other. It is a saying without words, but not with empty hands. [. . .] This is a Saying bearing witness to the other of the infinite, which tears me open as it awakens me in the Saying. [. . .] As witnessing, Saying precedes every Said. Before uttering a Said, the Saying is already a bearing witness of responsibility (and even the Saying of the Said is a bearing of witness, insofar as the approach of the other is responsibility for him).15

Thus, in passively and pre-consciously receiving the pre-originary Saying, I find myself as having already given myself over to “an obedience preceding the hearing of the order [i.e., the moral commandment].”16 For Levinas, on my reading, indicated by bracketed interpolations that attempt to disambiguate somewhat the philosopher’s dense and elliptical prose, Saying as testimony [is a pre-originary, proto-moral Saying that] precedes all the said. Before setting forth a said [i.e., before every quotidian saying and even every ethically mindful Saying of the said], [such pre-originary] Saying

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is already testimony of this responsibility—and even the saying of a said [i.e., any and every saying of the said], as an approach to the other, is a responsibility for him [. . .] . A pure testimony, it does not testify [merely] to a prior experience, but to the Infinite. [. . .] The Infinite concerns and closes in on me [Il me concerne et me cerne] while speaking through my mouth.17

This “speaking” by, or from, the “Infinite” is what I am attempting to explicate in this chapter, calling it a Saying, a way of speaking with the other, that is inspired by its felt sense of the pre-originary Saying. This pre-originary Saying is the ethical “transcendental”, so to speak, that, by definition, precedes all actual events of saying; and it commands that such saying always become an ethically mindful, ethically sensitive, ethically exposed Saying. My claim, then, is that these two textual passages just quoted certainly seem to imply a deeper dimension of saying/Saying, call it “proto-ethical”: a preoriginary Saying that precedes, and sets the ethically demanding conditions for, every actual, “de facto” event of saying—every ordinary, quotidian saying—that is to qualify, according to the philosopher’s austere criteria, as an ethically bound, ethically responsive Saying. Thus the pre-originary Saying calls for, requires, an ethical Saying that renders the complete incomplete, for the said is kept exposed, kept open, to the interlocutor’s further saying; by the same token, it may be argued that the pre-originary Saying calls for an ethical Saying that makes the incomplete complete, for the said remains incomplete until it is related by virtue of its transcendence to the “Infinite” that is embodied in the other, in whose proximity my slumbering sense of humanity, my response-ability, is summoned to its responsibility. Even for Merleau-Ponty, though, “communication” involves a dimension of our embodiment in which the ego-logical boundaries constitutive of our “normal” adult experience are not operative: My body [. . .] discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person’s body are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously. (PPF 406, PPE 354)

Insofar as this account is understood as a phenomenological elaboration of “being-in-the-world”, Heidegger’s revolutionary starting-point for philosophical reflection, Levinas would have had no objection. My body and the other person’s body do belong to one and the same world; and the histories and destinies of our bodies are certainly, by grace of their both being together in this world, intricately intertwined. However, besides echoing Kant and insisting that whatever it is that we are referring to when we invoke someone’s


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“humanity” cannot be reduced to a mere phenomenon, Levinas would have had to disavow the way that the other is “incorporated”, turned into a “prolongation of my intentions”: in the ethical relation, the other must be experienced as “infinitely” other, “infinitely” withdrawn from my presence and my knowledge, withdrawn not only from every possible “system”, but even from simultaneity, from “synchronicity”; thus, in the ethical relation, the voice of the other is withdrawn, even whilst being also, enigmatically, unbearably near, my relation to its proximity the very origin of the voice of conscience that resounds as it withdraws from me within me, summoning me irrecusably to my self-sacrifice, my responsibility for the other. The other may be said to be, for Levinas, “within” me, but only as that to which I am hostage, that by whom I am accused, that which denies me the peaceful rest of a monadic identity, that to whom and for whom I am, according to Levinas’s persistently hyperbolical argument, “infinitely” obligated. (I must recommend, here, David Wood’s nicely formulated objections to this hyperbole.)18 In attempting to subvert the very possibility of solipsism by appealing to the phenomenology of embodied experience, Merleau-Ponty risks reducing the other to the same: the other, which solipsism places beyond the possibility of experience and knowledge, he places instead too close, in the intertwining of subject-bodies without the suffering, the hetero-affection, of difference. In “The Concept of Nature”, a lecture course that he gave at the Collège de France many years later, Merleau-Ponty argued, boldly avoiding both intellectualism and empiricism, that, because the ego is not separated from the other by the abyss its solipsism has projected, but is in fact connected with the other in the dimension of experience that underlies the subject-object structure, it becomes possible to see that the nature of the prepersonal dimension of our embodiment points towards its realization, its fulfillment, in “an ideal community of embodied subjects, of intercorporeality.”19 This is an extremely important insight, giving to Hegel’s account of “recognition” in his Phenomenology of Spirit the phenomenological incarnation it calls for. But despite incontrovertible sympathy for this phenomenological refutation of solipsism, and despite accepting the phenomenal truth of an intercorporeality that would be an auspicious beginning for the reversibilities and reciprocities necessary to approximate the state of justice, Levinas will continue to insist on an absolute separation in the ethical relation. For him, the ideal community of embodied subjects that Merleau-Ponty invokes would be possible only if the experience of intercorporeality—which he describes in terms of “substitution”, my subjection to the welfare of the other—could teach us not only these reversibilities and reciprocities, the necessary conditions for an approximate justice, but also the absolute singularity—the absolute withdrawal—of the other in the ethical relation: a necessary condition for the possibility of an ideal community formed without any essence in common.

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In “The Child’s Relations with Others”, Merleau-Ponty discusses the infant’s entrance into the world of language, calling attention to the evidence for a certain “pre-communication” taking place between the infant and others. There is, he suggests, an “initial sympathy” and even an “initial community” resonant in this “pre-communication”.20 What might Levinas have had to say here? I think he might have wanted to suggest that this “precommunication” is the audible register of an inaudible communication that has claimed a much deeper dimension of the flesh, constituting, at its deepest, the “pre-originary” Saying, that metaphysical enigma to which, after this detour, we will return. What if our speaking, our voicing, our words, all that we have acquired and mastered, were no longer to come from the ego-logically constructed body, the body formed through social interactions, but instead from renewed contact with the body’s naturally endowed predisposition to sociability? Sufficient recognition has not been given to the significance, both for our experience with language and for our ethical and political life, that is implicit in a reflexive “recapitulation” or “retrieval” of the child’s prepersonal experience: what Merleau-Ponty will later describe as the intertwinings of a chiasmic flesh, wherein the potential of a radically different speaking subject, one with alterity at its very heart, has in fact already been constituted, already enjoined. In order to realize the ethical implications of this phenomenology, however, it would be necessary to see that in the intersubjectivity, the intercorporeality, of the prepersonal dimension there is always and already a certain ethical predisposition informing the individual’s experience in interactions with the world. So if one’s speaking were again to make contact with this dimension of embodied experience, the words that one might be speaking could begin to register in tone and content—even if only as an already fading echo—the summons to that infinitely more arduous responsibility which is felt to issue from a still deeper, more withdrawn dimension of the flesh, in the “pre-originary” Saying. One might perhaps argue that Merleau-Ponty himself bears witness to this deepest, most enigmatic dimension, for, in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, he says that there can be no “massive flesh” without a “rarified flesh”, no “momentary body” without a “glorified body” (VIF 195, VIE 148). But I can think of no other passages to elaborate, or even to confirm this reading. The task that the resumption of Merleau-Ponty’s project would seem to suggest—or that, in any case, one might profitably undertake—calls for reflecting on the transformative potential inherent in the phenomenological restitution (“récupération” and “reprise” are his words) of the marvelous experience of prepersonal intercorporeality that appropriates the life of the infant. If the adult, instead of maintaining a speech the character of which is determined by an ego-logical subjectivity—consequently by an objectifying, instrumental rationality—were to “open up” the voice, perhaps it


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could become a communicative medium for the bodily felt sense that might emerge from the effort to retrieve something of the infant’s “paradisical” experience, long suppressed, split off, virtually forgotten, of intercorporeality. What new world might we live in, if the adult, instead of perpetuating a speech, a way with words that has been complicitous in an ontology and politics of violence, were to attempt to make contact with this prepersonal sense of interpersonal connectedness—with what, in “The Intertwining— The Chiasm”—Merleau-Ponty will call a “universal flesh”? (VIF 181, VIE 137). In the Phenomenology of Perception, the “sujet parlant” is an ego-logical subject; but in the late writings, this subject is radically displaced, cast into the chiasmic, and its speaking is consequently no longer necessarily egological. What new world might we live in if the ecstatic openness to alterity of the “parole parlante”, and not the closure of the “parole parlée”, were to claim our priority? (Ibid.) I take it that the terms of this question bring Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language into the proximity of Levinas’s ethical distinction of “le Dit” and “le Dire”—a distinction that I think Merleau-Ponty’s terms darkly anticipated. Even if the speech that predominates in our time is a speech that not only manifests, but perpetuates the diremptions, the reifications and violence distinctive of modernity, is it not possible that a voice in deeply felt contact with the infant’s prepersonal, preconscious openness to alterity could emerge from this experience with an attunement that would significantly alter its character? In The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot says: The voice [. . .] is not simply the organ of a subjective interiority but, on the contrary, the reverberation of a space opening onto the outside. Certainly, the voice is a natural mediation, but through this relation with nature it denounces the artificial order of socialized language. [. . .] The voice releases itself from speech; it announces a possibility prior to all saying, and even to any possibility of saying. The voice frees itself not only from representation [i.e., the logic of identity], but also, in advance, from [the support of this logic in] meaning [. . .]. This voice that speaks, without a word, silently [. . .] tends to be, no matter how interior, the voice of no-one [and therefore, in a crucial sense, of everyone]. What speaks when the voice speaks? It situates itself nowhere, neither in nature nor in culture, but manifests itself in a space of redoubling, of echo and resonance, where it is not someone, but rather this unknown space [. . .] that speaks without speaking.21

Blanchot seems to take us deeper into the voice than Merleau-Ponty. But if one reads Merleau-Ponty’s late writings, locating the origin of the voice in the chiasmic flesh of the world, one can only conclude that the advantage in this comparison is not easy to decide. (See VIF 318, VIE 264–65.) In any case, where Blanchot takes us, following the withdrawing of the voice into silence,

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nothing remains of the voice but its echo, an echo so faint that we might even doubt that we have heard anything at all. But is there at least a less reserved voice that could be drawn from our intercorporeal being? Who, then, would be the one speaking? It is Merleau-Ponty’s argument, regarding the need for a phenomenology of language, that we must undertake “a return to the speaking subject [le sujet parlant], to my contact [contact] with the language I am speaking.”22 (In his late writings, for example, on “The Chiasm—The Intertwining”, Merleau-Ponty explicitly gives to this speaking subject a chiasmic dimensionality, deepening—but also problematizing—the origin of the voice. In his earlier work, the Phenomenology of Perception, this dimensionality remained implicit, not fully acknowledged.) Thus, in “The Body as Expression and Speech”, the chapter in his Phenomenology of Perception devoted to the questioning of language, he vigorously argues against philosophical theories of language that attempt to explain language without a speaking subject, not to mention their neglect of the experience of the voice: In the first [i.e., empiricism], there is nobody to speak; in the second [i.e., intellectualism], there is certainly a subject, but it is a thinking one, not a speaking one. As far as speech is concerned, intellectualism is hardly different from empiricism. [. . .] Thus we refuse both intellectualism and empiricism by saying simply that the word has meaning. (PPF 206, PPE 177)

The voiced word itself bears meaning; and the word is a sensuous formation brought forth by the voice of a subject who speaks. But this defense of the speaking subject is not at all a defense of the Cartesian, Kantian or Husserlian versions of the subject. On the contrary, those versions are subjected to a shattering critique, especially in the chapter on “The Cogito”, where, with arguments that are remarkably similar to ones later formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, he uses the phenomenology of language to deconstruct those erroneous versions of the subject. In a later text, anticipating Levinas’s distinction between “le Dit” and “le Dire”, he again calls attention to the “subjective” or “experiential” dimension of language, noting that there is an “operant or speaking language”, a “langage opérant ou parlant”, singing “beneath spoken language”, beneath “le langage parlé”.23 (But it must be noted that the “speaking subject” to which Merleau-Ponty wants phenomenology to return is not at all the same as Levinas’s “subject” of return: for the latter, the recurrence must give voice to the subject, the self, prior to the ego, prior to the “Moi”, that bears a pre-originary claim against its existence. For Levinas, what Merleau-Ponty names the “tacit cogito”—it could even be a question of the prepersonal, prelinguistic “cogito” of the infant—must be located, ultimately, at a still deeper level of subjectivity, for it is that medium which has been “elected”, as subject, to bear the message of a silent, preoriginary Saying.) Here Merleau-Ponty reaffirms and elaborates a thesis for


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which he had argued years earlier, when he wrote in Phenomenology of Perception that, Behind the spoken cogito, the one which is converted into a discourse and into essential truth, there lies a tacit cogito [. . .]. (PPF 462, PPE 403)

This tacit cogito has, however, no sovereign possession of meaning. Possession is not why the philosopher seeks it out. Indeed, the phenomenological excavation of this other cogito serves to reveal the cogito’s inevitable dispossession, its loss of control over the univocity and lucidity of the formations of meaning that it brings to expression (VIF 319, VIE 266). Taking us, in his very last writings, even deeper—that is to say, into the chiasmic nature of the flesh, we enter a dimension of our experience where, according to him, “one no longer knows who speaks and who listens” (VIF 318, VIE 264–65). (I wonder whether Blanchot read these words and had them in mind when he wrote what I have quoted above.) As a response that undercuts solipsism even before it can posit its ego-logical, ego-centric starting point, this deep phenomenology is very effective; and it does pose a significant challenge to ethical and political philosophies that presuppose certain versions of individualism, with consequent doctrines of rights and duties. However, if it lends support to the reversibility-test that defines Kantian morality and lays the foundation for a politics of justice, it cannot take us in any direct way to the “humanisme de l’autre homme”, nor to the ethics of heteronomy, the ethics for which Levinas so eloquently argues, and which, in comparison to the ethics that is bound up with Kantian autonomy, is infinitely more austere, more demanding, in that it subjects this very autonomy to the law, the priority, of the other—to a heteronomy radically other than Kant’s. But it must be pointed out, here, that there is no conflict between “heteronomy”, as Levinas understands it, and Kant’s notion of “autonomy”, if [1] Levinas’s “heteronomy” is taken to refer to the pre-originary giving and binding of the moral law, appropriating the flesh of our bodies in a time before ego-logical consciousness and memory; and [2] Kant’s “heteronomy” refers to our freedom to disregard or obey the moral law, our freedom to heed or not heed our moral “election”.

§2 The Voice of Reason In a letter to Johann Fichte written in 1799, Friedrich Jacobi reminded his friend that, “the root of reason [Vernunft] is listening [Vernehmen]”: a point the significance of which was not, for him, merely etymological. But he followed this remark with an observation that bears, as I can only hear it, duplicitous moral implications: “Pure reason listens only to itself.”24 This may

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seem unproblematic—until we question whether Reason can be totalized, whether it can claim totality without doing violence to what is not Reason—and that means, without doing violence to itself, to its moral authority over the other it would command. And other questions soon emerge: If “pure reason” must exclude inclinations, feelings, and sentiments, then would its listening only to itself be desirable? What is the investment of the moral law in the voice? And how can we be sure that the voice we hear is the voice of moral Reason, not something “pathological”? Is the “voice” that “pure reason” hears when it listens to itself just one—or is it a gathering of many different voices? What is the nature of its authority, its universality, and its unity? Levinas assigns to Merleau-Ponty’s “communication with the world more ancient than thought” an ethical signifyingness: a meaning that, in the final analysis, even underlies the hortatory voice of conscience, the voice of Reason in its ethical responsibility. In “Meaning and Sense” (1972), Levinas maintains that, in order to arrive at an understanding that is faithful to our ethical experience, we must, in his words, posit a consciousness without reflection [functioning] beneath and above all reflections, in short, to surprise at the bottom of the ego [au fond du Moi] [and thus also above it] an unequivocal sincerity, a servant’s humility, which no transcendental method could corrupt or absorb.25

(Just how far the ethical voice that Levinas invokes removes us from the voice of the daemon that recalls Socrates to pious wisdom becomes evident when we listen to Socrates’s words in the Crito: “This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.” Levinas’s “Jerusalem” is a world away from the “Athens” of Socrates.)26 As I read the above passage from Levinas, its importance cannot be overestimated, for it suggests, when assembled with other textual passages, that the body is a palimpsest: it implies not only the existence of a dimension of our incarnation, our embodiment, that precedes, and remains below, the “rational” ego-structure, namely, a prepersonal, preconscious, and moreover pre-originary dimension, “medium” of our “election” by the Good, but also the ethical possibility of a “higher” dimension of experience—call it, if you will, “transpersonal”—that exceeds, that breaks out of the mature adult’s ego-logical structure, giving rise to a heteronomous self that takes over in a committed way the humble life of service, of heteronomy, to which it has already been assigned by way of its flesh. In Otherwise than Being, the philosopher refers us to a voice that “interrupts the saying of the already said” (AE 230, OB 183). Perhaps this is the hortatory voice of conscience, the voice of ethical Reason. But this voice is not


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originary, is not the origin of this interruption. There is another, even deeper, more withdrawn voice, whose pre-originary Saying is calling even the voice of conscience into question—this uncanny voice that, in Being and Time, Heidegger is perhaps naming “the voice of the friend”: a voice that Levinas describes as “more primordial than any knowledge” one can have of it, that “comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.”27 Like a good detective, Levinas is searching for an echo of this voice: “the trace of a saying which has never been present, [and] which obliges me”: The responsibility for the other, never assumed, binds me; a command never [actually] heard is [nevertheless] obeyed. [. . .] It orders me in an anarchic way, without ever becoming or being made into a presence or the disclosure of a principle. (AE 214, OB 168)

Such is the ethical force, the “an-archy”, of the pre-originary Saying, already prescribing my ethical responsibilities, my obligations, prior to the voice of Reason, indeed prior to any “origin” that Reason might claim to uncover. This Saying communicates the ethical prior to a Reason which knows how to address us, how to command us, only through its abstract universal principles. In fact, since for Levinas all discourse is communication, hence subject to the hortatory exigency of the ethical relation, Responsibility for the others, or communication, is the adventure that bears all the discourse of science and philosophy. Thus this responsibility would be the very rationality of reason, or its universality, a rationality of peace. (AE 205, OB 160)

In other words, the pre-originary Saying of responsibility may be thought of as itself a modality of Reason, Reason of and for the other. As such, however, it is a voice of hospitality and peace, that precedes, that is in fact responsible for, the old, familiar “voice of Reason”. “Proximity,” says Levinas, giving us an especially useful formulation: signifies a reason before the thematization of signification by a thinking subject, before the assembling of terms in a present: a pre-originary reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason. It is a reason before the beginning, before any present, in that my responsibility for the other commands me before any decision, any deliberation. (AE 212, OB 166)

This is obviously not the form or modality of “rationality” with which we are on familiar terms. This is the “pre-originary Saying”, the modality through which the moral law speaks and commands, summoning us in the accusative—in a voice that registers it in both the grammatical case and the moral

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judgement. Levinas is unquestionably calling upon us to engage much more deeply the dimensions of the voice. The distinction between Saying and said thus ultimately draws us even deeper into the palimpsest that is our body of experience, requiring that phenomenology become, in effect, a hermeneutics assigned the task of letting us hear, insofar as that may be possible, even if only in the nature of some lingering suspicion of resonance, some faint and fading echo suggesting the pre-originary Saying of the ethical and the ethical “destination” of the voice. But the ethical assignment that he is putting before us must first overcome our deep slumber, a slumber in consequence of which the pre-originary potential given or assigned to the body has been woefully neglected. It was therefore to the retrieving, the restitution, the reactivation, of this potential, borne by the metaphysical dimension of our embodiment, that Levinas, according to the reading unfolding in this chapter, dedicated some of his most important, and certainly most provocative phenomenological analyses. But, as we shall soon see, these analyses conducted him—and will conduct us—into the enigmatic, there where the categorical difference between fact and fiction, phenomenon and epiphany, the corporeal and the metaphysical—or say the difference between flesh and spirit—can no longer be sustained and decided. Now, a major argument in Levinas’s writings in ethics, an argument at the very centre of his critique of modern bourgeois liberalism, is that freedom is not to be grounded in Reason, but rather in responsibility—in an absolute, unconditional responsibility for the other, and that unless freedom issues from an indeclinable, non-negotiable responsibility, and remains conditioned by its imperatives, it will inevitably turn into an arbitrary and ultimately violent form of volition (TIF 231, TIE 253). Even when freedom is grounded in Reason, its responsibility to and for the other is easily compromised, easily corrupted, by the reduction of Reason to an instrumental rationality that awards priority to the instrumentalities of egoism. In the final analysis, he sees no way for Reason—which, despite the Kantian distinction between a reason of ends and a reason of means, he reduces at once to calculation, a merely instrumental form of rationality—to check the egoism, the self-assertiveness, in freedom. If, he thinks, there is a voice of Reason, its ability to curb the will to power inherent in freedom is much too weak to be effective; but, perhaps even more seriously, it is also inherently, essentially oriented towards the universal, and cannot therefore recognize and protect the singular individual. “Reason,” he says, “has no plural”. So he asks, without taking time to consider different possibilities: “how could numerous reasons be distinguished?” (TIF 92, TIE 119). The “violence of reason” thus consists in two supposed “facts”, neither of which, however, can be used to accuse the discourse ethics that, in recent years, Jürgen Habermas has formulated through a critique of Kantian ethics: [1] it supposedly imposes a universal law that can only suppress the other, and [2] it is presumed to be inherently a


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monologue not actually addressed to the other. The voice of Reason is thus inherently deaf to the voice of the other (TIF 44, TIE 72). Levinas is uncompromising in his critique of the abuses of Reason, the acts of inhumanity committed in its name, and unequivocally severe in his judgement of uses of Reason that, in spite of good intentions, nevertheless subordinate the singular individual to the estrangement, the otherness, of an oppressive universality, deaf to the voices that cry for recognition of their singularity. There is no misology in his ethical philosophy. However, in “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951), Levinas questions the claim of Reason, the priority of the language of Reason, arguing that Reason, like ontology, must submit to the priority of ethics: It is not on behalf of a divorce between philosophy and reason that we hold to a meaningful language. But we are entitled to ask whether reason, presented as the possibility of such a language, necessarily precedes it, or if language is not founded on a relation anterior to comprehension and which constitutes reason.28

This text certainly provokes many questions. What, then, is anterior to the voice of Reason? What comes before it? What voice could this possibly be? How would it speak to us? How would it sound? It can be compellingly argued, though, that language, which in a certain sense is an expression of Reason, even indeed its very incarnation, necessarily acknowledges and presupposes the existence of interlocutors, others who are not mere extensions of myself, but singular, independent centres of life; and that language, rather than supporting a rational universality deaf to the singular voice of the other, and consequently restricted to its normative rationality, actually makes a universality sensitive to singularity possible in the first place. In Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas seems to recognize the validity of these points (TIF 45, TIE 73). “Language,” he observes there, is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. (TIF 49, TIE 76)

Thus, precisely as passage from the singular to the universal, language does in a certain way offer the protection of the universal—the vouchsafing of rights, liberties—to the singular other, even if there are limits to the ways in which this language can acknowledge singularity as such. And although language makes possible claims to “rights” of possession that are really nothing but usurpations, it also lays the foundation for a justice of Reason and thus even “lays the foundation for a possession in common”. (Ibid.) Many years later, in Otherwise than Being (1974), Levinas further developed these thoughts about the ethical significance of the language of Reason

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opening up an entirely new dimension for thinking about his argument, now submitting Reason to the voice that comes before: If [. . .] reason lives in language; if the first rationality gleams forth [already] in the meeting of the face-to-face; if the first intelligible, the first signification, is the infinity of the intelligence that presents itself (that is, speaks to me) in the face; if reason is defined by signification rather than signification being defined by the impersonal structures of reason; if society precedes the apparition of these impersonal structures; if universality reigns as the presence of humanity in the eyes that look at me [and in the voice that speaks to me, namely, the voice of the other, appealing to me in and through the voice within me that is commanding me, obliging me, calling me into question with regard to my responsibility for the other]; if, finally, we recall that this look [or this voice] appeals to my responsibility and consecrates my freedom as responsibility and gift of self—then the pluralism of society could not disappear in the elevation to reason, but would be its condition. (AE 183–84, OB 208)

(Something fairly like this condition for pluralism is, I believe, what MerleauPonty’s writings, even his relatively early Phenomenology of Perception, anticipated.) Reason itself is to be “grounded”, or say “conditioned” and “disturbed”, “dérangée”, by an absolute, irremissible responsibility, the categorically obligatory ethical relation to the singularity of the other. In our ethical relations with one another, the voice of Reason is not the first voice that speaks, not the first voice that demands to be heard. The first voice to be heard, already belated, in fact, already not origin, is a voice coming (as Levinas puts it) from “the Infinite”—or rather, coming from the other as from the “Infinite”—that already displaces and disturbs the voice of Reason even before it begins to speak. But as early as Totality and Infinity, we can see Levinas seeking a way to recognize a role for Reason—the language of Reason and the voice of Reason. Relating his argument about language and Reason to the face—that is, in this context, to speech, and more especially, to the “epiphany” of the face of the other, he observes that, The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation [. . .]. It is that discourse which obliges entering into discourse, the commencement of the discourse that rationalism prays for, a “force” that convinces even “the people who do not want to listen” and thus founds the true universality of reason. (TIF 175–76, TIE 201)

So the “the ethical condition or essence of language” is this “bond between expression and responsibility” (TIF 175, TIE 200). But soon after making this claim, Levinas turns the rational and ethical connections into a religious


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experience, suggesting that “discourse becomes incantation as prayer becomes rite and liturgy” (TIF 177, TIE 202). “Incantation”, I take it, in the sense of an address, or appeal; for the other, as my interlocutor, someone who is facing me, is not “present”, first of all, as an object of representation, a theme, but rather as someone whom I acknowledge simply by my speaking (TIF 177, TIE 203). In the face-to-face presence of the other—Levinas will not hesitate to speak here of a “revelation”—reducing him or her to a theme is not merely a form of disrespect; it is an aggression, a dehumanizing violence, indeed an offense against God (TIF 171, TIE 197). According to Levinas, however, Reason tempts us to use language in this way. Now, I have suggested that Levinas’s analysis of Saying and voice eventually draws us into a dimension of experience, namely, the “preoriginary”, that is much deeper—and much more enigmatic—than the dimension in terms of which we were considering it in the preceding chapter. In the first chapter, “Saying” was taken to refer to an ethically signifying event in which, or through which, the one addresses another: an ordinary, familiar situation, which Levinas turns into something extra-ordinary and unfamiliar. But the event is even more complicated. For, as I indicated, he even situates it in a paradoxical, anachronistic temporality. It has an enigmatic, “pre-originary” depth. We are of course indebted to him for the analyses of both dimensions. But he does not remark the fact that his analysis implies that there are two distinct dimensions. Although they are obviously inseparable, and in fact interdependent, it is crucial, as I hope will become apparent, to delineate the difference. It is accordingly to this deeper dimension—a dimension which, in my judgement, requires us to think of it as a dimension of our embodiment—that we must continue to give thought. But if it is a distinctly hermeneutical phenomenology of this embodiment that his recurrence to the trace requires, I must argue that, despite his “rehabilitation” of the body of experience, the required phenomenology is still missing from his account. The argument of this chapter is that what is required is a phenomenology that can concede the phenomenal illegibility of the trace, concede its withdrawal from presence and representation, but that also understands that, whatever it is, this “trace” requires the supposition—the citation—of a palimpsest of the flesh for its inscription. It must be recognized—such, anyway, is my claim—that, before the voice of Reason, there is another, earlier—infinitely earlier—voice: a voice “before” not only in the sense of earlier, indeed earlier than time itself, time as we know it, but “before” also in the sense that, as if in a tribunal, a “Gerichtshof”, this anarchic voice which speaks on behalf of and for the sake of the other, always the singular, comes before the tribunal of Reason to question and accuse it, demanding that it must present its claims to moral jurisdiction. The voice of judgement, here, is so much earlier that it even precedes every possible “origin” in time and history that might be attributed to the voice—

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the voice that society developed into the voice of Reason, the voice in which, not entirely free of its egoisms, the language of Reason speaks in the innermost chambers of individual conscience and in the public realm about questions of morality. This earlier voice is “pre-originary”, because it precedes every possible origin in time and history that we might claim to know: it withdraws into silence even from such “origins”. The overwhelming silence of this voice, earlier than the voice of conscience, leaving behind only its disturbingly haunting echo, compels us to turn inwards, since it cannot be attributed to a source outside ourselves; and it summons us to subject ourselves to a disquieting ethical interrogation, questioning even the authority of a conscience that, as Adolf Eichmann’s testimony showed, cannot be secured against complicity in the construction of a violent social order.29

§3 The Pre-Originary Voice Plainly stated, the thesis for which I am arguing in this chapter is that Levinas’s “saying” must be doubled: it requires two distinct moments, dimensions, or phases. The one we can easily reference is the saying that operates in every de facto communicative act, every actual speech event: a saying whose ethically required register, indicated by giving the first letter of that word a capital letter, was characterized in the preceding chapter. The other, however, subject of this present chapter, is much more difficult to recognize and comprehend—indeed, in the end, it remains an enigma. This is what I am calling the pre-originary Saying. Levinas himself never clearly articulates this doubleness, despite thoughts that, to my mind, compel such an explication. Briefly stated, Levinas needs to lay out the hermeneutical phenomenology of a pre-originary Saying, a Saying that would be the voice of God, the voice of inspiration that gives the moral law, inscribing its “one-for-theother” in the palimpsest of the flesh. (See Diagram II following this chapter.) Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the “logos prophorikos”, the explicit word, a meaning or sense articulated in audible language, and the “logos endiathetos”, the silent word, implicit meaning, a bodily felt sense still inchoate, not yet crystallized in language, anticipates Levinas’s firstlevel distinction between “le Dit” and “le Dire”, but it is not also thereby an anticipation of the distinction between the voice of Reason and the “preoriginary” voice, the voice that comes from the metaphysical depths of our ethical life and figures in what Levinas calls “Saying”.30 It misses the preoriginary “Dire” that can be felt to impose its ethical obligation on the actual (empirical) “Dire”, requiring that the latter unsay its said. For, although the “pre-originary” voice figures in a Saying that remains silent, unspoken, it is experienced as a voice which precedes the origin of implicit meaning and remains unspoken because obstinately, persistently, inherently, aporetically


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unsayable. Furthermore, the “pre-originary voice” that figures in the diachrony of Saying is obstinately, persistently unretrievable except as enigma and anachronism, since it belongs to a time beyond the reach of volition and memory, beyond time itself. The “pre-originary” voice is the “an-archy” that precedes—and is responsible for inaugurating—the voice of moral Reason, moral law, the voice that is supposed to speak out in the interiority of conscience and instigate, indeed compel, authentic ethical Saying. Preceding the voice that speaks according to moral principles, the voice it invokes and inaugurates, this pre-originary voice is prior to principles, is accordingly itself without principle; but because of its “an-archy”, its polyphonic dissonance, its voice, though never graspable as a knowable presence, always comes as an enigmatic interruption, an unpredictable disturbance, a sublime “dictation”, seemingly from nowhere, and certainly not from any time of which I am conscious or which I can remember, putting me—my ethical life—in question: A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the saying of the already said. (AE 230, OB 183)

Here we may confirm the distinction between the pre-originary voice and the quotidian voice of saying, the first calling upon the second to assume its responsibility to and for the other. The pre-originary voice, interrupting the voice in its saying, is experienced as coming, as he puts it in “Diachrony and Representation”, from “an immemorial past”, signified without ever having been present, signified on the basis of responsibility for the other. [. . .] Harkening to a commandment that is therefore not the recall of some prior generous dispositions towards the other man, which, forgotten or secret, belong to the constitution of the ego and are awakened as an a priori by the face of the other. [. . .] The commandment comes—in the guise of the face of the other—as the renunciation of coercion, as the renunciation of its force and of all omnipotence.31

This voice comes to me, overcomes me, in my pure corporeal passivity, a passivity more passive than every passivity opposed to activity; it bespeaks the utmost receptivity to the other, a receptivity in the medium of the flesh without the slightest volition (AE 18, 182; OB 15, 142–43). One might relate this disturbing voice to the shudder that Levinas invokes in Otherwise than Being, quoting Goethe’s “Faust” in an epigram at the beginning of chapter six, and that, in an earlier reference, he described as a “thorn in the flesh of reason”, an ethical appropriation of the flesh where “difference shudders as non-indifference” (AE 221, OB 175; AE 105–06, OB 83–84. Also see AE 110 and 233, OB 87 and 185.) The shudder also figures in the thought of Theodor Adorno: introduced into both Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory, it signifies,

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as in Levinas, the body’s ethical subjection to alterity, our body’s experience of the ethical imperative of non-identity.32 Indeed, it is, for Adorno, a telling ethical experience. Thus, in Aesthetic Theory, he describes “Schauer” as “a kind of anticipation of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other.”33 And he remarks: “Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other.”34 The shudder, for Adorno, expresses, manifests, and preserves the body’s original subjection to the moral law. As a pre-originary Saying, that shudder belongs to the sublime “pre-history” of subjectivity, subjecting it to the moral law, putting it in question: it bespeaks, for Adorno, as for Levinas, an “archaic” experience bearing, summoning, from a time beyond memory, the disturbing, traumatic memory of the ethical claim of the other. Thus, to Levinas’s invocation of “Faust”, we might juxtapose Adorno’s asseveration, made indeed in a commentary on “Faust”, that, “Hope is not memory held fast, but the return of what has been forgotten.”35 My engagement, here, with Levinas has been stirred by precisely this hope—which, as I think it needs to be understood, requires an effort—a hermeneutical task—to take back from a rationality obsessed by identity and autonomy the memory of an alterity it has virtually erased, retrieving, as disturbance, as shudder, as the merest echo of a summons, some bodily felt sense of the unretrievable, the impossible memory of a sublime, preoriginary Saying that has taken over, taken hold of, our very flesh, and with it, the voice of the ego to which it gives both life and death. As Levinas explains in “Language and Proximity”, the pre-originary Saying takes place in “the passivity of a creature at the time of creation, when there is no subject [as yet] to assume the creative act, to, so to speak, hear the creative word.”36 But where is this passivity? What bears the Saying in this passivity? Must we not avow the medium, the site, of this Saying: there, in the silent sanctuary of my body? According to “Humanism and An-archy” (1968, 1976), there is “a pre-originary susceptibility”, presumably in and of our embodiment, though unfortunately, with serious consequences at stake for the interpretation of his legacy, Levinas does not make this site of incarnation explicit: it is, in any case, the incarnation of an ethical sensibility, said to be “more ancient than the origin, a susceptibility provoked in the subject without the provocation [itself] ever becoming present or becoming a logos”, and which he will also describe as a “substitution”, sacrifice of the one for the other.37 I want to suggest that, as “provocation”, this susceptibility constitutes a pre-originary Saying, an invocation of ethical obligation, addressing, laying claim to, the very substance of the body—the body, that is, of felt experience. As “susceptibility”, therefore, Saying both is and is not mine, is and yet is not speaking in, or with, what I would call “my own” voice. It is the voice of the other speaking to me through me, speaking before I have ever said even one word in the language I have entered and made “my own”:


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The first word says only the saying itself before every being and every thought in which being is sighted and reflected. 38

“But,” he adds, unmistakably invoking, I believe, the different dimensions of the experience and implying his recognition of [1] a pre-originary Saying and, distinct from this, [2] an event of customary saying that must become an ethically exposed, responsive, responsible Saying: if the first saying says this very saying, then here [in the ethical relation] the saying and the said cannot equal one another. For the saying in being said at every moment breaks the definition of what it says and breaks up the totality it includes. Even if it makes of this breakup itself its theme, and thus reconstitutes the totality it recounts in an, if possible, yet more total form, even if it thus shows its binding thread never worn out, here it interrupts its totality by its very speaking. [. . .] The first saying goes beyond its own forces and its own reason; the originary saying is a delirium.

“This first saying,” he concludes, “is to be sure nothing but a word. But the word is God.” Or say prayer for the welfare of the other. This word, this voice, therefore, cannot be, or be made into, “my own”, although I alone can hear it, since it is meant for me and me alone, calling upon me to assume a responsibility that has already claimed me. In the “presence” of the other, face-to-face in the ethical relation, the first word, a word I have received, in a crucial sense, from the other—from the other in a time that is prior to time as we commonly know it— and that the face of the other compels me to heed, bespeaks my indeclinable obligation. As Levinas puts it in Totality and Infinity: “The face opens the primordial discourse where the first word is obligation” (TIF 175, TIE 201). The face of the other opens me to the pre-originary Saying: breaching my ego-logically constructed defenses, it “reminds” me of that voice which ceaselessly insists on its being heard; it calls me back to my bodily felt sense of that pre-originary Saying, however attenuated, diminished or suppressed that sense may now be. It calls me back to a subjectivity which, because of its subjection to an exceedingly demanding ethical imperative, and correlatively, its interruption of sovereign selfpresence, the ego vainly attempts to suppress—or to evade. The pre-originary Saying—the moral law, experienced as a relation to the living God, taking hold of me, binding my embodiment, in a time before egological memory—precedes the empirical or factical presence of the other, the moment of the face-to-face. But because of the “slumbering”, the “repression” of this Saying, the concrete reality of the face-to-face relation to the other in his or her “destitution” will be necessary to arouse this Saying and let its voice be heard, its “hetero-affection” commanding the way the Saying of the conversation, the dialogue, should function in order to respect the other’s participation and cherish the contribution.

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In this connection, what Jay Bernstein argues about our experience of the moral law in the context of a discussion of Kant and Derrida offers a useful historical perspective: The moment of alterity both gives and ruins transcendental understanding in Kant’s sense because it follows the path of the primacy of practical reason, a primacy required by the supreme authority of the moral law. As the “fact of reason”, the moral law affects reason from without while being its grounding condition. Thus, the self-affection of reason, whereby reverence/respect/fear (the affective responses to the sublime address) for the moral law becomes operative, appears, is simultaneously a work of hetero-affection. The “yes” of respect is the re-marking [or, in Derrida’s sense, a repeating] of the original (non-appearing) “yes” of the moral law itself. It is that re-marking, that reproducing, prior to original intuition, that ruins transcendental selfconsciousness as self-presence. Kant simply took inadequate account of the fact that the affective states which make the moral law available in the first place, prohibit those states, by virtue of their secondary character, from being consequences of a self-affection.

And he concludes by asserting that, “The self is opened to its possibilities as self by what does not belong to it.”39 This opening or exposure is precisely what the hetero-affection set in motion by the face-to-face and the preoriginary Saying it obliges us to hear effectuates. For Levinas, as for Kant, these “possibilities” are, first and foremost, of course, ethical in character. In “Humanism and An-archy”, Levinas observes that the terms “preoriginary” and “preliminary” are intended to “designate (by an abuse of language, to be sure) this subjectivity prior to the ego, prior to its freedom and its non-freedom.”40 Having, as I (want to) read him, distinguished in his phenomenological writings the autonomous ego, essentially the ego representative of modern bourgeois liberalism, from [1] the pre-originary self that is heteronomous in its absolute subjection to the alterity of the moral law and precedes the formation of the ego, and also from [2] the potential self that is ethically “higher” than the ego, embodying the ethical ideal of a selfsacrificing life anonymously serving the needs of others, Levinas argues that, when the ego is “reduced to silence”, the self “still gives a response beneath the logos, as though its voice disposed of a register of graves or acutes beyond graves or acutes.”41 What I want above all to remark, in these textual passages from “Humanism and An-archy”, is its topology: it confirms the palimpsest of embodiment and the dimensions of the voice, the clear recognition of which is crucial to the interpretation that we have been undertaking in these two chapters: beneath the ego’s “logos”, there is a pre-originary Saying, the voice of a self that precedes the formation of the ego; and it is this “more ancient” self that is subject, in the most absolute passivity, the most absolute


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“susceptibility”, prior to volition and ego-logical memory, to the “substitution” through which, in the hetero-affection of the moral law, it is “accused”, always already “guilty”, held in the accusative, infinitely responsible for the welfare of the other. Thus Levinas invites us to reflect on the suggestion, provocatively expressed in “Language and Proximity”, that, “The first saying is a delirium.”42 Of course, as he avers in that same essay, “Coherent thought will no doubt be right to denounce its extravagance or its verbalism, to bring up as objections to this primary transcendence that breaks the Logos the conditions for its statement, to lay out its dissimulated history, and connect it to the world it claims to go beyond. Coherent thought forces one to coherent discourse. But it thereby [betrays the fact that it] understands the extravagance it combats and already recognizes its enigma. This first saying is only a word [n’est qu’un mot]. But that word is [reveals] God.”43 As “prior to anything [actually] said”, pre-originary Saying interrupts, or disrupts in advance whatever is said, already opening it to the discourse that concerns the other, my interlocutor; and by virtue of its self-effacing solicitude, its hospitality without reserve, it “bears witness to glory”, “the other face of the subject”, the “immeasurable transcendence of the other” (AE 184, OB 144–45). This witnessing is “the meaning of language, before language scatters into words” (AE 192, OB 151). The name of God, the Good that is absolutely beyond being, resonates in every Saying, when every communication expresses the ethical relation (Ibid.). For if my saying bespeaks sincerity, if it is a saying that reverberates with the hospitality of the pre-originary Saying, the glory of the “Infinite” comes to pass between my interlocutor and myself (AE 192, OB 151–52).

§4 Palimpsest: The Trace of the Other in the Text of Our Flesh, or, The Echo of the Other in the Trembling of the Flesh In Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber passes on a story he collected, keeping in remembrance a trace that itself has a story to tell: The maggid of Zlotchov was asked by one of his disciples: “The Talmud says that the child in the womb of his mother looks from one end of the earth to the other, and knows all the teachings; but the instant it comes into contact with the air of the earth, an angel strikes its mouth and it forgets everything. I do not understand why this should be: first one knows everything, and then one forgets it!” “A trace is left behind in man,” the rabbi answered, “so that he can reacquire knowledge of the world and the teachings.”44

Having been given the gift of freedom, we are left with just a trace of the memory-inscription, so that, with its hints, we are enabled us to use that

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freedom wisely. But Levinas complicates this story, withdrawing the trace from the serial order of time, from the possibility of presence, the possibility of representation, and leaving it virtually unrecognizable, indecipherable, enigmatic. And yet, precisely because of that, the demand on our freedom is all the more intense. In the Critique of Pure Reason (A 808, B 836), Kant evokes the “corpus mysticum of rational beings”, knowingly appropriating the Catholic liturgical doctrine for a displacement that the faithful in the Catholic Church could only contemplate, no doubt, with some horror. But the reference is cryptic, inasmuch as it attributes the “mystical body” to “rational beings”: a supplement that alters both terms in puzzling ways, creating intricate and intractable uncertainties that are left without resolution, spirited away—or say, rather, buried, encrypted, forgotten—within the architecture of a rational reconstruction that interprets perception whilst repressing its embodiment. Can ethics, however, which, for Levinas, is “first philosophy”, really do without the gift of embodiment—that medium which bears the life of Reason and an urgent sense of responsibility for the welfare of the other? The argument to be unfolded here will make the very strong claim that the ethics which Levinas proposes is not possible without the hermeneutical phenomenology of a certain “mystical body”: a body the conception of which, inspired by Talmudic and kabbalistic sources, could not be more different both from the Catholic and from the Kantian. However, as I have argued elsewhere, although Levinas recognizes an “embodied spirituality”, “une spiritualité incarnée”, he leaves this bearer of the trace, this “mystical body—or, as I would prefer to say, this “hermeneutically prophetical” body—insufficiently fleshed out.45 Thus, his evocations of the trace—the trace of the other—are left suspended in mid-air, without the affective sense of embodiment they obviously require. For without such interpretation, the very intelligibility of the concept is put at risk.46 What, despite its impossibility, Levinas imagines memory—in some sense, in some way—to retrieve from experience for the sake of our ethical life needs to be interpreted, I think, as some sensible awareness, some bodily felt sense, of the almost obliterated traces of our pre-originary heteronomy, the “one-for-the-other”, an exorbitant claim on our benevolence, our generosity, our compassion, our willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of the other: a categorical claim on our response-ability, what, borrowing a phrase from Kant, we might call our sense of “the humanity within us”, that we cannot possibly, in good conscience, decline or evade. The claim that, in the vestige of a trace, Levinas believes must continue to haunt us unquestionably requires an ethics at odds with the contemporary world: an ethical life motivated by an unconditional responsibility to and for the other. But the trace: what is it? This is a seemingly innocent question, but it is in fact intractably, irremediably aporetic, for, as unavoidable as the copula and


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the pronoun are, they betray and obliterate the trace they are meant to invoke, presuming an identity, a presence, it cannot have. But, with this warning in mind, Levinas will say of the trace that it marks our pre-originary beholdenness, my “pre-logical subjection” to the other, “slipping into me like a thief” and affecting me, commanding me, “unbeknownst to myself”: my “involuntary election” by “the Good” (AE 13, 19, 22; OB 11, 15, 18). The trace “is”, then, what will be called a “pre-originary Saying”, an “archi-Saying”, a Saying, a voice, already affecting me prior to whatever consciousness I might have of it: it “is”, prior to volition, prior to all memory, prior to whatever “origin” I might get at. And its impact—hetero-affection—is that of the moral law. Thus, the moral law is imagined to come to us as a pre-originary Saying, as an “archi-Saying”, and is what remains of God’s originating, commanding “impression”, the inscription or prescription turning the disposition of human nature in the direction of the Good. What remains of this “supervenience” is a mere trace or echo—something that can be bodily felt—of the absolutely third-personal pronoun, the “il” of “illéité”, that perhaps, without letting divinity be said, would be pronounced in prayer by the word “God” (AE 233, OB 185). The trace or echo of the pre-originary Saying intimates, according to the philosopher, “the unpronounceable inception of what, always already past, does not enter into any present, to which neither the names designating beings, nor the verbs in which their essence resounds, are any longer suited— but which marks with its seal everything that can be named.” (Ibid.) In other words, the trace or echo nevertheless bears witness to an ethical claim that can be neither absolutely forgotten nor made present in recollection: a claim experienced as binding the flesh long before it addresses consciousness in a diachrony—an anachronism—that defies the ego’s ordering of time. This summons to an ethical life touches me, seizes me, subjects and accuses me—but it does so “beneath the level of prime matter” (AE 140, OB 110). In fact, for Levinas, “the incarnation of the [ethical] self” must be understood as “a passivity prior to all passivity at the bottom of matter becoming flesh [la matière se faisant chair]” (AE 150, OB 196 n21). The peculiar “presence” of the moral law, nothing but a trace—or rather, more exactly, nothing but a trace of a trace, or the echo of an echo, since it is gone without ever having been present—transforms the very substance of our bodies, turning mere matter into a spiritualized flesh: into what Merleau-Ponty names, in a context reminiscent of Spinoza, whose “intellectual love of God” must be correlated, in keeping with his axiomatic rigour, to a fittingly glorious transfiguration of its embodiment, a “glorified body” (VIF 195, VIE 148). If the pre-originary Saying that comes before quotidian, customary saying as a moral commandment making a claim on my responsibility for the other and in fact revealing the very condition of possibility for all saying, all speech whatsoever, is, for Levinas, nothing but the trace of a trace, or the echo of an echo, it becomes, in Derrida’s attempt to think it in the context of Judaism, a question of

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the ancient ritual of circumcision, the marking or assigning of a moral code prescribed in advance of the individual birth as a kind of “election”: I have a great deal of trouble with the “doctrine” of election [i.e., the historical and theological doctrine that the Jews are the “chosen people”]. I would be capable of expressing the worst suspicions against it, but, whether I wanted it or not, I was designated, assigned, signed, even before my birth, even before I had any choice to make. There is a universal “structure” of heteronomic election: I am the only one to be called to do this or that; I am irreplaceable in the place of this decision, in being obliged to responds: “It is me”, “I am here”. This election of each seems to me to give to all responsible worthy of the name, if there is any, its chance and its condition.47

One should note, here, the way that, without calling attention to any “glissage”, Derrida seems, in effect, to leave his concerns behind, shifting from his reluctance to embrace the doctrine of the chosen people to an exposition of what I would call, in the context of Levinas’s ethics, the pre-originary Saying, an ethical commandment universally binding, electing not only Jews, but all worthy of the name “human being”. The dialogue continues, Derrida observing that: As for Jewishness “by birth”, there it is a question of another form of election [. . .], which a good number of Jewish thinkers would like to bind together [relier] with the universal one I just evoked. That is for me the site of this problem, this bond, but in any case, something, some One, marked my destiny even before I had a word to say. That is what I called “circumcision”, in the literal or figurative sense. I am marked even before being able to speak. (Italics added.)

Roudinesco then enquires, “You were circumcised, and therefore the mark was inscribed on the body?” Derrida replies, saying: I will not dare to say that it’s a metaphor. But whenever I have spoken of this [. . .], I have also treated the rhetoric that has always worked the literality or the tropic value of circumcision into the body: the circumcision of the sex, that said to be “of the heart”, of the lips, and of the tongue, etc.

Whether literal or figurative—assuming any clear-cut distinction is possible, the inheritance of responsibility, what Levinas terms the ethical relation, is a claim on the body, hence also on the voice. The moral assignment binding the voice comes and takes hold as a pre-originary Saying. Like the late thought of Merleau-Ponty, what the thinking of Levinas comes to in Otherwise than Being, this major text of his later thought, is, despite all their evident differences, a deep topography, or palimpsest, of the


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intersubjective body: a body belonging as much to preceding and future generations—to the dead and the yet unborn—as to those living in the present, including myself. For when I listen to the voice I call “my own”, I can hear within it a congregation of voices, the voices of my ancestors, my family, my teachers, my friends, my compatriots, even the voices of poets from distant lands and distant times, each voice with its own distinctive claim on my response-ability. In Otherwise than Being, the philosopher remarks that, “In the approach of a face, the flesh becomes word, the caress a saying . . .” (AE 119–20, OB 194). The “presence” of others—all those whom I encounter face to face—becomes a stimulus to my slumbering ethical consciousness, enabling the ethical claim slumbering in silence in the depths of my flesh to be heard more urgently, more easily. In one of his infrequent shifts from heliotropic metaphors into the rhetoric of auditory experience, Levinas remarks that the trace bears its moral assignment “like the echo of a sound that would precede the resounding of this sound” (AE 142, OB 112). The claim that haunts me in the trace and the echo holds me responsible and guilty even before I have acted—like, he also explains, “an indebtedness before any loan” (Ibid.). The claim of the trace, the claim in the trace, or rather the claim that I ascribe to the trace or the echo of pre-originary Saying, precedes the time of ego-logical memory, and yet, even though it records no event in time, it nonetheless calls upon me to remember, importuning, insisting, marking the time of my remembering, the time beginning with my assumption of responsibility, as already too late, already insufficient, already remiss (AE 116, 118, 134–35; OB 91, 93, 106). As Levinas explains in “Meaning and Sense”, where the trace is given a concentrated discussion, it is a question of “the trace of the utterly bygone, the utterly past absent”.48 Relating what I would call the bodily felt sense of the trace to an experience of the face of “the neighbour”, “le prochain”, which “obsesses me with his destitution”, he writes of “a trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of an excessive, but always ambiguous trace of itself” (AE 118, 154–55; OB 93. 120–21). The trace of the ethical could not possibly be more different, therefore, from the trace left by a material object in the sensible world. And yet. . . . As the philosopher defines it in “The Trace of the Other” (1963): “Only a being transcending the world can leave a trace.”49 That is to say, only a being exposed, vulnerable, susceptible of being touched and moved by the plight of the other can experience the trace. But the trace is not to be found in the world; in objective terms, it is nothing; its reality is only in and for this susceptibility. Indeed, the trace is nothing other than this very susceptibility. And we are reminded of its reality, its presence as presence of an absence, as trace of transcendence, by the theological story we tell about the origination of the moral law. Thus, the trace is constituted in the hermeneutics of a narrative that transmits the character of the experience of the claim which the

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moral law makes. It bespeaks the phenomenological experience of the moral law: the overwhelming force of its claim, its compulsion, its claim as something that neither reason nor feeling is capable of refusing to acknowledge and obey, despite their failure to fathom its dimensions. In its compelling facticity, it thus resembles what Kant referred to as a “fact of reason.” In thinking about the trace of the ethical, trace of the moral law, it could perhaps be useful to reflect on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the trace, which he contrasts to the aura. In a fragmentary note for his “Arcades Project”, the trace is described as “the apparition [Erscheinung] of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be.” Whereas, the “aura” is described as “the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.” To which he adds the reflection that, “With the trace, we gain possession of the thing; with the aura, the thing takes possession [bemächtigt] of us.”50 The supplementary remark draws a clear and sharp distinction; but the first two statements fail, since, at least in the ethical relation of concern to Levinas, where it is above all a question of “infinite” respect for the other, borne in its full consciousness with a terrible shudder of awe, one and the same phenomenon could be, perhaps should be, described both ways. For, as a trace of God’s own handwriting, the ethical trace is indeed auratic. One cannot get close to it, close as it is, for its very nearness—its inscription in the flesh—bespeaks its distance, its transcendence, as the handiwork of God, work which no mortal could possibly accomplish; and its distance—its coming from the Infinite— bespeaks its nearness as a claim taking hold even in the most intimate folds of the flesh. (Circumcision signifies the spectral materiality of the moral law: its appropriation of the flesh, a traumatic inscription on the male flesh of the spiritual hetero-affection and heteronomy of the moral law.) Where is the trace? Where is it retained—and how? What medium is it buried or encrypted in? Is it kept in “the mind”? In “the unconscious”? In the depths of “memory”? Or is it somehow preserved in and by “the body”? These questions and terms impose themselves and cannot be evaded. The only possible answers, if there are any, require invoking the body: not, of course, the body of biology, of naturalism, but the body of a certain hermeneutical phenomenology, a spiritualized flesh wrought by an effort of memory almost indistinguishable from the imagination. To arrive at a deeper, more satisfying understanding of the trace, we need, as I have argued, to experience and understand the body—call it our embodiment—otherwise. This different representation of embodiment is however only to some extent adumbrated by Levinas. Near the beginning of Otherwise than Being, Levinas concedes that, There is a paradox in responsibility, in that I am obliged without this obligation having begun in me, as though an order slipped into my consciousness like a thief [. . .].


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“But,” he immediately adds, this is impossible in a consciousness, and clearly indicates that we are no longer in the element of consciousness. (AE 16, OB 13)

What “element” could we be in, then, if not that of our embodiment—in fact, the mystical medium of corporeity that is invoked by the word “flesh”? In “Language and Proximity”, Levinas formulates an argument that likewise points away from consciousness, maintaining that, there is a consciousness which is a passive work of time, with a passivity more passive still than any passivity that is simply antithetical to activity, a passivity without reserve, [. . .] when there is [yet] no subject to assume the creative act. [. . .] Consciousness as the passive work of time which no-one activates cannot be described by the categories proper to a consciousness that aims at an object.51

This passivity is the elemental modality of “consciousness”—if we may still identify it by that name—encrypted in the sanctuary of the flesh: a flesh in subjection to the other, according to the moral law; a flesh entrusted with the prophetic spirit of this law, a moral “compass”. Levinas, however, seems somewhat ambivalent, occasionally expressing a certain hesitation or reluctance to avow the flesh as the medium for the “inscription” of the moral law, medium, as much spiritual as material, for its pre-originary Saying. In this regard, there are different ways of reading his words. In any case, I want to argue that, as soon as intentional consciousness arises and presides, the originary hold of the “proximity” that, in secret, could once have made me experience my responsibility to and for the other as absolutely urgent, unconditional, and indeclinable, tends to weaken, for the logic of ego-consciousness inevitably “represses” the sensibility of a “subjectivity older than knowing or power” (AE 104–05, OB 63). Nevertheless, the obligatory character of the ethical that subjects and binds the flesh continues to haunt and obsess even the coldest of egos, never releasing the ego altogether from the insistence of the ethical commandment and persistently urging the ego to become the mature moral self already traced out for it as an existential potentiality in the corporeal schematism of a pre-originary self—a self, a subject, that consequently calls for the redemption of its promise. If the body that bears in its flesh the trace or echo of the other is a “mystical body”, we need to recognize that a radically different experience is at issue, requiring a phenomenology that is hermeneutically sensitive. Taking a clue from the Talmud and the Kabbalah, I suggest that we think of the body that bears the trace as rather like a text—like a palimpsest of flesh. (See Diagram II, following this chapter.) Unfortunately, despite his intention to break

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out of the discursive contempt that has framed representations of embodiment in Western thought since Plato, Levinas provides little concrete phenomenological detail, little specificity, in his exposition of embodiment, sensuous and affective experience, volition, and perception. We need to recognize, in the flesh, a palimpsest of layers, the oldest of which, constitutive of the pre-originary self, is the medium of a “pre-originary election” by the Good, whilst the most fully spiritualized layer is the medium that would bear the sense and sensibility of the “zaddik”, the one who realizes this vocation in the piety of an ethical life at the compassionate heart of which is an unconditional—even if it is ultimately aporetic—commitment of responsibility to and for the welfare of the other. In spite of his manifest concern for moral education, Levinas does not recognize the need to correlate his hermeneutical reading of the synchronically operative layers in the palimpsest of the flesh with a diachronic phenomenology of the stages in moral maturation, the moral development of sensibility and judgement—ethical life as an ongoing practice, caring for the self as “the-one-for-the-other”. The exposition of embodiment as a diachronically formed palimpsest is a task that, in the context of his concern for moral education, the introduction of the trace makes all the more importunate. This figure of the trace, an ethical commandment claimed to bear a prophetic message coming from an order of time beyond ego-logical memory, loudly begs for elaboration. Among the matters demanding more satisfactory exposition, analysis, and interpretation, I would name at least these: His conception of the “pre-originary”, the logic of which would seem to imply, or call for, a process of moral self-development; his discussions of ego and self, in which their temporal relations are left frustratingly close to being undecidable; his apparent, but inadequately explained multiplication of the denotations constitutive of the terms “self” and “heteronomy”; and his invocation of an “involuntary election by the Good, leaving in the dark how, more specifically, this “assignment” prior to the possibility of memory, an “assignment” that I would like to interpret as a certain moral sense registered in the sensibility of the flesh, is passively received and subsequently related, presumably by some efficacy of our anamnestic capabilities, to the gestures that enact a conscious will. How can our “pre-originary election” by the Good—an “event” that is supposed to happen prior to consciousness and volition and that “remains” only as a “trace”—influence our conscious choices and decisions? Would it not need reanimation or re-enactment by memory, somehow to be made conscious? Or, if not, either it would have no role at all in our ethical life, in which case it would be nothing but a dubious conjecture, or else it would determine our ethical life like a mechanism of fate—an equally undesirable interpretation. What difference does this unconscious and involuntary “election” make—what difference could it make—in how I live my life? How could it figure in the way of life that I knowingly elect? Must it not be a


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question, somehow, of electively, willingly retrieving and reactivating the body’s felt sense of that presumed or imagined “pre-originary election”, that “subjection” to the needs and concerns of the other—even if that sense can bear, can attest, only ephemeral traces of traces or echoes of echoes? Using a rhetoric that specifically echoes the visionary, heliotropic rhetoric that Plato deploys in “The Republic”, and thereby importing from “Athens” into “Jerusalem” a representation of the ethical relation, Levinas declares that, Attachment to the Good precedes the choosing of the Good. [. . .] The Good is good precisely because it chooses you and grips you before you have had time to raise your eyes to it.52

But what bearing does this pre-originary “election” have on the choices I actually make? That it should influence my freedom is clear. But how? The trace is a persistently intractable problematic at the very heart of all these questions; yet, despite its importance, it is left very much in the dark. It is, in a sense, aporetic: we need it, according to the ethics that Levinas proposes, yet we cannot learn from him how to incorporate it into our ethical lives. We will resume these reflections on the question of retrieval in the following section. For now, I would like to return to the figure of the palimpsest. In Otherwise than Being, the philosopher asserts that “the body is neither an obstacle opposed to the soul nor a tomb that imprisons it, but that by which the self is susceptibility itself” (AE 139, OB 195n 12). This departure from Platonism, Gnosticism and Cartesianism is reiterated in many other texts. In “Without Identity”, for example, where he declares that “the subject is already [living] for the other on the level of sensibility.”53 So he might have added that the body is also not to be despised as nothing but a cauldron of unruly drives and ego-centred desires—for I take what he is saying to imply, but perhaps with some wavering, an acknowledgement of the body as the medium of a pre-originary “susceptibility”, and, a fortiori, a recognition of the fact that the body is not by nature totally inimical to the ethical order. But his attitude towards the body is not without ambiguities, since there are many textual passages that either state or imply that the ethical is inherently “contrary to nature”: as when it is supposed to be an experience of “trauma”, and even a “persecution”, a “wounding” of the flesh.54 But how can the nature of the body be inherently, essentially inimical to the ethical, when it is, as it must be, the one and only medium there can be to bear my “involuntary election by the Good”? (AE 19, OB 15).55 I say “as it must be”, here, because, if my “election” by the Good is prior to memory, prior to volition, prior, in fact, to consciousness, then it can only be, I submit, an “election” that takes place “in” the body: an “election” that is somehow, as it were, “inscribed” for safekeeping—and for the possibility of

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remembrance—in the very secrecy and intimacy of our flesh. But we must note that this “election” pre-ordains nothing, determines nothing: by itself, it cannot even set ethical life in motion, for only the actuality of the other can move us to awaken it from its slumber. I am completely free to ignore it, to neglect it. Indeed, since it takes place in a time prior to consciousness, and there is nothing that causally compels me to make it conscious, let alone obey its summons, nothing that even compels me to attempt its recollection—nothing, other than the claims that the ego may feel when facing the plight, the “destitution”, of the other, it could remain deeply repressed, despite occasional eruptions into the form of consciousness we call “guilty conscience”. How, then, is this pre-originary ethical claim supposed to enter into the life one elects to live? In his Preface to Beyond the Verse, a collection of Talmudic commentaries, Levinas, never released from the need of mourning imposed by the Shoah, asks a question that continues to haunt and obsess him: Can anyone amongst mankind wash his hands of all this flesh gone up in smoke?”56 As Howard Caygill points out, Levinas intends this question not only to draw us into the struggle to accomplish the universal history posited by the Enlightenment project, but also to summon us to the heights of a “sacred history that touches the flesh of all humanity.”57 But flesh, here, must be taken more seriously, more literally, than Caygill assumes. What we regard as our “flesh” is, as it has always been, the site of a struggle unto death between the spirit of the moral law and the dispositions of nature—its “aorgic” impulses, drives, appetites, desires. Nevertheless, it is by grace of the flesh as medium of prophetic transmission that the appeal of the messianic— sacred history—enters into the struggle of consciousness, of reason, to realize, as soon as possible, for the sake of each and every human singularity, the principles of justice constitutive of universal history. I think that the distinctions which Kant draws in Book One of Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone might make it possible to illuminate, if not resolve, some of the perplexities about our embodiment of the ethical that Levinas’s phenomenology leaves insufficiently addressed. Kant there introduces three critical terms to clarify how human nature is related to good and evil. In effect, these terms set up a palimpsest of the flesh, the layer underneath “sublated”, “aufgehoben”, by the later one—surpassed, but not obliterated, still functioning in a kind of suspended potentiation, still tempting us to fall back into its disposition. At the beginning, at the bottom, there is the “Anlage”, which refers to our pre-originary natural predisposition: Although we are born neither good nor wicked, we are given a nature enduringly capable at any time of enacting either one of these potentialities. Nevertheless, with this nature, we are also “given” the moral law, a moral “compass”, designed to accompany us and guide us on our journey through life. For Kant as for Levinas, the origin of this “equipment”, bestowed in a time older than any originary time, is noumenal; it exceeds the finitude of


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our comprehension. Using Levinas’s terminology, this predisposition may accordingly be described as “pre-originary”, because the origin or ground of this predisposition precedes whatever origin or ground we could possibly possess and represent as knowledge. It is not available to our knowledge of origins and grounds, for knowledge can represent its objects only as present within the irreversible, linear temporal series. After the “Anlage”, that is, surpassing this endowment, there emerges the “Hang”, our natural “propensity” for succumbing to the temptations of our desire-driven nature and the corruptions of social existence and for consequently exercising our freedom of will in ways that disregard the commanding authority of the moral law. Of course, this propensity can in principle always be resisted. All three modes of this propensity—weakness of will, moral ignorance and confusion, and the wicked subordination of the moral law to some form of selfinterest—can always, in principle, be resisted. In spite of this propensity, however, nothing in our nature denies the will its freedom to heed the moral law, subordinating all desires, all interests, to its dictates. Kant’s third term is “Gesinnung”, which refers to our cast of mind, the accumulated precipitate of the will’s actions, the actual disposition of our character—whether or not, over time, the will in the acts of its freedom has struggled against and resisted its natural propensity, demonstrating a consistent pattern of concern, a habitual respect, for the good and the right. The cast of mind, our “moral personality”, emerges from the second phase, overlays it, and completes it, expressing its final, or anyway stabilized, shape. If interpreted as referring to the nature of the body, these terms make it possible to formulate a coherent and compelling picture of the body within the altered phenomenology that Levinas leaves with us. Perhaps this picture could give new life to the categorical imperative, investing the flesh with the spirit of the moral law. Be this as it may, in “Humanism and An-archy”, Levinas effects what could perhaps be read—without disavowing the ambiguities—as an astonishing reversal, overturning the picture of the body that has dominated Greek and Christian philosophy. He writes there that, it is not because the ego is an incarnate soul that temptation troubles the antecedent obedience to the Good and promises sovereign choice to man; it is because the obedience free of servitude to the Good is an obedience to the other that remains other that the subject is carnal, on the limit of eros, and becomes a being.58

I experience myself not just as corporeal, but as flesh, to the extent that I experience myself as an ethical creature—because the flesh of the body is avowed to be a vessel, a medium, that carries the tracework of my ethical assignment, and the prophecy of my ethical vocation, and because that assignment compels me to struggle with the corporeal nature of my desires. It is my

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prophetic—my “supersensible—destination that grants me a body of flesh, a body that is not mere substance, mere matter—nor even mere animality. “But,” he says there, “nothing in this passivity of possession by the Good [. . .] becomes a natural tendency. The relationship with the other is not convertible into a nature. [. . .].” These words seem to suggest that the ethical does not belong to, does not emerge from, the nature of the body. But I submit that they should rather be understood merely as insisting that, despite our pre-originary “election” by the Good, our ethical comportment, our actual choosing of the Good is not pre-ordained, not predetermined by the moral assignment constitutive of our pre-originary corporeal nature. It is always possible to turn away from this assignment that the flesh has received. Calling attention to “the feeling of identity between self and body”, Levinas rejects the discourses of idealism and rationalism, arguing in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” that, to separate the spirit from the concrete forms in which it is already involved is to betray the originality of the very feeling from which it is appropriate to begin.59

Of course, this “affirmation” of the body—if that is what it is—must not be construed as supporting a doctrine of biologism. Nothing could be more hostile to the project within which Levinas is attempting to think what might be called the “redemption” of the body (“of” the body in both the objective and the subjective grammatical senses of that preposition) than a doctrine concerning the nature of human corporeity that, after imagining the division of humanity into different races, assigns fate according to consanguinity and offers ideological shelter to a violent struggle for domination based on biological inheritance. Thus, in Otherwise than Being, he states a position that recapitulates Merleau-Ponty’s nicely wrought diachronic and synchronic schematism, Aristotelian, Hegelian, and Schellingian, in his early work, The Structure of Comportment, according to which: The schema that corporeality outlines submits the biological itself to a higher structure. (AE 139, OB 109)

A very significant, but insufficiently elaborated claim that seems at least to allude to a process of moral maturation, moral self-development, the full potentiality of which would seem to be, for Levinas, already prophetically “inscribed” as a supersensible “assignment” encrypted within the very nature of our corporeity. Something like this thought is already to be found in Aristotle’s “De Anima” and in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature, as well as, even more intriguingly, in Schelling’s never-completed work, Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, where one of the interlocutors in the


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conversation remarks that “the lower level [of our corporeal nature] contains prophecies of the higher, but this level nevertheless still remains the lower one.”60 (Schelling, as we know, greatly influenced Rosenzweig, who, as we also know, was a great source of inspiration for Levinas.) But unfortunately, Levinas does not undertake a phenomenology of moral development—nor, a fortiori, does he sufficiently acknowledge the role of the body of experience in relation to such a narrative. This, however, is a task that his ethical philosophy certainly requires. If this interpretation is correct, the argument proposed in this chapter— derived, in fact, from the Old Testament and claiming that, in a time before memory, a time before time, the moral law, pure trace of “illeity”, was “inscribed” in the flesh of all mortals—cannot be construed as an unwitting fall into one of the numerous versions of naturalism with which philosophical thought is all too familiar. But, however much the moral life is, and must be, a ceaseless struggle against certain inclinations, desires, passions, whims and habits of the body, it cannot be denied without lapsing into nonsense that a moral life is nevertheless “natural”, in the very precise sense, a still minimal sense, perhaps, that [1] moral comportment is, and must be, summoned and educed from the endowed nature of our embodiment and therefore, a fortiori, [2] moral comportment always involves and engages the nature of the body. Moral life is related in very intricate ways to the body of needs, desires and intentions; the body of sense and sensibility; the body of speech and judgement. To be sure, moral comportment, moral life, is not “natural”, if by that one means the possibility that, like Eve coming forth from Adam’s rib, it can come forth from corporeity spontaneously, without countless civilizing mediations, processes of socialization and cultural transmission. That all this is true seems so plainly obvious that the necessity for taking cognizance of it may strike one not yet corrupted by years of absorption in the study of philosophical texts as utterly astonishing and perplexing, were it not for the fact that “naturalism” has consistently been interpreted to imply the causal determinism of an organic machine or the reduction of the normativity constitutive of human life to the facticity of biological processes. The “naturalism” for which I will be arguing here, however, and which I think that Levinas’s ethics requires, is committed to the following claims: [1] that the ethical relation emerges from the nature of the body; [2] that it is in the nature of the body to carry and preserve the ethical, if only in suppression or sublation; [3] that neither [1] nor [2] means that the ethical is not, despite this incarnation, “contrary to nature”, just as Levinas wants to insist, but in the specific sense that its demands call upon us to struggle against the temptations of egoism and the corruptions inherent in social existence, which frequently encourage acting out urges and desires that overcome our respect for the moral law; and [4] that the outcome of this struggle is never a foregone conclusion, because, even if I am always “elected” by the Good in a

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pre-originary appropriation of my corporeal nature, I am always nevertheless free to ignore, resist, or defy the ethical assignment. In Otherwise than Being, there is a sentence—one in fact that we have already noticed—bearing on these points; it merits much more attention than it has received. It says: The incarnation of the [moral] self [must be understood as] a passivity prior to all passivity at the bottom of matter becoming flesh [la matière se faisant chair]. (AE 150, OB 196 n21. Also see AE 140, OB 110)

We should note here, first of all, that Levinas uses the reflexive, “se faisant”, a grammatical construction perhaps even suggesting something that only the absent “middle voice” could adequately express. The English translation unfortunately conceals this grammar—and consequently its philosophical implications. What the philosopher is undoubtedly saying, here, is that the “matter” constitutive of our corporeity bears within itself the immanent potential—the prophetic assignment, the pro-mise—to become flesh, spiritualized medium for the realization of the ethical life, bearing a sense of responsibility for the other, and committed to the historical “work of justice”. It is in this sense that Levinas must be understood when he says, giving Heidegger’s terminology a corporeal supplement, that, “to be flesh [l’être-làen-chair] is to enter into time” (TIF 89, TIE 90–91). Time engages the flesh as diachronic—and is prophetically inflected. With the last two quotations in mind, I would like to suggest that we differentiate body from flesh, naming the flesh figure for the spiritual potential of the body, the body as medium for the emergence of this spiritual potential, granted by the pre-originary gift of its predisposition, where the struggle between good and its contrary takes place. The flesh is the body experienced in the mode of its spiritual sublimation, the body in regard to its prophetic, “supersensible destination”—a “destination” that Levinas, recalling the Old Testament, will describe more than once as an “inscription”, an “assignment” given to us, that is, to the flesh of the body, in an immemorial time, the time, in fact, of “a past that has never been present”. (The last-quoted phrase here, crucial to Levinas’s phenomenology, is one that he unquestionably borrowed from Merleau-Ponty, and it shows the extent of his indebtedness.) The flesh is the body experienced in its assumption of responsibility as medium for the realization of a prophetic spirit; it is the pre-originary dimension of the body out of which this spirit can emerge into the light, the saying, of consciousness; it is the body in its pre-originary passivity, site of its struggle over submission to the spirit of the moral law. The flesh is also, therefore, the “traumatic” body experienced in its moment of spiritual struggle; it is that pre-originary disposition, that peculiar commitment of the body which, for the sake of the Good, urges us to oppose certain inclinations that arise from


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the very nature of the body that bears it—although the opposition to the body’s ethically “lower” desires, to its propensity for temptation by certain types of ego-logical satisfactions and interests, which of course take place through the flesh, attests at the same time its glorification, its consecration of this corporeal nature, revealing the possibility of a higher reconciliation between the nature of the body and the spirit of the moral law, in which the body, site of moral struggle, would be dedicated to serving others and working for the triumph of the Good. From the early writings to the late, Levinas insists on the importance of sensibility for our ethical life. As he wants us to understand and experience it, it is the medium of my exposure to the other, my vulnerability, my susceptibility to being affected, touched and moved, by the plight of the other. For it is also the medium of my subjection to the other—a subordination so profound, so overwhelming, so inescapable, that he resorts to the word “hostage”, a word that also indicates the extremity of my passivity, to describe— and at the same time awaken—the condition of my experience. Sensibility will also be described as the medium of a “substitution”: substitution in the sense of an indeclinable responsibility to and for the other, even to the extreme of sacrificing myself instead of permitting the sacrifice, or the suffering, of the other. Such substitution must not be mistaken however, for a sympathetic absorption of the difference that separates the one from the other. On the contrary, it is an ethical assumption of the sufferings endured by the other, an assumption that is permitted in no other way to acknowledge and respect the alterity, the withdrawal of the other from the violence of ontology. “Einfühlung”, employed to rescue transcendental phenomenology from solipsism, would thus in fact be, in this regard, a term of violence, since it not only subverts itself by representing both the one and the other as minds enclosed in bodies whose walls it must then somehow, impossibly, penetrate, but also, precisely under the compulsion of that representation, in itself a form of violence, it posits the alterity of the other at the same time that it posits a sympathetic assumption which magically penetrates and dissolves that alterity. (See AE 143–44, OB 125. I am, here, expressing disagreement with Levinas, who is still, by retaining this psychological term inherited from Husserl, not entirely free of the transcendental idealism he wants to avoid.) Now, this draws us into another major problematic. It would seem that, according to Levinas, we cannot understand the “incarnate subjectivity” of ethical life unless we distinguish the ego from the self. However, he is less than clear about their relationship. On my reading, influenced by MerleauPonty’s diachronic-synchronic topography, which remarks an anonymous, pre-personal phase-dimension of individual existence preceding and underlying the phase-dimension constitutive of our personal existence, Levinas invokes not only a self prior to and underlying the ego but also, as always at least a potentiality, a possibility requiring the ego’s commitment, an ethically mature

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self surpassing the ego in its formation of a character, a “Gesinnung”, that embodies the virtue of a life lived for the sake of the other. The self, he says, is “older than the ego, prior to principles”. Thus, the ego has a “prehistory”: “in the ‘prehistory’ of the ego posited for itself [there nevertheless] speaks a responsibility”, an indeclinable “election” by the Good—a pre-originary Saying—that is “prior to freedom” (AE 149–50, OB 116–17). In other words, prior to our formation as ego-logical, we are accordingly already in a certain ethically signifying “contact” with the other: not in what would commonly be called “physical contact”, not even in the sense that we are in what would commonly be termed the “presence” of the other, but rather in the peculiar sense that Levinas gives to the term “proximity”, namely, that, prior to any actual encounter with the other, I am always already sensibly predisposed, predisposed by the very nature of my sensibility, to be concerned, to feel some responsibility to and for the good of the other (AE 178, OB 139). Which does not mean, of course, that I am not free to disregard this bodily feelable summons to responsibility, despite the fact that it demands and grants no exception, free even to neglect this moral obligation to such a degree that its command, its summons, its pre-originary Saying, can no longer be heard. As when, in Hannah Arendt’s example, Adolph Eichmann could no longer hear the voice of conscience—or rather, could hear it only through a corrupted, twisted echo, reducing the moral maxim to the “law of the land”, and, finally, to the absolute, hence arbitrary will of the Führer.61 But balancing the texts that posit a self before the ego, there are also numerous passages, numerous texts, where Levinas clearly wants us to think of a life—call it that of an ethically mature self—which is later than the ego, as surpassing or exceeding its “imperialism” by virtue of its voluntary commitment to the “substitution”, the requirement of responsibility for the other, that has already imposed itself on the flesh of the self prior to the emergence of the ego. This other, other-oriented self would be, in effect, an ego that has learned what Levinas, or Levinas’s Judaically informed philosophy, has to teach, profoundly altering its way of life. Thus, for example, the philosopher will tell us, in the course of a long narrative in which, as I take it, a process of moral maturation is surely implied, that the self “abrogates the egoism of perseverance in being, which is the imperialism of the ego [. . .]” (AE 165, OB 128). He also declares that “egoism is neither first nor last”, implying, I suggest, that the ego which emerges from the involuntary, unselfconscious anonymity and heteronomy of the pre-originary, prepersonal self to become its implacable master must, in turn, be sublated by a morally “higher” self—a transpersonal self, consciously and by intention anonymous and heteronomous (AE 162, OB 126). Since, however, the whole point of the philosopher’s written work assumes that the address, the appeal, of his thought could alter our investments in the ego’s egoism, its imperial disregard for the other, it is perhaps to be expected—although I consider it regrettable—that we would


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find few explicit references to the self as the “successor” to the ego and little explication of the process of learning and maturation through which the ego overcomes itself and to become this “higher” self. The narrative explicating the earlier, pre-originary self, however, is presented with much more phenomenological intricacy, much more detail—although in this regard, too, even more narrative detail would have been desirable. Because of sensibility, the ego is compelled to undergo a certain passivity, rendering it more susceptible to the moral claims of the other. This claiming takes hold of us not through the body’s “passivity of inertia, persistence in a state of rest or of movement”, but through a passivity immeasurably more passive than the passivity that is contrasted with activity, because the moral assignment of responsibility for the other is, as it were, “inscribed” in the flesh, suggesting—according to the hermeneutical phenomenology that Levinas proposes—a covenant with God that belongs to a time that only messianic prophecy can recognize: a time before the time of memory, before the emergence of volition, before the beginning of consciousness (AE 94, OB 75). Sensibility “refers [us] to an irrecuperable, pre-ontological past”—in fact, as he never tires of saying, it comes from “a past that has never been present” (AE 99, OB 78). Would this not be a past the traces of which could be recognizable, if at all, only through the body’s receptivity to their revelation, a past in which the messianic promise of redemption would be spelled out in the moral assignment prophetically “inscribed” in the universal flesh of our particular, individual bodies? Levinas holds that “Incarnation is an extreme passivity, [. . .] exposed to compassion, and, as a self, to the gift that costs” (AE 139, OB 195). Numbers 15:31 says: “One who has broken God’s commandments is one who profanes the covenant inscribed in the flesh.” The most important reference to this “inscription” that I can find appears in Otherwise than Being, where, in a passage that we cannot, and must not, reduce to metaphorical arabesques, Levinas says, once again using the reflexive grammar that perhaps approximates the middle voice: there is inscribed or written [s’inscrit ou s’écrit] the trace of infinity, the trace of a departure, but trace of what is inordinate, does not enter into the present, and inverts the arkhé into an an-archy, that there may be [. . .] responsibility and a [morally disposed] self. (AE 149, OB 117)

God will communicate to us by way of a “pre-originary Saying”; but, as other passages I have quoted from the philosopher’s writings indicate, this Saying comes both by voice and by writing. (Writing, of course, keeps us within the realm of vision, hence bound to the violence that Levinas wants the ethical to break out of.) The nature of the flesh is such that, because of its peculiar impressionability, its capacity to bear the moral law in feeling, the

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body is “elected” to be the medium—the prophetically designated site—for the first revelation of the law, rendering us already beholden to the other, already responsible, even before consciousness emerges. And if we take “the word” to represent the moral law, then Schelling’s remark, in Of Human Freedom, could also shed some light on the Talmudic hermeneutics in Levinas’s phenomenology. Schelling observes: The word which is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark, prophetic (still incompletely spoken) word.62

Perhaps it would also be useful to recall, at this point, what Benjamin, familiar with Gershom Scholem’s research into the mystical texts of the Kabbalah, says in his study on the origin of the German “Trauerspiel”, the Baroque “mourning-play”: The sanctity of what is written is inextricably bound up with the idea of its strict codification. [. . .] So it is that [. . .] the script of sacred complexes [. . .] takes the form of hieroglyphics. The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script—there will always be a conflict between sacred standing and profane comprehensibility—leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics.63

But a much more likely source of encouragement for Levinas’s recuperation of the hermeneutics of inscription—if indeed any at all were needed, other than the Holy Scriptures themselves—would have been Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, in which the earlier philosopher says that “the prescriptions for action and rules of life [are] in large part to be regarded as a mode of script [Schriftart] and have, as ceremonial laws, significance and meaning [Bedeutung und Sinn].”64 Thus he urges “a kind of midwifery”, a “Geburtshülfe”: faithful observance of the liturgical ceremonies and, no less important, diligent study of the Talmud, the written and oral teachings, translating the visible and invisible texts, audible and inaudible, into a way of life—“a living mode of script”.65 Levinas would seem to be in agreement with this. Thus, for example, in his “Preface” to Beyond the Verse, he declares that the “writing” with which he is concerned “is always prescription and ethics, [. . .] holy writing [écriture sainte] before being a sacred text [texte sacré].”66 In any case, for the interpretation of Levinas proposed in this chapter, particularly with regard to my narrative of moral development, I want to claim Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem as a valuable source of encouragement. In a letter to Benjamin, Gershom Scholem remarked that the esoteric communications of the Sacred Scriptures are not lost, but merely are not yet decipherable, not yet revealing their meaning.67 We cannot avoid the fact that Levinas’s invocations of the inscribed trace, “trace of the other”, generate just such questions of comprehensibility as Scholem’s letter indicates.


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But it is a comprehensibility inextricably connected to the ethical disposition of the will, the strength or weakness of the “desire for the Good” that would resist temptations to evade its Saying. Thus, the “incomprehensibility” or “illegibility” attributed to the inscription is symptomatic of the ego’s evasion of the categorical summons to responsibility already consecrating and commanding the nature of the flesh. But if all that remains of the inscription are traces of traces, the seeming facticity of the philosophical claim comes into question, its hermeneutics suspended in a disconcerting moment of undecidability. Is it revelation or mere construction? Is it empirical—or does it belong to the allegorical register of prophecy? Is it a transcendental illusion? In the next section, we will reflect on this dilemma further. But, whatever the answers to these questions, I think it incontestable that Levinas’s ethics needs the body, needs to distinguish flesh from body, and needs the flesh of the body to bear the prophetic assignment in its covenant with God, to live in mindfulness of the moral law, understood as the law that, hosted by the flesh, makes me “hostage” to the other.—Not that this makes the facticity of this embodiment, its anachronistic temporality, its metaphysical origin, its legibility, entirely comprehensible in the phenomenological register. Not even when our phenomenology has turned hermeneutical in a concession to the hiddenness, the withdrawal, of the trace. But could it not be argued that, in the shudder, in the disquieting obsession with guilt, and in the overwhelming need to confess, there are at least symptomatic indications, compelling decipherments, of the otherwise illegible moral “inscription”?

§5 Enigmatic Echoes: Retrieving the Trace In “the Actuality of Philosophy”, Theodor Adorno remarks that, “only in traces and ruins is [reason] prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality.”68 In a way, but in a sense different from Adorno’s, Levinas is also settling his hopes for reason on traces and ruins. But, as the preceding section makes decisively clear, the conceptual figure of the trace introduces an intractable problematic into Levinas’s phenomenology. Not only virtually impossible to conceptualize, to put into words, the trace resists memory—and even resists all familiar modes of experiencing its very existence, its reality. So thorough is this resistance that one is compelled to question the very meaning of any claim regarding its existence or reality. Is the “memory” that, despite impossibility, retrieves a felt sense of the trace, the echo of a voice commanding ethical life, an effect of a metaphysical imagination? In his Critique of Judgement, Kant seems to acknowledge a power of imagination that he could not bring himself to avow in the earlier Critique of Pure Reason:

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The imagination (in its role as a productive cognitive power [produktives Erkenntnisvermögen]) is very mighty [sehr mächtig] when it creates [in Schaffung], as it were [nämlich], another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it.69

This power, a power to produce an original exhibition of the object (exhibitio originaria), is said to give the object in an exhibition that precedes “experience”. In Kant’s striking formulation—in which the rhetorical effects of “nämlich” unquestionably exceed his control—we can see that the doubling and duplicity of the imagination are already recognized. Could the phenomenology that the retrieval of the pre-originary requires be a hermeneutical process that is neither a work of pure memory nor a work of pure imagination, but a work of memory that only the animation of a morally inspired imagination could bring forth for the first time, hence originarily, in the guise of a re-enactment? In The Work of Fire, Blanchot states with lapidary elegance the aporia that we must confront: Something has disappeared. How can I recover it, how can I turn around and look at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists after?70

Levinas of course recognizes this problem, but never abandons his claim that the moral law comes as a pre-originary Saying, comes with a priority that makes its very “reality” irremediably aporetic. I hope that, by now, it is clear that I am not challenging the claim; however, it seems to me that, despite his obsessive preoccupation with the pre-originary, and despite his commitment to articulating his thought in the language of experience, he nevertheless leaves the phenomenological characterization of the process of retrieval—a task that the claim obviously requires—insufficiently worked out. It would be worth recalling, here, the biblical story of Moses, bearing the table of commandments to the Jewish people. The story concerns a test of faith in the invisible voice of God. According to the biblical account, Moses erupted in wrath at the sight of the Jewish people worshipping an idol instead of an invisible God whose voice—the voice of the commandments, the voice of the moral law—they, as limited to the conventional, would never hear. In the Old Testament, the voice whose Saying constitutes the ethical relation is already experienced as only an echo of an echo. Nothing more. And yet, for those with faith, it is a voice that commands and promises. It accordingly would be no exaggeration, I suppose, to suggest that the trace becomes, for Levinas, the object of a sleepless obsession. How can one approach the unapproachable and describe that which never appears, never presents itself to intuitive or cognitive apprehension? What can be


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said, anyway, about a trace of the other that is declared to be “almost nothing”, when anything we might say about it would inevitably make it into a something? And how is memory to relate to it, since, although it is supposed to be claiming me in a time that has passed, the philosopher denies it to the fortunes of memory? The philosopher tells us that, a linear, regressive movement, a retrospective back along the temporal series towards a very remote past, would never be able to reach the absolutely diachronous pre-original which cannot be recuperated by memory or history. (AE 12, OB 10)

But even if, per impossibile, it could in some exceptionally strange way be recalled, it could not enter the presence of consciousness as a past made present, inasmuch as it never was present in the past to begin with (AE 67, OB 52). The trace, he explains, “cannot be recuperated by reminiscence, not because of its remoteness [in time], but because of its incommensurability with the present” (AE 13–14, OB 11. Also see AE 36, 112; OB 28–29, 88). There can be no “conjunction” with the present, otherwise the trace would be captured by an ontology committed to the violence inherent in totality. However, if the pre-originary cannot be retrieved in any sense, in any way, then either the obligation it imposes would become effective in absolute independence of my volition, my consciousness—in which case, my actions would be both blind and without freedom, subject to a rigorous corporeal determinism; or else that obligation, that claim, would play no role whatsoever in my ethical life. Without some confirmation by a process of recollection, his entire phenomenology of the trace would be threatened: it would become nothing more than an architecture of empty, speculative postulates, completely removed from ethical experience and processes of learning and maturation. So far, we have concentrated on the trace. Instead of traces, however, we should as much as possible be thinking, here, of echoes, or rather, to maintain the strictest correlation—of echoes of echoes. For we are concerned, of course, with Saying, the realm of the voice, not with the realm of light and vision, from which Levinas himself, despite his continued resort to the tropes of that rhetoric, is anxious for good philosophical reasons to break away. Perhaps at this point, it would be worthwhile to read again a remark that Merleau-Ponty makes, bringing us back to the question of voice. Of course, whether we are reflecting on the readability of the trace or the audibility of the echo, essentially the same problems will be disturbing us. Now, although, to be sure, Merleau-Ponty is referring to the speech disorder known as “aphasia”, I submit that it lends itself to an interpretation that bears on the problematic that this section is addressing, namely, the ethical moment of avowed responsibility:

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The memory or the voice is recovered [retrouvés] when the body once more opens itself to others or to the past, when it opens the way to co-existence and once more acquires significance beyond itself. (PPF 192, PPE 165)

I want to argue, here, that, mutatis mutandis, something very much like this is at stake in the reflective retrieval, the recapitulation and reanimation, of the pre-originary—at stake in that ethical “movement” or “gesture” by virtue of which the ego, finally acceding, finally capitulating, to the exhortation, the urgent sense of responsibility it can no longer avoid feeling, would attempt to draw upon the inspiration of the pre-originary, its voice, its Saying, to strengthen its commitment and deepen its compassion. In “Humanism and An-archy”, Levinas observes that the pre-originary voice, the voice that claims me body and soul for an ethical vocation, is “a sonority that no voice can sing and no instrument produce.”71 This voice, the voice in which there passes the pre-originary Saying, cannot be retrieved: the closer we come to it, the more it withdraws, for it is the very origin, the sanctified sanctuary, of the moral law. The trace (or say echo) in the present left by transcendence, by pre-originary Saying, is nothing more, he says, than the trace (or call it the echo) of its by-passing, or passing by, the present (AE 12–13, OB 10–11). Its very possibility of survival in fact requires that it withdraw from knowledge and use, from the babbling of tongues that—so the story goes—evolved after the traumatic exile from Paradise. “But”, he asks us, struggling, in another text, “Enigma and Phenomenon” with the aporetic character of this Saying: how refer to an irreversible past, that is, a past which this very reference could not bring back, like a memory which retrieves the past, like signs which recapture the signified?

“What would be needed,” he suggests, would be an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated, instead of a reference that rejoins it. Such is the trace, in its emptiness and desolation. Its desolation is not made of evocations, but of forgettings, forgettings in process, putting aside the past. (Italics added.)

Thus, the trace—or say here instead, the echo—is “the emptiness of an irrecuperable absence”: “What has withdrawn is not evoked, does not return to presence, not even to an indicated presence.”72 Because it must be preoriginary in order to resist and avoid the Scylla of naturalism and the Charybdis of social-cultural relativism, the origin of the ethical must lie, to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, in a “place of inevitable loss”.73


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What Giorgio Agamben notes in Language and Death also bears on this point: “If language were immediately the voice of the human being, as the braying is the voice of the ass and chirping is the voice of the cicada, man [. . .] would never be able to experience the taking-place of language and the opening of being.”74 For if the ethically commanding Saying, the Saying which assigns the welfare of the other to our care and indeclinable responsibility, were to be immediately accessible, immediately audible, immediately representable, there would be no interruption, no break, in the passage from the merely natural sound to the human voice; nor would there be anything between the voice in its social-cultural errancy—the voice lost in totality, and the voice that summons us from the depths of its ethical exigency. In other words, we would never be able to experience the voice as an ethical Saying, opening our relationship to the other and exposing us in our response-ability, hollowing out a dimension of inwardness subjected by substitution to the other. In “Enigma and Phenomenon”, Levinas asks: “Why is the silence of a breath held back produced in the bustling of the totality?”75 Answering his question, he argues that, In order to tear itself from the ontological weight, must not the subjectivity have to have received some most private convocation to appear from beyond being and the rational enchainment of its significations?

“This message,” he admits, is untranslatable into objective language, undefendable by coherent speech, null compared with the public order of the disclosed and triumphant significations of nature and history. It nonetheless summons with precision and urgency, because it first hollows out the dimension of inwardness.

The pre-originary Saying, in and as which the ethical commands me, is thus, for the philosopher, an “enigma”: “An enigma is beyond not finite cognition but all cognition”: How light is the voice of the “subtle silence” that covers its victorious noise, how irresistible the authority of the call to order! But how empty is the space that the word which knows how to speak as though nothing has been said leaves to being.76

Elaborating this understanding of “enigma”, he observes that: what in an enigma has signifyingness does not take refuge in a sphere that is present in its own way and awaits a concept capable of finding and grasping

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it there. The signifyingness of an enigma comes from an irreversible, irrecuperable past which it has perhaps not left since it has already been absent from the very terms in which it was signaled.

And then, in parentheses, he explains, with an understated emphasis, that, “‘perhaps’ is the modality of an enigma, irreducible to the modalities of being and certainty.” Thus, everything that is being claimed here—by Levinas, by me, too—must be understood as subjected to the equivocating vibrations of this “perhaps”. (This is not the only textual site where his wording suggests hesitation or caution and introduces vibrations of uncertainty that disturb one’s confidence.) However confident one may be that this enigmatic status can somehow be made tolerable, the temptation to forget is omnipresent! “The enigma is,” he adds, drawing attention to the anachronism, “the way of the Ab-solute, foreign to cognition, [. . .] because it does not lend itself to the contemporaneousness that constitutes the force of the time tied into the present, [i.e.,] because it imposes a completely different version of time.” (This bears on my earlier discussion, in the first chapter, of the aporetics involved in a saying committed to “giving time to the other”.) Heeding the absolute temporality of the pre-originary Saying requires of us an “extravagant movement of going beyond being or transcendence toward an immemorial antiquity”—a movement that, he claims, draws us towards infinity, a past at once irretrievably, absolutely past, and yet also, nevertheless, hospitable somehow to an “afterlife” in echoes and felt reverberations of signifyingness: “The enigma extends as far as the phenomenon that bears the trace [or say the echo] of the saying which has already withdrawn from the said.”77 But will the aporetic logic of this phenomenology compel us to acknowledge that the very thought of the trace, the echo, is nothing but a phantasm? Novalis once said that, “There is no absolute beginning—it belongs in the category of imaginary thought.”78 If we were to take this to refer to the preoriginary Saying, what consequences would ensue for Levinas’s entire project—his entire ethical phenomenology? I would like to suggest that this impossibility of retrieval does not mean that one should relinquish the attempt to retrieve traces—or say the echoes— of this pre-originary Saying. Indeed, I believe that, though bound to failure, when considered from the standpoint of the making-present (again) of representation, there is nevertheless, there must be, in the context of Levinas’s hermeneutical phenomenology, great ethical merit in the very attempt—provided, of course, that, without claiming the dispelling of the inevitable provocations and intrigues of skepticism, it is made in the purest possible sincerity. Doomed though it is to failure, the effort to retrieve what cannot be retrieved can succeed at the very least, it seems, in making contact with a certain bodily felt sense of that unsayable Saying—a certain sense of its resonance, its reverberations throughout the medium of the flesh, its incarnation.


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I am drawing support for this claim, which no doubt will seem “extravagant”, in part from an observation that the philosopher makes in “Enigma and Phenomenon”. Noting that pre-originary Saying is always a disturbance in the realm of the said, he remarks that, It enters in so subtle a way that, unless we retain it, it has already withdrawn. It insinuates itself, withdraws before entering [il s’insinue, se retire avant d’entrer]. It remains only for him who would like to take it up [lui donner suite]. Otherwise, it has already restored [restitué] the order it troubled: someone rang, and there was no one at the door: did anyone ring?79 (Italics added)

Later in the same paragraph, Levinas says, acknowledging the temptation of skepticism: Dismiss the illusory call from our minds! The insinuation itself invites us to do so. It is up to us [C’est à nous], or, more exactly, it is up to me to retain or repel this God without boldness. . . . (Italics added)

The philosopher will, however, resist the temptation; although renouncing certainty, he holds on to his faith: the pre-originary Saying, the “summons to moral responsibility”, is for him no illusion, no mere phantasm: This assignation—categorical in its straightforwardness but already discrete, as though no one assigned and no one checked—summons to moral responsibility. Morality is the enigma’s way.80

“How,” he then enquires, “is a response made?” His answer: “To the idea of infinity only an extravagant response is possible.” Then, with words that may remind one of Merleau-Ponty’s invocation, in the Phenomenology of Perception, of the trace of “a thought older than myself” (PPF 404, PPE 351–52), Levinas adds: There has to be a “thought” that understands more than it understands, more than its capacity, of which it cannot be contemporary, a “thought” which, in this sense, could go beyond its death. To understand more than one understands, to think more than one thinks, to think of what withdraws from thought, is to desire, with a desire that, unlike need, is renewed and becomes ardent the more it is nourished with the Desirable [i.e., the Good beyond being]. The response to the enigma’s summons is the generosity of sacrifice outside the known and the unknown, without calculation, for going on to infinity.

I am also drawing support for my “extravagant” claim—my claim, namely, that, precisely as a failed effort that knows it must fail, the retrieval of a certain

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bodily felt sense of the pre-originary Saying is to some extent possible after all—from something that the philosopher says in Otherwise Than Being: Men have been able to be thankful for the very fact of finding themselves able to thank [. . .] In a prayer in which the worshipper asks that his prayer be heard, the prayer as it were precedes or follows itself. (AE 12, OB 10)

Similarly, mutatis mutandis, one might say that, given the absolute impossibility of any recovery, any representation, the truly sincere attempt is as good as the successful retrieval would be. In fact, immeasurably superior, from an ethical point of view, since an attempt made in the realization and avowal of its futility demonstrates a singular ethical virtue, a virtue beyond the grasp of egoism. And the effort can in fact retrieve at least some reverberations of the pre-originary Saying, some lingering echoes of its “afterlife”, still causing the body to tremble. If one dares to listen and feel! According to Levinas, in the face, or bodily proximity, of the other, I will immediately experience the prohibition against violence—against, at the extreme, murder. Levinas sees—finds—in the face of the other an immediate manifestation of the First Commandment. But, obviously, this immediate manifestation is not sufficient to prevent murder. Neither, of course, will any amount of moral education—whether it be by example or by the teaching of principles for judgment. Levinas, however, does not depend solely on the immediate manifestation of the moral law to secure ethical life; his lectures and writings demonstrate the importance, for him, of what I am calling “moral education”. And yet, contrary to what one might have expected, his phenomenology of ethical experience has nothing to say about the formation or development of a moral consciousness, a moral sensibility. My contribution, in this regard, is to show how a process of moral education that undertakes the retrieval of the moral law in its deepest corporeal inscription works together with the immediate experience of the prohibition in the face-to-face relation. For what is to be retrieved is that which is responsible for my disposition to experience immediately, in the face of the other, the prohibition against murder—or, as I would prefer to say, the humanity, the kinship, and the vulnerability, of the other. I can agree, then, that, in the face, or proximity, of the other, I will immediately and always experience, at least to some extent, the compelling force of the ethical relation. There can be no doubting that, in the face-to-face proximity of the other, the moral law itself is at work, is in effect. But that is because, in undergoing this experience of proximity—in being subjected to the forceful immediacy of the ethical relation, I am put in touch with a felt sense, a trace, of the moral law itself, inscribed as it passed into the very flesh of my body. In other words, the face-to-face proximity of the other not only compels an immediately ethical responsivity; it also at the same time activates, or enacts, the


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moral law inscribed within me. But, of course, exercising my freedom of will, I can always disregard what the ethical relation in its proximity, its forceful immediacy, requires of me. The phenomenology for which I have been arguing suggests that making contact with the body’s felt sense of the moral law and retrieving, in so far as a process of recollection makes possible, some echo of its pre-originary Saying can strengthen the immediately compelling force of the ethical relation that manifests in the face-to-face proximity. This pre-originary Saying of the moral law is, to borrow a description that Eric Santner formulates, but in reference to the phenomenology of “mood” in Heidegger, “a sort of virtual archive in which are inscribed the traces of an originary—and at some level traumatic—opening or attunement [hence also exposure and subjection] to ‘otherness’ below the level of intentional states and propositional attitudes.”81 Thus, the attempt to retrieve the moral law in that pre-originary Saying, even if it ultimately must fail, is worth the effort, for it embodies an attentiveness that makes the immediate force of the ethical relation in its face-to-face proximity less vulnerable to the vicissitudes, the vagaries, of the moment. The retrieving of the moral law in its pre-originary Saying, though certainly not necessary for the conduct of an ethical life, can, however, serve, like the rudder of a sailboat, to give to the ethical character of the face-to-face relation not only a certain stability, constancy, and endurance, but also, as in the lives of the saints, a more highly developed capacity for compassion, a capacity for responsiveness to the sufferings and needs of the other that is seemingly almost beyond the extent of the human. Thus, the most developed ethical life would be one in which the immediacy of the ethical relation is strengthened by a conscious relation to the pre-originary Saying of the moral law: strengthened and also greatly extended, since the Saying concerns how I should respond to each and every singularity. In this way, the effort to retrieve some sense, some echo, of the pre-originary Saying of the moral law serves the forming of ethical dispositions, an ethical character that, connecting the singular and the universal, would predispose me, prior to any actual encounter, to be more sensitive, more responsive, to the concerns of the other. And it is this spiritual predisposition of the flesh that makes me susceptible to the immediate manifestation of the moral law through the face-to-face. Of course, as soon as whatever is retrieved by, or in, that felt sense of the echo, indicating the imparting of the pre-originary Saying in a time that permits no present, is contained in and as something said, it requires what Levinas still calls phenomenological “suspension” or “reduction”, in order to return it—to submit it—to the priority, and the undoing, of the Saying. Indeed, even these philosophical statements that I am making here must submit to this paradoxical, aporetically driven procedure. Relying for the time being on Husserl’s terminology of reduction, despite its subtle treachery, Levinas argues that:

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The said in which everything is thematized [. . .] has to be reduced to its signification as saying, beyond the simple correlation which is set up between the saying and the said. The said has to be reduced to the signification of saying, giving it over to the philosophical said, which also has to be reduced. (AE 231, OB 183. Italics added.)

This formulation, however, makes the experience in question seem very theoretical, much too impersonal; so we must not forget that it is always a question of a really lived encounter with another: an ethical relationship taking place in the realm of communication. In this regard, therefore, it is crucial to bear in mind what Levinas says about the movement whereby, for the sake of the other before me, I am obliged to “sacrifice” the communication of the said, heeding the pre-originary Saying as I unsay what I said in the act of Saying: The I approaches the Infinite [Je m’approche de l’Infini] by going generously toward the You, who is still my contemporary, but presents himself out of a depth of the past, faces, and approaches me. I approach the infinite insofar as I forget myself for my neighbour who looks at me. I forget myself only in breaking the undephasable simultaneity of representation [. . .]. I approach the infinite by sacrificing myself. Sacrifice [i.e., a surrender of what is sacred] is the norm and the criterion of the approach. And the truth of transcendence consists in the concording of speech with acts.82

It is only for the sake of the other, then, that I am called upon to attempt, going into the depths of myself, a retrieval of the pre-originary Saying—insofar as it reverberates still, echoes still, in the bodily felt sense of a voice that is at once mine and not mine: a voice that speaks only to me and that I alone could hear, but that nevertheless speaks with an uncanny otherness, as if infinitely far, infinitely removed from the power of my own voice and from the certainty of self-knowledge. But how can this pre-originary Saying, trace or echo of the claim that has, unbeknownst to myself, “in an immemorial past, signified without ever having been present, signified on the basis of responsibility”, appropriated and affected me, making me exposed and vulnerable to the destitution of the other, be brought to bear on my conscious comportment? Levinas at times certainly appears to deny all recourse to memory, asserting, in “Diachrony and Representation”, for example, that the relation to the trace, or say the echo, can only be a question of— hearkening to a commandment that is therefore not the recall of some prior generous dispositions toward the other person, which, forgotten or secret, belong to the constitution of the ego, and are awakened as an a priori by the face of the other.83


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But is this the only modality of rememoration that is possible? Is this not, rather, the expression of a critique of just one particular practice? There must be some way of retrieving the pre-originary Saying, echo of the ethical commandment—otherwise the philosopher’s discourse would be nothing but empty rhetorical gestures, signifying nothing. It must be a question, then, of memory in a different mode: in any event, not a memory driven by any empirical or transcendental egoism, but a practice of memory committed otherwise. So the pre-originary cannot be retrieved by any anamnestic process taking place within the positivities of empiricism or within the intentionalities, the “Sinngebungen”, of transcendental consciousness, whether these be Cartesian, Hegelian, or Husserlian; for these methodologies assume the possibility of a total representation of past experience in the form of knowledge or self-knowledge. The memory required is not a narrative reliving or reenacting of the ego’s worldly dispositions and deeds; nor is it in the service of any transcendental constitution. It must be a practice of memory, a hermeneutical process, that absolutely resists the temptation to bring the preoriginary into objective or subjective presentness. But it must also be different, despite Levinas’s occasional invocations of Platonism, from the “anamnesis” in Plato’s dialogues. This much, then, we may conclude: whatever the legitimate rememorative process may be, it must not be [a] the making-present or the representing of [b] a form of knowledge [c] claimed with regard to an irreversible past “in which nothing is lost” and [d] which takes its place as irreversibly past within the temporal continuum. There is no way to get around the paradoxical temporality of the pre-originary: the fact of its anachronism, what in Totality and Infinity is described as the “posteriority of the anterior” (TIF 25, TIE 54). But of course it is not enough to know what the process is not. And it is in this regard that Levinas leaves me, at least, dissatisfied. The problem is moreover exacerbated when Levinas says that, in the experience of the other person’s ethical “proximity”, what gives itself to be “heard” is “a moral command” that has come “as though from an immemorial past” (AE 112, OB 88). What, then, are the traces, the echoes of alterity? How are we to take the “as though”? How can we “hear” a moral command that belongs to a past inaccessible by memory? What deconstruction of ethical experience, if any, does this little phrase implicate? Are these traces merely figures of the moral imagination, mere fabulations, schematizing an ideal of moral relationships in terms of a deep topography of the intersubjective body—a body not just mine, but the other’s, a body belonging as much to preceding and future generations as to those living in the present? Are they nothing but wish-fulfilling projections, ethical values cast onto human nature to give them the force of nature? Could it be said, or should it be said, that the traces or echoes of the other’s claims on me have no reality other

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than the role they play in my “tracework”—the tropological staging of my self-development as a moral subject, provocatively figured as a reflexive turn, or rather return, to retrieve, or attempt to retrieve, traces, echoes of motivation and guidance from the gift of a primordial incarnation, a body imagined as already graced with a moral predisposition? In this case, it is not that traces of the moral inscription, echoes of the pre-originary Saying, are already there, actually, really present in the flesh, simply awaiting the time of a reading or hearing, but rather that the traces or echoes of the moral law are a tropological production, markings or soundings on a fabulous topology of the body, legible or audible, if at all, only in and as the very movement that would make the flesh reveal its moral appropriation, its moral assignment—legible or audible, as it were, only by the heart that seeks them as signposts of encouragement along the stages of its moral journey. The desire to retrieve traces or echoes of our originary moral disposition cannot succeed; but it could nevertheless open us, precisely in the moment of failure, to that which we never have mastered and never should master: it could open us to the immeasurable humanity of the other and provoke us to make their welfare our cause. The retrieval towards which we have been moving in this chapter is, I think, radically different in every respect from the “Platonic “recollection”, the anamnestic “recuperation” that Levinas justifiably rejects.84 What is needed is an incarnate rememoration, a “practice of the self” voluntarily retrieving and reactivating, if only from the faintest of echoes, a certain bodily felt sense of response-ability—call it a pre-originary Saying—a Saying the reverberations of which, though almost nothing, we nevertheless carry with us by grace of the extraordinary medium of memory and imagination that is our flesh. We also need a phenomenological account of social interactions much more intricate than the sketches that Levinas provides, because what urgently motivates the retrieval and reactivation is always, after all—the “face”, or “proximity”, of the other. In the “presence” of the other—a “presence” that is destitution and absence, I am recalled to myself, reminded in seemingly unprovoked accusation to make contact with my body’s—my voice’s—never entirely obliterated felt sense of its pre-originary subjection to the ethical relation, its indebtedness and shame before the voice of the other. As a “practice of the self”, ethics requires attentiveness to the inaudible, the inapparent, the Saying that nevertheless lets itself be heard through the relation of the one with the other. For, in certain telling moments, a deeply felt sense of the corporeal remnants of pre-originary experience can suddenly overcome us, anarchically disturbing our composure, revealing, beyond our powers of denial, our involuntary subjection to the law of the other—a Saying that sets in motion the always belated consciousness of my obligation to the other. Although there are immeasurable benefits to be had, if one knows Church Latin, Aramaic, or Hebrew, one does not need to understand them to


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derive the most intense pleasure and the very deepest spiritual inspiration simply from hearing the sound of the liturgy chanted in these tongues. The voices themselves are bearers of the spirit, angelic signifiers. And precisely here there is indebtedness beyond all measure. But how can there be a transmission of meaning without any understanding of the language? How can meaning be retrieved from the voice of the other? Before this enigmatic phenomenon, this paradox, the voice of Reason is stilled. Nor can the voice of Reason lend itself to an explanation of the indebtedness one can hear avowed by the melodic and rhythmic qualities of one’s own voice. Thus if, whenever I am speaking, I should listen with care into the depths of my voice, I find that I can hear, gathered and resounding within it, the voices of all those who have in any significant way figured in the conditions of my life: family, friends, teachers, neighbours, compatriots; and not only the voices of the living, but also the voices of the dead; and not only the voices I have heard directly, but also the voices that can be heard through the medium of the written word, the voices of the poets I have read, the voices of those in whose imprints of thought, still resonant with their distinctive voices, I have so often found my heartfelt dwelling. My voice is indebted to these absent voices, which have affected me deeply—most often without my awareness. And with each absent voice there comes a summons—and a questioning of my response-ability. My voice is never first; my first word is already an avowal of indebtedness, obligation, responsibility. Can I retrieve this moment of avowal? There is a poet whose verse may be said to address this question. With the plainest of words he gave it his voice. In “As On a Holiday . . .”, Hölderlin wrote: And that which happened before, but hardly was felt, is manifest only now [. . .].85

The ethical responsibility that binds me to the other manifests in mysterious ways. But only when we are prepared to retrieve it, to listen for the echoes of its Saying. The moral law remains imperative, commanding respect and obedience, precisely because its hold on us comes from another temporality: it cannot be reduced to the totally present, an object of possession and knowledge, but demands of us an interminable effort to ground our lives nonetheless in an experience of its order. It is only this intense effort that ultimately matters, for the desire to make immediate contact with the origin of the moral law is, despite the fact that we never have possessed it and never can, that which exposes and opens us to the moral existence of the other. Precisely because of the compelling recognition of its ultimate “failure”, the effort to retrieve the ethical in pre-originary Saying is already, in and of itself, a significant ethical act; accordingly, it can be understood only in ethical terms, not in terms of a

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procedure for the acquisition of empirical knowledge. And I am thus responsible for the exertion, working with a memory almost indistinguishable from the imagination, for the pre-originary is forever beyond recalling. Perhaps the final note in Adorno’s Minima Moralia could cast some light on this double bind: the ethical necessity, namely, that, in spite of its impossibility, we somehow attempt to think towards and experience the preoriginary Saying, the commanding voice of the moral law, if only in the trace of a trace, or the echo of an echo. In his concluding note, Adorno asserts that the horrors of history demand that we consider the human condition from a messianic perspective: The only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.86

It is this attempt, I am suggesting, that, in the context of Levinas’s ethics, we should interpret as the effort to retrieve echoes or traces of the preoriginary Saying. The origination of the moral law remains inaccessible: it cannot be re-presented, cannot be possessed in its presence; its prophecy, its messianicity prohibits knowledge and images. But the Saying nevertheless takes hold of us. And from our sense of the retrieved, we are granted a sensibility capable of registering the world as it is in its moral condition. Adorno’s note continues: Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, revealing it to be [. . .] as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.

Translating this into Levinas’s ethics, we learn that it would be from our achieved sense of the pre-originary Saying that such perspectives could be formed. Adorno, again: To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought.

The task for ethical thought—the task, in fact, for an ethical life—must involve felt contact, as Adorno says, with its “objects”, its “objectives”; but it is crucial that this task be understood to imply felt contact with the body’s sense of the pre-originary Saying: felt contact with the echoes of this Saying, a hetero-affection that, reverberating through the spiritual medium of the flesh, can always still be retrieved from oblivion for the sake of the human voice. For the sake of its humanity.


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This task, Adorno says, “is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge.” However, as meta-physical, it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the realm of existence [. . .].

Consequently: “Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible.” This is precisely why the attempt that we have undertaken in the present chapter—the attempt, namely, to retrieve a felt sense of the pre-originary Saying—is of the utmost importance. And yet, as Adorno will observe in Negative Dialectics, it has become questionable whether it is still possible to have a “metaphysical experience.”87 Are we, today, definitively cut off from the standpoint of redemption? Can we still make felt contact with the messianicity prophetically encrypted in things—and even, or rather, most especially, in the spirit of our own flesh? In “The Paradox of Morality”, Levinas addresses this question, speaking with a courage that perhaps only the most unshakable faith could sustain: It cannot be concluded that, after Auschwitz, there is no longer a moral law, as if the moral or ethical law were impossible, without promise.

And then he adds: Before the twentieth century, all religion begins with the promise.88

If religion begins with the promise of redemption, ethics, for Levinas, begins with the pro-mise of the moral law: the pre-originary, metaphysically “a priori” setting-in-place of the moral law, its blessing and its curse bestowed upon the otherwise biological nature of the flesh in a time beyond the individual’s possibility of memoration. In our culture of discipline, nature is avowed only as repressed and denied. But nature resists total subjugation. Moreover, paradoxically, this cultural opposition to nature, a mixture of rejection, outright exclusion, and repressive inclusion, preserves in it—in the vestiges of nature not totally incorporated by the culture of discipline—the power to demonstrate its resistance, challenging the repressive authority and the violence of a culture that no longer recognizes any limitations, any metaphysical measure. It is precisely because the flesh in its elementality, irreducible to the body of sociocultural construction, belongs to the abyssal dimensions of nature and cannot be captured by culture—by its relativism and egocentrism—that the moral law is bestowed upon it and encrypted for safekeeping within its folds. To be sure, it is in the nature of the body to oppose and resist the moral law whenever the law calls for the inhibition of its impulses and desires. But

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inasmuch as the body is a socio-cultural construction, this opposition and resistance are always and already configurations within the dialectic of that construction. The elemental flesh out of which the human body is formed is, by contrast, absolutely metaphysical, a profound transcendence. This metaphysical transcendence means, however, that the attempt to retrieve the moral law in its pre-originary operation is an effort that must fail. It “must” fail in two senses: not only “de facto”, i.e., because of that transcendence, but also “de jure”, because, were it to succeed, that accessibility would expose the categorical absoluteness of the ethical to the compromises and corruptions of principle that characterize everyday life. Thus, the effort to retrieve echoes of the pre-originary Saying of the ethical is not merely a virtuous gesture, but is also, paradoxically, an effort whose failure is absolutely required by the moral law itself—for this failure constitutes a glorious revelation of the absolute metaphysical transcendence of the ethical. There is a certain small, but perhaps not insignificant resemblance between [1] my argument here that we must strive to retrieve the preoriginary Saying which takes hold of the flesh, despite knowing the impossibility of recuperating it in its presence, and [2] Kant’s argument, in the Critique of Practical Reason, that the moral law requires that human beings realize the common sense of humanity that they all carry within their hearts and strive to bring about a “Kingdom of Ends” here on earth, even though we can have no reason to think that we are capable of founding a perfectly moral world in which virtue is assured the reward of happiness. For Kant, it becomes necessary, therefore, to postulate the existence of God as ground of our hope. In my phenomenology, however, it is not a question of postulating a practical ground, but rather of remembering to contact our bodily felt sense of the voice of the moral law, necessarily absent, yet still echoing within our own voice—within its “soul”, as it were. Longing and striving for the absolute, the unconditioned, the immediate, pre-originary Saying of the moral law is desirable—as long as we understand the impossibility of attaining it. It cannot be known, but only felt through an act that partakes of both memory and imagination. We can know the origin of the moral law only through our inability to know and possess it—except as it appears in the felt echoes of its passing touch. The traces and echoes of a moral assignment inscribed and felt in the flesh would constitute, prior to the recognition of the moral law, the felt sense of our appropriation by a certain moral disposition; but these traces and echoes are indeed virtually nothing—unless, as I suggested before, we make something of them. Our “moral sources”, which we imagine to be buried beyond recall in the forgotten depths of the flesh, are thus always, nevertheless, with us, making us capable of sympathetic responsiveness to the suffering and destitution of the other, demanding of us the virtue in an interminable effort to approach and realize in the way we live out our allotted time of life the


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meaning of their assignment, their forever secret promise. Thus, even though recollection, reminiscence, is impossible, the exertion, as an ethical practice of the self, is not at all futile. Indeed, inasmuch as one’s responsibility to and for the other is in principle interminable, as unlimited in fact as possible, and one’s sacrifice never enough, the effort to expose oneself to the provocations of the pre-originary Saying, which even in felt traces and echoes can be awesome in communicating its power of ethical motivation, must be recognized as an essential gesture, acknowledging the claim of the other in the experience of an irreducible otherness: “It is by the voice of the witness that the glory of the infinite is glorified” (AE186, OB146).

Diagram II The Remembrance of the Voices of the Other in the Voice of the Subject

Epilogue 8 In his “Logological Fragments”, Novalis wrote that, “For this age, reason and the divine spirit do not speak audibly or strikingly enough from a human being—stones, trees, animals must speak in order to make the human being feel himself and make himself reflect.”1 Today, nature is in a sense speaking to us, speaking in the only language it knows: the language of devastation, ciphers pointing towards catastrophe, the dreaded silence of a wasteland in slow death. This is a language that speaks to us more directly, communicating the urgency and exigency of the imminent crisis by an appeal to our capacity for feeling. Novalis also remarks, in his “Miscellaneous Observations”, that, “The transcendental point of view for this life is awaiting us.”2 The final aphorism in Adorno’s Minima Moralia recapitulates this remark. Although already recited, its pertinence to our concluding reflections is such that, in order to develop my reflections, I shall quote from it again, setting it in a different context of questions: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, revealing it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.3

This, he says, is the arduous task of thought—thought which, precisely in its uncompromising negativity, points towards the possibility of wresting from what-is the conditions necessary for a radically different life-world. In my writing of this book, it has been my intention, and my ardent hope, to contribute in some small way to this task of thought. In no small measure, this has meant undertaking a work, a process of remembrance, for without the restitution of what in the name of unity and sameness, be it ego or empire, has been suppressed, excluded, or denied, no meaning for redemption is even conceivable.

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But how can there be restitution or redemption for species of plants and animals that have vanished and become extinct? May we claim any reason to believe in the reversibility of their fate? And is the ardent hope implicit in the metaphysics of restitution and redemption anything more than, anything other than, an impotent expression of our despair? To be sure, nature has demonstrated again and again its amazing powers of regeneration, its defensive resourcefulness, slowly undoing the destruction, the destructiveness, of human activity. But there are limits to these powers, these resources. There are some fragile ecosystems—forests, savannahs, marshes, swamps, lakes, rivers, coral reefs—in which it seems that the destruction may already have exceeded those creative limits. Is a planetary catastrophe already inevitable? Perhaps. Since, however, even if such a catastrophe is inevitable, we surely cannot claim now to know that it is, we cannot abandon all hope! But what good is served by hope? Are there different ways of hoping, different existential configurations? Should we not more wisely—or more prudently—maintain the infinitely more demanding openness of a hope that forfeits all consolatory eschatologies? Would it suffice, though, to make hope a question of the most extreme vigilance, awaiting the opportunities with which a future as yet unforeseeable might favour us? What would it be “reasonable” for us to hope for? And how would it be “reasonable” for us to carry—to bear—this hope? Much depends on whether, and how, the passion in hope is turned into useful action and a mindful way of living. Hoping must inspire, must motivate, must hold us to account. Otherwise, it becomes not merely a “passion inutile” and a type of “mauvaise conscience”; it becomes an avoidance of responsibility for what we know about the future and what we can do with that knowledge. There is, at the end of the day, only one question that matters: Are we, right now, doing everything that we possibly can do to rectify our reckless rule over nature and reverse the effects of our exploitation? As Adorno says, “The moment in which nature and history become commensurable with each other is the moment of passing [ist das von Vergängnis].”4 We have an historical responsibility for nature, entangled as it is in human history. For the sake of the souls of our children, all the generations to whom we must pass on our historical inheritance of nature, we must respect the autonomy of nature, its release from the curse of being merely useful, and preserve it in its beauty and sublimity. Derrida has argued that the future, object or end of hope, “can be anticipated only in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can be proclaimed, presented, only as a sort of monstrosity.”5 Does this mean that we must abandon all hoping? Abandon it because it is futile? But the future is not, after all, totally unpredictable—nor is expectation incapable of making a difference. Should hope be relinquished because it seduces us into complacency—the avoidance of responsibility? Does hope distract attention from what can be predicted

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about the future? Derrida’s evocation of the future is unsettling. To imagine the future “as a sort of monstrosity”, anticipating the worst we are capable of imagining, might encourage the assumption of responsibility, though it could also compel a despair that would suffocate inspiration and defeat motivation. It would certainly be wise to want a future significantly different from the present we are suffering and from the past whose ghosts we have inherited; but to want a future that breaks absolutely with the past, abandoning the predictive knowledge that we have gained and the progressive institutions that, in the course of bitter struggles, we have achieved, would be to risk the catastrophic, the very monstrosity we fear from a future that merely repeats the past with all its errancy. In his essay “On Being Haunted by the Future”, David Wood observes that, whilst it is imperative to acknowledge our limitations and necessary, also, to avoid attaching our desire, or our hope, to an empty utopianism or messianicity, distorting hope and anticipation by extending passion into an impossibly possible transcendence, it is equally imperative to avoid denying ourselves the capacity to anticipate, predict, and shape the future: “what is equally disturbing,” he says, “is not our inability to expect the unexpected, but the failure of our institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable.”6 I am taking this to suggest an indictment that calls for dramatic changes, both in our social practices and in our practices of the self, our ways of understanding who we are and determining what we are about. There is, to be sure, a certain configuration of consciousness in messiancity that can end up supporting the causality of fate rather than a causality of freedom, a causality in which, by virtue of our use of freedom in the assumption of responsibility, fate would become destiny, the future whose possibility must be carefully wrought from our material and spiritual inheritance. Hope must finally tear itself away from its prophetic obsession with the future, with the unpredictable, and begin putting its faith to the test in what can be done right now. In “Vergangenheit als Zukunft”, addressing us in a voice of audible passion to which we are not accustomed and permitting himself, as he seldom will, to give the voice of Reason the rhetorical effectiveness of prosopopeia, Jürgen Habermas observes that, while outer nature broods in its way on revenge for the mutilations we have inflicted on it, nature within us also raises its voice [. . .]. We cannot be deceived, for example, by the crippling sadness which overcomes us amidst a landscape destroyed and poisoned, stifled in its expression, by the hands of human beings and the detritus of civilization.7

What can be done right now? His answer, made with a vivid sense of its tragic limitations, remains constant: “Communicative reason operates in history as an avenging force.”8 But without the anarchy of utopian or messianic

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imagination, without an extreme effort of memory to retrieve the immemorial promise, what possible destiny—what new forms of sociality and new ways of relating to nature—could we wrest from the powers of fate? We of today bear a responsibility to bequeath a redeemed nature to future generations. This is an indeclinable moral obligation, since the very survival of future generations will depend on this inheritance. It is precisely in the argument for this difficult responsibility that my reflections on MerleauPonty and those on Levinas, seemingly far apart, should be understood ultimately to converge, bringing out from the recessive depths of their respective phenomenologies of language the moral claim whose echoes never cease to indebt and appropriate the human voice and its saying. What is at stake therefore is not merely a question of vouchsafing for the future the beauty and sublimity of nature. Without for an instant ceasing to work for major changes in our institutions and social practices that will benefit the natural environment, we must continue, as Shelley says in “Prometheus Unbound”, “to hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”9

My Voices I should like to be an ardent voice for the rights of the oppressed, an angry voice against the corruptions of justice, a voice of compassion attentive to the hurt we inflict upon each other, a voice of impatience in the confrontation with history, a voice of force to shake our slumbering indifference for the sake of a dying nature, a voice therefore of lamentation but a voice also with a message of hope, recalling the ancient promise that summons to their future our greatest and most worthy potentialities. I am still learning what it means to speak humanly.


Notes 8 Introduction 1. Wallace Stevens, “Chocorua to Its Neighbour,” The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 300. 2. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion (“Die Eigentliche Metrische Fassung”), Sämtliche Werke (Berlin and Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), p. 584: “Laß mich menschlich sprechen.” These words appear only in the early “Metric Version” of the novella. What follows those words, in a voice of sublime beauty, imparts the poet’s joyful recognition and embrace of the tragic finitude that conditions human existence. 3. Hölderlin, “Am Quell der Donau,” Sämtliche Werke, p. 299: At stake is “Die menschenbildende Stimme”. 4. Two books, recently published in Italy, deserve mentioning here: Salvatore Natoli, Parole della filosofia o dell’arte di meditare (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2004) and Adriana Cavarero, A più voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003). For thoughtfully engaged review summaries of these books, see, for the first one, Francesca Rigotti, “Etica del finito,” L’Indice dei libri del mese, vol. 21, no. 9 (Settembre 2004), p. 25 and, for the second one, Pier Paolo Portinaro, “La potenza del canto,” L’Indice dei libri del mese, vol. 21, no. 1 (Gennaio, 2004), p. 20. 5. Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), pp. 108, 115, 119, 127–28. My own translation. 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993), p. 138. 7. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 9; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 8. 8. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. J. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), Book I, ch. 2, pp. 28–29. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Preface to the English translation of Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienza e l’origine della storia (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1978); Infancy and History: An Essay on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993), p. 3.

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10. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Vox Clamans in Deserto,” The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 234–47. 11. Italo Calvino, “Un re in ascolto,” Sotto il sole giaguaro (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1995), p. 69. My translation. 12. Theodor Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. IV, p. 68; “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, p. 54. The German phrase is “die Stimme der Menschen zwischen denen die Schranke fiel.” 13. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin and Leipzig: Königliche Preussische [later Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften, George Reimer Verlag [later, Walter de Gruyter], 1900–), vol. V, §28, pp. 257–62. 14. I wonder whether the “voice of a friend” that Heidegger invokes so cryptically in Sein und Zeit should be thought of as his own version of the Kantian “sense of humanity” that he thinks all human beings bear. See Sein und Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1941), p. 163; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 206: “Listening-to [is] Dasein’s existential way of being open as beingwith for others. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-being—as in hearing the voice of a friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears, because it understands.” 15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.: 1956), A 613/B 641, p. 513. 16. Theodor Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen,” Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. II, p. 291; “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, p. 249. 17. Ibid., p. 293 in the German, p. 251 in the English. 18. Ibid., p. 291 in the German, p. 249 in the English. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 215–21. I have slightly altered the translation in a few places. 20. Martin Heidegger, “Der Genesende,” Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961), vol. I, p. 313; Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), vol. II, p. 58. 21. Ibid., pp. 315–16 in the German, p. 60 in the English. 22. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Monologue”, in Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret M. Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 83–84. 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On Heidegger on Being and Dread,” in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press , 1978), p. 34.

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24. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 76. 25. Ibid., p. 80. 26. Ibid., p. 39. 27. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche-Preußische (subsequently Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, later, De Gruyter, 1900–), vol. 8, p. 422. And see “The President’s Speech”, an essay by the eminent neurologist, Oliver Sacks, in The New Yorker, April 15, 1985, p. 29. According to Sacks, many patients suffering from aphasia are, surprisingly, especially adept at distinguishing truth from lies and hypocrisy in the speech they hear, precisely because they cannot understand the ideas, but must rely entirely on the tonality of the voice— what Gottlob Frege called “Klangenfarben”—and on the other expressive qualities that accompany the words. Sacks remarks that he and others who have worked closely with aphasiac patients feel that it is impossible to lie to them, because their ability, their sensitivity, to tones of the voice—and other expressive elements—gives them exceptional powers of discrimination. 28. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 60. 29. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 179. 30. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Press, 1947), p. 363. 31. W. S. Merwin, Houses and Travelers (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 28. 32. See Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 20: Describing the voice of his teacher, Georges Dumas, Levi-Strauss brings us into an experience of the voice as a gathering of voices from the past: “It was,” he recalls, “a veritable siren’s voice, with strange inflections that took us back not only to his native Languedoc but to certain ancient modes of speech, musical variants that went beyond all regional considerations and partook of the quintessential music of spoken French.” 33. Thoreau, “Walking,” in Carl Bode (ed.), The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 616. 34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Joel Porte, ed., Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 28. 35. Jay Bernstein, “Negative Dialectics as Fate: Adorno and Hegel”, in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 28–29. 36. Ibid. And see Thomas Bernhard, Ungenach: Erzählung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 17: “Die Natur existiert gar nicht mehr.” And he does not mean this in a Foucauldian sense!

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37. On the question of fate, see G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 228–30. 38. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1987), p. 28. 39. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Das Allgemeine Brouillon”, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig (Herrliberg-Zürich: Bühl-Verlag, 1945), p. 305; “General Draft”, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret M. Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 128. 40. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 70. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 216. 44. Merleau-Ponty, “L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui,” Notes de cours, 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 159–68. 45. Max Horkheimer, “On the Concept of Philosophy,” Eclipse of Reason, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum Book, Seabury Press, 1947), p. 165. 46. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 74. 47. Blanchot, op. cit., Part III, ch. 5, p. 459 in the French, p. 314 in the English translation. 48. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 33. 49. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989, p. 74. And see also Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 3, in regard to the “tone” of philosophical discourse. 50. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1799), p. 14. 51. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Vintage, 1966), vol. I, ch. 26, p. 112. 52. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 75. 53. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), p. 76; Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104. 54. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 243. 55. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 5.

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56. See Stanley Cavell, “Counter-philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 58. The phrase is his. 57. Rainer Nägele, “Public Voice and Private Voice: Freud, Habermas, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 72. Also see Lawrence Klein, “Enlightenment as Conversation,” in Keith M. Baker and Peter H. Reill (eds.), What Is Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 148–66. 58. Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003). 59. Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 140. 60. Ibid., p. 162. 61. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 62. Jacques Derrida, “D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1983); “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Semeia 23 (1982), pp. 63–97 and in Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984), pp. 3–37. Also see Peter Fenves (ed.), On the Rise of Tone in Philosophy: Kant and Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 63. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes from 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, Continuum Books, 1978), pp. 107–8. 64. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961), Bd. I, pp. 168–69. For the English, see Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), vol. I, The Will to Power As Art, pp. 143–44. 65. Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954), pp. 55–56; What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glen Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 26. 66. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Liars”, in Donald Frame, trans. and ed., The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), Part I, ch. 9, p. 23. 67. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), p.p. 130–31; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), §66, p. 103. 68. Jürgen Habermas, “Introduction,” Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age, trans. Andrew Buchwalter (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 18.

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69. Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), pp. 181, 145. 70. Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 8. 71. See a letter from Theodor Adorno to Max Horkheimer, dated 21 September, 1941, in (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, trans. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 506. 72. Adorno, Minima Moralia, §90, pp. 179–80 in the German, p. 137 in the English. Italics added. 73. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 168. 74. Michel Foucault, “Le ‘non’ du père,” Dits et Écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. I, p. 201; “The ‘No’ of the Father,” in James D. Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. II, p. 17. 75. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 208; Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 179. And see Montaigne, “Of Prompt or Slow Speech,” Essays, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), Book I, ch. 10, p. 26: “The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draws more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself. [. . . ] This also happens to me: I do not know what I meant; and sometimes, a stranger has discovered it before I do.” Merleau-Ponty’s version is: “We who speak do not necessarily know what we express better than those who hear us.” 76. Ibid., p. 407 in the French, p. 354 in the English. And see Montaigne, “Of Liars,” Essays, Book I, ch. 9, p. 23: “We are human beings and belong to one another only by way of the word.” 77. See Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec autrui de l’enfant (Paris: Centre du Documentation Universitaire, 1975); “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 78. In any event, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed this. See his essay on “Nature”, in Joel Porte (ed.), Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 46. 79. Joel Porte (ed.), Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 339. 80. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 30; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 51. See also Paul Celan’s evocation of the scream in “Edgar Jené und der Traum von Träume,” Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. III, p. 160: “Have we not wanted to hear screams, our own screams louder than ever, more piercing?”

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81. Karl Kraus, Die Sprache, Werke, ed. Heinrich Fischer (München: Kösel Verlag, 1956), Bd. II, p. 444. He also argued that there is an “image of divine justice” in language. See his Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), Bd. II, p. 175. Perhaps this sense of “image” corresponds to Levinas’s notion of a “pre-originary Saying”, committing language to the moral law as well as to Habermas’s argument that there are normative ideals implicit in every communicative interaction. Also see Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” in David Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 82. Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 91. 83. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 29; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 13. I would have liked to include, either as cover or as frontispiece, an image reproduction of Enoch Wood Perry’s oil painting, “Talking It Over” (1872), in the collection of American paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An eloquent painting of a conversation taking place in a farmhouse, with nature very much in presence. As I look at this painting, I am reminded of Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace”: “Much from morning on has mankind lived through, ever since we are a conversation and listen to one another.” 84. Ibid., p. 318 in the French, p. 264 in the English. 85. Ibid., p. 190 in the French, pp. 144–45 in the English. 86. Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue: Self-Consciousness and Proximity of the Neighbour”, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 142. Also see Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 174–75 on “Dialogue” and “Monologue”. Rosenzweig argues there that , “Only when the I acknowledges the Thou as something external to itself, that is, only when it makes the transition from monologue to authentic dialogue, only then does it become the I. . . . The I of the monologue is not yet an I. . . . Only in the discovery of a Thou is it possible to hear an actual I. . . .” Levinas is indebted to Rosenzweig for many of the terms that figure in his own thinking; however, they differ profoundly with regard the symmetry of the ethical relation and with regard to its basis in commonality, the “likeness” between one’s neighbour and oneself. On this topic, Rosenzweig is much closer to Buber. Thus, see Rosenzweig on “The Eternal in Man”, op. cit., p. 259. 87. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 181 in the French, p. 137 in the English. 88. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 407; p. 354 in the English translation.

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89. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, pp. 231–32. 90. Ibid., pp. 236–37. 91. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” in Poems and Fragments, in bilingual edition, trans. Michael Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 438–39. 92. Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Schlußszene des Faust,” Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. II, p. 138; “On the Final Scene of Faust,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, p. 120. 93. Rosenzweig, op. cit., p. 274. 94. Ibid., p. 321. Chapter 1: The Remembrance of Nature in the Voice of the Subject 1. Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. Nadler, 6 vols. (Wien: Herder, 1949–1957), vol. 3, p. 192. My translation. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Molinari, eds. (Berlin-New York: Walther de Gruyter, 1967–1977), vol. 4, p. 38; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1954), p. 33. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours 1935–1951 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1997), p. 66. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 223, 233, 266; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 170, 179, 212. Hereafter, these works will be cited, in my text, as, respectively, VIF and VIE, followed by the page numbers. The “lien natal” is invoked at VIF 54, VIE 32. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 2nd edn., 1945), p. 239; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 185. Hereafter, the French edition will be cited as PPF, the English as PPE. 6. See Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses, suivi de proèms (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). 7. Walter Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), Bd. I, Teil 2, p. 148; “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, eds., Edmund Jephcott, trans., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1913–1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. I, p. 69. It should be noted that “Sprache” means “speech” as well as “language”. Also see Benjamin’s essay, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”—in English, “The Task of the Translator”, op. cit., pp. 253–63.

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8. See Marianne Cowan, ed. and trans., Humanist Without Portfolio, An Introduction to the Writings of Wilhem von Humboldt (Detroit: 1963), pp. 235–36. Cowan attributes the text I have cited to Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ankündigung einer Schrift über die volkische Sprache und Nation nebst Angabe des Gesichtspunktes und Inhaltes derselben”. 9. Merleau-Ponty, The Concept of Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 71. 10. Edmond Jabès, Le petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 31. 11. Merleau-Ponty, PPF 218, PPE 187. 12. See Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 38, citing Marjorie Boulton’s The Anatomy of Poetry (1968): “connotative meaning clings to sound like ants to a sweet apple: b and p sounds feel explosive; m, n, and ng we experience as humming and musical; l as liquescent, holding within itself something of streams, water, rest; k, g, st, ts and ch as harsh; t, w, and v as evocative of wind, wings, an easy light motion; t and d as best suited for short actions, and th tends to be soothing.” 13. See David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), especially the chapters titled “What Is Ecophenomenology?” (pp.149–68) and “Globalization and Freedom” 169–94). This is an admirable contribution to contemporary ethics and politics—indeed, to the very practice of philosophical thought as a questioning response to the needs of our time. Also see the exceptionally fine contributions to a phenomenologically grounded ecology in the writings of Ted Toadvine, a few of which I will name here, especially recommended:”Naturalizing Phenomenology,” in Linda Alcoff and Walter Brogan (eds.), Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existentialism, vol. 25, Supplement to Philosophy Today, vol. 44 (1999), pp. 124–31; “Nature and Negation: Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Bergson,” Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning MerleauPonty’s Thought, vol. 2 (2000), pp. 107–18; “Singing the World in a New Key: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Sense,” Janus Head, vol. 7, no. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 273–83; “Limits of the Flesh: The Role of Reflection in David Abram’s Ecophenomenology,” Environmental Ethics, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 155–70; “The Primacy of Desire and its Ecological Consequences,” in Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine (eds.), Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 139–53; and “Ecophenomenology in the New Millenium,” in Steven Crowell, Lester Embree, and Samuel Julian (eds.), The Reach of Reflection: Issues in Phenomenology’s Second Century (Pittsburgh: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, 2001). And here are some other important works: David Wood, Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

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Press, 2005); Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, eds, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream (New York: Routledge, 1989); Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century (New York: Crown Publications, 1991); John Russon, “Embodiment and Responsibility: MerleauPonty and the Ontology of Nature,” Man and World, vol. 27 (1994), pp. 291– 308; Renaud Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty et la nature,” Chiasmi Internationale, vol. II (2000), pp. 47–62; David Abram, “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth,” in David Macauley (ed.), Minding Nature: The Philosophy of Ecology (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), pp. 82–101; and Glen Mazis, Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). Mazis has also written a very compelling critique of Arne Naess: “Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne Naess,” in Environmental Philosophy, vol. I, no. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 46–61. In one of his Shakespeare lectures, Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued the case for Romanticism, strongly rejecting conventionalism, according to which “The sound sun, or the figures s, u, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object.” For conventionalism, “the language of nature is a subordinate logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing represented, and was the thing represented.” This conception of language exemplified, for him, the “fallen” experience and understanding of language that developed after Adam’s exile from Paradise. The task of poetry was consequently to approach as closely as possible the spirit, if not the letter, of the prelapsarian language. See The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper & Brothers,1854), vol. IV, pp. 45, 47. See Nowell C. Smith, ed., Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (London: H. Milford, 1925). Wordsworth seems to have coined this phrase in writing the 1800 Preface to his Lyrical Ballads. Also see a magnificent study by Gerald Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001). Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1966), p. 11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Joel Porte (ed.), Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 271. Ibid., p. 266.

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19. See the argument that Mauro Carbone makes for this point in Ai confini dell’esprimibile: Merleau-Ponty a partire da Cézanne e Proust (Milano: Angelo Guerini, 1990), p. 194. My translation. On the “rehabilitation ontologique du sensible”, see Merleau-Ponty, “Le philosophe et son ombre,” Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 210; “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p.167. 20. Such is Merleau-Ponty’s orienting description of nature in his Introduction to La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), p. 2. See Aristotle, De Anima, Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), Book II, ch. 8, 410b34–421a4, p. 573: He has observed that it is possible for humans to speak only when breathing is in a certain way bound, restrained, channeled. The binding of the breath gives rise to the voice; the binding of the voice gives rise to speech; and grammar for the sake of writing is the binding of speech. 21. See Renaud Barberas, “Merleau-Ponty and Nature,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 31 (2001), pp. 22–38. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Philosopher,” in Daniel Breazeale, trans. and ed., Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1979), §58, p. 22. 23. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 15. The entry is dated June 9, 1822. 24. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Joel Porte, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 459. 25. Ibid., p.449. 26. Ibid., p. 450. 27. Henry David Thoreau, “Sounds,” in Walden, ed. Carl Bode, The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 363. 28. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Die Dinge hör’ ich so gern,” first published in Mir zur Feier (Berlin: Meyer Verlag, 1899), p. 23: “Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort,/ Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus:/ Und dieses heißt Hund und jenes heißt Haus,/ und hier ist Beginn und das Ende dort./ Mich bangt auch ihr Sinn, ihr Spiel mit dem Spott./ Sie wissen alles, was wird und war; / kein Berg ist ihnen mehr wunderbar,/ ihr Harten und Gut grenzt grade an Gott./ Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern./ Die Dinge singen hör’ ich so gern./ Ihr rührt sie an: sie sind starr und stumm./ Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um.” My own translation. Rilke’s concern for the way the words we invent both form and accommodate our experience of the world is also conveyed in another poem, similar in part: “Nach so langer Erfahrung, sei “Haus”,/ “Baum”, oder “Brücke” anders gewagt./ Immer den Schicksal eingesagt,/ sag es sich endlich aus.// Daß wir das tägliche Wesen entwirrn,/ das jeder anders erfuhr,/ machen wir uns ein Nachtgestirn/ aus der gewußten Figur.” John L. Mood translates this poem as follows: “After such long experience, let “house”,/ “tree”, or

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29.

30. 31.

32.

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“bridge” be dared differently./ Always whispered to destiny,/ finally at last say it out.// To untangle daily creation,/ which all differently endure,/ we make ourselves a constellation/ out of the known figure.” See the bi-lingual text in John J. L. Mood (ed.), Rilke On Love and Other Difficulties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 74–75. In his ninth Duino Elegy, there is a third rendering of this theme; this time, however, the poet is even more daring, as he expounds the thought that the task of the poet is to find the right words for the “essence” or “interiority” of things, giving expression, giving voice to what things in their very muteness nevertheless communicate. This is strikingly reminiscent of Benjamin’s metaphysical reflections on the language, the spiritual communication, of things. Here is the pertinent part of the stanza, with my own translation: “Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,/ Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster,—/ höchstens: Säule, Turm? . . . aber zu sagen, verstehs,/ oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals/ innig meinten zu sein.” My translation: “Are we, perhaps, here, only for saying: “house”,/ “bridge”, “fountain”, “gate”, “jug”, “olive tree”, “window”,—/ indeed: “pillar”, “tower”? . . . but for saying, you know,/ oh for such saying as the things themselves never/ hoped so intensely to be.” See Rilke, “Duineser Elegien,”Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1960), p. 474. Rilke, Poems 1912–1926, a bi-lingual edition, trans. Michael Hamburger (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1981), pp. 46–47. The German reads: “Tiere traten getröst/in den offenen Blick, weidende,/ und die gefangenen Löwen/ starrten hinein wie in unbegreifliche Freiheit;/ Vögel durchfliegen ihn grad,/den gemütigen; Blumen/ wiederschauten in ihn/ groß wie in Kinder.” Among other things, Rilke also challenges here the radical separation of human beings and animal beings. Another poem similarly penetrates these persistent ontological dualisms: “Da steht er nächstens auf und hat den Ruf/ des Vogels draußen schon in seinem Dasein/ und fühlt sich kühn, weil er die ganze Sterne/ in sein Gesicht nimmt, schwer—”. In Michael Hamburger’s translation: “There in the night he rises and already/ inside his being has the call of birds/ outside, and he feels bold because he takes/ all of the stars into his vision, heavy—”. See Michael Hamburger (ed.), Poems 1912–1926, pp. 34–35. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), p. 15. Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows, and Other Poems, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger, with translations also by Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Strand (New York: New Directions, 1979), p. 13. Paul Valéry, “La Pythie,” in Album des vers anciens 1890–1900 (Paris: A. Monnie et cie, 1920), p. 43. Or see Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), vol. I, p. 136. Merleau-Ponty cites this verse in Le visible et l’invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 155.

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

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Hereafter, the French original will be cited as VIF, the English translation as VIE, followed by page numbers. Merleau-Ponty, VIF 203, VIE 155. Emerson, “Two Rivers,” in Mark Van Doren, ed., The Portable Emerson (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 345. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,”Essays and Lectures, p. 271. See Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1985), p. 199. And see Victor Perera and Robert Bruce, The Last Lords of Palenque: The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982). This is a heart-rending story of the commercial destruction of the mahogany forests, within whose protection the Lacandon have lived for millennia. They believe that “the roots of all things are tied together”, so that, every time a mighty tree is felled, a star in the heavens falls from the sky in sympathy. See p. 86. Are the “last lords”, then, the Lacandon priests and sages—or are they really the giant trees? It is also worth noting that, in their language, there is no word for silence as such, though there is a phrase for the absence of silence: no word. Devall and Sessions, op. cit., pp. 205–6. And see Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Life Style: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and “Validity of Norms: But Which Norms?”, in Ingemund Gullvag and Jon Wetlesen, eds., In Skeptical Wonder: Inquiries into the Philosophy of Arne Naess on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1982), pp. 257–69. Also see a compelling critique of Naess by Glen Mazis, “Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne Naess,” Environmental Philosophy, vol. I, no. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 46–61. Henry David Thoreau, in Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau, p. 549: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Colin Turnbull, “Song of the Forest,” The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), p. 92. Washington Matthews, “The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony.” Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, 1883–1884 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Annual Reports, 1887), p. 459. Anaximanes, Fragment 2, in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 19. The three quoted fragments from Herakleitos appear in Freeman, op. cit., pp. 27, 28, 32. I have altered the translations. Also see Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), pp. 279–318, 353–59. Merleau-Ponty, L’oeuil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 31–32; “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167.

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42. Friedrich W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), §123, p. 185. Italics added. 43. Emerson, Journals, in Joel Porte (ed.), The Portable Emerson (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 618. These words were written in 1856. 44. Emerson, “Nature,” in Joel Porte, ed., Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p.28. 45. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 209. 46. William Wordsworth, Prelude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Book V, p. 86. And see also the Netsilik Eskimo poet-shaman’s song, recorded by Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, trans. W. E. Calvert (Copenhagen: Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–1924, Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1931), vol. 8, no. 1–2, p. 321, which likewise understands the empowerment of words that are connected by mindfulness to the singing of the wind in the breath that words take: “Songs are thoughts, sung with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices. . . . My breath—this is what I call this song, for it is just as necessary for me to sing as it is to breathe.” “All my being is song,” he says. “I sing as I draw each breath.” 47. Rilke, “Sonnette an Orpheus,” Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1962), Part II, §1, p. 507; Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1962), p. 71. My translation here. 48. Ibid., Part I, §3, p. 488 in the German, p. 21 in the English translation. My translation here. 49. Ibid., Part II, §29, p. 526; in the English translation, p. 127. My translation here. 50. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 79. 51. Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaires, 1975), p. 37; “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 122. 52. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 172–73. 53. Ibid., p. 174. 54. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Macmillan, 1953). 55. Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 174. 56. Ibid., p. 173. 57. Ibid., p. 174.

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58. Levinas, “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?”, Entre Nous: Essais sur le penserà-l’autre (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), p. 19. For the English, see Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 7. 59. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’existence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 178; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), p. 140 60. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1936), p. 404. 61. See Jacques Lacan, “On Paranoia and its Relationship to Aggressivity,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) and “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 34 (1953). Pp. 11–17. Also see his study on “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed to Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, p. 17. For Lacan, it is paranoia that “constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with entities or things that are very different from the Gestalten which experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field.” 62. Lacan, Le Seminaire: Livre I. Les Écrits techniques de Freud, ed. J. A. Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), p. 22. 63. Ibid. 64. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 136; p. 105 in the English. 65. Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik?” (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1955), p. 35; “What Is Metaphysics?”, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 105, 108. 66. Ibid., p. 35 in the German, p. 106 in the English. 67. Ibid., p. 34 in the German, p. 105 in the English. 68. Ibid., p. 37 in the German, p. 108 in the English. 69. Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1936); Gesammelte Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1930–1934), Bd. IV, p. 118. These words are taken from an incomplete late poem written by the poet in 1924 to his wife, Clara. 70. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 180, p. 141 in the English. 71. Ibid., p. 146 in the French, p. 115 in the English. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 228 in the French, p. 181 in the English. 74. Ibid., pp. 227–28 in the French, pp. 180–81 in the English. 75. Ibid. p. 227 in the French, p. 180 in the English. 76. Ibid., p. 160 in the French, p. 113–14 in the English. 77. Foucault, “Neither One Nor the Other,” in Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside and Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (New York: Zone Books, 1987), p. 53. 78. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. p. 228, p. 181 in the English.

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79. Walter Benjamin, “Einbahnstraße,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), vol. IV, Part I, p. 113; “One-Way Street,” Selected Writings: 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 463. 80. Edmund Jabès, “Return of the Book,” The Book of Questions, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), vol. III, p. 151. 81. Rilke, Due Sonette an Orpheus Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1962), Part II, p. 526; Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), Part II, p. 127. 82. See David Sobel (ed.), Ways of Health: Holistic Approaches to Ancient and Contemporary Medicine (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), p. 177. Recent research suggests that singing and listening to song may actually be therapeutic for some patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and even—perhaps because of strong rhythms, patients with movement disorders caused by Parkinson’s disease, improving or restoring memory and other cognitive powers, and inducing patients who had completely withdrawn from the world to return from the silence of an extreme speechlessness to communicative sociability. The patient’s ability to experience an “emotional resonance” in relation to the music appears to be crucial in many cases. Clive Ballard, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society and Professor of Age-Related Diseases at King’s College, London, spoke in support of the findings in this research. See Jane Elliot, “How Singing Unlocks the Brain,” BBC Internet News Health Report, November 20, 2005. 83. Emerson, Emerson and His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 399. The entry is dated November 1848. 84. Ibid., pp. 69–70, 321. Also see Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 91. 85. Ibid., p. 300. The entry is dated February, 1843. 86. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 203; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 155. 87. Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), Bd. II, pp. 140–57; “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 314–36. And see “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” op. cit., pp. 210–13; “On the Mimetic Faculty,” op. cit., pp. 333–36. 88. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” “Celebration of Peace,” Poems and Fragments, bi-lingual edition, trans. and ed. Michael Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 438–39. 89. Hölderlin, “Germania,” op. cit., pp. 404–5. My translation here. See in regard to language and mouth, Michael C. Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Also see

Notes

90. 91.

92. 93.

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Black Elk Speaks, ed. John G. Neihardt (New York: Pocket Books, 1959), p. 90. Describing his experience singing the ancient songs of his tribe, Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux sage, spoke of “feathers of all colours coming out of the mouth.” Concerning the mouth in regard to its opening and closing, and also to the relation between animal and human, all matters that figure in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, see Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 70: “The silence of the mystery is undergone as a rupture, plunging man back into the pure, mute language of nature; but as a spell, silence must eventually be shattered and conquered. This is why, in the fairy tale, man is struck dumb, and animals emerge from the pure language of nature in order to speak. Through the temporary confusion of the two spheres, it is the world of the open mouth, of the Indo-European root *bha (from which the word fable is derived), which the fairy tale validates, against the world of the closed mouth, of the root *mu.” Hölderlin, “Brot und Wein,” Poems and Fragments, pp. 246–47. My translation here. Heidegger, “Das Wesen der Sprache,” Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Günther Neske, 1959), pp. 207–8; “The Nature of Language,” On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 101. Also see “Aus Einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” op. cit, pp. 142f and “A Dialogue on Language,” op. cit., pp. 47–48, where a Zen master tells Heidegger that the Japanese expression for language would be “koto ba”, meaning “the petals that stem from koto”. Heidegger, taking “koto” to refer to being, or perhaps to the divine, the numinous, the ultimately enigmatic origin of all things, responds by attempting to let the sound “koto” resonate freely within the experiential field opened up by that metaphor. See Thoreau, “Walking,” in Carl Bode (ed.), The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 616. Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1962), p. 517; Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), Part 2, p. 99. Hölderlin, “Ermunterung”, “Exhortation,” in the bi-lingual edition, Poems and Fragments, pp. 160–63. My translation here. The sixth of Pindar’s “Olympian Odes” entreats the gods with words of moving beauty: “Make blossom the delightful flower of my song.” He was probably the first poet to suggest this metaphor. Commenting on Hölderlin’s phrase, in “Germanien”, “flower of the mouth” and his phrase “Worte wie Blumen” in “Brot und Wein”, Heidegger says that, in the singing of poetizing language, “the earth blossoms toward the bloom of the sky.” See Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darmstadt: TempelVerlag, 1960), pp. 278 and 322; and see Martin Heidegger, “Das Wesen der Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959),

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95. 96. 97.

98.

99.

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pp. 205–206, 208. In those same pages, Heidegger also argues that, “The mouth is not merely a kind of organ of the body understood as an organism—body and mouth are part of the earth’s flow and growth in which we mortals flourish, and from which we receive the soundness of our roots.” Heidegger here directs our hearing to the sound of the earth in language— its “earthiness”. In Hölderlin’s Erde und Himmel,” he argues that the task for us is to hear gathered into a harmony within our own voices the voices of the earth, the sky, the gods, as well as the voices of other people. See his Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), p. 170. In “A Tree,” Houses and Travelers (New York: Atheneum), p. 14, W. S. Merwin wrote: “All the roots of the earth reach blindly towards mouths that are waiting to say them.” Undoubtedly influenced by Hölderlin and the other Jena Romantics, Ralph Waldo Emerson comments that the poet speaks “with the flower of the mind.” See his esay, “The Poet”, in Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 452. The Aztecs apparently experienced language in a similar way, hearing song, or refined speech, as a flowering of the mouth. See Angel María Garibay, Historia de la literature nahuatl (Mexico City: 1953–1954), cited in Miguel Léon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack E. Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux medicine man, is recorded describing the tribe’s ceremonial chanting as like “feathers of the mouth”. See John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), p. 90. In bitter cold winters, it is not surprising that the singer’s breath should give that appearance. Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, Part I, pp. 504, 517; Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, pp. 67, 99. Rilke, Poems 1912–1926, trans. Michael Hamburger (Redding Ridge, Connecticut: Black Swan Books, 1981), pp. 80–81. My translation here. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag Taschenbuch, 1971), pp. 38–39; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 32. Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. II, p. 84; Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, p. 70. Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Neue Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1967), Bd. I, p. 112. Also see his essay on “Die Neuere Romantik,” op. cit., Bd. IV, p. 243, where the poet repeats this motif in recollecting “eine Feenzeit, da das wunderbare Lied, das in allen Dingen gebunden schläft, zu singen anhob, da die Waldeinsamkeit das

Notes

100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

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uralte Märchen der Natur wiedererzähtle, von verfallenen Burgen und Kirchen die Glocken wie von selber anschlugen, und die Wipfel sich rauschend neigten [. . .].” Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, p. 83; pp. 68–69 in the English. See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in K. F. A. Schelling, ed., Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart und Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1860), Bd. VII, 1, p. 399; also see p. 411. For the English, see Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1936), p. 79; and also see p. 92. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), p. 349; Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, New Left Books, 1998), p. 224. In this work, concerned with the origin of the “Trauerspiel”, Benjamin takes the greatest possible pains to distinguish the “Trauerspiel” from tragic drama. That is the principal contribution, in fact, of this work. The English translation of the title is therefore singularly inappropriate and misleading. I will therefore refer to this work by its more accurate English title. Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), Bd. II, Part 1, p. 417; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Reflections, p. 329. Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Torino: Einaudi, 1990), p. 49; The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 58. Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” op. cit., p. 417; for the English, see op. cit., p. 329. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Frankfurt an Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), §63, p. 393; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 271. Peter Matthiessen, The Nine-Headed Dragon River (Boston: Shambhala, 1985), pp. ix–x. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, p. 508 in the German, p. 73 in the English. My translation here. Ernst Herbeck, Alexanders Poetische Texte, ed. Leo Navratil (München: 1977), p. 7: “Die Poesie lernt man vom Tiere aus, das sic him Walde befindet.” See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer (March, 1956), in Lorenz Jäger, “Prologue,” Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. ix.

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111. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), Bd. II, p. 484. My own translation. The fragment was probably written in 1922. 112. Hölderlin, “Die Titanien,” Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin & Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), p. 362: “Denn es fehlet/ an Gesang, der löset den Geist.” Chapter 2: The Question of Origins 1. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 214; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p.184. In future, the French will be cited as PPF, the English as PPE, followed by page numbers. 2. Regarding the question of origins, see Fabio Ciaramelli, “L’originaire et l’immédiat: Remarques sur Heidegger et le dernier Merleau-Ponty,” Review philosophique de Louvain, no. 2, 1998, pp. 198–231: concerning the “primordial nature of the detour through symbolism”, he argues that, “The order of symbolic mediation that constitutes the original deviation of the origin founds the inaccessibility, in terms of immediacy, of the originating.” (See p. 229) Instead of “founds”, though, I would have preferred to say “ensures”. 3. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), vol. II, p. 208. 4. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 166–67; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). p. 125. As before, the French will be in future cited as VIF and the English will in future be cited as VIE, followed by the page numbers. 5. See Maurice Blanchot, “Le Paradoxe de Aytré,’ La Part du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 68; “The Paradox of Aytré,” The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 62. The refusal to speak is, he justly says there, immeasurably more silent than that of a mollusk or a stone. 6. Blanchot, La Part du Feu, p. 131; The Work of Fire, p. 126. 7. Richard Erdoes, ed., Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), pp. 155–56. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), esp. pp. 246, 276–77. And see Michael C. Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 9. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Schriften, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1960), Bd. III, §295, p. 283. My own translation. And see J. G. von Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, Sämtliche Werke (Berlin, 1981), Bd. 5, p. 51: “Man himself invented language from the sounds of nature.”

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10. Novalis, Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (München, Wien: Hanser Verlag, 1978), Bd. II, p. 699. My own translation. This principle of “sobriety” originated, I believe, with Hölderlin. 11. See in this regard, the analysis of vowels, consonants, and dipthongs in Marjorie Boulton, the Anatomy of Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). She argues that, on the level that Aristotle calls “melos”, connotative meaning clings to the sensuous qualities of the sounds that are taken into speech. 12. Merleau-Ponty, “La conscience et l’acquisition du langage,” Bulletin de psychologie, vol. XVIII, no. 236 (1964), pp. 3–6. For the English, see “The Contribution of Linguistics,” in Hugh Silverman ed. and trans., Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 81. 13. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 464; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), III, ch. 5, p. 317. 14. Ibid., pp. 459–64 in the French, pp. 314–17 in the English. 15. Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 21, 53–54. 16. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (München: Deutschen Taschenbuch: 1976). Unfortunately, so far, I can neither remember nor find the page on which I once read these words. 17. And see Merleau-Ponty, L’institution: La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France 1954–1955 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 57. 18. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 229. 19. Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (New York: American Book Co., 1935), vol. II, p. 58. 20. Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: un seminario sul luogo della negatività (G. Einaudi: Torino, 1982), pp. 104–5. My own translation. See Aristotle, De Anima, Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), Book II, ch. 8, 420b34–421a4, p. 573: He has observed that it is possible for humans to speak only when breathing is in a certain way bound, restrained, channeled. The binding of the breath gives rise to the voice; the binding of the voice gives rise to speech; and grammar for the sake of writing is the binding of speech. 21. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. I, 2, p. 694; “Theses in the Philosophy of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 254. The citation comes from the third thesis. Also see some short texts, “Zur Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik,” “Zur Moral und Anthropologie,” and “Zur Aesthetik,” Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. VI, pp. 9– 53, 54–89, 109–29.

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Chapter 3: The Voice of Ecological Attunement in a Practice of Caring for Oneself 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Sonnete an Orpheus, Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1962), Part I, p. 504; Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), p. 67. And see Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” Act IV, line 415: “Language is a perpetual Orphic song.” This expresses the still un-actualized critical utopian potential in language, the voice of language itself. 2. In this regard, see John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger, and Others (London: Macmillan, 1991). A fine, subtle argument for ecological responsibility. 3. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 189. 4. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 139; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 102–03. As before, references to this text will in future be cited as, respectively, VIF and VIE, followed by the page numbers. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “A Critical Backward Glance”, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), §III, p. 7. 6. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. and ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), Book III, note 809, pp. 427–28. 7. F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Cordova-Rios (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 28. 8. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 239. Also see p. 237. 9. Merleau-Ponty, “Le language indirect et les voix de silence,” La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 123; “The Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 87. 10. See the excellent study by Wayne J. Froman, Merleau-Ponty: Language and the Act of Speech (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1982). 11. See Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: The Bollingen Foundation, Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 85. 12. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 111. 13. Merleau-Ponty, “Le philosophe et son ombre,” Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 195, 210; “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167.

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14. See G. W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. II, part III, sect. 3, ch. II, p. 922 on musical harmony. 15. On “Metaphor, Image, Simile,” see ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. IIIb3a, p. 304ff. 16. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Vermischte Bemerkungen,” Das philosophischen Werk, I, Schriften, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: W, Kohlhammer, 1960), vol. II, p. 416; “Miscellaneous Remarks,” in Jay M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, trans. Joyce P. Crick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), §14, p. 204. 17. If we acknowledge our finitude, our ignorance, our fallibility, and recognize the fact that we are a part of the very nature we are attempting to understand, use and administer, then our interventions in nature must be undertaken with the greatest circumspection, the greatest mindfulness and vigilance. To that extent, it is imperative that, whilst regarding nature as a realm of necessity, we also become receptive to its seemingly free beauty and leave it to itself as much as possible, measuring the limits of our interventions by what we know and understand—and must undertake. Here, in the original German, is Friedrich Schelling’s first version, the 1811 version, of Die Weltalter, in which some of what I am trying to reflect upon here is brought so magnificently to expression: “Unserem Zeitalter scheint es vorbehalten gewesen zu seyn, den Weg zu dieser Objektivität der Wissenschaft für immer zu öffnen. So lange diese auf das Innerliche beschränkt bleibt, fehlt es ihr an dem natürlichen Mittel äußerer Darstellung. Jetzt ist, nach langen Verirrungen, die Erinnerung an die Natur, und an ihr vormaliges Eins-seyn mit ihr, der Wissenschaft wieder geworden. Aber dabey blieb es nicht. Kaum waren die ersten Schritte, Philosophie mit Natur wieder zu vereinigen, geschehen, als das hohe Alter des Physischen anerkannt werden musste, und wie es, weit entfernt das Letzte zu seyn, vielmehr das Erste ist, von dem alle, auch die Entwickelung des göttlichen Lebens, anfängt. Nicht mehr von der weiten Ferne abgezogener Gedanken beginnt seitdem die Wissenschaft; sondern umgekehrt, vom bewusstlosen Daseyn des Ewigen anfangend, führt sie es zur höchste Verklärung in einem göttlichen Bewußtseyn hinauf. Die übersinnlichen Gedanken erhalten jetzt physische Kraft und Leben, und umgekehrt wird Natur immer mehr der sichtbare Abdruck von den höchsten Begriffen. Eine kurze Zeit, und die Verachtung, womit ohnedies nur noch die Unwissenden auf alles Physische herabsehen, wird aufhören, und noch einmal wahr werden das Wort: Der Stein, den die Bauleute verworfen, ist zum Eckstein worden. Dann wird die so oft vergebens gesuchte Popularität von selbst sich ergeben. Dann wird zwischen der Welt des Gedankens und der Welt der Wirklichkeit kein Unterschied mehr seyn. Es wird Eine Welt seyn, und der Friede des goldnen Zeitalters zuerst in der einträchtigen Verbindung aller Wissenschaften sich verkünden.” “Bei diesen Aussichten, welche die

270

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

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gegenwärtige Schrift auf mehr als eine Weise zu rechtfertigen suchen wird, darf sich wohl ein oft überlegter Versuch hervorwagen, der zu jener künftigen objektiven Darstellung der Wissenschaft einige Vorbereitung enthält. Vielleicht kommt der noch, der das größte Heldengedicht singt, im Geist umfassend, wie von Sehern der Vorzeit gerühmt wird, was war, was ist und was seyn wird. Aber noch ist diese Zeit nicht gekommen. Wir dürfen unsere Zeit nicht verkennen. Verkündiger derselben, wollen wir ihre Frucht nicht brechen, ehe sie reif ist, noch die unsrige verkennen. Noch ist sie eine Zeit des Kampfs. Noch ist des Untersuchens Ziel nicht erreicht; noch muß, wie die Rede von Rhythmus, Wissenschaft von Dialektik getragen und begleitet werden. Nicht Erzähler können wir seyn, nur Forscher, abwägend das Für und das Wider jeglicher Meynung, bis die rechte feststeht, unzweifelhaft, für immer gewurzelt.” See the 1811 and 1813 “Urfassungen” in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter: Fragmente, Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter (München: Biederstein Verlag und Leibniz Verlag, Münchner Jubiläumsdruck, 1946), pp. 8–9. Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre du Documentation Universitaire, 1975), p. 18; “The Child’s Relations with Others,” The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1964), p. 109. Hereafter, the French original of this text will be cited as RF and the English translated will be referred to by the letters RE, followed by page numbers. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’education (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade edn., 1961), pp. 161–62. Also see the discussion of Rousseau in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: Belin edn., 1817), p. 176. Cited by Derrida in Of Grammatology, p. 242. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glen Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Part II, Lecture 1, p. 124. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 246 Ibid. Friedrich Schelling, “Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie,” Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1959), vol. III, p. 222. My own translation. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, p. 255. Ibid. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragment 116, “Athenaeum Fragments,” Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 31.

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29. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 9. The influence of Walter Benjamin’s essay on “The Mimetic Faculty” on Heller-Roazen’s use of empirical research is nothing short of profound. Giorgio Agamben’s writings on language have also obviously figured in the formation of his thought—not surprisingly, since he produced the English translations for several of Agamben’s books. 30. See, e.g., Roman Jakobson, on the “prattle” of infants, in Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, trans. Allan R. Keiler (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), p. 21. 31. Ibid. 32. Heller-Roazen, op. cit., p. 11. 33. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Prose,” Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 57. 34. Emerson, “Nature,” in Joel Porte, ed., Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), ch. 8, p. 46. Also see Giorgio Agamben, Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienza e dell’origine della storia (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1978) and my essay, “Verso l’origine etica della voce,” in Mauro Carbone and David Michael Levin, La carne e la voce: In dialogo tra estetica ed etica (Milano: Associazione Culturale Mimesis, 2003), pp. 67–115. 35. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays and Lectures, p. 261. 36. Heller-Roazen, op. cit., pp. 11–12. 37. Ibid., p. 13. And see the eighth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies on the question of language acquisition and the openness of “creaturely life” (die Kreatur) to the realm of plants and animals: Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1972), p. 470. 38. See John Locke, The Capacity for Spoken Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Also see Merleau-Ponty, “Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant” (Paris: Centre du Documentation Universitaire, 1975); “The Child’s Relations with Others,” The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 141–51. 39. Aristotle, De Anima, in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. J. A. Smith (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 573. 40. Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” in Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 354. The quotations come from the chapter on “Reading”. 41. Heller-Roazen, op. cit., pp. 16–17. And see Nikolas S. Trubetskoi, Principles of Phonology, trans. Christiane A. M. Baltaxe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 205–9. 42. Heller-Roazen, op. cit., p. 18. 43. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), §80, p. 285; Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), §80, p. 304.

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44. Benjamin, “Theses in the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), Thesis 2, p. 254. 45. See Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays and Lectures, pp. pp. 449, 450, 469. 46. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 4. 47. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 108; Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 103. 48. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §60, p. 216; Critique of Judgement, §60, p. 232. 49. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 47. 50. Paul Celan, “Sonnenfaden,” Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), vol. II, p. 26; “Sunthreads,” Poems of Paul Celan, bilingual edition, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1972), p. 227. The poem first appeared in Atemwende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). 51. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Èditions Gallimard, 1945), p. 368. 52. Maurice Blanchot, Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 445; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 302. Chapter 4: The Saying and the Said: Giving Time to the Voice of the Other 1. Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 339. 2. See Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem, The Daily Prayer Book (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1949), p. 331. 3. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 51. 4. Jean Cocteau, Renaud et Armide (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 23; “Renaud and Armide,” in André Fraigneau, Cocteau on Film, trans. Vera Traill (New York: Grove Press, Evergreen Books, 1961), p. 160. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 29; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 17–18. 6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, Sämtliche Werke (München: Carl Hauser Verlag, 1991), Bd. 17, §979, p. 886. My translation. 7. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 2e edn., 1967), p. 208; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 70.

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8. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 79–153. 9. See, e.g., Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989), pp. 104–28 and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). Also see Dorothy Leland, “Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism: Towards an Adequate Political Psychology,” Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989), pp. 86–103 and Alette Odin Hill, Mother Tongue, Father Time: A Decade of Linguistic Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Intonation in a Man’s World,” in Thorne, Kramarae, and Henley (eds.), Language, Gender and Society (Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House, 1983), pp. 69–87. . To get a sense of the cultural mythology under the spell of which we are still living, see Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Carl Bode, ed. (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 354. Distinguishing, in the chapter “Reading”, between the spoken and written forms of language, between the language heard and the language read, he observes: “The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, from our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.” Finally, see Levinas himself (AE 216–17, OB 170–71) on the entanglements of state and rationalism in the maintenance of violence. 10. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” op. cit., p. 147. 11. Levinas, “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?”, Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), p. 20; “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, in Peperzak, Critchley, and Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 8. 12. I want to express my support for David Wood’s objection to Levinas’s hyperbolic assertion of an “infinite” responsibility. 13. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,1973), p. 179; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 117. 14. Max Horkheimer, “On the Concept of Philosophy,” The Eclipse of Reason, (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 165. 15. Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Emerson, Wittgenstein, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 65. 16. Cavell, “Declining Decline,” in Stephen Mulhall, ed., The Cavell Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 351. 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 266. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, sixth printing, 1994), p. 229; Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 182. Hereafter, the

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

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French original will be cited as AE, whilst the English will be cited as OB, in each case, followed by the page numbers. Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 49, 133–34. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1917), vol. I, pp. 62–63. And see also “I Hear America Singing”, a short poem, op. cit., pp. 13–14. See Theodor Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. IV, esp. p. 68; “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, esp. p. 54. The German phrase that sums up the argument is “die Stimme der Menschen zwischen denen die Schranke fiel.” This, according to Adorno, is the voice that one can hear in, or through, the voice of the true lyric poet. Kant’s Critique of Judgement anticipates this analysis, for the judgement of taste is subjective, yet, because of its formation, it can make a legitimate claim to being universal. Levinas, Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994); and see Emmanuel Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. and ed., Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 11. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1982), pp. 62–65; “Sharing Voices,” trans. Gayle Ormiston, in Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift, eds., Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 234–35. It is worth noting that “obsession” is connected by etymology to the ancient and mediaeval experience of the siege. The ego obsessed with its responsibility is thus, we might say, “besieged” by the demands of the moral law. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds., The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 167. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 60. See in this regard Charles Bernstein’s poem, “The Lives of Toll Takers,” a collage of voices, in his Dark City (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994), pp. 9–10. The poem is composed of fragments of conversation, fragments of utterances, joined together without any semblance of rhyme or reason, capturing something of the heteroglossia of quotidian life. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 563. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 214.

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31. Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), p. 119. Quotes from this text all in my own translation. 32. Ibid., pp. 108, 115. 33. Ibid., pp. 127–28. 34. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 232. 35. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 202. 36. Ibid., p. 203. 37. Ibid., p. 24. Also see Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 29; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 13. Echoing Montaigne, but in order to refute Cartesian metaphysics, he says: “A genuine conversation gives me access to thoughts that I did not know myself capable of, that I was not capable of, and sometimes I feel myself followed by a route unknown to myself, which my words, cast back by the other, are in the process of tracing out for me.” 38. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, second edn., 1951), pp. 91–92. My own translation. 39. See Paul Davies, “Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Kant and Levinas,” in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 161–87; John Llewelyn, “Levinas and Language,” op. cit., pp. 119–38; Edith Wyschogrod, “Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas,” op. cit., pp. 188–205; and Gerald Bruns, “The Concepts of Art and Poetry in Emmanuel Levinas’s Writings,” op. cit., pp. 206–33. 40. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Swenson and Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 232. 41. Jacques Lacan, “The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Anthony Wilden, trans. and ed., The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 205. 42. Levinas, “L’Ontologie, est-elle fondamentale?”, Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), p. 18; “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, in Adriaan Perperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 7. 43. Ibid., p. 17 in the French, p. 6 in the English. 44. Ibid., p. 18 in the French, p. 7 in the English. 45. Ibid., p. 19 in the French, p. 7 in the English. And see AE 190, OB 149.

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46. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie, p. 247. 47. Levinas, Hors sujet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), p. 221; Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 149. 48. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 445; also see pp. 53– 54. For the English translation, see The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 302. Also see pp. 37–38. Blanchot’s discussion of Nietzsche might perhaps be useful in further defining the ethical difference between saying and Saying. In “Nietzsche et l’écriture fragmentaire”, Blanchot outlines a distinction between two types of speech that, whilst obviously different from the two “moments” described above, might nevertheless contribute to the interpretation I have presented. According to Blanchot, Nietzsche wants to argue, after vehemently repudiating the decadent speech of his contemporaries, for a contrast between what might be called the speech of “the higher man” and what might be termed “plural speech”. The first of these, characterized in such a way that one can discern its proximity to Levinas’s description of saying, is, in Blanchot’s words, “an integral discourse, the ‘logos’ that says the whole, . . . a speech that is continuous, without intermittence and without blanks, the speech of logical completion that knows nothing of chance, play, or laughter.” A speech also, I would add, that is, whether or not by intention, persistently foreclosing the intervals, the pauses and silences, that would give to others the opportunities they need in order to voice their concerns. A speech, therefore, in the most extreme contrast to that way of addressing the other which Kierkegaard’s vignette so beautifully characterizes. The second type of speech, what Blanchot refers to as “plural speech”, and in which one can discern striking points of similarity to Levinas’s description of Saying, is “a speech that is intermittent, discontinuous, a speech that, without being insignificant, does not speak by reason of its power to represent, or even to signify. What speaks . . . stands as a sort of sentry duty around a rite of divergence, a space of dis-location that it seeks to close in on, but that always dis-closes it, separating it from itself and identifying it with this margin or separation, this imperceptible divergence where it always returns to itself: identical, nonidentical.”49 The comparison with Nietzsche’s typology is instructive, I think, because of Blanchot’s emphasis on what Levinas would call the “entre-temps”, the “meanwhile” of Saying: the time-for-the-other prepared by the suspension or interruption of the said. “Plural speech” is way of speaking that welcomes a plurality of voices. It is also a way of speaking that never ceases to honour its obligation to give each and every human voice the responsive hearing that it demands. I consequently wonder

Notes

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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whether, in choosing the term “plural speech”, Blanchot had Hannah Arendt’s political thought in mind. See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, pp. 231–35; The Infinite Conversation, pp.154–56. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967), p. 231; “Language and Proximity,” in Alphonso Lingis, trans. and ed., Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 121. The translation of this text has been revised. Ibid., p. 231 in the French, pp. 121–22 in the English. Ibid., pp. 231–32 in the French, p. 122 in the English. Ibid. Ibid. And see AE 194, OB 152. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, p. 212; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 73. Ibid., p. 213 in the French, p. 74 in the English. Ibid., p. 213 in the French, p. 75 in the English. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., pp. 235–36; “Language and Proximity,” op cit., pp. 124–25. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 209; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 71. Ibid., p. 209 in the French, p. 70 in the English. Ibid., p. 210 in the French, p. 71 in the English. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 213; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 74. Ibid., p. 210 in the French, p. 72 in the English. Ibid. Blanchot, L’Attente, l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 52; Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1977), p. 25. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 205; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 67. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., p. 232 ;“Language and Proximity,” op. cit., p. 122. Ibid., pp. 232–44 in the French, p. 122 in the English. Ibid., p. 224 in the French, p. 115 in the English. Also see AE 10, OB 8. Ibid., pp. 224–25 in the French, pp. 115–16 in the English. Ibid., p. 228 in the French, p. 119 in the English. Emerson, “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 79. Also see e.g., p. 82 concerning “the injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching”.

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72. Levinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), p. 175; Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 201. Hereafter, the French original will be cited as TIF and the English translation as TIE. And see Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 5: What happens when the ego’s defenses are breached and one is exposed to the sufferings of others. 73. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., p. 236; “Language and Proximity,” op. cit., p. 126. 74. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 214; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 75. 75. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 253–64. 76. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., pp. 210–11; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 72. 77. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zum zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–89), vol. II, pt.2, p. 421; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 122. 78. See Franz Kafka: Parables and Paradoxes, ed. Nahum Glatzer, trans. Clement Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1975), pp. 80–81. 79. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 211; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 72. 80. Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993), p. 138. And see n. 41 supra. Chapter 5 : The Pre-Originary Dimension of Saying 1. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Das allgemeine Brouillon,” in Carl Seelig, ed., Gesammelte Werke (Zürich: Bühl-Verlag, 1945), p. 305: “Der größeste Teil unsers Körpers, unsrer Menschheit selbt, schläft noch tiefen Schlummer.” My translation. This is reminiscent of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Brot und Wein”, where the poet asks, “Delphi schlummert und wo tönet das große Geschik?” (“Delphi is sleeping, and where is great fate to be heard?”). See Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darmstadt: Der Tempel-Verlag, 1960), p.277. The connection I would like to make, independent of historical fact, is that, in both texts, it is a question of a destiny, a great human potential that is not being realized. “Delphi” would here trope the oracular, prophetic assignment inscribed on the secret flesh of the human body and imparting the preconditions for ethical life. 2. And see Merleau-Ponty, La Nature: Notes, Cours du Collège de France 1956– 1957, ed. Dominique Séglard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955), p. 281: “My corporeal schema is a medium for me to become acquainted [connaître] with the other bodies and for them to get to know mine.”

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3. Walter Benjamin, “Schemata zum psychophysischen Problem,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: 1985), Bd. VI, p. 82; “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings 1913– 1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 1996), vol. I, p. 396. 4. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 102. 5. Levinas, Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991), p. 17; Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 6. 6. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow? A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 5. Italics added. 7. Ibid., p. 112. 8. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), p. 77; Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 84. 9. Ibid., p. 152 in the German, p. 167 in the English. 10. Ibid., p. 77 in the German, p. 84 in the English. 11. This phrase, “eine schwache messianische Kraft”, is borrowed from Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), Bd. I, Teil 2, 704; “Theses in the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), §2, p. 254. But Benjamin is no doubt echoing Kant’s phrase, “eine schwache Strahl der Hoffnung”, which figures in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, §80, p. 285; Critique of Judgement, p. 304. 12. See Levinas, “Messianic Texts,” Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 89. And see Autrement qu’être, ou au delà de l’essence, p. 142; in the English, p. 112. 13. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 102–3. 14. Levinas, “Dieu et la philosophie,” De dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 121–22; “God and Philosophy,” trans. Simon Critchley and Adriaan Peperzak, in Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 145. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty remarks that, “The memory or the voice is recovered when the body once more opens itself to others or to the past, when it opens the way to co-existence and once more acquires significance beyond itself” (PPF 192, PPE, 165). See also PPF195, PPE 168: “Metaphysics—the coming to light of something beyond nature—is not localized at the level of knowledge: it begins with the opening out upon ‘another’ . . .” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962): the French original is indicated by PPF, the English translation by PPE. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), §17, p. 74. Ibid. Levinas, “Dieu et la philosophie,” op. cit., pp. 121–22; pp. 145–46 in the English. See David Wood’s compelling critique of this “infinite obligation”, “infinite responsibility”, in “Responsibility Reinscribed (and How),” chapter eight of The Step Back: Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 139–48, but esp. pp. 145–148. Also “Where Levinas Went Wrong,” op. cit., pp. 53–69. The key point in the first of these two chapters is that, as Wood states, “the other” cannot mean “all others” “in some additive, or even distributive sense, such that I have impossible-to-fulfill obligations to every other person in the cosmos.” Moreover, against Levinas’s hyperbole, Wood rightly argues that it is not the case that morality imposes “infinite” obligations on me—of course, there are in various ways and for various reasons and causes, real limits; so the core of truth in Levinas’s claim is rather that “my exposure to the other means that there are no a priori limits to my responsibilities.” Who could possibly think this claim interesting? Merleau-Ponty, “Le Concept de Nature,” Résumés de Cours: Collège de France: 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 115; Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France: 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1970), p. 82. Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec l’autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1975), pp. 33–34; “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 119–20. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 386; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 258. The translation has been revised. Merleau-Ponty, “Sur la phenomenology du langage,” Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 106; “On the Phenomenology of Language,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 85. Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix de silence,” Signes, p. 94; p. 75 in the English translation of that book. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes), p. 14. Levinas, “La signification et le sens,” L’Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), p. 52; “Meaning and Sense,” Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 56.

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26. Thus the daimonic voice heard in the Phaidros (at 242) is very different from the Hebraic voice of conscience: its sensuousness and daimonic origin cannot of course be reconciled with the Hebraic: “As I was about to cross the stream, the traditional sign was given to me—it always forbids, but never bids me to do anything which I am going to do; and I thought I heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been guilty of impiety, and that I must not depart until I had made an atonement.” 27. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1941, 5 edn.), pp. 163 and 275; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 206 and 320. This voice is, he says, making another point that Levinas will take over, “more primordial than any knowledge” we can claim about it: See op. cit., p. 286 in the German, p. 332 in the English. And see also Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV), in John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 175. Derrida argues there that the “voice of a friend” is “really the voice of the other”. 28. Levinas, “L’Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?”, in Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), pp. 15–16; “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, in Peperzak, Critchley, and Bernasconi (eds.), Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 5. 29. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964). 30. For his own distinction between “le Dire” and “le Dit”, see Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 229; for the English, see p. 197. For the discussion of the “logos prophorikos” (the logos brought to assertion), and the “logos endiathetos” (the logos that, bearing a meaning prior to predication and assertion, expresses our openness to the world), see Le Visible et l’invisible, pp. 222–24; pp. 169–70 in the English. Also see VIF 233 and 266, VIE 179 and 212. 31. Levinas, “Diachronie et representation,” Entre Nous, p. 178; “Diachrony and Representation,” Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 172. 32. For its appearance in the former, see Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 28; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1984), p. 27. 33. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 490; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 455. Also see p. 180 in the German, p. 118 in the English.

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34. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 489–90; Aesthetic Theory, p. 331. There are numerous other sites in that text with references to “Schauer” as well. For further discussion see my book, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin’s Question of Measure After Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 131–36 and 343–46. 35. Adorno, “On the Final Scene of Faust,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. I, p. 120. 36. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 2e edn., 1972), p. 223; “Language and Proximity,” in Alphonso Lingis, ed. and trans., Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 114. 37. Levinas, “Humanisme et an-archie,” in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), p. 75; “Humanism and An-archy,” Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 134. 38. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., p. 236; p. 126 in the English translation. 39. Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), p. 185. 40. Levinas, “Humanisme et an-archie,” op. cit., p. 74; p. 133 in the English. 41. Ibid. 42. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., p. 236; p. 126 in the English. 43. Ibid. 44. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 144. And see my earlier attempt to understand the trace, in David Michael Levin, “Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of MerleauPonty and Levinas,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (University College, Dublin), vol. 6, no. 3 (October 1998), pp. 345–92. 45. For the phrase, “une spiritualité incarnée”, see Levinas, “In Memoriam Alphonse de Waelhens: De la sensibilité,” Hors sujet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), p. 163; “In Memory of Alphonse de Waelhens: On Sensibility,” Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 108. 46. See “The Invisible Face of Humanity,” my chapter on Levinas, in David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1999), pp. 234–334. My book has been reprinted in a slightly revised paperback edition by Duquesne University Press in 2002. 47. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow? A Dialogue, p. 193. 48. Levinas, “Signifiance et sens,” op. cit., p. 64; “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 103. 49. Levinas, “La trace de l’autre,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, p. 201. My own translation.

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50. Walter Benjamin, “Spur und Aura,” Das Passagenwerk, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. V, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982, 1991), Konvolut M16a,4, p. 560; The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belnap Press, 1999), p. 447. 51. Levinas, “Langage et proximité,” op. cit., p. 223; “Language and Proximity,” op. cit., p. 114. 52. Levinas, “The Youth of Israel, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 135. 53. Levinas, “Sans identité,” L’Humanisme de l’autre homme, p. 94; “Without Identity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 147. 54. See my essay on the complexities of “persecution”, “Persecution: The Self at the Heart of Metaphysics,” in Eric Nelson, Kent Still, and Antje Kapust (eds.), Addressing Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 199–235. 55. And see also Levinas, “Humanisme et an-archie,” op. cit., p. 80; “Humanism and An-archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 137. 56. Levinas, “Avant-propos,” L’Au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1982), p. 13; Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. xvi. 57. Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 187. 58. Levinas, “Humanisme et an-archie,” op. cit., pp. 80–81; “Humanism and An-archy,” op. cit., p. 137. 59. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17 (Autumn 1990), pp. 68–69. 60. Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, Clara, oder Über den Zusammenhang der Natur mit der Geisterwelt, Sämtliche Werke, Karl Friedrich August Schelling, ed. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862),vol. IX, p. 53; Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spiritworld, trans. Fiona Steinkamp (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 39. 61. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 126. 62. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in Karl F. A. Schelling, ed., Sämtliche Werke, Bd. VII, Abteilung 1, 1805–1810 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1860), p. 411; Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court, 1936), p. 92. 63. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds., Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980–1989), vol. I, Pt. 1, p. 299; Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1988), p. 175. 64. Moses Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem: oder, Über religiöse Macht und Judentum,” Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumesausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: F. Frommann-Holzboog, 1974, vol. 8, p. 193. My translation.

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65. Ibid., pp. 158, 169. 66. Levinas, L’Au-delà du verset, p. 9; Beyond the Verse, p. xii. 67. See the Benjamin-Scholem Briefwechsel 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), p. 147. 68. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Robert HullotKentor, Telos, vol. 31 (Spring 1974), p. 120. 69. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Karl Vorländer, ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), §49, p. 168; Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 182. 70. Blanchot, La Part au feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 316; The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 327. 71. Levinas, “Humanisme et an-archie,” op. cit., p. 132 in the English. 72. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 207; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 69. 73. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. and ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 143. 74. Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: un seminario sul luogo della negatività (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), pp. 104–5. 75. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., pp. 213–14; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., pp. 74–75. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., pp. 214, 211 in the French, pp. 73, 75 in the English. 78. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg), Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (München and Wien: Hanser-Verlag, 1978), vol. II, p. 699. 79. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 208; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 70. 80. Ibid., p. 215 in the French, p. 76 in the English. 81. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 45. 82. Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène,” op. cit., p. 208; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” op. cit., p. 70. 83. Levinas, “Diachronie et representation,” Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-àl’autre, p. 78; Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 172. 84. In this regard, see my essays, “Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 (1998), pp. 345–92 and “Persecution: The Self at the Heart of Metaphysics,” in Eric Nelson, Kent Still, and Antje Kapust (eds.), Addressing Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern

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87.

88.

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University Press, 2005), pp. 199–235. Also see my chapter on Levinas, “Arrhythmia in the Messianic Epoché: Opening the Gate with Levinasian Gestures,” in David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin’s Question of Measure After Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 311–94; and finally, my chapter, “The Invisible Face of Humanity: Levinas on the Justice of the Gaze” in David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 336–407. A slightly revised version of my book was reprinted by Duquesne University Press in 2003. Hölderlin, “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . .” Sämtliche Werke (Berlin and Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), p. 295. My own translation. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 281; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1974), p. 247. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), pp. 362–63; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 372. Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds., The Provocation of Levinas, trans. Robert Bernasconi (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 176.

Epilogue 1. Novalis, “Logological Fragments”, Part II, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret M. Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), §15, p. 70. 2. Novalis, “Miscellaneous Observations,” op. cit. §49, p. 31. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), §153, p.; Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1978), §153, p. 147. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967), vol. VI, p. 353; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 359. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 3. 6. See the extremely astute reflections of David Wood, in his essay “On Being Haunted by the Future,” Research in Phenomenology (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2006), vol. 36, pp. 274–95. 7. Jürgen Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft (Zürich: Pendo Verlag, 1991), p. 125; The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 94.

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8. Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” in John B. Thompson and David Held (eds.), Jürgen Habermas: Critical Debates (New York: Macmillan, 1983), p. 227. Also see p. 90. 9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” Act IV, lines 574–74, in Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 286.

Index 8 Abraham, 166, 171 Abrams, David, 255 n13 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 18, 35, 37–38, 41, 44, 46, 48, 58, 65, 69, 91–92, 95, 147, 151, 201–202, 223, 236–37, 241–42 Agamben, Giorgio, 2–3, 93, 108–109, 165–66, 227, 263 n89, 271n29 Anaximenes, 71 Arendt, Hannah, 220, 277 n48 Aristotle, 3–5, 30, 53, 58, 74, 109, 118, 131–32, 216, 257 n20, 267 n10, 267 n20 Augustine, St., 30 Austin, John, 152 Bachelard, Gaston, 66–67 Barbaras, Renaud, 256 n13 Baudelaire, Charles, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 24, 44, 56–58, 64, 85, 87, 92–93, 109, 134, 178–81, 210 Bernhard, Thomas, 249 n36 Bernstein, Charles, 274 n28 Bernstein, Jay, 18, 204 Black Elk, 263 n89, 264 n94 Blanchot, Maurice, 2–3, 24, 65, 85, 100, 104, 138–39, 171, 176, 191, 193, 224 Blythe, Ronald, 106 Bruns, Gerald, 30, 256 n15, 275 n39 Buber, Martin, 43, 119, 147, 205 Butler, Judith, 273 n9

Cadava, Eduardo, 262 n84 Calvino, Italo, 4 Carbone, Mauro, 257 n19, 271 n34 Cavell, Stanley, 11, 26, 28, 30, 112, 152–53, 163 Caygill, Howard, 214 Celan, Paul, 139, 145 Char, René, 97 Cocteau, Jean, 147 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 256 n14 Cordova-Rios, Manuel, 115, 134 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 133 Davies, Paul, 275 n39 Descartes, René, 21, 27, 35, 39, 42, 54, 62, 69, 77, 92, 158, 192, 213, 233 Derrida, Jacques, 27–33, 60, 123, 148– 49, 152, 181–83, 204, 207–208, 242–43 Dewey, John, 38 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 91–92 Eichmann, Adolph, 200, 220 Elijah, 147 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 30–31, 41, 61–64, 68, 72, 86–87, 129–30, 135– 36, 152, 177, 264, 294 Ezekiel, 147 Faust, 46, 201–202 Fenves, Peter, 31

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Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 21, 26, 92, 98, 193 Foucault, Michel, 21, 36, 38, 73, 107, 226 Frankfurt School, 34 Frege, Gottlob, 249 n27 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 75 Froman, Wayne, 268 n10 Gnosticism, 213 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 46, 107, 148, 201 Habermas, Jürgen, 19, 31, 36–39, 43, 150–51, 196, 243 Hamann, Johann Georg, 53 Hamlet, 86 Hegel, Georg W. F., 18–19, 33, 107, 119, 189, 216, 233 Heidegger, Martin, 7–9, 13, 19–20, 34, 54, 56, 64, 70, 75–77, 83, 86, 89, 92, 99–100, 136, 155, 166–68, 188, 218, 231 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 27, 128–31, 133 Herakleitos, 30, 67–68, 71, 74–77, 94, 102–103 Herbeck, Ernst, 95 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 13, 45, 64, 88–91, 96, 153, 167, 235, 253 n83 Homer, 60, 68 Horkheimer, Max, 14, 34, 38, 91, 95, 151 Horowitz, Gregg, 19–20 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 57 Husserl, Edmund, 21, 28, 42, 62, 69, 98, 107, 114, 123, 153, 158, 192, 219, 233 Jabès, Edmond, 86 Jacobson, Roman, 128–31 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 26, 193 Johnson, Charles, 58 Jung, Carl, 75

Kafka, Franz, 11, 95, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 10–11, 21, 31, 33, 35–38, 62, 65, 69, 91–92, 100, 134, 138–39, 158, 179, 183, 185, 192–93, 196, 204, 206, 210, 214–15, 223–24, 238, 274 n22 Kierkegaard, Sören, 2, 9, 76, 80–82, 153, 166–67, 170–77, 276 n48 Kraus, Karl, 42 Kristeva, Julia, 148, 273 n9 Lacan, Jacques, 82, 170 Lame Deer, 102 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 107 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 249 n32 Llewelyn, John, 268 n2, 275 n39 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 107 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 59–60, 65, 129, 139 Matthieson, Peter, 94 Marcuse, Herbert, 34 Mazis, Glen, 256 n13, 259 n36 Mead, George H., 37–38 Mendelssohn, Moses, 222 Merwin, W. S., 15, 23, 264 n94 Montaigne, Michel de, 30, 35, 39–40, 42, 252 n75, 252 n76, 275 n37 Moses, 171, 224 Musil, Robert, 27 Naess, Arne, 69, 256 n13, 259 n36 Nägele, Rainer, 31, 36 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 29, 117, 158 Navajo, 70–71 Netsilik (Eskimo), 260 n46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5–14, 26, 34–35, 53, 57, 63, 83, 99, 114, 139, 152, 164–65, 276 n48 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 8–9, 19, 102–104, 120, 181, 228, 241 Odysseus, 60

Index Pascal, Blaise, 30 Paz, Octavio, 67 Péguy, Charles, 187 Perry, Enoch Wood, 253 n83 Piaget, 107 Plato, 30, 33, 58–59, 156, 164, 212, 233 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 65–66, 73–76, 82– 83, 86, 89–91, 95, 110, 131, 137 Rimbaud, Arthur, 158 Rosenzweig, Franz, 45–46, 162, 217, 253 n86 Roudinesco, Elizabeth, 182–83, 208 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 58–59, 102, 124–25, 132, 164–65 Russon, John, 256 n13 Sacks, Oliver, 249n27 Santner, Eric, 231 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 136 Schelling, Friedrich Joseph, 18–19, 22, 57, 63–64, 69, 72–73, 92–94, 125, 216–17, 222, 269 n17 Schlegel, Friedrich, 94, 125 Scholem, Gershom, 222 Shakespeare, 25, 256 n14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 244, 268 n1

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Socrates, 27, 91, 194 Sophocles, 64, 153 Spinoza, Baruch de, 63, 207 Stevens, Wallace, 1 Thoreau, Henry David, 15, 18, 64, 69, 112, 132, 164, 273 n9 Toadvine, Ted, 255 n13 Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 133 Turnbull, Colin, 70 Valente, José Ángel, 144 Valéry, Paul, 67, 100 Vico, Giambattista, 104 Vogel, Steven, 256 n13 Wagner, Richard, 274 n30 Wellmer, Albrecht, 250 n46 Whitman, Walt, 157, 163 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9–11, 26, 42, 99, 152 Wood, David, 189, 243, 255 n13, 273 n11 Wordsworth, William, 59, 73 Wyschogrod, Edith, 275 n39 Zimmerman, Michael, 256 n13


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Levin demands that phenomenological description not be speculative and metaphysical, but rather have a basis in the human developmental process.The work on Levinas in the second half of the book is equally exquisite, if not more so.”

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that are made about the priority of the phenomena. Kleinberg-

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childhood and language progression that justifies the distinctions

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‘does phenomenology,’ instead of just talking about its necessity.

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“Kleinberg-Levin is that rare phenomenologist who continually

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and ontology of Merleau-Ponty and the ethical philosophy of

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alterity developed by Levinas as an address to the ecological crisis

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of the earth and sky. He has done so with both wide-ranging

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scholarly erudition and a sense of practical urgency.This is a work of true philosophical wisdom for our times, written in a voice of compassion and strength.”

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“Kleinberg-Levin has brilliantly rendered the phenomenology

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author of Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses

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— Galen A. Johnson, Island Images Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

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Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics (Suny Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Gathering Of Reason (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition (SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason

The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Before Logic (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Action, Ethics, and Responsibility (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

Structural Depths of Indian Thought (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare (Suny Series, Ethics and the Military Profession)

For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)

For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)

Ontotheological Turnings?: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology (Suny Series in Theology and Continental Thought)

The Role Of History In Latin American Philosophy: Contemporary Perspectives (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

Suffering and Moral Responsibility (Oxford Ethics Series)

An examination of the place of reason in ethics

The Communicative Ethics Controversy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Neoplatonism and Indian Thought (Suny Series in American Social History)

Ethics, Psyche and Social Responsibility (Corporate Social Responsibility Series)

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Reason in the Age of Science (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics (Suny Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Gathering Of Reason (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition (SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

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The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason Essays in Objectivist Thought

The Voice of Reason

The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Before Logic (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Action, Ethics, and Responsibility (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

Structural Depths of Indian Thought (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare (Suny Series, Ethics and the Military Profession)

For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)

For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)

Ontotheological Turnings?: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology (Suny Series in Theology and Continental Thought)

The Role Of History In Latin American Philosophy: Contemporary Perspectives (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

Suffering and Moral Responsibility (Oxford Ethics Series)

An examination of the place of reason in ethics

The Communicative Ethics Controversy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Neoplatonism and Indian Thought (Suny Series in American Social History)

Ethics, Psyche and Social Responsibility (Corporate Social Responsibility Series)

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Reason in the Age of Science (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

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