The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Phaenomenologica, 175)

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THE INHUMAN CONDITION

PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED BY H.L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES

175 RUDI VISKER

THE INHUMAN CONDITION Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger

Editorial Board: Director: R. Bernet (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Secretary: J. Taminiaux (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve) Members: S. IJsseling (HusserlArchief, Leuven), H. Leonardy (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-laNeuve), D. Lories (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve), U. Melle (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Advisory Board: R. Bernasconi (Memphis State University), D. Carr (Emory University, Atlanta), E.S. Casey (State University of New York at Stony Brook), R. Cobb-Stevens (Boston College), J.F. Courtine (Archives-Husserl, Paris), F. Dastur (Université de Nice), K. Düsing (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), J. Hart (Indiana University, Bloomington), K. Held (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), K.E. Kaehler (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), D. Lohmar (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), W.R. McKenna (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J.N. Mohanty (Temple University, Philadelphia), E.W. Orth (Universität Trier), P. Ricœur (Paris), C. Sini (Università degli Studi di Milano), R. Sokolowski (Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), B. Waldenfels (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum)

RUDI VISKER

THE INHUMAN CONDITION Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW

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Each generation has its own task and need not trouble itself unduly by being everything to previous and succeeding generations. S. Kierkegaard

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations

x

Introduction — Talking ’bout My Generation

1

Part I

LOOKING FOR DIFFERENCE Chapter 1 — Levinas, Multiculturalism and Us 1. The Political Approach and Its Implicit Metaphysics 2. The Ethical Approach and Its Explicit Metaphysics 3. A Question of Attachments Chapter 2 — In Respectful Contempt. Heidegger, Appropriation, Facticity 1. In the Margins of Thought 2. Relativism, Scepticism, Historicism 3. Appropriating Heidegger After Foucault 4. Being Held (Up) 5. Just How Naked Is Dasein’s ‘That’? Chapter 3 — Whistling in the Dark. Two Approaches to Anxiety 1. Anxiety and Fear 2. Heidegger’s Approach to Anxiety 3. The ‘Security Paradox’ 4. Anxiety in a Pluralistic Society

23 24 29 34

40 42 44 46 49 52 59 59 64 69 73

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part II

AFTER LEVINAS Chapter 4 — The Price of Being Dispossessed. Levinas’ God and Freud’s Trauma 1. A Discomfort That Liberates? 2. The Proximity of the Other 3. Responsibility Is Misplaced 4. Affects Without Context 5. A Shock Without Affect 6. Ex Nihilo, an Other Scene Chapter 5 — The Mortality of the Transcendent. Levinas and Evil

79 82 86 89 93 99 106 112

1. Transcendence and Exteriority 115 2. Two Paths in Metaphysics: From God to the Face and From the Face to God 118 3. An Invitation or a Command? 126 4. A Passio in Distans 132 Chapter 6 — Is Ethics Fundamental? Questioning Levinas on 142 Irresponsibility 1. Some Technicalities: The Privative Negation 2. Levinas’ Ambivalence Toward Privation 3. Responsibility, in a Very Small Nutshell 4. The Face – Not an Obstacle, but the Secret Aim of My Desire 5. A Naturalization of the Other? 6. A Confusion of Tongues? 7. Not Leaving Oneself 8. Beyond “Help” – The Logic of Appreciation 9. “Not Without” Qualities – Racism Reconsidered

143 145 149 151 157 164 168 173 180

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ix

Part III

AFTER HEIDEGGER Chapter 7 — Intransitive facticity? A Question to Heidegger 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

189

Untranslatably My Own 194 Undoing Dasein’s Self-Defence 198 Talking Oneself Out of ‘It’ 202 The World – A First Liberation 206 The Message of Boredom 210 Does Boredom Truly Have a Message? 215 222 Between the Tines of a Fork Intransitive Facticity, the Pre-History of ‘The Primacy of 228 Ethics’

Chapter 8 — Demons and the Demonic. Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Anxiety and Sexual Difference 235 1. Being Unable to Die 2. Silence, Fear and Trembling 3. Not Nothing – Anxiety and Pudency 4. Adam’s ‘Passing Into the Act’ 5. A Mute Transcendence

237 239 243 250 252

Chapter 9 — Dissensus Communis. How to Keep Silent “After” Lyotard 255 1. The Fissure 2. A Conceptual Shift 3. Sorrow or Care – “After” the “Death” of “God”

260 267 270

Conclusion — In Search of Visibility

284

Acknowledgements

301

ABBREVIATIONS

The following is a list of cross-chapter abbreviations for Levinas and Heidegger. Further abbreviations for these or other authors which are restricted to a chapter or a section thereof will be introduced in the notes. Throughout this book all italics, unless otherwise indicated, will be my own. Levinas: BPW Basic Philosophical Writings (ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak et al.). Bloomington, Indiana U.P., 1996. CPP Collected Philosophical Papers (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Dordrecht, Nijhoff/Kluwer, 1987. DF Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism (trans. Seán Hand). London, Athlone Press, 1990. EE From Existence to Existents (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P., 2001. GCM Of God Who Comes to Mind, ed. (trans. Bettina Bergo). Stanford, Stanford U.P., 1998. OB Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. RTB Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (ed. Jill Robbins). Stanford, Stanford U.P., 2001. TI Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980. TO Time and the Other (trans. Richard A. Cohen). Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P., 1987.

Heidegger: BW GA

Basic Writings (ed. David Farell Krell). New York, Harper and Row, 1977. followed by the number corresponding to Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann. When appropriate, the pagination of the standard English translation will be given after the solidus. On a few occasions I will refer

ABBREVIATIONS

SZ

xi

only to the English translations of GA 29/30 as FCM (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker). Bloomington, Indiana U.P., 1995) and of GA 20 as HCT (History of the Concept of Time (trans. Theodore Kisiel). Bloomington, Indiana U.P., 1985). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1979 edition); followed, after the solidus, by the pagination of Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988.


INTRODUCTION

TALKING ’BOUT MY GENERATION

One day, upon making my way to our Institute, I was stopped at the gate by a young man of Asian complexion, his face in despair – he told me he had just visited our library, but did not know with which book to begin. ‘Where does one start, professor?’ – I do not remember how I got out of the situation, but the answer I gave must have disappointed him for I never saw him around again. Now that I think of it, I realize that there was perhaps a certain depth to that question that my embarrassment at the time had not allowed me to see. Where to begin, indeed? One has always begun, and the sparkle that ignited thought may not have been in the first book, nor perhaps in the second. And in a sense there is no end to such beginning, it does not lay in the recesses of a dim and distant past, but it is there before each of us, every day, with every book we pick up and decide to read. Which are the books one ought to stay with, which are the ones to push aside? There are simply too many and no matter how well-based one’s decisions, it seems as if an element of chance will always creep in and insert a little crack into the foundations of however great the work that is built on them. Perhaps we write to cover that crack, to hide it like one does, in every culture, with that part of the body that is considered private. Thought too is embodied, it has its private parts and it can be embarrassed when it feels no longer able to cover them. It is that inability which this volume seeks to address. Philosophy has many names for it, but there is one that I think better than others, although it has never been exactly popular and seems very much out of fashion today: the postmodern condition. The term made its entry on the philosophical scene by way of a little and somewhat confused book by Lyotard (1979), written as a report for the Canadian government on the then present state of knowledge, in the margin of what he considered his proper philosophical work – its success surprised its author who suddenly found himself promoted to the role of leading man in a movie for which he had unintentionally come up with the title. The cast was impressive, all of a sudden it had become possible to group philosophers, who happened to share a nationality, under one banner. Not that they liked it, but they could not help being dragged

2

INTRODUCTION

into a debate over ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’ where the one thing they shared was that they each were not understood. It was the last time that European philosophy had the sense that there was some central issue to decide, something one could not let pass unnoticed. Since then, the doors have been closed again, one concentrates on one’s own work, the once nearby overview seems lost in the clouds, the parishes flourish and now and then that word, which once had a magic ring to it, is brought up again as a kind of peg on which one can hang whatever one dislikes: relativism, of course, but also nihilism, individualism, narcissism and the list could continue. Post-modernism became a label applicable only to others – if used at all, then used to signal what one is not. The result? A generation became buried, either under Ph.D.s which studied it from a distance, or in notes which ostracized what as a rule had not been read at all. And another generation – my own – became disoriented. For if we are not postmodern, then what are we? Fortunately, a new term came up to save us from that embarrassment – it was an old word, but in the turmoil its meaning had been forgotten: if we were not postmodern, we must be “modern” in the sense Levinas gave to that term whenever he referred to “la pensée moderne” to avoid directly naming Heidegger. So we returned to our sources. And, we found them lacking on just that point at which Levinas came to rescue: with this (re-) discovery of the Other we entered a new age, the age of intersubjectivity. To top the confusion, there were those who wanted to restore continuity: Levinas became a postmodern thinker, and postmodernism adapted itself to its new element – it was henceforth an ethics before it could be anything else, and least of all a metaphysics. This picture may be crude, the strokes in which it is painted could be refined, a richer palette used, but it is more or less the story of those who, like myself, tried to make their way back into phenomenology. We were looking for difference and difference was what we were offered. But was it of the right kind? Hence the three parts into which this volume is divided – their joint headings corresponding to the subtitle of this book which in its title pays homage to the two authors whose work was constantly at the back of my mind when writing the essays collected here. Although the reader will miss a close study of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and may be disappointed to find the chapter on Lyotard mainly dealing with The Differend and only pointing to The


3

Inhuman, it is that last book, and particularly its preface, which directed me to the first. I shall not try to summarize it here. That would be improper – as Foucault once said, there are three kinds of books: those one did not read, those one read and writes about, and those one finds oneself unable to write about, – they are, to use a Heideggerian expression, the horizon of what one tries to think, the border (peras) which brings things into appearance, and which therefore, like death, which is not a being outside of us, but the very structure of our being, is missed (like one misses an occasion) when objectified. As Rilke writes of the manifold of memories needed to write one poem, one must be able to forget them, and to have the great patience to wait until they come again – only then, Rilke’s Malte tells us, when they have become blood of our blood, indistinguishable from ourselves, it may happen that they give birth to the first word of a poem that has the force to wriggle itself free.1 For that reason, if for no other, Lyotard’s essays defy comment (for me). But their leading idea that one should distinguish between “two sorts of inhuman” – “the inhumanity of the system which is currently consolidated under the name of development” and “the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage”2 – proved to be important for the orientation I took. Mankind, Lyotard suggested, was “inhabited” by an inhuman “proper” to it, – an inhuman to which it owed its humanity: “the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born” – a debt which he says “we can never pay off” and of which we must “bear witness”. Translated into my own vocabulary, – a translation which takes up most of this book – what this means is that the human being is a being for whom the source of its dignity is also the source of its misery, in the sense of what plagues it and invests it with an unrest which make it turn to others. Let me try to explain, without doubling some of the analyses that follow.

1

I am paraphrasing from R.M. RILKE, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (trans. M.D. Herter Norton). London, Norton, 1992, pp. 26-7. 2 These and some of the following quotes are taken from the opening pages of J.-Fr. LYOTARD, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time (trans. G. Bennington - R. Bowlby). Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. Precise references will be given in chapter 9.

4

INTRODUCTION

Some of the things we call meaningful, in the sense of important, what we care about and would like to see respected, are, in fact, lacking in meaning, if by the latter we refer to what is there to be seen by all, having certain characteristics open to each and everyone. What makes these things important, is beyond such meaning – what makes them ‘special’ to us cannot be specified in terms of specific characteristics they have and other things lack. A holy object is an object unlike others, but not, for example, because it is made of a material that no other object is made of. It is holy because it is part of a practice that separates (the word ‘sacred’ is derived from secare, to cut off) from others. To those outside of that practice, it is not special at all – indeed, it is like any other object and their disappointment when dis-covering it, should be taken literally: what makes them not see the grail, is the veil of the practice which makes it the grail it is to those who have learned not to remove what covers it (das Bild zu Saïs... of which Novalis spoke). The meaning such ‘things’ have is not externally given, it is part of the web that constitutes them, it is, to return to an expression I used before, ‘embodied’. This embodiment invests them with a frailty that is not accidental, but essential to such ‘meaningfulness’: it is what puts it, in a sense, even beyond the reach of those who are struck by it, since they are unable to find the words that could explain to others not so concerned what it is that struck them. There is, in Lyotard’s vocabulary, a debt, but its terms are uncertain and it is such that it cannot be paid off (paying it off would call for a scheme of instalments that together could exhaust what is presented here as essentially inexhaustible). Or, to resort to another word he launches: there is an infancy, a muteness (in-fans, from fari, to speak) that no adulthood can break open into speech, and which, moreover, it has to respect and be loyal to, for without such silence human language would lose its humanity and be a mere means of communication such as, we now know, whales or dolphins also use. For humans, the urge that drives them into language is co-originary with the wound that language inflicts them with – the word, as Hegel said, kills the thing. But what it thereby lost is not merely absent, a nothing, simply not present and thus inexistent – Lacan who is no doubt behind Lyotard’s idiosyncratic use of the expression ‘la chose’ (sometimes with capital ‘la Chose’) when speaking of “the soul as that of spirit which


5

remains hostage of the thing”, in his famous seminar on The ethics of psychoanalysis ‘defined’ the Thing as “what of the real suffers from the signifier”, a formula which, though enigmatic, suggests that, in the case of language too, that which it kills is not as dead as the murderer thinks. Language as a system of signifiers, whose meaning lies in their mutual difference and thus in what they’re not (a b is not a p), does more than represent what precedes it. The differences on which it is built rest on nothing, they do not mirror differences that preceded it, the discontinuity they presuppose in order to be distinguishable from one another, is not given in the reality they’re supposed to refer to. Since it is not hooked onto things, the signifier has no ultimate signification in itself – the chain of signifiers is, as Saussure said, like a system of values that differentiates them amongst themselves – like a railway-table in which the four o’clock train is the one arriving after the three o’clock train and before the five o’clock one. To know the meaning, that is, of one train one is referred to the others, as is the case in a monetary system (the value of 5 euro is half the value of 10, which is twice 5, and half of 20). The Thing in Lacan is what comes to block this endless chain of mutual references. Some things have a value of their own that escapes determination in the way described – they are incommensurable and break out of any system which makes them substitutable with others. What gives them such Value cannot be rendered in terms of any of the values present – they are priceless, not that theirs is a price too big to be paid (contra ‘anyone has his/her price’, ‘there’s nothing that money can’t buy’) but that they are out of the range of what can be priced. Selling them is to defile them, to betray them.

It would call for a separate study to further clarify the link between Lyotard and Lacan suggested here. But to return to our example of meaning‘ful’ness, it has by now hopefully become clear why the inability to explain the meaningful in terms of what we ordinarily call meaning (the meaning expressible in the chain of signifiers) should not be seen as the mere lacking of a capacity one ought to have. To the contrary, this in-fancy is what is implied in the word meaningful: it cannot be substituted by something else, not because it has a special identifiable property, but because it is special – of an importance that escapes both

6

INTRODUCTION

the comparative and the superlative. Comparing the important to what is less important is already to defile it – the comparison rests on a category mistake: as if there would be a hidden, special meaning to the meaningful. As this example suggests by its choice of vocabulary, it does not come alone. In part I and in some of the later chapters we will come across a number of other examples, one of which, as could be expected, will, of course, be ‘having values’. Again, to abbreviate the analysis given there, the point is to see that what is meant by such expressions is exactly the reverse: it is not us who ‘have’ values in the sense in which we have clothes, or have money in our pocket etc., it is these values which have us, – the link between our values and us is not exterior, nor interior (a situation which mirrors exteriority: here what makes these values special would be a ‘meaning’ only accessible to those inside – but this meaning would not differ from what one ordinarily calls meaning, the only difference being its accessibility, i.e. ‘privileged access’). Values, as Levinas remarked, weigh on us; like the Good, they have chosen us, before we could choose them. They cannot be fully accounted for without reference to that weight which escapes all accounting procedures or puts them in a ‘catch 22’ in which philosophers would recognize what they call ‘circularity’: the impossibility to express in a neutral language what turns these values into what they are. To understand their point one will always have to rely on concepts which already bear their stamp. This is, by the way, what another of those dragged in into the postmodern camp, Richard Rorty, named a ‘final vocabulary’, – its finality meaning that one cannot step out of it to see its point. But here’s the rub: language can be stopped – its chain arrested – at more than one point, there can be more than one final vocabulary, more than one word which is ‘final’ in the sense described above, but also in the sense of indicating the point beyond which further concession is inconceivable. There will, in short, be different candidates to absorb the echo of what Lyotard and Lacan refer to as the Thing – and thereby to receive a rigidity that puts them beyond negotiation. Such is the price for plurality – there may be more than one final vocabulary possible, but this does not mean that they are all equal. But their non-equality escapes ranking – in this sense what is said here ties in with the ‘end of the great narratives’ which the critics of postmodernity were all too happy to associate with relativism. Without having to declare oneself ‘postmodern’, it is easy to see why they are wrong: giving up the


7

aspiration to find the Vocabulary of vocabularies, in which all the existing or previous ones would find their partial place (partial, for onesided), is not tantamount to relativism, in the sense of indifference. The contrary seems to hold: although the differences cannot be ranked without doing them injustice (dis-incorporating them from the web in which they are embedded) this does not make them in-different. If anything, postmodernism, properly understood, is the contrary of a relativism – it does not state ‘everything is relative’, thereby committing itself to a performative self-contradiction between the content of its statement and the exception implied in stating it. What it tries to point to is a prima facie paradox on the level of meaning: the difference between a meaning accessible to all and the meaningful which qua meaningful is not thus accessible, but not fully closed off either. We can understand, ‘learn’ to see that what is behind a certain blockage of communication is a clash of final vocabularies, we can see and respect that what makes someone else’s vocabulary ‘final’ is formally the same structure as the one behind our own, but our capacity to understand, which puts them on a par, does not imply that these vocabularies become interchangeable (since they’re ‘equally’ good it would not matter with what vocabulary one ends up). Once thought (or values etc.) is embodied, it is tragically dependent on this embodiment – not in the sense that it becomes incommunicable, solipsistic etc., but in the sense that despite the access it can have to other such embodied meanings, it remains stuck to its own. The access remains what one could call ‘external’, it is restrained to the level of meaning – to reach beyond that, to the level of the meaningful, would require a special effort: the effort of learning to share a practice, of letting oneself become part of a certain embodiment of meaning. Nothing in the above should be taken to indicate that such effort is bound to fail, – for example, people grow in and out of values during most of their life and aren’t stuck to the set they have been gifted with at a mythical moment in time. But, at any moment in time there will be a difference, for each of us, between what we are able to understand (‘externally’) and what we are able to show understanding for, in the sense of to take seriously. One needs a certain sensitivity to see the point of embodied meaning; and, the reverse side of that sensitivity, however stretched, will always be an insensitivity experienced as an incapacity to ‘see something’ in what one nonetheless understands.

8

INTRODUCTION

Part of the argument in what follows rests on the attempt to see in such an incapacity more than the absence of a capacity which the subject in question should strive to develop. The analysis is neutral with regard to whether the subject should or should not try to develop itself in such a direction, – the point is rather metaphysical: it is important not to miss what this ‘in’capacity reveals to the subject about its ontological makeup. If to understand something does not automatically lead to an ability to show understanding for that something, the finitude at work here should perhaps not be seen in terms of the in-finitude it did not yet reach. It should rather be thought in its own terms. To find out what these terms are, I have tried to inject what I thus suspect to be a ‘postmodern’ take on ‘difference’ into the work of the two authors whose approach to difference seemed most apt to make this contrast. Thus, after the reconnaissance work in part I (‘Looking for Difference’), I have turned successively to the writings of Levinas (part II) and Heidegger (part III) with the aim of clarifying whether the difference I suspected at work here, could be taken up in the paradigm of either ethical or ontological difference. But instead of confronting these authors with a theme imported from elsewhere, I tried to read them on their own terms and, whilst doing so, register what it was that these terms tried to make accessible to thought, and what, if anything, they left in the dark. Not that I wanted to criticize them for such darkness. But neither did I want to presume that I or ‘we’ could still be sharing (in) it. For there is no light which comes without a darkness – and it is not certain that what for them allows there to be light, should be the same for us. In other words, and to prevent any misunderstanding here: what I have hitherto explained under the name of ‘post’modernity arose out of these readings of Levinas and Heidegger. Out of an impression, that is, that not all of what I was more or less familiar with was already said by them. One comes to read a text with a weight one did not know one carried and of which one only becomes aware when what one reads refuses to bend to the gait one did not know one had. It is only afterwards, upon reflection, that one becomes aware of being on alien ground, and through such awareness one can sometimes cast a glimpse on what one’s “own” ground may be like. To put this in a more familiar vocabulary: there is no thought worthy of the name which comes


9

without its unthought and it would be to conflate philosophy with an entirely different enterprise to believe that becoming aware of a great thinker’s unthought is the same as to criticize him. As I state in the introduction of chapter 4, the unthought is what enables a thinker to think, what he or she did not have to think – a darkness at the heart of the light which his or her thought let shine on the world. But why presume such a world would still be ours? One could instead do a phenomenology of the silences it imposes on speech – e.g. all the talk on ‘difference’ our age seems to indulge – which in its turn, no doubt, must leave certain things unsaid... In other words, I decided to use my non-understanding (taken in the above sense) as a kind of compass – not that it should be trusted at first sight, but if repeated attempts to overcome it by re-reading an author proved unsuccessful, I believed I could rely on it as a pointer to a question to which the text I read was not giving an answer, because the concepts which it used and the directions it took did not allow for the problem I found myself trying to phrase. In a way this ‘method’ is itself an application of the difference between the capacity to understand someone and the capacity to show understanding for what that someone else stands for. One can register one’s own ‘lack’ of sensitivity and, if time and again, it turns around the same issues, come to suspect that there is a telling power at the back of such a deafness: a chance to chart (part of) the ground on which one finds oneself standing. Rather than summarizing the results of these readings here, let me just try to explain why it is no accident that the order in which the reader will find them presented here – Levinas first, then Heidegger – is the reverse from the one usually taken by the literature which finds Heidegger lacking in what Levinas rightly directed our attention to.

So let us have a look at ethical difference first. The claim is, by now, a familiar one: ontology would be “a philosophy of injustice” (TI 46) – it would “subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, to a relation with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents, subordinates justice to freedom” (TI 45). To distinguish the ethical relation from the one implied in knowledge, one would have to call on an otherwise than

10

INTRODUCTION

Being and insist on its irreducibility – on its difference – to Being. One would have to affirm the primacy of ethics over freedom. Only a metaphysics in the guise of ethics could break the “inhumanity” (TI 46) implied in an ontology unable to question its own grasp, its comprehension which “neutralizes” what is other by recognizing in it the Being which permits a “movement within the same” (TI 47) and subjugates what arrests this movement by “refusing to give itself” (TI 45). Hence the attempt to distinguish the alterity of the other person from the otherness, amenable to the same, implied in things. The personal other – the Other – would appear in his/her “own light” and that light would refract the light thrown upon it by the one who seeks to know. In bending it back upon him, it would call him into question. The Other would be more than an other ego, s/he would not simply come to share my constitutive powers, but would demand that I depose them. But why does this demand – the ‘appeal’ of the ‘face’ of the Other – not issue in war, in conflict, in a mutual contestation, whence that force to put me into question? Levinas will never doubt that the Other has such a force – it is, he reasons, testified to by the shame that overcomes me when thus brought under his or her appeal. Should I not ‘feel’ this shame, this my ‘empirical’ reaction – shamelessness – will nonetheless be marked by it: it will be no more than a flight into irresponsibility, a cover-up of the shame I nonetheless feel. We will come back to this absolutely central claim on which the whole of Levinas’ ethics rests, in the slow and patient reading which we will offer in the three chapters of our second part. Let it, for now, be noted that it cannot be refuted, – and that shame can thus be seen to occupy a structurally similar place – a topos – to anxiety in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of which it is claimed too that if it does not set itself through this is because it is simply suppressed (chapters 3, 8). Let us focus instead on an alternative formulation of this claim about the relation between shame and shamelessness: I cannot, Levinas says repeatedly, not hear the appeal of the Other. All non-hearing will be a pretence, the violent attempt to close oneself off from what nonetheless has already been received. One always ‘answers’ to the appeal, one cannot escape the responsibility it brings – silence is not an option, it too will be a way to answer. Once there is an appeal, there is no outside of ethics. Whatever one does will carry an ethical qualification, albeit that of evil. Again, let us note in passing, that the structure of this premise, without


11

which one cannot enter Levinas’ world, is formally identical to the one we will see at work in Heidegger (chapter 7) – there too there is always a call, and that call too seems always received, be it in flight or insurrection (Aufständigkeit). But suppose we grant Levinas this first move, what further moves will need to follow? The answer is simple: Levinas will need to embed this move in a metaphysics which articulates what is minimally presupposed in the thus described relation between the appeal and the one who is touched and transformed by it. This transformation is portrayed as a liberation: the subject that already longed for an escape will find in the ethical obligation a way to transcend itself without taking the self, which it wants to overcome, with it in its transcendence. Salvation comes from outside! A responsible subject is still a subject – it does not lose its independence – but it is different from the subjectivity it left behind: it is now obliged by an obligation which finds its source outside of it (in the Other) and which is thus no longer at risk by a boredom that can make the subject doubt the purpose of whatever engagement it engaged itself in and secretly remind it of the tie that binds it to itself. And, in this its irreplaceability – no one can take over this obligation from me – it can, through the Other who obliges, receive a message that, had it taken a more direct form, would have blotted it out. At the bottom of the ethical relation, presupposed by it and enacted through it, shines the shy light of a creation that could not reveal itself directly for fear of “burning the eyes” (TI 77) of the one thus reminded of his/her origin. Ethics thus leads to a metaphysics which in its turn centres around what Levinas will later refer to as the “original theological” structure of the “psyche” (RTB 271). Without exhausting the full meaning implied by that term, it is clearly linked to what Totality and Infinity already called the human being’s “final essence” (TI 179), his or her “final reality” (TI 178): an essence that vows it to the Other, – the human being is “liturgical”, devoted to whom it is not. Its relation to the Other is “religious” – built on a knot that ties it to an outside which it cannot without injustice disavow. In the first two chapters of the second part I shall analyse these connections between ethics-metaphysics-religion in great detail, if only to rebut those readers who believe that one can have Levinas’ ethics “whilst leaving God out of it”. Clearly one cannot: for this ethics rests on the claim that the other is “above me” and by itself that claim is entirely

12

INTRODUCTION

counter-intuitive – it cannot be made and was not meant to be made without showing how it would via a description of human relations necessitate words like ‘God’ and ‘creation’. Banning those words, or missing them, will inevitably reduce Levinas’ philosophy to the caricature that unfortunately still circulates: enormous claims, an at best endearing moralism, but floating in thin air. If one wants this kind of ethics, one should at least be willing to pay the price. And if one has the feeling that such price is more than one can pay, one should perhaps wonder whether what one wants is really this kind of ethics. And one could, then, perhaps start to question some of its premises.

Does the analysis of shame in the way described really stand investigation? Does the distinction between the face and the form of the Other really do justice to the implied alterity of that Other? Is the Other really someone whose alterity does not follow from the characteristics which make him/her other? Could it not with more right be asserted that, instead of being “signification without context”, the Other is “not without” context, “not without” qualities etc., and that the relation between that Other and me, instead of confronting me with my conatus essendi, rather confronts me with my inability to account for that about me which I am unable to put at the distance required for it to have meaning, and which I am not able to give up? What prevents Levinas from considering the alternative route indicated here, is, as I show in the last part of chapter 5, a thesis on the relation between transcendence and immanence that is perpendicular to the one suggested here and that ultimately derives from his idea that “God does not take body” (e.g. RTB 219). Like God, the Good, the Infinite, the transcendent, and its wake, the face resist incorporation – if they are announced within a context, that context entirely remains outside of what is thus announced. Ethics, as Levinas says, comes before culture. Should it lose this priority, immanence would triumph over transcendence, and the orientation offered by the Good would be eclipsed. It is precisely this thesis which I contest, though not so much in my own name, as in the name of a complication at the heart of ‘contemporary’ philosophy. For one can think of another relation between the transcendent and the immanent than the one implied as the


13

only possible one by Levinas. Transcendence can be dependent on what I earlier called its embodiment – what incorporates it may not be its mere outer wrapping, but the only way for it to announce itself. The reader of chapter 5 will thus be invited to at least consider the possibility of something other than the platonic model suggested by Levinas – there is, e.g., what Derrida, in his early work, has called the structure of an originary supplement, where what is considered to be a mere wrapping is, in fact, producing that which it was thought to be only be a supplement to. It is not, in short, because an origin is “inscribed”3 that it ceases to be an origin. To be sure, the meaning of its originality changes: not that it becomes simply immanent, relative, particular, – but it loses its platonic prestige and becomes vulnerable, in need of the particular which it is unable to fully take up into its absoluteness. Conversely, the particular infects the absolute with a materiality from which it cannot withdraw – it becomes embodied, delivered over to a body which one needs to enter in order to feel its pull. And thus the absolute becomes one amongst the many, a particular absolute, not absolute in spite of its particularity, but thanks to it. As I argue in chapter 6, if one pursues this line of argument one is not forced to side with the ill-famous ‘reduction of the Other to the same’ for which Levinas warns all those hesitant to adopt his course. One has

3

J. DERRIDA, ‘Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in ID., Writing and Difference (trans. A. Bass). Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 112 ff. and for example: “to neutralize space within the description of the other, in order thereby to liberate positive infinity – is this not to neutralize the essential finitude of a face (glance-speech) which is a body, and not, as Levinas continually insists, the corporeal metaphor of etherealized thought? Body: that is, also exteriority, locality in the fully spatial, literally spatial, meaning of the word; a zero point, the origin of space, certainly, but an origin which has no meaning before the of, an origin inseparable from genitivity and from the space that it engenders and orients: and inscribed origin. The inscription is the written origin: traced and henceforth inscribed in a system, in a figure which it no longer governs. Without which there no longer would be a body proper to oneself. If the face of the other was not also, irreducibly, spatial exteriority, we would still have to distinguish between soul and body, thought and speech; or better, between a true, nonspatial face, and its mask or metaphor, its spatial figure. The entire Metaphysics of the Face would collapse.” As to this collapse to which the Anglo-American reception of ‘Derrida-with-Levinas’ remained remarkably insensitive, the reader could independently see it at work in e.g. TI 66 which constantly opposes the “living presence” to an exteriority that mortifies it.

14

INTRODUCTION

perhaps, to the contrary, reached the core of the ontological pluralism Levinas himself once promised to save from ontology’s tendency to monism. But this pluralism will come without the safe net Levinas’ ethics had spun under it: since both the self and the other are already marked by an allegiance to a (not necessarily identical) transcendence, it becomes possible to doubt the soundness of Levinas’ two major premises. First, that the affect which marks the entry of the Other should be shame. Second, that the appeal cannot not be heard. There can be an insensitivity to the Other which is not a mere lack in sensitivity, or a refusal to open up, – the reader will remember what was said before about the difference between ‘to understand’ and ‘to show understanding’. The Other, moreover, can embarrass the self by confronting it with its dependence on an embodiment that cannot be separated or be held at a distance from it. But this embarrassment is not shame, it is the affect in which the subject meets its condition of being decentred – attached to a different some‘thing’ (the quotation marks signal that it is not an ordinary thing) than the Other. And, to my mind, a more correct phenomenological description of the alterity of the Other who is in need of the form into which s/he cannot disappear becomes possible. Unlike the Infinite, what Levinas calls face is not simply too big to be contained in its idea. The face shivers, it demands recognition for what it finds itself attached to, unable to break lose from, and unable to penetrate with its glory. And should the self find itself unable to give it that recognition, this inability will be genuine. Instead of the sign of an ill will, it will reflect the pluralisation of a transcendence that lost the Oneness Levinas contested to Being but subsequently sought to restore in the one Good that would be Otherwise than Being. I hope the reader will not dismiss this argument before looking at the chapters in which it is made. Let me just remind her or him of its terms: the aim is, of course, not ‘to refute’ Levinas. It is to show that one can proceed differently. But there is, admittedly, a point which goes farther than this, a point where I am not satisfied with showing that one could proceed differently. As I just stated in the preceding paragraph, I believe that the analysis of the ‘face and the form’ should be liberated from the analogy with which Levinas explicitly wants to burden it: the face, to repeat an argument which will be given at length below, does not relate


15

to the form as the Infinite to its idea.4 And consequently the true problem in the alterity of the Other is not only to see that it is not reducible to a set of properties that make such an Other different from me, but that a third category is needed beside face and form, to understand that the Other also refuses to be as ab-solute, as de-tached and up-rooted as Levinas would want him/her to be. This third category is the ‘not without’ I mentioned before – it is more than a negation (it is not the case that x is without), but a category in its own right: it points to the importance of some‘thing’ which is not a thing, nor a no-thing, nor, for that matter, the Nothing of which Heidegger spoke. This last remark brings us to the threshold of our third part and of the question that governs it: can ontological difference account for the kind of difference which ethical difference failed to take into account?

Here I can be much briefer. The Heidegger I engage with is the one of the twenties up to and around Being and Time, and the questions I bring to him have already been fashioned by the previous engagement with Levinas. They are basically the same, although they seem to come from a different angle: unlike many contemporary readers of Heidegger I have no problem with his existential ‘solipsism’ and do not think he should have directly developed Mitsein into the starting-point of a ‘co-existential analytic’ (Nancy). Indeed, if anything, it is precisely this refusal to hand over the subject to intersubjectivity that attracts me in his work. But of the three great themes ‘world – finitude – solitude’ which he set out to deal with in one of his lectures courses,5 it is the last one which I cannot help find lacking in complexity. My hesitation has two focuses: the account Heidegger gives of anxiety (chapters 3 and 8) and the role he assigns to facticity (chapters 2 and 7).

4

E.g.: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (TI 50). And TI 51: “The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic Image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea”. In this context, see the previous note on Derrida. 5 Cf. the subtitle for the ’28-’29 lectures: ‘Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit’ (GA 29/30).

16

INTRODUCTION

In the briefest of ways: in anxiety Dasein is forced to experience its being-in-the-world as such, it is faced with the nakedness of its existence, thrown back upon itself and as it were reminded of its ontological responsibility for the being that it is and has to be. Dasein, Heidegger states, is without a hold, and this ‘without’ is the most positive thing one can assert of it – there is no one, nor nothing that could replace it in its first position singular of the verb to be. Dasein is vereinzelt – singularised –, shown a position that it can and must assume. What this account of anxiety leaves out is that singularisation can also take a different form: it could have to do with a becoming non-interchangeable due to some‘thing’ about Dasein which it cannot take up into its being. Dasein could become anxious not because its Seinkönnen implies a Seinmüssen and that in this task it is alone, without a hold. Its anxiety could instead point to something having a hold over it and spring from its inability to give up that some‘thing’ from which it derives its sense of mineness, and its joint inability to be it in the transitive sense that Heidegger ascribed to the verb ‘to be’ when used for human beings. In chapters 7 and 8 I try to show how this account comes much closer to what one ordinarily understands under anxiety. Anxiety is said to be ‘not without’ an object, not because it has an object (not: without), but because that which causes anxiety is not nothing, nor Nothing, but some‘thing’ to which one cannot relate precisely because it is not a thing. My second point is related to the first one: does not what Heidegger calls facticity – the inevitable facts that characterize each of us as the one s/he is – betray a certain ontologism in suggesting that all such facticity can be taken up in existence? There would be no facts about us that we would not be in a transitive sense (I am my sickness). This, of course, is a consequence of the definition of an existential which, as one will remember, differs from a category in that it cannot be applied from without. To categorize the human being is to forget that it is a being for whom (everything about) its being is in question. But, to anticipate the example I shall develop in chapter 2, could one apply this to someone’s ‘style’ (of writing, e.g.)? Can one apply this to ‘sexual difference’ (chapter 8)? Can one apply it to what it means, for us humans, to be ‘rooted’? If I am my style, my roots, my difference – then whence that embarrassment, that unease that overcomes me when too directly confronted with it? Is my ‘thrownness’ always taken up into the transcendence of my being,


17

and never what could instead itself transcend that very transcendence? And confront it with a question it cannot answer? I beg for the reader’s indulgence to grant me the benefit of the doubt till these points are taken up and developed in the respective chapters. Let me just stress what is at stake: if one links anxiety to what I call intransitive facticity, such an anxiety, instead of being an anxiety over having to be the being that I am, would spring from an inability to give up what I cannot take up in my being and yet singularises me without me understanding what it is that thus gives me a sense of mineness I was unaware of. And this singularisation would, contrary to Heidegger, not be a position I could (and should) come to occupy if only I stopped fleeing what is thus shown to be mine and mine only. At the moment my mineness is revealed the self who is its bearer threatens to be blown away. This anxiety may not be without ‘object’, but it is, according to all descriptions I know of, certainly without subject. It could, moreover, explain some of the terms that Heidegger in what Sartre called “his abrupt, rather barbaric fashion of cutting Gordian knots rather than trying to untie them”,6 put at the beginning of his analytics, without attempting to further derive them. One of the notions I am thinking of is Mitsein, the other Sprache. Indeed, as we shall see in the respective chapters, there may be more to ‘whistling in the dark’ than simply a ‘lautwerden in der Unheimlichkeit’ (GA 17:317). This leaves us with chapter 9 and the conclusion which, as it were, ‘naturally’ come to raise the question of ‘postmodernity’ again. I will leave it to the reader to discover that raising that question also entails that one questions the work of those assumed to carry its banner – the work of Lyotard too has rifts of its own, and there is no need to follow it all the way through. When writing that chapter, I must confess, I still hesitated near its ending about the course to take – could one not try to develop some sort of ethical attitude out of the painful confrontation with one’s own incapacity to receive the Other’s appeal? An ethics not of the appeal that one cannot not hear, but that would develop from a response to the inappealability one finds oneself ‘struck’ with? Could or should one then go on to link such ethics to a politics from which it

6

J.-P. SARTRE, Being and Nothingness. An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (trans. Hazel Barnes). London, Routledge, 2001, p. 244.

18

INTRODUCTION

would nonetheless differ (and certainly differ more than Lyotard seemed to allow for)? To add a confession to that confession: I do not know whether I managed to get out of that ‘hesitation’ unscathed. What I know is that at a certain point the work of Arendt seemed to come to the rescue – not the Arendt of political participation, of (inter-) action where in word and speech one shows oneself to others, but the Arendt who spoke of the necessity of there being a division between the private and the public, and for whom the public character of the agora did not derive from the agreements it would allow for, but from the distance it put between humans who would thus be prevented from stumbling over one another. The Arendt, that is, who insisted on the difference between a freedom prone to express itself and a freedom that needed to take on an entirely different shape, and to adopt a robe or a role, a mask or a persona to bridle the passions that would otherwise have corrupted it from within. But I should perhaps leave, at the end of this very long ‘intro’duction, something to be said for the conclusion which, as my title indicated, will, by combining the incongruous, try to ‘push Arendt into postmodernity’.

I started this introduction by evoking the young man who confronted me with a question which at the time embarrassed me. It is good to be embarrassed, – in Spanish the corresponding term means to be pregnant, occupied by what one has still to give birth to. As Socrates remarks in the Symposium, only the thus embarrassed have it in them to become philosophers, – provided they are helped through the pangs of birth by someone more experienced who already is what they strive to be. It is a pleasure to acknowledge that the essays contained in this volume would have remained stillborn were it not for the help of a number of colleagues who at times were even prepared to listen to what had just been written and encouraged me to push further – thanks to Herman De Dijn, Frans de Wachter, Arnold Burms and Paul Moyaert for always being available. And thanks to Rudolf Bernet for not being thus available – and hence able to give a human face to that harsh and demanding voice which is above each writer’s ego, potentially destructive unless it speaks and allows itself to be spoken to. I will not easily forget the honour of being refereed and accepted by him to publish this volume in


19

a series which made the history I am attempting to understand in the pages that follow. I thought it only proper that they be dedicated to the young man who never made his way into our library.


I

Looking for Difference


CHAPTER ONE

LEVINAS, MULTICULTURALISM AND US

Multiculturalism is not a recent phenomenon. From the moment a different world appears, a different culture for which the evidence of the cultural world in which I participate is put out of play, we are confronted with the problem of a split between the world as such and my world, which is only one among others, and we find ourselves compelled to seek a solution. One such solution would be to try to deny the split by restricting the meaning of ‘world’ to one’s own world alone; another one would be to welcome the split as allowing us to understand that humanity must ultimately be sought beyond all particularism. But it is not by looking at such classical solutions, which, though unsatisfactory, are still with us, that we will understand what might be new in this multiculturalism that so commands our attention. What is new is neither the problem posed by it nor the solutions we have found for it, but our fascination with the phenomenon. It is indeed only very recently that the word ‘multiculturalism’ itself has begun to take over from that other key word which fascinated us for so many years: we no longer expect ‘postmodernism’ to provide the answers to all our enigmas, but rather multiculturalism. This fascination is somewhat surprising. In order to understand it, we will have to try not to let it captivate us. But perhaps it has already captivated us as soon as we see in it only the name of a problem to which we must find a solution as soon as possible. Hence a series of counterquestions: What is it about multiculturalism that manages not only to fascinate us, but also to make us believe that our fascination merely points out the urgency of a problem that only concerns us to the extent that it concerns others? Whence the tendency to treat the multicultural as something that primarily deals with the existence (ethical or political) of the other, and hence as something that implicates us in an intrigue that interpellates us only in that dimension of our existence that we are content to call our ethical or political responsibility? Multiculturalism would put us ‘in response’ to the other. It would thus be of concern to that part of our subjectivity in which we find ourselves linked to others. But it would not cut deeper than that. As if our fascination for the other

24

LOOKING FOR DIFFERENCE

would not engage us in another aspect of our being, as if our ‘nonintersubjective’ subjectivity had nothing to do with it, as if our very existence were only implicated in the multicultural by the threads of an inter-subjectivity which are only the warp of a subjectivity already there, and ultimately unaffected by it. Let us pause for a moment to consider what is seductive about this logic of the ‘as if’, for it is in this logic that most ethical and political approaches to the multicultural seem to find their point of departure.

1. THE POLITICAL APPROACH AND ITS IMPLICIT METAPHYSICS We would – and this is the essence of the political approach – have to find a way of showing the citizen subject that all those people to whom s/he has until now refused the rights of citizenship are subjects just like her, and that, far from constituting a threat, they are only asking for measures that will allow them to integrate better. Just as we will have to convince him or her that although certain of these measures demand special rights that take account of the fact that current or potential fellow citizens do not have the same cultural background as his or her, there is still nothing special about these rights since they merely confirm the essential premises underlying every right within a liberal state. Indeed as Will Kymlicka has shown,1 a liberalism that does not neglect a hermeneutics of its own institutions ought to lend its full weight to measures that will make what he calls a ‘multicultural citizenship’ practicable. For it would be a mistake to see liberalism as nothing but a presocial atomism ignorant of the complex links between the individual and society (MCC 73). On the contrary, as Kymlicka shows, there is a broad liberal tradition resting on a moral ontology that stresses precisely the inextricable texture between an individual and society. Far from being an atom without any context, the individual is seen as essentially attached to a context that allows her to make choices. If such choices are not to be devoid of meaning, there must not only be viable alternatives, but one must also be informed about these alternatives and be able to ‘read’ them and interpret them so as to understand their meaning. All of

1

LCC: Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989; MCC: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995; SNC: States, Nations and Cultures. Assen (The Netherlands), Van Gorcum, 1997.


25

which clearly presupposes that one has access to ‘cultural narratives’ (SNC 34) which, as Dworkin would say, not only provide us with options but also with “the glasses through which we can identify experiences as being valuable” (cited in SNC 34). The moral ideal of individual autonomy would be perverted into a cult of choice for choice’s sake (LCC 48) if individuals were deprived of access to what Kymlicka calls a “societal culture” that provides them with a shared vocabulary, traditions and conventions supporting a whole range of social practices and institutions. If we should lend our full support to the existence or survival of such a ‘societal culture’, it is not in the name of some intrinsic value possessed by these ‘glasses’, but because an individual’s autonomy would be blind without them (cf. LCC 165). This autonomy, then, is extremely fragile, for it can only be exercised in conditions of visibility that it cannot give itself. The moral ontology that Kymlicka’s liberalism wants to defend has to permit every individual to see by himself: everyone has a right to her own vision of ‘the good life’, just as everyone has the right to alter that vision. What matters here are the conditions of visibility, for it turns out that these conditions are not the same for everyone. Multiculturalism is precisely that condition where there is not a single societal culture or a single shared vocabulary, but many. And, it is at this point that this heteronomy, which until now might have seemed innocent since it was working towards autonomy, begins to make things more fuzzy. Some moral ontology that tries to speak of attachments that appear to withdraw from reason and whose logos cannot be determined! Indeed, as Kymlicka shows, one can only register, but not understand, that this attachment by principle is not the same for everyone, and that it is not enough to offer individuals any ‘societal culture’ whatsoever for them to be cured of their blindness. What they really need are not simply glasses, but glasses adapted to their eyes. But we are not at an optometrist’s so there is no way to measure objectively the strabismus in question. Those who request minority rights, concerning their language for instance, are unable to explain precisely why this language is so important to them. We must simply believe them and respect their indigence. I am not going to discuss here the details of the admirably complex and often ingenious arguments that Kymlicka puts forward on the basis of

26


these intuitions2 which, he readily admits, all seem to hinge on the factum, noted but never explained, that there exists a ‘deep attachment’ (SNC 40) to their own culture among the members of national minorities. What is important to Kymlicka is to be able to show that this does not pose any threat to a liberalism aware of its own principles. Instead of seeking explanations for these unexplainable attachments, the political philosopher should be content to observe that, by all accounts, minorities cling to their national or cultural identity ‘for the same reason’ (SNC 41) as those who belong to the majority culture. For there is nothing that would permit us to think that the latter attach less importance to their freedom to live and work in their own societal culture. The only difference is that they are not even aware of profiting from a regime of visibility completely tailored to them. As this requires no effort of them, they take it for granted that they are able to see and decide for themselves. They are thus able to take advantage of favourable circumstances which other people not only cannot take similar advantage of, but actually suffer from, by the mere fact that their language, for example, is not the majority or official language of the country. As I have already indicated, this example can be taken sensu lato, for language in this case is not simply a ‘transparent medium of communication’, it bears within itself an entire history, conventions and traditions which one must be able to live from the inside if one is not to be excluded from that tacit knowledge (M. Polanyi) by which a language “renders vivid” (SNC 34) the point of the activities and social practices among which we are constantly choosing in order to lead the life that we deem to be good and just. To be excluded from the cultural narratives which are the precondition of any intelligent judgement concerning such a life, by the mere fact that one happens not to have been born into the majority culture, is to find oneself with a sort of handicap: the handicap of a reason that was unable to exert itself because it lacked that self-

2

See the excellent discussion by D. Chaerle and A. Van De Putte: ‘Liberalisme en cultuur. Will Kymlicka over multicultureel burgerschap’ [Liberalism and Culture: Will Kymlicka on Multicultural Citizenship], Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1997 (59:2), pp. 215252 and the ‘Symposium on Multicultural Citizenship by Will Kymlicka’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 1997 (4:1), pp. 35-87 including various articles and an important response by Kymlicka entitled ‘Do We Need a Theory of Minority Rights?’ (loc. cit., pp. 72-87).


27

respect and self-confidence which, one way or another, seem to depend on an element that is out of the individual’s control: his or her societal culture (LCC 175ff.) Such a culture, then, is an element in a pre-socratic sense, one which no national state is lacking. But it is an unjust element that allows some to breathe freely while others die of asphyxia. And since liberalism has always tried to distinguish between what precedes individual choice and what results from it, it would contradict its own principles were it to accept such injustice. If someone like Rawls did not include societal cultures among the so-called primary goods (LCC 1667), the fault lies not in his liberal ideas but, says Kymlicka, only results from his monocultural point of departure – an implicit but untenable premise that he shares with other notables of liberalism such as Dworkin. Once that premise is made explicit, one cannot but conclude with Kymlicka that minority rights are not at all in contradiction with liberalism’s fundamental intuitions but in fact confirm them. Yet do they not confirm even more than that? It is striking that Kymlicka’s reasoning tries to show the unfoundedness of all the anxieties that other cultures seem to inspire in us. He expects that his liberal co-citizen’s anxieties will dissipate as soon as they realize that the other is a disabled being just like them, and that his disability, like their own, is but the servant of a reason that he shares with them. For ultimately, this other is an autonomous and reasonable being and if, despite himself, s/he finds that s/he bears the mirror of a disability which is also our own, if s/he reminds us of this blindness at the very core of our reason which is not without attachments, it is not in order to sap our strengths but to make us aware of what is best in us and to reinforce it. Disability, like unity, gives strength.3 It is also what unites us. There seems to be in all of this a kind of metaphysical optimism that I do not wish to criticize as such. I just wonder where it comes from. Kymlicka, one must conclude, hardly if ever speaks of it. But how could one speak of it if, at the same time, one wants to embrace a tradition – a quite recent tradition – that treats political philosophy as if it were a separate domain? Would that not be to cut oneself off in advance from a whole classical conceptual system that might be of some assistance in understanding what the closing lines of Multicultural Citizenship modestly indicate as the punctum caecum of this entire liberal tradition 3

A reference to the motto of the Kingdom of Belgium, “l’union fait la force”.

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that it has been attempting to renew: liberal citizens find themselves as the bearers of, or rather borne by, ‘a very peculiar state of sentiment’ that consists of desiring ‘union’ without desiring ‘unity’? What we need, then, is an affect that can ‘unify’ us without ‘fusing us’ (MCC 192). Is this not precisely what Levinas tried to rediscover in the feeling of shame? In what follows I would like to retrace our steps, not so that we discover a ready-made solution – there is none in Levinas – but so that we land in the same problematic situation where Kymlicka left us. In order to pull ourselves out of this situation, it will perhaps not be enough to simply change course, as Levinas does, by taking ethics as a point of departure on the way to politics. But we might arrive at a better understanding of the rather unusual suggestion towards which I have been trying to lead: multiculturalism is perhaps not only an ethical or a political phenomenon; it should also be recognized in its metaphysical dimension. And this is not in contradiction with what I have just suggested regarding Levinas: for although it is true that the philosophy of Levinas consists precisely of an effort to take apart the classical intrigue of what belongs to ethics, politics and metaphysics, this does not seem to me to help us understand anything about multiculturalism. Quite to the contrary, as I shall attempt to show, there seems to be no place in this intrigue for the kind of phenomena that are of interest to us – and this for structural reasons. Not only does it seem to have been constructed out of a suspicion of the sort of deep attachments that we have just come across in Kymlicka, but we will see that, ultimately and beyond all superficial opposition, this suspicion itself derives from the same refusal to recognize something that, in all the other’s problematic alterity, points to a completely different way of questioning our subjectivity than that which these authors try to indicate by the word ‘responsibility’. In order to show what is at stake in this metaphysics of the nonresponse, which seems to me to constitute the repressed truth of our symptomatic fascination with the multicultural, let us take a brief detour through the philosophy of Levinas, who is sometimes – and rightly – presented as the most radical critic of liberalism’s principles. Let us look first of all at the price one would have to pay if one were to accept this critique.


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2. THE ETHICAL APPROACH AND ITS EXPLICIT METAPHYSICS Though often ignored by his commentators, there is clearly some audacity in Levinas’ attempt to save this old word ‘metaphysics’ within a frankly anti-metaphysical, or at least a post-metaphysical, climate. It is enough to open any page of that brilliant ‘essay on exteriority’ – the subtitle of Totality and Infinity – to be struck by words like ‘God’, ‘good’, ‘infinite’, ‘creation’, etc., words which an entire movement of Destruktion (Heidegger) or deconstruction (Derrida) of metaphysics has done its best to erase. Isn’t the ethical condition itself, from the very beginning of the book, called our religious condition? Yet Levinas is not merely doing restoration work, nor is there anything reactionary about his insistence on these words which we thought had fallen out of use. He does not treat them as obvious. If they are so manifestly present in his discourse it is because he believes that, past a certain point, they become inevitable. For Levinas is above all a phenomenologist and what he wants to avoid at any cost is theology. Far from taking a point of departure in words such as ‘God’ or ‘creature status’ (créaturalité) he wants to make them resonate, as if for the first time, at the end of an entire philosophical journey. It is only by reflecting on what is given – or rather not given – in the ethical situation that one can discover a new access to it. For what, in fact, transpires between me and the other? Inexplicably, Levinas tells us, the face of the Other appeals to us and this appeal concerns us. Which is not to say that it interests us. It is in opposition to our every interest that we turn towards the Other. Where does that Other get this strange ability to interrupt our own life, whose normal existence consists of pursuing its own course? If there is no quality of the Other that can interest us, then why is it that we undeniably experience within ourselves this strange feeling of not being able to ignore without fault (OB 87) his or her appeal for help? Where does this shame before the Other come from, even before we have decided to turn our back on him? For there is indeed such shame, Levinas insists, and its mere empirical absence in this man or that woman whom we describe as ‘shameless’, far from contesting this, actually reaffirms it. The shameless one has already recognized this shame and is only trying

30


to run away from it.4 But this is a futile flight, since it has already brought with it what it is trying to avoid: it sees itself in the mirror that the Other, by her mere presence, has provided. For the first time, in these other eyes, this being of mine, busy in being, saw or knew or experienced the fact that it is actively engaged in being its being. And from that moment hence, this course which nothing, and certainly not the Other, can prevent me from pursuing seems to have fatally lost its innocence. To pursue this course, to decide to ignore what those eyes have shown, is to take a decision and thus to be already situated within a horizon which escapes that freedom of initiative by qualifying it. For that is what intersubjectivity is according to Levinas: a non-neutral horizon where the subject is suddenly confronted with the choice of either belatedly recognizing as war a state in which it has always been without knowing it, but which now turns out to be the truth of that existence which only pursues its own course by treating everything in function of its own being, or else withdrawing from its own being and recognizing the being of the other, which bears no interest nor threat to it, as a being to which one cannot without injustice prefer one’s own. It is important that we understand clearly what Levinas is getting at here. This phenomenological approach to the intersubjective encounter is not simply pointing to another’s being which would be as valuable as my own. If that were the case, then I would not experience in this encounter with the other a feeling of shame when I discover that I have until now been leading a life which took only itself into account and which could not but be involuntarily egocentric. If the Other’s being were not more valuable than my own, if between us there were not this irreversible asymmetry of which Levinas speaks when he says that the Other has an “unimpeachable right over me” (CCP 125), I could continue pursuing my course without experiencing or having to repress the bad conscience of having preferred my interests to those of the

4

After having spoken, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, of a “fraternity that cannot be abrogated” (OB 87), Levinas adds this remarkable note: “It is perhaps by reference to this irremissibility that the strange place of illusion, intoxication, artifical paradises can be understood. The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother” (OB 192n21, my emphasis). Impossible suppression, since “proximity is an impossibility to move away without the torsion of a complex, without ‘alienation’ or fault”.


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Other. I would perhaps have mixed feelings about having to resolve this undecidable situation without an ultimate justification, where there is a strict equivalence between his existence and my own. But for Levinas, the ‘unjustified’ or ‘unjustifiable’ is not yet the same thing as the unjust – something Derrida seems at times to forget.5 For there to be injustice what is still mixed about my feelings would have to become separate, determined. For Levinas, just as for Kant, to whom he is very close on this point, this ‘mixture’ can always be divided into what is pure and what is pathological. The purity of the Good is always at risk of being contaminated by the forces of Evil which, like the serpent in Paradise, try to divert us from that initial orientation that we encountered in the face of the Other. To choose one’s own existence, to place it above that of the Other, is to contaminate Good with Evil, even if one tries to cope with the situation by treating it as undecidable. To claim that the Other and me are on the same level is already testimony to that pact with Evil which has rendered us incapable of grasping the difference between what is mere intoxication and illusion – the false relaxation of irresponsibility (OB 192n21) – and that state of extreme sobriety in which the appeal to our responsibility places us, at least according to Levinas. But how does he know this? Why should we believe it? What if what is described here as a mixture turns out to be an original solution? Is it really so clear that the separation between the pure and the pathological – if separation there be – overlaps the separation between Good and Evil, between the sacrifice of being-for-the-other and the detestable preference for oneself? It is no doubt here that those words I just mentioned weigh

5

For instance in J. DERRIDA, The Gift of Death (trans. D. Wills). Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 71: “What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female, rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is Abraham’s hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I make at each moment. These singularities represent others, a wholly other form of alterity: one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages. How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people?”. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, this dramatization of an unjustifiable not distinguished from the unjust will subsequently transform the discussion between Derrida and Levinas into a dialogue of the deaf (Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Phaenomenologica, 155). Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1999, pp. 275-326; I shall henceforh refer to this volume as Truth and Singularity).

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undeniably on Levinas’ discourse. As Derrida noted quite early,6 without the word ‘God’ – and I would add: without all those words that are implicated in that ‘first word’ (such as ‘trace’ and ‘creature status’ for instance) – Levinas will never get out of this situation. But this is not the place to recapitulate what I have attempted to show elsewhere.7 Let me just note that without such words, Levinas would never be able to maintain what I take to be his fundamental claim: that “the violent one does not move out of himself” (DF 9). Which would be undeniable if, before being connected to itself, the human being were connected – but in a non-neutral sense, in the sense of ‘devoted’ – to the other (OB 105). But such a ‘pre-original fraternity’ can only be thought inside the framework of a metaphysics where words like ‘God’ and ‘creation ex nihilo’ appear as the keystones of a building that, without them, would be at the mercy of the elements. Levinas would be the first to agree. For him, the crisis and afflictions of a post-colonial Europe racked by all manner of relativisms, particularisms and culturalisms are but the result of the fact that Europe did not dare to radically uproot itself. The child of an Athens and a Greece which were sacred and pagan before being reasonable, Europe did not possess that extraordinary courage of Judaism which, as Levinas writes in a text on ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’ that echoes in my title, demanded the ‘destruction’ of ‘idols’ rather than their ‘sublimation’ by a Christianity too desirous of ‘conquering humanity’ by integrating “the small and touching household gods into the worship of saints, and local cults”, thus giving “piety roots, nurturing itself on landscapes and memories culled from family, tribe and nation” (DF 233-4). There is no doubt that, for Levinas, the multicultural situation throwing contemporary Europe into confusion finds its genealogy here. The flames that are burning again in Europe today, just as those that burned in an all too recent past – burning not just Europe but an entire people – are the same ones that warmed those wooden gods that were invoked in a mythical past when waging war on one’s brothers.

6

Cf. ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in J. DERRIDA, Writing and Difference. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 79153. 7 Cf. my Truth and Singularity, part III.


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Levinas would not doubt for a moment that it is the glimmer of those flames that lurks behind multiculturalism and gives it its attraction. If there exists a multicultural problem, and if we are in need of ingenious solutions, such as those provided by Kymlicka’s liberalism in order to solve this problem it is because we still refuse to hear the voice of that ‘difficult freedom’ which reminds us that our only attachments are those we have to the Other. Which is to say that we must accept that Other without any condition whatsoever, just as we must be prepared to sever those opaque, unjustifiable and, as we have seen, unjust ties with which we find ourselves bound to our ‘societal culture’. For it is violence itself that has forged these ties which make us believe that we cannot get outside of ourselves. Whatever may be the origin of this belief, it becomes wilful idolatry from the moment that another human being’s face, naked and uprooted, gives us the chance to recognize it as such. “Man, after all, is not a tree” (DF 23); rootedness is only a spell. But like any spell, it can also be broken if one finds the exact words and if one has the strength to pronounce them. And the Other gives us these words: in his or her face, says Levinas, “I hear the word of God”.8 The simple phrase ‘help me’, when spoken by the Other, dispossesses us of whatever has taken ‘possession’ of us and raises us to the height of a humanity that is beyond all nature and without any other attachments but those tying us to one another. It would seem then that, for Levinas, even a sophisticated liberalism like Kymlicka’s is not sufficiently severe. It is still too much influenced by that pacifying illusion cast by the ‘sacred groves’ on the naive walkers who are unaware of or prefer not to know what goes on in the dark corners of our forests where animals devour each other beneath the trees that fight for the light of the sun. It is cherishing a false peace to want to have a situation where the Other’s deep attachments can coexist with our own. It is to naively place one’s trust in the strength of a doubtful sympathy which, from the moment that things become difficult, easily turns into an instinct for war, as we are daily reminded by those countries, including my own, where the fate of immigrants’ rights depends on the mood and good will of the natives. The metaphysical optimism exhibited by this liberalism is but the mask of a physical realism which never forgets its own interests. This is what happens, Levinas 8

Altérité et transcendance. S.l., Fata Morgana, 1995, p. 114, my translation.

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would say, when we place our trust in political reason and neglect to find for it a different centre of gravity in whose name it might be contested. One should not start out from political reason in the expectation that ethics will build its foundations after the fact; one should follow the reverse path. That path is too long and tortuous to pursue here. It is worth wondering, though, where this demanding critique of liberalism will lead us and whether we can really endorse it.

3. A QUESTION OF ATTACHMENTS As we have seen, Levinas begins with this strange affect called shame which we experience in the face of the other and which, according to him, attests to an original asymmetry between the other and me. The Other has more rights than me; indeed, if there were only her and me, then I would have no rights. To recognize my rights at this level would necessarily make my freedom precede my responsibility, and then my responsibility would only be obligatory to the extent that I give it my assent – a strange obligation, one whose force would depend on my good will not to want to invoke these rights, and from which with a bit of ingenuity I could derive any excuse necessary to refuse it. Which is not to say that I am condemned to live without any rights at all, for there is always more than one Other and more than one appeal.9 So it becomes necessary to compare them, to weigh their urgency, and for that one needs time, at least the time to turn one’s head, to look at each of them and assess their needs, one after the other. During that time I am alone, leading my own life in which I must eat and sleep, among other things, so as not to lose my strength. But that sort of life, which we all lead and which requires enormous organization and ultimately a State – for we require rules since we cannot be omnipresent – is really only a relaxation. It does not bear its weight in itself, but only results from that necessary interruption of ethics – necessary precisely because all the others have rights that are equally absolute over me. Which is to say that if life in the

9

This famous problem of the ‘third’ is at the centre of the fifth chapter of Otherwise than Being which I have analyzed in detail in the text cited in note 5. Cf. also R. BERNASCONI, ‘Wer ist der Dritte? Ueberkreuzung von Ethik und Politik bei Levinas’, in B. WALDENFELS, I. DÄRMANN (eds.), Der Anspruch des Anderen. Perspektiven phänomenologischer Ethik. München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998, pp. 87-110.


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State, with its rules of justice, accords certain rights to me, these rights can never take precedence over those of the other. The rights I have at my disposal, which the State accords to me, are only there to allow me to serve the Other better. Just as the cry of a concrete Other will always prevail over all the rules of a justice that cannot serve as my excuse. Does this mean that Levinas is preaching an ethical anarchism? Must I assist the assassin in evading justice if by chance he happens to ask me to help him? Not at all. For in helping him or her to escape I would be neglecting my obligations towards other Others. One sees how difficult the situation can become and one is perhaps not surprised that, with regard to the concrete situation in Israel for example – a multicultural situation if ever there was one – Levinas always protested against a Zionism which, as Finkielkraut says, “sacrifices the constitutive homelessness of man on the altar of a re-discovered home”,10 but never against the state of Israel as such, for as Levinas says, “my family and my people are, despite the possessive pronouns, my ‘others’ like the foreigners, and they require justice and protection” (quoted in Finkielkraut 567). But then once we have arrived at this ultra-concrete level, which is perhaps not the only one that matters but which surely matters as well, what have we gained? Is what Levinas has just said about his family and his people on the basis of his anti-liberal ethics really so different from what a liberal theoretician like Kymlicka presupposes when he tries to explain to his countrymen that their rights will not suffer if they concede certain special rights to ethnic or national minorities? To be sure, Levinas would arrive at this point by a completely different route, and it is no minor thing to defend the notion of a peace which would be other than merely a containment of war. But is such a peace of this earth? Is it made for finite beings like you and me who, if one can believe Kymlicka, are attached to their ‘societal culture’, and who in its absence are just as handicapped as those multicultural others of whom Kymlicka and (perhaps) Levinas speak? It is striking how little one hears about those attachments. Perhaps because it is clearly too dangerous: none of us wants to be associated with the extreme right, who never cease to speak of these attachments because they are certain of having penetrated their secret. And yet, as Kymlicka 10

A. FINKIELKRAUT, ‘Le risque du politique’, in C. CHALIER & M. ABENSOUR (eds.), Cahiers de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas. S.l., L’Herne (biblio essais), s.d., p. 566.

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shrewdly remarks, it is these very attachments that explain how our states survive in a situation where one would have expected to see them rapidly disappear. We live in fact in a situation where there is a progressive diminution of the differences between liberal states, and a growing diversity within each country (SNC 35-6). In such circumstances, to abolish the borders between such states would be a sure way of increasing our equality and liberty. What is holding us back then? To answer this question, it will not do to simply try and combine Kymlicka’s politics (which takes the answer for granted) with Levinas’ ethics (which makes the question impossible). Indeed, what one would need to explain is not, as in Levinas, why ‘the state is needed’, as he often says, but why states are needed. Should the existence of borders only be seen as exclusion, as a sad testimony of a reality that is not yet at the level of what within it is better than itself? But perhaps one should try not so much to answer these questions as to understand what it means that we do not manage to answer them. They mark the limits of what is thinkable for us on this ground where we move. To defy that ground, for instance by recalling the Heideggerian word according to which a border (peras) was not, for the Greeks, the point at which something ends but ‘that on the basis of which’ there could be appearing and phenomenon, is to risk being associated with the Nietzsche of the second Untimely Meditation and from there with the whole Gegenaufklärung or worse. Must we then be content to call, with Derrida, on the cosmopolitans of all countries to make one more effort?11 Should we not also, perhaps first of all, reject these alternatives and begin to see multiculturalism as putting into question the very ground on which we move? That ground, be it understood as ethical or political, seems no longer to enable us to speak about ourselves. At best, it allows us to speak of our responsibility and so implicitly totalizes us by only permitting us to understand ourselves as ethical or political beings. As if in human life, in human destiny, there were only what connects us with others. Clearly this is not the way that one has, until very recently, tried to speak of human existence. Which makes one wonder whether perhaps those anxieties that persist despite our efforts to explain why they are not well founded, as well as our very fascination with the multicultural, are but 11

J. DERRIDA, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! Paris, Galilée, 1997.


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signs that we have recognized in that Other that we enjoy talking about, ‘the figure in which our question returns to us’. The phrase I just quoted comes from the German poet Theodor Däubler, whose importance for the work of Carl Schmitt is well known.12 Schmitt, as we know, concluded from this that a certain other is our enemy insofar as he bears within himself the ‘negation of our own mode of existence’13 – which is not, for Schmitt, just a political definition but a definition of politics itself. I only quote this here because it seems to me that, between Däubler’s verse and the interpretation of it provided by Schmitt, there is a short circuit that is still at work paralyzing us. Why and in what sense would the ‘negation of our own mode of existence’ follow from a confrontation with ‘our own question as figure’? Is it not because we lack the domain where that in us which does not answer this question might be given a name? In unmasking behind this silence at the heart of the subject all the violence of an egoism that refuses to accept that the ultimate essence of its For-Itself is indeed a For-the-Other, Levinas’ philosophy presents itself as a last heroic effort to fill the gap of a subjectivity that seems to be left without an answer to this question, a question which is nevertheless its very own: what are these attachments that singularise the subject so much that, without them, it would risk losing that autonomy from which Kymlicka says it derives all its dignity? In denying the subject these attachments by reminding it that it is neither an animal nor a tree, Levinas’ metaphysics comes dangerously close to doubling the ‘constitutive homelessness’ of the human being by a total immanence. Henceforth, all that remains silent in us will only be a refusal to speak, a

12

For an excellent discussion of the role played by this line from Däubler in Carl Schmitt’s work see: T.W.A. DE WIT, De onontkoombaarheid van de politiek. De soevereine vijandin de politieke filosofie van Carl Schmitt [The Inevitability of Politics: The Sovereign Enemy in Carl Schmitt’s Political Philosophy]. Ubbergen, Pompers, 1992, pp. 415-424, 450-452,468-479. 13 C. SCHMITT, Der Begriff des Politischen (Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien). Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1996, p. 27. To avoid any misunderstanding, the reader should remember that I wrote “a certain other” in italics. It is not just any other, but the other Däubler speaks of when he says that “Der Feind ist unsre eigne Frage als Gestalt”. For this notion of the (public) enemy in Schmitt, see also the detailed commentary by H. Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’. Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden. Stuttgart, J.B. Metzler, 1988, especially pp. 84-92.

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refusal to answer, here and now. But should one not hear in the refusal of this refusal, to which our fascination with the multicultural seems to testify, something else than the stammering in which a Saying entirely centred on the Other is in search of itself? If we lack the words that would allow our fascination to speak, is it not because, in looking at the other, we begin to understand that there is another sense than the one highlighted by Levinas in the French ‘autrui ne me regarde pas’?14 Which, on this our ground – and this is the whole problem, since on this ground even silence becomes eloquent – can only be understood as a manifesto of irresponsibility itself. We should not be surprised that, under these circumstances, what Schmitt calls ‘our question’ found no other means to keep from drowning in the night of ethical-political irresponsibility than to return, as he says so well, as a ‘figure’. That is, at the price of a regression towards what Lacan would call the imaginary, which might explain certain of the difficulties facing our contemporary democracies. And this may mean that what they need in order to get out of these difficulties would be to accept that, for us, transcendence has become silent and that we should stop forcing this silence to speak or condemning it in the name of an ethical-political eloquence to the silence of the imaginary. What we need then is a new language that will make us understand what we already knew: that human life, where in a sense we are never alone, resounds with a silence in which not being alone does not mean being with or for others. There is something metaphysical in us not because instead of simply being, we would be (with) ourselves (EE 28), but rather because for us to be means to be those attachments which leave us without an answer and yet to which we nonetheless feels attached. This 14

The French regarder means both ‘to look at’ and ‘to concern’. Thus Levinas could contest Sartre’s statement that the other looks at me (autrui me regarde) while taking over the same phrase and giving it the meaning that ‘the other concerns me’ (cf. Truth and Singularity, o.c., chapter 5). I am suggesting that one could do to Levinas what he did to Sartre: that ‘the other does not concern me’ (ne me regarde pas) does not have the ethical meaning Levinas would give to that statement because it could also be taken to mean ‘the other does not look at me’, i.e., it is not his gaze that unsettles me, but an impersonal gaze in me, to which I refer, with a different metaphor, as that in me which does not respond to me: not to me, and thus not to the Other. This non-responsibility is not a deficient mode of (ethical) responsibility. It is, as we shall see, prior to it and, as such, immensely complicates the search for an ethics.


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new language will be metaphysical and will define what we continue to call ‘man’ by what within him or her is not transascendent but transdescendent: the human being is a being who must take account of something that does not take account of it.

CHAPTER TWO

IN RESPECTFUL CONTEMPT HEIDEGGER, APPROPRIATION, FACTICITY

The ‘respectful contempt’ to which I refer in my title is not my own. Nor does it concern Heidegger. At least not directly. It is Hilary Putnam who in Reason, Truth and History1 in the course of a discussion on relativism, just after showing that it is self-refuting, suddenly reminds himself and his readers of the ambivalent attitude which he has to one of his colleagues with whom he has been engaged in a political discussion over many years without them coming any nearer to one another. Putnam refuses to draw relativist conclusions from this. Neither he nor his co-disputant (who happens to be Bob Nozick), he assures us, would agree that what divides them is “just a matter of taste” (165). Such a “false relativism” is “dishonest” (166), it lacks the courage to admit that in such a fundamental disagreement each of the disputants feels “something akin to contempt, not for the other’s mind (...) nor for the other as a person (...) but for a certain complex of emotions and judgments in the other” (165). There is “respect for the intellectual virtues in the other”, but it goes together with “contempt for the intellectual and emotional weaknesses” (166). Each of the parties in such a discussion may find the other to be excelling in open-mindedness, willingness to consider reason and arguments, honesty, integrity, kindness etc., but nonetheless “regards the other as lacking a certain kind of sensitivity and perception” with respect to the issue they disagree on (165). In such a situation, Putnam suggests, “respectful contempt” is clearly the “more honest attitude”. It is to be preferred to the relativist “pretense that there is no giving reasons, or such a thing as better or worse reasons on a subject, when one really does feel that one view is reasonable and the other is irrational” (166). I am not particularly impressed by the sort of conclusions that Putnam would like to draw from this example, nor his way of handling it. Suffice

1

Hilary PUTNAM, Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1981. Quoted in the text by mere pagination numbers.

IN RESPECTFUL CONTEMPT

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it to say that a “certain complex of feelings and judgments in the other” is a rather hazy notion which does not, to my mind, become more precise by Putnam’s repeated assurance that the mixed feelings with which he reacts to that complex do not bear on the other as a person. In fact, it is quite striking to observe with what apparent ease Putnam can introduce what he himself calls an “interestingly mixed” (165) and “ambivalent” (166) attitude like respectful contempt only to take it apart on the next page into the two components of respect and contempt, that apparently owe their independence to a reference to different parts or ‘complexes’ in the other. There is a whole ontology of the person involved here, and although Putnam has, of course, no doubt thought deeply about that too, my reason for mentioning his anecdote has not to do with the views he himself takes on it, but with the anecdote as such. I think that Putnam, whatever his other merits may be, has certainly a point about the analogy which he would like to build between a political discussion of the kind he had with Nozick and (at least some) philosophical discussions. For example those between different ‘schools’ of thought, like the sort of schools that, according to the organizers of this conference,2 each of the invited speakers here is supposed to represent. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that what we feel here for each other is – or should be, if we are “honest” – a mixture of respect and contempt. Not only because that would be both presumptuous and presumptive, but also because I am inclined to believe that if one transposes the sort of situation that Putnam describes to conferences like this one, what one feels is not first and foremost a mixture of respect and contempt, but something more akin to what Heidegger has called in § 29 of Being and Time a fahle Ungestimmtheit, a pallid lack of mood which is “not nothing” (SZ 134/173), but a mood (a Stimmung) in its own right, and, as Heidegger suggests, not the least current one in everyday life.

2

Jim Faulconer and Mark Wrathall who, in May 1999, called together ten readers of Heidegger, all deemed to represent a different approach to his work, in the (idle) hope that they would mutually clarify their positions. The ‘event’ of this conference is such an integral part of the present text’s message that I decided not to erase occasional references to it. What I try to point out cannot be understood except by reference to an actual or imagined participation in just the kind of conference as the one in Park City, Utah.

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1. IN THE MARGINS OF THOUGHT Everydayness is, of course, not just a condition of those who are outside of philosophy. It affects philosophers too. Not just outside their ‘professional’ life, but in its very heart, although philosophers have found all sort of tricks to prevent it from contaminating the kind of mood (wonderment etc.) which they deem worthy of philosophy. The most common of these tricks consists in recognizing the presence of everydayness, and its accompanying ‘lack of mood’,3 while locating it in the margins of philosophy. Heidegger is no exception here, one only needs to open some of the volumes of the Gesamtausgabe to enjoy the delicate sarcasm with which he treats philosophical conferences, that aim to “generate an understanding” through “the cumulation of lack of understanding” (GA 20:376/273). But even if one would be inclined to think that he is exaggerating when in The History of the Concept of Time he scolds those “people who travel from one conference to another” – people like you and me – “and are convinced in doing so that something is really happening” (ibid.), the fact remains that those of us who think that the sort of conferences that Heidegger is scolding here are the ones they don’t attend, nonetheless will introduce their own margins into the sort of conferences which they do attend. There is, for example, the official conference time, the lectures and the discussions, and then there is that marginal time, for example between two lectures when one exchanges views or impressions which basically come down to expressing one’s interest in what one has just heard, or one’s “pallid” (SZ 134/173) lack of interest or enthusiasm. Something has been said there, some discussion took place, but it failed to catch our attention. We don’t know really what to think of it, whether it is true or not, we have no particular problem with it, and cannot think of a good counter-argument, it was just not our ‘sort of thing’. Or if it was, we profit from the break to state to our companion what we did not allow ourselves to say in public. It is true that the speaker had our attention, we even did him the honour of raising what we honestly thought to be a serious objection, but “between you and me, although I couldn’t tell you

3

I am not suggesting that everydayness is necessarily ‘ungestimmt’. It knows other moods too. But the ‘lack of mood’ is typical for the ‘Durchschnittlichkeit’ characteristic of everydayness.


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what was missing in his lecture, something was. I wouldn’t like my students to write like that; that is not the way it should be done; or, wasn’t that typical X or Y, I do not know what they see in him; and, no, no, I am no saying that he did not have a point, it is just that ...”. I have been eavesdropping at the margins of philosophy and what I heard would be according to the author of Being and Time just the noisy hubbub of idle talk with its typical ambiguity, distantiality (Abständigkeit) and uprootedness. But my reason for doing so was a bit more complicated than such an orthodox application of Heidegger’s ‘insights’ seems to suggest. As I mentioned before, and I am certainly not the first one to underline it, it is perhaps not so evident to label the murmur in the margins of thought in the strict sense, with tags like ‘everydayness’ or ‘the ‘they’’, ‘doxa’ or ‘sophistry’. When Heidegger says in volume 27 (Einleitung in die Philosophie, Freiburg WS 1928-29) that “there is a sophist in every philosopher” because “philosophy is essentially a human, that is: a finite possibility” (GA 27:24), or when, making fun of philosophical conferences in the passage I quoted from the Prolegomena he adds that “ancient sophistry” displayed the same “essential structure, although it was perhaps shrewder in certain ways” (GA 20:377/273), he is not exactly original in this attempt to separate ‘philosophy’ or ‘thought’ from its inessential margins. It is true that Heidegger in speaking of an essentially human, finite possibility and in explicitly recognizing therein “a possibility which is constitutive of the structure of Dasein” (ibid.), seems already himself engaged in a rather complicated attempt to keep, on the one hand, philosophy uncontaminated whilst, on the other hand, outdoing himself in trying to understand the structure of that tendency that makes philosophy – and not just philosophy, but Dasein as such – prone to a contamination, in which Heidegger sees a ‘covering up’ and an ‘untruth’. I will come back to this later, when discussing thrownness, falling and facticity. But, for now, let me just stress that Heidegger is in no way taking the fashionable line of ‘deconstructing’ the strict demarcation between ‘philosophy’ and ‘sophistry’ or between ‘thought’ and ‘doxa’. And this is an observation which should concern us all, especially in light of the theme of the conference where this paper was originally given and its chosen motto from What is Called Thinking?: “Every confrontation of different interpretations of a work ... is in reality a mutual reflection (Besinnung) of the guiding presuppositions; it is the discussion (Erörterung) of these

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presuppositions – a task which, strangely is always tolerated only marginally (am Rande) and covered up with empty generalities”.4

2. RELATIVISM, SCEPTICISM, HISTORICISM Perhaps the shortest possible way of summarizing what I am up to here, would be to state that, as you already may have suspected, I want to contest Heidegger his margins. Or rather: I would like to take another look at what exactly is happening in these margins, which Heidegger, as you will have noticed, divides into two: the margins filled with empty generalities, which tend to usurp the text they are supposed to only accompany; and, as a result of that usurpation, the margins into which the true task of thinking, which should really be at the centre of our attention, gets marginalized. What should be uncovered is covered up, forced to move into the margin and into a solitude in which it humbly continues its task: “No thinker ever has entered into another thinker’s solitude. Yet it is only from its solitude that all thinking, in a hidden mode, speaks to the thinking that comes after or that went before”.5 If we would put this quote from What is Called Thinking? next to the one which the organizers of this conference have offered us as a motto, the standard Heideggerian explanation for the marginality of the task of thinking immediately jumps to the eye: given that thinking is a solitary business, it is, on second thought, not so strange that a mutual Besinnung on the guiding presuppositions is something that is, more often than not, covered up with empty generalities – or as the German says more precisely: with allgemeine Redensarten, with common ways of speaking. What such ‘commonality’ does, is precisely, to cover up a solitude that, in the last instance, would be what Being and Time has been trying to unearth as the solitude of solitudes: the solitude of every Dasein which it cannot share with others since it comes from the heart of its being as an obligation to exist. It is, as we shall see in more detail later, this “naked that” of existence (das nackte which forms the core of Heidegger’s

4

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking (trans. anon.). New York, Harper & Row, s.d., p. 177 (my italics)/ Was Denken? ed. Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1984, pp. 109-10. These sentences had been printed on the poster announcing the ‘Appropriating Heidegger’ conference. 5 Ibid. 169/164.


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analytics of Dasein and which explains how he can both come to distrust sophistry and see in its twin brothers, scepticism or relativism, at once “a fruitful rebellion” (fruchtbare Rebellion) against what he calls the “exteriorization of philosophy” (“Veräußerlichung der Philosophie”) and “eine Halbheit”, something that stops mid-way (Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Marburg WS 1923-24, GA 17:99). Heidegger’s qualified sympathy for these rebel-movements is not so difficult to understand: he shares their enemies. As he says in his ’24 lecture for the Marburg Theological Society: “anxiety in the face of (vor) relativism is anxiety in the face of (vor) Dasein”.6 The context is the contemporary “moaning about historicism” and the belief that one needs again the “supra-historical”. It is precisely this craving for a firm grip, above or outside of time, which betrays, according to Heidegger, an anxiety in the face of Dasein, an attempt “to steal away from time”, i.e. from what makes up the ‘Da’ of such Dasein. But, the sort of easy embrace of time (one need only think of Ranke’s famous “gleich unmittelbar zu Gott” – although Heidegger does not mention him) implied in historicism is not, of course, what Heidegger would advocate instead. Historicism is but the flipside of the craving for the suprahistorical, just like relativism or scepticism are merely absolutism reversed (cf. GA 61:162 ff). In volume 60 (Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Freiburg WS 1920-21:31 ff.) and elsewhere with a remarkable tenacity in the lecture-courses leading up to Being and Time, Heidegger keeps raising the same critical question: what exactly is it that one wants to secure oneself against by seeking refuge in either side of these oppositions? And, whether he is analysing Husserl’s Philosophy as a Rigorous Science or Troeltsch or Spengler (there is almost no lecture course which does not bring up Spengler at some point or other), Heidegger’s answer is always the same: “wir müssen also das Bekümmerungsphänomen im faktischen Dasein unverdeckt zu Gesicht zu bekommen versuchen” (GA 60:52) (roughly: we have to try to get a direct look at this phenomenon of worrying in factical Dasein without anything covering it up). This means that instead of joining the public chorus that cries out “the universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit) of knowledge is in danger, scepticism!” (Phänomenologische Interpretationen 6

Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time (trans. W.H. McNeill). Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, p. 20/20E.

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zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Freiburg WS 1921-22, GA 61:88), we have to turn our attention toward the being that is addressed here, the being that is supposed to sense this danger and sensibly react to it, and we have to wonder whether what is implicitly presented as that being’s only sensible response is not precisely the kind of response which “alienates”7 that being from its being. In other words, we have to undertake an analytics of Dasein and in the course of that analysis, we have to understand against what kind of “unrest” (Unruhe) Dasein is, first and foremost, trying to protect itself. Heidegger is going to raise what Deleuze once called the Nietzschean question par excellence: ‘Who is speaking?’. In Heidegger’s terms: what sort of care (Sorge) is behind the care for a firm, absolutely valid knowledge, for a strenge Wissenschaft? Who is the “subject” of that care? And what or who is it trying to subject? Foucault should perhaps have thought twice before letting Nietzsche get the upper hand over Heidegger who, to my mind, did not influence him enough.

3. APPROPRIATING HEIDEGGER AFTER FOUCAULT This last reference, tongue in cheek, to Foucault’s famous last interview,8 which shocked his readers by his unexpected revelation of his earlier obsession with Heidegger (from which he claims Nietzsche relieved him), will not have surprised those readers who are somewhat familiar with my interests. I beg for their and the other readers’ indulgence in referring here to my earlier work on Foucault and Heidegger.9 The reason why I bring it up is that my own ‘appropriation of Heidegger’ was triggered by my disappointment with Foucault’s turn to Nietzsche. I have always thought that Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ writings (Discipline and Punish, Power/Knowledge, etc.), that marked the break7

A word that is used a lot by Heidegger in this period. The central passage in Sein und Zeit is § 38 where ‘Entfremdung’ and ‘entfremdend’ occur 7 times. 8 Michel Foucault, ‘Le Retour de la morale’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, June 28-July 5 1984, p. 36-41; trans. The Return of Morality’, in L.D. KRITZMAN (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. New York/London, Routledge, 1988, pp. 242-54, esp. p. 250 (on Nietzsche/Heidegger). 9 Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique (trans. Chr. Turner). London/New York, Verso, 1995 (original Dutch: 1990). Some of my later essays on Foucault and Heidegger are reprinted in my Truth and Singularity.


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through of his popularity in the U.S., represented some sort of decadence in comparison to the earlier ‘archaeological’ phase (The Order of Things, etc.), which earned him his chair at the Collège de France. The sort of Nietzscheanism that inspired him in his genealogies seems to have been won at the cost of a complete obliteration of what comes closest in contemporary ‘continental’ philosophy’s jargon to what Heidegger called ‘ontological difference’, i.e. the idea of a ‘symbolic order’.10 In the roughest of strokes: when Foucault reverses Clausewitz and sees in politics a war continued with other means, then links Truth to power, and thus to politics, and goes on suggesting that the Truth is always the Truth of someone, and that, like the code of law, it is written with the blood of the besieged, and is constantly trying to muffle the clamour of the war continuing underneath it, he is in fact naturalizing what Lacan, Lévi-Strauss or Lefort would call the symbolic.11 As these authors have stressed in various ways, the symbolic is not what mirrors or reflects something prior to it, but what gives it form and structure. Foucault is, of course, right in asking ‘whose form?’, but he is so charmed by the possibilities of this new ‘genealogical’ question that he 10

Admirers of Foucault’s genealogy will, of course, object to the sort of caricature that I am going to give of it in the long sentence that follows (its length and its syntax being an indication of a certain loss of interest that often sets in after one has struggled with an author for years). In my defence I could point them to the meticulous analysis of the internal tensions in his genealogical writings I have tried to make in my Genealogy as Critique, Chaps. 2 and 3, esp. pp. 54-73. My comments in the following lines refer to Foucault’s 1975-6 recently published lectures: “Il faut défendre la société”. Cours au collège de France (1975-6). Paris, Seuil/Gallimard, 1997. Foucault’s summary of that course appeared significantly titled as ‘War in the Filigree of Peace: Course Summary,’ The Oxford Literary Review, 1980 (4), pp. 15-19. Fragments of it were published before: ‘Two Lectures’, in C. GORDON (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 78-108 (esp. 90-92 on Clausewitz) and the German bootleg publication of the two following lectures which caused quite a shock: W. SEITTER (ed.), Vom Licht des Krieges zur Geburt der Geschichte. Berlin, Merve Verlag, 1986; see e.g. p. 43 in “Il faut défendre la société” (o.c.) where Foucault seems to comment without any reservations the ‘counter-history’ that goes back to Edward Coke and John Lilburne in England and to Boulainvilliers in France, according to which “the laws are born in the blood and the dirt of battles” (my trans.). 11 For an extremely revealing comparison of Foucault’s and Lefort’s readings of Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton NJ, Princeton U.P., 1957), see Bernard FLYNN, ‘Foucault and the Body Politic,’ Man and World, 1987 (20), pp. 65-84.

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forgets a point he made with great clarity in his archaeological writings: that every imprinting of a form or a structure or an ‘order’ (like in The Order of Discourse) brings with it its own limitation, exclusion and rarefaction. The voids that are necessary to tell any meaningful story are not by themselves political. Politics contests the sort of voids and the sort of meaning they generate. It would be wrong to contest to there being voids as such. And this is exactly what genealogy implies when it blames the law for not being as ‘founded’ as it should be, i.e. for not being a law at all, but a war-machine. By uncovering all law as martial law, Foucault misses what is written in Lacanian psychoanalysis as Law (capital ‘l’). He reduces that dimension without which no law could ever be a law to its present (vorhanden) representative, and thus falls sort of what again, in psychoanalytic terms, one would call symbolic castration (which has nothing to do with male domination, or with the penis and its envy, but with that void which there is, of necessity, between an arbitrary symbolic system (e.g. the linguistic chain of signifiers) and what it is ‘about’; in Heideggerian terms: language is a world-disclosive power, which cannot be grounded exclusively in what it discloses, for ‘world’ is not a being, but an ontological function). In other words, Foucault, notwithstanding his fervent denials, is re-entering with his turn to genealogy the naturalism which he has always sought to escape (and which he in fact escaped in his archaeology). In accusing the law of not being a good law, he implicitly stipulates what he would accept as a good law: a law which would be entirely founded, and thus a law which would miss what one could call with Lyotard or Levinas, the moment of ‘obligation’. With the idea of an entirely legitimate law, where the one for whom it holds would be perfectly interchangeable for the one who issues it, genealogy, again psychoanalytically spoken, has not only discovered perversion (The History of Sexuality I) as a new object of study, it has raised it to the dignity of a method. Hence my own turn away from genealogy to the Foucault of archaeology and my subsequent attempt to take him into the later Heidegger who thought that there was a lethe which no aletheia could ever do away with. An untruth not equiprimordial to truth, as Being and Time still held (§ 44), but an untruth that, as Heidegger tells us in Vom


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Wesen der Wahrheit, would be older than truth;12 a phrase which led me to speculate about what for us was still at stake in that mysterious Kehre which everyone evoked, but which I failed to understand until I ‘appropriated’ it in my own way. I do not know whether that was a happy decision, it is one that I cannot undo. But since I want to ‘repeat’ it, in the Heideggerian sense of Wiederholung, allow me to draw just a few more lines on the map on which I am trying to find my coordinates.

4. BEING HELD (UP) If Foucault’s genealogy turned to a ‘politics of truth’, his archaeology seemed to call instead for something like an ‘ethics of truth’. Not a set of moral rules, but an èthos in the sense that Heidegger had evoked in his Letter on Humanism: “The word names the open region in which the human being dwells. (...) The abode of the human being contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to the human being in his essence”.13 Or again: “More essential than instituting rules is that human beings find the way to their abode in the truth of being”.14 Abode, èthos, is rendered by Heidegger as Aufenthalt, which can both mean ‘residence’ (hence: abode), but also something like ‘delay’. One could say that the ‘Halt’ in ‘Aufenthalt’ is both what holds you and what holds you up. Heidegger is usually understood and perhaps understood himself as pointing to the first of these meanings (the abode contains and preserves), but if one reads him with Foucault’s archaeology in the back of one’s mind, there seems, in principle, room for the second meaning too. Discourse, as Foucault understood it, seems to be both an open region in which we dwell and which holds us, but by thus being held we are also invested with a finitude the weight of which we feel when we don’t manage to get (for example) our thoughts across. Like Putnam in his conversations with Nozick, we do not manage to drive home our point. Something seems to hold us up, but it is the same something that allows us to make our point in the way we make it. This something is not, of course, an ontic something. It is not a being, but that in the light

12

Cf. the essays reprinted in my Truth and Singularity, Chaps. 1 and 2. Martin HEIDEGGER, Pathmarks (ed. W. McNeill). Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1998, p. 269. 14 Ibid., p. 274.

13

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of which beings can appear. It is of the same order as what Heidegger mysteriously calls Being. But there is nothing mysterious about it. It is not, as Putnam himself seems to suspect, his ‘point’, his ‘argument’ as such which lacks the refinement it would need in order to become acceptable to Nozick, it is, as Putnam rather helplessly tries to explain their endless moving in circles, a “certain kind of sensitivity and perception”, which he, however, immediately hypostatises into an ontic “complex of emotions and judgments in the other”. It is against this combination of such a hypostatisation, and the causalisation which it allows (my reasons are sound, it’s Nozick’s sensitivity which I find lacking!), that Heidegger and Foucault, if read through each other’s spectacles, seem to warn us. As Ian Hacking has superbly shown in his translation of Foucault’s insight into the language of analytic philosophy,15 with notions such as ‘discourse’ we have what one can regard as a framework relativism of the non-Quinean type, and hence resistant to the Davidsonian attack: it is not the truth but the possible truth-value of a statement which is dependent on the framework, which simply means that one must be able to ‘hear’ a proposition, in the sense of ‘taking it seriously’, in order for it to be accepted as a candidate for either truth or falsity (i.e. for correspondencetruth). It is this ‘ability’ or ‘sensitivity’ which we do not owe to ourselves, but to what Foucault calls ‘discourse’ or Heidegger ‘clearing’ (a parallel which I have argued for at length elsewhere, cf. note 9), which both supports our speech, enables us to formulate what (and as) we do, and which can give it that strange gravity which hinders it from landing on that planet that we call ‘the other’. Not necessarily so, of course, but in those cases where the other sees (or formulates) things, as one says, in a ‘different light’ than we do. Although one can never be certain, when one is trapped into the kind of disagreement that Putnam describes, the uncanniness, that like mist seems to dim the light between us and our co-disputant, may be due to him and us bathing in a different light. As Being and Time said, the other is not a subject. He is, like me, Dasein, being-in-the-world. But Being and Time never said that his world and my own need to be the same. Neither ontically, nor, of course, ontologically. One is, Heidegger, told us, always-already-in-a-specific-world. One 15

E.g. in his ‘Language, truth and reason’, in Steven LUKES - Martin HOLLIS (eds.), Rationality and Relativism. Oxford, Blackwell, 1982, pp. 48-66.


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always already ‘bathes’ or ‘dwells’ in a specific light through which certain phenomena can come to appear. When Heidegger in § 29, decided to move not beyond but before ‘all psychology of moods’ by relating what one ontically knows as ‘moods’ to what he ontologically termed ‘Befindlichkeit’, (probably to be translated as) ‘finding-oneself-in-a-situation’,16 he was not just forestalling the flattening effects of analyses like Putnam’s (who, in his own way, misses the point of ontological difference), but, in principle at least, opening the door to the sort of ‘ethics’ that we seem more than ever in need of: instead of locating that which holds us up in the other (and thus potentially blaming him, or at least a part of him: Nozick’s “complex”) Heidegger wanted to turn our attention to the fact that when ‘findingourselves-in-a-situation’ we do not find ourselves in the ordinary sense of ‘find’: “A mood assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being” (SZ 136/176). The ‘complex of emotions and judgments’ to which we respond with ‘respectful contempt’ is not hidden somewhere ‘outside’ of us ‘inside’ the other, nor is that affect which assails us, somewhere ‘in’ us or ‘between’ us and the other. Like any other affect, Heidegger tells us, it “can be understood only in conjunction with the basic movement (Grundbewegung) of Dasein itself” (GA 20:354/256). As is well-known, there are three ‘moments’ in that movement which together constitute the structure of care as the ‘movement principle’ (Bewegungsprinzip) of human being: existentiality (ahead-of-oneself), facticity (being-already-in) and falling (being-along-side-with). These moments are co-original, but the first is, as it were, primus inter pares. Indeed, it must be, not just for Being and Time to be the book it is, but also, I suspect, for it to be the project that failed, according to Heidegger’s own admittance, in the way it did: Being and Time, Heidegger tells us, had its defects (Mängel), but one did not notice it, “since its pagination continued” (cf. GA 49:27).

16

I follow here Bruce BAUGH’s excellent ‘Heidegger on Befindlichkeit’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1989 (20:2), pp. 124-35.

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5. JUST HOW NAKED IS DASEIN’S ‘THAT’ ? One of the first, if not the first, and still one of the very few not to be fooled by Heidegger’s continuing pagination (including the pagination of those texts in which Heidegger after his ‘turn’ tried to retrieve what went astray in Being and Time), was certainly Emmanuel Levinas, one of Heidegger’s readers of the first hour who was going to introduce his work in France. Unfortunately, Levinas’ resistance to Heidegger – perhaps the only significant one in this century – was left largely unexplored precisely because of the success and the renown which the books, which grew out of that resistance, had brought him. Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being were (and still are) considered to be exercises in the grey zone between ethics, metaphysics and religion, with the result that, for Heideggerians at least, Levinas’ work became at best some sort of supplement to Heidegger, which could perhaps be inspiring (after all, Heidegger’s answer to the young student in the Letter on Humanism concerning the place of ethics in his work did not fully satisfy all of his readers), but only after one had purged it of its clear misunderstandings of what had really been at stake in the ‘thought of Being’. The countless remarks in which Levinas shows, from 1932 onwards, not only that he understood these stakes, but also understood why they were so high, were (and still are, with very few exceptions) simply ignored: “It is important”, he writes after brilliantly summarizing Heidegger’s project in Being and Time, “to stress this reduction to time of everything that one would be tempted to call ‘supratemporal’, the reduction to existence of everything one would like to call ‘relation’.”.17 This was 1932, a remark in passing in his first text on Heidegger. Here are two random passages from some of his last works which underline the same tendency to what he called already then ‘ontologism’ (ibid.): “There is reduction of everything human to ontology. The privilege of Dasein resides in that it exists ontologically. Everything that man is, all his modalities are adverbs: not properties, but ways of being”.18 Or again: “Heidegger’s being-in-the-world is a comprehension: technological

17

‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie’ (1932), repr. in a modified and abridged form in Emmanuel LEVINAS, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris, Vrin, 1988, from which I am quoting here in my own translation: p. 71. 18 Dieu, la Mort et le Temps. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1993, p. 69 (my trans.).


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activity itself is openness, discovery of Being, even if in the mode of a forgetting of Being” – an obvious statement to anyone familiar with Heidegger, to which Levinas adds the following, a bit less obvious remark: “The ontic, which at least involves an opaqueness, everywhere yields before the ontological, before a covered-over luminosity to be disengaged. The existentiell reveals its meaning in the existential, which is an articulation of onto-logy. An entity counts only on the basis of knowing, of appearing, of phenomenality” (OB 80).19 And this included that very special entity that Heidegger no longer wanted to call a ‘subject’: “Being’s esse, through which an entity is an entity, is a matter of thought, gives something to thought, stands from the first in the open. In that there is indeed a kind of indigence in being, constrained to an other than itself, to a subject called upon to welcome the manifestation. (...) (It) follows that, outside of the part subjectivity plays in the disclosure of being, every game that consciousness would play for its own account would be but a veiling or an obscuring of being’s esse” (OB 132). A last quote which will allow us to understand what is at stake in the previous one: “Being and Time has argued perhaps but one sole thesis: Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (which unfolds as time); Being is already an appeal to subjectivity” (TI 45). For someone familiar with Heidegger, the striking thing about these quotes is probably that, except for a few relics of a vocabulary that Heidegger has rendered obsolete (‘subject’, ‘consciousness’), they seem to add nothing new, underscoring as they do the obvious. Whereas someone familiar with Levinas is likely to have heard, in some of the terms that he uses here (like ‘reduction’ or ‘relation’), already the echo of that ‘Otherwise than Being’ which, in his mature works, Levinas tried to salvage from the Seinsfrage. But isn’t there a third way of listening to these quotes? Let me try to summarize what I hear in them in my own words. Although we are all familiar with Heidegger’s famous “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (SZ 42/67), we are perhaps too familiar with it. For what is implied in this thesis is not only that the privilege of Dasein is to exist ontologically. It also means that if Dasein in its factical existence ‘covers up’ this privilege, this covering up should be understood 19

I have corrected the translation (onto-logy instead of ontology; phenomenality instead of phenomenology).

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out of the very structure of that existence itself. Understood, but not justified. For “hermeneutics has the task, to make accessible the always own Dasein in its sort of Being to this Dasein itself (...) (and) to trace the self-alienation which has struck Dasein to its sources” (Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), Freiburg SS 1923, GA 63:15). And, the source of this self-alienation which makes Dasein opaque to itself lies not outside of Dasein, but in its very heart. Dasein’s existence is by itself “burdensome” (SZ 134/173) because it is a being without essence: a being that has to be its being. Not only does it have to be its being, it cannot but be its being. Whatever it does, whatever way it is, this will be a way of being its being, of filling it out, so to speak. This filling out has always already happened. Dasein exists factically. It is always already thrown into a given world, engaged in certain relations with beings, including others and itself. And, as it is thrown, it tends to focus, without even noticing it, on what it is thrown into. It chooses, without noticing, the path of least resistance: falling along with the movement of its thrownness, Dasein has a “tendency to take it easy and make it easy” (SZ 128/165). This ‘it’ is its own being, the “naked ‘that’ ” of its existence: that it has to be its being, that it has to answer for it.20 But before Dasein can reply to this responsibility, it always already has received a reply through its thrownness: it finds this reply in the world into which it has been thrown and in which it always already has taken up certain possibilities which that world made available to it. If it were asked to think of itself, Dasein would think of these activities, the relations they involve, the problems it faces in each of these, and the sort of future it can reasonably expect to build starting from these perspectives. The problem is that these perspectives are “twisted” (e.g. GA 17:287). Not because they are wrong, but because the light in them comes from the wrong side. Although this light is, in principle ontological, it reflects back on Dasein only after having touched its activities and the beings they engage with. Dasein’s “own self is reflected back on it out of the things” that occupy it, with which it is busy (GA 24:227). Its own possibility to be (Seinkönnen) is taken over by the things with which it is engaged: it tends to become determined by 20

Cf. SZ 134/173: “nacktes ‘Daß es ist und zu sein hat’ ”; 276/321: “das nackte ‘Daß’ im Nichts der Welt”; 343/394: “das nackte Dasein”; 344/394: “seine nackte Unheimlichkeit”. The English translation has not always rendered nackte as ‘naked’.


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the success or failures of such engagement, by what it leaves to be done and shows as impossible (GA 24:410). Through this ‘Reluzenz’structure, which belongs to the very structure of its being (for Dasein exists), Dasein is, as it were, blinded. It is oblivious of itself (GA 24:411), and what’s more, it seems to like it. For the answer that the world has given it still gives it some leeway, some possibility to prove itself. If Dasein exists factically as a philosopher, and if it is on a tenure-track, it can keep track of that track; if it has an endowed chair, it has a reputation to defend, conferences to go to, prizes to win. Some hold is given to it and it grabs for it (cf. GA 61:117 ff, esp. 121-2). It will also defend it. If it happens to have a certain expertise in a field of philosophy because it has familiarized itself with the books of a certain philosopher it may not feel inclined to engage with other such philosophers in a mutual Erörterung of the guiding presuppositions of their different interpretations of those books. It may rather think of them as belonging to different schools. It may even feel for such schools what Putnam called respectful contempt. As is well-known, all of what I have just described would be considered by Being and Time as a covering-up of Dasein’s basic nothingness, of its being without a hold, a pure possibility to be. It would thus have to side with the untruth, with semblance, and irresponsibility. It would be a fleeing from a threat that comes out of Dasein itself: the threat that it has to be its being, and that there is no ‘what’, no ‘content’ to this being which is not the ‘what’ of such ‘that’. It is this thesis of every ‘what’ being the ‘what’ of a ‘that’ which I am inclined to link to what Levinas called a reduction to the ontological, and which he linked himself, correctly I think, to Being and Time’s explicit attempt to show that all ontic opaqueness is a covered-over luminosity to be disengaged. An attempt which, in its turn, led to the further attempt, central to Being and Time, to show that the subject’s own ‘game’ is precisely the game of Being: all parts that it tries to play outside the part it plays in the disclosure of being, its every attempt to turn away from that disclosure, is still a move within its script, testifying to Dasein’s preontological familiarity with Being even there where it may be ontically forgetful of it. Being, Heidegger says in § 39, “ ‘is’ only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs. Hence Being can be unbegriffen (not grasped), but not unverstanden (it never completely fails to be

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understood)” (SZ 183/228). There will always remain a trace that betrays Dasein’s having tried to turn away from (its) Being. The cover up betrays itself. Without that premise Being and Time could not be a hermeneutics of facticity. Just as Being and Time could not be a hermeneutics of suspicion without the analyses of death and anxiety which show that it is a possibility for Dasein not to turn away from its Being. Nothing can completely cover up the ‘naked that’ of existence, since this nakedness is not that of a thing, but of the ‘No Thing’ that Heidegger calls Being. Man’s true roots come from Being, even if Being in a certain sense uproots him. But only in a certain sense, for this ‘Unzuhause’ brings man home into his own being, it allows him to give the response to that being for which he has to answer. “I am, that means I can”, says the text of the Prolegomena and it explains: “Dasein itself, insofar as it is, is nothing but being-possible” (GA 20:412/298). Which will lead Being and Time to that strange reasoning that since “facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum, but a characteristic of Dasein’s Being”, this must mean that it “has been taken up (aufgenommen) into existence” (SZ § 29: 174/135). The question that bothers me and that should bother all of us, given the theme of this conference, is whether thereby “facticity” as we know it has not been dissolved into existence. As we know it, e.g. in light of the ‘fact’ that this conference seems to have convinced most of us that our readings of Heidegger depend on what the quote from What is called Thinking? referred to as “guiding presuppositions”, and thus seem to display a certain ‘style’ of thinking.21 But if that is the case, one may wonder whether the true reason for our reluctance to engage in the task that the organizers of this conference, like Heidegger, are urging us to engage in, could not be that we suspect that the ‘naked that’ of existence may not be as naked as Heidegger would have like it to be. In other words, the ontical alternative rooted/uprooted which, turned around, 21

I am thinking of that wonderful exchange between Robert Bernasconi and Mark Okrent where the first, after a very long question which did not seem to get across, exclaimed: “I guess what I am asking is whether you can see why we are not so interested in what you are doing”. But, as I am sure Bernasconi would agree, it may not have been so much the content of Okrent’s (to my mind: interesting) argument, which stood between them, but rather the ‘style’ of that argument (it being understood that one cannot simply separate ‘content’ and ‘style’, as if the latter were just an outer wrapping. On this last point, see my remarks above on Foucault and Hacking).


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still determines Being and Time’s fundamental ontology,22 may not be the correct one. The human being could be a being who is neither with, nor without roots, and whose true unrest comes from the facticity of having both too many roots for the ‘that’ of its existence to be naked, and too few roots for it to become absorbable into a ‘what’.23 Something does not stand out in our existence but it insists in it without, however, turning into one of those ‘properties’ which Heidegger rightly denied us to have. Perhaps he would have glimpsed that something which is not a thing, neither ontic nor ontological, had he not turned to death but to the Other to let man be confronted with his or her finitude. Whereas death dissolves all ‘what’ into a ‘that’,24 the Other, like Nozick for Putnam, confronts the subject with its ‘that’ always being the ‘that’ of a ‘what’ which both holds him and holds him up. Perhaps what one calls style, is the dust that covers the nakedness of existence. And as we all know, there is a dust through which things shine and get a glow. Le style c’est l’homme, but ‘man’ is not his style. In the midst of its transition, being is interrupted by something that makes it 22

Throughout Being and Time Heidegger opposes an everydayness characterized by ‘Entwurzelung’ (uprootedness) and ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ to a proper existence that is ‘verwurzelt’ (rooted) and ‘bodenständig’ (see the entries in Rainer A. BAST - Heinrich P. DELFOSSE, Handbuch zum Textstudium von Martin Heideggers ‘Sein und Zeit’. Band 1. Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1979. These characterizations are ontological: ontically, everydayness may not feel ‘uprooted’ at all, whereas, from Heidegger’s ontological point of view, such ‘feeling at home’ is just the tranquillizing suppression of Dasein’s basic ‘uprootedness’ (its “naked ‘that it is and has to be’ ”) which in turn is Dasein’s true ‘Boden’. And conversely, what is ontically experienced as uprootedness could be seen ontologically as Dasein hitting ‘rock bottom’ (as in anxiety). All of which seems to allow for the statement that I have just made. To put it more fashionably: one should ‘deconstruct’ the influence the ontical alternative rooted/uprooted may have had on Being and Time’s fundamental ontology. 23 I should perhaps stress that already in Truth and Singularity I have turned this same idea about man’s facticity against Levinas. I will come back to this in the essays of the second part of this volume. So the point I shall be making in the next lines, should not be confused with Levinas’. 24 I am alluding to the beautiful passage in The Concept of Time (o.c.), p. 21/21E in which Heidegger sings the praise of the democracy of death: “In being together with death everyone is brought into the ‘how’ that each can be in equal measure; into a possibility with respect to which no one is distinguished; into the ‘how’ in which all ‘what’ dissolves into dust” (I take this ‘how’ to be an early expression of what Being and Time will call Dasein’s naked ‘that’).

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less than a transitive verb.25 It is also, I think, that something that had interrupted the pagination of Being and Time somewhere between § 41 and § 50. On p. 191/235 Heidegger wrote: “That in the face of which we have anxiety is thrown Being-in-the-world”, on p. 251/295 he writes “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world itself”. In between these two quotes the facticity of thrownness (our always being in a specific world) has been dissolved into a facticity that can be taken up into existence which can then play the role of first among its ‘equals’. As a consequence, anxiety for relativism can come to be interpreted by Heidegger as an anxiety for Dasein, i.e. for its ex-istence, for its every ‘what’ being the ‘what’ of a ‘that’. But if one insists upon the ‘that’ being the ‘that’ of a ‘what’, which is neither ‘Nothing’ nor an ‘object’, a different unrest seems to creep into the heart of man’s being. Anxiety for relativism could then perhaps be seen as an anxiety for what is not ‘Da’ to Dasein, for what, in its facticity, cannot be taken up in its existence.26 Instead of a primacy of the future, one would have to reckon, through such facticity, with the competing primacy of a past which has never been present. And these competing claims would not, as they have until now, point to the difference between ontology (Heidegger) and ethics (Levinas). They would to the contrary testify to ‘something’ disrupting ontology from within. Indicating perhaps that the human being’s being is the being of a being that has to care for ‘something’ (neither an object, nor Heidegger’s ‘No Thing’) that does not care for it. Being, that is, may not be a transitive verb after all. Something escapes that transition, hiding perhaps in the hyphen which Heidegger after his ‘turn’ tried to introduce into Dasein’s existence. But then the ek-sistence on which the Letter on Humanism insisted, would stand, contrary to what Heidegger is claiming there, for something left unaddressed by the author of Being and Time.

25

Being is called ‘transitive’ when it has the sense that Levinas indicates in the quote corresponding with note 18: ‘I am my being’. 26 This is the thesis that I will defend in the rest of this volume, particularly in the third part. But the next chapter will already further explore some of its possible consequences.

CHAPTER THREE

WHISTLING IN THE DARK TWO APPROACHES TO ANXIETY

According to a recent newspaper article, 40 million people in the European Union live in anxiety every single day (results of an unnamed survey of 20,000 patients in 558 doctor’s offices in Germany). Apparently only 6% of the population can summon the courage to talk about their anxiety with their doctor. It would seem that doctors have too little time to recognize the signs of what the article calls the “new illness”. Nor are they encouraged to do so by the renowned scientific journals, where the focus is solely on a purely medical treatment for anxiety, or by the pharmaceutical industry, where anxiety is equated with “long-term easy money”. The title of the article immediately struck me, especially since it seemed to be in flat contradiction to its subtitle: “Anxiety as the other side of affluence. Being afraid without knowing why”.1 Let me first of all try to explain why this contradiction did not really surprise me.

1. ANXIETY AND FEAR It is well known that ‘anxiety’ is traditionally opposed to ‘fear’, where the difference is said to be that fear has a clear object but anxiety does not. One is afraid of something determinate, whereas with anxiety one appears to be afraid without knowing precisely why or what one fears. Yet this distinction is not as straightforward as it seems: merely mentioning it is not the same as maintaining it, as can be seen in this frequently cited passage from Freud: “anxiety [Angst] has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ [Furcht] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst] if it has found an

1

D. BOGAERT, De Morgen, 29 June 2001, p. 26.

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object”.2 Freud appears to waver between two possibilities: either anxiety is essentially characterized by indeterminacy and a lack of object, in which case it is literally anxiety for nothing, or anxiety is temporarily undetermined, in which case it is anxiety for something that cannot immediately be named (certainly not by the one who suffers from it) but that could be named and determined with the proper technique or therapy. In this second case – the one Freud clearly prefers – anxiety would be a fear whose object is provisionally undetermined. And indeed, hardly a paragraph further Freud no longer concerns himself with the distinction he just drew and with seeming carelessness sets aside the rules of correct usage which he brought to his readers’ attention: “a real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is a pulsional danger [ Triebgefahr]. By bringing this danger which is not known into consciousness, the analyst makes neurotic anxiety no different from realistic anxiety, so that it can be dealt with in the same way”.3 Neurotic anxiety, then, is only anxiety as long as the danger causing the anxiety is unknown. And, Freud’s treatment for revealing that danger essentially boils down to turning the neurotic anxiety into a realistic anxiety, or more precisely: to show that the danger, although different in each case (pulsional danger; danger from the external world), is knowable in principle and so does not betray anxiety but fear! Realistic anxiety already has an object (a known danger) and is therefore fear. Neurotic anxiety has a hidden object which can and must be disclosed: “where there is anxiety there must be something that one is afraid of”.4 Evidently, “anxiety is not so simple a matter”, 5 as Freud himself wrote and, one could add, experienced in the text from which I have just quoted at length. But this is not the place to embark on a Freud exegesis.

2

Sigmund FREUD, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20 (trans. James Strachey). London, Hogarth Press, 1953, pp. 164-5. 3 Ibid., p. 165. 4 Sigmund FREUD, ‘Introductory Lectures. Lecture XXV. Anxiety’, in Standard Edition, vol. 16, p. 401. 5 FREUD, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, p. 132.

WHISTLING IN THE DARK

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I only quoted Freud to show that even someone who spent most of his life thinking about anxiety had difficulty maintaining the, at first sight, so simple distinction between anxiety and fear. And Freud is not the only one. For what takes place in a complicated way in his extremely complex text also seems to take place in a very simple way in our newspaper article. Whereas the subtitle builds on the classical distinction between anxiety and fear, seeing anxiety as something without a ‘why’, the title, by contrast, seems to provide us with an explanation, with a ‘why’: anxiety, it suggests, has something to do with affluence, specifically with “the anxiety of losing acquired material prosperity”. The article extensively quotes a German psychiatrist, a certain Ulrich Wittchen, affiliated with the famous Max Planck Institute, who might seem to provide a running commentary on the theme of modern anxiety were it not for the fact that he, too, almost immediately loses sight of the phenomenon: “men and women who know they are anxious must reorganize their lives. Usually this means that they must turn away from painfully acquired material values. For the majority of anxious conditions, however, this is an insurmountable problem. And yet there are quite a few people in Germany who have traded a relatively luxurious lifestyle for a more humble existence in which calm, humane values and solidarity with others are central. We have witnessed cases where people were able to completely give up psychopharmacological medication after they began helping others”. The moral is clear: we are not at the mercy of anxiety; we can do something about it, but then we must live differently. Wittchen again: “I am not arguing for a return to traditional religion, but rather for the rediscovery of spiritual values like trust, friendship, honour, honesty and the willingness to help where one can. Just look at the Straight Edge movement among German and Dutch youth. Young men and women barely seventeen years of age consciously choose what they call ‘old-fashioned values’. They voluntarily reject any form of drug use and alcohol. Smoking and promiscuous sex are also frowned on. By looking at their parents, or other young people, they have seen how a life without values leads to anxiety, ruin and even suicide. This is why they choose a society without anxiety” (my italics). The attainable Utopia of a society with no anxiety is here opposed to the present-day welfare society which is adrift since the only values it allows for are material values, which are too volatile in these fast-changing times to give us a hold: “look at the many company closures and workforce redundancies in the

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European business world. Every employee who is laid off is for the rest of his life a potential anxiety case. Religion and social contact used to offer a psychological counterbalance; today people ‘chat’ on the Internet in an almost purely technical manner. (...) It is a wonder that only one in ten Europeans currently suffers from the phenomenon of generalized anxiety”. I would not want to give the impression that I do not take Wittchen’s remarks seriously. I am no psychiatrist, psychotherapist or analyst, and I am not qualified to offer a better or a different theory of anxiety. As a philosopher with no practical experience, all I can do is read this newspaper article in such a way that it gets taken a bit less for granted. I want to try to show in what way this text is actually much more complicated than it might seem at first sight. This is because there is much more implied in this text than what one initially suspects. Only on the surface is this text of one piece. One only has to scratch that surface slightly in order to see how different traditions, and different ways of thinking about anxiety, come together and clash in the text, sometimes fighting it out and sometimes banding together to relegate yet another tradition to the margins. Take Wittchen’s suggestion that it makes no sense to fight anxiety as an enemy, certainly not with pills. Or not with pills alone. What is needed is rather a new balance and greater harmony. But contrary to those who, like the organizers of the conference where I first gave this paper, would recommend “taking anxiety as our friend”,6 Wittchen dreams of a society without anxiety, i.e., a society organized in such a way that the causes of anxiety – lack of something to hold on to, and the resulting uncertainty – will have disappeared. But then what about that other long-standing tradition of thinking about anxiety alluded to by that conference’s title (“Anxiety: enemy or friend”) – a tradition that does not simply want to get rid of it, but that wants to learn from it? Think of Kierkegaard who writes in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) that

6

As is clear from the conference flyer which states that “we are daily confronted with anxiety in our patients and in ourselves, anxiety for life and for death. How do we deal with it? Fight anxiety as an enemy, with words or with pills? Or take anxiety as a friend in a process of growth towards a new balance and greater harmony in life?” MedicalPsychological Weekend, “Anxiety: Enemy ... or Friend?”, of the Society of Flemish General Practitioners, 6-7 October 2001).


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“the more original a person is, the deeper is his anxiety”. Kierkegaard does not want to be rid of anxiety before he has had a chance to learn something about it: “only he who passes through the anxiety of the possible is educated to have no anxiety, not because he can escape the terrors of life but because these always become weak by comparison with those of possibility”.7 Terrors which, as Kierkegaard shows, have to do precisely with the fact that ‘man’ is a being without anything to hold on to, who has ‘to be his being’, to live his life without there being anyone or anything that can help him with the decisions he has to make. “A person cannot rid himself of this relation to himself”8 and even faith, in which Kierkegaard sees a sort of solution, is only accessible in “fear and trembling” because it concerns the relationship with a God with whom “everything is possible”9 and who occupies the highest rung of the “terrors of possibility”. For Kierkegaard, then, anxiety appears not only as something threatening. It also has an educational and purifying function: it makes us lose our hold and, in so doing, shows us that we actually have nothing we can hold on to. Or more precisely: that we do not provide our own hold, that we must abandon that illusion, and that only unconditional faith in another Power that has established us can save us from utter despair. It will be objected that this is too religious, and the objection would be understandable, but in this case it is beside the point. All that matters here is that what gives anxiety its eye-opening revelatory function for someone like Kierkegaard is precisely what makes it an enemy for others who deplore a value-less society’s lack of any hold. But what do we mean when we talk about ‘losing one’s hold’? Who is holding what here? Are values something like handles that we can grab and hold at will, and how can they suddenly be lost? Or is it rather that values have us in their hold, that they hold on to us, and how is it that they then can cease to do this? I would like to linger with these questions

7

S. KIERKEGAARD, The Concept of Anxiety. A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton NJ, Princeton U.P., 1980, respectively p. 52 (translation emended), p. 157 (translation emended). 8 S. KIERKEGAARD, The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton NJ, Princeton U.P., 1983, p. 17. 9 Ibid., p. 38. Fear and Trembling deals widi Abraham’s ordeal when God asks him to sacrifice Isaac and with the faith he exhibits in obeying.

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for a moment, but first let me explain why, since it might seem as though this is yet another digression leading us further away from our topic.

2. HEIDEGGER’S APPROACH TO ANXIETY We tried to gain a hold on anxiety, but it continually slipped through our fingers. It offered us no grip. Perhaps because it is without an object and because we are unable to imagine what this ‘without’ could mean. We can only think of it as the absence of something. So we first think of that ‘something’ – values, say – and then we try to think it away – the ‘valueless’ society. Something is lacking and we understand this lack by way of its opposite: anxiety lacks an object and so we define it as a fear without an object. With fear, an object is present; with anxiety it is (or appears to be) absent. We understand anxiety by way of fear, absence by way of presence, and ‘nothing’ by way of ‘something’. What if all our difficulties had something to do with the fact that we uphold this ordering, as a long philosophical tradition has taught us? What if we were to reverse this ordering and attempt to understand fear by way of anxiety and – however strange this may sound – ‘something’ by way of ‘nothing’? This is precisely what occurred in one of the most famous philosophical texts of the century: “What is Metaphysics?”, the inaugural lecture given by Martin Heidegger on July 24, 1929 in Freiburg. In order to show that we cannot simply understand nothing as the absence of something, Heidegger penned a line that, according to some, represents the consecration of utter meaninglessness and, according to others, is one of those lines that alters the history of philosophy. The line is brief: “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” – “the nothing itself nothings”.10 I would not think this worth mentioning were it not that Heidegger comes to this rather puzzling pronouncement precisely by taking anxiety, and what is said about anxiety, at its word: “In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels ill at ease [es ist einem unheimlich].’ What is ‘it’ that makes ‘one’ feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for him. All things and we ourselves

10

Martin HEIDEGGER, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, in David FARRELL KRELL (ed.), Basic Writings. New York, Harper and Row, 1977, p. 105. I have slightly altered the translation: “nothings” instead of “nihilates”.


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sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing”.11 It might help us to understand what Heidegger is trying to say here if we think about boredom, specifically the type of boredom that, like anxiety, has no object. Here, it is not a specific person or thing that bores you (so that you might think your boredom would vanish once that thing is gone, or that person has cleared off); no, your boredom goes much deeper: nothing or no one matters to you any longer, you no longer desire anything. And what happens then is exactly how Heidegger described anxiety: every thing, and ourselves as well, sinks into indifference, but neither the things nor ourselves disappear. It is rather that we can no longer reach things, no longer be absorbed by them, no longer lose ourselves in them. We feel strangely empty and – even stranger – that emptiness oppresses us. Just because we have ‘nothing’ to do, we seem to be too much for ourselves, strangely superfluous. One who is bored does not know what to do with himself, would actually prefer to be rid of himself, but whatever one does ‘nothing’ helps, one keeps getting in one’s own way. The parallel I am suggesting here between deep boredom and anxiety, in order to explain what Heidegger seems to have in mind when he says that anxiety ‘reveals’ nothing, is not entirely persuasive. At least not for Heidegger himself, who always tried to make a distinction between what happens in deep boredom and what happens in anxiety.12 But he never quite succeeded in maintaining this distinction and the reason why is sufficiently interesting for our topic to pause and consider it. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger is one of those who think that anxiety fulfils a purifying function (indeed, on this point he was influenced by Kierkegaard). This manifests itself primarily in his appreciation of fear which, according to him, turns away from what anxiety reveals and thus constitutes a kind of flight. Fear is something for cowards who try to flee from anxiety’s strictures by putting something in the place of the Nothing that overcomes them in anxiety. They try to fill up with “compulsive 11 12

HEIDEGGER, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, p. 103. Ibid., p. 101 ff.; I come back to this point in chapter 7.

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talk” what Heidegger calls the “vacant stillness” in which even words fail us (“anxiety robs us of speech”, since all things “slip away” from us in anxiety, and words, of course, are also things).13 They whistle away but, for Heidegger, this tendency to become loud in uneasy situations (lautwerden in der Unheimlichkeit)14 is a flight that closes off the possibility of having anxiety as a friend, of learning something from it. And what is to be learned from it? Simply this: that ‘man’ is a “lieutenant of the nothing”.15 Anxiety reminds him or her of this task, which only the bravest are up to – this is 1929 and Heidegger’s text, however revolutionary it may be, cannot entirely escape from the spirit of a time which, I suspect, says little to us today. To cite but one passage: “the original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. 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. But those daring ones are sustained by that on which they expend themselves – in order thus to preserve a final greatness in existence.”16 And when we then read that, for Heidegger, anxiety is pervaded by “a peculiar calm”17 precisely because anxiety does not need to concern itself with something specific, then it does indeed look as if the mood that Heidegger calls ‘anxiety’ – and which he based on ordinary usage18 – actually has very little in common with what ordinary or scientific usage means by anxiety. With scientific usage, I am thinking, for instance, of Kurt Goldstein’s impressive research, where it is no accident that he equates the absence of anxiety (Nichtangst) with rest (Ruhe) and links the unrest that typifies anxiety (“die sinnlose Raserei der Angst mit ihrer erstarrten oder verzerrten Ausdrucksgestalt”)19 with precisely that indeterminate 13

Ibid., p. 103. See below chapter 7 for a comment on the context of this quote from GA 17, p. 317. 15 Ibid., p. 108 (“Platzhalter des Nichts” in the original). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 102. 18 “In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels ill at ease’”, and when the anxiety has passed we say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was ‘really’ – nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself – as such – was there” (ibid., p. 103). 19 Kurt GOLDSTEIN, ‘Zum Problem der Angst’, in ID., Selected Papers/Ausgewählte Schriften. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, p. 235. 14


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character that Heidegger sees as an argument for linking anxiety with rest! But he adds something to this that can perhaps help us in understanding Heidegger’s strange idea that “the nothing nothings”. For Goldstein, anxiety has to do with the state in which an organism finds itself when it is no longer able to carry out the tasks that correspond with its “essence”.20 Anxiety is not a result of this state; it is the state itself. The patient is anxious, not because he is aware of the impossibility of carrying out the tasks or of the resulting threat: “the patient is entirely unaware of the danger of the object that is the external cause of anxiety. (...) He is not anxious because of something, he is just anxious. (...) In fact it is not entirely correct to say he has anxiety; it would be more exact to say that the patient is anxiety – just as he is unaware of an object, so is he unaware of himself, for self-consciousness is a correlate of consciousness of an object”.21 Anxiety, then, is not only without an object, it is also without a subject. That one does not actually have anxiety but is anxiety has to do with the fact that what causes anxiety does not behave the way an object is supposed to behave: it overpowers or inundates us and thus deprives us of the possibility of responding adequately. So there is indeed a reason for the anxiety, but that reason is not experienced or known as such by the one who has/is anxiety. And perhaps this gives some indication of the possibility and the difficulty of treatment: the person who is anxiety must, one way or another, become a person who has anxiety, i.e., she must learn to ‘contain’ the anxiety so that it no longer overcomes her, so that she can deal with it. As is well known, it is frequently the patient himself who is the first to make such an attempt, however desperate it may be. Think of the compulsion with which some people end up mutilating themselves in an attempt to localize an ungraspable, indeterminate anxiety and tie it to a recognizable pain. Think of what happens in cases of phobia, where the phobic object’s role is precisely to bind the anxiety to itself, so that it is

20

Goldstein demonstrates this with research into brain-damaged patients who are no longer able to process certain stimuli, something that posed no difficulty before their injury: the patient responds to such tasks with so-called “catastrophic reactions”, subjectively experienced as anxiety. 21 Ibid., p. 239.

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localizable and somewhat controllable, albeit at the cost of “a heavy sacrifice of personal freedom”, as Freud drily remarks.22 With these last examples, we seem to have come back to neurotic anxiety which, as you will recall, has to do with pulsional danger (Triebgefahr), i.e., a danger that comes ‘from within’, not ‘from without’ as in real anxiety. But as now must have become apparent, this inside/outside distinction has lost its relevance, since anxiety is precisely a state in which this distinction, at the limit, disappears. Whether it is a question of pulsional danger or ‘external danger’, anxiety has to do with being inundated, with no longer being able to react, no longer being able to turn away, no longer being able to disappear – in short, with a fundamental ‘helplessness’, as Freud repeatedly mentions. But this helplessness – this inability to disappear, this inability to withdraw – also means that the subject is on the point of disappearing into something that is no longer a thing, into an object that is no object. These formulations are only apparently paradoxical. The minimal meaning of subjectivity is precisely ‘inferiority’, i.e., that there is a limit between ‘me’ and ‘not me’. If this limit comes under threat, ‘I am no longer myself’, as someone might say when attempting, after the fact, to provide excuses for some sort of ‘fatal’ love affair. When, like in the film “Fatal Attraction”, one can no longer offer any resistance to that fatal Other by whom one is possessed, then, on this point at least, one has lost one’s subjectivity. To be a subject means being able to withdraw, and normal objects respect this ability. They show themselves, but they do not impose themselves. They do not break in uninvited, but stand on the threshold between inside and outside and then politely knock. As long as an object behaves like an object there will be a subject who decides whether to admit it or not. A fascinating object behaves differently. It is not the sort of object that one can simply see; it is an object that one cannot not see. It captivates the gaze; one cannot look away. It is blinding without making you blind, since the problem is not that you lose your sight but that you see only that ‘object’. You can no longer avert your gaze, you are seized by something that is no longer concerned with the other ‘somethings’, something that can no longer be compared or

22

FREUD, ‘The Unconscious’, in Standard Edition, vol. 14, p. 184.


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situated. It has sucked in everything else and has become, as Sartre so beautifully puts it, “a gigantic object in a desert world”.23 Such a world is in fact not a world: in order for there to be a world, things must be separated from one another, must be capable of referring to one another, must in some way belong together or contrast with one another, constitute a foreground and a background. A world, therefore, is not the sum of the things ‘contained’ in it. It is what makes it possible for them to be things, and to appear. This presupposes a sort of openness in which the things can be present and it also presupposes, between those things, even if they are crowding one another out: nothing. Think of the nothing between letters that do not flow into one another, and so remain readable; or the white space between the lines of the text and the margins: this emptiness, this white space, these margins are not just no letters, no lines, no text. They are not merely the absence of something else; they are an absence that makes some presence possible. It would be wrong to understand this kind of absence as the negation of something else that could be or ought to be present instead. This is why philosophers since Heidegger speak of an original absence, which is actually less clear a formulation than saying ‘the Nothing (absence) nothings (permits presence)’. But the question is: is it this that takes place in anxiety? Should we not rather say that anxiety only begins from the moment that – horribile dictu – the Nothing no longer nothings? I am aware that this formulation sounds even more abstruse. And yet I think that we cannot get around it if we do not want to lose sight of the anxiety that we just managed to catch a glimpse of. But let us first look in a different direction. In a certain sense, we have been moving in this direction all along.

3. THE ‘SECURITY PARADOX’ We shall no longer try to understand anxiety on the basis of fear, but fear on the basis of anxiety. We shall not think that anxiety is caused by a provisionally undetermined object that we could determine and then

23

Jean-Paul SARTRE, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (trans. Hazel E. Barnes). New York, Washington Square Press, 1966, p. 216: “In fascination there is nothing more than a gigantic object in a desert world”. For this reason fascination is always on the brink of turning into anxiety.

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remove, so that a situation without anxiety would be restored. To the contrary, we now think that anxiety is already there, and we simply ask ourselves what it might mean – if it means anything – that “its breath”, as Heidegger writes, “quivers perpetually through human existence”.24 We have seen that Heidegger comes to this rather strange idea because he thinks that ‘man’ is a being who, without the Nothing that nothings, would not be capable of doing what s/he does: relate to things, to other people, and to oneself. All these relations presuppose a kind of openness, or what might be called a ‘separateness’, hence a kind of ‘between’ or ‘distance’ which nonetheless is something other, and more importantly does something other, than merely span the space between two points. For this distance is found not only ‘between’ the things outside of us, or between us and things. Rather, we are shot through with this distance, this openness: we would not be capable of thinking, for instance, if our thoughts did not somehow appear one after the other, in a spatiality that is not geometric but that allows them – gives them the room – to form a train of thought. A further example: we would not be capable of having a past or future were it not for ‘something’ – and Heidegger calls this the Nothing that nothings – that somehow prevents the present from being inundated either by the past or the future. It is precisely this ‘inundation’ that is of interest here: ‘something’ gets closed off, not just ‘something’ outside ourselves – an openness in which we are able to move – but ourselves as well, that openness that we are. One only has to think of what happens when we are unable to shake off the past, when we are smothered by something that does not want to be pushed into the past and thus makes not only the present but also the future unliveable. We are not simply beings who move like timeless points in time; we are also branded in every aspect by time, which means: open in such a way that ‘there is’ for us a curve of tension between present, past and future. When Heidegger says that anxiety is only asleep and that slightest thing will awaken it, he means that there are moments when we can catch a glimpse of ourselves, and in particular this openness that we are, from the outside as it were. For a brief moment, we are not absorbed by our relationship to things, to others or to ourselves and we thereby perceive that ‘emptiness’ that makes us capable of such relationships. 24

HEIDEGGER, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, p. 108.


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As I mentioned before, one can argue about whether this ‘experience’ should be indicated with the word ‘anxiety’, but for our present purposes the more important point is that this Heideggerian approach to an anxiety that is always already there may allow us to see what it might mean to construe the relationship between anxiety and fear in a different way than Wittchen has done. If humans are essentially openness and children of the Nothing, then the anxiety we bear within ourselves could refer to the reverse side of that openness, to the possibility that everything might close up, that the Nothing might cease to nothing. To show what might be at stake here, let us take a simple example. Recently I took part in a so-called ‘expert seminar’ on the subject of “Anxiety and Uncertainty in Modern Society”.25 At one point, one of the participants raised the issue of what he called the ‘security paradox’: the paradox that, although our Western societies have actually never been safer, we are still confronted with strong feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Think, for instance, of the anxiety regarding our food supply, at a time when the quality of our food is more trustworthy than ever (according to the speaker). I then made the comment that if there indeed exists something like a security paradox (which can always be contested: is our food in fact safer than it used to be?, etc.), it can only be called a paradox if one assumes that anxiety is generated only when there is a reason for it. On this view, the paradox is that, despite the high quality of our food or the high objective degree of safety in society, there nevertheless arise all sorts of anxieties about our food or security without any apparent reason. And the question then is, why does this happen? Just like Wittchen, my colleague suggested (to nods of assent from the other social scientists present) that behind the, at first sight unreasonable, anxiety and unclarified feelings of insecurity, which led to the impression that one is dealing with a paradox, there were in fact completely reasonable causes which, once exposed, would make the paradox disappear, since it would then become clear that people had good cause to be concerned, though these concerns had – for one reason or another – shifted towards an anxiety that seems prima facie unreasonable. We

25

Bart PATTYN - Luc VAN LIEDEKERKE, ‘Anxiety and Uncertainty in Modern Society’, Ethical Perspectives, 2001 (8), pp. 88-104. This is a discussion text written on the occasion of the 2001 Leuven Multatuli Lectures, held by Mary Douglas and Robert Putnam.

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would then be able to find a reason for these feelings of insecurity and anxiety which, once found, would allow us to address their real causes. Yet is there not a different way of looking at this paradox? If one would start from the premise that anxiety is always there already, and that the problem for individuals and for society is one of preventing that anxiety from breaking through by binding it to certain distinctions, it will seem less strange that in a society becoming more and more secure anxiety seems to assume more and more irrational forms. In such a society, anxiety has fewer places to hide, as it were. One could also put it the other way around: such a society has less opportunity to accommodate or shelter anxiety in an acceptable way. By accommodate and shelter I mean: localize it, give it structure. A bit like the way fairy tales work for children: it is no accident that we speak of a fairy-tale world, i.e., a set of distinct figures that are part of a narrative structure which lends a certain pattern to a child’s already existing anxiety, links it to figures one can actually picture (which thus have a certain determinacy) and to which one can relate, with the help of the fairy tales. Fairy tales do not fill children with anxiety; rather, they teach children to enjoy these stories by imposing a certain rhythm on anxiety, by cutting it into pieces which can then become the figures of a narrative in which what is unmasterable is nevertheless held in check. Perhaps what the ‘security paradox’ – which in that case too would no longer be a paradox, but for a different reason – shows us is that in an increasingly controllable and disenchanted world there are fewer acceptable candidates for the role of the menacing figure who must somehow be defeated in the tales that the adult world in its turn tells itself. Not so long ago darkness was what a Maupassant or a Poe invoked to make their readers shudder in fear; now in our electrified world, where the forces of nature have largely been supplanted and social violence brought under control, it is little more than a worn-out metaphor for an anxiety we no longer suffer.26 Who still whistles in the dark when one can just as easily flick the light switch or shine a flashlight?

26

On this, see the interesting discussion between Konrad Lorenz and Jürgen Habermas in H. VON DITFURTH (ed.), Aspekte der Angst. München, Kindler Verlag, s.d., pp. 56 ff.


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4. ANXIETY IN A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY One would be wrong to conclude from the above that we have simply left anxiety behind, and that we are not in our own way just whistling in what, for us, is the dark. It is simply that this darkness is no longer recognizable by the oncoming dusk. For there are what Levinas calls “nights in full daylight”.27 Such nights are characterized by a darkness that is not just the opposite of the light that permits us to discern things. They should not be confused with what Blanchot called the “first night”, a night that belongs with the day, a night in which one rests and relaxes.28 Even if we are afraid during a night like this, we are afraid according to daylight logic: we are afraid of something which we cannot see but which nonetheless still has an outline, and looks back at us from the shadows. But there is also a night which Blanchot calls the “second night” – a night that does not belong with the day, a night without truth since in it nothing appears, but the night itself, a night in which we are no longer afraid of something determinate but of the very darkness itself that seems to swallow us whole and in which all distinctions have been effaced. What if Wittchen’s “valueless society” would be a society in which the days have become like this second sort of night? – instead of being a society that has lost its hold and, as Wittchen and conservative critics of culture think, should pull itself together and substitute the (lack of) hold provided by material values with the genuine hold of spiritual values which have been lost but could be regained. It would need to be thought of as a society for which nihilism – the loss of values – is not something that could with a bit of effort be overcome, thereby relegating anxiety to the past. Rather than pointing to that condition in which something is not there, or is not there any longer, nihilism means that the Nothing no longer nothings. Nihilism does not belong to the first night but to the second: not to a night in which values are absent, but to one in which they are in a certain sense all too present, so much so that they threaten to smother us. One way to understand this suggestion would be to adopt the following hypothesis: in our pluralistic societies the threat is perhaps not

27 28

E. LEVINAS, ‘Il y a’, in ID., L’intrigue de l’infinie. Paris, Flammarion, 1994, p. 106. M. BLANCHOT, L’espace littéraire. Paris, Gallimard, s.d., p. 213 ff.

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a lack but a surfeit of values. Every one of us is constantly aware that for every value we feel attached to, there are other values which other people feel attached to. Because of this, our relation with our values has something arbitrary about it, and this is somehow threatening: we suddenly realize that it is the values that have us rather than we who have them, and even though we cannot immediately shake off these values – they have grown to become a part of us – we are still unable to say what exactly they have to do with us. They weigh on us, and this weight cannot be wholly translated into the arguments we might give for the fact that we have these values and not others. Some inexplicable residue remains, as also becomes apparent from the fact that we cannot find argumentative means to convince others, nor can they convince us, of the correctness or superiority of those values which nevertheless make us who we are. This silent link between us and our values isolates us, not only from others but in a certain sense from ourselves as well: what is that self, what is this singularity that weighs on us, and what does this weight have to do with us? This singularity somehow escapes us and thus provokes discomfort. There is an exteriority to what singularises us that escapes our intimacy and weighs on us, with the idiotic and irrepressible weight of incubi who crush us in our worst nightmares.29 It is, then, not so much we who find a hold in our values as the values that have a hold on us. If this is true, then one might (go on to) wonder whether the success of materialism (the ‘false’ values) could not better be understood as an attempt to shake off that hold, that oppression. In that case, the absence of genuine values would not be in a chronological succession with their presence, but would constitute, as it were, the reverse side of the way in which they are present. And the godlessness of the monetary circuit in which everything is substitutable and nothing irreplaceable would then be merely a counterweight to an attachment (these, ‘my’ values) that does not give an answer to the question of what it wants from us and, precisely for this reason, oppresses us. Once again: if this is true – a hypothesis which is but the expression of a suspicion towards conservative cultural critics like Wittchen – the question arises whether there might be other ways of dealing with and cultivating this 29

For this example of the incubi, see J. LACAN, L’angoisse: Séminaire 1962-3, session of 12-12-62. Lacan’s determination of anxiety as “the lack of the lack” resonates with my “the Nothing no longer nothings”.


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silence other than drowning it out with the din of an increasingly frantic life or desiring the return of a Someone’s voice who would speak and explain the meaning of our attachments. Kierkegaard, perhaps the last to have heard that voice, was still able to write that “only the one who was in anxiety finds rest”.30 Since then no one is certain if anxiety is a friend or a foe. All we know is that the world will perish if we ever stop whistling. This may not be much, but all things considered it is at least something (in any case, pace Heidegger, it is more than a flight). We may not be able to drive away anxiety by whistling, but we can perhaps cultivate it – I mean: bring it into culture by imposing on it a rhythm, just as we do with untilled ground. To bind anxiety – to continue it by other means, as Willem Jan Otten writes so beautifully in his novel with the significant title, “There is nothing wrong with us”31 – would then mean something other than making sure it remains at a quantitatively tolerable level. It means qualitatively changing it by ensuring that it remains on this side of the night. And to accomplish this, it is perhaps sufficient that we realize how little the adult in the following anecdote, borrowed from Freud, really understood about the matter: “While I was in the next room, I heard a child who was afraid of the dark call out: ‘Do speak to me, Auntie! I’m frightened!’ ‘Why, what good would that do? You can’t see me.’ To this the child replied: ‘If someone speaks, things lighten up’”.32

30

KIERKEGAARD, Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Princeton NJ, Princeton U.P., 1983, p. 27 31 W.J. OTTEN, Ons mankeert niets. Amsterdam, Maarten Muntinga, 1999. I italicized ‘nothing’ for what I hope, will be obvious reasons. 32 FREUD, ‘Lecture XXV. Anxiety’, p. 407 (translation emended).


II

After Levinas


CHAPTER FOUR

THE PRICE OF BEING DISPOSSESSED

LEVINAS’ GOD AND FREUD’S TRAUMA

The word “dispossession” is not mine. It comes from Levinas.1 It is not merely a word among all those others which his thought has bestowed on us, but its central word, the one word which it cannot give to us, not even if it would wish to do so, for it is a word that his thought does not possess and in a certain sense fails to give to itself. Every thought is busy with such a word, a word around which it circles endlessly without ever finding a place there, without ever setting its foot on the ground and taking hold of the very thing it seeks. But without this failure there would be no thinking; thinking would not search, it would not speak and it would not write, should it indeed lay hold of that thing, grounding itself in a word in which everything is said and which makes all other words superfluous. There is only “room for thought” because it harbours something unthought from which it wishes to protect itself. By joining words together, thinking hopes to form a sort of chain to lay around that “something,” a chain by which to somehow hold it in place. But however strenuous that attempt, it never quite succeeds at this, and the greater the thought the greater its vulnerability. No work of thought is ever without a weak link somewhere in the chain, one which is imperceptible for the thinker who wrought it, less secure than the others, a link in which that “something” which defies this thought takes up its abode. Not that this “something” will remain there, for it is too mobile and too cunning for that. It knows that it would betray itself by burrowing in a single place alone, and so it digs tunnels to other words and always conies up, mole-like, where it is least expected. Hence is thinking not merely vulnerable, but helpless, and this is a helplessness which defies all attempts to come to its aid. For it does not help to refer thinking to the word in which it is grounded: what conclusion could it draw from that? Any word which it would choose to set its foot on in

1

My first sentence alludes to the title of an earlier piece on Levinas, entitled ‘Dispossessed: How to Remain Silent ‘After Levinas’’, in Truth and Singularity, pp. 115-43.

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order to establish itself, to give itself a foundation, would immediately forsake that effort, becoming in its turn merely another word which thinking sinks through. Every thinking is thus alone, without recourse to help arriving from the outside. It knows that it must go its own way and above all that this will mean it must always remain in motion, always seeking new words to say the same thing. Or better: although it “knows” that no word can quell the gnawing going on beneath it, this knowledge does not exempt it from its task to bring together enough words in the right manner, for there is no other way for thought to protect itself from that unbearable noise. Perhaps thinking speaks or writes not so much to hear itself, but only to make itself heard well enough to drown out this noise which has already wormed its way back into what it has just been writing or saying. And perhaps most of all, what drives thinkers and makes them rely on a language that they “know” they cannot trust is this anxiety at being left alone with those words on which their thinking had relied – to see them crumble away, riddled by the holes that their thinking had been unable to stop up. Hence, perhaps, the confusion of the one who comes after this thinking and who can see those holes which the author not only could not see but needed not to see. For good writing – and Levinas wrote well – is writing in which the holes that inevitably appear also disappear so quickly that the writer does not get to see them. But a good reader cannot afford to be blinded in that way which for the author is a grace. A good reading must try to follow the author all the way until seeing what the author saw and wanted us to see. But the reader must also always look over the author’s shoulder, for if one does not see the holes from which the author tries to escape, then one will fail to understand the price of that thinking, and thus will overlook its true value. Readers must allow themselves to be led to the grounding word of the thinking which they try to penetrate, but they must also always hear the manner in which that thinking falls through that word. It is this hearing that distinguishes the reader from the author: for a reader to be truly a reader, he or she must hear something that the other was not permitted to hear. Undoubtedly, it is this asymmetry which makes philosophy such an endless task, and so disorienting an enterprise. To be sure, there is the canon, there are the great texts of the tradition. But how to relate to them, if we wish to avoid merely repeating them, and if this wish inevitably means that, in one way or another, we cannot escape having,


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like Oedipus, “one eye too many,” which makes us see what those great texts could not see? And to see what those texts could not see is not to see or to think better than they did. For there seems to be a sort of doom hanging over this kind of vision: in making us become aware of the price of that other thought, thus becoming able to “appreciate” it, it seems fated to shift us to another position where we cannot pay that same price ourselves. Not because we are unwilling, but because we simply cannot: one does not take possession of thought, one is possessed by it. The price of seeing a thought is to become lost before it. This may sound somewhat dramatic, but it nonetheless seems better to bring it out in the open than to act as if thinking is a free commodity of which anyone can partake without taking away from others. It is not only a mistake, but pure hubris to ask of a reader that he or she make the work of someone else accessible. What a reading really comes to is permitting others to see beyond the first understanding one has of a work, to what in it remains inaccessible and, once that has been understood, to why we can no longer presume we are justified in taking its side. One is thus served notice: at work here will not be the philosopher but the bookkeeper – someone who brandishes evidence of unpaid accounts, laden with the unpleasant task of cautiously reminding a thinker’s followers that they may have overextended themselves when buying into that thinker’s work. Thinking is solitary, and it is not a reader’s task to violate that solitude. To the contrary, it is this above all that one must protect. Hence my title and my program: to bring out the price of being dispossessed is not just to show how that very word dispossesses Levinas himself, how his thinking disintegrates when directly confronted with it, but also to show how the greatness of that thinking somehow dispossesses us. And in order to bring this into view, I begin with a reading which is undisturbed by that asymmetry which inhabits and defines philosophy – a reading which belongs to no one in particular, but which somehow remains in circulation, and which I call the “official version” of Levinas. But how to counter this reading which knows of no “dispossession,” least of all of itself, and which strolls happily along, filling in or stopping up those essential holes in Levinas’ text, treating them as if they were ordinary mole-holes, and as if philosophy would ideally be as flat as an English lawn? For surely to merely indicate these holes to the reader would be but another way of making certain that the reader does not stumble. And a mistaken way at that, for these holes are

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everywhere and nowhere, as I will try to show – by tightening the sail in which Levinas’ thoughts have been caught, until it is so tight that only the most innocent reader will not pause before taking the next step. Still, since we do have to take a next step, always and now, let me begin with a brutal statement which, however, will qualify itself as our reading progresses: the “holes” come from God. “God” is the name for the plot of dispossession made possible by the structure of Levinas’ thinking, but which at the same time undermines and limits it. God is the mole which that thinking has tried to live with.

1. A DISCOMFORT THAT LIBERATES ? For the moment, the most important thing to be said of that God is that nothing can be said about him. God is not an object of speech. He is the object of no speech whatsoever, thus including theo-logy (OB 196n19), not even when it is negative (OB 12). God is not a theme. He does not permit himself to be thematized, not because there could be no Saying which would determine him exhaustively, nor because every said – every predicate – would fall short of him, but because Saying (le Dire), every saying, already testifies in its structure to what Levinas calls “the first word.” And that first word – which appears, not by chance, last in the text which I cite here – “is” God. It says nothing, except “the saying itself.” But this changes everything: “if the first saying says this saying, here the saying and the said cannot equal one another. . . . Someone has escaped the themes” (CPP 126). It is that difference between the Saying and that which is Said, between the “someone” who says and the “something” that he or she says or that is said about him or her, that Levinas points to in dropping the word “God.” Drops it: both in the sense of “renouncing” all use of a word and in the contrary sense of suddenly and unexpectedly, but not without precautions, engaging a word that cannot abide unnoticed. For Levinas never begins with God. He not only wants to break with onto-theology, as did Heidegger, but also refuses to introduce that word into his philosophy in the name of one or another religion – even if it would be Jewish: “How to be sure that the Word one takes up is indeed the Word of God? One must go in search of the original experience. Philosophy – or phenomenology – is


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necessary to hear His voice.”2 Nevertheless, this must not be taken to mean that Levinas has succumbed to what he himself calls “the temptation and the illusion which would consist in finding again by philosophy the empirical data of the positive religions”.3 The original experience which he strikes up against with his phenomenology is one which puts it – and with it, all philosophy – in its place, a place alongside all of the existing religions. For the experience in question is a “heteronomous experience” (TrO 348), and Levinas wishes to show, against the philosophical tradition, that such an experience is not a contradiction in terms but, to the contrary, points to a movement of transcendence reaching us “like a bridgehead ‘of the other shore’ ” and without which “the simple coexistence of philosophy and religion in souls and even in civilizations is but an inadmissible weakness of the mind” (ibid.). Hence an ambitious program which is bold enough to jump over Heidegger: “to hear a God not contaminated by being is a human possibility no less important and no less precarious than to bring Being out of the oblivion in which it is said to have fallen in metaphysics and in onto-theology” (OB xlii). An onto-theological conception of God would therefore be problematic not so much because it confuses Being with God – with the “highest being” – but also and above all because it confuses God with Being, thereby contaminating and denying God.4 It would therefore be necessary to “destroy,” in its turn, even Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysics, and to distrust the thoughtfulness of “thoughtful thinking,” if one is to understand what it means that there is a withdrawal which in no way cooperates with manifestation, and thus differs from the sort of withdrawal of Being that the later Heidegger pointed to. But this is not the place to engage this struggle. Let it suffice here to observe that Levinas’ ethics cannot be an ethics of Gelassenheit in which I would “let” the Other “be” the Other, would let him or her appear qua Other, as the Other that he or she “is.” For the prime concern of this ethics is not how I affect the Other, but how the Other

2

E. LEVINAS, Altérité et transcendance. Paris, Fata Morgana, 1995, p. 177. E. LEVINAS, ‘The Trace of the Other’ (trans. A. Lingis), in M.C. TAYLOR (ed.), Deconstruction in Context. Chicago, Chicago U.P., 1986, p. 348. Henceforth quoted as TrO. 4 E. LEVINAS, Dieu, la Mort, et le Temps. Paris, Grasset, 1993, pp. 143-4. 3

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affects me. And that is anything but reassuring: the Other divides me, “de-nucleates” and beleaguers me, does not leave me alone but instead obsesses me and persecutes me, takes me hostage and traumatizes me, brings me to hate myself, to abdicate my place at the centre of my own concerns, to give everything up, to give nothing more to myself, and thus to hemorrhage ceaselessly; the Other burns him- or herself into my skin, and penetrates me5 – in short: the Other does virtually everything to me, except “let me be.” Still – and Levinas never tires of repeating it – all of this happens “without alienation” (OB 112, 114-15, among many other references of this sort). The Other does not enslave but liberates, awakens, disillusions, purifies, and elevates.6 One cannot but conclude: the Other brings me a trauma which heals. Even if the Other “paralyzes” me (e.g., TI 145; OB 104), he or she gives me the precise movement that I needed – paralyzing my paralysis and so pulling down the walls which had hindered my movement (e.g., OB 180). The Other’s face taps a source in me henceforth not to be closed; it inflicts a wound in me which purifies with its continual flow of blood: the Other does not permit me to be alone, but leaves me no choice than to come out of my shell (for he or she smokes me out of every hiding place, every refugium), to step outside, to bare myself and stand in a nakedness which, as Levinas likes to say, is still more naked than that of my bare skin, for it inverts my skin, turns it inside out, so that I become an outside without an inside (envers sans endroit) that no longer has any secrets, no longer any interiority, leaving me completely open, empty, without the possibility of holding anything within myself and thus without the possibility of holding anything for myself. One must not forget that it is precisely these extraordinarily violent expressions that Levinas will take up in order to explain what he means by “proximity,” the nearness of the neighbour which, perhaps because we have coupled it so long with love, has taken on the 5

One need only open Totality and Infinity or Otherwise Than Being to come upon one or more of these expressions. Jan de Greef has written, already some time ago, a very interesting article on Levinas’ almost compulsive recourse to “military” and “pathological metaphors”: ‘L’affectivité chez Levinas,’ in G. FLORIVAL (ed.), Figures de la Finitude: Etudes d’Anthropologie Philosophique. Paris/Louvain-la-Neuve, Peeters, 1988, pp. 53-65 (conference given in 1984). 6 All of these are words used by Levinas himself. This also goes for all of the following appraisals and metaphors.


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connotation of a sweetness “human, all too human”: “The proximity of the other is the immediate opening up for the other of the immediacy of enjoyment – it is the immediacy of taste, the ‘materializing of matter,’ altered (alterée) by the immediacy of contact” (OB 74). Not only altered, but also excited, awakened, stimulated as when one becomes thirsty:7 for the “matter” in question here is my own, which the Other’s face brings to life, sowing in it the “restlessness” (OB 25) by which it is something more than dead material, or more than material driven from within and adapting to its own form. The Other “inspires” my matter, “literally” inflating it (OB 124), so that its form becomes too small, forcing outside, since the inside – interiority – has become oppressive, stifling. Angustia, says Levinas: anxiety in and through the oppressive proximity of the Other, through which I feel “ill at ease in my own skin” (OB 108), like matter in its form, but “already tight,” as in a “Nessus tunic” (ibid.) – skin which betrays me and burns me, because it leaves me exposed to the Other who disturbs me. Yet this is a disturbance which liberates me, for it “materializes” my matter to a point where it “is more material than all matter” (OB 108) and undergoes a change that I myself can neither enact nor resist: instead of binding me to myself (materiality of care for myself – a self that I am never rid of and which I – in what I do, and in where I am – continually stumble over as if over a doppelganger, for even my solitude is something I share with myself),8 matter is now “the very locus of the for-the-other” (le lieu même du pourl’autre; OB 77), and I move from my natural place. My place is not nature – the Other does not bring me down, does not make me fall into nature, as for Sartre, but raises me up, calls me up out of nature. Hence the unrest which I feel: the gaze of the Other rests on me not as on inert matter, but is accomplished in a “turgescence,”9 a swelling of bodily tension. And hence do I blush... But why from shame, as the official version of Levinas would have it? And what has all of this to do with God and with saying? We have digressed, but not unintentionally. We are not lost, but in fact have come to a critical point, a point to which, sooner or later and in

7

This last notion is also contained in the French altérer. On this notion of “materiality,” cf. TO 55-57 and EE 82ff. 9 E. LEVINAS, ‘Transcendance et Hauteur,’ in Liberté et commandement. Paris, Fata Morgana, 1994, p. 66. 8

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one or another manner, every reader of Levinas must eventually come. A point which we have staged didactically in order not to forget a problem that is difficult to dispel. Nevertheless, we will keep with the agreedupon procedure. We have marked a point which we later shall have cause to re-examine. But, for the moment, let us follow the strings of the official version. The melody is well known: they play (with) the face and the form.

2. THE PROXIMITY OF THE OTHER It is the face of the Other that makes me uneasy and – what, according to the “official version,” amounts to the same thing – before which I am ashamed. And this would not be the case if in the face I did not “hear the word of God,”10 and if the Other would not stand “closer to God” (CPP 56) than I do. But again, this is not an argument which begins from God. Levinas is describing human relations, and he thinks that at a certain moment those descriptions make words like “God” or “creation” necessary (again) (cf. CPP 100). Let us follow him further, for the analysis of the preceding section had almost reached this very point. A simple example of the otherwise abstract-sounding “materialization of matter” is close at hand. In a certain sense, a person receives his or her hand from the Other. The hand stops being an organ for grasping things when it comes upon the Other: this particular sort of touch is of a different nature than any other, and it gives the hand another structure than does the feeling of grasping things. Such a grasping is a taking of possession, it is already property: “in stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin” (CPP 118) – the tiger is already a fur coat and the pig already a sofa. Things offer themselves to the grasp without imposing themselves. They have a form which makes them recognizable and therefore familiar. They do not call us or our hands into question, and they allow us to remain in a practical or theoretical mode. In short, precisely because they appear, have a beginning and end, and thus a form which defines them, they are already referred to us: “The illuminated object is something one encounters, but from the very fact that it is illuminated one encounters it as if it came from us” (TO 64), and hence we can, whether literally or not, also take hold of it. To make things our 10

LEVINAS, Altérité et transcendance, p. 114.


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own, to reduce their otherness to sameness, to “totalize” them, is not the same thing as to abolish their otherness, not the same thing as to “over run” them, as Heidegger said of technology. One can let nature be nature, one can “build, think, and dwell” and still let things be or appear without having them lose their role and disturb us, as does the hand of a dead person. A hand turned cold is an anomaly because it permits itself to be felt as a thing, and the cry with which one pulls back one’s own hand upon suddenly realizing that what one feels is not coursing with life, as expected, but still and dead – that cry rejects the hand that unknowingly defiled, or exorcises it in order to prevent it from receding to the pre-human. The skin of the Other does not offer itself to us like leather to be used, but unsettles our hand so that it no longer knows quite what to do. It is through this disturbance that it can open and, like the hand of a child – of which it is said, not for nothing, that it is quickly filled – learn to stroke rather than strike. But even without touching the Other, his or her proximity ensures that I know no pause with my hands and that they are already not my own when I fly at his or her throat and slit it with them.11 And yet the Other also brings my hands to rest: I can extend my hand and thereby, says Levinas, open myself fully, disarm myself, give myself to the Other naked. Symbolic handshake: whatever the effort it costs, it is not for nothing perceived as self-overcoming and therefore a step toward peace – “for it is not certain that war was at the beginning” (OB 118). First there was the proximity of Saying. These are the same thing: Saying is proximity. Not through what it says, but through that it says. In the proximity of the Other, one cannot be silent. One cannot not speak – as with the stranger sitting nearby in a waiting room: one first of all speaks in order to break the silence. An unbearable silence that is not, as one sometimes hears contended, unnatural but precisely the menace of the violence of nature, the menace of regression. Even if one says nothing, one must restrain oneself in order not to say something; one must keep busy, occupy oneself, as when, in that same waiting room, one

11

Whereas in proximity I bear myself in my own hands – the Saying that only says itself and nothing else, says “here I am” and offers them to the Other – here I no longer have myself, so to speak, fully in hand. It is rather that my hands have me, or that I have become my hands. The tension between “having hands” and “being hands” has disappeared.

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reaches for a nearby magazine. And, if this gesture of self-protection somehow always fails to make us feel comfortable, it is not because one feels threatened and limited in one’s freedom, as Sartre thinks, but rather because under the gaze of that other person, one feels this freedom brought to life and yet also guilty of allowing it to die by keeping silent. The words that stick on our tongue die there and leave us with a bad aftertaste – but this is the taste of a spoiled freedom, the taste of the placenta wherein the child suffocates. For a human being, says Levinas, is not someone who wants to speak. We cannot do otherwise. And Levinas asks himself why: “What then came to wound the subject, so that he should expose his thoughts or himself in his saying?” (OB 84, translation corrected). Why indeed are our thoughts not kept to ourselves? Why does keeping silent cost us so much effort? And why is this always understood – for instance, by Heidegger – as a Verschwiegenheit (Sein und Zeit § 34) which is “telling” and thus also speaks? Is this not already an acknowledgment and a recognition of the “bleeding wound of saying” (OB 151) which “cannot heal” (OB 126), and which the Other, through his or her sheer proximity and without even touching us, has opened? Before it says something, the saying says and it says itself; it says something first of all in order to say itself, to “express itself,” to declare itself as one declares one’s love, out of a certain unease: hence not because one has decided to do so, but simply because one cannot do otherwise than allow oneself to be drawn out – it must come out – through the opening which one did not open oneself. This proximity is not like that of things – not contiguity – but obsession, a besiegement stronger than the walls of Jericho. I must contain myself so as not to give way before this trumpet which is not even a weapon. “Sick with love,” reads Levinas in the Song of Songs (OB 198n5), “impossibility of being silent” (OB 143). This impossibility is more incomprehensible still than the impossibility of keeping one’s feelings of love to oneself, for it is a matter of a saying which begins to stir in myself and wants to get out in the proximity of an Other who is not special to me, an Other whom Levinas calls the “undesirable par excellence” (CPP 164; OB 123), a stranger to whom I attach no importance – someone who is as “untelling” as can be. But then, whence my unrest, that wave which propels me outward? Levinas answers: from the very structure of the trauma. It is worth pausing before this answer, for although to my knowledge the official


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version never mentions it, this matter of the trauma, this is nonetheless a point that might help it to avoid unnecessary detours in the path leading to the standard and familiar story of the face and the form.

3. RESPONSIBILITY IS MISPLACED Otherwise Than Being would not be the book it is without its persistent preoccupation with the trauma (traumatisme) which I incur through the proximity of the Other. And yet, as I already mentioned, there is something counter-intuitive about this trauma. For equally persistent is Levinas’ claim that it does not alienate me, but purifies and elevates me. Instead of limiting my freedom – as is the case in pathology – Levinas’ trauma establishes it, or “invests” it. But how can a trauma, something which escapes my freedom, thus something of which I am not the subject but to which I am subjected – how can this liberate me? How can I be healed by a shock that uproots me, knocks me loose, tears me away from my every anchoring? Why should such a shock be “sobering,” or “awaken” me? What could I gain from a complete loss of interiority? How could the “nothing private” by which Levinas characterizes the proximity of the Other (OB 138, 144), how could being lain bare before the Other be anything but sheer terror – is it not precisely in totalitarianism that every form of privacy falls away? Or yet again: why would penetration by the Other – “the-one-penetrated-by-the-Other” (OB 49) – be anything but brutal violence? How, then, are they not rape and trauma in the most common sense of those words? Before rejecting as either meaningless or against all intuition the notion of a trauma without alienation, one must first understand what a trauma is and in what sense Levinas uses that word. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the impression that it is either a failure or an unwillingness to take this word for what it is (and perhaps more unwillingness than failure, for the misunderstanding is so convenient that it cannot be innocent) that lies behind all those misinterpretations of Levinas’ ethics which either reduce it (and often without noticing) to a thaumaturgy which miraculously heals us through contact with the Other or with the Other’s appeal, or which discards it for having failed to bring to the problem of the subject and the Other more than a mere reversal where the Other is to constitute me rather than me the Other (alter ego). In both cases, Levinas’ philosophy has been narrowed to an ethics which is

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no longer comprehensible, and that incomprehensibility is then used as an excuse either to embrace that ethics – in which case responsibility would be “practical” and for that reason incomprehensible, or, to invoke a favourite term of late, “undecidable” – or else to dismiss it, in which case the excessiveness of such a responsibility would be considered merely the consequence of philosophical deficiency: the asymmetry which Levinas recognizes in the Other would be too asymmetric and his or her transcendence too absolute. And all of this would be the price of a philosophy which – as Derrida recently suggested – is ultimately unable to maintain a distinction between the infinite otherness of God and that of the other person. The problem with this ethics would thus be that it is “already religion.”12 This may be true. But if it is, then it represents a problem which Levinas’ ethics engages frontally, and not, as Derrida suggests, one which escapes it. For the central insight of that ethics is that everything in ethics turns around affects which cannot be described without that description falling short. Discomfort, shame, self-accusation, and the contrition rising in me simply through a sense of the proximity of the Other – these are not affects like all others. I can feel angry because someone has insulted me, but I feel shame and discomfort without any reason. Why should I feel embarrassed before an Other whom I do not know and whom I have nothing to do with? I have no reason to be afraid of her; she keeps her distance over there, and I know where I am going. I have done nothing wrong, and so have the law on my side. And still there is something about the Other’s gaze which does not leave me indifferent – for a moment I hesitate, I slow my pace, as if I have lost sight of my destination: “Whence comes to me this shock when I pass, indifferent, under the gaze of the Other?” (TrO 350). Surely, nothing has happened there. The Other has not asked me a single thing!

12

Cf. J. DERRIDA, ‘Donner la mort,’ in J. M. RABATÉ - M. WETZEL (ed.), L’éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la Pensée du don. Colloque de Royaumont decembre 1990. Paris, Metaillé-Transition, 1992, p. 81. Elsewhere I have tried to show how Levinas would consider such remarks to have missed his problematic completely – and not only because the distinction between the otherness of God and that of one’s neighbor is, in fact, central to it. See my ‘Can Only a ‘Yes’ Save Us Now? Anti-Racism’s First Word in Derrida and Levinas’, in Truth and Singularity, chapter 10.


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The Other calls to me in spite of him- or herself. The Other’s proximity alone suffices. There is no need of beseechment or imploring hands. Whether or not the Other actually turns toward me, I am turned toward the Other. Responsibility, says Levinas in a constantly recurring formula, is an answer without a question (e.g., OB 150). This formula also characterizes what Otherwise Than Being calls “saying” – for saying and responsibility go together, both involve being ordered-to or openedto the Other without any decision to open oneself. But to believe that since it is not we who are behind this opening, it must be the Other who opens us, is to misunderstand what is at stake here. After all, why would the Other open us? Surely, it is too simple to think that we speak because we are first spoken to, and although one cannot deny the subtlety of those who would have language address us before we address one another in it, this model, too, starts with a first address (a Zu-sage which is still a sagen) to which we must pay heed for us to speak properly and “enter” into the Spielraum which unfolds for us. But Levinas’ idea of a “response without a question” seems to suggest that there is no such “entering.” Somehow, both saying and responsibility never quite “take place.” They are literally misplaced, out of joint, pointing to an anachronism which cannot be resolved, synchronized, serialized, or situated, for example, in the chain of cause and effect, without nullifying the “plot” or “intrigue” in which they show up. What Otherwise Than Being repeatedly calls the “intrigue”13 of saying or responsibility stands or falls with this anachronism which represents an absurdity within the order of being. For how could there “be” something like “a sound that would be audible only in its echo” (OB 106), “an indebtedness before any loan” (OB 111), and “an accusation preceding the fault” (OB 113)? How can one be responsible without having any part in it? How can one be involved where one was not involved? Is it not mistaken to hold someone responsible for the mistakes of the Other? Or for the misuse that that Other has made of his or her own responsibility? And yet, parents are not only answerable for their children, but feel themselves responsible, even long after the children have grown up and begun to stand on their own. And yet, not just by law but even in accordance with popular sentiment, secretaries of state 13

Together with “trauma,” this is one of the central and recurrent concepts in Otherwise Than Being.

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must resign their posts for mistakes made under their administration. And yet we are reproached – indeed, we reproach ourselves – for not having intervened in things gone wrong which we had nothing to do with, and which we did not even know about while they happened. And yet it is not without embarrassment that we open our lunchboxes when seated between two people we do not know – again in a waiting room, or perhaps at the train station – even if there is nothing to indicate they are hungry. Is it a mistake to say that bread is made to be shared? Such affects are not mistaken. It is only that they are out of place within the order they disturb. And that order does not understand them because they come from somewhere else. Not that they are from another order. Rather, they come from something that cannot or will not be of any order, something which does not permit itself to be understood because “it has left before having come” (CPP 68), thus something that breaks with the order of consciousness which can only know, re-cognize, and admit what has first been rendered familiar and knowable. This is an order, then, which cannot accept something which escapes the grasp of the present and places the primacy of the present in question. And which therefore cannot but understand responsibility as an engagement, a selfengaging answer to a need which presents itself, which thus announces itself and over which one can in all freedom make a judgment on how to act, if at all – and after one has investigated it from all sides and then weighed the pluses and minuses of each choice. One understands why Levinas has resisted calling the face of the Other a phenomenon, why he refers to it as too great for its form, and why he places so much emphasis on the fact that “the Other who manifests himself in a face, as it were breaks through his own plastic essence,” “divests himself” of that form, of that face which, however, “has nonetheless already made him manifest” (CPP 56, translation corrected). For this silent manifestation is more and other than “appearance”; it has rather something of a demonstration that lays hold of us purely and simply by passing us by, and without even asking anything of us. Though there is nothing to see, we are intrigued. Or better: this intrigue, the fact that we feel uneasy, that we are embarrassed or ashamed, has nothing to do with what there is to see of or from the Other. And it is precisely there that our discomfort is to be found: we are seized by something that we ourselves can in no way grasp or lay hold of. We are


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“out of order,” out of our usual rhythm – dispossessed – without knowing why. This “without why” is not that of the rose that blooms and which we must learn to simply let bloom. It places our own bloom in question, and there is nothing in it to learn. Whether the Other is young or old, whether his or her face is faded or withered – “peau a rides,” skin with wrinkles (OB 88, 93) – and however “mad” it may appear,14 my shame seems to establish my responsibility for the fact that the Other receives no water, that his or her skin is dry and shrivelled already before I could have cared for it. I always come too late to this responsibility, it is older than my capacity and my freedom, and it has a structure which prevents me to ever truly learn from the experience – the next time is never better – because it holds me in the web of an intrigue that is intriguing precisely because it turns around a past which has never been present. An intrigue which Levinas calls “religious” (OB 147) and which cannot be understood except by relating to an Other who Levinas says comes in the “trace of God.”

4. AFFECTS WITHOUT CONTEXT Why does the Other come in the trace of God? What does it mean that in the Other’s face I hear “the word of God,” “the word that points to my debt and my duty before the Other”?15 In order to understand what brings Levinas to these formulations, one has to bear in mind the extreme unlikelihood of what they are trying to describe. For how can a face which withdraws from its own form, a face that breaks that form open, that breaks through it, eclipsing the light in which, as we have seen, the world and everything in it are familiar to me – how can such a formless face, despite the falling away of that familiarity, in its being-notreferred-to-me, in its ab-soluteness, still touch “something” in me? Why is the effect of what is thus absolutely alien and non-familiar not what 14

Cf, e.g., OB 142: “The psyche, a uniqueness outside of concepts, is a seed of folly, already a psychosis. It is not an ego, but me under assignation.” Countless such passages are to be found in Levinas’ work. 15 Levinas’ own clarification of my previous citation. See ‘ ‘Wat men van zichzelf eist, eist men van een heilige’: Een gesprek met Emmanuel Levinas’ [What one demands from oneself, one demands from a saint: A conversation with E.L.], in J. GOUD, God als Raadsel: Peilingen in het spoor van Levinas. Kampen/Kapellen, Kok, 1992, p. 145.

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one might expect it to be? Why should I feel guilt rather than, for example, panic? Why are discomfort and shame the same thing for Levinas? Why is my disintegration specifically ethical? And why, then, is it totally different from the disintegration that overwhelms me and makes itself my master when the absolute other that Levinas calls the il y a emerges, and which is characterized precisely by opening me to the apeiron (cf. TI 159) – the monstrous and formless which, for example, some science fiction and horror films try to capture in an image? An image of the formless which, fortunately, is still not without form and thus still reassuring, while only invoking a fright which we can no longer imagine. But why does the ab-soluteness of the Other who completely withdraws from his or her own form, and whose alterity Levinas insists has nothing to do with the form of his or her visage – which is, of course, recognizably human – why does this Other not directly instil the same sort of fright in me? Why am I not “crushed” (TO 85, 91) or “burned” (TI 77) by the Other’s transcendence, which refuses capture in the forms by which it would become immanent to me? If by withdrawing from his or her form and thereby upsetting the order in which things are given to me – but without imposing themselves on me (EE 47) – if in this way the Other, despite him- or herself, through being other than his or her “form,” becomes intrusive, or “obsessing,” then why am I not petrified by the Other, or why do I not run away in panic, as occurs when in horror I am overtaken by an absolute otherness which I can in no way situate or comprehend? The answer can only be: because the otherness of the Other is not absolute in that sense. Not only because the Other comes in the trace of God, but moreover because I, too, bear a trace of God.16 But, I only know that – and without my being able to appropriate that knowing, for that “knowing” is ethics – through the Other. Were it only a response to the situation in which it emerges, my discomfort would not be shame but panic. For in retrospect, there does seem to be something special about that situation, and we were thus too quick to suppose that there was nothing in it which could clarify the kind of affect involved here. For even if the Other leaves us “in peace,”

16

The remainder of my investigation is directed to clarifying the difference between these two “traces.” The fact that for Levinas I, too, am a trace of God is confirmed beyond any doubt at TI 104: “Creation leaves to the creature a trace of dependence, but it is an unparalleled dependence.”


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he or she is still an Other, and this alterity which is without form could at best explain our discomfort. But it cannot explain the specific feeling of shame. That our discomfort is an ethical discomfort, and that Levinas can define it by responsibility, cannot be explained by the falling away of “forms.” A discomfort which is shame, a suffocation (angustia) which is more than anxiety at nothingness, presupposes something more. It presupposes another scene. It presupposes what Freud would call the first time of the trauma – but then a time which overturns the normal course of time in everyday life: that of a past which not only never has been present, but never will be. This is why this past asserts itself through an affect. Contrition, discomfort, and shame are affects without context. They emerge from nowhere, out of nothing, and can in no way be clarified by the context in which they assert themselves. That context, as it were, breaks open because there is something in those affects which is out of accord, something which does not tally or fit. Something other breaks through. Something which has not been worked out and which could not have been worked out otherwise, says Freud, who then goes in search of what that could have been.17 And he discovers something interesting: the adult Emma, who has come to him now because she has not dared to enter a clothing store alone since an episode at age twelve, when she fled a store in panic after seeing two salesmen laughing – at her clothes, she now thinks – displays a phobia which cannot be explained solely on the basis of that situation as such. For as a woman, Emma now dresses quite differently than she did as a twelve-year-old, and even the company of a child seems to be enough for her to feel at ease while shopping for clothes. Freud discovers that there has been something operating behind the scenes since the beginning of Emma’s puberty and which still limits her freedom, an other, hidden scene which works its way through into the second scene (at age twelve) and whose meaning comes to light only now – but without Emma being able to grasp it – coming over her as

17

For what follows, see S. FREUD, ‘Entwurf einer Psychologie’ (1895), in his Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902. Frankfurt a.M., S. Fischer Verlag, 1962. English translation by J. Strachey in The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. New York, Basic Books, 1954. Henceforth cited as E and Origins. The translation has occasionally been modified slightly. All italics are mine.

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affect, taking hold of her as she enters any clothing shop unaccompanied. That first scene occurred in another shop, which the eight-year-old Emma entered to buy candy. The shopkeeper, a grocer, had touched her genitals through her clothes, grinning while he did so. And the little Emma returned again to the shop – Freud makes note of this, but the Project pursues it no further – perhaps not only because she wanted more candy, and it happened again, after which she never returned. Perhaps that touching had intrigued her, and that was why she went back, just as we all retrace our steps when intrigued by something. But nothing came of it, nothing that she could do something with, like with candy, and Emma grew up, forgot the first incident, and got on with her life until a phobia for clothing shops began to unravel it. And then there was – fortunately – Freud, who associated the salesmen’s laughter with the grocer’s grin, and brought the clothing of the adult and twelve-year-old together with that of the child, and saw in all of that a hysteron proteron hysterikon, along with a complicated scheme which shows that without the little Emma’s noticing it – à l’insu, Levinas would say – a force had entered her psychic apparatus in such a way that the apparatus could not operate since it simply was not put together for it. What occurred in that first scene could not be represented, “bound,” neutralized, or worked out by it. It was thus in fact nothing, and yet it had somehow impressed itself on Emma, but without leaving her with an impression of that im-pression. She would only notice later, when she reached an age at which a woman knows what to do when someone touches her. But the salesmen did not touch her, they only laughed, and the striking thing about that laughter was that it quite literally struck hard enough to make her lose self-control, bringing her “out of her mind.” For that laughter, says Freud, awakened the (unconscious) memories of the other, first shop, which in turn exposed her to what “she could not have experienced then, a release of sexuality, which asserted itself in anxiety” (E 354/Origins 411). And Freud concludes that “here we come upon an instance of a memory awakening an affect which is not awakened by the [remembered] event itself, because in the meantime the change to puberty has made possible another understanding of what is remembered” (E 356/Origins 413). As if the grocer’s hand had impressed a small scar in Emma’s skin but without that skin itself feeling it (she did indeed feel that she was touched, but not that she was scarred), and which only later, as that skin


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grew, became legible. Or actually not. For this writing came too soon. In a certain sense, it was too big for Emma’s small skin, and thus not only mutilated it, but also distorted itself so that it could no longer be read by the time the salesmen looked and laughed at Emma. She was exposed to something which at that time she could not read (which is, according to Freud’s notion of a “delay in puberty,” normal), and now still less (and that is another matter). But this explanation seems not in keeping with what Freud says. For Freud, everything seems to centre around “memory traces which can be understood only upon the appearance of one’s own sexual perception” (E 356/Origins 413) – or almost everything, for all adolescents have such memory traces and yet not all become hysterical. The scene with the salesmen provided the more sexually “mature” Emma with a context through which her psychic apparatus could, via association, “read,” interpret, and understand the first scene as something sexual. But that same process of association also led her to misread the second scene: she thought that the salesmen were laughing at her clothes, while for her own part finding one of them attractive (as she later remembered) – a combination that called up the offence in the grocery store, so that the new situation involves a sense of danger completely disproportionate to the event itself (“they want to touch me again”), with the result that Emma runs away in “some kind of fright” (E 353/Origins 410). Now that she finally reads the first scene, this scene, “understood at last,” makes her misread the second: the laughter of the salesmen becomes a grin which promises no good, which is terror itself, and she flees. As if the impression of that first scar was so great that it still impresses itself now – or rather, only now – in all other signs and, being itself deformed, deforms them too, so that the very sight of it petrifies Emma – even though she has reached the age in which a laugh, however erotic it may be, need not be threatening, and in which she herself is adult enough to ignore someone grinning with an ulterior motive, or else simply put him in his place. Emma’s trauma thus has to do with a trace that wipes out all other traces, infiltrating everywhere. Through that trace, the laughter of the salesmen is suddenly transformed into grinning, it “signifies” something other than it “signifies,” it becomes a leer which cannot signify anything because it comes too close and does not keep the distance necessary for a signifier to give way to signification. Such laughter is no longer laughter at all but the convulsion of a deformed face, as Levinas would say, leering

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at her and petrifying her just as does the il y a which emerges as all familiar forms fall away, leaving nothing to protect us from the power of suction thus coming into existence. This, Levinas might add, shows us what happens when the face does not “precede eros.”18 For Emma, eros is from the beginning a disturbance, “ambiguous” and unreliable – in short, terror, and thus not the “experience” of a face that is taken in by its blush and instead of breaking through its form descends into it, or drops into it so that the form trembles, glows, loses its control, or breaks in the manner of lovers’ eyes, when sexual pleasure takes them into their own flesh and into the flesh of the Other, a flesh that begins to take possession of their faces, allowing them to descend stealthily from their sublime height, and to flirt with incarnation while delivering themselves to the “vertigo” of a pleasure which, even at the very limit of the impersonal, still does not swallow up the personal (TI 264). Eros: supreme vulnerability of a face that finds itself released from the need to be a face, a face which trusts itself to become “weighted down with a skin” (OB 85; TI 264) as divers carry weights they can later throw away. None of this, however, was possible for Emma, who seemed to carry a weight in her that she could not throw away, a heaviness whose power she began to feel only later as it threatened to crush her from the inside out, operating like a black hole which sucks everything else into it, skewing the poles of the field in which, for a healthy woman of her age, she should have felt attracted and attractive, and without experiencing that feeling as a threat. Emma’s trauma lies in that interval by which all future seductive smiles have become welded to a past grin that, in refusing to pass, makes all (sexual-erotic) laughter meaningless to her, an interval into which the entire field of erotics and seduction has disappeared, just as suddenly and just as inexplicably as ships sink in the Bermuda Triangle. This comparison might seem far-fetched, but, as we will see, it is in fact both apt and to the point. It must help us to see not only the similarities but also the differences between, on the one hand, Freud’s manner of thinking the structure of the trauma within the framework of a metapsychology still modelled on physical science, and, on the other, 18

The analysis of eros appearing in Totality and Infinity comes in a section bearing the general title “Au delà du Visage” (Beyond the Face, TI 251ff.), which signifies a priority Levinas continues to uphold later (e.g., OB 192n27).


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Levinas’ at first sight rather strange attempt to free it from such a framework and make it the cornerstone of a metaphysics which has the – to our ears today – strange pretence to put psychoanalysis in its place. Not to refute or reject it, but to establish itself without it. For the trace with which Levinas is concerned is not only “better” (OB 54) but also “otherwise” – it belongs in an “otherwise than being” which, instead of worrying about some disturbance within the order of consciousness, as Freud did, remains sovereign and prior to it.

5. A SHOCK WITHOUT AFFECT In Freud’s discussion of a trauma, he makes a distinction between two “times” which, however, do not simply follow each other as such. While the real course of events does move from the scene in the grocery store (when Emma is eight) to the scene in the clothing store (when she is twelve), the temporality of the trauma is somewhat different. There things happen, in a certain sense, in the reverse order: the first scene, which in itself had nothing traumatic about it, becomes traumatogenic only “afterwards” (après coup, nachträglich), that is to say, through the second scene. It is therefore not the case that the first scene is simply the “cause” and the second its “effect.” To stay with this terminology, one would have to say that the cause becomes “richer,” or changes, through the effect that it causes. The effect works “thus” upon the cause, thereby “awakening” an affect that, as we have seen, could not have been awakened “through the remembered event itself,” an affect that was not there so long as the “cause” was still without an effect. But then how can this affect be there once there is an effect? What sort of “memory trace” is this that changes once it is “activated”? And what is the nature of that change? Is it nothing more than an actualization of slumbering potential? When Emma fled the clothing store in panic, it was because she felt assaulted, and because she did not have time (an expression we will find again in Levinas) to “meet” that assault. She was unprepared for it, says Freud, because it came from an unexpected corner: for it is not in her case a perception “but a memory-trace which unexpectedly releases unpleasure” (E 358/Origins 416). The surprise is, as Levinas would say, “complete” (OB 99, 148), for the assault comes not from outside (in itself, the scene in the clothing store has nothing threatening about it), but from “inside.” Moreover, this is an inside of which Emma was

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completely unaware, an “inside” which does not coincide with the “inside” of her psychic apparatus, for it had entered that apparatus without being spoiled by it. Borrowing a word from Lacan we might refer to this inside, which remains “outside” the inside of an intimacy which has no knowledge and thus no understanding of it, as ex-timacy.19 This ex-timacy makes the ordinary inside of intimacy vulnerable from inside out: it acts somewhat like a traitor within the walls, opening the gates at the most unexpected moment, allowing the seemingly innocent passer-by to slip inside and arm himself with the weapons – the “energy” – to begin sowing terror. This is what overcomes Emma when the grin appears as more than a harmless memory trace, more ex-timate than the intimacy of her ordinary memories, forming an alliance with the laughter and thus attacking her, so to speak, on two fronts at once, so that she no longer knew how to react. The assault is everywhere and nowhere, no longer localizable: it comes from neither outside nor (the ordinary) inside, but from an outside in the inside or an inside in the outside. What is confusing and debilitating about that assault is not only that Emma – literally – cannot “place” it, but also that – again, literally – it leaves her no “time.” Something that had seemed past now suddenly seems not at all past; something returns, a bit like in The Return of the Living Dead. Not entirely so, however, for that which returns was not yet as it is now. It returns, but having changed. The memory trace in question there suddenly appears to be something other than the impression of a present now past. And it is through this that the actual present – the laughter in the clothing store – also seems to be different from the present we are all familiar with. For this present refuses to pass, it intrudes, becomes intrusive and silences Emma, persecutes20 her all the way into the future which is already forced under the “sign” of what to avoid. What Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, or afterwardsness, seems to bring with it a sort of implosion of the ecstases of time – time lacks the strength to unfold, and as it thus becomes one-dimensional it is no longer an “element,” becoming flat and at the same time heavy, leaving

19

The term itself comes from J.-A. MILLER, ‘Extimité,’ in M. BRASHER et al. (eds.), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society. New York/London, Routledge, 1994, 74-87. 20 I intentionally use the words with which Levinas describes “proximity” in Otherwise Than Being.


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Emma unable to breathe, smothering her in the manner of damp laundry which is not aired properly.21 What is oppressive in the trauma, the Angst (angustia) that it awakens, is thus that the a priori forms of sensibility are suspended, put out of order. In this way, Emma is taken hostage by the other-in-oneself. And regardless of how one twists or turns it, this other “is.” One can call it the unconscious (which, as one knows, has neither place nor time), but the unconscious, too, “is.” It cannot be clarified or explained by the expression “otherwise than being,” which Levinas wishes to join to the trauma. Taken strictly, one also cannot use any of the terms which one is nevertheless tempted to reach for when, based on I know not what optimism, one appeals to psychoanalysis in order to contest metaphysics. For before we associate this strange trace about which we have already heard Freud speak with the trace discussed by Levinas – a trace that differs from all other traces, the trace of a “God” who has passed without ever having been present, thus the trace of an “absolute past” which has never been present22 – we would do well to look carefully once again at what happened to Emma. More happened in the grocery store than Emma herself realized. But that “more” announced itself only later, in connection with the second scene. And still, it must in some way have already “been” there. Freud is aware of the difficulty this involves, and he rejects, after some explanation and not without reason, the term “unconscious affect” – after all, what sort of affect can go entirely unnoticed? An unconscious affect, he says, can in the strict sense signify at most that there has been a “potential beginning” (eine Ansatzmöglichkeit) of affect-formation which somehow could not “develop” (entfalten; Ubw 137/SE 178). Freud adds

21

In ‘Das Unbewusste’ (1915), Freud explains that the affect of Angst is an inversion of another affect which is denied the possibility of manifesting itself, due to an unconscious repression of the representation bearing it. The affect which “gets no air” becomes, as it were, toxic, just as an organism does when forced to hold its breath. It is through this poisoning that the affect becomes Angst. In S. FREUD, Psychologie des Unbewussten: Studienausgabe Band III. Frankfurt a.M., S. Fischer Verlag, 1975, 141. English translation by J. Strachey et al. in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. London, Hogarth Press, 1954-73, vol. 14. Henceforth cited as Ubw and SE. 22 On this notion of a “trace” differing from all other traces, because it is not the impression of a past presence, cf. TrO 345-59.

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that this is due to (secondary) repression, which leads to all sorts of problems that I must leave aside here. I thus admit that I twist Freud slightly – more than slightly, some would say – in the direction of Lyotard, referring now to the first “time” of the trauma as a “shock without affect.”23 The fact that there is no affect is not the problem; this means only that at the moment of the shock itself one feels no affect. The problem is with the shock, a term which suggests that little Emma’s psychic apparatus received a stimulus to work through (the entire scene in the grocery store) which, however, it did not entirely do (and “not entirely” is something other than “entirely not”). Some of that stimulus escaped her apparatus (the intriguing sensation in her genitals, and the grin which accompanied it). However, the excessive “remainder” of stimulation which could not be worked out does not let go of that apparatus and smuggles itself inside. It is the intrusion of that unworked surplus which justifies the expression “shock without affect.” Or, in Freud’s language, a language I twist, though not without reason: though the remainder does not form an unconscious affect,24 there has indeed been something like a “potential beginning” to affect-formation – but nothing seems to come out of it. Remember: Emma was “intrigued” (Levinas’ term!) and went back to the shop, it happened a second time, we may assume, and only then did she stay away. And we know that there is nothing to indicate that the first scene itself was already laden with negative affects. In any case, considered in itself, it was not traumatizing. The intriguing feeling that motivated a second visit to the store seems after that to disappear. Even if she was touched again, there was nothing special about this touch; Emma had first thought it something unusual, but this seemed not to be the case. It was a touch and nothing more. With what had initially intrigued her, she found out she could do nothing – it did not admit representation, not even affect-representation. And it therefore disappeared – literally, it did not re-present itself.

23

In what follows, I am inspired by the brilliant first part of J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Heidegger and the Jews. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990, above all pp. 11-35. 24 On this point, I depart from Lyotard. Cf. ibid., pp. 15-16, where he refers twice and without reservation to “unconscious affects” in FREUD, Ubw 136-38/SE 177-79, who, as we have seen, would disagree.


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The entire scene in the grocery store involved no more than a memory trace in which the being-touched and the grin were only one moment among others. Yet without her noticing, Emma was, as we have already seen, “scarred” by it; the un-worked-out “quantity” of excitation had entered her psychic apparatus. There was a shock that Emma did not feel and that she would feel only later, in the meantime spreading as a sort of “affective cloud” (thus, not an affect per se), an “energy” of which it must be said that her psychic apparatus not so much did not know what to do with it as could not know, since it had not even registered that energy. It did not become an affect, but it nonetheless continued to exert itself, “as a thermal condition of the system which, because it was not determined, could not be worked out.”25 This changes with the second scene, in which, as Lyotard says, an “affect without shock” is released: nothing special happens, and yet Emma panics. The “sound” of the shock without affect becomes audible only in its echo26 – in an affect without shock. The second time thus does not so much follow the first as it goes before it. The first time reverberates in the second, which forms the context in which a sound hitherto inaudible can finally be heard. Or, in terms of the energy metaphor, the energy which at first was not registered now suddenly announces itself and allows itself to be worked out or transposed into the affect which overwhelms Emma. In the language of Freud’s Project, one could say that the (as it were) innocent memory trace of the first scene was linked to a gas bubble of unused, unregistered energy. Through the salesmen’s laughter in the second scene that “link” and thus that “trace” begin to vibrate (Freud speaks of “association”), so that that gas bubble is released and comes rapidly to the surface. And then there seems to occur something similar to what, according to the most recent theories, also occurs in the Bermuda Triangle: through the release of gases from the ocean floor, mixing then with seawater, the relative weight of the water decreases, sinking the ships which had been built to float on normal water. The gas bubble comes to the edge of the psychic apparatus, and makes it so porous that Emma’s ego no longer has time to meet the present perception (laughter) and react to the danger which could be 25

LYOTARD, Heidegger and the Jews, pp. 15-16. As one will recall, Levinas introduced us to this image of a sound audible only in its echo (cf. OB 106 and my commentary in section III above).

26

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bound up with it. The laughter escaped attention because it was immediately too close to the retina, attracted as it is by that dark grin which now casts aside its earlier silence and lets itself be heard. Everything snaps shut, and henceforth Emma knows only that she must avoid entering clothing shops. She must sacrifice – quite literally – part of her “time” and part of her “place ” if her life is to have time and place. The price of this trauma is a phobia that literally dis-possesses Emma: in order to maintain at least some control over the danger lurking “in” her, she projects it outside (“clothing shops are to be avoided!”), but this requires her to accept the formation of an “enclave” (Ubw 143/SE 184) in that “outside” which belongs to the sphere of unconscious influence. And that is, as Freud soberly remarks, a “great sacrifice of personal freedom” (Ubw 143/SE 184). For Levinas, this tremendum which determines Emma’s life would not be very different from what he describes elsewhere as the fasci-nosum.27 What psychoanalysis describes is an ec-stasis toward the inside, but not therefore any less possessing. The figuration in which Angst is bound up – Freud’s “phobic outer structure (phobische Vor-bau)” (Ubw 143/SE 184) – is at the same time the forecourt where the gods are born. And where, as Levinas would add, humanity is debased and enslaved: for – like Emma – it will have to bring sacrifices to keep its peace and tranquillity in an attempt to bring the gods which are unreliable (and which Lacan therefore locates in “the real”)28 into the symbolic order in the hope that they will answer and that a covenant may exist.29 A vain hope, says Levinas, hope that is nothing but vanity and hopeless hope since it aims at the “bad infinite” (TI 159) of an outside to which the subject is attached, but without being separated from it. Endless spiral of ever bloodier sacrifices,30 or sacred spell which lets time tick away at the

27

For example, every time Totality and Infinity goes on the offensive against “gods without faces” (e.g., TI 142, 158, 160). 28 J. LACAN, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Seminaire XI). Paris, Seuil, 1973, 45. 29 J. LACAN, L’angoisse: Seminaire 1962-1963 (unpublished manuscript), session of June 5, 1963, and passim. 30 LACAN, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, p. 247 (“les dieux obscurs”).


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gate of a Law which never answers31 – there is no difference between the heteronomy of a transdescendence which either renders us immobile or forces us to ceaselessly repeat the same rigid gestures, and binds the subject with the very bonds by which it tries to protect itself from it. What is absent from such a “transcendence” is the goodness of a Good which is transascendent because “the distance it expresses, unlike all distances, enters into the way of existing” of the being involved there (TI 35, emphasis in source).32 Which is “only” to say that this being is responsible. For responsibility is an impossibility-of-disappearing in which the subject thus abides: here, too, there is infinity (for responsibility is without end), but then with a good liberating the subject, rather than depleting it. Indeed, the Good animates and inspires the subject, and without the subject’s bending or breaking under its breath, but holding itself up. By singularising me into an irreplaceable I, the responsibility which is thus “irrecusable ” (OB 109) distinguishes itself from the “impossibility-to-disappear” in which there lies the terror of the il y a. The il y a paralyzes: it sucks the subject into it, it obsesses it and ensnares it, it compels the subject to bear witness to its own naked depersonalization, but without permitting it the distance necessary to escape from it. In the il y a, something comes too close, so that, as in the case of Emma, everything falls shut. Angst, oppression, a feeling of suffocation: these are the final affects which for a subject left without any escape announces its impossibility-to-disappear in its very disappearance. The terror of the il y a is the announcement of a still greater terror: the imminence of a “being without beings,” an existence without existents in which the existent that I am will disappear but without its nothingness offering me any peace.

31

On this problematic of a Law that withdraws from the relation, but precisely in this way imprisons, cf. J. DERRIDA, ‘Préjugés - devant la loi,’ in La faculte de juger: Colloque de Cérisy 1982. Paris, Minuit, 1985. 32 One should not forget that already at the beginning of Totality and Infinity Levinas says that “transcendence ... is necessarily a transascendence” (TI 35), and that he never retracts this. Every critique which, remaining in line with Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” brings the notion of “the other in the same” into confrontation with the distinction, crucial to Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, between “le même et l’autre,” will thus first have to explain whether and how that “other” still leaves room for there to be a self – in other words, whether the transdescendence of “the other in the same” is still indeed a transcendence.

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It is this menace which, according to Levinas, stands central in psychoanalysis: the menace of an unreliable “primary process” always ready to submit the “secondary process” to itself. The unconscious: a “thinking that thinks otherwise,”33 a being without consciousness, but still a being. One understands why Levinas turns his back on psychoanalysis: not because he did not wish to acknowledge it, but, to the contrary, precisely because he had indeed recognized it. The place of psychoanalysis – this is the place of the il y a. It is this same il y a that the metaphysics of Levinas discerns and engages in culture: it is to be put to work – as negativity yes, but one which will have to work! – in an ethics in which, just as in Freud, everything turns around an affect that “leaves us no time,” that “intrudes” on us, “dis-possesses” us. But unlike in Freud, this affect does not suffocate and overpower us, does not alienate and enslave us. If it oppresses us, then it is an oppression which liberates. And hence the place of that affect is an other trauma, a trauma that heals. A good trauma, then, for this is the trauma of a Good that leaves us “no time” (CPP 98) to refuse it or choose for it, but which, as Levinas always adds, is good precisely because it “redeems” (rachète) the “violence of (that) unfreedom” (OB 123). This un-freedom is thus that of a trauma which, in contrast to the one Freud describes, liberates. Not because it comes from the Other – for why wouldn’t the Other enslave me, as Sartre thought? – but because here, too, an other scene breaks through. This other scene is that of creation.

6. EX NIHILO, AN OTHER SCENE At first sight, the God that Levinas wishes us to hear “on the hither side of being” somewhat resembles the man in the grocery store who could not keep his hands off Emma. God too does something to us the meaning of which comes to light only later, after the fact. And here too without our being able to understand that meaning “afterwards,” or

33

This expression comes from Rudolf BERNET, ‘Inconscient et conscience: Sur la nature de la pulsion, du désir, de la représentation et de l’affect,’ in G. FLORIVAL - J. GREISCH (eds.), Création et événement: Autour de Jean Ladrière. Colloque de Cérisy 1995. Louvain/Paris, Editions de l’Institut Supérieure de Philosophic de Louvain-laNeuve/Editions Peeters, 1996, pp. 145-64.


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make it our own. All of the gravity belonging to Levinas’ philosophy of creation, as well as the reason why he calls it ex nihilo, lie in this après coup, in this “posteriority of the anterior” (TI 54): “The cause of being is thought or known by its effect as though it were posterior to its effect. One speaks lightly of the possibility of this ‘as though’ which is taken to indicate an illusion. But this illusion is not unfounded: it constitutes a positive event” (TI 54). Levinas calls this positive event “separation”: creation of an independent being which can ignore its own creatureliness. Creation is ex nihilo because it breaks with the chain of cause and effect, and creates a being which need not feel the imprint of the creator, a being which thus can be atheistic – not in the sense of denial or rejection, but as a “having no knowledge of” (TI 58; OB 105). Between cause and effect, there is a hiatus by which the cause frees itself from its effect and thus also sets that effect free. The absoluteness of God – for Levinas is concerned here with God – lies in the humility with which God withdraws, not wishing to intrude on or prove himself to the one he has created. This God holds his breath in order to make himself smaller, opening up space beside him, but he also exhales carefully so as to counteract the suction from his inhaling, and above all to preserve the distance between himself and his creation.34 This God “passes by” without leaving a sign or a trace (in the sense of an impression – cf. TrO), wipes away all traces that could lead back to him, and weaves them into an “intrigue” which cannot be dissolved by speaking his name or calling out to him.35 This intrigue “which connects to what detaches itself absolutely” (OB 147) is of course that of “proximity” and “responsibility.” Inexplicable proximity, drive to go outside of myself, directing myself to someone 34

Through the rhythm of this inhaling and exhaling there comes into being an “intersubjective space,” a “curvature” (TI 291) which prevents it from becoming pure dispersion or pure fusion. What Sam IJsseling once called the “explosion of the transcendental” is countered here by the thought – inspired by Lurianic Kabbalah – that “the limitation of the creative Infinite, and multiplicity – are compatible with the perfection of Infinity” (TI 104). Bonum et dispersum convertuntur. 35 Cf, e.g., OB 149: “ ‘Here I am’ (me voici), in the name of God, without referring myself directly to his presence. ‘Here I am,’ that and just that! The word God is still absent from the phrase in which God is involved in words for the first time. It does not at all state ‘I believe in God.’ To bear witness to God is precisely not to state this extraordinary word.”

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who offers me no motivation, no inducement to approach him or her, someone who, as we have seen, is “uninteresting.” “Saying” of a responsibility that begins without there having been a question or an announcement: “The Infinite orders me to the ‘neighbour’ as a face, without being exposed to me. . . . The order has not been the cause of my response, nor even a question that would have preceded it in a dialogue ... [it is an] order that I find only in my response itself” (OB 150). That response is – literally – extraordinary, motivated by nothing in the actual context in which it is given. And therefore, says Levinas, it points beyond itself to another context which, however, must not be taken as a mere alternative. The relation to God is found only in my relation to my neighbour – which does not mean that God is invisible or inaccessible (absconditissimus) – but instead that God is accessible in ethics (cf. TI 78), which in turn means that for Levinas ethics is not so much a “correlate of the religious,” but “the element in which religious transcendence can have meaning.”36 One sees why Levinas thinks that his description of human relations reaches a point where words like “God” and ”creation” are necessary. For human relations do not answer to our expectations, and they withdraw from the descriptions one finds in someone like Sartre. As soon as one feels not only uneasy but morally ashamed the analyses of Sartre fall silent.37 As soon as shame is more than the loss of my freedom (shame according to Sartre), as soon as it accuses itself of that freedom and goes against it by giving something up for someone else, it is already an affect that escapes its context and in which it displays the trace “of a passage which never became present, possibly nothingness. But the surplus over pure nothingness, an infinitesimal difference, is in my non-indifference to the neighbour, where I am obedient as though to an order addressed to me” (OB 91).

36

E. LEVINAS, Nouvelles lectures talmudiques. Paris, Minuit, 1996, p. 30. J.-P. SARTRE, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (trans. Hazel Barnes). London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 221ff. However, I have shown elsewhere that the discussion between Levinas and Sartre must be conducted at a much deeper level than this, and that there are good reasons not to follow Levinas too quickly in his critique of Sartre, a critique which, in spite of all else, in fact shares more with Sartre than one might suspect. See ‘The Gaze of the Big Other. Levinas and Sartre on Racism’, in Truth and Singularity, chapter 11. 37


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Levinas’ whole effort is to draw the philosophical consequences of this as if. I behave as if I have been commanded, and yet there is no one who spoke. Do I hear voices then? No, says Levinas, but it is the voice of God which I hear “in the face of my neighbour.” God himself, I do not hear. God only lets himself be heard in an affect which is not directed to him. Anachoresis of a transcendence which “owes it to itself to interrupt itself even before it is heard (OB 152). The voice of God is nowhere other than in the relation between me and the Other: creatio ex nihilo means that the God who could have constructed the entire violin was, so to speak, pleased to “make” of me a sounding board which releases the sound it was built to release only at the moment that my neighbour passes by and, without realizing it, provides the strings on which that sound can be heard, but “only afterwards.” Creation is thus for Levinas the first moment of the trauma. But it is a moment which is no moment at all, and which, as distinct from what Freud calls the first scene, can in no way be situated in the temporal order which it disturbs. Which is why God is not quite like the man in the grocery store, and why the scene of creation ultimately cannot be compared with Freud’s “memory trace,” in which there comes to life an affect that, in a sense – but only in a sense – did not previously exist. Creation is not the past of an energy which remained unnoticed but was there nonetheless; it is an absolute past that escapes every present and origin, thereby anchoring metaphysics in ethics. Metaphysical movement – transascendence – “is” only in the ethical affection which itself “is” not, since it falls outside of being and therefore dis-inter-ests. This interruption of inter-esse, of the conatus that binds us to being, is not purely negative. It presents itself as an affect of non-indifference – of non-disinterest – which cannot be clarified by its context in being. It is “otherwise-than-being,” the epekeina of the Good that breaks through in this affect, thus preventing metaphysics from becoming onto-theology, or religion from becoming theology, in which a “pious thought hastily deduces the existence of God” (OB 93). The existence of God must not be proven or denied, for revelation does not bear proof: it “is accomplished by the one that receives it” (OB 156), and is thus no more and no less than “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OB 111). And therefore it is an ab-solute past but also an ab-solute future. The God who has always already passed by is always still to come. This metaphysics supports this ethics, and the ethics

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supports the metaphysics: both rest on a principle (a beginning which “is” not a beginning) of dispossession that Levinas calls “God”: “Dieu ne prend jamais corps [God never takes on (a) body].”38 One thus has hands only because one can never get one’s hands on God. Through this non-absorption – through the resistance of this infinity which does not show itself in or through immanence – God “is” the “first word.” Other than all others. God “is” the hiatus between face and form, between Saying and Said. Of the Other. But also of me. For God “is” the misery that the Other (“stripped of its very form, a face is frozen in its nudity”)39 did not wish and the affection that leaves me no peace. The misery of the Other leaves me no peace, the one affection infects the other and God “is” the system without system of that Contagion, the Plague that is no Plague. According to Levinas.

– According to Levinas! But where are the “holes” sighted at the beginning? Where are the holes? Did you not promise to stretch the fabric of the official reading so much that it would now simply tear apart on its own? – Yes, but I have not said that it would happen immediately. Or without exertion. I mean: the fabric of a great thought tears only when one has run over it long enough. Only if one runs back and forth across it. For example, because one is intrigued. And I cannot imagine that this thinking does not intrigue you. It seems the very essence of coherence. But does that coherence convince you? Are you converted to this thinking now that it has shown you its inner architectonic and its outer defence walls, how they were designed to protect in advance against all the objections – and let us be frank: there have not been that many – later raised in an attempt to embarrass it? It is to this dissociation between seeing that coherence and being convinced by it that I wanted to call attention, and to which I pointed already when I stated that the task of reading is to go beyond a first grasp, to an un-grasping which attends to the solitude of a thinking. This solitude is uncomfortable, 38

LEVINAS, Altérite et transcendance, p. 172. I will later come back to this quote (CPP 96, translation altered) and attempt to turn it against Levinas (chapter 6).

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which is perhaps why people let themselves so often be converted by a particular philosophy, and why it is so gladly agreed that philosophy is a dialogue. But the dialogue lives from a silence which it cannot make common and which is not common. It is due to this silence that the “holes” of the Other are not merely gaps which I can fill in. I did not want to drown out that silence here with my own arguments, for that would be to locate those holes of which it was said that they are everywhere. I wished only to let that silence be heard, in the hope that it will cause discomfort – for only if it does that can one understand that in this discomfort, which is not shame and without which philosophy would not be the kind of practice that it is, lies hidden the beginning of what philosophy could and should object to Levinas.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MORTALITY OF THE TRANSCENDENT

LEVINAS AND EVIL

Evil, the tradition tells us, has no intelligibility of its own. But this does not mean that it is entirely without intelligibility. It is a privative concept which, like all such notions, derives its intelligibility from that which it denies. In plain terms: we cannot understand or experience something as evil without having some sort of knowledge of the good of which it deprives us. Evil, that is, is more than a negation of the good: it is what takes away the good that ought to be there; it is a privatio boni in the sense of a steresis, it robs us of some good which we feel to be lacking.1 Although this approach to evil seems to inspire little enthusiasm in contemporary philosophy, it is far from certain that we have moved beyond it. For example, when Arendt, in her epoch-making report on Eichmann,2 introduced the then shocking idea of the banality of evil, she did not break out of the traditional approach: she showed that Eichmann’s evil deeds were a result of his thoughtlessness – his inability, that is, to use a faculty which he should have used. Indeed, what else could she have done? If one were to grant evil an intelligibility of its own, one would thereby run the risk of explaining it away. Kierkegaard already realized this, as shown in his mocking of those who perceived, behind the murderer, the child “represented as a little angel” who subsequently fell prey to a “corrupt environment that plunged it into corruption”.3 Understanding evil could thus lead to showing an understanding for evil that ends in no longer seeing it as evil, but rather as innocence spoiled by

1

C. STEEL, ‘Het kwaad: een foltering van de filosofie’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 2003 (65:1), pp. 3-32 (summary ‘Evil: a Torture of Philosophy’: p. 32). 2 H. ARENDT, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, Penguin, 1977, and the fine commentary in S. NEIMAN, Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy. Oxford/Princeton, Princeton U.P., 2002, pp. 288 ff. 3 S. KIERKEGAARD, The Concept of Anxiety. A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton NJ, Princeton U.P., 1980, p. 75 – for further commentary see chapter 8 below.


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… another evil! In such explanations evil is handed over like a hot-potato – one will never truly understand it, nor get rid of it. But there is another way to resist the idea that evil is privatio boni. Here, instead of granting it an intelligibility of its own, the reverse is attempted: one claims that evil has no intelligibility whatsoever, thereby disconnecting it from the good. This evil is ab-solute (absolvere means ‘to disconnect’). Or to use another, more fashionable term: it is radical. To which one could object that such evil would no longer even be recognisable as evil and that this attempt to escape the denials of theodicy by some sort of anti-theodicy creates more problems than it solves. Evil now seems to be placed wholly outside of us, as if it were some sort of seismic force that overcomes us and has nothing to do with us. Evil thus becomes fully de-humanised, and one can then wonder whether the dark fascination for an evil so radical and so ab-solute is not the flip-side of an age no longer willing or no longer capable of bearing a responsibility of its own. “The more extreme one considers evil to be, the more absolute one pictures it, the more hyperbolic it becomes and thus the less dangerous. Evil threatens to become something marginal, like an explosion in the margins of history, almost a physical catastrophe. (...) something that ‘happens’ rather than something which I do, something of an a-moral order, no longer my moral evil.”4 What road to travel if one wants to avoid such extremes (denying all intelligibility to evil or granting it an intelligibility of its own) and yet feels hesitant to follow the traditional approach, which does not seem suitable for taking the inherently excessive character of evil into account, reducing it, rather, to the lack of the good? Here Levinas seems to provide us with an alternative – in the words of De Wachter: “when confronted with the suffering of others that is caused by me, my moral failure appears to be more than lack or privation: it is inherently excessive, since the victim experiences its own suffering as an intrinsic malignity that cannot be accommodated into any order of being” (57). The suffering of the Other would be intolerable, not just for him, but also for me. It would confront me with something for which I cannot

4

Fr. DE WACHTER, ‘Hoe radicaal is het radicale kwade?’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 2003 (65:1), p. 37 (There is an English summary of the argument at p. 57: ‘How Radical is Radical Evil?’). Quoted in the paragraph that follows by pagenumbers in brackets.

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remain indifferent. With an excess, Levinas would say, more excessive still than that of my own suffering. Evil is not a lack, but a ‘too much’: “the always ‘too much’ of the suffering, of even the smallest suffering that I cause” (56). One of the questions I want to address in what follows is whether Levinas does indeed take us out of the tradition which sees evil as a privation. Is he not simply reformulating it? After all, my nonindifference for the suffering of the Other, which Levinas places at the heart of his ethics, leads to a corresponding notion of evil that is no less privative than the old one. Whoever would remain indifferent simply fails to demonstrate the proper response. It is precisely the attempt to unmask what he calls the “Luciferian lie” of Evil, its claim to be “the contemporary, the equal and the twin of the Good” (CPP 138), which is at the centre of Levinas’ ethics. There would be an anteriority of the Good that has chosen me and moved me before I could even take the initiative to be thus moved or not. Humanity would come to me from the appeal of the Other, and just as I am unable to escape the Good, I would be incapable of not hearing its messenger. I could, at most, demonically deny it by violently closing myself off from what I nevertheless already carry within me. Attractive as this approach may seem to those who seek to give a contemporary account of evil, one may wonder whether the price at which it comes is not as excessive as the evil they wish to take into account. For the danger here seems to be that far too much will count as evil. Can every closure be seen as an active, evil attempt to close off a prior opening? Could one not imagine an indifference that is not lacking in the non-indifference which Levinas claims there to be? Furthermore, how to conceive of such an attempt to close oneself off from what is already within us? If this would be its structure, does evil still stand a chance? On the one hand, it would be omni-present, whereas, on the other hand, this its pervasive structure would escape all comprehension. To state it even more provocatively: are we not faced here with the paradox of a philosophy that does such a “good” job of rethinking the Good that it no longer seems able to affirm anything of interest with regard to evil? To be sure, this philosophy is not unaware of evil’s existence. But this existence seems all the more strange since the sources which could have given rise to it seem to be dried up by the way that the Good has already taken us into its orbit. It is not exactly a good sign


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when the demonic is evoked to, almost ex machina, explain the absence of that supererogatory goodness which, in Levinas, seems to have become the only goodness conceivable. Such, then, will be the questions I seek to address in the body of this chapter. In order to raise them, I propose that we read Levinas anew, as if for the first time. I will thus attempt to de-familiarize us with the Levinas we have all become too familiar with, by adopting an almost Brechtian “Verfremdungs”perspective. I will describe his philosophy as a kind of game in which there is a manual to be studied, a general theme which gives the game its structure, its rules to abide, and that defines the goal to achieve if one wants to win.

1. TRANSCENDENCE AND EXTERIORITY The aim of the game is to realize transcendence.5 The difficulty here has to do with the nature of transcendence: how to avoid that the one who transcends finds himself unaltered at the end of that movement? In other words, how to transcend oneself? Can the I escape itself? Are all exits not blocked by death, the cruel, yet perhaps sole figure of a transcendence that truly affects the identity of the subject, albeit at the cost of its loss of substance? Should one infer from this that the supposed movement of transcendence is but a kind of excursion – a trip one undertakes to momentarily forget the worries that are on one’s mind? Is metaphysical desire – “desire for a land not of our birth” (TI 33-4) – nothing but an illusion, with mankind condemned to despair? Is human existence but a game without purpose, without end? Is there no way, if not to win, then at least to excel at this game? The human being is thus (we read the instructions) a metaphysical being: it wants to arrive somewhere other than where it began. From whence this desire? Is it natural or cultivated? What is certain is that the human being wants to escape itself. Something compels it outside: the first transcendence is an excendence.6 But this attempt to escape is bound to fail. Once one is, one is stuck to oneself. One is too much for oneself,

5

E. LEVINAS, ‘Pluralisme et transcendance’, in E.W. BETH et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1949, pp. 381-3. 6 E. LEVINAS, De l’évasion (1935). S.l., Fata Morgana, 1982, p. 73.

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one is never alone. On n’est pas, on s’est.7 One seeks diversion and the world provides it: simply lighting a cigarette suffices to erect a screen between me and myself that diverts my attention from this double to whom I am irrevocably attached. To undo that bond it suffices to do something, to direct oneself toward something. But every activity has its end, and attention is something that diminishes. To truly escape from myself there must be something that claims me. And things cannot do that: they are not capable of sustaining the movement of transcendence in which I direct myself toward them. They are not able to “resist the lures” of the I (CPP 50), because they have let themselves be captured by it. For things need light to appear and the light in which they can show themselves “dissolves their otherness.” In the transcendence that binds me to them, they are no longer this-here, but something general, something that has a recognizable form, an intelligibility that shows itself to me: “To know is to surprise in the individual confronted, in this wounding stone, this upward plunging pine, this roaring lion – that by which it is not this very individual, this foreigner, that by which it is already betrayed and by which it gives the free will, vibrant in all certainty, hold over it, and is grasped and conceived, enters into a concept” (ibid.). The human being is lonely. Regardless what it does, its activity is only a diversion, and in the shadow of the light that it needs for this, it only encounters itself, magnified: “For the claim of realism – the recognition of an other than I – to be possible, it is necessary that I myself am not originally what I remain even in my explorations of the obscure or the unknown: the peaceful and sovereign identification of the self with itself, and the source of adequate ideas” (BPW 15). Thus there would not only be the desire to get rid of oneself, there is also, next to or above this unrest, the will to stay (alongside) oneself. The I that cannot get rid of itself turns this its plight into a ‘virtue’: “The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it” (TI 36). Identity is a verb: “the primordial work of identification” (ibid.). One might also say: a curse. There are passages that make one suspect that one could indeed go as far as to say that –

7

E. LEVINAS, De l’existence à l’existant (1947). Paris, Vrin, 1990, p. 38.


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“the law of evil is the law of being”8 – but let us for the moment be satisfied with taking note of this. Whether there is a curse or not, the I seems to be able to reconcile itself with its condition, even more: to be proud of it. The I seems to take pride in subjecting everything to itself. That is its natural place – if the I should renounce the “violence” (CPP 19-20) of this movement in which it relates everything to itself it would renounce itself. It would be related to something else, but would end by disappearing into it. This move is out of the question: ecstasy, fusion, participation, enthusiasm, possession – merging into something that is so other that it is indigestible for the I, this would mean giving in to what Levinas calls the sacred, to the numinous where the I loses its separation and is “transported outside of itself”(TI 77). “Ni savoir, ni extase” (“neither knowledge, nor ecstasis,” TO 35) – whatever transcendence is or does, it should neither submit the other to the self, nor the self to the other. True transcendence has a double allegiance. There is a pretension to realism: encountering something other in its otherness. And there is the sober-mindedness of rationalism: “to keep one’s as-for-me” (TI 77), to stand on one’s own two feet, to be independent. But is such a transcendence possible for the I? If it holds to this sobriety, it seems it must then give up the pretension to realism. Should it want to realize this pretension, cost what it may, then it must relinquish its independence. Is there a way out? For Levinas there is only one exit. And the I cannot reach it on its own. It is actually not an exit, but an entrance. Something enters from outside, offering to rescue the I: “God comes to mind” as one speaks of “coming to help.” Here we meet the theme of exteriority that is brought to bear against a privative definition of transcendence as lack, impoverishment and need. For exteriority “is no negation, but a marvel” (TI 292). Transcendence does not begin with me, but with that Outside that transcends itself toward me and acts upon me (TI 62). Metaphysics is about desire, not about need. The need to arrive somewhere else is transformed into a desire that is not a lack: a desire that grows as one feeds it, insatiable, infinite – but never as an absence of something that there should be: the infinite is simply “too large” to be contained in the 8

E. LEVINAS, ‘The Paradox of Morality. An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, in R. BERNASCONI - D. WOOD (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London, Routledge, 1988, p. 175. I will quote this text in what follows as PM.

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finite. In this excessiveness – in this apparent absence of measure – lies precisely its perfection. It is through this that it is independent of the finite, capable of taking the measure of the finite. That is to say: to make it feel its imperfection (Descartes’ point – TI 86), and thereby to immediately introduce something that not only yields to the identifying movement of the self, but that qualifies this movement and brings it into doubt. Let us pause for a moment over the reversal that is occurring here: the ‘in-’ of the infinite is no privation (it does not point to an excessiveness that lacks measure), it is an “excellence”,9 but precisely because of this the finite can come to lose its self-evidence and experience its existence as an imperfection – as a privative shortcoming. In this being that never called itself into doubt, there suddenly arises a question that radically shakes it up: am I indeed justified in my existence, do I really have the right to the food and air that I appropriate? Is this appropriation not a misappropriation, is it not at someone else’s expense? Is it not murder and “usurpation” (TI 303; OB motto), is the existence that I maintain not injustice itself? The missing link that makes this transition possible is, as is well known, the face of the Other that stands between me and the perfection of the Infinite and which takes care that this Exteriority does not consume me. One can understand this in different ways: either by beginning with the effect of the face on me, or by bringing to the foreground the entire drama of a theophany – of a transcendence that owes it to itself to interrupt its own demonstration (OB 152) – that is only discretely indicated. Let us first follow the latter way which is the least well-known.

2. TWO PATHS IN METAPHYSICS: FROM GOD TO THE FACE AND FROM THE FACE TO GOD A metaphysical relation is not totalisable: it does not form a totality in which the two related terms join together to form a higher unity or in which one of the two absorbs the other into itself. It assumes a plurality 9

‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, in R. KEARNEY, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester, Manchester U.P., 1984, p. 68.


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which is not “a missed union” (RTB 111), a multiplicity that is more excellent than any kind of unity. What binds the one term to the other can therefore not be understood in terms of a return to the a quo. Desire is not homesickness. And it is even less the need for fulfilment by (or completion with) what is provisionally still missing – for example, by a still higher happiness that would be the completion of the desire for happiness that we have already experienced. Transcendence is not a ferry to another shore. It concerns a relation that occurs here and now between the terms involved, a relation ‘without relation’ because these terms have a status of their own which is not determined by their relationship (they are not absorbed by it and do not derive their essence from it). But it is a relation without relation: despite their independence there is something that connects the terms, an effect of the one on the other that leaves that other term its independence. As should be clear by now, the knowing relation does not suffice for this definition, it is a ‘taking-into-possession’ and demands from the known just this ‘surrender’ that would mean giving up its independence. Conversely, every ascendance of the finite into the infinite, every ‘homecoming’ will suffice even less. And if transcendence is a descent from the infinite into the finite, if it is ‘in-spiration’, then in any case that infinite may not crush the finite: it may not make such an impression that the finite has no other choice but to receive the revelation of that which is infinitely larger than itself. It must be able to refuse what it receives; it must not become determined by it. And even less may it feel humiliated by a perfection that would be the superlative of what is imperfect in the realm of the finite. It must, despite the confrontation with its own imperfection, be able to assert itself. It must receive the possibility to become ‘better’, and it must be able to choose. In freedom. This assumes that nothing may manipulate it in its choice. Hence Levinas’ distrust of all rhetoric (TI 70): what is required is a “Goodness that never tempts” (BPW 75). An infinite that announces itself in or to the finite, without burning, humiliating or seducing it? That restrains itself and yet does not turn itself away? That takes the chance that it will not be noticed and yet leaves open the possibility that it might be? Such an infinite can only be an infinite that creates. For creation is separation. True creation establishes a hiatus between the creator and its creation by which the latter, in its (created) dependence, nevertheless remains independent:

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“One can call atheism this separation so complete that the separated being maintains itself in existence all by itself, without participating in the Being from which it is separated – eventually capable of adhering to it by belief. The break with participation is implied in this capability. One lives outside of God, at home with oneself; one is an I, an egoism. The soul, the dimension of the psychic, being an accomplishment of separation is naturally atheist” (TI 58). Atheism is no rejection of God, but the possibility of not ‘knowing’ Him. It is thus not a denial of the divine, but ignorance with respect to a gift that is so discrete that it is not even noticed. One occupies a space without realizing that it has been cleared, one sits down without realizing that someone has offered their chair. Making room without it being noticed that one is doing so – is that not the challenge for every educator? Think of Socrates who never wanted to enforce his opinion, who did not want to inseminate, but who by just ‘talking through’ something hoped to enable the other to give birth to what he had always carried with him,10 and in such a way that the other believed that he had had that insight long before the conversation and without need of its assistance? But our text forbids this analogy. Not everything comes from inside! Atheism does not mean that nothing comes from outside or that the outside must forever remain incognito: “The marvel of creation does not only consist in being a creatio ex nihilo, but in that it results in a being capable of receiving a revelation, learning that it is created, and putting itself into question. The miracle of creation lies in creating a moral being. And that implies precisely atheism, but at the same time, beyond atheism, shame for the arbitrariness of the freedom that constitutes it” (TI 89). Here is where the path we have thus far been following crosses over into the first. For one could also begin with shame. Even more: this is actually where, according to Levinas, one must begin. Everything else is ‘theology’ or – even worse – ‘theomythology’.11 One does not need to

10

See H. Arendt’s touching portrait of Socrates in H. ARENDT, ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (1954?), Social Research, 1990 (57:1), p. 73-103; on his ‘sterility’, M.-Cl. GALPÉRINE, Lecture du Banquet de Platon, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1996, especially pp. 56-9. 11 Cf. TI 77: “The metaphysical relation, the idea of infinity, connects with the noumenon which is not a numen. This noumenon is to be distinguished from the concept of God possessed by the believers of positive religions ill disengaged from the


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begin with God, one should not want to ‘prove’ His existence, one must begin “with human relations” (BPW 29) and push the philosophical meditation so far “that it catches sight of the necessity to resort to notions such as that of the ‘Infinite’ or ‘God’” (BPW 57), – notions whose meaning one must not ‘borrow’ from one or another “positive religion” (BPW 50), but which one should try to make, perhaps for the first time, audible. Like Heidegger made us hear in Being not a substantive, but a verb, so the word God must be given a new ring: “The Infinite produces itself (se produit) by withstanding the invasion of a totality, in a contraction that leaves a place for the separated being. Thus relationships that open up a way outside of being take form” (TI 104). And these relationships are relationships between persons. Ethical relationships, for “the ethical is, of itself, the element in which religious transcendence can have a meaning”.12 The only element: “There can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from the relationship with men [...] It is our relations with men [...] that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of” (TI 78-9). No God and no belief without works. Stronger still: works are belief – “The work of justice – the uprightness of the face to face – is necessary in order that the break that leads to God be produced – and ‘vision’ here coincides with this work of justice” (ibid.). God is thus not inaccessible. He is “accessible in justice” (TI 78). Only there? That is uncertain – the text we read provides no definitive answer.13 But in any case, at least accessible in justice: “The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth and is indispensable for my relation with God. He does not play the role of mediator. The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed” (TI 78-9). Let us first unravel the threads that Levinas is bringing together here. The Other is not a mediator, that is to say: the Other is not a ladder I

bonds of participation, who accept being immersed in a myth unbeknown to themselves.” 12 E. LEVINAS, New Talmudic Readings (trans. Richard A. Cohen). Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P., 1999, p. 66. 13 I have elsewhere tried to show that this problem is only resolved in OB, notably in the fifth chapter – the God implied there is more than a merely ‘moral’ God (Truth and Singularity, pp. 308-10).

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can climb in order to arrive at God. In the face of the Other “I hear the word of God.” He “must be closer to God than I” (CPP 56). The word of God is a command: thou shalt not kill. It is directed toward me, but I would have never found it in myself, it is against my ‘nature’. Creation is unnatural because it is ex nihilo and because it brings order into that nature which is without order. “Infinity opens the order of the Good” (TI 104): what was previously disoriented, without orientation and without being disturbed by what it did not feel lacking, now becomes oriented. The Good makes (a) difference: the fate of the Other does not leave me indifferent. It concerns me. And that it concerns me is in itself quite remarkable. Why should I be my brother’s keeper? Let alone that of some stranger with whom I have “no connection” (OB 87)? From whence comes the shock when I pass, indifferent, under the Other’s gaze (BPW 52)? Where does the Other get this remarkable authority by which he makes an appeal to me? This “call” concerns me, even if I have nothing to do with that Other. It addresses me, even if the Other does not interest me, and in this sense does not concern me. Manifestation of the height in which God reveals Himself. But also of the depths. Not just God’s glory then, but also His destitution. The Other needs me. God makes an appeal to me through him or her. There are texts that go so far as to say: He puts his creation in my hands.14 I can, right here right now, annul this creation. But without this possibility creation could not do what it intends to do – it could not open the order of the Good. The Good that lies beyond being, and thus orients this being. That renounces its claim on me, that interrupts the force of attraction that it (unavoidably?) exercises (it is impossible not to admire Perfection and not to want to approach it), that interrupts and diverts it toward an other who exerts no attraction, “the undesirable par excellence” (GCM 68). One sees here how Descartes and Plato cross paths and at the same time are reinterpreted: infinite, yet without proven existence; epekeina, but not hoos eromenon. Purification of eros that, according to Diotima, is only a demi-god (BPW 159) and misses that which is lacking, with which he wants to unify himself. Amour sans eros: purified love, love without ‘concupiscentia’. Brotherly love. There is a text that suggests that one can only access such a love, which is the energy of the Good, via a 14

For example in the second of the Nine Talmudic Readings (trans. A. Aranowicz). Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana U.P., 1990, especially pp. 40-1.


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command: “Faith is not a question of the existence or the non-existence of God. It is believing that Love without reward is valuable. It is often said that ‘God is Love’. God is the commandment of love. ‘God is love’ means that He loves you. But this implies that the primary thing is your own salvation” (PM 176-7; compare OB 93-4). It should thus be possible to arrive at generosity – ‘love without reward’ – without requiring that one first must have experienced such a generous love, love that one subsequently ‘passes on’. One need not be previously spoiled in order to spoil. God does not have a gentle touch. This is a religion without promise and without consolation. There is a text with the title: “A Religion for Adults” (DF 11-23). But religion in this case does not give rise to a cult. The only liturgy is leitourgia, working without a view to recompense: “the liturgy is not to be ranked [as a cult] alongside ‘works’ and ethics. It is ethics itself” (BPW 50). And ethics is “the spiritual optics” (TI 78). “Grace begins here. In unmotivated action. The term ‘face’ points to such an unmotivated love. It is the command of an unmotivated action. Commanding love! Commanding love means recognizing the value of love as such” (PM 176). To summarize: no one will arrive at such a love of one’s own accord. It must be commanded.15 But this command is an invitation, not a compulsion. An invitation to detachment – to severing with “a manner of existing that testifies to an attachment to oneself that is as radical as the naïve will to live” (TI). Loss of naïveté, a sobering (dégrisement), a waking up (réveil, GCM 63), an investiture of freedom (TI 84): becoming clothed with a freedom truly deserving of its name, because it is a freedom that can be generous. Something like this tolerates no intoxication, no temptation and no pampering. The pinnacle of kenosis16 is perhaps this: renouncing the chance to be the first to show the created one’s love out of fear of spoiling it and in the hope that it will learn to love. In such a manner it may form itself according to the image of a love that it has not known: “‘To be ‘in the image of God’ does not mean to be an icon of God, but to find oneself in his trace. [...] To go toward

15

Autrement que savoir. Emmanuel Levinas. Paris, Osiris, 1998, p. 81. For Levinas’ appropriation of the theme of kenosis and his relation to the Christian conception of it: M. DUPUIS, R. GÉLY and B. LOBET, ‘Les figures lévinassiennes de la kénose. Philosophie et théologie’, in N. FROGNEUX - Fr. MIES (eds.), Emmanuel Lévinas et l’histoire. Paris, Cerf, 1998, pp. 357-65. 16

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him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is rather to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity” (BPW 64). I do not know if the game which Levinas invites us to play has hereby become any clearer. But perhaps a few persistent rumours regarding that game have been suppressed. Is this truly a moral God? Is this really (only) about a moralization of the desire for the Infinite? Perhaps it will suffice that the answers to these questions, which are understandable questions, have lost some assurance. And, one does not need to fully understand a game before one starts playing it. One learns, as they say, by doing. But perhaps to engage in a game, one must first agree with the stakes. Are we in agreement with them? In the introduction to this piece, I promised in an initial movement to shed some light on Levinas’ thoughts regarding privatio. It may appear that I have done everything except precisely that. But this would be a false impression. Not only because the word has been used a few times, but because the answer that was already given in the introduction – ‘the absence of non-indifference is understood privatively’ – can actually only now be properly understood. A synonym for ‘non-indifference’ is ‘responsibility’. The term is simpler but expresses the same thought: here as well the reference to an Outside, to which one ‘answers’. It also more easily adheres to the privative semantic: in place of a triple negation (non-non-indifference) one may simply speak of irresponsibility as a lack of responsibility. A lack, and thus not purely an absence. The ethical register, in which the meaning of the primary term (responsibility) is established, immediately determines the register in which the secondary, privative term belongs. Irresponsibility does not just stand over against responsibility as its simple negation. It indicates an absence of something that should be there and which it does not completely annul: it is the refusal to accept a responsibility that one nevertheless has. Irresponsibility is not situated outside ethics, but within its horizon: it is a shortcoming in the responsibility with which this horizon has invested us. It is thus a manoeuvre internal to ethics. It makes no sense to try to find for irresponsibility a register of meaning of its own – privative terms never have a meaning in themselves, they are only comprehensible in


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relation to the positive contrary and thereby presuppose the ‘good’ situation.17 When contemporary authors turn against a privative determination of evil, their criticism seems primarily inspired by the transition from ‘being’ to ‘good’ that threatens to slip into the determination of “the ‘good’ situation: “Western philosophy attempts to think the (distinction between good and evil) in ontic terms with the well-known teaching of evil as privatio boni, as robbery or diminishing of being. The presupposition for this is that being in itself is good. Being and the good may, according to a classic saying, be interchanged (ens et bonum convertuntur). If being is intrinsically good – and that must be the case, for every being is grounded in God – then evil can only be understood as a form of non-being. But considering that it does in fact exist, it is then understood as a being with a shortage of being, as a good that is not good. This is, however you slice it, a solution out of embarrassment.”18 In the sections that follow, we will have to ask ourselves if De Boer’s Levinasian counterproposal – “Good and evil must be formulated in terms of sense and nonsense, of orientation and disorientation” (ibid., 51) – truly gets us much further. But his objection points to a very significant difference between the modern point of departure of someone like Levinas who, following Spinoza, defined beings as directed by the conatus essendi (everything tries to persevere in its being), and the Aristotelian-Thomistic opinion that things, in all their strivings, pursue the perfection that accords with their existence. Levinas’ intention to “return to Platonism in a new way” (BPW 58) must be understood against this modern background. Speaking of the Good “beyond being,” and seeing that Good as an invitation to break out of this conatus, and thus to a break with the logic of being, presupposes a ‘non convertuntur’ that, precisely on the grounds of a different conception of creation, was absent from the tradition. This is

17

R. TE VELDE, ‘Thomas over het ontologisch statuut van het Kwaad’ [Thomas on the ontological status of Evil], in ID., Thomas over goed en kwaad. Baarn, Ambo, 1993, p. 113; and G. VAN RIET, ‘Le problème du mal dans la philosophie de la religion de saint Thomas’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 1973 (71:1), pp. 5-45, notably pp. 8-13. 18 Th. DE BOER, De God van de filosofen en de God van Pascal. Op het grensgebied van filosofie en theologie [The God of the Philosophers and the God of Pascal. Between philosophy and theology]. ’s-Gravenhage, Meinema, 1989, pp. 50-1.

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why the term ‘non-indifference’, which is primarily found in the later Levinas, has an important connotation which risks being lost in its synonym ‘responsibility’. Non-indifference not only qualifies my attitude to the face of the Other, but also to that which manifests itself in that face.19 It thus refers as well to the humility of the Infinite, of the Good (which just for this reason is ‘the’ Good rather than ‘a’ Good, and is connected by Levinas with words such as ‘God’ and ‘creator’20) that places itself at my mercy, appeals to me in the hope that I assume the work. One should not fail to notice this humility, even though some of Levinas’ formulations seem to pass it by. Thus, he will, for instance, speak of an “election by the Good which one cannot refuse, which has always taken place for the chosen,” and he brings this election into relation with a “passivity that is more passive than any passivity” (CPP 135): with a passivity that does not have the time to receive because it is not simultaneous with the Good that “has chosen me before I could choose it” (OB 11). But he adds to this that “this passivity is not a simple effect of a Good which could be reconstituted as the cause of this effect” (ibid.). In other words, creation cannot be thought in mere ontological terms (TI 104-5)! And then comes a passage that clearly summarizes the previous ones: “It is in this passivity that the Good is. Properly speaking the Good does not have to be, and is not, were it not out of goodness. Passivity is the being, from beyond being, of the Good which language is right to circumscribe – betraying it, to be sure, as always – by the word non-being” (CPP 135). New mysterium iniquitatis: it is not Evil that is a ‘non-being’, but the Good! We are not there yet!

3. AN INVITATION OR A COMMAND? In the previous two sections I have distinguished two ways into Levinas which cross over into one another. There seems to be a back-and-forth from the Good to the face that in turn owes its authority to this Good. But there is a problem that I have not brought up yet, a problem which raises doubts about the commutativity of the relation between the Good

19

GCM, 65: “The difference between the Infinite and the finite is a non-indifference of the Infinite with regard to the finite.” 20 Cf. Truth and Singularity, pp. 257 ff. for a commentary on these connections.


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and the face. I was alluding to it when I spoke of a command that is actually an invitation. Are these really the same? Is there not a genuine difference between inviting and commanding? There is, to be sure, a resemblance: both presuppose that the one to whom one grants freedom is not obliged to respond. Commanding is not compelling. One may refuse a command just like one may decline an invitation. One can ignore it. But is this all that can be said? Let us have a more detailed look at the text. The following passage is clearly about a command, “Before the hunger of men, responsibility is measured only ‘objectively’. It is irrecusable. The face opens the primordial discourse where the first word is ‘obligation’ which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding” (TI 201). One can only refuse the call after one has already received it. This refusal – irresponsibility – is a reaction to a responsibility that one cannot avoid. Remaining silent is still an answer. An answer that borrows its meaning from the “axiological bipolarity” (CPP 138) established by the ethical horizon into which the face somehow drags me. Keeping silent – not taking up the call – is choosing for evil. That choice is possible, but it is “incapable” of annulling responsibility, “of breaking the passivity of the pre-liminary and pre-historical subjection [to the Good, R.V.], of annihilating the hither side, repudiating what the subject has never contracted” (CPP 137). This ‘hither-side’ and this ‘never’ point to the antecedent election by the Good, or in a terminology that we have in the meantime justified, to the essential anteriority of a creation that precedes the created and thus can never be co-present with it: “The Good cannot become present or enter into a representation. The present is a beginning in my freedom, whereas the Good is not presented to freedom – it has chosen me before I have chosen it. No one is good voluntarily” (OB 11). With this last sentence we still find ourselves entirely in the register of ‘command’, as Levinas also makes clear in the accompanying note: “The Good as the infinite has no other, not because it would be the whole, but because it is Good and nothing escapes its goodness” (OB 187n8). Like Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being also speaks of an unavoidable responsibility: “the irremissibility of the accusation from which it can no longer take a distance – which it cannot evade. This impossibility of taking any distance and of slipping away from the Good is a firmness more firm and more profound than that of the will, which is still a tergiversation” (OB 112). We will have to ask ourselves whether Evil, which involves precisely such distancing and slipping away can occur at

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all under these conditions. Just as we will have to ask ourselves whether what was said before about a call that makes responsible, yet still leaves one free not to assume this responsibility, is not a bit too easy. But first let us make our way to a few other passages in which Levinas himself seems to suggest an entirely different understanding of this election by the Good that resounds in the call of the face. Not as a command that cannot be ignored, but as an invitation that one only bears if one accepts it. That thus – against the notion of a call that one cannot not hear – could indeed not be heard: disturbance (i.e., the face) “insinuates itself, withdraws before entering. It remains only for someone who would like to take it up. Otherwise, it has already restored the order it troubled: someone rang, and there is no one at the door: did anyone ring?” (BPW 70). And a bit further, in terms of creation: “It is up to us, or more exactly, it is up to me to retain or repel this God without boldness”; in biblical terms: “God was revealed on a mountain or in a burning bush, or was attested to by Scriptures. And what if it were a storm? And what if the Scriptures came to us from dreamers?” (ibid.). In worldly terms: “A lover makes an advance, but the provocative or seductive gesture has, if one likes, not interrupted the decency of the conversation and attitudes; it withdraws as lightly as it had slipped in” (ibid.). One may recall: the Good is not the cause of an effect. One can neither say that it is nor that it is not, “except by goodness” (CPP 135). Perhaps one should say: the Good ‘is’ nachträglich – it comes ‘before’, but this ‘before’ will only have been there if the ‘after’ is received. Concretely: creation is a ‘trauma’, and like every trauma it has two times.21 There ‘is’ a first time that actually ‘is’ not – it is not ‘first’ in an ontological or chronological sense, but at the very most ‘logically’ first: being chosen by the Good is like a shock without affect. This choice is the creation of a moral being that has no knowledge of this creation, or of this morality. Natural atheism of the soul. Does this atheism stand a chance? That depends on how we understand the ‘second’ time. First version: there is no avoiding responsibility, I feel responsible, guilty, ashamed etc., without understanding why. In other words, there is an affect (shame, guilt) without shock (nothing about the Other can explain why I feel this way). In this way, ‘shame’ is like “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OB 111). That sound ‘is’ 21

See the preceding chapter for a full presentation of the argument I summarize here.


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creation. One cannot think of this creation otherwise than as logically prior to the created. But the created is only created if it accepts becoming such a sounding board – without the ‘second’ time no ‘first’ time. Levinas speaks of “the posteriority of the anterior”: “in it the After or the Effect conditions the Before or the Cause” (TI 54). A cause that is “still to come” (ibid.) – Totality and Infinity plays with this “logically absurd inversion” (ibid.) which perhaps only receives its full weight in Otherwise than Being. But everything thus depends on whether the consequence, the echo, exists. The first version – one cannot not hear the call – assumes that this echo is always there. There is responsibility no matter what. There is shame. Irresponsibility is an avoidance of responsibility within responsibility. Shamelessness is an avoidance of shame, an anaesthesia, an intoxication (OB 142n21). But one inevitably sobers up after this intoxication, conscience continues to gnaw. One cannot drown out the voice of conscience.22 It keeps on reverberating. But there is also, apparently, a second version that would seem to point in an entirely different direction. Here Levinas stresses the extreme discretion of the Good that is only noticed by those who will take up its invitation. Evil is no longer the refusal of a responsibility that one has and that one cannot escape. It is rather a sort of deafness, and one may ask oneself if this deafness should still be understood in privative terms. For ‘hearing’ in this case is not, as it usually is, the normal condition that deafness bereaves us of. ‘Nature’ – man as nature, as conatus – does not hear. The order of being ( – of nature – ) is the order of evil (PM 175). This Evil is a ‘force’ (ibid.). The Good, however, is no counter-force. The Good is an authority that only receives its power from the one who grants it to it. Revelation “is made by the one who receives it” (OB 156). Can we indeed keep these two versions apart? Does Levinas keep them apart? The order of being would be the order of Evil. But must one not at least admit that it does not know of any evil? In the strict sense, one may only speak of Evil if the Good has announced itself and is welcomed before it can withdraw. But the Good does not impose itself, it is discrete and it thus runs up against what Levinas calls the “irrefutable lie” of Evil 22

See e.g. the last sentence of ‘Philosophie et positivité’: “moi ne pouvant pas faire taire la vocation qui m’assigne et me voue à la responsabilité” (in Savoir, faire, espérer: les limites de la raison. Brussel, F.U.S.L., 1976, p. 206).

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“which is nothing else than the very egoism of the I that posits itself as its own uncreated origin, as master and sovereign principle.” This “pride” – “a Luciferian lie” – is irrevocable, for “without the impossibility of humbling this pride, the anarchic submission to the Good [that chooses me, before I can make a beginning (archè) with my choice] would no longer be an-archical and would be equivalent to a demonstration of God, to theology which treats God as though he belonged to being or to perception” (CPP 138). One can see the difficulty: to call the order of being the order of Evil, this order must have already been disrupted by the Good, and marked by this disruption. But as soon as the order of being is disturbed by the Good, it can only act as if this is not the case. The so-called irrevocable lie of Evil is thus actually already refuted: Evil is not “the contemporary, the equal and the twin of the Good” (CPP 138). At most it may “claim” to be so, but this claim cannot be maintained. For the pride of Evil rests on contemporaneity – to be the uncreated origin of itself23 – and the Good is, by definition, un-contemporary: it is, like creation, logically anterior, it chooses without asking approval: “If ethical terms arise in our discourse, before the terms freedom and non-freedom, it is because before the bipolarity of good and evil presented to choice, the subject finds itself committed to the Good” (OB 122). Thus the versions that we have just tried to differentiate once again overlap. Regardless how discrete the Good is, it does not seem possible for it to withdraw itself. Evil is “the temptation to separate oneself from the Good” (CPP 137), “the seduction of irresponsibility, the probability of egoism in the subject responsible for its responsibility” (ibid.). Levinas calls this temptation “the very incarnation of the subject or its presence in being,” but he immediately adds a note to this: “the incarnation, which is fundamentally erotic, is also [!] the impossibility of escaping from oneself, that is, of fleeing one’s responsibilities.”24 And in a note to 23

This is for Levinas the core of Job’s problem with God – OB 121. See R. VAN RIESSEN, ‘Buiten de orde. Levinas’ denken over de transcendentie van het kwaad, de Ander en God’ [Outside of order. Levinas on the transcendence of evil, the Other and God], in A. DE LANGE and O. ZIJLSTRA (eds.), Als ik Job niet had. Tien denkers over God en het lijden. Zoetermeer, Meinema, 1997, pp. 139-55. 24 The word ‘erotic’ in this passage should not be immediately linked to ‘eroticism’. In Levinas’ vocabulary it connotes a centripetal, “virile” force (the conatus and the reduction of the Other to the Same implied in it). The contrast is thus with “love


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this passage he adds: “The illusory character of the break with submission [to the Good] is thereby evinced” (CPP 137). As Otherwise than Being repeats time and time again: “no one is good voluntarily, no one is enslaved to the Good” (OB 11). Loosely translated: the Good allows us the freedom to turn away from the Good. Goodness is not a “natural tendency” (OB 53), not a “‘divine instinct’ of responsibility, ‘an altruistic or generous nature’ or a ‘natural goodness’ ” (CCP 137). It is antinatural for “it binds (us) to an outside,” and this is why it needs the temptation of evil: “This exteriority of the alliance is maintained in the effort required by the responsibility for the others, foreign to eros as well as to enthusiasm – which is a possession in which the difference between the possessor and the possessed disappears. But it needs the temptation of the facility to make a break, the erotic attraction of irresponsibility, which, in a responsibility limited by the freedom of him ‘who is not his brother’s keeper’, has a presentiment of the evil of the absolute freedom of play” (ibid.). Conclusion: “Evil shows itself to be sin, that is, a responsibility, despite itself (malgré soi), for the refusal of responsibilities” (ibid.). Thus Evil ends up where it belongs: “in the second place,” “neither alongside, nor in front of the Good,” but “beneath, lower than the Good” (ibid.). Even if it triumphs it has lost and can only cherish the “illusion” of having broken with the Good. One can only break with the Good when one finds oneself in the Good. Irresponsibility is irrevocably privative. One may, like de Boer, see disorientation in this, but this disorientation would be no less privative than the view he rejects. For it is without concupiscentia”. The idea that the incarnation closes the subject up in itself, but at the same time fails to do so, is expressed for the first time in OB 79. This ethicisation of subjectivity aggravates the difficulty to understand how the subject would still be able to escape its exposure (a possibility to escape that is mentioned a number of times: OB 76, 79, 128 (‘can be forgotten’), ...) Especially in light of the appeal as the second time of the trauma, it is hard to see how the subject could still resist giving in to the appeal: when the ‘second’ time hooks onto the ‘first’ the subject is, as it were, blown out of itself – which explains the violent vocabulary to which Levinas resorts here (obsession, nightmare, taking hostage) to describe the relation to the Other. There may thus be a structural or conceptual reason for what other readers (e.g., R. Burggraeve) often interpret as the hyperbolic, wilfully chosen exaggeration of OB. There is no overstatement but a problem when ethics finds itself in such an ‘overdrive’ (like an automobile) that it is forced to treat what the tradition would see as ‘supererogation’ as the normal condition of morality. For further argument: Truth and Singularity, pp. 266 ff.

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a dis-orientation incapable “of breaking the passivity of the pre-liminary and pre-historic subjection,” incapable “of repudiating what the subject has never contracted” (ibid.), incapable, that is, of not referring to a prior orientation. What brings us to this conclusion that, we must admit, rather disappoints? Do we have the right to be disappointed? Could one not suspect behind this disappointment the enticing call of an anti-theodicy that would like to grant Evil a more prominent place, to make it more ab-solute, ‘looser’ from the Good, ‘more irrefutable’ than Levinas allows it to be? But perhaps it is not necessary to be so ‘radical’ (?). One may perhaps be able to make what is here called Evil – an irresponsibility that acts as if it has not heard – ab-solute in yet another manner: by asking if it has indeed always heard. Is there no other way to think of irresponsibility than in privative terms? Can one not conceive of a relation between the other and me in different terms than that of an asymmetrical call that commands, accuses and fills me with shame? The following passage makes one suspect as much – something of the stillborn ‘second version’ we spoke of earlier seems to echo in it: The Austrian officer lit a cigarette. Now he stood there smoking. That cigarette unexpectedly created a bond between him and me. As soon as I saw the smoke I also felt like smoking. That desire made me think that I had cigarettes with me. A few moments passed. I had aimed automatically, now it became a conscious action. I had to think about having my weapon aimed and that I aimed it at someone. [...] I only had to pull the trigger and the man would fall to the ground. The knowledge that his life was in my hands made me hesitate. It was a human being facing me, a human being!

4. A PASSIO IN DISTANS It would be easy to give a Levinasian twist to this testimony. Thus, Alain Finkielkraut, from whom I borrowed this story,25 reads a ‘substitution’ into it: “Through the agency of recognition, Lussu [the I-figure – R.V.] puts himself in the place of the unknown person whom he has in his power.” By the lighting of a cigarette, the enemy officer “is no longer an officer and no longer an enemy,” but a “fellow man” (semblable) that “floods” the potential shooter “with compassion”: “The sharpshooter suffers from his target; the spy empathizes with his prey.” It is as if a

25

A. FlNKIELKRAUT, L’humanité perdue. Essai sur le siècle. Paris, Seuil, 1996, p. 36 – all further quotes will be from this and the following page.


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passio in distans26 is described here, an inability to close oneself off from the potential suffering of the Other. Finkielkraut refers us to Levinas’ idea that “monotheism” has taught us to “be able to see behind the diversity of historical traditions [...] man as the fellow (semblable) of men”? But is this not too easy trick? For if the fellow being is semblable for Levinas, it is in the biblical sense of prochain, the neighbour who needs me. S/he is face, and that face is something other than the ‘form’, the ‘role’, the ‘context’ that makes something – or someone – recognizable and familiar. It breaks through such form, role or context, says Levinas, who exhausts himself with metaphors to try to explain that the face is independent from the figure in which it announces itself: the Other “is like a being who opens the window on which its own visage was already taking form,” his/her face “divests itself of the form which does already manifest it”; it is “naked,” “ab-stract,” “without any cultural ornament” (BPW 53), “signification without context” (OB 91), in short, “not confined in the form of its appearance [...] stripped of its very form, denuded of its presence which would again mask it like its own portrait”.27 The face is ‘in’ (or ‘out of’) the form like the idea of the infinite is ‘in’ its ‘ideatum’: without any “assimilation” (GCM 80) taking place, too large to be contained in it. The face breaks through or resists the form that would de-fine it, it resists consciousness and this resistance never turns into a consciousness of the resistance. The face offers nothing to see, it is invisible and this ‘in-’ is, again, no privation but rather an excellence that compels me to an answer that differs from appropriation. The Other is anything but my ‘fellow being’: s/he is not just another person like me. He or she is above me. Clearly, it is not that ‘experience’ of the Other – experience ‘without concept’ (TI 101) – that comes to the fore in the story that we are discussing. For what prevents the shot is precisely a sort of recognition: of one smoker by another! And this recognition has a structure all its

26

In analogy with the classical definition of magic as actio in distans. Although passio in distante or a distante would have seemed grammatically more correct (the term is used by Schopenhauer to refer to clairvoyance), it suggests a one-way ‘traffic’ from the prey (a distante) to the shooter (passio) which does not agree with the to-and-fro movement that I shall be trying to read in this passage (see below on transitivism). 27 E. LEVINAS, Humanism of the other (trans. Nidra Poller). Urbana (Ill.), Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 7.

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own – it does not bring about a substitution, but a shift of place: the shooter indeed suffers from his target because he recognizes himself in him, and in effect discovers that he is pointing the gun at himself. There occurs a sort of redoubling in which it is no longer clear who is the original and who is the copy. That is the role of the cigarette which “unexpectedly creates a bond between him and me.” The cigarette is not only his, but mine as well (“it made me think I had cigarettes with me”). It is a sort of mediator-object that is neither here nor there, or is both here and there, and it seems to start a transitive process (“as soon as I saw the smoke, I also felt like smoking”28) in which one could recognize what IJsseling calls the structure of an original mimesis (‘appearing in another place’29). There is indeed an inability to remain within oneself because something – an object, and above all: a certain gesture that ‘sticks’ to that object – jumps out of the image that this ‘oneself’ had formed of the man on the other side. He not only has the ‘form’ of his uniform, not only this ‘role’, but also another one: there is the context in which he is an enemy and the context that interferes with it, in which he and I smoke together. The one context disturbs the other, that is to say: there is no context that fully determines (Derrida would say: surrounds) him.30 But this is not to say that he is ever a signification without context. He is, in each instance, “not without” context. And he is fortunate that one of these contexts is also mine. He owes this fortune to an object that, upon closer inspection, is not just an ordinary object, something ‘Zuhandenes’, ready at hand. It is, to begin, an object that opens a context, the metonymic crystallization into a single point of an entire narrative structure in which I and this other can circulate: instead of having an image of the other (the enemy) in which I can reduce him to his properties (officer, enemy), and in this way keep him outside of me, the chain of signifiers which is crystallized into that object breaks through my protective fence, and before I know it, it makes me slip into a play of references over which I have no control. The Other smoking over there is no alter ego; I am rather his alter tu – I am that

28

For transitivism (e.g. one child falls, the other cries ‘as if’ it had hurt itself) see M. MERLEAU-PONTY, ‘Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant’, in ID., Parcours. 1935-1951. S.l., Verdier, 1997, pp. 147-229, especially pp. 228-9. 29 S. IJSSELING, Mimesis. Over schijn en zijn. Baarn, Ambo, 1990, e.g. p. 18. 30 J. DERRIDA, Marges de la philosophie. Paris, Minuit, 1972, pp. 365-93.


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hand that now smokes and later will perhaps toss the cigarette aside or light another with it. The cigarette is not an object that I see, it is an object that – literally and figuratively – disarms me because it creates a connection between me and the plume of smoke such that I, as it were, momentarily look at myself from outside, and see my finger on the trigger. What happens is a kind of bi-location, a split between my eye and my gaze: just for a moment this gaze escapes my eye and finds another support ‘outside’ me. I ‘see’ the cigarette that looks at me and am turned inside out. “Je fais tache dans le tableau.”31 But could it not have been otherwise? Cora Diamond, who borrows a similar story from Orwell – in this case the enemy does not smoke, but runs away as he is trying to hold his pants up with both hands – remarks that it is perfectly conceivable that someone other than Orwell would indeed have taken a shot: “What you have then with an image or a sight like that of the man running holding his trousers up is something which is not compelling.”32 Whether it is ‘compelling’ or not apparently depends on whether what we ‘see’ is an image of what Cora Diamond calls a ‘fellow creature’. And that, I would like to add, depends in its turn on whether or not it concerns an object in the sense described above, i.e. an object that is able to snare me and thus to create an unexpected ‘fellow’-ship. Suppose that Lussu was not a smoker, but someone allergic to smoke. Or that the trousers were a Lederhose and the shooter was someone like the Bavarian film maker Herbert Achternbusch, for whom that article of clothing seemed to represent all that he hated. There is nothing about the cigarette that guarantees that it will help the Other transcend his context: he could just as well be merely a smoking enemy. But if it does do that, it is because it brings into the image of the enemy a depth in which I am situated as well. The décalage that occurs between me and the Other and between the Other and his image has something of a caricature: someone who runs away with his pants in his hands is not

31

A quote from Lacan’s analysis of a similar, though not identical case (‘Petit-Jean’), which one could translate as “I was a stain in the picture”: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Le séminaire, livre XI). Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 89 (see also: “Le tableau, certes, est dans mon oeil. Mais moi, je suis dans le tableau” – “The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture”). 32 C. DIAMOND, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, in ID., The Realistic Spirit. London/Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, p. 332.

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so much a being that opens the window in which his visage is already defining itself, but rather someone fiddling with a window and unable to open it. And I do not shoot if one of my windows once refused to open, for example that frosted-glass window in the room I intended to sublet and which I found myself unable to open when I triumphantly wanted to give the potential-renter a view of the garden. Whether or not the Good is capable of removing “the allergy” between the self and the Other, and of opening the “non-allergic” (e.g., TI 51) relation-without-relation that Levinas calls ‘ethics’ – but also ‘religion’ (e.g., TI 80) – thus seems to depend on a coincidence, a fortunate or unfortunate ‘incarnation’. Not on an appeal from a face in which the other is “disincarnated,” but on something about that Other that seems to withdraw from the distinction between face and form. That the Other is irreducible to his or her form seems rather due to another form (a role, a context) that breaks through the first and brings it into movement. The Other, Levinas tells us, precedes her properties; she has her otherness as a property. But what, aside from the word ‘God’, prevents that what is here claimed about the otherness of the Other, who is said to be my brother, could just as well be claimed for the otherness of the Other who is my enemy? The enemy precedes his properties as well, he has his being an enemy as his property, that is to say, s/he is the bearer of an otherness that threatens rather than obliges. The enemy has but one dimension. Qua enemy, there is no other quality to bring him into relief; he threatens because he is an enemy and he is an enemy, frightening, because I can connect nothing further to him. It is only when he smokes, or wears pants on the verge of falling down, that some relief is brought into his massive otherness and that something like a connection – a recognition – is established. By chance a coincidental and thereby incongruent gesture comes to humanize him. Incarnation is not Evil: it keeps it, in this case, at a distance. But we are not dealing here with the same incarnation as the one which Levinas equates with Evil. The meaning of the “return to Plato” was to oppose an otherwise-than-Being to Being and thereby to give the subject a role outside the one it was supposed to play in the unveiling of being in which “every game that it would play for its own account, would only be a veiling or obscuring of the being’s esse” (OB 132). Such an incarnation would enclose the subject in being and thereby in the role that being provides for it. Only the transcendence of the Good would


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allow it to fall out of that role and to play “for its own account”: the responsibility that comes with this makes the subject irreplaceable – “no one can be responsible in my place.” But, as we have seen, if the subject refuses such responsibility – which it cannot do except by being irresponsible – then it cheats, and once more falls outside the role provided for it. But it remains inserted in the script of the Good: as the evildoer whose lie is as irrefutable as it is incomprehensible, and who is weighted down by a bad conscience. In neither case could the subject therefore ‘play for its own account’ – whatever it does takes its place in the balance of a different accounting, whether it is that of Being or that of the Good. One may ask oneself what it has thereby gained. Similarly, one may wonder whether what is at stake in “modern philosophy” (Levinas means: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) or in “modern anti-humanism” (and he is thinking about (post-)structuralism) is not simply a more honourable role for the subject.33 For example because these philosophers, otherwise than Levinas suggests, have refused to let the subject get taken up in (the unveiling of) Being. Or because they have refused to see the subject as a mere interiority that must be opened up – “interiority without interiority” – in order to be wholly for the other. The ‘incarnation’ about which we earlier spoke is an inheritance of this refusal – it is not a total immanence; it does not play off the one saturated context over against the other. What we here called ‘context’ never entirely closes itself. It closes around an ‘object’ that never remains entirely ‘inside’, but always has a recalcitrant ‘outside’ that allows or hinders that it takes up another context. Perhaps this becomes clearer when one replaces ‘context’ with ‘culture’ and considers that the problem of, for example, multiculturalism is not that of an incomprehensible ‘next to one another’ of closed cultures that, for an even more incomprehensible reason, would demonstrate attention or respect for one another (unless one would see in this, like Levinas or Theo de Boer,34 the discrete activity of the Good that provides it with such orientation). If

33

On this other role of the subject see the introduction, the conclusion and the third part of my Truth and Singularity. 34 Th. DE BOER, ‘Contouren van een niet-relativistisch pluralisme’ [Contours of a nonrelativist pluralism], in ID. - S. GRIFFIOEN (eds.), Pluralisme. Cultuurfilosofische beschouwingen. Amsterdam/Meppel, Boom, 1995, p. 162-79, especially pp. 168, 171, 178-9.

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multiculturalism stands for more than a purely socio-economic problem then this is due not to a lack of order or orientation, but to an excess. Every culture (or each segment of a culture) has transcendent values: something that cannot be reduced to the immanence of the cultural context, something toward which it directs itself. But these values, which do not precede the culture, and even less arise from it, are somewhere accommodated in it, somewhere embodied in it, and this ‘in’ is not the ‘in’ of a book in a bag. It is rather the ‘in’ of an ‘idée sensible’, 35 like a symphony is nowhere else than ‘in’ its performance, or like the blasphemous or obscene is nowhere else than ‘in’ the words or deeds that are deemed to be such,36 or like the dignity of a person lies ‘in’ his/her proper name or – controversial example, but we will see why – ‘in’ the veil that she wears. The performance, the words, the name, the veil are not the house in which the transcendent finds a temporary accommodation, not the incarnating envelope that is simply wrapped around the incarnatum, as the body is to the soul. They are neither sign nor expression nor supplement; they sign-ify, in-form, im-press themselves, or as Derrida would say,37 they produce that which one would be mistaken to think they only serve to supplement. What we mean by the dignity of a person we understand by the proper name and not the other way around: change one letter, lay the accent elsewhere, and one violates this dignity. Like violating the veil (forbidding it, for example) is, for one person, a violation of the woman, and for the other it is precisely a restoration of her dignity. As soon as transcendence is embodied it is affected by that embodiment: not that it disappears, but it is irrevocably materialized, individualized, pluralized. It turns its back on the One for good – and as a result, there is what one could call an explosion of the transcendental (IJsseling38), the damage of 35

1

M. MERLEAU-PONTY, Le visible et l’invisible. S.l., Gallimard (TEL), 1964 , pp. 200 ff. 36 S. MENDUS, ‘Harm, offence and censorship’, in J. HORTON - S. MENDUS (eds.), Aspects of toleration. Philosophical Studies. London/New York, Methuen, 1985, pp. 99112, e.g. p. 109. 37 I am referring to what Derrida formulated as “an original supplement”, e.g. in the last chapter of his justly famous La voix et le phénomène. Paris, Epiméthée, 1967. 38 S. IJSSELING, ‘Koning Midas en de Sileen. Over de differentie, de kunst en het transcendentale’ [King Midas and the Silenus. On difference, art and the transcendental], Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1995 (57:3), p. 431.


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which Levinas wants to limit by exchanging the one Being of Parmenides for the one Good. And like the angel in Wender’s Der Himmel über Berlin, this transcendence – better, these transcendences – are also going to bleed, they become mortal. All values, De Dijn writes in a piece about ‘values and incarnation’ from which I have learned a great deal, “whether they belong to a person or to a group, are necessarily embodied and thereby intrinsically vulnerable. ‘Everything of value is vulnerable’ (Lucebert). That is the reason why the loss of a beautiful painting is a true loss for beauty; why the death of every person is something to mourn; why the disappearance of cultures is terrible.”39 And as the South-African philosopher Johan Degenaar long ago pleaded for ‘the mortality of the soul’,40 so one could see here an attempt to envisage the mortality of transcendence: “Platonic philosophy tried to escape these insights by linking them to the world of pure ideas, separating value from its intrinsic relationship with incarnation. But by doing this, transcendental values are divorced from real life, they become the object of philosophical speculation. This means that real contemplation and wonder are forgotten and become inaccessible.”41 One cannot better express “the antiplatonism of the contemporary philosophy of meaning” (BPW 42 ff.) about which Levinas complained and in which he saw a “modern atheism.”42 But atheism is not what is at stake here. What is at stake is that the vulnerability of the transcendent “can be the source of tragedy when different forms of beauty, life forms, ethical systems, people [...] remain incompatible, such that one or the other must clear off.”43 Instead of Evil – hypostasis and denial of ‘the’ Good – one could perhaps see here an aspect of religion for which

39

H. DE DIJN, ‘Values and Incarnation’, in M. OLIVETTI (ed.), Incarnazione, special issue of Archivio di Filosofia, 1999 (67:1-3), pp. 375-6. 40 J. DEGENAAR, Die sterflikheid van die siel. Johannesburg, Simondium-uitgewers (EOMS)BPK, 1963. 41 H. DE DIJN, p. 376. 42 For example in the following passage from DF which is by no means the only one: “all civilizations would be equal. Modern atheism is not the negation of God, it is the absolute indifferentism of [Lévi-Strauss’] Tristes Tropiques. I think that this is the most atheist book that has been written in our day, the most absolutely disorientated and desorientating book. It threatens Judaism...” (p. 201), – in this context see also the argument in ‘Meaning and Sense’ (against Merleau-Ponty: CPP, e.g. p. 82 ff). 43 H. DE Dijn, ibid.

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Levinas had no room in his philosophy (and perhaps also could leave no room): “Perhaps one of the functions of our relationship to the divine transcendent is to help us to come to terms with these forms of tragedy.”44 Modern atheism? Or just an attempt not to mix too many things and to keep matters pure (“to Caesar...”)? Perhaps it is not in the element of ethics that religious transcendence can be experienced, but rather, where ethics leaves us in the lurch. As at that point where one of the many transcendences which give rhythm to our (co-) existence falls out of step, showing us its unsightly side at the risk of losing its splendor, as when someone else – Poe’s William Wilson – all of a sudden seems to be the bearer of my utmost proper name. A transcendence that is embodied, vulnerable and mortal is a transcendence that is mute, essentially silent: there always comes a moment in which it leaves me without answer as to what devotes it to me and me to it (William Wilson is just a name, it has nothing special about it; dozens of others, equally unique, bear this name). That is the other irresponsibility I would like to save from Levinas’ privative approach: I am bound to something, but I have no access to it. I do not fall together with it, but neither can I free myself from it. A mute transcendence that gives me no answer to the question of how that ‘who’ that I am is attached to it, what it has to do with it. As we will see in the chapter that follows, the problem with Levinas seems to be that by insisting on making that transcendent speak he risks becoming unfaithful to the alterity of the Other that he seeks to describe. For, unlike the Infinite, that Other shivers for lack of a form able to contain him or her. Which is to say that the Other is in need of such a form. He or she is not God – and not just because s/he comes in His trace, but because he or she is marked by a forsakenness that is the price of the very structure of alterity. Derrida, in his first essay on Levinas, already pointed to this tension between the recourse to a certain “infinitism” with “classical” roots and the embrace of the “modern audacity” to go for an “originary finitude” (a finitude, that is, which should be thought in its own right, without referring to the infinity

44

Ibid.


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which it lacks).45 I hope to have shown that the root of this tension lies in Levinas’ decision to “return to Plato” (BPW 58) in his own way – the misery of the Other is on the side of a finitude that cannot be reconciled with the disincarnated Infinite that Levinas brings in in order to give the Other’s appeal that strange authority by which s/he is presented as “closer” to God than the one under appeal. Rather than a tension, I suspect that what we have here is a contradiction which, if solved, dissolutes the main thesis. Time, then, to question whether ethics is indeed as fundamental, as Levinas would have wished it to be.

45

J. DERRIDA, ‘Violence and Metaphysics. An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in ID., Writing and Difference (trans. A. Bass). London/Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 104 and passim.

CHAPTER SIX

IS ETHICS FUNDAMENTAL ? QUESTIONING LEVINAS ON IRRESPONSIBILITY

In what follows I should like to focus on two questions that I suspect are related: First, whence the recent return to ethics in contemporary thought? And, second, why is it that the kind of ethics seemingly most favoured in this return is an ethics in which “the Other” is somehow made the central term? To reshape these questions, beginning with the latter one: What is so attractive about Levinas’ ethics that, in certain circles, it seems to have become synonymous with ethics as such? What could be the returns on this ethical reorientation toward the Other? Why is it that our culture is so eager to talk about what is other from it or to it, and why, in making this move to alterity, has it so monotonously repeated the message that this “Other” is somehow a good other, that his or her otherness ought to be respected in such a way that we should not allow ourselves to be closed off from it? Or, at least according to the official discourse. Think, for example, about the ever growing concern with multiculturalism – is it a coincidence that one of the most famous contributors to this literature immediately links this issue to the problem of recognition?1 One is reminded here of that famous “speaker’s benefit” Michel Foucault suspected a long time ago lingering behind the bravado with which our culture dared to broach the subject of sexuality: “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervour of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for

1

Charles TAYLOR, ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ in Amy GUTMANN (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1994, pp. 25-73. Taylor’s essay characteristically ends with an appeal to our “willingness to be open to comparative cultural study of the kind that must displace our horizons in the resulting fusions” (p. 73, my italics).

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the garden of earthly delights.”2 But as a good phenomenologist (!) Foucault bracketed all of that juvenile pathos and instead focused on the kind of statements that appeared along side it: “The question I would like to pose is not; Why are we [sexually] repressed? but rather, Why do we say with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?”3 I wonder whether we should not approach the enthusiasm with which our culture engages in an ethical discourse on the Other with a similar sobriety: Why do we state with such passion that we are responsible for such an Other, and that we always fall short of ourselves in approaching him or her? Whence this delectation in declaring and decrying our own injustice? I shall have to disappoint those hoping for a straightforward answer to these questions. But let me buy their attention by immediately giving voice to the suspicion that I shall try to render plausible throughout the rest of this text. I suspect that the success behind the recent “turn to ethics,”4 of which the explosively growing literature on Levinas seems to be a symptom, could have to do with the central place this kind of ethics gives to a particular notion of responsibility and to the concomitant place it reserves for irresponsibility, which it conceives simply as an absence of responsibility. Although this seems self-evident, it is not. But, one will object, what other notion of irresponsibility could there be? The answer to this objection is relatively straightforward: it is not at all evident that irresponsibility should be defined in a privative way. Let me explain what the tradition means with “privation.”

1. SOME TECHNICALITIES: THE PRIVATIVE NEGATION When philosophers speak of “privation,” they do not refer to a neutral absence, but rather to the absence of something that should be there. This meaning comes from the Latin root privare, which means “to rob,” 2

Michel FOUCAULT, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (trans. Robert Hurley). Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, pp. 6-7. 3 Ibid., pp. 8-9. 4 See Peter Dews’ lucid review of a number of such recent publications, including an essay collection entitled The Turn to Ethics (eds. Beatrice HANSSEN et al.). New York/London, Routledge, 2000: ‘Uncategorical Imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the Ethical Turn,’ Radical Philosophy, 2002 (111), pp. 33-37.

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“to withhold” – a meaning which is still present in the English “privation,” as in “deprived,” lacking in, say, adequate food. Thus, for human beings, deafness is the absence of an ability to hear, an ability that properly belongs to humans. To lack this ability is a defect, a shortcoming. This is not so in the case of a stone, which is simply a non-hearing thing. Similarly, being wingless, when said of humans, is an ordinary negation, whereas (so far as I know) it would be privative when referring to birds. These examples are easy to understand, but all sorts of complications immediately arise as soon as someone like Thomas Aquinas starts saying things like “evil is a privation of the good” (privatio boni), implying that evil, like any other privative term, has no intelligibility of its own and can only be understood in relation to its positive contrary. This might seem strange at first, but, of course, there is something to be said for it; for, if evil had its own essence and intelligibility it could be understood as such, and might then no longer be considered evil.5 Evil is, after all, a disorder, something that is not as it should be – which means that in order to speak of evil properly one should first have a certain notion of what should be instead. Just as one should have a certain understanding of what it means to play soccer in order to state that a player has missed a penalty. Similarly, a machine can only be said to malfunction or a biosystem to be disturbed by someone who knows what their normal functioning entails. Privative terms are thus inevitably evaluative; they express a judgment concerning a subject to whom something essential is withheld by the privative predicate (deafness, blindness, in disorder, etc.). To blame someone for being heartless, thoughtless, or insensitive is to imply that in having these qualities that person falls short of what it means to be human. The evaluation is thus given in reference to a norm (to a “normal state”) that should, of course, be grounded independently. It is easy to see that one could proceed analogously in the case of irresponsibility. In order to do so one would first have to define the

5

See Ludwig HEYDE, The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God. (trans. Alexander Harmsen and William Desmond). New York, SUNY, 1999, pp. 93116. I also owe a lot for my understanding of privation to Rudi te Velde’s article in a Dutch reader which he edited, ‘Thomas over het ontologisch statuut van het Kwaad’ [Thomas on the ontological status of Evil], in R. TE VELDE et al. (eds.), Thomas over goed en kwaad. Baarn, Ambo, 1993, pp. 107-122.


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positive term for which irresponsibility was not only the negation but the privation. That is, one would have to show that responsibility is the ‘normal’ state for humans and that, consequently, irresponsibility, like moral evil, which could function as another name for it, is a shortcoming, a failure to be responsible. As we shall shortly see, this is exactly the course by which Levinas proceeds. But let us first take a look at the consequences of this move. From the start responsibility is made the dominant term and irresponsibility the privatively derived one. And since responsibility is clearly an ethical notion, so then is irresponsibility. Thus, the semantic register of the dominant term determines the register in which the privative term can be heard. But couldn’t one pursue another line of argumentation? Is one always bound to understand irresponsibility in the privative mode? Is disorder always the absence of order, lacking an intelligibility of its own? What if one were to instead follow Canguilhem or Foucault and argue that what seems a disorder from one perspective, when seen from another, is actually an order sui generis? Not the absence of order, but another order entirely – an alternative to the order which, as then becomes apparent, had been trying to domesticate it with the label “disorder.”6 Ironically, Levinas’ entire work could be read as one continuous attempt to escape privative reasoning – except, as we shall see, in the case of ethics. Or rather, given that ethics itself will first be introduced through a break with privation – except in the case of what ethics considers to be unethical yet still well within the realm of its authority: irresponsibility.

2. LEVINAS’ AMBIVALENCE TOWARD PRIVATION When speaking of the alterity of the Other, Levinas will always stress that one should not see in it an otherness which merely resists my attempts to comprehend it: “The not-knowing is not to be understood here as a privation of knowledge. Unforeseeableness is a form of alterity only relative to knowledge. For it the other is essentially what is unforeseeable.

6

For this notion of order, see Bernhard WALDENFELS, Ordnung im Zwielicht. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1987 and my Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique (trans. Chris Turner). London/New York, Verso, 1995, ch. 4.

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But, alterity...is not synonymous with unforeseeableness.”7 The aim of knowledge is to get to know things, to become familiar with them, e.g., by discovering the laws that regulate their behaviour. It is this familiar pattern between us and the world that Levinas has in mind when he speaks of a reduction of “the other” to “the same.” There is nothing wrong with such a reduction – it is what knowledge essentially has to be about: it aims to foresee. The unforeseeable here is an anomaly, an invitation to reconsider knowledge and to refine its normal patterns. What one does not comprehend is the absence of a comprehension that is yet to come. It is a privation. Not so, however, in the case of the human other. Take love, for example. When the lover at the height of his/her passions exclaims, “I love you so much that I could devour you,” the subjunctive points to an awareness that it would be remiss to do so, even if the devouring were to remain only metaphorical. This becomes tragically poignant in the case of a lover who obsessively begins to investigate a beloved’s past, all previous relationships, diaries and so on, until she is left bare before the lover, stripped of all secrets. Such a lover mistakes knowledge for love. Led by “the false romantic idea of a love that would be the confusion between two beings,” s/he fails to accept that “the pathos of the erotic relationship is the fact of being two, and that the other is absolutely other” (EI 66). It is not, Levinas stresses, “as a miscarried knowledge that love is love” (EI 67). The alterity that characterizes eros is not something that ought to be done away with for there to be a perfect communication between lovers. They are not vessels: “What one presents as the failure to communicate in love constitutes precisely the positivity of the relation; this absence of the other is precisely her presence qua other” (TO 99). Readers of Levinas will know that in his later work this last sentence becomes the matrix for his approach to the otherness of the other as such – thus it is taken from the context of erotic love and re-immersed in what one could perhaps call “neighbourly love.”8 New distinctions will be

7

Emmanuel LEVINAS, Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo (trans. Richard A. Cohen). Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P., 1985, pp. 66-7. Henceforth EI. 8 Although Levinas uses the expression “amour du prochain” (e.g., in OB), his views on what is meant by it do not exactly seem to cover what the Christian thinkers have understood it to be. For such a presentation, see Paul MOYAERT, De mateloosheid van het Christendom [The measurelessness of Christianity]. Nijmegen, SUN, 1998, Part


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introduced, but the model remains essentially the same: what is mistakenly seen as the mere absence of something that ought to be present is in fact its own way of being present. Thus, the invisibility of the face is not a lack of visibility. Instead, as we shall see, it is precisely what enables it to call me into question and what distinguishes it from phenomena that do not lay such a claim on me. Similarly, the other’s opacity to me is not an obstacle that I need to overcome; it is rather the tain of the mirror that s/he holds out to me and in which, for the first time, I apprehend myself as embroiled in the endless project of overcoming whatever is in my way – an image to which I somehow (we’ll soon see how) react with shame. Finally, let us have a look at the famous “infinite” which Levinas refers to in the title of his first opus magnum, Totality and Infinity, and which he links to Descartes’ notion of an ideatum that is too big to be contained in its idea. The infinite is not something that simply misses its correct size. The “in-” is not a mere negation of the finite, nor is it a monstrous privation of what would be its more appropriate form. It is instead, as Levinas repeatedly says, its very perfection: “The idea of infinity, the overflowing of finite thought by its content, effectuates the relation of thought with what exceeds its capacity....This is the situation we call welcome of the face. The idea of infinity is produced in the opposition of conversation, in sociality. The relation with the face, with the other absolutely other which I can not contain, the other in this sense infinite, is nonetheless my Idea, a commerce. But...the ‘resistance’ of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure : ethical” (TI 197). Ethics, then, has to do with an excess which is not the result of the mere absence of a correct measure. It has to do with an inability to contain which is not a failure or a shortcoming on my part. What would be privative terms within the realm of knowledge, lacking any intelligibility of their own, are terms which display a “positive” content as soon as they are brought out of that register. The order of knowledge is not the only order. Ethics, at least, is another order, another register. Levinas’ resistance to privative reasoning, done in order to clear the ground for his own philosophy, is not, however, what singles him out One; and Philippe VALLIN, Le prochain comme tierce personne dans la théologie de la création chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin. Paris, J. Vrin, 2000.

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among contemporary authors. One need only think of Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible or of Derrida’s early writings to see a similar suspicion at work.9 What is characteristic for Levinas is that, unlike these authors, his first concern is not to turn against “privation” in order to complicate ontology from within (Merleau-Ponty’s “endo-ontology,” Derrida’s “differance”). Levinas’ first concern is to emancipate ethics from the tongs of ontology. Perhaps this is why, unlike these authors who seem to be suspicious of privation as such, Levinas does not hesitate to reintroduce a privative definition into the heart of his ethical philosophy, by making irresponsibility the absence of a responsibility that is always already pre-given. Although this sudden return to what one could call a “privative approach” is remarkable in that it constitutes a move which sets off Levinas from either Merleau-Ponty or Derrida, it is not entirely surprising and certainly not merely the vestige of a tie with the tradition which he simply forgot to sever. Indeed, as I shall try to show, Levinas cannot but approach irresponsibility as the absence of a previously defined ethical responsibility. Had he even left open the possibility that there could be an irresponsibility outside of the ethical register with an intelligibility of its own he would have derailed the entire argument that allowed him to forward ethics as the better candidate for the title of first philosophy. It is, of course, toward such a non-privative notion of responsibility that I shall be steering my argument, if only because I suspect that what makes Levinas’ ethics so attractive to our contemporaries is precisely that it seems to exclude such a notion. For, as I shall explain, it is perhaps more soothing to live with the conviction that we are perpetually falling short of our infinite responsibility before the other, than to entertain the thought that irresponsibility could have to do with something within us which not only doesn’t respond to the

9

Thus the invisible is, for Merleau-Ponty, not an absent visible; it does not refer to a de facto but to a de jure invisibility. It is an invisibility of the visible, and it is the latter which consequently needs to be rethought. Similarly, for Derrida the supposed loss of presence that characterizes “writing” is an absence sui generis, in terms of which the phonologocentric hierarchy between “speech” and “writing” is to be reconceived. As in Levinas, both these authors find their starting point in contesting the hierarchy between a dominant and a derived term.


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other, but not even to ourselves.10 But I should first explain how exactly Levinas conceives of responsibility and its subsequent privative negation. This will take us a while, but one should bear in mind that, as Tristram Shandy reminds us, digression can often be a way of progression.

3. RESPONSIBILITY, IN A VERY SMALL NUTSHELL Responsibility means that something is expected of me and that I am not free to fulfil that expectation according to my whim. There is a “meaning and sense” that does not find its origin in me, but that forces itself upon me.11 It weighs on me, yet without that weight crushing me. On the contrary, it orients me – which means both that it has a hold on me and that I find a hold in it. Indeed it seems Levinas’ entire philosophy is based on this contrast between a pre-ethical freedom which is disoriented, like a compass needle at the Earth’s poles that has only itself as a point of reference, and a freedom that is imposed upon us from outside and is thus able to provide us with the orientation we need. To put it differently, responsibility is not an engagement. If it were, the one who entered into this responsibility could always withdraw from it. It would be, in Kantian terms, hypothetical instead of categorical: under the hypothesis that I deem this or that important (and as long as I do so), I will have to act in such or such a way. The ethical act is, to be sure, a free one, but the freedom implied in it is of a different type. It is the sort of freedom that must be presupposed for one to be able to express regret – that is, the feeling of having fallen short (privation!) of what ought to have been done. This latter freedom, then, presupposes a horizon, the validity of which is not simply dependent upon my free decision to grant it that validity. Ethics has to do with being forced into such a horizon, with not having the choice of whether or not to enter it. Ethical responsibility is not a free engagement, but most fundamentally a being engaged through which that first freedom of 10

Here and elsewhere I play on the Latin root (respondere, to reply) in the notion of “responsibility.” In French (or in the German: Verantwortlichkeit [Antwort = reply]) this etymology is clearly present in normal usage; indeed, as we shall see, Levinas’ use of ‘responsabilité ’ refers to it. 11 ‘Meaning and Sense’ is the title of one of the essays in Levinas’ Humanisme de l’autre homme [Humanism of the other man]. Paris, Fata Morgana, 1972, translated in BPW, pp. 33-64.

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choice is redescribed: what characterized such a freedom was that it started in me and always looped back to me – whatever I attached myself to, it was me who tied that knot and me who could also undo it. But, if responsibility, as Levinas is so fond of stating, is “older” than freedom (OB 57), there must be yet another knot – one that I will always fail to undo, for it was not one of my own craft. No matter how much I try to writhe free from it, I cannot. It is so much a part of me that, were I to succeed in cutting myself loose, it would be equivalent to a self amputation, for that knot is the texture of “intersubjectivity” – not just because I am not “alone in the world” (Hector Malot) but because that world which I share with others would lack all orientation without them. I would be its only centre, and a precarious one at that. To be sure, everything would continue to appear to me. It is me, after all, who feels joy, or sadness – me, for example, who upon hearing the first tones of the national anthem, feels or does not feel the way one is “supposed to” feel. But nothing could guarantee that what appears effectively appeals to me, that I do not find myself deeply indifferent to it. And, in this indifference, I could become bored with always having to be the origin or the pole of all appearances. And this boredom could consume me to such an extent that I am left stumbling over myself, over my “freedom” which I cannot get rid of and from which nothing can distract me. In the deepest throes of this boredom, one would long for a liberation that is more than a mere distraction. One would want to be liberated from oneself, from that self that one always finds as one’s unwilling companion in boredom – the holder of a freedom that the tradition has not without reason called the freedom of indifference (libertas indifferentiae). Ethics, then, on the contrary will have to do with something that is capable of breaking through that indifference. But, the meaning of ethics, Levinas is quick to add, cannot consist in the mere fact that it does away with such indifference. If it did, ethics would be but a means of satisfying my need for distraction. And, in that case, why would the demands with which it tries to tear me out of my indifference be any “better” (OB 122) than any other means one could use to reach the same goal? Hence, there must be a force at work in ethics from which I cannot pull back, something stronger than even my deepest boredom, something that does not leave me indifferent no matter how much I suffer from that spleen of which Baudelaire has sung the darkest allure. There must be


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something in the world the signification of which does not depend on the meaning I bestow upon it – something which carries a light of its own and which, through this independence, is capable of penetrating the armour of my indifference. Such a penetration must be more than a violent trespassing of the borders of my interiority, more than a violation I suffer passively. That is, it should not only take from me, but also bring something to me, something of which I hitherto did not have the faintest idea but in which I can recognize myself – “my final essence” (TI 253), says Levinas – without that recognition being reducible to what happens in knowledge. For, as we have seen, knowledge is an attempt to eliminate surprises. It aims for familiarity by letting things appear to me, that is, emerge in a form in which I can recognize them. What appears in the light of this knowledge is thus never truly other. “Light is that through which something is other than myself, but already as if it came from me” (TO 64). The illuminated, encountered object does not have the force to tear me out of myself precisely because its meaning is a meaning for-me, a visage it shows to me without imposing itself on me. I may take notice of it, but I do not have to (I could, e.g., simply close my eyes). It carries no signification in itself which I would not be free to ignore, which I would be bound to attend to.

4. THE FACE – NOT AN OBSTACLE, BUT THE SECRET AIM OF MY DESIRE It is this latter kind of signification that Levinas, in his technical language, refers to as the “face” of the Other. Such a face is, in fact, not simply a signification, but rather what the French text calls a signifiance, stressing the verbal sense of signifying something to me. It gets a message across, a message I cannot refuse to receive. I cannot not hear the appeal of the face of the Other, not receive it. The Other does not simply look at me. Its look concerns me. S/he is foisted upon me. This face cannot leave me indifferent, and the shame that overcomes me in the gaze of this appeal, even if I try to suppress it, reveals that I am more than libertas indifferentiae. Here, according to Levinas, is a movement of revelation and recognition that points to a non-indifference in which my “final reality” (TI 178-9) betrays itself: “The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity – its hunger – without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but

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promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness” (TI 200). To be sure, the Other cannot force me to do what it asks of me, but I cannot deny that something is introduced which would not be there were this a world without others: another centre than my own. Not just another centre next to mine, parallel to mine; but a centre that profoundly shakes my own self-centredness. For although I retain the freedom not to take up the appeal of the Other, to do so constitutes a refusal, a foregoing of an option that I would not have had without the appeal. As we have seen, in a world in which I was the only centre, there was nothing that could have dethroned me from that position. In such a world I could not but be bound to or attached to myself. That bond is, so to speak, the ransom of being: to be, means to be me, not to be able to not conjugate the verb “to be” in the first person singular. There is, in other words, in being a “first person directedness” that one cannot simply drop, the involuntary egocentrism of having to be one’s own being. But it is precisely this inevitable centration on the ego – the fact that I am and that whatever appears, appears to me – which is put into question by the appeal of the Other. Suddenly a choice is put before me which I did not have before, the choice between holding on to my being or giving precedence to the being of the Other. Ethics is a “investiture of freedom” (TI 84ff.) because it introduces a degree of freedom I did not have before. What was inevitable and involuntary now turns out to be something about which I can decide: I can break the chains that tied me to my being and put the being of the Other above my own. Instead of not being able to be anything other than that being towards which everything refers, I now have the option of devoting my being to the Other who introduces a different reference-point. This cannot but trouble me, for even if I cling to my own being there is a hitherto inexistent question which, if I choose to be egocentric (now in the moral sense of the term), I will, in so doing, have answered: why me and not the Other? Or again: is my existence justified (EI 121)? Not only in the sense of “can it be given a justification” but also in the sense of “is it just,” “do I not by existing, by breathing, feeding myself, murder the Other”? Can I take all these things for granted which were there for me as long as the other does not appear on the scene? Is my place under the


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sun not a usurpation?12 Levinas has no difficulty in answering these questions: “The presentation of the face is not true, for the true refers to the non-true, its eternal contemporary, and ineluctably meets with the smile and silence of the sceptic. The presentation of being in the face does not leave any logical place for its contradiction. Thus I cannot evade by silence the discourse which the epiphany that occurs as a face opens... ‘To leave men without food is a fault that no circumstance attenuates; the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary does not apply here,’ says Rabbi Yochanan. Before the hunger of men responsibility is measured only ‘objectively’; it is irrecusable. The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding” (TI 201). I will resist the temptation to give a detailed commentary of this text which to a certain extent speaks for itself. Let me just underline what is important for our argument. If, as Levinas claims, I cannot not hear the appeal of the Other, if it has imposed its obligation on me even before I could decide to let it in, then any attempt on my part to ignore it will be doomed to fail. No matter how I react to it, I will have done just that: reacted to it. That is the meaning of “objective” in the preceding quote. To ignore the appeal is but a way to receive it (like trying to forget about a letter one has left unopened fearing it will bring bad news). Whatever my reaction, it will have a meaning that is to a certain extent beyond my control, for it will be an ethical meaning. It will receive a significance (good/bad) from within the ethical horizon into which the appeal of the Other has fatally drawn me – a horizon of “obligation,” of a command I could not have given to myself (for Levinas, autonomy presupposes this minimal heteronomy which he also calls “exteriority”). The “first word” is obligatory, for unlike any animal noise (for Levinas, a phenomenon) it appears in its own light instead of borrowing from mine. The language the Other addresses to me, however trivial, will have called me out of my self-centredness, oriented me toward another centre. It is sabbatical, for it interrupts the labour of egocentrism – that constant effort, of which I was largely unaware, that is demanded by the process of being my being and of, inevitably, having to relate everything else to it. Interiority is a verb, a nomen actionis, it presupposes interiorization (TI 36). Language, 12

One of the mottoes of OB is the famous line from Pascal’s Pensées (112): “ ‘That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”

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then, is an appeal before it is anything else. And even if it remains silent, the face speaks. Its silence is but another speech, a silent accusation: can you justify – and is it just – that you are busy being your own being? Before ethics is about an engagement, then, it is about a finding oneself primordially already engaged. And ethical engagement is about engaging oneself in this first engagement. Similarly, responsibility presupposes a first moment of which I cannot be the originator. It is a response to an appeal that reaches me from outside (in lieu of Kant’s “Reason,” Levinas introduces the Other – a fact for reason, rather than a fact of reason).13 And just as one has always heard, one has always responded. Something has already managed to slip inside us and no degree of interiority will ever rid us of the intruder. The reason is that, by definition, interiority presupposes a capacity to close oneself off. It presupposes privacy in an ontological sense. But this in turn only works if the something from which one wants to fend oneself off awaits, so to speak, our permission to be let in. As if it would politely knock and present us with its identity papers which we then inspect. But the Other is wholly different from any such “data.” He or she does not wait politely at my threshold, but has already intruded my grounds “like a thief” (OB 148). Something in me has already been stirred by the Other’s appeal before I could even decide to study the legitimacy of its claims. To close oneself off from such an appeal means to erect a closure around it: like callosity around a thorn in the flesh (Levinas likens the appeal to a thorn). In “the severe seriousness of the goodness” (TI 201), says Levinas, one is awakened and unable to sleep again, opened up and unable to stitch the wound. It is this sort of reasoning that is behind Levinas’ privative approach to irresponsibility. To be irresponsible is to be situated within a prior responsibility. It is the refusal to take up a responsibility that one cannot escape. The absence of responsibility testifies to its presence. It is an attempt to deny what cannot be denied, an attempt to be one’s own origin, to decide about the meaning of all one’s deeds oneself. Or again, it is a will to appropriate for oneself a horizon in which something else

13

For a comparison between Kant and Levinas, which is to my mind a bit too biased in favour of the latter, see Catherine CHALIER, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas (trans. Jane Marie Todd). Ithaca, NY, Cornell U.P., 2002. See also the entry for “Levinas and Kant” in the index of my Truth and Singularity.


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has come to the fore, something other than the logic of self-preservation which is, for Levinas, the precarious logic of being (I am the one who is stuck to my own being and longs to get rid of myself, but nevertheless always carry my being with me – omnia mea mecum portans – unless I loose hold of what I am tied to, which means self-destruction). But if the Other can “arouse my goodness” (TI 200), I cannot be fully defined within that logic of self-preservation. There must be another familiarity in me than the one I have with my being, another destiny to which something in me testifies. This something is conscience, says Levinas, and he means the bad conscience of remorse, for the Other was there before I could even first receive its appeal, and so, in a sense, I have always reacted too late. Attestation of an “otherwise than being,” even if I prefer to sedate it with a flight into “illusion, intoxication, artificial paradises” (OB 192n21).14 What are we to think of this? One should perhaps resist the temptation to dramatize what Levinas is describing here and immediately think of extreme examples (jumping after the drowning person, getting up for the hundredth time to tend to the sick child at night, nursing an “ungrateful” patient with unbearable pain). One should also think of the less spectacular, of what Levinas calls the “small goodness” – e.g., greeting someone, letting someone go through a door first (“After you, sir!”). Levinas’ aim is not to provide a foundation for such acts. Although he has become famous for his claim that “ethics is the first philosophy,” this is not meant in terms of a philosophy of origins

14

Accordingly, “shame” is, for Levinas, as we noted before, not just an empirical affect which can be either present or absent. “Shame” seems to be rather a Grundbefindlichkeit, to be compared to Heidegger’s “anxiety.” In both cases, the apparent absence of it is interpreted as testimony for its presence. Thus, “shamelessness” is a flight from – or a repression of – “shame,” which is what Levinas is saying in the extremely important footnote that I am referring to here. I quote the full passage, beginning with the main body of the text to which the note is appended: “The neighbor is a brother. A fraternity that cannot be abrogated, an unimpeachable assignation, proximity is an impossibility to move away without the torsion of a complex, without “alienation’ or fault” (OB 87), to which the note continues: “It is perhaps by reference to this irremissibility that the strange place of illusion, intoxication, artificial paradises can be understood. The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother... ”(OB 192n21).

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(ursprungsphilosophisch). The aim is rather to understand what it means that such practices are common and that we are all the time already engaged in them. We always already implicitly have an understanding of them that, if explicated, exposes a dimension in us that has hardly, or insufficiently, been thematized in the philosophical tradition which had supported another candidate for the title “first philosophy.” Take the “After you, sir.” One could of course try to understand what is going on here along the lines of self-preservation: try to get through every door first, there is a good chance that sooner or later one will end up with bruises. But this interpretation seems impoverished. It is improbable that those engaged in this practice will recognize themselves in it. It is not a hypothetical rule of conduct (“if – and only if – I don’t want to get sandwiched, I should wait for my turn”). Something else is going on. Levinas thinks of something like allowing another to pass before me as a social rule in which one pays one’s respect to the Other and in the same breath gives expression to the fact that such an Other, qua Other, precedes me. The idea here is that one does such things, not because it is the customary agreement (e.g., giving the right of way, as in traffic), but because it involves the very structure of the relation between me and the Other. Qua Other, the Other is “above me” (which is why its otherness is capitalized). The relation between the Other and me is asymmetrical. Its appeal concerns me. I am, whether I like it or not, responsible for this Other, quite independently of the fact that my appeal would concern her or him, that s/he would, in turn, would feel responsible for me. This oriented asymmetry tells me something about myself to which I give expression by letting another pass before me. It reveals that I am not solely attached to myself, but that there is another kind of bond than that of being. There is also in me the trace of that which is beyond being, which means that “in my final reality” (TI 1789), I am “initially for the Other” (EI 96), not just “tied” (noué) to but “vowed” or “devoted” (voué) to him/her (GCM 165). Pace Levinas, it seems that one cannot understand except as a metaphysical “homecoming,” this liturgy of the Good15 that “compensates” for the

15

‘Liturgy’ is a word that Levinas uses in the etymological sense of leitourgia “which in its primary meaning designates the exercise of a function which is not only totally gratuitous but requires on the part of him who exercises it a putting out of funds at a loss” (BPW 50).


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“violence” with which it has “chosen” me before I can choose it (e.g. OB 11). “The Other is not an obstacle,” says Levinas. “He is desired in my shame” (TI 84). To think of the Other as an obstacle only makes sense as long as one is engaged in the race of being in which every being is solely trying to persist in its being. But the Other cures me of that cramp, gives me the opportunity to pull myself above or beyond that conatus essendi. The Other alienates me from an alienation of which I was not even aware. To pay heed to the appeal of the Other, to take up a responsibility that I could not have given myself, means to exit from Being by the fissure that is suddenly opened there, and to cut through, like Abraham, the roots that tie me to myself. It is the end of the Odyssey of Being. The “I” that is concerned by the appeal has no time to turn around toward itself. It will never come home again and no longer belongs anywhere.16 But this is not a loss. It is, says Levinas, a “transfiguration” (TI 246). An upward fall out of nature wherein things have a soil they claim for themselves. At the threshold of humanity there is a first hesitation: Does my place under the sun not take away the light from someone else? “Humanity is not a forest” (DF 23). It is of an essential plurality, different from the plurality of any other species. For the second human is not just a double of the first. The other man or woman is the one who tears me out of nature, puts me beyond the law of being and thrusts me into humanity. Humanism only starts with two. It is a “humanism of the ‘other’” – a subjective genitive – the other humanizes me.

5. A NATURALIZATION OF THE OTHER? These broad strokes should suffice to give us the outline of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility. Admittedly, it not only seems to be coherent; but 16

One should take this opposition between Abraham and Odysseus of which Levinas is rather fond (e.g., BPW 14, 48; TI 27, 102), cum grano salis – see the end of last paragraph where I spoke on purpose of a “metaphysical homecoming.” This, by the way, would considerably close the gap between Levinas and the Christian appropriation of this old theme. See the very informative article by Carlos STEEL, ‘Abraham und Odysseus. Christliche und neuplatonische Eschatologie,’ in Jan A. AERTSEN - Martin PICKAVÉ (eds.), Ende und Vollendung: Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter. Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 2002, pp. 115-37, with whose conclusion I would thus tend to disagree.

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is also quite attractive. For it is no doubt the central place this ethics reserves for the Other that explains why people are so impressed by it, as Levinas himself seems have realized quite early. “In 1968...all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other....[E]ven when a language against the other resounds, language for the other is heard behind it” (RTB 99). Indeed, the otherness of the Other seems to have become our obsession. It is an otherness we should respect, learn from, and refrain from reducing to a copy of ourselves – as we have done for too long – in a euro- or occidentalocentrism that, like king Midas, fatally turned whatever it encountered, into of copy of what it had wished to be the ideal, i.e. European world.17 But this world turned out to be uninhabitable, the lonely world of knowledge where everything has finally become familiar and thus uninteresting, and where we have become, as a result, terribly alone, bored by everything including ourselves. In short, we’re faced with the crisis of the European sciences that, as Husserl remarks in the opening of his last great book, “no longer seem to have anything to say” about “the questions that are decisive for genuine humanity.”18 Is it not time to dig a hole in which we can bury our shame? “First philosophy has donkey’s ears” – is it not that confession for which we are truly grateful to Levinas, whose ethics of the Other finally justifies our desire to break with the past? And what a break it is: The discovery of the value of cultures and of the subcultures within these cultures. A vulgar critique of pure judgment (Bourdieu). The triumph of multiculturalism. And within that triumphant celebration of alterity, a new sobriety: one should learn one’s lessons from the past, and avoid, for example, reducing the Other to a culture – not ours, but his/hers/theirs! One should avoid homogenization by letting him/her/them be absorbed by a new totality – the “other” culture(s) – for that would be but another way of labelling and controlling others by making them recognizable. Besides, one should perhaps mistrust all this talk about multiculturalism. Is it not, in truth,

17

On “eurocentrism” and its (confused) critics, see my ‘Uneuropean Desires: Toward a Provincialism without Romanticism,’ in Truth and Singularity, pp. 144-64. 18 Edmund HUSSERL, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (trans. David Carr). Evanston (Ill.), Northwestern U.P., 1970, pp. 5-6.


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an ideology that simply serves to mask late capitalism’s true contradictions: exploitation, deprivation, repression?19 A false consciousness, to be sure! But then again, for Marx, ideology is not simply a false consciousness, but the correct consciousness of a false world. In covering up its injustice multiculturalism at least indirectly testifies to the need for such a cover-up, and in the false harmony it preaches, there is nonetheless the desire for happiness, for a better world.20 In all this confusion, clearly one value keeps us going: the Otherness of the Other. His/her hunger, as Levinas says, is sacred. But can this hunger be approached, as Levinas believes, “objectively” (TI 201, quoted above)? Does it provide us with a firm standard? Couldn’t it be confusing us in its turn? For human beings not only need to be kept alive. The food one offers to humans should, lest one treats them as cattle, be spiced. Alain Finkielkraut, who considers himself a disciple of Levinas,21 comes across this complication without noticing that it makes the whole edifice tumble. “The reverse side of the humanitarian concern with suffering,” he says, “is a disdain for everything in life which does not let itself be 19

Nothing of what I write here should be taken as a denial of this claim. Multiculturalism is certainly also a matter of socio-economic inequality, deprivation, etc., and there is always a risk that the theme of “the Other’s difference” will camouflage what is, in fact, going on – as in the often heard remark, “If they are unemployed, this is due to their refusal to assimilate,” the suggestion being that they are to blame for their non-participation in a labour-market that is not in itself “segregated” or “dual,” but open to all. However important these issues of distributive justice are, and however unfit a phenomenological approach may be for accessing them, I do not believe they are the only ones at stake in our culture’s obsession with the Other. There is, as I will try to show, also a “metaphysical” side to this desire to do ethical or political justice to the Other. 20 I am thinking here of the lesson Adorno taught us, for example in his wonderful piece on Veblen: “The person who laughs at the image of beatitude is closer to the powers that be than is the image, however distorted by power and glory it may be” (Theodor W. ADORNO, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber). Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1981, p. 92). 21 Besides being the author of a beautiful book on Levinas (La Sagesse de L ’amour. Paris, Gallimard (Folio/essais), 1984), Finkielkraut belongs to the few who have tried not just to write “on” Levinas, but to develop a Levinasian approach to a number of a contemporary issues (as in the pages we shall discuss here). It is the honesty with which he devoted himself to this task which at times, as I hope to show, makes him raise issues that cannot be conceptually accommodated within Levinas’ own conceptual frame.

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reduced to Life in the biological sense of the term,”22 And in a chilling passage in which he protests “against this Olympian indifference toward a peasant humanity” (CC 88) – a humanity that is more than such a biological life, that has all sorts of customs and practices which divide it – he writes, “To save lives, such is the global task of the doctor without frontiers; he is too busy filling the hungry mouth with rice, to still have time to listen to what it is trying to say” (HP 128). Finkielkraut protests against a uniformization in suffering. In the end, pain would be the final equalizer; we all moan and cry the same way. The Olympian indifference about which he is so shocked would be, in fact, a refusal to take into account “the meaning which people give to their existence” (CC 88) – a meaning about which, needless to say, they do not agree. Spices are important, but it is hard to prove why they are. Like everything important in life, they are without reason. We do not bury our dead simply because we are afraid of epidemics – there would then be more efficient ways of getting rid of them, some sort of garbageservice, perhaps. It is important how we bury them; and on this, there is no agreement – not even among the monotheistic religions. We can, of course, give some sort of “explanation” for our practices (e.g., for being buried on your right side, with your head facing Mecca rather than Madrid), but the process will soon come to a fruitless end (why the head and not the feet? why lying on the right side, rather than on the left or the back?) Such things are extremely important (hence the existence of ‘multicultural’ graveyards), but we cannot “prove” why they are. They are, so to speak, both necessary and arbitrary. They are like that because they are like that. And it may not always be pleasant to be confronted with our incapacity to fully argue for what is truly important to us, to fully account for those practices that constitute the inner core of our intimacies. It is as if this incapacity is somehow improper. How can what is most our own be something we so poorly possess that we cannot even give conclusive argument for it?

22

Alain FINKIELKRAUT, Comment peut-on être Croate? Paris, Gallimard, 1992, p. 88. Henceforth CC. With HP I will refer to the more recent L’Humanité perdue: Essai sur le siècle. Paris, Seuil, 1996, for which I will provide translations of my own. Whereas the first chapter of this book is entirely in line with Levinas, Finkielkraut seems in later parts to be taking a direction which, to my mind, ought to have forced him to reconceive his allegiance to Levinas.


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Finkielkraut’s protest against a humanitarianism that does not allow “the words [of the Other] to reach the domain of its care” (HP 128) is no doubt justified. But what exactly is happening here? Why do these words not reach me? Could it be that precisely because these words do not reach me, I prefer to stuff the Other’s mouth with rice? What is the status of this “not reaching,” this “not hearing”? Is there, then, some sort of appeal, which – contrary to what Levinas had told us – I can not hear? Can there be some sort of insensitivity or impassibility between me and the Other that points to something other than the attempt to sedate/anaesthetize a prior sensitivity? Could it be that, if there is something in this life of the Other to which I do not respond, this lack of response on my part is something quite different from any attempt to muffle what in me has already responded? Insensitivity, impassibility, non-response: could it be that what announces itself here, should not be understood in the privative mode? Is any other way to understand these non-responses possible, however, once one has embraced (like Finkielkraut, in the same book) the principles of a philosophy like that of Levinas – a philosophy which has, perhaps not by accident, expressed a similar disdain for what is peasant in humanity and sung the praise of Socrates “who preferred the town to the countryside and the trees”? Here is the passage immediately preceding this sentence, where Levinas seems to speak from his heart: “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist [Levinas is rendering here what he sees as Heidegger’s view], is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light [supreme provocation against Heidegger] technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the Place. Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative. It is not a question of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate. Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding the Place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situations in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity” (DF 232-3). Let us linger with this passage, for it is crucial if we are to understand why Finkielkraut may be, perhaps without realizing it, raising an issue that can only be taken seriously once one leaves the alternatives that

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Levinas allows here. As Levinas sees it, the choice is either being “attached” to or “implemented” in a landscape, a Place, a climate – in short, being en-rooted – or being without such attachment. This latter “unrootedness,” however, is no mere absence. It is not, for Levinas, a handicap, but a positive capacity: the ability to leave behind all such roots. To truly perceive the Other as a human being presupposes that one is wrenched out of one’s native world – that the ties by which that world holds us are broken. It thus presupposes an emancipation: a doing away with that mancipium that holds us in its spell.23 Technology can break that “grip” by situating us in a space in which the division between the autochthonous and the allochthonous no longer makes sense. Hence, it is surely no coincidence that Levinas never employs the latter term in reference to the Other. Whereas the I is said to be autochthonous – “enrooted in what it is not [and yet] within this enrootedness, independent and separated” (TI 143) – the Other is never referred to as the one belonging to a different (allo) soil (chthoon). He or she is, instead, consistently called a Stranger, someone without a homeland (apatride) who is “outside the situation in which he or she is placed.” And again this “outside” or this “without” are positive qualifications, not privative ones: it is thanks to them, it seems, that the human face can shine in all its nudity. Whoever is “native” will first have to unlearn his/her inborn tendency to treat that nudity as a lack of something the Other should have in order to belong to the community of those who are “inside.” To overcome the division between natives (inside) and strangers (outside of that inside), means to break with the meaning privative reasoning bestows on these terms. Better still, it means to turn this reasoning against itself. For, to be a native – to be “inside” – is in fact itself a shortcoming. It refers to the incapacity to have broken with what Totality and Infinity calls participation. In this condition, one is still part of a whole to which one finds oneself subjected. One is spell-bound, under the spell of some Difference to which one finds oneself attached to the point of being pre-judged, for it is precisely this difference which will render one indifferent to those who seem to lack these very same ties. It is only by breaking its spell – whether with the help of technology, as the 23

For this reading of “e-mancipation,” see Lyotard’s beautiful piece, ‘The Grip,’ in Jean-Francois LYOTARD, Political Writings (trans. Bill Readings et al.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 148-50.


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above quote suggests, or through the appeal of the Other, as other texts tell us24 – that one is able to accede to that “non-indifference” which Levinas sees as our deepest essence: responsibility. The above is as fair a comment as I could give on the passage that concerns us here and in which, as I now hope to have shown, Levinas indeed speaks from his heart. Leaving the polemics with Heidegger aside,25 one can perhaps begin to see why Finkielkraut, in complaining about the “Olympian indifference toward a peasant humanity,” may have raised an issue that does not fit at all well with the way Levinas would want to approach this issue. Indeed, whereas for Levinas “peasantism” breeds “indifference” – both categories characterizing the “native” – Finkielkraut seems to see in “peasantism” something that characterizes both my humanity and that of the Other. There is, as it were, something “peasant” about the human condition as such. Whether it be that of beings who live in the town or in the countryside, the human condition would appear to owe its humanity to what Finkielkraut – with another (and to my mind: better) metaphor – calls “an inscription in a world.” Without such an inscription a human being would be reduced to anonymity, i.e., would be “nothing more than a collection of bodily functions, nothing else than the anonymous organic life that pulsates in him” (HP 128). One would be what Finkielkraut elsewhere calls a “victim” – “a human being severed from its surroundings and its roots, who no longer has a spot and a situation of his own, whose essence and possibilities are taken away from him” (HP 132). Our question then is this: is the Levinasian Other such a victim? If so, is this due to an implicit naturalization of his/her otherness? Let us not discuss this question straightaway, but try to clear up the apparent confusion of tongues that may make it difficult to hear what exactly is being addressed by it.

24

There is, in fact, no tension between these texts, for technology and science would not be possible without the appeal of the Other first calling into question my “possession” of the world (see TI 60ff.). 25 One reason why I think this is not the place to go into this, is that, as I have shown elsewhere in this volume (chapters 2 and 7), one should raise the same kind of questions, which I try to raise here against Levinas, when reading Heidegger who, more often than not, is merely presenting us with a mirror image (and its concomitant inversion) of Levinas’ position.

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6. A CONFUSION OF TONGUES ? The preceding section has left us with two views on what it would mean for humanity to be “peasant” and on what it would mean to give up or to be forced to give up that condition. For Finkielkraut, severance from one’s surrounding and roots means loss of one’s humanity. For Levinas, such a severance, in allowing us “to perceive men outside the situations in which they are placed”, constitutes our humanity. Is there more here than a confusion of tongues? Let us look a bit closer at what Levinas means by this “outside” – and at the chain of oppositions it undeniably functions within: outside/inside, town/countryside, human face/ phenomenon, nakedness/enrootedness, outside a situation/defined by a situation, absorbed and defined by a context/breaking through a context. In relation to this notion, how should we understand what Finkielkraut has called humanity’s “inscription”? What is it, in Levinas’ words, for the Other to be “naked,” a face “bereft of all context,” “destitute,” “without a home,” “without any cultural ornament” (e.g., BPW 53)? Is this not the very thing Finkielkraut denounces as the situation of the victim – of those (to recall our earlier image) whose mouths get stuffed while being simultaneously cut loose from what is truly important to them, their “surroundings and roots”? What roots? How does Levinas’ “nakedness” relate to Finkielkraut’s “enrootedness”? Consider, for example, this passage from Humanisme de l’autre homme: “The Other who manifests himself in a face as it were breaks through his own plastic essence, like a being who opens the window on which its own visage was already taking form. His presence consists in divesting himself of the form which does already manifest him. His manifestation is a surplus over the inevitable paralysis of manifestation. This is what the formula ‘the face speaks’ expresses. The manifestation of a face is the first disclosure. Speaking is before anything else this way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form, an opening in the openness” (ibid.). Does Levinas say something different from Finkielkraut here and, if so, what is at stake in this difference? Answering this question will help bring into sharp focus the issue of the relation between responsibility and irresponsibility – and the question of the place of ethics – that ultimately concerns me here.


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First, what precisely is Levinas saying in the passage above? The Other does not simply appear, but “breaks through his/her plastic essence,” is “behind” and more than the form (morphè) that makes this appearance intelligible to me. Were I to reduce the Other to this form, I would commit an injustice, lock the Other up within contours, between borders (fines), de-fine him/her. The Other speaks, for example, and I hear what s/he says. But s/he cannot be reduced to the Said of his/her Saying. S/He is what perpetually breaks open that which is said. Not just that every saying sediments into a “said” which can subsequently be un-said again.26 The Other is more than this to-and-fro between saying and said. Independently of the content of the speech, the Other is this saying which reaches out towards me. Regardless of its content this saying itself concerns me, touches me. “Stripped of its very form, a face shivers in its nudity. It is a distress. The nudity of a face is a denuding, and already a supplication in the straightforwardness that looks at me. But this supplication is an exigency; in it humility is joined with heights. The ethical dimension of visitation is thereby indicated” (BPW 54). We should ask ourselves, however, why this face “shivers.” Clearly, it seems to be missing that form, which the preceding quote tells us was too narrow to contain the face. This would be its height: it is always breaking through the visage that seems to announce it. But if the face divests itself of such form, if it is in surplus over its form, why or how then can it be “in distress” once it is stripped of it? How can it be in need of that which it has just stripped itself of? It would seem that, in terms of the chain of oppositions mentioned earlier, the nakedness of the face is not – contrary to Levinas’ own suggestion – on either “side.” That is, it cannot be defined by a situation, but it suffers from not being able to be so defined. It does not simply fall “outside of a context, a situation, a form.” Rather, it is not, to begin with, ever fully inside. If one thinks this through and starts to play a bit with Levinas’ metaphors, instead of opposing

26

On the “Saying” and the “Said,” see the extremely dense pages in OB 45 ff. I should add that I somewhat abuse Levinas’ distinction, since in OB the “saying/said” is used in relation to the one under an ethical appeal, rather than the Other. But the point I wish to make still stands, as will hopefully become clear from what follows. It is important not to miss the formal homology between this distinction saying/said and the (better known) one between face/form. In both cases there is a first term (saying, face) whose status is independent of its further intrication with the second term (said, form).

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“nakedness” to “fully dressed,” we should perhaps compare “nakedness” with “not quite properly dressed.” Think of the unease with which one discovers oneself not to be dressed properly for a specific occasion. Being either over- or underdressed, one feels as if one were naked. Or take the unease of our “peasants” who suddenly finds themselves amongst “townsfolk” (and any member of a minority group could, of course, find him- or herself in the position of such a “peasant”). The townsfolk are not just dressed differently. They “behave” differently. They have different manners. Moving amongst them our “peasants” feel like Chaplin in that hilarious scene where he has swallowed a whistle and now inadvertently keeps making shrieking sounds that call everyone’s attention to him.27 Chaplin is “out of tune,” just like our metaphorical peasants are “out of place.” Both are unable to disappear by participating in the symbolic circuits of those around him/her.28 Something about

27

I borrow this example of Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) from a 1935 text by Levinas which has only very recently been translated (De l’évasion. Paris, Fata Morgana, 1982, p. 87; On escape (trans. B. Bergo). Stanford, Stanford U.P., 2003, p. 65). But I am putting my own twist on it as should be clear from the context. In general, a lot of what I support is much closer to Levinas’ early work than to his later texts. As I have tried to explain elsewhere (Truth and Singularity, passim), his early notion of the il y a can be developed and taken up in the view of the decentred/inscribed subject that I am operating with here. 28 Surely it takes little imagination to see that participation in the “public space” (Arendt), e.g., for minorities, would amount to partaking in a symbolic circuit that would not make one feel “out of place” in the sense suggested here. Although I cannot work this out here, I think this is the way to take up the spirit of Arendt’s “antiexpressivism” with regard to the public space. Instead of treating it as a realm in which what already exists in private can be expressed without distortion, what matters for Arendt is that the light in which things become public has a productivity of its own. It involves a depersonalisation reached, paradoxically, by the discipline expected from those who enter that realm to impose upon their private self a persona, a mask required for appearing in a public (e.g., On Revolution. London, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 107). Further discussion would need to point out at least the following: 1) how this antiexpressionist view is entirely in track with Derrida’s criticism of the phonologocentric supplements; 2) how that “discipline” – Arendt’s “courage” (Between Past and Future. London, Penguin Books, 1993, p. 156) – is not so much a personal virtue, but something that is supported by the symbolic order itself (which does not merely mirror what precedes it, but instead actively informs and symbolizes it); 3) how this latter function, although open to criticism and strife (whose symbolic order?), can never be reduced to the result of such strife (Foucault’s infamous inversion of Clausewitz:


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them sticks out – something they can no longer cover with their symbolic presence because they have lost the possibility of being “part of” their “surroundings,” not like being a cog in a machine but by having a part to play. Of course, one could object that this is exactly what Levinas has in mind. Whoever finds themselves in such a situation is in distress (think of the stateless persons Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism). And thus a face: naked, destitute, etc. And yet, this objection is, as will become increasingly clear, off target. At the very least, we should wonder whether it doesn’t beg the question. For the story of the peasant who is too dressed to be naked, but too unfittingly dressed to be clothed is, of course, nothing less than a parable about human rootedness. If we are not trees and humanity not a forest, as Levinas says (DF 23), perhaps this is so, first and foremost, not because humans lack roots (again the chain of oppositions, naked/rooted, etc.)29 but because they do not have the kind of roots that trees and plants have. They have, as it were, both “too many” and “not enough” roots – too many to be called “naked” in the Levinasian sense and “not enough” to be put on par with trees or plants. In other words, humans are, as Finkielkraut says, “inscribed” (CC 88) – but their misfortune is that they cannot read their own inscription. Or in a different metaphor – and recall our earlier account of burial practices – they are attached to ‘something’ which they cannot simply break away from or (e.g., argumentatively) gain access to, and which thereby makes their attachment seem somehow ultimately arbitrary. It is this ‘something’ that Finkielkraut’s “hungry mouths” would prefer to talk about, even if – or better, precisely because – they will never succeed in doing so, for they will never have the kind of distance toward it that is required to truly talk “about” it. They want, for example, to talk “politics” would then be “war carried on by other means”, cf. chapter 2); 4) how the persona involves a mask that protects us against what is private to our private “selves” (a point I deal with in Truth and Singularity, pp. 371 ff. and will come back to in chapter 8 and the conclusion). 29 Whereas the Other for Levinas is without roots and hence “naked,” anyone under appeal is by that appeal, as it were, uprooted, i.e., put in a position where they can be ashamed of whatever ties them to (their) being. We would thus, Levinas reasons, differ from plants or trees that have the kind of roots that never question their place, sucking and feeding without shame of depriving what grows next to them.

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“about” their inscription in the world. They want to talk “about” what imports them but what they do not understand – about, for example, “What it means to be a Croatian” and not just a victim. They want to talk about this because they are not defined or absorbed by it and yet cannot ever simply deny it. Somehow it holds import and yet they do not manage to say how.30

7. NOT LEAVING ONESELF Shocking as it may be, one cannot but wonder, then, whether Levinas’ way of linking ethics to the face does not directly lead to the kind of humanitarian indifference that Finkielkraut is so concerned about – filling hungry mouths with rice so that we no longer have to listen to what they try to say. These mouths are, as it were, not de-contextualized enough, not “urban” enough, but are overcome by a “peasant-like” embarrassment that prevents them from striding at ease amongst the naked and context-less.31 They are badly dressed, but too proud or shy to cast away their ill-fitting attire. To be sure, they too speak because there is something they are not quite able to express, but not because they are more than the form of their manifestation, a mere saying that cannot be exhausted by any said (i.e., that springs forth from an Infinity that has left its trace in them, and that, like Descartes’ Idea of the Infinite – to which Levinas compares the excess of the face over the form (TI 50 ff.) – is too big to be contained in its ideatum). It would rather seem that they suffer from a said – Finkielkraut’s inscription – that their saying never quite manages to exhaust. And perhaps not because it is too big. Or too small. But because, rather than being “an opening in the openness” (BPW 53), it is something that one never succeeds in opening since, so to speak, it constitutes a closure that is more original than the relation between concepts of openness and closure with which Levinas operates. Such a closure one cannot understand in the privative mode as what closes off a primordial openness. It is not for nothing that Levinas in a

30

As I have shown elsewhere (Truth and Singularity, pp. 11-14) it is nationalism’s lure to promise that those who listen well will finally understand this ‘how’. 31 I am here referring back to the metaphors Levinas himself introduced in the quote about Socrates “who preferred the town to the countryside” (DF 233) which I gave in full above.


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terrible passage launches the rallying cry that one should “denounce” (!) “everything that constructs itself as an interior world, as interiority”.32 For him closure – any interruption of the direct connection between me and the other – has a demonic dimension. It is always an attempt to refuse the goodness of the Good in which one is already situated. It is the beginning of all violence – “the Luciferian lie” of Evil pretending to be the “contemporary, the equal and the twin of the Good” (CPP 138). For Levinas, whatever from within the order of the Good appears as Evil can never be anything other than a privation. War is a privation of peace: “the violent one does not leave himself” (DF 9). Not leaving oneself, according to this reasoning, would be both voluntary and a lost cause, for the appeal of the Other has already made me leave myself. As Levinas says, “I cannot evade by silence the discourse which the epiphany that occurs as a face opens” (TI 201, quoted above). Accept this reasoning and of course the problem I am trying to formulate is spirited away. Let me formulate it nonetheless. What if, as Finkielkraut fears, the fact that “the words [of the Other] do not reach the domain of my care,” is not simply the result of my having fallen short of my ethicalhumanitarian intentions? What if the Other, who does not appear in my world like any other phenomenon, is not only, as Levinas is fond of saying, a “hole” in that world (BPW 60)? What if there is already a hole in that Other, too33 – a hunger one cannot satisfy? What if there is a hole in the Other’s words – an “inscription” around which it keeps moving, perhaps in an attempt to keep it in place, like a traumatic event one tries to contain so as not to be flooded by it? And what if the shivering of the face – its being in need of a form, a context... – has to do with some such hole in any form, context... which it would try to seek solace from? Then humanity’s split into “natives and strangers,” contrary to what Levinas suggests (DF 232), may not be the price one fatally has to pay once one starts toying with “the spirits of the Place.” To see why the price need not be paid, let us see what happens if we begin by giving these “spirits of the Place” another chance. It is clear that they have their abode in that “hole” in the world that we are trying to address here. That hole or these holes? Why would we assume that there 32

E. LEVINAS, Dieu, la Mort, et le Temps. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1993, p. 219. I owe this phrasing to a recent book by the psychoanalyst Daniel SIBONY, Don de soi ou partage de soi? Le drame Levinas. Paris, Odile Jacob, 2000, pp. 106-7.

33

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is only one such hole, one such “inscription” or that all of its occurrences somehow form a single “accord”?34 Why assume that there is some connection, some secret code that ties all these inscriptions – these “enigmas” as Laplanche would say35 – together? What if the inscription that has marked the Other is not the same as the one that has marked me? Could there, then, be between me and the Other a silence that is not the reverse side of my refusal to leave myself – a silence which is not voluntary and, instead of a lost cause, a cause for deep concern? And why would that concern have to be ethical? Finkielkraut is perhaps too much a disciple of Levinas to let his doubts carry him as far as this last question. For him, humanitarianism fails because it does not allow the words of the Other to reach the domain of its care. As a good Levinasian he is indignant over that barrier and that indifference that deprives itself from what is nonetheless within its capacity: the subject is, in its deepest essence, a non-indifference (e.g., OB 123), – it is, in its last reality, a for-the-Other. A for-the-Other or a for-the-other? It is interesting that, not unlike Kierkegaard,36 Levinas never seems to have raised that question that is clearly at the heart of Finkielkraut’s doubts – and our own. It is the question of irresponsibility to which, through all these digressions, we have finally made our way. Let me bring together the bits and pieces we collected en route. If the Other is not “without cultural ornament” (BPW 53), this is perhaps because s/he is “not without” cultural ornament37 – it is never 34

This is, in fact, what Levinas explicitly has in mind when he speaks of another “kinship” than the one which ties us to one another through blood and descent. I will come back on this later. Let me just point out that this alternative can only be bought at the price of a “theologisation” of the self – a price Levinas is willing to pay to avoid the dangers of a naturalization (Transcendence et Intelligibilité. Genève, Labor et Fides, Centre Protestant d’Etudes, 1984, p. 26, 39: “le psychique et originellement le théologique!”), and which I am trying to avoid paying. 35 Jean Laplanche distinguishes an “enigma” from a “riddle” (which can be solved) in his Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse: La séduction originaire. Paris, P.U.F. (Quadrige), 1994. 36 See chapter 8 below. 37 For Levinas’ presentation of the Other as a being “without cultural ornament,” see the beginning of the preceding section. Here, I am not only denying that claim (it is not the case that...), but I am trying to break out of the opposition “with/without” that Levinas employs. The “not without” which I, in turn, oppose to it cannot be situated at either side of the with/without; it is, as will become clear, a syntagm that is neither


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enough to fully absorb the other, and always too much to simply ignore. Or again, in opposition to Levinas’ idea that the alterity of the other cannot be the result of its “other” characteristics but must be antecedent to them (e.g., TO 83-4; RTB 49), perhaps one should rather say that the alterity of the other, although not reducible to his/her characteristics, is also not detachable from them. The other is not defined by them, and it is exactly this “not” which makes someone an other, not just to me, but to him/herself – that is, the bearer of an inscription that s/he cannot read. This inscription is not just some thing, for then it could appear and be read; but it is not nothing either. It is the “not nothing” of human rootedness. For example (I will give others later), to capitalize upon the title of one of Finkielkraut’s books, there is no answer to the question “Comment peut-on être Croate?” (or Flemish or British or...), but it is a question nonetheless. Even before I do not reply to the appeal of the Other, something in this Other already does not reply to him or her. This “something that is not a thing” seems somehow powerful enough to compete with Levinas’ infinite for contesting ontology’s pride of place. Indeed, many, if not all, of the locutions Levinas reserves for ethics (the other-in-me, the soul, etc.) could be put to good use in trying to spell out the structure of this other “otherness” whose name is not “the Good” (= the Infinite = God) but something that seems to complicate that Good (and these subsequent equations) in an essential way.38 For it would seem to complicate Levinas’ views on (ir-)responsibility. To rephrase: before I am or am not responsible for the Other, there would already appear to be an “irresponsibility” in the Other – something “in” the Other that already does not respond to him/her, something which makes such an Other other “to” itself. Or rather, this “something” would appear to invest the Other’s self-hood with an ineliminable exteriority such that this “self can never be possessed or fully interiorized. Hence, if this Other is indeed other to me, then what ontological nor ethical. It belongs to what I have called elsewhere mè-ontology (Truth and Singularity, p. 396). I will return to this notion in the conclusion to this volume. 38 One way of reading Lacan’s famous seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7 (trans. Dennis Porter). London, Routledge, 1992, would be to compare what he there refers to as “das Ding” to an infinite that, although absolute, cannot be equated with either “God” or the Good. My point stands, however, without this backing by Lacan who nevertheless has been an enormous inspiration to me.

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makes it other “to” itself – that is, its inscription – does not overlap with what makes me other “to” myself (i.e., my inscription). Instead of there being an “accord” between us, which I am reminded of by the shame that befalls me in front of that Other, there would rather be an unease, a discomfort between us – an affect – that is not eo ipso ethical. There would be between us an irresponsibility that is not the absence of an ethical responsibility – not a manco or a lack of, but something sui generis that complicates ontology (i.e., this something is not a thing, an on and it escapes logos) without giving ethics pride of place. For this some‘thing’ is not the Good. It does not deflect the rays by which it attracts me toward the Other who thus becomes involved with that strange authority that puts him/her above me.39 The Good, as it were, has exploded, and all that is left of it is a plurality of inscriptions that complicate the relations between us and force us to come to terms with the whole problem of human rootedness (which is also an uprootedness, and not as its opposite), the whole “enigma” of the Place (on which Heidegger, by the way, was perhaps a bit more subtle than Levinas seems to think – and above all a bit braver).40 One excludes these problems by forcing them on the Procrustean bed of privation. It is remarkable that Levinas, who was perhaps more suspicious of this notion than many other of our contemporaries who spend the night at this inn, should nevertheless have done exactly that. For again, one need only take up his own formulae to point to what is sui generis or positive (non-privative) about the structure of these problems. 39

For this conception of the Good which is epekeina but not hoos eromenon, see GCM, pp. 68ff. 40 When I say “braver,” I am thinking of certain pages, e.g., in the lecture course on Der Ister, in which Heidegger at least makes an effort to think what particularities (like “Germany”) could stand for (see Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”: GA 53 (Summerterm 1942). Frankfurt a.M., Klostermann, 1984, e.g. pp. 67ff. Needless to say, Heidegger’s analysis is not without its problems. For the “more subtle,” see e.g., Derrida’s early remark in his justly famous ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’: “The Site, therefore, is not an empirical Here but always an Illic: for Heidegger, as for the Jew and the Poet. The proximity of the Site is always held in reserve, says Hölderlin as commented on by Heidegger” (145). But, of course, one would need to patiently deconstruct all of Heidegger’s statements about this “reserve,” and more specifically focus on all those passages in which he seems to bring it into relation with an unwillingness, typical of the Germans, to let it come out of its hiddenness.


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For example, that there would be something in Others that does not respond to them, that confronts them with a question which is an enigma not a riddle, is precisely the condition that allows it to function as an inscription. If it would respond, a question would not remain. “Man” or “Woman” would turn into a tree and humanity into a forest.41 In short, although what I am calling, in a play on words, “irresponsibility” here is indeed the absence of a response, this absence should not be understood in the privative mode. For, abusing Levinas’ original intuition for my purposes, it is precisely as this absence that the enigma of the “inscription” which remains uninscribeable is, so to speak, present (this is how Levinas formulates the otherness of the other!).42 There would appear, then, to be in the Other – and not just in the Other but in me – in the human being, something like an “unrest”43 that is different from the absence of rest – an “unrest” that keeps our speech on the move, without ever being moved by it, an unmovedness that is at heart of human misery but also, as we shall see, of human dignity. The human being is a being for whom the source of its dignity is at the same time the source of its misery. In this sense, humans are “beyond” help – for they seem to suffer from some‘thing’ (not a thing) for which there is no final cure.

8. BEYOND “HELP” – THE LOGIC OF APPRECIATION Above I have suggested that Levinas’ approach to the otherness of the Other is in danger of naturalizing it by conceiving of this otherness in such a way that it is no longer clear why the face of the Other should not only be what is “above me” (the Other’s dignity), but also what comes

41

It is this sort of metamorphosis that is the price of any totalitarian-nationalist conception of the “unity” of “the People”. See Claude Lefort’s superb analyses in John B. THOMPSON (ed.), The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986, pp. 237-306 and Democracy and Political Theory. (trans. David MacEy). Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988, esp. pp. 1-55 and 163-282. 42 See the passage commented on in the second section above: “this absence of the Other is precisely his/her presence qua Other” (TO 99). 43 In Dutch which, as is well-known, is the only language, apart from Greek, in which one can truly philosophise, the word for ‘unrest’ (onrust) also means the ‘balance wheel’ in a clock which keeps it going.

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“from underneath” (the Other’s misery). But one can, of course, think of situations where the Other is not, as I suggested, “beyond help,” but so destitute that the only thing he or she needs, is just that: help. These are the situations – by no means imaginary – to which Finkielkraut is referring when he speaks of “hungry mouths.” There are, for example, homeless people, people who literally shiver for lack of food, clothing, shelter – people who would be happy to have their mouths stuffed with rice. These are people, that is, who have fallen below the threshold of humanity, who have no time to care about their lack-cum-surplus of roots, the meaning of their existence, the “necessary arbitrariness” of the things they care about. These are people reduced to what Levinas, in another context,44 calls “a famished stomach that has no ears, capable of killing for a crust of bread” (TI 118) – people whose needs are perhaps no longer “in their power” (TI 116), who no longer “thrive on their needs,” who are not “happy for their needs” (TI 114), in short, people for whom the beautiful analysis of human need and enjoyment that Levinas gives us in the second section of Totality and Infinity would no more hold true than the picture we have been trying to save from its privative clutches. These people are, no doubt, in need of help. Reduced to “life in the biological sense of the term,” to “a collection of bodily functions” (Finkielkraut), these are lives “dissolved into a shadow,” “reduced to pure and naked existence, like the existence of the shades Ulysses encounters in Hades” (TI 112). Is it wise, is it at all reasonable, to turn these people into the paradigm of an otherness that is supposed to shake the foundations of Western philosophy? Is it wise to forget, in the name of these needs, that there is a distinction between “helping and appreciating” and that the otherness of the Other may not just be on one side of this distinction? Is it wise, is it at all reasonable, to situate the relation between me and the Other within the dimension of helping and to first forget and then condemn as “violence,” “closure,” “refusal to open up” all the difficulties and the complexities that follow once one passes the threshold of help into appreciation?

44

In the following lines I shall be giving quotations from the second part of Totality and Infinity in which Levinas gives a highly original analysis of “enjoyment” as a basic dimension of life. The quotes should be understood as pointing to the absence of such a basic enjoyment in the people we are referring to here.


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The distinction between “help” and “appreciation” to which I have been alluding could be formulated in the following terms: “All human beings crave recognition: they hope that others enjoy their company, admire their looks and talk about them with affection. But in some circumstances such considerations cease to matter. If we are famished or in pain, we only desire to be helped.”45 Recognition has to do with appreciation, not with help. One can help someone because that person is in need of help. But one cannot, without “misfiring,” appreciate or recognize someone only to make the person happier. My praise of someone’s talents, of a book written, for example, needs to be sincere. People feel cheated if they find out our praise was merely meant to please. Appreciation, then, in a certain sense, is involuntary. I cannot, without misfiring, simply decide to appreciate someone or to show recognition for something done. It is in this way different from “helping.” But there is still another difference. Whereas “helping” is in a sense “direct,” recognition or appreciation is not. I do not – nor am I expected to – recognize or appreciate a person directly. I recognize or appreciate what they stand for, “care about,” feel connected to, find important, and so on. In general, people want recognition for the things that are “meaningful” to them. Even in the most trivial cases, they rejoice when they find we take an equal interest in just these things, not because we want to please them, but because we are really interested, awestruck, etc., by what they are interested in. Appreciation and recognition are in this sense indirect. They do not immediately connect to those we appreciate or recognize, but to something they feel connected to and find “meaningful.” But it is, of course, because such meaningfulness is never full of meaning enough that people are so interested in others taking it seriously. The meaning we “give” to our existence is never fully given to us. We can never wholly stand back from it, judge it at a distance, compare it with a cold, deliberating gaze to all the other “meaningpackages” from which one tries to choose the best option. We can only do this to a certain extent because what we find meaningful, valuable, etc., is at bottom something that strikes us as meaningful, valuable, etc. 45

Arnold BURMS, ‘Helping and Appreciating,’ in Sander GRIFFIOEN (ed.), What Rights Does Ethics Have? Public Philosophy in a Pluralistic Culture. Amsterdam, VU University Press of Amsterdam, 1990, pp. 67-77, here p. 74.

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The meaningfulness imposes itself on us, “weighs” on us,46 and it is this intimate connection between us and what, for example, we devote our lives to, that makes us so sensitive to praise, criticism, or respect. It is this lack of distance between ourselves and what we find “meaningful” that prevents us from being the impartial and autarkical judge of it. At the same time, it is this lack of distance that makes us so vulnerable. There is no meaningfulness that simply stands on its own, that does not come embedded in some symbolic circuit, in some shared practice of meaning (like burying the dead) whose diverse components refer to one another but cannot, as a whole, be grounded in some independent datum. All of this becomes very clear when the contingency of these practices is highlighted by the fact that, for similar purposes, others are engaged in different practices. This is a difference that, more often than not, makes us so uncomfortable, that we cannot control our irritation – as happened to Levinas himself in what is perhaps his most embarrassing public statement: “I always say – but under my breath – that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing....[t]elevision shows the horrible things happening in South Africa. And there, when they bury people, they dance....That is really some way to express mourning....[I]t supplies us the expression of a dancing civilization; they weep differently” (RTB 149). Enough has been written on this passage, which is by no means a hapax legomenon. 47 But we should ask ourselves not only whether the kind of eurocentrism that is implied here and that has estranged even Levinas’ most faithful commentators is simply an accident de parcours. We should ask also whether it does not point, in all its shocking honesty, to an inevitable blind spot in Levinas’ attempt to put ethics “before 46

I owe the idea that values “weigh” on us to Levinas himself, who seems, however, to restrict his remark to the one value of the Good (as he understands it). See OB 98n28 and 123. 47 See the references in Robert BERNASCONI, ‘Who is my neighbor? Who is the Other? Questioning ‘the Generosity of Western Thought’,’ in Ethics and Responsibility in the Phenomenological Tradition: The Ninth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, 1992, pp. 1-31, who drew my attention to this passage, which I discuss together with Bernasconi’s reading of it in Truth and Singularity, pp. 347 ff.. See also Sonia SIKKA, ‘How Not to Read the Other: ‘All the Rest Can Be Translated’,’ Philosophy Today 1999 (43:2), pp. 195-206.


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culture.”48 Rather than become indignant over Levinas’ reaction here, let us consider whether this reaction does not point to a different relation with the alterity of the Other than the one implied by his philosophy. What if the otherness of the Other can make me feel uncomfortable, ill at ease, even before it can make me feel shame? I would interpret this prior discomfort along the lines of the foregoing, as following from the fact that the other’s otherness confronts me in turn, and without even intending to do so, with an otherness in me. For if both me and the Other are the bearers of an inscription we cannot read, then both the indirect and involuntary character of the recognition or appreciation we are mutually looking for puts a strain on our relation from the start. The absence of such recognition or appreciation is not simply privative, not a matter of either of us refusing that to which the Other is entitled. For as we have seen, recognition, in contrast to help, does not bear directly on the person demanding it. It bears on something that persons feel connected to, as it were, in spite of themselves – without, that is, being fully clear about it, without having clearly made up their minds about it. Or rather instead of saying “in spite of” one should perhaps say “thanks to” – but then one is referring to a self that has attached itself to persons, inscribed itself on them, before they could decide to do so. It is not a self that one possesses, like one possesses a chair or a house; and it is not separate from the meaning of people’s existence. Both of these “nots” are not privative. One would feel differently connected to such “meaningfulness” should it fully reveal its meaning to the person concerned with it. Did it not have the character of an inscription that persons cannot read by themselves, one would not be as sensitive to the

48

This is a section title in Levinas’ ‘Meaning and Sense,’ see BPW, 57. When speaking of “inevitable blind spot” I am thinking of what Heidegger has taught us about the “unthought” which every thinking has as its shadow. As I suggested before (chapter 4), to truly read philosophers, it does not suffice to think along with them. For the unthought is theirs: it is what allows them to think, which they do not have to think. It is a grace for authors, but a curse for a readers if one fails to see it – one will then become a “follower,” losing the separation needed to think for oneself. Surely part of the reason why the philosophical scene is that much divided into “schools” is through a lack of respect for the asymmetry between author and those who read them. Admiration without resentment presupposes that one breaks with the presumption of symmetry at work behind all such “spokespersonship.” See my ‘Philosophy and Pluralism’, Philosophy Today, 2004 (48), pp. 107-19.

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reaction of others. If I already knew by myself the answer to the meaning of this connection others would be able to affirm what I already knew (or be mistaken about it), but they would not be able to hurt me, to make me glow with pride or blush for shame. Perhaps the true attraction of Levinas’ ethics is that it seems to eliminate this distinction between helping and appreciating. All the examples Levinas gives seem to resort to the category of “help” (the orphan, the homeless, the hungry, the naked), and his conceptualization of the Other, based on these examples, seems to leave no room for the lack of clarity involved in the problem of appreciation and recognition.49 We can ask, then, whether in doing this, Levinas’ philosophy is not one more example of the tendency, characteristic of our age, to let “the ideal of helping function as a paradigm for all human interaction.”50 The concomitant naturalization of the Other would then seem to serve as a neutralization of all “that is precarious and unpredictable in what the Greeks called the human affairs” (HP 132). As Finkielkraut goes on to say, “the reverse side of the ubiquitous compassion is a resistance against the risk to which human plurality exposes all judgment and against the complex problems that follow from such plurality” (HP 133). In substituting the paradigm of help for recognition, in collapsing the kind of plurality implied in the latter for another kind of pluralism implied in the former, Levinas’ philosophy seems not only deeply anti-political,51 but also deeply anti-metaphysical. It eliminates in the human being every kind of solitude – every question that resists being taken up and codified within ethics. Levinas’ Good would “redeem” (OB 11) the violence with which it elected me. It would be a “good violence” (OB 43) that does

49

The one example which I mentioned before and which does not fit in the category of help would be the “After you, sir.” But like the other rules of courtesy it could be analysed differently, as taking both me and the other out of a position of mutual embarrassment. I am thinking of some of Helmuth Plessner’s remarks in his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 2000. 50 BURMS, ‘Helping and Appreciating’, p. 75. 51 I would follow Lefort in his thesis that politics is, at bottom, not just a reflection of the division of society, but an attempt to symbolically regulate it. This holds especially true of democratic politics. I implicitly refer to that conception in my use of “antipolitical.” But one could perhaps say that Levinas has a (very sui generis) theologicalpolitical conception (a thesis which I defend in Truth and Singularity, pp. 274-325).


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away with the “allergy” (TI 197, 203) which I could have toward what is other than me. But it can only do so by first eliminating every other “point of gravitation” (TI 236, 239, 244) in me or the other that might somehow compete with the Good’s. The “non-violence” of the Good presupposes that prior violence of privation by which ethics establishes its authority over any other dimension (ontology, religion, politics...) that might seem to claim a place next to it. Hence the central move by which the “allergy” to otherness becomes described as my unwillingness to respond to the Other, an unwillingness which is interpreted, in its turn, as a lack of response which resists my deepest essence – namely, to be tied and vowed to the Other before I am tied or vowed to myself. It is this “liturgical” definition of the self that constitutes the linchpin holding together all of Levinas’ philosophy and that explains why it is no accident that words like “God,” “creation,” “creaturiality” are much more central to it than some of his more secular commentators would like to admit.52 Of course, once one has accepted the authority of these words in the reading that Levinas gives of them,53 one will have to accept everything that follows. The Other will then not be an obstacle. Instead, he or she will be desired in my shame, for through their appeal, in my assent to the Good this appeal arouses in me, I will meet my “being-created” (TI 104-5; OB 92). In the Other’s face, I will hear the word of God – a God in whose trace we all come,54 and in whose trace we would all unite within the harmonious pluralism of a 52

I discuss the view of John Caputo and other commentators that one can have Levinas without “the non-human back-up” in Truth and Singularity, pp. 235-73. I hold this view to be in error: the Other can only asymmetrically oblige me in the sense Levinas gives to this, iff I am “in my last essence” devoted to him/her. It is this “last essence” to which Levinas’ views on creation refer. One could, of course, drop all reference to that word, but one will, then, already have entered Levinas’ logic. 53 In my mind, the best critical discussion of this reading, both from a Christian and a Jewish point of view, is in Dutch: Ignace VERHACK, ‘Over de moralisering van ‘het verlangen naar de Oneindige’ bij Levinas,’ [On the moralisation of ‘the desire for the Infinite’ in L.] Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1999 (61:2), pp. 235-69 (English summary: p. 269). 54 Although Levinas only explicitly states that the Other comes in God’s trace (e.g., BPW 59-64), one can argue that since his appeal does not violate me, but is rather recognized by something in me, I too must somehow come in His trace. Again (see note 52) this is supported by Levinas’ views on “creation” which like the Freudian “trauma” comes in “two times” (see chapter 4 above).

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“kinship” (OB 177) that is otherwise than being – not determined by blood ties but by a Good that has devoted us toward one another. We will all be children of the same “Father.”55 It is perhaps no coincidence that it should be this thought which leads Levinas to take a stance against the violence implied in racism, which for him seems to be a prototype of ethical Evil. Let me end by contrasting his approach, which rests on a privative definition of irresponsibility, with the non-privative one I have been suggesting here. We may then be able to understand a bit better what the speaker’s benefit in our age’s return to ethics could be.

9. “NOT WITHOUT” QUALITIES – RACISM RECONSIDERED For Levinas, of course, racism is an example of the denial of the otherness of the Other. Or rather, it is a reduction of that otherness to an otherness of a different type, namely, the non-human otherness of a totality, of a species in which Otherness loses its singularity and is simply treated as one more of a kind. The Other is not approached qua face, but reduced to its outward appearance, to its “form” – to the characteristics that make people recognizable as other, as of another “kind,” as having such or such qualities that make them belong to a race different from my own and inferior to it. The Other is no longer a man – this man – or a woman – this woman – but is, as in the famous scene in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom, a “Banto male/female” with no singularity of his/her own. Racist language de-humanizes the Other; it de-faces people by denying them that dignity to which Levinas gives expression by distinguishing the face from the outward visage, from the “form.” Racism denies persons this capacity to “break through” or “rent” the form that announces them. It de-figures them by reducing them to figures that are not so fissured. If it is true that the face is the bearer of that first commandment from which all the others follow, namely, “do not kill me” (TI 197ff.) – that is, do not reduce me to a form, to a phenomenon, for I am what escapes all phenomenality – then racism is guilty of breaking precisely this

55

In the course of an interview on racism, ‘The Vocation of the Other,’ Levinas speaks to this effect and mentions a “divine filiality of humanity”; “a filiality of transcendence...above any tribal link: to address oneself to God as to a Father” (RTB 109). But see below, the quote on Christianity in note 63.


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commandment. Hence its profound paganism – in biblical terms, its idolization of a golden calf, its incapacity to live with “what does not take body.”56 Racism, then, is an “embodiment” of the Other. It is, of course, against the logic commanding these reductions that Levinas insists, as we have seen, on the dignity of the human face, on what in it is in surplus of any manifestation and resistant to any phenomenalization. Hence also, his insistence that the otherness of the Other cannot be compared to the sorts of otherness which are the consequence of a set of different (“other”) characteristics but is, on the contrary, antecedent to them. To recognize the Other as a face “without any cultural adornment” is to refuse to subject persons to any such reduction which would rob them of their dignity, of their unique irreplaceability. But, what if these Others, like Finkielkraut’s “mouths,” are not satisfied with their status as “abstract human beings,” “without any cultural ornament” (BPW 53)? What if the other refuses to be just another (an Other) human, and insists on being a woman, on being black, homosexual...? And let us be clear: What if they do so, not because they know what being a woman or black (or white or Flemish or Muslim...) means, but precisely because they do not know it and because this not-knowing does not permit them to detach from such inscriptions – inscriptions which, in their own way, thus make them irreplaceable. A person who refuses to be solely recognized as a human being, or as American, and insists on being treated (respected, etc.) as a “black American” does not, if s/he understands the point of such a refusal, introduce therewith the name of a new (sub-)species. Such a person does not want to be reduced to his/her (“different”) skin-color, etc., but also refuses to be detached from it – insists on something that, in not being a thing, escapes full understanding, is not possessed, cannot be determined (the way one determines whether a thing has such or such a quality). “Blackness” is not a quality different from “whiteness,” etc., and to insist on one’s blackness is not the same as claiming to have a quality that is different from other such qualities. If it were, then black persons would share the logic of the racist – that is, reduce themselves to a difference 56

“Dieu ne prend pas corps” – ‘God does not take body’ is a phrase one finds, e.g., in RTB, p. 219, 243; see also Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence. (trans. by Michael B. Smith). London, Athlone Press, 1999, p. 169.

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that fully absorbs them, supplies them with the roots they would otherwise miss, or rather, undoes the perpetual unbalance at the heart of human dignity and human misery, between a “lack of” and “too many” roots. To be black or white, man or woman, straight or gay, this person with that history or that background, speaking this or that language – in short, to be “different” – is to be “inscribed” by a multitude of inscriptions that somehow seem to matter, although they never tell us how.57 Hence, there are also those persons for whom their blackness does not seem to count in the same way as for those who insist on it. They are in neither “better” nor “falser” faith toward their “blackness” than the others,58 as long as they recognize the difference between an uncountable (unreadable) inscription and something that one denies existence to because one literally cannot count (or read...) it. Not reducible to qualities nor detachable from them, the Other is, like me, a “Mensch nicht ohne Eigenschaften” (a person “not without” qualities), plagued by lacking the fully story about what, at the same time, supplies him with an irreducible dignity. This “not without” (need it be stressed?) escapes any privative approach. It is not “nothing” (not even the Heideggerian “Nothing”),59 nor something (some thing). It seems to fall between the folds of an ontological or ethical difference, and yet it seems at the heart of what constitutes for us humans our singularity. It holds the key to the question “who” we are by holding that 57

In classical terms, it is clear that what is involved in such inscriptions is a transcendence that does not speak: one is “tied to” (stands out toward) “something” to which one does not have access as one would to a thing. The “tie” is enigmatic. No matter to what extent race relations, etc., will be linked to questions of distributive justice, they are, to my mind at least, also the place in which what one used to call metaphysics has been forced to hide. Neglecting this metaphysical dimension seems, to me, disastrous: the being of our being would then, e.g., become reduced to our being political. A sequel to this present piece could appropriately be called “Is Politics Fundamental?” It would find support in Nancy’s recent misgivings about our “mundanisation” in, e.g., his La création du monde ou la mondialisation. Paris, Galilée, 2002, esp. pp. 40ff. and in Blanchot’s notion of the “immonde.” 58 This is an allusion to Lewis R. GORDON, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, Prometheus Books (Humanity Book Series), 1995, who is too close to Sartre to take into account the complication I am introducing here. For my elaboration of what is at stake in this discussion, notably the difference between a Sartrian and a Lacanian gaze, see Truth and Singularity, pp. 350ff. and the conclusion to this volume. 59 See chapters 3 and 7.


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key from us and thus preserving the difference between whoness (quis?) and whatness (quid?) that for Arendt is at the heart of the human condition, like that daimon she at times evokes,60 and which all human beings carry on their shoulders without being able to see it, and – as she does not add – without being able not to feel its weight. What this means is that we are perhaps never so truly not alone as when we are (alone with) “ourselves.”61 For then we are stuck with that “something,” with that daimon the presence of which makes us feel uncomfortable precisely because it is not a presence that shows itself to us. It is not something that has meaning insofar as, and because, it appears. It is something that imports us, which matters or counts, notwithstanding the fact that – and precisely because of the fact that – it does not appear and take shape or meaning. To repeat: it is to the “misery” of such a something, which is too much to be nothing and not enough to be a thing, that our “dignity” is related – some “thing” which escapes our grip and which we refuse to give up because we would then loose (part of) our “selves,” like one would loose (part of) oneself in betraying one’s past, and for similar reasons. To betray one’s past is not to betray a piece of our personal history that one could cut out and describe. It is precisely to treat it like that – to cut through the bonds that tie us to it by pretending that these bonds do not exist or that they have lost their meaning for us (whereas in fact, the past never had this meaning and was always – to repeat a famous title – a thing lost, which is not to say that it was meaningless). Inscribed, we were never at the origin of our origins, and between us and them, there could only have been that strange contract which gave birth, a-posteriori, to one of the contractants whose late arrival on the scene seems to have been stipulated by the contract itself. It is this structural delay in humanity that we have been calling inscription, and which Arendt called “daimon” using an image which is perhaps misleading since the body which carries it only starts to take shape as the result of this weight. Racists are perhaps among the first to feel this weight. They are, in a sense, for all their subsequent dishonesty – for all their “bad faith” –

60

Hannah ARENDT, The Human Condition ed.). Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 1998, e.g., pp. 179-80, 193. 61 Again, this is a thought I borrow from the early Levinas but with a similar modification as the one mentioned above (note 27).

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more honest to it in their claim that “colour is important” than those anti-racists for whom it is so “clear” that it is not. But racists are uncomfortable with what thus imports them in singling them out. They cannot live with an inscription they cannot read, and so they decide to read it by making the Other, who confronts them with that lack in them, in its turn, readable. So they reduce the Other to colour and thus not only deny the Other dignity, but also misery. In treating the Other like some other thing, they deprive that Other of the question – the inscription – that troubles him/her. And in denying the Other the ‘pain’ of that question, racists medicate their own, for that reduction allows them to situate what makes them different from that Other within a universe of readable differences which they comprehend and, they imagine, control: the colour which excepts them from others, is in itself exceptional – points to an exception their nature or their culture has granted them (and their “like”) and refused others. This “Evil,” then, is a kind of self-therapy. It anaesthetizes the racists’ discomfort by grafting an Answer on what in them does not respond to them. They are, henceforth, attached to something to which they – and those “like” them – have access. Racists, in thus restoring the unbalance in their unrootedness, are inventing their own cure for the non-ethical and non-ontological irresponsibility we have been trying to point to. They have done away with their decentrement by restoring their position at the centre.62 If, however, we refuse to take into account this nonprivative irresponsibility – for example, by embracing an ethics that insists on seeing in it no more than the refusal to respond – perhaps we are not doing anything substantially different. For if there is no decentrement of the subject except the ethical decentrement which the appeal of the Other forces upon one, then at least there would be a clear choice. Singularisation would not embarrass us with a question we cannot answer; it would, on the contrary, bestow a responsibility upon us that, although a heavy weight, would leave us with something to be done, some course to take, some way to forget, to repress, no longer be troubled by the same ‘pain’ that racists, by taking their deeply unethical

62

In Truth and Singularity I defined decentrement as being attached to some“thing” one 1) cannot get away from, and 2) does not have access to. Accordingly, there are two ways of denying it: by affirming 1) and denying 2) (bad particularism), or by denying 1) and, a fortiori 2) (bad universalism).


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course, have in their own way managed to sedate. We would reason differently of course, but we would both be denying the same troubling message. To be sure, unlike racists, Levinasian anti-racists do not claim an ability to read their inscription. But, they do claim that there is an Inscription which does away with– effaces – all other inscriptions and that it is this effacement which is truly human.63 Allegedly, this Inscription of the Good has always already attached us to the Other and given that attachment a greater weight than any other bond we could have. The response we have already given to the Other’s appeal before we could decide to give it has already driven us outward – and I would add, has already thus allowed us to ignore what in us does not answer to us and a fortiori what in us does not answer to the Other. Privation establishes the authority of this ethics64 – not just over ontology, but over what complicates ontology by escaping its logos. It provides ethics with that speaker’s benefit I mentioned at the beginning of this text. We feel we can, without blushing, engage again in metaphysics, in religion; we can speak again of transcendence. Our lives are meaningful again. And to enjoy this freedom it seems but a little price to pay that we should let ethics imprint its stamp on all these old coins, that ethics should become the only register in which religious transcendence could be experienced, that metaphysical eros should become Desire – for the Other, that the only true transcendence should be ethical transascendence (TI 135).65 If all of this is needed to silence 63

One passage only to illustrate some of the consequences of this view: “Man is his own master, in order to serve man. Let us remain masters of the mystery that the earth breathes. It is perhaps on this point that Judaism is most distant from Christianity. The catholicity of Christianity integrates the small and touching household gods into the worship of saints, and local cults. Through sublimation, Christianity continues to give piety roots.... That is why it has conquered humanity. Judaism has not sublimated idols – on the contrary, it has demanded that they be destroyed” (DF 233-4). 64 It should be clear that I am here (and below) referring to the kind of ethics of the Other that we have been dealing with. But one should not underestimate its scope and the presence of some of its themes, even if implicit, e.g., in discussions about “cloning” where one of the counter-arguments is that one should beware of projecting one’s narcissism (one’s self-image) on the child whose alterity should remain a “surprise.” 65 “Transascendence” and “transdescendence” are terms which go back to a famous article by Jean WAHL, in ID., Existence Humaine et Transcendance. Neuchâtel, Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944, pp. 34-56, 113-59, where exchanges with Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel make it painfully clear that “transdescendence” has not been well defined. In

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the daimons in us, who would want to object? – especially since, from now on, the camps are clear: we can all be multiculturalists now, open ourselves toward the Other, instead of, like racists, doing them- and ourselves the violence of closing off that prior opening. It is good to be on the side of the Good. For then, at least, we know where the Evil is that we need to combat.

Perhaps I have been exaggerating, but such seems to me to be the implicit logic behind our age’s fascination with an ethics of the Other. And it is difficult – it is next to impossible – to question this logic without immediately being submersed in it. We may be so obsessed with ethics that we can only hear whatever is spoken outside it, by first letting it pass through ethics’ filter. Thus I have been trying to point to something that from within this epochal position of ethics cannot really be pointed to: for every time I mentioned a non-privative irresponsibility it will have been heard – how could it not? – as a plea to restrict ethical responsibility, as a plea “against” ethics – and thus as itself an illustration of what ethics means by “irresponsibility.” All of this simply means that one will not break an epoch’s authority by merely raising one’s voice against it. My aim, however, was not to break with an authority. It was to make it visible.

Truth and Singularity (see index) I have appropriated the term to refer to the structure implied in a decentred subjectivity. In terms of this chapter, the relation to the “inscription” is transdescendent. My choice of this term is motivated again by my reworking of Levinas’ notion of the il y a into what, instead of simply denying the personality of the subject, is necessarily impersonal about what constitutes it as a singular person.

III

After Heidegger


CHAPTER SEVEN

INTRANSITIVE FACTICITY ? A QUESTION TO HEIDEGGER

It is no secret that for some time now the wind blowing through contemporary philosophy has changed direction. It comes from an angle that is known as ‘the other’, with or without a capital “O”, neutral or personal, inside or outside the ‘subject’. And it is generally considered to be a good wind: as long as it blows in the ‘subject’s’ face, its effects can only be positive. Skies will clear up, and all sorts of problems will drift away. Thus a book with the fashionable title “Strangers to ourselves” ends with the promising conclusion that “by recognizing our uncanny strangeness” – the ‘other’ in us – “we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside”. The foreigner, Kristeva triumphantly continues, “is within me, hence we are all foreigners”. From which would follow a “cosmopolitanism of a new sort”: “If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners”.1 Needless to say, Lacan thought differently which is why the famous article on “The mirror stage” (‘I am an other’) was followed in the Écrits by a paper on “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis” in which he argued that aggression had its origin in an intrasubjective source, i.e. in just that fission which forever marks a subject that is ‘an other’ and will never manage to be it... This should suffice to draw our attention to a number of presuppositions that seem to characterize what one could call the “alterity” turn in contemporary philosophy. There are at least two: that which is other to the ‘subject’ seems somehow to be in “accord” to it – if it changes the ‘self’, as is generally assumed, it changes it for the better. The Other may be a trauma, as in Levinas, but then a trauma that liberates – that alienates “without alienation”.2 The second presupposition is implied in the first: there must be an other-in-me, of which I was hitherto unaware, which somehow is activated or awakened

1

J. KRISTEVA, Strangers to ourselves (trans. Leon S. Roudiez). New York etc., Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, p. 192. 2 OB 114-5 – on trauma and the ‘other-in-me’ in Levinas and Freud, see chapter 4 above.

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by the other outside me and which is grateful for this outward help to undo it from a self (a ‘subject’) that suppressed it. Hence a corollary: the otherness-in-me is generally assumed to be only a threat to that part of me that stands in the way between me and the other outside of me. In other words: it is an otherness which does not threaten me from within me; it will always allow for there to remain a me to which, or in which, it is other. I will refrain from showing here how this confidence in the theme of ‘alterity’ gets its most serious and rigorous articulation in the philosophy of Levinas, who was perhaps more lucid than others in understanding that what these three presuppositions commonly presuppose is a “theologisation of the self”;3 they have their common basis in our “last reality” which would be “religious” precisely in the sense that, as created beings, we are “initially for the other”, bound to and vowed to him or her before we are bound to ourselves.4 The point I want to make is more general: when I spoke of a new wind blowing through contemporary philosophy I was not exclusively thinking of Levinas’ increasing popularity. I was also referring to how that wind had been blowing against whatever stood in its way in the landscape of Heidegger’s texts. The catch-word here seems to be “existential solipsism” (SZ 188/233). Just a few quotes, almost at random:5 “In its essence Entschlossenheit is linked with what Heidegger calls ‘existential solipsism’ (SZ 188): doxa, relationship to other human beings, and plural debate are excluded from it and relegated into the orbit of concern, i.e., the inauthentic comportment of Dasein. Consequently, the very distinction between inauthentic and authentic seems to coincide with the distinction between public and private. We are justified to suspect here the echo of the Platonic disdain for human affairs”. Whether one agrees or not with this suspicion, its message is clear: Dasein would still be too much of a subject, too “monadic”, or too autarkic, even when reaching out to 3

E. LEVINAS, ‘Discussion Following “Transcendence and Intelligibility”’, in RTB, p. 271: “the psyche is originally theological”. 4 All these expressions can be found in Levinas (e.g. TI 178-9, 253 etc.). For an analysis, see chapter 11 of my Truth and Singularity. 5 I will not reference these quotes, since I give them as tokens of ‘the said’ of our times – that is, as what Foucault in his archaeology named ‘énoncés’ (statements). Their anonymity is, in a sense, essential: what matters is not who said it, but that these are the things that are being said (or written).

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others: “authentic solicitude is a paradoxical relation in that, while seemingly uniting people, it refers them to their radical unrelatedness”. One can, of course, wonder whether people are not in fact radically unrelated. But the point is that, even if one were to do so (as Heidegger himself did), one has already transgressed the boundaries set by a contemporary sensibility. As is shown by another quote. Its author proudly announces that he is “deliberately twisting Heidegger’s words” with the aim of opposing his idea that “the fundamental experience of finitude is non-relational, and all relationality (...) rendered secondary because of the primacy of Jemeinigkeit”. This author confesses himself ‘shocked’: “Authentic Dasein cannot mourn. One might even say that authenticity is constituted by making the act of mourning secondary to Dasein’s Jemeinigkeit. Heidegger writes, shockingly in my view, ‘We do not experience the death of others in a genuine sense; at most we are just ‘there alongside’ (nur ‘dabei’)’ (SZ 239)”. How then should we mourn? What is implied in mourning that Heidegger overlooked or excluded? Here is the twist our author wishes to put on Heidegger’s words who claimed that the corpse of the dead other is “ ‘more’ than a lifeless material thing” (SZ 238/282): “I would say that the fundamental experience of finitude is rather like being a student of pathological anatomy where the dead other ‘ist ein lebloses materielles Ding’. (...) one watches the person one loves (...) die and become a lifeless material thing. (...) This is why I mourn”. The misunderstanding implied here is too obvious to merit comment.6 Mourning, as Derrida has shown7 (and nothing in Heidegger’s text seems to go against this), has precisely to do with the difficulty to ‘let the other go’, to let him/her be dead, and this difficulty would not even arise if his/her corpse would only be ‘a lifeless material thing’ and not refer, beyond itself, to the idea of life. I would not have given this quote, were it not for the eloquence with which it opposes the primacy of Jemeinigkeit in Heidegger to what it would prefer instead: a primacy of relationality. As if there is something intolerable about non-relationality and as if changing primacy, like one changes currency, could help us solve the problem. Intersubjectivity against the

6

It would suffice to read the corresponding passage in Being and Time (SZ 238-9/2823). But, again, the point is not to polemicize, but to take notice of this its being said. 7 E.g. J. DERRIDA, Mémoires pour Paul De Man, Paris, Galilée, 1988, p. 57 (“invivable”).

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subject – no loss and only profits to be gained! Clearly, in suggestions like this we meet again the idea of the loss of all foreignness, but this time without recurrence to something other to/in ourselves – without resorting, that is, to that part of ourselves which, for Heidegger, could help explain why there is alterity as such. For in my incapacity to die the death of the other – to take it over – I experience myself as not being the other, and the other as not being me. Which is to say that not everything is accessible by me, that I am not ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (SZ §36) and that, to my grief perhaps, I am bound to my being in a different and more irreversible way than I am bound to the being of the other. And perhaps this is finitude. At least for Heidegger. He did what he could to show that death “throws” Dasein “back” upon itself (SZ 437/385), but he also did his utmost to understand why Dasein is the kind of being that ‘dislikes’ the company of its being and is constantly on the run from it. It is not just that death for inauthentic Dasein is something that only happens to others, such that it could escape its mortality and its finitude. For it would not be any less inauthentic for Dasein to think that it can die the death of others, by, for example, properly mourning that death, in being there otherwise than ‘just alongside’. Without the experience of this radical unrelatedness Dasein could never ‘open up’ to the other; it would take the other’s place, which amounts to saying: it would not let him/her be other – dead for example, or mortal or finite, i.e., burdened by a weight no one can take over. To truly meet the other, that is, Dasein needs to accept a certain priority of its Jemeinigkeit over its Mitsein. For, as is well known, it is through the existential Mitsein that Dasein first and foremost manages to avoid its task of having to be the being that it is. This was, of course, the famous lesson of the ‘They’: Dasein’s tendency to not be itself, – to be anyone, in fact, except itself. As these last paragraphs have suggested, I do not intend to sail with the wind that is blowing in contemporary thought. Indeed, I intend to sail against it. For it seems to me that what is now considered to be unfashionable in Heidegger, and in need of revision, is precisely what must be defended, and perhaps even fortified. ‘Intransitive’ facticity would be just such a fortification – more in line, that is, with the spirit of Heidegger’s argument than those who propose “to rewrite Being and Time” in order to adapt its ontology to the ethics we seem to be in need of: “it is necessary to refigure fundamental ontology (as well as the


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existential analytic, the history of Being, and the thinking of Ereignis that goes along with it) with a thorough resolve that starts from the plural singular (du singulier pluriel) of origins, from being-with”.8 Instead of an existential analytic, we would need a co-existential analytic. Being would be being-with and this ‘with’ would not simply be an addition to Being, but would be what constitutes it. It would be “at the heart of Being” (ibid., 30). One would need to go beyond Heidegger who only went as far as positing being-with as constitutive of being-there but waited to introduce “the co-originarity of Mitsein until after having established the originary character of Dasein” (ibid., 31). In preserving the order of classical philosophical exposition Heidegger would have failed to “thematize the ‘with’ as the essential trait of Being and as its proper plural singular coessence” (ibid., 34). Admirable as this attempt to go beyond Heidegger seems to me, it nonetheless seems to opt for a course that is exactly contrary to the one I intend to set (which does not mean, since the earth is round, that the two would never meet, if only because I share and respect Nancy’s worries about the fate of a community that would be more than a mere assemblage of parts).9 Contrary to what seems to be Nancy’s intention, I do not think that we should try to understand what Levinas insists on calling an “otherwise than being” as “the ownmost of Being”, and thus try to think “being-with rather than the opposition between the other and Being” (ibid., 199n37). What I shall put forward as “intransitive facticity” would rather seem to point to an opposition between the other and Being, which is not the ‘opposition’ Levinas tried to thematize in terms of a Good (or a God) beyond Being, and which tries to link the problem of singularisation to something which seems to fall between the folds of either ethical or ontological difference.10 But before we come to that, we should take not one, but more than one step back and make 8

J.-L. NANCY, Being Singular Plural (trans. Robert D. Richardson & Anne E. O’Byrne). Stanford, Stanford U.P., 2000, p. 26. 9 In my ‘Enfance, transcendance et mortalité des valeurs. Pour un républicanisme actuel’, in A.-M. DILLENS (ed.), Le pluralisme des valeurs. Entre le particulier et l’universel, Brussels, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2003, I try to show how what I will call here ‘intransitive facticity’ leads to a certain existential derivation of being-with and to a corresponding notion of community and public space(s). 10 The present chapter is a sequel to the previous one in which I questioned ‘ethical difference’ from the same perspective as the one I shall be adopting here.

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sure that we understand what exactly brought Levinas to oppose an ‘otherwise than Being’ to Heidegger’s ‘Being’. Let us start, then, at the beginning, with this untranslatable term ‘Dasein’ which, because of its untranslatableness, seems to invite us to take it for granted.

1. UNTRANSLATABLY MY OWN Dasein is a verb. But, it refers to a being. And yet, Heidegger never speaks of a Dasein. The reason is, of course, that the kind of ‘being’ involved is not a being that one has, but a being that one is (GA 17:287). In the expression ‘Dasein is its being’, the ‘is’ does not function as a copula which links Dasein to a predicate (‘its being’). It has a transitive meaning. One is one’s being, like one lives one’s life. But, not quite like one cooks one’s dinner. For the relation between the subject of the verb ‘to be’ and its direct object is more intimate than in the latter example. One can choose not to cook one’s dinner and eat out instead, but one cannot choose not to be one’s being. For Dasein to be means to conjugate the verb ‘to be’ in the first person singular – ‘I am’ means: I have to be the being that I am (SZ 42/68). Whatever I do will be a way to be that being. Nothing can be said about my being, no content given to it, which will not be adverbial: referring to a how (ein Wie) I am that being (GA 17:45). Perhaps one could say that being is not just a transitive (GA 63:7) but also a reflexive verb – but one cannot say it as well in English as one can in French: “on n’est pas, on s’est”, Levinas comments (EE 28), which misleadingly translates as “one is not, one is oneself”, as if there would be a content to this ‘self’ (‘just be yourself!’). Heidegger says it like this: “Dasein ist das Seiende, das ich je selbst bin, an dessen Sein ich als Seiendes ‘beteiligt’ bin” (GA 20:205). A being in whose being I as an entity “share” (HCT, 152), or as I propose to translate: in which I play a part. I always play a part in my being, which is why Dasein “does not signify a what, [but] the way to be” (ibid.) of the being it designates. And there is only one way to be this being: “to be it – is essentially to be it in each instance mine, whether I expressly know about it or not” (GA 20:206/153). ‘To be it’ translates the German ‘Zu-sein’, which also connotes: having to be this being, being unable not to be it. Hence the famous ‘daß es ist und zu sein hat’ of which Being and Time tells us that this “that” is “naked” (e.g. SZ 134/173) – for it is not a “what”, and


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hence Dasein seems to miss something other beings have. It misses a quidditas, an ‘essence’, a ‘Wesen’: “the ‘essence’ (Wesen) of Dasein (des Daseins) lies in its existence”, in its ‘having to be’ (Zu-sein)” (SZ 42/67). If its “Wesen” would not be the kind of verb we have been referring to but a noun (essentia) Dasein would not be the being “for which its proper mode of being in a certain sense is not indifferent” (GA 26:171/136). Which is to say, and we will come back to it, Dasein would not transcend (GA 27:323 ff.). Dasein is thus indeterminate, its being offers it no content, it can only give, indeed: it cannot but give content to its being. But this indetermination is not a simple lack. It is not a privation. It is a chance: what seems to be a void (Nichtigkeit) is in fact the most positive (das Positivste) in Dasein (GA 27:332). It means that for Dasein, to be is to be able to, ‘Seinkönnen’. In Dasein, possibility is higher than actuality11 – Dasein is free, it has a leeway not just added to its being, but in its very being! In other words, in not being fixed by an essence or accidental properties, Dasein does not fall together with itself. It is ‘opened up’, not just to its being, for which it is responsible, but also to the ‘contents’ it cannot but give to this being. Or more precisely, for there is a complication: since Dasein’s being implies a certain openness, it is not just ‘something’ that can be filled, but something that always already is filled. Heidegger uses the verb ‘preisgeben’ which means to surrender (e.g., a city under siege), to give up (e.g., one’s honour), to be helplessly exposed to (e.g., famine), and even to sacrifice (e.g., one’s life). Let me quote a long passage from Heidegger’s first course upon his return to Freiburg (WS 1928/29, the course which Levinas must have attended) – I will quote in German and give the translation in note: “Weil das Dasein ein solches Seiendes ist, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht, ist es an das Seiende preisgegeben, und zwar wesensnotwendig. Denn wir hörten, das Dasein ist erschlossenes; Seiendes, das es nicht ist, ist ihm offenbar; aber jetzt zeigt sich: nicht im Sinne einer bloßen Kenntnis, sondern, weil das Dasein wesenhaft aus sich herausgetreten ist,

11

Cf. SZ 143-4/183: “As a modal category of presence-at-hand, possibility signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary. It characterizes the merely possible. Ontologically it is on a lower level than actuality and necessity. In contrast to this, possibility as an existential is the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically” (last italics mine).

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ist es dem Seienden und dessen Übermacht preisgegeben, und zwar nicht nur der Übermacht etwa der Naturgewalten, sondern auch den Machten und Gewälten, die das Dasein als Seiendes in sich selbst bringt” (GA 27:326).12 It is almost as if Dasein’s being, in its indeterminateness, leaves Dasein in the lurch, surrenders it to powers higher than its own – including, Heidegger adds, those powers that it carries within itself. And thus, as he also adds, “transcendence as transport over beings (das Seiende) in the understanding of Being (Seinsverständnis) has lost completely the indifference one is tempted to credit it with, when one unfolds the problem of the understanding of Being in the frame of traditional ontology” (ibid.). “Transzendieren das Seiende, d.h. In-derWelt-sein, heißt, an das Seiende preisgegeben sein” (ibid.). There is a sense of drama here: man is alone although he is surrounded by beings. This “metaphysical isolation” (GA 26:172/137) of Dasein is thus ontological, not ontic: it means that Dasein’s being has entrusted it with a task for which it provides no answer. Man is no longer that creature that under the eye of his/her creator had to travel the path set for it, thus accomplishing its essence. Dasein is ‘given up’: no longer homo viator, but “a lieutenant of the nothing” (Platzhalter des Nichts) which traverses its being (BW 108). Not finding an answer in its being as to how it has to be its being, Dasein will find its answers elsewhere: in that to which it has been surrendered. Being and Time will thematize this as Dasein’s tendency to fall (Verfallen). But the lecture courses which preceded it and prepared for it are, in a way, much more thrilling when it comes to describe Dasein’s ‘problem’ with its being. Thus the famous Widerschein or Reluzenz, mentioned only once or twice in Being and Time (e.g. SZ 21, cf. 16 and 247 (Widerschein)), finds itself in the company of a host of other Latin terms (Praestruktion, Larvanz, Ruinanz, Horrescenz, das Tentative, das Quietive, das Alienative, das Negative) which all turn

12

This roughly translates as: “Because Dasein is the kind of Being for whom its Being is at issue in its Being, it is surrendered to beings, and essentially so. For we heard, Dasein is opened up; beings, that it is not, are revealed to it; but now we see: not in the sense of a mere cognizance, but [in a different sense]: because Dasein essentially has stepped out of itself, it is surrendered to beings and their superior forces, – not just those of nature, but also the powers and violences that Dasein as a being carries in itself”.


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around the same problem: life – as it is then still called – misses something and it is not going to accept that condition. One could even say: it is not going to be grateful for it. And then one could add that, if there is an ethics implied in this ontology, it is precisely the ethics that follows from learning to see in what we supposedly ‘miss’, that which makes us possible: our dwelling place, our Aufenthalt, our ethos. But we are not quite as far as that. Life, Heidegger tells us, “constantly eludes itself as such”, it avoids meeting itself (sich aus dem Wege gehen) (GA 61:107/80) and tries “to let itself (...) be carried (tragen) by beings which it is not” but with which it can “identify”, since it is open to them, and, in fact, always already occupied by them (GA 26:174/138 – trans. corrected). Dasein, as it were, profits from the fact that being open, it is always already taken in by other beings, ‘human’ or not, which will always give it things to do, to be occupied with, to engage itself in, to have plans with or for: “This very multiplicity of possibilities (...) always implies an increase in the possibilities of mistaking (Vergreifen) oneself in ever new ways. (...) insofar as these interminable mistakes (Verfehlbarkeiten) are all of the character of meaningful things in which, as meaningful-wordly objects, life lives, this interminability becomes what is formalistically characterized as infinity and infinite abundance, inexhaustibility, that which can never be mastered, the ‘always more of’ life, and the ‘always more than’ life” (GA 61:107/80). ‘Mistakes’ should be understood literally here: not as errors, but as mis-takes – ways not to grab the thing itself, but to grab past it. ‘Life’ does its utmost to mistake itself for something else. For example, life tends to ‘miss’ the fact that it is finite. It misses that ‘fact’ like a shot misses its target, by first ‘missing’ the meaning of this finitude (taking it to mean: ‘not infinite’) and then (in the same breath) re-appropriating it by its ever new possibilities: “This infinity is the disguise (Maske, mask) factical life factically places upon and holds before itself and its world. (...) With this infinity, life blinds itself (blendet), puts out its own eyes. In the sequestration (Abriegelung), life leaves itself out; life comes up too short. Factical life leaves itself out precisely in defending itself explicitly and positively against itself. (...) In its taking of directions, factical life places itself on a certain track (bahnt sich die Spur) and does so specifically by inclining (Neigend), suppressing distance (abstandverdrängend), sequestring itself (sich abriegelnd) within a directionality toward the easy”

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(GA 61:107-8/80-1). Let’s repeat the underlined: (factical) life leaves itself out in defending itself explicitly and positively against itself by placing itself on a certain track. We’ll come to the ‘factical’ (faktisch) later. Let us first ask why ‘life’ (later: Dasein13) needs to defend itself against itself.

2. UNDOING DASEIN’S SELF-DEFENCE Heidegger would dismiss the question. There is no ‘why’, for there is no need for such a defence. It just so happens that with the kind of Being that we are analyzing here (life, i.e. Dasein), the structure of this being is such that it is always already dis-tracted from what its being demands of it: to be this being in the first person singular. But, as we have seen, this demand is empty and even not listening to it – being distracted – is a way to pay heed to it. “Whether I expressly know about it or not”, we heard Heidegger say, I am the subject of my Being in the grammatical sense of the term ‘subject’. We touch here upon the status of doing philosophy for the Heidegger of the 1920’s. Let us not forget that Being and Time explicitly said that the analytic of Dasein that it was offering was meant to provide us with “possibilities for a more primordial (ursprünglichere) existentiell understanding” than we would have had without it (SZ 295/341), and that, in the same book, Heidegger describes his project as “an interpreting liberation of Dasein for its utmost possibility of existence” (SZ 303/350). Fundamental ontology is not meant to be neutral. It is revolutionary. Its task is not just to describe Dasein, but to help the Dasein that it addresses to become Dasein. How so? Why could fundamental ontology not restrict itself to a neutral description of the ways in which Dasein is busy being its being, of the ways it moves about in its being, – a being which has, Heidegger tells us in an early text, a “peculiar kind of movement” (Bewegtheit) to it (GA 63:65/51)? How could the thematisation of Dasein’s ‘movement’ be not neutral?

13

For this evolution from ‘life’ to ‘Dasein’, see e.g. H. TIETJEN, ‘Philosophie und Faktizität. Zur Vorbildung des existenzial-ontologischen Ansalzes in einer frühen Freiburger Vorlesung Martin Heideggers’, Heidegger Studies 1986 (vol. 2), pp. 11-40. Also Th. KISIEL, ‘Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes “Faktizität” im Frühwerk Heideggers’, Dithey-Jahrbuch, 1986-7 (vol. 4), pp. 90-120.


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There are at least three elements in Heidegger’s writings which one should take into account here – and, as we shall later see when we turn to Levinas’ early discussion with Heidegger, none of them follows directly from an analytic of Dasein as such, but they all involve a certain articulation of that analytic – a kind of “decision” imposed on it by Heidegger. The three topoi I am thinking of are the following: Dasein flees; but that from which it flees will always have left a trace which can help Dasein to find its way back to itself; provided it grabs the occasion and pays heed to the call which it can, however, always refuse to hear. Heidegger seems to think of philosophy as a certain practice which can help Dasein recognize such a call. Thus, after a lengthy analysis in which he gives seven points of comparison to set off the two types of boredom (being bored by/being bored with) he had been lecturing on, Heidegger ends his lecture with a characteristic warning: “It would, however, be a misunderstanding if we were merely to take what is summarized in these seven points as a result, instead of demonstrating all this to ourselves in a living manner by now retracing the various interwoven paths taken by our investigation hitherto. For, to point it out once more, in case you have not yet noticed: it is not a matter of taking a definition of boredom home with you, but of learning and understanding (verstehen lernen) to move oneself in the depths of Dasein” (GA 29/30:198/131, trans. corrected). Philosophy can only prepare for such an understanding, which is not intellectual but is rather, as all Verstehen in Heidegger, a matter of knowing one’s way about a certain x or y, in this case: ‘boredom’. “Philosophizing”, Heidegger tells his students in a later lecture of the same course, “always remains something penultimate” (257/173). Philosophy prepares for a “complete transformation” (Umstellung, ibid. 95/62) of (our conception of) man, but it cannot succeed by itself. It will only succeed if those it seeks to address will revolve around their own axis: “Nor will we be tempted to believe that these questions and the answers we give to them will eliminate the need (Not) of contemporary Dasein. Such need will at best be rendered more acute (verschärft), more acute in the sole possible sense that this questioning will bring us to the brink (Rand) of possibility, the possibility of restoring to Dasein its actuality, that is, its existence. Yet between this uttermost brink of possibility and the actuality of Dasein there lies a very fine line. This is a line one can never merely glide across, but one which man can only leap

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over in dislodging his Dasein” (ibid.). Seinem Dasein einen Ruck geben – to give it a push or a pull, can only happen in “solitary action” (einzelnes Handeln). It cannot be taught – but it can be facilitated, and this is what philosophers or poets do by “helping bring to word that which Dasein wishes to speak about in this fundamental attunement [i.e. boredom, – R.V.]” (249/167). For it is “by means of words” that “the attunement of Dasein can be made visible in such a way that certain new possibilities of Dasein’s being are set free” (GA 20:375/272). Philosophy’s task is “not to describe the consciousness of man but to evoke the Dasein in man” (GA 29/30: 258/174). Instead of ‘evoke’, Heidegger writes ‘beschwören’, which is what one does with snakes, spirits, demons... But he immediately discards all reference to magical enchantment or mystical vision and insists that philosophy has at its disposal only “sober conceptual questioning” to “form” and “keep open” “its own interrogative space” (ibid.). Yet, it is within that, almost (?) therapeutic space, that the call must be heard or received. Better still: in which it can resound. For there is a call, and the only problem is that Dasein’s normal comportment is such that it does not hear what is nonetheless there, reaching out to it. Here we find again the basic structure behind the three themes I previously mentioned. Dasein is on the run for something it need not run from and which it cannot outrun. It is this co-presence of a ‘need not’ and a ‘cannot’ which explains the opposition which is underlying all of the lecture courses leading up to Being and Time and well beyond it: the opposition between Feigheit (cowardice) and Mut (courage). Dasein, as we know from Being and Time, has a tendency to take it easy and to make it easy for itself (SZ 165/128; GA 61:109). It tries to avoid taking up “the burdensome character” of its Being – the “that it is and has to be” we discussed before. What is threatening about this burden is that it does not tell Dasein what to do with it, how to carry it. But Dasein wants answers and it finds them in what surrounds it, in its Umwelt. The things Dasein is engaged with reflect back on Dasein a certain kind of image as to who it is and what it needs to do. This is the famous Widerschein or Reluzenz – reflection in an optical sense: “To reflect means, in the optical context, to break at something, to radiate back from there, to show itself in a reflection from something. (...) Dasein does not first need to turn backward to itself [i.e. re-flect, – R.V.] as though, keeping itself behind


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its own back, it were at first standing in front of things and staring rigidly at them. Instead, it never finds itself otherwise than in the things themselves, and in fact in those things that daily surround it. It finds itself primarily and constantly in things because, tending them, distressed by them, it always in some way or other rests in things. Each one of us is what he pursues and cares for” (GA 24:226/159). Dasein prefers, as it were, to have its own self reflected to it from things, rather than face the fact that it is this self and that this self can only have the content Dasein gives to it without ever coming to a ‘final’ content, for to actualize one possibility is to leave out others one could have actualized instead (possibility, remember, is higher than actuality – and this is a consequence of that thesis). Dasein thinks of itself, for example, as a future professor, it writes a Ph.D. and hopes to find a job, to be invited to conferences, to outdo other competitors, to get tenure-track, to become important etc. This is what surrounds it and provides it with answers and a path to follow – Dasein’s future is pre-structured by its Umwelt: it “comes toward itself from out of the things” (GA 24:410/289). Instead of being “answerable” for its self, Dasein gratefully takes over the answers that make it “forget” (ibid.) its questions: “life, possessing relucence in care, is precisely intent on having something surrounding itself, having the world in such a way that this world makes up the surroundings (Umgebung) for the activity of life and answers or at least listens, watches or comments such activity” (GA 61:129-30/96, parts in italics corrected!). Transcendence, one could say, instead of being dramatic, but mute (i.e. not answering, not responding, irresponsive), becomes a charade in which it is not us who transcend beings, but beings that move over into us and submit us to a force we unknowingly provided them with. There is some sort of fetishistic structure to what seems to be happening here: “as though Dasein’s can-be were projected by the things, by Dasein’s commerce with them, and not primarily by Dasein itself from its own most proper self” (GA 24:410/289). We’ve lost our Seinkönnen in or to the mirror held out to us by things. But only because we expect, like the evil queen in Snow White, the mirror to be able to give us an answer to the question that plagues each of us: ‘who am I?’ And because, like the queen, we are satisfied with an answer to a different question (‘who am I not?’) as long as it gives us some hold, for example the hold

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of the comparative (you are a more promising student than ...) or of the superlative (you are the best). Heidegger thus understands how Dasein can come to lose track of itself, but he doesn’t approve, does not think this is inevitable, although it is happening all of the time. He insists on calling it a flight (Flucht): “Aussein auf etwas, was begegnet in der Welt ist nichts als der Ausdruck des Wegkommens aus der Unheimlichkeit” (GA 17:317). To be intent on something that one can come across in the world is nothing but the expression of getting out of the uncanny. Nothing but! And Heidegger immediately gives an example which may function as an eye-opener to what in fact he is claiming here: “From this basic phenomenon of uncanniness one also has to explicate what we designate as language (Sprache). Sprache: a specific way of man’s being. Sprache means (...) as speaking in the uncanny: sich aussprechen, lautwerden in der Unheimlichkeit” (GA 17:317). And he adds, between brackets: “a wellknown phenomenon, that one starts to speak loudly (laut zu reden) in the uncanny”. And a bit further: “Das Dasein spricht sich gewissermaßen aus sich heraus – von sich weg”. One could render this as: Dasein talks itself out of it. And then the question becomes: what is this ‘it’ and how or in what sense is it uncanny? It is on this question that Levinas and Heidegger disagreed. As least on first sight...

3. TALKING ONESELF OUT OF ‘IT’ The passage with which we ended the previous section comes from a 1923/24 lecture course – this by itself is remarkable for in these few lines much more seems to be said about language than we come to know in Being and Time where the most significant thing that is said about it is that it is the “worldly Being” of Rede: “Die Hinausgesprochenheit der Rede ist die Sprache” (SZ 161/204). With or in language Rede becomes “verlautbart” (SZ 163) – it is put into words and these words sound – they are sounds one can encounter within the world: “Language is a totality of words – a totality in which discourse (Rede) has a ‘worldly’ Being of its own; and as an entity within-the-world, this totality thus becomes something which we may come across as ready-to-hand” (ibid.). Thus, Being and Time has the idea that language (Sprache) should be thought of in terms of an ex-pression (Sichaussprechen) of Rede. But it no longer seems to have what, in 1923/24, Heidegger was suggesting when


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linking such ‘sich aussprechen’ (to express oneself) to a “sich aus sich heraus sprechen” (to talk oneself out of oneself) and to a “von sich weg sprechen” (to talk away from oneself), which I tried to render as “to talk oneself out of it” and for which Heidegger himself gave the example of ‘becoming loud’ in the uncanny. In speaking, Dasein turns away from what is uncanny about itself! Which means that Dasein, as it were, seeks to escape the confrontation with its ‘self’ by seeking the company of words, – just as we heard Heidegger explain that Dasein is fleeing its own mute transcendence by turning to what in the world seems to provide it with answers. In other words, it would seem that language qua ‘Verlautbarung’ is considered by Heidegger in 1923/24 as itself some sort of flight. If this “flight” were somehow necessary, this would have amounted to an unprecedented existential grounding of language: something in Dasein (the “it” Dasein talks itself out of, – the uncanny) would have driven it out of itself ... into language! Heidegger would have been on the brink of discovering something – an ‘on the way to language’ – that he never retrieved. It is no coincidence that this potential insight into the Being of language did not prevail. What prevented such break-through is precisely the theme, already present in 1923/24, that got the upper hand in Being and Time and in the inaugural Freiburg lecture, “What is metaphysics?”. Loudness, in these texts, is seen as a way not to hear, to outcry a message that silently announces itself (Gerede in Being and Time is essentially “vociferized” Rede (verlautbarte Rede), and the voice of conscience, as is well known, does not resort to sounds, but says nothing, speaks in silence).14 Thus we read in What is Metaphysics?: “That in the malaise (Unheimlichkeit) of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of the nothing” (BW 103, my italics to indicate that such a flight is not necessary). It is this ‘nothing’ which makes Dasein feel ill at ease (malaise = mal à l’aise), for it robs Dasein of its usual ‘holds’ and confronts it with the “nakedness” of “the Being that it is and has to be”. In other words, what is characteristic for the moods Heidegger will analyse as “Grundstimmungen”, such as anxiety and boredom, is that they take away what is usually present as 14

For an analysis of Rede/Gerede in Being and Time, see my Truth and Singularity, pp. 30-39 in which I ask the sort of questions that Derrida’s early readings of Husserl have taught us not to neglect.

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something to hold on to for Dasein. The mirror things hold out to Dasein and from which a certain picture of itself reflects onto Dasein is, as it were, shattered in anxiety or in boredom. Or perhaps more exactly: it is still there, but no longer reflecting anything, like a fogged mirror in the bathroom after having taken a hot shower. In other words: the Reluzenz-structure drops out. Standing-out-toward “nothing”, Dasein is left “hanging” in the very movement that characterizes it qua ek-sistence, “hovering”, as it were, “above” the nothing (BW 103) of which we heard Heidegger say that it is not a privation (the absence of something that ought to be there), but “the most positive” (das Positivste) about Dasein (that through which it is not closed onto itself, but a being that is ‘opened up’, that ‘lacks’ an essence, and that is its possibility). One could think of this “lautwerden in der Unheimlichkeit” in terms of what happens when ‘whistling in the dark’.15 If one thinks of darkness as a kind of disappearance (what is normally there to be seen, is now not visible), then darkness does away with (at least part of) the Reluzenzphenomenon: Dasein is thrown back upon itself, alone with itself. And it doesn‘t withstand this, it breaks up that loneliness by singing or talking or whistling to itself. It thus seems to provide itself with the means to dis-tract itself from itself – as Heidegger puts it in a different and more familiar context to those who read Being and Time: “Dasein speaks about itself and sees itself in such and such a manner, and yet this is only a mask which it holds up before itself in order not to be frightened by itself. The warding ‘off’ of anxiety” (GA 63:32/26). In other words, what I am suggesting is that ‘idle talk’ and ‘whistling in the dark’, which both resort to language as a ‘sound system’, both serve the same purpose of breaking Dasein’s uncanniness, as is were, by placing something (the worldly Being of Rede: sounds, Sprache) between Dasein and itself. With this fall into the world – into language – Dasein puts itself off track (sich verführen). It mis-takes itself. It fails to hear (überhört, SZ 279) its ‘own’ message for which it substitutes a more telling story and thus gives in to its tendency to “have itself objectively there for itself”, to “bring itself objectively into its there”, that is: “to take possession of itself”, that is in turn: “to make itself certain and secure about itself” (GA 63:64-5/51). 15

See chapter 3 above where I confronted the Kierkegaard-Heidegger tradition on escaping anxiety with the different understanding of such ‘whistling’ one finds in Blanchot, Lacan and the early Levinas.


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Language, one could conclude on the basis of this 1923/24 passage, is Dasein’s last resort. When all else fails, when all escape routes are blocked, Dasein can still speak to itself or whistle a tune which will calm it down. Language is Dasein’s most reliable pacifier. One only needs to compare this ‘take’ on language with one single sentence from Levinas’ 1947 ‘From existence to existents’ to immediately see how this text – Levinas’ first ‘real’ book – is at once very different from and extremely close to the Heidegger of the twenties. Here is the passage I have in mind: “One has to find something to say to one’s companion” (EE 32). To be sure, the stakes of this passage are easily overlooked, for Levinas continues the phrase: “(one has to) exchange an idea, around which, as around a third term, social life necessarily starts” (ibid.). This reference to a third term suggests that Levinas, here as elsewhere, is merely pointing out that the kind of other we meet in “the world”, is but an other who is “dressed” in a “role” or a “function” or a “form” which covers up what is genuinely other about him/her: that which Levinas in his other works will refer to as “the face of the Other” which “breaks through” or “rends” all such forms, functions or roles: “Form is that by which a being is turned toward the sun, that by which it has a visage [the French face and not: visage, trans. corrected!], through which it gives itself, by which it comes forward. It conceals the nudity in which an undressed being withdraws from the world” (EE 31, my italics). Polite, “formal” conversation, in which one exchanges n’importe quoi, be it some meaningless comment about the weather or about the dentist who is once more lagging behind schedule, would be but a way to avoid meeting the Other: “Social life in the world does not have that uncanny (inquiétant, trans. altered) character that a being feels before another being, before alterity” (ibid.). Read in this way, there would be no break with the structure of Heidegger’s argument – indeed, there would be a formal parallel: social life, e.g. formal conversation, would be but a means to flee the confrontation with what is uncanny. And the disagreement with Heidegger would restrict itself to the a quo from which one tries to dis-tract oneself – Dasein’s nothingness, for Heidegger; the Other’s nakedness, for Levinas: “the basic timidity that affects one . . . is banished from the world” (EE 32) precisely by resorting to the ‘form-al’ holds the world offers us to hold on to (EE 33). But this would be misunderstanding Levinas’ aim here and completely missing the point he is making – precisely against Heidegger: “To say

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that clothing [and thus, by extension: ‘form’, ‘function’, ‘role’] exists for covering oneself up is not to see how clothing frees man from the humbleness of his naked state” (EE 34, my italics). It is not just that “not everything that is given in the world is a tool” (EE 34) and would thus display the Um-zu structure (‘in order to’, e.g., cover oneself up) Heidegger famously analysed. It is, above all, that Heidegger failed to realize – if he ever overlooked anything (TO 63), as Levinas adds elsewhere, perhaps not without humour – that “in the ontological adventure the world is an episode which, far from deserving to be called a fall, has its own equilibrium, harmony and positive ontological function: the possibility of extracting oneself from anonymous being” (EE 37). Social conversation, ‘idle talk’, is not just an escape which takes the place of a more genuine communication, of a Verschwiegenheit (a telling silence) that, without resorting to formulas without content, says all there is to say.16 It is a liberation! It frees from an embarrassment that would be mortifying – both to oneself and to the other. Like in Heidegger, something is put between oneself and the other – a third term is inserted between the parties, but this term, unlike in Heidegger, is seen as what “provides the possibility of existing in a withdrawal from existence” (EE 38). Time, then, to go backstage and wonder how Levinas can come to formulate as a problem – existing in a withdrawal from existence – what to a Heideggerian ear would be, at best, a confusion of terms. Here is a parallel statement from a contemporary text: the world “offers the subject a liberation from itself. [It] permits it to exist at a distance from itself. The subject is absorbed in the object it absorbs, and nevertheless keeps a distance with regard to that object” (TO 67). Let me try to comment.

4. THE WORLD – A FIRST LIBERATION What for Heidegger is a flight, a falling into the world (in an ontic sense) and a turning away from one’s being-in-the-world (in an ontological sense) by clinging to the relucent and prestructured contents Dasein comes across in the world, – in short: Dasein’s absorption into what it is not, is characterized by Levinas as a liberation. Instead of losing itself to 16

For Verschwiegenheit as a cure for the ambiguity that is introduced by vociferation, see my analysis referred to in note 14.


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the world, what Levinas calls ‘world’ here is what permits the subject to lose itself! Instead of seeing in everyday life a lack of courage, Levinas reads it as “a preoccupation with salvation” (TO 58)! Instead of an inauthentic flight, a necessary one! And thus a parting of ways, where Levinas chooses to follow the track Heidegger “decided” to ignore – for example in the passage concerning language’s ‘birth’ out of the uncanny which we discussed in the preceding section. What happens, in fact, is that Levinas’ path leads him back to a point situated this side of Heidegger’s primitive (i.e. underived) concepts – Dasein, Jemeinigkeit, existence, being-in-the-world. Indeed, Levinas starts from a notion which he knows to be “absurd” to Heidegger: “The most profound thing about Being and Time for me [E.L.] is this Heideggerian distinction [between Sein and Seiendes, Being and being, between existence and existent]. But in Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation. Existence is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit (mineness) precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone. I do not think that Heidegger can admit an existence without existents, which to him would seem absurd.” (TO 44-5). Levinas knows what he is doing. He knows that he is parting ways with Heidegger, who indeed did not hesitate to correct the one passage in which, to my knowledge, he had dared to suggest the idea of a Being without beings.171 am not going to take the reader through all the stages which Levinas follows in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other after having chosen as his starting point precisely this notion of a Being without beings which, to Heidegger, could make no sense. Let it suffice to point out what the obvious consequences of such a move must be. Once one accepts a Being without beings, the next step, of course, is to introduce a being – a step that Levinas, who knows his classics, calls hypostasis: the transition of a verb into a substance. A transition giving rise to something that stands on its own (sub-stance) and that cannot, of course, be the initiative of what will result from it: a subject that exists in a withdrawal from existence (Being). It is as if a certain fissure is opened

17

I am referring to the famous 1943 “Nachwort zu: ‘Was ist Metaphysik’ ” where Heidegger originally wrote “... daß das Sein wohl [corrected 1949: nie] west ohne das Seiende” (GA 9:306). See J.-L. MARION, ‘L’angoisse et l’ennui. Pour interpréter “Was ist Metaphysik?” ’, Archives de Philosophie, 1980 (43), pp. 121-46, esp. p. 134.

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up in the continuum of such anonymous Being that Levinas also calls the ‘il y a’, a ‘there is’, as indistinct as can be. Distinction presupposes a setting apart, a caesura, a certain between, and thus, so to speak, the transition from the analogous to the digital, from continuity to discontinuity. The ‘il y a’ opens up (s’ouvre: EE 104), recedes and, as it were, gives “birth” (EE 8) to an ontological privacy: to a being that has a certain mastery over Being (its Being). An atheist version of creation – without creator, without generosity: it just so happens that ‘there is’ a rent in what hitherto was seamless.18 A strange “contract” where one of the parties only comes into existence as a result of the contract which it was never given occasion to sign (ibid.). The hypostatic subject has contracted its being, almost like one contracts a disease, like something it didn’t ask for, but was infected with. Loaded with a weight it is not quite fit to carry and which nonetheless (Levinas thinks of what happens in effort, fatigue, weariness or indolence) it is unable to let go of, “holding on to what it is letting slip” (EE 18). The subject’s delay in its contract with being, its always having arrived too late for it to cancel that contract which already obliges it, seems somehow to keep pursuing it. The delay continues, being is portrayed as an effort to catch up with oneself: “Existence drags behind it a weight – if only itself – which complicates the trip it takes. Burdened with itself ... it does not purely and simply exist. Its movement of existence, which might be pure and straightforward, is bent and caught up in itself, showing that the verb ‘to be’ is a reflexive verb: it is not just that one is, one is oneself (on s’est)” (EE 16). On s’est – we used this formulation before when commenting on Dasein’s “that it is and has to be”. But then we (ab-) used it to clarify Heidegger’s insight that being is a transitive verb: one is one’s being. But it is not so for Levinas – as one of the few commentators on these early texts pointed out: “Heidegger, when saying that existence is a burden [Lastcharakter des Daseins] does not have the means to take into account its doubling into a being and a having”.19 It is precisely this mixture of something transitive and something “absolutely intransitive” (TO 42) 18

As will become clear below, I am not implying that the author of EE was an ‘atheist’. I am suggesting that, for strategic reasons, he adopts the ‘methodical atheist’ standpoint, Heidegger had claimed to take, in order to show it to be untenable. 19 D. FRANCK, ‘Le corps de la différence’, Philosophie, s.d. (nr. 34), p. 75.


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that Levinas seems to be pointing to. One is one’s being, for sure, but this being is more than the direct object of the verb to be. It sticks to the one who is supposed to conjugate it in the first person singular, but who in fact never achieves that mastery, is constantly hindered by it, stumbling over it, like one stumbles over one’s feet. Inevitably so, according to Levinas, for in being oneself (on s’est) there is already a self that is, as it were, too much: “The relationship with oneself (soi) is, as in Blanchot’s novel Aminadab, the relationship with a double chained to the ego (moi), a viscous, heavy, stupid double, but one the ego (le moi) is with precisely because it is me (moi)” (TO 56). There is, in other words, a price to be paid for mineness, for escaping from Being without beings: the “inability to detach oneself from oneself”, the inevitability of “returning to oneself”, of being “riveted to oneself” (TO 55). “Ontological relationships are not disembodied ties. The relationship between ego (moi) and self (soi) is not the inoffensive reflection of spirit upon itself. It is the whole of human materiality” (TO 56-7). This should suffice to catch the gist of what is happening here: not so much a critique of Heidegger than a different starting point which then, of course, will lead to endless disagreements. As we will clarify in the next sections, what Levinas is doing is in fact shifting the weight between the terms of Heidegger’s existential analytic – one could say that by risking the hypothesis of a fall into being before there is a thrownness into the world Heidegger’s analysis is rendered more dynamic. And the source of this dynamism is a desire in the subject to escape ... itself. To get rid, that is, of its double – which also means: of its materiality, of its being stuck to itself, of its being doomed to be its own company. Jemeinigkeit in Heidegger is a task, not a desire. Whereas in Levinas it is, from the start, the longing for a release – which is why whatever meets that longing half-way will not be seen as a mere distraction, but as an attempt at liberation. Thus the world – which, precisely because it is not just an ontological function, but also an ontic content, not just a void that allows things to appear, but also these appearances themselves – will be portrayed as what ‘nourishes’ this desire to part company with itself: “the world and our existence in the world constitute a fundamental advance of the subject in overcoming the weight that it is to itself, in overcoming its materiality – that is to say, in loosening the bond between the self (soi) and the ego (moi)” (TO 62).

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Hence Levinas’ polemical remark that “Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry” (TI 134): “Human life in the world does not go beyond the objects that fulfil it. It is perhaps not correct to say that we live to eat, but it is no more correct to say [as Heidegger would, according to Levinas] that we eat to [um zu] live. The uttermost finality of eating is contained in food. When one smells a flower, it is the smell that limits the finality of the act. To stroll is to enjoy the fresh air, not for health [cf. das Worum-willen of SZ § 18] but for the air. These are the nourishments characteristic of our existence in the world. It is an ecstatic existence – being outside oneself – but limited by the object” (TO 63). Limited – and not seduced into inauthenticity. The world is a resting place, a first stop for that endless desire of the subject to transcend itself – to find itself engaged by a movement at the end of which it will have been transformed. Which is to say, redeemed. And this, as is well known, will presuppose an event that prevents the everyday transcendence of life in the world “from falling back upon a point that is always the same” (TO 66). Such a transcendence “without a return to its point of departure” (ibid.) will need to come from Outside. It will need the ethical Other, – the face and not its worldly form.

5. THE MESSAGE OF BOREDOM Let us see where this excursus into Levinas has brought us. Recall our starting point: Heidegger’s idea that being is transitive and that the being he calls Dasein should not flee from the task implied in this transition. Levinas may have helped us to realize that in thus putting forward the verbal Dasein as the name by which to refer to the human being’s Being, Heidegger may have left out what he should not have missed – not just to come to a ‘full fledged anthropology’ (which was, of course, not his intention: SZ § 10), but to raise the question of Being. And of Time. Again, let us refrain from following Levinas in the reasoning that leads him to conclude that ‘time’ should not be linked to Being, but to the Other (Time and the Other thus already in its title announces Levinas’ disagreement with Being and Time). The ‘differend’20 with Heidegger can

20

I use the term in the sense in which Lyotard introduced it in his book with the same title: as a ‘discussion’ where there is no neutral language in which both parties can


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be formulated at less costs by simply focussing on an analysis they both share: the analysis of boredom. As was pointed out before, what makes boredom such an interesting mood for Heidegger is that, not unlike anxiety, it seems to do away with the obfuscation to which Dasein tends to fall prey by way of its very ek-sistence. Instead of being taken in by things, in boredom Dasein finds itself disengaged: nothing seems to interest it any longer, everything becomes pale and indifferent. Consequently, when in ‘The Fundamental Concepts’ Heidegger analyses and describes various types of boredom, his interest seems to lie precisely in the kind of boredom for which Dasein can no longer ‘blame’ anything or anyone. This boredom leaves Dasein no escape, it seems to force a phenomenological reduction onto it in which it cannot but hear the message concerning its own Being that is addressed to it.21 Here it is not just a matter of a train coming late, of a teacher giving a boring class, or of a wasted evening in a not so engaging company that lies at the heart of boredom. Boredom no longer seems to come from outside (re-flecting back on us through boring things, persons, situations), but from the depths of Dasein itself. Everything becomes, in one sole stroke (mit einem Schlag), indifferent to Dasein, including itself. This is, as Boris Ferreira has wonderfully shown,22 what seems to make this type of boredom even deeper than anxiety: for in anxiety Dasein’s Umwillen-seiner-selbst (for the sake of itself) still stands (it is anxious for itself), whereas in deep boredom Dasein seems no longer even to care for itself. One could perhaps add that the difference with a full-fledged depression is that Dasein, even here, still cares about this no longer caring for itself (the transition to depression then being a matter of degree). Hence the desperation, the ultimate non-indifference with being bored. Be that as it may (GA 29/30:211/140 may not be dealing with the same ‘despair’), what is striking is that Heidegger returns, to describe what is happening here, to the formulation he used formulate, without distortion, what they have to say (cf. chapter 9). That such is, to a certain extent, the case will become clear as we proceed. 21 I see no reason for not extending the Heideggerian phenomenological reduction to what happens in ‘boredom’, given that a broad consensus has been built that anxiety, in Heidegger, can be seen as such a reduction (for that point: J.-Fr. COURTINE, Heidegger et la Phénoménologie, Paris, Vrin, 1990, pp. 218-47). 22 See his excellent Stimmung bei Heidegger. Das Phenomen der Stimmung im Kontext von Heideggers Existenzialanalyse des Daseins, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2002, esp. p. 265 ff.

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in Being and Time (and elsewhere) to describe anxiety (es ist einem unheimlich, SZ § 40): es ist einem langweilig. It is this ‘einem’, which suggests a certain anonymity (as does the ‘es’), that interests us here. Here is Heidegger’s commentary on the meaning of ‘it is boring for one’: “For whom then? Not for me as me, not for me with these particular prospective intentions and so on. For the nameless and undetermined I, then? No, but presumably for the self (dem Selbst) whose name, status and the like have become irrelevant” (GA 29/30: 215/143). The quote goes on, but the English translation manages to make Heidegger say the exact contrary of what he in fact says: “wohl aber dem Selbst, dessen Name, Stand und dergleichen belanglos geworden, selbst in die Gleichgültigkeit mit hineingezogen ist” – it is the name, status etc., which are themselves drawn into indifference, and not, as the translators have it, the Self “which is itself drawn into indifference” (FCM, 143). This is crucial if only because, as we shall see, Levinas will disagree on precisely this point! The rest of the passage should be understood accordingly, – what drops out is the inauthentic self, Being and Time’s They-self (Man-Selbst), the self as one has it through Praestruktion and Reluzenz: “Yet the self of Dasein that has lost its stakes in all these areas (das in all dem belanglos werdende Selbst des Daseins) does not thereby lose its determinacy, but rather the reverse, for this particular impoverishment (Verarmung) which sets in with respect to our person (Person) in this ‘it is boring for one’, first brings the self in all its nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be it [i.e. Dasein].” (ibid., trans. heavily corrected!). The point is clear: we lose our public self-hood, our persona (name, status, function etc.), but we do not loose all self-hood. To the contrary, we are reminded of what truly being a self amounts to: to be the being that each of us is (jemeinig) and has to be. For Heidegger, what is characteristic of deep boredom is the link between this de-persona-lisation and its reverse, extreme singularisation, metaphysical loneliness: no one (and certainly not the public ‘one’ (Man)) can take over my ‘Zu-sein’ from me. If one misses this point one has missed everything (as, for example, H. Dreyfus does with regard to anxiety,


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making the same mistake as our translators).23 One will have missed, for example, the structure of the revelation (offenbaren is a verb that keeps coming up in these lectures) Heidegger is trying to uncover here. He resorts to a play on words that, again, is almost untranslatable. “Alles Versagen ist ein Sagen, d.h. ein Offenbarmachen” (e.g. GA 29/30:216) (“all telling refusal is in itself a telling, a making manifest”, FCM 140). Let us analyse the structure of this formula first before wondering what is said in deep boredom, by whom and to whom. Surprisingly, Heidegger, who is normally very wary of what I elsewhere called ‘the privative approach’,24 resorts to a full-fledged privative reasoning. The dominant term is ‘Sagen’. ‘Ver-sagen’ means that something is with-held, not given, refused. It is a sort of active negation. One is deprived (cf. privation) of something. Privative negations refer to the absence of something that ought to be there (e.g. a wing-less bird). Thus in Heidegger who continues the passage: “What do beings in this telling refusal of themselves as a whole tell us in such refusal? What do they tell us in refusing to tell? It is a telling refusal of that which somehow could and was to be granted to Dasein. And what is that? The very possibilities of its doing and acting. The telling refusal tells of these possibilities of Dasein. This telling refusal does not speak about them, does not lead directly to dealings with them, but in its telling refusal it points to them and makes them known in refusing them” (GA 29/30:211-2/140). This is, then, deep boredom’s message: “in telling refusal there lies a reference to something else. This reference (Verweisung) is the telling announcement (Ansagen) of possibilities left unexploited (brachliegenden Möglichkeiten)” (212/141). In deep boredom Dasein comes to understand itself as Seinkönnen, possibilitas, precisely because boredom is the kind of mood in which no single possibility is attractive enough to engage in and thus to identify with. Boredom, then, is an im-possibility, or one could better say: it impossibilises Dasein, i.e. it paralyses (inauthentic) Dasein’s tendency to

23

This remark goes back to a long discussion I had with Dreyfus – the core of our disagreement comes down to my protesting his comment that “In the face of anxiety the self is annihilated” (Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Division I, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1991, p. 304 – and the analysis that then follows). 24 See the preceding chapter.

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always engage itself in possibilities which it is intent to actualise and out of which it understands itself.25 By not leaving Dasein any such possibilities, boredom confronts it with its being-possible as such. But, over and above that, it also confronts Dasein with the fact that it is not the sole master or origin of its possibilities, – as it tends to think every time it is engaged in one of them, planning and projecting ahead. ‘Something’ else is pointing to itself in this telling refusal, ‘something’ which Heidegger calls “that which properly makes possible the Dasein in me” (das eigentliche Ermöglichende des Daseins in mir) (216/143), “something that makes possible, sustains and guides (führt) all essential possibilities of Dasein” (ibid.). This “something” else is, for Heidegger, time. Time is what withholds itself in boredom and thereby points to itself and to its ‘link’ with Dasein – and thus: to its ‘link’ with Being. For Dasein is, for Heidegger, the kind of being that, because it is such that it always plays a part in (its) Being, carries in itself the privilege of being able to raise and listen to the question of Being ... and Time. And just like Being “kann unbegriffen sein, nie aber völlig unverstanden” (SZ 183/228), just as Being, however forgotten it gets, always has left a trace that points to its having been forgotten (Being and Time could not have been written, the question it asks could not have been raised, were it not for such traces which it diligently tracks), so time too cannot hide without leaving a trace: “What entrances in telling refusal must (my italics!) at the same time be that which gives something to be free in its telling announcing and which fundamentally makes possible the possibility of Dasein” (GA 29/30: 223/148). ‘Why must?’, Levinas will ask. And he won’t be impressed by Heidegger’s answer. Indeed, why should it be the case that “Alles Versagen ist ein Sagen”?

25

In this respect, boredom could be called, like death, the possibility of impossibility – provided one reads that expression as genitivus subjectivus: it is the impossibility that possibilises (see Truth and Singularity, pp. 246 ff.). Correlatively, Levinas’ alternative formula for death (the impossibility of possibility) will also be the matrix for his competing analysis of boredom.


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6. DOES BOREDOM TRULY HAVE A MESSAGE? Let us first summarize before we take up Levinas’ question. For Heidegger boredom seems to be a kind of purgatory in which Dasein is ultimately forced to come to terms with the kind of being that it is and has to be. Dasein, that is, is not just suffering from boredom. Boredom, painful as it may be, is also an occasion for Dasein to wean itself from its tendency to cling to whatever can help it not meet itself. In this respect boredom operates on Dasein not unlike anxiety: “Anxiety discloses an insignificance of the world; and this insignificance reveals the nullity of that with which one can concern oneself – or, in other words, the impossibility of projecting oneself upon a potentiality-for-Being which belongs to existence and which is founded primarily upon one’s objects of concern. The revealing of this impossibility, however, signifies that the possibility of an authentic potentiality-for-Being is allowed to light up (Aufleuchten-lassen)” (SZ 343/393, trans. corrected). Anxiety qua impossibility points to a possibility, it “reveals the possibility of an authentic Seinkönnen” (SZ 343/394). One finds the same structure in Heidegger’s analysis of boredom: what im-possibilises is at the same time what possibilises. Alles Versagen ist ein Sagen: there is a with-holding – a putting out of order of what tends to hold us, gives us something to hold on to (some sense of purpose, a project) and, simultaneously, a pointing toward what truly holds us. Thus, in boredom, time somehow doesn’t seem to pass and we who are bored seem to be stuck, held up, unable to continue. We are “aufgehalten”, – as if paralysed by something which has put us under its spell. As we have seen, this ‘something’ is time: “The time that thus entrances (bann) Dasein, and announces itself as thus entrancing (Bannendes) in boredom, simultaneously announces itself and tells of itself as that which properly makes possible” (GA 29/30:223/148). Thus, for Heidegger, what goes wrong in boredom is due to time and it can only be ‘fixed’ by time – “the spell of time can only be broken by time” (226/151, trans. altered): “It is boring for one (einem). In this, the time that entrances (bannende) as a whole announces and tells of itself as that which is to be ruptured (gebrochen) and can be ruptured solely in the moment of vision (Augenblick) in which time itself, as that which properly makes possible Dasein in its actions, is at work” (224/149). Boredom is time out of joint, bidding Dasein to open itself up (sich erschließen) to the

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element that makes its ‘Da’ possible and to take up its responsibility for the freedom it has thus been granted, by being its past and its future, which is to say: by joining them in an active, transitive sense: “The moment of vision (Augenblick) breaks the spell of time (Bann der Zeit), and is able to rupture it, insofar as it is a specific possibility of time itself. It is not some now-point that we simply ascertain (feststellen), but it is the look of Dasein in the three perspectival directions we are already acquainted with, namely present, future and past (...) the look of resolute disclosedness (Entschlossenkeit) for action in the specific situation in which Dasein finds itself disposed in each case” (226/151). Heidegger’s reasoning is thus not only privative (Alles Versagen ...), but also homeopathic (time is both the poison and the cure)! One can wonder, as Michel Haar does in a fine commentary on this text, “whether Heidegger is not resorting to a metaphysical topos when turning the negativity of boredom into the principle of a rediscovery of time and of what seems to be a total self-appropriation of Dasein”.26 Indeed, as Haar adds, “Heidegger does not take into account the case where boredom would no longer give way, where time would indefinitely continue to fall apart without pulling itself together again” (ibid., 135). There seems to be in Heidegger an implicit premise that there is “a necessary link between the accomplishment of an extreme degree and the overcoming of such limit” (ibid.). Indeed, the problem for Heidegger is that Dasein always seeks to escape boredom, instead of letting it take its full swing (ausschwingen lassen, GA 29/30:216) and letting it tell what it has to tell. Hence his whole analysis is directed toward a situation where boredom is at its deepest and the possibilities not to hear its message minimal – toward the “es ist einem langweilig” which we analysed in the previous section. There is a revelation and philosophy – ‘das Vorletzte’ – is to accompany it in order to secure the chances of Dasein becoming Da-sein by listening to what is revealed – to the Sagen behind or in the Versagen (123/82). And thus one also understands why Heidegger, although constantly referring to such willingness to listen as courage (Mut) and to its negation as cowardice (Feigheit), will nonetheless

26

My translation of M. HAAR, ‘Le temps vide et l’indifférence à l’être’, in ID., La Fracture de l’Histoire. Douze essais sur Heidegger. Grenoble, Jérôme Millon (Krisis), 1994, p. 128. Further references to this analysis will be given by simple pagination in the text.


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emphatically deny that his is a philosophy of heroic deeds:27 for Dasein does not have to do something heroic, it only has to stop doing what it usually does, and instead of suppressing boredom, let it be and let it take Dasein into its own element (GA 29/30 § 19). Not unlike Michel Haar, who never refers to him, Levinas contests just these two moments – privation and homeopathy – which get Heidegger’s analysis going. Boredom, for him, is not a Versagen in which what withholds at the same time announces itself. It is a Versagen that should be understood on its own terms, – not in reference to a Sagen which provides it with its intelligibility and with its way-out. In boredom, what paralyses and puts under a spell is not time, but the il y a – the Being without beings from which man’s being arose in a transition that was never secure. Boredom is a kind of limit-situation in which the il y a announces its return: “In the hypostasis (...) in which a subject’s mastery, power or virility are manifested as being in a world, in which intention is the forgetting of oneself in light and a desire for things (...) we can discern the return of the there is. The hypostasis, in participating in the there is, finds itself again to be a solitude, in the definiteness of the bond with which the ego (le moi) is chained to itself (soi)” (EE 84). Accordingly, for Levinas the problem of boredom is not a confrontation with one’s true solitude, but its contrary. In not feeling engaged by anything outside itself, the subject is not alone: “It is, as it were, a dual solitude: this other than me accompanies the ego like a shadow. It is the duality of boredom, which is something different from the social existence we know in the world to which the ego turns in fleeing its boredom; it is also something different from the relationship with the other which detaches the ego from itself” (EE 90). There is, then, not so much something lacking in boredom (what Heidegger refers to as a mixture of “Hingehaltenheit” and “Leergelassenheit”), but something too much: the ego is suffocated by itself – by its self. To the point of being threatened by its “extinction” (EE 64): “What we call the I is itself submerged (...), invaded, depersonalized, stifled. The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves

27

For ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’, just a few passages, almost at random: GA 63:103; GA 20:436; GA29/30:117, 248, 255; ‘What is Metaphysics’, passim. For Heidegger’s feeling that he has been misunderstood: ‘Afterword’ to ‘What is Metaphysics’ and the long retrospective complaint in 1941: GA 49 (§11).

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what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously” (EE 53). To be sure, ‘what one calls the I’ is not what Heidegger calls Dasein – it refers to the mineness of a me that, as we have seen, is portrayed by Levinas as having fallen into Being before it falls into the world (EE 105). Consequently, boredom for Levinas is not the ontological mood that Heidegger takes it to be (the mood that brings Dasein to its ontological purity): it “puts into question not the existence, but the subjectivity of the subject; it prevents the subject from gathering itself up, reacting, being someone. What is positive in ‘the subject’ sinks away to a nowhere” (EE 68). But, this ‘nowhere’ is not the Heideggerian nothing – it is, so to speak, rather a nothing that no longer “nothings”,28 that no longer, one could translate, provides beings with appearance by holding them apart. The il y a “lacks rhythm” (EE 62), it is a continuum in which all distinctions are lost, including those ‘boundaries’ which one needs to speak of a being (which as this being must be distinct from that other being). What happens in boredom is, as it were, the undoing of the hypostasis, and thus the transition of a noun (a substance, standing on its own) into a verb – nothing appeals to us any longer, but “this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something’. But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence” (EE 52) which Levinas likens to “a field of forces, a heavy atmosphere belonging to no one” (EE 53) and which slowly, but irresistibly, seems to suck us in. It should come as no surprise that, given this different starting point, Levinas will, as it were, reverse whatever Heidegger, in his analysis of boredom, wishes to bring to the fore. Thus, instead of trying to bring Dasein to the point where it lets boredom take its full swing, Levinas will rather applaud all attempts to turn away from boredom by seeking whatever distraction one can have: smoking, for example, is analysed by Heidegger as a socially acceptable “inconspicuous possibility of passing the time” (GA 29/30:169/112), whereas for Levinas, the cigarette, as a worldly object of enjoyment (TI 133), would be one of those screens the world puts on offer to loosen the bond with oneself – smoking is a way for a being that is burdened with its own company to be more alone than 28

For this variation on Heidegger’s famous ‘das Nichts nichtet’ in ‘What is Metaphysics’, see chapter 3 above.


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it would be when ‘merely’ with itself. True, we do not smoke in order to escape boredom, but whilst smoking we are typically engaged in just that rhythm (inhaling/exhaling) that is absent from the il y a. Smoking, one could say, is indeed good for nothing: it is a way for the nothing to ‘nothing’ (nichten), to create an interval, a distance between the self and itself. But, of course, like all worldly activities, it is not a successful “liberation”. One will have to light up, again and again, and at the end of each butt one will again find that “silent association with oneself” (EE 89) which for Levinas is the tragedy of existence, its incapacity to successfully leave itself behind, to truly transcend itself. Nothing in man’s being “replies” to such desire. “Being is without reply”: “Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace ... but it does not respond to us” (EE 9, trans. corrected!). Unlike time for Heidegger, which is both the cause and the liberator of boredom, Being for Levinas is indifferent to the indifference it afflicts us with. There is no generosity in the il y a, no Sagen behind its Versagen – as Levinas keeps stressing by opposing it to (the later) Heidegger’s Es gibt: “ There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential” (EE 53). But, we are not at the end of our surprises. Here is Heidegger: “It is boring for one. What is this ‘it’? The ‘it’ that we mean whenever we say that it is lightning, it is thundering, it is raining. It – this is the title for whatever is indeterminate, unfamiliar” (GA 29/30:203/134). The attentive reader will not be led astray by the striking coincidence that Levinas should have chosen the ‘il pleut’ to set off the il y a from Heidegger who himself refers to ‘es regnet’. For Heidegger’s whole consecutive analysis will go on to determine what at this point in his lectures remains indeterminate. As we know, the ‘es’ for Heidegger is, of course, not a determinate being – it will turn out to be the intimate horizon of all beings (220,226/146,150), including Dasein: time! And in taking and withholding, time will give and be at the centre of a remarkable sacrificial structure which makes one wonder whether there is not an intertext that, at a deeper level, is shared by both Heidegger and Levinas, who are supposedly each other’s anti-podes: “The temporal spell that becomes manifest in this ‘it is boring for one’ can be broken only through time. Only if the temporal spell is broken do beings as a whole no longer refuse themselves, only then do they give up their own

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possibilities, make themselves graspable for each specific Dasein and give this Dasein itself the possibility of existing in the midst of beings in one particular respect, in one particular possibility in each case” (226/151).29 Time, by “impelling Dasein into the extremity (Spitze) of the Augenblick” (151/227) arranges for its own spell to be broken and, in its wake, for a generalized economy of donation where it seems that beings as a whole offer themselves to Dasein by giving up their own possibilities in a sort of imitation of time which ‘did what it could’ to give itself up – calling on the one banned to break its spell ... This is certainly not the only place where Being (of which Time is ‘the first name’, GA 9:376) seems to be engaged in a part Levinas would have liked to reserve for the Good or even for God. The whole structure of Heidegger’s argument – in deep boredom Dasein is forced to hear a message (GA 29/30:209/139) it nonetheless is called upon to receive (and thus, could possibly not receive) – reminds one of Levinas’ appeal of the Other which the I cannot not hear (i.e. it is forced to hear it) and yet has the freedom to ignore (to not receive). As if Levinas’ formula for revelation – “revelation is carried through (se fait) by the one who receives it” (OB 156) – could equally well hold for Heidegger’s ‘Offenbarung’. Indeed, the same tension one finds in Levinas between, on the one hand, an appeal that has always arrived, and, on the other hand, a revelation that only arrives for the one who is open to it, seems to be at work in Heidegger’s text, who resorts, in fact, to a solution that is entirely parallel to the one proposed by Levinas. Received or not, there is always a trace – one will always already have been struck by that which one flees from. Fear is suppressed anxiety (Heidegger). Shamelessness suppressed shame (Levinas, OB 192n21). Undeep boredom suppressed boredom – but boredom still. The three topoi that we earlier signalled to form the backbone of Heidegger’s analysis – a flight, a trace of that from which it flees, a message that can be heard – may have been discarded by Levinas as far as the analysis of boredom is concerned. Nonetheless it

29

The corollary in Levinas would have to do with the Good’s self-abdication (it interrupts the desire which it arouses and deflects it to the non-desirable other) and the self-contraction of God who doesn’t impose his creative ‘authorship’ on creatures (TI 58, 77-9, 105) and runs the risk of being ignored (OB 161). For an analysis of these themes in Levinas, see chapter 5 and Truth and Singularity, chapters 9 and 10 (esp. 282 ff.).


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would be easy to show30 how they make up the backbone of the ethics he opposes to ontology. And with a similar aim, or at least a similar result: a purification of the human such that it falls into ‘accord’ with its element – Being (Time) for Heidegger, the Good for Levinas: “Being’s esse, through which an entity is an entity, is a matter of thought, gives something to thought, stands from the first in the open. In that there is indeed a kind of indigence in being, constrained to an other than itself, to a subject called upon to welcome the manifestation. (...) (It) follows that, outside of the part subjectivity plays in the disclosure of being, every game that (it) would play for its own account would be but a veiling or an obscuring of being’s esse” (OB 132). Indeed, this was the point of undoing Dasein’s ‘self-defence’: to distract it from its distraction and bring it into its own element such that it could welcome the manifestation. But when Levinas puts another distractor to the fore – the ethical Other whose appeal finally breaks the bond with which I am tied to myself – the result seems to be the same: a kind of indigence of the Good (of God) who can only manifest itself (Himself) indirectly – i.e. through that appeal, which leaves me no game to play for my own account that will not be a kind of foul play: irresponsibility, as the (impossible) refusal to be responsible, is not an alternative, but the confirmation of a prior responsibility.31 Just as Heidegger’s fleeing Dasein, Levinas’ irresponsible subject is an impurity, a stain on the script that is written for it – a false note in the harmony it was supposed to join as the element where it ‘belonged’. These similarities are not mentioned here to cancel the difference between Heidegger and Levinas. They are meant to put it into perspective – into a different perspective, that is, than the one that would prefer to simply portray Levinas as the first critic of fundamental ontology.32 Not that there is no critique! But it shares a certain soil with what it criticizes: firstly, because it takes an opposite starting point – the

30

See in addition to the chapters above the Levinas studies collected in Truth and Singularity. 31 For an analysis of this move, see chapter 6 where I also point to a non-privative notion of ‘irresponsibility’ which one can defend against this privative definition. 32 Almost the title of an important article by J. TAMINIAUX (‘La première réplique à 1’ontologie fondamentale’, in C. CHALIER - M. ABENSOUR (eds.), Cahiers de l’Herme: Emmanuel Lévinas. Editions de l’Herne, 1991).

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one that we saw Heidegger ‘decided’ not to take (section III); and secondly, because it ends up with a solution that seems formally analogous to what it opposes. Foucault had a name for such a situation: he called it the ‘tines’ of a fork,33 and what interested him was the stem which held them together and, above all, the soil into which it was planted. Perhaps what we have here, then, is another of these passionate discussions in urgent need of deflation. For it could be that by thus refusing to take sides, in thus ‘bracketing’ the parties’ right or wrong, we may come to spot what perhaps was not entirely unhidden to each of them. Time, then, to finally raise the question we have been trying to make audible all along – the question of an intransitive facticity.

7. BETWEEN THE TINES OF A FORK It is no coincidence that we took so long to come to the issue we promised to raise. For it has been travelling with us for some time now and we had to make an effort to let it go unnoticed so that it could make the journey on its own terms instead of being forced on the Procrustean bed Heidegger-specialists would no doubt have accused us of preparing for it. Facticity is, in fact, simply Heidegger’s technical term to distinguish what one could call ‘concrete’ Dasein from the kind of concreteness one meets in other beings. ‘Factical’ Dasein is, of course, a situated Dasein in many ways: it is born in a certain place, at a certain time, in such or such a family, it is a boy or a girl, with a certain physiognomy (colour of skin, of eyes, of hair, ...), growing up in a town or on the countryside, speaking the local dialect or not, etc. But, as we have seen, Heidegger has a number of terms that eliminate the need for such a list of specifics: Dasein is always jemeinig (it is the Dasein of a specific person), it is jeweilig (it ‘has’ its own ‘time’), it is ‘thrown’ into a specific world (it is thus not causa sui, not its own origin, and always situated in a certain setting – e.g. the XXth century, which is, of course,

33

My attention was drawn to this expression by Ian Hacking’s ‘Michel Foucault’s immature science’, Noûs, 1979 (13), pp. 39-51. Hacking claims it to be his own (“a teasing device that I call Foucault’s fork which surprises us by stating that competing bodies of belief have the same underlying rules of formation”, p. 41), but one can find it in The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Vintage, 1973, e.g. p. 299.


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not the XIIth and thus ‘prevents’ Dasein from taking part in the second Crusade ...). One could say that whenever Heidegger writes ‘faktisch’ (factical) he was simply, by abbreviation, referring to all the above. But the point is that there is a difference, characteristic for Dasein, between what is ‘faktisch’ and what belongs to mere factuality (Tatsächlichkeit). Whatever ‘facts’ one can enlist for this person’s Dasein, will be ‘facts’ that are taken up in his or her Dasein: not predicates, but adverbs, modalities of his/her being. In other words: each Dasein will be its facts in a transitive sense. They are not just outward characteristics (qualities an outward observer can state about this or that Dasein), but, if you wish, characteristics that are ‘lived’ by the one supposedly so characterized. Unlike animals, Dasein is not simply sexed.34 It ‘is’ gendered: sexual difference is a difference that it lives and ‘understands’ (in the very wide sense that Verstehen gets in Heidegger: to know one’s way about). Unlike stones, Dasein does not simply ‘have’ weight, it watches its weight (or it doesn’t). Unlike plants or flowers, Dasein is not simply ‘coloured’, its ‘colour’ is not indifferent to it – it will be its colour, for example by taking pride in it (Black is beautiful) or by thinking that it should not play a role when applying for a job (and thus rejecting either positive or negative discrimination; either of which, of course, it could also support). Thus, for Dasein, facticity (Faktizität) should be distinguished from factuality (Tatsächlichkeit): “Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something present-at-hand, but a characteristic of Dasein’s Being (...). The ‘that-itis’ of facticity never becomes something that we can come across by beholding it” (SZ 135/174). I will return to what I have left out in this passage in a moment. Let us first seek confirmation in a much earlier quote: “ ‘Facticity’ is the designation we will use for the character of the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein. More precisely, this expression means: in each case (jeweilig) this Dasein (...) insofar as it is, according to its being (seinsmäßig), ‘there’ in the character of its being. Seinsmäßig Dasein means: not, and never, to be there (...) as an object of which we merely take cognizance and have knowledge. Rather, Dasein is there to itself in the how of its ownmost being. (...) Being – transitive: to be factical life! Being is itself never the possible object of a having, since what is at issue in it, what it comes to, is itself: being” (GA 63:7/15). 34

I will return to this in the course of the next chapter.

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One understands how this can be the opening passage of a 1923 course titled: Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität – for given the kind of Being Dasein is (a being ‘that it is and has to be’), what needs to be done in such an ontology is, of course, not to objectively describe such a being by taking an outward look at it. It is, to the contrary, to understand how such a being ‘makes sense’ of its being, how it ‘moves’ about (in) its being. Consequently, “the common thesis that Heidegger has no ethics, appears from the perspective of a hermeneutics of facticity to be a plain misunderstanding”.35 For at the centre of Heidegger’s enterprise is the distinction between facticity and factuality – a distinction that points to the fact that Dasein is in each case interested in its own being, that it plays a part in it, that its being is not indifferent to it. As Grondin continues his comment, “the task of such a hermeneutics is to destroy the concept of humans as objects for an indifferent theory and to substitute for it the human being as a Seinkönnen that each such being has to take upon itself” (ibid.). Indeed, as we have seen, ontology for Heidegger was not meant to be neutral! It was meant to be practical through and through, a reminder to each Dasein of the task implied in its having to be its being. Hence the quote we abbreviated from Being and Time reads in its full version: “Facticity is (...) a characteristic of Dasein’s Being – one which has been taken up in existence, even if proximally (zunächst) it has been thrust aside” (SZ 135/174). We have seen how this ‘thrusting aside’ (Abdrängung – an almost Freudian term!) brings a certain unrest into Dasein in which it fails to see its own doing. Instead of seeing in this unrest the suppression of a movement at the heart of Dasein – the movement of transcendence opening its Da –, Dasein only sees in it a lack of rest. And it will blame time for withholding from it what it truly needs: more time! It will see time as merely versagend – depriving it of the time it lacks (even in boredom where there is, in a sense, too much time, this ‘too much’ is precisely what seems to hold Dasein up and to prevent it from catching up with its plans, projects, activities, thus introducing a delay into its being for which it believes time is to blame). Always short of time,

35

J. GRONDIN, ‘Die Hermeneutik der Faktizität als ontologische Destruktion und Ideologiekritik. Zur Aktualität der Hermeneutik Heideggers’, in D. PAPENFUSS - O. PÖGGELER (eds.), Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers. Bd. 2. Im Gespräch der Zeit. Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1990, pp. 163-78, quote p. 169.


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Dasein will perceive itself as doomed to a lesser element and it will long for what transcends that element: the supratemporal, the eternal, the objective, the transhistorical (even if, like Spengler,36 one decides to look for it in the historical itself). Whereas Heidegger believes Dasein can and should overcome this unrest,37 for Levinas man’s existence inspires him/her with an unrest that does not derive from a movement he/she tries to suppress, but from the fact that the existence of a being necessarily implies that the anonymous flow of a being without beings has somehow been brought to a stop in this being which no longer flows along with that anonymity, but breaks (rompt) it (EE 103). This interval is ‘the present’ – the instant: that which stands on its own, without being the result of what precedes it, nor being linked to what follows it. The instant is the separation of a being which has a name out of the anonymity of being in general. It is what we earlier encountered as the hypostasis: the birth of an independent subject, the transition of a verb into a sub-stance, – a transition that now appears as a certain freezing of what flows: the instant stands, it does not move. It does not come from somewhere and it does not go somewhere. “Not having received its being from past” (EE 103), it will not cede it to either past or future. It is, thus, “an event”, a “pure present” (ibid.) not “included in the dynamism of time” (EE 102). But as such, it points to a “deeper drama” (EE 85) that one misses if, like Heidegger, one thinks that “ecstasy is the original mode of existence” (EE 82): “To the notion of existence, where the emphasis is put on the first syllable, we are opposing the notion of a being whose very advent is a folding back upon itself, a being which contrary to the ecstaticism of contemporary thought, is in a certain sense a substance” (EE 81). To which Levinas adds, in full awareness of his originality: “Hypostasis, the apparition of a substantive, is not only the apparition of a new grammatical category; it signifies the suspension of the anonymous there

36

Interestingly, in GA 60 Heidegger portrays Spengler as some sort of Platonist: “Denn bei Spengler ist die geschichtliche Welt die Grundwirklichkeit, die einzige Wirklichkeit” (46). Spengler’s “absolutisation” of historical reality is a mere “opposition” to Plato, but not a real break (47-8). 37 It is not for nothing that anxiety is described as a state of “peculiar calm” (BW 102) and self-compunction totally different from the “bewildering” “drifting back and forth between ‘worldly’ possibilities” characteristic of fear (SZ 344/394).

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is, the apparition of a private domain of a name (un nom). On the ground of the there is a being arises. The ontological significance of an entity in the general economy of Being, which Heidegger simply posits alongside of Being by distinction, is thus deduced ” (EE 83). But with this ‘deduction’ everything that is supposed to follow from it in the Heideggerian universe of thought will be changed. Including facticity, of which it can precisely no longer be affirmed that it is “taken up into existence”, a formulation that we already came across in Heidegger and which he also uses with regard to birth (SZ 391/443). Indeed, for Heidegger, Dasein’s proper way to relate to its birth is not to see it as something of the past that lies behind its back: “Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand” (SZ 374/426). Factical Dasein is its birth, “es existiert gebürtig” (ibid.), its birth is not a fact, but a matter of facticity, for which the existential term is thrownness: “As being, Dasein is something that has been thrown, it has been brought into its ‘there’, but not of its own accord. (...) As existent, it never comes back behind it as some event which has (...) factually befallen and fallen loose from Dasein again; on the contrary, as long as Dasein is, Dasein, as care, is constantly its ‘that it is’” (SZ 284/330). One has rightfully seen in these passages the basis for a Heideggerian ethics of responsibility. As François Raffoul has shown, it is the very opacity, the finitude and the expropriation implied in Dasein’s birth – its thrownness – which brings Heidegger to the expression of a “Faktizität der Überantwortung” (SZ 135), factical Dasein as delivered over to its ‘that it is’. As Raffoul writes, not without a certain sense for paradox: “What Dasein has to be, and what it has to be responsible for, is then precisely its very facticity, its being thrown as such. What I have to make my own is thus what can never belong to me, what evades me, what will always have escaped me”.38 That is, in other words: I have to appropriate my birth – take it up into my existence in spite of its preceding me. I have to take up this predecession into my existence, I have to be “my own thrown basis”, by “projecting myself upon possibilities into which I have been thrown” (SZ 284/330). Which means that, instead of “getting dragged along in thrownness” (SZ 348/400), I will have to take it upon 38

Fr. RAFFOUL, ‘Heidegger and the Origins of Responsibility’, in ID. - D. PETTIGREW (eds.), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy. Albany, S.U.N.Y. Press, 2002, p. 212.


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my own shoulders, “catch” the throw of my Being-thrown-into the world, and “achieve some sort of position” in which I stand on my own (selbständig) and no longer seek to avoid the task of having to be my being which, for all its concretion, never determines me (SZ 322/369).39 Levinas’ views on what it means to be born could not be more different. Whereas for Heidegger birth qua thrownness does not rule out transcendence, but on the contrary calls for it (‘become what you are!’), for Levinas “transcendence is not the fundamental movement of the ontological adventure” – it is, he adds, “founded in the nontranscendence of position” (EE 105),40 which is yet another name for what we met as ‘hypostasis’, ‘substance’, ‘instant’ – the birth of a being whose very advent is a folding back upon itself. A folding back that, for Levinas, is an incapacity to leave, a being stuck to one’s being, something “absolutely intransitive” (TO 42), something that rules out all transcendence: “The act of taking position does not transcend itself. This effort which does not transcend itself constitutes the present or the ‘I’ ” (EE 81). There is something final, something irrevocable or irremissible about being born – one is inscribed into a being into which one is locked in. Birth is an event, for sure, but “to not receive its being from a past, is not the gratuitous evanescence of a game or a dream. A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present” (EE 103). The instant, we have seen, stands on its own, but if it “thereby escapes the weight of the past (the only weight that was seen in existence, [Levinas is referring to Heidegger among others]), it involves a weight of its own which its evanescence does not lighten, and against which a solitary subject, who is constituted by the instant, is powerless” (EE 104). And, Levinas concludes: “Time and the other are necessary for the liberation from it” (ibid.). Transcendence will then, for Levinas, need to come from outside, as does time – “a mode of existence where nothing is irrevocable, the

39

I have elsewhere argued that what this means is that one cannot, according to Heidegger (another “decision”!), authentically ‘fall’. ‘Falling’ is what I called a ‘disappearing existential’ (in contrast to other existentials where there is both an authentic and an inauthentic way of taking them up, authenticity with regard to falling implies that one stops falling and takes up “a position” etc. See Truth and Singularity, chapter 1 and pp. 175-6). 40 The ‘founded’ refers to the way ethics will come to redeem this longing (cf. infra).

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contrary of the definitive subjectivity of the ‘I’ ” (EE 91). Whereas the instant remains out of time – severed both from past and future – time for Levinas redeems the unredeemable: “the work of time” (EE 94) is a resurrection! Not the “destruction” of the instant, but “the unravelling of the knot which is tied in it, the definitive, which its evanescence does not undo” (EE 95). Whereas Heidegger called upon Dasein itself to be the transition between its proper past and future in the Augenblick (the moment of vision), Levinas will need other eyes – the eyes of an Other to introduce “a future where the present will have the benefit of a recall” (EE 93). Hence his conclusion which already announces Totality and Infinity: “To simply say that the ego leaves itself is a contradiction, since, in quitting itself the ego carries itself along – if it does not sink into the impersonal. Asymmetrical intersubjectivity is the locus of transcendence in which the subject, while preserving its structure of a subject, has the possibility of not inevitably returning to itself” (EE 100). For me to be somewhere else than my self, to be pardoned, to not be a definite existence, presupposes that one moves out of ontology which can at best understand that there is such a need, but not that this need is truly a Desire.41 A need will not be able to undo the bond that ties me to myself, whereas Desire is precisely such an undoing – giving oneself up for the other. As Existents and Existent puts it very soberly: “Reaching the Other is not something justified by one’s own self. It is not a matter of shaking me out of my boredom” (EE 85).

8. INTRANSITIVE FACTICITY, THE PRE-HISTORY OF ‘THE PRIMACY OF ETHICS’ At least two things should have become clear by now. The first point to remember is that Levinas’ dismissal of the primacy of ontology and his subsequent turn to ethics and to ‘the Other’ results from his early confrontation with ontology. More specifically, Levinas seems to have concluded that matters are worse – that the drama is “deeper” – than Heidegger would like them to be. Dressing up in the gown of the

41

The distinction between ‘need’ and ‘Desire’ is made at the beginning of TI (see section I.A.I. Desire for the Invisible). Ethics, one could say, replies to a need by changing it into a Desire (without that alteration the whole enterprise would be open to the Nietzschean suspicion that I only help my neighbour out of self-interest).


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“methodological atheist”, Levinas tries to show that Heidegger gives the game away by claiming what he would have to ‘prove’: that being is transitive, that the cause and cure of boredom are the same, that Dasein can and should stop fleeing itself and, finally, that facticity can be taken up into existence. As we have seen, Levinas denies each of these claims and specifically points to a facticity that cannot be taken up into existence – the whole drama of the hypostasis being that its thrownness into being turns it into “a monad”: “it is by existing that I am without windows, and not by some content in me that would be incommunicable” (TO 42). This brings us to a second point: it is precisely by insisting on the subject’s solitude, on its being inscribed in its own being – the one thing one cannot “exchange” (ibid.) between beings – that Levinas finds his way toward inter-subjectivity. Far from blocking off the road to others, as the wind of our times would have it, it is precisely an even more radical unrelatedness between people than one finds in Heidegger (‘existential solipsism’) which seems to eliminate “the disdain for human affairs” Heidegger found himself accused of. Social conversation, for Levinas, testifies to a “joy of communication” that is more than a “Pascalian diversion” (TO 59): “By connecting solitude to the subject’s materiality – materiality being its enchainment to itself– we can understand in what sense the world and our existence in the world constitute a fundamental advance of the subject in overcoming the weight that it is to itself, in overcoming its materiality – that is to say, in loosening the bond between the self (le soi) and the ego (le moi)” (TO 62). Being, that is, far from being a co-Being and a Being-with in which beings would be exposed to one another (Nancy), is precisely what works against all such ex-posure to the point of triumphing over all such ‘worldly’ advance which is, ultimately, unable to move the stasis of the hypostatic subject into the ekstasis and the ek-sistence of Heidegger’s Dasein. As bearer of a ‘Da’, the imminent implosion of which it is incapable of successfully warding off, the being that Levinas calls ‘subject’ is marked by a facticity that time and again seems to rub out the ‘ek-’ in which or by which it seeks asylum for its ‘-sistence’. But, as we have seen, this “atheist” pessimism – a sobered up version of Heidegger – is but a starting point from which to fully appreciate the unworldly appearance of an Other who is more than the form s/he turns toward us, but is “the bearer of his own light” – a light that will finally come to save the subjectivity of the subject (cf. TI

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26) by allowing it to truly transcend itself, and thus to not find itself unaltered when arriving at the other shore. Sociality is an excellence, as Levinas will later say. It redeems a hope that, within the element of ontology, would long since have petered out, given its endless disappointments... Where does this leave us? Except with a ‘differend’? With a ‘discussion’, that is, where the terms that go to and fro between the parties constantly change meaning and where there is no reason, except idiosyncratic sympathy or per baculum argumentation, to choose one side rather than the other? We can, of course, patiently document, as we indeed did, such ‘conversation’ and try to bring order to Babel. But this would be to reduce ourselves to the silence of the witness or, if we are more ambitious, to take up the role of a referee who, at least, still has the illusion of partaking in the game. Or we could ask, instead, whether this game is still ours. ... Indeed, as we had occasion to point out, there seems to be something in that game which only regards us, and does not seem to be of any concern to the players. I am referring to the fact that, however opposed Levinas and Heidegger may have come to be, they also seemed to share, as it were, a common ‘soil’ which did not do away with their differend, but strangely seemed to allow for it. Let us, instead of repeating what was noted before (near the end of section VI), simply recall that, however different (‘differend’) the diagnosis of the predicament of our ‘Zu-sein’ may have been, there was at least a formal agreement over what could be considered a cure: a part for the subject to play, such that it could leave behind its ‘unrest’. And such a part presupposes a script in which the subject would find just those lines that were only meant for itself. Lines which could invest it with a singularity it could, in principle, affirm or bear, without being crushed by the demands they put on it. And if ethics, for Levinas, constitutes the better script, one should not forget that it has stolen its lines from the ‘not-so-fundamental’ ontology it was meant to trump: ‘no one can take my responsibility from me’ being substituted for ‘no one can die my death in my stead’. Responsibility will purify the subject to the point of it becoming invested with “an interiority without secret” (OB 138) – an expression which recalls, to say the least, that strange “impoverishment” that, according to Heidegger, time was offering to Dasein as it invited it to take up its time and carry through time‘s self-sacrifice that time itself was calling for.


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Both Dasein and the Levinasian ‘subject’ have to give up something – have to ‘impoverish’ – for them to embrace time and settle in the folds where they ultimately belong. They have to give up ‘eternity’ – a denial of time for Heidegger, who sees in it the inauthentic longing for an im-mortality where mortality is privatively misunderstood as what lacks the ‘im-’; a condition that is not yet in time for Levinas, who portrays ‘birth’ and ‘the instant’ as being ‘out of time’, independent but suffering from their own weight, – a terrible price to pay, but still worth paying if one thinks of what it allows one to leave behind: the thick, suffocating presence of the ‘il y a’, an “atmospheric density” (TO 46) that one feels sometimes approaching in the nightmarish “consciousness that it will never finish” (TO 48), that one is going to die forever (EE 56), entirely in the grip of a past “that renews nothing” (ibid.) and from which there is no escape, – indeed, from which death itself would be a liberation.

It is too late to question this unexpected agreement. Let us be satisfied with a hint: perhaps one way to make sense of this debate is to see it in terms of the a-cosmic situation that characterizes ‘modernity’. Indeed, the Heidegger of the twenties has been read and understood by many a reader as either giving expression to such ‘acosmism’ or trying to curb it (or failing to do so, as some have concluded).42 Let us not forget the passage in Being and Time where Heidegger speaks of “the sole authority which a free existing can have”: a “loyalty to its own self” which consists in “revering (Ehrfurcht) the repeatable possibilities of existence” (SZ 391/443). One can see Levinas as disagreeing with such ‘anti-nomism’ (as Hans Jonas calls it). A disagreement which made him return to Plato in his ‘own’ way – which was perhaps still a ‘modern’ way, reacting, like Heidegger, to modernity from within the boundaries of modernity. Indeed Levinas, in a sense, tries to save the cosmos without restoring it: he puts it in our own hands, the hands of ‘adults’ whose only way to God or to the Infinite is through an infinite responsibility of an endless bleeding (“a haemorrhage”, OB 92) for the other(s). In the end, Parmenides may have been killed, but ethics – circling around the one 42

E.g. H. JONAS, Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit. Zur Lehre vom Menschen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1963, pp. 5-25.

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Good, the one Infinite, and the One God – nonetheless seems to retain the essential traits of henology.43 It is these traits that should make us wonder whether that discussion can still be ours – and whether what one called, with a terrible word, ‘postmodernity’ (terrible because it became fashionable by (not just for) not being understood) should not be understood in different terms than the a-cosmic ones put forward to understand the modern predicament. Instead of the demise of the old order, one would have to face an ‘increase’ of orders: what was considered un-ordered turned out to be a different order – and not just one, but many! The problem of postmodernity, then, is not that an order fell out, but that, in its wake, there was an endless multiplication of competing orders. Not an a-cosmism, but a poly-cosmism that one can perhaps compare to an explosion of the transcendental (Being; the Good) that somehow in Heidegger and Levinas still retained its unity.44 And in its wake a sort of rediscovery that there is something in us that ‘does not move’ – and that this something is not the same for each of us, indeed that there may be more than one such ‘Thing’ (Lacan) to have taken in each ‘single’ person. I am referring to all these differences for which people are prepared to bleed as for what in their lives is higher than life... Would it be wrong to see them as ever so many infinities coming to replace the once exclusive Infinite; as the many go(o)ds replacing the one Go(o)d; as particularizations of the Absolute turning into particular ab-solutes? Thus the feeling of an unclear ‘belonging’ – for one is not bound to all of them, and those one feels ‘attached’ to have nothing about them that could explain why it is to them and not to others that we feel thus attached.45 Hence the discovery of a silence that is not voluntary, nor telling in the sense of Heidegger’s Verschwiegenheit and that should not be understood as what suppresses speech. This in-fancy – this silence in us that refuses to give way to adulthood – is, Lyotard suggested, something like our soul.46 Something not taken in by time, and not to be rendered to it. Let us say that it perhaps points to an infra-temporality

43

As I argued in chapters 5 and 9-11 of Truth and Singularity. See the end of chapter 5 above for how it retained its unity in Levinas. 45 See my article quoted in note 9. 46 J.Fr. LYOTARD, ‘A l’insu’, Le Genre Humain (nr. 13 – special issue Politiques de l’oubli), pp. 37-43, citation p. 39. 44


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that is not inferior to time, but perpendicular to it, like supratemporality was before modern philosophy taught us to see in it something that could and should be reduced to its true origin: temporality. Postmodernity, then, is perhaps the name for a condition in which the intemporal insurrects against its undue temporalization. Something does not move – some ‘Thing’ in us “more us than us”, as the (Lacanian) saying goes.47 We bump into that some ‘Thing’ every time we are unable to join a common practice, to disappear in a certain social metabolism. The ‘subject’ is an indigestion. The subject, that is, is confronted with its subjectivity in the ‘this is not me’ in which it is thrown back upon itself as if ‘throwing up’ or being ‘thrown up by’ an element in which it does not belong. But I am thrown back to some ‘thing’ about me that remains opaque to me: I couldn‘t possibly prove the worth of my attachments. They have me before I have them. They are, as Rorty puts it somewhere, ‘the lights I work by’... Or as the later Heidegger said, there is an untruth at the heart of truth, which Derrida famously rendered as: there is a darkness at the heart of light, a shadow cast inward.48 A closure, that is, that unlike in the Heidegger of the twenties, can no longer be seen as what comes to close off a more primordial openness... There might be, then, still another kind of intransitive facticity: the one by which we introduced the term (the opening pages of section VII) and which we gradually lost sight of as we came under the spell of the debate between the ‘early’ Heidegger and the ‘early’ Levinas. Could it be a coincidence that the only time in these lectures of the twenties Heidegger gives the example of skin-colour he leaves it to das Man to mention it whilst forgetting it: “Of course, people will say, attunement is perhaps something other than the colour of the hair and skin of human 47

J. LACAN, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (trans. A. Sheridan). London, Penguin, 1977, pp. 263 ff. 48 J. DERRIDA, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. An Introduction (trans. J.P. Leavey Jr.). Stony Brook N.Y., Nicolas Hays Ltd., 1978, p. 105: “But, so that history may have its proper density (...) must not the ‘critical’ forgetfulness of origins be the faithful shadow that accompanies the movement of truth rather than its accidental aberration?” (my italics). This remark paved my way to the later Heidegger and to Foucault (Truth and Singularity, chapter 2). I have turned it against Rorty’s “let’s stick to our own lights” in ‘ ‘Hold the Being’. How to split Rorty between irony and finitude’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 1999 (25:2), pp. 27-45.

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beings ...” (GA 29/30:90/60)? But what if the Grundstimmung which is ours should be understood from out of such differences that turn us into subjects that are ‘not without’ qualities49 – not reducible to them, nor detachable from them, but ‘attached’ to them, decentred by these differences we cannot give up, nor stay alone with? Lacan had a name for such a ‘mood’. He called it, like Heidegger, ‘anxiety’ – but he significantly added that it was “not without object”. And he related it to an ‘embarrassment’ that he refused to see as the reverse of a shortcoming vis-à-vis an Other who is asymmetrically above us. ‘Embarrassment’, he said, comes from the Latin ‘imbaricare’ (to impede). And Lacan, being Lacan, compliments himself for this find which, as usual, he does not really explain. Manifestly, he says, the wind is blowing with me (manifestement le vent souffle sur moi).50 He may have been right – manifestly, the wind which carried him is not the one against which we have been trying to set our course...

49

On the meaning of this ‘not without qualities’, see chapter 6 above. If one accepts the non-privative notion of irresponsibility which I develop there (singularisation as having the structure of being attached to some “thing” that does not respond to us) it becomes less evident to affirm, as François Raffoul does (art cit., p. 217), that “everything takes place as if it was precisely the disruption of this commonality between the I and others, as Jean-Luc Nancy has emphasized, which provided the basis for the very emergence of the other and therefore for the very possibility of an ethics of responsibility” . I would tend to disagree with Raffoul and Nancy over this last clause. My disagreement comes from a notion of irresponsibility that is not ethical but mèontological (and which, as such, points to ‘metaphysical solitude’ that is not incompatible with a notion of community, but is perhaps putting it under less strain than is ‘otherwise’ done). More on mè-ontology in the conclusion to this volume. 50 J. LACAN, L’angoisse, Séminaire 1962-3, unauthorized text published by the ‘Association freudienne internationale’, p. 17. For an illustration of such ‘embarrassment’, see chapter 2 above.

CHAPTER EIGHT

DEMONS AND THE DEMONIC. KIERKEGAARD AND HEIDEGGER ON ANXIETY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

My title is a truncated reference to a little-known passage in Arendt in which she mentions “a daimon which has nothing demonic about it”. That daimon, she tells us, “accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself”.1 The passage is not exactly a hapax legomenon. Arendt uses the same imagery a few times in The Human Condition, but she never gets any clearer about the daimon. For her it seems to have been no more than a metaphor for that public part of ourselves that we show to others – since the daimon can only appear to others, it reminds us of the need of a public space. But if one pushes the metaphor somewhat, one may wonder whether Arendt’s plea for the necessity of a public realm would not have been stronger had she portrayed the daimon as that part of ourselves we can not bear to stay alone with. Instead of simply letting the distinction between the private and the public realm equal “the distinction between things that should be shown [to others] and things that should be hidden [from them]”,2 one could try to ground it ontologically in the fact that there is this ‘something’ about me (the daimon) that not only is hidden from me (as Arendt explicitly says)3, but that needs to be hidden from me (as I would like to push her4). The daimon is, so to speak, private to me: it has to do with who I am, but it is also a secret I cannot penetrate. The function of the public realm would then be to bring in a distance

1

H. ARENDT, Men in Dark Times. San Diego/New York/London, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983, p. 73. 2 H. ARENDT, The Human Condition. Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 72. 3 Ibid., pp. 179-80 and 193 (“visible only to others”) – there is no indication in the context as to why here she uses stronger statements than in the opening quote from Men in Dark Times. 4 I shall return to this in the conclusion below.

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between me and myself, or rather between me and that daimon to which I am attached and through which I am singularised. It is clear that, conceived in such a way, Arendt’s daimon would be even less demonic if one follows Kierkegaard in seeing as one of the aspects of the demonic the violent effort to close off a prior communication or openness. For the daimon is precisely that about the subject which breaks it open toward others if it is true that the subject does not want to or cannot stay alone with it. But is this true? What would it take for it to be true? Clearly, the inability implied here stands in need of further analysis – and here Kierkegaard may surprisingly come to our rescue. For, as we shall see, some passages in The Concept of Anxiety5 seem to be pointing in a similar direction: there would be ‘something’, which is not nothing and yet not a determinate thing, marking the subject which makes it anxious and which it tries to ‘harbour’ in some sort of affective response. This ‘something’, I will suggest, has more to do with sexual difference (not nothing) than with ontological difference (the Nothing one finds in Heidegger who claims to be influenced by Kierkegaard). Of course, Heidegger and others who were struck by the force with which Vigilius Haufniensis insisted on the difference between fear (which has a determinate object) and anxiety (which hasn’t and therefore is linked, as we shall see, in The Concept to ‘nothing’) were not misreading Kierkegaard. But they may have been overlooking a sub-text which I find particularly attractive, although I am equally puzzled as to why it only remained a sub-text in Kierkegaard himself. To be honest, I have no direct answer to that question. But I suspect it may have to do with some of the other difficulties I fatally seem to experience when trying to concentrate on Kierkegaard. Somehow I find myself always interrupted in my reading, as if there is some force in those texts that tries to shut me out – the more I try to appropriate the argument, the more inappropriate the thoughts I seem to come up with. But let me, instead of speaking abstractly, by way of preparing our later

5

In this chapter I will use the following abbrevations when referring to Kierkegaard’s work: CA: The Concept of Anxiety. A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1980; FT: Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1983; SD: The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1983.

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reading of The Concept, just give a few examples of the kind of interruptions I have in mind – as one will notice, they somehow seem to touch on the question whether Kierkegaard is our contemporary (or what it would take to be his).

1. BEING UNABLE TO DIE The first example I am thinking of is that strange equivocation on the very first page of The Sickness unto Death: “such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another” (S 13). Another or an Other? Something else or someone else? Anti-Climacus does not make the distinction and yet one wonders whether it would not make a difference to the formula which he subsequently proposes for describing “the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out”: “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it” (S 14), a power by which, as the rest of the text makes clear, ultimately can only be meant a someone else, i.e. an Other, God. But what would it mean – would it at all be meaningful – to pursue the other possibility (another/something else) that Anti-Climacus does not even mention? As is well-known, for Anti-Climacus ‘the sickness unto death’ is not death itself but the inability to die, “the hopelessness that there is not even the ultimate hope, death” (S 18). Who is in despair despairs “that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing” (S 19). But compare this experience to what I think is happening in our age and wonder whether that means that it is consumed, even if it would not admit it, by despair. As everyone knows, our age thinks of itself as pluralistic, the selves that live in it are characterized by differences that do not tolerate any further reduction to unity. But as a consequence these selves are constantly confronting each other with their mutual differences and thus manoeuvring one another into a position that seems at least formally homologous to the one that Anti-Climacus describes as the inability to die. Let me, in attempt to explain this, introduce a distinction which I borrow from Lacan, the distinction between a symbolic and a physical death. Hitchcock’s ‘The Trouble with Harry’, in which Harry’s corpse is repeatedly buried and dug up again, could serve as an example of the difference between a person’s physical death and the symbolic settlement

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of it (Lacan uses it this way to refer to the trouble with Polyneikos).6 But for our purposes, we should think of the opposite case of someone who is physically alive, but symbolically ‘dead’ – in the sense of unable to participate in the symbolic circuit of the other self with which he or she is confronted. Examples can be trivial (the embarrassment of being overor underdressed at an occasion in which one, as a result, is unanimously ignored by the other guests) or spectacular (as in the case of the anthropologist who after months of intensive field work finally has learned the language of his tribe and proudly visits the next village where, as the locals explain to him afterwards – that is: after having had a good laugh at him – he has greeted the chief’s wife as ‘hairy and called the chief himself ‘long dong’, his brother ‘eagle shit’, one of his sons ‘asshole’, and a daughter ‘fart breath’ – all misnomers being the consequence of having been fooled systematically by his local informers for more than five months7). And between the trivial and the spectacular one finds of course the texture of our everyday lives where for each of us there are a number of symbolic systems that, by letting us circulate in and through them, enable us to cover the nakedness of our being. Finding oneself excluded for whatever reason (be it the trivial one of wearing the wrong dress) from such a symbolic circuit means that the symbolic texture covering our ontological nakedness suddenly seems to slip away. We are as naked as we would be when without the physical texture of some piece of clothing – or perhaps more naked still, for although we seek protection through similar bodily gestures as those with which we would tend to cover that first nakedness (e.g. folding the arms over the breast), they are somehow less effective and there is nothing more illustrative of the embarrassment of symbolic death than the handwringing of someone who feels ‘out of place’, unable to find the gesture that could break the paralysis of a physical presence one cannot escape from. Is this generalized inability to die, to which the present age seems prone to expose our plural selves, an indication of the depth of its hopelessness from which it could only be saved by religion (as Anti-

6

J. LACAN, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-6). The Seminar of J. Lacan: Book VII. London, Routledge, 1999, p. 270 ff. (‘Antigone between two deaths’). 7 N. CHAGNON, Yanomamö. The last days of Eden. San Diego/New York/London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 25.


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Climacus seems to think), or would perceiving it in such a way make us blind to Kierkegaard’s epochal situatedness? Is faith dependent on the promise of a transparent grounding which would do away with the opacity that characterizes the finite self? Is perhaps what some have called ‘the death of God’ nothing more – but also nothing less – than the giving up of that assumption which still seems to govern Kierkegaard’s thought? Instead of coming up with an answer to that question, let me bluntly admit that I have none and that I, mistakenly perhaps, do not expect to get much help from Kierkegaard in trying to pursue it. It touches on something that deeply worries me and that has to do with the point at which one introduces the word ‘God’ into a philosophical discourse (I think of The Sickness as a philosophical discourse). I suppose the upshot of this first example of an hesitation I notice having when reading Kierkegaard (‘something else – someone else?’) is that I am not convinced that Anti-Climacus’s way of introducing ‘God’ still has the persuasive force it was meant to have, at least for someone whose mind drifts off in the direction I have been pointing to. Treating the inability to die of the symbolic death that I have just described as but a welcome addition to the generality of despair that Anti-Climacus has detected, thus underscoring the actuality of The Sickness unto Death or of Kierkegaard in general, may be but a refusal to think for ourselves. For example, by wondering whether something else is not announcing itself in what we all too eagerly try to domesticate as ‘despair’. Let me now try to pursue that suspicion from a different point of departure, from a different occasion at which I feel shut out from Kierkegaard’s texts.

2. SILENCE, FEAR AND TREMBLING As is well-known, Kierkegaard, like perhaps no thinker before him, has given us a phenomenology of silences which he distinguishes according to the spheres of existence in which they are to be found. By far the most notorious of these silences is Abraham’s. Unlike esthetical or ethical silence Abraham’s silence is not simply voluntary (like heroic or playful or deceitful silence) nor a refusal to open up (like with demonic silence which resists the possibility to communicate and which Kierkegaard calls a “inclosing reserve,” “an inwardness with a jammed lock” (S 72)). Abraham’s silence testifies not to an unwillingness to speak, but to an

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inability to speak. And this “inability” is more than the absence of an ability, it has more than a privative status. It has a significance of its own which Kierkegaard calls a “second” or a “later” immediacy (FT 82), thus signalling that Abraham’s silence is due to the fact that he has been put beyond the universal and thus beyond language and reflection.8 Whereas the aesthetic hero has the possibility to speak but prefers not to, and therefore is considered a hero (Agamemnon’s silence vis-à-vis Iphigenia so as not to increase her sorrow), and whereas the ethical hero is under the obligation to speak, for to be an ethical hero is to reveal oneself (thus the same Agamemnon not hiding anything from his wife and daughter), the religious ‘hero’ – the knight of faith – simply cannot speak even if he would like to. You know the passage: “Abraham remains silent – but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety. Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking. This is the case with Abraham. He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say that – that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it – then he is not speaking. The relief provided by speaking is that it translates me into the universal. Now, Abraham can describe his love for Isaac in the most beautiful words to be found in any language. But this is not what is on his mind; it is something deeper, that he is going to sacrifice him because it is an ordeal. No one can understand the latter, and thus everyone can only misunderstand the former” (FT 113, italics mine). As Johannes de Silentio tells us, Abraham speaks “no human language”: “even if he understood all the languages of the world, even if those he loved also understood them, he still could not speak – he speaks in a divine language – he speaks in tongues” (FT 114). And thus Abraham is plagued by a loneliness, an isolation, a separation which is characteristic for someone who has been put in an absolute relation to the absolute – and his distress and anxiety are due to the ensuing silence, to this inability to speak. You know the rest of the story. I won’t go into it, for it seems immaterial to the question I cannot help raising: is

8

Cf. the excellent piece by Mark C. TAYLOR, ‘Sounds of Silence’, in R.L. PERKINS (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals. Alabama, The University of Alabama Press, 1981, p. 165-188, esp. 184-6.


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Abraham’s silence, his inability to speak, to make himself understood, exclusively the sign of a religious predicament? Take the case of what a contemporary philosopher like Lyotard has called a differend: two parties in dispute and no court to hear and judge their case, failing a common language in which each of them could without distortion make themselves heard.9 Even though they could go on talking night and day, each in their own language, without interruption, they would not, in the end, have come any nearer. Again one can think of many examples, both trivial and spectacular. As for the trivial ones, think of what happens when people with different values discover the vocabularies they use to talk about these values to be ‘final’ in Rorty’s sense.10 Think of a daughter telling her parents about her decision to have an abortion and think of the hours or days of discussion moving them in the circles of the vocabularies they use to try to make themselves heard. Think of the distress with which they discover their lack of success, always stumbling over what Rorty calls ‘last words’ – meaningful to them, but not to the other – and think of the unease with which they finally find themselves with their backs against the wall of those last words. Words which, if used amongst their kin, allow them to circulate in the symbolic network of their vocabulary, i.e. to tell a meaningful story about themselves and what they stand for. But words which, utterly devoid of (such a) meaning(fulness) to the other, somehow also seem to lose their meaning for them, as if they are choking on these words which block all the others which normally follow: “if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking”. Or think of the spectacular case, the insistence with which the Al Qaeda terrorists insist on defining themselves as our political enemies (in the sense Carl Schmitt gives to this term in his The Concept of the Political (1932)) and hence refuse the language we are using to refer to them as being outside of civilisation, humanity etc. As Schmitt shows, humanity is not a political term, for there is only politics if there is, and as long as there is, the opposition friend/foe (hostis, public enemy). It is precisely by insisting on this opposition that the terrorists refuse the 9

J.F. LYOTARD, The Differend. Phrases in Dispute. Manchester U.P., 1988; the notion is explained at length in our next chapter. 10 Cf. R. RORTY, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1989.

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ethical ban which the others are trying to put on them. However embarrassing and inconvenient there is a differend; however unreasonable, these others add to it the unreason of both refusing to be dehumanized and seeing in what we call humanity but our attempt to patent a term for our purposes: “if we cannot make ourselves understood when we are speaking, then we are not speaking”. One might object that I am moving all too carelessly, collapsing distinctions which for Kierkegaard are vital. Didn’t he explicitly state that “silence is both” demonic and divine (FT 88), and aren’t we in the process of obliterating just that distinction? After all, it is not just the knight of faith who finds himself put into an absolute relation to the absolute. The same is explicitly said of the demonic individual: “the demonic,” says De Silentio, “has the same quality as the divine, namely that the single individual is able to enter into an absolute relation to it” (FT 97). The story of the merman is there to illustrate the point (FT 94 ff.).11 But as it also makes clear, the merman, unlike Abraham, can speak and had he spoken Agnes would have understood. But the father and the daughter, in our example, the terrorist and us, have spoken. But they might as well not have. Of course, they heard each other speak. They did not simply hear noises, they knew the meaning of what was said. But they knew it without partaking in it, their understanding was abstract, it was, as Kierkegaard might have said, objective, but not subjective, indifferent but not interested (in the literal sense of inter esse: they were not ‘in the midst of’ what they – only externally – understood). Note the parallel with the previous point: what this silence – this inability to speak – indicates is precisely the kind of position in which one can no longer move forward or backward. One is stuck because blocked out of a symbolic circuit in which one cannot participate, because the kind of self one is, has to do with one’s belonging to a different circuit. The distress, the anxiety perhaps, consists in being robbed of what Kierkegaard calls the consolation of the universal – of language. Instead of smoothly circulating in whatever conversation these parties are having between themselves, conversation between them stops as it becomes more and more apparent that they are moving in circles, 11

On Agnes and the merman the illuminating remarks in P. CRUYSBERGHS, ‘Esthetische en demonische geslotenheid bij Kierkegaard’ [Aesthetical and demonic closedness in K.], Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 2001 (63:1), p. 55-85.


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always refuting the same points with the same arguments that meet the same counterarguments. One is reminded here of one of the examples of ‘uncanniness’ that Freud gives in his ‘The Uncanny’ and in which he mentions precisely the unease with which one reacts to the discovery of having moved in circles.12 Think of that awkward point in a conversation at which one suddenly starts to talk about something else in order to break the silence which overtook the parties as they discovered the very pointlessness of what went on before – a pointlessness that threatened to colour off on the very selves that, for a moment, are no longer able to disappear into their respective vocabularies. Are these selves in despair? Should they be? Their inability to make themselves understood seems to follow from their being related absolutely to some absolute. But this absolute is, for each of them, a different one. Does this mean that they have been established by another rather than an Other? Or should we rather drop that vocabulary and resort to the Heideggerian one of thrownness and facticity? It is perhaps time to let that suggestion take us into my subtitle.

3. NOT NOTHING – ANXIETY AND PUDENCY The Concept of Anxiety is not only, as one scholar recently put it, “a maddingly difficult book”13 that has driven generations of commentators to despair, but it is also of all of Kierkegaard’s writings by far the one that had the most influence: Sartre, Tillich, Heidegger and a host of existential philosophers up to Ronald Laing claim to have learned from it.14 And yet if one tries to read this text, which is subtitled ‘a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin’, the fact that it could have exerted such an influence seems all the more fantastic. It would seem that, if influence there was, it would have come from single sentences torn out of context or from isolated observations. What I propose to do is to look at one of these passages, to 12

S. FREUD, The ‘Uncanny’ (1919), Standard Edition, vol. 17. London, The Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 237. 13 G.D. MARINO, ‘Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety’ , in A. HANNAY - G.D. MARINO (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1997, p. 308. 14 Cf. R. MAY (ed.), Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1958, chapters 1 and 2.

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situate it in its context and then confront it with the influence it was supposed to have had on Heidegger. My aim, though, is not to trace this influence, as a host of commentators have persuasively done,15 but to problematize it: if we are to appreciate The Concept of Anxiety we should try to liberate us from its Heideggerian reception, not just to do justice to Kierkegaard’s text, but all the more so if we want to let The Concept help us cope with the problem our previous excursions seem to have left us with: to find out what sort of affect corresponds to selves who discover being tied absolutely to an in each case different absolute. As I will try to show, the ‘concept of anxiety’ that Heidegger inherits from Kierkegaard is too ontological – too much ‘without an object’ – for it to throw light on that predicament. Whereas Kierkegaard himself seems after an anxiety that – although he doesn‘t state it like that – would seem to be ‘not without’ an object. Let us take our point of departure in Kierkegaard’s remark that “in observing children one will discover [an] anxiety [that is] intimated more particularly as a seeking for the adventurous, the monstrous, and the enigmatic”. To which he adds: “this anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness” (CA 42). Referring to linguistic usage (as Heidegger will do after him) Kierkegaard observes that the relation of anxiety to its object is “altogether ambiguous” (CA 43): “one speaks of a pleasing anxiety, a pleasing anxiousness, and of a strange anxiety, a bashful anxiety” (CA 42). As these oxymora show, anxiety both attracts and repels. It is, says Kierkegaard, “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”. In the context of Haufniensis dealing with the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin, this discovery is like a philosopher’s stone. For anxiety’s ambivalence can be used to show how the transition from innocence to guilt was neither predetermined by Adam’s sin, nor entirely without connection to it. Each individual makes this transition for himself in a qualitative leap which, like all leaps in Kierkegaard, cannot be further explained (CA 43). But some light can be thrown upon it and this is precisely what anxiety does: “The qualitative 15

I have especially enjoyed Dan Magurshak’s ‘The Concept of Anxiety: The Keystone of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger Relationship’, in R.L. PERKINS (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, Mercer U.P., 1985, p. 167195.


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leap stands outside of all ambiguity. But he who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him [= antipathy], a power that he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is guilty for he sank in anxiety, which he nevertheless loved [= sympathy] even as he feared it” (CA 43).16 Kierkegaard believes that in thus letting anxiety shed light on man’s fall out of paradise, he is doing a much better job than those who held that God’s prohibition to eat from the tree of Good and Evil itself awakened what the tradition calls concupiscentia, inordinate desire: “concupiscentia is a determinant of sin antecedent to guilt and sin and yet still is not guilt and sin” (CA 40). Bringing in concupiscentia would make the transition to sin gradual, rather than abrupt as when through a leap. The fall would have become “something successive [i.e., gradual],” and it remains unclear how exactly the prohibition could awaken concupiscentia, even though “pagan and Christian experience” are there to show that “man’s desire is for the forbidden” (ibid.). Kierkegaard insists: nothing is ‘explained’ unless one admits that the prohibition induced anxiety in Adam and thus the possibility to sin: “the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility... the anxious possibility of being able” which Kierkegaard calls ‘the nothing of anxiety’ (CA 44).

16

Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm about this find may at first seem strange to us: what good is an explanation that doesn’t explain anything? But his position is more familiar to us than we assume; for clearly guilt/sin is something that one cannot explain without by the same token taking away all responsibility from the one who would for these causes be “guilty” – long before criminologists, psychologists and social workers made their way to the courtroom, The Concept of Anxiety already warns for the confusion lurking in that reasoning (“The child is represented as just a little angel, but the corrupt environment plunged it into corruption”, CA 75). No responsibility without anxiety, i.e. without a foreign power that both is tempting and yet can be withstood. But if it can be withstood, then the problem becomes, as Vigilius is very much aware, how to avoid Pelagianism, i.e. how to avoid the heresy that each human being could by itself avoid all sin (and hence would not be in need of grace; so much for redemption!). Given these two dangers and the obvious difficulty to avoid the one without embracing the other, one can perhaps with a little more patience accept the fact that the issue of hereditary sin is, wisely, qualified to be a dogmatic one. The dogma of hereditary sin is precisely a dogma because it concerns something that cannot be further explained: how sin is “neither a necessity nor an accident” (CA 98).

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It is, of course, this link between anxiety, possibility and ‘nothing’ which will have struck readers like Heidegger who, as is well-known, in Being and Time explicitly refers to Kierkegaard’s analysis and indeed seems to continue it. Let me just give one quote: “in anxiety lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety singularises (vereinzelt). This singularisation brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. These basic possibilities of Dasein (and Dasein is in each case mine) show themselves in anxiety as they are in themselves – undistorted by entities within-the-world, to which, proximally and for the most part, Dasein clings” (SZ 190-1/235). Allow me to briefly comment on this quote and only to the extent necessary for reconstructing the reasoning of those (including Heidegger himself) who think Heidegger is here taking up Kierkegaard’s point. The first thing that should strike us is that for Heidegger anxiety does away with a distortion. It can (indeed it cannot but) do so since, as Heidegger repeats after Kierkegaard, unlike fear, it has no determinate object: “that in the face of which one has anxiety is nothing ready-tohand within-the-world” (SZ 187/231). But this “nothing,” Heidegger continues, “is not totally nothing. This nothing is grounded in the most primordial ‘something’ – in the world.” And since “ontologically the world belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-World, if the nothing – that is the world as such – exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-World itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious” (SZ 187/232). What this means is that anxiety allows us to get a glimpse of our true ontological condition. It takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself in terms of things or activities in the world and throws it back upon itself, i.e. upon the fact that it has to be its own being and that there is nothing or no one that can give it a hold in dealing with that task. Anxiety singularises us by doing away with all the innerworldly holds we try to cling to in the hope that they will solve the problem of our existence for us. We have to be our being and we cannot but be our being: even when shirking that ontological responsibility, it is us who are fleeing it, and fleeing itself is but a way of being our being. It is the ontological truth of the “naked ‘that it is and has to be’” (SZ 134/173) which is revealed to Dasein in anxiety, “that is, its being free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself” (SZ 188/


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232). Another way of putting this would be to say that “everything that man is, all his modalities are adverbs: not properties, but ways of being”.17 In other words, being for Dasein is a transitive verb: whatever content one could give it, would be a content that Dasein is in a transitive sense. It would be a mode of being its being, a way of being. For Dasein every ‘what’ is the ‘what’ of the ‘that’ it is and has to be. As Heidegger says “even what does not depend on our freedom in the narrow sense of the term, like a sickness or a talent for something, is never something simply there, but always something that has been so or so taken up or rejected in the how of our Being there”.18 Man, one could say, does not have properties, he is his properties. For that reason Heidegger introduces the artificial term “facticity” when referring to this fact that our existences are, of course, not situated in a void, but in a certain, determinate context or ‘world’. One particularly telling example of such a facticity is precisely ‘sexual difference’. The few pages that Heidegger wrote on it19 make it clear that he does not think it would force him to reverse his analysis. To the contrary, Dasein as such is explicitly said to be gender neutral, and although it is true that each factical Dasein is either man or woman, this simply means that it will have to be (transitively) whichever of the two it happens to be. As Hubert Dreyfus comments, “there may be facts about Homo sapiens bodies that are the same in all cultures; but each culture has already taken over these facts and given them some specific meaning. Thus, for example, it is a fact that like any other animal, Homo sapiens is either male or female. This fact, however, is transformed into a social interpretation of human beings as either masculine or feminine. In Heidegger’s terminology, we can say that Homo sapiens can be characterized by factuality [Tatsächlichkeit, R.V.] (e.g. male or female), like any object, but that, because human beings ‘exist’, have Dasein in them, they must be understood in their facticity as a gendered way of

17

E. LEVINAS, Dieu, la Mort et le Temps. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1993, p. 69. M. HEIDEGGER, Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winterterm 1928/9), GA 27. Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1996, p. 337. 19 M. HEIDEGGER, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Summerterm 1928), GA 26. Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1990, p. 172 ff. 18

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behaving, e.g. as masculine or feminine”.20 Of course, this gendered way of behaving, which a culture will offer to its participants, will in its turn be unable to solve Dasein’s problem in its stead. As Dreyfus rightly adds, precisely because Dasein’s way of being makes facticity possible it can never be defined by its facticity. Even if Dasein would display a tendency to let itself be defined by its facticity, e.g. by the interpretations its culture is offering it, anxiety will, as it were, remind it of “the sole authority which a free existing can have – the repeatable possibilities of existence” (SZ 391/443). To be is to be possible. An important consequence of this is that anxiety for Heidegger does not spring directly from Dasein’s thrownness or facticity. What makes Dasein anxious is its being-in-the-world as such, even if this world is a particular world in which certain particular interpretations are on offer. In other words, Dasein is not anxious because it discovers that it is rooted in a particular world. Dasein is anxious because at bottom it is without any such roots. It is, as Heidegger says, “not-at-home” in an ontological sense. Should Dasein feel at home, or feel rooted in a particular world, such ontical feeling would merely be covering up its ontological not-at-homeness which is brought to the surface in anxiety where one feels, as the German text says, un-heimlich (e.g. SZ 344). What is ‘uncanny’ for Heidegger is the ontological fact that ultimately we are without a hold and hence have to be our being. A being which he calls ‘naked’ to underscore that there is no indication hidden in it as to how we should ‘be’ it. Heidegger never considers that other sense of uncanniness I have been alluding to where the feeling of uncanniness comes from the fact that something holds us without us being able to determine it.21 Because of that inability we would then both be rooted and uprooted: there would be something holding us (roots) but this some‘thing’ is not a thing, not determinable (uprooted). For simplicity’s sake let me refer to this as the ‘not nothing’: not a determinate something, but neither the pure nothing that Heidegger seems to be thinking of. Indeed, whenever Kierkegaard speaks of the object of anxiety as ‘nothing’ he means ‘not something determinate’, but he does not seem to mean what Heidegger makes out of it. 20

H. DREYFUS, Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge Mass./London, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 24. 21 See the analysis in chapter 2 above.


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The clearest example of this is the passage in which Kierkegaard talks about the concept of ‘modesty’ (Danish Blufaerdighed, perhaps best translated as pudency, diffidence rather than as ‘modesty’ or ‘shame’, although Kierkegaard himself also has the German Scham in his text). What is at stake here is “a knowledge of sexual difference [geschlechtliche Differenz] but not as a relation to sexual difference, which is to say the sexual urge is as such not present”.22 Pudency, diffidence, shame is thus a sort of response to the first discovery of sexual difference. There is an anxiety, Kierkegaard says, and it has to do with “spirit not being merely qualified as a body but as a body with a generic difference” (CA 68). Spirit discovers itself as a foreigner, it feels diffident not just about belonging to a body, but about belonging to a sexually marked body. “The sexual is the expression for the prodigious contradiction that the immortal spirit is determined as genus. This contradiction expresses itself in the profound Scham that conceals this contradiction and does not dare to understand it” (CA 69).23 And, as Kierkegaard goes on to remark: “the anxiety” we are dealing with here (in Scham) “is prodiguously ambiguous. There is no trace of sensuous lust, and yet there is a sense of shame. Shame of what? Of nothing.” (CA 68). It is clear that this last ‘nothing’ refers to (the mark on) the sexually or genetically marked body in which there is not yet sensuous lust. So it refers to a ‘something’ that spirit does not yet relate to, something which is there but which it cannot understand. Spirit seems to be anxious because it does not know how to relate to this ‘thing’ which is neither a thing nor a nothing.24 It is too close to spirit – spirit is marked by it – for it to stand back from it and yet not close enough for it to absorb it or to appropriate it by determining its meaning. The anxiety that Kierkegaard describes here springs from ‘something’ that does not have the exteriority that is characteristic for things in the usual sense of the term, i.e. 22

A. GRØN, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken. Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1999, p. 41. I owe a lot to this excellent commentary. 23 On this contradiction W. SCHULZ, ‘Die Dialektik von Geist und Leib bei Kierkegaard. Bemerkungen zum ‘Begriff Angst”, in M. THEUNISSEN - W. GREVE (eds.), Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 347-66. 24 As soon as the sexual urge is present this sort of anxiety will be alleviated because now, apparently, a path is opened to relate to generic difference. Naivety of the young who still need to find out that “there is no sexual relationship” (Lacan).

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‘objects’. Thus, when Kierkegaard calls this ‘something’ a “nothing” (CA 44), this should be understood as: not a thing in the sense in which fear is, contrary to anxiety, related to a thing, to an object. Spirit is anxious because such an object fails; but this failure is not a mere absence: there is, at the basis of spirit’s anxiety, a ‘thing’ but it is unclear what it is and what it has to do with or what it wants from spirit.

4. ADAM’S ‘PASSING INTO THE ACT’ One comes across the same structure (not a thing, nor a mere absence) elsewhere in The Concept of Anxiety. For example in the commentary on the fall – remember what, according to Kierkegaard, is the effect of the divine prohibition on Adam: “Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. ... The prohibition induces in him anxiety” (CA 44). One would be tempted to add: just like the generic marker induces anxiety in spirit and for the same reason. The prohibition seems to want something from Adam, but it is not clear what. It is not nothing and yet it is neither something he can stand back from. He cannot stand back from it precisely because it is too undetermined. For a thing to appear it needs to have contours, a more or less determinate shape which distinguishes it from other things etc. The prohibition is not such a ‘thing’, it lacks all of that, and precisely therefore may be sensed by Adam as ‘something’ coming too close, laying siege ‘before’ him. I can imagine him becoming so obsessed by these words that he does what they forbid not because he is eager to understand the difference between good and evil but because transgressing the prohibition is the only way of putting a distance between him and it – the distance of a bitten apple, of a tree, of an act.25 25

One could apply a similar analysis to the story of the ten commandsments. In Exodus 32,5 Moses receives the two tables which are written by God himself, in His own writing. But Moses smashes these tables out of anger over the people’s idolatry (‘the golden calf’) (Ex. 32, 19). He then receives the commandments again and is ordered by God to write them down (Ex. 34, 27 – but see Ex. 34, 28 which contradicts this). A structural interpretation would stress the balance brought in by the second set of tables between a too much of the visible (the calf) and a too much of the invisible (how could Moses even imagine to read God’s own handwriting? – Like Adam, he does not understand what he bears in his hands). The smashing of the first set, followed by the


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As you no doubt know, this is not how Kierkegaard continues the story – for him the prohibition awakens in Adam the anxious possibility of being able to transgress it (a hint that Heidegger, as we have seen, took seriously). But what I am driving at is that The Concept of Anxiety cannot as a text be reduced to what people like Heidegger have found there: i.e. to the link anxiety-nothing-possibility-freedom, where anxiety gets a revelatory and educative function (revealing to man his ontological truth: his nothingness, his possibility, his freedom of having to be his being). There may also be a sublayer in The Concept of Anxiety, at least in certain passages and notwithstanding the dominating presence of that first tradition of thinking anxiety, which one could see as announcing another tradition: one that sees anxiety not as a Nothing but as an all too present something that is not a thing and precisely therefore at the point of flooding the subject. For this tradition anxiety doesn’t have an educative, revelatory function, it doesn’t remind man of an ontological nothingness he is all too eager to flee.26 To the contrary, it shows that man has good reason to flee such anxiety, that the only thing he can do with it, to prevent it from flooding him, is to bind it to representations, to try to structure it, localize it etc. A bit like fairy tales do for children: the reason they allow children to enjoy anxiety (as Kierkegaard observed) is that these tales cut it up in all sorts of figures which then come to play a role in a story which allows them to shudder, but also to domesticate a feeling which would otherwise flood them. In a way I suppose one could say that such stories protect a child from having to stay alone with its anxieties. They help these anxieties throw out their anchor in a public symbolic world in which they can be pursued with different means.

burning of the idol (Ex. 32, 19-20), is the beginning of a history of reading which, as one knows, always left open the possibility that God did not speak, that all that Moses heard during his second retreat on mount Sinaï was the aleph, the inaudible spiritus lenis that announced a voice that may have never resounded (cf. G. SCHOLEM, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 46-8). But that possibility itself made it perhaps possible for the Jews to read and interpret – that is: to relate – without sacrilege. Smashing the tables was a way of putting a distance between a people and an, at first, totally unreadably command. Without that distance there would be no relation, all leeway would be taken away, and the Jews would have been in the grip of a command that terrorized them. 26 On these two traditions, see chapter 3 above.

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5. A MUTE TRANSCENDENCE If this world falls out, for whatever reason, the distance it has allowed us to put between ourselves and the ‘object’ of our anxiety will come to fail us. Alone with the ‘not nothing’ that singularises us, but does not tell us in what sense it does so or what it wants from us, we may find ourselves a bit like Abraham, bereft of the consolation of the universal which, as we now realize better, is precisely that it allows us to pursue our anxieties with different means. The stress here should be on to pursue – the alternative being that we would be forced to give up or to betray what lies behind them. In Silentio’s terminology what lies behind them is the absolute to which we find ourselves absolutely related. Abraham found himself able to cling to such an ab-solute by having faith – and faith here presupposes (or perhaps consists in believing) that that ab-solute had a name, and that it was the same that had spoken before and was referred to in the stories that were told about it. Perhaps the difference between Abraham’s predicament and that of the ‘postmodern’ selves that seemingly find themselves overcome by the same inability to make themselves heard is that their absolute no longer has such a name. It is perhaps more ab-solute (in the sense of the Latin absolvere), still: no longer a recognizable addressor functioning in a story of revelation, but rather an anonymous transcendence that itself remains mute. The danger facing all attempts to ‘apply’ Kierkegaard to the contemporary scene would be that one simply regards this latter transcendence as an impostor trying to take over the place of the former. And that, as a consequence, the choice would be between despair or faith. But clearly, if there is any truth in my suggestion that the sort of silence characteristic for our age is very much like Abraham’s but with the difference that he still had the element of faith in which or through which he could relate to the absolute, then this choice is forced. Faith is for us not the cure for despair, because despair, albeit hidden, is not the sickness of the age. Our age suffers from a sickness that one cannot even begin to understand if one sticks to the alternative Anti-Climacus operates with (established by itself/established by another) or even if one uncovers still another alternative (another/an Other) buried in this first. Heideggerian thrownness – Dasein not being its own origin and having been unable to prevent having come into being – is still situated within this alternative. But is it a coincidence that Heidegger’s solution –


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to repeat (Wiederholung) what one could not originate – turns its back to the public world? If thrownness and facticity can be transitively taken up in existence, solitary Dasein does not need the company of others to find its way to authenticity. The Concept of Anxiety suggests differently: here anxiety comes from ‘another’ that just seems to be there, without pretending to have the power to establish the self. But this other is not simply other to the self, it is rather a dark or opaque side ‘of’ this self (or better still: ‘to’ this self) without which, though, it could not be this self. Diffidence is not a way of being this other, of taking it up into existence. It is rather an acknowledgement that there is no way of being this other, no way of assuming it. Sexual difference is not just another property, a ‘what’ that Dasein is and has to be. And diffidence is not just a response among others with which Dasein seeks to flee the anxiety engendered by its factical marker. What diffidence points to is a necessity not present in the Heideggerian universe: the need to keep one’s distance from what nonetheless singularises us. Heideggerian singularity concerns a position one can occupy: it is the singularity of the unique whose task cannot be taken over by someone else (the task of being in Heidegger, of sacrificing Isaac in Kierkegaard, of answering to the appeal of the Other in Levinas). It presupposes an addressor (death, God, the Other) whose address tears its addressee out of a position in which it could be substituted for by others and shifts it into a position which no one else could occupy in its stead. Singularity isolates, and the proper response to this isolation is not to flee it, but to hold it out. Authenticity in Heidegger, faith in Kierkegaard, ethical sacrifice in Levinas are the names for the engagement into what each time is portrayed as the movement of a transcendence one cannot escape, but only, so to speak, conjugate. Diffidence, to the contrary, points to a transcendence we cannot contain – in Scham spirit discovers being linked to something contradicting it without there being a possibility of taking it up into it. Such is the non-ontological difference in sexual difference – and perhaps not only there: the ‘not nothing’ of sexual difference is not an isolated given, but characterizes, as I suggested, the kind of difference our ‘pluralistic’ age finds itself having to cope with. Perhaps, then, what our age is lacking vis-à-vis these demons which have nothing demonic about them, are the sort of harbouring gestures which, like diffidence, would be able to acknowledge (or to accommodate for) what not even refuses to

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speak. Such is our predicament. Some have named it ‘the postmodern condition’.

CHAPTER NINE

DISSENSUS COMMUNIS HOW TO KEEP SILENT “AFTER” LYOTARD

I have the feeling that I should apologize, though without really knowing what for and why. Not for my title in any case, even though I know it must sound like a curse to some people’s ears. For, after all, this title – this curse – is not my own; I chose it only to indicate what is at stake in someone else’s thought – to report and to describe. But can one be limited to this? Shouldn’t one rather be attracted to this thinking if one is not to betray what is at stake in it? Of course, this “attraction” is also just a feeling. And a feeling, as Lyotard tells us at the beginning of a touching homage to Wittgenstein, is something like a phrase waiting for its formulation. “We feel that we are thinking (even if just barely) ‘after’ this thought. We should continue, we will have to continue on the basis of this thought. We seek the way. This ‘after’ is not yet determined. But what is determined is that this thought will be taken into account – and [that] we will account for it”.1 From the moment something like this is determined, we in philosophy no longer have the feeling that we must apologize. We have the right of secure passage against whomever interrupts or obstructs us. We are gripped by a higher “necessity”. We attempt to understand what it could mean that we are gripped, that we are concerned by a thought, that “something” in that thought holds us in its clutches.2 We would be quite pleased if that “something” had waited for us, even though we know, if we are honest, that what “gets passed to us from outside” did not wait for us. That our thinking is “bound” by

1

‘Wittgenstein, “après” ’, in J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers, Paris, Galilée, 1984, p. 59 (trans. in his Political Writings, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 2 On this “something” which Lyotard nearly always puts between quotation marks: ‘A l’insu’, in Politiques de l’oubli, special issue of Le Genre Humain nr. 13, p. 37-43; L’inhumain. Causeries sur le temps. Paris, Galilée, 1988, passim (The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991); Heidegger et “les juifs”. Paris, Galilée, 1988, passim (Heidegger and “the jews”. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990). In what follows I will use quotation marks for similar expressions taken from these texts.

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something for which it cares, but which itself might not care about such bonds. That it is “inhabited” by something to which we are indebted, but which itself cares so little about this debt that it even forgot to stipulate how it should be repaid. Can anyone blame us for endlessly trying to establish these stipulations? Can we do without that dishonesty which is ultimately a way of not forgetting that one cannot remember that debt? That one has always already forgotten it? That there is “something” within this thought – a thought which relies on such a debt in order to think – which cannot itself be thought? Perhaps philosophy is a way of recalling this forgetting and this inability. A way to keep one’s footing in that undetermined and hence threatening debt, and not having to feel shame for this one-sided love which gives us the feeling, for example, of being able to take up someone else’s thought without needing to apologize. For philosophy writes, and writing, Lyotard says, “is this ‘labour’ that is nourished by what is barred and excluded from within (...). It is always a sort of dressing on the wound done to a soul in its unpreparedness, leaving it an infant”.3 Anima minima: at the end of a long and unsurveyable path filled with twists and turns which will drive cartographers of the future to despair, this philosophy wrestles with what remains of our soul and, in its turn, writes its “Minima Moralia” – “the faint glimmer that the Law, despite everything, emits in the ruins of ethics”.4 It is not ashamed of “explaining to children”5 what it had to say, for it believes that the “debt to childhood cannot be repaid”, and hopes that “it is enough not to forget this debt in order to offer resistance and, perhaps, not to be unjust”.6 This is not a philosophy which, like that of Rorty, tries to raise our children by giving them hope for a better future,7 but a philosophy 3

J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Heidegger et ‘les juifs’, p. 63 (trans, p. 33). Ibid., p. 76 (trans. p. 44). ‘Anima Minima’ is the title of the last chapter of Lyotard’s Moralités postmodernes. Paris, Galilée, 1993. 5 Cf. J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Paris, Galilée, 1986, (trans. University of Minnesota Press, 1992) a title which, as will soon become clear, can be read in more than one sense. 6 J.-Fr. LYOTARD, L’Inhumain, p. 15 (trans. p. 7). I will be referring to this collection of essays by I, followed by the French pagination first. 7 Cf. “Writing ‘the history of the present’, rather than suggestions about how our children might inhabit a better world in the future (...) thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard (...) cannot bring themselves to say ‘we’ long enough to identify with the 4

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which prefers to tell our adults that “what there is (in them) of the infans, unsuited to preferring, is irreducible” (I 42/33). This is not a philosophy which tries to forge solidarity out of the awareness of contingency and irony, but a philosophy which discovers that “the distress of having to inscribe what cannot be inscribed without a remainder is the only grave testimony”, and does not even take pride in its testifying because it knows that “once confirmed by a witness, the distress and the uncontrollable are already, as it were, annihilated” (I 215/204). At the end of this long path of which I can only survey a fraction here, this philosophy which wants to bear witness to a “debt which each soul has contracted” (I 15/7) and which calls the witness “a traitor”8 comes to the conclusion that “only the receptivity to what thought is not prepared for deserves the name of thinking” (I 85/73). In order to save us from the cybernetic machinery which must keep the future megalopolis running, this philosophy does not placate us with nostalgic talk about pastoral idylls which will once again befall us when we have given up our alienation.9 It boldly tells us that we will never again find what we have lost and that it is therefore time, high time, “to be ‘patient’ in a new sense: no longer that of passively and repetitively enduring the same ancient and actual passion, but of (...) giving (ourselves) to (...) the events which come to (us) from a ‘something’ that (we) do not know” (I 39/30). This is a philosophy which, even before the dichotomy between activity and passivity, hopes to make our hope and strength draw on our passibility (passibilité). In this sense it is more current than ever. One need only think of the recent stress in ethical circles on the importance of a moral passivity which does not replace moral activity, but which has to do with an “ability to receive” without which we would “never reach moral behaviour” – a receptivity which risks being forgotten

culture of the generation to which they belong” (R. Rorty, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity’, in ID., Essays on Heidegger and others (Philosophical papers, volume 2). Cambridge U.P., 1991, p. 174). 8 I 215/204 (last sentence of the book). On this ‘treason’ the beautiful essay on H. Arendt: ‘Survivant’, in J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Lectures d’enfance. Galilée, Paris, 1991, esp. p. 62 (‘The Survivor’, in J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Toward the Postmodern. New Jersey/London, Humanities Press, 1993, p. 146). 9 Cf. ‘A pain always new. In the lowest depths of the domus, rumour of anti-nature, threat of stasis, of sedition (...) Something in the domus did not want the bucolic’ (I 207/195-6).

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by the importance which our societies attach to the ability to choose and to ability in general, and by the lack of attention for “the way we relate to what we are unable to do”.10 And if it is true, as the literature on toleration has suggested, that people do not want to have their sensibilities regarding their values respected, but those values themselves,11 then it seems but a small step to the main idea Lyotard defends in The Inhuman: that there is not only an “inhuman” in the usual sense, as something which attacks the humanity of man, but also an “inhuman” which constitutes the humanity of man and which – so to speak – gives him his soul, at least on the condition that “soul”, as Lyotard thinks, is understood to be that in our spirit (esprit) which remains hostage to “a thing”12 – to “a familiar and unknown guest, a guest which agitates (us), making (us) delirious but also making (us) think” (I 10/2). Indeed, what would be the source of our dissatisfaction over a negative freedom where we consider one another’s feelings and otherwise leave each other alone; what would be the source of our disappointment over others being only “interested in us” but not “in what interests us”13 – whence that desire for indirect recognition – if it is not the fact that there ‘is’ something in those values to which we are attached that takes no account of us and always leaves us in the dark about the ultimate meaning and value of that attachment? And isn’t this “something” the “inhuman” in Lyotard’s sense – the trace of an original “dispossession” within our subjectivity (I 42/33)? A trace which shows up, for instance, whenever we are confronted with our inability to ultimately justify “that which we honour in us”.14 A trace which comes to light at those

10

P. VAN TONGEREN, ‘Morele passiviteit’ [Moral passivity], Wijsgerig Perspectief, 1992/93 (33:4), p. 109. 11 Cf. H. DE DIJN, ‘Tolerance, loyalty to values and respect for the law’, Ethical Perspectives, 1994 (1:1), pp. 27-32. 12 ‘A l’insu’, art. cit., p. 39 (“si par ‘âme’ on entend ce qui, de l’esprit, reste l’otage de la chose”). As noted in the introduction to this volume, the expression ‘la chose’ (the thing, sometimes with capital) is probably a reference to Lacan’s reading of Freud’s early Entwurf – see J. LACAN, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. London/Tavistock, Routledge, 1992. 13 A. BURMS, ‘Autonomie: het ideaal van een narcistische cultuur’ [Autonomy: the ideal of a narcissistic culture], Psychologie en Maatschappij, 1992 (16:1), p. 32. 14 Ibid., p. 34.

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moments when the recognition that we have certain values changes into the ambiguous feeling that those values have us, that they reach back to “something detached from the function by which it exists in us”.15 These are merely a few instances of how we can make alliances with this thought in order to move forward with it. But in spite of all these enticing perspectives, there is something which makes me hesitate and which, as I said earlier, gives me the feeling that I should apologize. The reason is simple: I have collated and read, made excerpts and re-ordered, compared citations and mused – in short, I have done everything one could expect of me, neglecting none of the “external motions” which must be performed if one wants to understand a way of thought. But after and in spite of all that, I still did not feel attracted to this thought, I did not have the feeling that I should carry it further, join with it, or that something in “my” thought was already, even without my knowing it, connected to it. Of course, it would not have seemed relevant to mention this were it not that this philosophy of passibility seems to exclude as a matter of principle the very possibility of my inability to receive it and thus to join with it. On the contrary, as I intend to set out in detail, it tells me that I have no choice. That the way in which I take up its phrases (or those of others) is contingent, but that this taking up itself is necessary, a müssen, not just a sollen.16 It tells me that I cannot do otherwise than take up its phrases. That even my silence would still be a phrase,17 and hence a way of linking up (enchaîner). That to do justice to my silence an idiom will have to be found for it. That in its absence, I am wronged. It is this that makes me hesitate. Are there but two kinds of silence in language: one voluntary (an ability to not speak: pouvoir ne pas parler) and one involuntary (an inability to speak: ne pas pouvoir parler), having to do with the absence or the oppression of an idiom in which one could express oneself? Or is this – as Lyotard himself wonders for a moment in 15

G. SIMMEL, Philosophie des Geldes (Gesamtausgabe Band 6). Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 37. 16 J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Le Différend. Paris, Minuit, 1983, p. 103 nr. 102 (The Differend. Phrases in Dispute. Manchester U.P., 1988). References to this book will be by paragraph number, or for unnumbered passages, by the abbreviation D followed by the French and English pagination. 17 D, 9/XI: “one’s silence makes a phrase”; D nr. 22: “silence (...) is a negative phrase” and passim (e.g. nrs. 24, 26, 27 ...).

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The Differend without dwelling on it – not an exhaustive alternative (nr. 14)? The first part of my argument will address this question. In the second part I shall wonder if Lyotard’s continuing interest in the sublime as a “passibility to lack” (I 129) (as you know, in the sublime, the handicap of the imagination is shown) does not lure him into neglecting the problem of a “lack of passibility”. At the intersection of these two questions a prefix is at stake to which I refer both in my title and even in my subtitle. With this prefix (dis-) Lyotard takes his leave from the Kantian “Idea of commensurability in the sense of an affinity without a rule” as it still appears, for example, in the “Zusammenstimmen” of the sensus communis in Kant’s Third Critique. “For us, today”, he tells us, “this Idea strongly mitigates – too strongly – the event of fissure”.18 Let us first of all attempt to understand what is meant by this fissure.

1. THE FISSURE An example: in the final paragraph of his The Principles of Political Economy (1883-1901) Henry Sidgwick gives an economic evaluation of alms-giving which is, at the same time, a kind of defence of economic thinking as such. Political economy, Sidgwick writes, teaches us “that if a man’s wants are supplied by gift when he might have supplied them himself by harder work and greater thrift, his motives to industry and thrift tend to be so far diminished”. And Sidgwick goes on to say, “not only his motives, but the motives of all persons in like circumstances who are thereby led to expect like gifts for themselves”. The giving of alms should thus be done prudently, since it presupposes an art which only very few possess: “From such an art selfish, inert, or frivolous persons, if duly instructed, have a natural disposition to keep altogether aloof. But there is reason to hope that, in minds of nobler stamp, the full perception of the difficulties and risks attending the voluntary redistribution of wealth will only act as a spur to the sustained

18

J.-Fr. LYOTARD, L’enthousiasme. La critique kantienne de l’histoire. Paris, Galilée, 1986, p. 112. On Kant’s ‘sensus communis’: J.-Fr. LYOTARD, ‘Sensus Communis, le sujet à l’état naissant’, Cahiers Confrontation, 1989 (-120), pp. 161-79.

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intellectual activity required for the successful accomplishment of this duty”.19 Before celebrating its great theoretical triumphs, political economy announces its mission one last time: if not to take over the task of ethics, then at least to alleviate it.20 Long before we even felt the need to set up centres for ‘ethics and economics’ economics had already appointed itself as a sort of well-balanced ethics: “alms-giving” is redefined as “voluntary redistribution of wealth”, the commandment to love one’s neighbour is seen as a duty which is no longer possible without “sustained intellectual activity”, and the economic theory in which “minds of nobler stamp” discover regularities which are stronger than good intentions alone has “reason to hope” that the inefficiencies of traditional moral practice will soon disappear. And, as we know, that hope has not been belied – for today our first and usually our last concern in offering help consists in asking ourselves if this help is truly efficient, and if it will not, for example, impair “the motives to industry and thrift”. We know the regularities and a science which prides itself on being value-free leaves the decision about values to us. The only problem with this positivism with a human face is that in the meantime we seem to have lost just those practices which it helped us to reorganize and make efficient. Unsurprisingly so, since that reorganization was based on a misunderstanding: charity does not, of course, deliver us from the need to check if the money is really put to good use, but it cannot be reduced to that. To love one’s neighbour implies that “we must do something for the other even when we know and see that it serves no purpose”.21 In loving one’s neighbour “the enjoyment and satisfaction of realizing that what we do for the other makes him happy, are denied us”.

19

H. SIDGWICK, The Principles of Political Economy (1901), New York, Kraus Reprint Co., 1969, p. 592 (last sentences of the book). 20 On the institution of economic discourse as a moral discourse built on what one could call the trias economica (scarcity, need and rationality), my ‘Marshallian Ethics and Economics: Deconstructing the Authority of Science’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1988 (18:2), pp. 179-99. 21 For this and the following comments on charity: P. Moyaert, Ethiek en sublimatie. Over L ’Ethique de la psychanalyse van Lacan [Ethics and Sublimation. J. Lacan’s Ethics of Psychanalysis]. Nijmegen, SUN, 1994, pp. 157 ff. , which is the best commentary one can find on Lacan’s famous seventh seminar.

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By making the meaningfulness of alms-giving depend on the question of whether it contributes in an efficient manner to the well-being of both the recipient of help and the society at large (“all persons in similar circumstances”, including the donor) Sidgwick misses the proper finality of the command to love one’s neighbour which – as Lacan has argued – “relates us to the good which lies beyond the economic circuit of happiness”. For this command does not simply aim at limiting our egoism but at “renouncing the desire to see everything in light of happiness”. Economics is a practice and a theory which takes efficiency to be central. Love of one’s neighbour, on the contrary, is about a selfless generosity. As soon as one of these two aims drowns out the other and pretends to speak in the name of the other we have what Lyotard calls a “differend”: a situation where no agreement between the two sides is possible because there is no idiom in which both standpoints can be heard. In such a predicament no comparison is possible: a “differend” is not a dispute or a litigation on which someone could pass judgment. It is, as the word itself indicates, a state of contra-diction, a Widerstreit, where the judge can do no more than prevent one of the sides from making the other believe that they both speak the same language and that, within that idiom and according to the standards it employs, their disagreement could be settled and any loss or damage sustained could be redressed. At first sight this model looks quite plausible, and it should not come as a surprise that it has been enthusiastically received. For it seems that Lyotard’s aim is to dispel the illusion of a pseudo-communality, thus preventing the one genre from drowning out the other and thereby committing a wrong – a wrong which consists of a conflict between two genres being settled in the idiom of one of the two parties, so that the other’s accusation either cannot be heard or is only heard in a distorted form (nr. 12). To settle the conflict between economic theory and traditional morals according to criteria of efficiency is to wrong the idea of caritas, since what it has to say cannot be said in the idiom of political economy. Hence it is victimized, since a victim (victime) for Lyotard is one who has been deprived of his language (unable to speak: ne pas pouvoir parler) (nr. 9). It is no wonder then that Wolfgang Welsch sees a “Moralia linguistica” here, and points out that instead of abandoning the idea of justice Lyotard in fact takes it absolutely seriously: justice is only

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justice if it applies to everyone, and given that Lyotard’s concern is precisely to bring to light “systematically hidden injustice” (Habermas would say: “systematically distorted communication”), it is for him clearly not a question of diminishing or relinquishing the idea of justice but of expanding it. “The aim”, Welsch concludes, “is thoroughly universalistic”.22 Lyotard as a sort of “silent partner of Habermas” – what better alliance could one come up with in order to impress those who had given up all hope of finding in contemporary continental philosophy even the barest trace of agreement? But let us not be too hasty in lending an ear to those pragmatically inclined heirs of Critical Theory who maintain that significant theoretical differences “should not be emphasized so much that one loses sight of the fundamental agreement [with Habermas]”.23 I will come back to these theoretical differences. But first let us pose a few elementary questions. If Welsch is right, we could expect a sort of linguistically tinged liberal conception of freedom which would grant everyone his or her own idiom and permit everyone to live his or her own life within the limits of that idiom as long as no harm is inflicted on the idioms of others. This is a kind of watered-down version of the idea of “negative liberty” which one finds, for example, in Rorty. But even Rorty is not entirely insensitive to the complications which arise as soon as people are no longer seen as mere language “users”.24 For then the question becomes: how does a language, an idiom, or – for Rorty – a “final vocabulary” affect its user? That language is not simply a means of expression for its user is clear, for instance, from the fact that someone can be humiliated by a lack of respect for the words or the names to which she reverts in order to justify her actions, convictions or even her life. That such last words exist for all 22

W. WELSCH, Unsere postmoderne Moderne. Weinheim, VCH (Acta Humaniora), 1987, p. 240. 23 H. KUNNEMAN, ‘De strijdigheid. Het geheime bondgenootschap van Habermas en Lyotard, (2)’ [The Differend. The secret alliance between Habermas and Lyotard], in M. KORTHALS - H. KUNNEMAN, Het communicatieve paradigma. Mogelijkheden en beperkingen van Habermas’ theorie van het communicatieve handelen. Meppel, Boom, 1992, p. 201. 24 R. RORTY, Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge U.P., 1989, esp. ch. 2. For a further development of these brief remarks on Rorty, where I try to show that these complications should have turned Rorty out of the ‘liberal irony’ he advocates, see Truth and Singularity, chapter 12.

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of us makes one suspect that there is also a sort of violence – whatever its status may be – within the idioms themselves, and that it is perhaps illadvised to act as if the problem of justice and violence, or of ethics and difference, could be limited to the relations among idioms. That people seem to be vulnerable in their own idiom seems to indicate that such injury has something to do with a lack of distance between an idiom and its so-called “user” – a lack which might also be formulated positively by stating that the idiom leaves its traces in the “user”, that it not only and not primarily ex-presses, but also and perhaps first of all im-presses itself upon whatever or whoever it is supposed to simply express. To interpret the inability to speak (ne pas pouvoir parler) as a deprivation of one’s own idiom, and to read the “differend” which goes along with it as an appeal to rectify this deprivation (e. g., nr. 21), means perhaps that, unintentionally, via this notion of “ownness” control may have already been lost over the answers which should be given to a number of important related questions, and in the first place to the question of violence in language. Before we know it we may have given the kind of “humanistic” and “anthropocentric” answer to these questions which Lyotard is so keen to avoid (nrs. 91, 122-3...). Too keen perhaps. For it is difficult to avoid the impression that The Differend has chosen to structure its principal concept in such a way that these questions cannot even arise. In this model there is no place for subjects, intentions, users or players – these are only so many anthropomorphisms prompting the suggestion that “we, identifiable individuals, x, y, pronounce phrases or remain silent, and are the authors of those phrases or silences” (nr. 18). Lyotard denies this: phrases or silences (but silence is also a phrase) occur or arrive, answering to what he calls a regimen, and that regimen establishes the rules which determine how and at what place within those phrases we can appear (e. g., nr. 119). In the prescriptive phrase “obey!”, the place of the sender (destinateur) is not marked. But it is significant that the receiver (destinataire) finds himself here in the position of a “you”, and that s/he cannot exchange this position for that of the “I” who prescribes. Or at least that is the case as long as this phrase forms part of or is claimed by the ethical genre: the place of the “I” and the “you” in ethics, as Lyotard

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– following Levinas – stresses,25 is asymmetric. But when this phrase is considered in itself, there is nothing which tells us that it must necessarily belong to the “ethical” genre. Instead of responding with a feeling of obligation (and for Lyotard this feeling is also a phrase) as occurs in ethics, one could also respond with an evaluation such as “how well you have said that” or with the comment “he says that I must obey” (nrs. 41 ff). Although Lyotard sees an impertinence in both these ways of relating to the prescription “Obey!”, he refuses to explain it as the consequence of not complying with the intentions of the one who gives the command to obey (nrs. 140-1, 147-9, 183), because, – and the entire edifice of The Differend rests on this “because” – in a different genre than the ethical, such impertinences can be of use in achieving the goals of this new genre. Within the political genre for example, the goal is legitimacy.26 One then has to generate norms of the type “x has decided that y must do this or that”, and one must find a way of securing the legitimacy of these norms, for example by introducing a principle of autonomy which stipulates that y is bound by the command to “do this or that” if and only if y can put him- or herself in the position of x who gives the command. Now, the substitutability in principle of x by y, which lies at the basis of the modern answer to the problem of legitimacy (no one is above the law: nul n’est au-dessus de la loi), begins precisely from a socalled autonymic transformation of the command: “do this or that”. By casting the command in the form “it is required that p” or “x has decided that y ...”, one is reacting to the command with a commentary, thus making oneself “guilty” of the same impertinence as when one answers the command “obey!” with “he says that I must obey”. Whereas it is clear that in ethics one cannot answer in such a manner, it seems that one cannot do without it in politics – which is why Lyotard sees a différend between, for example, ethics and politics: there is no ethical community (ethics is asymmetric), but there must of course be something like a

25

Cf. the ‘Levinas notice’: D, 163 ff./1 10 ff. and ‘Levinas’ logic’, in A. BENJAMIN (ed.), The Lyotard reader. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 275-313. 26 For what follows cf. J.-Fr. LYOTARD, ‘L’autre dans les énoncés prescriptifs et le problème de l’autonomie’, in En marge: l’Occident et ses “autres”. Paris, Aubier, 1978, pp. 237-56.

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political community which makes the asymmetric ethical obligation symmetric by turning it into an obligation for everyone (nr. 206). I have developed this example in some detail in order to show in which direction Lyotard wants to go with this model which is formulated in terms of “phrases” and “genres of discourse”, and which thereby tries to avoid any appeal to subject-centred notions. But let us come back to the essential point: there are, then, “phrases” which – as Lyotard is fond of saying – “arrive” and which are followed by other “phrases” (including feelings, gestures and silences). What is established is only that certain phrases must follow, not which ones. And in addition to these phrases and their phrase regimens, there are also genres of discourse which pursue certain mutually exclusive goals (to persuade, to legitimate, to make us laugh), and thus try to win over or claim these phrases for themselves. Since there will always be only one phrase which can link up with the previous one, and since the nature and value of that linkage depends on the goal pursued by the genre in which the linkage occurs, and furthermore since no absolutely “good” or “valuable” genre exists and every genre – after the death of God, Lyotard says27 – can lay just as much claim to a linkage as any other genre, we are confronted here with a situation in which the “differend” has become inevitable: language wages a civil war against itself.28 One could always have made a different linkage. Every phrase which follows upon another presupposes that a certain genre has conquered another, and that this victory could in the next round turn to defeat. None of these genres can do what Leibniz’ God once did: there is no longer any “pre-established harmony” and the result of this is a generalized incompossibility, an “ontological war” between those “monads of language” Lyotard calls phrases.29 In this conflict which threatens to erupt at any moment between the possible linkages, Lyotard sees the breeding ground of the political. But although this implies that “everything becomes political”, it does not advocate that 27

‘Le nom et l’exception’, in H. NAGL-DOCEKAL & H. VETTER (Hrsg.), Tod des Subjekts? Wien/München, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1987, p. 44. 28 “A differend takes the form of a civil war, of what the Greeks called a stasis: the form of a spasm. The authority of the idiom in which cases are established and regulated is contested. A different idiom and a different tribunal are demanded, which the other party contests and regrets. Language is at war with itself (...)”. (‘Judiciousness in dispute, or Kant after Marx’, in The Lyotard Reader, p. 357. 29 ‘Le nom et l’exception’, art. cit., p. 44.

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politics “become everything” in the sense of a genre which would encompass all others (nr. 192): “politics is not at all a genre, it bears witness to the nothingness which opens up with each occurring phrase” (nr. 199). Doubtless one may wonder where all of this must lead. Would it not for instance be better for us to try and forget the “differend” which arises with every link between phrases, instead of espousing it, as Lyotard seems to want? What, in fact, does Lyotard want? Does he not contradict himself, as Manfred Frank suggests,30 since The Differend itself incorporates a genre and phrases which come in place of other possible phrases, thus seeming only to increase the ontological “injustice”? Or should we follow Harry Kunneman’s reply to Frank and start seeing in The Differend “a thoroughly normative inspired attempt to exclude in advance from philosophical discourse the concealment of violence – a basic model of the exercise of power – by assuming a priori the presence of violence and a not (yet) expressible injustice?”31 But what kind of violence is actually at issue here, and what is this “injustice” which has become ontologically inevitable? Let us attempt to take some critical distance.

2. A CONCEPTUAL SHIFT We began from a situation where the “differend” seemed to involve one genre (economics) threatening to overwhelm another genre (charity) thus being guilty of what Oakeshott in “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” has called superbia: pride.32 When a voice in a conversation drowns out the other voices, as Oakeshott saw occurring with the voice of science, then one is in danger of arriving at a point where something can no longer be said. But by now, Lyotard has manoeuvred us unnoticed in a different direction. By referring the 30

M. FRANK, Die Grenzen der Verständigung. Ein Geistergespräch zwischen Lyotard und Habermas. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 34, 60-1, 94-6 etc. Jacob Rogozinski has needed only a few pages in order to point out the confusion in Frank’s argument: ‘Argumenter avec Manfred Frank?’, Les Cahiers de Philosophie (Jean-François Lyotard. Réécrire la modernité), 1988 (-5), pp. 185-91. 31 H. KUNNEMAN, art. cit., pp. 205-6. 32 In M. OAKESHOTT, Rationalism in Politics and other essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1991.

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“differend” to the always scant and exclusive possibilities for linkage between “phrases”, he turns it into a situation where something can not yet be said: “The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (nr. 22, my emphasis).33 What makes this second model (“not yet”) so implausible is that it gives a literally sublime twist to the very idea which rendered the first model (“no longer”) plausible, namely the belief that “every wrong (tort) ought to be able to be put into phrases” (nr. 21). The mechanism of the Kantian sublime – where the displeasure [Unlust] accompanying the inadequacies of imagination still goes together with the “simultaneously awakened pleasure” (KU, B98) arising out of “the feeling of the supersensible side of our being” (ibid.) – is now simply transplanted to the situation which arises when “something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (nr. 23, my italics): “then, says Lyotard, the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language (...) to recognize that what remains to be phrased (ce qu ’il y a à phraser) exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (nr. 23). One might wonder whether Lyotard’s insistence on the “presently” and the “not yet”, which I have emphasized in this passage, does not indicate that he is in fact taking the sting of finitude out of the Kantian sublime by reading in the union of pleasure and displeasure an appeal to not acquiesce in finitude and to keep generating new idioms. But even without entering the entire difficult and exceedingly complex debate

33

In a recent text Lyotard quotes this passage but drops the “not yet” and replaces it by a simple “not”. Cf. ‘L’inarticulé ou le différend même’, in M. MEYER - A. LEMPEREUR (eds.), Figures et conflits rhétoriques. Brussels, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1990, p. 201 (nr. 1): “On lit au numéro 22 du Différend: ‘le différend est l’état .. [etc.] .. ne peut pas l’être’” (my italics). No doubt this substitution has the status of a lapse (Fehlleistung), since, as we will see, the “not yet” is responsible for a number of serious complications in The Differend.

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between Lyotard and Kant,34 the problem with which Lyotard is struggling should be clear. As we have seen, Lyotard seems to interpret our inability to put something into phrases as an exhortation to at least make the attempt: language demands that we establish new idioms (nr. 23). Hence it is our momentary shortcoming, our non-ability, which here provides a sign of what we should be able to do. The “differend”, Lyotard says, is about “something which must be said and cannot yet (ne pas encore) be said”. But what is this “something”? And what happens to it when it is put into phrases (mis en phrases)? Suppose that these phrases impress themselves into what they were intended to express? Suppose that there would be within language this minimal violence, which is perhaps not a violence? Wouldn’t the “not yet” then turn into a radical “not at all”?35 And, are there not some silences which would be wronged by considering them to be signs that something can not yet be said? For we should not forget that silence, and keeping silent, are also phrases for Lyotard. Keeping silent is also a linkage.36 It can indicate an ability to not speak (pouvoir ne pas parler) and thereby signal approval or disapproval, for instance. Or it can indicate an inability to speak (ne pas pouvoir parler) because one has not yet found, or no longer has, an idiom. But, is there an idiom for everything? Is there not also a silence which signals that something cannot be said? A silence which is no phrase, a silence which is no linkage, but which interrupts every linkage?37 34

Cf. apart from the remarks on the sublime in The Inhuman, ‘L’intérêt du sublime’, in Du sublime, s. l., Belin, 1988, pp. 149-77 and Leçons sur l’Analytique du sublime. Paris, Galilée, 1991. 35 This seems to be the direction taken by the article quoted in note 33 where Lyotard sees a ‘differend’ between the Freudian ‘affect’ and the word-and thing-presentations (Wortvorstellung; Sachvorstellung) (see e.g. nr. 5: “Phrase articulée et phrase-affect ne peuvent se ‘rencontrer’ qu’en se manquant. De leur différend, résulte un tort. Si articulation et inarticulation sont irréductibles l’une à l’autre, ce tort peut être dit radical”). But one wonders whether this is the only way to account for silence in language, and whether this is the only silence to disrupt the chain of linkages... 36 Cf. apart from the passages quoted earlier from The Differend, the explicit statement in J.-Fr. LYOTARD, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York, Columbia U.P., 1988, p. 8: “Even a silence, being a phrase, is a way of linking”. 37 Following Blanchot, Jacob Rogozinski has raised similar questions in his ‘Lyotard: le différend, la présence’, in Témoigner du différend. Quand phraser ne se peut. Autour de Jean-François Lyotard. Paris, Éditions Osiris, 1989, pp. 61-79. Rogozinski does not connect them to the problem of impassibility that I am trying to articulate here.

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Is it not possible that the real root of a “differend” should be sought – not in the necessity, in the inevitability of linkage – but rather in an incapacity, an “inability to link” which is not a shortcoming whose displeasure would be compensated by the feeling of pleasure with which we discover a higher “ability”, as is the case in Kant where “the inadequacy of the images is a negative sign of the immense power of Ideas” (I 109-10/98)? What would have become of the “differend” had Lyotard not tried to define “bearing witness to the differend” by using the structure of the Kantian sublime (as he understands it)? What would happen to this witnessing when it is no longer understood to be something which draws its strength from a passibility encountered in and through an inadequacy (“what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase”; nr. 23)? What could it mean to connect “bearing witness to the differend” to a lack of passibility – that is to say, not to a lack where one falls short in one’s passibility, but to a lack which makes up the structure of passibility itself? Let me try, via a detour, to tie in with Lyotard one last time and work out to what extent one can find pretexts for such a (more) Heideggerian reformulation of the problem.

3. SORROW OR CARE – “AFTER” THE “DEATH” OF “GOD” Until now I have mainly tried to show how Lyotard in The Differend gives an unexpected twist to the at first sight rather plausible idea of a “differend” by building such a “conflict without rule” into the basic structure of language itself. Lyotard exploits this conceptual shift, which makes the “differend” into a situation where something can “not yet” (instead of “no longer”) be said, in order to locate a “new kind of sublime” in the tension between the effectively realized linkages and the infinite potential for linkages which were not (yet) realized: “in this sublime, not only [as in Kant] would the irreparable distance be experienced between an Idea and that which is presented as ‘realizing’ the Idea, but also the distance between the diverse families of phrases [and genres]”.38 Not that this latter distance is normally “experienced”. To the contrary: that occurs only in exceptional cases, when the “genre” which has implicitly prevailed over the other genres seems, in light of certain 38

L’enthousiasme, o.c., p. 108 (my addition between square brackets so as to keep conformity with the terminology we have been using).

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events, no longer capable of maintaining the semblance of obviousness with which it enforces its own linkages between phrases. The death of God, and hence the civil war within language, were quite successfully hidden from view by modernity as long as it succeeded in concealing the ultimate contingency of its linkages by means of a number of so-called “great narratives”.39 This assumed that the narrative genre could impose itself as a kind of meta-genre and avert the need for legitimation – which relates to the ontological void between the phrases to be linked – by resolving the whole problem of linkage with a few privileged signifiers: one could think here of the narrative about the “emancipation” of “humanity” through “technology” and “science”, or through the figure of “the proletariat”. If I understand Lyotard well, he is of the opinion that this spell is only really broken in postmodernity. So the real impact of the disenchantment of the world only takes place “after” modernity when those signifiers by which modernity strove to forget the nature and extent of disenchantment are shattered against certain names – Lyotard cites Auschwitz, Budapest, May ’68, and the like –, names which seem impossible to integrate within the great narratives and which, as it were, fragment them from within because they focus directly on those signifiers which modernity relied upon in order to be able to forget (science, the proletariat, etc.). Moreover, it seems as if Lyotard wants to suggest that the crisis of postmodernity has to do with the fact that we can no longer find any such master signifiers, not only because modernity’s signifiers no longer work, but also because the collapse of the great narratives has shown us something we can no longer forget: that we require some signifier or other in order to forget the contingency of our linkages. I would concede that I am pushing Lyotard a bit here, but one could wonder if the contempt which he exhibits for a vulgar postmodern eclecticism40 should not be understood from this perspective. The impotence of a so-called “postmodernism” would appear already from the fact that it can claim this role of transcendental signifier only for itself: the only signifier which still makes a difference for us is the one which says that there is difference, that difference makes a difference: 39

I repeat here, albeit loosely, a number of themes present in La condition postmoderne. Paris, Minuit, 1979; trans. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 40 Cf. Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, o. c., passim.

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“post-modern” .41 And, along with the artificial and scarcely credible character of this attempt to deliver us from the collapse of modernity, there is also the equally worrisome attempt to try and fill in this “lack of names”, under which we evidently suffer, by reverting to a premodern stage where one clings to the well-orchestrated myths regarding the mission of Volk, soil and nation. We are aware of the terror to which this has led and still leads today: “No one is sufficiently named. Let him show his genealogy, his genos” .42 The lesson Lyotard draws from this unattractive alternative appears to be homeopathic: since forgetting no longer works, we have to remember that we cannot forget – “(one must) bear witness to the differend” [il faut témoigner du différend] (D, 11,XIII; nr. 22...). This is a witnessing which not only means that we must hasten to the assistance of whatever is on the verge of becoming no longer possible to say, but also a witnessing that is quite explicitly seen as a protest against the power by which genres of discourse are able to make us forget “the nothingness opened up with each occurring phrase, giving rise to the differend between genres” (nr. 199; 188). Moreover, to bear witness to this nothingness is for Lyotard the task of politics (la politique) (nr. 199) – I would say, rather, of the political (le politique).43 But what kind of politics is this, one might wonder, which wants to expose the civil war – the stasis, the discordia – within language? How can Lyotard even ask himself “if the stakes of thought (?) concerned the differend rather than consensus” (nr. 146)? If politics “is everything”, if the political question is posed with every linkage (nrs. 194, 98) – with every attempt, that is, to obscure the contingency of the linkage by pushing to the fore certain discursive goals

41

My treatment of ‘postmodernism’ as a ‘transcendental signifier’ has been inspired by Lacan (see e.g. Le transfert (Le séminaire, livre VIII). Paris, Seuil, 1991, pp. 272-3: “signifiant (...) que l’on ne peut écrire qu’entre parenthèses”). 42 ‘Le nom et l’exception’, art. cit., p. 52. 43 The distinction between la politique (politics) and le politique (the political) is at the heart of Claude Lefort’s political philosophy – le politique stands for that instituting moment whereby the symbolic order of a society and the place of politics in it (a place that differs according to the regime thus instituted) gets determined (see the studies collected in J.-L. NANCY - Ph. LACOUE-LABARTHE (eds.), Le retrait du politique. Paris, Galilée, 1983). Bringing in this distinction would, of course, change the perspective entirely: as will become clear as we proceed, it could mean that instead of us ‘bearing witness to this nothingness’ (la politique), le politique helps us “bear” this nothingness.

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– what can then be the sense of a witnessing which makes this contingency central? Lyotard knows that the political is not a genre; it is rather that nothing, that gap which makes genres and the struggle between them possible (nr. 188). But he also knows that there is no politics unless the political withdraws and is determined by a genre – a genre which varies according to the solution one provides to the problem of legitimacy which, as we have seen, amounts to finding a reason for the authority of an instance, x, who has decided that y ought to do this or that. Myth, divine law and democratic deliberation constitute such “reasons”: “I, emperor by the grace of God, have decided that... ” (nrs. 199ff.) or “We, the assembly of people’s representatives, proclaim that...”. However one resolves this problem politics will still ultimately appear to be subsumed under one genre which, says Lyotard, already by the very fact that it is a genre and thus excludes other genres, leaves “a ‘residue’ of differends that are not regulated and cannot be regulated within an idiom, a residue from whence the civil war of ‘language’ can always return, and indeed does return” (nr. 201; 106). The intellectual is the one who helps in forgetting the existence of this residue (nr. 202) whereas the philosopher who stands up for this remainder aims to prepare us for this stasis (which seems to be what is at stake in Lyotard’s witnessing). A preparation which can in fact assume two forms, one of which in The Differend seems to have gained the upper hand on the other. Let us concentrate initially on the answer which rings loudest. Lyotard’s transposition of Kant allows him to trace his “witnessing the differend” back to the sublime feeling where, as we have seen, the frustration over not being able to say what wants to be said goes together with the “delight” (délice) resulting from the appeal made to us by language “not to enlarge (our) [communicative] ability”, “but only to permit other, perhaps heterogeneous, phrases”.44 Within this hospitable universe, which is perhaps no longer a uni-verse, heterogeneity triumphs. Lyotard even grants it the status of an Idea: for in this sublime feeling which postmodernity sets free “not only would the Idea of a single aim be indicated [as in the Kantian sublime], but already the Idea that the aim consists of forming and freely exploring Ideas, and that this aim is 44

Cf. ‘Judiciousness in dispute’, art. cit., p. 357 (trans, altered). My addition in square brackets finds support in I 119-29/108-18.

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the beginning of an infinite number of heterogeneous finalities”.45 The problem of incompossibility is resolved here by the appeal emerging from the Idea of heterogeneity itself. What counts is not “convergence” but “divergence”.46 “The only consensus which we must be concerned with (...) is the one which could encourage this heterogeneity, these ‘dissensus’”.47 This concern is itself sufficient. For even when, as Lyotard says in The Differend, the frustration of never being able to present that unpresentable heterogeneity within reality, even when this frustration overrides the joy of being nonetheless called upon to do so, and even when we are more depressed by the abyss that separates heterogeneous genres of discourse than excited by a possible passage from one to the other, even then the “sublime melancholy” – the sorrow (Kummer) – with which humanity reacts to this would be sufficient to supply the proof that it is progressing (nr. 256). The melancholy with which observers reacted to the spectacles of the twentieth century, a melancholy which seems to have replaced the enthusiasm with which a previous century reacted to the French Revolution, is for Lyotard a “sign of history” (Geschichtszeichen): “it attests to an Idea of reason and to its absence in empirical reality. This melancholy is a way of bearing witness to what has been forgotten. It is a feeling which can assume a sublime character, which can thus ‘prove’, signify, or attest that this Idea has not been lost. Hence there can exist today a sorrow surrounding politics which, if it is unanimous (einstimmig) and disinterested, can function as a sign of history”.48 Thus the first answer – an attempt, says Lyotard, to drop Kant’s teleological hypothesis (Lyotard is concerned with the Idea of heterogeneity), and still “be faithful, without paradox, to the Kantian Idea of ‘culture’”.49 With or without paradox, it is in any case clear that Lyotard’s melancholy results from the clash between two meta45

L’enthousiasme, p. 109. This idea is already present in J.-Fr. LYOTARD - J.-L. THEBAUD, Just Gaming. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, e.g. p. 95: “a politics of Ideas in which justice is not placed under a rule of convergence but rather a rule of divergence”. 47 Peregrinations, o. c., p. 44 (trans. altered) (cf. D nr. 146). 48 ‘Das Undarstellbare – wider das Vergessen. Ein Gespräch zwischen Jean-François Lyotard und Christine Pries’, in PRIES, Chr. (ed.), Das Erhabene. Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Grössenwahn. Weinheim, VCH (Acta Humaniora), 1989, p. 332. 49 L’enthousiasme, p. 114. 46

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prescriptions. The first focuses on heterogeneity and divergence: “Be plural, respect the differences between genres, phrases, etc.”. The second points to the impossibility of this heterogeneity and the limited room for divergence: “Whatever you do, remember that the result of your linkage will always amount to your not having respected certain differences”. In attempting to hold these two prescriptions together by referring to the sublime cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined (I 109/98) Lyotard seems to plunge us into a melancholy from which it is difficult to see how one could escape. “Heterophilia”, Welsch now soberly states, “necessitates courts of law everywhere, and at the same time makes them impossible”.50 We are left then with the second answer, which could not really be announced in The Differend because Lyotard is inclined to let it be absorbed into the first. To be capable of hearing this second answer we must start by forgetting what Harry Kunneman has told us about the intent of The Differend and we must resolutely sever the ties of that pragmatically constructed “secret alliance with Habermas”. For this second answer does not teach us that the point is to “exclude the concealment of violence in advance by a priori assuming the presence of violence”.51 On the contrary, it teaches us that we cannot do without this concealment, that we are the ones who cannot but forget a certain violence in order to speak, that we have to rely on genres of discourse which can only be what they are and can only do what they do insofar as they succeed in averting our gaze from the injustice committed against the various possible linkages after every phrase by the phrase which follows. In other words: the purpose of “bearing witness to the differend”, according to this second answer, is not so much to cure us of the bad habit of forgetting this injustice, but rather to “sensitize” us to the fact that we forget, that we are – so to speak – cursed with an “ontological illusion”52 which not only lets the void, out of which every phrase “arrives”, become obfuscated by this new arrival, but also makes us forget this forgetting by seducing us into seeing ourselves as the authors of these 50

W. WELSCH, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, o. c., p. 254n. H. KUNNEMAN, quoted at note 31. ‘A propos du Différend. Entretien avec Jean-François Lyotard’, Les Cahiers de Philosophie (Jean-François Lyotard. Réécrire la modernité), 1988 (-5), p. 50. 51 52

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phrases, as the ones who “use” language. Lyotard is not concerned with redressing this forgetting, nor even the forgetting of this forgetting.53 His aim, like (the later) Heidegger’s,54 is rather to draw our attention to a kind of withdrawal which we cannot manipulate, which we cannot lay our hands on and be e-mancipated55 from, but to which we must relate in one way or another. We have to relate to the fact that we cannot remember “something” because that “something” is already forgotten from the moment we have presence, recollection and memory. This “immemorial” goes by many names – Lyotard calls it childhood, infantia, chose, immaterial matter, mancipium – but it can only be spoken to in one way: “All I can do is tell that I can no longer tell that story. And that should be enough”.56 It must “suffice that we remember that we no longer remember it”.57 That we do not speak the unspeakable, but rather – like sublime art – “say that we cannot say it”.58 Here, in these later texts, it seems that Lyotard wants to return to our passibility or, in the terminology of The Differend, to the fact that phrases “arrive”, occur, happen. As we have seen, The Differend makes a distinction between the contingency of the linkage (which phrase will follow?) and the fact that there is linkage, that this linkage is necessary, that one phrase always follows another, even when this phrase would be a silence. The “how?” or the “what?” must not be confused with the “that”. A quid is not a quod (nr. 131). “In the gap which separates the one phrase from the other, there is both the contingency of the quid [which phrase follows] 53

Cf. D nr. 124: “The presentation entailed by a phrase is forgotten by it, plunged into Lethe. Another phrase pulls it back out and presents it, oblivious to the presentation that it itself entails. Memory is doubled by oblivion. Metaphysics struggles against oblivion, but what is whatever struggles for oblivion called?” 54 For my views on the difference between the Heidegger before and the one after the ‘turn’ (Kehre), see Truth and Singularity, chapter 2. 55 On e-mancipation, the hand and the mancipium: J.-Fr. LYOTARD, ‘La Mainmise’, Autres Temps: Les cahiers du christianisme social, 1990 (-25), pp. 16-26. Here and in what follows I am drawing on the structure of Heideggerian forgetting (‘kein Tilgen der Seinsvergessenheit, sondern das sichstellen in sie’), as I understand it (cf. Truth and Singularity, chapter 2). 56 Heidegger et “les juifs”, o. c., p. 81 (trans. p. 47). 57 Ibid., p. 68 (trans. p. 38). 58 Ibid., p. 81 (trans. p. 47). Cf. J.-Fr. LYOTARD, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: the Sublime’, Artforum 1982 (20:8), pp. 64-9.

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and the necessity of the quod [that a phrase follows]”.59 It is a question of an occurrence (Ereignis) coming before any meaning is ascribed to it: “It is not what happens, but that something happens before the what can be given significance”.60 “That it happens ‘precedes’ (...) the question pertaining to what happens ... The event happens as a question mark ‘before’ happening as a question” (I 102/90). And the question which asks for the quid to be filled in forgets the question mark: “the ‘that it happens’ is always hidden by what happens, already enveloped in a web of meanings and anticipation, which are necessarily prejudices”.61 And, he continues, we are condemned to such a prejudice; it is impossible to avoid that the quod of “it happens” is anticipated by its meaning (by its quid). Let us recapitulate, for this is crucial and it should be sufficient for understanding why those, like Frank and Apel, who thought they could see in this philosophy the classic self-contradiction [Selbstwiderspruch] of a plea for dissensus (a dissensus which, by making a plea, already assumes a horizon of consensus),62 why those theoreticians of self-contradiction continue to be obsessed by the quid of the linkage and are unable to think (denken) the forgetting, or better, are unable to have remembrance of it (gedenken, Gedächtnis). What Lyotard tells us here is that “language” withdraws and creates its own ontological illusion. One cannot reproach the genres for their diligence in linking up and in anticipating such linkages: that is what makes a process of signification possible. Genres are a sort of “equipmental totality” [Zeugzusammenhang] as it were, a totality of references and possible linkages in which the equipmentality [Zeuglichkeit], the “that” of the linkage, the “being” of the beings (including the being that we are), only comes to light when something breaks or goes missing – Heidegger would speak of a hammer (BT § 1516), Lyotard has in mind the lack and the inadequacy in the sublime. “The shock par excellence”, he writes, “is the evidence of something happening rather than nothing” (I 112/100). And the Sublime, for

59

‘A propos du Différend’, loc. cit., p. 55. Ibid., p. 43. 61 Ibid. 62 See note 30 (Frank is relying on Apel). Lyotard discusses with Apel in ‘Grundlagenkrise’, Neue Hefte für Philosophie (nr. 26: Argumentation der Philosophie), 1986, pp. 1-33. 60

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Lyotard, is this shock: the pleasure which, as we have already seen, comes “from the appeal which language makes on us” to establish new idioms, to still provide an idiom for that which can not yet be said, an idiom which itself falls short in light of the infinite potential of unrealized linkages. I mentioned earlier my distrust of this appeal to the “not yet” and I could now add that the analytic unity between the pleasure of innovation and the appeal of the not yet realized is unclear,63 and that Lyotard gives here the impression of reading Burke into Kant (cf. I 110ff/99ff; D nr. 130). But what further increases to my distrust is the dramatization and the avant-gardism which comes with this appeal to the sublime. Lyotard’s intention is clear: “that something happens, the occurrence”, he tells us, “means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that...’ is the formula of non-mastery of self over self (...). The event testifies to the self’s essential passibility to a recurrent alterity” (I 70/59). It is this “passibility”, this “aesthesia” which we must bear witness to and not lose touch with if we are not to be condemned to what he calls the “anaesthesia” of technique: the “enframing” [Gestell] in which nothing reaches us but what we have given to ourselves.64 Which would seem the end of the gift and the eclipse of alterity. And yet I hesitate, for perhaps this picture is too melancholic and too apocalyptic. Too spectacular and not banal enough. Too much tied to the premise that silence is also a phrase and hence a linkage; a premise which – as I would like to show in closing – is itself still too tied up with, or forms the ground for, a universal juridification; a premise which leads to a melancholy which mourns a lack of law because it forces the lawfulness of the Law into the alternative “either heterogeneity or law

63

Cf. P. CROWTHER, ‘Kantian Sublime, Postmodern, Avant-Garde’, in ID., Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 158-9 for an argument concerning Lyotard‘s use of the sublime in painting that could be transposed to the problematic of The Differend: “Lyotard’s use of the Kantian sublime also has its worrying aspects (...) why should there be any question of us (or the artist) striving to present what is unpresentable? (...) our enjoyment of innovation is one experience, and our sense of infinite possibility is another. (...) But if the sublime is a genuine and distinct mode of experience, we must surely demand that its complex elements have at least a logical bearing on one another”. 64 This idea is developped passim in The Inhuman and in the last sections of ‘Grundlagenkrise’ (art. cit., pp. 23 ff).

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courts”,65 thereby losing sight of the open space in which the Law can and must be heard. A premise which perhaps – but I won’t elaborate this – still works too much with the idea of a totality (Levinas) by trying to situate the silence within the chain of phrase linkages. A premise, finally, which tries too hard to connect the Idea of the infinite – under which the incompossible is subsumed – with an appeal summoning us to turn the “not” into a “not yet”, and which, in this appeal to our “ability”, perhaps continues making use of that technical apparatus from which it wants to protect us. The question is simple: is the sublime the only “place” where the quod buried underneath the quid can still come to light and where we can have the experience of “an obscure debt” (I 153/141)? And, the answer is “no”. We are all familiar with situations – they form the very texture of our banality – in which, for instance, we are confronted with others (or their phrases or their genres) whom we understand but who also escape us, to whom we don’t really have access, who are too strange or too banal to be alternatives for us, to captivate or interest us. We do not turn our back on them, not all the time or at least not in principle. Sometimes we keep listening in silence because we respect the fact that there is something not getting through to us. Sometimes we lend our help, even if we do not know what happens to this help, even if we know that in this bizarre world of the other our help is received in a way which we would rather not witness. That respect or that help is there, not in spite of but by virtue of our feeling of being dissociated from those others or from those phrases, a dissociation which has to do with our inability to link, with an “interruption” of the linkage between phrases or genres in which an “inability to speak” (ne pas pouvoir parler) is experienced, a nonpassibility which forms the other side of our passibility. As if we could only be interested in something if something else is closed off. As if we could only be in the grip of “something” (values for example) if “something” else – the “something” of the other – does not get through to us. In discourse, Foucault reminded us – but it is only a

65

On this aporia W. WELSCH, o. c., pp. 254 ff., who wrongly concludes from this that Lyotard is stressing too much heterogeneity and thereby loosing sight of the kind of overlappings that underlie what Welsch calls ‘transversale Vernunft’ (and point in the direction of his later defence of ‘transculturalism’ against which I reacted in my ‘Transcultural Vibrations’, Ethical Perspectives 1994 (1:2), pp. 89-100).

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metaphor for a more general situation –, we cannot hear everything. The other is somehow always the one who hears something else. We understand him but he remains, as Husserl says, inaccessible. There should then be a “politics” which perhaps has not so much to do with the shortage of possible linkages for which the monads of language fight their civil war, but which must build a polis around that void no one even fights for, thus building a “we” which would call in the nomads. And this politics will have to join with an ethics, not in order to replace ethics – since, as Levinas says, there are “tears which the state officials do not see” –, but in order to feed from the ethos that this ethics asks of us. An ethics, then, which perhaps does not begin with an appeal that has always already arrived, which has me in its grip before I even understand it, but rather with an appeal that simply does not arrive because there is “something” else (and this “something” is not the other’s “something”) which has me in its grip. The appeal of the other would not, so to speak, be able to reach me if it had not first missed me if I had not first of all experienced the other as someone with whom I do not share something, someone from whom I feel dissociated, if I had not first of all kept silent and, like a child, with the aid of numerous questions, opened up that space within me where – in spite of my plenitude – something can “arrive” . In Lyotard’s terms, if we accept this language and thus accept that it is not man who makes language but language which makes man,66 and that phrases are not addressed to a subject but arrange the design of the subject by locating it within those phrases;67 in Lyotard’s terms, then, if we accept this language, here are some of the questions which may well make something in us give way: how is it that I do not belong to or hear that phrase that (or where) the other hears? How is it that this genre “seduces” me and that I do not feel seduced by the other’s genre? I cannot occupy the position from which the other in those phrases and in that genre is obligated; even less can I occupy the position of that other who is obligated. A “practical discourse” (Habermas) is no way forward here since this law – this obligation – falls outside of the alternative ‘either reasonable, and hence convincing, or else unreasonable, and hence 66

Cf. apart from D, passim the conversation with G. Larochelle: ‘That Which Resists, After All’, Philosophy Today, 1992 (36:4), p. 408. 67 ‘A propos du Différend’, loc. cit., p. 46.

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coercive’. To be in the grip of something is not – as Lyotard remarks himself – a matter of conviction/constraint (nr. 176). This law, this grip, this attachment which I see the other is tied to and which I cannot feel since I live with a different attachment, this law is a law because it compels. But then how can I still distinguish it from terror? I am the only one who hears this voice. “You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed”.68 But “President Schreber” also spoke with “God” (nr. 164). Was it God who spoke to Schreber? Terror of the idiolect, says Lyotard (nr. 206). A terror, then, which must be crushed – by offering a ram for a son or by giving an apology, for instance. An apology for a ‘lack’ of passibility which cannot be treated ironically, for then one would rise above it, and which should not lead to melancholy, for then it would be thought against the background of something which transcends the lack. This lack does not have the structure of a usurpation, which would be my place under the sun according to Levinas, following Pascal. Not even that. I cannot even make it ethical, I cannot leave to ethics the task of giving meaning to that which, for me, allows meaning to arise but which remains itself meaningless. Perhaps I can do no more than apologize for the fact that even this insight is not sufficient to render that “something” or its effects – my values for instance – futile. And perhaps this apology, as Lyotard would say, must be enough. Perhaps this is sufficient. Sufficient to be able to hope for forgiveness, if Lyotard is right in seeing forgiveness – like Arendt – not as a forgetting of what has been done, but as “the postponement of what has been done”.69 Perhaps there can be no politics without such postponement, such forgiveness – not primarily as something demanded from us, but as something granted to us. Ethics is not politics. The Law of charity asks that we give this unrecognizable other a chance (and therein, Lacan helped us realize, lies its “cruelty”). The Law of politics, to the contrary, 68

L. WITTGENSTEIN, Zettel § 717. In fact, the expression used in The Human Condition is “undoing what has been done”. The translator of ‘La mainmise’ (cf. note 55) introduced it to render the following passage: “Arendt écrivait, dans The Human Condition, que le pardon est la remise de ce qui a été fait. Non pas 1’oubli, mais une nouvelle donne” (p. 26; translation in Philosophy Today, 1992 (36:4) p. 427). Although one could think of more correct translations, it seems to me that this one can be sustained, especially in light of Lyotard’s sharp criticism of Arendt’s humanism (‘The Survivor’ loc. cit.). 69

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gives us another chance. Which means that the law of Lyotard’s polis cannot be built on a simple forgetting, and that it cannot simply say to us what Thrasybulos, leader of the democrats after their victory over the Thirty in Athens in 403 BC, said: “let us forget stasis, let no one or nothing again remind us of that civil war”.70 For in the language of Lyotard, which has tried to grant to this civil war its ontological rights, in this “postmodern” language, which perhaps would have sounded very Greek to Heidegger, forgetting and forgiveness are ontologically housed in a law which addresses us differently: “I know about your nonpassibility and I have heard your apology. I know there is “something” that has been unwilling to let you go and that is turning you against me. I cannot annihilate that “something” by my presence. But I can help you bear that which keeps turning you against me. I forgive you and I will help you postpone what is occurring”. This Law places itself above stasis and above the terror of my idiolect. It profits from my silence, but also makes it possible:71 “It does not make the obligation transitive, that’s 70

Cf. N. LORAUX, ‘L’oubli dans la cité’, Le temps de la réflexion, 1980 (1), pp. 213-42. The kind of ethics I was trying to conceive of here [at the time I wrote this text] should not be confused with the one I resisted to in Levinas. The suggestion is that the realm of ethics is only opened when the other confronts me with the “that” of ‘dissociation’ and de-centres my I [why would the domain of ethics be opened here? Why would it not implode?]. The reason why I help the other is that through such confrontation I have lost the reason not to do so: not that he is like me (alter ego), but I am like him (alter tu) – bound to ‘something’ to which I owe what is most my own without owning it. It is this ‘something’ which renders me silent and ‘dissociates’ me from others. But due to this de-centrement my silence is no longer something I possess. It rather seems to possess me and it could be [why/how, under what conditions?] this de-thronement that exposes me to the Other’s ‘appeal’. Be that as it may, the point to remember here is the difference between (such an) ethics and politics – unlike the latter, ethics is not making my silence possible, but owes its own possibility to my being struck by that silence in me. As I signalled in the introduction to this volume and indicated here by my bracketed remarks, this proposal betrays a certain indecision as to which route to take: the ‘political’ one which, in terms of the text, would help me bear my silence or the ethical one which, as it is formulated here, seems to presuppose that I can, without such help, draw lessons from it. I now think that presupposition to be over-optimistic. The self is struck by its dissociation, but without a certain symbolic structure coming to its help, it threatens to become annihilated by it. Thus, an in principle ‘metaphysical’ experience (the inhuman condition) is both necessary and, if left to itself, impossible. Hence the importance of a public sphere – a point that I will take up in the pages that follow. 71

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impossible, it makes it common” (nr. 206). This Law helps us bear the wound of our attachment since it is written. Which means, perhaps, that this Law sings – for it was by singing that the goddess could soothe the wrath of Achilles (mènin aeide theá...), and thereby break what he could not break himself, and dress the wound done to his soul “unprepared as it was”.

CONCLUSION

IN SEARCH OF VISIBILITY

If one listens to the buzz produced on the scene of contemporary thought from a sufficient distance, it would seem that, despite all sorts of disagreements, there is one topic on which nearly everyone involved (not just philosophers, but ordinary people, the media, politicians, in short, everyone, but no one in particular) agrees – the idea that what is given as ours does not stand alone and cannot be understood unless one links it to the Other. An echo from this is no doubt what prompted me to write the chapters gathered in this volume. Yet, as soon as one tries to descend from that height and direct one’s attention to the texts from which that echo came, things immediately get more complicated. Take the expression ‘the other in the self’. For a number of authors the idea here seems to be that the self is not at its own origin: it is split, divided and it is due to such a split or division that it can aim to overcome what would otherwise be its self-centredness, its condition of being closed in upon itself. The implicit premise is that such an other who is thought to inhabit the self, fulfils a positive, almost soteriological, role. But this, as we noted in chapter 4, remains to be seen. Why would a self that is inhabited by the other, still be a self; why would such an other not prevent it from being a self? Does not the notion of selfhood minimally point to a certain degree of ontological privacy, that is: to a capacity to close oneself off– from the other? Further difficulties arise as soon as one asks what ‘other’ is meant by the expression ‘the other-in-the-self’. As we have seen, there is an enormous difference between authors such as Levinas or Lyotard who would at first sight seem to give the same answer: the soul. For the soul in Levinas stands for that part of the self that is deeply connected to the Other outside of it; whereas the soul in Lyotard could very well be taken into a direction in which it stands for the unexpected and inexplicable absence of any such connection. I will come back to that in a moment. But let me first deal with yet another complication. There is obviously also an Other outside the self. How should one define him or her? As an ethical Other? Or as a political Other? Does one definition exclude or include the other? Can the Other be both my enemy and my brother? Can one have it both ways?


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Let us start here. As the reader will remember, Carl Schmitt in his Zum Begriff des Politischen, was looking for a definition of what could count as a political situation. And he then came up with the suggestion that we enter the political as soon as a certain dissociative force has reached a degree of intensity such that a friend-foe division is established. The foe – the hostis, that is the ‘public’ enemy – being the one who constitutes a threat to my/our “Existenzweise”. Politics is thus about a division between those we can associate with and those we cannot. Schmitt believed this elementary vision of politics had been covered over by two deeply a-political theories: liberalism and economism. For liberalism sees in the other a partner in dialogue; just as economism approaches him/her as a partner-in-trade. But dialogue and trade, thus conceived, fall below the threshold of politics – any order that embraces these and these alone will pay the price of depoliticizing the world. A political world is a divided world, a pluriversum instead of a universe; it always is opened up to the risk of war, when the threat exerted by the opposite views (the enemy’s) can only thus be curbed. After September 11, there seems certainly a great deal of actuality to Schmitt’s approach – notably in his warning that whoever speaks in the name of humanity, e.g. in order to launch a war on those who fall outside it (the barbarians), is, politically spoken, a mere liar. Thus Bush’s campaign against Al Qaeda – the forces of evil – had to be a moralreligious campaign, it could not be political. For politics begins with granting the other the status of an enemy – of a political other. And it was exactly that status that Bush denied those who attacked him. The whole conflict thus reached out onto a meta-level: it turned around what one could call with Lyotard “a differend” between a basically moralreligious discourse and a political one, with the ‘terrorists’ insisting that they were fighting a war against what constituted, according to their view, a threat to their “way of life”. The tension in Schmitt is thus a tension between oneself and the other (the enemy) primarily; it is inter-subjective rather than intra-subjective. And yet, one also finds in Schmitt a formula that seems more ambiguous and to which he often returned, with each time a different reading of what he meant by it. In fact, this formula is not his own. He takes it from the poet Theodor Däubler. The German reads as follows: “Der Feind ist unsre eigne Frage als Gestalt” (literally: “The enemy is our own question as Gestalt”).

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As has been pointed out in great detail by Ruth Groh, the ambiguity of this formula is that it allows just as well for a substantive definition of the enemy (the enemy is the Jew – Schmitt during his nazi-years) as for a formal one (after the denazification1). Yet, leaving Schmitt’s biography apart, it would seem that a certain potential is opened up here which could take us into a direction Schmitt did himself not take. For, if the foe is both the one who threatens our mode of existence and the Gestalt in which we meet our own question, it could be that the latter question deals precisely with the way we relate to our own mode of existence. Through the Other, as someone who does not share what we seem to share, the meanings of both our ways of sharing could come to lose part of their self-evidence. This requires some explanation. What I am trying to make Schmitt’s formula say – against his grain – is that our own question bears on how we deal with or stand to what we believe to be our own mode of existence. As is common knowledge, in an age as pluralistic as ours, we have come to accept that more than one way of life is possible. Pluralism has gained the status of a common currency between individuals who each seem to opt for a set of values, a way of understanding the good life, etc., that acknowledges other choices or other options being open – if not to them, then at least to others. Such a pluralism is, then, merely a numerical one: it does not bear on the subject, does not affect the subject in its way of being, but is located outside of it. It is, says Levinas, a pluralism that can be “counted” by a subject that remains itself outside of the counting process, unaffected by the mere multiplicity around it.2 Returning to Däubler, one could say, that the reason that the otherness of the Other does not constitute a threat to this subject is that it disconnects such otherness from any bearing on its self. The question of liberty here is merely the negative one of not letting these freely choosing selves encroach upon each other’s freedom to choose. But what about a pluralism that does not rest on such

1

Ruth GROH, Arbeit an der Heillosigkeit der Welt. Zur politisch-theologischen Mythologie und Anthropologie Carl Schmitts. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1998, chapter 2, ‘Die formale Bestimmung des Anderen’, esp. pp. 67 ff. 2 E. LEVINAS, ‘Pluralisme et transcendance’, in E.W. BETH et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1949, pp. 381-3.


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an attempt to disconnect the Other and the self? What notion of liberty does it imply?

As we have seen in the opening chapter of this volume, Levinas is no less inclined to embrace liberalism than Carl Schmitt, though his disavowal does seem to come from the opposite direction. Pluralism for Levinas is not real unless it goes to the very core of the subject. Unless, that is, the other puts the subject in question. Again returning to Däubler’s verse, unless the subject meets in the Other what it cannot trim down to its own measure. For, Levinas reasons, what is specific about the Other is that, qua Other, he or she is the bearer of a light of his/her own. And such a light is incommensurable to our own – if we merely approach the other as a datum in our outside world that does not contest our inhabiting a world of our own we overlook what is specifically other about such an other. That is: we overlook or overhear our own question – the question such an other, no matter how distant he or she may be, addresses to us: why should you have the rights you assume to be entitled to, the rights to life, liberty and limb? Does not my fate concern you? Are you not your ‘brother’s’ keeper? Such a question derives its authority not from the realm of being in which everything is reducible to the one who counts and synthesizes the multiplicity surrounding him. It derives its authority from what lies beyond Being – from the Good, says Levinas. Why should you have precedence over me? – it is this simple question which the face of the Other addresses to me, and which, at bottom, I can only answer in shame – the shame of indeed having to admit that I took myself for granted and that, in doing so, I put myself above the Other. As the reader by now should know, Levinas contests that latter move. For him things are to be reversed: instead of me taking precedence over the Other, he (or she) is to have priority over me. Our relation is asymmetrical: the Other is above me, but also below me. His (or her) appeal comes from on high, but it is an appeal nonetheless – I cannot deny it, but neither can I be forced to act upon it. Such is ethical freedom: imposing a choice upon me such as I did not have before, the choice to either deny the Good that has chosen me before I could choose it, or to follow that Good in the reorientation it invites me to take by allowing myself to become a self-for-the-other. There would thus be two

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selves: a self that is tied to itself and a self that is tied to and vowed to the other before it is tied to itself. A self that belongs to being and a self that ‘is’ otherwise than being. Ontological pluralism would demand the latter sort of self. It would demand a conversion. The subject of ontology – a mere conatus essendi – would need to be turned inward out to the point of becoming entirely devoted to the other, “without time to look after itself”. What a difference with Carl Schmitt! It would seem that Levinas’ other can never become someone who could be perceived as a threat to our way of life – unless, of course, the reason we would feel threatened gives away the answer: if we should still cling to our way of life, this clinging would be the self-satisfied violence of our egoism, it would betray our deepest vocation. However noble one might think this Levinasian approach to the problem of pluralism, it comes, however, at a certain cost. For, why would the other – any other3 – be able to inspire me with shame? The whole approach seems circular: shame expressing the priority of the other, and the priority of the other being derived from shame. Indeed, we have in the chapters above been unable to find an independent argument in Levinas for either of these options set apart. Levinas reasons as if the I, before the Other enters the scene, is entirely within nature – its only concern being its own survival (conatus essendi). Then, with the Other, the I falls irrevocably out of nature: it gets a choice – to let itself be humanized by the Other. Ignoring this choice would be like playing foul: it would be egoism, but egoism now is only one alternative within the ethical-human horizon to which such Other has introduced us. It is Evil. The question we felt compelled to raise was, of course, whether this is a fair portrayal of the situation of the self both before the Other comes in and after s/he has entered the scene. And there was a further question we could not avoid raising: is Levinas giving us a fair portrayal of the Other when he pictures such an Other as the bearer of an otherness that precedes the qualities that would make him or her other – in short: as someone who has his/her otherness as a quality? Both these questions

3

Levinas does, of course, allow for interactions with others that lie outside of ethics. But his point is that the meaning of the word ‘other’ when applied to human beings is ethical. Shame, therefore, is the affect that accompanies intersubjectivity as such, regardless of what my factual relation with any such other would be like.


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hang together – they point to a similar complication: is my not paying heed to the appeal of the Other really a way of resisting the call that pulls me out of nature? Or could my supposed lack of openness have to do with the very constitution of my (e.g.) already cultured self, which may, in such cases, be a differently cultured one than the self of the Other? The alternative position we have tried to formulate in some of the preceding chapters (including those on Heidegger which sprung from the same problem) followed from a question Levinas did not or could not put to himself: could not the otherness of the other confront me with an otherness of my own, an otherness of which I could not have been aware without the Other, but which I can neither simply give up the moment he or she enters the scene? In such a case, I would not react with ethical shame to the Other’s appeal, but rather with some sort of mild anxiety – an unease – derived from the realization that I cannot fully account for what is my own and at the same time feel unable to give it up. Here is an Other who wants me to respect the values s/he deems sacred. But I cannot simply want to respect them in order to please him or her. For these values are not my own, and respect is not something I can decide to have. Unlike help, it is not voluntary and it does not bear directly on the Other, but on something that holds importance for him or her. I can, of course, to a certain extent, admit that mine is not the only set of values possible. But having granted this, I cannot but add: and yet, they are the only ones possible for me. The reason is that I am not at the origin of these values – the kind of self that I am presupposes them. As Levinas says himself: values weigh on me, their value holds before any freedom to choose, for they make such a choice meaningful. But, when making this point, Levinas is again thinking of the one Good beyond ‘being’, whereas, in the pluralistic scene we are imagining, the problem is precisely that my Good does not (always) seem to be the Good of the Other. I take ‘Good’ here in the broad sense which would involve all the kind of practices implied in whatever it is that I or the Other stand for. At first sight, the situation thus described seems to fit nicely what is known as ‘tolerance’: a willingness to bear what one does not approve of, or indeed positively rejects. But there is a complication: for the weight we have to bear does not simply come from what we cannot respect in the Other, it also involves the weight our own values impose on us. In other words, the tension is not simply an inter-subjective one, it is intra-subjective,

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deriving from the Other confronting us with a question to which we fail to come up with an answer: what is it that makes these values, this Existenzweise my own (our own)? In order to answer this question, let us look again and in more detail than we did before at what our age has come to call pluralism.

The term suggests a certain disinclination to fix plurality by hierarchically ordering it – in which case there would still be a story that allows us to cope with differences by situating them at a greater or lesser distance from a goal they are all trying to reach. The other’s difference would then simply confront me with his or her not having reached the level of development or complexity testified to by my own, or, at best, would show me that just as her (e.g.) values are an approximation of the ideal value, so are mine. I could thus either solve the problem by remaining convinced of my being (more) right than s/he, or by admitting that both s/he and me are still approaching the truth or the norm that will once unite us. In the latter case, the Other’s difference helpfully reminds me of the incompletion of my own path – though I doubt his values, that doubt bounces back on me and makes me realize that I should doubt mine too, and that we should sit together and engage in a discursus that ideally will help us out. What one has come to call ‘postmodernity’ refers, however, to a different predicament: there would no longer be a great story able to accommodate for such a localisation of our mutual difference. There would be instead an irreducible plurality of vocabularies, such as those that Rorty has called final in order to convey in one an the same breath both the idea that, for each of us, there is no going back behind (or beyond) the vocabulary in which we state what holds for us, and that, as a consequence, there is always more than one such vocabulary – there is at least mine and the other’s. Any attempt of either of the parties involved to convince the other will fatally be drawn back into the words put on display by the vocabulary one comes from, and thus these words are ultimate or final – there is no going back beyond them, for it is through them only that we can come to express what holds meaning for us. Take the case of euthanasia as an example. Disagreement here typically takes the character of the dissenting parties both resorting to the


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same words (‘the value of life’, ‘a dignified death’), but what these words stand for is not the same. It is not as if one could have the words referring to one and the same value which, ideally, could be given in a Last Final Vocabulary that would do away with all dissent. The value in question does not come apart from the vocabulary we resort to in order to ex-press it. It would rather seem to only come in the wrapping of such vocabularies. There is no ‘validity’ independent from the frame of ‘meaning’ in which it is expressed (Habermas’ terms), no transcendent ‘sense’ without the ‘signification’ that envelops it (Levinas’ terms).4 Put technically: what so-called postmodern authors, like Lyotard or Derrida, seem to be affirming is the end of the platonic dream. Transcendence is not simply independent of the immanence in which it announces itself: there is no transcendence apart from the ladder which leads to it. What was supposed to be a mere ex-pression, a wrapping, a supplement, impresses itself on what it was supposed to merely convey. Ideas become ‘sensible’ (Merleau-Ponty), and thus no longer platonic. There is, for example, no truth as such. There is only truth and falsity on the basis of a discourse (a Truth) that determines the conditions of well-formedness for any candidate to truth and falsity in the plain sense of the term (Foucault). One could say that transcendence (be it of the True, the Good etc.) has descended into an element that has infected it with a genuine mortality. There is no longer a Transcendent hovering over all the contextual attempts to approximate it; it has been taken in, divided and materialized by the practices of which it has become part and parcel. Note again the difference with relativism. Instead of there no longer being an Absolute, the idea here is that the absolute is particularized into what can no longer become a whole. Such is the price of this particular incarnation: it divides, infects what can no longer stand apart from it – where the ‘no longer’ does not have a chronological meaning, but is simply there to indicate the divide between the defenders of modernity and their postmodern counter-parts. To put this differently: far from being the age of relativistic indifference its critics believe it to be, postmodernity is about the combination of a non-indifference with a loss of the belief in the one Absolute. Thus, although I can understand that 4

Thus, Habermas and Levinas, although they seem worlds apart, share the same position as to the relation between transcendence and immanence – for further elaboration, Truth and Singularity, chapter 3 and pp. 362-3.

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there are other possibilities beside my own to give ‘expression’ to what is worth living (or dying) for, this very realisation does not detach me, does not unhook me from the horizon (the final vocabulary, the practices...) that gave rise to whatever it is that I hold sacred, true, right, etc. It is this hiatus between my capacity to understand (in the intellectual sense) and my capacity to show understanding (in the affective sense), which any Other, worthy of the strong sense of otherness implied in the name,5 confronts me with. That the Other be the Gestalt in which I meet my own question would thus mean, in postmodern terms, that, through him, I am confronted with something about me that hitherto escaped me and now embarrasses me. For what could it mean and how can it be that I experience this inertia in myself, this inability to let my affective understanding join my intellectual ability to understand what is other about the other as another human possibility different from my own? One could say that this hiatus singularises me, in the sense that it seems to belie my implicit belief that I could be everywhere. Clearly, I do not belong everywhere, but somewhere, although it may not be clear where exactly it is that I belong. At this point we meet mè-ontology.

Let us retrace our steps first. Earlier on, when addressing tolerance in the etymological sense of tolerare (to bear with what one does not accept) I mentioned a complication that by now, hopefully, has become a bit clearer: the weight I have to carry is not just the other’s, it has to do with a weight the Other confronts me with in what I implicitly took for granted as the meaning of my ‘self’. This meaning is now complicated: for I experience my self in the incapacity to follow the lead of my intellectual understanding: “Here I stand, I can go no further”. Not because I do not want to, but because some‘thing’ is pulling me back. Even if I would be prepared to doubt my right or wrongs, this 5

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress that, as this formulation suggests, there are, of course, also those others who do not have such an effect on me, because they either belong to my with-world or are such that they can come to complement it. My entire argument is restricted to the third kind of Other where the capital ‘O’ seems fully justified – this being the most difficult case, the one-sidedness of what is claimed here follows from an elaborated version of Ockham’s razor (implied by the praeter necessitatem) – formulate an argument in such a way that it includes the ‘worst’ case.


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some‘thing’ does not give way. It is certain in my stead. It does not doubt. It demands my loyalty, just as it threatens my disloyalty with the chaos of utter meaninglessness, including that of the meaning I ascribe to my ‘self’. In the “this is not acceptable/not thinkable” (for me), I stumble over the roots I did not know I had. But these roots are not there for my intellectual appreciation, they do not show their meaning to me, they rather recede into the unclear difference between what I can still ascribe meaning to and what I can’t. In a different vocabulary, one could say that I am forced to experience (if experience is still the proper word for what I am trying to convey here) my own condition as a decentred subject: being tied to some‘thing’ I can neither get away from (without losing my subjectivity) nor simply have access to (by standing back from it, unscathed by it as it were). The Other’s difference makes me feel my own, but in an affective sense. I cannot bear what is other about the Other, – e.g., what s/he does to her body, to her soul, is simply impossible for me. And yet, this circumcision or this clitoridectomia give me a glimpse of what I do to my own body, which, like any other human body, is not without what Marcel Mauss called its ‘techniques corporels’. Through the other I can come to realize the contingency of my practices (e.g. bodily techniques), but this realization does not undo the grip they have over me. I now rather see, or better: I feel that grip. I feel the weight of what I am attached to, but I no longer can explain it in terms of something ‘special’ about them. I look at the content of my attachments with the eyes of the other and what I see is just that beaker made of silver or gold, and replaceable by any other one like it. I see that there is a whole network of words that are there to incarnate my values, but no word in that net sticks out like something special. And yet, it is these words I resort to in the last instance, and not his or hers; it is this object which I call sacred... as if there is more to it (or to them) than what the Other sees and makes me see through him or her. Hence my discomfort, my unease: there is no special ‘extra’ meaning to explain this hold, this grip over me, and yet there is such a hold, such a grip.6

6

This situation could, at first sight, seem similar to what Sartre is describing in Being and Nothingness as the effect of the gaze of the Other on me: “If I am told that I am vulgar, for example, I have often grasped by intuition as regards others the nature of vulgarity; thus I can apply the word ‘vulgar’ to my person. But I cannot join the meaning

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Hence the sense of profanation at the bottom of our disputes, e.g. of the multicultural type. Profanation meaning here not so much the besmearing of a special object by the unclean hand of the non-believer, but precisely the disappointment over the not in itself ‘special’ quality of what harbours the transcendent for me. And together with that profanation which I myself am forced to undergo, there is a disarray that overcomes me. These words are ordinary words, replaceable by others, and yet there is ‘more’ to them than I can see, although I could not spell out what it is and am no longer able to think of this ‘more’ in terms of a surplus of meaning. What is special for me is at the same time ordinary. ‘My’ way of life, ‘my’ culture: it is not just that there appear to be other ones, but that the weight expressed by such possessive pronouns points to me being dispossessed by something both contingent and yet absolute. In so far as it is contingent it is a something that can be described. But its absoluteness falls below the level of description — it is not a ‘nothing’, but not a something either. Which is why the difference it installs could be called mè-ontological: I cannot see it, and yet it holds. Let me further elaborate this point.

One could resume the foregoing analysis by stating that the figure of the Other confronts me not with the other-in-me, but with a kind of otherness that belongs to the very mine-ness of such a me. There is no ‘me’, no ‘self as an uncomplicated given, as something interior that stands opposite to anything outside it. What we mean by ‘me’ or ‘self’ cannot be thought without introducing a kind of ‘outside’ to that me or self which cannot be separated from it and through which it becomes such a me or self. Unlike other things that are outside me, at a distance, and thus different from me, the ‘outside’ that I am pointing to here is of this word to my person” (trans. Hazel BARNES. London, Routledge, 2001, p. 527, – last italics mine). But it is, in fact, profoundly dissimilar in that it presupposes that there is a meaning‘ful’ness from which I cannot abstract my person – I can join the Other in his or her access to a meaning, but that Other cannot join me in my bearing the stamp of the meaningfulness that lies beyond (or before) it. The Other makes me lose my natural attitude toward the meaning‘ful’ which suddenly comes to lose the meaning it was supposed to be filled with — a loss which, as I noted before, does not loosen the grip it has on me.


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not outside in such a sense. It is rather the outer side of the self, a side that falls out of the self’s sight but on which it gets an oblique glimpse by the confrontation with the Other who in turn owes his or her otherness to such an ‘outside’. This ‘outside’ is at the basis of our nonexchangeability with the Other; in this sense it singularises us. But it is not something to which I can relate. Singularisation does not have the structure of what shows me a position that only I can assume and that no one can take over from me (like death in Heidegger or responsibility in Levinas). I am singularised in the sense that there is a border I am unable to cross, something I am unable to digest (and which can be perfectly digestible for others). But this inability is due to what I just called my outer side: not a thing nor a nothing, but an in-between that is not outside in the usual sense, nor inside or interiorizable. It is too close to be at a distance and not near enough to interiorize. It belongs to the self, but as something to which that self is attached; or rather: through which that self which is but that attachment different from the Other’s attachment, gets into being. Lacan coined a neologism to refer to this structure: he spoke of an ex-timacy, thus denying the intimacy of interiority by combining it with an exteriority that is not so exterior that I can hold it at a distance and treat it like something that is unrelated to me. Lyotard, in the same vein, speaks of a ‘thing’ — where the brackets refer to the fact that it is neither given to me as a thing in the usual sense, nor reducible to a mere nothingness. It — the thing — is a mè-on. When I suggested earlier on that the Other makes me feel the weight of my own question, what I meant was that through his or her alterity the Other shifts me into a position where I am confronted with that some‘thing’ about me that is not nothing nor simply a thing and thus would seem to escape ontology. This confrontation is not intellectual, but affective: what I feel is Angst — not because there is nothing which holds me (Heidegger), but because there is some‘thing’ about the mineness of my me which I cannot place at sufficient distance, cannot understand or transcend. Again, Lacan seems to strike the right chord when he states that anxiety is ‘not without’ an object: what lies behind anxiety is neither a mere absence, nor a mere presence. Similarly, and connected to this: what is specific about my ‘question’ is that it confronts me with something that is not nothing, nor some thing with qualifiable aspects. There is more (or less) to it than what the Other sees and what I

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can see when I adopt his or her stance, and it is this ‘more’ (or less) which unsettles me.

If the above is not altogether untrue, we are, of course, confronted with the question of how to cope with such a ‘difficult’ pluralism which not only divides subjects amongst themselves (intersubjective tension) but also within themselves (intrasubjective tension). Clearly the problem with the latter tension is that it comes from what one could call a bad invisibility: if I could hold at a distance the things that are important to me I could judge them and understand why they have the importance they have. I could even doubt whether they really should have the importance I attach to them. But the whole point is that they lack that kind of visibility. It is their invisibility which makes me ill at ease. Accordingly we should look for the cure to such a ‘terror of the invisible’ (not nothing, nor something) in what could restore a certain visibility to them. And here is where we meet not the letter, but the spirit of what Hannah Arendt may have had in mind when she pointed to the importance of not only having a private sphere, but next to it (and separated from it) a public one which would make visible (i.e. invest with visibility) what to each of us remains invisible about ourselves. Of course, we should modify Arendt a bit. Instead of the sociological distinction between private and public, we could reorient her analysis by modifying the private sphere along the lines set out above: not as a private into which I can retreat, but as what is private to me, inaccessible and yet close, too close for it to be a thing which I can possess and get rid of.7 I do not have my values, they rather have me, and it is that weight which the Other exposes me to. An uneasy situation, not at all the comfort of a private sphere into which I can withdraw! Not a house, or, if one wants to keep the metaphor, a haunted one. I feel haunted by what I cannot recognise as my own, in the sense of account for, and yet have to admit

7

I do not think Arendt took her demon-metaphor in this direction; but she could have taken that course which would have forced her to reconceive the opposition between ‘who one is/what one is’, which in its present formulation reminds one too much of the notion of singularity that both Levinas and Heidegger (Jemeinigkeit) were using (cf. chapter 8 and note 28 of chapter 6).


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as being that part of me that is most singularly my own since it refuses to move along with my intellectual self’s capacity to understand or to doubt. The revolt, the disgust, the anger, that the other’s difference inspires in me, is but the flipside of the anxiety I feel over my own difference which refuses to give way and yet keeps escaping my effort to understand it.8 Or to be more precise: it is not so much an anxiety that I feel, but an anxiety I am in, a passion that is at the point of desubjectivizing me, sweeping me away. Without outward support, in this passion which comes from the very mineness of my me, there would no longer remain the me whose singularity is in question. Singularisation threatens to be of the kind that wipes away the very subject it is supposed to singularise; as soon as its operative force lightens up the one who is supposed to receive that light is in fact blotted out by it. Private passions that deprive the one they impassion from the capacity to remain the self he or she is! Which is why s/he is desperately in need of whatever can give some solidity to these passions, can harbour them, or can bind them. And Arendt suggests that such is the task of the public sphere: to restore visibility to what, for ontological (or as we could now add: for mè-ontological) reasons, remained without it. In her words: “passions (...) lead an uncertain and shadowy existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized into a shape to fit them for public appearance” (HC 50). This is not the place and time to elaborate on what shape that would need to be – suffice it to indicate that in a truly pluralistic society the mutual differences that are at the origin of such passions demand an institutional context where they can be located, left behind and bound to a certain arena that is separated (and thus sacred, in the etymological sense of secare, to cut) from the rest of society. As I write this, the word ‘Entlastung’ (A. Gehlen) comes to my mind. Or in yet another vocabulary: democratic societies not only accept their own division but play it out on a scene that has the advantage of both making it visible and of containing it (Cl. Lefort).9 If

8

I am, of course, aware that there are degrees of anxiety (unease, embarrassment, etc. ...). But again, I am working with the praeter necessitatem clause explained in note 5. 9 It is, in part, my allegiance to Lefort’s thought that makes me hesitant to follow the letter of what Arendt stood for. Her stress on participation, as against representation, seems to derive from a notion of re-presentation which is no longer ours (the ‘re-’

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fundamentalism and individualism today constitute a threat to democracy, the reason is perhaps that the division of society is no longer only intersubjective, but has reached the level where it has become intrasubjective (chapters 3, 9). It would seem that the tendency to either put oneself at the origin of all value or to claim some sort of private, privileged access to them could be seen as a kind of self-therapy the subject resorts to when it feels it cannot count on outward help. Perhaps Arendt was right, then, to suspect that the public/private distinction has given way to something which is neither – to what she calls ‘the social’. The collapse of that distinction may even be more dramatic than Arendt thought. We may be in need of a public culture that not only has the already difficult task of accommodating what divides us between ourselves, but the even more difficult one of pulling what divides us in ourselves into a light where it can take a ‘Gestalt’ that is no longer the Other’s, but something between her and me – a mutual question that, although not solvable, we each can bear to live with. The public sphere, that is, is (or ought to be) the sphere in which our own question can take on Gestalt. But for it to become that sphere, we should, no doubt, first feel the weight of that question and realize that our inability to answer it is mirrored in the other’s inability to answer the question that in turn plagues him or her. No doubt that realisation is not a solution, but perhaps it can make each of us a little less exacting as to the kind of ‘solution’ one might rightfully claim. The eschatological demands that the so-called ‘death-of-God’ and the demise of religion implying a loss that, at least since Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of ‘presence’ (re-presen-tation), is no doubt to be reconsidered). Representation in Lefort is linked to symbolisation: it does not so much re-present, but actively in-forms, gives shape to. Thus the political sphere in a democratic society does more than ex-press that society’s division: it gives it a political status, imposes a form(at) of debate on it, etc. In this context see e.g. Arendt’s rather derogatory appreciation of the ballot box in her ‘Public Rights and Private Interests. In Response to Charles Frankel’, in M. MOONEY F. STUBER (eds.), Small Conforts for Hard Times. New York, 1977: “The voting booth can hardly be called a public place; indeed, the only way (!, R.V.) in which a citizen today can still function as a citizen is as member of a jury” (p. 104). A statement which one would need to confront to Lefort, for whom in (democratic) elections, the fact that “substance falls apart into numbers”, is by itself already of public significance: the voting booth is part of a ritual in which society can both evoke and ‘conjure’ its own division. By the same token, this ritual prevents it from giving in to the (totalitarian) phantasm of the people-as-One. The ritual enables society to relate to its (lack of) unity.


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have put on a this-worldly world are to be rejected. Whatever one thinks of religion and of the metaphysics that accompanied it, one should perhaps not forget that its wisdom partly consisted in distributing the weight of human desire between the needs that could be fulfilled in this world and their rightful excess which demanded another one.10 But this other one was present in this one in a separate enclave, cut off from normal time and place, and in being perpendicular to it, it was able to keep open the question of any such normality. Perhaps our problem is that upon losing that sacred enclave, we also came to lose the ability to keep things separate that were nonetheless connected, as all u-topianism admirably testifies to. The announcement of the death of God was therefore not a happy message, but, as Lacoue-Labarthe put it somewhere, the statement of an immeasurable loss, – those who came after it were led to believe (by Levinas, among others) that the word ‘God’ was but a shorthand for all the tears that history did not dry. It was much more than that: it stood for the promise that even those tears that were not wept, would, in the end, be wiped from all our faces.

10

I should perhaps stress that I am describing the crisis secularisation brought to us and not advocating a ‘return to religion’ which, qua return, is doomed to fail anyway. But, we should understand the structure of what was lost and question (crisis comes from krinein, exerting judgment) how we reacted to it. It is not evident that the loss of a divine Transcendent (as an enstructuring power, not as a content of belief) should have led to a horizontalisation of transcendence as such. What was described in these pages as a mute transcendence, the corrolary of a metaphysical experience that is both necessary and impossible if left to itself, could have equally been described as a vertical transcendence on which religion had once been able to graft itself. To give an example from another context: the loss of belief in resurrection did not exactly take the sting out of death – it did not manage to fully reduce dying to a mere innerworldly event, wherein death would simply mean the logical opposite of life. Death did not lose its verticality, though it came under increasing pressure to bend itself to the horizontal. There is still a sense (which we can no longer make sense of) in which der Tote (the dead one) is not the same as das Tote (the dead matter). I have tried to defend that difference, which is similar to the difference between the “two sorts of inhuman” that I evoked in the introduction to this book which, clearly, has opened more files than it managed to close.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The introduction, conclusion and chapter 7 appear here for the first time. An early version of chapter 5 was published before in Dutch (Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 2003). English versions of the other chapters appeared in Ethical Perspectives 1999 and 2001 (ch. 1 and 3); Continental Philosophy Review 2003 (ch. 6); chapter 2 in J. FAULCONER - M. WRATHALL (eds.), Appropriating Heidegger, Cambridge U.P. 2000; chapter 4 in J. BLOECHL (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace of God, Fordham U.P. 2000; chapter 8 in P. CRUYSBERGHS e.a. (eds.), Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Leuven U.P. 2003; chapter 9 in P. BIRMINGHAM - Ph. VAN HAUTE (eds.), Dissensus Communis. Between Ethics and Politics, Kok Pharos 1995. I should mention that chapter 7 would not have been written without the invitation of François Raffoul to contribute to a volume on Rethinking Facticity which he is in the process of editing for SUNY. All these chapters have been revised for the present edition. Let me thank Jeff, Chris and Drew for their help in translating a number of these texts and for bearing with my efforts to leave my imprint on their English. Finally, I should not forget to thank Ariane for typing most of this material and arranging it into the book which lies before you.

Phaenomenologica 1. 2.

3. 4.

5/6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

E. Fink: Sein, Wahrheit, Welt. Vor-Fragen zum Problem des Phänomen-Begriffs. 1958 ISBN 90-247-0234-8 H.L. van Breda and J. Taminiaux (eds.): Husserl et la pensée moderne / Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Actes du deuxième Colloque International de Phénoménologie / Akten des zweiten Internationalen Phänomenologischen Kolloquiums (Krefeld, 1.–3. Nov. 1956). 1959 ISBN 90-247-0235-6 J.-C. Piguet: De l’esthétique à la métaphysique. 1960 ISBN 90-247-0236-4 E. Husserl: 1850—1959. Recueil commémoratif publié à l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe. 1959 ISBN 90-247-0237-2 H. Spiegelberg: The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction. 3rd revised ed. with the collaboration of Karl Schuhmann. 1982 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2577-1; Pb: 90-247-2535-6 A. Roth: Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen. Dargestellt anhand seiner Vorlesungsmanuskripte. 1960 ISBN 90-247-0241-0 E. Levinas: Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. 4th ed., 4th printing 1984 ISBN Hb: 90-247-5105-5; Pb: 90-247-2971-8 A. de Waelhens: La philosophie et les expériences naturelles. 1961 ISBN 90-247-0243-7 L. Eley: Die Krise des Apriori in der transzendentalen Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1962 ISBN 90-247-0244-5 A. Schutz: Collected Papers, I. The Problem of Social Reality. Edited and introduced by M. Natanson. 1962; 5th printing: 1982 ISBN Hb: 90-247-5089-X; Pb: 90-247-3046-5 Collected Papers, II see below under Volume 15 Collected Papers, III see below under Volume 22 Collected Papers, IV see below under Volume 136 J.M. Broekman: Phänomenologie und Egologie. Faktisches und transzendentales Ego bei Edmund Husserl. 1963 ISBN 90-247-0245-3 W.J. Richardson: Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by Martin Heidegger. 1963; 3rd printing: 1974 ISBN 90-247-02461-1 J.N. Mohanty: Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning. 1964; reprint: 1969 ISBN 90-247-0247-X A. Schutz: Collected Papers, II. Studies in Social Theory. Edited and introduced by A. Brodersen. 1964; reprint: 1977 ISBN 90-247-0248-8 I. Kern: Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. 1964; reprint: 1984 ISBN 90-247-0249-6 R.M. Zaner: The Problem of Embodiment. Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body. 1964; reprint: 1971 ISBN 90-247-5093-8 R. Sokolowski: The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution. 1964; reprint: 1970 ISBN 90-247-5086-5 U. Claesges: Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution. 1964 ISBN 90-247-0251-8 M. Dufrenne: Jalons. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0252-6 E. Fink: Studien zur Phänomenologie, 1930–1939. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0253-4 A. Schutz: Collected Papers, III. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Edited by I. Schutz. With an introduction by Aron Gurwitsch. 1966; reprint: 1975 ISBN 90-247-5090-3 K. Held: Lebendige Gegenwart. Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0254-2 O. Laffoucrière: Le destin de la pensée et ‘La Mort de Dieu’ selon Heidegger. 1968 ISBN 90-247-0255-0 E. Husserl: Briefe an Roman Ingarden. Mit Erläuterungen und Erinnerungen an Husserl. Hrsg. von R. Ingarden. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0257-7; Pb: 90-247-0256-9 R. Boehm: Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie (I). Husserl-Studien. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0259-3; Pb: 90-247-0258-5 For Band II see below under Volume 83

Phaenomenologica 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

T. Conrad: Zur Wesenslehre des psychischen Lebens und Erlebens. Mit einem Geleitwort von H.L. van Breda. 1968 ISBN 90-247-0260-7 W. Biemel: Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0263-1; Pb: 90-247-0262-3 G. Thinès: La problématique de la psychologie. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0265-8; Pb: 90-247-0264-X D. Sinha: Studies in Phenomenology. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0267-4; Pb: 90-247-0266-6 L. Eley: Metakritik der formalen Logik. Sinnliche Gewissheit als Horizont der Aussagenlogik und elementaren Prädikatenlogik. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0269-0; Pb: 90-247-0268-2 M.S. Frings: Person und Dasein. Zur Frage der Ontologie des Wertseins. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0271-2; Pb: 90-247-0270-4 A. Rosales: Transzendenz und Differenz. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der ontologischen Differenz beim frühen Heidegger. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0272-0 M.M. Saraiva: L’imagination selon Husserl. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0273-9 P. Janssen: Geschichte und Lebenswelt. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion von Husserls Spätwerk. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0274-7 W. Marx: Vernunft und Welt. Zwischen Tradition und anderem Anfang. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5042-3 J.N. Mohanty: Phenomenology and Ontology. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5053-9 A. Aguirre: Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion. Zur Letztbegründung der Wissenschaft aus der radikalen Skepsis im Denken E. Husserls. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5025-3 T.F Geraets: Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale. La genèse de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la ‘Phénoménologie de la perception.’ Préface par E. Levinas. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5024-5 H. Declève: Heidegger et Kant. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5016-4 B. Waldenfels: Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs. Sozialphilosophische Untersuchungen in Anschluss an Edmund Husserl. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5072-5 K. Schuhmann: Die Fundamentalbetrachtung der Phänomenologie. Zum Weltproblem in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5121-7 K. Goldstein: Selected Papers/Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by A. Gurwitsch, E.M. Goldstein Haudek and W.E. Haudek. Introduction by A. Gurwitsch. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5047-4 E. Holenstein: Phänomenologie der Assoziation. Zu Struktur und Funktion eines Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husserl. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1175-4 F. Hammer: Theonome Anthropologie? Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine Grenzen. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1186-X A. Pažanin: Wissenschaft und Geschichte in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1194-0 G.A. de Almeida: Sinn und Inhalt in der genetischen Phänomenologie E. Husserls. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1318-8 J. Rolland de Renéville: Aventure de l’absolu. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1319-6 U. Claesges und K. Held (eds.): Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer Forschung. Für Ludwig Landgrebe zum 70. Geburtstag von seiner Kölner Schülern. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1313-7 F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.): Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1302-1 W. Biemel (ed.): Phänomenologie Heute. Festschrift für Ludwig Landgrebe. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1336-6 D. Souche-Dagues: Le développement de l’intentionalité dans la phénoménologie husserlienne. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1354-4 B. Rang: Kausalität und Motivation. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Perspektivität und Objektivität in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1353-6 E. Levinas: Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. 2nd. ed.: 1978 ISBN 90-247-2030-3 D. Cairns: Guide for Translating Husserl. 1973 ISBN Pb: 90-247-1452-4

Phaenomenologica 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie, I. Husserl über Pfänder. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1316-1 K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie, II. Reine Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Historisch-analytische Monographie über Husserls ‘Ideen I’. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1307-2 R. Williame: Les fondements phénoménologiques de la sociologie compréhensive: Alfred Schutz et Max Weber. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1531-8 E. Marbach: Das Problem des Ich in der Phänomenologie Husserls. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1587-3 R. Stevens: James and Husserl: The Foundations of Meaning. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1631-4 H.L. van Breda (ed.): Vérité et Vérification / Wahrheit und Verifikation. Actes du quatrième Colloque International de Phénoménologie / Akten des vierten Internationalen Kolloquiums für Phänomenologie (Schwäbisch Hall, Baden-Württemberg, 8.–11. September 1969). 1974 ISBN 90-247-1702-7 Ph.J. Bossert (ed.): Phenomenological Perspectives. Historical and Systematic Essays in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg. 1975. ISBN 90-247-1701-9 H. Spiegelberg: Doing Phenomenology. Essays on and in Phenomenology. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1725-6 R. Ingarden: On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1751-5 H. Kuhn, E. Avé-Lallemant and R. Gladiator (eds.): Die Münchener Phänomenologie. Vorträge des Internationalen Kongresses in München (13.–18. April 1971). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1740-X D. Cairns: Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Edited by the Husserl-Archives in Louvain. With a foreword by R.M. Zaner. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1793-0 G. Hoyos Vásquez: Intentionalität als Verantwortung. Geschichtsteleologie und Teleologie der Intentionalität bei Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1794-9 Le monde naturel comme problème philosophique. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1795-7 W.W. Fuchs: Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence. An Essay in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1822-8 S. Cunningham: Language and the Phenomenological Reductions of Edmund Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1823-6 G.C. Moneta: On Identity. A Study in Genetic Phenomenology. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1860-0 W. Biemel und das Husserl-Archiv zu Löwen (eds.): Die Welt des Menschen – Die Welt der Philosophie. Festschrift für 1976 ISBN 90-247-1899-6 M. Richir: Au-delà du renversement copernicien. La question de la phénoménologie et son fondement. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1903-8 H. Mongis: Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur. La destruction de la fondation métaphysique. Lettre-préface de Martin Heidegger. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1904-6 J. Taminiaux: Le regard et l’excédent. 1977 ISBN 90-247-2028-1 Th. de Boer: The Development of Husserl’s Thought. 1978 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2039-7; Pb: 90-247-2124-5 R.R. Cox: Schutz’s Theory of Relevance. A Phenomenological Critique. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2041-9 S. Strasser: Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einführung in Emmanuel Levinas’ Philosophie. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2068-0 R.T. Murphy: Hume and Husserl. Towards Radical Subjectivism. 1980 ISBN 90-247-2172-5 H. Spiegelberg: The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2392-2 J.R. Mensch: The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2413-9 J. Loscerbo: Being and Technology. A Study in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2411-2 R. Boehm: Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie II. Studien zur Phänomenologie der Epoché. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2415-5

Phaenomenologica 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

H. Spiegelberg and E. Avé-Lallemant (eds.): Pfänder-Studien. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2490-2 S. Valdinoci: Les fondements de la phénoménologie husserlienne. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2504-6 I. Yamaguchi: Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2505-4 J. Libertson: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2506-2 D. Welton: The Origins of Meaning. A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2618-2 W.R. McKenna: Husserl’s ‘Introductions to Phenomenology’. Interpretation and Critique. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2665-4 J.P. Miller: Numbers in Presence and Absence. A Study of Husserl’s Philosophy of Mathematics. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2709-X U. Melle: Das Wahrnehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phänomenologischer Einstellung. Untersuchungen zu den phänomenologischen Wahrnehmungstheorien von Husserl, Gurwitsch und Merleau-Ponty. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2761-8 W.S. Hamrick (ed.): Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Essays for Herbert Spiegelberg. 1984 Hb: ISBN 90-247-2926-2; Pb: 90-247-3197-6 H. Reiner: Duty and Inclination. The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2818-5 M.J. Harney: Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2891-6 Kah Kyung Cho (ed.): Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2922-X A. Lingis: Phenomenological Explanations. 1986 ISBN Hb: 90-247-3332-4; Pb: 90-247-3333-2 N. Rotenstreich†: Reflection and Action. 1985 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2969-6; Pb: 90-247-3128-3 J.N. Mohanty: The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. 1985 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2991-2; Pb: 90-247-3146-1 J.J. Kockelmans: Heidegger on Art and Art Works. 1985 ISBN Hb: 90-247-3102-X; Pb ISBN 90-247-3144-5 E. Lévinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. 1987 ISBN Hb: 90-247-3272-7; Pb: 90-247-3395-2 R. Regvald: Heidegger et le problème du néant. 1986 ISBN 90-247-3388-X J. A. Barash: Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3493-2 J.J. Kockelmans (ed.): Phenomenological Psychology. The Dutch School. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3501-7 W.S. Hamrick: An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3520-3 J.C. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux (eds.): The Collegium Phaenomenologicum. The First Ten Years. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3709-5 D. Carr: Interpreting Husserl. Critical and Comparative Studies. 1987. ISBN 90-247-3505-X G. Heffernan: Isagoge in die phänomenologische Apophantik. Eine Einführung in die phänomenologische Urteilslogik durch die Auslegung des Textes der Formalen und transzendentalen Logik von Edmund Husserl. 1989 ISBN 90-247-3710-9 F. Volpi, J.-F. Mattéi, Th. Sheenan, J.-F. Courtine, J. Taminiaux, J. Sallis, D. Janicaud, A.L. Kelkel, R. Bernet, R. Brisart, K. Held, M. Haar et S. IJsseling: Heidegger et l’idée de la phénoménologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3586-6 C. Singevin: Dramaturgie de l’esprit. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3557-2 Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3577-7 K.-H. Lembeck: Gegenstand Geschichte. Geschichtswissenschaft in Husserls Phänomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3635-8 J.K. Cooper-Wiele: The Totalizing Act. Key to Husserl’s Early Philosophy. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0077-7

Phaenomenologica 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

S. Valdinoci: Le principe d’existence. Un devenir psychiatrique de la phénoménologie. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0125-0 D. Lohmar: Phänomenologie der Mathematik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0187-0 S. IJsseling (Hrsgb.): Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0372-5 R. Cobb-Stevens: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0467-5 R. Klockenbusch: Husserl und Cohn. Widerspruch, Reflexion und Telos in Phänomenologie und Dialektik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0515-9 S. Vaitkus: How is Society Possible? Intersubjectivity and the Fiduciary Attitude as Problems of the Social Group in Mead, Gurwitsch, and Schutz. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0820-4 C. Macann: Presence and Coincidence. The Transformation of Transcendental into Ontological Phenomenology. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0923-5 G. Shpet: Appearance and Sense. Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems. Translated from Russian by Th. Nemeth. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1098-5 B. Stevens: L’apprentissage des signes. Lecture de Paul Ricœur. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1244-9 G. Soffer: Husserl and the Question of Relativism. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1291-0 G. Römpp: Husserls Phänomenologie derIntersubjektivität. Und Ihre Bedeutung für eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomenologischen Philosophie. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1361-5 S. Strasser: Welt im Widerspruch. Gedanken zu einer Phänomenologie als ethischer Fundamentalphilosophie. 1991 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-1404-2; Pb: 0-7923-1551-0 R.P. Buckley: Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1633-9 J.G. Hart: The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1724-6 P. van Tongeren, P.Sars, C. Bremmers and K. Boey (eds.): Eros and Eris. Contributions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology. Liber Amicorum for Adriaan Peperzak. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1917-6 Nam-In Lee: Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2041-7 P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.): Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2142-1 G. Haefliger: Über Existenz: Die Ontologie Roman Ingardens. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2227-4 J. Lampert: Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3105-2 J.M. DuBois: Judgment and Sachverhalt. An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3519-8 B.E. Babich (ed.): From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3567-8 M. Dupuis: Pronoms et visages. Lecture d’Emmanuel Levinas. 1996 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-3655-0; Pb 0-7923-3994-0 D. Zahavi: Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität. Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3713-1 A. Schutz: Collected Papers, IV. Edited with preface and notes by H. Wagner† and G. Psathas, in collaboration with F. Kersten. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3760-3 P. Kontos: D’une phénoménologie de la perception chez Heidegger. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3776-X F. Kuster: Wege der Verantwortung. Husserls Phänomenologie als Gang durch die Faktizität. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3916-9 C. Beyer: Von Bolzano zu Husserl. Eine Untersuchung über den Ursprung der phänomenologischen Bedeutungslehre. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4050-7 J. Dodd: Idealism and Corporeity. An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4400-6 E. Kelly: Structure and Diversity. Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4492-8

Phaenomenologica 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169.

J. Cavallin: Content and Object. Husserl, Twardowski and Psychologism. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4734-X H.P. Steeves: Founding Community. A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4798-6 M. Sawicki: Body, Text, and Science. The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4759-5; Pb: 1-4020-0262-9 O.K. Wiegand: Interpretationen der Modallogik. Ein Beitrag zur phänomenologischen Wissenschaftstheorie. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4809-5 P. Marrati-Guénoun: La genèse et la trace. Derrida lecteur de Husserl et Heidegger. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4969-5 D. Lohmar: Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken. Hume, Kant und Husserl über vorprädikative Erfahrung und prädikative Erkenntnis. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5117-7 N. Depraz and D. Zahavi (eds.): Alterity and Facticity. New Perspectives on Husserl. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5187-8 E. Øverenget: Seeing the Self. Heidegger on Subjectivity. 1998 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-5219-X; Pb: 1-4020-0259-9 R.D. Rollinger: Husserls Position in the School of Brentano. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5684-5 A. Chrudzimski: Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5688-8 B. Bergo: Levinas Between Ethics and Politics. For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5694-2 L. Ni: Seinsglaube in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5779-5 E. Feron: Phénoménologie de la mort. Sur les traces de Levinas. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5935-6 R. Visker: Truth and Singularity. Taking Foucault into Phenomenology. 1999 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-5985-2; Pb: 0-7923-6397-3 E.E. Kleist: Judging Appearances. A Phenomenological Study of the Kantian sensus communis. 2000 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-6310-8; Pb: 1-4020-0258-0 D. Pradelle: L’archéologie du monde. Constitution de l’espace, idéalisme et intuitionnisme chez Husserl. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6313-2 H.B. Schmid: Subjekt, System, Diskurs. Edmund Husserls Begriff transzendentaler Subjektivität in sozialtheoretischen Bezügen. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6424-4 A. Chrudzimski: Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6860-6 N. Depraz: Lucidité du corps. De l’empirisme transcendantal en phénoménologie. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6977-7 T. Kortooms: Phenomenology of Time. Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-Consciousness. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0121-5 R. Boehm: Topik. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0629-2 A. Chernyakov: The Ontology of Time. Being and Time in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0682-9 D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt (eds.): One Hundred Years of Phenomenology. Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0700-0 B. Ferreira: Stimmung bei Heidegger. Das Phänomen der Stimmung im Kontext von Heideggers Existenzialanalyse des Daseins. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0701-9 S. Luft: “Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie”. Systematik und Methodologie der Phänomenologie in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Husserl und Fink. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0901-1 M. Roesner: Metaphysica ludens. Das Spiel als phänomenologische Grundfigur im Denken Martin Heideggers. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1234-9 B. Bouckaert: L’idée de l’autre. La question de l’idéalité et de l’altérité chez Husserl des Logische Untersuchungen aux Ideen I. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1262-4 M.S. Frings: LifeTime. Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Time. A First Inquiry and Presentation. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1333-7

Phaenomenologica 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

T. Stähler: Die Unruhe des Anfangs. Hegel und Husserl über den Weg in die Phänomenologie. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1547-X P. Quesne: Les Recherches philosophiques du jeune Heidegger. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1671-9 A. Chrudzimski: Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1859-2 S. Overgaard: Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-2043-0 J. Dodd: Crisis and Reflection. An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-2174-7 R. Visker: The Inhuman Condition. Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger. 2004 ISBN Hb: 1-4020-2825-3; Pb: 1-4020-2826-1

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The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Phaenomenologica, 175)

The Inhuman Condition

The Inhuman Condition