Aesthetics As First Ethics Levinas and the Alterity of LiteraryDiscourse

Henry McDonald

diacritics, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 15-41 (Article)

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diacritics / winter 2008 15

AESTHETICS AS FIRST ETHICS LEVINAS AND THE ALTERITY OF LITERARY DISCOURSE

HENRY McDONALD

1

Notwithstanding the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid since the 1980s to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy of “the other,” critics and theorists have gener-ally approached the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his work warily. Although

rapid rate, arguments applying that philosophy to literary and aesthetic theory have been few and tentatively advanced. Some critics have contended that Levinas was something of a Platonic moralist who “disparaged” and “denounced” art and literature as failing to conform to his idea of what was “ethical.”1 If there is a critical consensus on the issue, it would seem to be that Levinas believed that art and ethics are incompatible.2 Based on the aesthetic writings that Levinas produced over a four-decade period, as well as on the role literature played in the genesis and development of his ethical philosophy, such assessments seem puzzling. A Lithuanian Jew who studied with Hus-serl and Heidegger in 1929–30, Levinas (1906–95) came to philosophy initially through literature, especially Russian literature and Shakespeare: “the whole of philosophy,” he said, “is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”3 -turity, Existence and Existents (1947), discussions of aesthetics and literature introduce and develop the notion of being as il y a (there is), an account which, in giving emphasis

I am indebted to Alain Toumayan and Tina Chanter for their helpful comments on a prior draft of this paper. 1. See section 5 for my discussion of what I believe to be Levinas’s clearly anti-Platonic posi-tion. On Levinas’s so-called “Platonism,” see Robbins 17. Edith Wyschogrod, in her early work on Levinas, completed prior to the publication of Otherwise than Being in 1974 (although I cite here from a later edition), speaks of Levinas’s “Platonic bias” in art [Emmanuel Levinas 78]. In a later essay, however, Wyschogrod’s perspective is much more helpful [“The Art in Ethics”].

-bins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature [xxi, 39–40, 48, 50, 52–53, 75, 85]. The present essay is in no sense intended as a response to Robbins’s book, which would require a very different kind of argument than the one I have undertaken. Other studies asserting that Levinas was dismissive of literature due to its lack of ethical value or meaning include Steve McCaffery, Prior to Meaning 215; and Chris Thompson, “The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Leo Bronstein, and the Inter-

commentary on this essay in Encountering the Other [58, 71–72, 120–23, 126–28, 149, 152–53]. Most commentators, unlike Toumayan, simply assume that “Reality and Its Shadow” “denounces” ethics. See, for example, the otherwise very interesting and challenging perspective provided by Kevin Hart in “Ethics of the Image” 120. 3. TO 72. For a general discussion of the literary background of Levinas’s philosophical inter-ests, see Levinas and Robbins, “Interview with Francois Poirie (1986).”

diacritics 38.4: 15–41

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to being’s “horror” (horreur), simultaneously critiques ontology and places ethics on a tragic basis.4 The il y a, along with its temporal counterpart, the entretemps (between times), introduced just one year later in “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), are of particu-lar importance to his writings on aesthetics, produced during a period from the 1940s through the 70s.5 The latter provide abundant evidence of the potential for ethical mean-ing, indeed transcendence, he attributed to the artwork, as in “The Poet’s Vision” (1956), in which he asserts: “Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world . . . the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice” [“The Poet’s Vision” 134, 137]. Although Levinas never completed anything approximating a “system of aesthetics,” it is nonetheless true that in pieces ranging from developed essays

works, he gave substantive indications of the ways in which his radically nonconceptual, nonontological account of ethics might alter our understanding of the status of “the liter-ary artwork.” Most crucial among those indications is the close connection he posited between the

antiontological accounts of “being” and especially “time” (entretemps, “between times”). As early as “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas proposed the thesis, extended in his later essays, that the alterity of art and literature was located not in any ontological or concep-tual “beyond”—in a spiritual dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the abso-lute” [1]—but in the “interstices” of language [3], in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can be accessed only by way of “the tragic” in art.

What Levinas terms “alterity,” or otherness, points not toward a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but strives to expose the complicity

Holocaust, its history, as Levinas put it, of “National Socialism, Stalinism, the camps, the gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment.”6 Art and literature dem-

that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity. A central aspect of such an aesthetics is its privileging of music and musicality, which Levinas shares with a more recent thinker and critic, Paul Gilroy.7 Like Gilroy, Levinas

-Black Atlantic 73], the Hegelian thesis

of the death of art via philosophy, but to challenge critical theory’s claim of an all-encom-

4. The twelve-page chapter “Existence sans existent” [93–105] of De l’existence a l’existant (1947), in which the notion of the il y a is introduced, employs the term horreur or its cognates about twenty times, by my count. The work has been translated by Alphonso Lingis as Existence and Existents. 5. Discussions of the il y a play a prominent role at both the beginning and the end of Other-wise than Being. With the exception of “La réalité et son ombre” (“Reality and Its Shadow”), most of Levinas’s writings on aesthetics important to this essay can be found in Noms propres and Sur Maurice Blanchot, both of which are translated by Michael Smith in Proper Names / On Maurice Blanchot. 6. Foreword, PN 3. In common with Theodor Adorno, for whom writing poetry, after the Shoah, is “barbaric” [Prisms 34], poetry has for Levinas what Berel Lang calls a “retroactive status” in understanding that complicity [“Evil inside and outside History” 11]. See also the works of Zygmunt Bauman, including Modernity and the Holocaust. 7. See Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic; Postcolonial Melancholia; Small Acts; and his “Fore-

am indebted to the works of Tina Chanter for alerting me to the centrality of time in Levinas’s effort Time, Death, and the Feminine.

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passing textuality: to open up, within the structures of rationality, a tragic, subversively ethical function for art. “What is coming to a close,” Levinas posits, “may be a rationality tied exclusively to the being that is sustained by words. . . . Poetry poetically the resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing” [Foreword, PN 4; “Poetry and Resurrection” 12]. It is the diachronic, temporal nature of literary lan-guage, what Levinas calls its “sovereign forgetfulness” (oubli souverain) which is also a kind of homelessness, a diaspora of identity—the view from “the Stranger,” “the state-less person,” “the dispossessed”—that is the vehicle of transcendence [“Servant and Her Master” 143, Foreword, PN 6]. Such an aesthetics intersects closely with “the Diaspora concept of culture” developed in recent decades8 and is alert as well to what Gilroy calls “the advantages of marginality as a hermeneutic standpoint” [Black Atlantic 213]. The comparison of Levinas’s view of aesthetics to Theodor Adorno’s assertion that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is apt in that Levinas’s view of literature,

not for this reason but to point up Levinas’s “negative” attitude toward art. But that is to distort not just Levinas’s perspective but Adorno’s as well. To quote Adorno more fully:

and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Abso-

is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. [34]

Adorno uses the word “impossible” here in a way similar to that of Levinas: as conceptual, ontological impossibility, not as ethical impossibility. To assign to art the function of representing the horror of human existence, the function of presenting its bar-barism, is to assign it, after the Shoah, the task of representing the unrepresentable, a task both impossible and necessary. Art performs the ethical risk that it represents. That risk is

the barbarism from which it cannot be disassociated is the ground of its transcendent status. In this essay, I argue that aesthetics plays a crucial role in the central project of Levi-nas’s philosophy: his effort to make ethics, as he says in pointed allusion to metaphys-

whole, as has been suggested, Levinas’s writings on literature and art are at the heart of

his ethics. It is no accident, in this respect, that much of Levinas’s ethical terminology, clustered around the notion of passivity, has its origin, directly or indirectly, in his aes-thetics. The question of aesthetics in Levinas’s philosophy is arguably the question of that philosophy, since it is precisely with reference to the aesthetically and phenomenologi-

il y a and the entretemps that Levinas developed his ethical

philosophy” whose alterity to, and at the same time complicity in, theoretical discourse functions to delineate the bounds of the ethical, the ways we do and do not conceptualize ethical categories.

8. See, for example, Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora; and Braziel and Mannur.

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Throughout much of the history of Western philosophy, however, aesthetics has been far from a much closer to an other “other” philosophy.9 It is therefore crucial, and will be the effort of this brief section, prior to discussing his aesthetic writings themselves, to describe the post-Kantian philosophical orientation within which Levinas’s views of aesthetics took shape. That orientation has two prominent features. First, in common with many post-Kantian philosophers, Levinas challenges the concept of rationality underlying Kant’s tripartite division of the spheres of philosophy, but he does so less by offering an alter-native account of rationality, as Hegel, Heidegger, and poststructuralism do in different ways, than by imposing limits on what is counted as rational, pointing up the boundaries between the conceptual and the nonconceptual and refusing to assimilate the two to a common frame of reference.10 Such a method tends to be antiepistemological in recog-nizing the value of untruth, of falsehood (as Nietzsche also stressed); and antiontologi-cal, desubstantializing and “de-nucleating” [“Poetry and Resurrection” 10] the noumenal sphere in order to trace the pathways of the nonconceptual in the conceptual. The bounds of sense, in Levinasian terms, lie not at the border of some ontological otherworld but within “the interstices” of language: within, that is, the “gaps” in time that language fails to represent—which are “present” in language as unrepresentable. Levinas laid the basis for such critique early on through the notions of the il y a and the entretemps, his counter-Heideggerian accounts of “Being and Time,” respectively (and the title of Heidegger’s most important work). At the heart of Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian ontology is a critique of the unity and autonomy of the temporal instant or moment—what is also at issue in Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same”11—which serves as the foundation of the

and arriving; and which Heidegger, according to Levinas, did not challenge radically enough. Here, again, it is a question not of providing an overarching theory or explana-tion of the way time works but of pointing up, within the instant or moment, that which is “other” or beyond conceivability, “immemorial” and unpredictable. It is aesthetics, as a mode of expression of the tragic grounded in the entretemps of the artwork, that gives

“between the lines,” its culture and society.

eighteenth century, of Horace’s dictum in Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) aut prodesse aut delectare (to teach or to delight), usually applied more in the form “to teach [ethically, morally] by delight-ing” and often having reference to another maxim of Horace, ut pictura poesis (a poem is like a

turn grounded in a more theoretical knowledge: what is described by Nietzsche in his early period in The Birth of Tragedy [89–93, sec. 14]. According to this conventionalized view of the role of aesthetics in ancient and medieval times, whose distortions cannot be considered here, the arts are secondary to morals which are in turn secondary to the theoretical sciences. For remarks on the

Turn”; “American Literary Theory and Philosophical Exceptionalism”; and “Language and Be-ing.” 1O. On Levinas’s critique of “philosophy,” with reference not just to Hegel and Heidegger, but Derrida as well, see “Ideology and Idealism” 238. See also “God and Philosophy” 167.

and Levinas’s entretemps. My work was completed too early to take into account a remarkable, exceedingly valuable collection of essays, Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God” [ed. Stauffer and Bergo]. Especially pertinent to my arguments are the articles by Stauffer,

notes 14 and 20.

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But that ability is at the same time an ethical one. The second general feature of Levi-nas’s post-Kantian philosophical orientation is that it posits a common basis for ethics

the one hand, ethics is no longer subordinated to and largely equated with morality, which in Kant’s system had been viewed as an adjunct of theoretical reason that he called “prac-

both classical metaphysics and modern ontology. On the other hand, aesthetics is not just given a nonconceptual basis; such had been the central thrust of the modern tradition of aesthetics after Baumgarten in the eighteenth century, and was common, indeed, to Ger-man romanticism, French antiexpressivism, and the European-wide “art for art’s sake” movement, all of which had taken music as the central symbol of the nonconceptuality of aesthetics.12 What is new, rather, is that aesthetics should be rooted in the nonconcep-tual and philosophy.” The link between ethics and aesthetics, in the work of Levinas, is expressed

art’s philosophic transcendence. Literature, instead of being interpreted by the critic on the basis of theoretical, ultimately philosophical principles, becomes the vehicle of an ethical critique of traditional philosophy, of philosophy as modernist rationality. What enables such critique, what serves as its tragic locus, is the musicality of the artwork, and the characteristic mode of time, the entretemps, to which it is intimately related. Crucial to the notion of the musicality of the artwork is the ethical sensibility which animates it, which is contrasted with traditional morality—to which contrast I now turn, by way of a brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn that will also highlight a number of themes charac-teristic of Levinas’s mode of literary analysis before describing the temporal basis of his tragic aesthetics.

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Traditionally, morality has been characterized as the rules and conventions used to guide a person’s conduct or behavior, such rules and conventions having reference to a “ra-

imperative,” its universality. “Ethics,” by contrast, connotes the more personalized, less universal and consequently less rigorously rationalizable aspects of our moral interaction with others in the world. If the meanings of the two terms have often been blurred in the history of moral philosophy, that is because they have been assumed to occupy a continu-um in which ethics was marginalized in favor of the more “essential center” of morality.

-nard Williams, the late Derrida, Rey Chow, and Levinas himself, something approaching an ethical “Copernican Revolution,” reversing the axis of reference from morality to ethics, has occurred in the work of many literary theorists, social scientists, and philoso-phers.13 From such a vantage point, the history of moral philosophy since Kant appears in changed perspective: as a history in which morality gained its privileged, essential

with respect to the antimimetic implications of music as a semiotic model for understanding lit-erature’s (ontological) mode of existence—a mode Levinas is engaged in resisting—see Beck 283–86; Dixon 1, 37–38, 48–50, 80–84; Gadamer 16–18; Guyer, “Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb”; Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom 84–85, 95, 132–41; Kristeller 3: 416–28; Dahlstrom ix–xxx; Henrich 30; and Norton. 13. See Williams; Chow, Ethics after Idealism. Some of the pertinent Derrida references are Acts, “At This Very Moment,” “Faith and Knowledge,” Of Hospitality, and Politics of Friendship. For a good account of these issues with respect to Levinas, see Spargo.

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status only by assimilating the alterity of ethical experience to the universal categories of the self—by reducing what is “other” to the same. Justice, as a consequence, can no

put it in Levinasian terms, of the alterity, the incommensurability, the unpredictability, of experience—whether such “experience” consist of an encounter with the other person, with death, or within the entretemps of the artwork. As Nietzsche urged, ethics begins where morality ends; the two “converge” only at a semantic aporia where the moral basis of the self is confronted with its own impossibility.14 Such impossibility is at issue when Huck Finn, in the celebrated scene of chapter 31 of Mark Twain’s novel, turns against his own “conscience,” against everything he has been taught to believe is true and good, which includes slavery and the Christian moral-

emphasized, is not an abolitionist; he thinks that the institution of slavery is moral and just, and he takes on the commitment to help Jim at the cost of what he dramatically avers is his own eternal damnation. But readers who would attribute such avowals merely to the internalization of religious dogma and social convention have not heeded Twain’s language carefully enough. In this scene and elsewhere in the novel (not to mention in a

makes clear that it is the moral nature of the self that is at issue.15 “Huckleberry Finn,” as James M. Cox says, “is an attack upon the conscience. . . . And not only the social con-science . . . but any conscience” [“Uncomfortable Ending” 353]. The vehicle of that “at-tack,” however, is a certain passivity, a receptivity and trust, which puts in check Huck’s inherited belief system, casts the reason of his moral self in a hateful light, and compels him, as it were involuntarily, to obey impulses and recognitions that take shape, in this scene, in the memory images of Jim’s “talking, and singing, and laughing,” of Jim’s

“No one is good voluntarily,” as Levinas says [OB 11]. Huck’s commitment to help Jim, which is initiated prior to this scene, is an ethical, not a moral, act, a putting of himself in service to his friend that subverts his settled sense of self, incites him to a state of dis-ease not just with himself but with most of the people he encounters, and projects him toward a space of social and moral dislocatedness, toward a sort of diaspora of identity that is

pervasive theme of American literature, “I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” [HF 229]. Huck wants to get “ahead of” the rest in order to get away from the rest;

14. The moral impossibility referred to here is an ontological, not an ethical one. Bettina Bergo, in “The Flesh Made Word; Or, The Two Origins,” makes a similar distinction [Stauffer and Bergo 104], although without reference to the contrast between “ethics” and “morality” that I have drawn. Bergo’s discussion of an ethical alterity associated with “the instant of sensation’s upsurge” [103] is similarly conducive to the understanding of the corporeal and temporal nature of ethics that I emphasize in this essay. Also in Stauffer and Bergo’s collection, see Rosalyn Diprose’s “Nietzsche, Levinas, and the Meaning of Responsibility.” What I am terming “morality” is parallel to what Diprose calls a “juridical concept of self-responsibility” [116], which she contrasts with both Levinas’s and Nietzsche’s ”responsibility for the other . . . made possible by an idea of corpo-

-ity of the body, in “the body open to an undetermined future” [118–19]. This splendid formulation goes to the heart of the musicality of the artwork, which I locate in Levinas’s aesthetics beginning with Existence and Existents (1947) and “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948). See sections four and

15. The story I refer to is Mark Twain’s “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” Other places in Huckleberry Finn where Huck’s “conscience” is made an issue

where Huck remarks, “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does, I would poison him” [183].

diacritics / winter 2008 21

he sees himself as continuously engaged in an effort to break free from the frozen and false authority of the present in order to become “a citizen of somewhere else,” as Haw-thorne put it at the end of the preface to The Scarlet Letter. To say that Huck’s self-identity is diasporic is to say that it is irremediably split or divided. Indeed, for much of the novel, it seems to be shadowed by itself. The shadow has a corporeal form: Huck’s prior, reappearing best friend, Tom Sawyer. Competing with his loyalty to Jim is Huck’s admiration for Tom Sawyer, who incarnates all the con-ventional moral virtues—the values of Southern romantic honor which we know Twain despised and even made “responsible for the war”—that Huck seems driven, but fails, to turn his back on.16

“evasion” chapters where Tom, with Huck’s reluctant participation, subjects Jim to a make-believe version of his morality that is cruel and humiliating to Jim.17 These chapters have stirred much critical offense, and in turn defense, but what such responses often fail to appreciate, in their understanding of Huck as either intrinsically good or pragmati-cally self-serving, is the basic duplicity, the tension of ethical and moral imperatives, that informs Huck’s behavior throughout the novel. Huck’s irresistible attraction to Tom is emphasized at the beginning and the end of the novel, but it is Huck’s more affecting rela-tion to Jim, by virtue of the parallelism of his escape from Pap and of Jim’s escape from his owner, that structures the novel’s plot in between. Indeed, that relation is anticipated early in the novel when Huck is imprisoned and nearly murdered in Pap’s cabin while Pap delivers several racist, if comic, harangues, all of which are nothing if not reminiscent of the conditions some slaves were forced to endure [26–29]. Huck’s character has often been proclaimed as the founding voice of modern American literature, and that voice, as scholars have argued, has its origin partly in the voices of the Negro slaves that Twain—who viewed the narrative artist as a “word-musician”18—was immersed in growing up in the South:

for Twain, in the work of Sir Walter Scott: “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war” [qtd. in Twain, Life on the Mississippi 266]. 17. For the better part of a century, critical discourse on Huckleberry Finn has tended to focus

has read in romantic novels. “When a prisoner of style escapes,” Tom explains, “it’s called an eva-sion” [211]. During the middle of the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Marx charged Twain

--

ing antics. Twain’s “evasion,” Marx argued, constituted a “lapse in moral vision” that crippled

persuasively countered, if not exactly refuted, by drawing attention to their own moral complacency

observed, at a safe distance; it is an approval of a sentiment, not of a political course of action.

is an exposure of the reader’s throughout the novel. In the headnote to Huckleberry Finn, Twain

warning in support of a view that argues Huck’s ethical crisis is largely a chimera, a fabrication

war against it had been fought and won, Huck does “the easiest thing,” as Cox put it, in commit-

to our understanding of this novel through their detailed historical and political contextualizations,

Carton; Cox; Doyno; Fulton; and Powers. 18. Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” 302.

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In Mark Twain’s manuscript pages half a century later, these [slave] voices chal-

indigenous American literature. They ushered in a replacement . . . the solo riffs of the dispossessed—the advent of an American voice derived not from Eu-ropean aesthetics, but entirely from local improvisational sources, black and white. [Powers 8]

The point is not at all that Huck is possessed of the ability to assimilate and internalize, through Jim, “the reality” of slavery, but on the contrary that precisely as other and inca-pable of being assimilated such reality exerts its effects on Huck, unsettling and putting in question his “true” self. It is the experience of Tom, not of Jim, that Huck “internal-

possible by withholding information, until the end of the novel, from the reader (Pap is already dead; Jim has already been freed) suggests that Huckleberry Finn’s “musical form” is closer to that of a comic opera, with a closed, narrative structure, than a blues

-ing, as James M. Cox, Myra Jehlen, and Evan Carton have argued, exposes the compla-cency and bad faith of the post-Reconstruction reader who, like Tom, already “knows”

as literary icon: the complicity of modern forms of reason and representation, including

the fractured nature of his ethical identity, encoding the racist cruelty it rebels against but also its perpetual incompleteness, its distinctive dislocatedness pitting “conscience” at odds with itself.

4

It is worth observing, whatever one’s judgment of Huckleberry Finn, that Levinas, for all his privileging of the form of tragedy, did not fail to defend the “rights” of literature as pleasure and entertainment, as what Henry James, more darkly, called “amusement,” connoting a “right” of irresponsibility and immorality.19 For these authors, to a greater or lesser extent, comedy clears the air from, and punctures the pretensions of, a modern, especially expressivist aesthetics which views art as a form of knowledge or cognition having the mind or imagination of the artist as its source. As Levinas put it, with studied irony:

An artist–even a painter, even a musician—tells. He tells of the ineffable. An artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common percep-tion trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates, a poem or a painting speaks. Thus an artwork is more real than reality and at-tests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute. [RS 1]

For Twain, as I have tried to indicate, as for Levinas, such a view of art was naïve and potentially of bad faith. Levinas, however, was skeptical of the expressivist view of art

19. “One cannot contest without being ridiculous . . . [art’s being] reduced to a source of plea-

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for reasons less cynical, less pessimistic—and less romantic—than Twain. He believed be nonrepresentational, to be disengaged

“Reality and Its Shadow” (1948)—that the question of art is “the meaning” and “the value” of “this disengagement.” Exercising that post-Kantian discrimination, as I have described it, which traces the pathways of the nonconceptual in the conceptual, Levinas asks rhetorically:

Is to disengage oneself from the world always to go beyond [au-delà], toward the region of Platonic ideas and toward the eternal which towers above the world? Can one not speak of a disengagement on the hither side [en-deca]—of an interruption of time by a movement going on on the hither side of time, in its “interstices”? [2–3]

What is encountered on that “hither side,” beneath representation, is a dimension characterized by the image, which is distinguished from the concept by its temporality: by our ability to sense objects, rather than perceive or conceive them. Images, unlike con-cepts, are not “expressed” or represented, but rather “impose themselves on us without our assuming them” [4] and compel our participation, impower us,20 in a characteristic rhythm, or externality, that Levinas calls “musical” [3]. Just as music demands from us an involuntary responsiveness that encloses us in a private yet shared sense of posses-sion, “an exteriority of the inward” [4], so too art compels a passivity, a participation prior to understanding, which reverses the ordinary identity of things and exposes what is shadowy and strange in them, effecting a deconceptualization, a “disincarnation of real-ity” [5]. “The artist,” Levinas says, “moves in a universe that precedes . . . the world of creation” [7]. The artist is not a maker, a fabricator, a creator, but rather, as Levinas puts it

to reside” [“The Poet’s Vision” 136]. What is most striking in such an account, from the post-Kantian perspective I indi-cated previously, are the homologous roles played by art and ethics in Levinas’s thought: the passivity, nomadism, and discontinuities of language and time, that function in both cases to undermine philosophy’s rationalist paradigms. At the core of these homologies is the role played by aesthetics in Levinas’s ethical critique of ontology. The “universe which precedes creation” that Levinas denotes, in “Reality and Its Shadow,” as aesthetic, was described, just one year previously in Existence and Existents (1947), as a charac-teristic of being as il y a; and the il y a posited a tragic account of being that was the starting point of an ethical critique of both classical metaphysics and modern ontology.

Shadow” is part of a tragic account of time central to that critique. “To insist on the mu-sicality of every image,” Levinas says in the latter, “is to see in an image its detachment from an object”—its detachment, that is, “from the category of substance” [5], which was the basis of Aristotelian metaphysics. It is also to insist that “Non-truth is not an obscure residue of being, but is its sensible character itself” [7]: which does not mean, as it did for

20. Here and elsewhere in this essay, my use of the term “impower,” or “impowerment,” contrasts with the expressive or imaginative attributes of empowerment normally attributed to the artwork. Suggestive of the ethical potential Levinas grants to aesthetics, and drawing on the model of music in particular, it describes a radical passivity grounded in the temporality of the body. Such passivity might be understood, in Nietzschean terms, as a sort of somatic self-overcoming: the will

-fully, although in different ways, is crucial to Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, relating both (i.e., will to power and eternal recurrence) to the passivity of Levinasian ethical alterity.

diacritics / winter 2008 25

Plato, that the aesthetic world is a lesser one of becoming. It means that art’s “disengage-ment” is philosophically subversive, radically so. Critics who claim that Levinas’s view of art is “Platonic” have confused his critique of the function of representation in art with a critique of art’s failure to represent. The latter, for Levinas, contrary to Plato, is not a failure at all. Although art for Levinas is a region of darkness and obscurity, error and falsehood—of “the untruth of being,” as he put it—the question it poses, from its “hither” side, is ethical: what are the meaning and the value of such an “untruth of being”?

-ics—that Levinas tries to answer this question is through the notion of the entretemps, which is a characteristically “aesthetic” time that, in its association with “the time of dy-ing” or what Heidegger called anxiety toward death, undercuts both metaphysical notions of time as a “moving image of eternity,” in Plato’s words [Timaeus 37d], and modern,

own impossibility, so too tragic art opens up an externality of time, a diachronic tran-scendence, immemorial and unpredictable, which is subversive of the idols of eternal and historical meaning guarded by philosophy. But beyond art’s function of subverting the rationalist paradigms of philosophy—of “calling [philosophy] back to error,” as Levinas

being: in face of the Nazi terror and Jewish Holocaust with which Heideggerian philoso-phy was actively complicit, and to which Levinas was a close witness. Because Levinas’s aesthetics was formed within the cauldron of such a philosophic history, let us look, very

The genesis of Levinas’s challenge to the ontological tradition in philosophy can be traced to a series of texts published during an eleven-year period between 1934—the year after Heidegger joined the Nazi Party upon Hitler’s ascension as Chancellor and when

year of Existence and Existents, composed largely while still in a German labor camp.21 Levinas had personally studied with Heidegger in 1929–30, and many of the terms of his

fundamental ontology. Heidegger was of crucial importance to Levinas not for his betray-al of the integrity of philosophy, however, but for something close to opposite: because his work “sum[s] up,” as he later wrote, “a whole evolution of western philosophy” [“Phi-

question of being had been submerged or forgotten by two millennia of metaphysics, but what that claim had itself suppressed, according to Levinas, was “the essential possibility of elemental Evil.”22 An elemental evil is a necessary one, evil as an intrinsic part of be-ing, rather than evil as the privation or lack of what is good, and it is on the basis of such a notion of being, which Levinas arrived at not theologically but through phenomenologi-cal analysis of pain and suffering, nausea, and alienation, that he challenged Heidegger’s ontological philosophy. Using the French term mal, or evil, in close association with its meaning of “hurt,” he writes in Existence and Existents:

Horowitz, “Is Liberalism All We Need? Prelude via Fascism,” as well as the Milchman and Rosen-berg collection Postmodernism and the Holocaust, especially the essays by Fabio Ciaramelli, Rob-

-

Levinas’s.

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We shall try to contest the idea that evil [mal] is defect. Does Being contain no other vice than its limitation and nothingness? Is there some sort of underlying evil in its very positivity? Is not anxiety over Being—horror of Being—just as primal as anxiety over death? Is not the fear of Being just as originary as the fear for Being? . . . Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. . . . There is a pain in Being [Il est le mal d’etre]. [4–5; 9]

What results from Levinas’s “contestation” is the notion of being as il y a, which is an “excess of nonsense over sense,” an excess of an anonymous being that disallows, by assimilating and negating, all that is outside itself: a kind of black hole of meaning or state of radical nonalterity or sameness which precipitates the formation of the subject as ego—precipitates it, that is, as “other”—by means of the latter’s resistance to its anony-

of states of nonconsciousness and sleep that are not, in Nietzsche’s terms, “the opposite of consciousness” [Beyond 201, sec. 3], but are elements of a fundamental passivity which forms an essential groundwork of identity. It is as though the self, being too full of itself with a sense of the ceaseless, meaningless activity of its own being, with its own insom-

Originary to the self, in sum, originary to the formation of its ego, is a splitting or fracturing of self-identity which conditions receptivity to what Levinas will call, in his later work, “otherwise than being”: to an absolute alterity, an exteriority or discontinu-ity that puts that very identity in question, compelling the opening up and uprooting of the subject’s positionality and placing the self in a grammatically accusative position, a “me” rather than an “I.” Such alterity acts as a demand, a compulsion, in no sense chosen by the self, which can be neither anticipated by nor assimilated within prior categories of thought. It is this compulsion, an involuntary responsiveness, that I have likened to Huck’s act of putting himself in service to Jim; but such an act, in its anti-moral subver-sion of social and political authority as well as incitement to ethical transcendence with-out recourse to any settled sense of self, is by no means unique in American literature; and it is the effect of the argument of “Reality and Its Shadow” and later essays to suggest that such compulsion and involuntary responsiveness may be rooted in a larger dimension of literary diaspora and ontological exile of identity in which the self is “called” from its base or home of identity, to which it does not return, but without being able to discon-nect or free itself wholly from that home. Transcendence and exteriority beckon toward a

possibility is impossibility:

Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of

let us “take off”—but for the fact that in that conquest of exteriority, we must remain for ever excluded; for, if it did offer shelter to the poet, exteriority would have lost its very strangeness. [“The Poet’s Vision” 134]

At issue, in such Mosaic-like exclusion, is not self-denial or renunciation, but what Levinas calls “non-indifference,” a self-overcoming or negating of a necessary egotism or indifference, which is also a disinteressement or forgetfulness of being (esse).23 Out of forgetfulness of being and the diasporic consciousness which follows in its wake arises a “nomadic memory”:

23. See Cohen, Elevations 163–64, for a discussion of Levinas’s use of this term.

diacritics / winter 2008 27

From the depths of sedentary existence a nomadic memory [in literature] arises. Nomadism is not an approach to the sedentary state. It is an irreducible rela-tion to the earth: a sojourn devoid of place. Before the darkness to which art recalls us, as before death, the “I,” mainstay of our powers dissolves into an anonymous “one” in a land of peregrination. It is the I of the Eternal Wanderer,

extending farther than the true. [“The Poet’s Vision” 136]

Such nomadic memory entails a sort of “tragic harmonics,” a musical impowerment, in a region nonconceptual (of the image), antiepistemological (on the border of untruth) and nonmoral (of the mal, the evil and the hurt, of existence): a region that is trespassed most often, in literature, by the genre of tragedy. In classical times, music had been closely associated with poetry, tragedy in particular; and Aristotle thought there was a morally

movements of the soul” [Butcher 132]. But for Levinas, it is not the soul with which trag-ic art resonates but the formation of the ego out of horror (horreur) of being. In classical and Shakespearian tragedy, the hero typically experiences an event that causes her or him

and consciousness. In order for this to occur, the event must be experienced not merely as destructive, but as inexplicable and indeterminate—as nonconceptual and communicable only by means of “musical” images. When Sophocles’s Oedipus, for example, blinds himself after learning that he has married his mother and murdered his father, he gives expression to just such horror. The suffering he must endure is out of all proportion to

in terms of theodicy (God’s justice) or hamartia -matizes the invasion of Unmeaning into the hero’s life and consciousness: an Unmeaning that is not “meaningless” in the sense of being the opposite of meaningful, but rather belongs to a netherworld in between, in violation of the law of the excluded middle. This invasion forecloses any possibility of the hero’s recovery of his former self-assurance and settled state of identity. Unlike the epic poet, who acts as a mouthpiece of the gods, the tragic poet is a mouthpiece of Unmeaning. From beneath representation, a diasporic disorder arises, spilling into and subsuming any form of order.

5

The source of such disorder, the temporal counterpart of the il y a but arising in art from its “interstices,” is the entretemps. According to the account in “Reality and Its Shadow,” where it was originally and most fully presented, the entretemps is a “between time”

-ent moment, a sort of permanent interruption [8–11]. Levinas illustrates the entretemps mostly with reference to the plastic arts, to statues and paintings, but he makes clear that

same, the identical, action. Such a mode of time is “something inhuman and monstrous” [11]. What is inhuman or monstrous about the entretemps, in particular, is that it deprives the present moment of its “essential characteristic”: its evanescence or dissolution. To deprive the present moment of its ability to “pass” is to abolish both the future and the past. Yet the entretemps, like the songs of the Sirens who lured Odysseus’s men to their

the fantastic and intoxicating power of stopping or slowing down time, but although what

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the entretemps conveys may be fantastic and intoxicating, it is not, Levinas insists, a power—and nothing shows this better than the fact that the entretemps is not just a purely “aesthetic” time but that it also characterizes “the time of dying,” which “cannot give itself the other shore.” Alluding to his critique of Heidegger’s account of being toward death, Levinas says: “What is unique and poignant in this instant is due to the fact that it cannot pass. In dying . . . one is in the interval, forever an interval” [11]. For when the instant “passes,” one no longer is. Like the characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, notably “The Premature Burial,” but many others as well, death is experienced as an event which defeats all attempts to master or control it, negating human possibility by frustrating con-summation. Heidegger, according to Levinas, misses the point when he refers to death as “the possibility of impossibility,” or Nothingness, for such an account neutralizes the radical alterity of death by assimilating it to the self-comprehension of the subject as an existential structure of possibility. “Nothingness” is just the counterimage of the Christian Afterlife, a picture which reassures Dasein “virility” [see TO 69–73]. It is our rituals and practices around the treatment of the dying, the burial of the dead, and the preservation of their memory that give meaning to death, not the existential experience of the consciousness of death. In order to foreclose such neutralization of death’s radical alterity, Levinas inverts Heidegger’s formula of death as “the possibility of impossibility” and calls it instead the “impossibility of possibility,” by which he means to indicate death’s radical exteriority to, its transcendence of, human consciousness as possibility. Death is what eludes all at-tempts to master it; in our relation to death, we live in the eternal suspension of the future, what paralyzes and negates any present. Whether in the time of dying, or the entretemps of the artwork, by repeating or eternally suspending the present as present, one is locked in a nightmare of the eternal return of the same.

The Gay Science [273–74, sec. 341, “The Greatest Weight”] and elaborated at length in Thus Spoke Zarathustra [e.g., 179, “Of the Vision and the Riddle”], ability to “will” the eternal recurrence of “even” the smallest and most regrettable events of one’s life. The basis for comparing the two notions, eternal recurrence and the entre-temps, is the critique of time on which they hinge. If the entretemps is like “the moment” before death, and every moment of life is, potentially, the moment before death, then the entretemps—and eternal recurrence, in a different way—might be regarded not so much as an “inhuman and monstrous” time but as an exposure of a certain monstrosity of time that is concealed by both the classical (metaphysical) and modern (ontological) accounts of time.24 Classical metaphysics, according to Heidegger’s critique, with which Levinas large-ly agreed and which Nietzsche anticipated, equated time with the being or “presence” of inanimate objects, rather than with the kind of being characteristic of humans, what he called Dasein,

at-hand, at once passing away and arriving. But by viewing such instants only in terms of “eternity,” it deprived the moment of that which was necessary for it “to be,” its evanes-cence. Levinas’s entretemps is essentially a dramatization of this fact, viewing the mo-

an eternity which does not move. On the other hand, from a Levinasian and Nietzschean perspective, the alternative offered by Heidegger did not fundamentally challenge what is presupposed by the clas-sical picture: the integrity and coherence, the wholeness, of the moment. According to

24. For discussions of the contrast between (classical) metaphysics and (modern) ontology, see my “Language and Being” and “The Ontological Turn.”

diacritics / winter 2008 29

Levinas, Heidegger’s positing of an existential continuum of past, present, and future,

the metaphysical tradition’s reduction of time to a self-present instant by making that continuum a sort of whole, and therefore simultaneous and instantaneous, rooted in Da-sein’s projection of itself. Such a temporal horizon negates the diachronic nature of time: both the alterity of the future, what is radically unpredictable and not to be anticipated; and the alterity of the past, what is immemorial and exceeds memory and conceptual as-similation. In the same way that the meaning of death does not consist in our subjective consciousness of it but in the rituals around the dead and dying, so too the meaning of time does not have reference to an existential continuum, to an already constituted series of punctual instants, but arises from that which, being immemorial or unpredictable, is “other” to those instants. As Levinas says in a late aesthetic essay, “Poetry and Resurrec-tion: Notes on Agnon” (1973): “There, between the present and that which has never been able to join a present, is situated the ‘between times’ [entretemps] of poetry or resurrec-tion” [12]. By “that which has never been able to join a present,” Levinas refers principally to an “immemorial” (or “unrepresentational”) past that cannot “join a present” because it is in excess of any such present; it is an “exteriority,” a diachronic transcendence, that is the reference point of the “resurrection” enacted in poetry. But the connotation of a suspended eternity, suggesting the original meaning of the term entretemps, is present as well; as though Levinas were signifying, using exactly the same words, both the hor-ror of a timeless eternity and the transcendence of a diachronic time. Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal return,” as an eternal return of “the same, yet always different” has a similar ambivalence.

Nietzsche’s words [Twilight 110]—and it is such by virtue of its encounter with a horror not just of being but of time. In the same way that the il y a, an excess of anonymous being, serves as the tragic basis of ethics, so too the entretemps, an excessiveness of time from within the heart of the instant, and a subversion of both the metaphysical and ontological conceptions of time, serves as the tragic basis for a diachronic, aesthetic transcendence. It is in the interiority of the moment that the alterity of time is encountered. The source of poetry’s musical impower, its interruption of the synchronic continuities of philosophical language, is the interstices of time, the entretemps: “It is of the essence of art to signify only between the lines—in the intervals of time, between times [entretemps]—like a foot-print that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice” [“Poetry

sovereign forgetfulness, which frees language from its servitude towards the structures in which the said [le dit] prevails” [“Servant and Her Master” 153]. Providing a satirical counterversion of the Hegelian account of the death of art via philosophy, Levinas identi-

reputed to love wisdom [and] is all memory, all anticipation, all eternity. [The language of philosophy] is never-fading, and always has the last word. It con-taminates with logic the ambiguity inscribed in the trace of forgotten discourse and never gives itself up to enigma. As the speaker of truth, how can she be silenced? [“Servant,” Levinas Reader 158]

She can be silenced, it turns out, by poetry’s “discontinuous” and “contradictory” lan-guage of forgetfulness. In (1961) Levinas uses the term “forgetful-ness” to mean a natural and necessary “atheism” that makes us forget not what we are but that we are: that we are not, in particular, self-created but must regard ourselves as

30

such, such “forgetting of transcendence” being necessary to that very interiority of the self which makes possible our involuntary receptivity to an ethical encounter with what is “beyond the self”—the transcendence, that is, of the other person.25 Literary language’s “sovereign forgetfulness” is similar to such atheistic forgetting in that it occurs in a mode of time “before the world’s creation” (that is, of self-creation) and in that it at once pro-

a radically other, immemorial or unpredictable time. It is a forgetfulness of being (esse), disinteressement, kind of passivity,” one “beneath consciousness,” and on “the wrong side of being”: “As if beyond the ambit of a melody a higher or lower register resonated and mixed with the chords that are heard, but with a sonority that no voice can sing and no instrument can produce” [“Humanism” 50]. At the very beginning of Otherwise than Being, Levinas speaks of his “breathlessness” in striving “to hear a God not contaminated by Being” [xlviii]. Both the entretemps and the eternal return of the same are efforts to deal with the enigma of time as seen from the perspective of death. The enigma of time is that it is not something to be gotten “outside of” (as the metaphysical tradition, with its picture of time

Heidegger, inheriting a view of time as duration and horizon from Bergson and Husserl, had posited). Rather, the problem of time is the analysis, or “opening up,” of the moment; and it is from the post-Kantian perspective of the moment, in common with Levinas, that Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare, just prior to announcing the eternal return of the same: “behold this gateway. . . . Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. . . . The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment’” [Thus Spoke Zarathustra 269–70]. The alterity of time can be accessed only by means of the Moment, by means of that eternity of presentness which is an eternal repetition: that impossibility of time which is the omnipresence of death. By paradoxically taking responsibility for such impossibil-ity, Zarathustra—who undergoes cycles of joy and disgust, guilt and happiness—dra-

exteriority of the inward is at the same time a self-forgetfulness, a receptivity to alterity, that carves a path of destruction. To take on an eternal presentness is to destroy, through forgetfulness, eternal being. It is to resist injustice, including the injustice of death (for

evanescence, the radical alterity—what Levinas calls “the diachrony” [e.g., OB 56]—of past and future.

25. In s’oublier]. The

forgetting [L’oubli] of transcendence is not produced as an accident in a separated being; the -

virtue of this proximity of a separated being—this, in a word, is the paradox of creation” [89–90]. “Forgetfulness” constitutes our existence as separate, created beings; a natural, necessary, but temporary “atheism” makes us forget not what we are but that we are—that we are not, in particu-lar, self-created; but that we must regard ourselves as such, as beings possessed of free will and

expression in Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin’s 1824 book, The Soul of Life (Nefesh Hahayim), such that the necessity of our forgetfulness would be not just a “test” of faith but an essential bulwark of cre-ation. This is to come perilously close, however, to attributing to Levinas a perspective that would merge ethics and ontology—precisely what his philosophical work tried so hard to keep separate—or, still worse, to justifying a supposed asceticism, or denial of the body, on his part. What is at

Nietzsche says, of its failure.

diacritics / winter 2008 31

From the perspective of death, every moment of life is the moment before death; and every moment is a suspended eternity within which one is imprisoned. Nonetheless, art, as the very penitentiary of that moment, dramatizes an “exceptional event”: the overcom-ing of death—the gaining of more life—within the externality of the moment’s inward-

“the resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing.”

6

These words are from Levinas’s essay “Poetry and Resurrection,” on the Israeli writer S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970). Agnon’s works helped to create, in the midst of the destruction of East European Jewry, a modern Hebrew literature at a time when this ancient language, which had not been used in everyday, spoken discourse for almost 2000 years, had barely advanced beyond the stage, so to speak, of its own rebirth. Like Levinas himself, Agnon was a modernist immersed in traditionalist sources—the Bible with its rabbinic com-mentaries, the Talmud, the Midrash, and medieval literature, down to the Musar works and Hasidism of more recent centuries (though Levinas was, true to the maskilic and mitnagdic elements of his Lithuanian background, strongly disaffected by the latter). The themes of homelessness and exile (galut) are everywhere present in Agnon’s writings, most notably in his major novel A Guest for the Night (1939), but these themes are re-

which is not an “anguish over the end of traditional Jewish life, but over the possible end of the literature that could bring it to life” [“Poetry and Resurrection” 15]. What Levinas shares in common with Agnon is a self-exposing modernism complemented by a richness and depth of religious tradition. “Poetry and Resurrection” deepens our understanding of Levinas’s ethical aesthet-ics by bringing that aesthetics face to face with Judaism: with Judaism not as a faith or set of beliefs but as a form of language and mode of expression, an “ambiguous” and “enigmatic” mode of expression26 that is illustrated in the ancient practice of the melitsah

away from a certain ontology”:

melitsah] belongs to its mode of expression not only in the way a theme belongs to dis-course. By its “mode of expression” that way of life prolongs and redoubles the enigma. The community of Israel and the things pertaining to its exile, and the land regained—these do not have any beginning in the being they spell out! They attest to that past through ritual. . . . It is as if the land meant nothing but the promise of land. . . . How can we express that modality, which is totally different from being? Would not the word beyond be adequate here? Not at all because of religion, which teaches of the beyond. The opposite would be closer to the truth.

-stantiation of being is of itself procured, of itself possible—an excluded middle in which the limits between life and non-life disappear. . . . The symbolism of the rite, like the enigma of the Hebraic mode of expression [dire], de-nucleates ulti-mate solidity beneath plasticity of forms, as taught by Western ontology. [9–10]

26. On Levinas and the Talmud, including the analogies between Talmudic and literary inter-pretation, see Levinas, “Bad Conscience and the Inexorable”; ; Nine Talmudic Readings. See also Cohen, Elevations; Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy; Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God; and Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor.

diacritics / winter 2008 33

The Hebraic mode of expression is rooted in a diasporic, Jewish community, that has no “beginning” in “being”! Rather, it is an antistructural, antiontological practice of language that “has issued forth from the symbol” and to which the term “beyond,” in an otherworldly sense, is not appropriate. The “Jewish way of life” reverberates within language: “[It] mirrors, in Agnon, the sonority of the language in which it is expressed. . . . That life is not just sung; it is itself song” [10]. Levinas is careful to distinguish, here and elsewhere in the essay, between “the sing-ing and the song”—between the act of telling and what is told—which is a version of his more basic distinction between the Said and the Saying, le dit et le dire. The Said includes the totality of language in all its referential and thematic functions. The Saying, on the

-guage, not in it. In attempting to convey the Saying within the Said, language inevitably, necessarily, betrays itself (which doesn’t mean the betrayal shouldn’t be committed), for the Saying leaves in the Said only what Levinas calls the trace of itself, a trace that does not, however, compromise the exteriority of the Saying to the Said. “Poetry and Resurrection” applies this understanding of language, at least implicitly, to the performance and transmission of literary texts. The most basic point is that since stories are not self-originating, are not “acts of creation,” it means that they have refer-ence to a mode of time “beyond” themselves, a time that has been “forgotten” but which is nonetheless carried, borne, by the discourse, by the Saying—though not by the story, by the Said—of the narrative. It is not just that all tellings are retellings, it is that all stories carry the trace of their prior sayings: of what is said and unsaid, not said and then with-drawn from what is not said. These retellings, these “eternal” repetitions of the “same” story, are what preserve the irreversibility of its Saying, the undetectability of its origin, the resistance to its being totalized in a system of the Said. Such incommensurability of Said and Saying, story and discourse, this necessary narrative uncertainty, necessary forgetfulness, bears, in its excessive relation to any referential context, the “trace” of an immemorial or unrepresentable past, of a radical alerity and transcendence.27 Language bears not in itself but in its saying a relation of diachronic discontinuity with its past. As Levinas comments on Agnon,

And Agnon’s language, and the life it lets speak (whether in its wholeness or its

in wondering whether it could ever have been contained within a present, and

the Saying and the Said attributable to the writer’s craft, nor to the “author’s love for his people, religion or language” (to the ahavat Israel). All craft, alle-giance or commitment aside, the quest for a certain sound (and a sense unsay-

resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing. [8; 12]

Resurrection is the theme of the principal story of Agnon discussed by Levinas, “The Sign,” which tells of what happens when the author, “settled in the land of the ancestors,” on the eve of Shavuot—a festival that commemorates the most important event in Jew-ish history, the giving of the Torah that was the culmination of the Exodus—learns “of the extermination by the Germans of all the Jews in the Polish town [Buczacz, Galicia] where he was born” [13]. In the dreamlike vision which is then narrated, Agnon sees the

27. On “narrative uncertainty,” see my “The Narrative Act: Wittgenstein and Narratology.”

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dead in what Levinas describes as “their absolute place . . . a place that is not a site . . . in which place is already non-place.” At one point, the poet says to two of his last remaining townspeople:

“You said that after the second catastrophe no one was left alive in the town. So you are yourselves no longer alive!” They smiled, then, as the dead smile when they see that we think they are no longer alive. [14]

Levinas’s response to this passage is striking:

An enigma set within the enigma. Does not this smile also express the irony the dead have toward themselves? Are the living completely wrong? Are eternity and resurrection through poetry free of all illusion? Are language and poetry the ultimate meaning of humanness? [14]

Notwithstanding the exceedingly high value we have seen Levinas invest in art’s sub-versive ethics, art’s diachronic modes of time, the answer to this question is clearly no: literature and poetry are forms of action that gain their value from being part of a human, if broken and highly indeterminate chain of transmission, one in which the critic, Levinas stresses, plays a vital role. It might be noted that Levinas’s rhetorical questions, by which he has inserted himself into the narrative discourse on a level with Agnon, implicitly as-similate the opposition between life and death to that of life and art, tying the value of art, once again, to its tragic functions. Indeed, to believe that “language and poetry are the ultimate meaning of humanness” is to endorse that “hypertrophy of art” which Levinas warned against; and to undermine the very real and important tragic potential art and

work does have.28

That section starts off with a fairly lengthy quote from the story referred to above, “The Sign,” whose words are sharply, bitterly ironic in a manner characteristic of Jew-ish modernism—but going back to the Bible—with an underlying sad sincerity to which Levinas is acutely sensitive:

been killed, and the other two-thirds are orphaned. . . . It was a great thought that He who lives eternally had, to have chosen us from among all the peoples,

created facing us, a kind of human beings that would take our lives because we observe the Torah. [15]

In a late essay, “Useless Suffering” (1982), which his commentary on this passage an-ticipates, Levinas examines religious doctrines such as Leibniz’s “theodicy” (God’s jus-

28. Nietzsche, too, warned against a hypertrophy of art which he saw incarnated in the music of Wagner and the philosophy of Schopenhauer: an antitragic overvaluation of the artist as “a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from the beyond” [Geneal-ogy 538–39, Third Essay, sec. 5]. Nietzsche also critiqued the theory of “l’art pour l’art” as a concealed morality inimical to what was most vital to “the tragic artist”: to be a “genius of com-munication” [Twilight of the Idols 81–2, sec. 24]. Similar sentiments and views are conveyed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra [149–52, “Of Poets”] and Ecce Homo [703, “Why I Am So Clever,” sec. 5; 729–30, “The Birth of Tragedy,” sec. 3]. It is in the latter passage, in Ecce Homo, that Nietzsche

“radical repudiation of the very concept of being.”

diacritics / winter 2008 35

concludes that although theodicy in this very broad sense has been a component of much Western thought, its role has come to an end with the Holocaust. The Holocaust, with its murder of one million children because their great-grandparents may have been Jewish,

employing the term mal with the same ambiguity of connotation of “evil” and “hurt” that we have seen before, Levinas says,

the denial and refusal of meaning . . . is the way in which the unbearable is precisely not borne by consciousness. . . . Suffering, in its hurt and in its in-spite-of-consciousness, is passivity. . . . The passivity of suffering is more profoundly passive than the receptivity of our senses. . . . All evil refers to suffering. It is the impasse of life and being, their absurdity. . . . Thus the least one can say about suffering is that in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, “for noth-ing.” [91–93]

At the heart of Levinas’s diagnosis of Western thought is his recognition that the motive force driving the construction of the moral systems of the West is the need to give mean-ing to suffering; and that it is that same need which has been the source of those same

nature of evil, but its effacement of the human, its ontological denial of the powerlessness at the heart of consciousness, that constituted its demonic power. It was that denial, that ontological need, which lay at the source of its violence and hatred of the other. The es-sence of Hitlerism was its radical incapacity to deal with the impower, the suffering and evil, at the heart of human being. Levinas expresses everything he thinks is dangerous about efforts to justify suffering,

of the neighbor’s pain is the source of immorality is to say that I do not have the right to give meaning to that which, in others, may be inexplicable in myself; and that it is part of

--

cation of one’s own pain, begins with the denial of the meaninglessness of suffering, the denial of the elemental nature of evil.

impower at the heart of human being, that constitutes its ethical transcendence. For to refuse to justify suffering is, on the one hand, to resist the barbarism of reason: to resist, as Levinas says in his comments on Agnon’s “The Sign,” “comfortable theodicies, consola-tions that cost us nothing and compassions without suffering—to recognize “Evil in evil

give meaning not to one’s own suffering, which is always meaningless, nor to the suffer-ing of the other, which is always questionable, never to be presumed, but to my suffering

of the relation between self and other, a recognition that such relation is not a function of some common essence shared by individuals, but of those individuals in an interhuman relationship, such that the very basis of community is its dedication to those who are other to that community—“the inevitable binding into a community of those human beings who are dedicated to the other man” [15]. In Ethics after Idealism, opposing models of critical theory and cultural studies, an idealization of “the other” as

36

“essentially different, good, kind, enveloped in a halo” [xx], which implicitly privileges one’s own otherness, whether theoretically or culturally. Is there something to be learned from the way Levinas draws on the tradition and culture within which his own Jewish identity was shaped to critique Western universalism, yet refuses to privilege the concept of otherness per se—whether based in Jewish “election” or anything else—but rather the capacity of the other to put our settled sense of self at risk? Levinas, an observant Jew, once went so far as to say, “Judaism is not a religion—the word does not exist in Hebrew—it is much more than that . . .” [qtd. in Malka 130]. This statement is indicative of the extent to which Levinas saw his identity as a Jew, his identity as a person bound to a certain tradition, people, and set of texts, not as the basis for criteria of judgment, but as the starting point of a process of ethical self-critique continuous with that of philosophy. Wittgenstein once said: “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” [Tractatus

in ethics. But they are also “the same,” for Levinas, in that what is at issue, most generally, in Levinas’s aesthetics is what is at issue in his ethics, the alterity of language as a non–meaning-

to a subjectivity, to the constitution of destructive, entailing a shattering of identity through a force or shock “from the outside” which interrupts or disrupts the habitual categories and ways of thinking and perceiving of the ego. Because art and literature are not obedient to the language of philosophy, they are better able than any other language, perhaps, to dramatize the identity of destructive and constructive processes. Such dramatization goes to the heart of the tragic function. Tragedy gives expression to, opens up a mode of time for, the nonpresence of things:

constitutes subjectivity by delineating the bounds of the ethical, by breaking down onto-logical and conceptual categories into realms of uncertainty, regions of forgetfulness, that mark the limits of transcendence. The invasion of Unmeaning into the self precipitates an experience of meaning outside the self. Art and literature, it might be said, attempt, fool-ishly, wastefully, wantonly, with sovereign forgetfulness of their own self-preservation and identity, what philosophy would never have the courage to attempt: the representa-tion of the unrepresentable, the taking on, full in the face, of the horror of the il y a and the eternal presentness of the entretemps. It is art and literature, by entering the moment “from the wrong side of being,” from “beneath consciousness,” with a “new concept of passivity,” that can give breath to that moment and a “resonance” to that “beyond” [“Humanism” 50]. Nonetheless, “in that conquest of exteriority [transcendence], we must remain for ever excluded,” for if “exteriority . . . did offer shelter to the poet,” Levinas says, ever-mindful of the unrepresentable, the unpredictable, without which the whole idea of “otherness” or alterity would be a sham, “exteriority would have lost its very strangeness” [“The Poet’s Vision” 134]. What has most impeded recognition of the ethical nature of Levinas’s aesthetics is the radicalism of his ethics. “Ethics” for Levinas entails a shattering encounter with fail-

ethics,” which shaped the tragic, deeply language-oriented nature of his philosophy to the end. What Levinas meant by “otherness” does not separate it from the culture or cultures in which it acts but is rather an “alterity” accessed by means of those cultures. All litera-tures, Levinas would agree with Deleuze and Guattari, are minor literatures [see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka]. All literatures, that is, even the “major” ones, even the ones that don’t want to, dramatize to greater or lesser degrees a potential to subvert the dominant social and political norms of the cultures in which they are produced. But that potential,

diacritics / winter 2008 37

Levinas insists, is predicated on literature’s fractured timelessness: its ability to dramatize

future, within the externality of the moment’s inwardness.

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