Language and alterity in the thought of Levinas

9 Language and alterity in thethought of Levinas A workof literary translation, says Walter Benjamin, exists as though stationed outside of a forest it cannot enter and as calling into ‘

9 Language and alterity in the

thought of Levinas

A workof literary translation, says Walter Benjamin, exists as though stationed outside of a forest it cannot enter and as calling into ‘the wooded ridge’ in order to receive an echo that gives backin its own language that which reverberates in the alien one.1 The workof Levinas is such an invocation, an effort at translating incommen-surables, a troping of that which cannot be troped, an unassimil-able excess that resists apprehension in propositional discourse This

‘more’ that remains beyond spoken or written language is the other-ness of the other person, an otherother-ness that cannot be configured as a content of consciousness but that issues an imperative that obliges

me to assume responsibility for the other

Like the otherness of another human being, the more of the infinite overflows the idea that attempts to contain it, its superabundance both traduced and expressed in acts of translation into the language

of philosophy The other human being in the sanctity of her or his

manifestation as a human face and the infinite as an ideatum whose

excessiveness goes beyond any idea we can have of it can only be the objects of an insatiable desire Any translation (always already merely putative) demands a contraction of this content so that on the one hand it is communicated and on the other retains its ethical authority, the exteriority from which it derives In order for there to

be translation, there must be a pre-existent store of concepts, a spec-ulative language without which translation could not come about, yet one that is disrupted by the more, the exorbitance, of an alterity that is beyond it

Levinas’s enterprise is indebted to Heidegger’s forging of a concep-tual language that makes accessible the primordial affective relations through which human existents apprehend the world In bringing to

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the fore what Levinas calls the pathic elements hitherto refractory

to philosophical speculation, Heidegger offers an account of these affects in light of the meaning of Being Taking the verb ‘to be’ as active, Heidegger attributes to Being the activity that had generally

been ascribed to the existent Meaning for the Heidegger of Being and Timeis, in Levinas’s view, disclosed in terms of the ontological dif-ference, the difference between Being and beings Yet it is precisely Heidegger’s interpreting of Being as active, as the power of Being, rather than turning to the Good that Plato had discerned as lying beyond Being, that leads Levinas to dissociate his thought from that

of Heidegger Acknowledging his indebtedness, Levinas neverthe-less feels compelled to ‘leave the climate of that philosophy’ (ee19) Heidegger’s account of the relationship of human beings to Being as power, Levinas maintains, can only engender political and economic relations founded on violence

To challenge this violence still another act of translation is

re-quired, one that brings to the fore the commanding kerygma of the

Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud, the rabbinic commentary on

Scripture in the language of Western thought not, per impossibile,

to exhume their underlying equivalence but rather to correct the hubris of philosophical rationality The mandate of absolute alterity condensed for him in the synecdoche ‘Hebrew’ calls into question the self-satisfaction of philosophy that penetrates even philosophy’s moments of incertitude Despite his critical appraisal of philosophy

as the conceptual language of ontology and of Being’s potential for violence, Levinas never reneges on his allegiance to the rationality

of Western thought without which the ethical could not be brought within human purview The essential taskof language is not to ex-press what cannot be exex-pressed, the excess that lies beyond being Rather thought that betrays as it exposes this excess can be regarded

as envisaging a certain difference, as a thinking of the ligature be-tween philosophy and that which transcends it, that separates as it unites them

In what follows, I shall discuss the multiplicity of meanings at-tributed to language in Levinas’s thought I shall turn first to the ways in which sensibility, the infra-cognitive world of sensation and enjoyment, and totality, the historical whole, cultural, politi-cal and economic as constituted by thought, may be disrupted In this context, I focus upon the face of the other who is beyond the

totality, the other who is seen as elevated and without history and who insinuates her/himself into my world as my interlocutor Al-ways already language, the face of the other intrudes into the totality that has been historically constituted and issues a call to responsi-bility Understood in Hegelian terms, ‘the face breaks the system’ (en34)

Next, I shall consider language as gift, as a bestowal of significa-tion upon another Thence I turn to the ‘dionysian’ languages of art and of a certain poetics contested by Levinas Finally I discuss an ethics that becomes discourse, a discourse that becomes ethics A language that is prior to speech, one that is always already ethical, will be seen in its relation to propositional discourse, the language of linguistic practices and ‘semantic glimmerings’ Language is not de-fined as the transposition of words into referents or by the formalism

of the relation of signifiers to one another but as an ethical relation, a responsibility to the other person, ‘a semantics of proximity’ (os93).2

It could be argued that this order of enquiry suggests a developmental sequence in the workof Levinas who denies that there is, in the

man-ner of Heidegger, a significant Kehre in his thinking.3Yet despite the thematic unity of its preoccupation with the ethical relation,

differ-ences of approach may be discerned Totality and Infinity (1961) and

the essays of this period consider the disruptions of alterity within

the constraints of ontological language whereas Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence(1974) describes the unlimited accusation

of self by the other, the radical passivity of subjectivity, the ethical that is the primordial signification of the one-for-the-other that gives rise to the distinction between the Saying and said.4

totality and its undoing

Totality is for Levinas a freighted term that includes epistemologi-cal, historical and political meanings In its broadest signification, totality designates a whole, such that ‘a multiplicity of objects .

or in a homogeneous continuum, a multiplicity of points or of ele-ments [that] form a unity, or come without remainder under a sole act of thought’ (at39).5 Levinas points to the danger of a thought

so encompassing that the intellectual act that intends the whole loses touch with the world in its concreteness and is left with the pure form of the thinkable thus returning to the Kantian problem of

the transcendental unity of apperception (at41) Hegel, he argues, understands this dichotomization and tries to breach the real and the rational by organizing the parts heuristically into a system, a system of history ‘The true function of totalizing thought does not consist in looking at being, but in determining it by organizing it’ (at47).6For Levinas, such organization or totalization is an expres-sion of freedom, one that is intrinsically time tied, so that total-ity’s historical dimension is not merely incidental but integral to it: history is totalization itself (at47)

The politics that Levinas sees embedded in this history is a politics

of war and cannot be overcome by way of the fragile peace that su-pervenes upon war As in Hegel’s phenomenology, ‘the trial by force

is the test of the real’ (ti 21) The totality can be disrupted only by that which lies outside it, a dimension Levinas does not hesitate to call eschatology The term is not to be understood teleologically as referring to the aim of some future time but rather as the instituting

of a relation that is beyond the totality and as a drawing of beings out of history, beings who always already speak(ti22)

If there is a content whose excessiveness overflows the capacity of consciousness to contain it, one that cannot become the aim of cogni-tive intention or of a need that can be satisfied, this more must be the object of a desire that precludes satiety Such an excess is the human face whose exposure is prior to thematization, to phenomenological description Although beyond discursive formulation, the face dis-closes itself as language What is expressed is united with the one who expresses in a ligation that binds and unbinds what can never

be made commensurable

For Levinas, ‘to present oneself as other is to signify or to have meaning To present oneself as signifying is to speak’ (ti 65–6) Speech that emanates from another is always already a pedagogy,

a magisterial putting into questions of cognition The arena of ethics

is not a level playing field in which all are alike but rather one in which self and other are absolutely asymmetrical Levinas contends that ‘the presentation of the face is not true, for the true refers to the non-true, its eternal contemporary The presentation of being

in the face does not leave any logical place for its contradictory’ (ti 201).7 In sum, the depiction of alterity seems to thematize the other, but language is always already an address to and from the other who cannot be contained within a common genus as an essence of

human being Discourse is the experience of absolute exteriority, an otherness that is foreign, ‘a traumatism of astonishment’ (ti73)

alterity and the universal

Could it not be argued that even if the other commands me in a rela-tion to which I alone can respond that the other finds her- or himself

in a comparable situation so that each one becomes a self in so far as she/he is solicited by another? In that case, each other is like every other other and ethics is in fact grounded in the universal.8Otherness

in the absence of individual specificity would then become a vacuous concept, an otherness common to all or as one critic would have it:

‘To respect the other in his non-objective subjectivity means only

to respect first the general community which is bound together by [a] generalized otherness’, that Levinas, however, means to surmount.9

In a complex argument that in part responds to the criticism that undifferentiable alterity entails an empty universality, Derrida points to the inherent necessity of the betrayal of the beyond of on-tology He contends that Levinas takes calculated risks when tying together spoken language and the beyond in such a way that calcu-lation leaves room for the incalculable.10 It is the language of the ligature between the before and the beyond that attests that there is

a beyond, that which cannot come into plenary presence ‘Contam-ination is no longer a riskbut a fatality that must be assumed.’11 Within this contaminated frameworkof a language, the self as the irreplaceable one, says, ‘At this very moment, here I am [me voici]’, thereby offering her-/himself as hostage for the other, as a singularity that defies description yet at the same time speaks

But, as Derrida reveals, there is still another issue at stake, that of distinguishing the human other from the infinite other In explaining Levinas’s claim, ‘Tout autre est tout autre [Every other one is every bit other]’, Derrida shows that the sentence need not be read as a

tautology, that two senses of tout may be distinguished which, in turn, lead to differentiable uses of autre:

If the first tout is an indefinite pronominal adjective [some, some other one], then the first autre becomes a noun and the second [an adverb of quantity

(totally, absolutely radically infinitely other)] in all probability, an adjective

or attribute One no longer has a case of tautology but instead a radical

heterology; indeed this introduces the principle of the most irreducible heterology.12

At the same time, if the homonyms are read tautologously, the sentence can be glossed as a swallowing up of the other, an interpre-tation that could be seen as an entering wedge into a Kierkegaardian reading On this view, Derrida claims, the other does not disappear but introduces into a hetero-tautological dimension, the altogether other who is God To be sure, Kierkegaard attributes homogeneity

to human others – the ethical is the universal – whereas God is the altogether other But in the hope of rescuing human singularity by seeing every human other as other than every other other, Levinas cannot, as he would wish, distinguish between human others and the infinite other Derrida concludes that no line could then be drawn between the ethical and the religious.13This conclusion is borne out

by Levinas’s remark: ‘If the word religion is to indicate that the

re-lation between men, irreducible to understanding in human faces

joins the infinite – I accept that ethical resonance of the word with all its Kantian reverberations’ (en8)

the gift of discourse

The meaning of gift made thematic in French thought from Marcel Mauss to Georges Bataille is seen by Derrida as a key motif that wends its way through Levinas’s understanding of alterity For Levinas death is the gift that can be given to the other In his cri-tique of Heidegger’s account of mortality, Levinas faults Heidegger for seeing death as one’s ownmost possibility and for the additional

claim that the call of responsibility is first heard in the Jemeinigkeit

of my death In its being-towards-death, Dasein answers first and

foremost for itself By contrast, for Levinas, my ipseity, ‘the

same-ness of myself’, is constituted post hoc through my relation to the

other.14 I am always already included in the death of the other as being called upon to sacrifice myself for the other As an irreplace-able substitute for her or him, I bestow upon her or him the gift

of death ‘Death, source of all myths, is present only in the Other,

and only in him does it summon me urgently to my final essence,

to my responsibility’ (ti 179) Yet for Levinas gift-giving is bound

up with the notion of economy without which the gift cannot be

understood The world as signification opened up by utterance is given to the other as language, a signification that challenges the life

of economy Far from analysing the globalization of economy or the commodification of discourse, Levinas envisages economic relations

as rooted in more basic world relations that may be traced to Heideg-ger’s descriptions of the primordial comportments that characterize being in the world, comportments that for Levinas include need, en-joyment, habitation and, as arising out of habitation, work.15Levinas contends that workreduces the otherness of the world to the same but the worker does not control what is produced by the activity of labour ‘Works have a destiny independent of the I, are integrated

in an ensemble of works maintained in the anonymity of money’

(ti176).16 Bought, sold and interpreted by others, works no longer express the I of my interiority What is true for me holds also for the works of others

Workderives from a self that lives in a home, departs from and returns to it It is as habitation, as home, that a space is opened that enables one to represent things and from which the face of another may be encountered, another who calls the self that has emerged

as a separated being into question and who ‘paralyzes possession’

By disengaging the self from objects, language contests relations of possession, the realm of economy understood in terms of money, ownership and exchange ‘The calling in question of the I, coexten-sive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language’ (ti171), Levinas avers

Far from reflecting the fall of a primordial speech, language as ac-tual discourse is not the regrettable traducing of alterity, a violation

of transcendence, but a gift, an offering of that which is thematized

to the other ‘To thematize is to offer the world to the other in speech’ (ti 209), to manifest beings through representation and concept,

to say what they are Knowledge is the correlation between in-tending acts of consciousness, a consciousness that posits itself as self-identity, and the objects intended In its relation with what is other than itself, it reduces the alterity of its object to the same But language as gift exceeds the speech that brings objects into plenary presence to include the bearer of discourse, the one who calls violence into question In the absence of the other, the meaning of individuals emanates from the totality whose significance derives from power that is ultimately expressed in war (ti24) The cessation

of violence that supervenes upon war is an ersatz peace, that merely substitutes the violence of exploitation grounded in economy for actual war (en37)

Speech in conferring signification brings the world to the other, thereby creating a common world Far from endorsing an infra-rational dissolution of speech in favour of a primordial relation to the world as sensible quality, Levinas sees signification, the capacity to generalize, as an ethical event An individual entity receives a

univer-sal meaning through the word that designates it to another The hic

et nuncof the thing is first experienced as possession, thereby pre-supposing economy To be sure, the thing is first mine but language which designates it thereby giving it to the other is a dispossession,

‘a first donation’ (ti173) Generalization as an invoking of the world

in acts of nomination is an offering of the world to another.17

the face: phenomenon or enigma?

How does a relation anterior to comprehension, one that is un-grounded and remains refractory to incorporation into concepts, come to us? In concurrence with Husserl’s account of phenomena, Levinas maintains that things emerge from a horizon, give them-selves perspectively By contrast, the human face as starting from itself without recourse to form, an outside that enters the sphere

of visibility, gives itself otherwise than as a visible configuration

As distinct from Max Picard’s poetizing of the face, or from Sartre’s account of it as expressing a social role or from Deleuze’s interpreta-tion of the face as an icon of imperialist force, for Levinas the face in its very upsurge breaks into a world that is seen and understood but manifests itself otherwise than as idea or image Is the face, then, a content that in bypassing form gives itself directly as an encounter with pure sensibility in an experience of sheer enjoyment? In rela-tions of pure sensibility the boundaries between self and other are blurred, thereby blocking out the alterity of the other human being How, it must be asked, does the face overcome the hegemony of on-tology, of the being that is cognized to open a new dimension within the sensible?

The face is not an appearance but rather an epiphany that re-sists conceptual grasp, rending the sensible through which it ap-pears It proffers itself as defenceless, ‘in the nudity of the absolute

openness of the transcendent’ (ti199) expressing itself in its alterity

as destitution and as a solicitation to desist from violence Chal-lenging the freedom of action that opens the arena of violence, the face unfolds as a discourse that resists violence, as speech ‘whose first word is obligation’ to the other (ti201) It is not freedom that grounds an ethics of non-violence, of genuine peace, but anterior to freedom, the face of the other reveals the totality as injustice

It can be argued that if the face belongs to the arena of visibility, its very appearing must somehow be ‘disconnected’ or bracketed not

in the interest of exhuming pure or absolute consciousness through phenomenological reduction, but rather to release its ethical signi-fication If Levinas remains phenomenological, it is not because he

puts the existence of the face out of play, as Husserl brackets the

existence of the world, but rather because he refuses to grant tran-scendent meaning to the face as image.18

The resistance to images reflects the strenuous opposition to an-thropomorphic imagery in conformity with the long Biblical and rabbinic tradition that Levinas affirms In accordance with this trad-ition, the most serious theological error consists in the imputation

of corporeality to God, an error that undergirds idolatry which, as Maimonides defines it, is the idea that a particular form represents the agent between God and his creatures.19Idolatry is precipitated

by the unfettering of a figural imagination required by ordinary mor-tals in order to render theological truths accessible but which dis-figures this truth through figuration itself Maimonides concedes that prophecy requires both the logical and imaginative faculties even if the rational faculty is to predominate The danger of the hypertrophied imagination cited by Maimonides releases the image’s power to unleash a mixture of true and imaginary things.20 Even

in prophetic visions, Maimonides warns, the viva vox of God is

absent; when thought to be heard, it is only imagined to be present Moses alone, he contends, is exempt from the mediation of deceptive screening images: ‘All prophets are prophetically addressed through

an angel except Moses our teacher, in reference to whom Scripture says, “Mouth to mouth I speakto him”.’21In conformity with this account, for Levinas the other is always already given as unmediated discourse ‘Speech cuts across vision’ (ti195)

Levinas could hardly be unaware of the polysemy of the common

Hebrew term for face (panim) as adumbrated by Maimonides Not

only does the word have a corporeal referent but, in one of its forms,

means ‘in ancient times’ as in the sentence ‘Of old (lephanim) hast

thou laid the foundations of the earth’ (Psalm 102:5), a significa-tion reflected in Levinas’s account of a past that can never be made

present inscribed in the human countenance as a trace Panim in

an-other metonymic expansion can also mean persons receiving

atten-tion and regard The semantic resonances of panim from its meaning

as archaic time to its meaning as regard for another can be seen as

‘translated’ into the atemporality of an irrecoverable archaic past and regard for the other

In sum, the face belongs to the world it inhabits but must in some fashion retain the alterity of a beyond, a transcendence that is in-scribed as a trace that attests an indestructible alterity As signifying the transcendent, the face does not nullify what it signifies in order

to force its entry into an immanent order ‘Here on the contrary tran-scendence refuses immanence as the ever bygone trantran-scendence of the transcendent’ (tio355) The trace (as we have seen) issues from

an immemorial past that Levinas calls eternity, a past that can nei-ther be converted to the present of the acts of a self nor incorporated into the diachronicity of the historical process The face of the other itself becomes a trace whose demands are in excess of any response

I may make and before which I inevitably fall short

If the face is in the trace of that which is beyond, may we not askwhether the trace is not the trace of ‘something’, perhaps of a God who remains invisible Levinas rejects any facile imputation

of causality to God, so that the trace becomes the sign of a hidden God who ‘imposes the neighbor on me’ (ob94) Rather the other is always already in the trace of what he calls illeity, the ‘He is He’, that attests to an unassimilable otherness (en57).22I cannot follow the trace as though it were a path or a way through which one might approach God Instead I am adjured to turn to the other who stands

in the trace of illeity ‘To be in the image of God is not to be an icon

of God but to find oneself in his trace’ (bpw 64) Is the trace as a beyond that falls into immanence not always already contaminated? Derrida suggests:

The contamination of the beyond language and the he within the economic immanence of language and its dominant interpretation is not merely an evil

or negative contamination, rather it describes the very process of the trace