Levinas and language

Da-sein, Heidegger maintains in Being and Time, is in each case mine jemeinig.. linguistic possessions In the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ Heidegger calls language the house of Being.4Taking t

6 Levinas and language

This chapter attempts to expound Levinas’s philosophy of language

by seeking to explain the reference made in the final crowded

sen-tence of Otherwise than Being to

the trace – the unpronouncable writing – of what, always already past –

always ‘il’, Pro-noun, does not enter into any present, to which names desig-nating beings or verbs in which their essence resounds are no longer suited –

but which marks with its seal everything that can be named [ob 185]1

I begin by giving brief accounts of two of the philosophies of language that dominated the intellectual scene when Levinas’s main works were being composed

structuralism

The cluster of ideas that goes under the name structuralism derives

largely from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics,2

though, as Levinas reminds us, structuralism is anticipated by the

philosophical ideal of a mathesis universalis proposed by Descartes

and Leibniz (ob 96) While nineteenth-century theoreticians had focused mainly on the evolution of language, Saussure projects a science that subordinates the diachronic to the synchronic

Distin-guishing acts of speech (parole) from language regarded as a system (langue), he aims to show how the units assembled in a linguistic

system signify not ‘positively’ by standing independently for objects signified, but ‘negatively’ through the combinatorial differences between them According to Saussure, a sign comprises two distin-guishable but inseparable components: a phonetic, graphic or

other-wise embodied signifier (signifiant) and a signified concept (signifi ´e).

119

He lays down a programme for a general science of signs, a semiology

of all systems of signs that extends to other special fields the lessons

of the science of language In this programme relatively simple signs are identified by the places they can and cannot fill, as in chess what matters is the moves that can be made with the pieces, not their shapes or the material of which they are made

Levinas takes over from structuralism the word signifiant How-ever, prising it away from the signifi ´e understood as the conceptual

aspect of signs, he applies it to the speaker, but to the speaker not

regarded only third-personally or as one of a first person plural we For Levinas the signifiant is primarily the speaker in the first person singular subjectivity of its me, in the accusative case – except that

the word ‘case’ is misleading Before being a case, the speaker is a face,

the face that speaks And what the face primarily says, its signifi ´e,

is nothing but its saying When I say something there will normally

be some semantic signification of a message, but such sense-giving

Sinngebung is already signifiance, where my saying is my saying of

my saying Hence, while on the structuralist theory the positivity

of the signs we use depends upon negativity defined by differences between the constituents of the systematic interdependent totalities

of signifiants and of signifi ´es, signifiance as what I shall call ‘deep’

saying testifies to the positivity of my being accosted by another

human being, an event that holds ‘the secret of the birth (naissance)

of thought itself and of the verbal proposition by which it is con-veyed’ (cp125) Signifiance is without horizon or world Although or

because it is the expression of the face of my neighbour, it infinitely transcends the confines of culture; so its saying is prior to every his-torical language (cp122) Other than the countenance, the face has

no features or properties or substance, no ousia The signifiance of

the face is abstract, but its abstractness is prior to the abstractness defined by the structuralist as the separability of the intersubsti-tutability of propositional signs from a given empirical embodiment Precisely because in structuralist semiotics the components or terms owe their meaning to their internal interrelations, it is ar-guable that there is only one unit, the system as a whole This sug-gests an analogy with mathematical systems, where it is arguable that the mathematician reads off from the system as a whole the the-orems he calculates or infers One might say that it is the system that thinks through the mathematician And something like this is what

is said by some of the human scientists who apply Saussure’s model

to their own special fields With some structuralists the idea that

‘it’ (es, c¸a) thinks in me turns into the idea of ‘the death of man’,

so that it becomes questionable whether they can properly be called

‘human’ scientists Lacan in psychoanalysis, Althusser in political theory, L ´evi-Strauss in anthropology and Foucault in the genealogies

of knowledge and power are among those whom Levinas would see as representatives of ‘modern antihumanism’ (ob127) Although this is

a description many structuralists embrace, they do so, Levinas main-tains, only because they identify humanism with the idea that the human being is first and foremost the author of his acts, including his acts of speech Kantianism is typical of humanism understood

in this way Spontaneity and freedom are stressed, too, by the exis-tentialism against which structuralism reacts One of Sartre’s titles declares that existentialism is a humanism.3 For him, as for Kant and for the tradition culminating in them both, humanism is a hu-manism of the first person singular subject

ontologism

According to Levinas, much the same holds when one turns from the humanism of the subject to a humanism of a being whose way

of being is that of being placed, being somewhere, here or there:

Da-sein Da-sein, Heidegger maintains in Being and Time, is in each case mine (jemeinig) Da-sein is mine-ish Da-sein is a being that interprets itself and its place (Da) in its world Its way of being is

for its being to be in question It is therefore with a questioning of

questioning that the analysis of Da-sein begins Heidegger enumer-ates the elements of investigative questioning – Untersuchung, as in the German title of the Logical Investigations of Husserl, the dedica-tee of Being and Time These components include the topic, which

in the case of Heidegger’s bookis Being; what we seekto discover about the topic, which in this case is the meaning of Being; and that

at which attention must be directed in order to discover this, here the beings in which Being resides The being pre-eminently to be addressed, Heidegger maintains, is precisely the being that is able

to raise the question of the meaning of Being, the so-called ‘human

being’ or Da-sein Heidegger also maintains that the question of the meaning of being is first and foremost the question each Da-sein

puts to itself about its own being To state this in the terminology

of Being and Time, ontological and existential questioning begins

in questioning that is ontic and existentiell It will turn out to be

of importance for our understanding of Levinas’s teaching that in

Heidegger’s analysis the being to whom is put the existentiell

lead-ing question is none other than the person by whom that question is put For Heidegger questioning is first self-questioning: not initially

fragen , but sich fragen, Da-sein’s ability to askitself about its own

way of being toward its own death

linguistic possessions

In the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ Heidegger calls language the house

of Being.4Taking the liberty of reading Being and Time in the light

of this later remark, but appealing also to Heidegger’s

demonstra-tion in the earlier workitself that Da-sein’s being in the world is its being in language or discourse (Rede), could one say that while the point of entry into Heidegger’s account of language in Being and Time is the question and questionability, the point of entry into Levinas’s account of language is the response and responsibility? This would be to oversimplify For a notion and sense of

respon-sibility (Antwortlichkeit) is all pervasive in Being and Time.

But the responsibility that figures in that bookand in Heidegger’s later works is finally the responsibility towards Being, whereas the responsibility that is first and last in Levinas’s treatment of language

is responsibility to the other human being And in so far as the target

of his ‘humanism of the other man’ is the ‘anti-humanism’ he sees

in theories like structuralism, it cannot fail to have in its sights at the same time the accounts of language put forth by Heidegger in

the course of which we are told both that Da-sein has language and that Da-sein is, as we might say, had by language.5Language is not merely a competence possessed by a subclass of animals, the

ratio-nal ones, the z ˆoon logon echon of Aristotle Da-sein is and has in its essence to be the place (the Da) where language speaks There is then

a mutual belonging of Da-sein and language, as is indicated formally

by the conjunction of the name Da-sein with the statement that lan-guage is the house of Being and with the idea that Da-sein has to be (zu sein hat), to take on, to assume the responsibility for the that and

the how of its Being.6Language on this account is not ultimately to

be compared, as Wittgenstein compares it, with a toolbox.7We speak English or German or French, but that is because we already belong

to the linguisticality of which the speaking of natural languages is

a manifestation Language speaks, ‘die Sprache spricht’.8Although

it is not incorrect to say that we possess this or that language and the ability to speakit, prior to that is our being possessed by lan-guage

Prior to my being possessed by language, Levinas maintains, is my possession by the human being who speaks to me But, again, this formulation of the difference between Levinas’s and Heidegger’s doc-trines of language is too simple unless we acknowledge the difference between what each of them means by possession and recognize that the difference between Heidegger’s and Levinas’s doctrines of lan-guage is not merely a difference between monologue and dialogue

Already in Being and Time Da-sein’s being possessed by language, understood as a basic structure of Da-sein’s occupying a place in the world, is a way of Da-sein’s being with others, mit-Da-sein Being

in the world is Being in dialogue Sprache is Gespr ¨ach Heidegger

can say this despite his saying that language is monologue,9 for what he means when he says that language is monologue is that

although it is language alone (allein) that speaks authentically and although this speaking is lonesome (einsam), lonesomeness is

pos-sible only if one is not alone, not solitary, not cut off from com-munity Lonesomeness is a way of not being alone; it is a privative

way of being with others Therefore our earlier reference to the self-reference of Da-sein’s questioning must not be taken to imply that the mine-ishness of each Da-sein is incompatible with an original

sociality

However, there is more than one way of understanding this so-ciality For both Heidegger and Levinas it is linguistic, and a way of being possessed by language But, to repeat, whereas for Heidegger

possession by language is a way of being with others, for Levinas

it is also a possession by others This latter possession disrupts my

being possessed by language as this is understood by Heidegger My possession by language is obsession at the same time – or rather from a time beyond recall of which the diachrony is anterior to the diachrony correlatively opposed to synchrony by the structuralist The other’s call to responsibility to her or to him and to the third party, that is to say, to the whole of humanity, is anterior to the call

to responsibility to being Its anteriority is announced in a pluper-fect tense marking the diachrony of a time incommensurable with what a verb in the present tense might have reported This ab-solute, separated past is contained neither by the structuralist’s idea of lan-guage as a synchronous totality nor by the Heideggerian ontologist’s

description of a historical (geschichtlich) dispensation (Geschick) as

a unitary whole in which Da-sein’s having-been, coming-toward and

making-present are co-implicated

Combining Heidegger’s turn of phrase with one of Levinas’s, we can say that the human other breaks into the house of Being like a thief (ob13) This possession by the other is a dispossession of my home and my belongings, a discomforting that is, to use Heidegger’s

word, un-heimlich, unhomely I am disconcerted, discountenanced

and decentred Prior to the subject’s self-consciousness, prior to the mine-ishness of the self that says ‘I’, and prior to all consciousness, the self is the me accused by some other human being whose place in the sun I have always already usurped simply by being here, simply

as ego or Da-sein Levinas goes as far as to call this obsessive

pos-session by the other psychosis, intending us to hear in this

reso-nances both of Husserl’s Beseelung, animation, and of madness or

folly, the topic taken up from Freud in the work of Foucault and Lacan

Another of Levinas’s contemporaries who should be mentioned in this context is Ricœur No less critical of structuralism than Levinas, holding, like him (and John Austin),10that the study of language as

an object of science must be supplemented by reflection upon mo-mentary acts of speech, Ricœur makes a special analysis of avowals But this analysis, like psychoanalysis, is conducted within the frame-workof the symbols and primarily Greekmyths where the notions

of impurity and culpability arise in the West So the concern with

parolethat Ricœur shares with Levinas is of a sort that leads him to stress the importance of narrative even in his investigation of con-fessions of guilt Typically, the confession of guilt isolates the person who confesses In owning up I come to own myself, even if the guilt is shared.11On Ricœur’s account the isolation effected in the acknowl-edgement of culpability is not itself isolated from the context of a narrative or myth It therefore serves well to bring out the boldness

of Levinas’s account For, according to the latter, culpability is inde-pendent of such narrative or mythological contexts, notwithstanding

that Levinas sometimes cites even in his more philosophical writings stories from the Hebrew Bible by way of illustration

nouns, verbs and verbal nouns

A narrative is a sequence of statements Among the simplest state-ments, at least in Indo-European languages, are predicative ones in which something is said about something or somebody The subject about which the statement says something is represented in the sen-tence by a noun or noun-like term What is said about it is expressed

in a phrase involving either the verb ‘to be’ explicitly or a short-form verb, e.g ‘runs’, paraphrasable by a long-form copulative expression, e.g ‘is running’ Taking the hint from languages like German, where

‘Das Himmel blaut’ says ‘The sky is blue’, some logicians, for in-stance Quine, have pointed out that long forms can generally be transposed into short forms, as in ‘The President of the United States clintonizes’, ‘The teacher of Plato socratizes’, ‘Pegasus pegasizes’.12

Following what he takes to be Heidegger’s teaching on the verb and verbal noun (ob 189), Levinas gives as examples of identity state-ments ‘Socrates socratizes’ and ‘Red reds’ Another example given

by him orally, but not to my knowledge in print, is ‘Le violoncelle

violoncellise’ These express, he says, the fashion (fac¸on) in which,

for example, Socrates is (ob41) He italicizes this word in order to

bring to our attention that it derives from the Latin facere, to do or to

make, and in order to help us to hear in predication the time, tense and verbality of being and the adverbiality of being’s modalities, its

Seinsweisen But here Levinas’s word for ‘being’ is ‘essence’ In a note

at the outset of Otherwise than Being he explains that he does not

use the word ‘essence’ as it is traditionally used, for the nature or

whatness of something He uses it in the verbal sense in which Sein

is used in German and in Being and Time in opposition to Seiendes, this latter standing for a being, an ´etant Nevertheless, the second syllable of ´etant retains a trace of the suffix ance from which ab-stract nouns of action are formed through derivation from antia and entia , for example naissance, a word we earlier found him using in the course of explaining this point, and signifiance, a word to which

we shall return below Other examples are tendance, a word used in Otherwise than Beingin conjunction with a family of words based

on tendere, e.g ostension, and essance This last is a word Levinas

says he will not be so bold as to use there, notwithstanding that it

would have represented well the verb-noun ambiguity of Sein and Wesen and the fact that ˆetre can be either a verb or a noun.

The hidden difference at issue here is what Heidegger calls the on-tological difference, the difference between Being and a being present

already in the ambiguity of the Greekword on Levinas calls this

difference an amphibology Because there survives in the second

syl-lable of ´etant a hint of the action and verbal-cum-adverbial fashion

exemplifed in ‘Socrates socratizes’ Levinas might have had no objec-tion to translating this into ‘Socratizing socratizes’, by analogy with Borges’s Heraclitean verbalizing conversion of ‘The moon rose above the river’ into ‘Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned’ But note

in this last example the pronominal ‘it’ that insists on itself as stub-bornly as it does in ‘It is raining’, ‘It reds’, ‘Es gibt Sein’, and ‘Es gibt Zeit’ These last two, meaning ‘There is Being’ and ‘There is time’ (literally ‘It gives Being’ and ‘It gives time’) pose what may seem to

be a problem In his essay ‘Time and Being’ Heidegger says that the belonging together of these two statements, signalled by the ‘and’ of

his title, is expressed by the word Ereignis.13In colloquial German this word means a happening or event Now just as one cannot say

ei-ther of Being or time that it is or gibt, nor can this be said of Ereignis.

To say any of these things would be to treat Being as a being, time as

in time and happening as a happening The best we can do, Heidegger concludes, is to say ‘Das Ereignis ereignet’ Although Levinas may have this apparent tautology in mind when he writes ‘Socrates

soc-ratizes’, it should be observed that the latter is a statement about a

being in time Heidegger’s statement, on the other hand, purports to

be about Being and time, yet, as the definite article Das indicates,

it puts Being in the same logico-grammatical slot as is occupied by the proper name ‘Socrates’ Heidegger’s statement fails to markthe ontological difference Of this he is quite aware He goes as far as to argue that the history of philosophy is a history of the forgetting of this difference by philosophers and of their failure to become aware

of this forgetting Hence they fail to askhow one can speakof Being without saying the opposite of what one means or wants to say.14

Frege raises the question of how one can consistently say either

‘The concept horse is a concept’ or ‘The concept horse is not a concept’.15Appearances to the contrary, the first of these is not an an-alytical truth, and the second is not a contradiction Both suffer from what he calls the ‘awkwardness’ that a concept is what the predicate

of a statement connotes, whereas in both of these statements the form of words preceding the copula, the grammatical subject of the sentences, converts the alleged concept into an object What we are calling Heidegger’s problem is analogous, but it is more deep-seated than Frege’s, because it is about Being as such

What we are calling Heidegger’s problem is not Levinas’s problem But we have been obliged to outline it in order to go on to show now where the crucial difference lies The relation between saying

(dire) and the said (dit) treated in Otherwise than Being is a relation

between a verb and a nominal part of speech It may therefore seem

to correspond at the linguistic level with the ontological difference between Being and beings and to be a derivative of this But Levinas

is concerned less with the dire that is a speech-act correlative with what is said than with a dire that is somehow presupposed by that correlation That deep dire is therefore different both from the pair

of correlative dictions and from the pair opposed in the ontological difference So, if a problem is a question that can in principle be an-swered, it is not a problem that is raised by the relation between

this dire and the ontological difference or amphibology Answerable

questions arise as to Being and beings (where among beings are in-cluded processes, events and whatever else there is) The question as

to how these questions and their answers and topics are related to the uncorrelative saying is not then strictly a question Deep saying

is the expression of answerability prior to the expression of questions and answers But it must now be acknowledged that Levinasian deep

saying has a parallel in the Heideggerian deep being or Ereignis of the differentiation between Being and a being If no answerable question

or problem can be posed about that, we shall have reached a deeper analogy between Levinas and Heidegger Nevertheless, this leaves

it open for Levinas to maintain that the verbality of the infinitive

dire, to say – the verb of or for infinity and the unfinished (ob13) – expresses an excluded third infinitely deeper and older than the ver-bality of to-be-or-not-to-be

pronouns and pronunciation

Like Heidegger and Frege and Wittgenstein, Levinas is confronted with the difficulty of saying or otherwise showing how the philoso-pher can avoid saying precisely the opposite of what he wants to say

He cites the sentence in which Hegel poses this difficulty (ob84),16

and would have his readers remember the context in which Hegel’s sentence occurs It occurs in the context of the discussion of the the-ory of sensible certainty according to which the richest and truest knowledge is the allegedly immediate apprehension of a sensible datum denoted by the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ Hegel chal-lenges the advocate of this theory to write that pronoun down He does not have to wait long before he is in a position to point out that the unmediated datum the pronoun was supposed to denote earlier may now denote something else, and that the same can be said of

‘then’ and ‘now’ as well as of the first person pronoun ‘I’, should the advocate defend himself by asserting ‘This richest and truest knowl-edge is the sensible apprehension I am experiencing here and now’ For all these pronouns, along with ‘my’, ‘your’ and the other posses-sive adjectives cognate with them, shift from one referent to another Therefore they do not register a purely immediate apprehension, but import the mediation of comprehension They do not designate pure sensible receptivity, but engage the conceptualizing activity of the understanding, albeit not in the same way as do common nouns The challenge ‘Write this down’ is the part of Hegel’s reply that

is very relevant to the understanding of Levinas’s teaching on lan-guage and pronominality The written word is especially exposed to interpretation in ways different from what the author intended The mortal author cannot always be there to forestall the misinterpre-tation of his intentions And this holds for any work, whether set down in inkor produced in paint or in bronze or in tablets of stone

Plato’s Phaedrus is the workon which Levinas draws in mak-ing this distinction between a work(œuvre) and the spoken word.

Yet in the part of the dialogue that is most relevant here, sections 275–6, this distinction is blurred Although Socrates is keen to get Phaedrus to agree that there is a kind of discourse that is prefer-able to writing, this preferprefer-able kind of discourse is said to be writ-ten in the human being’s soul; and Levinas, too, notes how fitting this metaphor is for discourse that expresses knowledge of principles (ob148) We saw that in the final sentence of Otherwise than Being

cited at the beginning of this chapter Levinas goes as far as to de-scribe as ‘unpronouncable writing’ what he wishes to contrast with

a work This is not writing in any ordinary sense It is related to the archi-writing to which, discussing the same Platonic dialogue, Derrida appealed in 1968 to indicate what is somehow presupposed