God, Death & Time

2003-07-18T04:11:00.000-07:00

2003-07-18T04:02:00.000-07:00

Lecture 23: Thinking about Death on the basis of Time

After the first two paragraphs of this comparatively long lecture on thinking about death on the basis of time, Lévinas makes no further reference to death. In this penultimate lecture, it is almost as if time were the Aufhebung of death. Or, perhaps more accurately, these lectures on death have ultimately been a question for Lévinas of time. If Heidegger does indeed think time on the basis of death, the overriding themes of Lévinas’s lectures on death is to question and to refute the use of death to argue for the finitude of time, or time as finitude. For Lévinas, time is a diachronic “relationship with the other, rather than with the end.” Is the relationship with the other then never a relationship with the end? I suppose that is Lévinas’s most profound point: the relationship with the other never ends: it has no end, especially my end, that I can claim, know or capitalise on. But, as always with Lévinas, the question is what kind of other are we talking about? The relationship with the other who has already died has no end; the relationship with the loved one has no end; the relationship with the unencompassable, infinite idea that has been put in me of God has no end. But what if the other wants to put an end to our relationship? What if the always, endless relationship with me is too much for the other? Or what if the other wants to put an end to me, to murder me? Lévinas writes at the end of the first paragraph: “We shall have to attempt to start from murder as suggesting the complete meaning of death.” For Lévinas, the relationship with the other is itself a kind of Kantian categorical imperative against murder. But what about the murderous other who does not ascribe to the universal laws of pure practical reason as the ground for the moral law and the actions of the free will? What about the other who is not a Kantian? Lévinas himself had raised this question in his short autobiographical essay “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” when he writes: “This dog was the last Kantian in Germany, without the brain needed to universalise maxims and drives.”

But, as I said, this lecture isn’t really about death. It is a remarkable coda on Lévinas’s thinking of time otherwise than Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. I cannot help but be convinced by his challenging the assumptions of presence of the same founded on “time as a series of instants,” and yet I am not sure what to make of Lévinas’s eloquent alternative: “a disquietude that would be identified as indiscernible”; time as a non-phenomenal, noncontainable, unqualifiable, infinite diachrony; a diachrony “without a punctuality that would let it be designated”; a diachrony that resists the present, representation, synchrony and synthesis; time as tearing, splitting apart by excess, transcendence as nonindifference, as awakening without rests. How is one to read this time that has been so carefully carved out from the edifice of Western philosophy? Is it a kind of quasi-romantic, rational negative theology of time? Such an idea of time may account for death, for ethics, but how does it account for the phenomenal, the synchronic, the containable, the qualifiable, the present and, perhaps above all, finitude? Is there an end that is also a relationship with the other?

2003-07-06T03:06:00.000-07:00

Lévinas: Lecture 22 - A Reading of Bloch: Toward a Conclusion

In your first comments on Lévinas’s reading Bloch you reacted to my reference to Derrida’s notion of a messianism without a messiah as affirmation of the à-venir, the future that is always to-come. In fact, it is possible that Derrida formulated this idea as much from Lévinas as Nietzsche. In the preface to Totality and Infinity (interestingly enough, published 3 years after Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, though there seems to be no obvious reference to Bloch), Lévinas speaks of “the eschatology of messianic peace”. Eschatology, he writes, “institues a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history [par-delà la totalité ou l’histoire]”. Lévinas opposes this eschatology, which is “prophetic” in its origins, to war and ideas of morality founded on, accommodated to, politics. Though I have not seen it, I know that Howard Caygill has published a book on Lévinas and politics and perhaps part of the slight strangeness of these concluding lectures on Bloch is that they hint towards a political theory, which one perhaps does not necessarily associate with Lévinas’s thought. And yet, from his early essay on Hitler, politics have always been a part of Lévinas’s work. It is hardly fortuitous that Totality and Infinity opens with the question of the relationship between morality, war and politics, or that Lévinas would conclude his academic career in these final lecturers by linking the thought of death founded on time to the melancholy interruption of the always utopian working for “a world to come”. Beyond the neverending debate with Heidegger, Lévinas begins his own leave taking with an affirmative eschatology, a reassertion of time beyond the finitude of death.

It is interesting that he foregrounds Bloch’s notion of habitation (which, as part of the larger question of possession and dispossession plays a central role in Totality and Infinity) with the fleeting epiphany of astonishment, of glimpsed moments of hope which promise “the Da might be fully realized and not simply Dass-sein”. There is something very romantic about this and though it may be more from Bloch (the quote from Tolstoy) than from Lévinas, I have often been struck by the moments that Lévinas privileges in his works from Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. I am not quite sure how to characterise these. Are they simply raising the aesthetic or are they blinding epiphanies that rupture the aesthetic and affirm something else (like “a ray of light coming from the utopian future”). I think we need to read Lévinas’s 1948 essay on the arts, Reality and its Shadow.

It is also struck me that Bloch’s emphasis on working for a world to come that overcomes the opposition between Man and World could be inspired by Rosenzweig, whom Lévinas credits as one of the principal influences on Totality and Infinity. In a 1959 essay, Levinas notes that Rosenzweig denounced Hegelian totality as “a totalitarian tryranny” and argued for a return to the question of Man in relation to World and God. The relation of God and World is one of creation. The relation of God and Man is one of revelation and the relation of Man and World is one of redemption. Lévinas writes: “Revelation provokes Redemption”, “God’s revelation therefore begins the work of Redemption which is none the less Man’s work”: “Redemption is the work of man.” It is perhaps the long standing occulted debt of both Bloch and Lévinas to Rosenzweig and to the idea of work as God provoked labour to bring Man and World together – in an always utopian future – that underpins the short-hand of Lévinas's “break” with Heidegger at the end of these lectures on death.

2003-07-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

On Lecture 21:A Reading of Bloch (continued)

What is remarkable to me about this lecture is the ease with which “an alternative to Heidegger’s account of death and time” can be offered. One would think that after having one’s denial of death stripped away and being brought face to face with its ineluctability it would be no mean feat to turn around and say that of course if you look at it right it’s not such a big deal, just one phase in something else that one actually cares more about.
I think that Lévinas in his exposition of Bloch brings this off rather well. How is it done?
Simply by evoking a number of literary references, Hamsun and Tolstoy. In addition to this he spins out a theory based I suspect on the Marxist concept of alienation which contrasts the debased form of leisure under capitalism with its fetished commodities with a utopian leisure of man under socialism who feels at one with all he has produced. These two accounts are somewhat at odds with each other, since the literary references point to moments of “astonishment” within an unredeemed social order, moments presented as complete in themselves. I would call these moments of grace, when the “burden is lifted and we see into the heart of things” – profoundly unalienated moments, but in which I do not necessarily discern a “tua res agitur”. I think it is true that we are all not so far from entering these moments, at any time, these intimations of immortality which do suddenly make the solid realities of a Heidegger recede into the far distance, but I don’t know that they can be claimed for any political program.
Lévinas wants to underline their connection both to ethics and to love, but before discussing his arguments here I want to digress with an anecdote. Recently it occurred to me to meditate on “the morning after my death”, to imagine the world going on without me, the trees, the trams, the manifold busyness of the city, the little clumps of smokers in front of city buildings, my corpse - now just clay - cooling somewhere, etc. All of it seemed very beautiful, it was like imagining a world utterly cleansed of the fever of the self and its needs and wishes, a world no longer needing me, witnessed with perfect equanimity – I could affirm it wholeheartedly. But then I attempted another twist, I thought, “What if you don’t just die alone, but in some massive holocaust, as if the entire city is destroyed by an atomic blast and none of the things you were imagining are still there, much less anyone to witness them.” I found I could not affirm this, the vision of it filled me with pain and disgust. It actually surprised me to find such a reaction, but it seemed a Blochian moment. It is not that I feel a solidarity with aspirations to a human utopia, but there is a solidarity with a world where the freedom to shift awareness into a contemplative mode is still available. This kind of awareness is impersonal, but it is not inhuman. I suppose my horror would extend to worlds like those of “1984” or “brave New World” or “The Matrix”, where again the possibility of contemplation was almost entirely extirpated.
Lévinas says that this vision of the Good “subordinates being and the world to the ethical order” because the telos of the vision is to “end exploitation”. I have problems with all the parts of this. The ability to grasp the world in astonishment, “sub species aeternitatis” may be the outcome of a rigourous ethical clarification as in Spinoza, but a moment of grace which permits such a vision still comes down to an influx of feelings of a certain kind, and by themselves feelings can never be wholly ethical. Even impersonal feelings are merely subjective, and the “ethical order” is still not yet ethics. To fill it out one needs some principles, for example the ending of exploitation, but this last is a rather vague and at best incomplete principle in whose name much evil can be done. Freedom from exploitation is an essentially egalitarian principle and as such threatens the more important principle of liberty in its implementation.
“There is in all this an invitation to think death on the basis of time, and no longer time on the basis of death. This takes nothing away from the ineluctible character of death, but it does not leave it the privilege of being the source of all meaning.”
There is an extraordinary suggestion here that in these Blochian moments of release there is an authentic experience of time which goes deeper than the sense of time engendered by the knowledge of death. I’m not sure if Lévinas unfolds all that might be gained for phenomenology by following this clue. It is also rather surprising to be reminded in the above passage of the degree to which Heidegger has “psyched” us into a monochromatic world of the stark alternatives, life and death. It is characteristically adolescent to find the world drained of all colour once one has seen the skull beneath the mask. There always comes a compensatory moment when desire reaffirms itself, but there may remain the sense that this renewal is essentially absurd. The Blochian vision offers that it is not.
I’m not sure what to make of the last paragraphs of the lecture. Is it Lévinas dragging back his albatross(?): “However, it is not my non-being that causes anxiety, but that of the loved one or of the other, more beloved than my being. … The love of the other is the emotion of the other’s death.” Or is there something quite new (?): “It is my receiving the other … that is the reference to death.” As if “receiving the other” names a kind of connection understood by way of the redeemed vision which is reduced to the reference to death by being reframed in ontological terms.

2003-05-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

testing 123

2003-05-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

Another Digression

I just wanted to add a digression on one of your remarks from the last lecture:

^{Even a community, such as the Jews of Masada, under immediate threat of annihilation does not have a communal being towards death but takes on mass suicide as a positive act. (I must admit that Andrea Dworkin, a writer who I find egregiously wrongheaded on most things forever desmystified Masada for me, by questioning the unanimity of the decision for suicide, and evoking the forms of coercion that were probably needed to achieve that ‘transcendent’ solidarity.)}

I have not read Josephus, but I have read two interesting essays, “Flavius Josèphe et Masada’ (1978) and ‘Flavius Josèphe et les prophètes’ (1985), by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, collected in his book Les Juifs, la mémoire et le present (1995). For Vidal-Naquet, “Masada” is represented ‘d’un récit et d’un espace’: two very different forms of information which must be treated with caution. In contrast to Yigal Yadin, the Israeli archaeologist who took Josephus to Masada to find archaeology to confirm his narrative, Vidal-Naquet makes a distinction between facts, le récit and the discourses or speeches within le récit. The facts are that Herod built a fort at Masada. There is evidence that Jews were at Masada and that there was a fire and a later Roman occupation. The history/story by Josephus is the ONLY account of the death by mass suicide of 960 Jews at Masada. The discourse is Eleazar Ben Yair’s speech making the case for mass suicide. The relation between the archaeological site, the facts, the history/story and the speech is complex and has commonly been amalgamated into a single narrative and unambiguous historical event.

There are some recent scholars who have gone so far as to suggest that there was no mass suicide and only a Roman massacre. Vidal-Naquet is cautious about any firm conclusions and, while not denying that there may have been a mass suicide, raises many questions about the commonly accepted view of the mass suicide as an historical fact.

For example, Josephus’s story is structured by the necessity of survivors to tell the story: two women escape and tell the Romans what happened. This often used fictional strategy casts some doubt upon the narrative as historical fact. Though there is ONE precedent of Jewish suicide (during the Maccabee period) – in this case of an individual – and numerous cases in the medieval and modern period of group suicide, mass suicide was a well-established Greco-Romano discourse. Josephus, writing in Greek to a Roman audience was presenting a comprehensible event to his readers.

Interestingly, FOR Josephus mass suicide is NOT part of the Jewish tradition and he prefigures the events at Masada with his own decision not to collective suicide and rather to live and join the Roman enemy.
Joseph depicts an event of mass suicide that he disapproves of and, Vidal-Naquet suggests, links it to the destructive excesses of apocalyptic discourses, pseudo-prophets and Zealots in Jerusalem who precipitated the destruction of the Temple. Eleazar’s speech, which is in two parts, begins as an apocalyptic call for death (Arnaldo Momigliano and others reject this association of the speech with apocalyptic discourses) and ends as obviously Hellenistic and pagan argument for the virtues of suicide.

Having re-read Vidal-Naquet’s essays, I think that one should be very cautious about the uses that the myth of Masada are put to. The archaeology appears to suggest that Jews and Romans were at Masada and that there was a devastating fire there at some point. It can tell us nothing else. As the ONLY source for the events at Masada, Josephus’s version must be treated with caution. His antipathy to the apocalyptic destruction brought about by the zealots and disapproval of the events he describes at Masada; his reliance on Judeo-Greco discourses to account for the mass suicide; his writing in Greek to a Greco-Roman audience and status as a ‘traitor’ who is still loyal to Judaism (Momigliano) – all of these make the story of Masada an unanswerable question about the motives and reliability of Flavius Josephus. Perhaps most tellingly, the Talmud makes no reference whatsoever to Masada. Vidal-Naquet implies that it is perhaps only in the late 1940s and 1950s when the world was focused on the heroic defence of the new State of Israel that Masada – the site and the story – became an unambiguous, indispensable part of Jewish identity.

In ‘What Flavius Josephus Did Not See’, Momigliano argues that Josephus’s Judaism ‘is flat, not false or trivial but rhetorical and generic’. It rejects apocalypse (and has no understanding of the already established tradition of the synagogue) and has some similarities to the rationality and pragmatism of the early Talmudic Sages, such as Johanan ben Zakki, but unlike the Rabbis of the Talmud: ‘What one finds lacking in Flavius Josephus is the act of rejoicing in the Law, the sense of a disciplined community life, the love and concern for younger generations, and a faith in God that – together with a high degree of intellectual freedom, juridicial competence and obsession with norms of purity – characterize the rabbis who emerged as leaders of a nation without a state, without a territory, and without linguistic unity’. Momigliano concludes by noting that Josephus’s work was preserved by the Christians and played little role in Jewish tradition until the medieval period.

2003-05-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

Lecture 21: A Reading of Bloch (continued)

I really don’t have much to add on this second lecture on Bloch. There is undoubtedly a political gesture here, but I think Lévinas is primarily concerned with offering an alternative to Heidegger’s account of death and time. For Bloch. ‘the utopianism of hope is the temporalization of time’ and, as Lévinas comments, ‘the first ecstasis is utopia, not death’. With all its attendant political dangers – which, as a Lithuanian, he can hardly be cavalier about or be merely pandering to a fashionable Parisian Marxism – Lévinas sees in Bloch’s notion of utopia an excess, an always elusive surplus (somewhat similar to the desire structured by the idea of the infinite), an ‘authentic future’, that exceeds the unrelenting finitude and manifold uses of death in Being and Time.

2003-05-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

2003-04-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

Lecture 20

My reading of this lecture is coloured by reflections from the career of the composer Erwin Schulhoff two of whose string quartets I was listening to earlier in the week – and mighty fine they were too. He was a German speaking Jew from Prague active in the pre-war years as a leading pianist and composer and champion of the new music. He could not only play the most demanding avant-garde works but he was also a gifted jazz pianist.
Artistically, he searched for a perfect synthesis of German and Bohemian elements within a modernist idiom that was vital and even slightly jazzy. He’d been living in Berlin when Hitler came to power and so he fled back to Prague where he seemed to have embraced the utopian promises of communism. As the war neared and many of his peers would have been searching out way of getting to America he opted for the Soviet Union and eventually took out citizenship in that entity while still living in Czechoslovakia. Perhaps with the Hitler-Stalin pact it seemed like a good gamble, but needless to say it was not. When the Germans came he was under a triple jeopardy – as a Jew, a Communist and a Soviet citizen – he and his son were arrested and sent to the nearest Concentration camp and killed – but even if he had made it to the Soviet Union in time his fate would most likely have been the same and for pretty much the same reasons.
A sad story and an understandable one considering how so many highly educated people at the time believed, or maybe just hoped beyond hope, that a new and collectivised social system would come and sweep away all the “social evils” that had bedevilled the European past – whether that system called itself National Socialism or just Socialism. It seems to me that the major error of these hope addicts was to place Equality, or worse still Fraternity, as ideals ahead of Liberty . This confusion was perhaps part of the subtle twist that the French revolutionaries gave to their (failed) imitation of the spirit of the American revolution.
At any rate I assume that in 1976 a majority of Lévinas’ audience would still have called themselves Marxists, or at least Marxians of some stamp or other and hence the necessity of his addressing the marxian version of time if not the marxian version of death – about which there could also be much to say, couldn’t there?
The change of key in this lecture when he introduces a social perspective is palpable. When he says “death is not the source of all sense and nonsense…” this seems an inadequate way of accounting for the fact that the entire investigation that he had been pursuing up to this point is suddenly shunted to the side. This may be because for social thinking, that is the thinking on behalf of the community, death does not exist, since the social entity goes on despite the death of its individual members. Even a community, such as the Jews of Masada, under immediate threat of annihilation does not have a communal being towards death but takes on mass suicide as a positive act. (I must admit that Andrea Dworkin, a writer who I find egregiously wrongheaded on most things forever desmystified Masada for me, by questioning the unanimity of the decision for suicide, and evoking the forms of coercion that were probably needed to achieve that ‘transcendent’ solidarity.)
It seems to me like a sort of category mistake to put the temporality of Heideggerian being towards death side by side with that of a social philosophy’s hope in a progessive and (never final) alleviation of social evil. They are not strictly comparable since the locus of the former is in the soul’s solitary communion with itself, which is not to be dissolved in any kind of aufhebung to the authentic Heimat. If on one side we have become used to the symptomatic critique of our own subjectivity under the rubric, “the personal is the political”, it is quite another thing to discover a phenomenology of political aspirations, a “the political is the personal”, which would place the intrinsic temporality of a political movement at the core of one’s being. It is commonplace enough in our world, however I believe that the philosopher’s role is to question such bad-faith rather than to encourage it.
I am being a bit disingenuous here because it is central to Lévinas’ philosophy to undermine the division between the personal and the inter-personal. For Lévinas at the core of my inner subjectivity when I attempt to grasp it in its truest depth there is the imperative of the Other, the ethical imperative which necessarily displaces any drive to gnosis. This prioritising of the ethical marks Lévinas’ meeting point with Marxism, as mediated by a thinker like Bloch for whom the demand for justice is the engine of a form of dialectical materialism. As a branch of Marxism this is very much on the fringe. The usefulness of this as a way into Marxism is its appeal to bourgeois intellectuals, but when one’s understanding is fully matured on must suspend the prioritisation of the good, the true and the beautiful, at least until the party’s work of re-making subjectivity is complete.
The other distinction which Lévinas strategically blurs is that between morality and religion; my turn towards the Other is so absolute that it can only be underwritten by God, even though God is nowhere to be seen in this relation to the Other in that I am not absolved of it to any degree. How does this square with Bloch’s elevation of the theological virtue of Hope to the rank of primary marxian virtue? In Judeo-Christian terms Hope is tied to messianism, which to me is the worst idea ever to emerge from the Jewish genius. Lévinas is much too smart to treat it naively – your Derrida quote perhaps illustrates the vapid form it now takes in the most sophisticated thinking. Vapid but still poisonous, since evil is what takes place while you are once more purging your premises of (Western) metaphysics.

2003-04-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

Escaping Literature: another digression

I have always been haunted by the idea that literature is a form of escape. While I am untroubled by the drug-like pleasure of the lights dimming in a cinema, promising a brief liberation, literature seems a dangerous therapeutics of escape. I am always thinking of the great renouncers Balzac and Proust, who withdrew from the world in their thirties to spend twenty years in relentless nocturnal creation until, in mid sentence, they died. There is always something of death when it comes to literature. The sentences that I read as an teenager and still remember were as much about an adolescent disbelief in mortality as a strange suspended presence of death in literature: ‘So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight’ (The Great Gatsby); ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buenida was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’ (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Even the first great sentence of David Copperfield suggested an awful displacement in the suspended presence of life: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show’.
What J. Hillis Miller has called in his fine book On Literature (2002) the magic of virtual worlds seems a virtual escape that escapes nothing, that feigns and, somehow, announces, introduces the inevitable:

Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
Must die at last, ‘tis best
To use myself in jest,
Thus by feigned deaths to die.
(John Donne, Song)

I have sometimes bestowed on this strange suspended presence of death in literature the sweet hovering melancholy of the last, perfect line: ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies’ (Keats, To Autumn). I might celebrate Whitman’s insistence in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, ‘It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not’, as he calls beyond his own death, in the past-tense, to the future, ‘Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt’, but I always return to the static grandeur of creation as death, of death-by-creation, caught by Browning in My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto and The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church.
Blake suggests that literature is the involuntary inspiration of divine dictation and Blanchot that it is the inexhaustible autonomous demand of the work that is written despite the author. Hillis Miller argues that the literary work is ‘discovered, not fabricated’. The possibility that literature is neither creation as transcendence, indulgence or death – that it is malgré moi – is strangely comforting. For Blanchot, ‘If to write is to surrender to the interminable, the writer who consents to sustain writing’s essence loses the power to say “I” ’. Writing ‘makes what is ungraspable inescapable’. Writing, as Blanchot understands it, is a kind of death that cannot be harnessed as an extension or aggrandisement of the life of the author. This stark curtailing of the hubris of creation almost mitigates the unforgiving mortality of literature as a voluntary creation.

2003-04-10T06:18:00.000-07:00

Lecture 20: Another thinking of Death: Starting from Bloch

‘And he who reveals secret things makes known to thee what shall come to pass’. This lecture brought to my mind these lines from Daniel (2:29-30). Lévinas’s is moving from one grand discourse around death (the alternation of being and nothingness) to another (the alternation of the present and the future).

It is interesting that he introduces Bloch through the concept of ‘the world’. Both Heidegger and Bloch have concepts of world, though they make use it in different ways, for different temporalties or social constructions. In Foi et savior, Derrida has asked what is “the world”? The world is ‘neither the universe nor the cosmos nor the earth’. He argues that le monde has a very specific Christain history and links it to ‘la mondialatinisation’ (this strange alliance of Christianity, as experience of the death of God and of tele-techosciencetific capitalism)’. Despite the politics, it could be said, that both Heidegger and Bloch are caught up in an essential ‘religious’ deabte about the world (an anti-eschatology (which is already caught up in an eschatology), on Hedigger’s part and eschatology reworked for Bloch).

Somehow it seems that these grand discourses about death are really always about time. Lévinas suggests here that Heideggarian time ‘goes back’. Where ever it goes, time always goes back to being-toward-death and to finitude. Heideggerian time always ges back to the alternation between being and nothingness, in other words, to finite being. Time is always a projection that goes back.

Blochian time, on the other hand, ‘does not go back’, but it is not a projection. I’m not sure I fully understand the difference between time as projection and time as fulfilment. Time does not throw something foward (like spirit through history, like being), it is (it it accounts for), the action, the performance of an accomplishment. (But how is this different from Hegel and time as fulfillment of the performance of spirit as history in abolute knowledge? Hegel’s time is perhaps a projection as fulfillment). Bloch seems to have a Hegelian model for the journey, with with destination always held in suspense. Time is the (concrete) fulfillment what is not accomplished, yet. Time as fulfillment requires a future that is, now, ‘nowhere’. Time as fulfillment is utopia and hope: protecting from the present what it is always expecting as the expected.

This seems a bit like Daniel’s dreams: dreams of things that are always ‘secret things’ in the present that ‘make known what shall come to pass’. Always somehow reserved, protected or held back from the present they are guaranteed, they guarantee, a future, a to come, whether it be a death beyond finite being, or the messiah.

Bloch perhaps never looses hope in the certainty of hope and in a present that in fact assures and completes the future as incomplete. This seems to be a mirror image of a nothingness that is always already being.

In the last 10 years, Derrida has increasingly spoken of a messianism without a messiah as a structure for an à-venir that neither of the present nor of the future (sans horizon d’attente et sans préfiguration prophétique). In his most recent book, Voyous, he speaks of the à venir:

^{Cet appel porte tous les espoirs, certes, mais il reste, en lui-même, sans espoir. Non pas désepéré mais étranger à la téléologie, à l’espérance et au salut de salvation. Non pas étranger au sault à l’autre, non pas étranger à l’adieu (“viens” ou “va” en paix), non pas étranger à la justice, mais encore hétérogène et rebelle, irrédutible au droit, au pouvoir, à l’économie de la rédemption.}

It seems very difficult to avoid the good conscience of the pure not yet, of a clean redemption to come. And yet, when I think of Jacob as the first great figure of remdemption, there is never any good conscience, just anguish, patience and time.

2003-04-08T06:37:00.000-07:00

Lecture 19. Part 2 A Digression: ‘Death, Speaking Poetry and Heidegger’.

I think your idea about tragedy in Lecture 19 is very interesting and ‘blood and soil’ as a metaphor for the understanding still in ‘thrall’ to being makes sense. (A ‘little off-beam’ is always more interesting than ‘on beam’). It is not quite the same thing, but in Difficult Freedom, Lévinas talks about the seduction and limitations of pathos (particularly a Christian pathos in Dostoyevsky). I am not sure about the Duino Elegies as ‘poems of earthy being’, the Sehnsucht and sublime terror of beautiful angels seemed to me, when I last read them some 10 years ago, more rarefied. Isn’t it who Heidegger turns from the fractured romanticism of Rilke to a poetic ‘earthy being’? I am not really sure about all this, so I am just glancing at the beginning of ‘What are Poets For?’ at the moment. Without getting diverted from Lévinas ...

From Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, there is ‘the Ab-’ as the ‘absence of the ground’, of the defaulting God that should ground the world. The ‘Ab-’ is also the absence of ‘the soil in which to strike root and to stand’. The ‘Ab’ is the default of God, ground and soil and announces ‘the world’s night, the abyss of the world’ which ‘must be experienced and endured’. How much of this is Heidegger and how much of it is Hölderlin I don’t know, but there is something heroic (it makes me think of The Robbers and Byron’s Manfred - heroism within the tragic) in enduring the abyss, in reaching ‘into the abyss’. Heidegger also links the ‘Ab-’ to the ‘the destitution of time’, almost as if the wealth and dwelling of time is found in soil-ground-God - and, as if, this restitution begins with the soil. But on the other hand, through Hölderlin, Heidegger only discerns traces of the ‘holy’ ‘ether’ of the ‘fugitive gods’. It is not the soil, but the wine and bread of an kind of disembodied transubstantiation that offers almost entirely ‘obliterated’ traces of restitution.

When he turns to Rilke, Heidegger sees a similar destitution of time ‘not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality’. How does one become ‘capable’ of his or her ‘own’ mortality? This makes me think of what remains, in my limited reading, the best of Blanchot: The Space of Literature (‘Doesn’t this faith which he [Rilke] expresses - this thought that one can die greeted by a death of one’s own, familiar and amicable - mark the point at which he eluded the experience by enveloping himself in a hope meant to console his heart?’). For Heidegger, or for Heidegger reading Rilke, time is destitute ‘because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love’. All that ‘remains’ is ‘the song ... which names the land over which it sings’. Is this land a land, or a metaphor for the absent, concealed land of death, of Being? Without the German text, I can’t even begin to answer this, but it is interesting that Heidegger goes on to cite an untitled poem of Rilke’s which begins:
As Nature gives the other creatures over
to the venture of their dim delight
and in soil and branchwork grants none special cover,
so to our being’s pristine ground settles our plight;
we are no dearer to it; it ventures us.

For Heidegger these lines ‘contrasts [the] human being with all other creatures’ , placing ‘things in an identical setting to make the difference visible’. Both humans and animals, as being, have a relation ‘to their ground’: ‘The ground of beings is Nature. The ground of man is not only of a kind identical with that of plant and beast. The ground is the same for both’. Soil is again linked to the ground that is more than the earth (it is the the ground for the world) and Nature is added to the absent triptych soil-ground-God from Hölderlin but, in this case, seems very much to be present. How is the ground of Nature different or similar to ‘the soil in which to strike root and to stand’? Heidegger goes on to call Nature, ‘the Being of beings’, the ‘ground ... for nature in the narrower sense’. Rilke’s pristine ground [Urgrund] is Being. I suppose in this sense, poetic speaking of soil, of ground is a metaphor for Being. I also just came across these lines in “poetically Man Dwells”, again through a reading of Höderlin: ‘Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’.

Blanchot: ‘The search for a death that would be mine sheds light, thanks to the obscurity of its paths, upon precisely what is difficult in artistic “realisation’’.

2003-03-24T04:33:00.000-08:00

Lecture 19.
This is probably a little off-beam, but I had the impression while re-reading this lecture that Lévinas’ goal was to show that art, in the sense of tragedy or poetry cannot answer to death for us. In this it seemed that Hegel, with his aesthetic religion puts forward tragedy as the place where we can come face to face with death in its human dimension. It is no so much the Germanic blood and soil thing as the fatalistic quality of the tragic arc that Lévinas cites as as evidence that this way of understanding is still in thrall to a positivistic sense of Being. In the language of tragdy this is the metaphoric assimilation of earth and ground. Fink, represents a refinement of this view, by way of Heidegger, and it seemed to me that the jist of what he makes Fink stand for is the late-Heideggerian view that poetic speaking can speak Dasein’s true relationship with Being. This kind of poetic speaking is alluded to when he says that [according to Fink] “Comprehension is in language and language can recount comprehension according to its modes (labour, war, love, play), which are behaviours in and towards being.”
I think the kind of poetry to have in mind here is something like Rilke’s Duino Elegies or the Sonnets To Orpheus. These are poems of earthly being, and of the turning towards the mystery of death but in a profoundly neo-pagan way.
Perhaps I’m forcing this interpretation somewhat. What Lévinas actually stresses is “intelligibility” - although in a way that seems contradictory. First he says that the difficulty of speaking of death is what marks it as intelligible, as if intelligibility is the obverse of thinkability, “We know death, but we cannot think it; we know it without being able to think it. It is in this sense that death …. must be received in silence.”
In the next paragraph however, it is the other way around, “In Fink, as in Heidegger, intelligibilty coincides with what can be said…” This is why I think that it is poetic speaking that is being alluded to – because it resolves the contradiction of what can be spoken but not thought, what we speak of while remaining silent about. It is the very aufhebung of silence and speech (sprachen).
“Can death be said without its nothingness being converted into a structure in-the-world?” asks Lévinas, begging the question of just what it means to think death with all due gravity as a part of earthly life. It already seems as though it is not enough, as if we are being encouraged to hastlily dismiss this way of speaking of (life and) death because “there is no liberation” in it. But just what sort of liberation does Lévinas have in mind?
It may well be that the tenor of feeling that Lévinas wishes to evoke is of a far more extreme kind than one finds in Rilke and the neo-pagans. I must confess that the enchantment of Rilke or Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs or the elegies of Arvo Paart doesn’t really work for me the way that it once might have done. It is usually the role of religion to bring us to peace with death, by somehow making it intelligible, and to hold out against this, against all forms of appeasement seems more honest, although even here we are preceded by poetry of perhaps an even more banal kind.
I am thinking also of Miguel da Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life” which is premised on exactly this refusal to be reconciled with death. I’m sure that this is not what Lévinas has is mind even in his protest against “being subsumed by the worldly”.
I’m not sure what he means about the “negative anthropology”, especially when he glosses this as the “search for a transcendental concept of man, a thinking prior to being.” The word “negative” here is probably not meant as an allusion to Blanchot, but rather as a trope for Heideggerian poetic post-metaphysics which he treats as if it were a form of dualism. The error it falls into, according to Lévinas, is to imagine that a thinking that is prior to being is anything but one more way to be subsumed by being. Whatever one thinks of Heidegger this seems to be question begging, on Lévinas’ part, in the extreme.
Similarly in his last paragraph. Isn’t the incomprehensibility of death a sign that the thinking that seeks to speak being is still on track? It may be “comprehension” is some larger sense, but it knows “don’t know”. It is Lévinas who at the end is left demanding some “model” of death – making a demand that can only be answered by that turn to higher forms of mythology known as religion.

2003-03-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

Lecture 19: The Scandal of Death: from Hegel to Fink

I had intended to add some notes on Derrida’s reading of Antigone in the last lecture. Very briefly, in Glas (1974) Derrida is concerned with the ‘moment’ of the family in the Philosophy of Right and reads Hegel on the Aufhebung of: love, the Holy Family (as a spirtual father-son relationship with the mother as a material by-product), Judaism and Jesus. He then turns to the question of sexual difference and death and comes to Hegel’s reading of Antigone and the role of the sister in burying the dead. I can’t even begin to summarise the 50 pages or so that Derrida devotes to Antigone. Just a few points. Derrida is interested in the apparently unqiue relation between the brother and sister that suspends all desire (“a sexual difference posited as such and yet without desire”). He asks why is Hegel fascinated with “this sister who never becomes citizen, or wife, or mother” - the ‘eternal sisiter’ who is without “womanly, wifely desire.” He also looks at Hegel’s relationship with his own sister. For Hegel, more than the daughter, mother or wife, the sister is the most “spirtual”, “ethical” of women. Perhaps one day we can return to Antigone, Hegel and - if you can bear it - even Derrida.

It must have been quite strange going to these lectures and having to wait a week for the last paragraph, the summation, of each lecture. I had some difficulty following this trasnsitional lecture as it moves from Hegel to Fink (and seems to recall Heidegger) before moving to Bloch and the final coda on death. I am just going let myself wander a bit ... and respond, obliquely, to your pertinent additional remarks on the radical dis-interest (as a divesting) of ethics by “post-modernism” and “otherness” as a sacramental ethics that perhaps elides the very singularity it seeks to protect and respect (the other as Other, as more than just another). I didn’t fully understand his use of the wonderful phrase “a negative anthropology”, but perhaps much of the greatness and the limitation of Lévinas’s sacramental ethics can be found in this phrase.

The summation of last week’s lecture seems to be: corruption is just a generation waiting-to-happen (a death-to-spirit). At the same time, Lévinas seems to allow for a pathos of finitude in Hegel. Knowledge is dangerous and what is “real is destined for destruction,” but, oh what a sublime destruction! Hegel recognises finitude and yet puts death to work for Spirit, for the univseral.

What is this undercurrent in the lectures on blood and soil? How to choose between the unrelenting grey finitude of Heidegger and the black and red drama of Hegelian finitude and the struggle to the universal? Perhaps, as Lévinas suggests, the brown earth brings the Germans together. Heidegger tries to take death out of Berlin Alexanderplatz and bring it back to earth in the pagan grottos. Hegel and Heidegger find grounds for being and the being of ground in death. Lévinas seems to imply that German death is an idealism of the elements, a phenomenology of the earth, an ontological nationalism. It reminds me of the end of the first series of Heimat, when all the voices of dead are valted over the German countryside and then gathered into the earth itself.

As you say, the emphasis on the importance of the survivor in Hegel suggests that Lévinas is closer to Hegel than he would admit (and this is Derrida’s point in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’). Perhaps Lévinas is saying, if death is unthinkable, unintelligible, if it is has nothing do with being or nothingness, nor with blood or soil - if it can be separated entirely from ontological-nationalism - then “death” is really about what kind of survivor you have, and how she or he uses death. Is death an incomprehsible irreducible singularity, one name after another or is it just a singularity on its way to some kind of explicit or implicit universal? As Derrida might ask, can it ever just be one or the other?

So, perhaps the question is - after Lévinas’s readings of Heidegger and Hegel - how do we not use death? Can death avoid “being converted into a structure in-the-world?” Can we avoid usuing death as something thinkable about being, family, place? Perhaps, for Lévinas death should not only be “no response” but also “no place”. But is such a prohibition possible? What does it mean to take death out of the world, out of history? And can it be read as a response to the uses of death in the aftermath of the twentieth century? Perhaps there cannot be such a thing as a “history” of death and yet the traces of nineteeth and twentieth century ideas of blood and soil almost seem to provide the occulted “ground” of Lévinas’s texts. Is such a prohibition only a reponse to the unburied? What is a negative thantology? Is it no more than an impotent cry that Death (as we have used it) shalt die?

2003-03-05T17:39:00.000-08:00

Thoughts out of sequence.

Our recent e-mail exchanges prompted me to define my difference from a classically conservative position, and it was not hard to see that far from being of that persuasion I am a more of a libertarian who finds that in the current climate the opposition is more likely to be sighted on the left than on the right. Not always, however, as for example the recent proposals by the Howard government here in Australia to impose blanket censorship of the internet in the interests of keeping pornography from teen-age boys. This kind of thing raises my hackles, not out of any regard for internet porn, which I think is mostly horrible stuff in every way, but at the arrogant assumption by the governing powers they are fit to determine what should or shouldn’t be seen by private citizens. A bit later some other things got me thinking about this in another way, which minus the particular circumstances, amounted to asking “What would Lévinas (or rather Lévinasian ethics) say about this?”
The ethical question is different from the political question, since the latter, at least on issues like this, is to some extent is concerned with the way in which ethical decisions are to be carried out, and with prioritisation of values. That said, it seems to me that the Lévinasian view would be strongly opposed to the dissemination of pornography because it proliferates images of the human face and form in contexts which make it impossible to feel the pathos of the ethical, and which work beyond their context to generally coarsen our ability to see others in their unique humanity, and to appreciate the tenderness and mystery of human relations.
This is not to say that people who consume pornography are less moral than others, only that their access to the Good as it is defined by Lévinas is hindered. Perhaps, however, Lévinas’ version of the Good is not the only one, perhaps it doesn’t even claim to be?
Shifting the question a bit, one might wonder to what extent the opening to an other in their radical otherness is central to ethics. It seems to me that a significant cause of Lévinas’ recent popularity is that post-modernism, with a kind of ethical zeal in the name of Otherness, demolished all principled ethics by demostrating the very particular interests that formed their hidden ground – the only thing that remained as a quasi-principle in all this was Otherness itself; and here was Lévinas basing his ethics on just this, and carefully and subtly demonstrating that Otherness, rightly understood, is not itself just another ground. I don’t think Lévinas had any intention of presenting post-modernism with a great-white-hope, I think he was trying to develop a religious vision of everyday life with sufficient ethical depth to withstand what Blanchot called “le désastre”.
Without attempting to create an exhaustive list one could say that there are three kinds of ethical system that enable a fine-tuning of our relations with others, as distinct from some kind of revealed legalistic rule based system. The first and most secular focusses on pain. This includes the ethics of karma in the Buddhist sense, where the pain we create in others comes back to us, and so as we see this compensatory function more and more clearly we become more and more tender in our dealings with others. In effect we become compassionate, since we can no longer distinguish anothers pain from our own. This kind of effective-compassion can also arise, it seems on purely logical grounds, as in the case of utilitarians. All pain is equivalent, in this view, no matter who feels it, so it is incumbent on us to act so as to reduce its aggregate as much as possible, or equivalently to raise general happiness.

The second is a rational-principial ethics as in Kant. What emerges here is not simply the empirical facts about pain, which may go either way, but an injunction with the authority of Reason which insists that the other is an end in himself, and can never be treated as a means. The split with utilitarianism could not be greater, as evidenced by some of the views of Peter Singer, who has taken the latter to its logical limit. In particular, there is his view that parents have the right to kill off a seriously disabled, but viable, child at birth. The Kantian sees the other as an absolute, but does not have to open his heart to the other in any way, doesn’t have to feel anything in relation to the other. There must however be a recognition of the other as other and I’m not sure how a Kantian would deal with certain marginal cases except by a further appeal to the categorical imperative - which may considerably sharpen one’s conscience. If a Kantian was tempted to consign some category of humanity (eg disabled babies) to non-personhood, he need only ask himself about the merits of making such determinations mandatory and he will most likely be dissuaded.

The third is the kind of ethics that Lévinas is presenting. I would call this a sacramental ethics, since in this the relation with the other ultimately occurs on the sacred plane. A Christian writer I recently saw quoted put it like this (freely paraphrased): We come to know each other in the love that God bears towards Himself, as we are parts of God. This is a rather beautiful sentiment, and it entails a least one interesting conclusion which none of the other ethical systems attain, and that is, that it is Good in itself to know the other deeply, even though you can never fathom any other person completely. One doesn’t find this expressed in so many words in Lévinas but I believe it is there – the up-side, one might say, of all his hostage-giving / in extremis stuff. Since he is speaking to a secular audience death comes to stand for the entire spiritual sphere because it is the one thing which even an atheist must stand in fear and trembling before. Again, this idea of the intrinsic good of intimate knowing of an other is close to the de facto ethics of literary humanism, which is another reason why university post-modernists hang on to Lévinas.
We can also see why Lévinas is so repelled by Hegel’s “divine law” which seems in some ways to be close to his own view. Dragging us back to the family and its hothoused resentments is exactly the opposite of the sacramental cosmic family, freed of resentment, in which we participate as worshippers of God.
In this kind of ethic there is an intrinsic vision of what a community consciously sacramental would be like and a commitment to work towards the realisation of such on earth. This is not sympathetic to lassez-faire libertarianism, it takes sides, it acknowledges the existence of evil.
Beautiful as it is there is to me something suspicious about this sacramental ethics, and I think it lies in the Big ideas that are brought in which give the ethics so much depth but seem to miss the responsibility to the petty, comic, everyday, tit-for-tat sides of human nature. These enthusiasts would have us be uninterruptedly sublime, and in doing so commit an injustice to our small, all too human, selves.

2003-02-28T22:58:00.000-08:00

Lecture 18

Before I begin I want to acknowledge the death of Maurice Blanchot on the 20th Feb 2003. Reading Blanchot forever deepens one’s appreciaion of the mysteries of death and the phenomena of life and its reproduction. I presume that right now the shade of MB is recovering from the surprise of finding out that he got it all terribly wrong.

Back to Lévinas.
I actually found this lecture to be quite puzzling and possibly tendentious. After giving a very fair account of Hegel’s observations on Human Law and Divine Law in the previous lecture in this one he seems to overlook so much else that Hegel says in order to be able to relegate him to a convenient distance from the main track.

I take your and Derrida’s point here about a certain generation of French thinkers being too quick to see Hegel’s philosophy as an infernal machine sublimating everything human – but no longer to be called human – into idealised vapour.
Also about their ideologically driven insistence on their own immense respect for the concrete particular, which even in D&G is a sort of Satrean move. One proved one’s ethical purity by the fierceness of one’s denunciation of idealism. (I was tremendously impressed with this when at odds with my own idealising urges.)

I don’t accept Lévinas’ argument that seems to run like this: The divine law is still a law, therefore it thinks the person “by virtue of the universality of law.” Death then is viewed as the means for the divine law to get its hands on the person in the form of a manifest universality, namely as “deceased”.
One of the big things he skips over here is the gendered nature of the relevant passages in Hegel. Within the family, which is the locus of the divine law it is the brother/sister relationship in which it is most purely manifest and even here it is particularly the sister.

“In this relationship … the moment of the individual self, recognising and being recognised, can here assert its right, because it is linked to the equilibrium of the blood and is a relation devoid of desire. …
[The brother] passes from the divine law, within whose sphere he lived, over to human law. But the sister becomes… the guardian of the divine law. In this way the two sexes overcome their natural being and appear in their ethical significance..” [457-9]

Again this sense of the law is not something raised into conceptual universality:

“Therefore they do not desire one another, nor have they given to or recived from one another this independent being-for-self; on the contrary; they are free individualities in regard to each other. Consequently the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical. She does not attain to consciousness of it…because the law of the Family is an implicit inner essence …” [457]

I would say that this is a model for Lévinas’ ethical relation, albeit restricted to the Family, in fact to a dyad having “blood-ties”. Lévinas makes much of the “blood-ties” – he loves to quote this phrase and to juxtapose it with references to the earth, in order to create the connotation that Hegel is just spouting more of that German “blood and soil” stuff, but actually if you look at the references to blood-ties in this passage from the Phenomenology they are actually about absence of sexual desire, which is ascribed to an “equilibrium of the blood”. Indeed it is easy to imagine the same kind of ethical relations functioning in any community where the men are all “brothers” and the women “sisters”.

To tease out the status of death in these passages of Hegel it is not enough to focus on the material relating to burial, to do this is to beg Lévinas’ question, since you are bound to find many chthonic references. Consider instead this: “The loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister and her duty towards him is the highest.” This seems to me another prefiguration of Lévinas’ view, but in the key of the family relationship. It reminds me of a remarks I made early on, that Lévinas wants to make Antigones of us all, and also of a thread that has run through our discussions of acknowledging the preremptory duty that the death of another imposes upon us but seeing the locus of this as extending not much further than our extended family – with ‘extended’ in the loosest sense.

I must confess that I didn’t understand what Lévinas was getting at in the last parts of this lecture. What does this mean: “.. Hegel comes closer to it here, but he speaks of it on the basis of the behaviour of the survivor [why the ‘but’? Isn’t this exactly what Lévinas does too?] – although one could not take a less reifying approach to death than Hegel does here, since it is neither a thing nor a person, but a shadow.” [Where does Hegel call death a shadow?]

Why does Lévinas suddenly announce, “We can now turn to Hegel’s chapter on religion.” We are far from that chapter in the text of the Phenomenology. He only makes the vague connection between the reading of Antigone that is taking place here and the “Aesthetic Religion” in order to invoke a number of terms that might otherwise seem out of place. I’m thinking in particular of the ground/appearance distinction which Lévinas seems to trace to the imaginal invocation of the “shades” of the dead.

This is actually a Blanchottian moment in Lévinas, the treating of the dead boby as the source of the aesthetic image, whose false-in-the-true easily slides into the true-in-the-false of idealism.

There is a more interesting discussion of the efficay of the shade in the Phenomenology at 474.
“But if the universal thus easily… carries off victory over the rebellious principle of pure individuality, viz the Family, it has thereby entered on a conflict with the divine law…. For the latter is the essential power, and is therefore not destroyed, but merely wronged, by the conscious Spirit. But it has only the bloodless shade to help it in actually carrying out its law… Being the law of weakness and darkness it therefore at first succumbs to the powerful law of the upper world …. But the outwardly actual which has taken away from the inner world its honour and power has in so doing consumed its own essence. … Thus it is that the fulfilment of the spirit of the upper world is transformed into its opposite, and it learns that its supreme right is a supreme wrong… The dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of vengeance … these powers are other communities whose altars the dogs of birds defiled with the corpse which [precisely as defiled] has now acquired as a force of divine law a self-conscious real universality.”

This could be interpreted as saying that the death of the other does command a certain power of vengeance, not through metaphysical agencies, ghosts and such, but through the fact the bright powers of consciousness that affront it have their source in the dark powers of the unconscious, which exert an inexorable compensatory force. This is a highly un-Levinasian thought. We are supposed to be beyond all of that karma or punishment stuff, and yet by basing his ethics on the phenomenon of death Lévinas opens himself to all of these forces.

2003-02-23T06:01:00.000-08:00

Lecture 18: Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology

I have no home on earth and none below,
not with the living, not with the breathless dead
Antigone (941-42)

This is an remarkable lecture, surrounding an extraordinary quote from the Phenomenology. There is something very strange about this paragraph in Hegel. It is as if the Hegelian machine runs on after death - as if the journey of the soul from sense through self-consciousness to absolute knowledge is not really concerned with the life and death of a man or woman (except perhaps Antigone). The great speculative machine goes on after death and gives a ghostly almost vampiric - even cannibalistic - quality to “the dead individual” at the “mercy” irrational forces and “unconscious appetites.” The vampire that feeds on “the dead individual” is matter. Burial by the family enacts what is presumably the last Aufhebung (but we haven’t reached “religion” yet), the last ‘incorporation’ or ‘de-corpsing’ of an individual by a universal.

I recently read Deleuze and Guattari insisting in What is Philosophy? that "the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always singular" and I was struck by so many post-war philosophers (particularly in France) sharing what must a post-Hegelian refusal of universals. Lévinas makes his own stance very clear: “here, in our present inquiry, the person is an individual other, and every universal must begin from there” (85).

I also wonder, is Hegel really talking about “persons”? The “dead” is a “being-for-itself that becomes a “universal individuality”. Obviously this is Lévinas’s point, the individual other is entirely subsumed or consumed in the Hegelian machine. But I also recall Derrida challenging the “anthropologistic reading of Hegel” in “The Ends of Man” (1968), noting;

^{First of all, the Phenomenology of Spirit, which had only been read for a short time in [post-war] France, does not have to do with something one might simply call man. As the science of the experience of consciousness, the science of the structures of phenomenality of the spirit itself relating to itself, it is rigourously distinguished from anthropology.}

For Hegel, burial of the dead by the family overcomes “matter” as “the master” of being. Hegelian burial (and his reading of Antigone) are, Lévinas says, “a destruction of death.” As I suspected in the last lecture, Lévinas makes much of the dead as the deceased and not as a cadaver in Hegel (which must have some resonance from his reading of Heidegger), but I found the last section of Lévinas’s lecture very subtle.

He argues that Hegel turns death into a “shadow,” a dematerialisation of “the dishonour of anonymous decomposition.” But, at the same time, he discerns in Hegel’s treatment of death a “the idea of ground, or final ground” that is a “return to the ground of being.” Death, as part of relentless machine of ever diminishing and ever increasing singularity and universality, overcomes matter and, in what is perhaps the “final" Aufhebung, is the ground of being. Though I am not entirely sure I followed this, Lévinas also seems to imply that death is the possibility of phenomenology: as a dematerialised ground of being it introduces an authentic “world of appearance” into thought. Is death then at the “beginning” of the Phenomenology, before sense-certainty, as it is in the Preface? As if the end has already authenticated the beginning? As if the Phenomenology - phenomenology itself - must already be buried, be dead, to begin? Finally,when Lévinas say that Hegel describes the “return to the ground of being” as “the return to the elements,” I am sure he is directing his listeners to his account of the elements in Totality and Infinity:

^{Before possession as dwelling in a home (before the “enjoyment of self”), the subject encounters the elements. The elements are “essentially non-possessable, ‘nobody’s’: earth, sea, light, city.” “Every relation or possession,” Lévinas insists, “is situated within the non-possessable which envelops or contains without being able to be contained or enveloped.” Formless, anonymous, the element presents “the strangeness of the earth,” the there is, “the nothingness which separates.”}

2003-02-15T03:49:00.000-08:00

Lecture 17

The resonances you note in your opening lines are inescapable these days. I was struck too in a similar vein, but I was thinking of the “peace movement” and the reluctance to consider the option of war of contemporary Germany. This seems to be such an ethical position and yet something always smells bad about it to me. There isn’t that red thread of recognition of the divine law.

These passages in Hegel have always been among my favourites and they provide endless food for thought. I agree that Lévinas’ exposition is wonderful, and wonderful too how it illuminates the French Hegel of his time. I’m holding out however for the punchline in the next lecture(?). One can see Lévinas positioning himself but I don’t want to pre-empt.

It seems however that as much as Hegel in these passages appears to be pointing the same way as Lévinas – the death of the other as an indelible responsibility to them – if you extrapolate from Hegel you don’t get to Lévinas – at the very least H. still rests on an element of “blood and soil” – the divine of his “divine law” is a cthonic divine – something that repels Lévinas on many levels.

To some extent it comes down to the question of who you feel this spontaneous responsibility for. Is it the Other as every other, every bearer of a human face, in whatever form, or is it just your family, tribe, circle of friends or special interest group?
The Hegel passages are redolent of a certain historical period, a pre-modern stage in the development of civilisations. “Man contemplates himself in the public law and opposes himself to the obscurity from which he detached himself. In the law, in broad daylight, he reflects himself.”

(I am reminded of a story by Bashevis Singer: A Warsaw Jew who has educated himself in the best of Western Culture shares his enlightenment by penning essays on Kant for the Yiddish press. The typesetting was manual and sometimes strange mix-ups occured. A key phrase is missing from one of his pieces and he searches through the rest of the paper to find it. Finally it appears in a piece of court reporting about a low-life accused of incest with his daughter. The witness’ report reads, “I entered the room and found them in the transcendental unity of apperception!”)

At any rate Lévinas does not seem to belong to such a world. His ethics are for a kind of self that we might only find in the post-modern, or perhaps a self that it still to come. There is a belief current among spiritual types that the circle of concern expands and universalises as one “develops” spiritually. That’s why there always seems to be something of the cutting-edge about things like veganism and pacifism, which seem more properly, to me, to belong to Hegel’s “beautiful soul” formation.
If Lévinas is advocating something like this extension of the moral sense, the true aufhebung of the divine law, to its widest possible compass, then it is incumbent on him to do more than propose this in a pious way but show us how to reconcile it with the complexity that that level of perception entails.

Your observations about the question of the question seemed on the mark too. It seems to go something like this: the essence of response is questioning, but the essence of questioning must be response – or at least responsibility. The first is the quintessential phenomenological move: to properly respond is to answer to the depth of things, and to meet this depth one must uncover its origin within ourselves, to question. The second is the great French discovery, by way of Mallarmé, that the essential question is the unanswerable question, is the negative of the question. I still like to hover in the strangely vibrating nothing that this points to, and so feel a little harried when Lévinas tells me it is time to stop dreaming and start taking responsibility.

2003-02-14T03:30:00.000-08:00

Lecture 17: From the Science of Logic to the Phenomenology.

Reading this lecture, as an hour and half away from me, tanks patrol Heathrow airport, I wondered if anyone in the White House had been reading the Phenomenology of Spirit lately? For Hegel, war is the recalling of the individual from nature and the family towards spirit and the state. War is for the communal spirit and, through the political, a becoming aware of the whole as an encounter with death.

More mundanely, I was reminded again of the great importance of the Phenomenology for post-war French philosophy and the influence of Jean Hyppolite.

Lévinas asks, how do we respond to “the undeniable end”? Again, Lévinas suggests that death raises a question of the question. To respond to death “is a questioning that is not a simple modality of the theoretical expression of belief, of doxa.” We must, Lévinas says, “search for a response that is not a response” - suggesting that we will know that we have asked the right kind of question about death when, uniquely, there is no response.

However, he adds, that we must look for “a response that is not a response but responsibility.” I am still unsure about the link between the uniqueness of death as non-response and the ubiquity of responsibility for the other. But perhaps, the responsibility from the non-response of the death of the other is uniquely the responsibility of the survivor, perhaps that is part of Lévinas’s point in returning to Hegel’s preoccupation with Antigone?

Reading Lévinas’s account of Hegel, I think it is a pity that he did not write more commentary directly on the Phenomenology. I have to say that I had never made the connection with the “immediate” being a Cartesian “cogito all alone” (yet another reason for the importance of the French reception of Hegel as the introduction of thinking as ‘a thinking between consciousness” and for the necessity of recognising the other).

If - following Antigone - the first responsibility (following the divine law) of the survivor to the non-response of death is seeing to burying of the dead (despite the law of the state), Hegel imbues this responsibility for the dead with the progression of substance to subject, with the spirit as “universal and nonimmediate consciousness”. He also infuses the corpse with spirit. For Hegel, the first responsibility to the non-response requires that “the dead one” has a status that is at once individual and universal (“a universal essence without being a citizen”).

If the first responsibility of the survivor is seeing to burying of the dead, I wonder when Lévinas says at the end “the act of burial is a relationship with the deceased, and not with the cadaver,” - a cadaver is perhaps an absolute singularity, a “dead one” that is without response and that I am responsible for, a “dead one” which is without spirit (a death without Antigone) - if he is not also implicitly thinking of the lines from the beginning of Psalm 79:

^{The dead bodies of thy servants they have given to be food to the birds of the sky, the flesh of thy pious ones to the beasts of the earth. Their blood have they shed like water round about Yerushalayim; and there was none to bury them.}

2003-02-03T05:03:00.000-08:00

Lecture 16
Yes, this was a refreshingly short lecture, which gives me all the less of an excuse for being so tardy in getting to it. What can I say? It has been so ennervatingly hot here in Melbourne and since I live in two houses on opposite sides of town I don’t always have my copy of GDT with me…

There is an interesting distinction running through your post. For me it almost amounts to saying that Kant is to Hegel as Judaism is to Christianity. Yes, of course Kant would have been horrified with what Hegel made of his finely drawn limits of Reason – like anthropomorphising the sky God we’d just spent several centuries de-anthropomorphising. Still, Judaism has its own fair share of dialecticians, especially amongst the Kabbalists.

I’m interested too in your question, “Why is there no becoming that is not phenomenal?” It is close to the question that suggested itself to me as I was reading this lecture. If the nothing of the pair being/nothing does not apply to the death of a fellow human, surely it is also true that being doesn’t wholly apply to the lives of such as us? Even in a Heideggerian or Satrean way we can say that our mode of being is to hold Being in question. So then, rightly, if our death were a victory of the nothing then it would be as if we had been mistaken all this time in doubting our being, it would prejudice the outcome of a research that cannot end. No, the evidence of death is precisely equally divided on the sides of being and nothingness – just as all the efforts of life to manifest being once and for all always fall short, no matter how monumental the achievements of the life.

Returning to non-phenomenal becoming, one could say that everything phenomenal is a becoming because in order to reveal itself a being must bring about some kind of change that draws attention to it. Who can say how much undiscovered immensity there is in our witnessing of life, only that it has never yet moved, and constituted as we are we cannot attend to it. But this is not the same as saying that every becoming is phenomenal. What is it that cannot by any definition, or any shift of attention, be a phenomenon? Only that which sees phenomena, the eye which cannot see itself but which must be present in any seeing. It seems to me that this, which you could call perhaps, pure witnessing, escapes the categories of being/nothingness just as well as death. And in so far as verbs suit it better than nouns one could stretch then so far as to call it becoming – but of a scandalously non-Hegelian kind.

2003-01-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

Lecture 16: Reading Hegel’s Science of Logic

I don’t really have that much to say about this short lecture (the students must have been in and out of the Sorbonne in no time). I just have a few rather elliptical remarks.

I was thinking about what you said some time ago about Kant and reason (“the thing that is most real, most concrete for Kant is Reason itself”). Lévinas brought to my attention that for Hegel “a thought of Reason” is a “speculative proposition”. What would Kant say about this, how would it effect the reality and authority of Reason?

“Becoming is the phenomenal world, the manifestation of being.” Why? Is there no “becoming” that is not the phenomenal world, the manifestation of being”?

Though we have not touched on it here, we have talked elsewhere about Catherine Chalier’s writing on the creatio ex nihilo in Lévinas’s work as an indication of the religious preoccupations (the conflict between Christian and Jewish theology - the creatio ex nihlio marking a radical separation of the divine and human world that both rejects any anthropocentrism and is the very source of responsibility for others as a act for God - and more specifically, between the mitnagdim and hassidim in Lithuania) informing his philosophy. I was struck by his emphasising that the unity of being and nothingness in Hegel (difference, negation always already working for becoming) is “a Christian thought” and, therefore, that the creatio ex nihlio “would confirm the speculative proposition”.

I’ve also been thinking about the so-called pre-Socratics. Hegel quotes Heraclitus and I’ve always thought Hegel was inspired by Heraclitus’s observation that the universe “in differing, agrees with itself”. I’ve been reading the fragments of Parmenides and now know who to blame for this endless story of being (Heidegger goes on and on about it and Lévinas’s goes on and on about Heidegger). Parmenides (and his pupil Melissus) seem to be saying (in a phrase that only reinforces Heidegger’s observation that language has always already “got us’ when it comes to being) - ‘there is never not being’. Melissus says what exists has always existed and it is infinite (and therefore, as Lévinas notes, the opposition between “what is” and “what is not” is in no way like the “seizure” of death). However, I noticed that Melissus also adds that what exists is also incorporeal (infinite, incorporeal, cannot not exist ... sounds familiar .. we always seem to get back to “God” one way or another). Still, my favourite pre-Soctratic philosopher, and perhaps the most Jewish of the lot, was Xenophanes, who said that “there is one god, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought”. He also recognised the Greek propensity to represent the divine in their own image, saying: if cows had hands they would draw their gods like cows .

2003-01-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

Lecture 15.

I agree that Lévinas seems far less encumbered when not speaking of Heidegger. With Hegel one makes jokes, that is the general feeling. Of course this has all been set up by the conclusion of the previous lecture – after all what else is Hegel for Paris than “Western” thought incarnate?

I’m inclined to ask, “What’s wrong with the Aufhebung anyway?” – At least as a process of thought or understanding it does serve to describe the way that views supercede each other and grow more inclusive. Of course not everything is preserved, and the path traced out may not be unique or determined by any destination (how would we know if we are still on it?), but these reservations still leave us with an Aufhebung of sorts. When I think of myself and my understanding of life as it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago, it seems to me that I stand at a higher, albeit more lonely, and more tired, point of vision than I did then. Perhaps we need a new version of that old 70s song, “Aufhebung is not a dirty word.”

The point being that once you embrace such a notion it becomes immediately clear what its limitations are, immediately clear that Lévinas’ “other” is in no way analogous to the nothingness which fits so snugly with being in the Hegelian crib.
I think the reason for the lip-curling rejection of the Aufhebung in intellectual circles of the second half of the 20th Century is a purely aesthetic one. The shape, the tonality, the music of it did not sound right to our ears. We were mad for a certain elusive dissonance and strove to find it everywhere and could hardly imagine we’d end up with Philip Glass!

In suggesting that Lévinas’ distinction between self and other is effectively a Hegelian thesis/antithesis, Derrida as usual is barking up the wrong tree, but if Derrida did not exist we would have to invent him, he is the exeplary dupe of the jargon of signification. You have to step out of the text to see what Lévinas is pointing to, and there is absolutely no way to persuade anyone to do so. I agree that Derrida is in an ongoing dialogue with Lévinas, and it is also possible to see in late Lévinas an ongoing dialogue with Derrida, but then Derrida “wins” and you lose the awakening that Lévinas offers in a maze of quibbles.

On the other hand Lévinas’ confidence that he has found a point within the philosophical examination of life where one must step out of the role of thinker, not merely because one’s wife is suggesting that it is time to go to bed, but because of the exigencies of the thought itself, is surely misplaced. If anyone can prove this confidence is misplaced it is Derrida! Lévinas overplays his hand of course with all that stuff about “Every death is a murder.” - he is asking for his own thought to be murdered.

One could say that the dialectic is the best that we come up with when we try to understand understanding as a concrete historical impulse in in our lives and in our worlds. Does it also entail the belief that there is nothing but understanding? I think not, but this is a tricky question when we come to pose it because it is asking for an understanding of the limits of understanding, and hence to some degree of what is beyond understanding. The precise degree involved is what determines whether we are in the Kantian or nominally Hegelian camps. Does knowing that you can’t know entail knowing what you can’t know?

Lévinas’ relaxed exposition of Hegel’s originary dialectic of being and nothingness makes it clear that this is of quite a different order than what he has been pointing to in the effect on us of the death of someone we are face to face with. There are two different nothingnesses here, in the simplest terms we could call them a first/third person (subjective/objective) nothingness and a second person nothingness. If we vividly grasp how strange it is that there should be two such heterogenous originary nothingnesses then of course we are immediately led to an Aufhebung, an expansion of understanding in which our world is enlarged and we stop dumbly trying to reduce the second person to an effect of the first and third. This doesn’t mean that we now claim to “understand” the other – to think that would be to miss the whole point, no, we have just come to understand what the other is for us.

Hope and Love conducted by a trio of saints. Before the last of these he is struck blind
Towards the end of the Paradiso Dante submits to a series of oral exams on Faith, as a result of peering with too much curiosity into the light-body of St James. The allegorical meaning however is that love, the highest of the theological virtues is independent of understanding. The content of Dante’s answers belies this to a large extent, he derives love as if it were a logical conclusion from the authority of the scriptures and this despite the fact that it is the very personal love between him and Beatrice which has enabled this entire ascent. When the examination is over it is the rays from Beatrice’s gaze into his eyes that resore Dante’s sight to him, “So that I saw better than I had before.” There is a performative acknowlegement here of something that “Western” thought has always known but never understood.

2003-01-05T04:17:00.000-08:00

Lecture 15: Hegel’s Response: The Science of Logic

I liked your redefinition of the question of how to think nothingness in relation to death as an inconsolability and the hope for consolation. I think you are right that Lévinas relies on Kant more than he admits to get “outside” Heidegger. I was also struck, reading lecture 15, by the difference in style when Lévinas is speaking of Kant or Hegel and when he is speaking of Heidegger. The concise, magisterial summary of Kant and Hegel is so different from the laboured, entangled and endlessly reworked reading of Heidegger. It is interesting what you say about Lévinas’s earlier texts and it is almost as if once he sets himself the explicit task of thinking beyond being, he is inextricably tied to Heidegger, like Ahab and the whale.

I still think that Derrida makes a compelling case for the short comings of Lévinas’s reading of Hegel: in attempting to avoid negativity - the engine of the Aufhebung - Lévinas adopts an “absolute” anti-Hegelianism (a transcendence of negation, of history and difference) which “mirrors” and “invites” the Aufhebung and history as spirit that culminates in absolute knowledge. At the same time, I am still curious about both Lévinas’s and Derrida’s relation to Kant. It seems that so much of the French reception of Heidegger (and perhaps Husserl) is based on a variation of a complex negotiation between between Kant and Hegel. I seem to remember Ricoeur referring somewhere to a post-Hegelian Kantianism. Anyway, I still have much to read.

Again, perhaps because of the change in style, I actually really enjoyed this lecture. Lévinas begins, as I would have expected in a reading of Hegel, with the question of “a negativity radically other than the negativity thought by Greek philosophy.” And yet, his fine reading of “the beginning” as “indetermination” does not rush to transcendence. The indeterminacy of a dialect at the start is, in effect, the grist of an inevitable determination. History is the history of becoming: “the beginning is not yet, but is going to be.” The beginning is a nothingness that must become something: being. The negation or movement of negativity that gets things going at the start (the petrol for the Aufbehung as the engine of the history as spirit) ensures that to think nothingness is, ultimately, to assert identity (74).

I wonder if in some way Lévinas is also referring here to Derrida’s critique of his own anti-Hegelianism. Lévinas seems to appreciate that “pure being” or “pure nothingness” are, to change metaphors, just wood for the Hegelian, a pure difference that invites the Aufhebung. How is Lévinas going to counter the Hegelian dialect of nothingness and being as the history of becoming? By a “pure” anti-Hegelianism?

Having enthused about the inability to think nothingness in the last lecture (and, as I am sure you have seen, I am always a sucker for a scrap of epiphany), I would now like to enthuse over Lévinas’s account of a “confined” nothingness, a nothingness that is put to work in the great Hegelian machine. Of course, I would add that Hegel’s architecture of becoming (of being that is already becoming) is - as Lévinas says - founded on “a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself” and, as Derrida suggest, this difference is hardly assured in the Hegelian project.

Finally, to return to opening of the lecture.

Lévinas appears to echo Husserl’s definition of consciousness as “consciousness of something” when he says that death is “the death of someone.” Perhaps, as you suggest, there is an occulted phenomenology of death in Lévinas’s lectures.

Thinking of some of your earlier remarks (about murder and the other), beyond the always unexpected moment of death, what does it mean when Lévinas says “every death is a murder”?

And why is it that ‘everything unfolds in death as though man were not a simple being that perishes’? This still seems to me an essential question and evokes on the one hand, an “empirical” imperative of death as the physicality of dying in a hospital and, on the other hand, the inconsolability and the hope for consolation that you speak of. Though I enthuse about not being able to think nothingness and about being able to think it in the operation and faults of the Hegelian machine, it is perhaps also Kant that I rely on when thinking of death.

2002-12-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

Lecture 14.
I suppose what you mean by Lévinas’ stab here at a “philosophy of dying” is that in raising the question “How to think nothingness?” he is implicitly insisting that the only way to satisfy this demand is to present a way of speaking of what death confronts us with – “what death, in its nothingness, puts in question other than our being.”

This seems a strange and self-contradictory demand – like some Zen injuction: “Speak of what cannot be spoken of!” – but it seems to me that Lévinas is more interested in playing the French game of exposing the blind-spots in “Western thought” than in actually waking anybody up.

“One cannot fail to acknowledge the nothingness of death, but one cannot know it either.” This sentence is in the register of a certain humility in the face of death, iseparable from one way of grasping the human condition – we immediately know how to read this, what tone to give it. Immediately afterwards he shows up a lot more sure of the stakes: “… the negativity of death, as more negative than nothingness, as vertigo and risk experienced in the ‘less than nothing.’ A negativity that is neither thought nor even felt…” Who say?!
The only positive terms here are “vertigo and risk,” and these belong perhaps to your undeveloped philosophy of dying. As such, I would say that they are primarily psychological terms and would need to be examined thoroughly to see whether they justify being lifted into philosophical clues as to the nature of the reality of death.

I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself here, I’d planned to begin by tracing out the shape of the lecture, so let me try to do that now. There are two parts separated by the parenthetical section on p.67, the hiatus makes it appear that they are more closely linked than is in fact the case. The first is on the “place” of Kant’s rational hope, that is, its place in the metaphysical universe. The conclusion he draws is that since it can’t be in space and time it is in “nothingness”. This may be fine in a manner of speaking, but I don’t think Kant would be too happy with such language. We are distracted from wondering about this by the parenthetical section, which hints at the way that Lévinas is leading us. The hope may be in time, but not a time such as you, Horatio, have been able to conceive it. If it is God’s time or Messianic time towards which hope is pointing then this leaves a blank on our radar not because it is out of time, or in some kind of nothingness, but because our antennae cannot register such an unprecedented event. Eugen Fink is trotted out as the token benighted phenomenologist, so mindlessly attached to the category of being that he cannot grasp the place of this hope as anything more than some shadowy interspace. The key thing is that he only concept able to deal with the place of this hope with an intensity equal to what such a hope must do for our lives, here and now, is Lévinas’ own “beyond being”.

In the second, and longer, section Lévinas treats the various ways in which certain philosophers have treated the concept of nothingness: Bergson, Heidegger, Husserl and Aristotle. Bergson and Aristotle are philosphers for whom being is life and so their perspective blinds them to the essence of death – as Lévinas is unfolding it, which is death as experienced by us in the event of facing it, whether our own imminent death or that of another person close to us – the touchstone of which is that we are shaken to the core: Timor mortis conturbat me, as the old lyric puts it, (“Fear of death is freaking me out” – as we would say.) Husserl doesn’t catch it either because, although he is a philosopher of infinitely fine examination of experience the units of experience are “thoughts”, or better “theses”, all the way down. There is no room here for an experience of what “conturbat” could mean, the point when the little man commentating in your head finally vanishes. The treatment of Heidegger is a little more tricky, since Heidegger is precisely fascinated by philosophical content of non-thetic phases of life – “sentiments, actions, etc., which are all irreducible to serene representation”. In fact Lévinas’ method, at least in his earlier works was just in this line, examining boredom and insomnia for non-theoretical clues to our true metaphysical state. In this lecture he lumps Heidegger with the other thinkers whom death has “defied” because Heidegger’s interest is “to think nothingness”, and this word “think” makes it seem as if he is still with Husserl. This is a bit disingenuous, and not really necessary since he has made a pretty good case that Heidegger’s grasp on nothingness is slanted by his insistence on “Being” as the highest category.

The paragraph the sums it up is on p.70 when he says, “In death, as pure nothingness, as foundationlessness – which we feel more dramatically , with the acuteness of that nothingness that is greater in death than in the idea of the nothingness of being …”
This is however, presented here as something we feel, rather than think, not quite the Blanchottian “negativity that is neither thought nor even felt” of two pages ago. As feeling it is hardly something absent from the Western tradition, it is what one might call “inconsolability”.
To pursue further into this as a philosophical cue, as in Heidegger, but with the added “risk” that one does not take Being as a foundation (which is the path of the late Heidegger as well) seems to me to be a veiled way of repeating the Kantian move. We are inconsolable and yet we “know” somehow that there must be consolation and so we find ourselves called into a context beyond being, a sacred context.

2002-12-18T12:59:00.000-08:00

Lecture 14: How to Think Nothingness

Given our discussion from Lecture 13 of a rational hope that suggests - as you say - “a larger cosmic order” for Kant, or “sacramental”, and even “quasi-messianic” folds in time and traces of otherness - given all this, it was a surprise to find that we have now moved to the limits of ‘Western thought’ and gazed from those limits into the abyss of an unthinkable nothingness.

Without, as you say, “getting all Blanchot” about this nothingness and giving it the privileged status of a “temporal nothingness” than can be thought in the West (and which gives the impersonal, the neutral, the ‘empty’ a grace and grandeur) or giving it some kind of Eastern virtue of negation (like neti-neti) - without all these temptations - I was actually relieved to see Lévinas using Kantian rational hope marking out a threshold that was a threshold, a limit - of death as an unthinkable and “undeniable” nothingness.

My relief was in a sense an intellectual satisfaction at a philosophy of the limit, of the limitations of philosophy - somehow, in this context, it is a limit that gets closer to death as dying in a hospital (last night I saw a remarkable TV film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson, called Wit, about a Professor of English who specialises in Donne’s holy sonnets (‘Death be not proud...’ was discussed, of course and emphasis put on the proper punctuation of the last line of the poem being: ‘And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die’). The film is almost entirely shot in a hospital and follows her chemotherapy for ovarian cancer and her dying. Far from the question of anticipation of death as an opening of the future or responsibility for death of the other, this film left me with a profound fear of dying and it made me think that philosophy can perhaps only deal with death and somehow cannot address dying. Without recourse to an ‘empiricism’, is a philosophy of dying possible?)

It is interesting that Lévinas had characterised Kantian rational hope as both in and beyond time, whereas here rational “hope is a hope that cannot be compared with hope in time”: it is a non temporal rational hope, a “void” that cannot be filled by either time or being. What kind of “rational hope” is unfufillable, a-temporal and transcendent? Is this, to pick up on a point you made a few weeks ago, a virtual hope and a virtual rationality that projects itself (“like an extra-ordinary projection of meaning”) across the abyss of nothingness? Is this part of what Lévinas hints at when he asks, ‘Is to think simply to live’?

It is also interesting that Lévinas seems to be turning to negation and the negative - to a nothingness more negative than Aristotle or Bergson can address and a nothingness more inaccessible than Husserl or even Heidegger can admit. Derrida, I think rightly, makes much of Lévinas’s shying away from the negative in his early work in an attempt to avoid the Hegelian colonisation of negation as the engine of history as spirit. Though I hardly can presume to have a good knowledge of Heidegger, it seemed like a real insight into his work when Lévinas says, “what fascinates Heidegger about death is the possibility he finds in it of thinking nothingness’.

I also found the “performative” nature of the parenthetical note on page 67 fascinating - is this an unscripted aside in his lecture? It is presented as an aside and yet it appears to say something quite significant: pure nothingness can perhaps be thought in time (in the temporal ecstasis), if it is in relation with ‘what cannot come to pass” and with an awaiting that is always exceeded by what is awaited. Lévinas (or Rolland) leave this in parenthesis and turns back to a-temporal nothingness that is impossible to think.

Though I still think Lévinas’s use of the question (of “putting in question” as a kind of critique) is tied more closely than he will admit to being as to be in question - I was struck by the question of “what death ... puts in question other than our being”.

Death, as pure nothingness cannot be thought; it marks a limit to Western thought (perhaps THE limit). Pure nothingness is affective - we “feel” it - and yet all we “feel” is that it is without foundation and that it marks a change in which “nothing” ‘subsists’.

Perhaps in this lecture, in which Lévinas seems to have suspended or bracketed his ethical imperatives, he comes closer to a “philosophy of dying” than in any of the previous lectures.

2002-12-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

I too have made some hospital visits recently which worked in spite of their occasions to put Lévinas to the test. You are right, there is a dark comedy of the body, to put it mildly, of which Lévinas says nothing – in fact, if one knows of him, he becomes one of the personages in it. But that is perhaps not an unsuitable role for a philosopher. We would like philosophy to have the last word and maybe we dream of a larger more rollicking philosophy, but to see the limits of philosophy in the company of the other major conversations that cast their nets over life is to see an important philosophical truth.
Some philosophers acknowledge this, like Kant and Lévinas, others apparently like Heiddeger, who would like to say that at ground all discourses are discourses of being, do not.

Visiting hospitals always leads to the thought, “What if it was me?” – because it will be me soon enough – and then you see how all you have are attitudes and reaction formations, some hearsay knowledge and some shallow humour and plenty of hardness and cynicism of heart which seemed like good ideas when it was just a matter of getting through life, and you wonder how you are going, in the very limited time you may have, to fashion a “boat of death” (D. H. Lawrence). And you know, at least if you are me that it is more a matter of some old tableau of “the death of a sinner” than of the Leopard’s slim consolatrix in her “brown travelling dress.”

In spite of such canny assesments Kant’s question, “What am I entitled to hope?” imposes itself at such times and it may point to nothing more, although this is already a lot, a tremendous amount perhaps, than, at the centre of the storm, a peaceful acceptance of fate – even the absurd fate imposed by drugs and organ failure.

The precise sense of Kant’s rational hope is not for an afterlife but simply that there be a larger cosmic order in which justice prevails and happiness is the reward of virtue. I would venture to add that it is an impersonal hope because in it one aligns oneself with reason – a subjunctive hope: may justice prevail! “Mathematics works,” a pure mathematician friend once reported after a stay in hospital for some painful chemotherapy. Kant’s hope would seem to be of a similar nature, “to find the self is to forget the self,” because if one were to personalise the whole thing and to try to estimate how much happiness was due to one for the sake of one’s virtuous deeds one would by that very act be diminishing them.

Like you I am feeling around for what “realm of essence” is the rightful home of Lévinas’ hope. The realm of the ideas of reason seems too remote for the work of religion which ought to lie somewhere between Kant and Miguel da Unamuno. For Unamuno the primal scene is when we are lying in extremis and all abstractions have been burned away and desire with concentrated fury fixes upon its first and last prize, indefinite continuation of ME. The wisdom of religion is to see that this bravado is just another evasion, a way of getting away from the self, away from the place where we are most wounded, most incomplete, most answerable for the way we have lived, where the possibility of hope, or of forgivness, might melt us, might touch us most to the quick.

Or is this perhaps too Christian a view of the soul’s drama? Is a ‘quasi-messianic’ hope of a different order? Whatever it be I don’t think the religious can be separated from a certain yoking of opposite categories, a metaphysical catachresis, something almost in bad taste, an intercourse of the human and the divine, of the evanescent and the eternal.
Where could there be an opening to such a possibility? Only in the folds of time, time itself as a mysterious offspring of human reality and universal being, the dimension in which “the trace of the other” and messianic hope are equally at home. Every way of access to the human has its own specific temporalisation, there is a psychoanalytic time and a time of waiting at tramstops, a time of making love and a time of waiting for the medicine to work – as the psalm says, but they are simultaneous and interpenetrating not successive, and it is not hard to see them each as sacramental.

I have enough crumbs of religious mania left in me to be able to see things this way at times but I can also be brought up short by the sort of rhetoric that is heard in the two quotes you give from Chalier. I used to thrill to this sort of thing when I was a fan of Simone Weil – proving the yes by the no, finding the trace of God in the very silence of God. I’m not sure if it is quite the same move as the turn to hope, since the latter may be motivated by the needs of reason even if it excedes reason’s grasp, the former reminds me too much of Weil whom I eventually concluded was a prima donna of the soul.

There is also a danger, it seems to me, in locating the site of eschatological witness in an interzone, marked off with a philosopher’s rigour from both the negative and the positive, that one finds oneself surfacing in the realm of art, unable to tell the difference between scripture and literature.
If Weil is Scylla then Blanchot is Charybdis.

2002-12-09T14:27:00.000-08:00

Lecture 13: A Reading of Kant (Continued)

Last Monday my aunt, my mother’s eldest sister, came to visit us for one night on her way back from India where she had been with a teacher called Ramesh. After a few hours, she became very unwell and I took her to the hospital. It is probable that she had a minor pulmonary embolism, possiblly caused by her flight. She is still in hospital also suffering from an Indian “virus”, but feeling much better.

So I have been spending a great deal of time over the last week in the hospital and was thinking how little Lévinas or Heidegger have to say about death and medicine and death and hospitals. For many, “death” is inextricably tied to the emergency ward, the hospital bed, doctors, nurses, drugs, pain killers, vital signs, and the shared ward with others sleeping, living and dying next to you.

I have also finished reading The Leopard this week with death appearing as ‘a young woman; slim, in brown travelling dress and wide bustle, with a straw hat trimmed with a speckled veil which could not hide the sly charm of her face.’ Another passage also caught my eye:

The two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. For both of them death was purely an intellectual concept, a facet of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh, yes, it existed of course, but was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

After reading your comments, I reread Lecture 12 and have been thinking about Kant and Lévinas. I am now reading the third volume of Stiegler’s La technique et le temps, Le temps du cinéma, which came out 5 years late because Stiegler has had to addrese ‘la question de Kant’. I also came across a passage in Alain Finkielkraut’s In The Name of Humanity where he cites Lévinas remarkable essay in Difficult Freedom, ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’. This brief reflection on Lévinas’s time as a prisoner in a Jewish prisoner’s labour camp, ends with an account of a dog - the only living thing to treat the prisoners as humans. Lévinas writes: ‘This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany’.

I found it interesting that Lévinas moves from “inside Heidegger” and a philosophy of finitude not to a philosophy of the infinite, but to Kant, where “ at the heart of the finite being of subjectivity and the phenomenon ... there is a rational hope, an a priori hope.” Lévinas focuses on the labour of distinctions to “define” a hope that “occurs in time and goes beyond time.” How much of this is due to the unique structure of hope (and I know that Lévinas is coming to Bloch) and how much is due to an ‘x’ that is IN time and BEYOND time?

The BEYOND in question (and it is always a question of the au-dèla with Lévinas) is not a “a beyond that would prolong time.” He goes on to say that it is “not a beyond that is (and would be)”, almost suggesting that time and being are somehow inseparable. The beyond (founded on a structure that is IN time and BEYOND time) is it seems beyond ontology and temporality and, at the same time, signifies “another relationship with the infinite” and “a temporality other than that of being-to-death”.

How does one name or define the Transcendental Ideal that is the not given, or the beyond that is of “another dimension of originarity”, a ‘something that had a meaning other than finite or infinite time’, a “something beyond measure”, beyond knowledge? In a way, it was Lévinas who most profoundly “answered” this question for me when I first read The Trace of the Other: you cannot name or define the beyond; there are only traces “in finite time”.

But perhaps, the question of death - the question that is always in front of me - requires more of the beyond than just a trace: it is has to give hope. Hope for the beyond gives meaning (to death), a meaning other than that “dictated by a relationship to being”.

The question of the au-dèla here, in Lévinas’s reading of Kant, is also a negotiation with the hope of immortality, survival and salvation. The meaning given to death by hope is more than the nothingness of being and less than the hubris of survival and immortality. It is a quasi-messianic hope; a hope that is not an awaiting, but which allows and opens an open-ended hoping for. It is a hope that offers a different kind of to-come, of the what is ahead from the anticipation of death as the being-towards-death in B&T.

Lévinas’s reading of Kant’s emphasis on a freedom (and morality) that is independent of all divinity, reminded me of a passage in Chalier’s La trace de l’infini. She writes that Lévinas sees in the creatio ex nihlio affirmed by Rambam, ‘une réalité qui ne se tient aucunement dans un rapport de besion et de dépendance à l’égard de son Créateur.’ She also quotes a wonderful sentence from Difficult Liberty: c’est “une grande gloire pour Dieu d’avoir créé un être capable de le checher ou de l’entendre de loin, à partir de la separation, à partir de l’athéism.’

2002-12-06T16:37:00.000-08:00

Lecture 12

I must say I felt an immense relief on reading this lecture, not least because he started talking about Kant, who is far and away my favourite philosopher. It was like someone threw open the windows and let light and air in, and the fragrance of Summer.

The passage you mentioned on p. 60 is one of the ones I particularly liked. This last Monday I’d been at a Ma’ariv Kaddish service for an aunt of mine who had died the week before. It was the first time for ages that I’d been to a synagogue and I came away very touched by the restraint and simplicity of the service. I liked the way that the Jewish prayers focus on God, on glorifying and praising Him, rather than on the meaning of death, or the afterlife or salvation or any of that stuff. No speculations on where the individual might be right now, or what they might be enjoying. The most explicit it got was something like “their soul is bound up in the bonds of immortality… to receive the Eternal as their inheritance… ”
Kant as presented by Lévinas seems to be in just the same spirit, and what a wonderfully concise presentation it is. The point seems to be that to encompass within one’s thinking and living an intention towards that which is beyond being is not such a difficult or unusual thing, we are equipped to do it because our ‘operating system’ (please excuse the jargon) already (and necessarily) includes the ability to refer to virtual ideals – which is certainly one meaning of ‘otherwise than being.’

Your emphasis, via Steigler, on the Heideggerian treatment of temporality is very much to the point in this opposition to Kant, since the treatment of time in B&T paves the way for the later work on the history of Being, so much so that the latter is implicit in the former. Heidegger is one of the great historicists in the line of Hegel and Marx and looking forward to Benjamin and Foucault (it is not a phenomenon exclusive to the right or the left.) And of course one of the main accusations levelled against Kant and the European enlightenment by the post-modernists is that they are “ahistorical”. Although the texture of Lévinas’ philosophy is quite different to that of Kant I think they share some ahistorical features.

It is interesting to wonder about the different ways in which Kant and Heidegger go about the task of what I would call “completing being”, that is providing a perspective for unlimited unfoldment of being – as required by everyday life. Heidegger does this in a way that enables him to maintain the finiteness of Being throughout, that is through the temporal ekstases. Kant does it synchronically through the transcendental ideals of Reason. Why is Kant’s system infinitary? Because – and this was one of my revelations during our reading in the Kant Group – the thing that is most real, most concrete for Kant is Reason itself. These systems cannot be mapped onto each other without loss, they each have their own virtues and limitations. I am reminded somewhat of Lionel Trilling’s concise characterisation of the difference between 18th and 20th century European ethical ideals under the rubrics of Sincerity and Authenticity, Jane Austen vs. Joseph Conrad.

As Lévinas presents it the Kantian system, mindfull of Kant’s four core questions is morally superior to that of Heidegger with it’s narrow and narcissistic amalgamation of the questions of Being and of Dasein’s being - especially as the former is onto-theologically equivalent to God’s being. Thus I’m not convinced that a phrase like “the disquietude of God” really gets us beyond the onto-theological context – and do we really want to get beyond it in such a hurry – the sovereign attraction of ‘beyond’ characterises the ideal of authenticity.

There is a poem of Rilke’s which manages to sound profoudly religious in spite of the fact that the solicitude it directs towards God is due to the somewhat arrogant assumption that God is lonely and dependent on our prayers. It succeeds because it places God in an unexpected dimension of care, and suggests in that way that God is in every dimension we have of care, if only we could see it. In a similar fashion Heidegger’s opening of Being, through care, into the finite, temporal dimension actually makes possible a far deeper opening to others than is available in a Kantian world although it is (seemingly) far less moral. Hence after Heidegger we have all sorts of hermeneutical projects and subtle post-modern relativisms of which it is never entirely clear whether they are sub- or super- Kantian in their morality.

I guess there is enough disquiet about post-modern ethics, which whether from the right or the left all smells a bit like Martin Heidegger, that is, bad, to make Lévinas its great white hope. How he pulls this off is what we are trying to see, but again I’m not encouraged by the fact that his notion of care for the other focusses on the death of the other. This seems like it could be a veiled return of the limiting focus on death as the royal road to Being that Lévinas himself exposes in early Heidegger. Does Lévinas foreclose hermeneutics except as textual interpretation? Is that a partial return to Kant what effect does it have on his ethics? In other words, ultimately just how open is Lévinas to the other, not enough, too much, or just the right amount?

2002-12-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

Lecture 12: The Radical Question: Kant Against Heidegger

As I began this lecture, I had a similar feeling to reading Otherwise Than Being: an endless repetition and reworking of the same phrases that left me with a strange sense of being trapped and transcending at the same time.

I have been reading Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time which is also preoccupied with the Heideggarian sense of anticipation, the future and the already there. Reading Stiegler has made me wonder, yet again, if there is something more fundamental at heart of Lévinas’s objections to Heidegger’s characterisations of death.

Stiegler emphasises that Dasein is temporal because it is futural. He quotes from Heidegger’s The Concept of Time (1924): “in this being futural it [Dasein] comes back to its past and present” and “only so far as it is futural can Dasein be authentically as having been.’ He also cites B&T, emphasising that the already-there indicates that “any Dasein is as it already was” and that Dasein’s “own past ... is ... something that already goes ahead of it.”

To vastly simplify this: a future that is always beyond me (but which is also “mine” as my end that I can anticipate but never know) shapes my sense of the past and the present; a past that can never be mine (and at the same time is “mine”) shapes my present and my past. The “futural” and the "already there” haunt me, elude me and, entirely, shape “me”: they are the strangeness of time. Though I know I have made this all too simple, how far would Lévinas disagree with this? How far does he accept Heidegger’s basic ideas of temporality (as a critique of Husserlian retention and protention)?

Is the difference that for Lévinas, it is not the indefinite finitude of being but the radical infinity of the other that is the “authentic” mode of these temporalities?

Is it the case that “The entire structure of time [in Heidegger’s work] is drawn from the relationship to death”? As you have said, death plays a less dramatic role in Heidegger’s later work and reading quotes from The Concept of Time, it seems that the notion of temporality as “a future engaged in a past” does not require a relationship to death? Or is Lévinas right, that our relationship to time requires death, that for us there can be no experience of the strangeness of time without the idea of death? Is Lévinas just trying to emphasise the finitude in Heidegger’s philosophy? Is there any time without death for Lévinas? To paraphrase Lévinas’s “radical question”: is time always an event of death?

For what it is worth, I think that death is always there and that our sense of the strangeness of time does not require death.

As Lévinas brings his extended reading of Heidegger to a close, he returns to the key themes: death cannot be reduced to the question of being; the death of others (and the attendant ideas of responsibility) exceeds the “immanent meaning” of death as a question of being; and therefore: the other and the human are “not exhausted in service of being.” It is interesting that we have been talking about death, but it is the human (and the ghost of the inhuman) that ends Lévinas’s reading of Heidegger.

Again, I think it fascinating that as Lévinas attempts to move beyond Heidegger (or ontology as finitude) he turns to God. I loved the phrase: ‘The disquietude of God”. Lévinas’s implies that to move beyond death as a question of being, one must think of God beyond onto-theo-logy.

As you know, it is sometime since I have read Kant, but I find it curious that Lévinas “uses” Kant in thinking of God to think of death beyond ontology. What do you make of Lévinas’s case for a meaning without reference to being in the first Critique? Do Kantian ideas of duty, salvation and hope exceed the question of the meaning of being?

I got a bit lost in the 4th paragraph on page 60 about the ‘signification in which what is after-death can be thought’.

Lévinas implies that Kant is essentially “against” Heidegger because he offers the “hope” of a “signification other than that of finitude”. Lévinas appears to rest this signification on a hope that is “in” time and that “goes beyond time”.

2002-11-25T03:46:00.000-08:00

On Lecture 11
I certainly can’t answer the question as to what all this is doing inside Heiddeger!

For me the most striking thing about this section was the idea that one could think radically about time without invoking death. Hardly a surprising idea really, but Heiddegger has us all so hypnotised that we have come to take the linkage for granted, at least if we don’t want to be seen as shallow.

Lévinas’ brief summary at the begining of the lecture is, as you note, rather confusing, perhaps because the Heideggerian logic that it seeks to retrace is confused. We see time as linear because we see our lives as contingent events that switch on and switch off. Our being is naively viewed as factical and so time is the simple medium in which it unfolds, our history as linear as the the gap marked by the two dates on a tombstone. Death as anihilation is equivalent to life as factical. Within this life, however, there are moments when one faces the reality that death is not an event like others that comes and goes. Death, in the way that most matters for us, neither comes nor goes – but is always imminent. It is a possibility that never takes place in the sense that it can never be witnessed, yet one that we can appropriate and in that appropriation give meaning and authenticity to our lives. Facing up to death we accede to a sense of time that is utterly different from that constant medium in which things unfold in succession, arising and passing away. There is no more of life, no more of my being-here than there is of time and no more of time than there is of life. Time is now grasped as the medium in which my being is spread out, and it is not linearity that is in question but time as answerable to all the ways in which being does not coincide with itself.

So there are two kinds of time, an ontic time and an ontological time, a time of the things that come and go, and a time that is the expression of the being for whom Being itself is the question. What marks these is that they each derive from a way of holding death. But death for Heidegger is an event belonging to the world of things and so what holds the place of death in the ontological realm must be re-labelled with somesuch term as “Dasein’s ownmost possibility”. For Heidegger it is not so much death as anxiety that provides access to authentic time – nonetheless the question arises as to why, once this has been disclosed one needs to assume that just these ideas and these only belong to it.

Perhaps indeed Bergson’s durée créatrice is precisely an experience of the same level of disclosure as Heidegger’s authentic time and the fact that the framing ideas are life and creativity instead of death and anxiety merely accidental. Where Bergson is at risk is that his formulation is open to psychologisation, but being less bound by philosophic rigour he is readier to grasp that authentic time is structured not by the logic that brought it into view, but by the new landscape of significances that arises within its purview. Chief among these is the Other.

Thus, I realise time as the open-ended medium in which I do not coincide with myself, which is my nature, in which death is an ever present possibility but not an end-point, and I understand this as a time which is deeper in some sense than everyday “measurable” time. I can more or less immerse myself in this time and when I do so the landscape of the world changes radically. I am no longer cued to solidities but to voids, to points that give time the way that I give time, that is, to others.

2002-11-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

Lecture 11 Inside Heidegger: Bergson

This rather strange title signals that Lévinas is moving away from his close reading of B&T. He “moves away” by going “inside” Heidegger and finding Bergson: it is an odd image - you go inside a philosopher and, like Russian dolls, find another, different philosopher.

I really enjoyed your thoughts on the “dialogue of the soul with itself” as, among other things, involuntary prayer. As you say, I think the key questions are, “what basis we have for faith in the function of the other” and what is the “price” for “the acceptance of Lévinas’ veiled religion” in view of the dismissal of Truth?

I would like to say more about the endlessly indeterminate “end” of phenomenon, but I have a few odd notes that I have come across in some of Lévinas’s other works, that I would like to leave scattered on the screen:

“Is time the very limitation of finite being or is it the relationship of finite being to God?” - Time and the Other (1946-1947)

Lévinas makes no mention of death whatsoever in his “summary” of B&T in “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie” (1932).

In “L’ontologie dans le temporal” (1948), Lévinas says that Heidegger’s notion of “la finitude” in B&T has “un sens nouveau”: “Elle signifie en somme qu’en nous inscrivant dans l’être nous nous inscrivons dans le néant.”

Lévinas also says in this essay that ‘L’exécution quelque peu sommaire de Bergson par Heidegger dans Sein und Zeit semble donc totalement injustifiée.”

I found this short lecture extraordinarily compact and intriguing. The critical sentence for me is: “For Heidegger, infinite time is deduced from original finitude” (55).

I am not entirely sure how to read the first paragraph. When is Lévinas summarising Heiddger and when is he adding his own interpretation or views? (Inside Heidegger is a bit of a labyrinth). Death (as annihilation) “marks” being-there in the finitude of the everyday. Death also “marks” an infinite time beyond the time being-there (before birth, after death), a “a more profound, originary time beyond linear time.” How significant is this “infinite time” for Heidegger himself?

The second and third paragraphs suggests that the possible (a possible that remains assumed and still contingent and which is supported by this “infinite time”) indicates a “not yet” (the “future, or what is to-come") that is pre-comprehended by Heidegger within the structure “to-be is to-dying.”

I am still not quite sure what Lévinas is doing here. I assume that he is critical of Heidegger’s constriction of the “to-come” to the drama of being/no being. Is it the status of originary time (finite or infinite) that determines the “not yet” or “to-come”?

Again, I am not entirely clear where Lévinas stands with Bergson and Bergson’s relation to Heidegger. He seems to imply that Heidegger both repeats and differs from Bergson: “As in Bergson”, Heidegger has “various levels of time” but, unlike Heidegger, Bergson associates duration with life and does not inscribe death and nothingness in duration (time). For Heidegger, on the other hand, Bergson’s idea of death would be the simple return to presence.

So, Lévinas seems to be saying: for Bergson time is for a life, an infinite originary time and a naive presence; for Heidegger time is for death, a finite originary time (being/no being) and a more sophisticated view of the limitations of presence. He then says, forget the naive “vital impulse” in Bergson and look at his more radical idea of duration as an "appeal to the interiority of the other man”.

In this compact weaving in and out of the weaknesses and strengths of the two thinkers, he concludes by using Bergson to affirm that “the to-be does nor exhaust the meaning of duration”.

I am left wondering why all of this is considered to be inside Heidegger?

2002-11-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

Lecture 10.

You lead off with a most interesting discussion. “The dialogue of the soul with itself” – the respects in which this already presupposes the presence of the Other are overdetermined, but rather than getting into that I want to reflect on what goes on when I try to commune with myself.
The preminent literary form for such a dialogue is that of overheard speech, like Shakespearean soliloquies, but these are founded on a conceit that the speaker is alone with his/her truth. I wonder if despite the physical solitude required for such a “dialogue”, there needs to be that in one that one wishes to speak the truth to – perhaps an ear of the self? Or is it better named an ear of the Other-within-the-self?
(What I am doing right now is an example of it. I am trying to think things through aloud, and using the sense of the questions you raised and the act of your having raised them as a guide to my words.)
I say “wishes to speak truth to”, but does that come anywhere near to describing what takes place? Is it something like conscience, a sort of inner witness that belongs to Reason and that in a sense obliges us to truth, in a moral sense which we fall short of? I think that is something like the Kantian position, where Reason is an impersonal Other, yet is somehow of our very essence. On the other hand in psychoanalysis the only hope for coming to an inner truth is via the attention of the analyst, who in a sense simulates the function of the Kantian Other, not in an aloof sense but in the quick of memory and desire.
Clearly there is a sense in which religion, at least in the monotheisms, posits God as the place of this intimate Other who gathers our truth, whether through exaction or a sort of friendship. Our innermost soliloquy is prayer, whether intended that way or not.
It is not that God guarantees that we are true to ourselves, but that we have faith that He is leading us to truth, feeding back, as it were a signal proportional to our error. If we let go of God but still retain faith in our own ultimate good faith then this function of feedback, that which gradually leads us away from error is a product of community. (By error I mean only that which imperils the “dialogue of the soul with itself”.) This is not necessarily a move away from religion or God - we could say that we are no longer holding on to His apron strings - but the question still arises as to what basis we have for faith in the function of the other. A profoundly sceptical question and perhaps what Derrida has in mind in his comment on Levinas’ ethics.
If the alterity of the other is the same as that of God then we are obliged to speak our truth to the other, even, or especially if we are incapable of speaking it to ourselves. And if we are nonetheless obliged to speak our truth to the other does that mean that the other is transcendental in a Theological sense?
What is the desire of the philosopher if it is not to speak truthfully?

Another contribution of Heidegger was to tell us that the activity of the thinker is to “err”, where this word is to be traced back to “errare” – to wander. We take a path in thought – and in our meditations – of which we do not know the destination. We do not have a map, or any sort of grid, we must make one up as we go. Without a sense of “Truth” we rely more than ever on the company of others to make our errors result in something meaningful. This is why post-structuralist philosophers give so much attention to “friendship”. Does the reign of friendship and error lead us to a more inclusive and deeper ethic? In the end this has to be the question, since we can no longer call on Truth. Is the acceptance of Levinas’ veiled religion the price to pay for a positive answer to this question? A troubling possibility.

Returning to the text, I agree that the richest part of this lecture is on p.50
I am fascinated by this phenomenon of the end/end of the phenomenon dichotomy.
The “end of the phenomenon” is not meant in the sense of Saul Bellow’s “death = no more pictures” (Ravelstein) but the end of the phenomenon of the other. It is this that is Levinas’ privileged sense of the phenomenon in phenomenology.
“Contrary to what appears death is like a return of being in itself, where that which beckoned turns back into itself, and can no longer respond. It is a movement opposed to phenomenology.” The phenomenon is the way the human event imposes itself upon matter – I am not doing phenomenology when I introspectively study the persistence of images, as much as when as when I am studying my friend’s face, this flesh invested with infinte meaning. This is not a phenomenon whose nature can be delimited in any way – it has indefinite degrees of freedom as we might say. (Thematised as "the trace" (?)) Given this infiniteness or indefiniteness Levinas is entirely right to question whether the end of this phenomenon is the phenomenon of the end of anything. We never knew what the phenomenon was of, so we can hardly claim to know to what its end belongs. We can apply these categories of ending either to others or to ourselves, but if we apply them to ourselves primarily then we are more likely to anticpate the phenomenon of an end – “What? My death, no more pictures – the end of this thing called David.”
Well, that’s certainly a thought to sober the mind, and does it therefore function as a reliable interlocutor, as a demand for truth? Maybe, but not in a simple way since I have to admit that I know as little what this living phenomenon is a phenomenon of as I do that phenomenon, the one of my friend. (The phenomenon of) Death leads us to radically question what life is. “What is the very mortality of life?” If radical questioning is possible at all surely it is possible in this instance.

(I recall Shelly’s uncompleted “Triumph of Life”, where the protagonist seeing the seductions and vanities unfold in a ghostly masque repeats the question, “What is Life?” - it seemed to me that this inexhaustible question must be renewed at each new level of understanding and I was thoroughly off-side from Paul De Man’s deconstructive interpretation where the very repetition of the question is the function of death as blind repetition. Yet De Man’s reading drew power from the fact that it “imagined” death with a new intensity – rendered all the more acute by De Man’s own overdetermined death a short time later.)

I take Levinas’ question, “What is the very mortality of life?” to be the same question as “What is the meaning of death for time?” This is a clue to how to take Time in Levinas’s sense, that Time that is the medium and substance of the phenomenon, that is of the life of the other.

2002-11-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

Lecture 10: Time Considered on the Basis of Death

I have been thinking about Lévinas’s question from lecture 8, “Is not the dialogue of the soul with itself possible by virtue of another’s questioning” (42). In La trace de l’infini, Catherine Chalier examines the relation of Lévinas’s work to R. Haim de Volozin’s book L’Âme de la vie (Lévinas wrote the preface to the French translation). Chalier writes:

^{Son [l’homme] intériorité est humaine en ceci très exactement qu’elle ne se tourne pas vers elle-même, en un mouvement de réfleivité, car le soufflé divin qui l’habite ne lui permet pas de se constituter en un “pour soi” fermé à l’altérité des autres creatures (37).}

You talked about this “dialogue of the soul” as an original social relation that prefigures and makes possible the relation to self (like the Hegelian leap to self-consciousness, the Lacanian mirror and other mythical “captured” moments of profound self-recoginition / division: oh, you are not me, I am me, I mean really me, I think). I keep wondering how much of Lévinas’s philosophy is infused with theology. Derrida writes in Donner le Mort: “Lévinas ne peut plus distnguer entre l’altérité infinie de Dieu et celle de chaque homme: son éthique est déjà religion” (117). I think there is a lot of truth in this and it gives a profundity and a kind of abstract quality to Lévinas’s ethics and to his account of death. If, as you say, Lévinas can’t let go of Heidegger letting go of death, it is perhaps because Lévinas has always held on to death as à-dieu.

As you say, Lévinas is summarizing his account of B&T and I think we have already covered most of the material here. I think there are three interesting points on page 50 that are, for the moment, left hanging:
1) death and “the end of the phenomenon”: is death a unique end of appearing, of manifesting?
2) again, Lévinas equates death with the question and again I wonder, in this context, what is a question, for Lévinas?
3) ‘what death is for time’ , “the meaning of death for time” - I think this the most significant point that he has raised so far and, probably, leads on to the infinite, dés-intéressement and à-dieu. (Lévinas seems to return to this last point at the end of the lecture when he summarizes Hediegger’s position as: “it is through death that there is time.” I wonder if Lévinas will reverse this order: it is through time that there “is” death? Does he hint at this when he emphasises the indeterminacy of the “when”, the anticipation that cannot be realized, and the future that cannot be measured?)

As you say:

^{It is interesting to observe how death as “most proper” to Dasein, is not only integral to the analysis of Dasein, but leads directly to the interpretation of everydayness as a kind of “fall’.”}

For me, Heidegger’s account of both the avoidance and centrality of death in the everyday is his most compelling contribution to the “philosophy” of death – and it is a contribution that, like Freud’s essay on death during WW1, is fundamentally about attitudes towards death in the 20th century. Lévinas puts it very well when he writes: ‘the certainty of death … is described from the everdayness that avoids the certainty’ (52). I think this avoidance is unique to the 20th century and arises as much from post WW1 (Eliot, I had not thought death had undone so many) to the move of dying away from the home to the hospital and the professional funeral industry (The American way of Death).

Perhaps it is the account of the professionalization of death, more than the anachronistic heroic being-toward-death, that gives B&T a contemporary resonance. I say this in part because, for what it is worth, I don’t think Heidegger’s insight that death is not some “final instant” but about “the very way in which man is in his being” is that remarkable or a particularly “new” observation. This is Montaigne’s theme in ‘To philosophise is to learn to die’ and seems like a commonplace in many (particularly Christian) religious discourses.

I was reading Herodotus yesterday and came across the discussion between Croesus and Solon (I: 30-33; trans. Grene, Chicago). (It is interesting that Lévinas makes no less than five references in T&I and one in Otherwise than Being to the Gyges episode at the beginning of Herodotus (I: 8-15)). Croesus asks Solon whom he thinks is the most “blessed” man that he has ever met. Solon gives two examples of men who “died splendidly” as the most “blessed”; the “best end” showing “how much better it is for a man to be dead than to be alive.” Croesus (the man of hubris) is angry that Solon has not picked him as an example of the blessed. Solon replies:

^{In the whole length of time there is much to see that one would rather not see – and much to suffer likewise. I put the boundary of human life at seventy years … So that all the days of a man’s life are twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty; of all the days of a man’s life not one brings to him anything exactly the same as another. So, Croesus, man is entirely what befalls him.}

2002-11-01T23:43:00.000-08:00

In previous lectures Lévinas always placed his elucidation of Heidegger’s view in apposition to the development of his own, but in Lecture 9 and, from what I can see, in the immediately succeeding lectures he steps back and devotes the entire lecture to the other thinker. Fortunately you have filled the gap somewhat here by including material from elsewhere that underlines the distinction that marks Lévinas’ ascension into the ethical realm.

I must say that I found Lévinas’ 3-page summary of Heidegger in this lecture pretty masterful. Like you, I don’t recall the details of B&T well enough to be able to criticize his interpretation, but such a critique doesn’t seem to be the point. Levinas’ Heidegger is an organic figure, a genius of pre-ethical phenomenology. It is interesting to observe how death as “most proper” to Dasein, is not only integral to the analysis of Dasein, but leads directly to the interpretation of everydayness as a kind of “fall’.
It is a remarkable insight to see the banality of the everyday as the elision of anxiety (in the particular technical sense that H. gives it) by fear – so that death is present even when it is farthest from the subject of conversation. (This reminds me very much of the nauseating expressionist vision of social life I used to experience when I was a young cannabis smoker.) Even if “resoluteness” is a mistranslation of entschlossenheit, or whatever the Heideggerian term was, there is still the sense that the Subject who would remain truest to his intrinsic mission – which is to elucidate Being – in this dispensation is a solitary hero – Clint Eastwood more than Hermann (the quintessential Teutonic warrior) or even “Old Surehand” (the hero of a series of German “Westerns” from the 1950s. implicitly referring perhaps to H.’s Zuhandenes.)

I’m not sure about equating Hegel with mastery – when, for example, Antigone is his ethical exemplar. I wonder if one could compare, in each of these philosophers, the views of going to one’s death for the sake of someone else or some cause?
The understanding of death as “the impossibility of having a project” was an extraordinary insight which shared by Lévinas and Blanchot but which each developed in a distinctive way. I wonder if this is not, in a way, incompatible with “dying for a cause”? To see death in this way one must follow the actual dying process of an other, holding their hand, as it were, all the way through, so that one witnesses how every layer of intention and willful contextualisation is gently peeled away by the inexorable physical process. This is something like the scenarios rendered in Blanchot’s novels, but it involves a sense of the individual that is characteristically modern and urban.

Another literary resonance: Heidegger’s Gerede – “chatting”, but always, without admitting it, doing so in the acknowledgment of death by its willful forgetting. Isn’t this a bit like Samuel Beckett’s endless monologues and dialogues? In these, in spite of their appearance of triviality the sense of facing the mystery is never absent – one has the sense that the indirect punctuated soliloquising is a far more respectful approach to “what cannot be spoken” than a frontal one would be. These still seem to be pre-ethical, nd yet the Beckettian narrator does connect, in spite of himself. As if the imperative, “just keep talking” is a version of or a respone to Lévinas’ “don’t let me die alone.”

Again, I wonder about this connotation of “guilt of the survivor” that attaches so readily to Lévinas. (Or, alternatively, “responsibility of the survivor”.) Is guilt an ethical emotion? I know it seems to be, but these days we have psychologised guilt to such a degree that it is seen as a kind of mood, akin to and perhaps not so easily separable from anxiety or fear. One can almost claim the sacred rights of the victim if one is tortured by guilt. Thus it is quite a different matter than remorse, for which a prerequisite is that one actually has to have done something. A generalised guilt can be seen to characterise the invisible dark cloud that hangs over the everyday (even at its most banal) as much as fear or anxiety. The burden of life – what used to be called original sin, perhaps, or in Buddhism the dukkha (suffering) inseparable from the mere fact of selfhood.
Guilt and responsibility of the survivor could also be called Hamlet emotions – so again they belong not to the ethical in Lévinas’ rather advanced sense, but to the last phases of the dispensation of the lex talionis, the law of revenge.

Returning finally to that sense of the social as fallen, as inherently given over to some implicit bad-faith about our existential destiny, if there are times when the consciousness of this can become oppressive, there are also moments when through some unaccoutable grace the burden if lifted and one simply affirms, with a limpid heart, all things just as they are. Are these ethical moments, any more or less than the others?

2002-10-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

Lecture 9: Death, Anxiety and Fear

I really don’t have much to say about Lecture 9 and this summary of Lévinas’s reading of Heidegger. Again, he equates death and authenticity (totality and the proper) as “taking charge.” More interestingly, he asks whether life “fills” time or if death is the “end” of time and argues, once again, that Heiddeger reduces this time beyond the human to a “mineness” as “mortality.” Lévinas’s account of the loss of self and the avoidance of death and the “not yet” in the public theyness of middle class 1920s Germany appears to be – as far as I can remember - a good description of B&T.

It seems, as you suggest, that Lévinas is far more concerned in these lectures with B&T and the “early Heidegger,” perhaps in part because these were Lévinas’s final lectures and he is revisiting the work that had such an impact on his own thought. If, as you say, Heidegger moved away from a conception of death (and the authentic) that was inspired by WW 1, it is interesting that, as Lévinas’s work is more and more influenced by WW 2, he will not “give up” on death. Heidgger responds to the 20th century by moving from culture (warrior; the They) to geography (the Pagan grottoes); Lévinas responds by not moving, by holding on to death.

In Time and the Other (1946-47), he already says that he will separate death from “the anxiety of nothingness” and look at “solitude in the pain of need and work.” Suffering, pain is “the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence.” Suffering is “the absence of all refuge”; the “impossibility of fleeing or retreating”: it is “the impossibility of nothingness” (69). It is suffering that is also “the call to an impossible nothingness”, to death, to “an event beyond.”

^{The unknown of death signifies that the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light, that the subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself. We could say it is in relationship with mystery (70).}

Lévinas goes on to speak of death as an “experience of passivity” and contrasts this with the “supreme lucidity” and “supreme virility” of Heidegger’s being toward death (70). He writes:

^{Death in Heiedgger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism(71).}

And later:

^{Death is the impossibility of having a project. This approach of death indicates that we are in relation to something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity…(74).}

Lévinas holds on to death because it remains both a limit to the mastery (Hegel), virility (Heidegger) of the subject and a threshold to the au-delà, to what is the beyond the subject, to the absolutely other, to the “mystery.”

His attitude towards death does not seem to have changed that much in thirty years. But I did notice that he allows for an irresponsibility (founded on an idea of the purity of suffering), a pathos, in death in the 1940s that is replaced by the 1970s with the endless responsibility and guilt of the survivor:

^{Where suffering attains its purity, where there is no longer anything between us and it, the supreme responsibility of this extreme assumption turns into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy. Sobbing is this, and precisely through this it announces death. To die is to return to this state of irresponsibility, to the infantile shaking of sobbing (72).}

There seems to be no sobbing or crying, by the 1970s.

2002-10-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

Lecture 8:

It is interesting to play with the notion of triangulating the position of Heidegger relative to the fixed points of Kant and Hegel. If Hegel is left of Kant then Heidegger is further left, but not in a straight line. Lévinas, oddly, seems closer to Kant again, perhaps because of the “moral law within” – if not the “starry heavens above”. Reason is a very lofty term for Kant, and it is only by virtue of this eminence that the context of contexts is thinkable. For Hegel and Heidegger this role is taken over by a kind of poetic (poietic?) thinking, but for the former the tone of this is set by the Idea of the One, while for the latter it is the experience of concrete things.

Your point about the pagan afterlife is well-taken. Rather than a blank nothing it seems that the ancient notion of the afterlife is merely dreary and limited – as in the underworld described by Virgil, or that of the Emperor Hadrian’s poem to his soul written as he was dying:

Animula vagula blandula
hospes comesque corporis
quae nunc abibis in loca
pallidula rigida nudula
nec ut soles dabis iocos

Sorry-lived, blithe-little, fluttering Sprite,
Comrade and guest in this body of clay,
Whither, ah! whither, departing in flight,
Rigid, half-naked, pale minion, away?

-trans. ECB

The Christian idea of direct participation in the infinitude of God after death, at least for the Blessed, was however probably already present in the Neoplatonists. And as much in the Gnostics as well, with whom Heidegger has been compared.
The later Heidegger makes much of the term “mortals” for us humans, as in his discussion of the “fourfold”. This is perhaps not so much prejudging the matter of an afterlife as tying our manifestation here to the particularity of place. Da-sein = being here. But where place is understood specifically – that’s what seems so pagan, in fact so like the Native Spirituality that is so celebrated these days. Mortal = subject to death, and whatever death may be it is also eminently an event in place. One becomes clay, goes into the ground, “rolled in earth’s diurnal round with rocks and stones and trees.”

The idea that we go into Nothing is actually a rather sophisticated one. Post-Nietzschean as you say, in the continental stream of Western thought, but perhaps also the same as Buddhist notions of no-self and Emptiness. As an event in the history of metaphysics to even be able to think this must deserve at least as much fanfare as Heidegger greets it with in Nietzsche. I guess Hume would be the first cheerful representative of this view.

In the first part of lect.8 before Lévinas resumes his reading of B&T it seems to me that he tips his hand a bit, by contrasting the radical opening that is introduced by the encounter with death with the “positivity of experience”. It sounds as though he is just translating Heidegger’s distinction between the everyday and the authentic (with all or some of the impied value judgements?)
The diurnal, sublunary world, or whatever you want to call it is hardly a bland positivity to me. I think there is enough wonder in the “intimations of immortality” that renders the “eye made sober by keeping watch over man’s mortality” (roughly quoting from memory) suspect at best.

While you loved the “every question is a request or a prayer,” it made me wince.

One of the things that changes in the later Heidegger is the importance of death as anchor point in the revelation of Being. One might speculate that the early writing were unduly influenced by the proximity of the First World War, and that this led to a kind of morbid, warrior-like obesssion with death. I think Lévinas is right to celebrate Heidegger’s insight into “the transitivity of ‘to be’”, but I think the point is that the logic by which this is tied necessarily to the encounter with death is specious. Heidegger realises this and moves on from there to new ways of speaking the openness. Lévinas also wants to find new ways of speaking the openness but will not give up on death. He might make the case that death is the mother of theology but I am not convinced that deep inquiry into Being must be arrested by its demand.
I guess I’m saying that while early Heidegger does priviledge the “authentic” in spite of what he says, he struggles with this tendency and tries get beyond it as his philosophy develops.

In order to say this I need to consider Lévinas rhetorical question: “is not the dialogue of the soul with itself [only] possible by virtue of another’s questioning?” This is meant to imply that such a dialogue is not “proper” unless it acknowledges the priority in its own thinking of the face-to-face relationship. To this I would reply that if “dialogue” stands for deep inquiry then in spite of the anthropological priority of the “social” for the formation of any thought at all, such inquiry is nothing unless it penetrates to a point upstream of where one “becomes oneself”. In a religion of transcendence one meets with Reality in the most formal dress of one’s personhood, in a religion of immanence, like say Spinoza’s system, one meets Reality naked of whatever in oneself is not itself Real.

The idea of drawing power from the encounter with death – as if death’s power to annihilate me draws forth an answering power to determine my own death –
is one which Lévinas brilliantly teases out of Heidegger. It is another pagan-sounding theme, also a warrior one.
“To be out-ahead-of-oneself is concrete in being-toward-death. … Dasein is only possible as mortal.” This is how Lévinas summarises Heidegger, and I wonder just where he himself stands on this. He seems to modify it to something like “to be turned to what is beyond being is concrete in the death of the other..” So the Other is only possible as mortal? In a perverse way it would seem as if the ultimate ethical act is killing the other, so I can mourn him. (Don’t laugh, I think this is exactly what the ethical sophisticates who advocate euthanasia believe.)

2002-10-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

Lecture 8: being-toward-Death as the Origin of Time

I like your description of Lévinas’s attempt to read the Heideggerian project in B&T as an assimilation of the proper and the totality. But, if as you rightly say, Kant strenuously forbids such an assimilation, is it not possible that Heidegger is still influenced by the great assimilator, Hegel?

Part of my difficulty with Heidegger is how far to take his own denials of the direction of his work. In other words, when he keeps on saying that the dull greyness of the they, of the blandness of the everyday, of the tyranny of the public is in no way a cultural, political, or even anthropological description, I have my doubts. I suppose one of the differences between Derrida and Lévinas, is that Derrida takes Heidegger’s qualifications, hesitations - his almost Husserlian bracketing – very seriously, while Lévinas sees the broad direction or conceit of the philosophy implicating itself, malgré Heidegger. One reads inductively, the other deductively. One refuses the ends (the proper, totality); the other begins with them.

As a passing footnote, I wonder if one can say that for the pagan death was the end. Most pagans (Greek, Roman, barbarian) had some kind of an afterlife, an au-delà la mort. I was just thinking of the film Gladiator, the best part of which touches on the cult of the family, and joining them in the afterlife. If Heidegger is a “pagan” I wonder what is the modern genealogy of an absolute finitude, of death as simply the end. Is it merely a post Nietzsche reaction against Christianity?

It is interesting to see how important the “question” is for Lévinas’s in moving au-delà Heidegger. (As you noted earlier, there are some wonderfully ambivalent sentences in these lectures. I am thinking here of: “we must pass beyond Heidegger,” beyond the finitude of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher of finitude, through “a relationship to the infinite.” How does the infinite help us to “pass beyond Heidegger”?)

For Lévinas, death is a question and “as a question” it is distinct from or prior to experience, phenomenality, comprehension, judgement, existence. Incidentally, why does Lévinas speak of positivity here? As a question, death is not only distinct, separate; it also actively reverses belief, “doxic thinking”. Lévinas appears to equate this separating, reversing quality with a turning, a “turning toward the other.”

Somehow the question that questions itself, keeps at a distance, holds off, turns around the qualities of human domain (the horizontal) and passes beyond Heideggerian finitude, by what seems to be a gesture to the non-human domain (the vertical): “every question is a request or a prayer.” I have to say, I loved this phrase, this irruption of the infinite.

In ‘Diachrony and Representation,’ Lévinas writes ‘Responsibility “is anterior to deliberation and is that to which I have thus been exposed and dedicated before being dedicated to myself.’ It seems Lévinas is saying on page 43 that since I can only become myself through an anterior relationship of responsibility for the other (the other in me; ‘is not the dialogue of the soul with itself,’ Lévinas asks, ‘possible by virtue of another’s questioning?’) – since my identity, my irreplaceable uniqueness, is already founded on a prior substitution for the other – my death can also be characterised by a prior responsibility and substitution for the other, a relationship that precedes and exceeds my ‘end.’

Lévinas suggests that death as a question is “founded” on time, on “this questioning that is a relationship to the infinite”; a questioning that exceeds the Heideggerian equation of death as a lifelong mode of being, and a privileging of imminence that turns it into a resource of power. For Lévinas, transcendence is the only counter to imminence as power.

2002-10-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

Lecture 7

I must confess again that whenever I try to read anything written by Derrida I just feel slightly sick, as if I am confronted with an inane verbal diarrhoea, full of intricate quibbles and utterly lacking in any spine or wisdom. So I can't comment on the quotes you include, perhaps there are good things in them, but I lack whatever it is one requires to make anything out in them.

I think you are right to point to the different ways that Heidegger and Levinas treat the concept of unsubstitutability as key. Since H. is first in the field, there lingers the suspicion that L. is just manufacturing a clinamen away from his (justly) hated precursor. [See this article by Ron Rosenbaum, in the course of which Heidegger is depicted more evil than the holocaust denying neo-Nazis.]

Lecture 7 is a short one and it seems to contain only two short sections where L. keeps developing his own position in contrast to that of H. which he is exposing. These are the initial paragraph and the long bracketed section a little later on p.39.

L. shows that H.'s reflections on the essence of Dasein are dependent on a "group of derived notions (the end and the totality)" - I think that he probably has these in mind when he sneers at "any doxic form of the Kantian categories". At any rate in the Heideggerian story that he tells, these only come after Dasein begins to reflect upon what is most proper to itself. In this story Dasein, foolishly believing that "experience [is] the deepest thing that could happen to [it]" confuses the proper and the total (a tabloid Kantianism of which Kant would have no part) and finds his first clue to this in the death of the other, when the other ceases reaching beyond him or herself and becomes merely the totality of their pasts. This, however is an impasse for Dasein, since it cannot experience what this would be like in the other, it must turn around and apply this knowledge to itself, and in doing so discovers its radical irreplacability, its mineness, Jemeinigkeit. In reflecting on the difference between life and death Dasein is made to acknowledge that its own being (alive) is always also a project, a becoming, an extending forth into the unknown, and that death is the indefinite terminus of this. Since death does not await ripeness, but comes whenever it comes, the completion that it offers to life is in no way determined by the interests of a life, no matter how well lived. One must assume death as the end, that is take it on as consciously as possible, knowing that one can't know it and one can't earn it.
This pathos of the Heideggerian subject towards his own death seems to somewhat belie the sense which L. wants to ascribe to him of naively assimilating the proper and the total. Perhaps the German pagan knows that this assimilation is not ultimately an ontological but an aesthetic achievement, like in Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs".

Could it be that Ethics is the Jewish Aesthetics? Heidegger never explicity invokes the aesthetic in B&T, but it seems to be called for, and to some degree it shows itself in the later philosophy. Levinas is clear that where the same questions of the ontological openness and the unsubstitutability of Dasein arise only an ethical answer suffices. It is an extraordinary twist to see that this entails the substitution, or the readiness to substitute of the unsubstitutable. That is a fecund Judeo-Christian theme for meditation. The other thing which I think Levinas is spot on about is that the Heideggerian epos forcloses any sense of "information from the beyond" - for the good pagan death is the end - while for the good Judeo-Christian, while we cannot know we must stay open to the possibility of a beyond. This openness in what is called faith, does require an ontology that is not tied to experience, that is beyond experience, or alternatively an experience of the beyond-ontology.

2002-10-08T04:18:00.000-07:00

Lecture 7: The Death and Totality of Dasein

In your fine reading of Heidegger, “Heidegger” and Australian surf culture you focus on “the question of whether the properness of Dasein can only be achieved in the wholeness of Dasein.” If you will forgive me, I would like to turn briefly to Derrida’s Aporias , (1993), since Derrida stands somewhere between Lévinas and Heidegger. Derrida notes, for Heidegger (or, as you say Derrida’s "Heidegger"), the ontology of Dasein has an “absolute priority” over the ontical knowledge of life and death, of any “anthropo-thanatology or biology.” If, Derrida writes, the “death proper to Dasein was compromised in its rigorous limits, then the entire apparatus of these edges would become problematic, and along with it the very project of an analysis of Dasein.” Is this in part what Lévinas is trying to do? To question the "distance” or “priority’ of Dasein – by weighing it down, pulling it into the domain of death, a “death” that in fact indicates a greater and more fundamental distance and priority than Dasein?

Derrida goes to focus on the difference between properly dying (eigentlich sterben) and perishing (verenden), noting that for Heidegger animals can never die properly nor demise (ableben). Again, I hope you will forgive me quoting Derrida, but I would be interested in your take on the following:
^{It may be enough to distinguish between demise and dying in order to avoid Lévinas’s objection to Heidegger regarding the originary and underivable mineness of dying. When Lévinas accuses Heidegger of privileging, in the existence of Dasein, its proper death, what is at stake is Sterben. Indeed, it is in dying proper and properly speaking that “mineness” is irreplaceable, that no one can die for the other, in the experience of the hostage or of the sacrifice, “in the place of the other,” and that no testimony can testify to the contrary. But, conversely, when Lévinas says and thinks that, against Heidegger, he is saying “death of the other is the first death’ and “it is for the death of the other that I am responsible, to point of including myself in death. This may be phrased in a more acceptable proposition: ‘I am responsible for the other insofar as he is mortal,’ “ these statements either designate the experience that I have of the death of the other in demise or they presuppose, as Heidegger does, the co-originarity of Mitsein and of Sein zum Tode. This co-originarity does not contradict, but, on the contrary, presupposes a mineness of dying or of being-toward-death, a mineness not that of an ego or of an egological sameness (38-39).}

As you might remember, since I have your old copy of Lévinas’s Time and the Other, Lévinas says in the preface:

^{The other in Heidegger appears in the essential situation of Miteinandersein, reciprocally being with one another ….The proposition mit (with) here describes the relationship. It is thus an association of side by side, around something, around a common term and, more precisely, for Heidegger, around truth. It is not the face-to-face relationship, where each contributes everything, except the private fact of one’s existence. I hope to show, for my part, that it is not the preposition mit that should describe the original relationship with the other (40-41).}

In §47, Heidgger says that when “Dasein reaches it wholeness in death” it “loses the Being" of its “there” and cannot “experience this transition” and, therefore, this “makes the death of Others more impressive.” Dasein, he goes on to write, “can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others.”

It is seems that the fundamental point for Lévinas is “the death of the other is not only a moment of mineness.” Perhaps one of the critical issues here is over the irreplaceable (of death as mineness, as a "possibility without any possible substitution”). Heidegger says in §47, “the dying of Others is not something we can experience in a genuine sense.” Heidegger raises the question as to whether “the dying of others is a substitute theme for the ontological analysis of the Dasein’s totality.” While “one Dasein can be represented by another” in the everyday world, such a proposition of “random” substitution “fails altogether to recognize Dasein’s kind of Being”: “no one can take the Other’s dying away from him.”

For Lévinas, death here becomes the difference between Substitution and Totality. Briefly, in Otherwise than Being, Lévinas defines substitution as “the very subjectivity of a subject” (signification is substitution and signification precedes essence). It is, he writes, “through this substitution that I am not ‘another’ but me.” Lévinas reworks the notion of “a separated being in relation with an other absolutely other” from Totality and Infinity into the idea of an irreplaceable singularity that substitutes itself for the other: “the non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others.”

The irreplaceable substitutes itself to “be” itself, to be responsible for the other, to die.

2002-10-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

Lecture Six.

In this lecture Lévinas is sharpening the focus on the question of the question - so it seems appropriate that your comments consist mostly of questions. To whom are they addressed? I don't know, but I put myself in that place when I was writing and have tried to answer some of those questions - without being specific about which one's I'm listening to at any particular point.

There is a quote from Emerson which goes something like this, “Ultimately it comes down to just two things: I and the abyss.” In Lévinas’ reading it seems that Heidegger would say, “I and Being” and would then erase the “and”. In an extraordinary stroke he characterises Heidegger’s thought as illuminating the epos of Being (subjective genitive), Dasein is to Being as Aeneas is to Rome. Dasein is that by which Being is disclosed, its very “mineness” is what enables this since it makes what is most proper to Dasein – which is the only thing that Dasein can properly question – precisely what is most proper to Being.

According to this account death is then proferred as the solution to the problem of Dasein’s spending most of its time engaged in activities in which Being is not in view. “The way in which Heidegger goes toward death is entirely dictated by the ontological preoccupation,” say Lévinas, in one of those marvellously ambiguous sentences of his. (As if “Heidegger” is a personage in Being’s epic?)

The way in which death fulfills this function is then expressed in the oddly convoluted sentence at the top of p.36: “It happens that this ipseity of Dasein, established from the appropriation of the affair of being by the being-there in man, is authentic in the appropriation of a possibility in which this appropriation is its most proper, its most inalienable, to the point of being inevitable: death.” In Lévinas’ reading, Heidegger marks an equation of inevitability and properness, whereas for Lévinas himself no such equivalence reigns. In the last part of the lecture “anxiety” is a trope for this inevitability while properness, which sums up the ‘ontological preoccupation’ is placed in question as that “which gives time its meaning as duration”.

In Lévinas’ own course, of which we are only at the beginning here, the important contribution of Heidegger is “substituting philosophical concepts for the common concepts of death and time.” What he wants to leave with Heidegger is the equation of death and annihilation. He is certainly right to do so, since we have no way of knowing. Whatever death may be should surely remain at least as indelible a question as the ontological inquiry – with which there is absolutely no reason to equate it.

The question for me at this stage of the reading, however, is does “Heidegger” really require the equation of death and annihilation? (I put Heidegger in quotes because I don’t mean the author of B&T, but the figure encountered by Lévinas at this stage of his course.) This is really the question of whether the properness of Dasein can only be achieved in the wholeness of Dasein. If the answer is yes, then everything is pointed to when “appropriation is most proper”, which is the point beyond which there is no more “out ahead of oneself”, i.e. death.

For some reason, perhaps because I’m Australian, the figure that comes to mind as the exemplary Heideggerian subject is the surfboard rider and his endless solitary rehearsal of death: “Thus the totality of the human being and of its own being-there is sought without any intervention by another, solely in Dasein as being-in-the-world.”

This is a quinessentially masculine attitude, as my friend David Deida would say, and yes, it does seek ultimate fulfillment in annihilation, even if this is thought in terms of the vulgar mysticism of surf culture. Where do dead surfer’s go? Well, they either become merged with nature itself, or they end up in a sort of surfer’s Valhalla, endlessly riding the “perfect wave” – “Changed by eternity into his true Self.”

Life in this view is thus “a question with a given”, that is, a question with a pre-comprehended (but latent until the point of death) answer. This is what Lévinas calls “finite”, a philosophy in which there is at least potentially an answer to every question because there is a logic with only two terms, Being and nothingness. Against this Lévinas poses a philosophy which is open to the infinite, where the fundamental question(s) may have no answer but are, as it were an invitation to be open to the unknown. The sometimes convoluted rhetoric in which Lévinas dresses his third term, the “question without response” is actually necessary in order to maintain its status as infinite. (In mathematics, one definition of the infinite would be that it is what satisfies the equation x = x + 1.)

I am reminded again that Lévinas’ is a feminine philosophy, at least as opposed to that of Heidegger. Infinite versus finite, open to the other versus solitary, preserving the enigma versus erasing it, respecting emotion rather than interpreting it away.
Every one of these terms is essential, so that Lévinas can conclude that any philosophy with a two-valued logic is finite and therefore unable to bring us to a true opening to the other and vice versa – hence his throwaway line about all post-Kantian philosophy.

Perhaps Lévinas could also say “just I and the abyss” – but this is because there is no deeper abyss than the Other.

2002-09-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Lecture Six: Dasein and Death

Is the difference between Lévinas and Heidegger just an argument over attributes? What is the difference between them? From a very brief glance at B&T, it seems that death for Heidegger is primarily a matter of life, of how one lives, of the quality of existence.

The public, the “they” of the “everyday”, somehow miss death; they evade and conceal the truth of death. They die but they miss out on death. Those who are somehow able to see beyond this evasion, grasp that dying is a matter of ‘that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death’ (291).

Why does the “lack of totality,” the possibility, the ahead of itself that constitutes the future tense of being come “to an end with death” (286)? Why does death signify or indicate some culmination? For Heidegger, it seems death is not about demise but ‘the possibility of authentic existence’ (307). I’m on precarious ground here, but it almost seems like a death that gains its resonance, its place in B&T, from Husserlian distinction between visent and atteignent. “Aiming” at death (one would no doubt have to qualify the Husserlian intentionality and say that the “there” has already aimed us towards death - and yet, how do those who are not the ‘they,” comportment themselves towards death?) but not “reaching” it gives death an imperative for life, for the ‘way of Being”. If this is not just some kind of Hegelian hubris, why is this so problematic?

If it is really all a matter of attributes (and I am still thinking about a Rambam-like prohibition on all anthropocentric attributes for death), how different is Heidegger’s “death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” from Lévinas’s “the unknown that is without a response”?

On the other hand, if there is a profound difference, Lévinas’s emphasis on “a question without response” seems like a “response” to Heidgger’s link between being and putting in question; putting death beyond the question of being.

If it were a matter of comfort, one could almost say that there is more comfort in death as the possibility of authentic existence than in the ambiguity of the without response.

What does Lévinas mean when he asks, “Can there be a signification of being-there as a whole beyond the biography?”

Perhaps the difference between the two thinkers is not a matter of possibility or non-response, but the finite and the infinite. Lévinas clearly associates Heidegger’s thought on death with a position of finitude. Heidegger says “Only being-free for death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude.” Perhaps if death signifies appropriating my own authenticity (the unique) or a responsibility towards the other (the substitution of the unique), what is really at stake is whether death indicates finitude or the infinite.

What is the difference between death as confirmation of a authentic finite existence and death as encounter with the imperative of the infinite?

What does Lévinas mean when he says, “Since Kant, philosophy has been finitude without infinity”?

Finitude or the Infinite? Is this the difference? Is this a question of time, or of God (the adieu), before it is a question of death?

2002-09-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Lecture 5.
First off I must say that when I express a nostalgia for the days when I first read Heidegger it has nothing to do with feeling drawn towards creepy Nordic fairy tale forests. In so far as Heidegger can be called “pagan” – and it is there in his very name, Heide = heath – the connotations for me are with the South, with Greece, with the German wine country and with Rilke and Holderlin. The Heideggerian protagonist discovers himself in the midst of a sensual world, already individuated and with tremendous lucidity in amongst the things of nature, it is only in a subsequent stage of his meditations that he discovers the mystery of death. Think Wordsworth or better still Wallace Stevens. Although I find Heidegger’s universe no longer large enough for all the things I love about the world, I’m not joining the Heidegger bashers.

In Lect. 5 Lévinas is exposing only the first arc of Heidegger’s philosophical narrative in B&T, what one might call man in nature, and resrerving for subsequent lectures the sequel which changes everything, namely, man and death.

I found it surprising that Lévinas begins by asking rhetorically about the connection of his inquiries with the sciences. I think that you are right to hear a nod to Husserl in this, after all Husserl’s version of phenomenology was precisely that of a philosophical propaedeutic to science, clarifying the “infrastructure of intelligibilty and significance” which it presupposes.

I don’t get the impression that Lévinas has much interest in science. He makes the odd comment on p.29 “…a phenomenology of naturalist concepts is necessary (if only to be able to work and take notes)…”

Earlier in the lecture he neatly brought to the fore the point at which he swerves away from Husserl: “…to recognise that the human dimension does not simply make universal reason incarnate or individuated, but signifies its own intrigue… without which objectivity threatens to dissimulate the original sense…” That could be pure Husserl, but the actual vehicle of this overturning of (naïve) objectivity and universality is what Lévinas called a “rupture in the epic of being” brought about through the experience of death, which is “the relationship of the one to the other (i.e. the domain of ethics).”
Where for Husserl the unfolding of the transendental intrigue of being stabilises the meaning of being, for Lévinas it threatens to “dissolve in meaning” the entire adventure of being.

I have only two more comments to make.
First I want to worry some more at Lévinas’ insistence that the arisal of the domain of ethics demands a dissolving of the conatus. This is somewhat like that psychological language that would say that ethical action is only possible once we can see beyond the (narcissistic) drives of the ego. We can grant this latter observation (it is virtually a tautology) and still wonder whether it really is equivalent to the former.
“Dissolving the conatus” – “unless you die to self” – there is an oddly Christian resonance to this. But one might ask, why not just generalise the conatus: yes, you want to persevere in being but so does everybody else and so it is only fair to take this into account, and to try to judge things as from their point of view before acting. This seems to be the very sense of the ethical as it is debated in the public sphere, the sense that would give rise to a utilitarian ethos. This seems rather coarse from a Levinasian point of view but there is also a certain tact in it as one is not always holding the other in extremis.
Further, one could argue that the perseverance in being, the conatus itself, evolves ethically by unfolding deeper horizons of being. This is precisely what ontological inquiry is supposed to hold open as possibility. It seems that Lévinas forecloses the sense of “being” in order to insist that the turn to the other involves a “beyond being” – but what if the turn to the other simply discloses a further horizon of being – one in which we are profoundly non-separate, so that it is one’s responsibility to being, stewardship of being in this deeper sense that defines the ethical?

This last alternative represents what might be called a higher paganism, such as perhaps is found in Buddhism, whose unintentional resonance is heard when Lévinas writes, “This is a non-taking upon oneself or a non-assumption of what is equivalent to no content.” This sentence occurs in the first “more specific” paragraph on p.29 when Lévinas is describing the temporal structure necessitated by his turn towards the dying other. As I see it this is a particular kind of open-endedness which is attended by certain kinds of tropes (centred on negation) but apart from that I don’t see it as much different from the “out-ahead-of-itself” that he describes in his commentary on Being & Time, the open-ended future directed dimension of ontological care. The tropes are different and hence the polarisation is reversed, but this may be just an optical effect. Where Lévinas says, “The ‘never’ of patience would be the always of time,” a Heideggerian would say, “The ‘always’ of time would be the never of patience.”

In the analysis of Dasein death arises as the term for the never-to-be-achieved wholeness which is nonetheless an essential existentiell dimension in that it reveals Dasein’s ontological intrigue like nothing else can. It does more than just “focus the mind”. (Like that wonderful pro capital punishment movie Dead Man Walking which shows how only the imminence of execution is able to dissolve the hardened bad-faith of a murderer and raise him to the ethical.) So while one could say that in the Heideggerian text “Dasein is total only in its necrology,” one could equally say that in the Levinasian text “Ethics is elegy”.

2002-09-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

Lecture 5: The Analytic of Dasein

Like you, I find myself pulled back into Heidegger, perhaps as one would be pulled into a thick forest that is a world into itself; dense, seductive, without much air, poisonous mushrooms and each soundless step sinking into deep moss - an Anslem Kiefer forest or, as Derrida writes in De l‘esprit, ‘une forêt european’, ‘une forêt noir”: the forest of being.

The first two parts of this lecture can be seen as a sketch of an alternative “route” from the road taken by Heidegger, which begins with Husserl. I am hardly competent to speak of Husserl, so I hope you will forgive some naive remarks. In his 1940 essay on Husserl, Lévinas speaks about the importance for Husserl of the difference between visent and atteignent, between aiming and reaching. Aiming appears to indicate the essential structure of intentionality and meaning in consciousness, thought and being.

By focusing on aiming as opposed to reaching, Husserl indicates an opening, a possibility that he equates with phenomenology. Heidegger reformulates the distinction between aiming and reaching into the question of Being and Lévinas reworks it into the Other that puts my identity and freedom in question.

I don’t fully understand the contested ground here, but it seems that Lévinas’s attempts to distinguish questioning from comprehension (which he sees as soldered together in Heidegger’s work) turn on the nuances and definitions of possibility, of awaiting, projecting and anticipating.

Lévinas suggest that the “impact” of death on "human time" is that of an “ever-open possibility … whose hour remains unknown.” (I’ll leave aside the question of the “rupture” of death and the “rupture” of the ethical and whether these two ruptures rupture in the same way). For Lévinas, time must therefore “be considered in its dimension of awaiting or anticipation, without any anticipating aiming.” Lévinas goes on step further than Husserl: it is not about aiming rather than reaching, it is about anticipation without aiming. Lévinas marks an awaiting, an intimation of the future (of the unknown day of my death) as an unavoidable passivity and inevitable responsibility for the other (non-taking upon oneself; nonassumption). Anticipation without aiming is an awakening. Death marks time: “the ‘never’ of patience would be the always of time.”

How much of Lévinas’s attempt to differentiate himself from Heidegger here goes back to Hegel and “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative”? And to Blanchot on Kirilov and the impossibility of suicide? And to Derrida’s attempts to resist the force and power of “teleogical anticipation” in Hegel, and his interest in “l'expérience d'une anticipation sans cap.”

As Derrida remarks in Glas, for Hegel, the particular absolute totality of a given moment or power “comes to a halt, stops itself.” In stopping itself, in inhibiting itself, it takes on “a certain independence” which ultimately manifests the absolute: “the delay it thus takes on itself ... is the positive condition of its appearing, of its glory.” The delay, Derrida notes, “is also an advance, progress, an anticipation.”

I wont pretend to have caught the complexities of Heidegger. From what I can gather – without, at this stage, going too far beyond the scope of Lecture 5 - anticipation is being as care towards-death (§ 41, 53). Care indicates that being is “ahead of itself already in the world” and this worldly anticipation, this grounded openness to the possible, the future contains the “possibility of Being free for authentic existentiell possibilities.” Care, as Lévinas says is “a permanent nonclosure of Dasein.” Lévinas emphasises the apparent incompatibility of care (as possibility) with totality: being-towards death indicates a possibility that is compatible with totality (as a form of anticipation).

Being-towards-death is being towards a possibility (that which is not ready or present at hand). Heidegger defines the comportment of this “being-towards” the possibility of death as anticipation. Heidegger writes: “Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being of that entity whose kind of Being is anticipation itself.” Like being is question is to be, anticipating a potentiality (being–towards-death) is to be and it is to really be, authentically. “Antcipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say the possibility of an authentic existence.”

As Lévinas implies, Heideggerain anticipation transcends the "dictatorship of the they", it overcomes the everyday and the public world. Anticipation is nothing less than the engine of individuation for Dasein. Anticipation is the source of certainty and – most crucially for Lévinas – “the possibility of taking the whole of Dasein in advance in an existentiell manner.” Heidegger writes, “in anticipation Dasein can first make certain of its ownmost Being in its totality.” Anticipation is the origin of “an impassioned freedom towards death.”

From this cursory reading of B&T, Heideggerian anticipation seems to be a grand act of prepossession of death as freedom, authenticity, individuation: it marks a very active possibility, a possibility that is put to work and that not only aims, but reaches everything in the advance certainty of the possibility of death. As Hegel said, ‘This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.’ As Lévinas aptly puts it, for Heidegger, “Dasein is total only in its necrology.’

Heidegger’s Dasein may not have, as Lévinas says, “the security of an event grounded on the earth or son some principle imposed by itself, whether absolute or divine’, but it does have death.

As Lévinas suggests in his extraordinary essay ‘Heidegger, Gargarin and Us,’ Heidegger did turn to “the security of an event grounded on the earth” – perhaps death was not enough and he needed the pagan grottoes, the forests, to
^{"follow a path the winds its way through fields, to feel the unity created by the bridge that links the two river banks and by the architecture of buildings, the presence of the tree, the chiaroscuro of the forests, the mystery of things, of a jug, of the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl, the gleam from a carafe of wine sitting on a white tablecloth. The very Being of reality will reveal itself behind these privileged experiences, giving and trusting itself into man’s keeping.”}

2002-09-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

Whenever I read the title of lecture 4, “An obligatory passage: Heidegger” I get the sense of a weary reluctance on L.’s part to once more engage with the great German, whose popularity with his audience in Paris in 1975 was probably still assured. In a way it seems at odds with the spirit of the difference between them which I think you captured perfectly at the end of your piece:

^{According to Lévinas, for Heiedgger to BE in question is TO BE is a grand act of placing la propriéte before l’hospitalité. There is more to say about this. What is the status of the question when it is a matter of being PUT in question BY the other?}

As usual, I want to make some irreverent comments as well as hopefully some reverent ones.
I take the first section of this lecture to be a brief restatement and deepening of his earlier exposition of the relation to the dying other before he plunges into the “obligatory passage”. Whatever it is he’s talking about is more complex than first appears. When I read of the “held in awakening” and the “incessant sobering up of the Same intoxicated with itself” and of the “responsibility of the hostage”, what comes to mind from my own experience is being a parent, and especially that indelible irruption into my narcissism that was the birth of my first child. You don’t have to be a parent to feel this sort of heart-opening care for another, especially when that other is helpless in some way and is entrusted to you – think a child with a pet dog – but that real once and for all shattering of a simply presumed “for-me” only happened ‘for me’ in this way. The effect of having people close to me die, of which there had been two by that stage in my life, seemed to work in a different way, it strengthened the self by bringing the ‘phenomenon of life’ into clearer focus. This is not simply a positive thing – there is no such verity as the ‘phenomenon of life’ – it comes to be in the same process by which it is grasped for each one of us – and a strong self is also a strong constrictor of the mutitudinous energies of life. I am aware that in saying this last I am sounding a bit like that existential psychology which descends directly from Heidegger, but it may only be a superficial likeness, since I am unpersuaded that it can all be traced back to anxiety and eigentlichkeit.
At any rate the idea that there is naturalistic source for the irrational feeling of care for others in the feelings towards children, and more generally family is a nice sceptical countercurrent to what L. seems to be urging on us – that the essence of our humanity is in spontaneous responsibility for others. I would express this by saying that our humanity is a difficult and precarious achievement of civilization as against the essence of our humanity, which is wildly partisan.

But Levinas’ position is more complex than what I have just sketched. I’ve tried to fill in for the missing indirect object of that “irresistable call to responsibility” with something like altruism, as it would be in my care-for-children analogy. L. never says what it is that I am supposed to do for the other – in fact he suggests quite the opposite, that there is nothing I can do, and it is in that nothing, to which I am still held, that I encounter passivity, the duration of Time etc. Which leads to that very strange parenthesis on page 23 which to me has rebarbative soixante-huitard connotations: “Such a passivity, a passivity of the hostage, cannot exist in an organised society or a State etc.”
I confess I’m at a loss to understand what he could have meant by this, while at the same time knowing from current personal experience about the disquiet without intentionality, the responsibility that is not a debt, the experience of a passivity that throws the “for-me” into question, the nonsense that is inseparable from unfathomable depth when one sits by the bed of a dying friend.

[An extraordinary and indispensable text for meditating on these themes is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein.]

Before leaving the introductory section I can’t resist placing it in juxtaposition with what could almost be its antithetical double, from the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology:

^{The element that disappears has rather to be looked at as itself essential, not in the sense of being something fixed, that has to be cut off from truth and allowed to lie outside it, heaven knows where; just as similarly the truth is not to be held to stand on the other side as an immovable lifeless positive element. Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is per se, and constitutes reality and the life-movement of truth. The truth is thus the bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached than it eo ipso collapses straightway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm. Judged by that movement, the particular shapes which mind assumes do not indeed subsist any more than do determinate thoughts or ideas; but they are, all the same, as much positive and necessary moments, as negative and transi tory. In the entirety of the movement, taken as an unbroken quiescent whole, that which obtains distinctness in the course of its process and secures specific existence, is preserved in the form of a self -recollection, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence. [Baillie, trans.]}

This (brief) moment of supreme philosophical self-confidence is gained by Hegel after a thorough slagging of mathematics. I would expect mathematics to do a lot better near Levinas, and indeed it is easy to mistake “Totality and Infinity”, at least by it’s title, for a text on Set-Theory. Seriously though, the way that Levinas and many of his contemporaries in France mobilise certain dialectical terms, like l’infini, or différance, or Blanchot’s le neutre, in a non-dialectical manner has its precise analogy in mathematics. [vide A.Badiou et cie.]

The rest of the lecture is an extraodinary subtle and detailed reading of the opening sections of Being and Time, wherein it seemed to me Levinas put aside his objections to Heidegger and payed off some of his debt to him.

I enjoyed this section very much, because it gave me a certain nostalgia for the days when I first read B&T. I’m no expert on the book, but it seems to me that H. does indicate a pre-response, and that this is the very reason why Dasein is the privileged site for the interrogation of Being. This pre-response is not already a response, like Kant’s a priori it needs experience to develop, but it does mean that the inquiry into Being takes place within the philosophical subject and not say in the mind of the scientist, even if he be a theoretical physicist. This is one pillar of Heidegger that remains after he does the turning towards his later philosophy. I can’t imagine what Derrida has to say against this except some sophistry about the exact meaning of a pre-response which would underline the way that the Heideggerian is radically open to the world.
In crude terms, the Heidegger idea that we are all of us engaged in some way in interpreting Being in whatever we happen to be doing in life, whether it is explicit or implicit, is an intoxicating one. It captured the early Lacan, amongst others. I remember stumbling across an almost exact précis of it in a strange book by Laura Riding and Schulyer Jackson called The Telling. It is extraordinary that as L. says “for the first time, and with such a rigour, the ‘I’ is deduced from … being.” I think that the ethic that follows from this is not actually H.’s one of authenticity and resolution but rather something more like the early Lacan’s “acknowledgement”.
But are we really all just on about Being? You can go quite far with this, but you end up having to exclude too many things. For one that Aristotelian omnivorous curiosity, and for another those profound dimensions of life that don’t belong to being, such as L. finds in death. Perhaps it is even enough to consider the priority of the social, that between-us comes before for-me. It is not ‘I’ that is dedeuced from Being, but the other way around; and in that case what is deduced from ‘us’?

2002-09-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Lecture 4: An Obligatory Passage: Heidegger

Before I start, I wanted to mark the death last month of the editor of God, Death and Time: Jacques Rolland, philosophe, est mort dimanche 25 août à l'âge de 52 ans, des suites d'une maladie foudroyante.

I found the first section of this lecture (22-23) a fine summary of Lévinas’s attempt to differentiate himself from Heidgger by redefining enthusiasm as disinterest and paganism as inspiration.

Recalling the sans-réponse of lecture 1, Lévinas describes death as the sans-repos. Death produces the sans-repos from the sans-réponse. For Lévinas, the disquietude of death (the sans-repos from the sans-réponse) indicates an emotion that – contrary to Heidegger – has it source not in anxiety, but in humanity.

Lévinas describes this humanity arising from the disquietude of death as a “held-in-awakening” or “vigilance” (he has also called this vigilance insomnia). Vigilance or insomnia is an incessant awakening OF the autonomous “self” BY the other. For Lévinas, this awakening is an enthusiasm (or inspiration) as disinterest, “an incessant sobering up of the Same intoxicated with itself.” The dis-interest of this awakening (“an awakening of awakening”) is “guaranteed’ (I can’t think of a better word) by a ceaseless and excessive iteration, a repetition “beyond-measure” “that never stops: the infinite. This excessive iteration indicates an irresistible call or obligation to responsibility (the concrete, or what amounts to the “horizontal” trace of God, since this dis-interest as awakening as inexhaustible excessive iteration is the dread of the before God or to-God).

Lévinas counters the apparent paganism of Heidegger with an idea of DEATH that inspires humanity and leads to GOD (mediated as the responsibility for the other). It is this disquietude of death leading to God (adieu) that indicates the impossibility of tranquillity, of good conscience towards the other and, most of all, of an assured, achievable autonomy of “being for-me.” This impossibility of tranquillity arising from the à-dieu marks the “deferring to infinity”, marks the duration of TIME.

Speaking of Death, God and Time, as it is nearly Yom Kippur I’ll just have to offer a few quick comments on the rest of the lecture.

I was struck by Lévinas’s account of B&T as in part “a question of possessing a pre-response” (23). It is perhaps the question of “a question of possessing a pre-response” that separates Lévinas’s reading of H from that of Derrida. For Derrida, Heidegger may have been tempted but ultimately does not presume to possess a pre-response. For Lévinas, Heidegger presumption was great.

For Lévinas, “to put in question” (as critique in T&I) is distinguished from Heidegger’s notion that “it is proper to being to put itself in question.’ According to Lévinas, for Heiedgger to BE in question is TO BE is a grand act of placing la propriéte before l’hospitalité. There is more to say about this. What is the status of the question when it is a matter of being PUT in question BY the other?

Hateema tova,

2002-09-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

It's already Sept 11 here in Australia, and I'm thinking back to one year ago when the first I heard of the attacks on the USA were when I switched on my computer and saw a banner on Google. Leon Wieseltier, for whom I have huge respect, has a diary called "The Fall" over at The New Republic, which also makes a pretty profound allusion to Lévinas.

2002-09-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

“Eloquent Madness”

Your patient, careful reading of lecture 3 has an almost Talmudic grandeur.
I did not have your patience with this most compact and dense of lectures. I was struck particularly by a few of your comments (which I have quoted below) and hope we can return to. I’ve added two remarks of my own.

1) "that in order for this process to not be reclaimed in the positivity of an ‘enterprise’ we must posit ‘the risk of a nonsense, a madness’ in the very ‘egoity of the I’."

2) "Lévinas’ first interpretation of the non-intentionality in emotion is as a question. Where does this word ‘question’ suddenly spring from?"

-You noted how close Lévinas is to Blanchot in the presupposed privilege he gives to ‘the question’, to ‘putting in question’? Is he not also close to Heidegger and “the question of being” at the beginning of B&T? Derrida touches on the ‘privilège apparemment absolu et longtemps non questionné du Fragen” in Heidegger et la Question (1987). Derrida suggests that Da-sein ‘n’est pas choisi comme étant exemplaire pour la question de l’être que depuis l’expérience de la question, la possibilité du Fragen” (20, 30). It is perhaps not fortuitous that Lévinas employs the question in T&I when he argues that metaphysics precedes ontology. For Lévinas, “critique … calls into question the freedom of the exercise of ontology’; ‘critique does not reduce the other to the same as does ontology, but calls into question the exercise of the same. A calling into question of the same – which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same – is brought about by the other” (42). Lévinas returns to idea of critique later, noting that in contrast to theory, critique “puts itself into question” (82). Critique begins by calling “into question the central place the I occupies in the world” (83). The “prerogative” of critique consists “in being able to put itself in question, in penetrating beneath its own condition.” Critque ‘poses the problem of the foundation” only by presupposing the other. “To welcome the other is to put in question my freedom” (85). I think it would be worth exploring the role played by ‘to put in question’ in Lévinas’s work.

3) "It is here that we are forced to acknowledge an emotion-without-meaning which becomes an enigmatic question opening up an inner fissure, as if to say that all the rest of our emotional life is woven seamlessly out of meanings and projects. That it can become such a question is because it interrupts the flow of intentional life,"

4) "in order for this process to retain a dimension in which it is never finalised, and which therefore is always open to the transference, we must posit a muti-dimensional temporalisation."

5) "This also returns us to the primordial sociality of Lévinas’ philosophy, a chiasmus whereby the inner that constitutes the world is itself already constituted by the outer, by the knowledge of the seemingly contingent facts of death which touch us more intimately than the intimate."

-As Derrida suggests, so much of Lévinas’s philosophy can be defined by his reaction against Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. I was just thinking about what Lévinas says about the “the inner” and “the outer” in ‘L’oeuvre d’Edmond Husserl’ (1940): ‘L’extériorité de ce quelque chose est comandée par l’intériorite du sens. Et cette dialectique d’intériorité et d’extériorité determine la notion même de l’esprit” (21).

Finally, two Poe quotes:

The ‘eloquent madness’ of ‘German moralists’ (Manuscript Found in a bottle).

‘the truly imaginative [are] never otherwise than analytic’ (Rue Morgue)

2002-09-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

“a phenomenology of the imaginary”?

I heard a great story last week. Somehow it seems appropriate for our discussion of GDT. A vicar in a small English parish found his cat stuck on the high branch of a tree. The vicar got a ladder and tied one end of a rope to the branch and the other end to his car in an attempt to bend the branch. The rope broke and the cat flew into the sky. Two weeks later, the vicar met a parishioner in the local shop who was buying cat food. The vicar said, I didn’t know you had a cat. The man said, two weeks ago I was sitting in my back garden with my daughter. She said she wished that she had a cat. I said, you will just have to ask God for one. At that very moment a cat fell from the sky and landed next to us.

Lévinas’s philosophy as “a phenomenology of the imaginary.” This seems a bit harsh. Though there maybe something to this in Lévinas work, perhaps it is more apparent here because it is a matter of death. I think it is hard to get beyond “a phenomenology of the imaginary” when one is discussing death. On the other hand, I find Totality and Infinity in particular to be far more than a “a phenomenology of the imaginary.” Part of the problem is that while I am convinced by Lévinas’s argument that ethics is a responsibility for the other that precedes (and provides a foundation for) the relation to self – that l’hospitalité precede la propriéte, as Derrida says in Adieu - I am not persuaded that his account of ethics (of identity) can be joined so seamlessly to an analysis of death. Perhaps “the phenomenology of the imaginary” is labour of fitting all these different concepts into one overarching and entirely non-contradictory system. Sometimes it seems as if infinity, the other, time, death, adieu, etc are all interchangeable – all equally ethical – concepts for Lévinas. As Derrida suggested in Violence and Metaphysics, there is something Hegelian about Lévinas’s anti-Hegelianism.

2002-09-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

I divide Lecture 3 into several parts. The first three pages are concerned with an extended elucidation of the key notion of an “affectivity without intentionality”, or “nonintentionality – […] a static non-state”. The second part begins after the first tilde on page 19, and concerns the consequences for the understanding of the “I”, or “my-self” of the post-intentional structures brought forward in the first part. This is a most important consideration as intentionality and some sort of quasi-cartesian self are mutually implicative and mutually self-evident. The second section is interrupted by the important parenthesis at the bottom of p.19 which reintroduces the theme of the analysis of Time. When the analysis of the “I” resumes Lévinas introduces two very important ideas, (i) that individuation is only through the relation with the other and (ii) that in order for this process to not be reclaimed in the positivity of an ‘enterprise’ we must posit ‘the risk of a nonsense, a madness’ in the very ‘egoity of the I’. The final section lists ‘a number of presuppositions’ on which the analysis has been based and looks forward to a treatment of them, beginning with a ‘dialogue with Heidegger’, which will begin in the next lecture. The following is a commentary on all but the last section.

It has always seemed to me that one of the weaknesses, and also the strengths, of the phenomenological method is that by its nature it reads some speakable content into every phase of human life that it inquires into. It is an artifact of the method that the ‘phenomenon’ implies a correlative ‘I’ for whom it is some kind of act of taking up or constitution. Hence in the case of emotion, for Husserl it is fundamentally a representation, a thought about its object, while for Scheler it is a value judgement. For Heidegger it seems that it is a refraction of a fundamental onto-logical anxiety, although Lévinas reserves his discussion of this. [Martha Nussbaum’s recent work championing the philosophical value of the emotions also interprets them as a kind of thought.] Both experientially and scientifically it is more plausible that feeling and emotion precede the subject for whom they are meaningful. Lévinas is forced to consider such questions from within phenomenology by turning his attention to the fundamental event for any human subject of encountering the death of another. It is here that we are forced to acknowledge an emotion-without-meaning which becomes an enigmatic question opening up an inner fissure, as if to say that all the rest of our emotional life is woven seamlessly out of meanings and projects. That it can become such a question is because it interrupts the flow of intentional life, whereas in a rival understanding the mystery is ubiquitous since it is that of how meaningful life arises from ‘the inertia of the sensible state’.

Lévinas’ first interpretation of the non-intentionality in emotion is as a question. Where does this word ‘question’ suddenly spring from? It is not clear to what degree it is literal or metaphoric. “Would not the dis-quiet of emotion be the question that, in the nearness of death, is precisely at the point of being born?” [my emphasis] and “This is a disquietude that… resists all appearing… as though emotion passed by way of the question, without encountering the slightest quiddity…” [my emphasis again]. This question is described in very Blanchottian language as “an interrogation [that] interrogates itself yet is not convertible into a response, [or rather] wherein the response is reduced to the responsibility of the questioning itself, or of the one who questions.”

[It is as this point that I would introduce a citation of Poe, from The Facts in the Case of M. Valemar. The narrator is addressing Valdemar whom he has kept mesmerically suspended at the very point of death for seven months:

^{"M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes

now?"}

^{There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the

tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the

jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same

hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:}

^{"For God's sake! --quick! --quick! --put me to sleep --or, quick!

--waken me! --quick! --I say to you that I am dead!"}

^{I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided

what to do. At first I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient;

but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my

steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him.}

(Incidentally, passages such as this make it clear that Poe and not Kafka is the novelist Blanchot's true precursor.)]

What is the question that we would most like to address to someone at the point of death? Do we want to know if there are glimpses of another world, or do we just want to know “how it feels”? Is it “responsibility for the other in the unknown” or an inquiry into “that deeper relation to the infinite, which is time”?
Lévinas seems to want it both ways, but at least at the end of this section he goes for the latter interpretation in very strong terms: “Death is not annihilation but the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced.”

Since I can never experience my own death my relationship to it is mediated through my experience of the death of the other. This mediation he calls “transference” and insists that it is “not mechanical but belongs to the intrigue or intrication of My-self.” Following the parenthesis this intrigue will be interpreted as “identification” – which we can gloss as individuation, but in order for this process to retain a dimension in which it is never finalised, and which therefore is always open to the transference, we must posit a muti-dimensional temporalisation. The language is stretched to the utmost here, but if “the Same” is taken to refer to the flowing mundane time and “the Different” or the “Other” to the synchronous, infinite, uncontainable dimension of Time [compare with the quintessentially Christian concept of “kairos” – the moment of destiny, when the infinite touches the finite] then we can understand why “Time is at once this Other-within-the-Same and that Other who cannot be together with the Same.” Mere flowing is not enough to engender time, despite Husserl’s retentions and protentions, it requires at all points an equal relation to Time, but if this relation were to become too close then time would collapse into synchrony, into a single moment.

[At this point I would introduce another extraordinary quotation from Poe, this time from The Colloquy of Monos and Una, in which Monos, upon being “re-born” recounts his experience of death and the grave:

^{And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there

appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its

exercise I found a wild delight yet a delight still physical, inasmuch

as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had

fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery

throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain, that of

which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an

indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It

was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. ….

And this- this keen, perfect, self-existing sentiment of

duration- this sentiment existing (as man could not possibly have

conceived it to exist) independently of any succession of events- this

idea- this sixth sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was

the first obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the

threshold of the temporal Eternity.}]

The discussion of “the identification of the I” which begins on p.20 recaptures in highly condensed form a number of key phases in the philosophy of personal identity. Is it like that of an identified thing, the invariant “of a series of views or intentions?” Clearly not, because that is the identity of an object, but what we are inquiring into is the identity of a subject. Do we then dissolve, or declare fallacious, the difference between the object and the subject, as the materialists and cognitivists do? This doesn’t work either since in this case the I “could no longer be distinguished from the totality thus formed”. [A cognitivist would counter that this distinction doesn’t matter since it cannot be coherently made, it is defined practically from moment to moment by the situation.] The answer then is that the I is individuated through a sort of interpellation: “The “me” only surfaces in its uniqueness in responding for the other in a responsibility from which there is no flight … a duty beyond all debt” in which one cannot “be replaced”. There is an extraordinary coincidence of theological and materialist, of active and passive registers here, but there is also the skirting of an abyss – how is the other for whom I am responsible identified if not through his or her own responsibility for me and for further others? It is this as much as the necessity of avoiding “sufficiency and institution” that demands the recognition of “nonsense” at the heart of the constitution of the I. This also returns us to the primordial sociality of Lévinas’ philosophy, a chiasmus whereby the inner that constitutes the world is itself already constituted by the outer, by the knowledge of the seemingly contingent facts of death which touch us more intimately than the intimate.

2002-09-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Notes on Lecture 3. Preface

I once wrote something about the interpretative latitude of those who applaud Lacan’s equation of Kant with Sade, saying that they might equally equate Lévinas with a serial killer. This was meant to be a scathing remark on the side of Kant, whom I still find the most convincing writer on ethics, but what I thought was an obviously inadmissible gloss on Lévinas’ focus on the moment of the death of the other doesn’t actually seem so far-fetched at all now. Perhaps I’m more of a Lacanian than I think (despite the fact that the-voice-of-Hegel came to me in a dream last night and showed me convincingly that none of his critics had ever really understood what he meant by Absolute Knowledge) but if I were to write the mischievous essay it would be called “Lévinas avec Poe”. More of this later, I hope, but I want to continue this preface to a reading of Lecture 3 with some more irreverant and superficial remarks that insist on being written down.

First I want to nod at some of the ways in which the death of the other encountered in a sort of amoral context can provoke emotions that are anything but overflowing solicitude. There is the way that some old people like to begin the day by reading the obituaries and derive a strange elation from the knowledge that they have outlived certain of their contemporaries. I think that if one lives long enough this element may even be mixed with the sorrow at the death of an (elderly) child. Then there is the well-known aphrodisiac effect of proximity to the death of another, as if nature’s response to the loss of a life is to make a life. There is a literary citation of this in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (I don’t have the book handy), but my favourite anecdote was from a young woman I once knew who told me that at one stage she used to get a lift home from her boss, a middle aged and perfectly respectable gentleman. One afternoon they passed the scene of a car accident in which several dead bodies were clearly visible. Without a word exchanged between them he immediately drove to a motel where they made furious and peremptory love. Finally there is something I’ve read which stuck in my mind concerning the Chinese soldiers whose duty it is to carry out the executions which are so common in that country. A certain amount of physical intimacy is involved in this act and apparently it usually results in a visceral sense of well-being in the survivor.

None of these examples would be any surprise to Spinoza, for whom the will to persist in being, the conatus is essential. Cupiditas est ipsa hominis essentia hoc est conatus quo homo in suo esse perseverare conatur. [Desire is the essence of a man, that is, the endeavour whereby a man endeavours to persist in his own being. Ethics Book iv Prop 18 (proof)] Lévinas’ pointed insistence that “the human esse is not a conatus” seems to be directed against Spinoza as well as Heidegger, although only the latter is mentioned. In these passages Lévinas often speaks of an essence of humanity perhaps in a defiant reference to Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”.

Second, I wonder what use it would be to people whose job it is to attend others in moments of life-and-death crisis, people such as intensive care nurses and emergency paramedics to receive Lévinasian counselling? From my own experiences as a hospital patient and observations of friends it seems that ordinary virtues of attentiveness, efficiency, tact, warmth, sensitivity etc. are worth much more than profound emotion, deep and meaninful hand squeezes and eye-gazes. One may not want to hold anybody hostage, and feel rather put upon by someone who insisted on letting you know that they were “yours” in this way. Could Spinoza (or Heidegger) account for any of the virtues that I just listed? Probably not. What would it take then to give a philosophical underpinning to these “nurturing” virtues, that I think most people would acknowledge are such? Do they challenge the project of an immanent rewriting of the world?

Third, whatever the currency in real life of the notion that those in immediate neighbourhood to someone in articulo mortis are summoned to do all in their power to do right by this one, in whatever form, whether before or after their death, it is certainly a staple in fiction and especially in cinema, at least where the sympathetic neighbourhood of the protagonists is concerned. What I am getting at here is the doubt that to some degree Lévinas’ phenomenology is an imaginary one, that is a phenomenology of the imaginary.

2002-09-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Lévinas and the Face

I was tempted, after reading your thoughts on the face (I loved the Melbournian image of the encounter with the other on a tram) to wander away from death (if such a thing were possible). But the third lecture calls and I think a few quotes will have to do for now. Perhaps we can turn to other works of Lévinas at a later date.
Otherwise than Being: “The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself” (88). “A face is not an appearance or sign of some reality, which would be personal like it is, but dissimulated or expressed by the physiognomy, and which would present itself as an invisible theme … A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbour on me. It is a trace of itself, a trace in the trace of an abandon, where the equivocation is never dissipated” (93-94).
Totality and Infinity: In the section “Phenomenology of Eros,” Lévinas writes “the pathos of voluptuosity is made of duality” (276) and, “sexuality is in us neither knowledge nor power, but the very plurality of our exisiting” (277).

Lecture Three: The Death of the Other and My Own

There is something unavoidable about the coincidence that Lévinas gave the final lecture on death and on God - his final lectures at the Sorbonne - on 21 May 1976 and that Heidegger died on 26 May 1976. Lévinas speaks in the first lecture of the “debt” that every contemporary thinker owes to Heidegger, “a debt he often owes to his regret” (8). In the first of the Quatre Lectures Talmudiques, delivered in 1963, on forgiveness, Lévinas writes, “On peut pardoner à beaucoup d’Allemands, mais il ya des Allemands à qui il est difficile de pardoner. Il est difficile de pardoner à Heidegger” (56). I wonder what Lévinas would have said in his last lecture on death if Heidegger had died a week earlier? It seems to me that this lecture is a slightly disgruntled anticipation of the next seven lecturers that work their way through the “obligatory passage” on Heidegger’s thought.

I found it interesting that Lévinas describes the relation we have to the death of the other as “a purely emotional rapport,” “an affectivity without intentionality..” This is somewhat like Francis Hutcheson, for whom the moral sense is both natural and disinterested because it is an entirely involuntary feeling. On the other hand, Lévinas distinguishes the emtional relation of the exceptional rapport to the death of the other from “an emotion … that is made up of the repercussion on our sensibility” (16) and any kind of “revelation” (17). What is this emotional relation – “an affectivity without intenionality” - and why is it emotional? The OED defines affectivity as emotional susceptibility and susceptibility as “readily affected by feeling, impressionable, sensitive, capable of or likely to respond or react.”

Perhaps the most significant question in the first part of the lecture is “whether affectivity is awakened only in a being persevering in its being’ and “whether the humanity of man is having-to-be” (18). These questions refer to Lévinas's works from the early 1970s, but they also suggest that my “affectivity without intentionality” to the death of the other defines my humanity. For what it is worth, I think Lévinas is probably right and yet in the brevity of the lecture there is something almost Heideggerian in this, as if the certainty, the monumentality of being-toward-death has been replaced by a humanity (beyond, otherwise than being)-toward-death.

Perhaps I am overstating the idea that death underwrites our humanity, our affectivity. Lévinas adds that the emotional relation to the death of the other is “a disquietude within the unknown.” I like the sense of a disquietude that is already “within” the unknown.

What made most sense in this lecture was the “glimmer of nonsense” that gives patience its passivity. I can understand that “the possibility of a nonsense … is this deference to death that is not meaning.” Dying – in others, in me – indicates an inescapable and, perhaps arbitrary, “nonsense of death, [a] deference to the nonsense of death” (21). Does this deference to the nonsense of death also affect me with an affectivity as humanity, as responsibility? Perhaps that is part of “the pure question mark” of death that Lévinas speak of?

2002-08-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

My death or the death of the other. If you are going to be a phenomenologist in the broadest sense of the word, looking to understand life from your own ground, then you need to take one of these as a bedrock limit to experience. Lévinas shows that only the latter choice is honest, both to what life is really like and what our way of proceding ought to be.

2002-08-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

I wonder if L. is indeed arguing for an "assured, inescapable ethics"? I sometimes read him that way too, as if he is an enthusiast whose prophetic imperatives are to be countered by an appeal to the practical superiority of an ethics of common measure. He can't really be suggesting that we are called to such a total responsibility for everyone, can he? The "divine law" as Hegel calls it which ties us to certain people in a responsibilty unto and beyond death is that precisely because certain ties, of blood, of election of spiritual kinship are themselves irrational and given to us without our consent. The "human law" is the one before whom all are to be treated equally, it is rational to the point that in being subject to it I am stripped of my individuality, but for the sake of fairness. These two laws are in dynamic tension, and while it may be that the human law is ultimately grounded in the divine law it is needed to check the excesses and partialities of the other. Sometimes it seems as though L. is proposing extending the sway of the divine law over all human relations with same universality as applies to the human law. As if he is saying, "After the holocaust we are all Antigone." But that is a caricature, and surely the question of where and how the boundaries between a sociality of deep responsibility and that of rational pragmatic ethics can be drawn should wait until we have phenomenologically clarified the former?

I want to run through a few points that stood out in my reading of this lecture. "The movement that can go to the point of masking someone within his face." (Lect.1) L. is always sensitive to this simultaneity of showing and hiding. Sometimes it seems as though he is referring to the "human" life masking the "vegetative" functions, the merely physical animal nature, but mostly it seems that he means the endless layers of hiding and showing within the human itself. I am fascinated by this "emphatic gradation of showing, hiding, associating". They sound a bit like developmental stages, from the childlike innocence of showing onself, making oneself and ones wants known, to the elaborate "masques" of social life. For L. it seems that these are not to be interpreted as the putting on of false selves, of layers of character armour, of inauthenticity etc., but rather of coming into "decency" which is quintessentially human.
"Dressing is a denuding beyond nudity" - the Levinasean encounter with the other, when eyes meet and responsibility is transferred is one that takes place fully clothed, it respects decencies, - one keeps one's distance. (Personally I always imagine it taking place in a tram.) I once tried to find if L. had said anything about sexual intercourse, and it seemed that he considered it too close for preservation of the ethical relationship. There seems to be a profound truth in that, probably going even beyond the "divine law/ human law" dialectic.

"That which Descartes makes a substance...is described phenomenologically as a face. Without this phenomenology one is pushed towards a reification of the soul..." Is the face then the priviledged phenomenological exemplar for the chiasmic nature of embodied life - not the semantically rich term "the face", but the face itself? Is looking at the world looking at the face of someone or something? To look into the face of the sky? Coming back from an encounter with death or mortal illness one might look into the face of the sky ... or does one just see "the terrible mirror of the sky" and "bend to the invisible" like Wallace Stevens' Blanche McCarthy or Blanchot in a memorable fragment. Could the face be merely an event among events? Perhaps the first and last thing we see in this life, a face peering at us. I loved your quote from Montaigne: "Myself am all face." But what could more easily provoke the Heideggerian moralist in me than that British magazine "The Face"? Why is porno so enamoured of the "facial"? The face is already a mask - we put on a face to go out etc. "Face time" as they used to say in California. L. is exquisitely sensitive to all... well, some of these connotations, and means them - hiding, showing, associating.

Then he adds another step to this gradation - "to be entrusted to me." Emphatically in the first person - but still part of the phenomenological inquiry - my implication in the very asking of these questions - what I'm going to have to give for the sake of them. Is there a moment when I accept the covenant or has it already been inscribed with my name? Before I even know that I am, prior to grasping the world through ontology and logic my name has been called - I've been summoned. (Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - and what if the face I must look into is that of Hamlet? Or is that priviledge reserved for the "me" - the subject strong enough to be entrusted with you.)

"Henceforth I have to respond to him. All the gestures of the other were signs addressed to me." [my emphasis]. It is difficult to follow him in this, but we must remember that he is detailing an affective response and a "dé-mesure". L. is consciously siding with what he calls a feminine response, with the "women" who "weep without measure" - as against masculine stoicism - which can "bear the spectacle of death" - and abstention (Plato?).
This excess is because "the death of the other affects me in my very identity" - "more intimate than intimate" or where I am more me than me - as the Lacanians would perhaps say. The ethic that has to do with this deeper than conscious source of identity is precisely what Hegel calls "the divine law" - that it should be invoked by "anyone" seems an almost to be a reference to the fatherhood of God.

Like you I am totally with L. in his criticisms of Heidegger, except that I'm not sure that a Heideggerian would accept his reading of S&Z (B&T), and anyway would refer one to the later Heidegger. Perhaps its a straw Martin, but it does the job. L.'s valuing of the complexities of covering and decency also save him from the jargon of "resolution" in the face of death etc which the Heidegger approach inevitably leads to, and which make it seem like a descendant of some old Germanic warrior code. I liked it when he said in Lect. 1, "There is a forgetting of death that is not a diversion" - I think that to feel deep compassion for human life is to respect the incalculable dreadfulness of death and thus the forgetting or denying of it as well - in contrast to the insistence that we should always be aware of it.

The reference to death as "healing and an impotence" takes us back into the Phaedo, but also returns to the theme of sickess mentioned at the beginning of this lecture. Life is never the perfect filling of the vessel of the body with the expression of the soul, there is always a degree of separation, the space of the veilings and dissimulations, the gap made more evident in sickness. Life as a fever that agitates the matter of the body, sends it runing hither and thither until death comes and deprives us of our power to run, and cures us...

And if death is "healing and impotence" then life is "disinterestedness and adieu." This is a wonderful definition, worth brooding on at length. When it springs up in the last lines of the lecture I am left wondering just what the steps were which brought me to it.
The death of the other affects me in a way that is beyond the parameters of experience. I cannot experience what it feels like on the inside, but I can't say that I know it secondhand. It is unknown, ambiguous - and then, I must in turn reflect, isn't my own death just as unknown, unknowable and ambiguous - it is a response to movements too deep within me to know of - and having admitted that I see that I am split within, it goes "to the point of fission" and that since this precedes "me" I can grasp it only through passivity. Passivity being a gloss on "disinterestedness" (that word! which got us going in these discusssions in the first place). This word coming here also seems related to Blanchot's words like "désoeuvrement" and "le neutre" for something deeply passive and receptive that precedes ontology. Seemingly a feminine concept but in quite a different register than the previous evocations of the feminine.

What about "adieu"? It is so soft, almost pagan - like something in Rilke. How does this square with the unpayable debt to the other? Perhaps only by way of an infinitely gentle register that underlies the overflow of emotion.

2002-08-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Lecture Two: What do we know of Death?

Lévinas appears to be adding two profound attributes to death, here: death is more than the Heideggerian anxiety about my own extinction and death is an ethical relation. Lévinas is very persuasive and eloquent in countering Heidegger when he argues, “the event of death overflows the intention it seems to fill.” At the same, I am not quite convinced that the ‘death of the other who dies affects me in my very identity as a responsible ‘me.” It is a difficult question to ask, but why should death be ethical?

Lévinas says that “the experience of death that is not mine is an “experience” of the death of someone.” Death (of the other) is “the stopping of expressive movements,” of “someone [who] expresses himself,” who “expresses himself in his nudity” as a face and as someone for whom “I have to respond.” The expression, the showing of the face is a form of entrusting, an appeal that signifies the infinite debt of “my deference to someone who no longer responds,” and “the culpability of the survivor.”

Allowing for the shorthand around the complexities of “the face,” I think Lévinas offers a remarkable account of the terrible intimacy of my response – my unending response – to the death of “someone.” But what about the death of “anyone”? What about the fleeting glance at a body on the road, after a car accident? Will my response to the death of the other always be the same? Will it always be a response of culpability, of responding for the other who is now without response, for years to come, for the rest of my life?

I am listening to La Bohème as I write and I wonder if Lévinas makes a distinction between the dead and the dying? He speaks of “sickness” and again, I wonder how much of “the “experience” of the death of someone,” is an intimate drama (“more intimate than intimacy”)– like the scandal and crisis of the death of Socrates – of dying, of the dying of the loved, of the beloved, the friend, of someone whom I am face-to-face with? Lévinas writes, “Dying, as dying of the other,” affects my identity as “I”; dying indicates the ‘rupture of the Same in my “I.”

Despite my concern over the equation of the dying of the other and what can be read as an assured, inescapable ethics, I think Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger – of death ‘as a possibility of Being” (§50) - is very compelling. If I still need to be convinced about their being responses to death rather than simply the ethical response, Lévinas argues that there is more to the unique affectivity of death than the threat to my being. The affectivity of death is more than being/nothingness, more than the external relation (of the death of the other) and the internal relation (of my own death). Being affected by death, Lévinas writes, is affectivity.

Reading Lévinas’s definition of life as hiding and denuding, as the flexibility, the movement of dressing (as opposed to the autopsy of death) – of life as the putting on and taking off of clothes – I thought of Montaigne’s essay on the custom of wearing clothes. Given that for Lévinas, the mobility of dressing and undressing is indicative of the expressiveness of the face, it seemed somehow appropriate to read in Montaigne that when someone approached a tramp in midwinter who was only dressed in a shirt and asked him if he was not cold, the tramp replied: ‘You sir, have your face quite uncovered: myself am all face!”

Sean Elan-Gaston

2002-08-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Last thoughts on lecture 1.
Levinas carefully brings into play an opposition which at one point he indicates as being between “nothingness and the unknown”. These terms stand in for orientations of the self (?) towards either a realm of mastery or one of passivity. The first is indentified with language and the second with emotion.
The list of ways in which we become acquainted with death, which begins with “At first, it seems to us as if all that we can say and think about death and dying, and their inevitability, comes to us secondhand.” And ends with “Death appears as the passage from being to no-longer-being, understood as the result of a logical operation: negation.” This list, despite going beyond the merely linguistic, seems to indicate that all of our everyday experiential knowledge of the death of others is in the service of reinforcing the illusion of our own ability to be. Despite the eloquent invocation of the witnessing of the death of Socrates in this section it seems to be regarded as ethically inferior to the other orientation, passive, emotional, unknowing, prior, open to exteriority and somehow feminine. The order of feelings in the former is one in which love would be lined up symmetrically with hate, the medical version the soul whether of psychologist or priest. This seems a little strange to me, because I think of our ethical life as being lived in the moment by moment decisions of just this realm where initiative is gained and lost, where right is lined up against wrong, where what is deliberate matters, and so it is morally dubious to suggest that we deflect attention from here to higher but more abstract understandings.

I feel a resonance when I read L.’s evocations of an a priori knowingness (?) that cannot be reduced to experience, but am puzzled by the exigency of an experience that is not “experience”. I am suspicious of a turn to feeling viewed as somehow innately deeper that thinking, because it is presumably not abstracted. I want to interrogate my own propensity to feel such resonances, that is to interrogate the dangers of poetic language. Its ability to make us feel things that aren’t true.
I guess I’m going to stay pretty suspicious of the drift of L.’s song for quite a while.

I’m impressed by the number of different lines that L. has set going in this brief few pages. It is a meditation on, time, on death, on how to do phenomenology, on the limits of experience, on language, on relations with others, on belief, on Plato, on the history of philosophy, on Heidegger’s iniquity etc, etc.

2002-08-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

Lecture One: Initial Questions

As Lévinas introduced the concept of Time, I kept thinking of the old arguments about whether one should attach any attributes to God - like Rambam, who rejects all anthropocentric attributes, but embraces the thirteen attributes of mercy (from Exodus 34). I suppose Lévinas has to give some attributes to Time, though he says he wants to "leave to time its own mode". So, I was interested by the first attribute: "the duration of time" as a continuity that somehow outlasts or exceeds an ontology of time. The second attribute is patience or passivity. Is the third attribute of Time, Death? ("death understood as patience of time").

Lévinas's attributes of death seem very eloquent and dispassionate (as if he has seen others die; an impression I never got from Heidegger in Being and Time): disappearance of expressive movement; sans réponse; stripping- the nakedness of autopsy; reduction to immobilisation; emotion par excellence; without consolation.

I think the most significant point raised by Lévinas in the first lecture is that we can only know death second hand, from the experience and observation of others and yet my death can only be my death. Lévinas seems to use emotion (from the death of the other) as way to bridge this gap: death becomes an impossible experience that is "an affection more passive than a trauma" ("without experience and yet dreadful"). So, is he saying that death (of the other) indicates a cessation of movement and that death moves me, moves like a duration, a patience, a passivity that exceeds ontology and this disappearance of movement that moves is... time?

It is also worth noting that when Lévinas says "death is a departure ... A departure toward the unknown, a departure without return" he is gesturing to his earlier essay 'The Trace of the Other', when he writes: 'A work conceived radically is a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of depature." This "departure without return" breaks the Hegelian colonisation of the other. It is interesting that 'le départ sans retour' of the work in 1963 reappears as 'le départ sans retour' of death in 1975. Perhaps Lévinas is closer than I thought to Blanchot's writing on death and the work in The Space of Literature.

Sean Elan-Gaston

2002-08-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

Levinas 7/11/75

This opening lecture is an extraordinary piece. Part of me wants to refrain from analysis and just stand back and applaud, another part wants to pick a fight with L. because I feel I’ve been forced to agree with him without the chance to fully object to or claim for myself certain intermediate steps.

One of the texts that’s in the background here but never mentioned is Husserl’s “Phenomenology of the internal time consciousness”. (Lectures edited by Husserl’s young assistant Martin Heidegger, which analyse the experience of flowing time in terms of ‘retentions’ and ‘protentions’ – that is spontaneous intentional acts directed to the inner horizons of past and future and which are continually ‘running off’. I’ve heard an eminent cognitive scientist, Marvin Minsky, recommending this book to those trying to incorporate temporal perception into their models of mind. I think it may be helpful in understanding how we perceive music or any other temporally unfolding forms, like narrative and poetry.)

L. systematically separates himself from these concerns. There is a kind of rhetorical trick going on here of which Heidegger was a master – dismissing another investigation as “not authentic” immediately puts oneself in the position of someone who knows even better what really is authentic.

The lecture ends with another reference to ‘retentions and protentions’ which actually makes it seem as if we are after all concerned with the question that he refuses at the beginning, “what is time?”

The idea of a dimension of time called “duration” which is more profound than its dimension as flow comes from Bergson, where it is coloured with a certain turn-of-the-century vitalism. Nonetheless I think that it’s a good distinction.

When he says “…the confusion between what flows within time and time itself.” he is reminding me of what was most unsatisfactory about Husserl’s examination of time. The reference to taken for granted things like “running off” mean that time is already assumed and what we are being shown is just how our experience of it is structured, but it and our knowledge of it are already assumed. (Husserl opens with a quotes from St Augustine: “Everybody knows what time is until you ask them.”)

“Temporalization” or “originary temporalization” are terms from a later version of phenomenology that attempt to address this gap in explanation. It is curious though that L.’s distinction between duration and flowing time echoes Heidegger’s between Being and beings. Again I think the question “What is time?” that he claims to have dismissed is returning to haunt the text. I think he doesn’t like it because it gives a gnostic colouring to the inquiry – what saves is a knowledge, which is an interior matter and L. is trying to turn us thinkers to a radical exteriority.

A few free associations: “duration” to me evokes the experience of time I had as a young child – before I had the “hearsay” knowledge of death (which L. is absolutely right to say penetrates us in a way that no other such knowledge does or can…) It could be intensely pleasurable but it is also the time of suffering, or at least of discomfort, hunger, colic, a cold wet diaper – these were things I seemed to remember when I had some major surgery at age 20 – passivity in pain, waiting for someone to come and make it better. Duration is also the time in which dust motes float in a light ray – something each and every child seems to have been transfixed by at some time. Flowing time does seem to be a debased form – the rushed quality that becomes more pronounced with age – the time of the Heideggerean “gestell” or enframing, for example that of an advertisment for high tech appliances that appears on trams, “Because life’s too short…” – the idea of “quality time” – once you’ve converted the currency of time in this way (like Pushkin’s Nikolai Kuzmich…) it just evaporates in your hand.

The other night at the piano concert I went to this eminent young pianist got up to play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. The interpretation seemed extremely bizarre. One of the things he did was to lengthen some of the the pauses, for example the one at the very start after the opening resounding phrase, to such a degree that one wondered if he’d forgotten what came next – and hence to the degree that one’s ordinary surrender to the flow of the music was blocked and one had to become aware of duration. At other times it seemed as though he was playing drunkenly. I remembered hearing this pianist on a radio program discussing the playing of certain extreme works of Messiaen and how they forced the pianist into a super-ordinary state of timelessness. I wondered if he was playing Beethoven as if he were Messiaen. The slow movement was nonetheless extraordinarily anguished and profound, but at the end of it the pianist cupped his face in his hands and then rushed from the stage. Someone had to come out later and inform us that this man had been very ill and had only appeared through “extreme sufferance” and would not be able to complete the sonata. I heard later that it was mental rather than physical grief that had caused him to age 20 years in the last few months. So, where the audience had expected an aesthetic transformation of pain in an extreme and halting delicacy of flow and rush (the Hammerklavier at its best) we were instead moved to compassion and to the raw experience of time as duration.