"The Possibility of the Poetic Said" in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lvinas) Author(s): Gabriel Riera Reviewed

work(s): Source: Diacritics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 13-36 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805815 . Accessed: 03/06/2012 13:38
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44 THE POSSIBILITY OF THE

POETIC

SAID"

IN

OTHERWISE

THAN (ALLUSION,

BEING OR BLANCHOT IN LEVINAS)

GABRIELRIERA

Language would exceed the limits ofwhat is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable /en laissant sous-entendre, sans jamais faire entendrey an implication of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concepts. This possibility /vertu/ is laid bare in the poetic said. [.../ shown in the prophetic said. ?Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being [my emphasis] Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes It is

that one not prefer art, but

efface art as writing effaces itself. ?Maurice Blanchot, Writing ofthe Disaster In an effort to elucidate a more originary difference than Heidegger's ontological dif? ference between Being and entities, as well as an ethicity of thinking able to respond to the trace of transcendence ofthe other's face, Levinas's philosophy redefines language radically and does so in uneasy proximity to poetic language. In Otherwise than Be? ing or Beyond Essence (1974), Levinas deploys a constellation of terms?discourse, order to eluci? face, sincerity, witnessing, prophecy?in expression, communication, date the ethical dimension of language, the ethicity of philosophical discourse. This constellation revolves around the crucial notion of signification and the two operative concepts of the said {le dit) and saying {le dire). By the former Levinas understands the semantic content of an utterance or the giving of signs by a sender to an addressee, but also the different modalities by which a subject masters the world by assimilating it to the measure of consciousness (discourse, narration, history, manifestation, representa? tion). Saying {le dire) refers to the way of signifying primarily that I am for the other, that subjectivity "is" before positioned as the the expression of being-for-the-other source of signs or comprehension: subjectivity as exposition. While the said expresses a content, the saying is expression without content. Language for Levinas is the "structure" of both the retraction and the inscription of infinity {Tinfini), and this "structure" is what Levinas calls ethics. It is thus possible to affirm that in Levinas there is no ethical turn without a certain linguistic turn, one in which the a priori of language is interrupted by an anteriority whose a priori character is enigmatic. But Levinas's linguistic turn is turned inside out: for him language con? tains the other's call and thus harbors a form of exteriority within itself. This is because language is elevated to a metaphysical category (in the sense of Totality and Infinity [1961], where it means the breaching or interruption of totality) that exceeds the simple

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Lynn Hershman Leeson Conceiving Ada 1997 Film still Photo courtesy of LynnHershman Leeson and bitforms gallery, New York

"giving out of signs" [delivrance de signes] [AE 81/OB 48] or communication. Levinas claims that "saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communi? as exposure [exposition^ cation, [AE 82/OB 48]. Signification precedes and defines as proximity and contact with the other and not as the "vicissitude [peripetia] language of the thematizing intentionality" [AE 216/OB 137] of a subject whose main attribute and is its ability to synchronize questions and answers, being and its manifestations, so doing leaves no margin for being exposed to the other. Further, signification also by names an enigmatic pre-diction that challenges the primacy that language, understood as a system of signs, enjoys in other philosophies (structuralism and analytic philoso? phy, for example). Most critics agree that Levinas's philosophy is inhospitable to aesthetic phenomena and ambivalent toward poetic language. His severe condemnation of the work of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948) is still present in Totality and Infinity, Levinas's first major work, where he establishes a relation with the other as face-to-face in dis? course. And although in Otherwise than Being Levinas finally acknowledges "poetic" language's ability to suggest significations that exceed the order of discourse and even endows it with a (quasi)-ethical force, this acknowledgment goes without saying, or is This work marks a "linguistic turn" in Levinas's think? merely implied (sous-entendu). ing, evinces a different conception of language from the one prevailing in Totality and Infinity, and even transforms some of the key concepts of "Reality and Its Shadow." But this acknowledgement appears only by way of an allusion to Maurice Blanchot's The Madness ofthe Day. As I will show throughout this essay, Levinas's indirect reference marks the site of a complex intertextual grafting: what the poetic said simply suggests, that "language would exceed the limits of what is thought," becomes operative in Levi? nas's own text. It allows welcoming the "otherwise than being" and putting into place a writing whose double temporality (diachrony) lets the other "come to thought, as ap? proach and response" [Blanchot, ED 41/WD 36]. It is through this allusion and grafting of Blanchot's text that Levinas makes the structure of the primary ethical signification (saying) explicit and produces it as a form of writing that undermines the primacy of Being and its systemic closure. There is much more at stake in this allusion than the simple illustration of the suggestive richness of poetic language, then, since through Blanchot, Levinas not only maps out the topology of the "prison-house of language," but also shows the way out. In an antihumanistic and inhuman age, Levinas aims to articulate a "humanism of the other man" in which language is more than structuralism's diachronic systematicity and for which subjectivity is the effect of a linguistic structure. Nor can one assimilate Levinas's conception of language to the poetic dwelling of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, in which man is Being's respondent. Levinas's goal is therefore to abstain from both a humanistic rehabilitation of the work of art (as in Sartre) and its nonhuIt is important to give manistic use, often associated with so-called poststructuralism. some thought to Levinas's double refusal, since for him, there is something in the relation between "first philosophy" (ethicity) and poetic language that cannot be fully accepted without resistance. Levinas does not aim to develop a general theory of art but, rather, as he explicitly states in Totality and Infinity, "[to establish] the primacy of the ethical [. . .] a primacy upon which all other structures rest (and in particular all those which seem to put us primordially in contact with an impersonal sublimity, aesthetic or ontological)" [TI79]. Levinas's ambivalence toward poetic language is visible not only at the level of evaluation or judgment (critique), but also at the level of the most basic determination of the ethical relation. The role poetic language plays in Levinas's ethical writing is ambigu? ous as well (in his elaboration of the syntax that enables him to preserve the other in

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the grammar of the same). Why does Levinas explicitly state that only the language of philosophy can recount and, for this reason, betray the intrigue ofthe other-in-the-same that language is?1 Why can the ethical interruption of ontology (knowledge, representa? tion, manifestation, and narration) only take place by a saying unsaying the conceptual statement? In the light of the allusive, albeit highly productive intertextual grafting of Blanchot's The Madness ofthe Day in Otherwise than Being, these claims must give us but rather pause, since poetic language here is no longer an aesthetic epiphenomenon, a constitutive element of language's ethicity. For Levinas the work of art in general, and poetic language in particular, is neither the other {alter, alius) of philosophy nor a type of other {heteron) able to interrupt the working of totality and thus give access to the "otherwise than being." In general and for the most part, it is a "fake" other that totality can easily assimilate and reduce to propositional utterances {said) or, at best, to "the pre-eminent exhibition in which the said is reduced to a pure theme, to absolute exposition. [. . .] The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology" [AE 70/OB 40]. Only exceptionally, "poetic language lays bare language's possibility to exceed the order of discourse" [AE 263-64/OB 169-70], and it is Blanchot's writing that best qualifies as the exception. It is not by chance then that Blanchot's writing punctuates Levinas's thinking and that his presence is felt at crucial junctures. He first appears in a footnote to Existence and Existents (1947) and is acknowledged for having described the // y a, a central con? of Levinas's thinking, in his novel Thomas VObscure [EE 103/63]. Between 1956 cept and 1975 Levinas will devote three essays to Blanchot's work, in part to acknowledge Blanchot's reading of Levinas's own texts (as well as to argue against it in some instances) and in part to recognize Blanchot's own important breakthroughs.2 Levinas and Blanchot share a basic premise: the other escapes both the order of discourse and the framework of narration, but must nevertheless be written. Faced with the assimilating grasp of the concept, if the other must be preserved as such, then writing has to abandon a series of guarantees and pass tangentially through the scene of knowledge and the order of representation. Blanchot brings Levinas the question of the other that "poetic language" (writing) releases in a modality that is alien to manifestation?the night, the neuter, the outside. Blanchot's writing helps Levinas to determine pure being and the structure of totality whose secondary or derivative character his thought seeks to describe. But he also provides Levinas, as this paper will show, with a formal prin? ciple to outline how the primary ethicity of language (infinity or the "otherwise than being beyond essence") breaches totality or Being. So Blanchot's textual presence in Levinas's work functions as the marker of both a description of the closure of being or totality (of its topology) and its opening or interruption. "The possibility [vertu] of poetic language"?Levinas's own expression?reveals itself as an ideal point of access to examine Levinas's philosophy of language. But first it is necessary to situate the allusion to Blanchot within the frame of Levinas's overall reflections on art and poetic language and in view of isolating continuities and displacements in his philosophy. From the ontological domain of pure being, the region in which Levinas situates the work of art in Existence and Existents, we will need to move gradually, by way of his most systematic treatment of aesthetic categories in "Reality and Its Shadow"), to a specification ofthe nature of ethical prose (discourse as the face of the other) in Totality and Infinity, before being able to fully assess what takes place in Otherwise than Being and what this means for the ethical dimension of "poetic lan? guage." 1. "The philosophical speaking that betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us still remains, as a saying, a proximity and a responsibility" [AE 262/OE168]. 2. The essays were later collected in Sur Maurice Blanchot.

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Sensation ys Opaque Materiality

and the il y a

The conceptual system that allows Levinas to approach the work of art and to situate it within a preethical realm, devoid of the other's presence, might be explicated through a reading of Existence and Existents and "Reality and its Shadow." Here Levinas articulates his first conception of language, as well as the notion of il y a or pure Being. Both play a crucial role in his definition of the work of art and his understanding of and Existents (1945-47) Levinas analyzes the dimension underlythe constitution of the world: a different order, with its corresponding ing array of exists on the hither side of cognition. The work of art gives access to this order, forms, which Levinas calls "existence without a world," and makes it possible to specify the "contents" of the // y a, a crucial concept which is logically prior to all propositions, including negative ones. Unable to be negated itself, the // y a serves as a moment of Being's foundation. At the same time, however, if the il y a necessarily precedes the constitution of any world, it posits an implicit, irreducible challenge to the world's au? tonomy and stability. Levinas therefore defines the il y a as "the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation" [EE 61/100]. It is highly significant that the il y a is an "experience" whose elaboration is com? mon to both Levinas and Blanchot given that its determination shares many ofthe same characteristics in both thinkers: the presence of the absence of beings, its nocturnal provenance, its dissolution of the subject in the night, its horror, the return of being at the heart of every negative movement, and the reality of irreality.3 For Blanchot, the presence of absence is felt as an expulsion from the world in which the distinction between inside and outside collapses and with it the subject of that experience. describes this collapse in analogous terms: Levinas poetic language. In Existence

There is not determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is /il y a/, takes form. Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in one? self, to withdraw into one ysshell. One is exposed. The whole is open upon us. Instead of serving to our means of access to being, nocturnal space delivers us over to being. [EE 96/56] Levinas the exposure of consciousness to the il y a as a horror that throws into an "impersonal vigilance, a participation" [EE 98/60] from which no subjectivity escape is possible. This is precisely what distinguishes Levinas's analysis of the il y a from Heidegger's description of the pure nothingness (das Nichts) that the experience of anxiety exposes, in which the negation ofthe totality of entities reveals Dasein's authentic being.4 For Levinas horror refers to the return of Being after the negation of all entities has taken place, a return that takes the form of a "haunting specter" [revenani] conceives [EE 100/61]. The central operation of Existence and Existents performs a reversal of Heidegger's analyses of experiences such ontological difference through detailed phenomenological 3. Levinas's analysis was first published as "II y a" in Deucalion, vol. 1. In afootnote he credits Blanchot's Thomas l'Obscur with providing a description ofthe il y a [EE 103/63]. In "Literature and the Right to Death" Blanchot credits Levinas for having elucidated the experi? ence ofthe il y a. 4. See Heidegger, Being and Time, ?40 228-35, and "What Is Metaphysics?"

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as fatigue, insomnia, and the instant of which the work of art is a part.5 For Levinas and possesses negative connotations, since it still art is a figure of desubjectification refers to the impossibility of fully breaking away from the impersonal and anonymous being. The work of art refers to the opaque materiality of sensation: "the movement of art consists in leaving the level of perception so as to reinstate sensation, in detaching the quality from this object of reference. [...] Sensation is not the way that leads to an object but the obstacle that keeps one from it, but it is not of the subjective order either: it is not the material of perception. In art, sensation figures as a new element. Or better, it returns to the impersonality of elements" [EE 85-86/53]. Levinas isolates an aes? thetic materiality, the "in itself of sensation that he locates at the margins ofthe world (neither inside nor outside), and uses the term alterity to refer to what happens in this "in-between" {entre-deux).6 The exoticism of the work of art has to do with its disengagement from the world; it points to an outside without reference to an inside, and this lack of correlation receives the name of alterity. However, for Levinas not all artwork preserves this alterity. Levinas ties the obscure dimension of the il y a or neutrality to the fate of the work of art, which allows for the claim that thefate ofthe work ofart is Fate. It is possible to cipher the crux of Levinas's argument in this apparently tautological statement, since it captures the ineluctable destiny of art: its pagan spatiotemporal schema, which, unlike Heidegger's, is not the condition of possibility of both the world and earth [see Heidegger, "Origin of the Work of Art" 41-48]. Although the work of art gives way to alterity, the realm of aesthetics is severed from the sobriety and seriousness of ethics. It is necessary to surmount the il y a given its "barren, insistent and dreadful character and its inhumanity" [EE 11]. But due to its inhuman neutrality, the surmounting cannot be "aesthetic." The exoticism of the work of art consists mainly in interrupting the subject's power, in what Levinas calls the cancellation of interesse, mediation of being among objects oriented toward their possession or dominion. the

Art's Inhumanity In "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948) Levinas further develops the distinction between rational forms of cognition and artistic ones where knowledge is not at stake.7 In order to ground this distinction, Levinas criticizes Sartre's doctrine of committed art as well as Heidegger's conception of the work of art as the unconcealment of truth.8 Sartre's a central role during the 1940s in France, and Levinas subscribes philosophy played to Sartre's analysis of the image and the imaginary, as well as to the thesis regard5. It is necessary to stress that in Otherwise than Being the "reversal of ontological dif? " ference is followed by its reinscription and displacement. This is a precondition for writing the "otherwise than being," as Levinas explicitly states in the preface to the second edition of De 1'existence a l'existant (1977) and inpart as a response to Jean-Luc Marion's objections in L'idole et la distance. Levinas's treatment of Heidegger's ontological difference is a contentious issue, as evidenced in Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics." For an assessment ofthis problematic, see Silvano Petrosino, "D'un livre a Vautre: Totalite et Infini et /'Autrement qu'Etre," and Silvano Petrosino and Jacques Rolland, La verite nomade: Introduction a Emmanuel Levi? nas. 6. The genealogy ofthis concept, according to which in the altering being of things a naked type ofinwardness takes place, is Husserl's irreflexive consciousness [see Husserl]. This concept is akin to Merleau-Ponty's entre-deux [see Merleau-Ponty]. 7. For other readings of "Reality and Its Shadow," see Armengaud; Eaglestone; Robbins; and Wall. 8. See Sartre, "Qu'est-ce que la litterature?," and Heidegger, "The Origin ofthe Work of Art."

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ing the contiguity of art and dreams.9 However, while for Sartre a recuperation of the imaginary's negative dimension is possible, the realm ofthe image is not at the service of consciousness's freedom for Levinas, given that art's temporality and spatiality are inhuman. In this essay Levinas further develops the theses on the originary character of sensation and the exoticism of the work of art he first introduced in Existence and Existents. He does so through the concept of shadow, by which he severs the work of art from the responsive ethics his philosophy seeks to preserve as the fundamental structure. But if in Existence and Existents the work of art was a medium to make pure Being [ilya] explicit, in the 1948 essay Levinas elaborates an ontology ofthe work of art whose pivotal concepts are shadow, image, and resemblance. "Reality" refers to the natural presuppositions of critical philosophy, whose fundament and purpose revolve around the notion of cognitive truth, while "shadow" refers to an image already exiled from the real: the sensible or sensation. Based on Husserl's thetic neutralization, Eugen Fink first introduced the concept of shadow by showing that in the image there is an element of "unreality" that depends upon and is given simultaneously with positional reality (the latter becoming the medium of "unreality"). The distance that exists between both regions belongs to the same constitutive intentional act whose objectivity is appearance and not truth [see Fink 71-72]. Although coinciding with Fink's schema, Levinas disputes phenomenology's conception of the He is more interested in the opacity or shadow than in the lumiimage's transparency. nosity of the image. For this reason, he endows the image with an allegorical function and with the capacity to alter the being of the absent object: A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself is its own image. The original gives itself as though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in a being delayed behind being. The consciousness ofthe absence that characterizes an image is not equivalent to a simple neutral? ofthe object ization ofthe thesis, as Husserl would have it, but is equivalent to an alteration ofthe very being ofthe object, where its essential form appears as a garb that it abandons in withdrawing. [RO 779/CPP 7] At issue is a movement between the two realms that, nevertheless, differs from the Platonic thesis of representation according to the hierarchy and temporality of original and its essence copy. Reality does not present itself in a univocal and linear fashion?first and then its reflection, as in Plato's Book X of the Republic?but as ambiguous and dual: light or obverse, truth, and shadow or reverse, nontruth. This shadow precedes the luminous concept and neutralizes its reference to the apprehended object. The im? age or shadow subtracts itself from idealization; it is a nonconceptual sensation. In the image, the object becomes a nonobject; it remains at a distance, withdrawn or altered reduction that favors without, however, being neutralized, as in the phenomenological the image's resemblance: 9. See Sartre, L'imaginaire, translated as The Psychology of Imagination. Basing his analy? sis on Husserl's formulations ofthe quasi-reality ofthe imaginary, Sartre emphasizes the nega? tive character of imagination when compared to perception. The image refers back to consciousness's "fonction irrealisante." Sartre's main concern, however, is what features to confer on a consciousness endowed with imagination and the ability to produce images. This ability that goes beyond reality is the condition of possibility ofa free consciousness. And, since this unreal outside the world is the product ofa free consciousness that remains in the world, the negative dimension ofthe imagination quickly reverses into a positive one.

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A represented object, by the simple fact of becoming an image, is converted into a non-object. [...] The disincarnation of reality by an image is not equiv? alent to a simple diminution of degree. It belongs to an ontological dimension where commerce with reality is a rhythm. [RO 776/CPP 5] When descending to the bottom of life and once the zone bathed by the light of the concept is left behind, it is possible to discover an obscure and ungraspable essence different from the "essence revealed in truth" [RO 780/ CPP 7]. Levinas distinguishes this shadow or resemblance from Heidegger's since sen? "letting be" [Sein-lassen], sation does not reveal our being-in-the-world where "objectivity is transmuted into power" [RO 774/CPP 3]. The sensible impression retains what is felt and this retention engenders a resemblance that, according to Levinas, has a "function of rhythm" [RO 776/CPP 5].10 For this reason, there is a mutual summoning of elements in the image that affects us without having to appeal to a receptive will. When our will awakens, rhythm has already invaded us; we already participate in it. This rhythm is neither con? all the situunconscious?since scious?it invades and paralyzes our freedom?nor ational articulations are present in an "obscure clarity"?: Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is part of its own representation. It is so not even despite itself, for in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity. [RO 775/CPP 4] Levinas compares this rhythm to the automatism of marching or dancing [RO 775/CPP 4]. However, there is something negative in the spell that the plastic and rhythmic hold of the image exercises. This negative dimension of art competes with ethics because, although affecting subjectivity's autonomy, it does not allow the self to open itself to the call ofthe other, which Levinas's philosophy aims to preserve as the defining ele? ment ofhis philosophy. Rhythmic repetition's rhetorical effect is alienating; it produces Same in which a departure from the other's face occurs. The poem's an encompassing discontinuous expression substitutes the immediate expression of the face in speech; it is a constant rupture and beginning. The artwork's expression (an expression of itself) puts a mask or facade before the opening of presence, the "in itself of the author or of his circumstance before the expressive urgency of the other. It also delays and leads the other's presence astray, as if artistic forms were unable to respond to the other in a face-to-face Levinas's relation. image shares many characteristics with Sartre's: a negative character, the dimension of absence, a closed familiarity with shadow and resemblance, a fun? damental ambiguity and captivating force. However, while Sartre bridges the gap be? Levinas tween the imaginary and the real and preserves the unity of consciousness, stresses a hiatus in the very structure of Being. For Levinas the image excludes the concept and its effective grasp of the object. Contesting many of the received ideas of modern aesthetics (art as revelation, creation, disinterest, and freedom), Levinas claims that the proper dimension of art is obscurity or nontruth and that the production of im-

10. Levinas s aesthetic conceptuality belongs to a French literary and philosophical tradi? tion whose points of origin are Alain and Paul Valery. It is Sartre who popularizes this tradition. Some ofthe main tenets ofthis tradition are the clear distinction ofcolor and soundfrom words; the distinction between sound and image; the opaque nature of sensation; and the placing ofart on the hither side ofform s material values.

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ages entails a form of magic. The artist is a possessed individual whose irresponsibility, and evasion are dangerously contagious. disengagement, Levinas disqualifies the image by putting it under the heading of idol, a concept that brings together the opacity of aesthetic materiality and the fixed temporality of the work of art: "to say that an image is an idol is to affirm that every image is in the last analysis plastic, and that every artwork is in the end a statue?a stoppage oftime, or rather its delay behind itself [RO 701/CPP 8]. The concepts of image, idol, and statue make up the coordinates of art's denigration and are related to the way in which time temporalizes itself in the work of art. The idollike or statuesque character of the work of art refers to an instant that does not pass and that "endures without a future" {dure sans avenir): "The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life that is not master of itself, a caricature of life. [. . .] Every image is already a caricature. However, this caricature turns into something tragic" [RO 782/CPP 9, my emphasis]. Levinas claims that "in the instant of the statue, in its eternally suspended future, the tragic, simultaneity of necessity and liberty, can come to pass: the power of freedom congeals into impotence" [RO 783/CPP 9]. Here too, as in Sartre, we must compare art with the oneiric realm: "the instant of a statue is a nightmare" [RO 783/CPP 9]. Against the modern humanistic aesthetic credo, art fails to accomplish loftiness and instead produces a relapse into destiny, an entry into the hither side of time: monstrous and inhuman. The plasticity of the image, the statuesque perfection of its rhythm in the idol, mean while" {entreleads to a pernicious time: a time of dispossession ofthe self?"the and "the meanwhile" are systematically tied to the pagan destiny temps). Image, idol, of art: The fact that humanity could have provided itself with art reveals in time the uncertainty oftime's continuation and something like a death doubling the impulse oflife. The petrification ofthe instant in the heart of duration?Niobe's insecurity ofa being which has a presentiment offate, is the punishment?the obsession ofthe artist's world, the pagan world. [...] Here we leave the great limited problem of art. This presentiment offate in death subsists, as paganism subsists. [RO 786/CPP 11, my emphasis] In the artwork, we face the fate of paganism, as well as its pernicious survival. Levi? nas's indictment of art is a monotheistic and moralistic condemnation and may explain why he subsumes the concepts of image and rhythm under Levy-Bruhl's evolutionist category of participation, a type of belief structure proper to primitive societies.11 The "meanwhile" of the work of art is the "irreversible time" of a present in which "there lies the tragedy of the irremovability of a past that cannot be erased, and that condemns any initiative to being just a continuation" [RO 65]. The "meanwhile" belongs to il y a's "elementary materiality," which must be surpassed by the approach of the other hu? man being, whose face bears the trace of transcendence.12 11. See Levinas, "Levy-Bruhl et la philosophie contemporaine." According to Jill Robbins, participation "describes primitive mentality's mystic belief in the unseen, supernatural forces, its emotional and affective relation to collective representations, which are perceived as having a transitive influence. [...] Participation [is] as way of thinking indifferent to the law ofcontradiction" [86-89]. " 12. "Reality and Its Shadow is a multilayered essay that combines an ontology ofthe work ofart, a critique of Heidegger's ontological use ofthe work ofart and its solidarity with what Levinas calls "the philosophy ofHitlerism," an incipient model of ethical criticism, and, finally, a rather peculiar interpretation ofthe biblical prohibition regarding images. I have limited my? self to an exposition of Levinas's ontology ofart.

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<(Dispelling the Charm of Rhythm": Ethics as Prose In Totality and Infinity (1961) Levinas emphasizes an ethical language that is pure im? mediacy: the face (visage) of the other faces me, concerns me (me regarde) without mediation. The face, for Derrida "the non-metaphorical unity of body, glance, speech and thinking" ["Violence and Metaphysics" 128"], exceeds the grasp of representation and overflows form, but shapes my answer: the face is discourse. Levinas conceives the sincerity or straightforwardness of discourse in opposition to rhetoric and other forms of representation, including those of artistic works. In the face as the origin of signification, "prose" comes to interrupt the "charm of poetic rhythm" [TI 222/203]. Because this conceptual opposition between prose and poetic rhythm is underwritten by a privileging of presence, it will disappear from Otherwise than Being, where Levi? nas replaces a logic of binary oppositions (being/entity, totality/infinity) with that ofthe "amphibology of being," according to which language is conceived as a dual structure. Within this "amphibology" being is said, but the "otherwise than being" is a saying that subtracts itself from the grasp of being and its categories. In Totality and Infinity Levinas describes the face in opposition to the phenomenon and foregrounds its lack of horizon and nonmanifestation. Yet the face reveals and itself. The face-to-face, the form ofthe ethical relation, is neither a mystical expresses fusion nor a cognitive relationship: it is speech, a "relation in which the terms absolve themselves from the relation, remain absolute within the relation" [TI 59/64]. Totality and Infinity tells a story whose pivotal point is the concept of separa? tion and whose main sequences are corporeality, nourishment, habitation, possession, labor, economy, knowledge, and technique. It is the story of a joyous ego that, after a harmonious fusion with the feminine other (a familiar alterity), must confront an even more rigid other toward whom no appeal of responsibility is possible. The other of To? tality and Infinity is an external alterity that dispossesses the ego. The ego's enjoyment endows sensibility with a concrete character and, at the same time, is the condition of possibility for a metaphysical Desire that opens it to the other, transforming subjectiv? ity into hospitality. The book's argument follows an ascendant path, from the ego or Same to the transcendence ofthe other, the turning point being the face-to-face with the other. Alterity originates in the encounter with the face (visage), which institutes "a rela? tion with being beyond the totality" [TI 6/22]. This is a central theme in Totality and In? finity inasmuch as the approach of the other entails subjectivity's ethical determination. Levinas devotes considerable time to elucidating the modality of access to the face that he defines as ethical. The face marks the border between inside and outside and is also expression: the coinciding of manifestation and what is manifested. The face thus between two types of appears in language as an interlocutor. Levinas distinguishes an impersonal one that goes from the same to the other without crosscommunication: ing the barrier of cognitive reason, and an apologetic communication in which the self justifies its freedom before the other. The original phenomenon of reason consists in when faced with the other. Interlocutors speak as singular faces this self-justification in an asymmetrical relationship instead of being symmetrical and abstract senders and receptors. The essence of language is found in this asymmetrical relationship. The face is not an ordinary phenomenon, since its ethical character endows it with a surplus exceeding the grasp ofthe phenomenon. The face cannot be seen; it overflows its own form, and its encounter cannot be organized around the dynamic of vision: the face gives itself without appearing to my gaze. Further, the face's excessive way of giving itself produces an inversion of the cognitive relationship organized around the subject/object polarity: I cannot fix the face in a form, but the face looks at me and concerns me (me regarde):

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The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist infiguring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itselfforth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face ofthe Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum?the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but KaO'awo. It expresses itself. [TI42/50-51]

The face's overflowing ofthe idea, its undermining ofthe regime of adcequatio, "means concretely [that] the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised" [TI 198/216]. The speaking ofthe face is the "primordial essence of language" or signification, whose being consists in "putting into question in an ethical relation constitutive freedom itself [TI 225/206]. This is why meaning is the face ofthe other {autrui) and also why any linguistic exchange takes place "already within this face to face of language" [TI 225/206]. Language unfolds in the effect of this "personal signifier"?expression?upon the anonymous signifier of speech. Only in this way can the face be epiphany, discourse, or originary word in the medium that is the impersonality of language. The other {autrui) reveals itself at a distance that one must safeguard; it must remain a proximity, while at the same time the face is encountered in the face-to-face or the immediacy of presence. In Totality and Infinity Levinas endows discourse with a capacity to assist itself; as in Plato's Phaedrus, it is "a living presence," unlike the simulacrum of writing. The face signifies in itself and by itself, without reference to an external sign; it gives meaning {sens) its general orientation. However, for this to take place, the face must assist its own speech [TI 60/65]. The face, speech coming to its own assistance, is the plenitude of discourse: Manifestation kath'auto consists in a being telling itself to us independently of every position we would have taken in its regard, expressing itself. /. . ./ The face is a living presence; it is expression. [. . .] The face speaks. The mani? festation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato's expression, to his own assistance. [TI 61-62/65-66] As could not be otherwise, the reactivation of the scene of full speech goes hand in hand with a denunciation of rhetoric as nondiscourse, as an oblique way of approaching the other. It is only by renouncing rhetoric that one can face the other and be "in a veritable conversation" [TI 95] and therefore institute justice. In this sense, "language lays the foundations for a possession in common. The world in discourse is no longer what it is in separation; it is what I give: the communicable, the thought, the universal" the presence ofthe other in language arrests the terrifying preces[TI 96]. Furthermore, sion of simulacra, given that speech "surmounts the dissimulation inevitable in every apparition" [TI 97-98]. This surmounting of rhetoric and the simulacrum also entails the surpassing of poetic language since the straightforwardness of discourse or "prose" the charm of rhythm [. . .] which enraptures and transports the interlocutors" "dispels [TI 203/222]. In summary, from Existence and Existents to Totality and Infinity Levinas situates the work of art at the antipodes of his philosophy and derives no positive determination from poetic language. Quite the opposite, poetic language is a privileged means to expose us to being in general, although it can neither break with the il y a's hold nor take us out of its suffocating neutrality. The ontological pitfalls of the work of art that Levi? nas circumscribes early on in Existence and Existents are transformed in "Reality and

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LynnHershman Leeson Conceiving Ada 1997 Film still Photo courtesy of Lynn Hershman Leeson and bitforms gallery, New York

Its Shadow" into a denunciation and cohere into a system of concepts that goes against the grain of all the tenets of modern aesthetics. Totality and Infinity cuts off poetic language from ethics by privileging the face-to-face and a speech without mediation over the artwork's facade. Furthermore, it makes an appeal for a sober and demanding word; the other summons the self in a severe prose that exorcises plasticity's rhythm and rhetoric's simulacra.

Thinking otherwise than he thinks, he thinks in such a way that the other might come to thought, as approach and response. ?Maurice Blanchot, The Writing ofthe Disaster Wittgenstein 's i(mysticism," aside from his faith in unity, must come from his believing that one can show when one cannot speak. But without language, noth? ing can be shown. And to be silent is still to speak. Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it. Writing or Saying /Dire/, that precedes every phenomenon, every manifestation or disclosure: all appearing. ?Maurice Blanchot, The Writing ofthe Disaster [translation modified] More than a decade after the publication of Totality and Infinity Levinas deploys a different understanding of signification in order to think an ethical language that is no longer primarily determined by the plenitude of speech. In the distinction between the said (le dii) (writing, synchrony, essence, history) and saying (le dire) (face, diachrony, passivity, testimony), Otherwise than Being elucidates the ethical saying as an origi? nal presemiotic dimension inhabiting each historical language. An immemorial trace haunts language and bears witness to "the glory of the infinite," or the proximity of the other to the same. In order to manifest itself, this preoriginal saying is destined to fix itself in a said or predicative proposition. It thus becomes a theme, the object of a narrative, and is subordinated to a linguistic system woven by ontological categories. However, for Levinas the uttering of the said is derivative and secondary and presup? to being and to the language in poses the gravity of a responsibility incommensurate which it is uttered: A methodological element of problem arises here, whether the pre-original the non-original, as we designate it) can be led to saying (the anarchical, is possible), betray itself by showing itself in a theme (if an an-archeology and whether this betrayal can be reduced; whether one can at the same time know and free the known from the marks which thematization leaves on it by subordinating it to ontology. Everything shows itself at the price of this be? trayal, even the unsayable. In this betrayal the indiscretion with regard to the unsayable, which is probably the very task of philosophy, becomes possible. [AE 18/OB 7] The necessity of this betrayal constitutes the clandestine intrigue that Otherwise than Being elaborates in opposition to the philosophical narrative or plot dominant in Total? ity and Infinity. The "otherwise than being" must be said, but at the same time, it must subtract itself from the structures that characterize the said (propositions and narra? tives). In Otherwise than Being "the possibility of poetic language" undergoes an im? portant shift. If in Existence and Existents Levinas associated language with an inhu-

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will now be treated as a defining feature of ethical expression. Further, poetic language is no longer and simply characterized as shadow (semblance or image), as in "Reality and Its Shadow," but is envisioned in the proxim? ity of prophetic language. What actually occurs between Existence and Existents and Otherwise than Beingl What displacement takes place in Levinas's textuality that makes an allusion to the promise of an ethical possibility of poetic language possible? I say promise because Levinas's way of proceeding is complex. On the one hand, Levinas circumscribes this possibility to the order of discourse?being's verbality, said {le dit). On the other, this is put to work in view of elucidating the ethical primordial structure: a say? possibility man?"existence without world"?it ing that exceeds consciousness's power to bring together being and its manifestations in a single stroke. This is so because Levinas endows saying {le dire) with a double temporality (diachrony). Being without origin, saying constitutes the immemorial spac? and, as such, it is a type of writing whose ing of the intrigue of the-other-in-the-same is not the reciprocal exchange of the Socratic dialogue. It thus resists being response fully reabsorbed by discourse. In the next section I will highlight the peculiar structure of Otherwise than Being, as well as the shift in Levinas's conception of language, in order to show how Levinas puts the "possibility [vertu] of poetic language" to work within the context of the ethi? cal reduction of discourse.

Mad Possibility?Of

Poetic Language

in Otherwise

than Being

The unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbor in narration. The rela? tionship with him is indescribable in the literal sense ofthe term, unconvertible into a history, irreducible to the simultaneousness of writing, the eternal that records or presents results. present ofa writing ?Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being One can imagine a voice that "comes from the other shore" that by saying "at this very moment here I am" "interrupts the saying ofthe already said." It is a voice that refuses to tell stories, much like the one in Maurice Blanchot's The Madness ofthe Day, a mad voice ("obsessed, persecuted"), whose echoes disrupt the transparency of daylight, manifestation, and discourse. Yet even while refusing to tell stories this voice bears witness to an intrigue with the other in a style that defies the conventions of philosophi? cal argumentation. If in "Reality and Its Shadow" and in Totality and Infinity its alienating force char? acterized the aesthetic category of rhythm, in Otherwise than Being's "emphatic mutation" it becomes ethical.13 The voice that welcomes the other unfolds as a writing

13. While distinguishing his own method from transcendental philosophy, Levinas claims that in the latter an idea is always justified when one reaches its foundation. However, when the point of departure is the approaching ofthe human being "there is another sort of justification of one idea by the other: to pass from one idea to its superlative, to the point of its emphasis. You see that a new idea?in no way implicated in the first?flows or emanates from the overbid /surencherey [DQV 141-^42/GCM 89]. As an example ofthis way of proceeding, Levinas refers to the concept ofthe world's positing [thesis, position] and ofits emphatic transformation into an ex-position. This "to be posited in a superlative manner" illustrates the passage from an ontological structure to an ethical subjectivity. Although this seems to be a discrete example, it illustrates in nuce the constructive principle of Otherwise than Being, or what Levinas calls "exasperation [as] a philosophical method" or "emphatic mutation."

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that, not unlike Blanchot's, is "indiscrete with regard to the unsayable" [AE 18/OB 7]. However, the mutation of rhythm is not an isolated phenomenon: it is as if the language of Otherwise than Being were subscribing to Blanchot's rewriting of Wittgenstein's maxim: about what one cannot speak, one must write. Although Levinas energetically refuses any form of mysticism and remains committed to a rational philosophy, there is something outrageous in this book. Otherwise than Being's "clandestine intrigue" is "un-narratable and indescribable," two features that would of the other-in-the-same a philosopher like Wittgenstein to remain silent. It is the sort of precertainly compel involvement of the other-in-the-same (before the same becomes an autonomous ego) that does not fully abide by the rules of discursive exposition and can perhaps be more Levinas's daring attempt to write easily tolerated in poetic language. Nevertheless, what by his own account exceeds the order of discourse and escapes the categories of essence could also fall, as does Blanchot's, under Foucault's category of the "writing ofthe outside."14 By applying this Foucaultian expression to Levinas I may very well be going against Levinas's explicit intention, since for him writing can neither "effect the [ethi? cal] reduction" by itself [AE 75/OB 44] nor allow access to the "otherwise than being." But although Levinas does not develop a positive concept of writing, one can read his reduction of phenomenological discourse as a displacement and reinscription of a classical understanding of writing (one in which the qualities of writing are no longer derived from speech, as was the case in Totality and Infinity, but are understood as constitutive of signification in general) [see Derrida, Of Grammatology]. Further, the for this connection is that The Madness of the Day is lurking somewhere justification in a corner of Otherwise than Being, much like the silhouette of the "different law" that appears behind the backs of the masters of discourse in Blanchot's recit. It is a question then of interrogating this textual witness according to the double logic that Levinas derives from it: first, in terms of the order of discourse, even if it supposes a form of violence, and second, in terms of a certain outside of discourse, a margin in which wel? coming the other can have a chance.

"A forgetting

older than the forgetting

of Being"

How in Otherwise than Being does Levinas locate an enigmatic inscription in lan? guage that bears "an allegiance to the other"? What does he understand by significa? tion? As happens with most of his terms, signification is ambiguous. Its scope extends to manifestation or disclosure, and to proximity, a form of "allegiance to the other" that he situates on the hither side of manifestation. On the side of manifestation, beings and entities show themselves in the said to a consciousness able to synchronize their manifestation in the present. However, beneath manifestation and exceeding the grasp of ontology, Levinas locates proximity, a different modality of openness in which the same is involved with the other before the other appears in any possible way to con? sciousness. This "exposure precedes the initiative a voluntary subject would take to expose it" [AE 276/OB 180]. If on the side of manifestation it is possible to assemble a signification according to the play of differences, on the side of proximity there are is unable to assemble. The crux echoes of a saying whose signification consciousness of Otherwise than Being is both to allow the vibrations of this echo to reach the reader and for the inscription of its trace to interrupt the all-encompassing assimilation of the the said. This echo is not the resonance of essence or of a saying assimilated saying by 14. This expression refers to Foucault's formula for Blanchot's writing [see Foucault, "La pensee du dehors "].

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by the said: "the said, contesting the abdication of the saying that every where occurs in this said, thus maintains the diachrony in which, holding its breath, the spirit hears the echo ofthe otherwise" [AE 76/OB 44]. If signification extends to both sides of manifestation, language also presents an ambiguous structure. On this side of manifestation, one can conceive language either as a system of nouns, according to the inaugural distinction that Plato's Cratylus establishes, or as an excrescence of the verb. According to Levinas, ontology has widely understood language as a system of nouns, and this becomes evident when analyzing the structure of the apophantic utterance in terms of "amphibology" or ambiguity. The correlation saying/said is proper to manifestation or apophansis, whose privileged vector is nomination, the reduction of all significations to nouns. This correlation annuls alterity since it rests on the correspondence between verb and noun. Levinas in terms of a partial identification between predicate and subject analyzes predication and shows how designation can be derived from predication to the advantage of the assimilating power of identification (the "this as that"). Moreover, even if in identi? fication there is an enigmatic reference to an already said,15 ontology forgets it and also forgets that "the signification ofthe saying goes beyond the said." For that reason Levinas is able to claim that ontological difference is not the last: "behind being and its monstration, there is now already heard the resonance of other significations forgotten in ontology" [AE 66/OB 38]. For Levinas the difference of ontological difference is a redoubling, since the verbalness of the verb ("the red reddens," or "A is A") does not fully break with the substantiality of the noun: "the said, as a verb, is the essence of essence" [AE 67/OB 39]. It is within this context that art becomes the "pre-eminent exhibition in which the said is reduced to a pure theme," and that poetry is "productive of song, of resonance and sonority, which are the verbalness of verbs of essence" [AE 68/OB 40]. As in Existence and Existents and in "Reality and Its Shadow," art is still exotic, "isolated, without a world, essence in dissemination." However, the schema of rhythm at play in the latter becomes a more positive element here since art exposes the ambiguity of the verb to be. Yet in art "the said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology" [AE 68/OB 40]. Although Levinas's description of rhythm is purged of the hypnotic overtones of "Reality and Its Shadow," this is still an eminently classical and partial determination of art whose main goal is to secure the sublime character of the ethical. Art exhibits a reduction of the said to a pure theme, since in artistic exhibition the kerygma of the said and the signifyingness [signifiance] of the saying vanish.16 If in "Reality and Its Shadow" and in Totality and Infinity art failed to reveal Being (it "let go the prey for its shadow"), here Levinas seems to endorse a view of art not very different from Heidegger's: the essence of things resounds in the work of art. What the poem says is "absorbed in the said," even if this said is "prior to communication." That is, even if could "manifest itself as already invoked in silent and non-human language by Being the voices of silence, in the Geldut der Stille" [AE 211/OB 135], this language would amount to nothing more than a resounding of the said: "any radical non-assemblable diachrony would be excluded" from it [AE 211/OB 135]. Everything seems to indicate that the amphibology that characterizes language, that language is (that the work of art 75. "A word is a nomination, as much as a denomination, a consecrating ofthe 'this as this' or 'this as that' by a saying which is also understanding and listening, absorbed in the said. It is an obedience in the midst ofthe will (T hear this or that said'), a kerygma at the bottom ofa fiat" [AE64/OB36]. 16. By signifyingness ofthe saying, Levinas means the giving of oneself as the one-for-theother before expressing any content or message: signification as contact.

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exposes in a superlative way), voids any possibility of thinking the diachronic tempo? rality of the ethical intrigue in poetic language. However, there are some indications that the poem's poeticity may allow a heteroaffection as anarchic as that of the ethical saying. "Inspiration," "witnessing," and "prophecy" are tropes that refer to the ethical saying. Is poeticity a case of the saying, or is the saying a case of poeticity? Levinas does not posit things in these terms, nor does he settle the issue here. He states that the ethical saying "is already a sign made a sign of this to another, a sign of this giving of signs, that is of this non-indifference, of slipping away and being replaced, of this identity, this uniqueness: impossibility here I am" [AE 227/OB 145]. In a footnote that immediately follows this passage, he adds: "as a sign given of this signification of signs, proximity also delineates the trope of lyricism: to love by telling one's love to the beloved, the possibility of poetry or art" [AE 227/OB 199]. The anarchic ethical saying is the possibility for the origin of poetry. The question remains whether proximity delineates the trope of lyricism or whether poiesis delineates the trope of proximity beyond the metaphysical determination of aesthetics.

"Loosening

the grip of Being":

Ethical Reduction

as Writing

Thus there are not two discourses: there is discourse ?and then there would be dis-course, were it not that ofit we "know" practically nothing. We "know" that it escapes systems, order, possibility, including the possibility of where totality has let itself be language, and that writing, perhaps?writing, it in play. exceeded?puts ?Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster Tell us "just exactly" what happened? A story /histoire/? never again. ?Maurice Blanchot, The Madness ofthe Day No. No stories,

In Otherwise than Being Levinas locates the possibility of a saying that exceeds the grasp of the said (although betrayed by it) in the amphibology of language. This be? trayal and the irreducible echo of the saying encompass the infrastructure of language or ethicity. In order to "expose" this infrastructure, Levinas must accomplish a reduc? tion: It is clear that the verb to be, or the verb to consist, is used in the formulas from these first pages that name the hither side of being. It is also clear that being makes its apparition and shows itself in the said. As soon as saying, on the hither side of being, becomes dictation, it expires or abdicates, in fables and in writing. If being and manifestation go together in the said, it is infact natural that ifthe saying on the hither side can show itself, it be said already in terms of being. However, is it necessary, and is it possible that the saying on the hither side be thematized, that is, manifest itself, that it enter into a proposition and a book? The responsibility for another is precisely a saying prior to anything said. The surprising saying which is responsibility for another is against the "winds and tides of being," is an interruption of essence. /. . .] and recounting as an Philosophy makes this astonishing adventure?showing the grip of being. A philosopher's effort, essence?intelligible, by loosening and his unnatural position, consists, while showing the hither side, in imme-

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diately reducing the eon which triumphs in the said and in the monstration, and, despite the reduction, retaining an echo of the reduced said in the form of ambiguity, of diachronic expression. For the saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the said. /. . ./ It is the ethical interruption of essence that energizes the reduction. [AE 75/OB 43-44, my emphasis] The "for the other" at the heart of the one names the dynamism of the signifier and the preceding proximity constitutes le dire, saying or preoriginal language. Language, the both langue and parole, bears the trace of this preoriginary structure encompassing to saying {le dire) as "la signifiance meme de la signification," language. By referring or "le propos de l'avant-propos" [AE 6], Levinas stresses the total immersion of the trace in every part of discourse. Saying, however, cannot be totally contained in the proposition and while each of its parts accomplishes the saying's negation, it manages to affirm itself at the same time. Since the correlation saying/said is the price that any form of manifestation must pay, the distinction between being and entity is already included in the said. And al? though the said lies and betrays (it does not contain within itself the whole process of signification), it nonetheless makes its reduction possible. Language's fa^ade can give access to what subtracts itself from a system of differences, "the otherwise than being." Levinas calls this process ex-ception, as if it were an obverse of being, or its other? wise. Saying is the ex-ception to the said inasmuch as it overflows its themes while pronouncing them to the other. It is for this reason that one cannot simply conceive the saying as a rawsaid, as a part of the said that remains silent or unspoken. The said is an echo of the saying, or saying is an echo of the reduced said. Because being is delayed with respect to its own manifestation, its delay signals a diachrony {contre-temps) hidden behind the synchrony that, in turn, negates a content by affirming its presence. The affirmative utterance accomplishes a negative act in an illocutionary way. Nevertheless, negation negates the saying without fully capturing it because it is contained within the limits of the proposition, while the saying takes place even beyond nonbeing, in a subjectivity that Levinas equates with the soi-meme, un? derstood as nonindifference and restlessness. This saying prior to anything said "bears witness to the glory" of infinity [AE 220/OB 145], since it is a "dedication to the other" and therefore "sincerity." This is a saying that does not narrate any manifestation and is thus irreducible to the truth of disclosure. As a nonthematic saying, it is a witnessing or prophecy. The reduction of "the said to the saying beyond logos" [AE 77/OB 45] is a philo? sophical operation that Levinas characterizes as the "return of skepticism." Skepticism is a hyperbolic figure of philosophy through which Levinas renders a "return of the diachrony refusing the present" [AE 258/OB 169]. The "return of skepticism" after it is refuted allows Levinas to anticipate the objection that would accord discourse the total power to capture and mend any form of interruption [AE 198/OB 155]. The philosophi? cal speaking that "betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us still remains, as a saying, a proximity and a responsibility" [AE 257/OB 168, my emphasis]. This does not mean that Levinas assumes a skeptical posture, but rather that in the history of philosophy the very movement ofthe return of an irreducible diachrony is best testified by skepticism's refusal. This is a refusal to synchronize in a single stroke both the implicit affirmation that the saying contains and the negation that this affirmation states in a proposition. The force of skepticism's refusal lies in that it "makes a difference and puts an interval between saying and the said" [AE 261/OB 168]. Ultimately for Levi? nas "language is already skepticism" [AE 263/OB 170] because in it the "two times" of diachrony unfold within it without achieving a final synthesis.

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when Levinas claims that the "impossible simultaneousness of Nevertheless, the non-assemblable is an excluded but also inseparable one-for-the-other, meaning, middle signifying as equivocation or an enigma" [AE 258/OB 169], he supplements the hyperbolic figure of skepticism with the poetic said. He needs to show that language can exceed the limits of what is thought and that it allows "a possibility of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concepts" [AE 259/OB 170]. For Levinas, this possibility is "laid bare in the poetic said and the interpretation it calls for ad infinitum" [AE 259/OB 170]. The poetic said exposes the possibility of a subversion of essence and accomplishes a dismantling ofthe normative and violent dimension of coherence. The retraction in the direction of the saying (le dire) toward what is prior to the "amphibology of being and entities in the said" [AE 74/OB 4] is thus made possible. Without forcing the argu? ment, it is possible to claim that, for Levinas, poetic language "is already skepticism" in a superlative manner, even if he does not explicitly phrase it in these terms. This can be shown in two ways. First, it is possible to locate a double temporality exceeding the grasp of discourse in the poetic said. This is the dimension of poetic language that Levinas explicitly recognizes and valorizes, but he does so in terms of "possibility [vertu]." Indeed, the refutation of skepticism, the oppressive dimension of the order of discourse and its refusal of anything that could escape its grasp, is curiously described in terms of a text Levinas only alludes to, Blanchot's The Madness ofthe Day. This allusion is placed before the last chapter, titled "Outside" ("Au Dehors"), in which Levinas elucidates the form of openness that pertains to substitution. Substitu? tion, the master trope of ethics, supposes a "writing of the outside" in which space ceases to be simply the condition for the openness of entities in the light of the day. The outside names an absolute exteriority that Levinas characterizes with the hyper? bolic feature of being "out of the world." Can one claim that a substitution, a one-forthe-other of "poetic" and "philosophical" writing, takes place here, even if two pages later Levinas, once again with Heidegger in mind, questions poetry's ability to "reduce rhetoric (the said)"?17 Second, from The Madness of the Day Levinas implicitly takes a set of figures and uses them to describe the order of discourse as well as to account for the textual principle of his own book. Because the first use of these literary figures responds to a classical philosophical treatment of tropes, Levinas does not hesitate to qualify it as a said. This said belongs to ontology and offers a satisfactory description of totality's topology. The second use, however, does not belong to this configuration. It is the po? etic saying that, while going unacknowledged, silently provides Levinas with a formal structure to describe and inscribe the ethical Saying as what exceeds ontology and totality. Given the complexity of Levinas's gesture, it is necessary to pay attention to this double use of figures. The poetic said allows Levinas to describe how discourse accomplishes the mending ofthe saying's "latent diachrony," what we can call the "first version of interruption":

17. "In all the compunction of Heidegger's magical language and the impressionism of his play oflights and shadows [. . .] does poetry succeed in reducing rhetoric? Everything that claims to come from elsewhere, even the marvels of which essence is itself capable, even the surprising possibilities ofrenewal by technology and magic [. . f?all this does not deaden the heartrending bustling of the there is [il y a] recommencing behind every negation. There is no break in the business carried by essence" [AE 280/OB 182-83].

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Coherence thus dissimulates a transcendence, a movement from the one to the other, a latent diachrony, uncertainty and afine risk. Are the rendings ofthe logical text mended by logic alone? It is in the as? sociation of philosophy with the State and with medicine that the breakup of discourse is surmounted. The interlocutor that does not yield to logic is threat? ened with prison or the asylum or undergoes the prestige of the master and the medication ofthe doctor. [...] The discourse then recuperates its meaning by repression or by mediation. [. . .] It is through the State that knowledge and force are efficacity. But the State does not irrevocably discount folly, not even the intervals of folly. It does not untie the knots, but cuts them. The said thematizes the interrupted dialogue or the dialogue delay ed by silences, fail? ure or delirium, but the intervals are not recuperated. Does not the discourse that suppresses the interruptions of discourse by relating them maintain the discontinuity under the knots with which the thread is tied again? [AE 263-64/ OB 170] Levinas thus conveys the violence of coherence, its dissimulation of the intrigue, in terms of a "literary scene" that also presents the "association of philosophy with the State and with medicine": Then I noticedfor the first time that there were two ofthem and that this dis? tortion ofthe traditional method, even ifit was explained by the fact that one ofthem was an eye doctor, the other an specialist in mental illness, constantly gave our conversations the character ofan authoritarian interrogation, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules. Of course neither ofthem was the But because there were two ofthem, there were three, and this chiefofpolice. third remained firmly convinced, I am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks and who reasons with distinction, is always capable of recounting facts that he remembers. A story? No. No stories, never again. [Blanchot, BR 199/FJ 29] and the Repression and mediation appear here under the guise of the ophthalmologist the two figures that interrogate "the interlocutor that does not yield to psychiatrist, logic" and, therefore, who resists the complete assimilation of the saying to the said, as well as the violent suppression of the saying. However, Levinas still refers to poetic language as a said, without mentioning the interruptive force of Blanchot's recit as the it is this "liter? saying that subtracts itself from the order of discourse.18 Nevertheless, scene" that makes it possible to ask whether there is another way of dealing with ary interruption. Is there "a second version of interruption" that does not depend on the violence of coherence (the forceful extraction of a testimony by interrogation, which is precisely how Blanchot figures the coercive nature of the order of discourse and the law of narration)? The poetic saying provides Levinas with a formal structure to describe this other version of interruption and to inscribe the ethical Saying, since what he is finally proposing is the possibility of understanding interruption as different from interruptions in discourse. Levinas focuses on what discourse represses or on what a conventional ver? sion of interruption evacuates but nonetheless preserves on the underside ofits fabric or tissue. Although the thread of a violent continuity comes to the forefront as the dissimulating effect that the first version of interruption accomplishes, it is the inscription of

18. For a reading more attuned to the dimension ofthe saying exceeding the grasp ofthe said, see Derrida, "La loi du genre."

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a no less forceful interruption that sparks Levinas's interest (the series of knots). How does Levinas seek to relate these two series? He must comply with two conditions; first, he must expose the discursive work of interruption (its thread) and show that this is a "broken thread" unable to fully reduce the knots of interruption. Second, he must interrupt the interruption of discourse and demonstrate that the continuous thread and the knots of interruption no longer relate to each other in terms of simultaneity or correlation. As can be seen, Levinas's allusion to the possibility of poetic language goes hand in hand with a deployment of a series of textual tropes (thread, knots, tissue, weaving). This deployment makes the ethical reduction of the said possible, since in the poetic of meaning" [AE 262/OB said language suggests "an impossible simultaneousness It is precisely this simultaneity of meaning that philosophical discourse betrays 169]. and that Levinas attempts to write. I will now follow Levinas's deployment of these textual tropes and his writing ofthe ethical reduction: Every contesting and interruption of this power of discourse is at once related and invested by discourse /relatee et invertie/. It therefore recommences as soon as one interrupts it. /. . .] This discourse will affirm itself as coherent and one. In relating the interruption of discourse or my being ravished by it, I retie the thread /j'en renoue le fil/ /.../ and are we not at this very moment in the process ofbarring up the exit which our whole essay is attempting, and encircling our position from all sides? [AE 262/OB 169, my emphasis] And a few lines further down, within the context of his allusion to The Madness Day, Levinas states: ofthe

The said thematizes the interrupted dialogue or the dialogue delayed by silences, failure or delirium, but the intervals are not recuperated. Does not the discourse that suppresses the interruptions of discourse by relating them maintain the discontinuity under the knots with which the thread is tied again /sous les nceuds ou le fil se renoue/? The interruptions of discourse found again and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied again /dans les nceuds d'un fil renoue/, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity. And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all discourses are stated, in saying it /en le disant/ to the one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true ofthe discussion I am elaborating at this very moment. This reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through /perce/ the text that the discourse claims to weave /tisser/ 170, my emphasis] in thematizing and enveloping all things. [AE 264/OB

The reduction of the said that brings about the intrigue of the other takes place in two times (a contre-temps) [AE 76/OB 44]. This is the double movement of Levinas's quasi-narrative that seeks to inscribe an intrigue of the other and to welcome it. In the first moment, Levinas relates the interruptions according to the temporality of the said (le dit); that is, according to the order of discourse and ontology. The ethical interruption of ontology leaves its marks, but as soon as one attempts to fill them with some content they are tied back to the order of discourse and lose their ethical force. At this very mo? ment, Levinas is describing what is taking place when he attempts to exceed the order

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of discourse, but he is he is describing. From in the second moment ment that produces an

also accomplishing?Iretie the thread [j'en renoue lefil]?what the viewpoint of discourse's totality, interruption fails. However, ofthe reduction it is possible to locate an alteration and displace? excessive remainder, "the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity" [AE 76/OB 44]. The repetition of Levinas's gesture under the heading of at this very moment inter? rupts the recounting of interruptions in the immanence ofthe said and makes it possible to preserve them "like knots in a thread tied again [dans les nozuds dy unfil renoue]." Levinas's repetition interrupts the expository line ofhis argument, and this interruption is preserved at a different level than that of philosophical discourse. The interruptions of the said (discourse, ontology, knowledge, narration) occur as the tearing of a continuous tissue or fabric now preserved in a discontinuous surface in which the series of interruptions can no longer be retied by the unifying thread of discourse. Further, the reduction interrupts these series of interruptions by saying it to the interlocutor, to the other. The final interruption takes place under the modality of the address that is prior to the language of ontology, the saying of the intrigue of the other: an adjacent supple? ment that keeps the two series out of sync.19 Levinas refers to this supplement with a different series of tropes: breath, breathing, and inspiration. It is the "restlessness of respiration" [AE 276/OB 180] that keeps the series ofthe mended thread (the recuperated interruptions in the said) and the series of knots (the saying as interruptions ofthe said) separated and in constant "animation." This chain of tropes brings about an "emphatic mutation" of the aesthetic category of rhythm that now becomes ethical. The alienating force of aesthetic rhythm becomes the ethical trope of substitution. The interlocutor, the other, who comes from the outside, is "a fission of the subject beyond lungs. It is a fission of the self, or the self as fissibility" [AE277/OB 180]. Levinas reverses the classic value of breathing as the sign of a vital force and transforms it instead into the movement by which "I already open myself to my subjection to the whole of the invisible other [a tout V autre invisible]" [AE 278/OB 181]. The final reduction of the said, the one that keeps the "two versions of interruption" apart, is "the breathing opening to the other and signifying to the other in its very signifying? ness" [AE 278/OB 181]. The ethical reduction is not a punctual movement, but rather an "incessant unsaying ofthe said" [AE 278/OB 181]. Levinas invokes the poetic said at the very moment when he speaks of language as "skepticism" and energizes his ethical reduction of discourse through a textual graphics that bears striking similarities to The Madness of the Day. It is as if the language of Otherwise than Being, a language that shows a different understanding of its own operations than that of Totality and Infinity, were making peace with a certain "pos? sibility" of poetic language. A substitution of "poetic" and "philosophical" writing has taken place in spite of Levinas's discrete acknowledgement ofthe possibility of poetic language to un-say the said.

19. Derrida coins the term seriature /serie + rature/ in order to refer to the complex struc? ture of Levinas's text. Derrida describes this structure as "an interrupted series of interlaced interruptions, a series of hiatuses [. . .] that I shall henceforth call, in order to formalize in economical fashion and so as not to dissociate what is no longer dissociable within this fabric, seriature" ["En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici" 189]. See also Critchley.

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WORKS CITED et Esthetique: De 1'ombre a Fobliteration." Cahier Armengaud, Frangoise. "Ethique De UHerne: Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Catherine Chalier and Miguel de Abensour. Paris: L'Herne, 1991. 605-19. Blanchot, Maurice. "La litterature et le droit a la mort [Literature and the Right to Death]." La part dufeu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. 312-31. -. The Madness ofthe Day. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981. Trans. ofLafolie dujour. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973. First published as "Un recit." 2 May 1949: 13-22. Empedocles -. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Ed. George Quasha. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1998. [BR] -. Thomas VObscur. 1950. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. -. The Writing ofthe Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. du desastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. [WD] Trans. ofUecriture Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: BlackCritchley, well, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. "En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici." Psyche: Les inventions de T autre. Paris: Galilee, 1988. 159-202. -. "La loi du genre." Parages. Paris: Galilee, 1986. 231-66. -. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hop? kins UP, 1998. -. "Violence and Metaphysics." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chi? cago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 65-79. Eaglestone, Robert. "Cold Splendor: Levinas's Suspicion of Art." Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. 1930-1939. 1927. The Hague: Martinus Fink, Eugen. Studien zur Phanomenologie, 1966. Nijoff, Paris: Gallimard, Foucault, Michel. "La pensee du dehors." Dits et ecrits 1,1954-1975. 1994. 546-67. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962. Trans. of Sein undZeit. 15th ed. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984. -. "The Origin ofthe Work of Art." Language, Poetry, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 17-84. -. "What Is Metaphysics?" Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cam? bridge UP, 1998. 82-96. A Translation ofDie idee der PhaenomHusserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology: Husserliana II. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic, enologie 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. [GCM] Trans. of De dieu qui vient a Videe. Paris: Vrin, 1982. -. -. -. -. [DQV] Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Trans. oiDe V existence a Vexistant. Paris: Vrin, 1963. [EE] Humanisme de Vautre homme [Humanism ofthe Other Man]. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972. "Levy-Bruhl et la philosophie contemporaine." er-d-Vautre. Paris: Grasset, 1991. 49-63. Otherwise Entre Nous: Essais sur lepens-

than Being: or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. [OB] Trans. ofAutrement quf etre; ou, Au-dela de Vessence. Paris: Kluwer Academics, 1978. [AE]

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Papers. Trans. Alphonso "Reality and Its Shadow." Collected Philosophical 1998. 1-14. [CPP] Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, ?. Sur Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975. ?. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pitts? burgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Trans. of Totalite et infini: Essai sur Vexteriorite. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. [TI] Marion, Jean-Luc. Uidole et la distance. Paris: Grasset, 1977. Maurice. "La philosophie et son ombre." Signes. Paris: Gallimard, Merleau-Ponty, 1962. 201-28. Petrosino, Silvano. "D'un livre a l'autre: Totalite et Infini et 1' Autrement qu 'Etre" Em? manuel Levinas. Paris: Verdier, 1*984. 35-78. Petrosino, Silvano, and Jacques Rolland. La verite nomade: Introduction a Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: La Decouverte, 1984. Plato. Cratylus. Trans. Harold North Flower. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. -. Phaedrus. Trans. Harold North Flower. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Robbins, Jill. "Aesthetic Totality and Ethical Infinity." Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 75-90. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. London: Routledge, 1995). Trans. of Paris: Gallimard, 1940. Uimaginaire. -. "Qu'est-ce que la litterature?" Situations II. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. 55-330. Thomas C. "The Allegory of Being." Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Wall, Agamben. Albany: SUNYP, 1999. 13-30.

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