The Elemental Imperative

ALPHONSO LINGIS

Pennsylvania State University

For Kant, an imperative weighs on the understanding. Understanding is

understanding according to principles. Understanding is under an imperative to
synthesize disparate data according to the universal and the necessary. As soon
as there is understanding, understanding understands that it is under an
imperative that there be law. It is in subjection to the imperative for law that
understanding understands. Understanding is constituted in obedience.
Understanding would not be bound by a principle it itself formulated in
a representation it put before itself. The imperative weighs on the under-
standing before it is formulated. It is a fact; it is the first fact, for facts can be
represented as facts only by an understanding that apprehends them in
universal and necessary forms of judgment. The imperative is the a priori
fact that precedes and makes possible the a priori forms with which under-
standing understands empirical facts.
The understanding is before the imperative for law as receptive to it,
afflicted by it. There is a sensitivity for the imperative for law in its
spontaneous activity of formulating representations of principle. This recep-
tivity, this intellectual feeling, Kant identifies as the sentiment of respect.
Respect is respect for law; respect for persons is respect for the imperative for
law they diagram. Respect is phenomenologically described by Kant as
"something like fear, something like inclination." Respect is the feeling of
being burdened by the force of an absolute exteriority, which the spontaneity
of one's representational faculty acknowledges each time it turns to imma-
nent sense-data and takes them to represent for itself objects in a space and
time that are exterior relative to itself.

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The imperative is put singularly on me. Understanding is particularized

as my understanding in requiring content from my sensory faculty which
collects each time particular data and from my practical faculties which
adjust to an each time particular layout of the phenomenal field. It is through
my practical faculties, of motion and manipulation, that the data are
gathered; it is also through my practical faculties that the material of the
environment is ordered according to intentions issuing from my understand-
ing. The imperative orders the understanding to order the sensory and
'
practical powers that particularize understanding as mine. The imperative
commands my rational faculty to be in command.
The I that understands is constituted in this obedience; the subject is
constituted in subjection. Ordering the activity of its sensory-motor faculties
by a representation put to its will, a representation one's own reason has
, formulated, the human composite will make itself no longer a congeries of
faculties diversely activated from without-by the transmission of forces and
the lures of external nature, by the compulsions of its unconscious nature.
A will that is activated by sensuous representations is activated by the
lures of pleasure that each time contingent contours of sensuous objects
present. The core vital force is confirmed by a gratification offered any of its
organs and receptor surfaces. The vital force in us wills to maintain itself, but
does not will to will unconditionally. If the contingent lures of pleasure the
empirical field offers it are not as great as the pains they inflict upon it, it can
will to suppress itself; it can will its suicide. But the will that is activated by
representations put to it by its own understanding subject to the imperative
for the universal and necessary is motivated to will and to act in all
circumstances and always. It maintains itself in force unconditionally. The
rational agency constitutes itself as a will that wills itself, an identity that
maintains itself in presence, an ideal presence.
The immediate effect of the rational activation of the will is the reduc-
tion of impulses and sensuous appetites to suffering. Their activation by the
contingent lures of pleasure with which the sensuous faculty represents its
synoptic objects is intercepted and held in suspense. Pain is engendered in
the psychic apparatus; it is the mode in which the sensibility knows itself
backed up to itself, mired in itself. Expiration, in the guise of the sensuous
natural activity being reduced to passivity, is the modality in which the
psychic apparatus knows its receptivity for the imperative for the universal
and the necessary. The death the law commands is the inward knowledge
understanding has of its own obedience.
But one also needs an external knowledge. In order to obey the impera-
tive, in order to make myself in my particular empirical situation an
examplar of law, I need an advance representation of the figure I must
compose of my powers. I need a representation that is concrete and sensible:
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an image, but also general, such that it can be transferred to other concrete
material. The free imagination finds itself, from the first, commanded to
produce an imperative image. Kant has labeled these imperative images
"types."
There are three possible "types." Nature, an instrumental complex, and
civil society are the three possible representations of systems ordered by law
the understanding subject to the imperative must produce. The individual's
practical imagination must produce an advance representation of himself by
transferring these models upon himself. The conception of law is not the
same in the three images; all three types are required.
What has a nature of its own in the empirical world is a multiplicity of
elements governed by an intrinsic order; the whole of the phenomenal field is
represented by the theoretical employment of reason as nature inasmuch as it
is understood as governed by universal laws, the laws formulated in empiri-
cal science. The individual human composite comprises a multiplicity of
impulses and sensuous appetites which are excited by the representations its
sensuous faculty makes of phenomenal objects as lures of pleasure. There is
no necessary connection between the properties of an object and the pleasure
it gives; the impulses and sensuous appetites attach the practical will each
time to the particular and the contingent. When these impulses and sensuous
appetites are intercepted, by a representation of the universal and the
necessary conceived by the understanding and put to the practical will in
their stead, the anarchic intermittence of impulses and appetites, activated
by external contingencies, are made into a nature.
The second "type" is an instrumental field. The phenomenal field is
represented instrumentally when its elements are represented economically:
an instrument is a value, its properties and its place and time are represented
as exchangeable for other terms. The end is a good for which values are
exchanged. An end that is not exchangeable in turn Kant terms a digniry.
Thus, in the economy of production, raw materials are exchanged for
manufactured goods, base metals for noble metals, commodities exchanged
for the production of a monument in which the idol is enshrined; henceforth
the economic community will expend its resources to defend the dignity of its
monuments and its idols. The imperative that requires the rational will to
maintain itself in force in all circumstances and always makes of it an
inexchangeable good; it requires the subject to imagine his own sensuous
faculties and their objects as means. His operations in the phenomenal field
will transform sensuous objects from lures for his appetites into means.
The third "type" is civil society. A multiplicity of individuals forms a
civil society when they set up a legislative instance for themselves. Then
those individuals are regulated neither by the armed forces of another civil
society nor by the contingencies of the natural environment and the drives of
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their own psychophysical natures. However, the civil societies that we can
perceive in empirical history have been in fact shaped by men dominated by
a passion for power, for wealth, and for prestige; their order is in fact a
provisional armistice between passionate men. Kant defined passion as a
drive that takes a partial satisfaction of the drives in the human composite for
the totality, that is, for happiness. One must rather then imagine another
civil society, such that the order is rather that of what is intrinsically
universal and necessary. Such would be a multiplicity of individuals regu-
lated by principles valid for each and in all circumstances. Each one makes
himself a member of such an imaginary civil society when he represents its
laws as his own. The most integrated form of civil society is a republic, where
each envisages every other individual as a fellow citizen, that is, as an
' exemplar of laws that bind him also.
The image of such a civil society makes possible the image of each
citizen and of oneself as a society unto himself. The individual will imagine his
rational faculty as an autonomous legislative instance which imposes an
intrinsic order upon the anarchic multiplicity of his own impulses and
sensuous appetites and constitutes him as a micro-republic that makes itself
independent of the orders put on him by the forces of external nature and of
the anarchic compulsions of his own composite constitution.
The imperative image makes possible respect for the other. Respect for
the other, as an entity on his own, a nature that is not simply to be ordered as
a means for one's own ends, is respect for the law that rules in his composite
faculties. To respect the other is to respect the law that commands in him
and commands me also.
One does not know, in any given case, that the positions and movements
one sees in the psychophysical functioning of another are in fact caused by a
representation of principle he himself puts to his will, just as one does not
know, in any given case, that the operation one perceives one's own faculties
performing was not rather programmed in unconscious drives and regulated
by the confluence of external forces. But one believes-one must believe-
that it is possible that the representation of principle alone activates the will.
One believes, one is commanded by the imperative laid on one's under-
standing to believe, that one can command one's psychophysical composite
to execute actions that will be instances of the universal and the necessary.
And one believes, one must believe, that the particular diagrams of action
one perceives in the other's phenomenal figure can be understood as instanti-
ations of the universal and the necessary, and that the other has in fact so
represented them in advance.
The belief is immediate. It does not, like a rational hypothesis, arise in
the measure that reliable observation of the stands and moves of the other in
the empirical field makes plausible that other laws than those of the physical
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universe and those of psychophysiological natures are needed to understand

them., As in the case of understanding my own nervous circuitry and
energized musculature, as in the case of the irregular orbit of a comet, I am
obligated to suppose that any phenomenal datum that is not an illusion holds
together with the laws that make it an integral moment of nature. If the other
can present the phenomenal form of a citizen, whose moves are programmed
by principles represented in his own understanding, this figure is engen-
dered, not at some advanced stage of synthetic observation of his psycho-
physical organs operating in intelligible nature, but out of an immediate
sense of law in him, a law sensed as binding the understanding because I
sense it weighing immediately on my own understanding. In the respect for
another I recognize that the exteriority of the imperative unconvertible into a
principle my own understanding would formulate is the very exteriority that
constitutes alteriry. For the other is other, another nature, not by virtue of the
sum total of phenomenal differences his psychophysical organism shows from
my own; he is other as an authority to which I find myself subjected. That is
why it is that the feeling of being contested, being summoned is immediate,
comes with the first intuition of being approached by another, and why it is
that one is relieved, acquitted, when one begins to see the color and shape of
what is there. In the measure that one sees what it was that moved him (the
discomfort of the chair, the raw wind), in the measure that one understands
why he spoke as he did (the surprise of finding me here, his immigrant's
faulty command of the idiom the situation calls for), in the measure that one
understands why he felt as he did (how my shape fits into his archetypes of
authority figures, father figures, rebel figures), one dissipates the sense that
his law binds me; one's perception and synthetic understanding of what one
perceives justify oneself.
The feeling of the force of the imperative in oneself, origin of the rational
faculty, is itself a rational feeling; it motivates itself. It is confirmed, not by
the perception of the causality with which it activates the practical will and
the nervous circuitry and musculature of one's body, but rather by the feeling
of one's own impulses and sensuous appetites being intercepted and blocked.
This nonaccomplishment is inwardly felt as pain, not the pain with which the
sentient substance knows the wound with which the outside breaks into it,
but the suffering a continued appetition undergoes when the mental appara-
tus has itself prohibited its satisfaction. It is also this sense of pain that makes
rational the a priori belief that the other is other with the alterity of an
imperative. This imperative is located in the phenomenal field in which the
other figures in the measure that one perceives not simply a psychophysical
organism responding to the pressures and lures of its empirical environment,
but rather a nature jarred and buffeted by the forces of the environment,
suffering the dictates of an imperative that does not reign immemorially in
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physical nature. One does not perceive the efficacy of an inner program
regulating his organs and his limbs; one winces, one senses the pain. One
does not perceive the pain where it is, in the psychic depth in which his own
nervous circuitry knows itself; one senses it at the surfaces of contact. The
other, then, in his alterity, the other as a fellow citizen in the republic of ends,
appears in the real world in the phenomenal figure of a surface of exposure, of
vulnerability, of susceptibility, that suffers. In this suffering alterity is
exposed to me and commands imperatively.
The pain of the other that afflicts me immediately, with the very
immediacy with which law is a priori laid on my mental apparatus, is
suffered, according to Kant's precise formulation, in the spontaneity of my
understanding. Understanding arises out of, constitutes itself in, this afflic-
tion. It acts to synthetically reorganize the sensuous substances about me
. into effective means for the imperative order presented in the alterity of the
other. The pain of the other is the origin of my own reason.
The figure of the other as a rational agent on his own is wholly this
susceptibility, this surface phenomenon. The discordance between the other
as a psychophysical organism, which the imperative laid on my understand-
ing demands I understand as wholly subject to the laws of nature, and the
other as a rational agent, whose imperatives bind me, is not brutally that of
the other perceived and understood and the other as the term of belief
synthetically represented by my own imagination. It is rather a discordance
between what we can call, on the one hand, a depth perception of the other, a
perception of his phenomenal figure that prolongs itself by an understanding
of the psychophysical processes that expose him to me as a phenomenal
surface and which processes are determined by the electromagnetic, physico-
chemical processes of a universe whose close-up phenomenal contours lure
his impulses and sensuous appetites in accordance with the this time psycho-
physical natural laws, and, on the other hand, an affective sense of the
surface of painful susceptibility which the axes of his active body expose. The
pain of the other is not simply his de facto vulnerability as a physical
substance whose space has to exclude and resist the force of inertia of other
physical substances. It is a pain produced by his own action in obedience to
law, an action that constitutes sensuous substances as means, such that his
impulses and appetites no longer end in them. _
. In Kant's typology, the third type, the other as citizen in a republic of
ends, is not independently elaborated alongside of the other types; it is the
'
integral type in which moral understanding is finally accomplished. For by
itself the first type, nature as a totality governed by laws, would only induce
in one the Stoic or technological project of viewing one's own psychophysical
complex of impulses and appetites and practical volitions as governed by
universal psychophysical determinisms and induce one to take one's belief
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that one's practical will is activated by representations of things as lures of

pleasures and risks of pain, representations produced by one's sensory
faculty, to be an illusion. The first type would exclude the second, the
environment as a field of means for ends that could be introduced into it. It is
the third type, which presents the other's and one's own sensory surfaces as
exposing themselves in a suffering that a practical will activated by the
representation of the universal and the necessary engenders, that reverses the
natural finality of those impulses and appetites and first makes possible the
constitution of sensuous objects as means. And makes possible, thus, the
second type, the image of nature as a practical field and the image of one's
own faculties as means for one's own dignity.

It is at this point that we see that Kant's opening metaphysical positions

is overcome by his own phenomenology. Kant's practical philosophy set out
to locate the law not in nature-whether represented, as by the ancients, as a
spectacle moved by a cosmic Fate or represented, as by the moderns, as an
atomic or electromagnetic universe governed by the laws formulated in the
natural sciences-nor in a representation of a heteronomous divine legislator
of man and nature. It is in the constitution of the individual's own faculty of
understanding that the imperative for law is first manifest, as an a priori fact.
The laws formulated in the natural sciences, as well as the laws formulated
by institutions in human history and society, are formulated, Kant means to
show, by reason in obedience to the imperative for law it knows within itself.
The force of the imperative for law is not revealed in nature or civil society,
'
but illustrated in them.
My reason obeys the imperative by formulating principles for my will.
The principles it will produce do not represent the force or the fact of the
imperative, which as imperative is irrecuperably exterior. The formulation
will only represent law as though one had given it to oneself. The imperative
commands reason to constitute representations of law-governed totalities-
nature, instrumental fields, civil society. The imagination will then use these
images as "types," to shape advance representations of the forms to be given
one's own multiple faculties in order to make of oneself an examplar of law.
Yet for Kant the understanding itself does not simply feel the force and
the fact of the imperative; it knows its properties: the imperative is an
imperative for law, for the universal and the necessary. Where has this
definition come from? In fact Kant's text has drawn it from logic; this is the
logical definition of a principle. From what logic? From the logic governing .
the pure, theoretical use of reason. But this logic, we are more clear about
now than in Kant's day, is a formalization of the procedures used by
speculative reason, that is, reason at work forming a synthetic representation
of the empirical field as nature. Reason-that is, modern Western calculative
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reason. Kantism would not consider the ancient concepts of law in nature as
Dike, as karma, the forms of organization L6vi-Strauss has formalized as
common to the great civilizations of America, or contemporary statistical
concepts of law in use in recent micro- and macrophysics to have achieved
the intelligibility the understanding requires. Kant's definition of law is
taken directly from the formal logic elaborated out of the ancient substantive
physics and metaphysics of Aritotle.
We are then forced to conclude that the formal properties of the
imperative, universality and necessity, are not known a priori; they are
derived from the "type," from the representation of empirical nature the
speculative use of reason, commanded by the force of the imperative,
constitutes. But there are three types, and it is not true that the order that is
found in a representation of an instrumental field or the order that is found in
civil society is that of logical principles, with the properties of formal
universality and necessity. It is also not true that the order that represents
the phenomenal field as nature, totally representable, is only the kind of
universal and necessary laws formal logic derives from the substantive
physics of Aristotle and the physics of Newton. The types, imperatively
imagined, and not the sentiment of respect, are then the original locus of the
form of order the imperative commands.
What then of the force and the fact of the imperative? The imperative is
imperative in being absolutely exterior to the understanding on which it is
laid, by not being convertible into a principle reason spontaneously formu-
lates. In our discussion of the integral type, that of the other as fellow citizen
in a republic of ends, we argued that the other is other with the very
exteriority of an imperative, that his surfaces afflict one immediately, prior to
the perception and the understanding that place them back into the depth of
nature, with the force of an imperative. We argued that the surface of the
other, a surface of affliction, immediately sensed in my own mortification,
weighs on my understanding with the obsessive force of a command to
neutralize my sensory faculties which represent external objects as lures of
pleasure. We argued for a surface-phenomenology which explicates in the
affliction with which the other surfaces before me the force of the imperative
that binds all understanding, as well as the form with which it commands
me.
The nature that Kant takes as the first type, the scientific representation
of nature, is a nature elaborated by a depth-phenomenology. In describing
the givens of external sense as pure medley, Kant anticipates the later
physics that disintegrates the landscapes of vision, touch, smell, and hearing
into "merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly" (White-
head, Science and the Modern World, 54), place-time loci of an electromagnetic
field. They function, logically, as data, that is, media in which principles are
instantiated. Kant neglects completely the contours they exhibit, the hills
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and the valleys of landscapes, the surfaces. For him the surface of a box
reduces to the side of a cube, which for its part is given not sensorially but in
the geometrical formula. Our thesis is that a surface-phenomenology of nature
will reveal the surfaces of exterior nature as also an original locus of the force of
an imperative. The form of order such a representation of nature exhibits will
reveal the form and properties of that imperative that can thus function as a
"type" for the practical judgment imperatively enjoined upon us.

The essential themes of a surface phenomenology of nature were elabor-

ated two centuries after Kant in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-
Ponty's phenomenology showed, beneath or prior to nature as objectively
represented by theoretical or scientific nature, not a pure sensuous medley, '
but sensible things. The relationship between the sensible aspects in a thing
is not that of external relations or additive juxtaposition, and the sensible
aspects do not simply, as in the Kantian conception, instantiate in a here and
now basic forms of organization that can be disengaged from the logic of
predication. A sensible thing has the consistency and coherence of a Gestalt,
where the parts both implicate and express one another. The visible pattern .
determined by and determining the tangible surface and composition, the
sonority, and the odor presents a "sensible essence" to perception from the
start. ·
Secondly, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology elaborated a quite new '
conception of the field in which things are set and extended. He does not, like
Kant, see it as infinite axes of space and time actually given in intuition. But
for him it is also not composed of horizons in Husserl's sense-series of
potential objects intuited with a multitude of concomitant rays of intention-
ality spreading about the central ray that fixes the actualized object. He also
does not conceive it as Heidegger does-as a dynamic array of instrumental
links. Merleau-Ponty centered on the phenomenon of levels. The eye distin-
guishes the colors as they distend or contrast with the level of the ambient
color-tone and with the level of the light. The ear delineates particular sound
patterns, of a particular pitch and intensity, as they diverge from the key in a
melody, from the general murmur of nature, from the rumble of the city. The
touch discriminates particular tactile patterns by taking a certain pressure
and density of the tangible as a level-the fingers pick out the Braille letters
from the texture of the paper. Sensible things are set on levels; the back-
ground is neither indeterminate nor a multitude of potential figures; it is a
nexus of sensible levels. The levels are not intuited with a pure or a priori
intuition, nor are they constituted or posited by an organizing intellectual
operation. They are not really perceived; one does not look at the light, one
looks with it or according to it. The real world is the matrix of sensible levels.
The world is on the side of the carnal subject; it is that with which we
perceive.
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Sensible things are not really given in perception but command it like
norms. Our perception, Merleau-Ponty finds, in fact discriminates the real
colors and sonorous resonance and weight and sizes and shapes of things
from colors and tones and sizes and shapes refracted through a medium or
seen in abnormal light or set askew or seen in perspective or from a distance
because it is finalized toward seeing things, that is, intersensorially coherent
and consistent wholes. Our perception takes as phantoms, mere appear-
ances, mirages, illusions, sensory patterns that do not fit in with the consis-
tency and coherence of things. The imperative to perceive things is itself
grounded in the imperative to perceive a world. Things have to not exhibit
all their sides and qualities, have to compress them behind the faces they
turn to us, have to tilt back their sides in depth, and not occupy all the field
with their relative bigness, because they have to coexist in a field with one
another, and that field has to coexist with the fields of other possible things.
In Merleau-Ponty the world is as an imperative. It is not given; the light
illuminates things in the measure that one does not see it but sees according
to it and with it. The levels make the things that emerge as reliefs set on them
compossible, but the world they form, the cosmos, the order, the consistency
and the coherence, is not representable as a set of universal and necessary
laws. It is recognized as a style (the style by which we recognize Paris again,
the style of being by which we recognize the visible, the tangible, the
sonorous), and, like every style, the style of reality is recognized in transition,
in the transition from one thing to another and in the transition from one
field of things to another.
In Kant the categorical imperative requires the theoretical employment
of reason which is obligated to construct a representation of one's field of
experience as a universally necessary nature in movement, and, paradoxi-
cally, this theoretical employment of reason represents nature in such a way
as to make the practical employment of reason, to produce rational and free
initiatives, unintelligible. Practical reason has to juxtapose to the first
imperative image, nature as represented by the theoretical employment of
reason, a second imperative image, the environment as a field of means and
ends. There is a parallel aporia in Merleau-Ponty. The objective representa-
tion of the universe elaborated by empirical science makes objects out of
sensible things by realizing in advance in an object all the aspects that the
successive and perspectival exploration of a thing will make determinate. It
will have to represent the perceiver's own body as a totally determinate
object, in determinate relations with the movements of objects outside that
body, and it will have to represent the perceiver's perceptual field itself as a
multiplicity of psychic facts, sensations, in a constant relationship with the
objective properties of external stimuli. Merleau-Ponty affirms that this
objectification of things, of the levels, of the perceiving body, and of the
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appearances of things in the perceptual field about that body is indeed

commanded by the world-imperative itself; it accomplishes the most com-
plete commitment to the imperative that one perceive with and according to
the levels, with a perceiving finalized toward the consistent and coherent
things they put forth.
But this unreserved commitment to the world-imperative produces,
paradoxically, a disengagement from the world. The subject that has con-
verted the world of levels with which he perceives into a representation of
fully determinate objects whose futures are present and whose perceptual
possibilities are actualized and has converted his perception of himself
through postural schema and body image into a representation of a psycho-
physical object and has converted the sensible field of his perception into a
layer of psychic impressions locates himself everywhere and nowhere, con-
verts himself into a high-altitude universal eye contemplating a psychophysi-
cal object he no longer moves with and whose initiatives are in fact physically
determined reactions.
Yet Merleau-Ponty also sees in the science of our day-what Kant did
not see in the science of his-the objectification of the universe pivoting on
itself and, at a certain point in its elaboration, returning to the sensible
world. Psychology discovers, by its own methods, the unverifiability of the
hypothesis of constancy between physiological impulses and the Gestalten that
form in the subject's field of perception. Physiology discovers, by its own
methods, that the behavior of a living organism is correlative not with the
objective properties of the external objects impinging upon it but with their
phenomenal properties, discovers that it must, to understand behavior,
correlate it not with the stimuli as represented by physics and chemistry but
with the sensory appearance of the organism's environment, which the
organism itself elaborates with its specific sensorium. Eventually physics too
discovers as ultimate physical facts relational events which implicate the
observer in the observed. The scientist devoted to objectifying representation
finds himself returning to a world of sensible levels in order to understand
how he is commanded to pursue objectification, what operations his thought
effects on the things given in his phenomenal field, and how he occupies a
viewpoint, stands, moves, and sees.
The movement of disengagement from and return to the sensible field
and levels of the world, which Merleau-Ponty maps out in the advance of
objectifying thought, he already finds in perception. "The relation between
the things and my body is decidedly singular; it is what makes me sometimes
remain in appearances, and it is also what sometimes brings me to the things
themselves; it is what produces the buzzing of appearances, it is also what
silences them and casts me fully into the world. Everything comes to pass as
though my power to reach the world and my power to entrench myself in
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phantasms only came one with the other; even more: as though the access to
the world were but the other face of a withdrawal and this retreat to the
margin of the world a servitude and another expression of my natural power
to enter into it" (The Visible and the Invisible, 8). The body that advances to
and retreats from the levels at which things are found is the competent body,
which can have objectives because the future and the possibilities of things
are open-ended and because the imperative that makes each thing an
objective is relativized by the next thing and because the levels do not hold
him unless he takes hold of them. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology makes
perception a praktognosis, makes our existence a stance whose posture is
directed upon objectives, makes our body occupied and laborious. Is then
Homofaber the schematic style of which every culturally elaborated figure of
corporeality is a variant? Merleau-Ponty set out to show at least that the
scientific culture which represents the psychophysical organism as an inte-
grally determined object among integrally determined objects does not
produce a new figure of corporeality in which we can actualize ourselves. It
is itself motivated by the imperative world-levels which present things as
objectives for competent bodies.
What of the disengagement from things, and from the levels and planes
which engender things, toward those refuges from the space of the world
where the phantom doubles of monocular vision, perceptual illusions, mere
appearances, refract off the surfaces of things; what of the dream-scene, the
private theaters of delirious apparitions, that realm of death in which the
melancholic takes up his abode? What of the possibility of releasing one's
hold on the levels, drifting into a sensible apeiron without levels, into that
nocturnal, oneiric, erotic, mythogenic second space which shows through the
interstices of the daylight world of praktognostic competence? Might not the
body that lets go of things and retreats from the planes and axes of the world
be ordered by another imperative-an elemental imperative?

Emmanuel Levinas has separated the elemental from the world-order

by reinstating the separation of sensing from perception. The ground,
reservoir of support, the light, the luminous clearing, the silence or the
incessant murmur of the city, the heat and the damp of the monsoon, the
night in which all the contours of the things are engulfed and which is not
nothingness but darkness-these surfaceless phenomena, without contours,
inobservable from different viewpoints, without boundaries, but also without
horizons, are not simply conditions for the possibility of things, as Husserl
defined the field, nor simply the dimensions in which objects are extended,
like the infinite space-time dimensions of Kantian pure sensibility, nor are
they levels generating things. One comes upon things in light, distibuted over
the supporting earth; one hears a sound in the silence; one takes hold of a tool
 15

in the dark, moves it in the light. But what get apprehended as things also
revert to the elemental. As a tool a hammer is a surface of resistance and an
axis of force determinate in its involvement with other surfaces, implements
and obstacles. But the tool, in being used, reverts to a rhythm in the vigor of
the carpenter bathed in the morning sun. The house is a tool-chest, in which
implements are arranged in the order most suitable to the specific uses of the
inhabitant, a machine for living, as Le Corbusier said, but in being inha-
bited, it and all its contents sink into the elemental density of a zone of
intimacy and retreat from the open roads of the world.
The elemental is sensed in a movement sur place that has to be phenome-
nologically distinguished from the intentional finality of perception. The
movement in sensation that senses the elemental is not the intentional
transcendence that passes from the surface to the thing, from the sense-datum,
in the non-empiricist sense of a given directive, to its referent, from a signifier to
the signified, in obedience to a world that, as a complex of signification,
orders one's moves; the sensuous sensation is rather a movement of involu-
tion, which ends with the given, which envisages no future and no possibility,
which ends in light, earth, silence. The involution, not an initiative but an
affectivity, a conformity with what supports and sustains, with the sensuous
medium, Levinas identifies as enjoyment. For Levinas the intentionally
directed relationship with light, the musical key or the rumble of the world as
levels, axes, dimensions, is itself a structure that arises out of elemental
enjoyment and relapses back into it.
The imperative that comes and that speaks and that orders, Levinas
argues, comes from beyond the elemental sphere of enjoyment and beyond
the praktognostic field of perception, comes from the alterity that phenomen-
ally is traced in the face of another. The imperative for the perception of
things and the world, he argues, arises from the encounter with the face of
another; the things are things by being offerable to another; the substances
presented are representable as things in the language-of words but also of
gestures and works-that makes their objectivity intersubjectively verifiable;
the world is the clearing staked out by others beyond the zone of intimacy of
one's own sensory enjoyment and inhabitation.
Totaliry and Infiniy is commanded by the exigency to preserve the
imperative status of alterity by making alterity irreversible; Levinas argued
against a position such as Hegel's, which finds a totality in the rational
organization of the kingdom of ends, a totality produced when the one that is
subjected by the heteronomous order dialectically arises to subject the one
that orders in turn, finally objectifies the totality before the ultimate, self-
constituting consciousness of the one to whom the totality is given, and who,
for his part, is free from every imperative he has not given himself. The
withdrawal from the totality Levinas locates at the beginning, when the
16

subject constitutes its as-for-me in the closed sphere of contentment. Then

the imperative falls upon that closed contentment as an a posteriori event
from the exteriority of alterity.
But Otherwise than Being elaborates a very new conception of the sensibil-
ity that opens upon the pure elements-upon light, earth, sonority, warmth,
tranquility, liquidity, heat. Levinas's earlier work had separated the sensi-
bility for the sensuous elements, in which the subject constitutes itself as an
eddy of enjoyment, an involution of contentment, and the sensibility for the
contestation and order laid on one by the face of alterity, and which is laid on
a subject already constituted for-itself. This second sensibility is received in
the initiatives of responsibility, in action; and action will be action on things
in the pathways of the world-not, as in Kant, simply an ordering of the
sensuous substances, whose contours are immediately represented as lures of
pleasure, into means in a universal practical field for which the apathetic
rational agent is the end or, rather, for which the community of republican
legislators, whose legislation promulgates the universal laws of nature, is the
end. Levinas conceives the world practically constituted in obedience to the
imperative to be not a universe of objects, but a world of things, of sensuous
substances ordered to the needs and demands of the other. Otherwise than
Being will find that the separation of the two receptivities, so emphatically
argued in Totality and Infinity, the receptivity for the sensuous elemental and
the receptivity for the imperative which comes a posteriori from alterity,
cannot be maintained. The' imperative that contests and that commands one's
sensuous enjoyment also commands it from the start. It is precisely as a
subject that enjoys the elemental that one is ordered. The very involution
into the elemental with which an eddy of subjectivity first stirs in the night of
'
the there-is is commanded.
Levinas maintains the desacralized and positive Enlightenment concep-
tion of preobjective nature. His late writings aggravate in a new way the
separation of the there-is of the gratuitously, contingently given elemental
and the exteriority of the imperative. From the period of his incarceration in
a Nazi concentration camp, Levinas could conceive the imperative neither in
the nourishing and sustaining substance of preobjective elemental nature
nor, like Hegel, in the judgment formulated by the course of events in the
history of the world, but rather only as a transcendent instance that judges
the hunger and destitution which nature inflicts on human life, and judges
with the tears, the blood, the corpses of Auschwitz and Hiroshima the course
of world-history. Like Kant's final pages, where Kant hypostatized in the
figure of God, Lord of nature and Lord of the kingdom of ends, the locus of
the imperative that orders the one to the other, Levinas invokes the non-
concept of God to preserve the absolute alterity of the imperative that is
phenomenally traced in the perceptible face of another. As in Kant, the
r..
 17

manifestation of the imperative is finally located in the order formulated in

the understanding itself as though it were a law one gives to oneself; for
Levinas the first utterance of one's own speech bears witness within itself to
the imperative facticity and force of God. For Kant, every law formulated by
the synthetic activity of the faculty of reason always appears as a law one gives
w
to oneself, but it owes all its imperative force to the fact that it is put forth as a
response to an order that is obeyed before being formulated. So, in Levinas,
the first words of speech, the words with which I first arise as a subject of
logos, are the words: Here I am! Here I am, at your service! This Yes with
which I begin to speak is set forth as my own self-affirmation, but it is a
response to a summons to speak that came from without. When I turn to face
the one that called upon me, I find only the sensible face of another molded
out of light and shadow. But the implied "at your service!" in the "Here I
am" bears witness to that of which this light and shadow are but the trace,
and which is the transcendence of an imperative that orders unconditionally
before being formulated. To this unformulable one assigns the pseudo-
formula, the pseudonym, of the word God.
This solution, it seems to us, leaves not only phenomenologically
unexplicated but unexplicatable the relationship between the sensibility for
the elemental and the sensibility for alterity. One will answer: precisely
Levinas understands the response to alterity as a contestation of the content-
ment in which one enjoys the elemental. But this leads us to criticize, as
metaphysical, the concepts of pleasure and enjoyment and contentment with
which Levinas has understood the sensibility that is prior to the perception of
things. Heidegger incorporated the ordination to another in the very consti-
tution of implements; an implement is not first an entity that is, in its being,
for-me, and then, by an external relation, destined for-others; just as no tool
is useful for just here and for now, but useable for a time and in several
places, so it is a tool only by being objective, that is, for-anyone. So also we
argue that if one is backed up into presence in the elemental in the involution
of enjoyment by the demand imperatively addressed to one, then the impera-
tive is constitutive of the very presence of the elemental; the elemental is not
there as given but as an imperative.
In this respect Merleau-Ponty's analysis had gone further. Merleau-
Ponty conceives of the levels on which things are given as directives. One
does not see the light, as a particular objectified before one; one does not
enjoy the light by a closing spiral of involution; one sees with the light. The
light which clears space, which establishes a level, orders the eye. Earth is a
nonobject, cannot be observed; when one circulates on its surface one does
not synthetically advance toward the total series of its profiles. Its nonweight
supports all weights-those of the things and that of one's standing body.
One does not grasp the earth with any other prise than one's posture ordered
18

to uprightness. The sonorous level, the chromatic level of the room and of the
landscape, the darkness of the night, the scope of the symphony or the
hubbub of the halls at intermission, the play of will-o'-the-wisps and mirages
and monocular images that flicker in the interstices of the world-these
world-rays are for Merleau-Ponty not phenomenally given to the movement
of closure of contentment, but as levels are directives that a priori lay an
order on the eye and the hand that moves and that gropes for objectives.
But Merleau-Ponty defines these imperative levels in two ways which
seem to us to be contestable. On the one hand, for him, the things and the
world are the finality of these sensory imperatives. The light leads us-to
things, the earth holds us-within reach of things it stabilizes before us. The
visible, the world, remains the telos of sensibility, assigned by the impera-
tives that order the spaces between things. On the other hand, for him every
withdrawal from the world is a withdrawal of the sentient body into itself.
He takes the systole and diastole of presence to and withdrawal from the
world as an existential movement that from the world-imperative retreats
back into one's own body. As I walk my eyelids drop over my vision a brief
lights-out; with each step the close-up plane of the landscape shudders before
settling down again in its stability; the shudder is in fact in my body. The
laboratory subject, in a room empty of tasks, is reduced to reflex movements
provoked within his body. The one that awaits sleep, like the shaman
awaiting the enchantment, withdraws his intentional implantation in the
tasks of the world. The space in which dreams form and drift, in which the
great black bird rises and falls, is a Kantian space whose crests and troughs
are thrown out by the respiration and the flux of erotic craving surging and
subsiding within the substance of the dreamer's body. If the dream-space is
filled with nothing but the debris of the world, if in this space the dreamer
does not quit the world of perception and that is why reawakening back into
the world is possible, Merleau-Ponty willfully affirms that the sensuous
density with which one maintains contact even in sleep is the reservoir of
things. For him the enchanted fields of the shaman, the supralapsarian ether
of myths, the feverish matrix of hallucinations, and the Eden of the child are
so many regions of the world, which contains all these, and which one was
only wrong to identify with the scientifically verified representation of the
world realized. What Merleau-Ponty denounces with the term "prejudice of
the world" is this realization. We think, however, that he has not carried his
critique of the prejudice of the world far enough. We think that to withdraw
from the illuminated surfaces and contours is phenomenologically to give
oneself over to the night, to be drawn not to the body but by an elemental
imperative. Blanchot has, in a very early text, described sleep existentially
not as a reflux of the existential arc that by awakening embraces the world
and now turns only in the forms of one's own pure and a priori sensibility;
 19

sleep is a stance of existence, one goes to sleep, one anchors oneself firmly
against the pillow and upon the great body of earth in trust, and one draws
from the elemental rest of earth, prior to the stability of any object, one's own
repose. We think that the sensibility that withdraws from the world is drawn
not into itself, but subjected to the elemental.
We think then that the world in Merleau-Ponty's sense-the light that
forms a level along which color-contrasts phosphoresce, the key about
which the melody rises and falls, the murmur of nature from which a cry
rises, the rumble of the city beneath which a moan of despair descends-
these levels themselves form in a medium without dimensions or horizons-
the luminosity more vast than any panorama that the light outlines in it; the
vibrancy that prolongs itself outside the city and beyond the murmur of
nature, the darkness more abysmal than the night from which the day dawns
and into which it confides itself. We submit that the world itself is set in
depths, in uncharted abysses, where there are vortices in which the body that
lets loose its hold on the levels of the world, the dreaming, the visionary, the
hallucinating, the lascivious body, gets drawn and drags with it, not things,
but those appearances without anything appearing, those phantoms, carica-
tures, and doubles that even in the high noon of the world float and scintillate
over the contours of things and the planes of the world. -
But we also mean to agrue that if the sensibility is drawn into these
vortices beyond the nexus of levels where the world offers things, it is drawn
imperatively. Does not the visionary eye that is not led to the lustrous things
the light of the world illuminates obey another imperative in the light, the
imperative not to make distinct but to make clear, the imperative to be a
lumen naturale, a solar incandescence which squanders almost all of its light
in the darkness without bringing any things within its reach? Is not our stand
which enjoys the support of earth also subjected to its order; to support and
to ground? Does not the vertigo that gives itself over to the abyss that
descends and descends without end obey, not the imperative of the depth to
maintain surfaces, but another imperative that depth promotes and is: to
deepen? Does not the hearing that hears, not the particular songs, cries, and
noises of the world, but the vibrancy beyond the corridors of the world obey
the imperative addressed to hearing that it become vibrant? Is there not in
the earth, water, atmosphere, and light that life has produced on this planet
the imperative that life live to become support, to become oceanic, to become
aerial, spiritual, to become lambent?
Levinas separated the elemental from its imperative; the imperative
backs one up into the elemental from exteriority, the exteriority traced in the
alterity of the other. He situates the imperative, not in an ideal order beyond
all phenomenal reality, an order accessible only to pure understanding, but
in the face, the surface, with which alterity becomes a phenomenon. The
20

imperative takes form in the eyes of another inasmuch as they open in the
visible a hollow of nakedness and want, in the hands that let go of the things
to turn to me empty-handed, in the disarming with which the other that
advances upon me does so only with the vanishing breath of his voice, in the
skin, inasmuch as it is, beneath or between the diagrams of signs the
musculature of initiative trace on it, wrinkled with the passivity and vulnera-
bility of its suffering and its mortality.
This substance of the face, this exposed vulnerability, seems to us to
belong to the elemental. The face that faces does not only demand things.
The eyes that speak do, it seems to us shine; in them the light dwells and
radiates its directives. The body that stands before one, at the distance of
alterity, that demands one take a position, answer for an attitude, that orders
one, draws the repose of its position from earth, makes itself the figure in
which the ground demands that one ground. In undertaking to answer
responsibly, in undertaking to secure the ground for what one says and does,
it is first to the imperative for ground that the stand of another addresses
singularly to one that one responds.

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Heidegger, Martin. Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik.Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
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Kant, Immanuel. GrundlegungZur Metaphysikder Sitten. Berlin: Cassirer, 1922. Trans.
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Kant, Immanuel. Die Metaphysikder Sitten. Berlin: Cassirer, 1922. Trans. by James
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Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft.Berlin: Cassirer, 1922. Trans. by
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Krüger, Gerhard. Philosophieund Moral in der KantischenKritik. Tübingen:J.C.B. Mohr
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Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et infini. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. Trans. by
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phinominologiede la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
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 21

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l'invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Trans. by

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Whitehead, Alfred North. Scienceand the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.