Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011

Introduction
Jeffrey Bloechl
Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. vii-xiii (Article)
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Introduction
Jeffrey Bloechl
T
he attentive reader of Levinas is familiar with
the fact that his considerable effort to free ethics
from ontology and politics includes an insis-
tence on rationality over and against any appeal to passion, emotion,
or personal desire. Such a reader has also certainly noticed frequent
hints toward a philosophy of religion in his argument for the pri-
macy of ethics. Of course, the philosophical works intent on ethi-
cal metaphysics are paralleled, since the 1950s, by numerous essays,
commentaries, and reviews that are explicitly Jewish and monotheis-

tic in their concerns. Yet the word “God” does indeed appear in the
philosophical works as well, and not infrequently by the end of the
1960s. Would there be any connection between Levinas’s commit-
ment to rationality and his suggestion of a religious, perhaps even
monotheistic, dimension of ethical metaphysics?
As a matter of upbringing and religious outlook, Levinas seems
to leave little doubt about the influence of the intellectual Judaism
in which he was raised. Lithuanian Judaism was predominantly mit-
nagged Judaism, which is to say a Judaism that is opposed to the pas-
sionate enthusiasms of the Hasidic Judaism that was then widespread
in Poland and western Russia. Indeed, opposition to sentimental or
fevered elements of religious life lies at the root of a vigilance, pres-
ent throughout Levinas’s work, against any sign of what he judges
to be primitivism, whether it is a matter of pagan frenzy, an alleged
tendency in mysticism toward fusion, or even the idolatrous impulse
whereby classical theology risks subverting authentic transcendence.
It is especially the suspicion raised against theology (in which the
vii
viii Levinas Studies 6
absolute God would become available in images or concepts) that

renders the movement toward ethics as first philosophy highly sig-
nificant for philosophy of religion. For it is there, as it were in a single
thought, that emerges simultaneously the definition of being as radi-
cally plural and of “God” as a name for the fact that that plurality
is bound together in human relations. To be sure, the argument is
proposed according to a manner and a progression that are phenom-
enological: in the encounter with the other person, my neighbor,
there erupts a transcendence that is not merely the not-me or the
always-more, a transcendence which is fully absolute and in that sense
properly divine. Without becoming theology, phenomenology thus
discovers a new exigency to meditate on the word “God.” Moreover,
this exigency is also thought to register in ordinary human experi-
ence, as when the face of the other person singularizes me without
isolating me: my responsibility is truly, inescapably my own, and yet,
“thanks to God” there are Others who also have their radical respon-
sibility to bear, including for me (OB 159 / AE 202). Levinas thus
finds God in the fact that plurality is not dispersion, and responsibility
not a formula for solitude. Some of the deepest movements of Oth-
erwise than Being, or Beyond Essence invoke a “matrix” and a “plot”
(une intrigue) whereby we are left ordered to one another. It is a
thought that moves within the apophatic tradition and beyond it: in
this ordering of one-for-the-other, one catches sight of the passing
of God (17–18 / 14–15). Anachoresis, the very absoluteness of the
absolute, issues in ethics.
As for ethics, we know it is embedded in sensitivity to the vulner-
ability to the Other, whose face is defined by an exposure to violence.
We also know that that face awakens me to a responsibility that is
anterior to my freedom because it signals the proximity of one who
is in an important sense closer to me than I am to myself — one who
is there already before I begin to care for myself. As a call for help
and a summons to action, this responsibility could destroy me, since
limitless responsibility is readily all-consuming. Famously, Levinas at
this point appeals to his conception of the third person, the other
Bloechl Introduction ix
Other whose simultaneous call for help places a check on my care

for this one Other person who faces me here and now. In simpler
terms, it is the extreme demands of my responsibility for one per-
son that saves me from the extreme demands of my responsibility for
another person, and no doubt this can be multiplied. Hence Levi-
nas’s social philosophy, in which the ethics of the Other person flows
into an account of justice and the conscience that yields decisions.
At this point, one must expect that on Levinas’s conception the sub-
ject who calls the Other person and other Others will, under a sense
of tremendous urgency, endeavor to define and pursue a course of
action in which the unavoidable need to care for them all at once
requires extraordinary exercises of reason and a painful sense of their
inadequacy. For Levinas, the otherness of the Other is defined by a
destitution that is inexhaustible, and the plurality of other Others
by a multiplicity that is unassimilable. If the response to the Other
person must be a response that arises from something deeper than

any pathos coiled around the self and animated by its interests, so too
must it take a form that resists, and if possible purifies, itself from all
pathos. The being-for-the-other that is also being-to-God (à-Dieu)
requires a rationality in which alone the true glory of God may come
to light.
These reflections trace some of the background for remarks offered
by Levinas in the 1978 interview published in this volume as “Moral-
ity in the Laboratory.” As Joëlle Hansel and Peter Atterton point out
in their translators’ introduction, Levinas’s perspective can already
be glimpsed, of course in retrospect, in some features of his disserta-
tion on Husserl. And as they also point out, it is a perspective that
signals some limited affinity with Léon Brunschvicg, whose work will
have encouraged an attempt to think in open sympathy with modern
science without capitulating to its agnostic or atheistic tendencies.
Levinas audited some of Brunschvicg’s lectures in the early 1930s,
after completion of his first works on Husserl. This was probably also
the period of his encounter with Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,2
where Levinas will have been prompted to allow his Judaism to open
x Levinas Studies 6
a path toward insights that transcend ordinary denominational lim-

its, and in turn to develop their most profound implications by way
of resistance to totalization.3 Just how far is Levinas from Rosen-
zweig on matters essential to both? The reader of this volume will
find in Jules Simon’s “Tracing the Sacred, Tracing the Face: From
Rosenzweig to Levinas” an elegant guide to the tremendous com-
plexity of each author precisely where they meet on terrain that is at
once phenomenological and, permitting ourselves this word one last
time, theological. In both cases, and for both authors, it is finally a
question of seeing.
Between Rosenzweig and Levinas there is nonetheless the figure
of Heidegger, who was known by the author of the Star only quite
late (Rosenzweig died in 1929, having sided with Heidegger against
Cassirer barely two months previously). After decades of scholarship
in the area, there is no longer any use in repeating the numerous
points at which the philosophy of Heidegger instructed, provoked,
and repelled Levinas. Specifically with regard to religion, one sur-
mises that Levinas found the critique of metaphysics as onto-theology
compelling, though hardly the death knell of positive reflection on
God. What philosophy of religion there is in Levinas’s ethical meta-
physics is marked by a two-fold conviction that God remains alive and
well after Heidegger and that one may not plausibly say so without
taking Heidegger into account. These matters are explored in some
detail by Sarah Allen, in “Reflections on the Metaphysical God after
His Demise: Heidegger and Levinas in Dialogue.”
Allen’s move between Heidegger and Levinas includes interesting
reference to the Platonic tradition to which each thinker makes cre-
ative appeal. The question of Levinas’s relation to Platonism or at any
rate its Neoplatonic variant, has already been posed with considerable
profit in the work of Jean-Marc Narbonne.4 Somewhat in this line,
Bernhard Casper’s essay in this volume now brings Levinas into con-
tact with that remarkable Christian Neoplatonist, Meister Eckhart.
Casper’s “Recognizing the Gift in Giving Thanks” plots a course
between the two thinkers along a line held open by the fact that
Bloechl Introduction xi
Eckhart’s mystical theology, no less than Levinas’s religion of respon-

sibility, refuses onto-theology and idolatry in favor of a metaphysics
of gift and giving. Of course, the two are hardly in perfect agreement,
even if there are, as Casper shows, a number of interesting points of
conjunction. There is more work to be done in the direction indicated
here: what might be the prospects for, and the limits of, a metaphysics
that never has been subject to the contraints of what Nietzsche and
Heidegger unmask at the apex of Western modernity?
In the philosophy of Heidegger, the death of God is interpreted
in view of a realization of the end of metaphysics. Levinas’s path with
and against Heidegger is severely aggravated by the impact of the
Shoah, which confronts him with the inadequacy of theodicy. 5 Three
of the essays in this volume mediate on the implications of this latter
proposition. Claudia Welz’s “A Wandering Dog as the ‘Last Kantian
in Nazi Germany’” takes us to Levinas’s reflections while in the sta-
lag at Fallingbostel, where he encountered a dog with a humanizing

sense of duty all too lacking in the German people in the area. By the
late 1960s, Levinas has characterized his own work as a “humanism of
the Other.” Would this have been developed in response to the ter-
rible evidence that it counts among our human capacities that we may
claim justification in reducing others to mere objects — or less (one
cannot forget the terrible episodes recounted by Primo Levi)? James
Hatley’s “Skeptical Poetics and Discursive Universality” focuses on
the manner in which Levinas’s response to the Shoah may be felt in
his philosophy of language. Hatley is not the first to concentrate on
the sense in which for Levinas the ethical relation is language,6 but
there is particular interest in his wish to highlight the point where one
may feel the impact of problems more often addressed within religious
thought. In suggesting that we understand the notion of saying, as
responsive speech to my neighbor, to signal a shift toward recogniz-
ing goodness immediately in the here and now, and not in some
transcendent sphere, Hatley proposes to hear in Levinas’s philosophy
of language an echo of the death of God and the end of theodicy
highlighted previously by Allen and Welz. Attention to the manner in
xii Levinas Studies 6
which Levinas thus conceives of language to move restlessly without

end permits Hatley to also bring him into contact with Paul Celan,
for whom language was not merely restless, but tortured.
The attempt to understand Levinas’s conceptions of subjectivity
and language as somehow commemorative has been undertaken with
great tenacity by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster.
Arthur Cools’s “Disastrous Responsibility” proposes that we find the
critical stake of Blanchot’s interpretation in some difficulty he has
with Levinas’s notion that the subject is finally one-for-the-Other,
which is to say responsible for the Other all the way to standing in
the Other’s place and bearing any concerns as one’s own. Contrary to
what Levinas contends, this substitution is not the very site of ethical
subjectivity but would instead be the impossibility of acting freely as
oneself for the Other. If the Other has already been intricated between
me and myself, and if the Other’s face awakens me to that intrica-
tion — to the infinite nearness of the neighbor — then that face elicits
a response that is not mine, but precisely that of an Other in me that
speaks in place of me and indeed overrides everything that belongs
properly to me and mine.
A somewhat different concern lies at the heart of Christopher
Fox’s “The Novelty of Religion and the Religiosity of Substitution in
Levinas and Agamben.” As Fox points out, the notion of substitution
has appeared more recently in the work of Agamben, who further-
more shares Levinas’s interest in freeing ethics from ontology, or bet-
ter, in defining ethical subjectivity otherwise than as a being. When
approached with a view to temporality, substitution thus is found
alongside election, testimony and prophecy, all of which signal a mes-
sianism otherwise occluded by an insistence on ontology. Of course,
and as Fox points out, Agamben’s postreligious messianism is no lon-
ger Levinas’s predenominational messianism. Between Agamben and
Levinas there is a gulf of disagreement over how to understand the
implications of overcoming ontology, accpeting the death of God,
and refusing classical theodicy.
Bloechl Introduction xiii
The final essay in this volume reminds us of the special difficulties

accruing to a philosophy that wishes to contest a tradition from within,
and indeed sometimes use that tradition’s deepest insights or sharpest
tools to work against its grain. In “Tradition and Its Disavowal: Levi-
nas and Hermeneutics,” Philip Harold, too, applies himself to Levi-
nas’s philosophy of language, this time as the site of his break from
a commitment to drawing from the order of knowledge any original
resource for concerted action. For Harold, the reduction of know-
ing to the said, itself ceaselessly interrupted by a responsive saying,
signals at one and the same time the possibility of freeing ethics from
ontology and the impossibility of linking that ethics productively to a
politics that would call for careful deliberation as the prerequisite of
concerted action. Appealing to some work by Paul Ricoeur, Harold
calls for an ethics that would indeed be fully distinct from ontology,
but also better attuned to the need for a robust politics.
1. See “Entretiens Emmanuel Levinas – François Poirié,” in François Poirié,

Emmanuel Levinas. Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 62–63.
2. According to Malka, this occurred circa 1935. Salomon Malka, Emmanuel
Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 62.
3. According to Malka, the encounter with Star of Redemption occurred circa
1935. Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2006), 62. As Bernhard Casper notes in his contri-
bution to this volume, the recently published wartime notebooks return several
times to the thesis of complementarity between Judaism and Christianity. See
Levinas, Carnets de captivité, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, ed. Rodolphe Calin
and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Grasset, 2009), and my review of the Carnets in
Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011): 111–18.
4. See Jean-Marc Narbonne, Levinas and the Greek Heritage (Leuven: Peeters
Press, 2006) and “God and Philosophy According to Levinas,” in Jeffrey Bloechl,
ed., Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, vol. 2 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 2007), 29–48.
5. This is a central argument in Levinas’s “Useless Suffering” (EN 91–101).
6. For an extended development of this point, see Didier Franck, L’un-pour-
l’autre. Levinas et la signification (Paris: PUF, 2008).
Abbreviations
Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. xv-xvi (Article)

ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used in this volume. Citations to the

English translations are given first, followed by the original French
texts, if provided. Any other abbreviations used in individual essys
are indicated at the beginning of the endnotes for those essays.
Levinas’s Works in English

AT Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
BPW Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon
Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1996.
CPP Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pitts-
burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
DF Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seàn Hand. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Translation of DL.
EE Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2001.
EI Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1985. Translation of EeI.
EN Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. M. Smith and B.
Harshov. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Trans-
lation of En.
GCM Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
GDT God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Palo Alto: Stan-
ford University Press, 2000. Translation of DMT.
xv
xvi Abbreviations
IR Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed.

Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
OB Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lin-
gis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Translation
of AE.
OE On Escape. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Palo Alto: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2003.
PN Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
TI Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969. Translation of TeI.
Levinas’s Works in French

AE Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. La Haye: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974.
DL Difficile liberté. Essais sur le judaïsme. Paris: A. Michel, 1963.
DMT Dieu, la mort et le temps. Paris: Grasset, 1993.
EeI Ethique et Infini. Paris: Fayard, 1982.
En Entre nous. Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset, 1991.
TeI Totalité et Infini. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961.
Morality in the Laboratory: An Interview with Emmanuel
Levinas by Josy Eisenberg
Josy Eisenberg, Peter Atterton, Joëlle Hansel
Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. 1-7 (Article)

Morality in the
Laboratory
An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas
by Josy Eisenberg
Translated by Peter Atterton and Joëlle Hansel
TranslaTors’ InTroducTIon
T
he interview with Emmanuel Levinas that we
have published here for the first time was origi-

nally broadcast on French television on March
26, 1978. It appeared in the program entitled “La Source de vie,”
which was produced and hosted by Rabbi Josy Eisenberg, a popu-
lar and amiable representative of Judaism for the French public. The
interview marked the occasion of the publication of the second edi-
tion of Difficult Freedom (1963, first edition; second edition 1976),
and is the only video document devoted entirely to that work.
In the interview, in clear and accessible language, Levinas invokes
themes that are at the center of his “essays on Judaism” (the subtitle
of Difficult Freedom): the critique of the sacred, of the numinous,
and of myths; the materialism in accordance with which “the Other’s
material needs are my spiritual needs”; the ethics in which the relation
of infinite responsibility to the Other is the very source of meaning.
Levinas’s responses also clarify his position regarding rational-
ism. Critics of Levinas have often claimed that his theory, insofar as
1
2 Levinas Studies 6
it identifies the tradition of Western philosophy with violence and

seeks to go “beyond knowledge,” inevitably falls back into the irra-
tional. This contention is mistaken. Although it is of course true that
Levinas, as early as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology,
which appeared in 1930, called into question the primacy of theoreti-
cal reason, a question that was repeated two years later in “Martin
Heidegger and Ontology,” where Levinas contested the priority
that the theory of knowledge (as developed by Ernst Cassirer and
the neo-Kantian school) gives to the thought of being, Levinas was
never tempted, unlike some of his contemporaries, to give in to the
seduction of the irrational. Even if it is admitted that he saw in philo-
sophical reason and argument certain limitations that his own ethics
was precisely devised to go beyond, the point remains that Levinas
remained unwavering in his commitment to the best that the tradi-
tion inspired by Cartesian rationalism has to offer. As he put in the
preface to Totality and Infinity, “The aspiration to radical exterior-
ity evinces [this book’s] allegiance to the intellectualism of reason”
(TI 29).
In the interview this allegiance takes the form of an adherence to
science and its “rigorous exercise.” Levinas argues forcefully that it
is now the laboratory that is “the place of morality and of holiness.”
The remark rehearses almost verbatim a formula that he had used
in an article that appeared in Le Monde just a few days before the
interview:
Despite all that may have been said against science, we must not
forget that, amid the deterioration of so many human orders, scien-
tific research remains one of the rare domains in which man controls
himself, bows to reason, is not wordy or violent, but pure. These are
moments of research, constantly interrupted by the banalities of every-
day life, but moments that, conjoined, have their own duration. Is not
the place of morality and loftiness henceforth the laboratory?1
The example of science is not idiosyncratic. Levinas always remained

faithful to the rationalism embodied in the work of his teacher,
Eisenberg & Levinas Morality in the Laboratory 3
Léon Brunschvicg, to whom he had dedicated in Difficult Freedom

a vibrant homage. In one of his earliest publications, and the only
one he wrote in his native Lithuanian tongue, Levinas described the
spirit that animated the philosophy of Brunschvicg: “For Brunschvicg,
mathematics is true inner life, more profound than the intuitions of
the mystics or the delirium of the ‘enlightened’ ones.”2 In the inter-
view of 1978, Levinas expressed in similar terms his admiration for
the “special interiority that is the interiority of the mathematician.”
Levinas makes a clear case against the sacred and magic, and the
violence that they conceal, as well as “another form of the irrational”
in contemporary thought, namely, the mythic.
But if Levinas, like Brunschvicg before him, embraces rational-
ism as a way of rejecting the violence of the sacred and the idea of
supernatural forces, he does so by freely developing his own posi-
tion. Not content to confine thinking within the limits of science
and mathematics, Levinas seeks to enlarge the powers of reason to

encompass the relationship with the Other, which “to the extent that
it is a meaningful relationship, it is certainly a rational relationship.”
Levinas’s ethics may be said to be an attempt to bring rationalism for-
ward by showing how the notion of reason is not restricted to scien-
tific evidence, but includes the relation with the Other as the source
from which everything — including the word “God” — has meaning.
an InTervIew wITh emmanuel levInas3
Q: As part of our program we invite journalists and critics to talk

about books they particularly enjoyed. For once, however, I’m the
one who is going to talk about a book I liked very much — Em-
manuel Levinas’s Difficult Freedom, the second edition of which just
came out. The first edition was published some time ago and the
new edition, published in the Presence of Judaism series, has been
very attractively done.
Mr. Levinas, are you tolerant?
4 Levinas Studies 6
EL: Very!
Q: So you are going to tolerate what I have to say. It is an honor
for our program to have you as our guest today and since you are
tolerant, you must admit that others may not share your opinions.
I consider you to be the greatest Jewish philosopher of our time.
So if you don’t agree, tell me after the broadcast.
EL: Definitely!
Q: Emmanuel Levinas, professor of philosophy at several universi-
ties, notably the Sorbonne, you are a leading figure in contemporary
Judaism and your collection of articles, Difficult Freedom, is an al-
together original book in which — this is what we are going to talk
about today as it is not possible to deal with the wealth of material
in this book in such a short time — you offer a defense of rational-
ism. That sometimes surprises Jews. I would like us to discuss this
point: Are you really a rationalist?
EL: Look, the opposition between rationalism and antirationalism
is too simplistic. There is a point at which this book is rationalist.
Indeed, the first chapter is called “Beyond Pathos.” “Beyond Pathos,”
to me, means beyond sentimental eloquence, beyond stirring rhetoric,
and also beyond a notion that plays a very large role when critics in
the modern epoch talk about a desacralized world — the notion of
the sacred. It is an exaltation of the will produced by something, by
an anonymous force, which can also be called the “numinous.”
Q: Does this have any relation to what the Greeks called the Apollo-
nian and the Dionysian? In other words, there was a God of Reason,
Apollo, and Dionysus . . .
EL: It has nothing to do with that distinction. It probably goes
back to a great extent to ethnologists’ descriptions that show man
before the sacred as the essential being of the spiritual. The whole
of Difficult Freedom is opposed to this notion of the sacred. It also
opposed to another form of the irrational in the whole of modern
thought today, which is the exaltation of myth. Myths, because they
are cruel, pass for profound; because they are obscure, they pass for
mysterious; and because they can be found almost everywhere, they
pass for universal. The whole of the mythic, the numinous, is defi-
nitely antipathetic to me. In any case, it seems to me quite foreign to
the notion of spirit as envisaged in Judaism. My immediate response
is to turn to the rigorous exercise of science, to this special intimacy
that exists between the scientist and matter, this special interiority
that is the interiority of the mathematician. There is a lot one can
say in our time against science, against its uncertainties, against the
technology that has engendered it. One cannot forget that, amid the
degradation of the human to which we are witness today, the sole
domain where man controls himself, where he is not wordy, where
he is not violent, where he is pure, is when he is in the laboratory.
These isolated moments in the laboratory eventually fall into place,
relate to each other afterwards; henceforth there is the whole dura-
tion of scientific research. But the laboratory is at the present time

the place of morality, and even of holiness.
Q: Is the Jew in a laboratory when he studies the Talmud?
EL: Ah, certainly!
Q: He is in a laboratory?
EL: Certainly. It’s very similar. In fact, I always find a kind of inner
purification before the work of the scientist. Now, I mentioned to
you earlier that the opposition is not simple; there is one area where
I do not completely adhere to this type of rationalism. Is this what
I should speak to you about?
Q: Most certainly!
EL: The rationalism of scientific knowledge is the rationality of an
all-encompassing will. However, there is a relationship with some-
thing other, with someone else, with the Other, that is not possible
for a consciousness that is absolutely autonomous; and this is the
relationship of responsibility, not servitude — a certain subjection to
the Other, of course, but not a servitude. Responsibility appears to
6 Levinas Studies 6
me as also a meaningful relationship as well. And, to the extent that

it is a meaningful relationship, it is certainly a rational relationship.
The notion of reason is not restricted to scientific evidence; it is
also — in this sense, the notion is a little larger since the meaningful
is also found in the relationship with the Other — in responsibility
regarding the Other; and, if you will, in this responsibility regarding
the Other the name or the sign of God is heard. My view is that
this is perhaps where this name or this sign is given in a manner
that is most authentic. This has not been sufficiently developed by
the philosophy that has been passed down to us. This is certainly
something that is essential to Judaism. I would like to quote the
following phrase that is familiar to us all: “All Israel is responsible
for one another.” What this means, in terms of a veritable humanity,
is that every man is responsible for the other man. I guarantee you
that this is what it means.
Q: You have spoken a great deal about responsibility and what I
find really striking in your work is that, while analyzing very subtly
and with great originality the specific teachings of the Rabbis [of
the Talmud] — and thus of Judaism itself — you have succeeded in
finding within them a quite extraordinary universal dimension by
showing in particular — and you are probably one of the first in
contemporary Judaism to have done so — our responsibility regard-
ing the Third World. You are a philosopher who has talked about
the Third World a lot. I remember you quoting a saying by Rabbi
Israel Salanter in one of your lectures: the others’ material needs are
our spiritual needs. And there is a wonderful sentence in your book
where you say that the only materialism that is shameful is our own,
something we cannot say about that of others. Is that right?
EL: It is a sentence that should be cited with caution because when
one says that the other’s material needs are our spiritual needs, for
many people this does not mean a very important need.
Q: You have tried to show that throughout the Talmud the Rabbis
spoke for man. That is what I meant to say.
EL: Yes. When Rabbi Yochanan says, “To eat is great,” he certainly
does not mean that for him, it is very important to eat. He means that
nourishing people is an act of the highest dignity and an extremely
important thing. Think of Joseph, his role, without even analyzing
it in the light of the Talmud, simply by a careful reading of the text
itself. Joseph was the man who fed a lot of people. Joseph is able
to justify his extraordinary adventure through the fact that he was
sent to feed people, not at all to teach them a moral lesson, but
to give them grain and meat first! To be sure, this still implies that
“To eat is great,” “To feed is great” and feeding is greater still than
eating; this was Rabbi Yochanan’s intention when he said “Gedola
legima!” — “To swallow is great!”
Q: I would like to ask you a personal question. I consider your work
to be an exaltation of responsibility but also an exaltation of a truth
without compromise, regardless of what it is. Correct me if I am
wrong. So I would like to ask you the following question: For you,
is there something more important than truth?
EL: One cannot answer such a question because, whatever the re-
sponse, it is suspect. It is suspect if one says “no,” and it is suspect
if one says “yes.”
Q: That is already a talmudic reasoning.
EL: It’s a matter of knowing what one understands by truth. Is it
a matter of a certain type of knowledge or is it a matter of a type
of sincerity? Truth is opposed to error and sincerity is opposed to
lying.
Q: Let’s talk at the level of sincerity.
EL: Well, there, certainly, I even think — I wrote this somewhere, but
I don’t remember where — that sincerity is not a quality of speaking,
it is speaking that is the possibility of sincerity. It is because we are
bound to sincerity that we speak.
N OTES TO A TTERTON AND H ANSEL , “M ORALITY IN THE L ABORATORY “
1. Levinas, “Le mot je, le mot tu, le mot Dieu,” Le Monde 35 March 18–20
(1978), 10, 306. Translated by Michael B. Smith as “The Word I, the Word You,
and the Word God,” in Alterity and Transcendence (London: Athlone, 1999),
91–96.
2. See Levinas, “The Understanding of Spirituality in French and German
Culture,” trans. Andrius ValeviÛcius, Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 1
(1998): 1–10.
3. Conducted by Josy Eisenberg, this previously untitled interview appeared
in a program entitled “La Source de vie,” and was originally broadcast on French
television on March 26, 1978.
Tracing the Sacred, Tracing the Face: From Rosenzweig to
Levinas
Jules Simon

Tracing the Sacred,
Tracing the Face
From Rosenzweig to Levinas
Jules Simon
LEVINAS’S FACE
M
ost readers of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity
are aware of his remark in the preface about
his apparent debt to Rosenzweig’s work:

“L’opposition à l’idée de totalité, nous a frappe dans le Stern der Erlö-
sung de Franz Rosenzweig, trop souvent present dans ce livre pour
être cite” (TI 28 / TeI 14).1 However nowhere else in the text does
he cite Rosenzweig’s name or give us a clear indication of the nature
of his indebtedness. Instead, he claimed that what animated his work,
through phenomenology, is the aspiration to exteriority, which is the
metaphysical, which is truth, but most importantly an aspiration that
leads through ethics to a relation with the absolutely other. But what
is absolutely other for Levinas entails specifying what he means by
the sacred. My thesis is that we can better ascertain what Levinas
means by the absolutely other — in reference to the sacred — through
retracing what Rosenzweig says about the face, truth, and God in the
closing sections of Der Stern der Erlösung, but on the basis of what
Levinas says about infinity and the face in Totality and Infinity. For
Levinas, “The true essence of man is presented in his face, in which
he is infinitely other than a violence like unto mine. . . . Man as Other
comes to us from outside, a separated — or holy — face” (TI 291–92).
9
10 Levinas Studies 6
Levinas refers to this relation as a “curvature of intersubjective space”

and that “this ‘curvature of space’ is, perhaps, the very presence of
God” (291). In what follows, I present some reflections that I hope
will enable us to better determine to what extent this “curvature of
space,” and thus “the very presence of God,” may have been prefig-
ured for Levinas by Rosenzweig.
But first, to set the table so to speak, I turn to what Levinas said
about expression and Spinoza’s ethics. In order to better understand
the radical departure of Levinas from naturalist ethical theories based
on rational reciprocity or pragmatically efficient utilitarian calcula-
tions, we need to ask: What do we know of expression from Spinoza?
Despite himself, Gilles Deleuze provides support for Levinas’s
contention that, taken to its logical conclusion, expression set in a
Spinozistic framework results in the inevitable collapse of whatever
might be considered monadic singularity into the one metaphysical
substance:
On the one hand, essence is reflected and multiplied in attributes, attri-

butes are mirrors, each of which expresses in its kind the essence of
substance: they relate necessarily to an understanding, as mirrors to an
eye which sees in them an image. But what is expressed is at the same
time involved in its expression, as a tree in its seed: the essence of sub-
stance is not so much reflected in the attributes as constituted by the
attributes that express it; attributes are not so much mirrors as dynamic
or genetic elements.2
Despite his attempt to enliven Spinoza’s theory of attributes, Deleuze

attempts to explicate what he contends is a core dimension in Spi-
noza’s philosophy of expressionism, namely, that real distinction is
formal distinction between expressed attributes. Played out to its
logical conclusion, that proposition leads to the positive argument
that all natures (attributes) are perfect since all forms of nature, all
attributes, are equal: “the absolute is in its nature infinite in all its
forms.”3
According to Levinas, this sort of metaphysics presupposes a phi-
losophy of unity that suppresses separation and interiority as irrational
Simon Tracing the Sacred 11
or mystical but which then entails, in the process, that the meta-
physical as a phenomenal process is supposed to somehow absorb the
metaphysician as well in its logic of ultimate unification. Levinas sug-
gests that these sorts of metaphysical movements are simply conun-
drums on the theme of recovery from a fall, repair of a rupture, or
deliverance from privation. He likens their logical narratives to this
or that metaphysical odyssey, moving out from an unspecified origin
with a nostalgic yearning for a return to an illusionary unity. Each
results from an unexamined metaphysics of need, such that, “Need
indicates void and lack in the needy one, its dependence on the exte-
rior, the insufficiency of the needy being precisely in that it does not
entirely possess its being and consequently is not strictly speaking
separate” (TI 102).
As he implies later in the chapter on “Separation as Life” and
based on the identification of the I with reason, the default posi-
tion in Spinozistic metaphysics is that the I becomes identified with
“the power of thematization and objectification,” thus losing its very
ipseity (TI 119). For Levinas, the loss of ipseity is tantamount to the
loss of any possibility of subjectivity and the sensibility of enjoyment,
which is not equivalent to representing something to oneself, dialec-
tically opposing something, using something, or aspiring to some-
thing — but rather the I asserts its meaningful subjectivity through
expressing its enjoyment.
Nonetheless, there is an aspirational movement of sorts that occurs
in distinguishing between that which is expressed and expressing, a
movement by which, claims Levinas, a face reveals itself by attending
to its expression, to its manifestation. This aspirational movement is
the key to Levinas’s dismissal of Spinozism at the end of “Separation
and Absoluteness” where he argues for “An infinity that does not close
in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological exten-
sion so as to leave a place for a separated being to exist divinely” (TI
104). And that withdrawal from the patterns of need constitutive of
the ontological order happens through the aspirations of desire, that
is, that transcendent movement by a human who not only possesses
its being entirely but goes beyond the plentitude of its being — essen-
tially accomplished through the grasping and appropriating work of
its own hands — to aspire to a being outside of itself. Levinas calls this
aspiration the accomplishing of infinitude, a movement that is marked
by admitting that there is a being proximate to oneself but outside
of or exterior to oneself that is not the object of my need. The very
foundation of society is based upon this movement of separation and
production of inwardness, of the secure dwelling where enjoyment
can happen at all. This becomes the order of desire and goodness and
thus the very first articulations of society. As Levinas notes, “Infinity
is produced by withstanding the invasion of a totality, in a contrac-
tion that leaves a place for the separated being. Thus relationships
that open up a way outside of being take form” (104). But in the
midst of these relationships taking form, the kind of separation and
withdrawal that occurs through the contractions of self-possession
redeems creation by establishing a de facto phenomenon where the

necessities of existence that are fought out in the struggle for exis-
tence, what he calls “the plane of the needy,” can be suspended in
the actualizing practices of a sabbatical existence. The life that is thus
produced is a life that is created, that is, separated from the system
of complementary needs that takes shape precisely as independent
separation, not as a need but as a psychism.4
These are the first moves of the curvature of intersubjective space
without which we would be unable to be able to ever approach the
other. But my works and my life are masked through symbolic, visu-
al designators that preserve my sovereign interiority. This is what
Levinas wants us to understand as the disclosure of a phenomenal
relationship, namely, the absenting of oneself from relationship with
the Other, as other, through maintaining the structure of a formal,
logical relation where the terms imply each other as point-to-point
counterparts (TI 180).
Levinas contends, however, that before any production of a sign
and thus prior to disclosing the relationship of sign to signified, the
signifier must present itself by itself, that is, as a face. Shifting attention
from the signifier and the work of production that can be signified
(exemplified by the separation of sign and signified in Frege’s Sinne
und Bedeutung) already determines a prior commitment to a phi-
losophy of language that excludes differentiated interiority in favor
of undifferentiated (and thus predictable and manageable, because
quantifiably measurable), objective exteriority.5 This commitment has
consequences for self-expression and understanding, or simply hear-
ing, other-expression. What is lost is the phenomenon of attending-to.
The life of interiority is enclosed subjectivity signified through the
production of speech-acts. Whereas, it is only in the expression of my
face that I attend to myself — an expression that as the spokenness of
the deciphering activity itself precedes the mute relations of sign to
signified of written language, already prefigured for us. As Levinas
notes, “Between the subjectivity shut up in its interiority and the sub-
jectivity poorly heard in history, there is the attendance of the sub-
jectivity that speaks” (TI 182). This attendance consists in expressing
oneself, which is more than a mere transfer from some inner to an
outer realm and that can be adequately captured in an axiomatic sys-
tem of arbitrary signs and stipulated referents.
Indeed for Levinas, “Expression does not consist in giving us the
Other’s interiority” (TI 202). Rather, “The ethical relation, the face
to face . . . cuts across every relation one could call mystical . . . where
discourse becomes incantation as prayer becomes rite and liturgy,
where the interlocutors find themselves playing a role in a drama that
has begun outside of them” (ibid.). Finding myself playing a role in
a drama that began outside of me throws into anarchy my engrained
supposition of myself as an absolutely independent autonomous
agent, able to freely and absolutely determine my course through life.
In fact, “The relation with the Other as a relation with his transcen-
dence — the relation with the Other who puts into question the bru-
tal spontaneity of one’s immanent destiny — introduces into me what
was not in me” (ibid.). And this introduction is a demanding one in
the way that the exterior play of expressions is how I read the infinite
play of differences of the other. In showing oneself in expression,
the face rises, in its guilt, to responsibility. Having to respond to the

showing of expression means having to respond to my awareness of
violating the difference of the expression of otherness that becomes
unavoidably apparent in a sensually bound face-to-face relationship.
The infinitely differentiating play of features that constitutes the
expressive face delineates a difference that is, on the one hand, unthe-
matizable and that defies description but, on the other hand, always
calls for new phenomenological interpretations of ethics, that is, those
sorts of accountings that include ethical tropes such as intention and
motivation. This is what Levinas means by the experience of transcen-
dence introducing reason as a passage of a content from one mind
to another: “The relation with the Other as a relation with his tran-
scendence — ‘the relation with the Other who puts into question the
brutal spontaneity of one’s immanent destiny’ — introduces into me
what was not in me. But this ‘action’ upon my freedom precisely puts
an end to violence and contingency, and, in this sense also, founds
Reason” (TI 203). It founds Reason in the sense that it is not a grasp-
able content that is readily categorizable, but is rather an evaluative
content based on responding to an experience and experiencing a
response. The expression that plays across the face of the other calls
for discourse, but not just any kind of discourse. It has to be a certain
kind of nonviolating discourse: “The idea of infinity in me, imply-
ing a content overflowing the container, breaks with the prejudice of
maieutics without breaking with rationalism, since the idea of infin-
ity, far from violating the mind, conditions nonviolence itself, that is,
establishes ethics” (204). Moreover, “The originality of this kind of
discourse with respect to constitutive intentionality, is that of a pure
consciousness which destroys the concept of immanence: the idea of
infinity in consciousness is an overflowing of a consciousness whose
incarnation offers new powers to a soul no longer paralytic — powers
of welcome, of gift, of full hands, of hospitality ” (205).
Whereas Husserl subordinated words to reason, Levinas subordi-
nates reason to words, to expressive verbalism as true speech that
ventures forth at random, resulting in tangible significations surpris-

ing the very thoughts that initiated them.6 Levinas states that “signifi-
cations do not present themselves to theory, that is, to the constitutive
freedom of a transcendental consciousness; the being of signification
consists in putting into question in an ethical relation constitutive [of]
freedom itself. Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to
words takes place already within the primordial face to face of lan-
guage” (TI 206). Said otherwise, “Signification is the Infinite,” it is a
process of infinity that “presents itself in the Other.” I become aware
of being involved in such an ethical process in how “the Other faces
me and puts me in question and obliges me by his essence qua infin-
ity” (207). The Other enacts this ethical facing by way of expressing
significations. As Levinas says, “Signification is infinity, that is, the
Other” (ibid.).
The key concepts have to do with how Levinas deals with the
expressiveness of the face and how that phenomenon is ethically deter-

minative for the face-to-face relationship between one and an other.
Preliminarily, consider what Levinas says in Totality and Infinity near
the end of the “Face to Face” section:
The shimmer of infinity, the face, can no longer be stated in terms of

consciousness, in metaphors referring to light and the sensible. It is the
ethical exigency of the face, which puts into question the conscious-
ness that welcomes it. The consciousness of obligation is no longer a
consciousness, since it tears consciousness up from its center, submit-
ting it to the Other. . . . It is not the impersonal in me that Reason
would establish, but an I myself capable of society, an I that has
arisen in enjoyment as separated but whose separation would itself be
necessary for infinity to be — for its infinitude is accomplished as the
“facing.” (TI 207, 208)
Levinas’s elaborations on the presentation of the face as expression

present his foundational claim that what is essential about a face-to-
face relationship is not the work of thematizing, which is the work
of a philosophy of vision, but is rather the experience of sensing
something absolutely foreign. To hear the voice of the other is to

hear the other’s destitution and not to envisage an image, that is, the
face-to-face phenomenon results in positing “oneself as responsible
both as more and as less than the being that presents itself in the
face” (TI 215). Hearing the voice of the other establishes an ethi-
cal relationship that takes shape as an experienced awareness of the
other’s destitution, poverty, and need that motivates me sensually
and spiritually — bodily and mentally — and thus draws me toward the
other in a movement of direct response. Levinas’s position, it seems
to me, is that the experience of sensually hearing the suffering of a
proximate other is a much more powerful and strange attractor than
envisaging that same other. However, this position confounds what
we would usually associate with the physical spatiality and visibility
of a face in a face-to-face relationship.
What Levinas means by the presentation of the face is, on the one
hand, built upon a metaphysics of the ethical that is instigated by
“the Other who dominates me in his transcendence [and] is thus
the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated
(TI 215). This tripartite stereotypical referent signifies any unknown
other who is in need, and as such is what Levinas intends as a for-
malization — that is, a universalization — of ethical exigency. But
the formalization calls for empirical verification by the actual oth-
ers who determine the directionality of my life with the unavoidable
exigency of their own, particular, and thus unpredictable, demands
and unquenchable desires. Visually sighting such suffering/desiring
others could be avoided by simply closing my eyes or turning my
head to avoid the sight of their plight. However, in the moment of
encounter, it is unlikely that I would or even could stop up my ears
to avoid hearing a moan of lament or the barely perceptible groan of
pain — just as much as I would not be able to turn away from the call
of my beloved. Indeed, the demands and the desires of the exigent
other are trop souvent present to quantify, to calculate, or to file away
on my Flickr or Facebook photo album.
ROSENZWEIG’S FACE
Turning to Rosenzweig’s conception of the face, I begin with an

excursus on two transliterations of significant Rosenzweigian terms
from my Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen:
Gesicht: (Antlitz, Miene); having to do with seeing, ‘from’ the front

part of one’s head; an abstraction of the verb ‘seeing’ and related to the
function of one’s eyes; the origin of one’s perspective, of one’s seeing,
as in Gesichtspunkt, used by Duerer from the 16th century; developed
into meaning a monadic point of view since Leibniz with the influence
of the French point de vue.7
Antlitz: (Gesicht); with its prefix, “Ant-,” carries the sense of ‘over
against’ such that in German it has the sense of “Entgegenblickende,”
viz., that which glances over against one; from Luther’s translation, it
came to have the meaning of a ‘more elevated expression’ for Gesicht;
also “Miene;” as ‘countenance’: one’s bearing or demeanor evidenced
by one’s facial expression, connoting moral support.8
By the end of The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig has prepared us

for judging the merits of the logical structure of his argument about
the metaphysical nature of his ethical theory, a judging that depends
on us getting some sense for what he means by the term face as a
determinative, that is, determined and determining, structure in terms
of Gesicht and Antlitz. But in fact, it’s not just any face — any Gesicht
or Antlitz — that becomes the gestalt of the Stern for Rosenzweig. In
order to get to the terms that constitute that conceptual structure,
we as readers have to undergo a process of textual conditioning
that enables us to understand his claims, and to thus be in a better
position to act upon them.
The Eternal Way

Rosenzweig begins that process of conditioning by providing us with
the finishing details of his construction by stating in the subsection,
“The Eternal Way,” that “Jene scheinbare Vertauschungsmöglichkeit
ward ihr selbst in Gestalten festgebannt, die ihren festen Platz in

der ewige Wahrheit des Gottestags angewiesen bekamen” (“That
apparent possibility of substitution itself became firmly in structures
which received their secure place in the eternal truth of the day of
the Lord”).9 One way to understand this strange claim by Rosenz-
weig is that his work, like Levinas’s, is fundamentally metaphysical.
What I mean by metaphysical is that the factual-textual construction
of the parts of the book called The Star of Redemption offer us a
model that tells us that the apparent substitutability of one’s choices
for grounding and guiding metaphysical principles is, from the per-
spective of truth as verification, an essential precondition in order to
bind those principles into a stable platform upon which to erect the
sort of social structures he sets out in the final sections of his work.
Precisely on a metaphysical level, these preconditioning structures
coordinate philosophical, theological, and aesthetic categories that
enable Rosenzweig to make the case for an indirect argument. The

essential inference of that indirect argument is that correlating existing
with ideally normative ethical relations between community groups
(such as Jews and Christians, but also between members of any other
kind of community) based upon love relationships (between lover and
beloved) presents us with a model for how humans should become
ethically responsive to each other. Much of the second half of his
text extends and substantiates that inference, including the following
concluding comment: “so wird hier in die Welt, die sichtbare Welt,
wirklich schon ein Stück Erlösung hineingestellt, und es wird wahr,
dass von der Welt aus gesehen die Offenbarung eigentlich schon die
Erlösung sei” (“thus, seen from the perspective of the world, a piece
of redemption is already placed here in the world, the visible world,
and it is thus true that revelation is really already redemption”).10
What he means by that speech-act is two-fold: On the one hand, it
refers to an ideal normative structure of what would happen were
the world ordered in the way that Rosenzweig stipulates. On the
other hand, it refers to the actual unfolding of the lives of individu-
als relating to each other in already existing interdependent human
communities, such as Christians and Jews. Additionally, and even

more to the textual point, that a “piece of redemption is already
placed in the world” refers — for us! — to the factual production that
is his work, Der Stern der Erlösung.
But that is only one interpretive strategy. Another strategy is to
consider that in the passages at hand, Rosenzweig refers to the ethical
transformtion of the human being himself, as such. Indeed, he says as
much by arguing that one fulfills one’s humanity insofar as one ethi-
cally acts as the new, reborn Adam; namely, that one who has become
ensouled by having experienced the differentiating love of hearing,
speaking, and responding that goes along with a revelatory love
relation. I propose that this relationship may well have served as the
keystone for Levinas’s ethical theory, specifically, the face-to-face
relationship.
The Eternal Life

It is Levinasian in a two-fold sense: (1) Levinas mined from Rosen-
zweig’s work the structure of the face as emblematic of an overall
embracing ethical movement, and (2) the face, in human form, is also
the source for experiencing the sacred. It is the source of the sacred
because the sacred happens in the world, or at least one aspect of
the sacred, as the unique expression of an individual who relates as
inviolable to an other and simultaneously as motivator to respond to
or to act for another other in a similarly good way. As a phenomenon
that necessarily introduces genuine expressions that should not be
appropriated, the face introduces the sacred as inviolable. The element
of necessity is experienced in the systematic and constructive dimen-
sions of Rosenzweig’s work, in building and rebuilding (through
rereading) the Star as a human artifice. Rosenzweig claims: “Denn
der Mensch ward in der Offenbarung zum Menschen geschaffen, und
in der Erlösung mocht und musste er sich offenbaren” (“Because the
human was created as human in revelation, and in redemption s/he
wants to — and must — reveal herself ”).11 The ethical imperative is
such that, having been created as a human being in the revelatory
act of love — an ethical act in itself, as human I am then compelled

to reveal myself, that is, express myself, to another in a similar but
never the same way. In other words, the eternal way through the
world — the necessary incursion of the sacred — happens when the
experience of Sichoffenbaren happens, that is, when a revelation of
one’s self as expression of one’s self happens through which the
inimicable dialogue of one with another occurs in a face-to-face
relationship.
In this regard, Bob Gibbs notes that Levinas breaks with a phe-
nomenological idealism in the face-to-face encounter by reversing the
flow of the intentional assimilation of consciousness:
The face of the other is the primordial signification, from which all
other signs take their meaning; the perception of the other is the true
one, from which all other bodily reception ultimately derives. Here
is ‘the thing itself ’, at which phenomenology aimed, but its very
excess — that I think what I am unable to think — reorients all of the
previous categories of cognition. The desire for this unreachable other
now becomes the passion of knowing — and the assimilatory desire of
mastery of the object is made derivative.12
Gibbs analyzes correlations between Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig,

and Levinas in order to get at how a concept of self-sanctification
is determined in each philosophy. He pairs Rosenzweig with Co-
hen, claiming that both have a moment of self-sanctification before
God as the key moment of becoming an individual I, and argues
that Levinas differs by finding self-sanctification in the face-to-face
relationship with the absolutely other. I only am able to become I
through ethically substituting for the other in an infinite task, which
is the trace of God, or the sacred (TI 187). I am not sure he would
say the same today, but there and then he demurs that even with this
construction Levinas might still be one with Cohen and Rosenzweig
in allowing the radical freedom of the other in terms of what they
meant by the sacred. This is so because they all dance around the
phenomenon of responsibility.
How often Levinas’s face-to-face presents aspects of Rosenzweig’s

conception of the face can better be gleaned when we consider what
Rosenzweig refers to as the temporal character of self-revelation. That
temporal character is the process of reckoning time on one’s own,
which Rosenzweig calls consciousness: “die eigene Zeitrechnung, das
Bewusstsein.”13 The nature of this consciousness is that it produces
a sense of creatureliness, a sense that occurs through experiencing an
event of redemption. As an event, redemption is that which first cre-
ates someone as fully human by giving one the condition of firm last-
ingness, a “beständige Leben statt des augenblicksgeborenen immer
neuen Daseins.” (“lasting life instead of an always newly born-in-the-
moment existence”).14 The condition of firm-lastingness, however,
occurs in the context of an ethical movement that happens through
creating a loving soul in revelatory, expressive experiences in the form
of a listening-speaking phenomenon of responsibility. Through lis-
tening and speaking, responsibility takes form as an awakening to

becoming conscious, that is, I become conscious of my own being
through sensing that there exists an absolutely, unthematizable other
being in my immediate and sensible proximity, a sensible awareness
that can only begin to dawn in me in so far as I prioritize the other
over and beyond myself. Rosenzweig calls this a reversal of time that
“founds the life of the eternal people.”15 What he means by this is that
the way that time is accounted for is transposed from a common lin-
ear reckoning to an anticipation of an ideal end of time, an end that,
through the anticipation, becomes the beginning of a new time — a
beginning as such. The end is the anticipated ethically resolved life
that becomes an actual motivation for beginning to live a sacred life in
the this-time of profane temporality (die Zeitliche), as opposed to an
abstractly disengaged eternal (ewiges) time. Recall my discussion from
above of Levinas’s position on the separation of sign and signified, or
the break-up of meaning endowing relationship in the separation of
sense and reference. What is missing is the curvature of subjectivity,
which Rosenzweig theoretically provides.
To live in time means to live between beginning and end, to live

in what Rosenzweig called the conversion (die Umkehrung). To live
eternally means to positively deny the between and to live outside
of time — a category that unjustly earned Rosenzweig the label of
being antihistoricist.16 Rather than categorize his position as antihis-
toricist, for many years now I have been interpreting this differently,
that is, proleptically. For Rosenzweig as for Levinas, the conversion
(Umkehr) of living could more aptly be understood as the denial of
self-time for the sake of living the time of the other. For Levinasians,
this is called substitution. For Rosenzweigians, this is living with the
rituals of Sabbath time.
The eternal folk celebrate the Sabbath, living as if the entire world
is already accomplished (fertig). I interpret this to mean that the
Jewish people live with a certain kind of aesthetic purpose, namely,
a ritual, in the sense of a purposeless purpose. In Hannah Arendt’s
sense, this would be living with a conscious awareness of the bind-
ing nature of the human artifice of communal activities. In her case,
this sort of living means creating works of art but also participating
in the free speech of sovereign and democratic forms of government,
establishing conditions of “firm lastingness.”17 In other words, this
would produce the consciousness of a beständige Leben — a life that is
conscious of having withstood the test of time.
But reading Rosenzweig with a Levinasian lens, I now interpret
Rosenzweig otherwise by focusing on his effort to deny the omnipo-
tence of time, specifically, the between of time (the conversion). This
denial entails entering into the warp of our temporal contexts differ-
ently which gives us a uniquely ethical experience of living. He claims
that one of those uniquely ethical experiences means reconsidering
an important hypothetical: if one lives their ritual life in a normatively
determinate “as if ” mode, one would be living the ritual of the law in
the sense of living out the mitzvoth in an awareness that those com-
mandments, as imperatives, are simple ethical prescriptions that can
be translated into third-person public relations of justice, economics,
and political legislation.
Rosenzweig called these two options — the eternal way and the eter-
nal life — the two Ansichten (views, as in opinions that one can hold)
that form the various Gisichtspunkten (perspectives) of the world or
of the human that make up “self visible structures” (selber sichtbaren
Gestalten), structures that fall under the sign of the “eternal truth.”
Rosenzweig presents us with a danger that he identifies as eternal
pagan gods that want to live on forever: the state and art. These
can also be understood as pagan images of materialism (state for the
world, art for the human). These pagan, materialist gods are in con-
stant conflict with each other, while the calm createdness of nature
is set against those conflicts, a createdness of enduring “self visible
structures” lived in the “as if ” mode, a mode that limits the divinized
world and turns it into structures of eternal life (through the aesthetic
ritual of mitzvoth), while at the same time the human is bent in their
ethical intentions towards other humans in intersubjective curves.
The problem is that the two Ansichten — the state and art — are
drunk and blind in only wanting to see themselves (Nursichsehen-
wollen) — art for art’s sake, and the sovereignty of the state. Thus, eter-
nal conflicts regularly erupt over competing totalizations, on the one
hand, with Nietzsche’s will to power taking the form of the blind will
to create oneself as one’s own work of art, and on the other hand, the
neo-Hegelian state with its institutionally supported mandate to pro-
duce a heteronymous-yet-homogenous never-ending stream of indi-
viduals who would give themselves up to the sovereignty of the state.
This is at least one way to understand what Rosenzweig means by
the glance of truth (Blick der Wahrheit). The two-fold danger means
that not only does the perhaps (Vielleicht) disappear, but also the
possible (Möglich) — which are both essential for the exigency of the
ethical. For Rosenzweig, the work itself that he models with The Star
of Redemption does not cycle out of existence, but remains as a stand-
ing over of the fleeting transience of an experience. What this means
can be interpreted on one level in terms of aesthetics and art, that the
written book (of The Star itself ) emerged as an actual work or artifact
of art and so assumes its own place as one of the dangers. But also,
on another level, the sense of the reference can point to the remnant
that stands over our transient experiences which can be understood
as socio-political acts that remain imprinted on the political body.
The book continues to serve a political function if for no other rea-
son than because of its self-evident political resistance that it mounts
through how it strikes a battle-cry as a messianic and thus ultimately
political act.
But perhaps the most significant interpretation of a standing over
occurs in how Rosenzweig provides us with a phenomenological
orchestration of an ethical movement that occurs as a face-to-face
relationship that presents itself in the dialogue of love. That begins to
take shape in the heart piece of the text, in the chapter on Revelation.
By the end of the text, he complicates that dialogue with the claim that
with the one glance of truth each and every standpoint sinks before
the one existing look (beständigen Schau), a look that tests the dura-
bility of the experience of revelatory love. Explicitly, he states that the

“Welt- und Lebens-anschauungen vergehen in die eine Anschauung
Gottes” (“World-, and life-views disappear in the look of God”).18
The look of God is the fact (Tatsache) of The Star of Redemption that
remains even if it is believed in or not; it is not any form of an ism.
This fact that remains provides an orienting over and under which is
not replaceable (no substitution) and thereby provides the recogniz-
able (der Erkennende) which does not tolerate any ifs. This remnant
of an experience that cannot be substituted for is what he calls “das
Antlitz Gottes,” namely, the countenance of God, the face of God.
But reading from a Levinasian trop souvent present awareness, the
expressive face of such a God has to tolerate, absolutely, the possibil-
ity and unpredictability of an if.
Let us reconsider Rosenzweig’s position: while he admits that
“Wir sprechen in Bildern,” he quickly adds that: “Aber die Bilder sind
nicht willkülich.” They are not arbitrary because the irreversibility
of truth only lets itself be expressed in the images of a livingness (in
dem Bilde eines Lebendigen) that takes form through expressions of
human experience. It is precisely a human livingness that is expressed
in images where the self-consciousness of the distinction — this pecu-

liar expression (dieses Auszeichnens) — is awoken. What it means to
be self-consciously awoken is not to be in dialectical confrontation
demanding objective recognition as it would be in a Hegelian con-
ceptual phenomenology. Rather, for Rosenzweig, self-consciousness
entails assuming a stance (i.e., a stand): “Der Mensch hat oben und
unten an seiner eignen Leiblichkeit” (“The human has an over and
an under in his own bodiliness”).19 Namely, there is that within the
human’s very own bodiliness that is awoken in the perceptual experi-
ence of recognizing a face that orients one in a directional sense of
what is over and under, of where attention should be directed entail-
ing a “to what” or a “with whom” toward which I should be disposed
as deserving the dignity of paying respect.20
Just as the truth is given structure in the movements of The Star,
Rosenzweig claims that total truth — as structure (Gestalt) — is
ordered toward the God (as superior) and not merely toward the
human (as proximal or distal; as anterior or posterior) or the world
(as inferior). What this means is that The Star mirrors (spiegelt) the
superior overness embodied in the phenomenon that occurs as the
context of bodiliness inspired by the ethical relation of dialogue for
Rosenzweig, a mirroring that occurs as the Antlitz or the expressive
face of the absolutely other. Thus, it is really not crazy at all to talk
about God’s Antlitz or even the parts of God’s face in terms of those
of a human face because the truth — as it occurs within the bounds
of our embodied condition — does not allow itself to be spoken of in
any other way. However, talking about “God’s face” does not mean
having to read Rosenzweig as renewing the Jewish mystical tradition
(as Richard Cohen does) because Rosenzweig was unequivocal in his
rejection of mystical interpretations of what he meant by a revela-
tory love relationship.21 But reading Rosenzweig in the context of an
absolute, embodied empiricism, as a Levinasian would, makes com-
pelling interpretive sense.
Indeed, I would argue against both Gibbs and Richard Cohen here
that there is less difference between Levinas and Rosenzweig. Recall
Rosenzweig’s imperative that on one level, it is precisely the point

to get beyond all possibility to merely be able to see (schauen) and
Levinas’s claim in Totality and Infinity that “ethics is an optics” (TI
29). In fact, seeing (as intentionality), in both cases, is paired most
purposefully with a nonseeing (as nonintentional receptivity).
Das Menschen-gesicht
In the penultimate section of The Star Rosenzweig compares the
six parts of the figure of the star that he built throughout the text
with a living human face, at first noting that each figure represents
a way of either passively or actively engaging with one’s environ-
ment (Umwelt). The perceiving organs of the face (aufnehmenden
Organen) are coordinated with the ground-level (die Grundschicht)
which Rosenzweig referred to as the building-blocks (Bausteine),
upon which the face, as a mask, is composed (zusammensetzt) — the
forehead and the cheeks. The cheeks belong to the ears, the forehead
to the nose: “Ohren und Nase sind die Organe des reinen Aufne-
hmens” (“The ears and nose are the organs of pure perception”).22
Indeed, he reminds us that in the Holy Scriptures the nose represents
the entire face as the smoky fragrances of ritual sacrifices find their
way to it just as the movements of the lips find the ears. On the
triangular foundation of those receptive organs is the second triangle
of effective sensibility, the two eyes and the mouth. These are the
active/intentional as opposed to the receptive/nonintentional organs,
those of seeing and speaking. The play of these organs in highly or-
chestrated movements of nonintentional receptivity and intentional
activity is what initially enlivens the rigid mask of the face.
This articulation is remarkable, not in the sense that it is unexpect-
ed, but rather in the sense in which Rosenzweig aesthetically depicts
his fusion of aesthetics and ethics as a truth-claim and sets that in the
context of a paradigm of ritual activity. Levinas’s appropriation of
this fusion is profound, the more so in that he was able to explicate
the ethical core of Rosenzweig’s work and transform that into what
is undeniably his most important trope, the ethicality of the face-to-
face phenomenon. Because of the phenomenon of experiencing the

untouchability of the other while simultaneously experiencing their
proximity, I enter into a sense of their mortal embodiment that in its
very livingness leaves me bound to consider her as sacred and thus
inviolable. The other is sacred and inviolable based on their living-
ness as such, which can only be translated into the commandment to
respect and to not murder the other. But even beyond being com-
manded not to murder, I am compelled to assume material responsi-
bility for the other — the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. I am
compelled because the fleeting expression that plays over the Mien
of the embodied other signifies joy or suffering of the other that I
actually — physically and bodily — discern through holding my breath
and averting my gaze while nonintentionally listening and sensing the
proximal needs and desires of the other who stands before me. The
priority is to listen, to assume a stance of nonintentional receptivity.
This ultimate signification endows meaning and directive guidance

in our relationships. In other words, there is no face-to-face relation-
ship without the history of the face because experiencing the play of
signification takes time to listen and to take in the aromatic sweetness
of the other. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is just such
a narrated, particular history depicting the face of an other. As such
a history, The Star should not be reduced to a symbolic portraiture,
but should rather be understood as the work of an enlivened face,
expressing its having been shaped (created) in a series of necessary
movements of approach towards or reception by countless others.
This is one reading of the life of Franz Rosenzweig and, at that, one
page from the production of his book. In this play of approach and
reception, the face is formed by being questioned and challenged in
its thematizing prejudices — but not only: approach and reception
incites the phenomenon of infinite desire that enlivens both members
in the relation.
What it means to enliven is to show itself in expression through the
glance and through speaking, precisely the Levinasian point about
the face rising in its guilt to responsibility through a Rosenzweigian
confession becoming a Levinasian apology. Words spoken become

signs of a lived moment,23 and books written are simply various death
masks of those moments. The moment of ethicality structured by
the image of a star-become-face in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of
Redemption is such a death mask, as is its ongoing enlivening vitality
through its expression in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.
N OTES TO S IMON , “T RACING THE S ACRED , T RACING THE F ACE “
1. “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz
Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung, a work too often present in this book to be
cited.”
2. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Zone Books, 1990), 80.
3. Ibid., 82.
4. For Rosenzweig, psychism is analogous to what he calls ensouling, that is,
the process that occurs when the pride and defiance of the daimon of a human
turns to soul when he or she becomes the object of loving attention in a revela-
tory love relationship.
5. For a critical examination of the twisted roots of Frege’s separation of sign
and signified and how that is woven into the background of Husserl’s phenom-
enology, see Claire Ortiz Hill and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, Husserl or
Frege? Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing,
2003), esp. chap. 2, “Remarks on Sense and Reference in Frege and Husserl,”
23–40.
6. Here I am paraphrasing an insight that I received from John Lewellyn.
7. See Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, ed. Wolfgang Pfeifer (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 439–40.
8. Ibid., 48.
9. Franz Rosenzweig, Stern der Erlösung (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988),
466. Translated into English as The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Ellen Galli
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
179
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 467.
12. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 186.
13. For an interesting application of this sense of “accounting for time as one’s
own,” which Rosenzweig provides in Part 2, Book 3 of Stern der Erlösung, see
Hans Liebeschütz, Von Georg Simmel zur Franz Rosenzweig: Studien zum Jüdischen
Denken im deutschen Kulturbereich (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1970), 4ff.
14. Rosenzweig, Stern der Erlösung, 467.
15. Ibid.
16. For a well thought out presentation of the rejection of historicism by
Rosenzweig, as well as other Jewish intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, see
David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-
Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
17. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), esp. sec. 5, “Action,” 175–247.
18. Rosenzweig, Stern der Erlösung, 467.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 470.
21. See Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig
and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 241–51.
22. Rosenzweig, Stern der Erlösung, 467. For this, note the possible connec-
tion of Rosenzweig’s sense of pure perception to the passivity or unintentional
consciousness of Levinas’s ethical relation.
23. See Norbert Samuelson, A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s “Star of
Redemption” (Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1999), 101.
Reflections on the Metaphysical God after His Demise:
Heidegger and Levinas in Dialogue
Sarah Allen

Reflections on the
Metaphysical God after
His Demise
Heidegger and Levinas in Dialogue
Sarah Allen
A
fter Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of
the metaphysical God and Heidegger’s cri-
tique of metaphysics as onto-theological think-

ing, one might wonder: is it still possible today to do metaphysics?
Even further, is it still acceptable to speak of God in this metaphysics
that has fallen from favor? At the risk of following in the footsteps
of Nietzsche’s madman — who continues to cry out in the darkness
for God after his demise — these are some of the central questions
Emmanuel Levinas raises in his thought.
In “Death and Time,” Levinas asks: “In philosophy, has not the
disquietude of God other meanings than the forgetting of being and
the errancy of onto-theo-logy? Is the God of onto-theo-logy — who
is perhaps dead — the only God; are there not other meanings to the
word ‘God’?” (GDT 59; italics added). We can see here an open chal-
lenge to Heidegger, to the godless ontology of his early years, and
perhaps also to the godless thinking he calls for in his later thought
in an attempt to go beyond what he understands to be the onto-
theological constitution of philosophical metaphysics. To put matters
simply, in response to Heidegger’s Being without God, Levinas pro-
poses instead a sense for God beyond Being.
29
I am stating nothing new here in bringing out the antagonistic

relationship Levinas had with Heidegger in his thinking. But a good
enemy can be as influential as a good friend: as such, in order to
understand Levinas’s seeking of sense for God beyond Being, it is
necessary to grasp what he took to be objectionable in Heidegger’s
ontology. Further, in hope of opening up a broader perspective
beyond Levinas, it is worth delving into what Heidegger is in fact
saying about Being, and examining how far the gods do and do not
come into Heidegger’s thinking of Being.1
Indeed, if we allow ourselves to step out of what we will see is a
somewhat caricatural depiction of Heidegger by Levinas, then a truly
interesting dialogue can be opened up between the two thinkers.
Though both tend to speak in what may appear to be contradictory
vocabularies, a deeper understanding of their respective languages
may surprisingly reveal their paths of thinking to be less divergent
than originally thought. For though there are certainly important dif-
ferences between the two thinkers, I will argue that both are inspired
by a desire to get to the heart of metaphysical thinking and the pas-
sivity that constitutes it.
Let us begin, however, by way of opposition in order to discover
this hidden point of convergence. Four main oppositions will be
addressed in what follows:
1. Heidegger’s privileging of Being against Levinas’s privileging

of a beyond Being;
2. Heidegger’s critique of the onto-theological character of the his-
tory of philosophy as metaphysics, against Levinas’s criticism
of most of the history of philosophy as comprised of totalizing
philosophies of Being, which he attempts to go beyond by return-
ing to a more originary philosophical sense that he identifies,
among other things, as metaphysical;
3. The “god-less-ness” of Heidegger’s thinking of Being against
Levinas’s attempt to find a sense for God both within and
beyond philosophical thinking on Being;
Allen Reflections on the Metaphysical God after His Demise 31
4. The deconstruction of values and ethics in Heidegger’s later

thought on Being against Levinas’s privileging of ethics as first
philosophy.
BEING OR BEYOND BEING?
In a sense, one of the main motivations behind Levinas’s formu-

lation of a beyond Being originates with Heidegger himself, in a
criticism of his early fundamental ontology from Being and Time. It
should be mentioned that this critical stance toward Heidegger is not
only theoretical in nature, but also stems from Levinas’s personal life
experience as a Jew (having lost most of his family during the Second
World War) faced with Heidegger’s prewar embracing of National
Socialism. Levinas’s most extended critique of Heideggerian funda-
mental ontology appears in Existence and Existents, a book that he
began to write while held in a prisoner of war camp during the war.
In this book, we find his recasting of Heideggerian Being, the es gibt,
in terms of the dark and horrifying il y a, which Levinas characterizes
as a neutral, anonymous and dehumanizing indifference, and some-
times even calls evil (EE 20, 57–64). This negative conception of
Being follows Levinas throughout his various works, and it partly
explains why, beginning from such a negative ontological standpoint,
he finds it necessary to seek out a place for goodness and God beyond
Being. Accordingly, it is also in Existence and Existents that we find
Levinas’s first reference to the Platonic Good beyond Being as pro-
viding the framework for ethical and temporal relationships between
human beings that cannot be accounted for purely in terms of Being
(15).
What exactly is Levinas’s criticism of Heideggerian Being, then?
Heidegger’s thought is concerned, among other things, with turning
our attention to the ontological difference between Being and the
substantive beings (or entities) through which Being as such always
appears to us. In this way, he hopes to open up a path of think-
ing toward Being, which is what, according to him, always remains
unthought and forgotten in the history of Western philosophy.2

Levinas interprets Heidegger’s approach to the ontological differ-
ence as a difference between verb and subject, that is, between verbal
Being understood as an impersonal force of existence and subjective
being as the taking up of a personal position within this otherwise
impersonal existence (EE 17–18). The problem with verbal Being for
Levinas is that it presents a constant threat of depersonalization to
subjective beings. Thus, on a fundamental ontological level, human
existence is little more than a struggle for the private, subjective being
to protect itself from verbal Being. In this sense, the relation to verbal
Being is experienced as suffering in Levinas, and not as the liberat-
ing and empowering resoluteness of authentic Heideggerian Dasein
in relation to its own being and to Being as such. Freedom, truth,
and goodness in Levinas are to be found, not in a movement toward
Being, but in a movement of excendence (out of Being) and tran-
scendence, toward what he calls the Good beyond Being.
One should not be misled, however, into thinking that Being is
always and only negative for Levinas. In fact, the movement beyond
Being must always pass through Being (EE 15), and a more positive
conception of Being can be found by focusing upon subjective being
in its relations to various kinds of otherness. For instance, subjective
being becomes enjoyment and light in relation to the various kinds of
otherness it encounters in the world — food for nourishment, other
human beings in familial and economic relations, the material world
as object of labor, and finally the world of objects that offers itself
to representative thought.3 These relations are what constitute the
worldly being of the subject and it is in the light of this worldly being
that the subject finds a measure of escape from the threat of the il y a
and the weight of its own constantly threatened personal existence.
The most powerful expansion of this light is to be found in the sub-
jective being’s capacity to represent the world objectively to itself. In
representational thought, the subject reaches its greatest enjoyment
and power, its highest independence and separation from all that
constitutes it, for it approaches the world without feeling threatened

by it and as if it had created the world itself in order to respond to its
personal needs (TI 123, 126).
The separation of subjectivity is necessary to the production of
transcendence in Levinas, that is, to the production of goodness (TI
35–46). The powerful, independent, representing subject is the place
in Being where the revelation of the beyond Being can be received
according to Levinas. Without the representing subject, there would
be no place for the entrance of the beyond into Being. There would
be no openness, no receptivity in Being to the beyond Being. In this
sense, philosophy as ontology, as the thought of Being, as the subject
thinking Being, has a positive sense in Levinas.
However, this lighter, illuminated, representational side of Being
discovered in the representing subject and its capacity to think Being
is not only positive; it also presents its own threat of depersonaliza-
tion and ensuing anonymity, namely, the depersonalization or total-

ization of otherness — and particularly of other human beings — by
this worldly, independent, representing subject. This leads us toward
our second point, namely, a comparison of Levinas’s and Heidegger’s
respective critiques of the history of philosophy.
TOTALIZING PHILOSOPHIES OF BEING AND ONTO-THEOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS
If Levinas’s concern with Heideggerian Being is that it threatens to

depersonalize the subject, he claims that subjective being itself, in
its enjoyment of life and capacity of representation, has a tendency
to overlook the other as other and to approach otherness only in
terms of itself. Hence, though subjective being is the first step out
of impersonal and anonymous Being (the il y a) toward a goodness
that lies beyond Being, by itself, it is not enough. By itself, it contin-
ues the depersonalizing work of Being. This depersonalization char-
acteristic of Being, both in its verbal and subjective aspects, leads to
what Levinas calls totality: namely, the tendency to approach and
comprehend all that is from one all-encompassing standpoint (the

isolated subject, for instance) or from within an undifferentiated,
neutral whole where no true alterity as alterity remains.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of totalizing ontology at
work in the history of philosophy according to Levinas: solipsistic
ontologies, where the isolated subject absorbs all otherness into itself,
and takes itself to be the source and end of all meaning in Being; and
universal ontologies, where the relation between self and otherness is
mediated by some kind of neutralizing and universal third term that
ultimately absorbs both the self and others into its neutral and imper-
sonal universality (TI 42–44, 87–88, 305). In Levinas’s interpreta-
tion of the early Heidegger, fundamental ontology can be seen as
guilty of both universalism and solipsism: universalism, in so far as all
questions about relations to otherness are subordinated to the ques-
tion of Being as such; solipsism, in so far as the privileged approach
to Being as such is through Dasein considered in its authenticity, that
is, in relation to itself, to its own death, to its own being and its own
nothingness.
As we will see shortly, it is perhaps a mistake to call Heidegger’s
thought on Being solipsistic without further examination. Heidegger
puts into question precisely the separation between the representing
subject and the objective world that would be necessary for a charge
of solipsism to hold. Further, neither can we really call his thought
on Being a kind of universalism, for Being is not a universal concept
for Heidegger, but rather, in so far as we can define Being at all,
it may be better to conceive of it as an all-pervasive, yet somehow
withdrawn and concealed matrix that makes the appearance, pres-
ence, thought, and existence of substantive beings possible in the
first place. In fact, it is precisely the subjectivistic and universalistic
approaches of the history of philosophy to Being and beings (or enti-
ties) that Heidegger becomes critical of in his characterization of the
history of Western thought as steeped in onto-theological metaphys-
ics. Before considering this Heideggerian critique of metaphysics in
more depth, however, let us step back and follow the Levinasian path
for a moment longer, to see what Levinas proposes as a way out of
totalizing ontologies.
First, one might see this way out as a return to a kind of subjectiv-
ism after Heidegger. The subject has and maintains a central place in
Levinas’s thought. The movement out of Being, the transcendence
beyond Being, is only produced starting from the separated and inde-
pendent subject. Without this independence of the subject, there is
no real separation between the self and others, and thus no possibil-
ity of transcendence. But the separated and independent subject is
only the tip of the iceberg for Levinas. The separation of the subject,
which Levinas terms “absolute,” begins with the creation and setting-
free, the “ab-solution,” of the subject by others in ethics. And the
most transcendent Other in ethical encounters is God, for the face of
the human other always carries the trace of God. Levinas’s return to
the subject, then, should not be understood as a return to the self-
willing and self-thinking modern subject; rather, it is a return to the
subject in its original passivity, that is, as created and commanded by
God through its ethical obligation to others before itself.4
Second, as is well known, Levinas’s transcendence of Being hap-
pens as a prioritizing of ethics over ontology: the question of how I
can justify my own being before the other is more central for Levinas
than the question of the meaning of Being itself.5 This question of
justification arises in my relation with the transcendent other who
puts me into question, throws me back upon myself as perhaps lack-
ing justification, just by revealing his or her face to me. My experience
of the face of the other functions here as a limit experience between
immanence and transcendence, where the other has a kind of phe-
nomenal being and visibility that offers itself to my vision and my
grasp, but what I see or feel is that the other transcends this phenom-
enality and visibility. I see that I do not see; I grasp at what I cannot
grasp; and I sense an order of justification coming from elsewhere,
from a transcendent source beyond my sensing, willing and thinking.
This transcendence manifests itself to me in terms of my own feeling

of shame and lack of justification before the other and my desire to
justify myself before this other by giving to the other.
For Levinas this quasi-phenomenological encounter with the other,
described in terms of desire, shame, and generosity, is not only ethics,
but the source of all subsequent philosophical sense and thinking — it
is first philosophy, metaphysics. As such, Levinas further links the pri-
ority of ethics in establishing philosophical sense to two central ideas
of the history of metaphysics: the Platonic ethics and metaphysics of
the Good beyond Being — a return to philosophical metaphysics as
it manifested itself at its very inception; and the idea of the Infinite
or God in Descartes — where metaphysics involves at its very core a
relation with God, that is, a kind of religious relation. In fact, a close
reading of Totality and Infinity will show that ethics, metaphysics,
and religion basically coincide for Levinas in the relation between
the separated subject and the transcendent other, both created and
invested by the goodness of a God who is absent from Being, but
comes to have philosophical sense for us precisely in the ethical rela-
tion between self and other. The face of the other is the only trace
we have of God in Being, and thus true religion only has meaning as
ethics for Levinas (TI 77–79; GCM 200n23).
It is worth pointing out that Levinas’s references to Plato and
Descartes in this context, as well as his quasi-phenomenological
approach to the ethical relation, are meant to show that the relation
to the beyond Being as a relation of creation and transcendence is an
idea that comes from philosophy, not from theology; further, it is an
idea that has invested philosophical thinking from its very beginning
(TI 103). As such the God of philosophy, the God of metaphysics, is
not a hidden theological dogma that has slipped into philosophy, but
a fundamental source of sense that has always invested philosophical
thinking.6 The question arises here: Does this not point precisely to
what Heidegger calls the onto-theological character of philosophy as
metaphysics?
What does it mean to call metaphysics onto-theology? Heidegger’s
critique of the history of philosophy as onto-theological metaphysics
arises within the framework of his call to overcome metaphysics, or

better put, to step back toward a more originary thinking that houses
the hidden unity of what is both revealed and concealed in meta-
physics, namely, Being as such beyond its ontological and theological
restrictions (ID 50–51). Heidegger makes few if any exceptions in his
critique, including within it most of the history of philosophy since
Aristotle up to himself. Yet, it is important not to understand this
critique as indicating two thousand years of “mistaken” metaphysical
thinking that Heidegger — in his clear-sightedness — would then be
the only thinker to have the capacity to correct. Rather the history
of philosophy as metaphysics is necessary in all its various stages or
epochs; it is the result of the various ways Being as such has given
itself to thinking across history (ID 67; LH 238–39).
What reunite the various epochs of onto-theological metaphysics
are the following four characteristics:7
1. Metaphysics is unable to think the ontological difference as differ-

ence: this is a result of the way Being has given itself to thought,
namely, always in relation to the totality of beings that present
themselves to thought, always in a kind of oblivion or con-
cealedness of Being within beings.8
2. Metaphysics is ontology: throughout the history of metaphysics,
Being has given itself to thought as the ground of beings and
of thought on beings, as the basis in common, as what is most
generally and universally present in beings.9
3. Metaphysics is logic: because Being has always revealed itself as
ground of beings and through beings, in order to access Being,
thought has been called to give an account of Being as present
in beings. In this way, logic, defined as giving an account of the
ground, has always belonged to metaphysics.10
4. Metaphysics is theology: in order to provide an adequate account
for Being as common ground, and because Being always gives
itself to us in beings, metaphysical thought has been called to
name a highest being that would be both the first cause and
the ultimate end of the totality of beings: this highest being is
the God of metaphysics, who must be thought of as causa sui,

self-caused, in order to stop the multiplication of grounds and
grounding at work in metaphysical thinking.11
Of further interest in describing Heidegger’s critique of metaphys-

ics as onto-theological is his account of metaphysics in its particularly
modern form, which finds its most complete embodiment accord-
ing to him in Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power and his
proclamation of the “death of God” (WN 53). The death of God
in Nietzsche signifies not only the death of the Judeo-Christian God
and a general loss of faith for humanity, but the end of Platonism,
of a seeking of guidance and value for human life in an eternally
abiding, supersensible world of ideas (60–61). The death of God is
the end, or “devaluing” of what have been traditionally held as the
highest values for humanity. In response to this devaluing of values,
Nietzsche proposes a “revaluing” of values out of a new principle:
the will to power and its manifestation in a love of life that remains
entirely sensible, earthly, human (66–70).
Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s thought as the culmination of the
subjective character of metaphysics in modernity. The subject, as the
representational thought before which beings present themselves, has
always been characteristic of metaphysics in some sense. The think-
ing subject is the giver of accounts, the logos in onto-theological
metaphysics. One might even think of the metaphysical God as the
highest subject, as the thought and will that can think and will both
itself and the totality of beings it has created, and in so doing, give an
account for the totality of beings. With modernity, this capacity shifts
over to human thought (a road opened up by Descartes’s metaphysi-
cal discovery of the “I think” principle) and to the human will (for
instance, in Nietzsche’s Übermensch). The human subject does not so
much come to replace God, as to provide a new ground and end for
approaching beings in their essence.
In modernity, value becomes of primordial importance in the sense
of what value a being can have for the human subject. In Nietzsche and
in the contemporary technological world, according to Heidegger,

beings are restricted in their Being to the value they can come to have
for the subject willing the continuation and enhancement of its own
power. This object-subject structure of metaphysics, where the sub-
ject dominates the object, cuts us off from a more originary approach
to Being as the horizon or clearing (Lichtung) within which we stand
or dwell as human beings, as the clearing which we are in a sense. In
this clearing and as this clearing, we are called to receive what pres-
ents itself to us, what Being sends or gives to us, and to care for it as a
shepherd tending a flock, not as a dominating ruler seeking to impose
his or her will (LH 227–30, 233–34).
The notion of clearing in Heidegger is the idea of Being itself
opening up a home or dwelling in Being through a kind of with-
drawal and concealment of Being that allows a place for the human
being to be or dwell. Clearing can be conceived of here as something
like a clearing in a forest. Only once the trees have been cleared away
is there room for light to shine through.12 Only in this dwelling and
as this dwelling can the human being subsequently shine the light
of its thinking on other beings. In this clearing, and as this clearing,
human being is “ek-sistence,” a standing out of Being, or a standing
outside Being, that is also a standing in the clearing of Being, where
what Being sends to us can be received. Another way of conceiving of
the clearing of Being is as language. Language is famously “the house
of Being” for Heidegger, and we as human beings dwell in this house
(LH 236–37).
We can see here that, whatever Heidegger’s thought on Being may
be proposing to us, it does not fall neatly on either the solipsistic or
the universalistic sides of Levinas’s critique of totalizing ontologi-
cal philosophies. Much to the contrary, in fact, one finds a similar
concern in both thinkers to avoid the domination of other beings
by a self-serving, self-willing, and tyrannical subject. I am not con-
tending here that Heidegger and Levinas are saying exactly the same
thing, for all thinkers always have their own motivations and particu-
larities that set them off from others, and we will see further on that
there are some important points of contention between Levinas and

Heidegger. What I would like to emphasize at this point is the mis-
leading nature of Levinas’s criticism of the Heideggerian notion of
Being — which we should recall functions as a kind of negative origin
for Levinas’s Good beyond Being. This criticism sets up a greater
initial divide between the two thinkers than is necessary and can at
times be an obstacle to understanding their similarities, for instance,
their common concern to move beyond the modern subject and its
tendency toward domination.13
Keeping this in mind, let us turn to the question of how God
comes into philosophy for Levinas and Heidegger. Once again, we
will find that the divergence between the two thinkers is not as great
as it might originally seem, and it does not lie where it is often (mis)
placed, namely, between an ethico-religious metaphysician and an
atheistic ontologist.
THE GOD OF METAPHYSICS AND BEYOND
As we have seen, the God of metaphysics for Heidegger is the

highest being as first cause and ultimate rational end of all other be-
ings. The God of metaphysics is the generative source of beings and
what keeps them enduring in Being. God is the first and ultimate
ground upon which rests the certainty of logical (account-giving)
subjective discourse about beings. At the end of metaphysics, in an
attempt to think beyond metaphysics or to step back behind its incep-
tion to its original essence, Heidegger calls for a “god-less thinking
which must abandon the god of philosophy” (ID 71–72). What is
this “god-less thinking”? Should we assume here that Heidegger is
promoting a kind of philosophical atheism?
We can answer this last question in the affirmative with respect to
Heidegger’s earlier thought. For instance, in a lecture from 1922,
“Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An
Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” Heidegger explicitly calls
his own approach to philosophy atheistic: “If philosophy is in principle
atheistic and understands such about itself — then it has resolutely

chosen factical life with a view to its facticity and, in acquiring it as an
object for itself, it has preserved it in its facticity.”14 It is not clarified
here precisely what this atheism of philosophy entails, but what seems
to be at stake is a positing of the phenomenological-hermeneutical
position of Heidegger’s early thought, where philosophical question-
ing is to take place within the scope of Dasein’s own factical life. That
is, philosophical questioning is to take place from the perspective of
an individualized Dasein, authentically disclosed to itself in relation
to its death as a particular temporal and finite existence, without the
reassuring thought or support of any exterior transcendence, such as
a metaphysical or religious God, to sustain and ease the difficulty of
this life. Even here, however, Heidegger makes no claims about the
existence or nonexistence of God. Atheism is rather a propaedeutic
condition of proper philosophizing: we must begin to think by our-
selves, without God.

In his later thought (for instance, in the Letter on Humanism)
Heidegger himself explicitly asserts that his thinking does not yet pro-
nounce itself on the existence or nonexistence of God, and is thus not
atheistic (LH 252–54). Nor is his thought indifferent to religion, but
rather, he believes the way toward thinking God beyond metaphysics
must be prepared by a thinking that opens itself to Being beyond the
restrictions of metaphysical thinking, that is, to Being approached as
clearing rather than ground. Only through this more originary open-
ness to Being can thinking then move into the dimensions of the holy
and the divine through which Heidegger claims it would be possible
to raise anew the question of God, or perhaps better put, gods.15
The notion of the holy is developed by Heidegger in his writ-
ings on Hölderlin and the fourfold (earthly, heavenly, human, and
divine) through which the holy manifests itself to us.16 The holy can
be seen as coming from the hidden dimensions of Being that do
not reveal themselves to us; the holy comes from that which with-
draws from us. One might speak of it as that which does not come to
light. Philosophical metaphysics concerned with presence, with what
appears to us and is illuminated by thought, does not have any access

to what can only be spoken of as darkness and absence in metaphysi-
cal terms.17 It is the task of the thinker, according to Heidegger, to
break out of these metaphysical restrictions and think Being more
originally as clearing and language. In this sense, Heidegger is seek-
ing a philosophizing beyond metaphysics, or even a thinking beyond
philosophy, if philosophy is reduced to metaphysics.18
Where can we turn to discover the path of this thinking? To the
poets and poetic language, according to Heidegger, with their capac-
ity to intimate the hidden, the concealed, the holy, in a way that
the clarity demanded of traditional (technical-metaphysical) philo-
sophical language does not allow. If it is only through the holy that
the way back toward the gods is opened up for thinking after the
death of the metaphysical God, then thinking becomes dependent on
poetry — not science, dogmatic religion, or ethics — for approaching
the gods anew.19 The metaphysical approach to God for Heidegger, is
a degrading of God’s essence by thinking God as the highest value.20
If God or gods are to have any sense for thought, it is not as a source
of security and certainty for subjective thought and human life. God
is not, for instance, Descartes’ divine guarantor of ontological truth.
God is not the ground of thinking. The thinking of Being and gods
beyond philosophy defined as metaphysics cannot take the form of
ideas (be they infinite) and certainties serving an illuminated subjec-
tive thought and self-enhancing will. Rather, this thinking moves as
much in darkness as in light, and it is constituted at least as much
by the passivity and uncertainty of silent listening as by self-certain
speech. Thinking that moves toward the poetic is a careful and medi-
tative dwelling in language, and not only in any language whatsoever,
but in the language of Being, in the very creative upsurge and fount
of all particular languages (LH 264–65).
Still, it is true that any sense of God or gods remains subordinate
to Being in Heidegger: first, the thinking of Being, and then per-
haps (although not with any certainty) the thinking of gods; first, the
opening of thinking and existing to their horizon or dwelling place,
then perhaps the coming of gods into this horizon. It is this prece-
dence of Being over all else that Levinas finds particularly objectionable
in Heidegger’s thinking. Though Levinas admits that in so far as we
can speak of God at all in philosophy (and here we have to return to
a clearly monotheistic sense of God) it is through God’s descent into
ontological language, into the horizon of Being, this descent is some-
thing of a betrayal or reduction of the transcendent sense of God.21
In a way, Levinas’s thought rests on a wager that there may be a God
beyond the horizon of Being, a source of sense that precedes the hori-
zon of sense, and if there is, this God beyond being breaks through
the horizon of Being in my ethical encounters with others. This leads
us to question again: Does Levinas’s seeking out of a source behind
the horizon, and particularly of a God before Being, mean a return
to onto-theology, to God as first cause and ultimate end of Being? Is
his God a ground of security and certainty for thought and the beings
that present themselves to thought?
Before answering these questions too hastily, it is worth consid-
ering more carefully what it means for God to be beyond Being in
Levinas and how it is that God comes into philosophy defined as
representational thought on Being, if God does at all. From a certain
perspective, Levinas’s God seems to play the traditional monotheistic
role of a creator God that creates the human as subject, even if, by
the very withdrawal of God from the subject and from Being, the
human subject most often takes itself to be causa sui, self-caused,
and is thus by nature atheistic.22 One of the dominant ways the God
of metaphysics is depicted as the first cause and ground of all beings
in the philosophical tradition is precisely as a creator God at the ori-
gin of all beings, understood, to be sure, as creatures. In this sense,
Levinas’s God sounds very much like the God of metaphysics, and
his metaphysics does indeed seem to entail a return to onto-theology
after Heidegger.
To this at first glance plausible claim that Levinas remains stuck in
the onto-theological tradition of metaphysics, one might quite justifi-
ably respond: “So what!?” The questions bear asking: What is wrong
with onto-theology? Why should we seek to go beyond it? And have

we really understood the God of metaphysics so well, that we know
this God is to be left behind?23 But perhaps to conceive of onto-
theology as wrong or passé is misleading. In Heidegger, for instance,
onto-theological metaphysics is not entirely wrong, but carries con-
cealed within it the “treasure of its own proper wealth” (LH 235),
that is, the horizon of Being from which it has arisen. As such, it is to
metaphysics itself that we have to look in order to discover the traces
of this horizon. The trouble with metaphysics, however, is that is
remains blind to its own treasure, unaware of the horizon that makes
it possible, and it is thus limited and constricting. In this sense, for
Heidegger, the thinking of Being is an attempt to deconstruct and
move beyond onto-theology by opening up thinking to this, for the
most part, concealed horizon at the very heart of metaphysics. But in
order to do this, we have to delve right into the depths of that which
we are attempting to surpass: we have to go through metaphysics and
its restrictive ideas and language.
Even if we admit this positive and necessary role to metaphysics
in Heidegger, I think more needs to be said about Levinas’s rela-
tion to onto-theology. In the likening above of Levinas’s creator
God to the God of metaphysics, a central claim was left out, namely,
the claim that the primary sense to be given to the relation to God
in Levinas — be it described in terms of creation, religion, or tran-
scendence — is to be found in ethics, in my ethical encounter with
the other. Two things are important to emphasize about the ethical
encounter for our present purposes: First, the ethical encounter is
not one that provides a ground of certainty for my thinking, that sup-
ports me in my self-certainty, but rather one that puts my freedom
and my self-certainty into question. The encounter with the other
pulls the ground out from under my feet, leaving me ashamed of my
natural, egoistic movements and infinitely responsible for the other
without the possibility of ever repaying my debt, without the possibil-
ity of regaining my peace of mind, my sure-footing on a stable and
justifying ground. Second, not only does the ethical encounter put me
into question, but its own sense is itself uncertain. Levinas describes
the transcendence of the other — both the other human being and
God — as breaking in upon me like a light that blinks on and off so
quickly in the darkness that I can never be certain whether there was
anything out there at all (GCM 78; OB 152). It could be that ethical
transcendence is just a figment of my imagination, or worse the mark
of insanity, of a mind unhinged. Levinas goes so far as to speak of an
ambiguity between God and the il y a (GCM 69), of an inability to
distinguish from the standpoint of knowledge between being exposed
and depersonalized by a meaningless Being, and being liberated from
one’s solitude by a source of goodness and sense.
This double uncertainty of ethics — the destabilizing of the ego and
the impossibility of knowledge with respect to ethical sense — sug-
gests that the role played by Levinas’s God is not so much to pro-
vide a foundation for thought and knowledge along the lines of an

onto-theology, as to put thought and knowledge into question, par-
ticularly, the thinking and knowing of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient,
self-originating modern subject. As such, his ethics — which is at the
same time “true religion” and first philosophy, metaphysics — har-
bors a critique of subjectivity and a foundationlessness that at least
in some sense follows a direction similar to Heidegger’s thinking of
Being beyond onto-theological metaphysics. Recall that Heidegger’s
critique of metaphysics is, among other things, an extended critique
of the subjectivistic tendencies of modern metaphysics: the tendency
to conceive of Being and God as ground of value for our self-
preservation and self-enhancement, and as ground of certainty for
our thoughts. Being is, for Heidegger, what makes our thinking
possible — it is the matrix of thinking, but it does not serve our
thinking; it does not provide us with certainty. Perhaps one might say
that it is a kind of groundlessness, an Abgrund more than a Grund.
What supports us in the postmodern era of metaphysics is an uncer-
tainty and withdrawal of support, and we are first touched by this
groundlessness through the moods and desires that arise out of our
contact with it, out of our being put into question by sources that lie
beyond us and withdraw from the light of our knowledge.
A third and last point to be raised in favor of my argument that
Levinas is not simply an onto-theologian lies in the role Levinas attri-
butes to philosophical thinking about God and transcendence in his
later thought. He accepts that the language of philosophy is, for the
most part, ontological. Our thinking takes place within the horizon
of Being. How then are we to think a God that is supposedly beyond
Being from within this horizon? As already alluded to above, Levinas
claims that transcendence descends into Being, the God beyond Being
allows himself to be captured and spoken of within the language of
Being, but not without some restriction and betrayal of God’s original
sense. This God within Being can be found in philosophical figures
like the Platonic Good and the Cartesian Idea of God, prime mani-
festations of what both Nietzsche and Heidegger have called the God
of metaphysics. However, rather than proclaiming this God dead or
sweeping God aside to make room for the possible coming of new
gods, for instance, for a god before whom one could kneel, pray, play
music, and sacrifice (ID 72), Levinas claims that the God of meta-
physics and the God of faith are one.24 The various figures of the God
of metaphysics function, for him, as beacons for our thinking, point-
ing to a beyond that cannot be captured in ontological language. At
the same time, they are philosophical ideas of which we should always
remain sceptical on a philosophical level, precisely because they betray
the true sense of the beyond and may often appear contradictory or
incomprehensible to us from the standpoint of ontological language
and reasoning. This explains the general philosophical scepticism in
our day about the metaphysical God and a sense of transcendence
related to this God. It also suggests the need for some species of
reduction in order to get beyond the imprisonment of the sense of
God in ontological language. This reduction, for Levinas, is an ethi-
cal reduction that takes us to the very limits of our thinking, where
thinking turns into desire. It is also the place where the God of faith
and the God of metaphysics meet: in their ethical reduction. If the
primary and true sense of the religious for Levinas is only to be found
in ethics, this goes for faith as well as for philosophy.
Structurally speaking, we can see a certain similarity between
Levinas and Heidegger even here: both elaborate a double view of
reality where the philosophical tradition captures something right
about reality, but is also restrictive and limiting, cutting us off from
its sources. For Heidegger, this is formulated in terms of an onto-
theological tradition and a metaphysical God that both cut us off from,
and carry within them traces of the horizon of Being that makes them
possible. For Levinas, it is ontological language and the very horizon
of Being that are reductive, but carry within them the traces of a
beyond Being from which their sense originates. However, because
we can never access the source-level (God or Being) directly, philo-
sophical thinking becomes for both thinkers an endless hermeneuti-
cal and deconstructive interpretation of its own necessarily restrictive
language and tradition.25
Levinas and Heidegger are also similar in that they point to the
self-enclosed, self-serving, and self-justifying modern subject as the
main culprit in restricting our view of reality, calling for an open-
ing up of the subject beyond itself and its selfish interests. It is here,
however, that we come to what may be an important parting of ways
between the two thinkers, namely, in examining how the reduction
or deconstruction of the tradition is to take place, how the subject
is to be opened up beyond itself. One could put the question in
the following way: Is it through a kind of poetic, aesthetic open-
ness and obedience to Being that we can move beyond the sup-
posed certainties and self-affirmations at work in onto-theological
thinking (to use the language of Heidegger)? Or is it through the
ethical encounter with others that the ground is always pulled out
from under restrictive and dominating, but at the same time neces-
sary ontological thinking (to use the language of Levinas)? What is at
stake in this diverging of paths? Can any complementarity be found
between them? Or are we faced with a substantive difference that is
strong enough to significantly change the conciliatory flavor of our
previous reflections?
ETHICAL REDUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTING ETHICS
Let us return in closing to Levinas’s original criticism of Heideg-

gerian Being, namely, that Being is totalizing, depersonalizing, not
only for the self, but also and primarily for the other. Another way
of putting this criticism is to claim that there is no room for ethics in
Heidegger’s ontology, or at least, ethics is subordinated to ontology,
the relation between self and other to the relationship to Being.
One need only turn to the end of the Letter on Humanism to see
that ethics — at least in the sense of the upholding of values, rule-
following, and prescriptions for the good life — does indeed have
a subordinate role to the thinking of Being in Heidegger. In fact,
Heidegger presents true thinking as a thinking against values and as
preceding any concrete rules or laws of conduct we might seek out in
a traditional ethics. If read too quickly, superficially, these claims can
lend themselves to misunderstandings; for instance, they can lead to
caricatures of Heidegger (of which he is well aware) as praising nihil-
ism and the senseless destruction of tradition. However, Heidegger is
careful to point out, at some length, that to think against values does
not necessarily mean to destroy all our traditional positive values and
raise up opposites in their stead. It can also mean to open up thinking
beyond the stance of valuing and evaluating, which is itself reductive,
approaching all reality in terms of what value it can have as an object
for a subject, or as a technological instrument for one’s use. It can
mean to open up thinking to the source of all values, to what makes
values and valuing possible. And this is indeed what thinking against
values means for Heidegger.
In the same sense as Heidegger’s thinking of Being goes beyond
values to the source of values, it goes beyond the particular rules and
prescriptions of traditional ethics to their source in Being. Heidegger
likens his thinking of Being to an “original ethics” (ursprüngliche
Ethik; LH 258) where the term “ethics” is linked to “ethos” under-
stood as dwelling. If language is the house of Being, then “original
ethics” is something like a careful dwelling in the language of Being.
What does this mean? It means an openness, listening and obedience

to the way Being speaks to us and thus forms the very language in
which we ourselves experience our world and everything that comes
into it. It also means a “fitting saying” of the language of Being:
speaking or remaining silent in the appropriate way, at the appropri-
ate moment, in attunement with how Being gives itself to us. It is in
this way, in this careful attention paid to language, that thinking is
guided by poetry or becomes poetry itself.26
A Levinasian might object at this point: How is this ethics? Where
is the all-important other, the human and divine other that tran-
scends and commands me? In a sense, Heidegger might answer that
his thinking of Being is not an ethics, but in fact much more than an
ethics, namely, a thinking that precedes the distinction between dif-
ferent philosophical disciplines (ethics, logic, physics, ontology, etc.)
and between contemplative and practical thought such that it is the
source of ethics as well as much, much more. But Levinas’s ethics

itself is also of this metaethical, metaphysical character, providing a
source for all subsequent limitations of sense into various disciplines.
The objection is thus not really to the metaethical, metaphysical tenor
of Heidegger’s thinking of Being, but rather to the subordinate role
played by the human — particularly the other human being — and the
seeming absence of the divine Other — God.
In light of this objection, let us take a last look at Heidegger’s
thinking of Being. In describing it as an “originary ethics,” Heidegger
illustrates his meaning with a story about Heraclitus taken from
Aristotle. In Heidegger’s rendition, the story goes that some foreign
visitors have come to visit Heraclitus at home in hope of catching a
glimpse of the great thinker in the act of thinking. What they find
is a simple and familiar scene, a man, the great Heraclitus himself,
warming himself by the stove. As they disappointedly turn to go,
having expected extraordinary spectacles, the thinker speaks to them,
invites them in saying: “Here too the gods come to presence.” In
his own analysis of this story, Heidegger remarks particularly upon
the simplicity and familiarity of the thinking of Being: we should not
seek the thinking of Being in some complex and esoteric wisdom, but
pay attention to what is closest and most familiar to us. This is per-
haps what Heraclitus is trying to get across to the visitors. Even more
important for our purposes, however, is that this story is also a story
of hospitality, of inviting the stranger into one’s home with words
that suggest a common task, an awaiting of the gods, of the “unfamil-
iar one[s]” or “the ones to come” (Zukünftige).27 Here we find the
human and divine others so central to Levinasian ethics, though their
encounter can only take place, if at all, within the horizon of Being,
and the language is rather one of invitation, receiving and awaiting
than of accusation and command.28
Yet, we should keep in mind that this story is only an illustration
of what might be entailed by an authentic dwelling in Being for
Heidegger. He does not put Heraclitus’s words of invitation forward
as an ethical command or a first law of thinking. Instead he speaks
of the “fittingness of the saying of Being” as the first law of thinking
from which all subsequent human rules, laws, and commands — be
they ethical or otherwise — are to be derived (LH 264). Beyond
this abstract characterization, the first law cannot be formulated in
advance for us by Heidegger for at least two reasons: First, because of
Being’s historical, flowing nature, the way it reveals itself to us may
change over time and with respect to the various situations in which
we find ourselves. We thus always have to remain at attention, open
for novelty. The task of thinking is never finished. Second, attunement
and obedience to Being begin on a personal level. The task of think-
ing is never to be passed off onto someone else. We must all think for
ourselves. This gives us an idea of the difficulty and personal responsi-
bility involved in true thinking, despite its purported simplicity.
Levinas as well is a great champion of novelty, of remaining open
for what has yet to reveal itself to us. And the transcendence of this
novelty is much more radical than in Heidegger in the sense that
we can never come to make it our own, we can never dwell in it as a
familiar home, and we can never know it with any certainty, even in a
transient and historical sense. Ironically, however, Levinas does tell us

in advance what the sense of this novelty, this transcendence can be:
either the ethical sense encountered in the face of the other — moving
somewhere between the commands not to kill the other and to die
for the other — or meaninglessness and nothingness. In other words,
either we will hear the command of the other human being — and
thus the command of God — over us, or we will not. Depending on
what we hear, either there will be goodness in human existence or
there will not. In other words, either there will be sense in human
existence, or there will not, for all sense starts with ethical goodness
for Levinas.
Why this limiting of the first source of sense to ethical goodness for
Levinas, and the further limiting of ethics to encounters and relations
with other human beings? If we admit that what is up for question in
the concern with ethics in both Levinas and Heidegger is not so much
about ethics as it is about metaphysics, about the sources of sense that
inspire our thinking and our acting, then it seems that Levinas leaves
us with rather narrow, strict, and already decided alternatives in com-
parison to the potential richness of Heidegger’s thinking of Being.
There is danger in this richness, because of its ambiguity — there is
room for both good and evil, healing (Heil ) and raging (Unheil ),
in Heidegger’s Being (LH 260–61); but even Levinas’s strictness
does not protect us against this, for goodness only comes into Being
if it is heard and heeded, and thus the final court of appeal always
remains within each one of us, in our personal responsibility for our
own experience and what we draw from it. Finally, one might add
that while our relations with other human beings are absolutely cen-
tral in any kind of ethics, and Levinas’s thought has the constant
merit of reminding us of this, there is a care and attentiveness for all
beings privileged in Heidegger that suggests an even broader eth-
ics of utmost importance in curbing our exploitative and totalizing
tendencies not only with respect to other human beings, but with
respect to all otherness.29
N OTES TO A LLEN , “R EFLECTIONS ON THE M ETAPHYSICAL G OD “
In addition to the abbreviations at the front of this volume, the following are also
used: Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (ID), trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Heidegger, Letter on Humanism
(LH ), trans. F. A. Cappuzi and J. G. Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 217–65; Heidegger, “The Word of
Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’” (WN), in The Question Concerning Technology, trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 53–112. The use of the
abbreviation of Levinas’s work, GCM, specifically refers to his essay “God and
Philosophy,” 55–78.
1. In addressing these issues, I am not only seeking to follow a path of ques-
tioning internal to Levinas’s thought itself, but to contribute to a line of think-
ing on Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as onto-theology addressed,
among others, by Ignace Verhack in his article “Immanent Transcendence as
Way to ‘God.’ Between Heidegger and Marion,” in Religious Experience and the
End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003), 106–18. Verhack questions whether it is “still possible, in the wake of the
Heideggerian deconstruction of metaphysics as onto-theology, to make ‘God’ a
theme for philosophical thought” (107, italics added). He goes on to claim that
Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology is often (mis)understood as a removal of
God from Being, and a restriction of philosophy to this Being purified of God,
such that questions about God can no longer be philosophically posed, and talk
of God only has its place in faith and theology. This interpretation forgets that
Heidegger’s critique is actually directed in some senses at a search for a God
beyond onto-theology who can come into Being and thus into philosophy as the
thinking of Being. Or, as I will argue is the case in both Levinas and Heidegger,
there is an openness in Being to the coming of gods, though no certainty as to
their arrival or continued presence, and this openness and uncertainty are reflected
in the ways we continue to speak of God in philosophy after the Nietzschean and
Heideggerian critiques of metaphysics.
2. See, for instance, Being and Time, ¶ 1, on the forgotten question of Being;
or LH 226–27: “Metaphysics does not ask about the truth of Being itself.”
3. For Levinas’s account of subjective being as worldly and illuminated, see
EE 37–51 and TI 109–83.
4. On the subject as creature in Levinas see: TI 102–05; and OB 104–05,
where the metaphor of maternity is used to refer to the subject as created.
5. See Levinas, “De la signification du sens,” in Heidegger et la question de
Dieu, ed. R. Kearney and J. S. O’Leary (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1980), 240–41.
See also TI 42–48, where the Heideggerian approach to Being is placed second
to ethics and justification.
6. While this does not necessarily reassure the reader against Dominique
Janicaud’s claim that Levinas’s notion of transcendence as ethical desire pre-
supposes a kind of “metaphysico-theological” structure that would underwrite
his philosophical language, we can see that Levinas argues strongly, here and
elsewhere, against a theological source for transcendence in his philosophy. See
Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française
(Combas: Éditions de l’éclat, 1991), 15.
7. For an excellent account of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as
onto-theology, see Iain Thompson’s article, “Ontotheology? Understanding
Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics,” International Journal of Philosophical
Studies 8, no. 3 (2000): 297–327.
8. See LH 226: “Metaphysics does indeed represent beings in their Being,
and so thinks the Being of beings. But it does not think the difference of both.”
9. See ID 70: “When metaphysics thinks of beings with respect to the
ground that is common to all beings as such, then it is logic as onto-logic.”
10. See ID 59: “Ontology . . . and theology are ‘Logies’ inasmuch as they pro-
vide the ground of beings as such and account for them within the whole”; and
ID 68–69 on logos as ground in metaphysics.
11. See ID 60: “The Being of beings is represented fundamentally, in the
sense of the ground, only as causa sui. This is the metaphysical concept of God”;
and ID 70–71: “When metaphysics thinks of beings as such as a whole, that is,
with respect to the highest being which accounts for everything, then it is logic
as theo-logic.”
12. See Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in
Basic Writings, 441–42.
13. For a further account of some of Levinas’s “misreadings” of Heidegger,
see: François Raffoul, “Being and the Other: Ethics and Ontology in Levinas
and Heidegger,” in Addressing Levinas, ed. Eric Sean Nelson, Antje Kapust, and
Kent Still (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 138–51.
Contra Levinas’s separation of ethics and ontology, his identification of ontology
and the Same, and his privileging of the death of the other over the mineness
of death in Heidegger, Raffoul argues for a sense of Heideggerian Being that is
traversed by otherness, for a reading of Dasein that is both fundamentally mine
and a being with others, and for a being toward my own death that is singular-
izing and thus the condition of encountering others as other. He further suggests
that Heideggerian ontology should not be separated and subordinated to ethics,
but rather understood as an “originary ethics.” I develop my own reading of this
originary ethics further on.
14. In Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond,
ed. John Van Burn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 121. We
can also find reference to the atheism of philosophy in Heidegger’s 1925 lecture,
History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985), 80, where he claims: “As long as phenomenology understands
itself, it will adhere to this course of investigation [i.e., the phenomenological
one] against any sort of prophetism within philosophy and against any inclination
to provide guidelines for life. Philosophical research is and remains atheism . . . .
Precisely in this atheism, philosophy becomes what a great man once called the
‘joyful science.’”
15. See LH 242; 252–54: “Only from the truth of Being can the essence of
the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity
to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or
said what the word ‘God’ is to signify” (253).
16. See, for instance, “What are Poets for?” and “Building, Dwelling,
Thinking,” in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New
York: Harper & Row, 1971), 91–161.
17. See chapter 8, “Subjectivism and Humanism,” of Ben Vedder’s
Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religions: From God to the Gods (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 2007), 189–214.
18. “The thinking that is to come is no longer philosophy, because it thinks
more originally than metaphysics — a name identical to philosophy” (LH 265).
19. See “What are Poets for?,” 93–94: “Poets are the mortals who singing
earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’
tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. . . . We
others must learn to listen to what these poets say.”
20. LH 251: “When one proclaims ‘God’ as the altogether ‘highest value,’
this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the
greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being.”
21. This descent happens in the interest of human justice and equality, so
that goodness may be available to all and reducible to some kind of thought and
calculation despite the fact that the Good itself, produced in ethics, always breaks
through thought and calculation and does not concern itself equally with good-
ness for the self and for the other. See OB 153–62.
22. One can find traces of this narrative of creation at work in TI 77–79,
102–05. It becomes even more pronounced in OB.
23. Adriaan Peperzak, for instance, argues that we have yet to come to a
clear understanding of what the difference between the God of philosophers
(the onto-theological/metaphysical God) and the more personal God of faith
consists in — if there is a clear difference at all, that is. For a discussion of this
topic, see Adriaan Peperzak, “Religion after onto-theology,” in Religion After
Metaphysics, ed. Mark Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
104–20.
24. GCM 57: “To ask ourselves . . . whether God cannot be uttered in a rea-
sonable discourse that would be neither ontology nor faith, is implicitly to doubt
the formal opposition . . . between, on the one hand, the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, invoked without philosophy in faith, and on the other the god of the
philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition constitutes an alternative.”
25. On the shift in philosophy from the notion of God as highest idea of an
onto-theological metaphysics to a hermeneutic approach to God as constantly
withdrawing from thought and calling for renewed approaches and reinterpreta-
tions, see Ben Vedder’s tracing of the development of the hermeneutical tradition
in philosophy from Schleiermacher, through Dilthey to Gadamer and Heidegger
in his “The Disappearance of Philosophical Thought in Hermeneutic Philosophy:
Historicizing and Hermeneuticizing the Philosophical Idea of God,” in Religious
Experience and the End of Metaphysics, 14–30. In his own way, Levinas as well
falls into this hermeneutical tradition.
26. For some excellent further reflections on the “original ethics” at work in
Heidegger’s thinking of Being, see F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew, eds., Heidegger
and Practical Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Of
particular interest is Jean-Luc Nancy’s article, “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics”
(65–85), where Nancy offers an interpretation of the thinking against values at
the end of the Letter on Humanism as going beyond a determinate morality of
preestablished rules and values toward a more originary ethics of action or com-
portment (l’agir) where we have no preestablished norms to guide us, but are
intimately involved in, and deeply responsible for the making of values through
our very action, that is, through our comportment toward ourselves, others, and
Being itself. Nancy claims that to understand Being as ethos, as abode, is to
understand it not so much as a dwelling place, but as the very act of dwelling, as
a kind of conduct (79). In fact, the two senses of dwelling need not be separated,
for if language is the house (the dwelling place) of Being, it is also the way we
comport ourselves toward Being.
27. See LH 256–58 and section 4, “The Ones to Come” of Heidegger’s
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth
Maly (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).
28. This suggests that the ethics of hospitality Jacques Derrida discovers in
the thought of Emmanuel Levinas — see Derrida’s Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas
(Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1997) — may also find inspiration in Heidegger. It also
reminds us that the welcoming (accueil ) of the stranger so central to Levinasian
ethics (which is paradoxically a kind of expropriation, a giving of all I have to the
stranger) can only occur if I have a place, a home, an economic horizon within
which to receive the stranger.
29. On this concluding remark, a particularly insightful reading of the possibly
broader ethical tenor of Heidegger’s thought is to be found in Silvia Benso’s The
Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2000), where she takes Heidegger’s thought as inspiration for elaborating
an “ethics of things,” an “ethics of the other of the Other,” that would come to
supplement Levinas’s ethics of the human other (xxix). As well as responsibil-
ity to human others, responsibility to things is also necessary in our present age
according to Benso: “To avoid the environmental catastrophe to which techno-
logical rationality seems to have consigned the age of postmodernity, it seems
therefore necessary to explore, and espouse, ways of relating to things that do not
reduce them to objects, but rather recognize in them the possibility of their own
signification, of their own difference, of their own alterity” (xxxiv–xxxv).
Recognizing the Gift in Giving Thanks: Thoughts on Emmanuel
Levinas and Meister Eckhart
Bernhard Casper, Tobias Keiling

Recognizing the Gift
in Giving Thanks
Thoughts on Emmanuel Levinas
and Meister Eckhart
Bernhard Casper
Translated by Tobias Keiling
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
I
f there has ever been an upheaval in phenomeno-
logical philosophy that attempted to give a reason-
able account of belief, then it is the transition from
Husserl’s phenomenology of pure consciousness to a hermeneutics of
the factually lived mortal Dasein. This came to full fruition in Heideg-
ger’s thinking. Yet it already began at the end of the First World War
with Franz Rosenzweig and around the same time with Ferdinand
Ebner’s thinking on language. The move beyond transcendental phe-
nomenology was also taken later by philosophers such as Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, who expressedly
connected the hermeneutics of life to the Jewish tradition.
In order to reveal the richness of this upheaval and new begin-
ning, I wish to depart from the comment Husserl makes in the Crisis,
on the tremor that the “universal a priori of the correlation” as the
beginning of all thought had caused in him: “The first breakthrough
of this universal a priori of correlation between experienced object
and manners of givenness . . . affected me so deeply that my whole
53
subsequent life-work has been dominated by the task of systemati-

cally elaborating on this a priori of correlation.“1 Just as for Descartes
the nightly Neuburg vision of the mathesis universalis became the
source for the certain disclosure of the world in the horizon of
the fundamentum inconcussum of ego cogito, for Husserl insight into
the apriority of being-already-in-relation became the most fundamen-
tal precondition of all cognition. This insight revealed itself to him
as a necessary first insight by which the scission between subject and
object was overcome and at the same time recognized in its proper
depth as experience.
Husserl understands this correlation of having always already hap-
pened and happening anew in every unreserved regard as one that
comes to itself solely in human consciousness. It happens in the eidenai,
in the seeing knowledge [sehenden Wissen] to which, according to the
first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, all human intentionality is
by its very nature directed.2 Led by the intentionality of this eidenai,
Husserl’s questioning in the reality of time thus necessarily became
a Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.3 Everything cogni-
zable and finally even the cognizing subject must become visible and
transparent for itself in consciousness.
The young Heidegger began the way of his thinking quite within
the horizon of this Husserlian a priori of correlation. But Heidegger
asks beyond Husserl for the very specific mode of being (Seinsart) of
the human being, who precisely can only be understood as that being
distinguishing itself from all other beings by its factually lived mortal
Dasein that discloses the real. In such a way, this being is — intention-
ally — “in its being . . . concerned about its very being.”4 Heidegger
explicitly ponders the access to reality that not only happens in the
pure I think of transcendental subjectivity, but in the I am of factu-
ally lived Dasein. Because of this primordial access, the fundamental
questions of philosophical thinking must become “experienceable in
factical life, able for me to experience it,” as Heidegger declares pro-
grammatically in the 1920/21 lecture course on Aristotle.5 These
questions must not be examined in their noematic content but rather
Casper Recognizing the Gift in Giving Thanks 55
in their senses of actualization and maturation that are lived in the

factual I am.6 Only by these senses does one arrive at the true ground
of the phenomenality of phenomena by way of thinking.
If one were to ask wherein lies the difference between the access
to the being of beings by way of the transcendental of ego-cogito-
cogitatum, on the one hand, and by way of the lived I am, on the
other, one would soon turn to the different character of temporality
in each. The transcendental subject, in its correlative disclosure of the
being of beings, attains being without time; thus, whatever it discloses
has the same validity for all thinkable subjects without respect to their
temporality. In this way, the “sphere of transcendental being” is dis-
closed as “monadological intersubjectivity.”7
Yet the I am of the factual Dasein gains access to being only by
being itself in time, namely by being mortal. Only as zum Tode, as
Dasein toward death, does it gain access to the intentum of its inten-
tion — the being, to which nonetheless it finds itself related to from

its very ground. It is being itself and in its being is being with other
Dasein — Dasein is concerned, is revealed to itself in the paradox of
temporality itself.8 This paradox entails that Dasein can realize itself as
a being toward death only in the postponement, only in the deferral
of its death; but precisely in doing so, Dasein really is concerned with
being [sein] in a verbal sense. Yet in this very paradox Dasein finds
itself as tasked with itself. It finds itself responding to the responsibility
for the temporality that happens by its very self. Only in this does it
achieve its authenticity. In such a way, it finds to its own self-being
[sein]. Only in a hermeneutics of facticity that proceeds in such man-
ner can a true disclosure of the being of beings take place. Being must
be disclosed in its sense of actualization and maturation; it is to be
disclosed in its whole truth.
Once one has grasped the fundamental importance of this turn
from a mere phenomenology of consciousness to a phenomenology
of the actualization of Dasein, one understands why Heidegger in
his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion (1920/21) wishes
to explore Christianity through the following thesis: “Christian
religiosity lives temporality as such.”9 But one also understands

why the interpretation of being as gift (Gabe or, as Herman Cohen
expresses it, Gebe or Gebung), on the one hand, and as an event of
thanking and thankfulness, on the other, can be fully understood in
their phenomenality only through their senses of actualization and
maturation — these two characters being constitutive for all authentic
religiosity.10
LEVINAS’S THOUGHT AS EVENT OF BEING MADE GRATEFUL
How this experience happens can best be shown in the thought

of Emmanuel Levinas, since Levinas, not unlike Heidegger and by
virtue of Heidegger’s influence, takes Husserl beyond Husserl.11 Yet,
in a manner that takes him far from Heidegger, Levinas is occupied
with the religious relation that every human being as human being
is concerned with, and in this context explicitly takes up the biblical
tradition.
According to Levinas, in all human speaking, as human speaking,
there occurs a response, in diachronic manner, that is, in a manner that
breaks proper time and thus transcends it. In this response, a human
being, as oneself, honors the “Glory of the Infinite” (OB 140–52).
All genuinely human discourse reveals itself in its very occurrence as
already in the face of the other to whom I speak in the form of solici-
tude (Bitte) and, in view of the “Glory of the Infinite” that it brings
into play, prayer (EN 7).12 Truly human speech is always already a
speaking in the face of the other who is like you, namely, a freedom
that knows itself and is his or her own end; already in the temporality
of this human event there is the intentionality of being thankful for
being. For the hermeneutics of facticity, all human speech is in the
end, and whatever else may be its content, an ethical act. It realizes
itself in need of a beyond, thanks to which it is and in the face of
which the speaker hopes to be redeemed. Every speaking has, in itself,
a latreutical [serving, ministering] character. The first and last human
question thus is not “Why is there anything at all and not nothing,”
but “Why may I be?”13
“WITHOUT PREDICATE” AND “REBIRTHING THANKFULNESS” IN ECKHART’S

THOUGHT, AND THEIR PARALLELS IN LEVINAS
Yet one can find this fundamental interpretation of human Dasein,

and by extension of being itself, in terms of gift and, as regards the
factually lived I am, also as response to the infinite Gebung beyond
human beings, already in the medieval thought of Master Eckhart. In
his Liber Benedictus, the great book of consolations for Queen Agnes
that speaks of the human fundamental situation of being-in-suffering,
Eckhart first shows that the good human is “born child and son of
goodness,” child of the goodness that is “neither created, nor made,
nor born.”14 In developing this idea, he takes up a scholastic scheme
that goes back to Plato according to which all good action originates
in the relation of the human to the good which “is not being but is
still beyond being.”15 Yet it is striking that Eckhart does not phrase
this relation using scholastic categories such as final cause or efficient

cause. Rather, he voices it as a relation of bearing, birth, and being
born or as being a father and being a son. Now in the fourth of his
recently published Carnets de captivité, Levinas notes that classical
Greece was marked by this reduction of fatherhood to the meta-
physical category of causality: “In classical philosophy fatherhood
is consumed by the notion of cause. See Aristotle. It is against this
that I direct myself in positing fatherhood as an original relation.”16
That Eckhart uses the relations of fatherhood, sonhood, or birth may
appear to contemporary philosophy as a merely metaphorical form of
expression. Because of this, the respective terms could not be included
in a Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts, though they have a place in
a Dictionary of Philosophical Metaphors.17 Perhaps the categories of
fatherhood, sonhood, bearing, and being born can become evident as
categories describing the realization of human freedom in a herme-
neutics of facticity, rather than in a systematic thinking conducted
the timelessness of transcendental subjectivity where mortal human
Dasein is reduced to one of the things themselves.
Eckhart meditates on what he regards as a lived and uncircumvent-
able relation occurring between limitless, uncreated goodness and the
good human, describing it as a relation of being given and receiv-

ing. His point of application was Luke 10:38, where the relation is
revealed as the event of “rebirthing thankfulness.”18 Eckhart reads
Luke 10:38 as follows: “Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum et mulier
quaedam, Martha nomine excepit illum in domum suam” (Jesus
entered a village, and a woman named Martha received him into her
house). According to his interpretation, the text speaks of an irreduc-
ible, originary correlation (Urkorrelation) in which the mortal human
finds the eternal uncreated güte. This grace (Güte) is approached with
all the strife of Dasein, with the intentionality of the I am. What
grounds Eckhart’s interpretation is the fundamental principle of the
Nicomachean Ethics: “the good has rightly been declared to be that
at which all things aim” — a principle widely taken up in medieval
thought.19 This intentional moving-toward-the-good can only be
thought as the mortal becoming of temporality. And in order to be
able to speak of this mortal temporality as temporality at all, Eckhart
translates the single word mulier twice: “Our Lord Jesus Christ went
into a village and was received by a virgin, who was a woman.”20 The
analysis of this intentionality that grounds the good action as actually
good first of all reveals that this relation can only be virginal because
it actualizes itself in a receptivity that does not withhold anything but
instead receives only what is absolutely good in itself and which thus
can be unconditionally affirmed.
One can easily find, or so it seems to me, a parallel to this insight
in the thought of Levinas, where he proposes a “passivity more pas-
sive than any passivity antithetical to activity” and which founds every
realization of “being hostage for the other.”21 To use Kant’s words,
what is seized in a good act must be of categorical, not of hypotheti-
cal character.22 The relation to the unconditioned good must thus be
one âne eigenschaft (without predicate, or perhaps property); it must
be such that I do not intend me in my arbitrary and dependent proj-
ects but what is actual in and from itself and in that sense is uncondi-
tionally good.23 Thus, the actual good reveals itself as unconditioned
gift; and this gift, because of its unconditionality, is true throughout

time, which is also to say independently of me.24
A number of European languages contain remarkable traces of
this knowledge of the presuppositionless character of the good as the
actual good and as unconditioned gift. When someone who receives
a gift thanks the person who gave this gift to him, the giver may
answer “Aber ich bitte Sie” or “Keine Ursache” to express that the
giving actually happened out of mere benevolence and not for a quid
pro quo (do ut des). As being given just for the sake of giving, the gift
had no other cause than itself. It was given purely for the sake of itself
and not in order to oblige the other to a specific end.25 Thus, the gift
proved a don du rien (gift of nothing) — all the greater and purer that
it was.26 Similarly, in Beethoven’s Fidelio the spouse, actively willing
to give her life for her husband, answers his question, “What have
you done for me?” by saying “Nothing, nothing my Florestan.”27
This sense of nothing can be seen in various languages when the giver
of a gift properly responds to being thanked by saying “de rien” in
French, “di niente” in Italian, and “de nada” in Spanish. One may
also think of the response in English: “You are welcome” signifies
a wish to express that the gift was not given with the intention of
receiving a gift in return, but purely for the sake of the gift.28
To the extent that the gift is a pure gift, it has no other ground than
itself. It is given out of nothing else than out of finite preconditions.
It is given in such a way that, in Eckhart’s conception, the giver shows
himself or herself as “ein mensche . . . der von allem fremden bilden
ledic ist, also ledic, als er was, dô er niht enwas” (a human free of all
alien image, as he was when he was not).29 The human being who
stands in a relation to the true good must thus be a purely receptive
human: a juncfrouwe, a virgin. Yet this human is a part of this rela-
tion as one who is born by the nameless and unique giver of “Every
good gift and every perfect gift” (James 1:17). The human is in an
immediate relation to the “Glory of the Infinite,” which proves to be
a relation of responsive gratitude (antwortendes Sich-Verdankens).
For the one who “without predicate” receives this pure gift in all
good gifts, this relation cannot remain a relation of knowledge only.
Since a human’s own mortal being [sein] is a mortal-temporal actu-
alization, this being will have to be given in testimony if it really is
to be. In other words: the good gift only becomes a good gift if it
is received not only in a knowledge of pure noema, but rather in a
thankfulness actualized in the whole factual Dasein. Only in thanking
is the gift wholly there as gift. Wit is wholly truthful, sincere thanking
is never merely a verbal expression such as “thank you” from which
I could always take a distance — as if it were merely a movement of
my tongue. Rather, the true expression of gratitude (Danksagen) can
only be a gratias agere, a thanking from the heart, that is a thanking
happening in the whole I am. Only in such thanking is the gift as gift
fully recognized in what it is. In German, we rightly say that some-
one “sich erkenntlich zeigt” (someone recognizes himself being given
to).30 Such cognition does not happen in the mere seeing of a noema.
Rather, it is an act actualized by the whole Dasein.
Thus, Eckhart can insist that the pure gift to which one can only
relate while being purely receptive, virginal, also comes to its full
truth only where the gift bears fruit in the “rebirthing thankfulness”
of the human being (“Nun gebt acht und seht genau zu! Wenn nun
der Mensch immerfort Jungfrau wäre, so käme keine Frucht von
ihm. Soll er fruchtbar werden, so ist es notwendig dass er Weib sei”).
The term Weib, meaning woman or wife, “is the most noble name
one give to a soul, and it is much nobler than ‘virgin.’ ”31 Only in
this responsive event, in which the human recognizes himself as being
given a gift that he is for himself and that is everything given to him,
does the meaning of being gift achieve itself: “since the becoming
fruitful [Fruchtbarwerden] of the gift, only that is thankfulness for the
gift, and in this the spirit [Geist] is a woman in the rebirthing thank-
fulness.”32 In this phrase, the meaning of wider- in the Middle High
German verb widerbern is not the sense of “again,” but of “against,”
of “over and against,” of “back again,” as the end of the sentence
shows: “dâ er gote widergebirt Jêsum in daz veterliche herze” (when
he gives birth again to Jesus in the fatherly heart).33
THE FRUITFULNESS OF A FREEDOM THAT IS NOT ONLY FORMAL: “PRIVILEGED HETERONOMY”
This responsive relation, in which being in its plenitude is under-

stood and testified as gift, is open to a thinking that understands itself
as a hermeneutics of the facticity of mortal human Dasein. It can be
accessed by a thinking that earnestly engages with the mortal-temporal
I am as such. This thinking resolves the dilemma that ensues from
the ahistorical, and thus merely formal and incomplete, understanding
of freedom that bars thinking from access to an originary religious
interpretation of human Dasein — I mean the dilemma of heteronomy
and autonomy with regard to the actualization of human freedom.
Kant has rightly shown that a free will can only be an autonomous
will that is not determined by anything except itself. Such responsi-
bility comprises the dignity of every human being. Only those acts
can be moral acts in which I determine myself as myself and thus
act autonomously and not heteronomously, which is to say without

being determined by something alien (without being determined, for
example, only by the law of nature). Yet this does not exclude that
I let myself be determined by that which concerns me as the good
as such, and indeed seize it as a responsible human. Here, Levinas
has corrected the incomplete understanding of Kant and coined the
term of a “privileged heteronomy” that does not violate freedom
but rather installs it as such in its fulfilled actualization (TI 88; see
302–04).34 Only in such a way, freedom, merely formally understood
as autonomy comes to its factual fulfillment, realized in a mortal,
historical human Dasein.35
Once one has understood this, the fact in the dignity of the other
human, as intangible other, there is an infinite and unconditional
demand which obliges me, no longer contradicts the autonomous
essence of my freedom. Rather, this demand becomes the decisive
challenge for freedom and the chance of its concrete fulfillment. With
this insight into the noncontradiction between the autonomy of free-
dom and its determination by the unconditional and infinite good
that occurs in being invited by the other human, the temporal-mortal
Dasein, “in its being . . . concerned about its very being,” must realize
that it does not owe itself to itself, but is given itself. It can only
understand itself as the unconditional gift. Yet this gift as gift comes
to its full being only in being thankful for the gift. Only in the respon-
sible being itself of mortal-temporal Dasein does the gift reach its
saturated phenomenality.
Dasein, in its factually lived historical reality, is bound to a decision.
Dasein might try to uphold itself thanklessly in an isolated and abso-
lute conatus essendi. Yet if it overcomes this temptation and arrives at
the fundamental truth of its being itself given to itself, Dasein gains
the charis (grace) of being allowed to be in the eu-charistia lived in
and as responsibility and in such a way gains its unconditioned and
infinite concretion.36 Dasein gains its fully fulfilled being in wider-
bernden dankbaerkeit. In this way it becomes itself a fecund being.
But such fecundity is the true measure of the mortal human life in the
abundance revealed to it in the event of responding.
“BEING HOSTAGE FOR THE OTHER” AND THE CARNETS DE CAPTIVITÉ
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas has explored this fundamental

insight into a fecundity that is both chosen and challenged in a
“privileged heteronomy” of the I am (TI 267–70, 300–01). The
Carnets de captivité, published in November 2009 from his Nach-
lass, shed new light on how the breakthrough to this fundamental
insight occurred. The Carnets consist of seven notebooks contain-
ing notes taken by Levinas from 1940–45 while being imprisoned
in a special camp for Jewish prisoners of war. Levinas hints that he
tried to understand these years of imprisonment which led him to
the very limit of his existence as he was burdened with an epoché,
an epoché radically calling for the I am, for his own being.37 It was
an event that took from him the many things, which his former life
consisted of and thus radically bracketed everything that his I am
was not actually able to found. The situation of imprisonment threw
him back in an existential epoché unto the last, leaving him naked,
reduced solely to his I am.
Yet what founded this I am in such a way that there was no way
beyond? Levinas found it in the indebtedness of his I am. This
indebtedness revealed itself for him as the unsurpassable original rela-
tion founding his I am and preceding all ethical or moral guilt — and
in fact such guilt can only be thought of in the light of this origi-
nal relation. One may be tempted to find in this situation of being
indebted a close approach to Heidegger’s notion of Schuld.38 Dasein,
as that being that is “in its being . . . concerned about its very being”
is precisely in such relation of indebtedness in fundamental ontol-
ogy. Dasein is indebted to itself to be authentic. But as distinct from
such an analysis of Dasein to which one rightly or wrongly limits the
Heidegger of Being and Time, Levinas’s Carnets de captivité sees a
deeper, more fundamental founding of the I am, and considers that
the original situation in which I am given myself only for a certain
time reveals the relation of indebtedness — namely, when I try to
begin something that is irrevocably mine: “solitude, responsible for

the whole universe.”39 But this indebtedness means that I am in a
relation to the other that can only happen in a disruption of time, in
an interval. It is remarkable how often in his Carnets, Levinas uses the
topos of felix culpa (which he understands in a pre-Christian man-
ner),40 in order to voice what originally makes me myself in my I am.
I am given myself as a task and burden; this is what I am in original
givenness. And the provocation by this being given as the task that I
am in my I am for myself leads me from the timeless question about
my Being to the question of my salvation. With the phrase “Salut n’est
pas l’être,” Levinas sharply dismisses any understanding of Dasein by
which Dasein would be interpreted as something that is only because
of its own conatus essendi and thus thanks only itself. Rather, the I am
is truly founded in that much is at stake in the historical actualization
of my being-a-task-for-myself: my salvation, the salvation of myself
and of all human beings.
I am a task for myself in my being and insofar as I am indebted in
a fundamental and premoral sense. This indebtedness makes up my
I am. Yet it places me, giving itself originally; in my temporalization
as moral, I am always in a relation to another who “is like you”

(Lev. 19:18).41 And with this, I find myself in this relation invited,
summoned by the abyssal infinite becoming of salvation, itself ungrasp-
able by my power (as solely my power); I am summoned by the “Glory
of the Infinite.” By virtue of the potentiality of my own conatus essen-
di, I cannot unify this double relation of indebtedness and salvation.
Yet in such a way, by approaching and concerning me, the infinite
salvation, at once calling myself in my indebtedness and far exceed-
ing but also orienting my potentiality, proves to be what in the very
end is my I am. This unconditioned salvation can only be spoken of
prophetically, in such a way that language, in its potential to become
itself in an event (Sich-ereignen), still exceeds its own potential for
actuality, which is to say for presence. In such “accomplishment,” the
actualization of its speech, the I am is thankful; it is only due to what
it thanks, is by being chosen.42 By this election, the I am shows itself
as stigmatized. Those who are thankful in their I am, finds themselves
chosen to be a companion of the servant of the God of whom the
prophet Isaiah sings.43 In this call, Levinas sees what unites Jews and
Christians in their I am.44 In “rebirthing thankfulness” responding to
this call, the temporal Dasein of Jews and Christians bears fruit.
N OTES TO C ASPER , “R ECOGNIZING THE G IFT IN G IVING T HANKS “

1. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 166.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a21.
3. The text is derived from a lecture Husserl gave in 1904/05 and was
edited by Martin Heidegger in cooperation with Edith Stein in the Jahrbuch für
Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1928. A second edition appeared
with Niemeyer in Tübingen in 1980; the full volume and its handwritten appen-
dices can be found in vol. X of Husserliana and its English translation: Husserl,
On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans.
John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), 10.
5. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into
Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001), 114–15. See also p. 130: “What this questioning
intends to understand is precisely that which Ego-metaphysics and egoic idealim
of the most varied gradations cannot let appear, on account of their preconcep-
tion: the question of the sense of the ‘am.’” Also see the appendix entitled “The
Ontological Sense of the ‘Am’” (132–35).
6. See ibid., 25, 40–41; also Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens,
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 60, ed. Claudius Strube (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1995), 248.
7. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 89.
8. In Being and Time, Heidegger readily understands Dasein as Mitdasein,
as Dasein with others. It is precisely because of this that he is concerned with the
authentic being itself of Dasein. See for example Martin Heidegger, Einleitung
in die Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 27, ed. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-
Speidel (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), 325: “Dasein must be able to
be essential itself . . . if its is to know itself as being carried and led by an other, if it
is to be able to open itself up for the being-there with others, if it is to be able to
invest itself for others.” (Dasein muss wesenhaft es selbst sein können . . . wenn es
sich getragen und geführt wissen will durch ein anderes, wenn es sich soll öffnen
können für Mitdasein der Anderen, wenn es sich soll einsetzen für Andere.)
9. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 80: “Die christliche
Religiosität lebt die Zeitlichkeit als solche”; see also ibid., 82, 104, 116.
10. Already in 1917, Hermann Cohen, as the last article of his “Einheit oder
Einzigkeit Gottes” was about to go to print, searched for a German expression
for the Jewish term for revelation, “Mathan Thora” (Gift of the Thora) in order
to twist it free from its undue objectivization so as to interpret it as an event: “But
Mathan is not Mathana. It should thus be allowed to translate, if this would
be a usual way to use this word: die Gebe, die Gebung . . . a self-giving of God,
as he gives himself in everything, that comes from him.” (Mathan aber ist nicht
Mathana. Es müsste also übersetzt werden dürfen, wenn dieser Wortgebrauch
üblich wäre: die Gebe, die Gebung . . . ein Sich-Geben Gottes, wie er sich in
allem gibt, was von ihm ausgeht.) Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften (Berlin:
Schwetschke, 1924), 96–97.
11. See Bernhard Casper, Angesichts des Anderen. Emmanuel Levinas.
Elemente seines Denkens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), 161–74.
12. On this fundamental trait of the human condition in Rosenzweig and
Ebner see Bernhard Casper, Das dialogische Denken: Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand
Ebner und Martin Buber, 2nd edition (Freiburg: Alber, 2002). On Ferdinand
Ebner see also: Ferdinand Ebner, Schriften, ed. Franz Seyr II (München: Kösel,
1963), 293: “all being is conceived as gift, that is in its last ground to say: as
grace” (wird alles Sein als Gabe. d.h. im letzten Grunde als Gnade begriffen);
ibid., 301: “That all being is grace” (Dass alles Sein Gnade ist).
13. Levinas commented on his relation to Heidegger in these terms during
a 1981 interview with me. See Bernhard Casper, “El rostro, la primogenitura y
la fecondidad. Dialogo con Emmanuel Levinas el 11 de junio 1981 en Paris,”
Revista de Filosofia 107 (2003): 19–28.
14. Meister Eckhart, Werke, ed. Niklaus Largier (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1993), 2:234/35: “Die Gutheit ist weder geschaffen noch gemacht noch
geboren; jedoch ist sie gebärend und gebiert den Guten, und der Gute, insoweit
er gut ist, ist ungemacht und ungeschaffen und doch geborenes Kind und Sohn
der Gutheit.” (diu güete enist noch geschaffen noch gemachet noch geborn; mêr
si ist gebernde und gebirt den guoten, und der guote, als verre sô er guot ist, ist
ungeamachet und ungeschaffen und doch geborn kint und sun der güete.)
15. Plato, Republic 509b: “ouk ousias ontos tou agathou all’eti epekeinas tes
ousias.”
16. Levinas, Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, Oeuvres, vol. 1, ed.
Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 129: “Dans la phi-
losophie classique la paternité est épuisé par la notion [de] cause. Voir Aristote.
C’est contre cela que je m’élève en posant la paternité comme une relation origi-
nelle.” On the relation of fatherhood as a category originally given, also see ibid.,
141, 382, 450.
17. The Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–
2007) lacks the terms fatherhood, sonhood, bearing (Gebären), and being born
(Geborenwerden). Yet the Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern, ed. Ralf
Konersmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007) includes
an article “Gebären” (bearing) by Christian Begemann, 121–34. However, this
article neglects the Middle Ages completely and engages in no way with the cor-
relative thinking of Meister Eckhart.
18. Eckhart, Werke, 2:26/27: “wiedergebärende Dankbarkeit” (widerbern-
den dankbærkeit).
19. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a3: “agathon hou pant’ephietai.”
Translation by W. D. Ross. See Bernhard Welte, “Meister Eckhart als Aristote-
liker,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Bernhard Casper (Freiburg: Herder,
2006–09), 2:219–31.
20. Eckhart, Werke, 1:25: “Unser Herr Jesus Christus ging hinauf in ein
Burgstädtchen und ward empfangen von einer Jungfrau, die ein Weib war.”
21. Levinas, En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: PUF,
1974), 156. On this see Casper, Angesichts des Anderen, 27–32.
22. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and
ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25–27.
23. Eckhart, Werke, 1:24.
24. The convertibility of bonum and verum in medieval thought is rooted here.
25. Such reciprocal obligation in the service of specific intentions — today,
one might think of commercial giveaways — can always be part of the praxis of
giving. These are described by sociology. Marcel Mauss has brilliantly done so in
his sociological and ethnological “Essai sur le don” (1924).
26. See Jean Duvignand, Le don du rien. Essai d’anthropologie de la fête (Paris:
Stock, 1977).
27. Act 2, scene 5: “Was hast Du für mich getan? — Nichts, nichts, mein
Florestan.” I follow the text of the famous interpretation of Fidelio in the Bavarian
State Opera House in 1957 directed by Ferenc Friscay.
28. In relation to the phenomenology of language in general, see Casper,
Angesichts des Anderen, 119–31.
29. Eckhart, Werke, 1:24.
30. French: revaloir qc à qn; Italian: mostrarsi riconoscente.
31. Eckhart, Werke, 1:26/27: “‘Weib’ ist der edelste Name, den man der
Seele zulegen kann, und ist viel edler als ‘Jungfrau’” (Wip ist daz edelste wort,
daz man der sêle zuo gesprochen mac, und ist vil edeler dan juncvrouwe).
32. Eckhart, Werke, 1:26/27: “denn Fruchtbarwerden der Gabe, das allein
ist Dankbarkeit für die Gabe, und da ist der Geist Weib in der wiedergebärenden
Dankbarkeit” (wan vruhtbærkeit der gâbe daz ist aleine dankbærkeit der gâbe,
und dâ ist der geist ein wip in der widerbernden dankbærkeit).
33. Eckhart, Werke, 1:26/27: “wo er Jesum wiedergebiert in Gottes väterli-
ches Herz” (dâ er gote widergebirt Jêsum in daz veterliche herze). The French
Eckhart scholars Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière thus translate
“widerbernde dankbaerkeit” as “the gratitude that begets in return” (la grati-
tude, qui engendre en retour). Jarczyk and Labarrière, Maitre Eckhart. L’étincelle
de l’âme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 43. Rendering the expression in German
as “wiedergebärende Dankbarkeit,” though in accordance with today’s orthogra-
phy, brings with it the danger that “wieder” is understood solely in the sense of
“again.” On this, see the long list of word formations using the prefix wider- in
Mathias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Taschenwörterbuch (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1992),
317ff., such as “wider-minne: gegenliebe” (responsive love).
34. For a fundamental reflection on the importance of freedom as purely
formal is found in a central passage of Levinas’s thought, see Levinas, Carnets
de captivité, 343. Recently, Gerold Prauss has shown that an understanding of
freedom as purely formal autonomy does not do justice to the whole and just
understanding of freedom in Kant. See his Moral und Recht im Staat nach Kant
und Hegel (Freiburg: Alber, 2008).
35. See Bernhard Casper, “Die Determination der Freiheit,” Rivista di
Filosofia 68–69 (2008): 141–52; also in Forum 49 (2008): 7–17.
36. On the determination of the absolute and infinite concretion see Welte,
Gesammelte Schriften, 1:269–72, 4:182–89.
37. See the editor’s introduction to the Carnets de captivité, 23–24; also in
the text p. 70, as well as the equation of the phenomenological reduction to
the Sabbath: “To break with history is to place oneself in history” (Interrompre
l’histoire, c’est se situer dans l’histoire) (59, 73).
38. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 258–66.
39. Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 53: “solitude, responsable de l’univers tout
entier.” See also the expression made by Father Zossima’s ailing brother, Markel,
in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to which Levinas later makes frequent
reference: “Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the
others.” On this, see Bernhard Casper, Angesichts des Anderen, 72.
40. See Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 72, 81–82.
41. In the sermons of Eckhart one finds the wonderful word “ebenmensch”
(sameman) for this idea. See Eckhart, Werke, 1:76. My translation follows the
insight of Rosenzweig and Buber in their German translation of the scripture,
namely that the Hebraic “kamoka [can] only refer to a noun, not to a verb, . . . and
thus ‘love-kamoka’ (he is like you) means: he also is created in the image of God”
(kamoka [kann sich] nur auf ein Substantiv beziehen nicht auf ein Verb, . . . und
so bedeutet “liebe-kamoka” (er ist wie du), denn auch er ist im Bilde Gottes
geschaffen). Franz Rosenzweig, Sprachdenken. Arbeitspapiere zur Verdeutschung
der Schrift, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, 2 (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984), 140.
Kamoka can thus not be used adverbially as in the current German translations
“Love your neighbor as (you love) thyself.” Consequently, Rosenzweig and
Buber translate “Liebe deinen Genossen / dir gleich” as “Love your neighbor /
who is like you.” Cohen repeatedly uses this translation, for example in the pref-
ace to Der Nächste (Berlin: Schocken, 1935).
42. Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 98, 119: “accomplissement.” It is peculiar
which important role this determination, which reminds of the sense of actualiza-
tion and maturation in early Heidegger, plays in the Carnets: “divine choice that
might be redemption” (élection divine qui est peut-être le salut) (68).
43. See Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 114. Levinas later repeatedly referred to
the Servant Songs (Isaiah 53) as the biblical epitome of his thinking.
44. On the essence of Christianity “whereby in love one suffers the suffer-
ing of the other,” see Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 109. Using the abbrevia-
tions J and C, Levinas repeatedly brings together Judaism and Christianity in the
Carnets.
A Wandering Dog as the “Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”:
Revisiting the Debate on Levinas’s Supposed
Antinaturalistic Humanism
Claudia Welz

A Wandering Dog as
the “Last Kantian
in Nazi Germany”
Revisiting the Debate on Levinas’s
Supposed Antinaturalistic Humanism
Claudia Welz
L
evinas has time and again been accused of
advertising an anthropocentric and antinatural-

istic form of humanism. Levinas’s critics see a
troubling ethical blind spot in Levinas’s savage characterization of
the natural, which allegedly leads Levinas to misconstrue the relation
between the human and animal realms as a radical incommensurabil-
ity. Further, his critics doubt that Levinas’s move against Heidegger
makes sense, namely to take ethics as rst philosophy and to set it
against ontology.
In this essay, I will revisit the debate about Levinas’s supposed
antinaturalistic humanism. For this purpose, I will rst outline the
counter-arguments put forward against Levinas and then analyze one
of his essays, which has been interpreted in line with the critique
of his position, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” On the
basis of this analysis, I will present some problems with a naturalistic
understanding of human nature and clarify in what respect Levinas’s
humanism is antinaturalistic. Thereafter, Levinas’s reception and
modication of Kant’s heritage will come into focus. Finally, I will
point to problems with Levinas’s account and, in a critical appraisal
65
of it, I will explore the ethical dilemmas of which the hyperbolic for-
mulations in Levinas’s later writings are symptomatic.
THE CRITIQUE AGAINST LEVINAS
The critique directed against Levinas leads to an alternative pro-

posal that has been unfolded by Bob Plant in his book on Wittgenstein
and Levinas.1 Plant asks, would it not be more adequate to under-
stand ethics as an extension of primitive, natural reactions — rather
than opposing ethics and ontology and understanding one’s being-
for-others as rupturing the natural drive for self-preservation? The
counterarguments put forward against Levinas can be summarized as
follows: (1) On matters pertaining to birth, sex, suffering and death,
the animal’s form of life is not radically different from the human;
(2) Levinas reiterates traditional philosophical prejudices concerning
the dignity of man as zóon lógon échon — but there is no reason to
attribute any more ethical weight to rationality and language-use than
to those behaviors upon which the latter are founded; (3) Levinas’s
assumption that the realm of the natural is saturated with an egoistic
instinct of life is wrong, since it is also a natural reaction to tend and
treat the part that hurts when someone else is in pain. Thus, the natu-
ral itself proves appropriate to the ethical task.
This critical conclusion, which is turned against Levinas, comes
much closer to Levinas’s own position than the above-mentioned
criticism wants to make us believe. This can be demonstrated with
reference to Levinas’s essay on “The Name of a Dog, or Natural
Rights” in Difcult Freedom (DF 151–53).
LEVINAS’S ESSAY ON “THE NAME OF A DOG, OR NATURAL RIGHTS”
In this essay, Levinas connects an exegesis of two Bible verses with

memories of his internment in a Nazi POW camp where he and other
French prisoners were graced with regular visits from a wandering
dog. The other human beings, those who were free, the men who
Welz A Wandering Dog as the “Last Kantian in Nazi Germany” 67
had dealings with the prisoners, and the children and women passing
by, viewed the prisoners as subhuman. Levinas felt that the prisoners
were being stripped of their human skin: “we were no longer part
of the world. . . . We were beings entrapped in their species; despite
all their vocabulary, beings without language.” (DF 153) For the
prisoners, the question was how they could deliver a message about
their humanity that “will come across as anything other than monkey
talk.” And then, about halfway through their long captivity, for a few
short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog
entered their lives. He would appear at morning assembly and was
waiting for them as they returned, jumping up and down and bark-
ing in delight. The prisoners called him Bobby. For this “cherished
dog,” there was no doubt that they were men. According to Levinas,
this dog was “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain
needed to universalize maxims and drives” (ibid.).
Levinas’s phrasing contains two insights: First, under the condition
of war, it was a dog — not human beings — living up to the absolute
and unconditional requirement that lies in Kant’s categorical impera-
tive. Second, the categorical imperative that prescribes to “act only
according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that
it should become a universal law”2 is, in Kant, derived from what he
calls pure practical reason, which determines what ought to be done
without reference to empirical contingent factors. However, those
creatures that are endowed with reason do not necessarily use their
capacity to fulll the requirement captured by the categorical impera-
tive. In a sense, the dog Bobby showed himself to be more humane
than the human beings.
Levinas describes Bobby as a descendant of the dogs of Egypt
mentioned in the Bible, the dogs that attested to the “dignity” of
the enslaved Israelites (DF 152). Levinas here refers to Exodus 11:7,
where Israel’s release from slavery is announced. In the fatal night
of the death of the rst-born of Egypt, there will be a loud wailing
throughout Egypt, but among the Israelites not a dog shall growl at
any man or animal. On Levinas’s view, the dogs of Egypt not just
witnessed how the slaves henceforth followed “the most high Voice,
the most free path” and thereby became a “gure of humanity” and
of freedom emancipated from servitude; but also, with “neither eth-
ics nor logos,” the dogs themselves, through their unusual behavior,
attested to the dignity of the person. The English translation, which
speaks of “the dignity of its person” (ibid.), as if the dog as species
would have attested particularly to its own dignity in that night, is
mistaken. The French original does not mention any person in par-
ticular: “le chien va attester la dignité de la personne” (DL 233).
Hence, the most reasonable interpretation is that the dog attested to
the dignity of personhood as such. Personhood can be embodied by
human beings; whether or not it can also be embodied by animals
must remain an open question. However, the fact that Levinas calls
the dog “the friend of man” (ibid.) offers an argument in favor of the
assumption that he here takes the dog as attesting to the dignity of
the human person. Yet, this interpretation might be challenged by his
exclamation, “There is a transcendence in the animal!” (ibid.). It is
not entirely clear how transcendence is to be understood in this con-
text. It could be understood in the sense that animality points beyond
itself to humanity, or in the sense that animals, too, refer to the trace
of the divine in fellow creatures.
Levinas discovers a new meaning also in the verse he interprets
rst, namely Exodus 22:31, which is quoted at the beginning of his
essay. This verse commands not to eat any esh that is torn by the
beasts in the eld and ends with the demand that “you shall cast it to
the dogs.” Levinas rejects an allegorical reading that takes the name
of a dog in the gurative sense, be it as an underdog who is given
the dirtiest work and a dog’s life (cf. DF 151), or as “the one who is
a wolf [loup] under his dogged faithfulness, and thirsts after blood”
(152). Instead, Levinas follows the hermeneutics of the talmudic
Doctors and takes the dog as a dog — literally. About this dog, he
writes, “Beyond all scruples, by virtue of its happy nature and direct
thoughts, the dog transforms all this esh cast to it in the eld into
good esh” (ibid.). As Levinas puts it, this hermeneutics “allows itself
to explain the paradox of a pure nature leading to rights” (ibid.). But
whose rights is he talking about? At rst sight, it seems as if he were
talking about the natural rights of the dog because he states: “This
feast is its right” (ibid.). However, at second sight this interpretation
becomes dubious because the so-called feast has extremely negative
connotations for Levinas and is described in terms reminding of the
human world. Levinas comments that the “feast” suggests “the hor-
rors of war” and makes “one lose one’s appetite” (151). Yet, the
dog’s right to participate in this bloody feast paves the way for the
human right not to indulge in it. Thus, the difference in nature leads
to different rights. Nonetheless, human beings do not always act in
accordance with their natural rights. In acting just like beasts or in
being treated like a dog by others, humans can come to forget their
privilege. The new meaning that Levinas nds in the verse about the
esh to be cast to the dogs is expressed in the statement, “It [the
verse] reminds us of the debt that is always open” (152). Again, one
could ask: whose debt is he talking about?
The dogs of Egypt have shown their solidarity with the human slaves
and therein acknowledged them as their masters. In the same vein,
Bobby delivered the message about the humanity of the prisoners — a
message which they themselves could not convey. Since the dogs are
in this text characterized as creatures that naturally do the right thing,
Levinas in all probability is not talking about their debt, but rather
about our debt. He does not delimit the debt in any sense, and he
does not determine to whom we are indebted. However, it would
be in line with the text to say that we are indebted to acknowledge
the dignity of the person, and that this debt is always open because
human beings have the option not to respect human rights and not
to recognize that which should be natural for them. Yet, if this is the
case, how are we to speak of human nature?
PROBLEMS WITH A NATURALISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE
So far, we have been confronted with a certain ambiguity inherent

in animal nature. On the one hand, wild animals can devour each
other; on the other hand, they can take care for conspecics that are
wounded. The case of the so-called animal rationale is still more
complicated. Its rational nature cannot inhibit irrationality. To put it
paradoxically: unnatural conduct seems to be grounded precisely in
human nature. For humans, the unnatural can become natural — at
least in the sense of a habitual second nature. In the best case, this
second nature manifests itself in cultural achievements; in the worst
case, it manifests itself in brutish behavior. Human beings can do
something with their nature. Strictly speaking, they cannot avoid
doing something with their nature. From the very start, they have to
relate to how they are — and thereby, they become something differ-
ent. However, if their being is only in becoming, human nature is not
xed or self-evident. Therefore, the reference to human nature does
not explain anything. It raises more questions than it answers. Now,
if human nature is not predetermined, which rst of all allows for
human self-determination, what does it mean to oppose a naturalistic
understanding of human nature to Levinas’s supposed antinaturalistic
humanism? How are we to conceive of naturalism in regard to human
nature?
Let us rst look at the dictionary denition of naturalism. The
author of the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, David
Papineau, distinguishes between ontological and methodological
naturalism. While ontological naturalism asserts that reality has no
place for supernatural entities, methodological naturalism claims gen-
eral authority for a certain way of investigating reality, namely for the
natural sciences.3 This twofold denition rules out two approaches to
human nature. First, it rules out references to God in order to explain
the origin, condition or destination of human beings. Although
hardly any theologian today would take God as an entity among
others that can be used as a stopgap to ll in the holes in scientic
explanations, which steals the thunder of ontological naturalism, a

theological approach is nonetheless ruled out at least by method-
ological naturalism. This is due to the fact that, even if God is taken
as natura naturans, as Spinoza suggested, God’s presence to or in
the world will never be identiable, let alone measurable, by the natu-
ral sciences. Second, the above-mentioned denition of naturalism
rules out all philosophical approaches to human nature that have a
normative dimension. This is due to the fact that empirical sciences
can only establish descriptive ndings. Accordingly, Barry Stroud has
pointed out, “Naturalism is widely understood to imply that no eval-
uative states of affairs or properties are part of the world of nature.”4
However, this raises the following question: “If the goodness or other
evaluative aspect of something is not a ‘natural’ quality of it, what
exactly is a natural quality?”5 Stroud then argues: If a natural quality
is nothing more than a property with which it is the business of the
natural sciences to deal, then the famous naturalistic fallacy would be
simply the attempt to replace ethics by one of the natural sciences.
Nonnaturalism in ethics would then be nothing more than the view
that ethics is not one of the natural sciences.
This conclusion claries that methodological naturalism cannot
account for human nature if human nature cannot be reduced to phys-
iological processes and if the human possibility of self-determination
cannot be reduced to causal chains. In other words, if human
responses can involve reasons and thus cannot be explained com-
pletely with reference to factors or mechanisms that control human
behavior subpersonally so that counter-intuitive thoughts, decisions
and actions would be impossible, then a naturalistic understanding of
human nature remains dissatisfactory.
IN WHAT RESPECT IS LEVINAS’S HUMANISM ANTINATURALISTIC?
The next question is in what respect Levinas’s humanism is ‘anti-

naturalistic. It is striking that Levinas’s critics are far from defend-
ing methodological naturalism. It might be, though, that Plant’s
suggestion to rediscover the animal in the other person’s eyes, where

Levinas discerns a spark of the divine,6 is made in defense of onto-
logical naturalism. Yet, if this is the case, it is not made explicit. I
must admit that I am not convinced by Plant’s argumentation. His
suggestion is based on the idea that the vulnerability attributed to
the face of the other lies not in the humanity, but in the animality of
the other. Plant claims that pure animality “is pure trust, faith and
obedience to the demands of another who is absolute authority.”7
This claim becomes implausible already in regard to the animality of
cats. They do not have a master whom they obey, they have human
staff . . . Joking aside, one should not underestimate the vulnerability
that appertains to humans in particular. They are vulnerable not just
in the sense that they are bodily beings. In addition, they are sus-
ceptible to verbal insults that challenge both self-respect and social
recognition.
But what about Plant’s explicit critique directed against Levinas’s
alleged “inhospitality” toward the nonhuman animal — is this critique
justied?8 As my interpretation of Levinas’s essay on “The Name of
a Dog, or Natural Rights” has shown, nothing in the essay supports
Plant’s claim that Bobby “is here celebrated only as a hollow coun-
terfeit of the fully ‘human,’ ” and nothing supports John Llewelyn’s
claim that it is crucial for Levinas’s account “whether Bobby merely
barks or whether in doing so he can say Bonjour.”9 Notice that
Levinas’s essay was rst published in French with the title “Celui qui
ne peut se server des mots” (1975). As we have seen, in Levinas’s
essay it is not just the dog that cannot make use of words, but also the
French prisoners of war in Germany. However, while Bobby’s body
language was sufcient for communication, the silence forced upon
the Frenchmen challenged their sense of being human (or at least
their sense of being treated as humans). Levinas is not interested in
turning the dog into a human being. The cherished dog is welcome
as a dog. The problem is, rather, that the human beings are not truly
human when depriving other human beings of their human rights.
In sum: the claims that Levinas’s humanism is antinaturalistic in the

sense that it disregards nonhuman animals are absurd. These claims
are based on a misreading of the essay, which tries to harmonize it
with quotes from other texts by Levinas. These other texts concern
another question, namely the question of whether or in how far ethics
can be grounded on human nature. If this is not possible, ethics must
countervail human nature and, in this sense, be antinaturalistic. The
answer to the question depends on the evaluation of human nature.
LEVINAS’S KANTIAN HERITAGE: HUMAN NATURE PREDISPOSED TO THE GOOD BUT INCLINED TO EVIL
The problem that human nature cannot without reservation be

evaluated as good is an age-old problem that questions the naïve claim
that the natural itself proves appropriate to the ethical task. Levinas
was well-acquainted with Kant’s attempt to deal with this problem.
Before examining how Levinas transforms Kant’s approach, let me

briey recall the Kantian heritage. In his book Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793, 1794), Kant characterizes human
nature in three ways: First, he mentions formal requirements. The
natural is that which is gattungsmäßig, that is, that which belongs
to the species. In this particular case, Kant speaks of the human spe-
cies. The natural belongs to this species as a whole, universally, and is
present already at birth.10 Second, Kant mentions content-related fea-
tures that are in a certain tension with each other. On the one hand,
he refers to the original predisposition (Anlage) toward the good
in human nature. Thus understood, the good is within the range of
human possibilities and can be achieved naturally.11 On the other
hand, Kant refers to the propensity or inclination (Hang) toward evil
that can be innate, but must nonetheless be considered as brought
upon the human beings by themselves.12 Hence, human nature is
evaluated in an ambiguous way. It has the potential for the realization
of good and evil alike.
What is it, then, that tips the scales? Apparently, it cannot be human
nature itself as it is pregiven to us. Rather, it must be our way of relat-
ing to our natural predispositions and propensities. We can develop
ourselves in one or another direction, depending on what we wish to
cultivate and how we wish to educate ourselves. Yet, the capability
of relating to that which is pregiven and to transform it is not just a
crucial feature of human culture. Rather, this capability characterizes
human nature itself. Human culture expresses human nature. For this
reason, the former is as ambiguous as the latter. The natural itself
opens a space of possibilities. This raises another question: What is it
that allows human beings to relate to themselves and to choose how
to behave? Which role is it that freedom plays here?
For the third characterization of human nature, in clarifying the
relation between human nature and freedom, Kant comes to the con-
clusion that human nature is identical with human freedom because
otherwise, the human being could not be accountable for good or
bad acts.13 If human beings are to be seen as responsible agents who
can use or misuse the naturally determined maneuvering-room within
which they move, decide, and act, human nature must be equated with
human freedom. How, then, is human freedom to be understood?
Kant denes freedom as absolute spontaneity.14 This implies that
the agent can begin something on his or her own and be the sover-
eign of his or her deeds. It is the agent who controls what the agent
does. Further, freedom is dened as autonomy. Autonomy is the
quality by which one gives laws to oneself. The autonomous agent,
and no one else, is the legislator setting down the moral laws, rules,
and principles of action. In addition, freedom involves the power
of execution, the power to carry out what one intends to do. From
the command that we ought to become better human beings, Kant
deduces that we must also be capable of it, even if what we can do is
of itself insufcient.15 According to Kant’s moral religion, to become
a better human being, everyone must do as much as it is in his or her
powers to do, and only then can we hope that what does not lie in our
own power will be made good by cooperation from above.16
LEVINAS’S MODIFICATION OF THE KANTIAN HERITAGE:

RESPONSIBILITY OVERFLOWING FREEDOM AND THE GOOD BEYOND BEING
In his essay “Humanism and An-archy” (1968), Levinas develops

the notion of a “responsibility overowing freedom” (CPP 135) that
makes it impossible to limit responsibilities for others. While Kant
maintains that human beings can only be responsible for what they
have deliberated and done in freedom, Levinas makes human beings
responsible even for what they have not done and what they have not
known. For him, responsibility includes “an obedience prior to the
reception of orders” (ibid.). Yet, who has given the orders and whom
do we obey before we are aware of doing so? And what do the orders
tell us? Levinas does not refer to someone specic, but rather to an
impersonal invisible magnitude: the Good. According to Levinas, the
Good has no place in human nature. Yet, it orients us towards itself.
It is the norm of what we are supposed to do.
On Levinas’s view, we are elected and obliged by the Good that we
have not chosen. We cannot choose it “out of a neutrality before the
axiological bi-polarity” of good versus evil (CPP 135). We are always
already tied to the Good. Still, the Good is and remains “beyond
being” (136), and nothing in the passivity of our “possession by the
Good . . . becomes a natural tendency” (137). It is not us possessing
the Good as something that could be ascribed to us, but rather us pos-
sessed by the Good as something remaining distinct from us. None of
us ever personies the Good. The bond between the human subject
and the Good is “anarchical,” that is, it was there before it could be
willed or declined (ibid.). This bond does not constitute a natural
goodness but binds “to an outside” (ibid.), to an exteriority. While,
for Kant, there is no good in the world unless it is willed and done by
someone, for Levinas, the Good precedes and exceeds human willing,
but leaves its traces in this world. Where Kant advocates human spon-
taneity in relation to the good we ought to do, Levinas puts forward
that we are passively related to the Good in capital letters.17
None of them takes human nature to be evil. If that were the case,
no one could become better or return to the Good after having done
something wrong. Like Kant, Levinas denes evil morally, namely
as “a responsibility . . . for the refusal of responsibilities” (CPP 137).
Responsibility appears in two places: as primordial obligation and as
a relating to this obligation. Other than Kant, Levinas claims that we
are responsible for others even before we are free to accept or reject
our responsibility. Kant and Levinas agree that good and evil are not
on the same level. Evil comes in the second place, for it is lower
than the Good. Despite the anteriority of the Good, evil (dened
as egoism or the being that perseveres in being) claims to be “the
contemporary, the equal, the twin, of the Good,” which is “an irre-
futable, a Luciferian lie” (137–38). While, for Kant, human nature
is between good and evil and the person free to follow good or evil
principles, for Levinas, there is no such choice in the rst place, for
this choice would make evil coequal with the good. On the contrary,
before actively choosing we are already passively chosen to act cor-
responding to our obligation. We can display our responsibility or
irresponsibility only after we have become aware of the fact that we
are always already obliged. We cannot escape our responsibility, even
if we decline it.
As Catherine Chalier has shown, Kant and Levinas disagree also
on the question of the source of ethics.18 Kant continually defends
the idea of autonomy as condition for ethics, whereas Levinas reval-
ues the notion of heteronomy. As Kant sees it, heteronomy alien-
ates the moral agent and destroys ethics, whereas Levinas speaks of
a heteronomy that, far from abolishing freedom, leads it to a path
where it discovers the excellence of its moral vocation.19 In the Bible,
the Israelites leave Egypt in order to receive the Torah at Mount
Sinai, not to bestow their own law on themselves. They exchange the
tyrant’s heteronomy for the Lord’s, but they remain within heter-
onomy. Contrary to Kantian imperatives, the commandments “Thou
shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13) and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) do not emerge from the subject’s will.
The appeal of the good in the form of God’s commandments solicits

the subject. The presence of the Other constitutes a privileged het-
eronomy that does not run counter to freedom but invests it. Unlike
Kant, Levinas elucidates the liberating sense of this kind of heter-
onomy. The law that emanates from it is not expressed in a purely
formal manner as in the universalization of maxims, but demands a
specic behavior.
However, Levinas does not just exchange heteronomy for auton-
omy. He also describes “a reversal of heteronomy into autonomy”
(GDT 200). In this reversal lies more than an appropriation of what
has come to the agent as another’s command. Therein lies that the
foreign command is turned into a law that the agent takes to be his
or her own law. Yet, how is this possible? Levinas explains: “It is
inspiration: to have received from who knows where, that of which
I am the author” (ibid.). Levinas does not claim that the subject has
made up the law on its own or given it to itself; rather, it is something

it has received. The origin of the law lies elsewhere. Notice that the
claim is not that the law is god-given. It remains open where it comes
from. Still, the subject also understands itself as the author of what it
has received. The law seems to be comparable to a talent to perform
something. The talent itself is not due to the talented person, but
in employing one’s talent, one nonetheless is the one to whom it is
attributed. Levinas argues that in the reversal of heteronomy into
autonomy, “the Innite comes to pass” (ibid.). If the divine is identi-
cal with the innite, it cannot be located in a realm separate from the
human sphere. As the innite, it must be present or be passing every-
where, though not identiable as something or someone. Is it, then,
the innite that bestows human beings with autonomy of which they
think they are the authors? Levinas leaves this unanswered here.
In his interview with Richard Kearney, Levinas is more explicit
and claims that God cannot appear as the cause or creator of nature.
Rather, the word of God calls for an ethical conversion or reversal
of our nature. Levinas holds that humanistic concern for our fel-
low human beings “already speaks the voice of God,” and the moral
priority of the Other over oneself “could not come to be if it were

not motivated by something beyond nature. The ethical situation is
a human situation, beyond human nature, in which the idea of God
comes to mind.” Levinas continues and says that God is the Other
“who turns our nature inside out, who calls our ontological will-to-
be into question.” For him, the ethical call of conscience remains “an
essentially religious vocation.”20 By contrast, Kant underlines that on
its own behalf morality in no way needs religion but is rather self-
sufcient by virtue of practical reason.21 Nonetheless, Kant concedes
that morality inevitably leads to religion and extends itself to the idea
of a mighty moral lawgiver outside the human being, in whose will
the ultimate end of the creation of the world is at the same time what
can and ought to be the ultimate human end.22
Kant introduces the idea of God because of the problem of theod-
icy: God is the only one who can coordinate the moral and the natu-
ral order of the world and make sure that, nally, the fulllment of
one’s duty is rewarded with happiness.23 On the one hand, Kant and
Levinas seem to have similar intuitions when distinguishing between
these two orders. On the other hand, the roles attributed to God
are radically different. While the Kantian God keeps together what is
distinguished though created by himself, the Levinasian God takes
sides, as it were, but without being the origin of what is natural and,
as such, not ethical.
Although Levinas has at several places expressed his appreciation
of Kantianism, “which nds a meaning to the human without mea-
suring it by ontology,” by being or not being, he nonetheless does
not follow Kant in his way of determining the good concretely.24 For
Kant, what the good is in a given situation can be found out by imag-
ining the universalization of one’s maxims. This way, Kant holds on
to that which is the common interest of all human beings. This com-
mon interest can become the point of departure for a ght for equal
rights. By contrast, Levinas shifts the focus from the good that can be
done by anyone and that potentially benets everyone to the supreme
Good beyond being that leads one to unselsh conduct, to “love
without reward” and the readiness to sacrice oneself.25 This Good

contradicts the struggle for life. Levinas reminds us of what tran-
scends the ontological privileging of one’s own right to exist: one’s
connectedness with the Other. Formulated from the rst-person
point of view, this connectedness is asymmetrical. I must see myself
as responsible for everything, even for another’s misuse of freedom
because whether the other accepts responsibility cannot be my busi-
ness, but it is my business is to acknowledge the innite weight of my
responsibility. This weight outweighs my own interests.
PROBLEMS WITH LEVINAS’S ACCOUNT
Levinas’s account is problematic in its own way. I will outline three

problems with it, focusing on (1) the confrontation of ethics versus
ontology, (2) the humanism of the Other, and (3) pathologies of
bad conscience.
Ethics versus Ontology?

First, in opposing ethics and ontology, Levinas comes to place those
interhuman relationships, in which the Other’s dignity is honored, in
a realm beyond nature, beyond being. He explains that his research is
guided by “ethical relationships — improperly called ethical if ethics,
as ethos, means habit and second nature.” For Levinas, human rela-
tionships “signify the otherwise than being,” and what he calls God
can take on meaning “only on the basis of these other relationships”
(GDT 185). Plant asks whether Levinas indeed opposes ethics and
ontology or just places ethics before and above ontology.26
In fact, there is evidence for an opposition of the two. In his
reading of Genesis 4:9, Levinas states: “[W]hen someone says to
[Cain]: ‘Where is your brother?’ He answers: ‘Am I my brother’s
keeper?’ . . . Cain’s answer is sincere. Ethics is the only thing lacking
in his answer; there is only ontology: I am I, and he is he” (EN
110). Other than Cain, Levinas is haunted by the following ques-
tions: “By being, by persisting in being, do I not kill?” (EI 120); “My
being-in-the-world or my ‘place in the sun’, my being at home, have

these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other
man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a
third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, strip-
ping, killing?”27 On Levinas’s view, ethics is “against nature because
it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my own exis-
tence rst.”28 In this context, the term ontology does not just denote
the philosophical discipline that attempts to comprehend the Being
of beings or the meaning of what is; ontology has extremely negative
connotations and stands for the attempt to give undue preference to
one’s own being-there in a specic situation. The question is, again,
whether such a behavior is natural and, consequently, whether the
ethical is indeed antagonistic to human nature.
The antagonism rests upon a lopsided, polemical understanding of
human nature. As I have suggested earlier, human nature can neither
be reduced to nature out there before our very eyes, as if humanity
were a forest, nor can human nature be reduced to an inner essence
that is pregiven and develops on its own. Rather, human nature
involves human beings’ relating to themselves within the limits of
their nite freedom. Hence, it is not clear from the start how an indi-
vidual will use its freedom. Further, human nature can be understood
such that it is not just equivalent with how one is, relates and displays
oneself right now, but also with what one is supposed to become. The
notion of human nature can include a normative notion of human
destination. Nature then appears as a regulative ideal rather than only
a matter of fact. Human beings do not just follow their instincts but
can enter into a struggle with themselves. If such a struggle could
not take place, it would not make any sense to think about ethics as
resistant to natural drives. However, the ethical struggle also testies
to the fact that ethics is not only and not always opposed to human
nature. Ethics is also in line with human nature because only humans
can enter into ethical struggles with themselves.
In his article on the question of whether ethics is fundamental,
Rudi Visker states that “it is perhaps more soothing to live with the
conviction that we are perpetually falling short of our innite respon-

sibility before the other, than to entertain the thought that irrespon-
sibility could have to do with something within us which not only
doesn’t respond to the other, but not even to ourselves.”29 What
interests me here is the idea that, in acting unethically, we might do
harm to another and miss the aim of our own existence. If the aim
of our being is our being-ethical, ethics and ontology might factically
be in conict with each other, but ought to be concurrent with each
other. When Levinas delineates the ethical as an “investiture of free-
dom” (TI 84ff.) and as the capability to break the chains that tied one
to one’s being and to put the being of the Other above one’s own,
he gives the impression that human nature is utterly self-centered and
that one needs another to pull oneself beyond one’s conatus essendi.
Accordingly, Visker writes that the other person is “the one who tears
me out of nature, puts me beyond the law of being and thrusts me
into humanity” — and, he importantly notes: “The Other alienates

me from an alienation of which I was not even aware.”30 This implies
that, when the Other tears me out of nature, the Other does not
alienate me from myself, but from my alienation with myself. The
alienation is cancelled when one does that which is natural to do.
Self-alienation is possible because we are never one hundred percent
identical with our nature. Rather, we exist at a distance to ourselves.
Therein lies the natural possibility to act contrary to our nature, and
that is why ethics and ontology are not only opposed to each other,
but also intimately intertwined with each other. By nature, we are
ethical beings that have to take a stance to themselves and to others.
Another problem is how we can avoid betraying the ethical by
speaking an ontological language. Simon Critchley has described
Levinas’s solution as follows: In reducing the said (the ontological
propositional language in which all entities are disclosed) to the say-
ing (the ethical form of language in which one addresses and exposes
oneself to an interlocutor), ethics is not the simple “overcoming”
of ontology, but rather the “deconstruction” of the latter’s limits.31
Ontology remains distinct from ethics, but ontology can be inscribed
in ethics in such a manner that ontology is not just intertwined with

ethics, but transformed and redened. This way, by unsaying and
resaying the said, the strict opposition of ontology and ethics can be
overcome.
Humanism Only of the Other?

Still another point for some concern is Levinas’s humanism of the
Other, which raises the question of whether this is a humanism only
of the Other, or of oneself and others. Arguing against Heidegger’s
prioritization of ontology and Darwin’s idea of the struggle for life,
Levinas characterizes the truly human by the attitude that the life
of the Other is more important than one’s own being-there. For
Levinas, it is the potential for self-sacrice that constitutes the “mean-
ing of the human adventure” (AT 227). If the human is more an
ethical than a biological category, that is, if the biologically human is
just the necessary condition for the ethically human, we are human
only in continually aspiring to become truly human “in sharp contrast
with the perseverance of entities persisting in their being” (EN 157).
Levinas’s humanism of the Other is directed against self-assertion on
others’ costs. The idea that humanity only starts with two is advanta-
geous not only for the Other whose interests are represented by the
one who is considerate of the Other. As Visker has pointed out, the
humanism of the Other is to be understood as a subjective genitive
and means that the Other humanizes me.32 Without the Other, the I
would not have opportunities to yield precedence to the Other and
therewith to overcome its egoism.
Yet, when spelling out the notion of subjectivity as hostage, Levinas
seems to forget that only someone who is free can be generous. If
forced to renounce, what one gives is not a gift to the Other but
ransom to regain one’s freedom. Levinas, however, emphasizes that
freedom is not rst: “The position of the subject is already its deposi-
tion” (GDT 181). The subject is in the accusative, responsible prior
to freedom “through an untransferable responsibility that makes
it unique” (ibid.). Maybe it is not just hyperbolic speech by which
Levinas presents the idea that the subject is, basically, subjected to
the Other as the Other’s hostage. It may sound exaggerated, but for
Levinas, it designates the truly human:
The grandeur of modern antihumanism — which is true beyond its own
rationale — consists in making a clear space for the hostage-subjectivity
by sweeping away the notion of the person. Antihumanism is right
insofar as humanism is not human enough. In fact, only the humanism
of the other man is human. . . . The uncondition of the hostage will thus
be, at least, a fundamental mode of freedom, and not some accident of
an I [Moi], of itself haughty and proud. (182)
This passage is surprising insofar as being a hostage is portrayed as

a mode of freedom. One does not choose to be another’s hostage.
Levinas grants that the deposed subject shall again nd autonomy
and equality (181). Yet, how can it, while living as a hostage, be
free? This is possible only if the notion of freedom is reformulated.
Levinas claries that freedom can here be thought “as the possibil-
ity of doing what no one can do in my place” (ibid.). By serving
the Other instead of occupying the Other’s place, a new meaning is
conveyed to one’s own existence. One becomes unique and irreplace-
able. However, does the humanism of Other, then, include oneself?
Such a move of inclusion is exactly what Levinas eschews.
The asymmetry of roles brings with it a disadvantage: If I see
myself as a hostage, I must see the Other as a hostage-taker. Maybe
the Other does not want to play this role, and maybe I do not want
to be victimized by the Other. Levinas’s picture is an attack on self-
respect. Moreover, it is questionable whether one indeed can bear
the burden of “the responsibility for the responsibility of the other”
(OB 117). According to Levinas, this is the task of the hostage who is
innitely responsible. Such a self-understanding on the hostage’s side
seems nearly presumptuous, if it is supposed to denote more than a
mere feeling of responsibility. It is degrading and humiliating if some-
one else pretends to take upon him- or herself the responsibility for
one’s own acts. If Levinas’s humanism of the Other is to defend the
Other’s dignity, it needs to take into account how one’s self-image
(portraying oneself as the Other’s hostage) might react on the Other.

If one sees oneself as a hostage, one’s conditio humana turns, through
another’s interference, into a conditio inhumana. Does not such a
self-image function as a silent accusation that indirectly makes the
Other responsible for one’s own condition?
If one reads Levinas’s account on the backdrop of a philosophy
after Auschwitz, one might take the term hostage literally and under-
stand Levinasian ethics as an attempt to deal with outrageous injus-
tice and unbearable suffering. On this backdrop, one might appreciate
the effort not to dehumanize the perpetrators and to nd a realistic
point of departure for ethics: “the putting into question of my spon-
taneity by the presence of the Other” (TI 43). Robert Bernasconi
argues that one should not suppose that Levinas’s analysis shifts the
blame for violence and murder to the victim, because that would be
to confuse Levinas’s discussion of ethical responsibility for the legal
form of responsibility.33 The question is not who should be blamed,
but “what am I to do?” To accept responsibility for the suffering
undergone is to be challenged to act, but this action does not have
its seat in the spontaneity of a willing subject conceived in isolation
from interhuman relations. Still, I wonder whether these interhu-
man relations are taken seriously enough if one allocates the roles
like Levinas — in abstraction from concrete interactions. Instead of
stating that the subject is a hostage (in all circumstances?), one should
take into account that the roles of the hostage and the hostage-taker
can be reversed and that one suddenly can nd oneself in a master-
slave-dialectic resembling the one described by Hegel.
Pathologies of Bad Conscience: Excessive Feelings of Guilt and Shame

I nd it problematic that Levinas’s ethics is tied to pathologies of
bad conscience and excessive feelings of guilt and shame. Having a
bad conscience can be a good thing, for one gets to know what one
otherwise would not get to know about oneself, although it might not
be a pleasure to know.34 However, it is alarming that Levinas refers to
emotional experiences that he himself classies with the help of terms
from psychopathology. He concedes that one’s being accused by the

Other is “a seed of madness . . . a psychosis” (GDT 188), and that his
conception of ethics is in some sense “masochistic” (IR 46).
In what follows, I will sketch the trajectory on which Levinas comes
to these extremes. The problem is not that he connects conscience
with the experience of being put in question by another; nor is it
problematic that this experience of being-affected by alterity precedes
philosophy as a theoretical enterprise. According to Levinas, “If phi-
losophy consists in knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation
for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the
other is presented as the Other, and where the movement of thema-
tization is inverted” (TI 86). As an example of this inversion, Levinas
mentions one’s being-ashamed by the needy Other who provokes
one to commit oneself. Prior to its investment, freedom appears “to
itself as a shame” (303). In Totality and Innity, Levinas empha-
sizes the ethical signicance of shame experienced before the Other

who is exposed to the violence of one’s self-absorbed freedom.35 In
shame, “freedom discovers itself murderous in its very exercise” (84).
In this shame, the Other “is not an obstacle, does not threaten me
with death; he is desired” (83–84). Before one can think about alter-
ity, one is already moved by concrete others who awaken one’s con-
science, that is, one’s knowing-with oneself and others who enter the
sphere of one’s awareness.
Probably we all know that our responsibilities not just over against
one specic Other, but also to a third party, can place us in a dilemma,
which makes it impossible for us to do justice to everyone. Plant has
described it like this:
With the third party the sacricial component of ethical responsibility
is no longer merely a matter of my own self-sacrice (my being-for-the-
other without reserve), but also my sacricing the demands and needs
of the other other for the sake of this other. The call for justice thus
augments the bad conscience even further: Between only the two of us
I simply owe everything, although I can never rest assured that I have
done enough. . . . But along with the third party, . . . in my choosing you
over him or her or them . . . , I am additionally guilty.36
In this case, one’s feeling of guilt corresponds to the fact that one
can never meet the requirement of representing the conicting
interests of many individuals or groups at once. It is impossible to
care for the well-being of all of them in the same way and in the
same intensity.
Yet, it is one thing to feel guilty and ashamed when considering
one’s shortcomings in relation to the Other or several others, but
another thing to feel shame and guilt for nothing else than for existing
among others, without having done anything wrong. It is here that
Levinas’s account becomes problematic. In “Humanity Is Biblical,”
he follows Kafka who describes a guilt without a crime, a world where
man never understands the accusation brought against him. Levinas
writes, “as soon as I see someone else, bin ich schon schuldig: I am
already ‘guilty.’ ” He calls this feeling of guilt “the guilt of survival.”
Although he relativizes the guilt by adding that one is “at least under
an obligation,” which might be slightly different than being guilty,
he later modies this again and maintains that one owes the Other
“without having ever borrowed.”37 This way, Levinas separates the
feeling of guilt from any deed that might arouse it. No matter what
one does or does not, one is caught in a vicious circle where one can-
not but feel guilt and shame for being alive.
The problem is that Levinas does not distinguish between the con-
dition of the traumatized survivor of atrocities and the normal human
condition of everyday life after and apart from the War. He seems to
build his ethics upon the extreme possibility and takes it as something
that applies also to the ordinary. In generalizing the pathologies of
bad conscience, Levinas blurs the boundaries between the sick and
the healthy. These boundaries might not be clear-cut in our lifeworld
anyway; nonetheless, it would be helpful to be able to keep apart at
least conceptually what experientially tends to overlap in a ow from
order to disorder or vice versa.
THE DEBATE ON LEVINAS — NOT ONLY A DEBATE ON LEVINAS
To conclude, let us for a moment imagine two worst case sce-

narios and apply Levinas’s principles to them. This will allow us to see
whether or not conceptual clarity concerning the above-mentioned
point is necessary. In describing one’s being-for-the-Other as the
“break-up-of identity” (OB 14) or as psychosis, Levinas alludes to
what psychotic patients experience as real and utterly threatening:
another intruding in the privacy of consciousness, persecuting them
and questioning their right to be. Seen from outside, it is easy to say:
“Well, this is just delusional intersubjectivity.” Before beginning to
study, I worked in a hospital and had to do with some patients who
talked to and fought with someone who remained invisible for me
and anyone else. Nonetheless, insofar as this someone interfered in
their lives, these patients were confronted with real ethical problems.
And so are, for instance, the soldiers, doctors, and other staff return-
ing from war zones and struggling with posttraumatic stress disor-
ders. In these cases, what might be called a hallucinatory self-disorder
is at the same time a self-other-disorder that concerns both the Other
within and the Other outside the self. How to treat the voices of a
tyrannizing, internalized Other or one’s own painful ashbacks and
memory images of helplessness when seeing someone die?
At this point, the debate on Levinas exceeds the debate on
Levinas. Probably, an application of Levinasian principles would
complete the traumatic victimization or, respectively, the psychotic
self-victimization and lead the patients into suicide rather than cure
them. Kantian ethics with its focus on reciprocal respect seems to
have a greater potential for helping to regain sovereignty and per-
sonal agency. For the sake of orientation under disastrous conditions,
too, it seems important that the Good as norm of one’s conduct is
directed to the aim of saving as many lives as possible, including one’s
own. If one forgets including one’s own life in this number, one for-
gets that one also is an Other to others who might be guided by a
similar system of values as oneself and who will therefore desire one’s
life rather than one’s premature death. The latter would increase the
others’ feelings of guilt rather than enrich their lives.
Yet, do these difculties imply that Levinas’s antinaturalistic
humanism of the Other is misleading? As the analysis of Levinas’s
essay “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights” has shown, Levinas is
wrongly accused of misconstruing the relation between human and
animal realms as a radical incommensurability. Further, he has good
reasons for adopting neither ontological nor methodological natu-
ralism. However, as the comparison with Kant’s anthropology and
ethics has revealed, Levinas’s polemical antinaturalism and the con-
tradistinction of ethics versus ontology cannot account for the com-
plexities and ambiguities of human nature. Levinas is right in resisting
the temptation to dene ethics as nothing more than an extension
of natural reactions. Still, he underrates the potential that lies in the
struggle with oneself — a struggle that is both in line with and against
one’s own ambiguous, undeterminable nature. Levinas’s humanism
of the Other becomes misleading at the point where he forgets that
human nature is something shared by self and Other, both in the
good and in the bad.
Levinas’s vocabulary poses problems insofar as it evokes scenarios
in which it would be best not to apply Levinasian principles. Yet, by
trying we have learned that Levinas’s ethics is not equivalent with
normative ethics working with the help of principles that can be uni-
versalized and applied to a variety of cases. Rather than prescribing
what everyone ought to do, Levinas’s phenomenological ethics offers
descriptions of the grounds of responsible agency.38 Levinas has not
seen his task in constructing ethics; rather, he has tried to seek its
meaning (see EeI 85). On his exploration, he has discovered an abyss,
but it is us to nd out how to jump to the other side.
Carnets.
N OTES TO W ELZ , “A W ANDERING D OG “

In addition to the abbreviations at the front of this volume, the following are
also used:
Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (R),
ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1990), page numbers of this vol-
ume are given first and are followed by the page numbers of the 2nd edition.
1. See Bob Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought
(London: Routledge, 2005), 166–79.
2. This is the imperatives’ first formulation taken from Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten (1785).
3. See David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2009), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
spr2009/entries/naturalism/.
4. Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of
the American Philosophical Association 70, no. 2 (1996): 43–55, here 50.
5. Ibid., 53.
6. See Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, 174.
7. Ibid., 175.
8. Ibid., 149.
9. Ibid., 171; John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A
Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger and
Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 56.
10. See R 20 / 7–8; 29 / 21. I focus on this relatively late work, which
appeared after the three Critiques, because it largely summarizes Kant’s position
on human nature.
11. See R 28 / 19; 46 / 46.
12. See R 29 / 21.
13. See R 19 / 6.
14. See R 55n / 59.
15. See R 44 / 43.
16. See R 48 / 48.
17. As to a phenomenology of the invisible Good, see the section on Levinas
in my book Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy, Religion in
Philosophy and Theology 30 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 277–326.
18. See Catherine Chalier, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas,
trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), chap. 4.
19. See ibid., 72, 75–80.
20. Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with
Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), 61.
21. See R 3, preface to the first edition.
22. See R 6–7, preface to the first edition.
23. As to the problem of theodicy see my article, “Reasons for Having No
Reason to Defend God — Kant, Kierkegaard, Levinas and their Alternatives
to Theodicy,” in Hendrik M. Vroom, ed., Wrestling with God and with Evil:
Philosophical Reflections, Currents of Encounter 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press,
2007), 167–86.
24. OB 129, see also GDT 184.
25. For a critique of Levinas’s opposition of selfish erotic and unselfish
nonerotic love see my articles, “Keeping the Secret of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard
and Levinas on Conscience, Love, and the Limits of Self-Understanding,” in
Claudia Welz and Karl Verstrynge, eds., Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and its
Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas (London: Turnshare, 2008), 153–225; and
“Love as Gift and Self-Sacrifice,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und
Religionsphilosophie 50 (2008): 238–66.
26. See Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, 178.
27. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1996), 82.
28. Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” 60.
29. Rudi Visker, “Is ethics fundamental? Questioning Levinas on irresponsi-
bility,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 268.
30. Visker, “Is ethics fundamental?,” 275.
31. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 7–8. Critchley here discusses the
innovation in Otherwise than Being (OB 18), which was present only in the preface
to Totality and Infinity (TI 30), namely the model of the performative saying and
the constative said as a way of explaining how the ethical signifies within ontologi-
cal language. Levinas’s method of reduction reduces the said to the saying, thereby
letting the saying reside as an interruption within the said (see OB 7).
32. See Visker, “Is ethics fundamental?,” 275.
33. Robert Bernasconi, “What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is
the answer?,” in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds., The Cambridge
Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 240.
34. For an elaboration on this thought, see Welz, “Keeping the Secret of
Subjectivity,” 153ff.
35. By contrast, in On Escape (first published in 1935), Levinas emphasizes
the ontological significance of shame. Shame is here described as “enchainment”
(OE 55), as inability to escape one’s own existence. In one’s having-to-be, one is
stuck to oneself. Levinas’s explicit account of shame is unfolded also in Totality
and Infinity (1961) and in remarks scattered throughout his works (e.g., EN
169; OB 90, 11, 195). See my article, “Shame and the Hiding Self,” in Passions
in Context (forthcoming).
36. Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, 156–57.
37. Levinas, “Humanity is Biblical,” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by
Elisabeth Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004), 78, see also 82.
38. See my article, “Welche Macht ist mächtiger als Ohnmacht? Mit Levinas
auf den Spuren dessen, was sich den Zeichen entzieht,” in Philipp Stoellger,
ed., Sprachen der Macht. Gesten der Er- und Entmächtigung in Text und
Interpretation, Interpretationen Interdisziplinär 5 (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2008), 179–80n58.
N OTES TO H ATLEY , “S KEPTICAL P OETICS AND D ISCURSIVE U NIVERSALITY “

1. Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008), esp. 81, 122–23, 131, 144–45.
2. Oona Eisenstadt, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of
Levinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 134.
3. Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden (Walden; or, Life in the
Woods), ed. Philip van Doren Stern (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 447.
4. See particularly OB 111: “This responsibility is prior to dialogue . . . and in
the saying proper to responsibility is produced as a digression.”
5. That is, the Greek word for peace. Traditionally, it is transliterated as
“irene,” but I have chosen here to modify the spelling in order to emphasize the
comparison and contrast with “irony.”
6. Babylonian Talmud: Menahot 29b.
Skeptical Poetics and Discursive Universality: An Etiquette
of Legacy in the Time of Shoah
James Hatley

Skeptical Poetics and
Discursive Universality
An Etiquette of Legacy in
the Time of Shoah
James Hatley
Upon hearing Nelly Sachs’s “Yes, I am a believer,” he [Celan]

said he “hoped to be able to blaspheme until the end.”
— John Felstiner
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made dirtier.
— Wallace Stevens
For every [lynching] victim that lies pasted in some racist family’s photo album . . . or
stored in a trunk with grandma and grandpa’s Klan robe, or still pinned to the wall of
a service station in some holdout sorry-ass little town — if we can acquire and place
their photos in an accurate, respectful context, identify and record them for the first
time, I feel some slight awareness of what is meant by resurrection.
— James Allen, cofounder of the Web site,
“Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America”
THE SCANDAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE
N
ear the ending of Otherwise than Being, in
the nal section of its “Exposition,” Levinas
explicitly raises the issue of skepticism. Perhaps
more accurately, the subject is not so much raised as its ineluctable
persistence throughout the entirety of Otherwise than Being, a book
89
dedicated to those fallen in the Shoah, is acknowledged. For the

skeptic, as Diane Perpich’s recent The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas so
clearly articulates, shows up at every step in the development of Levi-
nas’s theme not only to call it into question but also to be scandalized
by its very expression.1 For the project of Otherwise than Beings, to
the degree it can be called a project, is to articulate that its own argu-
ment precedes any attempt at articulation. At every turn in Levinas’s
argument, if it can indeed be called an argument (Oona Eisenstadt
prefers, rightly in my view, the notion of an appeal), Levinas’s words
and the themes they sound cannot evade echoing the scandal of their
actual assertion in words as themes.2
Yet philosophy cannot help itself: “If philosophical discourse is
broken, withdraws from speech and murmurs,” Levinas points out,
“it nonetheless speaks of that, and speaks of the discourse which a
moment ago it was speaking and to which it returns, to say its provi-
sional retreat” (OB 169). In the very next sentence Levinas questions
the discursive status of his own essay, his point mirrored when one
notes that even at this very moment one is engaged in exactly this
sleight of hand — “of encircling [one’s] position from all sides” — so
that one might exhaustively, totally, truly render here what Levinas
terms there diachrony. In doing so, does one not betray, even as
Levinas does in his own discussion, the very signicance of the theme
by bringing it into philosophic language, a discourse that is in its
logic synchronous and anonymous, both precisely what Levinas
would counsel against in his appeal to diachrony? Simply to notice
and make sense of one’s own or the other’s saying already locates one
within this ouroboros — in swallowing its own tail, this discourse, as
Levinas puts it, provides from its own reasoning both its beginning
and ending precisely by insisting on its own coherence and oneness
(ibid.). Philosophy in this sense is allergic to the idea of creation and,
even after millennia of discourse affected by an Abrahamic insistence
on the signicance of monotheism, still sides with Aristotle on the
eternity of the world.
Hatley Skeptical Poetics and Discursive Universality 91
If creation, a term that appears with regularity in Levinas’s text, is

to be signicant in any interpretation of that work, then a sensitivity
to discourse that confounds the adamant although necessary cultiva-
tion of synchrony in philosophical language is needed. Speaking in
philosophy’s all-too-limber tongue, afrming its eagerness to con-
sume all that approaches it, or to be that discourse itself in which all
discourse is stated, must at the very least provoke awareness of this
discourse’s inherent scandal, of its necessary immodesty. A sensitivity
to the limits of the synchronic dimensions of philosophical discourse
is revealed, Levinas claims, in our reception of philosophy’s theoreti-
cal project of reason as a tradition engaged in communication, as a
saying that goes from one speaker to another, as an “account” (recit,
which could also be translated as “story”). In this account of philoso-
phy that must speak to its progeny across the generations, we become
open to, as Thoreau would put it, “the character of that morrow
which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn.”3 This openness
without end is qualitative rather than quantitative and to be thought
otherwise than as necessity, which is to say, not an eternity that is
justied and extensive but rather a creation that is gratuitous and
unprecedented. Yet again, even at this very moment, one’s thinking
and that of one’s reader provokes thought beyond the limit of a strict
continuity, even as its movement is not arbitrary.
Discourse and not dialogue is called for here — discursus, in its
Latin root, a running to and fro that only later comes to be charac-
terized as a movement peculiar to speech, as opposed to the more
settled dialogos, from the start “speech,” in its Greek root, located
between reciprocal interlocutors.4 From Socrates to Plato to Aristotle
and beyond, new speakers have arisen in every generation to inter-
rupt provocatively Philosophy’s themes, redirecting them in manners
that we in turn inherit, along with all previous redirections by all the
previous forebears of the forebears. Sometimes we even nd forebears
anew that no one previously had suspected of being present in the
tradition. And we do this only to nd our own words concerning
their words redirected yet again by those who inherit our saying in
Philosophy’s said. One exists in a tradition not because of what one

has said but because of what others have heard.
“The philosopher,” Levinas writes in the opening sentence of
the exposition of his argument in Otherwise than Being, “seeks and
expresses the truth” (OB 23). Yet have we not all had the presen-
timent that our philosophical forebears, if they were to come back
from the dead, would nd themselves most likely deeply disconcerted
or uncannily surprised by what others have made and are making of
words offered in the service of truth? What would Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and all the others have to say if they were to hear what we are
now making of their legacy? To contemplate this question is to nd
one is engaged not merely in a theoretical project to be carried out by
means of a discourse about discourse pursued anonymously, without
any voice in particular speaking it. One also is engaged in an etiquette
of inuence, of legacy. To speak of Levinas’s thought is already to
hear attentively in one’s own philosophical voice the inection of his
voice, as well as within and yet beyond his voice, the inection of a
myriad other voices — of Parmenides and Plato, of Celan and Goethe,
of Aristotle and Maimonides, even those of National Socialists, as
well as of Jewish Rabbis and Partisans. And particularly the gures
explicitly written on the doorway into Levinas’s text, the dedication
page, which names “those who were closest among the six million
assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on mil-
lions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of
the other man, the same anti-semitism” (v). How then might any of
these voices be heard in the voice of the philosopher here and now
who would, as Levinas recommends, seek and express the truth?
This is the skeptical moment, diverging from traditional notions of
skepticism, of which Levinas would speak in the nal passages inside
the horizon of Otherwise than Being. Not only the irony of skepticism
is at issue here but also what might be termed its ireny (ειρήνη),5 its
susceptibility beyond any reasonable limit to the offering of peace for
the sake of another, to my irrevocable investment in the other and
all the other others who address me. Ireny goes beyond the skeptical
suspiciousness of the ironical attitude, of that acute, philosophical

sensitivity to the manner in which an apparent truth nds itself yet
again overturned by a renewed critical inquiry into how a thought
now calls for further thought. In ireny my thought discovers I am
always already speaking fraternally, that my very thought is already
inected with and subject to the tones and meanings of all the other
others who speak and have spoken, or even, will have spoken. To
open my mouth is to nd my words already intoned by the voices of
all the others who have spoken them too, although in ways I have yet
to even appreciate. I understand my own thought only retroactively
in this sense. Perhaps even more uncanny than the manner in which
the other interrupts my space — that no place under the sun, to para-
phrase Levinas’s citation of Pascal, can be claimed responsibly for me
alone — is this claim made upon my language: there is no place in my
words for my speaking alone responsibly.
How dare one then proceed? Perhaps here it serves us well to

remember how in a much-cited aggadic passage from the Talmud,
Moses is instructed in the heavenly court not only by the Most High
concerning the meaning of the revelation given through him on Mount
Sinai, but also by Akiva, a rabbinical gure who appears millennia after
Sinai. Not only this, Moses nds much of what Akiva argues escapes
Moses’ understanding. Moses is made uneasy by this, yet his response
is nally one of gratitude.6 Marc-Alain Ouaknin comments on how
this interchange teaches “interpretation is not just perception,” but
“the creation of meaning.”7 The inability to recognize what others
have made of one’s speech is not simply that they stand on the shoul-
ders of a giant or, in the case of these words here and now, a mouse,
and are thus able to reason beyond where one’s own mind in its train
of thought would have by necessity taken itself. Rather, one witnesses,
as opposed to merely understands, a turn in one’s thought as another
articulates it, a turn that one could never have come to on one’s own
regardless of how much time and space one were given to think it so.
In this way, one’s very thought becomes one’s teacher, as it is renewed
uncannily in the mouth of another, in the mouths of others.
Further, as the discussion above already indicates, in alliance with

the skepticism introduced by the one-for-the-other of a philosophical
tradition is the skepticism of language itself. For language is the very
sign for Levinas that our thinking is for another, is a communication
that speaks toward another in order not only to express itself but
also to understand the signicance, insofar as it can be an object of
understanding, of that expression. Beyond empowering one’s sharing
the outcome of contemplation previously accomplished in the silence
of one’s own mind, language insists on one’s thought already having
come to its birth in the noisy environs, in the incessant over-hearing
of that plethora of other voices that already have addressed one’s
own voice before one might have even heard it as one’s own. One’s
autonomy is revealed not to be founded unequivocally in one’s rea-
soning as it is called to be consistent with itself from out of itself, to
be, as Kant would put it, a law given unto itself by itself. Rather one’s
autonomy is only derived in the aftermath of one’s subjection in lan-
guage to the other and even more importantly, as far as language is
concerned, to all the other others. One’s autonomy only comes to
itself through digression, indirection, displacement.8
In regard to Levinas’s discussion of skepticism, we encounter a
strategy, if it can be termed that, often used in Levinas’s philosophical
oeuvre, in which a traditional term or theme emerges in his argument/
appeal but with a difference. Skepticism is such a term. Rather than
resisting skepticism, rather than justifying transcendence at its (skep-
ticism’s) expense, Levinas reinterprets or advances the very meaning
of skepticism so that it is allied with, rather than made difdent or
antithetical to, the philosophical account of transcendence, or at least
Levinas’s renewing of that account. Further, Levinas displaces the
usual tension between skepticism and philosophy, between difdence
and declaration, by arguing it is not skepticism that philosophy has
inevitably, although mistakenly, sought to refute, but transcendence.
For in the breaking in of transcendence into philosophical thought,
which put more directly would be the breaking in of a breaking up of
the concept itself, the very temporality of skepticism is given its expres-
sion in Levinas. Skepticism is revealed not only as suspiciousness in
regard to reason but also as a being given over to another’s claim on
one’s own thinking that one could never have justied through one’s
thinking. One’s thinking never catches up to itself, because another
already has invested one in that thinking through tradition and lan-
guage. Language carries forward diachronicly a memory through the
address of another that could never have been recalled in a past that
was once present. In this manner, unlike the philosopher intent on
rendering a discourse of all discourse, the skeptic becomes attentive
to the breaks in discourse, as attentive, to borrow the words of a Zen
Roshi, as a cat sitting by a mouse hole. Or as Celan has put it, one
listens in language for eine Atemwende, “a breath-turn.”
“I AM YOU, WHEN I AM I”
How then might the irenical, a skepticism voiced in how my words

are delivered to one through the other’s words, be registered in the
said that is Otherwise than Being? This is to ask: If we take seriously
Levinas’s own account of philosophy as a tradition, how might we
now be called to read Levinas’s work anew? How might that morrow
come that is not simply the necessary outcome of passing time or
words? Put in another fashion, this question asks what sort of modes
of reading are called for, what sort of metapractice of attentiveness
might be cultivated, however provisionally, if we are to engage in
an etiquette of legacy, particularly in the time of the Shoah. In the
nal inner section of Otherwise than Being, Levinas himself specically
singles out the poetic (and the prophetic) as a mode of sharpening
attentiveness to the diachronic within the synchronic, of “laying bare”
saying within the said, even if in doing so that which is laid bare is
covered up in the very gesture of laying bare. Precisely because in the
poetic said an interpretation is called for that is “ad innitum,” one
can begin yet again with each reading to witness in the poem’s words
how the one-for-another of saying is related, suggested, traced out by

means of “an insurmountable equivocation, where meaning refuses
simultaneity” (OB 170).
Chapter 4 of Otherwise than Being begins with the following
epigraph: “Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.” With the above question
of how to read Levinas’s work anew in mind, what might then be
made, for yet another time, of this epigraph hovering or drifting over
the words of chapter 4, words lifted by Levinas from an aphorism,
rather Nietzschean in at least its form, located within the text of Paul
Celan’s poem “Lob der Ferne” (Praise of Distance)? The German
words transliterated: “I am you, when I I am.” Eric Kligelman in his
recently published account of Celan’s poetry claims that the fourth
chapter’s treatment of substitution, which is to say, of the metaethical
signicance of the one-for-the-other, is itself a subtle and persistent
rereading of Celan’s poem.9 The epigraph then is not merely an illus-
trative aside adding some poignancy or concreteness to the chapter’s
argument, but is elevated above all the other words of the chapter so
that they are in the wake of its breath, its inspiration. In this manner,
the chapter nds itself inserted within a poetic tradition and so, by
Levinas’s own argument, his philosophic discourse invites its poetic
(re)interpretation, even as it is offered to the other to be read as a
philosophical appeal. Although Kligelman provides only minimal dis-
cussion to back up his suggestion, much merit lies in its prospect.
How then might the epigraph be understood in its fuller signicance
for Levinas’s text? First, it might be helpful to quickly look at the whole
of Celan’s poem from which this one line is excerpted by Levinas. In
the architecture of the poem’s said, the line is one of three successive
expressions, aphorisms, left by the poet’s heart which, after having
lingered among humans, throws off its clothing, as well as the glare
or radiance of an oath, even as it gives itself over to the eyesprings of
the other whom the poet addresses. At the end of this series of actions
described or promised (since this address occurs in the rst person,
the poem is not clear on which verbal mood, optative or indicative, is
at play) in the second verse comes a colon, a grammatical signaling of
a breath-turn, a renewing of saying, that then leads to the following

three aphorisms, perhaps composing the oath itself that is being cast
off, or perhaps yet another saying that takes the place of the repudi-
ated oath:
Schwärzer im Schwarz, bin ich nackter.
Abtrünnig erst bin ich treu.
Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.
Blacker in black, am I more naked.

Apostate only am I true.
I am you, when I am I.
Blacker in black, am I more naked.

Betraying am I rst true.
When I I am, am I you.10
How much more intricately and ambivalently Levinas’s epigraph

rings when the tone of the aphorisms immediately preceding it in
Celan’s poem is taken into account. Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin is,
to borrow a conceit from the American poet Robert Frost, a bit like
a harvested potato that has been thoroughly washed before being
put on the plate for the reader of Otherwise than Being. There is an
abstraction and purity to the aphorism taken alone that is compli-
cated, disturbed, even soiled, when it is remarried to its sisters. For
in that expanded context, the poet’s oath to the other hinging on
apostasy, the poet’s nakedness before the other only deepening the
darkness of the poem and the threat of self absorption on the part of
the poet’s Ich — both the rst-person pronoun and the noun for the
Freudian ego in the original German and emphasized in its imme-
diate repetition, all these trouble the sincerity of the poem’s saying
before the other. Further the very situation of the poem, particularly
as it is given in the verse following these aphorisms, in which the
poem’s Ich both oats or drifts upon and searches for spoils in the
other’s eyesprings,11 exemplies how the very drift of the line Levinas
excerpts for his own thought is in its Celanian context disturbingly
ambivalent. In fact, to suggest an intensication of this ambivalence,
the following question subtly emerges — are the “lines” of the poem,
characterized metaphorically as a net thrown out into the waters, are
they a snare, a pretense or a sincere offering?
Put more provocatively, how often have readers of Levinas’s fourth
chapter on substitution been sufciently mindful of the full extent
of the mood or tone expressed in the Celanian aphorism: “In sever-
ing, we embrace”? Or in his poem’s awkward and yet devastating
nal image: “The hanged man strangles the rope”? In addition to
the skepticism of irony and ireny treated above, the reader is called
to become attentive to yet another of its (skepticism’s) modes in the
Celanian trope of Widerruf,12 of countering or repudiation, of calling
out against. In the skepticism of Widerruf, the poem engages in a
spoiling of its own conceits, in a shaming of not only its voice but also
of the voices of the others who both approach and are approached in
this saying become a poetic said. Traditions are both put on trial and
plundered in these images, including that of Christianity which would
make the followers of Jesus the shers of men; and that of Judaism
whose adherents have shed bitter tears by the rivers of Babylon in
the midst of exile, even as they are plundered in their very tongue,
being commanded to sing songs associated with Temple rites for
the amusement of the Temple’s very desecrators. In the strangled
human gure, both reminiscent of the crucied Jesus and of those
Jews submitted to annihilation in the Shoah, as well as to all the other
victims of history, in this nightmare from which we seemingly can-
not awaken, a strange countering of violence occurs. The suffering of
violence is not undone but rather intensied, magnied in a manner
otherwise than could ever be expected from within the intent of the
violence itself.
For, and here one is digressing, in those postcards with pictures of
crowds, families, ministers, mayors, and lawmen posing at the lynch-
ings of African American men, offered for sale in the nondescript racks
of dime stores and gas stations even through the middle of the twen-
tieth century, who could reasonably expect emerging from the gazes
among these onlookers, both nonchalant and hard-hearted, how the
rope imposed by the persecutor’s hand is strangled in its very tight-

ening around the victim’s neck?13 The blasphemy of this breath-turn
that undoes breath in order to bring breath to the poem’s line is out-
rageous and yet compelling. Even as Celan’s poems would evoke and
be subject to Shoah, Exile, and Crucixion, his lines would bring us
to these postcards too, to a renewed, discursive attentiveness to them,
so that we are drifting in the eyes of the lynched man or woman,
casting out our nets of intention only to be caught in the net of the
hanged one’s distance, a yarn, a snare, a net, or perhaps a rope of
another sort.14 It is this distance otherwise than distance for which
Celan’s poem offers its praise that is otherwise than praise.
For Celan the vocation of the poet requires that she or he not
evade pornographic or blasphemous images of the other, as well the
words that accompany them, often rendered in the voices of the per-
petrator. These are part and parcel of the violence in language that
the victims of history, those undergoing the same anti-Semitism, the
same hatred of the other as that inicted upon the six million men-
tioned in Levinas’s dedication, suffer. In bringing the reader into
contact with these images and their words, the poet must also avoid
that subterfuge all too often accomplished surreptitiously within the
poem, in which the trace of the other’s voice is lost in an aesthetics of
representation insistent upon the play, the achievement of xing the
other in a series of magnicently conceived nouns. Rather, the poet
is called upon to expose language, both his own and that of his read-
ers, yet again to infernal moments of disintegration or betrayal lying
in wait to snare one in one’s saying for the other. In an exposure to
cruelty, to, as Levinas puts it otherwise, the pitiless, so that our words
might grow darker than the darkness to which they bear witness,
poetry would reveal in the very words we speak their craven tones
of dehumanization, as well as the nearly unmentionable and almost
inarticulate whimpers and murmurs of saying left behind by those
suffering the violence of these words.
Celan would bring our language, our saying incessantly becom-
ing said into what he names a Gegenlicht, a back light, although
in the German gegen the sense of a countering (an against) rather

than depth (a behind) is emphasized. This Gegenlicht, which is the
repudiation of the Galgenlicht,15 of the gallows glow that permeates
our every word of philosophical discourse, is ironically and irenically
articulated as the poem’s very abuse of its saying, its recommendation
of itself precisely in its most violent modes of inarticulateness. And
these occur not so that language’s creativity, its very articulation as
address, as a for-the-other might be restored to it, cleansed, puried
cathartically of all stain, but rather that one’s language might nd its
saying renewed, recreated precisely through its failures, its collapse,
its shame, its being soiled, its accusation. The renewal of language is,
it turns out, the most terrible moment of all, precisely because it does
not engage one in a birth that is repetitive or restorative, does not
underwrite a rebeginning that is merely the yet-again of cycles and
seasons but rather brings one’s saying to arrest one’s life itself. Only
then can one nd oneself and one’s world created anew.
A disturbance is registered in beginning again that could not have
been anticipated, that could not have been announced beforehand
in any possible set of conditions for beginning: “It was Spring, and
the trees ew to their birds”; or “Our talk of justice is empty, until
the greatest battleship founders on the forehead of a drowned man”;
or “Bury the ower and put the man on its grave.”16 As these lines
from the collection of Celanian aphorisms titled “Gegenlicht” make
evident, it is the illumination of language, no matter how infernal the
light it sheds, shining out from within its very saying that opens up
this revelatory note, this alternative meaning, this resistance that is not
a force majeure but the disturbance introduced through the uidity,
the discursus, the skepticism, of speaking itself. Whether heard in the
rst instance as pure fantasy or as metaphysical assertion, these lines
ultimately arrest otherwise than these options the reader and calls
her or him to resay how these terms — rope, hanging, strangulation;
spring, bird, tree; justice, battle, victim ought to be heard anew.17 In
“Gegenlicht” we encounter a countering that is neither a foregone
nor an already implicit conclusion in a play of dialectic, nor an absurd
non sequitor. Celan’s poetic said calls to be read and reread discur-
sively, in the aphoristic style, say, of Nietzsche, or like a condensed
parable of, say, Kafka.
“I AM ‘IN MYSELF’ THROUGH THE OTHERS”
How then to hear more acutely the Celanian voice(s) in the text
that Levinas has named Otherwise than Being? So far the answer to this
question has focused on an explication of Celan’s poetics, particularly
as they are practiced in one poem written quite early in the poet’s
career, but let us now briey, turn to chapter 4, “Substitution,” and
attend for a moment not so much to its philosophical argument as
to its poetics. For in the latter can be marked numerous openings for
interpretation and reinterpretation of Levinas’s thought in the light
of Celan’s “Lob der Ferne,” as well as for countering reinterpreta-
tions of Celan’s poem in Levinas’s renewed hearing of it.

In attending to the proximity of these two texts to one another,
one might well start with how Levinas engages in an extended dis-
course in chapter 4 on the pragmatics of pronouns that is deeply rem-
iniscent of Celan’s own approach to the persona of the poet within
“Lob der Ferne,” as well as the rest of his poetry. For Levinas what is
only afterward translated substantively or nominally as the self is “at
rst” a pronoun “that bears itself as a borrowed name,” and further
on, “a non-quiddity, a no one, clothed with purely borrowed being,
which masks its nameless singularity by conferring on it a role.” As
these lines indicate this pronominal locus of responsibility can sec-
ondarily “appear in an indirect language, under a proper name, as an
entity, and thus put itself on the edge of the generality characteris-
tic of all said, and there refer to essence” (OB, 106) But in the rst
instance, to which it incessantly recurs both in Celan’s poetry and
Levinas’s philosophy, the self is a pronoun denucleated of the noun’s
essence.
Consider for a moment in these passages how Levinas might be
interpreted as having heard the saying of pronouns within Celan’s
“Praise of Distance.” One distinctive difference quickly emerges: the

“you” to whom Celan speaks from the very beginning of his poem
drops out of Levinas’s account. In the essay on Celan in Proper Names,
Levinas remarks on the Buberian characteristics of Celanian poetics,
of its heavy reliance on the second person pronominal, with both
admiration and a certain distancing (PN 42). Here in Otherwise than
Being, that distancing remains intact. On the other hand, Levinas’s
remarks on the use of the rst-person pronoun parallel the movement
of the I, das Ich, in Celan’s poem. As Levinas advocates in his own
philosophical discourse, the Celanian pronoun of “Praise of Distance”
is spoken such that its sense is neither general nor particular.18 Rather
the pronoun is singular — it obsessively recurs to its locus of responsi-
bility without making the identity of that locus its theme. Instead the
theme addressed by the pronoun is found beyond its own purview in
“your eyesprings” (die Quellen deinen Augen), a phrase that is explic-
itly stated four times in the 16 lines of the poem and implicitly frames
its every word. Insofar as Celan names in later lines nominal loci of
the poem’s rst-person pronoun — as a heart, as the maker of an oath,
as clothed — these names are ultimately “thrown off.” In fact the line
cited above from Levinas — in which the pronoun signies “a no one
clothed with purely borrowed being” — both absorbs and translates a
line from “Lob der Ferne” in which the self is similarly denucleated:
“I throw off my clothes and the glare of an oath.”19
A less obvious naming of the rst-person pronoun — the adop-
tion by the poem’s ich of the mask of an implicit brotherhood with
the shermen of the Madsea20 — is one of the fulcrums or hinges by
which the poem’s breath turns in the latter part of its verses. For in
casting off its own heart’s clothes, in traveling into the Madsea of the
other’s eyes, where the pronoun then drifts and searches for spoils,
the net or line that is cast out by the poet/sherman/pronoun only
ends up being entangled in the net or line cast out by the other’s
eyes (or “your” eyes, in Celan’s pronominal pragmatics), a net that
remains entangled in the net of the rst-person pronoun, embraced
by it, even as this pronoun is severed away from the second-person

pronoun who has cast its countering net out to him. That one seeks
to plunder the other who is at sea in her or his madness or erring
is itself disturbing if not a scandalous situation for the poet to have
placed himself. The poet seeks the spoils of those who suffer. The very
lines of the poem that Celan is writing bend under this accusation,
since these words too can be interpreted as lines or yarns, spinning
out the poet’s own agenda at the expense of the reader who is being
snared. The poem trades in violence whose shamefulness it cannot
escape. Even the oath that one has left behind (implied in the per-
sona’s claim that the “glare of an oath” was “shed”) only reinforces
the ambivalence in one’s discourse that cannot be undone but must
be suffered.
Furthermore, the difculty of imagining a net entangled in a net
gives way to various problems or questions implicit to this image,
which magnify and disrupt any interpretation of it — for example, the
doubled instability of this image’s locus (for exactly where does a net
exist?), the doubled imsiness of any substantiality upon which the
eye can x itself, and the doubled goal or intention of the nets snar-
ing one another. 21 The image of a net netting net (or line snaring
line) is at the very least awkward to imagine, if not impossible or even
ludicrous, and yet the call to do so in spite of the image’s ineptness
offers a renewed sense to that awkwardness precisely in the urgency
of that call.
This act of imaginative stumbling is complicated even further
as the reader is brought, if she or he is careful about what is being
thrown out and brought in, to nd a correlation between the net/
line of the penultimate verse and the strand of rope from which the
other hangs in the last verse. For both are snares of string or cord.
This shift in perspective after already so many awkward transitions
piled one upon another, unnerves the reading of the poem, brings
it to be engaged in otherwise than the reader’s intentions were rst
lulled into anticipating as he or she was called into collaboration with
the poet and with his words. The poem itself has snared the reader,
so that even the noun “reader” becomes questionable, indefensible
as a mask of her or himself. What the poem pictures it also affords,
offers its readers. And yet this affordance is itself a severing off, for the
rst person pronoun continually sheds its nouns and so leaves the
reader in the end struggling with her or his own investment in having
spoken in the rst person at the invitation of the poet’s having done
so. Mimesis and imagination are revealed otherwise and in torsion as
investment and inspiration.
In this shift that is both severing and entanglement, this draw-
ing apart that remains in proximity, this abstraction (and one should
remember that in English, French, and German the word abstrac-
tion/abstraction/Abstraktion is literally a word made of words signi-
fying a “drawing from,” a “severing”) that is nevertheless singular, is
given the theme of which the poem provides its praise — a revelation
of distance from another articulated otherwise than the term might
suggest in its common said, its unimaginative or uninspired or merely
denotative understanding. The revelation of this distance leads to the
most arresting reversal in the poem — its nal line in which is given
the aphorism of the hanged man. This image provides a Gegenlicht
by which the entirety of the poem is illuminated from behind so to
speak, from its ending, and so invites yet once more its rereading,
its renewing. One can hear — or is it invent? — oblique references to
this line in Levinas’s discussion of lungs and breath as gures, tropes,
for the subject who speaks as a personal pronoun, “in its own skin”:
“Not at rest under its own form, but tight in its skin, encumbered
and as it were stuffed with itself, suffocating under itself, insufciently
open, forced to detach itself from itself, to breathe more deeply, all
the way, forced to dispossess itself to the point of losing itself” (OB
110). But in Levinas’s rather shadowy, circuitous appropriation of
the image of the hanged man, strangulation is displaced from the you
or other who is witnessed by the rst-person pronoun as undergoing
strangulation to the rst-person pronoun itself becoming the perse-
cuted, the strangled.
A small detour, a running about, a discursive digression pertains

at this moment of strangulation. For there is perhaps an earlier work
in Levinas’s textual corpus where the logic of Celan’s aphorism is
worked out more straightforwardly. Is there not an odd similarity, a
subversive reciprocal inuence, at work between Levinas’s own gure
for the emergence both of my temptation to and prohibition from
murder in Totality and Innity, in my witnessing the face of the other
(TI 197–201), and Celan’s witnessing of the hanged man who in
turn strangles the rope with which he has been strangled? In both
tropes, a devastating resistance otherwise than a force majeure, oth-
erwise than a power that overwhelms one’s intentions by means of a
counter-intention, is registered. In both cases, one consciously con-
siders the murder of the other only to nd one is incapable of doing
so without succumbing in that very consideration to a limit in whose
revelation the very intention to murder has already been rendered
powerless, inept. This undoing of my power does not keep me, either
in Levinas or in Celan, from precipitating violence against the other.
But it does denucleate, no matter how I might respond, my intention
to have ignored the face of the other, to have reduced her or him in
the act of violence to a mere vector of my own time. The self as the
singular rst-person pronoun is revealed here, in its provocation to
murder the other, as an assignation to answer without evasion.
This turning around or torsion of words like “murder” and “stran-
gle” from a dehumanization of the other in violence to a revelation of
peace for the sake of the other is itself a trope that recurs insistently,
even obsessively, within both Levinasian and Celanian discourse.22 Is
this not also a trope searched out persistently in the discursive tra-
ditions of Judaism and Christianity, for both of which persecution
and suffering already offer a revelation other than that anticipated by
the persecutor, by those who insist on inicting their own intention
upon another? Even the hard heartedness of Pharoh has its other
sense, its redemptive breath-turn. Levinas turns to words of immola-
tion and unrest, to irritability and disruption, to denucleation and
delirium, much as Celan turns to strangulation and madness, to praise
and blasphemy, to nearness and distance, to snaring and invitation

not only to allude to senses of the words already established in the
sociality of the said, in dictionaries and on Wikipedia, in Shakespeare
and Buchner, in Mandelstamm and Isaiah, in Torah and Testament,
in Plato and Parmenides, in Descartes and Kierkegaard, in Hitler and
Chamberlin, in Gandhi and Rumsfeld, but also to collaborate in a
renewing of all these traditions of speaking beyond their institution-
ally dened senses.
But to return to Otherwise than Being: Following upon the passage
in which is found the trope of self-strangulation, of a subject that suf-
focates under its own weight, a renewal rather than a mere repetition
of Levinas’s earlier account of the face-to-face relationship is now
proffered to the reader. This time, in lieu of the pronoun’s being the
potential murderer, in lieu of working out the trope of murder in the
gaze of the one tempted to violence as he or she gazes into the face
of the one whose very gaze in return resists this violence, Levinas
now places the singular pronoun in the position of being faced by
the pitiless, by its persecutor (OB 111). It is as if suddenly the pro-
noun is speaking from the place of the hanged man. Here we mark
yet another breath-turn, however ironical and persecuting, another
renewing of Levinas’s theme, however scandalous and disturbing,
that calls for much more than merely accounting for it in a series of
explicit observations about what has changed in its said.
IN OTHER WORDS: DISCURSIVE UNIVERSALITY
Late in this essay neither time nor place is afforded to develop any
additional details on the difference this particular breath-turn makes
in Levinas’s own thought as it moves from the discourse of Totality
and Innity to that of Otherwise than Being. But what, hopefully,
has become evident by this point in these readings and rereadings
of Levinas via Celan and Celan via Levinas and both via postcards
available for purchase in the mid-twentieth-century United States is
the articulation, through language practiced as skepticism, of what
might be termed discursive universality. Rather than announcing a

principle, a theme by which the postcards of hanged American citi-
zens might be included in the Celanian witness of violence in a time
after the Shoah, the poem traces out a prethematic sensitivity to the
approach of others. The poem’s language turns about one’s hearing of
the image and imagining of the word so that the uidity of a human
tongue, a langue, in which one word’s sense already suggests that
of another in its various sayings, all this slings one outward into yet
other vectors of engagement for the sake of yet other others.23 One
does not merely reach out to grasp a postcard of a lynching via an
abstract category of unjust violence under which such an image falls,
or merely through a particular, experientially-forged association of
neck and noose. One must also receive the postcard’s communication
in a burdening of one’s sensitivity to the word or image that catches
one before one might have ever caught up with it.24 Even if one is
explicitly directed to the website where such an image is archived,
one enters into its presence as if one has been found out by it rather
than the inverse. One not only should not, but in the rst instance
one actually cannot look at the image as merely historical material.
In fact, its very storage as a material image (even if the material is
electronic impulses encoded in binary mathematical algorithms), makes
one immediately uneasy, as if one has participated in a blasphemy
that even if necessary is nonetheless deeply objectionable.
In speaking of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide, and
the death camps, among the other names given to one unnamable
event among a glut of unnamable events that must nevertheless be
named, one must inevitably confront a question that can only be asked
in the most skeptical and incendiary of tones: Why must we here and
now worry about this particular historical moment of catastrophic
mayhem? Are there not other genocides, other regimes of starvation
and displacement, other trails of tears, other lynchings and middle
passages and all the rest that already also demand our attention? Is
not remembering the blasphemy of the other already a blasphemy of
the other others who must go unremembered, precisely because one
is speaking here and now of this blasphemy? Why now this one of
which you are speaking?”
One’s response to the skeptic’s impatience with the betrayal of the
plenitude of particulars by the poverty of the singular, of all the other
others by the unique other, ought not begin or end by justifying
one’s speaking on behalf of this other now before one at the expense
of yet other others. Comparing the respective qualities and quantities
involved in various instances of genocide and other historical cata-
clysms and blasphemies is at times perhaps politically appropriate but
also shamefully insufcient in its reply to the skeptic’s question. Rather
one must register in one’s speaking, a registering that can never have
been emphatic enough, to have found oneself already pulled ahead of
one’s very speaking, already possessed in prophetic or poetic equivo-
cation by an ireny of saying that can only locate itself in a language
in which all the other others are already speaking. One speaks of the
Shoah precisely because one is already speaking, whether one wills it
or not, of a postcard of a lynching sold in a Mississippi gas station.
In this damning yet redemptive ambivalence, in this universality that
does not lend itself to categorization but undermines and yet renews
itself in every attempt to afrm and structure its breadth and depth,
one would remain true, however ambivalently, to the particular other,
even as one turns, however ambivalently, to the other others.
For this reason, the singular other, the other who approaches me
before I could have prepared for that approach, never actually appears
before me in Levinas’s thought. This other here and now, these partic-
ular eyes into which I gaze, they are not exactly those of the singular
other to whom Levinas would claim I have already offered hineni, my
sign of recognition that is also a sign of my submission or obedience.25
Nor can the other others surrounding this enigmatic dyadic node of
other and me actually make themselves heard directly either, even if
one listens in every direction for their speech afterward. The entire
scene of the other who obsesses me, who calls me to account no
matter what she or he may demand, occurs in a past that could never
have been present to me. I am only there afterward. For this reason
the singular other is neither palpable nor spectral in its presence in

Levinas’s text. It appears otherwise than appearance, which is to say
it is revealed enigmatically. My hineni, my “here I am,” was already
offered to the other’s face beyond any actual scene of which I might
be or could have been conscious. Here and now as I contemplate
testimony upon testimony in regard to this or that other in the hear-
ing of yet other others, all this is already afterward. The present that
is palpable is undermined by a present that could never have been
present to me. This is the nontheological signicance for Levinas of
my having been created.
Thought cannot resolve the swelling multitude of claims by oth-
ers upon one’s voice, cannot provide a foolproof or even defensible
(or at least ultimately defensible) rationale by which one chooses/
is chosen by this voice here and now at the expense of all the other
voices. Rather one nds oneself already amidst a noisy upsurge and in
an impossible predicament, suffering call upon call for one’s witness

without any possible way to stop any of this. Put simply: The willing-
ness to respond to evil by speaking on behalf of the good does not
overcome the former but subjects one in perpetuity to speaking on
behalf of a good. Universal humanity and its universal justice are not
illuminated by any given principle, an eternal emanation in a discern-
able design of a discernible origin, although the elaboration of prin-
ciples is certainly crucial in one’s advocacy for the universal. This is to
claim the universal is in the rst place discursive and anarchic rather
than principled and originary. In discursive universality one cultivates
sensitivity to detours, to digression and allusion, to the citation of
precedents that both anticipate and yet fail in crucial points to t the
case at hand. In this way one’s reason offers its witness of the universal
rather than merely its unfolding. One’s thought becomes wary of the
temptation to make claims that culminate in a grand truth. Instead,
one’s thinking confronts its poverty in a “cellular irritability” that is
“restless for the other” (OB 143).
One must live discursively. This would be one way of hearing how
for Levinas “I am ‘in myself ’ through the others” (OB 112). For in
the very saying of me as “myself,” in the moving from the mask of

pronominalization to the various nouns that serve me to articulate
however fragilely, however briey, however falsely, however darkly
my identity, I cannot evade the other voices, the other vectors of
approach, the other singular “angle[s] of creaturely inclination,”26
to borrow a phrase from Celan, that here and now perplex my speak-
ing. In the wake of the other’s saying and my taking up with its said,
its residue, in my saying, I nd myself employing yet another word
rendered in torsion by Levinas in chapter 4: tergiversation. In this
word — itself signaling in its Latin roots a turning back or a turning
of one’s back, whose French meanings include caught up in hesita-
tion, employing detours to put off any nal decision, evading a pre-
cise response — is given anew the sense of a responsibility that must
digress if it is to remain in proximity to the other, that must betray
if it is to remain true to the other. Faithless in philosophy, I respond
loyally in truth. Blaspheming in philosophy, I praise. Denying my
oath in philosophy, I keep it. If these were lines in a play, certainly
some Horatio would reply: “ ‘Twere to consider too curiously, to
consider so.”27 Yet, might this practice of equivocation, so carefully
exercised by both Celan and Levinas, this shilly-shally of language,
might it do otherwise than undo us?
APPENDIX
Lob der Ferne Praise oF distance
Im Quell deiner Augen In the springs of your eyes

leben die Garne der Fischer der Irrsee Live the Madsea fishermen’s nets
hält das Meer sein Versprechen the sea keeps its promise.
Hier werf ich, Here, as a heart

ein Herz, das geweilt unter Menschen, That abode among humans
die Kleider von mir and den Glanz I throw off my clothes and the
eines Schwures: glare of an oath:
Schwärzer im Schwarz, bin ich nackter. Blacker in black, am I more

Abtrünnig erst bin ich treu. naked.
Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin. Apostate only am I true.
I am you, when I am I.

treib ich and traeume von Raub. I drift on and dream of spoils.
Ein Garn ng ein Garn ein: A net snared in a net:

wir scheiden umschlungen. embracing we sever.

erwuergt ein Gehenkter den Strang. a hanged man strangles the rope.
Paul Celan, Gedichte I Trans. John Felstiner,

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul
33 Celan (New York: W.W. Norton,
2001), 25
N OTES TO H ATLEY , “S KEPTICAL P OETICS AND D ISCURSIVE U NIVERSALITY “
1. Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008), esp. 81, 122–23, 131, 144–45.
2. Oona Eisenstadt, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of
Levinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 134.
3. Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden (Walden; or, Life in the
Woods), ed. Philip van Doren Stern (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 447.
4. See particularly OB 111: “This responsibility is prior to dialogue . . . and in
the saying proper to responsibility is produced as a digression.”
5. That is, the Greek word for peace. Traditionally, it is transliterated as
“irene,” but I have chosen here to modify the spelling in order to emphasize the
comparison and contrast with “irony.”
6. Babylonian Talmud: Menahot 29b.
7. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book, trans. Llewellyn Brown (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 174.
8. While some thinkers might proceed along the trajectory of this insight
to argue against autonomy itself, that is not the conclusion being supported
here. Autonomy remains an important and irreplaceable element in any politics
that would speak on behalf of one’s own and another’s responsibility. And a
clear sense of autonomy is essential if one, in one’s own political practices, is to
move from a notion of responsibility for the other to guilt on behalf of one’s
own actions. As in other Levinasian renewals of a philosophical term, autonomy
would signify in the first place the autonomy of another rather than one’s own.
9. Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the
Visual Arts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 66.
10. Paul Celan, “Lob der Ferne” [Praise of Distance], in Selected Poems and
Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001),
24–25. The second translation given is mine. For the entire version of Celan’s
poem in German, as well as Felstiner’s translations of it, see the appendix to this
essay on p. 111.
11. This is my rather idiosyncratic translation of Celan’s line, “Quell deiner
Augen,” which Felstiner renders as “the springs of your eyes.” Felstiner partially
identifies the source of this image in a line from Celan’s “Edgar Jene and the
Dream of a Dream,” in which Celan proposes as a poet to “never leave the depths
and keep holding dialogue with the dark wellsprings [ finstern Quellen]” (John
Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew [New York: Yale University Press,
2001], 52). In a very Levinasian move, Celan now emphasizes in “LOB DER
FERNE” how these Quelle — wellsprings, sources — are not a locus of primor-
dial origin, but the provocation to anarchical address in the approach creatively
offered by and in the other’s eyes. What comes then of the Levinasian philosophi-
cal impulse to seek and express the truth, when it is directed, as Levinas would
himself have it, not to principles or to an anonymous, even if universal arche
(αρχή) but precisely and singularly to the Quelle of the other’s eyes? Eyes expres-
sive through their tears, tears signifying vulnerability in the other. It is hard to
imagine a more perfect poem for Levinas to have cited to open his chapter on
substitution.
12. This term is first proposed by German critic Gotz Wiendold and then
adopted by Alvin Rosenfeld. See my discussion in Suffering Witness: The
Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2000), 182–87.
13. A collection of such disturbing images can be found at www.
withoutsanctuary.org. For a discussion of the powerful yet complex modes of
witness provided by the images from the Without Sanctuary website, see Roger
I. Simon, “The Public Rendition of Images Medusee: Exhibiting Souvenir
Photographs Taken at Lynchings in America,” in Storia della Storiografia 55
(2009): 108–27. Difficult ethical questions assail any exhibition or even refer-
ence to these images, including the one being made here. Simon’s essay is an
important contribution in exploring the irresolvable ambivalence the postcards
introduce into our social and historical judgments. It also provides an exemplary
case study in the practice of discursive universality.
14. In the poem’s line — “Ein Garn fing ein Garn ein / A net snares a net
in” — the word Garn translated by Felstiner as “net” actually means “yarn” and
in turn suggests German locutions similar in their sense to the English “to fall for
a line,” in the “to be ensnared by someone” — jemandem ins Garn gehen. As in
English one can also “spin a yarn” in German, which is to say, tell a tall tale.
15. The puns and other homonymic structures upon which poetic (and
midrashic) language thrives not only can speak truth but may be privileged in
doing so. Precisely in the instability of expression, in the incessant shifting of
meaning that runs to and fro throughout poetic discursus, thought is rendered
yet more sensitive to its unspoken, to its as of yet unwitnessed betrayal and vio-
lence. In poetry, as Celan provides for it, language cannot hide from its own
voices!
16. Paul Celan, “Gegenlicht,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Alleman and
Klaus Reichert, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), trans. Rose Marie Waldrop
as “Backlight,” in Paul Celan: Collected Prose (New York: Routledge, 2003). The
first quote is my translation from the original German, p. 163; the following two
quotes are from Waldrop’s translation, pp. 11–12.
17. The connection between “Lob der Ferne” and “Gegenlicht” is even more
direct. For in the latter is found the parable of a gallows that imagines itself a tree,
even as the witnesses to the hanging look down in shame before the unbroken man
who has been hanged and whose eyes, which have remained open, the hangman
must now close (Celan, “Backlight,” 13). But it is a tree that cannot be proven
to exist. No one looked, the parable argues, so the gallows might have become a
tree. The resistance of poetic language functions here, as in “Lob der Ferne,” to
arrest the reader by arresting how the very gesture of arresting her or him might be
offered. The discourse here is not evidentiary. It resist otherwise than by providing
an explicit or even implicit nay to oppose a yea.
18. This anticipates yet another poem by Celan: “Psalm” (Tehilah or “Praise”
would be the Hebrew word used in regard to this literary/religious form of
discourse which the Greek “Psalm” renames as “harp song”). In Celan’s poem,
the Psalm renders its praise by transmuting the “You” to which the words are
directed into a “no one,” the second person personal pronoun succumbing to
a neuter placeholder. Registered in this transmutation and hinted at as well in
Levinas’s discursivity of pronouns is the illeity of G-d, the “itness” of the En
Sof, of the Without Limit, of the Infinite (see especially Levinas’s discussion of
illeity in regard to the human and G-d in OB 149). Perhaps these names could
also name G-d, but Levinas argues G-d is to be named in the first instance by
my signifying my responsiveness, my obedience, to the other who approaches
me in her or his vulnerability: hineni. Arguably, Celan, in his countering of the
biblical Psalm, of its trajectory of praise for that which is too easily named, takes
this approach as well.
19. See appendix, p. 111.
20. The translation of Celan’s “Irrsee” by Felstiner as “Madsea” plays on
how Celan’s invented idiom mirrors Irrsinn the German locution for insanity.
What this particular translation fails to sufficiently emphasize is the root meaning
of Irren which is to err, to wander aimlessly. In an earlier translation, Felstiner
attempted to articulate this latter meaning through another invented locution:
“Wildsea” (Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, 52).
21. Although, in the German, the difficulty turns around one’s line that trolls
for another’s line only to be entangled in the other’s trolling for one’s own line.
The same dynamics of imaginative stumbling is involved but perhaps not as pro-
nounced as in Felstiner’s translation of the German Garn by the English “net”
in place of “yarn” or “line.”
22. Torsion, a word peculiarly apt for Levinasian discourse that would be
restless for the other, in cellular irritability: “Torsion, c.1425, ‘wringing pain in
the bowels,’ from O.Fr. torsion (1314), from L.L. torsionem (nom. torsio ) ‘a
wringing or gripping,’ from L. tortionem (nom. tortio ) ‘torture, torment,’ from
tortus, pp. of torquere ‘to twist’ (see thwart)” Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v.
“Torsion,” by Douglas Harper, accessed October 1, 2010 via http://dictionary
.reference.com/browse/torsion. The ambivalence of poetic discourse is not con-
fused but twists, intensifies or magnifies itself in torsion precisely as its mode of
truing itself to the other’s proximity. This compaction of contraries by twisting
their meanings about or against one another is to be distinguished from paradox,
in which the contraries welcome one another with effortless grace, without suf-
fering even being hinted at. The question needs to be asked: has one’s reading of
Levinas been too freighted with paradox and lacking in torsion?
23. Or would it be better at this moment to have employed, in place of the
centripetal metaphoric of the tongue’s fluid voice being slung outward, that of
the tongue’s fleshly engorgement, of a tongue swollen with the phonemic ges-
ticulations of other voices, of other idiolects, a tongue stuttering in the excita-
tion and discharge of its burden of saying? In this latter metaphoric my saying
would come perilously close to the engorgement of the hanged man’s tongue,
the strangled one. This likely is closer to Celan’s own implicit “enlanguement” of
tongues in his poem. At another level, this observation indicates how philosophy
is not only a seeking of the truth but also its expression. The words one chooses
in order to pursue an argument are themselves as much an act of the philosophi-
cal mind as the argument itself, as if an argument might ever have been disem-
bodied from its langue, its language, its tongue.
24. The one who renders justice, Levinas argues, “is not limited to ‘the func-
tion of judgment,’ the subsuming of particular cases under a general rule. The
judge is not outside the conflict, but the law is in the midst of proximity” (OB
159). In the heightened ambivalence of poetic and prophetic discourse are given
modes of public reasoning that provide ways of bringing into language how the
one who judges is always already embroiled in the conflict demanding her or his
judgment. The judge is always already witnessing the one who is to be judged
and all the other others as well.
25. See Perpich’s discussion of this issue in which she argues: “there is simply
no way to do justice to the singularity of a face in a description” (Perpich, Ethics of
Levinas, 47). The tendency is for readers of Levinas to confuse the particular face
with the singular one. While Perpich argues against this confusion altogether,
it may be that yet again we are entwined in an ambivalence that is irreducible
in regard to the relationship of the particular to the singular. The other who
is singular, whose face proceeds any characterization in the particular, is always
implicated in the emergence of the other’s face in the particular. Precisely here
in this gap between the singular and the particular, the poetic and the prophetic
emerges to speak otherwise than in a language of principles and comparison in
regard to one’s judgments about others.
26. My translation from the closing words of this sentence: “Diese Immer-
noch des Gedichts kann ja wohl nur in dem Gedicht dessen zu finden sein, der nicht
vergisst, dass er unter . . . dem Neigungswinkel seiner Kreaturlichkeit spricht”
(Celan, “Merdian,” in Gesammelte Werke, 197).
27. Hamlet, 5.1.
N C , “D R “
Disastrous Responsibility: Blanchot’s Criticism of
Levinas’s Concept of Subjectivity in The Writing of the
Disaster
Arthur Cools

Disastrous Responsibility
Blanchot’s Criticism of Levinas’s
Concept of Subjectivity in The Writing of
the Disaster
Arthur Cools
I
n the Anglophone reception of the works of
Blanchot and Levinas, it is generally accepted that
the main differences between the two authors can
be explained from the distinction between an aesthetic and an ethi-

cal point of view. Is not a reection on the essence of literature and
the ontological status of the artwork the central theme of Blanchot’s
writings? And is the philosophy of Levinas, on the contrary, not dedi-
cated to defending the priority of ethics with regard to the ques-
tion of being and thus also to redening responsibility for the other
as a modality of subjectivity in terms of an otherwise than being?
Yet at the same time it is also accepted that this distinction does not
really divide the two friends who articulate a similar or perhaps even
the same structure of difference within the condition of existence.
This assumption is generally taken for granted, and forms the start-
ing point for inquiries into the relation between Blanchot and Levi-
nas as different as are those of Joseph Libertson,1 Leslie Hill,2 and
Simon Critchley.3 It still is the basis for the comprehensive approach
given by Alain Toumayan, although he is aware of the fact that “the
encounter” constitutes “a common theme” in Blanchot and Levinas
and that the scope of this theme goes far beyond the possibility of the
aesthetics/ethics distinction, “disrupt[ing] the subject’s foundation
113
of selfhood, the subject’s fundamental spatial and temporal coordi-

nates, and generally, the subject’s conceptual resources.”4
It is indeed astonishing that the evidence of the aesthetics/ethics
distinction is never seriously put in question with regard to the rela-
tion between Blanchot and Levinas. Certainly, Levinas is making
this distinction because he wants to go beyond the primacy of the
ontological and he sees in the aesthetic mode the mere continuation
of being. But Levinas is not alone in his opposition to Heidegger’s
renewal of a fundamental ontology: Blanchot, too, is searching for
a language beyond ontology. How then — outside of the primacy
of being — are we to consider as evident a distinction that can be
given clear conceptual delimitation only within the realm of beings?
Moreover, it is not right to argue that the aesthetics/ethics distinc-
tion can account for every difference between the two approaches of
Blanchot and Levinas. On the contrary, it may even seem that the
themes which they share and upon which they communicate with
each other in trying to investigate the insufciency of a strict ontolog-
ical determination — such as, for instance, the il y a, death, the other,
the trace, transcendence — are rst of all indifferent with regard to the
question of priority for either ethics or aesthetics. All the same, when
analyzing these themes with proper care, it is not difcult to make
manifest an insurmountable gap between the two friends.5 When
reducing this gap to a matter of different emphases on the aestheti-
cal and the ethical, one is led to overlook the farther reaching tenets
of their debate that concerns, as Toumayan formulates it so well,
the “subject’s foundational selfhood” and “the subject’s conceptual
resources,” and as such concerns the very possibility (and manner) of
distinguishing aesthetics and ethics.
I hope to show this specically by focusing on the notion of
responsibility. It is well known that this notion is central to Levinas’s
philosophy, with its decades-long defense of the priority of the ethi-
cal and thus contributing a renewed sense among European philoso-
phers of the importance of an ethics of responsibility. But long before
Levinas’s works reached prominence even in France, Blanchot had
Cools Disastrous Responsibility 115
addressed himself explicitly to the Levinasian sense of responsibility

in some fragments of his The Writing of the Disaster (1980) — and
indeed undermined it in several instances, especially in creating the
strange, disorientating formulation: “responsibility is itself disastrous”
(WD 27).
My aim is to give a philosophical reformulation of Blanchot’s
criticism of Levinas’s notion of responsibility in The Writing of the
Disaster. The stakes of this criticism go far beyond a so-called aes-
thetic takeover of Levinas’s ethical argument, and concerns nothing
less than the question of language and the problem of the singularity
(or if one prefers, the unicity) of selfhood.
LANGUAGE
Subjectivity, responsibility, and language: it is in the philosophi-

cally construed equivalence of these three terms that Levinas’s phi-
losophy nds its basic expression. Let us briey recall this threefold.
First, in the introduction to Totality and Innity, Levinas presents
his philosophy explicitly as “a defense of subjectivity” and he relates
the inescapable presence of subjectivity to the obligation of respond-
ing to the face of the other, which “demands justice” (TI 26, 294).
Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence repeats this central argument.
In the introductory note to that book, Levinas formulates the follow-
ing as a rst “proposition . . . which names the beyond essence”: “To see
in subjectivity an exception putting out of order the conjunction of
essence, entities and the ‘difference.’ ” He also goes on to announce
that “it will then be necessary to show that the exception of the ‘other
than being’ beyond non-being, signies subjectivity or humanity”
(OB xli–xlii, 8).
Second, Levinas denes the exceptional meaning of subjectivity
immediately as responsibility or substitution for the other person.
It is true that Totality and Innity does not yet fully develop these
notions as the main categories to dene the exceptional meaning of
subjectivity, but already in this book Levinas explicitly relates what he
calls “the irreplaceable unicity of an I” to the personal involvement

in the relation to the other: “In welcoming the Other I welcome the
On High to which my freedom is subordinated. But this subordina-
tion is not an absence: it is brought about in all the personal work of
my moral initiative (without which the truth of judgment cannot be
produced), in the attention to the Other as unicity and face . . . , which
can be produced only in the unicity of an I” (TI 300). In continuity
with this denition, he announces, as a second introductory proposi-
tion by which Otherwise than Being will name the beyond being: “to
catch sight, in the substantiality of the subject, in the hard core of
the ‘unique’ in me, in my unparalleled identity, a substitution for the
other” (OB xli–xlii).
Third, it is in the saying (i.e. in language as it occurs in the relation
to the other) that the meaning of this responsibility is originally given.
In Totality and Innity, Levinas calls it the face: the face speaks, he
says, the “face brings the rst signication,” which means that the
original essence of language has its origin in the face of the other:
“the essence of language is the relation with the Other” (TI 207).
Responding to this meaning of the face is the birth of the responsible
self: “The call to innite responsibility conrms the subjectivity in its
apologetic position. . . . To utter ‘I,’ to afrm the irreducible singular-
ity in which apology is pursued, means to possess a privileged place
with regard to responsibilities for which no one can replace me and
from which no one can release me” (245). And in Otherwise than
Being, he dedicates a whole chapter to this relation between saying
and subjectivity, showing what it means to maintain that “the rela-
tionship with a neighbor, incontestably set up in saying, is a responsi-
bility for the neighbor, that saying is to respond to another [dire, c’est
répondre d’autrui]” (OB 47).
The intrinsic equivalence between subjectivity, responsibility, and
language is pointedly expressed in the following formula of Otherwise
than Being, as the central argument of the entire book: “saying or
responsibility require justice” (OB 45). It is this equivalence between
responsibility (for the other), language (as speech given in response
to the interpellation of the face) and justice (which implies a plea for
subjectivity) that underpins all analyses delivered in Levinas’s phi-
losophy. Levinas still repeats this close interconnection between these
three terms in one of his latest articles, “Ethics as First Philosophy,”
where he writes the following: “What one sees in this questioning
[the very justice of position within being] is . . . to be open to ques-
tion, but also to questioning, to have to respond. Language is born
in responsibility. One has to speak, to say I, to be in the rst person,
precisely to be me (moi).”6
In different fragments of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot
debates with Levinas, and in particular with the philosophy of Otherwise
than Being, though without explicitly mentioning the book. He obvi-
ously expresses his disagreement with some of the basic principles of
Levinas’s argument. To the obligation of saying “me” in responding
to the other, he opposes the indeterminacy characteristic of what he
calls “the disaster, ruin of speech,” which he relates to other cen-
tral themes of his writings such as “the outside,” “the neuter,” or
“worklessness,” all of which seem to make disappear any obligation
and in particular the inescapable position of a me. Consequentially,
Blanchot speaks of “the effacement, the extenuation of the subject”
and in a reection that seems to have Levinas especially in mind he
regards “the use of the word subjectivity” contestable, opposing it
with a notion of “the other in place of me. . . . Anonymity is the name,
and outside is the thought of the other.”7
At this insurmountable divide, it is rst of all the understanding of
language that plays a decisive role. In one of his fragments, Blanchot
writes:
When Levinas denes language as contact, he denes it as imme-
diacy, and this has grave consequences. For immediacy is absolute
presence — which undermines and overturns everything. Immediacy
is the innite, neither close nor distant, and no longer the desired or
demanded, but violent abduction — the ravishment of mystical fusion.
Immediacy not only rules out all mediation; it is the inniteness of a
presence such that it can no longer be spoken of, for the relation itself,
be it ethical or ontological, has burned up all at once in a night bereft

of darkness. (WD 24)
Indeed, in Levinas’s essay “Language and Proximity,” published

for the rst time in the second edition of Discovering Existence
with Husserl and Heidegger (1967), language is dened in terms of
contact and immediacy: “Qua sensible the concrete is immediacy,
contact, and language” (CPP 118). However, this immediacy does
not mean for him the annihilation of any kind of relation, but on
the contrary, the ethical meaning of proximity — the relation to the
other — in which language originates: “This relation of proximity,
this contact unconvertible into a noetico-noematic structure, in
which every transmission of messages, whatever be those messages,
is already established, is the original language, a language without
words and propositions, pure communication. . . . Proximity, beyond
intentionality, is the relationship with the neighbor in the moral
sense of the term” (119).
On this issue, confrontation leads to radical contradiction: Blanchot
sees only destruction and annihilation in an argument with which
Levinas exposes the ethical meaning of subjectivity. Why should this
be the case? What is at stake in this mutual exclusion is not limited
to the meaning of the notion of responsibility, but involves broader
questions concerning the denition of language and the way in
which language is constitutive for the world and for the self. With
the notion of responsibility, Levinas thinks not only of the ethical
responsiveness toward the other, but also, and more fundamentally
the original locus of the event of language, which includes the modal-
ity of referring to a given world. According to Levinas, the essence
of language is not grasped in dening it as a system of signs or as
the expression of thought. It is related to the performative mode of
interpellation in which I am designated to respond. Face to face with
the other, the indices of language are given a direct presence and
upon this vivid presence of the other depends the possibility of speak-
ing about a world in common. In this regard, Levinas considers the
encounter with the other as the emplacement of language: the mean-

ing of any single utterance is conditioned by the ethical meaning of
the inescapable position of the responsible self with regard to the
other. He writes, “Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse
to words takes place already within the primordial face to face lan-
guage” (TI 206).
For Blanchot, as is well known, language does not allow for such
a presence. In The Writing of the Disaster, which is in the rst place
a book on language, Blanchot criticizes in several fragments the ety-
mological understanding of language, refuting the illusion that is at
its basis and that implies the idea of the proper meaning of words.
His main argument, however, does not merely repeat the well known
linguistic point of view that considers the status of the derivation of
a word from an original root as doubtful and indemonstrable, but it
also challenges the assumption of any such derivation, namely, the
“relation of subordination or any relation whatever between absence

and presence” (WD 93). As such, Blanchot’s argument is necessarily
directed also against Levinas’s attempt to dene the original locus
of language, which of course does not appeal to the etymological
understanding of language, but to the presence of the face-to-face.
Furthermore, in thus opposing these two views that relate language
to an original presence, Blanchot is not content merely to resist privi-
leges for a certain absence, but instead wishes to reverse the more
general conditions of dependency. For him, the relations between
presence and absence is itself an effect of language:
The “root” of a term, far from being its rst sense, its proper meaning,
only comes to language through a play of interdependent little signs
which are by themselves ill-determined or of doubtful signicance.
These determinants which put indetermination into play (or indeter-
minants which determine) draw what wants to be said into a general
errant drift where there is no longer any term that, as meaning, would
belong to itself and where, instead of a center, each has but the pos-
sibility of being decentered: bent, inected, exteriorized, denied, or
repeated. At the most, lost. (WD 93)
The notion of the disaster, as Blanchot approaches it, is already

implied in his criticism of the etymological and/or original under-
standing of language: “the indeterminateness of what is written when
this word [the disaster] is written, exceeds etymology and draws it
into the disaster” (WD 117). In another fragment, Blanchot calls this
indeterminacy “the inniteness of language [which] is always presup-
posed” (103). It is impossible to understand this inniteness in the
way Levinas mentions “the innity” of the face (TI 207). The latter
expresses the signication of an obligation that can only be heard in
the face of the other, whereas with the former Blanchot has in mind
the impossibility of xing language to a pregiven signication or to a
nal word. In short, what Levinas denes as “the primordial essence
of language” (206), that is, the original entrance into discourse with
the other, is according to Blanchot conditioned by an indeterminacy
which undermines the possibility of deciding the question concern-
ing the original entrance into language. As Blanchot already stated in
“Literature and the right to death,” language is an “innite disquiet,”
an endless interrogation, because “its meaning derives not from what
exists, but from its own retreat before existence.”8
There are many consequences to be drawn from this approach to
the inniteness of language. In Blanchot’s view, language is a kind of
absolute, not in the sense that it gives a rst meaning, but in the sense
that it is not possible to leave language in order to x its meaning or to
name its original moment of appearing. Language already conditions
and thus completely changes the relation to what precedes language.
It is only from within language that one may express what is beyond
language — only from within language that one may go in search of
the moment that exceeds language, which according to Blanchot is
a dening realization of literature: “literature learns that it cannot go
beyond itself towards its own end.”9 We understand now why the
notion of immediacy in the fragment quoted above is the crux of the
divide between Blanchot and Levinas. Language does not allow for
immediacy. Language is mediation, “innite mediation,” as Blanchot
says in reference to Humboldt (WD 106). It is from this condition
that we are able to encounter the other without being reduced to

muteness. But we misunderstand the function of mediation, if we
are looking for a pregiven meaning that installs it or if we are trying
to dene its constitutive parts — the original roots of words — from
which it is derived. Language as mediation is endless productive of
meanings, it creates an orientation thanks to which the world can be
discovered, but it is not itself transparent. Nor is it possible to dene
its function from outside in order to x the meaning of the world
that it enables us to discover. In other words, by the same power by
which it makes us discover a world, it takes away the evidence and
the guarantee that assures us that we refer to the same meaning of
the world when we speak to each other. Accordingly, for Blanchot,
the possibility of referring to oneself in the face of the other is not a
sufcient condition for speaking about a common world.
SUBJECTIVITY
We have already taken note of the fact that Blanchot, in his debate
with Levinas, contests “the use of the word subjectivity” and even
rejects it with regard to “the other in place of me” (WD 28). We have
also seen that a different approach to language is at the basis of this
divide. But Blanchot’s criticism of Levinas’s concept of subjectivity is
not limited to the question whether or not the possibility of referring
to oneself is a sufcient condition in order to speak of a common
world. To the contrary, he rejects Levinas’s notion of subjectivity for
another, still more fundamental reason.
On two different occasions, in exactly the same words, Blanchot
denies the promotion of the self that Levinas sees at work in the
responsibility for the other: “The responsibility with which I am
charged is not mine and causes me not to be I.”10 The formulation is
such that it is only possible to interpret it as a kind of inversion with
regard to Levinas’s position. For of course it is Levinas’s position that
the responsibility that comes to me in the face of the other is inescap-
ably my responsibility.11 With regard to the appeal of the face, I can
ignore the demand of the other and fail to take up my responsibil-

ity, but I cannot not respond: “The I is not simply conscious of this
necessity to respond, as if it were a matter of an obligation or a duty
about which a decision could be made; rather the I is, by its very posi-
tion, responsibility through and through” (BPW 17). It is precisely
because of this inescapable position that Levinas argues that goodness
has chosen me — before I can chose what to do for the other.
This suggests that in order to understand what is at stake here in
Blanchot’s inversion, we rst have to introduce the notion of elec-
tion, which has a central meaning in Levinas’s philosophy including
where it attempts to dene our subjectivity. The notion of election
is used in order to clarify the basic condition of subjectivity: “The
election of the I, its very ipseity” (TI 279). It expresses the idea that
the singular relation, characteristic of selfhood, implies the reference
to a personal me that only appears in this relation by designating
itself in the rst person: “election by which the I is accomplished qua
I” (245). Elsewhere he writes, “The ipseity is then a privilege or an

unjustiable election that chooses me and not the ego. I am unique
and chosen; the election is the subjection” (OB 127).
It is important to see how this notion of election functions as an
argument in Levinas’s account of subjectivity. With this notion, he
rejects, on the one hand, the idea that enjoyment (and what he calls
in general the experience of the there is and in particular the needs of
the body) is a sufcient condition to take into account the singular
relation of selfhood. But on the other hand, he argues that the sin-
gular relation of selfhood is not grasped when thought in terms of an
evidence (the concept of cogito), a faculty (the power of determin-
ing oneself), or a representation (the identication with an image, a
model, a project) of the self. In other words, with the notion of elec-
tion, Levinas tries to go beyond the traditional philosophical way of
dening the basic relation of selfhood without giving up the idea that
the rst person conditions the singular relation of selfhood. The I of
election concerns the singular self-relatedness of selfhood, which pre-
cedes identication and exceeds the concept of the ego, without the I
being able of determining or choosing it. Levinas talks of the unique-

ness of selfhood “as chosen without choosing its election” (OB 57).
To say it in still other words, with the notion of election Levinas
thinks selfhood in terms of a radical heteronomy, that is, on the basis
of a modality of obligation outside the self on which the self-related-
ness of selfhood is dependent and from which it takes its very subjec-
tivity. The difculty with this thought is twofold. On the one hand, in
order to truly oblige the self, heteronomy may not become arbitrary:
it must still concern the self and have an appeal to it in such a way that
the self may not escape it and may not transform it in an instrumental
way into a means for self-realization. On the other hand, in order to
constitute the subjectivity of selfhood, heteronomy may not become
bondage and alienation. The idea of radical heteronomy as the condi-
tion for a philosophy of subjectivity therefore implies not only a rela-
tion of asymmetrical dependency which the self cannot escape, but
also a relation of obligation which appeals to the self ’s subjectivity.
In order to overcome these difculties, Levinas elucidates the
notion of election by means of three other notions that he considers
characteristic of selfhood. First, the self is irreplaceable: with regard
to the question of responsibility, nobody can take my place. This idea
of irreplaceability is formulated in phrases such as: “To be unable to
shirk: this is the I” (TI 245); “called to leave in his turn, or without
awaiting his turn, . . . to respond with responsibility” (OB 185); or,
“impossibility of slipping away and being replaced” (56). Second, the
self is unique. The response given to the appeal of the obligation sin-
gularizes the self and is in this sense unique: it is not a response given
to and made possible by a pregiven universal, but it is the unique
expression of the singular relation of my selfhood: “Obligation calls
for a unique response not inscribed in universal thought, the unfore-
seeable response of the chosen one.” (145). And third, the elected self
is an elevation: “Subjection and elevation arise in patience above non-
freedom. It is the subjection of the allegiance to the Good” (126).
The response given to the appeal that obliges me turns me away from
the complacent self-relatedness of my selfhood and brings me into

contact with the asymmetrical position of the other outside myself.
These very notions are targeted at the core of Blanchot’s criticism
of the idea of a responsibility for the other which involves the per-
sonal engagement of the self. According to Blanchot,
That the other has no meaning except the innite aid which I owe
him — that he should be the unlimited call for help to which none but
I can answer — does not make me irreplaceable; still less does it make
me unique. But it causes me to disappear in the innite movement
of service where I am only temporarily singular and a simulacrum of
unity. I cannot draw any justication (either for my worth as a stand-
in or for my being) from a demand that is not addressed to anyone in
particular, that demands nothing of my determination and that in any
case exceeds me to such a degree that it disindividualizes me.12
Let us try to consider more precisely at what Blanchot is pointing

when he opposes to the irreplaceable self a self that is “always the
substituted [le toujours substitué]”; to the uniqueness of the irreplace-
able self a self that is “the un-unique”; to the elevation of the self
“the dying” of the self; and to “the election by which the I accom-
plishes as I” an other who “withdraws me, by the pressure of the very
near, from the privilege of the rst person.”13 In fact, it is possible
to argue that this opposition depends only on a different point of
view on the relation to the other. Levinas describes this relation from
the perspective of the self who enters it, so that the self becomes
the starting point for any description of the other (and of course
puts this description under constant pressure).14 Blanchot, however,
seems to combine different perspectives on the intersubjective space,
already accepting a kind of symmetry that allows us to speak of the
appearance of the other to the self and of the presence of the self
for the other.15 From this last perspective, it could be argued that
the other calls to nobody in particular, but rather addresses the one
who happens to be passing. In turn, this makes it possible to argue
that such an indeterminacy does not require us to contradict the
experience of the self which, in order to respond to the appeal of

the other, is confronted with its own irreplaceability.
However, things are more complicated than this, as becomes obvi-
ous when Blanchot distinguishes “the other in me” from the other
person outside me who calls for my response. A philosophy of subjec-
tivity that considers the response given to the other, however much
that person persecutes me, in terms of the election of the I, does
not need to ignore the dimension of the other in me — and at any
rate Levinas does not seem to do so, for he does envision the pos-
sible return of the il y a even within the relation to the other. But
it must be admitted that the I is able to account for this otherness
and can be delivered of its indeterminacy in order to defend in the
response given to the other the uniqueness and the elevation of the
I. Blanchot disagrees, contending that this ability, the appearance of
the I as responsible for the other, is not given in the passivity to which
the other in me reduces me:

And yet because the other, according to Levinas’s designation, replaces
the Same, just as the Same substitutes for the Other, it is henceforth
in me — a me without selfhood — that the signs of transcendence (of a
transdescendence) appear. Whence this high contradiction, this highly
signicant paradox: when passivity idles [désoeuvre] and destroys me,
I am at the same time pressed into a responsibility which not only
exceeds me, but which I cannot exercise, since I cannot do anything
and no longer exist as myself.16
Here it is worth noting Blanchot’s use — without further claric-

ation — of the notion of transdescendence (and not only “transcen-
dence” as is wrongly mentioned in the English translation). With
this notion, he seems to dismiss the idea that the substitution for
the other is a sufcient condition for dening the original moment
of appearance of the I as exceeding its self-relatedness in its response
to the other. Whatever may be the theological context in which this
notion makes sense, Blanchot’s specic use of “transdescendence”
must be interpreted in relation to what he calls “the outside” within
the self.17 The other in me, instead of opening a personal relation of

responsiveness to the other person beyond my self-relatedness, reveals
an outside that oppresses me from within and reduces my selfhood
to something mute and indifferent.
The otherness implied in the notion of the outside, as it affects
selfhood, is exemplied in some fragments in The Writing of the
Disaster where Blanchot, commenting on Ovid, considers the char-
acteristics of narcissism. These considerations have a central meaning
for Blanchot’s understanding of the condition of subjectivity (as the
fragments on etymology in the previous part have for his view on
the inniteness of language), not only because he explicitly connects
narcissism with the condition of poetry as expression of subjectiv-
ity,18 but also because he introduces his reections on narcissism as a
commentary on the (im)possibility of relating “a primal scene.” On
this he writes, “(A primal scene?) It is typical of narcissism, dened
carelessly or subtly, that, like La Rochefoucauld’s amour-propre, its
effect is easily discernible in everything everywhere” (WD 125). These
thoughts can thus be related directly to a well-known fragment at the
core of the book, pertaining to the whole question of the singular
condition of selfhood: “(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to
a heart that beats no more, etc.” (72). It is perhaps worth saying that
this fragment, which sketches the gure of a child standing by the
window and looking through the pane, has been widely considered
as a key to Blanchot’s writings because of its alleged autobiographical
character.19 At any rate, the manner in which this scene invites con-
nection with others also reecting on the traits of narcissism allows us
to interpret Blanchot’s reections on Narcissus as an exemplication
and even more as a clarication of his view on the singular condition
of selfhood, so that we might propose an analogy between the image
that Narcissus sees but in which he does not recognize himself and
the otherness of the outside as it affects the self.
Well then, what is typical of narcissism is the strange, xed, imper-
sonal and indelible character of the image to which Narcissus is bound
and in which he loses himself. This image reveals something mute and
anonymous at the heart of selfhood to which it is attracted — “the
glorious, terrifying, tyrannical infans” (WD 68), as Blanchot says
in another fragment — something that does not speak and cannot
account for itself, and the presence of which leads him to interpret
Narcissus as “a double Same, that is to say, as containing unknowingly
[à son insu] — and knowing full well [et le sachant] — the Otherness
[l’Autre] within the same, . . . a schism which in fact is no schism, and
which would give him a divided self without any I, while also depriv-
ing him of all relation to the other [autrui].”20
It is clear by now that at the basis of Blanchot’s opposition to
Levinas’s concept of subjectivity, there is a different structure of oth-
erness in which the (im)possibility of accounting for subjectivity is
involved. Yet both agree on the radical otherness of the other person
which is irreducible to the sphere, the dominance and the faculties of
selfhood. For both, therefore, the self is confronted in the encounter
of the other with an irreducible strangeness. But with regard to the
experience of proximity of this strangeness, their views differ radically,
perhaps to the point of excluding one another. According to Levinas,
proximity has the meaning of an immediacy that concerns me and
appeals to me without permitting me the possibility of escape: hence
is it a matter of my responsibility for the other before being myself,
substitution, the obligation of responding in the rst person. The
otherness of the other concerns the self in such a way that it is obliged
to exceed its self-relatedness, and in this movement of exceeding, of
responding to the other, it nds its subjectivity. For Blanchot, how-
ever, the proximity of the other confronts me with the other in me,
which does not call for my response, but neutralizes any response.
What responds is not mine and does not speak. This is something
anonymous which I cannot substitute, but always has substituted me,
and precisely therefore obsesses me, prosecutes and destroys me with-
out my being able to respond.
CONCLUSION
I have highlighted an insurmountable gap between Blanchot and

Levinas from the perspective of The Writing of the Disaster, and have
determined that this divide is not sufciently described in terms of
the distinction between ethics and aesthetics, but instead must be
interpreted in a more fundamental way in relation to the “subject’s
foundational selfhood” and “the subject’s conceptual resources.”21
My main argument consisted in a clarication of Blanchot’s refusal
of the term subjectivity in order to name “the other in place of me.”
Substitution for the other, what Levinas calls responsibility and in
which he sees appear the unique, irreplaceable position of the chosen
I, is, on the contrary, according to Blanchot, what deprives me of the
possibility to respond in the rst person and confronts me with some-
thing mute, something indifferent that does not elevate me, that does
not even give me a position, because the I no longer exists.
Therefore, it is simply wrong to state that “Blanchotian imper-

sonality is the precise communicational conguration which articu-
lates the meaning of Levinasian substitution or assignation — and vice
versa.”22 Nor is it possible to embrace both positions in another way,
by accepting, on the one hand, “Levinas’s essential teaching [which]
is the primacy of the human relation as that which can neither be
refused nor comprehended and his account of subjectivity disposed
towards responsibility,” and by claiming, on the other hand, to fol-
low Blanchot in order to restore “the ambiguity of tension in the
relation to autrui.”23 This view confuses the indeterminacy of the
otherness in me with the ambiguity of the response given to the other
person and in doing so it does not take into account what Blanchot
calls “the other in the place of me,” which deprives me of all relation
to the other. It misunderstands, moreover, the Levinasian account of
the relation to the other, which is certainly not without ambiguity.
This view does not give rise to ask the right questions with regard to
the divide between Blanchot and Levinas: is philosophy inevitably the
mere expression of narcissism?; by what condition might subjectivity,
in its response to/for the other, appear? It could be that these two
questions are more closely related to one other than one is initially
inclined to think, and even that Levinas’s philosophy continues to
have a certain priority in our attempts to answer them, whatever may
be the criticism it attracts.
In a certain way, Blanchot’s criticism of Levinas’s concept of sub-
jectivity is very radical, even more radical than Derrida’s reections
on the face in L’animal que donc je suis.24 With regard to the latter, it
is possible to recall that the epistemological problem concerning the
limitations of what is conceptually dened as face, in Levinas’s per-
spective, is always secondary to the ethical primacy of responding to
the face of the other, which is the neighbor. This means: it is possible
to defend Levinas by arguing that the delimitation of responsibilities
already depends on the event of responding and on the discourse
between the other and me. Blanchot’s criticism, however, is directed
against the condition of singularity of the responsive subjectivity.
What he puts in question is nothing less than the notion of election
in which Levinas thinks the unique, inescapable position of the “Here
I am,” responding to the other.
However, in my opinion, in order to understand fully what is at
stake in this opposition, it is necessary to also consider another scene
and to examine the broader metaphysical context and the religious
assumptions which underpin the concrete analyses of language and
subjectivity proposed in both positions. The importance of the Jewish
religion is well known with regard to Levinas’s position: it is obvi-
ous in crucial references to the Talmud in his philosophical works as
well in the reformulation of several key concepts of his understanding
of subjectivity, the rst of which is precisely the notion of election,
in direct relation to his interpretation of the Jewish religion (and of
course we must not forget his many contributions to the talmudic
tradition, as well as his articles written for the Jewish community in
Paris). As distinct from this manifest correlation of Levinas’s philoso-
phy with a particular religious tradition, it is generally accepted that
Blanchot’s ctional and theoretical writings are without reference to
any such religious tradition and its accompanying metaphysical prem-

ises. Is this necessarily the case? Blanchot’s entire work has its condi-
tion in a notion that is very difcult to understand without a reference
to a religious, not to say metaphysical, view on human beings and
world: death precedes life, and death has always already occurred.
Death in this sense is approached in his writings from the beginning:
it is the main theme of his rst novel Thomas l’Obscur, and it is again
central in some fragments of The Writing of the Disaster where it is
gured as “a child already death” (the infans, again):
A child already dead is dying, of a murderous death — a child of whom
we know nothing (even if we characterize him as marvelous, terrifying,
tyrannical, or indestructible) except this: that the possibility of speak-
ing and of life depend on the ctive establishment, through death and
murder, of a relation of singularity with a mute past, with a prehistory,
with a past, then, which is outside the past and of which the eter-
nal infans is the gure at the same time that he is concealed therein.
(WD 71)
Naturally, this quotation is crucial rst for understanding Blanchot’s

view of the task and the importance of ction. But Blanchot is also
well aware of the religious roots of such a guration; at the end of
The Writing of the Disaster he explicitly mentions Saint Paul as the
historical instigator “who wanted to emancipate us from the Law”
and in doing so introduced “the drama of the sacred, sacred tragedy,
life born of death and inseparable of it” (WD 144).
If this is so, then it may seem that the divide between Blanchot
and Levinas must be considered on still another basis than we have
attempted here — that of implicit religious understanding. This, to be
sure, calls for a new examination and a further interpretation of the
question contained by their divide, which might be promising espe-
cially with regard to the current interest in the current meaning and
status of religion and the so-called deconstruction of Christianity.
But such efforts lead far beyond the scope of the present reections.
27. Hamlet, 5.1.
N OTES TO C OOLS , “D ISASTROUS R ESPONSIBILITY “

In addition to the abbreviations at the front of this volume, the following are
also used: Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (WD) trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
1. See Joseph Libertson, Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and
Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). The author argues that
in the relation between Blanchot and Levinas, “a single configuration of com-
munication insists” and that means: “Blanchotian impersonality is the precise
communicational configuration which articulates the meaning of Levinasian sub-
stitution or assignation — and vice versa” (3).
2. See Leslie Hill, Blanchot Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge,
1997). For instance, the author states: “As far as L’Espace littéraire is concerned,
it is clear that much the same structure of difference and dependence as obtains
between existence and the existent also governs the relation between the work
of art and the worklessness that is the concealed origin of the work; and, indeed,
Blanchot dramatizes the genesis of the work of art in a manner that very closely
echoes, in content if not necessarily in its vocabulary, Levinas’s description of the
emergence of the human existent from the anonymity of existence” (116).
3. See Simon Critchley, “Il y a,” Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. Death,
Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 31–83. The author first iden-
tifies the position of Blanchot and Levinas with regard to the notion of the “there
is” (“The discussion of the latter essay [“La littérature et le droit à la mort”] will
allow me, first, to show how Levinas’s notion of the il y a can be understood as
the origin of the artwork for Blanchot” (35)) and then he uses Blanchot in order
to overcome what he calls the linear narrative of Levinas’s ethics as first philoso-
phy (“Might this [the return of the il y a that is not decisively surmounted] not
plot a different itinerary for reading Levinas, where the name of Blanchot would
function as a clue or key for the entire problematic of literature, writing, neutral-
ity and ambiguity in the articulation of ethics as first philosophy?” (77)).
4. Alain P. Toumayan, Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem
of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2004), 6.
5. See with regard to the theme of the il y a, my article “Revisiting the il y
a: Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas on the Question of Subjectivity,”
Paragraph 28, no. 3(2005): 54–71. For the elaboration of the divide between
Blanchot and Levinas from the event of language, see my Langage et subjectiv-
ité. Vers une approche du différend entre Maurice Blanchot et Emmanuel Lévinas
(Louvain: Peeters, 2007).
6. Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 82.
7. WD 33 (translation slightly modified), 14, 28.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Station
Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster,
and Robert Lambertson (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999), 382, 381.
9. Ibid., 385.
10. WD 13, 18. Quoted is the sentence on page 18, which differs in the
English translation from the sentence given on page 13. In French, the sentence
is repeated in exactly the same words, but mentioned between brackets in the
second occurrence: “La responsabilité dont je suis chargé n’est pas la mienne et
fait que je ne suis pas moi” (cf. Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre [Paris:
Gallimard, 1980], 28 and 35).
11. See for instance the article “Uniqueness”: “For me, it would be to fail
in my first-personal responsibility — in my pre-judicial responsibility with regard
to the one and the other — fellowman — were I to ignore the wrongs of the one
toward the other because of this responsibility, prior to all judgment, of proxim-
ity” (EN 168).
12. WD 21. The same rejection of notions as uniqueness, irreplaceability, and
elevation is expressed in other fragments as well, for instance on page 13.
13. Ibid., 13, 18. The translation of the first quote has been modified.
14. “The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the
other is other with respect to a term whose essence is to remain at the point of
departure, to serve as entry in to the relation, to be the same not relatively but
absolutely. A term can remain absolutely at the point of departure of relationship
only as I ” (TI 36).
15. See WD 19, where Blanchot distinguishes between the relation of myself
to the Other and the relation of the Other to me.
16. Ibid., 19–20; translation modified, italics added.
17. In France, Jean Wahl first distinguished between transascendence and
transdescendence in relation to the question of subjectivity. See Jean Wahl,
“Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 37,
no. 5 (1937): 161. Wahl refers to a theological and a moral distinction which
he puts at the same time in question: “L’étre sera angoissé parce qu’il ne sait pas
en face de quoi il est, en face d’une transcendance bienfaisante ou d’une trans-
cendance malfaisante, en face de Dieu ou en face d’une force démoniaque, si le
mouvement qu’il accomplit est un mouvement de ‘transascendance’ ou de ‘trans-
descendance’ . . . On pourrait se demander si la ‘transascendance’ est forcément
bonne, la ‘transdescendance’ forcément mauvaise.”
18. Blanchot quotes Schlegel, “Every poet is Narcissus,” and recalls that
since the romantic movement poetry is expression of “absolute subjectivity”
(WD 135).
19. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who states that “il s’agit, à n’en pas dou-
ter, d’un texte ouvertement autobiographique” (“Agonie terminée, agonie inter-
minable,” in Maurice Blanchot. Récits critiques, ed. Christophe Bident and Pierre
Vilar [Tours: Éditions Farrago, 2003], 439). Christophe Bident interprets the
scene in The Writing of the Disaster as “l’événement, à la fois psychologique,
métaphysique et mystique . . . , ouvrant la voie à toute la portée athéologique de
l’œuvre” (Maurice Blanchot. Partenaire invisible. Essai biographique [Seyssel:
Champ Vallon, 1998], 18). For my interpretation, see my “D’une scène ‘primi-
tive’ à l’autre. L’écriture et la question de la singularité chez Maurice Blanchot,”
in Les Lettres romanes, special issue (2005): 131–51.
20. WD 134; translation modified.
21. Toumayan, Encountering the Other, 6.
22. Libertson, Proximity, 3.
23. Critchley, “Il y a,” 82.
24. See Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet
(Paris: Galilée, 2006), for example page 151:“déclarer ne pas savoir où com-
mence le droit d’être appelé ‘visage’, c’est confesser qu’on ne sait pas au fond ce
qu’est un visage, ce que veut dire ce mot, ce qui en règle l’usage. . . . N’est-ce pas,
dès lors, remettre en question toute la légitimité du discours et de l’éthique du
‘visage’ de l’autre, la légitimité et même le sens de toute proposition sur l’altérité
de l’autre, sur l’autre comme mon prochain ou mon frère, etc.?”
N F , “T N R “
The Novelty of Religion and the Religiosity of Substitution
in Levinas and Agamben
Christopher Fox

The Novelty of Religion
and the Religiosity of
Substitution in Levinas
and Agamben
Christopher Fox
A
s a claim about what ethics entails, Emmanuel
Levinas’s notion of substitution radicalizes his
own philosophy and transforms the tradition

it criticizes. Levinas’s assertions that, prior even to its advent as such,
the temporal subject is interrupted by the other, and that this inter-
ruption cashes out ethically as the condition of being hostage to the
one to and for whom it is answerable, rightly have been assessed as
major departures from Western philosophy’s theorizing of the self
and its commitments. But it is less clear what substitution signies
for religion. To approach substitution primarily through epistemo-
logical or even ethical narratives about the inversion of transcendental
subjectivity occludes its signicance for other conceptual formations.
This is especially true for the religious sources to which Levinas turns
to outt substitution with the terms able to convey such a super-
charged ethical relation. Here one thinks especially of election and
inspiration.
Given the religious overtones of these supplements to substitu-
tion, it would be fruitful to inquire into substitution’s religious
signicance, as a project in its own right and an aid to understand-
ing how Levinas denes religion. However, this overdue project
131
already would be inadequate were it to proceed as if substitution did

not have currency in the work of thinkers other than Levinas. So to
sufciently appreciate the religious signicance of substitution, and
to get at what Levinas does mean by “religion,” this essay will attend
to the religious sense of substitution that appears in the thinking of
Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben.
Why Agamben? He, like Levinas, situates himself in proximity to
religious traditions (Latinate Christianity as well as Judaism), though
his relation to them is not motivated by what may seem to be a desire
for grounds from which to launch a critique of philosophy from out-
side.1 In negative parallel with Levinas, and in marked contrast to
other possible interlocutors such as Jean-Luc Marion, Agamben does
not press his uses of religious tradition into the service of anything
like a standard apologetics.2 Levinas and Agamben both try to open a
way to what lies beyond the bounds of an inherited metaphysics and
are equally uninterested with presenting proofs. As I will show, they
come startlingly close in determining the meaning of spirituality, vili-
fying mysticism, privileging ethics, and, yes, formulating substitution
as an ethico-religious doctrine.
However, the status each assigns to messianism provides the clear-
est indication of where they join and part ways. Both turn to some
version of the messianic to navigate what comes after the end of meta-
physics qua onto-theology announced by Heidegger.3 But Levinas’s
Judaic confessional writings show him to be an orthodox believer
in a way not decidable from Agamben’s work, and in some fashion
this biographical difference parallels their disagreement over how to
appropriate messianism.4 Levinas proceeds by what one may call a
“messianism of the trace,” marking the messianic to come as ethical
experience in which the innite, in the form of a trace, withdraws from
presence to signify the interruption of one realm by another. While
radical, this meaning poses the trace as a noninterface between dis-
tinct orders of transcendence and immanence, thus remaining com-
patible with a traditional sense of religion.5 By contrast, Agamben,
following Benjamin, envisions the messianic as a “subtle, yet total”
Fox The Religiosity of Substitution in Levinas and Agamben 133
displacement of the present that breaks with previous ontology and

inaugurates a messianic possibility, internal to being and to ethics,
beyond salvation or damnation.6
This proximity of two post-Heideggerian thinkers on the question
of the end of metaphysics qua onto-theology is hardly surprising.7
And in fact, at one point Agamben considers Levinas’s response to
the problems that animate his own thinking: “Even Levinas’s critique
of ontology, which found its most complete expression in a revision
of the Platonic and Neoplatonic epikeina tes ousias (Levinas 1978),
really only brings to light the fundamental negative structure of meta-
physics, attempting to think the immemorial having-been beyond all
being and presence, the ille that is before every I and every this, the
saying that is beyond every said. (However, the accent which Levinas
placed on ethics was not treated in the context of this seminar.)” (LD
40). Irrespective of whether this is or is not an accurate statement of
Levinas’s position, it does at least suggest the bounds of a potential
comparison. The fact that Agamben mentions only Otherwise than
Being helps to limit the discussion to some of Levinas’s strictly philo-
sophical texts covering a manageable span of 20 or so years. So I
propose to do two things: to extract a new sense of religion as novelty
from Levinas, and to demonstrate that a parallel sense operates in
Agamben; and, to locate an analogue of Agamben’s idea of being-thus
within Levinas’s account of substitution. I will conclude by suggest-
ing that the senses thus obtained signicantly advance our view of
what Levinas intends by religion, not merely in substitution, but in
his work as a whole.
RELIGION VERSUS “RELIGION,” “SPIRITUALITY” VERSUS SPIRIT IN LEVINAS
By way of a general characterization, Levinas identies genuine

religion with the ethical and the fact of responsibility without quite
making them coterminous.8 Therefore, the formulaic denition
from Totality and Innity of religion as “the bond that is established
between the same and the other without constituting a totality” does
carry on in Otherwise than Being, but now bears the added burden of
sustaining Levinas’s rethinking of relationality and identity (TI 40 /
TeI 10).9 And in fact, the two uses of “religion” proper in Otherwise
than Being do manifest the prior meaning in a renewed sense, and
establish what I will refer to as the original sense of religion. In the
rst, Levinas speaks of the nonobjectifying mode of relationality he
calls proximity: “Proximity is the subject that approaches and con-
sequently constitutes a relationship in which I participate as a term,
but where I am more, or less, than a term. This surplus or this lack
throws me outside of the objectivity characteristic of relations. Does
this relationship here become religion? It is not simply a passage to a
subjective point of view. One can no longer say what the ego or I is”
(OB 82 / AE 104). Here proximity echoes the prior denition of reli-
gion as a relation that does not subsume its relata, but it goes further
to assert a relation in which the relata need not even rise to the level
required for them to count as relata. Proximity extends the denition
of relation in such a way that even a not-yet-an-I, or a proto-I, or an
I denied its rights, can nd itself in relation with another. And where
this is possible, there is also the signicance that religion bestows
upon a relation. But here religion does not point to anything actually
other than the ethical relation of responsibility. This leaves untouched
the contemporaneity between the ethical and the religious, and leaves
undecided the question of whether religion adds anything new to the
ethical.
This question can begin to be answered by the other passage, in
which Levinas elaborates the paradoxes by which an ethical com-
mand, that as a trace both arrives and withdraws, disrupts the time
and the self-presence of its addressee. He writes, “this trace does not
belong to the assembling of essence. . . . It is the trace of a relation-
ship with illeity that no unity of apperception grasps, ordering me to
responsibility. This relationship is religion, exceeding the psychology
of faith and of the loss of faith” (OB 168 / AE 214). The mention of
illeity establishes that religion is not just honoric but also structural,
since illeity names the nonevent by which the innite approaches me
by withdrawing so that I may turn to the other and to the others.10

In relating to God I become able to relate to the others, and in relat-
ing to the others a trace of God passes between us. As Levinas writes,
“the illeity in the beyond-being is the fact that its coming toward
me is a departure which lets me accomplish a movement towards a
neighbor” (13 / 15). While it would be misleading to say that illeity
is the innite, and it would be a category mistake to say that ille-
ity presents the innite, it is proper to say that through the ethical
relation with the neighbor, the innite passes as illeity. If this is the
case, then religion here does name something more than a second-
order tincture upon responsibility, since some antecedent has to open
the way through which the ethical might come to pass.11 And if, as
Levinas concedes, illeity “may indeed rst signify such a disposition
of personages,” then the relationship with illeity is religious on two
counts: not only because the relation itself does not subsume the
one whom it approaches, but also because it involves that personage
which counts as highest (ibid.).
Provisionally, then, by “religion” in its positive sense, Levinas
intends a relation that does not subsume its terms, however reduced,
and one in which one relata comes from on high to abnegate itself by
withdrawing so as to present the neighbor.12 Of course, this elusive,
infrequent, positive sense of religion often is overshadowed by the
misbegotten, onto-theological senses that it founds, and it will be
upon these that Levinas (and Agamben after him) will sharpen his
knives. The most interesting of these is an actually pejorative sense
in which religion, guised as onto-theology, betrays its innermost
impulse. I say “interesting” both for the strong condemnation it elic-
its and the theme of spirituality that it opens up. Levinas writes, “one
can seek to seat the religious on a philosophy of the unity and total-
ity of being called Spirit, and to this unity which ensures the efcacity
of God in the world, sacrice transcendence, despite the inversions
of the totality into totalitarianism” (OB 95 / AE 120–21). Levinas’s
disdain for Hegelian totalitarianism reciprocates his disdain for any
religion that would establish itself by evacuating transcendence. The
marker of this false religion therefore would be Spirit, whose function

in Otherwise than Being and elsewhere is to tag along behind Levinas
as an ontological whipping boy.
The words “Spirit” and “spiritual/spirituality” have a long tangled
history in Levinas, denoting at various times both that which belongs
within being and history, and that which transcends it. An early essay
written in Lithuanian, “The Understanding of Spirituality in French
and German Culture,” considers a range of denitions that describe
“spirit,” all of which remain bound up with a capital S, Hegelian
Spirit.13 Notably, in this essay of 1933, the seeds of Levinas’s mistrust
of spirit are evident in his observation that “extremist political par-
ties, which are presently so strong in German, are enchanted with
this notion of spirit.”14 And here too one also nds an early version
of his distrust of the mystical, specically in its German formulation:
“it is easy to forget, to lose your balance when you imagine yourself
hearing a mystical voice in the depths of your soul.”15 These tropes

are sufciently durable as to enjoy a long career in Levinas’s ongoing
polemic against Spirit and the spiritual.
But this negative polemic about Spirit is a long way from foreclos-
ing spirituality as a major, if underrated, player in Levinas’s view of
religion. For as little scholarly attention as the term presently receives,
it does a lot to suggest the extraethical dimension of what transpires
in the religious relation. I will argue that Levinas inherits his usage of
the word from Bergson. While this claim seems to be belied by the
scant two references Bergson receives in Otherwise than Being, both
of which critically fault him for collapsing disorder into order, a brief
foray beyond this text will help to establish the Bergsonian lineage of
spirituality, and will permit us to return to the thread of its articula-
tion.16 This way of proceeding will be somewhat anarchical, since a
later text, “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” holds the Bergsonian
key that retroactively unlocks the earlier meaning of spirituality.17
At least as early as 1964, Levinas had expanded spirituality to
include a positive sense identied with the innite and the beyond of
being. In “Meaning and Sense,” he writes, “the revealed God of our
Judeo/Christian spirituality maintains all the innity of his absence,

which is in the personal ‘order’ itself” (BPW 64). But this leaves
unexplored the question of what transpires within the connes of
this personal order that deserves the title “spiritual.” While the chap-
ter “Proximity” partially answers this question, that discussion must
wait until 1984’s “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” where Levinas
connects Bergson with what now has become a full-edged version
of spirituality comprehended through transcendence. There, Levinas
asserts, “Bergson is an essential step in the movement which puts
in question the framework of a spirituality borrowed from knowl-
edge and therefore from the privileged and primary signication of
presence, being, and ontology” (154). Levinas glimpses in Bergson a
possibility, however partial, that is not accounted for under the usual
dichotomy of ideality/materiality, each of which mirrors and doubles
the other, and in which ideality always takes precedence. Bergson,
rather, in the notion of the dureé, thinks a univocity of being as time,
which denotes a different modality of existence and another set of
possibilities. What the dureé produces, says Levinas, “is the bursting
forth of incessant novelty. The absolute novelty of the new. This is the
spirituality of transcendence, which does not amount to an assimilat-
ing act of consciousness” (154–55). Sidestepping the complications
that arise from reading Bergson’s dureé (which is in being) through
Levinas’s trace (which is not), what this spirituality contributes is a
fact of surprise and possibility that disappears, or is banished, under
the light of knowledge. The sense that things can be different and
that it is possible to be surprised testies to the possibility of being
engaged beyond the “been there, done that” jadedness that dogs rea-
son.18 On this account, only one who is capable of being surprised — if
not shocked — can claim to be alive in the sense intended by “spiri-
tual.” And surprise only is possible because of a mode of engagement
that does not comprehend everything in advance, and is aware of its
own limited ability to anticipate. So if to call spirituality a “mode of
existence” already runs afoul of hypostatizing within being a dimen-
sion beyond being, it nonetheless conveys the sense of engagement
with, openness toward, and even welcome of whatever may arise that
“spiritual” denotes.
Here we may rejoin Otherwise than Being to witness the spiritual
dimension that transpires in the immediate, nonthematizing, non-
self-possessed, already displaced, diachronous relation that Levinas
calls proximity. Negatively, the pejorative “spirit” based sense of
“spirituality” operates as something more than a foil, because here,
as elsewhere, Levinas’s description is constrained by the self-imposed
prohibition against manifesting what lies outside manifestation.
Accordingly, he begins with a via negativa series of tropes that call
out Husserlian and Heideggerian pretences to spirituality: “not all
spirituality is that of theoretical, voluntary, or affective representation
in an intentional subject. . . . But every spirituality is also not com-
prehension and truth of Being and openness of a world” (OB 82 /
AE 103). Against this negative spirituality, Levinas catalogues a num-
ber of determinations — obsession, recurrence persecution, assigna-
tion, remorse — in the course of a quasi-phenomenological analysis
meant to determine just what is entailed in proximity to the other.
This analysis transforms what is meant by the spiritual. Where Levinas
some years later will characterize Bergson’s “spirituality” almost as
weightless openness to the new, a mode of transcendence seasoned
with positive anticipation, “spirituality” here casts the transcendence
of the self as exposure and openness that is caught up in subjection to
the moral weight of the other. This radical transformation is appar-
ent in his nal, condensed formulation of “spirituality” as “sense,” in
which Levinas returns to address the phenomenologists by stripping
being from sense and hurling the former back at them. He writes,
“Spirituality is sense, and sense is not a simple penury of being.
Spirituality is no longer to be understood on the basis of knowing.
In the splendid indifference of radiant being, there is an overwhelm-
ing of this being into sense, into proximity, which does not turn into
knowing” (97 / 123). This nal denition condenses all the trau-
matism that was shown to pass in proximity into what is “no lon-
ger to be understood” and into the “overwhelming of this being,”
as circumstances that shut down every being’s pretences to mastery.

In proximity as a spiritual relation, what the being is surprised by and
comes to know are the limits of its own knowing, the foundedness of
its own self, and the weight of the incomparable burden it bears. In
the spiritual as Levinas understands it, Bergson’s dureé takes on moral
weight in direct proportion to its innite capacity for the new. And
if it is true that the commanding sense in such spirituality is ethical,
as marked in the nonindifference that is the opposite of being’s indif-
ference, it is equally the case that it is predicated on a kind of open-
ness and willingness, whatever may follow.19 I believe this openness,
willingness, and yes, novelty, all link up with the previous denition
of religion. So in conclusion, my argument accounts for the positive
sense of spirituality in a way that extends the positive sense of religion
always already tied to the ethical.
While it would seem that the next step should be to move directly
to identifying the religious aspect of substitution by demonstrat-
ing the inuence of these charged terms, I instead propose to take a
detour through substitution as Agamben envisions it. Not only will
this establish the larger connection between ethics, religion, and the
aftermath of metaphysics, but it will help to focus attention on the
narrowly religious aspect of substitution.
AGAMBEN ON IMPOTENTIALITY, THE IRREPARABLE, AND BEING-THUS
Where religion is concerned, Levinas and Agamben come together

over a shared allergy to mysticism. In a passage that parallels Levinas’s
polemic against the sacred as saturated with being, Agamben writes,
“The mystical is nothing but the unspeakable foundation; that is,
the negative foundation of ontotheology. Only a liquidation of the
mystical can open up the eld to a thought (or language) that thinks
(and speaks) beyond the Voice and its sigetics; that dwells, that is, not
on an unspeakable foundation, but in the infancy (in-fari) of man”
(LD 91). Both thinkers critique the Western tradition’s attempts to
mystify its own origins, whether philosophically or theologically. But
where Levinas’s strategy for demystication is to reread the tradi-

tion for the opportunities it affords to exit being (Plato, Plotinus,
Descartes), Agamben will comb the West’s philosophical and theo-
logical traditions for alternatives to the need to appeal to an outside,
whether ontological, temporal, or ethical. As stated above, in terms
that resonate strongly with Heidegger’s call for a “new beginning,”
Agamben’s goal will be to reclaim “the infancy of man.” In appro-
priating the West’s philosophical and religious traditions, Agamben’s
challenge is to spotlight those supposedly dormant ideas that really
were active all along, but whose time has now come in a new philo-
sophical and historical situation beyond philosophy and history. So
if Agamben remains bound within a tradition that Levinas seeks to
escape, he adopts a heterodox stance toward it over against the theo-
logical and philosophical orthodoxies that, for all his radicality, char-
acterize Levinas.
Two examples of this appropriation that form the anchors of
Agamben’s philosophical position are Aristotle’s notions of impoten-
tiality and the patient intellect. While these obviously do not derive
from a strictly religious source qua theology, their religious import
is direct. In Metaphysics theta, Aristotle determines the notion of
impotentiality as the obverse side of potentiality: “What is potential
is capable of not being in actuality. What is potential can both be and
not be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be” (P 182).
Agamben interprets this passage to mean that it is one level of poten-
tiality to say that some X is able to be realized in the form of Y, but
quite another for potentiality X to harbor the capacity not to be real-
ized as Y, by holding back its powers and lling out its capacity to
be not-Y. In so doing, it may then determine itself as not-not-Y, ad
innitum. If impotentiality falls short of qualifying as metaphysical in
Levinas’s sense as absolutely other, to be capable of one’s own impo-
tentiality nevertheless has metaphysical cachet as the innite capacity
for choice that distinguishes the human. The religio-ethical implica-
tions of impotentiality are apparent when Agamben writes,
Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human poten-

tiality is in relation to its own privation. This is the origin (and the
abyss) of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to
other beings. Other living beings are capable only of their specic potenti-
ality; they can do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are
capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality
is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality. (P 182)
Although Agamben remains on this side of immanence, the “limitless”

nature of human adynamia and the “abyss” from which it springs
do herald something like the divine. And if impotentiality as human
can generate the divine, Agamben effectively has turned the Imago
Dei on its head.20 The ethico-counterpart of this religio-inversion is
likewise radical, since to identify the divine with impotentiality means
that a kind of passivity subtends the usual active/passive dichotomy
associated with potentiality. Impotentiality thus measures human
potentiality to a power of two, and intimates an unsuspected ethical
substratum.
Agamben’s other major Aristotelian appropriation is that of the
patient intellect, which comprises the form par excellence that impo-
tentiality takes, namely, thought itself. This contributes to the mes-
sianic character of potentiality.21 Given that potentiality entails
impotentiality, when impotentiality exercises itself, what must this
entail? Agamben takes his cue from a denition of Aristotle that
appeared in the Suda, a lexicon of the late Byzantine era: “Aristotle
was the scribe of nature who dipped his pen in thought” (P 214).
This metaphor derives from Aristotle’s own discussion in De Anima
of the potential intellect that commonly goes under the name tabula
rasa: “the mind [nous] is like a writing tablet on which nothing is
actually written” (215). In its textual place, the metaphor extends
Aristotle’s preceding point that the nature of mind is that of pure
potentiality: “it [nous] has no other nature other than that of being
potential, and before thinking it is absolutely nothing” (214). If the
notion of thought as pure potential is conjoined with impotential-
ity, the potential of thought really equates to its ability to restrain
itself — in the language of the metaphor, to exist “as a writing tablet

on which nothing is written” (LD 215). The potential of thought to
hold itself in abeyance produces a zone in which it becomes possible,
among other things, for thought to witness itself not exercising itself,
and thereby to become its own thematic object as “thought thinking
itself.” This, as is well known, is Aristotle’s denition of God. And
if thought is pure activity, then the deep paradox is that its purest
activity is that inactivity by which it beholds its own impotentiality.
As Agamben writes, “pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act,
is pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of a potentiality” (216).
This inversion of actuality into “the potentiality of potentiality” com-
pletes the above theological inversion by dening the being of man
through the old denition of God.
These doctrines matter because taken together impotentiality and
the patient intellect annul the need to appeal to transcendence. And
if it is true that such an internalized, self-othering structure runs afoul
of Levinas’s prohibition against immanence, it also must be said that
this patient intellect and impotentiality, given the kinds of weakness
and susceptibility they exhibit and the ethics they enjoin, tender their
own kind of rejection of the pretence to mastery and violence inher-
ent in the Western ontological tradition. To this extent they may
be taken to depart from the violent being of the tradition, and to
redene what counts as conceivable in a way that, at a minimum,
attains some measure of community with Levinas’s position.
Against these efforts to redene himself out of onto-theology,
how does Agamben understand religion? He does not employ “reli-
gion” as a technical term. In fact, his usage appears to echo religion
as socio-historical in Levinas’s pejorative sense, right down to the
concomitant sense that, measured against itself, religion has lapsed.
For Agamben, religion’s problem is the disproportion between the
meaning-bestowing function formerly attributed to it in the West and
the postmetaphysical crisis, which on Kojévian terms signies the end
of history.22 Agamben nds religion qua historical to be as exhausted
as everything else, and no better able to cope with this crisis. Poetry,
religion, and philosophy, he writes, “have long since been trans-

formed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost
all historical efcacy” (O 76–77). Negatively one can say that reli-
gious efcacy lies elsewhere than in being spectacular or private, but
that contributes little to a positive understanding of religion. So the
problem is to determine what a positive sense of religion or religious
would mean for Agamben, as a prelude to interpreting substitution
as religious.
Agamben does drop a useful hint in the passage above when he
prefaces poetry, religion and philosophy as “the historical potentiali-
ties” (O 76). The near-miss reference to Hegel’s spirit (art, religion,
and philosophy) invokes what Heidegger and others have character-
ized as onto-theology, which on Agamben’s terms counts as thought
under the sign of potentiality.23 If this is so, then religion and the
tropes of religion calibrated to the thought of onto-theology qua
historical potentiality count as a non sequitur, however valid they pre-
viously may have seemed.24 But even worse, by dissimulating human
impotentiality, they are an immemorial non sequitur. Because they
respond to a derivative order (historical potentiality) rather than to
the original (impotentiality), historical religions (specically, the vari-
ous Christianities) always already compromised their ability to reect
any ultimate situation. Thus, the genuinely religious becomes possi-
ble only when impotentiality comes into view.25 If one then asks after
the status of the religious in Agamben, at a minimum anything call-
ing itself religious would, to be valid, need to be founded upon im-
potentiality. This would be really to found the religious for the rst
time, because if anything merits the status of religious, the ultimate,
or God, it would be impotentiality as the immemorial category.
The import of this redenition for our argument becomes clearer
if one recalls that the net effect of impotentiality and the patient intel-
lect was to annul transcendence. What then would it mean to ascribe
a religious sense to a response to impotentiality that must stay within
immanence? One way to get at this question is to ask what religious
sense survives Agamben’s rereading of messianism, a theological
concept formerly associated with transcendence. In Agamben’s previ-

ously alluded-to appropriation (from Gersholm Scholem by way of
Walter Benjamin) of Jewish messianism, the messiah’s coming nei-
ther re-creates the world nor renders it unrecognizable. Rather, some
small displacement is sufcient to ensure that “everything will be just
as it is now, just a little different,” where even this small difference
has the effect of transforming the whole. But this difference is so hard
to effect that “humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the
Messiah come.” When Agamben adopts this story, however, he strips
the ability to produce this change from the Messiah and imputes it to
the telling of the story, itself: “What is new, instead, is the tiny dis-
placement that the story introduces in the messianic world” (CC 53).
The story itself, then, renders the world different and transforms it
in the messianic way stipulated in the anecdote. But what does this
amount to? Agamben species that “the tiny displacement does not
refer to the state of things, but to their sense and their limits. It
does not take place in things, but at their periphery, in the space of
ease between every thing and itself” (54). What the messianic story
changes are the possibilities that attend reality as it is given, and what
the religious signies is the ongoing possibility that some other real-
ity may arise from the innitesimal displacement of the present one.
Without putting too ne a point on it just yet, taking the religious
in this sense broaches Levinas’s idea of spirituality as novelty, though
tempered with Agamben’s messianic caveat that “what changes are
not the things but their limits” (92).
This messianic capacity to change the limits of things is, for
Agamben, a prelude to the irreparable, a term which denotes the
singularity that arises from impotentiality. Agamben himself appends
a longer discussion of the irreparable, under the same title, to the end
of The Coming Community, which he prefaces by establishing its con-
text as section 9 of Heidegger’s Being and Time, wherein resides the
famous distinction of the ready-to-hand versus the present-at-hand
(CC 89–106). If, in the later discussion of the broken hammer as
present-at-hand, Heidegger’s point will be to demonstrate how the
broken hammer points beyond itself to open up a surrounding world

of involvements, Agamben counters that it points preeminently to
itself, and that the condition in which it nds itself signies the abil-
ity of impotentiality to open a way out of metaphysics. This ability
to not not-be initiates what Agamben calls “a contingency to the
second power,” that evades the either/or trap set by necessity and
contingency, to which he jointly refers as the “two crosses of Western
thought” (40).
So what does it mean to exist as irreparable in the awareness of
this impotentiality? One way to answer, only half in jest, would be
to ask how Heidegger’s broken hammer might conceive of itself.
Agamben writes, “Irreparable means that these things are consigned
without remedy to their being-thus, that they are precisely and only
their thus” (CC 39). What is, would be measured only by itself and
its own incapacity, and the irreparable therefore provides another
name for the category of singularity. But of course, human beings are
not hammers. So what would human existence now mean for those
residing in the mode of the irreparable? “But irreparable,” continues
Agamben, “also means that for them there is literally no shelter pos-
sible, that in their being-thus they are absolutely exposed, absolutely
abandoned” (39). A mode of existence that combines singularity with
ethical exposure risks sounding cliché, but Agamben reads it as the
condition of what has reached its messianic destination. Note espe-
cially the coexhaustion of theology with teleology: “After the judg-
ment, animals, plants, things, all the elements and creatures of the
world, having completed their theological task, would then enjoy an
incorruptible fallenness — above them oats something like a profane
halo” (40). Having passed through their potentialities, things are at
ease (this is a technical term) in their being-thus.26
And while it may seem that being-thus conicts with messianic dis-
placement, and that the religious sense of displacement and change
actually goes missing, Agamben circles back to fuse the two notions
in a paradoxical formulation: “all will be just as it is, but precisely this
will be its novelty” (39). This use of “novelty” suggests how close
Agamben now has come to Levinas’s “ethical singularity” character-

ized by exposure, but the fact that the new comprises only the capac-
ity to embrace incapacity measures how far apart they remain. This
proximity and distance is echoed in a nal passage that pertains to
Agamben’s notion of religion, in which he shares a key term with
Levinas, spirituality: “Non-thingness (spirituality) means losing one-
self in things, losing oneself to the point of not being able to conceive
of anything but things, and only then, in the experience of the irre-
mediable thingness of the world, bumping into a limit, touching it.
(This is the meaning of the word ‘exposure.’)” (103). “Spirituality”
here is Agamben’s word for the kind of openness to which a nonthing
is delivered by the messianic. With the messianic wavering of sense
and limits, one’s own determinacy gives way to the irremediable fact
that the world and things simply are thus. One becomes enthralled by
thus-ness, and having so become, one then is able to encounter the
limits and determinacy of those other things that also are thus. And
yet this being enthralled does not collapse into mystico unico, because
everything else also exists in its own being-thus. No inaccessible mas-
ter term cloaks itself in the privilege of founding any other.
TWO SUBSTITUTIONS, ONE RELIGION, PART 1: AGAMBEN
Agamben’s concluding parenthetical helps to set up the com-

parison with Levinas, given that exposure marks the kind of relation
that will be at issue in the latter’s idea of substitution. But similari-
ties between the two as to substitution should not be overstated. As
testied by the fact that Agamben has no chapter titled “substitu-
tion,” the term does not denominate a central doctrine for him as it
does for Levinas.27 But this fact does not leave it without importance
for religion. Specically, Agamben establishes substitution as a meet-
ing point of our own newly coined senses of the religious, commu-
nity, and the ethical.
Although Agamben’s discussion does name Islam, the archaic
bases of his substitution lie in Judaism and Christianity. The rst
consists of a talmudic theological doctrine whereby each person,

pending death, has reserved two places, one in Eden and one in
Gehenna. At the nal judgment, each person earns a place in one
of the possible destinations, as well as the place reserved for another
whose judgment ordained the other destination. Similarly, the one
who goes elsewhere inherits the unused spot that was reserved for
the rst. Agamben ignores the question of salvation and damnation
to focus on the indirect implications that one’s theological arrival
produces for being-thus. The whole passage deserves to be cited:
“At the point when one reaches one’s nal state and fullls one’s
own destiny, one nds oneself for that very reason in the place of
the neighbor. What is most proper to every creature is thus its sub-
stitutability, its being in any case in the place of the other” (CC 23).
How does the displacement of being-thus into substitution count
as religious in the senses previously established? Clearly, substitu-
tion mirrors the aspect of messianism in which the sense and limits
are expanded without removing what was. After all, I can hardly
substitute for another if I have been totally displaced and annulled.
Substitution only would be possible as messianic, since if it were sim-
ply my effacement by another I would cease to exist and no longer
would be able to substitute for another. Therefore, the image estab-
lishes the sense in which my being-thus already refers to another,
and helps to locate the emergence of this sense in the aftermath of
theology and metaphysics.
But this talmudic reference neither lls out the sense of nov-
elty associated with the religious, nor species just what is entailed
in establishing one’s own being-thus as a substitution in the place
of another. These elements are provided in Agamben’s Christian
source, the Arabist Louis Massignon, himself a convert to Catholic
Christianity. What piques Agamben’s interest is Massignon’s deci-
sion to found a community named Badaliya (the Arabic word for
substitution), whose members “took a vow to live substituting them-
selves for someone else, that is, to be Christians in place of the others”
(CC 23). Agamben spells out two possible meanings of this vow
that, with a little thought, parallel the bifurcation of potentiality and

impotentiality. The rst, dismissed as “hardly edifying,” would turn
substitution into a reciprocal economy of salvation in which one soul
pays for another. The second, pregnant sense discloses the novelty
residing within substitution as an expression of being-thus. Agamben,
following Massignon, elaborates this second hyperbolic sense as “exil-
ing oneself to the other as he or she is in order to offer Christ hospitality
in the other’s own soul, in the other’s own taking-place” (24). This
formulation intensies novelty to a power of three, since the capac-
ity for surprise expressed in accepting my own taking place would
be doubled through my exile to another’s, and tripled through the
welcome I would extend to the being-thus of Christ. And to go even
further to the level of the community, substitution actually creates
its own sort of space, in much the same way that the telling of the
messianic story is sufcient to effect the messianic displacement. For,
as Agabmen writes, “this substitution no longer knows a place of
its own, but the taking-place of every single being is always already
common — an empty space offered to the one, irrevocable hospital-
ity” (24). This one hospitality is immediately many, since substituting
myself for another produces the space in which all others are free to
be-thus. And mirroring Aristotle’s transition from ethos to politikos,
this religious substitution effects the transition from ethos to what
Agamben calls “an absolutely unrepresentable community,” unrep-
resentable for no other reason than its uncontainable novelty and
its embrace of its own being-thus as impotentiality (25). Being-thus
always means being with others, and accepting their being-thus as
cotemporaneous with my own.
So if the project of the Coming Community was to vindicate the
denition of being as quodlibet, or “whatever,” “being such that it
always matters,” and to draw out the ethical and logical implications
for singularity so dened, this notion of substitution effects the transi-
tion to a community founded upon being-thus, as the site in which
the displacement of each is the condition of possibility for encoun-
tering the religious surprise by which things might be displaced and
novel (CC 1). In substitution, Agamben writes, it simply is the case

that “there is no place that is not vicarious” (24).
TWO SUBSTITUTIONS, ONE RELIGION, PART 2: TWO WORDS AND TWO QUOTES FROM LEVINAS
However much Agamben and Levinas jointly afrm that displace-

ment is original, the contemporaneity of my own being-thus and the
being-thus of the other is nothing that Levinas will allow into his
account of substitution. Noting this disagreement is one way to pref-
ace my attempt to use Agamben’s substitution as a telescope through
which to bring into focus, however preliminarily, those aspects of
Levinas’s substitution that qualify as religious in the sense established
for Levinas-cum-Agamben, as some messianic combination of nov-
elty and being-thus.
As is well known, Levinas formulates his doctrine of substitution
at least partly in response to criticism, particularly Derrida’s, that the
account of subjectivity in Totality and Innity left too intact the pre-
vailing categories of identity and, indeed, theology.28 At a metalevel,
novelty does describe Levinas’s blasphemous (for Western philoso-
phy) assertion that in substitution the subject undergoes a preoriginal
displacement on the way to taking its transcendental place. My dis-
cussion, however, will zoom in and show the emergence of novelty,
qualied as that which was not foreseen and cannot be controlled,
from within Levinas’s account of how the self transpires in substitu-
tion. I will demonstrate this by focusing on the terms alluded to at
the start, election and inspiration, and reading them against the claim
that they present nothing more than a means of increasing ethical
gravity. I instead will approach them as indexes for religious novelty
and the subject’s afrmation of being-thus, both that of the one for
whom substitution is made, and for its own as the one substituting
for another. It will be sufcient to show that these words not only
extend Levinas’s own sense of novelty as religious, but also sustain
“being thus” as an expression of messianism.
Ethically, election signies that in being elected for responsibility

by the Good, the subject is brought into being as this subject and not
any other. But in a reversal of the word’s usual upward connotation,
election founds the subject’s uniqueness in an extreme responsibility
for the persecutor’s persecution of the subject. Levinas apparently
would have this sense be decisive, since he insists that “a philoso-
pher can give to this election only the signication circumscribed by
responsibility for the other” (OB 122 / AE 157). But I will out
Levinas’s preemptory warning, since I mean to establish the contem-
poraneity of religion and ethics, by denying that this relation merely
restages the difference between freedom and the Good.
Typically, Levinas invokes election in connection with counter-
part notions of the Good, being hostage, and uniqueness. Here is
an emblematic passage: “has not the Good chosen the subject with
an election recognizable in the responsibility of being hostage, to
which the subject is destined, which he cannot evade without deny-
ing himself, and by virtue of which he is unique” (OB 122 / AE
157)? Election would be the manner in which being picked out by
the Good inaugurates my uniqueness, and Levinas works to secure
the antecedence of the ethical by locating this event to “an unrep-
resentable before” (123 / 158). But Levinas has his own problems
maintaining the antecedence of election, and his difculties create
an opening by which to locate the action of religion qua novelty
and being-thus with the ethical moment. At one point, he writes
that “in substitution my being that belongs to me and not another is
undone,” and shortly after, “I am unique and chosen; the election is
in the subjection” (127 / 163). Levinas’s insistence on antecedence
does appear to waver at this point, though if his intimations that some
original identity predates election are more than slips, they do not
reach the level of contradictions. But even without a contradiction,
these passages can support my reading because that which is unique
must entail novelty, albeit as a singularity. If, as I want to claim, the
religious counts as the possibility of surprise, then it would be just as
plausible to argue that to be brought into existence through election
inaugurates the new, as it would be to argue that the disruption of

my preexisting self does.
Furthermore, even if this advent of the self is for the sake of an
ethical commitment, novelty plays an ineradicable role in election.29
Because election instantly whipsaws into persecution, one could not
be elected in the intended sense were one’s election not a surprise,
and were it not a surprise that the great privilege bestowed in this elec-
tion actually entails one’s de-privileging to the point of persecution.
Novelty here exists in direct proportion to the weight of my ethical
burden, and is a sign of the religious extent to which my being-thus
consists in being delivered over to that of the other. To say the same
thing differently, election to persecution denes my religious being-
thus as ethical, and exposes me to kinds of novelty (in the weightiest
sense) that I cannot anticipate. And if the objection is brought that
Levinas means for election to do away with impotentiality under-
stood as the ability to conserve the self, one response would be to

point out that for Agamben, exposure characterizes being-thus as the
limit, ethical and ontological, of impotentiality. Border wars of eth-
ics and ontology notwithstanding, impotentiality consigns me to my
being thus, which for Levinas entails election and persecution.
Inspiration presents something like an ultimate test case for
Levinas’s way of appropriating religious terms. What, after all, is more
religious than being inspired? And what, more than inspiration, risks
contamination by the mystical rapture that Levinas vilies? Levinas
will annul inspiration as the takeover of the natural by the supernatu-
ral, and instead will take it to mean the ethical and its way of bearing
on (or in) the subject.
To transform inspiration from a theological to an ethical doctrine,
Levinas (following Heidegger’s cue) highlights the etymological con-
nection of “inspiration” with breathing; one breathes in the spirit,
and one is “in-spired.” But when one is inspired not by God but by
the other, such inspiration effects substitution by reversing the prior-
ity (temporal and ethical) of the self and by founding the subject on
the grounds of the other. As Levinas writes, “the subjectivity as the
other in the same, as an inspiration, is the putting into question of all

afrmation for-oneself, all egoism born again in this very recurrence”
(OB 111 / AE 141–42). Inspiration therefore designates the meta-
physical-structural disruption of the self by the other, whose ethical
effect is to overwhelm the ego’s native concern for itself.
But Levinas’s use of “inspiration” goes well beyond parroting a
Heideggerian tic for etymology. This is clear when he follows inspira-
tion all the way through its counterpart in expiration to identify how
the logic of respiration operates in the self. This larger way of employ-
ing inspiration transforms what would otherwise be a religious cliché
into one moment of a model of ethical selfhood that cycles through
an interruption of time. Levinas locates the self that is pressed into
substitution (and thus inspired) as residing in the down-time between
these poles. His admonition that the reader not take inspiration as a
metaphor attests to the importance of this religious-derived gure
for understanding substitution. Levinas writes, “The expression ‘in
one’s skin’ is not a metaphor for the in-itself; it refers to a recurrence
in the dead time or the meanwhile which separates inspiration and
expiration, the diastole and systole of the heart beating dully against
the walls of one’s own skin” (OB 109 / AE 138). While Levinas
explicitly denies that the self involved in substitution should be taken
to be in itself, the locution “in one’s skin” is evocative enough that
he retains it to describe the temporal/ethical scheme of inspiration
and expiration. If to be one’s self already means that one is substitut-
ing for another, then to be in one’s skin means to be residing there
between the last expiration and the next inspiration. Such down time
receives the name “meanwhile” to indicate the state of readiness, if
not anticipation, of the self preceding substitution. This meanwhile
has a curious status, both where the question of time determinations
is concerned and for its relation to the activity/passivity couplet.
Regarding time, the meanwhile does not belong to the diachron-
ous time of substitution, since it both follows and precedes the self ’s
breakup by the other; nor to synchronous egoic time, since the mode
of existing here never becomes an active synthesis by the transcen-
dental ego that must resist incursion by the other. Levinas determines
this meanwhile as an echo of his frequent refrain about the “passivity
beneath all passivity,” which bears on the distinction of activity and
passivity. In particular, he writes that “outside of any mysticism, in
this respiration, the possibility of every sacrice for the other, activity
and passivity coincide” (115 / 146). So this strange temporality of
the meanwhile precedes substitution and its diachronic interruption
by the other, since this other is not yet present. But it succeeds or
escapes the order of synchronic time, since to be “in one’s own skin”
signies the self ’s lapse in its self-directed activity, and its state of
inactivity as it awaits the other.30
Here I will assert that this meanwhile in which one waits in one’s
skin designates a moment that is religious in the senses for which
I have been arguing. The meanwhile that occurs in the dead time
between systole and diastole marks the self that exists in its being-
thus, and also entails the capacity of this self to be surprised with
every new diastole. To state it in Agamben’s terms, the meanwhile
counts as the messianic moment in which I am delivered over to my
own being-thus, or the irreparable, and in which I become capable
of experiencing the new. However, where for Agamben this already
counts as the messianic, for Levinas this moment of dead time antici-
pates my delivery over to the being-thus of the one by whom I am
inspired, and for whom I substitute. This, rather than the moment of
down-time, would be Levinas’s messianic event. Differences notwith-
standing, the temporal engine of the meanwhile produces inspiration
and expiration, and ethical inspiration by the other has being-thus
and novelty as its religious conditions. I am delivered over to what is
new, without recourse, signied in the dead time between systole and
diastole. By way of such “proof texts” as are available, the following
passage accents responsibility for the other not as submission but as
openness. According to Levinas, “Its [the self ’s] responsibility for
the other, the proximity of the neighbor, does not signify a submis-
sion to the non-ego; it means an openness in which being’s essence
is surpassed in inspiration. It is an openness of which respiration is a
modality or a foretaste, or more exactly, of which it retains the after-

taste” (OB 115 / AE 146). Being open to the possibility of inspira-
tion described here signies the opening of a religious possibility that
resides somewhere between the ethical’s gravity and being’s weight-
lessness. One surely does nd in Levinas passages to the contrary that
wholly assimilate religion to one or the other of these competing
orders. But here, in the form of the acceptance of being-thus and
openness to the new, we encounter an attitude of the religious that is
not yet fully ethical, and absolutely not neutral. Here, Levinas deals
effectively with the problem of the ethical violence done me by the
other, by balancing the other’s inspiration of me — which could be
an ethical incursion, and to that extent violent — against a religious
stance of openness to the other.
So within substitution, election and inspiration do support the
redenition of religion as novelty and being-thus. It remains to be
seen whether this compatibility between old and new meanings also
applies to Levinas’s use of spirituality and religion in substitution.
Here the evidentiary stakes are higher, not just because these are the
Ur-words for my argument, but because each appears just once in the
chapter of Otherwise than Being entitled “Substitution.” And what is
more, Levinas must use these words in their positive sense if they are
to be of any use for my argument.
Initially, the text that mentions spirituality does not seem very
encouraging. Levinas writes, “Paradoxically enough, thinkers claim
to derive communication out of self-coinciding. They do not take
seriously the radical reversal, from cognition to solidarity, that com-
munication represents with respect to inward dialogue, to cognition
of oneself, taken as the trope of spirituality” (OB 119 / AE 152).
Here, Levinas castigates philosophers for failing to note the “radi-
cal reversal” that genuine communication effects on the ego’s coin-
cidence with itself in inward dialogue. If the “trope” of spirituality
remains bound to this inward dialogue, then it is incapable of com-
munication, still less solidarity. But by prefacing the philosophers’
view as “paradoxical,” and by qualifying their version of spirituality
as a “trope,” Levinas does suggest a way to displace it in favor of the

positive notion.
The argument for this displacement rests on the comparison
between communication and spirituality. Levinas denies that com-
munication is merely “another way of seeking certainty” and instead
formulates it in terms of solidarity with the other. Mutatis mutandis,
if communication and spirituality run parallel, then the genuine sense
of spirituality, and not its philosophical “trope,” will entail solidar-
ity with the other rather than some reection caught up in “inward
dialogue.” So like the positive sense of communication as solidarity,
the positive mode of spirituality would exhibit an openness to the
other that goes beyond the project of “cognition of the self.” Such
spirituality is neither wrapped up in the ego nor a mode of cognition.
To use our now-long overused word, it is best expressed as openness.
And while further on Levinas’s allergy to Heidegger compels him
to deny that communication is “a transmission of something in an
openness,” he does ask whether solidarity “begins by bearing witness
of itself to the other.” To bear witness of oneself to the other in this
way, to engage in the “communicating of communicating . . . sign of
the giving of signs” presumes openness on the part of the self reach-
ing out, both about what it is itself, and about the other (OB 119 /
AE 153).31 So although Levinas does not give the name “spiritual-
ity” to the openness required to bear witness, his dismissal of the
refusal of openness as a “trope of spirituality” implies that the posi-
tive moment of spirituality as openness would permit the advent of
religious novelty, and, what is more, would signify accommodation
to the being-thus of that to which one is open.
The nal mention of religion, rendered as “religiosity,” requires
no indirect argument of its own to establish that Levinas employs the
word in a positive sense. Quite the opposite, in fact. It merely has to
be shown to be compatible with our extraethical sense of religion as
being-thus, or novelty, or something including both. Using a favorite
trope from Hamlet, Levinas asks,
Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me?32 Am I my

brother’s keeper? These questions have meaning only if one has already
supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern
for itself. In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that
the absolutely outside-of-me, the other, would concern me. But in the
“prehistory” of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The
self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to
principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond
egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self. (OB 117 / AE 150)
The early part of the passage reissues Levinas’s denial of original-

ity to the ego “concerned only with itself.” We should recall that
Agamben also dethrones the orchestrating and controlling subject
of Western philosophy “posited for itself,” for which anything other
poses a threat. But even afrming that the ethical self of Levinas and
the “whatever” self of Agamben react against the same foil, does the
religiosity of Levinas’s self therefore signify either its openness or its
attunement to being-thus?
Here it is certainly true that Levinas denes the self as an ethical
being that is to be for the other, and that it is to the exigencies of this
other that it is most subject. This is apparent in the references to the
“prehistory” of the ego, its “responsibility” prior to “principles” that
makes of it a “hostage.” But what then remains of the religious that
is not exhausted by the ethical? Here is my answer. When Levinas
identies “the religiosity of the self” with the fact that “what is at
stake for the self, in its being, is not to be” then I would ask the fol-
lowing questions: what throws the self back upon openness more
than its reckoning with the possibility that it might not be? And what
way of exhibiting its being-thus would be more radical than for it to
exercise its impotentiality by saying of its life that it “would prefer not
to?” It seems to me that the deepest exigency of the self, which for
Levinas is the requirement that it be for the other, tests precisely the
capacity for openness and the acceptance of its incapacity that I have
named “religious.” After all, Levinas classies egoism and altruism
as varieties of nonopenness, since both are predicated on the ego’s
retaining control over itself and others. And if the “religiosity of the
self,” so stated, resides beneath the ego’s ambition to remake every-
thing in its own image, then it can consist in the awareness of its own
incapacity (being-thus) before the other to whom it cannot help but
be exposed (openness).
If I had to give a name to the openness and acceptance at the
root of what Levinas calls the “religiosity of the self,” it would be
surrender, a word that I can nd nowhere in Otherwise than Being,
and whose voluntarist connotation Levinas has every reason to avoid.
On his own terms, Levinas comes closest to disclosing this religious
moment when he refers to the bodily subject’s “renouncement” for
the other, and to the fact that oneself has “nothing at its disposal that
would enable it to not yield [italics mine] to the provocation” (OB
79, 105 / AE 100, 134). However, these references and Levinas’s
possible reservations notwithstanding, I believe “surrender” is the
best available word. But this would not be surrender in the sense in
which Hegel’s slave prefers life to freedom and therefore surrenders
to the fear of death provoked by the master, only to wait for the
inevitable reversal followed by restoration. Nor would this surrender
be a way to reassert the primacy of the active self even in its breach.
Rather, this surrender would be where openness and being-thus meet
in confronting the highest exigency, where, in abdicating, one real-
izes rather than denies one’s self. In substitution, the religious resides
in the moment prior to the uptake of the ethical as being hostage of,
and for, another.
CONCLUSION
I have tried to argue that religion, as something other than being

and not quite continuous with the ethical as gured in substitution,
has an unsuspected status in Levinas, and I have used Agamben’s
notions to get at and develop this suggestion. It may seem as if I
have fought through many words for a little bit of ground. But to
short-circuit religion’s automatic identication with the ethical, and
thereby to bring into view these new senses of the religious as nov-
elty and being-thus, really may add something to the discourse about
religion in Levinas. Determining the status of religion in its own
right has been difcult, and not just because religion does, indeed,
wait upon the ethical. This difculty also emerges from the dispro-
portion of religion to the other domains where it might appear and
show itself differently. Levinas’s erce polemics against Being are well
known, and his attacks on play as a relevant or meaningful category
are only slightly less harsh.33 To bear the weight of the ethical while
still only heralding it is the challenge Levinas poses to religion, and
it is through his novelty and Agamben’s being-thus that religion can
begin to take its proper place.34
N OTES TO F OX , “T HE N OVELTY OF R ELIGION “
In addition to the abbreviations at the front of this volume, the following
works by Girogio Agamben are also used: The Coming Community (CC), trans.
Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Language
and Death: The Place of Negativity (LD), trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael
Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); The Open: Man and
Animal (O), trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004);
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (P), ed. and trans. David Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
1. Martin Kavka contends that earlier phases of Levinas scholarship tended
to construe Levinas as simply opposing Judaism to philosophy. By contrast,
Kavka argues, “[F]or Levinas, Judaism serves as an expansion of philosophical dis-
course, by showing that the idealist urge to make God present — to show that God
reigns — can actually be fulfilled in worldly acts, in acts of signification to others.”
“Religious experience in Levinas and R. Hayyim of Volozhin,” Philosophy Today
(Spring 2006): 72. For Kavka’s effort to refigure the relation between “Athens”
and “Jerusalem” within Judaism itself, see Jewish Messianism and the History of
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–8.
2. For a critical discussion that places Levinas into proximity with the apolo-
getics of Jean-Luc Marion and Henri Duméry, see A. T. Nuyen, “Phenomenology
of religion: Levinas and the fourth voice,” International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 49 (2001): 19–31. See esp. 21–23.
3. Bettina Bergo observes that Agamben and Levinas employ parallel gram-
matical strategies to produce the category of the messianic: “Thus the messianic
changes the world without altering any factual, phenomenologically describable
dimension of it . . . We find a similar tensor in Levinas’s examination of the adver-
bial in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. There the adverb, in its relation to
the verb, inflects the active quality of being; but rather than durably changing it, it
leaves a trace; the disinterestedness found in justice. Thus messianism in Levinas’s
late philosophy functions surreptitiously as the modalization of being analogous to
the relation of the adverb to the verb.” “The time and language of messianism,”
in Levinas and the Ancients, ed. Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso, with foreword
by Adriaan Peperzak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 182. I agree
that Paul’s h:os m:e has the effect of suspending the “now” by posing it against itself,
and Bergo rightly goes only so far as asserting that both thinkers employ “a simi-
lar tensor.” Bergo’s case for similarity notwithstanding, I argue that the different
messianic endpoints posited by the two thinkers help to preserve the contrast, as
does the sense in which Levinasian messianism exits being through the ethico-
transcendence of the other, versus Agamben’s appeal to no outside.
4. Jeffrey Kosky, by contrast, determines Levinas’s ethico-religious project
as heterodox, insofar as “Levinas’s phenomenology ‘saves’ the religious notion
of creation only by interpreting it outside of its orthodox, dogmatic or tradi-
tional context.” Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001), 150.
5. “Society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the
interval that separates God from the creature. By contrast with totalization we
have called it religion” (TI 104 / TeI 77).
6. Leland de la Durantaye’s description of Benjamin’s vision of the messian-
ism of the “profane” applies mutatis mutandis to his inheritor, Agamben: “Such
a world no longer waits for any transcendental consecration or culmination, and
what it celebrates, it celebrates now. The idea of happiness Benjamin expresses
is profane in precisely the same sense as his idea of prose, and the same sense as
Agamben’s ‘coming community’: in its all-inclusiveness, in that it does not base
its rights or its practices on a connection with a sacred or transcendental realm.”
“Homo Profanus: Giorgio Agamben’s profane philosophy,” in Boundary 2 35,
no. 3 (Fall 2008): 34.
7. De la Durantaye mentions a conversation between Agamben and Levinas:
“Agamben has recounted on several occasions a conversation he had with
Emmanuel Levinas about the teacher they had known at different periods. The
image of an ‘extraordinarily hard’ man that Levinas had retained of Heidegger
in 1928 and 1929 was offset by Agamben’s recollection of a man who, nearly
forty years later, singled himself out for what Agamben called the “gentleness”
of his demeanor.” Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 2009), 307.
8. Jeffrey Kosky argues for the following figuration of religion and the ethical:
“My thesis is this: the analysis of responsibility opens onto a philosophical articulation of
religious notions and thus makes possible something like a philosophy of religion . . . This
philosophy of religion gives significance to religious meanings by reducing them
to the responsible subject where they appear” (Kosky, Levinas and Philosophy of
Religion, xix). Kosky’s locating of religiosity within ethically determined subjectiv-
ity surely is right. But my approach here is to downplay the ethical in pursuit of a
more precise determination of what else the religious signifies.

9. Compare this with another famous formulation which reserves the term
“religion” for the relation “that results in no community of concept or total-
ity — a relation without relation” (TI 80 / TeI 52).
10. “For Levinas, then, God is inseparable from responsibility not as the other
for whom I am responsible but as an other other, the other whose absence inclines
me to responsibility for others” (Kosky, Levinas and Philosophy of Religion, 191).
Note especially the potential inversion by which the absence of the religious
precedes the ethical.
11. Adriaan Peperzak writes, “instead of introducing religion as an ascent of
the individual soul to God, he [Levinas] approaches it through human proxim-
ity and justice. Since human others are absolute and infinite without losing their
finitude, neither the other’s commanding existence, nor my unchosen responsi-
bility can legitimate themselves. The enigma of morality suggests an elsewhere
or an otherness that is otherwise other than you and me, an other Other from
which our relation, including your command and my pre-voluntary obedience,
‘comes.’” “Illeity,” Philosophy Today 42 Supplement (1998): 44.
12. Elsewhere, Levinas offers a gloss on illeity that also implicates the reli-
gious: “The detachment of the Infinite from the thought that seeks to thematize
it and the language that tries to hold it in the said is what we have called illeity.
One is tempted to call this plot religious; it is not stated in terms of certainty or
uncertainty, and does not rest on any positive theology” (OB 147 / 188). Jeffrey
Bloechl observes the contemporaneity of the religious and the ethical in illeity:
“this will have been the claim staked in Levinas’s concept of illeity: the author-
ity of the absolute is stated in the mouth of the one it commands.” Liturgy of
the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2000), 247.
13. Levinas, “The understanding of spirituality in French and German cul-
ture,” trans. Andrius ValeviÏcius, Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998): 1–10.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. Ibid., 6.
16. OB 191n6, 194n3 / AE 89n6, 128n3.
17. But this way of proceeding should not be taken to suggest that Levinas’s
positive appropriation of Bergson cannot be historically narrativized. Quite the
contrary; the recently released “Hommage à Bergson” pinpoints 1946 as perhaps
Levinas’ earliest affirmation of Bergsonian spirituality (Oeuvres — Tome 1, Carnets
de Captivité suivi de Ecrits sur la Captivité et Notes Philosophiques Diverses, edité
par Rodolphe Calin et Catherine Chalier. Préface de Jean-Luc Marion. (Paris:
Grasset/Imec, 2009), 217–19). Given Levinas’s glowing appraisal in this text,
his late-career embrace of Bergson signifies a return to form — notwithstanding
the wavering regard for Bergson in between. A full elaboration of this sketch,
however, must wait for another time.
18. Jeffrey Bloechl helpfully discusses Husserl’s doctrine of time conscious-
ness as the foil against which to understand Levinas’s adoption of diachron-
ous time. This requires that I better establish the contrast between “religious
novelty” and the intentionality of time entailed in protention, which Bloechl
describes as “anticipation, the basis from which to look ahead to the not-yet”
(Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor, 228). He frames this difference as follows: “is
temporalization the pulsing of consciousness itself, or must it be located in an
‘irreducible disturbance’ beneath it?” (229). And later, in a footnote, he both
answers his own question, and helps to substantiate my thesis: “For Levinas,
the fact that the beyondness of the other in this sense appears always facing me
otherwise and before my expressions does not controvert another sense in which
his face signifies an otherness which is always coming, in the future, as the very
opening of the dimension of futurity” (293).
19. In the course of asking after the Il of Illeity, Bloechl arrives at this con-
clusion: “In order for responsibility to be infinite, which is also to say for the
otherness of the other to be radical, authority will have been removed from any
contact with it — in advance, or by definition, but in any event not by any act or
intention on my part” (ibid., 246).
20. It is true that Agamben’s more recent work polemicizes against the
Western “anthropological machine” for producing the distance between man
and animal, which does put in question his earlier celebration of adynamia as
the signal feature of humanity: “The division of life into vegetal and relational,
organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile
border within living man, and without this living caesura the very decision of
what is human and what is not would probably not be possible . . . But if this is
true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first within man,
then it is the very question of man — and of ‘humanism’ — that must be posed in
a new way” (P 15–16). And then, circling back to the theme of the present essay,
Agamben concludes “and perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relation
with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from
the animal” (16).
21. While this theme appears in a celebrated passage in the chapter entitled
“Bartelby” in The Coming Community, the discussion here draws on the ear-
lier and more fully-elaborated version in “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality.”
These may be found, respectively, in CC 35–37, and in P 205–19.
22. Analogous to the crisis of meaning experienced within religion, Agamben
understands his own productive relation to theology through the model pro-
posed by Benjamin: “My thinking is to theology what the blotting paper is to ink.
The latter is completely steeped in the former. Were it up to the blotting paper,
nothing that was written would remain” (De la Durantaye, “Homo Profanus,”
369). De la Durantaye interprets the figure and the interpretive imperative aris-
ing from it thus: “Benjamin’s method then became to think and to write through
theological figures — but never to do so in ‘unmediated terms,’ thus keeping the
figure of theology concealed beneath the strategic surface of words.” Such is the
case a fortiori as regards Agamben and theology, for whom “it [theology] is pres-
ent in every word of every line” (ibid., 371).
23. And not merely on Agamben’s terms, either, as Bloechl observes:
“Levinas similarly targets the Heideggarian ‘potentiality-for-Being’ (Seinkönnen;
Being and Time §51)” (Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor, 295n68).
24. Agamben observes that St. Thomas treats much the same problem in
Question 91 of the supplement to his Summa Theologica, in the course of asking
about the condition of nature after the universal judgment: “What will happen to
the animals and plants? The logical difficulty that these questions run up against
is that, if the sensible world was ordered to fit the dignity and the habitation
of imperfect humans, then what sense can that world have when those humans
arrive at their supernatural destination?” (CC 39).
25. This claim parallels Agamben’s claim in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life about the state of exception as the permanent condition of the political
that only is revealed in the breakdown of the modern era: “Today, now that the
great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution and the emer-
gency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the rule, the time is ripe to place
the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new
perspective.” Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12.
26. De la Durantaye corroborates this when he says that “for Agamben,
Benjamin’s messianism, like his own, is an attempt to grasp the potentialities of
our present situation” (“Homo Profanus,” 376). And to put a finer point on it,
I will apply, mutatis mutandis, de la Durantaye’s discussion of the endpoint of
Benjaminian messianism to Agamben’s version: “Nihilism is the ‘task’ of world
politics because it represents the effort to see the world as nothing more than it
is — to construct world politics not on the basis of a sacred order to come, but
instead on a profane order that is already right before our eyes and that is the only
world we have ever known” (382).
27. By way of confirmation, as near as I can tell, the topic of substitution goes
unmentioned in de la Durantaye’s otherwise exhaustive Critical Introduction
to Agamben. For a thematic discussion of The Coming Community, see de la
Durantaye, “Homo Profanus,” 158–91.
28. In the section entitled “Theology and the Unthought Constitution of
Ethical Metaphysics,” Kosky argues for “the necessity of reading Totality and
Infinity as a disguised or displaced theology,” and he enlists in this effort a
critical rereading of Derrida’s argument in “Violence and Metaphysics” (Kosky,
Levinas and Philosophy of Religion, 25–46). For another take on how substitution
exhibits Levinas’s response to Derrida’s critique, see Diane Perpich, The Ethics of
Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 70–72.
29. Kosky affirms something like this novelty when he declares that if election
is assumed to proceed from a phenomenology of consciousness, “it thereby loses
the sense of an election which happens before me, without my having intended
anything that would merit it or not” (ibid., 153).
30. The philosophy of action implicit in this notion of inspiration comes
uncomfortably close (for Levinas, at least) to Agamben’s characterization of
animals as “responsive” to some “disinhibitor,” which means they are “with-
out world.” Agamben exemplifies this view in Jakob von Uexküll’s discussion
of the tick: “However, at this point, Uexküll informs us that in the laboratory
in Rostock, a tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is,
in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment. He gives no explana-
tion of this peculiar fact, and limits himself to supposing that in that ‘period
of waiting’ the tick lies in ‘a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience
every night.’” Agamben concludes with the following question: “And what sense
does it make to speak of ‘waiting’ without time and without world?” (O 47).
This brings the animal and the religious qua novelty as defined here too close
for Levinas’s (and perhaps Heidegger’s) comfort. Inversely, by assessing against
Agamben the remaining distance between human and animal, Kelly Oliver misses
the possible connection between the animal and the divine. She instead reads
his “return to religious metaphors” as a means of recovering some element of
“mystery” for a humanity whose being “biological and medical science” have
rendered as “bare life.” Kelly Oliver, “Stopping the anthropological machine:
Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,” PhaenEx 2, no. 2 (2007): 3,
8–10. This exhibits a number of conceptual problems, not the least of which is
that Oliver attributes Agamben’s anxiety over the anthropological machine to his
supposed fear of what might happen “if science succeeds in turning man into an
animal whose every desire can be determined by chemical processes” (10). But
in the passage she partially quotes (that if science turns man into an animal, then
“neither man nor animal — and perhaps, not even the divine — would any lon-
ger be thinkable”), Agamben actually attributes this disenchantment (my term)
to a “fundamental metaphysico-political operation” within Western philosophy
and theology that now has become exhausted, and only secondarily to techno-
science (P 21). Oliver obviously is right to be wary of biologistic reduction, but
Agamben sees technoscience as, at best, a minor player in the production of “bare
life.” Oliver thus mystifies the theologico-politico origin of the now-collapsing
boundary between the human and the animal, and this error helps to gener-
ate the distorted claim that “nostalgia” for some kind of “mystery” motivates
Agamben’s turn to the religious. This, along with the under-elaboration of what
Agamben means by a messianic end of history, bars Oliver’s access to any poten-
tial connections between the animal and the divine.
31. To a remarkable degree, this discussion parallels Agamben’s use of
Benjamin’s phrase “the return of the new” as a way to convey the sense of
potentiality as impotentiality. In the course of discussing this appropriation,
de la Durantaye designates Benjamin’s linguistic “gnosis” as the idea of “the
reading of what was never written . . . the reading before all languages” (“Homo
Profanus,” 19). De la Durantaye describes this as “not a reading of a content
communicated in language, but the communicativity of language itself . . . pre-
cisely that which cannot be said in language — language’s true mode of being as
potentiality” (ibid.).
32. Levinas also includes this quote as a footnote to an earlier passage (OB
192n23 / AE 110n23).
33. Levinas opposes himself to Eugen Fink and Jeanne Delhomme when he
writes, “to be without a choice can seem to be violence only to an abusive or
hasty and imprudent reflection, for it precedes the freedom non-freedom cou-
ple, but thereby sets up a vocation that goes beyond the limited and egoist fate
of him who is only for himself, and washes his hands of the faults and misfor-
tunes that do not being in his own freedom or in his present” (OB 116 / AE
148). Agamben, again following Benjamin, also identifies the site of “game” and
“play” with the advent of the sacred, though the meaning of games as entertain-
ment now figures as “secularizing [of ] an unconsciously religious intention” (de
la Durantaye, “Homo Profanus,” 39). To this extent, the messianic displacement
of sacred politics by the order of profane ease perhaps would meet with Levinas’s
approval by reinstalling the genuinely religious elsewhere than within play.
34. This essay is dedicated to my now-toddler son Eli, my wife Sheaukang,
and the nurses and doctors of St. Joseph’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in
Wichita, KS.
Tradition and Its Disavowal: Levinas and Hermeneutics
Philip Harold

Tradition and Its
Disavowal
Levinas and Hermeneutics
Philip Harold
INTRODUCTION
W
ith the thought of Emmanuel Levinas
political theory is faced with an enigma.
Ostensibly an ethical philosophy, while at
the same time seemingly devoid of any normative content, Levinas’s

work not only fails to illuminate the political realm but seems to be a
premonitory sign of the ethical trade-offs of just such an endeavor.
For Levinas the power-drive and the will to understand are inti-
mately related; the political is in the last analysis inextricable from
Lichtung, the clearing wherein beings show themselves. In his later
work, Levinas’s opposition to Heidegger is not that of a barren rever-
sal, at once quietist and fideist, but instead attempts to maintain the
tension between Heidegger effacing the gap between the realm of
the political and that of disclosure, and the ethical deficiencies of a
thought centered in overcoming metaphysics. Is not the inner core
of metaphysics — the representation of beings in general and in the
highest — the ethical truth of the Delphic imperative “Know thyself,”
namely, “Know that you are a man and no god”?1 Levinas’s early
work, culminating in Totality and Infinity, attempts just such an ethi-
cal rehabilitation of metaphysics. Despite the fecundity of the themes
developed there and the author’s claims about them, the work fails to
effectively confront Heidegger, as Derrida has shown in the essential
159
essay “Violence and Metaphysics.”2 The step back out of metaphys-

ics, the question of why all men by nature desire to know, what calls
for thinking, is not, as Levinas had claimed in his first great work, a
violent appropriation of persons to anonymous truth.
In his later thought Levinas opposes Heidegger in a more coher-
ent fashion, and it is here that there arises the quandary for political
theory. For what is true of Heidegger — that there is no direct appli-
cation of his thought, that there can be no “applied Heidegger”3 — is
even more true for Levinas, creating an aporia that is heightened with
Levinas’s continued use of ethical language in his descriptions. Is not
ethics, of all the sciences, that for which application is most impera-
tive? How can we accept the late work of Levinas as a valid critique
of Heidegger if it both concedes to the latter its fundamental gesture,
the step back out of metaphysics, and fails to appeal to practice? What
is the significance of Levinas’s later thought for practice? If there is
none, should we not again ignore the polemics Levinas directs against
his teacher in Otherwise than Being for the opposite reason than for
his first magnum opus, namely, that this later work is its equivalent in
everything save its vocabulary?
If Heidegger’s thought is insufficiently ethical, it is not because of
this or that particular immoral consequence of his thought, but rather
because it fails to account for the ethical aspect of man’s dwelling
as such. And since this last expression is a pleonasm, such a critique
could not at the same time fail to be less than fundamental. A fun-
damental critique of Heidegger, however, would be required to go
beyond being and ethics. This is exactly what Levinas attempts to do
in his later work, which therefore cannot be considered ethical in any
real sense. The first canon of interpretation of Levinas’s later thought
therefore must be the following: that it is not an ethics. To effec-
tively deal with Heidegger, one must abandon the complaint that
his thought is unethical. In his later work, culminating in Otherwise
than Being, Levinas steps back from the science of ethics, mimicking
Heidegger’s step back from metaphysics.
Harold Tradition and Its Disavowal 161
Ethics, the science of the goods achievable by action, is inseparable

from the master art of politics. Just as metaphysics is onto-theology,
that is, both ontology and theology in a unified way, so social sci-
ence, the science of the goods achievable by action, is in a unified way
both ethics and politics. Social science is ethico-political; it involves a
correspondence between the good achievable by all individuals gen-
erally and the good achievable by the highest statesmen deciding for
the whole community. Happiness and the best life are the same for
both.4 Similar to metaphysics, the inner unity of social science is uni-
fied by the circular relation of the individual and community.5 Recall
Plato’s anthropological principle, or Aristotle’s transition from the
Nicomachean Ethics to the Politics, where there must be right laws
already present in order to provide the habituation for one to be
receptive to ethical arguments, though it is ethical reflection which
produces those very laws and training.
The step back from social science as ethico-political achieved by
Levinas in his later work results in a philosophy that is unable to be
applied. There is no Levinasian politics. The reason for this differs,
however, from the reason that there is no Heideggerian politics. For
Heidegger, the step back can only occur through a challenging of the
metaphysical language we speak; his critique of metaphysics there-
fore includes a critique of technology. We must get our bearings for
where we are in the encounter of Being and man, and on this basis
we can blaze new pathways. Included in the Heideggerian project is
the deconstruction of Western political metaphysics, wherein insights
can be gleaned for our thinking concerning the political, if not for
politics.6 It is certainly true that Heidegger himself, as Ricoeur writes,
neglected to make the return to cave as it were, by failing to engage
the human sciences.7 Taking its inspiration from Heidegger and allow-
ing this engagement to take place, it is in the field of hermeneutics
that we must look for the encounter between social science and the
deconstruction of metaphysics. From the perspective of this encoun-
ter I will examine here the fundamental reason that lies behind the
impossibility of applying Levinas to the political, which, to anticipate,

is this: any act of knowing is a said that can only deform (nonethi-
cally) the saying, and bringing out the possibility of the latter is the
foremost object of Levinas’s philosophical research.
I shall turn to the thought of Paul Ricoeur, that great representative
of hermeneutical philosophy in France, for answers to these questions
concerning Levinas’s work. This is so not only because of Ricoeur’s
penetrating critique of Levinas, but also because of Ricoeur’s incisive
contribution to the Gadamer-Habermas debate.8 Ricoeur sees a dia-
lectical relationship between these two thinkers and attempts a “criti-
cal supplementation to the hermeneutics of tradition,”9 believing that
he can to some degree reconcile the hermeneutics of Gadamer with
the critical theory of Habermas even on their matter of greatest dis-
agreement — the political consequences of Gadamer’s rehabilitation
of prejudice. I will first sketch Ricoeur’s contribution to this debate,
then turn to Levinas and his understanding of the limits of herme-
neutical philosophy, before concluding with the contribution which
Levinas can make to the impasse between hermeneutics and critical
theory.
AUTHORITY AND TRADITION
For Gadamer, the Enlightenment has obfuscated the true source

of authority by collapsing it into the power to give commands.
Authority is denigrated as requiring blind obedience and as unequiv-
ocally opposed to the value of exercising reason for oneself, a dichot-
omy which ignores the epistemic function of tradition as a source of
truth. Without a kind of trust the progress of knowledge could not
advance very far at all. If the claim to knowledge of anything required
a full intuition in the phenomenological sense, our knowing would
be so severely restricted the sciences would cease to exist. For one
who has never been to Australia, for example, trust in its existence is
merely a belief in the accounts of those who have traveled there. This
is not, however, an abdication of reason but rather a recognition of
legitimate authority which there is no reason to doubt; we might say

it is the “best account” of things I have at the present time.10 Beliefs
can be revised upon investigation when cartographers conflict, for
instance. But the reason it is counter-productive in matters such as
the existence of a continent is that some things are so thoroughly
embedded in tradition that they impose themselves as established
facts. There would be no progress made in knowing the world if one
attempted to obsessively bring to a full intuition everything which has
already been established by other people, previous generations, and
the traditions of the sciences.
An extreme skepticism is of course advocated by no one, and for
the most part the best-account principle functions surreptitiously. It
does so more perhaps in the hard sciences, where the canons of a
science are less regularly under threat of a paradigm shift, than in
the social sciences, where there are multiple traditions of inquiry, the
fundamental principles of which are hotly contested. They are con-

tested not because they have ethico-political consequences while the
hard sciences do not, but because for the former such consequences
are direct, as they are a part of the very subject matter that is stud-
ied, while the latter can present themselves under the guise of pure
theory, as Habermas has seen.11
It is precisely the ethico-political consequences of the rehabilitation
of prejudice that are controversial. Edmund Burke drew out political
implications from the truth-value of tradition, emphasizing gradual
change and resistance to the public use of individual reason.12 Such
a conservative political outlook is resisted by Habermas. While he
might accept the claim that our starting point is tradition in ethico-
political matters, for Habermas there must be a possibility of critiqu-
ing what has been handed down. “Gadamer’s prejudice in favor of
the legitimacy of prejudices . . . validated by tradition,” he writes, “is
in conflict with the power of reflection, which proves itself in its abil-
ity to reject the claim of traditions.”13
Certainly Gadamer does not advocate an automatic acceptance
of tradition, but grounds authority in recognition, following Max
Scheler’s account.14 At issue then is the source of this recognition,

which must presumably at the same time make possible a disavowal
of the bad aspects of tradition. For Habermas, it is the ideal of unlim-
ited and unconstrained communication, an ideal of responsibility and
autonomy, which remains outside of tradition, is known a priori, and
can ground a critique of ideology, that is, of the deformations of com-
munication. Gadamer cannot rise to this level of critique from the
“hermeneutical Urphänomen,” the openness of listening, the herme-
neutic priority of the question.15 To be open to the new experience
of the other is only made possible by my own “familiar and common
understanding.”16 For Gadamer, it is a delusion to claim that there
is a source of knowledge beyond the interplay of listening to and
questioning the tradition in which I stand. Such a pretension ignores
its own roots in tradition and risks becoming a fruitless methodology
detached from the significant questions of life.
The primary experience of hermeneutics and its motivating power
revolves for Gadamer around what Paul Ricoeur names “appropria-
tion,” the placing of the other within my horizon, not through sub-
ordination by a violent methodology but rather by openness to the
experience of the other. The fact that I am placed in the present, that
I have prejudices, and that I can only work to overcome them one at
a time with the aid of others is our historical condition. No science
can free itself of it. While adopting this approach, Ricoeur also wishes
to shift the emphasis away from appropriation, with its disjunction
between truth and method, discourse and structure, replacing it with
a dialectic between them, which is modeled on writing rather than
conversation. Writing produces a work, and what a work says is not
contained in the intention of the author or in a naïve reading, but is
mediated by the structure of the text. Explanation and understand-
ing therefore work hand in hand; an analysis of the structure of a text
is necessary in order to make its meaning one’s own. The reader is
open to the world unfolded by the text, which involves the possibil-
ity of critique in the tension between it and the world I inhabit. This
tension is not present in the same degree with the model of everyday
conversation, which always seeks to get beyond seeing the other as

an object, to get to the truth of what the other is saying and to over-
come the distance between us. For a text, however, in its distance to
us there is a power “to open a dimension of reality [that] implies in
principle a recourse against any given reality and thereby the possibil-
ity of a critique of the real.”17 Particularly in fiction, the imagination
is opened as to how my world and myself could be different.
Therefore Ricoeur sees value in Habermas’s desire for a critique
of ideology and wishes to sketch a “critical supplementation to the
hermeneutics of tradition.” But for him there could not be a critical
science of this alterity putting the prejudices of a tradition in question.
Exposing these prejudices as ideological illusions would undoubtedly
have a freeing effect. For his part Gadamer has a notoriously difficult
time explaining how it is that there can be a clear line between good
and bad prejudices.18 To do so seems to require something like the a
priori ideal of unrestrained communication proffered by Habermas.
For him there needs to be a social critique to free communication
from manipulative methods of control, and “institutions based on
force” must be replaced by “an organization of social relations that is
bound only to communication free from domination.”19
But for Ricoeur social critique can only be a mode of hermeneu-
tics. There must be an experience of communication first for the dif-
ference between it and ideological manipulation to be known, and
for social critique to begin. It is from a tradition that the resources to
evaluate a pervasive ideology come; in order to critique the prejudices
of one tradition as a foreclosure of communication, another tradition
of open communication is required. The ideal of free communication
is empty until it is applied in a specific situation, where it is a matter
of multiple clashing traditions. We cannot escape our present preju-
dices, but can put them in question only through the hermeneutic
value of openness to the other.
Unless it is applied, the ideal of emancipation from ideology can
be for Ricoeur only a “pious vow.”20 This means that a critique must
present a fresh new alternative of order; and this can only be done from
within the tradition, as a critique from the outside can only diminish
the capabilities of action, thereby falling under Ricoeur’s definition
of violence. If a challenge to a tradition is not adequately grounded
in it, it is attempting to speak from nowhere. Such a challenge should
go back and learn the classic texts before it deigns to oppose author-
ity with nothing but its own unsupported views. It should open itself
up to the critique the tradition offers it. When it does, it will accept
the value of the tradition’s authority; it will thus be tamed and co-
opted into the very thing it was purporting to critique.21 For real
emancipation to take place, it must plunge into the actual business
of communicative action. “And,” writes Ricoeur, “upon what will
you concretely support the reawakening of communicative action, if
not upon the creative renewal of cultural heritage” (la reprise créatrice
des heritages culturels)?22 This remains within a decidedly conservative
outlook on ethics and politics. Consider what this model of a critique
of the social order takes. First, it occurs through the world opened by
a distant text rather than with the uncomfortable presence of the critic.
Second, it occurs through the detour of fiction rather than direct claims
about what the social order is. Finally, the critique is ultimately subject
to the same hermeneutical criterion of all texts, a creative renewal of
past tradition adding possibilities to our power-to-be.
Critique cannot occur through a universalism alone, what Ricoeur
calls in his book Oneself as Another “morality” as opposed to “ethics,”
the latter being the full aim for the good life. Ethics and morality hold
the same relationship as do hermeneutics and critique, the latter term
in both pairs being subordinated to the more fundamental first term.
Morality, the crafting of norms, must be subordinate to the ethical
aim which is shaped by historical and communitarian contexts. This
is shown by descending to actual practice — it is the exercise of moral
judgment in situation, practical wisdom, which shows that universal
norms are not sufficient. The latter are unable to deal with conflicts
between goods because they do not acknowledge the real diversity
of goods and hence the tragic nature of the conflicts. Morality can-
not learn from tragedy, while practical wisdom must. While tragedy
is nonphilosophical, still, he writes, “tragedy teaches us” (la tragédie

enseigne).23 There is, however, a gap between practical wisdom and
tragic wisdom; the latter challenges the former to reorient itself and
respond to it, but without providing clear counsel as to what this
response entails.24 I will return to tragedy and its ability to upset the
ethical, but at this point only note that for Ricoeur, rather than short-
circuiting it, tragedy leads back to the core hermeneutical problem
of application, highlighting the inability of morality to substitute for
practical wisdom.25
For Ricoeur the human person is constituted by the threefold struc-
ture of the desire to live well, with and for others, in just institutions,
and the ethical life is articulated into three moments of teleology,
deontology, and practical wisdom. In each of these configurations
is exhibited what I have called the ethico-political constitution of
social science. The desire to live well is inseparable from the question
of fashioning just institutions, and it is practical wisdom that is the

culmination of the ethical structure. The idea of justice is the indis-
pensable concept for social science; it is the “highest category of the
practical field,” it unifies the different levels of the ethical life, and is
the point of intersection between the universal and the historical.26
Justice, Ricoeur says, develops out of the first childhood experience
of something not being fair. When we attempt to justify to some-
one else the feeling of ire at being ripped off, we enter the realm of
justice, where the question of what a just institution is necessarily
arises. This is the circle within which social science operates: the wish
for the good life, self-interest, the expansion of one’s own being is
obstructed and turned into a question — what is the being of justice?
Such a question could be sophistically answered as the interest of
the stronger, or philosophical inquiry in hermeneutical fashion could
commence, for which a final synthesis is perpetually postponed, and
in which the problem of application is integral to any understand-
ing.27 Philosophy demands that we be put in question, that we in
some sense abandon our perspective, that we are exposed to critique;
for Ricoeur the passivity of exposure to the other, of receiving one’s
self from the other, is intimately tied to the alterity of the other world
unfolded by the text.
However, as John Thompson rightly remarks, it is unclear how it is
that the text could ground a critique of reality, rather than the other
way around.28 Ricoeur’s objection to Habermas’s ethics of discus-
sion can be cited here: “Seeking a reason is an extraordinarily com-
plex and varied social game in which many different passions conceal
themselves under the appearance of impartiality. Arguments can be a
cunning way of pursuing a struggle.”29 If this is the case, how could
we then be sure that the critique we engage in and to which we
are exposed is not actually an extension of our own will to power?
The attempt to justify the indignation of “That’s not fair!” might be
merely the playing out of an adult version of childish covetousness.
The foundational concept of the virtue of justice might only be the
maintenance of an illusion of a capability for impartiality, a sublima-
tion of our passions that only better cloaks their destructive effects
to others, as well as to ourselves. This, Nietzsche’s challenge, is the
application to the subject the diagnosis which critical theory applies
to the ideological distortions of communication in a society. Such a
radical position is no recapitulation of sophistry, but a step back from
both philosophy and sophistry to show their necessary connection.
For, as Eric Voegelin saw, noesis must arise in critical contention
with nonnoetic interpretations of society.30 Society could never be
perfectly rational, and philosophy must be limited by postponing syn-
thesis. But why then do we desire to know? What gives thought? As
Jean Grondin puts it, “What is the point of striving for understand-
ing, when everything is perspectival and historically conditioned?”31
The question is inseparable from ethics in Ricoeur’s sense, as know-
ing is part of living well with and for others in just institutions. And
if ethics is unified by the idea of justice, the question becomes, “Why
be just?” It is a question held in abeyance until the very end of Oneself
as Another, where Ricoeur speaks of “being enjoined to live well with
and for others in just institutions and to esteem oneself as the bearer
of this wish.”32 What is it that is responsible for this imperative? At
this point philosophy perhaps fails us:
Perhaps the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not
know and cannot say whether this Other, the source of the injunction,
is another person whom I can look in the face or who can stare at me,
or my ancestors for whom there is no representation, to so great an
extent does my debt to them constitute my very self, or God — living
God, absent God — or an empty place. With this aporia of the Other,
philosophical discourse comes to an end.33
In a larger sense, however, the entire book is an attempt to answer

the Nietzschean challenge through an alternative conception of
subjectivity structured around what Ricoeur names “attestation,”
which is the hermeneutic level of epistemic certainty of the self,
what he says in another place can alone “include both the apodictic
certainty of the Cartesian I think and the uncertainties, even the
lies and illusions, of the self, of immediate consciousness.”34 By not
insisting that philosophy provide certainty, one does not fall prey to
the inevitable undoing of the foundation of the self. Likewise, by
going all the way to moral judgment in situation, the high point of
practical wisdom, Ricoeur is able to appeal to conviction, and hence
to those examples of individuals whose “Here I stand” exemplifies
their concern for justice. Here there is no indubitable proof, but
only the testimony of others. The way is then opened to accept
the hermeneutic circle as the nonfoundational foundation for all
inquiry and authority. We must start where we are, combating the
local injustices and illusions where we find them with the resources
at our disposal. Our ideologically covered moral faults can only be
exposed through the back-and-forth of hermeneutic dialogue, which
can congeal into a “Here I stand,” the appropriation of alterity that
Ricoeur sees lacking in Levinas.
LEVINAS AND THE SOURCE OF JUSTICE
For his part, Levinas does not thematize this appropriation, not
because he wishes to deny its necessity or importance, but because
he wishes to pause at the moment prior to it, the original impul-
sion toward justice. It is an intentionality that fails.35 When we want
to be just, to remedy injustice, to fashion just institutions, then we

must reflect and ethics is born; but the desire to be just in the first
place is not thematizable according to Levinas. It is the prophetic
impulse irreducible to Greek measured reflection.36 This moment sets
the hermeneutic circle moving — when we are willing to be exposed
to critique for the sake of greater knowledge and justice, we are able
to enter the circle in the right way. Yet setting the hermeneutic circle
in motion is an effect of prophetism and does not exhaust it; the pro-
phetic moment is not this will to undergo a limited sacrifice for the
sake of accruing greater benefits, rather, it is a measureless thirst for jus-
tice. This is a statement which is avowedly self-contradictory — there
can be no measureless thirst for justice, since all justice as well as the
search for it must take place within the finite limits of our hermeneu-
tic understanding. To this charge of senselessness Levinas accedes.
The prophetic moment is not; it is beyond being. It cannot be stated
without self-contradiction. But this has to do with the limits of our
Greek or rational thought.
But how can Levinas possibly expect to elaborate on the limits
of Greek thought while speaking Greek? If we discover our limits,
are we not attaining a valuable piece of knowledge that allows us to
stay within those limits and thus mitigate their destructive possibili-
ties — in short, something eminently sensible and thus nothing at all
like the descriptions proffered by Levinas? A response to this crucial
point can be seen in Levinas’s essay “Hermeneutics and the Beyond,”
to which I now turn.
From the very beginning of the essay it is clear that Levinas is
speaking of a thought that cannot be assimilated to a hermeneutical
interpretation, a thought that thinks more than it thinks, a thought
that goes beyond without thinking that it is going beyond. The essay
is therefore entirely in the evocative mode. It functions by posing the
question whether appearing is sufficient as the meaning of being: is
being only that which appears to us? Levinas’s strategy is twofold. First
of all he raises the question whether the phenomenological or herme-
neutical understanding of meaning could ever give way to something
deeper, something indeed operating a tergo, or if there is nothing

more than intentionality or historically effected consciousness. This
possibility is immediately denied, and Levinas instead affirms that
there is nothing that could be said to be apart from some access to it,
which would necessarily be another intentional moment or encoun-
ter with tradition. Levinas agrees that nothing could be said to be
apart from our access to it. But is it the case that the said, inclusive of
all being, is exhaustive of the saying which is a relation to the other
person? Must the saying to the other person be tied exclusively to
what can be said? In this way Levinas (in his later thought) is quick to
acknowledge that he is not making a claim (as was unclear in Totality
and Infinity) about what the other is. Ricoeur writes that for Levinas,
the “face is that of a master of justice, of a master who instructs and
who does so only in the ethical mode: this face forbids murder and
commands justice.”37 In other words, the other person is a stand-in
for God, a misreading shared by some of the best commentators on

Levinas.38 A misreading, however, that Levinas corrects in the essay
under consideration: “It would be appropriate,” he writes, “to ask at
this point whether we are dealing with a transcendence to God or a
transcendence in terms of which a word like God can only first reveal
its meaning. The fact that that transcendence is produced from the
(horizontal?) relationship with the other person means neither that
the other person is God nor that God is a great Other Person” (EN
73–74 / En 84).
We have seen Ricoeur, under the heading “the aporia of the
Other,” express ambivalence over the source of the moral injunction.
Philosophy cannot say what the other is. But to ask this question
is to miss the point. The other is unspeakable and is not a possibil-
ity of action. It must be at the limit of a philosophy of the speak-
ing and acting subject such as Ricoeur’s. The limit recognized by
Ricoeur is at the same place Levinas places the responsibility that is
beyond being, namely, as we have seen, that which enjoins the ethi-
cal structure he elaborates in the first place. The other limit occurs
in tragedy, the moment when the prophetic beyond being is unable
to congeal into a “Here I stand” of conviction. More than tragedy

itself, however — which refers to the mediation of a play or a historical
account, built into the experience of which is the third-person per-
spective or just distance away from the participation in tragedy, and
issues into “tragic wisdom” as Ricoeur calls it — it is the unspeakable
of tragedy which is the real limit, the unthinkable aspect which can-
not be objectified in this way without losing its terrifying character.
To be face to face with the tragic suffering of the other, with useless
suffering, requires us to suffer with them. This is not empathy, which
takes place from a distance in myself as a subject as I maintain my
place and my power to act, feeling the pain of the other beneath me
while never losing the sense that it is occurring to a subjectivity differ-
ent than mine. The suffering in a tragic situation undoes subjectivity;
the suffering of the other becomes my suffering, not out of any act
on my part. Once the saying is said, it ceases as saying. Knowledge
and consciousness for Levinas “signifies distance as well as accessibil-
ity” (EN 68 / En 78–79), or distanciation as well as belonging for
Ricoeur; while knowledge might overcome alienation, it also dulls
astonishment, “a disproportion between cogitation and cogitatum”
(69 / 79).
The question as to what the other is, is irrelevant, as it is beyond
being, yet this is the question that drives the last study in Oneself as
Another: “What mode of being . . . belongs to the self, what sort of
being or entity is it?”39 It is Levinas’s contention that for this ques-
tion the hyperethical character of the subject will always be a closed
book. For Levinas the hermeneutical approach to knowledge (which
he summarizes in Otherwise than Being as the kerygmatic source of
meaning) is necessarily tied to an ontology of power. What counts
for a being is its persevering in its being, accomplishing the unfolding
of its essence: “Esse is interesse; essence is interest” (OB 4 / AE 4).
Knowledge is a mode of this power of existing. Ricoeur concurs with
this ontology of Levinas’s, and upholds the conatus of Spinoza, where
a close connection is established between the intelligence and the
power-to-be, as the ground of the self. While Ricoeur claims that
Levinas’s level of analysis cannot be the basis for a critique of his own
work, because the latter “is bound up with an ontology of totality
that my own investigation has never assumed or even come across,”40
this comment only hits the mark when applied to Levinas’s earlier and
somewhat confused philosophy, in the period culminating in Totality
and Infinity. In fact Ricoeur’s embrace of Spinoza’s conatus is antici-
pated by Levinas in Otherwise than Being, a book that advances deci-
sively beyond Totality and Infinity and is Levinas’s definitive work.
To privilege practical wisdom as Ricoeur does requires the sub-
ordination of both a morality of universal norms and a science of
critique to a hermeneutics of practice. For what is crucial for a judg-
ment in situation is the power to live well with and for others in just
institutions. For Ricoeur it is the power-to-be, the wanting to live
and act together, the solution that action can offer to tragic conflicts,
which brings ethics to its application in situation. The power to act
governs Ricoeur’s thought in the same way that autonomy governs
the thought of the universal moralists, as a “principle that provides its
own legitimation.”41 Accept this, and one must accept the subjection
of critique and universal morality to hermeneutics and ethics. If it is
a matter of acting, of finding a solution, and of overcoming tragedy
(in the immanent sense of a present reality), then Ricoeur’s driving
principle is certainly self-legitimating. And for what else could we ask?
To insist that no power be applied until we are sure that the norms
of its exercise are all completely justified is to resemble what Max
Scheler called the “eternally other,” the one who “does not want to
find the true and the false, or the values of good and evil, etc., by
experiencing, by investigating the facts, but sets himself as a judge
over all these.”42
Ricoeur’s ontology of power is anticipated by Levinas in precisely
the same sense as it is explicated in Oneself as Another, and the latter
attempts to surpass it through an appeal to the beyond being. The
endeavor to expose this beyond, the saying, can on the other hand
only occur as a kind of endless critique, never holding power itself.
This does not mean Levinas is putting forth a quietist ethic, as that
would be to assimilate the saying to the said. Rather he is trying to

evoke a deeper source for ethical prohibitions, one that is presup-
posed by deontological theories, one that speaks in the “primordial
expression . . .: ‘you shall not commit murder’ ” (TI 199 / TeI 173).
Ricoeur writes the following: “The sense of injustice is not simply
more poignant but more perspicacious than the sense of the justice,
for justice more often is lacking and injustice prevails. And people
have a clearer vision of what is missing in human relations than of
the right way to organize them. This is why, even for philosophers,
it is injustice that first sets thought in motion.”43 Injustice, culmi-
nating in violence, first sets thought in motion. What is violence?
It is according to Ricoeur the “diminishment or the destruction of
the power-to-do of others” which at the limit reaches the “depths
of evil” in torture and humiliation.44 Suffering is similarly character-
ized by Ricoeur: “Suffering is not defined solely by physical pain, nor
even by mental pain, but by the reduction, even the destruction, of
the capacity for acting, of being-able-to-act, experienced as a viola-
tion of self-integrity.”45 Who cannot sense the dissymmetry between
this violation or violence and the thought that is impelled toward
ethical reflection there from? They are not commensurate. Can our
power-to-be really tie up the thread from the trauma of radical evil?
If the answer is no, as it seems clear that it is, then the whole struc-
ture built up from the application of our power-to-be must at some
point give way. Of course we must act . . . and tragedy does teach us.
But tragic wisdom is not practical wisdom, as Ricoeur says. When is
it time for the one over the other? When is it time to lay down one’s
own power-to-be? When one’s social group has become so corrupted
and ideological that it is time to extricate oneself from it, to resist it.
Even in the teeth of a hegemonic social power one must become a
law to oneself, auto-nomos, rather than participate in the evil it fosters.
Yet such a decision is still an exercise of practical reason, weighing the
consequences and then acting, and suffering the consequences clearly
ascribable to its heroism. Such an action, which “affirms treason in
order to bear witness,”46 follows in a tradition and is based in the
power-to-be, even if it ends up sacrificing it.
Levinas understands the necessity for ethics and politics and is far
from disputing their vital role. However, the loosening of their tight
circular relation should not be covered over. There is more going
on than meets the eye in the impulse toward the ethical that leads
to political action for a better society, as well as in the political order
were peace reigns allowing individuals their pursuit of the good life.
Hermeneutic understanding is important but not exhaustive, and it
requires a leap, a gap between the saying and the said, which takes
place in Ricoeur in the mediation between fundamental ethics and
regional ethics through justice, and can be seen in other great social
theorists: for example, with Voegelin in the idea of knowledge as a
movement toward the ground of order, or with Habermas in the move
from the practical interest to the emancipatory interest, and in his later
work in the idea of communicative action as having a telos of reach-
ing understanding.47 However, the (non)understanding of this breach
which Levinas’s thought offers us cannot congeal into a piece of social

science knowledge, that is to say a privileged insight into both the right
way to live and the right way to direct the political realm.
CONCLUSION: THE POSSIBILITY OF A TOTAL CRITIQUE
What do Levinas’s ideas have to add to the dispute between

Gadamer and Ricoeur on the one side, and Habermas on the other?
First of all we must be very skeptical of the attempt to fashion a criti-
cal science and attempt to generate theoretical knowledge concern-
ing the ideological blockages of communication for the reason that
it pursues the illusory goal of solving the paradox of authority with
knowledge. Levinas shares Gadamer’s reservations concerning the
expert having the right to dictate in the practical sphere because he
or she has diagnosed the social ills from which society needs eman-
cipation. Even if it is true that all authority should be replaced by
rational consensus, this piece of theoretical knowledge does not give
the knower the right to implement it by force. This is the paradox of
authority: authority exists, and yet neither the claim to legitimacy of
the one who commands nor even consent on the part of those who
obey makes an order authoritative. Shall we, with Ricoeur, admit that
we do not know the source of authority, and content ourselves with
a phenomenology that differentiates it from power and persuasion?48
Or shall we, with Habermas, refuse to accept Ricoeur’s definition of
authority and, focusing instead on the clear difference between the
imposition of a more powerful will and a rationally motivated agree-
ment, investigate the conditions for the latter in order to expand it?
The difference between these two orientations is clear: acceptance
of authority and a hermeneutical inquiry into it versus the drive to
discover how the social order could be fashioned in a better, more
rational manner. Ricoeur does not wish to base authority on knowl-
edge, and in this he and Levinas are in agreement. Knowledge for
Levinas can never justify itself to itself, but is always rooted in a pre-
original moment, an anarchic prophetic impulse older than Greek
rationality. But it is for this very reason that Levinas at the same time
opposes Ricoeur and what might be called the closure of the herme-
neutic circle, with the excess of the unthinkable beyond being. The
impulse behind Habermas’s orientation toward a future better society
would then be correct, for it must be possible not only to critique
the contents of a tradition but the whole tradition as such. Yet it is
impossible for such a critique to be knowledge, if on the one hand
there is no theoretical knowledge outside of hermeneutics for the
reasons given by Ricoeur and Gadamer, and, on the other hand, if the
prophetic impetus (which makes the critique possible), far from being
a completed knowledge or view from nowhere, is beyond being and
therefore not knowledge at all.
Our ability to apply the distinction between legitimate and ille-
gitimate exercises of power can then be thrown into question. While
the difference between power-in-common and domination is analyti-
cally clear, it is important to see how it breaks down when we try to
put it to use in a particular circumstance. Ricoeur admits that such a
clear-cut distinction on the global level is not possible.49 There will
always be structural inequities and injustices bound up with the exer-
cise of political power. The question of the justice of the total social
order will therefore always recede to the background in favor of this

or that particular wrong; and since itemized injustices appeal to my
power to help shape a remedy, I can focus on them while ignoring the
hard questions about the implications of the maintenance of my own
power. Under the alibi of practical wisdom, a situation demanding
radical resistance can be met only with conservative complacency.
One must be inside a tradition and know it thoroughly to cri-
tique it. Yet critique of an entire tradition could only be possible
using resources outside of it. While this cannot be accomplished from
ostensibly universal norms — here hermeneutics is correct — a total
critique is possible, but only by way of the beyond being. When one
is part of tradition, that tradition constitutes oneself, and giving it up
is a loss of self which is suffering in Ricoeur’s sense, as a restriction on
the power-to-be. Conscious knowledge is too distant and reserved to
be the mode of a total critique: there is always more to learn, other
aspects to assimilate, synthesis must always be delayed, a complete
perspective always to come, and therefore a total critique is always
postponed. Never able to secure a full representation of its subject
matter, social science can never be authoritative. And since knowl-
edge cannot be the source of authority, the “ultimate philosophi-
cal horizon”50 of the critique of ideology captures an aspect of the
source of ethics missed by hermeneutics. Gadamer’s complaint about
Habermas is true, that it is “inevitably the self-abolition of philoso-
phy,”51 but the prophetic moment might require this self-abolition,
this suffering, on the part of the philosopher allied with the city yet
unable to countenance its injustice. It is a total critique as a witness,
a saying, and not a doctrine.
N OTES TO H AROLD , “T RADITION AND I TS D ISAVOWAL “
1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 150.
2. Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” in L’écriture et la diffé-
rence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 117–228; trans. Alan Bass as “Violence
and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1978), 79–153.
3. Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 76.
4. See Aristotle, Politics, 1324a5.
5. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 69.
6. A recent example is Nicholas Dungey, who puts together Heidegger and
Derrida: “The Ethics and Politics of Dwelling,” Polity 39 (2007): 234–58.
7. “With Heidegger’s philosophy, we are always engaged in going back to
the foundations, but we are left incapable of beginning the movement of return
which would lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemologi-
cal question of the status of the human sciences. Now a philosophy which breaks
the dialogue with the sciences is no longer addressed to anything but itself.” Paul
Ricoeur, Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 59.
8. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990),
387–93, trans. Kathleen Blamey as Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 335–41. For an account of this critique see both Bernhard
Waldenfels, “The Other and the Foreign,” in Philosophy & Social Criticism 21,
no. 5/6 (1995): 111–24, and Richard A. Cohen, “Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian
Response to Ricoeur on Levinas,” in Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh,
eds., Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002), 127–60.
9. Paul Ricoeur, “Herméneutique et critique des idéologies,” in
Démythisation et idéologie, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1973),
51, trans. John B. Thompson as “Hermeneutics and the critique of ideology,” in
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 91.
10. The “best-account principle” is formulated by Charles Taylor, a moral
philosopher inspired by hermeneutics. Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 58.
11. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J.
Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 193, 315.
12. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock
of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the
individuals would be better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital
of nations, and of ages.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87.
13. Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 170.
14. Scheler writes: “Authority differs from mere power or force in that a
person can possess authority only over one who knows by evidence that this
person possesses a deeper and wider moral insight than he does. Moral ‘trust’ in
an authority is based on this insight, and authority is based on this trust. If this
trust is removed, authority becomes non-moral power and force.” Max Scheler,
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings
and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 328.
15. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E.
Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 11; and,
Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York:
Crossroad, 1989), 361–79.
16. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 15.
17. Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 93 /
“Herméneutique et critique des idéologies,” 54–55.
18. “Does hermeneutical good will have the power it claims of looking back
on its constitutive prejudices, those which we are as well as those we have — or
to put it another way by rephrasing Heidegger’s well-known remark on lan-
guage — those which have us, in all the sense of the word, as well as those which
we have? In apprehending unity, doesn’t good will suspend precisely the moment
of critique, becoming powerless from then on to put under criticism the preju-
dices that structure understanding (krinein: to make a definitive judgment), even
though it will inconsistently assume that a clear line can be drawn between good
and bad prejudices, that is to say, between productive prejudices and obstructive
ones?” Philippe Forget, “Argument(s),” trans. Diane Michelfelder, in Dialogue
& Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder
and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989),
135.
19. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 53.
“Herméneutique et critique des idéologies,” 60.
21. Eric Voegelin describes this process: “In order to degrade the politics
of Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas to the rank of ‘values’ among others, a con-
scientious scholar would first have to show that their claim to be science was
unfounded. And that attempt is self-defeating. By the time the would-be critic
has penetrated the meaning of metaphysics with sufficient thoroughness to make
his criticism weighty, he will have become a metaphysician himself. The attack
on metaphysics can be undertaken with a good conscience only from the safe
distance of imperfect knowledge.” Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 20.
“Herméneutique et critique des idéologies,” 60.
23. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 243 / Soi-même comme un autre, 283.
24. Ibid., 247 / 288.
25. Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste 2 (Paris: Esprit, 2001), 279, trans. David Pellauer
as Reflections on the Just (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 243.
26. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 3, 60, 234–35 / Le Juste, 9, 71, 270.
27. On the postponement of a final synthesis see Don Ihde, Hermeneutic
Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1971), 13–14. The centrality of the problem of application is
spelled out by Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 307–11.
28. John B. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul
Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
164.
29. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 245 / Le Juste, 282.
30. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: Univers-
ity of Missouri Press, 1978), 144–45.
31. Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 140.
32. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 352 / Soi-même comme un autre, 406; italics
removed.
33. Ibid., 355 / 409.
34. Paul Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interprétations: Essais d’herméneutique (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 262, trans. Don Ihde as The Conflict of Interpretations
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 266.
35. “It is nonetheless true that the very relationship of the saying cannot be
reduced to intentionality, or that it rests, properly speaking, on an intentionality
that fails (échoue)” (EN 71 / En 81).
36. In Ricoeur’s magisterial work The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1967), philosophy finds itself confronted by symbols. Symbols rise to
thought according to Ricoeur, giving thought something to think about. They
can move into reflection because they already in the element of discourse. The
ethical vision of the world is destroyed by the myth Ricoeur privileges, the
“Adamic” myth of the fall of man, which “is the fruit of the prophetic accusa-
tion directed against man” (240). Prophetism aims not at ethics, but beyond it:
“Ethics is rather the slackening of an impulse that is fundamentally hyperethi-
cal” (55). The hyperethical, from which the ethical is an abstraction, is the life
and dynamism of the Jewish people, as revealed not in their codes but in their
chronicles, hymns, oracles, and sayings. He writes, “The notion of law appears
only when the word of command is on the point of detaching itself from the
situation of calling, from the dialogal relation” (52). This fundamental relation
of the Jewish people to God is expressed in chronicles and hymns, and the pro-
phetic word, which “possess the breadth and the depth of the primordial word
that constitutes the dialogal situation,” is that which “gives rise to chronicles,
codes, hymns, and sayings” (53). The prophetic word gives rise to the symbolisms
Ricoeur analyzes in his philosophical hermeneutics; it is not identified with those
symbolisms, but is in fact separated by the same “methodological rupture in the
continuity of reflection” (347) that Ricoeur speaks of concerning the difference
between pure reflection and reflection nourished by symbols. For the prophetic
word must be living and effective; it is not constrained to the mere understanding
of past events and symbolisms but in fact inspires speech and action in the pres-
ent. Were this not the case, Ricoeur’s whole philosophical hermeneutics would
collapse, predicated as it is on an oriented understanding of myths that partici-
pates in the struggle between them. In this struggle, however, Ricoeur applies
the criterion of illumination, where symbols are to be judged on the basis of how
much they reveal about a realm of human existence. The revelation at stake is
not a simple augmentation of self-awareness, but a searching for wisdom that
would end both “the closure of consciousness of oneself . . . [and] the prerogative
of self-reflection” (356). However, this wisdom, the openness of discourse over
force, an openness to accept that “some things that are against me, even though
no one else forces me to do so” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361), which is
at the core of both hermeneutics and Habermas’s discourse ethics, is opened by
the prophetic word, yet the latter is not exhausted by this opening and this openness.
There is a nonlinguistic residue of the symbol, which is unable to be integrated
into reflection, a saying over and above the said, and it is this that Levinas wishes
to bring out.
38. See John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993), 225–26; Phillip Blond, “Emmanuel Levinas: God and phenomenology,”
in Post-Secular Philosophy, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998), 213.
40. Ibid., 335 / 387.
41. Ibid., 238 / 276.
42. The quote continues: “It has not become clear to such a man that all
criteria are first derived from contact with the things-themselves, that even the
criteria are to be so derived.” Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, 139–40.
44. Ibid., 220 / 256–57.
45. Ibid., 190 / 223.
46. Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et vérité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 247, trans.
Charles A. Kelbley as History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1965), 246.
47. See Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 2–3 / Le Juste, 8–10; Eric Voegelin,
Order and History, Volume One: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State Press, 1994), 10; Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason,
God, and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2002), 160. While maintaining methodological atheism (a posture shared by
Levinas in his philosophical work), Habermas does not foreswear a religious
inspiration for these ideas.
48. See “The Paradox of Authority,” in Reflections on the Just, 91–105 / Le
Juste 2, 107–23.
49. “No State exists without a government, an administration, a police force;
consequently, the phenomenon of political alienation traverses all regimes and
is found within all constitutional forms. Political society involves this external
contradiction between an ideal sphere of legal relations and a real sphere of com-
munal relations — and this internal contradiction between sovereignty and the
sovereign, between the constitution and power or, in the extreme, the police.
We aspire to attain a State wherein the radical contradiction which exists between
the universality pursued by the State and the particularity and caprice which it
evinces in reality would be resolved. The evil is that this aspiration is not within
our reach.” Ricoeur, History and Truth, 259 / Histoire et vérité, 261.
50. “An eschatology of non-violence thus forms the ultimate philosophical
horizon of a critique of ideology. This eschatology, close to that of Ernst Bloch,
takes the place of the ontology of lingual understanding in a hermeneutics of
tradition.” Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 87. Levinas sees a
kindred spirit in Bloch, see GDT 92, 105 / DMT 108, 122.
51. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 344.
About the Contributors

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Sarah Allen is a professor of humanities at Dawson College in Montreal.

Her areas of specialty include twentieth century continental philosophy,
ethics, and philosophy of religion. She has published a book on Levinas
and Plato, The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence: Levinas and Plato
on Loving Beyond Being.
Peter Atterton is associate professor of philosophy at San Diego State

University. His books include The Continental Ethics Reader, On Levi-
nas, Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, and
Radicalizing Levinas. He is currently exploring the relationship between
Levinas and Darwin.
Jeffrey Bloechl is associate professor of philosophy at Boston Col-

lege. He has published widely in contemporary European thought and

philosophy of religion, most recently on positions taken by Girard,
Jankelevitch, and Kierkegaard. He is currently working on book-length
studies of philosophy of religion in the wake of Heidegger and some
implications of Freud’s late work. Bloechl is also the founding series
editor of Levinas Studies: An Annual Review.
Bernhard Casper is professor emeritus of systematic theology at the

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He published numerous important
works in philosophy of religion, Christian philosophy, and systematic
theology. In addition to several books engaging the thought of Bernhard
Welte, he is also the author of Religion der Erfahrung: Einführung in
das Denken Franz Rosenzweigs, Das Ereignis des Betens: Grundlinien einer
Hermeneutik des Religiosen Geschehens, and Phaenomenologie des Idols.
Arthur Cools is associate professor of philosophy at the University of

Antwerp. He is the author of Langage et subjectivité: Vers une approche
du différend entre Maurice Blanchot et Emmanuel Levinas. He is coedi-
tor of Maurice Blanchot: La singularité d’une écriture, and The Locus of
Tragedy. His work concentrates in the field of French contemporary phi-
208
About the Contributors 209
losophy, with particular interest in the question of singularity in relation

to subjectivity and the interplay between philosophy and literature.
Rabbi Josy Eisenberg is a French television producer. His program,

“La Source de vie,” has shown regularly on French television since the
early 1960s. He has also published several books, including Dieu et les
juifs and Livres de vie.
Christopher Fox is associate professor of philosophy at Newman

University in Wichita, Kansas. His recent publications are “From Rep-
resentation to Constituent Power: Religion, or Something Like It, in
Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” in the Journal of Cultural and Religious
Theory, and “Is Nothing More Important Than Forgiveness? Hiroshima,
Hegel, and the Speculative Truths of Forgiveness,” in Philosophy after
Hiroshima. His present project is a reappraisal of Hegel’s early views of
Judaism, extending through The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Joëlle Hansel is a former student at École Normale Supérieure and

teaches philosophy in Jerusalem. She is a founding member of Centre
Raïssa and Emmanuel Levinas (MOFET, Jerusalem) and Société Inter-
nationale de Recherches Emmanuel Levinas (SIREL, Paris), as well as
an honorary lifetime member of the North American Levinas Society
(NALS). She has written Moïse Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746): Kab-
bale et philosophie and edited Levinas: De l’Etre à l’Autre and Levinas
in Jerusalem: Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics. She is also the
author of numerous articles on intellectual Jewish history and French
contemporary philosophy.
Philip Harold is associate professor of political science and codirector

of the honors program at Robert Morris University. He is the author of
Prophetic Politics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Sanctification of Suffering.
In 2010 he completed a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany,
working on his next book on values in politics.
James Hatley is a professor of philosophy at Salisbury University in Mary-

land. The author of Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after
the Irreparable, he is currently coediting a book on Levinas and environ-
mental philosophy, and writing a series of essays about the responsibility
to witness the living world in an era of species extinction.
210 About the Contributors
Jules Simon is associate professor of philosophy at the University of

Texas — El Paso. His publications include Art and Responsibility: A
Phenomenology of the Diverging Paths of Rosenzweig and Heidegger and
two books focusing on ethics and genocide: The Double Binds of Ethics
after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments and History, Religion, and
Meaning: American Reflections on the Holocaust and Israel.
Claudia Welz is professor of systematic theology in the faculty of

theology and research fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research,
both at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the author of
Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy and Vertrauen und
Versuchung. She has coedited Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret
in Kierkegaard and Levinas and Trust, Sociality, Selfhood. She is work-
ing currently on a project entitled Conscience, Self-Understanding and
Self-Deception.
Index

INDEX
aesthetics, 113–14 Benjamin, Walter, 132, 144, 197n6,

Agamben, Giorgio, xii, 132–33, 139–49, 200n22, 200n25, 200n26, 202n31
151, 153, 156–58, 197n6, 198n7, Benso, Silvia, 184n29
199n20, 200n22, 200n25, 200n26, Bergo, Bettina, 197n3
201n30, 202n31; The Coming Bergson, Henri, 136–39, 199n17
Community, 144, 148 Bernasconi, Robert, 84
Akiva, 93 beyond Being, 29–32, 35, 43, 46. See also
alienation, 81 transcendence
Allen, James, 89 Blanchot, Maurice, xii, 113–30; aesthetics
Allen, Sarah, x and, 113–14; Thomas l’Obscur, 130; The
animal nature, 66–70, 72–73, 88, 199n20, Writing of the Disaster, 114–15, 117,
200n24, 201n30 119, 126, 128, 130
antinaturalistic humanism, 65–66, 71–73, Bloch, Ernst, 207n50
88 Bloechl, Jeffrey, 198n12, 199n18, 199n19
Aquinas, Thomas, 200n24 Brunschvicg, Léon, ix, 2–3

Arendt, Hannah, 22 Burke, Edmund, 163
Aristotle, 54, 57, 58, 90, 140–42, 148,
161 Casper, Bernhard, x–xi
art, 23 Cassirer, Ernst, x, 2
atheism, 40–41, 182n14 categorical imperative, 67
Atterton, Peter, ix Celan, Paul, xii, 95, 96–104, 110;
authority, 162–69, 175–76, 203n14 “Gegenlicht,” 100, 192n17; “Lob der
autonomy, 61, 74, 76–77, 94, 173, 174, Ferne” (Praise of Distance), 96–104,
191n8 111, 191n11, 192n17; “Psalm,”
192n18
bad conscience, 84–86 Chalier, Catherine, 76
Beethoven, Ludwig van, Fidelio, 59 Christianity, 55–56, 64, 105, 146–48.
Being: beyond, 29–32, 35, 43, 46; as See also religion
clearing, 39; and depersonalization, Cohen, Hermann, 20, 56, 185n10
32–34; Heidegger on, 31–33, 36–43, Cohen, Richard, 25
45, 48–51, 54–55, 63; language and, communication, 155, 164–66. See also
39, 42, 48–49; Levinas on, 31–32, 40, language
43, 48. See also being conatus, 62, 81, 172–73
being: as gift, 56–57, 61–64; subjective, conscience, 84–86
32–33; thankfulness for, 56, 60, 64. See consciousness, 21, 54. See also
also Being self-consciousness
being-thus, 133, 145–51, 153–56, 158 Cools, Arthur, xii
211
212 Index
creation, 90–91 44–45; politics and, 161, 175; priority

Critchley, Simon, 81, 113, 190n31, of, 35–36, 65; rationality and, vii, ix,
194n3 66–67; religion and, vii–viii, 36, 78,
critique, 164–68, 176–77 133–34, 151, 157–58, 198n8, 198n12;
curvature of intersubjective space, 10, 12 Ricoeur and, 167–69; Rosenzweig’s,
17–20, 24, 28; source of, 76;
Darwin, Charles, 82 uncertainties concerning, 44–45
Dasein. See Being; being evil, 73–74, 76, 174
death, 130 Exodus, book of, 67–68
De la Durantaye, Leland, 197n6, 200n22, expression, 10–11, 13–15
200n26, 200n27, 202n31
Deleuze, Gilles, 10 face of the Other: as expression, 13–15;
Delhomme, Jeanne, 202n33 and human essence, 9; impact of,
depersonalization, 32–34 viii, 44–45; presentation of, 15–16;
Derrida, Jacques, 149, 159–60, 184n28, Rosenzweig’s work and, 17–21, 19,
201n28; L’animal que donc je suis, 129; 24–27; and the sacred, 19–20; and
“Violence and Metaphysics,” 159–60 speech, 56; vulnerability of, viii, 72. See
Descartes, René, 36, 38, 46, 54, 140 also Other, the
desire, 11–12 fatherhood, 57
diachrony, 90, 138, 152–53 Felstiner, John, 89
dignity of humans, 66–69 Fidelio (Ludwig van Beethoven), 59
discourse, 91 Fink, Eugen, 202n33
discursive universality, 107, 109. See also firm lastingness, 21–22
universalism Forget, Philippe, 204n18
dogs, and ethics, 66–69 Fox, Christopher, xii
freedom: heteronomy and, 61, 76; and
Ebner, Ferdinand, 53 human nature, 74; Kant’s conception
Eckhart, Meister, x–xi, 57–60 of, 74; responsibility and, 75, 82–83
Eisenstadt, Oona, 90 Frege, Gottlob, 13
election, 122–23, 129, 150–51, 201n29 Frost, Robert, 97
enjoyment, 11, 32, 122
Enlightenment, 162 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 53, 162–65, 175
ethics: aesthetics vs., 113–14; animal Genesis, book of, 79
behavior and, 66–70; conscience and, Gibbs, Bob, 20, 25
84–86; God and, 77–78, 79; Heidegger gift: being as, 56–57, 61–64; goodness as,
and, 48–51, 182n13, 183n26, 184n29; 59; pureness of, 59–60
human nature and, 73–74, 80–81; God: Aristotle’s definition of, 142; as
inspiration and, 151–54; Kant and creator, 43, 77; death of, 29, 38; and
Levinas compared on, 75–78; Levinas’s ethics, 77–78, 79; explanatory role of,
step back from, 160; and meaning, 51; 70–71; Heidegger and, x, xi, 37–38,
and metaphysics, 36, 159; morality 40–43, 180n1; Kant and, 78; in
in relation to, 166–67; ontology and, Levinas’s work, vii–viii, x, 29–31, 35,
vii, xii, xiii, 35, 65, 66, 79–82; and 43–51; metaphysics and, 36, 37–38,
the Other, viii, xii, 15–16, 26–27, 35, 40–41, 46; and the Other, 6, 10, 35,
Index 213
77–78, 171, 192n18; and plurality, viii; humans: antinaturalistic understanding of,
relation to, 135; Rosenzweig on, 24–25 71–73; dignity of, 66–69; and freedom,
goodness: categorical nature of, 58–59; 74, 80; moral ambiguity of, 73–74, 80;
Eckhart and, 57–58; and election, naturalistic understanding of, 70–71;
150; as gift, 59; as goal or end, 58, nature of, 73–74, 80–81
75, 78–79; human nature and, 73–75; Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 120
Levinas and, 31–33, 36; transcendence Husserl, Edmund, ix, 14, 53–54
of, 78–79
Greek thought, 170, 176 illeity, 134–35, 198n12, 199n19
Grondin, Jean, 168 il y a, 31, 33, 45, 125
guilt, 84–86 impotentiality, 140–45, 148, 151
imprisonment. See prison, Levinas in
Habermas, Jürgen, 162–65, 168, 175–76 indebtedness, 63
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 155–56 infinity, 11–12
Hansel, Joëlle, ix “in one’s own skin,” 152–53
Harold, Philip, xiii inspiration, 151–54, 201n30
Hasidic Judaism, vii interiority, 12–13
Hegel, G. W. F., 84, 135–36, 143, 157 interpretation, 93
Heidegger, Martin, x–xi; Agamben and, ireny, 92–93, 190n5
140, 144–45; and Being, 31–33, irrationality, 2–5
36–43, 45, 48–51, 54–55, 63, 82; irreparable, the, 144–45

Being and Time, 31, 63, 144; and Islam, 146
ethics, 48–51, 182n13, 183n26,
184n29; and God, x, xi, 37–38, 40–43, Janicaud, Dominique, 181n6
180n1; Letter on Humanism, 48; Judaism: and being, 64; Levinas and, vii,
Levinas and, 29–51, 56, 151, 155, 5–6, 31, 53, 129, 196n1; Lithuanian,
159–60, 198n7; and metaphysics, vii; persecution and suffering in, 105;
29, 36–40, 44, 160–61; and National Ricoeur on, 205n36; and substitution,
Socialism, 31; phenomenological 146–47. See also religion
contributions of, 53–56; Ricoeur on, justice: impossibility of, 85–86; injustice
203n7; and thinking against values, 48 and, 174, 176–77; and the judge,
Heraclitus, 49–50 193n24; particular vs. universal,
hermeneutics, 53, 161–62, 164–65, 176–77; responsibility, language, and,
169–72, 175–77, 204n18 116–17; social science and, 167; source
heteronomy, 61, 76–77, 123. See also of, 169–75
privileged heteronomy justification of being, 35–36
Hill, Leslie, 113, 194n2
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 41 Kafka, Franz, 86
holy, the, 41–42 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 61, 65, 67, 73–78,
hospitality, 50, 184n28 87–88, 94; Religion within the
hostage, 58, 82–84 Boundaries of Mere Reason, 73–74
humanism: antinaturalistic, 65–66, 71–73, Kavka, Martin, 196n1
88; naturalistic, 70–71; of the Other, Kearney, Richard, 77
82–84, 88 Kligelman, Eric, 96
214 Index
knowledge, 162–64, 170, 172–73, Libertson, Joseph, 113, 194n1

175–77. See also rationality Lithuanian Judaism, vii
Kojéve, Alexandre, 142 Llewelyn, John, 72
Kosky, Jeffrey, 197n4, 198n8, 198n10, love, 24–25
201n28, 201n29 Luke, Gospel of, 58
lynchings, 98–99, 107, 108
language, xi–xii; and Being, 39, 42, 48–49;
Blanchot and, 117–21; indeterminacy Marion, Jean-Luc, 132
of, 120; Levinas and, 117–20; as Massignon, Louis, 147–48
mediation, 120–21; and the Other, 94, mathematics, 3
116, 119, 155; philosophical, 90–91, meaning, ethics and, 51
193n23; poetic, 99–100, 192n15, meanwhile, the, 152–53
193n22, 193n24; rationality and, messianism, xii, 132–33, 141, 143–47,
14–15; renewal of, 100; responsibility 149, 197n3, 197n6, 200n26
and, 116–19; skepticism of, 94; metaphysics: ethics and, 36, 159; God and,
subjectivity and, 116–18. See also 36, 37–38, 40–41, 46; Heidegger and,
communication 29, 36–40, 44, 160–61; Rosenzweig
Levi, Primo, xi and, 18. See also onto-theology
Levinas, Emmanuel, works by: Carnets modernity, 38–39
de captivité, 57, 62–63; “Death and morality, 166–67. See also ethics
Time,” 29; Difficult Freedom, 1, 3, Moses, 93
4; Discovering Existence with Husserl mysticism, 25, 136, 139
and Heidegger, 118; On Escape, myths, 4–5
190n35; “Ethics as First Philosophy,”
117; Existence and Existents, 31; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 183n26
“Hermeneutics and the Beyond,” Narbonne, Jean-Marc, x
170; “Humanism and An-archy,” 75; narcissism, 126–27
“Humanity Is Biblical,” 86; “Language National Socialism, 31
and Proximity,” 118; “Martin naturalism, 70–71
Heidegger and Ontology,” 2; “Meaning neo-Kantianism, 2
and Sense,” 136–37; “The Name of a Neoplatonism, x
Dog, or Natural Rights,” 65, 66–69; Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, 23, 29, 38, 46,
Oneself as Another, 172, 173; Otherwise 168–69
than Being, viii, 89–92, 95–97, 101–02, novelty, 137, 139, 144, 145, 147–51,
106, 115–17, 133–34, 136, 138, 154, 153–54, 158
157, 160, 172, 173, 190n31; Proper
Names, 102; The Theory of Intuition in Oliver, Kelly, 201n30
Husserl’s Phenomenology, 2; Totality and ontology: and ethics, vii, xii, xiii, 35, 65,
Infinity, 2, 9, 15, 26, 28, 62, 85, 105, 66, 79–82; solipsistic, 34; totalizing, 34;
115–16, 133, 159, 171, 173, 201n28; universal, 34
“Transcendence and Intelligibility,” onto-theology, 37–38, 43–46, 132–33,
136–37; “The Understanding of 135, 139, 142, 143, 161
Spirituality in French and German openness, 138–39, 146, 153–57
Culture,” 136
Index 215
Other, the: Blanchot on, 124–27; ethics Prauss, Gerold, 187n34

and, viii, xii, 15–16, 26–27, 35, 44–45; prejudice, 163–65, 204n18
God and, 6, 10, 35, 77–78, 171, prison, Levinas in, 62, 66–67
192n18; hearing, 16, 27; hostage for, privileged heteronomy, 61, 62, 77. See also
58, 82–84; humanism of, 82–84, 88; heteronomy
language and, 94, 116, 119, 155; pronouns, 101–06, 192n18
priority of, 82; psychotic relation prophetic impulse, 95, 108, 170, 171,
to, 85, 87; rationality and, 3, 5–6; 176, 177, 205n36
relation with, 12–14, 20, 81–87, 124; proximity, 118, 127, 134, 138–39
and responsibility, 5–6; as sacred,
27; as singular, 107–09, 194n25; Raffoul, François, 182n13
subjectivity and, xii, 35, 156–57; and rationality: authority and, 162–63; ethics
transcendence, viii, 13–14, 35–36, 45; and, vii, ix, 66–67; language and,
as unknowable, 171–72. See also face of 14–15; Levinas and, 1–2, 4; limits of,
the Other 170–72, 176; and the Other, 3, 5–6,
Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, 93 14; science and, 2–3. See also knowledge
reason. See knowledge; rationality
Papineau, David, 70 redemption, 18–19, 21
Pascal, Blaise, 93 religion: Agamben and, 139–49, 200n22;
passivity, 35, 42, 58, 75 Blanchot and, 130; ethics and, vii–viii,
patient intellect, 140–42 36, 78, 133–34, 151, 157–58, 198n8,
Paul, Saint, 130 198n12; false, 135–36; and illeity,
Peperzak, Adriaan, 183n23, 198n11 134–35; in Levinas’s work, vii–viii, 36,
Perpich, Diane, 90, 194n25 133–39, 149–58; spirituality and,
phenomenology, 53–55 135–39; substitution and, 131–32,
philosophy: applied, 160–61; and 146–48. See also Christianity; Judaism
hermeneutics, 167–68; history of, religiosity, 155–57
33–34, 36–37, 47; language of, 90–91, responsibility: Blanchot and, 114–15;
193n23; limits of, 177; tradition election and, 150; freedom and, 75,
of, 91–95, 139–40, 142, 145; and 82–83; language and, 116–19; the
transcendence, 94–95 Other and, 5–6; primordial character
Plant, Bob, 66, 71–72, 79, 85–86 of, 75–76, 79; Rosenzweig on, 21;
Plato, 140, 161 subjectivity and, 115–17, 121–24
Platonism, x, 31, 36, 38, 46, 57 Ricoeur, Paul, xiii, 53, 161–69, 171–77,
Plotinus, 140 203n7, 206n49; The Symbolism of Evil,
plurality, viii 205n36
poetry, 42, 95–96, 99, 192n15, 193n22, Rosenzweig, Franz, ix–x, 17–28, 53; The
193n24 Star of Redemption, ix, 9, 17–19, 23–28
politics, 159–62, 175
potentiality, 140–43, 148 Sabbath time, 22
power, 159, 164–66, 168, 172–74, sacred, the, 4, 19–20, 27
176–77 “said” and “saying,” 81, 95–96, 99–100,
practical wisdom, 166–67, 169, 173–74, 116, 162, 171–72, 175, 190n31
177 Salanter, Israel, 6
216 Index
Scheler, Max, 163–64, 173, 203n14 theodicy, xi–xii, 78

Scholem, Gersholm, 144 third person, viii–ix, 85–86
science, 2–3, 5, 163 Third World, 6
self. See subjectivity Thomas, Saint, 200n24
self-consciousness, 25. See also Thompson, John, 168
consciousness Thoreau, Henry David, 91
self-sanctification, 20 thought. See patient intellect
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 155–56 time, 21–22, 55, 152–53, 199n18
shame, 84–86, 190n35 totality, 33–34, 135
Shoah, xi, 84, 90, 92, 95, 99, 107, 108 Totality and Infinity, 36, 149
signification, 12–13, 15 Toumayan, Alain, 113, 114
Simon, Jules, x trace, 132
sincerity, 7 tradition, xiii; Agamben and, 139–40, 142,
skepticism, 89–90, 92–95, 98 145; authority and, 162–69, 175–76,
social science, 161, 163, 167 203n14; challenges to, 164–66, 177;
solipsism, 34 Gadamer-Habermas debate concerning,
speech, 56 163–64, 175–76; individual’s relation
Spinoza, Baruch, 10–11, 71, 172–73 to, 91–95; Levinas and, 139–40
Spirit, 136, 143 tragedy, 166–67, 171–72, 174
spirituality, 132, 135–39, 146, 154–55 transcendence: impotentiality and patient
state, the, 23, 200n25, 206n49 intellect and, 142–43; independent
Stevens, Wallace, 89 subjectivity and, 33, 35; the Other and,
Stroud, Barry, 71 viii, 13–14, 35–36, 45; philosophy and,
subjectivity: attendance of, 13; and being 94–95; spirituality and, 137. See also
“in one’s own skin,” 152–53; Blanchot beyond Being
and, 117, 121–22, 124–29; and transdescendence, 125, 195n17
enjoyment, 11; Heidegger’s critique of, truth, 7, 23–25
38–39, 45, 47; independent, 32–33,
35; language and, 116–18; Levinas on, Uexküll, Jakob von, 201n30
11, 45, 47, 115, 121–24, 127, 149; unity, opposition to, 10–11
and the Other, xii, 35, 156–57; and universalism, 34, 166. See also discursive
responsibility, 115–17, 121–24; Ricoeur universality
and, 169; tragedy and, 172
substitution, 22; Agamben and, 132, Verhack, Ignace, 180n1
146–49; Celan’s poetry and, 96, 98, violence, 99–100, 105, 154, 174
101; Levinas and, 149–57; religion and, Visker, Rudi, 80–81, 82
131–32, 146–48 Voegelin, Eric, 168, 175, 204n21
Suda, 141
suffering, 172, 174 Wahl, Jean, 195n17
surprise, 137, 148, 151 Welz, Claudia, xi
surrender, 157 will to power, 38
symbolism, 205n36 writing, 164–65
tabula rasa, 141–42 Yochanan, Rabbi, 7

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Introduction

Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. vii-xiii (Article)

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commentaries, and reviews that are explicitly Jewish and monotheis-

absolute God would become available in images or concepts) that

Other whose simultaneous call for help places a check on my care

person must be a response that arises from something deeper than

a path toward insights that transcend ordinary denominational lim-

Eckhart’s mystical theology, no less than Levinas’s religion of respon-

lag at Fallingbostel, where he encountered a dog with a humanizing

which Levinas thus conceives of language to move restlessly without

The final essay in this volume reminds us of the special difficulties

1. See “Entretiens Emmanuel Levinas – François Poirié,” in François Poirié,

Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. xv-xvi (Article)

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The following abbreviations are used in this volume. Citations to the

Levinas’s Works in English

IR Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed.

Levinas’s Works in French

Josy Eisenberg, Peter Atterton, Joëlle Hansel

Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. 1-7 (Article)

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have published here for the first time was origi-

it identifies the tradition of Western philosophy with violence and

The example of science is not idiosyncratic. Levinas always remained

Léon Brunschvicg, to whom he had dedicated in Difficult Freedom

and mathematics, Levinas seeks to enlarge the powers of reason to

an InTervIew wITh emmanuel levInas3

Q: As part of our program we invite journalists and critics to talk

tion of scientific research. But the laboratory is at the present time

me as also a meaningful relationship as well. And, to the extent that

Levinas Studies, Volume 6, 2011, pp. 9-28 (Article)

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his apparent debt to Rosenzweig’s work:

Levinas refers to this relation as a “curvature of intersubjective space”

On the one hand, essence is reflected and multiplied in attributes, attri-

Despite his attempt to enliven Spinoza’s theory of attributes, Deleuze

redeems creation by establishing a de facto phenomenon where the

the face rises, in its guilt, to responsibility. Having to respond to the

ventures forth at random, resulting in tangible significations surpris-

expressiveness of the face and how that phenomenon is ethically deter-

The shimmer of infinity, the face, can no longer be stated in terms of

Levinas’s elaborations on the presentation of the face as expression

something absolutely foreign. To hear the voice of the other is to

Turning to Rosenzweig’s conception of the face, I begin with an

Gesicht: (Antlitz, Miene); having to do with seeing, ‘from’ the front

By the end of The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig has prepared us

The Eternal Way

ward ihr selbst in Gestalten festgebannt, die ihren festen Platz in

enable Rosenzweig to make the case for an indirect argument. The

communities, such as Christians and Jews. Additionally, and even

The Eternal Life

act of love — an ethical act in itself, as human I am then compelled

Gibbs analyzes correlations between Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig,

How often Levinas’s face-to-face presents aspects of Rosenzweig’s

tening and speaking, responsibility takes form as an awakening to

To live in time means to live between beginning and end, to live

bility of the experience of revelatory love. Explicitly, he states that the

in images where the self-consciousness of the distinction — this pecu-

Rosenzweig’s imperative that on one level, it is precisely the point