Fido the Yak

Perhaps Morris is being fair to Levinas when he writes, "Far from an ethics of seeing, remoteness, and the face, when we become attuned to our sense of space as a sense of living movement that crosses us with the world and other bodies, we find an ethics of being in touch, of movement, that goes back into the prior movement of development, place, and the social, a movement limited by death in the here and now, rather than the infinite of God, as in Levinas's ethics of the face" (Sense, pp. 178-179). Be that as it may, I'd like to recover from the concept of the face something of a physicality and a phenomenality that doesn't efface the infinition of the other person, a phenomenality that does recognize singularity and radical exteriority even as it's characteristically encountered by way of chthonic temporalities and indeed a certain fugaciousness of existence, for, this may be paradoxical, in order that the world be intelligible, the infinition of the other person's face necessarily functions as a hermeneutic measure of finitudes, or, more broadly, horizons. We can't properly know what finitudes mean absent the appearance of the face of the other person, and conversely and simultaneously, we need to perceive limits in order to feel transcendent ourselves, to feel our own openness to the world upon which so much of our existence depends. I suggest then that the face be thought of as radically exterior to consciousness, but not by that token remote from phenomenality, for remoteness appears in phenomenality as remoteness from, and implicitly also as remoteness from a horizon. What belongs to the from, what's embedded in the from, is not shaken free in the movement away from phenomenality; such a freedom would require yet another movement, a necessarily invisible movement decidedly not connected to the world of perception. Yet there is however a spasmodic quality to infinition, a suddenness of instantiation, implying a sudden and immediate ethics. The spasmorealization of a cadacualtic—apologies—aspect of coexistence is given in every important sense by the face of the other. Infinition so far as we know it touches upon the contingent, in so many words, which leaves us to think of not what the unknowable face would look like, or some such, but rather the meaning of the con-, which changes everything we should want to say about touch, and thus, insofar as we use touch to interpret the phenomenal world, our statements about the world or indeed even about reality, if we were given to such talk. To sum up, Morris's criticism, regardless of whether it treats Levinas' philosophy with due fairness, would be unfair to a conceptualization of the face as touchable. More strongly, the touchablity of the face informs our understanding of the infinition of the face of the other person which is not arrived at by any detour around remoteness, but through "remoteness" such as it appears exactly.

Labels: ethics, face, infinity, Levinas, Morris, singularity, touch

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:01 AM. 6 comments

Gary Peters, whose Philosophy of Improvisation found its way into my hands today, has written a brief overview of Levinas' ideas about rhythm ("The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics." Radical Philosophy 82: 9-16). Notwithstanding that I haven't read all the sources Peters consults, I'm sure I disagree with Levinas' usage of the term rhythm and with certain aspects of his conceptualization. Nevertheless I'm inspired enough by Peters' review to offer a few words on the topic.

I follow Randy Weston in holding that rhythm, far from being opposed to the melodic, is the heart of the melodic. In fact I can make the case more forcefully. Rhythm is already melody, a lesson Weston first learned during his travels in Tunisia, if I'm not mistaken, though the lesson is portable enough. The following therefore, should make no sense to me:

The melodic (the 'said') can take up residence within the noise of the world, it is stated and yet its delivery (the 'saying') remains silent. The eloquence of this silence is rhythmic, the rhythm upon which the melodic depends, the rhythm that needs no melody. Rhythm cannot be heard, it can only be sensed; it is the melodic that is heard.

(p. 13)

Rhythm can be sensed and heard. If there is a truth here in Peters' summation of Levinas' position, it lies in there being within the saying qualities aptly described as rhythmic, qualities that say, enigmatically, paradoxically, qualities that are said to be "in the saying" eloquently and in silence at once. Levinas' desire to delimit melody, to box it in and then out, to thoroughly captivate it, has of course a special significance with respect to the history of ideas. However, if rhythm is already melody, rhythm does not provide a means of escaping the thesis of intentionality. Rhythm is a phenomenon of consciousness. "Rhythmic" time consciousness and "melodic" time consciousness both illustrate, all things considered, the same reality. Protention and retention still apply. Do they still apply to anarchic rhythm, the pulse of the breach?

Levinas says that in "in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity. This is the captivation or incantation of poetry and music" (Philosophical Papers, p. 4, in "Rhythm," p. 11). Furthermore, Peters explains:

For Levinas, the thwarting of Husserlian intenionality, the eluding of perception, simultaneously enervates conceptual cognition while intensifying the sensation of 'things-in-themselves', precisely by presenting the exteriority of those things. He sees the dispossession that the exotic inflicts on perception as the mark of an aesthetic sensation which, in slipping between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity, and between consciousness and unconsciousness, confounds intentionality, confronting it with the anarchic. The peculiarity of Levinas' aesthetics of rhythm concerns precisely the anarchic character of the exotic pulse and, in particular, the way in which the transcendental ego loses its intentional grasp and is carried away. Having said that, however, it is significant that even in this early work he is careful to avoid the radical amorality of the unconscious and the transgressive potential of anarchic rhythm.

Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative, or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away. . . . It is a mode of being to which is ascribed neither the form of consciousness, since the I is stripped of its prerogative to assume its power, nor the form of unconsciousness, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light present.

(ibid.)

(p. 10)

I like the attempt to shatter continuous duration in the name of the time of the other, but I have limited use for dark lights. In being responsible for our own experiences of rhythm, a responsibility that flows from the freedom to move, which is a primeval way of being in rhythm and all of its modalities, despite contingencies which are in actuality necessary for the exercise of rhythmic freedom, we do not lose responsibilities for the other. We feel other rhythms. The question of an originary ethical relation, though it lies within the scope of consciousness without thereby being created by consciousness, is not to be answered by appealing to a metaphysics of instantaneous time that borrows from our love of musicality, and especially polyrhythmia, only to betray it. "Duration is not the measure of existence." Agreed. But read carefully: absolute alterity is sensed as a rhythm which "is not the respiration of the instant itself but the explosion of that instant, the 'accomplishment of existence'. . . . [T]he result can be forever thrown into doubt; nothing can be 'prefigured' in instantaneous. It is understood here as the stopping of time which then has to be renewed anew" (p. 14). The hard truth is that existence accomplishes nothing by ceasing to breath altogether. Levinas perhaps has more than one target in his critique of prefigurations. However, anticipation does not mean prefiguration, it does not extricate the thinker from doubt, and it emphatically does exist at the edge of existence where people breathe, the edge of existence any sane discussion of existence must address if not occupy. The physicality of the rhythmic is, pace Levinas and Peters, of the body. A genuine rhythmosophic trismagestics interprets the whole instant, and rather than doing away with respiration, sets respiration as a problem to be addressed, a question. The question of breathing is a question of rhythm at the edge existence.

Labels: breathing, Husserl, Levinas, Peters, Randy Weston, rhythm, the instant

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:36 AM. 2 comments

"Infinite being, that is, ever recommencing being—which could not bypass subjectivity, for it could not recommence without it—is produced in the guise of fecundity" (Totality, p. 268). Levinas explains that his concept of fecundity denotes a future which is both mine and not mine, not a future of the same, but an adventure for me (ibid.). It is both a possibility of myself and of the Beloved, and as such it "does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity" (p. 267, my emphasis). Is there a significant dialogic essence of the possible, or a polylogical dimension of the "can" (the originary importance of which I Levinas would reject in the form of the "I can," the living body)? Is there, alternatively, a meaningful polylogic ethos of possibilities? My departure from Levinas may be radical. I'll get back to it.

Have we found, in infinite being, a remedy to the vexation of repetition? Levinas speaks of the cessation of the tediousness of the reiteration of the I, but not the cessation of the reiteration. "The diverse forms that Proteus assumes do not liberate him from his identity," he insists (p. 268). He continues, "In fecundity the tedium of this repetition ceases; the I is other and young, yet the ipseity that ascribed to it its meaning and its orientation in being is not lost in this renouncement of self. Fecundity continues history without producing old age." A marvelous concept to be sure, and perhaps not only that. Levinas finds that senescence, conceived in continuity, manifests a limitation on the infinitude of being in the form of the past. I'll hold off criticism on this point a moment longer. The theme of the monotony of identity noted here is one Levinas repeats in his conclusions (p.304). Breaking the monotony of identity ties in with the absolute necessity, in Levinas' eyes, of discontinuity established through death and fecundity.

Levinas is keen to recognize discontinuity at the core of ipseity. In the context of outlining his concept of childhood and filiality, he argues that resuming the thread of history, which must be regarded as distinct from continuity, is marked by an originality "attested in the revolt of the permanent revolution that constitutes ipseity" (p. 278). He speaks at length on temporal discontinuity:

Time is the non-definitiveness of the definitive, an ever recommencing alterity of the accomplished—the "ever" of this recommencement. The work of time goes beyond the suspension of the definitive which the continuity of duration makes possible. There must be a rupture of continuity, and continuation of across this rupture. The essential in time consists in being a drama, a multiplicity of acts where the following act resolves the prior one.

(pp. 283-284)

Now, here is where I find Levinas truly challenging my predilections: for me the face to face could be described as a modality of coexistence; Levinas believes nothing of the sort:

To say that universality refers to the face to face position is (against a whole tradition of philosophy) to deny that being is produced as panorama, a coexistence, of which the face to face would be a modality. This whole work opposes this conception. The face to face is not a modality of coexistence nor even of the knowledge (itself panoramic) one term can have of another, but is the primordial production of being on which all the possible collocations of the term are founded.

(pp. 304-305)

Levinas' critique of panoramic being comes as he bypasses existential phenomenology in favor of an ethics, perhaps an ethics at the limits of philosophy. At bottom of the face to face there is goodness in place of either being or nothingness, which "consists in going where no clarifying—that is, panoramic—thought precedes, in going without knowing where. An absolute adventure, in a primal imprudence, goodness is transcendence itself" (ibid.). He takes a strong position, which I sympathize with, against a certain style of existential phenomenology. Before I would follow him, however, I would be concerned about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A criticism of panoramic being could conceivably leave existence unscathed, criticisms of the clarifying work of existence can't make appearance go away, and rejecting a certain notion of pre-understanding doesn't make hermeneutics uninteresting. There are other modes of pluralism and other possibilities of existentialism besides those on offer in the pages of Totality and Infinity. Nonetheless Levinas has inspired me. I respond to a call to think repetition as operating within a temporality of limited scope, whereas the most vital temporalities take their shapes from the dramatic encounters with other persons. In a future post I will explore variations of the synkairotic encounter while keeping open the question of coexistence, as much as that's possible given my predilections.

Addendum. In a footnote to a passage in which he discusses the difference between his sense of "revelation" and "disclosure" (touched on here), Levinas tells us how he would have us interpret the term "drama":

In broaching, at the end of this work, the study of relations which we situate beyond the face, we come upon events that cannot be described as noeses aiming at noemata, nor as active interventions realizing projects, nor, of course, as physical forces being discharged into masses. They are conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term "drama" would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would have like to use it when, at the end of The Case of Wagner, he regrets that it has always been wrongly translated by action. But it is because of the resulting equivocation that we forego this term.

(p. 28, note 2)

Labels: continuity, drama, Levinas, logos, repetition, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:56 AM. 4 comments

"Every work of art is painting and statuary, immobilized in the instant or in its periodic return" (Levinas, Totality, p. 263, my bold). We need to ask whether rhythm opens us up to the infinities of other people. For me, rhythm is a manumission from stupid moods, a dynamic movement out of a dismal immobility which is marked by the throb of a mere will to subsist, and an anemic throb at that. Rhythm overcomes the dolorous–or alternatively dwells in it, it amounts to the same–or rather it presents the means and the inspiration, the method of breathing and bodily vibration and most vitally the feeling that propels through the horizon of the given, the blue given, in a motion something like transmutation; rhythm is less of a form that one imposes on life than a music that emerges, develops and sends, a music that gives. Listening to rhythm, making rhythm with my knives and pans, musical instruments or my feet, makes me alive to my infinition. I enjoy it. Would this ecstatic journey of the self through rhythm be a condition for an openness to your infinition? Or do I risk deceiving myself about what is truly called for by your face? Levinas says "the whole body–a hand or a curve of the shoulder–can express as the face" (p. 262). So let's take off our shoes and socks and dance. Let's dance to some Zydeco Cha Cha.

The statues too would join us. The statuary and the plastic would join the performing arts if only we knew when to grasp the skoppic, the improvisation of the shape, and its many returns, the clay of everyday language. We could see them moving towards us, the statues, the sonorous masks, expressing, ecstatic, performative, the marble foot. This expression must not be confused with the infinition of the other person. Is such expressivity not a condition, though, of the openness to the infinitions of other people? What do you say of your mobilities, the ones you put out in the open? Do you ever find that you give yourself rhythmically?

Labels: form, Levinas, motility, rhythm, Terpsichore, the instant

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:08 PM. 0 comments

Shahar blogs (naturally in a post one ought to read a few times in its entirety):

Levinas equates the Saying (to be opposed to the Said) with the immanence of the body, with the diachrony of ageing and pain, and with the sensibility of flesh. In contrast to structuralism, which synchronizes the relations between signs in an atemporal horizontal totality, Levinas posits the primordial relation with the other. In this instance, signs are given as gifts between interlocutors before they are fixed into impersonal structures. Time de-phases the identical.

My recent use of somebody's idea of the "unsaid" is similar to the Saying in that it points to the performance of the said, its illocutionary residue; its particular bias is textualist as well as dialectical. Levinas' formulation holds more promise.

Time de-phases the identical. Dephasis problematizes temporality, as if temporality could persist while Time (time's identity) passed underground, even beneath phenomenality, phasis, delivery. A model for this temporality is the gift economy, if only because it's already been described. Now, do we say Time, its reality bracketed out for the sake of exploring the problem of dephasis, neither phases in nor phases out the identical, its presupposition it would seem, but precisely deprives it of phase? Interlocution as the relation that absolves of the relation? We can use totality to undo totality at the "same time" we step outside it? Is this approach suggested by an inherited style of reflection, or perhaps guided by an eidos of reflection? Has structuralism justly been given a due?

I'm sure Kevin would have something to say about this dephasing of the identical, as evidenced by his commentary here. "The music of engagement is always richer than this." (I don't mean to deflect. Just curious.)

Labels: givenness, kvond, Levinas, pragmatics, Shahar Ozeri, temporality, the same

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:00 AM. 13 comments

Ruse and ambush–Ulysses' Craft–constitute the essence of war. This skill is inscribed in the very existence of the body; it is suppleness–a simultaneity of absence and presence. Corporeity is the mode of existence of a being whose presence is postponed at the very moment of his presence. Such a distention in the tension of the instant can only come from an infinite dimension which separates me from the other, both present and still to come, a dimension opened by the face of the Other.

(Totality, p. 225)

The body exceeds the categories of a thing, but does not coincide with the role of "lived body" ["corps propre"] which I dispose of in my voluntary action and by which I can. The ambiguity of corporeal resistance which turns into a means and from means turns into a resistance does not account for its ontological hybris. The body in its very activity, in its for itself, inverts into a thing to be treated as a thing. This is what we express concretely in saying that it abides between health and sickness.

(p. 229)

I learned your softness through my body, alive enough, present enough, never fully inverted into a thing. As always, we will have to define the for itself for ourselves. Me, if I'm going to learn a metaphysics, a metaphysics of the supple, for instance, it won't be for the sake of circumventing the phenomenal. When I say epiphany I refer to the phenomenal, where I sojourn when I'm earthly. In this light to actually see the phenomenal is a gift. To feel your softness is a gift. Epiphany says that.

Labels: body, Levinas, metaphysics, phenomenology, softness

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:30 PM. 0 comments

Scarry asks us to imagine a face. "It may seem than in shifting from the motion of skating to the motion of smiling, we have veered away from the subject of circles, but we have not, for when the face breaks into a smile, the mouth moves into a small upward opening arc" (Dreaming, p. 208). Levinas asks us to imagine a face that would break through the image of the face, a face that would appear above and beyond phenomenality. This metaphysical face that transcends appearances is a face that speaks.

To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form, to present oneself in a mode irreducible to manifestation, the very straightforwardness of the face to face, without the intermediary of the image, in one's nudity, that is, in one's destitution and hunger.

(Totality, p. 200, Levinas' emphasis)

If we could ever turn off the imagination, everpresent as life, we might be able to discern whether faces ever appeared without touching on images. The imageless appearance perplexes. Perhaps, however, it is intermediacy rather than the image per se that has vexed us so. What appears to be a phenomenon of the persistence of images may be an aspect of intermediacies, in which case we might prefer to approach an understanding of living with images, their betweens and their middles, before thinking we know what an image does to the point where we could identify appearances that weren't images.

I imagine the face of the beloved. Images appear. That much makes sense. Are appearances irreal? Is the face of the beloved any less a real face for appearing as an image to me? Well, it is not the face of the beloved until it speaks to me and breaks through its image? How long does that last? Are there pauses in conversation? Perhaps a mistake has been made by Levinas in isolating a purely phenomenal form. How many images in life are purely phenomenal forms? My ruminations on the imagination have led me towards the idea that the imagination, rather than being an activity I can easily start and stop at will, by a process that might generate purely phenomenal forms, is instead integral to my life at every moment. Its rhythm doesn't belong to the will in any unscrutinized sense of that idea. My imagination surrounds the spoken, interweaves, intermediates. Has enough been said about the betweens of the said, or the betweens of the said and the unsaid?

Labels: face, imagination, Levinas, plasticity, Scarry, speech, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:43 AM. 0 comments

A twist on the problem of the phenomenality of the Other: "For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced in the oecumenia of being the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. This simultaneity is not an abstract construction of dialectics, but the very essence of discretion" (Totality, p. 155). I don't believe it's so easy to escape dialectics. I say that despite not understanding exactly what Levinas means by "discretion," which I take to function as an antithesis to dialectics. When I say that human contact does not presuppose ideation–the imagination of an other self, for instance, and all that implies– I too am proposing an alternative to dialectics or any comparable totalizing system of thought, though in seeking to hew to the actuals of coexistence I've not yet arrived at a position on the experience of other selves, and, in dodging this issue, I know I'm not giving ideation a fair shake. This is quite damaging. At stake in the problem of the phenomenality of other people is a sure enough understanding of some ways in which experience is shaped by ideation. A caveat: I, who defend the reality and philosophical relevance of the person, don't maintain that ideation is the work of windowless monads or isolated psyches–despite the fact that solitude and loneliness, topics that authoritative thinkers of the present seek to avoid, have emerged as challenges for me–and as much I would resist reducing ideation to dialectic thought (possibly an other of one's felt own understandings), I would resist reducing it to "cognition" narrowly conceived or "behavior" in its most reductive acceptations, that is, as something a monad might do. It might be presumed that ideation begins in coexistence, in living with. . . ; however, the opacities surrounding ideation are such that at this incipient stage of investigations I'd rather not presume to know ideation in any detail except insofar as one must make presumptions, imaginatively, for purposes of exploring various possibilities of ideation.

Labels: coexistence, dialectics, ideation, Levinas, totalities

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:14 PM. 0 comments

I question correlations between desire and the addressee of the question, I question desire, and, as much as I'd agree that the question's addressee is a necessary condition for there being a question, I question the addressee's presence, his mode of spatiotemporal persistence, or givenness. Here's Levinas:

[T]he question that asks about the quiddity is put to someone. He who is to respond has long already presented himself, responding thus to a question prior to every question in search of quiddities. In fact the "who is it?" is not a question and is not satisfied by a knowing [hmm, FtY]. He to whom the question is put has already presented himself, without being a content. He has presented himself as a face. The face is not a modality of quiddity, an answer to a question, but the correlative of what is prior to every question. What is prior to every question is not in its turn a question nor a knowledge possessed a priori, but is Desire. The who correlative of Desire, the who to whom the question is put, is, in metaphysics, a "notion" as fundamental and as universal as quiddity and being and the existent and the categories.

(Totality, p. 177, Levinas' emphasis)

Because of the relationship with the Other, the ethical relation, man can know the difference between being and phenomenon and recognize his own phenomenality (pp. 179-180). Could this ethical relation form in response to a question, even a question that would not be satisfied by a knowing? Does any kind of ethical relation logically follow from the question who? On the other hand, by asking who? we presuppose an ethical relation. Was it really there waiting for us already? Did it not need to be welcomed, following on the welcoming of a who?

The face I welcome makes me pass from phenomenon to being in another sense: in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response–acuteness of the present–engenders for me responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality. This extreme attention does not actualize what was in potency, for it is not conceivable without the other. Being attentive signifies a surplus of consciousness, and presupposes the call of the other.

(p. 178)

Let's return, with no overriding sense of urgency, to the question of the question prior to the question. Of course it can't really be a question just yet, as an a priori. It's first questionality is imaginary. It begins to resemble/by resembling an imaginary question. Thus we've been made aware of the phenomenality of the question, perhaps especially the first question. How then can we begin to separate what the imagination brings from what the Other brings to the question? Imagination as other, Other as imaginary: "The phenomenon is the being that appears, but remains absent" (p. 181). Imaginary phenomenality. Do we recognize the phenomenality of the ethical self–by which I only mean the other of the other, or, to move towards a definition, one who listens to the call of the other–in the same manner that we recognize the phenomenality of the quiddity? Are all phenomenalities put together the same way? The key to Levinas' thinking here seems to be the remaining absent of the being that appears, and this would seem to have something to do with desire. Should I desire to transcend phenomenality? Now, if I say that in my experience there are temporary absences, or intermittent absences, that I become inured to temporary absences, does this say nothing about phenomenality, which presumably has to do with permanent absence? I don't actually know that I will always be able to reformulate the first question at will, or at the suggestion of the other. Questioning could fall apart. Why would we want to imagine a questioning that could never fall apart? (A question that would resemble being impervious to time, a questionee who was always and never there?) Would that be logical?

Labels: dialogism, imagination, Levinas, phenomenology, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:14 AM. 0 comments

How do we call into question what the hand grasps? It could be a tool, it could be apeiron–could the indefinite be a possession? Possession is called into question by the encounter with the Other, Levinas says (Totality, p. 163). We can think of this encounter as transcendence. Not only am I happy to see transcendence defined, I'm happy that Levinas discusses this transcendence with respect to language.

The relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question the world possessed. The relationship with the Other, transcendence, consists in speaking the world to the Other. But language accomplishes the primordial putting in common–which refers to possession and presupposes economy. The universality a thing receives from the word that extracts it from the hic et nunc loses its mystery in the ethical perspective in which language is situated. The hic et nunc itself issues from possession, in which the thing is grasped, and language, which designates it to the other, is a primordial dispossession, a first donation. The generality of the word institutes a common world. The ethical event at the basis of generalization is the underlying intention of language. The relation with the Other does not only stimulate, provoke generalization, does not only supply it with the pretext and the occasion (this no one has ever contested), but is this generalization itself. Generalization is a universalization–but universalization is not the entry of the sensible thing into a no man's land of the ideal, is not purely negative like a sterile renunciation, but is the offering of the world to the Other. Transcendence is not a vision of the Other, but a primordial donation.

(pp. 173-174, my bold)

The first donation is a question of the hands, in presenting the gift and receiving. Is this business of the hands merely a presupposition, a condition? Would we then say that the hands have been transcended in speech, in the encounter with the Other? If we accept a restricted sense of the hic et nunc as equivalent to the grasped, it does not indubitably follow that the hand well represents the hic et nunc, for hands also open. They relax. Well, what do we think about hands? How do we call them into question? We do things with hands. Levinas says that the hands are "the condition for all technique" (p. 167). He even provides us with a master technique, which is, surprisingly perhaps, not grasping but groping. He says groping is "the work of the hand par excellence, and the work adequate to the apeiron of the element [which] makes possible the whole originality of the final cause" (ibid.). Why isn't giving the work of the hand par excellence? Let's play with an idea of Merleau-Ponty's. We simultaneously grasp and communicate with other people who have hands that grasp and communicate, communicative hands. (Not everybody has hands, of course, but most people have hands that communicate various meanings, enough to give meaning to the phrase "communicative hands.") If communication is the work of the hands, and it occurs simultaneously with grasping, should we, following Levinas for a moment, regard communication as being transcended by giving? Are the two incommensurate in any given hic et nunc? Perhaps we need to grapple with multipurposivity of hands. Levinas' argument, however, is that we can't allow giving to be regarded as one activity among many. Apparently the idea would be that multifunctionality doesn't explain anything. Here we pick up again on the discussion of language.

Language does not exteriorize a representation preexisting in me: it puts in common a world hitherto mine. Language effectuates the entry of things into a new ether in which they receive a name and become concepts. It is a first action over and above labor, an action without action, even though speech involves the effort of labor, even though, as incarnate thought, it inserts us into the world with the risks and hazards of all action. At each instant it exceeds this labor by the generosity of the offer it forthwith makes of this very labor. The analyses of language that tend to present it as one meaningful action among others fail to recognize this offering of the world, this offering of contents which answers to the face of the Other or which questions him, and first opens the perpective of the meaningful.

The "vision" of the face is inseparable from this offering language is. To see the face is to speak of the world. Transcendence is not an optics, but the first ethical gesture.

(p. 174, Levinas' emphases, my bold)

The first ethical gesture is most probably performed with the hands. A gesture without gesture is improbable, and it would smack of mystification were I to impose upon you to seriously think such a thing. (Is that a wink?) The face is emphatically inseparable from the world of the hands, a twilight world as well as a world of days and nights. Has Levinas adequately anticipated these criticisms, for instance by saying that speech "as incarnate thought [. . .] inserts us into the world with the risks and hazards of all action"? Well, on the one hand action means labor, on the other it means any action whatsoever, including action that surpasses action. Furthermore, the latter kind of action, which is the ethical event of the encounter with the Other, is the basis for general meanings, and hence for the meaning of any action. I don't think I'm completely uncharitable, or ungrateful. I'd like to imagine the priority of an ethical event which puts the world into question, so I should be willing to allow my understanding of hands to be put into question, and, of course, my understanding of understanding. I'm groping here. How do I live in this world offered by my encounter with Levinas?

Labels: generosity, gesture, hands, language, Levinas, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:02 AM. 0 comments

"The veritable position of the I in time consists in interrupting time by punctuating it with beginnings" (Levinas, Totality, p. 143). What does the beginning begin from? Is there a time outside of beginnings that would allow for something coming before and after, or a beginning against which other beginnings could be measured? What would be the qualities of such a time outside of beginnings, a time from which beginnings could begin?

The primordial positivity of enjoyment, perfectly innocent, is opposed to nothing and in this sense suffices to itself from the first. An instant or standstill, it is the success of the carpe diem, the sovereignty of the "after us the deluge." These pretensions would be pure nonsense and not eternal temptation could not enjoyment tear itself absolutely from the disintegration characteristic of duration.

(p. 145)

Would joyless time be recognizable as time itself, or would we have to arrive at a recognition of joyless time by a process of subtraction?

We have sought to elaborate the notion of enjoyment in which the I arises and pulsates: we have not determined the I be freedom. Freedom as the possibility of commencement, referring to happiness, to the marvel of the good time standing out from the continuity of the hours, is the production of the I and not one experience among others that "happens" to the I. Separation and atheism, these negative notions, are produced by positive events. To be I, atheist, at home with oneself, separated, happy, created–these are synonyms.

(p. 148)

How does one freely commence enjoying a time apart from the dreary blur of hours? Does one simply say "Let's enjoy ourselves?" Before we produce our freedom, as the possibility of commencement, mustn't we recognize our unfreedom (I'm not going there just yet), our being in the thrall of miseries or at the whim of passions? In what time does this recognition take place? The break from time, or the interruption of duration, appears then to have occurred prior to the onset of beginnings. This being prior bespeaks a felt time, or a response to temporal passions that may itself be passionately felt–indeed if it does give rise to the production of enjoyment it would be passionately felt, though it may appear as passionately felt only after the fact of an enjoyment, or, rather more precisely, a commencement which signifies enjoyment. Commencement would then be prior in its appearance to the ego, the nexus of feeling, prior even to time, which, if it is constituted by the feeling subject, is constituted only after the fact of its being felt, and perhaps also then after its quality of feeling had being signified, even meontically. Hmm.

Labels: jouissance, Levinas, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:44 AM. 5 comments

"The distinction between form and matter does not characterize all experience," Levinas assures us. "The face has no form added to it, but does not present itself as the formless, as matter that lacks and calls for form" (Totality, p. 140). Your body has neither a shape superimposed upon it nor does it appear as the absence of shape. Are we about to grasp an immateriality of the body? Your shapeliness intervenes, I insist, between imposition and absence of shape. It's your body that impresses, in the manner of an emanation. Flowing hand. Mutatis mutandis your bodiliness intervenes between stuff and emptiness. Thus your body is no more immaterial than it is unshapely. If we assign your shapeliness to singularity–to recognize your body is you, youtastically, that shapeliness is your gift to experience (experience thanks you)–then what of materiality, a singular materiality? Will materiality allow itself to be manifested uniquely-plurally? Levinas says that enjoyment is "an ultimate relation with the substantial plenitude of being, with its materiality" (p. 133). But hasn't your body, your body-with-a-face, compelled me to rethink materiality? Neither substance nor apeiron, but singularly you, your body. In pure expenditure, like dolphins, in pure loss, flowing hands.

Labels: body, form, formlessness, jouissance, Levinas, uniqueness, you

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:21 AM. 0 comments

If we pose methexis as an alternative to mimesis how do we account for spontaneity? Conceivably it doesn't fall on the side of methexis. Levinas tells us that representation is itself pure spontaneity, a thought which is by no means self-explanatory (Totality, p. 125). Let's see how Levinas talks about representation and, in particular, the temporal qualities of representation, because if we can make sense of what he is saying in these respects we will have some foothold on his equation of spontaneity with representation. (I've proffered a defense of spontaneity already; now, as a sort of rejoinder, we need to refine our understanding of representation.)

Levinas sees in representation, against expectations, the power to repeat the event of enjoyment, which is to be understood not as an involvement but as a break (p. 123). This implies to me that something like a whole person takes part in representation, whole enough for enjoyment, though one step away from involvement. However, for Levinas, the whole person who ages has no place in representation, or, rather, the temporality of such a person who represents is put on hold for the sake of a repetition which also means a step into eternity, a repetition that is foremost a break.

At the very moment of representation the I is not marked by the past but utilizes it as a represented and objective element. Illusion? Ignorance of its own involvements? Representation is the force of such an illusion and of such forgettings. Representation is a pure present. The positing of a pure present without even tangential ties with time is the marvel of representation. It is a void of time, interpreted as eternity.

(p. 125, Levinas' emphases)

So mimesis does not simply oppose methexis so much as it erases it, avoids the participatory, wipes away all traces of past involvements in the present while still it returns to them. And yet–this is surprising–in Levinas' account the unfolding of representation is sonorous rather than visual, a modality suggestive of both ongoing methectic entanglement and, less surely, enjoyment.

The "I think" is the pulsation of rational thought. . . . The subject that thinks by representation is a subject that hearkens to its own thought: one has to think of thought as in an element analogous to sound and not to light. Its own spontaneity is a surprise for the subject, as though despite its full mastery qua I the I surprised what was taking place. The inspiration [génialité] is the very structure of representation: a return in the present thought to the thought's past, an assuming of this past in the present, a going beyond this past and this present–as in the Platonic reminiscence, in which the subject hoists himself up to the eternal. The particular I is one with the same, coincides with the "daemon" that speaks to it in thought, and is universal thought. . . .Universal thought is always a thought in the first person.

(p. 126, Levinas' emphasis)

Is eternity broken off from any putative pulsation of the cosmos? Where does pulsation come from once even tangential ties to time have been broken off? Does enjoyment have its own separate vibe? And inner speech? I have a doubt about whether my inner voice coincides with me, the person of universal thought, a person who would have to be appreciably acosmic yet alive in their own vibration–no, not their own vibration, this is precisely what is in question. Who among the living will answer for the pulsation of thought? Is this something we just pick up on, or do we relate to it more ingeniously? Do we ingeniously talk to our inner voice? Alternatively, if we can, from a position of analytical subjectivity, wipe out a cosmos of the inner voice, the power of an illusion, of a return, yet still recognize it as a voice, the unsaid in every saying, how will we make a space for the acknowledgment of its singularity? Would such an acknowledgment be like breaking off a time, interpreted as eternity, for the enjoyment of time? Arguably the singularity of the inner voice needed no acknowledgment but was, despite its being an inner voice, already plain as day. And time never needed to be made personal, but always existed through the sonorous as well as hyperspherically. (A tangent? No doubt. But it is Levinas who said "pulsation" and not without reason–it remains to us ask what kind of activity pulsation represents, whether it is anything like a continuation, or its opposite, and how we should measure it.) Imagine the peripherality of time's reaches, if we can finally risk a personification. Instead of making a break from time that would run contrary to methexis, mimesis repeats a movement into the periphery of time. Such movements can be described as unfolding hyperspherically–the concept time merely reminding us that the person's full range of movement extends into many dimensions. Insofar as mimesis presents itself as a locus of all points, the very pulse of the cogito, it would have to be regarded as delusional. We can't be sure, however, that mimesis will follow this rule, that it won't ever lapse into perfect clarity. Methexis and mimesis may be rhtymosophically homeomorphic, but we must concede a difference: whereas methexis participates roundly in the hyperspherical ballet of existence, mimesis jets into the peripherality of movement (an absurdity, you will notice, though an absurdity with a surplus of sense), passing itself across the stage of the delusional, briefly, wing to wing, only to spontaneously discover the question of a locus. Was the question already there waiting to be asked? Waiting wouldn't have been enough to make it a question. More to the point, we can't rule out the possibility that the mime will one day be able to spontaneously answer the question he discovered in his own voice. Nothing will have happened spontaneously in representation that wouldn't have been an absurdity had representation been spontaneity–but that doesn't preclude our finding any sense in the equation, naturally.

Labels: inner speech, Levinas, methexis, personhood, spontaneity, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:39 PM. 0 comments

Levinas says:

For a body that labors everything is not already accomplished, already done; thus to be a body is to have time in the midst of the facts, to be me though living in the other.

This revelation of distance is an ambiguous revelation, for time both destroys the security of instantaneous, happiness, and permits the fragility thus discovered to be overcome. And it is the relation with the other, inscribed in the body as its elevation, that makes possible the transformation of enjoyment into consciousness and labor.

(Totality, p. 117)

I'll note the primacy of enjoyment and get back to what that means. What more can be said to characterize this time that is had in the midst of the facts? Is it a time of expectancies, seeing as how expectancy seems to go along with a sense that there is something yet to be accomplished? How do these expectancies manifest themselves in relation to memory, or, less thematically, to sedimentation? "Enjoyment is made of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching" (p. 112). Levinas characterizes pure existence as ataraxia while happiness, he says, is accomplishment. (Enjoyment, he says, is "the very pulsation of the I" (ibid.)). I'm not sure that ataraxia is easily attained, and, to the extent that is attainable, as freedom from worry, I'm not sure it does away with either joy or suffering. I'm not sure that raw existing, like pure existing perhaps, doesn't alternate between joy and suffering. Isn't this the very pulsation of the self, this alternation between joy and suffering? And isn't suffering made from the memory of joys? What happens to time as the beats of the self become memory? How does the process of becoming memory move through the body?

If we insist that the alternation between joy and suffering is the pulsation of the self, Levinas is then quite sure he disagrees with us. For him life is personal because it is enjoyment, not the other way around.

Life is affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life. To despair of life makes sense only because originally life is happiness. Suffering is a failing of happiness; it is not correct to say that happiness is the absence of suffering.

(p. 115, my bold)

I'm sorry but this argument makes it seem that unhappiness, instead of being a modality of experience, is something that one discovers philosophically, something that one, correctly or incorrectly, reasons one's way into. I don't think the Epicureans have been adequately responded to, much less refuted. My characterization of Levinas' argument is of course directly at odds with how Levinas asks ut to imagine enjoyment, which would not be inconsistent with a pluralism that acknowledged feelings as having priority over reasoning. So my criticism may well be unfair. Another word from Levinas:

Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an involution. What is termed an affective state does not have the dull monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in which dawns the self. For the I is not the support of enjoyment. The "intentional" structure here is wholly different; the I is the very contraction of sentiment, the pole of a spiral whose coiling and involution is drawn by enjoyment: the focus of the curve is a part of the curve. It is precisely as a "coiling," as a movement toward oneself, that enjoyment comes into play.

(p. 118, Levinas' emphasis, my bold)

Can we enjoy a vibrancy of ex-istence without withdrawing into the self, or, more promising, a vibrancy that involves and evolves at once? Is the body, the body for whom not everything is accomplished, already a vibrancy?

Labels: body, infinity, ipseity, jouissance, Levinas, memory, vibration

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:41 AM. 0 comments

"Apparition is a congealed form from which someone has already withdrawn, whereas in language there is accomplished the unintermittent afflux of a presence that rends the inevitable veil of its own apparition, which is plastic like every apparition" (Totality and Infinity, p. 98). When we challenge Levinas on the issue of whether a certain kind of presence, the presence of a speaker, intermits, we must keep in mind not only the fact that Levinas has a special (highly refined) understanding of language, but also that he understands experience to be constituted by alterity, so to speak, a position which would, were we to adopt it in the form Levinas suggests, modify everything we would want to say about the rhythm of affluxes, convergences towards speech, which we should carefully distinguish from convergences towards phenomenality, for the moment, even though certain rhythms of phenomenality might be traceable to the movements of the other speaker. For Levinas, the other is there at the commencement of experience (p. 93). In my view the other isn't properly welcomed by an idea of infinity, for such an idea takes from the other the power to come and go as she pleases. Hospitality demands that we not box the other in–actually I think there's agreement on this point; the question is whether we acknowledge the other's rhythms, or what we make of the rhythms of conversation. Would rhythms box in by virtue of their phenomenality, or of belonging to a phenomenal world?

Let's look at a passage in which Levinas relates his thinking about language to his thinking about consciousness. In this passage he is engaging in a critique of ontology, arguing that ontology posits a world in language before it says "yes" to anything. It should be kept in mind that for Levinas "attention," which makes explicit thinking possible, does not signify a refinement of consciousness but consciousness itself (p. 99).

The signification of beings is manifested not in the perspective of finality, but in that of language. A relation between terms that resist totalization, that absolve themselves from the relation or that specify it, is possible only as language. The resistance of one term to the other is not due to the obscure and hostile residue of alterity, but, on the contrary, to the inexhaustible surplus of attention which speech, ever teaching, brings me. For speech is always a taking up again of what was a simple sign cast forth by it, an ever renewed promise to clarify what was obscure in the utterance.

To have meaning is to be situated relative to an absolute, that is, to come from that alterity that is not absorbed in its being perceived. Such an alterity is possible only as a miraculous abundance, an inexhaustible surplus of attention arising in the ever recommenced effort of language to clarify its own manifestation.

(p. 97, my bold)

How is recommencement possible except on the basis of something like exhaustion, incompletion–is this what is meant by in-finition? I doubt it, because it is the recommencement that is described as ever happening. Recommencement never finishes, yet it would seem that it would have to finish in order to be recommencement rather than some other kind of commencement.

Would language be able to clarify its own manifestation without the aid of the question? Yet what if the question is not something that exists prior to language but must be constituted, or, rather, unfolded in dialogue. When we ask about the question's conditions of possibility we may catch a glimpse of language being made up on the fly (even given the depths of its temporal horizons)–but I don't see this is as quite what Levinas has in mind. What might he teach us about the world of the question?

Thematization manifests the Other because the proposition that posits and offers the world does not float in the air, but promises a response to him who receives this proposition, who directs himself toward the Other because in his proposition he receives the possibility of questioning. Questioning is not explained by astonishment only, but by the presence of him to whom it is addressed. A proposition is maintained in the outstretched field of questions and answers. A proposition is a sign which is already interpreted, which provides its own key. The presence of the interpretative key in the sign to be interpreted is precisely the presence of the other in the proposition, the presence of him who can come to the assistance of his discourse, the teaching quality of all speech. Oral discourse is the plenitude of discourse.

(p. 96, my bold)

Perhaps we are in the presence of philosophy's lovely question, but it can't be said that we've made no progress. Is the world of the question a de novo world, a world that is ever recommenced? Is it a world of rhythms, or is that too lovely? Yes, it may be, for Levinas resists thinking of language as a world. The question arises in a conversation in which worlds are posited but which itself is not a world and does not constitute a world. We might say that conversation is a condition of possibility of the world of a question, but I wonder then if we aren't (a) avoiding thinking about conversation from every possible angle, including from the angle of conversations being worlds, or doing something worldlike such as enveloping or being a "field," and (b) avoiding thinking about the radicality of the question. Could the question possibly free itself from conversation, or would such a belief require some sort of miracle? Whether or not it delivers, does the question promise the miraculous? The fabulous? (The fabulous response?) Does it fly? The world of flight can best be described as intermittent–it does and it does not float on air.

Finally, how does phenomenality enter into the conversation? Had it been absolutely excluded? We witness traces of conversation in phenomenality, apparitions of speakers who have withdrawn, ourselves perhaps. What do we take into conversation? Is a conversation that excludes all phenomenality desirable? How do we know we're not dealing with something like total conversation (a phantasm), a conversation that would insist on an unremitting afflux of presence, and would be able to insist, because it isn't real, or isn't designed for real conversation? Further clarification would be thwarted by such a total conversation, I suspect, leading me to speculate that perhaps further clarification requires an ability to step back, from phenomenality but more to the point even to step back from conversation, which means to be in conversation intermittently.

Labels: dialogism, language, Levinas, phenomenology, questions, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:31 AM. 0 comments

Levinas is wrong about spontaneity but he is creatively wrong so it will be worth our time to read him carefully. Propadeutically, I have a sense that I am responsible for my existence, responsible for giving it meaning and ultimately determining what it is. Levinas challenges this sense. He asserts that we are created, which would imply to many that one cannot claim full responsibility for one's existence. However, Levinas has an unusual definition of the creature which should pre-empt a hasty repudiation of his position. He says, "The unity of spontaneous freedom, working on straight ahead, and critique, where freedom is capable of being called in question and thus preceding itself, is what is termed a creature" (Totality, p. 89). Perhaps the issue is one of simple nomenclature, though I reckon not. In the phrase "working on straight ahead" we find a clue to Levinas' misconstrual of spontaneity. He identifies spontaneity with the activity of the for-itself, implying that freedom does not fall within the purview of a complete existentiality but is instead reserved for a certain kind of being. (Again there are issues of nomenclature. Does saying "existential" imply a relation to human existence, or more generally and by extension of this meaning to sentient existence? In my usage it often does.) Levinas thus gives freedom a peculiar definition. He says that the "imperialism of the same is the essence of freedom" (p. 87), and he states that "freedom, the determination of the other by the same, is the very movement of representation and of its evidence" (p. 85). On these terms Levinas may be right in analytically separating spontaneous freedom from critique, if only to unite them in the creature, but they are questionable terms.

Against Levinas I maintain a skepticism about any primary curvature of being (p. 86). Being may be curved in any variety of ways, and humans in particular evince a multitude of curvatures. Spontaneity then is not primarily orthogonal to relations to other people or to any primary curvature of being. (I wonder if Levinas is entirely consistent in speaking of a primary curvature of being here?) This point is important when it comes to thinking about what it means to be put into question. Levinas says that "[t]he knowing whose essence is critique. . . leads to the Other. To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom" (p. 85). Maybe there is some truth in this statement, yet I hesitate at this juncture to say that we are on the same page. What does it mean to be critical, and how does this being critical relate to spontaneity? Levinas equates the critical essence of knowing with "the movement of a being back to what precedes its condition" (p. 84). Hmm. The prerogative of knowing, Levinas says, lies in "being able to put itself in question, in penetrating beneath its own condition" (p. 85). I'm perplexed as to why there wouldn't be a condition beneath the condition. (What does philosophy have against the condition?) Perhaps the condition beneath the condition of knowledge is the question, in which case perhaps we put ourselves in question only because we can. Perhaps not. At any rate, I am inclined to balk at putting spontaneity at odds with critique. On the contrary, spontaneity may be essential to the performance of critique. Is criticism a transformative process? Does it lead to anything? Does it reach out to others–surely we can be spontaneous in reaching out? What about welcoming, then? Welcoming is quite different from reaching out to things, a neutral reaching out. The welcoming of gifts?

I welcome Levinas' critique of philosophy, if not as nicely as possible, then nice enough for discussion.

Philosophy itself is identified with the substitution of ideas for persons, the theme for the interlocutor, the interiority of the logical relation for the exteriority of interpellation. Existents are reduced to the neuter state of the idea, Being, the concept. It was to escape the arbitrariness of freedom, its disappearance into the Neuter, that we have approached the I as atheist and created–free, but capable of tracing back beneath its condition–before the Other, who does not deliver himself in the "thematization" or "conceptualization" of the Other. To wish to escape dissolution into the Neuter, to posit knowing as a welcoming of the Other, is not a pious attempt to maintain the spiritualism of a personal God, but is the condition for language, without which philosophical discourse itself is but an abortive act, a pretext for an unintermitting psychoanalysis or philology or sociology, in which the appearance of a discourse vanishes in the Whole. Speaking implies a possibility of breaking off and beginning.

(p. 88, my bold)

Responses: (a) I wouldn't want to say that spontaneity lacks conditions, even in a roundabout way; (b) Levinas draws a distinction between discourse and language; (c) the possibility of breaking off and beginning is the possibility of spontaneity. Whether we are talking about language in any ordinary sense or language in Levinas' metaphysical sense there is an implication of spontaneousness. Moreover, welcoming does not negate spontaneity but rather welcomes it.

Labels: language, Levinas, spontaneity

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:13 AM. 0 comments

"The role Kant attributed to sensible experience in the domain of the understanding," Levinas tells us, "belongs in metaphysics to interhuman relations" (Totality and Infinity, p. 79). Likewise he says that "metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted–in our relations with men" (p. 78). So why doesn't Levinas turn to social anthropology for any sort of metaphysical insights? Despite his emphasis on interhuman relations I think Levinas was profoundly at odds with the anthropology of his day. "The idea of infinity, the metaphysical relation, is the dawn of humanity without myths" (p. 77). Anthropology has yet to discover a humanity without myths, though of course we know of individuals who are critical of the myths which have been handed down to them. From the vantage point of anthropology infinity is a myth of the philosophers. It is reasonable, Levinas' infinity. It makes a kind of sense. For the anthropologist, however, the mythical need not be opposed to reason or sense (though for some it would of necessity be opposed to some category of thought). So while Levinas' infinity provides an instrument to critically examine the anthropologists totalizations, the anthropologists have given us a critical way of looking at Levinas' infinity. Where does the discussion go from here? Can one imagine an anthropology of infinities? Or, conversely, could one practice a metaphysics of the quotidian that, if not scientific, would not be inconsistent with a kind of scientific skepticism? How does one appreciate empirical studies of the face-to-face?

The OED word of the day is meronym. In the first, rare sense it means a word that is midway between two extremes, e.g. convex, flat, concave. (I'm afraid in its second sense the word metonym will be more commonly used.) Is it possible that a meronymic quality can be found for every concept. Take infinity. What's its midwayness, its meronymy? I suggest that the contour may be seen as a meronym of the face-to-face.

Labels: dialectics, face, infinity, Levinas, parataxis

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:33 AM. 0 comments

Perhaps there is something like a schema of the face that we humans are born with. Perhaps such schemata are imprinted in early infancy. Why won't I admit that the face is both metaphysical and physical? Or simply metaphysical? What's the story with my attitude towards the metaphysical? Am I holding on to a face, a dear face? Am I afraid of other faces? Or have I really set my feelings aside in order to maintain a critical distance? Will I allow myself to be so naive? Does the face, by its nature, evoke naivety? Shouldn't I want to be free of the magistrature of criticism, once it's recognized as such? But such a freedom isn't quite the promise of the face.

Let's flesh out the sense in which Levinas means for us to understand language as metaphysical. First, though, a word on forms. Do we need forms to work through language? Levinas speaks of naked things, things which have no need for disclosure. He says they "disappear beneath their form. The perception of individual things is the fact that they are not entirely absorbed in their form; they then stand out in themselves, breaking through, rending their forms, are not resolved into the relations that link them up to the totality" (p. 74). He acknowledges a phenomenon of adumbration (and the als etwas, for this is how things are disclosed) as he prepares to offer an alternative. He calls this alternative "revelation," which, as we have remarked, is a difficult thing to ask an English speaker to regard as truly different from disclosure. Expounding, on the theme of language, Levinas says that the work of language "consists in entering into a relationship with a nudity disengaged from every form, but having meaning by itself, καθ αύτό, signifying before we have projected light upon it, appearing not a privation on the ground of an ambivalence of values (as good or evil, as beauty or ugliness), but as an always positive value. Such a nudity is the face" (ibid., Levinas' emphasis). He goes on to add, making his critical stance abundantly clear, that the face "is by itself and not by reference to a system" (p. 75, Levinas' emphasis). (There may be an irony in positing the revelation of the face as a step in the critique of the system, but I don't mean to be sarcastic by any stretch.) Why language? Why is this the theatre of revelations? Is it simply because language was the talk of his century? To be sure, Levinas touches on a truth about language that we should pay heed to whether we are talking about language in a metaphysical sense or what the linguists call natural language. He says "language institutes a relation irreducible to the subject-object relation: the revelation of the other. In this revelation only can language as a system of signs be constituted." (p. 73). He says that "in its expressive function language precisely maintains the other–to whom it is addressed, whom it calls upon or invokes" (ibid., my emphasis). What then is the relationship between expression and form? Perhaps we should imagine the press of air in the throat, the touch of air, its sculpting. Who will then take from the skop the final word?

Labels: face, form, language, Levinas

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:42 AM. 0 comments

Now that it's winter and the snow is falling we can think about what happened. We can think about it from a distance. It happened in the springs, where the water springs from the earth. That's where we killed metaphor. We slapped its head against a rock like a poet taken out of his element.

We didn't have a plan going in. It was inspired, and yet it seemed natural. Metaphor stood for everybody we hated. One word was enough to send us over the edge. It shouldn't have opened its mouth. But it did. That's how it happened. That's how it started. It said something and we sprang on it. It didn't stand a chance.

There's kind of a contradiction in how we've handled it, an unspoken contradiction. It was a noble cause, a blessing in some ways. We did it for truth, a kind of higher truth, a magisterial truth. We drew from our commitment to this truth the sense that we had to surmount plurality at any cost. Paradoxically, then, it also seemed natural that metaphor should die, that is, it seemed as if metaphor died of natural causes and not for the cause of our allegiance to conviction, to the community of overcoming, the community that is our only protection against myth and falsity, thought's mortal enemies.

I don't know how to explain the silence around metaphor's death. Everybody knows that metaphor didn't really die in a boating accident but nobody wants to debate it with us. After all, we killed metaphor. That's just how things stand.

Whenever I hear the word "spring" I think about what happened. I don't feel guilty or anything. I just wonder what it all means. I wonder what it means now that metaphor is dead.

Labels: Levinas, metaphor, Spinoza, truth

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:29 AM. 0 comments

Who is Emmanuel Levinas, whose centennial seems to have been marked, posthumously, only yesterday? I'm reading texts by Levinas, complicit in a work of evocation, elicitations, replication in every sense. Should I–out of respect for the person, or a superseding fidelity to meaning– suspend the tradition of talking about the author in the present tense? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy restricts itself to speaking only of Levinas the philosopher. Is such a figure of the thinker required in order to read thoughts in the best sense, in order to read by the author? It must be said that, given an alternative configuration of textual life, thoughts could be published anonymously. I suspect that when we characterize we often wind up thinking we know far more than we can adequately be responsible for. (The more you know about me, the more you may be inclined to regard my suspicions with suspicion. I exhibit symptoms. My love of close reading is born of necessity.) "Words are disfigured or 'frozen', when language is transformed into documents and vestiges. The living word struggles against this transfer of thought into vestige, it struggles with the letter that appears when there is no-one there to hear" (Levinas, "The Transcendence of Words" (trans. Seán Hand, in The Levinas Reader, pp. 143-149), pp. 148-149).

Is the figure unambiguously good, an unequivocally positive valence? The word "figure" also has ghastly harmonics. A dissonance rages between the figure, not just the figure of the author, but also figures of readers, all manners of figuration on the one hand, and, on the other, living, the living word, and the discordance plays out not just between these polarities, but amid them, each within the other, the living word within the figure, the figure within the living word.

Here are some words for Yusef, whom I surmise will be ambivalent about bifur/bifurre, but who nonetheless may appreciate Levinas' call to criticism: "The primordial status of the notion of erasure affirms the simultaneity of multiplicity, and the irreducibly ambiguous nature of consciousness" (p. 146). Who am I kidding? These words are alive for me. And hasn't Yusef in an important sense also already animated these words for me, illuminated them one might say, with his discussions of bifurcation? I don't go into reading alone, and I don't come out alone. Levinas won't dare and contradict me. (Go ahead ask me about living grammar. (I taunt taunting, fwiw.)) For Yusef, for real: "But in these bifurcations and erasures Leiris is less concerned to go down the new paths opened up or to latch onto the corrected meaning than he is to capture thought at that special moment when it turns into something other than itself. It is because of this inherent ambiguity in bifurcation that the very phenomenon of the association of ideas becomes possible" (ibid.).

For Michael–but not just for Michael, for all those who read along with Michael, including those (those figures, am I calling upon nameless figures too?) who also read along with me:

By creating beauty out of nature, art calms and quietens it. All the arts, even those based on sound, create silence.

This silence may be the result of bad conscience, or it may weigh heavy, or cause dread. This need to enter into a relation with someone, in spite of or over and above the peace and harmony derived from the successful creation of beauty is what we call the necessity of critique.

(p. 147)

I find it necessary to criticize the following quotation, and I call upon Levi, who will also be critical, to momentarily suspend his judgment, for our sake, in the event that there is in fact a sense in which this position means something more to us than a hegemony over the real, the material, or the natural: "The sounds and noises of nature are failed words. To really hear a sound, we need to hear a word. Pure sound is the word" (p. 148). We can appreciate Levinas' dialogism even as we maintain our critical distance: "because thought is symbolic, ideas can link up to form a network of associations. From then on. . . this network, further enriched by all that the signs of writing can then evoke, is important not for the way it displaces one idea onto another, but because it assures the presence of idea in another" (p. 146). How can we not hear in every dialogism the echo of other dialogisms? Or is it pure dissonance? Perhaps we need to hear what Levinas is saying more fully, what he is saying in these texts by Levinas, because he too has a sense of what "real" means.

As I review this last quotation, my thoughts are with Shahar, while at the same time they wander back over the territory of thoughts about the imagination that has become familiar to me–a certain quotation from Bachelard comes to mind:

The use of the word wrenches experience out of its aesthetic self-sufficiency, the here where it has quietly been lying. Invoking experience transforms it into a creature. It is in this sense that I have been able to say elsewhere that criticism, which is the word of a living being speaking to a living being, brings the image in which art revels back to the fully real being. The language of criticism takes us out of our dreams, in which artistic language plays an integral part. Certainly, in its written form, it in turn generates new criticism. Books call up books–but this proliferation of writings halts or culminates at the moment when the living word is installed and criticism blossoms into teaching.

(p. 148, my bold)

I butcher a chicken, I thank the chicken. Foul thanks. How can I thank Levinas? How can I? Levinas the creature? Never. Too creepy. Yet isn't there a sense in which I desire to be such a creature, a "man who speaks"? Chthonic replicant, reader of the autochthonic. Whichever way I turn it appears I am forced to abdicate learning, to subvert a loyalty, or turn my back on a critical engagement. Levinas? The inexpressible sadness of echoes? Are those my words now? Hardly. I don't keep them from you, fellow students of melancholy. Nor do I ask you to accept them uncritically. It is an irony that "the inexpressible sadness of echoes" says something about the sadness of echoes. I feel it.

Labels: chicken, dialogism, echo, language, learning, Levinas, reading, silence

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:21 PM. 3 comments