The Face of the Other & the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

INTRODUCTION

Jeffrey Bloechl

Rather than summarize each contribution in this volume, I wish only to say a few things about their relation to one another, which of course does require me to mention briefly what each author has set out to do. My original intention as editor was simply to gather some older works perhaps less known in the Anglo-American world, augmented by some newer ones. To this I have added the idea of mixing contributions by authors on both sides of the Atlantic, with the obscure aim of asking whether there might be different trends or currents in reading Levinas. A more important dimension to this volume more or less imposed itself with the arrival of the contributions: as the table of contents clearly shows, Levinas can and often is read with greater attention to either the I-Other relation or to that other Other which the tradition has called God. However, as many essays collected here make plain, this difference in orientation, whatever its justifications, need not be exclusive. This is no doubt more significant than any possible divide across the Atlantic.

The order in which the contributions appear also has a certain logic. Among those which are more focused on the I-Other relation, Didier Franck’s The Body of Difference not only comments on a benchmark position established at the onset of Levinas’s independent philosophy but also analyzes, and to some degree deconstructs, the manner in which Levinas found his way past Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. As many commentators have urged, what is condensed and assumed in Totality and Infinity (1961) was worked out in great detail more than fifteen years earlier, in the texts presented here by Franck. Accordingly, Paul Moyaert’s reading of the provocative phenomenology of eros appearing in Totality and Infinity can be situated already after the fact of that move past Heidegger. Let the reader be warned in advance: Moyaert’s essay is no mere commentary on Levinas, but the sketch of an ethics which contests the one he finds contained within fifteen pages of Levinas’s first great work. Some of the themes emerging there (corporeality, desire, vulnerability) are taken up again by Rudolf Bernet, who returns the discussion to Husserl—a Husserl who, moreover, proves unexpectedly, to some at least, subtle and resourceful on such matters. This touches on a hidden benefit from any reading of Levinas: one always returns to his various discussion partners with a more penetrating sense of their independent positions. This is also the style of Robert Bernasconi’s intricate reading of Levinas and some critics on the difference between otherness as strange and otherness as alien. Having first given the floor to three of those critics—Derrida, Ricoeur, and Francis Jacques—Bernasconi then allows Levinas the right to respond powerfully, but with the result of better exposing a still deeper problem which Bernhard Waldenfels will have best understood and addressed. Bernasconi’s essay moves between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1973). Michael Newman remains close to the latter book, along with some of its supporting essays. This was the period in which Levinas’s philosophy of God emerged, both through an extension of already familiar ideas on infinity and exteriority, and through a renewal of his dialogue with Husserl, now specifically on time and sensibility. Knitting these two poles together, Newman’s piece is also an occasion to gather the numerous strands of I-Other analysis hitherto dominating Levinas’s work, thus opening discussion of the place that God has perhaps always occupied there. My own essay begins at nearly this same point, tracing Levinas’s definition of the ethical relation outward into its more classically religious background or horizon. However, whereas Newman may be said to focus on defining the ethical relation which that religion seems to support, my own interest is more with situating that religion with respect to the forms of thinking from which it takes its distance, and then exploring its existential implications.

Those last two contributions of the first section of this volume are recognizably transitional, moving already from the ethical relation toward the question of God. The second section nonetheless starts anew, wishing above all to state some basic facts and explore some key connections before taking up debate and appropriation. Roger Burggraeve’s contribution begins by reviewing some biographical information concerning Levinas’s particular Jewish identity, which he himself termed mitnagged in origin and intellectualist in form. From there, Burggraeve moves quickly to Levinas’s relation to Scripture, as learned at the hand of Chouchani (incidentally, also the teacher of Elie Wiesel),¹ and then to an exploration of the spirituality which this involves. Adriaan Peperzak’s essay dovetails neatly with Burggraeve’s but is far more exploratory in nature, sketching the contours of a Christianity at the far reaches of Levinas’s ethical critique of metaphysical theology. Whereas Burggraeve calls for an intellectual lay Christianity paralleling Levinas’s intellectual lay Judaism, Peperzak tries to reawaken a mysticism purged of foundations and totalization. The knot between a non-foundational religion, the nontotalizable community which this implies, and thus a non-violent concern for others, is also to be found in Merold Westphal’s attempt to read Levinas partly in line with Augustine and Kierkegaard, but against a certain Hegel. It is probably Kierkegaard whom we associate most readily with the idea that, properly understood, a divine command is the sole event which can open us from universalization into a truly ethical singularity. Westphal finds this thought in Augustine’s talk of an opening within our conscience to an otherness which memory can never recapture. The resonances between Levinas and Kierkegaard have often been noted; Westphal awakens us to the unmistakable echo of Augustine in Levinas’s notion of an immemorial past (see Newman). The language of memory and immemorial moves away from the philosophical terminology of question and answer, and closer to the religious terminology of appeal and response. From this angle, Levinas’s thinking on God presents itself as an approach to a Word voiced before memory and immune to recollection. If a philosophy of this immemorial Word is thus a philosophy which moves beyond, or better beneath, foundations, then the postfoundational thinking par excellence will be religious. This has long been the strategy of Jean-Luc Marion, who not only reformulates it here, and in updated form, but also with pains to state his debt to Levinas. A nearly opposite tack is taken by Rudi Visker, in a tour de force which draws mainly on a constructed dialogue between Levinas and Freud to assert that what emerges from the explosion of transcendental philosophy, itself possibly the last good candidate for foundationalism, is not religion at all, at least not in anything like its classical forms (see Westphal), but in fact something more like sheer pluralism with a weak option for paganism, but in any event reducible to, if I may invoke a word dropped at the end of my own essay, materialism. This possibility represents an appropriate point of departure for the final contribution to this volume, John Caputo’s meditation on Derrida’s adieu to Levinas. More than a good-bye, Derrida’s final word is also wrapped up in a discrete network of associations anchoring the eulogy itself in a prolonged argument with Levinas that began with the question of the closure of metaphysics, moved through the implications for time and writing, and has now become explicitly political but also religious. To date, Levinas’s political philosophy has received far too little attention, a state of affairs which is only now changing, with the appearance of collected essays in that direction.² It is not necessary to agree with the specifics of Derrida’s analysis, and still less with his own politics, to be won over to the view that there is nonetheless a lurking political dimension to Levinas’s entire oeuvre. Indeed, if it is true, as Caputo and Derrida suggest, that the question of the political is inextricable from the question of the religious, then this last essay serves not to close the book on Levinas, neither here nor elsewhere, but instead to convoke yet another reading of the claims set forth over more than fifty years and retraced here, in the present volume.

NOTES

1. On Chouchani, see S. Malka, Monsieur Chouchani: L’enigme d’unmaître du XXe siècle (Paris: Ed. J.-C. Lattès, 1994). For a statement of his importance to Levinas, see E. Levinas, Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le ju-daïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 373.

2. See, e.g., E. Levinas, Altenté et transcendence (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1995).

I

Relations with Others

1

The Body of Difference

Didier Franck

Is there a path leading from originary time to the meaning of Being? Is time itself manifest as the horizon of Being? Heidegger poses these two questions at the end of the existential analytic, where they interrupt Sein und Zeit, announcing the section entitled Time and Being, at the threshold of which fundamental ontology breaks off provisionally but also, as it has happened, definitively. Can one, in spite of this solution of continuity and the unachieved status of a universal phenomenological ontology, still engage these questions, describing the movement of thought which bears them and to which they are opened and delivered?

In order to move from originary time to the meaning of Being, it would be necessary for the former to be the condition of the possibility of comprehending the latter, as that toward which Being as such is projected—in short, time must be the horizon of Being. But to ask whether this is indeed so is to question beyond Being, rejoining the Platonic theme of the epekeina tes ousias. Furthermore, to exceed Being toward that which opens comprehension of it is to return to the origin of the ontological difference, since to comprehend Being is to comprehend its difference with beings. To conduct oneself beyond Being is thus to found the ontological difference already at work throughout the preparatory analytic of Dasein, which at that point remains unfounded. The section Time and Being would thus have had as its aim establishing the ontological difference in transcending Being toward its horizon.¹

This program was never carried out, and Heidegger eventually renounced it. Is this to say that he struck up against insurmountable difficulties in the way of achieving his goal? Is it impossible—and if so, why—to deduce the ontological difference from a description of the manner that Dasein, which is this very difference (since it is the being that comprehends Being), occurs in Being by comprehending Being? In other words, can one describe the movement which, going from existence to the existent, makes ontological knowledge itself possible? All of these questions inherited from fundamental ontology are in the background of a book which Levinas published in 1947, entitled De l’existence à l’existant. Thus, we will attempt to respond to some of them by following his path to the Other.

Levinas has always claimed a Platonic heritage. My teaching, he declared in 1987, remains, in the final account, quite classical; it repeats, as in Plato, that it is not that consciousness founds the Good but that the Good calls to consciousness.² This claim does not close the book on philosophical research and enterprise. To the contrary, the Platonic formula placing the Good beyond being is the most general and empty indication which guides them. This last phrase comes from the Avant-Propos of De l’existence à l’existant, the first moment in the philosophical itinerary of which Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence is undoubtedly the final accomplishment. Thus, the considerable evolution which Levinas’s thinking has undergone is such that we may consider De l’existence à l’existant the first step in a project whose necessity was strong enough and deep enough to guarantee and assure an inner consistency.

It goes without saying that the Platonic formula situating the Good beyond Being is difficult to interpret. We will not involve ourselves in that exercise since for the moment all that matters is the specific sense which Levinas has given to it. It signifies, he writes in the same Avant-Propos, "that the movement which conducts an existent toward the Good is not a transcendence by which the existent is elevated to a superior existence, but a departure from being and the categories which describe it: an ex-cendence." This version of the epekeina tes ousias calls for several remarks. First, by existent, Levinas indicates the being which we are, Dasein. But, as we will see, existence and existent also translate Sein and Seiende, Being and beings in general. Thus, for Levinas, the word existent designates the very beings (étants) whose modes of Being (d’être) Heidegger takes great pains to differentiate—an ambiguity testifying to an assimilation of all ontological structures to categories, a move which requires further explanation.³ Second, if the movement beyond Being is not a transcendence toward a superior existence but a departure from Being, this implies on one hand that the transcendence of Dasein is not, as Heidegger maintains, the truth of the epekeina tes ousias, and that the agathon is not the source of possibility as such.⁴ On the other hand, it also implies that the distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence is understood in terms of a distinction between the superior and inferior, which thus supposes a hierarchy within Being. Third, to this transcendence which is only a movement internal to the Same, the movement and the mobility of the Same, Levinas opposes a movement radically otherwise, a veritable departure from Being and its truth, a movement which never returns to the Same, an exodus without hope of return, or an evasion, as the 1935 essay bearing that title puts it, also proposing the neologism excendence, the motif of a departure from Being which "expresses the movement toward the Creator [traduisait l’élan vers le Créateur]" and necessitates the conclusion that every civilization which accepts Being, the tragic despair which it bears, and the crimes that it justifies, deserves to be called barbarous.⁵

If there must be evasion, if the existent must exceed Being toward the Good if it is to find salvation and happiness, this is because it first has a foot in Being, has already taken position. Without this taking of position, no excendence would be possible, which is why Levinas can evaluate Being and affirm that it is better to be than not to be. Since excendence therefore proceeds from Being to the Good, it is necessary first of all to fix and understand the terminus a quo, the position of this existent in the existence which it is called to depart from. As the Avant- Propos states, the present work limits itself to clarifying this theme. This limitation, in turn, confers upon De l’existence à l’existant a preliminary status with respect to all of Levinas’s subsequent work, since the movement by which an existent enters into a contract with existence precedes that by which that existent evades existence; to describe the position of the existent in existence is to describe the springboard for excendence, determining the meaning that Being is to receive when summoned to appear before the Good.

De l’existence à l’existant begins with a review of the difference between that which exists, the existent, and the very event of existing, existence. This difference which Heidegger raises and deposits at the beginning of Sein und Zeit is immediately understood by Levinas in terms of a difference between verb and substantive, or substantive participle. A grammatical interpretation of the ontological difference is presupposed throughout the work of Levinas, for whom the enduring grandeur of Heidegger’s thought resides in having reawakened and restored the verbal sense of Being.

However, as the history of philosophy readily shows, the difference between Being and the being, between verb and substantive, is difficult to maintain because thought slips imperceptibly from being where a being is, to a Being which is the eminent cause of all beings. Where does this confusion come from? The difficulty of separating Being and ‘the being’ and the tendency to see one in the other are certainly not accidental. They derive from the habit of situating the instant, atom of time, beyond every event. What does this mean? Being and the being must be distinguished without being separated: Being is the being of a being, and when we affirm of a being that it is, this implies that the being has already made a contract with being upon which it exercises the same domination as the subject exercises on the attribute. Now this singular domination is accomplished "in the instant which, under phenomenological analysis, is irreducible [indécomposable]." Everything depends on how one understands this. Either the instant is conceived as a pure present state and Being is canceled by the being, or it is an event and the verb distinguishes itself from the substantive, manifesting the ontological difference. One can ask oneself, writes Levinas, "whether this adherence of ‘the being’ to Being is simply given in the instant, whether it is not accomplished in the very stance of the instant, whether the instant is not the event itself by which in the pure act, in the pure verb to be, in being in general, a ‘being’ is posed, a substantive which is rendered its master; whether the instant is not the ‘polarization’ of being in general." But how to derive this event from the instant? Commencement, origin, birth display a dialectic where this event at the heart of the instant becomes meaningful. In fact, when a being surges forth from Being—and from where could it do so if not from Being which, at this level, has an unquestionable priority—it is necessary to assign it a cause, but above all to explain what in it receives existence (DE 16/EE 18)—or so says Levinas, substituting existence for Being (être). Now what can this reception (accueil) of Being by a being mean, if not an act of that being on Being, and thus the mastery of the subject, it, over its attribute, is? It is thus by studying this dialectic that it will be possible to render to the instant its dramatic character as event. This, however, would not be possible without also defining a sense of being in general that becomes the Being of a particular being thanks to this inversion (DE 18/EE 18) which is the event of the instant, where what is first—Being (l’être)—becomes an attribute of what is second: a being. Hence does Levinas’s project take the following course: accede to Being in general in order to analyze the position of the existent in existence.

This program issues from fundamental ontology, which has defended perhaps only this one sole thesis: Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (Tel 15/TI 45). Heidegger conceives of this as existence and being-in-the-world. Yet should we not dissociate existence and being-in-the-world? In fact, with the exception of mythology, when we do speak of a disruption of the world, or an end to the world, we designate a moment in which the world ceases to be coherent and our relations are interrupted. The residue of this quasireduction is neither the pure ego nor death as possibility of impossibility, but naked existence, the fact that one is and that there is Being (être il y a). Being-in-the-world is thus not synonymous with existence, since the disappearance of the former does not affect the latter. In the situation of the end of the world, there is posed the primary relation which attaches us to Being. This relation does not join two substantives, but a substantive to a verb, an existent to existence. The end of the world manifests the fact of Being and that the existent exists in and through participating in it, taking up existence in an assumption preliminary to all commerce with the world, an event of birth anterior to being-in-the-world, and which, considered in the context of economic life, where instants are equivalent and compensate for one another, occurs in all moments (DE 26–27/EE 22).

To exist is thus to adhere to existence. But in order to distinguish the existent and existence, is it not necessary to view that adherence of one to the other as a cleavage? In other words: where are we to discover this adhesion of the existent to existence in statu nascendi? In fatigue and indolence, which are not in the first place contents of consciousness offered to reflection but attitudes of the existent toward existence. True fatigue is intransitive, without object, because it is weariness itself. To be tired is to tire of Being, and what tires is precisely existence. Fatigue is thus, in the modality of refusal, the proof of an unremitting obligation to be. Existence in weariness is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and all the harshness of an interminable contract (DE 31/EE 24). If being fatigued is at once to exist and to refuse to exist, to exist in abdication or in discharging oneself from existing, then weariness brings to light, with the movement by which the existent takes up existence, a cleavage between them which in the same stroke testifies to a contract binding them together. Let us note in passing how the meaning of the word contract, whose use Levinas does not justify, is unstable and indecisive, that is to say contradictory, since one of the contracting parties, the existent, derives from the contract, while the other, existence, is by nature without the possibility of subscribing to it or imposing it. Being does not enter into a covenant. In short, is it legitimate to speak of a contract, which moreover cannot be terminated, where the free and reciprocal consent to obligation among two or more parties is in principle impossible, and where all juridical reference is excluded since it is a matter solely of the position of the existent in existence and of the ontological difference? One can doubt it, and this doubt is not without importance, for to speak of a contract between the existent and existence, between a being and Being, is ultimately to subordinate the question Why is there Being rather than nothing? to the question I have the right to be? (DVI 257/GCM 171)—a subordination which all, or almost all, of Levinas’s work tries to sustain.

Indolence is also an attitude of the existent with respect to existence. It is indolence of existing. What does this mean? Indolence concerns the beginning, as if existence were not there already, but preexisted the beginning in an inhibition (DE 33/EE 26). Indolence is a hesitation to exist, the beginning of existence, but in the mode of retention. What, then, is it to begin to exist? The instant of the beginning can reveal itself only in that there is already something to lose, for something is already possessed, if only this very instant itself (DE 35/EE 27). The instant of the beginning maintains with itself a relation of possession, it is and it has, it belongs to itself and it takes itself up, and it is relative to the weight of existence that indolence has meaning. Existence is a burden, said Heidegger, without the analytic of Dasein having been able to render an account of its split into being and having.⁶ Indolence and fatigue thus manifest, by way of a de-phasing, the contractual relation between the existent and existence. Nevertheless, whereas fatigue does apprehend existence and thus chafes at having shouldered it, indolence refuses that shouldering itself (DE 39/EE 29).⁷ But to speak of the existent’s relation to existence as one of body to body (corps à corps)—is this not to suggest that the existent has a position in existence by virtue of having a body?

If the non-differentiation of Being and beings is provided by the obliteration of the dramatic character of the instant, the task of grasping the meaning of a phenomenon within the general economy of Being must begin by examining the instant of its event. To scrutinize the instant, writes Levinas, to seek the dialectic which occurs in a dimension hitherto unsuspected—such is the essential principle of method that we have adopted (DE 42/EE 30). It would only be at great risk of misunderstanding for one to approach the thought of Levinas, which always describes what it does, without close attention to the support it receives from this method inherited—not merely taken over, but transformed—from Husserl and Heidegger: a method which consists in treating substantives as verbs or states of being as events, and to which, finally, despite the presence of numerous gaps of varying amplitude, he will always remain faithful. Accordingly, we take up the analysis of fatigue, placing ourselves in the instant of its event.

Fatigue is present as a kind of numbness (engourdissement), a "constant and increasing lag [décalage] between the being and what it is still attached to, like a hand which little by little releases something that it finds tiring to lift, releasing it in the same instant that it tries to hold it" (DE 42/EE 30). Fatigue is not relief or relaxation pure and simple, but, still bound to what it releases, a displacement of self upon self, "a dislocation of the I from itself" (DE 50/EE 35). There is fatigue only at the heart of an effort which lunges forward out of it and falls back on it (DE 44/EE 31). What, then, is dramatic relation between the thrust (l’élan) and fatigue, the relation whose very tension constitutes effort? Effort is a thrust beyond oneself which fatigue holds back: in the advance over oneself and over the present, in the ecstasis of the thrust which anticipates and bypasses the present, fatigue marks a delay with respect to oneself and to the present (DE 44/EE 31). Effort, delay with respect to oneself in the advance over oneself, articulates thrust and fatigue, with fatigue conditioning thrust, which projects itself forward only to be thrown back. Effort thus cannot be reduced to a pure thrust which knows no fatigue; it does not find its temporal meaning in the ecstasis of the future, but is an effort of the present that lags behind the present (DE 45/EE 31). The ecstatic temporality which flows from the future is thus submitted to a temporality of originary delay of which Levinas will eventually deploy all virtualities. Consequently, the account of fatigue will not have completed the existential analytic but in fact overturned it.

However, no account of the temporal structure of effort would be complete without describing its relation with the instant. To exert oneself is to exert oneself in duration. Every effort is a step-by-step engagement in duration. This is not continuous: in musical duration, for example, each note appears only to immediately disappear. The duration of effort is not that which Bergson and Husserl have analyzed. Its essential movement proceeds in fits and starts. The duration of effort is made up entirely of stops. The instant of effort is thus neither that of a melody which is never present because it always passes and vanishes, nor that of the thrust which anticipates the future, but simply an ineluctable present. Effort is caught up in the instant as an inevitable present. Effort accomplishes the stance of the instant; in the midst of the anonymous flow of existence, there is stoppage and positing (DE 48/EE 34).

This definition of the instant of effort—and through it Levinas also applies himself to an account of the dynamism of the thrust toward authentic possibility (la possibilité propre)—permits a deduction of the notions of act and activity, situating them in the general economy of Being. If effort accomplishes the instant, to act is not to struggle with matter but to take up a present. And this present is not an intratemporal now, a substantive, but a function (TA 32/TO 52), an event of existence by which something is born from itself, the event of a departure from self and return to self, the very work of identity. In effect, to act is to assume existence, and this assumption both flows from existence and returns to it, as the existent appears in subjugating it.

Effort, correlate of the act, is always an effort upon fatigue, which is fatigue of existing, and the lag of the existent behind existing. Now this lag (retard) constitutes the present which effort takes up. To act is to take up a present lagging behind itself, and without this lag the relation of the existent to existence would not appear. In this way, fatigue, as the present lagging behind itself, makes possible a description of the hypostasis, the transmutation of the verbal into the substantive, or of existence into an existent, thus in the same stroke also yielding a deduction of the ontological difference. Levinas draws the necessary conclusion: "If the present is thus constituted by the taking charge of the present, if the time-lag [décalage] of fatigue creates the interval in which the event of the present can occur, and if this event is equivalent to the upsurge of an existent for whom to be means to take up Being, the existence of the existent is essentially act" (DE 51/EE 35). Indeed, even when inactive the existent is always active. What is the meaning of this originary activity through which alone the worldly opposition of action and inaction has meaning? Echoing Husserl’s reference to an archi-immobile ground which he calls Earth—absolute where I live my body and relative to which I can move or come to a rest—Levinas understands this primary sense of activity as the act of positing oneself on the ground, as an abiding (repos) insofar as this is "not pure negation but the very tension of position, the bringing about of a here" (DE 51–52/EE 36). The event of abiding is thus the very surging of a being on Being: the hypostasis. De l’existence à l’existant attempts only to clarify the implications of this localization, the here which posits itself and abides.

However, this interpretation of act as assumption of the present raises another problem. Whereas in assuming the instant through effort we engage ourselves in the existence which is event and pure verb, in the concrete world we are involved with things, with substantives. In other words, the ontological function of the act cannot be identical with its occurrence in the world.

Objects in the world are objects of intentions. How are we to understand this? According to Levinas, the notion of intention must not be taken, as it has by Husserl, in a neutralized and disincarnate sense, but in its ordinary sense, with the sting of desire which animates it (DE 56/EE 37). Setting aside our reservations at this disincarnation of Husserlian intentionality, let us describe Levinas’s sense of intention characterizing our being-in-the-world. When, for example, I desire something to eat, I know perfectly well what I want, and I am wholly present to what I desire, without ulterior references. It is not only that an intention is aimed at an object, but also that the object is at our disposal. If the world is what is given to us, this implies that we receive it, that objects are destined to us, offered to our intentions, and possessed even before being desired. In the world, desire is in a certain sense always at its end. To eat is thus to have an experience of complete correspondence between desire and its satisfaction, a full realization of its intention (DE 65/EE 43). Daily bread is not, as Heidegger thought, a tool ready to hand,⁸ not something in order to… which refers to something else and finally to care for Being, but the very consummation of the intention. It is not that we eat in order to live, but that eating simply is living, so that intention defines being-in-the-world because it has an end. Intention, or consciousness, is always sincere, for it describes a closed circle where it remains by effacing every ulterior finality (DE 68/EE 44–45). The world, which is this circle, is not a complex of tools but an ensemble of nourishments—these are the nourishments which characterize our existence in the world (TA 46/TO 63). Being-in-the-world is not care but enjoyment, and it is before being-in-the-world that we can implicitly comprehend, without the light of sincerity, the verbal sense of existence. Consequently, everyday being-in-the-world, far from being a fall into inauthenticity, permits one to extract oneself from anonymous being (DE 69/EE 45).

Being-in-the-world is this extraction because the intention thanks to which the ego possesses the given preserves a distance from it. While the existent is enthralled (envoûté) by the existence which adheres to it, the world offered to the intention leaves the ego a freedom with regard to it, such that existence is always a burden which encumbers us and which we must always be concerned with, a burden deposited and yet also still present in that way, like left luggage. Tending toward things, the ego can also withdraw from them and, in the world, has an inside and outside (DE 73/EE 47; cf. also 36/27). That by which one person refers to another is meaning, or luminosity. Light is constitutive of the world, since through it the object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it (DE 76/EE 48). Intention and light, being-in-the-world is knowledge, and this in the manner of a relating oneself to things and events without attaching oneself to them—freely keeping one’s distance, one’s reserve. The epoche is therefore no longer the avenue to a pure extramundane ego, but rather the mode of being of an intramundane ego. This makes it understandable that for Levinas being-in-the-world is, at the heart of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from Being (DE 79/EE 50), how the hypostasis as consciousness and consciousness as intention, light, and knowledge, is an evasion of existence in the verbal sense, a resistance to anonymous being (DE 80/EE 51).

But why resist anonymous being? We cannot respond to this question without describing the verbal sense of existence which is the central notion (DE 80/EE 51) of the work whose course we are following. However, to the degree that this existence is not confused with being-in-the-world, it is necessary first to show that we can depart from the world, or disinterest ourselves in it. Art, understood as exoticism in the proper sense of the term, is this possibility. Art removes things from the order of use. Whereas perception gives us mundane objects, art departs from the level of perception in order to reinstate sensation, and instead of arriving at the object, the intention gets lost in the sensation itself (DE 85/EE 53). Sensation leads away from the object; it is not material offered to apprehension but "the impersonality of the element" (DE 86/EE 53). Deforming their luminous and rational forms, which convert exteriority into interiority, art—and it is above all modern art to which Levinas refers—transports objects into an exteriority without a correlative inferiority. It discovers the materiality of Being (DE 92/EE 57), it brings about an absolute existence in the very fact that there is something which is not in its turn an object or a name (DE 91/EE 57). The exoticism of art thus manifests in the unformed world the formless proliferation (DE 92/EE 57) which precedes it.

If art reveals the absoluteness of the fact of existing, it still does not describe it and does not yield an analysis of the idea. To do this, we must begin by imagining that everything is annihilated. The return of all existents, of all substantives, to nothingness is an event. But then, what are we to think of this nothingness itself? Is it an ultimate substantive, a final state? Is it not, to the contrary, the privileged moment in which it is necessary to deploy the method which approaches states as events? What occurs when one treats nothingness as an event? Nothing more than this: something is happening. Now this something is happening does not refer to a substantive; its indeterminateness is not that of a subject. "Like the third person impersonal pronominal of a verb, it designates not the poorly understood author of an action, but the character of the action itself, which somehow has no author. This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself, we shall designate with the term there is [il y a]. The there is, inasmuch as it resists an impersonal form, is ‘being in general’" (DE 93–94/EE 57).⁹

The there is thus designates existence without existents, the pure verbality of the verb of verbs. Three reasons can have motivated Levinas’s choice of this expression. The first would be that il y a is a locution which signifies Being; it says Being without repeating the word itself. The second would be that in French il y a can have the status of a preposition, and since it is a matter here of describing the position of the existent in existence, it would indeed be necessary to invoke pre-position. The third and most important reason, however, would be that in understanding Being as il y a, Levinas is able to point toward impersonality, anonymity, and neutrality. As determined by the expression il y a, Being is conceived outside of all relation to the being—thus as Being in general. Having adopted this expression, Levinas never reconsiders it. It recurs regularly throughout his subsequent work, including in the first lines of Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Accordingly, the determination of Being as there is represents the constant ontological premise by which Being can be subordinated to the Good and ontology to ethics.

Can one have an experience of the there is? "Were it not for the fact that the term experience is inapplicable to a situation which involves the absolute exclusion of light, we could say that night is the very experience of the there is" (DE 94/EE 58). In this night which can in fact take place during the day, things no longer have contour or form, and names have lost their deictic power. Nothing is given anymore, but that universal absence is an unavoidable presence: nothing responds to us but this silence; the voice of this silence frightens us like the infinite spaces which Pascal speaks of (DE 95/EE 58). But there is more. The night engulfs and submerges the ego itself. To accede to the there is is to accede to Being which is no longer the attribute of any being, to existence of which no existent is the master. To be exposed to the night is to be deposed of oneself—the there is is not an en soi but a sans soi (TA 27/TO 49)—it is to be brought back to "what cannot disappear, to the very fact of being in which one can participate, for better or worse, without having taken the initiative, anonymously" (DE 95/EE 58). In opening us to Being, the night revokes our capacity to say I. The one is no longer the pronoun declining the